Connor surmised the sniper’s victims were rising from the dead, considering the frenzied change in pitch of Shaun’s screams.
“No!” he wailed, shrill with terror. “Get the fuck away….”
Screaming in horror and agony for only a few seconds longer, Shaun’s dying wails went silent, replaced by the wet grind of jaws in his flesh.
Not long now, then, thought Connor.
Shaun would rise to join the damned, then he and the feasting undead would find Connor’s dying form, a mere twenty feet away. His end would be filled with white eyes, crimson teeth, terror, and pain.
The Glock was too far away for him to end it himself, having spun from his hand as the bullet tore through his abdomen. The rifle was empty, having blasted fully automatic suppressing fire towards where he thought the sniper was. Trying to move to better cover, he had drawn his pistol to keep a barrage of fire with no time to reload on the run, but their enemy was too good, having already displaced to another window in a different building. That had only been possible with expert preparation, making a portal between the two shooting positions through the internal walls. The whole ambush was perfectly laid and despite a tempest of bullets fired from the men under his command, the sniper never stopped moving, taking another man or two down while they were still firing at his old location. Whoever this Nate was, Connor had never seen his like. He was intelligent, prepared, and lethal in his execution.
Connor had been firing at the wrong place when the enemy rifle cracked again, and a storm of agony erupted low in his guts, the Glock spinning from nerveless fingers as he collapsed. He cried out as he was hit, and then dragged himself into the cover he had been running for. Now, he was without a weapon, dying, and only a short hop from one undead, that was about to become two.
Resigned to his fate, he sighed, lamenting his brother’s madness, and he hoped Caleb would be okay.
Connor had never wanted any part of his father’s criminal enterprise. The military had been his escape from Harry’s dark shadow, but when his deployment in Iraq ended in April 2009, he returned home out of concern for his youngest brother, Caleb.
As the eldest, and cut from the same soiled cloth as their father, his brother Jamie was left in control of the family “business” after Harry Bancroft had been locked up two years earlier. Connor never wanted to be a part of their way of life, but concern for Caleb inevitably pulled him back into the dark folds of the Bancroft legacy. Johnny was a brainless thug, and Jamie had always craved power and control, but Caleb was an intelligent kid, introspective and thoughtful, who had dreams of a career in medicine. All Connor wanted was the chance for Caleb to follow his own heart and make a new life for himself, away from the drugs and perpetual violence that formed the foundations of the Bancroft name. When Caleb passed his A-Levels in 2011 and started thinking about university, Connor would fight to give him that life with everything he had, no matter if it came to blows with his father and Jamie. Even if it meant Connor swore his allegiance to the Bancroft criminal legacy, using all the skills he had learned in service to his country, and go against everything he believed in, he would. He would sacrifice his own honour, his own life, to give Caleb the chance at happiness, and something resembling a normal future.
June 23rd changed everything.
In the first three days of the chaos, Connor refused to participate in the mass of kidnappings Jamie ordered. He would defend their home against the living and the dead, but flat refused to steal people from their homes or the streets. The arguments between the two older Bancroft boys were heated and fierce, ignited when Jamie had sent men to steal the young boy, Charlie, to ensure their maintenance contractor stayed to keep their home in good order. The IT guy, Isaac, was ripped from his home office by armed men, a nurse was taken from the streets on the second day in an opportunistic capture, and even the old lady from the nearby farm, were all brought to their house and forced into servitude.
When pretty young women in their twenties were locked into a harem to keep Jamie’s men “entertained” through the inevitable hardships to come, Connor had started planning an exit strategy that would allow him to get his younger brother clear of all the madness. Jamie had often had his people lay a beat down on rapists; it was a weird fork in the road of his twisted code that crimes against women—especially crimes of assault in any form—were treated with pitiless wrath. The enforced enslavement and prostitution of the women was so far from Jamie’s usual eccentric morality, Connor knew something had broken in his brother. He doubted if it could ever be repaired, and Connor had no interest in trying to fight that battle.
He knew the hearts and minds of those loyal to Jamie would never be swayed. They were simple and greedy men, all violent bullies without a shred of human empathy. To a man, they were black-hearted sheep who needed a shepherd, but one that would feed their lust and greed, and Connor was not that man.
Despite his distaste for Jamie’s actions, he was still his brother. He was raised in the looming shadow of Harry Bancroft, an old-school gangster who valued strength and loyalty to family above all other tenets. Jamie had always been the heir apparent as the eldest, groomed to one day sit upon their black throne, and as such was entirely the product of
