Only quiet from outside. I put the ARs in and steered the second UAV into the ground. It impacted far enough away I didn’t hear it when the display went blank. Darren signaled for the kids to follow behind him as I stayed crouched over Corbin.
“This was quite the operation you had going here,” I said, taking the ARs out and throwing them to the floor, once again stomping on them.
Corbin coughed for several moments before rasping, “It was…not my…operation.”
I gave a sarcastic laugh, “we caught you in the base of operations sampling the goddamn merchandise,” I said, “with two guards at the door just for you.”
He tried laughing, but it turned into a groan. “I’m…middle management. And I’m pretty sure…pretty sure they sent me here today specifically…to die.”
“Who is they?”
“You…you think you toppled this operation. You have…no idea,” he coughed, “no idea the…the resources they have at their…at their disposal…”
“Who?”
“I don’t fucking know,” he pleaded, going into a coughing fit again before continuing. “Someone m-more p-powerful than m-me,” he glanced at a black cube with some blinking lights in the corner of the room.
“What about the gene doping?” I asked, “and the Shift?”
“Th-the genes,” he winced, gritting his teeth through a spasm of pain, “it came…it came from this p-place in-in-in W-Wichita. Wichita, K-Kansas. I went there to pick up…to pick up…”
“Kansas? What place in Wichita? Where is it?”
“Christ, kid. Are you going to kill me or what?” he asked, going into another coughing fit.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said.
“If you d-don’t, then someone…someone else will,” he said, still gasping for breath.
“Maybe,” I said, “Can you get up?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Corbin said, glancing again at the black box. The lights on it were now dark.
I grunted, “can I ask you something?”
“I’m not sayin’ another goddamn thing.”
“This is more of a personal question,” I said, pausing a few moments before saying, “did you enjoy doing this, or were you just another desperate bastard like the people you recruited?”
He said nothing for some time, breathing heavily, body trembling. Finally he spoke. “I d-didn’t d-d-do it…voluntarily.” He coughed. “But you-you’d be uh-m-m-mazed what you can g-get yourself to enjoy after you d-do it long enough.” He winced. “I…I worked for a b-bank before. I was…I was b-blackm-m-mailed into this after you m-meddling bastards r-released those goddamn M-Mexico Memos.”
“Blackmailed by who?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, wincing in pain.
“Fine,” I said, feeling a strange sense of satisfaction at this interrogation, “but I bet you’d be amazed how much you stop enjoying everything after an even longer time. So, were you diddling the kids? Or just selling them to people who do?”
He let out a loud groan, “Jesus C-Christ kid, just fucking kill me already and get it the f-fuck over with.”
I stood back up straight and raised a foot, putting it gently down on his mangled shoulder. He opened his eyes, looking up at me confused until I applied pressure on the severed stump. A bloodcurdling bellow escaped his mouth as I pushed more and more force onto the torn flesh.
“Hey.”
I turned around, seeing Darren descend the stairs, followed by two LoC Security agents. I took my foot off the trafficker’s wound, feeling momentarily dazed.
The LoC Security agents swiftly strode over as I stepped away, holding the .45 over my right shoulder and Corbin’s pistol in my left hand.
“The house is on fire,” Major Riviera’s voice said.
The other agent approached, their reflective mask looking down at Corbin. I stepped out of the way, listening to the trafficker moan in agony as the agent easily lifted him up in the hydraulic arms. Darren helped guide the last of the children out, all of them running and coughing as smoke flooded the house. I dropped my weapons and limped over to the corner, pulling the server Montgomery kept glancing at off the wall, and then made for the stairs. Major Riviera followed behind me.
Everyone piled out of the tattered structure. Heat singed at my flesh with naked ferocity. A sickly red blaze danced over the entire moat like some demonic orgy. A makeshift bridge formed from the other transport van sliced through the Hellish bacchanalia before me.
The children screamed as we herded them across. A gauntlet of flames pirouetted around the scorched trailer, their bare feet burning on hot metal. Ellen Malloy awaited on the other side, her own face bloody and burned, along with several other newly arrived medics, tending to the first of the rescued children. The agent carrying Corbin jumped easily through the fire, the hostage shouting as flames swirled over his mutilated body.
I lifted one of the smaller children in my free arm and jumped onto the side of the trailer, running across with her. Darren and Major Riviera followed suit. I set the girl down on the other side, sending her running across the lawn to where the medics performed triage. The other agents leapt over and started picking the wailing kids up, running them across the blazing moat. None of us stopped until all of them were across. Only then could I feel my skin blistering as I turned to watch the truck become engulfed. Loud, crackling fire twirled over the entirety of the submerged transport vehicle, flames licking sixty feet into the sky from the blazing house. I stared on, next to one of the other agents putting a crude tourniquet on Corbin Montgomery.
“How many…casualties?” I coughed, lungs burning.
Major Riviera approached, taking her helmet off. The pitted and pocked exoskeleton suit was covered in burns, soot, blood, and mud. Blisters and bruises marred her face, highlighted with shiny sweat and trickling blood.
“Five,” she said, “we fucking lost five.”
“What about at the other houses?” I asked.
She shook her head, “every single one of them gave up without a fight,” she looked down at Corbin, eyes narrowing.
“This wasn’t about the children, was it?” I said. Montgomery only groaned in response, delirious with shock. I looked back to Major Riviera. “Did Colonel Reynolds…”
“He’s injured,” she said, “but he’ll live.” She paused a moment, keeping her eyes on Corbin as she repeated, “he’ll live.”
The house came tumbling down after burning for about twenty minutes, the kids crying out as the infernal crash sent renewd flames grasping toward the sky. After two hours, the moat showed no signs of going out. Craters from the UAV’s rail gun scarred the desiccated lawn. Patches of dry grass continued smoldering under the relentless sun. More agents, medics, and even transport helicopters showed up as morning turned to afternoon, taking kids in the most serious condition by air to the Denver hospital.
Every other house was either abandoned by the traffickers or surrendered without a shot being fired. Everyone attributed it to good luck, but I couldn’t help but think something larger was at play. Something to do with whatever was in Kansas. Whoever was behind the bombings in the LoC. Whoever Montgomery was working for. And I couldn’t help but feel Benecorp lurking behind it all.
Which works out fine…Benecorp is now priority one.
The hissing sound of the automatic sprinklers in the cornfield floated over to where LoC security agents had laid out the remains of their fallen – mostly limbs and shards of exo suits – and continued processing the children and handful of prisoners. Corbin Montgomery, no longer conscious, had been loaded into a transport vehicle to be taken to the hospital under LoC Security custody. Some of the less injured children strolled about the lawn, watching as the moat endlessly burned.
Colonel Aaron Reynolds sat in the grass nearby, watching, his left arm wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.
“Two hundred seventy-two,” Reynolds said, “two hundred seventy-two kids.”
“That’s a lot,” I
said, trying to assure him that the ends justified his losses.
“That it is,” he said, “That’s a lotta kids that don’t gotta suffer no more.”
“You’ll be seen as heroes.”
“And martyrs,” Reynolds sighed, “but all these folks knew the risk. Ain’t none of ‘em came in here with any notions it weren’t dangerous. The detail was entirely voluntary.”
I grunted, turning my gaze toward him.
Reynolds kept staring forward at what was left of the dead LoC security agent’s remains, laid out and covered with sheets. His expression was grim.
“I almost thought I might need to turn some folks away, they all wanted in on this so badly.” He turned to look up at me, “your people gave everyone somethin’ to fight for again. And this here…this’ll only make ‘em wanna fight harder.”
“What we’re doing is more than just rescuing enslaved children,” I said, “I’m not looking to drag anyone into something they don’t want to do.”
“We may not follow you traipsin’ around God’s green earth,” he said, “but yer people will always have a place in the LoC.”
Chapter 18
The Denver hospital swarmed with people by the day after Easter. All two-hundred-seventy-two kids we rescued were driven or airlifted to the larger facilities. Doctors from around the LoC – including Doctor Taylor – volunteered to come help. The former captives were in varying degrees of illness, some extremely sick while others were not much worse off than scared and underfed.
The media had shown up from all over the LoC and other seceded states –even some of the more independent blogs from the CSA and PRA. The LoC security agents were inundated with questions about the raid. Body cam video of what happened was shared. Information found on the trafficker’s drives was distributed online. Faces and names were plastered on every news site and social media outlet. This increased the number of children saved as government investigators and vigilantes alike tracked down other kids using the information we released.
And the outrage was immediate. High level CSA politicians, executives from numerous corporations and banks, foreign dignitaries, and well-known celebrities were involved in the human trafficking ring – buyers, sellers, child pornographers, money launderers, investors and corrupt officials who had been paid to look the other way. Images and videos of the rescued kids became instant memes. Fingers were being pointed on all sides. In the few days afterwards, those whose names were not released got on their high horses while those whose names were released started resigning their positions or defending themselves as ignorant of the whole thing.
Protests broke out in several cities in the CSA. One politician in Charleston, North Carolina, whose records indicated he bought as many as seven children over the years, had his house burned down. He became the face of evil in the city, with effigies hung and burned. Pictures of the children were stuck to every available surface. Graffiti hailed the Easter Emancipation, evoking the rising of Jesus as an analogy for the life returned to the rescued children. Cops in exoskeleton suits resorted to brutality within only a few hours, inciting a riot that got at least five people killed.
Several people in Director Gabriel Mitchell’s administration were involved. In order to save face, Mitchell immediately fired those implicated and called for emergency elections to be held before the end of the year. It was a cynical attempt to regain legitimacy, as his own personal popularity almost assured his reelection.
At my request, only a few of the people in the PRA were exposed – two active politicians and three former politicians. Chairman Darrel Gibson publicly denied the allegations, yet all of the accused soon disappeared. I wanted to keep the rest a secret, at least until I could follow up on them for my theory about Benecorp getting the kids addicted to Shift in the PRA.
The PRA was enthusiastic in their condemnation of everyone else involved, having many fewer people exposed than the CSA. Chairman Gibson, along with his inner circle, relished in pointing out the hypocrisy of the ostensibly Christian region. Gibson never tired of invoking Mitchell’s regime’s white heterosexual cis-male privilege in making them think they can do what they want to poor brown children. He called for the symbolic federal government to allow the PRA to publicly prosecute the guilty. Gibson called for harsher laws and surveillance to be imposed on the southeastern region, with his administration in charge. He called for the federal government to split the CSA into three smaller regions, and portions of it to be subsumed into the PRA.
These pleas were obviously not granted – the federal government didn’t have the power to carry out policy anymore even if it wanted to – but it created even more animosity between the two regions. More than that, the uncertainty many CSA patriots had about the future of their region caused a panic. People ran on the banks and demanded the government buy back their bonds. CSA cryptocurrencies were quickly exchanged for PRA and foreign cryptocurrencies. The CSA economy plummeted, their stock market crashed, and thousands of government employees were furloughed. This only fed more fuel to the protests.
Gabriel Mitchell, being the shrewd politician that he was, capitalized on all this, making the return of Christian morality his mandate for the emergency election. He blamed atheists, Muslims, feminists, sexual deviants, transgenics and secularism for the spread of moral sickness. Bills outlawing all these people, deemed morally corrupt, from assembling were quickly passed. Executive actions were swiftly taken against speech and behavior that might promote immorality. A witch hunt for corruption began at every level of the CSA government, as well as in the news media, conveniently discovering malfeasance in all of director Mitchell’s biggest critics and political rivals, particularly within the judiciary. Mitchell claimed his election would allow the people to bring back a government with a more biblical ethics, like had been the original vision of the CSA. He called for an integration of church and state, with a governmental council headed by leaders of the various churches to bring the aim of policy in line with the fate of the immortal human soul.
Benecorp’s stocks only dropped a couple percentage points. The ubiquity of their products in both regions – and around the world – made Benecorp difficult to avoid. Calvin Lind released a video online, sitting next to his young third wife Jillian and fifteen-year-old son from his first wife, Michael. Lind praised the LoC for their courage – never mentioning the forty-eights – and announced the punishments of the rogue executives in his corporation for their involvement, evoking his son to highlight his disgust about the whole thing. Anita Patrice had been quick to lambast Benecorp for having any kind of involvement, saying it was those sorts of despicable practices that caused Enduracorp to split off.
Viral videos of politicians and business people from Brazil, India, Japan, Germany, and Britain condemning the human trafficking and pledging money to the rescued kids popped up. The Anonymous Knights released an open letter with condemnations all around, but otherwise remained strangely quiet on the issue.
And as the days rolled past, the status of the children continued to be updated almost minute by minute. By two weeks after the Easter Emancipation, almost one hundred fifty more children had been rescued in the CSA, the PRA, the other seceded states, as well as in Canada. Of the original two seventy-two in the LoC, twenty-three had ended up succumbing to Shift withdrawal, two to malnourishment and another three to disease. Six needed limbs amputated due to untreated infections. Nine needed skin grafts from bring burned by the moat fire. Three had been injected with so many mismatched gene doping treatments that they had become hideously deformed. One hundred ninety-one of them – one hundred sixty-eight of which were girls – had been given the gene doping that keeps them pre-pubescent, with sixty-two of those being seventeen to nineteen years old, yet looking more like nine.
Masaru setup a new charity to pay for all the kids’ treatment. More than enough was donated from all over the world. Toys and clothes were sent. All the well-wishers stopping by created a shrine in the hospital lobby. Politi
cians and corporate executives came for photo-ops.
Masaru and Regina remained the faces of the rescued kids in the media, the two of them giving almost constant interviews following Easter. Masaru spoke about the Christmas Crossing to give an even greater dimension to the whole trafficking ring – namely what things were like on the Mexican side. But the CSA and PRA media always pivoted any conversation into the forty-eights movement itself. In both regions, the forty-eights were portrayed as the new drug cartel who had violently overthrown the previous ones. The forty-eights, in their eyes, were Shift pushers. The story of the people sent by Benecorp to make Shift in Mexico was twisted to portray them as forty-eights, the video edited to appear like evidence of our activities south of the border.
Akira, who I thought would be ecstatic with our success, only got worse. She briefly visited the children once and then never again. Instead, she continued working in the lab. This weighed heavily on Masaru, who tried in vain to get her out on numerous occasions.
“You’re worried about her,” I said as the two of us entered the Denver hospital.
“Always,” he replied, nodding at the LoC Security agent guarding the door – a man both of us became familiar with during our frequent visits.
“She’s been through a traumatic experience,” I said, “with you and Yukiko…she’ll get through it.”
“I know,” Masaru said, “I know…she’ll get over it. She’ll get over it now that you gave her a mission again.”
“She told you about going forward with it?”
He shook his head, “she didn’t have to. I knew as soon as you brought it up that she would be on board. Since back in Japan, she’s obsessed about how reincarnation works as much as anything else. It bothers her that she can’t come up with a good scientific explanation.”
“It’s not like it’s putting her in any extra danger,” I said, “and I need her if I’m going to-”
“This isn’t just about her sneaking around behind my back again,” he said, “it’s also about you enabling her.”
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