Chapter 14: 14: Into the Fire

Twenty long, tense minutes passed. Twenty minutes of screams, boots pounding tarmac, minor additional explosions, and more screams. Section 13 was getting torn apart and listening to it in the dark of the Nissen hut was terrifying.

Whatever I might have thought about the organisation, being in the middle of what sounded like a massacre was awful. There were screams of people in pain and dying. I heard a battle hardened soldier crying out for his mother with his dying breath. Another voice screamed that she was on fire and begged for help. The way her pleas abruptly stopped suggested that help never came.

After a few minutes, I heard the occasional gunshot. Some of the soldiers had found weapons, despite the destruction of the armoury. Voices shouted commands over the roar of the fires that had erupted. The Nissen hut that I was in stood between two others, so its windows faced theirs. Reflections of the fires burning nearby flickered across the panes. Twisted shadows raced across the drill yard. Other shadows leapt through the fire-lit night and savagely bore down on the soldiers, who didn’t get back up.

More gunshots. More screams.

The soldier with his pistol trained on me kept checking his watch.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered.

Later I’d call this group the ‘Monster Liberation Front’ – or MLF for short. It was yet another group that I’d somehow managed to stumble across. In the past six hours I’d come into contact with three separate factions in what Wilson had called ‘The Invisible War.’ Firstly there was Victoria Pryce and her contingent, which seemed intent on capturing and studying supernatural creatures. Then there was Section 13 whose sole purpose was exterminating supernatural creatures no matter what the cost.

And now there was this murderous group, busy laying bloody waste to Section 13.

My relatively straightforward life of fixing cars, hanging out with my friends and hoping my powers were some hormonal phase seemed a long way away.

Eventually the door opened again and Dr Pierce, now back in her ‘human’ form, entered.

“Let’s go. Operation Mayhem worked.”

“We’ve got the files?”

“And done enough damage to keep Section 13 recovering for months,” she confirmed.

“Where’s Brooks?”

“He didn’t make it.”

“The kid?” the soldier said, waving his pistol at me.

“Not in our mission parameters, nothing to do with us,” she glanced at me on her way out, “Good luck kid.”

With that, the pair of them ran back out into the smoke-filled night.

Outside, a van revved up. Over the crackling fires, I heard the front gates being rammed and more gunshots.

I’d given up trying to make any sense of anything by this point. I was only sure of one thing.

Right, to hell with this. It’s time to get out of Dodge, and fast.

I didn’t care what was going on anymore. Or who was fighting who, or why. All I cared about was getting out of here. Major Wilson, if he was still alive, could go whistle. They all could. There was enough chaos and bloodshed out there for me to be able to slip away unnoticed, at least for the time being. The only people who knew I had something weird about me had just blown up and torn apart a military base and smashed their way through the front gates in a van. They wouldn’t be telling anyone my secrets.

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I could get out of here and not look back. With any luck, Major Wilson would assume I’d been killed in all the chaos.

I cautiously opened the door and peered outside.

Smoke filled the square, billowing out from the fires. The armoury and the office block were ablaze. People poured out of the latter and onto the drill yard, running for cover and trying to find a safe spot. Soldiers ran here and there, but most of them didn’t have weapons. Tactically, taking out the armoury had been a smart move. With nothing to shoot with apart from some pistols stowed here and there, the soldiers had been easy targets for the MLF.

This had been a coordinated attack that had taken years of patience, infiltration and preparation. A one-off strike at the heart of Section 13 that would leave them in complete disarray for months.

I stepped out of the hut.

The smoke made my eyes water and causing me to cough. An eerie, low wind was blowing around the base. It kept the thick smoke low, causing it to obscure everything. The smoke, pushed around by the unnatural breeze, was so thick that I almost tripped over a body as I left the hut.

A soldier lying on the floor, face up, eyes blank. His throat was sliced into ribbons, blood congealing underneath his head.

With a shock, I recognised the older soldier that had been with me in the back of the Transit van. The one everyone had been joking with less than two hours earlier.

I backed away in horror.

I’d never seen a dead body before, not like this at any rate. Brutally murdered. A bloody victim.

It doesn’t matter how many dead bodies you see on television or computer games. Nothing prepares you for the awful reality of seeing what was once a person torn apart and lying there, never to move again.

I recoiled, turned away, focussed on not throwing up.

I peered through the smoke, dry heaving and coughing simultaneously.

The three-metre high fence stood just behind the three Nissen huts. I was pumped up, adrenaline and fear coursing through my body. I was sure I could make the jump with enough of a run at it, but that meant going into the drill yard. One jump to get on top of the hut’s roof, another bigger jump to take me all the way over the fence and onto the other side. There was no other choice.

I headed to where the smoke was thickest, covering my mouth with the sweater, eyes watering hard. As I stepped into the yard, a familiar figure appeared. His face was blackened with soot, his eyes filled with fury. With the fire burning behind him and his streaked face and bloodshot eyes, Major Wilson looked as demonic as anything I’d seen yet.

Worse than that, he had an automatic rifle pointed directly at me.

I froze, staring down the black muzzle of his weapon.

All it would take was one pull of the trigger and I’d be riddled with bullets.

Wilson’s eyes blazed with rage.

In case you were wondering?

It was around this point I lost track of how many times I’d thought ‘I’m only sixteen, that’s way too young to die!’

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