Survival: After It Happened Book 1 (9 page)

That afternoon when people had slept a little longer; washed and rehydrated, Penny began to call the new arrivals in for a deeper background check.

She invited Dan, Neil and Jimmy to accompany her, and Dan was surprised to see Kate on the interview panel with them. Penny seemed to have selected a head of medical services.

She started off explaining the rules of the group, and asked each new person to account for their actions since the ‘incident’.

Ninety nice per cent of life gets wiped out and Penny still refused to use emotive language.

The questioning went on, and covered employment history, qualifications, vocational experience, and strangely a new category had appeared in the interviews; “What would you like to be in the new society?”

Kate was exempt from this, unless as Dan suspected it had already been done privately, and as the respective heads of department (Medical, Basecamp, Operations and Engineering) they spoke to each person in turn until everyone in camp knew what was going on. A small queue formed as they were speaking to the first person. Kyle.

Kyle had GCSE’s. He worked a checkout. He couldn’t drive. He had no injuries or illnesses. Kyle wanted to be a Ranger and have a gun but he offered no previous experience to support this and was assigned to assist Jimmy’s scavenging teams. He was unhappy with it, but he didn’t argue.

Ana had no formal qualifications. She worked on a factory line. She could not drive. She was fit and well. She raised livestock with her family before coming to the UK. Ana was temporarily assigned to the basecamp, with a view to her tending their new livestock very soon. The rules of this were simple; keep the animals alive.

Lexi was a deputy manager at Primark. She had a Higher National Diploma in Business Studies. She could drive. She was healthy. She had kept fit by learning Ju-Jitsu every week, and had even competed a few times. She was a former Army Cadet with experience of firearms and went running regularly. Dan agreed to assess her firearms skills, so Lexi was assigned to Ops as a potential Ranger as per her wishes.

Ian had come round significantly from yesterday. He could drive pretty much anything on wheels. He also knew a lot about solar panels, as he worked for a company which distributed them.

“It’s amazing how much you pick up about stuff when you’re waiting three hours to unload it.” He joked.

Neil snapped Ian up straight away; lorry driver who could get them hot water and electricity from solar panels in the long run? He was assigned to engineering effective immediately.

Adam was a tiler and knew a lot about plumbing too. He drove a large van most days. He was a bit of a fitness fanatic. Jimmy took him as driver for a second scavenging team with Kyle. He promised him training on using the master keys.

Jay was taken by Penny to be ‘ma about the house’. He was qualified to use a chainsaw and Dan thought that he was either going to end up as an enormous lumberjack, or he would have to find a log splitting machine.

Liam was a sullen youth, constantly moaning at the lack of electricity. Fact was, they had generators and could power televisions and the like. Nobody seemed to want to though, and there seemed no point in using up a limited supply resource just to keep Liam happy. He was hard work. He was nearing his final GCSE’s and would never actually finish high school now.

Liam wanted to be anything which had a gun, so Dan objected to him on principle.

“It’s a burden. A heavy one; not a toy” he warned, but he could tell he was trying to lecture someone who had grown up playing call of duty and probably thought he could shoot. Takes more than your thumbs, kid, he thought.

Liam was allocated to be under Andrew’s care, as the newly appointed head of supplies. Liam would have to learn to take stock inventory.

When they had finished, Penny recapped and produced her notes to the others:

Operations

1
st
Ranger - Dan

Ranger (proposed, requires assessment & training) Lexi

Engineering

Neil (Head), Ian

Cedric – vehicle & fuel recovery

Logistics

James (Head) & Kevin – team 1

Adam & Kyle – team 2

Agriculture/Horticulture

Ana – livestock maintenance

Maggie – vegetable grower

Medical

Kate (Head)

Catering

NEED A COOK! (Penny in the interim)

Supplies/Inventory

Andrew (Head), Liam as apprentice.

The new heads of department looked over her notes. Dan noticed she had put herself in as the temporary cook, however it was very clear that she was the head of the group in most ways. They discussed whether they should wait where they are for a few more days or start clearing the prison as soon as possible. Dan pointed out that the sooner they moved the bodies, the easier and better. Kate seconded him, as a paramedic she would have seen the results of bodies in various states of decay.

Dan claimed ownership of Ops, Engineering and Logistics to clear the buildings. Penny agreed to follow with the caravans and supplies and everyone else to set up their new home the next day, she just wanted more time to load supplies. The only objection to this was that Kate offered to help with the clearance. Nobody argued against that. They parted, agreeing to take the rest of the day off and tell everyone that evening.

That afternoon, Dan took Lexi out a few miles away to discuss her training and sight their guns. She had fired a handgun once, and had plenty of experience at shooting rifles on ranges. He ran though the basics of the role of a ranger. He was making it up as he went along, trying to remember it for next time. He broke down and built up an M4 in front of her, equipping it with the same 4x zoom optic as he used. He gave her the rifle – like his own weapon but with a slightly longer barrel with no vertical foregrip or suppressor as she seemed more comfortable with it.

The Sig was a harder weapon to handle than the Glock, so he instructed her with his own gun – it was easier to use with smaller hands. They went into the industrial estate and he set up targets at ten and twenty feet. She was about sixty per cent accurate at twenty feet, which was good enough for him. He took the opportunity to sight his own M4 as she did hers. She remembered how, despite the years since she had held a firearm. Adjustments were made, and Dan saw she was eight for ten at what he guessed was a one hundred and fifty metre range. Pretty damned good.

He kitted her out with one of the body armour vests, having to tighten it up as far as it would go as Lexi had narrow shoulders and a fairly flat chest. He gave her the Glock and the spare magazines, and showed her how to load and unload them to ease the springs.

He ran though primary weapon failures and having to go to the secondary and reloading. He gave her a rucksack and a list of what she should take every time she went out, finally adding a couple of knives to her kit.

As he went over the rules for different scenarios with her at the armoury trailer, he stripped, oiled and rebuilt a Sig to replace the Glock he had given to Lexi. He loaded three magazines, sat two of them neatly in place on his vest and slapped the third one home in the gun. He racked the topslide to chamber a round. Looking at Lexi, he thought he should probably loot some black clothing for her too so that they didn’t look too different. Uniforms, no matter how bizarre the situation, have a psychological effect on people.

As he was running through map skills and what kind of buildings and vehicles to mark, she held up a finger to shush him and looked sharply to her left. Dan heard it at the same time, and snapped into action. Unmistakably a motorbike, and what sounded like a person shouting a screaming like they were drunk or deranged. Dan decided to leave the Land Rover where it was, and they both approached on foot as fast as they could. Between them they had nearly three hundred rounds of 5.56 ready to fire on full auto, and that was before they even used their pistols. Whatever it was they were hearing was unlikely to be a threat to them. He hoped.

As they neared the sound, they could hear a voice pleading for help. The word ‘no’ was being screamed though sobs of pain, mostly drowned out by the motorbike.

Dan held his hand up and they both stopped. He saw a fixed steel ladder running up the side of a building with a flat roof, and pointed it out to Lexi. She nodded, slung her rifle and ran to climb it. He knew she had a more than average chance of hitting anything she saw within a short distance and felt more secure having some top cover. When she reached he flat roof he readied his carbine and rounded the corner at a crouch, knees bent and walking fast.

What he saw horrified him. A young man was riding a dirt bike around an older man. The older man was covered in cuts, and the rider was enjoying himself riding past him and making slices through his clothes with a machete not unlike Dan’s. This kind of Mad Max shit made him very angry; people like that have such an ignorant understanding of anarchy – they think it’s a free ticket to rape. To maim those weaker. To prey on others.

The older man was trying desperately to protect a younger female by shielding her with his body. Dan would see no more of this man’s blood spilt, so he flicked the safety catch to auto and fired three short bursts at the motorcyclist. Fuck the verbal warning, he thought with a savage flash of remembered anger; that was for a world with barristers who call you a murderer for doing your job.

The initial burst blew dust from the gravel in front of him. The second strafed up the front wheel and onto the instruments, the last caught the man with three or four rounds from thigh to neck. The bike toppled instantly and stalled. By the time he reached them, still watching him through his optic and moving forward in a semi crouch, he had died. Dan was just in time to see the last few weak spurts of arterial blood pulse from the ragged hole the bullet had torn in his neck.

He safetied and slung his M4, and bent down to the body. It looked like a fairly normal young man, not some crazed biker psychopath. He always believed that some people were just born bad, and this was one of them – just waiting for a situation to arise where he could throw off the bonds of acceptability, remove his mask of a normal person and hurt other people for fun. Dan despised him, and felt no remorse for having ended is life without warning.

A scream from behind him made him spin round and drop to one knee. The hysterical girl who was protected by the now unconscious bleeding man had seen another would be rapist enter the yard on another motorbike. Dan was thirty feet away, probably too far to be effective with the Sig which he had never fired before, but he held the man in his sights and shouted a warning.

“Fucking leave, now. Do it now and I won’t kill you” he shouted. The girl still screamed and keened in terror. The man he was aiming at looked past him at his dead comrade, and revved his bike. Dan settled himself to squeeze off rounds systematically and try to bring him down. As he started to breathe out and squeeze, he saw the man shudder and fold over the handlebars, both body and bike hitting the ground together. A split second after the impact he heard a sharp crack and the report of Lexi’s rifle. He ran over, covering the body with his Sig but found that the 5.56 bullet had shattered his sternum and the heart behind it before blowing a small chunk of flesh out by his right kidney. Sick as it seemed, he was very happy with his new recruit’s accuracy and timing.

He shouted Lexi and asked if she was ok. She called that she was fine, and he replied to stay where she was and take out anything that didn’t look friendly.

Dan sprinted back to the Land Rover and drove it back as fast as he could without losing his trailer. He knew he should administer emergency care where he was but he needed to be out of the area and back to Kate some time yesterday. He dragged the man and girl to the truck and forced them in; he was barely conscious and bleeding badly, she was in hysterics.

Dan jumped onto the bonnet, then the roof rack and called Lexi to come down. She shinned down the ladder quickly by holding the sides and sliding then trotted round the side of the building to them.

“Three more bikes, a mile or so out I think” she said. He decided not to wait to be introduced, not that these two would ever speak again, and gunned the diesel engine hard back to camp.

Lexi had her head on a swivel on the way back as Dan concentrated on the driving. She checked the mirrors and kept turning to look behind in between shouting questions at the girl. “Who were those men? How many of them are there?”

She was incoherent, other than to cry “Dad” repeatedly at the unconscious man bleeding beside her. Dan caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror; he did not look good and was probably going into shock. The quicker he got the man to Kate the better; they lacked the equipment to save him here, he needed more intravenous fluids than the one litre bag Dan had scavenged so far.

They turned in hard to the camp and Dan sounded the horn three times before coming to a stop by Kate’s ambulance. He was out of the Land Rover as it stopped, roaring her name. She appeared from Penny’s caravan and her face suddenly dropped, she threw down her cup of whatever and ran towards them as Dan was dragging the unconscious man from the car. The girl was left there for now – her immediate issues were mental, not time critical or physical and nothing could be done for her yet. Her Dad was the one who need treatment quickly. Kate shouted at Dan to put him on the bed as she started ripping open sealed packs and cutting his clothes off. Dan was the only other person in the group with medical knowledge, so he stayed and did as he was told, only pausing to unclip his M4 and rest it against the stretcher at the back. He told Lexi to get Neil and Penny, now.

They arrived as he was helping strip to unconscious man. “Lexi, Neil, get guns out of the trailer now. There’s a group of hostiles about a mile south, we killed two and there were more. Lexi, top cover. Get up somewhere; on one of the lorries if you can but get me eyes on now. Neil, load the tactical shotguns too. Go. NOW” he yelled as they were both stood waiting for more orders.

Penny called to him “What should I do?”

“Get everyone to load up. Use the last of the daylight to be ready to move ASAFP. We are moving tonight. DO IT” he yelled, whilst helping Kate dress the least serious of the wounds – the ones that didn’t require stitches to stop the bleeding. Kate was trying to find a vein to get fluids into the man, but had to resort to his neck as he was already in shock due to blood loss. It looked likely that he would die.

Kate worked feverishly on the man. "Kate, we need to move" Dan pressed her. She ignored him and continued to work.

He went outside the ambulance to see how the rest were doing breaking camp. The caravans had been hastily hitched and the 7.5tonne trucks were started. It was a mess; people were split up just to get enough drivers behind wheels. Dan went to check on the girl, and found her in a daze still in his Land Rover.

He saw people throwing bags into any vehicle they saw, and Neil had hitched his precious fuel tanker before throwing tools into the back of his own 4x4.

Lexi made eye contact him and froze briefly before carrying on. He knew he would have to deal with the trauma forming in her head soon, but now wasn't the time. She had just killed someone without the time to reason why; that would hit her hard when the panic stopped.

Dan jumped back in the ambulance.

"Kate, either we move or we could all die" he told her.

"Ok, that'll have to do" she said

He closed the doors and did a last check of everyone. All were accounted for and their supplies were ready to drive, more or less.

"Sidelights only, follow me and be careful" he shouted, climbing behind the wheel.