by Jon Grahame
They worked together through sign language because they couldn’t hear themselves speak. They had seen Reaper go sideways off the grass mound, but had he been shot or was he throwing himself in that direction? Gunfire had also splatted the wall of the Tower around Brother Abraham as the monk had ducked inside and slammed the door.
Yank saw the carbine fall from the roof and her heart contracted in anguish, only to leap again when James resumed firing. It made her more reckless in attracting the return fire in their direction rather than upwards at their youthful comrade. Then the gunfire above them stopped and the enemy concentrated solely on them. James was down. They all knew it, they all felt the pain, they all knew they could be next.
Doors closed on one of the 4x4s and it began to move towards them, straight across the central area of tall grass. Two men were in the back, firing rifles over the roof, but they ducked when Jenny turned the machinegun on them. When she lowered the sights, the bullets hit the steel sheet welded to its front.
Yank abandoned her position and ran into the Museum. She dodged behind the cafeteria and went as far to the left as she could to get an angle on the approaching vehicle. She fired through the glass frontage and raked the side of the vehicle, hitting the driver. It didn’t stop, but the driver’s foot pressed the pedal hard and the vehicle veered violently to the right, headed straight for her and crashed into the side of the building. She changed magazines but had only a steel sheet to aim at. One of the men in the back leant over the cab roof to fire at her.
Shit, she thought. Is this it?
Then she was aware of Keira, stepping clear of the cover of the field gun to get a better line of fire, and putting burst after burst into the other side of the 4x4, until she went down, flung backwards into the museum.
Yank was consumed with anger. She left cover, used a concrete planter as a stepping-stone, and leapt over the steel sheet onto the bonnet of the car, to see that the men in the front of the vehicle were either dead or badly wounded, then onto the roof of the cab. The two men crouching in the back looked up in shock. She blasted both as bullets came through the roof around her feet. Someone inside was still alive.
She jumped backwards into the truck bed, firing into the cab as she did so and kept firing until the magazine was empty, only to be hit in the back as she reached for a fresh magazine. The blow put her down and her back hurt, as if it had been thumped by a sledgehammer. But she knew she was okay, that the vest had done its job. She reloaded, her head in the lap of one of the men she had killed. Then she rolled over and fired a short burst over the back of the truck bed – which, she realised instantly, was a mistake. The side of the truck was no real protection against bullets and she had alerted them to the fact that she was still alive.
But was Keira?
Yank leapt back the way she had come and ran into the shadows of the museum frontage and round the cafeteria. Her partner lay on her back, arms spread, ankles crossed like a grounded angel. Her eyes were closed and, for some reason, Yank took that as a good sign. You die with you eyes open, don’t you?
‘Make it, you Irish bastard,’ she said, her words lost in the deafness and noise of firing, touched her fingers to her lips and transferred the kiss to Keira’s forehead, then ran back to the cover of the field gun to continue the battle.
Jenny was shouting something to her but she couldn’t hear and shook her head. Yank was crying with anger and she fired burst after burst over the gun, changing magazines, and firing again, until she realised that only two guns were firing back. This was holding fire. Containment. Most of the enemy had gone in the other direction. Were they chasing Reaper?
The shooting from James and the girls was enough of a distraction to aid Reaper’s initial escape as he took cover among the vehicles in the car park. Ahead, towards the Hilton Hotel and the city itself, he could see a line of armed men spread across his path. A couple fired in his general direction but most hadn’t seen where he had gone. He crabbed sideways, further to the right and the river.
He could hear a limited pursuit behind him but most of those in the square seemed to be engaged in returning fire towards the girls. More shots were fired, but came nowhere near him. With luck, some stray bullets might cross the car park in either direction and hit his foes.
As he ran, dived, rolled and scrambled, he wondered whether he had managed to hit Steel, whom he was sure had stayed inside the Hummer while his subordinates got out. The man was not as macho as he had thought. It had been a clever move to stay out of sight until he knew exactly what risks he was facing. Reaper hadn’t had that luxury, but at least he was in one piece and running. But where? Back to Haven, as he had instructed everyone else? Or could he hole up for one more try at Steel?
There were three entrances into the Coppergate shopping mall: to the left, next to the Hilton Hotel, was the route he had ridden with Brother Abraham on his first visit to the city; to the far right, on the other side of an underground car park entrance, a walkway went alongside the river before going beneath the shops; the third was directly ahead and went down the side of Fenwick’s store and then became a short underpass into the piazza. This was the one he chose.
Two men were directly in his way, others were nearby but looking outwards. He let the Uzi dangle from the strap around his neck, took the two Glocks from their holsters and ran straight ahead without hesitation. He took one shot with each and both men went down as he continued running towards the underpass. The shouts behind meant pursuit was close and, as he entered the piazza, he knew he would be an easy target if he kept running. Perhaps he could find a refuge from where he could tempt Steel into showing himself.
Bullets went past him and hit the paved stones at his feet. Other men were in the lane by the side of the church. They fired and smashed the windows of Topshop. He went through them, past mannequins that lay like bodies amid the debris. He took refuge behind a pillar and fired back at his attackers. Not surprisingly, they took cover before returning fire.
The men facing him were not trained soldiers and were probably not prepared to die for the cause of John Steel. They would prefer to keep Reaper pinned down and wait for his ammunition to run out before contemplating anything as drastic as storming the store. For the moment, it was a stand off; Reaper kept his head down, changed the magazine on the Uzi and wondered if Steel would appear.
Sandra and Pete ran to the Range Rover. She opened the boot and threw back a blanket to reveal an arsenal of weapons with which she started arming herself.
‘Reaper said if it went wrong, you should go back to Haven,’ Pete said. ‘He said you would be needed to organise resistance.’
‘Right,’ she said, continuing to strap guns from her shoulders and grab extra magazines of ammunition. ‘You drive.’
Pete didn’t ask where she expected him to drive. He knew where they were going. As he was about to close the boot, Brother Mark appeared and reached inside and took a combat shotgun.
Sandra looked at him questioningly.
‘How does it work?’ he said.
‘Get in and I’ll show you on the way,’ she said.
As Pete got behind the wheel, the noise of battle changed. It was no longer frenetic with automatic and machinegun fire. It now sounded more like a siege.
‘This way,’ said Brother Mark, pointing.
Tanya and Jenny were now using L85 automatic rifles. They knelt amidst a flooring of shell casings. Yank touched Jenny’s shoulder, pointed at the enemy and raised two fingers to indicate the number of guns they faced. Jenny, face taut with strain and dirty with residue, nodded. Yank pointed at herself and at the tree in the middle of the square. She mouthed, ‘Cover me’ and ran back into the museum, past the body of her friend and around the cafeteria to her former position behind the crashed car. She looked across at the girls and nodded and they both began firing in sustained bursts.
Yank
left cover and, crouching low, ran through the tall grass which gave her partial concealment. She made the tree just as she was spotted and ducked behind its trunk as bullets chewed through the bark and scythed the grass. They were still pinned down and neutralised from the action unless a miracle happened or Yank tried a suicidal charge. Why not? she thought, as grief and battle anger took hold of her.
Then the miracle happened.
Brother Abraham appeared from the entrance of Clifford’s Tower. He began to come down the fifty-five steps at a cautious pace. In his hands he held a sword. Yank began to fire again, to cover the monk’s approach from their enemy’s rear. She attracted return fire but Tanya and Jenny joined in as an added distraction and Abraham speeded up his descent.
He reached the first gunman and swung his weapon as the man realised he was under threat and began to turn. He hit him across the neck. The second gunman turned as Brother Abraham lifted the sword and approached him for another strike. Yank stood up from cover, aimed and fired, and took the man in the back, causing him to discharge his rifle over the head of the monk and smashing the blade of the sword.
The three girls ran to the bunker of cars. Yank realised with a shock that there were a lot of bodies. Brother Abraham was breathing heavily and looked with surprise at his broken blade.
‘It’s a Viking broadsword,’ he said. ‘It’s only a replica. It doesn’t even cut.’ The girls glanced past him at the man he had struck. ‘I think I broke his neck.’
To make sure, Tanya put a bullet in him.
The girls were all dishevelled, dirty and out of breath. Abraham’s robes were unsullied and he looked remarkably clean in the circumstances, but a fire burned in his eyes.
‘They’re still shooting,’ he said. ‘Reaper’s still alive.’
They ran across the car park towards the sounds of fighting. Three girls carrying L85 automatics and a fiery monk with a broken sword.
Reaper used the Glocks. Single shots, always at a target, nothing random or wasted. He had reloaded the Uzi with the spare magazine and would save that until the end. In the meantime, he kept moving from one side of the window to the other, using the cover of clothes racks and broken furniture and his bullets to keep the enemy at bay. If nothing else, he might give the girls and James a chance to escape; it was Reaper after all that Steel wanted.
He saw a man with red hair in the lane by the side of the church and fired two quick shots but without effect. His desire to kill Steel put his own survival at the back of his mind. He felt dispassionate and distanced from the situation he was in, and the fact that he didn’t rate his chances of getting out alive didn’t bother him unduly. He might find a way out of the back of the shop and go on the run through the city, but he had to give the others as much time as possible and he still had a chance, slim though it might be, of nailing Steel.
A bullet scored his arm but he hardly felt it. He had been hit several times, mostly in the vest. If he lived, his bruises would give him hell. The wounds he had taken on his arms, legs and one that had scoured his neck, were minor irritations. If he lived, he would survive them. If he didn’t, then what did they matter?
If he died, he was dying for good people, and besides, he’d had a year of life that actually meant something, whereas those immediately before had meant nothing but pain, anguish and guilt. He thought of Greta and what might have been, and he thought of Sandra and his heart swelled with pride. He knew that, in his situation, she would do the same; that the young girl was a true warrior with both courage and compassion. God, but he was proud of her. Tears dampened his eyes and he laughed at his sentimentality and the thought that, by a quirk of serendipity, his last stand was being enacted in Topshop, the chain store where she had worked. For a few seconds he stood tall and fired both guns recklessly before it dawned on him that he was behaving like some Wild West cowboy.
He moved back into cover when bullets came too close. The clouds had broken, he could see blue sky and the sun was about to burst forth in all its glory. He grinned as he changed the magazine on one of the Glocks. The last magazine. At least, he had a nice day for it.
Sandra instructed Pete to stop the Range Rover at the top of the lane that led down into the mall from where all the shooting was coming. They were all equipped and Brother Mark knew the simple rudiments of the seven-shell, pump-action shotgun and how to reload.
As she slipped partway down the lane, she surmised from the way the firing was being directed that Reaper was holed up in premises at the far end and on the left; everyone else was facing him in the arc of shops and churchyard to the right. She went back to the Rover and gave her instructions.
Reaper had six bullets in each Glock plus the one magazine in the Uzi that hung round his neck. Not long before the final curtain. What was the song? My Way by Sinatra, the anthem of pub singers everywhere. Not for him. He spaced his shots from the handguns. What music would he choose for his final curtain? Something loud to wake the bastards up. No tears, no regrets. A Stones record would be good. Jumpin Jack Flash or Brown Sugar. Maybe Sympathy For The Devil? He took more shots and the Glocks clicked on empty but he thought he had seen Steel’s distinctive red hair behind the church wall on the far side of the square. Maybe he could still take him.
He put the handguns in their holsters and pulled back the slide on top of the Uzi to arm it. He had a clip of forty bullets that would burst out at ten per-second. Four seconds of continual fire and he would be empty. He was determined to make them count.
The Range Rover rolled gently down the slope, attracting shots from Steel’s men before coming to rest against the wreckage of the burnt-out fast food outlet. The clouds above parted at speed, as if they had been waiting for stage directions from God. The sun finally broke clear into an unblemished sky. Its brightness shone down in a beam of light that, by some miracle of refraction, hit the windscreen of the Range Rover to be deflected with laser intensity onto the broken shards and slices of still upright glass in the shattered shop windows. The result was a starbust of brightness that blinded everyone in the piazza. They blinked and squinted and wondered at the dazzling light that was brilliant enough to be a portent of divine intervention. And from its corona stepped an Angel of Death.
Sandra walked forward, an Uzi in each hand, firing indiscriminately as the guns bounced erratically in her grip, but providing a terrifying barrage of 9mm bullets. On her right side was Pete Mack, holding a light machinegun with pit bull determination, its deadly stutter chewing brick, concrete, wood, glass and flesh. On her left marched a bearded monk with wild hair, blasting anything in sight with 12 gauge buckshot. When his gun clicked empty, he dropped it and reached for the second shotgun that was hanging around his neck. Sandra dropped the Uzis and swung the L85 forward from its strap and continued firing in short bursts. She wore one Glock on her right thigh and a second slung cross-belt style in a holster across her chest.
The three stood side by side and produced a terrifying storm of firepower. Reaper stepped from the shop window and joined them and restricted his Uzi to short bursts to extend his effectiveness.
It was too much for Steel’s men, and those still able to get to their feet, broke and ran, turning the pedestrian access points into rat runs as they sought a way out. Steel tried to rally them but they brushed past him. At this point, he would have run, too, except that Sandra shot him in the leg. He went down and no one stopped to help him.
Post-percussion deafness made the piazza a silent place and the four allies walked to the prone figure of John Steel. He rolled onto his back and stared up at them. Sandra stood over him and her outline was blurred by the halo of sun above her. He shook his head as if puzzled that the battle he’d thought he had won had been turned to utter defeat by a girl.
‘Angel,’ he said.
And the Angel shot him. One bullet in the head.
More shooting came from the direction in
which the enemy had fled and, without a word, the four ran off in pursuit. When they came out opposite the car park, they saw the remnants of Steel’s army, leaping into parked 4x4s outside the Hilton, some returning fire at a small band approaching from Clifford’s Tower. Tanya, Jenny and Yank were blasting away while Brother Abraham, a broken sword in his right hand, held his arms outstretched above him as if in a rapturous prayer or entreaty.
They joined them, Brother Mark pushing cartridges into the shotgun he still carried. Sandra handed spare magazines to Reaper for his Glocks, and they fired as the vehicles reversed backwards down the slope into Tower Street, colliding in their desperation to get away. They began to drive forward, going back the way they had entered York, only for the drivers to brake in disbelief.
Coming towards them, and filling both sides of the dual carriageway, was a fleet of cars, Land Rovers and trucks that spread out to block their escape. The newly arrived convoy stopped and its occupants climbed out and levelled weapons: Smiffy had the right flank behind a machinegun mounted on a military truck; Ashley commanded the centre with another machinegun on an army Land Rover; Gavin Price and Kev held the left flank by the river with a group of militia with automatic rifles.
Between them were not just Haven militia but friends and neighbours from the federation: The Prof and Alan White from the ‘Brains Trust’, Bob Stainthorpe and Nagus Shipley and a contingent from Bridlington; Preacher Charlie Miller and a group from Filey, and many more from the hamlets and villages that had come together in the hope of building a better future. They pointed their weapons like a firing squad at the vehicles attempting to flee.
The thugs in the 4x4s braked and tried to reverse again but vehicles crashed into each other and panic set in.
Sandra stepped forward and, above the chaos, she shouted, ‘No prisoners!’ She opened fire and all followed her lead. The barrage was devastating, added to by grenades launched by Kev from an L85. The guns eventually fell silent, as if from shock at the carnage they had wreaked, even before Sandra raised her arm.