by James Tarr
“It keeps me warm,” Weasel shot back.
Since George was being talkative, and they weren’t going anywhere for a while… “How’d you get the nickname ‘Bodycount’?” Ed asked him.
George took so long to respond that Ed thought he wasn’t going to. Then, finally, he spoke.
“You don’t want to hear that story,” George said flatly. Ed just stared at him with his typical reasonable patient face until, finally, George sighed. “You know I was a cop, right? Back when the world was sane. Downriver. Small department. Lower-middle-class suburb. I was a Sergeant, I was the Rangemaster, I was the head of the SWAT team, I had a lot of hats. I was also a pretty avid competition shooter. For a cop I was a really good shot. Compared to the guys I competed against I wasn't that good, but they were really really good. Most cops, much as it pains me to say it, are not very good shots. It’s not that important to them. The gun is as much a sign of the office or their power as it is anything else, they figure that might makes right, just the fact they have a gun is enough, and most of the time they’re correct.” Ed kept his eyes on George but he could sense the other members of the squad within earshot listening as well. This was the most talking anyone had heard out of the man.
“So, anyway,” George said slowly, apparently in no hurry to get to what pained him in the story, “because we were a small department our SWAT team was only a part-time gig. We trained with a lot of other small local departments and were in fact part of a multi-jurisdictional task force that rolled out on big incidents. Barricaded gunmen, bank robberies, that kind of thing.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Things had been going downhill for a while, inflation, protests, riots, shootings, but we still hadn’t seen much of it, most of it was taking place in the big cities. We only saw it on the news. But still, it was a lot crazier than what anybody had seen before and a lot of people were bugging out of town. We had a lot of officers calling off with the blue flu. Lot of outrage about civil liberties being violated, but that seemed to be all on the federal side, we just kept trying to do our jobs, traffic, domestics, whatever. One day my Chief gets a call from the feds, they’re asking if the SWAT team can assist them in serving a search warrant. All they would need us to do is provide perimeter security, they’d be the ones actually going in and searching the premises. Nothing we hadn’t done before, so how could you say no to a friendly request like that? Brothers in blue, right?” He shook his head.
“There ended up being six of us on site from the multi-jurisdictional SWAT team, two each from three departments. I actually had the most seniority and experience of anybody there, so I took informal command. I set up in an overwatch position to the rear of the property with Greek, who was my spotter. Nobody could actually pronounce his last name, there was a lot of apa-papa-lapadopoulos’ in there. The property was just a medium-sized residential house on a big couple-acre lot halfway between the neighborhoods and cow country. It was technically inside our city limits but I’d never rolled out on the address before. That should have been my first clue.” He sighed and paused for a while.
“Anyway, there were six feds all done up in tactical raid gear, and our ‘perimeter security only’ role didn’t last five minutes. Then two of our SWAT team guys are with them going through the door for additional manpower, and the other two are set up in an overwatch position covering the entry. I hear the call over the radio, they’re going in. I’m about a hundred yards out so I can barely hear the shouting, but then the shooting starts and everybody’s talking all over themselves on the radio and I can't understand shit. Suddenly a suspect comes running out of the back of the house with an AR-15.” He glanced at Ed. “I don’t know if you know much about police work outside of watching TV, but running into bad guys, actual criminals with actual guns, much less ARs, is pretty damn rare and it freezes your blood cold. Mostly who cops deal with are idiots and assholes, not actual bad guys, with or without guns. So I took the shot.” He sighed and shook his head. “Technically, it was a good shot, and a good shooting. Person was running at an angle about eighty yards from me, so I had to figure the lead on the fly, and the bullet hit exactly where I wanted it to go. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
“She?” Ed said.
George looked at him, his face gray and stony. “Yeah,” he said curtly, “she. Now, she wasn’t the first person I’d ever killed. When I was practically still a rookie, barely two years on the job, I had to shoot a guy in a domestic. He’d been beating on his wife and when we showed up he came at us with a baseball bat. If I hadn’t shot him he would’ve laid that bat across my partner’s skull. But at the time of this raid, I was the only person on our department in fourteen years who’d actually ever killed someone on duty. Most small departments, it’s like that. We only had one, maybe two murders a year, and they weren’t big mysteries, half the time the person who did it was standing over the body when we rolled up. So me shooting somebody, much less someone who looked like a teenage girl, with a black rifle in her hands, was quite something. For me, and for our department.”
“I get my partner to stand watch over the body and go inside to find out what the fuck happened on this supposed ‘no big deal’ search warrant—” at which point George interrupted himself. “I guess I should have known it was more than just a simple search warrant if they had twelve guys including a loaner SWAT team working the house. But anyway, I go in there and talk to the lead fed, and they’re all standing around the homeowner who’s DRT on the floor in the front room with a pistol near his hand. So they killed the dad and I killed the daughter, and I still don’t know why the hell we were even there because all my Captain told us was we’d be assisting feds on a search warrant and that it was no big deal.”
George flexed his hands, obviously upset at the memory. “So I’m hot, you know I’ve got a temper, and I get all in the feds’ face wondering just what kind of shit they dragged us into and what the hell the search warrant was about because the girl, she was blond and turned out to only be 22 years old, and the homeowner, he looked like an accountant. A lot like you,” George said glancing at Ed. “No offense.” Ed just shrugged
“Turns out,” George growled through clenched teeth, “they didn’t even have a search warrant. They were hitting the house using the blanket protection of the federal martial law which had just gone into effect. I mean, the President had declared a National Emergency eight months earlier because of the civil unrest and halted all gun and ammo sales and assemblies of more than ten people, and everyone was still in an uproar over that. Then he doubles down with martial law, including a total gun ban and curfews and warrantless arrests and a dozen other things nobody could quite believe were real? It was crazy, you remember, nobody knew what to think or even, for sure, what the new rules were. And yet there we were, hitting the house like a platoon of Rangers because the homeowner owned several firearms including handguns and an ‘assault rifle’ and they had no record of him turning them in, even though the deadline to do so was barely a day past.”
“They suckered you into helping out on a gun raid?”
“Yeah,” George said, practically spitting. “And I know they didn’t tell my Chief the truth, or at least tell us the whole truth, but because if they had, there’s no way we would have helped out on a raid to confiscate guns. We kinda knew those were going on but most of our guys weren’t about to do that, for a lot of different reasons, and my Chief had no interest in risking our lives on something he viewed as illegal and unconstitutional. So I keep talking to the feds hoping to find out something that would ease my conscience, you know, that it’s not really just about the guns, that the guy is a serial killer or a pedophile or bank robber or making meth in the basement or something. But no. The guy had no criminal record. Didn’t even have a fucking parking ticket to his name. The only reason they were there was because of the guns. For that they kicked down his door, and with what I know now I’m not convinced they even properly identified themselves as police. He came running up with a
gun in his hand and they downed him. Shit, for all I know they shot him down and planted the gun, wouldn’t surprise me after all I’ve seen now. Daughter saw it and went running out the back, which they were supposed to have covered before they went in the front but didn’t, and I shot her. Maybe she didn’t even know it was cops busting down her door, maybe she thought they were home invaders and she died not knowing it was her own government doing this to her.”
George looked at Ed, and it was the closest Ed had ever seen him to crying. The sadness in his eyes was palpable. “And they had a whole list,” he told Ed, his voice cracking. “I saw it. It had to have forty, maybe fifty names on it. That was their sole assignment for that week, heck maybe that month, they were just going house-to-house knocking down doors, seizing guns that had been bought legally, and arresting anybody there. And probably shooting a bunch more people,” he added. “They didn’t seem to care whatsoever that they’d just killed a man who’d honestly done nothing wrong other than not turn in guns the government decided were now bad and who ran up when he heard his front door getting kicked in. In fact, the way they were talking, they were looking forward to killing more guys like him. I’ve known a number of cops like them, that if it’s legal that meant, to them, it was right, and they never gave any thought to the idea that just ‘cause they can doesn’t mean they should. The type of guys who never consider the fact that some laws are not just stupid but wrong, and these feds were that times ten. These guys were just ecstatic about their new freedom and power to do damn near whatever they wanted. Might makes right,” he said again.
George didn't say anything else for so long that Ed thought perhaps maybe he couldn't finish his story, maybe the memories were too much for him. It was the most emotion Ed head ever seen the man display.
“So I killed them,” George said finally. “Those six federal agents. Right where they stood. Because…” He shook his head. “They were just going to keep doing what they were doing. And it was wrong. Hell, it was evil, even if it was technically legal. And…because they’d made me complicit in what they were doing. Made me kill a young lady who’d never done anything wrong. Before it was over they’d probably kill a lot more innocent people. Or get other cops, like me, to do their dirty work for them. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Six. How’d you manage that?” Ed asked softly.
George shrugged. “You’re not a gun guy, or a competition shooter. If you were, me saying that on a good day I could run a plate rack in three seconds might mean something. That’s six six-inch metal plates, seven yards away. Think six headshots. These guys weren’t seven yards away, they were seven feet away, and not expecting it. The other guys on the SWAT team lost their minds and would have arrested me reflexively if I’d given them a chance, but the muzzle of a smoking gun in your face tends to reorient your priorities. I zip-tied them, and I walked away. Walked away from the scene, walked away from the job, walked away from my whole life.”
“Family?” Ed asked. Ed had never inquired about George’s personal situation.
“Daughter,” George said. “And an ex-wife. They were living down in Florida, I was pretty much estranged from both of them. Haven’t talked to either in forever. Since the war broke out. Which happened not too long after that.”
“You didn't know,” Ed said to his number two about the woman he’d killed.
“I should have, though,” George said. “I should have asked questions instead of just blindly following along.” He looked at Ed and said simply, “And I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. But no matter what I do, how many of them I kill, it doesn’t bring her back.”
Major Phillip Abraham Stein, commander of Wolverine—Phil-A to a lot of his friends, and Chick to everyone else—listened to the man breathing. His breath was chugging in and out, slow, uneven, wet, syrupy. Bubbling? No, closer to burbling, like one of those picturesque streams out in the woods somewhere, happily bouncing over stones and through fallen branches. Except, of course, that it wasn’t a stream, it was a human being in a lot of pain struggling to pull air into his lungs. Which still wouldn’t have been great cause for concern, in a war zone a lot of horrible things happened, people died every day, except that, in this particular case, all those troublesome sounds were coming out of his own mouth.
His squad had been heading south-southwest, carefully, slowly, doing everything they could to not get spotted by anyone, as instructed, when they heard one hell of a firefight half, maybe three-quarters of a mile ahead of them. They immediately took a left turn and headed east, trying to put some distance between them and whoever and whatever the hell was going on over there. The firefight hadn’t gone on very long, but it had been fierce while it lasted, with a couple of explosions that sounded like grenades. Before long he’d spotted a fresh column of black smoke, probably marking the spot where whatever had happened, happened.
Ten minutes later Potter, his #2, had recommended they get under cover, because you just knew a gunfight that big was going to draw a lot of attention. He’d been right, as usual—they’d barely gone to ground inside a half-collapsed small commercial building when the first Kestrel had roared overhead.
Whatever had happened it seemed to have seriously upset the Tabs, because between the incessant circling helicopters and the rumble of patrolling Growlers, Wolverine only made it another block east before giving up on any further movement that day. They overnighted in a big two-story house that three generations earlier had probably been very nice—now they were happy that the roof only leaked a little, and nothing inside the house had been set on fire by recreational arsonists.
The next day hadn’t been much better. Birds back and forth overhead for most of the morning and into the afternoon. The occasional distant sound of a vehicle, no doubt military. “Whatever happened, the Tabs are pissed,” Brown observed, staring up at the ceiling.
Finally, as the sun was heading west, the activity died down. They hadn’t heard a wheeled vehicle in hours, and the closest aircraft had been well over a mile away. Chick had been itching to put more distance between them and that firefight, as well as move further southward toward their objective, even though they had all the time in the world to get there.
They moved out slowly, carefully, walking through the back yards of the decrepit homes, finding their way to a gravel alley that ran behind the detached garages to the rear of the houses. With all the trees and bushes gone wild they felt invisible as they walked down either side of the narrow alley.
Near the end of the block Chick stopped and held up a hand. He’d heard something, a whimpering scramble that sounded like an injured dog. He and Brown rounded the corner of the last house together and saw two men behind a low commercial building. One of the men was standing, the other was atop a very skinny naked black woman. Even though she looked about twelve Chick thought for a second the act might have been consensual, or perhaps a business transaction—he’d seen a lot worse things during his time as a dogsoldier—then he saw the revolver in the hand of the man watching, and the knife in the hand of the man atop the girl. And her terrified angry face.
“Hey, fuckers!” he shouted reflexively.
The standing man turned, the revolver started to come up, and Brown put three bullets through the man’s chest with his AK-V.
“Don’t you do it!” the man atop the girl said, pressing the knife to her throat and staring at them with wild eyes. “Don’t you fucking do it! I’ll—” The bullet from Chick’s Daniel Defense Mk18 hit him just below the bridge of his nose and the man fell backwards off the girl, the back half of his head gone. She screamed reflexively and scrabbled backward from the dead body.
“You okay? Where are your clothes?” Chick asked her, gun down and hands up soothingly. He didn’t approach her, the knife had fallen out of the dead man’s hand and was right beside her hip.
“Shit, I don’t know. They cut ‘em,” she said, sobbing. But she wasn’t just sad, she was angry, too, which he was glad to see.
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br /> “I think we might be able to find something for you to wear,” Chick said.
Potter had an old button-down shirt in his pack that was long enough on her to cover the essentials, but she still took the holey t-shirt offered by Fine and wrapped it around her waist for an additional layer of psychological protection.
“We need to di-di,” Brown said.
“Yeah, I know,” Chick agreed. They were too exposed there, and hadn’t moved after shooting. “You got someplace to go?” he asked the girl, as he walked around the corner of the commercial building to take a peek at the area. There, less than a hundred yards away, were an IMP and two Growlers who’d heard the gunshots and were creeping in as quietly as they could.
“Contact! Displace!” he screamed, and then the roof gunner on the IMP let loose with the full-auto grenade launcher, and the one atop the Growler joined in with his belt-fed M240B.
The girl and maybe half the men of Wolverine died where they stood, before they even had a chance to fight back, shredded by the bullets and grenades landing between the buildings. Chick found himself with Potter and Brown in a fighting retreat through backyards, using houses as cover, as the vehicles surged forward, trying to encircle them. A long burst of machine gun fire slipped between houses and took Brown down as he hopped a fence right behind Chick.
Now Chick stared down at himself. The syrupy breathing was problematic but he was sitting upright, so at least there was that. Of course, he couldn’t really move his left arm, and his legs weren’t much better. The amount of blood he could see on his skin, and his clothes, and the pavement underneath, seemed excessive. Quite uncalled for. His back was against a low concrete wall, and there was the rotted hulk of a car to his left, providing cover in that direction. There was a burned-out gas station on the other side of the wall behind him. In front of him was a small, half-collapsed house. The five steps leading up to its porch might as well have been a mountain.