Revenger

by Cain, Tom

  Schultz fired his final bullet, a shot to the attacker’s temple from point-blank range that killed him instantly.

  But the action of turning to shoot took Schultz’s attention away from the men climbing up the shelves and exposed his shattered left arm at the precise moment that another man jumped down from the top of the metal and hit him almost precisely at the point of the wound. The pain was more excruciating than any Schultz had ever experienced. It left him sickened and paralysed with agony. He was barely even conscious of the machete swinging down towards his throat. With Panu still struggling to free himself from the weight of the corpse now lying on top of him there was no one to save Schultz as the blade sliced deep into his abdomen, just below the ribcage.

  At that precise moment Carver came through the door from the supermarket. He blew away the man standing over Schultz, then pumped the gun and hit another shadowy figure looming over the shelving. Carver raced across to Schultz, who was lying in the middle of a rapidly expanding pool of blood. It was obvious that there was no saving him, but he seemed to be trying to say something. Carver bent down and caught the words, ‘. . . meant to be like this’, before the flickering life in his old comrade died.

  Carver wasted no time in mourning: leave that for the funeral. He switched his attention to Panu, pulled the body off him, lashed out with the butt of his gun, cracking it into a grimacing, tattooed face that had suddenly appeared out of the darkness, and shouted, ‘Run for the basement. Go! Go!’

  Panu scrambled away on all fours until he found his feet for the last few paces that took him to the door to the basement steps. Carver followed him, stepping backwards, keeping his gun still pointed towards the shelves.

  He had two cartridges left.

  A hand clutching a gun appeared over the top of the metalwork and fired blindly downwards.

  Carver ignored it. His attention had suddenly swung one hundred and eighty degrees to the sudden sound of hammering on another door – the one into the supermarket. With an explosion of dust and wood, the lock was blown away and the door swung open.

  Carver fired another round straight into the exposed doorway, hitting at least one, possibly two targets. Then, as the bodies were thrown out of the way and the first rioters from the supermarket ran in, just as the invaders from the back yard began to climb en masse over Schultz and Panu’s abandoned barricade, Carver ran for the basement door, yanked it open, dashed through, pulled it close behind him and turned the key in the lock.

  He threw himself down the steps as the first bullets ripped into the door.

  The door crashed open. A rioter burst through and stood at the top of the stairs. He was a wiry little hoodie with a hunting knife in his hand. Carver had one round of ammunition left. He could use it to take out a rioter, or he could give one of the women an instant, painless death instead of the gang-raped mutilation to which the rioters would subject her.

  He was just about to make his choice.

  And then the timer in the microwave went, ‘Ping!’

  38

  A COMBINATION OF soap flakes and lighting fluid makes a substance that is both highly combustible and very sticky. It is, in effect, a domestic form of napalm.

  An aerosol can of deodorant contains chemicals that react under intense heat to create a violent explosion.

  Fine-grade flour is, like icing sugar, a surprisingly explosive substance when suspended in air, which is why history is littered with examples of fatal explosions in flour mills. The principle is very simple. Explosions are intense chemical reactions that require an energy source and a supply of oxygen. Flour and sugar are both powerful fuels, which is why we eat them, and air, of course, contains oxygen. A full packet of tightly packed flour has relatively little contact with the air around it and is thus quite safe. But when every single particle in that bag is individually suspended in air, then the proportions of fuel and oxygen are potentially far more dangerous.

  But there is still one more element to add to the mix before anything goes bang: a detonator. And that was provided by the contents of the microwave.

  The heating of the aerosol deodorant in the Lion Market microwave set off one explosion that blew open the oven and projected a blazing hot spatter of napalm into the air inside the Lion Market. This in turn detonated a secondary, even more powerful explosion of the flour suspended in the atmosphere.

  A deafening blast of white-hot flame ripped through the packed shop. It set light to any flammable materials. Much of the napalm was vaporized immediately by the blast, but the rest stuck to people’s clothes, skin and hair, turning them into human torches. The shock wave from the explosion, travelling at supersonic speeds, tore through the rioters’ bodies, inflicting catastrophic soft-tissue damage. Most critically it induced severe pulmonary contusions, bursting blood vessels and causing a condition known as blast lung, in which victims drown in their own blood as fluids build up in their shattered lungs until breathing becomes impossible. As ways of dying go, it is almost as horrible as being burnt alive.

  The blast ripped through the open door into the storeroom, and though its effects were far less devastating than they had been in the shop itself, the deafening sound of the explosion, the flames, the screams and the terrible sight of people tearing at their clothes and their own flesh, desperately trying to pull away the napalm, which stuck to them like burning coal superglued to their bodies, were enough to end any further thoughts of combat or robbery. All that anyone who was lucky enough to be alive and more or less in one piece – temporarily deafened, perhaps, but flame-free and still able to breathe – wanted to do was to get the hell out as quickly as they possibly could.

  They scrambled back over the shelves, out into the yard, and retraced the steps that had got them into this earthly hell in the first place. And meanwhile, in the shop, all that could be heard were crackles of flame from a few small fires, moans of pain from those burn-victims who were still able to breathe, and the gurgles, wheezes and desperate, futile gasps of dying looters being killed by their own blood.

  39

  DOWN IN THE cellar Carver heard the explosion, the screams, the shouts of panic and the scurrying feet desperately rushing to get away. In the cold light of the camping lantern he could see Chrystal sitting weeping with Ajay Panu’s bear-like arm around her shoulder. Paula Miklosko was looking a little more conscious of what was going on around her, though she was still a long way from being fully alert. Maninder Panu was sitting alone, staring into the darkness of the basement, as if his circuits had simply overloaded under the strain of what had happened since the riot first began. Barely fifteen minutes had gone by, but it might as well have been a lifetime.

  Carver crouched on his haunches beside him. ‘Where’s the control-box for the CCTV?’ he asked.

  Maninder said nothing. Carver repeated the question. Still no response.

  ‘In the back office,’ said Ajay. ‘Across the storeroom there’s a door with a glass panel. Through that’s the office. The box is in there. It’s connected to the computer. Why do you need it?’

  Carver didn’t answer the question. He just asked, ‘What’s the password?’

  Maninder paused.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t want your money . . . or your porn.’

  Ajay gave a tired smile. ‘It’s “prosperity”,’ he said. ‘Ironic, innit?’

  ‘At least it wasn’t “peace”.’ Carver saw the black torch lying on the floor in front of Ajay and Chrystal, picked it up and said, ‘Right, I’m going now. I can’t be certain it’s completely safe up top, so don’t move from here till the police find you.’ He nodded at Paula Miklosko. ‘Make sure she gets seen by a doctor as soon as possible. I made a mess of your shop. Sorry about that. About tonight . . . I wasn’t here. If anyone asks, you defended yourselves with a bit of help from a bloke called Snoopy. You were heroes. He was a hero. The people who attacked you were murderous filth. You’ll probably get medals. You deserve to. But I wasn’t here. Is that u
nderstood?’

  They nodded at him wordlessly and Carver turned to go.

  ‘Excuse me,’ called out Maninder, ‘but you never even told us your name.’

  ‘I know,’ said Carver.

  Maninder nodded. ‘Well, thank you, anyway. We owe you our lives.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  He went back up the stairs, the torch in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and slipped through the damaged door to the storeroom. Inside it was deserted apart from a small group of the dead and dying strewn by the scorched hole where the door to the shop had once been. As the torch-beam swept the room, Carver heard a rustling sound and shone the light in its direction, catching a shadowy figure staggering, doubled-over in pain, as it fled through the back door. One of the blast-victims made a feeble attempt to lift a hand in supplication and gasped, ‘Help me.’ Carver knew there was absolutely nothing he could do. He turned the torch off, then stopped for a moment and listened for any other signs of movement or hostile action, but the only sounds to be heard were coughs, wheezes and gurgles coming from the supermarket, making it sound like a hospital ward filled with consumptives and lung-cancer patients. Carver would check it out in due course, but first there was work to be done.

  Even without the torchlight he could see the outline of the office entrance. He slipped through it, closed the door behind him, and turned the torch back on to find little trace of the carnage elsewhere, just the usual paperwork of a small business. There were box-files on shelves; plastic trays filled with invoices and correspondence; more papers strewn chaotically across a desk; a mug containing half a dozen pens and pencils; and a Dell PC next to a black box whose facia was covered with buttons like a domestic satellite receiver. Carver pressed the ‘on’ button on the computer and was not entirely surprised to see that it worked. It struck him that the air-blast had worked a bit like a neutron bomb: killing human beings but leaving property largely intact.

  Two minutes later the entire CCTV feed for the past twelve hours had been deleted. He sprayed the computer keyboard with screen-cleaner fluid from a pump-spray bottle standing next to the Dell, then wiped it down with his handkerchief. Carver looked up to establish the position of the door so that he could find it again in the dark. Then he turned off the torch and repeated the cleaning process.

  He had one more use for the cleaner fluid, so he put it in his jacket pocket, and it was then that he realized the head cam was already there. Carver took the camera out. The ‘record’ light was on, a glaring red dot in the darkness. It must have been running all the while, capturing the sounds, if not the images, of the supermarket battle. What was more, the head cam’s owner had been wearing and presumably using it when Carver and Schultz had gone to rescue Paula Miklosko. So their faces would be on it, too. Carver’s immediate instinct was to go straight back to the computer and delete all the head cam’s video files, just as he’d done with the CCTV. Then he stopped. There was evidence against him on here, true, but there might also be evidence against other people, evidence he could use. He turned the camera off. For now, at any rate, its contents were staying put.

  Carver, however, had to get going. And that meant doing something he’d been putting off for the few minutes he’d been in the office. He had to go back into the shop and see for himself the havoc that his homemade bomb had wreaked.

  40

  CARVER HAD BEEN in bus-stations attacked by suicide bombers. He’d seen hospitals hit by air-raids, and the burned-out remnants of an Iraqi tank regiment, blown to smithereens on the road from Baghdad to Kuwait. But there was something uniquely hellish about this. The corpses lay thick on the supermarket floor, a gruesomely vile and pointless slaughter that resembled a circle of hell as the blue-grey gloom and deep-black shadows were pierced by the flickering light of the flames and the sulphurous orange glow of the street lamps outside.

  It disgusted Carver that he had been reduced to doing this. It shamed him that he had had the perverted skill to wreak such havoc. It angered him, too, for what choice had he had? He and the others would have died otherwise, of that there was no doubt. And for what?

  Carver had known men who had killed for vast profits, or out of political or religious conviction. There were no excuses or moral justifications for their acts, but he could at least follow the calculations of those who thought their ends were important enough to justify such violent means. He could understand how suicide bombers believed that their self-destruction was in a great and worthy cause, even if he disagreed with them. But what had these people died for? Free fucking groceries.

  Something caught Carver’s eye – a movement by the window. He stepped back into the shadow and stood motionless and silent as the slight figure of a girl appeared at the far side of the crashed garbage truck, peered in and then hesitated, not daring to come any further. From the size of her Carver guessed she must be around eleven or twelve. There was no sound in the room beyond the hacking and burbling of the rioters’ breaths, the occasional pathetic attempt at a call for help, and the fearful weeping of the dying. Some of the bodies were moving. Others were holding out hands in desperate supplication. Carver hoped to God that the girl would not understand what she was looking at; that the meaning of it would somehow pass her by.

  She said something, but her voice was very faint, and Carver could not make out what it was. She straightened herself up and tried again, more loudly this time. ‘Ricky?’ and then again, ‘Ricky! Are you there? Mum says you gotta come home. You got school tomorrow.’

  There was no reply. The girl stood there uncertainly, not sure what to do next. Then a barely audible whimper came from somewhere at the back of the room, an expression of pain unrelated to anything she had said. The girl must have recognized the voice as her brother’s, for she cried out, ‘Ricky!’ Carver could hear the relief, but also the mounting terror. She had still not taken a single step further into the shop. ‘Come on, Ricky, come home . . . please! Mum’ll kill ya if you don’t.’

  There was another moan: the same voice as before, from the same place. Then the girl sniffed and cried out, ‘I don’t understand . . . I don’t know what to do!’

  Every professional instinct told Carver to ignore the child. What mattered now was to avoid detection. The last thing he should do was to make himself identifiable. But as a human being, as a man, he simply could not stand by and ignore the girl’s distress. He’d brought the shotgun with him, just in case that last cartridge was needed for self-defence. Now he switched the gun to his left hand, held it casually down by his side and stepped out of the gloom. The girl gave a little squeal of alarm as she saw him loom up in front of her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  She looked at him. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Go home and tell your mum she needs to call an ambulance. Your brother Ricky needs an ambulance. Soon as possible.’

  ‘Where is he? I want to see him!’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Carver said. ‘Just go and get an ambulance. That’s what Ricky needs.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Please, just go,’ Carver insisted. ‘I’ll look after your brother.’

  ‘Why? Are you a doctor?’

  Carver said nothing. The girl was trying to decide what to do. There was nothing more he could say now to help her make up her mind. He got a feeling she was about to turn and go but then there was another cry from the same direction as the previous ones.

  ‘Ricky! I’m coming!’ the girl shouted. She took a pace or two into the shop but then stopped. The bodies carpeted the floor of the shop so thickly that it was impossible to pick a clear path through them. At least half were still alive, though the number of survivors was diminishing with every minute that passed. Carver sighed to himself and gave a shake of the head; he could not believe what he was about to do.

  ‘Here, I’ll help you,’ he said and held out his right hand to her. The girl took it and let him guide her through th
e carnage.

  ‘Watch out,’ he said, seeing her about to tread on a twitching, outstretched hand.

  The girl said, ‘Sorry,’ as she kicked into another body, cutting the end of the word short as she realized the body was dead. He was close enough to see her eyes now, and the bows on the ribbons that held her braids in place, close enough to see the look on her face as she suddenly gasped, ‘Ricky . . .’

  There in front of them, slumped on the floor with his back up against a shelf, was a teenage boy, no more than fourteen, wearing an Adidas tracksuit over a Chelsea shirt. His eyes were still open, filled with fear and incomprehension, and there were small bubbles of foaming blood at the corners of his mouth as his lungs fought against the liquid filling them from within. The girl sat down next to her brother, taking his hand in hers and leaning her head against his shoulder. ‘I’m here, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I’m here . . .’

  The boy was going to die for sure. But as Carver stepped away from the two kids and began spraying screen-cleaner all over the Mossberg he realized that there was something he could do to put right some of the wrong that he had been forced to do here. This riot had not been a spontaneous event. Someone had planned it. They’d brought a man in to act as the commander on the ground – that scrawny, grey-haired guy with the unexpectedly upmarket accent – and Carver was forced to admit that his old friend Schultz must have played some kind of a role in it too. Schultz had known things were going to kick off in Netherton Street, but he’d thought they’d be safe in the pub. That was why he’d been so astonished to see the mob come streaming in through the door, and that was surely the meaning of his final words: ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this.’