Divided We Fall

by Adam Bender

  “This is where you come in, Seven. Let me ask you, how did you feel when you first took in our nation and realized you didn’t recognize it?”

  “How would you feel?”

  “Just humor me.”

  Seven exhaled miserably. “Disoriented, I guess.”

  Danny grinned. “So was the prisoner. Here he was all used to living in a dark cave, and now there’s this big bonfire stinging his eyes. I bet part of you wanted to go back to what you knew before, right?”

  Seven considered. “I couldn’t go back.”

  “Neither could the prisoner. Instead, he followed the path out of the cave. When he experienced the sun for the first time, it was even more severe to his eyes than the fire. But soon he became accustomed to the light.”

  Young paced toward the Guard poster opposite Seven, apparently to gather his thoughts. “Now that you know the truth about this nation, how does it make you feel when you meet people who blindly follow the Guard and the Church?”

  Seven frowned at the floor. “I mean, I guess you just said it. I think they’re blind.”

  “So did the man who escaped the Cave,” he said. “Well get over it! Try to assimilate!”

  A short laugh shot from the prisoner’s lips. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Of course not–it’s too late, isn’t it? When he tried to go back, he realized he could no longer play their game of shadows. For you it’s the same. You don’t understand how people can buy into the lies told by the Guard and the Church. And you must disdain so called Patriots, for they embrace the lies without question.”

  Seven gazed blankly at the white-tiled floor. “So what did the prisoner do?”

  “The same thing as anyone who learns great truths. He tried to free the others so they could see the light, too.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No. They insisted that the prisoner’s eyes had been corrupted. When he wouldn’t give up, the others decided there was only one solution.”

  Seven looked up at Young’s index finger pointing high in the air.

  “Kill the Heretic.”

  The prisoner frowned. “So you’re saying it’s hopeless.”

  “Not quite,” Young returned. “You see, there’s one important difference between the Cave and this world, Seven. You have allies.”

  Danny leaned against the fiery symbol of the Underground on the wall across from the prisoner and beamed. Seven exhaled, “What do you want?”

  “It’s just as I said before, Seven. You’re a blank slate–well, blank enough anyway. That means your opinions are pure and not tainted by the Guard’s propaganda. That’s valuable to me.”

  “How?”

  “I want you to be my adviser.”

  A black luxury sedan with armor that could withstand a machine gun snaked between two lanes of traffic. In the passenger seat, Eve stared at a red dot blinking on the screen of her tablet. “He’s been in one spot for almost an hour since we started tracking him,” she said.

  Rodriguez kept his eyes on the road and returned, “This could be big. If he’s really at Underground HQ, we’re about to get a whole lot of extra credit from the president.”

  “Hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, rookie.”

  “Can you tap into the live audio?”

  “Don’t have a strong enough wireless connection,” said Eve, glancing at the red rocks whizzing by her window. “Probably just this damn desert.”

  “Well, we’ll be out of it soon. Underground HQ isn’t far from the city.”

  Eve thought of Jon and smiled. God was giving her another chance to convince him, she thought. She could practically taste their happily ever after.

  Rodriguez tapped Eve’s shoulder and pointed to the radio on the dash. “The president’s on.”

  “My friends,” drawled the voice on the radio, “we face an infestation. Victory is within our reach. The famed Guard–your boys and girls–are right now preparing to meet the Enemy invaders on Luna Coast. I’ve ordered our defenders to pull no punches. They will not rest until the termites–all of the termites–have been exterminated.

  “This attack, while horrible, should give Patriots no reason to despair. It is rather God’s hand pushing us to be better. The Great Power has merely identified chinks in our armor. It is our duty to seal them.

  “My friends, the sad truth is that heresy runs like poison through the veins of our great nation. There are people among us–hiding in plain view–whose only ambition is to weaken us. These selfish men and women say they are working in our country’s interest, but we must not believe it. We all know the truth–that they are working for the Devil and seek only to create chaos. We must weed them out, one by one.

  “To that end, I am today announcing ‘Patriot ID,’ a national identification program to assist in the Guard’s efforts to seek and destroy heresy. Under the program, which we will roll out soon after the Enemy is driven from our shores, your family doctor will administer a simple, painless procedure that will allow Guard to identify you and your loved ones more quickly than ever before. Patriot ID is more secure, efficient and effective than traditional documentation, and it will allow us to quickly separate the Heretics from the Patriots. Think of it as paperless billing from your friendly government.

  “You see, my friends, in the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary. That’s just what Patriot ID is for.”

  Rodriguez chuckled. “I hope this doesn’t mean we’re out of a job.”

  Eve didn’t respond. Her mind was replaying something the Headmaster said during her briefing: “It is of national importance that information about the technology in Mr. Wyle’s head is not revealed to the public.”

  She felt sick. The president couldn’t really be doing that, could he? Suddenly all she could think about was the promise she’d made last year to a good friend.

  Eve remembered feeling very cold as she looked at the red and yellow flowers. Jon’s hand dropped gently on her shoulder. “My love, you’ve had that door open for two minutes now.”

  Nodding, she snatched a bouquet of fiery wildflowers. “Sorry,” she sniffled. “It’s just really hard to pick flowers for a gardener.”

  They shuffled to the counter. “Hello,” chimed the old lady at the register. Her gray eyes popped to the package in Eve’s arms. “Those are beautiful.”

  Jon placed a glass vase on the counter. “This, too, please.”

  “Would you like a decorative tag?” asked the cashier, spreading five varieties out for them to see.

  “Um,” stammered Eve. She pointed at a cobalt one reading Get Well Soon, and felt the need to explain. “Not the most original, but he’ll like the color.”

  No amount of gifts felt like enough. Bill had always been there for her, celebrating her successes and helping her through hard times–like when her mom…

  Eve gulped.

  She hadn’t thought of her mother in years. It had been so long ago, that day when Eve came home from school and mom wasn’t there. She remembered watching TV by herself, well past the cartoons and into prime time. At about 9:00 p.m., her father arrived with a grocery bag full of canned ravioli. He was crying. Mom had been shopping downtown when a protest broke out, Dad said. The Heretics brought out guns, and she was standing in the middle of it all, and…

  Dad was a wreck for days. But old Bill listened to Eve, found pretty flowers for her, took her to the playground.

  “Cry if you need to,” he’d say. “You’ll feel much better.”

  “After you,” said Jon.

  She was back in the hospital, standing in front of Room 303.

  The old man lying on the bed seemed too frail to be her friend. “Hello, Uncle Bill,” she greeted meekly.

  Some color returned to the man’s cheeks as he looked over. “Eve! Still on your Watched List, am I?” He beamed.

  Chuckling, she took a seat by his side. “You’re never going to let me live that one down, are you?” />
  “Never!” he declared. Suddenly he fell into a fit of coughs.

  Eve tried to help but Bill waved her off. “Those are beautiful flowers,” he said eventually. “Thank you for coming. And you too, Jon–you taking good care of my angel?”

  Jon smiled. “Doing my best.”

  “Good,” he said. “Sorry for excluding you–inside joke. Short story is she thought I was the Devil!”

  Eve’s boyfriend nodded knowingly. “Oh, she told me. She’s still embarrassed.”

  “I’m not!” protested Eve, hitting him playfully.

  A nurse, probably in her forties, stepped into the room. “Oh, visitors!”

  Eve sprung up from her seat. “Sorry, do you need us to–?”

  “Oh no, I have to give Bill his meds, but it’s nothing that can’t wait fifteen minutes. Take your time.”

  When the nurse had gone Eve turned back to Bill. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not bad.” He inhaled slowly through the clear tubes running through his nostrils. “I’ve accepted what’s coming.”

  She frowned. “Bill…”

  “It’s okay. I’ve had a good life.” He bobbed his head slightly. “Well, the last twenty years anyway, after your dad took me in. I’m especially proud of you–the first young lady ever to be inducted into the Elite Guard!”

  “One of the first,” she corrected with a blush. “Anyway, you inspired me. Ever since I met you, got to know you, I couldn’t bear the thought of a good, innocent man being prejudged as a Heretic.”

  He gave her the warm smile that always filled her with cheer and optimism. Even now, with its owner on his death bed, the smile was infectious.

  “You have a rare talent for reading people–like x-ray vision, but better,” Bill replied. “That’s grand, because not everything is black and white. It takes close and careful observation to see the grays, and an open mind to see the colors.” He coughed again. “Will you promise an old man something?”

  “Anything.”

  “There are people out there who will want you to rush to judgment, maybe because it’s more convenient to theirs or someone else’s agenda. But Eve, you mustn’t let them. Promise me you’ll always look for the colors.”

  You’ve got the wrong guy,” protested Seven. “I don’t want to help the Underground or the Guard. I just want to be left alone!”

  Young’s face tilted incredulously. “This coming from the man who risked his life supplying evidence against the government?”

  “I felt guilty for hurting the Underground. I did it to make amends, but that was it. I’m done taking sides.”

  Danny shook his head. “Repentance may have been part of it, but I think there was more,” he said. “You made a judgment call. You decided that what the Guard was doing was wrong, and you wanted to do something about it.”

  Seven looked sullenly at the concrete wall behind his captor. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Young squinted at him. “Do you disagree with our methods?”

  “I just don’t see the point,” he sighed. “How is the Under-ground going to change anything? Do you even have the numbers to go up against the Guard?”

  A smile crept slowly onto Young’s mouth, and suddenly he was guffawing loudly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “do you think our master plan is to start a civil war? A second Great War?” He shook his head. “No, Seven, we don’t have the numbers for that, but my father never believed it would need to come to that.”

  Seven was speechless.

  “I should probably explain how our government is struc-tured, and give you a little history,” said Young, licking his chops. “I always did love social studies. More than philosophy even.”

  Here we go again, thought Seven. He wondered why Danny hadn’t become a professor.

  “We have four branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial, and the Church,” he explained. “They are supposed to have equal power, and in fact they had equal power, until one fateful day decades ago when the president and the Church decided to gang up and fight the growing evil.” He made quote marks with his fingers around the last two words.

  “Let me guess,” Seven interjected. “Heretics?”

  Danny grinned broadly. “You got it–a splinter church to be exact. The Headmaster at the time tried to convince then-President Frederick Wright that the new religion’s growing prominence was a threat to the nation.”

  “Tried?”

  Danny shrugged. “For a while it didn’t work. President Wright held firm that Church and State should be separate, and wouldn’t order the Guard to intervene. But things changed fast when the Heretics–allegedly, mind you–set off a bomb in the old Capitol building. The president was traveling, but his wife and the vice president were in the building. Neither survived.

  “As you might expect that got Wright’s attention. And so just like that the Headmaster had the president’s full support. Together, they pressured congress into writing a law declaring the splinter church illegal. The so-called Heretics fought back, which in turn started what we now refer to as the Great War. It lasted four gruesome years, and the better trained Guard came out the victor.

  When it was over people were weary of fighting and violence. The Church easily convinced them that it was heresy that began the war, and therefore it was heresy that needed to be prevented in order to keep the peace. So, President Wright pushed another bill through the Congress which he called the Heretic Act. The proposed law defined the differences between a Patriot and a Heretic, and laid out the punishments for being a Heretic. That law was rather loosely written, leaving the courts essentially powerless to side against the government whenever the Guard brought in a suspected Heretic. The result is that most people arrested for heresy in our country are quickly convicted.”

  Seven shook his head vigorously to stop Young. “Wait, why wouldn’t more people resist a law like this?”

  “Two reasons,” Young said. “One, they were told that the law was critical to national security. When the president of the whole goddamned country says something is critical to national security people tend to be more receptive. Second, the Heretic Act was fully endorsed by the Headmaster, and everyone’s priest espoused its virtues. Imagine you’re at church, and your minister is telling you about a proposal that will lead to a purer society, usher in God’s love, blah, blah, blah. Sounds pretty good, right?”

  Seven felt a headache coming on. “But that’s crazy!”

  “It gets worse. Turned out the Heretic Act also gave the executive branch broad new surveillance powers. Again, very loosely written. As a result, the president suddenly was able to inflict pretty much any crazy paranoid measure he wanted onto the public. As long as he said the reason was to protect against heresy, he was in the clear. And he had the Church right behind him slapping everything with a big red ‘Ap- proved by God’ stamp!”

  Danny clapped, apparently for effect.

  “Lucky for you, Seven, seems you woke up in a new era of change! It’s easy to miss, but there is this growing…restlessness, I guess. For most people it’s like this seed, or–no–it’s like this match inside them. All we need to do is strike these God-fearing churchgoers in just the right way and–I promise you–they will ignite and fight on our side!

  “The really good news for us is that some of these people have made their way into the Congress. Even with the Heretic Act, Congress still maintains the power to impeach the president and fix the laws. But the only way to do that is to get the other legislators to stand up against him and the Headmaster.”

  “Can’t the president just block an impeachment?”

  “No,” said Danny. “Our country’s founders gave the legislative branch the power to remove the president, and no one has the balls to throw out this country’s first laws. The real problem is convincing a majority of the stubborn jerks in Congress to take action. Seriously, these fools will stalemate over naming a post office!

  “Still, even with all that, my father believed it
was doable if we brought forward some pretty compelling dirt. Unfortunately, it’s near impossible to collect appropriately damning evidence without breaking the law.”

  Seven found himself perplexed as he thought about the chip in his head. “What about the evidence I sent you?”

  Young shrugged. “While certainly concerning that the Guard would take such elaborate steps to infiltrate the Underground, it’s difficult to make the case that they’ve overstepped their authority. For example, you–the old you–technically consented to having the chip installed.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Don’t get me wrong. What you got was great stuff. But to stage an uprising against the president…Unfortunately we’re just going to need to find a few more skeletons in his closet.”

  Seven felt strangely invigorated by the fiery-eyed symbol of the Underground staring back at him from the wall. “I guess that’s where we come in, right?”

  Danny responded with a brilliant grin.

  Young shoved a gun in Seven’s back and pushed him stumbling up the wooden steps from the cellar. They made eye contact briefly. The prisoner’s face showed no emotion. Danny’s thin lips quivered up and down like a fish. Danny ducked around a lonely yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, and pushed the door open. Sunlight rushed through, and for a split second Seven teetered off balance. A blunt stab in his lower back pushed him forward again.

  “So this is my home,” welcomed Danny. “One of them anyway.”

  Seven rubbed at some rope burn left on his wrist and looked around.

  The living room was about what Seven expected, considering the Young family owned the top bank in the country. He couldn’t decide of which feature he was most jealous–the tall floor-to-ceiling windows, the cushy leather sofas, or the cinema-sized TV screen. Then he saw the view. Through a shady thicket of giant oak trees Seven could see the ocean and a brilliant blue sky.