by Conell, Zach
On the way there, Sofia asked a thousand questions about the death of Professor Erdmann, his research, and their own findings so far, very few of which Cillian and Rose were willing or even able to answer. But their reserved responses did little to discourage their driver, who was passionate about digital political activism, or “hacktivism” and investigative journalism, and who therefore couldn’t believe her ears when Rose told her about her specialization in IT and Cillian mentioned his background in journalism.
However, when they were less than two blocks away from the beginning of the industrial park, their conversation came to an abrupt end when they suddenly heard gunshots—at least the sharp, rapid loud bangs sounded like rifles being fired—coming from the area where they were headed. Sofia immediately slowed the car, and all of them peered anxiously in the direction where the shots were coming from.
“What the hell is going on there?” Cillian wondered as he moved from the left side of the back seat to the right and back, while frantically looking through the side windows and in front, like an impatient dog eager to get out of the car. “It sounds like we’re about to enter a battlefield.”
His remark was spot-on, for just at that moment they passed the last building on their left and saw the industrial park behind it to their north come into view. The far northern side of the area—a large flat patch of muddy soil scattered with old brick buildings, chimneys, and rusty metal fences—was crowded with armored police cars in front of which a battalion of officers in full tactical gear could be seen approaching toward the south on foot on the main road, while on the southern side, less than two hundred yards from their car, a group of heavily armed, black-clad militants had taken position behind a number of old factories and storage buildings. Both sides were almost continuously exchanging bursts of assault rifle fire.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Sofia exclaimed as she observed the combat zone. She slammed on the brakes and within seconds the car came to a full stop in the middle of the road, less than a hundred yards before it bent left to the north, after which it led straight to the industrial park that began about a hundred yards from the bend. Cillian slammed into the driver’s chair, but without sustaining any injuries. He was glad that he had insisted the others wore seat belts, which were absent in the back.
“Is everyone okay? What the hell do we do now?” Sofia appeared to be seriously freaking out.
“I’m fine,” Cillian mumbled, feeling slightly disoriented but otherwise fine. “Please turn around.”
“Me too. Try to stay calm, Sofia,” Rose urged in a surprisingly soothing voice given the circumstances.
With remarkable finesse the teenage driver turned the car around and drove them back in the direction of the building they had just passed, which happened to be a closed-down auto-repair shop.
“Please stop here,” Cillian requested coolly once they were fully behind the cover of the car garage.
“Why?” Sofia wondered, while already slowing down the car.
“I want to go over there. I need to know what the hell is going on,” he responded.
“You mean we need to,” Rose remarked as if she were correcting him.
“Fine,” Sofia replied as she stopped the car, “but then I’m coming with you. My brother might be there.”
“No freaking way, young lady,” Cillian retorted. “I’m sorry to sound so patronizing, but I cannot have you risking your life on my watch. It’s bad enough that there’s no way I could ever get her to stay here with you,” he said, indicating Rose. “Or could I?” he asked the latter.
“No freaking way, young man” was her resolute answer.
“See what I mean?” Cillian commented to Sofia.
“Please stay here, Sofia, really,” Rose implored.
“Whatever,” she relented. “Just call me the minute something is wrong. I can always come to your rescue if you get pinned down or something.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Rose insisted. “But promise me that if I call and tell you to go, you drive away as fast as you can without asking questions.”
“Ugh, so boring,” Sofia said with a sigh. Then she shot Rose a worried glance. “Just be careful, you two, okay?”
“Of course,” Rose stated confidently. “You too.”
The moment Cillian opened the car door to get out, the sound of the ongoing gunfire increased to a loud roar, as if they were already in the middle of the battlefield. He indicated to Rose to follow him and jogged to the far corner of the auto-repair shop. Looking around the corner, he quickly saw a way for them to get to the industrial park without really exposing themselves, namely by walking through the shrubs along the left side of a line of trees that started about a dozen yards behind the garage. He stepped back to let Rose have a look around the corner while he explained his plan to sprint toward the trees and from there on crouch down and slowly move closer to the industrial zone. She nodded and moved back behind him. At a signal of his hand, they began executing the move and soon found themselves nearing the fence around the industrial park, a dozen yards to the left of the main road leading to the entrance.
Cillian was concerned that going closer to the entrance would leave them completely exposed, so he was happy when Rose pointed out a hole in the fence a few yards from them that was big enough for them to pass through and would bring them in a safe position behind the redbrick wall of an old factory. He nodded and moved forward. When he exited the shrubbery to get through the fence, he was almost overwhelmed by the deafening noise of the gun battle that seemed to rage on with ever increasing intensity. They went through the fence and moved along the wall in a westward direction, away from the entrance, because Cillian did not want to get too close to the main road where most of the shooting appeared to take place, assuming that he could still trust the information his ears were providing him within this tornado of noise.
After thirty yards or so, they went around the corner and walked for about fifty yards along the back wall of the factory toward the north until they reached the most northwestern point of the building. When he peeked around the corner in the northeastern direction, Cillian got a pretty decent overview of the battlefield along the main road.
On his side of the road, about twenty yards to his north and fifty yards to his east, four glacier fighters had positioned themselves behind the lower part of a partly collapsed wall from what had once been another factory. On the other side of the road, four more fighters were hiding behind the ruins of a brick chimney that had toppled over. The eight militants were exchanging fire with the zero-tolerance officers that were slowly advancing from the north while seeking cover behind the old factories and warehouses farther up the road. Looking east along the northern wall of the building he was standing behind, Cillian could furthermore see the gun barrels of half a dozen glacier fighters sticking out of the broken windows of the factory, all aiming to the main road. And even farther to his east, on the other side of the road, stood a seemingly identical factory with an equal amount of rifle barrels sticking out of its window frames, pointing to the north.
From the strategic positioning of the headhunter squad along both sides of the road in almost the exact same manner, Cillian derived that this was hardly the result of the spontaneously coordinated battle plan of a headhunter whose squad had just happened to be in the near proximity of the industrial park when the zero-tolerance unit began moving in and who had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to resist the police incursion. Instead Cillian got the impression that the headhunter squad had been thoroughly prepared for this, while their positions had been carefully chosen in advance as the best way to defend an anticipated attack, which implied that the headhunters had known of the zero-tolerance raid in advance.
Cillian took out his phone and indicated to Rose that he wanted to film the battle. She seemed worried at this, so he nodded reassuringly to show that everything would be fine even though he felt far from sure about that. He began filming the four glacier fighters in front on his s
ide of the road, as they were closest to him and it didn’t require him to lean around the corner much to capture them. Two of them were firing at the police unit while the other two were ducking down behind the wall. Then at a hand signal of one of the standing fighters, the two militants that had been firing ducked down and turned around to reload their rifles, while the other two got up to commence firing in turn, in one fluent, seemingly rehearsed movement. Cillian now got a good look at the face of one of the fighters who was reloading his weapon and recognized him as the young man he had seen on the picture Sofia had showed them in her room. He turned to Rose and signaled her to look around the corner. As she moved beside him, he pointed to the young fighter. Rose’s eyes opened wide in surprise as she recognized him.
“Hernando,” she mouthed at Cillian.
He nodded. Once Hernando and his buddy had once again exchanged positions with the two other fighters, Cillian gradually leaned a little farther around the corner to capture more of the battle. Just when he managed to get a good shot of three zero-tolerance officers standing behind the wall of an old warehouse on the other side of the road over a hundred yards to the north, they crouched down, turned around the corner toward the road, and swiftly began moving along the front of the warehouse southward while firing at the glacier fighters down the road, apparently with the aim to get to the open door of the warehouse and take cover inside. The first two managed to do so, but when the third one was about to join them, he suddenly stopped and reached for his throat before collapsing to the ground like a rag doll. Cillian was sure that the officer had been hit in the throat and about equally certain that he was dead.
A feeling of severe nausea overwhelmed him, and he barely managed to move his upper body back behind the corner before dropping down on his knees. For an instant Cillian felt like puking, but he was immediately distracted when he caught a sudden movement by Rose from the corner of his eye. She was nervously reaching in her purse for her revolver while glancing around the corner. When he turned his head back to the right he noticed how three zero-tolerance officers carrying assault rifles a little to the northeast of him were moving southward along the western side of the ruins of the factory behind which Hernando and his fellow fighters had taken position. As a matter of fact, the officers were about to go around the southwestern “corner” of the collapsed building, which would give them a clear shot at Hernando and his mates from the side.
Cillian drew back his coat and reached for the .40 pistol in his waist holster. At that moment the first of the three zero-tolerance combatants leaned around the corner and aimed at Hernando’s four-man squad, just when Sofia’s brother was in the process of reloading his rifle. Cillian heard a burst of rifle fire coming from inside the factory he and Rose were standing behind and saw chunks of brickwork being chipped off the corner as one or more of the glacier fighters inside the factory took aim at the zero-tolerance officer. The latter moved back out of range until the firing stopped. Then he leaned out from behind the corner again to let loose a volley of bullets at the factory, while his two colleagues got ready to jump forward and take aim at Hernando’s men. Cillian noticed that Hernando was anxiously watching the corner, anticipating the attack but unable to defend himself because he struggled to get a new magazine into his rifle; he was frantically hitting it with the palm of his hand as it seemed to be stuck, while yelling to his mates. However, one of them was lying facedown next to him behind the wall, apparently having been hit by a bullet from up the road a moment earlier, while the other couldn’t possibly hear him either as they were wildly firing up the road, ostensibly in revenge of their fallen comrade.
Just as the two officers emerged from behind the corner with their rifles pointed in Hernando’s direction, Cillian pulled out his gun and shot the first one clean in the shoulder, making him drop his rifle and stumble back to the corner, while the second officer jumped backward in shock with his gun still directed at Hernando, just as Rose fired and hit the brickwork right above the head of the third officer, who immediately withdrew behind the corner as well. Finally Hernando managed to slam in his magazine, but by now the second officer had recovered himself. They simultaneously let fly at each other, and then, in an almost synchronized manner, both men tumbled to the ground.
Chapter Eighteen
In the already familiar safety of his room in the Windy City Waterfalls Hotel, Cillian found it hard to believe that what he remembered of this afternoon was anything other than a dream. Nevertheless, the phone conversation he and Rose had just had with Sofia served as proof that it had really happened, that he and Rose had not merely witnessed but actually participated in a battle between Hernando’s headhunter squad and Gullfay’s zero-tolerance unit.
After the shootout Cillian and Rose had taken part in, the headhunters and their glacier fighters had succeeded in forcing the zero-tolerance unit to give up its incursion and retreat from the South Side. While Hernando’s comrades were driving back the zero-tolerance officers—including the one Cillian had shot in the shoulder and the one Hernando had hit in the arm—Cillian and Rose had established that Hernando was not seriously injured and convinced him to follow them to his sister’s car. They had carried his injured friend with them along the same route they had come from.
Sofia had been overjoyed to be reunited with her brother and to learn that he had sustained nothing more than a minor flesh wound. His comrade had been in worse condition, however, being hit in the shoulder, so the four of them had carried him into the car, after which Sofia had driven him and Hernando to a nearby hospital. Cillian and Rose had decided not to join, hoping that the headhunter victory over the zero-tolerance unit had made it possible for them to find a way out of the South Side on foot along the western side of the industrial park, which turned out to be true. After about an hour of crouching and sneaking interrupted with short sprints, they had managed to reach an “L” station in the West Side without encountering a single militant, whether a glacier vigilante or a police officer.
They had arrived at the hotel about an hour ago, by which time the sun had already gone down and they were so exhausted that they could have fallen asleep at once. However, they were anxious to know what had happened to Sofia, Hernando, and the wounded fighter, so they had called Sofia. When she picked up, she was still in the hospital. Her brother had only needed a few stitches, but his comrade had been rushed into surgery since he had a bullet lodged in his shoulder and a fractured collarbone, so Sofia and her brother had decided to stay and await the result of the operation.
Sofia had told them everything she had been able to learn from her brother so far, beginning with the fact that the Stigmata Man had come to the South Side last Saturday to meet with a few headhunters. He had told them that Mayor Gullfay had given orders for the execution of a number of simultaneous zero-tolerance raids into the South Side on Monday afternoon, starting from different locations along the border between the South Side and the West Side and the South Side and the Loop. Unfortunately Hernando had not seen the Stigmata Man himself and consequently had not learned anything new about his identity or appearance.
According to the Stigmata Man’s instructions, the various headhunter squads had subsequently taken up positions near the sites where the police raids were expected to take place in order to prepare for the defense of those areas on Monday. So apparently, Cillian and Rose had witnessed only one out of several battles that had ensued at the different locations where zero-tolerance officers had shown up that afternoon, all exactly according to the predictions of the Stigmata Man. However, not all these clashes had taken pace in isolated areas, and only two of them had ended in a clean victory for the headhunter squads. In most cases there had been a great number of fatalities on both sides, and in a few instances regular SNN residents had gotten caught in the crossfire, leading to significant civilian casualties and deaths, as a consequence of which the South Side hospitals were currently overflowing with people having sustained bullet wounds.
Furth
ermore, Sofia had heard shocking stories of injured South Side residents failing to reach nearby hospitals or medical centers in the West Side or the Loop after being denied access by officers at CCFF checkpoints. In some cases such denial had had fatal consequences.
After telling them everything she knew, Sofia had asked Cillian and Rose about their adventurous departure from the South Side. Then they had all wished each other good luck in their respective undertakings, agreed to talk again soon, and finally said good night.
So Cillian had not been dreaming; South Chicago really had become a war zone, and he and Rose had taken part in the hostilities. That realization was bizarre enough on its own, but things got only more surreal when Cillian and Rose began checking the news. For even though the local media all reported on the violence that had shocked the Windy City that afternoon, they mainly attributed the death and destruction to spontaneous attacks by slum residents who were fed up with the brutality displayed by Mayor Gullfay’s “beloved zero-tolerance thugs” during their repeated incursions into the SNNs. In line with the Chicago Transparent articles published earlier that day that deeply incriminated Mayor Gullfay, the mainstream media had completely turned against the mayor and were now blasting him for proceeding with his ill-conceived plan of pacifying the South Side through violence—a policy that until recently had been unequivocally applauded in those same news outlets. Now their undeserved praise had shifted to the performance of the CCFF task force in containing the violence behind their checkpoints, thereby making sure that the “ills” of the South Side wouldn’t “contaminate” the rest of Chicago. Mayor Gullfay had up until now declined to comment on the developments but was expected to give a special press conference the following morning.