From those memories, he saw the twenty-year-old Dan, fresh-faced and unburdened by years of pain and distrust, trying his hardest to hold his chin from quivering. You didn’t show weakness in front of the brutally hard man, even with comedy facial hair disguising his look of pure malevolence while addressing one so young and inexperienced.
Still, that’s how it had been for generations, and probably would have been for years to come if the whole world hadn’t been turned upside down; children are bullied into conflict under a flag by older bullies who had been bullied themselves.
That was over-simplified, he allowed, and overly harsh. He had felt a burning pride at serving his country, at going to war and being part of one of the best, if not by any means the biggest, gangs on the planet. If only he could speak to that twenty-year-old now, he could dispense some valuable advice.
As he wandered, he tried to remember what Adam had been before; was he a plumber? No, something to do with bathroom fittings or tiles. It made no matter really. What they were before held little or no relevance to what they were now.
Finding Adam carrying his heavy bag back towards the newly ventilated Land Rover and wearing an embarrassed look, Dan tried to soften his face to convey a sense of unjudging empathy. Adam dropped his bag and stood awkwardly in his clean trousers, broadcasting an obvious juxtaposition between the clean black cotton and the travel-stained top and equipment vest.
Dan waved Ash away from him to sniff at a nearby hedgerow while he lit a cigarette to give himself thinking time.
“First one’s a big milestone,” he said as he exhaled, trying to sound nonchalant about it. He was just about to launch into a superior-sounding speech about dealing with the aftermath of a contact and deliver some words of wisdom when the truth of the situation hit him like a brick in the chest. All he was missing were the big chops and the obvious loathing of other human beings but other than that, he was the sergeant major preaching to the new recruit.
Suddenly lost for words, he slapped a hand on Adam’s shoulder and walked away as he whistled for his dog.
He was just an old soldier pushing the next generation, only there was no flag now.
WARM SAFE PLACE
The cycle of the last nearly two weeks had been broken in relative style. They had bathed in warm water, rinsing away the filth and stink of the hard travelling. They were dressed in clean clothes, took the time to clean their equipment and all the while were given hot drinks.
Real hot drinks. Tea with actual milk, not the powdery stuff they had come to barely tolerate which left a film on their teeth and had a nasty habit of accumulating into chewy lumps. Real milk. From cows.
It was a small comfort, but one they rarely had even before they lost their home.
With the drinks came food, and after the scraps they had survived on for the previous fortnight, that too was like the richest ambrosia.
Now fed, clean and rehydrated, they sat with their hosts and Lexi tried to apologise again for earlier.
“I just panicked a bit,” she explained to Simon for the fourth or fifth time since they met. “I saw the truck and assumed or something…” she said as her voice trailed away.
Simon held up a big hand to ward off any further clumsy attempts at an apology which he felt wasn’t necessary. His broad smile beamed at her again, making her embarrassment even worse than before. “It’s fine, my dear. Honestly,” he said with a small laugh at her discomfort. “It was actually us who pointed guns at your friends when we first met them.”
His smile faded away at the thought that of the group who first met Dan and Mitch, only he remained alive. His smile wavered further when he saw Lexi’s face drop at the mention of the others.
“I think it’s time you told me what happened, don’t you?” he asked kindly. Lexi’s face remained pointed at the ground, so Chris interjected.
“The one you met, Dan, he was our leader in a way,” he said to Simon, “but a couple of months back, he decided to leave for bloody Africa to try and save Marie – she’s his woman and was another sort of leader – because she’s pregnant and their weird scientist girl thinks she knows a way to make the babies survive.” His own voice wavered as the painful memories of his own stillborn child surged to the surface like a breaching whale. He swallowed and went on. “I lost a baby,” he said, pausing to cough and straighten himself, “and my woman too. She went away with them.”
Simon nodded with him as he spoke, keeping a respectful silence. All of this he knew from speaking to Dan anyway, but in a small way he was enjoying hearing their story from the perspective of the non-believers. It would have been far more entertaining had the story not been so tragic.
Simon had heard the arrival of the helicopter in the harbour and later spoke with Dan about Steve and marvelled at their luck in finding a pilot and a working aircraft. To hear Dan relay Steve’s fears that it wouldn’t last long become reality in Chris’s blunt description of the terrible crash made the whole tale become sadder by the minute.
Lexi picked up the story again after Chris became too emotional to continue, and she spoke about how they had started to lose cohesion, to come undone at the seams without the ones who had left. She told him of her own failings. Of how she couldn’t step up in the circumstances to fill both Dan’s and Steve’s shoes and how she retreated into a permanent state of hostility towards everyone. She told him of the suddenness of the attack, of her burning anger at the betrayal of the Twins, and of their quickly made choice to flee instead of fighting. It stung her how easily she had made that decision, and only pure chance had led to Chris and Melissa being with them.
She blamed herself for the uncontested arrival of the Twins, saying that she should have tried harder to retain control, that if she had then none of it would have happened and they would still have a home.
“That’s utter bollocks,” growled Chris from behind her, making her turn around to look at his angry, tear-filled eyes. “That’s bollocks and you know it. Stop trying to blame yourself,” he said. “You think even Dan and all the others could’ve stopped whoever it was wiping us out? No. Look at how many of them there were; we were outnumbered and all of them were armed. We’d have been slaughtered if Dan was there and tried to fight them off. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.” With that, he rose and walked away for some privacy.
Lexi was shocked by the outburst, but she was beginning to agree with Chris’s feelings. They hadn’t stood a chance. They would have had to build defences and man them twenty-four-seven to have stopped a force that size. As much as she agreed with that, her ingrained defence of Dan and his policies still ran deep, and she felt obligated to object to laying the full blame on their saviour who had abandoned them.
Her mouth opened but she found herself unable to articulate those feelings with any coherent sequence of words. She closed her mouth and looked at Simon, hoping he would understand her confusion to further explain her actions.
The big man stirred himself in his seat. “Would it help if I told you what he did for me?” he said, setting out the scene without waiting for a reply.
Almost without emotion, he told them of meeting Dan and the subsequent attack on his camp. Speaking in a quiet monotone, he told them of how he and his friend had been rescued. Of how their friends worked desperately to save a man’s life. Of how he felt when they couldn’t, and he realised that all the men who had trusted him, had followed him, were all dead now. He told them of how Dan had helped him gather fuel, given him the Land Rover, and then set sail across the Channel with hope.
Aboard Hope, to be precise.
~
He didn’t tell them that he had turned back after an hour of driving. That he had hidden the Land Rover and crept to the seafront under cover of darkness where he lay in wait until his patience paid off and he was able to exact a brutal and murderous revenge on the man who had hurt him so badly.
He would take that story with him to the grave, because to tell another soul about it would make it re
al, and if it were real then he was a savage man who was just as capable of murder as he was of tending livestock or growing crops.
He didn’t want to think of himself like that, so those two days and two nights were consigned to a locked vault in his memory.
~
He looked up, slowly waking from his reverie to see the assembled faces watching him. Waiting for more.
But there was no more that he would share, so his mask of a broad smile returned and he did what he did best. He changed the subject.
“So, how can we help you?” he asked them.
The four outsiders looked at each other, unsure of what they really wanted. If Lexi were pushed to guess, she’d think that Chris and Melissa would stay with Simon and his group. Become farmers again and live in peace. She hoped Paul would stay with her, whatever she decided.
“Can you help us get to France?” asked Chris, breaking the silence and shocking Lexi. Simon took a sip of his tea and smiled at them. “I can do one better,” he said, pausing to drain his cup and flick the dregs away on the grass. “I’ll come with you.”
THE VOID
The official title was Camp Bravo, which he thought was predictably unimaginative. On deeper reflection from the uncomfortable hospital bed, the name given to their new home – irrespective of their personal wishes – was wholly indicative of the personality of the man in charge.
His complete lack of one, more like.
He struck his first camp, moved to a new site and attached the moniker “Bravo” to imply it was the second place. The next letter in the alphabet. A to B.
It was precisely that stiff lack of personality which made almost everyone at the camp despise their leader. The man who strutted around, constantly flanked by no less than four armed men at all times.
Dan would never have needed a bodyguard detail, Steve thought with amusement. Even if there were people who wanted to do him harm, he would still refuse protection and meet whatever threat he faced head on. Sometimes that attitude was a failing too, but in light of their current contrast, Dan could do no wrong.
If he were there. Or even knew where they were.
Steve had to resign himself to the fact that they were part of the bigger machine now. Someone else’s machine. They had been swallowed up just as much as a dozen other groups had been, and now they were part of Camp Bravo.
For Steve, life felt like a void, like he had fallen into an empty pit with no bottom, no sides and no way out. The pain he experienced didn’t help, nor did the regular doses of opiates he was given. He spent days, or it could have been weeks, in a daze interrupted only by crippling waves of pain and occasional overheard snippets of talk. At times, he didn’t know if he was awake, or even alive, and his fogged brain made little sense of what he heard and saw.
He realised he was becoming more aware of his surroundings, although he had no idea how long he had been there. He had grown a beard, giving him the estimate of at least four weeks since the crash.
The crash.
It came back to him again like an electric shock.
The noise.
The terror.
The pain.
Closing his eyes tightly to try and squeeze away the images and feelings in his head, he breathed steadily to calm himself.
Factory reset. Open your eyes, he told himself, deal with what’s happening now. Open your eyes.
Looking up at the stained ceiling, he tried to place his surroundings. Draughty, with a plastic feel to the room. Stale. A portacabin? The smell was terrible, a cross between rotting meat and chemicals.
He realised in horror that most of the smell was him. His clothes were stiff where he had soiled himself and it had dried into the fabric. A film of dried sweat covered his skin and left an unpleasantly sticky feel. Silently, he began a top-to-toe survey of his body.
Thinking firstly of his head, he felt the throbbing pain emanating down his neck and the tingling area of numbness behind his right ear. Moving down his aching neck, he tensed arms and fingers until a deep breath sent a sudden stab of agony through his ribcage.
Best not to try that again, he thought.
Hips, waist, legs all tensed in turn until the sensation of his lower right leg fully returned. The lancing, searing jolt of agony fired a full salvo up his leg and continued along up his spine where his brain registered the sensation and threatened to return him to unconsciousness.
As his rapid breathing began to calm and the tears stopped flowing down his cheeks, he summoned the courage to try and move again. It’s only pain, he thought to himself, but this kind of pain couldn’t be used in conjunction with the word only.
Forcing his weakened body to exert the energy, he pushed down on the thin mattress to raise his upper body, gasping with the effort as he turned the movement into sitting up. Burst sores on his back left his raw skin exposed as the scabs stayed put on the dirty sheets and his atrophied muscles quivered with the exertion until he was upright.
Pausing to catch his breath, he looked down at the thin blanket covering his legs. Like ripping off a dressing, he threw it aside quickly to expose his lower limbs. He didn’t know what he expected, but seeing a blackened and swollen shin through the straps of an immobilisation boot, he knew instantly that he had broken it badly and that someone had fixed it with a degree of skill he didn’t possess.
Details flooded back to him: Lizzie and Alice, more pain and the bliss that overcame him when the injections were given, and the noise and panic when their home was taken from them.
He sensed that he had been left with the minimum of care to see if he recovered, although the empty drips of ampicillin on the stand next to his bed told him that they didn’t want him dead, just in pain.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he caught sight of his reflection in a scratched mirror on the wall. He looked like a prisoner of war being repatriated: emaciated and dirty.
“You’re awake,” said a voice from the other side of the room, making Steve jump in fright. A stocky man in pale-green scrubs was sitting on a plastic chair in the corner of the room. He gently closed the book he was reading and placed it down with an air of reverence on the table next to him before looking up and regarding Steve. He smiled at him, although not convincingly.
“Don’t ask me any questions because I probably don’t know the answer and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you even if I did,” he said in a distinct accent as he stood and stretched, revealing thick arms and a broad chest as he uncoiled like a resting animal.
Steve regarded him as best he could manage, trying to piece together the words he wanted to say and croak them out of his dry throat. Of everything he could have asked the man, he was most curious about his uncommon accent.
“You’re,” he began, before coughing in sudden pain. He regained his breath as the man strode effortlessly across the creaking floor and picked up a bottle of water. He tossed it to Steve, who fumbled the catch and winced as the bottle struck his ribs.
No soft touch here, he thought. Drinking greedily, he wiped his mouth and tried again. “You’re South African?” he asked the man.
“Oh? How did you guess?” he replied with a grin of sarcasm.
Unsure if he was being toyed with, Steve chose his next words with greater care. “I mean, your accent, it’s not very common-”
The man cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I’m fucking with you, man. Relax!”
Hoping that the joviality was genuine, Steve did what he was told not to do. “How long have I been here?” he asked, receiving a reproving glare in response.
The man said nothing, just walked up to Steve and placed one hand on his forehead to shine a light in both eyes in turn.
He muttered softly as he worked. “There’s a guard right outside the door,” he said as he made a pretence of checking Steve’s pulse and looking at his watch when in fact his fingers were nowhere near the artery in his neck. “Whoever you were, you’ve really upset someone.”
“I stole a helicopter fr
om Richards,” Steve whispered in response.
The man stopped and looked him directly in the eye, a slow smile creeping the corners of his mouth upwards. “Well, my friend,” he said quietly, “you just became my newest hero!” Stepping back and raising his voice to normal levels, he addressed Steve for the benefit of listening ears. “Right, you stink so I need to get you to the showers. My name is Jan. I’m the orderly in the hospital wing.” He pronounced the J as a Y.
“Jan?” Steve asked.
“Trust me, man, you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my full name!”
With that, he was helped to his feet and given crutches. They were slightly too short for him and his wasted muscles made moving very hard work. With a great degree of difficulty and a lot of help from Jan, he made it to the shower where he sat on a plastic chair and washed away the blood and filth.
Clean and clothed, he was returned to the portacabin where fresh bed sheets had replaced the old ones. The smell mostly remained.
Out of breath from the effort of moving, Steve lay back on the bed with the back raised as his chest heaved to repay the oxygen taken from his muscles.
“I’ll get you some food,” said Jan, having returned to a more genial mood now out of sight of the guards. “Stay here,” he said as he left the room.
Steve’s head spun from the effort of moving only a matter of metres.
“Don’t worry, pal,” he said to the ceiling, “I’m not going anywhere.”
DOG-TIRED
Two days of driving slowly, scouting ahead and making camp for the night in a carefully selected position made for very slow progress.
Sanctuary: After It Happened Book 5 Page 3
