A Touch of Hope

Chapter 2 - The Tit

Under quite different circumstances, far across the city, away from the squalor, the depression and the so called crime, a woman sat at a large mahogany desk, typing at her laptop. Her soft auburn hair pulled back tightly into an immaculate bun. She was adorned by a simple white blouse and a tight pencil skirt to match her thick black tights and heels. Her fingers paused momentarily over the keyboard as they hovered above the enter key. The importance of this single e-mail could not be underestimated. The moral dilemma facing Amelia bubbled at the back of her mind, forced deep down to align with the views of her boss, were squashed as quickly as they had come. Her finger stabbed down, punching the enter key, signing the death warrants of over 500 rebels. This effectively ended the secret order that had risen in opposition to the police state, with barely a moment's hesitation. Their incestuous high fives, their cruel, evil peer deprecation, she knew the speech.

Leaning back in her seat she gazed around the room she had worked so hard to acquire. The heavy, velvet, red drapes decorated the 6 large bay windows behind her. Usually these would provide a spectacular aerial view over the entire city from the financial district all the way to the docks. Today however the nights gloom and fog had obscured all bar her reflection that stared back all her. She was pleased to notice that her thick make up still effectively covered her face, despite a long busy day. She felt her bright red lipstick was done particularly well today.

In front of her, beyond the laptop, the pens, the paper and her oversized desk, past the rich red carpets, the entire wall opposite was taken up by a single painting. The main body of the picture comprised of death and destruction that turned Amelia's stomach every time she took time to look at it in detail. It depicted, extremely graphically, the Pax Plague that was to blame for the current circumstances. On the left of the painting lay huge mounds of corpses, their bodies contorted into painful positions, flames turning them to ash as naked people wearing creepy white masks pranced and danced around the pyres as they worshipped the disease. In centre frame, death stood carrying his customary scythe as humans hugged and shook hands around his feet. The picture clearly showed the transition of healthy to diseased humans as the people that had been touched joined the endless line of deathly pale, sick people. The queue wound its way across the rest of the picture, past riots, pasted the crazed cannibals, to a ravine at the far right that dropped straight into hell, the first people in the line flailing as they fall in. Above all this death and destruction, above the red sky and standing on the white clouds, stood Ragant, the saviour. She stood with her arms open, sunlight shining out, welcoming all those that supported her. It was a picture of doom. It was a picture of Ragant's rise to power.

Looking to her left Amelia glared at the large double oak doors and golden handles, leading to the rest of the capital building. They had been opened far too frequently by military advisors, secret police, special forces, leaders of state, all of whom had crossed the carpet and passed through the identical doors to the right. The doors to Ragant's office.

Confident she would not be disturbed due to the late hour, Amelia gently closed her laptop with a soft click and gingerly slid open the bottom drawer to her desk. Contained within, tucked behind a false back and multiple pieces of paper, sat a laptop identical to the open sitting on her desk. Withdrawing the laptop with one hand and removing the portable hard drive connected to the one on her desk, she swapped them over. Closing the drawer so that nobody would notice, she reconnected the hard drive, and opened the laptop.