End of the End

by Paul Kane, Simon Guerrier

  “April, sweetheart. It’s okay.” This was Hood again, rising and making his way over to the pair. “Look, Mum’s all right.” He pointed and the little girl looked past the assassin, seeing the woman on the floor sitting up. There were splashes of colour on her vest-top, too light to be blood.

  As the girl ran over and flung her arms around the woman, an alarm began to go off. The felled guards had obviously, finally, been discovered by someone and the flag had gone up. “About time,” grumbled the Hooded Man. The first assassin was rising now, dropping the knife and grabbing a fire extinguisher to put out the flames. When he was done, he pulled off his mask to reveal a kindly face, framed by ginger hair and long sideburns. The other assassin, still clutching his leg with one hand, put down his gun and did the same: he had closely-cropped hair and a sour face, but was about the same age, in his early to mid-thirties.

  “Bloody hell and bollocks!” he said, shouting above the alarm.

  “Not in front of April,” Hood admonished.

  “Not in front of... She fucking...” He paused, then said more carefully: “She bit me.”

  A hand went up, one that was missing a finger, and the green hoodie was peeled back. The face was very different from the one who usually wore it. “She wasn’t to know,” Mark—the real Mark—informed him.

  “It was all just a game, darlin’,” said Mary behind them, rocking the crying girl on her shoulder, not caring that she was getting the purple paint from her vest all over the child.

  “Just pretend,” Mark added for emphasis.

  “Tell that to my leg!” the man with the close-cropped hair protested.

  “Oh, stop moaning, Chillcott,” Mark snapped, showing him the wounds on his arm and leg. Even with the blade dulled, they’d done some damage. “Trevena got me a couple of times pretty good, and you don’t see me complaining.”

  “As did you,” said Trevena, rubbing his reddening nose. “And you were pretty damned close with that arrow.”

  “It was nowhere near you. Trust me, if I’d wanted to nail you, I could have... even with a rubber-tipped arrow.”

  Trevena ignored this, asking: “And what did you do with Jenkins, by the way?”

  “Oh, he’s okay. Sleeping it off in one of the cupboards, out of the way.” Mark thumbed back down the hall. He switched his bow to the other hand, bending to clasp Mary on the shoulder and then stroke April’s hair.

  Mary looked up at him. “She’ll be all right, just a little spooked. We should have told her, you know. Given her some warning.”

  “You know what Dad would say, don’t you?” Mary nodded. “The real assassins won’t give us any warning.”

  “No, but you all knew we were coming at some point over these past few days,” argued Chillcott.

  “At some point,” said Mark. “Just like we know there’s going to be a real sneak attack on us here, at some point.”

  “So what are you going to do, just wait up every night like you were tonight? Just in case?” Chillcott countered.

  “If I have to,” Mark told him, puffing out his chest. “It’s what Dad... Robert would do. And with him not here, the buck stops with me.”

  “You do know that...” Mary began, then shook her head.

  Mark frowned. “What?”

  “Well, not only are you starting to look like him these days, you do know you’re beginning to sound like him, too.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Mark said, with a smirk.

  Mary smiled back. “That’s how it was meant.”

  He patted the top of April’s head. “And as for taking after people, you, young lady, are a chip off the old block. Both of them.”

  April—who had almost stopped crying—looked up and over at her brother, still hugely confused by what had happened, and now about what Mark meant.

  “You’d better go check on the others,” Mary reminded him, and Mark nodded, rising.

  “Wait a minute, so who won?” Chillcott called after him as he began descending the stairs.

  “Let’s call it a draw,” was Mark’s reply.

  HE TOOK THE stairs two at a time, hurrying to get down and see what the ‘casualty’ situation was. He’d managed to save his mother, but had any of the others survived? Doubtful, as his other two ‘assassins’ wouldn’t have made it upstairs if they had.

  That worried him. All of this worried him, in fact. Just another way in which he was similar to the man he’d come to call and think of as his father over the years. Who was he kidding? Mark was thinking about him like that not long after they’d met—when Robert Stokes had saved him from the Sheriff’s men at that outdoor market. So long ago now; he’d only been thirteen. But he wouldn’t go back to those times, wouldn’t swap them for now. He’d been virtually alone back then, since the virus. After he met Robert and Mary, all that changed. He was given another family, and so were they.

  There had been hard times, sure—things they’d had to tackle together. The Sheriff, De Falaise; The Tsars (both of them); the Welsh Dragon; the Widow up in Scotland. The Morningstars. But somehow, no matter how hard things had been, it had always brought them closer together in the end.

  Mark remembered some of the times they’d had as a family and smiled again. That Winter Festival they’d held at the Castle. What a wonderful night that had been! He’d danced with Sophie until their feet hurt, laughed with her until their sides hurt.

  It hadn’t been too long after that they’d got engaged. It had been the business with that Native American, Shadow—who’d stolen into the castle, a little like his men had tonight, and kidnapped Mark—that had sealed the deal really. Sophie had been so worried about him, had realised she couldn’t live without him then.

  They’d married a few months after that, the Reverend Tate presiding over it just as he had done when Mary and Robert had got hitched. They hadn’t wanted a big affair, just friends and family, with Mary heavily pregnant by this time. Dale had been his best man—strange, how close they’d become, when at the beginning they’d always been at each other’s throats; mainly because Mark thought he was after Sophie, it had to be said. He’d been a bit of a ladies’ man back in the day, had Dale. And who could blame them for falling at his feet with those good looks, not to mention he’d played lead guitar in a band back before the world went to shit. Then Dale had met Sian—saved her from the Dragon—and fallen in love. The pair of them got married the year afterwards, back in Wales where they’d lived for a while until the Ranger presence there was well and truly established. Just like it was in most parts of the country now, not to mention Europe—thanks in no small part to their alliance with the current monarchy and its forces. And while they were still separate entities in their own rights, the Rangers and His Majesty’s New Royal Infantry knew they could rely on each other when needed. They’d fought together on many occasions, not least when trying to quell the troubles in Russia and Germany.

  Robert himself was currently travelling with a compliment of NRI himself, on a tour of some of the Ranger stations abroad. His second-in-command Jack ‘The Hammer’ was with him. As was Azhar, possibly the finest fighter they had in the ranks of the Rangers.

  Mark understood that the trip was necessary, but the timing could definitely have been better. There was increasing unrest at home, rumblings from those who disagreed with the ban on firearms that had been imposed in the wake of what had happened with the Dragon and the Widow. The Rangers had simply reasoned that it was much easier to keep the peace when you knew you weren’t going to get your head blown off, especially when they themselves still didn’t carry guns. Robert had never approved of them, hated all they stood for—mostly all that was wrong about the previous world that had destroyed itself. It was bad enough that those who attacked from other shores had access to such weapons, without having to worry about stuff like that at home.

  But it wasn’t as if Robert and the Rangers just decided on their own. It had been in conjunction with the monarchy, and after a vote from the f
ledgling council system that had been set up—formed out of as many representatives from towns and cities as they could find. People who knew what Robert had sacrificed to defend them, who trusted him to carry on doing just that. It was no different from the system that had been in place before the A-B virus struck, anyway. Ordinary citizens couldn’t take the law into their own hands then, weren’t legally allowed to own firearms; they had to trust the police—of which Robert was a former member himself—and military to protect them.

  Of course, even back at the start there had been voices of dissent: those who argued that people needed a way of defending themselves, just in case. A small but vocal band that had grown in size over time, and now even had their own resistance movement. Their propaganda would have people believe that the council was a joke and the Rangers were lackeys of the new regime. That last one made Mark absolutely furious: the Rangers were nobody’s playthings.

  It was because of this misguided resistance effort—the so-called ‘Defiants’, who had stepped up their activities over the last year or so—that they all had to be prepared. Ranger spies had learned that they were planning on covertly striking at Robert’s core leadership team to destabilise the Rangers. They weren’t big enough to come at them head on, so it made sense that a small assassination unit would be sent to do this (a decision had been made to downplay all this, as Robert would have returned immediately).

  They just didn’t know how or when it would go down...

  One of the reasons why exercises like this were so critical. The three Rangers involved had been trained to think as those people would, trained to be able to infiltrate a heavily guarded city and castle. And they’d managed to pull it off, maybe not getting to Mary or Robert—if he’d been here—but certainly taking out enough of Hood’s most important people to cause the maximum amount of damage. The loss of Dale and Sian, of himself and Sophie... Mark closed his eyes, sucking in a breath and suppressing the tears that were threatening to break free. The thought of that last one—of losing her—was just too much.

  He couldn’t let his wife see him like that, see how worried all this made him—how scared for them all he was, for her. Mark was at the bottom of the stairs anyway, making his way along to his quarters. A Ranger called Abney had been standing in for Mark these past few nights, just as Mark had been standing in for Robert, providing added protection in case something did actually occur. Mark trusted Abney, both he and Sophie had known the guy and had been friends with him long enough for that. You’d have to, to let him ‘share’ a bed with you, in whatever capacity. But Mark had absolutely no worries on that score. Not only was Abney in a serious, long term relationship with somebody, that somebody also happened to be a guy.

  So, it was quite a shock for Mark to round the corner and find not Abney, but a totally different Ranger there instead. A brown-haired guy wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Even through his top, the outline of his broad chest and six-pack could be discerned—and as for those arms... Not that Mark was any slouch in that department, he couldn’t afford to be; it was just that being confronted by it for some reason made him feel strangely inadequate. The man was dotted in that same light purple paint, ‘killed’ by one of the assassins obviously, and was now sitting up on the bed crossed-legged. Booth, his name was, Mark recalled. One of a batch of new recruits the other month, who had only just finished his basic training if Mark remembered rightly. Something the bloke had relished, perhaps a little too much. Sophie was propped up at the head of the bed, pillows bracing her back; she too had been ‘murdered,’ judging from the purple paint that stained her white satin chemise—which had a plunging neckline Mark was altogether too aware that Booth was ogling.

  It took a moment or two for them to register the fact Mark was even in the doorway, Sophie laughing—actually laughing—at something Booth had just said. Those freckles on her face, though less pronounced than when Mark had met her at fifteen, were infinitely more apparent when she smiled or had the giggles. But what was annoying him more? The fact that neither of them had taken this exercise seriously, or that Booth was making his wife laugh in a way he hadn’t seemed to be able to do in a while?

  When they saw his face, the laughing stopped. Booth went rigid, getting off the bed and saluting. “Sir!” he said, voice cracking slightly.

  Ordinarily, Mark would have told him there was no need for all that: he wasn’t in the bloody NRI. But right at that moment, Mark was glad of a chain of command, of his superiority over this man—even though he was at least five years younger than Booth. Mark didn’t salute back, however, and didn’t give him permission to relax his own either. So there he stood, like a statue, or a robot awaiting further commands.

  “Mark,” said Sophie, rolling her eyes sideways and nodding, encouraging him to do just that and put the guy out of his misery.

  “At ease, Ranger...” said Mark through gritted teeth. “Booth, isn’t it?”

  “Sir,” replied Booth, sticking with the military theme.

  “Where’s Abney?” Mark asked, of either Booth or his wife, he didn’t care who answered.

  “Cried off sick tonight,” Sophie told Mark, quickly. “Some sort of stomach bug. Tommy here kindly stepped in at the last moment.”

  Tommy now, is it? And I’ll bethe stepped in.

  “I see...” said Mark, drawing out the last word. “And what was so funny?”

  Sophie and Booth exchanged a glance, as if struggling to cast their minds back all of a few minutes. “Oh,” said Sophie, finally. “We were just tickled by the fact Tommy had fallen asleep by the time your guys burst in.”

  Booth looked extremely sheepish about that, it had to be said. “I pulled double shifts sir, sorry.”

  “Okay,” said Mark. It was how he’d have ended up himself if he’d been here, but the fact remained that he hadn’t been. It had been Tommy, asleep, in bed with his wife. “And you were both...” He couldn’t bring himself to say killed about Sophie, even for an exercise. “You both got shot, I see.”

  “Yeah, ’fraid so,” sighed Sophie, as if she’d just missed out on winning some sort of competition. Didn’t she see the danger in all this, didn’t she understand why they were doing it?

  Mark couldn’t help himself. “Jesus, if this had been for real—”

  “But it wasn’t,” she said, sitting up even straighter in bed and folding her arms. “Was it? This was just some silly game.”

  “One that might save all our lives,” Mark insisted.

  “Won’t happen next time, sir.” This was Booth again. Next time? Mark wasn’t about to let any of this happen again, either as an exercise or for real. He liked to think, with his reactions, tired or not—asleep or not—he would at least have been able to save Sophie.

  Mark glared at him. “You’re dismissed,” he said. “De-briefing will be tomorrow morning, oh-nine-thirty.” He wanted army talk? Mark could fucking do that.

  Booth took one last look at Sophie, nodded, then left.

  Sophie still had her arms folded, waiting for her husband to say something. When he didn’t, she began instead. “You know, all of this was your idea, Mark.”

  He pouted. “Not just mine, we—”

  “I just don’t get what your problem is! I’ve played along, haven’t I? Even though I think it’s the stupidest thing in the world. How can you plan against a surprise attack? The whole point is you’ll never see it coming.”

  “That’s comforting,” said Mark with an edge of sarcasm that wasn’t lost on his wife.

  “It wasn’t meant to be. I think sometimes you forget how we first met,” she said. That wasn’t very likely: he remembered every moment of that day. Going on a ride-along to a village with the Rangers, spotting Sophie in that yellow dress. Feeling so sick and nervous talking to her. Then the Sheriff’s men—grabbing and ripping her clothes. Mark offering himself up to go with them instead. Absently, he rubbed the stump of his missing finger, the one the Sheriff’s torturer Tanek had taken from him..
. Maybe she had a tendency to forget as well? But he didn’t bring that up—he hadn’t done it to impress her. He’d done it because he felt something for her, even then, even having only known her for such a short space of time. “Look at the world we live in. These have always been dangerous times, there’s no escaping that. And there’s no ‘planning’ to prevent things from happening. You have to live for each moment.”

  “They’re not as dangerous as they used to be,”’ Mark replied.

  Sophie snorted. “If you think that, then you’re just kidding yourself.”

  Mark walked over to the bed, sat on the end of it. “Perhaps I am,” he said sadly. “But it’s only because I want to keep you safe.”

  She reached out and took his hand, noticing the cuts on his arm and thigh for the first time. “You’re hurt.”

  He shook his head. “Just scratches. I’ve had worse.” A lot worse. They both had. “Just some silly game, as you say.”

  “Maybe I should take a look?”

  “I’ll be fine, it was just...” But then Sophie was pulling at his top, pulling it up and kissing his stomach, then his chest. Mark let out a low moan; it had been a while since she’d done something like this. Something so spontaneous. What could have...

  “Tommy,” he said without thinking.

  Sophie broke off from kissing him, pulling back. “What?”

  Mark didn’t know what to say now, hadn’t meant for the thought to pop out of his mouth.

  “What about him?” Sophie pushed, then when she didn’t get an answer, said: “You think... What? What do you think?”

  “I just saw the way he was looking at you, Soph. Especially dressed like that. He—”

  Sophie pulled back abruptly, folding her arms once more.

  “Not this again. I don’t care how he was looking at me,” she barked. “Doesn’t mean I was looking at him the same way, does it? And this is what I always wear to bed, you know that. You said you wanted things to be as normal as possible during the exercise. You put him in here—where you should have been, I might add. For the last few nights, in fact.”