Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

Mirko, a gentleman aged gently by a long life under the Mediterranean sun, hated his job. It was supposed to be an easy affair which would see him gently into retirement. But with a complicated state pension situation, a nasty habit of spending his earnings down at the local tavern following a long shift, he was looking at retirement somewhere in his mid-hundreds. Even with his healthy seafood-based diet, he was hardly looking to hit that age.

Besides, nights had grown worse for him over the past few weeks. Strange things beginning to happen, giving him the hackles he hated. It was becoming a rather strange place to work.

He worked as a security guard on a crumbling old British airfield. The Brits had stationed several bases all dotted over the island during the Second World war, that remained in use for some time after – no doubt to do with the Cold War. Then as the eighties rolled around and the world began to settle itself into hippie peace, they were slowly but surely abandoned – their presence now far more minor than they had been in the previous century.

Some of them had been converted into quite fancy workshops where local artisan producers made crap for the tourists – some of which was quite good if you were into mosaic bowls and Maltese cross candlesticks. He’d also tried a hand at it for a little while, something extra to pay off his bar tab, only to discover that while he might have the skills to be able to woodwork or metalcraft, he didn’t have the patience to deal with dumb tourists asking stupid questions about the authenticity of the material.

It was knocked up in a battered old tin can, what do you reckon?

People irritated him so much that instead, he’d taken on the night security guard role at one of the abandoned airfields, further out of town. Away from the tourists, away from even the locals. A night it was even away from the heat of the day and the irritating co-workers. He had imagined it would be heaven. He was a particularly heavy sleeper away, so during the day was never bothered once the shutters were closed.

Every night he would patrol the grounds on an hourly basis. He didn’t know why they insisted on this, his bosses, they were so far out of town there weren’t even local children to mess about in the back of the tin-can barracks. Why would you come around to fool around with your childhood sweetheart in the back of a dusty military shed – when there were plenty of abandoned local homes for you to do the same in much closer to home?

The small office, a pool of light in an otherwise dead and dark landscape, was a small brick building at what used to be the entrance to the complex. It had everything he needed – a working television, a functioning phone and a crapper in the back.

From there he would wander out into the night. Most nights the Milky Way would light his way, sometimes joined by the radiance of the moon. Other nights he would need his torch, the cloud cover blocking off the natural light. Either way, the long, curved mounds of the various barrack buildings lay in parallel lines down a strip of land – ending with a runaway stretching out further into the distance that he cared to go. The air tower, a squat short building had pretty much already fallen into disrepair and was a place no one ventured into.

He would go down one side, unlocking and peering into each of the crumbling metal buildings. Sometimes there were boxes inside, sometimes there were pallets. Often there was nothing save for the slight squeak of a mouse caught in the torchlight. He would then lock up, move onto the next one – and so on and so on until he reached the end of the left-hand row. He would come back up the other side in much the same fashion, finishing more and more these days with a quick al-fresco piss, the night’s coffee working its way faster and faster through him with middle age.

A few of his friends, who in reality were the other local drunks in the bar, had asked him whether or not he was ever scared working the night shift alone on that abandoned base. He had replied to the negative, he didn’t care – the only thing that scared him was people and very few of them would bother to come out so far.

One night they had deigned to grace him with their presence, attempting to find out if he was as devoid of fear as he claimed. But the funny thing about drunks was they were nowhere near as quiet or as sneaky as they thought they were – and so when four portly shapes covered in a white bedsheet began to stumble around outside his office building, shushing each other loudly enough to spittle, he’d been the one to terrify them.

Lately, that had begun to change. Only over the past two weeks, though. It had begun small at first, the sound of a shuffle in one of the barracks. He chalked it up to a large mouse but he was sceptical. His torch showed nothing in the darkness, no intruders, so he forgot about it.

A few nights later, while wandering from left side to right side, looking out at the distant hulk of the air-tower he heard steps. Only a few though he had been standing perfectly still. Shining his torch around, he saw no one. That spooked him more and so he’d skipped the next hour’s patrol, only coming out when the summer’s early dawn began to lighten the sky.

There were whispers one night, he was sure of it. Subtle whispers in the dark he had to strain to hear. Not the whispers of the wind, scattering small pebbles and dust across the landscape or against the side of the building. People.

He had mentioned it to his bosses, who had chalked it up to some bored local kids probably playing a prank on him. Or maybe they had tired of the abandoned houses near their hamlets and decided to venture somewhere with a bit more excitement. Still, he had found no evidence of that, by day or by night. There was not even that much for them to steal, vehicles which no longer ran, British army uniforms which would by now be out of date and low spec – there were no armaments and didn’t need to be. Nothing harmful.

By the second week, he was convinced that someone was coming to the base every night. The worst incident happened when he thought he saw a black shape moving in the distance between two barracks. A humanoid shape that was gone before he could see. He had instantly knocked off the lights in his office, locked the door and allowed his eyes to adjust fully out to the night around him. He saw no other shapes, no other movement except the tricks his eyes played on him.

That night, the final night he would work there, he refused to leave the building. He sat through his normal first three patrols as the sun went down and the night rolled in. He couldn’t bring himself to put on the television, couldn’t make himself a cup of coffee. He sat in his chair, peering out into the darkness, looking for signs of intruders.

He truly was afraid of people, he knew what they could do to one another. It was a paralysing fear when all alone in the middle of nowhere. So when the lights went out – and he had not been the one to turn them off – he was unable to move. Hands gripped the arms of his swivel chair as he looked out into the night.

There it was. A black shape moved from one of the barracks and onto the path in the middle. It was a cloudy night and so all he saw was a dark black shape against a blacker background. His heart thundered in his chest when suddenly there was another beside him.

He let go of his bladder when he heard the soft click of the supposedly locked office door behind him. It opened, slowly creaking, a third shape appearing in the window. Only this was not on the outside. The slowly growing shape was moving closer and closer to him, the clear presence of movement behind him.

A small moan escaped his lips as a cold hand slipped over his shoulder. He felt someone lean down to him, a voice slid in his ear,

“Sorry, old boy, these games have been fun. But things have changed and we need to speed this up.”

He couldn’t remember anything after that. Not until the morning when he woke to a wet seat and the keyboard imprinted on his cheek. He had run, ignored the calls of his now-former boss; and sat watching the news the very next day as a pyramid broke through the streets of Mosta.