Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  There was only one thing for me to do now. Get the you-know-what out of there and start to live.

  We’d had to dig down through our room to get down to Mum, so I’d already pulled out some of my stuff. A few clothes. I got my board that I painted in art class while school was still going: ‘Who is Martina Okoro?’ Some other bits and pieces. Couple of books. My Black Sabrina doll with the braids and hair extensions. I used to collect them for a while until I got sick of how pretty they all were – they were making me jealous – so I got rid of them all except her. My money I’d saved. Yeah, and a little bag with some gold in it. A gold chain, a few gold coins. My secret phone, which was still there under the mattress where I hid it when I slept. But most importantly – I got my backpack! Yeah! My backpack had been packed for years, just waiting for the chance to get out of this dump to a sensible country where you can actually have a life.

  It was time to go. I’d spent the past few years hanging around against my better judgment looking after my mum. It was time to think about myself for a change. We all have our dreams and ambitions. Some want to Do Good, some want to travel, some want to make loads of money. I wanted to spend my war being decadent. Drugs, booze and sex. Mostly sex. Lots of sex. Every single way you can imagine.

  People who know me would be surprised to hear me say that because I’m such a prude. I never swear. I can’t watch when a sex scene comes on a film, I have to put my head in my hands or look the other way. I’m such an iron virgin that not only have I never had sex, I’ve never even been kissed. It’s true. But inside, there’s a dirty bitch waiting to come out who only I know, just waiting for the right chance to be introduced to the right people. It’s just that none of them have chanced along to meet me yet.

  I was soooo looking forward to it.

  I was already packed – I’d been packing for years. That backpack was the first thing I went looking for after the bomb, because you can bet there were plenty of people beetling about in the rubble that day, pretending to help, who were really just looking out for what they could loot. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get to it first, still intact.

  All the essentials were in there. Underwear. Five or six changes of clothes. Make-up. Books – The Gender Games and my copy of the autobiography of Malcolm X, that my dad gave to me. If I wasn’t so besotted with Beyoncé, it would be Malcolm X who’d be my hero. His motto is my motto: ‘By any means necessary’. It’s just that he wanted equal rights by any means necessary, and I want to get out of this hole and get stoned and you-know-whated by any means necessary. I know a lot of people who admire Malcolm X as much as I do, but none of them admire him quite like me. The big difference is that whereas they admire him for the Black liberation years, I revere him for the New York years, when he was out there busy getting his hair straightened into a conk, taking loads of cocaine, wearing a zoot and sleeping with white girls.

  And my meds, they were in there. About three months’ supply – enough to get me to Amsterdam, city of fun, where you can buy the things over the counter, so they say. I’m never without a supply of meds. You better believe it.

  I have family in Amsterdam. One, maybe two half brothers from my dad’s past life. I haven’t heard from them in ages and I’ve never seen much of them anyway so I can’t say that they’re the main attraction. But it helps to have a foothold, you know what I mean?

  Once I left the loo, I got outside, hid myself away round behind the back of Thomas’s house and took out my secret phone and my earphones to listen to some tunes. The phone had a bit of juice in it, where I’d charged it at Thomas’s generator. Nothing but the best for our Thomas.

  It was one of my very precious things, that phone. It was a present from my dad, the last present he ever gave me before he disappeared. He left one with Maude and one with Mum, but would you believe those bitches, they lost theirs ages ago, which was really careless of them, because they both knew how important the software on it was to Dad and the people he worked with. Not to mention all those poor suckers down there in the ERAC at Huntingdon, who were having their brains spring-cleaned twice a day, courtesy of the Brotherhood of the Blood of Jesus. You want to know how important that software actually was? So important it had been bugged so that it couldn’t be copied, or downloaded or duplicated in case anyone fiddled with it or put a virus in it or learned how to decode it. That important. Yes, those bitches had lost their phones and I still had mine, like the faithful daughter I was.

  Which meant I had the only copy of Dad’s Very Important Software existing on the entire planet. Big responsibility, huh?

  Who’d have thought it?

  You might not have heard about the ERAC at Huntingdon. The Bloods never exactly advertised it, obvs, and our lot up here, the FNA, the Free Northern Army, they were never too keen on making it public knowledge either. It’s the old story. Most of them refused to believe it existed in the first place, and the ones that did were like, Are you kidding? You want us to deal with something happening way down there? That’s up to the East Anglian bunch, or the southern bunch. We’re too busy fighting for our own people.

  ERAC stands for Evangelical Realignment Centre. It’s where the Bloods fix up idolaters and heretics and believers in equal rights, that sort of thing, to put them back on the straight and narrow. Of course, being white supremacists, they have their own ways of working out if you are a heretic. So for instance, if you’re south Asian in descent, you’re a Muslim. Stands to reason. If you’re Black, you may or may not be a Muslim, but best to take no chances. If you’re a Black Christian, you’re going to be the wrong kind of Christian, and if you’re not a Christian, you’ll have more than likely got your head full of all that equal rights nonsense anyway. Best to shove you in there, too.

  I’m not saying there’s no white people in ERAC, just that they need pretty good proof that you belong there. As opposed to no proof whatsoever if you’re Black.

  White supremacists, don’t cha just love ’em?

  The ERAC isn’t just any old internment camp. It’s an experimental facility. They put a chip in your head, an actual microchip, and they reboot your identity with it. I know! Don’t ask. It literally makes my skin crawl. They use some kind of software, but software just happens to be the thing my dad was a genius at. He’d been developing a virus that could undo the damage.

  Clever stuff. Clever Dad. And he may have actually done it, too. He was just about to go down south to deliver the software when he vanished overnight. Fortunately he’d put copies of it on these phones which he then handed out – one to Mum, one to me and one to Maude – to keep safe if anything happened to him.

  ...Not that there was any need to say anything about me still having that phone to Maude. She didn’t need to know everything. I told myself, ‘It’s a safe bet that if she does ever find out I still have it, she will seriously try to kill me.’ As far as she was concerned my phone disappeared in the same police raid as hers and Mum’s a few days after Dad disappeared. We thought we were safe from the Bloods because at that time, they were a hundred miles away still busy fighting for Birmingham. It must have been a task force they sent up from down there, just to take my dad out. They knew what a genius he was, even if the FNA didn’t. They took him out and I guess we ought to be thankful they didn’t come back and take us out as well. But they didn’t. Instead they came back and took all the hardware we had – laptops, phones, USB sticks, the lot. My dad’s software, that he had spent his life working on – gone. Every last copy. And yet... here was my phone that Dad gave me, right here in my hand. Odd, eh? The world is full of contradictions, isn’t it? You just never can tell.

  I only kept it because it was a real good phone, better than my other one. It had my music on it, including the playlist my dad made for me. Wi-fi was on and off like a traffic light, the mobile masts were always being knocked out, so if you wanted tunes on demand, you needed a hard copy. Normally I kept the secret phone, well... secret. You know? And quiet. Bu
t on this occasion my other phone, my cheap, nasty public phone, didn’t make it out of the house, so there was no choice if I wanted to listen to my tunes. Even so, I so wished I didn’t have it, because what it meant was, that before heading off to Hull to catch a ferry on my way to Amsterdam, city of my dreams and my future home, I was supposed to go south, down towards Blood territory to deliver the software and fulfil my dad’s crazy dreams of giving all those poor lost souls in the ERAC their freedom. Who, frankly, were never any of my business in the first place, except that he made me promise I would.

  Except – really? I mean – really? Yes, I know I promised my dad if anything happened to him I’d make sure that software got down to the ERAC in Huntingdon. And yes, I know that Maude’s poor heart had been broken into a thousand pieces when all that hardware went missing, taking my dad’s dreams with them, which of course had become her dreams too, ever since he saved her life... But the thing is this; no one in the world – no one – had any idea that I still had that phone with my dad’s software intact. And...

  Dad was dead, wasn’t he? He had to be dead – why would the Bloods keep someone like him alive? And promises don’t count to dead people, do they? My dad was a man with a huge brain, so huge that when he spoke to you, you often didn’t know what he was talking about. Tell the truth, I sometimes wonder if he understood himself. Yeah, he was a brain. But he was a dead brain now.

  I kneeled down there among the bins, where I doubtless belonged. The sweet notes of Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ filled my ears. A message from my dad. I tapped my fingers on my knee in time to the music. I could hear my dad in my ear, saying... ‘Is it a man? Is it a woman? Do we care? NOOOOOOO!’

  When we first realised that Dad had gone from our lives for ever, first thing Maude did was try to give the software to the FNA. But as far as they were concerned, my dad was just another crazy old Black man with a bunch of crazy old Black dreams that were never going to come true. After that, when they said no, she was all ready to set off on her own, all the way down there, into the very teeth of the enemy, to deliver a phone full of crazy software to some guy my dad used to know, who might not even be alive any more. Even though she’d almost certainly never make it. Even though she had no idea whether the software would even work or not. And even though she really owed it to me to stay and help me look after my mum, because I was the one who saved her life.

  But! Guess what? It came to pass that it was exactly at that moment that the Bloods came and raided our house, so she couldn’t go and had to stay and help me look after Mum after all.

  So there I was behind the bins, thinking, Hmmm. So, what’s it gonna be, Marti? Amsterdam, with its drugs, sex and its cheap, hedonistic lifestyle? Or the ERAC, with the Bloods and all their attendant oppression, racism, torture, rape and almost certain death? Because, let’s face it, as I stood there in my stockinged feet, I represented everything – everything – that the Bloods hated. If they ever got their hands on me, I was worse than dead. They’d spend the rest of eternity beating me up and pulling out my fingernails just for fun.

  Now let me see...

  In case you’re wondering, I’m not a Muslim. Neither was my mum or my dad. And I’m not a Christian or political or anything really, except I’m really, really, really pro-Martina Okoro. So what is it about me they would hate so much?

  You may well ask.

  The music moved on. It was my hero, Beyoncé. I love her so much. I want to be as much like her as it’s possible to be. Same face, same boobs, same life. I know, I know! Dream on. But we all need an ambition in life to keep us going. Mine just happens to be being Beyoncé.

  I sat there for a few more minutes, waiting and thinking, thinking and waiting. What was it to be? Fulfilling my dad’s noble ambitions – or my petty, small selfish ones? Putting myself in grave personal danger for the greater good, or running for cover and a selfish, hedonistic lifestyle? Fighting for hope, freedom and democracy for my fellow countrymen – or making a run for it to grab whatever I could for myself?

  No competition, was it?

  Sorry, Dad. I know how much you wanted to help mankind, but the present is more important than the future. More to the point – I am more important than them.

  And you? You’re dead.

  I got up. I had things to do. On the way out I walked right past the bins – Thomas still kept his bins, the snob, even though no one had collected any rubbish for years – but I didn’t throw the phone away. Not yet. Those tunes were a present from my dad. They were like messages – memories, bits of information, beliefs. In a way, they were all I had of him.

  I loved my dad at least as much as I loved my mum, maybe even more. I don’t think I liked him much more than her, but I admired him. My mum was too fragile for this world. She didn’t have it in her. Actually, I think Mum would have had a hard time coping even in the land of milk and honey, let alone the land of shrapnel and bullet wounds. But my dad was brave and clever and determined – all the things that I’m not and never will be. He seemed to really believe that he could force the world to see things the way he did – which was nonsense of course, but you have to admire him for it. He picked those tunes for me. It was stuff he liked, stuff I’d liked at various times of my life. Stuff my mum liked. Songs that he wanted me to know about, or that showed me something he thought was important. He’d really thought about it, like he thought about everything. He was dead, dead as a leg of lamb. He was a lousy dad even when he was alive, always away looking after anyone on Earth so long as they weren’t related to him, as far as I could make out. But those songs were all I had of him, and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to chuck them in the bin.

  4

  While I was busy planning our escape, Maude was still at it, pulling, digging, chopping her way through the beams. She kept saying she could hear something under there, voices, bangs and so on, but it was obviously just the house settling. A bomb goes off, BANG, and your house falls down, but it spends a while settling. Bits fall off. It creaks and groans and sometimes – often – it sounds like voices. But it isn’t voices, except once in a hundred. It’s two beams rubbing themselves together, or the last bit of breath being squeezed out of your mum’s cold dead body, most likely. No one gets out after three days under the rubble. After two days, if they do find you, you probably wish they hadn’t. It wound me up, to be honest. I was on at her to pack it in. She was going to need that energy for later on.

  ‘We can’t leave until we’re sure,’ she kept saying. And I was like, What are you going to do, move the whole house with your bare hands?

  ‘If I have to,’ she said.

  See? I don’t call her Rubblehead for nothing. She got a thing in her head, that’s it, for weeks. She used to be such a cow, then she tried to make up for it by being a saint. And she had no sense of self-preservation. Which is fine, but she’d not only give her last crust of bread to some poor old woman who’s going to die anyway – honestly, I’ve seen her do it – she’d give my last crust of bread to some poor old woman who’s going to die anyway. Which is unacceptable. It’s a war zone, Maude! You don’t do that sort of thing. You look after yourself. There’s no shame in it. You have to.

  The situation was getting urgent; the Muslims were arriving. I saw some in Withington when I went out to see what was going on. At that point it was just a few dozen, hanging out on the pavements, little groups of them, trying to catch my eye and give me the nod, working out if I was one of them or not. Well, I wasn’t. I didn’t nod back, I kept my eyes straight. I didn’t have anything I wanted to share with them.

  They weren’t getting what you’d call a warm welcome. It wasn’t like we had enough ourselves. With all those extra mouths to feed, things were going to get a lot worse pretty quickly. The ones I saw in Withington were just the start. We’d all seen the tanks rolling into Birmingham, seen the columns of refugees on our screens – miles and miles of them, strung out along the M6, marching north, overwhelmi
ng towns and villages on the way. Tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, marching up the country because they’d been pushed out of their homes by the regime. That had been going on ever since the US put the Bloods in charge after the war down south a couple of years ago. They’d chased the Muslims out of London first, so they’d all gone to Birmingham. Now the Bloods had taken Birmingham so they were all coming up here. You see? Once us brownskins started arriving in Manchester in numbers, you can bet the regime would be right behind them.

  Manchester was going right down the pan and it was going to get worse, fast. As soon as the Bloods got here, we were going down. There was no unity. The Free Northern Army controlled the south of the city, the fascists had the north, the east was in bits, that sort of thing. There were snipers and street-to-street fighting, all that. There was shelling and bombs going off, it had been going on for three years or more already, ever since the government fell and the civil war got going properly. Things had got a lot worse in the past six months or so with the real heavy bombing, the air raids, when the Bloods began advancing north. Softening us up, I suppose. It wasn’t just them, either. The big powers never want to risk their own boys on the ground, so they help their chosen side with bombs. Don’t ask me who it was dropped that junk on us in Fallowfield, there’s so many different sides, I can’t even count that high. Probably the US, who hated the FNA. Turkey may have had a few planes going over. The Gulf, Europe. I don’t know. The point is the Muslims and the Blacks, the commies and the queers and the libertarians, etc were all coming and the Bloods were behind them and when they came, they’d bring along the big stuff – American stuff. Tanks, heavy artillery, helicopter gunships. And troops. Lots of troops. Lots of heavily armed troops. We were not going to be on the payroll. Maybe they were a few months away, maybe a few weeks, maybe even a few days. But they were coming, and by the time they got here, I wanted to be gone. I wanted to be gone yesterday.