Fanatics: Zero Tolerance

by Ferguson, David J.

  She stopped when she reached the door and looked back at the cross mounted on the wall over the pulpit, as if expecting God to appear in person and offer some sort of explanation for all the pains, inconveniences and indignities she had had to suffer.

  He made no appearance and offered no explanation, presumably because He had done that before, and was not in the habit of doing encores; and besides, people were still not paying attention to what he said the first time around.

  Sadie spat on the floor and left.

  PART 4: Emergency Measures

  How can anyone be described as “chipper” and “ready to resume his duties” or even just “alive and well” only a few days after being shot in the head?

  Beats me; you’d think the person concerned would at least have a thumping headache.

  One imagines a lot of people might be more than a bit surprised to hear news of this sort; it’s nearly as strange as hearing that someone has risen from the dead after being killed quite thoroughly by crucifixion, isn’t it? Sort of hard to be blasé about, eh? For others, though, especially those whose lives have lately been so profoundly disrupted, one more odd thing just slips past without attracting too much sceptical attention.

  *****

  Hair never grew back over the place on McDonald’s skull where the bullet entered. He wore the bald patch like a badge of courage, and his quirky refusal to have plastic surgeons do anything about it endeared him still further to followers amazed to see him alive at all.

  In later years, when things became more difficult and people began to be disenchanted with his leadership, the stigma served as a very useful reminder to the public of the potential disaster his absence from public life could be. Were they restless, wanting a change? They should be ashamed of themselves! How could they forget what he had almost sacrificed for them?

  *****

  Spotting someone he thought he recognised standing in the doorway of the relief centre, Tony Bannister made his way towards him, elbowing his way past the handful of people hanging around the outer “gate” (actually, not so much a gate; more a break in the coils of razor wire surrounding the place). Relieved to see a familiar face, he paid no attention to the sign by the gate which read: ATTENTION! ALL LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT!

  A soldier, suspicious of his well-groomed appearance at a time when almost everyone else was dusty and bedraggled, stopped him. The soldier’s manner was not deferential; he did not simply stand in Tony’s way, or even just extend his rifle barrel across his path. The point of his gun poked into Tony’s ribs right over his heart. “Empty your pockets,” he ordered in a dangerously flat-toned voice.

  “What?” said Tony. He put on an expression of innocent bewilderment.

  The soldier simply waited.

  Tony shrugged and smiled at him. He had great natural charm; it had gotten him out of many scrapes in the past when he had nothing to offer by way of an excuse other than a fake naivete. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s this for?"

  His charm cut no ice this time; the soldier gestured to a subordinate, who stepped forward and began to bodysearch Tony. A protest from the latter was cut off by another poke in the ribs from the rifle.

  The second soldier took a very big wad of notes from one of Tony’s pockets. They both looked at him silently.

  “Hey, it’s all mine! I mean, really! No messing! I can prove it -” He looked back at them, desperately trying to think of something convincing to say, and wondering what his chances would be if he tried to make a break for it through the bystanders.

  “Take him away,” said the soldier, and suddenly he found himself being frogmarched around to the back of the building.

  “Wait here,” they told him, and unexpectedly stepped away from him, making him think that luck was going his way after all; presumably someone more senior (and more easily bluffed, he hoped) was being fetched to question him.

  The bleakness of his situation only truly came home to him when he realised that the wall he was standing in front of had a lot of chips knocked out of the brickwork at about chest level, and there were a handful of darker patches around the same places.

  Inside the relief centre, the workers, startled by the sound of a brief burst of automatic gunfire, lifted their heads; then they carried on as if nothing had happened. It was not the first time they had heard that sound, and it would probably not be the last.

  *****

  Children were disappointed to discover that even the worst calamity since World War II did not mean that school was cancelled. Anything that helped restore a feeling of normality was welcome, and anyway, comparison of school records with rolls of who actually turned up gave the authorities a very useful kick-start with what came to be called their “civilian inventory”.

  *****

  A census was as inevitable as recriminations. Before McDonald’s government could properly plan for the long term, it needed information; everything had to be inventoried, especially people. Everyone understood its importance.

  A certain question on the form raised a few eyebrows, but provoked no particularly militant reaction; the people from whom one would have expected such a reaction, the Christian Democrats, had been firmly relegated to the third division of politics, and looked likely to stay there indefinitely.

  Besides, there were other questions just as odd as the one about the number of Bibles per household. It hardly seemed worth worrying about… and anyway, Bibles were suddenly unpopular. Everything that smacked of lemming was unpopular. Religious stuff was what started the war, wasn’t it? It wasn’t surprising that people had zero tolerance for it these days.

  *****

  The most dreadful thing about any large-scale catastrophe is that children are not spared; and their suffering, which in one sense is less acute than that of their elders (it is immediate and does not look apprehensively to the future), is in another sense much worse: children are not as well equipped as adults with the ability to see things from the other person’s point of view, and are consequently far less likely to set personal differences aside and pull together in times of crisis. If a scapegoat is available, they leap on it with a savage’s yell of joy.

  If their parents and peers approve, the yells are even louder.

  Graham Torrey looked like a very convenient scapegoat. A lightly-built Protestant boy of fifteen who had to walk home from school through an area dominated by the presence of Catholics might as well have been holding a placard with the invitation in bold letters: Lynch me. The Police and the Army were overstretched by tens of miles; no-one would be around to protect him.

  A knot of eight or nine boys from St. Colum’s High School saw him approach, then hesitate as he screwed up his courage, then walk briskly on with his gaze to the ground, allowing himself a sidelong glimpse at the hostile crowd every few steps. If he had not glanced at them, his chances of avoiding a confrontation would have been much better; but his looks caught their attention and focused it, challenging them to do something about the anomalous fact of a Lemming in their territory (that he was not actually a Lemming did not matter a jot - he was Not One Of Us, which made him a chicken in a fox’s den; he wore the uniform of the enemy, so he was the enemy).

  Graham did not waste time turning to look when he heard the slap of footfalls; he broke into a run, his schoolbag bouncing off his side and back. The boys behind him, realising that their hippo-in-a-minefield efforts at stealth were pointless, burst into an animal cheer of abuse and hate-slogans.

  One of them must have been St. Colum’s top hundred-metre sprinter, for far sooner than Graham expected, somebody gained on him, snagging the shoulder-strap of his bag. Without turning, Graham managed to shrug it off and push it downwards. He heard a satisfactory thud and a cry of pain; then there was another shout heard as the general howl abated momentarily, and the sound of someone skidding across concrete. The athlete must have tripped over the bag and then someone else had fallen over him.

  *****

 
; Philip Allen peeked out from behind his living-room curtains just in time to see a schoolboy tearing past, followed by what looked like a roaring mob.

  He stepped back, tut-tutting, ashamed at his sense of relief about not being involved, but still with not the least intention of actually doing anything about what he had just seen. Then he caught himself; that was a despicable attitude. If he was in that boy’s shoes, apart from praying that they were running shoes, he would certainly have been praying for help.

  Well; he was a little too old and unfit to have any hope of catching up in time to lend a the boy a hand - or to be more precise, a couple of sets of knuckles - but that didn’t mean he couldn’t help. He turned to his phone and rang 999.

  “We apologise, but this service is temporarily unavailable,” said a woman’s recorded voice. “Please try again in a few minutes.”

  *****

  Graham, legs aching and lungs burning, turned the last corner; he had only a few more metres to run before the trap was sprung. The mob was very close now, and he could feel himself flagging; but he ignored the stitch in his side and the calf muscles howling their pain at him, spurred on by a sudden horrible suspicion that his friends had set him up - they would be nowhere to be seen, because there was no ambush planned, and the fenians would rip him apart...

  Then, just a little prematurely (their battle fever getting the better of them) the warriors of Gilbert Memorial Community College broke onto the street to the left and right of the advancing St Colum’s boys, brandishing sticks, stones, and a handful of petrol bombs, and Graham Torrey’s principal concern became getting out of their way before the ammunition began to fly.

  The Catholic boys pulled up sharply just as Graham finally ran out of puff, avoiding entrapment by the narrowest of margins thanks to the wilder ones on the other side who’d jumped the gun. But it took the Catholics a second or two to overcome the momentum of the trailing members of their pack, who were still arriving, and to snap out of the “hunt” mode their minds were in.

  Graham turned just in time to see the foremost St Colum’s boy as he looked to left and right with a satisfyingly stricken expression, (ah, ye coward, you’re not such a hard man now!), struggling unsuccessfully to turn and get past those who were dunting him forward into enemy territory. Then the first petrol bomb landed, shattering against the angle of the boy’s shoulder. In an instant, he was engulfed in fire; his screams were blood-freezing, and stopped the battle in its tracks. He swatted futilely at the flames licking his arms and chest and face, and lurched blindly towards Graham, almost falling into him.

  It was a defining moment in Graham Torrey’s life. The lectures of parents, ministers, social workers and Policemen had failed to sink in; but now, at last, he understood that the word fight meant something more than big talk and a few punches and bruises and boasting about a trickle of blood as if it was a major injury and trying to be one-up on the barely-known object of some barely-justified juvenile hatred.

  Then a cheer went up, an ugly, hate-filled sound with nothing of mirth about it. After a moment, others joined in; and the battle resumed.

  Graham Torrey’s screams of horror were drowned out completely.

  *****

  A few days later, Philip Allen said goodbye to the census officer who’d just paid him a visit, closed his front door, and went back into his living room to sit down.

  He looked around, drinking in that feeling of being at home, of being comfortably surrounded by all the things it had taken him and his late wife a lifetime to gather up and arrange until they were just so. He was pretty certain this would be one of the last few times he would have leisure to do this, and the thought was melancholy. His wife’s touch was still to be found in every room in the house, even after twelve years; leaving it would, in a certain measure, feel like losing her over again.

  But something inside told him the time had come to move on. The quiet, humdrum phase of his life had, with the advent of the war, and particularly of this census, come to a close; and though he was apprehensive about the dangers involved in what he was about to set in motion, he was as certain about the part he must now play as if it was already a thing of the past. He had been waiting for this for years, and now it had arrived!

  The plans which for so long had been mere daydreams began unfolding in his mind like the petals of a flower, complete and flawless, hardly less real than the roses in the garden outside, having grown just as slowly towards fullness. He turned them over in his mind, examining them as one might a work of art, thanking God that he had finally discovered what it was that he had been waiting for all this time.

  He had often wondered why his life seemed so dull (even though it was a pleasant kind of dullness) and sometimes felt guilty that he was making no perceptible mark on the lives of those around him. It seemed futile to ever speak of it to anyone; how could a doctor, of all people, particularly at a time like this, believe that his work was pointless? Surely if anyone was needed by people it was he. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the chronic shortage of doctors following the war, Philip Allen still often struggled against a sense of being engaged in something ineffectual; the Human Race was an enormous machine badly in need of major repairs, and day by day he did no more than buff and paint a few rusty spots here and there. The curious, not to say bizarre, diminution in social standing of the medical profession these days only served to make how he felt even more emphatic. When people inexplicably preferred the remedies of quacks and charmers to sensible medical treatment, he became less and less able to resist picturing himself as someone trying to gather up grains of sand into a pile, one grain at a time, while a howling wind kept blowing them away. He daydreamed of silencing the gale, of being useful in a way that really made a difference - of building something that would last.

  Now, it seemed, his dreams had come to life before his eyes.

  The first step was the acquisition of a place to live, a base from which to operate what would shortly become a highly illegal business. Jericho, a recently closed residential home not ten miles away, seemed the most likely prospect. Even if he sold his house, he would still not have anywhere near enough money to buy the place - he could hardly have rented the lobby! - but no doubt the cash would turn up. His Father was very rich.

  He moved across the room to the telephone, and as he punched in the number of a certain solicitor of his acquaintance, he realised he was smiling. He glanced at the book he had been about to begin just as the census officer arrived. It would have to wait.

  His day had come.

  *****

  “I don’t understand this.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. Just do it.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Sir, I don’t feel I can go through with this unless I have some sort of explanation -”

  “I can always get someone else to step into your job if you don’t feel up to it, Agent Grey.”

  “But these people... Marshall, Mulhearn, Spence... all of them! Just when we’re having to cope with so much crime - I mean, it’s not as if there’s even one of them who’s been involved in looting or murder or rape -”

  “The problem isn’t as trivial as that. Lemmings are the problem.”

  “What? I don’t see - according to the records, these people are the last you’d accuse of being Lemmings! And anyway, what if they were? It isn’t illegal.”

  “Don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t matter! Those kind of people have brought us all to our knees!”

  “But they’re not Lemmings! In fact, they were the ones responsible for that poster -”

  “I know that! Don’t try to teach me my business!”

  “Then why have we been ordered to wipe them out?”

  There was another pause; this time a dangerous, teeth-grinding kind of pause that might very well have been ended by a gunshot.

  “I’ll explain this to you once, and after that you will get no more explanations and I don’t want you to ever question my orders a
gain. Understand?”

  Agent Grey nodded grimly.

  “Okay. Here are the facts. McDonald narrowly escaped assassination by a Lemming. While he was out of it, Lemming-minded people here stirred up a wasps’ nest, and Lemming-minded people of the Islamic variety over there jumped on the bandwagon; now every third city in the first half of your atlas glows in the dark, hm? We have all the proof we need that their mindset is a destructive, negative one. We can’t tolerate it and pat ourselves on the back for being broad-minded and cosmopolitan. It has to be stamped on, or we’re committing suicide as a state. But we can’t stamp on it, see? We know that doesn’t work; the communists tried repressing religion for years, but it just went underground and thrived. Do you see where that leaves us?”

  “I think so. For the sake of our own survival, we have to stamp it out; but we can’t take the initiative. The impetus for wiping it out has to come from popular opinion. But the men and women on this list - aren’t they doing the job for us?”

  “They’re doing it very well; so well, in fact, that we don’t want any of them getting an attack of conscience, stepping forward and saying, ‘Hold on, it was all just a practical joke’. We want to see this extended and intensified, hopefully across all of Europe.”

  “But if public opinion should change... and aren’t those posters supposedly from the Government?”

  “We have deniability. None of this was our idea, after all; we just happen to sympathise with the anger everyone feels towards the fanatics. And anyway, they’ll soon have the carpet whipped out from under them; something radical is developing, something that everyone will get to hear about very soon. I’m not allowed to say any more about that just now. Are you satisfied?”