by S. G Mark
Aiden galloped up behind, startling him.
“You can’t listen in,” he said.
“I know, but I need to know what’s going on,” Jack said.
“You know Alex, don’t you? You know him personally?” Aiden enquired with angelic naivety.
“How long is he going to be in there for?” Jack’s temper was strained and he did not want to entertain questions from prying teenagers.
Aiden walked back down the corridor, motioning for him to join, “Dinner’s ready. He’ll be out in time. Nothing in there is of any of your concern.”
Feeling downtrodden and in despair at not being included in the current affairs, Jack followed and briefly noted how well spoken Aiden was, for a fifteen year old at least.
In the dining area, there were five others gathered over their meagre bowls of green slop. Steam rose from the kitchen area as the pot containing today’s offering brewed over the warm stove. Aiden was already ladling two bowl’s worth of the stew when Jack caught up with him. He smiled and took them out to the end of one of the benches.
The others, of whom Jack only recognised two, barely glanced up from their meals. They were all either immersed in their own conversations or were reading books. Peering over at the adjacent table as he clamoured into the seat, Jack spied that one man was reading The Fellowship of The Ring, by Tolkien. Jack’s expression must have illustrated the thought that had just formed in his head, for it attracted the attention of the reader who peered up from the book and pulled off his reading glasses.
“Every year since I were ten year old I read this book,” the man said in his syrupy Yorkshire accent, “I’m no’ gonna let a bloody dodgy government stop me now.”
“I read it as a child,” Jack said, fondly. “It was magical.”
He grimly returned to reading, plainly not wishing to hear of Jack’s opinion.
“Stew’s good today,” Aiden said, shovelling spoonful after spoonful down his throat.
Jack stared at it disappointingly. Maggie would have made something wonderful out of the ingredients available here, but her cooking seemed a lifetime ago and it saddened him to think about her and what she might have cooked tonight. A delicious roast, a scrumptious pie… the finest pastas in all of Scotland.
Raising a spoonful of the green gloop into the air, he examined it curiously. It dripped from the edges and sploshed satisfyingly into the sea of its kind below. Its smell displayed no indication that its taste would differ from its appearance.
“C’mon, Jack,” Aiden encouraged, “The guys spent hours preparing it for everyone. Don’t be rude.”
Jack was both taken aback and embarrassed by what Aiden pointed out and bashfully gulped down the poised spoonful. Indeed, though it pained him to admit it, it was not as bad as it looked. It dared to even be pleasant, warming. Jack glanced at Aiden, who was continuing to try to achieve a conveyer belt motion in order to eat his food as fast as possible. It did not seem that long ago that Jack would be wolfing down his own family meals just as quickly; they were the only cooked food he ate all day and frequently were his only chance at sustenance.
“You don’t like us, do you?” Aiden said, having finished his meal inside a few breaths.
It was a question that Jack did not want to answer honestly. He was aware that many ears had prickled with alertness and were impatient to hear his answer.
“Aiden, you’re young. There is a whole world out there you just don’t understand,” Jack began, but instantly knew he was on the wrong footing for the glare that he was receiving from the boy was damning.
“Ask me where my Mum is,” Aiden said, bluntly. “Ask me where my sister is.”
Jack’s brow furled into concern, “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. My Dad doesn’t know either. They went into town one day and never returned. Everyone swears they never saw them. Gone. Vanished without a trace. Taken by the government - locked away so we keep in fucking line! And we do. They come by every month to check on us, to demand money from us and to gradually grind us down until we can take no more. You think I don’t know what it’s like? Disappearances, people being jailed for everything and anything - you think it’s a world I don’t understand?”
Remaining silent, Jack was stunned by the mirror image that faced him. Both his mother and sister: gone, perhaps forever. It was too close to home for Jack. Too close to the truth that he no longer hoped to keep hidden, but only hoped to forget. Perhaps he would have eventually responded to the boy, if it were not for the terrifying shriek that emanated from the far end of the corridor.
“FUCK!” Alex’s unmistakable voice roared from behind the closed door to the War Room.
A moment later, an enormous thud accompanied it.
Everyone in the dining room abandoned their food, leapt to their feet and dashed out into the corridor. As they all stared down the barely lit tunnel, the whisperings immediately began.
“Oh shit,” one woman said, all colour flushed from her face.
“Should we start packing up? Have they found us?” the Yorkshireman was panicked.
Aiden was knotted with confusion, seemingly divided between conflicting fears. Were they about to be stormed by the CRU? Was it all to be over in a matter of minutes? Jack struggled to define his hope.
“It’s finished, we’re through,” an anonymous whisper rattled through.
“Oh god they know, they know!”
The atmosphere was racked with terror - a terror that Jack was not able to comprehend, but did appreciate. Whatever it was that the terrorists feared, they were frightened that it had now come to pass. The horror and alarm scrawled across their human faces spoiled any prejudice against them. They were exposed: as raw as an open wound.
Then the scream shattered all into silence. It was more than deafening. It was stung with a primeval tremolo; its harmonics plunged into a depth of despair so toxic it poisoned the air around it. Unyielding, unrelenting, unforgiving reckless emotion burst through the War Room door as a woman fled from it, tears cascading down her cheeks. She bolted past the guards and up the stairs to the exit.
No one ran after her. Everyone was frozen in their own personal fear. With the door wide open, the War Room was exposed. Jack distinctly saw a table toppled over, paperwork rained down around it. Several others shifted around in the background, but it was Alex that stood out prominently; Jack had never seen him so contorted with anger.
He didn’t know what possessed him to do it; whether it was telepathic empathy, or basic human nature, Jack stepped forward from the back of the gathering and ran after the woman. As he turned into the staircase he caught Alex’s furious gaze and his heart threatened seizure - the man was incessant with rage.
Emerging through the secret entrance, he inherently knew where to look for her. Running out of the farmhouse, he raced across the muddy yard toward the gate and found her crouching in the sea of flowers; she was enigmatically sorrowful in the silver moonlight haze.
She was sobbing, that could plainly be heard. Her head was buried in her hands and she was shaking uncontrollably. It was a familiar sight; far too familiar.
“Who was it?”
The woman jolted, looking up sharply.
“M-m-my b-brother,” she said, shivering with grief.
Jack slid to her side, putting his arm around her. It was little comfort, but he knew the pain she felt. She furled her head into his shoulders.
“I know you won’t believe me when I say this, but one day this pain will heal,” he said, stroking her hair, “In fact, no. I’m sorry, it won’t heal. But one day you’ll grow to remember the best of brother, rather than just this day.”
The woman burst into raw tears. Horrific memories flooded back to Jack’s mind as he recalled the moment he reached out to feel Jess’s pulse, only for it never to be found. The grief suffocated him. There was no returning from it; there was no possible way out and trying to replay the ways it could have been avoided only poisoned sanity.
Jack gently rocked her. The moon faded behind a thin veil of cloud in an otherwise starry night. The entire world seemed to be just them and not another soul.
“Th-there’s n-n-nothing I c-can d-do,” she whimpered.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter,” Jack whispered, “Don’t analyse it now.”
“B-b-but it -”
Jack cut her off, “No, don’t. You can’t do this to yourself.”
The woman withdrew, “Y-you d-don’t understand -”
“I already do.”
She shook her head violently, “You don’t. You can’t.”
“More than you know,” he said, looking into her dark eyes. In the half moonlight he could barely make them out from the darkness behind her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Jack. I’m Jack,” he said, “And you are?”
“Emma.”
He felt strange for being involved in someone else’s grief. A part of him felt wrong to be comforting a stranger; another felt that he needed to be there, to help someone else through what he had to go through alone.
“Who… who did you know that -”
“My sister,” Jack said bluntly, finding it significantly easier than the last time he had spoken about it.
“It feels too raw, too unreal,” she said, “I can’t comprehend it. It’s like a nightmare - remember the ones that affect you for the rest of the day when you wake from them? It feels like it’s happened, and that it also hasn’t? I feel that he might walk up behind me at any second, tell me he was joking? I don’t understand it. I don’t understand death - not… not like this. Not this way. I’ve seen… I’ve caused… but not like this.”
Jack eyed her through the darkness, preying on her words. A terrorist who did not understand death? After all the lives she had so callously taken? As bats swooped overhead, he tried to comprehend who she was. The grieving sister and angry terrorist conflicted each other - both could not be true, surely?
“You were close then? You and you brother?”
Emma nodded furiously, “You wouldn’t believe. Sometimes it feels like I have a twin - except he’s two years younger. We were so close as teenagers, and then as adults - he’s my best… he was… my b-best f-friend.”
“Come here,” Jack said, taking her under his arm again. “Just remember one thing. Promise me.”
“Wh-what?”
“Never blame yourself. Never think it was your fault. Never try to dissect what happened. Trust me, that is a cycle you will never escape if you choose to go down it. Never blame yourself and never pick away what cannot be undone.”
“I feel like it’s my fault. I should have been there, I should have… I don’t know. I could have saved him.”
“Don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“You sound so sure of what to do,” she sobbed.
“That’s because I spent far too many years making all the wrong choices.”
Emma leaned back, there was fright in her eyes. She brushed her hair from her face and gazed at him intently for a moment. Jack stared right back at her, unsure what she was reacting to. As the moment dragged into a minute, Jack began to fear that Alex had revealed his darkest secrets to the entire Resistance. How could Alex expose him in such a spiteful way? To have his whole life ripped apart and then for the gossip to be feasted upon by strangers like pigs at the trough.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said, eventually.
“Who?” Jack was reluctant for the answer. What lies might Alex have told?
“You’re the man he brought - the man with the past, the man we should trust?”
It was the last answer that he was expecting. The man we should trust? This was not born of Alex. It did not make sense.
“Who told you that?”
Before she could answer, however, Kyle called his name from the other side of the gate. Jack turned and saw him standing in the fine line between shadow and moonlight. His hood was drawn over his face; which did not waver in its graveness.
“Jack you need to come with me,” he said.
“I’m with Emma. Can’t it wait?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We need everyone inside,” Kyle said plainly, “We have something to announce.”
Jack turned back to Emma, who was already standing above him, reaching out her hand.
“Come,” she said, “We are needed somewhere else.”
“But Emma, you’re grieving - you can’t return to - to duty?” Jack was furious that Kyle would try and cut short her comfort. “Kyle - please! She’s lost her brother! Are you completely insensitive?”
However, Emma had already passed through the gate, which Kyle was holding open courteously, and they were both looking back at him with an obedient glare.
“Are you… are you monsters? What are you? First you tell me you’re good - this disgusting organisation that kills people is good? Bombs, threats, shootings - tell me that’s not terrorism because right now I am so fucking lost! I am here in this fucking hell not through choice! Not through choice and you fucking know it - you pretend not to, you pretend that I’m here to be persuaded! Well I’m fucking done! I’m fucking done! That man - that man you call a Leader has taken everything away from me! Every last piece of hope I had left! He has taken it and he has destroyed it and why? For what? Because he didn’t like what was happening - that’s the man you would follow into farcical battle? That’s the man you would have lead this bloody revolution, is it?”
Jack paused for breath, panting with rage. Both Kyle and Emma watched him in abject horror, as if he had cursed them with his words. It stretched beyond that: it was repulsion. He did not understand what they could be repulsed by - he only spoke the truth, was that too difficult for them to digest; to chew on like a juicy bone? Had they forgotten the truth, too long playing revolution in a back garden in the country? Jack was furious. His blood was bubbling with hatred. He felt his muscles seizing up as he remembered each and every event that Alex had played to him like theatre. That was all his life was to Alex - a puppet show and there was no end to the strings that he would pull.
A long shadow cast behind Kyle and Emma; too focused on Jack, they did not see it. But without a sliver of doubt, Jack saw it. He saw the coldness in its outline; he felt the emotion drain from his body; the pacifier had come; his master, the one who plucks the strings so well.
“Go back inside, you two,” Alex said, his anger exquisitely suppressed, but Jack knew better.
Surprised by his presence, Kyle and Emma jumped slightly. Kyle opened his mouth to say something, but Alex raised a hand to quickly silence him. Sensing they did not belong, they scurried back through the yard to the farmhouse and into the shelter of the bunker.
Meanwhile, suppressing his own rage, Jack stood limply in the flower bed of the deceased. Any speech he had prepared to say to this man dissipated; any cruel thoughts he had for him, were quelled; any insults had all but vanished. He could not be vile to the man before him, though every molecule in his body demanded it.
“Don’t speak like that to my comrades again,” Alex said bluntly, “I will not stand for it.”
“Comrades, Alex? Comrades? We aren’t playing soldiers! This is real!”
“I know, Jack. What makes you think I don’t?”
Sighing frustratedly, Jack clenched his fist as a strong desire to thrust it into his friend’s face clung to him.
“This!” Jack threw his arms in the air wildly, “This pretence - the great display! The game of shadows you play - you are this… this unseen presence. You love it, don’t think I haven’t realised? That’s why it’s so pathetic.”
“What am I supposed to have done?” Alex advanced through the gate. It creaked in the otherwise seamlessly silent night.
“That woman’s brother died tonight. She didn’t even get a chance to grieve. She didn’t even get a chance to fucking cry before you
dragged her right back to the revolution.”
“The mission was a failure,” Alex said.
“Is that all you care about?” he asked, “Is that all you fucking care about? Not the people you killed, not the life lost?”
“Lives. The lives I’ve killed and the lives I’ve lost,” Alex answered defiantly, “And yes. I think about them every fucking day. But until you take another’s life, you won’t ever understand.”
From out of nowhere, the guilt struck him backwards. Jack bent over, nausea rising to his throat as the memories returned to his retinas.
“Don’t act like you have forgotten,” Jack spat, collapsing to the ground.
“I haven’t, Jack. And I know what plagues you right this second.”
“What? Jack cried furiously, “You tell me what fucking plagues me?”
“Guilt. Guilt for an accident in which three lives were lost,” Alex said, “Until you are crippled over with the guilt for a life you so willing cut short, I am afraid you have absolutely no right to judge me. I do what I do for my family, for my friends, for my people and for my country. Your actions only serve yourself.”
Alex sneered at him and turned his back on him. Jack watched as he swept up the muddy courtyard and into the warm glow of the farmhouse. Isolation wrapped around him; he was a singularity lost in darkness. A shaft of moonlight glazed over the flower bed beneath his feet. He looked down and suddenly felt his throat tighten with regret. In his anger and fit of guilt at remembering what he had done to his sister, he had trodden on Scar’s flower. The daffodil was squashed into the ground, its petals torn from the stem and ground into the mud.
Diving to the floor, he picked up the flower between his two fingers and tried to make it stand, but it only fell down limply. Again and again he tried, but it was proving fruitless. Each attempt to bring it back to life made it more determined to remain dead. Tears were streaming down Jack’s cheeks. Scar’s flower was gone.