The Sandman Cometh

Three

ThreeThe street in which we lived in those days was wide and sweeping. Terraced housing, but each possessed with that little blush of individuality which made them so attractive. All had front gardens, with little paths leading from the tiny gate that separated our private worlds from the traffic beyond. Not that there was much traffic, as I could remember. The fuel crisis had become a permanent fixture by then and the distant war in the Middle East meant people were conserving everything, especially petrol.

I was about six, I think, on that fateful day, sitting on our garden wall, my Nan beside me talking to Mrs. Roberts from next door. I can't remember what they were talking about, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway – my Nan could talk about nothing for hours on end. She was a lovely woman, so kind, so caring. Tall and big-boned. Spectacles. 'Have you got your glasses case?' my mum always asked her as Nan readied herself for work. 'Handkerchief, purse and keys?' It was a ritual. This particular day, she wasn't at work, so I guess it must have been a Thursday because the shops weren't open on Thursdays. They'd gone back to the 'old days' as Nan called them. Another indication of just how bad things were becoming.

Well, they talked, Nan and Mrs. Roberts and I watched the street. There were two dogs across the road and they alerted us to the danger. They froze, ears standing upright like they were on stalks, eyes shooting down to the left, then they were off, tails between their legs, racing away like greyhounds from the starting gates. I felt Nan tense, then she gestured for me to get off the wall, her hand flapping around like a flag in a gale. She didn't speak, but I knew she was worried. I got down, brushed my backside and she put her arm across my chest, pressing me back against the wall, hard. Both she and Mrs. Roberts stood ramrod straight, like soldiers at attention, eyes set straight, not a muscle moving, as rigid as marble pillars.

The Sweepers came. There were two of them, big men, dressed in long, beige coloured raincoats, collars up, massive coal scuttle helmets on their heads, the neck guards trailing down their backs like lobster tails. Some called them lobster-tails, a throwback to the English Civil War someone at school told me years later. But I didn't know that then. All I knew was that Nan was frightened, more frightened than I thought a human being could be, and that frightened me too.

The lead Sweeper drew close, smiling, seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were everywhere, the reason they bore the name 'Sweepers'. They patrolled the communities, seeking out 'undesirables' – the unregistered, those who were not yet chipped, many of them foreigners. So many people fled from the devastating wars in the east and swarmed into our country, creating a society at breaking point, and despair and fear walked hand-in-hand along every street. Most were innocent refugees, but some were hardened terrorists, d**g-traffickers, gangsters. This was what Nan told me. I won't repeat what Dad called them, but I think his sentiments echoed the majority.

Inside the Sweepers' huge helmets ran a mass of technology, feeding a constant stream of information into the cortex of their brains. Scanned, filtered and diagnosed, this enabled them to identify, within a few seconds, the exact whereabouts of any person not authentically chipped. Don't ask me how they did it, but it was fast and it was brutal.

The bigger of the two was ruffling my hair, whilst the other looked along the houses.

“Nice boy, mother,” said the big Sweeper in a sickly sweet voice, “you must be very proud.”

“He's not mine, sir,” said Nan. I glanced at her, frowning. Nan calling him sir? “He's Mabel's.”

The Sweeper nodded, knowing that this was the case because of the scan he had made. I noticed the little electric impulses scuttling across the visor that he had lifted up so we could see his eyes. When they went into action, the visor came down, connecting them into the central mainframe. But they could scan with the visor up or down. Their eyes did that. Hot-wired into the helmet. More machine than human being. “Yes, of course he is. Tell me more about him, mother.”

“Born and raised here in the street, sir,” she answered. I noticed she wasn't looking at him, her eyes locked straight ahead, mouth set in a wide grin. But not a pleasant or friendly grin, more like one engraved into her features. I saw the sweat glistening on her brow and realised she was terrified.

“A good boy?”

“Very good, sir. Doing well in school. “

“Yes. Had problems with the downloads, I understand.”

“Yes. I think it was when…” she suddenly stopped, her eyes darting to his and quickly back again. Did I hear Mrs. Roberts take a sharp intake of breath?

The Sweeper's shoulders shifted under his voluminous raincoat. “Heard rumours have we, mother?”

“Nothing that is of any importance, sir.”

“No? Why don't you share them with me then?”

For a dreadful, achingly long time we all stood there in silence, so quiet I could hear the processors whirring in his head. With painful slowness, he reached out his right hand and placed it on her shoulder and spoke in the most menacingly soft and sweet voice I had ever heard. “Just the highlights will suffice, mother.”

I sensed her body giving way, all the resistance leaving her, his huge paw pressing down with immense strength. A tiny moan escaped from her mouth. “A glitch, sir. Nothing more.”

“A glitch. Explain it to me, mother.”

The use of that word, 'mother', chilled me to the bone. I snapped my head around. “Please sir, it was a software problem. The connection went down and for a moment…”

He turned his eyes to me, eyes which burned with something not of this world, dissecting and examining every nerve and fibre of my body. Seized with crushing terror, I felt my bowels loosen. “Did your chip malfunction, sweet child?”

I managed to speak, my voice little more than a croak, “Only for a second or two, sir.”

“Best run a diagnostic,” he said and his eyes closed.

A sudden bolt of searing white light pulsed through my brain, but before I could react, it happened.

One minute we were stood there, hardly daring to breathe, my eyes filling up with tears, my thoughts jumbled up but still managing to wonder why this horrible man talked to my lovely grandma in such a way his words turned her into a quivering wreck, and then…

Two or maybe three men, I can't remember the exact number, came bursting out of a doorway from across the street. Instantly, the second Sweeper was moving, visor down, his raincoat blooming wide open, the massive gyro-controlled laser suspended from his shoulder taking a bead on the running 'undesirables'. The lead man reared up and screamed as the first burst hit him, a single beam of intense light slicing his torso in two. I watched in horror as his legs kept running forward for a few steps before buckling and collapsing to the ground. The top half of his body, a singed slab of charred meat, flesh crackling, spitting fat, lay quivering on the pavement. I could see his face, the eyes wide, terrified, open-mouthed, smoke curling out from between the lips. The whole body in spasm.

I screamed. There was nothing I could have done to prevent it. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Nan pulled me down to the ground, her body shielding me. But I could still see.

The other two men cart-wheeled over the pavement as the lasers hit the ground next to them, bringing up their own weapons, barking out their responses. These were older weapons, of course. Ancient. Nine-millimetre automatics, no doubt loaded with dum-dum bullets. Several hit Mrs. Roberts across the chest, throwing her back, making her dance like a marionette as the bullets punched into her body, little explosions of red blood peppering her body – one, two, three, the bullets hit home, like the beat of drum to accompany her dance. She made no sound, just a shocked expression crossing her face before she slumped to the ground.

I screamed again. Nan threw her hand over my mouth, pressed me close. But I had to know, I had to see.

The big Sweeper, the one who had spoken to us, moved fast, cutting across the street, whilst his colleague out-flanked the two men. It was over quickly and viciously, one of the men losing his head in a blink, the other both of his arms. They wanted him alive, that much was obvious. And they had him. His wounds, instantly cauterised, were not going to be the cause of his death. The t*****e he would endure would do that. But not before he told them everything they needed to know – who controlled them, where their hideout was. How many more of their 'cell' plagued the streets?

Three hover cars and a seemingly endless stream of air-bikes came whispering down the street, blocking off all the entrances, Sweepers disgorging from the vehicles like a swarm of locusts, dozens of them, spreading out in all directions.

But they all froze when the Sandman came.

I'd never seen one before that day. And from the moment I saw it, my waking hours were to be filled with dread, and my sleep dominated by nightmares.