He waited and he watched, but outside of the initial blunt force, there was no reaction at all. The gunman didn’t wake from their stupor. They didn’t clutch at their bleeding wound, and they didn’t scream bloody murder. There was nothing, just a trickle of blood that ran down the gunman’s shin. And then he let go of the button.
There was an instance – there’s always an instance – where the gunman felt nothing. They – like The Old Man – were merely a clean canvas with no past and no future, just this, a present state. They felt no fear, and no pain or anxiety. They felt no desire, no guilt, and no remorse. They felt neither good nor bad. They were untied from their obligations and they felt none of the stress or the burden of their often unfulfilled expectations. They felt disconnected from their nerves so that there was no proof – in that instance – that they even had a body. They felt disconnected too, from each of their emotions so that in that instance, they were in a state of complete equanimity. In that instance, they were entirely awake and aware, yet they were divorced from their ego – severed from their often anguished self. But, an instance is brief, and as quickly as the gunman’s rattled senses came back to life, so too did the feeling of intense burning and fire in their right leg. And they screamed. They screamed bloody murder. It was loud and piercing. It was the kind of scream that woke up mothers in the middle of the night. It was partly from the pain, yes, but really it was fear. It was the fear of wolves and dinosaurs, and the fear of eight armed monsters lurking under the bed. It was the fear of death and dying. It was the fear of being left alone – of being unwanted and abandoned. And they screamed. They screamed loud and convincing until The Leader pressed the button once more, and then they stopped.
“And the rabbi?” he asked.
The other gunman was still behind him, waiting - with a nervous kind of patience - for their next command. “Tagged and caged, sir.”
They both stared at the gunman sitting in the chair.
“Go through every room again. Search all personnel. The Imam is here.”
“Yes, sir.”
They were both still staring at the gunman in the chair.
“It’s a shame, but they’ll never walk again.”
The Leader raised his weapon once more and shot the gunman in the head.
“Find that Imam,” he said, dropping the control on the ground.
As fires were being lit around the facility, The Leader slowly made his way down to the ground floor. The Doctor walked with him, his hands clasped behind his back – the walk of a scholar or a murderous fascist.
“You have no idea of the work we were doing here – how close we were to a breakthrough. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I suppose it never did.”
The Doctor said little more. He did not walk like a condemned man. He did not walk like a defeated man. He walked like a man who had a future, irrespective of his past.
“We can all learn from this you know. There is no wasted knowledge,” said The Doctor.
It was now that he sounded scared. The Leader ignored him, though. He continued to inspect each room as they made their way down below. Thick black smoke billowed from the air ducts above their heads, but this didn’t deter or distract The Leader. Room by room he went, making his final inspection.
“I see a bold future for you and I,” said The Doctor.
They both now stood outside of the facility. In the distance, sirens and engines roared. There were police, fire brigade, and ambulances. There were so many that it was hard to tell in which direction they were headed. Nothing was as loud, though, as the sound of crackling fire, bursting into the sky, smashing open windows, and showering glass on the people who gathered below.
The line of prisoners slowly dredged forwards until eventually, they were all placed in small cages inside one of the many buses the lined the street. One by one their engines turned and roared; and on command, they each left facility one by one, each going in their own unique direction.
“What now?” asked The Doctor. “Is there some facility or some labour camp? Where to now?”
He spoke as if he had some kind of a future. He spoke as if his knowledge and his life were indispensable. He spoke as if he did not have, in fact, a gun pointed at the back of his head.
XXIV
There was a single shot and then everyone screamed. And even though their faces were masked in hoods and duct tape, they all shut their eyes. The first shot brought with it several more, and in barely a second, there was a war going on. Inside his cage, The Old Man could hear a barrage of shouting coming from all sides, but couldn’t tell who was who. He kept his eyes shut too, but instead of clenching up like all the others, he felt a wave of absolute calm wash over his mind and his body, and then he just let go and relaxed.
“Any second now,” he thought, expecting a bullet to tear through the side of his head.
He’d felt like this before – many times in fact. The first time he had sex. The first time he got into a fight. Whenever he got drunk or stoned, and that time that he had a seizure – the twenty minutes or so that followed it. There were moments like these and much more which were like this moment now. They were like them, but they nowhere near as serene. He sat there in his cell waiting for a bump or a thud, and then for everything to go dark and quiet. He didn’t watch his life unfold. There was no film and there was no running commentary, there was just an awareness that this was the end. And it felt wonderful. Better than any drug, orgasm or seizure.
The Old Man smiled as the first bus exploded. The others did not, but that was to be expected. And when the second and third buses followed, the prisoner’s whimpering and snivelling turned into panicked shouting and pleas for help – not from the authorities, but from their captors, to ‘get us out of here’ as they put it, far from the brink of extinction.
The explosions continued, as did the gunfire from behind clouds of smoke and ash. The whole while, the prisoners cringed in puddles of their own urine, most of them reverting back to prayer while their bus sat perilously still. In her cage, The Girl caressed her belly. She did so as if she were not in the middle of a war but in fact, laying in the soft sand of some desolate beach, awaiting her drink and portion of fries. She hummed quietly and there was not a hint of bother in her voice, or in her softly caressing hands. Unlike the others, she was not cringing and she did not hunch or slouch her body. She sat with her back arched, and her head tall and noble in the centre of the window that her fellow passengers were trying to avoid. Both she and The Old Man looked as if they were someplace else.
“Cease fire,” ordered someone from the armed forces. “Cease fire,” they said again.
It took a moment or two, but the gunfire slowly came to an end. Both sides lay down their weapons and took refuse where they hid. There was the occasional shot here or there but soon enough it was dead quiet, except for the rattling of empty shells rolling down the sidewalk. And it was another minute or so before the armed forces spoke again.
Both sides were bloody and wounded, but neither would let on.
“Put down your weapons. It’s over. We have the entire area surrounded. There are roadblocks at every corner for the next twenty kilometres. There is no other way out of this, believe me.”
He spoke as if he wasn’t sure.
There was a tense era of silence. It could have been a second, a week or a year. I didn’t matter how many seconds there were, for the prisoners caged in the bus, it felt like an eternity. It brought with it hopeful exhilaration, and at the same time, gut-wrenching panic.
The first sound to break the silence was that of weapons being laid on the floor. One by one, the gunmen lay down their arms. There were so much – their arsenal so large – that it took a minute or two before the quiet returned.
For the first time, a sense of relief washed over those who were caged on the bus.
“Nobody else needs to die here today.”
This, he was sure of, but whether they would or not, he did not say.
There was a rattling behind an overturned bin. Two hundred weapons instantly drew their red lasers in that direction. “Hold your fire, men. Hold you fire.”
Dressed in black - but with his face visible for the first time - a young boy stepped out into the open. He would have been no older than fifteen. He had his hands above his head and he walked in slow even steps in the direction of the armed forces. Each of his steps resonated. They sounded alone and vulnerable. It was the only sound there was, and this might have been the only time in history that so many people listened so intently to the sound of a young lad’s footsteps.
“That’s it, fella; one step at a time.”
He had two hundred red dots all hovering over his chest and face. It was easy to see how nervous everyone was. Not one of their sights could sit on his heart for more than a second, no matter how hard they tried.
“You’re doing fine, boy.”
He crossed the great divide – a sea of blood and broken glass that littered the dead and wounded. He stepped over and around young men no older than himself. And he stepped over women who might have been his mother, and young girls, who were old enough to, on any other day, have caught his heart and his passion. He stepped over their lifeless bodies, and he ignored the plight of their bloodied hands as they reached out to take his own.
“Nearly there, son.”
And he was. He was nary an arm’s length from the man who was calling him in. He was close enough to whisper and be heard. And if he wanted to, he could spit in their faces; he was that near. Instead, he smiled, and as he did, several of the officers smiled back.
“Nothingness, or nothing at all,” he shouted.
There was a second of confusion before the belt around the young boy’s waist exploded. Cars were ripped in half, and limbs blew about like specks of dirt. There was a hole in the ground where the boy had stood that was the size of a small swimming pool. And as for those two hundred red dots, they were reduced to a couple dozen at most.
And then, like some morbid symphony, around the city, there was a crescendo of explosions; each more devastating than the last. An orchestra of men and women, both young and old, came flooding out of buildings and alleyways and as passengers on the back of motorcycles. They walked into shopping malls, into libraries and museums, and they made their way to every roadblock and checkpoint in town. They all wore the same vests and they chanted the same creed a second before fire erupted from their bellies. “Nothingness or nothing at all,” they all shouted, each just as loud and impassioned as the one that came before. Their beliefs and ideals ignited with them. Their hearts and their thoughts lit up the sky.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
And like that, the gunfire returned, and with it came a great deal of panic.
“Help us,” shouted somebody in the back of the bus.
“Save us,” said another.
Finally, the engine started. The whole bus shook and rattled; and as it slowly pulled away, the prisoners slid about on their seats, nearly falling and strangling themselves on their cuffs and chains. This didn’t matter, though, not one inch. The bus was moving; that’s all that mattered. Whoever was behind that wheel right now was their white knight. And as bullets whizzed past their windows and grazed their arms and legs, each of the prisoners welded their eyes shut, and the best they could, they hoped and they prayed in their own particular way for the driver of this bus to be extraordinary at this very moment, and to save their bloody lives.
The bus smashed its way through the first barricade. Most of the vehicles had already been burned to a cinder, and the officers and soldiers who manned them were either dead or begging for first aid. You could hear their pleas each time the bus changed gear. And by the time they reached the fourth and fifth barricades, the popping gunfire disappeared beneath the roar of the engine and the rattle of their cages, until soon enough it was clear that they had made it – they had escaped.
And there was rapturous cheering.
Were their hands not bound, there would have been rapturous applause too.
XXV
For the first hundred or so kilometres, there was little to no speaking. Though they had long since escaped the gunfire and explosions, the prisoners sat in their caged confines looking anything but saved. Most of them still huddled as best they could in their seats, though their cuffs and chains would only allow them to bend over just enough so that only the tips of their backs were visible through the windows. But every time the bus drove over a pothole or hit a pedestrian, the prisoners were swung about like a bag of stones, hitting their heads on the seats in front, and twisting their chains into uncomfortable binds.
There was only the sound of the roaring engine and escaping from it, the smell of oil and diesel. The prisoners, though, they looked as if cars, buses and young soldiers were still exploding all around them. Every muscle in their bodies was clenched as tight as it could, and their eyes and cheeks constantly flinched whenever the bus or their seats squeaked or squealed. Most of them were covered in blood; if not their own, then from the scraps and remains of young men and women who had given themselves in the bloody war. And there were others who were still showered in broken glass. It sat pooled on their laps, and on the backs of their necks as neither had either the courage or the will to move a bare inch.
There were thirty prisoners in total. They were each crammed into small cages with their ankles and wrists bound painfully tight. Neither knew the other’s name or anything about their lives’ whatsoever, yet when they caught one another’s passing stares, it was if they had spent a lifetime trading cultures. There was comfort and a sense of fraternity in their silent passing. They were all strangers to one another, except of course for The Old Man and The Girl.
And then there was the bus driver. He or she was hidden behind a barricade of enormous steel plates. There was a door with which they could exit and enter their post, but it bolted shut from the inside. And piled up at the front of the bus were enough explosives to destroy a small town. They were all connected by a matrix of wires and sensors that ran from the front of the bus, all the way to the back – attached to every hinge on every cage, and on all of the emergency exits. And hanging from the roof there was a large television showing old cartoons and advertisements for hand cream.
Outside the scenery was beautiful. The horizon was filled with mountainous ranges, and there were open pastures for as far as they eyes could see, and they were all different shades of green. Some of them were light and some of them were dark, and the rest were somewhere in-between. There were animals wherever you looked – happily grazing and lazing about in the afternoon sun. And every now and then they passed the odd farmer, selling strawberries by the roadside, or walking barefoot and blistered with an open jerry-can in one hand, and a lit cigarette in the other.
It was a hot day, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun was right overhead, busy sapping the life out of anything that was unfortunate enough to be caught without a roof or a speck of shade. There was a slight breeze, but only as long as the bus was moving. Whenever they stopped, the air became like a red hot blanket that burned the prisoner’s skin and seared the backs of their dried and aching throats.
The view though was exceptional, not that anyone cared.
All eyes were on the explosives packed at the front of the bus.
“Where do you think they’re taking us?”
They sat beside each other in their own cages; she on one side of the aisle, and he on the other. The Old Man was still grinning, but not with as much character as was before. It almost looked forced now.
“Well that was fun,” he said.
He wiped the dried spit from the cracks of his mouth and stretched out his old, haggard muscles – as much as the chains would allow of course. He started with his toes – curling them and squeezing them as tight as they could get before letting them go one by one. He did this for some time before he worked his way up through every muscle in his body – twisting and turning, clen
ching and tensing. And when he was done, he wiped away the bit of blood and bone that was dried near the corner of his eye.
The Girl, on the other hand, hadn’t moved her body an inch. She was still curled over her belly, her hands a useless but comforting support. Whenever the bus rattled or jumped, her hands immediately pressed on the small bump, rubbing it like a crystal ball.
“What is it with you and that thing?” said The Old Man, nodding at The Girl’s belly. “If I had a dog I wanted dead, I’d either let him off his lead, or I’d grow a pair and kill him myself.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“I don’t mean to pry but you were nursing quote a few drinks back at that bar; half of which would have put you in a coma and that baby in a very small coffin. And starving yourself back at the hospital. You didn’t duck once throughout all that nonsense.”
“Neither did you.”
“Yeah, but I’m not carrying a foetus, now am I? These aren’t the actions of someone who is unfit or deranged. And you don’t look like a junky.”
“What do I look like?”
“You look sad,” he said.
Her eyes never strayed from her caressing hands.
“So… what’s the deal then?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I do think it is something, lassie. Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean I’m a complete bloody idiot. If you want to terminate it, just do it. It doesn’t have feelings. It’s not aware. And even if it was, it wouldn’t see it coming. That’s a step up from the rest of us. You know there are clinics on every corner. You don’t have to go and hurt yourself. Path of least resistance, you know? So, what’s the deal?”
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