Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Shaking his head, he remembered the hills he’d once climbed as a younger man… and wondered, bitterly, if he would ever see them again.

London

United Kingdom, Day 15

“They’re doing it on purpose,” Aashif proclaimed, loudly. The small gathering of young men around him murmured in agreement. “They are showing no respect for our religion at all!”

Seated halfway across the room, with the women and young children, Fatima could still hear him voicing his anger. Aashif was twenty-one years old, born to a family and community that was largely excluded from the mainstream population. A stronger person might have broken down the barriers or carved out a career for themselves, but Aashif — like so many others — had chosen to fall back into his community and wrap himself in a tissue of imaginary grievances. She’d heard it all before; the world was against him, no one liked or trusted him because of his religion, and he had rights . It never seemed to have occurred to him that his failures were a result of his personality, or that he could have made something of himself if he tried. He found it so much easier to blame others for his failings.

She rolled her eyes. Men like Aashif were a persistent pain in the posterior. Deprived of the sort of wealth and power they thought the world owed them by rights, they turned upon the women in their lives. Aashif’s sister was terrified to talk to strangers for fear that her brother would hear of it and beat her; his mother was a pale shadow of a woman, scared of the boy she’d brought into the world. Only his grandfather had ever been able to exercise any kind of restraint on the young man, and he’d passed away two years ago. She listened to his bragging and shuddered, inwardly. There was a new conviction in his voice that had been missing several months ago.

Not that she could really blame him. The aliens had taken over every building large enough to hold their oversized forms — and that included a number of London’s mosques. Even the police had been reluctant to just barge into the mosques, fearing the effect such provocative acts would have on the Muslim community. But the aliens had just taken the buildings and evicted everyone who complained. They’d done the same to a number of churches, yet they seemed to have targeted mosques deliberately. Given the rumours coming from the Middle East — and spread over the internet, along with far too much outright nonsense — it seemed as though they were attacking Islam directly. From what she’d seen herself, Fatima suspected that the aliens simply didn’t care. Humans were their property now — and property didn’t get a vote, or the right to complain.

“We’re going to do something about it,” Aashif continued. Bragging about his connections to the underground Jihad movement wasn’t new either, but she’d always known that he was just a poser, someone who would probably faint dead away at the thought of being asked to blow himself and a great many innocent civilians up. There were too many girls out there who were prepared to allow such claims to overpower their common sense. “I’m going to see to it personally.”

Unseen, Fatima rolled her eyes. Of course he would — and while he was at it, he’d create the perfect Islamic State… never mind that such a state only existed in the deluded rants sprouted by preachers with nothing better to do. There were times when she was tempted to believe that suicide bombers were God’s way of weeding out the unworthy from the Muslim community. The young fools who died for a dream rarely got to spread their seed.

She shook her head, and then helped her stepmother and the rest of the girls clear away the dishes and wash up. They knew their place, all right — and the fact that she was a doctor cut no ice with the men. Men like Aashif wanted women to stay in their place. It was the only way they could convince themselves that they were in charge. She smiled, in a moment of dark humour. The world could hardly be worse if women were in charge.

Sergeant Abdul Al-Hasid was feeling dirty. Not the feeling he’d had when he’d first discovered pornographic magazines, despite knowing that his God-fearing father would thrash him to within an inch of his life if he’d been caught looking at naked sluts. And not the feeling he’d had when Salma — his first girlfriend — had allowed him to touch her bare breast. It was the feeling of knowing that he was doing something utterly wrong — and the fact that the people he was helping to do it wanted him to help them didn’t make him feel any better. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he would be called upon to answer to God and that no answer he could give, nothing he could offer in his own defence, would help his case.

He’d grown up in a strictly Islamic environment — so of course he’d rebelled. School hadn’t given him much in the way of qualifications, so the Army had seemed a logical choice. And it had been the making of him. He’d knuckled down at it and worked hard for the first time in his life, deploying to Iraq and then Afghanistan with the Green Jackets. Along the way, he’d seen just what living under Islamic Law really meant — the only people who wanted Taliban-style rule were the people who had never had to live under it. He’d seen enough to convince him that the rulers, for all their dedication to making others follow the rules, enjoyed breaking them every chance they got. Walking through a Taliban-run whorehouse had been enough to convince him that they had to be stopped. They’d killed the girls rather than risk having them freed by the British Army.

After the aliens had invaded, he’d volunteered to return to London with several other Londoners. They’d known that it would be dangerous — no one could describe the military as a safe job in the best of times — but he’d known people who might be able to help them fight the aliens. Wearing civilian clothes, he’d wandered through the communities with his ears wide open, listening carefully. Finding the would-be suicide bombers had been depressingly easy. Like so many others, they had bad intentions — and no contacts with the underground world. Obtaining explosives on the black market wasn’t exactly easy. He’d lost count of how many idiots seeking a quick death had tried to buy weapons and explosives off police informers.

He glanced around the garage, rolling his eyes. Like many other business in the area, as much of the business as possible was done off the books — just to keep the taxman from taking an undue interest in their profits. He found it hard to blame the struggling small businessmen for trying to keep their profits for themselves, but the garage had clearly been involved in preparing stolen cars to be released back onto the market. The tools to rig up a small van with enough explosive to really ruin someone’s day had been easy to find. God alone knew what had happened to the owner and his family. They hadn’t returned to work in the days since the invasion.

A tap at the door brought him to full alertness. He half-drew his pistol with one hand as he padded over to the door and peered through the one-way glass that the previous owner had installed. The young fool was standing there, waiting for him. Abdul rolled his eyes, silently grateful that he wouldn’t have to rely on such fools forever, knowing that the man wouldn’t have bothered to walk in a manner that might deter a shadow. His confidence that God would protect him was grossly misplaced. In Abdul’s experience, God helped those who helped themselves — although He probably wouldn’t want to help suicide bombers. Part of him wanted to tell the young fool to go home and enjoy the rest of his life, but there was no real alternative. They had to remind the aliens that they existed before the aliens broke their determination to resist.