It is really rather dark and there's a Content Warning for depictions of violence and death. It's darker than I expected, so be aware.
Also, I wrote it in 2013 when the scenario seemed mostly unlikely. Today... maybe less so.
*
In the moment, all I know is the smell of Brasso and Death.
It is dark: the kind of all-encompassing dark one's eyes and
mind never adjust to. On my back, I reach directly up with my hands and meet
nothing but cold, still air. I roll onto my right and feel warm, sticky
something transfer from floor to face. It slides onto my lips and the stale
iron taste makes my stomach clench, ready to vomit.
I haven't been in the dark like this since I was thirteen,
pot-holing on a school trip. We went deep into a mountain and turned our helmet
lights out. There was nothing but the sound of our voices. We thought it was
five minutes, but the light was doused for only thirty seconds. Time has no
meaning in the dark.
There's no mistaking the Brasso, but I don't know why. It reminds me of Sunday mornings
when my dad did his cleaning chores. Boot polish, disinfectant and Brasso, a
combination of stinks filling the tiny yard we called our garden. It was a
postage stamp of withered lawn, half-a-dozen cracked concrete patio slabs and
two half-dead ferns in pots.
I could be anywhere, and it could be any time of day. I have
no idea what's going on. If knowledge is power, I am a weakling. It is almost
liberating: if I have no power, I cannot fail.
I sit up and the back of my head aches from lying on the
cold, icy floor. Reaching back, I can at least be reassured that the blood is
not from my own skull. A brief check all over suggests I am uninjured, except
for returning to consciousness in a pitch-black place surrounded by the stench
of Brasso and Death.
I reach out, my trembling hands not wanting to find anything
in the dark and knowing they will. There, a few inches to my left, a hand, cold
and stiff with rigor. I have small hands, this is smaller. I grasp it for a
moment, as if I could restore life by wishing, then drop it with disgust and
horror.
There is no light and death is close by. Uncertain of
anything at all, I resolve to stand and investigate. My legs ache, stiff and
bruised but after slipping in blood I make it to my feet. Shuffling, not
knowing what I might find, my shoes make contact with hair, clothes and the
corpses of I couldn't possibly guess how
many people.
In my nose the stink of oil and ammonia, metal and rotting
soft tissue as I try to move around. I tread on a hand and stumble forward.
Instead of hitting the floor, I crack my head on a concrete wall and sprain my
wrist in the attempt to break my fall.
The surprise of it brings me to my senses and now I remember.
They came for us. I never thought they would, because we
didn't do anything wrong. They came for us just the same.
There is nothing in my stomach to lose, but my muscles spasm
into painful dry heaves just the same.
They came for us. I never thought they would, because we
weren't the ones they wanted. We weren't dangerous, we weren't radical. We were
good people who lived quiet lives, not agitators or criminals. We didn't sign
petitions or go on marches. They came for us just the same.
I lean against the cold wall, improbably the only living creature
in a roomful of people.
I remember. I remember what I'd forced myself to forget: how
they came for us because they'd already come for everyone else.
They hadn't the infrastructure to deal with so many of us. We
were locked in what had been a storeroom once, gallons of bleach and other such
things lined up in neat rows on metal shelves. The bleach was gone but the
smell remained as we were shoved inside, twenty or more in a space intended
only for cans, bottles, tins and containers. The children – there were six –
scrabbled up onto the metal shelves to give us more space. We had been left six
litres of water between us.
We were locked in to wait, we supposed. No law or justice
could protect us, so we could only assume that we would be retrieved at some
point. Time passed. Tempers flared, cooled, rose again. The small bucket we
used as a toilet filled quickly. With nowhere to empty it, the blue plastic
bucket stood in a corner reeking and we were forced to abandon any notion of
decent sanitation. Soon, as we grew hungry and thirsty, even our bowels and
bladders ceased full function.
One man, a silver-haired gent who took very badly to
relinquishing his dignity and would not tell anyone his name, kept time on the
blank concrete wall in blood drawn from his finger. One short smear was an
hour, the line drawn through the marks represented 12 hours. We moved into a
third full day and he kept scrupulous time with the gold watch he had hidden
from our guards in his underwear.
By the fourth day our carefully-conserved stock of water was
gone. Some of the grown ups collected their urine in the empty water bottles
and drank it. The children tried to do the same but gagged at the smell and the
taste. I refused at first, but thirst got the better of me quickly. Human
beings will do all sorts of previously unthinkable things if they have to.
This is the truth I had forced myself to forget. They came
for us, in broad daylight. There was no hiding, no scuffles in the dead of
night. They did not need to hide, did not want to hide. It was in their
interests to show their form of law in action. My crime was not explained to me
when I was taken or at any later point. I was simply taken.
They came for us because they could.
The fourth day proved the breaking point for some. A woman
called Julie, who had started this bleak adventure with what I'd considered
indefatigable optimism, smashed her head against the wall so hard she knocked herself out. When she
roused, she did it again three times and didn't wake again.
The silver-haired gent's finger wouldn't bleed sufficiently
after four days and six hours. My brother sliced his own index finger open on
the rough corner of a shelf and took over for him. The door stayed locked, and
we began to discuss the possibility that we had been forgotten about, or that
this was the entirety of our punishment simply to remain here. It was efficient
on their part to just lock us away and forget about us.
They came for us, but it didn't follow that they should
expend much effort to destroy us. We were nothing, after all, but people.
On the fifth day, the silver-haired gent did not wake up. My
brother took his watch and kept up the time-keeping. We had five corpses at
that point: Julie, the Gent, one of the children and two young women who had
requested strangulation from one of the men and been granted.
My mouth was painfully dry and my body felt like lead. I
drifted in and out of a sleep that brought no rest or peace. The moaning and
indignant grumbling of the first few days had given way to hopeless silence
except for the shallow, rattling breaths of the still-living.
Then one of the women spoke up: “I'm not having this. What
have we got left here?”
Her voice was slow and her vowels barely formed, but we
understood. It took an age but we established that we had a bucket of effluent,
a gold watch, six empty litre bottles and there were three tins of Brasso,
presumably left over from the room's time as a store.
A plan formed. My brother and a woman volunteered. The five
surviving children were pulled from the shelves, hugged and kissed, then my
brother and the woman used the cans of Brasso to cave in their heads. It was a
quick death, as merciful as could be provided.
They came for us and left us to rot. We would not give them
the satisfaction of a longer death than this.
The children were restored to their shelves except one, whose
mother had no tears to weep but clung to the son on the floor. It was his tiny
hand I had found when I woke.
My brother lost the will for more death after that and
dropped the can to the floor with a clunk. He returned to his time-keeping for
two hours, then ripped his wrist against the shelf and slid down the wall
bleeding out too slowly for mercy.
The woman offered the same blunt force trauma to everyone else,
fired up in righteous fury. Many took her up on it, refusing to exist in this
place any longer. Then, she had no more strength left and crashed to the floor
herself. She fell to catatonia and her breathing slowed until her open eyes
stilled.
They came for us, even though they had told us we had nothing
to fear, nothing to hide for having done nothing wrong.
One of the last survivors managed to get a can of Brasso
open. She waved it aloft as if a Cosmopolitan and drank it, gagging on the
fatal cocktail until she spit blood. Another person took the can and imitated,
and another until it was empty. Another can was opened, more people resigned
from the situation. Then, the lights went out.
How I came to be the last left I cannot say. Staring with
dry, sticky eyes at the desolation, I suppose I passed out. Why I came around
again I do not know, how I remain alive in this coffin, I do not know. My brain
does not function as it should, though better than the circumstances demand. I
cannot see in the blackness. I have no way out except to wait for my body to
break. I cannot think it will be much longer. All I know is the smell of Brasso
and Death.
They came for us after promising security. They came for us
because they had already come for everyone else.
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