After It Happened (Book 7): Andorra [The Leah Chronicles]

by Ford, Devon C.

  I walked ahead, both long rifles on one shoulder and trying to keep eye contact with her as her lip curled in mild threat. The two flights were awkwardly managed, and as we reached the second-floor window we had climbed from only a few hours before Nemesis was struggling to break free from his grip. She almost threw herself out of his arms and he managed to direct her body to flow through the open window. I realised I had been holding my breath. I let it out in an exaggerated sigh of relief over such a trivial challenge and followed inside to take the stairs down to the ground.

  By the time we had reached ground level, Nem had forgotten her ordeal and searched the area with her nose glued to the ground as though daylight made everything different. Jogging the short distance over the debris-strewn ground to rejoin the others, I smiled at Dan to communicate the whole, “Hey! I’m glad you didn’t all die just then,” thing, and we realised our mistake at once.

  Shots rang out, coming from past the barricade as we dove for cover, and a pair of meaty thwacks indicated the strike of bullets into a prisoner who fell, crumpled really, wearing a look of shock and agony. He gasped once, then stayed silent.

  We had ambushed the defenders, and then the defenders were ambushing us right back.

  Cliffhanger

  “No!” Jack exclaimed, rising up on his knees in protest as Peter held both hands over his mouth in mock horror. “You can’t stop there!”

  “Well,” Leah said in a tone that sounded almost dastardly, “I can’t very well just tell you the whole story in one go, can I?”

  “Pleeeease?” Peter whined as Jack sat back and looked sullen.

  “Tomorrow,” Leah said firmly, “you have to go to sleep now and what comes next wouldn’t help you do that easily.”

  The boys stood, Jack ruffling the fur on the back of Ares’ head as he passed and both of them took it in turns to hug and kiss their aunt goodnight. Their cousin, Leah’s daughter, was a tall, fierce young woman with a broad smile and a quick laugh. She waited patiently in the doorway, her hand held out for the boys to follow her and be tucked into bed. Before they left Jack turned back, his face completely serious as was his manner, and he fixed Leah with a stern look.

  “Didn’t you feel bad?” he asked. “Attacking the people like that?”

  The woman in the chair leaned back, sucking in a breath through her nose and holding it as her eyebrows met in thought.

  “Not really,” she said, “not now anyway. Not after what we knew they had done.”

  “What did they do?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” she told him, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  ~

  Leah rose, taking her evening inspection at the pace of a sedate stroll so that she could enjoy the company of her old dog for a day longer. He had been through a lot with her, had comforted her when she lost Dan and Marie when human contact held too many pressures to talk about her feelings and force her to listen to their opinions. Ares never judged her, always knew when she was upset and the bond between them was, in her opinion, far stronger than she had seen before; even between Dan and Ash.

  He grumbled as he sat stiffly, lifting an arthritic hind leg to swing it through the air as he lacked the flexibility to reach the itch behind his ear.

  “Oh,” Leah said, bending down to scratch it for him and make the grumble turn to one of satisfaction and affection, “poor old bugger.”

  Ares looked up at her, sneezing once and opening his mouth to pant lazily. She walked onwards, avoiding the steep stairs in favour of the longer way around on flatter ground to save his old legs. Instead of taking in the view from the ramparts as she usually did, she took him around at sea level towards the livestock pens, heading towards the shape of an old woman coming from the pens. Ares stopped to water a fencepost, staggering slightly as he couldn’t lift his leg even half as high as he used to be able to. The sounds of chickens and pigs reached her just after the smell which, as unpleasant as it was, meant that they had food and were thriving. The shape became identifiable from how the old woman moved and Leah caught up with her easily.

  “You’re out late,” she said, making the bent shape stop and turn stiffly.

  “So is he,” Sera answered, her voice a sibilant, toothless croak of the one who had spent years berating Dan at every opportunity. She pointed at Ares, his tongue lolling out as he padded towards them and wagged his tail slowly.

  “He likes the evening air,” Leah told her as she reached down for him to lick at her fingers, “less people around to stress him out.”

  “Hmm,” Sera answered, giving no indication of whether she agreed or passed judgement, “you checking on the new pups?”

  “I was going to poke my head in,” Leah said, sounding as non-committal as possible.

  “Hmm,” Sera intoned again as she turned away and patted Leah on the arm, “good night then.”

  “What do you think, boy?” Leah asked Ares, his partly vacant but happy face looking back up at her in the low light of the rare lightbulb fitted to one of the alternator setups. “I know, they’re very young…”

  She leaned over the gate into one of the stable stalls, seeing Ares’ youngest daughter from his second litter returning her gaze tiredly as the six balls of brown and black fur bounced unsteadily over her exhausted body. They were three weeks old, still suckling and draining the poor girl and making her appear thin and drawn. She was being well fed, with fresh cuts of meat and fish with rice and other pulses being brought to her three times a day to keep her strong.

  The lineage, started so long ago with a grey puppy found by random chance by Dan so many years before, lived on in the bundles of fuzzy fur on the blankets before her. She knew she would have to pick one of them in a few months, either to replace the old dog at her side or to not miss the opportunity to bond with her new partner at the right time when they were broken away from the bond with their mother. She was racked with guilt, with sadness for the imminent loss of her friend who had shared so many dark experiences and happy ones at her side.

  “Life moves on, eh boy?” she said to him, seeing him tuck his tongue back up into his mouth and issue a huff from his nostrils. Switching off the light, she walked him slowly back to her room and slipped under the covers as her trusted companion settled down on the hearth rug. The other person in the bed stirred, rolling over and wrapping an arm around her waist as he tucked himself into the contours of her body. She kissed the hand once, readjusting it for comfort, and closed her eyes.

  Counter Attack

  We all reacted at once, dropping our bodies in the instant we heard the first shots ring out. That bullet-time principle struck me again; transforming time into slow-motion as irrelevant facts ran through my brain.

  Small calibre, shotgun, semi-automatic, my brain tagged each of the three sounds to reach my ears in the same instant as my body still dropped and twisted to seek cover.

  Mitch, further away from the barricade, stood tall and emptied his entire magazine towards the threat in the hope of suppressing whatever attack came our way long enough for our people to get into cover. The sound of unsuppressed firing stopped, only to return as a fresh thirty-round magazine replaced his expended one and the full-auto firing resumed.

  I scrambled across the dusty road surface, low to the ground and breathing hard as the adrenaline flooded my system, glancing back to see a snapshot of our tiny force. Nemesis was beside me as I half lay in the tentative cover of a car’s wheel. Dan was on one knee low down behind an engine block beside a flat tyre. Lucien, his wavy blonde hair falling over his eyes above his mouth which was wide open with shock and fear, was fumbling to pull his backup weapon from behind him without getting up and becoming an easy target. Mitch still stood, pouring murderous fire like a one-man relief force, until his weapon ran dry a second time in the space of a few seconds and then he too flung himself down into cover. Chloe knelt down, her body half obscured by the tent between us, but her body position was different. She didn’t face the threat, nor did she seem to
care that her cover stood no chance of stopping a bullet, and she was on both knees facing half away from the barricade. My eyes took it in, but my brain took a split-second longer to figure it out; she was tending to someone lying flat on their back with the toes of their boots pointing skywards.

  Casualties afterwards, I told myself, knowing it was bullshit because if it was Dan or Mitch I would be running towards them already. Deal with the threat first.

  Time seemed to return to normal speed, and with it the sound increasing like the world had been on pause for the briefest of moments. I glanced at Dan who had his eyes boring straight into me and saw him hold up four fingers before pointing at the other side of the barricade. Shouts reached my ears now; Chloe at the rear and other voices I didn’t recognise in a language I didn’t speak. I nodded, left my battle rifle where it was and brought the carbine round to my front. I got my feet underneath me, staying as low as humanly possible, and headed to my right away from the centre of the road as Dan mirrored my movement to the left side. Mitch still rattled off bursts of automatic fire, his intention not to kill specific targets but simply to keep their heads down for us to get into a position to end the conflict before they dug in. Some shots came back; the booming echo of a shotgun and the answering metallic peppering of shot against the metal skins of the vehicles. A second volley added to Mitch’s, Lucien I presumed, and I took two steadying breaths before flicking aside the telescopic part of my weapon sight and swinging my body around the edge of a truck.

  Target recognition and assessment, my brain lectured me in Dan’s voice, taking in the scene in an instant and weighing up all of the factors before taking a shot. It’s what makes the difference between being a hero and being a murderer.

  He had told me the story, back when he was still healing from being skewered with his own knife by the Frenchman I had shot with a bow and arrow, of how he had weighed up all the factors back in the past and still made the wrong decision. That choice, that action, had ended his career and affected everything in his life to the point where it finally made sense why he enjoyed things so much after almost everyone died. Life just became more… simple.

  As my right shoulder, head and weapon popped into view my brain slowed again, the adrenaline being used and channelled to hone my fight or flight instincts into a very sharp blade, and I fired.

  Two bursts, one directly ahead and one slightly to the right, and both of them fell at once. My ears registered an echo of my suppressed shots, but in hindsight I realised it must have been Dan firing from the opposite end to drop the third and fourth attackers just as a fifth lost their nerve entirely and ran. Neither of us fired, as I had given the command to release Nemesis into the fray. I heard Dan yelling the order again to cease fire.

  She accelerated away like a demon released from hell. Nemesis went to my command of, “Get him!” just as I had heard Dan use the same words to Ash so many times. I was up and following, gun raised in what Mitch told me was perfect symmetry to Dan rising from the opposite end as we tracked the dog and the man who, if he escaped, would destroy our plan.

  Now Dan always said that Ash was fast and big, but I had to allow myself a moment of pride as Nemesis stretched out to time her leap and snag the man’s arm and snatch him off his feet to land face-first on the tarmac and skid to a writhing, screaming stop as she lost her grip on the limb. She skidded and turned, pounced again and landed on his thrashing leg to sink her teeth in for added measure.

  “Hold!” I yelled as I moved forwards, not wanting her to injure the man beyond his ability to answer questions. Dan caught up with me, his longer legs striding powerfully as we moved side by side.

  “Nem! Back,” I called, adding some gravel and dominance to my voice but literally lacking the balls to make it sound as deep and menacing as Dan did.

  She released her quarry, leaving him to whimper and sob as he writhed on the ground in his own blood. He gripped his right forearm, blood seeping through his fingers despite clutching it so tightly that his fingers and knuckles shone white in the growing sunlight, and his mouth stayed open in a grimace of pain and shock so intense that it couldn’t yet find sound. I glanced up, trying to figure out where he was hoping to reach before being brought down, and saw the only building in a wide expanse was one identical to the border post on the far side of the mountains in France.

  Dan saw it at the same time, muttering for Nem to watch the bleeding man who wouldn’t be able to run away, let alone be of a mind to try.

  We went forwards with Dan on my right shoulder a few paces out and approached the small building head on, as being a glass box with views all around it offered no safe direction to attack from undetected. Our guns moved everywhere our eyes did, able to bring fire to bear on anything we saw that offered a threat, and Dan laid his boot hard against the door to burst it inwards. Nobody was there, but the temperature and smell in the room told me that it was recently occupied, probably by the four who had run back to fire at us from the side of the barricade that we had assumed safe.

  ’Umption had been made an ass of in that respect, it seemed.

  “Must have been using the barricade as an operating base,” Dan said, “no wonder they didn’t seem switched on; this was where they were standing guard, not there.”

  A cry of pain from outside pierced the air, lifting our heads. Guns up after exchanging a look, we went back outside to find the person making the noise, and what we found turned my stomach.

  In some crude parody of crucifixion, a man and a woman were tied to the posts of the sign directing all vehicles to stop and prepare to be searched. The man, black skinned and long limbed but sagging down in a way that made me worry he had already succumbed to the torture, and the woman beside him who was far shorter and lighter. She was moving, weakly, and her lips moved under closed eyes with only intermittent noises coming from her.

  Dan snapped, as he always did when such pointless suffering was inflicted on others, stepping forwards to draw his knife as he simultaneously dropped the gun to fall on its sling. He sawed at the bindings around the woman’s chest as he moved behind her, grunting as he worked and made her weak body jerk.

  “It’s not rope,” he growled, “it’s electrical cord.”

  I cast one last sweep of the rising ground behind us leading into Andorra, then dropped my own gun to hang as I pulled the larger blade from the back of my vest. I forced the knife through the thick, rubbery bonds and levered it between the strands to try to stretch and snap them free, starting at the ankles and the hands then attacking the thick loops around his bare torso. Dan had freed the woman, laying her down in the knowledge that she still lived before stepping fast towards me as I struggled to free the larger man.

  “They’ve been here a while,” he snarled, disgusted at the treatment of people at the hands of supposedly fellow humans, “she’s badly sunburned.”

  I finally managed to mangle the last strand of flex holding the weight of the man and stepped back as he slumped forwards into Dan’s arms.

  “Can you get her?” he asked, grunting as he manhandled the floppy weight of the unconscious man up into a fireman’s lift, the strain evident on his face as he bent his legs and performed at least a ninety-kilogram squat with an uneven weight over his shoulders. I said nothing, instead going to the woman who was luckily far smaller than the man Dan carried. I was gentle about it, I couldn’t be if I had to get it done, and I hauled her up by her arms as her head flopped back and a small whimper came from her mouth as I ducked fast and put my shoulder under her ribs to drive all my strength through my heels and stand with her weight added to that of my own body and equipment.

  I walked in short, quick steps to cover the distance back to the barricade and shouted for help as soon as we got near. I left Nemesis watching the prisoner, satisfied that he wouldn’t be making a move as the memory of her teeth was still a very painful prospect to him. Mitch heard us first and came running through the gap in the wrecked cars to assess which of us needed the most h
elp. I was both ashamed and glad that he decided it was me, but my pulse throbbed in my temples and I was out of breath faster than any sprint had ever made me. My legs and shoulder burned even after he lifted her off me and carried her back like she was a child.

  “Found them tied to a fucking signpost,” Dan hissed from under his burden, “dehydrated and sunburned. Probably been there a day.”

  Mitch said nothing, instead pressing ahead to where he had dropped his kit bag beside a small panel van peppered with bullet holes of differing sizes. He laid her down, turning to Dan who had arrive just behind him and helped set the man on the ground beside her.

  “Top of my bag, I’ve got two bags of fluids ready to go,” he said to me. I didn’t answer, there was no need to, instead I just threw open the top flap of his old camouflage rucksack, his Bergen as he called it, and snatched up the IV bags.

  “Him first,” Dan said unnecessarily, as though I didn’t know to treat the unconscious casualty before the one who still made noises.

  I pulled his arm into a position where I could extend it and find a vein, squeezing his bicep and slapping at the flesh until I located one. Inserting the needle into his skin I extended the tube leading to the tough, flexible bag and called for some tape. A roll of metallic silver was handed to me and I tore some off to slap it over the bag which I stuck high up on the side of the van.

  “Prisoner back there being watched by Nem,” Dan said, prompting Mitch to call Lucien in from his position and instruct him to bring the man back.

  I repeated the process with the woman, inserting the needle into a vein on the third attempt and taping it to the same level as the other bag. I stood back, looking at my work, when a thought from the brief firefight came back to me like a jolt of electricity.