by Devon Ford
“No problem,” he said, draining his glass before heading for the door.
Stepping out onto the high stone walkways as he lit a cigarette from the unfamiliar packet having resupplied with more French tobacco, he enjoyed a solitary stroll along the ancient battlements to gather his thoughts. Glancing down at the approach road, he recognised two shapes from the procession heading uphill.
“Where the hell is she going with my dog?” he asked himself aloud.
THE SAFETY BUBBLE
As Dan wandered back along the exposed walkways in search of anything constructive to do, he almost collided with Polly who was scurrying along with armfuls of rolled paper.
She had reluctantly told them that her previous life was spent as an architect who specialised in open-air projects; parks and the like. Her experience and understanding of architectural history made her choice of places to seek safety in very limited. Limited to one, in fact, which is exactly where she ended up within days of the world taking a hard right into terrifying.
She had been visiting an old college friend in southern Spain when it hit, and she immediately packed her few belongings and drove the rental car over the mountains to seek safety. In her panic she drove the small car off the road when distracted, forcing her to walk the last thirty miles to the town with dried blood on her face from the cut on her scalp.
What she found surprised her, shocked her in fact. She found only a few people milling around in confused terror without the first idea how to start rebuilding their lives. Polly knew that they had weeks, maybe months, of relatively easy living without proper organisation and that was where her natural ability and experience shone through. Having spent most of her adult life in and around the construction industry, she had found herself alone in her gender on most days. She had adapted well to this, and quickly showed a flair for managing the rough men under the control of her project management. Often they tried to intimidate her just for fun with crude jokes and unsavoury conversations, only to realise, to their embarrassment, that she could out-crude their own humour, and could do it so quickly and publicly that her reputation grew as a woman not to mess with.
People who knew her joked that she carried such a large handbag around because she needed the extra space for all the balls she had removed from the men working for her.
But that was a lifetime ago.
What had happened to the world had rocked Polly. Rocked her so much that, unknowingly, she had tipped over. She had always been an anxious person before, though to look at her you would only see a fiercely organised woman who has no time for procrastination; look a little closer and you would see her eyes glaze over sometimes as she became momentarily unaware of the world outside of her head. She was often seen talking to herself, arguing even, but she pushed away any further speculation by smiling back and informing them that she had to speak to herself in order to get a sensible answer.
Dan saw it. Dan suspected that it indicated something far deeper than peculiar habits, not that he judged her on her flaws; god knew he was probably one dropped plate away from a screaming breakdown most days.
Dan’s concerns were natural. Instinctive. Ingrained. So deeply rooted in his psyche that if you snapped him open the words suspicious bastard would be found running through his whole body like a stick of hard candy.
“Sorry,” he muttered to the tutting woman who was on her hands and knees retrieving the scattered architectural sketches. He bent to help only to have the one roll of paper he had retrieved snatched from his grasp rudely.
Seeing the look of shock on Dan’s face, Polly reset her manner by closing her eyes and opening them to start again. When she opened them, Dan was startled to see such a different look in her eyes that she could have been a different person.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said in her peculiar accent; a mixture of Canadian and French that was so unique Dan had still not grown used to the sound of her voice. “I wanted to…”
She stopped, her eyes focusing on the lit cigarette in his hand. Reading this distraction completely wrong, Dan reached for his pack to offer her one.
“Oh! No thank you!” she said flustered. “I never smoked… cigarettes anyway,” she finished in a quieter tone. A wry smile pickled the left side of Dan’s mouth, making the ugly scar running down the left side of his face crease and transform him from brooding to amused.
“Well I haven't got any of that, sorry,” he said, still smiling.
“No, I wasn't suggesting… sorry!” Polly stammered, embarrassed that she had told a secret to a stranger.
“OK,” Dan went on, changing the subject. “Let’s just stop apologising to each other, shall we?”
“Yes. Sorry," Polly answered, straightening herself. “How can I help you?” she asked.
Dan’s confusion was momentary before he recovered and told her that he didn't almost knock her over on purpose to get her attention.
Embarrassed again, Polly remembered that it was actually she who was on the lookout for him and not the other way around. Deciding on the aloof recovery method, she capitalised on the chance encounter.
“Well seeing as I bumped into you, no pun intended, I wonder would you walk with me a minute?”
Dan fell into step alongside her as she went at a slower pace along the windy, exposed stone walkways. Polly fell back on facts to fill the time and ignore the biting cold cutting through her clothes. “These walls have never been breached,” she said suddenly, nodding over the ramparts to the approach road. “The town has been besieged so many times throughout history, even before the fortifications and the defences - impregnable at the time. The Spanish kept trying to take the town claiming it was theirs. It’s been traded between countries, even betrayed once, but never beaten.”
Dan nodded in silence, suspecting that the subject he was waiting for was about to be raised.
“I’ve been thinking for a while now, even before you arrived, that we haven't seen the kind of behaviour you would expect; no violence or looting. Maybe we are too isolated?” she said. Dan stayed silent, knowing that the safe cocoon that enveloped the town was burst when he and his gang arrived.
“How would you attack this town?” she asked him almost casually, as though the answer mattered only as conversation.
Expecting this to come sooner or later, Dan took a breath and attempted to annoy the woman slightly in order that his real suggestion be listened to. “Four-man team would come in from the bay using scuba gear under cover of darkness. Just before dawn I’d have a high-altitude-high-opening parachute team of two snipers take out the watch tower on the cliffs and both teams would start picking off the sentries on the fort silently. Garrison the gatehouse, use mortar rounds or drone strikes to suppress the fort then take it via the stairs. Obviously having a satellite overhead giving us infrared coverage and a command and control room to advise us via radio too,” he said, deliberately making his plan sound like an action movie. Turning to face Polly with a smile to meet her frown, he waited to be berated. Instead she closed her eyes momentarily, opening them again and asking a more specific question to negate the flippancy of his last answer.
“If you were to try and take this town, from an outsider’s point of view, given today’s limitations, then how would you go about it?”
Dan thought for a moment. “At the moment,” he started, “quite easily.” He glanced at her to see that she wasn't the slightest bit shocked. “I’d need twenty fighters, come in by boat and completely overwhelm any defences, of which there are none, then take the gatehouse and then force a surrender from the fort by starving them out or climbing the stairs and killing them. The last option would probably be the only way we would lose any attackers. I’d have probably sent in at least two people a few weeks before with instructions to secure your weapons as soon as the attack started.”
Polly sighed. Even before Dan’s ragged crew had collapsed on their doorstep, she had suffered sleepless nights about the risk of attack. So far they had seen none of th
e roving bands of outlaws so associated with an apocalyptic wasteland, but hearing Dan and his group talk about the ambushes and the roadblocks, her concerns had evolved into fears, and those fears were now causing her a significant amount of lost sleep.
“Are you the advance party?” she asked seriously.
“No,” Dan replied, mirroring her tone.
“So how do we stop it?” she asked simply.
Pausing to lean his back on the stone ledge of the exposed walkway, Dan lit another cigarette from the end of the last one before tossing the stub into the wind.
“I haven't given it much thought,” he lied, “but I know someone who has.”
DEAD DROP
Steve wiped a damp cloth over each plastic tray, silently counting as he went. At twenty-three he found the small plastic disc he was looking for, quietly swept it into the bin with any other detritus he found left by the diners, and carried on with his task. After the kitchen was cleaned he limped away, leaning heavily on his walking stick as he carried a bag of vegetable peelings, returning the kindly greetings he received from two men walking past.
They pitied him, he could tell. They all pitied him. Even, he suspected those in the resistance who knew who he was. But even those didn't know his full plan or his capabilities. Shrugging away the annoyance of pride for being underestimated, he reminded himself that this was exactly the camouflage he had to maintain. Keeping the number twenty-three securely in his head, he limped on until he found the livestock pens.
To the casual onlooker, this broken man liked to end his working day by taking choice leftovers to the pig pens and smiling as the eager animals snuffled at the treats he brought every evening. Not that any guards were posted to overtly watch him any more, but that wasn't a risk he could afford to take.
On this night, Steve limped alongside the fence, smiling as the most recent piglets squealed with anticipation that it may be their turn to receive an extra ration. Stopping seemingly at random at the twenty-third enclosure, he rested his stick and leaned over the low fence to empty out the bag onto the ground. As the squeaks and snuffles from the mini feeding frenzy below raised the ambient noise level substantially, Steve carefully retrieved the note hidden in the feed bucket attached to the inside of the gate. Keeping it in his hand as he watched the banquet noisily being consumed, he eventually straightened with a satisfied smile. He slipped his free hand containing the note into the pocket of his oversized coat that he wore for warmth against the chill of the winter evening.
Irrelevant to whether he knew or not, Steve was watched from the shadows. Not by the bidding of Richards, for the man in charge had long forgotten about the pilot’s treachery and had dismissed him as a threat, but purely by his own volition, Benjamin watched him in secret whenever the chance arose.
Sticking to the shadows he had kept Steve in his sight for over an hour now, and had seen nothing to support his suspicions and feelings of unease about the man. Annoyed, he slipped his black balaclava back over his head and returned to Richards.
~
Safely tucked up in his bed, Steve used his most precious of possessions; a small book light that clipped onto the pages and bathed a small area in bright light to allow him to read in the dark without disturbing others.
Carefully retrieving the note, he laid it smoothly on the page he was reading and, as such, gathered the latest piece of information vital to the efforts of the resistance. His resistance. Not that anyone knew the full extent of his involvement bar a few trusted Lieutenants, and even they didn't have the full picture.
Compartmentalise, insulate, protect.
Gather, watch, listen, wait.
Soon the wait would be over, and the day would come when the cogs in this machine rose to overthrow the tyranny they lived under. Quite what the new world would look like Steve had no idea, but a life where the guards looked outwards instead of inwards had to be better.
Only a few more pieces would need to be placed before he could call checkmate, and he doubted Richards would take the defeat calmly and gently place his king on its side.
They would probably have to wipe the whole board and back him into a corner; and a cornered animal is the most dangerous kind, he told himself.
Shutting off the precious light, he settled down to sleep and plan his next move.
HARD YARDS
Totally bedraggled, Lexi and her companions soldiered onwards. They had not encountered any other people since the primitive ambush attack on them weeks before, but she hadn't taken her eyes from Simon since. The way he turned and seemed to enjoy killing, had disturbed her. So much so that she didn't even know if she had seen it and her mind was playing tricks on her.
They had been forced to rest for a week through a mix of bad weather, low fuel supplies and no food. Finding an abandoned supermarket, they had hidden their vehicle from sight and set up a temporary camp to recoup. Every day they siphoned as much diesel as they could using the handpump and jerrycans until the main tank and the extended range reservoir on the roof were full. Refuelling their bodies was more difficult as, rough as the fuel was becoming, the food supplies had degraded more. Living off canned food, they recovered over that week. When the time came that their exhaustion had faded, and they began to wake feeling relatively refreshed, the reluctant call to continue south was made.
Now deep in mid-France with no sight or smell of the coast, they pushed onwards down the map making slow but steady progress each day, and each day they headed further towards peril.
GREEN CREDENTIALS
It took the lumbering cart three hours to reach the nearest outlying farm from Sanctuary. Leah and Mitch weren't idle on the journey there, both scouting high ground and feeling rejuvenated at getting back to what they did best. Ash bounded along at her side with graceful ease, his quiet paws betraying the fact that he was a killer when called upon.
Mitch watched the girl pause before the skyline so as not to silhouette herself to any enemy. She assessed the ground, eyes darting back and forth between low ground and rocky outcrops. Mitch glanced between the open land ahead and back to the girl beside him. A girl technically, yes, but a warrior at heart and one that people underestimated as their last mistake. He thought to ask her what she was seeing, as he would when training a recruit, but he knew what she would say.
It would be the same as he would say.
“Gulley, six hundred metres ahead, ERV,” she would say, meaning that if they suffered an attack and were separated they should head for that scar in the ground and defend it. It would be hard to dig any armed enemy out of there without explosives or air support. Glancing at her again he saw her twist her mouth to the side in concerned thought. He knew what that was about too, and she confirmed his guess by voicing her opinion.
“Mile ahead. Our road hits a pinch-point: steep ground to the left and building to the right. I’d ambush there.”
Mitch had seen it already and agreed entirely. If anyone around there had a mind to bring the fight to them, then this place would be a perfect cut off.
It would be the tactics he would use, guerrilla warfare; take out a supply convoy and kill the guards. More trained soldiers would be sent to investigate, and he would lure them into an ambush too. By the time they realised they were under attack they would already have lost a huge percentage of their fighting strength. His mind drifted back to his tours of Northern Ireland a lifetime ago; he had never known stress like it when he had no idea if the person walking down the street minding their own business would turn and shoot him in the back. An enemy stood in formation in front of you was a quantifiable factor; an unseen enemy of mythical number and strength saps the moral from people like an emotional hypothermia.
Bringing himself back to the moment, he agreed by suggesting they scout ahead of the supply wagon.
~
Jogging forwards at comfortable pace, they abandoned the road to approach from the rear of the building side. That way, if it was set up as an ambush point, they wouldn't be wal
king into set fields of fire. Assuming the fictional ambushers knew how to organise the most basic of infantry manoeuvres that was.
Carbines up, torches on full, the three of them systematically cleared the first floor of the big building. It was almost immediately apparent that nobody had been inside for months, if not longer, but they carried on with the drill because a good opportunity for a live-fire training exercise should never be wasted. It kept them sharp, and after weeks of relative comfort they had grown a little sluggish in comparison with their usual standards.
At the loud announcement of “Clear”, Ash visibly relaxed and returned to pet mode, sitting to scratch at his ear with a hind leg.
Returning to the road, Mitch waved the cart towards them. A mixture of sign language and shouting had made it clear enough that they were to wait until told it was safe. The kindly Frenchman leading his horse humoured the peculiar English, for little other reason than they were an entertaining distraction to an otherwise uneventful life. Besides, such excitement involving guns and soldiers held no interest for him, he just enjoyed seeing others exert unnecessary energy. Clicking his tongue and gently coaxing the placid mare onwards, they resumed their journey for the last mile before the farm.
~
Dropping down from the higher ground of the road, the sprawling expanse of green opened up before Leah’s eyes. Sloping higher ground on all sides, the farm sat in a huge natural bowl; an oasis in an otherwise rocky and broken land.
People milled about purposefully but without any urgency. The closer she looked, the more she understood. Dark furrows ran neatly through the greenery where new crops would be planted at the proper time, just like in their own greenhouses back at the prison. Heavy polythene was stretched over wooden frames set low to the ground in protection from the fast winds that blew through the low ground.