Robert Parker - Snow Storm

This time it sounded like the engine was slowing, killed at the last minute, before the screech of tyres on the tarmac, as presumably the plane touched down. It couldn’t be good news at any rate, unless this was the cavalry being flown in to rescue him, or better still, some dozy lawnmower owner who’d got lost and had actually killed the engine before executing a handbrake turn or a doughnut. He’d probably be happy with that, especially if it distracted his captors and gave him the chance to bolt.

He tried to get the girls attention but they were still too busy talking at each other. There was a lot of background noise but he didn’t fancy shouting. Funny how a hostage situation felt somehow like being back at school. One thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be getting Stockholm Syndrome for these boys anytime soon. That’s if they let him live for any length of time.

He couldn’t be sure of the girls though. They might be well far along with the whole assimilation into the cult thing. There must be a way out of here. He couldn’t get the cable ties undone himself, he knew that. But it wasn’t like they were actual hand cuffs, they should be easy enough with the right thing, something sharp or flammable. He twisted his wrists as he thought about it, trying to find any give where he knew there was none. He could try scraping them on the pallet, but that wouldn’t work in a short enough time, i.e. before they decided to dispose of him.

Eventually he managed to get their attention by whistling. The high pitch cut through both the noise from outside and their whispered scheming.

“What do you want? Water?” Ania asked as she made her way across the room in a quiet way. Maybe there were cameras in here he thought.

“Is there any way you can let me loose?” he asked her. Better to die trying than face the end having done nothing and wondering what might have been.

She shook her head slowly.

“You have nothing sharp?” he asked slowly, like a tourist who thinks his lack of language skills can be rendered unimportant by close adherence to the principles of vocal projection. “Nothing that burns?”

Again she shook her head. Of course, what was he expecting her to say? ‘Oh here have this sulphuric acid/laser beam/plasma cutter we forgot about’?

“What about your friends?” he asked, clutching at straws in a way only the doomed knew how.

“They have nothing,” she replied, looking at the floor before looking back at him with concerned eyes and touching the side of his face with an icy hand that somehow, despite all odds, felt warm.

He tried rubbing the cable tie on the upright bar of the pallet he sat on again, frantically this time, but nothing. He kept going until the sting in his wrists grew too much and he could feel the warm trickle of blood drizzling down his hand.

There must be a way. He would not die here. He wouldn’t allow it. It was too stupid a way to go. Held by a bunch of nutters on the basis that you decide to play a practical joke, one that wasn’t even on them really. The joke was more just one between him, Davie and Colin, pretending to be master surveillance experts and professional saboteurs. Well, the punch line had gone down like a lead balloon and now no one was laughing.

He heard footsteps approaching and the door was thrust open, flooding the inside of the shed with light, practically blinding him and his fellow inmates. The girls huddled together in the corner as two of the Georgians made their way purposefully towards them.

They seemed to huddle and scatter in turn, like sheep, the last five or so in a field, difficult to move or pin down or keep together in any kind of cohesive group but tough to separate in order to pick them off one by one. In this case they didn’t have to as one of the girls was on the ground convulsing suddenly, before lying still. The others focussed on her like a car crash.

It was then he saw the wires connecting the girl’s body with something in the toothless, bald one’s hand. It was then he couldn’t help himself.

“Leave them alone you bastards!” He shouted quite unintentionally, wanting to do anything he could to protect the hostage girl on the ground, so far from home and away from those who loved her.

He was now the target but wouldn’t be for long. The giant made his way towards Andy, a smile spreading across his gaping black hole of a mouth.

“Fuck you,” Andy spluttered. The anger was in charge now. “You can’t go one on one and you can’t even move a lassie without using a tazer, fucking useless meat head arsehole.”

The man towered above, looking down on him, moving his neck from side to side and swivelling his shoulders clearly relishing this, ready for the sensory release of knocking seven bells out of this mouthy teenager.

When he moved it was instant, unthinking and terrifying.

Andy braced as best he could for the blows that were coming, at least the girls would take less. At least he’d done something good. At least he’d done something.

When enough time lapsed and nothing happened he opened his eyes to see that gurning face level with his, breathing its foul stench in his. The giant tapped his face gently with a sweaty palm before laughing and walking away to continue with the task in hand.

Then, he was alone. The plane had departed with its cargo, which had been replaced in his prison by actual cargo in wooden boxes.

He felt cold and he hoped the end would come soon. The dread that filled his mind left him wondering why they’d kept him alive. He knew it couldn’t be good.

Victor lay in his cell waiting. He’d done waiting, in ways lesser men could not hope to imagine. This was nothing, a blip on an otherwise steadily up-sweeping curve towards his ultimate destiny. Some would say his ambitions were unjust but he’d entered a way of life all those years ago in the frozen wastes, a covenant that required honouring. Some of his brethren had parted ways with the true path, sold out as they liked to say here. They had positions of authority, titles and responsibilities, all of which served to uphold the values of an unjust society, a society that was corrupt, rotten to the core and had forgotten its own.

The communists had come to power promising to free those imprisoned by indentured servitude, only to trap them in their own version of the daily grind, less time spent in the duties of serfdom, more in the bread queue.

They had called on the brotherhood for help in their war, only to betray them when it mattered and send them back from where they’d taken them to rot once more. Later they had tried to extinguish them with the help of those with ambitions beyond bars and so the time they called the bitch wars had begun.

He and his kind had survived all of this but now they had been brought to the brink of extinction. Now they were a dying breed and all because of their own failings; their lust for individual power and the trappings of success and above all some form of acceptance by the very thing that had abandoned them in the beginning, this thing they called society, their need to be treated like vulgar celebrities, nothing more than performing bears, by the very people they had sworn to despise.

He had done waiting and could wait some more, forever if need be. He would live on through his sons and the empire he’d created.

He laughed at himself and his train of thought. Such thoughts of negativity were pointless. Plans were in motion. All would be well.

Burke was alone in his office at last. It had been a busy day and it wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down. He placed his feet up on the desk and leaned back in his chair letting the blood run towards his head, feeling his eyes bulge before sitting back up when he felt suitably distracted. He’d read somewhere that people did this for inspiration, hanging upside down with gravity boots to get the extra oxygen into the grey matter. He could see the reasoning, liked the theory even, but couldn’t get over the fact that they recommended the same thing for baldness. If they’d found a genuine cure for that, he decided, it would have been well documented. Nonetheless, the sensation made him feel something other than tired and bedraggled, which was refreshing in itself.