Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

But we didn’t give up, and even now I couldn’t understand why. We spent nights huddled fully clothed in burned-out buildings, wrapped in layer after layer of blankets, afraid to sleep in case Security patrols found us. We starved, froze, went insane. There were rumours that Zoology had released their wolves and let them roam the Campus. There were rumours of cannibalism...

  That last was true. A hundred and fifty people started that Winter in Hall 102. Only five saw the thaw. They were still under close psychiatric supervision.

  One member of the New Board had published a paper entitled ‘Why Did We Win?’ and his conclusion seemed to be that he simply didn’t know. We were outnumbered, outgunned, and starving. We were dying. And we won anyway.

  The Fall came with dizzying, incomprehensible speed, in the middle of one of the Winter’s worst blizzards. One moment we were trapped in the Geography Faculty building, with the Faculty Members variously dead or locked in the cellar. The next moment, Security were laying down their weapons and coming over to us in such bewildering numbers that I thought at first it had to be some bizarre strategy.

  We heard later that, when Security started to come over to us, the Colonel instituted a purge of his staff, a purge that went on to the very last hours of the Old Board. There were stories of him striding down the corridors of the Admin Building, pearl-handled revolver in each hand, personally bestowing the fatal bullet on those who displeased him.

  I suppose he was true to his lights, right to the end. When we made that final march on the Admin Building through the snow we were ten thousand strong, students and Lecturers and Security alike, armed to the teeth, the amazing scent of victory making us feel invulnerable. Seeing us coming, the ring of Security men surrounding the building simply put their rifles on the ground and fled.

  The Board surrendered almost immediately, apart from the odd die-hard, like my predecessor. But the Colonel locked himself into a room in the West Wing and killed thirty people who tried to winkle him out. In the end, he was fighting with his teeth and bare hands, and he never gave up.

  Those thirty lives were on my conscience; I had given the order that the Colonel was to be taken alive at all costs, and if I hadn’t been so fastidious those people wouldn’t have died. I wanted to see the bastard on trial and I wanted to hang him myself, but when I thought about it now it seemed a high price to pay for such a mean and ugly life.

  “They boobytrapped the river too, you know?” Araminta told me. “About twenty miles east of School 902. You couldn’t even fish in it without getting your face blown off. Every year some little kiddie would ignore their parents’ advice and see if they could catch something and they’d wind up hooking a mine or one of those automatic shotgun things.” She looked down the hill towards the Medical Residences. “You can’t tell kiddies anything, Rupe. They never listen.”

  I nodded. Araminta had spent her whole life out on the far Eastern edge of the Campus, right up against the Fences. She knew the Death Zones and the dog patrols and she had spent every day of her life looking out towards the mountains beyond which Lady’s Law might hide. Those things were more academic, if you’ll excuse the pun, to those of us living close to Admin and School 1. Our writers and artists tended to romanticise the Schools out along the Fences, but from what Araminta had told me there had been nothing romantic about growing up there. Not long before she arrived, I had gone up to the North Side, in search of a fabled poacher who was said to have discovered one of the safe routes off the Campus, and all I found were sad, apprehensive people who wore threadbare clothes and looked at me as if I was an exotic bird, fallen out of the sky.

  We were still prisoners. It seemed too ludicrous for words. According to the last Census, there were a little over one hundred thousand people on the Campus. Even allowing for the very worst attrition of the Revolution, there had to be over eighty thousand of us left, and we couldn’t get out.

  “We tried everything, I suppose,” she said. “Hot-air balloons. Gliders. Tunnels.” She tugged one end of her scarf, tightening it around her neck. “The balloons and gliders were all shot down. The tunnels,” she shrugged and shook her head, “well.”

  Anyone wanting to tunnel out under the Fences would have to dig for well over two miles. It was impossible; the ground around the Fences was sown with mines, some of them buried ten, fifteen, twenty feet deep. You’d be digging a tunnel, stick your spade into the earth, and bang. The ground around the perimeter of the Campus was dotted with sad little depressions where tunnels had met an explosive end.

  Eventually, of course, all those doomed escape attempts would clear a way through the Death Zones, through the Fences, through the Death Zones on the other side, and we would all be free. By then, I calculated, there would be about seven of us left to enjoy it. The joke was that two or three of the New Board had actually suggested it, just concentrating escapes in one place and keeping going until all the booby traps ran out and we could walk out over the bodies of the unfortunate. Sometimes I thought I was working for the wrong people.

  The Old Board had had this thing, we still didn’t know what it was or where it came from. If anything larger than a seagull took to the air over the Campus there would be a line of smoke in the sky, an explosion, and an expanding ball of flame. When we had all sufficiently collected our thoughts, I had authorised an experiment using a hot-air balloon the size of a large dog. We ran the balloon and its burner up on a line to a height of roughly fifty feet before that line of smoke appeared in the sky and the balloon vanished in an immense concussion. I issued a blanket ban on escape attempts after that, but the North, West, East and South sides were still losing people who thought it was worth a try. Like Araminta said, you can’t tell kiddies anything.

  “Good grief,” she said when she saw the building we were walking towards. “What did you do to that?”

  “The Arts Faculty,” I said. “They just wouldn’t give up.”

  She stood, hands in pockets, tilting her head back so that she could see the building from under the rim of her knitted hat. “Obviously.”

  Gunfire and siege had made the Arts Faculty building uninhabitable, so we had imprisoned the Colonel and the Old Board there. An armed militiaman stood guard at each of the entrances; the officer on the main door knew me by sight but I made sure he checked our passes and signed us both through. Once security started to get sloppy all manner of vengeance would be coming through these doors.

  The guards had taken over the old Porter’s Lodge as a shelter from the cold. I left Araminta there to have a cup of tea and a chat with some of the boys, and took one of each with me up the great echoing marble main staircase to the third floor.

  We had grown strong by the time we reached the Arts Faculty, and we had done a great deal of damage to it with our Security-augmented ordnance. We had put him in one of the more damaged office suites along a length of corridor with holes blown in its outside wall, through which I could see a misty half-revealed landscape and indistinct buildings. The tea in the tin mug I carried steamed in the cold air.

  The guard and I stopped before a heavy oak door sporting six hefty padlocks, hasps screwed inexpertly but very securely into the wood. The guard began the process of unlocking, selecting each separate key from the ring that hung chained to his belt. He kept fumbling the keys into the keyholes.

  “One at a time,” I murmured in what I meant to be a friendly tone of voice.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and promptly dropped the key ring. I heard laughter from the other side of the door.

  I walked down the corridor and stood at one of the holes in the wall and sipped my tea. In spite of the cold and the mist, it was really a very nice morning. You could almost convince yourself that Spring was coming. I listened to the guard trying to get the door open; I wondered if I made him nervous, or if he was this jumpy all the time. If he was like this all the time, I was going to have to arrange a transfer for him. Jumpy people and firearms were, in my experience, a poor combination.

  “Sir?”<
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  I turned and looked down the corridor. He finally had the door unlocked. I walked back down to him and he opened it for me. Then he saluted as I stepped through, and I felt myself cringe. He closed the door behind me, and I heard the locks being clicked shut again.

  There was a table in the middle of the room. I went over to it, pulled up a chair and sat down. I put my folders and my mug down in front of me. On the other side of the table was a small stack of books. I reached over and picked up the top one. The Prince.

  He didn’t turn from the window.

  I put the book back on the pile. “I’d have thought you’d know it by heart by now.”

  He didn’t answer. He had his back to me and his shoulders were so straight they looked as if they had been set using a spirit-level. We were above the level of the mist, and the window seemed to look out over a huge vaporous lake, from which the towers and spires and cubes of Science City rose like the skyline of a mythical metropolis, the seven-hundred-foot spire of the Architects’ Tower at its heart catching the morning sunlight on its thousands of windows.

  “Nice view,” I said.

  “Professor,” he said without turning round. He always used my predecessor’s rank when he spoke to me.

  I opened one of my folders and took out half a dozen sheets of paper and sorted through them.

  He looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. “Good morning.”

  I looked up from the documents. “Good morning, Colonel.”

  “Have you read Machiavelli?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He smiled again.

  When he took over from the Old Colonel, he had been twenty years old. Now he was nearly seventy, and he looked as hard as an old tree. His white hair was combed straight back from his forehead, and his face was pink and freshly-shaved. The room wasn’t cold – there was a little heater in the corner – but he was wearing a heavy blue greatcoat and a grey scarf. I sipped some tea and consulted the documents again.

  “Do you intend to be entertaining today?” he asked without moving from the window. “Or will this be another of those visits where you just sit and stare at me?”

  I continued to read through the documents. They had nothing to do with my visit; they were just camouflage. I made a pencil notation on a report about lightbulb production and wondered distantly why it had arrived on my desk.

  “I see,” said the Colonel. He turned to look out of the window again.

  I read for another minute or so. It was childish and silly, I knew, but I needed the time to gather my thoughts. He scared the living daylights out of me.

  Finally I said, “Any complaints?”

  It was his turn to remain silent.

  I said, “Runway Four.”

  He said nothing.

  I said, “Don’t you think it’s remarkable that people would try escape attempts so close to Admin? I mean, I can cycle from my office down to the river in an hour or so. It’s hardly out of the way.”

  “I don’t think it’s remarkable at all,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not even going to bother telling you about the bodies we found,” I said. “We have more than enough evidence against you and your people.”

  No reaction.

  I got up from the table and banged on the door. The guard opened it and I said, “Go downstairs and get four men.” He looked at me for a moment or two, confused, then closed the door again. I heard him running off down the corridor.

  I stood by the door waiting. The Colonel turned from the window and raised an eyebrow.

  A minute or so later, I heard booted feet running towards us along the battered floorboards of the corridor. The door opened and the Sergeant of the Guard stepped into the room, followed by three of his men.

  “Handcuff him and take him outside,” I said to the Sergeant, nodding at the Colonel.

  He didn’t resist as he was handcuffed and marched bodily out of the room, down the corridor and down the stairs. Araminta came out of the Porter’s Lodge as we swept by towards the doors, and she fell in behind us as we went outside.

  “I’ve had enough,” I told the Colonel as we walked.

  “Really?” he asked, looking about him. It was months since he had been out of his room, and he was making the most of the change of scenery.

  “I’ve had enough of wasting time and resources on you.”

  “You’re welcome to stop,” he said. “Any time you feel strong enough.”

  “Yes,” I said, coming to a halt. “Stop,” I told the guards. “Make him kneel”

  The guards looked uncertainly at each other and then forced the Colonel to his knees. I heard Araminta say, “Rupe...?”

  I took a pistol from my jacket pocket, cocked it, and put the muzzle to the back of the Colonel’s head.

  “Rupe!” said Araminta.

  I pulled the trigger.

  There was a moment’s shocked silence, then the Colonel began to laugh.

  SHE WAS VERY quiet for a few days. She seemed to spend most of her time teaching, or working in the Library. When she was at home, she spent a lot of time in her room.

  One evening, while I was working through a pile of routine intelligence reports, she came and stood on the other side of my desk and said, “Rupe, we have to talk about what happened the other day.”

  I sat back and looked at her. She was wearing a pair of my cords and one of my shirts and she had her hair tied back. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her nose looked red, as if she’d been crying.

  “He did much worse to others, Araminta. I wanted to shake him up.”

  “What you did was barbaric, Rupe,” she said. “I don’t care what that man did to you, you had no right to start behaving like him. I thought the Revolution was supposed to put an end to all that.”

  There was, of course, no answer to that. She was right, I was wrong. I spread my hands and shrugged.

  “I thought you were better than that,” she said sadly, and she turned away and went back to her room and closed the door.

  NOT LONG AFTER that, she came to my office and announced that she was taking a Sabbatical.

  “A what?” I said.

  “I’m going home for a while,” she told me. “I want to get my head together.”

  “Your head looks all right to me,” I said, but she had stopped finding me amusing.

  “I want to decide whether you’re worth the trouble,” she said.

  1

  THE CALL CAME through as Jim was preparing to leave the office. He had tickets for the anniversary revival of Shrek: The Musical at The Theatre Royal, a birthday surprise for his stepson. He very nearly left the expert system to pick up the call, but in the end a vague sense of duty won out and he answered and listened to the voice at the other end of the connection.

  The caller rang off, and Jim phoned home, made excuses into a frosty silence. By the time he got downstairs there was a car waiting for him.

  Settling into the back seat, he felt his phone buzz. The office distrusted electronic communications on principle, considering them inherently impossible to secure. For the most confidential missives, paper was the only acceptable medium. But the situation was still developing and there was no time to print up documents, so someone – an intern, judging by the number of typos – had been tasked to text him a briefing.

  He scrolled down through it as the police driver accelerated the car smoothly into the West End’s evening traffic. Not much more than the phone call had told him, really. And there was that phrase again. Claims to have seen a map.

  So, Jim, in the back of an anonymous saloon car, the underlighting of the phone’s screen making him look older than his years. Untidy fair hair, a dimpled chin. Gawky. A former girlfriend once told him he looked like one of those awkward wading birds. But she also told him he had the cold, dead eyes of a shark, so there was that. Bright lad, Cambridge-educated, good record. Steady worker rather than a superstar. Good eye for detail.
Prosaic.

  The Whitehall and Charing Cross bombings had resulted in the previous century’s Ring Of Steel being retooled as the Maze Of Steel, a patchwork of blocked-off streets and security checkpoints which still bewildered all but the most experienced of cabbies, so it was some while before he realised that the car had not, in fact, travelled all that far. He found himself being conveyed through the thirty-foot-high sliding gates at the back of the new Camden Town police station, a forbidding fortified compound which would not have looked out of place in Belfast in the 1980s. The brief campaign of car- and truck-bombings had forced a hurried rethink of police security across the country. Most existing police stations – the ones which hadn’t been closed down by the cuts in the 2010s, at any rate – had made do with barriers and exclusion zones. Newly-built stations such as Camden had been purpose-designed to take into account the Global War On Terror. Which was all very well, but...

  “Excuse me, what are we doing here?” Jim asked.

  “Ordered to bring you here first, then drive you on to Potters Bar, sir,” replied the driver.

  “What am I supposed to do here?”

  “I only drive the car, sir.”

  While the driver parked among the armoured vans and fast interceptor cars in the compound, Jim essayed a text. The reply came almost immediately. Full, repeat full, report on incident.

  “Do not pass go,” Jim murmured. “Do not collect two hundred pounds.”

  “Pardon me, sir?” asked the driver.

  “Nothing.” Jim opened the door. “Go and see if the canteen will give you a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich or something. I might be here a while.”

  “Sir.”

  A tall man in a suit was walking across the yard towards the car. Jim met him halfway and they shook hands. “Superintendent Spicer,” said the man. “Could I see your identification, please, sir?”

  Jim showed him a card which bore neither his real name nor the name of the organisation for which he worked, but which nonetheless required members of the police, fire, ambulance and coast guard services – and perhaps the RSPCA and the AA as well, he’d never had occasion to explore all the possibilities – to do his bidding without question.