by H M Sealey
“Listen to me!” She bellowed over the commotion, “this truck’ll blow up unless I give you the keys to move it. And I’ll only do that when you listen to what Diana Lamont has to say!”
One of the Wolves leapt up, onto the back of the truck, River turned and glared at him.
“Try and take them by force and I’ll throw them away as far as I can. I mean it!”
The wolf grunted and tried to catch her ankle.
“Stop that!”
One of the other Wolves growled the order, but the Wolf closest to River didn’t listen, he began to climb up to the roof, savage eyes wide with hunger and fury.
The gunshot sounded even above the chaos all around, and the Wolf who was now only a few feet from River slumped backwards, bleeding from his mouth and nose, his furious eyes suddenly blank.
“I said to stop that!” The Wolf’s voice was harder this time, full of authority and power. “I’ll shoot the next man to ignore my orders too!”
Now there was almost silence. The man who seemed to be in command held a gig, blod-stained hand out to River.
“Give me the keys.”
River shook her head. “Your boss wants to talk to you.”
The Wolf turned his head to see Diana standing stiffly, a gun to her head.
“What?” He grunted, irritated the destruction had been curtailed.
“Get your men to stand down.” Diana’s order was given in a voice that was almost steady.
The Wolf snorted. “Why?”
“Because they’re going to kill me if you don’t you stupid moron!”
The Wolf pulled his mask aside long enough to spit.
“So what?”
Diana’s eyes widened in indignation and fear. “Who do you think funds you, you Neanderthal?” She hissed. “Who released you from prison? Who sees you have all the equipment you need? Who stops the government from coming after you?”
All around ripples of unpleasant laughter rose up in the crackling of the fires.
“Your government’s fit for nothing!” The Wolf laughed. “The only thing your police can do is arrest people for fucking assuming someone’s gender. They’re fuck all use otherwise!”
Diana swallowed, her confidence oozing away.
“Just do as I tell you!” The command became a plea and River seized on this.
“So let me get this straight!” Her voice was clear. “The great and terrifying Wolves, scourge of the border areas, are commanded by a woman?” She sniggered. “Wow. That’s impressive. If my mother snaps her fingers and tells you to bark, you say how loud? I’m not sure you should be called Wolves. Poodles perhaps!”
The Wolf commander gave her an ugly look. “She’s not in charge of us!”
“But you’re here because she told you to come! She wants me dead, she wants this house burned to the ground and you’re obeying!”
“What the Hell. We get paid for this!”
“I’m sure she gives you plenty of poodle treats for being good little boys and doing her dirty work for her.”
The Wolf turned his gun on River. “You shut the fuck up!”
River glared at the Wolf, her entire bearing unafraid.
“Why do you do this?”
The Wolf laughed loudly at that. “What’s not to like? We get guns and trucks and as many girls as we can fuck.”
“And you can’t have those things in Old Britain otherwise, can you?” Josh’s voice rang out clearly. “I spoke to one of the other Wolves.” He clarified, omitting the terrifying memory of watching a bullet rip through a human skull, it was an image that would never leave him. “And he told me that he’d been treated at if he was broken all his life, just for being a man.”
River picked up on this.
“My mother hates men. Or, at least, she hates men she can’t control. She used to joke about keeping all men in concentration camps until they’d learned to embrace their inner feminist. She said she’d castrate you all if you weren’t needed for breeding. She used to get really mad when women didn’t dominate every profession – except anything that required dangerous or dirty work. Men were good enough for that! She even thought it’d be acceptable to make all men wear a badge warning people they were potential rapists!”
River surveyed her audience, she caught Baraq’s eye and continued.
“Why do any of you put up with that kind of discrimination?”
The Wolf’s eyes didn’t leave River’s face.
“What the fuck can we do about it?”
“You’re kidding? Men comprise half the country.”
“Not real men. Most of them are pussies sucking at the tits of feminism. Any real men are in the prisons. Nobody gives a fuck about them.”
“The….Emperor’s New…. Clothes.”
The voice was strained, River looked behind her and saw a young Japanese man climbing to his feet, there was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
“What?”
“Something Alaia said.” He seemed to wince as he said the name. “She was special. She saw that the people on both sides of the border could see the stupidity of the leadership, they were just too scared to speak up. She….she said someone needed to be brave, like the little boy. To speak up and point out that the Emperor has no clothes. But nobody speaks up.”
The man stood up. “I want to speak up.” He said. “I don’t know how, but I swear I’m going to spend my life speaking up.”
The Wolf laughed. “For a skinny guy you’ve got guts. You want to join us?”
“No!” The man shook his head. “I don’t want to kill people, or destroy property, or rape. I want to defend. I want to protect.” He stood straight and faced the Wolf with the fearlessness of a man who had nothing left to lose.
“But the whole country is full of people who don’t like NuTru. Who think they’re bigoted, racist, sexist idiots. They’re just too scared to point it out because NuTru have made it seem as if everybody thinks the way they do, but I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s a very loud, very small minority of true believers making too much noise.”
“None of you are real men!” River shouted the accusation loudly. “You’re hired thugs doing exactly what my mother says because you’re scared of going back to prison!”
“Do you know what prison’s like?” The Wolf shot back.
“If it’s anything like a Rainbow Centre then yes. I do. I know it’s hell.”
“It’s worse than fucking Hell. At least in Hell they don’t try to mend you. I got taken away from my parents when I was six because I made a gun out of a bit of wood and ran around the playground. My dad laughed and said boys will be boys and said it didn’t do him no harm.”
The Wolf paused for a moment. “I never saw my dad again. He was accused of warping my mind. In prison they tried to get me to denounce him, said it was his fault I got mad and tried to smash things, but it wasn’t!”
“So why not try to change things for other little boys?” River shouted. “Why use all this power just to serve the woman whose government took you away from your parents? Because that’s all you’re doing. You’re saying it’s okay to take little boys away from their families just for being little boys. You’re letting them carry on doing it!”
People were listening, the Wolves were watching her and River was winning. She knew it, she could feel the shift in the atmosphere
But she didn’t get any further. The fire reached the truck and she didn’t even notice, not until it ate into the fuel tank.
The truck exploded in an almighty roar that filled the air more loudly than any wolf, and the whole vehicle became a vast, crackling fireball that sent fiery flares high into the night sky.
~
~ Thirty–Two ~
Josh
River’s burned body is thrown clear of the explosion, somehow I manage to keep the gun trained on Diana, even though my heart seems to be on fire too.
“River!” Diana screams her daughter’s name, almost as if
she cares. Almost as if she didn’t just order her murder.
For a few moments there’s turmoil as the truck rages with fire, spitting flame to all sides.
“Move the other trucks back!” The Wolf-in-charge orders. “Get them away from the flames.”
Diana continues to scream. “My daughter! My little girl!”
I shift forwards and make sure the gun is clearly touching her.
“Don’t you dare pretend you cared about her!” I scream back, fighting to keep control of the deadly weapon in my hands. Releasing a volley of bullets into her body is not as abhorrent a thought as it should be. “Don’t you dare! You brought these men here to kill us all!”
Diana falls to her knees and sobs. “But….I didn’t want to see…..not like that. I wanted to make it…..kind.”
“Kind?” I can’t believe she just said that. “Do you think it was kind when I was taken away from my family? You and your government is the very definition of cruel. Look at the Wolves! You created them, and I don’t mean you let them out of prison and gave them guns, I mean you twisted them up inside, demonised their natural instincts, gave them a world they couldn’t live in! I don’t believe they were evil men until you made them that way! Every single one of the Wolves’ victims is on your head! You’ve damaged everyone!”
So help me, I want to kill this woman, I want to make her suffer. I tighten my fingers over what I think is the trigger.
“This isn’t murder!” I tell her. “This is a lawful execution! You’ve destroyed a whole country on every level. You set people at war with each other, you made men hate women and women hate men and look at the results! Look at it! You should be ashamed!”
Diana continues to sob, great long rivulets of white through her smeared mascara.
“Stop it!” I cry. “Stop crying over her. You don’t have the right!”
“Josh, stop!”
Baraq is beside me, a little more blood seeping through his bandages but otherwise well.
“Don’t kill her.”
“She deserves to die Dad.” I look up into his kind face. “She stole twenty years of my life!”
“I know. And I know it’s going to sound trite, but she really did believe she was doing the right thing. She had an ideal image of a country free of religion and hated and bigotry. But to achieve that, she needed a totalitarian grip on the people and she needed to use her own version of religion, hatred and bigotry. She isn’t the first human being to do terrible things in the name of something good and she won’t be the last.”
There are tears flooding my face.
“But River…..she was your daughter?”
He nods and I can see that he’s fighting to hold back the tears. “She died doing what loved most, fighting for what’s right. Now we have to try and finish what she was doing. Underneath the balaclavas these Wolves are just damaged men. They’ve done terrible things but they were given no choice. Diana channelled their anger at the injustice they experienced into a deadly weapon. But I think that can change.”
I sniff back the tears and gaze around. The house is burning, as is the carcass of the truck. But nobody’s killing anyone any more. I don’t want to count the dead bodies around me though.
But there are live bodies too, and the Wolves have gathered near their remaining vehicles, a pack of hunters unsure what it is they should be hunting.
I still hold the gun on Diana, choking back tears.
“You deserve to die!” I tell her. Then, even though my hands are trembling so badly I have little control, I manage to hurl the gun to the side. “But I’m not going to do it.”
I walk away from her, towards the burning truck. Why am I bothered about her still-living corpse when River’s needs to be found?
~
River
River’s body was burned almost beyond recognition, certainly beyond recovery, but she wasn’t dead. Not quite.
“Josh….?” He couldn’t touch her at first, he couldn’t bear to. There was no part of her body that hadn’t wasn’t sticky with weeping wounds.
“River?”
Her voice was soft, almost a squeak as she forced the words out through damaged vocal cords.
“You….you’re kind of…..my brother. Right?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m….half and half see…..I half belong to Old Britain. Half to the BSI.” Her body stiffened as if she was fitting. “It...hurts.”
“I know.”
“I’m….not stupid. I’m….burned all over.”
“We can get you to a hospital.”
“Dear Josh…..always optimistic. In the old days….when infections could be fought, maybe. You have to fight what can be fought Josh. This…..can’t be fought.”
She lifted an arm, an arm that was black with charred flesh, and managed to touch his face. Then she pulled him as close as she could and whispered a few, strange words into his ear.
“Finish….it.” She begged.
“What?”
“Finish both things. Fight what can be fought and…...let go of what can’t. Please.”
~
Josh
I hold River’s body until I know her life is gone, and slowly I move my hand away from her mouth and nose. I hope she really was a Christian and I hope there’s a beautiful heaven ready to welcome her. She deserves some sort of reward.
“No!”
Diana throws herself down beside me, swallowing tears of horror at the sight of her burned daughter.
“Oh River...River...”
“You took her name away from her.” I have no sympathy for this creature.
“To keep her with me.”
“She’d have been better off with her father.”
“Wearing a hijjab? I wouldn’t condemn a dog to live amongst the Muslims.”
“And yet you spearheaded the Yes to Shariah campaign because you respected their beautiful culture so much. You’re a hypocrite.”
“We had an alliance, Islam and NuTru, against the most damaging aspects of western society. White men and Christianity. Once we’d won, we didn’t need the alliance any more.”
I turn my face in disgust, I don’t want to even look at this ugly hypocrite.
“I’ll take her home, have her buried.” She whispers.
I cling to the ruined body. “Her home wasn’t anywhere near you.”
“Get up!” The Wolf Captain presses his gun into the small of Diana’s back. I didn’t even realise he was there, nor did I care. He can do what he wants, he’s not my problem.
“I – I want to see to my daughter.”
“Just get up!” He commands, thrusting a big hand into her perfectly curled hair, and hauling her to her feet. Then he marches her off, towards where the Wolves have gathered by the trucks. They brought up wine from the cellar and most of them are drinking heavily, cigarette-tips glow red in the dark.
“Listen to me!” He announces, and we all listen. “I’ve been told what to do by this fucking government for long enough! They told me that all white men were killers and rapists so I might as well kill for her.”
He throws Diana forwards and she stumbles onto her face on the gravel. “But I wasn’t a killer. Not until I did what she told me to do. I was never a killer. I wanted to pick up a gun and fight bad guys. I wanted to rescue princesses from dragons. I wanted to raise a family! But they told me I couldn’t do those things any more and wanting to do them was a sign of how broken I was inside. How toxic! They told me I was misogynistic and sexist when I admired a girl I liked. Then I was told there were no dragons to fight, only sexist attitudes and micro-regressions inside me. I was told everything wrong in the world was the fault of white men and we should feel guilty every day of our lives.”
He pauses. “But it turns out there are dragons. There’s a government holding a whole country in a tower and nobody tries to rescue them.” He gazes towards the rest of the wolves.
“I’m not her hired killer any more. I’m not gonna take out my anger
on innocent people. I feel guilt. I feel real guilt, not because I’m a white man, but because I let this bitch make me kill on her behalf! I raped women because every time I saw their faces, I saw her face and I hated her! I can’t ever make up for that, but I can take my toxic masculinity where is can do most good, to the heart of this bitch’s government!”
He glances over towards one of the trucks. “Get the girls out. Cut them free.”
The Wolves stare at one-another in confusion.
“Do it! Nobody abuses another girl. They’re not the enemy. It’s her government that’s made us feel like women are our enemies.”
The truck doors are pulled open and the girls helped out. The Wolves cut the ties around their wrists and they stand, huddled together, frightened.
“You’re free.” The Wolf tells them. “Get it?”
“But where can they go?”
Missy runs towards them, most are crying and many are in shock. “The government won’t admit what’s happened to them. There’s nowhere for them to go. Only Rainbow Centres and institutions. If they try and tell their stories they won’t be believed.”
The Wolf grunts. Then he grins.
“Okay then, lets do it their way.”
Missy looks at him with caution. “What?”
“Their way. Protesting. Angry people yelling in the streets outside Plas Gwyn. The media loves to film those fucking protests, so lets give them a real one.”
He stares down at Diana. “You haven’t got an army to protect you any more, and your police are all feminist pansies.”
I step forwards to speak, River’s blood still sticky on my hands and clothing. “She’s a slave trader too. If you rescue the slaves on her property you’ll have more people to join your protest. More evidence.”
The Wolf nods. “I quite fancy being a liberator. We’ll take every slave who fancies fighting back, and you,” He hauls Diana to her feet again, “Can explain who these girls are. You can explain who we are and why we’re armed to the rest of your fancy friends in parliament and to the media.”