Humanity: After It Happened Book 2 (2 page)

FREEDOM IS THE RIGHT TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT TO HEAR

As decided, nobody went off the reservation save for those who tended to the gardens twice a week.  All the preparation for winter had been done with nothing to plant until the New Year.  The horses and sheep had been moved to the farm so all the animals were in close proximity for wintering.

A crude system of rainwater collection provided water to the bathrooms via the guttering; this saved having to carry up bottled water to use for washing hence extending their water resources further.

Penny came to see him the next day, and he insisted on dressing and meeting her in Ops with a gun at his waist.  He had not spoken to her since before the hospital and he was not happy about the whisperings he had been hearing from his covert sources; he had to appear strong in front of her, despite his injuries. 

It had been said that Penny wanted control of the Rangers to come under her department and not be run separately by Dan.  The rumours spoke of a political coup, of a subtle but important balance of power.

Still quite shaky on his feet and with half of his head bandaged, he walked tall and asked Leah for a report as he strode into Ops.

“All quiet” she said.

“Penny” Dan said in greeting, turning his head to be able to see her.  She was flanked by her new PA, Karen.

“May we talk?” asked Penny quietly.

“Leah?  Break time” he said, and the girl walked from the room with as much dignity as she could muster in the circumstances.  She knew full well when she was being dismissed for grown up talk.  She clicked her fingers to Ash who followed without question; following his stomach, Dan thought.

He sat at the main table with the two women, and he turned to look pointedly at Karen.

“Would you give us the room, please?” Penny said politely to the woman after following his deliberate gaze.  Karen looked surprised, even a little affronted, but gathered her things and left the room in a mimic of Leah but without the same level of grace and decorum. 

This obviously wasn’t a meeting that required minutes.

The two looked at each other for a few seconds in silence before Penny broke first.

“How have we come to regard each other like this?” she asked.  He wasn’t sure how to explain it without causing offence, so he didn’t bother to try.

“Our ideal was a cooperative society, which you are trying to turn into a communist state” he said.

Penny bridled instantly, and Dan thought she would rise and leave the room.  She kept her temper in check and answered him acidly.

“That is ridiculous and slanderous” she bit back “You would turn us into a police state with martial law I presume?” she emphasised the word police, and left the counter-accusation hanging heavily.

“Without protection, where would we be?” he asked rhetorically.

“Rules are protection.  Co-ordination is safety.  We all have our jobs here, and mine is to deal with the violence so you and the others don’t have to.  You think me barbaric, but you misunderstand me intentionally; we are the rough men who stand ready” he said, meaning to get through to her on a deeper level with references to literature “the violence I use is for the good of all and not myself” he finished, having risen from his seat as he spoke to lean his hands on the table. 

His aching head hurt as he spoke, but he could not show weakness now.

“There is, and will be, no police state here.  No Big Brother.” He said more quietly as he sat back down and seemed to shrink in size “which means there will be no inequality also.  No leadership class of person to rule the others.  We work together or we are all slaves”

“What are we, if not the leading class?” asked Penny “You lead yours for now and I lead mine so what is the difference?” this was too much for Dan.

“There is a world of difference!” he shot back vehemently, ignoring the ‘for now’ comment.

“We lead because we are the best placed in our fields.  When someone better comes along, they will lead instead of us.  No one person should have the final say.  Your model of our cooperative society is a dictatorship and nothing more!” Penny said nothing, so he carried on “What if a member of the group wished to take a council seat?  Maybe yours?  What then?  Would you have a Ranger banish them?  Punish them?  Would you have us performing public executions?”

Penny stuttered for words, unable to admit that she had never given a thought to relinquishing power.

“They must be allowed to present their case to everyone, others would present their own and the people will decide.  If another person wanted my job they could have it; but they would have to prove to everyone that they are better at it than I am.  I will not retain power by force, nor will I wield it to keep you on your damned pedestal” he finished angrily.

Penny was fuming, but silent.  He knew he had said some things which shocked her, mostly because they were true and she would not admit it to herself.  She was also angry that he knew more than she thought he did.  Obviously her quiet plays for power amongst the wider group had reached ears sympathetic to Dan’s popularity.

Dan stood, slowly and carefully pushing his chair back under the table, before fixing Penny with his good eye.

“Please, Penny” he said softly “Remember how we all started this journey together.  I don’t want overall control but I will challenge you for it if needs be.  Please, this is about all of us and not just one person.  There’s no throne, no crown here.  It’s survival or death; and if we fight amongst ourselves then there won’t be much in the way of survival.”

He walked out, wanting to lie down again for a very long time but feeling too wound up to stay still.  He walked slowly outside and sat heavily on a felled tree trunk some distance away, deep in thought.

It was there that Leah found him.  He had no idea how long he’d been there until his trance was interrupted by the girl and his dog.  She sat next to him in silence.

“What we do now will inevitably change us” he said softly to her.  To himself.

“What we see and do will take whatever innocence we have left, and our humanity with it.  To survive we have to adapt; to adopt the same behaviour as the people we fight.”

He hung his head with a sigh and continued the introspection.

“We have to become capable of rage and the sickening violence we see them use but there is a difference”

The last word he said with savage passion.  He turned to the silent girl, seeing his own bright eyes mirrored in hers as she let his words soak in.

“The difference is that we keep our evil locked away deep inside us until we need it, then we let it out of the cage to protect what we have.  We let it out to get the job done and then we lock it away again.”

He hung his head again and sighed; the sudden fire now extinguished.

“But there is a cost to us.  We’re not monsters but we have to act like monsters, and that takes a toll on us.  We are willing to make that sacrifice to keep people safe.  To make life peaceful”

He got up, dizzy for a second with a wave of pain and exhaustion.

“You’re right” he said to Leah who still hadn’t spoken a word.

“Ok.  I’ll talk to Penny again” he said as he rose with difficulty, leaving her sat there.

WHY’S AND WHEREFORES

Penny returned to her room and paced, restlessly.  She had been so scared when Dan had gone, and felt awful for relishing the thought that he might not come back alive or at all.  She imagined herself moulding his replacement into a more malleable version of him; a controllable leader of her personal honour guard.

Dan’s words had cut her deeply.  Her temper was high, and made worse when she realised that he was right about her behaviour.  The truth was, she was enjoying the power. 

It started as happiness to have other people, then swelled into pride to have people working for her.  The routine of giving orders and thinking of jobs for people to do, then choosing who should do them had taken over her every waking thought.  So much so, that without realising it she had accrued a staff to follow her around and annotate those orders for distribution.

She had grown power hungry, and she was suddenly ashamed at the realisation.

It wasn’t intentional she convinced herself.  It was the situation; it does things to people.  From the very beginning she had busied herself every day, and when more people joined them she had more to organise and so on and so forth.  She told herself that they all needed her to plan their every day.  They wouldn’t be on the firm ground they were had it not been for her leadership.

Sometimes that leadership took away the choices of the people, but it was for their own good.  People came to her with ideas, with suggestions, and she politely listened at first.  Lately she was so busy that she started to turn them away.

Since Karen arrived she had issued a standing order not to be disturbed directly, and to take the details of those wanting to see her.  She had become obsessive, almost fanatical in her thoughts of the future for reasons she hadn’t shared with anyone she now knew.

She stopped pacing and stood still.  She started to cry.  She was suddenly so very tired, she thought, as she lay down on her bed to submit to the sobs coming from deep inside her.  She felt sick, and the waves of pain that had affected her recently started again.

A while later, Dan found her still in that position.  He sat gently on the edge of her bed, and rested his left hand lightly on her shoulder.  She woke to see him watching her, and for once did not have the energy to straighten her appearance.

“I am so sorry” she said “Things just, took on a momentum that I couldn’t’…”

“It’s ok.” He said “We need you to be you, nothing more”

She smiled and closed her eyes again.

RUMOUR CONTROL

All thirty-eight of them sat together for dinner on the tables.  They ate, and afterward Dan told them the sanitised version of events at the hospital.  He thanked the people he wanted to thank, and laid out some ground rules with a heavy olive branch.

“Penny’s direction to have those on the farm and gardens carrying shotguns is to remain in place.  Anyone wanting training is to make themselves known” He said.

“On that note” he continued “suggestions and questions are more commonplace now that there are lots of us” he paused to scan the room, having to raise his voice for all of them to hear him.

“These will be written down – we have plenty of paper – and placed in the box that Karen will organise.  We will bring these to the council every week.  Concerns about every day work are to be brought to your head of department, but this provides another route which should be available as we have agreed” he nodded to Penny, who graciously accepted the mention even though nothing of the sort was decided until Dan said it now.

“We are locking down things for the winter, so everyone is going to have more time on their hands.  There will be three hours of electricity after dinner from the generators.  My advice is not to let Leah choose the film every night” that got the laughs he hoped for.

“Over the next week, everyone is to find a time to report to Kate so that the medical unit have a full history and everyone gets an MOT” another ripple of low laughter.  He had discussed this with Kate, Lizzie and Alice and they had been preparing a filing system to keep medical notes of them all.

“Nobody will go off site unless with permission, not counting those working on the farms and gardens.  Or Pete, obviously” he added

“There will only be a couple of trips made a month during the worst weather, and until our wounds are healed there won’t be any.  So, everyone take some time to relax.  Those of you organised to help with the farm know who you are, this gives farm workers time off to make it fair.”

He asked Leah what the film was tonight, and she said a title he didn’t recognise which prompted a mixture of different noises from the rest of them.  The group took that as dismissal, and he nodded to his operations department when he got their eye contact.  He had to call Leah over, and she came reluctantly holding a DVD which he could only describe as ‘pink’.  He decided to deal with her job first so she could get on with having a life.

“Any applications coming in to Ops go to you, you record them in a ledger and keep them ready to discuss.  Ok?” he said

“Ok.  What’s a ledger?” she asked

“A book used to keep lists” he said, keeping it simple to avoid the trademark, ‘wait, what?’ from her again.

She ran off hoping to get to the TV before someone overrode her film choice.  He sat down to look around his Rangers, and what he saw was almost pitiful.  He still had half of his face bandaged, and had not yet seen the damage.  He had, however, seen the grimace on Kate’s face when she changed the dressings.  Steve was still bandaged but he had lost the sling.  Joe was uninjured but was still the weakest link, as bad as Dan felt by thinking it.  Lexi was badly bruised over her head and face.  Her eyes were ringed with purple and yellow, and she moved stiffly under a loose sweatshirt.  He knew the cuts on her chest were worse than she made out.  It would probably be weeks before they were all fully fit, and he had to look at a rehabilitation program for them.  They needed to stay fit and lean; there was no off-season training or warmup games – when they went out they had to be at one hundred per cent or people would die.

“Sidearms at all times, we’ll take a day at a time each in Ops.  Joe, Me, Steve, Lex, in that order.  When we are physically capable, we are making a trip that will require some heavy machinery.” Eyebrows were raised “Police armoury – hopefully more Glocks, MP5’s, G36’s.  If we’re really lucky they’ve upgraded to the HK416’s.  Either way we need more guns that aren’t for pheasant shooting.”

Agreement all round, although there were some questioning looks about his knowledge.  Dan stayed to help clear the plates as he realised that Cara was waiting behind in the kitchen, heating the water to wash up and not wanting to interrupt.  He apologised, and helped her.  They talked as they worked; Dan washed and Cara dried up, and she promised to make a lemon drizzle cake for him.  One of the small echoes of sentimentality which he felt mattered.

He walked outside the front door and lit a cigarette as Ash limped around in circles looking for the best place to empty his bladder.  Lexi joined him, as he suspected she would.  He offered her a cigarette, which she took.

“Doing ok?” he asked her

She inhaled, held it, and let it out slowly.  “Yeah.  No more bikinis, but yeah”

Leah was turning out to be a very useful spy; Dan had heard that Mark had tried hard with her when she got out of the hospital wing but she seemed to have shut that door in his face. 

“What about Penny” she said.  He knew this was coming from someone, and knew that whatever he said would probably become common knowledge within a day. 

There’s the truth, and then there’s the truth they all needed to move on together.

“She’s been under a bit of pressure – the stress of us lot getting put through a blender didn’t help I should imagine.  She’s done well getting everyone organised for the winter though, don’t you think?” he said, turning to Lexi for her turn.

“Yep.  She’s not, you know, planning on changing things or anything?” She asked innocently.

Dan matched her innocence.  “Like what?”

“Well.  We still work for you, don’t we?” she said, trailing off in uncertainty at the boundaries she was pushing.

Rumour really did spread fast he thought. 

“Yes.  You do.  Why, did you hear that she was planning on any changes?” he challenged.

“No, no” said Lexi “I was just checking”

Dan finished his cigarette, called his dog and went to watch the film.  Luckily, Leah missed out.  He settled down with his thoughts spinning, pretending to watch a film with the others.