It wasn’t long before the laser cannon blasted three Avoiders and then the pair realigned the weapon on the individual who had inspired the cruel obesity remarks. They terrorised the poor man with the glee of schoolboys torturing insects.
"Yo, gotcha fucker! I blew his left leg off Macmillan, but the cunt is still sending it back! Jeez, he’s bleeding like an evil Friday man! See what you can blow off him next buddy."
The pair had got so carried away with their sick commentary that they hadn’t accounted for Feyer, or seen Wingate take evasive action down a narrow side street. The woman was their primary threat as she had managed to enter the ground floor of the hotel. Shortly after the exchange of fire began. She had slithered between the corpses of the provision victims and then she took refuge alongside the corpse of a frail old man. Then Feyer stealthily entered the hotel via the main entrance. There had been no one on the ground floor, no one to witness the arrival of a slight woman – reddened heavily by the blood of others.
She set to work quickly, anchoring steel traces to tactical points in the ground floor brickwork. When she was satisfied with her labyrinthine maze of fixing wire, she started to secure packs of plastic explosive at five key points. She perspired, she shook and her vaginal region hurt from the pain that she had inflicted there the previous day. Despite these barriers, Feyer remained resolute in her central purpose – to transform the Hotel Kaiserworth into a pile of ashes.
The laser cannon two floors above Feyer camouflaged any noise that she made and she was assisted further by the return – fire from the square. Eventually though both forms of weapon fell silent and the woman finished her task without making an audible sound. She then installed a crude clock – based detonation device. The Avoiders had acquired a limited amount of explosive material from their raids, but they hadn’t come across any of the sonic detonators used by the Project. Feyer set the detonator for six minutes and then proceeded to quietly make her way to the hotel entrance. She knew that she had to head left once she was outside and so she crept across the fringes of the square. Shattered bodies lay all around her.
Feyer could discern low voices from the second floor and she heard the sound of triumphant laughter accompany the dialogue. Looking upwards over her left shoulder, she noted that three MC-Project hit-squad members were engaged in conversation. They were standing near an open second floor window, with their backs to the square. If one of them cast a downward glance to their right, Feyer would be noticed in an instant. As their congratulatory laughter increased in volume, Feyer heard a sound a few metres into the square. She couldn’t immediately detect whether it was a groan from the dying, or a pneumatic release from one of the melted corpses. When she did pinpoint where the sound came from, a shiver of horror ran through her frame.
Staring in her direction was Jack Clancy, one of her fellow Avoiders. His mangled body was a repugnant outcome of the laser cannon. Both his legs had been blasted away and his left arm was also absent. The man’s right arm had been fused into his partially exposed rib cage and laser heat had melted the left hand side of his face.
Despite his appalling injuries, Clancy was still alive! He was in excruciating pain, but he wasn’t dying through loss of blood because the laser had fused his limb endings. The man surveyed Feyer with his remaining eye. His request was pitiful as he spoke in a hoarse whisper.
"Finish me off Feyer. Take my head, so the bastards can’t locate us. Please finish me."
The woman knew that Clancy was right. In the man’s condition he was beyond help. She took a machete from her waist belt and proceeded across the corpses to where Jack Clancy was situated. His request to be decapitated made sense for all the Avoiders. He knew that unless this was done, the Project would read his Main MC-vault and illuminate the modus operandi and whereabouts of the Harz – pack.
As Feyer neared Clancy, she saw the bodies of other Avoiders and she realised that other heads would have to be taken. She said nothing to Clancy, but gave him a quick, kindly acknowledgement with her eyes, before severing his head with a single machete blow. She affixed the head to her belt, using the man’s hair to secure a tight hold. Then Feyer set off further into the square to find another dead Avoider.
As she neared the centre of the square she kept glancing up at the second floor of the Kaiserworth, in case one of the hit squad should look out and notice her. She had threaded her way through the bodies silently until she stumbled over a dead woman and fell heavily on her knees. The sound of the fall alerted her enemy immediately!
"Game on fellas – one’s still alive! Blast the fucker Danny!"
"No chance man. They’re a fucking femme. Look at her running! I’m just gonna wing the bitch and then we’ll shag her brains out. We’ll go two-up man and split her in half!
Feyer had started to sprint as soon as she realised that she had been spotted. As she approached the edge of the square she expected the laser cannon to blast her through the back, but she was felled by just one pistol bullet because her enemy had other plans for her flesh.
She had received a glancing bullet wound to her left cheek. As some blood flicked across her face, she momentarily lost consciousness. The woman was revived less than a minute later by two pairs of male hands pulling her clothing from her. They ripped off her jeans and one of her assailants then started to peel off his military uniform – whilst the other brandished an Uzi in her direction. He taunted Feyer as his partner undressed.
"Prepare yourself bitch. My buddy is a circumcised fucking stallion and just after he’s rammed home, I’m gonna do you back-ways at the same fucking time!"
Feyer heard the sick words as blood rolled down her cheek, but she was focusing on her Kalashnikov. The gun was just a couple of metres behind her would-be rapists.
The undressing male had just discarded his trousers when the Hotel Kaiserworth blew apart. In a matter of seconds the hotel was reduced to a tangled mass of bricks and beams. Feyer only needed a second to realise her chance of escape. She felled the gun-toting individual with an upward kick to his testicles, whilst the explosion distracted him. Then the woman leapt for her gun and despatched her semi-naked attacker with a volley of shots to the base of his neck. She didn’t have time to recover her jeans or worry about the location of other hit-squad personnel. Feyer knew that the explosion would bring a full project cohort to the area in a matter of minutes and so she fled barefoot from the scene of slaughter.
The woman tore through the back streets of Goslar in a state that reflected the savagery that she had encountered. Her facial wound dripped blood quite profusely; her limbs were covered in bruises and she was left wearing only her ripped shirt and ragged underwear. Her feet were severely battered by Goslar’s cobbled streets and she fell on the hard surface three times. When Feyer encountered a shallow stream to run through on the outskirts of town, she was grateful for the pain-relief it generated and she managed to reach the lower slopes of the Harz mountains after quite a short duration.
When Feyer was a couple of kilometres from the valley where the Harz-pack were temporarily based, she heard the distinctive drone of a project helicopter and she instinctively reached for her supply-bag. Her heart sank when she realised that the bag had been left in Goslar. The helicopter had the most advanced heat-seeking detection equipment and Feyer knew that it was capable of pinpointing humans in the deepest foliage. She had seen two of her fellow Avoiders killed by a seek and destroy chopper in the past.
The Harz-pack had acquired a masking spray for heat sensitivity in one of their raids on a ruined military base two years previous, but her canister was one of the essential items that her bag had contained. As the drone of the chopper grew louder Feyer didn’t panic, but remembered alternative masking agents that Ludmilla had shown her. Although the Latvian communicated largely by gesture she had openly laughed at the masking spray when the pack leaders exhibited the canisters and in private she had shown Feyer a natural ingredient that fulfilled the same function. The exchange had been quite surreal without la
nguage. Ludmilla had smeared herself with a brown substance that she had located in the soil beneath one of the types of fir-tree that abounded on the lower slopes. When the woman had smeared her entire body, she had made a shallow trench in the soft woodland floor and then she had pulled undergrowth on top of her. After her demonstration, she pointed to the sky and signed the whirling rota-blades of a helicopter. Then Ludmilla had pointed to her smeared body and had signed a cross to imply that the chopper couldn’t find her. That demonstration from the Latvian had been the first real communication between the pair and although her command of English was still very minimal, she and Feyer had become close pack members through signing as the years unfolded.
Feyer quickly located the correct type of fir-tree and proceeded to scrape brown sediment and lichen from the earth around the trunk. Once she had accumulated her paint, she shed all her remaining clothes in a matter of seconds. She started to daub the substance all over her body and in order to cover her back; she lay down and pressed her spine firmly into the camouflage. She writhed left and then right in order to fully cover herself. The woman didn’t have time to scrape a trench because the helicopter was almost directly over the small thicket that she was hiding in. She pulled a pile of leaves over her frame and rested her head on her sodden clothing. Finally she applied handfuls of moistened sediment to the facial bullet wound and her vagina because she didn’t want blood illuminating her presence. The heat-seeking equipment would be activated fully by human blood.
The chopper passed over Feyer’s position very quickly, but then it circled around the surrounding airspace for twenty minutes. Just when Feyer thought that the chopper was heading away it came back! On this occasion the surveillance involved the craft travelling at a greatly reduced speed at a height of no more than thirty metres. It would hover in a fixed spot at random intervals and the woman was petrified that her leaf-based camouflage would be blown from her due to the down-wind that the helicopter generated. A cold sweat broke out on the woman’s body and this added to her fears of detection. She could do nothing about this physical excretion though and as the chopper drew even nearer she fainted through nervous exhaustion.
When Feyer eventually came to, darkness had fallen. She was completely naked, cold and thankfully – alone.
The chopper must have passed very close to her position, because all the foliage that she had pulled on top of her was scattered a few metres away. The woman left the daubing materials on her body and after pulling on her clothes; she started to search for her gun. Feyer had thought that she had hidden the Kalashnikov close by, but her search proved fruitless in the darkness and she had to give the weapon up as a lost cause. As she neared the region where the Avoiders were based she fell heavily on the rough terrain, but managed to drag her battered body onwards. Her tenacious spirit became her guide.
The Avoiders had found a temporary cave-base in the Harz foothills and on that particular night the chosen pair of sentries were Dean Blackwell and Ludmilla. When the pair shone their torches on the approaching Feyer, recognition took them some time. It was only when she stumbled forward that Blackwell recognised the savage eyes that typified Feyer. He managed to arrest her fall and help her into the cave. As Avoider eyes scanned her entrance, Dean saw that she was overcome with her journey. He asked one question to her before Ludmilla could dress her wounds.
"Hey painted lady where the hell did you get to."
Feyer’s reply summed up the extremities of her day.
"To the land of rapists and zombies Blackwell – get my message?"
THREE
Feyer spent thirty-six hours recovering from the horrors of Goslar. She had slept for the best part of a day and then a medically trained Avoider, Dr Robertson had treated Feyer’s wounds.
Her glancing bullet wound had been cleaned out thoroughly and a dozen stitches held her skin together. Her feet had been severely bruised and both had been bandaged quite tightly. Robertson had treated Feyer’s vagina with the utmost professionalism given the fact that the Avoiders were without any implements to properly address internal bleeding. He hadn’t asked the woman any awkward questions, but his eyes had shown curiosity on occasions. Feyer thought that he probably recognised the self-inflicted nature of the injury, but if that was the case - he said nothing. The woman had been given an old pair of crutches to move about on and as she tested them for mobility, Blackwell entered her section of the cave. His tone was sympathetic – even caring.
"Hi Feyer. Great to see you again. I guess that was some fucking ordeal! Only you and Wingate made it back, you know. Still, if fate only allowed a couple of survivors, I’m bloody glad you were one of them. You’ve been the talk of the pack whilst you slept. Wingate thought that you might have got the heads. He didn’t say he’d been knocked out by a laser cannon blast!"
Feyer digested Blackwell’s words for a few seconds before delivering a choice response.
"After Redmond was wasted I called for a Full-Star retreat - but all hell broke loose when our guys stopped to return fire. The laser cannon crew took out everyone apart from Wingate and myself. Clancy was one of those fried by the laser and I performed a Decap on him, tying his head to my belt. I was trying to get the other heads, when I tripped over a corpse in the square and the bastards spotted me in seconds. I was brought down by a glancing shot because the fuckers wanted to double-rape me, but then the Kaiserworth blew and I took full advantage of the distraction! I lost just about everything during my escape including Clancy’s head! In short, the project have got five Avoider minds to read. I didn’t realise Wingate made it because I lost sight of him after Redmond was wiped out."
The pair continued to discuss Feyer’s escape for some time and the woman knew that the infatuation Blackwell had for her, would be a far cry from the severity that she would receive from Michael Anderson – the leader of the Avoiders. Anderson had called an afternoon assembly for the whole pack in a copse that was close to the caves. Feyer expected verbal castigation from Anderson, but as she made her way to the assembly on her crutches, she became determined not to become Wingate’s patsy.
The Avoiders stood in a circle to undertake the assembly, but Feyer was permitted to lean against a broad oak tree due to her condition. Anderson launched into a heated polemic at the start of the assembly.
"The provisions raid on Goslar was an unmitigated disaster. Let me qualify this statement for everyone. Five Avoiders were killed and yet no heads were recovered. No provisions were acquired with regard to food stocks and weapons. One further supply pack was lost and one Kalashnikov was mislaid. The Avoider who was second-in-command during the raid received injuries that will restrict her mobility for a week or more. What the hell went wrong in Goslar we ask ourselves! Our reconnaissance binoculars only noted a small number of MC-Project personnel commanding a laser cannon and therefore we have to ask ourselves one burning question. Why did our crack troops scatter when faced with such a paltry resistance force?"
Anderson let the Avoiders verbally review the Goslar raid with each other before he continued.
"We have left too much pack evidence in Goslar. Each dead-head will be examined by the MC-Project and the brains of the dead will reveal thousands of images that will effectively lay us open! They will see our chain of command, probe our survival mechanisms and expose the criteria that shape our temporary mountain base. Some of our dead colleagues may well have received brain injuries that have left them unsuitable for neurological examination, but they only need one mind with an intact Main-Vault section to do us untold damage. Whilst we have never been a pack that has never favoured the maximum disciplinary penalty, I feel in this particular instance that both Mr Wingate and Feyer should account for this very dangerous failure."
Taylor Wingate was summoned to the centre of the circle and Feyer wondered what his order of events would be. She hadn’t seen him rendered unconscious by the laser blast and wondered if he hadn’t run out on the rest of the provisions group. She hadn’t any firm evide
nce to back up this suspicion, just Wingate’s gaze avoidance when she looked in his direction. Anderson began his questioning.
"Five out of seven dead is a painful fact to swallow Taylor. What the hell happened down in Goslar?"
Wingate ran the events by the group as they had happened in actuality, until Redmond’s death. Then he switched from the real and began an account of pure falsehood.
"Once I realised that Redmond was beyond help, I started to return fire towards the third floor of the Kaiserworth with the other guys. We were doing well until Feyer called for a Full-Star retreat, and then the men were cut down by the laser cannon. A shot from that weapon eventually came in my vicinity and the blast knocked me out for some minutes. When I regained consciousness, Feyer was absent and all the others were dead. I was going to retrieve the heads of our crew, but then I came under fire and made for the back streets. My Kalashnikov had jammed and this factor forced my retreat. I kept calling for Feyer, but I think in hindsight that she had fled the scene. I could only hope that she was in hiding and would gather the heads if the gun-crew chased after me. Obviously my hopes were dashed when the woman returned with nothing, save half her clothing."
Wingate’s pack of lies inflamed the anger building up inside Feyer. The questioning nature of his final falsehood was her breaking point and she launched into a scathing attack on the man who she now saw on a par with the scum she had left behind in Goslar.
"Fuck you Wingate, you callous lying bastard! I didn’t even see you fire your gun!
"I called for the Full-Star when Redmond was killed not after the others returned fire. You just spouted a stream of bullshit there! Why don’t you come clean and describe things as they actually happened?"
The woman’s initial outburst hadn’t yet proved cathartic and as his words kept replaying in her mind, she became even more incensed.
"You think I fled the scene do you fucker? No one gets away with that type of slur on me! You aren’t going to get away with inferring things about me to the pack you bastard! Yes I returned with half my clothing as you damned well emphasised, but everyone saw your suggestive look when you said that line. Get off over a woman’s clothing do you, you sleazy bastard? Well I’m going to ram this ragged shirt down your fucking throat! I’m-"
The Scream of Feyer: hitching a ride with a suicide bomber Page 3