Fifteen

2026-09-24 · by AnyoneButSam

The radio died at 14:31.

It had been dying for twenty minutes, spitting static through a cracked handset, and the last thing it gave them before the battery quit was a voice none of them recognised, torn in half by interference.

"...QRF... en route... fif... out..."

Then nothing. Just the hiss, and then not even that.

"Fifty," Jess said.

"Could be fifteen," Rhea said.

"Nobody does that road in fifteen," Nadia said. "Not with what's sitting on it." She said it through her teeth, because the shrapnel in her stomach didn't let her say anything any other way.

Cal Brenner looked at his watch. 14:31. He didn't know why he looked. It was just something to do with his eyes that wasn't looking at the three of them.

The patrol had been seven people at 13:50.

At 13:52 the lead vehicle drove over something buried in the road and lifted off the ground like it had been kicked by God. It came down on its roof, burning. Nobody got out of it. Cal saw a hand press flat against the inside of the window, and then the window went black with smoke, and then the hand wasn't there anymore.

The RPG hit their truck four seconds later. It came through the driver's door, and Reyes, who had been talking about his girlfriend's dog thirty seconds earlier, stopped existing from the chest up. The windscreen was red. The inside of the truck was red. Cal had pieces of Reyes on his face and in his mouth, and he spat and spat and couldn't stop.

Lieutenant Hale got out of the passenger side and was shot eleven times before he took two steps. Cal counted them, somehow. Eleven. The lieutenant danced with each one and then lay down in the road like a man who'd decided to take a nap.

The four of them who were left ran for the nearest building. A three-storey block of flats with its front blown off, balconies hanging like broken teeth. Nadia took shrapnel in the belly on the way in. Jess took a round through the shoulder at the door. Rhea made it all the way to the second-floor stairs before a burst came through the stairwell window and turned her left shin into something that bent the wrong way, with white bone sticking out through the trousers.

They'd been in the room at the top of the building ever since. A kid's bedroom, once. There was still a poster on the wall of a cartoon rabbit, riddled with holes. A plastic dinosaur on the windowsill. A narrow bed with a bare mattress. Glass everywhere.

From the window they'd watched the militia tie a rope to Lieutenant Hale's ankles and drag him behind a pickup truck, up and down the street, while men on the back fired into the air and filmed it on their phones. Up and down. Up and down. Until what was on the end of the rope stopped looking like the lieutenant.

Then the loudspeaker started.

A man's voice, cheerful, in heavily accented English, bouncing off the ruined buildings.

"Sisters! We saw you! Three sisters! Come down, sisters. We will take very good care of you."

He'd said it every few minutes since. Always cheerful. Always the same.

"Okay," Nadia said. "Options."

She was sitting against the wall under the rabbit poster, both hands pressed over her stomach. Her face had gone the colour of candle wax. Every time she breathed, fresh blood seeped out between her fingers and she pressed harder, like she could hold it all in by force.

"We fight," Cal said.

"With what?"

He counted. He'd already counted four times, but he counted again. "I've got one full mag and eight in the other. Jess has six. Your pistol's got eleven. One frag. One smoke."

"And downstairs?"

Jess was at the edge of the window, her right arm strapped useless against her chest, her rifle braced on the sill with her left hand. "Twenty-five I can see. Maybe thirty. Two technicals with heavy guns. And they just brought up a truck with jerry cans on it."

Nobody asked what the jerry cans were for. Petrol and a stairwell. Everybody knew.

"We fight, we last about four minutes," Nadia said. "Next."

"We hide," Rhea said. She was lying flat on the carpet with a tourniquet cranked so tight on her thigh that her whole leg was grey below it. Her voice was very calm. That was how Cal knew how bad it was. Rhea was only ever calm when things were very bad. "They clear the building room by room. They find us. Next."

"We run," Cal said.

Nadia almost laughed. It came out as a cough, and the cough brought up blood. "Rhea's got one leg. I've got my guts in my hands. Jess can't hold her rifle with the arm she shoots with. You can run, Cal. We can't."

"Then we wait for the QRF."

"Fifty minutes," Jess said.

"We don't know it's fifty."

"We don't know it's anything. Could be fifteen. Could be fifty. Could be some bloke on the net talking to a completely different unit." Nadia shifted and hissed. "They're on the ground floor already. I can hear them. They're not in a hurry, because they know we're not going anywhere. Ten minutes. Maybe less. Then the petrol comes up the stairs."

"Then we surrender," Cal said.

The room went very quiet.

Outside, the loudspeaker. "Sisters! Don't be scared! Come down to us, sisters!"

"Say it," Jess said. She didn't turn from the window. "Somebody say it out loud. I'm sick of everybody not saying it."

Nobody said anything.

"Fine. I'll say it." Jess wiped her face with the back of her good hand and left a smear of blood and dust across her cheek. "If you surrender, Cal, they'll cut your head off on camera. It'll take about a minute, and it'll be the worst minute of your life, and then it'll be over. Us, they don't kill. They don't take women prisoner. They take women as stock. You all saw the container at Hadra."

They had all seen the container at Hadra. Two months ago. A shipping container behind a militia compound, padlocked from the outside, and eleven women inside who'd been in it since the winter. Cal had helped carry them out. One of them had tried to bite him because she didn't understand he wasn't one of them. One of them hadn't said a single word, not then, not ever, as far as he knew. The women who could still talk told the interpreter how it worked. Sold on across the border. Then sold again. Then again. Passed from one man to the next like a phone charger.

"That's what 'we'll take very good care of you' means," Jess said. "That's the whole plan. Not a week. Not a month. Years. Until there's nothing left of you anyone wants to buy."

Cal opened his mouth.

"And don't you dare tell me they'd ransom us," Nadia said. "They don't ransom women. We're worth more sold."

He closed his mouth.

"So that's the options," Nadia said. "Fight, and die in four minutes, and maybe they take one of us alive anyway because we can't shoot straight. Hide, and they find us. Run, and three of us can't. Wait, for a number we can't even hear properly. Or surrender, and you get a minute and we get years."

"They're all garbage," Rhea said, very softly, to the ceiling.

"They're all garbage," Nadia agreed.

It was Rhea who said it first.

"Cal."

"No."

"You don't even know what I was going to..."

"I know what you were going to say. No."

"I'd do it myself," Rhea said. "But I can't sit up. And I don't think my hands would." She held one up to show him. It was shaking so hard it blurred.

"I can't hold the pistol left-handed," Jess said. "Not steady. I'd botch it. I'd end up blind and screaming and they'd get me anyway."

"Then we go out fighting. All of us. We go down the stairs together and..."

"You go out fighting," Nadia said. "We can't. One of us has to walk out of this building, Cal, and it's the one with legs. And you are not walking out of here with us still in it for those animals. You are not." She looked at him. Her eyes were very clear, even with the rest of her going grey. "I'm the ranking. It's my call. It's on me. Not you. Say it."

"Nadia..."

"Say it, Corporal."

His voice came out wrong. "It's on you."

"It's on me," she said. "Good. And one more thing."

She waited until he looked at her.

"When it's my turn, I might say no. The body does that. It's an animal. It doesn't know anything. All it wants is the next breath, and it'll beg for it. If I say no, you don't listen to it. You listen to me. This me. Right now." Her voice didn't waver. "Say it."

"If you say no," Cal said, "I don't listen."

"Good."

Downstairs, somewhere, boots on concrete. A man laughing. The scrape of something heavy being dragged. A jerry can knocking against the steps.

Nadia pulled her left hand off her stomach, red to the wrist, and worked her wedding ring off her finger. It took a while. Her fingers were swollen and slick. When it came free she held it out, and Cal held out his palm, and she put it in there and closed his fingers over it with her bloody hand.

She didn't say who it was for. He knew. He'd met the man once, at a barbecue. Big laugh. Terrible at football.

Rhea reached up to her vest and unclipped something from the loop by her collar. A tiny wooden bird, carved from pale wood, smaller than a thumb. Cal had seen it a hundred times and never asked about it. She pressed it into his hand next to the ring.

"Just give it to my dad," she said. "He'll know."

Jess came away from the window last. She pulled a bracelet off her wrist with her teeth, a woven friendship band made of threads that had once been pink and yellow and green and were now mostly the colour of dirt. It was frayed nearly through.

"My sister," she said. That was all. She dropped it in with the others.

Cal buttoned all three into his chest pocket. His fingers kept missing the button. Nadia watched him until he got it done.

"Me first," Rhea said. "I don't want to hear it happen to anyone else."

Cal knelt beside her. She reached up and took hold of his sleeve, and held on to it.

"Close your eyes," he said. He didn't know if he was saying it to her or to himself.

She closed them. She was whispering something. A prayer her grandmother had taught her, in a language Cal didn't speak. She got to the end of it, and took a breath, and said "Okay," like she was about to jump into cold water.

He did it the way Nadia had told him to do it while they were waiting. Close. Quick. No hesitation. That was the only mercy there was in it, and he gave her all of it.

The shot was enormous in the little room. It hit the walls and came back and kept coming back. The plastic dinosaur on the windowsill fell over.

Rhea's head turned a little to the side, gently, like she was listening to something in the next room. Her hand let go of his sleeve. Her fingers twitched twice on the carpet and went still.

The blood came slowly at first. A dark line out from under her hair. Then more. It spread across the carpet in a slow, widening circle, and the fibres drank it up and went black, and it kept coming. It reached the fallen dinosaur and ran around it. It reached the leg of the bed. There was a warm wetness on the back of Cal's hand, and he didn't look at it.

Jess made a sound.

It wasn't a word. It was the sound an animal makes when it's been hit by a car and hasn't died yet. She clapped her good hand over her mouth, but it came out anyway, a long, thin, wavering noise from somewhere deep in her chest. Then her whole body folded forward over her knees and she threw up on the carpet. Water and bile. Again. Again. Until there was nothing left and she was just heaving, her forehead almost touching the floor, her strapped arm pinned between her body and her knees, and the noise still coming out of her in pieces between the heaves.

Nadia didn't look away. Cal saw her decide not to. She'd given the order, so she watched. Her jaw was clamped so hard the muscles stood out like knots in her cheeks. Tears ran straight down her face and she didn't blink once. Under her hands the blood came faster, pumping out between her fingers in time with a heart that had started going like a bird's.

The ringing in Cal's ears was so loud he almost missed it when Nadia spoke.

"Good," she whispered. "That was good, Cal. Clean. She didn't feel it."

He didn't know if that was true. He would never know.

Jess stayed folded over her knees for a long time.

When she finally sat up, her face was grey and wet and streaked with sick. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Then she crawled on her knees and one hand across the carpet, through the edge of the blood, and sat down next to Rhea, and took Rhea's hand.

"It's still warm," she said. She sounded surprised. "Her hand's still warm."

Nobody said anything.

Jess was crying properly now. Silently, the tears cutting clean lines through the dust and the sick on her face. She was shaking all over, so hard her teeth were clicking.

"If you ever tell anyone I cried," she said, "I will haunt you. I'll hide your car keys every morning for the rest of your life."

"Deal," Cal said. It came out as a sob.

"Don't make it weird." She squeezed Rhea's hand. She looked up at the rabbit on the wall, with all its holes. "Stupid rabbit," she said. "Stupid, stupid rabbit." Her breath hitched. "Okay. Okay. Go. Go before I..."

He went.

Jess tipped sideways and came to rest against Rhea's shoulder, gently, like two friends who'd fallen asleep on a train. Her hand stayed in Rhea's. Blood ran out of her hair and down the side of her neck into her collar, and from the ends of her hair it began to drip onto the carpet. Tap. Tap. Tap. Slow and even, like a tap somebody had left running in another room.

Then it was only Nadia.

She'd dragged herself higher against the wall. The blood had soaked through her trousers and pooled under her, black in the light from the window, and some of it had found the edge of the bed frame and was running down one leg of it, and dripping off the bottom onto the floor, adding to the sound. Two drips now. Jess's, and the bed's. Out of time with each other.

Nadia held out her hand. When he gave her the pistol grip, she wrapped her fingers around his, steadying it.

"Your hand's shaking," she said.

"I know."

"Breathe out. Like the range. Squeeze. Don't pull."

"Nadia."

"You did good, Cal. You did everything right today. Everything. None of this is yours." She guided the barrel up. "Tell him I said the football thing. He'll understand."

She let go of his hand. Closed her eyes.

He breathed out. Like the range.

The muzzle touched her forehead.

Her eyes snapped open.

Something changed in her face. Cal watched it happen. The sergeant went out of it, all at once, like a light switched off, and what was left behind was somebody he'd never met. Her breathing went fast and shallow, sucking in and out through her teeth. Her pupils were huge.

"Wait," she said.

"Nadia..."

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait." Her hand shot up and grabbed his wrist and shoved the muzzle aside, off her head, against the wall. "No. No, Cal. I don't... I changed my mind. I don't want to. I don't want to."

"You told me..."

"I don't care what I told you. Please. Please don't. I don't want to die. I don't want to die, Cal, please, I've got..." She was pushing at him now, with the hand that had been holding her stomach closed, and it was so slick with blood that her fingers kept sliding off his wrist and grabbing again and sliding off again. "Please. Please. I'll be quiet. I'll be so quiet. They won't find me. Please."

Outside, the loudspeaker. "Sisters! Where are you, sisters?"

Below them, on the landing of the floor underneath, a man shouted something and another man laughed, and a jerry can clanked down on concrete. Close. So close. He could smell the petrol coming up the stairwell.

If I say no, you don't listen to it. You listen to me. This me. Right now.

"Please," Nadia said. She was crying. Nadia never cried. "Please, Cal. Please."

He pulled his wrist out of her hand. It was easy. There was almost nothing left in her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She was still saying please when he squeezed.

He didn't pull.

Her hand slid down his wrist and off it, and fell into her lap, and left a long red print across the back of his hand.

The room was very quiet. Just the drips. Tap. Tap. And the bed frame. Tap. Out of time.

He would spend the rest of his life not knowing which of her had been telling the truth. The one who gave the order, or the one who begged.

He sat among them. He didn't know for how long. Rhea with her hand in Jess's hand. Nadia against the wall under the rabbit, her eyes still open, looking almost surprised, if you didn't look at the wall behind her. He had their blood on his face and in his hair, on top of Reyes's blood, which had dried. He couldn't feel his hands.

Outside, the loudspeaker crackled.

"Sisters? Sisters! Where are you, sisters?"

Something in Cal's chest came apart.

It didn't feel like anger. Anger was a thing you could think around. This was a noise. A roar that started somewhere behind his ribs and filled his whole head until there was no room in it for anything else. Not fear. Not the pain in his cracked ribs or the burns on his hands. Not even the three people on the floor.

He stood up.

He took Nadia's pistol with the eight rounds left in it. He took Jess's rifle with its six. He slung his own with the last full magazine. He took the frag grenade off his vest. He took his knife out of its sheath and held it in his left hand. He didn't look back at the room.

He went out onto the landing.

They were coming up. Three of them, on the stairs between the first and second floors. He could hear the jerry can sloshing. He could taste the petrol.

He pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, counted two in his head, and dropped the grenade down the gap in the middle of the stairwell.

It went off right between them. In a concrete stairwell, a grenade isn't an explosion. It's a hammer. The blast came back up the shaft so hard it slapped the air out of his lungs, and the dust rolled up in a solid grey wall. Somebody below was screaming. Somebody else wasn't doing anything anymore.

He went down into the dust.

The first piece of luck was on the second-floor landing. A militiaman was there, deafened, blinded, spraying his rifle up the stairs at nothing. The rounds stitched the wall beside Cal's head. One of them hit his helmet. It was like being punched by a truck. The helmet spun round on his head and the strap sliced into his jaw, but the round skipped off the curve and went somewhere else. Half an inch lower and it would have gone in through his eye.

Cal didn't shoot. He was too close and too far gone. He grabbed the barrel of the man's rifle with his bare burned hand. It was so hot he heard his own palm hiss. He shoved it up at the ceiling while it was still firing, and the man hung on to the grip with everything he had.

Cal found the man's hand on the grip. Found the trigger finger. Bent it backwards. The man screamed. Cal kept bending until the finger snapped with a sound like a green stick breaking, and then it flopped loose in his grip, pointing the wrong way. The man was still hanging on. Cal found the next finger and snapped that one too. And the next. The man's screaming went up and up into a register Cal didn't know a man's voice could reach, and his hand finally opened, and Cal tore the rifle out of it and shot him twice through the chest from half a metre away.

The second man came out of the dust from the side and caught him round the waist, and they both went over the edge of the landing and down half a flight of concrete stairs, tangled together, cracking every edge on the way. They hit the bottom with the other man on top. He was heavy. He smelled of sweat and petrol and cigarettes. He got a hand on Cal's face, and his thumb went looking for Cal's eye, digging into the socket, and Cal felt the pressure on the eyeball, felt it start to give.

He twisted his head and bit the man's hand.

He bit down as hard as he'd ever done anything in his life. His teeth went through the skin, through the meat of the palm, and scraped against bone. Blood filled his mouth, hot and coppery. The man howled and tried to rip his hand away, and Cal hung on like a dog, shaking his head, and felt something tear loose in his mouth. The man reeled back, clutching his hand.

Cal spat whatever it was out and drove both his thumbs into the man's eyes.

He pushed. The man shrieked and grabbed Cal's wrists with both hands, but Cal was past anything that could stop him. He pushed until something gave under his right thumb, a wet, sudden softness, and then under his left, and the man's shriek broke into something else entirely. Cal rolled him off, and the man's head struck the corner of the bottom step, and Cal was on top of him with the knife.

He put it into his throat. Once. Then again. Then he couldn't stop. He didn't know how many times. He only stopped when his arm was too tired to lift, and the man underneath him had stopped being a man and become just a shape, and Cal was wet to the elbows.

The second piece of luck was that nobody came up the stairs while he was doing it.

He got up. Kept going.

The third man, the one who'd been screaming, was on the first-floor landing holding his face. The grenade had taken most of it. Cal walked past him, then turned round and shot him in the head. Not for mercy. He just didn't want anything behind him that was still breathing.

On the ground floor, the corridor to the back door was full of smoke and dust. A figure turned toward him through it, raising a rifle. Cal was already moving. The figure pulled the trigger and the rifle went click. Empty. The man had burned through his magazine shooting up at the windows and hadn't noticed. That was the third piece of luck.

Cal hit him with the butt of Jess's rifle, full swing, across the face. The man went down, and Cal hit him again. And again. And again. The man's hands came up, and then went down, and Cal kept going until the stock of the rifle cracked and something in the man's head gave way under it with a soft, final sound.

At the end of the corridor, by the back door, there was another one. Young. Nineteen, maybe. He saw Cal come out of the smoke, red from his hair to his boots, blood running out of the corners of his mouth, and he dropped his rifle on the floor and put his hands up.

"Please," the boy said. "Please, please."

Cal thought about a cheerful voice on a loudspeaker. Sisters.

He thought about Nadia saying please.

He shot him.

He didn't feel anything about it. That was the worst thing, later. At the time he felt nothing at all.

The back door opened onto an alley. At the mouth of the alley, twenty metres away, a pickup truck with a heavy machine gun mounted in the bed. The gunner saw him and swung the gun round, fast, and Cal knew he was dead. You don't outrun a heavy machine gun at twenty metres. Nobody does.

The gunner yanked the trigger and nothing happened. The belt had twisted in the feed when he swung the gun round. He was screaming, hauling at the cocking handle.

That was the fourth piece of luck.

Cal emptied his last full magazine into the cab of the truck. The windscreen turned white, then red. The driver slumped, his foot came down on the accelerator, and the truck lurched forward into the wall of the alley. The gunner was thrown out of the bed and landed on the ground with his leg folded under him. He started crawling away, reaching for the pistol on his belt. Cal walked up behind him, stamped down on the reaching hand, and felt the bones crunch under his boot. The man screamed into the dirt. Cal put two rounds from Nadia's pistol into the back of his head while he was still screaming.

Six rounds left in the pistol. Nothing in the rifles.

He ran.

Across the street there was a ditch, an old irrigation channel running along the edge of the town, a metre deep with brown water in the bottom. Fifty metres of open road to get there. Someone saw him halfway across and shouted, and the whole street turned.

The machine gun on the second technical opened up. The road around him exploded in chips of asphalt, and something ripped through the side of his trousers and scorched a line across his thigh, and he kept running. Then a sound he knew. A dull thump and a hiss. He saw it coming at him. An RPG, straight at him, at head height.

It hit a lamppost three metres in front of him, glanced off, and went skidding and bouncing down the road past his legs without exploding. A dud. That was the fifth piece of luck, and he didn't even have time to understand it. He threw himself headfirst into the ditch as the machine gun chewed up the lip of it where he'd just been.

There was a man already in the ditch.

He'd been hiding there, or smoking, or relieving himself. Cal never found out which. They crashed together in the brown water, and the man had a knife, and it went into Cal's forearm and grated along the bone. Cal didn't feel it. He grabbed the man's head with both hands, pulled it toward him, and bit down on his face.

He got the nose. He bit through it and tore it sideways with his teeth, and the man's scream turned into a gurgle of blood. Cal got him by the hair and forced his face down into the water and knelt on the back of his neck. The man thrashed. His hands came up behind him, clawing at Cal's legs, at his arms, at his face. Cal found the man's eye socket with his thumb from behind and pressed into it until the thrashing turned into jerking. Bubbles came up. The jerking slowed. Then stopped. Cal stayed there another thirty seconds just to be sure, kneeling in the ditch with his own blood running down his arm into the water, and the machine gun still firing over his head.

He crawled. The ditch ran along the edge of the town and went under the road through a concrete culvert, narrow and black and full of rubbish and something that had died in there a long time ago. He crawled through it on his elbows with his face in the filthy water, pushing the pistol ahead of him to keep it dry.

He came out on the far side of the road, behind a low wall, at the very edge of the town.

A man on a motorbike was stopped twenty metres away, engine running, craning his neck back toward the gunfire. He had a rifle slung across his back. He never turned round.

Cal walked up behind him and shot him twice at arm's length. The man fell sideways off the bike, and the bike fell with him, engine still running, back wheel spinning. That was the sixth piece of luck. The engine didn't stall.

Cal hauled the bike upright with arms that barely worked, dragged the dead man's leg out from under it, climbed on, and twisted the throttle.

He rode.

Bullets came after him. One took the mirror off the handlebar. One punched through the fuel tank, and petrol sprayed across his knee, and he kept going. The road climbed out of the town toward a low ridge. Halfway up, the back tyre was hit, or blew, or just gave up, and the bike went sideways and threw him. He rolled across the gravel, over and over, and came to rest on his back at the top of the ridge, staring up at the sky, with the pistol still somehow in his hand.

He heard engines.

He got up onto his knees.

Coming over the ridge from the other side, from the east, was a column of vehicles. Armoured. Heavy guns in the turrets. Their own. The lead turret swung straight at him, the gunner seeing a man on his knees in the road, covered in blood and filth, holding a pistol.

Cal dropped the pistol and put both hands up.

The gunner didn't fire. Somebody in the second vehicle had seen the uniform under the blood.

That was the seventh piece of luck. He'd stopped counting by then.

The vehicles stopped in a cloud of dust. Doors banged open. Soldiers poured out and spread across the ridge, rifles pointed down toward the town, where the smoke was going up in black columns.

A staff sergeant came running from the second vehicle. Holloway. Cal knew him. Everybody knew Holloway. A big, loud man who'd been in the army since before Cal was born.

He grabbed Cal by the front of his vest and hauled him up off his knees.

"Brenner! Brenner, look at me!" He was shouting over the engines, over the gunfire still crackling in the town. "Where's the rest of you? Where's Voss? Lindqvist? Okafor? Where are they? Where are the others?"

Cal looked at him.

He was shaking. He had four people's blood on his face and a dozen more on his hands, and another man's blood still in his mouth, and he was crying, he realised. He had been crying the whole time. Since the room. Since the stairwell. Through all of it. His face was wet with it, and he hadn't even known.

"Where are the others?" Holloway screamed.

Cal shook his head.

Just once. Slowly.

Holloway stopped shouting.

He looked at Cal's face. Then down at Cal's chest, at the buttoned pocket, where a few faded threads of pink and yellow were hanging out through the gap. Then up and across the valley at the block of flats at the top of the street, with its front torn off and its balconies hanging like broken teeth.

Cal watched him understand it. He watched it go through him like a round.

The soldiers nearest them had heard. They stopped moving. One by one, the ones around them lowered their rifles an inch, and looked at Cal, and looked at the building, and then looked anywhere else. Nobody said anything. Even the gunner in the lead turret had turned his head away.

Holloway let go of Cal's vest. His hands stayed in the air for a moment, like he'd forgotten what to do with them.

Cal looked down at his watch.

14:47.

Sixteen minutes.