Chapter 8: Mark of the Beast by Stephen Simpson

 

It had been a week since Bill died. The house was quiet, and feelings of desolation and loneliness bounced off the walls and crept into dark and dank cracks where it would fester and grow so large that in the end it would be difficult to get rid of it all – unless she burned it all to the ground. Cynthia had gone up to her bedroom, seven days ago, and went to bed. She had not yet had the courage to get out of bed again.

Lydia sat in the lounge with her feet on the coffee table in the middle of the room, scrolling through her newsfeed. It was crazy how the world seemed to be a different place since last year Christmas. Buildings were burning, and because of the lawlessness there was a curfew. Nobody was allowed on the streets after dark. Her newsfeed was full of images of empty shelves in the grocery stores. Even the large retail chains. People had bought everything, and if it was not bought then people had looted the rest. The economy was crashing. People were not going to work because they were either too scared to or they had not yet received their barcode. Nobody without a barcode was allowed to work. The government did not implement their plan in a slow, deceitful way. They came down hard. It was as if the leaders of Rheta did not care what the common folk wanted anymore. It was martial law; the governments of Rheta had suspended ordinary law. They were making promises that everything would go back to normal, the new normal, once every single person had received their barcode, but Lydia could not see that ever happening. This was already the new normal.

She heard the floorboards above her creak and realised that she felt so alone since her dad had died. Later today they would bury him, but she did not know how she was going to get her mum to go. She had never had to take responsibility for anything. At seventeen her mum and dad still did everything for her. They helped her to fill out forms that needed to be completed for Uni, for her provisional license, for her passport. They helped her with everything. What was she supposed to do now? Her dad was dead, and her mum was a walking shadow.

They did not have to go and identify her dad at the mortuary, and even though this would be her first funeral, Lydia thought that was what people had to do. What if her dad was not even dead? What if he died from getting the barcode and the government was hiding it from them? She wondered if she would be allowed to see him as he lay in his casket at the funeral home before the funeral.

On her newsfeed, she read that hundreds of thousands of people were getting the barcode every day. When she clicked on the government website there was a number in a green block indicating how many people were already barcoded and next to it a number in a red block for those who were yet to get the barcode. Every day the number in the red block got smaller, and the number in the green box got bigger.

She could not help thinking about the dream she had last night. There was a big lake of fire, and it had looked almost but not quite like the images she had seen of active volcanoes with red hot lava bubbling on its surface. A horned creature was thrown into this ocean of fire together with everyone who had received the mark. Lydia remembered wondering in her dream if the barcode was the same as the mark of the beast.

Then her dream shifted and there was a bright, white light all around her and crowds of people from all over Rheta, from every nationality, who did not have the barcode on their foreheads. She saw a great white throne and a figure sat upon it. Many great books were opened, and the corners of the pages fluttered at the wind caused by flipping the cover over. The air was filled with the rustling of paper rubbing against paper. On each book’s cover, Lydia saw the words Book of Life in large goldleaf. The bright surrounding light glinted off the gold. She understood then that each one of them had a book with their life story and that every little thing they had ever done was recorded in this book. She wondered what the figure on the throne would think when they started paging through her book. Then the crowd of people were divided, and some were sent to stand on the right side of the throne while others were sent to stand on the left. When it was her turn to be shown on which side she had to stand, she woke up.

She shook her head, trying to forget the strange dream, and turned her attention back to her phone. There were more creaks upstairs and she assumed her mum was getting ready so that they could go to the funeral home. Just as she read on her newsfeed that the army had been deployed to go door to door to make sure that those people who had not yet had their barcode was escorted to the barcoding centres, there was a loud knock at the door.

Maybe it was intuition, but the knock did not sound like a normal knock. It was loud and intrusive, and it sounded like a warning. Lydia felt a wave of panic rush through her entire body, from her head straight down to her little toe. Her phone fell on the floor as she jumped up from the couch. She did not bend down to pick it up as she ran across the room to the glass sliding doors on the opposite side of the room. She unlocked and pulled the door open hard. She had the foresight to pull the sliding door shut before she ran through the rain, across the grass of their back garden to the shed in the back of the yard. She quickly slipped between the fence and the back of the shed. Her heart was beating so fast, she could hear it thumping in her ears.

By the time it was dark, and the streetlights started coming on, she was drenched through to her skin. Only then was she brave enough to sneak a peek from behind the shed. Her whole body shivered from the cold, and her nose felt clogged. She breathed through her mouth and was desperate to get hold of some tissue paper so that she could blow her nose. The curtains in front of the sliding door were still pulled open and she could see all the way to the front door. The house was dark. Slowly she crept across the wet grass, and her socks felt heavy from being soaked by standing in the rain for a good few hours.

As quietly as she could she pulled the sliding door open and closed it again behind her. She stood still, listening if she could hear any noises. She dared not put the lights on and felt her way across the room. She walked up the stairs slowly, keeping her back against the wall. Upstairs, she walked across the hallway making sure, or trying hard, not to walk on the spots where she knew the floorboards creaked the loudest. She whispered, “Mum?”

There was no reply.

She retraced her footsteps until she was downstairs again.

“Lydia?” Someone hiss whispered.

Her heart stuttered in her chest, and she turned quickly to face the front door.

Liam was standing just inside the entrance. “We need to go,” he said softly. “Right now.”

Lydia said quietly, “I haven’t packed.”

“I’ve already packed us each a backpack.”

“You did?”

“Yes, last week when I was telling you about living off-grid. I thought it’ll be better to have it, rather than need it.”

She fetched her shoes from the kitchen where she left them this morning and sat down on the bottom step of the staircase to put them on. “I have to get my phone,” she remembered.

“No. Leave your phone.”

Lydia was already halfway down the hallway on her way to the lounge. She saw the phone only because there was a tiny red light blinking on and off. She picked up the phone and slid her finger across the screen to open the message.

Her mum had sent her a warning, and the message said: Run.

When Lydia followed Liam out the door, she thought it was eerie how quiet the streets were. There was no noise. No tyres whirring on asphalt. No voices or loud TV sounds. It was as if someone had pressed the mute button.

Liam crouched over as he ran from the front door to the road in front of the house, and quickly ducked behind a large Holly bush.

Lydia copied him. She fell down on her knees beside him and was immediately thankful for the wet squishy mud beneath her. She whispered, scared that her voice would echo too loudly in the silence, “What about your mum and dad? Is Jodie back yet?”

He leaned closer, and said softly next to her ear, “My mum and dad got the barcode, and I haven’t seen Jodie since the day he left to join the army.”

His breath had blown some of her hair in front of her face, and she wiped it away before she asked, “Where are we going?”

“I was thinking we could follow the river to the coast. It’s mostly rural that way, and we don’t have to follow the road but even if we did, we wouldn’t have to go through any villages and, also, there’s no big cities in that direction. Once we’re there we could see if we can get a boat to go further up north.”

“It looks safe this way.” Lydia looked in the direction where she thought they should go. A few houses up from where they were there was only farmland.

He shook his head. “It’s too open.”

“But going your way, we have to go through the village.”

“I’ve timed the patrol car. It only comes every hour, so we’ll hide then. Also, because of the curfew, the patrol car is the only vehicle on the road, so we’ll see it coming a mile away and we’ll have enough time to find a hiding place.”

Lydia agreed, “Okay. Let’s go.”

They stood up and started walking in the direction of the village square. At first, they had to walk really fast. The houses to the left side of them had hardly any gardens, and if they did there were no large bushes to hide behind. To the right of them, across the road, there was a high stone wall.

Luckily, nobody seemed to be home. Every single house they passed by was dark. Either the residents were hiding, or they had all been barcoded. Lydia wondered whether the barcode was killing everyone. She felt a pang of sadness for her dad, and right after that an even bigger pang of worry for her mum.

Lydia was startled by a tiny beeping noise.

“It’s just my timer,” Liam told her. “I set it to go off every hour which means the patrol car will coming down this road in the next ten minutes. We need to find a hiding place.” By now there were houses on both sides of the road, and there was a house, two houses down, on the opposite side of the street, with a large tree and a neatly trimmed hedge. “We’ll have to run fast,” Liam urged.

They ran across the road and then climbed over the low stone wall. As they hunkered down behind the large hedge, the night sky began to brighten. The sound of the patrol car’s engine was loud in the quiet as it came driving down the road.

Lydia leaned closer to Liam. “Where have all the people gone?”

Liam shrugged, keeping his eyes on the approaching vehicle. He squinted his eyes at the brightness of the car’s headlights.

They waited in silence until they could not hear the roar of the engine anymore before they climbed over the wall and started walking again.

When they turned onto the road, leading away from the village, Lydia said softly, “I have to go get my mum first. I cannot leave without her.”

Liam said, “No, we can’t. We’ll get away, hide, and then figure out a way to get fake barcodes. Then, we can come back and get your mum and my parents. If we stay now, then they’ll get us.”

Five minutes down the road, they saw the night sky brighten ahead of them. Liam grabbed her by the arm. “Quickly. In here.” They ran up a grassy driveway of a big house with an overgrown garden, and quickly hid between the large shrubs. “There must be a different patrol car driving this road. I’ll have to change the timer on my phone.”

After the patrol car had completed its slow drive by, Liam took a couple of seconds to change the timer on his phone. “I’m only guessing that this one comes every hour. We’ll have to be careful.”

The road was very twisty and there were a lot of curves, but that would make it easier for them to see the headlights of an approaching vehicle and it would give them time to hide. When they reached the village graveyard, they ran as fast as they could to the next bushy hedgerows, because there was not a lot of places to hide.

A sadness filled Lydia when she considered that her dad was buried somewhere in that same graveyard. He was buried today but nobody was at the funeral.

Once they left the village, the road they were walking on was very rural and there was farmland on both sides. They felt exposed walking out in the open but luckily there were a lot of hedges along the road, and when there was a gap in the windbreaks, they ran fast until they had a quick place to hide again.

After walking for a little more than an hour, they turned left at a dead end and came upon a dilapidated house just outside a village called Tyning. “The next patrol car is due any second now, that is if this road is on the same time schedule as the previous one. We should take a break here,” he said as he turned to walk up the driveway.

Lydia followed. She was too exhausted to talk.

Liam went into the building first and then decided that it would probably be better to make camp at the back of the building under a large tree.

She pushed the straps of her backpack off her shoulders, and it dropped on the ground. She was too tired to be bothered.

He pulled two sleeping bags from the two backpacks and laid them down next to each other. “Are you tired?” he asked.

Lydia nodded. “But I doubt I’ll ever sleep again. I just want to sit for a bit.”

They sat down on the sleeping bags, and he started to dig around in his backpack. He pulled out two snack bars and handed one to Lydia.

Lydia smiled. “You’re so awesome. I’m starving right now.”

Liam returned her smile. “Told you I’ll be good at survival.”

They both ducked down instinctively when the shadows between the leaves of the tree above their heads were infused with light.

Lydia blew a long breath of air over her bottom lip after the vehicle continued to drive away from them, throwing a large triangle of light up into the air. She pulled the wrapper from her snack bar and took a big bite. The crunch of the nuts and cereal between her teeth sounded exceptionally loud in the stillness around them. After she swallowed, she said, “I had the strangest dream last night. I’ve tried to forget it, but it’s stuck.”

He looked at her sideways. “What was it about?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

He laughed a soft laugh. “I already think you’re crazy.”

She looked at him for a long while and then she told him. Usually there were some dreams she could remember in small fragments, but this dream was still vivid, and she remembered every detail even though it felt as if it happened a lifetime ago. When she finished telling him, she added, “Now, this is the really weird part. That light I dreamt about, it’s still in me. I cannot explain it, but I feel as if there is this bright spot in the centre of my chest.”

Liam leaned forward and looked at her chest. He smiled. “I can’t see it.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand!”

He sat back. “I’m only joking, and, besides, it was only a dream. Dreams are just what they are. Dreams. Some people think they can predict their futures or that dreams have special meanings, but they don’t.”

She bit her bottom lip, then said, “I didn’t say it has any special meaning. All I’m saying is that if feels as if that light came with me when I woke up. I know it sounds bonkers, but that’s how I feel, and you’re just being mean.”

He laughed softly. “I am genuinely just joking. I’m sure the feeling will go away and it’s probably because it was such a strange dream that you’re still thinking about it. In the meantime, though, we should drape the sleeping bag over you so that we don’t attract unnecessary attention with that torch in your chest.”

She huffed. “You’re such an ass.”

He started getting up. “We better get going. It would be easier to get around while it’s still dark.”

She lifted herself up off the ground. Her feet felt swollen. When she pulled her trainers on earlier, she didn’t change her wet socks. Not good.

In silence, thinking about the long walk ahead, they bundled the sleeping bags into their backpacks and followed the dirt driveway back to the road.

As they rounded the large windbreakers, a dark figure moved ahead of them.

Continue reading Chapter 9/17

Copyright © Stephen Simpson. All Rights Reserved.
All work created and posted on this blog is the intellectual property of Stephen Simpson.