Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

“I told him that, Dad, but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe he wants to adopt me.”

“I already have a son, Sergeant Keegan,” replied Blythe. “One more than you, in a few minutes.”

“If you touch one hair…”

“Soldier,” barked Blythe.

The nearest of his troops yelled “Sir!” in reponse.

“If Sergeant Keegan utters another threat you will shoot him dead.”

“Sir, yes, Sir!” The soldier raised his rifle and stepped forward, keeping the muzzle a few inches from my dad’s head. Blythe glanced at the soldier and said witheringly: “Not there, you’ll cover me in brains. Stand behind him.”

“Sir, yes, Sir!”

I looked into Dad’s eyes and I could see him willing me to be strong and calm. I could also see his panic. I smiled at him.

“Lee, you surprise me, you really do,” said the general, turning his attention back to me. “I thought you were going to be the answer to my prayers. Instead you kill two of my men in what I can only call very creative ways, and you almost manage to make it three. I’m impressed.”

The look on Dad’s face was a picture; a mixture of horror, disbelief and pride. He mouthed ‘really?’ and I nodded, matter of fact.

“I don’t like being bullied, General,” I said.

“I can tell. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to tell me where your father’s band of merry men is hiding or I am going to kill you.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway.”

He laughed at that, a rich, warm laugh that contained no humour whatsoever.

“I surely am,” he said. “But I can make it quick or slow, and given how long you lasted on the waterboard I’m thinking you don’t have the stomach for slow.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I considered my options and the general waited for my response, studying my face closely as I did so.

“What constitutes quick?” I asked.

“I like to give people a choice.”

“A choice?”

“Yes. You can be shot, hanged, electrocuted or given a lethal injection. Your call.”

Again I considered. Again he watched me do so.

“Well, I’ve been shot, and I’ve been hanged, and I really don’t like needles, so I reckon I’ll go for the electric chair please.”

As soon as I said it I realised I’d made a mistake — he hadn’t mentioned a chair. Dad noticed too, and his eyes narrowed as he cocked his head at me curiously, trying to work out what was going on.

Blythe, however, missed it.

“All right, the chair it is. It is a classic, after all. But first…”

“They’re in the souk. It’s a courtyard behind a carpet shop with a green sign with red letters on it. I know they’re planning to stay there until tomorrow night. That’s the best I can tell you.”

Blythe nodded, satisfied.

“And why did you give yourself up?” he asked. “They must have told you about me, you must have known what would happen. Did you really think you could rescue your dad single handed? Can you possibly be that naïve?”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I have this thing about walking into the compounds of my enemies and baiting them. It worked once before, I figured why not try it again.”

Blythe stood up and walked over to me, leaning close into my face and studying me.

“I know you’re lying,” he said softly. “You’re not that stupid. And I’m curious, but not that curious. You are a footnote, son, and I don’t have time to waste on you. I’ve got a major operation to stage and this sideshow is holding me up.”

He turned back to face my dad.

“I had intended to torture your boy, make you beg me to stop, break you, force you to tell me everything you knew and then kill him in front of you,” said the general. “But events have moved more quickly than I’d anticipated. I have new orders, and that’s no longer necessary.”

Then he stepped to his left, reached out, and pulled the sheet away with a theatrical flourish to reveal an electric chair.

“So I’m going to skip to the end.”

The sun was half hidden by the horizon now. In a few minutes darkness would fall. The shadow of the electric chair stretched long across the marble. It was a curious thing, home made and jerry rigged. It was an ornate, tall backed ebony chair that probably once sat at the head of a grand dining table. Who knows, it may have been Saddam’s. Thick metal wire had been wrapped around the arms and legs, leading to a plain metal bowl, once intended for eating out of, now pressed into service as the head contact. The four other contacts — two for the feet, two for the hands — were made of gold, some relic of Ba’athist luxury beaten with hammers and flattened into something far less elegant. It made sense, though; gold’s the best conductor there is. Thick straps festooned the framework, ready to secure my body and limbs and ensure that contact was not lost when I thrashed and jerked as the current hit me.

“Please, I beg you, don’t do this,” cried Dad. “He’s my son. Please, God, no.”

I tried to catch Dad’s eye, tell him to stay calm, but it was getting too dark, and anyway it sounded like his eyes would be too full of tears to see clearly. The sound of my father begging for my life was the purest despair I’d ever heard. I wanted so much to tell him everything was all right, but I couldn’t. The truth was, I was probably about to die, and he was going to have to watch it happen.

“Power up the generator,” shouted the general, and the man who’d brought me here emerged from the shadows and stepped outside. A moment later there was the sound of a large engine spluttering into life, faltering momentarily, then finding its rhythm and settling into its work.

“Strap him in.”

I felt strong hands grab me and force me towards the chair. I tried to resist, I screamed my furious defiance, but they were too strong and too many. One of them punched me hard across the face and my senses reeled. Then I was sitting in the chair, and my arms were forced down and strapped in place. My shirt was cut off and my boots removed. Then the straps were fastened across my chest, forehead and legs. My hands and feet rested on solid gold as I felt someone taking an electric shaver to my head, shaving off all my hair and smearing my raw scalp with conducting gel.

The sun was gone now, and twilight was fading fast. I heard someone pull a switch, and arc lights burst into life, flooding the room with cold white brilliance. My father, able to see me again, let out a feral cry of agony and screamed his fury into the echoing dome above us, where it reverberated and rebounded, briefly amplifying his defiance before fading away into hopeless, beaten sobbing.

The general stepped in front of me and said: “Any last words, son?”

“I am not your fucking son.”

“So be it.”

Then he crouched down beside a junction box and pulled a big red lever, releasing the current to fry me alive.

“HE GIVES THEM a choice,” Tariq had said, as we sat on the roof the night before.

“A choice?”

“Of execution.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“No. You can be shot, hung…”

“Hanged.”

“What?”

“Sorry, it’s hanged, not hung.”

“Oh. Your father said hung.”

“Yeah, well. Hanged. I got this scar on my neck when I was hanged. I like to be grammatically correct about the forms of execution I survive. I’m a pedant. Sue me.”

“Okay,” said Tariq, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, you can be shot, hanged, injected, or he’s got this electric chair he’s made.”

“Made?”