| |
09:42 Tuesday 29 October 2069
At 09:30, all over the country, school gates were being approached by units of Defenders whilst the nation’s children were in school sitting at their desks having their first lesson of the day. This was the beginning of a massive national operation entailing the use of thousands of the menacingly clad elite troops and had the dual objectives of both sifting out the culprits and sending a chilling message to anyone who might be thinking of joining the resistance. Two Defenders, with orders to shoot to kill, were posted at all the entrances, trapping everybody inside each school.
At Downton Primary School on the outskirts of London, children’s noses were pressed against classroom windows just as they had been for centuries when something more interesting than the lesson was happening outside. What were these strange masked men in uniforms doing outside? Why did they have guns? At first, the children were simply interested, as normally the playground was empty at this time of the morning except for a few pigeons gathering scraps of food that had been spilled the day before. But when they saw a group of eight soldiers entering the school building even they knew that something was wrong.
Miss Troughton’s class drew their breath in unison as two of the scary-looking soldiers came into their room. The children were ordered to go to the assembly hall immediately, an order that Miss Troughton didn’t want to obey but she knew better to refuse an order from members of the ONP Defender Force, particularly such well-armed ones. She clapped her hands.
“Children, we’re going to go to the assembly hall now. Everybody leave quietly and calmly. I’m sure we’ll all be back here before you know it.”
Miss Troughton’s class filed out of the classroom to the assembly hall, where all the children at the school were gathering. A Defender ordered the teachers to separate any children who were under eight years old and older than twelve. These children were sent back to their classrooms.
On the school stage were two men in white coats, sitting behind a table with an unusual piece of equipment upon it. In a scene which was being duplicated nationwide, the children were brought up to the stage one-by-one to be examined by the ONP doctors.
Peter Simmonds was one of those children.
He looked at Miss Troughton who nodded that he should do as he was being told. As he walked up the three steps to the stage, he felt the same foreboding that he had experienced when arrested by Spanish troops during the Spanish Inquisition. His past lives had been mainly drama free, which is why it was so easy to remember that particular time of his lives. He had no idea what was happening to him, but he could sense in his bones that it would not end well for him. One of the doctors beckoned for him to sit down opposite him, which he did. The doctor had a very serious face and a very big nose, which Peter found it difficult not to stare at.
“Your name is Peter Simmonds?”
“Yes.”
“What is your date of birth?”
“29th October 2059”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
“That makes you ten years old.”
“Yes.”
“Look into the eye pieces of this machine.”
Peter did as he was told and a beam of purple light shot into his pupils. The light flickered for a second and then rebounded red. Peter wondered what this was supposed to mean.
“Is red good?”
“No Peter, Red is bad.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means you’re a Recarn.”
The doctor called a Defender over who escorted Peter out to the playground, with much more force than was strictly necessary. Peter was a ten year old boy and hardly a match for the jackbooted Defender.
Inside the assembly hall five more Recarns, two eight year-old boys, a nine year-old girl, and two more ten year olds, a boy and girl, were identified. The rest of the children were sent back to their classrooms, the purple light beamed into their eyes having rebounded green.
In Miss Troughton’s class, the children were about to resume their vigil at the window when the windows turned opaque. Miss Troughton had pressed a button under her desk to prevent the children from seeing whatever would happen next. She had no idea herself what was about to happen in the playground but she was certain that it wasn’t anything that a child should see.
Outside in the playground, the six youngsters were lined up. A Defender officer drew his pulse-pistol and set it to kill. One by one the children were shot in the back of the head and then placed carelessly in a heap near the school gate. Two minutes later, a refuse truck pulled up by the school gates. It positioned itself in front of the small pile of corpses and scooped the lifeless children into the bowels of the large container sitting behind the cab, before driving off to the next school to pick up more of its macabre cargo, leaving the children’s souls to drift away in search of their next hosts.