Chasing Imagination

Amy

It was in a moment of madness that I had agreed to accompany Casper on his little mission, and now I might end up regretting this decision forevermore. I had already been to the Vaults; I knew some of the risks and some of the excitement that came with being a Dreamer, but this was different. We were going out in public—the trains ran until past midnight, and even after that they were going once every half an hour or so, and it was likely that there would be cleaners at the station. I had no idea whether Casper had thought about that, but I sincerely hoped he had. What would he do if he came across someone? Shoot them? I wasn’t sure I could bear to stay with him after I saw him do that.

But then what would happen to me? If I saw something so atrocious like the merciless shooting of an innocent civilian, all reason would leave my mind, and I would run. I would try to escape, and the six of them would catch me in an instant. And then what? What would happen to me?

I felt my heart rate increasing with every step. Just imagine: I could be at home, sitting in the little living room of my student house, watching the news or perhaps one of the entertainment programmes on TV—the game shows; the quizzes; the sport programmes. Whatever happened to be on at this time on whatever day it was.

But no, I was stuck here, risking my life for the second time in three days for something that I didn’t really believe in. And yet I was so ready to give up. I had never been in a situation anything like this before, but I had never thought I would be a person who gave up easily. And yet I had. I hadn’t tried to get away, I hadn’t screamed and fought and struggled, and I’d even agreed to go to the Vaults and come along tonight.

So what did that mean? Did that mean that I was just a weak person? Or did it mean that maybe, somewhere deep down, in that dark realm known as imagination that I had scarcely scratched the surface of yet, and was still far away from utilising and controlling, that I actually wanted to be here?

One thing was for certain: imagination was insane.

I followed Casper round a sharp bend in the tunnel. He expertly brushed his gun with his fingertips before going round, carefully peering around the wall just to make sure that he wasn’t about to walk into a trap. Did he do that every time he turned a corner? How could you? To live your entire life in fear; to base everything you do around what might lie around the corner; how could you go on like that?

‘Come on,’ he hissed behind him, and as I looked round I could see how we’d all spread ourselves out down the tunnel. He was about ten metres ahead of the back people—Felix standing at the extreme rear, with Kira and Wolfie only a little further ahead of him. ‘Every moment we waste might be a moment less we get to ourselves.’

As if what he said was some paranormal spell—yes, I had learnt from the Harry Potter book what a spell was—Leah began to propel herself forward, standing at my side even though the flame in her eyes told me she didn’t want to be there, only too eager to get there as quickly as she possibly could. As much as everyone seemed to dislike Leah, her passion motivated the rest of them, who all quickened their pace to appear close behind us.
Other than the occasional order from Casper, though, we were silent. We hurried through endless underground tunnels; all so similar, either tiled or concrete, and always so dimly lit, if they were even lit at all. I began to wonder whether we would ever make it to our destination, and that made me inadvertently think about what would happen if we were lost, which began to scare me—imagination was dangerous sometimes.

But then we rounded another corner, Casper cautiously peering round first before ushering the rest of us round, and then I saw steps up ahead, and what looked like a billboard further through the archways leading to the exit, round the corner. The station was small and, like everywhere else, dimly lit. As we hurried towards it, the railway track came into view, leading in both directions into the black abyss of the train tunnels.

There were a couple of large advertisement boards—something about mortgage and something about energy drinks, though I didn’t exactly take time to check them—and a tiny kiosk selling sandwiches just through the arches that led to the exit, a little way off the platform edge, but everything else was deserted. Litter danced about in the breeze coming down the staircase from outside, food wrappers and newspaper pages all curled around each other in a silent waltz. It never stayed in the bins for very long, especially not when they were bulging to the brim with rubbish as they were now.

As a newspaper page twirled past Casper, flipping over itself and slowing down as the breeze faded away, he stamped his foot down on it to stop it from getting away. My heart jolted as the sound of his foot resounded through the noiseless station, expecting policemen and government workers to come crashing down on us from all sides, but nothing stirred.

Meanwhile, Leah took some spray paint from her large shoulder bag, and skipped, happier than I had ever seen her, over to the large expanse of tiled wall between the two billboards. Jay and Wolfie followed eagerly, and I saw Felix kick a squashed soft drinks can onto the train tracks—it rattled across the ground, what little, dark liquid that remained in it dripping out, before clattering down the cliff edge where the platform ended.

I watched Casper pick up the newspaper page. He seemed to know what he was looking for—he had picked up the front page of the Daily Mail, scanning through the headlines.

‘Go crazy,’ he said, glancing up at me. I wavered on the spot, watching Leah spraying red paint across the first billboard. I was intrigued as to the symbol she was creating, but I still kept half an eye on Casper.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘It’s always a good idea to keep a check on the news,’ he said. ‘The biggest stories will be on the front pages of papers, so they’re always the best ones to get, but if you see any recent papers at all, I advise you look at it.’

‘Anything about Dreamers?’ I prompted.

He shook his thick, black hair. ‘No, that’s always the first thing I look for though. Doesn’t seem to be much we need to know here anyway—been some flooding up north, and a new law on taxes is being brought in, but neither of them affect us. Still, it’s good to know.’

I nodded, saying nothing, wandering over to Leah, who was just finishing a simple yet strange picture of what could only be described as a sort of diamond-shaped eye. I felt I had seen it before, but I didn’t know where.

‘What’s that?’ I asked. Wolfie, standing beside her, who was more likely to give me a respectable answer, stopped spraying a black outline of what could only be the word ‘Dreamer’ on the wall and turned round.

‘It’s our logo,’ he said casually, as though I should have known that. ‘It’s for the Dreamers—the eye.’

‘The eye?’ I echoed as a question, proud that my vague description of it had been accurate.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘An eye: eyes; the windows to the soul.’

‘Huh?’

He laughed, a little patronising, but not with any mean intentions.

‘Have you never heard that quote: eyes are the windows to the soul?’ he asked, as though it was an outrage.

‘Sorry, no.’

‘Give over, Wolfie, she’s only been here a few days,’ said Casper, moving over and at my side before I noticed him. Wolfie laughed, and a smile brushed Casper’s face—they were only joking about with each other.

‘Yuh, I know,’ Wolfie said casually. ‘But I’d heard of it before I joined you lot—I just wondered if she had too.’

‘They don’t like us to believe we have souls anymore,’ I murmured darkly. I was only joining in the conversation, but I felt I was already dragging it down into a more serious place, and I wouldn’t be surprised if both Casper and Wolfie could detect resentment in my voice. ‘It doesn’t fit in with their ‘no imagination’ plans.’

‘Bastards,’ Wolfie muttered, turning away, and continuing to do a large, 3D outline of his A in ‘Dreamer.’ ‘Soulless bastards.’

Casper gave me an apologetic sigh. ‘Anyway, what Wolfie was trying to say is that it is, or was, a well-known phrase. And anyway, eyes can represent being open-minded, seeing the bigger picture, seeing that there’s more to life, and I guess indirectly they can symbolise dreams and imagination too.’

‘Right,’ I said half-heartedly, not really understanding all these ‘symbols’ and ‘representations.’ That was all stuff from when imagination reigned freely, and I had not lived during that ‘golden’ age.

I jerked round suddenly as I heard a large banging sound coming from the far end of the platform, my heart leaping out of my chest, instinctively expecting to see armed men running in, surrounding us.

But of course I was wrong. It was just my fear and my paranoia—the Dreamers were careful, and they knew it was my first time. We were only raiding a small, deserted underground station after all—I imagined much harder things happened. We’d already been to Vault 14, but I sensed that must be without a doubt the easiest Vault to get into. The rest would be a lot trickier; I knew that much for certain.

In fact, what I turned to see was Felix, Kira and Jay in a combined effort, managing to rip the sign from above the kiosk that sat in the walkway through the arches, in between this platform and the other one that was part of another line. 'Sid’s Sandwiches' now sat, one end in Felix’s hand, the other on the floor.

Casper smirked. ‘Good work guys.’

‘I ain’t finished there!’ said Felix, sounding almost offended that Casper could have thought such things, and kicking the kiosk as if to prove a point.

‘There isn’t a lot to do down here,’ Kira whined, watching Felix climb over the locked entrance into the kiosk and smash through the glass of one of the cabinets down below the counter with the butt of his gun. I moved closer, watching in intrigue and fear as he took out handfuls of plastic and glass bottles, chucking them out from behind the counter and aiming well—all except one either landed or rolled onto the tracks, most of the glass ones shattering. I cringed at every single crashing noise, expecting something dreadful to happen after each one, but of course nothing did.

After that, he started on the peanuts and crisps, ripping open packets and scattering them across the floor. Jay took a handful and scattered them across the tracks, whilst Kira moved towards Wolfie and Leah, now putting the finishing touches to their graffiti. Wolfie had finished his black outlines and was colouring them in with dark blue spray paints, the dark blue word DREAMERS emblazoned across the wall in large capital letters.
Leah jumped lithely down onto the train tracks, moving to the large, empty far wall and beginning to spray large, messy scribbles in bright red paint. She looked deadly serious as she did it, but just one glimpse of the light in her eyes showed how happy she was to be doing this.

In fact, everyone looked happy. Felix was fast demolishing the entire kiosk, and Jay was purposely spilling its contents onto the tracks—someone would have a hell of a big cleaning up job to do tomorrow. Leah was busy with her graffiti and Casper had just started a few smaller Dreamer words, plus a bit of profanity, beside Wolfie’s masterpiece. Even I had taken a couple of glass bottles from Felix and thrown them onto the tracks so that sticky fruit juice and coke and lemonade soaked the tracks.

Everyone looked happy, that was, except Kira. Even as she emptied the rubbish bins and threw a bottle of coke at the wall so that dark, sticky liquid splattered all up the tiles, she didn’t look contented.

‘So is this it?’ she challenged, her anger directed mostly at Casper. ‘No bombs? No shooting? No true resistance. The trains will be running within two hours of the cleaners coming in tomorrow.’

Casper sighed. ‘So what do you want to do?’

‘I want to fucking destroy this world,’ she said, her pretty, tanned face contorting into that of a snarling beast. ‘I want to make them pay for everything they do to us. And graffiti and spilling a few drinks is not going to make up for it—have you ever seen a crappier form of resistance?’

Casper looked hurt. ‘You organise it next time. You bring along your own army, and you do what you like. But I was given one day to sort this—no resources, and little time to get any. Spray paints were the best I could manage. If you like, go find the electricity source and cut through the wires—that’ll stop the trains from working for a while.’

‘Felix?’ Kira called, her face lighting up at a prospect she clearly hadn’t thought of. Felix appeared comically from behind the counter, drowning in the sandwiches and muffins he had dragged out from the storage. He jumped agilely over the counter, bringing several wooden crates with him, and throwing them onto the tracks as he went.

‘Amy?’ It was Casper who called me. I looked at him, standing there, as he held out a can of blue spray paint towards me. Some of it had spilled out and onto his fingers, which he had in turn used to wipe his face, and now had a faint streak of blue paint across the back of his cheek. In a weird sort of way, it made him look quite cute.

‘Do you want a go?’ he asked.

I pulled a face. ‘I can’t draw.’

Wolfie laughed at that moment—a loud, raucous laugh. ‘You can’t draw? Have you seen my attempts?’

I laughed at his latest drawing; I wasn’t about to even hazard a guess as to what it could be, but amongst plenty of swear words and repeats of the word ‘Dreamers,’ was something vaguely resembling a face.

‘Whatever,’ I laughed. ‘Er, if you think I should. What should I draw?’

Casper shrugged. ‘Whatever you like. Let your imagination out.’

‘Let your anger out,’ Leah said, her tone strangely vicious. I turned to see her, on the far side of the tracks, and laughed at her contribution—in amongst her scribbles, the words fuck you were sprayed crudely, and very, very big in bright red capitals across the wall for all to see. Meanwhile, Jay had taken over Wolfie’s job and was now—I had to admire his nerve—spraying a black Hitler moustache on the face of a government propaganda poster further up the staircase.

‘That’s brilliant!’ Wolfie cheered, egging him on.

I took the can and found another bit of wall, spraying the word ‘Dreamer’ across it, starting small, but with each letter growing bigger as I grew more confident. Beneath it, I had a go at drawing the eye symbol. It didn’t quite go right, but you could still tell what it was supposed to be.

‘Good,’ Casper said as though he was a teacher addressing a student. ‘Well done.’

‘So, you’re definitely one of us now?’ Jay confirmed.

‘Uh, I guess,’ I said, realising how much pleasure I got from destroying this wall. Finally, this was something real. I knew what I was doing, and I was completely happy to continue doing it. Only now could I truly understand how much the real world was a lie—all it ever had been was corruption and deceit, but this was the life beneath Dystopia. This was my new life, whether I liked it or not, so why not embrace it? This was the truth.

I noticed that Wolfie had been quiet for a while. He was standing further down the platform, past the kiosk. I craned my neck to see what he was spraying across the wall. It was big, almost as big as Leah’s ‘fuck you,’ and all in capitals once again—orange outlined in black, to achieve maximum effect.

It read 'This Is War.'