by Luke Duffy
However, something was wrong.
The village to the west of them was too far away for them to see anything, even with the binoculars, but to the east, an eerie scene greeted them and forced them to hesitate before pushing further on.
Through the binoculars, Stan could see vehicles abandoned in the streets, their doors lying open and their windows smashed. Houses were full of pockmarks from bullets that had ripped their way through the thin brick walls. Doors hung from their hinges, caved inward as though a rampaging mob had been through, ransacking the homes of the town. Windows sat like gaping black maws, revealing nothing of their interiors, their glass broken and their frames in tatters.
Here and there, from behind the buildings, faint columns of smoke could be seen rising up into the air, and soon, Stan began to notice the bundles that littered the ground around the buildings and vehicles.
Motionless bodies were scattered in every street. There had been a massacre.
“What do you think, Stan?” Marty asked as he pulled his eye away from the scope on his rifle and glanced at the blank face of his commander.
Stan squinted, his eyes fixed on the buildings and the streets of the ghost town.
“Could’ve been rebels, or even Syrian troops,” he shrugged. “Looks like they wiped out the whole town.”
Nick, the large bulky northerner, closed in from the flank, eyes alert and a look of concern etched across his rounded face. He held his sniper rifle close to his chest while he approached, as though hugging it for comfort.
“We’ve got movement,” he hissed.
The rest of them turned in the direction that Nick indicated and saw a gaggle of distant figures, clambering around a house on the east side of the built up area. It looked as though they were attempting to gain entry through one of the doors.
Marty raised his rifle and peered through his telescopic sight, focussing on the group. There was something clearly wrong with them. They moved in a strange way, slow and clumsily. Even from that distance, they looked pale and dishevelled.
The cluster of men, women, and children, were gathered around the building, but their efforts to get inside seemed half hearted, until the door collapsed. Then, the small clutch of people exploded into a frenzy, pulling at one another and forcing their way inside.
Marty looked at Bull, who was standing beside Nick, his machinegun resting on the edge of the bank and aimed at the ravaged town.
Nick shrugged and began to speak, his words flowing from his mouth in his distinct ‘Geordie’ accent that took a lot of effort to understand.
“Maybe the people who attacked the village are in that building and the survivors are after payback?”
“Do we crack on with the intended route?” Danny asked, turning to Stan.
Stan shook his head, and then shrugged his shoulders. He paused for a moment, glancing to the north, in the direction they wanted to go.
“The people who took out this village could have headed in that direction. Maybe even have an ambush waiting for anyone who comes along after them.”
He turned to Danny and nodded.
“It’s what we’d do.”
“Shit,” Nick suddenly hissed, drawing the attention of the others, “aircraft coming in from the north.”
Everybody turned and squinted up at the bright sky.
Low to the ground and far off in the distance, a black dot, a helicopter, was headed towards them, but its engines and rotors could not be heard due to the range and its low altitude. All the noise of its roaring motors was being forced down by the swirling blades above it and soaked up by the desert floor.
“Bollocks,” Bobby snapped as he ensured he had a full magazine on his rifle and checked his equipment in anticipation of a hard fight, “and everything was going so well. Now we have a gun-ship coming at us.”
Immediately, the team took up defensive positions, keeping themselves low and readying their weapons and ammunition to fend off the approaching menace. The helicopter was on a direct intercept course with them, its nose aimed at the riverbed and tilted downward as it increased its speed, leaving no doubt in the minds of the men that the aircraft knew where they were and was coming for them.
“Ready boys,” Stan called to his left and right as they all tensed and prepared for the coming battle. “Wait till he pulls up, and then nail the fucker.”
Every man removed their safety catches and adjusted their aims, pulling their weapons tightly into their shoulders.
Danny could feel his teeth grinding, a habit that had followed him from his days of wearing a gum shield when he was a boxer in the army. He could see the aircraft more clearly now, and the sound of its engines had reached their ears. The steady thump of its rotors echoed along the ground like the beating of Zulu drums.
He smiled to himself, almost tempted to call out a joke about the similarity to their situation and the British Army outpost at Rorke’s Drift.
Bull took up the first pressure on the trigger of his machinegun, ready to send a torrent of whizzing projectiles towards the attacking aircraft. He closed his left eye and focussed his foresight on the dark shape of the helicopter’s cockpit.
“Come on, you fucker…,” he growled under his breath.
Stan looked back to the village to check on the gaggle of people they had seen and what they were doing. They poured out from the house and more of them began to appear from amongst the other buildings. Glaring up into the sky and seeing the helicopter, they began sprinting through the streets and towards the riverbed where the men waited.
The helicopter was close now, just a few hundred metres away and headed straight for them, its heavy mini-guns and rockets clearly visible on either side of the fuselage.
The bulky shape of the aircraft, a Black Hawk, suddenly slowed and yawed to the right, as though about to fire its weapons into the riverbed while avoiding incoming fire.
“Hold your fire,” a voice suddenly rang out from the far end of the line.
It was Bobby. He had seen something that the others had not.
“Don’t shoot,” he shouted, waving his arms, and at the same time, gesturing towards the helicopter. “It’s one of ours.”
They all soon realised that Bobby was right. It was the aircraft that was supposed to pick them up, twenty kilometres further north.
The Black Hawk pulled its nose upwards and pivoted, so that it approached the dried up riverbed side on, its downwash kicking up a tornado of dust around it as the skilful pilot hovered just a few metres above the desert floor.
Stan made eye contact with the man in the cockpit, who waved back at him and pointed over his shoulder, instructing him to move towards the side doors.
All eight men jumped from their positions, moved towards the aircraft, and began climbing into the passenger compartment.
“What the fuck is going on?” Stan screamed over the shoulder of the pilot so that he could be heard over the engine. “You were supposed to meet us further north, in three hours. Why are you this far across the border?”
The pilot shrugged and pointed to a screen mounted on the console in front of him. Stan looked and saw a digital map of the area and a number of glowing red dots.
“We tracked you to this location,” the pilot called back to him as he began to lift the aircraft from the ground. “We had orders to come and extract you immediately, regardless of whether we had to cross the border in daylight.”
He glanced back at Stan, an apologetic expression on his face.
“I can’t tell you any more than that, because that’s all I know, mate.”
Stan sat back in confusion and realised that Bobby and Nick were fixated with something that they had seen through the window.
Leaning over their shoulders, he could see the gaggle of people they had been watching earlier, clustered on the ground below them. They all converged towards the helicopter, staring up as it passed low over their heads. They scrambled and jostled against one another, reaching out towards the undercarriage
of the Black Hawk. They did not look as though they were asking for help, but more like they were angry and wanted to attack the helicopter.
Did they blame us for their village being attacked? Stan wondered to himself.
Their faces, gaunt and pale, and spattered with blood, stared back at him, their mouths stretching wide and their teeth snapping shut again. All around the strange people, a multitude of mangled bodies lay motionless in large pools of blood, dismembered and torn to pieces.
The people below looked wrong. He had seen the sick and the dying on countless occasions, but he had never seen people who looked the way the villagers did. Though they moved and walked, they did not look real.
They looked, dead.
The helicopter soared upward, the pitch of the engine changed, and the battered village and the remnants of its people were left behind.
Stan sat back, his mind trying to make sense of what he had just witnessed.
6
He lay there, still breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling rhythmically while his heart continued to pound away at a rapid rate, beating like a base drum in his ears. His naked body, worn out and exhausted, was coated in a fine layer of sweat that seeped into the sheets beneath him.
His eyes had closed, unable to summon the strength to lift their disproportiately heavy lids anymore, and he was barely aware of his surroundings as sleep tugged at him, threatening to pull him over the precipice of the deep black chasm that had been created from the euphoria of orgasm.
Her hands brushed over the moist skin of his chest, caressing him as he slowly began to drift away. She twined the black hairs of his torso between her long slender fingers, gently pulling at them with just enough force to keep him from slipping into complete unconsciousness. She watched the glistening chest hairs, coiled around her fingers and tweaked them, just enough to raise the skin a little and prevent him from falling asleep.
Her face was close to the crook of his neck, and he could feel her sweet breath against his warm flesh. She giggled at the sight of him twitching against the slight discomfort she inflicted upon him, but he did not attempt to bat her hand away. He liked the feeling, bordering on pleasure and pain.
“Matthew,” she whispered.
“Hmm…?” He did not have the energy, or desire to speak.
“Your phone is ringing.”
In his dreamy state, he had become oblivious to everything around him, hypnotised by the sound of his own heart and the endorphins that raced around inside his numbed brain. The sound of traffic outside in the street below the hotel room, seemed a million miles away. The TV, the volume having been turned down to little more than a whisper, did not register in his floating mind.
He was far away, being carried along on the billowy pillows of sexual exhaustion.
His phone, switched to silent, throbbed in the pocket of his trousers that had been hastily removed and discarded on the floor. The hectic movements of the device’s vibrations caused a light hum that he could barely hear, even when he concentrated on listening for the sound.
“Fuck it,” he slurred, refusing to put himself through the effort of moving to retrieve it. “It’ll be the wife.”
Michelle, the woman beside him who was as equally naked and coated with perspiration, was not his wife. They had first met ten years earlier, when he was an office manager and she had applied for a job as a receptionist.
Due to her looks and flirtatious ways, he had instantly hired her as his Personal Assistant, justifying it to himself as, ‘a bit of eye-candy to look at while I’m at work wouldn’t do any harm.’
However, with Michelle’s ambition to advance within the business, doing whatever it took to get to where she wanted to be, becoming part of the temptation, Matthew had soon seen an opportunity presented to him that was too good to pass. He knew that he was taking advantage of her drive for success, but he could also see that it was how she operated, using her looks and charm to carry her forward rather than having to begin at the bottom, fighting hard for every inch of ground.
As her teasing style of dress and innuendos became more and more alluring, he found himself encouraging her behaviour, even actively taking part.
He knew that she was a businesswoman and that she was doing what she felt would help herself, but he did not care. He liked what he saw, and with the relationship with his wife waning and becoming bogged down in the bedroom department, Michelle’s advances ignited a new fire within him.
From the very start, he was drawn to her, seduced by her sexual powers and he knew, that it was only a matter of time before someone would make a move on her. Finally, he decided that it should be him.
After their first drunken sexual encounter at the company’s annual Christmas party, their relationship grew into an unspoken mutual understanding. A partnership that he was more than happy to be part of. She would fulfil his sexual desires and needs, and in return, he looked after her from a career sense.
As he was elevated to the dizzying heights of company director, she too received promotion, but as Matthew scaled the corporate ladder, he always made sure that she stayed a number of rungs below him. He was well aware that if the day ever came where the tables turned and the power and dependence changed hands, he would find himself cast out and forgotten, maybe even ruined and disgraced to keep Michelle free from any rivals.
She had never shown him any evidence of a darker side. Quite the contrary. She had never appeared as anything but caring, affectionate and charming, but in her eyes, he saw something, lurking just below the surface. Each time he gazed into her beautiful face, he caught a glimpse of a ruthlessness, born from her high ambition, and he knew that she would bring it to bear if the situation called for it.
It scared him, but equally excited him.
For the past ten years, they had played a silent and subtle game of cat and mouse against one another, vying for position. However, Matthew had always outmanoeuvred her, using his position as leverage and always keeping a firm grasp on the advantage.
He was more than pleased with himself and especially happy with the status quo. He got what he wanted, and she seemed content to continue the game.
Michelle moved her hands away from his chest and glided her fingers, delicately dragging her manicured nails along his stomach and down towards his groin area. Suddenly, she cupped his genitals and gave a gentle squeeze, just enough to get his attention and tear him away from the slumber that beckoned him.
“Well, my dear, Matty,” she breathed into his ear seductively, relaxing her grip on his testicles, slightly, “you had better answer it. We don’t want your lovely wife ever having reason to become suspicious, do we?”
He grunted and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and running his hands through the sweat sodden black hair of his head. He reached down to his trousers and pulled out his shuddering phone, checking the name on the screen.
“Yeah, it’s her,” he croaked, holding a finger to his lips to remind Michelle to stay silent while he answered.
She rolled her eyes at him, feeling slightly annoyed and insulted that he would even need to tell her something so obvious.
He thumbed the green button.
“Hey, darling,” he answered with an air of enthusiasm and affection that he found difficult to muster.
He fell silent for a moment, obviously listening to what his wife was saying on the other end of the line.
“Yeah,” he began again, thinking his way through the lies he was about to tell, “I’ve only just got out of a meeting with the partners. Clive was harping on about production and giving us a hard time, as though it’s our fault.”
He stood up and began to pace the room, the perspiration on his body glistening in the light that filtered through the gaps in the curtains covering the large floor to ceiling windows. He nodded and hummed, throwing in the occasional ‘yes’ and ‘really?’ as he continued the conversation as best he could.
He stopped and stared down at Michelle, stil
l naked and sprawled on the bed, looking back at him with a wry smile.
As the voice of his wife drifted away, becoming barely audible in his lustful mind, he eyed the exposed body of the woman in front of him.
His eyes burned with desire and his tongue hungrily licked at his blood filled lips.
Her long brown wavy hair cascaded down over the nape of her neck and towards her breasts like a dark waterfall that had been frozen in mid flow. Her seductive green eyes gazed back at him, silently telling him a countless amount of forbidden secrets and enticing him to experience them for himself.
Even after ten years, and now in her late thirties, she had a figure that drove him to burst with desire and would put most girls of twenty years old to shame. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s and free of any imperfections, and her legs, to him, they were something from a dream about what paradise should look like.
With her appearance, intellect, and physical skills, it was impossible for him ever to become bored, or even want to resist her.
Finally, with a great deal of effort that almost made him feel faint, he was able to drag himself back from the erotic daydream he had slipped into and focus his attention, fleetingly, on the grating voice of his wife in his ear.
“Listen, love,” he began, apologetically, “I have to go. Clive is waving to me and calling me back into his office for something. That bastard isn’t happy unless he’s busy whipping someone half to death.”
His wife said something and he began to nod.
“Yep, I haven’t forgotten. I’ll be home in time.”
Again, he dipped and raised his head vigorously, acknowledging what his wife was telling him from the other end of the phone and willing the conversation to be over.
“Will do, darling. I’ll pick it up on the way home. I know the one you like. It’s the Italian Rose that we had the other weekend, isn’t it?”
More nods.
“Yep, got it. Love you too.”
He hung up and shook his head.
“Fucking pain in the arse,” he grumbled as he turned to Michelle and seeing her knees part slightly, deliberately giving him a glimpse of what lay beyond, felt his carnal yearnings return.