The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  There was an escape committee, of course; seven Poles who had been imprisoned and wanted out, or at least to see their families again. Caroline was supposed to report any escape attempts to the guards, but she hadn’t bothered; escape seemed completely impossible. Under the torn-up turf, the stadium bottom was hard concrete, while the guards had been careful never to allow a weapon to fall into the hands of the prisoners; Caroline suspected that such a mistake would lead to the responsible guards, assuming that they survived the experience, joining the prisoners in the pen. More than one prisoner had been strangled by another, often for the smallest things; the guards wouldn’t have cared if they had all killed each other. Only the steady flow of MRE packs convinced her that the Russians didn’t just want to kill them all.

  “They want to see me afterwards,” she whispered to Marya. The Polish woman sat there, arms and legs akimbo; Caroline knew that she was almost completely broken. She would have spared Marya her torment if she could have done so; Marya was an innocent who deserved none of the horrors that had swept up and consumed her life. “They may hurt me…”

  Some prisoners had been taken for interrogation, mainly policemen and a handful of reporters. They had returned, some of them; beaten and broken. It was obvious that they had been tortured to extract information, but all of it had been trivial information; the policemen had been asked about a handful of criminals, while the reporters had been asked about politicians. It was brutal, pointless…and banal. Caroline’s world had shrunk to the four corners of the prison camp; it was growing increasingly hard to remember London, or the politicians who had helped create the mess for Europe. She wanted to forget…

  “No,” Marya said. She clung to Caroline as if Caroline was her mother. “You can’t go, please…”

  “I have no choice,” Caroline said. They’d become like sisters in the camp; Caroline, Marya and the other Polish women, who had worried about the two young girls. The Russians had reluctantly agreed to provide food for them and to look for other accommodation, but Caroline suspected that they would have either forgotten, or hadn’t found anyone. The Polish sisters had been related to soldiers, after all; their relatives might have all been disappeared. Promise me you’ll take care of yourself…?”

  “Yes,” Marya said. “Just come back, please…”

  “Caroline Morgan, come forth,” a harsh voice bellowed. “Caroline Morgan, come forth!”

  Caroline stood up and walked over to the gate. The Russian guards raised their weapons as she approached; she almost laughed, aware that there was nothing that she could do to them. She would have given anything for a shot of some superpower that would have had her breaking the guards with ease, but she was tired and wearing rags. What sort of threat did they think a malnourished half-dressed girl presented?

  “Hands,” a Russian growled. Caroline knew the procedure as well as anyone else in the camp; she turned slightly and put her hands behind her back, allowing the Russians to slip on a pair of handcuffs. That was a good sign; the prisoners had watched carefully and people who were handcuffed were normally returned to the camp, while those who were secured with plastic ties never returned. “Move!”

  The darkness of the internal corridors, now serving as the barracks for the guards, left her half-blinded long enough to lose track of her position in an endless maze of facilities below the ground. Marya had told her that the stadium, constructed in 2020, had been the largest one ever constructed in Poland; it could hold thousands of people, and even had other facilities, below the ground. The only sign of sporting equipment now was a handful of footballs on the ground; everything else had been removed, making way for Russian soldiers and their equipment. There were enough guns in the various storage areas to restart the war…assuming that they could ever get to them. The escape committee hadn’t been able to think of a way past the guards after weeks of heavy thinking.

  The guards finally led her into a brightly-lit room. She flinched back from the light, long enough for them to secure her against a wall, and leave her. Moments later, before she could realise what was happening, another Russian entered and studied her thoughtfully. Caroline felt like a trapped animal under his gaze; it didn’t help that she was firmly secured to what felt like a shower pipe. The Russian was remarkably pale, with very dark hair; his eyes were soulless, almost lifeless. He was a nightmare made flesh.

  “I am the commanding officer of the 4th FSB Security Battalion, Warsaw,” the Russian said finally. “You will identify yourself.”

  Caroline couldn’t believe that he didn’t know her name already. The Russians had not only collected ID tags, but they had asked her, more than once, about her name, building up a picture of who they had in the camp, and why. She had cooperated as little as she could, but the Russians had been skilful at actually making their prisoners work for them, doing as much of the heavy lifting as they could without resorting to torture to ‘encourage’ them to talk.

  “I am Caroline Morgan, reporter,” she said, and briefly outlined what had happened to her. She knew that holding anything back was a bad idea; the Russians were prepared to use torture if they felt that they had no choice. Caroline wasn’t a soldier, she was a civilian; she couldn’t have held out for long against pain, even if they had paid her. “What are you going to do to me?”

  The Russian looked up at her. “The question has been discussed at the highest levels,” he said. Caroline, oddly enough, believed him. “We have faced a constant barrage of propaganda from Europe, condemning us for thousands of crimes and offences, some of them only theoretically possible. The European media has persistently taken the side of the enemies of Russia, along with the other enemies of the civilised world everywhere. I dare say that if French reporters had still been at work during the insurgencies, they would have claimed that the insurgents were actually somehow in the right, just because they were getting the short end of the stick.”

  “I am a non-political reporter,” Caroline said. “I am not…”

  He slapped her, hard, across her face. “You are a political reporter, all of you are,” he said. “You repeated the lies told by refugees and Chechens who had an axe to grind; you’d think that you would have learned something from Iraq, but no, you chose to repeat their propaganda. The media played a role in the European refusal to grant us the support we needed when we needed it; now, we need no support and we have our enemies at our mercy.”

  Caroline could taste blood in her mouth. She looked for words to say, clever arguments that would win her freedom, but there were none. There was only force, and the threat of force…and Europe had acted as if both of those factors didn’t exist. She could have argued, she could have pointed out that the citizens of Poland and Germany…and perhaps even further west…hadn’t deserved occupation, but in the end, the Russians wouldn’t listen to her. Her own helplessness buzzed through her mind; the Russian could do anything to her, and she could do nothing about it. What hope was left for her?

  “I see you have nothing to say,” the Russian said. His voice was icy cold, without a hint of gloating or pleasure. “A decision has been made about you, Morgan, and all of your kind. You have no place in the new world order.”

  He drew his pistol and chambered a round. “Do you have any last words?”

  Caroline felt oddly calm. “Go fuck yourself,” she hissed. She tried to kick the Russian, but it was impossible from her position; he just stepped back and watched her struggle to keep her balance. “One day, we’re going to kill all of you.”

  “I don’t think that that will happen,” the Russian said, as he put the gun to her head. “The price of your socialist paradise was destroying the fighting spirit of the European Armies…and you gained your paradise at the cost of your freedom.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  Afterwards, they took her body, dumped it in one of the mass graves, and buried it unmarked under the Polish soil. No one in Britain would ever know for certain what happened to Caroline Morgan. Like so many others,
she had just vanished in the nightmare that had consumed Europe.

  Chapter Forty-Two: Covenants without Swords, Take Two

  The problem with socialists, to use a general term, is that of the dog who had one bone. Carrying it in his mouth, the dog looked into the river, saw a second bone, and made a bite for it…with the predictable result that the first bone fell into the river and was swept away…leaving the poor dog with no bone. Humans do not have the excuse of being unintelligent animals.

  Christopher Nuttall

  Hanover, Germany

  She was called Gudrun, a name that meant ‘battle-maiden’ to some ears; an irony that a handful of boyfriends had pointed out when they came face to face with her politics. Gudrun Krumnow was, in no particular order, nineteen years old, blonde, tall and shapely, and deeply devoted to the needy of the world. Like so many others in her position, she believed deeply and truly in the need to ‘Do Something’ to tackle the many issues of the world; she had marched in protests, sung songs in support of the Needy of the Week, and had generally made herself as helpful as she could. Her education had been limited; at nineteen, she had only a few years of university to go, years that she had already committed to the Causes.

  She was unprepared for the real world; German industries, already staggering under the weight of European regulations on this and that, had no time to take on more uneducated people that they could never get rid of, or lose. The best of them had the motivation to use the –unofficial – opportunities to train to an acceptable level; few of them truly had the motivation. Years of being told that they were due vast rewards if they were patient had taken their toll on the youth of Germany; no government could challenge the issue of vast unemployment without losing power. In a very real sense, Germany – and the remainder of the EU – was being red-taped and taxed to death.

  Gudrun and her family had cowered in their house as the first chaos began in Hanover, terrified of what would happen to them when the looters and insurgents found them hiding; Gudrun might have believed that they were the poor, and the underdogs must always be in the right, but sheer terror was overcoming her political beliefs. The sounds had been terrifying; she had always disliked the police – and had led a boycott of girls who dated police officers – but she had prayed then that the police would save her and her family. When Lord Mayor Paul Steiner - a class enemy, of course, despite him being Green – had used the army to end the disturbances, or at least confine them to a handful of districts within the city, Gudrun had been relieved.

  And then she hated herself, feeling like a traitor; she had silently accepted the treatment of the rioters and the looters, treatment that rumour said had been brutal beyond belief. It had led to her first serious argument with her father, ending with her flouncing off to her room and hiding; her father had threatened to lift his hand to her for the first time in her entire life if she even thought about going out and joining the protests against Paul Steiner. Her father, a civil engineer, had known what Gudrun had refused to allow herself to believe; the streets were no longer safe for protesters, or indeed for any young girls. As the Russian armies had advanced closer, he had even considered abandoning the city, but where could they have gone? Gudrun had three sisters, each as pretty as she was, and her mother had held her good looks; how could one man protect them all against the evils of society’s breakdown? They had remained in the city, hiding; keeping their heads down and hoping that they would not be noticed.

  For Gudrun, a free spirit, it had been torture. “I am not one of those women whose menfolk keep them covered all day,” she had shouted at her father, desperately trying to ignore the contradiction of her support for minority rights and practices such as the Burka and worse. “I am a grown woman and safe on the streets!”

  Her father had given her the worst look she had ever faced. “Yes, you’re a grown woman in body, if not in mind,” he had snapped. “If you go out there, you may be raped and murdered and you are not going out there! Until you leave the house permanently, young lady, you are under my authority. Understand?”

  Gudrun had subsided, muttering, as the noise of the advancing Russian Army had started to echo out over the city. Her father had gone out into the streets and brought back what he could in the way of food, quelling Gudrun’s objections to some of the meat – she was a devoted vegetarian – with a sharp remark about beggars not being choosers. The Krumnow had never been poor; their area of town had been remarkably unscathed by the fighting. Gudrun believed that it would never touch her…and the decision of the Mayor to surrender the city had seemed to confirm her belief. The Russians had behaved themselves and accepted the surrender; they couldn’t do anything to the citizens, could they?

  Her father had been less convinced. His family remembered the advance of the Russians during the Great Evil War, the war where Germany had set out to exterminate the Jews and other ethnic groups, the same Jews who had crushed Palestine and sent thousands of refugees to Europe. The Russians had looted and raped their way across East Germany; he had had relatives, old now, who had been forced to endure Russian attention. To Gudrun, it was a different world; such things just didn’t happen in her world.

  For the first week, events had been surprisingly peaceful; she had watched from behind her curtains as the Russians marched into the city, pale-faced soldiers who seemed tired, but happy. Rumour had it that the policemen had been rounded up, along with the soldiers, and sent out to the detention camps, but nobody knew anything for certain. They were more concerned with stability and survival; the Russians promised stability, although it was very much the velvet glove masking the steel fist. They had insisted that everyone remain constantly tuned in to the emergency frequency and used it to issue orders; their first order had been a curfew on all Germans between sunset and sunrise. Other orders had followed; Gudrun had watched as young Arabic men were forced to work clearing rubble from the streets, before being escorted out of the city to the laminations of their women. Her heart almost burst.

  In the second week, the Russians had caught up with her father; a Russian officer and seven armed soldiers appeared, bearing ration packs in one hand and weapons in the other. The offer had been simple; her father was a civil engineer who had worked for the city’s infrastructure, and he was being offered the chance to take up his post again, at Russian wages. The Russian had been brutally clear; they would be rationing food, and her father had the choice between working for them, or not receiving any rations. Only the elderly or the very young would get rations, the Russians said, without working for them; in time, everyone would work or starve.

  Gudrun had protested; surely everyone had a right to eat! The Russian soldiers hadn’t understood her nearly-hysterical German, the Russian commander had rolled his eyes and made a comment to the Russian soldiers, who had laughed. Her father had interrupted, his face very pale, and sent her out of the room; Russian laughter had followed her all the way to her bedroom. That night, her father had admitted to them that he had seen no choice, but to accept the Russian offer; it was that, or the family would starve. Gudrun had said nothing.

  The day afterwards, she met up with a few of her friends, male and female alike, including her current boyfriend. The Russians had closed the schools and universities for the duration of hostilities, and they had banned large gatherings, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once. The students compared notes, feeling strangely excited as they shared their stories; there couldn’t be more than a thousand Russian soldiers assigned to the garrison, and most of the soldiers were clearly overworked. Some of the male students complained about how the Russians had taken over the brothels, but their female comrades had little sympathy; at least the Russians would be able to pay the whores for their services. European banks were still closed and European money was worthless.

  The students compared notes and plans; many of them had graduated with honours in courses on people power and civil disobedience. They knew the theory and even some of the practice; they had studied, not wi
thout a little delight, the experience of the British, the French and even the Russians when it came to facing People Power. The Russians, in 1991, had crumbled before the people of Eastern Europe; many of the students knew people who had been alive during the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Germany. Without really noticing, they had gone from a group of young students to the beginnings of a resistance moment, devoted to peaceful protest. The handful of students who warned that the Russians would be unlikely to fold were laughed at; everyone knew that they were the ones who had volunteered to do their community service in the army. Gudrun had been smart; she had done hers in a university, soaking up the knowledge and learning.

  Three days later, the final straw came.

  “Citizens of Hanover, this is an important announcement,” the radio said. The Russians had told everyone that there would be an important announcement enough to make sure that everyone was listening at 9pm, the time that they had set aside for such messages from their occupation authorities. “Please listen carefully and comply with the instructions in this message.