Copyright © 2013 by Gareth K Pengelly.
Writing and illustrations by Gareth K Pengelly.
No part of this book may be taken, sold or reproduced without the express consent of the author.
All characters portrayed are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Chapter One:
It was 8:37am. In eleven minutes time, Nikki Taylor’s life would be changed forever.
But she didn’t know it yet.
All she knew was, she was late. The second time in her first week at her new job. Mr Pullman was going to kill her; the editor of the London Herald wasn’t known for his patience. Especially not now, not with everything that was kicking off; the growing troubles in the middle-east; the rumours of shadowy vigilantes on Britain’s streets. There was news out there and people weren’t going to hear about it without journalists such as herself there to tell it.
Nikki pushed her way through London’s busy morning rush hour, lowering her head and squinting her brown eyes against the drizzle, breathing in that fresh and unmistakable aroma of rain on concrete. She cursed her pound shop alarm clock. Twice now, it had let her down. Twice she had woken up, panicked, rushed hither and thither in her tiny bedsit; throwing on her clothes, straightening her shoulder-length blonde hair as quickly as she could without burning herself something awful, then dashed out the door to make her way to her new job. The first day she’d been lucky; Mr Pullman had been in a meeting with a prospective advertiser and she’d managed to sneak into the hubbub of the office unnoticed, settling down into the quiet corner allotted her without anyone being any the wiser.
But this morning there was a general meeting of all thirty staff. If she wasn’t there, she’d be noticed. And in trouble.
Should she ring in now, maybe? Find a quiet shop doorway, call the office, pretend that she was ill? Go back home and try again tomorrow? The idea was tempting.
No Nikki, she chastised herself, as she skirted past an old lady in tweed who slowly, laboriously scraped her way down the pavement at the helm of her Zimmer frame. No, you’re a professional. This isn’t the Rutland Gazette anymore. No more covering harvest festivals, church galas and village duck races. You’re a big city girl, working for a big city newspaper. These were serious times, she told herself. And you’ve got to be a serious girl now. A woman, in fact. As her mum was fond of telling her: you’re twenty-three, time to start acting like it.
There, up ahead: the bus stop outside Wilkinson’s. She groaned; there was already a queue of bored looking commuters, standing, waiting beneath the shelter, staring through half-asleep eyes down the dreary street as they waited for the bright red double-decker to come lumbering along, ready to take them to the daily grind.
Duly taking her place at the end of the queue, Nikki checked her watch for the umpteenth time that morning. It told her no better news than any of the previous times. 8:43. The meeting was at 9:15. Could she make it? She didn’t know. This bus, the 23, was the quickest way into town to her work; took her right past the office, the stop being only a hundred yards from the entrance to the building. But there were so many variables; the traffic; road works; whether the next bus would be too full of commuters and the driver would simply pass them by with a sorry shake of his head.
She fumbled nervously with the Oyster card in her coat pocket, eyes darting across from time to time to the Underground station across the road. The tube would get her into town in a jiffy, quicker than the bus. But the nearest station to the office, Elephant and Castle, was still a fifteen minute walk.
As she pondered her quandary, she turned her attention to the other commuters that stood, leaning against the advertisements in the bus shelter, posters that proclaimed the merits of anti-wrinkle creams and the latest Jason Statham blockbuster.
The obligatory old couple; the man flat-capped, his green wax jacket coat buttoned up high as he leant upon his walking stick; his wife wearing a purple woolly hat that she’d probably knitted herself, a scarf, too, wrapped about her neck to shield her from the worst of the miserable spring weather. Why did old people have to travel in the morning? What did Herbert and Mavis here have to do in their retirement that couldn’t wait till later in the day?
Next to them, a teenager, his hair long, half-covering his face and dyed black in the emo fashion, eyes glued to the phone before him that he clutched close to his My Chemical Romance hoody. He bobbed his head up and down in time to some beat that only he could hear through his headphones. Where was he off to? It was getting late for school. Perhaps he was skiving? Nikki told herself off for being judgemental; was it really that long ago that she herself was bunking off school with friends? Meeting down the park of a summer’s afternoon for hours of mindless conversation and bitter swigs from a bottle of White Lightning that one of them had managed to procure from a less discerning newsagent?
A be-suited businessman checked his watch, the gleaming timepiece flashing as it caught the light from a passing car. A Breitling. Nikki whistled internally. That trinket was probably worth more than she earned in a year. Assuming she still had a job by the end of the day, of course. Whatever the gent was packing in the expensive-looking briefcase by his side, it was probably something important. Was he a banker? A stockbroker? He was wearing Gucci loafers, brown with white stripes, that would have looked more in keeping strolling along Monaco harbour.
Next to the businessman, a somewhat more dishevelled gent stood, clad in a tattered parka with a backpack held tight over his shoulder. He looked about with shifty eyes from within a swarthy face. From his chin jutted the long, black, wiry beard that marked him out as a Muslim. Not an uncommon sight in England, of course, especially not in London. But for some reason Nikki’s eyes lingered too long, scanning his face, flicking back and forth between his nervous, darting eyes and the heavy-looking backpack. He caught her eyes and she glanced away, feeling her face growing flush with guilt, half expecting to hear him say something, to challenge her. But no, he looked away, gazing into the distance as he waited for the bus.
Try as she might, she couldn’t help but glance at him from time to time. What was it? Was it the news? The reports of that radical movement in the middle-east? The Brotherhood of the Veil, as they called themselves, had been all over the telly of late; threatening the US, and Britain in particular, with terrorism as punishment for their ‘decadent western ways.’ She knew, intellectually, that this lad had nothing to do with any of it. He’d probably been born and raised in Britain, spoke with a London accent, saw the same films, listened to the same music; grew up on fish and chips and BBC One, just like her. Perhaps it spoke of her own shallowness, she thought with another pang of guilt.
Or maybe it was just the paranoid mood of the country as a whole of late.
Times were changing. There seemed to be a frisson in the air, as though a storm was about to break and no-one knew when the first clap of thunder would ring out across the sky. Britain was nervous. Uneasy.
And so was she.
Oh god, where was this damn bus? She glanced over once more at the Underground station across the road. Should she? The businessman in the queue with her seemed to have made up his own mind on the matter, making his way with haste across the busy road, weaving his way between stopped cars as he half-jogged to the entrance.
With a silent nod, Nikki followed suit. She could always run when she got into town. She’d rather be closer to the office when she received the inevitable irate phone call asking where the hell she was. A black cab beeped at her as the lights changed and she raised her hand in apology as the cabbie shook his head. She made it across the road, spying the businessman disappearing down the steps and into the station entrance. She pause
d and frowned for a second as her eyes followed him descending.
Hadn’t he been holding a briefcase?
She turned on the spot, pivoting on her high-heeled shoes like a figure skater to look back at the bus stop twenty yards across the road. There it was, the black briefcase, still sat on the bench within the shelter on the busy pavement opposite. Should she go and fetch it for him, hurry and catch him up? The sound of a noisy diesel engine and she glanced left – the bus was coming now, slowing down to a stop.
God damn it! Her mind whirled with indecision. Be a good Samaritan and fetch the briefcase? Forget it and jump on the bus? She stood, like a rabbit in the headlights, on the opposite side of the busy road to the bus stop, caught in a turmoil of thoughts that her sleep-addled, coffeeless mind just couldn’t begin to sort out.
Her indecision saved her life.
As she stared at it in hesitation, the briefcase suddenly flared, impossibly bright, scorching its rectangular outline into her very retinas. Then time, for an instant, seemed to stop.
Before resuming again as an orgy of hellish violence and merciless destruction.
***
8:48am. The briefcase, packed with C4 and operated by a remote controlled detonator, exploded in the bus shelter on the packed rush hour street.
Those nearest, standing in the bus shelter, died before their brains could even process what was happening.
George and Margaret Vincent, on their way to visit their son and daughter-in-law and their new grandchild; Adam Johnson, on his day off from A-levels, off to work his part-time factory job so he could save up for his first car; Mamood Iqbal, making his way out of London to start a new life, having only yesterday plucked up the courage to tell his family that he was still their son, even if he was gay, and that if they couldn’t accept that then he was leaving; all of these lives were snuffed out in an instant, their bodies blasted apart, atomised by the brute concussive force of the initial blast as it tore the steel and plastic bus shelter apart like an eggshell.
But these four were far from the only casualties that day.
The number 23 bus itself was hurled from its wheels by the force of the explosion, its seven tons lifted clean into the air as though by the angry kick of some invisible giant. Few screams from those within as it fell, though; most were slaughtered unawares in that first half-second, as the shards of glass from the windows nearest the blast had sliced through the crowded interior like a hail of razor shuriken stars. Launched by the shockwave, the glass fragments traversed the bus’s interior at Mach one, tearing through furniture and commuters with equal, horrifying, ease, till the rent and twisted cabin of the Routemaster bus was painted as red as its famous exterior.
Within the hardware store behind the bus stop, those shoppers and workers fortunate enough to be behind shelving escaped mostly unharmed as debris was deflected. Those in the open, however, were less lucky; the glass front of the shop erupted inwards in a blizzard of razor sharp death, followed milliseconds later by twisted spars of hurtling metal from the bus shelter itself.
A store worker, standing there, pricing gun in hand as he restocked the shelves, turned at the roar, just in time to see a three foot jagged piece of steel blur its way towards him. A strange sucking noise then a twang. He turned again, to spy the piece of metal protruding from the wall behind him, having buried itself deep into the concrete. He gave a short laugh of shocked relief, but then a peculiar warmth began to spread its way through his midsection. He looked down; where his belly should be, there was now nothing more than a ragged, gaping hole. Even as he watched, his own innards began to fall in a slippery, steaming mess, to spill out upon the tiled floor. He gasped, began to cry, tried in vain to stuff his organs back within, even as they continued to slip through his fingers.
A short way down the road, a gaggle of schoolgirls, running late, had walked out of Subway, giggling and chatting to themselves, holding their coffees and breakfast subs as they prepared themselves for another day of carefree youth. A motorcycle, that once belonged to a courier, now no more than a red smear upon the pavement himself, bounced its way down the pavement in a shower of sparks, propelled by the thunderous explosion. It hit the group of teens, two hundred kilos of flaming metal at over a hundred miles per hour. They were later identified only by the school bus passes they carried in their pockets.
***
Blackness, at first. Then light. Silence. Then noise. Screams, crying, the moans of the dying. The sound of fire, of crumbling masonry. The distant wail of sirens.
Nikki rose unsteadily from foot of the wall against which she’d been blasted and blinked, gazing about with ever mounting horror at the scene all about her. What… what had happened? A man wandered like a sleepwalker, holding his detached right arm in the hand of his left like a child might carry a teddy bear. Somewhere, a child was calling for its mother.
There was a dripping noise and Nikki noticed a puddle of red on the pavement but five feet from where she stood. It splashed as it grew, fed steadily by a stream of drops from above. Slowly, not wanting to but unwilling to resist the impulse, she craned her neck to look up. A man dangled some twenty feet above, hurled by the blast and impaled through the chest upon the streetlamp, a fish upon the spear of some Amazonian rainforest hunter. The man gurgled, eyes wide, turning to look down at her. His mouth moved, but no sound came out; only a stream of blood-flecked spittle.
Finally, mercifully, his eyes glazed over.
Nikki turned, leant head first against the wall and retched. She retched and retched, heaving till her stomach hurt and there was nothing left to come. Her eyes burned, whether an after-effect of the blast or simply due to the tears that streamed freely, she couldn’t tell. How could this happen? What had these people done to deserve this horror? This nightmare?
All these commuters just going about their lives, beginning another day, earning their meagre wage so that they could return home come evening and spend what little time they could with their loved ones. All gone. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; entire lives destroyed. And for what?
Even as Nikki leant against the wall, her mind racing, her heart pounding, her stomach throbbing with the ache of expelling every last drop of breakfast, a suggestion of motion from the corner of her vision.
A pair of brown loafers. Striped with white.
Shaking, she turned.
The businessman stood there, a few feet distant, having emerged from the Underground station. Where everyone else in view wore a mask of shock or pain or anger or plain terror, this man simply stood, calm, cool, collected, fiddling with the cufflinks of his expensive shirt as he surveyed the carnage. Something approaching a grin seemed to flicker across his face, just for an instant, then it was gone.
Then with a quick adjustment of his tie, he strode away.
Nikki stood there, eyes slowly widening, as she watched him make his way through the hellish scene, picking his way unhurriedly through scattered body parts and traumatised survivors.
She watched him. And then she followed.
***
A flurry of lights and sirens, police cars, ambulances and fire engines going the other way, back towards the scene of the carnage. But Nikki kept her eyes firmly on her quarry. He moved swiftly through the morning crowds, yet casually, not like someone attempting to flee the scene of a crime.
He moved with confidence.
Nikki’s heart was pounding in her chest. Why was she doing this? This wasn’t her job. She tried her phone again, dialling 999, staying a dozen yards behind the man so as to not arouse suspicion. Again, the same recorded message as before: Network Busy. Damn. Should she try to flag down a policeman as they drove past? No – it would only alert the man she pursued. If he saw a cop car slow down and stop, he would leg it, she was sure.
No. Follow him. Take photos. Get a good look so she could give a description. She was a reporter, after all.
They were nearly a mile away from the scene of destruction now, but he seemed to show no si
gns of slowing. Her feet killed in her high-heeled shoes. She stumbled, nearly fell, but held out her arm and grabbed a steel bollard, steadying herself. She looked up.
He was gone.
Shit! She hurried forwards. Where could he be? He was there only a second ago! Wait, was that an alleyway between the shops there? She made her way towards it and rounded the corner. Was that him disappearing round another corner down the alley? She continued on, wary now, all too aware that she was out of sight of the general public. The alley was tall, dark, smelt of piss and damp. She felt suddenly vulnerable. She should keep her distance, make sure he didn’t know he was being followed.
She rounded a Biffa bin, overflowing with cardboard boxes, made her way slowly, stealthily, to the corner. She turned it.
And found herself face to face with the barrel of a gun.
Nikki stopped dead, eyes wide, staring at the black metal pistol that pointed straight at her face. Her mind urged her to run, to duck, to get out of the way of that weapon, but a curious weakness filled her limbs with lead, rendering her unable to move.
“You picked the wrong day to be a hero, miss.”
The man’s voice was calm, quiet and silky smooth with an upper-middle-class English accent. He stared at her with handsome blue eyes as he held the semi-automatic steady, pointing it directly at her head from only ten feet away.
“Why… why did you do this?” she managed to stutter, aware that each moment might be her last. She had to know.
The man smiled coldly and the look chilled her to the bone.
“I’m merely the bearer of a message,” he told her. “The first of many. There is a Judgement coming. A war that will encompass the entire world. And we are its harbingers. The Brotherhood of the Veil will make the cracks, weaken the foundations. Ready for those to come to deliver the final hammer blow…”
The Brotherhood? Memories of watching the news, of reading the papers, all flashed through Nikki’s mind. How easy it was to ignore such threats, to believe that such things could only happen to people far away and not on your own doorstep. So easy to believe that terrorists were only bluffing. Or worse still, make believe. Fairy stories to frighten the masses into line.
Bloodless Revolution Page 1
