You see, long, long ago, I was a slave myself. I was a fighting slave; a trained dog who both shed blood and bled my own blood to entertain the vicious and uncaring masses. I know that you will not believe me when I say this, but I was once a gladiator of ancient Rome, Dr Green, yes, once upon a time, a long, long time ago. And before that, I was a chattel slave in Egypt, where I was almost killed, nearly worked to death by a callous master who saw me as a sub-human life-form, below even the mules and donkeys he worked to death without a blink of pity or an ounce of compassion.
I have personally known slaves, tens of thousands of them over the centuries, and I have been one myself. You must understand just how pervasive an evil slavery is, just how tied to every part of human history, to every group of people on every continent it is. Yet you cannot truly understand the depths of its malice, its hatred, its injustice and horror until you have lived it yourself. And lived it I did, and after liberating myself from those shackles I vowed to liberate all slaves, everywhere, from their chains. Little did I know, though, how daunting a task that would prove to be.
Still, I tried. I fought, and sometimes I lost … but sometimes I won. Always, always, the forces of good were poorly armed and small in number against the tyrants, who usually had better weapons, superior technology and greater numbers on their side. Yet they – the monsters who fought only for greed and exploitation – they lacked something crucial that we always had with us: justice. On our side we had the roaring, inextinguishable flame of truth, justice and goodwill burning fiercely in our hearts. We knew that we were not fighting for selfish personal gain but for the freedom of all, for light and fairness to prevail over the forces of darkness. I can tell you this, Doctor, with absolute confidence: if you put a sword and money in a man’s hand, he will fight, yes, but not with the conviction and intensity of someone who is fighting for their very lives and the lives of those they love. Someone who is fighting for everything they hold dear, for every ideal that fires their blood, one fighter like that is worth ten hired mercenaries who believe in nothing but avarice and their own indulgence in base pleasures like drinking, gambling and whoring.
And that is how I arrived at this point, with my army here. I have won countless battle victories, utilising small and poorly armed but intensely motivated forces, who defeated far larger and better-armed forces. And after these victories, we took the arms and equipment from the vanquished, from the cowards who dropped their arms and fled so that they could save their own pitiful lives. We took the cowards’ weapons and thus upgraded our own inventories, whilst simultaneously becoming battle-hardened, and bolstering our own courage and motivation to win more victories.’
A shadow crossed the General’s face now, and storm clouds brewed their bulbous black bulk in his irises. Margaret could not help shrinking back in fear, for she could sense his immense powers beginning to swell, fuelled by a bottomless and righteous wrath, as he carried on with his story.
‘That is how the Antidote began, against this background of mine that has spanned centuries. It started with me – only me – taking on a gang of human traffickers. A band of disgusting rapists who kidnapped, drugged and gang-raped hundreds of teenagers before smuggling these broken children away to live the rest of their tragically short lives in a haze of never-ending sexual abuse, drug dependency, illness and untimely death in the worst brothels imaginable.
I took on this gang on my own, Doctor – decades ago, mind you – and I killed every last one of the thugs. What was left behind after I had taken care of the scum was a warehouse full of weapons, and some still-living teenage victims of extreme violence and multiple gang rapes. The children I could save I did, and I can tell you this of the survivors I rescued: all that those poor, broken souls wanted was to get revenge. Revenge on the world that had made their lives an tortuous, unending voyage through the darkest levels of all the hells imaginable. So I harnessed their anger, their rage, their disgust at the cruelty of indifferent, uncaring and greedy humankind … and I yoked it to my own darkness. Yes Dr Green, inside me is a shadow that has grown larger and larger through countless centuries of observing the worst that humanity has to offer. And believe me, you have not seen anything.Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. Those women and children you have helped here in the Congo, with their limbs hacked off by machetes? That is nothing, absolutely
