Olly

My body went cold. I could feel Geer there, around me. The warmth was present but not affecting me, I was surrounded by a blanket of warmth and yet I felt none of it. Neither did he. My brother, he would never feel warmth again. He would never feel again. The wind blew the bodies, shifted them left slightly. Six hung still, motionless, and cold there. I could hear Geer talking to me, to someone about something. I did not care to notice until he started toward the wall. ¨Chan eli, He deserved more than to have a bag over his head.¨ Geer had a vicious look in his eyes but a caring tone in his voice, he only spoke gaelic when he was hurting. At least he had emotion, all I did was walk blindlessly numb through all this. A humming rang in my head, nothing but static humming. The humming was not new; It had been there since The Korean People's Liberation Army took my mother, grew when they killed my father, worsened when they cut my sister's throat for mine, and became all consuming now when they hung Olly. Geer cut him down, he carried Olly’s body back to camp, HE buried my brother. Not me, why not me? 

    I just sat. Sat in our bunker, knees to my chest and my hands in the dirt underneath me. I rolled pebbles and clumps of dirt around in my fingers as I thought about everything. I knew that in the early 1940’s a holocaust befell the world, a world that in many ways is almost completely similar to the world we live in today. Now it is 2038 and only the most cunning have survived this. The British dropped their alliance with the United States, they were the last string holding the world into place. Communists and Monarchists Vs. Democracy. In Scotland rebellions rumbled from the moment Parliament declared its resiginations and the Crown’s promotion, when the North Korean and Chinese soldiers formed an alliance, from which sprung The Korean People's Liberation Army that stationed themselves in the U.K.’s military capital Edinburgh. The Scottish overwhelmingly rebelled, and rightly so. Only in recent history has Scotland finally won its independence from the British and now they station their unlawful army in my country based on dated constitutions and flawed documents. Scotland's rebellion was short lived and the outcome, much the same as the Jacobite’s defeat at The Battle of Culloden in 1746 it to the British army. The Korean People's Liberation Army had all but snuffed out the Scottish people before they even introduced the idea of re-education camps to the King of England. 

    The re-education camps, not unlike the concentration camps controlled by the Nazis, only differed in the sense that their tutoring tactics were far more brutal and conniving than Hitler could have ever created. They ran on manipulation, malnutrition, and physical torture; escaping was unthinkable, yet I did it. If you were like me before the war you had read many holocaust books and knew almost all the documented ways people escaped. “1. Gain trust. 2. Gain what power there was to gain. 3. Find an opportunity. 4. Run.” I repeated the mantra inwardly my entire duration at the camp in Gaelic,: “1. Faigh earbsa. 2. Faigh dè an cumhachd a bha ann airson buannachadh. 3. Lorg cothrom. 4. Ruith.” Before the war I was a Historian at Cambridge and I used that to my advantage in the re-education camp B-13. I “re-educated” my own neighbors as a teacher at B-13. I was given misinformation construed to make our new tyrants seem like gods to teach my own neighbors, siblings, and parents. But still I gained trust and power this way. 

The modern day Nazis had already taken my mother to a different camp when my father, siblings and I arrived at camp B-13. Not long after our arrival they killed my father for stealing food for Allison, my sister, by public stoning. Then I almost escaped once but was caught, I was too useful to them though, so they cut Allison's throat instead of mine.

B-13 was only built in a week by its own occupants. We built our own cage. I had become aware of the fact that there was a small section of fence that had been left unnailed to the post that if yanked forward could give way just enough to fit my body and Olly’s. If the hole was a mere coincidence or made on purpose I will never know, I prefer to think the latter. All I knew was that I had my opportunity.  

Olly and I did run. We ran all the way to Edinburgh. We found Geer only by sheer luck, a fellow Scott like us, a modern Jacobite, who took home and shelter in the same forest we happened to be. Unquestionably we combined our resources, a shabby loaf of bread between us and a canister for river water, We expanded Geer’s underground bunker to what we felt like was fit for a King. Life went on slowly after that, we hid in the day, only looked for resources at night, and stayed away from the army base in Edinburgh that felt only an arm's reach away at times. The Korean People's Liberation Army soldiers regularly caught Scotts and hung them on a north facing wall of Edinburgh Castle; our logic was to hide in plain sight, under their noses. 

That plan worked for a moment, until Yesterday. Geer and I, far more senior to Olly who is only fourteen. Was only fourteen. My thoughts sidetracked, I had to get used speaking of yet another soul in past tense.

While Geer and I were picking berries from the frequented bush we heard commands being yelled from nearly a half mile away. From the direction of our bunker. “Ne gumeong-eseo gieo nawa, deoleoun seukas” That was the only sentence I caught in full, and I could only translate the last two words for korean. “Dirty Scott.” I dropped the handful of berries from the makeshift bowl of my shirt and ran.

I paid no mind to the limbs hitting my face leaving scratches there and when I tripped over roots there was no transition from movement, if I was on the ground I crawled until I could get back up again. I was a scholar not an athlete, but in that moment nothing mattered, all of me was adrenaline, every cell in my body urged itself to move faster. Faster. Faster. Faster.

When I finally reached the narrow clearing where leaves and fallen branches covered our bunker entrance I saw my brother being dragged by his arms out of the ground. I could see him trying to use his body weight to loosen their grip, he dug at the floor of the forest with his heels and thrashed around. He bit the hand of his captors, blood pulled from my brother's mouth as the soldier screamed in pain. They kicked him. All of them, with their steel toe boots they kicked in my brothers ribs and lungs. He lay there curled into one side, knees to his chest face in the dirt. 

I reached from the brush consoling me, a scream on my lips. A hand came over my mouth and an arm around my waist. Geer pulled me down under the brush. “Shut up, Dùin do chab Moira!” He screamed at me in a quiet whisper. “Las, if you do what you're thinking, if you go try and stop that, we will both be dead.” I kicked and punched Geer and I screamed and cried for Olly. Geer just absorbed it, he took it all. Everytime I hit him he held on harder and every time I screamed he clasped his grip on my mouth more he moved us farther into the brush and kept me there until it was done. Until they took my brother away. Geer held me after that too. We stayed like that, I crumpled up in his lap, his arms wrapped around me until the sun rose. When I saw Geers face the tears streaks pouring down his cheeks matched mine. Without hesitation, without so much as a nod of approval, Geer and I started to walk toward Edinburgh Castle.