Cell

 

We start our underground because we want to save the 1960s, even though none of us were born when Jimi and Janis were alive,

We barely remember when the Weather Underground surfaced again in the 1980s.

I guess that why we screw it all up.

I guess we thought going underground so romantic until we actually got here.

Now we know how bad it feels to be hunted all the time.

 Yet none of us wants to admit to everybody else just how sick we are of it, figuring the others would claim we’re betraying the movement.

Still, we know it can’t go on forever.

Especially after some fink rats us out to the feds and we have to move into our safe house.

Believe me, when I tell you we get on each other’s nerves.

We bicker so much I figure sooner or later, one of us will grab up a gun and start shooting.

The sound of construction three doors down from ours only makes it worse, rattling already rattled nerves as if someone outside is shooting a machine gun.

We know we need to get out of town, but we’re hardly as frugal as we claim to be. We might praise the simply life, but we like our luxuries. So our reserve fund has just enough to keep his hid, but not enough to escape.

Barrett claims we played it too safe after we robbed the Brinks truck, and says we need to do one more bank heist if we expect to keep up our quality of life here.

I think he’s full of shit and tell him as much.

By this time we all know we’ve slipped from the path of peace and love into some dubiously ethically gray area.

But, of course, I’m out voted.

No one in this cell is going to do without their little necessities.

Since I’m not brave enough to break from the others, I go along.

That’s when everything falls apart.

Schedules we worked out months earlier have changed.

The police show up.

Barrett starts shooting.

People on both sides get killed.

A few of us manage to escape the cops and get back to the safe house.

But Barrett is out of his mind with blood lust. He’s discovered he loves killing cops.

I’m shocked.

I know we went beyond what I thought of as reasonable – maybe I even thought we sank as low as the system we wanted to destroy.

But I see the animal look in Barrett’s eyes and know that we’ve turned into a pack of animals.

Hunted animals, and that scares off of us so much none of us can sit still.

That’s when one of our trip wires goes off, and Barrett peeks outside to see the cops are all over the street.

We execute our escape plan along the roof.

Barrett clutches the bag of money we got from the heist.

That’s when we discover the missing building in the row of tenements; a gap filled with rubble and construction cranes.

We have to jump to the roof of the crane. I go first, then catch the others one at a time, until it’s Barrett’s turn.

He won’t let go of the money, even when the cops show up on the roof behind him.

We shout for him to jump, and he does, still clutching the bag.

He missed the cab and lands in the rubble.

We run.

Later, looking a lot different in my disguise, I wander back to the construction site.

The workers are all abuzz and point to the spot where Barrett died.

They call him a terrorist.

Only then do I realize they are right, and slink away.