Chapter 2: Mo
“We are going into war, lads,” barked their leader. “We are going into war against an enemy who won’t even recognise our existence. An enemy who won’t even admit they’re at war. They talk about us like we’re criminals and treat us like we’re vermin, denied even the right to life. They will not be merciful with you- so give as good as you get, lads!”
The five soldiers in his modest platoon uttered a unified cry of approval and saluted their commander. The scene was pretty pathetic, really: they had lost thirty men already and their headquarters had been taken over by the enemy, reducing them to meeting in an old abandoned garage on the other side of town, in one of the few suburbs still controlled by the Army. Yet their spirit had been strengthened rather than crushed by it all: they had witnessed what the enemy was capable of, the atrocities they were willing to commit, and had been galvanised into action. They would not let the enemy make them suffer anymore. They would not let the enemy put them under the yoke of oppression or enslave their women and children. Enough was enough, and their cause was just. If the situation was so dire that they would have to die for their cause, then die for it they must.
“Out there, right now, our brothers and sisters are fighting. Are dying. We cannot stand by and let them suffer while we stand around here yapping, so let’s move out now and kick some enemy ass! One, two, three, four, march, soldiers!”
The garage door was opened and the force of six men marched out into a chaotic scene. Fighting was everywhere, and it was often difficult to tell just who was fighting who. As a general indication, the enemy had better technology, so any soldier carrying a weapon made after the 1970s was probably not on their side. Yet other than that, the distinction was very blurred: both sides wore the camouflage khaki uniform common to most modern armies; both sides were largely from the same ethnic background, speaking the same language in the same accent; both sides followed similar tactics.
If tactics were even relevant anymore. Commanders watched from the sidelines in utter dismay as they saw their carefully-drawn plans descending into sheer might-on-might mêlée, where clever logic gave way to the brute force and individual wit of each soldier. This was not army versus army, both sides fighting as one, but every man for himself, with the only rule being that you don’t run from the battle or you get shot by your own side.
And six new soldiers had been added to the brawling. The battle spanned the whole suburb for about two miles to the West as the enemy tried to make good their already impressive gains and push the Army out of the city entirely, banished into the southern wastelands where hunger and cold would get them before guns or knives ever did. As the five footmen and their commander looked to their left, the sheer scale of the battle took them all by surprise and suddenly all the words of the garage, all the theories they had learnt and ideas they had memorised, vanished into nothing: it was time for action now, not debate.
Among the six was a man named Mo, a soldier with particular reason to hate the enemy. He had once been a family man, a proud father and husband who worked tirelessly as a mechanic to keep his family provided for in a time of severe economic decline. Then one day he had come home to find his house demolished to rubble and the cold, dead hands of his wife and child sticking out from the debris.
The enemy had done that to him. To his family. Before that day, he had been a pacifist; since that day, he had become a warrior, with understandably little care for his own personal safety, so long as he could avenge his memories of wife and child.
He knew other families who had been torn apart by the enemy, and he knew that if they were allowed victory, they would continue to do the same to others, too. Those who survived would be in no better a position, for the enemy would so restrict their freedoms as to make them virtual slaves. Of course, in the 21st century, nobody would ever admit that fact; the words “slave” or “slavery” would never be used; “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” would be vigorously denied, but the fact would remain the same, whatever name was given to it.
So he had been forced into action- “any means necessary”, as Malcolm X had said. He would blow himself up if he had to for the protection of his motherland.
The scene immediately in front of him was a crossroads on Palmer Street in an eastern suburb of Jamahiriya. He knew it well: one hundred yards to his left lay the school his son had attended; one mile to the right, the house they had inhabited together; straight ahead, the road to the city centre.
Yet the scene before him did not fit the image in his memory. Where houses should have been was now rubble; where street, now potholes. Bodies littered the area so mangled that it was impossible to tell who they had once been or which side they had been fighting for.
The enemy were coming from ahead. Their numbers were deceptively small: they were scattered about on the road from Cain Avenue, reinforcements arriving in a steady stream from behind. It looked sincerely like there were only fifty or so of them, but their fighting had the effect of five hundred men. It was like they were respawning like villains in a computer game: the player had the task of only surviving as long as possible, with no hint of an eventual victory.
And all of them were boys, not men. The fighters of the army showed the guts and wrinkles and toughened hands of age; the enemy were, in most cases, no older than Mo’s son would have been children, fired up by the idealistic ideas of youth and a revolutionary fervour for their theories. Back in the city, one David Weinberger was extolling his followers with the virtues of communitarianism, his own political doctrine which provided the basis for their struggle against Mo’s forces. The soldiers here did not have to think, merely obey orders; Weinberger did the thinking for them, and they all agreed in unison.
“For Weinberger! For Community! For the country!” was their battle cry, a chilling sound to any who had to fight them: for it signalled the beginning of a fresh assault, or the start of a new offensive, and with it the deaths of many good men.
Their cry went up now, and the new reinforcements who had amassed just behind the battle-lines rushed into the mêlée with guns and vocals blazing. At least two Army soldiers went down in this initial dash forward: Kam and Jamal, good friends of Mo. He cried bitterly at their loss.
Six were assembled, about ready to run in; yet the arrival of a seventh delayed their departure with news of a tragedy.
“Have you heard the news?” he panted, breathless. “Miriam. Miriam Stopwood. She’s dead. They killed her.”
“Miriam?” gasped the commander, aghast. “What kind of monsters are these?”
“They’re terrorists, sir,” offered Mo. “Nothing but immoral terrorists. Terrorists and murderers.”
“Miriam…” muttered the soldier next to Mo. His voice betrayed deep shock, betrayal, despair- and they all felt it. Miriam had been their spiritual leader, the head and founder of the Church of the Holy Tabernacle. It was their national religion based on the archaeological discovery of 3rd century scrolls by Miss Stopwood, who had then been a humble archaeologist, which had shed new light on the life and times, and teachings, of Jesus. Her discoveries had soon become popular for the way they unified Christians and Muslims under the banner of her new religion and were very quickly coming to influence government decisions. In the ten years since her discovery, her fame had made her into a household name, beloved of many.
Some disagreed, of course. The hard-line and the secular opposed her new interpretations, or her influence on government, but everyone understood that she was a peacenik and they respected her for it. She had earned a status elusive to most people in the public eye: she had become, almost, universally loved.
And now she was dead, murdered at the hands of what Mo could only see as criminals, murderers, immoralists with no respect for the life of anything or anyone aside from them.
“Right, lads, let’s give them what we’ve got,” ordered the commander, still a little shaken by the news. His five soldiers and their guest heartily obeyed an
d, with the passionate battle-cry of “Allahu Akbar!” resounding from their lips, they plunged themselves into the heat of battle.
There was half a road to run across before they reached the first line of troops, and then it was like pushing his way into a bustling crowd. The six had separated in their mad dash and were now hopelessly lost in a wall of people, crushed on all sides and struggling to recognise friend from foe. It was an undulating mass of living mayhem, with the only thing protecting him from certain death being the fact that everyone around him was already locked in their own struggles of mortal combat. It reminded him of the mosh pits his son used to go to, except this was much more deadly.
People here- weren’t people. They couldn’t be. At least, he couldn’t see them as such, for to do so would complicate his morals and slow him down, and he didn’t need that. Rather, he had to force himself to view them as machines, or monsters- empty vessels filled only with a hatefulness that justified their eradication. Given what they had done to his wife, his child, and his spiritual idol, this attitude was not difficult; but it still struck a note of discomfort on his soul.
Of course, this did not apply to the soldiers of his Army. He found himself trying to make the curious