Holy City: Chapter Fourteen

They came for V in the middle of the night. The buzz of the card that unlocked his hotel room door was followed by three pairs of flashlights and the turning on of all of the lights in the two rooms that created the suite. V was lying on his back when the shuffling of authoritative feet was first heard. He turned on his side to see who was approaching when the lights turned on. He saw a flashlight up close as it smashed into his face and he was knocked off the bed to the ground.

They treated him roughly like the imposter he was. They hit him again across the face with a flashlight even though he was not resisting. A second man pushed V to the ground and held him down, hands behind his back. V expected them to throw him out of the hotel. They didn’t throw him out of the hotel, not for the next two hours. They kept him prisoner in the Apricot Suite. V was on the ground for that entire time. Then the police showed up and he was taken away.

He found himself back in a cell. This wasn’t the makeshift cell of a refugee camp. This wasn’t the hard concrete cell of a military base. This was just a cell. He was housed with other criminals and with other non-citizens waiting to be deported. V counted forty of them in his holding cell, he may have missed a couple, he may have counted some of them twice, it was difficult, everyone kept moving around. He wanted a corner, but the corners were taken, they were the best vantage points in the cell, the best place to protect yourself. Instead, V found himself on a bench in the middle of the cell constantly jostled and stepped on and cursed at by those who refused to stay still.

V’s mind wandered back to the Accadan Checkpoint and the comfort of his cell there. He could wait lying down on his bed and close his eyes without worrying about the man next to him or the man next to that man. He had no such luxury in this holding pen. He dreaded the thought of dinner. Would the guards throw slop down on the floor and let the prisoners fight for it. He couldn’t imagine there being a tray for each prisoner. And with three other holding pens with the same number of people, he couldn’t quite picture everyone lining up in orderly fashion to take their dinner. Maybe, there wasn’t going to be any dinner. That suited V. He doubted that it suited the rest of the men in his cell.

There wasn’t any dinner. The holding cell was temporary. V was moved across the campus to a different cell. Now he had only four other cellmates. Maybe he was working his way towards his own cell again. The policeman that moved him mentioned a hearing the next day. That was why he was moved. V didn’t know if this was a promotion or a demotion, but it was a change. He was happy to be away from the holding cell.

There was still no dinner. It was lunch. Everyone was fed lunch. The five inmates in his cell received little plastic boxes that each of them tore through. V wasn’t hungry. He offered his little plastic box to the others. At first, suspicion ruled, eventually hunger took over and the other four shared it amongst themselves.

V was taken away less than an hour after lunch. He assumed it was for the hearing the policeman had mentioned, but this new policeman laughed when V asked about the hearing. He said it was Sunday, there weren’t any hearings on Sunday. V had a visitor.

V walked into a room with a long row of visitors on one side of an extremely long white table. On the other side were inmates, thirty, forty, V pretended there were inmates as far as the eye could see. It felt like there were that many. There were chairs for each inmate and chairs for each visitor, the chairs were on opposite sides of the table and separated by slim partitions.

V was guided to partition number twenty-seven. V felt like he was playing a scene from an old film. As he sat down in partition number twenty-seven he recognized the man across from him. It was Kane, the foreman he had left behind three days ago. Kane was dressed in a suit. The type of suit the workers at the shelter wore. It wasn’t nice but V could tell it was Kane’s best suit.

“Hello,” V spoke first.

“I bet you didn’t expect to see me.”

“No.”

“You should be happy to see me.”

“Oh.”

“I’m your last chance at salvation.” Kane laughed a laugh that was close to a cackle.

The noise from the other conversations swirled overhead like smog, it made it difficult for most of the inmates to hear the person across from them. V didn’t have any trouble hearing Kane.

“Do you want to know how we found you?”

“No.”

“No?” Kane cackled again. “You’re a curious one, Fontan. Isn’t that your name, Fontan?”

“Yes.”

“I usually don’t learn the names, except for the runaways. And you’re a runaway.”

“I thought I was a free man.”

“Who gave you that idea. You’re a man, but until construction is finished, you’re mine. And maybe after we finish you’ll still be mine. That’s the deal. That’s why we let you stay in our country. There’s no free ride, Fontan. Here, you have to work for your way. And I’ve come to reclaim you for that work.”

“What if I want to go back to my village?”

“I don’t think you understand me. When you were delivered to me, you became my property. You became property of the Mersh Corporation, in my keeping. You’re an asset in their ledger. We can’t have assets walking off and wandering around now, can we, we’d never get anything built.”

V didn’t enjoy talking with Kane like he enjoyed talking with Cpt. Horace and Pvt. Fontan.

“If I refuse to go back with you?”

“Refuse. Why would you refuse. I’m giving you a chance. This is your only chance. Out here, your nothing, your food for vultures. Under me, you ain’t much, but you’re more than nothing. Let me tell you a story.”

V didn’t want to hear Kane’s story.

“I wasn’t born into my position. I’ve worked my way up to it with hard work. And life hasn’t always been so easy. When I was young there were fewer jobs, men would have leapt to have a job on a construction site. There were men your age who refused to work or who weren’t any good at work and they roamed from town to town on trains. Some set up a camp down by a lake not too far from my home. When I was a kid, my friends and I would sneak down to their camp and spy on them. We weren’t rich, Fontan. I want you to understand that. My father worked hard to make ends meet and barely did. He was a butcher. That is tough work. I shared a room with three brothers until I was fourteen. You may think we’re all rich here in Vitesia but we’re not, we work hard, harder than you probably worked in that village you came from.

“One of the men didn’t like the camp. I don’t know, he might have been kicked out because he was a malcontent. He set up his own little camp a few steps from our backyard. He hung a large raincoat from a tree branch and that was his tent. Charlie, our dog, would go crazy barking at him in the morning, in the night. He was your age Fontan, maybe a little older, and once a man hits a certain age no one’s going to want to hire him. Not for construction work certainly. And this man, he survived out there for almost an entire year, through fall, then winter, into spring. God knows what he ate. He drove Charlie crazy that entire year.

“But he knew, Fontan, he knew what age he was, what was in store for him. It wasn’t going to get any better, I can tell you that. And one morning when I went outside with my brother to go to school we saw him hanging from that tree swinging back and forth in the wind. My father had to cut him down and wait for the police. And that was the end of that man. You see, Fontan, what I’m offering you is a chance, a chance of a lifetime, really, the last chance you’ll ever be offered.

“Do you want to end up like that man?”

V did not answer.

“You don't understand me, Fontan.”

“I think I do. When you saw that man swinging from the tree you didn't see a human being, you saw a failure, you saw weakness that didn't deserve to live, that didn't deserve a family or happiness. But what did you know about him, what did you know about any of those people in that camp. Why do the strong always hate the weak, the rich hate the poor, the healthy hate the sick. Are you afraid if you get too close you’ll catch these things, like a disease?”

“You’re a subversive, that’s it, like those subversives in Damasia. You want to know why you’re a refugee, why we bombed your pathetic little village, it’s because of those damn subversives and their failed utopias. They only make things worse, you know that, don’t you. They promise a paradise while creating a hell. They want to take over the world. We are the ones saving it.”

“You can save it on your own. I won’t go back with you.”

“Then you will starve to death like those men in that camp a long time ago. You come here expecting us to take you in and then spit in my face. When you’re huddled in some cardboard shelter and you hear the bombs falling from above, I want you to think of me, I want you to remember me during your last breath.”

I will think of you, V thought to himself, but it won’t be during my last breath.

The hearing was the next day. It was quick. There was a judge and many other inmates. Some of the inmates were sentenced to the workhouse. Some were sent to the maximum security prison in Longmountain and some were scheduled to be deported. V was scheduled to be deported.

He was put in a van with six other men the next morning. The van had no windows so V and the six others, all in chains, sat in complete darkness as the van drove for hours. It seemed like hours to V, it seemed longer than his walks through the capital city of Vitesia, than his walks through the desert.

The van stopped. The back doors were unlocked and opened flooding the compartment with sunlight. The seven men were blinded by the sunlight. Before their eyes could focus, they were unchained and pushed outside several meters away from the van and to the ground. V’s vision returned. He looked out. In front of him was desert, only desert. Two of the guards stood near the van with shotguns, a third guard unlocked the cuffs that connected the wrists of the seven men.

“Where are we supposed to go?” One of the seven asked.

“Don’t care.” The third guard said. “As long as you don’t try to go back to Vitesia, we don’t care. If you approach our border, you will be shot on sight.” The third guard was now standing next to the other two guards who were still holding their shotguns.

The three guards broke, running for the van and locking the door before any of the seven could do anything. The van started up and began the drive back to Vitesia. The eyes of the seven followed it as it drove away. Their eyes looked beyond that van to the green hills far off in the distance. They could see a tall electrified fence on the edge of the horizon in front of those green hills. There was no going to back to Vitesia. There was only going forward into the desert.

The seven men looked at each other, bewildered, confused. They had been deported to nowhere. A tall man with red eyes was the first to speak. He spoke in broken Vitesian. “We should go that way.” He pointed to a distant valley that was beyond all sight, the Avaris Valley, the valley that was on the other side of the Aten Desert, the valley that led to Damasia. V knew that and maybe the red-eyed man did as well and that was why he suggested it.

One of the other men, the one dressed in Flennish clothes turned to the man next to him and asked a question in Flennish. That man turned back to him and answered in Agrappan. V understood what they were saying. It wasn’t clear any of the others did. Soon an intense conversation broke out between the two men. They were having a debate. Finally, they made a decision, the man in Flennish clothes turned to the group. “We should go in that direction.” He pointed in the opposite direction, the way to the Kingdom of Lyonesse.

“No,” a long-haired man who was standing next to the red-eyed man said emphatically. “That way is too far. We will never survive the journey. We must go this way, towards Damasia, it is the shortest route to civilization.”

“Damasia isn’t civilization,” a green-eyed man standing next to a brown-eyed man said derisively. His friend, who was leaning on him because there was something wrong with his leg, nodded, even though it wasn’t clear he understood what had just been said. V suspected he would have nodded enthusiastically to anything his friend said. “We must go to the kingdom. Even if we survive the journey to Damasia, we will wish we were dead once we are there.”

“That is ridiculous,” the red-eyed man excitedly disagreed, a loud argument broke out amongst the six men with no one listening to each other and two of the six speaking in entirely different languages than the rest of the group.

V stayed silent, staring at the horizon despairingly. The desert was familiar to him, more familiar than it was for the other six. V was trying to decide if that desert was an old friend greeting him once again or a nemesis that kept appearing at an alarmingly familiar rate.

The voice of the man dressed in Flennish clothes rose above the others. “I agree,” he said. “I agree.” If Damasia is closest then we must journey there. He and his friend were now siding with red-eye and long-hair. Green-eyes and his hobbled friend were the holdouts, insisting that Damasia was death of another kind. He turned to V, “what do you think?”

“I have been to Damasia. I will go to Lyonesse with you.”

Green-eye’s chest puffed a little as he turned back to red-eye and long hair. “This man agrees with me. We will head in this direction no matter what you do.”

“And we will head in this direction no matter what you do,” red-eye responded. “You should be careful, my friend, hell awaits the man who tries to make the journey you are going to try. You will not succeed.”

“I would rather die on my way to Lyonesse than live in Damasia. Hell awaits the man who makes it alive to Damasia.”

“So be it.”

“So be it.”

The group of seven broke up hastily, with no goodbyes or good wishes. Red-eye, long-hair and their friends headed for the Avaris Valley. Green-eyes, his wounded friend and V went in the other direction, hoping to reach Lyonesse. There was only sand in either direction, the Aten stretching as far as the eye can see.

“It’s a trick,” green-eyes said after they were out of earshot of the other group. “That valley is a trick. You might be able to get close enough to see it, but you will not be able to reach it. The Aten is too unforgiving.”

V nodded agreeing with him even though he had made it through the Aten once to that valley. He had no desire to try his luck again.

Next Chapter: Chapter Fifteen
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