by Sarah Govett
‘I’m going after Lotte,’ Megan’s voice was flat.
‘Think about the mission,’ Adnan was trying to sound caring but his impatience shone through, ‘the life of one is nothing compared to the lives of thousands, the hundreds of thousands that are being destroyed by the Ministry. You know that more than anyone. That’s why we’re here. We can’t lose focus.’
‘I’m still going after Lotte.’ All Adnan had done was add sparks to Megan’s eyes.
‘I’ll come with you.’ Jack squeezed her hand as he spoke. Ever-dependable Jack.
‘This is crazy,’ Lee added. ‘Come on, guys. We need to remember who the enemy is here.’
‘Maybe there’s more than one enemy.’ All eyes turned to Raf. ‘The Raiders took Cara, a young girl from the Peak. They’ve now taken Lotte. Who knows how many more they’ve taken. They terrorise the settlements and even stop some from trading altogether. If we base decisions on numbers and start of think of people as statistics rather than actual human beings then we’re no better than the Ministry. We need to remember that every person counts. Every life counts. I vote we bring the fight to the Raiders. We can’t stop the seas rising, we can’t stop the mosquitoes swarming but we CAN rescue Cara and Lotte and any other Cell they’ve captured and make the Wetlands a safer place.’
There should have been stirring music accompanying this speech, but anyway, even with just a backdrop of smoke and seagull caws I still felt swept up by Raf’s words and felt pretty damn proud of my rebel-rousing boyfriend. I sat there with a stupid grin on my face until I realised some sort of response was expected from me.
‘I’m with you.’ And then I was back to the stupid grin again.
Megan and Jack stared at us in surprise and Megan even reached over and gave me and Raf a quick hug.
‘Lee?’ Adnan’s voice was now resigned.
‘Well, I guess I’m in too.’
And that was that.
Adnan allocated another ten people to our team. They were to return to base with the rescued prisoners and we’d press on to the Fence. If all went well. I didn’t like to think quite how big that IF was.
So we were now fifteen against God knows how many. But we had an advantage. They didn’t know we were coming for them.
The Raiders had left to the north-west and had a three-hour head start on us. We knew we had to hurry if we were to stand any chance of catching up with them, of following them and finding their base. They’d taken the Fort’s pair of sheep as well as Lotte so they wouldn’t be running or anything. They’d probably be tired as well – they’d have been marching all night. Attacking and ravaging probably takes it out of you a bit.
They’d been spotted starting out along this raised ridge of land so this was our setting off-point. The ridge continued for a couple of miles, so this set our course as it made sense that the Raiders would have stuck to it – after all, walking on dry land certainly beats wading. We marched to the end, trying to ignore the weight of my backpack digging into my shoulders, the constant ache in my knees – three days’ supply of water isn’t light. I wanted to stop, to sit and rest, but I knew if I ever let myself relax I’d never be able to stand up again.
Then it was decision time. There were two obviously drier routes. One would skirt another settlement, one would go across empty marshland. We chose the second. We figured the Raiders would have their hands full and wouldn’t want to risk a potentially hostile encounter. It also made sense that their base was slightly removed. After a quick water break, we were off again, marching along the path through the marsh.
The Raiders were still not within sight, and as the land was pretty flat apart from a distant woodland and an even further hill, this meant that they were a considerable distance ahead of us. Daylight started to fade and my feet were beginning to blister up badly but we kept marching, kept to the raised drier route, hoping that we’d chosen the right way.
As the sun properly set we reached the wood. Well, what used to be a wood. Skeletal trees clawed at the sky, their branches completely bare of leaves. The salt must have killed them but left their root structure intact so they still stood there. A tree graveyard. It felt so unnatural that I shivered. I think everyone was a bit creeped out as we were all talking about it when Raf suddenly hissed, ‘Quiet’. He signalled to deeper within the forest. I squinted, saw nothing, squinted again and then registered what he’d seen. A fire. Nothing major like at the Fort. Nothing out of control. A nice contained campfire. Lit by a person/persons who weren’t scared of attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Raiders.
We’d caught up with them at last. They must be resting up, before heading back to wherever home was tomorrow. We needed a scout. Someone who could sneak up close and see how many we were dealing with. Reports from the Fort put their number at anything between ten and fifty so we had to narrow it down. Jack volunteered and I couldn’t stop this laugh that bubbled up inside of me and, as it couldn’t get out of my closed mouth, sort of snorted out my nose instead. The idea of Jack – massive, heavy Jack – sneaking up on anyone, nimbly leaping over flora and fauna was just too hilarious an image. Jack turned to look at me and I expected anger or something but he actually joined in laughing.
‘Yeah, guess not.’ Maybe our friendship isn’t over. Maybe it’s the start of a new chapter.
Megan went in the end. She’s light, agile, good at this sort of stuff. She wouldn’t freeze in fear or snap a twig and go, ‘Aaggghhh!’ like a malc like me.
She was back quickly. Night ninja. There were nineteen of them. Megan’s eyes shone. Nineteen of them. Fifteen of us. Her excitement was a living pulse.
‘So we attack them now?’ Raf asked.
‘But then how do we find their base?’ Lee joined in.
‘We leave one to lead us to it,’ from Megan.
‘Leave one? You mean we kill all the others?’ I couldn’t quite get my head round us matter-of-factly talking about killing eighteen people.
‘Kill, injure,’ it’s the same thing. Break someone’s leg out here, you’ve as good as killed them anyway. It’ll just take them longer to die.
‘But can’t we just overpower them or take them prisoner or something?’
Megan laughed in my face. ‘Look around you – do you see any prisons here? Life here is survival. No one’s going to shelter and feed someone who might stab them in the back.’
Jack interrupted, I think more to save me from Megan’s tongue than anything, ‘But, we don’t know how many Raiders there’ll be back at camp. Even if we get led there, how to we overpower them? We need it to be a surprise. Do we wait till dark or something?’
A hungry wolf grin spread over Raf’s face. ‘We wear their clothes and approach at first light. They’ll think we’re the returning Raiders.’
‘Like the Trojan horse!’ Jack’s excitement conveyed his approval. He’d loved Year 4 Greek myths. He was big even then and one month we played Hercules in People’s Park every Sunday. I had to be Pegasus. Not so cool. I could see Raf was about to point out that, no, it wasn’t exactly like the Trojan horse, but I dug my finger into his ribs until he squealed and didn’t ruin this never-before-seen male bonding experience.
It’s hard to smear mud onto your face so that it covers as much skin as possible but doesn’t accidentally go into your mouth. It’s also difficult while tasting a mouthful of mud to remember that this is the least of your problems as you’re about to head out and try to kill someone.
We didn’t light torches obviously. This was a surprise attack. What we did was creep. In groups of four – four, four, four and three to be exact. One group to approach from each compass point so that we’d have the Raiders surrounded. I was with Raf, Lee and a girl called Lara. She looked tough. She wasn’t big or anything, it was just something about her face – the set of her jaw, the lack of light in her eyes. Our group was approaching from the east so had to sneak round the outside, wait in position and then prepare to charge. Lara went first and stopped
at our post – a tree where the trunk forked in three. We could see the glow of the fire less than ten metres away and could make out shadowy silhouettes of the Raiders through the criss-cross of branches. Lee was bringing up the rear and at one point pushed through a low hanging branch that then swung back and bounced up and down sending twigs clattering. There was a noise from the fire and my heart went into crazy levels of palpitations. I tried to calm my mind, dull it with my new mantra: wait, approach, arm, wrap, neck, squeeze.
‘Damn squirrels,’ came a low, muffled voice. No one moved from the fire. No one came to investigate. I kept the mantra going.
We were waiting for Megan’s signal. An owl’s hoot. I’ve always wanted to be able to do an owl’s hoot. I can barely whistle.
Focus.
In the dim light I could make out the glint of metal from Lara’s knife. I’d wanted to take my slingshot but Megan had overruled me. Slingshots are for open land. You need distance between you and the target. These were the woods. This was close combat.
Silence.
Crackle of twig.
Hoot.
Then we were running, stumbling out of the trees and towards the fire.
Lara didn’t hesitate for even a second. In a few bounds she was there, straddling some barely awake Raider, knife raised. Then the knife was plunging again and again and there was a terrible life-being-torn-from-someone cry. So much for silent attack.
All around me were dark shapes of people running, arms flailing and knives stabbing.
And I couldn’t move. I knew I should be helping, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. I was useless.
I could count twelve Raiders dead. Most of them hadn’t even woken properly. Been woken by metal slicing their neck. That left eight Raiders still alive. Megan was wrapped around a huge Raider, her arm forced up under his neck, choking him. His eyes were bulging and rolling in their sockets. His lips were blue and the veins in his neck were wriggling snakes. Lee and Raf were also mid-choke and Jack was punching some girl Raider repeatedly in the face, a totally freaked-out look stamped on his face. I almost expected him to start apologising between punches. Lara, Jono and Dan were stabbing. The others, I couldn’t see.
Then silhouetted against the firelight, this Raider started to move towards me. He’d spotted me. I couldn’t freeze anymore. He approached, but it wasn’t a run, it was like a saunter. That’s it, he sauntered towards me, and as he approached, his features came into focus.
His huge size.
His smile.
His melted face.
The psycho. He recognised me. He definitely recognised me. He gave a little laugh and started to sing to himself, ‘Girls and boys come out to play…’
Then he stopped about four metres from me. Stopped dead still and smiled.
I needed him to run at me. I didn’t know how to do the wrap round manoeuvre if he didn’t run at me.
‘I was hoping we’d bump into each other again.’ His voice was gravelly, his smile that of a shark. He seemed genuinely pleased. ‘You might want to start screaming now. All the girls start screaming some time or other. Particularly the pretty ones.’
I panicked. I ran at him, trying to swing myself round his body but he pushed me away so it was like all I achieved was a failed hi five. I fell to the ground awkwardly and suddenly everything hurt. My shoulder, my arm, my face. The first time I’d ever had to do anything and I’d fallen at the first hurdle. How the hell could I fight someone twice the size of me? I lay there trying to work out a plan – anything that might give me a chance. Then I remembered the knife in my belt.
I could hear his footsteps approaching. This time he was whistling.
Pretending to clutch my (genuinely) stinging ribs, I worked my left hand around to where the knife was – shielding what I was doing with my body. I gripped the handle and drew the blade out of its sheath. If I could just time it right maybe I could surprise him. A harmless-looking insect with a deadly sting.
I could hear his breathing. He was there, standing above me. My grip on the knife tightened, and I lunged up at him as fast as I could, the knife between both hands, trying to give my thrust all the power I could.
But I was too slow. In a blur, the psycho had me by the wrists, my knife pointing up between my trapped hands like a wise man’s gift. He smiled that shark smile at me again.
I felt a surge of pain down my arms and he began to twist them round so the knife was pointing back at me. At my chest. He was going to make me stab myself. It wasn’t enough for this sicko to kill me. He wanted to make me do it myself.
A scream tore out of me.
‘Come on, you can do better than that! I want a proper scream.’
I saw the knife coming towards me, the smile on his lips, and then images of Cara, of Lotte flashed through my brain. I’d like to say I saw red but I didn’t, I saw his horrific melted face and knew I wanted to obliterate it.
I wrenched my hands apart – the knife dropped to the floor and then the next thing I knew I was burrowing my thumbs deep into his eyes. Trying to burrow through the windows into his dark soul. It was his turn to scream.
But my hero moment was cut short by the full force of his fist. Ramming into my face like a steam train. Everything went blurry. I struggled to stay conscious, my vision doubling. There were two of him standing over me. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
‘Fun and games are over you little b…’
And then he stopped. Dead. He fell to the ground, and there, in his place, was Jack. A bloodied stone in his hand. I’d come here to save him, and once again he’d saved me. Malc Noa – the victim – the damsel in distress.
But the psycho was still alive. He was writhing on the floor, moaning incomprehensibly, and before I knew it I was on him – kicking him in the back, in the head, desperately trying to stop him doing whatever it was he did again. One moment, the knife was on the floor next to me, and then it was in my hand, raised above the psycho’s chest, aiming right over his heart. I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore.
‘NOoooooo!!!!’ Megan was running over screaming and jumped at me, knocking the knife from my hand. I struggled against her vice-like grip but she kept me pinned down.
‘You can’t kill him … he’s the last one.’
On paper it would have been a terrific success. We were victorious. Lotte was still alive – Megan had found her crouched behind a tree some hundred metres away, her eyes screwed shut and her hands over her ears. Trying to block it all out.
Eighteen Raiders were dead to only three of our own. Of our elite team Jack had a bad cut to his arm. Raf had two black eyes. Lee had a swollen, messed-up hand and Megan had a deep gash in her leg. Save for some massive bruises, I was unharmed, my intactness a badge of shame.
There were no celebrations however. ‘Only’ isn’t a concept with any meaning when people you know die. People who were talking and breathing and LIVING just an hour earlier. Jono, Lucie and Milo. I didn’t know them really. I’d seen them around at The Fort and we’d exchanged a few words on the march over, but that was about it. Jono had shared his water bottle with me at one stop so I didn’t need to get mine out of my bag and Lucie had the dirtiest laugh. As for Milo, I couldn’t think of a single thing I knew about Milo and that massively bugged me. He’d died and I couldn’t even really remember him.
Worse still, looking at them lying there, splayed on the ground, my overriding thoughts were ‘that could have been me’ and ‘that could have been Raf or Jack’.
Lotte wasn’t speaking. The trauma had muted her. Temporarily we hoped but who knows. And every dead Raider meant someone had had to kill them, take their life and have them haunt their eyes. Neither Jack nor Raf’s knives were bloodied. They hadn’t brought themselves to use them. But that meant they’d killed with their hands, which was probably even worse. Raf looked shell-shocked and I hugged him tight, kissing him roughly, trying to take away his horror. He gently nudged me away.
‘Not now, Noa.’ And then he mumbled someth
ing about their eyes and lights going out.
The last Raider, the psycho, was under guard, his arms and legs tightly bound with belts taken from the dead Raiders. Megan had gagged him too with a strip of torn shirt. To stop his taunts. To silence his laughter.
We could have gone back then. Or rather forward – on to the Fence. We’d accomplished our mission, we’d rescued Lotte. So why didn’t it feel enough?
After we’d eaten and wounds had been washed and treated with iodine, Lee coaxed the Raiders’ fire back to life and Megan called a meeting. She presented the options fairly, this time there was no theatrics or attempts at persuasion – it was a free vote.
Option one: our ‘elite team’ pressed on to the Fence while everyone else returned to The Fort. The advantage being that we got to the Territory more quickly, no more lives would be lost in the short term and we could begin our assault on our principal enemy.
Option two: we finished what we’d started. We seek out the Raiders’ headquarters and we destroy them like the cancer that they are so that they can never attack again. Never prey on the weak again.
Option two carried it unanimously. We were going to take them out.
No one was in a state to go anywhere immediately, so we rested in shifts, backs to the dead. I was on shift with Megan, probably because she didn’t trust me not to try and kill the psycho. I don’t blame her. I didn’t trust me either. I tried to apologise for my uselessness earlier, but she told me to be quiet. I thought it was because I might wake Lotte who was a sleeping foetal bundle at Megan’s feet. That, or she was too disgusted at my cowardice to even speak to me. But it wasn’t either.