A Battle Unseen

[Dredd]

Williams world was one of pitch darkness, save for the feeble glow of lanterns spaced throughout the tunnels. His sense of time had rapidly eroded in the underground world he had been consigned to. There were no longer hours, days and weeks in the mines under the Lirnak foothills; only ‘work’ and ‘sleep’. There was no ‘breakfast, lunch and dinner’; only scraps of bread snatched from a pile left in the quarters every morning, and sips of water from the cold stream that ran parallel to the mineshaft.

There was no time for daily prayers, no comfort of a bed, no warmth of a fire. In the abyss of time in which he and the other inmates resided, there was only the banging of picks on the walls, the rattling of minecarts filled with coal being pushed uphill, and the coughing of men with lungs full of coal-dust. The only mercy for those so afflicted was death, delivered by one of the masked guards when he could work no more.

William endured for longer than most, cursing himself for ever emigrating from Kalistan, but how could he have ever known moving for a clerks job would end up like this. He wrapped a rag around his face, hammered away at the coal seams and continued to work despite the withering of his muscles and his fading sight.

But eventually he too collapsed, coughing black phlegm and completely blind. When the blade of mercy slid across his jugular, his last thoughts were a prayer to God and the Empress, and gratitude that his suffering was finally at an end.
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Across western Kundrati, the soil churned, stone shattered and great pillars of concrete rose. The inefficient and obsolete industrial edifices of Liberalism were being torn down and replaced with something newer, better, more pure of purpose. Homes of the undeserving, too, were razed flat, their occupants cast out or consigned to penance through labor. In their place, new factories and offices were erected, manifestations of the efficient and pitiless state that now ruled the Kundrati heartlands.

The thunder of dynamite in the hills and mountains signaled the birth of hundreds of new mines and quarries. Soon, the tunnels would open up and tracks would be laid for carts. Cutting-edge industrial machines would move in to support the masses of degenerates fated to work themselves to death in the oppressive darkness. The forges of Kundrati would be fuelled with the dregs souls.

Comrade Sládek smiled as he envisioned it. No more wasteful consumerism, no more time wasted glorifying democracy and sin. It was over a century overdue, but Kundrati would finally have its rightful wealth.