School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  “Power up the generator,” shouted the general, and the man who’d brought me here emerged from the shadows and stepped outside. A moment later there was the sound of a large engine spluttering into life, faltering momentarily, then finding its rhythm and settling into its work.

  “Strap him in.”

  I felt strong hands grab me and force me towards the chair. I tried to resist, I screamed my furious defiance, but they were too strong and too many. One of them punched me hard across the face and my senses reeled. Then I was sitting in the chair, and my arms were forced down and strapped in place. My shirt was cut off and my boots removed. Then the straps were fastened across my chest, forehead and legs. My hands and feet rested on solid gold as I felt someone taking an electric shaver to my head, shaving off all my hair and smearing my raw scalp with conducting gel.

  The sun was gone now, and twilight was fading fast. I heard someone pull a switch, and arc lights burst into life, flooding the room with cold white brilliance. My father, able to see me again, let out a feral cry of agony and screamed his fury into the echoing dome above us, where it reverberated and rebounded, briefly amplifying his defiance before fading away into hopeless, beaten sobbing.

  The general stepped in front of me and said: “Any last words, son?”

  “I am not your fucking son.”

  “So be it.”

  Then he crouched down beside a junction box and pulled a big red lever, releasing the current to fry me alive.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “HE GIVES THEM a choice,” Tariq had said, as we sat on the roof the night before.

  “A choice?”

  “Of execution.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “No. You can be shot, hung…”

  “Hanged.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, it’s hanged, not hung.”

  “Oh. Your father said hung.”

  “Yeah, well. Hanged. I got this scar on my neck when I was hanged. I like to be grammatically correct about the forms of execution I survive. I’m a pedant. Sue me.”

  “Okay,” said Tariq, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, you can be shot, hanged, injected, or he’s got this electric chair he’s made.”

  “Made?”

  “Yeah, out of a big generator, a dining chair, some wires and a lot of gold.”

  “Shit.”

  “Your dad is going to be executed tomorrow. Blythe has decided he won’t break, so he gave him the choice.”

  “Shot,” I said immediately.

  “Um, yeah. How did you know?”

  “Dunno, just seems like the one he’d choose.”

  “But we have a plan to rescue him and it depends on him changing his mind and sitting in the chair. Unfortunately our inside man can’t get a message to him and tell him to change his mind.”

  “So your plan is, what, I get captured and tell Dad to change his mind?”

  “Perhaps. But I think it will not be so easy. Blythe will try and use you to get your father to break. So you may have to improvise.”

  “Okay. No, wait, hang on. Your plan is that I get captured and then give Blythe an excuse to kill me — but not there and then, later, at his leisure — and I choose the chair?”

  “Yes.” He saw the look on my face. “I know.”

  “That is a fucking useless plan.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And who is your inside man?”

  “Oh, that’s the best bit…”

  AS THE LEVER slammed home, the arc lights dimmed and flickered.

  My back went rigid, I gritted my teeth as my eyes bulged out of my head. The veins in my temples strained to bursting point and the muscles in my neck stood out like ropes. I shook uncontrollably in the grip of the current.

  Then I turned my head to General Blythe, smiled, winked, and said “gotcha!”

  The lights went out and darkness fell, but not for long.

  The chain of high explosives that ringed the walls of the compound exploded one by one, like a string of enormous firecrackers, lighting the room with a blinding orange strobe.

  I saw the man who’d turned on the generator run into the room, pistol raised. In his early twenties, dark skinned, of medium height and build, he was nothing to look at. Just another shaven haired grunt made anonymous by the shapeless uniform and regimented body language. But his face was a terrible mixture of fury and pain.

  He picked off the guards one by one, calm and efficient, his gunshots timed exactly with the explosions, so it took the guards — those not already dead — a few moments to realise what was happening. And a few moments was all it took.

  When the explosions finally ended, he and Blythe were the only men standing in the room, cast into sharp relief by the flickering fires that now raged outside.

  “Put down the gun, son,” said the general.

  “I’m not your son,” said the man with the gun.

  “Yes, David, you are and you will do as I say.”

  “Screw you, Dad.”

  “AND WHO THE fuck are you?” I asked the guard with the book.

  “David Blythe,” he said. “I’m the one…”

  “I know who you are. I thought you couldn’t get a message to my dad, so what are you doing here guarding him?”

  “He’s been moved. My dad’s taking one last pop at him.”

  “Where?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. Too many of them. You’d just get yourself killed.”

  “I thought that was the whole idea,” I said drily.

  “How the heck did you get down here?”

  “Scratch two of your dad’s goons.”

  “Holy… well, at least that should have sealed the deal. If you let me take you in, I reckon Dad’ll give you the choice.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Tariq trusts me.”

  “I’m still not entirely sure I trust Tariq.”

  “Look, I’ve spent three days setting this up, at great risk,” he told me. “Sooner or later someone’s going to notice that I’ve been rewiring things. We get one shot at this. And Dad’s been talking about new orders, hinting that we’re moving out soon. If we wait too long, he may be too busy to waste time with games; he might just shoot you both in the head. We have to do this now.”

  “I do not like this plan.”

  “Complain about it if you survive. Now give me the gun. Thank you.”

  THE CRISP CHATTER of automatic weapons fire drifted across the darkened compound as Tariq and the others fought their way in. All they had to do was create a diversion for a few minutes and allow Dad, David and myself time to escape.

  “Sar’nt Keegan, untie him,” yelled David.

  Dad was already working at the straps that bound me, but it was slow going with only one useable hand.

  “What is going on, son?” Blythe sounded calm and reasonable, even indulgent, as if this was all just some little misunderstanding that could be sorted out with milk, cookies and a moral homily from Papa.

  “You’re not my father. Not any more.”

  “I assure you, I am.”

  “My dad’s a soldier, not a butcher. The man who raised me doesn’t massacre civilians, impale people for fun, strap kids into electric chairs. My father was a man of honour and principle, proud to serve his country. You’re just a madman.”

  My head and chest were free.

  “David, I’m just following orders,” said the general. “Same as I’ve ever done.”

  “Bullcrap. What orders? Who the heck is there left to give you orders? And even if there were, these orders are illegal.”

  The general shook his head. “That’s not my judgement to make.” Was that regret I could detect in his voice?

  “You told me once that a soldier’s greatest duty is to protect the people from their rulers,” shouted his son. “Refusing to obey an illegal order is a soldier’s highest duty. That’s what you told me. Remember that, Dad?”

  My right hand came
free and I started loosening the strap on my left.

  “I surely do,” said the general. “But the world has changed, son. New laws, new rules.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “That would make you a fool, and I didn’t raise a fool.”

  With both hands free I got to work on my feet.

  “Weapons,” I said, and Dad nodded, moving away to salvage guns and knives from the corpses of the guards.

  There was a huge explosion somewhere nearby. The room shook and my eyes were dazzled by a flash of pure white light. When my vision returned, the general had gone.

  “Shit, where’d he go?” I yelled.

  David just stood there, gun still raised, dazed by the enormity of his betrayal.

  “He just vanished,” shouted the young man, surprised. But I’d seen how fast his father could move. I was amazed he’d chosen to run rather than fight.

  We urgently needed to be anywhere else.

  As the last strap came free I leapt out of that awful chair. I held out my hands for a gun, but Dad dropped the weapons to the floor and grabbed me, holding me in a tight, choking embrace and kissing my head.

  He muttered over and over: “Thank God, thank God.”

  I squirmed free, embarrassed and annoyed by his show of emotion; we didn’t have time for this. I held his good hand in both of mine.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “So you’re giving the orders now, huh?” he said, shaking his head in wonder.

  I wanted to say “Can we bond later, yeah? When there’s less chance of sudden, bloody death? That okay with you?” But I decided to go with the more laconic “Looks that way.”

  I bent down and picked up an M16, cocking it as I stood. I handed a sidearm to Dad.

  “You still able…”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  At that moment Tariq came haring through the door, bullets churning the ground behind him, and yelled: “RUN!”

  He ran right through us and kept going, so we turned and followed him, scattering the chunks of plaster that had been knocked free from the ceiling and walls by the earth shattering explosions. At the rear of the entrance hall was a sweeping marble staircase and Tariq made to climb it. David shouted at him not to, and he took the lead, dodging right and taking us to ornate double doors behind the stairs. These led into a kind of sitting room, empty except for one painting of Saddam on to which someone had felt-tipped a noose, and a large cock and balls squirting into the dead dictator’s face.

  David held one door open as we all ran through it, and then raked the hall behind us with fire to discourage pursuit.

  “Where?” shouted Dad.

  “This way,” replied David breathlessly, and ran to the corner of the room. In the half light I would never have noticed the door ring, but David had planned this well, and he went straight to the hidden door, pulled it open and ushered us through into a dark passage.

  I was last through, and as I passed the threshold I heard a metallic clatter from behind me which, although new to me, I instantly realised was the sound of grenades bouncing across marble. I grabbed the door and pulled it closed just in time. A deafening roar, amplified by the cold stone acoustics of the enormous, empty room, filled my senses and flung me backwards.

  The door held.

  David reached across me and slid a bolt home, locking it behind us. Then he leant down, helped me to my feet, and dragged me away into the depths of the unlit passageway.

  “Lee!” hissed Dad urgently.

  “I’m all right,” I replied.

  “Ahead thirty metres, then turn left and up the stairs,” said David loudly. I dimly heard Tariq give a grunt of acknowledgement somewhere ahead of us.

  We made our way forward in the pitch darkness as quickly as we could.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You saved my life.”

  David said nothing. I wondered which he was regretting most — betraying his father, or not shooting him when he had the chance.

  We soon reached a door, and huddled together, lit by the chink of light that gleamed through the tiny crack that outlined its frame.

  “This leads into a private bedchamber,” whispered David. “Uday would bring his whores here in secret. It should be unoccupied, but you never know. Once I open the door we run to the balcony. It looks out over the river, and over the wall. There’s a ladder under the bed. I’ll get it; we lay it across the gap, walk over the wall and drop down. Clear?”

  “And if the room is occupied?”

  “Then, Sergeant, we have a fight on our hands. Everyone ready?”

  There was the sound of four guns being cocked and then David counted down from three. We burst into the room, guns waving.

  “Clear,” said Dad. I got to the balcony first, and looked out into the night. I couldn’t see much because the balcony looked out of the compound across the waterway. There was less gunfire than before. It was coming in sporadic bursts now, somewhere off to my right, from a building that stood close to where one of the bombs had exploded. I could see the riverside wall was ablaze, flames licking out of the empty window frames. Tariq had only a few people left to him after last week’s massacre. The plan was that they would stay outside and lay down covering fire at the points where the wall was breached, that way the Yanks wouldn’t know which breach we planned to exit by. We would go across the wall here and then we and the rest of the gang would simply melt away into the darkness. It was a good plan, but it had one fatal flaw.

  “Where is it?” hissed Tariq urgently, behind me. I turned to see the three of them standing by the bed. No ladder.

  “I don’t know,” said David. “It was here this morning. Someone must have taken it.”

  “Fuck,” said Tariq, succinctly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. What now?”

  “Can we jump it?” asked Dad.

  I shook my head. “It would be suicide. Options? David, you know the layout of this place. Where’s the nearest breach in the wall and how do we get there?”

  “Two hundred metres east. I set a charge near the swimming pool.”

  “Okay then,” said Dad, looking for the door. “Hang on. Where’s the door?”

  “There isn’t one,” replied David. “Secret bedroom, remember? The passage is the only way in or out.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Who the fuck builds a secret chamber with only one entrance?”

  “The Ba’ath party,” said Tariq, “never could do a damn thing properly.”

  “So you mean we’re trapped?” asked Dad, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” said David.

  “And how long before someone figures out where we are?” I asked.

  “Not long.”

  “Then we have to go out the window.”

  “You said it was too high,” protested the Iraqi.

  “He didn’t say anything about jumping,” said Dad, smiling. Weird, but that moment, when he read my mind before the others, made me feel closer to him than all the hugging and wailing a few minutes earlier.

  “We climb,” I said.

  One of the good things about the palace compound was that the buildings were as ornate as they could possibly be. It wasn’t hard to climb up on to the roof using all the elaborate cornices, cupolas and jutty-out bits. Tariq went first, then me. Then David gave Dad a boost while Tariq and I pulled him up. David was still outside on the wall, perched on the ledge above the balcony, reaching for the lip of the roof when Uday Hussein’s secret fuck pad was blown to shit by grenades.

  The shockwave dislodged him and he began to topple backwards. I leaned out and grabbed his flailing right hand, pulling him back in. He scrambled up, flinging himself on to the roof. Almost immediately we heard someone run out on to the balcony and shout “clear!” I silently mouthed “close”. David nodded and mimed back “thank you”. I smiled and patted his shoulder.

  The flat roof was littered with discarded bits of stone, half cut rolls of waterproo
f tar stuff and other assorted junk left behind by the builders responsible for this architectural abortion. We moved away from the edge so we couldn’t be seen from below.

  “Now they’re going to be confused,” whispered Tariq grinning.

  “I hope so,” replied Dad. “Because if they figure out where we are, they’ll just blow up the building, or worse, set a fire and leave us up here to burn.”

  That shut us all up for a moment, and in the silence we all realised the same thing; the gunfire had stopped. Tariq’s forces had fled, been captured or killed.

  We were on our own, trapped on a roof in the middle of a compound swarming with people who wanted to kill us.

  “I told you I hated this plan,” I said.

  THERE WAS LITTLE we could do but wait.

  From our vantage point we could see that the area was heavily patrolled, plus there was a team sorting out David’s creative rewiring of the backup generator, so the building was a hive of activity. Come daylight, things would start to return to normal. This part of the compound was usually pretty quiet, said David; the main activity was all focused on the barracks, supply dump and vehicle store, about half a mile away on the compound’s northern side.

  “It may sound counter-intuitive,” he said, “but we’ve got a better chance of sneaking out in broad daylight tomorrow than we do now.”

  And so we decided to get some sleep. I was just clearing a space to lie down when Dad came over to me and sat beside me.

  “I’ll take first watch, keep an eye out,” he said.

  “Okay,” I replied.

  There was an awkward silence. I don’t think either of us knew what to say to each other.

  “When I last saw you, you were a just a schoolboy. It was all Doctor Who, Grand Theft Auto and wondering if you were going to snog that girl from the high school, Michelle, wasn’t it?”