Log #1420

Nineteen hundred.

I’ve been practically useless around here since Gabrielle spoke to me that day. Even when I want to help I seem to mess up. My mind has started turning to mush. My muscles have started turning to jelly.

Gabrielle didn’t speak to me again. For the first few days Fran left food and water at the door in the underground passage. Whenever I wandered out to use the toilet I kept my head down and tried to avoid everyone. I didn’t want to be seen.

Might have been a week of that, and then late one night Fran came in to talk to me. She skirted around the subject at first, but eventually she came out and asked me if Gabrielle was telling the truth.

I wanted to tell her that I hoped not. But I told her I didn’t know. Then I broke down.

Things seemed to be picking up, if only because Fran stayed to talk with me each time she brought me food. She didn’t mention the baby situation again–she just talked about how things were developing between Stella and Joel, and how Kelvin was really sweet and Wendel was still a “jerk”. She kept me up to date with Ruby’s progress searching the hard drives as best she could, and every now and then she brought me a pen drive of documents that Ruby wanted me to look through.

I started feeling okay. I remember it was a Thursday night, and I was lying there, smiling, after having had a pretty good day – without breaking down and cursing myself – when the noise of a commotion echoed through the underground passage and into mine and Jerry’s room.

I opened the tin box that I’d shut my pistol away in, but it was gone. Turns out Fran had sneaked it out a couple of nights before. She didn’t want me to hurt myself, she said.

With no way to defend myself, I had no choice but to put my hands on my head when Javier told me to. I had no choice but to follow him out onto the main platform and sit down with all the others.

He had four men with him: Ethan, Rohan, Diego and Chad. All of them in overalls, greasy as hell, with worse manners than a baboon. Chad actually looked like a baboon too. He was such an idiot, I’m surprised the others tolerated him. I guess he was easy for them to control though. He’d do anything if he could get his hands dirty in the process.

Joel tried to convince them to just take what they wanted and leave, but Ethan was actually pretty smart. He knew we had a good set up. He knew we had good barriers, fortress points, escape routes. We have electricity and running water. There was no way anyone with half a brain would just take our things and move on.

First thing they did was tell us to empty our pockets. I had nothing in mine, and they didn’t like that, so they took my flak jackets and argued over who should get them. I stood there shaking my head, pitying them. A bunch of young men taking to raping, pillaging and murdering, rather than working together with the few survivors there are left in this hellhole of a country, to get somewhere safe.

At first they bundled us all into the staff room and locked the door, while they went routing through the control room and the rest areas we’d been using as bedrooms. They quickly realised, though, that the only way to get into the supply room was through the staff room, so they moved us into the far rest area – Fran and Gabrielle’s room – and left us there, without food or water, for nearly forty-eight hours.

Joel was full of ideas for us to break out, then sneak back in and take the five raiders by surprise, but nobody had any faith in them. Stella, Fran and I know what happened to Jerry when he went out into the tunnels beyond the barricaded door. Gabrielle obviously wasn’t up for going anywhere, Ruby and Bridget said we had no chance against five armed men, Kelvin was reluctant to agree with them, and Wendel had other ideas entirely.

I sat there, not contributing a thing to the discussion, until eventually Joel got angry with me. He took my silence personally – reckoned I was making some sort of statement against him – because obviously I can’t possibly have my own problems.

That’s the main problem I have with Joel; he only ever thinks about things from his own point of view.

In the end Javier and Ethan came back before we were even close to deciding what to do. They wanted to take Fran and Gabrielle for “questioning” but there was no chance. I stood up to them and was followed by Stella, then Joel. I’d sooner give up my life than stand by and let a bunch of…

You know, I thought they’d kill us for questioning them. I thought they would just shoot us in the head and step over our bodies, to get what they wanted. Why they didn’t, I’ll never know. It would be nice to think that Ethan saw sense – saw that he had to work with us in order to get out – but he probably had something sinister in mind. He was a difficult one to make sense of. He seemed heartless. But there was something stopping him from going all the way. Something held him back.

He turned around and walked away, calling Javier after him.

That night, when everyone else was asleep, Ruby came and sat next to me, saying she had a plan. I asked her to explain, but all she did was put her pen drive in my hand. I sat there looking at it, confused, while she stood up and went down the stairs.

I try to tell myself that it isn’t my fault, but I feel responsible. Whether she broke out or tricked one of them to let her out or what, I don’t know. The next morning, though, Rohan and Diego were dead, and so was Ruby.

Javier, Ethan and Chad were furious, and they came to the rest of us, packed into that small room, wanting to vent their frustrations.

At first they just shouted and lashed out at whoever was closest. Then Joel volunteered me and himself to take whatever punishment they wanted to dish out. So I soon found myself being tortured by Javier. Tortured by the man I’d once left for dead.

By the end of that day I was hanging upside down from the footbridge that crosses from platform one to platform two, with Joel next to me, blabbering on about all these different plans he was thinking up.

I think the only words I said to him were “Joel, give it a rest.” And I don’t think he listened, because I distinctly remember being incredibly annoyed that he wouldn’t shut his damn mouth.

Obviously things got better, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now, writing this. There was a point the next day, though, when I didn’t think we were going to make it. There was a point when our deaths seemed inevitable.

I’ll hopefully write more tomorrow. Time now is twenty-two twenty-seven–time for me to go on guard duty. I’m with Kelvin, same as last night, which is good news. He’s a dreamer, he’s kind, and he has a way with words. Last night when he was telling me about things he remembered from his childhood, I almost felt free. I smiled, for the first time in months.

Which, again, is good news.

– Titouan Denaux