Dec 27 2008
Imperialism, Book One, Chapter Two
“Patton!” yelled Hans, fighting his way through the mob. Johnny watched him shove an Imperial away as he tried to reach his father.
“What, Hans?” shouted his father.
“Patton, we need to fall back. If our plan is going to work, we can’t lose all of the men fighting in the middle of Silverage!”
“Fall back now? Are you crazy? What about the children?”
“We can bring them along or hide them in the houses and return for them later. We need to get to their midship as soon as possible!”
Johnny watched in confusion as his father desperately screamed orders for the re-bels to fall back, for the children to run. His brief period of shock, brought on by seeing multiple men being murdered, was ended abruptly when a child tugged on his shirtsleeve anxiously, asking for help.
“I don’t know,” Johnny told the boy. “Just hide somewhere safe.”
The boy took off running, closely followed by seven or eight other children. They looked to be only about twelve or thirteen, and Johnny watched them go with sad eyes. Their unstained hands had never seen the horrors of the world, and their future was darker than Johnny’s own.
At least they get to stay in Silverage, stay on the land they have helped to cultivate and nurture and grow, stay on the land that is in their hearts.
And then Johnny was running as well, his heart pounding violently in his ear-drums, his breathing short. The muscles in his legs were strained, protesting pointlessly against the excruciating pain exerted through his joints. Every step sent fire coursing up his feet, and he heard a nearby man cry out in pain as the man’s ankle twisted in a small hole in the road. Johnny wanted to stop, wanted to help the man, but he knew that the situation was hopeless. The man would die within seconds, either from the stampede of blue demons or from a sword.
“Where are we going?” gasped the woman next to Johnny, whose long strides were growing shorter by the second.
“Back to the beach,” Johnny replied breathlessly. “To their midship.”
Johnny ran through the streets of Silverage, moving past the sickly houses, past the forgotten lawns, past the land on which he had grown up, the land that belonged to the people but was taken by the Imperials. And he pushed the anger down for the second time in minutes, pushed it back by the icy knot of dread in his stomach, pushed it back by the nauseous feeling that flooded his mind. He held down the anger with the same bonds that held the picture of the bodiless head lying motionless on the ground. Still, the anger pushed against the bonds, and the bonds were weak.
Johnny felt the hard, packed dirt begin to soften beneath his toes, a reversal of the situation before, and he saw the midship now, a massive vessel silhouetted against the darkening sky. It was dusk now, that strange gray zone between pure day and pure night. Long shadows leapt out from their recesses, groping with thin fingers towards Johnny’s soul, and he resisted their allure, their pull.
“There it is!” shouted Hans. “There’s the midship. We’re here! We can do this!”
The strong man’s words sent a message of hope and relief to all of the rebels, and even Johnny felt for the first time that this might actually be possible, that for the first time in history, there would be a successful rebellion against Imperialism. Of course, the hard part of the plan was now: though the ultimate goal was to escape to the mountain range that bordered Silverage to the east, there was a small Imperial blockade in that di-rection, and so the rebels would have to escape on the midship across the large Lake Planelia to the Havali Desert. From there, they could travel to the mountains. Johnny was not exactly sure how the rebels would be able to get inside and pilot the midship, but that was a problem they would have to face when forced to. For now, Johnny knew he had to focus on running, focus on disregarding the painful stitch that had just developed in his side.
