Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

“So this is your job, huh?” I asked as I worked. “You look after the king?”

“Yeah. Ow!”

“Big baby.”

The bullet had gone clean through him, just missing a kidney, but I couldn’t be sure whether his guts were punctured or not. I thought they probably were, and if so he’d need proper surgery sooner rather than later or there’d be a great risk of infection. In the meantime I did the best I could. I sterilised the wound, stitched him up, slapped a dressing over it and gave him a huge dose of painkillers.

“I train him, keep him safe,” explained my patient. “I don’t get out much. They only let me come to the school to get you because I begged and it seemed like a milk run. If the perimeter is ever breached, I’m to get him to a safe house we’ve set up about ten miles away. He’s my only priority.”

“But shouldn’t he have, like, a whole team of men guarding him?”

“Just me. That’s the best way. Keep it low profile, don’t draw attention to ourselves. Chances are that whoever is attacking us doesn’t even know he exists. We’ve not exactly gone public with him yet. He’s not ready.”

“He seemed to have things well in hand a moment ago.”

“Jesus, Jane,” he said, exasperated. “He’s fourteen, all right? Cut him some slack. You know what teenagers are like.”

“Of course I do. I run a school, remember.”

“He’s all right, he’s a good kid.”

“As long as he doesn’t expect me to curtsey, I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”

Sanders and I grabbed uniforms from the cupboard and quickly changed into combats. My uniform was ridiculously oversized, and the only way I could get the boots to fit me was to wear four pairs of socks, but at least it was better than my party dress and heels. All the time we could hear the sounds of battle outside, steadily getting closer. There were explosions, constant gunfire, the rumbling of tanks and, just as we finished getting ready, the roar of a fighter jet swooping low overhead, and the whooshing sound of a missile being released. Sanders was agog.

“F-16?” he said, incredulously. “We really have to go.”

At that moment the door to the king’s room opened and he stepped out. He was dressed head to toe in black and his face was smeared with boot polish. He handed the tin to Sanders and as we blacked up, he interrogated us.

“Attackers?”

“Americans,” I answered. “Trained soldiers, I think.”

“And you are?” His air of authority was impressive, but I thought it was an act. I’d seen a fifteen-year-old boy really take control, and there was a quality of certainty that Lee possessed that the king lacked. He was trying hard, though, I gave him that. And it must have been difficult for him to try and regain any dignity in front of me after what I’d just witnessed.

“Jane Crowther, I run a boys’ school, Your Majesty.”

“She’s with me, Jack,” said Sanders, passing the boot polish to me and checking his SA80.

“Good enough for me, and please call me Jack, Miss Crowther,” said the boy, drawing his sidearm. “Shall we go?”

“Both of you follow me,” said Sanders. “Stay low, we keep to the shadows, we don’t engage the enemy unless forced to. We make straight for the exfil and leave. Is that clear?”

The king and I both nodded. (No, I needed to stop thinking of him as the king. It was ridiculous and it made me think of Elvis. I would follow Sanders’ example and call him Jack.)

“All right then,” said Sanders. “Come on.”

Without another word, we ran out into a battlefield.

I ALWAYS SEEM to be running away from fights.

The last time I was in a proper pitched battle — on the day St Mark’s was blown sky-high — I grabbed a gun and ran like hell. In my defence, I was going to locate the girls who were in my care, and we did come back later and save the day. But my experience of being in a proper battle was of running as fast as I possibly could in the opposite direction. As we ran out of the barracks I was reminded of why that had seemed such a good idea last time.

The two men guarding the door were still there, and we all stood for a moment, getting our bearings and identifying where the heaviest fighting seemed to be.

The night sky was bright with orange flames and the blinding flashes of explosions. The noise was deafening, like a hundred fireworks displays going off at once all around us. The fighting, which had begun at the main gate, had moved quickly, and I could see a group of British soldiers using the buildings in front of us as cover. They were firing around the corners at the attacking forces.

One man readied a fearsome looking missile launcher, which he hoisted on his shoulder, and then he ran out between the buildings, straight into the line of fire. He knelt down and took careful aim at what I presumed must be a tank. It was an act of such bravery and madness that I stood riveted to the spot, trying to understand what would make someone risk their lives so foolishly. The only answer was training and necessity. It was the kind of thing that would be unthinkable in a skirmish, but in the heat of war it was almost commonplace. This was true soldiering. It was awe inspiring, actually. And doomed.

A swarm of bullets thudded into the soldier, and he toppled backwards, arms flailing. The rocket launcher flipped over his fragmenting head, still held in his right hand, until it was pointed straight at us. Then his dying fingers twitched and the rocket screamed free of its housing.

Someone must have shouted for us to run. We scattered and kept moving. Sanders, Jack and I ran one way; the two squaddies ran the other. They drew the short straw. The rocket slammed into the far corner of the barracks, hitting an oil tank used for heating. I was much closer to this explosion than I had been to the one at the main gate and it was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. I lost consciousness in mid-air.

WHEN I CAME to, I was lying on a hard metal surface, being bounced up and down. My head felt like someone had filled it with nails, and every bone in my body ached.

“Where…” I started to say, but my voice was drowned out by the sounds of a revving engine and a machine gun. I looked up and saw that I was in the back of a jeep. Next to me crouched Jack, SA80 at his shoulder, firing out the back at a similar vehicle which was pursuing us. The enemy jeep had a white star painted on its bonnet, and a bloody great machine gun mounted above the driver’s cab. A soldier was standing in the back, firing at us as we drove far too fast along a muddy track on Salisbury Plain.

I was about to reach for my gun and join the fight when our tyres exploded. The jeep lurched to one side then another as the driver — Sanders? — struggled to keep control. But it was hopeless. The jeep swayed from side to side with increasing velocity, then we hit a rock in the road and we rolled and spun. Everything around me whirled and crashed as I was flung up and down, smashing every part of me into the four sides of the jeep’s cab as the vehicle tumbled down a slope. We were still falling when my head met Jack’s with an enormous crack.

I slipped into the darkness again.

THE NEXT TIME I woke I felt like I’d never move again. My head was beyond painful. I couldn’t focus my eyes, which were as full of blood as my mouth and ears. I was lying on my face in thick wet mud.

It was like that moment when you get home from the pub, drunk. Your head hits the pillow and you realise that even though you’re lying down, your senses think you’re still moving and you feel the first inklings of the nausea and awfulness that’s going to take up the next day or so of your pathetic drink-sodden excuse for a life. The only sense that was working properly was my sense of smell. And all I could smell was petrol and blood.