On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 224, of 240 so far.

The Lamb

Coughlan had seen it all before. From the signs and banners to the face-paint and hand-holding. Protesters of the peaceful variety had only a handful of modi operandi, and this was the most common by a large margin. Right now they were chanting their slogans, but they’d be singing before the morning was out; he was sure of it.

He stood far from the centre of it all, keeping to the outskirts, watching and smoking. A constable had given him a cursory glance earlier, and he’d just nodded in return. The copper quickly lost interest, as predicted, because he and his colleagues had more pressing matters to attend to.

The day was cloudy but uncomfortably warm, and the police and the protesters were sweating just about equally. Entirely absent, of course, were those whose actions had drawn the protests in the first place.

Never around to take responsibility, Coughlan thought.

The root cause of the protest varied depending on who you talked to, or which news outlet you favoured. The liberal broadsheets proclaimed community justice and holding the wealthy and misanthropic to account. The rabid right-wing tabloids attacked young, shiftless, disenfranchised people without respect for the society that spawned them, or its traditions. It was all old news.

The company that owned the compound of warehouses and distribution centres had recently joined the ranks of those who had abandoned their decades-established policies regarding diversity in hiring and promotion. Positive discrimination, so they said, was still discrimination, and was thus bad. Coughlan had read the inevitable article in one of the broadsheets and noted that the company had no opinion on whether the lack of diversity which precipitated their erstwhile policies had been due to systemic discrimination too, and how that might alter their political calculus a bit.

He shook his head, suppressing the urge to spit on the ground, and turned his attention again to the most vigorous and vocal group of protesters, who were unsurprisingly also of a certain type — though certainly a diverse one.

The majority were women, of course, and Coughlan used the term very broadly. Middle-aged or older were a discernible subset, as were the rainbow-dye-job crowd. Then there were what he thought of as the two types of crewcut with their respective reasons: menopausal, because their hair has turned to straw; and gay, because they’re tired of men bothering them. Coughlan could deal with all that, and even sympathise. Women had been a mystery and a force to him all his life, and he’d learned to largely leave them to their own devices. But then there were the men in the crowd.

There were the squirrelly sort of guys; the kind who took a reusable container to get more gerbil food for their breakfast cereal from the shops that smelled like weed all the time. They mostly wore unflattering sweaters that Coughlan was sure had come from several previous careless owners, and maybe not via a washing machine any time recently. Then there were the OGs, which was Coughlan’s shorthand for original gay: the men who were clearly just the G without any of the other letters in the ever-expanding initialism. And finally the tricky categories that he’d never bothered to learn, where you’d get a guy who looked like a wrestler but wearing nail polish, or a guy who looked like a teacher from a Catholic school but wearing mascara. To them, Coughlan just gave the same kind of consideration that he gave to physics equations or astronomy facts or DNA-based vaccines: complete acceptance, with zero understanding and zero wish for understanding.

The police were everywhere, of course, and most of them looked like they were having a good time. Lots of smiles, and he’d even seen a WPC allowing some girl draped in a flag of varying shades of purple to take a selfie with her. Coughlan liked that, just as much as he was sure that her commanding officer wouldn’t.

Sooner or later, though, he knew that the mood would change. He pitched the cigarette before getting anywhere near the filter, and a nearby young copper gave him a glance, but Coughlan held eye contact and silently dared the kid to book him for littering here and now. Wisely, the officer averted his gaze.

The noisy crowd were blocking the main gates to the industrial compound, and further down the road — held at a distance by more police — was a queue of big trucks either making deliveries or waiting to load up. Every truck they added to the queue, and every hour that their schedule was disrupted, meant more lost money for the company.

And more tension here, he thought.

It wouldn’t be long until the police were compelled to get more aggressive. It would be the last thing that the officers on the ground wanted, but the higher-ups would tell them that things had gone on too long, and it looked bad for the force, and the company’s owners would be calling their politician friends and their lawyer friends and their friends in the force too. Words like livelihood and embarrassment and mob would start to float around, and people without accountability would start to make hard choices too easily. Coughlan had seen all of that before, too.

The events of the next few hours were clear enough to foresee. Patience on the part of the owners of the place would wear thin, pressure would be applied, and the authorities would redistribute that pressure here, on the ground. The protesters would be angry at first, then afraid, then some of them would be even more angry. Someone would go too far, whether it was someone in a uniform or in a brightly-coloured flag, and then a line would be crossed.

Maybe it would involve a water cannon, or rubber bullets, or a taser; or maybe it would be a glass bottle, or a fist, or one of those same flags turned to a new purpose as a weapon. Ultimately, the result would be the same, with black boots on the ground beside the head and body of some sacrificial lamb, all for the eager news cameras to see. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst part was that it would validate the status quo. The protesters would be vilified, which was easy when they had their hair and their clothes and their flags and their minority status. Endless others would speak out in support of them, and in horror at what had taken place, but it would still become another data point; another reason why they were Them, and everyone else was Us.

“Not today,” Coughlan said to himself, maybe even loud enough for the young copper nearby to hear, but the helmeted head didn’t turn this time.

And why would it? Coughlan was white and older and a little tubby, and he was well enough dressed in a conservative sort of way, and the look on his face was easily identifiable as disdain. He was the opposite of everyone that the police were worried about. And that was their mistake.

Because I’m mainstream, he thought. Part of the establishment. The status quo.

Anyone would have thought he was just reaching for his phone in his jacket pocket when he flipped the small switch to arm the device secured to his abdomen. Much smaller than in the movies. Much worse, too. But a means for him to give the only two valuable things he had: the legitimacy of his status, and his life.

Step back all ye rainbows, he thought, and the voice in his mind was utterly steady. Today I’ll be the lamb.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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