THE NORWICH INCIDENT#
“Thank you…” Engineer Sanchez was grateful that he had been saved from an angry mob about to lynch him for saying too much. “I thought I was going to die.”
“There is a price, Engineer. We did not rescue you out of good will.” The man who had ordered him to be rescued was now the one escorting him out of the zone with a group of armed men by his side. “I have a slight problem, and I need you to help me fix it.”
“Well, what is it that you need help with? I only fix computers and machines…”
“I need help with a computer.”
“Why don’t you call your lo–”
“No, no, we already have you here. That won’t be necessary.” Engineer Sanchez didn’t understand why so much secrecy, or why him specifically.
They silently walked through the dark alleys and odd streets of the city for several minutes until they reached a building that had a plaque reading, “3rd Platoon, 7th Company HQ.”
“Sir?”
“Lieutenant. Lieutenant Dario Crasso.”
“Lieutenant… you need me to fix a computer, right?”
“Indeed.”
“Is it a military computer?”
“Why, yes.”
“I don’t have clearance for that. You need to–” The Lieutenant took out his sidearm and pointed it at the Engineer.
“This is the last time I tell you. You”—he walked closer to him—“will”—sidearm pointing at his chest—“fix”—leaning to the right—“it”—into the heart. “Get it?” And then came the sound of a mechanism being triggered; the sidearm’s safety had been removed. It was ready to fire now.
“As you wish…”
“Get him inside.” Two armed men pulled him from the shoulders into the building. They took him, like a lamb to the slaughter, through the mess hall and the barracks. Rough men, trained to kill in the blink of an eye and drink a bottle of whiskey in the same amount of time, peered at him, then went back to their business.
Through a lifeless hallway he was taken until he reached a small room that was a complete mess. A person—probably one of the soldiers—was leaning against the wall. At first, Engineer Sanchez thought he was sleeping, but then he saw the blood and the… face, or what was left of it.
“Is that guy–” The soldier to his left backhanded him straight across the face.
“No ask. You work. Fix.” The man had a terrible accent; he could barely speak the language, probably from somewhere beyond the Germanic Wall. The Lieutenant soon joined them and saw the corpse against the wall to the east.
“Why the fuck hasn’t this been removed! Kristof!” A huge blonde man moved into the room and gave him a military salute with a guttural “Sir!” as tradition ordered. “What did I ask you to do?”
“Kristof forgot. Busy tending to men.”
“Tending to what? They are all half-drunk!”
“Not all half-drunk. Some all-drunk.”
“You useless…” The Lieutenant pulled his sidearm and fired once at the head. Then he viciously fired three more times at the head once the body was on the floor. “Claude!”
Another heavy pair of steps came from the hallway, and a shorter, dark-haired man reported with a military salute and a better grasp of English. The accent on the man revealed he was probably from the surrounding area or Northern France.
“I hereby promote you to Sergeant duty. You know the whole fucking drill—get rid of the bodies NOW!”
“Yes sir, immediately sir!” Newly appointed Sergeant Claude yelled some names towards the hallway, and instantly a group of four men appeared and pulled the bodies out. Claude, for his own sake, followed these men to see they did as he had commanded.
“You see what shit I have to put up with every day.” The Lieutenant took a glance at his handgun and placed it back in his leather holster. “It’s hard to find good people, you know? They give me shit to work with, you know? I get tired, I get angry, pissed. These guys barely speak English; they’re always drunk, you know? IT PISSES THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME EVERY GOD DAMN DAY! You know…?”
After that fit, the Lieutenant looked at Engineer Sanchez and sighed. He walked towards a metal box on the ground that had been completely shredded to pieces and pointed at it.
“That was our only computer, and we used it to get in contact with our HQ in Hastings for validation on everyday tasks and roll call. One of these assholes broke in here, drunk, and tore it apart. Don’t ask me how, because I can’t even begin to discern how the fuck he got in.” The Engineer examined the case. It was lost—nothing he could do for it—but the inside didn’t look so bad except for the video card, which had been broken on impact, and the Ethernet card, which would effectively leave them out of the network even if he managed to fix the thing. “I need this fixed BEFORE dawn, or I’m not gonna hear the end of this one.”
“Well… I can fix it.”
“There we go.”
“But you’re gonna be offline.”
“What? What do you mean, offline?”
“Your Ethernet card is broken, and I don’t have a replacement.”
“E-what? You better speak to me in clear fucking English and not broken techno-babble, kiddo.”
“Imagine a city that lives from sea trading.”
“Like Ipswich.”
“What would happen if, all of a sudden, a storm comes in and breaks everything on the coast?”
“They’re fucked.”
“That’s exactly your case right now.”
“How do we get a new one?”
“We need to speak with–”
“No. No.”
“–the office of this–”
“NO!”
“AREA! You have no other choice!”
“Look! I already had to kill two of my men for this. Reporting that to the higher-ups is going to bring heat on me, and now if I tell them one of their precious metal boxes broke down, they’re going to pour so much shit down my throat I’ll have to shit out all my organs to fit everything in.”
“Well, I can fix it, but still…”
“BUT STILL! Yes… now wait a second. You keep telling me to contact the office from this area. Aren’t you from this place?”
“No, I belong to the Lincolnshire Office.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“The Office in this area called me in because they needed help with one of their internal systems. A hardware malfunction, probably something related to a power supply. Sad to think I lost my papers when the mob wanted to lynch me.”
“Alright, no need to get all techno-babble in the way. Can you go in without drawing any suspicions about what’s going on?” The Engineer nodded a few times.
“Yeah… I’ll just go in, grab what I need, and get out.”
“Perfect.”
“Without looking at or fixing anything. Yeah, that’ll draw a lot of attention to me.”
“Then go and fix whatever you need to fix, then come here.”
“Alright…”
“I’ll send two of my men to watch over you.”
“I don’t think–”
“I INSIST on that.”
“Alright, alright, just calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when this is up and running again.”
“The sooner we go, the better.”
“Get me Petrov and Tyler, now!”