Bradbury brought his hand to his brow and massaged it slowly, as if the conversation was taking a serious toll on him. “Yes, of course I would. But… We don’t have the code… and even if we did, we couldn’t reach the Gate without legions. Face it, it’s a lost cause… and I’m sick of wasting time every week discussing it! It’s a waste of time and counterproductive!” A few people gave assenting cheers from around the table. Kara and Sven sat down, angrily. “Now if you don’t mind,” Bradbury said, “I would like to continue with what I was talking about until you pacifists came in.”
Kara did not like how Bradbury used the word disparagingly but knew that now was not the time to quibble over semantics. They had made enough of a scene. “By all means,” she said sardonically.
“Please, continue,” Sven said in a similar acerbic manner.
“Leaderless Revolution,” Bradbury exclaimed grandly as if titling his lecture, “is a powerful philosophy and each one of you revolutionaries should strive to memorize its central tenets. First, there is no leader. Second, there is no centralized organization. Third, anyone can join at any time and through any means. Fourth, there are no rules. The unit of the Leaderless Revolution is a cell. A cell may be an individual, or it may be a small group—like us. If a cell becomes too big, it will be destroyed. Discrete cells may cooperate with each other from time to time in order to carry out more coordinated attacks, but such is the exception and not the rule. The only connection between the larger network of cells is the cause. Escape from the Underground. Freedom for all!” Bradbury lifted his wine goblet in triumph.
“But how can we take down the establishment without an organization?!” a defiant man cried
“There are two strategies: organization and disorganization. There are pros and cons to each. An organization is stronger—more powerful. It can command greater respect, pull off greater feats, and inspire more effectively. But the very qualities that make the organization strong, also makes it weak. The organization is a target. It is vulnerable to infiltration by the enemy. If you cut off the head of the organization, the movement and cause will die. A single attack from the enemy can paralyze the movement. The organization is tenuous and walks a dangerous edge. It is constantly at risk from internal corruption and can easily become part of the establishment itself!” Bradbury’s final charge seemed to truly rouse the crowd. “The goal of every revolutionary should be to disorganize—to wreck havoc and challenge the status quo. We cannot be silenced. Cut off one cell and two will grow in its place. Our numbers are mysterious to them and from that we have not only the element of surprise but also fear. We appear far greater than we are. They fill the mysteries with their worst-case scenarios and we benefit from it! We are unpredictable. We scare them!”
“And what of the cons?” an older, wise gentleman asked.
“The cons?” Bradbury said slowly to think of something. “Leaderless Resistance, as it can also be called, is a solitary pursuit. If a friend dies, you will not have an organization there to comfort you and hold your hand. It is risky and lacks the glory and gratification. We are all silent martyrs!”
“Here, here!” chanted most of the others.
“You’re missing a few things,” Kara said caustically, again rising to her feet to challenge Bradbury.
“Oh, am I?” he said with a sarcastic and belittling grin. “And why should I listen to a little girl whose only contribution to the cause was through her dimwit mother and kooky father? Tell me, did they ever find another passage out of the Underground?!”
Sven rose by Kara’s side for no other reason than to give emotional support and a sense of intimidation. He knew that she could handle it. “My mother, and my father, had more cunning and intelligence than you will ever have. They have contributed more to the cause in just one year than you ever have or ever will in the whole of your pathetically insignificant existence!”
“I think I have upset her, how careless of me,” Bradbury declared mockingly to the sound of a few laughs from the crowd.
“At least my parents thought outside the box. They thought of things that no one else could come up with. You say the same thing over and over again every week but you don’t actually do anything! You don’t actually get anything done! You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results! This whole thing is just for you! It’s just to inflate your already inflated ego!”
“Hey!” Bradbury snapped. “How dare you question my motives? You may doubt my means, but never doubt my resolve or objectives!”
“Leaderless Resistance,” Kara said with less fire than before, “has never and will never work. All we do is create chaos. How can you expect the commoners of Imperium or Auctoritas to understand our actions when we don’t understand them ourselves? How would you interpret a bomb blast that killed your family, if you were a commoner? With benevolence or malevolence? How are they to think of us as a friend?”
“I would understand that it was a necessary sacrifice,” Bradbury said confidently. “I would welcome change in all forms.”
“They don’t know about change! Their’s is the only life they have ever known. They don’t know that life is better in the Buffer Zone.”
“Just like we don’t know that life will be better outside the Underground, but that doesn’t keep us from wanting it,” Bradbury responded, feeling clever with his retort.
Kara was frustrated. “They don’t have any conception of freedom. To them, it is the way life is and always will be. Can’t you see that our tactics are being spun against us. Their governments are using it to shepherd the populace into their arms. Leaderless Resistance lacks the clarity of direction and is in perpetual danger of morphing into something we don’t desire. Can’t you see that destruction and terror does nothing but make the situation worse?! Lives are lost. Sadness is felt. But the government is left unchanged. The world beats on like it did before, all that has changed is the amount of sadness. You might feel a little better lying in bed at night. You might tell yourself that you are making a difference, but in your heart you know that a bunch of people have died and there will be absolutely nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing! Can’t you see that it is violence without effect?! You are no better than a murderer!”
Bradbury’s face was contorted with anger. “Your ideas are poisonous,” he said astringently. “Sven, Kara? I think it’s time for the two of you to leave.”
Sven and Kara were escorted outside. Kara hung her head down and wept helplessly. Sven put his arm around her once more and tried to cheer her up, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do… We’ll go to that party tomorrow and will have a great time. We’ll forget about the cause for a while and just relax. How does that sound?”
Chapter 9: The Heroes Awaken
Atop of a massive mountain of plastic bottles, tin cans and other trash paraphernalia were two large craters, in each of which rested an outsider. The one in the smaller crater, that is to say Maggie, stirred first. With her eyes still closed she rubbed her head fiercely. With each massaging motion of her hand, a throbbing pain seemed to pulsate through her temple. She peddled her legs through the trash as a sub-conscious mechanism to cope with the pain. The crinkling clatter of compressing cans as she kicked aimlessly through the trash awakened our other hero in the larger crater next door.
Ember sat up violently, abruptly opening his eyelids and showering his eyes with light. He gasped for air as though he had been drowning but quickly realized that it was unnecessary. He moved his hands to cover his eyes as they made haste to adjust to the light. Ember noticed just how sore his shoulder was and, like Maggie, also had a throbbing sensation in his temple. It was only when he saw the dry blood and dirt around his fingertips that he began to put things together.
“Maggie!” he called out automatically. “Maggie, where are you?!” The sound of her brother’s voice evoked a tired moan from Maggie, who was still imagining herself in the comfort of her own room back home. Ember dug frantically through the pile of trash,
scarcely aware of the pain from his cut and bruised elbows and inflamed left knee. Following her moans, Ember made his way into her crater.
Maggie opened her eyes to an artificially lit world and remembered, in full, the journey they had taken to get there. She looked at Ember who was just now coming to the same conclusions.
“Where are we?” she asked, still staring upwards at the cavernous dark ceiling and yellowy tinged surroundings.
“You’re okay,” Ember declared, crawling up to- and eventually lying beside- her, also staring up at the inestimably distant ceiling. “I don’t know,” he replied, just now understanding her question.
“Did we fall from there?” she inquired, with her hand stretched upward and her index finger pointing into the void. Given the circumstances, she was surprisingly calm and seemed to be at deep peace with the rest of the universe. These feelings were, in no small part, influenced by the protective, soft barrier of the surrounding black trash bags and clear plastic bottles which seemed to encapsulate them like a giant womb.
“I think so,” he said, also feeling strangely relaxed despite his violent re-entry into the real world. “I can’t see the top, can you?”
“No,” she signaled without opening her mouth. “How long have we been out of it?”
Ember paused to think about this for a moment. In their giant cocoon, time didn’t seem to exist. He looked down at some more dried blood around his ankle and surmised the answer, “Probably a few hours.”
Maggie turned over to her side, and winced in pain before rolling over onto all fours. The feeling of her knee bearing into the tin cans below made her cry out in anguish but also instilled her with a new sense of intrepidity. “Let’s check it out.”
Ember slowly and carefully rose to his feet, nearly slipping twice on the slippery, cylindrically shaped bottles. Peering between two large heaps of trash Ember saw a great, never ending city, the likes of which he had never seen before. The lights seemed to shower everything with a golden aura, though it did not take Ember long to realize that it was far from a golden city. All but a few of the buildings were disheveled and very densely packed, and the dirt roads leading to them were gravelly and unkempt. “Maggie? Come here, you have to see this.”
Maggie rose to her feet with even more difficulty than Ember had, and joined him at the edge of their crater. Her jaw dropped as she peered into the vanishing horizon of buildings. She squinted her eyes at the sea of yellow lights before remarking, “This is WAY bigger than Erosa!”
“What is this place?” Ember said in awe, considering the building materials in particular, which did not seem to be made of wood.
“Are those all people?” she asked, scanning the ground far below them. Some of the crowded alleys were so densely covered that they could not see the road. Though the larger paths were far less densely populated, they still had enough moving people that they appeared, from the distance, to be like a flowing stream.
Ember’s heart soared with amazement. This was the adventure he had always dreamed about. He felt alive and anxious and longed for a way to communicate his feelings to his sister, but could only manage, “They were here this whole time. Right beneath our feet, and we never knew it!”
“I guess the man was right, there were lots of people just like him.”
Ember was confused. He looked back at Maggie and saw her clutching the key around her neck and suddenly remembered the old man and the mission he trusted them with. “He wanted us to help his people.”
Maggie smiled as she let the key dangle around her neck. For the first time Ember and Maggie shared in an overwhelming sense of purpose—their responsibility seemed less of a burden and more of a blessing. “Let’s go!” she said.
Maggie and Ember held hands as they cautiously scaled down the embankment. They were higher up from the ground than they had thought and their descent was not an insignificant undertaking, taking nearly fifteen minutes to reach the bottom and a good deal of dexterity to keep from falling.
Life seemed different from the ground. The perspective they had up above from the safety of their trash cocoon was gone. Things seemed immeasurably more unpredictable and dangerous from the ground. Maggie and Ember had, in part, expected the populace to greet them with open arms, and were a little disappointed to discover them moving on with their busy lives without so much as a sideward glance.
“Come on,” Ember said, pulling his sister’s hand, “stay close.” As they walked away from the garbage, the density of people grew. Maggie and Ember stopped in the street and tried to engage people as they passed by.
“Excuse me, sir?” Ember said to a woman who showed no interest as she walked by.
“Hello?” Maggie tried equally unsuccessfully.
“Could you spare a minute?” Ember asked before being rudely bumped into by a short gentleman.
“Hey!” Ember cried.
“Hello everybody!” Maggie shouted. “Listen up! We’re from the up-above and we’re here to rescue you!”
“Hey, get a load of these two,” a barely pubescent boy said to his gang.
“Nice clothing!” mocked one of the boys.
“Thank you!” Maggie said, not picking up his tone as she tried to straighten the low cut ends of her toga.
The boy seemed annoyed and clarified cruelly, “I was joking! You two look ridiculous! Where’dya pick that trash up from?”
Maggie looked down at her clothing, admiring her golden hems and looking back at Ember’s blue collared toga to see if there was anything wrong with his attire. “I suppose it’s a little dirty,” she said wiping off some mud from the shoulder of her dress and clearing some dirt from her fashionably—that it is, by Erosan standards—exposed knee and lower thigh. “We just came from the garbage over there,” she said, pointing in the direction from which they came.
“Did you hear that!” one of the more sadistic boys exclaimed to showers of laughter, “She said they came from the garbage!”
“Oh, it’s not like that!” Maggie said, still believing that all of their rudeness was the byproduct of harmless misunderstanding. “We’re not from around here. We’re from up-above. You know, where the forest and sky are. We’re from a little village called Erosa and I can ensure you that my outfit is very fashionable there.” She smiled kindly as though this explanation would clarify everything.
The boys looked around at each other bewilderedly. It was a while before any of them spoke. “You’re crazy,” a shot stodgy kid from the back exclaimed.
As the gang of boys walked away, Maggie’s hopes that the conversation would end more amicably than it began withered. Never before had she been talked to in this way, especially by a bunch of kids. In Erosa everyone was polite and kind—perhaps even overly friendly. Maggie had always been particularly agreeable, especially among children, and she couldn’t help but feel devastated. Having never weathered the storm of insensitive and unprompted insults before, she had not developed a thick skin and was brutally unprepared for the harshness of the Underground.
“It’s okay,” Ember said, equally taken aback. He patted his sister on the shoulder blade to help her hold back the tears, but was unsuccessful.
It was a visceral reaction. There was no shortness of breath, reddening of the cheeks, or convulsive movements, the tears simply flowed. “I don’t get it. I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, looking back at Ember to seek assurance that she wasn’t crazy.
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s okay. This is a whole different place, we got to remember that. Their whole culture and way of life is different.”
“I don’t get it. That’s not culture, they were just mean. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Ember panicked. He did not want Maggie to start losing hope so soon because he knew that she would blame him if they discovered that it wasn’t so easy to go back. There was a part deep inside him that worried that going back to Erosa or helping out these people would be a much harder task than it first appeared.
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br /> “Here, let me do the talking,” Ember suggested. Maggie nodded, wiping away the tears from her eyes and trying hard to resume her normal composure and happy demeanor. “Excuse me sir?” Ember asked a dirty rough man who seemed annoyed to break his fast gait.
“What do you want?” he asked, evidently annoyed.
“I’m sorry to bother you sir, but we’re not from around here.” The man stared at Ember blank-faced. “You see, we’re from up-above.”
“Get lost!” the man said in a disgruntled tone, as though he had been waiting for Ember to say something ridiculous before dismissing him altogether.
“No, it’s true!” Ember said, holding the man by the shoulder to keep him from leaving. “Look at how we’re dressed. These aren’t the clothes of your native people. Look.”
The man looked at Ember in his eyes to gauge whether or not he was serious. He looked on in disbelief. “You can’t be serious…” He paused and stared some more at Ember. “You’re serious… you really are serious.”
“So you believe us!” Ember said, prematurely excited.
“I believe… that you’re crazy! You’re a bona fide crazy person!” The man looked once more at his eyes and then started walking away.
“Listen!” Ember said, pulling the man back by his shoulders, increasingly desperate. “An old man sent us to help you all!”
“Sure he did,” he said sarcastically and increasingly annoyed.
“Look! He gave us this necklace,” Ember motioned for Maggie to come near. Maggie displayed the key delicately with her fingers, as though it might bring an end to all of the Underground’s suffering.
“Congratulations,” the man said, shrugging his shoulder free from Ember and finally walking away.
Ember looked back at Maggie. Her arms were innocently crossed and the tears were all dried from her eyes. At that moment Ember was unbelievably glad that she was there with him. The mere familiar image of her face and Erosan attire seemed enough to stabilize his worldview and instill him with new fortitude. She raised her brow judgingly and suddenly Ember felt a new urgent need to produce results.
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