The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

“I saw you coming out of the alleyway when I was just about turn into it. I thought I would follow you,” she retook her seat beside him, “Kyle sent me to get you.”

  “To get me?”

  “He thinks it’s time for you to really get involved in The Resistance. He was extremely impressed by your actions in Fort William,” she said.

  “He was?” Jack was stunned. He hadn’t done anything spectacular to deserve any praise.

  “Jack,” she leant in towards him, “You saw three people shot in the head and instead of dissolving into a mess which - quite rightly - any other person might do, you concentrated on what you had to do, which was to get out of there and get out quickly.”

  Ignoring Emma’s praise, Jack addressed the new situation he found himself in, “So do we move out tonight to meet up with Kyle?”

  “No, right now we both need sleep,” she said, “It’s been a long day. C’mon, let’s head up.”

  Jack lay awake most of the night, listening to the snoring and slumber of the others. Having shared a dormitory with a constant flux of random strangers for the past six months, it wasn’t these perennial noises that prevented Jack from sleep.

  Worry. It gripped his chest tightly, slowly pushing down on his lungs such that it was difficult to breathe. Whatever tomorrow had planned for him, it certainly toyed with him until dawn. Recoiling from the cold light, the anxiety slithered back into the shadows of deepest thought and allowed Jack’s heavy eyelids to close.

  But sleep did not stay with him long. He was awoken abruptly by a slamming door and when his eyes focussed, he was surprised to see that he was entirely alone. All the beds were made up as if no one had slept there at all. The duvet hid from view the soft imprint of a fugitive terrorist within.

  Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he threw the covers from him and ventured out into the hallway. A man he didn’t recognise nodded at him as he exited the bathroom, damp hair and carrying a set of bloodied towels. As Jack remained rooted to a particularly ragged piece of carpet, the man traversed the hallway and sidestepped into another room. It was a very claustrophobic house.

  Downstairs, he followed the sulphur trail of frying eggs into the kitchen to find Emma standing over the hob as Hamid stacked the drying dishes by the sink. Both had their backs turned to Jack.

  “I haven’t heard anything about them in months,” Emma continued the conversation uninterrupted by Jack’s silence arrival. “Every now and then I hear something, but it’s all on the grapevine. Sometimes I find it difficult not to just turn up at the house and peer at them through the window, if only to see what they are up to. Well, you know how I feel…”

  “I haven’t heard from them since the day they left, I guess it’s better that way. The less they have to do with me, the safer they are. But even still, I’d pay all the money I have left in the world just to know that they are still alive…”

  “You’re a brave man, Hamid,” Emma said, “I’m not sure many people could do what you’ve done.”

  Hamid turned around, drying off his hands with the tea-towel, and smiled at Emma before his gaze slipped to Jack.

  “We have a guest,” he said, “What do you fancy for breakfast?”

  The sizzling eggs were too enticing.

  “One of those please,” he pointed, “I haven’t had a hot breakfast in forever.”

  Jack sunk into a dining chair as Hamid fetched him a plate and Emma slid a solitary egg into his plate. Caring not that there was nothing else on his plate, Jack dug into his relative feast and savoured the warmth. Memories of many hangovers resuscitated themselves in a single mouthful.

  “Thank you,” he said when he scooped up the last forkful, his cheeks crammed like a hamster.

  Emma soaked the frying pan in the sink before taking the chair adjacent to Jack. She looked like she had slept as equally well. Hamid was hovering by the window, gently lifting the curtains to spy on the outside world.

  “So, do we leave now?” Jack went straight to the point.

  “Kyle said he took you to get fake ID. Do you still have it?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Then yes, we leave immediately,” she said, sitting back in the chair, “Immediately after we go through who you are and who I am.”

  Jack pulled out his ID from his pocket and gave it to Emma, who replicated his actions. Her card described a woman in her early thirties from Ilkley in Yorkshire.

  “How do we know each other?” she asked.

  “We met through a mutual friend?” Jack suggested.

  “At a party,” she continued, “You helped me when I’d had a bit too much to drink. Been friends ever since. So this was about four years ago, yeah?”

  “Sounds good,” Jack said, “What else do we need to know?”

  “Where we are going and why,” she said, “But that one’s easy. We are visiting friends in Leeds for New Year. They are going to be super relaxed right now - they can’t be suspicious of everyone going to other cities at this time of year. Well they can, but they can’t catch everyone out….”

  “What are our friends names?” Jack asked, wondering why it wasn’t a more obvious question for Emma.

  “Jackie and Daniel O’Neill,” Emma said, “They will only check if they are really suspicious, but by that time we’d already be as good as dead so it wouldn’t matter either way if we were basing our story on any truth.”

  Jack rested his hands on his knees. He didn’t feel ready to leave quite yet, let alone abandon this relative peace for the complete unknown. So Kyle wanted him for something, could he not least have the decency to outline the masterful plans he had for his life?

  Meanwhile, Emma rose to her feet and immediately reached for her jacket which hung on the hook on the back door.

  “Can you just give me a minute to say goodbye to Anne?” Jack said.

  “Anne? Emma queried, “She left first thing in the morning.”

  “To where?”

  “No idea, sorry,” she said, zipping up her jacket.

  “Hamid?” Jack turned to his host, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “If she comes back, I will let her know you said goodbye,” he smiled.

  “C’mon, we need to hurry if we’re going to catch the eleven twelve train,” Emma hopped on the spot to warm up.

  Twenty minutes later and they were approaching the station. There was a deluge of people pouring both in and out of it. The plaza before the entrance was crammed full of people and it took Jack a number of seconds to realise why. Where there should have been open concourse with sporadic tufts of nature, there was instead a barricade, a line of uniformed policemen and two sets of prefabricated booths, through which everyone in the long queue that snaked round the plaza must eventually pass.

  “Did you expect this?” Jack turned to Emma as they waited for a traffic light to turn green.

  “Nominally, but I was hoping they were going to be more relaxed than this,” she said, “No matter. It is what it is. The queue is long, but moving. At least that’s something in our favour. We have another fifteen minutes before the train leaves.”

  They crossed the road and joined the tail end of the queue. Immediately ahead of them was an older couple, seemingly in their mid-fifties. Dressed in heavy winter jackets and carrying a suitcase each, they also appeared to be in the middle of an argument.

  “We’re going to be late, I know it,” the woman worried.

  “It’ll be fine, we still have another half hour before our train,” her husband attempted to calm her.

  “It’s easy for you to be all relaxed about it!” she snapped back, “You're Not the one who’ll have to look them in the eye knowing what I’ve done!”

  “Calm down,” he urged her, scanning their surroundings with paranoid eyes.

  Both Jack and Emma pretended to be distracted in their own lives as they listened intently into the conversation.

  “Don’t you dare tell me to calm down,” she whispered sharply, “They won’t care we were hungry! I stole
them, and they know! I can just tell.”

  The man grabbed his wife’s hand tightly, “You’re going to have to pull yourself together. Now. It was one week’s worth, that’s it. No one died. So keep quiet and act like nothing has happened.”

  His words seemed to do the trick, for the woman fell pathetically into silence and turned her concentration to aligning all the zips on her suitcase together.

  Jack was touched with sadness. The poor woman had stolen a week’s worth of Rations because she was hungry but her guilt was proportional to fraud. Convinced that the CRU already knew, she was panicking that her time was running out. Jack wished he could lean in and whisper to her that it was going to be alright, but even if he could he was not sure he would be able to lie to her. Was it going to be okay? Jack was not convinced they would make it through the security checks themselves.

  He turned his attention to Emma, who was staring into the distance, quite within a world of her own. Jack wondered what she was thinking. He knew her earlier conversation with Hamid had been about their respective families. Though Jack was aware of their existence, she spoke very little of them.

  The queue advanced a few metres. Jack and Emma stepped forward, wordlessly, both trying to play it cool as if the security checks were nothing for them to worry about. All around them they heard complaints of the time it was taking and for the need of it in the first place.

  The security booths loomed omnipresent, and there was an infectious fear slithering around the crowd. Furtive irises glanced secretively around as waves of paranoia submerged all logic and reason; and in one foul sweep a hundred souls wore a hundred different masks in the eye of the beholder: thief or terrorist, murderer or sexually perverted. There were a hundred innocent lives in the crowd, and yet at the same time only one.

  Eventually they reached the top of the queue. The husband and wife ahead of them parted towards separate booths and Jack witnessed an intimate moment of fear between them; he felt as if he were trespassing.

  “Just show them your card and don’t say anything unless they ask you,” Emma said discreetly to him.

  “Next!” a voice called from the clear booth.

  Jack stepped up, comforted by sight of the husband and wife holding hands on the other side as they made their way to the platform.

  “ID card please,” the figure on the other side of the screen stared blankly, uncaringly at him. Barely did they drink in his appearance as they awaited the presence of an ID card on the little desk in front of them.

  Jack dropped the card casually in front of them and stared vacantly around, as if this security check was barely an inconvenience.

  “What’s your purpose for travelling today?” the drone behind the counter asked.

  “Visiting some friends in Leeds,” Jack recited, “It’s a tradition that we always meet up for New Year.”

  The security officer presented Jack’s ID card back to him, poised between two robotic fingers.

  “Cleared, please move on and board your train as soon as possible,” they said, waving Jack onwards.

  Through a little turnstile gate Jack headed, but his mental race for freedom was suspended by the security officer’s voice shouting after him.

  “Sir, where is your luggage?” the man was half leaning out of the booth.

  Inspiration shaped itself in the form of Kyle Monteith, and a question that Jack had asked him one time that was not dissimilar to the one presented to him now.

  “I’m only going to be away a couple of days, I couldn’t be bothered with packing, cheers though!” Jack didn’t even wait for the officer’s reply.

  Emma met him on the other side.

  “Well that was easy,” she said, steering Jack into the station itself.

  “This is definitely more security than there was when I was in Edinburgh,” Jack said, “But they aren’t really being that intensive… that woman in front had nothing to worry about.”

  “Didn’t she?” Emma said, “It matters not whether you got through or anyone else of a dubious character did… so long as enough don’t pass, it does a better job than if they investigated the entire history of every single person in the queue.”

  Jack glanced back at the security booths and saw a man being taken into a white van by two police officers. He understood what Emma had told him. Potential fear far outweighed the certainty of any situation.

  “C’mon, we need to get our train.”

  They grabbed two seats opposite each other by the window. Jack stared across the table at Emma, waiting for her next instruction. He felt completely at the woman’s mercy, especially now that he was out in the open. He assumed they couldn’t speak about the work he was going to do with Kyle, nor mention anything of where they had been or what they had been doing. Jack therefore had to silently accept that whatever was going to happen to him, he was not likely to be told of it with much advance notice.

  He sat back in the chair and stared out the window across the empty platform. The train slowly began moving; rain whipping the glass as it pulled out from under the shelter of the station.

  “Just as well we aren’t in that queue anymore,” Jack said idly.

  Emma yawned.

  “Did you not sleep well last night?”

  Emma, emerging from her yawn, said, “I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in years.”

  Jack instantly knew what she was referring to.

  “Well at least you enjoy your job, even if it’s exhausting,” Jack said, “I’d kill for that opportunity. I feel a bit redundant.”

  Emma looked up with an intriguing glare about her, “It’s not that you’re unemployable… I think things will turn around for you very shortly. New Year, new you and all that crap.”

  “Oh please, don’t. That saying makes me ill,” Jack smiled, “But I hope you are right. I feel like I’m coasting at the moment, that other people are in charge of my life.”

  “Oh I don’t think that ever changes for anyone,” Emma laughed, “Anyway, let’s not talk about work… or not work in your case.”

  “Yeah, driving me nuts. How’s the family?” Jack seized his opportunity to question Emma.

  “Not that either,” she said, and her eyes returned a cold glaze and the conversation was over.

  The rest of the journey played out as a stream of scenery whipping past the window, synced up to the scurrying thoughts in his head that were barely interrupted by the expanse of muddy fields dissolving into the distance, interspersed with dirty sheep and complacent cows. Midway through their journey, the rain subsided, but trails of droplets streaked continuously across the window. Jack shivered as a rush of frozen air seeped through the carriage. He looked across the table to try and catch Emma’s eye, but her head was resting against the side and her eyes were defiantly shut, though he doubted very much whether she was actually asleep.

  Leeds. He had never been there before nor really thought much about it. It was a city in the North of England and that’s all the information he had stored on it. Why Kyle could possibly want him here was a matter he had no inkling of an answer to. Whatever it was, Emma was not going to brief him in public. They would most likely head to a safehouse before discussing anything further. Jack understood the risks of discussing anything in public, but it also frustrated him. The older he got the more impatient he became.

  Five minutes from Leeds, the train conductor announced their imminent arrival and Emma woke from her deceptive slumber. She cast Jack a bland smile.

  “Sorry, I was really tired,” she said before Jack had even commented on her nap.

  As they arrived at the platform another line of security checks were being carried out - this time for both incoming and outgoing passengers. Jack flushed, but quickly calmed down and steadied his initial rush of adrenaline.

  The booths were identical to those in Blackpool. They joined the long queue of tired passengers with their suitcases and exhausted expressions. The turnaround was much quicker than previously, but Jack witnessed
at least three people being taken off by CRU officers. Greater efficiency seemingly evolved from greater ruthlessness.

  Jack presented his card to the officer - another android who grabbed it and perused its contents.

  “What’s the purpose of your visit?”

  “Seeing some friends for New Year. It’s a bit of a tradition,” Jack said jovially, preparing to bore the android to death with anecdotes if necessary.

  “Good to go, remember to be vigilant,” they dismissed him and ordered the next in line to come forward.

  Jack met Emma on the other side and they marched off out of the station together. The first impression of the city Jack had was a grim looking pub on the opposite side of the road, with what looked like neglected hanging baskets lining the edge of the building; long forgotten by humanity but devoured by winter’s crisp clutch. Adjacent to the pub was a tacky, run down establishment which could only loosely be described as a restaurant. The faded ideograph of a chicken hung over where the restaurant’s name should have been lit up in neon, but instead only three letters remained and the actual name of the joint was left as an enigma.

  “Where to now?” he asked, turned his attention back to Emma.

  “We’re getting picked up a few streets from here,” she said, “Follow me.”

  Her voice was commanding and serious. Jack’s arteries heaved under his thundering new pulse. He followed Emma closely, keeping an eye on the surrounding area for policemen and CRU officers.

  A car slowed and tracked them by for a few metres. Grabbing Jack’s hand, Emma suddenly pulled open the passenger door and threw him inside whilst she dove in after him.

  “Go, now,” she yelled at the driver as she slammed the car door shut.

  Jack, clamouring over to the seat on the other side, whipped round to glance a view behind them. A man was running along the pavement just a few metres from where they had hopped on board.