Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Robin lay on his bed, staring up at nothing. It wasn’t his bed, not really. The flat had been abandoned in the opening days of the invasion and the police, needing living space for policemen who had been forced out of their homes, had commandeered it. Robin had no idea who had owned the flat before he’d moved in, but they had had excellent taste in wine. He’d downed no less than six bottles over the last two days and was seriously considering finishing off the rest. It could hardly have made his life any worse.

Back before the invasion, he’d been a loyal policeman, upholding the law even when he’d wanted to forgot proper procedure and just kick some young thug’s head in, or turn water cannons on protestors who had no idea how lucky they were. And then the aliens had invaded and he’d told himself that he had to go to work for them, just to keep the public safe. His own justifications rang hollow in his ears, mocking him; how safe was the public in a world at war? Outside, parts of the city had been torn apart by rioting, dead bodies lay everywhere and what remained of the police force was working for the aliens. And they weren’t the only ones. Some of the special constables the aliens had recruited weren’t policemen, or even soldiers. They just wanted to get their kicks by pushing around helpless civilians.

He reached for the bottle and cursed when his trembling hand knocked it down onto the floor. Somehow, he managed to roll over, just in time to see the red wine draining out of the bottle and soaking the carpet. It would probably drip down to the flat underneath, giving the inhabitant a scare. He pulled himself upright and rubbed at his head. Maybe a few more drinks would make him drunk and then he could forget the world for a while. If he could go home, if he could see his wife… but she didn’t want anything to do with him now, not after the chaos in London. The entire world hated the policemen, those who had joined up to serve the aliens. If he’d known…

…Perhaps he would have gone underground too.

The thought was a bitter one. There were policemen, unmarried policemen, who had deserted their comrades and gone off to join the resistance. But they were the ones who had no hostages to fortune — or to the aliens. The married men knew that their wives and children were known to the aliens, and that they would be killed if their husbands or fathers showed any signs of disloyalty. Perhaps his wife could have evaded them if he’d vanished in the early hours of the invasion, when so many had gone missing, presumed dead, but it was now far too late. He reached for another bottle, struggled with the cork, and then took a long swig. Who cared about going on duty now? Maybe they’d just kill him and that would be an end to it.

How long had it been, he asked himself, since he’d walked his first beat? Not long at all, really; he’d known that he didn’t want to go anywhere else. The endless red tape that strangled real policing, the politically-correct rules invented and enforced by politicians that made it impossible to nick real villains or monitor terrorists… despite all the trials and tribulations of modern policing, he’d loved his job. And now he was nothing more than a filthy quisling. They didn’t need to drag up examples from France or Norway any longer, not when there were thousands of collaborators in the United Kingdom. They’d be calling them Robins in the future, no doubt.

His hands started to shake and he put the bottle down, quickly. He should get up and shower before donning his uniform, but he really didn’t care any longer. The weapons they’d stashed away… maybe he should go to the stash, pull out one of the pistols, and put a bullet through his own brains. What else could he do? Resistance was futile. He was halfway to his feet before realising that suicide would probably mean doom for his wife, if the aliens decided to view his suicide as a kind of desertion. Did they even have suicide as a concept? There was no way to know, although given their tough bodies, killing themselves probably required poison. Or maybe they just jumped out of their starships and burned up in the atmosphere below. The thought made him giggle, a sure sign that he was drunker than he realised.

“You know,” a voice remarked, “there’s little sillier than a drunken policeman.”

Robin’s eyes snapped open. He’d been alone. Unlike some of the other policemen, he had no intention of bringing a whore back to his flat. He still loved his wife, despite everything — and besides, at least some of the whores had murdered their policemen and vanished into the underground. No one loved the police these days. Through his rather hazy vision, he saw a young Asian man standing by the door, wearing a policeman’s uniform. Robin didn’t recognise him — and there was something about the way he wore his uniform that suggested that he wasn’t a policeman at all. But someone wearing a policeman’s uniform could walk around the complex without being questioned…

“Don’t worry,” the man said. “I’m not here to kill you.”

“Right,” Robin growled. His head felt as if someone had smashed it with a brick, repeatedly. Mixing the different kinds of alcohol had probably been a mistake. It was hard to form words in his mind, let alone say them out loud. “What do you want then?”

“My name is… well, they’ve been calling me Abdul,” the man said. Despite his light, almost flippant tone, his brown eyes never left Robin’s face. “You may have heard of me. I believe the reward on my head is currently enough luxury food to keep someone eating for the next few months.”

The name seemed to shock Robin out of his drunken haze. Of course he’d heard of Abdul — he was supposed to be one of the ringleaders behind the resistance, linking together groups as disparate as National Front racists and Islamic Fundamentalists. The name had been mentioned by captured insurgents during their interrogation, but none of them had known where Abdul based himself. Some policemen had thought that the name was a joke, yet the aliens had taken it seriously. The reward on Abdul’s head was massive.

“Don’t worry, they don’t know I’m here,” Abdul assured him. One hand rubbed the uniform, mockingly. “It’s amazing how many people spy the uniform and don’t look past it to the face.”

“We don’t know what you look like,” Robin managed. Up close, Abdul was almost unmemorable. He had no beard, but otherwise he could simply have faded into the crowd and vanished. Bearded Asian men had often been targeted by the aliens, purely on suspicion. One of Robin’s fellow policemen had joked that the aliens found beards intimidating because they couldn’t grow them themselves. “And now… why are you here?”

“I was told that you might know where some weapons are stashed,” Abdul said, lightly. “I think that it is time we talked, don’t you?”

Robin staggered to his feet and stumbled over to the shower. The water in London was often turned off and then on again by the aliens, purely to remind Londoners who was in charge, but there was never any problem with the water in police complexes. He turned the knob and blasted cold water over his head, shocking himself awake. Part of him wanted to sound the alert and call for help, but the rest of him… if Abdul knew that Robin had been involved in hiding weapons, what else did he know? It wouldn’t take much to alert the aliens to his betrayal — and they’d definitely see it as a betrayal. All weapons were supposed to have been surrendered to them.

“Fuck,” he said, as his mind finally caught up with him. “Who told you?”

“Does it matter?” Abdul asked. “All that really matters is that we need to talk.”

Drying up the water dripping from his hair gave Robin a moment to think. He hadn’t been the only copper involved in hiding weapons, and two of the ones who had had deserted after the first riots. One or both of them could have found Abdul and shared confidences with him, naming Robin as someone who had hoped that he would be in the position to do something about the aliens one day. But that day had never come…