The Day The Sun Fell From The Sky (7 page)

Recovery

I punch Pav in the face and he does not defend himself. I would have landed more punches but Iv has taken hold of my hand and refuses to let go.

“
Pav. Leave. Now.” She tells him.

He turns and exits the morgue without another word.

“He’ll have a smoke and then come back. He always does.” Hash is trying to reassure me.

I’m not entirely sure what came over me. I know that he was not personally involved in any of the torture and abuse that I had suffered at the base. Prior to today, I didn’t even know that
Pav existed as a person. But when I see him, I don’t see Pav. I see army. I see the people who have taken everything from me. I’ve come to see an enemy. We’re not supposed to make enemies. In these difficult times, you need as many friends as you can get.

“
Myc, are you alright?” Iv is concerned because I’ve started crying again.

“Her eyes didn’t close.” I reply.

“Who’s eyes? Who are you talking about?” Iv asks.

“
Lyth. She was the girl that I shot in the prison.” I tell them. “Her eyes never closed after she died.”

“Why were you shooting her?”
Iv is confused. I guess what I’m saying doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

“They force them to shoot their predecessors.” Hash explains for me.

“He said that on purpose. He wanted me to hit him.” I suddenly realize.

“Think about how badly you fe
lt after you shot Lyth. Multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll get somewhere close to what he’s feeling right about now.” Hash tells me gently.

“But he wasn’t part of the killing. He was just a driver.” I reply.

“You probably don’t remember this but he thinks of himself as having been responsible for you being dragged half to death on the way to your selection.” Hash explains.

“I remember now.
Pav was the one who gave us water.” I say as the memory comes back to me.

So
Pav was the truck driver from my selection. It’s amazing how I’d completely forgotten about the one soldier who offered us some kindness in all the craziness that was happening during my capture. If I can remember the ones who hurt me, then I should be able to remember the ones who tried to help (however slight the gesture). But I didn’t.

“You might be able to forgive him for his part in your capture but it will be a long time before he can forgive himself.” Hash tells me gently.

I’ve never considered that. I have met too many Venry who also happen to be psychopaths. I’ve never considered what it would be like for the ones who are a little more sane. I don’t know what it would be like to carry that kind of guilt around. I can’t imagine that it would be very pleasant.

“Can we help him?” I ask them.

“When was the last time you saw yourself?” Iv asks me.

“Do I look that bad?” I realize that I haven’t seen my reflecti
on at all since being moved to Hvin Prison.

“I wouldn’t recommend that you do anytime soon.” She replies.

“The best way that you can help him now is to get yourself better. Because right now, you are a walking reminder of the damage that he’s been part of.” Says Hash.

*_*

Being woken up by your own screams is exhausting and disorientating and you just want to punch someone. Unfortunately for Pav, that someone just happens to be him because he’s the one who has come over to calm me down.

The charts on the wall tell me that I’m not where I think I am. There is
a large map of the country of Hven with towns marked and numbers stuck onto them. Yes, we are counting our dead. The second chart is a vertical timeline of everything that has happened between the Venry and the Knax starting six months ago when the killings began with specific targeted individual killings rather than the mass executions that they have become.

I am in a hidden room behind the morgue that is supposed to be the safest place on earth right now. Supervising my recovery is not Hash or
Iv. It’s Pav.

“
Myc, it’s okay. No one is going to hurt you. It’s over.” He’s telling me.

What he says just reminds me that it’s not over for everyone.  There are still people
, right now, who are suffering like how I was suffering before.

“Sorry I hit you.” I reply, trying to slow my pulse which is beating is way too fast for someone that’s lying down.

“That’s okay.” He smiles. “If it makes you feel better, you can hit me again.”

I look at him properly now.  It doesn’t make any sense. I only see warmth. Where was the hardened soldier? Where was the man who was more than capable of killing someone but chose not to?

“What made you change?” I ask him.

“I didn’t. Change.” His expression sours a little. “I never wanted to kill anybody.”

“Then what made you leave?” I ask him.

“When this campaign is over, no one (and I mean no one) can be allowed to tell what happened. For those of us in the campaign, we either shut our mouths or we meet the same fate as our captives. I don’t plan on keeping my mouth shut.” He smiles.

“Will it end?” I ask him, uncertain.

“Our
neighbours have stopped trading with us so I imagine that eventually they will have to stop this campaign if they don’t want the economy to collapse.” He replies.

“What was the mission for you?” I ask him my journalistic interest piquing. “The guys at the top knew what they wanted the campaign to do. What did you think it was all about?”

“I didn’t. Think.” His voice is angry again – with himself. “You’re not really supposed to think about it. You just do it.”

“So you’re saying all of this craziness is the result of people just not thinking?” I ask him.

No offense to him but I don’t buy it. You have to be aware, however unconscious, that killing a whole bunch of people is just wrong.

“It’s hard to explain.
” He tells me. “And I know we will get no sympathy for it, but when I was in it, it was easier not to think about it. If I had given it any thought, I would have developed insomnia.”

“But you were not against it? I mean getting rid of the
Knax. If you didn’t have to see with your own eyes what was being done to us, you would not have objected to it.” I keep pressing because I am trying to understand.

“If I told you I wasn’t prejudiced against you, I would be lying. But there’s a difference between hoping that someone will go away and actually wanting them dead.” He replies.

“Not that big a difference though. I mean where could we go if everyone wants us to be somewhere else?” I laugh.

“It’s a bit different to what you think it is.” He tries to explain. “You think that it was all planned from the beginning: Alright let’s get rid of these people. But you’ve got to understand that no one can give that kind of order. What’s more, no one can control what people will actually do with that kind of order.”

“So you’re saying that it just got out of control?” I ask him.

“In a way, yes.” He replies. “If I told you that everyone has a killer inside them, would you agree?”

“Yes.” I nod.

“Okay, what stops you from killing?” He asks.

“I don’t want blood on my hands.” I reply.

“That’s one way of looking at it.” He smiles. “We think of death as this majestic thing. That’s why most people don’t know how to deal with it. But when you see too much death. When you strip away everything you’ve been told about death and you see it for what it is, it becomes surprisingly easy to kill.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” I counter. “I’ve killed as well. It doesn’t make me want to shoot everyone I meet.”

“You’re not in a situation where you have to shoot
everyone you meet. And that was just one person that you killed. I’ve killed a lot more.” He confesses.

*_*

Iv and Hash have taken it upon themselves to document the Aurora – the name that Hash has given to this period of our history from my comment about the sun falling out of the sky. When we were in it, there was not enough information. Now that we’ve somehow managed to get ourselves out of it, there is too much information.

Hash and
Pav won’t let me do any “fieldwork” so I spend most of my time working with Iv, sorting through every piece of intelligence that comes our way with regard to the Aurora. We go through newspaper clippings, online articles (downloaded from a nearby internet café), personal artefacts and private correspondences. It’s very different to what you would normally consider to be a recovery operation because we are not trying to recover people or property. We are trying to recover stories and statistics.

“You don’t find this work to be slightly depressing?” I ask
Iv as more deaths are reported in the papers, though with a sick positive twist to them because these deaths are wanted and not something to be grieved about.

“That depends. Would you
prefer not to know?” She smiles kindly.

“I think I would prefer to document it after it’s actually over.” I reply.

“That doesn’t sound like a would-be reporter talking.” She laughs.

“Maybe it’s because I’m too close to it.” I sigh.

“It’s never going to leave you.” She says more seriously. “You are always going to be too close to it. But if we don’t do this, who will?”

“If we ever have children, this isn’t what we
would want them to learn about.” I shake my head. Then I remember that I will never be able to have any children.

“This folder has everyt
hing that I’ve collected about Venry reactions to the Aurora. Some of it might actually surprise you.” She smiles as she hands me a blue folder.

As I flick through the folder,
I come across reports of Venry civilians who have been arrested for helping the Knax in various ways like providing supplies or allowing them to hide at their residence. The most touching report is one about a public demonstration where Venry girls paraded through the main road of Hvin without clothes, recreating what they had seen from our selections in the snow.

“I had no idea.” I smile.

“One of the reporters from Uvana is here and she is the one who has captured most of these stories. She goes for stories that either the Venry media won’t report on or they’re not allowed to report on.” Iv tells me.

“You forget.” I remark
. “When you’re in captivity, you forget about the outside world. You forget that there are people out there who don’t think like that. You forget that there are people who actually don’t want this to happen.”

“I think most people don’t really want this to happen.” She replies. “But they’re scared, Myc. They don’t know if they’re
going to be next. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them if they try to help us.”

I look at the photo of the reporter underneath the article that I am holding. This Uri reporter was fearless. She was not scared to show her face. She was not afraid to put herself in dangerous situations to get to the stories that no one else will write about.

“That’s why we have to let them know.” Says Iv. “We have to tell them the whole story. That there are people out there like you. People who didn’t die. And there are people like Hash and I – who have seen way too many people die. Then there are people like Pav, who has killed way too many people, and now he doesn’t want to kill anymore. We need to let them know that it’s not just about numbers. It’s about people too.”

Rescue

Hash and Pav come running into the morgue carrying an unconscious girl, who is dressed in a medical gown, between them. They are both soaking wet and it’s obvious that it has been raining outside.

“Who’s this?” I ask them.

“Another selected girl.” Iv tells me darkly.

“She’s not…” I don’t believe it. He’s done it again. “Isn’t there a way to rescue someone without killing them first?”

“There are. But this is the most convenient way to rescue someone.” Says the man who had refused to kill me when I asked him to back at the military base.

“Don’t worry.” Says
Pav. “I thought he was nuts at first as well but now I can see why he’s doing it.”

“Cover her.” Hash says to
Iv as he sets the girl down on a mat on the floor of our hidden room.

Iv
covers the girl with multiple sheets while Pav brings over a medical drip. Iv ties a small chord around the girl’s arm just beneath the elbow and Hash delivers the spike of the drip into her vein. The chord is then removed and the bag is attached to the stand. They operate as a team and it’s obvious that this is not the first time they’ve done this together.

“Where did you get all this equipment?” I ask them.

“The hospital won’t miss what they don’t know they had.” Says Pav.

“You don’t feel even a tiny bit guilty that you’re taking supplies away
from other patients?” I remark.

“Oh we got over the guilt of
borrowing
supplies about two days after we settled in here.” Says Hash. “You have to eat. You have to live. But we’re fugitives and we have no income to speak of.”

“We can’t even access our savings because that would be like telling the bank: Hey we’re back, we’ve escaped. You can go tell the government about us now.”
Iv adds.

“And no one’s noticed that anything’s missing?” I ask them with disbelief.

“This hospital is huge. They won’t know until they do an inventory count and even then, the stuff we’re taking is so minor that they might not follow it up.” Hash replies. “Okay, I’ll admit that the medical equipment and the drugs isn’t minor but the food and some of the other supplies –”

“– Like printer cartridges.”
Iv laughs.

“Yes that.” Hash rolls his eyes. “They’re not going to miss them. They have more important things to worry about.”

“You’re not going to give her the stimulant that you gave me?” I ask the good doctor.

“I can’t.” He replies.

“She’s in a worse state than you were when we found you.” Pav tells me. “If we give her too many drugs, it will kill her.”

“She’s going to have to wake up on her own.” Says
Iv.

“Why was this necessary in the first place?” I ask them. I still haven’t completely forgiven Hash for doing that to me.

“It’s easier to rescue someone who’s ‘dead’ than it is to rescue someone who’s alive and conscious.” Iv tells me. “People don’t ask so many questions and they definitely won’t miss a corpse that’s being moved as much as they will miss a live person.”

“Was there another
Zeb involved this time?” I ask them.

“Let me stress this one last time.
Zeb
wanted
to stay back. We did not force him to.” Hash is irritated. “As long as they still think that he is a common Venry criminal, they will have to follow due process. And due process means that they cannot kill him in prison even if they wanted to.”

“But they could give him the death penalty.” I reply.

“That would only happen if there is a death to report. In case you haven’t noticed, they are not recording what happens to the Knax who are under their control.” Hash is being sarcastic again. I’ve not seen him this agitated before.

“He would have fared a lot better with us.” I mutter.

“He can do more for the girls in that prison.” Pav tells me gently. “These rescue operations are not easy. There are too many people to rescue and we can only move one person at a time. We need people like Zeb in the institutions that we are having to break into.”

“I’m going out. I’ll come back.” Hash gets up to leave the morgue. “Keep her warm.” He gestures to our patient.

I stare at his retreating back, speechless.

“He’s always like that whenever we save someone.”
Iv tells me.

“It depresses him.”
Pav agrees.

“Why?” I ask them.

“Because he knows that for every girl we rescue, there are at least five others who are dying somewhere.” Pav explains.

*_*

The others are all out doing stuff for the “resistance” so I stay back with the girl who was saved today. It’s hard to believe that someone could be in a worse state than I was but then I remember Lyth, who had become an empty shell, and Heth, who didn’t survive her operation back at the base. I should be grateful that I did make it but I can’t say that I am. Right now, I don’t know what to feel.

Caring for the girl has made it a lot easier for me. I don’t have to think about the things that I don’t want to think about. This isn’t like how medical care conventionally works. There are no monitors that she’s hooked to. There are no drugs being pumped into her system that will “get her better”
(though she does have the same white paste on her injuries as was put on me back at the army base). Her breathing is so shallow that you have to put your finger under her nose to make sure that she’s still breathing and all she’s getting from the drip is saline.

This whole revival thing is completely up to her. We can’t tell if she will wake up at all. We don’t know how long she’s going to be out for and we can’t have too many girls down here so it’s really a race against time whether she does wake up. The others are still trying to rescue so
meone once every couple of days (apparently, Pav is actually very good at grand theft auto so they can use a different vehicle for each rescue). If one of the girls that we save has no hope, then Hash will be forced to do the thing that he hates the most in the world – help her to die. I keep trying to remind him that if he didn’t put them in the in-between in the first place, they might actually make it but he just shakes his head.

Iv
is the one who explains it to me when she comes back from her errand.

“By killing them when they go to rescue them, they are actually protecting us.” She tells me. “They are protecting this whole resistance. Also, they make it so that the people running these “programs”
can see that the girls are dead before they take them. That way if the girl survives, she knows that they are not going to try to find her.”

“He didn’t do that with me.” I recall. I was moved before anyone saw me. That was why
Zeb had to fake my cremation.

“Your rescue w
as different.” Iv shakes her head. “It was personal.”

My rescue was much riskier than any of the other r
escues that they had performed. They didn’t wait until I was in such a bad state that they couldn’t give me the stimulant to wake me up. They got me out when I was relatively “healthy”. They didn’t let the guards see me dead first before they moved me. They also didn’t leave anyone back at “headquarters”. They had gambled their entire resistance on my rescue.

“Are there other groups out there who are do
ing what we’re doing?” I change the topic because I don’t want to think about how close my friends had come to getting themselves killed for me.

“There probably are but we don’t know about them. It’s not like we’re advertising our rescues either. There are lots of resistance-like groups but they all do different things. There is a group that provides financial assistance to
Knax who are on the run. There is another group that tracks survivors and tries to reunite them with their families.” She explains.

“I think he should take a break.” I
remark.

“Who? Hash?” She laughs. “Ours is the smallest resistance in terms of size and he wants to keep it that way because he thinks that the bigger you are, the more likely you will be found.”

“He’s not a machine though.” I reply. “I don’t think he sleeps anymore.”

“It’s difficult for him to admit when he needs help.” She tells me. “
Pav understands some of what Hash feels but he doesn’t understand all of it. When Pav agreed not to shoot us, one of the first things that Hash did was to promise me that neither of us will ever be in a position where we can be used by the army again. He takes our survival very seriously.”

“But it shouldn’t be
his
job.” I exclaim. “We’re all in this together.”

“No operation can
be run without a leader.” She shakes her head. “We might not call him “Sir” or “Boss” but the reality is that he is our leader. He was the one who came up with the idea for these rescue operations and he feels a strong sense of failure when something goes wrong.”

“How do we make him see that he’s not alone?” I ask her.

“He’s not when you’re here.” She tells me.

Did she just imply what I think she’s implying? I decide to push that thought to the back of my head. If there was something to be said then Hash should be the one to say it.

“She’s coming around.” I go to our patient and I squeeze her hand.

“Where?” She gasps as she comes to.

“You’re safe now.” Iv smiles at the girl.

“How?” She stares at us as she’s never seen either of us before in her life.

“You probably don’t want to know all the details but we got you out.” I tell her. “They can’t hurt you here.”

“Who are you?” She asks us, some comprehension showing on her face.

“I’m Myc and this is Iv.” I point to myself and Iv.

“I’m Zara.” She says
.

“Do you want to tell us what happened?” I ask her.

“I don’t think you want to know.” She replies.

“I do know.” I pull up my top and show her a faded burn mark on
the side of my torso – this one was not sustained at the base but inside the prison by one of the inmates that I had to accompany. It’s almost completely healed over but still very obvious as a marker of trauma. “At least, I know some of it. But I don’t know all of it. You can tell me what you know.”