Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  “You have no rights,” he said, into the silence. He glanced from collaborator to collaborator and picked on a teenage boy who was clearly terrified out of his mind. Nicolas picked him up and held two fingers near his throat. “The interesting thing about the nerves here is that I can use them to tell when you’re lying,” Nicolas added, untruthfully. “Tell me a single lie and I’ll break your neck and go on to the next traitor. Do you understand me?”

  The boy nodded desperately. Nicolas fired question after question at him, starting with ones to which he already knew the answers. It was an old tactic. The only way to interrogate someone properly was to have a way to verify whatever they told the interrogator, or everything from drugs to torture became unreliable. A person being tortured would say whatever it took to stop the pain and would quite happily tell the interrogator whatever he wanted to hear. The trick was convincing them that lying would only bring more pain. It wasn't a task for the faint of heart, or the morally unsound. The questions were meaningless, really. The point was to humiliate the Order Police in front of their superiors.

  “Good enough,” he conceded finally, and dumped the boy back among his comrades. A rank smell suggested that several of them had lost control of their bowels. “Strip them.”

  Before the Order Police could protest, the soldiers brought out knives and cut away their clothes, leaving them naked on the ground. Small cloths that had been soaked in Tabasco sauce were stuffed in their mouths. They could still breathe, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. Even the most hardened palates would have hesitated to include so much Tabasco with their meals and the Order Police were getting it without any moderating food.

  They gathered up the remaining supplies, dumped anything they couldn’t use in the trucks, and set fire to them. By Nicolas’s estimate, the Order Police should survive the fires, which would probably attract the aliens. They’d come to pick up their servants and discover just what had happened to them. Perhaps they’d shoot them out of hand for failing so badly. Or perhaps they’d be discovered by locals who’d take the opportunity for a little revenge. He smiled as they walked away, even though it wasn’t particularly funny.

  From now on, he knew, things would only get worse.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Occupied)

  Day 130

  Nine figures slipped through the darkening streets, walking as casually as they could. Two of them were woman wearing the full veil, escorted by a man playing at being their brother. The remaining six were spread out, trying to act as if there was no connection between them. The aliens would probably not notice the formation, Sergeant Kalid Burke hoped, but the same couldn’t be said for their collaborators. Would they notice an advancing attack force before it was too late?

  He rubbed his beard as he walked towards the target. The secret to launching a surprise attack was that it had to be a surprise, and a surprise – generally speaking – was convincing the enemy that something he could see in plain sight wasn’t actually dangerous. Hereford had hammered that into his head. In 1940, the instructors had told him, the French had known that the Germans couldn’t use a certain attack route to attack France. They’d known it and they’d never actually bothered to test it…and when the German attack had materialised, it had done so against the weakest part of the French line. The aliens had to see the advancing force as harmless until it was too late.

  The presence of the women, he suspected, wouldn’t make that easier. The aliens didn’t seem to have any sexual dimorphism between the sexes and they’d seen female warriors on the streets. It made a surprising change from their different castes – they’d seen females for all of the known castes as well – but perhaps it made sense to them. He had to keep reminding himself that they were alien. They wouldn’t think the same way humans thought. Only four days ago, they’d rounded up – with the help of their collaborators – a few thousand city residents and forced them to dig graves for the thousands of dead humans, killed in the fighting to take the city. A National Guard unit – the National Guard had been the best the Saudis had had, although it hadn’t come up to the standards of a second-line British or American unit – had dug into part of the city and fought savagely. They’d been fools, Kalid had decided. They should have faded away into the civil population and joined the underground. Many of the other units had simply surrendered or disintegrated when the aliens had turned their attention to them, ending their war before it had properly begun. They’d been moved out to camps somewhere in the desert and no one had seen them again.

  He caught sight of one of the alien warriors and lowered his gaze, silently praying to Allah – a God he wasn't sure he believed in – that none of the young Saudis would do something stupid. He’d tried to train Arabs to become soldiers, but even before the occupation, it hadn’t been easy. The culture mandated against everything a soldier needed to learn; they took poor care of their weapons, considered simple tasks beneath them and demanded higher pay and living conditions. Kalid would have agreed that the British Army shamefully underpaid its soldiers, but men who wanted to sleep between silk sheets and get up at noon didn’t become soldiers. He couldn’t condemn their bravery – Arabs weren't cowards, whatever else could be said about them – but there was a time to fight and a time to make a tactical withdrawal. This was not the time to fight.

  The alien checkpoint loomed up in front of him, staffed by a group of warriors and their collaborators, who were openly humiliating the Arabs before allowing them to pass. Kalid couldn’t blame them for wanting a little revenge on their former masters, but there was such a thing as going too far. Some of the horror stories floating around the city had included women being publicly cavity searched and virgins being deflowered by the collaborators. There was no way to know if such rumours were true – the Arab world had little experience with an unbiased media, so rumour central ruled and every crazy rumour was rapidly converted into something preposterous – but perhaps it didn’t matter. It would encourage Arabs to fight the aliens. It would also encourage the honour killing of the women, reminding him of why his mother had fled the country in the first place. A plague, he’d decided, on both of their houses.

  “Men to that side, women to this side,” a bored collaborator announced. Kalid was privately surprised that they’d been allowed to get so close without being stopped, but it hardly mattered. “Remove headdresses and veils; prepare your ID Cards.”

  Kalid reached under his jacket. They didn’t have ID Cards. He hadn’t registered with the aliens when they’d started compiling their database of who was who within the city, any more than Gavin had. They might miss him, but if they checked Gavin’s DNA they might start wondering what he was doing in Saudi Arabia. The British expatriates who’d worked for the Saudis had packed up and left in the days following the invasion. Very few of them had cared anything for a country that considered Britain one of the world’s great evils. He grasped his knife in one hand and dropped the bag on the ground. The collaborator turned, too late. Kalid rammed the knife home and the collaborator dropped to the ground. It wasn’t perfect – the Hereford instructors would have been very disappointed in him – but it had worked.

  “Now,” he snapped, and opened the bag. He pulled out the AK-47 and opened fire on the aliens, firing short precise bursts towards their heads. The alien body armour, the Americans had discovered, was alarmingly good, better than anything of human manufacture. Their heads were only partly covered and served as the best targets. He’d assigned the Arabs to firing on the collaborators. The aliens didn’t seem to want to share their body armour with their human allies. “Hit them!”

  He saw an alien warrior die as his bullets tore into his head, followed rapidly by a second. The crowd was running everywhere, a handful even pulling out weapons of their own and adding to the chaos. That was an unwanted surprise, even though it would come in handy when the time came to fall back. The aliens would probably have confiscated the weapons when they searched the men at
the checkpoint – they’d been confiscating weapons from all over the city – but perhaps it would have allowed them to take down an alien before they died. Another alien warrior targeted and killed one of the Arabs before Gavin shot him down, pushing the advantage as far forward as they could. Kalid reached into the bag, brought out an onion string of grenades, and threw them right into the checkpoint. The explosion shook the ground and sent the remaining aliens reeling.

  Kalid brought out a whistle and blew it hard, before firing a final shot at the aliens and falling back down the side street. The danger was that their Arab allies wouldn’t fall back with them. The best they could do was give the aliens a bloody nose before falling back and leaving them to lick their wounds, but some of the Arabs had wanted to stay and keep fighting, until the aliens were defeated. It wouldn’t work like that, Kalid had warned them. The aliens would bring up their fighter craft and exterminate them. They couldn’t do anything about alien air power. He glanced behind him as he ran and was relieved to see that four of the Arabs were following them. Three had either been killed or were still fighting with their fellow Arabs against the aliens.

  “They’re coming,” someone shouted. Kalid had expected the aliens to give chase as soon as they got reinforcements. Any survivors back at the checkpoint would be dead by now. The aliens kept a rapid reaction force near any vulnerable place and they’d have it in play by now. He looked up, expecting to see an alien craft overhead, but saw nothing. He didn’t question their good fortune. They had to get to the first location before the aliens came after them. He turned the corner and ran up the street, smiling as he saw the cars lined up, useless without fuel. They’d be far more useful for him than they would be for their owners.

  He found the pre-prepared position and threw himself down, rapidly ejecting one clip and reloading the AK-47. Even a trained soldier burned through a hell of a lot of ammunition in a brief encounter. Soldiers in Afghanistan had fired off millions of bullets during their tours in the country. He exchanged glances with Gavin and saw the shared delight in combat. They were living life right on the edge, with hordes of angry aliens bearing down on them, and neither of them could be happier.

  The aliens advanced quickly, but carefully. They learned faster than their Arab opponents, for sure. One alien advanced, covered by a second and a third, and then waited to cover his allies before advancing again himself. Other aliens swarmed over the rooftops and hunted for snipers, reminding Kalid of a minor oversight. They didn’t have any snipers in position. He was a little surprised that the aliens hadn’t brought in any air power, but it didn’t matter. He would be grateful for Allah’s small mercies. He smiled at the thought. It was true. There were no atheists in foxholes. Feeling oddly calm, as if everything had already been designed, he reached under the car he was using for cover and removed the detonator. A moment later, his finger came down hard on the button.

  They’d packed the cars with high explosives over the last few nights, ever since he had started planning the raid. Ten cars detonated at once, sending waves of jagged metal flying through the air, cutting the alien force apart. Even their body armour couldn’t stand up to the wave of fire and shrapnel. Only two survived the explosion and were rapidly dispatched by Gavin, firing from his position. The aliens on the rooftops seemed stunned. Perhaps they’d been hit by debris, or perhaps they’d been stunned by the noise. Kalid’s ears were ringing, although he’d been much closer to the blast. Shattered window glass cascaded down on him from the car he’d been using as cover. It might not have been rigged to blow, but it was truly totalled. He allowed himself to imagine some poor Saudi teen – a man, of course – seeing his wrecked car and crying, as Kalid himself had done when his first car had been damaged.

  “Come on,” Gavin snapped. “We can’t stay here.”

  Kalid shook his head to clear the numbing and ran into the nearest house, through the female entrance. He doubted that anyone would care that much. A woman who looked old enough to have known the Prophet stared blankly at them and pointed towards the door. Kalid followed her finger, ran into the next room, and pushed aside a prayer rug someone had mounted on the wall. It revealed a hatch leading to the next house, part of their preparations for escaping afterwards. The reason they’d picked the area to stage their attack was that it was almost deserted. The collaborators had taken most of the inhabitants away to face the aliens. They were probably serving in work camps now.

  He muttered a silent prayer for the old woman under his breath as they ran through the houses, seeing no one else. She had refused to move, claiming that she’d lived in the same house for all of her life. She might even be telling the truth. The rare Saudi woman who wasn’t married off to someone, with or without her agreement, was doomed to eternal spinsterhood. Her family had been taken away and she had nothing left to live for. He knew what would happen to her.

  In the last house, they found a change of clothes and changed rapidly, before rigging the small pile they’d left behind to blow when someone touched them. They slipped back outside and merged in with the crowds fleeing the area. The aliens weren't known for being gentle to crowds. Sometimes they ignored them, sometimes they opened fire. Very few people remaining in the city were stupid enough to try to launch noisy protest marches. They ended up being handled roughly by the aliens, or their collaborators. Kalid took one last look behind him as the ground shook. The old woman had detonated the explosives in her house and, hopefully, taken out a group of aliens along with herself. He knew that the Jihadis had told lies, that nothing but hellfire awaited those who killed themselves to kill others, but he wanted to hope that perhaps she’d receive her reward some day.

  The collaborators were on the streets in force, pushing and shoving at the Arabs to get them to knuckle down to them. No one said anything. The aliens following their collaborators and watching for anyone stupid enough to start anything were enough of a warning. Kalid and Gavin stayed well away from them and followed a roundabout route to the safe house, hidden in a place he hadn’t believed could exist in Saudi society.

  The Saudis had a population of gay men comparable to every other country, yet being homosexual in Saudi Arabia could be a death sentence. The hidden apartment allowed men to spend time with other men without being noticed, although the cynic in Kalid suspected that there were two reasons the Religious Police never went anywhere near it. They had been well paid never to interfere with the homosexuals…and the last group of homosexuals they’d tried to arrest had sold their lives dearly. They’d known that they could expect no mercy and had held out for hours before the building had finally been burned to the ground.

  He’d wanted to go back to his grandfather’s house, but it was too dangerous. The other survivors of the attack would have scattered as well, yet it was just possible that the aliens would trace them back to his grandfather and arrest him and his household. The owner of the homosexual apartment had agreed to hide them, but he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t be doing anything else. The aliens didn’t care about homosexuals. If they hadn’t been so enthusiastically discriminating against Arabs, the homosexuals would probably have joined them as well. Instead, they were sitting on the sidelines. Kalid was tempted to point out that staying on the sidelines could be dangerous as well, but it hardly mattered. They’d learn, in time, just what the aliens had in mind for all of humanity.

  “Not a bad success,” Gavin said, as they relaxed in one of the rooms. The others in the apartment had been told that they were just two more homosexuals, shyer than most and genuinely devoted to one another. Irritating as it was, it provided an excuse to remain apart from the others. Simple statistics claimed that there was a good chance that at least one of the homosexuals would betray them, given half a chance. “They’re going to be pissed.”

  Kalid shrugged. He could hear the sound of automatic weapons fire out on the streets. Someone, out there, was fighting for his life. “Probably,” he said. After a mission, he found it hard to care about anything else.
“As long as they don’t find us, it doesn’t matter.”

  Gavin nodded and opened one of the packs. It contained weapons and some equipment, and a letter from Kalid’s grandfather. Kalid took it and read it quickly. The old man had had contacts everywhere and still did, even in the alien collaborator government. The Walking Dead couldn’t be trusted to be anything other than alien slaves, willing to betray the humans they had once known, but the unconverted…they could be bought, or suborned. They could be used against their masters.

  “Funny,” he said, finally. “The aliens are transporting the soldiers elsewhere.”

  Gavin looked over at him. “Where?”

  “It doesn’t say,” Kalid said. His written Arabic wasn't bad, but his grandfather had terrible handwriting. “They’ve given them the chance to write a few letters to their families and even some pay, provided that they go somewhere and fight for the aliens. They’ve even promised that those who serve them for at least a year will be released, free and clear, without any obligations in the future.”

  “Sounds ideal,” Gavin said. “Where do you think…?”

  He broke off. “Oh no,” he said. “They wouldn’t.”

  Kalid shook his head. It made a horrible kind of sense. The aliens had rounded up thousands upon thousands of trained soldiers they had to feed. They couldn’t let them go, because they would join the insurgency, they couldn’t trust them to fight in their own countries, and they couldn’t kill them all…why not? Perhaps the aliens regarded genocide as a perfectly logical and reasonable tactic…no, if they believed that, they would have wiped out humanity without setting foot on Earth.