“I’m just here to settle accounts, Commander. You can reach your own conclusions!”
“Now!” said Nassim in a hoarse whisper.
Afiz squeezed the trigger and a bolt of fire shot across the quad, burning a hole in Baldie’s chest and sending him staggering backwards with a look of complete surprise on his face. The courtyard erupted. The bandits began to blast the Metricians who dived for cover and fired back. Walshe was the next to go, a red stain filling his soft army hat as he slumped to the ground like a sack. Manchester Jones tipped over backwards, the last of the fake gold spilling from his tubby fingers.
In the melee, no one noticed seven children sprinting across the ground and slipping into the airship.
It had been Nassim’s idea. Making their way through the maze of corridors and stairs, the group eventually found themselves at an open door on the ground level. The airship was anchored nearby and beyond it stood the men, arguing over the gold. The disagreement was a gift. From where he hid, Afiz had a clear line of sight to any of them. It was Nassim’s suggestion to start with the fat one. Her only regret was that she wasn’t the one to pull the trigger. When the battle started, she urged the kids out and they sprinted to the airship. Now she was lying face down in the basket, gasping for air, bullets screeching overhead.
“Get the ropes! Start the engines!” shouted Afiz who was already at the gun-mount, unleashing a torrent at the remaining fighters. The airship shuddered in recoil and then shuddered again as Wadid fired the engines to life.
“Afiz! Look!” shouted Wadid, who pointed to a sleek Metrician airpod arcing its way toward the tarmac.
“Nassim, give me that RPG!” Afiz pointed to a cylinder lying at the bottom of the ship. “Hold my back!”
The balloon was rising now and the ropes that held it to the ground were ripped from their pegs.
It took just moments for Afiz to mount the heavy tube to his shoulder and line up the descending Metrician aircraft. A second pod, a transporter, was close behind. “Block your ears, kids,” he said with a grin and a tremendous bang, followed by a deafening hiss, sent Afiz and Nassim tumbling backwards. The basket swayed precariously. A stream of smoke arrowed from the launcher directly into the airpod which exploded in a star of silver fire, then spun wildly like a buckled wheel, colliding with the second aircraft and sending them both crashing into the buildings below. An orange flame mushroomed up and sent shockwaves towards the airship, pushing it high up into the air. It also tipped the basket so violently that Wadid lost his grip on the steering wheel, tumbled out and fell to the fast-disappearing ground.
“Wadid!” screamed Nassim.
She saw him hit the ground and roll, holding his leg. Nassim was going to jump but they were now too high and rising fast. A Metrician hoverbike was tearing across the dirt towards him and firing shots at the balloon.
“Wadid!” she screamed again. He yelled something back but the blimp was racing upwards out of ear shot.
“Nassim! Help!” a voice shouted behind her.
She spun around to see that Afiz too had been tipped out by the blast and was now dangling on the anchor warp, his legs trying to find a grip on the edge of the basket. She dashed over while the Metrcians’ shots tore past them both and made holes in the helium balloon. Nassim lunged for Afiz’s hand. She missed. For a terrifying moment he dangled from one hand. On her second attempt she made contact and hauled him aboard.
By now they were flying fast, beyond the range of the weapons and still rising. Afiz jumped to the wheel-house and pulled back the throttle to settle their speed.
Abaddon was disappearing, it’s roof camouflaged against the grey desert. A tower of black smoke rose from the crash-site like a crematorium. Wadid and the Metricians were now just ants. Nassim stared down as they vanished into the desert floor.
“Wadid! Wadid!” she cried, feeling the full weight of failure that only an older sister can feel. Waves of despair crashed over her and she sobbed. “We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to go back!” she cried. But even as she said it, she knew it was hopeless. Wadid was gone and there was no going back. Not like this. She slumped in the basket and hit her thighs with her fists. “No! No!” she cried, alternatively looking back at the disappearing complex and screwing her eyes shut in frustration.
The wind blew colder up here but Nassim couldn’t feel it. She lay slumped for a long while until Afiz called her. “Nassim!”
She looked up. The twins were aft, clinging to each other, terrified. Scruff was bending over the girl with ringletted hair, who lay partly covered by a dirty canvas. She was gasping for air, her eyes half closed. “Caught in the cross-fire,” he said, lifting the cloth to reveal a hole in her side.
Nassim crawled over and took the poor girl’s hand and dug out from somewhere inside herself the ability to smile. “What’s your name?” she asked tenderly. The girl tried to answer but nothing came out except a long sigh. She was dead.
Nassim felt nothing. The trauma of Wadid’s fall had dragged all emotion from her and she closed the girl’s lids and drew the canvas over her face. Now they were five: Afiz, the boy with scruffy hair and the twins. The wind buffeted the aircraft, and for a moment they simply sat and let the roar of the engines fill their thoughts.
“What’s the plan, boss?” asked Afiz eventually from behind the controls.
Nassim rubbed her tear-lined face and stood up. First things first, she thought. She edged her way to the twins and crouched. “Girls,” she said, touching their trembling hands. “I’ve been so rude. All this excitement and no one has even asked your names.”
The girls looked up with big wet eyes. “I’m Jasmine and this is my sister Hannah,” said one and she held onto Nassim’s hand.
“Well, Jasmine and Hannah, I’m Nassim. There’s no need to be frightened. We’ve flown away from the baddies and soon we’ll be hiding in a real cave with yummy food and a good-old cup of tea. Would you like that?”
The girls nodded, uncertainly.
“Good. Now you just snuggle up and we’ll get this contraption to land somewhere safe,” she said and kissed them on their foreheads.
She stood at the basket’s edge and tried to get her bearings. Having never been in the air before it took her a long time to understand just where they were. It didn’t help that all those days with bandits were spent inside a windowless wagon. But the appearance of a river to the east and then a well-worn road that wound its way south to a cragged mountain range made her wonder if they were flying back towards her home. Her eyes followed the thin line to the bottom of the hills, which pushed like an old man’s hands, all cracked and ridged, into the desert floor. She considered, for a moment, flying away from Abaddon and to keep flying till they crossed the peaks into Greater Israel, and then take on whatever new menace lay for them there. But the pull of Wadid kept her grounded and, anyway, there was nowhere in the world she could escape the tyranny of Metricia. So, she pointed to a small clump of green set in a narrow cleft of the rocky foothills.
“There,” she said, recognising her home. Afiz spun the wheel and tilted the huge rotors with a horrible whine, angling the craft southwards.
They landed in a massive cloud of dust. The houses were black ruins, burned by the rocket attack, and the goats had either escaped or been stolen. Nassim walked disconsolately through her old village, picking up burned or broken things: a book, a pot. She brushed off a damaged photo and recognised it as the wedding photo of her grandparents, Abassah and Juan. Folding the edges straight she brought it to her lips as a memento.
“To the caves,” she instructed, and she led them up the rugged escarpment to a narrow slit that they had to slither through to enter. Baldie’s bandits, in their haste, had overlooked the treasures hidden inside: dried food, fresh water in sealed pitchers, bedding, clothes, a small kitchen and an even smaller cache of arms. “My uncle created this for when we might be attacked,” she explained. “But we were too slow!” She smashed a crockery bowl on the floor.
>
The children looked frightened. To them she was an adult, the leader. Even Afiz was intimidated. She felt self-conscious and weirdly responsible for this little clutch of refugees. So, placing the photo on a shelf, she began the old domestic tasks that felt so familiar. She ordered the twins down to the well where they pulled up the water bucket. Afiz and Scruff covered the airship with a camouflage net that they’d found among the ruins and they all collected sticks for a fire.
The work, and a hot meal, cheered them up and by dusk they had gathered enough courage to bury the body of the unknown girl. Standing in the old goat paddock they took turns to throw dirt on her grave and held hands in some kind of ritual that Nassim made up. Somehow it felt right.
“We need bigger guns,” said Afiz as they sat at the caves’ mouth drawing long puffs from a hookah pipe. It was getting dark. Scruff and the twins were asleep.
“Why?” she asked. “These caves provide a strong defence.”
“For how long? And what happens when we need to trade or when the bandits return? And I assume you’d like to find your brother? These popguns won’t scare a rabbit,” he said, tossing aside her uncle’s rifle.
“And where do you hope to get more guns? Plan to trade with the Metricians?” she asked sarcastically.
“Not the Metricians.” He nodded towards the airship. “Your bandit friends can’t be far away. Baldie wouldn’t travel alone. I suspect they’re much closer than you think.”
She pondered his line of thought and then her heart made a little leap. “You mean we go find Baldie’s crew?”
“Better. They come find us. They’re expecting their leader to return with bags full of gold, right? So let’s invite them. Except, when they arrive we’ll greet them with lead – in their heads, if you like.”
“I do like. I do like very much,” said Nassim.
“They’ll have guns for sure. But we’ll have that big one of our own. Plus, the benefit of surprise, which is as good as a canon on any day.” He drew heavily on the hookah and blew out a mouthful of smoke and pointed to the valley entrance, where the hills rose steeply, creating a narrow channel. “And I think there is just the right place to say ‘hello’.”
She couldn’t sleep that night, simultaneously anxious about Wadid and excited about the prospect of meeting the bandits in an ambush. She’d long since given up thinking about the future, but for the first time in days a feeling of hope stirred inside. When she did fall asleep the winged-lion reappeared, kicking dust in the face of the snake and promising he’d return to save her. This time it had the voice of Jonah.
◆◆◆
When the Metrician transport dropped from the clouds, General Kenrick was surprised to see a plume of black smoke rising from the roof of Abaddon.
“Sir, we are getting reports of an attack,” said Hadrian Yang, handing GK the scrip.
The general’s face looked inscrutable as he read it. “Bandit hoopla. What’s new? These mutants have given us trouble since day one. Still, to shoot down an Airhawk with just an RPG is impressive. And I notice Commander Walshe copped one in the kisser. Is he dead?”
Yang nodded. “And four soldiers plus the troops aboard the two pods. Eleven in total.”
“Shame. And the dirty little beggars got away. Do we have a trace on this airship?”
“Yes, sir. It landed in a valley about one hundred kilometres southeast of here. Some kind of settlement. Would you like it destroyed?”
“Yes, better show them a little Metrician discipline. Can’t have the locals getting uppity, now can we?”
“Quite right, sir.” Yang scribbled instructions onto a holoscreen and hit the send button knowing that the next evening, a dry, empty valley in northern Egypt would be annihilated by Metrician drones. He knew it was the wrong valley but somehow blowing up a bunch of kids, even if they were mutants, just didn’t seem right. No one will know, he reasoned.
GK’s arrival at Abaddon was unexpected and a great fuss was made when the staff saw who walked stiffly across the tarmac.
“Shove off!” he growled as someone offered him a hovering armchair. “I’m not dead yet. Who’s in charge here?”
“Me sir, Deputy Commander Oswald Birch,” said a nervous man with a thin moustache and eye that twitched as he saluted.
“Good to meet you, Birch. You’re fired.”
The man gulped. “Um, yes sir. May I know why?”
GK whacked him on the arm with his cane and pointed at the smoke from the hoverpod fires. “For this, you numbskull. How does a ragtag group of mutant children do this to a top secret Metrician facility? Did you even pursue them and destroy their pathetic little blimp?”
“No sir, we don’t have any aircraft left. They were blown up in the, er, melee. Plus we were waiting for orders,” said Birch.
“Orders!” roared GK. “Since when do you need orders to kill mutants!”
Birch began to reply but the general cut him off.
“It was a rhetorical question, you halfwit. Yang, place this man under arrest. He’s charged with being an Idiot in Charge.”
“That’s not an actual crime, sir,” coughed Yang.
GK glared at his assistant with a ferocity that made him look insane. “Well, make it one then. And get me Professor Chang, I didn’t come here to deal with break-ins. I have an army to inspect.”
Chapter 21 - Desert ambush
Afiz’s shaved head appeared above the basket and the twins giggled. With his squat body and round face, Afiz made a passable resemblance to Baldie – especially at fifty metres above the ground. And there’s nothing a scarf couldn’t fix, reckoned Nassim, who had tied a black cloth around his face.
“Arrrrrrrrrg! Surrender!” he shouted.
It had taken all day to set up the ambush. Afiz removed the biggest gun from the airship, mounting it on the shoulder of the valley entrance. Nassim was on the trigger. The twins were given a rifle each and by lunchtime were shooting cans against a cliff face. Sometimes they even hit one. Scruff spent the day building home-made grenades, using bundles of nails and screws tied around plastic bags of gunpowder. “We need the impression of an army, if we can’t have an actual army,” Afiz explained.
By late afternoon they were exhausted and sat down to a dinner of salted locusts and dried fruits. The bugs crunched satisfyingly but were old and tasted bitter. To help wash it down, Nassim made them try some old wine, but they screwed up their faces and spat it out. Adults are weird, they all agreed.
The sun set behind fiery clouds and Nassim slept without dreams – the first time in weeks. She rose at dawn, excited about the day ahead. The plan was for the airship to search for Baldie’s mob and fool them into following the craft back to ground zero, as Afiz named it. It bothered Nassim that she and the girls were left shielding their faces from the dust as the ship lifted off. Once again, the boys get the coolest jobs, she thought, as Scruff and Afiz gave a final wave and disappeared over the ridge line.
Nassim spent the next hours pacing between the cave entrance and the gun mount, checking and rechecking that the weapon was loaded, that the mechanism was oiled, that the sights were accurate. In frustration, she fired off a couple of rounds, obliterating the remains of an old goat carcass. Target practice, she told herself.
The truth was that the valley was full of ghosts for her. From the vantage on the hill she saw herself pulling water from the well and her aunt at the outdoor kitchen, fussing with her assortment of cooking equipment and ingredients. She was not an unkind woman, but an unspoken resentment existed between them. Nassim hated being stuck in the desert; her aunt was angry at having two more mouths to feed. At least Wadid was useful for hard labour.
Her mind turned to Wadid and Abaddon and she fell into a kind of reverie, when the sound of engines awoke her. In her daydream she’d not noticed the airship was now virtually overhead. Afiz was waving maniacally from the bow.
“Girls! Girls! Come quickly!” she shouted and sprinted with them to the rifles, and set them l
ying their bellies, guns loaded. Then she dashed across the valley to her own gun. Her heart beat hard and then gave an extra leap when she noticed a small plume of dust was following the airship. They’d fallen for it! The caravan must be only five or so minutes away, she figured. It wasn’t enough time to conspire with Afiz, who was still fifty metres above them. “You’re on your own,” she muttered and said a quick prayer.
Scruff was fast becoming an expert at manoeuvring the craft and it had just settled on the valley floor, its machine-gun pointing directly at the valley entrance, when the first truck rounded the bend, followed by the entire mob and their collection of vehicles.
Afiz had given strict instructions: “wait till they’d all arrived, wait till the leader got out and whatever you do wait till I give the signal!” All this waiting was driving Nassim mad. Already the first mutant had leapt down from the truck and was sauntering to the airship while the last wagons were rocking clumsily into the entrance.
“Come on, come on,” whispered Nassim as the leader hobbled closer and bandits piled out of the trucks. The leader was just ten metres from the airship when a rifle cracked across the valley and he stumbled, clutching his thigh with a surprised look on his face.
“Gritz!” cursed Nassim. One of the twins must have slipped. Nice shot though, she thought.
The machine gun erupted from the airship, sending the leader trembling backwards, his shirt pocked by red stains. The rest of the gang sprinted to their trucks. Scruff leapt out and ran to his collection of grenades while Afiz sprayed the caravan with bullets. The twins too peppered the bandits with rifle shots, occasionally hitting their mark with a yelp but mostly just creating confusion, with bandits diving for cover and clambering back into their trucks. Nassim was biding her time, waiting for the first bandit to climb behind the tank turret that sat menacingly behind the truck’s cab. Sure enough, a head and shoulders popped into her sights and she gently pulled the trigger releasing a brief burst of bullets that ended in a blur of red. Hands reached up to drag his body away and another head appeared, this time with a yellow cap, but Nassim simply repeated the exercise, dislodging the hat with a comical flip before amputating him from the shoulders up.
Road to Abaddon Page 17