“There are six of them here. After yesterday all they’ve done is get drunk and high.”
“Have they got any guns?” I asked quickly.
She shook her head, sobbing, “No, I don’t think so.”
“Are there any more women in the house?” I asked.
“No, not any more, they killed the other two yesterday when they tried to escape.” We all looked at each other.
“Bastards!” said Jon, “let’s get them.”
Allan, who was standing close by, took charge again.
“You three stay there and don’t move!” Then addressing the five of us, he said, “Right, let’s keep moving, Bob you stay here and guard the ladies. There are three of those bastards left. We’ll clear the ground floor first and then move upstairs. Stay sharp, they may not have guns but you never know what they’ll do.”
We moved through the downstairs rooms in the house. They were empty, but all the rooms had been trashed, with rubbish and empty bottles everywhere. Allan held a finger to his lips to indicate for us to be quiet. In the silence, we could hear footsteps and banging coming from upstairs. It sounded like furniture being dragged across a floor.
Allan motioned for us to follow him, but to be quiet. We crept up the stairs, guns pointing in all directions. A figure suddenly darted from one room and ran along the landing. He was heading away from Allan and me, but Alex and Jon, who were following us up the stairs and walking backwards to cover our rear, were looking straight at him as he ran across the gallery. They both shot twice, the figure let out a scream then crumpled to the floor and didn’t move. The rest of the rooms were clear, apart from one. Its door was closed and when we tried to kick it in it didn’t give.
“The last two spineless arseholes have barricaded themselves in,” said Allan. “Come out, you bastards and face some real men, not the women and children you’re used to raping and killing!” he shouted through the door.
“Oh that’ll make ‘em want to,” I said sarcastically.
“Well I’m not going to beg them, am I!” replied Allan. “In fact, you know what, we haven’t got time for this,” he said furiously. He clicked the rate of fire selector on his gun to full auto, told us to stand back, aimed it at the door and emptied the magazine through it. There was the sound of breaking glass and a scream, followed by a thud outside. I ran to the landing window that overlooked the front, and saw a body lying on the drive. Allan gave a few mighty kicks to the door, which moved the table that had been hastily dragged up against it, and shoulder barged the door open.
The other man was lying dead on the floor, having been hit many times by Allan’s wild shooting through the closed door.
The one outside, in his desperation to escape, had apparently dived straight through the window. A twenty-foot fall head first onto the brick drive had taken care of him.
Allan immediately got back to business. “All four of us stay in formation, let’s do one more sweep of the house to make sure they’ve all gone, and then we can get Jerry in here to take care of the women.” Five minutes later he gave the house the all-clear and told Jon to get Jerry inside. In the kitchen, the three women were obviously still in shock and extremely distressed. Michelle was the most composed and was comforting the other two, who looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. Jerry gave them each a quick examination to check for any obvious injuries but it was the damage inside, the mental trauma they’d all experienced, which was going to be the real problem. We couldn’t imagine what these poor women had gone through or been made to do during their captivity. They would recover, but it was going to be a long and difficult healing process that would need careful handling.
While Jerry was attending to the women, I hung around in the kitchen, trying to be a familiar face, and offering words of comfort to Michelle. Allan, Jon, Alex and Bob conducted a search of the house. We’d seen food and other supplies scattered around during our search, but hadn’t been paying much attention to it.
Allan came up to me and said quietly, “Bloody hell mate, there’s loads of stuff here. It looks like these were the boys that emptied the local supermarkets and I can’t begin to guess how many houses they’ve robbed. We need to sort through it and get it back to the road. It’ll keep us going for ages.”
That reminded me to call Becky on the radio to tell her we were all fine and unhurt. You could hear the relief in her voice. They had all panicked when they’d heard distant shots and had been going crazy with worry. I assured her that we were all fine and that we’d rescued three women. I told her that Michelle was one of them, and promised to call her when we were on our way back.
I asked her to put Pete on the radio and told him about the supplies we’d discovered.
I suggested that he start planning how to get them back to the road, so that we could discuss it when we got home.
Jerry, with his gentle manner and kind words, had managed to calm the women down. He kept assuring them that they were all safe and would be taken good care of. The younger women introduced themselves as Kim and Mandy. They started to ask questions about why we’d come to help them, but Jerry said there would be time for all that later.
What was important right now was to get them safely back. Michelle, Kim and Mandy assured us that they would be OK to walk back. I asked them if they had anything they wanted to take with them before we left. Michelle answered for all of them when she said bitterly,
“You can burn this place down for all I care, there’s been too much evil in this house.” There was no answer to that so we all left. I radioed Becky and told her to expect us in ten minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Back at the road, Becky and the other women immediately took charge of Michelle, Kim and Mandy. Becky had organised for lots of hot water to be heated up, so they could at least have a shower and get clean. This would be an important first step in their recovery process, making them at least feel human again. The rescue party went outside to find Pete. We were immediately surrounded by everyone else on the road, all wanting to know the details of our mission. Allan gave them a brief summary, mentioning that not one of the gang had survived our assault. No one seemed upset about this and most congratulated us on getting rid of “that scum”. Then he embarrassed us by singing our praises and saying how well we’d worked as a team, after such a short training and planning period. Looking back, we realised that it had gone amazingly well; not one of us had even come close to being hurt and we’d worked together to achieve our aims.
More importantly, we’d struck up a bond which would help us in the pursuit of our main goal, survival.
Pete brought us back to the present.
“Can we have bit of quiet, please? While you were gone, John and the other two families left. They collected as many supplies as they could carry and just walked quietly up the street and out of our lives.
Retrieval of the supplies from the police station is going well and I’m storing it all in the front room of our house, where it’s being recorded and catalogued. Tell me again about how much you found at the gang’s house.”
When we told him how much there was, it was unanimously agreed that we would stop collecting the supplies from the police station, and lock it up where it would be secure. Then we would start making trips to St Agnes Road to collect everything we could from there.
Allan was focusing on security on the road.
“I need a few men so that we can continue to secure our perimeter. We’ve had so much to do that allocating manpower is becoming a problem. There are seventeen families still on the road, and we need at least two people on each barricade at all times to keep a look out.” Pete said,
“I also want to allocate six men to collect the food from the gang’s house. Allan wants at least three or four to help him. With my arm in plaster, I can’t do much, apart from organising us all for the moment, so it doesn’t leave many to help with the defence of the road, should we need it.”
Bob had been giving it some thought
.
“Couldn’t we use some of the older children as extra manpower? They’ve been having a great time, playing in the road and generally treating this as an extended holiday, but there’s no school in sight at the end of it, and boredom’s been setting in recently, and now they’re starting to get under people’s feet.”
He paused, swallowing.
“I know that after the events of yesterday, the smaller children are being kept inside. If we have another crisis, they’ll need to be found quickly for their own protection, and we can’t afford to have parents running around, trying to find them, just when they’ll be needed to help defend the road.”
It was a long speech for Bob, and needed consideration.
Pete thought about this for a while and decided that our first priority was security. He addressed all the parents standing around him.
“Would you be willing to let your older children help Allan and the others? Every group would have at least one of the walkie-talkies that Tom’s provided, so they’d be able to keep in touch with each other, and could be recalled at the first sign of trouble?”
They all agreed and most of the women volunteered to help as well.
Pete, obviously embarrassed, apologised for being such an old timer and admitted that he’d only considered the men for the heavy work but of course, if they wanted to help and felt up to it, they would be more than welcome.
Twelve excited children ranging from seventeen to ten were gathered up and told to report to Pete, where they would be given new duties. Pete gave them all a stern lecture on listening to their elders and doing exactly what they were told. They were being trusted to help, and must not abuse that trust by messing about. You could see their parents standing at the back, grinning wryly, as the children listened intently to everything that was said. There were few comments from them such as “Bloody hell, he hasn’t listened to a word I’ve told him for years, all he does is grunt, and a few lines from General Pete over there and he looks like a model citizen. Amazing!”
Pete gave Allan eight of the bigger children, as most of the work he had would be physical. He soon had them hard at work, pushing cars out of the way to clear the view up and down the road, or positioning them to help strengthen the barricades. The younger children were put to work moving the supplies around and helping Pete compile a list of what we had.
Pete sent a group of ten, (five men, me included, and five women), up to the gang’s house with my trailer, to start moving supplies. One of the women had the bright idea of bringing rucksacks and shopping trolleys or wheelbarrows with us, so that we could bring more back with every trip. A quick trip up to the supermarket on the High Street revealed plenty of abandoned trolleys, so we picked those up on the way past. On the way to the house we agreed on the following procedure: It would take at least four or five people to push the fully loaded trailer back to the road. While the rest were pushing the trailer or shopping trolleys, three of us would stay and move the supplies on to the drive. This would speed up the process of loading the trailer and trolleys when they returned. At the house, nobody commented on the bodies outside or inside, we all just got on with moving the supplies. It was an exhausting day, but we managed six trips back and forth to the house before the ten of us wearily trudged home in the growing dusk, five pushing the trailer and five pushing trolleys, and each of us weighed down by a full rucksack on our backs. There was still more to collect, but it would have to wait until the morning.
At home, Becky reported that Michelle and the girls were doing well. Jerry had given them all a sedative and they were sleeping soundly in one of the spare rooms. They hadn’t wanted to be separated and were all sharing the same bed. They had told Becky some of the things they had been made to do and she had been horrified. She wouldn’t give me any details, saying it was their story to tell if they chose to, but we had definitely done the right thing in killing those men. For Becky, with her liberal views on prisons and capital punishment, to come out with a statement like that was quite something.
I made no comment on that, but just told her I loved her for always doing the right thing and wanting to help people.
Russell was still working on his wood-burning oven concept, but in the meantime he had rigged up his marquee in the road and was using camping stoves and barbecues for cooking the meals. The volunteer cooks had made a lovely smelling stew. The church hall at the top of the road had yielded some very large pans, which were put to good use. We stood in line to get dinner and returned home to eat. As I hadn’t seen much of Stanley and Daisy since the attack, I spent some time playing with them before tucking them up in bed, and read them both a bedtime story.
Allan came round to see how the women we had rescued were doing. Becky briefed him while I opened a few cans of beer for Jerry, Allan and myself and a bottle of wine for Becky and Fiona. I still had quite a stock of drink in the house, and with the amount we’d retrieved from the gang’s house, it was one thing we were definitely not going to run out of soon.
I asked Allan how his defences were going and he said that he was coming up with new ideas all the time. I thought about the materials I’d bought.
“Before this all kicked off, I bought a load of mesh, and I’d planned to cover my windows with it, in the hope that it would make the house more resistant to attack. I’ve got quite a large stock of barbed and razor wire which I’ll be happy to let you use.” Allan was excited to hear this.
“That would make my plans easier. My idea, based on the speech you made to the neighbours the other day was to create a ring of defence around all of the houses. I plan to raise the fence line, by taking fence panels from between the properties and attaching them to the existing panels to create a high wall. If I could use the barbed and razor wire as well, it would make them harder to climb over.”
“Right then, let’s talk about it some more in the morning, when I can show you how much stuff I’ve collected over the years. I’ve also had some ideas I can tell you about, because protecting my property is something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years.”
Pete had popped in to see Jerry, wanting some stronger painkillers for his arm, which was aching badly after the day’s exertions.
“I haven’t finished cataloguing all the supplies we’ve got yet, but once that’s done, I’m planning to work out with our volunteer cooks just how many meals we can provide and how long it will all last.”
That led to a discussion about how to extend what we had by foraging for food from vegetable gardens in the area. I thought I could help there.
“I’ve got pages of information about wild edible plants and berries which will be useful for finding fresh food for the group. Moseley Park, at the end of my garden, has a fishing lake, so we might be able to catch fish, and then there are the ducks and the geese on the lake which could go into the pot as well.”
As so many ideas had been put forward, all with their own merits, it was going to be impossible to act on them all at once. We agreed that Pete would write them all up in a list, in order of importance. The list would probably change on a daily basis, as tasks were completed or new ideas were thought of which might take precedence, but at least it was a start.
We’d only built the barricade of cars the day before and so much had happened since then, it was all a bit hard to take in, but it was important to recognise what we’d achieved as well. We’d survived a violent attack and defended ourselves successfully, we’d rescued the women from the gang by attacking them ourselves, and we’d collected an enormous amount of food and still had more to get. Everyone was working amazingly well together, and with Pete’s organisational skills, allocating the available workforce to get through his ever-growing list of jobs, I was sure that every day we would be in a better position to survive. Pete wanted us to be even more organised, and suggested that the morning meeting should become a regular event. If we combined it with eating our breakfast, cooked in the communal kitchen, the day’s work could be allocated to individ
uals or groups, and it would also be an opportunity for anyone to raise concerns, or add another idea to be discussed.
Becky and I questioned whether it would it be fair for us to share the communal food, when we had enough of our own. We didn’t want it to appear as if we were hoarding our own stuff and using up valuable supplies that other people could use. Jerry and Fiona agreed with us.
Pete, always one step ahead, it seemed, had already thought we would object to it, so explained his reasoning, “I think it would be better for the group if you ate the same meals as the rest of us. That would prevent any bad feeling due to people thinking you were eating better than them. If you donate the equivalent of what you eat back to the group, then that way there can be no accusations.”
“Are you some sort of Machiavellian genius?” I replied laughing, “You’re always one step ahead of everybody. Does your brain ever stop thinking? Not only have you persuaded a large group of independent and strong-willed people to co-operate, but now you’re second guessing us all! How do you do it?”
He gave me a wink and said, "I suppose it just comes naturally to some people. But seriously, Tom, I don’t think you can begin to appreciate how thankful we all are for what you’ve done for us. If it wasn’t for you, we’d all be starving to death, or we’d have been killed by that gang, or others, out there. You knew what had happened and warned us. You made us build that barricade, and it was that and your guns that saved our lives the other day.” He stepped closer and placed a hand on my shoulder.
It was you that befriended Allan and Jerry, and look what they’ve brought to the group. In short, we all owe you our lives, and I think we’ll continue to rely on you in the future.
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