The Watchers (8 page)

She stepped forward. Maybe she should try and pick up a signal first like she had to with her mobile phone. Yes, that made sense. She took two more steps. She closed her mind to everything other than her urgent wish to connect with Uriel, to tell him about the hostages, who were now out in the open, waiting to be saved.

Suddenly she felt a strange pressure on her hands coming from the stick. It began vibrating. It was working! The force of the rod made her feel a tickling sensation in the pit of her belly. It was picking up some sort of energy force. She considered the notion that the rod was perhaps simply detecting traces of water from an underground stream. She had read that the lines travelled that way around the earth, like blood through veins. She closed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could. Help them. She repeated. You can help them now.

Then, as if the Watchers themselves had shouted in her ear, a message entered her thoughts.
Stop the train
, it said.
Stop the train.

Sarah

South of England

Ted Barrow checked his watc
h
. It was three am. They would be here soon. He didn’t have much time. He opened the door to the barn and went inside, keeping his torch pointed to the floor. He made his way through the disused stalls, empty now since he’d lost all his cattle to the mad cow disease outbreak of ‘93.
That’s when the farm went downhill. It had never recovered. He had never recovered. He’d had no insurance and the compensation from the government didn’t amount to much. Damn cheating dirty politicians!

He arrived at the interior door and unlocked the padlock, flicking the makeshift light switch dangling loosely from the wall inside. Sarah was lying on a mattress wrapped in an old grey army blanket. She was whimpering as she heard him enter. He couldn’t understand why, seeing as he had looked after her like a little princess.

As he approached her she sat up against the wall, hiding her face in the blanket, she was crying. He had to admit he felt a small amount of satisfaction watching her fear. It kind of made him feel good about himself. In charge!

Still, there was no reason to be afraid. He hadn’t touched her. He just wanted the company that was all. “I want you to come with me, Sarah.” He held out his hand and touched her shoulder.

She flinched and pulled back. “No, go away. I want my mummy and daddy.”

He sighed as he pulled the roll of duct tape from his pocket and scraped the end and he sighed again when he pulled a length from the roll. The tearing noise of it seemed to terrify her even more. She was going to scream, silly girl! He pulled her towards him and wrapped the tape around her head and across her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear and that pleased him.

“Give me your hand.”

She shook her head so he pulled her to her feet with as much strength as he could muster. He was beginning to think her presence in his life had been a waste of time. The whole country was looking for her and that didn’t seem fair somehow. He only wanted some company. “Come on. Don’t be a naughty girl.”

Grabbing her arm, he guided her out of the room, before he turned and locked the door behind him. Then he stopped. A car was coming up the track towards the house.

Sarah’s eyes lifted from the gloom of the darkness in the barn. She watched his expression as the moonlight filtered through the gaps in the wood and illuminated his face. He had a look of disappointment in his eyes, mixed with anxiety that made him seem like a cornered beast.

“They’re here,” he said.

Pennsylvania, USA

They’d been on the mov
e
for over an hour. From where Jay was sitting on the carriage floor, he watched the lush dark green scenery of Pennsylvania’s rugged countryside pass them by, as if he was watching a film from the front row of a movie theatre. Trees flashed past, rows upon rows of them, protruding to the sky like spears, to frosted peaked mountains in the foreground.

It was getting dark quickly now. The light was fading on the outside making the train darker inside since the lights had not been turned on. The passengers were tired. Their faces looked haggard and drawn as if this had been the worst night of their life. It probably was!

Two guards were now at the entrance to the carriage, perched on the arms of some seats near the front, holding their guns vertically at their side with the butts resting on the floor.

They were conversing in their own language so Jay couldn’t understand what they were saying and he guessed neither did anyone else. Nevertheless, they looked scared, their eyes revealing their fear like a dog searching for food on another mutt’s turf.

Suddenly the lights went on in the carriage. Now all he could see through the windows was the reflection of the hostages inside the train. It was like the movie had stopped playing and now the lights in the theatre had gone up. Across from him, Tom was still playing with his cell, waiting for a call to come through. “Where are they?” he muttered.

Jay was also wondering why the feds hadn’t made contact. It was possible they were biding their time. Maybe they thought it would endanger the hostages, or maybe they didn’t believe it was Tom who’d made the call. There could be a number of reasons.

Jay had sent a text to a few people he knew. Fran for one. She hadn’t answered, which didn’t surprise him in the least. One of his buddies from the local bar had text back, ‘Yeah right, J. And I’m in the next carriage. Drop by for a beer, bro.’ He’d pondered for a moment if that was true, but then decided he was fooling around.
Idiot!
The only other contacts he had left were his shrink and his client from Wall Street, who’d sent him out on the stakeout the night before. He figured his shrink would simply demand extra sessions, which left the client. Jay still hadn’t got around to submitting a detailed report on the arrival of the Watchers and the potential hanging of the dark-skinned youth, so it was a tough call to make.

Just as Jay contemplated calling his mother, who probably wouldn’t believe him either, Tom’s cell started vibrating. Jay watched his eyes as the kid read the message. They were wide with horror, and his jaw had slackened. Jay grabbed the phone from his hand and turned it to face him.
‘Stop the train’
, it read. ‘
Stop the goddamn train.’

Jay read the tex
t
on the phone with his mouth agape. And as he tried to digest the weight of the message, Tom was speaking with that sincerely annoying loud whisper of his.

“How can we do that?”

Jay dragged his eyes from the display and scrutinised the kid's face as if he'd never seen him before. "What? Are you crazy?" Jay had to stop himself from laughing. It was probably acute hysteria. "You get ‘Stop the train' from your little English girlfriend and now you're seriously asking me how we're going to ‘stop the damn train'?" What more could he say to someone who had a pea for a brain? "Why did I listen to you? How did you talk me into doing this? I must be crazy. My shrink will want to see me every day for ten years after this."

A noise from the front made them stop.

Both of them moved so that they could look around the seat to where the guards were watching the hostages with their gun at their sides. One with a black beard had joined them from the next carriage, and now they were all talking frantically as he delivered a message. Now they were all shouting. They were upset. Very upset.

Jay and Tom watched the bearded one reach out to one of the male hostages sat on the floor near his feet. He viciously grabbed the man by the collar of his shirt and pulled him upright. The guy held up his hands and shouted with sheer terror in his voice. “Take it easy. Take it easy.”

The other hostages were starting to panic. Some started screaming and shouting. Suddenly mayhem erupted. A woman stood up and lunged forward to take hold of the man within the grasp of the bearded terrorist. A guard pushed her away and she fell into the crowd. More people stood until the guns were raised and pointed towards the crowd. "Sit, sit," they screamed.

It was then, at that very moment, as if in slow motion, Jay watched Tom rise to his feet, stagger to the side of the carriage, open the emergency valve plastic cover and press the red button.

The impact was like a truck crashing into a brick wall.

The train screeched to a standstill from top speed, deafening them as iron against iron clashed like crashing symbols in a hollow tube. All the hostages who were once standing were thrown onto the people sitting or crouching on the floor. The guards were knocked off their feet from the force of the jolt and the screaming and the crying assaulted Jay’s nerves like a piece of chalk being dragged across a blackboard.

Tom had managed to get back into position. “You crazy son of a…”

The train came to a halt.

For one unearthly moment, silence ensued, until suddenly the whole train erupted to a level of panic greater than before. The hostages were screaming and crying and the guards fired orders into the huddled crowd. “Silence…silence.” A bullet was fired into the roof of the carriage so that silence ruled once more. One of the guards yelled frantic and indistinguishable rants, while the other two went through the partition doors into the next carriage, holding their rifles aloft. “What do we do now?” Tom whispered.

Jay shook his head. “Beats me, kid. I thought you had all the answers.”

One of the guards returned and took hold of the hostage he had grabbed once before. He was forcing him off the train, half dragging him, pushing him, screaming for him to move faster.

With the lights still on inside the carriage, no one could see what was happening in the darkness outside. Some were cupping their eyes to the windows trying to make out the movements of the Iranians and their single hostage. Everyone inside was quiet, except for the woman who had been pushed into the crowd. She was wailing. “What’s happening? Where are they taking him?”

Bang! A single gunshot broke into the night.

The women screamed and the men groaned with disbelief while Jay watched Tom push his head back against the carriage wall. He was biting his bottom lip, looking as if he was praying.

The woman at the front was screaming. “Larry, Larry…”

Then Tom began muttering to himself. “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.

A half-hour passed
.
The guard, who had left the train, had come back on board, but the hostage was no longer with him. Jay suspected his body had been dragged somewhere and perhaps a call made to the feds. ‘This is what we do to those who don’t comply with our demands’…or something to that effect. He looked at Tom. The kid was sitting with his head in his hands, running his fingers through his mop of black unruly hair. Jay kicked his foot. “You okay?” He kicked his foot again. “Hey, Tom…buddy!”

He looked up at Jay like a little kid lost. His eyes were glazed and his nose was red and moist. “It’s my fault. I’m responsible for that man’s death. If I hadn’t have stopped the train…I’m never going to be able to forgive myself.”

Jay felt a surge of compassion. Yes, the idiot had got them into that mess, but…well, he was just a kid. Jay started to blame himself. He shouldn’t have let Tom get so carried away. He should have seen it coming. Now the kid needed a little encouragement. “Nah, it probably would have happened anyway. You saw how they were behaving before the train stopped. They had already picked the guy out. The only difference is they shot him outside, instead of inside the train. At least his wife and the rest of us never got to see that.”

A yell from one of the hostages.

“What’s going on?” Tom whispered.

They looked around the back of the seat to the far end of the carriage.

The guards were gone!

Jay leaned across the aisle to an elderly guy sitting nearby. “Where are they?”

“They left the train.” He looked as baffled as everyone else. “And they left their weapons.”

Jay raised himself from the floor and peered through the crowd to the three rifles, now discarded on the floor at the end of the carriage. They had simply been abandoned. He crawled over to the window, cupped his hands over his eyes and looked through the glass, where he could just make out the silhouettes of the five terrorists walking towards the trees in the forest next to the track.

Tom tugged on his jacket. He had that familiar look of excitement in his eyes. “Come on.”

Just like a kid, Jay thought. He was over it already. “What? Come on where?”

“It’s the Watchers. They’re here.”

With fortitude in his step, Tom barged his way through the mass of people crammed into the carriage, some of them now straining to see out of the windows to the darkness of the night. He reached the end as Jay followed, both of them heading for the open door. Tom put his foot on the step outside and jumped off, landing with a thud on the rough terrain at the side of the track. He looked back to see the faces of the hostages peering out from the brightly lit carriage, until he turned and ran towards the trees, into the forest and onto the trail of the terrorists.

Jay was just behind him when Tom came to a stop next to a tree. They were both out of breath and panting for air. It was the altitude, he guessed. That or they were both nervous as hell. “I can hardly see anything,” Tom whispered.

“Me neither.”

"It's strange, though," Tom said as if a revelation had just hit him. "I don't know how, but I think I know where I'm going. It's weird."

“Well. I’m right behind you, kid. And if you’re correct, which I hope you are -otherwise we’re toast-you’re going to see your Angels one more time.”

“Yeah, cool.”

“Got your camera ready?”

“Oh, yeah!” He was grinning like it was his wedding day.

“Right, let’s go.”

They both ran ahead, keeping out of sight by ducking behind trees en-route, and darting among bushes. A clearing twenty meters in the distance stopped them in their tracks as Tom pulled Jay behind a tree out of sight. He signalled for him to move forward towards the edge of the area. There, they halted and fell to the ground on their shaking knees.

A feeling of Deja-vu hit him. Only last night, they had hidden near a similar clearing in central park. Ahead was a wooden picnic table and a large hollow log, lying at an angle on the hard earth. The moon was up on that side of the forest, lighting the clearing as if a single spotlight had lit up an arena where a battle was about to begin.

There they were; the five terrorists, inside the void of a circle of seven Angels. Two of the Iranians were crouched on the ground praying to Allah, and the others were standing, shouting undetectable words of abuse at the Watchers who were silent as they formed a circle about them.

The beings were magnificent. The power behind the strains of their muscles was boundless. Their legs were slightly parted like great towers of vacuum-packed meat, and their rippling stomachs were unyielding beneath chests protruding forth. The moon lit their features and as shadows became sucked into the hollow of their eyes, their expressions became even more haunting and terrifying.

As two Watchers stood to one side with their wings half erect, the other Angels each took a frightened man by his shoulder as if they were glued together. Five Watchers pinned five terrorists against five separate trees. The Iranians were hostages now and as each stood up against the trunk of an elm only meters apart, their faces leaned against the bark where the Angels stood behind them, their wings gradually rising as the mood of the occasion increased.

The five Iranian hostages began screaming for their lives.

The Watchers stepped forward and as their wings reached their peak, they become wrapped around the bodies of the men and around the width of the trees. The screaming peaked as the Angels resembled bats curled around a branch as the muscles in their backs and calves intensified. They were literally crushing the life out of the terrorists until they were no more.

An owl hooted from somewhere in the distance as a cloud of bats ascended into the moonlit sky.

Tom and Jay both gasped as they saw the Watchers step backwards, leaving nothing against the tree other than a mound of grey coloured dust worked into the grooves of the bark.

Then like icing crumbling from a cake, the dust fell to the ground.

Each Angel used the heels to grind the ashes into the dirt below the tree. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the men who had terrorised the people of America had been sent back to the earth from whence they came.