The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

  “I could fucking kill you,” she tensed her fists.

  The most depressing part of his tale was that it would please them. He knew they weren’t going to ponder too deeply on who would be hurt by this venture. Jack understood and that worried him. The greater good.

  “I’ve secured us a monthly income,” he said, “Five hundred a month.”

  She froze at once, “How?”

  “You don’t need to know how,” he said, honouring his promise to Julian for anonymity, “Just that it’s done.”

  “But… that’s… fantastic,” Lana said, “If it’s true…”

  “It is,” Jack said, feeling proud of his own work.

  Lana knelt down at his feet, “I thought the worst had happened… I thought you’d be caught or had done something stupid.”

  Jack had no response to her. Pride conflicted guilt.

  “Well this is cause for celebration, right?” she smiled, craning her neck towards Karl, “Get the brandy?”

  “This place had brandy and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Karl nicked it for tonight,” Lana said, rolling up her sleeves.

  Jack leant down to pull off his weary shoes. He’d forgotten what he had been wearing - Harry Kirk’s clothes.

  “Had a few yourself, I see?” Lana raised an eyebrow.

  Jack looked blankly at her.

  “You reek of it,” she whispered, “I won’t ask where the money’s come from… but it’s safe? No one can trace it back here, back to us?”

  Jack shook his head, “Glad to see you have so much faith in my common sense.”

  “It’s not that,” Lana said, “It’s them. The whole country’s against us - we don’t know who could be playing us…”

  “True,” Jack pondered, feeling a little frightened for a second before recalling the horror on Julian’s face when he first saw him at his home, “But being their enemy has its advantages too…”

  “What do you mean us?”

  “We fear them. We look behind our backs and keep our guard up. They’re everywhere. But we’re not. We’re a few. We’re endangered… and since when has humanity ever been fearful of the masses? To us, our enemy is everyone - to them, their enemy could be anyone.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sleet splatted against the window as the tea arrived. Grime coated windows showed a vista of destitution and grottiness. Rubbish spewed forth from the communal bins. The rain smeared all in a grey grease of desolateness. Granite skies reflecting a concrete world. The people racing by had their hoods held up against the wind; each resembling drowned corpses of themselves. February brewed an ugly future.

  Jack turned his attention to his tea; steam rising satisfyingly from the soft caramel brown. The waitress placed a tiny jug of milk between the cups and hopped away to the next customer. Stirring in a little sugar for luxury, Jack’s eyes flicked up towards his accomplice. Twenty eight days had passed since their last meeting. Though much had happened in that time, Jack had little to say to the man beyond what he’d prepared.

  “It was difficult to come into town today,” Julian said, warming his hands with his cup. He looked uncomfortably around at his surroundings. The grubby cafe was far from champagne and chandeliers.

  Jack stared at him. He had learned that the less he said, the more in control he was. He brought the tea to his lips but didn’t sip.

  “Security’s been a nightmare since that DD attack,” he continued. “I suppose you’re pleased about that though.”

  Jack replaced his tea on to the table and leant forward, “All cut from the same cloth, aren’t we?”

  “Were…” Julian lowered his voice, “Were you involved?”

  Fifty-three people killed over three days. Bomb attacks in London, Liverpool and Cardiff. The Democratic Demolitioners hailed it as a victory against society. Videos had been released to the media showing its members cheering as the bombs went off. The Masked Man issued a statement warning of more to come.

  “How’s Beth?” Jack changed subjects. He never denied his involvement with the truly disgusting acts of terrorism - Resistance or otherwise. Jack needed Julian to fear him to maintain the cash flow. He needed to be the monster Julian believed him to be.

  “Don’t talk about her,” Julian snapped.

  “Does she suspect anything?”

  “No,” Julian said, lowering his guard, “But it’s only a matter of time. She didn’t understand why I needed to go into the office today… I can’t keep lying to her.”

  “Not my problem,” Jack said, finally drinking his tea.

  “If you could lower the amount,” Julian pleaded.

  Jack kept his mouth shut but shook his head.

  “You disgust me,” Julian muttered under his breath.

  “Just give it to me,” Jack demanded.

  Julian slid a thick envelope across the table.

  “Go home,” Jack advised, “London isn’t a safe place for you to be right now.”

  “You know of something?” Julian looked suddenly out the window, as if he were expecting an explosion to happen on cue.

  “Look at it out there,” Jack said, “CRU are patrolling the streets. In a few hours Martial Law will descend. Guilty or innocent, everyone's a suspect to them.”

  Julian looked nervous, and seemed to be on the brink of asking Jack another question. But Jack seized control, slipping the envelope into his inner jacket pocket and rising to his feet; mug of tea in hand as he drained the cup dry.

  “Are you going?” Julian asked.

  “Why, do you want to stay and chat?” Jack laughed sarcastically. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He left Julian at the table and walked out into the torrential downpour.

  Snow had crippled the countryside, but in London it was merely a monsoon. It was supposed to be the worst snowfall in a century. The media streamed live images of fields drowned in snow and ice sheets. Vehicles were grounded by the snow drifts. Roads were closed and chaos was slowly spreading through the country lanes. Meanwhile in London, it was simply wet. However, that didn’t mean that it was free from the media storm. Every newspaper; every television outlet was saturated with the weather. For weeks this ran on for until five days ago when the first of the DD’s bombs struck. Seventeen dead in the first attack. Fourteen in the second. Twenty two in the third. Ever since then the country was on high alert for a wholly different reason. Just as the forecasters could not predict the harshest winter, no one could predict the severity of the government’s response. The CRU and Nightstalkers had doubled their patrols. Martial Law had returned with the army swooping in with rifles and machine guns at seven o’clock sharp. People were being hounded on the streets for information. Jack had seen one man who dared to stand up to the CRU officer harassing him being carted off into a van. As matter of course, he forced down his eyes and pretended that he had not seen a thing.

  London was indeed a whole new environment. Here the best and the worst of society coexisted. It was a training ground for criminals and a haven for the rich, just a few thousand metres apart. In all his time in Edinburgh he had never seen such treatment of citizens by the CRU officers. Perhaps, in the intervening months since he had last been there, it had been dragged down to the same bowels of hell he currently resided in. Whatever the current reality, in his head it was an idyllic ignorance. Every time he thought of the place he recalled it in a gilded nostalgia. Dare he dwell too long in the past and that guise of nostalgia quickly disintegrated into heartache.

  Taking out his mobile phone, he stared at the rain smeared screen. He’d stolen it from someone shopping on Oxford Street. Prime targets for such victimless crimes: the man was too busy admiring the designer suits he could afford than to notice the hand in his pocket. Lana had taught him the trick. At first he felt guilty. Now it was just about survival.

  No numbers were stored on the phone. He had wiped it as soon as he was back at the safehouse. Every number he needed to call was memorised, though he had only scope for Lan
a and the few others. Since arriving in London he hadn’t heard from Emma or Kyle. Alex was completely off radar. He trusted that the media’s lack of rejoice meant that he was still alive.

  Stopping at the corner of the street, Jack’s fingers automatically pressed the keys of a number he knew he shouldn’t. It was a number he knew off by heart and one that would never dial a Resistance member. The first few digits told of an Edinburgh area code. Home. Relugas Road. Eliza. He cleared the digits and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.

  Every now and then temptation overcame him. To dial the number, even just to hear her voice, would be a dream. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to just stop at that. He missed her more than he could even describe. How she must be feeling since the day that he disappeared, Jack could only guess at. From her perspective, she didn’t know if he were dead or alive. Maybe she had guessed dead; but it was his parent’s tragedy all over again. The constant waiting for news of a body that would never come. And what of Alex? Did he return home as often as he once did? Did he continue the lie? Jack knew these were questions he might never be able to hear the answers to.

  Marching onwards, he found himself slipping sideways into an off licence as a couple of CRU officers strode down the street toward him. He wasn’t even hiding from them, not especially, but his instincts kicked in and there he was, cowering between the bottles of cheap cider that looked ever more appealing by the second. With one eye on the entrance, he exhaled gently when the officers passed without incident. He wasn’t the only one. A woman to his left was also keenly eyeing up the entrance. Her hair was scruffy and she looked unwashed. Jack had only just enough time to register that her eyes were blue when she scurried from the shop with two bottles in her hand. With delayed reaction, the shop assistant bolted after her, crying for help. Cider bottle in hand, Jack watched as the two CRU officers tore past the shop in hot pursuit. It was then that he realised the idiot shopkeeper had left the place unattended. Casually, he walked out and continued on his way.

  No guilt. No remorse. No sense that he had committed a crime or had acted in any way against his principles. He wanted the cider, so he took it.

  An hour later and he was entering the filthy ex-council estate. Three weeks ago they had to move safehouses. One of the neighbours had tipped the CRU off and they had twenty minutes to leave. Fleeing with only the clothes on their backs, Lana had torched the place before they shut the door.

  “I don’t want them to find anything,” she said bitterly as she closed the flat door shut behind them.

  In all the terror and pandemonium, Jack’s heartbeat had remained steady and calm. That was the moment that he realised normality was a long forgotten place.

  He turned the key in the door and stepped into an aroma of damp and dog hair. The previous owner had been turfed out by their landlord and had apparently left the dog behind to die of starvation. It wasn’t a pleasant place to live, but it was shelter and it was safe - two commodities that Jack and Lana held preciously.

  He found Lana in the kitchenette, angrily bashing a tin of beans open. It was a pathetic but wholesome meal.

  “You alright?” he asked.

  She turned around. Her eyes were bloodshot. She had been crying.

  “What’s happened?” he said, expecting the worst.

  “Oh you know,” she said, abandoning the tin and wiping her eyes.

  “Are we the only ones here?” Jack asked.

  Lana nodded as more tears trickled down her cheeks. He knew exactly what was wrong, he just didn’t want to have to say it.

  “I got us this,” he presented the bottle of cider.

  “That’s even better than the takeout I was sorely tempted to get,” she laughed half heartedly, “I take it you have the money?”

  Jack nodded, extracting the envelope from his pocket and dropping it on to the coffee table.

  “Well that’s one piece of good news,” she sighed, “Still no word from the others.”

  “We just have to be patient,” Jack assured her.

  Since leaving the Camden safe house, they had been largely cut off from the rest of The Resistance. The others hadn’t followed Jack and Lana to this location, the increased raids partially to blame. Both God’s Disciples and the DD had issued a number of threats over the past few weeks - with the latter the only one to follow them through.

  “When it’s quietened down a bit, we will hear something,” Jack continued, “For now, we’ll just have to sit tight and drink this.”

  The cider called to him. He hadn’t had a drink since Hogmanay - more out of inaccessibility than a lack of desire. Every subsequent day this year had been gruelling. In hiding, sneaking around streets and conveying partial messages to their comrades. It was a quiet chaos. Since their safehouse move, they had been left entirely in the dark. However, before this point there had been very little light.

  Though another member had arranged their new safehouse, their communication with the rest of The Resistance remained strictly frozen. Despite being kept isolated from the decisions being made, they were met with a gentle wave of approved visitors; the waifs and strays of the terrorist world. Men and women would come and go from the safehouse, staying only for a few hours, occasionally a night. They would leave instructions for others - chain commands from above to find certain members and give them their orders. No explanations given. Details were a luxury.

  It was both banal and exciting. Jack could immerse himself in his role - every day stepping out of the house another person with a whole new agenda and personality; always returning as Jack, a little piece siphoned off each time. On days like today, a fragment was amputated in favour of Harry. Harry Kirk and his blackmail appeal.

  He poured the cider into two glasses - even terrorists craved decadence - and joined Lana on the stained sofa which overlooked an obscured view of the city.

  “It’s certainly better than the Camden flat,” Lana said, reaching out for her glass, “Though that place never stank of dog. I hate dogs.”

  “I had a dog once,” Jack recalled a splintered memory from when he was three, “I think it was run over though.”

  “Didn’t your parents get another one?”

  “No,” Jack said, sipping his cider. It was odd to discuss his parents as if they were normal human beings. He almost enjoyed it. “I don’t think my mum had the heart to get another.”

  Lana curled up into a tiny ball. She was super skinny. Jack sometimes forgot how young she was at only twenty-two. Feisty and fierce, she could also be as sweet as chocolate and it was the latter of which that Jack would regularly come home to since they moved into the Southwark estate.

  “To Karl,” Jack raised his glass, pausing for a moment’s humble reflection. He wished for more poignant words, but none that came to mind seemed either worthy or reasonable.

  Lana’s eyes shone in a film of tears. He wrapped his arm around her.

  Two weeks ago today he had died. Jack hadn’t seen it, but Lana had. She was the one who had to make the choice - to flee for her life, or to comfort a dying man and sacrifice herself. Maybe in the end there was no choice - but seeing Lana suffer the one she believed she had made was difficult to watch.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Jack said, struggling to find more meaningful, comforting words to say. He knew that she didn’t feel that it was her fault. The tears weren’t about that. They were about a loss of a friend; the death of a fellow human being who diced with chance and lost. They had been on a scouting mission in Bethnal Green. The Nightstalkers clocked them and opened fire. A fraction of a second later and Karl would have made it. But he didn’t.

  “I just keep on seeing him die over and over again in my head,” she wept, “I should have stayed… I should have…”

  “You know that you couldn’t have,” Jack said, “It had to be this way.”

  Jack the cold hard terrorist was speaking. Jack the boy who’d lost his sister remained quiet.

  Karl was shot in the leg. And then again in
the chest. Lana watched as his body crashed to the tarmac, scratches running down his face. Whether he died at the scene or in the hands of the CRU, they could only speculate. In their minds, he died the second Lana had left him. When she returned that night, she was in pieces. All the strength of a woman fighting an unwinnable war had vanished and she was simply the shell of a broken girl in her early twenties, exhausted by grief and worn down by the struggle.

  “I know it’s not my fault,” she wiped her eyes and pulled back from him a little, “I know that. It’s just hard… We spent three months together - that’s a long time in our world. God, we weren’t even close… but… I mean not like this? Why like this?”

  “I know…”

  “No,” she said, “No you don’t. Fuck this sounds terrible…”

  She stood up and leant on the windowsill, the light from the streets pouring in and softly illuminating her tear stained cheeks.

  Jack remained on the sofa, “What do you mean?”

  Lana sighed and sunk into another gulp of cider.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong is that Karl is dead,” she snapped, “And I’m more upset that I had to watch it happen than I am that he’s dead. What kind of monster does that make me?”

  Jack placed his glass on the coffee table and stood up, though he did not approach her. All this time he had been thinking how blessed he had been to not have witnessed what she had. The deaths of those at Fort William still weighed heavily on his mind. Though the nightmares had subsided, they were not yet in the past.

  “It makes you human,” he said, “The worst monsters of all.”

  She turned round, her eyes reading shock.