The Forgotten Holocaust. Scott Mariani

her attackers. Saw the second man, the one in the green hoodie, kick her brutally back down.

      But now Ben was on them. He ran straight into the hoodie without slowing down, twisting slightly to ram his shoulder into the guy’s chest. Ben heard the grunt as the impact drove the wind out of him. Up close, he smelled a minty smell on the man’s breath. The man staggered but stayed on his feet. He reached behind him to draw a stubby black cylindrical object from his belt. Clutching it at one end, he gave it a sharp flick and the extending law-enforcement baton whipped out to its full length: an impact weapon prohibited from civilian use in most countries and capable of belting a man’s brains to jelly with a well-aimed strike.

      Ben had been in dozens of fights against multiple armed attackers. In situations like these, gaining control of the weapon was always the first priority. He shouldered his way inside the arc of the coming blow and made a grab for the hand clutching the baton. But while years of training had sharpened his instincts to a fine edge, weeks and months of drinking and self-neglect had dulled them back down. Not all the way down to the defenceless, vulnerable level of Joe Public, but enough to make the difference when up against two men like these.

      They were quick and determined. They weren’t afraid of him. They’d done this before.

      Ben’s lunge for the weapon was too slow. The man side-stepped him and came back with a downward baton strike that hissed through the air an inch from Ben’s face.

      He ducked back. Suddenly he was on the defensive. The other man was coming at him from the side, ripping an identical baton from his jacket and extending it with a practised flick of the wrist. Ben skipped backwards over the rocks, dodging a blow that would have smashed his collarbone. But as he moved, his heel caught a rock behind him and he fell. He rolled, twisted, ready to spring back to his feet.

      Too slow again. A boot lashed out at him and his vision exploded white as the hard kick caught him in the side of the head. Pain bursting inside his skull, he managed to get upright just in time to see the guy in the navy jacket make another move at him. He was lucky this time. His right fist closed on the guy’s wrist. Yanked it sideways and downwards while he twisted the elbow upwards with a rising blow from the heel of his left hand. The man cried out and dropped the baton. Without letting go of his opponent’s wrist, Ben threw a kick and caught him in the belly. But it was a bad kick with not enough drive and power behind it, and failed to bring him down.

      The next thing, it was Ben’s arm that was being trapped. He twisted his body around to wrench it free. The man had a strong grip. Ben punched him in the face and saw blood.

      But now the other one was rushing back into the fight, and Ben didn’t react in time. The baton flashed towards him in a dark blur that his senses were too blunted to block quickly enough, and connected hard with his cheekbone.

      Ben went straight down, blinded by agony.

      Then the baton hit him a second time, and a third, and the lights went out.

       Chapter Eight

      From out of the dark depths, Ben felt himself rising. It was a long, slow swim to the surface. Sounds were faraway, all blended into a roar of meaningless noise that filled his head and made it feel about to explode with pain. He blinked, rubbed his eyes. The left one felt strange. It wouldn’t open at all. What little he could see through the right one was blurry and dancing with flashes and strobes of light. He couldn’t think straight or stand up. His head was pounding badly.

      Slowly, things began to focus.

      The twilit beach and the rocks were illuminated by a glow of swirling blue. Radios fizzed. Someone was helping him to sit up. He felt cold. He winced as another searing stab of pain pierced his head. He still couldn’t quite see straight, but could make out figures of people around him. Shapes that he made out to be a police car and an ambulance were parked a little way off, at the edge of the beach. No, two ambulances. Why were there two?

      ‘Let me go,’ he mumbled to the person who was helping him, brushing them away. Looking up, he saw the person was a woman. She was wearing overalls like a paramedic, and her voice was gentle and reassuring even though he couldn’t make out the words she was saying. He tried to stand up so he could see past the crowd of people and find out what was happening, but pain and dizziness made it impossible. The paramedic helped him patiently over to a rock, where he sat and bowed his aching head between his hands. He felt the wetness of his palms and stared at them in the flashing blue light. They were slick with blood. He touched his face and realised where the blood was coming from. It was all down the front of his T-shirt and spotted over the blanket that someone had draped around his shoulders. He put his fingers to his blind eye.

      ‘Try not to touch it,’ said the paramedic, her words sounding clearer now. His cheek felt swollen and hurt badly to the touch. He wiped the blood from his eye, and found he could make out blurry images with it again. He remembered that he’d been hit there. Hit very hard. He remembered the baton. Recalled the man holding it.

      ‘Kristen,’ he mumbled, his voice coming out garbled and indistinct. He looked around. ‘Where’s Kristen?’

      A policewoman appeared out of the confusion and spoke to the paramedic. Ben heard her say, ‘We need to ask him some questions.’ The paramedic replied, ‘He’s got to be seen to first.’ And something about a hospital. It didn’t feel as if they were talking about him.

      ‘Where’s Kristen?’ Ben repeated. ‘I have to help her.’

      The paramedic said something that sounded like, ‘You can’t help her.’

      ‘Those men … they were attacking her,’ he protested. But nobody seemed to pay any heed to what he was saying. Couldn’t they understand?

      Finally he stopped trying to speak, as his voice was slurring and his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He felt himself being lifted and laid down on a stretcher.

      Time seemed to drift. Then there was the sound of doors slamming and an engine, and he could sense he was in a moving vehicle. Someone was with him, maybe the same gentle female paramedic. Maybe someone else. He was somewhere very far away. He floated off and felt numb.

      Then suddenly he was in a new environment, hard white light dazzling him, walls rushing past either side of him. Faces peering down. He realised he was lying on his back on a gurney being wheeled through a white corridor.

      ‘I’m okay,’ he tried to protest. ‘I just need to find Kristen …’ Then he passed out again.

      The next several hours were a blur. How he got from the gurney to the couch in the curtained cubicle, his bloodied clothes replaced by a hospital robe, seemed to pass him by. He was half-conscious of the activity that milled around him. People came, people went. More faces looking down at him, as if he was some kind of specimen under observation. The nip of a needle, followed by a tickling sensation, he realised was the gash in his scalp being stitched. He vaguely remembered all the occasions in the past when he’d been sewn back together. This was nothing. Twice he tried to tell them so and get up, but dizziness overcame him and he slumped down against the couch.

      His eyelids felt heavy, but they wouldn’t let him sleep. ‘I feel much better already,’ he kept saying. Still, he’d been through this routine enough times to know that was the procedure in suspected concussion cases. A grey-haired consultant named Dr Prendergast, sporting a florid bow tie and an ironic sense of humour to match, shone a light in his eyes and asked him a lot of questions about his headache, his vision, whether he felt any weakness down one side of his body, which he didn’t. Nor was he showing other telltale symptoms – he wasn’t vomiting, his skin wasn’t pale, his speech was no longer slurred and he didn’t have one pupil dilated larger than the other.

      But Dr Prendergast seemed concerned about the severity of the headache and the dizziness. Ben was wheeled off to have his head X-rayed to check for a skull fracture before being taken back to the cubicle, where they still wouldn’t let him sleep, plied him with pills and as gently