Arduous though unemployment may be for Garrett Walker, frightening is the darkness staring at him when he looks through to the future and sees only despair. His bed is a crumpled mess, lost until the pale moonlight pierces the thick, rolling clouds at night and casts a sickly glow on the flat’s far wall. So early in this struggle and already he thinks himself losing his family and with them all he has left to lose. His wife pledges to stand by him, and she does, faithfully discharging her duties in the home even as she works to earn some small income at a restaurant. Soon, she convinces the manager to hire on her husband as a dishwasher, working a few hours a day for a pathetic wage. It’s hard for men like Garrett to swallow their pride and subject themselves to the indignities of this work, but he takes the job out of the will to provide for his family. Still, as he’s trapped in the noisy, steamy kitchen hosing off plates and glasses, he can’t help but let his mind wander to the tempting and salacious thoughts of revolution. He’s known of the working class parties, but never before this moment has he thought of himself as fit to join. There’s violence and there’s mayhem in the streets, and it’ll only take the gentlest of nudges to send men like Garrett over the edge and compel them to fully commit themselves to the war. For Simon Perez, the moment he steps out of the light and into the shadows marks the moment in his life when he finds his true calling, if only he could realize himself for what he truly is. Tonight he goes to work, crowbar in hand as he looks inside parked cars, glancing into one, then the next, then the next, at each just long enough to look in the seat for something, anything of value. There. In the front seat of a white sedan, a screen left in plain sight. He strikes the window with his crowbar, shattering glass, then reaches in and quickly takes the screen, putting it in his coat’s inside pocket before turning and making back for the alley. A day later he sells the stolen screen for his own pittance, a pittance he spends on his drug of choice. For years this drug has eaten away at the streets, killing, consuming, corroding like a potent acid. No one knows where it came from, no one on these streets knows the complicated, roundabout way each of the countless chemicals blended into each drop finds their way from some obscure corner of the world to here. To men like Simon, all that matters is the pain that goes away whenever he takes this drug into his veins, relief washing over him in a dull warmth. But the relief always fades, and the pain always comes back. Trapped, Simon is like so many others, once a working man discarded like some piece of old, disused machinery, now corrupted beyond repair by an insidious poison.
Not far from where the last man died in the night, Private Craig Thompson and the rest of the artillery brigade bed down for the night, thinking themselves suspicious, but not yet suspect. More than a few copies of banned texts circulate in the barracks, subject to occasional searches which reveal nothing. Private Thompson sometimes hears the rattling of distant gunfire in the night, something unthinkable even a few years earlier yet so common now. Over six weeks their lives seem to normalize, the drudgery of routine offering some small comfort in these trying times. They march, they muster, they travel to the range and fire off the guns in rehearsal for the war always seeming to be in the offing. “No force could ever suppress the human desire for dignity,” says Private Thompson, speaking as much to himself as to the others. “You may count your place in the stockade if you keep talking like that,” says another. “You’re not wrong,” says Thompson, “but there are people in the streets and all they’re fighting for is the right to live in their own homes.” The other soldier says, “I don’t disagree with that, but you must look out for yourself. If the Colonel has you brought up on sedition charges then you’ll be no good to anyone when you’re hanged.” An exchange of gunfire rattles through the night, the working man roused from his restless sleep just long enough to listen for a time. When he’s certain the exchange is taking place at least a few kilometres away, he returns to bed, closing his eyes and falling asleep as the gunfire stops, the exchange never really ending so much as subsiding, like an outbreak of influenza. For Simon Perez, his descent into the madness of addiction and crime marks an impossible tragedy all too common in this day and age. He sits, one morning, in his cell, the first of his cellmates to wake up, and eyes the guard. He’s memorized the guards’ patrols, and once he’s sure this morning’s patrol takes the guard out of sight he reaches under his mattress and draws out his drugs, quickly and quietly shooting up, a wave of relief, warm and soothing, washes over him. Meanwhile, the real criminals, they who grow fat off their theft of wages from the working men of the world not only escape punishment but receive exaltation in the annals of power. The real criminals remain anonymous, but not for long.
For men like Stanislaw Czerkawski, the act of working to fortify the police stations may be considered an act of self-harm, but in fact it’s a demonstration of the irrepressible working class spirit. By day Stanislaw works, but by night he harbours the same subversive thoughts as his brothers and sisters of the working class, each thought sending the same surge of energy through his body like the common thrumming of a universal pulse. Still he works, on this day his crew putting into place the last piece of fencing to complete one particular fortification, with just enough time left in the day to string razor wire along the tops of the fences. Stanislaw is not like the others, just as any one person is not like the rest; Polish by birth, he remains skeptical of the burgeoning working class movement in Britain, remembering as he does the stories his grandfather would tell of life under the old Polish People’s Republic. In time, he will learn to embrace the new character which the working class movement has come to embody. This’ll be time when the tables are turned and men like Simon are empowered to dispense their own justice, handing out the harshest of penalties to those guilty of looting and plundering the wealth of the world. As matches to kindling, all will be called to account for their crimes, for their dispensation of misery and poverty on ordinary men who’ve sought only to sustain themselves. It’s not unlike us all to realize our place in the scheme of things. Men like Simon Perez, the most pathetic and reviled among us will come to be exalted into the annals of power, and in so receiving exaltation will usher in a new era of the people’s rule. Simon Perez, locked in an overcrowded, decrepit prison, may not live to see it. Many young men will rot in this prison, consigned to never realizing their full potential, and many will die here. But theirs will be a vengeance meted out by the hand of another.