End of the Road (The Rozzers) Read online

  Contents

  Front matter

  Legal

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Epilogue

  COPS DON'T RUN, part two of THE ROZZERS (a free sample)

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  END OF THE ROAD

  Part one of

  THE ROZZERS

  By Diem Burden

  LEGAL

  Published by Shriven Books

  Copyright 2012 © Diem Burden

  Edited by Vanessa Finaughty

  Cover design © Jan Marshall

  Soldier image © Vladimir Ivanov | Dreamstime.com

  Police Officer image © Editorial | Dreamstime.com

  Police car image © Alan Mathews

  Landscape image © Yorkman | Yaymicro.com

  Sky image © Mykola Mazuryk | Dreamstime.com

  All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

  DISCLAIMER

  This book is based, in part, upon actual events and persons. I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in all instances, I have changed the names of individuals and places. I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence, as well as other descriptive details. Some of the events and characters are also composites of several individual events or persons.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Mr RV Mellor (1937 – 2006); a true teacher and a genuine English eccentric. Many years ago, he saw something in me that I couldn’t see for myself. If it hadn’t been for his selfless intervention, this book – along with all those to come – would never have been written.

  Thank you, Bob, for making a difference.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The sun had dipped below the horizon. The sky turned a sharp orange as darkness spread out across the desolate plain. Overtaking us in the distance was the black outline of a familiar Gazelle helicopter as it flew back to the nearby Army Air Corps base.

  I glimpsed a sign for Stonehenge, which marked the halfway point. We’d soon be back in camp, showered and dressed and out to Andover town centre with its pubs and girls.

  As the alcohol took hold of hungry men drinking too quickly, the debate between Pizza and Donk over the advantages of computers versus plant equipment became more and more animated.

  Pizza was the baby of the group, a young, funny lad of about eighteen years of age who had earned his nickname on account of his poor complexion, and had never once challenged it. That was the kind of guy he was.

  “Nah,” said Donk. “You dunna want none of that bollocks. Waste a-fucking time, computers.”

  Donk was hilariously proud of being called Donk, which we all knew was short for ‘donkey’. Built like a horse, he naively believed he’d earned the moniker on account of the size of his penis. He hadn’t; it was because he had a very long face which vaguely resembled that of a donkey. We never had the heart to correct him.

  “Construction’s where the money’s at,” Donk continued. “With the qualifications you’ve got, just top ’em up with a trucker’s licence on your pre-release course. Get a fucking top job anywhere in the world with those quals, mate.”

  What Donk was saying made perfect sense, and the free, month-long course given to all army leavers meant I could gain a qualification in almost anything I wanted. I had just twelve months to decide, and putting my name down for the course was another reason I had to make a decision about my future soon.

  “A mate of mine took a course in London with computers,” said Pizza, undaunted. “Did the lot, he did, and got loads of certificates at the end.”

  “And become what? A fucking secretary?” scoffed Donk.

  “He’s right though, Dave,” said Cat. “Like it or not, computers will be everywhere in the next few years. Could be useful to have computer skills; never know where it might lead.”

  Corporal ‘Cat’ Stevens was a newly qualified truck driver who had enthusiastically jumped at driving that day, although the unexpected beers had made him wish otherwise. Cat was my top drinking partner; everybody liked Cat and boy could he drink.

  I sighed. “You’re probably right, Cat, but computers? I mean, what am I gonna do with a shit-load of computer certificates?” In comparison, a trucker’s licence had merit – it was a real qualification.

  “How about the Old Bill?” asked Cat. “My mate’s in his first year with the Manchester lot, loving every minute of it, apparently.”

  I stared at Cat, speechless. The police? Me?

  “Dave a Rozzer?” laughed Donk. “Could you seriously see him as a cop?” He had a point; I had broken a fair few laws in my time and I hated the sight of blood.

  “Get stuffed, you ginger prick,” I said good-naturedly, as I turned and stared out of the window at the emptiness of Salisbury Plain. I listened absent-mindedly as the argument continued, and felt the warmth of something that had been missing from my life for several years creeping over me – job satisfaction.

  It was early September 1988, shortly after my twenty-third birthday. I remember it well because on that day a seed was planted, a seed that should never have seen the light of day. That seed only needed a slight amount of nurturing to begin its life, and that nurturing came from the most unexpected of places, as indeed did the damned seed.

  Apart from the sergeant, all the guys in the cab were my regular drinking buddies. We lived together, worked together, fought together and socialised together. We knew each other inside out, and probably would have died for each other if war had come our way. Thankfully it never did and, like all good military relationships pre-computers, I was to lose contact with each and every one of them as soon as I left the army behind.

  We were bantering about women, life and sex, easy and relaxed in each other’s company. The man in charge was Sergeant ‘Smudge’ Smith, an overly short career man who had been with us for so long that he was like part of the furniture. For a sergeant he wasn’t all that bad, despite his size. He was the man handing out cans of beer we’d been given earlier, blatantly ignoring army regulations which forbade drinking in military vehicles.

  “But Dave, seriously,” said Smudge. “You’ve got your pre-release interview with the Old Man next week, for fuck’s sake! You need to decide!”

  He was right, of course. I had to have something to say to the boss. In twelve months I’d be out of the army and on Civvy Street, and the major expected to hear of my plans for the future.

  But what?

  As much as the dull routine of army life had bored me for the last five years, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied at that day’s work. We’d been assigned to ‘civil aid’, which roughly means the army helping the civilian population in some way. We’d arrived in a tiny village in the middle of Salisbury Plain in a huge tipper-truck, towing an enormous tilting-trailer with one of our camouflage-green, earth-moving machines on the back.

  The twelve-tonne digger had spent the day knocking out the crumbling wall of the local church yard and digging the earth out, as we prepared the foundations for the vicar to have a new wall built. We also carted off all of the leftover rubble. Cat won the kitty for guessing the exact quantity of skeletons we’d pull out of the ground – zero, if you didn’t count the small finger bone. I tapped my pocket. A keepsake.

  “It’ll come back t
o haunt you,” Smudge had said, laughing.

  As we were sweeping the soil off the road the vicar came out and thanked us all individually, whilst presenting Smudge with a case of bargain beer for our efforts. We were thrilled; British squaddies will drink absolutely anything.

  The vicar watched as we routinely and expertly loaded the digger onto the trailer, tethered it down and jumped up into the spacious cab. After some careful shunting back and forth by Cat, we ended up facing in the right direction and headed off out of the village and up onto the desolate, darkening roads of the plain, and back to the dull routine of camp life.

  It felt good, and I wanted this feeling to be a regular part of my new life. So what could I do? In my panic to escape my previous life at seventeen, I’d ended up here – a squaddy in the British Army, overjoyed at being let out to do a bit of useful work for the day. That was a mistake I was only too aware of.

  How I’d turned out to be a combat engineer is down to similar, well-thought-out planning. At the army recruiting office I had commented on the fact that I liked the look of the Royal Engineer cap in the poster. I was told that I could learn any trade I wanted to in the Engineers. Nice cap; good trade. So into the Engineer Corps I went. As for the trade, I had no idea. Other recruits said that being a POM was the easiest job available. I had no idea what a POM was, and I certainly wasn’t one to take the easy option but it seemed like the job everybody in the know was taking.

  “You’ll have to sign up for six years for those qualifications, son. Army’s gotta get its money’s worth from its investment, you know.” When you are eighteen years of age, six years doesn’t seem like a very long time at all, so I took the job of POM – which I later learnt stood for Plant Operator Mechanic. For the last five years I’d been learning how to operate and maintain dozens of huge earth-moving equipment, along with all the other jobs we sappers did.

  I briefly thought of going back to college, but soon laughed at the thought. Being a squaddy changes you in subtle ways. I would never be able to fit in with a bunch of adolescent, immature college kids again.

  My rambling thoughts were silenced as efficiently as Donk and Pizza’s argument by the huge metallic crash from somewhere just behind us as something slammed through the truck. It smashed all thoughts from my wandering mind.

  We froze, brows furrowed, trying to identify the origin of the sound. Cat was startled enough to ease off the throttle.

  “What the fuck was that?” I asked quietly, looking at Cat. He was checking his mirrors as he double-de-clutched his way down the gearbox, carefully bringing the vehicle to a stop, apprehension on his face.

  “Did any cars pass us, Cat?” I asked, suddenly fearful. Despite the very realistic first aid training we did every year, I dreaded having to deal with injured people. I always panicked when confronted with a realistically made-up battlefield casualty, guts spilling out through his hands.

  “Dunno,” replied Cat. “I didn’t notice any.”

  I turned and, standing up, looked through the rear window of the cab across the back of the cargo area to where the digger’s cab should have been visible. It took a moment for me to comprehend.

  “It’s gone! The digger! It’s fucking gone!”

  The colour drained from Cat’s face. We all knew what this meant – we were in deep, military coloured crap. We’d lost the digger due to loose chains and we’d have to take full responsibility, especially the driver and the sergeant in charge.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” screamed Cat as he activated the truck’s hazard lights on the empty, darkening road in the middle of nowhere. He punched the dashboard as we jumped down from the cab into the silence of the plain, beer cans being thrown in panic into the darkness. When a squaddy throws his beer away, you know it’s serious.

  “Pizza! Run on ahead and wave down any approaching traffic!” I shouted. “We don’t want anyone piling into the digger.” I watched him swiftly disappear into the darkness and turned to the next man. “Donk, you do the same behind us until we know what we’ve got.”

  He quickly ran off in the direction we had come from as Cat and I legged it to the rear of the truck. We left Smudge flapping over the beers in the truck, anxiously throwing cans out of the window.

  We stopped and stared at the empty space behind the truck. The digger hadn’t just fallen off the trailer as we had feared; it had completely vanished, along with the trailer it was sitting on!

  Cat and I looked into each other’s eyes without saying a word – we both knew that this meant even bigger trouble than we initially thought. We’d lost the complete trailer! The whole damned thing had come uncoupled. Cat bent down with a view to checking the truck’s towing eye; he had to know – had he failed to lock it shut with the securing pin?

  The scream came out of nowhere and stopped him dead. Its volume was amplified by the absolute silence and darkness of the plain. It was right on cue and it scared the hell out of the pair of us. It was the most dreadful, painful, drawn out male scream I had ever heard. It came from the darkness, about fifty metres behind us.

  We stared into that void as the nightmare was unfolding around us, acutely aware of just how isolated we were out there on the plain.

  Part one of THE ROZZERS by DIEM BURDEN

  o0o

  CHAPTER TWO

  The trailer and digger combination – about twenty tonnes in all – had obviously flown off the side of the empty road, landing harmlessly on the grasses of the huge, empty plain. There was nothing but rabbits for miles around here, so who the hell was screaming and why?

  “Okay, so nobody passed us, but was there anybody behind us, Cat?” I asked.

  “No, definitely not,” said Cat. “I’m sure I would have noticed.”

  I believed him – Cat was a conscientious enough driver to be aware of what was behind him at all times.

  The sergeant reappeared, his nervousness clear. “What the fuck is that?” he whispered.

  Six eyes searched the darkness along the road, each of us wishing we were still at the church.

  “Anyone got a torch?” asked Cat.

  We both shook our heads.

  “Shit,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Well, there’s only one way we’re gonna find out who that is and why the hell they’re screaming like that.”

  I swallowed and looked at the other two. We nodded in unison, each drawing strength from the others. This is how I imagined war would be, as we set off at a ‘you go first’ pace into the darkness, none wanting to be the first to find the screamer; all completely terrified of what we’d discover.

  I jumped – we all did – when, after about twenty metres, a large black shape loomed out of the darkness, at rest in the middle of the road. It was about as big as an old TV set, black and mangled. Before any of us could guess what it was, the scream came again, further along the road, closer now. We ignored the lump of metal and walked on – it wasn’t screaming, whatever it was.

  About thirty metres further on a large black shape began to appear before us. The thing grew in size as we approached it, rising to about four metres in height and wide enough to completely block the road before us. It was digger - and trailer - sized.

  “I think we’ve found it,” whispered Smudge, hardly breathing.

  Another scream made us all jump, coming out of the black shape just in front of us. It didn’t stop this time – the casualty must have heard or sensed our presence. He wasn’t shouting for help as you’d expect someone in trouble to. He just screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

  We stepped closer and, slowly, the image of a car’s rear end formed, protruding from the black mass before us. So a car had passed us. Unfortunately, it was now wedge-shaped, reduced to a squashed point at the front by the twenty tonnes of heavy metal lying across the top of it.

  The front end of the car was buried somewhere under our digger, and still attached to the bottom of that was the trailer, now lying on its side across the road. I felt oddly relieved that the securing ch
ains hadn’t actually come undone as initially feared. In fact, they had done an amazing job of remaining intact throughout this enormous crash.

  We finally acted, as men do when there is no other way to delay the inevitable. We ran to the car, but we couldn’t open what was left of the doors. The screaming continued as we frantically searched for a way in, far more intense now. Or just closer. Damned close.

  The backhoe – excavator arm – was squashing the roof down at the exact spot that any front seat passenger would have been. There was only one scream coming from the car – there couldn’t have been two. The only way into it was through the smashed rear window, and Cat took the initiative and clambered into the backseat. I squeezed through after him.

  We were two burly squaddies squashed onto a tiny backseat, one much reduced in size due to the impact. We could hardly move and had to bend down so as not to hit our heads on the crumpled roof. The feeling of weight bearing down on us was very real. Once inside, we felt around the dark interior.

  My hands touched something warm and soft; the driver. We could feel him, but not see him; the darkness in the car was worse than outside. The driver was squashed so close to the lowered roof of the car that, if it hadn’t been for the noise coming from him, I’d have guessed he was dead. Fortunately, he proved to be very much alive.

  “We need a light,” said Cat.

  I searched the rear of the roof for an interior light and found it. I clicked the switch and, amazingly, it still worked.

  Only now could we see what was causing the man to make so much noise. He was pinned into his seat, and not two inches from his face and the whole of his body was the squashed-down roof of the car. We couldn’t see his lower legs; they vanished under the weight of the digger.

  “Help me, please, help me!” he cried, trying to turn his head towards Cat.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay! Try not to move; you might make matters worse. We’ll get you out of here; just try to stay calm, okay,” said Cat.