by steve higgs
‘Evening, gorgeous,’ he slurred, sounding a little drunk. From his sleeve he pulled a knife. Not a little thing like the one I had tucked out of sight, but a footlong blade that could gut me in a second.
Involuntarily, I sucked in a petrified breath, but he sunk to his knees to cut through the bonds around my ankles.
‘Try kicking anyone and I’ll kill you slowly,’ he promised, rasping into my face with breath that stank of cheap whisky.
He backed away, two other men coming around him to grab my arms and lead me from the cell.
Walking toward what I felt certain was the end of my life, I knew I expected my legs to feel weak or just refuse to work. Somehow though, having accepted I was going to die shortly, I felt something akin to serenity. My only hope was for the chance to kill the man behind it all. I couldn’t save Jan, who was being bundled along the corridor ahead of me, thrashing and struggling against his captors. Or Karen, who I could hear begging and whimpering as she was hauled from her cell.
The acolytes holding Jan paused to administer a few punches, hard blows to his gut and kidneys that persuaded him to stop fighting for a few moments.
At the end of the corridor, farther than I had gotten in my failed escape attempt, I was greeted by the sight of the Sandman himself.
His arms were aloft, framing his face and the broad smile it bore.
‘Acolytes, your brothers have fought bravely against the fools who stood against us. Tempest Michaels and his friends are no more. They tried to damage our mission, and though they have inflicted wounds, they gave their lives to do so. We will rejoice now and when the ceremony is complete, we will move on. I have a new place for us to call home and you will all be welcome there. Our mission must continue. Bring forth those who we honour tonight. Your victorious brothers will be waiting outside to join with us.’
He turned around and began to lead the procession. Around a corner we reached a set of wooden stairs leading upward. They were poorly lit and narrow, the men either side of me having to switch so only one had me in his grasp. It gave me a chance to adjust my grip on the knife.
I was ready, but I had ten people between me and the Sandman.
At the top of the stairs, I was surprised to find myself inside a house. It was dimly lit and sparsely decorated, but a house, nonetheless. The creak of floorboards beneath my feet gave an indication of its age.
We were heading for the front door; I could make it out between the heads of those in front of me. I thought we were going to go straight out but the procession halted at a door to a room on the left.
‘Are you ready, my love?’ asked the Sandman.
I found myself frowning. Who was he talking to?
When a woman emerged from the room a second later, a choked gasp escaped my mouth and closer to her, Karen screamed in fright.
Hyperventilating again, my eyes refused to believe what I was looking at. Framed by the light above her head, which cast ugly shadows onto her face, the woman was ghastly to look at. Her face would haunt anyone who ever saw it.
Her right eye was an empty socket, and a good portion of the hair on that side of her head was missing, giving way to terrible scar tissue beneath. She looked to have melted. Unable to take my eyes off her, I observed the fallen cheekbone and the hole in her cheek through which I caught a flash of a white tooth when she moved her jaw.
A hand flashed out, slapping Karen across the right side of her face. It silenced the poor, terrified woman but only for a heartbeat as the same hand then grabbed hold of her hair, twisting it cruelly.
‘This is your fault!’ the deformed woman rasped. ‘You did this to me. That is why you must pay.’
‘What?’ whimpered Karen. ‘What did I do? I don’t know who you are?’
‘I was beautiful once,’ the woman raged. ‘But a slut like you caught my husband’s eye.’
Oh, my God! She’s the Sandman’s wife!
‘He cheated on me,’ the woman sneered with a grimace at her husband. The Sandman hung his head in shame. ‘Didn’t you? You worthless maggot. So I tried to take my own life. Do you know what happens when you pour acid over your own face?’
Karen looked like she might vomit. There was no colour in her face and if she was expected to answer, I doubted she were able.
The hideously disfigured woman continued talking, providing an answer to her own question. ‘You have to spend the rest of your life in hiding, but your husband does anything you ever tell him to. Including finding other pretty young sluts to pay the price for his indiscretion.’ Her voice was an ugly snarl that sounded right at home coming from her face.
‘But I didn’t do anything,’ Karen snivelled, her voice cracking to become a hoarse whisper.
The Sandman’s wife snorted a laugh. ‘And soon you never will. Isn’t that better than ruining a marriage?’
As if on cue, an acolyte at the front door pulled it open and stepped outside.
The woman turned to go and as she did I saw the other side of her face. It was unblemished, and she was beautiful. In her sixties, but attractive nonetheless, the standout detail was how much she looked like Karen.
The wave of understanding hit me so hard it felt like I had been plunged into a vacuum. It wasn’t the Sandman choosing the women he killed. He wasn’t the one driven to murder them, it was his wife!
My brain was reeling, trying to add things up and it was then that I realised what was amiss. I heard explosions and shouts about fire when Tempest and the others stormed the building yet there was no smell of smoke.
If the Sandman’s acolytes defended the building and overwhelmed my friends, why were they going to be waiting outside like the Sandman just said?
Unable to conjure answers, I became even more confused when I arrived outside because there were no acolytes waiting there.
Looking impatient, the Sandman checked his watch and lifted a radio to his mouth.
‘Bunker team, where are you? We are starting the ceremony with or without you.’
The radio crackled. ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ begged Tempest.
Big Ben. How it Went Down. Saturday, December 24th 1630hrs
Tempest’s plan was about as mad as any he has ever concocted. We were going to storm the bunker, fake our own deaths and in the ensuing confusion caused by smoke and fire, we would overwhelm them.
In the hardware store, we bought the best breathing masks they had; ones that would filter out smoke. We also bought fire retardant spray with which we doused our clothes, and airtight goggles to protect our eyes.
When Basic found a t-shirt gun on a promotional end, we bought three of them and all the t-shirts they had. They all got doused in petrol.
While Basic and I went in the front, shouting instructions to Tempest and Amanda as if they were with us, Tempest was going in through the other door. He took bolt croppers and an oxyacetylene torch just in case, but the key on the big ring he took from the Sandman’s house in New Ash Green opened the lock.
The police had it in their possession but gave it back to Tempest when they released him. Whoever was inside expected us to come from one direction, and we were bang on that coming at them from both ends would throw them completely.
With a wall of fire before us, we drove them back far enough to get inside. We didn’t need to look for flammable material because the t-shirts provided it. They worked better than I could have predicted but we had to pretend to die before the smoke caused the dress-wearing nutbags to flee.
It was a difficult balance: they had to be blinded to our movements, but not so much they would know we were acting. Divided to fight on two fronts, each thought the other was winning. The reports of our deaths fuelled their confidence and as smoke filled the bunker and they needed to escape it, they came forward. Spread thin, coughing and choking from the smoke, we picked them off like apples on a tree.
If you are wondering why we weren’t worried about setting fire to the whole place or of accidentally killing Jane and the others, the answer i
s Tempest guessed.
On the way to the hardware store, he told us about the map he’d seen at Harry Hengist’s house. Cobham Woods and the old bunker was marked on it, but so too was a second building. There was a small annotation on the map, made in pencil. Tempest could not recall what it said but believed that was where the Sandman would be.
Not in the bunker.
His guess was based entirely on a single premise: the Sandman wanted us to go to the bunker and expected us to die there. If that was where he wanted us, it would not be where he was. He would have to be close by though and the only structure for more than a mile in any direction was this odd little house in the middle of nowhere.
Genuinely, I found it a little annoying that he was right.
Each of the dickhead monks got cable tied around their wrists and ankles with their hands behind their backs. A third cable tie connected the first two together – they were going nowhere. The joy of coming in from both sides was that we could be certain none of them had been able to get out and a trap intended for us worked against them.
The Sandman might be top drawer material when it came to being a psycho serial killer, but he was rubbish at military strategy.
Once sure we had them all, Tempest jogged back to his end to open the door and the through draft swept the smoke out. It had been slick and swift but the part of the job we had done wasn’t the part we needed to do, it just teed us up nicely for it.
Knowing I only had a few seconds before we needed to get moving, I checked the hogtied dickhead monks looking for one man in particular.
Grabbing one by the hair to turn his face my way, I asked, ‘Where’s Smiler?’
He didn’t respond and I realised he was unconscious.
I moved to the next one, ‘Where’s … ah, nuts.’ He was out cold too. ‘Are any of you idiots still conscious?’
I got no answer, but someone coughed.
‘A-ha! Where are you?’ Quiet ruled. For a second anyway. Then he couldn’t hold the cough inside any longer and that showed me where he was. ‘Where’s Smiler?’ I demanded, getting in his face.
He was trying hard to squirm away but tied up as he was, there was no way to escape me.
‘Who?’ he blurted, still wriggling to get free.
‘Calm down. I won’t hurt you if you just answer my question. I’m Big Ben, what’s your name?’ I asked, giving the man a reassuring smile.
I got a mad look back as he tried to reflect my smile. ‘Carl. I’m Carl. I’m really new here. I’m not really with these guys. I just …’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t like Carl as a name. I think I’ll call you Susan. So come on, Susan. Where’s Smiler? You know. He’s got a gob full of broken teeth.’ It was a good enough description so far as I was concerned.
Stuttering, the man said, ‘That’s Marco. He’s one of the master’s favourites. He is with him.’
Tempest loomed over me. ‘At the house?’ he asked the dickhead monk.
I prodded him. ‘Answer please, Susan.’
The man nodded vigorously. ‘That’s right. They are all at the house getting ready for the ceremony. Marco is being given the girl.’
‘Karen?’ Tempest tried to clarify.
This time Susan shook his head. ‘The blonde one.’
I stood up. It was time to go. There was rescuing to do. Tempest was already leaving, indicating to Amanda and Basic to go because we were coming.
I took a step, then stopped myself. ‘Whoops. Almost forgot.’
I know it’s wrong to hit a man when he’s down, but I don’t think that rule really applies to evil cult members who murder people for fun.
Susan went night night for a while.
Tempest. Ambush My Ambush. Saturday, December 24th 1638hrs
Four of us had taken out five times that number in less than two minutes. If we lived through this, I was going to record it as a massive victory and mark it on my calendar as a day to celebrate. We still had the biggest part of this to do though.
We had to confront the Sandman and however many men he had left – it could be one, ten, or a hundred – and he had three hostages to use against us.
This was far from over.
Finding the house was easier than I expected – we could see it only moments after leaving the bunker behind. It was a manmade structure poking up through the trees less than a mile away. It took us under eight minutes to get there and would have been less if Basic could run faster.
I wasn’t going to complain, I had no right to say anything negative to a man who volunteered to put his life on the line.
We all had two radios now. Our own ones, and another one each taken from the monks in the bunker. It enabled us to listen in to their radio net though we dared not employ them yet. Just as we arrived at the front of the little house, the front door opened.
I watched them leaving the building, filing out in a long line. There were maybe a dozen idiots in their black monk’s robes, plus the man I met as Harry Hengist. He had a woman on his arm, and the sight of her face sent a shocking chill through me because I recognised her even with the terrible scars.
She’d aged since someone took the picture I’d seen in Harry’s bedroom, but then several decades had passed. However, there was no mistaking that I was looking at Valerie Mitchell, the Sandman’s wife. I was rooted to the spot for a beat while my brain worked the new information.
She wasn’t shackled in any way, and she did not look scared or upset unlike the three captives being hauled along by the Sandman’s acolytes.
Before I could consider it any further, the Sandman lifted his radio and spoke.
‘Bunker team, where are you? We are starting the ceremony with or without you.’
I pressed the button and felt a smile crease my mouth for the first time in days. ‘Oh, don’t do that.’
Big Ben took that as his cue and started running.
A supressed pfft, pfft, pfft noise was just about audible as Amanda, hidden from sight somewhere to my right began firing nails at the crowd. Gathered together as they were, they made an easy target and she scored multiple hits in the first seconds.
I was running too, closing the distance because this was a close quarter fight. The way to stop them using Jane, Jan, and Karen as hostages was to get them back before anyone knew what was happening.
Our strategy was to get the captives back. Nothing else mattered. That said, if I got a chance to kill the Sandman, I was probably going to do it and I doubted Big Ben was going to shake any hands.
The four of us had spread out so we came at them from multiple directions, all screaming like berserkers as we crossed the open ground. We were exposed once we left the shadow of the trees, but our attack came so fast and was so unexpected that we caught them completely unprepared.
I heard a roar on my left as Basic met the first of the Sandman’s men and saw the edge of a sledgehammer catch the light as it scythed over his head.
Half a second later it hit someone in the chest. That person went down like a cannonball had hit them and they did not get up.
Each of us had a specific target – one of the captives. Basic was getting Karen, Big Ben’s task was to free Jan. I was going for Jane, and each of us was going to do as much damage as possible so we stood some chance of escape.
Amanda was going to do what she could with the nail guns – their effective range was only about ten metres, and then she was going to call the police. We needed them here to make the arrests and take the Sandman and his men away. Once the captives were safely ours, there was no reason not to involve Quinn.
Just about to swing the pickaxe handle I’d chosen as my weapon for this fight, I was thrown completely by lights filling the air and a voice barking commands over a loudspeaker.
‘You are all under arrest! Lay down your weapons now, or I will give the order to open fire!’
I didn’t need Amanda to call the police. They were already here!
The voice being amplified by the loudspeake
r needed no introduction; I knew Ian Quinn’s voice when I heard it. It came from my right, Quinn and his men emerging from the trees on a different flank to ours. They were moving fast, covering ground in a burst of movement the same way we were. How had they got here so fast? How had they got here at all?
Distracted by this unexpected ambush to my ambush, I missed my target – a man in a monk’s robe who was coming to intercept me – and tripped over a root or something poking from the dirt.
Jane was six feet away from me as I sprawled on the ground, but she was at the back of the line of people and nearest the house.
When we concocted our hasty ambush plan, we had no idea who might emerge in what order or even when they would leave the house. It was just bad luck that I got to aim my efforts at the one who was farthest from us.
The men holding Jane ducked back into the house, dragging her with them and from my vantage point low on the ground, I had to watch the Sandman and his wife escape inside too. At least one other acolyte got inside and then the door slammed shut.
It was the hostage situation I had been trying so hard to avoid.
Cursing Chief Inspector Quinn, I grunted my determination, thrust off the ground and started running.
Jane. The Final Fight. Saturday, December 24th 1640hrs
The upwelling of emotion when I first heard, and then saw, Tempest was a level of euphoria I worried I might never match.
Lost, defeated, and ready to die one moment. Jubilant, excited, and ready to fight the next. I was only just outside the front door of the house when I heard his voice come over the radio and at that point still looking for a way to get near to the Sandman.
The knife was in my hand and ready to go. No one had seen it. If I could get close, I would just lunge and stab. If they kept me away from him, I would first stab the two men holding me and then run at the one I wanted to kill.
Tempest’s appearance changed that plan in an instant. Suddenly I was imbued with a belief that we might win the day.