Leaving the squaddies to their grim task I stepped away and walked back to the trucks. Before stepping out into the road I instinctively looked left and right for oncoming traffic, then paused, realised what I'd done, and laughed at my own stupidity. Then something registered, and I looked right again.
At the far end of the street stood a figure. I think it was a man but it was hard to be sure because they were dressed in a bright yellow hazmat suit, their glass visor glinting in the sun, hiding their face. The figure just stood there looking at us, seemingly content just to watch.
I looked back at the soldiers. Two of them had taken up positions in cover and were scanning the opposite buildings. I was pleased to notice that Col had chosen the bush to hide behind, which meant he was kneeling in my piss. Ha. The other three were inside the shop attempting to pull Barker down. None of them had seen our visitor. I looked back and now there were two of them, both in the bright yellow suits. And I could see that they both carried shotguns.
"Um, guys," I said quietly, but they didn't hear me. Snatches of their conversation floated across to where I stood.
"No, not that arm, dipshit…"
"Jesus, now I'm covered in guts…"
"Oi, careful I just washed this bloody uniform…"
I spoke more clearly. "Guys, we have company."
The nearest man on watch heard me and called the others. They dropped what they were doing and I heard Barker hit the floor with a thud. Weapons raised, they scattered to positions of cover and vantage, all the while keeping their eyes on our two -no, three now – visitors.
I turned to see where the soldiers were taking up positions, about to move myself, and over their shoulders I saw four more of the yellow-clad figures standing motionless outside a ruined hardware store at the other end of the road. Before I could shout a warning, one of them raised a megaphone to his visor and a tinny voice echoed up the wrecked street.
"You shall be cleansed," he said flatly, his voice altered by a distorter that made him sound like a Dalek. "All shall be cleansed."
"Ah shit, cleaners," yelled the squaddie nearest to me. "Masks!"
"They're in the bloody trucks," yelled someone else.
Then there was a dull pop, I heard something metal hit the tarmac, and then a soft hiss.
There was a second's silence before I heard Col shout "gas!" and then I ran like hell for the truck where Rowles and Caroline were hiding. A cloud of thick yellow smoke billowed out from the area where the soldiers had taken up positions. I heard screams and then indiscriminate gunfire. A burst of rounds whipped past my head, punching holes in the nearest truck's canvas covering.
The hazmat guys just remained where they were.
Staying just ahead of the drifting cloud, I reached the truck and looked inside. Empty. They must have slipped away. No time to look any closer, the thick yellow cloud was nearly at me. I ran for the opposite side of the road and straight through the shattered doors of a branch of Lloyd's Bank. I was so panicked that it was only once I was inside that it occurred to me to look for tripwires. And there one was, about a centimetre from my right toe. Unfortunately I was still moving and my left foot was just about to hit the thin metal strip. I dived forward, clipping the wire as I did so. I hit the damp, mouldy carpet hard and heard the clang of something big and metal above my head. I rolled on to my back and saw enormous metal jaws, cut from what looked like car bonnets. It was a sort of huge, upside down mantrap and it would have taken my head clean off.
"They really don't like giving overdrafts," said a boy's voice to my right.
"You armed?" I asked.
"Natch," said a girl's voice to my left.
"Spare?"
"Catch."
I caught the browning semi-automatic handgun, chambered a round and sprang to my feet.
"There a back way out of here?"
"Nope," replied Rowles. "Already checked. How d'you know we were in here?"
"I didn't."
"Cool, woman's intuition," said Caroline.
"Yeah, right," Rowles laughed.
"Enough," I snapped. "Quiet."
We listened but could hear no noise at all from the street outside. The shooting was over. Through the door I could see the cloud of gas had nearly dispersed and was being blown towards the other side of the road. As the mist cleared a figure emerged. It was Col, with his hands over his face, staggering like a blind man. He walked into a car and his hands came away from his face. taking most of the flesh with them. His cheekbones shone white in the sunlight as he slumped forward across the car and lay still.
"I think I'm gonna puke," said Caroline.
"Are they all dead?" asked Rowles.
"Looks like it," I replied. "But Sanders and another one, Patel, they're off doing a recce. They should have heard the gunfire. They'll be back any minute."
"And do they have gasmasks?" asked Caroline. "'Cause if not…"
"Sanders is SAS. He'll sort it. We just have to sit tight and wait for…"
A yellow suited figure stepped into the doorway holding a gas grenade in his left hand.
"You shall be cleansed," he said.
And he pulled the pin.
Chapter Eleven
The men in yellow suits had come to the school during The Culling Year, a month after we closed the gates and instituted quarantine.
They pulled up to the gate in their trucks and got out, sealed inside their protective shells, eyes hidden in shadow beneath Perspex visors, mouths covered by bulbous gas masks. There were four of them, and two had cylinders strapped to their backs. Long tubes snaked out of the cylinders to metal spray guns with tiny pilot lights flickering beneath the nozzles. Flamethrowers.
We'd heard reports of their activities. They were roaming the country in teams, burning any houses that contained dead bodies, carting away anyone they found alive. We'd been waiting for them. Bates was still running the school then, so he and I went down to the gate to talk to them. We took guns.
"We hear you've got kids cooped up in there. Any of them blood type O-Neg?" asked the spokesman, his voice distorted by the mask.
"A couple, why?" I replied.
"They'll need to come with us, Miss. Government orders. All O-Neg citizens are to be taken to special hospitals. They're immune, you see."
"These children are under our protection," said Bates. "They're going nowhere."
"Look, don't make us get rough, mate," said the weary official. "They won't be harmed, they're immune, ain't they? We just need to take some blood samples and then take them to a special camp where all the O-Negs we round up are being looked after. We keep 'em safe, okay? Either of you O-Neg?"
Neither of us replied.
"If you're not, then you're going to die unless you got one of these," he gestured to his suit. "Simple as that. It's airborne. Animals carry it, birds carry it, it's in the water, and it's in the rain. There's no escape. Quarantine won't work. And who'll look after the kids then, eh? Best thing for everyone if you just hand 'em over to us."
"And if we don't?" said Bates, nervously levelling his rifle at the quartet.
"We have the authority to take them by force."
"There are two of us with guns, and there are more back in the main building," I said. "There are only four of you and two flamethrowers, which don't reach as far as bullets. I don't fancy your chances."
We stood there, facing each other.
"You really don't want to pick a fight with us," said the spokesman eventually. His voice was quiet, the threat clear.
"I think we just did," I replied.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Miss."
I gripped my gun harder, waiting for the inevitable fight. But it never came.
"We'll be back," said the spokesman. "You can count on it."
And they got back in the truck and drove away.
We spent that night and the whole of the next day erecting defences at the main gate, breaking the weapons out of the armoury and rallying the few boys sti
ll not sick.
But they never returned. They were the final representatives of bureaucracy and government we ever encountered. When they left, they took the last traces of the old order with them. Or so we thought.
We weren't sure whether they encountered some other group who gunned them down, or they succumbed to the virus.
But as I stood in that bank another possibility occurred to me.
Maybe they just went mad.
The cleaner who stood in the doorway had seen one unarmed woman run into the building. He wasn't prepared for three of us, with guns. We all opened fire at once. The blood flowed slickly down his yellow protective suit as he jerked and shook, then he collapsed in a heap. The grenade rolled forward a few inches then stopped on the threshold.
Without thinking I jumped up, ran forward, and kicked it as hard as I could. I was always more of a netball girl, but Johnny Wilkinson would have been proud of me. The grenade soared away across the street and landed in a bin. It popped and a column of evil poison smoke rose up, only for the wind to take it and blow it away from us.
I ducked back inside the bank, knowing that our victory was temporary.
"We need to get out of here now," I shouted.
"This is a bank," said Rowles, exasperated. "The back door is armoured, we can't kick it down."
"Shit."
"There is the vault," offered Caroline, sounding scared for the first time since I'd met her.
"The what?" I asked.
"There's a vault, a walk-in thing," she explained. "It's not huge, but it's probably airtight."
"And once we're in there how do we get out? Or breathe?" said Rowles.
"Fine," she shouted resentfully. "So what's your plan, genius?"
I didn't have time to waste watching a lover's tiff. "No, that's a good idea Caroline," I said, "and it might work as a last resort but…"
"Look!" screamed the girl.
I turned to see a yellow arm withdrawing from the doorway and a gas grenade rolling towards us, making a nasty squelching noise on the sodden carpet.
"Up!" I shouted. We ran through the door that said 'No Entry' and headed for the stairs. Even as we scrambled up that narrow staircase I knew that all I'd done was buy us a few minutes. We were trapped. Where the hell was Sanders?
This building was one of the few new ones on the main street of town, and it only had two storeys. We came to a landing and a series of non-descript offices so dull that nobody had even bothered to trash them.
"There has to be a fire escape," I said. "Check all the rooms."
None of the windows had been shattered, so cracking open these doors was like walking into a time capsule, breathing pre-Cull air, still with the faint tang of PVC chairs, air conditioning and carpet fumes. One of the desks had a framed picture of two blonde toddlers on it, next to a desk tidy full of neatly arranged pens. I didn't know which was creepier – booby trapped Woolies or this strange museum.
"Here," shouted Rowles. Caroline and I ran to the office he was in, which had a fire exit with a push-bar in the wall facing away from the street. Caroline and I stepped back and raised our weapons then I nodded to Rowles, who crouched down and shoved the door open.
The exit led on to a metal staircase in a dim courtyard. So dim, that the figure standing outside was just a silhouette. I held my fire, unsure, but Caroline panicked and squeezed off two rounds. I yelled at her to hold her fire but it was too late.
The figure grunted, staggered back against the metal railing and toppled backwards into space. We heard him hit the concrete below with an awful thud.
"Dammit Caroline," I yelled. "We have no idea who that was."
"But…"
I ushered her and Rowles out of the door and they clattered down the fire escape. As I turned to pull the door closed behind me I caught a flash of yellow on the landing and fired through the plasterboard walls at where I thought the cleaner was standing. I didn't wait to see if I'd hit him.
I pelted down the loud metal steps and found Rowles and Caroline standing, appalled, over the body of Patel, the squaddie Sanders had taken with him. Caroline had got him clean in the chest. He was stone dead.
In the dank concrete-floored courtyard, with the interior walls of buildings rising all around us, their small staircase windows looking out on this joyless scene, I could see her face was ashen white. Rowles was holding her hand tightly.
"He must have been coming to help us," she said softly.
"No time," I barked as I reached down and grabbed Patel's machine gun.
Then there was a loud clang. And another, and another, as something metal bounced down the fire escape behind us.
At the same time we heard the distant echo of gunfire from the main street. That had to be Sanders.
I threw my arms wide and herded the children towards a small brick alley that led beneath one of the buildings and out of the courtyard. As they ran I turned, slipped the safety off the machine gun, and sprayed the fire escape with bullets, hoping to discourage pursuit. Then I ran after the kids as I heard the loud hiss of escaping gas behind me.
We emerged into a car park littered with wrecked vehicles and shopping trolleys. But no cleaners, thank God. I strained to hear the gunfire and tried to identify where it was coming from. As soon as I was sure that it was coming from our left I turned and ran right, urging the children ahead of me as we ran behind the row of buildings.
"I think we're parallel to the main street," I explained as we ran. "If we can get to the opposite end of the street to Sanders we might be able to trap the cleaners in a crossfire."
The buildings ended at the car park entrance road, which turned right to rejoin the main street. I flattened my back against the wall and indicated for the kids to do the same, then I risked a quick glimpse around the corner. Nothing but a burned-out bus.
I turned to the children.
"Rowles, you stay here and make sure we aren't followed. Caroline, with me."
Why did I do that? I've asked myself a hundred times since then. Why didn't I take Rowles? But at that instant I was sure that it was safer to come with me, to approach the cleaners from behind with the element of surprise. I was certain that Rowles would be in more danger than she would be, and I knew he could cope with that.
So I ran around the corner, waving the traumatised girl along behind me. Guns raised, we moved slowly along the side of what had once been a small branch of Boots. There were sporadic bursts of gunfire ahead and to our right, so it sounded as if Sanders was still in the fight at the far end of the street.
I reached the next corner and again flattened my back against the wall and glanced around. The trucks were about thirty metres away. The gas had cleared and the bodies of the dead soldiers lay on the pavement and in the road.
Beyond the trucks were three cleaners, crouched behind available cover – a car, a brick flower bed, a phone booth. All were now armed with machine guns taken from the squaddies. They leaned out, took their shots, and then ducked back under cover, obviously involved in a firefight. But none of them spared a glance behind them.
I turned to Caroline.
"Okay," I said. "We go quickly and quietly. Move from car to car, stay in cover as much as possible. When we're close I'll give the signal and you take out the one on the right. I've got the machine gun, so I'll take the other two. OK?"
She nodded but I could tell she was having to work very hard to keep herself under control.
"It wasn't your fault, Caroline," I said gently. "But we can talk about it later. Right now I need you to focus on what we have to do. Can you do that?"
She nodded. "Yes, Miss."
I put my arm around her shoulder squeezed. "Good girl. Now come on."
We moved out of cover and ran into the road. It took us only a minute or so to get close to the cleaners. They were so preoccupied, and the noise of gunfire was so loud, that they had no idea they were being stalked. Both Caroline and I, on opposite sides of the road, took up firing positions behind ca
rs.
I was just about to give the signal when it all went wrong.
There was a burst of gunfire from behind us and to our right. I ducked instinctively before I realised it was echoing across from the car park. A cleaner must have bumped into Rowles. One of the men in front of us heard the exchange of fire and turned to look back. He saw Caroline. I turned to the girl and yelled at her to get down and as I did so I saw, over her shoulder, another cleaner emerging from the bank.
And then there were bullets everywhere. The one in the bank doorway raised his shotgun as the man in front of us turned and raised his machine gun. Caroline, unaware of the cleaner to her right, opened fire as I dived sideways and shot around Caroline at the man in the bank.
Caroline hit her man. He missed her and fell backwards, shot in the arm. I hit the man with the shotgun and his arms flew up as his gun went off. This saved Caroline's life; only the edge of the shotgun's pellet spray hit her, and those pellets were slowed by the glass in the car behind which she was standing.
But it was enough. She fell, screaming.
I continued firing and the cleaner in the bank disappeared back into the gloom, full of bullets.
The two remaining cleaners turned to see what was going on. One of them foolishly allowed his head to pop ever so slightly out of cover. A single shot from Sanders, still out of sight down the street, took the top of his skull off. I rolled on to my back, brought the gun up to my tummy and turned the middle cleaner's chest into mincemeat before he could get a shot off.
That left the wounded one. I stood to see where he was, but he was out of it – the bullet had hit an artery and he was lying in a widening pool of blood, not long to live, no threat to anyone.
I ran to Caroline. She was lying in the road, breathing hard, teeth gritted, whimpering.
Before I could bend down I heard pounding boots approaching and I spun, gun at the ready. A yellow suit passed in front of my eyes but the helmet was hanging down. It was Sanders. He casually put a bullet in the wounded cleaner's head as he ran past, without even slowing down.
"Easy, Kate, easy."
Operation Motherland ac-6 Page 14