J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

“Yes?”

“You don’t have to interrogate me, you know.”

“Seeing as you’re in my apartment I think I’ve got the right to know why.”

“You know why.”

“I suppose I do. Should I be regretting it?”

“That’s for you to decide.” It’s a futile exchange, but one which will, in its futility soon prove to make all the difference in the world for them.

One of the other residents in the building Valeri lives in, a black man around his age named Jeremy Washington, came from a background of lies, deceit, and betrayal, all help denied him by the way of things which deems him of no value. But he’s survived this long by way of the instinctive will to live which powers us all through even the darkest times of our lives. But events are afoot. Men like Jeremy Washington, though, learn to carefully navigate through their lives, dodging drug addiction, muggings, but most fearfully of all the troopers who stop them for the most frivolous reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. It’s one night, many years before Jeremy came to work at that plant with Valeri, when he was stopped by troopers outside a convenience store and beaten to within an inch of his life. The troopers take him and dump him on the side of the road a few city blocks away, an old, white lady waiting until the troopers had driven off before she helps Jeremy into her home and tends to his wounds as best she can. In the morning, she offers to take him to the local hospital, but he declines. For Jeremy Washington, the brutal beating at the hands of the troopers had a lasting effect on him. His family, his live-in girlfriend and their two young daughters, watched as he fell deeper and deeper into despair. The beating left him with a limp, making it hard for him to work. He used drugs, partly to cope with the pain, but also because they were cheap and readily available on the streets where he lived. He lost his job. He lost his family. The courts, an adjunct of the troopers who’d beat him, took them from him and made him pay for it all. When he couldn’t pay, they put him back in jail. This time, he emerged toughened by the experience, in the confusion his family scattering while he found his way into the building he now lives in. Still through the first years Jeremy Washington lived in this apartment block he kept on using drugs, eventually resorting to selling them to help make ends meet while still he can’t afford the medication he needs. Strange men came to visit him at all hours of the night, cash in hand, no questions asked, the troopers who patrolled the streets keeping an eye out but never seeming interested. All this had happened before Jeremy had even turned thirty years old. But now, for men like Jeremy, the promise of a new uprising offers him redemption and with it rebirth.

After the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the union is full of mainly ill-tempered but otherwise harmless layabouts. But like everyone else, the war fifteen years ago struck Jeremy at exactly the wrong time in his life, not when he was capable of taking part. It might seem men like Jeremy are the flotsam and jetsam of life, the degenerate criminals living on the margins. But while Jeremy Washington may well be a degenerate criminal, his whole life having come to revolve around drugs, but it’s in exactly his sort of person the future lies. The way men like Valeri will achieve their own liberation is not by the learned wisdom of the academic, nor by the charity of the sympathetic elite, but by the hopeless causes, the most pathetic and degenerate among the vast ranks of the deprived. Although Jeremy had not taken to the streets in the war fifteen years ago, men like him were rounded up and sent back to prison again, randomly selected in the wave of terror that swept across the country once the war had ended. He was taken in not because he’d committed a crime, though he’d done that; the troopers took advantage of an opportunity to purge the streets of men like him. He’s only just been released from prison when the current wave of unrest begins in earnest. He doesn’t think much of it, as the smoke rises from the fires burning in the streets, but while he falls in with his old habits he secretly hopes the troopers who beat him within an inch of his life all those years ago are out there again to be killed in the unrest. But not all is lost.

Soon Valeri and Murray march in the streets along with the thousands and thousands of their brothers and sisters, singing songs, holding signs, denouncing the attacks on them. “All power to the people!” shouts Valeri. “All power to the people!” shouts the crowd. It’s times like these Valeri feels his boldest, times when he feels utterly confident in the fate of the working man to seize his own destiny. The storm troopers are there, but they do not attack, under orders only to look on; they know what’s afoot. “This is only the beginning,” Murray leans in and says, his normal speaking voice barely audible against the din. “And what a beginning it is!” Valeri replies. The demonstration was called to protest rising prices of food, fuel, rents, but right now all that matters is the rage vented in the streets. (Valeri had invited Hannah, but she’d declined, opting instead to spend what precious time she has between shifts for some much-needed sleep). As the revolution forms, working men realize on their isolation; but the revolution itself may yet acquire a bloodlust that could drive it to do things it might’ve never thought possible. At the shop, Valeri’s nemesis Ruslan works, having refused to take part in this demonstration for fear of provoking the managers to get rid of him. But when Valeri comes in the next time, Ruslan says to him, “you should know I’ll report you if you don’t pull your weight today.” But Valeri’s in no mood to put up with his tricks. “Why don’t you get your nose out of the manager’s rear for once?” he asks, then says, “I do more work in a day than you do in a week. You only have it in because the managers use you to spy on all of us.” Later, Valeri’s alone with another worker named Albert Nelson. “You shouldn’t talk like that around him,” says Albert, “you know he’ll report you.”

“Let him,” says Valeri, “I can’t hold my tongue. Whether I’m punished for it or not, the truth is plain and obvious. What kind of cowards can see the way of things but choose to speak as if the opposite is true?”

The next time Valeri and Ruslan cross paths that day, Ruslan is chattering with Harpal after having done little work, and the three of them exchange a look. Harpal looks at Valeri with a slight grin. Already Valeri’s tired and sore all over from the day of work, and in his tired state he can’t keep up pretences. He says, “I see you’ve decided your dignity is worth whatever little extra they pay you.” Ruslan says, “at least I’m not the one about to lose his job.” Harpal says nothing. The better part of Valeri knows Ruslan is only toying with him. Still he can’t help but let the notion of impending unemployment nagging at the back of his mind. In the streets hidden under the venting of rage there’re whispers of what’s to come. “It’s not yet time,” says one man to another. “It’s exactly the time,” insists the other. “And if we fail we’ll lose everything,” says the first. “We have nothing to lose but our selves,” declares the second. The men talk of war, confident in the righteousness of their cause; this is the fertile ground in which the current rebellion could soon escalate into revolution. In Britain, the current order which has lasted for hundreds of years teeters on the brink of a spectacular collapse, needing only the gentlest of nudges to send it tumbling over.

In the night, the police move. In cities across Britain, they raid randomly-selected apartment blocks in working class districts, breaking down doors and barging into bedrooms, rousing families from their sleep. Stanislaw’s left out of these raids, but he turns up for work the next day to find some of his fellow workers absent. Immediately it occurs to Stanislaw that the ones who’ve disappeared were the ones who’d complained most vociferously about their stolen wages in the months before. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?” he asks the manager. “Why yes,” the manager says, “I did.” But the manager has a sneaky, almost impish grin as he speaks, and Stanislaw thinks not to press the matter. Later, he recalls the faces and the voices of the disappeared migrant workers and he feels pangs of regret at his failure to learn more about them than he did; but the police may yet come for him. As the consequences of this current round of police raids continues to bear itself across the country, it doesn’t yet occur to men like Stanislaw Czerkawski these are among the first, restrained gasps of a regime in its death throes.