At some point, events seem to take on a life of their own, defying any attempt to rein them in by any party to the unfolding conflict. At some point, one can only read so many headlines, so many stories of the working man deprived of his livelihood and evicted from his home before one becomes numb to the working man’s plight. It’s the way history changes. History is like an impersonal force; it finds whatever it needs to advance. We often think of our history as being led by great men, as being made by dramatic events, and without them the future we live in would’ve turned out radically different. And in some ways this is true. No matter who steps forward to make themselves into the icons of men, history will find a way to achieve its inexorable advance. In the working man’s quarters, there comes a moment when he changes irrevocably. It’s as though a switch has been flipped, in an instant his awareness graduating to a higher plane. No longer aware of himself only as one of many, the working man suddenly conceives of himself as many of one. It doesn’t matter what happens to prompt this in him; if you ask him, he’ll swear with absolute certainty that he’s seen himself this way all along. It’s like this, it’s always been like this, as the night passes slowly and the sirens wail in the distance it’s as though by some divine influence the working man has come to silently accept what must be done only days before circumstances align to allow change we’ve never seen before.
Before we proceed any further, I have to warn you of what lies ahead. Though we’ve seen much misfortune meted out by man against man, what comes next will make every life lost, every livelihood deprived until now seem not a tragedy by comparison but mere happenstance. As men are wont to do, the working man has his own idols, even if most of his brothers do not recognize his idols as such. Right now, the working man’s leaderless, like a ship without a rudder, cast adrift, at the mercy of the currents. Right now, the working man is decided on throwing his lot in with the rising tides of history, but without a steady hand to guide him he may find himself hurled against the rocky shores at the base of an imposing cliff. In the night, the sirens in the distance never stop wailing, instead fading in and out, warbling and whooping while the city lurches and lumbers through another night of disarray.
At last, dawn breaks. A new day promises the arrival of a new era, one in which all accounts shall be settled and all debts shall be forgiven. A future lays itself out before us like a road reaching across the desert landscape towards the horizon, offering itself as the way forward. But it’s not for the faint of heart. Before the day is out, Valeri will join in the fires of liberation burning brighter and hotter than ever before, in this, our apocalypse rising.
16. The Die is Cast
After so many years of neglect, it’s all come to this. In the streets, the day has come, across the United Kingdom ordinary workers, students, and parishioners take to the streets of cities large and small, among them Valeri Kovalenko in with a crowd on a street somewhere not far from Westminster itself. Although their stated reason for gathering is to protest the government’s austerity measures, events soon degenerate into the venting of rage. The crowd advances towards a line of troopers standing across the street with their arms at the ready. We’ll never know the reason why it happened, what happens next. A thrown rock or bottle, someone trooper’s jostled elbow, or just plain panic. A gunshot cracks through the air, then silence. Another gunshot cracks, then another, then another, soon the rattling of indiscriminate gunfire chattering in the air, tearing holes in the sound of so many people screaming, this time screams of raw terror. The black-clad troopers move forward in a ragged, jagged line, shepherding the crowd down the street with a wave of death, leaving behind blood-soaked asphalt and a scattering of broken, lifeless bodies. It’s a sight that recalls memories of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry more than fifty years ago, for those old enough to remember such acts of cold-blooded murder. At the polytechnic, news breaks of the massacre moments after the first bodies hit the pavement, and the students riot. Sean Morrison’s one of the first to pick up a stone and hurl it through a nearby window, soon the whole crowd seemingly ten times larger as they rampage across the polytechnic’s grounds, setting fires, overturning cars, and smashing glass.
Hearing the crack of gunfire and the screaming of voices in terror, Valeri makes for the side of the street, seeking cover. But he trips over the curb and finds himself set upon by a young trooper, shielding his face with his hands as the trooper rains blows on him with a nightstick. In the chaos, this exchange becomes lost, the two men struggling against one another drawing the attention of Valeri’s friend Murray. In two strides, Murray’s alongside them, his iron fist describing an arc in the air and landing on the trooper’s head; a second later Murray tosses the trooper aside, the trooper’s body sagging under the impact of two leaden blows to the face. Murray reaches for Valeri, grabs him by the shoulders, and sets him on his feet. “Let’s go,” Murray says, “we should leave.” Valeri nods. They make off down an alley. At the underground church, the parishioners cut off from their rogue priest emerge into the street, clutching Bibles, chanting in time with one another, demanding justice for the fallen. As Darren Wright is among them, he feels not afraid of the policeman’s bullets but emboldened by their use in massacring the demonstrators, at the centre of his chest an anger rising that should guide his steps along the street and never lead him astray.
In the working class blocks, the mood strikes immediately. “They’re murderers,” says one man. In the days to come, everything changes. “You don’t know two hundred were killed fighting for our homes!” insists another. “They gave up their lives gladly for our happiness,” still another says. “And for our cause!” says one more. At the union halls, in the classrooms, in the pews these views are angrily shared among men. Workers stage massive strikes. Students walk out of classes. Churches hold sermons where pastors and preachers alike deliver moving eulogies for the dead and call the faithful to action. Video screens replay the carnage from every conceivable angle, slowing down the footage, breaking the furious action into a series of lifeless stills, at once seeming to magnify the gravity of what’s happened even as they transform it into a caricature of itself. But for men like Garrett Walker this massacre strikes home, Garrett sees the carnage played over and over on his screens, shown from every conceivable angle, slowed until one can see the blood spilled frame-by-frame. He imagines his daughters among those killed, not by choice, as if the dark essence has seized his thoughts and taken them places he’d never go on his own. Soon he’s in the streets with all the other unemployed men, so emasculated by their forcible unemployment, mobbing the nearest police station, hurling stones and voices over the fortifications until nothing seems as it was.