Amalfi Echo

Amalfi Echo

John Zanetti

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2014 John
Zanetti

Fiction by John
Zanetti:

The Gardener Who Could
See

Writing Home

Amalfi Echo

War of the Shadows

Non-fiction:

The Christchurch
Destructor

Who Owns the Fish?

Smashwords Edition,
License Notes

Thank you for
downloading this e-book. You are welcome to share it with your
friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for
non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete
original form.

Cover images: Blue and
red fire dragons image, copyright, Dvargfoto; Burning and exploding
Planet Earth image, copyright, Ig0rzh; Images courtesy
Dreamstime.com

Cover design and
production by the author. Cover copyright John Zanetti 2014

This e-book is a work
of fiction. All characters in this work are fictitious and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.

Table of Contents

Amalfi Echo

Novels by this
author

About the
author

The handcuffs
bit into Marion’s wrists. A chain, linked through the cuffs,
tethered her to the floor. Scattered through the hall of an old
desert fortress in Algeria, other prisoners were similarly cuffed
and tethered, the passengers, mostly American, of a hijacked
airliner. The soft, crumbling walls of the ancient hall muffled
scattered conversation, fear and distress in the snatched whispers.
Many passengers kept quiet, not wanting to attract attention to
themselves, knowing that it was not much protection against a
jihadist beheading.

Across the
hall, a man called Digby, whose last name Marion did not know, rose
and moved stealthily towards a group of heavily-armed terrorists
sprawled over sofas. He was only metres away when they realised
that one of their prisoners had freed himself. It was of no
consequence. They gave it no thought. One of them raised his
assault rifle and sent a burst of fire into the man. Miraculously,
the bullets missed, although where they had actually gone couldn’t
be discerned. Before any of the others could raise their weapons, a
ghostly combat suit or spacesuit flickered and shimmered about
Digby. He pointed his hands at the group of men. The air vibrated
around them and they were transformed into bloody, quivering heaps.
Digby kept moving. He turned and pointed at more jihadists pouring
in the doorway. These too, were slaughtered. A grenade tossed in
through the doorway exploded harmlessly and silently.

A hiatus
followed. Digby took many small, glowing spheres from a ghostly
pocket and rolled them along the floor. A swarm of jellyfish
creatures popped from the spheres and darted about in the air. They
vanished out through the doorways and into the corridors of the
fortress. Screams and gunfire followed. More glowing spheres rolled
along the floor. From these sprung huge, pale and transparent
three-legged Trifid creatures, much of whom disappeared up through
the ceiling until the creatures’ legs walked through the walls and
away from the hall.

Digby came over
to Marion, reaching behind her. His hands were warm on her skin.
The handcuffs fell away.

“I’m not really
from East Lansing, Michigan,” Digby said.

“I didn’t know
that you were,” Marion said, a stranger speaking the words.

“Then it’s even
less relevant.”

“I was puzzled
by your accent. I couldn’t work out where you were from,” Marion
said. Although she did wonder why she was making polite
conversation.

“I never did
get the hang of American accents,” Digby said. He left her, going
to an empty corner of the hall and sketching with his hands to
bring into being three enormous screens set at angles to each
other. Scenes of carnage quickly unfolded on the screens in 3-D and
living colour.

The jellyfish
creatures were killing anything that moved and were impervious to
the hail of bullets and grenades from the terrorist fighters. The
few that tried to surrender were mercilessly cut down whether
carrying weapons or not and this extended to the many families of
the fighters in the fortress. A group of women and children had
fled into a storeroom and cowered in a corner, the women trying to
hide their children under their black chador. Perhaps they thought
the cloth, or their Faith, would protect them. Neither did. Their
dying screams filled the hall. The Trifids, standing astride the
fortress on giant legs, hammered the surrounding city, suppressing
rocket attacks and attempts to reinforce the fortress. Whole city
blocks crumbled before the onslaught.

Digby returned
to Marion who had not moved from her position on the floor. She
stared blankly at him. From another ghostly pocket he took a couple
of small green lozenges and went to press one of them against her
forehead. Marion pulled away in sudden fright.

“I’ve just
freed you,” Digby said. “Why would I now hurt you?”

“Oh, I don’t
know,” Marion said. “I’m sure I could think of a dozen reasons.”
Although, in truth, thinking was beyond her at this point.

“Band-Aids for
the mind,” Digby said. “These, let’s call them ‘green lozenges’,
will take all the trauma and tuck it away into a box so that you
can function normally. You’ll still have to deal with the trauma
later, though.”

Marion didn’t
know what to say and, unresistingly, allowed Digby to press one of
the lozenges to her forehead. Seconds later, as Digby had promised,
all the pain, all the hurt and fright, sucked away into a little
box tucked in the back corner of her mind. Within moments, her mind
was clear again.

Digby turned
towards the screens and said something to them in a musical
language. She could see the actual notes issuing from his mouth
like music had been written in the air. One of the screens changed
to show an aerial, or satellite view, of another city where jet
fighters were taking off from an airport. Now dust and debris
obscured the images as though the entire area had been hit by
missiles.

“Libya,” Digby
said, by way of explanation. He stood up and went to another
prisoner, still cuffed and tethered. This was a young American
teenager called Tessa. He freed her and, without asking, pressed a
green lozenge to her forehead. Then he went back to stand in front
of the screens.

Tessa came over
and hunkered down beside Marion. “WTF?” she said.

Even in their
brief acquaintance Marion had already noticed Tessa’s liberal use
of four-letter words. “Your parents wouldn’t like that,” she
said.

“My parents are
dead. Not that
she
cares.” Tessa jerked a thumb at Joanne
Fleischer, a middle-aged woman, still handcuffed and staring
uncomprehendingly at Tessa.

Marion already
knew that Tessa’s parents had died in a car accident, having learnt
this in a conversation on the plane with Joanne although why the
woman had felt the need to unburden herself on a stranger with such
intimate detail escaped Marion altogether. Marion had gathered that
Tessa was in foster care and that Joanne had been tasked with
returning Tessa to the United States because, so the story went,
Tessa had run away to the UK, having stowed away in the crew’s
quarters of a cruise ship. Marion herself had been on the plane
because, after 18 years in the UK, she was finally going home
although she was still not sure what had prompted the decision.

The rest of the
airliner’s passengers, still imprisoned, had, till now, been
mesmerised by events which had unfolded too swiftly to fully
absorb. Now they began to focus on the possibility that they too
could be freed. Demands for help began to flow towards Marion.

“Tessa,” Joanne
called. “Go and get that guy and ask him to come and help us.”

“You didn’t
say, ‘please,’” Tessa said.

Marion
scrambled to her feet. “We’ve got to help them.” She went over to
Digby. “We need to help the others too.” Yet she knew she had said
it without conviction, already having a sinking feeling that Digby
was perfectly well aware that the others were still imprisoned and
had made no move to help them. “Why Tessa and me, anyway?”

“Little busy
right now,” Digby said, gesturing at the screens. “Wars to fight
and so on.”

“Only busy when
it suits you, I’m thinking,” Marion said. Her reply had more bite
than she had intended. She backpedalled. “I don’t want you to think
we’re ungrateful.”

“The others are
not my responsibility,” Digby said.

“And Tessa and
me are your responsibility? How do you figure that?” The trend of
the conversation was beginning to frighten Marion. Had they simply
swapped one captor for another?

“Relax,” Digby
said. “After we leave here, you go wherever you want.”

Which wasn’t
really a satisfactory answer. Marion left it for the moment because
a bad thought had occurred to her. “Are you intending to leave the
rest of them behind? You can’t do that. The terrorists will kill
them.”

“They are not
my responsibility.”

“I am not
leaving without them,” Marion said. She meant it too.

Digby
hesitated. Sensing an opening, Marion said, “There are children
here, Digby. There’s no way I could leave them behind and live with
myself.” It was the simple truth.

“Well, now I
think about it,” Digby said, “this could be useful training for
you.” He tossed an invisible something over to her. “I cut you free
with this.” A short silver rod appeared in her hands. “It comes
with instructions,” Digby said and turned, with an air of finality,
back to the screens.

“
Useful
training
.” Marion didn’t like the sound of that but right now,
it was much more important to free the other passengers. As she
hurried away towards them she found that the silver rod did indeed
come with instructions. “It’s speaking to me,” she said to Tessa,
showing her the silver rod.

Tessa had been
following the exchange with Digby. Her eyes lit up. “Alien
technology. What does it do?”

“It’s speaking
in my mind,” Marion said.

“No shit!”
Tessa said. “Can I hold it?”

“No. It’s a
one-woman gizmo. It’s bonding to me so that only I can use it.”
Marion frowned at the rod, concentrating. An intense metre-long,
glacial blue light, shot out of one end. Marion concentrated again,
reducing the blade to a couple of centimetres. She used the silver
rod to cut the cuffs and chains from the other passengers. When
they were all free, everyone stood around not sure what to do
next.

“Listen in,
people,” Marion said. “As soon as Digby has a moment, you know, the
war and all that, I’ll see what the plan is for getting us
home.”

“We should
cover them up,” a woman said, pointing at the ruined and bloody
bodies of the terrorists. “The children shouldn’t be seeing
this.”

“Sounds like
you’ve got the job then,” said Marion. “Perhaps some of you others
could help as well.”

“Digby, huh?” a
man said. “He got a last name to go with that?”

Marion had to
admit that she knew nothing about Digby, not even his last
name.

“So who put you
in charge?” the man continued, standing aggressively, with his head
thrust forward. A fragile thing, gratitude.

Tessa jumped
in. “If it wasn’t for Ms. Dath Vader here, jerk off, you’d still be
tied up waiting to be an ass-wipe.”

“I want you
over here right now,” Joanne Fleischer said to Tessa.

Tessa’s
immediate response was to give her the finger and say, “Eat this,
bitch.” In an aside she said to Marion, “Do the light sabre thing.
That’ll freak her out.”

“That will be
enough, Tessa,” Marion said, wondering why she felt this
overpowering urge to protect Tessa, whom she hardly knew.

Joanne
Fleischer addressed Marion. “That child is a ward of the court and
you have no authority over her. I warn you that you risk being in
breach of applicable laws here and may have a case to answer, on
our return to the United States.”

Tessa turned
her back on the others, so that she could whisper in Marion’s ear
without them hearing. “I can’t go back into foster care. They did…
bad things to me. You know what I mean? I’ve told them, Fleischer
and the others, what’s been happening and they freaking ignore me.
I’m not going back. I’ll kill myself first.”

Unfortunately,
Marion had no way of telling whether this was true or not. She
looked at the tattoos covering Tessa’s left arm and down one leg.
The most striking tattoo circled her right eye, reaching up into
her hairline and completely obscuring the top right hand corner of
her face. Perhaps it was not just a defiant statement but an
attempt to hide an attractive face lying underneath.