The regime

From the outside the building didn’t look much. The iron had long ago rusted and was as brittle as ice; the brick façade was pitted – not just from the bullet holes that shattered the town centre during the ill-conceived military coup back in 1997, but also from the many stones that had missed the windows (the original targets) and crashed against the brickwork. Since the fire last week, part of the roof had collapsed.

Sara wondered what it was like inside, whether there were still remnants of the occupation: papers, clothing, torture devices. Daniel claimed to have climbed in through the fourth floor window, but at a distance of – it was here that Sara had to approximate – at least thirty-five feet from the ground she very much doubted he was telling the truth.

Her grandfather would have been proud that she’d used the old measurement system to gauge the height of the window and had not taken up with the metric nonsense that had come with the new regime. As much as possible, Sara and her family had resisted.

Until they had come for Joey.

A shiver ran down Sara’s spine whenever she thought of that night, the screams from her mother, the pleading; the shouts of her father, whom they had taken aside and calmly executed with a single bullet to the head. They had dragged Joey, kicking and screaming (the words they used in the newspapers the following day) and she had simply stared. One of the soldiers told her mother to remove her from the scene lest he want some child-flesh to feast upon. He had leered at.

Sara had stuck out her tongue when the soldier wasn’t looking. Well, she thought he wasn’t. She hadn’t counted on him checking himself out in the mirror that hung by the front door, angled so that father could check himself each morning without looking sideways. The soldier had clicked his tongue and turned around slowly.

Somehow the rest of the ordeal was buried deep inside Sara. She shivered again.

Now, the regime had taken over the city, the country, quite possibly the world for all Sara knew. Newspapers were one of the many banned forms of communication.

All Sara knew now was that, if Daniel had climbed up and made his way through the building, she had to follow his route, to find out what she needed to in order to move on. Long ago she had held ideas of overthrowing the regime, of finding a way to destroy it. Now, all she wanted was some peace.

Even that came at a price.

Of course, having her father and Joey back would be best, but deep down Sara knew they were as good as dead. What the regime had done with political prisoner, Sara had little idea, but her imagination played on in her dreams and often she found herself bathed in a cold sweat when she awoke with a start in the middle of the night. Making them dead was easier to accept than them being alive and continually tortured.

Moving around the back of the building, the bullet marks were worse, red dust lay on the grass and the surrounding scrubland was littered with lumps of masonry. Picking her way, as if the floor were mined, Sara crept close to the wall until she found what Daniel had described to her.

She found the next hand and footholds quickly and within seconds she was at the window ledge. Perhaps Daniel had been telling the truth that day in class and he had made it in. She had wanted to ask him more, but his family had moved away during the school holidays. Or so she assumed.

Carefully avoiding the sprinkling of glass on the ledge, Sara lowered herself into the cavernous space that had once housed the King. She found herself standing on a staircase. It led up only a further four feet, at which point it ended in a broken step where at some point a bomb, presumably, had opened up a gash in the stone. The steps down were intact and Sara walked down into the darkness, not sure of what she might find, but hoping that it would be better than that offered by the sunlight that was diminishing the further into the depths she went.