Cult Following_No Faith To Lose

by Simon J. Townley

“They settle, you mean. Weaken. Succumb to temptation, to the siren song of materialism and comfort. We’re better than that. We’re the ones who set out to rebuild it all.”

  “Those were teenage dreams.” Tom rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Everyone believes they can change the world when they’re fifteen. But you can’t. The world is a big place, and it ignores you. And everyone else living in it, they have a say too. They don’t want to change, most of them.”

  Marlo snarled at him. “Because they’re retards, stuck in a value system they should have progressed beyond by the time they were eleven or twelve. But no, they remain mired in magical thinking…”

  “Like your religious friends?”

  “One can move past magical and rational thinking. The road is endless. There’s more to discover than most ever suspect. Keep moving, that’s the trick, don’t stop, or get stuck. But you did. You let yourself drift and become one of the crowd, all for the sake of a career, mister investigator, putting it to the government. Only nothing happens. Words don’t do anything, Tom.”

  “What would you use? Sarin gas? Explosives? Innocent deaths?”

  “It’s a price worth paying, to save the world.”

  “It’s that was this is about? You’re saving the whole planet now? How does murdering a few random commuters fit in with that?”

  “It shakes people up.” Marlo waved his arms extravagantly. “The old order has to be broken, shattered. It’ll take a lot of deaths to do it but there’s no other way.”

  Was this an elaborate joke? Charlie used to love winding people up with extreme talk he didn’t believe, to get a reaction. “When did we ever countenance murder? Terrorism? And the worst kind, aimed at ordinary folk. What if you kill nurses, carers, children? If you were brave, you’d take the fight to those who hurt the world: the billionaires, the privileged, the elites. But you can’t touch them, that would be too risky. They’re protected, they push back.”

  Marlo grinned at him. “Their time will come soon enough.”

  Capgras chaffed at the rope binding his wrists. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “You’d have to be alive for that to happen.”

  “As threats go, that’s not very subtle.”

  “It’s more of a simple ultimatum. This is Gina and myself, putting the Ulysses Pact into operation. We promised that if you slipped into temptation, if you went soft, we would intervene. So, we’re intervening.” Marlo got to his feet, moved in close. He took hold of Tom’s jaw, pulled his face up. “You’ve weakened. You betrayed the Extremophiles, of which you were a founding member. Though you have no idea what you started. There are hundreds of us now. Soon there will be thousands. And we’ll march and act together, protect each other.” He gripped tighter, his mouth twisted into a determined grimace. “Join us. Get back on board. We would welcome home the prodigal son. You could feed our messages out into the world through your newspaper…”

  “They have sub-editors to catch that kind of thing. And no one reads it in any case, you said so yourself.”

  Marlo released his grip and span away, marching up and down the small room. “We plan to blow this sick society apart, rip it down and shred it. There will be slaughter, injustice and much suffering but once it’s done and the parasites who steal the wealth have been butchered in the streets, then we’ll build a better world. Once the gene pool has been cleansed. Once the lazy ones who can’t stomach a long journey, or the work needed to change and grow, once they have been rooted out.”

  “You sound like a megalomaniac. You’ve got a few hundred lunatics in a weird cult. That doesn’t make you powerful.”

  “We have plans, Tom. We have things progressing. Big ideas. They’ll take a few years to bubble to the boil, but when they do, watch out world. We’re coming for them, and won’t be stopped. We’ll pull the rug from under them and we know how. It’s all in place. You can be part of this.”

  “I’m not going back to prison. Not ever.”

  “There won’t be any more prisons. Don’t be so afraid. They’ve broken you, with this jail sentence. You’re terrified to rock the boat in case you end up behind bars. Call yourself a revolutionary?”

  “No, never have as I remember.”

  “There was a time, Tom, when I looked up to you. You were going to make something happen. Thought you’d be the one to strike out and lead us to a new world. A new Earth. But you’ve done nothing with your life.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion…”

  “Drinking, chasing women and getting nowhere with them. Falling in love. Earning money to get by, never enough to be independent. Don’t you want to be free?”

  “Very much. You could start by untying these ropes.”

  “Only if you join us, willingly. Rejoin the fight, come down off the fence, rediscover the rebel in you, the one I used to admire. Gina admired him too, but she saw, before any of us, that you were weak. That you would take the easy path. But we walk the road less traveled. We can show it to you. Shake off the illusions and the dreams, Tom. Fight with us. Help us tear down this corrupt and degenerate world and make a better one from the ashes. There’s work to be done. Work that matters, that means something, that changes things.”

  Marlo paused, finally, and stood over Capgras waiting for a response.

  “Well? What’s it to be?”

  This was no choice: die at Charlie’ s hand, or join his insane crusade and help to massacre innocents. Tom looked up at his old friend, wondering how long Marlo would wait, once he had his answer. Weeks? Days? Hours? Or only minutes? Would death be instant? “It’s no, and always will be no. You’re mad and your plans are despicable. I wish I could stop you. I can’t, not from here. But I won’t pretend to be on your side, not even to save my life.”

  “So be it,” Marlo said. He sat down, leaning forward, staring into his eyes. “I respect the honesty. The courage. There’s a glimmer of the man I knew left in there. But all the strength and determination has been beaten out of you.” He crossed the room, paused and turned back, a smile flickering on his lips. “You’ll have to die but I have good news: you won’t be alone.” He laughed as if channeling a demented hyena, and the door slammed shut.

  Chapter 26

  A Musical Interlude

  They put him inside a cramped, damp cell, empty apart from the metal framed bed, covered with a thin and lumpy mattress and a rough woollen blanket that stank of stale sweat. It was underground, with no natural light, fusty and cold. He would fall ill in in a place like this, anyone would. But he must endure, stay strong and be ready to seize any chance to escape. For that, he needed sleep. But it wouldn’t come. Not for hour after hour, until finally, as he drifted off, the torture began.

  White noise howled from two speakers embedded in the walls behind metal grids. No way to get at them to shut them off. He ripped the blanket off the bed and stuffed it in one grid and used the sheet on the second. It dampened the sound, but it was still deafening. And endless. A single note, screaming into the void as if it had fallen into the bottomless pits of hell. Capgras sat huddled in the corner of the room, the mattress over his head, hands pressed to his ears.

  “I won’t break,” he shouted at the walls. “I don’t care what you do. You’re all mad. Your guru is a fraud. Charlie Marlo is a faker. He doesn’t believe in your religion any more than I do. He’s leading you to your deaths.” Capgras paused from bellowing the words. No one could have heard him even if they were in the cell by his side. His throat felt ragged and there was nothing to drink. He should keep calm, save his energy. But he needed to sleep. His head lolled forward under the weight of the mattress. Should he get comfortable? Maybe. But the noise would be louder. He couldn’t block it out in any case. What would a few more decibels matter? The noise was pain, though, and the instinct to reduce it, by even a tiny amount, won the day.

  He knew why they were doing it: they wanted to shatter and splinter his personality, break it down to build it back up with their own ideologi
es and beliefs. Torture was the precursor to brainwashing. They still hoped to bring him around to their side. Maybe they were right: stronger men than him, with military training, who had been told how to resist these kinds of techniques, had broken in the end.

  He lost track of time and all sense of who and when and where he was. There was only the noise. Nothing else existed until suddenly it was gone.

  For a few blissful seconds an intense silence enveloped the room. It shattered into a roar of guitars, the thunder of drums and stomp, stomp of a bass guitar. Heavy metal. Now this was torture. A singer, unknown to Capgras, cut in over the riff, wailing nonsense about death and devils, bikes and booze, hell and high heels. The same song repeated, over and over, hour after hour. The music murdered sleep and sanity alike. It wrapped those two twins up in winding sheets and threw them from the battlements onto spikes below, where they were pecked at by crows, devoured by the worms that slithered into his ears.

  Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, guitar solo, drum break, a thrash of bass all on its own, verse chorus and out with a bang. Again. Again. The voice rasping and tortured. The guitar distorted so that the riffs cut and gouged at his ear canals.

  He would not break down. He would not give way. What did they call this? Futility music: a torture designed to make the subject pliable, defeated, so they could be twisted around the fingers of the intelligence community. The techniques were distributed worldwide by the internet, and now anyone was free to dabble, if only they possessed sufficient malice.

  Charlie Marlo was endowed with an abundance of malice. He probably bathed in it, ate it three meals a day. He should bottle the stuff and sell it in posh boutiques where the rich folk shopped, where their trophy wives idled the days away.

  Tom gave up all hope of sleep and huddled into the corner, hands clasped to his ears, repeating mantras and stray lines of verse from poems and plays remembered from childhood, reciting the names of geological time scales, in order, over and over, filling in gaps, cursing himself for forgetting the Ordovician and for placing the Calabrian before the Gelasian, counting backwards from a million for the sheer mind-numbing boredom of it all, so engrossed in building his mental walls he didn’t notice the cell door open. Hands gripped his shoulders, and he leapt up in shock and fear, his face distorted with a howl of rage.

  The sound clicked off.

  “Here,” said the guard. “Breakfast.”

  The door slammed shut. It began again: old time show tunes, remade as muzak. Tom Capgras threw back his head and howled at the world, ready to do, to promise or agree to anything, just so long as the fucking music would end.

  Chapter 27

  Chores

  Everything ached: knees, shoulders, back. He had been scrubbing this step for less than an hour. The job was far from done, but he was defeated already.

  “Keep going,” said the young woman guarding him. “If it’s too hard, then you’re too soft.”

  Capgras glared at her. She stared at him, defiant. She waggled the gun in her hand. “Get it shining, so I can see my face in it.”

  “You sure?” He smiled to himself. “I’d advise against it.”

  “Just work. Don’t talk.”

  The man with her had been sitting on a wall since the job started. Now he got up and stood over Capgras, who was on his hands and knees, grasping a scrubbing brush. He placed a size ten boot on the patch Tom had already cleaned. “Look, you missed a bit.”

  He sloshed the water around in the bucket and set about the step once more. In truth, he was glad to be outdoors. After two days and night in the cell, finally they turned the music off. As expected, they went to work on him with the whole brainwashing routine, talking about their guru and the scriptures and the sins he had committed and all the things wrong about him and didn’t he want to repent? He felt too weak to try fooling them, so he settled for open defiance and eventually they appeared to give it up as a bad job. That’s when they sent him out here, to put in a shift, though he was dizzy from hunger, disoriented from being locked in a dark room and blasted with white noise and terrible music, shaky from lack of sleep and he stank real bad. But they insisted the step from the driveway to the front door of the country house must be immaculately clean.

  The man and woman went back to murmuring among themselves. That suited him. He’d heard enough cult nonsense for one day. So he scrubbed, there seemed to be little alternative, and at least if he was working out here, he might spot clues to where he was being held. Or even a way out.

  The woman held a gun, cupped between her breasts. Could he get it off her? He could shoot them both dead and walk free, he calculated, since he was being kept a prisoner, tortured, all the rest of it. No jury would convict him. But was the guy armed as well?

  A car approached along the driveway. He pretended to stare at the step but swivelled his eyes to track it: a Mercedes saloon. For a group of anti-materialist simple-lifers, this bunch liked their flash motors.

  The Merc scrunched to a stop on the gravel drive. A man got out of the driver’s seat, walked around the car and opened the passenger-side door. He helped a woman out. She leaned on him. Gina. She staggered, the man caught her, and supported her towards the house.

  She stopped by him. “Tom, they told me you’d come back to us.”

  “Not strictly true.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Gina said. “Happy we can be together, at the end.”

  She walked on, the driver encouraging her, praising every small and tentative step she took.

  Tom threw the scrubbing brush into the bucket of water. “What does that mean, the end?”

  Gina paused, turned to him though it clearly pained her. “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Not that I recall. I’ve not been told much, since they kidnapped me.”

  “We’ve been chosen,” Gina said. “You and me, for a special mission.”

  “I wasn’t consulted.” He didn’t like the sound of this. “I don’t want to go.”

  “It’s all decided,” she said. “It’s foretold, written, it was meant to be this way. He told me so himself, in person. Such an honour.”

  “Who told you? Not the nutcase-in-chief?”

  “Hey!” The man supporting Gina made a threatening gesture towards Tom.

  Capgras ignored him. “This mission wouldn’t involve bombs or toxic gas at all would it?”

  “It will be wonderful,” Gina said. “Glorious.”

  She was touched. She’d always been a bit unhinged, even when they were lovers, though at the time Tom hadn’t given it much thought. Most teenage girls, at least the ones he knew back then, were either half crazy or pretended to be. “Gina, you’re not well, not thinking clearly. I’ll take you to a doctor.”

  “I don’t need one,” she said. “By this time tomorrow…” She coughed. The man urged her inside.

  “What?” Tom called after her. “What happens tomorrow?”

  Gina paused once more, turned and beamed at him. It was the smile he remembered, from their school days, from their wild youth when the world seemed young and fresh and full of possibilities.

  “We’ll be dead,” she said. “Hand in hand. We go to die.” She erupted in another bout of coughing. The man glared daggers at Tom and busied her indoors.

  Gun lady stood over him, and kicked his bucket, making the water sway from side to side. “Work,” she said. “Scrub. Or you won’t make it to tomorrow.”

  Chapter 28

  The Ex

  Gina ran her fingertips over his bare chest. She looked deep into his eyes. That confirmed it: she would kill him, if he didn’t get her first. And since he was strapped to a chair, and she had a loaded gun on her hip, the odds were in her favour. She scratched a fingernail across his pec, then turned and picked up the belt of explosives. After securing it to his torso, she patted him on the head. “There, nice and snug.”

  “You’re so thoughtful.”

  She took out a padlock and secured it, then tossed the key
into the corner of the room. “Don’t want anything going wrong, do we? Nothing should spoil our date with destiny.”

  “Not even a change of mind? Or heart?”

  “Especially not that.”

  “Can you tell me something?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, “but try me.”

  “That girl who died at Farringdon, she was one of your lot?”

  “One of the chosen, yes.”

  “Did she mean to die? Was that a suicide run?”

  “An accident,” Gina said. “We were moving the Sarin across London and the canister leaked.”

  “You carried it on the Tube?”

  Gina shrugged, as if the loss of life mattered little, if at all. “She was picked for the mission, though she didn’t know why. She thought it an honour. But she was sacrificed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her faith had faltered. She was deemed expendable and told to carry the canister. Regrettable but…

  “It was murder.”

  “There’s a greater cause here, bigger than all of us.” Gina’s voice had changed, as if reciting words learned by heart, or drummed into her, repeatedly. “We all have to make sacrifices for the sake of the world and the movement.”

  “Is that why you’re heading into a suicide mission, full tilt? Because you’re prepared to sacrifice yourself? To be used and thrown away, like that girl?”

  “No, this is different.”

  “How?”

  “Because I don’t mind dying this way.” She stared at him, her face impassive.

  He gazed back, unbelieving. “Is life that unbearable? Perhaps you need a change of scenery, and company, not a bomb strapped to your body.”

  “You don’t know the whole story.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Maybe later. There’s so much to organise.”

  “Later will be too late.”

  “Why? Are you hoping to talk me out of it?”