by Justin Bell
“So why are we having this conversation?” Rhonda asked. “We need to get to Philadelphia. We’ve been travelling across the entire country to get to my daughter, and here we are, three hundred miles away, and you’re holding us here.”
“Rhonda,” the sergeant said, drawing backwards. “I’m not holding anyone. I thought I was helping you.”
“You’ll have to excuse our issues with trust these days,” Phil said. “Literally every single other human we’ve met has tried to kill us.”
“And how would killing you benefit us?” Crowner asked.
“Then please, just let us go,” Rhonda said.
Crowner looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Something else is going on here, Rhonda. I can tell. This little crisis of conscience you’re having, it goes beyond wanting to get to your daughter. It goes deeper than that. You’re afraid for her safety.”
“Not just hers.”
“So talk to me,” Crowner said. “Maybe we can help each other.”
Rhonda looked over toward Phil who was already turning to meet her gaze. He pulled on his lip between clenched teeth.
“Okay,” Rhonda said, turning back toward Crowner. “Please understand why we’re hesitant to trust, especially trusting men in uniform.”
“Please,” Crowner said, his palms turning upwards.
“Along our way, while we were looking for our daughter, we ran into someone who presented proof of a conspiracy at the highest levels of government,” Rhonda said, spacing the words out, choosing them carefully. “A conspiracy to collaborate with North Korea on the detonations of nuclear devices within our nation’s borders.”
“What?” Crowner almost shouted. “Don’t be ludicrous!”
“He had some pretty convincing proof. Proof that has seemed to play out over recent months,” Rhonda continued. “Proof that ties Ironclad and Consolidated Tool and Die to the construction and distribution of the housings that were used to contain the suitcase nukes.”
“Impossible.”
“And you wonder why we were hesitant to reveal this information,” Phil said, rolling his eyes. “This is exactly the response we were expecting. Either this, or simply shot for being traitors.”
Crowner drew a breath and steadied himself, holding out his hands. “Okay, calm down. I’m sorry. Tell me what else you know.”
Rhonda’s eyes darted back to Phil’s, then moved and settled again on Crowner’s. “There was financial and logistical assistance from a few different Mexican drug cartels as well as over two dozen domestic based national militia movements. American citizens who believed the best way to get their country back was to blow it up and start over.”
“And you believe this,” Crowner said softly.
Rhonda didn’t acknowledge one way or the other.
“I don’t think we did, not at first,” Phil interjected. “It all seemed so unfathomable. But we went toe-to-toe with Ironclad. We’ve run into federal operatives who had actual physical proof of some of these connections.”
“And my parents run one of the militia movements,” Rhonda finished, saying the words out loud for the first time. The emotional impact of saying those words caught in her throat momentarily, making her catch her breath, as if the reality of the situation had substance, thicker substance than the air.
“Your parents?” Crowner asked. “This is why you’re so intent on getting to Philadelphia?”
“My parents have my daughter,” Rhonda whispered, again almost afraid to say the words out loud. “They’ve got her caught up in whatever they’re doing.”
Crowner leaned forward, pressing his elbows into the table. “And what are they doing? What more damage could they possibly cause?”
Once again, Phil interjected. “We found evidence that Consolidated is still producing the housings for suitcase nukes and shipped several of them to Philadelphia.”
Crowner’s eyes widened and his jaw worked as if mentally calculating some complex math problem.
“We think that whatever these groups started, whatever Ironclad, Consolidated, and the militia movements are working toward, they’re not done yet.”
“Lord have mercy,” Crowner said, leaning back again in his chair, his eyes roaming up to the ceiling.
The room was silent. Around them, soldiers stood, cradling weapons, but making no movement. Crowner pushed the chair away and got to his feet, crossing his arms and lowering his eyes, driving himself deep in thought. He walked from the desk toward a rear corner of the room, his feet scuffling along the carpet, thick combat boots dragging one along the other.
“What is he doing?” Phil asked.
Rhonda shrugged.
“I feel like maybe we said too much.”
“What’s the point of keeping it quiet, Phil? At some point we’re going to need help. If Ironclad is working behind the scenes on all of this, we don’t stand a chance with just us. That fight in Chicago proved that. We barely made it out alive, and that was only a small group of their people.”
“I get it,” Phil replied. “Really, I do. And I agree. I just hope these are the right people to share that information with.”
“We’re running out of options,” Rhonda replied. “We’re three hundred miles away and time is getting short.”
“So what were we going to do when we got there if we didn’t run into these guys?”
Rhonda sat in her chair, looking straight ahead, then shrugged lightly. “Improvise?”
Phil shook his head and chuckled. “Stellar plan.”
“It’s worked so far. I suppose.”
“Okay,” Crowner said, shouting the word across the distance as he turned toward them, walking across the worn carpet. “I think maybe we can help each other on this one. Walk with me.” He turned to walk away from them, and they both pushed back their chairs and joined him as he strode toward one wall, fingers clamped around his chin.
“So, right now, we’re in the midst of a vicious and violent conflict with enemies unknown,” he said. “They ambushed us in Cleveland, battle with them resulted in devastating losses in Toledo. Things are quickly spiraling out of control.”
“We follow you,” Phil said as they walked.
“You suspect a deep and sinister conspiracy, threatening to dismantle whatever’s left of this once great nation.”
“Sounds about right,” Rhonda replied.
He started to speak and then stopped twice, trying to form words that made no logical sense. “I’m not saying I believe you. But… let’s assume what you’re saying has a kernel of truth. Do you think the two might be connected?” Crowner stopped and turned to look at them.
Rhonda’s gaze didn’t waver. “The thought did cross my mind. And you don’t have to take our word for it. Fields will back up everything we’ve told you. She’s seen information firsthand that’s corroborated all of this.”
Crowner nodded slowly, seeming to turn a corner from not believing what they were saying to giving it serious consideration. “I’ll make sure to speak with her when we’re done here. So, say these Ironclad guys are also involved in this campaign of destabilization…”
“Campaign of what?” Phil asked.
“Destabilization,” Crowner replied. “So far, in Toledo and Cleveland, we were making progress. We’d dispatched military to those cities and had started a recruitment drive. We’d had pretty decent success and were actually getting started on planning rebuilt infrastructure. In both cities, our teams were suddenly and aggressively attacked, essentially putting those efforts back. In Toledo, as you claim you saw, the impact was even greater.”
“Right.”
“Now, say these same guys are also trying to plan another large-scale attack. If they’re staging this attack in Philadelphia they could be going after either New York or Washington; both are within spitting distance.”
“That’s… frightening,” said Phil.
“That’s one way to put it,” replied Crowner. “So, say we help you out. Bolster your forces with ou
r infantry. Scare up some hardware, maybe even some armor. Go straight down their throats. You say you know where they are, so we hit them with everything we’ve got. Halt their wide scale attack, and just maybe cripple their operations enough that these other attacks also start to fall apart.”
“Then what happens?” Rhonda asked.
“You get your daughter, then you all agree to help us take the fight back out to the streets. Take back Cleveland. Drive these guys out of Toledo. Stomp them out wherever we find them. Squash this war before it can truly begin.”
“Is that what this is?” Rhonda asked. “A war? A new Civil War?”
Crowner’s face twisted into an angry grimace, almost unrecognizable as the same man with the mostly friendly disposition. “This is no civil war, ma’am,” he said. “This is one group. One organization committing terrorist acts against their own country. That’s it, nothing more. And we’re going to react in kind.”
Phil nodded, obviously encouraged by this macho tale of violence fighting violence.
“It certainly sounds like it makes sense,” Rhonda said. “And heaven knows we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“Then let us help. Then you can help us in turn.”
Rhonda looked at her husband who looked back at her from underneath the stretched fabric bandage pulled tight across his forehead. He looked strong in this light. Powerful. The recent months had hardened him in ways she hadn’t seen before, not just physically, but mentally. His mind was quick, and even if his fighting skills were lacking, she saw something in him, a cunning and a strength that she had not always seen.
“Let’s do this,” Phil said with a confident sneer. “Let’s take the fight to them and get our daughter, and our country, back.”
***
Max and Brad mostly walked in silence, following a meandering path away from the elephant area, away from where they’d seen the beautiful wild horses and around toward the mess hall. They’d passed a sign for the Jambo Grill, which Max assumed was where the mess hall was now located, a converted zoo restaurant that soldiers were now using to serve meals to their own. As they walked down the path, Max looked back at the area behind them, the wide area of trees, pools, and squat, thick buildings. It was really the perfect place for them to be stationed. Lots of built in shelter, single access point, plenty of places to hide.
“So seriously,” he said, turning back to Brad, “what do you think they’re serving at the mess? Do you think we might actually get some meat? That’s not elephant?”
Brad shrugged. “I don’t even want to dream,” he said. “It’s been so long since I had a hot dog. Those things are so gross, and I would just stuff six of them in my mouth right now if I could.”
“You’d think hot dogs would live forever,” Max replied. “Even nuclear explosions can’t kill pig bowels.”
“Man,” Brad replied, wincing. “Why do you always have to take it to a nasty place?”
“I’m a twelve-year-old boy,” Max replied. “That’s my default setting.”
“So what do you think they’re talking about back at the transport?” Brad asked. “You think we’re going to have some backup going into Philly?”
“Hope so. We’re going to need it.”
“I thought you were Rambo with your little eight-shot pistol, killer.”
“Well, yeah, but I’m worried about all you guys. I can’t fight all of Ironclad by myself, can I?” Max swept the revolver from his belt and twirled it around on his finger, dropping into a mock cowboy stance.
Brad laughed. “Man, if Clancy saw you do that, he’d kick your—” He halted in mid-sentence, realizing what he’d said, his voice trailing off.
Max drew back upright and let the pistol finish its lazy spin, then stuffed it back in his belt holster and moved toward Brad, clapping him on the back.
“It’s all right, man,” he said. “You can still talk about him.”
“Not yet I can’t,” Brad replied quietly.
Up ahead the slanted roof of a building rose up just above the thick trees and Max looked up to examine it. To their left more trees barricaded their path from whatever was on the other side and Brad glanced over that way, peering through the twisting branches.
“I think that’s the mess hall right up ahead,” Max said, taking a few more steps. He slowed and turned, seeing Brad breaking off and moving left toward the trees. “Yo, where you going?”
“Shhh,” Brad hissed, glancing toward him and pressing a finger to pursed lips. “Quiet.”
Max screwed up his face, but kept his mouth shut and altered his path, converging on where Brad was walking to the trees.
He drew closer to his friend and leaned in next to him. “What did you hear?” he whispered.
Brad didn’t reply, he just moved forward, into the shallow thicket of narrow trees, pushing apart two slender trunks, and looking out through the criss-cross branches and bright green leaves. Max came up next to him, following the direction of his glare.
Their jaws dropped open and both sets of eyes drew wide.
“We need to tell the others,” Max hissed. “Now.”
***
Inside what used to be the information center, Crowner was hunched over a table, a long square of paper upside down on its smooth surface. The corners of the paper were torn from where he ripped the poster from the wall, but flipping it over left a wide blank space that he could use to document the information they needed.
He clutched a ball-point pen in his hand, looking at Rhonda and Phil as he sketched out the necessary details on the paper.
“Okay, so we have a mixture of resources here,” Crowner said. “Our main infantry support is 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, who are all light infantry specialists. We’ve got three squads, close to a full platoon, most of them on guard patrol here at the zoo, but we can gather them together for an offensive if necessary.”
“Sounds good,” Rhonda said, not really understanding how many men three squads really was.
“Three squads is about thirty men, just so you understand,” Crowner pointed out, looking up from the paper where he had written this information.
“Thirty?” Rhonda asked, concern evident in her voice.
“Yep.”
“I thought I saw more than that out there,” Phil said.
“What you have to understand is that our group was dispatched as an infrastructure evaluation and build team. We’ve got a full company of soldiers from the Army Corps of Engineers who were supposed to work to develop ways to start bringing systems back up and operational. We also have two squads of folks from the Criminal Investigative Division, because… well, because they were there.”
“Criminal Investigative Division?” Phil asked.
“Yeah. Mostly law enforcement types. Affiliated with the FBI.”
Phil and Rhonda exchanged glances.
“Something wrong?”
“As you know, Agent Fields, the woman you met out there, is with the FBI. She’d been working with several fellow agents, people who have helped us along the way. People who have paid the price for doing so. One of those people had… concerns about the conspiracy running deep within the FBI.”
“Is that a fact?”
Phil nodded. “How well do you know these people?”
Crowner shrugged. “I don’t. They’ve been helpful so far, though they’ve just been lifting heavy stuff and helping with security, no real investigating or anything.”
“Okay,” Rhonda said. “Maybe we don’t tell them about this little plan?”
“Rhonda,” Crowner said, his palms resting on the table, glancing up at her from underneath his close-cropped blonde hair. “We’re going to need all hands on deck for this.”
“Sergeant, ever since this whole thing began, I have been watching people I know die. My entire town… my entire state currently rests under a deadly radioactive cloud. Another member of our team, someone I considered family, just died less than forty-eight hours ago, f
rom an injury that should have required some penicillin and ten minutes on the surgery table. You will have to excuse me if I want to proceed with an abundance of caution. I have two children out there to think about.”
Crowner’s mouth stayed straight and flat as he looked back at her. “Do you think you’re the only parent here, ma’am? Do you think that the rest of us just live in isolation, surviving only to serve our nation that is currently crumbling apart beneath our feet? Do you not think the rest of us have lost loved ones or seen people die? This problem is not unique to you, and I suggest if you want us all to work together, you remember that.”
His neck tensed and strained with the measure of his voice, ligaments pulling apart taught skin. Veins bulged on his forearms as he clutched the edges of the table, bracing like he just might flip it over.
Rhonda closed her eyes and drew a long, deep breath. “You’re right, Sergeant. Of course you are. My apologies.”
Crowner lowered his gaze. “I understand what you’re going through. And I’m sorry I lost my composure. But I need to believe that mankind can work together to rebuild. There has to be some faith left in the world or everything that we’re working for is already lost.”
“So, we have a platoon of light infantry,” Rhonda said. “A company of engineers, and two squads of C.I.D.”
“That’s about right. About 150 Army operatives.”
“And we have no idea what we’re dealing with in Philly,” Phil interjected.
“I’d rather have 150 than the six we’d have otherwise,” Rhonda replied.
“We also have the transport you rode in, plus four Humvees. All four have roof-mounted fifty-caliber rifles. Automatic rifles and kevlar vests, likely enough for everyone.”
Phil lifted his eyebrows and Rhonda nodded. This was sounding better and better. At least somewhat more feasible than what they were working with previously. They might just be able to make this work.
Crowner curled his fingers around the poster and twisted it up into a tube as he stepped away from the table. “Let’s take a walk outside,” he said. “Start gathering the troops. If we’re going to commit to this thing I need to start getting resources involved.”