Stop the Cavalry: The Dark Legend Dossier, #3

By James Churchill

Britain is divided. War has broken out between the mutant graffe, the humans who support them and those who don't.

In an attempt to advance this war the military command come up with a daring plan to remount an operation from the Second World War. Unfortunately, for Will Morfasson and the other soldiers assigned to take the eighteen bridges of the River Mersey, it didn't work before and it certainly won't work this time.

But as Will fights for his life, fights to die anywhere other than Runcorn, he makes a discovery that changes everything he thought about the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Churchill
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386984238

James Churchill

James Patrick Churchill was born in York, England, but grew up in Greater Manchester. He studied history and archaeology at Bangor University before starting work as a writer and publishing his first book, now called Spawn, in 2012. As well as fiction he writes travel pieces and essays and in his spare time makes videos for the internet.

Book preview

‘Oh I say it’s tough, I have had enough.

Can you stop the cavalry?’

Jonah Lewie- Stop The Cavalry

I

IN THE GHETTO

As told by Dast

FERDINAND WAS DEAD, slain by my own hand at his request. We had both agreed that should either of us become infected then the other should end our suffering. Death was preferable to living as one of those things. Never for a moment did I think that it would happen. Then it did happen. It happened to Ferd and I had to do the deed. I had promised.

I had been sixteen and I was going to be all mature and grown up and come out to my parents. All my friends knew I was gay of course. How could they not when they had frequently seen me kissing other guys? My teachers knew I was gay and the lady who ran the corner shop knew I was gay... It was no secret. Everybody knew I was gay except for my parents. And everybody accepted the fact except for my parents.

Papa had dropped a stone when I told him, losing his shit and becoming like a possessed wild man. He was so infuriated by my sexuality that he insisted I leave the house at once.

I AIN’T LIVIN’ IN THE SAME HOUSE AS SOME NANCY BOY POOFTHA, Papa had cried, going full Blackburn in his accent. He had been brought up in Peshawar and moved to Blackburn during the eighties but when he was angry, as he was when I came out, he descended into a very broad Blackburn accent. Being a devout and traditional Muslim I can very much see why he was upset. He saw it as an affront to his faith and my sexuality must have been a hard thing for him to accept.

Mama meanwhile, being a Hindu, was much more tolerant but even she was disappointed with me. In the end, after some discussion, she agreed with Papa that I should leave the house.

Broken hearted, I made the decision to go somewhere where I wouldn’t be close to them. I got on a bus at Blackburn bus station and got off when I reached Worton, about ten miles north, thinking it would be the perfect place to hide out until I could get back on my feet. They did say, once upon a time, that if you wanted to run away there was no better place to run to than Worton. There you could lose yourself amidst the squalor and the filth and no one would dare come looking for you. 

I found myself sharing a squat with three girls on the west side of town, the worst part, and it wasn’t long before one of them introduced me to her best friend, Ferd. He was a few years older than me but it was love at first sight. Two months later we had moved in together and for three years we were happy, living in our own little paradise, spending our days in bliss and happiness and thinking it would last forever. There was no other lover like him in the world.

That awful night came... The night of the riots... The night the students of Beiderbecke fought back... The night the war began.

It came as a shock to us both to discover that Ferd was infected and we both held each other and wept. At the time there was nothing we could do to save him and I had to carry out my promise. I had to kill Ferd, the man I loved. And that is what I did. After we made love for the last time I took a knife from the bedside table and he held my hands as I plunged it into his bare chest. With tears in our eyes he stroked my cheek and died in my arms. 

FIVE MONTHS LATER

I awoke still sleepy and I rolled over in my sleeping bag. I had been dreaming of Ferd, as I had dreamed of him every night since his death, and as usual it was not a pleasant dream. This time he had been fully transformed and once more I was forced to relive the brutal moment of his death. I closed my eyes again, trying to go back to sleep, but it was now of no use. Mother Nature thought that I had slept enough for the time being and she wanted me up and about.

Eventually, after a few more attempts at sleep, I heaved myself up onto my elbows and looked about the place where I now lived. It was a room in the ruins of a care home on the far west side of town, what was termed the ‘graffe zone,’ and I shared it with six other people.

When the north side of the river (the Mender) became overrun most people had fled southwards but others, like ourselves, ended up trapped on the wrong side of the front lines. Those of us who were left behind banded together into small groups and we survived by whatever means we could. At any moment one of them could burst in through the window and rip us all to pieces. As such we had to be alert and ready to leave at any given moment. Every time we went out of the care home, always in pairs as a minimum, we had to maintain constant vigilance. We had to scavenge what food we could find, often tins of baked beans and old packets of dried fruit, but by this point these supplies were running scarce and there were days when we had no food at all. At night the graffe came and prowled our streets and by day groups of their sympathisers, the more fanatical ones, hunted through the remains for anybody who might be left.

These hunters were the main reason we couldn’t escape to the human zone across the river. The nearest place to cross was in the centre of town and that meant a long journey through the ruins, risking life and limb just to get to safety. The hunters watched all the roads in and out of the west side and there was no way around them. If they caught us they would kill us. We couldn’t even swim the river as it was still as polluted and toxic as it had ever been. The pollutants and the dangerous undercurrents would combine to kill a man in minutes. A few people had tried to make it out to the other side, even attempting to escape into the countryside in some cases, but within hours of setting out the hunters had strung their bodies up on a nearby lamppost and later that same night the graffe would gather to feast on the carcass.

We had no way out and very little hope of long term survival. We were doomed, but we struggled on regardless.

Marie, one of my group mates, had been on watch that night and she was sat in the corner eating from a cold tin of beans. She looked up and smiled at me, half-heartedly.

Pleasant dreams?

No. I grouched, rubbing my eyes. 

Ferd again? I nodded and proceeded to shimmy my way out of the sleeping bag. I was naked but I didn’t care that Marie could see me. She didn’t care that I was naked either. She had seen my naked body enough times to be used to it by now. Besides, there was no room for shame in our situation. We all lived in one room and so it was inevitable that we would see each other in the nude from time to time. Sex was forbidden of course, especially as we had no condoms and the inevitable baby that would eventually result would make things far too difficult in a large number of ways. Not that I would have had sex with Marie anyway. Even if there was another gay in our group I don’t think I would have slept with them so soon after what happened with Ferd. 

Nick didn’t come back last night, Marie said as I was dressing.

Are you sure? I glanced over at his sleeping bag and found it rolled up in the same position it had been in the night before, a state that worried me. 

Yeah... I’m sure... He wasn’t here when I started the watch and he isn’t here now, Marie snapped back.  I hadn’t intended to sound so sarcastic or cruel but I guess that I must have done.

Jazz and I need to go scavenging ... We’ll keep an eye out for anything that might have happened to him.

Don’t bother. If he’s been out this long he isn’t coming back... Marie sniffed and then got to her feet. I’m going up to the roof for some air... If anyone needs me you know where I’ll be... She shuffled to the door, leaving quietly so as not to wake any of the others up.

It was quite obvious why she was upset about Nick. Everyone knew the pair had feelings for one another, it was clear in the way they stared longingly and the way they talked to each other. They were in love but it was a love that they didn’t dare consummate because of their situation. They didn’t want to express their love for fear they might not be able to hold themselves back. They were afraid of the consequences. Had there been a chance to get across the river to the human zone and a way out of the west side there was no doubt that they would have confessed everything and made a break for it... But there wasn’t a way out of the west side. The only way out of the west side was death. So they tore themselves apart by bottling up their desires. It wouldn’t surprise me if Nick hadn’t tried to do a runner in order to escape from his emotions. I still felt it would be best to check for any sign of him however, despite what Marie said about him definitely being dead.

JAZZ WAS NO MORE THAN a kid. He was thirteen years old. His real name wasn’t Jazz, it was Miles Singer, but he called himself Jazz because he thought that calling himself ’Jazz Singer’ was hilarious. Initially I had felt sorry for him but I soon learned there was no need for sympathy as far as he was concerned. Jazz had been living on the streets long before the graffe had even been heard of, since he could walk. He was your typical product of a west side upbringing; tough, street smart and with little in the way of brains. He was stocky and tall for his age, as tall as I am and I’m not exactly short. He boasted a lot too, claiming that he had once slept with ten virgins in a night or fought off five graffe with his bare hands. Nobody believed him. Still, he was always good company whilst we were out scavenging.

As for the way he looked... Well you can’t fault him for that. At thirteen years old Jazz had reached that stage where you end up looking somewhere between a child and an adult; a kind of gangly, screwed up mess with limbs spread out all over the place.

Our residence was towards the north of the district once known as Crest, an area they used to jokingly refer to as Worton’s ghetto. People had spoken of how it was a dangerous place, a no go area, but I had never seen it that way. As is usually the case with such places the myth obscures the reality. People make it out to be worse than it is. Crest was where I had found myself when I first came to Worton and I had been welcomed with open arms. It was where I had met Ferd and where we had lived and made love under the stars. To me it was beautiful.

It had been a warren, a hive of activity where the buildings butted up against each other and in some places merged into one. Everything had been stacked on top of each other until it had become one collected mass of people and buildings. Imagine if you will the Brazilian favela, appearing as a shanty town without law and without order and yet held together by a strong sense of community and comradeship that you mess with at your own peril. It was like that. Crest had its own laws and its own rules and so long as you obeyed them you would be fine. It had its own hierarchy but if you paid those at the top their dues and respected them they respected you and left you alone. It wasn’t an easy life in Crest, it never is in such places, but it suited me perfectly well.

Crest really was dangerous these days. Some of the buildings had either collapsed or been pulled down by hunters and this had caused the warren to become even more complex. The crumbling ruins that remained, those that hadn’t yet collapsed or been pulled down, might have come down upon our heads at any moment. Things weren’t helped by the fact that we had to watch our every move, make sure we weren’t followed and make sure there weren’t any hunters or graffe lurking about. I’ve already told you about that stuff so I won’t repeat myself.

We emerged from the residence into a narrow courtyard, exiting over the ruins of what had once been an archway and onto a short boulevard. Here there had been a few ugly little shops and nail salons but now these were just shells.

Where d’you want to check today? Jazz asked me. His voice had not yet fully broken and that morning it was on the low side and scratchy.

Let’s check the grammar school. We’ve not been out that way for a while... Maybe the hunters have left some stuff behind recently. That was mainly how we got our food now that the tinned stuff had mostly run out. The hunters would leave their rations in places, sometimes hoping to snare us, other times out of casual absent mindedness and sometimes just so they didn‘t have to carry it back across town.

The way of the grammar school was towards the river and that was the way in which Jazz and I headed, silently. We dared not speak for speech could be overheard and might have distracted us from observing our surroundings. I instead listened to the noises about me. All I could hear were the sound of gulls scavenging somewhere in the remains. It cheered me to think that a decent standard of life still existed for the birds and the animals at least. I saw a few of those gulls perched on the remains of a wall as we turned off the shopping street and into a cul-de-sac where there had been a collection of old Victorian tenements.

Only a few of the walls now remained but they loomed over us like the pillars of a majestic cathedral. In some respects they might have been beautiful and picturesque but not that morning. That morning they were threatening.

I looked into the eyes of one of the gulls, perched on an isolated overhang as we passed, and for a moment it looked back at me in the way that birds sometimes do, that irritated contemptuous sort of look that silently threatens you, the look that tells you that you are in the bird's territory. 

Jazz and I passed through the tenement buildings and we came out into what I guess must have once been a suburban square, surrounded by houses and other tenement buildings. In the centre there stood a lone and dead tree, an old rope swing hanging from one of the branches.

I paused for a moment, listening and observing. Something was wrong. The gulls in the distance had ceased their chatter and an eerie silence hung over the square. I looked around for movement and saw none but a sense that something was watching us, waiting to leap out and rip us to pieces, was growing within me. In that situation it was best not to hang around.

Jazz... Move slowly, I hissed. There’s something watching us. Just turn around and head back the way we came... Don’t argue... Just do it...

We slowly turned around and made our way back into the tenement building, weaving carefully around the pillars and keeping an eye out for whatever was watching us.

I stopped again, hearing a low growl coming from nearby, though I couldn’t tell exactly where it came from as it echoed around the remains of the tenement. Fearing we would not escape the way we were going I put my hand across Jazz’s chest and pushed him back towards the square only to find our exit blocked by a single graffe, all menacing and evil and terrifying. Its jaws were encrusted with the blood of some other poor creature. It looked wild and untamed, not at all like it had once been human. The thing was grey and hunched with its clawed arms stretching out towards us. Jazz and I began to back away but then to our left I saw another two graffe lurking around one corner of the ruins. Then we saw and heard even more graffe approaching from behind. They had us surrounded.

I heard Jazz whimper in terror so I put my arm across his shoulder.

Don’t fret it Jazz... It’ll be over before you know it, I reassured as the graffe moved closer. Jazz acknowledged my statement and he wiped a few tears away from his eyes.

I won’t say that I wasn’t personally terrified because I was. Nobody wants to die, at least not in such a grotesque way as getting shredded. I tried to be as brave as I could. I tried to bottle it up and remain calm. I held Jazz close to me and then shut my eyes, concentrating on Ferd and all our happy memories to relieve me of the thoughts of approaching oblivion.

Then everything changed...

A great blur shot down through the tenement and two graffe went crashing to the floor, unconscious and with large welts on their foreheads. A second later two more went down. The remaining graffe were as perplexed as we were and they wildly looked around for what was knocking them about. Another graffe gave out a dangerous screech as it hit the wall and the final few of its comrades now decided that enough was enough. They ran for their lives, scared by the phantom that was knocking them cold. Only one of them got away. The others were desensitised by the force of a human body landing on top of them. 

The body stood up and wiped himself down before he turned to us. He was wearing a brown leather jacket over a lightweight Kevlar t-shirt, black, and his pants were of the combat variety and held up by a belt that was crammed with all sorts of practical looking tools. One of these, which I noticed immediately, was a little black box that had a red flashing light and a wire that ran up to his ear. His build definitely suggested he was some sort of military man. His clothes were tight to his body so they showed off every one of his many muscles. He looked to be really strong, although saying that he was still very slight and not bulky in any way. His face had that hardcore, soldier’s appearance and his eyes, which were blue, betrayed a world of hardship. His hair, a kind of rusty brown or red colour, was closely cropped and he wore a short, shaggy beard. At a stretch I would have put him somewhere in his mid twenties. My initial feeling was that he was a hunter and he had taken out the graffe so that he could have us for himself. I held onto Jazz, who was very much going out of his mind with fear, as the hunter came closer. 

What are you two doing out here? he asked us in a harsh, southern tone as he approached. I’m guessing he knew we weren’t with the graffe from the look of us. "This is graffe territory and if they don’t get you then their fanatical defenders will!"

You should know about fanatical defenders, I bluffed confidently. So what are you going to do to us? Kill us and string us up to the nearest lamp post? Jazz whimpered at the suggestion.

Why would I string you up?

That’s what you do isn’t it? You kill people and string them up and torture them...

The only people I torture are my enemies and unless you two want to be my enemy I suggest you start explaining why you’re both here.

We live here, Jazz spluttered innocently. We were caught on the wrong side of the lines when the war started and couldn’t get back...

So you’re transients then?

Transients? I asked him in confusion.

Transients... That’s what we call those of you who got stuck out here. We’ve rescued a fair few of you so far but I didn’t think there would be many left after this long. How many more of you are there? Do you know?

There’s seven of us... Maybe six... I don’t know... One of us disappeared last night...

Did he have blue hair by any chance? Quite tall? Jazz and I both nodded.

I saw him last night... He was headed towards the centre of town. I tried to get to him but he became spooked and ran... I don’t know what happened to him.

He’s probably dead then. The hunters will have got him and he’ll be hanging from a lamppost, Jazz mourned coldly.

What is it with you and two and hanging people from lampposts? 

That’s what they do... The hunters... When they catch you they hang your dead carcass on a lamppost as a warning to others... The man we thought to be a hunter looked disturbed.

And these are supposed to be the humans?

Human or adult graffe... We can’t tell, Jazz admitted. Our saviour shook his head.

"They aren’t adult graffe. None of them were strong enough to survive the supremacy contests... Jazz and I gave each other a curious look and without having to ask we were told what the supremacy contests were. When the war broke out the graffe started to challenge each other for dominance, trying to establish which of them were the alphas. All of the older, adult graffe thought that they should take precedence over the younger ones but when they had to prove themselves in a fight the adults all got butchered." He looked morose for a second before he glared at us again.

You said there were more of you... Can you take me to them? Jazz and I, still a little unsure about this man, agreed.

We led him from the tenement and back onto the boulevard, all in silence. The hunter, or the man we thought might have been a hunter, followed us without question, always looking around at his surroundings with eagle eyed precision and observing every movement he caught. He took particular interest in the gulls and the way they watched us as we passed them by. Eventually, after we had gone a short way down the street I hung back to introduce myself. I thought I might as well and I had nothing to lose by doing so. And with him around it felt safe to talk so I held out my hand.

I’m Dast by the way, Dast Sayeff. The man shook my hand without looking.

Commander Jake Williams. 15th Utopian Squad, Beiderbecke.

So you’re with the military on the other side of the river then? I surmised. Jake nodded without saying anything else and I tried to keep up the conversation. What’s it like over there now?

It’s better than here... Civilisation isn’t the same as it was before the war but things are ticking over. We’ve got hospitals and shops and schools; all the stuff we need to keep going. There’s no police but there’s no need because there’s not much crime anymore. Nobody dares. If anything does come up then it’s usually dealt with by one of the special divisions like the Utopian Squad.

Is that why you’re here? Is it a crime? Are the hunters illegally trading drugs across the river? Jazz asked ridiculously, walking backwards and nearly tripping over a large lump of concrete.

NO! Jake snapped. I’m here because a patrol unit spotted something they shouldn’t have... Something that worries me...

What sort of something?

It’s best you don’t know.

Jake went back to silence as we took him over the rubble towards our residence.

Something was wrong though. There was a sinister stench in the air and where once there had been a door and a wall there was just a large hole surrounded by blood splatters. Jazz and I were going to spring forwards to see if the others were all ok but Jake held us back.

Don’t... If this is what I think it is... Was he talking about the ‘something?’ I supposed he must have been.

He edged towards the door, his hand reaching for his belt. He shifted his jacket aside and for the first time showed us that he was packing heat, a holster containing an Arcus 98DA (I was one of those kids who was obsessed with guns).

"Stay close behind me and do whatever I say," Jake warned, readying the weapon and pointing it ahead into the building.

He trod carefully, making sure his footsteps couldn’t be heard, and Jazz and I followed like a pair of lumbering elephants. Jake checked every room, making sure there was nobody and nothing about. There wasn’t but as we passed up the stairs I again got this terrible feeling that something was wrong. Jake reached the room where we all lived and he held his hand out to stop us. 

Don’t come any further, he said sombrely. Stay there... Jake disappeared into the room. I waited but Jazz was all too eager to follow. I forcibly held him back.

"No... If Jake says to stay here then we stay here," I warned. Jazz looked at me as though he didn’t understand. It was his youth I suppose. His hormone addled brain couldn’t quite fathom that he really didn’t want to see what was in the room. Not his fault really.

No doubt it was truly horrifying as Jake came out looking severely shaken. Jazz tried to move into the room to see what had shaken him but Jake held him back just as I had done.

"You don’t want to see what’s