https://youtu.be/2Ow5otkT1N0
The Weapon
by Bob Johnston
Bob Johnston lives in Scotland where he loves the landscapes and loathes the weather. A quartet of his stories, along with links and information, can be found at bobjohnstonfiction.com
More TTTV stories by Bob Johnston
The trouble started on one of those hot lazy days that sometimes happen in June. Morgan had been spending a few nights back at the family home, ungraciously taking a turn looking after his mother. The woman had been insufferable when he was a child. Now that he was an unsuccessful adult, and she suffering from the early effects of dementia, she was even worse.
He sat mutely listening to the news channel while his mother droned on about his older sister, the one who never visited. Her rhetoric had always been glowing about Karen when they were younger, now it bordered on saint worship. Morgan liked Karen, he always had, but the real Karen was nothing like the fantasy his mother’s increasingly broken mind had created. The real Karen, the Karen Morgan liked, hated her mother even more than Morgan did, and she had scarcely spoken with her for years.
The old wall-connected phone rang. Morgan ignored it but his mother lifted the receiver and adopted that posh, affected voice that made him want to puke.
“Six, oh, one, four, the Ferris home.” Morgan cringed. “Who? Who is this? Catherine. Who’s Catherine? Oh, Karen.” And her face lit up. The saint had actually phoned. Morgan muted the TV and flicked on the live sub-titles, but he wasn’t paying real attention to his mother, Karen or the TV.
“Your brother is here. No, the other one. He’s not working again, can you speak to him and…” She stopped so suddenly that Morgan looked over. She was looking at him, her smile dissolving. “Of course. I’ll put him on. When will you be coming home, it’s been…” Again something Karen had said shut her up, but this time she looked like she was going to cry. With her lower lip trembling his mother thrust the phone at him, its old coiled cable pulling the base unit off the small table beside her armchair.
“Karen?”
“Morgan. Christ, what is she like with that damned accent? Are you watching the news?”
“It’s on in the background.”
“Something’s happening. People are getting killed everywhere. I’m getting out of the city and heading for our holiday home near the lakes. Are you able to drive?”
“No. It’s buses and trains for me.”
“Then you’re going to have to hunker down and keep quiet.” He heard a crash and raised voices through the ear piece. “Morgie. I’ve got to go. Take care of yourself. Watch the news, and stay…” The line went completely dead, no crackling, no hissing, nothing.
On the TV the local news was starting to pick up on events that were consuming the world. While his mother muttered in the corner about Karen and bad language he stood up and went to the window. Across the road two neighbors were ripping chunks out of one another in big clumsy movements. They looked like they were fighting all on their own and the other had just happened to be in the way.
He stepped back and looked at the TV. The news anchor looked off to one side, his eyes opened wide, and a figure suddenly appeared and threw him out of the camera shot. A few moments later the screen went black, not even a test signal.
He looked at his mother. “I need to go out, but I need to make sure your safe till I get back.”
She saw the fear in his eyes and just nodded.
“Is Karen all right?”
“Yes,” he said, looking over his shoulder and onto the hot sunny street.
#
The Rowes had a gun and Morgan knew that he had to get to that gun. There were, though, certain problems with that seemingly simple idea. The first was that he hadn’t seen the Rowes since he had stopped dating their daughter many years before. Another was that they lived several miles away, and what he was seeing out on the street told him that he was unlikely to make it half a mile, far less several.
He pondered the problem as he settled his mother into a chair in her bedroom. He had sorted her out with some snack food and bottled water and made sure she could see the small toilet. She was scared and for once he felt some sympathy for her. The illness was what it was, her horrible personality was a far deeper problem, but right now they were just two terrified individuals.
“Stay wrapped up. Don’t answer the door, and don’t put on the lights. It won’t get very dark tonight, it’s midsummer. Just stay safe and I’ll be back when I can.”
She nodded and squeezed the hand he held out. He still couldn’t bring himself to hug or kiss her.
In a kitchen cupboard he found an old friend, a blunt hatchet he had once used as a general-purpose tool when he had lived at home. The insulating tape he had carefully wound onto its handle years before was still tight. It was heavy, unbalanced but it was better than nothing.
He sat for a while in front of the dead TV, flicking empty channels. There was no way he could get to the Rowes using the streets but there was another way. The only problem was he hadn’t used it since he had dated Carly Rowe. He carefully stood in the bay window and looked across the road and up the railway embankment behind the repair shop. The North Junction Signal Box stood high up on the embankment, unused now but left undemolished. If he could get up onto the railway then the Rowes home was only three or four miles of relatively straight track away.
He went to the front door, listened carefully and then pulled it open silently. Mick Pascoe, the hated neighbor from next door, was standing there. He was older than Morgan remembered but he was still big, powerful and as mean and unreasonable as ever. He reached towards Morgan’s throat with an animal like whine that suddenly cut off as Morgan planted the blunt hatchet into the center of his forehead. As Mick slid downwards Morgan kicked him in the chest and sent him sprawling out and onto the short front pathway.
Morgan locked both doors and stepped over Mick’s silent body. Dead or not he had enjoyed planting the hatchet so effectively. The man had menaced him constantly when he had been a kid and payback can be great. He looked across and up at the junction box again. He remembered the route. This could be done.
#
The TV might be down but the power wasn’t, as he discovered when he tried to enter the tenement below the railway line. When he had made this journey before there had been no security doors in any of these buildings. Now he could not get through to the back yards. He pressed his back against the heavy steel door and carefully scanned the road. There was no one close by but he could hear the sounds of fighting. What next?
He hadn’t discovered this railway route when he had met Carly. In fact he had been exploring the huge tracts of land where several lines converged for years. It just so happened that her home and his turned out to be close to connecting lines. A few minutes away, around a corner, was a road crossed by three railway bridges. He had clambered up onto all of those bridges at some point, even discovering an abandoned tennis court on one occasion.
Morgan gripped the hatchet tight and jogged along the road. In the distance he saw several figures mutilating other figures but so far no one was paying him much attention. He turned the corner and almost crashed into a teenager who was flailing what looked like a Samurai sword about her head. She was short and he felt he could deal with her but then he saw that under the third bridge were a whole group of youngsters, presumably her pack. He had to be quick.
She was mumbling and her eyes were glazed but she did seem to be aware of him and took a couple of short steps forward. He backed up, and then jumped forward swinging the hatchet that caught her a very slight glancing blow on her forehead. She stopped, let the tip of the sword drop to the pavement, and touched the shallow cut. Her eyes awoke and she turned shouting to the group behind her.
Morgan took his chance and leapt up onto the low wall under the bridge arch. The narrow gap he had once used to get up onto the railway had been closed with a brick wall but it was only a bit taller than him and there was still a gap. All he had to do was get up and over and he could lose himself in the wilderness of tracks and undergrowth.
He was not as fit as he had been back then but he was managing to climb when his ankles were grabbed from below. Adrenaline surged in him and he kicked out, threw his toes against the wall and almost ran up the distance to the top. Then into the gap and he was running up hill for the flat of the tracks. As the sounds behind him faded he realized that he wasn’t being followed and he slowed a little. He needed to be cool. There was a station he had to pass through up ahead.
#
The station stood on a bridge above a busy main road. As he suspected people were on the north platform fighting. The routes into the station from below were open and easy. He slid across the tracks and studied the south platform. It was clear. He looked beyond the station to the enticing straight track beyond. There was another station there but after that it was just railway and overgrown embankments. The damned metal rails were almost enticing.
He moved along the rails, keeping as hidden as he could by the platform. He had seen no one else so far and had surmised that, whatever was driving this aggression, people were still sticking to what they knew. In all the years of exploring this strange, abandoned landscape in the middle of a large city he had never encountered another soul. It had always bemused him how people found their streets so safe when, in fact, they were nothing of the sort.
A loud crash sounded behind him. He spun and saw a huge man who was holding what looked like an ancient spear. The man prodded this at him and moved steadily forward. Morgan just knew that this wasn’t a Friday night face off and there was no point trying to calm this character down. In fact he didn’t look particularly agitated, just quietly determined to stick the vicious looking steel end of the spear into Morgan.
Quiet he may have been, but he was also impatient and his final thrust threw him just enough off balance to miss and tip forward right into Morgan’s waiting hatchet. This time he did follow through and caved in the man’s skull with a second blow. His senses felt bright and sharp as he quickly removed the man’s heavy leather belt and pulled it round his own waist. He then slid the hatchet into this makeshift holster, lifted the spear that he now saw was a garden edging tool.
The sound of fighting from the north platform was becoming quieter, suggesting that someone was winning. Morgan took off down the tracks, trying to keep to the sleepers that were just the wrong distance apart to allow for easy running.
#
As he made his way under bridges and over bridges Morgan began to get a better picture of what was happening in the city. Most people seemed to have bolted themselves indoors, so the streets were quieter than usual but what activity there was was horrific. The line passed by homes and gardens, pubs and work yards, supermarkets and shops. He regularly saw doors being kicked in, and people being dragged out into the open. Just before the second station on his route he met another rail track user and took an antique bayonet from him with little direct violence.
Morgan studied the blade for a moment, slid it back into its sheath and found a spot for it on his belt. Its former owner was already a hundred yards away and heading for some football fields in the distance. There had been no opportunity even to offer a hand of friendship or help. The bayonet’s owner had waved the blade in Morgan’s general direction, looked at the edging tool, and had then dropped the blade and run.
“Waste not, want not,” he muttered and walked into the next station that was quite empty.
Morgan paused on the ground between the tracks, the platform at chest height. Fear tugged at his belly. Why was there no one here? Then he noticed that the platform was clearly visible from the road above. Whatever fighting might have happened here probably already had. He climbed onto the platform and walked quietly to the waiting room. It was filled with horribly battered bodies.
He lifted a pistol from the chest of a young woman and flipped open the chamber. All fired. He dropped it and made his way to the end of the platform where he jumped down and continued on the last section of the journey.
#
The line effectively cut suburban neighborhoods from one another on this stretch. Areas might be mere yards apart but huge diversions were required by road to get from one to the other. Morgan kept close to undergrowth where he could, but tried to get a feel for what was happening on the ground, and it was much of the same. Relatively small numbers were prowling the streets, while the vast majority were locked in and plainly just hoping for the best.
Given the circumstances, he was surprised that the sight of Carly’s house over the top of another house and garden brought a pleasant flicker of memory. The relationship had been intense but doomed from the start. Her parents, the ones he was shortly going to try and take a gun from, did not like him from day one.
Morgan smiled and stopped. He looked back down the railway in the direction he had come. “I was from the wrong side of the tracks,” he said and laughed. It wasn’t the whole story, but it was an issue. He simply wasn’t as well off as Carly’s parents hoped their daughter’s boyfriends should be. The fact that they came from ordinary backgrounds as well struck him as amusing now. It hadn’t then.
The next bridge was his point of departure from the relative safety of the tracks. He scrambled down the stone wall and, for the first time in what felt like ages, his feet touched tarmac. The Rowe family home was just five very exposed minutes up the hill but he made it unscathed. This better-heeled area was keeping its head down, except, he presumed, for those of its number who were joining in with the mayhem.
Morgan stood on the driveway and looked up at Carly’s room. How many times had he thrown stones up there and waited to see her face appear at the window?
Her face appeared at the window, she looked across and towards the railway he had just walked along. Then she looked from right to left and finally down and into his eyes. He could think of nothing better to do than lift his hand in a limp wave. She looked down at him for what felt like an age, and all the while he held his hand in the air. Then she disappeared back behind the out of date net curtains.
#
Father Rowe had aged rather worse than mother Rowe but it was clear neither had warmed to him in the past couple of decades. Carly, though, was delighted to see him and he was pleased about that. Their split had been awkward but they had met a couple of times since then, just in the passing, and the awkwardness had passed.
“Can I have your gun?” He had little time for pleasantries with her father and was ready for any reply.
“Sure, Morgan, but what do you intend to do with it?”
The man’s agreement and sudden lack of hostility was disarming. Morgan took a moment before replying. He stood the edging tool against the kitchen table they were all sitting at, and then he slipped the bayonet and the blunt hatchet out of his weapons belt. As he was doing this Carly’s father went out of the kitchen and when he returned he was carrying the shotgun Morgan had been so taken with all those years before. Rowe placed it on the table above Morgan’s improvised bits and pieces.
“So, what do you want it for?”
Morgan sat back in his high chair, suddenly mighty tired.
“To protect my mother. She has dementia.”
“There was always something wrong,” muttered Carly. Memory surged in him and he unexpectedly recalled that his parents hadn’t approved of her either, some sort of inverted snobbery in their case. He let it go.
Rowe shrugged and held his hands out above the well-maintained gun.
“Fine. It’s yours. I’ve got about twenty shells in the utility room. You can have them as well.”
Morgan lifted the gun and was astonished again at how heavy it was. Then it hit him.
“Twenty shells. Is that all?”
“I haven’t done any shooting for years. I keep meaning to get rid of the thing but, hey, time passes. Boy does it pass. Carly is here visiting because her mother isn’t well. You picked an odd day to come visiting, Morgan.”
He put the gun back down on the table and smiled. “Purely circumstance, Mr. Rowe. I’ll leave the gun with you. You can probably use it better than me.”
He lifted his own motley collection of weapons from the table and slipped them into the belt. With a slight flicker of shame he recalled the look of fear in the eyes of the former owner of the bayonet. Guns run out of ammunition, fear seems to reload itself if it is done right.
“I better get going. It won’t get completely dark tonight but my mother will still be scared.”
Carly looked at her father and then across at her mother who had said nothing during this peculiar reunion.
“Dad, can I borrow the car and at least drive Morgie back home?”
Morgan looked down. ‘Morgie.’ Even in those moments when they had met again over the years she had avoided ‘Morgie.’ It was always Morgan. He smiled a little but then looked up.
“I’ll be fine, folks. I know a reasonably safe way back. A glass of water and a mouthful of food would be great, though.” He tapped the gun. “Thank you for the offer, but I think I can manage.”
#
Morgan stood a little away from the North Junction Signal Box and looked up into the midsummer sky. It was wrong to say there was no night at this time of year, but it was mostly twilight. The sky glowed and the sun was not far below the northern horizon.
He looked down and across the road. The family home was in darkness and seemed to have suffered no further violence. It was a bit too dark to see clearly but he had the impression that Mick’s body was still lying on the front path. In front of him was the tenement building he had failed to enter earlier on in the day. He doubted that the rear security door was any easier to get through than the front, so he had decided to push on to another bridge above a main road. If he could get onto the street from there then he was only five minutes from home.
He checked his hatchet and bayonet, adjusted the spear on his arm, and then headed for the bridge. That gun would never have fitted anywhere, he thought, but wasn’t it good to see Carly again.
Somewhere in the distance a car exploded and someone began screaming, but Morgan was already getting ready for getting home.
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