Danger Close

by Charlie Flowers

  The Asian man swore and pulled a pistol and emptied it wildly in our direction. The rounds went wild and thwacked into dead bodies. The pistol locked back and he started yelling and threw the weapon in our direction. It dropped to the carpet. Calamity drew a bead on him and shot him. He fell into a wall, bouncing and smearing blood. It was getting difficult to see through the smoke and dust.

  Silence. I spoke up. ‘Anyone got any water? I’ve got a mouth like Gandhi’s flipflop here.’

  Calamity looked at the water cooler. There was a bullet hole right through it. She shook her head.

  There was a hammering on the fire exit next to us. What? We looked at the blue doors. I readied my AK and tapped the exit with it. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Sonic the fucking Hedgehog, who d’you think it is? It’s me, Duckie!’ I pulled the doors open and she stumbled in. She was wearing an Infidels hoodie. ‘Gimme a gun, quick!’

  Roadrunner handed her the last AK. ‘Cheers.’ We ran back for the kitchen area. Mishy stood and loosed off a burst from her PKM to cover the retreat and metal cases flew. We made cover and ran down the corridor to the kitchen door. It was locked or jammed shut. Calamity hefted her fireaxe and began swinging desperately above the handle until the door splintered and crashed inwards. Into…

  ‘Oh no.’

  We pushed open the splintered remnants of the door and skidded into the kitchen area, into a charnel house. At the other end, the connecting doors were ajar to another slow-motion massacre, a circus of hellish noise and flashing light. The battle for the mosque was turning into a living thing, devouring the quick and the dead without favour.

  ‘Ya Allah. All the Birmingham lot are dead.’

  Very dead. They lay scattered like porcelain figurines in the kitchen galley among smashed crockery. The tiles were slick with blood. Here was Kiki. Dead. She’d taken a round in the throat and was staring glassily at the wall.

  ‘I told them to stay in the camera room. I told them. Where’s Sasha?’

  Bang-Bang knelt to check the pulse of the girl next to her, and slowly shook her head.

  ‘Holly. Get their ammo and radios.’

  She gave a sharp nod. The laptop and its connection was still going in their midst and their Bowman radio was hissing vacantly in a mosaic of pattered blood. I picked it up. Where was their leader? Had she gone forward too, infected with the battle mania that had swept over Maryam?

  Bang-Bang looked at the laptop. ‘It’s still working. She did good, got good views. Take a look.’

  The screen was divided into sections, each showing a camera feed. One showed the other side of the hall. Movement. I counted several men moving around. We all glanced at each other. Time to go.

  We went forward to the doors and peered through the gap. Smoke. Deafening bangs. More flashes.

  An AK muzzle came poking round a pillar followed by a soot-smeared face and a wave of a hand. Sasha was alive. I clicked my radio pressel. ‘Sasha come back, can you hear me?’ Nothing came back. Bang-Bang muttered in my ear ‘I think her radio’s busted or her earpiece ain’t in. What’s she saying?’

  Sasha looked back at us and made hand signals, with some difficulty as she’d lost two fingertips and blood was pattering from her hand onto the blue carpet. I transcribed. “Seven…enemy…left hand side…”

  I signalled back. “OK. Hold the line.” Bang-Bang threw a field dressing at her and it bounced short.

  Behind us a body stirred. Bang-Bang ran back to check. ‘That’s Lana. She’s just alive. Weak pulse. Bad way doll.’

  ‘You stay with her. Try and get a line into her.’

  ‘I’ll try. Where are the packs? Line? She’s got a sucking chest wound. This is not good.’

  The Bowman suddenly squawked into life. ‘Voodoo One-Three what is your status over?’

  God. I dropped the Bowman to the bloodstreaked floor like it was a snake. I got on the secure radio. ‘Riz for Cope. Who’s Voodoo One-Three over?’

  ‘Not one of our callsigns. Be advised we’re gonna hit the main building in five minutes. Can you put out smoke or markers over.’

  ‘We haven’t got any smoke or markers left, Cope. Just concentrate on the perimeter, it’s too mixed up in here. And the shooters in the building are ours.’

  ‘Have that.’

  I dialled back to our channel and looked around. Shit. My earpiece bleeped.

  ‘Sadie to Riz – a van just pulled in. Unsighted.’

  ‘Have that. Is it Regiment?’

  ‘Nah. Regiment are… ah I can see them forming up. Wrong side.’

  Bang-Bang consulted her glasses and tapped my arm. ‘OK drone sees the van, and five or so X-Rays coming in round the back wall, sneaky like. They look like they’re in uniform. Three feet, two feet… Lana just died on me by the way. Sorry guys.’

  There was the click-clack of a weapon action. ‘Ready.’

  I changed radios again for Dinger and the Army guys.

  ‘Riz for Dinger. What are your lot doing over?’

  ‘Rolling start line Riz. Expect action in four minutes.’

  ‘Four…? We need to go.’

  Bang-Bang looked at me. ‘Four minutes to clear this building?’

  ‘Yes! Let’s go!’

  Sasha loosed off a burst from her AK and ran back to join us. She grinned shamefacedly at her missing fingertips. ‘Shot ‘em off myself, in the excitement.’ Bang-Bang tutted and started to bind them with a dressing. There was a commotion from behind us and we aimed our weapons. Maryam scrambled into the kitchen, spattered with blood, and gulped at the carnage on the floor. ‘What, the…?’

  ‘No time, Maryam. We’re running out of people. Follow us.’

  ‘Er… OK.’

  We formed up and ran back out of the kitchen and left, down the corridor, down…and past the morgue. ‘Wait!’ I hit the door and looked in. A white-tiled room. Yep. Steel trays for the bodies. I motioned Bang-Bang in and we grabbed two. ‘Follow me!’ We ran for the ladies’ prayer area. Here was the sign in Urdu. Twenty feet…ten…we skidded to a halt and got ready.

  45

  We were at the main door of the ladies’ section. This was it. The shooting rattled and whacked off the walls. The whole level of the building was shaking under the onslaught of the enemy weapons, tearing into innocent men, women, children… I could hear the walls shuddering. Dust puffed from our side of the wall, almost in sympathy for the slaughter on the other side.

  I looked back along the wall at my assault team. ‘Girls. Stand by, stand by…’

  The AKs were stowed now, we had gone to Overmatch mode, cocking the array of brutal weapons my uncle had provided us and readying the barrel-mounted laser dazzlers.

  Duckie spoke from the end of the line. ‘Guys. This isn’t gonna work. But I can make it work. Look.’

  She whacked a photocopied map on the wall and jabbed her finger. ‘They know me. I’m an Infidel now. You get me? I’m wearing the clothes and I’ve been with them for the last week. You give me the best gun, I walk in from the right…’

  We got her. I assented.‘Do it, Duckie.’

  Duckie worked her way along the line, giving each girl a goodbye hug, and outlined her plan to the gang. We looked at each other and Fuzz handed her a spare Binatone and an Alliance Accelerator. A red 12-gauge shell was visible in the breech. Duckie ran to the second fire exit and snicked the bolt forward on the shotgun. ‘Switch to Channel 2, ready come back.’

  ‘Ready.’

  Hell was coming. I breathed out.

  Fuzz pulled her samurai sword from its sheath and then replaced it. Her hand flexed on the grip of her weapon.

  Down the hall, Duckie pressed the button on the machine shotgun’s dazzler and it lit the ceiling in a luminous 50’s horror movie glare.

  In my earpiece, the right-hand exits whacked open and I could hear Duckie. ‘Elllo, chicos. Say hello to my little friend.’

  The channel exploded in gunfire and screams.

  I jumped up and shouldered the door
s in.

  ‘GO!’

  We banged the main doors and rushed in, the killing weapons ready. The left door smacked a man right in the face and Bang-Bang slammed her steel tray bodily into him and fell on his prone figure. He fired his weapon spastically into the ceiling and plaster fell on us like snow as she struggled to knock him out with the end of the tray. She stood, kicked his gun away and brought the heavy steel tray down with all her force on his head with a shocking clang. He jerked and we swarmed over them and the tray and tried to form an ambush line among the dead bodies.

  I yelled ‘Everyone standing is enemy LIGHT THEM!’ Deafening strobing fire opened up in the hall from all directions. I saw Duckie pouring shotgun rounds into the hall and killing everyone standing. It had worked. I sprawled to the floor. Calamity swung her axe and it took the struggling prone man’s head nearly clean off. She stumbled over Bang-Bang and fell into the spraying blood, desperately trying to wrench the axe out of the man’s head.

  ‘Contact right!’ I shouted as rounds pummelled into his body and whanged off the steel tray in a hail of white sparks. I returned fire wildly one-handed just to get heads down. We hugged the carpet behind the morgue trays and the walls of corpses as the rest of our gang piled through the exit and lit up their dazzlers, tracked…

  Fuzz tripped over us and howled a command as shell cases flew. ‘Allahu Akhbaaar, get in the line!’ We scrambled to our feet and aimed. Time and space slowed and focused. Before us were two groups of cowering refugees and a fragmented line of enemy. The enemy were getting to their feet and turning, blinded by Duckie’s attack. They looked confused. Too slow. Fuzz elbowed me aside and tracked her dazzler onto their faces.

  The glare of her AM-15’s dazzler hit the main Eastern European guy square in the eyes. He screamed and clapped his hands to his face, dropping his weapon, and then Fuzz squeezed the trigger and 60 rounds of .22 Rimfire chewed him as though he was wet, bloody tissue paper. The whole attack line opened up and the building shuddered and shook.

  The AM-15s held 275 rounds, the Alliance Accelerators each held twenty rounds of 12-gauge, the PKM had over 50 rounds left. Above us Mishy yelled and stitched the PKM across the scattered remnants of enemy in a flail of luminous green tracer. The combined assault drove the enemy flopping down the hall like flotsam, bits flying off them in the sick green glare of the dazzlers. Five seconds. The guns roared. Ten seconds. Body parts flew. An air conditioning unit shattered and fell in front of us. Fifteen seconds. The mags ran dry and whirred and snapped empty with loud clacks. Blue smoke curled from our weapon’s receivers.

  The echoes faded. The refugees clung to the floor or behind the partition walls. My ears sang and I coughed on the cordite and the garlic stink of high explosive. There were three bullet holes in the top of the steel tray I was holding. To my right, Duckie gave a little wave and hashed our channel then dropped back into overwatch. We waved back. Fuzz drew her samurai sword and paused. She looked over the sprawled corpses next to us. One stirred. She walked over, chopped him down with one swift economical movement and sheathed the sword. His neck spumed blood and he died and she looked back and grinned at me.

  I ran forward, tracking my rifle left and right, concentrating on the reflex sight. CQB sight. Focus on the inverted -

  A man struggled up, raising his arms. I drew a bead on him and he fell back down. A local refugee. Christ that was close. A silence dropped on the building. Mishy and Duckie had disappeared. Where were they? My earpiece squalled. Fuzz racked the bolt back on her AK.

  My earpiece bleeped.

  ‘Sadie for Riz, movement outside, watch your left!’

  The loose fire exits opened and a bunch of police and CSOs walked in, laughing. Except they weren’t police or CSOs and they were carrying…

  They stopped laughing.

  ‘Contact right, freeze you mother-’ yelled Fuzz and then opened up with her AK anyway in a spall of yellow flame. They walked into the last of our ammo and died and dropped, shocked. To our left there was a commotion as a knot of enemy took advantage to make a break from behind their barricade of piled bodies. One fell and howled as a shot took him in the leg. Rounds whacked off the door frame as four ran for it into the sunlight outside. Missed ‘em. I looked back. Who was who?

  More men surrendering. In long coats. Shouting in a strange language. I raised my AK to shoulder height. I looked left and right. No-one knew what to do.

  And then Mishy ran back in to the hall holding the RPG with a expression of set, pure killing rage and levelled it. I flailed back after her and shouted ‘NO! No you can’t use a RPG inside a-’

  She shook her head like she was worrying off a bothersome fly, concentrated and…she squeezed the trigger.

  I dived for cover. The backblast took out two SVS who’d crept up behind us and drove their smoking bodies through the wall displays from a local school. The warhead quickly puffed twice, armed and detonated at the far end of the prayer hall, blowing every last surrendering combatant into the walls in a storm of bricks and out the two windows. I scrambled to one knee and emptied my AK into the two writhing enemy behind us in a shower of brass cases and blinding flame. The school displays, including a large cardboard thermometer, slowly toppled onto them. Mishy lowered the RPG launcher and blinked twice, then dropped the launcher to the carpet.

  It was over. It was over. The carpet was spongy with blood. Debris pattered to the floor and masonry and white dust coated the living and the corpses. I looked down.

  Fuzz was lying dead beside me.

  Oh no.

  Suddenly her eyes fluttered open and she coughed. ‘Y’allah.’

  I helped her up. Her left sleeve had burned away and she gazed curiously at her scorched, blackened arm. ‘Fuck. Pass me a dressing.’

  Calamity came running back in from the corridor, worrying at one ear with a finger and then replacing her radio earpiece. ‘Hang on…We’ve cornered them! We’ve cornered them! We’ve got them out the back in the caretaker’s building.’

  Maryam readied a grenade. ‘Good. Let’s frag ‘em out.’

  I could hear the dull thud of stun and smoke grenades in the street outside. I got on the secure radio. ‘Cope. Tell your lot to wait. Something’s happened.’

  The car park was full of the smoke from burning vehicles. The ITN van was charred, burnt-out. All the crew were scattered around its doors, blackened, dead. Too late for that.

  Maryam hobbled to the van, half-dragging her injured leg, and chanced a glance around the bodywork to the caretakers’ building. She looked and raised her hand in the correct signal. Then dropped her hand. All clear. She threw the grenade in through a broken window. She had the backspin just right and it whirred through the gap. There was a bang and a cloud of smoke and glass fragments, and shrieks, then silence.

  Mishy ran forward to the outbuilding. She readied the PKM and loosed a long burst through the door. The door fell into pieces and there was more screaming as the interior lit up in flashes of green tracer. She stopped firing and started shouting in Urdu. ‘Bahar niklo! Jaldee sey!’

  The survivors emerged, deafened and blackened. Mishy prodded them forward with the muzzle of the PKM. ‘Get in that car park you baby murderers.’

  Bang-Bang was watching with her usual non-committal look. ‘So we shoot them now?’

  ‘What?’

  Fuzz racked the slide on a pistol. ‘Yep, now. Click-clack pow. So the whole world sees what happens to people who murder children and defile a mosque. Move ‘em out.’

  Mishy came over and pointed at two of them. ‘These two. I recognise them from the screen photos from last night. Ray and Westey from C18 and the Infidels.’ She pushed them to their knees. ‘Came to see the massacre, did you? Hands on your heads.’

  Bang-Bang wiped at her bleeding mouth and looked me over. She touched my arm. ‘Allah must love you, Riz honey, you’ve escaped with hardly a scratch.’

  Then she raised a hand. ‘Hang on. Got a runner on the drone feed. Look.’ She pointed
to her netbook screen. The overhead display showed a figure racing away from the mosque. A box cursor settled on him and tracked as the target ran towards the junction of Coventry Road.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Dunno. Could be one of the leaders. Going to automatic. Not so fast, ese…’

  Bang-Bang tapped keys and the drone whirred above us and dropped, accelerating. She turned away and held a finger in the air, conducting the orchestra, a blissful smile on her face. Her eyes closed. I could see all the pent-up rage from Afghanistan about to expend itself. And we watched, a rapt audience. On the screen the view zoomed in like a TV-guided bomb. A running man.

  Running, turning… he turned too late and our last freezeframe of him was a shocked face gawping skywards at several pounds of whirring carbon-fibre bladed death. Out on the main road came a loud crack and presently, a little puff of grey-blue smoke rose into the air. Bang-Bang dropped her hand and gave a small half-bow.

  ‘And I thangyew. Droned ‘im. Someone wanna go clear it up?’

  ‘Rather you than me. Where’s Duckie? Can’t get her on the radio.’

  We found Duckie in the main hall, holding a baby. Her face was wet with tears. It wasn’t moving... We took the body off her and I wrapped it in a blanket. Bang-Bang spoke quietly under her breath over its body. ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un… O Allah. Make him a cause of recompense for us and make him a treasure for us on the day of Resurrection and an intercessor and one whose intercession is accepted…’

  Duckie nodded at the nearest door where some corpses were frozen in the act of clawing at the blood-smeared door handle. ‘Her mum. She didn’t get very far.’

  She looked up at me. ‘Forget it, guys, I’ve done my bit. If this is my England then I’m off. Maybe I’ll go to Spain. I’ll write.’

  Bang-Bang produced a wet-wipe and began dabbing at Duckie’s face. ‘You did good babe. Better than good. You saved us. Don’t ever kick yourself, Duck. Don’t ever kick yourself.’

  They shot the prisoners out in the supermarket car park opposite the mosque. Ray and Westey were first. The photograph of a shimaghed-up Fuzz putting a round through Ray's head was on the Evening Standard's front page that evening, and from that moment, the country changed. No-one could see Fuzz’s face, of course, but her gun arm had the tattoo on it. “Get Dead Or Die Trying”. The internet went mad trying to figure out the meaning.