The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “I can ask Mercy Prowse. She works in the kitchen,” replied Annette.

  “And, in comes Dean Pinella. Wonder how bad he’s sweating now he’s handling Dr. Patel’s old Diversity portfolio?” asked Eric with a soft chuckle.

  “I hear he’s so scared to step off campus he’s sleeping on a cot in his office,” Annette told him.

  “Any ideas on how we can get the card for the Monkoid Student Union building? I’d like to see about giving those bubble-lips a wake-up call.”

  “We might not need to,” said Annette. “I was going by there yesterday and I saw one of the basement windows that was open a crack. I’m sure we could get it open and toss a package inside, or one of the comrades could, but the trouble is there’s a damned CCTV camera panning right in front of it. We can ask our friend to take it out once we’ve worked out all the other details, but I know he has to be careful. This has happened twice now and I’m sure somebody’s wondering why the security cams seem to fail exactly at the crucial moment.”

  “We better scoot,” said Eric, looking at his watch. “We’ve got Young Dems upstairs at four. A couple of state legislators are supposed to be speaking and telling us all about the wonders of democracy, plus dangling a few minimum-wage internships in Salem for next summer in front of us. Bet you get a one of those offers and I don’t.”

  “Bet you get offered one by the Republicans and I don’t,” riposted Annette.

  “Let’s see what kind of a line we can get on them and check out how thoroughly they’re guarded. They’re supposed to be using mercs now, because the state police are spread too thin. State hacks should be fairly low on the totem pole and easier targets for us than the really big politicians.” He picked up the check. “I’ll get this.”

  Annette went out into the huge main lobby, glancing back at Eric where he stood at the cash register. Just outside the door of the Food For Thought Café hung a huge cork bulletin board with all the usual kinds of notices and flyers on it, for everything from nightclubs to special classes, apartments to share, items for sale, etc. She was studying the junk on the bulletin board when someone grabbed her from behind, twisted her left arm viciously behind her back, and slammed her into the wall. She felt the cold metal of a gun barrel pressing into her neck just below her right ear. “Hello again, Mary,” said a sibilant voice behind her.

  “What? Who are you? What the fuck are you doing?” gasped Annette.

  “You remember me, Mary, or whatever your name is,” said the voice. “We met briefly last June, outside the Benson Hotel. You were with Dawson Zucchino, who subsequently disappeared for several days and then showed up down in Los Angeles with a wild story about how he had been kidnapped and tortured by godless neo-Nazis. I was supposed to be guarding Zucchino. You embarrassed me, Mary. I don’t like being embarrassed by Nazi whores.” The man whirled her around, held his Glock under her chin, and pinned her to the wall with his knee in an obscene embrace, while with his free hand he ripped off her student ID from the chain around her neck. It was Perry, the security contractor who had interrupted her and Zucchino on the sidewalk that night. He was wearing a blue nylon jacket and baseball cap with the Blackwater logo on them. The Blackwater insignia as familiar and fearful to all the students as FATPO or police uniform, and Annette saw to her anger and her shame that all the white kids in the student union were simply glancing their way, turning their heads, and walking on rapidly, all of them pretending they saw nothing. The exceptions were a number of black and brown students who were standing and watching in sullen silence, slowly comprehending that some sort of policeman might have detected one of the evil white racists right here in their midst. None of the white kids dared to interfere and possibly be branded an evil racist as well; the building began rapidly emptying out of all its white occupants, terrified of becoming involved. “The Lord seems to have decided to give me another crack at you, Annette,” Perry said, studying the card and then staring into her eyes with loathing.

  “Please take that gun out of my face. I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve got the wrong person,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. She didn’t dare look back into the café to see where Eric was, or whether Eric saw that she was in trouble.

  “I don’t think so,” said Perry. “I never forget a face, even if the hair and the clothes are different. I’m on the security detail for some members of the state legislature who are speaking here this afternoon, I was doing a preliminary check of the area, I saw you standing here and I recognized you immediately. You’re an NVA slut and you’re under arrest.”

  “On what charge! You can’t arrest me! You’re not a cop!” yelled Annette.

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m a paid employee of the state, and since September 11th, 2001 I can do any damned thing I want!”

  Annette never saw Eric come out the door of the café, but all of a sudden he was behind the mercenary, lifting his closed laptop high. Annette twisted to her right and managed to knock the pistol away from her face with her left hand. Eric smashed the computer notebook down in an overhead chop that would have broken the man’s neck if it had connected, but someone in the standing group of black and brown spectators yelled “Look out behind you, man!” and Perry turned just before the laptop crashed into his head. The blow was a glancing one, but it was delivered with all Eric’s strength. It knocked Perry to the floor and dazed him. The pistol clattered down to the floor and Eric dove for it, simultaneously tossing the laptop to Annette. It had things on it that were none of ZOG’s business. Eric came up with the gun in his hand and whirled. He and Annette found themselves facing a group of about forty other students, all black or Asian or some variation of mud. They were starting to move forward menacingly in clumps.

  “You a NVA, bitch?” demanded one huge Samoan threateningly, apparently undeterred by the gun in Eric’s hand, or else he was simply too stupid for it to register. Eric cocked the pistol, raised it, and shot the Samoan dead center. He ooged and aarghed and crumpled bleeding to the floor. All the others screamed and trampled out of the building along with everyone who hadn’t snuck out already when they saw the trouble starting. Annette saw Perry staggering to his feet and tugging a stainless steel snub-nosed .38 revolver from his ankle holster. “Eric!” she screamed. Eric turned and shot the Blackwater thug right between the eyes at close range. Apparently Perry loaded his weapon with hollow points or fulminate-capped exploding bullets, because the entire back of his head was blown out. He stood wobbling for a second or two, his face a bloody mask, and the two of them could literally see daylight and the wall beyond through the dead man’s eye sockets. Then he collapsed as well and they were standing there alone with two corpses. They looked up and saw the red lights glowing on at least two closed-circuit television cameras; the whole thing had been recorded.

  “I don’t think we can talk our way out of this one,” said Annette. “What do we do now?”

  “Running might be a good idea,” suggested Eric.

  “Yes,” agreed Annette. “Run where?”

  “Not out any of the doors,” he said. “Sky bridge to the School of Ed first. Grab soldier boy’s holdout piece.” Annette picked up the .38 and stuck it in her purse, and Eric pulled two extra ammunition clips out of the pouches on Perry’s belt and stuck them in his back pockets. While they were running upstairs, he called back, “Anything in the car that you absolutely for sure have to recover?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Okay, I think we’d better do this on foot. A car will be too easy for them to spot and track, and there’s too much traffic downtown. We could get boxed in too easy. Let’s see if we can make it to Ninth Avenue, then downtown, then onto a Trimet or MAX station to our E&E point.” Eric reached up and forcibly ripped one of the upstairs security cameras off the wall. “Now they’ll have to guess which way we’ve gone.” He stuck the gun under his shirt and they strolled calmly hand in hand over the glassed-in archway connecting the buildings, and then down through the School of Educati
on, Annette with the laptop on a strap over her shoulder. They managed to leave by a side exit and get out onto the sidewalks campus. They could hear the sounds of a crowd and now police sirens behind them.

  “Procedure says we should split up,” said Annette in a low voice.

  “I know,” replied Eric. “To hell with procedure. I’m not leaving you.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “Unless our unknown comrade has somehow managed to give us a hand we don’t know about, they’re probably tracking us on the cameras,” said Eric. “We need to get off campus and away from those things. Head for Ninth Avenue and Market Street.”

  “There’s a security shack at the gate there.”

  “Yeah, but I know a way through the hedge.” They were able to crawl through and jump down onto Ninth. Traffic wasn’t too bad, the afternoon rush not having begun yet, but it was sufficiently crowded on the street and the sidewalk so that they could blend in. They jaywalked across the street, turned left on Park, and then right on Market. Eric pulled out his NVA cell phone and dialed. After several rings Jimmy Wingo’s voice answered. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Sliders Bar and Grill?” asked Eric.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “You still got Texas Tea?”

  Wingo was silent for a moment. “Yeah, we got it. You want to try some?”

  “Sure do. Got a real hankering for it. What time do you close?” asked Eric.

  “One in the morning. Call ahead to book a table.”

  “I will. See you later.” Eric closed his phone. “Okay, he wants us to go to location one, not our own E&E point, which means they’ll retrieve us. That would be . . . shit! I can never remember all this stuff.”

  “The downtown post office, Hoyt Street side,” Annette reminded him.

  “Thanks. Anyway, he wants another call when we’re there.”

  “You know they got the whole thing on digital from those damned cameras in the student union,” said Annette calmly. “That’s it, we’re toast.”

  “Eric Sellars and Annette Ridgeway are toast,” said Eric. “Tom and Becky will live on to fight another day. Many another day.”

  “Mmmm, not if we get spotted on the street,” said Annette. “They’ve got to have an APB out on us by now, with a description of what we’re wearing.”

  They were passing by a trendy and overpriced boutique. “Feel like stopping for a little shopping?” suggested Eric. “We use our plastic in here they’ll eventually pick up on it, but it may buy us some time.”

  Fifteen minutes later they emerged from the store clad in new outerwear. Eric was clad in a warm shepherd’s coat and Annette a brown corduroy jacket. They had lost the baseball caps; Eric now boasted a black cowboy hat and Annette a dark worsted pork-pie cap. They continued walking on down Broadway. There were sirens screaming somewhere, and twice the two of them turned and looked into a store window while a FATPO armored truck rumbled by. It was starting to grow dark now, and the neons and streetlights were blinking on in the murky dusk. They were walking by a yuppie fern bar with a large plasma TV on over the bar when Annette glanced up. “Oh, shit!” she exclaimed, grabbing Eric’s arm. He turned and through the window, on the television screen inside, he saw a large and distorted grainy picture of the entrance to the Food for Thought Café. It was CNN. Perry was just slamming Annette into the wall and poking the gun into her neck. Along with all the patrons in the bar they watched while Eric attacked the Blackwater goon with his laptop, then shot the Samoan, then shot the goon. They couldn’t hear any sound, but didn’t need to.

  “Boy, that was quick. They must be after us hot and heavy to get it on the air so fast. Us First Brigade boys are really photogenic,” said Eric dryly. “First the CO and those guys on Flanders Street, then Cat leading the band on Oscar night, then Cap Hatfield and the Wild Bunch on Sunset Beach, now us. We’re giving the media all kinds of exciting footage.”

  “Hopefully these new threads will disguise us until we can get picked up,” said Annette. They turned and walked on. “Well, this is it. Our old lives are gone now. Any regrets?”

  “Not a one,” Eric told her.

  “Me neither.”

  “Annette, I want you to listen to me and not give me any feminist bullshit or backtalk,” Eric continued, quietly but firmly. “If things break bad, I will hold off whoever it is and draw them off onto me. I want you to run, run like hell, and don’t look back.”

  “You did pretty good with nothing but this laptop back there in the student union,” she reminded him.

  “I was lucky, and there was only one of them. We won’t have that kind of luck again. I mean it, Annette. You’re a woman, and your life is more important to the future of the race than mine, as pompous as that sounds. You can give life to those who will come after. Like you said, we’re supposed to split up anyway. If anything goes down I want you to run. I’ll be fine, I can take care of myself.”

  “Fuck you,” said Annette, tears rolling down her cheeks. “No. And any babies I have are going to be yours.”

  “There won’t be any meaning to any of this if you die,” said Eric gently.

  “I said no. I’m coming with you, always. Now be quiet. We’re supposed to be escaping and evading.”

  They walked on in silence for the rest of the way, and made it to Hoyt Street. Dark was falling rapidly now, it was getting chilly, and they were glad of the new coats they had gotten. Their old ones were back in the car in the parking deck at PSU, probably being pawed over by now by all kinds of cops and Fatties. Eric dialed again. “Hey, I’d like a table for tonight.”

  “I’m kind of busy right now,” said Wingo. “I’ve got a busted hosepipe in the kitchen. Can you call back in five?”

  “Sure.” Eric closed his phone. “ETA in about five minutes. Authentication is hosepipe, in case it’s someone we don’t know, but my guess is they’ll probably send Lavonne.”

  “Is she back?” asked Annette.

  “Yeah. Don’t know where she went, but I imagine she needed some time off after Sunset. You heard what they did to her man in prison?”

  “Yeah,” said Annette bitterly. “How many of our guys did they murder in retaliation for the Wild Bunch embarrassing them like that?”

  “Near as we can figure about forty, before the stink got too bad even for Hillary and she called it off,” said Eric. “Well, there’s one silver lining, although I’d never say that to Lavonne.”

  “How can there be a silver lining to forty men being dragged from their cells in the middle of the night, strapped onto a gurney and injected with poison before they even know what’s happening?” demanded Annette.

  “We know we’re going to win now,” said Eric confidently. “Any government that does things like that is weak, terrified, in a panic. They’re losing and they know it, and so they’re just lashing out in all directions. They’ve lost their cool, we’ve still got ours. We’re going to win.”

  They were standing under a streetlight when a dark maroon Lincoln Town Car pulled up beside them. The power window rolled down, and Ray Ridgeway looked out at them. “Hi, kids!” he called out cheerfully. “Just happened to be driving by and saw you standing there. Almost didn’t recognize you with those jackets on. Must be new. Where’s the Lexus? Hop in, I’ll drive you back to campus.”

  “Oh God, no!” whispered Annette to herself.

  “What will we do if he’s still here when Vonnie or whoever shows up to collect us?” whispered Eric.

  “Come on,” she said. They went over to the car, and Annette leaned down to speak to her father. “Dad,” she said softly, “I’m going to have to ask you to do something for me now. Please listen to me, don’t say anything, just do it. I want you to roll up the window and go home, and do it without any questions or argument. I have to ask you to trust me and believe me when I say that it has to be this way. Eric and I are all right, someone’s coming for us.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Ridgeway. “I’m coming for you. Oh, I
forgot. I’m supposed to say ‘hosepipe.’ I’m not too familiar with this street-level stuff, I’m afraid.” Eric and Annette stared at one another, their mouths open. “Get in, please,” said Ray. “We’re holding up traffic.”

  Annette and Eric got in the back, the Lincoln pulled away, and they rode in silence for a minute or so. “Well, this is weird,” said Eric eventually.

  “How long have you known? I mean when did you . . . ?” asked Annette, not knowing where to begin.

  “A few months after you two,” said Ridgeway. “After Flanders Street, as I recall. As to how long I’ve known, you don’t really think I’m so unobservant as not to notice when one of my handguns goes missing, do you? First, I want you to tell me what happened today, exactly. Don’t worry, this is business. I’ve got a couple of wanted Volunteers in my car and I need to know just how hot you are.”

  “Pretty damned hot,” confessed Annette. “Obviously you haven’t checked CNN in the past thirty minutes.” She took a deep breath and filled her father in on the events of the afternoon. She told him the Blackwater thug Perry had recognized her from a previous mission, but she did not say what the mission was or what she had been doing, and her father impressed her by not pressing for details. He had picked up the Volunteer code, right enough. When she had finished she asked, “How did you hook up with the Army?”

  “I knew you’d killed Flammus. The only thing I didn’t know was whether or not you’d actually succeeded in finding and joining the NVA,” said Ray. “I considered simply confronting you both, since I knew both of you would be involved, but I didn’t know what I’d do if you simply lied to me and denied it. I had no proof, after all, and that might have spooked you and driven you away, out of the house and away from home to somewhere I could do even less to protect you. After a while I was pretty sure I saw signs that something was up. Your mother, and I assume Eric’s folks as well, thought that when you two were out at all hours you were just off canoodling somewhere like teenagers do. But that never quite gelled for me. You’re both very serious young people and I couldn’t imagine you spending quite so much time on that part of your lives. No offense.”