“No, it isn’t” said Dan “It’s Kyle’s for being a fucking jealous prick and mine for letting the rat get the drop on me. You know I roughed him up the other day and Ash saw him off?”
Lexi’s eyebrows raised “Yeah” said Dan “He demanded to be a Ranger. Again.”
Lexi laughed “I bet he shit a brick when you gave Leah a Glock!”
Dan wasn’t in the mood to laugh at Kyle’s wounded pride; his injuries were still too sore. He started to walk back to the house.
“So, we good now?” Lexi asked after him.
“Yes” he said, not entirely convincing himself, as he recalled her bare chest in his bed covered in scars she received for doing the job he gave her.
CABIN FEVER
After the excitement of Christmas and Kyle being branded an outlaw, New Year came and went without the grand celebration of previous times. Perhaps people were more pensive about the passing of time and making resolutions without sharing them with the loved ones they had last time around.
The mood became low, then tempers started to fray. Suggestions were made for scavenging runs, mostly for people to get out. Neil insisted Dan take him out for petrol as the generators had used almost all of his stores up. Dan knew he still had over three hundred litres of petrol, but humoured him anyway. Six people volunteered to come. In the end they went on their own, travelling further afield just for the hell of it.
One of the main reasons for Dan putting a stop to the trips during winter was that the roads, without proper maintenance and gritting, were degrading fast and were treacherous in places. He had to go slowly, avoiding potholes and even subsidence at one point. They had ten jerry cans to fill and two hand pumps to do it with.
Neil removed the reservoir locks as he had done before, and suggested a race to fill the first can. Dan smiled, and asked what the stakes were.
“Name your price, Monsieur” Neil replied in a sleazy French accent.
“I win, you do my washing up this week” he said
“Likewise” Neil said, offering his hand. As Dan took his own hand from the pump to shake Neil’s, he shouted “GO” and began to pump furiously, making Dan curse and rush to try and catch up.
They couldn’t call a clear winner, and sat panting and laughing together as Ash gave them both a questioning look. They finished the other cans at a more sensible pace and went to set off home. They drove for a few minutes before Neil stared ahead, leaning towards the windscreen.
He held up a pointed finger in silence, making Dan look to his right where a pillar of black smoke was rising behind a copse of trees in the distance.
They exchanged a look, and Dan turned the Discovery towards the possibility of people. They struggled to find the source of the smoke; when they got close to where they thought it was, they found a golf course blocking their path. They had to drive a long detour with Neil keeping an eye on the Ordnance Survey map of the area. Eventually they found a long, looping road which had housing estates branched off at intervals to the right, and industrial areas to their left.
The source of the smoke was the bonnet of a crashed Ford Transit minibus, the unfortunate driver having taken advantage of the relaxed seatbelt laws of late. His shattered and twisted frame was sprawled though the broken windscreen where his upper body was starting to cook from the heat of the small fire which hadn’t yet erupted to engulf the entire vehicle. Dan had seen enough in his life to know that the driver was killed on impact, and that the whole lot would be afire soon. Bags were strewn about in the back and on the ground next to the open sliding door.
“Someone survived” he said, pointing to the uneven tracks in the wet grass leading to the overgrown bushes separating the road from an industrial area.
Neil had not come armed, so Dan handed him his Sig as he retrieved the M4 from the cab. He whistled Ash to his heel and locked the Land Rover before setting off after the survivors of the crash. The tracks were a mess, like whoever had left them was dragging something in a hurry.
The more Dan looked at the tracks, the more concerned he grew. There were gouge marks intermittently, like whatever they were dragging was fighting back. He hadn’t survived this long by being careless, so he sank to a crouch and readied his weapon as he whispered his suspicions to Neil.
The older man switched on immediately and his happy demeanour melted away to reveal his darker, more serious side. Dan made eye contact with Ash before giving him a hand signal; Ash understood and sank into a stalk as he moved silently alongside his master.
Moving carefully meant moving very slowly. It was close to five minutes before they were rewarded with a low grumble from Ash’s patented early warning system. They slowly circled a building before finding a vantage point where Dan could see what was inside. It was a warehouse and looked similar to their own stores, but not organised by any standard. Crates of bottles and tins were ripped open in no particular order. He heard a male voice speaking, and what sounded like a female voice responding angrily.
He scanned the room and saw movement off to his right. He assessed what he saw and considered his options before deciding to play this one dumb. He stripped off his body armour and swapped weapons with Neil. He tucked the Sig in the back of his trousers before creeping alongside the building to where the shutter door was rolled up. He sat Ash flush to the building, so a person would have to be outside before they saw him. He made him stay with eye contact and hand signals before walking away to come to the building from the direction of the road.
He put his hands in his pockets and scuffed his feet as he walked, trying to demonstrate no threat in his body language.
“Hello?” he called as he approached the door.
The man who had been talking visibly jumped in fright, and wheeled on Dan holding a gun. He recognised it easily as a Glock, and thought that this weapon had probably been sourced in the same way he had his own in the beginning.
The man held it sideways, like he was in a film. Dan felt a surge of disappointment at the low standards of this newest adversary, suspecting that he was going to have to converse with a mouth breather; ever the post-apocalyptic snob.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked, scared and edgy. He walked away from the woman and Dan saw her clearly for the first time. Her blonde hair was a mess, and her big eyes pleaded with him for help but burned with a mockery that said she would never lower herself to actually beg for his assistance. He made no response to her look, but focused on the man with the gun.
He advanced on Dan, still holding the gun sideways and evidently scared by the intrusion. He thought that if he was going to walk up to him and hold the gun to his head then this was going to be easier than he suspected. He stopped short of the threshold, about ten feet from where Dan stood with his hands up.
Dan willed him to close the gap between them and make it easier to remove him from the equation. A glance at Ash showed that he wasn’t in play yet; their new enemy needed to walk forward a few more feet for the dog to surprise him.
“I said, what do you want?” said the man testily. His aggression failed to mask the panic evidently rising in him. He forced himself to sound in control, only managing to cover his fear with an excess of hostility.
“Who is it?” came another voice from inside. It wasn’t the woman, as she sat and stared at Dan with almost a sense of amusement at the turn of events.
That complicated things; there was at least one other in there and had no clue yet if they were armed as well.
“Whoa mate!” said Dan, intentionally attempting to mimic a local accent in an attempt to dumb down.
“Was that you that had a crash back there?” he said, stalling for time.
“No, someone else. We helped them” he said, uneasily.
“They ran us off the road and dragged me here” the woman started to shout indignantly before another man stepped into view and slapped her hard across the head, messing her hair up further and receiving a murderous look in response. Dan involuntarily stepped forwa
rd but the man with the gun pointed it in his face.
“Not one more step, she’s ours. Get lost.” he said nervously, waving the end of the barrel at Dan. He could barely keep the gun still. Dan now had to take out two in quick succession before the woman got hurt. Simply leaving was not an option for him now. He stepped backwards and stared at the man.
“What are you going to do? I bet you don’t know, do you? Look at you, you’re a joke” he said softly as he walked backwards, goading him.
The man reacted as he was supposed to, with his manhood affronted he stepped forwards to close the gap with Dan and threaten him again; to be close enough to see his fear.
As the hand holding the gun came into view he just saw Ash tilt his head to marvel at the new toy he was being presented with. A second later he launched, took the arm and the body attached to it. The force of the impact and the momentum of the dog was sufficient to yank the man’s neck painfully as he was taken to the ground. Dan stepped to the side, simultaneously drawing the Sig from behind his back.
He walked past Ash ripping at the man without taking his eyes off the second target; he had to trust the dog to do his job as speed was paramount. Untrained people take triple the time to react, and he capitalised on that.
As the second man saw what was happening he reached out and grabbed the woman, reacting far quicker than Dan expected.
Too late for Dan to strike, he held a knife to her throat and looking terrified and desperate. He had the same twitchiness as the man now screaming in Ash’s teeth.
“Get your dog off him!” he bellowed in fear, pressing the knife into the flesh above the woman’s collar bone.
“No. Let her go and I’ll call my dog back” Dan said in a low monotone. Give the appearance of calm, and their panic will rise.
“NO!” he snapped in retort over the noise of snarling and painful screams, trembling. Dan thought that this man was likely to cut her deeply by pure accident in his state of panic. He glanced at the woman, still pointing the Sig at the man holding her.
“What’s your name?” he asked her in the same low voice.
“Marie” she said through gritted teeth “Lovely to meet you, but please get this fucking arsehole off me” sarcasm in the face of adversity. She got more attractive by the second.
“Marie, I’m very sorry” he said. The look of confusion on her face was replaced by open-mouthed, horrified shock when he fired a single round.
The desperate man’s biggest mistake was that he had let Dan get to within ten feet as he spoke; so close that he could not miss. The bullet entered his face just under the nose, tearing a ragged hole through his top lip, shattering the teeth behind before blowing the brainstem out. The hand holding the knife had no chance to cut her accidentally, as it was instantly lifeless without the possibility of any nerve receiving a signal from the brain.
Marie stood still with her mouth open and blood splattered on her face as her captor fell to the floor, utterly lifeless. Dan heard the percussive cough of a suppressed weapon firing outside, and ran to find Neil had fired at, and killed, a ragged-haired woman running at Ash with an axe. He thanked him, and called Ash away from the dead man he still tore at.
“Good boy, leave it” he said. Ash trotted to his side without reluctance, happy with the praise. His muzzle, face and chest were soaked red with the man’s blood. He walked back inside where he found Marie wiping the gore from her face in horror. Dan went to speak to her, but was met with a snarl “In my hair? Thanks!” she said, then took a breath and steadied herself.
“No, seriously. Thanks” she said, and raised herself on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, transferring a small amount of brain matter to his face.
She walked to a door and opened it, revealing another woman and a man who was groggy with a lump on his head. The woman was much shorter and heavier than Marie, she was Asian, had long dark hair and an almond shaped face. She saw the spreading puddle of dark red blood on the ground and looked instantly unwell, hugging Marie tightly. In contrast, Marie seemed to be unfazed by their ordeal.
The man was barely conscious and couldn’t quite understand what was happening. Dan checked him out and hoped it would pass as he could detect no serious trauma. With help, he laid him on a heavy plastic sheet as a makeshift stretcher.
He retrieved the Glock and found no other weapons of use. They left the bodies where they were and spirited the women outside where he took back his kit from Neil. He used a bottle of water from inside to wash the blood from Ash’s face – fearing that it painted him in a less than ideal light.
Marie and Selina told them that they were in a minibus with their friend, Anthony, when something big hit the windscreen and they crashed. They were brought here by the now deceased occupants of the warehouse and told they were staying with them now. They disagreed on that point, whereby Selina was locked in a cupboard with the man injured in the crash.
“Then you showed up with your wolf and shot the nice man I was talking to” said Marie.
Dan couldn’t get a bead on her at all; she looked delicate and if forced to guess he would have said she was the ‘hide in a corner and cry’ type as opposed to the ‘make jokes about seeing someone shot in the face twelve inches away’ type. She fixed him with a smile to show she was joking, and he felt himself colouring up. He liked her. She disarmed him completely and made him feel like an awkward boy.
“I assume you two live somewhere near here?” Selina asked, changing the subject.
“We have our own manor house and grounds” said Neil pompously. He pronounced grounds as ‘grinds’, making Dan smile. He’d used the very same impression when they first met.
“And there are almost forty of us” Dan added. That got a response form the two, who exchanged a look. Selina asked “All immune?”
“I assume so, none of us got sick when it happened” he said, then changed the subject again as they walked to the Land Rover.
“Where did you come from?” Dan asked.
“Racist.” said Selina mockingly “My family’s from Bolton and I moved down for University” Neil laughed at her sense of humour.
“No!” Dan stuttered “I meant…”
“We know what you meant, silly sally” said Marie.
“We had to leave the city because supplies were running out and the smell was awful. There were also a lot more people like them back there making it unsafe to stay” she added.
“So, what do you ladies do?” asked Neil politely, as he called a stop to readjust his grip on the makeshift stretcher.
“Selina’s a madam in one of Europe’s most prestigious brothels and I’m an award winning pole dancer” Marie said, without even a hint of frivolity.
Both men were taken back by this, and both felt instantly foolish when the women started to laugh simultaneously.
Marie sighed “I am – was – a Detective Sergeant in the City’s Major Investigation Team” she let that hang and noticed a close scrutiny from Dan.
“He is some kind or architect, but to be honest I switched off whenever he spoke about work” she finished. ‘He’ was called Paul, and was looking a little green from the concussion.
“Well, I’m a pharmacist… Student.” said Selina feeling totally upstaged by Marie who was still locked in a staring match with Dan.
“Shall we give you three a little time alone?” she asked them politely. Dan snapped out of his trance to see that his bloodstained dog stared at her as intently as he had been doing, one lip curled up in a wonky smile.
LOVED OR UNDERSTOOD?
Dan and Neil drove their new additions back in awkward silence. Dan kept stealing glances at Marie in the rea view mirror, which he caught Neil noticing.
They spoke freely of their experiences in the last few months, of how people in the city who had survived the virus, it was a virus in Selina’s opinion, had simply died of a lack of basic skills such as the ability to find water when their taps ran dry and the local shop was looted.
Twice before
they had encountered hostile groups who wanted to take rather than build. They were the last of five people originally in the group; one died on the bonnet of their minibus and the other had killed himself about two weeks after he found them. Marie said that this was very selfish of him, as they had to clean it up.
The Glock was originally hers, taken on a whim from the holster of a dead colleague before she gave up and left work for the last time, but she was the first to admit that she had never fired one and hadn’t a clue how they worked; she had devoted her life to catching the people who used them on others.
Paul was deposited immediately into the care of Kate, who made loud noises about people plaguing her with serious head injuries. Marie and Selina were given the guided tour of the house by Dan. He didn’t want to seem eager, but he couldn’t bear to part with Marie so soon; there was something intriguing – no, enchanting about her.
He took off his kit in Ops and allowed Leah to clean the M4 and two pistols; his own weapons were dirty through firing, and the Glock through neglect. Leah was keen to show off, and Steve was there to keep an eye on her and make sure nobody was killed by a stray bullet ricocheting around the office by accident. Selina made a comment about child soldiers which went ignored.
He was as thorough as he could have been with the tour, introducing everyone he could remember the name of and offered to show them the farms and garden to extend the time.
“No thanks” said Marie “I’d love a cup of tea and a shower though”
Dan said he couldn’t help with the shower, then turned red as his courage abandoned him entirely. Penny gladly took them away from him and explained how the water was heated in the bathrooms for washing. They were taken to ‘Primark’ as it was dubbed – the clothing store, and allocated a place to sleep.
Lexi returned from the gym where she had been teaching a chilly self-defence class and heard of the new arrivals. She poked her head into medical and shrieked.
After It Happened (Book 2): Humanity Page 5