Chasing Imagination

Casper

The lights went out, and we were plunged into total blackness.

I heard Amy give a quiet shriek, and Leah burst into characteristic profanity, but I remained calm, fumbling for the torch in my bag.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, switching it on and seeing Amy scrabbling around in the darkness for something to hold onto, just to get her bearings. ‘It’s just Felix and Kira. They must have switched off the electricity—and done a better job than I expected.’

‘Will this affect the electricity at the base?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘That’s nearly a mile away—it’ll be under a different system.’

Another thought seemed to occur to Amy. ‘Is there CCTV down here?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, so casually she frowned and did a double take as though she had misheard.

‘Shouldn’t we do something about it?’

‘There isn’t a lot we can do,’ I said, which was hardly comforting for her. ‘But most of us have hoods, and even if they do get a clear look at us, what can they do about finding us? We’ve done rigorous checks on these cameras, and they don’t clearly show where we’ve come here from, so that doesn’t matter.’

She looked ever so slightly more relaxed, but still rather uncomfortable about the whole matter.

‘What the hell did they do that for?’ Leah cried furiously, bringing us back to the previous conversation. ‘I have no idea what I’m writing now!’

‘Didn’t you bring a torch?’ I asked. ‘I told you that you should always bring one.’

Even just by torchlight, one glare of her venomous eyes was enough to tell me not to say any more.

‘We did it!’ came a triumphant voice from down the little passage as two sets of footsteps ran back into the main area.

I pulled a face for Kira. ‘Really?’ I said sarcastically, indicating the lack of light around us. She giggled, obviously pleased with herself, and Felix pulled his oversized, grey hood back off of his head, pretending to show off.

‘I like the graffiti,’ he said. ‘What I can see of it anyway. But they’d better get the lights working again in time for people to see it, or else the cleaners will get rid of it first.’

This comment, as with most of Felix’s, was obviously directed at Leah, and she glared at him poisonously, evidently pleased with her work of art, and determined to get as many ignorant civilians to see it as possible.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned him. He just responded with a laugh, which made her even angrier.

More time passed but, whilst we had achieved maximum amount of damage with cutting off the electricity and vandalising the tracks, it meant we couldn’t do a lot else with the inconvenient lack of light. Funny how everyone remembered a gun, yet nearly all of them forgot a torch.

‘Come on, we should get going,’ I said after a little longer. ‘It’s getting late...or early, I should say, and we have to be well away from here when the station opens at five or six in the morning.’

Everyone seemed to comply—the paints were beginning to run low, and Jay and Wolfie had taken to just scribbling on anything and everything they could by now, not to mention the fact that Felix had tragically run out of peanuts to throw.

With a little bit of persuasion, Leah was dragged away—apparently she still had much more that she wanted to do to the wall, but we didn’t have the time for it, and we all edged down the narrow walkway between the wall and the edge of the tracks until we were enveloped by the darkness of the unlit tunnel, spotlight torches being our only light source, and we headed away from the station and further underground into the unused passageways.

I was happy with our success tonight as Jay took the lead on the way back, edging round every corner with his gun held in front of him, and making us all stop once when he mistook a dripping leak for signs of life. We had done a bit of resisting by vandalising and causing maximum disruption to the little station, we hadn’t been caught and, perhaps most importantly for me, Amy had truly learnt what to do.

I saw it in her eyes: whatever she still felt about me and this life, she was going to take it on. It was a challenge she was ready to face. I knew she was strong enough—she wasn’t the weak, little pretty blonde girl who would run at the first sign of danger that I and other people once thought she was. She was here to stay. She had discovered what was real and beautiful about planet Earth, and what was nothing more than lies and vanity, and that was before she even knew half of it. Because beneath this pristine world where crime rates were at an all time low and people were living longer than ever before, lay the truth. It had been buried for decades beneath the great halls, down in this bitter, untamed wilderness of the Dreamers and the believers, but it was still here. We had uncovered the darkest secrets known to mankind, and we would not stop fighting until they were no more than memories. Everything that had been lost would be found once again. We could, and one day we would, start a war.

***

I was quietly pleased as I sat the following morning in Markus’s office. He slumped, laid back in his chair, and I sat before him, Amy on one side and Felix on the other.

Of course we had people watching the local news with eagle eyes via the computers and the TVs we had down here, and those who worked in IT were monitoring the CCTV cameras down in the station, just purely so we could laugh at the faces of the first workers to go down.
And it was a fantastic sight. Men in navy blue overalls walked down there, first stopping and asking each other presumably about why the lights weren’t on, and then stopping dead in their tracks when they saw the graffiti. As more people came down, they all looked just as confused and terrified. Graffiti was rare these days, and dealt with severely, and graffiti done by what was obviously the Dreamers—the terrorists, as the others preferred to call us—was undoubtedly even worse. People couldn’t handle it.

Although the story was hardly big enough to make nationwide news, local south London newspapers were already printing the story, and even some of the bigger ones had small articles mentioning it. The local section of the TV news even had a short headline about it—‘underground train station near Kingston found heavily vandalised overnight. As well as cutting off the electricity and throwing various items onto the tracks, the culprits also identified themselves in their graffiti as ‘Dreamers,’—the main terrorist group fighting for the right to bring back imagination, who have been known on many occasions in the past to have vandalised, destroyed, attacked, and even bombed public places such as stations right across the world. CCTV footage shows at least six people, most wearing hoods and some carrying guns, vandalising the station between 1:30 and 3:00 am, but so far police have been unable to identify anyone specific. More information to follow.’

The entire base had been on edge watching for the first reports, and the reactions had been about as good as we could have possibly hoped. Although it wasn’t uncommon to have various resistance acts and vandalism done by the Dreamers, to have achieved such publicity was fantastic, and the underground was more alive than I had seen it in ages.

‘Looks like you did good there,’ Markus said, mostly directing his speech at me. I hadn’t really been in control down there, but I had still picked people to come with me and given them some suggestions of what to do—and got them in and out safely of course—so I felt I deserved some credit. Perhaps that, combined with my successful trip to the Vaults so recently, was enough to make up for my stupid slip-up that had cost Amy her freedom, but most importantly could have enabled anyone to follow me down here.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It was easy, really.’

‘I’m impressed with you, kid,’ Markus said, and I felt myself glowing.

Then he turned to Amy. ‘And you ain’t done too badly either, ‘specially for a newbie.’

‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

‘And we need more publicity like this,’ he continued, now addressing all three of us together. ‘We need to get the public aware of us—the more we’re in the spotlight, the less they can deny our existence. All the time we act only underground, the world continues without our influence. But we need to start making changes. We ain’t gonna win back imagination if no one even knows who we are.’

I had the feeling even before he said it that there was another task coming up.

‘I know you only just finished that, but that wasn’t exactly hard work—what’s so terrible about throwing glass bottles around the room and painting swear words on a wall?’ He meant his question rhetorically, so no one replied. ‘So I’m sending you lot up to central London in a couple o’ days. Amy: you got the choice. Casper, Felix: you’re already on my list.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. Felix nodded. Markus just looked at Amy.

‘What do you think?’ I prompted gently, determined not to force her into anything else.

‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘What does it involve?’

‘As you can see,’ Markus explained, ‘we’re a bit cut off from the base in central London over here. You can get there via underground tunnels, but it’s easier to go overground or on the trains. We still officially count as the London base here in Kingston, though. Nightshade is our official leader, but she’s mostly up there, so I’ve temporarily taken over down here. But we need to maintain regular contact, and if we’re planning anything major, we should really organise it with the London lot.
‘So I just need a few of you—you three, plus maybe one or two others, Imogen and Matt, perhaps? Or do you prefer working with Wolfie and Kira? Either way, go up there, the lot of you, find Nightshade, and just get the news and give her ours. I need to know if she’s planning anything. Just exchange a few stories and chat to everyone. You might even have fun.'

‘You wanna come?’ I asked.

‘Er, I guess,’ Amy said. ‘It sounds alright.’

‘I’ll tell Imogen and Matt then,’ Markus said. I was about to say ‘no, I’d rather work with Wolfie and Kira,’ but at the same time Felix said casually, ‘yeah, that sounds good.’ I sighed and punched the air beneath the table.

‘Excellent,’ Markus said. If he had heard my objection, he hadn’t noted it. ‘Well, you lot can go then.’