“I didn’t touch you, lady. Anything you feel down there is from when you were fucking Jesse Newman right before I arrested you.”
“Where’s he at? Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t kill him—yet,” I replied. “I’m going to repay him a little bit of the pain he caused me, but that’s it. I’m not a murderer.”
“Yes you are. All of you little revolutionary pansies are murderers. You’ve killed NAR agents, police officers, even the blood of people who get trampled in the riots is on your hands. You’re just too stupid to realize it.”
“How are you okay with the System?” I asked in frustration. “You’ve been in the federal government for a long, long time. You know what it’s supposed to be like and how it’s supposed to operate. You’ve even given a part of yourself for the common defense. How have you turned from being a good, red-blooded American into a commie stooge who does whatever her masters at the highest levels of government tell her to?”
“You don’t know shit about the former government, Haskins. You think it was all sunshine and rainbows, but you didn’t see the massive political infighting on a daily basis. There was federal gridlock on every topic because this party or that party sponsored the bill so they had to block it to show their constituents that they stood up to their political enemies. Instead of working for the people, the former elected representatives were more concerned with posturing in front of the camera for their voters so they could get re-elected and keep suckling from the government tit. Homelessness, poverty, and sickness were laughed at by the elites as they ate and drank meals that could have fed a family of four for a week. The divide between the two classes was wider than ever. This country was in desperate need of a reset and that’s exactly what the NAR did. They took it all and leveled the playing field.”
“No, they didn’t,” I scoffed. “Sure, some of the more well-to-do were knocked down a few pegs, but the ultra-rich are still the ultra-rich. They just call themselves an arm of the New American Republic now and keep on doing what they were doing before. I’ve seen the parties at the mansions on the west side of town. They haven’t changed shit. Don’t try to feed me your idealistic nonsense. The elites stayed that way and are even more separated from the common folk now that we helped to completely destroy the middle class. I see that now. I didn’t understand what we were doing at the time, but now I do. The System is just a way of completely separating the classes of American society.”
“You’re such an idealistic idiot,” she hissed. “You don’t know anything.” She dropped her head onto the rough wooden wall. “Now, leave me alone. I’m tired and want to sleep.”
I started to say something about her not being in charge, but instead, I just let it be. She had no power here and I really didn’t have any questions to ask her right now. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about what we’d do with her once we got her. Was she a bargaining chip to be traded for something or was it simply another embarrassment for the NAR that they lost an agency director? How could anyone working within the System feel like they were safe if it couldn’t even protect someone like Goodman?
I grinned and stood up. That’s what I’d go with. She was useful in the fact that it would make other loyalists question the NAR’s abilities to keep them and their families safe. That may very well pay more dividends in the long run than killing her and letting them get mad about the situation. The fear of the unknown was much worse than being able to face a problem head-on.
I advanced toward her menacingly and her body betrayed her as she shrank away from me. She may have been a raging bitch and thought she was the smartest person in the room at any given time, but in reality, she was just a scared little girl. Her eyes went wide when I pulled the knife from my front pocket and flicked it open.
“Hold still,” I ordered, bending down and grabbing her arm roughly to turn her over. She weighed next to nothing and once again, the twinge of guilt at what I was doing crept in. I forced it to the side, reminding myself that I was on the right side of the law—the legitimate law, that is. I was a federal agent and she’d been arrested for crimes against the American people. We were here in this barn because everything was fucked up right now and there wasn’t an actual jail cell to keep her in.
“Ahh, fuck it,” I grumbled, closing the knife and shoving it back in my pocket. I picked her up.
“What are you doing? Put me down!” she demanded.
I carried the struggling director over to the stall with the mattress and dropped her down onto it. Then, I took out my knife and cut the zip tie binding her wrists behind her.
“There,” I said. “I don’t want you getting off later because of cruel and unusual punishment. You know, the Eighth Amendment to the Original US Constitution, the legitimate US Constitution.”
“Are you going to give me any clothes?” Goodman asked as I walked toward the stall door.
I turned back. “Not yet.” I shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not sure how long you’re going to be kept alive, so I don’t want to waste the effort to find anything for you since you came here nude.”
She hadn’t been expecting that and for once, she was speechless. I had her. She was not in control here, I was. And I wanted her to know that.
Of course, I still planned to turn her over to the court system once we’d successfully restored the legitimate government, so I wasn’t going to commit any human rights violations or whatever else some lawyer might try to call it. She would be kept safe and healthy.
I locked the door behind me and began whistling as I walked toward the far end of the barn where we’d tossed Jesse Newman when we arrived. He was about to learn that prior actions have consequences. I’m not sure if his parents ever taught him that lesson.
I whistled louder as I got closer to his stall. Accidents happened and people got hurt all the time. Newman was about to trip and fall trying to escape.
TWENTY-THREE
After Goodman’s kidnapping, the NAR presence in Austin began to fall apart. They increased their operations for about a week, raiding suspected hiding spots and roughing up the citizens of the city, but as time wore on and it became apparent that they weren’t going to find her, the government agents began to lose their resolve. All over town, the federal response to our ongoing protests was haphazard at best. Their hearts were no longer in it.
Chris seized the opportunity to ramp up what we did in and around the city. We hit police stations while the cops were out responding to diversions that we created and we permanently disabled the sewer and power to the hotel housing federal agents who didn’t live in Austin. There were a lot more citizen arrests of officers as they became separated from their groups and they were bundled off to waiting vehicles where they were taken outside of the city and locked up in a prisoner stockade that the Resistance had established near Burnet. It was far outside the city to the west, whereas I had Goodman locked up to the northeast of Austin beyond Round Rock. I wanted to keep them completely separate.
Besides any bumps and bruises from their arrest, the only harm that came to any prisoners were the removal of the GPS microchip in their hands. We learned that the chip was about the size of a grain of rice and was usually less than a quarter of an inch below the surface of their left hand between their index finger and thumb. Our medics got damned good at administering local anesthesia and removing the chips while in a moving vehicle.
The guards at the new stockade facility knew that our ultimate plan was to bring the prisoners up on charges once the US Government was reestablished, so everyone took great care to ensure they were treated humanely without giving any future lawyer ammunition to use against the Resistance in court. Plummer, our resident student of history, described our goals to be akin to the Allied response in Europe after the end of World War II.
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals that decided the fate of both prominent and average Axis personnel. At Nuremberg, Nazi soldiers, political leaders, economic supporters, and concentra
tion camp guards and administrators were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We would hold public trials modeled after Nuremberg and the worst offenders would be incarcerated. Those officers who took part in the policing of the population, but did so in an appropriate way, would be released to become functioning members of society once more.
The trials were a lofty goal, but I could see the NAR beginning to break. There was something big that happened out east, but nobody was sure of what it was. The news promised coverage of “major developments” in Washington, DC and then never mentioned them again. Whatever the developments were, the government was suppressing the coverage of it. Chris said he had a good idea of what had happened, but wasn’t at liberty to share with me just yet. He was certain that it had to do with Rogan’s mission in some way, but not the actual details since he hadn’t heard from the operator since he left.
We were on a high in the Resistance. Everything seemed to be going our way and the NAR forces in Austin were on the ropes. Our planners estimated that we’d have complete control of the city in a matter of weeks and had similar reports from other major cities across most of the continental forty-eight and Alaska. Efforts to overthrow the NAR in the northeast, on the West Coast, and the upper Midwest were not nearly as successful, however. The Resistance efforts in those places were not well-received by the general population who believed that the new government was doing right by the population. We had almost no confirmation of anything from Hawaii, good or bad.
Yes, sir, everything was going well in our fight against the NAR. Then, disaster struck.
There’d been reports of large, fixed-wing drone activity around the city that day. We completely owned the city’s surveillance systems, but we couldn’t hack the closed aviation systems, so most of the leadership was hunkered down to avoid facial recognition technology from above. We’d been going over plans for the next several operations at the Resistance headquarters in Austin and I got a text from Cassandra telling me that the baby was coming.
I needed to get back to Beth’s house immediately. I’d just left the Resistance headquarters when I heard a whooshing sound that I didn’t really pay much attention to until I was thrown violently off of my feet by a concussive wave of sound and heat. I rolled ass over head for several feet until I came to a violent stop against a street sign. My vision was blurry and I was confused. What had just happened?
Fire burned at the edge of my vision. My head lolled listlessly toward the direction I’d been walking from. The Resistance headquarters was engulfed in flames. People ran, shouting, calling for fire trucks and ambulances. I knew it was up to us, the survivors and bystanders. If the NAR was responsible—fuck that—the NAR was responsible for the strike, so there wouldn’t be any help coming. We would need to do what we could on our own.
I struggled to turn myself upright and felt my skin pull away from the sidewalk below where it had been grated away. It was painful, but I was lucky. There was no way that I’d let a little road rash stop me from helping. Cassandra would understand. She had to understand.
“We have to do it!” I shouted at the growing crowd. There was almost always a crowd of people around Austin these days, looking for the next protest to join as their jobs had shut down. These people were now standing there, gathered around the building wailing for help. They didn’t realize that they were the help.
I stumbled, catching myself on the arm of a man I didn’t know. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and pushed my way past him, through the crowd. When I reached the front, I surveyed the burning building.
It was already a burning pile of rubble and wasn’t capable of being saved. The missile strike that I’d heard coming in had been a direct hit. It looked like it penetrated about one or two floors before exploding, completely knocking one half of the building away and collapsing several floors in upon themselves. There were one or two floors at ground level that were intact for now. If there were any survivors, that’s where they’d be.
I turned back to the gathering crowd and shouted as loudly as possible. “The NAR did this with a Reaper drone! There isn’t going to be a fire truck or ambulance. They shut them all off. We have to do this. We, the people of the United States of America.” I felt dumb adding that last part, but it was something that Chris played up in his Every American role. He said it helped remind citizens that they were Americans, not puppets and playthings of the NAR.
The murmurings of the crowd disappeared and became a flurry of action as people began rushing forward to help in whatever way they could. I found myself waiting to go through the doorway into the building behind several people who’d streamed quickly past me.
Inside, smoke was thick in the air and I took a moment to put on my gas mask that I almost always carried with me. I knew it wasn’t designed for the use like a firefighter’s self-contained breathing apparatus system would be, but it was certainly better than a shirt sleeve over my mouth and nose like some of the other volunteers were already doing.
I knew that the bulk of the volunteers would only be able to assist on the first floor because of the smoke, so I decided to see what I could do on the second floor and made my way to the stairs. The smoke and heat were intense. The building was burning from the top down. There was very limited time to do what I could before I had to get out of there or else risk getting trapped or killed in a total collapse.
I found a woman in the hallway, head bloodied from a gash beside her eye. She was crawling toward the stairwell. I scooped her up and she went limp, allowing me to carry here easily. I didn’t know if she’d died, passed out, or was simply overwhelmed with emotion that she was being rescued. It didn’t matter. She seemed like she weighed nothing as adrenaline surged through my body. I was amped on the stuff and determined to do as much good as I could before everything came crashing down.
There was a man coming up the stairs, so I passed her off to him and he turned around, carrying her away. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t notice the relief in his bloodshot eyes that he didn’t have to enter the burning hell of the second floor. He’d been willing to attempt it, but I’d given him a chance to reconsider the idiocy of the move and he’d gladly taken the safer route.
The building creaked and groaned around me. It was going to collapse soon. I needed to try to find more survivors. I couldn’t let the NAR win. We’d been so close to pushing them out of the city. A major victory like the destruction of the Resistance headquarters, and likely most of the leadership, would be a major boost to their efforts here. They would use this as an example to the citizens to get in line and stay in their socially-distanced boxes while their generous overlords gave them their weekly ration of food.
Fuck that.
I forced my way into a conference room. Inside, I found three dead Resistance members. All had various cuts and lacerations from flying glass and collapsed ceiling parts. Through the hole in the conference room ceiling, I saw the flames licking hungrily at the floors above. It was only a matter of time.
Again, I found more dead in an open office space. This was the place where I’d last seen Chris. He was talking with someone about an upcoming protest. I searched the bodies, but did not find my friend. Instead, I found the man he’d been talking to when I’d gotten the text from Cassandra. He was alive, but trapped between two massive wooden desks that had been thrown together.
“Help me!” the planner screeched.
I pushed against the tables, grunting with the effort. The movement reminded me of pushing against the tackling sleds back at football camp. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt pain in my ankle, but my body was on full auto. I didn’t register that it was happening. The heavy wooden desks separated and as the trapped man fell, I saw a second pair of feet sticking out.
“I need you to go down the stairs,” I shouted.
He looked at me dumbly. The smoke was clearly getting to him. I pointed to the stairs, but he sat on the floor, head flopping to one side. I could get him in a minute.
&
nbsp; I turned back to the feet I’d seen and grabbed one of them, using the pants leg as a guide to take me to the rest of the body. I crawled under the table to see who it was and if they could be saved. It was Chris. He was alive. Unconscious, but alive. He had a nasty-looking gash on his forehead and one side of his face was darkening rapidly where he’d hit it on something.
“Chris! Chris!” I shouted near his face in an effort to wake him up. He stirred.
Then the building came crashing down around us. I threw my body over Chris instinctively as heavy thuds of brick and mortar slammed into the big desk we were under. I heard an agonizing scream above the clamor, that stopped suddenly. The heat and smoke rose while I waited for the building to stop shifting.
When ten seconds passed without anything else falling onto the table, I decided it was time to go. I scooted out from under the table and saw the sky where part of the floors above had collapsed completely. Fire consumed every flammable surface around me and I knew our time was almost up—if it wasn’t too late already.
I grasped Plummer’s feet and pulled. He was a heavy son of a bitch and I couldn’t seem to get any leverage to free him from underneath the table. I wrapped the jean material around my hands and pulled. That gave me something to grip onto and he slid along the floor for a full foot, which caused me to fall backward onto my ass. I tried to catch myself and somehow ended up grabbing a burning chunk of wood. The skin in my palm bubbled instantly.
I tried to ignore the pain. Chris needed me to ignore the pain. He was in a world of shit and I had a little boo-boo on my hand. I grabbed his pants leg again and pulled. He slid free of the desk as the flesh on my hand tore away, making me cry out in pain, regardless of the little speech I’d just given myself.
Fire burned all around us and my body was slick with perspiration. Not much time left. This floor was going to collapse soon. I needed to get the fuck out of there.
I crab-walked up toward Chris’ torso and put a hand under each of his armpits. I heaved backward, lifting his limp body into a sitting position. Then I stood and crouched to put him over my shoulder.
American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent Page 16