To those of us who got a clue, there wasn’t much to the dog and dipshit shows—relic hunting rifles, a few postwar pistols a guy was dumb enough to bring back from his tours in one of the Eastern Continent “ ’stans,” sometimes an AR-17 the guy had never even shot before. Hell, we all black-marketed AR’s when they started confiscating them. Not anymore. Now we are all “safer.”
Way back in the day, there were a hundred million private firearms in the country and the guzzlers and smokes killed people like guns were never invented. They barely got the cigarette lighters out of the guzzlers. No “Mothers Against Guzzlers and Puffs” happened, either. No “MAGPIE” the vote, to stop Ms. Tasty Tobacco and Mr. Rolling Steal from driving around by themselves, murdering helpless citizens. That would be … ludicrous.
I don’t think we were very far away from the day when a drunk could’ve gotten himself out of a slaughter charge by saying, “The guns made me do it.”
Driving drunk while you smoke a cigarette? Might as well put a gun to your head.
My inner voice is getting more sarcastic and annoying as I stand back up. And I realize that I got caught up in the rage in my head for too long, because the bastards are only a couple flights down.
Shoot it out with them.
Not happening! Dead Protection vets aside, none of what’s left of us is going to trade bullets with half a dozen overtrained judgment junkies, jacked up at the thought of putting a DT—“Domestic Terrorist”—on their kill sheet. Bullets can kill you, that’s a universal constant.
The worst of it was, your neighbor would rat you out if they knew you still had a pistol stashed somewhere around your house. Backyard barbecue with a citizen for twenty years, get too drunk on State sanctioned swill… Little slip of the tongue later, and the first chance the guy gets, he screeches you to a Protection agent to save his own ass … for as long as he can.
We used to be able to deal with a nosy neighbor like that. A little visit from the faithful, that guy stopped squawking. But in the end, none of it mattered. It was all for nothing, because once the president sicked his tax-hounds on the National Resistance to Authority dudes—cut the head off the only guys left in the fight—that was that. We went the way of Aussie Islanders—Protection said jump and citizens hopped like kangaroos. And Simon and Cindy citizen watched on the PIN like the rest of us.
They said it over and over—guns were the enemy. Anyone who had them was too, simple as that. Repeat something long enough … pretty soon, that’s gotta be the truth, right? Truth or lie, we all got the message. They were taking the guns … and defiance equals death.
“Citizens”—uneducated nation-trusters—I used to think they were all a bunch of idiots. Out here among them, though, they’re starting to get the picture—sooner or later, the boot finds its way to everyone’s neck.
Once the State had most of them, things got worse. Unfortunately, they had that plan worked out for decades. The final phase—if you took too long turning yours in—they would dispatch three Protection agents into your house. Those guys would snatch you out of bed and wipe the inside clean. Then you were just gone—disappeared. So was your family.
To the State, citizens—anyone who questions their authority, really—were the dangerous ones. Someone who doesn’t obey? Shit, to a slave owner, that’s dangerous. But with ten billion of us on the planet and the dial spinning like a crooked cabbie’s time-ticker, no one noticed one less mouth to feed … until it was theirs.
— V —
WHEN THEY SLAM open the metal door to the roof, I’m almost to the ledge. I look for another way down, but it’s a roof! Doesn’t matter—they’re here and I’m dead.
I’m almost to the ledge and it’s my “sooner.” I wince at the cramp in my side, then turn as I stumble and fire two rounds, back over my shoulder. Miracle if I hit someone, but I only want to get to the ledge. And that’s it, counting the ones I fired in the alley, I’m out.
I chuck my Kimber and it lands with a metallic clank and bounces to a stop in a pile of useless metal misery next to a big heating and air-conditioning unit. The rain’s really coming down now.
Then I hear the words behind me, “Jacob Oliver Blake, you are hereby remanded…” I wince at the sound of my middle name and his voice trails off in my head—I don’t hear the rest. He could’ve saved his breath, though. I memorized the whole thing at the academy. So did every other agent and citizen. If they didn’t—
“State your compliance!”
Submit to judgment—that’s what he wants. I know how that ends.
You’re going to die with an empty gun in the rain. Isn’t that a bitch? Cliché.
The critic. I’m seriously tired of his shit. I’ll be glad to shut him up. A bright little star—silver lining to the sludge-filled clouds in the sky? Just a couple more steps and—
I feel the punch in the back of my shoulder as the first bullet hits me. Hell, the son of a bitch only fires one. They have good training, I made sure of that. The Rufflon-tipped lead rips through my back and out the front of the top of my chest, and my arm catches fire and I spin to the ground and yell. I slice my left hand on the sheet metal of the heating and air-conditioning unit on the way down, and blood’s pouring out of the gash in my palm. For some reason, I’m more concerned with my hand. Maybe because I masturbate with that one. Who knows what’s in my head at this point, because my mind is spinning.
I look, and the blood looks dark—darker than it should be. I’m no blood expert. Hell with it.
The bullet isn’t gonna kill me, it’s not supposed to. And I can hear the boots and I’m crawling on my knees and pulling with my good arm as fast as I can drag myself and—
“State your compliance!” As if I didn’t hear him the first time.
Then—Bam!
The second bullet tears across my ass. “Son of a bitch!” I yell it at no one. It flips me over and onto my back and I roll sideways, to get on my stomach, take a last look at them. Ten of…? No, eleven. I did drop one in the stairwell, I think. And they are mean-looking, hard-hearted bastards, dressed in all black everything. They look like little demons—my brothers—agents, coming for my soul.
And they got their singe-spray and billy clubs, and their goggles and their MP7’s—squatty little, toy-looking machine guns—9mm, nice weapon. And there they all are, fifty feet away, maybe. But they’re still coming, so I use all the ranting rage and adrenaline I got left to yell through the pain and stand back up, and then I limp two more feet and wince my way onto the ledge at the edge of the roof.
Someone behind them yells, “Stop!” and they all freeze. When the guy steps out from behind the pack of hard-hearts—PAIC, I think. And I should know, I used to be one of them. He knows that.
Officially, neither of us ever existed. That’s the other power they have in Utah. They can make a man disappear, but you’ll swear you can see him right in front of you as he shoves a knife in your gut. This ghost, he doesn’t want a corpse. He can’t interrogate a dead body.
Hot blood runs down my chest and I turn my head and look over my shoulder. I’m leaning hard on my right leg and the ass-cheek on my left is burning fire. I can feel the blood from that, too. Either way, everything from here is gonna be bad.
But there they all are—frozen, powerless. And then I know it’s the only way, the one sliver of freedom every citizen has left. Of course it’s illegal, but you can’t imprison a guy for killing himself.
Though, when too many citizens started getting away before we could pop them the vice—squeeze anything we needed out of their soon-to-be-dead heads—I figured that problem out, too.
Once the guns were gone, most suicides flapped themselves off a scraper downtown. Now, a “Flapper’s” family has to pay if someone splatters the pavement. But these bastards don’t know where my wife is. I made sure of that. That’s what they want to find out.
I look back, gaze out across the city. Despite the rain, it’s bright—must be a full moon behind the low fog, and th
e electro is coming on. It never really gets dark in the urban zones we used to call cities—just a constant, illuminated gray. There’s a million tiny little spikes of brightness, shining their white lies at every crack of the concrete decay most of us live in now. Every once in a while, there’s no clouds and you can see the real ones—the stars, trying to shine the truth.
I can barely feel the rain as it mixes with my blood and trickles down my chest. The pain is there, but the satisfaction too. Couple of lightning bolts light up the clouds and I count, One thousand one, one thousand two, one—Crack!
Heaven explodes its disapproval a couple miles away. I have to remind myself that I don’t believe in that shit. If I did—f there is a God—he’s left us all stranded in Hell.
When I look back at them, I can tell by their body language that they have no idea what to do next. They shoot me, I’m over the ledge and they get nothing, but if they don’t, I might jump anyway. Welcome to everyone’s new free will—power of choice—shitty and shittier. Have a nice day.
But the PAIC—this guy in charge—he knows how to handle a flapper. You don’t understand something, get rid of it. The rest of them get out of his way and he walks forward a couple of feet, looking at me with that downturned smile I taught them all to use. Then he raises up his big, Sand Eagle, .60 caliber… What an overkill joke that gun is.
I know, I know—time for rage is over—but I’m just trying to psych myself up. I look down at my legs and behind me. I don’t know if I can do it.
Whichever one of them shot me in the… That guy probably would fuck his mother. They all would if that PAIC told them to. Twenty-five-year-olds with machine-guns—brain-scrubbed Protection agents, followers. Doesn’t matter much now, but I shout it at them anyway, “Motherfuckers!” Then I jump.
— VI —
ANGELS MURMURED AND gasped coos from across Life’s side of the arena. And dark angels cawed and crowed, roaring in triumph from Dal’s side.
When the sounds of angels, thirsting for judgment, died down, he cawed and crowed wildly. Dark lion that he was, he voiced his amusement like a raven. “Each time—I began to worry,” he said. “It appeared he might falter.” He turned toward her with an evil grin stretched across his face. “That is your version of life? … Rather unfortunate, in my opinion.”
Silence fell over the hall as a million cold-hearted snowflakes … angels waited for the warmth of summer. But the winter of the Word was still upon them all. This eternity had not ended yet.
Life hung her head only slightly before she lifted it back up and turned toward him. “You force them with joyful elation to the darkness,” she said. “How may they find light?”
“I force them?” Dal said. “You herd them like lemmings over the jagged cliffs of your covenants. There is nothing to discover. Even you realize they are doomed before their attempt. It has always been so.”
— VII —
I LOOK, AND the outside of this tall scraper is all glass. I’ll be able to watch myself fall in the mirror. As soon as I see my reflection in the first window, things slow way down. Feels like I’m stuck in some kinda sludge. Not falling, more like … oozing my way down.
“Jake,” a voice says. It sounds far away, but I think … I think it’s my mother’s voice. “Jake?” I recognize the sweet drawl of Southern security.
Before my dad transplanted her to the Northwest Quarter, her Alabama accent felt like warm apple pie. Shortly after that, her drawl and her smile got covered in a blanket of cold, gray fog.
What’s she doing here? I think. And for a second, I forget where I am. But that is her voice, no mistake about it.
“Jake,” she says it again and the sound fills my ears with the security and confidence of being a boy, having someone do all the worrying for me. Before I became cynical—before all the shit—when life was just fishing and hunting and … I can smell the toasted peanut butter, banana and huckleberry jam sandwiches. That’s what she made me for lunch every time he went—
“Jacob, can’t you hear me? Your father’s back from hunting.”
And I race to the window of my bedroom above the garage, and then I see him step out of his truck. Looking down, I can see his muddy boots in the back of the bed of the pickup—mud was not allowed in the cab. The color of the mud isn’t much different from the rusty brown paint on his pickup. Not that the truck’s old, mind you. In fact, it looks pretty brand new, down there. Rusty, shit-brown, brand spankin’ new paint. That’s just the way he bought it. Drove my mother nuts. She hated the color of that truck. But the son of a bitch lasted twenty years before he sold it for damn near as many credits as he paid when he got it.
Less is more—a lesson that my “now” world has forgotten as we all fill the State Refuse Stations with disposable, plastic lives. But that’s how he was—he made things last. He lasted longer than he should have, too. Even a ripped-out heart from the loss of his beloved nation took ten more years to kill him.
My father? Impossible, I know, because the man is long dead. And he … he hasn’t looked that good in forty years. Hell, he looks younger than me.
When he pulls his hand back out of the bed of the pickup, three plump and noticeably limp drake Mallard ducks flop in his three-fingered grip—he would never tell me how he lost the fourth—but today he’s got a fourth duck crammed under his third finger.
That’s a wood duck! I think. Rainbow head and pink bill. The only one he ever shot, and I know exactly what day this is.
He made me wait until I was nine. Taunting and teasing me with the stories of adventure and the woods until I had to practically beg to go with him—with the men.
Years later, I realized what he had done. You force a kid into something you want him to do—tell him he has to—he’ll fight you tooth and talon. But if you make him watch and wish—wait and wait—constantly tell him he’s not ready yet, he’ll be begging you to let him in no time at all. That’s the theory we use on little purgatory, cherub rookies, too. By the time they’re cracked—graduate from The Rook, Protection’s academy for citizen-stomping agents—they’ll claw apart anyone you tell them to. So when I finally got to go… This is that day!
I know I should be panicked—I’m falling from a building, for God’s sake—but I feel kinda … serene. Serene? Why the hell would I use a word like that to describe jumping off a…? What was that last floor? “48,” I think it read? How long will that take?
It’s weird, because that’s how old I am. Graying hair, downturned lines on my forehead and a permanent scowl where my happy, devious grin used to be. But when I look at my reflection in the first window, that’s not who I see. Well, I’m still me, but I’m—short, barbed-blonde hair, white t-shirt, jeans and black tennis shoes, and a smile that only a boy getting ready for his first hunt with his father can grin. I’m nine again.
And I can’t feel the bullet in my shoulder anymore, or the one in my ass either, for that matter. All I can think of is gutting ducks.
That’s my job, what I have to do before we go. That was another one of his lessons—do the shitty jobs first, clean up the last thing before you go to the next. Only problem was, to me, that job was fun.
You can give a kid an antiseptic-filled, blood-drained frog to dissect in biology class, or you can take him hunting and let him see reality. Train someone to hunt, track down and kill an animal in its own habitat, and then process it from the ground to the greedy, grinding gums of another human being. No class on a conditioning campus can teach you more lessons faster.
I remember years later, going to the “Bravo Mike” black market, trading .22 caliber bullets for whole chickens the Rural Zone rats brought in.
To Protection, we’re all rats now. So don’t give me any shit about the Rural Zone vermin—it’s my life, let me enjoy the last of it.
Regardless, whole chickens were cheaper than the cut-up ones. When I bought them, Kelly looked at me like I was nuts.
Sure it was illegal, but the real problem was most citizens
, sucking on the tit of the State, have lost the ability to put a fork in their own mouths, much less turn a chicken or a dog into package-sized chunks of edible meat.
But me… These four ducks coming up the driveway, headed to my little processing plant in the garage… I’ve plucked so many ducks in there that I should be covered in feathers. I can gut birds with my eyes closed.
When I first started, they had a weird, pungent smell when I opened up their stomachs. Even as I fall, I can remember it … vividly. No, I smell it. But it’s a sweet stench now. I never thought how the nature of smells and what you associate with them changes.
I race to complete the task that was my doorway to the hunt—my ticket to the respect of my father and becoming a man.
It’s a strange thing to think, I know. But that’s where I am. Where my mind is anyway, because I know I’m almost or already dead. But here I am, gutting ducks in the garage, getting ready to go back out the door with my dad for my first hunt.
Then the foggy feeling hits me, everything gets blurry and gray, and then I can’t see. Then sounds fade to an unrecognizable murmur … and then … silence. And I’m gone … and so are my parents.
When the fog clears, the oozing feeling goes away and I’m falling again. Faster than before—rocketing down—and the pain shoots through my shoulder to remind me that I still got two holes, leaking out my life.
I flip around like a cat falling from a tree and look up just as all the bastards get to the edge of the roof and peer over the edge. Protection agents—a dozen black helmets now. They had six in the elevator, I think. I never had a chance.
And the PAIC bastard—powerless, watching me fall… All of them look like someone who just dropped their sunglasses over the side of the ferry, dumbfounded and helpless as they watch them disappear into the depths of the “lake.” I manage a smile.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 3