became communal property, raised not by Sharon, although I ensured she remained primary carer, but by the school as a whole.
The first time he crawled was during breakfast. He took off down the aisle between the tables to a huge round of applause and cheers from the assembled kids. Clearly, he's meant for the stage.
It was a special moment.
As the common room fills up for the evening's DVD I think of Josh and the effect he's had on us. What would the school do if he were taken? I don't mean if he died. It would be awful, but we're all familiar with death by now, and another reality of post-Cull England was that infant mortality was going to soar to… well, to the kind of levels seen in pre-Cull Africa. Death happens, you get over it, you move on.
I mean if he was snatched, spirited away, never to be seen again. It doesn't bear thinking about.
I dwell on this for two reasons.
Most importantly because the sell-by date on the condoms has just expired.
But more immediately, because children like Josh have been disappearing from homes and villages across the South-East for the last year or so. At first only a few, then more and more frequently and, after the incident at High Rocks, more violently. Someone is running an organised kidnapping ring and it's kids they're after. Chances are they'll eventually come for St Mark's.
I'm not a mother yet, I may never be. But these kids are all mine, in a way. And if someone's going to come and try to take them away at gunpoint, I'm going to stop them, or die trying.
Protecting them means leaving the school grounds, taking the fight to our as yet anonymous enemy. I've not left the grounds since I arrived here in a wheelchair, broken and battered after my time with the American Army. I don't want to leave. I have a kind of agoraphobia, I suppose. This is my home, my community, and the thought of leaving terrifies me. What if I inadvertently lead the enemy straight here? What if I have to watch Lee, or any of the others, die? I'm not a soldier, I never wanted to be a soldier, but that's what The Cull made of all of us. I've spent the last two peaceful years trying to pretend that my fighting days were behind me. But I was lying to myself.
I start the DVD then I head upstairs to strip and oil my guns.
Chapter Two
The gun felt weird; a mix of familiarity and fear.
I settled into my position, feeling the early winter cold seeping up through my trousers from the damp carpet on the floor of the front bedroom. My gun-shot legs would ache all day after this, like an arthritic pensioner.
I rested my arms on the window sill of the old terraced house, carefully avoiding the few shards of broken glass still sticking up from the crumbling putty, and nestled the stock of the L115A3 sniper rifle in my shoulder, sighting down the barrel.
I'd taken it down the firing range a couple of weeks before, when I'd realised that a fight was inevitable. It had only taken me an hour or so to master it. My skills had not deserted me. It was the same weight as the L96 I had taken from the sniper who'd used it to put a bullet in my left leg four years earlier, but it had a silencer, a better sight, and it fired a higher calibre round — 8.59mm rather than the L96's 7.62mm. Basically, it made it much easier to hit the target, gave a near 100 % certainty of killing them if I did, and a much greater chance of staying undetected after taking the shot. It felt like an extension of me, but one that I was not sure I was comfortable with, like how I supposed Tariq must feel about his hook.
I couldn't tell you whether it was fear, cold or anticipation that made my hands shake.
The pre-dawn darkness meant I would be invisible to the two men unless they were to turn their binoculars straight at me and, by some chance, pause to study the dark window for a moment. But right now they were pre- occupied with the strangers who'd just turned up on their doorstep unannounced and offered them five captive children. For the right price, natch.
'Do you have a preference?' I asked softly.
'Nah,' replied Tariq, from the window to my right.
'I'll take the one with the beard, then.'
'Okay.'
It had been two years since I'd held a weapon with intent to kill. It hadn't been a conscious decision to avoid guns, but after Salisbury I'd spent so many months recuperating — learning to walk, to use my arms, to talk again — that target practice had been the last thing on my mind. Two years of nobody shooting at us had helped, too. But if I'm honest, I was wary of the things. I knew that my behaviour during and after Iraq had been erratic. I knew that Tariq was concerned about the risks I had taken, and those I might take again.
I shared his concerns.
'Three, two, one…'
I took a deep breath, held it, squeezed the trigger gently, put a bullet in the guard's heart and splashed his innards across a brick wall. He fell without a sound. I saw my dad catch and lower him to the ground. Then he stood and drew his sidearm. Tariq's shot also found its mark, and his target jerked backwards as the top of his head exploded. Jane flinched in surprise and failed to catch him. He crashed into the wall and slid down, staring up at her in reproach.
'Head shot?' I asked as grabbed my heavy pack. 'Flash bastard.'
'Sight's high,' replied Tariq as we got to our feet and picked our way carefully down the rotten, rickety stairs. We left our sniper rifles behind us. They were no use at close quarters, and if all went according to plan they would be collected for us. We pulled the straps of our SA-80s over our heads as we emerged onto the street. As I did so, I realised that my hands weren't shaking any more.
As we ran down the road, the five kids that Dad and Jane had been escorting were throwing away their handcuffs and pulling guns from under their coats. By the time we reached them, the team was ready.
Dad led the way into the compound.
'We're going to go with a variation of the Trojan horse approach that Jane used a couple of years back,' my Dad had said, earlier that night. We had huddled around the feeble flame we'd just kindled in the fireplace of an abandoned farmhouse about a mile outside Thetford as he outlined his strategy.
'I had Rowles and Caroline with me then,' said Matron, as if pointing out the flaw in his plan.
'There are nine of us this time. The odds are better,' he replied, unsure what point she was making.
'You never met Rowles,' I said.
Dad rolled his eyes and continued. 'Jane and I will escort the younger children to the gate. You kids can stay bundled up in your winter coats, so there'll be plenty of places to hide your weapons. You'll be bound with what will look like handcuffs, but in fact…' He threw pairs of handcuffs to each of the twelve and thirteen year-olds we'd selected for this mission. The five children examined them and smiled one by one as they realised they were plastic toy cuffs, easy to pull apart but good enough to fool an unobservant guard in the half light of early morning.
'Sweet,' said one of them — a beanpole boy called Guria who had become de facto leader of the younger group.
'We know they keep two guards at the main gate but if last night was routine, they have no one else on the walls or, as far as we can tell, inside the compound,' Dad went on. 'They are not expecting to be attacked. Anyway, there's plenty of open ground between the gates and the nearest houses, so they'd see a frontal assault coming in plenty of time to sound the alarm.
'Jane and I will approach with the kids in tow and our hands up. They should assume we've come to sell them and let us approach.'
'How do we deal with the guards?' asked Tariq.
'I don't want to get involved in close quarters fighting with the young ones around, so while we keep them talking, you and Lee will have to use the rifles to take them out quickly and quietly. The nearest house will provide a perfect vantage point. 'I couldn't find any booby traps when I recced the area earlier, so you should be fine.'
Tariq and I glanced at each other and nodded. 'No problem,' we said in unison.
'Once the guards are down, you kids take off the cuffs, get out your guns and scatter to the nearest houses. I don't want you inside the compound, because things could get messy, but if we need to make a quick retreat you
