by S. G Mark
“Please,” Jack spoke softly to it, “Please don’t go, please, you’re all I have here, you’re all I’ve got. Scar, please! Don’t! I beg you! You don’t give up, girl, you don’t give up! Don’t let me down now… don’t let me down like I let you down. Please. I couldn’t… I can’t take it. It’s too much. Everything… Everything I have done… and he’s right. He is so, so right and I hate him for it. I hate him for it. Please, Scar,” he looked up sharply to the mountainscape beyond the realms of farm and field, “You better be fucking out there.”
Then, instead of coaxing the poor plant to life, he tugged it out of the ground and, holding it limply in his hand, he marched across the farmyard, sliding in the mud with fierceful determination, and into the house. Inside, he threw the pebble down the hatchet and rolled underneath the secret wall and thundered down the stairs. He needed to see him, he needed to face Alex before he lost his nerve again.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he was met with an eerie silence. Only the guards were within sight, but both had their heads bowed to the floor. Along the walls, the candles flickered a path for Jack to follow. All was still strangely quiet. What had happened to them all? Had they all left? Were they all to retaliate, avenge the death of their friend?
A cold breeze tunnelled down the dark corridor. As he passed the dormitories, he saw that they were empty: the beds were still made. There was no one in the kitchen either, or sitting at any of the tables in the dining area. He passed no one on his search until he came to the final door that he had not yet looked behind. By the dull candlelight he made out that door was open by just a fraction. Gently, he pushed it ajar and the sight that revealed itself to him touched him beyond reckoning.
They were all standing there, heads bowed to the floor. Everyone in the bunker was there, Aiden and his father Joseph also. They were standing around the overturned table, ignoring it as if it were all a figment of their imaginations. The papers littered the floor like snow, but that was not what magnetised Jack’s attention. On the far side of the room, brightly lit by a roaring fire, stood Emma and Alex. They each held an end of a photograph upon which a young man smiled cheekily back at anyone who looked. Together they raised it up to a wall of equally cheeky, grinning, blushing, smiling, bright, bubbly, warm and loving faces. There were hundreds of them. Each face as unique as the rest; no two looked the same for no two were the same. As Jack crept further into the room he could make out the whites of their eyes; the eyes that twinkled and radiated a happier time through the camera lens.
Emma and Alex placed the picture of the young man in the centre of the wall, but despite that he seemed to take no more significant place than the rest. To Jack’s mind not a single one of them was overshadowed by the other, though he did not grasp why he came to feel this way.
Alex looked up and saw Jack. Their eyes met across a room full of murderers and terrorists and Jack felt something he was not able to describe. Ignoring his presence, Alex addressed the gathering at large. Emma wept by the wall, her hand still touching the man in the photograph’s two dimensional face.
“Today we failed our mission,” Alex begun, “But that is not what is important. Today we lost our friends. Today,” he turned to Emma, “We lost a brother, a friend. We lost good people who only ever fought for freedom and justice. It is a sad truth that we are not alone in our grief. Every day someone goes missing. Every day someone is living in fear. Every day someone is arrested for crimes they did not commit. Every day someone’s Rations are reduced just that little bit more. Every day someone is pushed further and further until they can take no more pain. We are all those men and women. We are the ones who could take no more. We are the ones who said No, this is not the way. We are the ones who will changes this. We are the ones who will stop it. You know the pain as well as I. It won’t end until we stop it. Out there, they are listening. Out there, they are fighting. Out there, they control, they manipulate. Out there, they are our Enemy and out there, we are theirs.”
A chill spiralled down Jack’s spine. Alex’s words were in tune to his beating heart and as he looked around the room he could see that he was not alone. The rhythm was viral.
“Five good men died, killed, became martyrs to our cause - whatever you want to call it, it boils down to the same goddamn thing. This is real. This is happening. This is no game and you are not a player. You are here for your own personal reasons. To fight for a better world, to fight for your families, to fight for justice, for truth, for the right to be free. Maybe you have homes to go back to at end of this, maybe you don’t. I can’t promise that you’ll make. I can’t promise that your photograph won’t be placed upon this wall. But I can promise you that whatever your contribution - no matter how big or how small and insignificant, your effort matters. Your voice matters. You matter. You are what makes The Resistance and the strange, mad thing is you are what makes Them too. Without you, they have no control. Without you, they are savages. Something to bear in mind, when you have doubts for I don’t blame you if you do. Look at it out there. We’re on the run. We’re wanted. We’re killers. But we are one thing they haven’t reckoned yet. We are fighters, and no matter what they throw at us we will come back stronger and more defiant. And that, my comrades, is exactly why we are The Resistance.”
Alex bowed his head gently and swept across the room, passing Jack as he did, and left. The others remained, hanging in their own private vigil. The words from Alex’s speech echoed off the walls, swirling in the atmosphere.
After a moment, Jack summoned the courage to break the stillness and traversed the room to join Emma at the wall. More than a hundred faces looked at him and now that he knew they were dead their smiles and grins vanished and their once sparkling, happy eyes stared accusingly at the living. Jack dared not look them in the eye for fear of being judged; for fear of being ashamed to be alive where others were not.
Emma stood beside the photograph of her brother. He did not look old in the picture. He had light brown hair, just like his sister. Two dimples flanked his broad smile. Though only his neck was visible, Jack noticed how smart he looked. He wore a deep red tie and what looked to be a shirt and waistcoat.
“This was his wedding day,” Emma spoke, her voice weighed down by grief.
Jack felt his heart be dragged down alongside. Married? He had not entertained the idea that these people would ever have followed normal lives and now he was being confronted with the concept that they could be loved?
“She died,” Emma said, “Taken by the CRU and locked up. We don’t even know why. Someone didn’t like her, so they reported her.”
“Is…. is that why you joined?”
Emma shook her head, “We were already involved. The horrible thing is, Izzy never knew. She never realised how special the man she married was. My brother, my Jonny.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“For what? For being angry earlier?” she asked, “We’re all angry down here, Jack. That’s why we’re here. You’re one of us without even realising it. Alex said you needed time to adjust. The ironic thing is you don’t.”
“Emma, I don’t mean for this to sound offensive, but you really don’t know me at all.”
“No, but then perhaps you shouldn’t wear your heart on your sleeve. Maybe you should keep a closer eye on those feelings of yours because they are escaping you every time you speak, every look you give.”
“What are you saying?”
“The first month is the hardest,” she said, “But it’s not the length of time. It’s about learning to let go.”
At that she bent in to kiss her brother’s photographic cheek before slipping past him and exiting the War Room. Everyone’s eyes were bent low to the ground and Jack found himself following suit. If this was a vigil to all those that died, then he was going to be here for a while yet. He shut his eyes and allowed the silence to enfold over him. It was strangely comforting. For once he was not alone in his thoughts. There were thirty other lonely, gr
ieving, guilty voices joining him in chorus.
Chapter Five
Jack had been staring at the lifeless daffodil for longer than he cared to count. He was hypnotically linked to it. He could not find the strength to look away from it for through it he could see his memories more clearly. Since the vigil, he had been trapped in his own thoughts and unable to interact with the world with any great meaning. He recognised that there were people around him. He recognised that he still breathed air; he knew to keep circulating his blood; he knew where objects were and he knew when light touched his irises. Everything else was surplus to criticality and was displaced from his memory.
The daffodil. Squashed, lifeless and irrevocably dead. It was a tentative link to the past; a channel between reality and memory. The longer he stared at the fast decaying plant, the better he visualised his memories. They were not solely of Scar, although they were always the clearest, perhaps because they were the most recent. His favourite memory was the way her bravado confidence leaked into an occasional smile. He hadn’t realised how little she smiled. Had she much to smile about? Jack certainly did little to help with that. Food and company could only do so much, he knew that. What she had experienced as a teenager was never going to be healed by hot soup and afternoon chats. He should have spoken to her more - properly spoken to her. Instead he’d only ever talked about his own problems, and it had never really occurred to him that she might have wanted to speak about her own.
His mother climbed through the windows of his mind to interfere in his thoughts once more. There were no clear memories of her that he wished to see again. He only re-lived his sister’s funeral. Time and time again she would turn on him and her cruel words battered his eardrums once more. The hurt never ceased, never wavered in its might and menace. He was destined to regret and never forget. There was nothing he could do now. There were no words of comfort he could say to reassure himself and he was not even convinced that was what he wanted to hear. His mother had died, alcohol poisoning caused by no one but herself. Years and years of abuse had culminated into one final punctuation stop. Bitterness. That’s all he felt when she creeped into thought and into his heart.
Hard though it was for him to remember his mother, it was harder still for Jack to remember his sister. Jess. She never appeared in his childhood memories. A faded shadow lingered where she should have been. It could never have been any other way; memories of Jessica were never going to be anything but harrowing.
These were the people who kept him company as he slept. These were the people who watched him as he lay unconscious, as he rose from sleep, as he ate breakfast and as he whiled the hours away until the time came for them to meet again in his nightmares.
Three days passed since the vigil. The atmosphere at Resistance Headquarters was numb, nearly intangible. Few spoke and laughter was consigned to furtive moments of amnesia, before the sadness asserted itself again. A stiff solemnness gripped each and every one of them. From the moment they woke to the moment they slept, they kept their eyes level with the ground, daring not to look up for fear that their thoughts may be read telepathically. It was certainly Jack’s worst fear: that everyone could read his mind, see his memories and understand who he was deep down. It was silly to fear such idiotic ideas, but it preyed on his mind regardless. His hurt was an open wound and exposing it now would only lead to further bleeding; he could not risk that again.
Alex had not left his office in days. A guard was stationed outside at all times, allowing no one in. It troubled Jack immensely as to what the man might be thinking behind closed doors. What new schemes was he planning today? A revenge attack for the failed mission? Five men had been killed - was Jack supposed to believe that there wouldn’t be a retaliation? But not even The Resistance members were allowed in. The door remained closed. Spending hours sitting at the dining table, Jack had located the perfect spot to simply sit and stare at the wooden door. Not a single person was allowed in. Kyle had tried and failed several times; as had a short bald man Jack vaguely recognised.
The longer Alex remained isolated in his authoritative tomb, the more Jack became disinclined to believe that he was formulating any sort of revenge plan. Whatever Alex was up to in his office, Jack knew it had to be something close to his heart and only two people could ever occupy that role. Maggie and Eliza. His initial thought was that something had happened to them, but as time wore on he knew that Alex - no matter how cruel a man he was - would not deny Jack the knowledge that they were arrested or, worse, dead. Even entertaining the possibility that Alex could keep something as important as that from him made Jack physically sick.
If he knocked on the office door, Jack knew what to expect; but if he were to mention Eliza’s name, it would surely spell the end to any further conversations he had with Alex. On the very first night he spent here, Alex had told him never to mention her name again. Not even a syllable of her name had passed his lips. He was too afraid that saying her name aloud would somehow hurt her in a way or even cause Alex to completely unhinge. It was hard. In the last seconds of being with her he had felt complete, that he was a part of something bigger. All that had been snatched away prematurely from him and there was little he could say or do to change the situation. He was trapped in this place, this bunker of the morally corrupt. And if he could escape and return, what would he say? Over many hours he had pondered such an event - the explanation, the phrasing he would use. Would she believe him? He doubted very much if he would believe himself. It would come across as just another one of his lies. Eliza had no reason to trust him anymore. The idea that he might have lost her forever cut a deep wound that he did not believe could be healed. He loved her, though he dared not say it aloud, and had never loved anyone quite so selflessly before.
“Houston to Jack, come in?”
A hand waved in front of his eyes, but it was a number of seconds before Jack focussed on it and recognised the face that smiled on the other side of it. Smiling weakly, Emma was vying for his attention.
“Wha’?” Jack said sheepishly, awakening from his reveries. He had hardly noticed a single person’s existence in all the time he had sat in the dining room. At first he found himself religiously staring at Alex’s door, and the next he was dwelling on his darkest memories. An eternity seemed to pass in no time, and yet no time seemed to have passed at all.
“Kitchen duty,” Emma said, throwing him a tea-towel.
It hit him square in the face. Emma giggled. Removing it from his face, he revealed his confusion to her.
“What do you mean, kitchen duty?”
“The meals don’t cook themselves?” Emma said, not quite grasping what Jack’s problem was.
“Yeah, but -” Jack cut himself off before he made a mistake. He was on the verge of questioning why he would be involved in the cooking before realising the impact it would have. For nearly a month he had been eating their food without questioning its origin or helping in its preparation. He had come to expect it.
“But what? Come on, some of the guys are heading off tomorrow. They need a good meal in them before they leave.”
Emma gently pulled on his arm and coaxed him from his chair.
“See, your legs do work after all!”
She led him into the kitchen area and handed him an apron.
Jack looked around. He had not appreciated just how well equipped the kitchen was. It was not as neatly designed as the one upstairs and it was pretty basic, but there were drawers of onions and potatoes and an assortment of other seasonal vegetables. Stacked by the sink were piles of plates and cutlery and in the corner of the narrow room was a small fridge which was hooked up to a small Cold Storage Generator, just like the one that the Readers had. There was little workspace; just enough for three people to work individually and an oven and hob on which to cook. Both were connected up to a thick black cable that ran up into the ceiling and presumably the farmhouse above. Pots and pans lined the walls and baking trays were stacked above the fridge. Whilst th
e worktops themselves were clean enough, Jack could not help but notice the grime embedded into the hob and area around the sink.
A chopping board was laid out on the worktop by the hob. A knife awaited an owner. Aside Emma and himself, another man occupied the kitchen space and was presently excavating the fridge like a palaeontologist digging in the desert. He was odd looking man, slightly rotund and wore a strange hairstyle that could only be described as a lovechild between a mullet and a bob.
“Alan,” Emma said, “This is Jack.”
Bumping his head on the way out, Alan emerged from the fridge. A beard curved round his chin from his sideburns; he wore tinted round glasses and his cheeks were reminiscent of a hamster hoarding food for a later date. He extended a hand to Jack, who took it graciously but at the same time reticently. Alan completely betrayed the persona of a typical Resistance member.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, “You new? You don’t look too frightened yet!”
“Frightened?” Jack was alarmed.
Alan hissed a laugh, “Ah man, you lot are so easy to wind up.”
Jack shot Emma a petrified look.
“Alan likes to wind up our new recruits,” she said, “It’s about his only talent around here!”
“Ach, c’mon. I make a mean stew!”
“Alan, we only ever eat stew!”
“I know, you lot are so spoilt!” he returned his head to the fridge.