by Devon Ford
After it Happened
Book 6: Rebellion
Devon C Ford
Copyright © Devon C Ford 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2017
Cover by Claire Townsend
ISBN: 978-1-910780-61-9
www.vulpine-press.com
Dedicated to KH.
Annoyingly self-effacing, she demonstrated true bravery to me and took control of life when she was told it wasn’t in her power.
PROLOGUE
“Is it tonight?” Jan asked Steve excitedly, nervous apprehension twisting his insides. The older man thought for a moment before answering him.
“Yes,” Steve answered simply. “I’ll signal the start; everyone should know what they have to do, and if they don’t, well then it’s just too late to change it now.”
Jan nodded and turned to leave the room but swung back to face Steve when he heard his name called.
“Don’t die,” Steve said to him seriously before grabbing him close for a rough hug of solidarity. It was more than that, though. The two men had been thrown together by chance and had become not only close friends, but brothers. Comrades. The instigators of a rebellion which would, tonight, one way or another, change the lives of everyone in their camp forever. Jan hugged him back, patting his back roughly with a big hand, and assured the pilot that he wouldn't die.
“I mean it,” Steve added vehemently before pulling away and cracking a small smile. “Otherwise I’d have to find someone else dumb enough to get punched in the head as much as you do.”
Looking back and responding with a crude but good-natured insult in his native Afrikaans, he turned once more and left the room. Tonight he would fight, only this time he would fight to the best of his abilities. He would not test the waters, or play the crowd, or lose intentionally to an opponent so as to pick and choose who he fights next. Tonight he would put any man who wanted to stop him in the ground, and only when he faced the best warriors this place could serve up to him would they truly see what he could do. Relishing the prospect of facing either of the brothers, Will or Benjamin, in the arena without his own self-imposed limitations, he vowed to show them the cost of taking him for a fool.
Tonight, he thought to himself, shit or bust, I’m going to unleash hell. If he died, he died. He chuckled to himself at the film reference before his face dropped into seriousness as he began to flex and stretch his muscles. Walking towards the pit where the underground fighting took place made his heart rate increase and his breathing became more rapid. This would be the fifth time he had stepped into the arena; the four occasions before had left him with a week or two of physical recovery from the beatings he had received. Intentionally received, he reminded himself. Tonight would be different, he thought with a cruel smile tickling the corners of his mouth as he waited in the dark, metal container for his turn to fight. Winner stays on, and tonight he would be staying on until the very end.
Peeling off his shirt and going into the arena bare-chested for the first time, he heard noises as people finally saw how honed his body was; he hid his strength and size behind a happy and jovial personality, but there was no humour in him tonight.
Eying up his opponent he decided that round one of the Jan show would take a matter of seconds. He would tease and purposefully displease the crowd like that with a few opponents; dropping them quickly and offering no entertainment. That would get the crowd baying for a stronger fighter to join in and he hoped to meet the resident champion, Will.
When he or his brother stepped onto the hard ground inside the arena with Jan, they would die. Jan was about to cause the mother of all distractions.
And then the rebellion would begin.
BORING AS HELL
Alice absent-mindedly wiped an infected cut with antiseptic fluid, causing her patient to flinch and gasp at the stinging sensation. She didn't care much for their discomfort; the injuries were self-inflicted in her opinion. Ignorance was as much to blame for the infection as the injury itself.
Not that she was ever asked for her opinion. She was part of the machine: a small cog in a great contraption which ran on human beings. Get up, go to work fixing people who were broken, eat, sleep, repeat.
Her life since the invasion of their home was one of repetition, boredom, and wistful dreaming of another way to exist. She had considered a way out of that existence more than once. She had even been fortunate enough to find the medicine cabinet unlocked and was seconds away from self-administering a fatal dose of morphine when she came to her senses. It was only the small glimmer of hope which made her carry on with her dull life. The hope that Steve could somehow overthrow Richards, subdue his small army and take control of the camp.
It wasn't like their old home. This place was vast; almost a thousand people at her best guess, not that she was trusted to see any documentation or records. She was just a lowly nurse who treated injuries caused by stupidity and illnesses which any ten-year-old with a library book could diagnose.
It was bizarre, she thought, that she could barely recall her life before the world fell apart. She was away at university when it happened, studying for her degree in mathematics. Studying was perhaps a little strong; she was out four nights a week doing what any self-respecting student would do and making poor life choices whilst under the influence of very cheap alcohol. Now she was a nurse, and in some ways she had been a nurse her whole life; if her whole life qualified as the year since Dan had saved her from two savages with machetes and a loose understanding of the law surrounding sexual consent.
Her father, Mike, had been badly hurt and still bore the horrific scars from the cuts which would surely have killed him if it weren't for their rescue. Kate, a paramedic, had saved his life and later spent all her spare time teaching Alice the basics of emergency medicine. Lizzie had joined their small medical team too. It was a blessing that she was still there with her, even if they were forced to work differing shifts and barely had a chance to speak to one another. Lizzie had always been kind and motherly to her.
As she wiped roughly at the affected area and prompted more pained noises, her consciousness returned to the present. The wound, as small as it was, would need antibiotics if the infection was to be stopped before it poisoned the body. The thought of their finite supply of antibiotics stung at the edges of her consciousness for a second until she pushed it away. She had learned to concentrate only on the things she could immediately influence otherwise the stress would eat her up.
“Go and wait over there,’ she told the patient without looking at him. “You’ll need to see the doctor.”
Making a few notes in the patient’s file and placing it at the bottom of the in tray, which served as a waiting list, the injured man shuffled off to wait for his turn to be prescribed a course of medication which simple hygiene could have negated.
Returning to clean up her work station, her mind wandered again back to their former life at the prison. A quick mental inventory made for depressing reading: Dan was gone, having taken Kate, Marie, Leah and more than a dozen other people to chase some dream in Afric
a. The dream was that they could find some miracle cure for whatever caused women to have stillborn babies - ironic, as there was a newborn baby at their own camp which had all of the medical staff scratching their heads. After they had gone, newcomers had arrived at their home and not long after, they had betrayed them and brought in Richards’s entire army. They were all swept up, catalogued, bundled into trucks and set to work in the new camp. They were prisoners, but they were fed and protected. If freedom was starvation and fear, then captivity had to have some benefits she thought.
She often wondered what happened to the others. She saw people every day that she used to live with. She slept in her allocated cot in a room with no less than three of her former housemates. She saw Lizzie most days on shift change and she had even seen Steve once, when fate conspired to put them in the same room. That was a shock to her, as she had only learned the day before, by overhearing gossip, that he was still alive. Alice and Lizzie had tried so hard to keep him stable after he barely survived a helicopter crash. Lizzie had reset the bones of his lower leg but the internal injuries were beyond what equipment and training they had to be able to fix him. By the time he finally awoke from a coma, it was too late; the invading forces had come for them.
She knew her father still lived, that knowledge had found her shortly after arriving at the new camp. She had been treating a man with a twisted ankle when he whispered to her.
“Are you Alice?” he said softly so as not to attract the attention of the ever-present armed guards.
“Yes,” she replied, not taking her eyes off her task.
“Mike’s alive. He wanted you to know that he loves you,” said the man with a smile of achievement and happiness. Fighting down an emotional sob of elation, Alice picked up the man’s file and carefully read how the injury had happened from the triage nurse’s notes. He worked as part of an engineering party tasked with manufacturing and repairing farming tools. That made sense, she thought, her father was an engineer after all. Her elation at the news was short-lived, as there was no way of seeing him unless he ended up in the medical wing.
Still, he was alive.
She was alive, and that was really all she could ask for.
Shaking herself out of her reverie, she looked at the growing line of the sick and injured.
“Next,” she called in a bored monotone.
THEY SEE WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE
Steve was happy, in some small way. He had a purpose, and as he recalled Dan saying many times, people loved a purpose. It gave them a reason to get up, a reason not to give up, and motivated even the laziest of people to think about the future.
His version of the future haunted him day and night. His vision of standing on top of the steps to the camp headquarters and looking out over a massed crowd of frightened people; his vision of Richards dead at his feet; his vision of the elite guard killed in simultaneous actions all orchestrated by the whispers and rumours of the underground. Half of that network already existed, human nature dictates a need for gossip, but he needed to organise it. He needed to give the gossip a purpose; to steel it towards action, to gather the intelligence and form a plan ready to execute when the time was right.
He was certain that it wouldn't take much. Most of the guards were guards simply because it offered an easier, more privileged life. The path of least resistance, Dan had called it. The guards watched people and reported what they said in return for avoiding the manual labour. There was very little in the way of overt lawlessness, and credit where it was due, Richards ran a relatively tidy ship. That wasn’t to say that bad things didn’t happen, and he made a horrific example of one of his soldiers who had sexually assaulted a woman in camp.
Hundreds of people were rounded up and ordered into the large square outside headquarters. Richards took a microphone and peevishly explained the man’s crime, the disgust in his voice clearly evident. After the explanation, with no mention of having established the man’s guilt - not that it mattered, it seemed - he was summarily executed by firing squad.
No more rumours of guards mistreating residents reached Steve’s ears, but the oppression was far from over.
Now, having been finally allowed to rejoin the general population after his recovery had been mostly endured in solitude, he shuffled around leaning heavily on a walking stick and seeming, to all the world who cared, to look like a broken man. He was a shadow of his former self; a man who had flown helicopters in all weathers day and night in war-zones, and had even defied Richards by breaking his word and stealing a helicopter from him last year. Ironically, that same helicopter was the one that he had almost died in and still sat, mangled and rusting, next to the ornate building they used to call home.
He was happy that people saw him as an invisible, old cripple. They didn't know the truth.
The truth was, despite the life-threatening injuries he had received a few months ago, he was actually in good health. The limp was real due to the catastrophic break it had suffered, but he pronounced it to such a degree that nobody could tell at a glance that he would be able to drop the stick and sprint at any moment. He wore his clothes loose and oversized intentionally to make him appear thin and weak, when in fact he exercised feverishly when alone. He was as fit as the day he had lost control of the tail rotor of his Merlin and fought to keep it level as he ploughed into the soft, green earth so many weeks ago.
His physical state wasn't the only ruse he was proud of. Richards had summoned him on three occasions since he regained his health, and on all three meetings Steve had been assured of Richards’s insanity. He was also impressed that it was so effectively veiled behind logical planning and, he had to admit, a degree of efficiency in how the camp was run. He had fooled Richards into believing that he only wanted some company and a simple life for his dwindling days, and Richards’s arrogance made that lie believable. He had been given a menial job in the kitchens and allocated sleeping space with other people. Both concessions allowed him an unprecedented level of interaction with others, and from there served him well in forming the secret network of gossips into an ordered rebellion. He recruited lieutenants who knew the identities of other members and held trusted information, and slowly the network grew organically. He had nothing else to think about, and it became an obsession which filled every waking moment. One thing he was sure to do was insulate one member of the rebellion from another; if a person was interrogated or tortured for information - which was likely given Richards’s degree of paranoia - then they could only give up one or two people before they simply knew nothing of the others involved. Each layer had another layer, and that insulation protected him a hundred times over.
Over a few months he had made subtle contact with many of his former group members and learned that more than a few were unaccounted for.
In order to further the level of insulation, he carefully planned a break of anonymity in the low of information by way of using dead-drops, whereby a lower level informant would leave information at a set place during a time of high activity and would never know who picked it up and passed it on.
The only missing man whose fate was known was Ewan, their fiery Welsh farmer. Never one to be accused of having an introverted personality, he had refused to accept his place in the new order and ended up taking one severe beating too many. He died within a week of being brought to the camp and forced to tend livestock. The incident which led to his death was initially a simple misunderstanding, but when Ewan tried to explain something to people he had a tendency to come across as more than a little aggressive. That aggression had been reciprocated, and like two cockerels puffing up their chests the testosterone had become too great a force to be resisted. Ewan had died, and everyone else went back to work.
That was just one of a thousand injustices for which Richards would burn, Steve promised himself.
If he allowed himself to grieve for his losses, to lament over the things he regretted, then it was Leah he missed the most. The young girl he had spent twelve ho
urs a day training to use weapons, the girl who had become formidable and frightening, but was still the same sweet girl who viewed everything in a positive and simplistic way, taking each day as it came. Returning to his menial task of wiping clean and stacking the plastic trays ready for another meal serving, he wondered what she was doing and where she was.
LIFE INSIDE THE WALL
It had been weeks since they had found themselves safe behind the impregnable walls of Sanctuary, but Leah still felt half dressed. After the initial shock of finding safety, and the bigger shock of discovering that their onward journey was no longer necessary, she had finally realised something very important.
Having worn the same ballistic vest for as long as she could remember without it being washed, it stank.
That had been the first time she hadn't either slept in the thickly padded Kevlar or at least donned it the second she woke up.
Now, wrapped warmly against the bitter winter winds coming straight from the sea to her position high on the ramparts, she still felt strange not having the extra weight of body armour. Her feet felt light, like she was walking around in reduced gravity, and she began to suspect that her need to wear the vest was possibly more psychological than practical.
Even though they were technically disarmed when they had entered Sanctuary, Leah was still carrying two knives and had squirrelled a suppressed handgun into her clothes when they moved into their comfortable new quarters.
Still, she felt almost unnatural not waking before the dawn to watch for attacks. The relaxed atmosphere and the utter belief in their safety inside Sanctuary stuck in her throat too. It felt totally alien to not post sentries, other than one person being on duty to open and close the gate when required, and that person appearing to be as useful in a fight as coffee cup made of ice. In her opinion, they were just asking for trouble.