Rebellion: After It Happened Book 6 Page 10

  Max listened to the summary from the brothers as they bounced from each other like an endless tennis rally, speaking as though one person’s lines were being recited by two actors auditioning for the same role. Their easy assumption and confident report that the man only had himself to blame only made the report Max clutched in his hand all the more important. And all the more believable.

  Eventually Richards’s rage abated and he gave orders before dismissing the assembled men. He believed he gave orders, but Max knew by being the silent middle man that those orders were taken by a number of the senior ranks as mere suggestions. A few made minor alterations to their orders, all under the guise of real-time streamlining or tactical readjustments or whatever they wrote on their reports to justify the fact that they had a better way of doing things than Richards had suggested. The brothers were the worst; they didn’t even pretend to try and follow orders, but simply deployed guards where they saw fit and often ignored their instructions entirely. Which is why, after hearing their assertions about the death of the guard, he knew for certain that the anonymous intelligence submission held in his hand and deposited on his desk late last night was absolutely true. The note simply read:

  I have been asked to join a group to overthrow the Major. I’m meeting with the brothers tonight and will report back in the morning.

  At first glance Max hadn’t known what to do with this information, but whilst he was still ruminating a blood-soaked doctor appeared at the door with two others flanking him. He had reported the murder of a guard directly to Richards and suffered a barrage of abuse for not raising the alarm immediately. Max had then been ordered to assemble his senior officers and at no time did he have the opportunity to speak in confidence and warn the Major of the treachery.

  Nor did he think that would do any good. The Major was, without a doubt, insane. He hid it well but Max had no confidence in his ability to cope with this news rationally, and feared it would be turned on him as the bearer of bad news. So now he sat and clutched the scrap of paper as though he could squeeze a sensible answer out of it.

  He sat for a long time thinking. He had to deal with the interruption of Richards giving a string of orders to be written, copied into the occurrence book Max was forced to keep in a neat hand, and when he hesitated Richards pounced on the indecisiveness as insubordination. Max instantly apologised and assured the Major that he would never disobey his orders, but that he was in shock at the murder of the guard. He did his best to look vulnerable and upset, correctly assuming that Richards would then soften and offer magnanimous fatherly advice on how to cope with losses in conflict. Max lapped it up, thanked the Major for his patience and kind words, then went to work.

  He kept that piece of paper hidden all day until the conclusion of his duties, then quietly knocked on the door of the big office.

  “Come,” came the crisp reply. He entered to find Richards busily writing in a leather-bound ledger, doubtlessly recording the latest chapter in his memoirs which would immortalise the saviour of the human race long after his passing.

  “Sir, with your permission I’d like to visit my family tonight,” he said respectfully. He had no family, but Richards was not to know that the few people he had been captured with – or rescued with as he had to refer to it –were unrelated.

  Richards made a show of steepling his fingers and leaning back to think as he gestured for Max to sit opposite him. Silently he rose and poured two measures of scotch from the newly acquired replacement decanter.

  “Of course, Max. Of course,” he said as he sat in the leather chair next to his assistant and offered a glass to him. “It’s important to remember who we are fighting this war for. Go and be with your family, but remember to be back inside HQ by curfew.”

  The curfew had been reinstated that day given the previous night’s incident, but Max would be one of the few ‘civilians’ who could still walk around unchallenged due to Richards’s unnerving personal interest in him.

  “I mean what I say, Max,” Richards said intensely as he leaned across and placed a hand on his knee. Max tried his hardest not to flinch or recoil and give offence. He hated scotch and suspected that Richards had already sipped a few glasses that afternoon. To give a natural pause to the awkward moment Max drained his glass and leaned forward to place the empty crystal tumbler on the desk, subtly dislodging Richards’s hand as he moved.

  “I will, sir, I promise,” he said with a smile as though he truly appreciated the man’s concern for his safety.

  Walking from the office slowly he closed the door and checked to see that nobody else was in the hallway before he allowed his body to shudder from head to toe. Shaking himself out of the moment he strode purposefully from the big building and down the wide stone steps, nodding as he went to the two men manning the sandbagged positions permanently in place to protect the inner sanctum of the regime.

  Walking slowly with his head down so as not to attract any attention, he aimed for the main dining area. He had no idea how or where he would make contact, but he had to find the man which all the intelligence reports alluded to. The man Richards had been obsessed with but had now forgotten. The man he suspected was at the centre of some kind of underground resistance movement.

  Queuing with the others for his meal, feeling like a traitor as his own food was of far better quality than what was being served to the general population, he glanced around to try and find the man he hoped could help them all.

  ERROR 404 – SLEEP NOT FOUND

  “I told you I don't know what you're talking about,” Lexi said, her words sounding slow and sluggish.

  “What is sanctuary?” growled her interrogator again, repeating himself in the same menacingly patient monotone as though she hadn't spoken.

  Unable to form another reply, Lexi just shook her head from side to side, her movements unnatural and forced with none of the poise and grace she had previously possessed. She didn’t even know if the man spoke English other than the three questions he asked repeatedly.

  “What is sanctuary?” growled the man again, uncaring as to any answer he may or may not receive.

  Unable to respond with anything that would please her captors, Lexi's head slumped and her vision flashed white. She didn't know if she had been struck - although they hadn't physically hurt her since they were first captured - or whether she was experiencing another painful blackout as she had a few times over the last weeks. Or days, or hours. She had no way to know for certain.

  The flash extended to become bright lights, and then she realised that the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling above her were illuminated, mesmerising her with the almost imperceptible flickering and pulsing. She knew now that they had moved her again, as the last room was the one with the pipes and a single bulb.

  They did this; kept moving her between rooms and never allowing her to sleep comfortably. One of the rooms even had a bed in it, but her bound hands were tied to a fixing in the wall which prevented her from reaching it. She sat forlornly next to the bed and cried until she ran out of tears.

  But that was weeks ago, she thought, wasn’t it?

  The man was gone, she realised, but it took her a while to get her bearings in preparation for another interrogator to come through the door at any moment.

  What is sanctuary?

  Where are you from?

  What are you doing here?

  Three simple questions with such a multitude of different answers depending on the wants and needs of her captors.

  The way he had said 'sanctuary' made Lexi think that it was a place and not a concept. So, in that sense, she didn't know.

  She had told them time and again that she had come from England. They had driven here. When these answers failed to satisfy, her ramblings continued to describe the home she had grown up in as a child. About the garden and the swing set her father had put together for her seventh birthday which she fell off and scraped her knee and shin painfully. About the school she had attended. About the boy wh
o had kissed her for a dare when she was ten years old and had then run to his friends to mock her.

  It seemed that this previously unrecalled depth and clarity also failed to satisfy the interrogator, so her addled brain wandered off elsewhere.

  What was she doing there? In her more lucid moments she knew she was there because the four of them failed. They had simply wandered up to strangers and said hello, not recognising the obvious likelihood of them being unfriendly. She was there because they had kidnapped her and at least one of the others, that she knew of, based on her logical assumptions from the sounds of screaming, and now they asked her the same questions every day.

  She retreated into her mind once more, recalling with startling accuracy a televised documentary on the use of sleep deprivation as a weapon of torture. The words of the narrator came to her, only in the ruins of her imagination the narrator was a large, colourful parrot which eyed her suspiciously as it bobbed its head in time with the words.

  “The use of sleep deprivation is not a new concept; in fact, the earliest documented research of sleep deprivation was recorded in the late 1800s in Russia...”

  Her face twitched involuntarily, making the narrating parrot flap its wings and shift position to caw at her before it resumed its own interruption.

  “...little has changed in modern use for interrogation and psychological warfare. Symptoms on the body can include irritability, severe mood swings, impaired cognitive and emotional abilities and responses as well as more obvious physiological reactions; muscle spasms, poor coordination, tremors and painful aches...”

  Lexi tilted her head in mimic of the parrot who waddled closer to regard her with its tilted head fixing her with a single, black beady eye.

  “...long terms effects are uncertain, but an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes is as likely as premature death…”

  “I wish,” Lexi said aloud in a groggy voice. The door banged open and the parrot glanced back at the noise. Lexi saw a man walk in and close the door behind him, the shadowy light in the doorway making her guess that it was some time in the morning. Or maybe the early afternoon. When she looked back the parrot was gone, abandoning her like everyone else in her life had. The man walked to her and silently thrust a water bottle under her nose with a sports cap on the top. No longer caring enough to be suspicious, Lexi sucked on the bottle thirstily until it was taken away from her. Gasping after the sudden effort, she sat back to catch her breath.

  The man leaned down to look her in the eye for a while before speaking.

  “What is Sanctuary?” he said quietly.

  ~

  Hundreds of miles north of Lexi’s tomb, someone else was struggling with the effects of sleep deprivation, although by no means to the same extent.

  His symptoms were irritability and blurred vision when his focus wavered. He ached and he had a dull headache which he feared would never go away. His older brother, annoyingly more alert but infinitely more worried startled him by approaching from the shadows – something that would never have happened if he had his senses on full alert. The two had not slept the previous night, so had in effect been awake for nearing forty hours straight. Not only that, those forty hours had been packed full of action, stress, fear and pretending.

  They – or more specifically he, the impetuous Will – had judged one of their recruits poorly. Very poorly. They had a dozen guards, men of ability and ambition, securely attached to their cause now. Discovery would mean death as a traitor so they picked carefully, with one exception. The meeting had gone smoothly, but one recruit was very twitchy and kept asking questions. The man wanted specifics; times, locations, numbers. He sealed his own fate by overtly asking for the detailed information which would be used to formulate a report on the abilities and intentions of the rebels. He was so obvious that even he realised it, too late. At once the others around the small fire moved and penned the man into a corner of the shed they were in. He drew a knife and stood, terrified, holding his impossible defence against the others.

  That was when Benjamin first stepped up to offer his opinion on the matter. If Will was the hot-headed one of the two, then Benjamin more than made up for that with his almost eerie self-control. There was no other way to describe it; he was just plain cold.

  Stepping through the semi-circle of men fearful of the primal power of a blade, he calmly walked to within striking distance of the shaking man and stood still with his arms at his sides. He stared long into his eyes; cold calculation meeting terrified desperation. He smiled.

  “Who else knows?” he asked calmly.

  The man holding the quivering knife swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat with excessive exaggeration. He said nothing.

  “Who else knows?” Benjamin said again, injecting the slightest hint of threat and steel into the question.

  The Adam’s apple rose and fell quickly once more, but no words came.

  Fractionally moving his right foot, Benjamin caused the scratch of gravel under his boot sole to make everyone assembled jump with sudden fright. The man holding the knife spasmed, barely managing to control himself and not attack out of sheer panic. He held his blade, still wavering, pointing at the unmoving chest of Benjamin, who just smiled in response to the threat.

  The man’s nerve broke and he lunged.

  Benjamin anticipated the attack; he knew with absolute certainty that having placed his body where he had, the man would lunge for the closest target he presented. Shooting the sharp blade out in a straight stab, the man let out a yell of combined fear and rage.

  Benjamin let the knife come to him, turning his body slightly by swinging his right shoulder forward and allowing the movement to dictate the flow of the rest of his upper body. Swinging inwards like a revolving door, he brought his right hand up and slapped his palm into the wrist of the hand holding the blade and gripped. Simultaneously he slapped the palm of his left hand on the back of his attacker’s outstretched grip, the tense ligaments feeling raised and taught as he pressed it upwards and out.

  The combined movement of both hands had the instant effect of destroying the strength of the man’s grip on the knife and turning the hand inwards so the knife now pointed inwards, still towards Benjamin, only now without the strength and momentum he had before.

  Out of the desperate instinct to survive, the attacker did not give up just because his first attack was deflected; he still had the weapon and needed only to push it a matter of inches into the chest of Benjamin. Switching his footing clumsily, he renewed the power behind the thrust and yelled harder as he went for the kill.

  The yell wavered and changed pitch, turning instead to a higher note of fear. Instant and utter fear at his own imminent death.

  Instead of the knife burying its blade between the ribs of Benjamin, the man felt the impetus of his attack keep turning and swing, taking him off balance. In horror he watched on as his own hand holding the knife was turned inwards with ease, as though no matter how hard he tried the mechanics simply were possible, and the sweeping movement continued as the knife safely bypassed the body of Benjamin and headed, interminably and terribly, back towards his own body.

  The yell stopped abruptly with a strangled cry and he felt that all the breath was sucked out of him. He couldn’t breathe, and the pain was utterly consuming.

  “Did you tell anyone?” Benjamin hissed in his ear, close as a lover.

  It was the most painful, horrendous thing the man had ever experienced, and he seemed unable to draw breath for minutes. He just managed to make eye contact with Benjamin and shake his head; this final lie his only possible act of defiance.

  Looking down, cradling the knife softly with his own bloody hands, he finally took a breath and filled his lungs. The split second before he released that breath in an earth-shattering scream, Benjamin lashed out like a viper and struck him once, impossibly hard, in the windpipe and silenced him instantly.

  Falling back against the wall, his body awash with
fiery pain, he slumped towards the ground. He couldn’t tell which was worse; the feeling of suffocating or the knife deep in his belly that welled out piping-hot blood in big gushes.

  He knew the others were talking, but he couldn’t make out the words. Benjamin was giving orders, pointing at people, and he was vaguely aware of two of the others hauling him up uncaringly and carrying him away. The cold night air stung him as he jolted around in paralysed agony, looking up and seeing the occasional weak light in the black sky which showed his hot breath misting.

  His last memory was being thumped down on the cold, hard table and a woman looking down on him, asking his name.

  If he had been able, he would’ve told her that he was called Jason. That he had tried to do the right thing. That he had failed. That he was sorry. He managed to utter a few words and watched as her eyes grew wide.

  He died, although he had been in so much pain that death was a welcome relief.

  Now, meeting his brother in the cold and dark, Will wanted to apologise for his poor choice in recruit. Opening his mouth to start, he was silence by Benjamin speaking first.

  “I think he told us the truth,” he said quietly. “If he had told someone, then we wouldn’t have been trusted to give out orders today. If he’d told Richards we’d have been up against the wall wearing a blindfold at first light.”

  Will thought on this, seeing no obvious holes in the story presented to him. He didn’t think for long; his brother was the born tactician whereas he just enjoyed the violence.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked his older brother.

  “Stick to the plan,” Benjamin replied. “We take over and kill any fucker who gets in the way.”

  INVINCIBILITY LIES IN THE DEFENCE

  The sun was setting by the time the convoy returned to the gates of Sanctuary. They were met by Leah, Polly and Marie with little ceremony. Mitch, as ever, showing no signs of weariness but only excitement at their haul, was disappointed not to be asked to work through the night. Instead, Dan ordered all arms and munitions unloaded into a heavy stone room without windows by the gatehouse. Polly, in between carrying boxes and catching her breath, told Dan that he was probably the first man in a hundred years to order the magazine stocked. Dan knew precisely what she meant, but allowed the explanation to be heard by all the others.