He stared around the small holding pen. It was a simple fence of wire, holding seventeen men and one woman, surrounded by the aliens. Escape seemed impossible; even if they’d been able to cut or climb the wires, the aliens would shoot them down before they managed to run away from their base. Hell, he didn’t even know what they’d done to the area — they’d set up a handful of oversized buildings surrounding the holding pen. And he wasn’t entirely sure of where he was.
Must be getting old, he thought, bitterly. And to think that he’d been planning a comfortable retirement. He was in his seventies, after all, but still as active as ever… well, maybe not as active as he’d been when he’d been a young soldier in the trenches. His wife wanted to travel the world and he’d been happy to oblige her. But now…
He looked up as a heavy lorry roared its way into the camp. The driver was a human, probably yet another of the damned civil servants who’d managed to find a soft landing in the arms of the aliens. Terrence glowered at him, before deciding that he was being unfair. The arsehole might have joined up to feed his family. Not everyone in Britain lived on a farm.
The policemen opened the gates and waved the prisoners forward. They didn’t bother to shackle them, but what would be the point? Inside the lorry, they’d be prisoners just as much as they were prisoners inside the holding pen. He shuffled as slowly as he dared until it was his turn to climb into the vehicle, and then he pretended that his leg had failed, staggering down and collapsing on the ground. A moment later, a policeman helped him into the lorry.
He found a place to sit as the doors were closed and the big vehicle made its way out of the camp. There were no windows to allow him to see where they were going. A quick check revealed that they couldn’t force open the rear doors to escape. The sound of engines grew louder, suggesting that they had joined a small convoy. Or maybe it was a very large convoy. He found himself praying that resistance fighters — or the remains of his old service — were still out there, ready to attack the convoy, but nothing happened. The hours wore onwards as the truck took them further and further away from the land he’d known.
It almost made him want to cry. His wife, his children… would he ever see them again? Or would the grandchildren grow up without knowing their granddad? He told himself that they wouldn’t keep him prisoner forever, but there was no way to know. For all he knew, he might be going to his own execution. But they could have killed him easily without bothering to transport him halfway across the country. Maybe they wanted slave labour, or maybe they just had a holding camp for former military personnel somewhere isolated from the general population. They’d grow old and die there while the aliens took control of the rest of the country they’d sworn to defend. His grandchildren would grow up in a world where the aliens were a fact of life.
Shaking his head, he remembered the hills he’d once climbed as a younger man… and wondered, bitterly, if he would ever see them again.
Chapter Seventeen
London
United Kingdom, Day 15
“They’re doing it on purpose,” Aashif proclaimed, loudly. The small gathering of young men around him murmured in agreement. “They are showing no respect for our religion at all!”
Seated halfway across the room, with the women and young children, Fatima could still hear him voicing his anger. Aashif was twenty-one years old, born to a family and community that was largely excluded from the mainstream population. A stronger person might have broken down the barriers or carved out a career for themselves, but Aashif — like so many others — had chosen to fall back into his community and wrap himself in a tissue of imaginary grievances. She’d heard it all before; the world was against him, no one liked or trusted him because of his religion, and he had rights. It never seemed to have occurred to him that his failures were a result of his personality, or that he could have made something of himself if he tried. He found it so much easier to blame others for his failings.
She rolled her eyes. Men like Aashif were a persistent pain in the posterior. Deprived of the sort of wealth and power they thought the world owed them by rights, they turned upon the women in their lives. Aashif’s sister was terrified to talk to strangers for fear that her brother would hear of it and beat her; his mother was a pale shadow of a woman, scared of the boy she’d brought into the world. Only his grandfather had ever been able to exercise any kind of restraint on the young man, and he’d passed away two years ago. She listened to his bragging and shuddered, inwardly. There was a new conviction in his voice that had been missing several months ago.
Not that she could really blame him. The aliens had taken over every building large enough to hold their oversized forms — and that included a number of London’s mosques. Even the police had been reluctant to just barge into the mosques, fearing the effect such provocative acts would have on the Muslim community. But the aliens had just taken the buildings and evicted everyone who complained. They’d done the same to a number of churches, yet they seemed to have targeted mosques deliberately. Given the rumours coming from the Middle East — and spread over the internet, along with far too much outright nonsense — it seemed as though they were attacking Islam directly. From what she’d seen herself, Fatima suspected that the aliens simply didn’t care. Humans were their property now — and property didn’t get a vote, or the right to complain.
“We’re going to do something about it,” Aashif continued. Bragging about his connections to the underground Jihad movement wasn’t new either, but she’d always known that he was just a poser, someone who would probably faint dead away at the thought of being asked to blow himself and a great many innocent civilians up. There were too many girls out there who were prepared to allow such claims to overpower their common sense. “I’m going to see to it personally.”
Unseen, Fatima rolled her eyes. Of course he would — and while he was at it, he’d create the perfect Islamic State… never mind that such a state only existed in the deluded rants sprouted by preachers with nothing better to do. There were times when she was tempted to believe that suicide bombers were God’s way of weeding out the unworthy from the Muslim community. The young fools who died for a dream rarely got to spread their seed.
She shook her head, and then helped her stepmother and the rest of the girls clear away the dishes and wash up. They knew their place, all right — and the fact that she was a doctor cut no ice with the men. Men like Aashif wanted women to stay in their place. It was the only way they could convince themselves that they were in charge. She smiled, in a moment of dark humour. The world could hardly be worse if women were in charge.
Sergeant Abdul Al-Hasid was feeling dirty. Not the feeling he’d had when he’d first discovered pornographic magazines, despite knowing that his God-fearing father would thrash him to within an inch of his life if he’d been caught looking at naked sluts. And not the feeling he’d had when Salma — his first girlfriend — had allowed him to touch her bare breast. It was the feeling of knowing that he was doing something utterly wrong — and the fact that the people he was helping to do it wanted him to help them didn’t make him feel any better. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he would be called upon to answer to God and that no answer he could give, nothing he could offer in his own defence, would help his case.