Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Alex had always been embarrassed when her sexual organs had been examined, even by a female doctor, but she submitted without complaint. “I assume that you weren’t a virgin when you fell into their hands?” The doctor asked. Alex flushed, but nodded. Her first time had been nothing to write home about, although it had gotten better over the weeks that had followed. “There’s quite a bit of scarring down here — I don’t see any signs of any STDs, but I don’t have the equipment to do proper tests. I’m going to give you a course of antibiotics and I expect you to take them for at least a month.”

He shrugged. “Normally, we would have sent you for counselling as well, but we don’t have any of the trained specialists here,” he added. “I spent half my time as a civilian GP referring people for counselling who didn’t need it and now there are more trauma cases on my hands than I ever saw in my worst nightmares.”

“It’s tough all over,” Alex said, as she sat upright. It still hurt to move, but it was getting better — or maybe she was just getting used to the pain. Her hands shook as she reached for the dressing gown and she found herself having problems picking it up. The doctor gave her a sympathetic look and helped her stand upright. “I… why don’t I feel balanced?”

“Delayed shock,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen it quite a bit in military and police personnel. You keep plugging onwards while the crisis is going on and then you start coming to pieces. My advice, my very strong advice, would be to rest for the next few weeks. You don’t need to spend any time on the front lines…”

“The entire world is on the front lines,” Alex pointed out, dryly. “What happens if the aliens come crashing in here and demand our immediate surrender?”

“Try and relax,” the doctor said, with a faint smile. He hesitated, briefly. “One other thing. I’d strongly recommend that you refrain from sexual intercourse for the next month or two, at least while you’re taking the antibiotics. You really need to let your body heal before you do anything else.”

“I don’t think that that’s going to be a problem,” Alex said. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and scowled. Her blonde hair had been hacked off by a manic, her face was bruised and covered in tiny cuts and what little of her legs could be seen had been marked by the cane. “No one’s going to be interested in me for a few weeks anyway.”

The doctor shrugged. “I’d suggest refraining anyway,” he said. “I should warn you — some people putting out propaganda on the internet want to use your story to embarrass the collaborators. They will certainly want to talk to you about it, maybe have you filmed talking about it or take pictures of your wounds. If that bothers you, tell them to go to hell. They captured enough footage from the interrogation chamber to thoroughly embarrass the collaborators without needing your input.”

Alex looked up at him. “Footage?”

“The bastards recorded all of their interrogations,” the doctor said. He looked sick, even at the mere thought of it. “I saw a handful of them when they wanted a medical opinion. My considered opinion is that they were torturers first and interrogators second. At least one of them was supposed to be locked up in jail for the rest of his life. One of their sessions was the slow murder of a young girl with no real connection to the resistance. God alone knows what they did with the body.”

Alex remembered some of the reports from London. “The aliens had their prisoners dig pits and they simply dumped the bodies there,” she said. “Maybe there’s another pit near the detention camp. The girls in the cage told me that quite a few of them had died while they were in alien custody.”

The doctor shrugged. “I’d suggest telling that to the review team,” he said. “They may want to go back and look.”

He looked her up and down, and then nodded. “I’ll have the antibiotics and cream sent up to you,” he added. “We don’t keep them all here, for obvious reasons. And then I strongly suggest that you get plenty of rest.”

Outside, she met a young man who was wearing civilian clothes, but carried himself with a military bearing. “I’m Gus,” he said, with a faint smile. “I was wondering if you would be willing to discuss your time with the enemy with me?”

Alex blinked in surprise, even with the doctor’s warning. Part of her wanted to forget the entire experience, but the rest of her knew that telling the entire world could serve as a warning to other resistance fighters not to get caught. Or perhaps they’d be too scared to resist the aliens when the time came. But that would be their choice — and besides, perhaps talking about it would help her get over it. The headshrinker who’d visited the squadron after they’d lost a pilot to equipment failure had certainly believed that that was the case.

“If you wish,” she said, finally. “I’m afraid I intend to ask as many questions as you.”

Gus led the way into a large room that had once been a living room, with a sofa, a plasma television and a computer placed against the wall. “We have been going through the recordings taken by the collaborators,” he said. He nodded towards the television, which was showing a frozen scene from one of the recordings. Someone — Alex was relieved to see that it wasn’t her — was being whipped. Blood was dripping off his back and down to the ground. “Some of it is for propaganda, but the rest of it is for building a case against them. We have them as prisoners, you see.”

“Shoot them,” Alex said, sharply. She remembered the girl who had tried to help her, after her first session with the torturers. And the others, only half-remembered in the haze her memory had become, who’d been there. “Is there any fucking doubt that they deserve to die?”

“None at all,” Gus said, seriously. “But we intend to put together a series of videos for the internet that will prove them guilty, before we execute them. There’s been quite a bit of debate over the issue, I’m afraid.”

Alex snorted. “They chose to serve the aliens,” she said. “What excuse is there for their actions? They weren’t pushed into collaboration and they didn’t have any noble motives — they wanted to indulge their fantasies. And they did.”

She shuddered as she remembered the feelings of helplessness that had almost broken her, the awareness that she had lost all control over her body. Alone in the dark, she had come far too close to breaking, to begging them to listen to her as she spilled everything she knew. Who knew what might have happened if they’d been allowed to keep working on her for longer?

“We have to prove that,” Gus said, quietly. “And we need your help to do it.”

The next hour passed slowly. Alex watched one of the videos the torturers had recorded, fighting down the urge to be sick. She hadn’t even been the worst-treated person in the underground complex. Two men had been sawn apart by their tormentors, while a girl had been practically raped to death. She told herself that she was right, that the torturers had been more interested in hurting people than learning anything the aliens could use, but it was no mercy. How could anyone indulge themselves by torturing helpless victims?

Alex had known how Third World countries treated their prisoners. She’d always known that being shot down and landing in enemy territory was a possibility. Saddam’s regime had had entire corps of torturers, many of whom were nastier than the people the aliens had found and put to work. Iran and Saudi Arabia tortured dissidents and democrats with equal abandon, but they were both barbaric states. The thought of anyone in Britain willingly torturing someone was horrifying. And it was so pointless!