by Ric Beard
“I’m glad. I hope I get to see it.” She stepped forward and held out her hand. Moss took it. “I’ll make a deal with you. You get me home in one piece, and I’ll get that particular chess piece off the board.”
“The mayor?”
“Yeah. I have plans for my father that are going to shock the entire city.”
“We’re only working off a theory here. You’re going to kill him?”
“Yeah. I’m going to kill him.” Reagan seethed. “Traitor left me here to rot.”
Moss looked around at his team.
“If there’s anything this unit is going to do, it’s make sure you get home. That way our boys didn’t die for nothing. Hell, they’re heroes. We’ll get you there at all costs.”
“All costs,” Sanchez agreed.
“All costs,” Chapman said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Grand Entrances
In a rare display of mercy, the ominous clouds that threatened her crew from the west had moved off to the northeast, sparing them the brunt of what had looked like a particularly nasty cell whipping up winds and endless webs of lightning. Given the respite, Jenna decided to make the most of the weather. Moss’s last message indicated he had POWs inbound, so she wanted to get some vehicles cleared before he arrived.
She looked around at the crew and called for them to clear away. Patty was finally ready to punch something. Jenna smiled up at Ray in the cab of the truck. He drilled two anchors into the road and extended a hulking mechanical arm with a ten-by-ten metal plate attached to its end. Jenna checked the alignment of the plate with the broadside of a rusted cargo truck left idle since the Oil Age.
Jenna alerted Ray through the handheld. “Ready for punch!”
Everyone stood back and shoved fingers into their ears.
Ray flashed a thumbs-up and a shit-eating grin at Jenna. “One for Patty!”
All the energy stored in the pistons released at once, slamming the plate into the side of the relic. Jenna raised her hands in front of her face and jumped back as metal screeched and glass popped out, and Patty’s punch slammed the rusted hulk into the median, forcing it to flip across the opposite lane and roll down the hill where it plunged into a lake created by the incessant rains of a hundred years. The recoil strained the anchors beneath the demolition rig and they complained with a mechanical screech.
Jenna frowned as she watched the arm retract, pistons hissing and scraping as it withdrew. Thirty feet away Tyler was laughing, and Jenna turned a glare in his direction as she walked past Scruff and over to Patty before scaling the ladder. Scruff was shaking his head as she passed. She flung her upper body into the cab and thumped Ray hard on the head.
“Think you hit it hard enough?”
Ray adjusted the resistance dial to the right of the punch button back to normal.
“Just lettin’ off some steam, boss.”
“We measure for a reason, fuck-o! You trying to snap the anchors?” She shoved his shoulder and pulled back out of the cab. “Get her reset and stow the arm. We won’t have anything that heavy again for a few days.” She looked forward along the road. “We’ll start the push on the mid-sized stuff ahead and the backup crew’s lifter can handle the small stuff.”
“Got it, boss,” Ray said.
“Count on some body builders tonight while the rest of us are eating, shithead!”
Jenna climbed back down and walked to Tyler, who was still chuckling while looking west through a pair of goggles. She wondered if his freak ears had picked something up.
“Got something?”
Scruff appeared at her side, opposite Tyler. “Got something?” He grunted.
“Looks like Moss. Probably two minutes out.”
“Scruff, grab the med-kit. I want to check the POWs.”
She looked out across the cracked asphalt. Moss’s text relay about the woman and child peaked Jenna’s interest, but her deeper concern was Moss. He’d lost Darren, Brady and their rookie Hudson to a single sniper. Guy must have been one hell of a shot. Except for retirements, the unit had been together without losses for years. Moss refused promotion twice to stay with his men, which meant he was probably taking the losses like a punch in the gut.
Though Jenna’s team was a formidable force when it came time to do combat, they were civilian engineers. Well, except for Scruff. He was whatever she asked him to be. But Moss’s team was well-trained, some with ten years in service. They were a big part of the reason Jenna’s crew was still alive, and she was glad Moss was back, but she ached at the thought of the lost men. They were family. Jenna found herself wishing she’d left their attackers alone instead of going to hunt them down and sending Moss’s crew to clean up the mess.
I should’ve listened to Ty and Ray. We should’ve handled the guys with the neck tattoos ourselves. I killed Moss’s guys.
Static burst on Jenna’s handheld.
“I prefer your hair pulled back like that. Shows more of your face.”
Jenna grabbed the handheld off her belt and looked out across the gray asphalt expanse. She spotted the group to the northwest, sitting on their hover bikes. She zoomed with her goggles and saw Moss in the center of the group, staring back at her. He’d removed his ball cap and the sun glistened off his smooth brown skin. He waved. She returned it, wanting to smile and cry at the same time.
“Stop flirting and get your ass over here. You making grand entrances these days?” She felt herself smile, and warmth spread across her cheeks.
She watched as the bikes jerked back to life and sped toward her position. Warm light touched her face as the sun crept out from behind the clearing clouds, and she found herself hoping it was a metaphor of things to come.
It wasn’t.
Part Ten
Triangle City
Chapter Thirty-Eight
A Tyrant in Saint's Clothing
Day 5
Saturday, Mar 23, 2137
Triangle City
Jon Abel, dead. Copeland, in the wind—a building brought down in his wake. As if all that wasn’t enough of a shit steak steaming on his proverbial politician’s plate, these cowardly assholes in this so-called “Underground” were now jerking his chain in two different directions. At least when that Copeland scumbag was running things in what the mayor liked to envision as the sewers of Triangle City, things were simpler. Messages encouraging disruption of business and services relayed over the two-story government screen downtown were simpler. Leaflets using adhesive attached to the rain repellent windshields on cars or hover bikes, simpler. People could ignore them. They mostly did ignore them.
But the almost simultaneous attacks pulled off by the now-divided factions of The Underground were making it hard to continue to do so. People making out like horny teenagers in the streets from Diamond Sky vapors of unknown origin. Supply trucks erupting into the sky. These stories were energizing the usually passive media.
Perhaps he should have left Copeland alone.
But hindsight was 20/20, and there was no looking back. Besides, that bastard was either in the badlands or dead.
The mayor had spent the last five years railing against Diamond Sky, saying that if children got hold of it, life-changing impacts—like unwanted pregnancies—could result. Vaughn's real motivation was that a drug with no known side effects other than vivid dreams could impact attendance in government and private offices. Judging from the Department of Statistics data collected for the last five years, people were snorting, smoking, and eating the shit at alarming rates, but there was no real evidence they were skipping work. On the flip side, the wide recreational use kept them docile. Crime was virtually a thing of the past, except among those who couldn’t afford the drug.
He co-sponsored a bill to outlaw the drug with the Triangle City Council’s ranking member, Councilman Eldridge, but it was shot down and never made it out of committee. In response, Vaughn ordered his squad to keep their eyes out for significant quantities and to make life hard for those w
ho possessed them. Find crimes, use technicalities to arrest the criminals, and confiscate the drugs.
As if he needed one more kick in the nuts, Mikael Jensen planned on announcing his candidacy for mayor today and was showing some political savvy by doing it on a Saturday, and on the 75th anniversary of the first wall’s completion in Triangle City, when no one would be working.
Vaughn stared out the window, down onto the streets six stories below, as a man holding the collar of his yellow nylon jacket over his head ran down the ancient concrete stairs and across the reflective asphalt to the opposite side of the street where he took shelter beneath the outcropping of the high-rise apartments across the way.
Typical lazy bastard. Doesn’t he check the weather in the morning, like normal people?
He turned from the window and eyed the caramel-colored whiskey on the table in the corner. Then he flicked an eye at his number one, sitting in the chair across from his desk, staring at long, pointed fingernails.
If I have to spend one more Saturday in this dreary office with this dreary guy, I’m going to have to jump out the blasted window.
After checking his handheld and seeing it was just past noon, the mayor poured two fingers of whiskey and drained the glass.
Whiskey splashed onto the desk as he lazily refilled his snifter, but Vaughn didn’t bother wiping it away.
Vaughn stared at the Herald’s digital spread on The Underground, complete with pictures of the burned-out fuel truck and Tab images of strangers locked in embraces that ranged from friendly to downright inappropriate for young eyes. The former were images CorpKill himself sent to the media, which should be traceable. But they would claim freedom of the press to protect their sources, an old-world convention that wouldn’t have made it to the new world if Vaughn had been around to contest it all those years ago.
It was important to play the game and give people the illusion of such freedoms like they did in the old U.S. However, the media was going to have to get back into its shell, go back to covering the new tannery opening, the latest ribbon cutting by that bastard Blake Jensen at JenCorp, or perhaps his own initiative to increase the number of playgrounds and parks in the city—people were dopes for their children. Otherwise, we might have to hang reporters out of windows as a method of reasoning with them.
“I want these traitors rooted out, tried, and expelled from the city,” Vaughn said.
“Giving them the highest level of punishment might convince the population that what they say about you is true,” his aide opined.
The mayor swiveled in his chair and looked up at his chief of staff’s gaunt, pale face.
For a guy I elevated from Campaign Volunteer to Chief Aide, he has a lot of balls. But that could be remedied.
“And which thing that they say are you referencing, Morgan?”
“Nothing, sir.” His face lost what little color it possessed. Morgan was to pasty what blue was to sky.
“You know not to say that shit to me!” Vaughn spat, “They!”
“Forget I mentioned it.”
The mayor stood, and his aide cowered back in his chair.
“No, I’d like to know which thing. Please, speak freely. If I were to expel the people who forced them to make out in the streets, essentially robbing them of their free will, and then blew up one of the trucks carrying the fuel to heat their homes, what thing might they say about me?”
The aide’s expression melded from fear to determined in a flash.
“That you’re a tyrant in saint’s clothing. Heating oil isn’t going to carry a lot of political weight when summer is coming, Mayor Vaughn.”
“Really?” The mayor took another step forward. His aide did not step back. “You know we’re expecting snow again, right?”
“Page four.” The aide’s face was blank of expression.
“What?”
“The Herald, sir? Page four.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what it says?”
“It says that you fooled the city into thinking you would carry on the work of your predecessor to get what you wanted and that you are really just an old-world politician in a new-world suit. It says that you are poised to be a monarch, in the truest representation of the title.”
The mayor donned a look of amusement.
“Does it cite examples, Morgan?”
“It does, sir.”
“Do you remember the reporter’s name?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s the difference between us, Morgan. I focus on the things that matter. People write stories. So, you focus on the people who write the stories. Since you seem to have such a strong bearing of the citizenry, why don’t you tell me what else they’re upset about?”
“I am on your side, Mayor.”
“Then answer the question. Are you my chief advisor, or aren’t you? Advise!”
“The consistent trend downward in your polling over the last eighteen months seems to have begun with your recall of the road clearing crews.”
“Of course, the road clearing crews. People are out there getting shot at while they move rusted metal off the highways of Old I-40 for over 600 miles and they’re ungrateful when I pull them out of danger. The road west has been cleared all the way to the township in Asheville. Once I expand the security zone outside the city that far, there will be trade. Sure, Asheville is just a township, but it has a solid foundation and could be made into a bona fide city when the Triangle City population gets out of control. It is called foresight, Morgan.”
Morgan looked at him for a moment, apparently considering his words.
“Agreed.”
“Besides, road crews are expensive. Do the people of Triangle City want to deal with higher taxes to continue to fund them? Why not position ourselves as disinterested and let OK City foot the bill since they seem so hell bent on completing the job?”
They would stall when they got to Nashville and realized the true extent of the badlander problem there! He certainly wasn’t going to expose the Triangle City population to that war! His Mayorship would never survive war on that scale. Sometimes the people needed someone to think for them. People learned history. They knew the wars of the old world proved fruitless, in the end.
Mikael Jensen was a student of history. He knew more about the old world than anyone the mayor had met. He penned books on the topic and would use that knowledge to preach sermons to the people of Triangle City about the importance of expansion. The man was hell-bent on putting the road clearing crews back to work.
But he had a weak point. His former company, now helmed by his son, was losing loads of cash with the reduction of the Expeditionary Forces, since his precious JenCorp’s exclusive governmental contract to provide pulse weaponry and supplies to the forces was drying up with the drop off in recruiting. Vaughn was proud of that little finagling.
While it was true that people seemed to be supportive of continuing the connection to the west, the people were also passive. They had security now. They lived in a safe city where crime was impossibly low, considering what the world had been one hundred years before. They would buy his argument in the end. Even if OK City managed to win a war in Nashville that would take a year or more, by the time they reached Asheville, they would have invested everything, and Mayor Vaughn might just be seen as a genius who leveraged his superior intellect in preserving Triangle's resources instead of sending its sons and daughters into war. Let OK City spend its resources and its capital while Triangle City became a thriving, encapsulated economy, with more to trade and more ways to dominate the relationship.
The history annals would call him a genius, a true tactician. Perhaps they would build a statue in the Memorial Park he was building? But that didn’t guarantee him another term. People were too short-sighted.
“It doesn’t matter what they say,” the mayor said, at last. “We’ve secured hundreds of miles in every direction around the wall, and our farms and factories out there are thriving. We’ll expand the secu
re zone so we can obtain more resources. Our plan is for growth on our own terms, not an explosion of uncontrollable chaos.”
“Of course, Mister Mayor. Brilliant.” Morgan smiled a mouth full of sharp teeth. With those teeth and pale-ass skin, his advisor had to be one of those vampires from old-world literature. If he hadn’t seen him standing in daylight, unharmed, he’d swear by it.
“Thanks. That’s all.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Paid with Their Blood
Tab cameras flashed from beneath the media’s umbrellas when Mikael arrived on the courthouse steps. The clicking, mixed with the sound of the raindrops tapping the umbrellas, created a furious rattle reminiscent of the media in his younger days. But the new iteration of media was a hybridized combination of bloggers and beat reporters who contracted for media outlets according to who was paying the most for the scoop of the day. Mikael knew that if the mayor had his way, government subsidies for the media provided by earlier generations, who valued the public’s right to know, would be erased from the city’s budget, especially in light of the media’s recent treatment of the administration.
The air smelled of wet asphalt. Water splashed beneath Mikael’s feet as he exited the rear seat of his truck. Thunder echoed in the distance as the once-powerful line of storms weakened by the Appalachians made their way toward the city. The rain would become heavier soon, and as there was plenty of electrical activity, he needed to get this over with.
The street below was filled with protestors, pumping signs. Mikael read a few as he stepped out of the truck.
Keep Us Safe!
Where is The Chain? Where are our Expo Forces?
Excommunicate the Traitors!
Mikael turned to offer a hand to his wife, who took it and stepped out of the vehicle. She spared him the burden of her bodyweight as she slid down easily out of the truck.