“Look sir…” I gulped. “I-I don’t know…”
Brian studied my eyes for a moment before he stepped back and took a battered-looking field canteen from under his jacket. He took a sip, before shoving it my way. “Drink. We have a long way ahead of us.”
I took the canteen and asked: “Where are we going?”
“To a safe place, where you can explain to Jane about how you failed the task.”
“You mean about getting facts about the Gladius?”
“Yes.” Brian nodded. “Exactly.” Then he took a deep breath and said: “I don’t know what went through the Authorities’ minds, when they set those guys on us. I mean, it was already bad with the ****ing roamers and them screaming idiots. Not talking about the Damned kind, but facing your own lot…” Brian shook his head sadly. “…wasn’t really what we needed.”
“Are
you telling me that
they came after
you?”
Brian let out a deep sigh and nodded. “Kind of… but it wasn’t me, but the important ones. You know: the leaders, the thinkers, the engineers and the makers. The ones who could have helped us to rebuild civilisation, after society had gone to hell in a handbasket.”
“Could
you be
more specific, please?”
*** Brian ***
You might look at me and think I’m some sort of convict, but I’m not. The scars, the wear and tear, and even the short haircut are because of the times. It just wears you out. You cannot escape it. One day you’re a young lad walking down the street with long wavy hair, and the next you’re changing diapers and cussing like a sailor, because you trod on a piece of Lego in the darkness. It hurts. Badly.
The
point is you get old, and with that age, you should get a bit wiser. But more often than not, it just doesn’t happen. It is so easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, even though your very own eyes see that reality is quite a bit different than the fantasy playing in your head. You could even say that wisdom is like a nagging wife; you should have listened, but you didn’t, because you were so deep into stuff, you didn’t stop to wonder what’s really going on.
Critical thinking is just a concept that never ever crossed your mind.
I thought we had it under control, when we hunkered down as the jets rumbled above us to destroy the city. And when the dust started to settle, a few weeks later, I stubbornly believed that our hastily-erected fortifications would have kept all unwanted elements outside our nice little community.
They were so high. So thick. Almost like the walls of the
bloody Tower. There was no way in, and no way out. To be honest, those barriers should have lasted until the army saved the world. But, I was so wrong…
We were wrong.
At least one of us should have realised the military wasn’t going to last forever. Not against the fast movers, and certainly not against the slower ones, like the roamers as they after a while started forming hoards. Someone said: “
They are savages who don’t have any humanity left,” when they started to ravage through pockets of communities, there was no way for us to stop them. Not with what we had in our hands, and certainly not after it looked like the army ran out of bullets, and disappeared.
Maybe they thought it was better to hunker down like the bloody elite. To be honest, trusting them was deeply rooted in us, because outside the realms of possibility none of us believed the roamers were going to live for as long as they do. Seriously, there weren’t any scientific facts to make us believe otherwise. The person dies and they rot away… slowly. If you ask anyone - and there was a lot of that going around in the amateur radio community – they would’ve claimed ‘
the peak would be reached within a couple of months and then the creeps would go away one by one.’ The real truth was they didn’t, as one day that illusion were shattered.
I was in the back-garden, pulling out flowers, bushes and plants to make room to grow some vegetables and whatnot, when I heard an explosion. I turned to look towards the main street, but that was a mistake, as a pressure wave blew out the windows and showered the back gardens with thousands of shards. In a second they became a cloud that cut through almost anything. But I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t even notice the cuts as I was in shock; thinking the creepers had caught us and the army was fighting somewhere near us.
So, I ran inside only to see my wife laying on top of our daughter. Kelly was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, where shards had cut her arteries, and her face. For a fleeting moment I thought I could save them. Then I saw the lights die in Kelly’s eyes just as I heard a weeping coming from underneath her.
“Mummy, mummy,” she cried when I pulled Jill out.
I shushed her quiet, saying: “She’s going to be all right. Stay strong.”
I held Jill close to my shoulder when automatic fire started clattering around us. At first I thought the army were shooting the geezers, but as I raised my head and saw - from the small barred kitchen window - one of our own going down, I knew that something was very wrong.
Seriously wrong.
There was no way anybody could have thought that Robbie May would harm anyone.
Yet, there he was, standing on the street, a shovel in his hand, when a hail of bullets from blockade drilled through him. He slumped to his knees and coughed out blood with a stunned look on his face, while the sporadic firing continued, spreading its chaos down the street. In his dying moment he was probably thinking the same thing I was:
How could this sh*t happen? How could they do this to us? We’d done nothing wrong!
It didn’t stop them from speeding down the road and driving over him. Then they stopped, backdoors slammed open, and out came the guys, looking like they’d been through a couple of wars already. Each one of them carried a gladius in addition to their weapons. It was almost as if they thought they were Caesar’s bodyguards.
That sight was
so mesmerizing and
so wrong.
The next thing Jill pulled my sleeve and screamed in my ear: “Daddy, daddy, is mummy going to die?”
I clamped a hand over her mouth and hissed: “Be quiet!”
She mumbled something, and while tears rolled down her face I felt my heart shrinking. Unless I could get us out of there, inevitable death was upon us. But as I heard a high powered shot followed by a scream in the back garden, I knew we couldn’t risk it. I had to find some other way. Something that didn’t involve going out there.
Those guys had not come here to save us, but to slaughter us, of that I was certain.
I saw a human shape passing the window before something slammed on our door hard. Repeatedly. Listening to wood cracking and door giving in cleared my mind. Instantly. I knew what I needed to do. I raised a finger over my mouth and whispered, “Whatever you hear or see darling, you’ll stay quiet, okay?”
Jill nodded. I gave her a hug, and forced her into the cupboard under the sink. Then just as the front door caved in I smeared my face with Kelly’s blood. For a little while the thug rummaged on the ground floor before he started descending the stairs to the basement.
I laid down next to Kelly. When his boot landed on the floor, I held my breath and steeled my nerves, keeping my eyes open, but completely still. Slowly the brute of a man filled my vision as he walked into the kitchen, holding a silenced pistol in one hand and a gladius in the other. He stopped to point the pistol at Kelly’s head.
The red light gleamed under the barrel before the flash took my vision. I heard a clonk coming from cupboard, and so did the thug.
“Who’s there?” he grunted.
I blinked my eyes and through the sea of violet and red dots, I saw him pointing the pistol at the cupboard. As his finger tightened around the trigger, I exploded into action. I scrambled up, grabbed a long shard of glass and stabbed it above the thug’s knee.
He screamed and so did I as I bull-charged him against the fridge. I smashed my fists furiously against his belly. He pushed me back and tried to hit me with his blade. It scraped the top of my head. Then he started collapsing. I grabbed his blade in one hand, the pistol barrel in the other and smashed my head into his jaw. It was one blow and the geezer was down, taking the final countdown.
“Is he dead?” a frail voice asked behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Jill’s head poking out of the cupboard.
“Yeah,” I said first and then added quickly, “No,” and then, “Maybe. I don’t know.”
*** Henrik ***
I watched Brian hiding his face under his hands, while his mighty shoulders started shaking in the rhythmic sobs. And for the first time, I didn’t know what to say. How to comfort him and tell him everything was going to be all right; that what he’d experienced - in his house - was just a bad dream.
It wasn’t. Not by any account.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop thinking about how closely the Gladius resembled paramilitary contractors, the Mi-6 has favoured since the nineteen fifties. Of course, back then the Agency had not been in its fully realised form, but had come out as an idea. But Brian’s testimony made it clear that they were a cleaning crew. Like the ones we’d used successfully in the Northern Africa campaign to eliminate masses of Jihadists.