by Ginger Booth
Not surprisingly, they’d slept in until lunch. We were using Blake’s bedroom as a workroom, since his equipment was a hassle to move. IndieNews was flatly forbidden access to the meeting room and interrogation corridor where Emmett had claimed an office.
“Hey, Blake,” I said thoughtfully. “Could we edit together about a ten-minute segment of this?”
“What are you thinking here, Dee?” Brandy asked.
“Honestly? I’d like to show it to Emmett and Drum and the IBIS investigators,” I told them. “Probably our troops as well.”
“An audience of what, fifty?” Brandy complained. “Christ, Dee.” No doubt she was hoping for a top news story to grab millions of viewers.
“Well, we might get it past the censors,” I allowed. “What do you think our chances are of that?” Brandy sighed agreement. Not much chance today. “But once Emmett has such a video, he’d show it to the military governors. Cullen, Schwabacher, Taibbi, Link. You’ll play to a small but very select audience,” I coaxed. “Besides, I already paid you for it. And some of the footage will get declassified, sooner or later.”
After a little more wheedling, they conceded that they didn’t have any brighter ideas that could reach today’s headlines. We cobbled it together quickly, though Blake and I made time to shoot a short sequence on the Monongahela river walk near the hotel. That was just a quick script – me on screen, saying here we are in Pittsburgh, over there’s the deserted downtown damaged by tornados, we’ve found a city torn by religious conflict. Just enough to preface Brandy’s war from the rooftop narrative. IndieNews had collected enough footage for filler, including the wreckage of the famous Monongahela Incline and assorted other tornado damage closeups. At the end, we tacked on the local meshnet map, annotated with factions. That segment could simply drop off anything we tried to publish.
We invited Emmett and company up for a screening after dinner.
Major Drumpeter was enchanted. Closeted with Emmett on their mysterious business, she’d seen less of the nocturnal fireworks than the rest of us. And she’d certainly never worked with a news crew preparing custom briefing materials. Not many officers had, aside from Emmett.
“Why is there no fighting close to the hotel?” Drum pounced. She had her meshnet map out on her phone to follow along. We explained how the well-equipped Pittsburgh PD faction held our turf. Drum eagerly claimed ownership of Blake to poke through his other footage, while the rest of us edged back out into the hall. Sucks to be Blake, as Brandy would say. Though in fairness, Blake seemed flattered by Drum’s appreciative attention. Brandy and I were more inclined to treat him as a useful doormat. Some guys just invite that somehow.
“Any chance you’d help us past the censors?” I asked Emmett.
“No,” Emmett said flatly.
“But –” Brandy attempted.
“Cross purposes, Brandy,” Emmett told her. “You’re in Pittsburgh, and want headlines. But I don’t want attention on Pittsburgh. Nothing passes the censors for now. Great video, though. Thank you, darlin’. And your team, Brandy,” he added grudgingly.
“I was thinking it might make good orientation footage,” I said. “For Drum, the governors. Maybe the troops. Put it on a secure server for you.” I’d already sent him the link and password.
“Is that wise?” Kalnietis said. “Dee and Brandy have drawn subtle conclusions here, that I’m not sure I’m ready to make. I prefer to keep an open mind.”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Emmett. He shrugged. “Generals are used to that. Yeah, I’ll send it along. And Captain Johnson at least. A few others. Up to them what they do with it.” He excused himself and hurried back to work in his office off the lobby. Kalnietis left as well.
Donna Gianetti lingered a moment. “Dee, Brandy. Any clarity yet on the Judgment sect?”
“Sorry, no,” I said.
“I was watching the meshnet last night, during the fighting,” she continued thoughtfully. “Judgment seems to appear briefly, then vanish.”
I nodded. “I think they edit themselves out when someone tags them on the map. The other factions haven’t caught on to that yet. The meshnet is new to them.”
Gianetti’s eyebrows flew up. “You can edit someone else’s map marker?”
“Several ways,” I said. “If you want a map marker to vanish, the easiest way is to drop another icon square on top of it, saying something else. Then no one notices that there’s another marker underneath. Or, you can comment on someone else’s marker, but that won’t remove their comments. Unless you have overrides. But you’re also allowed to add more icons to an existing marker. Only one gets shown. Unfortunately, it’s whichever icon is lowest on the list, not the one that was added first.”
“Lowest on the list?”
I showed her the full list of icons, about 500 to choose from, though I’d curated a quick-pick list of 25 suggested icons, in a different order, displayed to the user first. The rest were hidden under a ‘more’ button. Naturally, the majority of markers used on the map were quick picks. The natives had selected smileys in assorted colors and expressions to represent militia force positions, in assorted colors. Judgment’s was a little devil. The Catholics’ angel, Apocalyptic purple frown, and Evangelist toothy grin were lower on the master list. Icons currently visible were automatically added to the quick-pick list, which had grown to about 40 with other people’s selections. Markers expired off the map in a day, unless updated or made ‘sticky’ by someone with the right permissions.
“The devil is an interesting choice, for a Christian sect,” Gianetti murmured.
“Never let your enemy define you,” I countered. “Besides, do we even know that Judgment is Christian? I mean, probably. But that’s an assumption.” I looked up to see that Drum had joined us, and was listening intently.
“What do other groups say about Judgment?” Gianetti continued probing.
“That they don’t know any,” said Brandy. “Followed by something slanderous. They eat children. They keep slaves. They’re mass murderers. They worship Satan. They want to rush us to Judgment Day.”
I frowned at her. “When did you hear that? I thought that was the Apocalyptics.”
Brandy sighed. “You were probably sitting right next to me. In the tornado shelter the other night. You just don’t know what you’re hearing.” She relented a little and allowed, “Also hard to keep track of who’s slandering who.”
I scowled in frustration. I knew there was something important here, in what these sects believed, but I just didn’t get it. Brandy was probably right.
Drum smiled at me sympathetically. “Dee,” she asked, “is there a way to display only icons of a particular type?”
“Sure,” I said, and demonstrated. Little devils of Judgment sprang up all over the map. I frowned, and panned around the map a bit. “They’re everywhere that fighting erupts,” I murmured. “More than I thought.”
“That’s very helpful,” Drum encouraged, with a smile. “Thank you.” Her phone chirped and she excused herself.
Before Gianetti left, too, she tapped my screen. “You’re onto something, Dee. I know this is hard for you, but please keep me apprised. OK?”
I sighed and nodded agreement.
“What next, PR master?” Brandy asked sourly, after Gianetti was gone. “Your boyfriend just promised to squelch anything we do.”
“Temporarily squelched,” I corrected. “Doesn’t mean it will never see the light of day, Brandy. Just that we can’t go public while it might interfere with his operations.”
“Which are?”
“Would I tell you if I knew?” I returned. “And I don’t know.” Although I thought I could guess. The prime directive of martial law was to enforce public order. Fighting in the streets was not a Resco’s idea of order. Ergo, I assumed Emmett and Drum were busy figuring out how to suppress the militias.
But, “Postcards from Pittsburgh,” was what I said. “We continue filming and spinning stories. Just can’t publish th
em yet. We’ll have great stories when we’re done, spun to explain the IBIS conclusions and Emmett’s recommendations.”
“You publish to back them up,” Brandy countered. “I publish to question them.”
“Then your stories will be forever censored, while mine play,” I said. “Brandy, look. Are you OK with religious factions fighting in the streets? You want to live here like this?”
“No,” she admitted sourly. “I know Emmett’s just doing his job, Dee. Not so convinced these people deserve it, though.”
I shook my head in disapproval. Nobody deserved to live in chaos. “At any rate, our viewers love seeing ex-U.S. stories. How people are coping in other super-states. The human interest stories will get watched. Not every story can make top ten.”
My phone chirped with a message from Emmett. I told Brandy, “Gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow.” I slipped into my room and locked the door.
“Thank you for joining us, Dee,” Hudson Governor Sean Cullen greeted me, when I joined the video conference in progress. I’d been cooling my heels in my bedroom alone for half an hour on standby, at Emmett’s messaged request. The other conference attendees had time to watch our video segment and discuss it before bringing me in.
I smiled wanly at the array of people on my screen. In addition to Emmett and Cullen, we had Penn’s General Taibbi and Ohio’s General Schwabacher. Captain Niedermeyer, top Resco of New England. Emmett’s commanding officer Pete Hoffman from New Jersey. And two more brother Hudson Rescos, Tony Nasser from upstate and Ash Margolis from Manhattan-Bronx.
Note to self: before dramatizing my ideas to get attention, ask first, ‘Why do I want attention? What will I do with it?’ Emmett looked like he might be wondering the same thing.
“Why did you produce this video?” Cullen asked. “Thank you, by the way. It was very illuminating.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Eventually, PR News and IndieNews would like to publish this footage. But when I saw it this afternoon, I thought it might make good briefing material for Drum – Major Drumpeter. And we can’t publish anything now, so… Just trying to be useful, I guess.”
John Niedermeyer and Ash Margolis knew me best. Their eyes seemed to dance with mirth. OK, I had to admit it sounded stupid.
“Ms. Baker,” Penn’s Seth Taibbi stepped in. “What do you think these people are fighting for?”
“I think that’s a crucial question, sir,” I replied. “I’m not convinced we’ve found an answer. The hotel manager seems to think they want to kill each other, over religious disputes. I was just studying the map with Drum. There’s one sect we still don’t have a handle on, Judgment. On the map, it looks like Judgment might be instigating these fights – I don’t know how – then covering their tracks. It isn’t clear whether they stick around to participate.”
Lt. Colonel Tony Nasser of upstate looked particularly concerned by this. Which was a new look on him. Tony was relaxed and affable the few times we’d met. Sean Cullen invited him to speak candidly.
“Yes, sir,” Tony acknowledged. “Dee, we’ve suppressed the details of this. But we’ve had serious run-ins with a sect in western New York. Part of their pattern is to run and hide in Penn. They seem to instigate armed conflict between Christian fundamentalists. Emmett, have you run into any mass graves?”
“Probable,” Emmett agreed. “Identified by Dee’s satellite survey. Don’t want to investigate until the area is pacified. Not worth the risk now.”
“What?” I couldn’t help blurting it out. My survey showed mass graves?
Looking slightly harried, Emmett displayed my layered map on his feed. “Dee, on the ‘unknown’ layer. Here, in Green Tree, where Paul Dukakis and the original video post claimed that Dane was killed.”
I’d noticed that feature before, and already mentioned to the IndieNews crew that our reporting team might go take a look. There was recently disturbed land, that looked something like a dump, but greener and lusher than the surroundings, with no machine debris. My heart sank, especially to think that Emmett and the other Rescos had seen enough mass graves to recognize them on a satellite image.
“There are a half dozen sites like this,” Emmett continued, “plus a much larger one outside West Mifflin, east of Allegheny County. Nearly the size of the Staten Island barrow yard. Anyway. Why, Tony?”
Tony looked grim. “When you can get out and look around, you might find some of the mass graves have signs, carved into a tree or something. I’ve dubbed them the Sixers here, because some signs said ‘666.’ Trying to lighten the tone. But another used an upside-down crooked cross.”
Emmett’s irate face replaced the map. “What Christian would adopt the number of the beast?”
Tony shook his head. “They aspire to be the beast, Emmett. They want to help destroy the world. Get on the winning side, I guess. They’ve murdered whole hamlets upstate. No, correction. They wipe out whole hamlets, but we only find about half the bodies. We think the missing bodies are either converts or slaves. They take a lot of younger men and women, probably slaves. Some say their goal is decimation. No more than 35 million should survive, baptized in blood. Just them, having destroyed any rebuilders. That would be us.”
“This is not a religion,” Sean Cullen broke in. “Emmett, don’t treat it as such. If you find that your Judgment group is more of these Sixers, exterminate them.” He amended his tone. “Or, that would be my order in Hudson. Seth?”
Seth Taibbi nodded slowly in distaste. “Agreed.”
Emmett pressed, “Tony? The size of the Staten Island barrow yards? That was hundreds of thousands of bodies. Are you suggesting that could be these Sixers?”
I could see Emmett’s gruesome point. An isolated hamlet could be wiped out by a large survivalist band. A force capable of killing – and burying – as many people as Ebola and starvation in Staten Island – that was a whole different league. A force far beyond the few dozen soldiers we had here to protect us.
Tony shrugged apologetically. “Mostly hundreds in upstate. One mass grave over a thousand. I don’t know what anything Staten Island’s size could be about. I assume you’re not missing that many from Pittsburgh. It’s not that big a city.”
Ash Margolis volunteered, “I heard over a million were resettled out from Philadelphia. Makes sense some of them would be sent toward Pittsburgh, Emmett. Colonel Schneider ought to have records, where they went.”
Emmett asked, “Permission to add Major Drumpeter to this call, sirs?” The governors nodded and Emmett went offline a moment, presumably to brief Drum. He didn’t introduce her, so I supposed she’d been introduced on the video call earlier, then gone back to work. Maybe they wanted to discuss her behind her back.
Pete Hoffman, Emmett’s CO from New Jersey, offered, “Emmett, here’s another clue. We tried to track these Sixers on the Amenac boards. Penn wasn’t talking at the time. But our incidents were northeast of your location. I found some others southwest, in West Virginia and Ken-Tenn. Different names. Apocalypse. Reckoning. Armageddon. Couldn’t match the sixes, just mass murders and taking slaves.”
“If I may,” Drum said diffidently, “I’ve seen nothing like this in the northwest corner, my Resco district. But there are ten counties east of us with no Resco at all. Tony, that would stretch nearly to I-81, south from Binghamton. Just not very many people in there.”
“Ten counties!” Sean Cullen said. “Drum, how many counties do you have?”
“My district is four counties, sir,” Drum said. “There are ten more counties without Resco running from the center of the state southwest to the West Virginia border. So about twenty contiguous unsupervised counties altogether, cutting across PA. There used to be a Resco with four counties to anchor the middle. But he vanished when General Taibbi took over. So western PA is pretty cut off. Except for the railroad, of course. Neighboring Rescos try to keep an eye on the railroad through the unorganized zones.”
“They pay taxes,” Taibbi said. “Lot of agriculture in those area
s. Seem peaceable, so far as I know.”
Sean Cullen and Charles Schwabacher, Taibbi’s neighboring peers, pursed their lips in censure. Schwabacher voiced their feedback. “Seth, if you don’t have eyes on them, you don’t really know what’s going on in there. Twenty counties? Emmett, please make note of this for your recommendations.”
“Sir,” Emmett agreed.
“I could ask the gran caravans,” I suggested. “They cross between upstate and Penn all the time.”
Taibbi and the other governor-generals looked pained. Their borders were supposed to be impermeable. But how could they be? That stretch of border between Penn and Hudson was a hundred miles of depopulated hills, with trees. The border with West Virginia was the same, plus mountains.
Emmett just smiled sadly. “Thank you, Dee.”
“Alright,” Sean Cullen said slowly. “Emmett, I approve your plans.” Taibbi and Schwabacher nodded. Pete Hoffman shrugged, but he wasn’t really Emmett’s commanding officer at present. Niedermeyer looked dubious as well, and Ash and Tony concerned. “Thank you, all,” Cullen said. And the video conference ended.
I didn’t know what plans they were talking about. But I went ahead and emailed my contact Jean-Claude Alarie with the gran caravans, asking for information on Judgment or Sixers, or any other sect they’d run into in Penn that seemed bent on destruction and decimation.
To my surprise, Pete Hoffman called me on the phone. “Hey, Dee? Forgive me if this is out of line, but I hear you and Emmett are having some relationship problems.”
“That’s kinda personal, Pete,” I agreed.
“I’d like to ask a favor, Dee,” Pete pressed. “Put it aside. Live in the moment. Emmett can’t be worrying about you right now. Deal with your relationship after you’re home safe. OK?”
I pursed my lips, unwilling to agree on the principle that he shouldn’t be asking. But then again, maybe he should. What was Emmett up to, anyway? “OK,” I said grudgingly.
Five minutes later, Emmett appeared at my door. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Pete told me to break off and visit you ASAP.”