Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Chris unhooked a grenade from his belt and motioned for the soldiers to get ready. A second later, he hurled it down the stairs, where it exploded. He followed it down, weapon ready to deal with anyone lying in ambush, only to see nothing more than scorched walls, illuminated by flickering light bulbs. They moved down and started to check each of the small rooms one by one. Most were empty, but a couple held wounded prisoners and one held a man who’d somehow managed to bite though his own wrists and commit suicide. Judging from the condition of his body, he’d been tortured so badly that he’d thought that he was on the verge of breaking and decided to silence himself permanently. Chris would have liked to take his body out of the alien base and bury it somewhere properly, but there wasn’t time. The aliens would be responding, even now, to the attack on their territory. How long would it take them to get reinforcements to be base, or decide to cut their losses and drop KEWs on their heads? The only thing keeping them from doing that was the aliens holding their building on the surface.

The final set of doors were locked, but Chris slapped an explosive pack against the doors and jumped back, allowing the explosive pack to blow the door off its hinges. Inside, there were five men, cowering under the table. Chris recognised two of them as people the aliens had recruited to serve as interrogators, which probably meant that they were all interrogators. He nodded to his men, who seized the interrogators, searched them roughly, and then bundled them back towards the stairwell. They’d be taken back to the resistance base, interrogated themselves, and then executed. After seeing what they’d done to the prisoners, he had no room left in him for mercy.

A shuffling sound further down the corridor caught his attention and he unhooked his torch from his belt, pointing the beam of light into the darkness. Dark eyes stared back at him and he almost fired reflexively, before realising that the alien was unarmed. How could it even be in the underground complex? Chris wasn’t claustrophobic, but he’d had to crawl through all kinds of tunnels at Catterick and the alien had to find the human tunnels proportionally worse than he’d found the drains he’d had to explore. It struck him a moment later that the alien had to be one of their intelligence officers. Who else would want to be so close to the interrogation rooms?

He pointed his gun at the alien’s head and glared at him. “Can you understand me?”

The alien seemed to quiver, and then nodded. “You’re coming with us,” Chris said. “We won’t hurt you as long as you behave yourself, understand?”

There was a pause, and then the alien nodded again. A student of humanity, perhaps? Human body language had to be alien to the Leathernecks, just as their own body language was almost unreadable to humanity. He looked at the alien’s clawed hands and winced, inwardly. The last thing he wanted was the alien behind him with those natural weapons. He’d heard stories that suggested that the alien claws could cut through flesh and bone.

He jerked the gun upwards and the aliens shuffled to his feet. Chris stepped to one side and motioned for her to move towards the stairs and he obeyed, slowly. He couldn’t tell if the alien was moving slowly because he was claustrophobic or because he was hoping that its fellows would come to the rescue. Chris poked the alien impatiently in the rear end and the alien jerked, before moving a little faster. His massive bulk blocked half the corridor.

“Get him to the surface and out of the base,” Chris ordered, before peering through the remaining tunnels. The lighting was failing, suggesting that the base’s emergency generator had been damaged in the fighting. Or maybe it was just designed to add to the effect. “We’ll finish searching down here and then get up to join you.”

The remaining rooms were empty, apart from one which had a pair of laptops and several large hard drives piled on one table. They were definitely human manufacture, which seemed rather odd — even though the aliens had been noted as having an interest in human computers and rounding up human experts they could put to work somewhere outside Britain. He picked them up anyway, remembering their intelligence sweeps through Taliban hideouts back before the invasion, where they’d found all kinds of interesting information — and porn — on their software. The intelligence staff would study the laptops and determine if the interrogators had stored anything useful on their systems. Who knew? There might be videos of their interrogation sessions that could be played at their trial.

He glanced into the final room and blinked in surprise. The interrogators had turned what had once been a small kitchen into a chamber of horrors. A small pile of tools lay beside a hospital table, which was stained with blood and shit and piss. He recoiled, despite himself, wondering how anyone could get their kicks by torturing helpless victims. A cigarette lighter, a welding torch, a dental knife, a rattan cane, a pair of wire cutters… he could see how they’d used each and every one of them to break their victims. He felt sick, fighting down the urge to go find the interrogators and put a bullet through their brains. Even the Taliban hadn’t been so unpleasant to their captives.

A glance in a cupboard revealed a small fortune’s worth of cannabis and heroin, as well as some luxury foodstuffs that had been unavailable since the invasion. He couldn’t tell if the interrogators had used them for themselves or tormented their captives with them, although he could see how they might addict someone to a drug and then leave the withdrawal symptoms as yet another form of torture. One compartment held booze, mainly the muck that various farmers were trying to brew in the absence of government officials to tell them not to make their own. Some of the bottles, however, were old enough to impress even the hardened officers in the mess. Chris couldn’t imagine what the torturers had done with the booze.

“Splash the fuel around here and let’s go,” he ordered, harshly. He didn’t quite recognise his own voice. Outside the room, back in the darkened tunnels, he could see just how easily the torturers could break their victims. They’d be able to convince them that the tunnels went on forever, that there was no hope of escape… the bastards must have been laughing as they enjoyed making people suffer. Perhaps they hadn’t even produced results.

He unhooked a small bottle from his belt and splashed the contents around as they headed back to the stairs. The compound had been devised by chemists — it was a distant relative of napalm — but they’d never been allowed to use it in action. They’d followed the ROEs carefully when the world had made sense, yet they no longer mattered now. He pulled a small detonator from his belt as they reached the top of the stairs and tossed it down the shaft. It produced a spark which ignited the liquid, sending flames roaring through the underground complex. The torture chamber, the supplies the torturers had hoarded and the evidence of their grizzly task went up in flames. By the time it burned itself out, it would have incinerated everything, leaving the aliens nothing, but ashes.

“Get the prisoners out to the RV point,” he ordered, as he headed back out into the open. The sound of shooting grew louder from the direction of the alien strongpoint. They were merely keeping the aliens pinned down, rather than trying to kill them — and invite the aliens to bombard the base from orbit. “Have we emptied the wire?”

The aliens had established two detention cages, one male, one female. They’d cut through the wire once they’d driven the aliens back from the execution grounds, but several of the prisoners were too terrified to move. Others had started streaming out as soon as the wire had been cut, heading out to the countryside and hopefully away from the aliens. Chris had detailed men to round up the prisoners and take them to resistance hideouts, but if any of the prisoners wanted to go their own way, that was fine with him. The further they were spread over the countryside, the harder it would be for the aliens to round them all up again. He did hope that they were smart enough not to go home. The aliens and their collaborators would presumably have lists of who had escaped and where their families lived, assuming they has families.