Kimberley had made a large pot of tea as soon as she’d heard their return, and had set it down with the cups on the coffee table by the time that Peter returned. Some of the adults exchanged looks, but Johnson and Bufford both shrugged at each other as if to say that they wouldn’t keep the boy out of the loop anyway. Amber was different, but this little lad had the mind of a thirty year-old when it came to practical matters.
“We cleared a gun shop quite satisfactorily,” Johnson started, pouring himself a mug of black tea and dropping in two sugar lumps from the bowl beside the pot, “and most of a grocery shop too before we heard noises.”
“What kind of noises?” Kimberley asked eagerly, stalling the telling of the story and delaying it. The others, being all forces personnel, knew when to ask questions and when to shut up and listen. So too, it seemed, did Peter.
“Gunfire and engines. Military vehicles, but not ours. I’m certain of that.”
“They fired at me,” Enfield said without indignation or anger in his voice, just the facts of the matter. Hampton frowned. Kimberley gave a small gasp and Peter furrowed his brow as though trying to understand why anyone living would do that. He reached the answer quickly, as the majority of his experiences with other survivors were negative until he had met his current company.
“Who?” Hampton asked.
“Why?” Kimberley chimed in at the same time.
“Who, is uncertain other than the fact that one of them was on the island with us. That means that he either got separated from the main group or he chose to leave,” he explained, leaving out the name of his nemesis in case he betrayed how angry he was, “As for why, I can only assume they either thought Enfield was a dead’un, which is unlikely seeing as he was running and carrying a gun, or they just don’t like people seeing their business. Either way, we don’t want to meet them again.”
“So what do we do?” Hampton asked.
“We need to join up with the others again,” Johnson said, seeing nods of agreement ripple around the small group, “but I don’t see how we can find them until this bloody weather has passed.”
“Which will be many weeks yet, I think,” Astrid chimed in.
Silence descended on them, broken only by Peter struggling to pour himself a cup of black tea. Nobody moved to help him, signifying that they respected his independence and not that they didn’t care for him, and he sat back down to sip the hot liquid before offering his own opinion.
“There can’t be that many places they could be, surely?” his little eyes searched the assembled faces looking at him, “I mean, I don’t really know, but seeing as they are soldiers too, wouldn’t they think the same as you and find somewhere that they could stay?”
The adults exchanged looks. The concept was nothing really new to them, but hearing it come from his mouth made it a little more real in the moment. Truth be told, they had been busy concentrating on surviving and consolidating more than they had been thinking about searching for the rest of the survivors from the island.
“That’s true,” Kimberley said, “where would you take your people if you were in that position?”
Bufford looked at Johnson. He had been in that position; however, it had been in the hands of his captain and not the senior NCO, and he had only known part of the working logic at the time.
“We need maps,” he said, “and we can try to work out where they would have gone. We can also see about more supplies.”
“I’ll get on it,” Bufford said as he glanced to Astrid. She nodded her assent that she would help.
“So what did you get today?” Hampton asked, changing the subject.
“New toys,” Johnson answered, standing to fetch his new shotgun and handing it over for inspection.
“Nice,” the old sergeant said with relish, “universal door opener.”
“Exactly,” Johnson answered, seeing Peter’s curious gaze at the weapon. He knew the boy had his own gun, one that he had even modified by taking off the barrels and stock to make it small enough for him to carry and use. He had only pulled the trigger once, he had told him, but for such a young boy to have decapitated an enemy with a shotgun and be alright with it signified something of a change in the way they viewed children.
Enfield stood too, retrieving the gun slips and producing the big hunting rifle first and the small Ruger after.
“Plenty of bullets for these, too,” their sniper said.
“That looks a little, um…” Kimberley said, searching for the right word which wouldn’t cause offence, “small?”
“It’ll do fine for popping heads at medium range,” Enfield said, “plus it’s very quiet.”
“Quiet is good,” Peter said, feeling suddenly embarrassed as they all turned to look at him. “I mean,” he began, his face flushing with colour, “it’s just better to not be heard is all I’m saying…”
“No,” Astrid said, “Peter is correct in what he says. Quiet is indeed good.”
Peter smiled and relaxed a little, the worry of giving his opinion in front of these big and frightening people washing away and being replaced with something else which he hadn’t experienced before.
Acceptance? Pride? Belonging?
What he felt was totally alien to him, but he couldn’t explain the main reason he was afraid to give his opinion in front of them. It was because he had lived his whole life in fear of being struck without warning if he spoke when his parents had decided that he shouldn’t. The only problem with that was that he never knew when he was to stay silent until the first smack made contact with his skull. It was the reason he never stood within arm’s reach of a grown up when they spoke, even if none of them noticed. It was the reason he flinched at unexpected noises and movements. It was the reason he could read the temperature and mood of a room in seconds.
Peter was a survivor. He wasn’t born as such, but his life had moulded him into one. It had shaped him and trained him to be almost perfectly developed to survive the world as it now was. He was empathic to the point of being a chamaeleon; able to blend into invisibility just to stay safe.
“Of course he’s right,” Hampton said as he gave the boy a gentle pat on the shoulder with a meaty hand larger than the boy’s head, “wish we’d always had officers as smart as Peter here.” He beamed a smile at the boy who, for the first time in his life hadn’t flinched away from being touched by an adult. Peter smiled back.
“So where do we look?” Johnson said aloud to himself. Bufford got up, sifting through the paper maps on the shelves before grabbing a few and turning back to them.
“Grab a map and start looking,” he told them.
“Pete,” Enfield said as he leaned over the side of his chair to pick up the new rifle, “let’s leave them to it. You can help me sight this in if you like?”
Peter nodded, hiding the wider smile he felt creeping out from inside him as his brain tried to reign in his enthusiasm. He had never looked forward to anything before, never got excited about anything promised unless it was actually happening. Every so often, when one of his parents was drunk to the point of feeling magnanimous, he would be promised something that he wanted only for it to be forgotten about entirely when sobriety returned. On the rare occasions he had reminded them about such promises he had invited punishment or humiliation, so he had just given up looking forward to anything.
Walking beside the tall Royal Marine whose footsteps seemed to make no noise, his eyes kept darting to the short rifle he carried as the bubbling excitement of all young boys when given the chance to play with guns rose closer to the surface. He looked up at Enfield as they walked. The marine was twice his size but about the same relative build, which made him wonder how he had become a marine because they were supposed to be very strong and tough. He didn’t know how to ask the question, mostly because he didn’t know how Enfield would respond, so instead he asked what he needed him to do to help.
“I need you to spot for me,” Enfield told him, producing a small set of binoculars from a webbing pouch
and handed them down to him, “I need you to call out whether I’m left or right, up or down on the target.”
“What target?” Peter asked, his own feet travelling at a relative velocity of three to one to maintain the same pace.
“I’ve got one,” Enfield told him, “we just need something static to fix it to.”
He led them to the far end of the village, the one from which they didn’t regularly drive in and out of, and reached into the bag he was carrying to produce three white cardboard boxes which rattled, and a handful of small, black metal rectangles.
“These are the magazines,” he told Peter, “twenty rounds a piece, and they go in like this.” He picked up a short bullet from the box he’d flipped open and spun it in his hands so that the brass glittered in the dull daylight before he slid it into the recess and pressed it down with his thumb. Then he added another on top. “That’s two. Eighteen more.”
Peter nodded, his tongue protruding slightly from one side of his mouth as he concentrated, and he carefully loaded in more bullets as Enfield spoke.
“This doesn’t have a bolt, so I can’t bore-sight it first. That’s when you take the bolt out and line up the hole through the barrel with the target. After that you line up the sight and fire a shot.” He rested the gun over a sturdy wooden fence and brought out a contraption from the bag. He rested it over the barrel and twisted the end until the G-clamp held the barrel tight to the fence. Enfield looked along the length of the barrel and squinted, pointing it at a tree about fifty paces away.
“Stay here and watch my back?”
Peter met his eye and nodded, unsure what he would do if something happened when he was outside the safety of the barricades. Enfield climbed over, still barely making a sound as he moved like the adult version of Peter, and trotted away over the cold ground. He stopped at the tree, producing a rough-torn square of beige cardboard, bearing concentric circles around a solid central circle, and held it against the trunk of the tree before tapping at the corners with something. He scanned around before jogging back, skipping over the barricade with the faintest of protests from the springs of the car he mounted as he crossed it. Looking back at his work he squinted again and nodded to himself. Peter looked at the makeshift target, seeing that the circles were almost the same size as Enfield’s head had been when he was there, and he asked about it.
“Where did you get the target?”
“It’s off the side of the ration packs,” Enfield told him softly, “thoughtful of them to give us food wrapped in a target. Right,” the marine sniper told the boy as he bent to the rifle and changed the subject, “watch that target and tell me where the bullet hits.”
Peter raised the binoculars ready but still jumped in fright when the small rifle coughed and spat a bullet far sooner than he expected. He thought that it would take time to line up a shot like that, that it would need careful consideration, but the man just aimed and shot.
“Well?” Enfield asked after a brief pause.
“Oh,” Peter said hurriedly, “err, up and right?”
“How much by?” Enfield asked confusing him, as he could surely see the same thing through his scope.
“Um, like the same as my hand?”
“Flat hand or your fist?” Enfield asked him, condensing the boy’s information and teaching him how to describe it.
“A fist.”
“Good,” Enfield said, standing up and clicking the dials on the scope before bending his head back to the sight and twisting the clamp a little tighter to make sure the gun didn’t move when he fired it, “standby. Firing.”
The gun spat again, no rolling echo of the gunshot rippling across the landscape as he would expect from gunfire out in the open.
“You hit the black bit,” he told Enfield.
“Smack in the middle?”
“No… just above it.”
“On the centre line though?”
Peter looked hard as he thought about his answer. “Slightly up from the middle. Half a fist.”
Enfield made another adjustment and fired another shot, this one hitting dead centre.
“Bullseye!” Peter said, a little more loudly and excitedly than he meant to.
Enfield just smiled at him from the corner of his mouth in a cocky way as he spun the lever to release the G-clamp and free the gun.
“Now we see if that’s right,” he said, hefting the little rifle into his shoulder and leaning into the standing shooting position before squeezing off half a dozen shots in rapid succession. He stopped firing, looking down at Peter who still stared up at him.
“Well?”
Peter fumbled with the binoculars to look at the tree. As the picture came into focus he saw that the very centre of the black spot was a single ragged hole exposing flashes of damaged bark and the white of virgin wood beneath.
“Whoa…”
Enfield chuckled, lowering the rifle and dropping out the spent magazine before offering it to the boy.
“Your turn,” he said, seeing the glisten of happy tears in Peter’s eyes staring up at him.
Chapter 12
“Who the hell was it then?” Nevin asked Michaels angrily.
“What does it matter?” he responded, pausing halfway through pouring the rusty liquid from a crystal decanter to a matching tumbler. He waved the decanter by the neck to emphasise his point and added, “why can’t you just let it go?”
Nevin said nothing, chewing at his lip instead of answering.
“Ah,” Michaels said annoyingly, pausing again to take a gulp of the whisky before he went on, “you’re worried about it being our former colleagues, aren’t you?”
Again Nevin said nothing, which was an answer in itself.
“Look,” Michaels told him as he slumped into the leather chair by the fire, “chances are that they…” a knock at the door stopped his words as both men stared at the doorway. Their eyes followed the path of the young girl carrying a wicker basket full of logs over to the fire, with difficulty because of the weight. She dumped it down, readjusting it to keep it clear of the direct heat, then turned to give an overly sarcastic bow before she walked towards the door. Her actions showed deference, but her eyes promised a painful death if only she could manage it somehow. Both men shuddered internally, privately, at seeing how much she detested them.
Michaels looked at the fire, then at the new supply of logs, then glanced pointedly at Nevin and raised an eyebrow. Nevin returned his gaze for a few beats before letting out an exasperated sigh of defeat and putting down his own glass to bend and pick up a log before tossing it half-heartedly onto the flames. Michaels tutted but carried on.
“Chances are, they are either gone or are too far away to be encroaching. It was probably just another nobody, so don’t worry about it.”
“Easier said than done,” Nevin said, “I can’t imagine they’ll be happy to see me if our paths crossed again.”
“Why?”
Nevin hesitated. He still hadn’t revealed the full extent of his betrayal when he had fired through his own men and caused the mother of all explosions. He didn’t know how many of them had survived, if any, and if any of them had, then his name would be shit among the squadron. And with the Royal Marines. And the Royal Air Force helicopter crews. And the SAS and the SBS and the civilians. It wasn’t a list of enemies he wanted to think about for long, not if he wanted to sleep ever again.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “what do we do next?”
“Do?” Michaels asked after a hefty gulp of scotch and the ensuing grimace, “About what?”
“About who is out there?”
“It doesn’t matter who is out there,” Michaels said, his tone mocking and derogatory, “so stop flapping your bloody gums about it. We carry on as we are, we try not to freeze or starve over winter, we collect the rents, we keep our patrols going and if we want something, then we take it. You think there’s a government coming back? You think we’re expecting the Americans to roll in with tanks
to help us out? Wake up, man. They’ll be too busy keeping the outbreak firmly on this side of the Atlantic. After that, they’ll be busting their guts trying to keep it from crossing the Pacific. Nobody cares about us, get it into your head.”
~
Jessica kept her mouth tightly shut the entire time she was walking out of the main house. She walked slowly, taking measured steps with a neutral look on her face so that nobody knew how much she was seething. She walked tall, her head held high and her jaw set tight, and went straight back to the crowded room that she shared with the two women. The older one of them wasn’t there when she walked through the door, but the young woman was. She was lying back on the bed she occupied, her head in a book, and she looked up, puzzled as Jessica fast-walked in and threw herself face down onto the pillow on her bed. She drew in a muffled breath, filling her lungs to their full capacity, and she screamed as loud and long and hard as she could.
Ellie watched her as she fully extinguished the first scream and drew in a second breath, like water withdrawing from a beach ahead of a tsunami. Despite the muffling of the pillow, the second scream was still loud enough to hurt her ears in the small confines of their room. Ellie waited for it to subside, lowering her book and breathing in to make her own sound and ask if the girl was alright. Before she could ask, a third muted scream tore the room in two and made her wince until the sound faded away to nothing.
As suddenly as the invasive sound had started, it ended, and the girl sat up to wipe the tears from her face.
“You alright, my sweet?” Ellie asked the girl. Jessica looked at her, wearing a face that said she most definitely wasn’t alright, but it also seemed resigned to the fate that she was powerless to escape.
Escape, she thought, I need to escape.
“I’m fine,” she said instead, “just angry at them.”
“Which ‘them’?” Ellie asked with a small smile.
“The ‘alive’ them. The ones who keep saying how they are ‘keeping us safe’.” She added emphasis to the words with scorn, which went some way to masking how scared and helpless she felt because of them. Ever since the nurse had unstrapped her from that hospital bed, she had vowed to always be in control of her own life. They had run, had found more terrified people also running, had managed to escape the hospital grounds and it felt to her as though she had been running and hiding in silence for as long as she could recall. The group she was with had changed. Some left and some joined. Others died. By the time they were ‘rescued’ by the people living here, she was utterly exhausted by a life on the run, and at first she had relished sleeping for an entire day knowing that someone else was keeping watch, but after that initial elation she quickly recognised that something was very wrong.
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 10