The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

  “Don’t be so fucking arrogant,” Reg retorted, calmly.

  “Oh, I didn’t say that I was the cause of it,” Jack laughed, turning around as Lana tapped him on the shoulder, displaying a number on her phone.

  Jack grabbed it and walked off to dial.

  When he was in the far corner, he nervously listened to the dial tone. Eventually she picked up.

  “Hello, Claudia speaking,” she said.

  “Hi sweetie,” he said, “It’s me.”

  “Sorry, who?”

  “Remember, the man from your bedroom?” he prompted her.

  Suddenly her tone dropped a few notches.

  “Why are you calling? How did you get this number?”

  “I have my sources,” he said, “I need something from you.”

  Claudia made hesitant noises down the phone.

  “I told you, I can protect you,” he said, “You know I’m on the right side.”

  A few seconds silence and Jack was frightened that she was going to hang up.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to know what Reg Watson’s been doing whilst he’s been Education Secretary,” he said.

  “Reg?” she asked, “Why? What kind of things - he’s been there for years?”

  “What’s his agenda?” he prompted.

  She paused, but he could hear she was still on the line.

  “Okay,” he said, “Let me put it another way. I have Reg right here with me. I want you to trust me, and then I need to trust you. I have him, but I’m not going to make any threats to his life. No matter what you tell me, I will not harm him.”

  It was a bold tactic, but he remembered the naked woman collapsed from exhaustion in her bedroom. She was strong, intelligent. Cheap manipulation was never going to work on her.

  “Education reforms,” she eventually said, “They’re designed to cut back on curriculums, but the exams standards have doubled.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it, Steven,” she said, “Why would anyone want an underachieving generation? I have to go,” she said abruptly. “Good luck.”

  The phone hung up. Jack turned and strode across the concrete with such force he only just stopped in time at Reg’s feet.

  “It must be nice,” Jack smiled, “To be powerful enough to make and break the next generation.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Reg said.

  “Oh, but I think you do,” Jack crouched again, investigating Reg’s wound with the tips of his finger, “Imagine you’re a kid, and you’ve been given half a book to read, but tested on the whole thing? Imagine how shit you’d feel if you kept on failing, kept on feeling you’ve not understood something, rather than never having being given the opportunity to learn it in the first place?”

  Reg glared at him, “So you’ve done a bit of reading. Big deal.”

  “Oh it is actually,” Jack smirked, “Because it means you’ve just handed over thousands of willing Resistance members. You reckon they’re going to want to wait until August for their exam results to come out before they can make a balanced decision? Especially when we tell them that the tests they just sat are designed for them to fail? Think how much more fearful those eyes would get if that happened?”

  Reg’s lips were sealed tight. Jack straightened up.

  “I thought as much,” he said, disappointedly, before taking the phone and switching it to camera mode. “C’mon Reg, smile!”

  He pointed the lens at them, so that it exclusively framed them both. The picture captured, Jack threw the phone back to Lana.

  “Get that online within the hour,” he said.

  “What about this one?” Tom asked.

  “Leave him,” he said, “If he’s worth anything to them, they will find him.”

  Jack marched from the warehouse with the others in toe. As the sunshine embraced him outside, he was awash with exhilaration. Though he hadn’t achieved much on paper, he felt a degree of control that no one else in The Resistance had ever had over the government. Claudia trusted him. Reg was now exposed to his peers as being weak, vulnerable.

  As they got back into the car, there was an eruption of applause.

  “Well fucking played, mate,” Tom patted Jack on the back.

  “What do we do now?” Devin said, tapping the steering wheel as he reversed out of the car park.

  “You know what? I think it’s about time we reminded Cameron Snowden that we are still here.”

  “What’s the plan?” Martin asked.

  “Thousands of students across the country are just about to realise that the exams they just set were designed to make them fail. I think we need to cause a riot.”

  Devin grinned from the rear-view mirror. “Fucking brilliant.”

  They reached Devin’s safehouse an hour later, having dumped the stolen car and replacing it with a pre-arranged pick up. Lana had uploaded the photograph to several social media sites and had dumped her phone in a public bin.

  As Devin sorted them all with drinks, Tom and Martin hovered over the laptop, keeping an eye on the news following the photograph going viral.

  “This is fucking hilarious,” Tom burst out laughing, “It’s gone everywhere.”

  They turned on the television and there in the top right hand corner of the news was the photograph of Jack and Reg together.

  “I think it’s because you look incredibly happy, and he looks miserable that makes it so special,” Lana smiled, “It’s not your everyday hostage picture is it!”

  “How is the recruiting coming online? Any responses so far?”

  “It’s not overwhelming, no,” Martin said, “But remember it’s all monitored, so we can’t be too direct.”

  “You reckon they’ve found him yet?” Devin came in with a tray of teas for them all.

  “Doubt it,” Jack said, “Or it’d be all over the news. Or this would be buried already.”

  He grabbed his cup of tea and felt instantly satisfied inhaling the hot steam rising from the caramel.

  “So this riot,” Lana said, “Where and when do you want it?”

  “Tonight, and everywhere,” he said. “Remember the first riots? The ones that captivated us, made us prisoners in our own homes? I want it to be one of those. I want a nostalgia of the fight we all used to have. We need torches, we need rocks, sticks, bricks. We need fucking Molotov cocktails!”

  “We can’t organise all that in a couple of hours?” Lana said.

  “Why not?” Jack shrugged, “It’s been done before, by ordinary people. Why not now, by extraordinary ones?”

  Tom slammed his hand down on the table, “Tonight it is then.”

  Jack drank his tea as the others swarmed around him, calling members across the country in order to organise some sort of nationwide riot over the education reforms. He was watching the news intently, waiting for it to break that Reg had been found safe and well. For his trust with Claudia to be cemented, he needed Reg to be alive. Every minute his reappearance was not broadcasted, Jack’s nerves rattled like a snake.

  Though he had been careful not to mention it to anyone else, a niggling little fear had nestled in his heart. Reg, despite his arrogance and defiance, was petrified and that itself sent chills down Jack’s already frozen spine. Claudia was scared. Reg was scared. Had Quentin been too? What was there to be scared of behind the parliamentary walls and why did that worry him more than anything else?

  Devin jammed a phone to his ear as he swept past.

  “Hello?” Jack clutched it.

  “What are you doing?” Alex’s tone was almost bored.

  “Organising a riot,” Jack said, “You up to much?”

  “I’m at HQ,” he said, “And I was just about to go for a walk when someone called me to congratulate us on a fantastically successful mission.”

  “Ah, well it was sort of spur of the moment,” he said, “But we should talk about it more in person.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, �
�Or at least if he isn’t, it wasn’t us.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “A promise,” he said.

  “Good,” Alex was pleased, “It’ll show the public another side to us. Compassion. Besides, it’ll make the government appear more weak - dead or alive, they will have to replace him. Dead, they can use it to their advantage, alive and it looks like they screwed up.”

  “Well I’m glad everything is going according to your grand plan,” Jack said, almost annoyed at how Alex was playing Jack’s achievements off as what he had wanted all along.

  “Good luck with the riot,” he said, “I’ll check in soon.”

  Alex hung up. Jack threw the phone on the table.

  “Everything alright?” Lana was hovering just behind him.

  “Yep,” he sighed, “Right, what do you need me to do?”

  “You can help with the cocktails if you like?” she grinned.

  Rising from his chair, “So long as I can drink the alcohol first, then yes.”

  Behind him the television blared. Still no word on whether Reg Watson was dead or alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The streetlights twinkled like stars. Office windows glared reflections of the gathering crowd; above a bruised sky rumbled with possibility. Sirens screeched, many roads away, and a cold wind snaked passed, biting them all with its icicle venom.

  The road was blocked with protesters: a black mass of people moving as one, placards rising into the air, charged with righteousness and rage. Tensions were high. Chanting had begun at the front and was joyously filtering through the crowd.

  At least two hundred had gathered along Edgware Road. It was a pitiful number considering the volume of people affected by the educational reforms. But after all these years, Jack expected little more. And even then, it was about so much more than a few reforms. Life was difficult in Britain, but not quite so difficult as to make them march on the streets. Granted, their lives might be in jeopardy, but could the CRU or the Army really defeat a passion that potent?

  As he stood in the centre of the protest, scarf shielding his face, Jack dwelled on that very notion. Two hundred strong against a nation of apathy. It made him sad, but not disappointed.

  Lana stood next to him; drizzle embalming her skin so that it shone in the low light. She was positively grinning, her eyes alight with a flame he hadn’t seen in months. Devin was nearby, detailing plans to a few other members who had travelled into the city for the protest. Martin and Tom were at the front, marshalling the anger.

  “You know we’ve only got a matter of minutes,” Lana said, almost relishing in it.

  Pulling down his scarf briefly, Jack smiled, excitedly, “It only takes a few minutes to change someone’s mind.”

  “Ha! I doubt that,” she laughed, turning her towards the roaring crowd before them.

  “It depends on the someone…” he said, focussing on the passion distilling through the air.

  Grasping an unlit Molotov cocktail in his hand, he watched with complete pride as the jeering continued; the chanting dominating their ears as if battle cries before the mighty fight. He had done this. Everyone here had come as a result of his actions, his say, his orders. Jack had never felt more confident and more powerful as a person. After all that he’d failed in his life, to see two hundred people yelling protest against a government and society that millions feared, Jack felt strangely at home in the midst of the crowd.

  “Shall we?” he said, pushing up his scarf to his nose.

  Without looking at him, Lana nodded.

  “Let’s give ‘em hell.”

  The crowd, pregnant with anger and hatred, burst into labour at Jack’s command as he lit his cocktail and launched it into the air. It smashed in a brilliance of flame at the foot of a shop window.

  “I thought you didn’t want to cause any damage to people’s property!” Lana shouted, as her bottle ejected from her hand.

  “Fuck it!” he yelled, “Maybe it’ll make them wonder why their shop is trashed!”

  The crowd stampeded forward. Soon there were little fires all around them. Jack caught Devin’s grin from across the road, as he jeered and raised a brick into the air and threw it into a shop window. The glass exploded and shattered at his feet.

  At the front, he could hear Tom and Martin yelling provocative slogans as the crowd’s fierce temperament heightened. Anything they were shouting was almost indiscernible though; as each voice strove to overshadow the other.

  Meanwhile, Jack had grabbed another cocktail and watched as it performed a perfect parabola over the crowd, smashing into the bonnet of a police car, screeching to a stop. He turned to Lana, who looked both panicked and excited. Neither of them had expected the police to turn up this early. They had at least another couple of minutes, surely…

  Ahead of them, the crowd were going wild. The front line had stormed the first wave of police officers. Another group were clambering onto nearby parked vehicles. More than a few were fleeing the scene, dropping everything they were carrying as they ran. Within a matter of seconds, the protest had gone from successful to shitstorm.

  Grabbing what debris was left on the ground, Jack charged towards the police. All the rage he’d felt over Scar, all the anger of Simon and the unjust slaughter of the friends he’d made that night in Fort William, poured out of him like magma. He slowed as he joined the crowd, thrusting his hand in the air as he followed the rhythm of their chant. A hundred and fifty angry citizens, finally speaking out and all because Jack made it so. His confidence soared. Picking up a broken bottle from the ground, he threw it in the direction of the police, who were slowly approaching the protest.

  But their anger displayed no signs of backing down. Jack saw Martin and Tom at the front, parading like kings before a battle. To his left flank, he saw Devin rising above them all as he yelled from the roof of a van, joined by a couple of others who were each throwing whatever they could at the police.

  Torchlight burst open from behind them. Jack wheeled around on the spot and his pride quickly melted into horror as he realised what was happening. Before he could even yell a warning to the others, the soldiers opened fire. Jack made a dive to the ground, but was thrown aside by the crowd as it wildly dissipated into a hundred individuals screaming for their own life. He was knocked to the ground, rolling over several times and being kicked and battered accidentally as his fellow protesters fell over their own feet to retreat.

  As he scrambled to his own, a knee slammed into his chin, and the scarf was torn from his face. Bloodied and battered, Jack felt the cool breeze on his face and felt naked and exposed. Though the crowd largely passed without acknowledgement, a hollow shriek from the midst in front of him told him that his infamy had not gone unnoticed. He shot a look ahead of him and saw a police officer crouching, clutching his gun as he steadied his aim and tried to convey his discovery to his fellow officers.

  Jack froze. The officer was yards away, surely he couldn’t miss from here.

  “It’s him! It’s Steven Lennox!” the officer was screaming to anyone who would hear.

  A few scarpering heads turned with idle curiosity, but cared little to stay and help.

  “Backup! I’m calling for backup! Steven Lennox is here, repeat, Steven Lennox is here!” he was shouting into his radio.

  To his side, a shadow appeared from nowhere and kicked the officer to the ground. Rising up from the midden of bodies, Lana stood, beckoning Jack forward with haste.

  Sprinting over to her, he grabbed her hand, ducking low to avoid further detection.

  “You need to leave!” she yelled over the commotion, “It’s not safe for you here!”

  “Safehouse?” Jack shouted.

  “No! It’s not safe in London! They know you’re here now!”

  She grabbed his arm and dragged him forwards, darting past several bodies lying strewn on the ground. The soldiers were still firing. Burst of shots broke the darkness. As they mounted the pavement, Jack gla
nced back only to see Devin falling to his knees, blood exploding from his chest.

  “No!” he yelled, but Lana was already pulling him backwards.

  “You can’t help him!” she yelled, “You need to go, now!”

  Several more bodies crumpled to the ground by the time he turned his back on them, heart thumping in his ribcage; he didn’t have time to be frightened. His brain was too busy processing what was to come for it to realise what had already happened.

  They reached a smashed shop window. A burglar alarm was wailing from within. Lana dragged him inside, dodging the aisles and launching themselves into the back office door, which led to the darkest of hallways, at the end of which was a bright green emergency exit symbol.

  “Get out of the city,” she said, “Any way you can. Get out and don’t look back.”

  “They shot Devin!” he gasped for breath, “They fucking shot him!”

  “I know, Jack! I fucking know it! But if you don’t move right now they are going to shoot both of us!” she raced down the corridor and threw open the emergency exit.

  They were in a dark alleyway, overflowing bins flanking either side. A few homeless people were cowering by a fire they’d lit in an empty barrel. They glared with indifference as Jack and Lana ran past them.

  Ahead, they saw some of their fellow protesters running. Even from here they could still hear the gunfire, the screams and the yells of fury. Feet pounding the tarmac, Jack strove to dull everything from his heart. Devin’s death, Scar’s disappearance, Eliza. Anything and everything that could distract him from successfully escaping was cut from his heart. Jack needed to survive. He had to purge anything that might weigh him down.

  Weaving through the alleyways, they eventually burst out the other side, where the police presence was markedly absent. Still, Jack did not trust it. He sprinted along the pavement alongside Lana. The greater the distance between him and the bullets, the better.