Apocalypse Rising

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Fifteen years ago all Europe was aflame. The working man’s passions, so long suppressed, were unleashed in a triumphant surge of insurrection and violence. For three weeks, a few million workers seized the continent and through pure strength of will held the whole world under their sway. It was a time not of heady ideals but intemperate, undisciplined outbursts of the working man made to live a life shackled by poverty, unemployment, and despair. Only a child at the time, Valeri Kovalenko was made to watch as his mother and father were among the striking workers killed in a hail of bullets. On a bright, unseasonably cold winter’s day, Valeri had the chance at a normal life taken from him by the black-clad troops meting out death by the bullet. But events are conspiring, and soon enough he’ll have his chance for revenge.

As uprisings go, this one saw much bloodshed, unlike what anyone would’ve expected in the middle of such countries as France, Germany, Spain, and here in Britain. There were strikes and demonstrations, angry voices and raised fists, workers seizing their factories and mills, students their universities, parishioners their churches, the whole lot of them forging a camaraderie from their common stand. But their newfound camaraderie succeeded in changing very little for the working man right away; once the bloodstains was cleaned from the pavement outside Westminster Abbey there was much hatred and recrimination vented but little progress made. Now, there’s war in the offing again, with erratic gunfire rattling into the night and bombs bursting in the streets, here and there the rage of the working man erupting in impassioned acts like the lashing out of cornered prey at the predator. Still the halls of his flat smell of cigarettes.

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