Capes

by Drabble, Matt

  If anyone had ever asked the boy what the robes were, he would have simply stared straight ahead with a distant look of confusion before closing the door again. If anyone had pressed him on the subject, then they may well have met a premature end by a mute teenager with a faraway look in his eye. Of course, the lack of outsiders in the town meant that particular situation was very unlikely to occur.

  The motel on the outskirts of town where Lilly lived and worked brought in visitors every season and newcomers were always afforded a warm welcome, but they were always watched carefully, very carefully, by the town.

  Albin was taking in the night air, enjoying his one cigar of the day, a habit that Ebba pretended she did not know about but a single vice she allowed him.

  Born outside of Blasvik, he was one of the few residents who was an outsider despite the fact that he had lived here for more than ten years now.

  He had met Ebba when he’d passed through the town looking for work and fallen madly in love with her and her young daughter within hours. He had always been a man who knew his own mind, and that day, his mind had been set to marry Ebba.

  Lilly’s father had left town years ago, and Ebba had been glad to see him go, a drunken fisherman without an ounce of softness in him and zero interest in his own daughter.

  Albin had become a husband and father, a job, it turned out, that he was born for.

  He supposed in small isolated communities that you never became a true local without the blood of the town in your veins, but the place had welcomed him with typical Swedish hospitality and it had been a good life.

  The cabin behind him had a trail of smoke rising up from the chimney, and he knew that Ebba would be fretting about his health as he stood in the cold.

  Of course, he wasn’t just out here enjoying the crystal clear skies. He was also waiting for Lilly to return.

  He loved his wife completely and placed her happiness above everything else. He would have rather cut off his own arm than see her caused the slightest pain, which was why he was out here waiting for their daughter to come home before Ebba realised that she was gone.

  He understood Lilly’s passion. According to her mother, she was her father’s daughter, a wanderlust heart with a selfish streak when it came to her own desires. But Albin hoped that his own kindness had broken through to the girl over the past decade. While he wasn’t her biological father, he hoped that his love had won her over.

  There was one trail into town, and he was beginning to think that he was going to have to go in after Lilly when he spotted movement coming towards him through the darkness.

  He stubbed out the cigar on his boot heel and breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to have to hike into town after all, but then one figure became two, then three, then four, then a whole stream of silhouettes emerged out of the tree line and kept on marching in silence past the lodge.

  More and more people walked out until the line disappeared out of sight to the right while the back of the line kept on coming. It seemed like the whole town was out tonight.

  Confused, Albin started to walk towards the caravan, but as he drew closer, his confusion level rose as he could see now that the entire line were all dressed the same, in long, hooded white robes.

  “Per?” he asked the town’s blacksmith as he reached the line, but the large man kept on walking, his eyes set firmly ahead and his face blank.

  “Maja?” he asked the young woman who cleaned for him at the resort during the season, but again, she blanked him.

  He walked down the line, trying to get a response from those residents he knew, but no one even seemed to see him.

  The whole sight was baffling, and he was becoming completely unnerved by the strange behaviour of what had been perfectly normal people. His mind was already racing towards a sinister answer due to the peculiar outfits, but his thoughts were halted when he spotted Lilly.

  He rushed to her and called her name, but again she ignored him like the others.

  Standing in front of her, she simply moved around him without breaking stride. He tried to block her path again, but now she pushed him out of the way, her slender frame seemingly stronger than he’d thought before.

  He reached out and grabbed hold of her arm and she tried to pull it away, but now he was badly scared, and his fear and love intermingled giving him enough strength to pull her out of the line.

  The effect was instant as the rest of the caravan halted in unison as one of their number was now no longer in place.

  “Lilly? Lilly, answer me!” he shouted as he shook the young woman violently.

  Her head rocked back and forth, but her eyes remained fixed on the horizon and she never uttered a sound.

  “LILLY, PLEASE!” he implored as he pulled her away.

  He recognised Torbin standing in place behind his stepdaughter and immediately blamed the young man.

  “You!” he snarled. “What kind of nonsense is this?” but Torbin only stared straight ahead.

  Albin let go of Lilly’s arm and stormed towards the boyfriend.

  “What have you done to her?” he demanded as he reached the slender boy. “ANSWER ME!” he said as he struck out a flat palm to the boy’s face.

  The slap was hard enough to leave a red mark, and Albin’s fear made the impact harder than he’d initially intended, but Torbin merely stayed motionless.

  The knife was in his back before he could even process what had happened and it took a few moments before he felt the pain.

  “Lilly,” he cried out as he started to turn, but the blade hadn’t come from his stepdaughter.

  Ebba stood next to her daughter wearing the same matching robe, one that Albin could not ever remember seeing before. His wife looked down at him as he sank to his knees in the snow before she walked around him and took her place in the line as the marching boots started up again and the caravan walked off into the darkness again.

  ----------

  The second wave started to march down the hill without a sound with only Crimson’s ears hearing them start to move and thus warning the others.

  “SLOW AND STEADY FIRE, MAKE ‘EM COUNT!” he yelled.

  The heavy drifts outside were to their advantage inside as the hooded robed figures made slow progress down the slope, dragging their way through the knee-high snow.

  The air inside was soon thick with acrid smoke as weapons spat deadly fire.

  Link and Crimson did the most damage, their aim truer and their weapon mastery far fresher from the battlefield in their minds.

  Jesus held a position propped up on the makeshift wall that contained the bodies of the first wave. His neck was starting to leak blood again from the wound as the automatic rifle on his shoulder held the kicking butt that was jarring the bandage.

  While his experience was entirely theoretical, he had spent enough time at the range to know how to hit a target, and even though the paper ones didn’t move at all, the approaching wave was barely moving above a crawl, enabling him to drop several.

  Jamie-Lyn had to wait and hold fire as Crimson had told her that the pistol’s range was limited and trying to hit anything more than ten feet or so in front her was a waste of ammo. So she had to wait and pray that she wouldn’t be necessary.

  Crimson and Link had ammo set up beside them, and every now and then, the gunfire would cease while they reloaded before the guns started to bark again.

  She watched on as the two men fired again and again and again, their aims not faltering, matching each other target for target. For a brief moment, she started to wonder why she’d been afraid or why Crimson had been so pessimistic.

  The trouble was, of course, that for every target they dropped, another emerged from the tree line, a seemingly never-ending cascade of hooded figures making their way down the hill.

  The most unnerving thing was the sheer silence that their enemies approached with. Even those hit but not killed merely lay on the ground and continued to try and crawl towards the building, leaving a
bloody trail behind them in the white snow.

  The wave kept on coming and now it was getting closer. Crimson, Link and, to a lesser extent, Jesus, were dropping targets as fast as they could manage, but the sheer numbers were just growing and too many to keep up with.

  “THERE’S TOO DAMN MANY!” Link called out over the gunfire.

  “AMMO!” Crimson yelled back.

  “EMPTY!” Link replied.

  “JAMIE-LYN!” Crimson bellowed.

  She ran to the large bags that they’d brought from Link’s friend’s safe house, but there was none left.

  “NOTHING,” she shouted.

  “Shit,” Crimson muttered under his breath as he switched from the empty rifle to a handgun.

  The horde were much closer now, and as Jamie-Lyn ran back to her position, she could see that she’d have to get involved now.

  She checked that the safety was off and gripped the pistol tightly.

  “Squeeze, don’t pull,” Link called out as he caught sight of her from the corner of his eye, which she found remarkable in itself as his whole upper body was making jerking motions from side to side before becoming momentarily rock still as he fixed and fired at targets with single shots.

  She breathed out and took aim at a young man who’d broken through the ranks towards the building. She ignored the disgust in her rolling stomach as the man used fallen companions as snowshoes as he walked on the corpses to avoid sinking in the drifts.

  She fired once, which went wide, before slowing her breathing even more and gently exerting pressure on the trigger. This time, she hit the man in the centre of his chest and he was flung back by the impact.

  “Shot,” Link called out as he too switched from his empty rifle to a side arm.

  The slope outside now was thick with bodies and still the wave kept on coming. Figure after figure emerged from the tree line and they were now using the trodden, cleared paths.

  All of them were carrying weapons and every now and then, a rifle shot would strike the building and all of them would duck with Crimson seemingly the exception as he judged each incoming bullet on its own merit and had yet to find one to be concerned with.

  “FALL BACK!” Link yelled out as the horde were almost upon them, hooded silent figures that were pushing ever forwards without fear for their own safety.

  “TO WHERE?” Crimson yelled back. “THERE’S NOWHERE TO FALL BACK TO!”

  “JAMIE-LYN, GET OUT OF HERE!” Link bellowed.

  “SCREW YOU AND YOUR CHIVALRY,” she shouted back as she slipped the last clip into the semiautomatic pistol that was now hot to the touch.

  “CJ? HOW’S IT LOOKING BACK THERE?” Link yelled as he was forced to take a step backwards into the room as a face started to clamber onto the top of their furniture and body wall.

  He took a step back to allow the figure to tumble over the wall before quickly stepping forwards and stamping down hard on the figure’s head with a sickening crunch of bone meeting hard floor.

  “CJ!” he screamed again. “WHERE THE HELL IS HE?”

  “Surrounded,” CJ’s voice suddenly came back as he dashed back into the room. “There’s no way out the back and they’re going to break in any minute.”

  “So what’s the bad news?” Crimson asked sarcastically as he used the butt of the large revolver in his hand to break a face that appeared over the wall.

  Jamie-Lyn felt her stomach clench as the realisation that there was no escape here hit her hard. Her own weapon was now empty, and judging by the way that the others had now switched to the knives that they’d taken from the weapon bags, they were all out too.

  Her head spun with the knowledge of her own certain death and its imminent arrival. The world around her slowed as she watched the wall start to crumble under the sheer weight of their attackers.

  Link was now fighting hand-to-hand, desperately trying to shove the horde back over the wall. He snatched up a large metallic microscope and smashed it down on a woman’s head as she lashed out with a meat cleaver.

  Jesus was lending his weight to a section of the barricade to stop it from falling, but she could see that he was only seconds away from falling himself.

  Crimson was spinning and moving as only he could. With a knife in each hand, he stabbed and sliced with expert precision along the line every time a figure started to crawl over. But she could see that it wasn’t going to be enough, not nearly enough. The sheer weight of numbers was about to overwhelm them.

  “WHAT’S THAT?” Link yelled out and pointed up the slope.

  They all looked and saw a swell of movement as some of the horde stopped in their tracks and turned back up the hill. Bodies started to be spat out of the wave as a swell ran through the hooded figures, hurling some of the ones still in the tree line out into the snow where they lay still after landing heavily.

  “What the hell is that?” Jesus wheezed as he hobbled over to join the others.

  “Cavalry?” Link offered.

  “You really think we’d get that lucky?” Crimson sneered tiredly.

  Jamie-Lyn stared up the slope as Crimson casually slit the throat of a man who, unlike his companions, was still trying to get over the wall as he hung over the edge.

  Bodies were being flung aside as something plunged its way into the rear of the wave, spitting out hooded figures seemingly with ease.

  From their distance away, no one could tell what was happening, only that their enemies were having their ranks decimated by some unseen force. Something with extraordinary strength was ripping through countless hooded figures with ease as whole bodies, limbs and the occasional severed head were being thrown out of the melee.

  “We’re saved!” Jesus exclaimed.

  “Yeah, I’d hold that thought,” Crimson replied with a sniff of the air.

  “It’s that thing, isn’t it?” Jamie-Lyn ventured as she read the look on Crimson’s face. “It’s the beast.”

  ----------

  chapter 37

  DEFROSTING ANSWERS

  The Boeing Chinook helicopter had flown in low across the North Sea, its passengers sitting rock still as they hung on for support as the strong winds buffeted the chopper as it flew through the stormy weather.

  15 black-clad figures wore nondescript combat clothing and all were armed to the teeth.

  None of the figures spoke a word as they flew in silence, their collective minds focused on the mission ahead, at least those who weren’t secretly trying to stop themselves from throwing up due to the turbulence.

  The two pilots of the borrowed RAF helicopter had shared a look of frustration as they fought off a huge gust that threatened to send them spinning down into the ocean depths waiting below.

  The money had been too good to turn down for the pair, but now they were both starting to wonder just what price they had inadvertently valued their own lives at.

  Jimmy Marks fought the stick and swore under his breath while Marcy Moore placed a hand that she could ill afford to spare on his arm and squeezed him gently.

  “We’ve flown through worse,” she’d said softly in the cockpit beyond the hearing of their passengers.

  “Bollocks have we,” Jimmy had replied as he quickly wiped the sweat from his forehead despite the freezing temperatures.

  “Just think about the money.”

  “Right now, I’m just trying to focus on not dying,” he replied hoarsely as another gust rocked them sideways.

  “Then think about Tuscany,” she cooed.

  “Tuscany?”

  “Tuscany,” she confirmed.

  “I thought that you didn’t want to. You said that it was too much money and we were too young to retire?”

  “Not anymore. I say we do it. The farmhouse, the vineyard, the whole thing. Life’s too short, babe.

  “Tuscany,” he whispered to himself, picturing the beautiful surroundings of their last holiday.

  They had been flying partners for almost ten years now and sleeping partners for the past three. Jimm
y had always figured that he’d somehow fallen into the luckiest category of man in the whole wide world: he’d got to fall in love with his best friend.

  They had spent four weeks in the sun far away from the noise of the world and all of its problems.

  They had spent the previous three months flying supplies into Afghanistan for the Americans, taking small arms and the occasional rocket propelled grenade. The money was good but both of them were getting too old to be cowboys anymore… or Skyboys, as Marcy liked to call them .

  While in Tuscany, they had spent a lot of time talking with the owner of a farmhouse they had stayed at, a widower who spoke of moving to Rome to live with his daughter.

  Jimmy had been the one to first broach the subject of buying the farmhouse and the vineyard.

  Marcy had laughed at the idea at first. She had always been of the opinion that she would fly until she was forced to stop; the idea of voluntary retirement seemed like an admission of guilt to her. But by the time that they had come to leave, he could tell that the idea had taken root with her and was no longer instantly rejected. Now, if she was genuinely saying that they should do it, then he was going to do everything in his power to make it happen.

  “Okay then,” he’d breathed to himself. “Tuscany.”

  He’d checked his gauges and had done a quick calculation in his head. They were heading into a small private airport in Denmark for refuelling before heading off again to their ultimate destination, some tiny fishing town that he’d never heard of on the coast of Sweden.

  He’d gripped the stick harder and set himself to the rest of the flight, positive that there was no weather on earth that would stand between him and his dream – not now, not ever.

  ----------

  Fast movement to Jamie-Lyn’s side made her spin around, but she was too slow, and someone slammed into her, driving her backwards at a rate of knots across the room before lifting her up and driving the air from her lungs.

  The man had taken advantage of their attention being focused out into the darkness, and he held her up high as he ran them to the centre of the room before he slammed her down, emulating a pro wrestling move, onto a large rug that covered some 20 feet or so.