by S. G Mark
Following a period of acceptable stillness, Jack urged Toby to follow him as they waded their way down the stream; slowly so as not to disrupt the acquiescent trickling. Twenty frozen moments later and they had neither seen or heard any sign of company. The steam itself was shallowing and, grabbing onto a branch, Jack heaved himself out of the water, collapsing on to the crumbling embankment and holding out a hand to his companion.
The frightened little boy was stunned for words. Jack had nothing comforting to say. He was in awe of himself for the time being. Much of the last few hours were completely blank to him. He had just done what had needed to be done. And he had survived. They both had.
The moon’s light shone down a cylinder of silver a short distance away. As they dried themselves, they skirted round the beam of light and scurried into scrubs. Eventually they reached the other side - a short fence clambered over followed by a muddy passage walked through towards the concrete streets ahead. Though their clothes no longer dripped, they were both frozen beyond comprehension.
ShutDown played their ally tonight, sheltering them in darkness. Around them they heard sirens: sirens screeching for them. The CRU’s searched had left a mess trailing along the streets. Debris from communal bins was scattered across the tarmac. Glass from smashed cars was sprinkled across the pavements like puddles of cracked ice. A few candles were lit in the windows of some homes, but most were drenched in black - more than likely too afraid to advertise anyone lived inside.
Ahead they saw patrols marching in pairs, deviating at a crossroads. As Jack and Toby sidestepped behind the cover of a small garden wall, the patrols disappeared down the next row of houses.
“What do we do?” Toby finally spoke, panting.
Jack had no answer for the poor child. He merely looked at him silently, and turned his attention back to the road ahead.
They needed to leave the town, but with Curfew now in place that was near impossible. They were wanted men, or at least Jack was. No one had seen Toby…
“What time is it?”
Toby looked at his watch, “It stopped at six minutes past twelve.”
Jack looked at the sky and fooled himself briefly into believing he could find fate in the stars. For the first time it was all on him to make the decisions. There was no Emma here to guide him, no Kyle to advise him and no Lana to shout at him. He was alone, and yet somehow he felt vaguely liberated. In the same way that he felt liberated when he first arrived in London. There was no reputation to address, no insecurities on display. Just Jack and whatever he wanted to make of himself.
“What do we do?” Toby asked.
“We need to get into open country,” Jack said, “We’re in a village right, the nearest farmland can’t be that far away?”
“Half a mile at most,” he said, pointing, “If we head up this street and turn left, that road leads straight into farmland. Loads of tractors take that route.”
Jack nodded, “Then that’s what we’re going to do.”
“But what about the patrols - the Nightstalkers will see us for sure? They are looking for us, what’s to stop them from killing… killing us too.”
Jack placed a reassuring hand on Toby’s shoulder, “We’re going to be fine. They are looking for one person, not two. Trust me, I’ve snuck around outside after Curfew plenty of times. If we are caught, we just have to spin them a good story.”
It was partially a lie, but he wasn’t here to babysit. They needed to leave this village alive and confidence was the only weapon they had right now.
“What story? What do you mean?”
“In a minute we’re going to walk out onto the street and you’re going to act so pissed off with me. Pretend that you’re my nephew and I’ve just busted you cheating Curfew. I’m just being a good Uncle and so long as they can see we are acting before - or if - we are caught, then it’ll make it more believable.”
“And what if they don’t believe that?” he asked.
“Then we run,” Jack said, “And we don’t stop running. Not for anything.”
The street was eerily quiet. They were careful not to make much noise, but not so little as to raise suspicion. Jack was Simon Jamieson, the first ID card he pulled out of the secret compartment in his wallet, and his wayward nephew had run out after Curfew following a massive family argument. His sister was called Katy and lived round the corner. The fictional family background helped raise his confidence, but he was still not convinced Toby would be quite as cool under pressure. Ahead he was already swinging round seeking guidance on how to behave, where to go, what to say.
They kept to the shadows where possible and soon found themselves at the end of the road which lead to the farmland. The rows of houses on either side simply stopped. Plots of land continued on in their absence, stripped of nature and littered with building material.
“They’ve been lying like that for as long as I can remember,” Toby said, “I used to hang with my friends around here.”
At the end of the road the trees wrapped around them once again and Jack felt more secure. Luck had been on their side that night. As they crept along the pavement, Jack had been prepared to be ambushed. He felt eyes watching him constantly, but every time he turned around a clear road stretched out behind him.
It was just as well they steered clear of danger for he wasn’t convinced Toby could cope. He was a nervous wreck and rightly so. Jack wished he could comfort the boy, but ultimately knew he couldn’t. The only way was forward, and for the time being they both needed to keep that in mind. Anything else was a distraction to survival.
Fields appeared on the horizon. The gravel path dissolved into muddy trench and the distinct farm aroma stung the air. They marched onwards, clarted in mud and their shoes weighed down by chunks of it. Toby took point, though Jack suspected it was for reasons other than leadership. For about ten minutes they journeyed along the dark path, a cold air swarming around them. Slicing through the trees, Jack could see frost topped fields and barrels of hay stacked; weathered by a drizzle hammering down hard. Soon the woods opened up into and a silver mist shone above the fields, silhouetting a small barn.
“Over there,” Toby said, pointing, “James doesn’t use the barn this time of year.”
“James?” Jack asked.
“The farmer, I grew up with his son so I know my way around this area.”
As they approached the barn, they grew more confident at its abandonment. There were no signs of any animals inside. It was one of those old brick buildings partly constructed with heavy, dark stained timber. Weeds grew out of the interlaced boulders. A rusty padlocked guarded the small door. It crumbled off in Jack’s hand.
Dark as it was outside, blacker it was inside. The stench of manure and hay tarnished the oxygen. However, it was warm and sheltered and a good few miles from the search zone the CRU had most likely erected.
Tufts of hay sprouted from the ground. Jack collapsed into it, feeling the stalks prickle into his skin uncomfortably. The adrenaline subsided and met with disappointed relief. Eyes closed, he could still sense the boy staring at him intently. He heard his waterfall of thoughts, questions and fears crashing down the rock decline of truth. The chase of fear had stolen the precious moments of explanation from the child and now the silence crept in around them, eager to hear the fallout.
“I know what it is you’re going to ask,” Jack spoke first, his tone encrusted with authority and he knew, now in the midst of the confusion, muddied boots and soaking clothes, that his training was over. Jack Blackwood was no longer the frightened, reluctant member. “I work for The Resistance.”
A slice of moonlight splintered through the rafters and a shaft of it spilled over the boy’s trembling brow.
“W-was my dad?”
“Yes,” he said, abruptly. His normal instinct would be to apologise, but he no longer felt it necessary. Having seen the bullet rip through John Malcolm’s head, he no longer had any sympathy for the ignorant.
“How lo
ng?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I was sent to extract him.”
“... Extract him?”
“Yes,” Jack said, untying his boots and inviting in cool air to circulate his toes, “The CRU had found out he was working for us.”
“They knew...” Toby quivered pathetically. “How?”
Jack glanced at him and tried to forget he was just a teenager. War had no sympathy for the young. He didn’t know what to say to him. Exactly how the CRU had discovered John Malcolm’s involvement he had no idea. It wasn’t his job to know, just to extract and to deal with the fallout of his failure.
“What did he do in The Resistance?” Toby continued, his voice teeming with questions. “Why did he join? How long had he been doing this - behind our backs?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, “Tonight was the first time we’d met.”
“But I want to know - I need to know! When did he decided to betray us, to become… a terrorist? This isn’t him, someone must have manipulated him, brainwashed him?”
“No one brainwashed him,” Jack was irritated by the boy, but he knew they were only questions he had asked Alex once before. It wasn’t that the questions annoyed him, but the fact that he now had to answer them. He’d been used to dealing with these questions in the recruitment drives; this was different though. Answering questions from the ignorant public who had taken steps to challenge the government’s viewpoint was an easier task than trying to make a distraught boy understand why his father was dead. Recruitment drives were impersonal, lacked a definitive emotion. Toby’s life was crumbling away in his fingers and it was up to Jack to prevent it from completely vanishing into dust.
“Then why did he join? Why did he risk everything he had for that - why did he risk us, his family?” Toby was clutching by the tears with desperation.
“I’m sure he never wanted to jeopardise his family,” Jack said, pacing the barn.
Toby thrust a punch at the barn wall, his hand returned covered in splinters. He looked pathetically at Jack, seeking something he apparently wasn’t able to define.
“I need to know,” he began, “Did he kill anyone? Did my dad kill anyone?”
Sighing, Jack knew he had to lie to the boy. Did he think John was a killer? No, but his own personal judgement did not have a good track record. For all Jack knew, John could have arranged bombings and had killed people - directly or indirectly. The question was whether or not this was something Toby needed to hear right now, and as Jack looked back at the boy’s bleeding hand he came to the conclusion that life did not need to be harder than it already was.
“No,” he said, “Your dad didn’t kill anyone.”
“And you? Have you… k-”
Jack cut him off, “No, I’ve not.”
“But you’re -”
“One of them?” Jack’s tone was bitter, factual, “Yes, I suppose I am. And that makes you one of us now too.”
Toby staggered back, “No, I’ll never be one of you. You lot disgust me,” he shook his head defiantly, unnerved by the slow realisation of who he had been running alongside.
“Leave and you're dead,” Jack said, “And not by my hand - by theirs. By the same bastards who murdered your dad. They’d kill you just for being related to the guy, let alone fleeing with the enemy.”
“I didn’t flee, you gave me no choice!”
Jack nearly laughed, “No choice? I saved your life. I saved you from seeing what they did to your dad.”
“I just have your word that he’s even dead,” Toby spat.
At that point, Jack threw his arms in the air, “Well fine, go back and check if you want. Risk the wrath of the CRU and be locked up with the rest of your family.”
“What do you mean locked up?”
Jack was growing ever more frustrated, “You think they will believe you that you didn’t know? How could you not know your own father was a terrorist? Would you believe it if it was someone else?”
Wiping the blood from his hand on his trousers, Toby stepped into a pool of moonlight, “My mum and my sister? They’ll be alright?”
Jack shook his head, “I doubt it.”
Toby made to race from the barn, but Jack caught him and threw him backwards against the hay.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Jack said, “They will almost certainly be detained. Maybe ignorance will keep them safe, I don’t know. Hold on to that, if you can.”
“Who… who the fuck are you to tell me this?” Toby snarled, rage building up like a brewing storm as he wrestled his way up from the hay.
“I’m the guy who saved your life,” Jack said, complacently. He knew the boy wasn’t going to leave. Two hours of solid fear leads even the strongest down the strangest paths.
“Why? Why did you do that? You’re a terrorist, a cold blooded killer!”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” Jack said, biting back a painful memory of feeling a pulse in ditch, “Maybe I’m a terrorist, I don’t know. Do you feel terrorised? Are you fearful of what I’ve done, or what you think I’ve done?”
Toby clutched onto a solid beam of wood that rose up to the roof. Dust snowed down around him.
“What did my dad do?”
“I don’t know, maybe he funded us, maybe he did more,” Jack said, “Why don’t you ask yourself why he chose to work for us?”
“I don’t know, maybe you forced him to?”
“And that’s why the CRU shot him dead on the steps of your back door?”
Toby collapsed to his knees: a drenched sobbing mess.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said, his knees creaking with weariness as he strode over to comfort the boy, who was shaking uncontrollably. Jack found no words to comfort him, and so remained silent by his side until he was ready to speak next.
The moments ached by in a painful montage of self reflection. A small patch in the roof was missing, revealing twinkling stars spilt upon an ancient sky. Coldly, they stared back at Jack. Void of emotion, they steadied Jack in a stormy sea of actualisation. What horrors had those stars witnessed this planet suffer, and was this worst that they’d ever seen? It comforted Jack to believe that there had been no harder times than these, and he cast aside the wizened worry that the worst was still to come.
“You said he was going to leave us?” Toby finally spoke, his voice no longer choked with shock.
“Yes,” Jack said, “I was to take him into hiding tonight.”
“Why? Why did he decide to leave?”
“The CRU were on to him,” Jack said, “If he had stayed, he knew he would be putting you through a much worse hell.”
“Couldn’t he have just stopped? Couldn’t he have just stopped doing whatever it was he doing for you - he was my dad. He wasn’t political. He wasn’t… he wasn’t bad.”
“The Resistance are not bad,” Jack said, “They don’t stand for chaos and destruction. They fight it. They risk everything they have to fight for a free society - so that you can have a dad that believes what he likes. So that you don’t have to flee with some stranger because in the government’s eyes your dad did something wrong.”
“I don’t want to hear this indoctrination,” Toby spat, “You’re using my dad to manipulate me.”
“Toby,” Jack paused for effect, “I’m the only one who hasn’t tried to kill you tonight. What does that say about me? What does it say about them?”
“Fuck knows,” he said, “But I’m not having you use my dad against me. My mum and my sister are out there - and… and they have no idea where I am.”
“You ran with me. You ran away from the CRU,” Jack said, “If there wasn’t a slightest bit of doubt in your mind, you would have stayed. But you didn’t. You were returning home before Curfew. Well before the deadline. Why? Because you were scared. Not of the terrorists creeping out from the shadows. No - from the officers with guns. The ones who monitor where you go, who you see, who you are.”
Toby sniffed, wiping his face dry with his sleeve, “What do y
ou do?” he asked, tentatively.
“Me?” Jack pondered, “I do what’s required. I recruit. I rescue. I run.”
“But you’ve never killed anyone?”
Jack looked at the boy from the corner of his eye, “Not yet.”
Frightened, he shifted a little backwards, “My… my teacher said something to me one time… She told me the key to defeating the terrorists wasn’t to hate them, but to understand them…”
“Well coming from someone who wasn’t always in The Resistance, that is a very wise thing to say,” Jack said, wishing he had learnt from this teacher a year ago.
“Was… was she one of you?”
“Did she disappear shortly after she said that?” Jack asked.
“Yes, she left the school a couple of months later.”
“Yep,” Jack said, “She was probably one of us.”
“And there are many of you like her, like my dad?”
“Not nearly enough,” Jack said, brushing a spider from his knee.
“What do you hate about us - why are you destroying everything?” Toby asked.
Jack could see the long drawn out night ahead of them. There was little value in dissecting society at this time in the morning. The boy was not primed to listen, simply to argue and reinstate his father’s place in his mind.
“We don’t hate you,” he said, “We hate society. We hate what it’s become. You’re probably too young to remember what it was like before… You’ve grown up thinking this is the way it should be and it’s not. You’re what, seventeen? You should be able to go out and get drunk in a pub on a fake ID and stagger home at three in the morning. You should be able to have a conversation with your teacher about current affairs. You should be able to live your life as you want, and say whatever you want without fear of someone reporting you.”
“But I can say what I want,” Toby began.
“Can you? Because if you can, then why did they kill your dad for the thoughts in his head? Shouldn’t they have just arrested him, given him a trial and thrown him in prison? And if you can say what you want… then why are you scared for your mum and your sister?”