Abe pulled his shirt off and held it out to her. “Go ahead, shift back. We have things to do.”
She curled her lip and chuffed, not really caring for his bossy attitude at the moment. Besides, where did he think she’d be going in only a shirt? She didn’t argue though, not like it would do any good. This time, when she shifted, it didn’t hurt. The out of control pulling of ligaments and tendons and crunch of bones didn’t strain her muscles or her body. Fallon went with it, accepting the change to her form. She embraced it.
“Thanks.” She snatched the shirt from his hand. “Why can’t I smell him?”
War rubbed the back of his neck. “He put dirt all of himself. He meant to look sickly and homeless.”
She rolled her eyes as she buttoned the shirt. “I need pants.” She held up her hand. “This isn’t going to work. I need clothes. We go in there with me looking like this and we’re dead.” She motioned to her barely-there attire.
“Grainger leaves clothes in the truck all the time. I bet you he has something that’ll fit.” Abe started for the SUV. “You’re wasting time standing there.”
She followed him, not wanting to know why Grainger would keep a change of clothes in the vehicle. Save that tidbit for a rainy day.
Fallon never lost control. She’d always been the one to keep a level-head and today, with the thought of Grainger being in trouble, she lost it. What is wrong with me? Abe hit the fob in his hand and the back end of the truck opened slowly. He pulled out a small pack and handed it to her.
“I’m not sure what’s in here, but we have your boots back there and your belt. It should work.” He grimaced.
Yeah. Growing a conscience should be done in well stocked areas. “Well, here goes nothing.” She took the pack from him and got into the backseat.
When Fallon opened the bag, she’d been surprised to see normal attire. Grainger enjoyed layering clothes. A screen-printed tee shirt with a long-sleeved shirt, then a jacket of some kind, with jeans and Chucks. The bag also held pants and a belt. Well, at least we’re both prepared. She retrieved the items she needed then set to work. The quicker she dressed, the sooner they’d be out looking for their team member. Better to go with a benign term, than something more involved.
She popped open the door and held her hands out. The pants, strangely fit her waist, but were a little long. She didn’t want to ruin his clothes by getting out without shoes on. “Shoes, please.”
Abraham placed the black boots in her hand. “Everything fit?”
“Pretty much.” She shoved her feet into the shoes then laced them up. “What was the original plan?” She had to know what they were walking into.
“Grainger said he’d be the bait—”
“Of course he was, duh. I mean what the hell was he thinking doing it now!” She smacked her hand against her thigh before getting out of the SUV. “What else?”
“He had the idea of placing cameras around the area so everyone could see what happened near the warehouse. He said he would send the signal before he went in.”
“And it never came?”
Warren shook his head. “No. Then you pulled up.”
“If he gave himself up as bait, how would we get information or be able to get in there?” She couldn’t believe how selfish and selfless Grainger could be. It irritated her because she didn’t know if she should slap him or kiss him. No kissing.
“Did he say how I’d get in there?” She arched a brow.
“No. But I’m thinking you have an idea?”
“You’re damn right I do.” She smirked. “This time, we’re doing it my way. Now, here’s what we’re going to do.”
Continued in … Art of War Part 2 of the Justice for All series part of the Hallowridge series
About the Author
World domination doesn't happen overnight.
The dramatically, deranged duo of TL Reeve and Michele Ryan, don't have enough on their plate, now they're moving to YA. Check out their new adventure as JT Camp. YA, for those who like stories with bite.
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The Liberty Box
C.A. Gray
Introduction
Prologue
Twenty-Four Years Ago
Smoke billowed up into the sky as far as the eye could see. Calmly, Benjamin Voltolini weaved his way through the crowd, his dark hair swept back, revealing an enormous forehead. He held his head erect, and kept his expression vacant, but with a hint of amusement that he could not quite erase. He took a step back as a looter dashed in front of him with a torch, lobbing it at the vacant bank not ten feet away. Within minutes, the bank went up in flames. The other looters cheered, throwing rocks to shatter the windows, or lobbing more torches for good measure as Voltolini moved through the crowd and away from the flames.
The banks had gotten the worst of it from the start.
Voltolini had intentionally ripped his clothes and caked them in mud to blend in, so that he could steal a large container of gasoline from one of the few remaining gas stations. He paused every so often to change his grip or wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, keeping as far away from the flames as he could.
He’d left his Mazerati well outside the city limits. He had a long way to go.
* * *
By the time Voltolini drove up to the fortress built into the side of the mountain, the sun dipped low behind it. Two armed guards stood by a high chain link gate, and they leveled their machine guns at him as he slowed to approach.
“Whatever happened to a simple greeting?” Voltolini muttered to himself, but raised his hands in the air behind the windshield.
One of the guards pulled some sort of device to his mouth and spoke rapidly as he jogged to Voltolini’s window.
“Identify yourself and state your business!”
“Benjamin Voltolini, Venture Capitalist.” Voltolini’s teeth gleamed in perfect rows. “Here to present to the former Congress of the United States of America the answer to all of their problems.”
“Do you know any members of the Tribunal personally? Have they summoned you?”
“I guarantee they all know me by reputation.”
“Get lost,” the guard ordered.
“Oh, I don’t think you want to do that, Sergeant—” Voltolini read the young man’s lapel, “—Filbert, and I’ll tell you why. Pretty soon I will be the dictator of this country. And I never forget a favor.” After a slight hesitation, he added with a hint of a smile, “Nor a slight.”
“I tell you what, you arrogant bastard,” Sergeant Branson snarled, moving the safety off of his weapon. “I’ll give you to the count of ten, and by the end of it if your tires aren’t screaming on this pavement,” he pointed out into the wasteland, raising his gun, “I’ll give you exactly what you deserve.”
Voltolini looked Sergeant Branson up and down, as if committing him to memory. “Go on, then.”
The sergeant’s mouth fell open for a moment, unsure how to respond to this. “One!” he shouted, “Two!”
Voltolini watched him as the sergeant’s face turned various shades of red and finally puce by the time he reached number nine. Then, just as he leveled the weapon with Voltolini’s face and was about to pronounce the number ten, Voltolini punched the accelerator as hard as he could—not in reverse, toward the wasteland behind him, but toward the locked chain link gate up ahead. The other armed guard scarcely had time to leap out of the way before Voltolini plowed through. The gate itself snapped open and huge sections of the fence clattered to the ground in its wake.
He saw the commotion behind him from the rearview mirror, but didn’t slow down until he reached the courtyard, skidding to a stop just before he crushed a fountain in the shape of an eagle. The
burnt rubber smell assaulted him even before he opened his car door.
He stepped out, opened his arms wide, and held up his hands in a gesture of both surrender and welcome as most of what remained of the Congress filed out of the meeting hall in disbelief.
“So this is the secret lair of the last vestiges of Congress!” he declared.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” snapped an old man with a shiny pate.
Voltolini gave a little bow. “Forgive my rather dramatic entrance, gentlemen. It was the only way I could get past your guards. Excellent young men. You should give them both a raise.” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Nobody gets paid anymore,” snapped one of them unnecessarily.
“Oh?” Voltolini raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Well, that’s a shame. I can help you fix that.”
“You can help us pay our guards?” cried one, incredulous.
“I can help you get paid again yourselves,” Voltolini clarified, “you and everyone else in this country. Well…” he chuckled again, “more or less.”
“That’s Ben Voltolini,” he heard one of them whisper to another, and then the whispers swept throughout the crowd. “The billionaire?” and “Where did he get gas for that car from, anyway?”
Voltolini gestured inside the fortress, adding, “May I?”
Now the members of the Tribunal stepped aside one by one, exchanging glances with one another that suggested they knew this was against their better judgment—but really, what harm could there be in hearing him out?
The entrance led to a long hall lit by torches, the light from the sky growing dimmer and dimmer as they walked.
Torches, everywhere torches, Voltolini thought with disgust. It was like the Dark Ages all over again. But not for long. Everything is about to change.
At last the hall opened up to a wide, irregularly shaped room looking like it had been hewn out of the side of a mountain—which, in fact, it had. The men filed in behind him to their seats, and Voltolini walked to the white boards at the front and grabbed a marker. He wouldn’t need to draw much, but this established to all that he had the floor, which was his intention.
“Gentlemen,” he grinned. “Let me summarize your current position. You have attempted to maintain order as a police state, but you haven’t the manpower to arrest all the rioters. So instead you have resorted to gunning down citizens at will. I am not judging you.” He held up his hands as the protests began, the mocking smirk never leaving his face. “I understand that there is a greater good at stake. You are doing all you can to maintain order. But you and I both know that it is not enough. Creating order, and maintaining it, requires money.”
“As if we don’t already know that,” someone shouted from the front row.
“Ah, yes,” Voltolini said calmly. “But where does the government get its money from?”
The question was patronizing, and the Tribunal glowered at him collectively, refusing to play along.
Undaunted, Voltolini answered his own question. “Taxes,” he said.
“There’s nothing for us to tax, idiot!” shouted one. “There’s nothing left!”
“Of course there is not. The people have to get back to work first so that you can garnish their wages. But I understand your conundrum—how can you create jobs for them when there is no industry left, when the few functional businesses that remain are being razed to the ground as we speak by angry citizens needing to feed their starving families?
“This is where I come in.” One hand fluttered to his chest, an affected gesture he’d perfected. “In the last ten years, I’ve funded two projects in particular that have the potential to turn this nation around, from absolute destitution and anarchy to a thriving Republic.” He paused. “Yes, that’s right, I said Republic, not Democracy.” He waited to be asked. When nobody did, he continued, unfazed, “The first of these projects is a genetically engineered version of the Epstein Barr Virus, distributed by an airborne vaccinia vector.” He uncapped his marker and drew a squiggly line on the white board, and an incomplete squiggly circle next to it. Then he drew an arrow, where the first squiggly line fit inside the circle. “This,” he pointed to the circle, “represents the vaccinia vector. It is a version of smallpox, minus the portion that makes it smallpox. Now it’s just a shell, a perfect delivery system for other genetic information. It has been engineered to cover hundreds of miles at a time once it is released. In this case, it is a delivery system for the Epstein Barr virus. This particular strain is highly virulent—much more so than the original strain, primarily causing anemia and severe fatigue.”
Voltolini read confusion and disgust on their faces. One said, “So you want to make us all sick?”
“Not sick,” Ben held up one finger, “just too tired to fight. Temporarily of course. I do have vaccines against the virus for a select few.” He grinned. “This step will buy us about six months.”
“Six months to do what?” someone shouted.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Voltolini said graciously. “The U.S. collapsed because every man looked out for his own interests and not for those of his fellow man. I state the obvious, of course. It was because of greed that eventually all of the government programs to support the needy ran out of funds, leading to irreconcilable debt and inflation, which led to our ultimate demise as a nation.”
“This from you, the greediest of them all!” someone snarled.
Voltolini raised his eyebrows in mock offense. “On the contrary, I am proving right now that I’ve invested my wealth in the ultimate good of the people.”
“Get to the point, Voltolini,” one of the growled.
“My point is this. If we can simply… persuade the people to think in terms of the greater good, then all of us could rebuild a nation much stronger than the U.S. ever was.”
“Oh, brilliant,” cried one voice, “let’s just persuade them! Why didn’t we think of that?”
As if he had not heard, Voltolini went on, “I agree that socialism does not work, in most cases, because men are too busy looking out for themselves. They protest. They rebel against their lot. Of course, mere arguments will not do the trick.”
Then he fell silent, waiting until someone shouted in exasperation, “Then what do you propose?”
“Just this.” His eyes twinkled. “We must fundamentally change human nature. We must change the way men think.”
Blank stares met him. Voltolini turned to the white board again, erased the vaccinia vector and its contents, and instead drew something he only just remembered from high school: a sine wave.
“Pretend for a moment, gentlemen, that this is a brain wave. Everyone, every human being, has a brain wave that corresponds to this carrier wave. Variations upon the carrier are what transmit information.
“Now. Suppose it’s possible to alter that wave? What if we, the government, the Tribunal, could broadcast a slightly altered version of the common human carrier brain wave?”
Dead silence. Then someone shouted, “How?”
“Ah,” he said. “I will tell you the moment you swear your allegiance to me.”
A ripple of uneasy laughter swept through the room in pockets, and then died away. He wasn’t joking, and he watched them as if marking in his mind who had laughed.
Voltolini shrugged, staring them down. “The reality, gentlemen, is that you have no choice but to implement my plan. You have no alternatives. You know you haven’t.”
“What will you call yourself? The President?” shouted one, scornfully.
“Oh, no no no,” Voltolini said, softly. “The title of President implies a democracy, and I do not wish to be misleading. I will call myself—the Potentate.” Yes, he thought, sighing with pleasure. What an appropriate title.
* * *
The Speaker for the Tribunal put it to a vote. Ben Voltolini was elected Potentate with an eighty-five percent majority, in the last democratic act of the former Congress of the United States of America.
As his fir
st act as Potentate, Voltolini declared that the nation would henceforth be known as the Republic of the Americas.
“Gentlemen of the Tribunal,” he declared, “we are making history. Together, we shall create the world’s very first utopia.”
1
Kate, Twenty-four years later
I shouldn’t have even been in the newsroom that day.
I went in half an hour late, stopping for a chocolate-filled croissant and a cappuccino on the way. When I walked into the newsroom, I saw my boss Nancy raise an eyebrow at me. I knew that look meant, If you’re going to be here, then be here!
Oh well. I was one of the faces of the nationwide broadcast, famous all across the Republic. What was she going to do, fire me?
I waved at her, my ostentatious engagement ring catching the light on purpose.
“Lucky for you it’s a slow news day,” called Nancy. “You’d better have brought me one of those.”
I looked down at my stash, pursed my lips and gave her a sheepish grin. “Want half?” I offered.
She grunted in a way that I knew meant, You’re impossible, and didn’t look up at me again.
I slid into my chair and powered up my net screen. Fifty-seven comms since yesterday. Par for the course. Most of them were leads getting back to me for stories either Jillian, the other lead news anchor, or I were already writing. There was the story about the woman whose daughter had been dying of a rare blood disease for which she could not afford the treatment—but then the government stepped in and provided the necessary funds. I had a voice comm from the doctor who performed the surgery and transfusion, two from the tearful mother, and even one from the recovering little girl.
Magic and Shadows: A Collection of YA Fantasy and Paranormal Romances Page 68