Chapter Forty-three
Pursuit
Malcolm Reed
They're good. They're horrendously good.
As my two companions and I duck back through the alley, it occurs to me with appalling irony that hunters this skilled are very likely Pack.
Not that that matters one way or another, not now. I abandoned all claim to Pack loyalty the day I fled Jupiter Station. The day I couldn't save Trip.
I saved Liz, and Hess, and Rostov. And myself, of course. He was glad of that, god help him.
At least Liz isn't here today. Not that she often comes out on raids, because she's much keener on binding up wounds than inflicting them, but now and again there's a reason for her to be with us – rendering medical aid to casualties we rescue or to internees we break out. However, four and a bit months ago I found out what she'd been hiding from me for the previous three, and that was it: we went back to stay with Grandmother, and no bloody argument, thank her very much and I don't think so.
Not that I think she was really keen on arguing. The medical camp out in the desert (for which we've pilfered supplies from the Imperial Hospital in Flagstaff on occasion) is thriving. Though Luca and some of the others have moved on, Opie and Nina still hold the fort, and despite the risk, Liz likes helping out there while she's still able to; it's poor and anonymous enough to grab any help it can get, without asking awkward questions, and Opie and Nina already know and trust her. Though if I find out she's been working past the date when she should put her feet up and get ready for the birth, somebody's arse will get a right kicking.
Pregnant. I still can't get my head around it. Every time I even try, I get this unbelievable mixture of utter incredulity, and fright, and pride.
I'm going to be a father.
I know one thing – if fate allows it, I'll show my affection a lot more freely than my father did, and make sure my son or daughter knows that a stiff upper lip is all well and good when you're on your own, but there's no shame in asking for help when you need it.
But impending fatherhood and its ramifications are not something I can waste time trying to get to grips with right now. The strike team has done its job and now we're running – running for our lives.
OK. It wasn't anything spectacular. We don't have the firepower or the manpower or the technology to infiltrate anything major. But we've been carrying out a kind of guerrilla campaign of minor irritations – not enough to stop the wheels, maybe, but enough to throw a bit of grit into them. Enough to send out signals that the Empire isn't going to have everything its own way; enough to send out a message to those who need to hear it, that the resistance haven't given up, that we're still fighting, that it's not hopeless.
Also, in this case, to blind a monitoring station long enough for a convoy of supplies for a practically destitute village in a drought area to get through. The supplies are stolen and the villagers are dying, and the only way for one to get to the other was for this station to have been taken offline at a precisely organised time. Others will arrange for the footage of the security cameras at the checkpoint to be fed into a loop, quietly deleting the passage of the lorries. The villagers will see to it fast enough that the supplies will disappear once they get there, and then the lorries will continue on to their supposedly real destination, rejoining the highway (with luck) a few minutes before the scheduled arrival of the scanning satellite overhead. Long-term, the plan is for someone to organise a drilling rig to sink a well, but that's going to have to wait.
Which is all very nice, and I hope it works, but there are times when I wonder what the bloody hell got into me the day I decided to take up covert ops for the Resistance. Today is one of them.
We double back and turn again, trying to lose pursuit in the maze of alleys. We have blockers on us that should hide us from their scanners, but I'm getting the desperate feeling that the men on our tail are not relying as much as they should on electronic surveillance equipment. They're hunting by instinct, and that's a Pack trait that I recognise with a shudder that has in it equal parts of joy and horror.
More alleys, more dead-ends, more glimpses of dark bodies in pursuit. Closing in now, and in the malodorous dusk among the tall buildings life is bright and risky and hard, valued most when it's in such deadly danger. I find myself salivating, my Pack conditioning rising in preparation for the last fight – and this will be the last, because they'll take me out between them, tearing me apart as the traitor that I am; there'll be no question of taking me alive, handing me over to not-Pack for sentence and punishment.
I'm just debating whether confronting them would buy enough time for my two companions to find some way of escape when there's a soft call from ground level. "Down here! Quickly!"
The side street is lined with half-derelict warehouses, all tightly locked to prevent them from being used as shelter by the homeless and destitute. They're a vista of barred shutters and gates, but almost by my foot one small access trap has opened.
We haven't time to ask questions; we're surrounded, trapped and outnumbered, and the pursuit will round one of the corners any minute. I gesture Ciaran and Erik to dive in, and then hurl myself after them.
I expect to land on something solid, but though I do, it's also sloping and slippery. I'm swept away into the darkness, the sounds indicating that all three of us are being shot down some kind of metal chute.
All kinds of interesting and unpleasant things could be awaiting us at the other end, but hopefully not half as unpleasant as the ones we left behind us. At any rate we're hurtling downhill at a rate of knots, and there's no way any of us can stop or even control our descent; all I can hope is that it doesn't end in some bloody great waste disposal unit, because those things are usually built extremely escape-proof.
It ends, suddenly, in a heap of soft, rather unpleasantly squishy material that smells like old cabbage. I flounder around with my companions in the pitch dark, listening with dread for the sound of engaging gears as I envisage vast, teethed steel jaws underneath us. Of all the sordid, pointless ways to die, being anonymously ground up with the rubbish of this arse-end of a place is about the worst I can imagine.
The lights come on without warning, fairly blinding us. All three of us crouch and freeze, anticipating the blast of weaponry, but none comes, though I'm pretty damn sure we're not alone.
And so it proves. When my eyes adjust enough to let me squint – very carefully – at our surroundings, the most noticeable feature of these are an inarguable number of old-fashioned projectile weapons aimed directly down at us. We're in a shallow pit full of heaps of malodorous rubbish, now surrounded by people who are without exception masked, some with revolting Hallowe'en caricatures and others with cloth bound about their faces. They ought to look absurd, but given the guns in their hands, nobody's laughing.
Now a weapons expert like me may deplore rifles like these as old enough to have gone out with Noah, but there's no denying that however dated the design may be, they bloody work if they're properly maintained and loaded. And I have no reason to hope that the people holding these have not done their homework as regards looking after them, or have unaccountably forgotten to load them.
So, the upshot and outcome is that we are either prisoners or dead. Neither of which is particularly appealing, but if it's the latter, I wish they'd get on with it; I have the most abominably low tolerance for dealing with suspense.
Suddenly one of the figures speaks – and it's probably the worst two words I could think of for him to come out with.
"General Reed!"
If any of the rifles weren't absolutely ready to fire before, they bloody well are now. And even my till-now-comrades shrink away from me as they realise the discovery of my identity has reduced still further their already poor chances of survival.
The Empire still has a bounty on my head. I forget how many zeros are involved, but there are quite a few. I don't know whether to be depressed or flattered, but at the moment depression feels like the better option, because I'm guessing someone's about to collect; obviously the authorities would prefer me being handed over alive, because then they could make an example of me, but they'll still shell out rather nicely for my bullet-riddled corpse – which would be far less likely to do something disagreeable in the meantime, like finding some ingenious way to murder everyone in the immediate vicinity.
But even as I tense in anticipation of a dozen rounds slamming into my body, another voice speaks, in a tone of ridiculous pleasure and surprise:
"Malcolm!"
One of the figures wearing a Hallowe'en mask pushes it up onto the top of his head and steps forward, beaming as he offers me a hand to climb up out of the refuse. "How long has it been?"
I bite my tongue on 'How long has what been?', because against all expectation, somebody seems to be pleased to see me on other terms than as a windfall payout. Cautiously I scramble over the lip of the pit, but getting to my feet feels like pushing my luck; I kneel instead, my hands raised to show I'm not offering any resistance. Meanwhile, I stare up at him, while my mind plays frantically backwards in search of a time and a place when there might possibly have been someone in existence who'd call me 'Malcolm' and smile.
Hell's bells and buckets of blood, it's Christopher.
He's still undersized, still skinny, still fair-haired, and still reminds me of a very lanky rabbit. He was one of the three boys who shared my dorm room at Nottingham Old Hall, and probably one of the extremely few who would have referred to himself as my friend, before and especially after The Day That Changed Everything. Though very shortly after that it didn't matter what he referred to himself as, because one day a new boy got put into our room and started using Christopher's desk and Christopher's locker, and we all knew that Christopher wasn't coming back.
Ever.
And he didn't.
If he's surprised to see the formerly great and terrible General Reed being flushed down a rubbish chute to wallow in venerable cabbages and other noisome forms of vegetable matter, I'll bet he's not as surprised as I am to see him still in the land of the living. Insofar as I'd thought about him at all (which wasn't a lot, if I'm honest, because I was all too busy with troubles of my own) I thought he'd died in some prison facility or other with the rest of his family, all swept up in the first of the purges against religion.
His father was a Reverend, and even at school we knew they were in trouble sooner or later if they didn't stay quiet. And once the Empire decided you were surplus to requirements, well, mostly your family were too. That kind of leverage was very effective, except on the ones who were more interested in the next life than keeping their loved ones safe in this one. It's surprising how educational a trip to some of the Comfort Houses can be as regards the fate that awaits people convicted of being accessories to treason. It's all very well to accept martyrdom for oneself, but somehow it's not quite that easy to accept it for those you love ... especially that particular form of martyrdom, which will last for a long, long time after you've collected your cheap and cheerful ticket to Paradise at the business end of a phase rifle.
"Please – get up. We need to get out of here." He helps me to my feet, apparently unconscious of the rifles still trained on me.
Well, obviously I'm not going to object, because there are some very unpleasant and extremely determined people looking for us, but I do wonder if he's thought this thing through quite well enough. For one thing, there are eleven other armed people looking at him like he's dropped all his marbles into the Mariana Trench, and for another there have been a few years gone under the bridge since he last called me 'Malcolm'. In those years I've become General Reed, and that's not the only thing I've become.
Maybe he has mislaid his marbles. Because I wasn't a friend to Reverends either, or any of their ilk, and I doubt if that fact was a State secret; they represented resistance to the Empire. If it wouldn't lie down and be quiet I stamped on it, and asked no questions.
He looks around at his eleven companions. "I'll vouch for him," he says with this huge, gentle simplicity. "We're friends."
Well. Whatever trick he has, if I had it I'd be ruling the Empire, not wallowing in decaying cabbages. I'm not saying the guns are withdrawn immediately (or particularly enthusiastically), but they're withdrawn, and that's the big result.
I'm pleased to see that whoever these people may be, they're not stupid. The three of us are handcuffed and blindfolded, and led off into a maze of passageways; several times we're gently but firmly turned around in a circle or two so that we lose any sense of direction. On past occasions I've managed to circumvent this tactic pretty well by turning with my feet placed at right angles so I can count the degrees, but, impressively, someone spots me doing it and nudges me hard enough to make me lose my balance; and after I've staggered to regain it, of course I've lost the plot. So with an inward sigh I simply trudge along, coping as best I can with the sensation of being a prisoner – not something I've ever been good at, and I'm a lot less after that delightful year I spent imprisoned in Sickbay on Jupiter Station.
My ears tell me we're in a fairly confined space. Footfalls (nobody speaks) echo off metal walls at first, but soon we move onto compacted earth and thence to rock, and every now and again someone presses my head down so it won't bang against parts where the ceiling gets too low to walk beneath upright. I'm grateful for this small, considerate gesture, even if it is more likely because they don't want to be arsed to carry me about after I've concussed myself than out of any sense of compassion.
I don't know how long we've walked, though I'll give it over two kilometres, when finally the echoes fall back. I'm steered, and then pushed backwards to feel the edge of a chair pressing against my knees. It being pointless to resist, I sit – lightly, as my wrists are still cuffed behind my back. The unmistakable press of a muzzle against my left temple suggests it wouldn't be a good idea to do anything reckless as the cuffs are released and then my wrists are separated, each being secured to an arm of the chair by solid-feeling manacles.
Blind, I've been concentrating on what information I can get from sound. This doesn't suggest that Eric and Ciaran have been given the same treatment – I can't even tell if they're still here, although I didn't hear anyone leave the party as we travelled. I hope they're OK.
It would be idle to claim my heart's not beating rather quickly. I'm all too conscious of the number of zeros in that bounty on my head; is someone taking a chance on keeping me alive after all, to claim the top prize for handing me over to face the reckoning?
If so, now is the time I should make my move. Later on, there will be far more sophisticated ways of keeping me under control – I'll probably be kept drugged up to make sure of my compliance till it's time for me to be made into a crowd pleaser with a rigged Court Martial and a show execution.
I won't be drugged again! The resolution crystallises in my mind. I'd rather have faced the Pack pursuers up there – at least that would have been honest and, in their minds at least, deserved. Maybe in mine, too, at some level; but the last thing I want is for my end to be televised, wherever it happens. Even in that desert wasteland in Arizona some of the shacks have televisions, and if Liz should happen to see–
There are indistinct sounds around me. At some distance a low-voiced discussion starts. I gently flex my wrists, testing the strength of the metal cuffs, but they're solid; I silently curse myself for not taking the chance to make a break for it before they got them fastened. At least if the gun had gone off into my skull I'd never have known about it, and if there are cameras trained on me it'd be obvious it was quick and inglorious.
Footsteps approach, and the blindfold is removed; I blink in the sudden light. We're in what looks like an underground storage facility – cases and crates are stacked on every side. My two fellow-saboteurs are lying at one side, and as they're still handcuffed and blindfolded I can't tell if they're unconscious or simply obeying orders and lying still. Possibly they're not regarded as representing the very real and immediate danger that I do.
Christopher looks down at me earnestly. "They need you to answer some questions, Malcolm," he says. "Please be honest – completely honest."
I could smile at his naïveté, but I'd better not. Where has he been for the past twenty-odd years?
The others are still wearing their concealing gear. Three of them step forward and confront me.
"You are General Malcolm Reed, right?" demands one – I'll call him A, because we haven't been properly introduced.
"I was General Malcolm Reed," I correct him. "I do believe that the broadcasts declaring me a deserter and traitor to the Empire were quite clear on the point that I was stripped of my rank forthwith."
"You think anyone's going to fucking fall for that?" snaps another (I'll call him B – OK, it's not very original, but we'll manage). "This is just another fucking scam – you pretend you're in disgrace, you go undercover, you ferret out a decent few nests of rebels and wham! All of a sudden it's all been a fucking misunderstanding. The General's been rooting out traitors in secrecy, and of course he's getting his rank back!"
I could laugh, if it wasn't so ironic. "Perfectly plausible, though it's been a bloody long time as undercover operations go. It's not true, but I can understand why you might suspect it is."
"Prove us wrong, motherfucker!" A third (he can be D, because C would be a bit predictable) strides forward and puts his face almost into mine.
"Easily." I keep my head up and return the stare. "Take me back upstairs and hand me over to the people we were running from. I'll guarantee that what they give me won't be promotion. Actually it'll be rather messy, but I'm sure you won't mind that as long as you get the proof I was telling the truth."
"Of course we won't do that." Christopher intervenes, pushing D away gently but firmly. "We've seen the execution squads in action before."
B huffs out a laugh. "And who trained them?"
"I did." I keep my voice matter-of-fact. "I was in charge of the security of the Empire and I did my job. But please don't pretend that the only victims were rebels. The execution squads targeted your common-or-garden criminals too.
"I'm not justifying the squads' existence, by the way, I'm simply pointing out in the interests of fairness that they aren't only instruments of suppression."
"Tell that to my brothers who were taken last year and never seen again! No trial, no charges – nothing!" D tries to push back towards me, but Christopher isn't having it.
"Perfectly possible." What point is there in denying it? It's not only Pack who make up the death squads, and there are plenty of little local commissars who take the opportunity to score points. I've been out of the game for more than a decade now, at least from the Empire's point of view, but for one thing I'm not telling him that and for another I doubt if he'd believe me even if I did.
"Bastard!" He points at me and shouts. "You're not even fucking SORRY!"
I glare at him. "What the fuck did 'sorry' ever achieve? What planet do you live on? If I was still 'General' Reed I could do something about it – at least I could find out what the hell happened to them – but as it is, all you've caught is a deserter, a traitor to the Empire. Sorry and all that. Maybe you can use the reward to bribe someone for information."
"Malcolm." My 'friend' looks at me reproachfully. "We didn't rescue you for the reward."
The masks make it hard to be sure, but I'm reasonably certain that I'm not the only one to be taken aback by this statement.
Possibly sensing the widespread surprise, he swings his head around. "When we picked up the call that there was another hunt going on, did we think 'Hey, they're chasing someone, let's get there first and see if there's a reward'?"
"Of course not, but what the fuck–"
He cuts B off peremptorily. "If we sell a man to the Empire, we're doing the Empire's dirty work for them. I won't be a party to that."
It seems to me that so far the vote is eleven to one against, and I more than half expect at least a couple of the eleven to point out that fact in no uncertain terms. When it comes to decision-making, the majority usually carries it – I believe that's called democracy.
Unbelievably, nobody does.
He turns back to me. "Malcolm. The broadcasts said that you were a traitor. That you were a renegade, and a threat to the Empire. Is that true?"
"From their point of view, I suppose it is," I reply levelly.
"And yet up till then you were one of the most powerful people in it. What changed your mind?"
Well. More accurately it would be who changed my mind, but I'm not going to reveal that. I know that Trip was taken and tortured; his execution was commuted, but beyond not killing him, there's no telling what they did to him after the trial. I presume he's still alive. Unless the Emperor, previously my SiC Austin Burnell, has revealed that I offered to trade my life for Trip's – which he may have done, but somehow I suspect he would regard that as Pack business and therefore private – as far as I know, the world in general believes Tucker's still my deadly enemy. Of course, I might have asked Amanda Cole about that the day we met her in the West Havens refugee camp, but there were so many questions and so little time that I never got to it. So, the fact that Trip and I are now both on the wrong side of the fence is purely coincidental, as far as the world in general knows. To let slip that he had so much influence over me that he actually converted me to his way of thinking would be to make myself into something that could be used against him, or someone who could potentially have useful information about anything he may have succeeded in keeping secret.
And, of course, Burnell does know we're no longer enemies. Most likely he guesses that my desperate attempt to protect Trip is a measure of my respect and affection for him, however unlikely these might be on the surface; and it's a working certainty that Trip feels something of the same for me, otherwise he'd never have released me from prison and let me loose on the Empire with the most powerful ship in the Fleet. So each of us is a powerful weapon against the other, and Burnell would be a gibbering idiot if he didn't realise it.
I'm not sanguine about Trip's ability to withstand torture in its most sophisticated forms, but then I'm not sure about how far Hoshi would have allowed them to go in maltreating him when he was first taken. He supported her – by reverse-engineering Defiant he effectively won the war for her – and never, ever failed to treat her with the appropriate respect. Whereas I'm absolutely sure that she has far less regard for my wellbeing. If I haven't forgotten the many occasions when her consent was not required as regards joining any or all of the Triad in bed, I'm damn well sure she hasn't.
As for Burnell's views on the subject, that too is somewhat of a closed book. That he would torture me if I were captured is entirely possible, after I disgusted him so utterly by abandoning my Pack status. Whether he would do so to Trip is less definite. Insofar as I understood his opinion of Trip back at Jupiter Station, I strongly suspected he admired the man. When he seized power, would he have chosen to revisit the issue?
There was a time when I'd have been confident of resisting torture. Unfortunately, Phlox's kind attentions á la Project Pregnancy had ramifications for my body that no amount of physiotherapy or medical intervention (or even Grandmother's potions and mystical ceremonies) will ever completely put right. I'd still resist more than most men would, I believe that much, but my ultimate defeat would be inevitable.
I would betray Trip. I would also, almost certainly, betray his family, which would be no less significant a betrayal despite their all presumably being safely hidden away, because it means ultimately, I would betray my alpha.
And that, I will not risk.
"I looked in a mirror," I reply.
A few of my captors grunt disgustedly at my flippancy, but Christopher nods them away, and (again to my surprise) they go. Most of them disperse about business of their own, but A, B and D go to Ciaran and Eric and take them away to a far corner, presumably to interrogate them to find out who they are and what they've been up to – and, of course, whether they're part of my fiendish schemes.
When we're more or less on our own, my 'old friend' squats down beside me. His face is grave. "Looking into that mirror must have been very difficult."
I shrug. I don't want his pity.
"I don't live here," he continues, gesturing around. "Actually I don't live anywhere. I travel. I go wherever the wind takes me – God's wind, of course. People like to have someone come among them and pray with them."
"You still go on about God?" I interrupt scornfully. "You wouldn't believe how many people I've heard scream for Him to help them, and there was never an answer." I have to pull myself up short there, because I almost go on savagely that I was one of them, and He didn't help me either.
He nods imperceptibly as though he knows exactly what I would have gone on to say. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out something old and worn and shabby that I recognise immediately – the missal he hid so carefully behind a loose brick in the school's half-ruined outer wall.
There are ribbon place-markers in some of the pages, so faded it's hardly possible to tell what colour they were originally. He turns to one of the marked pages, and begins to read, so low-voiced that even I can hardly hear him.
"'Thou knowest my reproach, and my shame and my dishonour; my foes are all known to thee.
Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair.
I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.
They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.'"
Then he shuts the missal, and returns it to its place, and looks at me gravely. "I've never read that verse since without thinking of you. You were a kind young boy, Malcolm, until you were made otherwise."
"That's life," I say brusquely. "Don't waste your sympathy on me. I repaid it with interest."
He nods. "I heard about the fire."
"I'm sure you heard about Sallis, too." I face him brazenly.
"I watched it. I wasn't sure which of you I pitied more."
Furious, powerless, I wrench against the manacles. I want this conversation over.
"But when you'd finally had your revenge, Malcolm, nothing had changed, had it? That's what you saw when you looked in the mirror. You saw that the pain was still there, the torment, the loneliness, the helplessness. And you couldn't find any relief from it. You had to go on and on, hurting people, controlling people, making them fear you because that was the only way you could imagine you were safe."
"Fuck off!" I hiss at him. This is almost as bad as a mind-meld; it's appallingly painful to have my most agonising secret and its consequences held up to the light. It was painful enough when Ginny did it, but at least with her I had the option not to co-operate.
"I don't know what actually changed you," he goes on seriously, with the slow blink I remember so vividly, "but something's different. I think you've found love. I think you've found it's stronger than hatred, stronger than cruelty. And that's why the Empire wants to crush you. They always do, when anyone uncovers their biggest secret: that they use force because they live in fear."
"The Empire wants to crush me because I deserted and because I know too much." My breathing is ragged, and I try desperately to steady it. "I had my reasons and they were nothing to do with any sky-fairy!"
He smiles gently. "I've always thought it doesn't matter so much if we don't believe in God, because that doesn't stop God believing in us." The statement recalls so clearly Grandmother telling me something similar about the Great Spirit in the days before the vision quest that freed my mind of Phlox's poison that I can't even think of a snarky response, so I sit there dumbly until he pats my shoulder and rises. "We'll get you something to eat and drink, and then we'll find you somewhere more comfortable to stay until we can let you go."
"Let me go?" I'm dumbfounded. He may believe in fairies, but does he think the rest of them are just going to let all those credits waft away from their grasp?
"I'm confident I can talk them around to my way of thinking. After all, if we hand you over, we simply strengthen the Empire one way or the other; if you're a traitor, they get rid of you, and if you're a spy, they get you back, complete with all the information you possess."
"And if you let me go, of course, and I am a spy, I can simply walk to the nearest Government office and demand protection, and half an hour later I'm in a fast ship bound for Security Headquarters where I download the lot – including intel about a resistance cell down here. I take it you haven't thought of that?"
"Malcolm." His eyes are serious. "They sent the hunters after you. They don't want you saved, they don't even want you caught. They want you dead."
He's perfectly right, of course, though the matter-of-fact way he says it chills me.
They want me dead.
He walks away, presumably having other things to attend to (he mentioned food, and now I come to think of it I'm hungry, so I hope he doesn't forget), and I'm left to my reflections.
Which aren't particularly pleasant.
Now Lucifer knows, being possibly the Empire's least likely candidate for a popularity contest is not new to me. Back in my heyday as one of the Triad, I'd have genuinely laughed my head off at the idea that I should give it a second thought. If I was hated, I was also feared, and that was all that mattered. All there was left to care about.
But Christopher (damn him) has stirred up a morass of very uncomfortable reflections. However briefly, he has reminded me of what I was before the windflowers. He watched me murder Sallis (well, strictly speaking it was 'execute', but given that I'd orchestrated every step of the trial, 'murder' is probably more accurate) and didn't know which of us he pitied more: the man who was dying that protracted, awful death or the warped, vengeful executioner wielding the knife.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Mine started off with a handful of windflowers, I suppose that counts as 'good intentions', but I damn soon turned into having the very worst of bad intentions, and any moral code I'd been raised with went to hell in a handcart. I was a blackmailer, a rapist and a murderer before I left school, and that was only the start of it.
So why the fuck, now, do I care? Apart, of course, from the fact that anyone with two functioning brain cells would put a rifle to my head and pull the trigger, and nobody in their right mind would lift a finger to save me?
The answer, of course, is as obvious as it's pathetic: I met good people. I met Liz, who somehow managed to endure my unforgivable abuse, and the new, stronger, more determined version of her who never lost that streak of compassion and took all my bullshit during my recovery and not only forgave me for everything, but even loved me in spite of it. I met Trip, who fought me out of my suspicions and finally dragged me – kicking and screaming – into trusting him. I met Elaine, whose heart was so full of maternal love that she mothered a monster, kissing my thumb better when I sliced it open while peeling potatoes that first day when I was deemed well enough to contribute some small effort to my upkeep. And I met Charles, who somehow saw past what most would perceive as some kind of psychotic fit, and found a way to accept the ruined human being behind it.
And having met them, I've been made aware of how low I have fallen. It only needed one person who knew what I was, and what I could have been, to complete the ruination of my self-esteem.
And there he is. Christopher. Christopher Stevens, a very ordinary little boy become a very ordinary little man.
Or perhaps I should say a very extraordinary little man. Because after a dinner of chips, omelette and peas (and he even remembered I like mushrooms!), he apologetically has me moved to a bathroom – which is very handy right now, I've been needing it for a while but didn't like to ask – and while I sit admiring the fixtures and fittings with my left wrist cuffed to the waterpipe, he conducts a prayer service for what sounds like quite a number of worshippers. Most of which, I have to admit, passes me by a bit, but there's one part where he asks the congregation to join him in asking God for things, and not only does he very properly pray for the persecuted, in the very next breath he prays for the persecutors as well.
I try not to feel shamed by his generosity of spirit.
I'm only partially successful.
If you don't remember Christopher, you might want to read "Genesis" by LoyaulteMeLie. You can find it quickly under my favourite stories in my profile. Poor Malcolm! How the mighty have fallen! What do you think the Mad, Bad, General Reed of his heyday would have said if someone had told him he'd one day find himself cuffed to a toilet, smelling of old cabbage and hiding from an Empire that didn't even want to make an example of him, only crush him like a cockroach?
