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

by Devon C. Ford

  “That’s right, clever pants,” she said, unable to resist the urge to squeeze the girl’s ribs and make her twist away in laughter.

  “What are you writing now?” she asked her mother.

  “The same thing I’ve been writing for a week,” she told her kindly. “It’s a very long story.”

  “Can you tell me some of it?” she asked hopefully as her face betrayed the need for attention more than knowledge of the actual story.

  “Not yet, beautiful,” Leah told her, “when you’re older you can read it yourself, but… not yet.” The girl’s bottom lip extended automatically until her mother’s next words lit up her face like a Christmas tree.

  “I’m taking a break anyway,” she told her, “because the next part of the story is very sad and I need to think about it a bit more. Let’s do something together instead, shall we?”

  “Papa wanted you,” she told her mother.

  “That’s good,” Leah said, “because I was just thinking about him.”

  ~

  Lucien took over from Neil on the sea wall in the early evening. He hadn’t slept in the day as would have been sensible for someone taking a night shift, but with Leah away inland with what was to all intents and purposes a war party there was no way he could relax enough to sleep.

  He always preferred to go to bed early, something which Leah couldn’t understand as going to bed early was a thing adults made children do, but could just as easily stay up for a day and a night without suffering too much. Feeling as anxious as he did that day sleep was a thing that wouldn’t happen in his near-future.

  “All quiet,” Neil said with a quivering salute, at least his midriff continued quivering when the remainder of his body had come to a halt.

  “Thank you, Neil,” Lucien answered, disappointing him by not returning the salute as he walked past and surveyed the darkening waters out towards the hulk blocking their idyllic sea view. As the shift commander of sorts he arrived before the members of the militia rostered for the chilly night duty, and saw the tired eyes of the men and women who had kept watch during the day. Some acknowledged him with smiles or greetings, whereas others just waited for their relief to show up after spending the afternoon trying to keep out of the hot sun. Lucien’s arrival meant that the end of their shift was imminent, and that realisation made the last half an hour almost unbearable for some.

  His people arrived in small groups and he replaced the guards from the furthest point in the defences for them to follow Neil back to the main keep where hot food would be waiting for them. When the sea wall was occupied by the ten fresh militia members Lucien settled in with a detached telescopic sight from a weapon to watch the horizon. He saw nothing, so called in to contact the three other areas connected by their makeshift communications technology.

  He checked in with the gatehouse, giving in to the urge to ask if the party had returned yet and hiding his dismay when told that they had not. He called up the fort high above his position on the opposite end of their small, protected enclave and received the same information.

  “Watchtower, this is Lucien,” he said into the other handset, waiting a few seconds for an answer before preparing to call them again.

  “Tower, here,” came the answer in French even though he had automatically called in English as the last call had been in that language. “All clear, the bastards have not come back.”

  “Keep watch,” Lucien warned, knowing that there must be some of them still ashore as Leah had gone to hunt them. He picked up his small scope again, leaving the rifle on his back until such time as he needed it, and scanned the darkening waters ahead with a sense of uncomfortable foreboding.

  ~

  The crew who had ridden their small boat back out to the water under the high cliffs, blocking their sight of the watchtower, had sent their signal and returned to shore. They had left a handful of men to give the impression that the farm miles inland was the focus of their attention, and Gareer had told the leader of the boat crew that these men were expendable. Now, joined together, the two groups began a slow and treacherous climb up the uneven and untrodden rocks to gain the plateau high above the protected bay in the hope that they would be masters of the high ground by morning and force the town below to surrender.

  That wasn’t the entirety of their plan because, as brutal as Gareer was, their leader, their Boqor, was a thinker.

  As soon as the night was fully dark, chosen for the lack of moonlight which had prompted their long wait at sea until the time was right, three boats would attack the bay under the cover of night.

  The climb to the top of the cliffs didn’t follow the plan, however, and after three of his men had slipped from the rocks to plummet noisily back down to their deaths, it became clear that they had little chance of successfully reaching the top without the light to pick their paths safely. Knowing this, but being more afraid of Gareer’s displeasure than he was of falling to an agonising death, the leader of the crews forced the pirates upwards with threats of violence and shouts.

  Those shouts, travelling much farther in the still, dark night than people unaccustomed to that time of day would expect, reached the ears of a sentry from the watchtower who had wandered outside to enjoy the cool night air. That enjoyment took the form of a lit pipe stuffed with the previous year’s premium tobacco from their friends in Andorra, and a relaxing emptying of his bladder over the cliff edge which he had stepped carefully towards in the poor light.

  The shouts from below stopped him mid-stream. He waited for a second in silence until his brain had convinced him that he had imagined it, that his mind played tricks on him in the night, and the stream resumed. He had done this many times and never before had the sound of it landing prompted noises of anger and disgust. The stream slowed and dried up as the dawning realisation hit him. He shouted to raise the alarm as he ran backwards zipping up his fly to snatch up his rifle.

  The others from the tower ran towards the sound of his high-pitched yelling, bringing their own guns as they peered over the edge to see nothing but darkness below. The man swore that he had not imagined it, had not made it up for attention, and ran back inside to wrap a thin blanket around a log before setting it alight. He ignored the protests as he waited for it to catch alight properly and leaned over the side to drop the now burning log into the dark void.

  Looking down as the sparks flew from each impact with the rocks, he was rewarded with the terrifying sight of two eyes, wide in shock and fear, looking back up at him from a dark-skinned face.

  Bullets tore downwards, snatching the pirates from the rock face to add the sounds of bullets striking meat and bone to the panicked shouts and screams of falling men. One of the sentries, thinking more logically than the other three, ran back inside to pick up the large battery-powered lamp, and as an afterthought grabbed the thick rag to bring the pot of hot water from where it hung above the large fireplace.

  Thrusting the big torch at one of his companions, the man prepared to tip the hot contents of the metal jug over the edge just as soon as he saw a target.

  ~

  Startled from his semi-meditative state far below, Lucien launched himself up to the distant sound of gunfire. He barked an order in French for calls to be made but he knew from the direction of the noises that the source of the battle had to be the watchtower.

  The attack, even though it failed, served a purpose in distracting the defenders beside the sea.

  Neil’s system of floating solar lamps, the kind of ones with the low output, showed the darkness of the two passing skiffs as the lights were obscured. By the time the defenders had noticed the silent boats sliding into the bay they were already hard under the edge of the sea wall and out of reach of the massive fifty calibre machine gun as the big barrel couldn’t be depressed far enough to take aim. The rattle of gunfire erupted closer to the town, prompting screams and shouts as the darkness devolved their panic into chaos. Defenders were hit and fell from the wall, struck by the undisciplined b
arrage of bullets fired from inside the bay as the attackers splashed into the shallow water to forge their way through wet sand.

  Lucien, cursing himself for being distracted by the far-off noises, swore loudly as he dropped low and tucked his body behind a stone pillar.

  “Take cover! Take cover!” he yelled over and over in both French and English, hoping that at least some of the militia would heed his words. Struggling free of the sling to bring the assault rifle around to his front he peeked his head out of cover just long enough to see multiple muzzle flashes on the lower ground. His mind raced, telling him unhelpfully that had the tide been in there wouldn’t have been the small stretch of sandy beach for them to land, but the savagely close ricochet of bullets forced his head back behind the protection of the ancient stone and his mind back to the immediate problem.

  Flicking the safety catch forward with his thumb he rose and turned in one smooth movement towards the edge of the walkway to fire short bursts into the bodies of the pirates illuminated eerily by the muzzle flashes of their own loud weapons. He stalked along the wall, killing three who were exchanging fire with a few of his people huddle by the machine gun still uselessly pointing out to sea. When his magazine clicked dry he hit the release and shook the weapon to let it fall out as his left hand brought a fresh one up to seat it into the weapon. He clicked it home, wiggling it slightly to make sure it was there as he was operating by touch alone, before opening up again in bursts aimed at the remaining attackers, who were easy to pick out in the darkness thanks to the long, bright flames coming from the barrels of their guns.

  But muzzle flashes in the dark worked both ways, and while his were less pronounced he was still a silhouetted target higher up on the wall as he stalked forwards killing them on the beach.

  What he didn’t see, what he couldn’t have seen, was the one pirate who had a jammed gun and had yet to fire a single shot. Lucien passed directly by him, having killed the two men either side of him. The pirate fumbled desperately with the weapon, yanking out the magazine and pulling on the cocking handle to free up the mechanics before slotting the magazine back in and making the gun ready to fire. As he fumbled with it in the dark the sky above him burst into brightness forcing his eyes to half close at the harshness of the firework display.

  It was a flare, or to be more precise a series of flares fired from the handheld guns taken from the many boats and ships salvaged over the years at Sanctuary. Not only were they being fired from somewhere at sea level, they arced out over the black expanse from the watchtower to descend slowly and light up the bay below. Now employed as a form of battlefield illumination the flares worked both ways, and the fire intensified at the shore.

  Only one pirate crew pitched the staged battle there, as the second had slipped further into the bay where they loosely lashed their rusty skiff to a wooden post and clambered up onto the stone sides of the old port. They split into two groups; one headed into the narrow streets and the other up the long, sweeping stone ramp towards the main keep.

  Unaware of this as he cycled his weapon for the second time, Lucien reached for the third magazine on his vest. The terrible whine of a ricocheting bullet combined with the sensation of having the reload snatched from his grip with a ferocity he wasn’t expecting, made him turn instinctively in the direction the shot had come from. In the strange light of the moving flares he saw a young man staring back at him in wide-eyed shock as he fumbled with the malfunctioning weapon. Only a single bullet had left the barrel before the rifle jammed again, and his inexperience at trying to reload the same magazine cost him his life.

  Dropping the carbine in his hand for it to be caught by the sling and bang his leg, Lucien drew the Glock from his right hip and gripped it tightly in two hands as he triggered off a half-dozen rounds into his attacker. As he dropped to slump soundlessly into the wet sand, Lucien’s eyes darted around to search for another target until noises from further inside the town caught his attention.

  Spinning back, his own eyes as wide as the boy who had almost killed him, he felt an impossibly hard thump to his back and pitched forward to crack his head against the stones.

  Non-combatants

  Leah stretched her back again, standing to hear the gathering array of cracks and clicks that accompanied periods of inactivity for her. Ares, thinking that it was time to go somewhere, pulled himself awkwardly to his feet only to sit heavily and bat at an oversized ear with an oversized back paw.

  She thought about how to word the next part of the story, thinking that it needed a little explaining for anyone in the future reading it to understand how the next part happened as it did.

  Her dog finished his scratching ritual, and as he hadn’t been called on to leave the room he lay back down in the patch of sun shining through the narrow window and went back to sleep in order to be fully charged for the next time he was awoken.

  Leah opened a battered canteen and took a long, pensive pull of water before sitting down and picking up the pen once more.

  ~

  One of the things that Dan got wrong in my very humble, and also very private, opinion was that he didn’t arm everyone he could from the beginning.

  I know back then that we only had a few guns and no decent source of ammunition resupply, but we lived in the country back then and even rural England was stocked with enough shotguns to make a difference. It wasn’t like people needed the laborious instruction of how to use an automatic weapon; how to reload fast on instinct through repetitive of hours of practice, but a shotgun was a very simple thing. You could point it in the general direction of someone you really didn’t like, and if that wasn’t enough to dissuade their offending behaviour then the wide spread of lead pellets often did the trick.

  I’m not saying there’s no skill at all involved in using one, but their simplicity made them effective and the training package lasted about five minutes.

  All of us who had left the prison and the farms so long ago to chase the wild goose south and over the water had been armed, and that never really dropped off after we eventually found safety inside the ancient walls of Sanctuary. People didn’t all walk around carrying their gun every day, but there was a kind of reassurance to know that those who possessed them had them hung over their fireplaces ready to use should that need ever arise again.

  We kept the good stuff locked away, because a shotgun and a machine gun are very different animals, but at that point the town was full of weapons. Maybe they weren’t expecting that.

  One of the closest inhabited buildings to the docks was a thin, three-level house with the ground floor originally given over to the town’s dive school. Alita had stayed there out of habit, living in one of the apartments above, so when she and Mitch had coupled they saw no reason to disrupt their current arrangements.

  With her man away and her baby woken by the sounds of a battle in the town to scream incessantly, Alita forced herself to prioritise and block out the sounds of the cries that tugged at her soul. She bypassed the room with the cot and her daughter, instead opening a cupboard at the head of the stairs and pulling out a shotgun which she knew Mitch kept loaded. She cradled it in her left arm and reached back inside to a higher shelf where her hand brought back a semi-automatic pistol and a magazine, which she slapped home and pulled back the slide.

  She sat halfway up the first set of stairs, trying to ignore the sound of her baby’s cries until her milk ran freely to soak two darkening circles on her grey top, and waited.

  She didn’t have to wait long. The door burst inwards in a spray of splintering wood which annoyed her as the door was unlocked. She saw a ragged man, black hair in tight curls and dirty beige clothing hanging loosely from his spare frame, and watched as he swept the barrel of a gun she recognised but couldn’t name over her sitting room.

  The shotgun was already aimed at the door, already pulled into her shoulder, so when the man appeared she just had to grip the weapon tighter and squeeze.

  He was snatched off his fee
t, thrown in bloody ruin back onto the street where he had come from having been converted from dangerous invader to so much broken meat and bone in a heartbeat.

  Alita racked a replacement cartridge into the chamber of the shotgun, muttering to herself that these bastards would never get near her baby. Sounds of crying forced their way down the narrow stairs and she called out in a soft voice to try and hush the baby torn from sleep by the loud boom of the gun, but she would not abandon her position in order to comfort her.

  Few things in life can push most people to commit such acts without remorse, but the life of such a young child being put in danger had set Alita’s resolve to previously unknown levels.

  All over the town others were waking to the sounds of gunfire, more sporadic by then, and were arming themselves just as Alita had. One by one all of the pirates who had slunk into the dark alleys between the tall buildings fell to the weapons of the town’s inhabitants.

  The other half of that boat crew, six men led by one only slightly more ruthless and inhuman than the others, headed for the large wooden doors leading to the interior of the old castle. The only defenders in that part of the town were on the ramparts above the gate and on the other side of the big stone construction. They knew better than to abandon their post in case an attack came from their landward side, regardless of whatever noises they heard behind them.

  The first two people inside the keep to confront the pirates died under a hail of gunfire to stain the old stones with fresh blood, which would take years to fade despite being scrubbed repeatedly. Nobody lived on that ground floor as it was where the cooking and congregating happened, but as people began to react to the attack they came down the multiple spiral staircases to find the confused invaders unsure of where to go as they were assaulted from the tight corridors and stairwells. Pinned down in the open with no cover, they split up on instinct to run for safety.