“We are in luck,” Alita said, “his boat came in last night and are not due to leave until after evening meal.”
I nodded, thanking the old fish woman in French for her help, and followed Alita towards the houses nearer the sea wall where half of the fishing boat crews lived. She asked a few people if they knew Mateo, following their directions to a faded, yellow-painted house in a terraced row. He seemed to have been napping, likely having been awake in the night on board his boat.
The look on my face and my nervous presence told the man enough, and his face of warm but confused greeting dropped as he looked at me. I took a pace closer to him and held out my hand.
“Mateo, I’m Leah.”
“Hello, Leah,” he said before giving the rest of his answer in Spanish. He saw my uncomprehending face and looked to Alita to ask a question. Alita didn’t relay this to me but answered. I made out the words English and French in the reply.
“Is my brother okay?” he asked in accented French, a look of worry creasing his brow.
He was the wider, stockier image of his younger brother. Just as quick to smile, under different circumstances I imagined, and with just as much expression on his face. I sighed, sucking in a breath and drawing myself up formally to take responsibility, and glanced to Alita. I wanted to explain in English to use the words I knew best instead of running the risk of not giving enough detail in a language I had yet to master. I knew there was a risk of Alita miscommunicating, so I kept it simple.
“Rafi was in the seat beside me,” I explained slowly, “and we were ambushed – attacked – by people as we left Andorra.” I paused, waiting for his face to register the translation. He listened to Alita but never once took his eyes from my face. “He was unconscious, and they started shooting at us.” I glanced at Alita as her hands told the story alongside her words. “And I managed to escape, but I promise, I’m going back to get him.”
Mateo listened to my words, looking right into my soul to gauge my sincerity.
“He lives?” he asked haltingly.
I swallowed hard before answering, unable to tell a lie or even sugar-coat the truth. “I… I don’t know, but I’m going to bring him back one way or another,” I promised.
Mateo thought for a long moment, his fingers picking nervously at his lips as his eyes looked at nothing on the ground, until he took a sharp breath in and looked up to rattle off an emphatic and impassioned speech to Alita. She watched him, muttering in English out of the side of her mouth as she translated.
“He says he wants to come with us, he says he believes that you did not abandon his brother, but he wants to be there to bring him back. Whether he yet lives or not.”
I hid my sigh, only able to promise that I would pass on the request and support it. I knew I wouldn’t be running the return mission, because the risk I had been in had angered Dan to such a rage that I had seen rivalled only once, and then he had burned a barn full of people alive.
I still shuddered at the thought of that, at the brutality we visited on the evil bastards who had killed Joe and hung his body from a streetlight. They had all died, and I was as responsible as everyone else for the violence we inflicted on others that night, but afterwards I was haunted by the screams of those burning and choking people. Their screams merged with the howling and snarling of the pack of wild dogs even now, years after both terrifying incidents, and although I made a promise to myself to always be aware of the limits of what would keep me human I was pretty sure that Dan’s enraged state held no such upper limit.
Mateo followed us back to the keep, quietly refusing the request to stay and wait for an answer, and I slipped ahead of him to get to the interrogation and hopefully avoid having to keep him away from my prisoner. I was saved that task by Marie, who had been waiting and suspecting she would have to intervene ever since Dan returned like a raging toddler unable to calm down. I told her who Mateo was, but she already seemed to know. She always seemed to know. She took him aside and offered him comfort, speaking in French in a soothing tone.
I walked into the small, empty stone room near the gatehouse where he was still bound and had been forced to his knees. Dan stood over him, still tense and seeming to be fighting his urge to reformat the guy’s face. I glanced at Mitch who just nodded a serious look to me. That nod and the look on his face told me everything I needed to know.
Don’t you worry, Nikita, it said, I won’t let him lose his shit.
Alita followed me inside, placing a cautious hand on Dan’s shoulder and snapping him out of his trance. He looked at me, then at Mitch, and left the room.
Now this wasn’t a new concept to us, but it was new in the fact that we had never interrogated a prisoner. Everyone who had wandered up to our gates, or who we had found on supply runs or just on the road had been subjected to a kind of entrance interview. We couldn’t just let anyone in to live among us and the vulnerable people inside our walls, so we had rehearsed our classic good cop, bad cop routine and all taken turns to be the sullen one whose job it was to seem unconvinced to let them stay.
I went first, choosing to be good cop, on the basis that I had killed three of his buddies and battered him a little, so if he thought I was the good one then he should be scared to death of Mitch. I cut his bonds and handed him a bottle of water, smiling a little as though I felt sorry for him. He gasped, muttered something in Spanish and rubbed at the swollen flesh of his hands. He looked up at me and returned my smile.
“Hola,” he said again.
“Tell me your name,” I told him, hearing Alita’s voice sound softly behind me.
“Rocco,” he answered, smiling again.
“Don’t fucking grin at her you wee shite!” Mitch snarled as he pushed away from the wall and shoved his face down into the man’s until their foreheads rang together with a clunk.
Bad cop established, I pushed Mitch away who pretended to obey and backed off balling his fists.
“Tell him I’m sorry about that, but if he doesn’t answer my questions then I won’t be able to keep him safe,” I said to Alita with my eyes still boring into him almost pleadingly. She rattled off the translation and I saw Rocco’s eyes flicker up to Mitch and back to mine.
“I need to know how many people are in his group,” I said softly, seeing his eyes switch to Alita before returning to mine. He gave an answer as the smile returned.
“He says,” Alita began, clearing her throat and sounded annoyed, “he says you have pretty eyes.”
SMACK!
Mitch launched away from the wall again and clapped an almighty slap across the right side of his face sending him backwards so hard that he rolled over to come to a rest facing the other wall. I had seen him do that before, even taken the piss out of him for it, but he was adamant that if he had to rough someone up then a slap was the best method short of waterboarding him. He maintained that if he wanted to knock him out then he would punch him, but some good, hard slaps around a man’s face had the psychological effect of beating him badly without actually shaking the brain and risking damage.
Rocco gasped and lolled his head in shock at the speed and savagery of the slap. It worked, because he instantly stopped trying to hit on me and switched to a new tactic.
“He says he does not know,” Alita translated his rapid babble, “he says he is small man in group and is not told these things.”
“That’s not true, is it?” I asked as I cupped his chin softly and lifted it to meet my gaze, “because if you weren’t that important then how come you were the only one out of four to have a weapon?”
He waited for the translation, his eyes darkening as he considered my logic. He said nothing instead.
“Let’s start again shall we, Rocco?” I said as I stood and leaned against the wall. Mitch sidled around the room and stood behind him in his blind spot, making him cringe away from the next strike that he wouldn’t be able to see coming.
“How many in your group?”
He said nothing, squirming
to try and see over his left shoulder whilst still maintaining a watch on me.
SMACK!
He pitched forwards to land on his face and rubbed desperately at his right cheek where the full swing of Mitch’s hand had connected. Mitch rubbed his hand too, and I was pleased to see that he seemed to take no pleasure in inflicting pain on someone else.
“Too long,” Mitch growled, “fucking answer her.”
Alita spoke rapidly, pleadingly to him as though she wanted the violence to stop. Although a timid woman by nature she had a core of pure steel, so I knew she was just messing with his head to try and push him down the path of talking.
“How many?” I asked again.
“Mil,” he growled, smiling at me.
“He says a thousand,” Alita translated.
I doubted that, as did Mitch who stepped up his game to speed things along. He hauled Rocco up bodily, slammed him against the wall and hit him with a hard left, right low in his abdomen. He made that awful croaking noise a person makes when their diaphragm goes into spasm and they can’t breathe. Knowing that Rocco wouldn’t be able to speak for a few minutes we left him there in the foetal position as he retched and gasped in breaths.
We reconvened down the hallway out of earshot with Dan. Marie still spoke to Mateo soothingly, one arm on his broad shoulder as the reality of his brother’s fate finally hit him.
“He’s playing silly buggers,” Mitch said, “thinks he’s a hard man.”
“We don’t have the time for this,” I said impatiently, “we need to know everything he knows.”
“Dog?” Dan suggested.
That could work, I thought, recalling how effective Ash had been as Dan’s bad cop when our home had been attacked and I had killed their leader as he ran from the destroyed vehicle convoy that Neil has shredded with the machine gun.
“I’ll do it,” I said, “give me Ash as well.”
Dan looked at me, glanced to where Marie was unaware of the conversation.
“Do it,” he said quietly, snapping his fingers to bring his dog from the shadows where he lay down. I did the same, hearing the clatter of claws on stone as both dogs padded towards us.
I opened the door again, saying nothing as I called the dogs in and closed it after Alita entered. She kept herself well away from the dogs as she knew what was coming and tucking herself into the opposite corner from where Rocco was huddled. His eyes grew wide as the dogs sniffed at him, keeping his hands away from them and trying to shrink away.
“Watch him,” I said in a flat tone.
Both dogs switched it on in an instant, dropping into low poses and snarling as though they were possessed. Ash, by far the veteran, showed his daughter how it was done as he lunged forward and snapped his teeth at the whimpering man.
“Watch him,” I growled, hearing Nemesis’ bark echo in the empty room and drown out the shrieks of fear from Rocco. Ash continued to lunge forwards, bouncing onto his front paws and rearing back onto his hind legs to gather the momentum for the next feigned attack. Rocco buried his face into the wall, tears streaming down his dirty cheeks as he sobbed.
“Tell him,” I said loudly to Alita, “that if he doesn’t want to see what they do next, then he needs to answer my questions.”
She raised her voice, telling him what I wanted her to. He yelled and begged, that much was clear, and I called the dogs back. As soon as they had stopped snarling I heard an argument going on outside the door and rushed back outside to see Marie rearing up on her tiptoes in Dan’s face, clearly unhappy at our tactics.
“… out of bloody order,” she snapped, “this is too far.”
“It’s done,” I said, hoping as all teenagers did that their parents would stop arguing.
Marie scowled at me, turning on me for my turn.
“And you!” she whipped at me, “you are better than this.”
I put my head down and let her berate me, taking the tongue-lashing that I probably deserved, but it wasn’t worth arguing back that some rules were worth bending when someone’s life was at stake.
None of us noticed Mateo slip into the room as Marie tore a strip from all of us. He had taken the key out of the old lock and the first we knew of what he was doing was the mechanism clicking over to lock him in from the inside.
“Fuck it,” Dan growled, immediately raising his boot and slamming it hard into the old wood. It didn’t budge, despite him being the victor of countless battles between himself and locked doors. He kicked it again, harder this time, to no effect. Mitch joined him as Alita shouted for Mateo to unlock the door.
“Back up,” Dan yelled as he drew the Walther from his vest.
“No!” I yelled, putting my myself in the way knowing that he would fire. “It’s too risky.”
Dan regained his senses in time to know he would probably hit one of them, when a foul scream of agony tore the air inside the room and made us all freeze. A pause sounded before another scream reached us, this one devolving into a desperate sob which undulated until the door lock snapped open and we piled inside.
“He talk now,” Mateo said, turning over a small knife in his hands with a blade that had evidently been sharpened so many times that it was just a whisper of steel.
As one, we looked at Rocco who held his groin with both hands. Dark red blood stained his hands as he sobbed and his legs seemed unable to stop his bare feet from dancing on the stone floor.
“What the fuck did you do?” Mitch asked.
Was that a hint of admiration I heard in his voice?
He spoke to Alita, who stared at him with her mouth wide open.
“He says,” she stammered, “he says he slice on his…”
“Oh for fuck sake,” Marie said in exasperation turning from the room and shouting for someone to fetch Kate.
Jaws 3
Rocco hadn’t been castrated, despite what Marie feared. Mateo had just run the slim blade across his balls to part a few layers of skin with deft skill, but promised to skin him alive staring with the rest of his sack if he didn’t tell him what had happened to his brother.
The beating had scared him. The dogs had terrified him. But the threat of dismemberment at the hands of the brother of the man they had captured had seemed more of a promise.
Mateo had apologised to us, assured us that he was never out of control, and had handled the rest of the questioning under close supervision after Kate, our ever-ready but constantly annoyed paramedic had staunched the bleeding and put three stitches into a body part she was squeamishly unaccustomed to handling.
Dan called a team together, more of a posse if I was honest, and planned to make the return trip to Andorra at the next dawn. I was going, that was without doubt, but Neil and Mitch had assumed they were involved also and I wouldn’t say no to that. Word had spread quickly, with people clamouring to volunteer. I had placed a call on the radio to the watchtower, asking for one of the young men by name. I told him to bring his rifle and prepare to be away for a few days.
I admit, I had a little flutter of excitement about him. Lucien Dumas, who Dan always insisted on calling Dumbass in an American accent. Mitch and Neil laughed when he did it, even Marie thought it was funny, but I had no idea what old film they were copying. One of the reasons they teased me about him was because he had some kind of effect on me and I blushed whenever I was around him. He was a couple of years older than me and had been a boxer as a child. He didn’t have the squashed face of one, in fact I thought he was pretty with his ash blonde hair falling in waves over his cheeky smile. He had volunteered to be part of the militia after we had arrived at Sanctuary and shown a natural ability to shoot well at distance. I had only found out he was a boxer when Henry, the daft boy who had stowed away with us from our home back in England, tried to show his superior size and strength to the smaller boy by beating him up in front of everyone, no doubt because he thought that would get my attention, and had ended up unable to land a single blow as Lucien had danced around him and pounded the flesh
y boy into tears. He had smiled the whole time, even helping the boy up after he had humiliated him. Henry, the sting of shame on his face, had moved to the farm then where he remained, growing bigger and stronger but still not able to remove the pain of defeat.
I had insisted that Lucien go to the watchtower, mostly because he had the attention of any woman remotely near his age and I felt something that was worryingly like jealousy.
Now, despite what I might feel about his cheeky smile and the glint in his eyes, I needed a shooter. I saw him jogging down the long cliff path, rucksack on his back and the only remaining HK417 in his hand, then turned away from the ramparts where the radios were under the cover of a shelter constructed by Neil, nodded to the woman of the militia who watched over the gate and went to the dining hall where the planning meeting was called.
Dan, Marie, Neil, Mitch, Alita and Mateo sat at the table, with three of the militia who Mitch had hand-picked. I agreed with his choices, knowing the two men and one woman to be reliable and steady. Anyone likely to be enthusiastic to go into conflict was a liability in my opinion.
“…need more fuel,” Neil said, “so we’ll have to go almost as far as Perpignan to pump some out. Leah?” I lifted my face to his gaze. “That truck of theirs, you said it had a radio in?”
“Yes, short range only and probably made worse by the mountains.”
Neil nodded. “We’ll refuel that and take it, so that’s our second vehicle. We’ll have to cram into the first two and send the others back after we’ve siphoned enough tanks or pumped out a fuel station.” He looked at Dan who took over.
“From what the prisoner has told us,” he began with only the subtlest of glances at Mateo, “we are facing a force of almost fifty. Some are armed, and some are trained. Ex-police or similar. They’ve blockaded the southern road to Spain, but their leader is with the majority of their forces at the French border. Leah?”
After It Happened (Book 7): Andorra [The Leah Chronicles] Page 11
