Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

“Capitol Hill ain’t there anymore. Nuked.”

“Okay, so New York, LA, Boston, Buttfuck Idaho, I dunno. Since The Cull the world’s been full of tinpot dictators throwing their weight around. I’ve met a couple of them. You’re not like that. I’m looking you in the eye and you’re not insane, and you don’t strike me as power crazy. So why are you still here?”

“I got my orders.”

“From whom? Who can possibly…”

I didn’t get any further because this huge granite man sitting opposite me suddenly moved faster than I’ve ever seen anybody move in my life, pulling a gun out of nowhere and firing a round over my head so close it ruffled my hair.

“Next one goes between your eyes. Understand?”

Fuck, yeah.

“I have no beef with you, boy. Your daddy’s a dead man, but if you tell me what I want to know you can still walk out of here. Hell, I’ll give you a lift back to Ipswich myself. But if you don’t answer my questions now, while I’m still of a mind to be civil, I’ll start asking a lot less nicely. Clear?”

“Crystal.”

I gritted my teeth. This was my last chance to back out of Tariq’s plan. If I said the wrong thing now, I was dead.

“Good. Question one, and make sure I like your answer: two of my men were shot and killed yesterday. Before they were shot they radioed that they had captured a British deserter. Was that you?”

“No,” I replied. “It was Captain Britain.”

He didn’t like that answer.

I HATE BULLIES.

They’re worse than madmen, psychopaths, dictators or power mad religious cultists; at least they all have either an excuse or an objective. Bullies are just cruel to make themselves feel cool.

I was bullied when I started school. Once.

I was six years old and had only just started at St Mark’s prep. The bully in question, Jasper Jason, was a year older than me. He was a snotty-nosed prick with a little coterie of fawning acolytes who laughed at his cruelty. They tortured cats, that sort of thing.

Anyway, one day, who knows why, he decided that I was going to be his victim. He came over to me in the playground, grabbed my Gameboy and started taunting me with it, threatening to break it, promising to make me cry and so on.

I punched him as hard as I could and broke his nose.

I was suspended from school for a week. Dad was at home that summer, and I remember him coming to collect me. I was terrified of his reaction, but when the circumstances were explained to him he just laughed at the teachers. Then he took me out for McDonalds and told me he was proud of me.

Nobody ever bullied me again.

As the hood was pulled over my face, I tried to remember how I felt in that playground.

As the ties were fastened around my wrists and ankles, I tried to find that sense of mocking superiority I felt when I realised that Jason was just an insecure little shit who could only feel good about himself by picking on weaker kids.

As I was laid on the thin wooden board and trussed like a chicken so that the board and I moved as one unit, I recalled the satisfaction of feeling his nose crunch and the realisation that I wasn’t scared of him.

As the towels were laid gently across my hooded face, I drew on all the anger, resentment and hatred I felt for bullies and I projected it on to the men who were about to drown me. How insecure they must be to torture a child. I laughed at them.

As they began to pour the water on to the towels, I felt myself tilt backwards. The liquid dribbled up my nose and I felt the hard pressure of a finger in my solar plexus, testing whether I was timing my breaths to coincide with the dowsings. I felt the purest resolve I had ever felt in my life.

I was stronger than this. I was The Boy Who Was Never Bullied. I knew they weren’t going to kill me, so all I needed to do was be strong. I could do this.

And then I had to exhale, unable to hold my breath for another second.

And then I was drowning, the thick cotton towels moulding themselves to my mouth and nostrils, gagging me, choking me, sealing me in a dark, wet, airless nightmare.

I felt the board tip up, a momentary respite, the towels loosened, I dragged in a ragged gasp of air, and then tilted again, more water, more choking, flooding, drowning in the unstoppable water as it probed every orifice, relentless, drawn by simple gravity, pushing its way inside me.

There was liquid somewhere else, but I couldn’t tell where, my senses were so scrambled. Only later did I realise that I’d wet myself.

And my resolve vanished, my strength disappeared, time elongated and claustrophobic terror took its place. Before I knew I was doing it, I was begging for release, promising to tell them everything they needed to know. Anything to make it stop.

So they did it once more, just to be sure. This time I lost my mind. I may have screamed and begged, I don’t know. But in my head I was with Matron. She was at Groombridge, I was in the gardens outside the room where I was dying, yet we still lay side by side, holding hands with our eyes closed, feeling the Earth turn beneath us, breathing slow, steady meditative breaths as the darkness closed in.

It seemed like a lifetime, but the whole ordeal probably only lasted thirty seconds.

WHEN I REGAINED consciousness I was lying on the floor in a puddle. It was better than being tied to a chair, I supposed.

They had untied me and dumped me on the hard marble floor

I was foetal, with my hands, now untied, near my ankles. I kept my breathing shallow, pretending to still be asleep, and I listened, trying to work out how many of the men who had waterboarded me were still in the room. I heard someone clear their throat, but that was it. Just the one, then.

The question was: where was he looking? I cracked one eye ever so slightly and I saw him standing near a window with his back to me. Either he was a rank amateur, which I doubted, or he had underestimated me.

“Oh yeah,” said the sarcastic voice in my head. “Can’t imagine why he underestimated you. You proved how gnarly you are with all the begging and pissing.”

I forced myself not to think about what I’d just gone through. Banished it to the back of my mind; something to deal with later. There was no lasting physical damage, and a resumption of torture didn’t seem imminent. Any psychological wounds could be cauterised later.

I had things to do.

I slowly moved my right hand to the hem of my left trouser leg and searched along it until I felt a tiny bit of resistance. Then I grasped it with my finger and thumb and pushed the thin metal down, slicing open the bottom of my trousers and slipping the razor blade out and into my palm.

I was not in the dungeon, as I’d assumed. Instead I was in a large empty room, perhaps an antechamber of the ballroom the general was using. It seemed incongruous that somewhere so light and opulent could be used as a place of torture. But with the bag over my head I hadn’t known where I was, so it hadn’t made any difference to me. I supposed the guys here just liked doing their job in the nicest available office.

I decided my best bet was to pick up where I’d left off.

I pretended to jerk awake with a yell. I breathed as hard and fast as I could, widened my eyes in panic, then sat up and scrambled backwards ’til my back was against a wall. I pulled my knees up tight to my chest, buried my face in my lap, and began begging for them not to hurt me any more, rocking slightly as I did so.

The torturer turned away from the window and walked over to me. He crouched down, reached forward and grabbed my chin, forcing my head up, getting right in my face.

“Start at the begin…”

The word lapsed into a strangled gargle, half rasp, half choke. I swiped the blade across his windpipe again, harder. And again, and again, feeling my fingers slip into the slick wet wound as they sliced deeper and deeper into his neck. I had grabbed his head with my left hand, holding him in place, preventing him from tumbling backwards and escaping. By the time he twitched free of my grasp he was unable to cry for help. He clawed across the floor leaving a thick red smear behind him.