Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8)

by Devon C. Ford

  “Twenty minutes,” Dan announced, causing the group to break away softly as though he had cut the bonds keeping them there and allowed them to float away. I caught his eye, my own expression one of grim determination which mirrored his. Both of our faces reflected a great sadness behind the anger; sadness that people still behaved like this to one another when there were precious few of us enough left already. We were both saddened and upset by what we had seen, and although that upset caused us to experience pain it wasn’t a weakness that showed through, but instead a hardened resolve to rectify the imbalance that had come to our little slice of the continent.

  Like everyone who had done so before, these bastards would pay the price for their inhumanity too. I gave him a nod and turned away, wheeling around to find my eyes directly in front of Lucien’s chin.

  “You,” he said sternly, or at least as sternly as he could manage when talking to me, “be careful and come back to me.” My eyes flickered to the covered body nearby before returning to his face. I managed to leave off the words, in one piece.

  It was only a little after midday by the time we had headed far enough inland so as to be totally alone in the world. Everywhere I looked the subtle signs of nature reclaiming the earth peeked back at me; a reflected glint of metal covered by creeping ivy or the unnatural straight edge of a distant building yet to have been pulled down to the ground by the elements.

  I always enjoyed being so far away from everything, so far removed from the world entirely, but that day my mind was so preoccupied with the gruesome results of barbaric human behaviour that any enjoyment I could have taken from the journey was whipped away by the warm wind rushing around us.

  It was late spring, or I guessed the start of summer, technically – not that the days and months meant anything in a life dictated by the seasons that had a habit of keeping their own schedule – and we were all sweating and breathing hard as we fought to gain elevation from sea level where we began. Rapid gains in height, especially when walking and jogging under pressure and stress, was so exhausting it sapped the will from my legs before I reached the top.

  “This…” I panted as I put my head down to force my legs to dig in deeper and propel me upwards towards the ridge line ahead, “is why… we run up… and down the bloody steps… at home…”

  Mitch said nothing, as his recent lack of sleep through baby-related activity had taken the edge off his usual billy goat-like fitness. Dan grunted in answer, all he could manage as he screwed his eyes up and opened his mouth wider to suck in the much-needed oxygen.

  When we reached the plateau, via the most direct route to save half an hour of meandering round the long way by road, I dropped to one knee and brought up my weapon to scan the ground ahead. Beside me, Dan did the same as Mitch remained stood tall and brought his heavier, longer gun up to his shoulder to view the land ahead through his scope.

  “Nothing,” Dan said first. I agreed but saved the unnecessary waste of breath in saying so. I just stood, lowered my gun into a low ready carry, and gave a short whistle to bring Nemesis to heel. The two dogs, unperturbed by the steep incline save for their tongues lolling from their mouths to lose the excess heat they had generated during the climb, stopped sniffing around in random tracks on the rocky ground and returned to us. Ash went to Dan and, being the seasoned professional he was, dropped into position by his left leg and waited to go to work. His age, and I guessed he must be almost nine years old given that we didn’t really know his age when Dan first found him, didn’t seem to slow him down. I knew it would, eventually, just as it would my Nem, but his only concession to his advancing years had been a little more bulk and a lightening of the grey around his big muzzle.

  Much like Dan, actually.

  I kept my own dog at heel, proud that even though she was a little under half of Ash’s age she was already an experienced sidekick and had performed well the only time I had ever had cause to deploy her as a weapon against real enemies. My mind shot back to her first bite, when I had been knocked stupid by a car crash and came under attack by someone wanting to finish the job of rendering me unconscious with a rifle butt, and she had flown through the air like a furry missile to savage the bastard to pieces.

  “Another hour,” Dan said. I looked up to see him pointing ahead and slightly left with a flat hand to indicate the direction we needed to take. Like me, he had these routes memorised and never took the same way to or from somewhere unless it was necessary, as you never knew when you might have to go around something. Knowing the ground was an advantage I enjoyed.

  Nobody spoke as we moved. Occasionally one of us would point out something: an animal or a position we should check before walking casually by. One of those was a thick copse of trees which were packed together so tightly that they created a dark void in their centre and grew so straight as though they were racing one another to get their leaves up to the sunlight.

  The method was simple, just as though we were hunting game birds back in the world where such sport was a pastime for the wealthy instead of being a necessity of survival. Dan and I sent our dogs into the trees with commands to search for enemies as we tracked their progress from the sides on open ground. A rustling of undergrowth and the pistol shot of snapping branches preceded a flurry of movement as three young deer, short-legged and bounding randomly, fled the trees with Nemesis running with extreme effort after them. I knew she couldn’t maintain that kind of flat-out sprint for more than a matter of seconds as she seemed to hinge in the middle of her back to get the maximum reach of front and back paws like a cheetah. I contemplated calling her back, but before I could draw in the breath to do it she realised the futility of her pursuit and broke off to loop a wide circle back to me. Ash emerged beside me, gave me an almost bored look, and sneezed once before trotting off to find Dan.

  Experience over youth, I thought, watching the older dog who knew better than to try to take down such agile moving food when it had a head start. I smiled at him, prompting Dan to ask what I was thinking.

  “Oh,” I said, unaware that I had been the subject of his scrutiny, “I was just thinking that he’s clever enough to know when not to bother chasing deer, but he’ll still pick a fight with any cow he sees.”

  Dan chuckled. “He does hate cows…”

  “Got something,” Mitch growled, bringing us back to the moment in an instant. Both of us brought weapons up as we sidestepped to the shade of the trees as Nemesis looped in to my left side.

  “Where?” I murmured.

  “Twelve o’clock,” Mitch told us, talking our eyes onto the target as we knew he would. As he had taught me to do. “Peak in the ridge line. Pan right to the patch of bushes…”

  “Got it,” Dan said.

  “…come down to the patch of dead ground… see it?”

  “I see it,” I told him as I picked up the reply. “Where now?”

  “Hold there,” Mitch told us. We held there until our patience was rewarded by a small billow of smoke rising from the dead ground ahead.

  Long Sleeves

  Ten of them were sent ashore on the first dawn after their huge mothership had dropped anchor opposite the small bay where people watched from the walls of an old castle. None of them had ever seen a place like it, and almost all of them aboard the small skiff heading up the coast stared in awe at the high walls and ancient defences of the seaward side of the enclosed town.

  They were more accustomed to walled towns of rusted metal sheets and mud walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire, but the most important part of their lives were spent at sea. Unlike their previous incarnation, these post-civilisation pirates spent more time on one vessel than they did previously. Instead of hiding in the small coastal fortresses in Kenya, Eritrea or Somalia and only going to sea when a hijacking mission had been financed and planned to spend weeks, often months aboard the captured ship until the ransoms were paid, they now lived almost exclusively at sea.

  The small group, a single crew of raiders, was sen
t ashore as a reward for hard work and good fortune when they had found a further cache of weapons in Tunisia and then a supply of alcohol in a port that they didn’t know was at the southern tip of Sardinia. Their leader, Gareer, who the crew simply referred to as Boqor, had told them to go inland away from the town so as not to test their defences yet. Their orders were as simplistic as they were ominous.

  They were told to go and have some fun.

  The first place they found to beach their boat safely, away from the sharp rocks, was a small bay of yellow sand, with a massed rampart of junk and plastic washed up over the years since people had stopped using the beach for leisure. They ran the small skiff aground and shut off the engine before they leapt from it to raise their weapons cautiously, if with little tactical ability.

  One of them, the smallest and likely the youngest, lugged a large plastic container of water awkwardly, the long AK rifle he carried slipping from his shoulder in his haste to try and keep up with the older men as they filed up the sandy slope towards the higher ground.

  It took them less than an hour to locate the homesteaders, as they were burning some wood from the previous summer which had yet to season enough not to emit a skein of dark smoke to rise up over their farm. They weren’t subtle about it. They didn’t conduct any reconnaissance or watch their targets with any degree of professionalism, but merely wandered up to their property wearing smiles of anticipated cruelty.

  There were eleven people there that day, and of those eleven just one was chosen at random to be the messenger. He was kept until last intentionally so that he had lots to report and would be debilitated and motivated by the fear in equal measures. He had been tied to an apple tree, the sickly sweet smell of the fallen fruit rich in his nostrils above his gagged mouth, and he had watched as the men in his group had been forced to the large chopping block they used to split their firewood. The one who appeared to be their leader, a tall and gangly man with prominent, yellow teeth and stick-thin limbs, brandished a dull-looking machete with rust pitted on the wide blade.

  The man watched – he had no choice as he was bound so tightly that he couldn’t look away – and every time he tried to close his eyes he was struck and threatened so that he saw the full horror of the display.

  “Just kill me,” he begged through the gag. He didn’t want to watch his friends die, but his pleas for mercy and humanity fell on deaf ears; the men who had come to their home possessed neither.

  He screamed and raged into the thick cloth stuffed in his mouth as tears and mucus ran freely down his face. He bellowed in fear and pain and guilt as he watched the men lined up in turn and given a choice; the choice of which parts they were going to cut off with the machete. If they didn’t choose quickly enough, if they hesitated or tried to resist in any way, the men would choose for them.

  The first man, forcibly restrained and held over the block, lost his head. The thin man with the machete seemed capable of an incredible strength when his thin arms swung the ugly blade, and despite its rough appearance the edge must have been carefully maintained as just three powerful downwards strokes severed the head, removing it from the body with a sickening eruption of fountaining blood.

  The next man dragged towards the block screamed and begged for them to take his hand instead. He threw himself down, sobs forcing the tears to run from his eyes and down his cheeks as he held his own hand out on the block to be taken. The man who dragged him there looked at his leader and shrugged. He shrugged in return and whirled the dirty blade through the air like he was splitting logs to bring it down and remove the hand just above the wrist with a crunch.

  The amputee howled in agony and shock. It wasn’t a sound the bound man had ever heard another human being make before, not even an animal, but that sound echoed in his mind until the moment he too died. With blood spurting from the severed limb the man tried to walk away on his knees as his right hand gripped the left forearm with as much strength as he could muster. It wasn’t enough to stop the bleeding, not by any stretch of the imagination, but that didn’t matter.

  “Where are you going?” the leader asked through laughter. “You have another prize to collect!” He gestured with the machete and the bleeding man was hauled back to the block where his right foot was amputated at mid shin. This second procedure took much longer, as the bones had to first be broken and manipulated to allow the blade to bite home. It took six or seven blows for the lower leg and foot to fall away, but by that time the man had blessedly lost consciousness either through the terrible, unimaginable pain or else through the severe blood loss. His body was rolled aside like discarded meat and the gang jeered the next man as he was ordered forwards. He stood, retaining as much dignity as he could, and when one of them moved to pull him towards his execution he drew his head back and delivered a brutal sucker-blow with his forehead.

  He timed and aimed his defiant blow perfectly, connecting the hardest part of his forehead with the widest part of his tormentor’s nose, and crunching it into ruined oblivion. He dropped, shattered nose rendering him unconscious long before his thin frame slumped to the ground, and the defiant man reeled from the blow to his own head.

  Savage strikes from rifle butts rained down on him, dropping him to the ground and continuing until another stomach-churning crunch signified that his skull had been fractured. An angry exchange took place between the leader and one of the men who had beaten their prisoner to death which none of the captured French people understood as it was in a language none of them had ever heard. Their leader seemed annoyed that he had been denied the sport and exercise of dismembering a terrified, innocent person. As their argument raged and grew louder, one of the other men took his opportunity to make a run for it in a bid for freedom. His sudden flight was noticed, thanks largely to the heads of the captives all moving in unison to watch his escape, and three loud rifles opened up with bursts of automatic fire to shred his body with the heavy bullets and throw his ruined corpse to the ground.

  More arguments erupted among the invaders and the sport of chopping up their captives was put on hold as the women were dragged inside the farmhouse only for their screams to rip the air for over an hour. The remaining captives, bound and gagged and forced to listen to their friends and loved ones suffering more torture than they could endure, suffered more casual beatings until they couldn’t offer any more resistance.

  One man, unable to contain his rage at seeing his woman dragged away, died slowly from a deep knife wound to his belly which had been delivered by the smallest member of the invaders. He seemed to be no more than a child, but any sympathy for his age and assumed innocence was obliterated by his sick and cruel actions. He had threatened the man with the blade, kicking him back down to the ground repeatedly and shouting at him to stay there, and when he hadn’t complied the boy had stood on the man’s chest and pressed the tip of the knife into his flesh just enough to pierce the skin. He snarled in his face, saying something that none of them understood, and slowly, inch by heart-wrenching inch, he pushed the blade inside as blood welled up and his victim began to make chocking noises of agony and convulsed like a landed fish. The boy withdrew the blade and held it up for the others of his group to see the bright, wet blood on his hands. They made a show of seeming unimpressed, either that or they were just anxious to take their turns inside the house, and just casually watched as the stabbed man died slowly.

  By the time they had finished with the women, none of whom came back outside again, the fight seemed to have escaped the men and their deaths happened with less excitement than the first few.

  The man bound to the tree stared without emotion as the man he had lived alongside as a brother for over six years twitched and bled out to soak the soft, green ground in front of him with red blood from where both arms had been severed just below the elbow.

  They left him there, still tied to the tree in a catatonic state, as they pillaged everything they wanted from the house and outbuildings. They took as much as they could carry
, seeming to prepare to leave as all of them drank from the large glass bottles containing home-brewed cider. The bound man knew that the drink wasn’t ready, hadn’t fully fermented yet, and took a tiny shred of satisfaction that all of them drinking it would suffer terribly over the next few days as their guts tried to reconcile with the active yeasts still working in the sediment they ingested.

  His eyes widened as a fresh hell was promised from one of them carrying a red-hot blade which had evidently been placed into the fire that always burned inside the house for cooking. He felt his bonds slacken as he was cut free and the pain of his numb hands burned fiercely as he fell forwards. Almost in a dream state, he found himself hauled forwards to the block where the smiling leader bowed to him in mock greeting.

  “Do you wear long sleeve, or a short sleeve?” he asked in heavily accented English. The Frenchman knew very little English, so he frowned in response as he tried to speak but found himself unable to. “I choose long sleeve for you, my friend.” The leader grinned evilly at him. He stood, nodded for others to hold his target practice still, and severed both of his hands with viciously hard blows of the machete before dropping the weapon and reaching out to carefully take the glowing orange blade. He pressed the flat of the blade to both wounds, sizzling the fresh blood and burning the flesh to produce the worst smell the now-handless man had ever experienced. His consciousness wavered as the pain somehow went away. He lay flat on his back, his ruined arms held out and above him as the world around him still moved to send muffled noises his way. After a while, which could have been minutes or hours, he became aware that he was now alone.

  One of his friends, his brothers, had been dumped on top of a fire which had been set in the small pit outside they sometimes used, and his dead form smouldered and smoked to emit another noxious smell that he couldn’t bear.

  He stood, staggering as he gained his feet awkwardly, and set off west without being able to look back at his home even once.