J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

As news spreads of the British people’s betrayal, so too spreads anger and fear. So early in the morning, a small crowd forms outside the now-closed parliament buildings, the crowd swelling as the sun slowly brightens the sky. Soon, the square fills with rage, with the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner massing in action against this latest outrage, the accumulation of so many outrages and so many indignities overpowering the feeble orders marshalled against them to cease. Then, gunshots crack across the cold winter’s morning, by some stroke of fate the course of our history changing, again, forever. Not yet out of options, not yet with his back against the wall, the working man assails himself against the decrepit remains of the state, the crowds stepping over the bodies of their own to advance on the troopers ahead. As Valeri mans the ramparts at Dominion Courts, in the distance there’s the sound of thunder rolling over the horizon, channelling through the city’s streets between tall buildings like a burst dam unleashing water along a canyon cutting a path deep into the earth. Defying the law, working men like Valeri form their own ad hoc governing councils, declaring their own autonomy even as they secretly harbour fealty to the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front. As they were before, Valeri’s cupboards are still bare, his windows are still broken, and halls still smell of cigarettes, only now mixed with the acrid and sour stench of spent gunpowder and the thick, oaky stink of fires only just burnt out. Soon, but for the colours of the flags flying from parliament Valeri can see no evidence of a change in power. It’s all a confusing mess, but soon enough the working man will form from among this confusing mess his future. He needs only to reach out and seize what’s rightfully his with both hands.

Aboard the cruiser Borealis the word arrives of the Provisional Government’s determination to carry on the war abroad. Immediately, Dmitri declares, “we can’t follow this banner either,” receiving a chorus of agreement among the rest of the bridge. Around this time, the crew receives word from a Coast Guard station on the Suffolk coast offering safe haven, the station’s new commander elected from among the men and determined to oppose the Provisional Government, too. It’s a gamble, but with no other options Dmitri orders the crew to weigh anchor and make down the Thames for the North Sea. “It’s a great risk,” says Dmitri, “but if we stay here for long then we’ll starve.” The rest of the men on the bridge nod their quiet but determined assent. Dmitri orders the banner of the Provisional Government flown, hoping to deceive anyone who might try to stop them. When night falls, the Borealis makes up the river, slowly, quietly, limping along, every turn of her screws bringing the first vessel in the Popular Front’s unofficial navy closer to her own liberation.

Still in the midst of jeopardy, the working man has grown to be fully confident in himself, in the fists of rage he raises, in the defiance of the order. After all that’s happened, and with all that’s yet to happen, the working man’s enemies seem teetering on the edge of their final collapse. But not all is as it seems. Even in these heady times, the love which once bound us together now can only be found in pieces, shredded like so much useless paper, the fires of liberation fuelled by the rage of the ten thousand fists in the air. That night, as news spreads of this current government’s collapse, there’s no readily apparent path to the thatching together of a new one. Every bridge has been burned, every alliance has been torn asunder, every last possible piece of goodwill has been cast into the same fiery cataclysm that now threatens to consume us all. But it’s not all for nought. For Valeri, this in-between time is a time of uncertainty; his contacts in the Popular Front have spared him precious little information since their offensive. He worries they’re dead. It seems only yesterday Valeri was a troubled but determined young man living in a world of grinding poverty, hopelessness, and violence meted out by unthinking, uncaring businessmen and their apparatchiks. Now, their passions aroused, men like Valeri can stand invulnerable as guardians of the future.

In the night, it comes quickly, unexpectedly, like a blade between the ribs. In the morning, nothing is left but the smoldering ruins of where once there’d stood a national pride, an emblematic sleight of hand never once successful in its intended purpose but kept up anyways. In the night, halfway around the world our army has suffered a devastating defeat, leaving many mothers without their sons and daughters without their fathers. As news spreads of this, the army’s latest humiliation at the hands of its vastly inferior enemy, so, too, does an anger, an anger new, unlike the anger already festering in every factory, every mill, every university and every pew, even as it all seems so eerily familiar to those with the time and the inclination to remember. “Parliament has been overthrown!” shouts Tonya from across the room. At Dominion Courts they’ve taken refuge in a third-floor flat, repurposed as a makeshift headquarters. “I can’t believe it,” says Roger. “I can,” says Valeri, confidently. It seems their moment of victory is at hand. But once the residents of Dominion Courts realize this new regime is to change nothing for them, their celebration turns, first to despondency, then to grim determination to carry on the struggle, no matter the cost.

The new government’s determination to carry on with the war effort becomes less credible, less tenable with each of these defeats. When Valeri takes to the streets, he does so with a muted despondency, worrying he’ll never see Sydney again but nevertheless proud to have known she who would grow to pledge her life in service of their struggle. Whether she is lost is become of no consequence to life on the streets, her place in the masses immediately taken by some other pathetic soul. But love is not so easily sacrificed, even in the name of a noble cause like the working man’s struggle which Valeri has come to devote himself to. In love, Valeri meets with Hannah, one last time before she’s to disappear from his life, from their shared life, forever. In the street outside what’s left of his apartment they come together and embrace. “I admire your courage,” she says, “to join the fight as you are.”

“It’s not courage,” he says, his voice low, his jaw straight in a grim look that betrays his uncertainty, “I’m fighting because there’s no other way to go about this. We can fight and take our chances, or die lying on our backs. I choose to fight.”

“That’s what I admire about you,” Hannah says. “Don’t admire me,” he says, “I’m only a man, and this is what men do. We are all bound by the same duty.”

Hannah sighs and looks away, then says, “I don’t understand you when you talk like that.” Valeri says, “I didn’t expect you would.” But Valeri realizes this is not his. He doesn’t have that conversation in the street, she doesn’t ever explain her true motives for fleeing the country for the relative safety of an old family friend’s in western Canada. This is merely his imaginings, the way he might’ve preferred it to be, the mind powerful enough to create its own fiction yet vulnerable enough to need to use its powerful to reassure itself. But as the world collapses all around us, it seems only a matter of time before the end comes. In those heady days when once it seemed the promise of the uprising fifteen years ago had at last been realized, Valeri was ecstatic. But now, as he sees on his screens the talking heads pledging us all to carry on the war against our foreign enemies, his heart hardens again. As our defeats mount, the lists of the dead and dying that used to be released to the public are released no longer, the screens instead filled with bombastic paeans to victories past, present, and future. At exactly the right moment, timed to occur at the precise time when one such paean reaches its triumphant peak, a bang, a flash, and a plume of smoke rising into the air mark another of the rebel’s attacks, while Valeri watches from his place on the picket lines, in the midst of the greatest coordinated act our world has ever seen. But Valeri can only look away and wonder, truly wonder what has come to be. Then, a bang, a crack, Valeri looking down the street in time to see a tank’s cannon spitting fire in his direction, blood spilling in the street as Valeri and the other picketers scramble for cover, finding none, in the time it takes one thousandth of a second to flash to the next a surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins and propelling him to superhuman strength. It’s all come to this.