Honestly, at times, I’m in awe of him.
Things have been calmer since that happened yesterday. Alicia apologised to Charlie and the kid got to give that hug he offered. This time, Alicia accepted it gladly and with a little smile on her face. She also offered her apologies to everyone, who just waved them away, accepting her with proverbial open arms. These are good people and I’m glad we liberated them from the awful situation they found themselves in, through no fault of their own.
But, can I just point out… Nate was SAS.
I fucking knew it.
Called it, bitches.
EVIL BE TO HIM
Connor Bancroft leaned his head back against the rough brick wall, jaw clenched against the burning pain in his belly, coughing as thick smoke scratched at his throat. Hot blood slicked his fingers as they pressed to the wound in his midriff, before snorting a dark chuckle at the futility of it.
His brother’s surviving minions had fled the scene when Connor went down, making a single push to extract him, but their enemy had been waiting for such an attempt. One thundering crack of the stolen rifle later, and Shaun dropped, the bullet smashing through centre mass. The bullet didn’t kill immediately, but Connor heard the man sucking desperately for air, choking and wailing for help in the thick smoke, crying like a baby for his mother. The remaining men had cleared out then, petrified of the demon sniper that had terrorised them.
No help was coming. Panic had erupted over the radio from their designated QRF as a second sniper assaulted them attempting to exit the house grounds. The relief force was not coming, and he had been abandoned by the men he was forced to lead into this expertly laid ambush. Even if their nurse was brought to the scene now, there was no fixing this wound. Connor had seen enough on active service to know when a wound was mortal. The only question to be answered was when he would die.
Connor surmised the sniper’s victims were rising from the dead, considering the frenzied change in pitch of Shaun’s screams.
“No!” he wailed, shrill with terror. “Get the fuck away….”
Screaming in horror and agony for only a few seconds longer, Shaun’s dying wails went silent, replaced by the wet grind of jaws in his flesh.
Not long now, then, thought Connor.
Shaun would rise to join the damned, then he and the feasting undead would find Connor’s dying form, a mere twenty feet away. His end would be filled with white eyes, crimson teeth, terror, and pain.
The Glock was too far away for him to end it himself, having spun from his hand as the bullet tore through his abdomen. The rifle was empty, having blasted fully automatic suppressing fire towards where he thought the sniper was. Trying to move to better cover, he had drawn his pistol to keep a barrage of fire with no time to reload on the run, but their enemy was too good, having already displaced to another window in a different building. That had only been possible with expert preparation, making a portal between the two shooting positions through the internal walls. The whole ambush was perfectly laid and despite a tempest of bullets fired from the men under his command, the sniper never stopped moving, taking another man or two down while they were still firing at his old location. Whoever this Nate was, Connor had never seen his like. He was intelligent, prepared, and lethal in his execution.
Connor had been firing at the wrong place when the enemy rifle cracked again, and a storm of agony erupted low in his guts, the Glock spinning from nerveless fingers as he collapsed. He cried out as he was hit, and then dragged himself into the cover he had been running for. Now, he was without a weapon, dying, and only a short hop from one undead, that was about to become two.
Resigned to his fate, he sighed, lamenting his brother’s madness, and he hoped Caleb would be okay.
Connor had never wanted any part of his father’s criminal enterprise. The military had been his escape from Harry’s dark shadow, but when his deployment in Iraq ended in April 2009, he returned home out of concern for his youngest brother, Caleb.
As the eldest, and cut from the same soiled cloth as their father, his brother Jamie was left in control of the family “business” after Harry Bancroft had been locked up two years earlier. Connor never wanted to be a part of their way of life, but concern for Caleb inevitably pulled him back into the dark folds of the Bancroft legacy. Johnny was a brainless thug, and Jamie had always craved power and control, but Caleb was an intelligent kid, introspective and thoughtful, who had dreams of a career in medicine. All Connor wanted was the chance for Caleb to follow his own heart and make a new life for himself, away from the drugs and perpetual violence that formed the foundations of the Bancroft name. When Caleb passed his A-Levels in 2011 and started thinking about university, Connor would fight to give him that life with everything he had, no matter if it came to blows with his father and Jamie. Even if it meant Connor swore his allegiance to the Bancroft criminal legacy, using all the skills he had learned in service to his country, and go against everything he believed in, he would. He would sacrifice his own honour, his own life, to give Caleb the chance at happiness, and something resembling a normal future.
June 23rd changed everything.
In the first three days of the chaos, Connor refused to participate in the mass of kidnappings Jamie ordered. He would defend their home against the living and the dead, but flat refused to steal people from their homes or the streets. The arguments between the two older Bancroft boys were heated and fierce, ignited when Jamie had sent men to steal the young boy, Charlie, to ensure their maintenance contractor stayed to keep their home in good order. The IT guy, Isaac, was ripped from his home office by armed men, a nurse was taken from the streets on the second day in an opportunistic capture, and even the old lady from the nearby farm, were all brought to their house and forced into servitude.
When pretty young women in their twenties were locked into a harem to keep Jamie’s men “entertained” through the inevitable hardships to come, Connor had started planning an exit strategy that would allow him to get his younger brother clear of all the madness. Jamie had often had his people lay a beat down on rapists; it was a weird fork in the road of his twisted code that crimes against women—especially crimes of assault in any form—were treated with pitiless wrath. The enforced enslavement and prostitution of the women was so far from Jamie’s usual eccentric morality, Connor knew something had broken in his brother. He doubted if it could ever be repaired, and Connor had no interest in trying to fight that battle.
He knew the hearts and minds of those loyal to Jamie would never be swayed. They were simple and greedy men, all violent bullies without a shred of human empathy. To a man, they were black-hearted sheep who needed a shepherd, but one that would feed their lust and greed, and Connor was not that man.
Despite his distaste for Jamie’s actions, he was still his brother. He was raised in the looming shadow of Harry Bancroft, an old-school gangster who valued strength and loyalty to family above all other tenets. Jamie had always been the heir apparent as the eldest, groomed to one day sit upon their black throne, and as such was entirely the product of their father. That hardened personality had been nurtured through the years as their father’s method of preparing him to lead the family and continue the legacy, but even Harry Bancroft would not have stooped to the depths that Jamie had in the first month of the world’s end. Connor still could not believe Jamie had fallen so far himself.
He had always been ruthless and uncompromising, but there was a darkness to him now that Connor had never seen before. Even growing up, when the two older brothers had fought like teenage boys do, there was never anything beyond normal sibling rivalry, no extra spark of malice that foreshadowed such a drastic change. He and Jamie would laugh about their fight a few days later, and all would be forgotten. Life would go on.
Since June 23rd though, something in Jamie had died, or more accurately, it felt like something darker had awakened within him. Jamie was still there in flashes at the start, but that part Connor knew so well had been
growing ever more distant, and the former soldier wondered how long it would be until his brother was no more, and all that remained was the cruel and malicious darkness that choked what little light was left.
For all the burgeoning darkness that seemed to be consuming Jamie, Connor had still loved him. He was still his big brother, and in the beginning, he could never entertain the thought of harming family; that was one of his father’s teachings that the former soldier did agree with. Instead, Connor chose to direct his efforts towards redeeming his brother, to right the course he was steering from.
Whatever progress he might have made, however, died the same day as Johnny.
A month into the world’s end, the third of the Bancroft brothers was killed while on a supply scouting mission with some of his moron friends. Johnny had been given one of the many Glocks, but his six idiot minions were armed only with a selection of melee weapons. Connor was mystified why Jamie had allowed their younger brother to go out—into the undead infested world—without adequate protection and had only discovered this fact an hour after leaving. The choice to inadequately arm their brother and his crew had been fatal in the extreme.
After finding out what happened to Johnny, Jamie had killed one of his brother’s companions in a frenzied explosion of violence, beating the man to death with the butt of his chromed .357 revolver. While Connor comforted Caleb at their brother’s death, Jamie was consumed by a rage so white and hot, it seared anyone in his proximity. From that moment, all Jamie’s efforts were directed to finding the two responsible; a man in his fifties, and a woman known to Johnny and his morons, called Lockey, though they had no idea of her real name. The woman had called the older man Nate.
Whoever Nate was, he was a crack shot. Johnny had been put down by two clean shots in rapid succession, one in centre mass and a follow up shot almost perfectly between the eyes. It was certainly not the work of any amateur, instead signifying someone with an abundance of both training and experience.
Jamie was impossible to reason with after Johnny’s death, as a single goal consumed him every hour of every day.
Vengeance.
Jamie sent three men out, all armed with scoped rifles from their preciously small stock, to watch key roads through town from elevated positions, desperate for any sign of Johnny’s killers. Each was given the instruction to take them alive if possible, as Jamie wanted their deaths to be long and loud at his own hand, but if not, then ending them would suffice.
“Take no chances,” Jamie had ordered. “You see any vehicle that isn’t ours—any vehicle at all—then you open up and stop it.”
Connor had been incensed by the call, arguing against firing on any potential innocents. They should have been fighting the dead, Connor roared, not the living.
“Until those two fuckers are dead at my feet,” Jamie hissed, “there are no innocents.”
Three days later, the call finally came that one of the men had the pair pinned down having disabled their vehicle. He had them trapped on the main road running between the shopping centre and court building, and they had nowhere to go.
Steve Briggs had led the QRF in response, the only other former military man in Jamie’s employ. Connor had no love for Briggs, as he had taken to the criminal life with gusto, enjoying being the big man in a little pond of amateur thugs.
When Briggs’ hastily assembled QRF arrived on the scene, there was a raging fireball in the road and a massive gathering of undead at the foot of the court building preventing any further investigation, but there was no sign of Jamie’s man, or the odd pair they were hunting, and things only got worse from there.
For the next few days, Jamie had ordered three vehicles, each with four armed men, to patrol the town in search of Lockey and Nate. The radio was constantly afire with Jamie demanding updates, screaming at the incompetence of their inability to locate Johnny’s killers, even as he said how imperative it was they were caught before the fuel run had to be made. He threatened to, “keep those bitches locked up so tight you’ll have to fuck each other,” if no results were forthcoming in the near future.
Jamie was erratic, uncharacteristic of the man before all this madness. Always cold and calculating, and cunning like a fox, the stark change into this wild demon, thirsting for bloody vengeance while abandoning all sense and reason, was a visceral transformation not lost on Connor, nor on Caleb.
“What’s wrong with him, Conn?” Caleb asked, after the third unsuccessful day of patrols.
The hunted pair were ghosts, though Connor assumed they were simply living away from the main town. Likely, they were sufficiently supplied to wait for the heat to die down some before venturing out again, though getting Jamie to listen to any kind of logic was virtually impossible.
When the patrols had returned before dark, the last to arrive without news of success sent Jamie into a spin. Without thought or hesitation, needing a release for the murderous rage rising like bile within him, he pulled out the .357 and disintegrated the skull of the man unfortunate to deliver news of their failure. The murder appeared to soothe his near debilitating fury, an aura of calm appearing to settle around him as the headless corpse collapsed to the earth, but the sudden violence had shocked Connor and Caleb to their core.
“I don’t know, little brother,” Connor had answered honestly. “Ever since the world died last month, I think our brother died that day as well.”
“What do you mean?”
Connor had pressed two fingers to each temple, trying to soothe the pulse of pain growing there.
“It’s like I don’t know him anymore, Caleb,” he sighed. “He’s… lost… somewhere, and I can’t reach him. It’s like…” He shrugged, struggling to articulate the hollow void in his heart where his brother once lived. “I don’t know, Caleb. Like he’s been possessed by… something. Every day, I’m finding it more difficult to see our big brother in there, you know?”
Caleb seemed to war with himself for a moment, then took a deep breath, reaching behind him to pull something from the back of his jeans. Connor stared in horror at the black Glock 17 the boy held in his hand.
“He gave me this yesterday,” whispered Caleb, eyes fixed on his brother. “Said it was time to sack up and be a man and do what’s right for our family.”
Connor’s own fury ignited at the combination of Caleb’s words, and the sight of his little brother holding a firearm. Caleb dreamed of being a healer, not a killer, and Jamie knew it. It was a bridge too far, and Connor started to rise from his seat.
“I’ll….”
“No,” interrupted Caleb, a flash of fear racing through his blue eyes. He shook his head, reaching his other hand out to grasp Connor’s forearm and stall him. “No, Conn. Don’t. I know what you’re going to do, but you can’t. You can’t go at him for this, not now. He’s not right, Conn, and I’m worried about what he would do.” The threat of tears polished his sapphire coloured eyes to a shine. “Because you’re right, I don’t know who he is anymore either and you saw him when he shot Alec in the face, right? He didn’t even think about it, and afterwards he seemed… happier.” Caleb did not resist the shudder that visibly ran through him. “We’ve just got to keep our heads down, Conn. We’ve got to find a way out of this.”
Two days later, war was declared.
Six men died, two SUV’s were lost, and weapons and ammunition stolen, when the now infamous pair struck the next fuel run to the nearby petrol station. Only the maintenance man, Mark, returned with the small tanker truck when Briggs led a QRF and prevented the pair from interrogating the engineer. Mark sported a fierce black eye after Nate had struck him with the butt of the rifle. Briggs had walked the scene, and it was only further proof that the older man had military training. His use of ammunition with the rifle stolen from the sniper of the court building roof was minimal and efficient, every shot finding its mark with unerring accuracy. The woman had baited them into the trap, and the old soldier had executed their four pursuers with assured ease. The two re
maining behind with Mark had then been ambushed by this Nate fellow.
Clinical, efficient, lethal.
Whoever this Nate was, he knew what he was doing, that much was certain.
Everything had gone silent for a full week. Realising his rage over the radio might have clued the pair into the fuel run, Jamie’s volcanic rage turned to a glacial ice, which made being in his presence difficult and uneasy, as though he stood on the edge of murder and the slightest nudge would push him over the edge. Connor and Caleb steered clear of their brother as much as possible, until Jamie called them both to a meeting a week after the disastrous fuel run. One by one, Jamie moved through the channels on the radio, waiting for a response before moving up, until finally, Nate responded.
The woman must have snatched up the radio though, because a barrage of bizarre statements, delivered in a fake American accent, came over the airwaves in a stream. None of them expected such an unorthodox response and it threw Jamie off completely, as every demand for respect was met with an ever-increasing level of mockery, until Jamie’s ice-cold demeanour evaporated in an explosion of incandescent rage. He smashed the handset into the table repeatedly, streams of profanity flowing from his lips, until the radio was little more than shards.
“This is what she wants,” offered Connor warily, seeking to dam the torrent of murderous fury. “Don’t let her get under your skin.”
As Jamie turned his gaze towards him, Connor’s breath caught in his throat. Madness rippled across the blighted stare of his brother and for a heartbeat, the former soldier’s instincts came into sharp focus. For that brief flicker in time, he sensed a real and genuine threat from Jamie.
Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Page 29
