The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “No…” Thorne blurted, almost hyperventilating now and suddenly very frightened of the unknown as the hairs on the back if his neck rose. There was something in the voice now… something in the speech and the mannerisms and the body language that was sending warning signals loud and clear to Thorne’s subliminal senses, and his sub-conscious was now screaming at him to back away… that there were questions here that should never have been asked.

  “Oh, don’t be modest, Max…!” Brandis snarled, his words laced with sarcasm. “You know you do! We all know you do! I told this next story to someone else once. It was a couple o’ thousand years ago, so I can’t vouch for it being word-for word, but I’ll damn sure give it a go! Who am I?” He asked bluntly, rising up to his full height within that tiny shack and seeming to grow inches taller, as if shrugging a great weight of deception from his shoulders. “I was born on the Third of May, Nineteen Sixty-Five…”

  “No…!”

  “I attended state secondary school before beginning flight training with the air force at the age of eighteen, and ended my ten years as a squadron leader…”

  “No…! Christ, no…!”

  “And after leaving the air force in ‘Ninety-Three, I travelled to England to study at Oxford,” Brandis went on, ignoring the weakening pleas coming from the man seated before him, a man now so completely shattered that there was no longer any need to hold him in place. “From there, I was recruited by the SIS, and was assigned to a special task force tracking Neo-Nazism spreading across Europe…” He laughed then, filled with the irony of the next sentence; one he’d first uttered so many centuries ago. “At that stage, we really didn’t know what we were getting into…!”

  “Oh Christ…” Thorne moaned softly, tears streaming down his face as the impossibility of it all engulfed him. “Oh, Jesus Christ…”

  “You never listened to anyone. Never took advice… never followed orders… And look at what you’ve created!” He shouted angrily, arms outstretched in supplication. “Just look at the end result! You will listen to me, and you will fall into line on this, because I will not… allow… anything… else…! Alec tried to tell you… Eileen tried to tell you… I have been trying to explain all this to you today and you’re still not listening: you still need to be broken completely before any of this actually sinks in! Mal summed everything up so perfectly, that day in the Palm Court Wing; and you’re going to do what you’re told now – finally – for exactly the same reason you never would before…” he continued, jabbing an accusing finger in Thorne’s direction. “Because the only person you will ever listen to is yourself…!”

  As he spat out that last, venomous sentence, Brandis leaned in toward him, hands grasping the arms of the chair for support, and with just inches between them, a distraught and terrified Max Thorne found himself staring directly into his own eyes.

  22.Epilogue

  He awoke in a fugue of semi-darkness, his mouth dry and his head throbbing vaguely. The room itself was small, but the cot on which he lay was comfortable enough, and he allowed himself the small luxury of rolling onto his side, eyes still closed, and entertaining himself with the elusive fantasy of some extra sleep.

  Come on, lazy: time to get up…

  “Bugger off…!” He growled softly, voice still thick with the remnants of sleep. “Can’t a bloke have a lie in on a Sunday morning?”

  You know it’s only Tuesday, yes…?

  “Tuesday…?” That piece of unexpected information caused him to pause a moment, his mind still to fuzzy to fully comprehend what was going on. “Bugger off anyway…” he suggested again, electing to go with a tried and true turn of phrase.

  We’ve got you have you back before Epiphany, and there’s a lot to get through before then…

  “Epiphany?” He muttered, uncomprehending. “When’s that…?”

  January Sixth, you heathen bastard… the voice answered, trying to sound scandalised but with mirth behind it. “Or the nineteenth, if you follow the calendar I’m used to…” Brandis added, poking his head through the partially-open doorway beyond the foot of the bed and completing the sentence in spoken words. Those words hadn’t been spoken in his usual, amalgamated accent. Instead, they carried a clear, if subdued Australian tone that sounded far too close to that of his own… or, perhaps not close enough, all things considered.

  “Oh… it’s… you…” He observed dully, rolling onto his back once more and almost sitting up as he opened his eyes for the first time. He should’ve felt surprised, but he wasn’t sure that he had any left after the shock he’d experienced the day before.

  “You were expecting someone else?” Brandis asked rhetorically with a grin as he entered the room fully, standing by the foot of the bed. “I found the voices disappeared for a while when I first arrived here, so I guess that means you’ll find the same…” He shrugged. “I was you at the time, after all…”

  “Should I check the back of my neck for a ‘socket’ or something?” He asked drily, finding the whole thing just a little too ‘Matrix’ for his liking.

  “Always thought Bluetooth would’ve been less messy…” Brandis smirked. “Probably should call you ‘Neo’, though: means ‘new’, after all. Kinda fitting, really, seeing as you are the ‘Noob’…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” He grumbled, sitting up properly for the first time and turning to place his feet on the floor. He wore just T-shirt and track pants, and didn’t even bother to wonder how he’d come to be in them… he could hardly be upset about undressing ‘himself’, after all. He rested there for a moment, rubbing absent-mindedly at his head and disrupting his bed hair as his rain continued the ongoing process of waking up. There was no fight left in him now. No anger. No frustration or denial. After what he’d seen and heard that preceding evening, all those petty, personal feelings now paled into insignificance.

  “How long was I out?”

  “About eighteen hours,” Brandis shrugged, guesstimating. “You dropped right there in your seat… I was worried you’d had a coronary,” he continued, tapping a fist gently against his own chest. “Almost thought I felt a little ‘sting’ myself for a moment there…”

  “So… what now…?” He asked simply, looking up and staring directly into Brandis’ eyes for the first time since waking.

  “First, we get something to eat, then I explain… everything…! It’s almost noon: you want a beer with your lunch?”

  “You know what?” He decided tiredly, thinking carefully before responding. “I don’t think I do…”

  “Good answer…” Brandis nodded, smiling openly for the first time. “Let’s go then, shall we? A decent feed’ll do you the world of good. Truce…?” He asked finally, giving a slight wink as he stepped forward and held out one hand.

  He stared at it long and hard, seriously wondering whether accepting it might cause both of them to spontaneously explode.

  “It’s quite safe,” Brandis assured, chuckling as he recalled the sensation from his own, dim past. “Skin cells regenerate roughly every two to three weeks, so there’s no real danger of a temporal implosion… unless we ‘touch brains’ or something…”

  “Guess we’d most likely be buggered already if that happened,” he pointed out, managing a grin of his own now. “Truce…!” He nodded finally, accepting the offered hand as Brandis braced his feet slightly and helped him up, off the bed.

  “Can we really communicated through telepathy?” He asked finally, after they’d stood motionless, a few feet apart, for long enough for the whole thing to become a little awkward.

  No… not at all… This is all just your imagination… Brandis replied instantly, smirking even wider. “It only works at short range, far as I know,” he went on to explain in more detail, but it does often tend to block out the other voices. They always come back though, eventually.”

  “So… this ‘lunch’ of which you speak…?” He asked with enthusiasm, suddenly feeling the savage pang of hunger stinging inside his stomach. />
  “This way…” Brandis suggested, backing away slightly and extending an arm toward the door.

  “Oh, you first, please…” He shot back with a grin, indicating Brandis should go first. “Age before beauty after all…!”

  “But I have both… how can I decide…?”

  “This is going to take some getting used to…! He decided, shaking his head in mild exasperation as he accepted the offer to lead on, heading for the door.

  “Yeah, I remember…” Brandis agreed with a thoughtful nod.

  “Well… what the hell, eh?” He decided eventually, paused at a hatchway that led both to food and to a different life altogether. With a last deep, steadying breath to calm his nerves, somehow feeling hopeful rather than concerned, Max Thorne pulled back the hatch and stepped forward into the new world to come.

  Author’s note:

  As always, before I get into anything else, I want to thank a few people. In the case of The Dead Alone, I first and foremost want to thank my long-suffering family – my amazing wife and smart, sassy, wonderful daughter – for putting up with so many lost evenings and weekends over the last two years, left without my presence as I toiled away at putting this behemoth of a thing together. As has been the case with both the preceding novels, none of this could ever have been possible without their support and forbearance.

  I would also like to thank one of readers, Kawika Liu, for his invaluable assistance in providing a small but important piece of authenticity to my depiction and description of Hawaiian cultural naming traditions and hopefully helping this rather sheltered author from halfway around the other side of the world to not sound too insensitive and uninformed.

  There are, of course, too many others to mention individually… so many others constantly posting their likes and comments of encouragement on my FB page as I plodded along with this – sometimes ad nauseam. There were times when it sometime seemed that this ever-growing manuscript might never be finished, and their support never failed to buoy my spirits and help maintain my determination to soldier on.

  The completion of this book was hard work… not because it was an unpleasant experience, but in the sense that within its almost four hundred thousand words, so many separate plot lines set up through the first two books in the Empires Lost series finally came together, with a number tied off completely. There were definitely times when this was a labour of love, particularly if one considers that this story was in fact originally intended to be Book Two until, during 2013-14, Winds of Change unexpectedly grew out of the opening chapters of this story and became a novel unto itself.

  And so, two years later, here we are. The Hindsight juggernaut rolls on, with – I hope – an ending that was still a surprise for some. There was a real excitement for me as I built toward that last reveal, and I do hope that it wasn’t too obvious for most people by the time we got there. There have been hidden clues – ‘Easter Eggs’, if you like – spread throughout the first two books that, in hindsight (no pun intended), may now be clearly seen as indicators of Brandis’ true identity – his origin. There’s still more to come from both of them, of course, and the relationship between the now two main protagonists has still to develop and expand in the remaining two novels to come.

  And so, the reality of Max Thorne is also revealed. I make no excuses for the fact that the character is imperfect – clearly so – and I have weathered substantial criticism from some quarters regarding his behaviour, particularly with regard to Winds of Change. I also make no apologies. Thorne’s arc has been clearly determined and planned in my mind now for some time, and to throw all that out of the window so far in would’ve been disingenuous at best, not to mention probably damaging a significant part of the final chapters of this book.

  Over and above that, Max Thorne, like the rest of my characters, is intended to be a human being, afflicted with all the foibles and failings that come with being a member of this imperfect race. The men and woman of Hindsight were the best available for the job, but they were never perfect, and I’ve have always intended to portray them as real human beings: individuals who can at times show weakness, pettiness, stupidity and also make mistakes. Theirs is a particularly difficult road to walk, and it would be unrealistic to expect real people to not occasionally stumble or take a wrong turn.

  There are a few matters of housekeeping that I’d also like to deal with in these notes, naturally.

  Firstly, the matter of the character of Langdale. Sergeant Langdale is fictional, of course, however as I’m not someone of indigenous descent, I didn’t want to draw some stereotypical caricature that might say more about my own Anglo-Saxon heritage than anything positive. I therefore drew heavily on the persona and personality of an old friend who is of indigenous ancestry, hopefully doing justice to his unwavering generosity, spirit and undeniable larrikinism, and also hopefully capturing how someone from the 21st Century from that background might react to the very different world of the 1940s. We unfortunately lost touch a few years ago after my move to another state, and despite a number of attempts to contact him, I’ve so far been unsuccessful. He was (and remains) a good mate in my eyes, and I remain hopeful that contact will one day be renewed.

  As a sidenote, the guts of the conversation between Langdale and Thorne in that helicopter over Darwin was a recounting of an identical exchange between the two of us one day at the Department of Defence, not long after I’d started work there so many years ago… and yes: to my ongoing mortification and embarrassment, I did at the time unthinkingly ask an Indigenous Australian how ‘they would feel’ if someone ‘came and took their country off them’.

  Next is the matter of the Battle of Ambon and, particularly, the Laha Massacre. Although the dates have been changed to suit my story, the events depicted regarding the invasion of Ambon by the Japanese and the massacre of Allied prisoners that followed are – in basic form – exactly as they occurred in Realtime. On 30th of January, 1942, Japanese forces landed on Ambon and proceeded, over the course of the following days, to conquer Australian and Dutch forces deployed there and summarily and quite brutally execute over 300 POWs, ostensibly in retribution for the sinking of an IJN minesweeper.

  Although detail of these events was drawn from a number of sources, of immense help was an excellent non-fiction work by Roger Maynard titled Ambon, an incredibly detailed account of not only the invasion and massacre, but also the background of the 2/21st and the terrible conditions suffered by the surviving POWs in the years that followed Japanese occupation.

  I won’t go into detail regarding individuals, however many of the members of Gull Force mentioned in my story are fictitious depictions of real characters, some of them involved in quite unbelievable situations on occasion. The instances of LT Anderson’s journey down from Mount Nona with the assistance of the Japanese, for example, and the capture, interrogation and subsequent release of LT Jinkins by the Japanese command (including the use of a pushbike) were based on real events substantiated by several independent sources – including the recounting of a Japanese officer shaking Jinkins’ hand and wishing him luck, suggesting they might meet on the field of battle at a later time. I’ve reimagined them to conform to the plot, of course, but these events did take place roughly as reported, if not in exactly the same fashion as recounted within the above pages.

  Bill Jinkins’ later escape from Tan Tui prison camp, and his and others’ subsequent journey by raft and commandeered private vessels from The Moluccas back to Darwin, via a most circuitous route, is the little-known stuff of legends, and the man himself lived on to see a number of promotions during the course of his army career. There are many more such stories of the bravery and sacrifice of the defenders of Ambon during 1942 and beyond, far too many to include in the book, and I would urge that anyone interested read Maynard’s Ambon for further information, or any other related works.

  In deference and respect to those Allied defenders and any of their family still living, I have made an conscious effo
rt to portray their actions in a mostly positive fashion – something that wasn’t difficult anyway considering the manner in which most of those men carried themselves during and after the invasion. My purpose was not one of recrimination or blame regarding the Realtime circumstances that lead to the island’s capture, or the surrender of Australian and Dutch forces stationed there: my only intent was to show some of the hardship and horror that those men were subjected to by a brutal and violent enemy, and the courage and spirit with which that aggression was met for the most part.

  With regard to Hasegawa Itaru, this was the one instance in which I chose consciously to create a fictitious character rather than stay with a historical figure. There was a meeting between a Japanese officer and Jinkins as the lieutenant was released back to his own lines during the Realtime invasion, however I was able to discover very little else about the officer in question. As Hasegawa unexpectedly became a far more important figure during the writing of these chapters, it became increasingly clear to me that I could not base this character on a real person.

  Regardless of my own opinions, or the facts surrounding the general treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese during WW2 and on Ambon specifically, I didn’t feel it reasonable to associate Hasegawa’s fictional actions with anyone whose family or descendants might still be living and possibly recognise the man’s name or the situation. His name has been changed accordingly. Although his attributed interaction with Jinkins on the night of the lieutenant’s release was based on a real event, Hasegawa himself is a completely fictional invention of my own mind, and no inference should be taken regarding the historical figure whom he’s replaced for the purposes of my story.