Monsters

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Monsters Page 7

by Daniel Greenwell


  “Not going to shoot him?” Tim asked.

  “Don’t have to,” Mal said, “I tucked him in for a nap while looking like Pat Mcafee.”

  “Yeah but when you swim,” Tim said, “you usually do it sober and don’t get arrested.”

  “Usually,” Mal joked as he grabbed his rifle and they left the area.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Solid Snake shit

  “So what’s the play here?”

  Tye asked as they stood in a perched position on a roof next to the wrecked building where the injured man ran into Quinn.

  “We take it low and slow like a barbecue,” Mal said, “You stay with the QRF on the first floor here and Jace, you are up here, you run-”

  Jace interjected immediately, “Wait, how big is your ego that you think you can infiltrate that building on your own?”

  Mal looked at Jace with a look across his face that can only be described as- annoyed.

  “I will be fine, thank you.” Mal said while strapping on the adaptive camouflage suit and the helmet.

  Tim piped in from his earpiece.

  “Okay Sam Fisher,” Tim sarcastically spat in reference to the Protagonist of Splinter Cell, “you need to move slow in that thing and keep your hands free of weapons. It won’t hide heat signatures or sounds and if someone gets a square look at you while moving, the adaptive camo won’t hold.”

  “You aren’t going in there unarmed are you?” Tye asked.

  “No, I have my pistol underneath the AC suit,” Mal said.

  Mal took one explosive round out of the bag and put it in his pocket, while hoping he didn’t have to use it. Mal picked up his rifle off the ground and put it in both of his hands so it could read his biometric signature in his hands, the XM-24 rifle’s biometric system were made to prevent US weapons from falling into the hands of the enemy.

  “XM-24 go into Safe-mode,” Mal said as the rifle sprung back into the small version it usually was when attached to his tactical vest.

  Mal handed it to Tye.

  “The plan is we will run them out to Jace here on overwatch,” Mal said, “So send that with my fire-team leader okay?”

  Tye motioned a young woman, late twenties, with long blond hair in a bun, he handed her the rifle.

  “Protect this thing with your life,” Tye said as she nodded back.

  “I want QRF on standby,” Mal said into his ear-piece, “more importantly, I want Wallis and her drone to by my Second pair of eyes in there.”

  “No problem,” Wallis said, “Just give me a ride will you?”

  Tye handed him what looked like an RC car but was decked out entirely with the same material as the AC suit.

  “If I get caught in there, I want you to drop everything you got on that building,” Mal warned.

  “Okay,” Tim said begrudgingly.

  Mal, attached his clip from the zip line to his waist and hopped off the building, riding the line into the rundown buildings one of many broken windows, he curled his legs up as he rolled into a ball and cut the wire. He rolled onto his back and right back to his feet, dropping the hood of the suit over his face as the faceplate closed. He was invisible to the human eye now.

  “Boots on ground,” Mal said as he landed and put the drone on the ground.

  “Be careful,” Tye said, “We have the clicker system to communicate for you in there. First contact, press the button in your thumb twice.”

  Mal pressed once for acknowledgment and walked into the building. The hallway he was on was mostly empty but he could see the rest of the building from the crack in the floor. He pressed the button twice. There were around twenty five men down in the atrium of the building with another hole into the sewer opened in the ground floor.

  “Men, stage one of our operation was a bit of a failure,” Quinn said from the stage, “but that’s the thing about diversionary actions, they really don’t have to be that successful to work.”

  The men in the audience clapped at Quinn’s speech.

  “What we will gain from this raid will purge this area of BANS and then the idiots in the Reds Army will finally pay enough attention to the fact that we can and will end this war,” Quinn said, “And purify this country so that God comes first, the Faggots go to hell and the SJW’s in charge of half of this country currently won’t keep trying to replace us anymore.”

  Ah, the classic white supremacist rhetoric but what I don’t understand was: David is a Person of Color. His mom was Native American, I don’t under what level of cyclical hypocrisy was required for someone to not realize that the bad people he was talking about was also talking about himself.

  “We understand that Malcolm Daniels, The Wolf himself has become part of BANS local forces but we have something that will stop him, right Ares?”

  Mal looked to the front row of the makeshift auditorium and saw his son, David Daniels.

  “I served with Malcolm,” Quinn said, “He’s whip smart but there’s one thing Malcolm Daniels isn’t most of the time, ruthless. The Malcolm Daniels I know he showed himself yesterday when someone sent four assassins to his house and he let one go off of a sob story. We got the kid back here now, he was part of our Cerberus program, been running some of the local street toughs down here at only twenty.”

  Good, he’s fair game then, Mal thought.

  “Malcolm Daniels may not be ruthless but yesterday BANS was,” Quinn said, “They caught some of our men the other day off guard and executed them with no questions asked in the street.These big government, socialist pigs aren’t interested in a treaty really, they are interested in building their strength to when they can blow through that wall and systematically go house-to-house murdering you, your wives and your children. They have no interest in peace, they have an interest in winning.”

  Everything he just said there, was a lie. Like every single facet of his story was untrue. I killed his troops with Jace yesterday after they attempted to get into a firefight with me, with all of the civilians in the firing zone. Quinn was always a liar though, this wasn’t new.

  “Now, as we start our plan we have to be ready to make every sacrifice to earn our victory, to save America,” Quinn said, “if that means we give our lives to our cause, then so be it. If that means we have to take some civilians into a firing zone to save this country from these people, then so be it. There is no cost to high to end this oppression from these Jew-Controlled sheep!”

  Quinn raised his arms like he just won the MVP of the World Series.

  Quinn’s not being dumb, he’s playing dumb. Everything he is doing here is part of a plan so this Alt-right You-tube channel he was running here in person was just to rile up his troops.

  Mal had always worried about Quinn’s politics. So heavily focused on things that weren’t really in danger and Mal was certain of one thing: dangerous policies and imperfections weren’t just on one side of the wall. He regularly had sparring matches over how things should be run on this side of the wall and what his tax dollars were spent on but, their side is dangerous and filled with hate.

  “How many Mal? One click per ten men.”

  Mal clicked the button twice.

  “Roger, Mal,” Tye said, “Press four times for a breach.”

  The RC drone drove off into another direction but Mal swung down to the stairs and slowly walked down to the main floor. The cracks in the stairs made it difficult to move without notice as there was a man at the end of the stairs watching the speech. Mal saw that Quinn was ending his speech and walking into an office ten feet away. All Mal had to do was distract this guy long enough to do that when all of a sudden, he fell to the ground asleep. Mal turned his head and saw the RC drone to the left before it disappeared again.

  “You are welcome, Mal,” Wallis said before the RC drone turned around and disappeared into the darkness.

  Mal stepped over the man’s body. Mal opened the door into the stairwell that led to the office where he could find Quinn. Mal stepped into hallway about fifteen feet b
ehind Quinn and realized he could have a choice on his hands. He had two choices: Kill or talk? He could kill Quinn and leave or try to talk him out of this which at this point may be impossible.

  I should probably just try and do a bit of both.

  “Mal, I am going to take some information out of the computers up here,” Wallis said.

  “Cool,” Mal muttered under his breath as he took the helmet off.

  “Malcolm Daniels, I have been waiting on you,” Quinn said from the other room.

  Mal pulled his pistol out from his suit’s inner liner.

  “Yeah, I am sure you have, between the Assassins and putting a price on my head, you probably assumed this visit would happen,” Mal said.

  “I did, I wasn’t really planning on them killing you though,” Quinn said, “I have a much better person in mind for that.”

  Glancing behind him, Mal saw the hallway was empty. The cracked floor of the former apartment complex had been mostly destroyed in the first salvos of the war.

  “Why did you lie to all of your soldiers out there?” Mal asked

  “Me? Lie? I would never and that is quite an accusation, hope you have proof for that.”

  “I was there, Quinn,” Mal said.

  “So, you were there for the war crimes and did nothing? How dare you come here to lecture me on morals when I do believe you shot two men while they were on the ground yesterday,” Quinn said.

  Mal raised his eyebrow at Quinn.

  That’s impressive amounts of spin, Quinn really should have worked in the White House. He-who-must-not-be-named could have used him during that Impeachment proceedings.

  “Look, your deflection crap may work on people who found History class hard but not really me,” Mal said, “and I think you knew that. That’s why you pressed the button under desk a minute ago.”

  Quinn grinned menacingly, like he knew it was time for some straight talk.

  “Don’t worry, it wasn’t live, just making a recording,” Quinn said, “I do think it’s even easier now to do this than it was before the war. People are more radicalized now than any other time in human history. Do you know what an Overton Window is? Of course you don’t, you know war and combat but anything outside of it? Useless. An Overton window is the area at which people on either side of the wall decide if something is acceptable or not. It used to be that the ideas that I espouse were found to be ridiculous and wouldn’t be approved by anyone but about a year before the War, everything started changing. I told someone one day that we should start shooting the Mexicans as they come across the border and he agreed with me. I knew then, something had changed and the Left has always been full of crazy Radical Socialists like Joe Biden all the way back to 1978.”

  Ah yes, well known socialist Joe Biden, a guy who was much closer to Republicans than he was to other Democrats on a slew of issues.

  “The Tomi Lahren rant is over, take your troops and go home. I will blow the hole and we can all live peaceful lives, I didn’t join BANS but you sent someone to murder me with a kid around, I can’t let that go.”

  “Mal, they weren’t going to kill you, that wasn’t their job. I have others that can kill you,” Quinn said.

  “Well, you are going to have to step up your game considerably,” Mal said, “I wiped them all out hilariously easy. I would like a moderate challenge at least.”

  Quinn chuckled at that assertion.

  “What I want is to end this war,” Quinn said, “now do I want my side to end it? Yes.”

  “I don’t know if you have noticed but you are the only one left fighting here,” Mal said, “The Reds and BANS were totally cool with the idea to leave each other alone.Tim and Kevin played golf with each other last month, this war: it’s over.”

  Kevin Higdon is the commander of the Reds units in Cincinnati and an old friend of Tim and Mal’s, the three of them were proof that peace had a chance. Kevin had actually gone out of his way to make sure any attacks on BANS in the area would be punishable by death, extreme but it sets the example that this war needed to end.

  “The realities are: when this city is rubble and corpses, the Reds army will take that opportunity and march right in here before taking the rest of the continent or I will do it myself.”

  “I think you are going to need some better troops for that,” Mal said, “I have found yours fall into traps pretty easily, they don’t have the experience to get the job done and while most of the guys Tim has aren’t very slick: Jace and I are.”

  “That’s why we won’t be fighting you head on,” Quinn said, “We are the terrorist cell here, we are going to take the lessons you and I learned fighting the Islamic monsters and use it against you here. We will take their future and all that will be left will be chaos, corpses and rubble.”

  “Who is we?” Mal asked.

  Quinn stared back at him, playing with a small knife in his hands. That was the scary part of Quinn, he wasn’t the traditional white supremacist in America. Instead of robes? He showed up in a three piece suit and talked about how he didn’t actually hate anyone, he just didn’t think they belonged her.

  “The Sons of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I believe that is a name you know, isn’t it Wolf ? Yeah, you hate the fact that your home state recognized him. That’s why I picked him, I decided it would partially provoke you.”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate general in America’s first Civil War, known for executing any non-white soldiers he came across and, even though he wasn’t from the State of Indiana, yet he had a town named after him and was a “Hoosier Hero” according to Mal’s high school textbooks.

  “The first grandwizard of the Ku Klux Klan, I know who he was…I also know this, he’s dead. You must look up to him?”

  Quinn smirked.

  “He wasn’t quite as evil as you imagine I am sure, he was a partially good man. Just hated the government telling him what to do.”

  Mal saw this was going nowhere and began to level his pistol at Quinn’s face. Quinn had never seen the Monster that was in Malcolm Daniels, he thought The Wolf were like many other callsigns by the US, just a way to inspire fear and recognize their allies. Mal squeezed his jaw and snarled at the man.

  “I will do you a favor,” Mal said, “I will send you to meet him.”

  Quinn smiled back at Mal as he said that. It made Mal’s skin crawl because he could feel a presence behind him. Mal spun with his MK12 pistol to slap it across, his enemies face. Mal’s pistol was stopped but his opponent’s other hand grabbed the back of Mal’s Camo suit pushed his hip into Mal’s back and pulled, throwing Mal through the glass window to the right of the office and into another room.

  “You wanted to kill him,” Quinn said, “Here’s your chance.”

  Mal looked up to see his own son, David Daniels. Almost a look back in time from Mal’s past, from what he was when he was younger. Tall and lean build but with a light tan skin, a pair of Reddish eyes and the dark jet black hair that Mal had given David. Mal put the pistol up, slowly and slipped the pistol into the holster on his left leg, careful not to make any sudden movements.

  “David, don’t do this,” Mal said as he struggled back to his own feet, “your problems with me, doesn’t change the fact that you are talking about genocide here, Son.”

  “Thousands to save Millions, Dad,” David said, “I am not surprised you can’t understand that. If we do nothing, BANS will just eventually run through us. You have always been just a bit dumber than me.”

  David stepped forward swinging a knife side-to-side, as if it would cut his throat. Mal stepped to the inside of David’s reach and blocked his arm, not the knife. Mal wrapped his arm around his elbow and pulled backwards to force his hand to open as the knife clinked to the ground. Mal kicked David back, then turned to pick up and throw the knife out of the building.

  “Dave, I won’t want to fight you,” Mal said.

  “That wasn’t hard to figure out,” David said, “I don’t want to kill you because I hate you,
even though I do, after Mom died: you might as well have.”

  David pounced forward as Mal sidestepped and threw a punch from a boxer’s position to the right of David’s step kick. As David landed, he dipped under his dad’s punch and elbowed him to the face. Mal staggered backwards and tasted copper in his mouth, he touched his mouth and felt the blood.

  “David, you can kill me if you want but you aren’t going to get any of those fancy weapons without me,” Mal said.

  “So, you know about Crane? Impressive old man but I don’t think you are seeing the whole picture here: There’s nothing special about you here.”

  David stepped forward and kicked Mal in his chest, knocking him back to the window sill.

  “The problem being,” Mal said, “You don’t know that I know about all of the people in question. That’s why you are going to be real mad when I tell you that Raynor Davis is safely headed to California.”

  The entire state of California was entirely BANS territory and a stronghold that would take years to even make a dent in, anything that BANS had that needed to be protected was there in either Camp Pendleton or San Diego’s Naval base, the home of the last fleet of ships in the country which was what made it so hard to be attacked now. When the fighting broke out, Reds were already there but now after they were driven into Arizona: there was no impregnating California even though the state’s massive size would be a problem. Dave’s mouth was open, like he couldn’t understand how his dad could know what was going on. Even though Mal himself still, had absolutely no idea who he was.

  “Then you know what the plan is?” David asked.

  “ I do,” Mal said, “it didn’t take long.”

  Mal pressed the clicker four times

  “Then you have to die old man, I can’t have anyone getting in the way of us breaking the wall,” David said as he reached behind his back to find what Mal suspected was a pistol but unfortunately he was slow because Mal had already drawn his.

 

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