The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

  Clamouring into the desk chair, Jack shook the mouse. As the screen sprang to life, Jack smiled with toxic delight. It was unlocked. Quentin’s email lay open as if he’d just left the room.

  The top few emails were from his wife, reminding him of several planned social events. He noted them mentally. Another few emails were governmental. These were what drew most of his attention. One was sent from a Liam Rafferty, discussing the latest expenditure in Rations. Another was from a Diane Howell, who described a delay to what she described as Building two-five-nine. It wasn’t until he randomly selected, after scrolling down several days’ worth of sent emails, one in particularly ensnared his attention.

  Request an urgent meeting with you as soon as possible. Our little friend has finally proved useful. Once this matter is dealt with we are clear to continue our operations as planned. Rebecca has confirmed notice to discontinue lots four-three-nine to eight-one-four effect immediately. Will likely see results by July.

  Regards

  Q.

  The email had been sent to someone described only as T.M. On a spare piece of paper, Jack scribbled down the contents and stuffed it into his pocket. There was something sinister in the phrase our little friend. Jack clicked on another, this time from T.M. It seemed to be in response to the earlier email.

  Q.

  Delighted. About time. Meet me at the usual place, four o’clock tomorrow. We will discuss further. Results need to be in before July. It’s only April now. Starvation doesn’t take that long to kill.

  He didn’t bother to sign his email.

  The hairs on the back of Jack’s skull prickled with fear. He gulped as he re-read the email’s final sentence. Vomit rose in his throat at the prospect. This was what the government discussed over the internet; bureaucracy and light torture through starvation.

  A sudden crash. A hollow burst of noise. Outside a rapid sprinkling of gunfire.

  Jack dove under the desk for cover, breathing heavily. Downstairs he heard thundering feet. Several shots fired out. They failed to echo in the still night. As he clung desperately to the desk leg, he listened out for the faintest of noises. Not a creak from downstairs, but further afield he heard the peppered sound of machine guns. Before remembering Mike and Phil had opted for shotguns, he had hoped the sounds had belonged to them.

  The guards had seen through the facade. Maybe it was inevitable. Perhaps they only had a limited window of opportunity. Either way, Jack was trapped in the Home Secretary’s office and after reading the content he’d just digested, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to remain any longer. Starving prisoners were likely to be the latest measure of torture. Jack was not prepared to endure that for the sake of cowardice.

  Creeping out from underneath the desk, he quietly stepped over to the doorway and listened out for anyone nearby. Nothing, not a sound.

  Silently, he pulled the door open and listened out along the long dark corridor to the set of stairs at the end. No sound came from below. It unnerved him. He felt exposed and craved for something to defend himself with.

  As he crept along the hallway to the staircase, he peered down through the bannister and saw nothing but dull grey walls beneath. He knew he had two choices. Either he stay here and bide his time until he was caught, or he had to move. Outside machine guns flared like rainfall in a storm.

  Another deep inhale and he descended into the gloom.

  With every step, he felt his fate drawing to a close. He heard nothing, not even the creak of a floorboard nor the whistle of a draught. At the bottom of the stairs, clinging to the shadows, he peered down both ends of the long and magnificent hallway, decorated by statues and portraits and antique dressers crammed with ornamental crockery. Nothing was out of the ordinary, save the pair of feet protruding from the doorway ahead.

  He had seen dead bodies before. Flashes of being carted out from the DD meeting in Cowgate burst fresh into his memory. The bodies killed in the suicide bombing at Shepherd’s Bush. His sister’s limp corpse crushed against the dashboard.

  Arthur’s shocked face was crescent in the moonlight. Blood trickled down from his lips. Another body lay sprawled beside him. Uniformed and all in black, crimson stained chest wounds. Without feeling for a pulse, Jack knew he was the only person living in the room. He felt sick, but somehow he was still in control. Paranoia and fear battering his reason, he was still in sound mind despite staring into the dead hazel eyes of the man who drove him here. He hadn’t known a single thing about the poor man. That was the way though. Comrade corpses were inevitable, it was just easier to deal with them if they weren’t your friends.

  An orchestra of noise tumbled to his left. He veered in the direction of its origin. A splinter of amber hue spilled into the hallway. A shadow carved out of the pool of light. Gazing back at Arthur’s vacant body, he silently apologised to the man before stealing his handgun and heading, silently as the seconds that passed, towards the source of the sound.

  As he approached, a voice rippled through the night air. A pompous tone Jack vaguely recognised.

  “... you honestly thought you’d outsmart us?” the voice said, “Did you really think that I would just leave this place unguarded, unsupervised?”

  Jack heard heavy breathing, then Alex’s strained voice.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” he coughed, “Tick, tock… tick… tock.”

  “Oh, more pathetic threats,” the other voice said, “I have protection. You cannot harm me.”

  “I don’t give a shit about you,” Alex exhaled, “You’re going to end up like David White. Dying in a fucking cell. Whose protection will you be under then?”

  The voice laughed, “I think not.”

  Alex sounded gravely injured. Clutching the gun tightly in his hand, Jack edged round the corner and the sight before him stunned him to the core.

  Alex was lying on the tiled kitchen floor, blood trickling from his side. Sweat dribbling from his forehead, shining in the incandescent light. A man stood in the doorway, his back turned to Jack. Short, slim - Jack did not need his face to recognised him. Quentin Robson had never left his home tonight.

  “The leader of The Resistance, in the palm of my hands. Look how weak he is now,” Quentin chuckled to himself, “What a prize you’ll fetch. Though I have to admit I’m a little surprised that the leader of this pathetic terrorist group could ever be as young as you. Charmed by the destruction? Seduced by the chaos?”

  Alex heaved with pain. Jack winced sympathetically.

  “Kill me, that’s fine. Someone else will just take my place,” Alex sighed, but his eyes had already latched on to Jack’s.

  “Whatever,” Quentin said lazily, raising his arm up so that he revealed the outline of his own gun.

  Without thinking, he had stepped forward. Jack’s brain had engaged his muscular movements before he had time to consult his morality.

  It felt oddly natural, to raise the gun up, gently aiming at the back of Quentin’s head. He didn’t even think. He didn’t contemplate what was happening until the shot had been fired, and Quentin’s body crumpled to the ground, his knees cracked on the stone before his head smashed into a pool of his own blood and grey matter.

  Trembling, Jack stared onwards, processing with defiant clarity exactly what had happened. There was a pressure in his temple that was burying the memories, but he fought against it. He didn’t want to forget.

  Alex was groaning with pain and he snapped back to reality. The body was still on the ground, bleeding profusely. Quentin’s remains dribbling from every orifice. Swallowing the vomit, he stepped over the body and into the kitchen. Alex reached out a hand for him. It was smeared in scarlet.

  “Jack,” he sighed, “You… you saved my life…”

  “I know,” he said, grabbing Alex’s side and raising him to his feet.

  They stared at Quentin’s body for a number of seconds.

  “Are you alright?” Alex said, flinching with pain as he grasped Jack’s shoulder even tighter.
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  The words were muffled in Jack’s eardrum. He couldn’t remove his eyes from Quentin’s corpse. As the words clamoured to his mouth, he gulped them back down again. His trembling body wasn’t ready to accept what had transpired.

  Something cracked against the tile work. His numb, open, hand was limp and had dropped the gun. He hadn’t realised he was still carrying it. The smooth metal was less a stranger to him; his wrist still ached from the recoil.

  Slipping in his own blood, Alex grabbed Jack to keep steady himself.

  “We need to leave,” he said, blood gently spilling from his side. “Now!”

  Dragging him through the kitchen and out into the hallway, Jack thought little of how they would escape. Far off gunfire could still be heard. Mike and Phil were continuing to hold their ground. How many more there were out there, Jack could only suppress his urge to guess. They just needed to make it to the car.

  Outside the front door the car awaited them. The atmosphere outside was calm, peaceful. Just as they’d planned. The night air was still and broken only by the spurt of now infrequent gunfire.

  Gravel crunching under foot, Jack threw open the back passenger car door and pushed Alex in. A flash of gunfire. Jack jerked up to look at it. A tingling of fear encapsulated him.

  “The others?” he asked Alex.

  “Leave,” he sighed, “Leave now.”

  “But they might still be alive?”

  “Go,” he mustered the strength to croak, “Go now. Or we’re both dead.”

  Jack slammed the door shut and jumped into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. Fractured gunfire much closer than before, Jack knew he might only have seconds to escape.

  Firing the engine up, he grabbed the wheel and, without sombre contemplation, sped out from the gravel driveway and into the depths of the dusk.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Keep something on the wound!” Jack yelled behind, throwing a glance at Alex in the back seat as he screamed in agony.

  “I am!” came the threatening response, “Fucking eyes on the road!”

  They were streaking through the night, moonlit fields zipped by in a haze of charcoal greys. Country roads bore them around tight bends. Jack’s knuckles were white against the wheel. Behind him Alex was whimpering in pain. He’d been shot in his side. There was no way of knowing how critically he was wounded.

  “Fuck!” Alex yelled suddenly.

  Jack swerved on the road, but quickly regained control, “What? What’s happening?”

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror. Alex had pulled himself up, one hand clutching on to the door handle for support, the other clamped against his wound. The scarf he’d put on it had soaked through already.

  “Alex,” Jack said, his voice trembling with worry, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, straining, “It looks worse than it is.”

  “You’ve been shot!”

  “He had a shit aim,” Alex said.

  “He still shot you!” Jack said, remembering with horror that in turn he had shot Quentin. “Oh god, what the fuck have I done?”

  “The right thing,” Alex said, “He was going to kill me.”

  “Yeah but I didn’t have to kill him!”

  “You did,” he said, “He was going to try and kill us either way. Once he’d finished me, it would have been you next.”

  “And that makes it alright, one death in exchange of another?”

  Ahead, a deer ran sporadically across the road. Jack slammed the brakes on as the animal hopped on his hooves and over the embankment, into the thick of the trees.

  “I don’t even know where the fuck I’m going!” he punched angrily on the dashboard. His adrenaline was out of control. He was out of control. Dangerously so.

  “Drive to headquarters,” Alex said, stretching the side his wound was on, “They’ll be help there.”

  “We’re miles away from there?”

  “About three hours,” Alex said, “Please, I’ll tell how you to get there.”

  “But Alex…?”

  The question needed to be answered, Jack just didn’t want to be the one to say it.

  “I’m going to be fine,” Alex said, “Just drive.”

  Infuriated, Jack turned to face the road ahead and gently began to accelerate. In the rear-view mirror he caught a glimpse of the darkness behind. He hadn’t been worried that they were being followed, in the distance they’d already covered he was sure of that. Jack wasn’t looking for the shining lights of a car behind him, he was taking a moment to reflect and to say goodbye. From this day onward, everything changed.

  As the horizon disappeared into a sea of deepest ebony, Jack let his eyes slip from his past and into the road ahead, his line of sight blurred in black and fringed with danger.

  “Turn left at this junction,” Alex said breathlessly as Jack slowed to join a major road.

  The road was clear in either direction. Jack kept a close watch on the dial - there was only another hour until Curfew.

  “Keep going for another forty minutes,” Alex continued, “There’s a place we can park for a while until they stop the Curfew searches.”

  Road searches were frequently carried out an half an hour before and after Curfew.

  “And then what, we just carry on?”

  “Yes,” Alex sighed heavily, “Headlights off or set to the dimmest you can manage.”

  Apprehensive, Jack suppressed the urge to argue back. Instead he kept a close eye on his friend through the mirror. He watched as Alex shuffled uncomfortably, stemming the blood with the soaked scarf. His complexion was grey. It did not look good.

  Forty minutes later, at Alex’s advice, Jack pulled into a small road shielded by trees. Crunching along the terrain, Jack steered behind a barn Alex pointed at, parked and switched off the engine. The heather ahead of them sunk into darkness. Jack turned around. Alex was resting full length on the passenger seats.

  “I think it’s not bleeding as much,” Alex said, lifting the scarf to have a look. His clothes shone scarlet.

  “We need to cut off the blood supply,” Jack said, rifling through his inadequate knowledge of medicine, “Take your belt off. Wrap it around your stomach and tighten is as much as you can.”

  Alex did so and immediately the blood gushing from the wound lessened.

  “How much do you reckon I’ve lost?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Jack said, “But you’re still conscious.”

  The stars overhead glistened. A couple of sirens sounded somewhere in the distance. They hadn’t travelled far from the estate. Jack’s mind was racked with information overflow. It might have been five minutes or five hours they’d been driving for.

  “Are you alright?” Alex asked.

  Jack wasn’t prepared for the question. His answer was steeped in doubt. He was alive, that much he could ascertain.

  “The first time… it’s always the strangest,” Alex continued.

  Hesitating at first, Jack eventually found his voice, “It’s weird… don’t they say it’s the hardest? Except I didn’t find it hard at all. I just did it. And now he’s dead and I can’t take that back.”

  “You can’t regret it,” Alex said, “If you hadn’t have killed him, he would have killed me. And then he would have killed you.”

  “Arthur’s dead,” Jack interrupted, “And we just left Mike and Phil.”

  “What’s done is done,” Alex said, “You can’t blame yourself.”

  Alex’s words tripped a switch in Jack’s head, “What the fuck do you mean I can’t blame myself? I killed him! I fucking killed the Home Secretary!”

  He was panting for breath as panic set in. Ever since the kitchen, he’d been suffocated from the guilt of killing a man - only now did he realise that he’d killed much more than that.

  “Fuck, Alex,” he struggled to control his breathing, “They’re going to know. It’s going to be all over the news…”

  “Jack, calm,” Alex order
ed, “You can’t think of that now. We just need to reach headquarters. It’s about an hour from here. We can do the post-mortem then, but for now you just need to get us there.”

  Everything rested upon Jack. He felt the weight on his shoulders, dragging him down. He was drowning and there was no hope for survival.

  “I should never have kissed her,” Jack said, “This fucking mess… If I’d just stopped to think for one fucking second, I wouldn’t have kissed her. And you wouldn’t have found us… and I wouldn’t be here.”

  Anger swept across Alex’s expressive eyes, but he said nothing.

  “And now we’re out here, in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Jack fought back against the nervous breakdown he was facing, “I mean fuck, the things that I’ve done!”

  “You’ve done great things since you joined,” Alex said defiantly, “You’ve provided funding, you’ve recruited many great members. Above all you got us the info on this place.”

  “It was a fucking trap,” Jack interrupted, “Isn’t that what Quentin was alluding to? He knew about it all along.”

  “Yeah,” Alex sighed, “Question is who tricked us?”

  Jack stared at himself in the mirror. He felt responsible. It had been his intelligence after all.

  “We can worry about that later,” Alex continued, “What’s important is getting back to headquarters now. What time is it?”