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Paradise Falling: Book Two
Di J.T. Marsh
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereValutazioni:
Valutazione: 5 su 5 stelle5/5 (1 recensione)
Lunghezza: 649 pagine11 ore
- Editore:
- Unnamed Publishing
- Pubblicato:
- Jan 20, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780463185155
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
The second novel in a spellbinding series about a proletariat revolution in the twenty-first century. Britain is in the grips of a new revolution, with Valeri Kovalenko among a group of ordinary workers who’ve seized their own homes. But their uprising is only the beginning of a new struggle. The new Provisional Government in London has raised a huge army in its Home Guard, and is slowly tightening its blockade on the newly-liberated urban zones throughout Britain’s cities. The rebels in the Popular Front promise aid to the proletarian fighters Valeri’s found himself taken in with, but it can’t come soon enough. Without adequate food to sustain them and with the Home Guard threatening a massacre, Valeri and the others are faced with a new struggle. But not all is lost. There is another way. Pushed to the brink of desperation, Valeri finally realizes what must be done.
In the streets of Britain’s cities, there’s revolution underway again. After having taken a stand for their right to live in their own homes, proletarian men like Valeri will soon become part of a much larger force with much grander aims.
Part future history, part warning on the folly of our times, Paradise Falling foretells the continuing saga of a spectacular war in the streets of our own cities, through crisis, terror, and a cataclysmic devastation the likes of which the world has never seen. Equal parts prophecy and premise, Paradise Falling is the second in a series of novels about a revolution to come.
Informazioni sul libro
Paradise Falling: Book Two
Di J.T. Marsh
Valutazioni:
Valutazione: 5 su 5 stelle5/5 (1 recensione)
Lunghezza: 649 pagine11 ore
Descrizione
The second novel in a spellbinding series about a proletariat revolution in the twenty-first century. Britain is in the grips of a new revolution, with Valeri Kovalenko among a group of ordinary workers who’ve seized their own homes. But their uprising is only the beginning of a new struggle. The new Provisional Government in London has raised a huge army in its Home Guard, and is slowly tightening its blockade on the newly-liberated urban zones throughout Britain’s cities. The rebels in the Popular Front promise aid to the proletarian fighters Valeri’s found himself taken in with, but it can’t come soon enough. Without adequate food to sustain them and with the Home Guard threatening a massacre, Valeri and the others are faced with a new struggle. But not all is lost. There is another way. Pushed to the brink of desperation, Valeri finally realizes what must be done.
In the streets of Britain’s cities, there’s revolution underway again. After having taken a stand for their right to live in their own homes, proletarian men like Valeri will soon become part of a much larger force with much grander aims.
Part future history, part warning on the folly of our times, Paradise Falling foretells the continuing saga of a spectacular war in the streets of our own cities, through crisis, terror, and a cataclysmic devastation the likes of which the world has never seen. Equal parts prophecy and premise, Paradise Falling is the second in a series of novels about a revolution to come.
- Editore:
- Unnamed Publishing
- Pubblicato:
- Jan 20, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780463185155
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
J.T. Marsh lives in Canada.His personal website is http://www.jtmarshauthor.com/
Correlati a Paradise Falling
Anteprima del libro
Paradise Falling - J.T. Marsh
Paradise Falling
A Novel of Our History’s Future
Book Two
J.T. Marsh
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
PARADISE FALLING: BOOK TWO
First Edition. April 2019.
Copyright © J.T. Marsh 2019
Written by J.T. Marsh
Published by Queensborough Books
Matthew 24
6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.
10 And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.
11 And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
13 But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
14 And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
I
1. Holding the Line
After having seized their own homes, the working men of Britain yet still face a dire fate. All through the day and night there’s the dull thump of distant explosions interspersed with erratic rattling of gunfire, pockmarked by rare moments of silence. The stench of raw sewage permeates every breath drawn in. Everywhere in London’s vast sprawl you can never escape the lingering, half-conscious sensation that every waking moment might be your last. With the country set alight by the fires of liberation, though, men like Valeri Kovalenko feel in their hearts the common thrumming of our universal pulse guiding them through this tentative early period when the war at home still searches for a decisive battle. As they use this time to bury their dead and tend to their wounded, Valeri and the other residents of Dominion Courts look ahead with a mounting desperation to survive. After having fought off the Home Guard’s troops who’d to confiscate food and supplies, they’d expected another attack to come immediately, the next assault surely to kill them all. But it doesn’t come. Each morning and each night Valeri looks to their defences, each day that passes seeming to draw out the tension in his muscles, only to return it ten times stronger than ever. But if ever Valeri should take to fearing his own demise, he should comfort himself with the knowledge that fear is courage, and courage is fear. For men like Valeri, their fear of death comes from a determined knowledge that he’ll keep on risking life in confronting evil, which makes his fear courageous.
Still they remain committed to their common struggle, bearing as they are the working man’s spirit of survival. Though they’ve been through much hardship, though they’ve seen much hunger and much pain, the spirits of the residents remains high. If not for the walls sagging under their own weight, for the windows shattered, for the splinters of wood and fragments of drywall scattered inside and out, it might not even seem like a block of flats so much as a loosely-piled assortment of materials, perhaps the ruins of a block demolished in the night. But for Valeri, his neighbours Tonya and Roger, and everyone else who’s still there, it’s theirs, and that’s what makes it worth fighting for, right down to the last plank of wood, the last pane of glass, even the last brick smashed into a thousand pieces. The ad hoc governing committee the three of them have formed seems more imagined than real, confined as its authority is to the narrow box of land surrounding Dominion Courts. As Valeri, Tonya, and Roger, among others, prepare to meet with residents of the other blocks in this working class district, Valeri, for one, can’t help but feel that odd and entirely discomforting mixture of courage and fear. But their courage comes from their determination to stave off death at all cost, which makes their courage fearful. This tension between courage and fear will guide them through their paradise, falling. But for Valeri, this is only the beginning of a much larger struggle, one which should consume them all. As Valeri will come to realize, with time, weakness is strength and strength is weakness, their struggle soon to embody this fundamental truth.
In fact, even as Valeri pledges himself to the uprising, he considers it may come to a final sacrifice. All cupboards are now bare. There’s no running water at all. Even paracetamol is impossible to find. Still the red-and-gold flag of the Popular Front flies from a makeshift flagpole on the roof, proudly declaring to all who would dare strike out at them the residents’ steadfast determination to win through. But when others come around looking for whatever meagre shelter and sustenance Dominion Courts can offer, Valeri realizes the time has come for new action. Though he hasn’t yet spoken one word among the residents in this little box of an apartment block, he hews to a cautious and disconcerting path, in the weeks since they’d fought off that first Home Guard incursion his initial euphoria wearing off. But this is by design; the Home Guard and the men who lead it are not stupid, even if they sometimes succumb to the temptation of believing in their own lies. For Valeri, this is still an awkward, uncertain, in-between time, when their budding revolution could easily be crushed by one enemy attack. As Valeri makes his way across the little strip of land they and the others have liberated in their rising, he recalls the words of his mother and father, something they’d said to him not altogether long before they’d died. He steps over a small pile of rubble, as he steps recalling his mother having said to him, it doesn’t matter what we do for ourselves, but what we can do for the next generation.
Then, he steps over a small amount of scattered glass shards, as he steps recalling his father having said to him, it doesn’t matter what you can do for others in this life, but what you can do for others who will come long after you’ve passed.
And then they’d died. Will Valeri follow in their footsteps? Or will he outlive them and achieve something more? Even he doesn’t know. But watching him, surrounding him at all times is the dark essence which guides the revolutionary struggle in all, there to coax his instincts, to guide him though this difficult, uncertain time.
When he meets with others from across the working class districts and hears their circumstances are just as dire, at a nearby church he proposes a joining of forces, a pooling of resources. United we can never be defeated,
he says from the pulpit once so occupied by a Father from the Anglican Church. A muted approval works its way around the would-be rebels assembled there. But even as Valeri delivers a fiery speech on the righteousness of their struggle, there’s a part of him aware of the growing evil gathering strength in the world beyond, just out of sight but surely there. It’s not enough to be here,
Valeri says, because the enemy will come for us in force, sooner or later. We’ve all seen them building their strength down the road.
He refers to the roadblocks they’ve been watching. He wishes they’d attack, the waiting seeming to impose a lingering uneasiness over them all. They may blockade the area,
says Tonya, then starve us into surrender.
And she looks Valeri in the eye, the two exchanging a firm, sharp glance. But hiding behind their debate, in the pauses and in the awkward, momentary silences that occasionally pervade, is the unspoken but acutely felt tension between these would-be revolutionaries. Each of Valeri and Tonya represent different factions within their ranks; Valeri looks forward to the next chance at fighting to the bitter end, while Tonya wants to become part of the larger revolution. This tension amongst them that’s emerged in recent weeks stems from the worsening situation in the liberated zones. Food supplies are dwindling, with abandoned shops looted and no discipline or rationing among the looters. They have some food, the war economy outside their liberated zones permitting the acquisition of supplies through the gaps in the Home Guard’s blockade. But even this will soon disappear. As if to accentuate the point, Valeri’s stomach growls, empty as ever, his having become used to the hunger pangs making them more of a reminder.
United we must always stand,
says another young man named Michael O’Connor, himself duly elected to lead the residents of his block through the current crisis. It’s one thing to talk of unity,
says Valeri, but it’s something else to make it happen!
But Michael has not seen action, having been so elected only after their leader Elijah had called for unity against the Provisional Government; the distinction is not lost on Valeri, who eyes Michael half-suspiciously from across the church. But they’re not alone in this church. An old woman named Evelyn Davis looks on, from a spot in the pews halfway down the hall. Alone, she’s come here to pray, but she finds it difficult to concentrate with the rebels talking so loud. After her husband had bled to death on the floor of a hospital’s waiting room, she’d taken to praying in this church every day. They’d never had children, and she now has no one. Her health is failing. As she prays for good health, she recalls the last thing her husband had said to her before he’d died. You and I are too old for this,
he’d said, but the young folks, they’ve got a chance.
Her husband had watched the last uprising fail but hadn’t taken part, something he’d always regretted, to some degree. I’ll go to the grocer and see if there’s any food gotten in today,
her husband had said, keeping his upper lip stiff as he bade her farewell. That afternoon, he’d been caught in a riot, among those shot by the Home Guard troops who’d fired into the crowd. And now she sits in this church and watches, silently grieving, confronted with an imminent future she can never live to see.
It’s always easy to talk,
says Tonya, interjecting from the front pew, but the fact that we’re all here is proof that we’re on the right path.
Though men like Valeri can sense, in the basic, instinctive way they can, this is the start of something more, they can only imagine on the struggle talking place in cities around the country and across Europe, as men like Valeri all pursue the same means independent of each other. But as they agree to form a common force in fighting the surely-impending attack by the Home Guard on their homes, still Valeri senses the evil waiting for them when they come under attack again. But he can only sense it; he can’t know it. In the end, it’s agreed: they’ll cooperate in organizing the defence of the neighbourhood they’ve seized, now referred to as one of the many liberated zones across cities, throughout Britain. They’ll form a governing committee, of sorts, for the purposes of better coordinating their defense against the Home Guard’s impending attack. As Valeri, Tonya, and the others have at one another, a consensus slowly emerges, even as the distant sounds of gunfire rattling and bombs bursting fade in through the church’s broken windows and half-collapsed walls. While they wait for either the Home Guard to attack in force or for the rebels in the Popular Front to come to their aid, the war outside their liberated zones will continue to rage, throughout Britain and across the continent people dying in ever greater numbers. But for Valeri and his newfound brothers and sisters in arms, the future presents itself as a vast unknown, about to impress itself on them and impose its will on their nascent revolution. They have little time until the next attack on their positions, the next attack to be so much stronger and more violent than the last they’d only just repelled.
Off the coast, the newly-flagged cruiser Borealis lies at anchor as there’s no pier long enough to dock. On board, Dmitri Malinin leads an inspection to determine the extent of the damage they’d sustained during their escape down the Thames. There’s a gaping hole in the ship’s port side where some of her crew quarters had been. Further aft, where she’d taken a hit square to her stern, she now has a smoking, smouldering patch of twisted metal. It seems no small miracle she’d made it out to the coast. Now, confined by battle damage to this little coast guard station, the cruiser Borealis can’t hope to resist any attempt by the loyalist navy to bring her under control or send her to the bottom. Expecting an attack to come at any moment, the crew must work to make good on their repairs before loyalists come to take them in. How’s the repairs coming?
asks Dmitri. Not well,
says the engineer, a young crewman named Sean Collins. Although the engineers weren’t officers, they’d fled when the men took over, leaving the rest of them struggling with the ship’s systems. Keep at it,
says Dmitri, receiving only a nod in return. Knowing that Collins has already been at it for twelve hours straight with no end in sight, Dmitri lets it be. It’s all he can do. It was only a short time, some weeks earlier that they’d fought their way out the Thames, dodging fire from loyalist units in the British Army, and only some months earlier that they’d been limping home from the thrashing they’d taken along with the rest of the fleet at the hands of the Russians. Although war rages on the continent, they still face assault from their countrymen at any moment, their commitment to the revolution at home earning them more enemies than friends. At any moment they could come under attack, whether from the Russians or from their own countrymen, and the need for constant vigilance wears on their nerves.
Dmitri heads to the bridge after completing his inspection, turning to his scope. Even out here on the coast he can still see the columns of smoke rising in the distance, across England and all around Europe the fires of liberation burning hotly, confusedly through the days and through the nights. His lead hand, a young man named Mason Smith, returns to the bridge, his face dirty, his eyes heavy and tired. What had been meant as a temporary refuge looked to be a permanent home. Still that hastily-made red-and-gold banner flutters from the cruiser’s mainmast, more threads than cloth by now. It flies not as a reminder but as a bold declaration on the crew’s transformation, on their having cast off the shackles of oppression and embraced the fires of liberation burning in the hearts of every last one of them. Any word yet?
Dmitri asks. No,
says Mason. With the loyalties of the local government undeclared, they must expect to be expelled from port at any moment, without notice. But the same evil growing, gathering strength seems to lie in wait here, too, while the men wonder what’s become of their loved ones after news of their rebellion reached the Admiralty. In truth, the evil, a light essence to the rebel’s dark essence, has plans for them, too. Although Dmitri, Mason, and the rest of the men have thrown their lot in with the rebels in the Popular Front, rebels who fight to establish worker’s rule in Britain and around the world, still they must continue to choose the right way forward. As they’re learning, the right way forward is fraught with hardships, with pain and suffering for them and their children and their children’s children. As they’re still to learn, the right way forward is much more difficult than the wrong, their struggle for justice provoking injustice against them.
In his years working as a common labourer, Valeri had seen much turmoil, much unrest, the working man’s constant yearning for freedom always met with the jackboot of the wealthy man’s oppression. If his mother and father were alive to see him now, they’d surely be proud. This, Valeri knows in his heart. As news breaks of the impending assault on the rebellious working class districts of London, men like Valeri know they haven’t a hope of standing against a serious attack by the enemy. But it’s precisely this knowledge that assures their ultimate victory. In the distance, gunfire rattles intermittently, while the heavy thud of explosions randomly punctuates the din. At Dominion Courts whole sections of walls have fallen, exposing the block’s innards to the elements. These facts Valeri is acutely aware of as he listens at the church to others declare their intent to stand and express their anger for the wealthy man whose arrogance and greed have led them all to this. On the way back from the church, Valeri feels the ground rumbling slightly beneath his feet, the bursting of distant bombs and the rattling of distant gunfire reminding him. Not enough of the rebels are here,
says Tonya. Not yet,
says Valeri, but we can hold out until they do.
As they wait for the rebels of the Popular Front to come to their assistance or for the Home Guard’s troops to destroy them, Valeri can’t shake the feeling that the death they’ve all seen is only a small preview of the death to be meted out on them all. He doesn’t know it, not yet, but the feeling he can’t shake comes from the dark essence which surrounds him at all times, which guides the revolution.
Not far from Dominion Courts, a family huddles in the wreckage of their little flat. The father, named Howard, returns from a meeting to the others, bringing with him a small bag of rice. With the beans they’ve got already, it’ll make a meal enough for the four of them. But Howard won’t eat. He says to his two children, I’m not hungry,
then pats his stomach and says, I’ve already eaten and I couldn’t eat any more.
Then, he passes his plate over to the children, dividing his portion between them, watching until they’ve eaten every last grain of rice and spot of beans. Later, when the children have gone to bed, his wife presents him with a serving she’d saved for him, and he gratefully eats. Although Howard still has work, working as he does as a mechanic at a shop which services the area’s buses. His shop is just outside the liberated zones seized by the likes of Valeri, and soon he’ll be completely cut off from his income. It’s only by virtue of the uprising that he’s not been taken for service in the Army, his skills as a mechanic in high demand. He’s only a short time left to escape, to send his children away, if only he had anyplace to send his children to. But most of all Valeri sees the others unsure what to do next. After having met with others from blocks around the neighbourhood, Valeri returns to Dominion Courts, there his neighbours, Roger among them, meeting him in the lobby. What’s the word?
asks Roger. The walls suddenly shudder and rumble, shaking off dust flakes of paint, a distant bomb exploding in the street. Everyone’s in the same situation,
Valeri says. The rattling of distant gunfire interrupts, erratic, as though someone’s shooting at nothing.
Can we expect anyone to help us?
asks Roger. No,
Valeri says, before putting a hand on Roger’s shoulder and saying, we’ll be helping ourselves, just like it’s always been.
Among the three it’s understood he means this in exactly the disquieted, roundabout way that’s come to be the way of our time. The others have questions, too, and these questions are answered to the best of Valeri’s and Tonya’s abilities. But battle calls, word arriving of the Home Guard’s troops about to attack. Valeri, Tonya, and Roger, along with some of the others who’ve pledged to support their cause rush to the barricades in the streets, clutching their few firearms close to their chests. In the heady days following their uprising, all seemed possible, as if their revolution could succeed in overcoming the existing regime in a few days of fighting. Reality, though, is proving Valeri’s heady optimism to be crushingly naïve.
Though the men of the cruiser Borealis are pledged to follow the banner of Elijah and the Popular Front, they don’t know where their next orders will come from. In the morning, they receive over the radio a summons from the Admiralty, ordering them interned. Dmitri’s on the bridge when the order comes through. But they ignore the call, as duly elected captain of the ship Dmitri receiving full confidence of the crew in issuing the order. It’s only by virtue of the fact that no one anywhere knows who’s in charge of the British government, in these few days that have passed since Elijah issued his call to action. It’s not even clear who at the Admiralty has sent the order to the Borealis, whether the still-new Provisional Government has removed the admirals and installed its own apparatchiks or whether the admirals are still there, at some stage in the process of deciding whether to follow the Provisional Government or make war against it all the same. But, Dmitri thinks after the Admiralty repeats their summons, they’re not following the banner of the Popular Front, and that means they’ll come after him and his crewmates no later than the precise moment their decision is made. Now we have to decide what to do next,
says Mason, we won’t last long before they come for us. And we need to find a supply of food, there’s nothing for us here.
Their families, many of them have families, are all left behind, Dmitri’s wife and young daughter having escaped to the countryside but cut off from all contact with him. Many of the men face similar trials. It’s a choice they’d made knowingly and willingly, the choice to risk never seeing their families again, but having made it knowingly and willingly makes it no easier.
The docks at Rosyth have been seized by striking workers,
Dmitri says, once we finish repairs, we’ll make for there. Until we receive orders from the Front, it’s the best option we’ve got.
He looks aside. There may not be a port left when we get there,
says Mason, the lead hand looking over a console’s screen, there are Russian submarines in the North Sea. They’ll surely see us as an easy target.
Dmitri thinks for a moment, then says, it seems we have a choice now—the enemy’s bullets or those of our own countrymen.
Mason looks at him and says, which do you prefer?
But Dmitri tightens his jaw and stiffens his back, then says, I choose to follow the banner of Elijah and the Popular Front, until death or victory.
And all on the bridge growl their menacing agreement. It’s a moment of peace. Confined to port, the men of the free cruiser Borealis can only continue making repairs with what little they can scrounge from among the smattering of smaller vessels laid up ashore, all the while wondering whether just beyond the horizon there lies death waiting to mete itself out on them, one by one, man by man. This, they know, the immediate task facing them to restore power to their cruiser before the forces arrayed against them attack. They won’t have long to find out which will happen first. But they have much to lose. As their leader, the rebel Elijah has said, theirs is the path not of peace but war, not of joy but suffering. And they take to this path willingly, hoping to see their families again. None of them knew what they’d be putting themselves through when they’d agreed to mutiny and seize control of their ship, but nor did any of them believe their war would be over by now. In the wake of their dramatic escape out the Thames, they’d spoken at length, even going so far as to hold a vote on the matter; and so they’d committed themselves to the cause of the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front.
For every hero of the revolution like Valeri Kovalenko and Dmitri Malinin, there’s an anti-hero waiting to confront them. There’re no villains; war doesn’t have villains. After having lived their lives working themselves exhausted, battered, and bruised for the profit of their masters, the working men of Britain, Europe, the world now stand on the precipice, looking off into the distance and imagining the dawn that has yet to come. Not far from the station where the Borealis has put in, a young woman named Sara Simmons works in an armaments factory, every day under the watch of Home Guard troopers. The troopers keep an eye out for anyone who might step out of line, leaving Sara to listen. She hears someone say, I want to turn the clock back to before.
But then she hears another say, there’s no going back, not for any of us.
As for Sara, well, she hears the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs in the distance, and she knows these are the mark of the rebel. She turns away from her work, walking over to the others before telling them, I don’t have a family to go back to, but even if I did I wouldn’t take back all that’s happened. I only want peace.
And there’s a muted agreement among the workers, before a trooper appears round the corner and eyes them up. For a moment, it seems a riot might break out. But it’s not to be. They all return to their work, their courage having not yet reached its crest. For men like Valeri and Dmitri, it seems only yesterday they were ordinary men subsisting on meagre wages, every day a struggle to make more from less. Now, they’re still ordinary men but called to extraordinary purpose, in the midst of an ascension to their true purpose, to a higher calling that’s been waiting for them all their lives.
It’s taken this long for us to call what we’ve seen, what we’ve yet to see a revolution, but here we are. The fires of liberation burn across Britain, columns of smoke rising, blending into the sky, casting a pall on the country. In the midst of a reawakening, the working man looks into his own future and sees a dark cloud gathering, at first only a patch of sky obscured by the blackness, then the sun blotted out. Standing where once there’s industry there’s now only death, the gears having seized, the engine sputtered and stalled. Still the wealthy man’s power endures, not in the form of his dominion over the workers but in his ability to marshal immense strength against the nascent democracy in the streets. Although Greater London is a war zone and cities across Britain seized in a revolutionary fervour, still the old order persists, with shops and petrol stations dispensing their wares for a price, with the luxurious villas and with the mills and factories still firmly under his control. So long as these facts remain true, men like Valeri and Dmitri know they can never be free, that their work can never be complete. This knowledge is what fuels the rebel Elijah’s campaign, giving him and his Popular Front the strength and the will to persevere, no matter the cost. Well outside the liberated zones, a young woman named Lori Taylor stands in a queue to receive their daily allotment of food, the woman in front of her murmuring indistinctly, the woman behind her silent. But when it’s Lori’s turn to receive her rice and beans, she’s told there’s nothing left, the Home Guard trooper cruelly inviting her, try again tomorrow.
She looks past him deeper into the warehouse, seeing it full of food from top to bottom. I’m hungry,
she says. Try Longview,
says the trooper, his cruelty softening for a moment, they might have something left for the day.
But then the trooper steps a step over to block her view. Longview’s twenty kilometres away. She thinks to challenge him, but the better part of her knows not to. As she walks home, thinking what to tell her family on her failure, she sees a lorry on the road, an armed Home Guard escort watching over a new shipment of fuel and food into the very warehouse she’d just been turned away from. Although shortages have been commonplace in Britain for many, many years, it’s only since the war on the continent began and the rationing that came with it that it’s brought this kind of hardships. And just out of view, not far from where Valeri and Tonya and all the others at Dominion Courts live, there’re bodies of people starved to death lying in the street.
The lights flicker on and off through the evening, finally quitting for good just after the sun has set. Despite the crippling shortages, men like Valeri and Dmitri survive on scrounging for food wherever it can be found; some barter in goods with the merchants, others take what they need at gunpoint. Despite this, even alongside it, shops remain open, buses trundle along the streets sometimes passing through several barricades and checkpoints along a single route, even television stations keep on broadcasting their simple comedies right through power failures. It’s this juxtaposition of the complete devastation and the continued functioning that strikes men like Valeri and Dmitri as the most unsettling. So resilient is the way of things even the destruction and violence meted out so far can’t keep it from subsisting on whatever it can find. This, then, is the new goal of the rebel Elijah and his Popular Front, not merely to decapitate the Provisional Government and the wealthy men whose interests it serves, but to wrest power from it and in so wresting laying clear the path forward. Never forget, the rebel Elijah knows, the indignities meted out on the working man’s head by the wealthy man’s dominion, the mass unemployment, the hunger, the fear. Whatever the cost of this war, Elijah and his Popular Front know there can be no turning back. As Elijah knows, the blame lies not with those who resist oppression but in those who perpetuated it to begin with. After the Provisional Government formed in February with the ouster of the old Parliament, a short time has passed, hardly two months and already the unusually short and brutal winter has passed, giving way to an unseasonably hot and humid spring, without power and without running water the parched conditions leaving men like Valeri and Dmitri facing a dire fate, with or without enemy attack.
But in the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front men like Valeri and Dmitri have hope. The chronic food shortages induced by decades of crop failures amid a rapidly shifting global climate have now given way to full-fledged starvation, with bodies visible in the street from Valeri’s perch atop the roof of Dominion Courts. Still men like Valeri and Dmitri place their hopes in the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front, only to soon enough realize their true struggle for deliverance from evil has only just begun. It’s been two years since Valeri began his rise from working class everyman to not-trained, poorly-equipped soldier, and in those two years Valeri’s learned to look into the future and see something, anything at all beyond his own eyes. But grounding him in the moment is a struggle for survival amid a vast and desolate wasteland of starvation, fatigue, and death. Still there’s much hardship, much pain and suffering in their future, in all our future, but as is the way of working men they’ll press through. They know how to do nothing else. In the middle of the end of one world already they look ahead to the dawn of the next. Still little’s known about the Provisional Government, who controls it, what it intends to do, little other than its half-hearted determination to carry on Britain’s participation in the unpopular war in Eastern Europe. But for men like Valeri and Dmitri, this fact is borne out by the old Union Jack still fluttering from the Palace of Westminster, in the midst of all life grinding to a halt the way of things persisting like an infestation of vermin that refuses to die. Across Britain, the managers still manage, the administrators still administer, and the executives still hoard their ill-gotten wealth, the warehouses still filled floor to ceiling with food and fuel, reserved for those essential to the war effort, leaving many to slowly wither away.
Still Valeri insists on the old slogan, ‘NO SURRENDER,’ in refusing even consideration of a strategic withdrawal suggested by Tonya and some of the others, determined as he is to face his impending fate. It’s hard to pin down an exact moment when his fatalistic ideal set in, sometime in the months they’d been living in this apartment block-turned-fortress. When the moment comes, Valeri’s sure, they’ll have the chance to make the hated Provisional Government and its troops earn every inch of ground they take. But the dark essence which guides the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front have grander designs on Valeri, Tonya, and the others here, designs that should earn them all a place in history. The immediate task facing Valeri, Dmitri, and all the others who’ve pledged to follow the banner of Elijah and the Popular Front is to consolidate their forces in preparation for the next battle. Neither Valeri nor Dmitri know it this way, only the rebel leader Elijah does, but their hearts are guided by the dark essence which inhabits all men who yearn to become masters of their own destinies.
None know what the Provisional Government will do next, and the rebel Elijah can only sense this unknown as proof on its weakness. All who count themselves among the ranks of the Popular Front know they are both the many and the few, the ignorant and the learned, the crude and the sophisticated, the strong and the weak. This is the way our future will be won, not by grand armies clashing on a distant battlefield but by men in their own homes, men approaching the task of victory with all the dispassionate, methodical rhythm of a working man at work. Every muscle smoothly contracted and expanded, every breath drawn in and pushed out, every step brought down and every pace measured forward bringing us all closer to our goal. In the months to come, we’ll all see what wonder and what terror our future has in store.
2. Memorial
Although the whole of Greater London has been plunged into chaos, there still remains an odd, roundabout sort of order to it. The crowds gather around Victory Monument, its spire still standing, defiantly, in memorial to the grand achievements of another time. But now, with half the city in ruins and the other half under the guns, it might seem a perverse irony that Victory Monument of all things should remain standing so stoutly and so resolutely. The rebel Elijah secretly wishes to preserve the monument, in the back of his mind hoping it should survive long enough to be pulled down by bulldozers surrounded by crowds of cheering workers. In the crowd, a man named Eric Parker throws his voice along with all the others, angry as he is with all the others. Each is angry for his own reason, and the sum of their reasons blends into a single chorus of anger. Parker raises his clenched fist, shouting, no surrender!
Parker’s with friends, all of them in their early twenties. His mother had warned him not to take in with the crowds of malcontents, asking him to stay out of harm’s way if not for his sake then for hers. He’d promised her not to come. He’d said he was going out to look for work. A lie was the last thing he’d ever say to his own mother. And the Home Guard troops, they respond the only way they know how, with nightsticks crashing down on skulls, with rifles firing into the air, filling the square with broken bodies and spilled blood. As Eric Parker is caught up in this attack, he tumbles to the ground, narrowly avoiding the bullet, rising to his feet again only to be struck down by the nearest trooper. This is one of the many pitched battles taking place throughout British cities and towns, between mobs of angry demonstrators and the handful of Home Guard troops mustered to confront them. After the formation of the Provisional Government only months earlier and the establishment of the liberated zones in the uprising only weeks earlier should’ve calmed the disorder in the streets, there’s a renewed outrage, as young men like Eric Parker die a new stage in the burgeoning revolution arriving.
It’s a delicious image, one that makes Elijah’s mouth water even as he must confront the next move in the Popular Front’s campaign to liberate the working class of Britain, Europe, even the world. Nevermore assured of himself, the rebel Elijah and his trusted leadership committee hatch a new plan, one which should replace the deliberate acts of terror in their old strategy with a clever and incisive campaign to draw the Provisional Government along until it, too, must inevitably collapse under the weight of its own stinking, rotted, bloating corpse. Then, the rebel Elijah knows, all the Popular Front will need to do is make one incisive strike to destroy the Provisional Government and seize power for the working man once and for all. The details, Elijah knows, can be worked out along the way. But while Elijah works out the details on the Popular Front’s campaign, inside the liberated zones men like Valeri continue their work. After having agreed to form a new governing committee in their liberated zone, Valeri and the others take to the streets, posting signs in strategic locations, over street signs, on the façades of apartment blocks. These signs call for the residents to attend meetings at the local church where the defense of their homes will be planned, the very church where Valeri, Tonya, and the others had met and agreed to a plan only recently. But after Valeri returns home, he speaks to one of the residents at Dominion Courts, a young, single mother who says her name’s Carmen, only Carmen, Valeri saying to her, it doesn’t look like this is going to be over any time soon.
Deemed non-essential to the war effort by the Provisional Government, people like Carmen and her two young children have nowhere else to go, Valeri and the others here agreeing to take them and others like them in only out of compassion. Even as food grows scarcer still they admit refugees, something in each of the defenders compelling them to offer their homes as a safe haven for anyone who comes.
In the streets, the Home Guard’s troops launch attacks on apartment blocks at random, sowing terror among the impoverished working class. Bullet holes mark the sides of exterior walls. Shards of glass lie shattered on the ground, littered inside and out. Piles of still-smoking wreckage lie in places where old apartment blocks had been defended to the last plank of wood and the last block of cement by ordinary people, by the workers, the unemployed, the most pathetic and wretched among the masses who’ve already given their lives in service of freedom. Already in ruins, the war can only set fire to the ashes of history strewn across the cityscape, here in London and across Britain, from the old industrial towns in the north to the historic ports along the channel. No one living has ever seen anything like it. No one dead can be heard for all the fire and fury unleashing itself in the streets anew every morning and every night. Elsewhere, not altogether far from the historic docks in Liverpool, a younger woman named Lois Price works in a transit station, seeing food imported from Canada and the United States forwarded to other parts of Britain. One morning, she’s arrived at work to find the electricity shut off but the bosses still demanding the work done, leaving Price and all the other workers to move crates by hand. The shipping containers come in from the port, pulled in by diesel-engined lorries, lined up to bay doors, left to be handled without the use of the electrically-powered machinery they normally use. In the middle of manually hauling a pallet of food from one side of the station to the other, Price stops for a moment, wiping the sweat from her brow. Keep moving!
shouts the foreman. She feels uncomfortable in clothes that haven’t been washed in weeks. They need these supplies at the front!
shouts the foreman, every time you stop, one of our soldiers dies!
Price looks over at the foreman, who glares at her. After she’s had her moment, she resumes hauling her pallet, her body tired and sore all over, still thinking of her family as she finishes the day’s work. But when she returns home to the little flat she shares with her brother and father, she sees them being led out at gunpoint, rounded up with so many others to serve in the Labour Brigades around the country.
If the enemy should seek to try our resolve, then they will be sorely disappointed,
says Elijah, speaking with his closest disciples in a disused restaurant, somewhere in Bolton. Manchester itself is the scene of heavy fighting, the heaviest yet seen in the working man’s burgeoning revolution, the gun battles there offering a taste of what’s to come. But Manchester is not our prize,
says Elijah, looking each of his disciples right in the eye, nor is Westminster. Through every victory and through every defeat, you must remember that our war is not won until every last man oppressed is liberated, here and across all the world.
And Elijah senses the coming betrayal, when his eyes settle on one disciple in particular, a man whose name we should learn, in time. As Valeri, Tonya, and the others try to mount a defense against the Home Guard’s surely impending attack, Valeri looks to affairs much closer to home. I’ve got something to tell you,
he says, it’s not good.
A burst of gunfire chatters in the distance. There’s not a lot of good news these days,
says Tonya. The ground quivers slightly for a moment. It recalls a conversation they’d had some days earlier, after having returned from the church with a new mandate. In the street that runs alongside Dominion Courts, they’d stood watch, on seeing a group of Royal Air Force fighters streaking overhead Valeri saying to her, d’you think they’d bomb us?
And Tonya had only shaken her head, then said, I’ve got a cousin whose husband’s in the Air Force. Think he flies cargo planes. They’re as hard up as anyone else.
It’s a rare moment of introspection, causing Valeri to shift his thoughts elsewhere. How’s your leg?
asks Valeri. Same as yours,
says Tonya, or anyone else’s.
And Valeri says, right.
Taking the hint, Valeri lets it be. Tonya’s been walking with a slight limp for a few weeks now, not enough to handicap her but enough to be noticeable. She can still shoot, and she still fight, as much as anyone else in the liberated zones of London’s restless working class blocks. For now, that’s enough. There’re no doctors, no hospitals anywhere near them, anyways, and no medical supplies for her to use. Valeri thinks she might just as well walk it off, if such a thing’s even possible. As he sees to the barricade they’re building in the street, Valeri puts Tonya’s injury out of his mind, looking down the street at the Home Guard troops in the distance, the better part of him half-wishing they’d attack and end their waiting. A young woman named Gillian Bailey has lived at Dominion Courts for several years, longer even than Valeri, and she’s joined in the uprising quietly, having no family to speak of. At the barricade, though, she talks with Valeri, saying things that offer hints of her past life, her reasons for joining their revolt. I used to clean their clothes,
she says, on the line day, I used to clean their rooms.
She says this referring to the wealthy, as she’d worked for a time at a luxury hotel, immersed all day in luxury she could never have. Now we can make them dirty,
says Valeri, and no one will be there to clean the blood from their shirts.
She smiles.
But with the fires of liberation burning, burning with a frigid heat, all the workers in this city have to guide them is the essence that watches over them every moment they live. The rebel Elijah and his Popular Front, its membership now numbering in the hundreds of thousands across Britain, serve this essence as well, tapping into the common thrumming of our universal pulse. Applying force diligently, dispassionately, the rebel Elijah directs the next stage of the people’s rising with all the skill and precision of a conductor leading an orchestra, a bomb bursting here, fits and spurts of gunfire rattling off there, while among the working class districts the ordinary men and women make good on their pledge to live and die by the means of their own liberation. Still in this tentative, in-between time, Elijah’s revolution is beset by numerous problems, fractured by internal divisions that’ve not yet made themselves clear. Still further afield, along Belfast’s Falls Road a teenaged malcontent named Harper Quinn lives without work, surviving with many others by his wits on the streets. Belfast’s Falls Road, like the other working class districts, is the scene of much decay, much hardship, its brief flirtation with prosperity following the end of the twentieth century’s Troubles having given way to a renewed impoverishment, while the old sectarian tensions have become inflamed again. On this day, one day, Harper’s walking along the side of the road when he feels the ground rattle and rumble beneath his feet. He nearly trips over himself, but reaches for the nearest lamppost in time. Keep your wits about,
Harper’s father had said, the last time they’d spoken months earlier. Are you hungry?
asks the priest. Harper doesn’t reply, not right away. The priest says, you’re always welcome here.
But Harper turns away. Later, the Home Guard raids the church and hauls off all the troublemakers, one of the many raids they stage across the country over these weeks. It’s only because he’d turned away from the priest that Harper escapes the raid.
But while Valeri, Tonya, and the others in the liberated zones wait for the inevitable, Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front plan their next moves. Don’t you think it should be good enough for anyone to join?
asks one disciple. It’s not for any man to know,
says Elijah, looking over the city. They talk after the meeting. But if we—
And I tell you we must expend our strength,
says Elijah, turning to face the man, in order to grow it anew.
As the rebel Elijah teaches, their revolution must make a terrific show of force, humbling the Provisional Government. Attacking in a moment of weakness is a supreme show of strength. And so it’s agreed by Elijah and his closest disciples in the Popular Front; they’ll launch a new offensive, so soon after the general uprising in the liberated zones seeing the opportunity. But this opportunity is distant to men like Valeri, living as they do in those very liberated zones, watching, waiting for help from outside, dismayed as each day seems to pass without help. The Home Guard tightens its perimeter, strengthening a few key barricades, establishing new ones elsewhere, leaving only a few open spaces in the lines around the liberated zones. It’s through these narrow open spaces that the flow of refugees continues unabated, each of them taking whatever they can carry. Even as Valeri’s up posting signs announcing their committee’s authority, he sees a group of young men entering a flat while refugees continue to flow in all directions. When Valeri’s back at Dominion Courts, he says to one of the remaining residents, if you want to leave, I won’t blame you.
But the resident, a middle-aged woman whose name he doesn’t know, says, I’ve got nowhere else to go.
But then she says, they’ll arrest me and take me into one of their Labour Brigades if I leave here.
And Valeri only nods. In the weeks since they’d seized Dominion Courts, the block has become something of a refuge, along with the other blocks in London’s liberated zones. As the Home Guard tightens its grip around the liberated zones, more and more refugees flow into them, concentrating the most wretched and pathetic among London’s working class in a small area.
A young man named Harry, Harry Jones is among those still working, among the men not yet conscripted to serve in the Labour Brigades. It’s impossible to imagine this getting any worse,
says Chris Cook, his friend, who lives in a flat on the floor below his. Whatever happens things can always get worse,
says Harry. They’re both employed at the local metal shop which receives scrap gathered by the Home Guard, sometimes taken from local merchants at gunpoint. But what’ll you do if work stops?
asks Chris, and Harry has to think about his response. At exactly the right moment when Harry finishes his thought, the power suddenly fails, cutting off their conversation for the night as each of their families turn for the bomb shelter. But the thought remains in Harry’s mind through the night. For the final moment they’ve got it seems the rebel Elijah’s campaign could hang in the balance, at this still-early stage in the revolution his forces weak where the enemy’s forces are strong. In the far reaches of Northampton’s working class slums, a woman named Petra Kaminska finds herself struggling simply to survive. Already out of work when the war began, she survived by the work of her husband, his pitiful wages stretched just far enough to keep them all alive. It’s something of an historical irony that there should be widespread unemployment even with the rigours of war imposed on Britain’s industries, a legacy, perhaps, of many decades of de-industrialization. But this irony is lost on Petra, who gives what food she can scrounge to her children, already their father, her husband killed in one of the many botched raids carried out by the Home Guard in the streets. At home one night, as on nearly every night as Britain’s come to be in the grips of a revolutionary fervour, Petra listens with her children as the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire sounds out across the night. Petra says to her children, it’ll be over soon.
Her children, nine- and six-year-old girls, are frightened by the noise even as they’ve lived their whole lives in the midst of war. It’ll be over soon,
says Petra, reassuring herself more than her children as the noise in the street seems to grow louder. It’ll be over soon,
says Petra, clutching her daughters close as there’s shouting in the street right outside their flat, the loud crack of gunfire bringing the war right to their door.
Meanwhile, events in the world at large continue to mount. Still at war with Russia, Britain must endure not only the policeman’s truncheon but the air raids and naval bombardments of its foreign adversary. The bulk of the British Army is bogged down in a pointless slaughter along the front lines in Poland and Ukraine. The Royal Navy and Air Force, both crippled by shortages of fuel and defections among the men, can make a show of defending the country, but they can only make a show of it. If not for the fact that all the warring powers of Europe on both sides are paralyzed by their own internal crises, Britain and her allies would surely have sued for peace by now. In this war Britain finds herself caught in an impossible dilemma she’s never before faced, where she looks to the future unsure whether she can stand alone but certain she can never stand together. All this is rather distant to men like Valeri, men focused on simply surviving through the days. But while Valeri and his fellow insurgents—they don’t think of themselves as insurgents, even as that’s what they are—continue to receive more and more refugees at Dominion Courts, the refugees bring with them news of the arrests, the Home Guard intercepting the refugees and picking off those it wants for work in the Labour Brigades. It’s an insidious plot, deemed to concentrate only the most useless and burdensome in the restless working class districts. What Valeri doesn’t know, what he’s to find out, is the Provisional Government’s hope to fill the liberated zones with so many refugees that so many will be killed, if not by the deteriorating conditions then in the assaults yet to come. It’s a vile and insidious plan, devised at the heart of the Provisional Government’s power, one which’ll be revealed to men like Valeri in time.
The rebel Elijah and the other leaders of his Popular Front are careful not to attack, in the aftermath of Elijah’s speech to the world the passions of the working men of all countries having been roused further. Instead, Elijah and the Popular Front liaise with their counterparts in the other countries, with the Front de Libération in France, the renewed Sozialistische Einheitspartei in the industrial quarters of the old East Germany, and the Frente de Liberacion Nacional in Spain, where each faces their own difficulties, the closer they are to the front lines of the war between countries the darker and bloodier events having become. But it’s not enough, not yet. In this uncertain time following the collapse of the old British government, with still the Provisional Government seemingly without purpose, without cause, all have confused, the demonstrations in the street momentarily quieting, the crowds of angry students, workers, and parishioners ceding the public square to a strange and disconcerting unease. But much, much closer to the seat of power, a middle-aged man named Aaron Alexander works twelve hour days at one of the many storehouses around Greater London’s outer environs. He works for the same pittance anyone else might, having been corralled into working by the Home Guard’s roundups. This isn’t the way things were the last time Britain found herself in a life-or-death struggle with a hostile power on the continent; these men are slaves. Today, one day, Aaron struggles with a piece of machinery, unable to carry its full weight, stumbling to the hard cement floor. A Home Guard trooper appears, looming over him, rifle slung over the trooper’s shoulder. Although Aaron might’ve expected a beating, he looks up at the trooper with a fearful, forlorn light behind his eyes. The trooper keeps looking down at him. Aaron says only, please,
his voice hoarse and tired. The trooper’s eyes soften, and he extends to Aaron a hand. In moments Aaron’s on his feet again, slowly, painfully ambling forward, having summoned the strength to carry the piece of machinery he’d dropped just a few metres further, just long enough to let it go into a bin. The bin’s pushed off by another worker, a middle-aged man just as tired and sore as Aaron. Even after all that’s happened, after all the bodies broken and the blood spilled in the streets, still some are capable of a kindness that seems so out of place. But war continues to escalate.
Still this uncertainty lingers in the night, eating at the fabric of the night like an awful spirit haunting us all. In truth, in the liberated zone surrounding the old working class district in London, Valeri has much time for introspection, the rigours of war amounting to extended periods of boredom interspersed with only the occasional burst of action. When he closes his eyes and listens to the night, Valeri can hear the distant bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire, sometimes not so distant, threatening to engulf him in a slow and studded silence, but for the memories only recently lost to the pages of time lingering in the back of his mind it’d seem he’s become engulfed in the chaos of war. At the scrapyard, when Harry and Chris next work, they find spare moments to talk. It’s in these little moments, in shops and in pubs and in shelters across Britain where the working class has its dialogue. Don’t think it’ll take too long for the war to come here,
says Chris. And it might never come here at all,
says Harry. They each reach for a piece of machinery too heavy for either, when they finish lifting it onto the table together before setting to it. It’s everywhere now,
says Chris, and it’ll come to us sooner or later.
A horn sounds, signalling the arrival of a new load, with a lorry appearing at the gate. Harry and Chris soon find themselves swamped with work, too much work to allow for talk, but the thought continues to linger in Harry’s mind. But then, the war arrives.
In the alley behind a church not altogether far from the old Gatwick Airport a woman named Theresa rummages through a dumpster in search of anything that could be used. It’s not clear whether she’s homeless or not; in the current war, many live in homes that were never theirs, that could hardly be called homes so much as a slipshod assortment of cement and wood. I wish you would move faster,
says her neighbour, searching through the rubbish along with her. We’re moving as fast as we can,
says Theresa, stopping only for a moment to wipe the sweat from her brow. So late in the summer, the thick, swampy air all around seems only
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