by J. T. Marsh
Apocalypse Rising
A Novel
J.T. Marsh
Book One of the
Revolutionary Trilogy
James 5
1Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
Copyright 2018 J.T. Marsh
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London, England
In the Not-Too-Distant Future
I
1. Before the Fall
Fifteen years ago all Europe was aflame. The working man’s passions, so long suppressed, were unleashed in a triumphant surge of insurrection and violence. For three weeks, a few million workers seized the continent and through pure strength of will held the whole world under their sway. It was a time not of heady ideals but intemperate, undisciplined outbursts of the working man made to live a life shackled by poverty, unemployment, and despair. Only a child at the time, Valeri Kovalenko was made to watch as his mother and father were among the striking workers killed in a hail of bullets. On a bright, unseasonably cold winter’s day, Valeri had the chance at a normal life taken from him by the black-clad troops meting out death by the bullet. But events are conspiring, and soon enough he’ll have his chance for revenge.
As uprisings go, this one saw much bloodshed, unlike what anyone would’ve expected in the middle of such countries as France, Germany, Spain, and here in Britain. There were strikes and demonstrations, angry voices and raised fists, workers seizing their factories and mills, students their universities, parishioners their churches, the whole lot of them forging a camaraderie from their common stand. But their newfound camaraderie succeeded in changing very little for the working man right away; once the bloodstains was cleaned from the pavement outside Westminster Abbey there was much hatred and recrimination vented but little progress made. Now, there’s war in the offing again, with erratic gunfire rattling into the night and bombs bursting in the streets, here and there the rage of the working man erupting in impassioned acts like the lashing out of cornered prey at the predator. Still the halls of his flat smell of cigarettes. Still he wears shirts and trousers with holes that grow wider by the day. And still he feels tired and sore all over when he returns home in the evening, where he lives under threat of eviction. Valeri Kovalenko knows this is not the life his mother and father died for. In the morning, one morning, Valeri rises, still tired and sore from the last day’s work, the little flat in Dominion Courts he shares with his roommate filled with the summer’s thick, oppressive heat. She’s not there; his only company is the dull roar of the crowds filling the street. In the sweltering heat of an unseasonably warm summer’s morning, Valeri makes for the window and mops sweat from his brow, then turns to the task of facing the day.
Fifteen years ago, Valeri was only a child. Now he’s a young man, and his heart rebels against any injustice, however slight, whether perceived or real. As a young man he still holds in his heart bitterness for the murder of his parents at the hands of the troops who’d put down the revolt. Today, he arrives at work to find the machines out of order, with the movement of big, heavy pallets to be done by manual labour. Inwardly he steels himself against the soreness and the tiredness already in his muscles, sure to be magnified a thousand times by the end of the day. At work, Valeri is as a machine, his body moving smoothly, rhythmically, every motion rehearsed ten thousand times until so learned the act of performing his work requires no thought, no input, leaving his mind free to wander. In the city, today, there’s angry voices shouting, heaping insults on the policemen surrounding them, and there’s unemployed youths throwing stones and empty bottles in all directions, with the distant rattling of gunfire seemingly nowhere at all. But on this day when the lights at Valeri’s shop flicker and the ground quivers and the dust shakes free from the bursting of bombs in the streets, Valeri seeks cover not in the imaginary protection offered by the shop’s safe spaces but in the temptation offered by memories lingering in his future.
He remembers the way his mother and father would promise to always provide him a place to call home; now a man, he feels forever left to wander the world aimlessly in search of this home so taken from him. It’s in this mindset that he comes to find himself working as a common labourer in a common shop, witnessing, living the exploitation of man by man, not in the wide expanses of the shop’s floor but in his heart. No matter how hard Valeri works, it’s never enough. Targets are met after strenuous weeks, months even, then new, still higher targets set, again met, then set higher again. This is the life of the working man, but one which Valeri’s come to believe with all the passion and intensity of a religious zealot need not have been. Valeri’s immediate challenge, therefore, is to see himself through the day, where once he might’ve had a future now he has only a limitless malaise. But Valeri is a working man, and like all working men he steadies himself against the day about to unfold. He knows of the men in the streets who fight back, with their bare hands if they have to, risking the truncheon and the bullet, but he doesn’t know he’s soon enough to join them.
In the common shop where Valeri works there’s always work to be caught up on, missed targets and quotas to be made for, and in this environment men like Valeri can but subsist from day to day. But little has changed since the war fifteen years ago. The wealthy man whose excess caused the rising has only kept on hoarding his wealth, the city sprouting so many glass and steel towers which mark the exact spots where he has seen fit to plant his flag. Each week that passes seems to mark the starting of some new project, the skeletal shells of so many shopping malls, casinos, and luxury residences lined up in a row along the street where once there stood simple, functional apartment blocks. It seems to working men like Valeri vast sums are flooding in and then disappearing quicker than anyone can make sense of, even as his life is marked by the degradation and deprivation of poverty. Now Valeri is part of a larger movement, one about to make good on the promise of the failed rising fifteen years ago, the streets to fill once more with the blood and sweat of men like him. Used to the occasional attacks in the street, the working men of Britain and their bosses don’t foresee the coming apocalypse, but when we all look back on it we’ll see it was inevitable.
The boss lady, an Indian woman named Harpal, comes around a few more times that day, each time eyeing Valeri with all the suspicion of a policeman silently interrogating a suspect. It’s not b
een that long since Valeri was at her mercy, dragged into an office and accused of all sorts of salacious misdeeds, from deliberately slowing production to slandering the name of the shop’s owners. As Harpal comes around for the last time today, inwardly Valeri can only look back and recall each of those accusations as entirely true, salacious or not. You see, Valeri is a dashing figure, prone to outbursts, so confident in the moral superiority of the working class that he brooks no patience for the managerial shenanigans. Only his strong work ethic and his relentless commitment to detail have saved him so far from being fired. Even these habits will soon prove inadequate. He speeds about the floor, dashing madly, hoisting twenty-kilogram boxes onto pallets and shunting pallets into their spaces, the noise of gears whirring and the sound of hydraulics sliding overpowering the senses but never making him feel overwhelmed. Bursting in the distance a wave of sound bounds through the air, seeming to rattle and roll the s hop’s frame gently, in the morning light a thunderous explosion booming across the city, a train derailing somewhere sending scores of men running for their lives with only the clothes on their backs and the air in their lungs. The dashing figure in Valeri imagines himself joining the hopeless fight, making himself one with the ragged, haggard mob, but the better part of him knows he’s destined for something more.
Once the machines have come back to life, the whole shop is abuzz with activity, with Harpal barking out orders made redundant by the handful of workers who follow a plan already in the works. Valeri presses himself to work harder and faster, hauling his pallets at a pace that leaves him breathless, as Harpal shouts and screams at them all to move faster still. Soon, it becomes evident even to her the workers are working the pace of their work faster than ever before; still she shouts and screams all the same, playing the role she was meant to play. But Valeri knows, in the instinctive, guttural way all working men can know that the larger struggle is underway, the coming escalation of the working man’s war for freedom will be different. It has to be. In the streets of Britain already the columns of smoke rise from the fires of liberation burning through the night, tempting Valeri to join the fight immediately. It’s not for the ragged, haggard mob to know, but theirs is a disorganized, disoriented lashing out that can only end in failure. As the police slam their truncheons against the heads of the unemployed youths, nor can they know the working man’s fight for freedom should soon disabuse itself with such outbursts, these mobs to evolve into the mightiest fighting force the world has ever seen.
The shop where Valeri works is near the junction of three different highways and four different rail lines, not far from the port which permits the steady flow of cargo en route from here to there and from there to here. It produces nothing, but ships essential supplies to many factories, power plants, ports and airports, and more. It’s back-breaking work; he’s seen many of his fellow workers break their backs in exchange for the pittance they’re paid. As he turns in his gear at the end of his twelve-hour shift, he’s utterly exhausted from an entire night spent on his feet. On the way out, he passes a young man there to take over where he left off, the two exchanging a brief but knowing glance, Valeri leaving much undone work for his co-worker to finish, just as his co-worker will, twelve hours from now, leave much work for him to finish. Men like Valeri know this is their way; it’s from them all is taken and to them none is given. His parents knew this. They died trying to change it. On this, the busiest shift he’s worked, he harbours a burgeoning resentment for having worked so hard simply for the sake of another’s profit. Still, between Valeri and his replacement there’s the unspoken knowledge shared of the coming wave of protests; but for Valeri’s tendency to give in to the intemperate passions of rebellion he’d have kept secret his leanings and spared himself much pain and suffering. His struggle is not yet one with they who burst bombs and rattle off gunfire in the night, but soon it will be.
Since his parents were killed in the failed uprising fifteen years ago, Valeri’s worked many jobs; dishwasher, cashier, night watchman, now as a labourer earning a few hundred pounds a week. It’s a pittance when held up against the sums on the ledgers of the company whose profits he advances every day, but it’s a pittance which, in this day and age of transient work and disposable workers, neither Valeri nor any of his brothers and sisters in union can afford to risk. Valeri has worked there for more than three-and-a-half years, and by now his fiery temperament would’ve had him out the door were it not for his work ethic. There are shifts when he accomplishes more work than half his co-workers put together, leaving himself so utterly spent he can hardly move when he goes home. After Valeri’s parents were killed, murdered, a family friend took him under his wing and offered him guidance, a man now known to him and to many other workers as their brother, Murray.
But he’s never resentful of his tendency to outwork the rest of them, not at all. He simply knows how to do nothing else but work at the same pace, day in, day out, as if there’s something in him that compels him to throw himself into the work. As Valeri mechanically acts out this day, he thinks on the noxious, quixotic fantasy of the war fifteen years ago, as he’s come to fill his own thoughts with these fantasies, the days blending into one another as he willingly drowns them beneath the half-drunken haze so offered in escape to the realm of the imagined. During the frenzy of the busiest shifts of the week, Valeri has no time for himself, the frenetic pace of the work demanding his full attention, he along with all the other workers on the floor seeming to fit around one another, acknowledging each other with a nod and a nudge but always speeding through their task; they never finish on time, they can never finish on time, the managers berating them at random intervals, the whole floor overwhelmed with action. Not far from the shop where he works Valeri lives in one of the simple, functional blocks left over from another time. Inside, there’s leaky roofs, mice living in the walls, threadbare carpets and the faint after-smell of cigarette smoke filling every available space. For men like Valeri, it’s home, oddly comforting in its familiarity even as he dreams for himself something more. Murray’s the union representative at the shop, a man of quiet action, always working behind the scenes, managing connections ever so carefully. Although Valeri’s grateful for Murray’s having guided him through the tumultuous years of his youth, still he sneers at Murray’s aversion to confrontation. Stand tall, Valeri thinks, and boldly confront evil no matter the cost. Soon enough, the war in the streets will offer Valeri the chance to do exactly this.
There’s always someone fighting; some nights the couple in the unit next to Valeri’s keep him awake with shouting and screaming and thumping on the walls. There’s always someone fucking, too; some nights the couple in the suite on the other side of Valeri’s keep him awake with over-exaggerated panting and moaning and the rapid, rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. Outside, there’s the sound of buses stopping, of bottles smashing against the pavement and of police sirens wailing day and night. Sometimes Valeri lies in bed, awake, watching the flashing red and blue lights that slant in through his bedroom window’s blinds and make for a show like a caricature of the northern lights. At work, Valeri is with his people, segregated among his own by the way of things. These men work every day to build something they can never afford. These men work to change the face of the city they were born and raised in, enslaved as they are, whether they realize it or not, by the pittance they are paid. At home, they are surrounded by the implements of their impoverishment.
It’s not their fault. They’re employed as an apparatus, as a mechanism, nothing more. They work to tear apart a community and install another in its place, to eject the ordinary, working-class people who live by the values of honesty, integrity, thrift, chastity, and in so ejecting they clear the way for the extraordinary, wealthy-class people who live by the values of duplicity, deceit, indulgence, corruption. Living in an older building, decrepit, decaying, Valeri looks to the future that’s being built and realizes, in some instinctive, almost primal way, that it’s not his people’s future,
that it’s for those who would be our betters. He realizes, later than he should’ve, his is no future, not under the way of things, that he are to be ejected from his own home without concern for where he might go. That day, at work it might’ve looked outwardly as though nothing happened, but at the moment when Valeri and Harpal crossed paths for the last time she gave him an evil look amounting to that last little nudge over the edge.
It’s a perverse irony that after so many years of fallen wages, of old, decrepit flats in a permanent state of disrepair, and of days spent working himself ragged and raw all over that something so simple as a mean look should finally push him to fight. But men like Valeri, they’ll fight back, and they’ll win, if only any of them might live to see the day when they should transcend their own lives and aspire to become more than what they are. You see, Valeri has fallen in love, and in falling in love he’s come to embody everything that is right in his world. No longer content to allow us to live in our simple homes and live our simple lives, those who would seek to wring every last drop of blood and oil from us now seeking to remove us altogether. Every tall building in London stands a different height, the designers of each competing with one another to create the most impressive symbol of their ambition and greed. But to the objective eye all they’ve succeeded in creating is self-mockery, a grotesque mass huge and confused.
Only the streets themselves break up endless slabs of concrete and glass, like rivers cutting canyons through rock. There’s rarely anything interesting to look at. There’s plenty of colourful neon signs, billboards, even some lively banners advertising an upcoming festival. The woman Valeri has fallen in love with, a fellow worker named Sydney Harrington, she’s been there as long as he has, it’s only recently he’s come to take an interest in her. For all the political upheaval in the world at large, it should seem a strange thing for love to strike at this time, given as Valeri still is at nearly thirty to the impetuousness of youth. When the managers announce wage cuts, he protests. When the managers announce longer working hours, he objects vociferously. When the managers announce a new round of firings, the shrinking workforce meaning more work for the rest of them, he declares it an act of pure, unvarnished greed. And still, some small part of him clings to the ideal of romantic love even as he’s about to embark on a path that will turn him against his growing love for her. Through Valeri’s objections, he’s kept hold of his livelihood, but when he’s deprived of his pittance he’ll be liberated, made free to fight back without fear of loss. When he’ll have nothing, he’ll have nothing to lose.