School's Out

by Scott Andrews

  "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.

  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?

  "Look," I said. "I agree with you in principle, of course I do. But for fuck's sake, look at that place. What good does it do anyone getting ourselves slaughtered?"

  He just ignored me and crawled away. Clearly I was beneath his contempt.

  The more I thought about attacking that place the less I liked it. I could see Mac's point about rescuing Petts, it was the only honourable sentiment I'd ever heard him utter, but it was going to get us killed. The power base that Norton was trying to build for a coup was just not strong enough yet, so there was no way of seizing power before the attack. And Mac was riding a wave of post-victory loyalty, so even our progress so far was looking wobbly. The boys had seen Mac's strategy win them a battle, and he'd been in the thick of the fighting, leading from the front. He'd proved himself both clever and brave. Which is, let's face it, what you want in a leader.

  Not for the first time I wondered if maybe Mac was the best choice to lead us after all. And not for the first time I recalled Matron's face and Bates' screams, and felt my resolve harden.

  Time was of the essence. We needed to devise a plan of attack quickly and efficiently and for that we needed more intelligence. We were clear on the approaches to the house and its internal layout, but we needed to know more about the routines and behaviour of the people who lived there. After all, attacking in force during their daily weapons training drill, the only time of the day when every single person inside is armed to the teeth, would not be a good thing. We needed to know stuff, and the simplest way to find stuff out is to ask. Rather than knock politely on the door and ask the insane cannibals to fill in a survey we decided to wait until someone left and then capture them. We didn't have to wait long.

  A group of three young men left the house around midday, armed with machetes and guns, and headed off in the direction of a nearby village. Speight led an ambush in which two of the men were killed, and then rode back to school with the survivor strapped across the back of his horse.

  "You'll bleed for this, cattle fucker!"

  The man was in his early twenties. His blonde hair was slicked back with dried blood and his face, torso and arms were similarly daubed. He stank like a butcher's shop and his breath reeked. Mac had tied him to a chair in an old classroom and was sitting facing him, turning his hunting knife over and over in his hands, saying nothing.

  "David will come for me and when he does you'll pay. You'll all pay." This last directed at me and Speight.

  "Let me guess," said Mac, impersonating The Count from Sesame Street. "We'll pay... in blood! Mwahahaha!"

  Speight chuckled. I rolled my eyes.

  "You'll help make us safe. We're chosen. You're nothing."

  "This whole 'safe' thing, let me see if I've got this straight," said Mac. "You smear yourself in human blood to protect you against what exactly... the plague?"

  "The chosen shall bathe in the blood of the cattle, and they shall eat of their flesh, and they shall be spared the pestilence."

  "But you've already survived the pestilence, yeah? I mean, you're O-neg, right? David's O-neg, your blood brothers are all O-neg, your victims are O-neg. You're all immune anyway otherwise you'd be dead, wouldn't you? So what's the fucking point?"

  "The pestilence was sent by God to cleanse the Earth. It was The Rapture, don't you see? The worthy were taken up to The Lord and we have been left behind. We are the cursed ones and we must prove ourselves worthy in his sight before the Second Coming. We are living through the seven years of The Tribulation. We must not fail the trials before us or we shall burn in hell forever. David is the prophet of the Second Coming and he shall lead the chosen into Heaven. He anoints us with the blood of the unworthy so that when the pestilence returns to carry off those who have failed in the sight of The Lord we shall be protected from the mutation. We shall live forever, don't you see? When David takes the blood of the cattle and blesses it then it becomes the blood of The Christ and we are cleansed. Hallelujah!"

  We just stared. None of us really had an answer for that.

  "Um, right," said Mac, for once rendered almost speechless. "Okay. Look, mate, I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion with you and stuff. I just want to know the routine in your little manor house, yeah? What times you eat, what time you put the lights out, guard changes, that sort of stuff. Oh yeah, and where you keep the cattle from Hildenborough locked up. You know, just the basics. Think you can help me out?"

  The prisoner appeared to think about this for a moment and then replied: "Piss off."

  Mac turned to me and Speight, and beamed. "Finally, fucking finally, I get to torture somebody!"

  He turned back and brandished the knife. "Right, you smelly little toerag, I am going to cut you into tiny chunks and feed you to the pigs!"

  "Mac, a word," I said. I was still in Mac's bad books but he hadn't demoted me or anything, so I figured I was still persona grata.

  "What is it Nine Lives? I'm busy." He advanced towards the captive.

  "Mac, a moment please," I insisted. "Outside."

  He turned to look at me. He did not look happy. "This had better be good."

  In the corridor I explained my idea to Mac, who thought about it for a moment and then nodded. Speight scurried off to get the necessary torture implements.

  "Does this mean I don't get to cut him?" said Mac, disappointed.

  "You can, yeah, but not now, eh? Just let me do this, we'll get the info we need, then you can do what you want with him. Fair?"

  "All right. This better work though."

  "Trust me."

  Speight returned and handed the tools over to me. I re-entered the room, with Mac and Speight behind me, and I advanced on the bound prisoner. I placed the torture devices on the bedside cabinet, pulled up a chair, and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially in the captive's ear.

  I told him what I was going to do.

  He begged for mercy, but I refused to relent.

  I reached into the bowl, pulled out the wet flannel, wrung it out and began to wash the blood from his face.

  He screamed.

  Not so safe now.

  By the time I reached for the shampoo he was telling us everything we wanted to know.

  Everyone assembled in the briefing room later that evening, in full combats, camouflage on their faces. Guns had already been issued. The thirty-eight remaining boys, four remaining officers, myself and Mac gathered together to plan an attack that I felt sure many of us would not survive.

  Mac talked us through his plan and I watched as it dawned on the boys exactly how dangerous this night was going to be for them. Rowles looked terrified, Norton was ashen-faced. Defensive fighting is one thing, but to deliberately pick a fight with a heavily armed force entrenched in a near impregnable fortress is quite another. Mac gave it the hard sell, and nobody refused to participate. And to be fair, the plan could work, with a huge truckload of luck.

  As the sun fell we marched out the front door and began the three mile yomp to Ightham Mote, determined to rescue our schoolmate and neutralise a threat that could destroy us.

  St Mark's school for boys was going to war.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The main assembly hall in Castle is full of names. On the wall that used to face the massed school each morning are six large black wooden boards, all hand decorated in blue and gold. The first three list, in chronological order, the Head Boys of the school going back 150 years. The next two list those pupils and teachers from St Mark's who died in The Great War, and the final one lists the Second World War dead.

  But these aren't the only names in the main hall. The wooden panelling which clads the walls, deep polished and ancient, has been carved on by generations of boys. From the modern graffiti, simple scratches with a compass, to the old, ornate graffiti, with ser
ifed fonts and punctuation, which must have taken hours of patient work with a penknife, boys have left their mark on St Mark's.

  These names tell stories, and one name always fascinated me. James B. Grant carved his name into the wood panel beneath the farthest rear window. It's a beautiful piece of work, one of the most elaborate signatures in the hall. It must have taken him ages. It reads 'James B. Grant, 1913'.

  His name also appears on the middle board of Head Boys, which tells us that he was Head Boy for the school year 1912-13; he must have carved his name on the wall in his final week at school, unafraid of punishment.

  Finally, his is the last name on the board listing the dead of The Great War. He died in 1918.

  A whole life story in three names.

  There are pictures of the boys St Mark's sent to war, all dressed up in their corps uniforms. The faded, sepia photographs hang in the corridor that leads to the headmaster's study, each one with a list of names beneath, telling us who these boys were. There is one photograph, of the school corps from 1912, in which every single one of those names is to be found on the list of war dead. Every single one. Even given the slaughter of those years that's a remarkable and tragic clean sweep.

  James B. Grant sits front and centre in that photograph. He's wearing puttees and a peaked cap, and he's got a swagger stick lying across his lap. He looks confident but not serious; there's a twinkle in his eye and a slight hint of amusement about the lips. He looks like a man who doesn't take himself too seriously, and I like that about him. He was an officer in the school corps and was doubtless an officer at the front.