Over the last few days, people had been sending messages to Captain Gordon. Paper messages, specifically, either handed to him in person, or by mail, or left for him to collect; his desk now had a burlap sack sitting beside it, into which all the new notes went to be sorted through. Any electronic communications would be too easy to trace to both him and the senders, and the government filters would pick up on the huge volume of incoming messages that all seemed to contain the same thing: names, addresses, pledges of allegiance, and inventories of weapons and munitions. The Colonel had put Gordon in charge of collecting all of the preliminary administrative minutia. As he sat down and dumped the day’s catch into the burlap sack one by one, he hesitated as he came across a small envelope, which had been left for him behind the bar at the tavern from the other night. The stamp on the back named the sender as ‘J. Corran’, and a shiver of electricity ran through him. He slit the envelope gently with an old field knife from his days in the Army, before it had become a tool of the Socialists. The Irish Territorial Army, not the field knife. He’d been an officer of the 2nd/14th Blackwater Lancers, a cavalry unit with a proud history, but it had been broken up and the parts renamed to align with the CSTO system. The trampling of tradition and status quo for the sake of bureaucracy was a common theme of the early days of the Central Social Treaty Organisation. He had quit the Second and Fourteenth the same day the change of government had been announced. In conversation with old colleagues, he staunchly refused to use the name ‘408th Cavalry Company’. He had never admitted it to a single soul, but the first time he’d seen a sign mentioning ‘408 CAV COY’, he had fetched a spray can of black paint and blotted it out in the middle of the night, barely able to control his anger as he scrawled ‘2/14 Lancers’ below the dark smudge. His was only one of many anonymous defacements of public property that occurred in the wake of the Council’s takeover.
Setting the knife down again, he slid the message out of its wrappings and unfolded the sheet of plain paper. Neatly handwritten in blue ink was a very simple message.
Dear Julian,
You already know my address and know of my support. We will be celebrating the end within a year, and I look forward to seeing us all there, safe and sound.
Kind regards,
Jane.
1 Pistol, Semi-Automatic, Webley-Fosbury, calibre 6mm flechette
36 Round, Flechette, Remington, 6mm cupro-nickel jacketed
Julian Gordon read and re-read the note, finally jotting down the details on his inventory list. He gently tucked the paper back into the envelope and paused before dropping it into the waste basket. He was burning the notes by the bin-load after reading them, but for one wild second he considered keeping hers, tucked safe in his desk drawer. Then, he imagined the police or the army bursting into his house and searching it, finding her name and the description of her only weapon. No, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he got her caught. The note dropped neatly into the half-full basket as he grabbed the rest of the day’s mail, stuffed it into the burlap sack, and stuffed the sack into the document safe under the desk.
Life on the Fringes 