by James Tarr
“You look tired,” Curly said cheerfully. “And old.”
“I am old and tired,” Ed agreed. “Been a long week. Been a long couple of weeks.”
Curly grunted. “It’s the busy season. You keeping up on your news?”
Ed shook his head. “I barely know what I’m doing half the time. And I’ve been a little too short of bandwidth to surf the web, if you know what I mean. Why, something happen?”
Curly checked the time on his big watch, light glinting off the brown dome of his skull. “Six hours ago, word came down the ARF liberated one of the big detention centers. Not sure which one, that’s a little fuzzy, I heard ‘Kankakee’, whatever or wherever the fuck that is, but I’m hearing hundreds, maybe thousands of POWs were released.”
“Holy shit,” Weasel said, stunned.
“Rioters,” Ed corrected him, mind racing. “Terrorists. Collaborators. Climate change deniers. Gun criminals. We’re not officially at war, remember? So they can’t be POWs.”
“Whatever, who the fuck cares? They weren’t calling it a gulag or re-education camp, either, but that’s what it was.” He shrugged. “Thought you’d be interested. So,” he said, taking his feet off the scarred wooden desk and standing up, “I’m guessing you need some shit, that’s why we’re all here. What do you need, and what do you have to trade?”
“We need fresh batteries that haven’t been charged a thousand times. New filters for water purifiers. Food. Water. Vitamins. Antibiotics. Clean socks. Underwear. NVGs. A good pair of binoculars, as we’re down to one. Freedom, cold beer, hot dogs, apple pie, and peace on Earth. Pretty much what we always need, except for ammo. That we’re good on. That’s what we’ve got to trade. Five-five-six. Pre-loaded in magazines.”
Curly’s thick eyebrows crawled up his head. He could do the math. This had to be the squad who’d ambushed that patrol. One of the things he traded in was information, and he liked to think he was the most well-informed man in the city. According to his sources the Army had lost a Growler and an IMP and over a dozen troops in a single ambush. Including the Kestrel they’d lost in the Ditch, and the three other soldiers who’d been killed in firefights, the Army was having a surprisingly bad week. Then again, he’d heard of two ARF squads being wiped out, so maybe the Army was in the lead, or at least tied. The amount of activity in the city was unusual. He wondered if it meant something big was going on. “How much?”
“Enough,” Ed said flatly. “Not on us, but close. Some cash, too, if you’re interested. Not sure how much it’s worth this week, I haven’t been paying attention to the stock market. You could use it as wallpaper in here, I guess. What about you?” Curly was the closest thing to organized crime in the city, at least that Ed was familiar with. The man was only interested in profit, which meant he was predictable. Ed liked predictable.
Curly grunted. “Step into my office.” He looked past them. “Kobe, Kanye, stay.”
There was a second door at the back of his office, and Curly went through that and led them into the vacant office space. Most of the rooms were being used for storage of rare and/or valuable items he didn’t want out on the floor, and if the Tabs ever wanted to search them, it would take them hours if not days and they’d never find any contraband. Not that that was any guarantee he wouldn’t get arrested if they felt like it….
The room in the very back corner was dark and cluttered with objects vaguely glimpsed. At the rear was a narrow closet, and Curly stooped to remove a soggy cardboard box filled with CDs and a milk crate stuffed to overflow with dirty toys. Then he grabbed a hidden handle and lifted up the trap door. The hole beneath it was obsidian.
Curly turned on a small flashlight and went down the ladder first. A hole had been pickaxed and sledgehammered through the concrete flooring, but below that the dirt and clay had been dug by hand with shovels. Ed had no idea how long the work had taken, but guessed weeks.
They went down ten feet, then followed a low narrow tunnel directly west. The roof and walls had been reinforced with lumber, but still Ed felt claustrophobic and worried the soil would fall in and crush him. The tunnel ran for seventy feet or so but felt longer because it was so cramped.
At the far end Curly climbed another homemade wooden ladder and banged on a second trap door. Ed noted that he pounded his fist against it five times—every day Curly had a different knock. Still, just to be sure, when the trapdoor was unbolted and raised the men found themselves staring into two flashlights clamped onto the ends of rifles.
Curly just grunted, and the guards moved out of the way and let them climb up the ladder. They came out in the basement of the two-story brown building they’d walked past just to the west of the market, the one with its narrow basement and ground floor windows all boarded up. Behind the plywood sheets were metal reinforcements, and the metal doors were in fact welded shut. Even driving a vehicle into the building to gain access was no sure thing—the first floor was three feet above ground level, and any vehicle would hit the side of the I-beam reinforced concrete floor.
Curly actually had electricity. Ed wasn’t sure how the man had managed that, considering how power seemed to be shut off to the entire city outside of the Blue Zone, but the lights in the basement were on, and he didn’t hear the sound of a generator. One of Curly’s men was in the corner loading 5.56 rifle ammunition on a Dillon press. The rifle brass was mostly scrounged by local kids from sites of firefights, and the Army practice range downtown. Curly paid by the piece. Where the man obtained the bullets, powder, or primers was anyone’s guess. Still, he never had enough to meet demand, and factory-loaded ammunition was always held in higher regard than his handloaded stuff—unless it was his pistol ammo. He sold nine millimeter ammo loaded with lathe-turned, pointed, copper solid bullets which would go through soft body armor.
On the bench behind the man an ancient tube TV was tuned to the local state-controlled channel. The broadcast facility was located in a high-rise in the Blue Zone, one TV and one radio station offering all the news the government approved for public consumption. The broadcast signal was picked up by old-fashioned rabbit ears atop the unit, but the image was still filled with static. Onscreen a talking head was moving his mouth, but the sound on the set was turned down to a murmur.
“Why do you even bother?” Weasel said with a frown, staring at the TV. “You know it’s all lies and bullshit and fake news.”
“If you pay attention to not just what they say but what they don’t,” Curly told him, “especially when you know what’s really going on, you can learn a few things about what they’re really thinking and really worried about.”
On the ground floor, above their heads, Ed knew there were numerous floor- and gun safes filled with various items including guns. Ed had only been up on the second floor once. There were private quarters up there, maybe Curly’s, as well as two belt-fed machineguns set up to cover every approach to the building. Those guns were invisible behind the tinted window glass and reportedly always manned, and they’d walked right under them, through their kill zone, to enter the market. Ed knew Curly wasn’t dumb enough to think those guns would hold off a serious assault by Army troops. More likely they’d be used to buy time to escape.
Moving to a large steel door behind him, Curly produced a big key ring and opened the hefty padlock. It was just one of several storerooms in the building, but the only one Ed had been inside.
“Look around, see if you see anything you like, and maybe we can make a deal.”
Ed paused outside the small storeroom and looked around at the barricaded basement windows, then lifted his head to stare at the ceiling. He made a face, and turned to Curly. “We never talk about security, but all these boards and bars and welds that keep people out are going to do a good job of keeping you in, if you’re in here when the Army finds the other end of that tunnel,” he told the man pointedly.
At first Curly wasn’t sure what angle Ed was trying to work, then he realized, seeing the earnest look on the man’s f
ace, that he was actually concerned for his safety. Curly pursed his lips, then a corner of his mouth ticked up slightly. He nodded at the trap door through which they’d entered, now closed and bolted. “You think there’s only one way in and out of here short of jumpin’ out the windows? That’d be dumb. I strike you as dumb?”
“I told you this was a bad idea, boss.” Harris popped the gum in his mouth and glanced at the leader of Flash. The two men were looking out a second-floor window, above a barbershop that hadn’t been open for business in roughly fifteen years. There was no glass in any of the frames, and they stood well back from the jagged openings.
Bill Condon, aka BabyThor, or just Thor for short (never just Baby), lowered the binoculars and glanced at his second in command. “You’re popping gum and saying ‘I told you so’? You’re allowed one, or the other, not both.” Harris, and the rest of the squad standing behind them, could tell from his tone he was serious.
“Sorry. But, well, shit.”
“Yeah.” Thor lifted the binos again and looked north on Springwells. Beneath them was his magnificent golden beard, which rested on his broad chest. It was just starting to show a little gray, as was the mane of hair on his head. The other part of his nickname had to do with his height, just five foot seven.
Four hundred feet ahead of them Springwells ran into Vernor Highway in a T intersection. The intersection in all three directions was obstructed by disabled vehicles, and Thor could see at least four men wearing gang colors manning the roadblock. He immediately spotted one AK leaning against one of the cars, and knew there would be a lot more. Parked on a sidewalk nearby was a big Harley. He moved a few feet closer to the windows and looked left and right. All the side streets he could see had been blocked to vehicular traffic with burned out car wrecks, overturned dumpsters, curbside mail boxes, and other assorted urban detritus. Anyone moving through the neighborhood was funneled directly to the roadblock.
“This area’s totally run by gangs,” Fast Eddie said behind them. “I’m pretty sure this turf right here is run by the Springwells Saints. Biker gang. I heard they’re affiliated with La Eme.”
“The Mexican Mafia?” Thor asked.
“Yeah. I know they spotted us walking in, I’m actually surprised nobody’s rolled on us.”
“We’ve all got fucking rifles,” Harris pointed out. “They can see we’re doggies, I bet they’re hoping we just go away and do our thing, so they can keep on doing their thing.”
“Raping, robbing, and terrorizing the locals,” Thor said with a frown.
“Well, yeah.” But Harris knew what that tone meant. They all did. He sighed. Loudly.
“We’ve got somewhere to be tomorrow,” Splatter reminded his squad leader. “And we’ve still got, what, five miles to go? Uncle Charlie—”
“Uncle Charlie may or may not have a thing going on tomorrow for us. Sounded big, but who the fuck knows? We might get there and find nothing. Or it could just be a water drop, remember last year when he directed us to that cache of water bottles and Gatorade mix? Not that I couldn’t use some fresh water about now, much less some electrolytes, but asshole criminals,” he nodded in the direction of the roadblock, “are just as bad as the Tabs.”
Thor studied the church on the other side of the side street ironically named Senator. Divinity Ev Lutheran Church he could just read on the stone set into the bricks beside the front door. There was a date also but it had been defaced. Maybe 1917? Brick and stone, solidly built. The doors and windows were boarded up and looked like they had been for decades. Gang signs had been painted all over the exterior of the church. “What is that, three stories?” He peered out the other windows. “That’s about the tallest thing around. I bet we could get a good view of that roadblock from the top of that tower.”
He turned around. “Eddie, Max, Chaco, you guys stay here. The rest of you, come with me, and we’ll see what we see from that church. I decide to take a shot, you guys staying here, you watch our backs and take out any inbound assholes. I’m not worried, and you shouldn’t be either. These fuckers might be professional shitheads, but I bet none of them can shoot worth shit, and it doesn’t look like they’re wearing armor either.”
Thor and three of his men exited the rear of the building into the alley. They walked across Senator to the rear of the church, where there was a narrow boarded-up door, covered with graffiti. It didn’t take them much effort to get inside.
With all the windows covered by plywood they had to turn on their flashlights to see. There were signs and sounds of rodents all around them, scurrying for cover. It took them ten minutes of poking around before they discovered the only place on the north side of the church from which they could see anything was a narrow vertical vent in the attic.
“I want one of you guys at the back door, and somebody else pry some wood off a window so you can see west,” he told his men. “If the other guys start shooting, I want you to be able to see what they’re shooting at.”
Thor slowly and as quietly as possible pried the old wooden slats out of the attic vent, eventually opening a rectangle six inches wide by sixteen tall. He set his backpack down and went prone behind it. The pack made a good rest for his rifle.
His Bravo Company Recce-16 was topped with a Trijicon 1-8X AccuPower rifle scope. There was a SureFire SOCOM suppressor attached to his muzzle which he’d liberated after a firefight several years earlier. He cranked the magnification on his scope all the way up, settled behind the rifle, and studied the roadblock. The tip of his suppressor was a foot back from the narrow opening, but still he had a more than wide-enough view to see all of the intersection. From his new perch he could see even more of it than he’d been able to from above the barbershop. Harris was squatting directly behind him, peering through the 10X binos.
“What is that, a hundred and fifty yards?” Thor said quietly, his cheek pressed against the stock of his rifle. His rifle and scope were zeroed at one hundred yards. Drop from there to 150 should be an inch or so, if he remembered his ballistics, not much more than margin of error. The church attic was hot and stuffy, and he could feel sweat dripping off his nose.
“If that. I count four, no five guys, all wearing colors. No armor plates, if they’ve got any armor on it’s the soft stuff, and I’d bet money against that, it’s too hot. I see at least two AKs. What is it with assholes and AKs?”
“Like flies to shit. Uhhh, what is this?”
A middle-aged woman was navigating her way through the roadblock carrying a canvas bag. Several of the men seemed to be shouting at her, and laughing. One man jumped down and strode cockily over to her. He looked inside her bag, reached in, and withdrew an apple. He tossed it to one of the other gang members, grabbed another apple out of her bag, then waved her on.
“Tribute?” Thor muttered.
“Road toll,” Harris announced. The woman kept her face blank as she walked down Springwells away from the men. After a block she turned aside and disappeared into the neighborhood. He paused. “Live and let live?”
“Fuck no,” Thor said, wiggling in tight behind the rifle. “Fuck that.” It was hard to get into a comfortable prone position on plywood while wearing hard body armor. “Fuck those guys.”
“Roger that,” Harris said, unsurprised. Thor had a zero-tolerance policy for bad guys. He turned and announced, “Going loud,” in a voice loud enough for the other men in the church with them to hear. Community outreach commencing in 3…2…1….
Thor had a clean backdrop, just a row of busted storefronts. With five unarmored targets he decided speed was more important than precision. He centered the reticle of his scope on the chest of the most visible man at the roadblock, sitting on the hood of a wheel-less Buick, and began squeezing the trigger of his carbine. The rifle bucked, the supersonic crack of the bullet loud, but the suppressor absorbed most of the blast.
Between the weight of the scope and the suppressor the BCM Recce barely recoiled and Thor saw the impact. As the man, seemingly in slow
motion, began to topple backward, he moved the reticle to the next closest gang member and broke the trigger quickly.
The three remaining gang members finally realized they were taking fire and dove for cover. However, because of the suppressor and the way sound echoed in the urban environment, while they heard the crack of the shots the men weren’t sure where they were coming from. Thor shot the third man as he crouched beside an overturned and fire-gutted Ford Bronco, looking in the wrong direction. The remaining two opened up with their AKs on full auto, spraying bullets everywhere.
One of the men finished emptying his thirty-round magazine. He was mostly out of sight behind the vehicles, but Thor aimed at what he could see, a shoulder, and scored a hit. Even four hundred feet away he could hear the man’s screams. The lone uninjured man must have done a reload, because he popped up and fired another thirty-round magazine—once again, in the wrong direction. Thor shot him in the neck and the man grabbed at his throat and dropped to the ground, flopping. Thor shot him again in the chest and the man stopped moving.
The screaming faded away, but whether that was because the shoulder-hit man had died or lost consciousness or some other reason was impossible to determine. Thor scanned the intersection through his scope. He couldn’t see anyone moving, then suddenly one of the gang members, maybe the screamer, was struggling atop the Harley. Apparently his plan was to start the motorcycle and drive away? Thor shot him in the side of his chest and the man fell backward, the Harley going down on top of him.
“Like I said, fuck those guys,” Thor said with some venom. “What I want to know is, where the fuck did they find full-auto AKs?”
“Conversions?” Harris opined, looking through the binoculars.
“Those guys don’t look like they could convert beer to piss. I’d like to take a look at those guns, see where they’re from. See if those rumors we’ve heard about China and Russia helping out the Tabs are true.”
The two dogsoldiers heard an incoming rumble, growing louder. Motorcycles. A lot of them.