The Cult of The Enemy: The Dark Places Trilogy

by S. G Mark

  Spying a flashlight through the forest, Jack ducked to the ground and his face was scarcely a few centimetres above the dirt, his heavy breath blowing the soil off the ground as if it were snow cascading from a mountain in a wintry storm. As he counted the interspersed signals of Morse Code, ignorant to their meaning, he estimated at what distance they were to him. It could not be more than a hundred metres. Too close for his comfort. If it were the others, would he be able to walk past them without fear of being caught? Had Emma already communicated to them that he had escaped? And what if it was Emma, was he willing to risk hurting her if she tried to stop him?

  The questions looped in his head but no answers formed. Instead he waited patiently, keeping his breathing as quiet as possible, until the light ceased and he was sure that whoever it was had passed. Minutes passed. His clothes were damp with mud. His caution urged him to wait longer, but he knew that unless he steeled his nerve he may be too scared to move for hours. It was slowly, therefore, that he raised himself from the ground and, clutching on to a nearby branch, stole off further into the forest.

  He was running at a decent pace again, though still without deliberate direction. His feet fled over babbling brook and landed on hardened rock and wrinkled root but all the while his panic was mounting. The farther he ran, the more unsure of where he was going. He did not seem to be running any more uphill than he was downhill. Contouring the hillside was not what he had planned. At some point he hoped that he would find a path and that he would speed down towards safety. But the more he ran the more he realised that this was unlikely to happen.

  Stopping hard, he searched frantically around him for a clear way ahead. The dense forest panted with him, and despite his fears he seemed alone. It had been a while since he had last seen any sign of humanity, but he knew he must choose his path quickly for the longer he stayed where he was, the more prone he was to being caught. He needed to keep moving. A flutter of wings invited him towards a vaguely discernible deer track. He had found his path.

  Scarcely had he set one foot forward than her voice rung out with crystal clarity across the cool night air.

  “You really think you can run?”

  As his foot hit the floor with a dull, sombre thud, Jack turned his head and felt the prison walls descend around him once more. Emma was staring at him from beside a tree. Rage was written across her face. Jack stepped backwards, frightened by what choices now lay before him. If she chose to fight him, would he retaliate?

  “What do you expect when you return home? What do you think might be waiting for you?”

  Jack opened his mouth to speak, but not a single syllable alighted from his tongue.

  Stepping furiously forward, Emma approached him until she was but a metre or two away. Jack looked at her, and he felt ashamed.

  “You think they’ll welcome you home and all will be forgotten? You think that you can rewrite the lies you told, that you can regain that trust as quickly as you threw it away?” Emma’s tone was spitefully cutting, “What do you expect? What do you think will happen? You’ll go home to your girlfriend and suddenly it’ll be fine - all this will be but a distant, terrible dream? A nightmare from which you did wake up from? This is real, Jack. This is real life.”

  “I can’t stay…”

  “What do you think the world is like out there? Do you think you’ll be able to truly forget what we told you? Do you think that you’ll be able to sweep your month-long disappearance aside? Do you think you’ll be able to bargain your way to a better life by selling our secrets?”

  “I don’t…” but she cut him off prematurely.

  “How many of your friends have disappeared, Jack? How many times have you gone to work and suddenly one more of your colleagues is absent, no questions asked? How many times have you walked down the street and passed armed guards? How often do they keep you awake at night? That’s not guilt you feel, Jack. It’s not the festering remorse of knowing you have done wrong - it’s knowing that something is wrong but not being able to articulate it. You’ve known all this time, you’ve just been too scared to admit it. Martial Law, open gunfire on civilians, terrorism being allowed to spread through the country like a virus? How many times have you been too scared to walk down the street - too scared that guilt is painted across your face? Too frightened to do anything in case it could possibly be wrong?”

  “Emma, please, I need to do this.”

  “You leave now and it’s tantamount to suicide. They will take you and they will drain you of any information they might think you have on us. You can protest your innocence all you like but they won’t believe you. They aren’t interested if you are guilty or not. All they want is information. Information you have, or that they think you have. And they will find any way to extract it from you. They will tear you apart to try and get at it - they will find the most precious thing to you in the world and they will burn it in front of your eyes. You think you can stand that torture? You think you’re strong enough to watch them torture Eliza?”

  “They won’t, they won’t,” Jack protested.

  “Believe me they will. They will stop at nothing and the pathetic thing is you know that. You’ve been there. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen it with your own eyes but you’ve been too frightened to admit it. It’s always been there, lurking in the darkness, at the corner of your eye. The CRU, the Rations, the Curfew, the Martial Law - control, control, control.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Jack shouted, though he was still standing beside her and not running to freedom. He could easily outrun her.

  “And what will it take for you to believe it? What happens when they find Eliza and drag her in for questioning? What happens when she disappears just like the rest of your friends - do you deny it then? Do you forget that she existed, keep your head to the ground and be a good boy?”

  He was physically shaking, the emotions inside him were erupting and at any second he might explode.

  “You have no future out there. Alex wanted you here for a reason and I am starting to see what that is now.”

  Jack shook his head violently, “You can’t. You can’t know that!”

  “You’re a liar, aren’t you, Jack?”

  “No!”

  “You’ve an exceptional talent for it. It’s so natural for you that you’ve forgotten that you do it all the time. And what’s brilliant is that you actually become the lie, don’t you? You live it, you are it and you will do anything to protect it. You did it to hide your secret family, how many more times did you lie?”

  Jack stared at her with intense hatred. He hated every foul word that spewed from her mouth.

  “Well, Jack? Can’t you see it now? Now here’s the real difference between you and me - between you and every single member of The Resistance. Accidental or not, we’ve both killed people, but what really divides us?” she laughed with disgust, “When we lie it’s to protect our families, our friends, every citizen in our country. When you lie it’s only to protect yourself.”

  Without thinking, he launched himself towards her and his fist, curled with anger and rage, fell short of her head and the force brought him to his knees. As he sunk into the earth, his body collapsed in on itself and he felt his heart rupture with regret. Above him, Emma towered and scrawled across her face was not disappointment, but pity.

  “How long have you been mastered by this fear, this doubt?” she asked, “How many years have you been running from who you really are?”

  Jack was too inconsolable to respond.

  “We need you, Jack. We need the best of you,” Emma crouched beside him, “We need the Jack who can lie for us all. We need the Jack who can fight, the one who will never give up. Does he still exist? Has society killed him off or he is still living and breathing? Would he sit and take whatever the government threw at him? Would he sit and watch them murder his loved ones, one after another? Would he watch silently as they took his girlfriend to slaughter? Would he watch as his friends were led to their death
s, or would he sit up and fight? Would he sacrifice himself to save them, or would he run home to his pathetic life of lies and regret in the hope that one day he may be able to forgive himself for his past mistakes?”

  Jack looked up at her and caught her brutal stare.

  “All my life I’ve been drifting,” when he spoke, his voice tore the fragile air between them, “Cruising from one vaguely interesting thing to the next, from one monotonous, robotic job to another. I suppose I never anticipated contentment wouldn’t just come along one day and solve all my problems. I just want to live a normal life.”

  His eyes were bulging with desperation as he nonverbally begged her to allow him to go.

  “Come on, Jack,” Emma pleaded with him, “You’re more intelligent than this.”

  Shaking his head, he pushed himself backwards from her, trying to display to her his repulsion. He did not belong with them. He belonged with Eliza and the outside world in which he cared little for politics and not at all for conspiracy theories.

  “You leave now and you’re making a huge mistake,” she said, “There won’t be any going back. You’ll last a day before they find you.”

  “I survived the last time,” Jack said defiantly, “I’ll manage again.”

  Emma burst into stunted laughter, “Survived? Did you really?”

  “They banned me from Rations because of my fake ID,” he said, pitifully recalling the day he was told.

  “How many months were you banned from Rations? Do you think that was a fair punishment for what you did?”

  Jack remembered tearing into Meredith’s office in anger at the way they treated him. He shied away from Emma’s piercing stare.

  “Kyle says you’ve been arrested a couple of times. Do you think they treated you well?” she snarled, sure that she would entrap him now.

  “That would never have happened if it weren’t for Alex,” he snapped.

  Almost as instantly as he said it, he feared he had revealed too much.

  “What do you mean?” she asked carefully, as if her words were cast from finest glass.

  “Nothing,” he said in a tone that did not even convince himself. It was as if he wanted her to know; and maybe he did? So what if anyone did?

  “How do you and Alex know each other?” she pressed him further, equally as delicately as the last.

  Looking up at her, Jack relented, far more willingly than he had reckoned, “He’s my closest friend. We lived together for five years. I was his family’s lodger.”

  “He kept this from you, didn’t he?” she asked.

  Jack nodded obligingly.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Jack was nervous now. He did not know what was going through her mind at all.

  “Well now that all makes sense,” she said, “Two friends, both lying to each other - both secrets unearthed?”

  “That’s between me and Alex,” Jack said, trying to claw back the information he now wished he had not divulged.

  “You hate him for putting you here, don’t you? You despise him for lying to you and keeping you against your will?” she goaded him.

  Jack ignored her. He did not want to listen to her twisted viewpoint, regardless of the weight of truth it carried.

  “Alex saved your life, you know,” she said, “If it was between revealing all this to you - given how he must’ve known you would react - and the chance that you might die, Alex would always choose what is right.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack said, suddenly he was the curious one.

  “Alex is not weak. Alex does not take pity where it is not deserved. He might hate you for lying, but he must care for you a great deal to risk having you anywhere near this place. You’re a liability - you have been ever since the first day you arrived by all accounts. We’ve all seen you in your cocoon of misery. I guess I now know why, but it still doesn’t make it any less pathetic.”

  He was angry now. Rage curdled inside of him. He wished he could stab her with his eyes. How dare she call him pathetic?

  “Fuck off,” he shouted at her, such that it echoed around the forest.

  A light rain dripped from the heavens, broken only by the branches of the tallest pine trees. Still she was standing tall over him and he felt weaker for it, but now he was beginning to grip the edges of rebellion and he wanted to fight for his freedom. He jumped to his feet, disguising how unsteady they were.

  “You’re so fucking righteous. You never make any mistakes! You stand there and pass judgement over someone you know nothing about!” he shouted, caring little for who might overhear.

  Emma looked back at him, silently and visibly unimpressed. Her arms were passive aggressively folded.

  “You have no idea who I am. You have no idea what I feel!” he screamed in her face, but she was unperturbed. “I am going now and you best leave me to it!”

  He turned around, his new found strength pummelling through his veins with pride. Three, four, maybe five steps he had taken before she spoke, calmly and without tone.

  “What happened to David White?” she asked.

  Stopping and turning around, he looked at her blankly, “What?”

  “If you think the world out there is so safe, so just, then tell me what happened to David White?”

  “The Prime Minister?” he was confused as to why any of this was relevant.

  “Former Prime Minister, yes.”

  “He was… corrupt, wasn’t he?”

  “What happened. I want you to tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know - it was something about money, taking bribes? I didn’t really follow it, I just remember him being celebrated one minute and removed from Downing Street the next.”

  “And then what happened to him?”

  “I… I don’t know?”

  “What would you expect to have happened?”

  “What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “What would expect to have happened?” she repeated herself.

  “I don’t know, a trial?”

  “A highly publicised trial?”

  “Yes, I suppose so?” he said, still perplexed.

  “But you don’t know what happened after he left Downing Street?”

  “No, why does it matter?”

  “The country’s most powerful man is, as you say, celebrated by the media one minute and then escorted from Downing Street for bribery charges the next, and you don’t know what happened to him after?”

  “No, sorry?”

  “Tell me, if the country’s most powerful man is not invincible to shadowy arrests and being obliterated from existence, then why the fuck should you?”

  It stood as if a wall between them. The great fear of the unknown, bereft of meaning. What was fear, if it was so omnipresent? Could he deny it any longer? Though he was only denying it to himself it seems, as this woman who he would normally call a stranger had seen through him as if he were made of glass. He fell again to his knees, weaker than he ever thought he was. All the strength that he had felt but seconds ago had been an a mere act, a chance for his body to delude his mind into thinking that there was a way out. Even a month of isolation could not beat the devil from his mind - relentlessly knocking at his metaphorical door. But of course there had been someone in after all, someone cowering in the darkness, too afraid to accept reality because it might be too much for them to take. Even now, as the words were spilling from his placid tongue, he wondered whether he might break under their unyielding weight.

  “I’ve seen it before,” he said, visually recalling the last moments he saw Scar and Simon, “Friends, colleagues.”

  He felt numb and that nothing in the world would ever feel right again.

  “They all just… disappeared.”

  Emma stood sympathetically above him, clearly holding back everything she was dying to say.

  “I feel numb,” he muttered, “I suppose I always have. I thought it was my fault - I thought was because of what I had done, but I’m not sure of that
anymore? I’m not sure of anything. I want to believe that I can go out there - just walk for miles until I reach the first town - and that everything will return to normal, but is that what I want?”

  Standing in silent agreement, Emma bowed her head and invited him to continue.

  “What is normality - Rations and unemployment? My friends disappearing one by one? I don’t even know why? Too selfish to stop and question it all? I don’t know, Emma. I’ve sat here for a month denying everything I have seen with my own eyes - and I want to keep on denying it but I think I’ve reached the end of the road. There’s nowhere to go from here, is there?”

  “Yes, there is,” Emma said, reaching out a hand to him, “You can come with us. Together, we can make a difference.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Jack said, heeding his own patheticness.

  “If you’re not with us, you must be against us,” Emma said, “There is no middle ground. Not here, not in this war.”

  “If I leave, I’ll disappear, won’t I? I’ll never see Eliza again?”

  Emma shook her head, “I’m sorry, but yes. There’s not a doubt in my mind that they would take you within a day of your return.”

  “I’m poison to Eliza?”

  “No, don’t think like that.”

  “No, no it’s more than that… it runs deeper than that. I have to stay. I’ve been caught before - I’ve seen what they do to innocent people... It doesn’t matter if I go anywhere near her, she’s still in danger… no matter if I talk when they break me,” Jack was muttering his thoughts aloud.

  “In danger either way?” she asked.

  “Emma, you don’t understand… Eliza means everything to me. She’s the reason I kept myself alive the past month - the thought that one day I might see her face again… but I can’t. I can’t - not now because I don’t even trust myself. I know too much. But it’s worse… because whilst she is everything to me she is also everything to someone else and it would be far, far worse for them to know who…”