Revolution Calling

[i][b]Chapter I

The Plunge[/i][/b]

New York City. Night.

Dominic Olentz wraps a cloth bandanna around his arm tighly, feeling the vein in his bicep give a satisfying twitch as he watches it pop out from under his skin. Carefully, holding the ends of the bandanna together in one hand, he removes the syringe from between his teeth and pulls back on the plunger, smiling as the golden-hued liquid rises to the top of the plastic chamber and levels off at the eight millimeter mark.

Looking closely for air bubbles, Dominic taps the side of the syringe, causing a stream of liquid heroin to shoot out from the top of the needle and rain down on the fashionable shag rug at his feet. He’s done this a hundred times before, and still hasn’t gotten over that little jolt of excitement one feels as he watches the juice spill over the side of the syringe. It isn’t sanitary, he reminds himself, but flair - pizzazz - is everything to him. And, who knows? Any number of his dead friend might be watching him, waiting for him to slip up and fill it just a little too far, waiting to welcome him to their world. If he’s going to die, he might as well go out with style and impress his ghostly friends.

Dominic presses the steel tip of the needle to his vein and closes his eyes. It feels like the handshake of an old acquaintance - but not an old one. He met with this fellow not twelve hours before. No, not old by any means, and not long forgotten. Heroin had been his constant companion since the days at St. Francis of Assisi’s in Rockford. And oh, what a good friend it was.

His thumb moves to the plunger. It was always hard to do, he knew. Dominic wasn’t one for pain, not at all; his fear of it was the only character weakness he’d ever admit to. Yet, in its own way, it wasn’t a weakness at all - how many had he known who felt no pain and took risks because of it? Dominic was no risk-taker. And Dominic was alive.

Half-conscious now, his finger buries the plunger into the neck of the syringe, and the cold sensation of steel is replaced in his vein by the glowing liquid warmth of the juice as it begins his journey throughout his circulatory system. In less than five minutes the liquid will have made its fateful pilgrimage from his bloodstream to his brain, inducing a euphoric state which Dominic thinks must feel something like dying. A minute after that the world will have ended and all that will remain is feeling, hot feeling.

It’s just like heaven, Dominic realizes with a start as the drug begins to spiral through his body.


Through the mists of his heroin-induced stupor, Dominic can see the past and the future. He is the Witch of Endor, consulting with the spirits of the dead.

His parents - gone. Swallowed up by the Revolution. Dead or alive, it mattered very little. His last memory of them was one of an auburn-haired woman aged a decade more than natural, chopping a rock into fine white powder on a mirror as hard-booted police broke through the barricaded door of their ramshack and spirited him away.

His wife - gone as well, this one as a result of her employment in the Free Media Outlet . That didn’t matter, either. She had known the danger of questioning the Provisional Government; she’d accepted the risk when she took the job.

The future - dead. There was none for him. He knew his fate: one day he’d walk into work and be stopped at the door, asked by a pleasant-face chap in a white overcoat to submit to a harmless and routine drug screening. He’d bring the little metal plate and ask Dominic to pull out a hair, just a little old hair, and a moment later he’d feel the strong hands of nameless men all over his body as he was dragged away screaming to blessed forgetfulness.

That, too, did not matter. Nothing ever did.


The cold rays of morning light slipped under Dominic’s eyelids like the fingers of a thief under a barred window, stealing his sleep and sending him leaping from his recliner with a howl.

He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a high. Oh, how he hated it! It cost him the better part of his weekly creditary to afford his habit, and he always fell asleep right as he felt himself surge up in his high. He’d remember next time to sleep before shooting up.

Dominic looked groggily about the apartment. Nothing was missing, he’d had no visitors in the night, as so many of his friends had reported to him. They’d come under the cover of darkness to watch, he knew. They’d do nothing, take no action, and simply watch, to get a feel for it. One could quit entirely and still be under surveillance for years; the barkeep of Durham’s had been taken well over a decade after he’d kicked the dragon. It was simply a fact of life, and there was no avoiding it.

He wiped the stale dried remains of sleeptime spittle from his mouth and moved gracelessly over piles of sweat-stiffened clothes to his television set. It was an old set, a black-and-whiter, and the satellite feed went out every time a cloud passed over the receptacle at the top of the apartment complex. Yet it had been for long his only point of contact with the outside world, and he appreciated it - certainly not for the news, which was enitrely scripted, but because it helped him to ward off the encroaching vestiges of solipsism he sometimes felt sneaking in along the highways and biways of his mind.

The television snapped on with a crisp sound, and Dominic made his way into the kitchenary to forage for food. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, couldn’t have eaten, thanks to the junk, and knew he had to nourish himself before attempting it again. And so, rooting about like a truffle-hog in his fridgionaire, he came away with a bottle of chocolate milk and a pre-prepared apple pie for his prize.

He settled back down in front of his television. Nothing of interest was ever on, and yet he made a habit of watching the news-feeds, for entertainment if nothing else. He knew very well the danger of cutting himself off entirely from the world beyond, and already walked along a fine line. Beyond which, he found the comedy of errors that were the news-feeds too entertaining to avoid completely.

He watched a thin, makeup-caked newswoman read hesitantly from her prompt about the Eurasian Conflict, denouncing the spies and saboteurs which were even now, no doubt, lurking about in the Allied States, going to and fro and seeking those whom they might devour. Dominic found the war dreadfully boring and wished she’d move on to tabloid rumors or any of the other innumerable aphrodisiacs the Provisional Government used to keep the population placid and the workers happily inattentive.

Yet it never came. For hours Dominic watched the screen, blank-faced, as a feeling of dull melancholy gradually swept over him. Nothing ever changed - his life, such as it were, would remain as it was, static and immobile, for as long as he lived it. Every morning he’d watch this same mousy woman read off the same war reports, until his hair whitened and his teeth grew yellow and finally he was taken away. There was nothing for him; no love, no life, just the endless procession of moments in their resolute march to infinity.

All this made him incredibly sleepy, and at last he nodded off, his stomach full with the milk and pie, and very nearly dropped off into sleep before a high-pitched whine jolted him back into awareness.

His first thought was that it was an air-raid siren - but it wasn’t. He’d heard that familiar scream many times, and this was far too staccato a sound to have come from any loudspeaker he’d ever heard. Glancing out the window he noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and decided at last that he’d finally gone out of his mind.

And then his attention turned towards the television, and he knew that he hadn’t. For there, instead of the moon-faced newswoman, was the likeness of a creature such as he’d never seen before, certainly not since before the Revolution. Her hair was all aflame, sparkling gilded-red, and her eyes set like green emeralds in her head. Her mouth was arched up in a glistening ruby smile, and Dominic thought that she was the first person he’d seen in a very long time to look truly alive.

He watched her face in rapt attention, noticed that it seem to hover as though it were the dream-face of an ancient goddess against the black, and then saw her lips part to speak. And, in two words, everything else seemed to be transfigured.

The words she spoke were, “No more.”

[i][b]Chapter II

“They Call Her ‘Lady Death’”[/i][/b]

“Who was she?”

That seemed to be the question on everyone’s lips the next morning. Dominic himself had no more than an academic interest in the identity of the red-haired woman - she had hacked into the State’s news-feed program, she was as good as dead already - and yet he seemed to feel strangely impelled towards her nonetheless.

The rest of the last day he had spent thinking about her, after the manner of scorned lovers who want to forget and yet can not. It wasn’t healthy, of that he had no doubt. He had no love for the Provisional Government, but, for all his bad and illegal habits, he could never bring himself to resist it, actively or passively. It was the honor code of the addict: one must never deny his fellow addict his drug of choice, no matter how harmful or horrid it might be.

And so it came as little surprise to Dominic that he resented Martin’s question. Martin himself, a co-worker with whom Dominic rarely fraternized, was tolerable enough, despite his stupidity; it was the question itself which set Dominic ill-at-ease. It reminded him, he thought, of the way he felt about the Missionaries employed by the Government to wage their war on drugs.

“I don’t know,” offered Michael, a rotund character who chatted more than he worked. “A rebel. They’re a dime-a-dozen. She’ll be caught soon. Why, I bet they’re tracing her feed even as we speak. Isn’t that right, Dominic? You know more than I do about how those things work.”

Dominic grunted in agreement and buried himself in his ledger, hoping they’d go away. Talking on the job wasn’t a punishable offense, yet it would certainly attract attention which Dominic would rather avoid. To his luck the pair moved off to a water cooler further down the hall, leaving him in blessed silence to crunch his numbers.

He liked his job. By no means was it simple, yet it did not entail physical labor of any sort, which Dominic believed himself ill-suited for and avoided at any cost. Like all workers under the Provisional Government, he’d been drafted into his job through the use of a semi-random number generator which assigned to each candidate a number based upon their aptitude in school and then matched that number with another in a field representing various possible vocations. He had been lucky, he felt, to have been assigned a task in the State’s Accountant’s office; much luckier than others of his educational rank who had been employed as bookkeepers within the Armed Services. He would have died from withdrawal had he been forced to enlist.

Nevertheless, Dominic felt uncomfortable in his position, as if the eyes of the world looked down upon him unfavorably. He did his best to make himself as nondescript as possible, to hide his nocturnal revelries from curious and potentially traitorous observers, but it sometimes seemed as if it wasn’t enough. Fowl looks in the hallway, sideways glances from a neighboring cubicle - Dominic felt at times as if his co-workers were in on a secret which he was not privy to. It didn’t help that the black glass camera above his cubicle was almost certainly patched into a row of computer monitors at the central Police Precinct, just as every other camera in the city was. The slightest errant move was enough to send a cadre of black-outfitted Party Police parading into the white-walled office building.

Which was coming anyway, he knew. He occasionally imagined simply letting himself go, looking up to the camera and confessing his guilt and allowing himself to be carted away. It certainly would be much easier than the waiting game he was now playing against time.

Dominic shook his head to clear his thoughts and swallowed water from his paper cup. No, not yet. One day they would come, though almost certainly at his apartment - he’d never seen an individual arrested in public, not even in the middle of a crime. But not today.


Lunch was reheated beef roast with gravy.

Dominic took his usual seat at the far left end of the cafeteria, avoiding most while managing not to look conspicuous in his choice of seating. That had been a matter of trial-and-error, and more than once since coming to his job a superior had exchanged words with him about his “insociability”. He had managed at last to learn to concede his desire to be alone at work in favor of his need to continue his drug habit.

But he was not entirely alone. Today, as he sat staring at the tasteless not-meat steaming on the not-yellow tray, a thin, frail man Dominic didn’t recognize approached his table. Looking about sheepishly, like a cat caught in the rain, the man swiftly took a seat several stools away from him.

The man was thin and pale, and looked for all the world to be another junkie. Which, he supposed, was possible; nothing precluded two addicts from being enlisted in the same line of work. Yet he found the thought highly improbable. The man was wearing a sleeveless button-down, and he had none of the tell-tale trackmarks which dotted Dominic’s equally pallid arm.

Nervously the man glanced around before burying himself in his food. It was possible, Dominic thought, that the man had recently been hired on; he was certain he too had seemed much like this stranger when he was first drafted. It would explain why Dominic didn’t recognize him. Yet the man seemed to have a strange feeling about him which set Dominic’s mouth at a slope. A Governmental agent? Unlikely. An informant? That was a possibility.

Just then Dominic realized that he’d finished his meal, and he rose to return his tray to the intake box. Suddenly the man jumped from his seat, glanced at his watch, and exclaimed:

“Oh! Look at the time!”

Then, in a rush of blue-jean and workshirt, he was gone.

Dominic looked around, stunned. While the man’s actions were by no means illegal, or even dangerous, they would almost certainly have attracted attention. Yet nobody seemed to have taken notice of his sudden exodus from the lunchroom, or his mannerly faux pas of leaving his meal uneaten and on the table, which was officially discouraged by higher-level management.

Shaking his head, Dominic put away his tray and returned to the table to gather his things. He’d retrieved his ledger and briefcase when he noticed a piece of paper sticking out from beneath the seat of the man’s stool. Intrigued - and glancing around warily - Dominic retrieved it, pocketing it, and made his way through the line of workers just now coming in and out of the cafeteria.

Cautiously, so as to not arouse suspicion, Dominic walked slowly to the toiletry, taking particular care to appear in no great hurry. He smiled and nodded to acquaintances, feeling heavily the weight of the emptiness behind both his and their smiles and knowing that he must have looked every bit the dead man. Rounding the final corner to the bathroom, he seemed to feel more like a marathon runner coming around the final stretch than a tired and junked-out accountant.

Reaching the toiletry, Dominic pulled open the door and made his way to the stall. He’d been there many times, and knew that, while none were under observation, each were almost certainly bugged with listening devices and smoke detectors. He was grateful, then, that what he was about to do required neither speaking nor smoking.

Locking the stall door behind him, Dominic pulled out the note.

It was a small card, of the sort used by secretaries to keep track of tasks in the hustle of the day. Unlined and pristine, the card was unremarkable. The lettering on it, however, printed neatly in black ballpoint ink, was.

“Revolutionary Plaza, 3:15 tonite. Come through Victory Lane. They call her ‘Lady Death’.”


More to come.

I can actually see Dominic, and that little fella as well. Nice character development in such a short time-frame. You even managed to make the mundane interesting.

…and then?