Ben Bracken: Origins (Ben Bracken Books 1 - 5) (7 page)

The woman appears from behind the bonfire, carrying what looks like a white plastic supermarket bag. Ben knows that despite how he’d like to assess the scene further, he may never get a chance to separate the woman and the infant, so he makes his presence felt.

‘Stop there, you psychotic old bitch’, he barks, as he runs into the clearing. He knows that if he gets close enough, his physical presence will root the woman to the spot. He’ll have to judge where to stop, because too close and she will surely panic and go for the child. Too far back and he won’t have any chance to reach the child even if he tried. He picks a spot and sticks to it.

‘You have done enough harm to this community. This is where it stops’, Ben commands. The woman looks at him with curiosity and it’s the first time Ben has had the chance to really look at her. She is tall, no doubt, and, on this further inspection, could be anywhere in age between 50 and 65. She has a shock of peroxide blond hair, cut in a cruel and uncompromising bob. She wears a red blazer with a cross pinned to the right lapel, over a tartan skirt. Facially, she passes more than a slight resemblance to Meryl Streep, but Ben feels that could just be the copal talking. She is ten feet from the altar, but Ben would like that to be more.

‘I’m 15 feet from you. I can get to you and put you on your back within two and a half seconds. Get on your knees now, so that I don’t have to do that’ Ben orders.

The woman smiles - a vile, smug, pursed grin. Ben dearly would love to wipe it off her face with his boot, if it didn’t make him feel so unnerved. She speaks.

‘Who are you to say what should or should not happened to the child?’ she spits.

‘I put that same question right back to you’ Ben retorts.

‘If you knew what I know about this child, about what is demanded, you would be assisting me, not apprehending me.’

‘At no point, ever, is the sacrifice of an infant acceptable or justified.’

‘And you’re evidence for this is...?’, the Baroness asks. Ben wants to answer about moral fibre and code, and simple right and wrong, but he knows none of that applies now. The simmering, acidic determination in the woman’s eyes confirm that they are long past negotiation. ‘You have no knowledge of the darkness that surrounds us, that surrounds this place, that surrounds the child.’

‘I know darkness. I’ve lived darkness. I’ll show you darkness, if you like.’ Ben retorts grimly. He coils his body, ready to pounce. But, with unexpected speed, the woman reaches into the carrier bag and pulls out a curved knife with an ivory handle. Ben knows the scales have tipped. His mind clouds with the horrors of what that knife must have seen and done, and he does his best to block the sinful visions out. The woman drops the bag and sharply drags the blade across the palm of her left hand, splitting the flesh and drawing blood.

‘Dabo meum sanguinem, nam quid oporteat fieri!’ she curdles, as she squeezes her left hand into a fist. Blood pours out of the bottom of her clenched palm. She raises the same left hand over her head, and shakes it like a salt shaker, raining droplets of hot fresh blood onto her hair, face and clothes.

Ben can take no more - the child crying, the maniac baroness embarking on some weird ritual. He charges at the woman, head down like a rhino. He wants to charge her full force off the ground and up backwards into the fire. The woman swings the blade upwards, and Ben feels that burning, urgent sickness as the knife sears through the meat just above his left collarbone. He curses himself, as he knows it was his fault - he left himself wide open, and knows he has had a lucky escape. Blood spits out of the gash by his left shoulder, down his shirt. He steps back away from the woman, who has stepped left away from the fire. She spreads her arms wide, like Predator beckoning Arnie to ‘come and get it’.

‘Magis sanguis vobis!’ she screams. Ben has no idea what she is saying, just that it is Latin. That freaks him out enough.

Ben brings his fists up, and adopts a combat pose. They circle each other.

‘Ego semper conantur ut dans...’ the woman offers. As Ben circles closer to the fire, he can feel the heat prickle his skin. He knows he must act defensively, until there is an opening. He sees the woman’s right shoulder dip back slightly, which gives him the split second heads-up he needs to know she is about to strike. He charges, just as the baroness brings the knife up and forward at his chest. Ben pivots his waist to the left, opening his shoulders to face the blade as it whistles past his midriff, and he grabs the out-stretched arm with both hands. He spins so his back is to the woman, and throwing caution to the wind, thrusts his head back to unleash a mighty head-butt. The impact is horrible and Ben knows it - it hurts him a lot, but he hopes that enough damage has been done to the woman to slow her down.

Fat chance, Ben thinks, as he feels her teeth sink into the wound in his collar bone. There is no quit in her at all. He still has her arm, but the strength he feels in her is unlike anything he expected. It reminds him of the kind of adrenaline surges people experience when they are in extreme circumstances - in the ultimate moments of ‘sink or swim’. It’s a natural reaction, nothing to do with the mind. If it was to do with the mind, he had imagined that sports people would use it all the time to jump higher, swim faster, hit harder. This woman seemed to be in a constant state of it. The teeth chomp harder, and he wriggles free, and in doing so, he is forced to sacrifice his grip on the arm. They break, and they are back to square one, staring each other down. She has a nasty gash above her right eyes, which itself is already developing a serious shiner. Blood pours from her mouth, but he knows it’s not hers. It’s his.

‘Sanguinem ex oppositione...’ she drawls, blood spraying as she speaks.

The baby is still crying, and Ben wishes above all else for this horrible scene to end. He changes tack. Defensiveness hasn’t worked - perhaps an all-out attack will surprise her and he will get the upper hand, he reasons. With that, he summons up all the rage he can, all the hate he can muster. He knows he shouldn’t, and that it is a bad practice in combat, but he knows it is that brute rage and strength that will help overcome this unlikely she-beast. He runs for her, and unleashes a scream, hoping that it will add to her confusion. He diverts his run, so he can leap off one of the low benches to his left and give himself a flying attack. In less than a second he is airborne, coming down on the baroness - who herself brings her knife up to meet him.

The blade rips into Ben’s right thigh, but Ben barely notices it, as he flies over the woman’s left shoulder. As he falls, he brings his own left arm around the woman’s neck under her chin. Ben knows that despite the lack of a plan, this is working out alright so far. From where he is, he can execute a quick smooth judo takedown. He bends forward, locking his left arm around the woman’s neck, and ripping her backwards over his arched back. She topples, as the knife tinkles somewhere. She crunches backwards onto the floor by the fire, with Ben still behind her. He aims to make his next move the last move of the fight. He keeps his left arm tight around her neck, and brings both his legs around her torso, interlocking his ankles. He brings his right arm around her forehead to clamp her head in place, and contracts all his body at once - locking the baroness in a monster sleeper-hold. He lies back and squeezes with every ounce of his being.

Ben has been forced to use this move a couple of times, and he knows when he gets down to it, it’s one that is very hard to beat. He grips and doesn’t relent. The woman squirms, but his legs stay firmly locked. His right thigh burns from the fresh gash, but it seems manageable for the time being, as he starves the woman of oxygen. She starts to kick frantically and buck. It’s not an aimless spasming, however, as Ben realizes she is trying to get closer to the altar. She’s not doing a bad job of it either - Ben can’t let go of any limb lest it weaken the sleeper hold. He has to keep squeezing and hope that she passes out before they can get to the altar. Ben doesn’t know if the altar is sturdy - it looks ok, but he can’t risk a stray kick sending the whole thing, baby and all, toppling into the pyre. But they are getting undeniably closer.

He is forced into action. He barrel rolls the woman onto her front, with himself still attached now on top of her back, as she is face down in the dirt. But that only gives the woman the chance to rise to her knees, which she sure as hell begins to do. Ben has to roll again, onto his back, but they are getting dangerously close to the fire now.

He throws his weight to his left, onto his back again, and this brings a blood-curdling, choked scream from the woman. He wonders what has happened to bring about such a response, but then he notices. He has rolled the woman’s feet into the fire. He can see the black patent leather of her shoes bubble and pop. Ben closes his eyes and squeezes, begging for the end. As awful as the scene is, he knows he has her now. The kicking and bucking continues, but there is a growing futility to it. An awful leather and flesh BBQ stench wafts up to Ben’s nose. Sadly, the flesh part of the smell is not foreign, and it brings back nasty memories. The woman has stopped screaming, and the bucking has nearly stopped. Her body loosens in tension, and flops in his arms. His mind can’t help but think the ridiculous phrase: ‘I just choked out an old woman while her feet were in a bonfire’.

He let’s go, and shoves the woman off him onto the floor - her feet still in the fire. He sits back and doesn’t know what to do next. Pull the woman out, or leave her for the authorities. It doesn’t look great for his record, burning an old woman’s feet off. Oddly, it seems to him that chucking her whole onto the bonfire might not look as sadistic. It’s a strange logic that doesn’t sit well with him, but he knows it might be the only way to stop this woman from harming anyone else. God knows how much harm this woman and her flock has reeked across this quiet beauty spot, but he knows that if he puts her on the fire, there will be no chance ever for her to commit or incite another atrocity. He puts his arms under he shoulders, and throws her unconscious body onto the fire. He doesn’t wait to see what happens, and turns straight to the altar.

He approaches the swaddling, hearing the crying and hopes to God the infant is ok. He peels back the top layer to reveal a naked, pink, sooty but intact baby boy. Ben thanks his lucky stars, and breathes out. He puts his hand on the boys chest, which slows the crying almost immediately. He has no idea what to do with children, so his gesture is purely an instinctive one. For the first time in a long time, he experiences happiness. Glee feels so foreign to him, it comes as a surprise.

Sirens drift from over the lake. He looks back through the trees, and can see the dim flicker of red and blue down below. Time to go. He looks at the child, knowing the child is now safe. If he were to leave now, the authorities will be here within minutes to take the child, he reasons - plus the fire will keep him warm until they get here. It won’t be long before he is back with his father. He wraps the child again, and, with a gesture that surprises himself yet further, he plants a kiss on the child’s forehead.

‘Take it easy, kid.’ he says.

And with that, he looks straight up to the inky abyss of the sky. He can see the North Star. His work here is done. The baroness is dead. He runs and dives into the tree-line before the police can spot him, and heads off in an easterly direction. Back to England, back home - away from one of the most horrible and unexpected scenarios even he, in his combat-warped mindset, could ever contemplate, imagine or survive.

CATCH 23

1

The trial had absorbed Ben from the start. It had been splashed all over the television, all over the radio, all over the red-top newspapers. The broadsheets had barely touched it, and that perhaps should well have been an indicator of things to come.

Despite all the posturing of the media, about how Terry ‘The Turn-Up’ Masters was as guilty as they come, with a rap sheet more extensive and weighty than most hardback novels, the man had walked free.

He had practically stood on the court steps at the end of the trial, and admitted his guilt to his part in the armed robberies of a series of East London jewelers. He hadn’t been present at any, but they had tied him to them thanks to some sloppy circumstantial evidence. One of the robbers had failed to fully tuck the collar of a particularly garish Hawaiian shirt down the neck of his boiler suit he was wearing for the robbery, which was like a red flag for the CCTV police investigators. A quick scan across the CCTV in a five mile radius of the first crime scene, revealed that The Turn-Up’s own son, Markland, had been wearing that exact same shirt on the morning of the robberies. He was ID’d wearing that shirt in Tesco, passing through Marylebone Station and, hilariously, on the street where his father owns a pub (The Old Tupenny). Ben reasoned that Markland must be, for want of a better phrase, thick as pigshit.

Now, Ben sits in a rented Mondeo, staring through the drizzle-specked driver’s window, at the front door of that very same pub. He has kept his distance to about 100 yards, and sits normal and relaxed, pretending to browse half-heartedly through a newspaper. When he had rented the car, he had also rented a kids booster seat to help with his story - if anyone asked why he was was sat doing nothing, he could say he was waiting for his kid to come out of whatever posh kid activity comes to mind. He fancies going with ‘piano recital’ today.

He doesn’t worry too much at all about being either recognized or quizzed. He has absolutely no connection to the Masters family, nor does he have any connection with any authority - well not anymore. If the Masters were to look him up, chances are they’d find that Ben was perhaps even more wanted than they were, and connected to crimes just as grisly. They’d also probably find that nice little caveat that now appears on any paperwork of an official nature relating to him: ‘DISHONOROUBLY DISCHARGED’. Given how bad that sounds, Ben almost thinks they should look him up.

Ben hadn’t been too bothered by the crime (nobody had been hurt). What had crawled under his skin was the fact that Masters Sr. had been so untouchable, despite the myriad of crimes that are widely attributed to him. This was the first time he had ever seen the inside of a courtroom, but it doesn’t matter: a quick google search reveals in lurid detail a guilty verdict. His wikipedia entry is a menu of some of the most godawful murders the streets of London have ever seen, peppered with the most liberal use of the words ‘allegedly’, ‘reported’ and ‘according to a source’. If the reports were to be believed (and Ben does believe them) then Masters has a horrible record for dismembering his competition, and distributing their remains to the rest of his opponents. It’s a reign of terror that has kept a stability to the London organized crime scene, in that nobody dare step up to take on the Masters’. But it has also brought an unruly bloodshed to the city that nobody who has come in contact with it can ever forget. Innocents scared on the street, neighbourhoods in the vice of terror... The Masters’ are bad news.