Yellow Mama E zine

The Names of the Martyrs

 

By Jeffrey Greene

 

 

        The contact's face was so vague and forgettable that even his voice seemed borrowed from ambient sources.  Keltner knew he was witness to perfection in the art of invisibility, and that nothing about the man would catch on the barbs of even so prodigious a memory as his. Just the guy, he thought, to carry the names in his head. 

        "Repeat after me," the contact said, not looking up from his book.

         There were sixty-seven, public utterance of any of which was punishable by burial alive with an internet video feed in the coffin, and as Keltner repeated each one he created an image in his mind to represent it.  When they were finished, he recited them without hesitation, then again in random order.  The contact nodded approval. 

         "Commit nothing to paper," he said.  "And speak the list only to the man, woman or child who says, 'It was too late to die young ten years ago.'" 

         "And if I'm arrested?"  he asked.

         "Your name will be added to the list."

         Keltner scattered his last handful of stale bread to the pigeons and sparrows mobbing him and walked briskly away without a parting glance, his hat pulled low against the autumn wind.  There was no eye contact on the crowded downtown streets, but he could see as clearly as if their skulls had turned to glass the tamped-down rage, despair, and seditious fantasies seething behind every face he passed. 

There hadn't been any resistance, armed or peaceful, in years, the newspaper business was dead and gone, and both internet and street leafleting had all but disappeared.  There seemed as many surveillance cameras as citizens, and the presence of thousands of paid police informants encouraged mutual mistrust.  Whoever stood up to the government was instantly and efficiently eliminated, his digital memory erased as completely as was possible for a regime that owned and operated the news, internet and entertainment media. 

         The government, through its sitcoms and action movies, likened the Underground to a pesticide-resistant form of cockroach, difficult, perhaps even impossible, to eradicate completely, but always at a disadvantage because each "terrorist's" cover was of necessity so deep that its members knew no one else in the organization except their immediate contacts. 

         He would never see the man on the park bench again.  His own cover was his daily life, and his next act of loyalty would be to unburden himself of the names he had memorized, passing them on somewhere, sometime, to whomever spoke the words, 'It was too late to die young ten years ago.'  Until then he was an interchangeable public enemy number one, a question-marked silhouette on every screen, demonized by news readers, talk show hosts, novelists, playwrights, Sunday school teachers and cops on the street. 

         Schoolchildren were so saturated with anti-Underground propaganda that he seriously doubted whether his own son and daughter would hesitate to turn him in if they knew.  His wife, he was fairly certain, would stand by him if she found out, but he could never reveal himself to her, not just for her own safety but for that sliver of doubt that she might be an agent of the secret police, whose cover was second only to the Underground in its depth. 

         There were rumors that regime scientists had successfully mapped the genetic markers of the ideal informant, and since every birth was tracked and coded in the genome bank, a mother in the Underground could be carrying her eventual betrayer in her own womb.  Time was always on the government's side, and they could afford to wait years to make an arrest. 

         So he kept his own counsel, and never consciously betrayed himself, right up until the moment of his arrest on Christmas day a year later.  Must have talked in my sleep, he thought, as he sat in the vermin-infested blackness of his cell.  Which meant that his wife was indeed an agent.  He came as close to despair as he ever had, then, the rustling darkness mocking their years together, their love. 

         They let him fester in there for days, feeding him spoiled food and slimy water, before taking him to an interrogation room where, his eyes tightly shut against the harsh lights, he was strapped into what felt like an unpadded dentist's chair.  A soft, polite voice asked him to open his eyes slowly, to let them gradually adjust to the admittedly garish lighting.  He obeyed, and after a few moments he could see a balding, uniformed man about his age standing before him, next to a metal table loaded with tools, some manual, some electrical.  The man's face surprised him:  it was mild and ordinary.  Looking down at him, his hands in his pockets, the interrogator seemed shy, almost solicitous.  

         "You're older than I thought you'd be," Keltner croaked, his throat burned by stomach bile from vomiting the tainted slop they'd been feeding him.  

         The man smiled ruefully, then picked up a pair of blacksmith's pincers and stepped in close enough to murmur in his ear, "It was too late to die young ten years ago."

         In his failing voice, Keltner recited the names. His contact repeated them flawlessly, adding "Orrin Keltner" with a scarcely perceptible bow of respect. 

         Then he proceeded with his duties.

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     Jeffrey Greene is on the editorial staff at Bewildering Stories. He’s published quite a few stories over the years, 43 at Bewildering Stories, and 11 at Altered Reality, as well as The North American Review, Zahir, Potomac Review, Oasis, and decomP Journal, among others. 

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      Zachary Wilhide is a writer and artist who lives in Virginia Beach, VA with his wife and cats.  He has previously had stories published in Spelk Fiction, Close To The Bone, Yellow Mama Magazine, and Shotgun Honey, among others.  His art currently resides at https://www.deviantart.com/whytedevil