My windpipe was so badly swollen that I could only breathe in short ragged bursts. My side was on fire where the knife had speared me. I was a mass of bruises, my head felt light, my hearing was muffled and I was covered, absolutely covered from head to toe, in blood – both mine and that of the man I had killed.
No, don’t think about that. Don’t think about the killing, about the intimacy of it, the penetration and the spurting and the tactile slickness of his dead skin. Don’t think about his breath on my neck, his hands on my throat, his knee in my back. Don’t think about how awfully, sickeningly different it was to the clinical dissociation of a gunshot. Don’t think about it. Save it for later. There’s time for the nightmares later. Things to do.
I limped outside into the sunlight and listened. The chanting had stopped but I could still hear the noises of a large group of people. My route to freedom was still the same, so I started walking towards where Petts should have been lying unconscious. But he wasn’t there. Had he regained consciousness and fled, or had he been found and captured? I peered around the corner of the hedge again and saw the machete men herding the townspeople into canvas-topped troop trucks, which had pulled up at the edge of the forecourt. They were shipping them off, presumably to their base of operations.
One man carried the dead body of the woman from the scaffold and tossed it into a truck amongst the living cattle.
Oh, God, they had a use for corpses as well. Could they be cannibals too?
With a jolt I saw Petts, holding his head, clearly disorientated, being shoved into one of the trucks. There was no hope of a rescue. He’d have to take his chances.
There was nothing I could do here. I had to get back to the school and warn them about the imminent attack by all that was left of Hildenborough’s militia, assuming it hadn’t already taken place.
I made my way as fast as I could across the small section of exposed ground and then back into cover on the road, behind the hedgerows and up to a stile. Even the simple act of climbing over a stile felt like an achievement given what I’d been through. And then into the field and safe to the trees.
Apart from the young woman, daubed in blood, carrying a gun, barring my way and looking at me quizzically.
We stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then I smiled and said:
“Safe now.”
She regarded my blood-soaked self and nodded.
“Safe now,” she replied.
And I was free to go.
CHAPTER TEN
I HAD NO idea what awaited me back at the school, but that three-mile journey felt like one of the longest of my life. I wanted to run but I just wasn’t capable. A shambling half-jog was the best I could muster.
I wondered how good David’s intelligence had been. Had he chosen this afternoon to attack Hildenborough because he’d known that some of their forces would be busy elsewhere? And if so, did that mean he knew about the school? Could we be his next target? All this, of course, assuming the school wasn’t already occupied.
I decided my best approach was to head along the river and come at the school from the rear, through the woods. That way I could get a sense of what had happened before showing myself.
The River Medway was part of the Ironside Line, the premier inland line of defence against the expected German invasion during the Second World War. As a result there are pillboxes all along the river, five of which mark the rear border of the school grounds. Under Mac’s defence plan only two were manned at any one time, and never the same two on consecutive days.
I approached the first, but it was empty, as was the second. But the third had finally seen combat, many decades after its construction. There were four men, all of whom had been carrying shotguns, lying spread-eagled on the ground; victims of the General Purpose Machine Gun that had been housed in the pillbox. When I entered the pillbox I found one of our boys – a third-former called Guerrier, who I don’t think I’d ever even spoken to – dead from a shotgun blast to the face. There was no sign of the GPMG, so I assumed the remainder of the Hildenborough attackers had commandeered it to use against further resistance. That would have evened the odds slightly.
I picked up one of the shotguns, emptied the cartridges from the pockets of the dead men, loaded the gun and moved on.
The fourth pillbox was empty but the fifth was pebble-dashed with shotgun pellets, and there was an abandoned GPMG inside, surrounded by spent casings. There were no bodies anywhere. Whoever had been manning this pillbox must have done a runner.
I moved cautiously through the woods to the edge of the playing fields and the assault course, which provided me with cover. I crawled through the netting and under the barbed wire and took up position by a wooden climbing structure.
There was no-one to be seen and no gunshots or screams to be heard; the school was silent and still. The fields offered no cover, but I had to keep going. I ran to the edge of the playing fields and made my way towards the school keeping myself close to the hedge. I made it to the outbuildings, where the walls were freshly chipped by what looked like GPMG rounds. One of the minibuses was aflame. The GPMG that had been taken from the pillbox was beside it, still resting upright on its tripod. There’d been a hell of a fight here, but it had moved on. There were two more Hildenborough attackers lying dead on the gravel path at the back of the building. All the windows on the ground floor were broken and one had a dead boy lying across it, half in and half out. I walked over and lifted his head. It was a junior called Belcher. I’d known him; nice kid, cried himself to sleep at night because he missed his mum.
Then I heard shots. But they weren’t the sporadic shoot and return of a fire-fight; it was a series of measured single shots, about ten in all. I had a horrible suspicion I knew what that meant.
I made my way carefully through the corridors of Castle, passing bodies and bullet casings, splintered wood panelling and blood-soaked floorboards, until I came to the front door. I looked out across the driveway and lawn.
The guard post at the front gate was smoking and I could see the body of a boy lying across the sandbags; it was Zayn.
One less officer to worry about.
One less rapist for me to deal with.
The fight at the front didn’t look like it had been as fierce as the one out back, which had obviously ended in a running battle indoors. I figured they’d sent a small force to the gate as a distraction, while the main force had attacked from the river. It’s probably what I would have done. Fat lot of good it did them. Because standing in front of the school, before the assembled body of surviving pupils, stood Mac, smoking Browning still in hand. To his left lay a row of eleven men, all with their hands tied behind their backs, all with neat bullet holes in their heads. Six more men were kneeling to his right.
As I watched, Mac popped the clip out of his Browning. Empty. He nodded to Wylie, who raised his rifle and executed the next man. Then Wolf-Barry, Pugh, Speight and Patel each took a life. Green protested but he had a gun forced into his hands by Wylie. Mac barked an order and stood beside him, menacingly. Given no choice, Green closed his eyes, turned his head, and pulled the trigger. Mac patted him on the back.
One more team-building exercise.
One more crime to unite them.
I pushed open the front door and walked outside. The gasps of the boys alerted the officers, who turned, guns raised, and then stood there, amazed. Mac came running up to me, his face a mask of astonishment. He looked me up and down and said:
“What the hell happened to you?”
I told him.
“So what you’re saying is that I’ve just executed a whole bunch of potential allies who could have helped us take on a far nastier bunch of heavily armed psychotic fuckers who like bathing in human blood and are probably cannibals?”
“That about covers it, yeah.”
“Fuck.”
Mac ordered the officers to hang the corpses from the lamp-posts that lined the school drive in the hope that they’d
deter any attackers for a while.
AFTER FILLING MAC in on my escapades I went to the San and attended to my own wounds, dosing myself with antibiotics and rubbing antiseptic and arnica on bruise after bruise. The wound in my side was excruciatingly painful, but I’d managed to miss all my vital organs and I didn’t think I’d punctured my guts. I stitched it up and hoped for the best; it would make strenuous physical exercise even more awkward and painful for a while. By the time I was done a hot bath had been prepared for me, one of the privileges of rank. Lowering myself into it was sweet agony, but I lay there, boiling myself for about an hour, letting all the tension seep away, trying to work out my next move.
We had been training for a potential war with Hildenborough, but after a brief, bloody skirmish they were out of the picture, replaced by a far more menacing enemy. This new force was highly organised, armed with machine guns and machetes, driven by religious fanaticism and pre-emptively attacking communities in our area. We had no idea what, if any, strategy they were using, where they were based, or when, if at all, they planned to attack. We were vulnerable and uninformed; what we needed more than anything else was good intelligence.
When I was cleaned up I briefed all the officers on the events in Hildenborough. I was relieved to find that there was no sign of the resentment I had been expecting from them; I had been blooded once again and it seemed I had earned their respect without even having to try. Mac made it clear that all information regarding the new threat remained amongst officers only; he didn’t want to scare the boys.
“Give ’em a day or so to mourn the dead and celebrate our victory,” he said. “We’ve seen off an attacking army of adults – twenty-eight of them – with only five boys dead. We can use this to increase morale a bit, coz if what Lee is telling us is correct then this was just a warm-up. I won’t leave one of my men in enemy hands so we’ve got to go and rescue Petts. That means picking a serious fight.”
Once the briefing was over the officers went back to the grisly task of hanging out the Hildenborough dead, and burying our own. Mac and I pored over an OS map of the local area and picked out the most likely bases of operation for the group that Wylie had colourfully christened the Blood Hunters. We mainly focused on places that would have good defences, which meant stately homes and old manor houses. There were a lot of them, but we prioritised and drew up a search plan.
While Mac pondered the offence that we would adopt as our best defence, I sent a note to Matron via Mrs Atkins, warning her of the new threat and telling her to be on guard.
“I HAVE NEVER been so bloody scared in my entire life,” said Norton. “There were bullets everywhere, the windows were exploding, the minibus blew up. I just closed my eyes and fired blind. Fat lot of use I was. Give me hand-to-hand and I know what I’m doing, but this was mental. Just fucking mental. And what I don’t understand, right, is why they picked a fight with us in the first place? I mean, what’ve we done?”
“They were watching us,” I said. “They saw Bates’ crucifixion, thought we were a threat. You can see their point, I suppose.”
“Still, couldn’t they have just, y’know, knocked on the door and said ‘hi, we’re the neighbours, we baked you a cake?’ I mean, there was no reason to come in guns blazing, no reason at all.”
“Look where it got them.”
“Look where it got Guerrier, Belcher, Griffiths and Zayn.”
I had no answer to that.
“I don’t want to die like that,” he said eventually.
“If it’s choice of being shot or being bled and eaten, then I’ll take a bullet every time, thanks. After all, been there, done that.”
“Yeah, yeah, stop boasting,” he teased, sarcastically. “By my reckoning you’ve been shot, stabbed, strangled, hanged and savaged by a mad dog since you came back to school, three of those in the last twenty-four hours.”
“I also shat myself.”
“All right. You win. You are both vastly harder and far more pathetic than any of us.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
“So, oh great unkillable smelly one, do you want to know how I’ve been doing?”
I nodded eagerly.
“Things in the ranks are confused. Some boys are really pumped up about the fight, gung-ho, ready for more. They reckon Mac’s leadership saved our bacon and they’re willing to fight for him now.”
“Mac’s fucking leadership provoked the bloody attack in the first place.”
“But they don’t know that.”
“Which boys are we talking about?”
“Most of the fourth- and fifth-formers. They’re the ones who cop it least from the officers, so they’ve got a less highly developed sense of grievance. But I’ve had a quiet natter with Haycox, the horsey one, and filled him in on what happened to Matron, and he’s with us. He’s trying to spread the word, subtle like.”
“And the juniors?”
“They’re more interesting. Rowles is a sneaky little sod when he’s not sniffling, and he’s got pretty much all of them on side. They loved Matron and Bates, and they fucking hate Mac. Plus the officers pick on them all the time and they’re feeling pretty pissed off.”
“So we’ve got basically all the seniors led by Mac, against all the juniors, led by us,” I said, morosely. “Not going to be much of a fight is it.”
“Do we have a better plan?”
I shook my head. “We’ll just have to choose our moment carefully, won’t we?” I said.
AFTER BREAKFAST THE next morning – a surprisingly good Kedgeree made with fish from the river – everyone gathered in the briefing room. Without explicitly detailing the situation, Mac told the boys that there was a new threat abroad and that we were going to be searching for their HQ. A group of five search teams was assembled, each comprising one officer and two other boys, and they were allocated specific targets to recce. The rest of us were to concentrate on repairing the damage of yesterday’s attack and bolstering our defence perimeter.
As walking wounded I was excused any actual work. Instead I spent a quiet day with three boys who had been wounded in the fight. The youngest of these, Jenkins, had been shot in his left hand, which was shattered and unlikely to be fully useable ever again. He was only eleven but he had already made it to grade six on piano; he was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that he’d never make grade seven. Vaughan had a nasty head wound, although this was from crashing into a table as he dived for cover. He was a bit concussed but he’d be fine. Feschuk had taken a splinter of glass to his left eye, and it was likely that depth perception was a thing of the past for him. We spent the day rummaging through the dusty library for any useful books and sharing stories of life before The Cull.
I casually manoeuvred the conversation around to the subject of Mac and was horrified to learn that, despite the wounds, despite what his actions had cost them, despite how he’d treated Bates and Matron, they were starting to like the bastard.
“If it weren’t for him we’d have been captured and hung yesterday,” said Feschuk. He related how Mac had taken his place in the defences when he’d been hit and had rallied the boys in the heat of battle to regroup and ambush the attackers inside Castle itself.
“The officers are a pain, but at least we’re safe here,” said Jenkins. His best mate Griffiths had died in the fight but he seemed detached and unconcerned by this. In shock or just accustomed to losing people?
“I never liked Matron anyways,” said Vaughan. Who was a prick.
THE NEXT MORNING I swapped dusty books for damp leaves and beetles, as I crawled through mulchy undergrowth on a reconnaissance mission. My side stung every time I moved, but the stitches held and the painkillers I was taking helped a bit. When I reached the edge of the forest I brought out my binoculars and looked down a long sweeping lawn at the headquarters of the Blood Hunters.
“I don’t fancy trying to storm that,” said Mac, who was lying beside me.
Neither did I.
&n
bsp; Ightham Mote was a solid wood and stone 14th century manor house that sat in the middle of a deep wide moat. This house was specifically designed to withstand siege and attack. The main entrance was a stone bridge that led underneath a tower flanked by stone buildings. The other three sides of the house comprised a half-timbered upper storey sitting on a solid stone lower level. There was another, smaller stone bridge at the rear. There were sandbagged gun emplacements on both bridges. There used to be a wooden bridge on one side, but that had obviously been pulled down by the building’s new occupants; the National Trust would have had a fit.
One of the teachers used to take junior boys on trips to Ightham and had produced photocopied floor plans for the lessons he gave before the trip. Earlier we had turned Castle upside down and found a pile of these sheets in a store cupboard. The building was a maze, not somewhere you wanted to get involved in close quarters combat.
“This is suicide,” I said. “There is no way we are getting in and out of there without getting shot to pieces.”
“What this? Nine Lives Keegan walking away from a fight?”
That was his new nickname for me, Nine Lives. Funny guy.
“Yes,” I replied. “Always. Whenever humanly possible I walk away from a fight. I don’t like fights. They hurt.”
“Petts is in there. He’s one of our boys. We never leave one of our boys behind.”
Grief, he was starting to speak ‘Tabloid’.
“Mac, mate, we’re schoolboys not Royal Marines. He’s probably already dead. And I know it’s callous, but chances are some, if not all of us, will die getting him out. Surely one dead, however regrettable, is better than twenty?”
Mac favoured me with a look of total disgust.
“You’d really leave him in there?”
“Considering the odds, yes.”
“Then you’re not the man I thought you were.”
Hang on, I wanted to say, since when did the murdering rapist have any claim to the moral high ground?
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