School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  “That’s gonna stain,” says Lee with a smile.

  WHEN THE MEETING’S adjourned, the inner circle all head back to their allotted tasks. Lee is working in the garden today, Jack is doing an inventory of the armoury, Tariq is teaching creative writing to a classroom full of impressionable teenage girls who hang on his every word. John teaches PE and survival skills, but has a free day. He stays in his seat until the others have left, then leans forward earnestly.

  “Good move, Jane,” he says.

  “But?”

  “I want to set clear chain of command in the field. We’ve not gone looking for a fight in a long time and I want to be sure everybody knows how things work.”

  “I’ve told you before John, in here I’m the boss. But in the field you’re in charge.”

  “And you’ll have no trouble taking orders from me?” he asks, slightly dubious.

  “None. You’re a soldier. I’m a… I dunno what I am. I used to be a doctor, then I was a matron. Now, I suppose I’m a headmistress. Either way, you’ve more combat experience and training than all the rest of us put together. It’s only right that you take charge when we’re in action.”

  He nods, biting his lip. I can sense an unasked question.

  “Do you think they’re ready?” I ask eventually.

  He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replies. “Jack’s pretty nimble on his leg. He’s not going to win any 100 metre sprints, but he’ll be fine. Tariq can still shoot straight and the claw’s a nasty weapon if needed.”

  “And Lee?”

  He pauses, trying to frame his reply correctly. “The limp’s almost imperceptible, his arm doesn’t have full movement, but again, it’s not a handicap. Physically, I think he’s as healed as he’s ever going to be.”

  “But psychologically?”

  “He worries me.”

  “Still? It’s been two years since Salisbury.”

  “But he won’t talk about it. Anything that happened between The Cull and Salisbury is off limits.”

  “And that bothers you?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “No,” I say firmly. “He wants to move on. I’ve told you everything I can about what happened during the year Mac was in charge, and Tariq filled you in on events at Salisbury. You know the facts. He was so angry all the time but it’s faded now. He’s calmer.”

  “I think that’s got more to do with you than anything else,” says John eventually. I just smile and he doesn’t pursue the point. “Anyway, I want you to keep an especially close eye on him while we’re out there. PTSD can manifest in unexpected ways. He’s been fine here, it’s true, but this is a sheltered environment and somewhere he feels safe. I was worried when he started going on field trips, but they’ve all gone smoothly. My point is he’s not been tested. It’s just possible he may fall to pieces the first time someone takes a shot at him. Or worse, see red and fly into danger without a second thought.”

  “I will, but I think you’re worrying over nothing.” It’s a complete lie. Everything he’s just said I’ve been thinking too. If I could think of a way to keep Lee out of danger, I’d take it. He’s earned the break. But he’d be insulted and would insist on coming anyway so in the end it would probably do more harm than good. “Not exactly a crack squad of elite forces are we?” I say with a smile. “A one legged boy, a hook-handed man, a partially deaf limping potential headcase and a matron.”

  He sits back and crosses his arms. “Took out the whole US Army didn’t we? I reckon a bunch of kidnappers won’t be too much trouble.”

  But we both know it’s bravado.

  “While I’ve got you alone, John,” I say hesitantly. “Are you… I mean… me and Lee… is it?”

  “Not my business,” he says firmly. “He’s 18.”

  “You don’t mind, though?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to me.”

  He sighs heavily and his shoulders sag. For a moment the mask slips and I can see concern on his face. But it’s not an unfriendly look.

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “All right then,” he says. “I think you’re gorgeous and clever and the best possible thing that could happen to my son right now.”

  “I hate to say this again, but… but?”

  And then he says something that in one fell swoop fucks me up more than I could have imagined possible.

  “Jesus, Jane, you don’t half remind me of his mother when she was your age.”

  He rises from his chair, puts a hand on my shoulder for a moment, then leaves.

  I sit there for on my own a long, long time.

  God, I could kill a cuppa.

  I WORRY ABOUT the perishability of rubber.

  We’ve got a huge great pallet of condoms that we lifted from an abandoned warehouse. I remember when we found them, back on a scavenging trip when Mac was still in charge. I insisted we bring them along. At first Lee got a bit embarrassed — he was fifteen, after all — and then a bit annoyed.

  “Why the hell would we want them?” he asked me.

  I told him he’d understand eventually. I think he thought I was making fun of him, but I was beginning to worry about a residential school full of teenage boys and girls and the difficulty of stopping them shagging like rabbits every time they were out of a teacher’s earshot.

  Once I was in charge, I organised sex education classes and then made the condoms available to any child who wanted them. No age limit, no questions asked. Simply put, the alternative was lots of teenage mums. I may favour home births, birthing pools and all that jazz but if there are complications I’ve not got the kit to deal with them.

  In post-Cull England, childbirth was once again almost certain to become a big killer of young women. I felt sure that sooner or later we’d hear of a communal birth centre being set up somewhere; it was inevitable. But until then, I wanted to keep pregnancies to a minimum, and sex ed. and free condoms seemed a pragmatic approach.

  We’ve only had one unwanted pregnancy so far and thankfully the birth was textbook. Sharon from Bournemouth has a little boy called Josh and she’s not telling anyone who the father is, although everyone knows it’s a spotty little tyke called Adrian.

  This baby did something I’d not expected. It drew us all closer together, unified the school. Josh somehow became communal property, raised not by Sharon, although I ensured she remained primary carer, but by the school as a whole.

  The first time he crawled was during breakfast. He took off down the aisle between the tables to a huge round of applause and cheers from the assembled kids. Clearly, he’s meant for the stage.

  It was a special moment.

  As the common room fills up for the evening’s DVD I think of Josh and the effect he’s had on us. What would the school do if he were taken? I don’t mean if he died. It would be awful, but we’re all familiar with death by now, and another reality of post-Cull England was that infant mortality was going to soar to… well, to the kind of levels seen in pre-Cull Africa. Death happens, you get over it, you move on.

  I mean if he was snatched, spirited away, never to be seen again. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  I dwell on this for two reasons.

  Most importantly because the sell-by date on the condoms has just expired.

  But more immediately, because children like Josh have been disappearing from homes and villages across the South-East for the last year or so. At first only a few, then more and more frequently and, after the incident at High Rocks, more violently. Someone is running an organised kidnapping ring and it’s kids they’re after. Chances are they’ll eventually come for St Mark’s.

  I’m not a mother yet, I may never be. But these kids are all mine, in a way. And if someone’s going to come and try to take them away at gunpoint, I’m going to stop them, or die trying.

  Protecting them means leaving the school grounds, taking the fight to our as yet anonymous enemy. I’ve not left t
he grounds since I arrived here in a wheelchair, broken and battered after my time with the American Army. I don’t want to leave. I have a kind of agoraphobia, I suppose. This is my home, my community, and the thought of leaving terrifies me. What if I inadvertently lead the enemy straight here? What if I have to watch Lee, or any of the others, die? I’m not a soldier, I never wanted to be a soldier, but that’s what The Cull made of all of us. I’ve spent the last two peaceful years trying to pretend that my fighting days were behind me. But I was lying to myself.

  I start the DVD then I head upstairs to strip and oil my guns.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GUN FELT weird; a mix of familiarity and fear.

  I settled into my position, feeling the early winter cold seeping up through my trousers from the damp carpet on the floor of the front bedroom. My gun-shot legs would ache all day after this, like an arthritic pensioner.

  I rested my arms on the window sill of the old terraced house, carefully avoiding the few shards of broken glass still sticking up from the crumbling putty, and nestled the stock of the L115A3 sniper rifle in my shoulder, sighting down the barrel.

  I’d taken it down the firing range a couple of weeks before, when I’d realised that a fight was inevitable. It had only taken me an hour or so to master it. My skills had not deserted me. It was the same weight as the L96 I had taken from the sniper who’d used it to put a bullet in my left leg four years earlier, but it had a silencer, a better sight, and it fired a higher calibre round — 8.59mm rather than the L96’s 7.62mm. Basically, it made it much easier to hit the target, gave a near 100% certainty of killing them if I did, and a much greater chance of staying undetected after taking the shot. It felt like an extension of me, but one that I was not sure I was comfortable with, like how I supposed Tariq must feel about his hook.

  I couldn’t tell you whether it was fear, cold or anticipation that made my hands shake.

  The pre-dawn darkness meant I would be invisible to the two men unless they were to turn their binoculars straight at me and, by some chance, pause to study the dark window for a moment. But right now they were pre-occupied with the strangers who’d just turned up on their doorstep unannounced and offered them five captive children. For the right price, natch.

  “Do you have a preference?” I asked softly.

  “Nah,” replied Tariq, from the window to my right.

  “I’ll take the one with the beard, then.”

  “Okay.”

  It had been two years since I’d held a weapon with intent to kill. It hadn’t been a conscious decision to avoid guns, but after Salisbury I’d spent so many months recuperating — learning to walk, to use my arms, to talk again — that target practice had been the last thing on my mind. Two years of nobody shooting at us had helped, too. But if I’m honest, I was wary of the things. I knew that my behaviour during and after Iraq had been erratic. I knew that Tariq was concerned about the risks I had taken, and those I might take again.

  I shared his concerns.

  “Three, two, one…”

  I took a deep breath, held it, squeezed the trigger gently, put a bullet in the guard’s heart and splashed his innards across a brick wall. He fell without a sound. I saw my dad catch and lower him to the ground. Then he stood and drew his sidearm. Tariq’s shot also found its mark, and his target jerked backwards as the top of his head exploded. Jane flinched in surprise and failed to catch him. He crashed into the wall and slid down, staring up at her in reproach.

  “Head shot?” I asked as grabbed my heavy pack. “Flash bastard.”

  “Sight’s high,” replied Tariq as we got to our feet and picked our way carefully down the rotten, rickety stairs. We left our sniper rifles behind us. They were no use at close quarters, and if all went according to plan they would be collected for us. We pulled the straps of our SA-80s over our heads as we emerged onto the street. As I did so, I realised that my hands weren’t shaking any more.

  As we ran down the road, the five kids that Dad and Jane had been escorting were throwing away their handcuffs and pulling guns from under their coats. By the time we reached them, the team was ready.

  Dad led the way into the compound.

  “WE’RE GOING TO go with a variation of the Trojan horse approach that Jane used a couple of years back,” my dad had said, earlier that night. We had huddled around the feeble flame we’d just kindled in the fireplace of an abandoned farmhouse about a mile outside Thetford as he outlined his strategy.

  “I had Rowles and Caroline with me then,” said Matron, as if pointing out the flaw in his plan.

  “There are nine of us this time. The odds are better,” he replied, unsure what point she was making.

  “You never met Rowles,” I said.

  Dad rolled his eyes and continued. “Jane and I will escort the younger children to the gate. You kids can stay bundled up in your winter coats, so there’ll be plenty of places to hide your weapons. You’ll be bound with what will look like handcuffs, but in fact…” He threw pairs of handcuffs to each of the twelve and thirteen year-olds we’d selected for this mission. The five children examined them and smiled one by one as they realised they were plastic toy cuffs, easy to pull apart but good enough to fool an unobservant guard in the half light of early morning.

  “Sweet,” said one of them — a beanpole boy called Guria who had become de facto leader of the younger group.

  “We know they keep two guards at the main gate but if last night was routine, they have no one else on the walls or, as far as we can tell, inside the compound,” Dad went on. “They are not expecting to be attacked. Anyway, there’s plenty of open ground between the gates and the nearest houses, so they’d see a frontal assault coming in plenty of time to sound the alarm.

  “Jane and I will approach with the kids in tow and our hands up. They should assume we’ve come to sell them and let us approach.”

  “How do we deal with the guards?” asked Tariq.

  “I don’t want to get involved in close quarters fighting with the young ones around, so while we keep them talking, you and Lee will have to use the rifles to take them out quickly and quietly. The nearest house will provide a perfect vantage point. I couldn’t find any booby traps when I recced the area earlier, so you should be fine.”

  Tariq and I glanced at each other and nodded. “No problem,” we said in unison.

  “Once the guards are down, you kids take off the cuffs, get out your guns and scatter to the nearest houses. I don’t want you inside the compound, because things could get messy, but if we need to make a quick retreat you can cover our withdrawal. Guria, you know how to use the sniper rifle, so you take up Lee’s position.”

  “Fine,” said Guria.

  “Jane, Lee and Tariq, you’ll come with me, inside.”

  “And then?” asked Jane.

  “Then we improvise.”

  DAD WENT IN first, Tariq followed, Jane and I brought up the rear.

  I watched Jane move as we entered enemy territory, marvelling at the change in her. I’d fought beside Dad and Tariq in Iraq and England, but Jane and I had only fought together once, very briefly, during the siege of the original St Mark’s, three years earlier. I knew she was capable and ruthless, but I’d not seen this side of her in a long time, and even then I’d never had a chance to study her in action. I’d become accustomed to seeing the gentler, nurturing, matronly for want of a better word, side of her, during the past couple of years. I had mixed feelings about watching her creep into danger, all stealth and purpose. On one hand, I hated the idea of her being in harm’s way. I wanted to protect her and keep her safe. On the other hand, damn, it was sexy.

  She glanced back at me, perhaps sensing how closely I was watching her. She gave me a quizzical look then a quick, amused smile, as if she was reading my mind.

  “Focus,” she whispered. Then she turned away, back to the business at hand.

  The wooden door in the old brick wall led directly into the playground of what had once b
een a primary school. We crept across a faded hopscotch cross that seemed to be pointing us to the main building — a solid, Victorian stone box with big, high windows which sat at the centre of a maze of single storey brick extensions built in the 1960s. The only sound was the crunch of gravel beneath our boots and the raucous crowing of a rooster, informing the world that dawn was nearly here. Anyone inside was obviously accustomed to sleeping through his daily performance.

  Dad waved us towards a side door. We were still in the middle of the playground, as exposed as we could be, when the door handle turned. Dad didn’t hesitate. He ran to the door, still totally silent, and was there with his knife drawn as it swung open to reveal a short, heavy-set man in a black jacket. The man was only half awake, mechanically going through the routine of opening up the building for the morning. He was so focused on his task that he didn’t notice Dad’s approach until the cold knife point brushed against his cheek. Dad grasped the man’s top and pulled him outside the door, letting it swing to. We crowded around our prisoner as his surprise faded, to be replaced by amused defiance.

  “How many of you, and how many kids?” whispered Dad as Tariq pulled a sidearm from the man’s belt and shoved it into his own.

  “Fuck off,” replied the man, misjudging the situation entirely. He probably thought he could issue a few vague threats, put on a show of defiance, and then we’d knock him out or tie him up or something.

  Dad considered his smug captive for a second, shrugged, and slid his knife between the man’s third and fourth ribs, straight into his heart. The man never even had time to be surprised. He was dead before the blade came out again.

  “Jesus,” whispered Jane, involuntarily.

  Dad lowered the body gently to the cold, hard tarmac, then flashed her a sharp look as he wiped his blade.

  “Problem?” he mouthed silently.