Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

“Move, bitch,” one of the guards snapped, pushing at her. Alex was tempted to fall to the ground and force them to carry her, but it was clear that there would be little point. The handful of prisoners who had been tortured so hard they couldn’t walk were being dragged along the ground by their hair or feet. A pair of alien helicopters flew overhead, the sound of their engines a mocking reminder of everything she’d lost since the day her Eurofighter had been blown out of the sky.

They rounded what looked like a gym and came to a halt in front of the wall. A set of aliens were waiting for them, with a smaller group of humans standing nearby. They looked like collaborators to her, although some of them clearly looked as if they wanted to be somewhere — anywhere — else. She wondered if she’d recognise any of them from the parish council — maybe one of those politicians had betrayed her — but none of them looked familiar. There was no sign of Beresford or any of his inner circle. Perhaps the aliens felt that they’d seen the slaughter in London and didn’t need another lesson in alien ruthlessness.

“Get them against the wall,” one of the humans ordered. The guards obeyed, pushing and shoving at the prisoners to make them move. Two of the badly-beaten prisoners sagged to their knees as soon as they were pushed against the wall, unable to remain standing upright on their own two feet. Alex leaned backwards and relaxed against the wall, feeling oddly calm. The aliens would kill her and that would be the end. No more torture, no more suffering, no more desperate attempts to prevent her treacherous tongue from speaking aloud… it would be the end.

A cold wind blew across the field as the collaborators prepared themselves. Alex was suddenly very aware that the entire country was going to see her naked — somehow, she found herself chuckling at the very thought. She’d once broken up with a boyfriend because he’d wanted a naked picture of her on his mobile phone; absently, she wondered if that ex-boyfriend would be watching as the aliens blew her apart with their handheld cannons. Perhaps her death would inspire him to go out and kill a few aliens… or perhaps it would just terrify him into submission. She did her best to stand upright, despite the increasing pain from her legs and feet. One way or the other, it wouldn’t be long now.

“Here we are,” Coates said. “They don’t normally bother to look inside the lorry…”

Chris braced himself as they reached the alien checkpoint. After the suicide bomber in London, and a handful of copycats from all over Britain, the aliens had installed blast walls and double-fences to prevent any more suicide bombers from getting into their bases before they detonated their bombs. They’d done the papers properly, using MI6’s forgery experts, but if the aliens decided to check the lorries anyway… they would have to fight their way into the base. The plan had been to rescue the prisoners and, ideally, give the aliens a colossal black eye. It would be much harder if they were caught outside the fence.

One of the aliens came stamping up to the cab and Coates passed him the papers. The driver was clearly nervous, although Chris suspected that it wouldn’t be so obvious to an alien. Some suicide bombers in Iraq had given themselves away by being nervous as they neared their target… he glanced at his watch, noting that they only had ten minutes before the executions were scheduled to take place. A delay could ruin the entire plan. Carefully, he allowed his hand to drop down into his rucksack, where he’d concealed the grenades. If they had to fight their way into the camp…

The alien stepped back and waved one clawed hand. Coates wasted no time in gunning the engine and sending them around the blast walls, while the other lorries were checked and then waved into the base. Chris was almost disappointed at how easy it had been, although there was some evidence that this base wasn’t really important to the aliens. They’d only flown a handful of their shuttles down to the base, while they kept flying them to the garrisons outside London and the base they’d built on the remains of Ten Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. He remembered, briefly, the friends he’d lost in the brief, but violent last stand of the Household Division. They’d be watching from the next world as he led a mixed group of soldiers and marines against the alien base.

According to a handful of collaborators who had maintained ties to the resistance, the aliens had two main detention camps and a number of buildings that served as their local headquarters. Several prisoners had been taken into those buildings and never seen again, although there was no clear explanation as to what had happened to them. The aliens, it seemed, maintained a human interrogation team who interrogated prisoners of particular interest to the aliens. At least one of the interrogators had been identified as a particularly unpleasant sadist and murderer who had been serving thirty years in jail when the aliens had arrived. Chris gritted his teeth at the thought of anyone he knew falling into their hands.

History hadn’t been a particular interest of his before the invasion, but he’d been reading about the French Resistance to Hitler. The French Resistance had been rather more low-key than it had claimed particularly after VE Day when the membership of the resistance skyrocketed, but it had had some successes. But it had also had problems with Frenchmen who threw themselves completely into serving the Nazis, as had the Russians and several other occupied countries. The locals had sometimes been worse than their foreign masters, having little or no regard for their own country. Some of the stories had been sickening. People had betrayed their fellows for food, drink, or merely some shelter in a world gone insane, but others had used it as a chance to play out their fantasies.

“Here we are,” Coates said, nervously. The three lorries had parked near one of the human buildings. “How long do you want me to wait here?”

“I suggest you get out to the gate once the shooting starts,” Chris said. Coates hadn’t realised it, but the moment the aliens realised that they were under attack, they’d blast every human vehicle moving near the base. The only thing preventing them from dropping KEWs on their heads would be the presence of hundreds of their own people. “You know where to go to link up with our people.”

He scrambled down from the cap and rapped on the back of the lorry. The first bunch of soldiers, wearing the brown uniforms that the aliens issued to their collaborators, opened the doors and jumped down, weapons in hand. If they were lucky, the aliens would start gunning down their collaborators, convinced that they had turned on them. And even if they didn’t, they’d be confused.

“Come on,” he said. The aliens didn’t allow their collaborators firearms. They’d know something was wrong the moment they saw the SA80s and antitank weapons. “Let’s go.”

The problem with trying to make a defiant impression as one was waiting to be shot, Alex decided with a flash of humour, was that it took time for the enemy to get around to actually shooting. Their collaborators were busy making speeches, cursing the bitter-enders who felt that they had to carry on the fight even though it was hopeless. After the first speech, a second had begun, followed rapidly by a third. The viewing public would be getting very bored by now, Alex told herself, wondering if there was something she could do to speed up the affair. It was growing colder and she was hardly dressed for the weather.

She caught sight of a group of aliens marching towards them, carrying their weapons at the ready. There was already one group of armed aliens with the collaborators, but perhaps the aliens had decided they needed two groups — or maybe three. What sort of threat did they think they were facing? They seemed almost laughably paranoid about their prisoners, even though they were tied and suffering the effects of torture.