Chapter 82

Home is Where the Heart is

Phil

2104

It was an image of a kind Phil had often seen before, but what was horrifying about it was the simple fact that it wasn't being broadcast as part of a news story from a distant urban slum or a foreign country. In fact, it was being transmitted from a surveillance camera just outside his own home. And this image, live and direct and in gruesome detail, showed a man's body slide slowly downwards into the dark red reflective sheet of his own blood that had splattered onto the steel shutters that covered the windows of Phil's house. It was fortunate that Phil had recently had them installed on the persuasive urging of the Ashton Lovelock Neighbourhood Watch.

The image was truly grotesque. The man's head had exploded from the impact of the well-aimed rifle shots. A rich red puddle of blood was spreading outwards across the patio in the long shadows of the late evening summer sun.

However horrifying the image was, Phil's thoughts were also with those neighbours of his who'd not abided by the local Neighbourhood Watch's advice. Many homes were lacking the steel shutters and anti-personnel devices that were now almost standard. Who knew from what humiliation and torture such poorly defended neighbours were suffering from at the mercy of the plebs who'd broken into their property and who hadn't yet been eliminated by the security guards? Their worldly possessions would be ransacked. Their houses plundered. And the women (and maybe even the men) raped. And possibly murdered.

Phil's hope rested in the speed and efficiency that the security guards would employ to defend his property. The manufacturers of his home security system had told him how many minutes the house was guaranteed safe against determined assault, but such information seemed so academic when he'd authorised the purchase of the advanced security system and had it installed.

The live feed from the cameras scattered around the lawns and residences of Ashton Lovelock were providing a continual and unsettling view of the violence that had descended on the gated community now that the plebs had overrun its streets and malls. Phil had the facility to switch the view from one camera to another simply by moving his hand. Many stores in the Gaia Mall had been totally thrashed, but they would have been the obvious target of the plebs' initial onslaught. They were after clothes and electrical goods as well as the food that they'd been pleading for. The extent of their avarice only demonstrated the extent of the hypocrisy in the claims made by the plebs' representatives in the media that having enough to eat was all they wanted. Some of Phil's neighbours' houses had been broken into. Phil felt especially sorry for the Stewarts, despite their decidedly Scottish surname, whose house was now engulfed in flame.

But, as the cameras also showed, the security guards were responding to the pleb invasion with overwhelming force.

It was only right—given the way they bled his wallet each month—that the security officers should respond to the invasion of Ashton Lovelock with so much force and determination. This was also only what was necessary given how many yobbish invaders they had to repel. Hundreds of the fucking plebs had streamed in through the breach in Ashton Lovelock's electric fence. And an entirely unappetising bunch they were too. The men were unshaven. The women wore no makeup. Shabby cheap clothes: ill-fitting, unstylish and unprepossessing. The plebs were barely human. They deserved the bullets that tore their bodies apart. They deserved the savage beating they were getting from the security guards that left them barely alive. The most unlucky ones deserved to have their corpses left abandoned in bloody puddles by the kerbside. If Phil wasn't so worried about his safety he'd gladly have left his home to personally deliver the coup de grâce to the bastards himself.

There'd been warnings of a possible invasion for several months now not just in Ashton Lovelock but in every affluent village and suburban retreat up and down the Republic. The protests in the big cities had been getting increasingly violent as the unwashed and uneducated proles, plebs, peasants and vagrants remonstrated about their imagined grievances. It was nothing more than whingeing, of course. Did they really expect to get something for nothing? Where did they imagine the money would come from to address their ridiculously long list of unachievable demands? The universal provision of education, healthcare, security and well-paid jobs didn't come from nowhere. They had to be earned. And although the protestors had been treated with far more respect than they deserved, they continued to agitate for what they laughingly and unashamedly called their rights.

The government's extraordinary patience eventually ran out. This was a long time after it had for ordinary middle-class citizen such as Phil. The protestors would have to disperse. They'd illegally occupied parks in London, Birmingham and Manchester and refused to pay the daily entrance fee. They'd erected tents around public and private property to which they wouldn't normally be allowed access such as cathedrals, banks and the shopping malls. They regaled innocent bystanders with demand for greater justice, equality and respect. Well, to get respect, a person has to earn it, and these people most certainly hadn't done that.

The private security staff and armed mercenaries employed by the English government and the mayors of England's great cities showed both enthusiasm and gusto in their struggle to force the plebeian scum off the roads. It was heartening to watch videos on the internet of their long-delayed retaliation. No mercy was shown with boot, stick, baton, rubber bullet and latterly, as the conflict worsened, with guns and other more lethal hardware. Despite the propaganda broadcast by what little was left of the liberal media, the retaliation was entirely proportionate to the nuisance caused by the plebs and their disruption to English commerce.

And now the bastards were invading Ashton Lovelock.

They must have come from miles away, though Phil wondered how they could have made the journey from the dilapidated urban wastelands of Warwick, Coventry or Bicester. The impoverished plebs couldn't afford to travel by car and they most certainly wouldn't have been welcome on the motorways. Perhaps they'd walked all the way or travelled on the back of donkeys. However they'd got there Phil could see the trouble brewing as he drove home every day and passed the steadily expanding encampment just outside Ashton Lovelock's perimeter. The signs they brandished were the usual ones about jobs, greed and human rights. There were even some relating to climate change, flooding and the other environmental problems that bedevilled the world. Didn't the plebs realise that the solutions to such problems were exactly what the company that employed Phil was working to resolve?