Let's Start A Riot

Chapter Eight - Immobilise

The air fills with voices now that all the windows are broken, and the soundproofing has been shattered. There is screaming and shouting mixed in with the ringing sounds of gunfire, it is horrifying.

Marcus, Hugo, and Sarah jump up from our hiding spot and start sprinting towards the cabin with Sarah shouting at me to follow. I get up and race after them, adrenaline rushing through my system.

Hugo and Marcus ram open the front door and charge inside with Sarah following close behind and I stumble in panting after. When I walk through the front door, I step into a literal murder scene. The hostiles are lying on the floor, surrounded by crimson red.

"Hostiles immobilised." Someone in the room says.

A few of the hostages have sustained minor injuries, a few looking bloody and bruised from taking a battering, and one has a bullet wound to the shoulder that they are staunching by tying their jumper tightly over the wound, but from what I can see everyone else is miraculously okay. I, however, am not.

The sight of the dead attackers, and the metallic smell of blood, the taste in the air – it is too much. I turn and run out of the cabin, where I promptly throw up on the grass.

Once I've thrown up the entire contents of my stomach, I take a deep breath and steel myself. When I finally feel ready, I step back inside. Sarah and Hugo are searching the bodies with some other people who I presume are other candidates, and Marcus is talking to Agent Hartley who has a grim look on his face and is rubbing the red marks that are raw on his wrists from where he was tied up.

I walk over to them gingerly, taking care to not step in the blood which covers the floor. Agent Hartley notices me and gives me a brief, tight smile. "I hear you almost got blown up on your first day, welcome to MI6."

"Gee, thanks," I mumble, "So who are these people? What did they want?"

"That's what we're trying to find out, we ideally would have kept some of them alive but when they realised that they were outnumbered they used the old cyanide in the fake tooth trick and killed themselves before we could ask." Hartley answers, glancing at a couple of dead hostiles that still have froth bubbling from their mouth. "They seemed to be messing around, stalling for time – they were waiting on someone. Did any of you see anyone else around the camp?" He asks as Hugo and Sarah move over to join us.

We all shake our heads. "No, Sarah and Patience were on lookout while Hugo and I took out some of the hostiles, and we basically travelled across the whole camp, there was no one... Except the time we heard movement when we were heading through the woods south of this cabin, but I believe they got here ahead of us rather than were heading elsewhere." Marcus responds, frowning.

Hartley returns the frown. "We will have to look into this – they overpowered us too easily, knew that we do the morning drill so that the squads wouldn't put up a fight until it was too late. There was more of them, a lot more, but a group of around twenty of them left about an hour before you arrived and haven't returned, none of them seemed to be the leader." He glances at Marcus, "That means we will be calling the director to camp."

Marcus sighs. "I know." Is all he says.

Hartley sends out multiple groups of soldiers to scour the camp for the other group of hostiles, and another group to retrieve vehicles to drive us all back to the cabins at camp. The group with the cars arrives back after an hour, everyone on high alert but there is no sign of any of the other hostiles. The other groups report back to Hartley via the car radios that the camp is empty – the hostiles have managed to disappear without a trace.

Hartley sends our squad first with the injured, telling us to go back to the cabin and have the rest of the day free. He informs us before we leave that we will have to further discuss the events of today, tomorrow, when the director, Marcus's father, arrives at camp. Luckily, this means no siren and no big drills. They need everyone focused on finding out exactly what the hell happened and how a military camp – especially one commandeered by MI6 – could be infiltrated. He also assures me that training – the basic kind – will begin for me tomorrow, a hostage situation isn't going to postpone that.