Jason Willow: Face Your Demons

by G Mottram

  ‘They can drive here any time they like, day or night, and we’ve asked your sister to tell your father what’s happening – maybe he can talk some sense into Ilena. Apart from forcing them to come in at gunpoint, there’s nothing more we can do.’

  ‘Let me speak to Miranda – phone her or something.’

  Brash shook his head. ‘I’d love to but…’

  ‘… but nothing, let me phone her.’ Jason almost shouted.

  Brash carried on, visibly forcing his voice to stay calm. ‘… but we don’t know how far the Brethren are into us. They’re extremely sophisticated and may well have phone taps already in place. One call from an abbey phone to Miranda could lead their agents straight to her and almost all my security has been brought back into the abbey grounds – I can’t defend the whole valley. If you phone her, you could be signing her death warrant.’

  ‘So I can’t see or contact my own sister in any way?’

  Brash shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I daren’t even send any more of my men there to try to persuade Ilena. If more Brethren are already in the valley, then a succession of abbey cars to Darkston Wick would lead them straight to her.’

  Jason drew a breath for his next argument but then let it slowly out. There was no point – Brash obviously wasn’t going to let him go.

  Brash gripped one hand on Jason’s shoulder. ‘Come now – we may have a day or more before anything happens by which time your father will be back and bring them all in to safety.’

  ‘I suppose so…’ Jason said, hesitantly. He had to feign grudging agreement now or Brash would probably lock him up or something. He needed to talk to Marakoff – either that or he’d get out by himself tonight.

  ‘Good lad,’ Brash said, shaking his shoulder and letting him go. ‘Now, the very best thing you can do is to push on with your training. When the attack comes, you will be in the safest place with my other V.I.P.’

  Jason looked up at him inquisitively.

  Brash smiled. ‘I’m sure you’ve cracked the abbey’s worst kept secret… the real identity of Anna Smith?’

  Jason nodded.

  ‘I thought so,’ Brash said. ‘Well you just make sure you look after each other.’

  ‘Of course, Anna’s been really good to me – I like her a lot,’ Jason said. ‘Someone else I need to ask you about – Violet – will she be with us “V.I.P.s”?’

  Brash’s smile faltered just for a second and he looked away to turn them back towards the abbey. ‘My ward is not combat trained – she’ll be perfectly safe elsewhere.’

  ‘But I thought you said Anna and I will be in the safest place.’

  ‘Indeed I did but I’m not burying you two totally out of the action – you need to have some exposure to what a real fight is like… to give you half a chance of surviving when you become hunters yourselves.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help out.’ Jason said.

  Brash glanced down at him, frowning. ‘Not yet. There must be no heroics from you, no trying to prove yourself. You do understand this, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jason said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Jason nodded. ‘I’m really not planning on dying any time soon.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Brash said and stopped again. They’d walked into the middle of the lawns at the back of the abbey and stood facing the magnificent church tower with its giant gothic windows and graceful flying buttresses. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Who would guess it will become a slaughter house for the Brethren scum?’

  Jason didn’t answer. Unless Miranda came into the abbey in the next few hours, he wouldn’t be here to see any slaughtering of Brethren. He’d get out and leave the valley with her tonight.

  ‘Now, before I send you back, I was curious about one thing,’ Brash said in a light, casual tone that didn’t quite ring true to Jason. ‘The man who I introduced to everyone yesterday, Sergei Marakoff, retiring here from the Watch – have you ever seen him before?’

  Jason shook his head. ‘The one with the limp? No – why should I?’

  Brash smiled thinly, his gaze fixed on Jason’s face. ‘Well, it’s just that he was a good friend of your grandfather’s you see - they worked closely together for a time. Did he or your father ever mention him?’

  Jason snorted. ‘Yeah, like Dad loves chatting about his past… and Grandfather for that matter.’

  Brash continued to watch him for a moment longer then smiled. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. I know things were difficult when Richard decided to… retire early. Your grandfather was still hunting and made no secret of his disapproval. Terrible thing – rifts in a family, especially in our world.’ Brash patted him on the arm. ‘I only mentioned it because Marakoff shared your grandfather’s somewhat hard-line views and may be a little… disdainful about your father if you come across each other.’

  ‘Then I’ll break his other leg,’ Jason said, defiantly.

  Brash nodded, dropping his searching gaze. ‘Good – I’m glad you’re still willing to defend your father’s good name, despite everything.’

  Jason nodded but didn’t reply. I’m not getting in to this.

  They were almost back at the abbey buildings and Brash stopped walking.

  ‘Now above all, remember to keep yourself safe, Jason, for all our sakes. There is absolutely no way we can have you falling into Brethren hands. Keep out of sight, all right?’

  ‘Yes, I understand, Mr Brash.’

  Brash searched his eyes again, looking for something – a hint of suspicion or mistrust perhaps. Jason returned a level gaze and forced a tight smile.

  ‘I’ll be fine Mr. Brash, don’t worry. I understand what’s at stake.’

  Finally, Brash nodded and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good. Now – time for you to meet the man who is going to babysit you through this little fracas. Run off to the cloister – your battle group will be there already.’

  Chapter 21

  Anna met Jason at the river by the refectory door. ‘Come on – I’ve just been sent to find you. All the other groups have set off for their battle-stations already.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jason said, ‘Mr Brash…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – we got a message. It doesn’t stop Sergeant Smith getting narked though.’

  ‘Great - another anonymous “Smith”,’ Jason mumbled.

  Anna ignored him and hurried through the refectory and out the other side into the sun-bright cloister.

  A small group was waiting in the shade - Carl, Fast Eddie, Erin Brock and Oliver Stone. Jason smiled to himself - So these are the V.I.P.s Brash was talking about.

  A man in the dark blue uniform of Brash Security stepped out of a small doorway just next to the chapter house and closed it behind him. Judging by the three small stripes on his right arm, the man was a sergeant. He was tall, well-built and perhaps thirty years old.

  ‘About time, lad, we’ve got us work to do, you know?’ The sergeant had a hard-vowelled, Yorkshire accent

  ‘Yes – sorry. Mr Brash wanted…’

  ‘A chat with you - aye, we were told as much. We could have done with you ‘ere half an ‘our ago though. You’ve got some quick learnin’ to do - I’ve been training these sad-cases in battle stations for the past six months so they already know the drill.’

  ‘Right,’ Jason said, ‘sorry – I’ll do my best to catch up.’

  The security guard nodded. ‘My name is Sergeant Smith by the way, and you’re lucky enough to be in Cloister 5 group.’

  Jason nodded. He wondered if Smith’s accent meant he was local, perhaps schooled in Silent Hill and groomed in the Brash gang to work in abbey security.

  ‘Right – let’s get to it.’ Smith said and turned back towards the small wooden door he’d just come through.

  There was one narrow window to either side of the door. To Jason it looked like Brash had decided to hide them in a cupboard.

  Smith tapped a code and pressed his thumb onto a concealed pad and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.
What looked like an insignificant old door actually had a steel core, five centimetres thick. Sunlight spilled into the room to reveal that the cupboard was, in fact, an armoury.

  Jason whistled softly as he stepped inside. Only perhaps four metres wide, the room was made even narrower by weapon racks and shelves bolted floor-to-wall on either side. Kalashnikov machine guns, rifles, pistols and cases of ammunition were stacked neatly along the length of the room. There were also crates labelled “grenades”, a rack of combat knives and, oddly out of place, four slim long swords hanging in their scabbards.

  Smith switched on a light and the harsh, bare-bulb glare was thrown back at them by the walls, floor and ceiling – all cased in steel.

  ‘Shut the door, New-lad,’ Smith said to Jason who was standing at the back.

  The bulb light shone off the sergeant’s number-one cropped hair. ‘Now, to fill you in, Jason. Our main task is to guard the armoury and supply runners with any arms they might need. Our best Kalashnikov users will be stationed at the windows and the rest of you will act as “gofers”.’

  ‘’Scuse me sergeant,’ Oliver grunted from the front, ‘Are you reckoning on the attack going on for a while then… if people are going to have to run back here to re-stock with ammo?’

  ‘I doubt that, Stone. The whole abbey will be a death-trap for whatever the Brethren chuck at us. It should all be over right quickly but, we have to make sure we’re set for the worst case scenario, as them on high would put it.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ Eddie said, ‘might I ask a question?’

  Smith turned his steel grey eyes on Eddie and a crooked smile bent his lips. ‘You usually do, Eddie, lad. Get on with it.’

  ‘Despite all our training, we are in a sort of crèche here, aren’t we? The Brethren are never going to reach us.’

  Smith smiled. ‘Aye, this is one of the safest places you can be during an attack. Mr Brash has a hell of a lot of folk in the likely break-through areas – he’s not risking you youngsters on the front line. The idea is you’ll be right safe here but a bit useful as well.’

  ‘And if the Brethren parachute straight in to the Cloister?’ Jason asked, peering through one narrow window onto the cross-shadowed grass. ‘Won’t we be in the front line then?’

  ‘If they get past our surface-to-air missiles and armed choppers, you mean, lad?’ Smith answered. ‘Even if they do get themselves into the cloister, they’ll be caught in an almighty crossfire that will rip them to shreds. Nothing will survive out there.’

  Jason nodded.

  ‘Now then, lads and lasses,’ Smith said, ‘I know you’ve heard this a hundred times or more but I want you all, not just the new boy, to listen up to your procedures and escape routes.’

  Smith was a good instructor – clear, concise and graphic. He quickly covered the essentials. Anyone approaching the armoury was to be ordered to halt, scanned with their walkie-talkies which apparently had a detector to pick up signals from identity pin transmitters all abbey personnel were going to be wearing. If cleared, they were to be given the ammunition they needed and sent on their way.

  In the unlikely event the cloister was overrun, they would fall back through a small door at the rear of the armoury which opened into the chapter house. From there they were to make their way into the church itself.

  Smith didn’t stop with just explaining things however. Cloister 5 group then spent the next two hours practicing and re-practicing each routine - everything from checking an approaching guard with the radio pin-detector and scurrying for specific ammunition to laying down a cross-fire of blanks across the cloister and running through the fall-back routes to the church doors.

  Jason tried to take a measure of solace from the fact that most of the procedures seemed well thought out and everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. However, the deafening crack and echo of the blank fire around the cloister called up memories of his mother’s murder and his stomach filled with moths whenever he imagined agents landing in on the grass and swarming towards their armoury door.

  The fall-back plan worried him as well. To reach the supposedly safe church, the members of Cloister Five group had to get into the chapter house through the rear of the armoury, run along a corridor past all the offices and out across the small rose garden, dash in through another door and turn left for the high security entrance into the church.

  If, Jason wondered, the abbey was overrun with heavily armed Brethren agents and demon-possessed killers, would that escape route be particularly secure? The chapter house had its own group of defenders – Cloister 4 – but what happens if they were also overrun and the building was crawling with Brethren? Also, even though the rose garden was completely enclosed by buildings, the Brethren could parachute in there as well and be waiting for them.

  They practised the route nonetheless and after three attempts, the whole team were evacuating the armoury and slamming in to the locked church door in under a minute. Perhaps the route was a good one after all. In any case, there was no other way out from the armoury.

  Finally, Smith stopped the rehearsing. ‘Right my little soldiers, I think you’ve got the procedures fairly straight in your heads at last and mayhap you’re getting’ a bit bored now. Still - the next time we do it we’ll have a few score Brethren at our heels to liven things up a mite, eh?’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Now then, before you all run off for a quick lunch, I’m to give you these.’

  Smith pulled out a small, slim case from his pocket and opened it. Inside was a row of pin transmitters. They were no bigger than a penny coin, completely black and each had a printed name tag tied to it.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing them out and tearing off the name tag as he did so, ‘pin these to the inside of your clothes and don’t go anywhere without them from now on.’

  The students each carefully pinned the small transmitters to the inside of their T-shirts.

  ‘Now remember, these little pins are your best hope of not being shot by ‘friendly fire’. Control can tell exactly who and where you are and they can be scanned by our walkie-talkies to call up your photo id.’

  ‘What happens if we lose it?’ Jason asked.

  Sergeant Smith shook his head. ‘If you have no pin, lad or even if your face doesn’t fit the photo, you’ll likely get yourself shot.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Jason mumbled and double checked his transmitter.

  ‘Now then,’ Smith said, ‘off you go to feed your faces before it’s time for a spell of shooting things with that nice Mr Mann.’

  Groaning, Anna led the team out across the cloister towards the refectory.

  ***

  Lunch consisted of ham and cheese sandwiches, salad, fruit and cereal bars. Anna piled up a plate full and dragged Jason and his food outside.

  ‘Come on, we need to chat a bit.’

  Most of the students had also decided to eat outside and they were flaked out all along the river bank and onto the huge lawns at the rear of the abbey.

  Anna found a quiet spot and plonked herself down. ‘Now then, youngster, something’s bothering you, isn’t it?’ she said quietly’

  ‘What – apart from the fact that we’re going to be attacked by murdering, Brethren agents at any minute?’

  Anna smiled. ‘Yeah, I can see how that might be a little unsettling but you’re worried about something else. We need to clear out whatever is clouding that tiny little adolescent brain of yours before they put a gun in your hand.’

  Jason couldn’t help it, he grinned back at her. How could she be so calm about it all?

  ‘My sister, Miranda, is staying with some friends in Darkston Wick – they won’t to come into the abbey because they don’t trust your… Mr Brash.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame them – he can be a bit of a git at times. Still, to be honest, they’re probably safer staying put – the Brethren won’t waste time or manpower scouring the valley if they’ve worked out all you juicy Gifted are here in the abbey.’ Anna shrugged a
nd took a bite out of her pile of sandwiches.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jason said, ‘Mr Brash said the same sort of thing.’

  ‘There you are then – it must be true,’ Anna said. ‘Now, any other worries Aunty Anna needs to hear about?’

  Jason bought himself some time by shoving some banana into his mouth. Even if Anna was right, he still couldn’t risk leaving Miranda out there, especially if Dad wasn’t back. He felt torn however – if he sneaked out of the abbey tonight, he’d be abandoning Anna and the others.

  ‘Everyone seems pretty sure that they can take on whatever the Brethren throw at us.’

  ‘That’s because we can.’ Anna said.

  ‘What if there are some Touched agents or a demon itself?’

  ‘Security and the Gifted teams have trained against the Touched – they can cope.’

  ‘What, really?’ Jason asked. ‘How can they do that?’

  ‘Captured spies and agents of course. When the hunter teams bring them in, we can’t ever let them go again. Until a couple of years ago we’d hardly ever seen any Touched. Transporting any of the captured ones over from Europe by land and sea is really dangerous and takes so long they’re half degenerated before they get here but now our teams are capturing more and more of them in Britain – half a dozen this year alone…’

  ‘Hold on – are you saying you bring Touched Brethren agents here to, what, kill in training?’

  Anna held his eyes. ‘A few, yeah.’

  ‘But… but that’s disgusting,’ Jason said, searching her face to see if she was trying to pull off some sick joke. ‘You can’t kill humans for practice…’

  ‘Oh don’t be so righteous, Jason,’ Anna snapped, ‘they’d do worse to us. Do you even have half a clue what goes on in the Carpathian Mountains if any of us are captured? We need to be as well prepared as humanly possible before we go out into the field and that includes having seen and maybe done some killing.’

  Jason stared at her then looked away across the grass to let things cool down for a moment. He chewed his bottom lip. So Anna shared some of her father’s ideas then – use anybody in any way necessary to achieve the goal.