Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (7 page)

“Police!” shouted the Paramedic, but they were still in the middle of a bawling match with the Porsche driver. A flying fist broke the Paramedic’s nose; he went down gasping and finished up under the tailpipe.

The tough guy began flinging boxes out of the ambulance, provoking a scramble for each one, even though no-one had any idea what exactly was in them.

There was a gunshot as the Police finally twigged what was happening and fired into the air to get everyone’s attention; everyone froze, and in the pause one of the Policemen called out: “Get away from the ambulance now! I will shoot anyone who prevents the medical personnel from doing their job! You!” he added to the tough guy, “Get away from there now!”

The bruiser took two steps forward, then hesitated as another shot was fired. The Policeman with the unholstered gun toppled slowly, his eyes rolling, and when he hit the ground someone yelled:
“Tiocfaidh ár là!”

Mark scrambled under the ambulance, his ears full of screaming and firing and shoes scuffling. Between the front wheels, he could see the body of the shot Policeman and the boots of the other one as he shuffled and dodged back and forth, obviously uncertain about where the other gunman was, or perhaps under the impression that there were two. Then another bullet ended it. The second Policeman fell with blood pouring from a chest wound; he turned his head, and for a second or two before he died, his eyes met Mark’s.
What sort of moment is this for settling old scores?
thought Mark, horrified.

Then someone screamed again:
“Tiocfaidh ár là! Tiocfaidh ár là!”

Evidently they thought it was the perfect moment.

*****

“Look, son, don’t waste your time trying to describe her to me. Everybody’s looking for somebody, and I can’t be expected to keep track of
them all, can I? If she’s alive and well, she’ll be doing the same as you are - filling in one of these.

“ - Yes, all of it.
It doesn’t matter if your address isn’t there anymore, fill that bit in anyway.

“- When the lists are complete, all right? We can’t work miracles.

“Thank you. Now, move on to the next desk, and give them the names and addresses of people you know are definitely deceased.

“OK, next, please -”

*****

Marilyn Reeve grimaced and gasped as another contraction seized her, realising she had lost count yet again of the seconds between them. The intervals may have been getting shorter, but then again, it may just have been wishful thinking on her part; she was beginning to feel as if she had never known anything other than lying in this twilight state of continual fatigue, pain drawing her one way and sleep the other.

She called out her husband’s name, wondering why his hand was not in hers, and turned her head to look for him. She expected to see Eric step into her view as he paced the room, or perhaps to be watching her from the wicker chair in the corner; but she was alone.

Then she remembered: he had gone to fetch help. For probably the hundredth time, she tried to make herself believe it was for the best; he hadn’t been coping terribly well here. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to do simple things like mopping her brow, and couldn’t seem to take in any instruction she gave him.

Well; he was doing his best. He might not be a doctor, but he was a hero. He’d gone out with the gun, and was bringing back help by hook or by crook, he’d told her. This would be quite a story to tell the little one when he grew up.

An imaginary picture of the future which had come to be one of her favourites over the last year or so rose up before her mind: Eric and a three-year-old boy playing outside on the lawn under a friendly Summer sun, kicking a football back and forth and laughing at each other. Eric was going to be such a good daddy.

Marilyn cried out as another wave of pain hit her. She had forgotten to keep count again.

*****

Barry had no idea how long he knelt over the dead body. He came to his senses again when he heard another noise like the one which had disturbed them earlier: a handful of broken concrete finally defeating the inertia of friction and sliding off some tilted surface to land with thuds and a gravelly rattle on the ground.

Her jumped to his feet, looking for somewhere to hide. There were plenty of nooks and crannies nearby, but none of them looked safe enough; and amid his frantic casting about for a
bolthole, or failing that, an excuse (
it wasn’t me, I’ve just found her, she fell and hurt her neck, oh, is she dead? I hadn’t noticed
), he found time for self-pity:
why does it have to be me? Why? It’s not fair! She was asking for it!

He shuffled about for a few moments making abortive movements this way and that, then stopped and stared helplessly through the doorway, waiting to become
a someone’s arrestee.

Part of the way up the lamp post standing half-skewed outside the shop on the other side of the road, something small flapped: the edge of a poster.

Something in his brain clicked into place.
Of course,
he thought.
Of course.
It was not only a way to get off the hook, but a means of making money, too.
I’ll claim she was a Lemming. Her friend’s dead. No-one will be able to say any different.

*****

Carson Rodden was right about opportunity knocking, but not everyone understood that the opportunities presented by a situation like the current one were double-edged.

A handful of politicians from South of the border (when they had stopped biting their nails and their bowels had begun to return to normal functioning) saw opportunity knocking; a
dream which had resided in the province of Cloud Cuckoo Land for decades suddenly landed in their open palms. All they had to do was grasp it.

“We just present it to them as a
fait accompli,
” said one. “They need help; we haven’t been touched by the bombs. We send in help from our emergency services, and of course they’ll
have
to be accompanied by our Army. The situation is very volatile up North. By the time it’s all over, we’ll be entrenched too deeply to move, and we’ll be the
de facto
government. The Brits won’t be able to budge us without a major effort, which is the last thing they can afford at this time.”

“They’ll probably be grateful to hand the Irish problem back to the Irish,” said another. “They’ve been hit very badly.”

A third laughed. “They probably have no idea just how badly. I can just picture them, hiding away in their bunkers - it could be months before they work up the courage to come out!”

A fourth man, who’d been on the telephone, slammed the receiver down bad-temperedly. “I can’t get through to the
Taoseach,” he told the others.

They exchanged worried looks.

“If we wait, we’ll miss our chance,” said the first. “This could take up to a day to get rolling. I say we instruct the army to go ahead and deploy.”

Everyone nodded.

*****

The Bureaucrat looked up for a moment from the form he was checking (his last “customer” had filled it in with the bad grace which had become routine here lately, skipping more questions than she had answered, so that it was all but useless for
official purposes) and his somebody-give-me-strength glance landed on a sullen-looking man in his twenties.
Not another one,
he thought.

It wasn’t his sullen expression that betrayed his errand to the Bureaucrat; very few of the people queuing at these desks felt as if they had anything much to smile about - they were there to help compile a list of the missing or deceased, after all. No
; the clues were in the way the young man kept fidgeting and quickly looking around him as if expecting at any moment to be denounced for something - in his air of pent-up nervous energy that looked completely out of place in these queues of people who showed only listless despair or vacant shock.
It’s true what they say,
the Bureaucrat thought:
guilty people run away even when no-one is chasing them.
He had a fair idea of what was making this one feel guilty. Ten to one it was the posters again.

The Bureaucrat shoved a form across the desk, gesturing towards a pencil stub secured to the desktop with string and
sellotape. “Mister -” he began. His tone made it a question.

“McCandless.
Barry McCandless.”

“Mr McCandless, would you fill that in, please? I’ll be with you in a moment.”

The young man looked at the form blankly for a few moments, as if it was completely irrelevant to his purpose. “Look,” he said, “the reason I’m here -” He hesitated and glanced about him. There were people pressing closely on every side but immediately in front, where the Bureaucrat’s table was; being discreet seemed impossible.

The Bureaucrat frankly didn’t care about
Barry’s discomfiture. He had his orders (more like strongly worded suggestions, actually), and since they apparently came from quite high up in the chain of command, he would do his job and obey them; but that didn’t mean he had to approve of them, or make things easy for the vile creatures who were eagerly leaping to (in some cases, literally) stab their neighbours in the back. “You’re here to report the decease of a certain person, I take it?” he said in a voice that caused nearby heads to turn. “A certain
kind
of person?”

Barry
shuffled nervously; his face reddened. “Uh, yeah. A Lemming.”

“A Lemming,” said the Bureaucrat. “And how was this accomplished? You’ll have to put it all down, you know.”

“There’s supposed to be a reward,” said Barry, growing angry. “The posters said about a reward. Do I get it here? How much is it?”

“Well, I don’t have the money on me,
son - I mean,
Sir
- and besides, we won’t know whether you’re eligible until we’ve had a chance to look at your case.
We
don’t know whether your victim was a Lemming, do we?”

“Are you calling me a liar?” demanded
Barry.

“I’m not calling you anything,” said the Bureaucrat quickly. “I don’t know the first thing about you. I’ve never met you before in my life.” Then, in his former tone, he added: “The Government can’t be seen to sanction murder. We have to know the particulars of every case. That’s what the form is for,
Sir
. Go to one of those tables over there and bring it back to me when it’s filled in.”

Barry
scooped the form off the Bureaucrat’s desk furiously, almost leaving nail gouges in the desktop, and stormed away, (somewhat inefficiently, it must be said, since he had to shove his way through a substantial crowd).

*****

Since the general atmosphere in the somewhat euphemistically-named relief centre was noisy in a bustling, businesslike way, the almost theatrical air of conspiracy between Barry McCandless and the man on the other side of the desk made them more readily noticed; so once Barry raised his voice angrily, bystanders had what amounted to a licence to be nosy.

Only a metre and a half away, Michael Andrews, attempting to fill in a form with a very short and almost blunt pencil, was therefore quite easily defeated by the temptation to mind someone else’s business.

The more he listened, however, the more he became alarmed, for what he heard
was
his business, after all. He was not a Lemming, but he could not deny he had spiritual kinship with them. They would all be tarred with the same brush; someone anxious to start rebuilding his life with the reward money would not care about the differences between one set of fanatics and the next.
Government sanction for murder!
he thought for the fourth or fifth time, having discounted almost immediately the bureaucrat’s attitude of disapproval. People like that little man would do as they were told. Half-remembered details of biographies Michael had read of those who’d suffered under repressive governments for holding “incorrect” ideologies churned and roiled in his mind.

The surging wave of associations suddenly slapped into a wall as he realised he’d come to a section on his
form which required details about his relatives: names, addresses, and so on. He put down the pencil stub, and folding the form and putting it into a pocket, slipped away as surreptitiously as he could manage.
Dad has to hear about this,
he thought.

*****

Vehicles of every description moved Northward in a great mass that made rush hour look light. Clare Latimer, a passenger in one of them, looked at her watch; she and her husband Stephen had been on the road four hours, and were still only twelve or thirteen miles from Ground Zero.

For a brief period following the start of the journey, they had been able to move relatively quickly; the traffic ahead had seemed to thin out quite suddenly as, following the lead of a few foolhardy and impatient souls, cars flooded through the gaps in the motorway’s central reservation and drove against the Southbound traffic. Clare and Stephen could faintly hear tyres screeching and horns being sounded as the much sparser oncoming traffic was forced off the road
; but no bangs or crashes. Watching the cars on the other side cruise along, they seriously considered crossing over; but very soon they caught up again, and were passing queues on the Southbound side which did not appear to be moving at all. Crawling along for another fifteen minutes brought them in sight of the plume of smoke rising from the inevitable pile-up. It took them a long while to pass it - drivers on their own side had abandoned vehicles to go and help the injured - and since neither of them knew any first aid, the only ease they could offer their consciences was a whispered prayer for the fools who lay dying in and around the wreckage.