“They’re ashore,” I said, knowing that Dan wouldn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were either, “near the farm.” I turned to Lucien. “Where’s the messenger?”
“Gatehouse,” he replied, his face resolute as he flanked me beside Dan.
“Je m’appelle Leah,” I told him, “can you tell me what you saw?” He nodded like a demented dog watching a juicy bit of fried chicken waving through the air before him, and started to babble in rapid French so heavily accented that I struggled to make out most of what he said. I turned to Lucien who translated to fill the gaps.
“He says they came two days before. He says they just stand near the farm and watch, they do not come near the walls.” The ‘walls’ were a joke in human terms, merely a wooden palisade designed to prevent predators from stealing livestock and pets. The wolf population had thrived in the absence of more humans and every couple of years we had to lead a cull on their numbers in case they threatened our dubious spot at the top of the local food chain.
“Ask him why they didn’t use the pigeons,” I said, turning back to the man and speaking in frustration.
“Les pigeons?” Lucian added the rest of the question like it was an interrogation. The man babbled again, the occasional word reconciling itself in my mind before stopping and glancing between us nervously.
“He said they have…” He dropped back into French again to clarify and spoke to me in English. “He said they have—”
“Falcons,” I said understanding the word he used well enough to get a vague translation.
“Birds of prey,” Lucien added for clarity, glancing between me and Dan. “How did they know to…” He trailed off, figuring out that the torture of the homesteaders must have included some questioning. It also answered the question as to why one man arrived at their gate having pretty much run all the way to get help.
“How many?” Dan asked. “Combien?” The man shrugged, throwing out random numbers which told me had literally no idea. Dan turned to Lucien. “Anything else? Any information on them?” As Lucien quizzed the man in more depth, I took a step back to stand beside Dan.
“We going?” I asked.
“Mmmhmm.”
“Today?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Good,” I said, “how many?”
“Maximum of ten,” Dan told me, “all fit. All experienced fighters. Leave enough good people to cover the walls and the bay.” I nodded and turned away, all feelings of generalised nausea and tiredness forgotten in an instant when there was work to do.
My first stop was Mitch, apologising to Alita as my knock at their door sparked a sudden and high-pitched crying from their baby girl. Mitch, a light sleeper at the best of times thanks to his years of cat-napping at any and every opportunity in the infantry, emerged wearing just his boxer shorts and a confused look. I had forgotten he had taken the night shift and would have had only a few hours’ sleep.
“Sorry,” I said, ignoring his appearance which told him that the visit wasn’t a social one. I turned to Alita and smiled another apology. “I need to steal him…”
Alita turned to Mitch and smiled a frustrated smile as she tried to rock their little girl back into a relaxed state. “Away with you both, then,” she said in her strange accented English, having learned most of her sayings from Mitch. He gave me a nod which I took as my cue to wait outside and he disappeared back up the stairwell to re-emerge a couple of minutes later in fatigue trousers and a T-shirt. He wore a gun on his right thigh, more out of habit than anything else, but didn’t appear in full combat gear.
“Job?” he asked as he fell in step beside me on the walk back up from the seaward part of town.
“Job,” I confirmed. “They’ve got inland somehow, and have used hawks to bring down the farm’s carrier pigeons. They haven’t attacked yet, at least they hadn’t by this morning, and Dan wants to go and have a look at them.
Mitch knew as well as I did what he meant by ‘having a look at them’.
“When?” he asked.
“Today.”
“How many?”
“Me, you, him,” I said, “and up to seven more. Capable but not all of our best. Don’t want to leave this place short.”
“That means one of us should stay back here,” he said. I shot a knowing glance in his direction. I knew he wouldn’t be volunteering to stay behind, and he knew that I wouldn’t either. The thought that Dan would agree and decide to stay behind the walls would have been funny under other circumstances.
~
It took close to two hours to gather the six people who met the criteria to come, and who had volunteered because to my knowledge nobody had ever been ordered on a mission. We paired them off as they drew weapons from the armoury and each took a pair under our respective commands. Trained operators they weren’t, but they were fit and dedicated and they knew how to work their weapons properly.
We’d trained like this, using militia as fire support and coached them accordingly. The upside of this was that they saw how to operate, so had a visual training package to follow. The training was something that I and others had conducted weekly, but with the arrival of the bloody pirates all of that had fallen away.
I travelled light as we all did, checking over my backup and stripping them of the unnecessary things they tried to take as I got them to turn out their emergency bags. We took enough to survive if we had to spend the night outside the walls, as Dan had warned us to prepare for, and I added the thigh pouch on my right leg to hold two spare magazines for the heavy rifle I planned to take.
A hand on my shoulder stopped me and I fought back the impulse to react as though it was a threat. I knew that touch, somehow instinctively, and I reached up to place my own hand on top of Lucien’s as I turned.
“It should be me going instead of you,” he said softly as he snaked his hands around my waist to smoothly bring himself closer.
“Why?” I shot back half seriously, as I reacted to the sudden change in temperature I felt because of the rush of blood his hands on me caused. “Because you are ze man?” I mocked playfully. “Because a girl can’t go out and fight while her boyfriend stays at home and cooks?”
He frowned at the metaphorical bait. “I’m hardly cooking and cleaning when you are out fighting a war,” he said sternly. “You leave me in command of the defences here and say that I cannot come with you?”
“No,” I told him, “you can’t come.”
“Why?” he asked in the same tome I had used.
“Because I want to protect you as much as you want to protect me, but”—I raised myself up on my tiptoes to kiss him softly—“I’m better at this than you are,” I told him with a smirk as I pulled away. He smiled back, reaching past me without taking his eyes off mine to pick up the leg pouch with the spare ammo for the big rifle, and handed it to me.
“Come back safely to me,” he said with another playful smile as he turned to leave, “or else.”
White Flag
Leah leaned back from her chair again, pushing the heavy ledger away and resting the pen gently down, looking out of the window to see the sun was setting and the light in the room had faded to the point where she couldn’t see well enough to continue.
She had gone back to her work after spending an hour with Adalene beside the sea, talking and laughing with her daughter before she forced herself back into the uncomfortable memories of the time when she was first pregnant.
Some memories were fun to recount. They took her back to happy times, times when people she loved were still with them, still young and full of life. It hurt her to think of the people she missed; it actually ached in her chest but with that loss came the flush of happiness that she ever knew them in the first place.
She stood, stretching out her back until the rewarding cracks of things realigning along her vertebrae sounded loudly in the small room. She reached into her leg pocket and pulled out the metal lighter she had carried for years. She turned it around in her fingers to regard
it and all the memories it carried before gripping it tightly and flicking off the lid with her thumb to bring the digit back own and strike the wheel to produce a rippling flame. She watched the dancing orange flicker for a moment before she picked up a candle and tipped the wick to the flame. She lit another and placed them on the desk near her work but realised that even with the light from the candles she couldn’t see well enough to continue.
“That’s enough for today, I think,” she said as she snapped her fingers to get the attention of the sleeping dog. Ares, twisted on his back with his front and rear paws resting in opposite directions, flailed as he fought to right himself in one movement. Leah chuckled at the dog, thinking of how daft Ash was when she had first seen him. She really hoped that Ares would grow into his legs along with his ears, and that he would locate another level, another gear in his maturity because she was sad to think that he didn’t have the required streak of savagery to be what she needed him to be.
She blew out the candles and patted her leg for the dog to follow her, stooping inside the door to retrieve the battered gun she had been using in the story she was writing down. Knowing it would be too early for another meal, not that she was overly hungry having eaten a late lunch, she took a walk along the ramparts as she had done so many times in her life.
The sun wasn’t fully setting yet, but it was starting to sink over the cliffs on the western side of the bay, dropping down behind the watchtower where Lucien had admitted to watching her when he was stationed there for his sharp eyes and his skills of long-distance shooting. She chuckled at that memory too, only a few years before the time she had spent all day recounting, but still fresh in her memory. His admission about watching her had been turned around when she asked if he had been pointing a rifle at her, and he responded that he had the safety catch on.
“Peaceful, ain’t it?” Joshua said from behind her as he walked quietly along the ramparts. Part of her suspected that he had spoken so as not to startle her by appearing close by, but she smiled and responded.
“I like it up here,” she said, “always have.”
“Top o’ the world, sure enough,” Joshua said wistfully as he gazed out to sea. Leah looked in the same direction, happy that the massive eyesore of the tanker she had been remembering was no longer there, no longer a part of their world. Joshua seemed to know what was on her mind. Their conversation the previous evening and her admission of why she wanted to drag painful memories from the past back to the front of their minds had bonded them a little more. He already felt an affinity, a platonic but affectionate sense of closeness to the young woman who had saved his life by not taking it with a bullet. Though in the months that followed his health declined and he felt confusion and resented her for not taking the shot and scrubbing out his misery right there and then. He had forgiven her for not killing him, as bizarre as that sounded, as much as he had been grateful for her saving his life, and whichever way those feelings affected him his sense of debt to her was strong.
He repaid it then with a few minutes of companionable silence spent gazing out over the darkening skies of Sanctuary before she spoke to him.
“Guess which bit I’ve got to in the story,” she asked.
“Well, given your contemplative state,” Joshua said carefully, “I’d say you had to take a break at that part when y’all went off spoilin’ for another fight.”
~
Stripped to bare arms covered only by gloves and elbow pads, an addition I’d dug out before leaving, I regretted wearing a vest top instead of a short-sleeved T-shirt. The small bag on my back, despite being strapped down as tight as it could be, rubbed the bare skin of my shoulders and chafed annoyingly. The big rifle didn’t help, and after I had to resort to carrying that with my carbine strapped to my backpack Mitch had seen me struggling and offered to carry it for a while.
I accepted, because there was no time to stop and get more comfortable; we had a lot of ground to cover and we didn’t want to be trying to make an approach as the sun was setting because that happened fast this far south.
The trading post, the abandoned building we had cleared and repaired so many years ago to act as a central point for our scattered settlements of friends and allies, stood proudly in the open ground far ahead of us. Dan called a halt and raised his gun to look ahead so I took back my 417 from Mitch and used the far more powerful optic to bring the building into closer view.
“I don’t see anything,” I said after a good half minute of watching.
“Doesn’t mean there isn’t anything,” Mitch grumbled back like it was an automated response.
“We go,” Dan said, “two down the flanks and one straight down the road.” I knew who he would choose to go straight down the road, to be in the most danger of all of us, and I knew that me trying to tell him not to go himself would just be ignored. I looked at Mitch, pointing that I would go right, and he nodded to head off left. We all went with our respective pairs of militia in support, heading for the building like a three-pronged spear. Mitch’s group and mine moved as tactically as we could, skirting the dips beside the repaired road as Dan walked tall and proud towards the trading post as though nothing was amiss in the world. His body might be sending out those signals, but I knew his eyes would be darting to every part of the landscape like he was being electrocuted.
I reached the position I had chosen to be able to fire on the building and cover the only other door in and out other than the front entrance. Pointing to where I wanted them, my team spread out to wait in professional silence as we watched Dan walk up to the building. I couldn’t see them, but I knew Mitch and his two would be opposite our position somewhere with their guns up and ready too.
Dan stopped, Ash stopping beside him, and I imagined the low, throaty growl coming from him. I don’t know why or how, maybe something about his body language, but I knew the dog was sounding his patented alarm. Dan raised his weapon as he dropped into a crouch and said something to send his two fighters ahead to the wall of the building. I saw this clearly, saw his lips moving through the powerful magnification of the big scope, and at once my heart began to bang in my chest and my breathing sped up. I forced both to slow down, at least I tried to, as I knew what uncontrolled adrenaline did to my accuracy at distance.
Dan went inside, Ash beside him as Nemesis grumbled at my side somehow sensing that there was action happening and she was being forced to watch. Tense seconds passed by as the three of them stayed out of sight inside the trading post until one of the militia ran outside and dropped to his knees, his rifle clattering to the roadway as he arched his back and vomited.
“Oh, this does not look good,” I said as much to myself as anyone else, standing and slinging the rifle diagonally over my shoulder only for it to rest awkwardly against my bag and half choke me as I ran forwards. Dan came out before I got there, heading me off and dropping his gun on its sling to block me from going inside.
“What is it?” I demanded, trying to push past him. “Is it Roland?”
“Don’t go in there,” Dan said, holding me firmly.
Roland had been at the trading post almost every time I had passed through since it had been reclaimed and made a part of our world. He was starting to get old but not so much that it slowed him down, and I marvelled at how someone who spent a lot of their time alone knew the comings and goings of every settlement in the entire area. He was a hub of gossip, a lover of dogs, and I was incensed that someone could have hurt him.
I pushed Dan’s hands off me and sidestepped him. He let me go, not wanting to escalate and actually take me down if I was intent on going inside, and afterwards a big part of me wished I hadn’t seen what they had done.
The supplies, the neatly stacked food and water and other tradeable items were scattered all over the place. Whole shelves had been pulled to the floor just to wreck the contents for no reason other than sheer destructiveness. My eyes kept panning, taking in the carnage as it unfolded, until they rested on a congealing, oi
ly puddle of dark brown on the ground. I stepped forwards, not seeing anything in the puddle and naively hoping that whoever had lost that much blood was still alive.
My gaze stopped on an abnormal item for the post: a rope tied against a fixed metal railing leading upwards to the cavernous pitched roof. Dreading what I was about to see, I followed the line of the rope upwards until I saw the butchered body of a man hung by his feet. He was stripped naked, sliced and stabbed in a thousand places and left to drip blood onto the floor like so much meat.
Scratch that, I told myself, nobody I know would even treat their food like this.
“We’re losing the light,” Dan said outside, “three miles to the farm. Let’s move.”
I stormed outside, walking right up to him and speaking in a low growl as Nemesis whined at the threshold of the building still not wanting to step a paw inside. It was as though she could sense what had happened and feared it.
“We can’t leave him like this.”
“And we won’t,” Dan answered equably, “but the time for that isn’t now.” The look he gave me made it clear that this wasn’t negotiable, but leaving Roland hung there like that was too much to bear.
“Can’t we at least cut him down?” I pleaded quietly.
“For the wolves and rats and god knows what else to chew at him?” he shot back. “Leave him where he is. We’ll deal with him properly later, okay?”
It wasn’t, but I had little choice in the matter.
We moved towards the farm, faster but more alert than before. Twice I thought I saw movement on the higher ground as though watchers pulled away from the skyline when we approached, and I didn’t know if it was my imagination or instinct that slowed me before the road swung sharply to the left in the direction of the farms.
“Stop,” I called, waiting as the noises of boots on the rough roadway slowed and stopped to be replaced by heavy breathing as we all fought to regain our breath. I caught eyes with Dan and pointed upwards at the higher bluff of ground which would lead back down to the road we would have to take on the other side of the bend. He nodded, telling the others to take a break.
Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8) Page 17
