School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles) Read online

  The car park in front of the building was empty except for one shiny BMW which, bizarrely, appeared untouched, still waiting patiently for its proud owner to return. Beyond the car park, to our left, was the driveway, lined with single storey outbuildings which appeared to continue behind the main building; there was more of the complex out of sight, presumably a parade ground and maybe an assault course.

  There were two sandbag emplacements at the entrance to the main building, but there were no men or guns there. They were the remains of a previous attempt at defence, long since abandoned.

  If I were defending this place where would I station myself?

  I scanned the roof and windows of the main building but could see no signs of life or other, more recent fortifications — no sandbags, barriers or not-so-casually placed obstacles behind which to hide. The firing range appeared empty, as did the outbuildings lining the drive. Perhaps any defenders would be stationed behind the main building, but that would leave them unable to cover the most obvious routes of approach, so that seemed unlikely. So either I was missing something, or the place was deserted.

  I was just about to hand the binoculars back to Mac when I caught a glimpse of a brick corner poking out behind the portico entrance to the firing range trench. I shuffled left a bit to get a better view and found myself gazing at a solid, brick and concrete Second World War pillbox. Anyone in there would have a 360° view of pretty much the entire complex, a mostly unimpeded line of fire, and bugger all chance of being killed by some yokel looter with a shotgun.

  I pointed to the pillbox and handed the glasses back to Mac, who nodded; he’d seen it already or, more likely, been tipped off by Bates earlier.

  “Bit obvious, though, innit,” he whispered, handing the glasses to Green, who took his turn scanning the area. “I’d have someone somewhere else too, covering the approach to the pillbox. Now, where would that fucker be, d’you think?”

  “Sir,” whispered Green. “The car in the fence. Rear right wheel.” He passed back the binoculars and Mac took a look. He grinned.

  “Not too shabby, Green. Not too shabby at all.” He passed the binoculars to me. Sure enough, just visible poking out from behind the rear wheel was a boot. As I watched it moved ever so slightly. There was a man under the car. Between him and the pillbox all the open spaces in the complex were exposed to crossfire.

  We didn’t have walkie-talkies, so the next thing was for Green and Wolf-Barry to skirt the complex, staying in the woods. They’d meet halfway between our positions and compare notes. Green scurried away while Mac and I shuffled back from the edge of the wood into deep cover and sat up against a couple of trees. Mac took out a battered packet of Marlboros and offered one to me.

  “They might see the smoke, sir,” I pointed out. Mac glared at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to pitch a fit, but eventually he nodded and put away the packet.

  “Fair point,” he said. He regarded me coolly. “Yesterday, why didn’t you just shoot that bitch?”

  Because I’m not a murdering psycho whose first instinct is to open fire.

  Breathe. Calm. Play the part. Earn his trust.

  “Wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get her mate before he shot Hammond and the others. Didn’t want to shoot first, I suppose. But I was just about to pop her before you did. So thanks. Saved me the trouble.” I grinned, trying to make out I thought it was funny. “Good shooting, by the way.”

  “Had lots of practice, ain’t I.”

  Oh very good, hard case. Make out that you shoot people all the time. I know where you got your practice — shooting pheasants on Daddy’s estate in your plus fours and Barbour jacket.

  Then again, not too fast. I didn’t know what happened to him during The Cull. I didn’t know what he’d been doing for the last year. He could have been on a killing spree. After all, who’d know? He may have been a pampered Grant Mitchell clone, but I knew it would be dangerous to underestimate him.

  “Killed many people since The Cull started, have you?” Casual, unconcerned, sound interested not appalled.

  “A few.” Cagey, giving nothing away. “No-one who didn’t have it coming, anyway. First time’s the worst. Easier after that.”

  “So who was first, then?”

  Long silence.

  Green emerged, limping, from the trees and the moment passed.

  “What the bloody ’ell happened to you?” said Mac.

  “Slipped, sir. Think I’ve twisted me ankle.”

  “Fuck me, Green, I’d have been better off sending my little sister. Right, sit down. What do they reckon?”

  “The parade ground round back is deserted and they can’t see anyone, so it’s probably just the man under the car and the one in the pillbox. The Colonel and his men are going to take up firing positions in the main building, on the top floor left. Our job is to take out the guy under the car without drawing the attention of the pillbox. He said that’s your job, sir.”

  But Mac was already moving. He’d pulled a vicious looking knife from his backpack, placed it between his teeth, and was crawling away on his belly.

  “Cover me, Keegan,” he whispered as he slithered out of the woods and began inching his way towards the car, which sat about fifty metres away and down a slope. The long grass provided good cover.

  I took up position at the tree-line, nestled the rifle into my shoulder and scanned the area for nasty surprises. The place was as quiet as the grave.

  And then, just as he made his final approach to the car, Mac burst out of the grass and ran as fast as he could back towards the trees, blowing our cover completely. I thought he’d lost the plot until the car exploded in a sudden blossom of flame and smoke, flinging Mac forward onto his face. He staggered upright again and continued running. No-one opened fire, and he made it back into cover safely. He sat next to me panting hard.

  “Fucking tripwire,” he gasped. “There wasn’t a man under the car at all. Just a fucking leg, attached to a piece of wire that some bastard was tugging. Lured me in and I didn’t see the booby trap ’til I crawled right into it. Fucking amateur!” He threw his knife in fury. It thudded into a tree, thrumming with force.

  “Where’s the puppeteer then?” I asked.

  “The wire leads off to the left, so anywhere between the car and the main gate I reckon. But we’re blown now. There could be any number of hostiles in there and they know we’re here. We need a rethink.”

  At that moment there was a crackle of static and an ancient tannoy system hissed into life. A man’s voice echoed tinnily around the buildings.

  “This facility is the property of His Majesty’s Armed Forces and is defended. In accordance with emergency measures, and standing orders relating to Operation Motherland, any attempt to infiltrate this facility is an act of treason. Any further incursions will be met with deadly force. This is your first and last warning.”

  The speakers fell silent, as did we.

  “What the sweet holy Christ,” said Mac eventually, “is Operation Motherland?”

  He bit his lip and surveyed the complex nervously.

  “Right. That place is full of ordnance and I’m bloody well having it, standing orders or not.”

  “We could wait ’til after dark, sir,” offered Green.

  “And if they’ve got night goggles we hand them a major advantage, numbnuts. Nah, we need to do this quickly.” He pulled out the binoculars again.

  “Two wires we need to trace. The tannoy ones and the puppet one. Let’s see where they go.”

  As he tried to trace the tannoy wires back to the mic I caught a glimpse of a flash from the top floor of the main windows. I looked closer and there it was again. I tapped Mac on the shoulder and pointed it out. He took a look.

  “It’s Bates,” he said. Not ‘the Colonel’ I noticed. Interesting. “Signalling us with a mirror. Bloody idiot, keep your head down.” But it was too late. A burst of machine gun fire raked across the face of the building, splintering the window frame
and spraying the remaining shards of glass inward at Bates and the others. The pillbox was manned.

  “I think someone’s hit, can’t see who,” said Mac. “Fuck, this is a shambles. Right, enough of this.” He handed the binoculars to me. “Green.”

  “Sir?”

  “The tannoy wires go to the pillbox and the puppet wire leads down to the main gate. I think there’s a man in cover there, probably a sniper in camouflage. You could probably walk right up to him and not see him, if he knows his job. But I want you to keep in the trees and move down to cover the area. He won’t risk a shot until he sees a target the pillbox can’t deal with, so I need you, Keegan, to draw his fire.”

  “Sir?” I asked, trying not to sound incredulous.

  Mac grinned. “I know you’re the better shot, Keegan, but Green’s not going to be doing the 100-metre sprint anytime soon, are you, Green?”

  “No, sir,” he said, abjectly.

  “And you can shoot that damn thing, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then. You’re the bait, Keegan, and Green shoots the shooter. Sorted.”

  “And what will you be doing while I’m being shot at, sir?” I asked.

  He opened his backpack, pulled out a stick of dynamite and waved it in my face. “Passed a quarry on my way back to Castle, didn’t I? I’m going to blow that fucking pillbox wide open.”

  “And the Colonel?”

  “Fuck him, if he’s not been shot already he deserves to be. We’re dealing with this. With me?”

  “Yes, sir!” yelped gung-ho Green.

  Oh, yeah, this was going to end well.

  WE SYNCHRONISED OUR watches and then, always staying in the trees, Green and I went left, while Mac went right, towards the pillbox. Green took up position covering the long grass near the main gate and I kept going. I travelled some way past the complex, out of any possible sniper’s line of sight, and scurried across the road leading to the gate. I made it safely into the trees on the other side and started to move back towards the fence. It didn’t take long to find a breach and I snaked under the chain link and crawled through the grass until I was behind the first outbuilding on the opposite side of the road to Green.

  Even higher on my list of Things-I-Never-Want-To-Do than ‘shoot somebody’ was ‘be shot by somebody else’. So I wasn’t entirely comfortable with Mac’s plan that I should run up and down in plain view of a sniper, presenting a nice juicy target for a thumb-sized piece of supersonic, superheated lead that could push my brains out through my face.

  I lay there for a minute, breathing deeply, calming myself, considering. Should I leg it? Just cut my losses and run? Go it alone? Did I need to remain at the school, taking orders from nutters and idiots, getting involved in unnecessary gunfights and risking my life… for what? For the school? For Matron?

  But where else could I go? And if I left, how would Dad find me?

  No, there was no choice. I’d made my decision to return to the school and I was stuck with it. I just had to stay alive long enough for Dad to come get me, and then I could split and leave Mac and Bates to their stupid army games. Until then I had to play along. After all, there was supposed to be safety in numbers, wasn’t there?

  I checked my watch. Time to go. I walked forward slowly. The gap between this outbuilding and the next was about ten metres. I had to cover that distance slowly enough to allow the sniper to notice me, sight, and fire, but sufficiently quickly that he didn’t quite have time to take aim accurately enough to kill me. I’m sure an experienced SAS man would be able to do some calculation based on distance, running speed and firing time and tell you, to the second, how long he should be visible for. I was just going to have to guess using my vast experience of watching DVDs of 24.

  Fuck it.

  I ran.

  Three steps, that’s all it took. Three bloody steps and I was flat on my face unsure what had hit me, and where. My mouth was full of grass before I even heard the shot.

  And then, as I tried to work out if I was bleeding to death, a burst of machine gun fire and a huge explosion from up ahead. Shards of pillbox brick impacted all around me.

  And then, before the dust had settled, a series of sharp reports off to my right, as the sniper and Green exchanged fire.

  And then a scream.

  And then silence.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE PROBLEM WITH being in a battle is that if you get killed you never know whether your side wins or not. Sacrificing your life in a blaze of heroic glory is fine, but only if you’re willing to accept that it might not have achieved anything.

  Movie battles have a good solid story structure — beginning, middle, end — and the audience gets to see how it all works out, how the actions of certain characters shape events, how their deaths either do or don’t have any meaning. But as I lay there in the cool grass, shot, bleeding, going into shock, I realised that the characters in those films, the ones who save the day by charging the machine guns or providing diversions so their mates can escape, the ones who say ‘leave me, I’ll only slow you down’ or ‘I can delay them, give you time to escape,’ die alone, clinging to the hope that maybe they’ve made a difference but not really sure if they’ve just thrown their lives away for no good reason.

  I had no idea if Green had shot the sniper or vice-versa. Even if Green had shot him, our ‘side’ might still not get the weapons. And if we did get the weapons we still might not survive the coming year. In which case what possible point did my slow, silent, blood-soaked death on a patch of scrubland between two prefabs actually have? How had I helped? Would I be remembered as a hero who sacrificed himself for the greater good, or would I just end up a leg attached to a piece of string underneath a car somewhere, luring other poor bastards into an ambush?

  Luckily, the thing about shock is that pretty quickly you stop giving a toss about much of anything, so I soon stopped philosophising. I then briefly, dispassionately, considered giving up or going on, and then began crawling towards cover.

  The sniper must have been aiming for my upper body. I wasn’t sure whether I was lucky that he’d only hit my left thigh, or unlucky that he’d hit me at all. A thigh wound might sound painful but non-threatening — all that muscle to absorb the slug, no major organs to hit — but you’ve got arteries running through your legs, and if the bullet had hit one of those I wasn’t going to be around for much longer, no matter how much cover I found.

  I made it into the shade of the next outbuilding without being shot again. I propped myself up against the wall and examined my leg. It was bleeding freely but not spurting. Lucky. I pulled my belt out of my trousers, looped it around my leg just above the wound, and pulled it tight. Up to now there’d been hardly any pain, but as the belt dug in I had to work hard to stifle a scream.

  I fastened the belt and tried to stand, using my rifle as a crutch. As soon as I was upright I had a massive headrush and tumbled back onto the ground.

  I may have blacked out, I don’t know.

  Deep breaths. Focus. Get back up.

  I hobbled away towards the main building. Dear God my leg hurt. Jonah had taken a chunk out of it and it hadn’t hurt half as badly as this. Matron would be pleased, assuming I ever made it back to the sanatorium.

  As I approached the gap between the next prefab and the one beyond I heard the unmistakeable snap of a twig. There was someone coming. If I tried to shoulder my rifle I’d topple over, so I propped myself up against the wall and raised the weapon, waiting for my stalker to break cover.

  My vision was starting to blur.

  Green hobbled from between the two buildings. He had one hand above his head but the other arm hung limp at his side, dripping fresh blood. Score two to the sniper. But the sniper obviously thought I was dead, because he strolled out in front of me, bold as brass, keeping his rifle aimed square at Green’s back.

  Two things occurred to me. Firstly, they must have marched right across the road in full view of the pillbox, so the s
niper didn’t think there was any threat to him from that direction, which might mean Mac was dead; secondly, I was once again being offered an opportunity to become a killer.

  “Hold it.”

  The sniper froze, staring straight ahead. Green, on the other hand, jumped out of his skin.

  “I could shoot you right here and now,” I said. “You’d be dead before you hit the ground.” I was lightheaded, all right, please forgive the clichés. “I really don’t want to do that, but please believe me when I say that I won’t hesitate for an instant if you do anything at all to make me nervous. I’ve lost a lot of blood and I’m not sure I’m thinking clearly, so you’d better not make me jump.”

  The sniper was well camouflaged. His face and hands were daubed in black and green paint, and he had webbing hanging off him like a cloak, with pieces of greenery, twigs, leaves and ferns sticking out of it. He was carrying an L96 sniper rifle and had various other pieces of kit in pouches and holsters. He was about 40 and middle aged spread had taken hold. Hardly Hereford material, probably some weekend warrior TA guy who worked in accounts during the week.

  “All right,” he said, still not moving an inch. “Now calm down, son. I had no idea I was shooting at kids. I’d never have opened fire if I’d realised. There’s no need for any more shooting, okay?”

  “Not if you drop your gun, there isn’t.”

  “Can’t do that, laddie. Orders is orders, y’know.”

  I raised the rifle, pointed it straight at his head, and shuffled forward until the muzzle gently kissed his temple.

  “Last chance. Drop it, or I drop you.”

  The cocky bastard actually thought about it for a minute, but then he lowered his gun and let it fall to the ground.

  Thank you. Still not a killer.

  Green staggered sideways and slumped against the wall of the opposite prefab. He was hyperventilating and glassy-eyed.

  “On the floor, face down, hands behind your head.”

  “Now listen, can we not…”