“A good day’s work,” she said. Two other collaborators lived nearby. They wouldn’t expect an old woman to be a threat, at least not until it was too late. “Let’s go see Mr Patel, shall we?”
The line of military trucks would have fascinated Timmy, once upon a time. At seven, he had told his daddy that he wanted to be a soldier, just like his father, uncle and several of his father’s friends. His father had laughed and promised him that he would allow Timmy to join as soon as he was old enough, but until then he’d better keep up with his studies, just in case. Timmy had learned more from books and instruction manuals than he’d learned from school, including how to take apart and rebuild remote-control cars, planes and other gadgets.
And then the aliens had arrived. Half-formed dreams of joining a real space force had died when the aliens had shown their true faces. The fifteen-year-old teenager had watched in horror as his father was dragged off by a team of collaborators and sworn revenge. Timmy hadn’t been supposed to know what was in his father’s lockable truck, nor was he supposed to know how to get in — and he did know that his father would have given him a sound thrashing if he’d been caught trying to get inside it. He wouldn’t have minded, now, if it would bring his father back to him. Instead, all there was left for him was revenge. There was no hope of honourable service as long as the aliens ruled the Earth.
Making an IED wasn’t actually difficult. Badly-educated insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had been doing it for years, although a large number had been killed or maimed by their own devices. Timmy had been on every military-related course and adventure holiday he could find since he’d been ten years old. He knew enough to set up a primitive IED, one that packed enough punch to seriously upset his target. The tricky part had been fitting it into one of his remote-controlled trucks.
No one was on the streets now, apart from the aliens and their collaborators. Timmy braced himself and turned on the truck, sending it forward and onto the road. His hiding place wasn’t perfect, but they probably wouldn’t see him unless they got very lucky. The truck, about the size of a small dog, would certainly be noticed, yet the only way they could stop it was by shooting it. Timmy intended to flick the switch and detonate the IED if they started firing, if only to buy some time to escape.
He heard someone shout from the lead truck just before his improvised IED rolled under the wheels. In Russia, he’d read, they’d trained dogs to carry explosives under tanks. The principle was the same here. He flicked the switch and the IED exploded under the lead truck. The blast was far larger than he’d been expecting, knocking him backwards and shattering every window in the street. He pulled himself back to his feet and gaped at the results. The lead truck was simply gone, while two more were wrecked and burning. Flames licked around them as their surviving crew jumped out, weapons in hand. The soldiers in the remaining trucks were leaping out as well, firing at imaginary enemies. Timmy had no idea what they thought they were shooting at, but none of the bullets came anywhere near his hiding place. Their shots went through broken windows and shattered doors, probably injuring or killing anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Timmy felt a pang of guilt as he started to creep away. It sounded as if the enemy soldiers were getting organised and once they started searching thoroughly, they might find him.
Luckily, he’d taken the advice in his father’s tactical manuals and prepared his escape route first. The rear of the house he’d chosen as a staging post — it belonged to one of his teachers, who had fled the city when the aliens arrived and never returned — possessed a neat garden, one that opened into a drainage ditch. It was simple enough to crawl through the pipe and out into the other side, under the houses on the other side of his teacher’s house. He’d done it often enough as a kid when he and his friends had dared each other to risk the pipe.
The shouts behind him were growing louder. Timmy took off his rucksack as he dived into the pipe and started to half-crawl along it. It stank worse than he remembered, but then he’d been a kid back then. Now, he almost got stuck twice in the pipe. Sheer fear kept him going, somehow; he slipped and slid his way to the far end of the pipe. No one had tried to block the far end. He was suddenly very aware that he was filthy and stank of shit and worse. It smelt as if the entire city used the pipe for their personnel waste disposal.
And if they saw him looking like that, they’d know exactly what he’d done.
Behind him, the shouts seemed to be growing fainter. The enemy troops had either decided it wasn’t worth the effort of hunting him down, or they believed that they’d killed him already. Or perhaps they’d decided not to let a single insurgent slow them down any more. More out of curiosity than wisdom, he shimmied up a drainpipe he remembered as a child, climbing onto the house’s roof. His father had thrown a colossal fit when he’d caught Timmy and his friends playing on the roofs, but no one had ever been hurt. Now… he was heavier, yet his body remembered how to climb. Compared to some of the climbing frames at action camp, the drainpipe was easy.
He kept his head down as he reached the roof, knowing that armed men were nearby. One of them might see him and open fire — and if he was blown off the roof, he was dead. Behind him, where he’d triggered his IED, the fire seemed to be mostly out, with a couple of enemy traitors using fire extinguishers to put out the remaining flames. It wasn’t the fire that caught his attention. It was the small crowd of people who had been yanked out of their houses by the traitors. They sat in the middle of the street, hands on their heads, watched by armed soldiers. A number of bodies lay on the ground, torn apart by bullets; they’d been gunned down in cold blood. Timmy fought down the urge to vomit; instead, he stared, heedless of his own safety. One of the enemy soldiers was shouting at the prisoners, demanding attention. Timmy could barely hear him, but he got the gist of it. They wanted the prisoners to point them in Timmy’s direction, or else. But the prisoners couldn’t help them…
There was a long machine gun rattle from where they were kneeling. They died as the machine gun was played over their position, leaving a pile of bleeding bodies in the street. Timmy couldn’t take his eyes off the scene, even though he wanted to run, or to fight back. They’d killed everyone just because they’d lost a few trucks and a couple of soldiers? He’d killed the prisoners just as surely as if he’d killed them himself. None of the war movies he’d seen, or the tales his father told, had suggested anything like a cold-blooded massacre. It was a nightmare.
A shot pinged off the roof. Timmy realised he’d been spotted and threw himself to the ground instinctively, crawling back towards the drainpipe as if his life depended on it. It was a harder task to get down than he remembered, and he scraped his arms quite badly on the brickwork, but he was eventually down on the ground. Turning, he ran as hard as he could, cursing his own curiosity. If they gave chase, they’d catch him — and if they caught him, he knew it would be bad. There were shouts after him, but nothing…
…And then he felt something strike him between the shoulder blades. The ground came up to slam into him with staggering speed, just as a red-hot needle seemed to dig into his back. He hit the ground, feeling his nose break as he slammed down face-first, trying not to scream out in pain. He’d been shot; they’d seen him and shot him and killed him…
He was dimly aware of running feet, and then silence.
“Please remain calm,” the loudspeaker said. “Terrorists are attacking this building. Please remain…”