by James Tarr
The two men, engrossed in the map before them, physically jumped in surprise. They instinctively looked for their rifles, which Ed could see leaning against the wall behind them, perhaps six feet away. “Don’t move,” he growled, and Hannibal was beside him, rifle up. Then Sarah and Jason were coming in the front door, carbines up and aimed. The two men before them froze, looking back and forth between the dogsoldiers. If they’d wanted to try something their chances of success had dropped toward zero with the appearance of two more people toting rifles. Ed and Hannibal were on one side of the room, twelve feet away from Jason and Sarah.
“You guys with a squad?” Ed asked. Sylvester had been the last squad to leave ahead of Theodore, but they shouldn’t have caught up to them already. Plus, Ed didn’t recognize either of these guys, and he was pretty sure he knew everybody in Sylvester, from Brooke on down. The men were in their early thirties, with beards, wearing civilian clothes, and solid with muscle.
The two men exchanged a look. “Um, no,” the taller of the two said. He was wearing a khaki button-down shirt over blue jeans. He glanced again at the gear on the floor behind him. There was a plate carrier with pouches, a big backpack, and a suppressed sniper rifle.
“Hands on your heads!” Hannibal barked, his rifle up, safety off, and finger on the trigger. “Hands on your fucking heads!” He took a step closer. To his left Sarah raised her suppressed short-barreled carbine as well.
“Whoa, relax, easy,” the shorter of the two men said. “Relax, we’re on your side.” They both had pistols on their hips, but when confronted by four people with rifles up and ready they laced their fingers atop their heads, eyes dancing from face to face.
“Golf ball,” Ed challenged them.
“What?”
“Golf ball,” he said, even louder. The agreed-upon codeword response, given to every member of every team by LTC Morris for this mission, was ‘Felix’. He became aware of growing sounds behind him, but didn’t take his eyes off the men.
“Look, I don’t, we don’t know what that means. We’re just on our own, in the city to shoot some of those Army assholes,” one of the men with his hands on this head said rapidly. His eyes darted left and right as the sounds Ed had been hearing to his rear seemed to flow around the house. Two dogsoldiers stepped in the front door behind Sarah and Jason, and the head of a third appeared through the empty window frame to one side of the men. He was standing in the front yard, dimly illuminated by the numerous flashlights now on inside the house. Ed felt the floor under him move as more men entered the structure.
“I’m not going to take your pistols,” Ed said evenly, “but I am going to ask you to get down on your knees and keep your hands on your heads. That way we can all relax and have some polite conversation, get this sorted out.”
After a three-heartbeat pause, and a shared look, the men did as they were asked. They weren’t happy about it, but the number of heavily-armed dogsoldiers in the house had swelled to a dozen. Their eyes darted all around, wondering just what the hell was going on, why the house was suddenly filled with guerrillas.
“You got this?” Ed heard softly in his ear.
“Yeah,” he told George, without taking his eyes off the duo. “Leave me half and get going. We’ll meet you there.”
“We’re on a clock,” George reminded him unnecessarily.
Thirty seconds later half the contingent had moved off, leaving six dogsoldiers inside the house and three outside on watch. Verifying that others had their carbines still trained on the men Sarah slung her SBR and walked behind them. She walked out from behind the moldy couch carrying the suppressed M5 carbine she and Hannibal had spotted. She hoisted it for the two men on their knees to see, a dubious expression on her face.
“I dug the chip out of it,” the smaller of the two men said quickly.
“Yeah?” Deftly and with a few sure movements Sarah unloaded the rifle and separated the polymer stock from the metal components. She peered inside, then dropped the barreled receiver to the floor with a loud thump and dug out her flashlight. She shone it inside the stock, then turned it so everyone in the room could see. There was a divot cut out of the polymer in the center of the handguard.
“See?” the man said.
“How long have you been using that?” Ed asked.
“A couple of weeks. We ran into a couple of Army guys, killed them and took their gear. But we’d been told about the chip, so I dug that out.”
Sarah’s face got hard. “Yeah?” she said derisively. She walked back over to where she’d grabbed the rifle and picked up a Kevlar helmet with night vision goggles attached. “They tell you about the chips in the helmets, too?” She set the helmet down and shook the camo carbine stock at them. “They tell you about the second chip in the stock, the one in the middle of the butt, that you can’t dig out without destroying the stock, or at least making the rifle unshootable?” Her voice rose in volume until she was almost shouting. “Apparently your commanding officer didn’t tell you everything you needed to know for your mission. Because if you were who you say you are, after just one week of carrying this shit around you’d be fucking dead.”
She dropped the M5 stock, grabbed the pistol grip of her SBR, and pressed the muzzle of the weapon against the side of the man’s head. “Name, rank, and goddamn serial number,” she growled. Behind her, Jason’s eyes grew wide.
“Look, okay, he’s full of shit, we just grabbed that stuff the day before yesterday,” the other man said quickly, his eyes darting around the room. “And we didn’t even kill anybody, we found a patrol that had been ambushed, or something, and took their stuff.”
Sarah made a sound and moved behind the two men again. She began to dig through one of the backpacks.
“So who the fuck are you? You just wander into the city?” Hannibal made a face.
“We came up from Columbus. There was nothing happening there and we wanted to see some action.”
“War tourist?” one of the dogsoldiers from Flintstone said dubiously. Sarah moved from the first backpack to the second. She wasn’t delicate, she opened the top and dumped it out on the floor.
“We don’t know our way around here, how things are set up. Is this your territory? We can leave if you want, we didn’t know. Are you guys ARF? You’re ARF, right?” His eyes moved back and forth between the dogsoldiers. None of their gear matched, and they were all covered in mud and smelled like actual shit for some reason, but they were all fully kitted-out and behaving in a professional manner, so it was a good bet. Hell, they weren’t just kitted out, they were buried under gear, bulging backpacks and magazine pouches and olive drab tubes, the very sight of which surprised him.
Sarah made a sound, and turned around. In each hand she held a top-of-the-line military-grade radio. The two men on their knees looked over their shoulders at her.
“Radios?” she said, the look on her face like she’d eaten something sour.
“Yeah, we took them off the bodies too. We’ve just been using them to talk to each other when we split up.”
“That’s encrypted, they can’t track it,” the other man said.
“Are you lying to us, thinking we’ll still buy your line of shit? Or is that what they told you? Because while they can’t understand what you’re saying, yes, they can track it. Or at least triangulate it. Man, did they screw you on your mission briefing.” Sarah could see it in their eyes. “I’m almost embarrassed for you.” She looked at Ed and Hannibal. “Not a doubt in my mind,” she told the two squad leaders, her voice flat.
“Yep,” Hannibal.
“Maybe they’re half-assing it because that’s all they think they need to do,” Ed said. “Should I be insulted? I feel insulted.”
“Look, I don’t know who or what you think we are,” the bigger guy said, now getting a little nervous, “but we’re here to fight the Army. The Tabs. Fuck those guys if they think they can take our guns, right? A few common sense laws are fine, right, to keep the wrong kind of guns a
way from the wrong kind of people, but banning everything for everyone? So I can’t even defend myself against criminals? No fucking way. They went too far. So fuck those guys. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here, right?” He looked around the room, looking for support and sympathetic faces.
Ed shook his head. “You need to just stop.”
Hannibal just sighed. He was so tired. “It’s not about guns,” he told the two men on their knees. “That’s like saying wars are about flags. It’s never been about guns, it’s about freedom. It’s always been freedom. Guns have just been the bellwether, the canary in the coal mine. Governments always want to control you, and bad governments want to enslave you. They can’t do that if you have guns, so the first thing any government which has evil intentions needs to do is take away the ability of its citizens to defend themselves. That’s World History 101.” He treated the men to a dirty look. “But the gun bans were the very last straw, not the first or only, that’s what you fuckers just don’t seem to get. The last straw from a government that had spent decades attempting to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, what they could eat, drink, drive, own. What kind of toilets they had to use, what kind of lightbulbs they had to buy. Guns were just the final line in the sand, and we finally said this far, and no further. And if you were fighting on our side, you’d know that. The only people who still think this war simply started because ‘crazy’ people wouldn’t give up their guns are the other side, your side, the same people lying to themselves about the reasons for the war, who have always had a problem seeing the reality in front of them, and who love to rewrite history.”
The bigger of the two looked back and forth between Ed and Hannibal, his eyes finally resting on Ed. “You,” he said. “You look reasonable. What are you doing? This is treason! You’re fighting against your own government. Your own people.”
Ed cocked his head. “So because they are the government, our government, that automatically makes them the good guys? Are you that blind? That ignorant of history? You’re okay with whatever you’re told to do, simply because it came from the people that are in charge? Soldiers have a duty to disobey orders they know are illegal. Doesn’t your oath of enlistment state that you’re supposed to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic?”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Maybe you just don’t care. Is that it? You’re just happy to pull the trigger for whoever is signing the check? Might makes right?”
“Screw you. I love my country.”
“No, you love your government. If you loved your country you’d be fighting against your government, which has turned totalitarian and fascist and is everything our Founding Fathers went to war against in the first place. And more, actually.”
The man on his knees was shaking his head. “You’ve actually convinced yourself of that crap?”
Ed’s face flooded with heat. “The Bill of Rights,” he growled, “the entire Bill of Rights, was a complete ‘Fuck You’ to the idea of trust in government. An insurance policy. The people who wrote it had just fought off a tyrannical government—their own. Not just the Second Amendment, every amendment in there from the First to the Tenth enumerated the inherent rights of individuals, above those of government. The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant us rights or privileges, it lists the ones we have as human beings that the government has no right to take away. It flat out states the government has no authority to infringe our rights, and the Second Amendment is just there to guarantee the other nine. It’s not there so you can go duck hunting, or even so you can defend yourself against criminals—that was assumed. It’s there so that people like us don’t get ground under the bootheel of tyrants, or at least have a fighting chance, because there always have been tyrants. Always will be. Most of the Constitution is written in very plain language, but ‘shall not be infringed’ is about as plain as it gets, and only people with evil intentions could even attempt to start arguing it doesn’t mean what it says. Free men own guns, slaves don’t, it’s as simple as that. You’re fighting for a government that is trying to argue we should have no rights except for what they grant us. Besides plain unConstitutional that’s evil, pure and simple. And, if you actually took a look at the conditions that caused the colonists in America to revolt against the British back in the 1700s, those laws and regulations are nothing compared to the outrages citizens were having to endure prior to this war.”
“They didn’t even have cartridges back when the Second Amendment was written. The rifles were all muzzleloaders. And you think it gives you the right to own a machine gun?” The shorter of the two men scoffed.
“They didn’t have radio, TV, or the internet, but you folks seemed to think the First Amendment applied to those as well as pen, ink, and parchment,” Ed shot back. “At least, until you shut down the press because it was saying things you didn’t like. If you knew anything about history you’d know George Washington borrowed privately-owned cannon to equip his army to fight the Revolutionary War. Not machine guns, privately-owned cannons. That answer your question, sport?”
“This is ridiculous. And a waste of time,” the short one said, glaring.
The taller of the two nodded. “Hulce, Terrance,” he said finally, staring straight ahead. “Staff Sergeant. 732-54-5221.”
“Keeley, Robert, Captain, 689-77-4423,” the other man said. He looked at Sarah, who still stood close to them. “I’m guessing we’d be pretty valuable in a prisoner exchange.”
“You’re right about this being a waste of time,” Sarah said, and then shot both men in the head with her suppressed carbine, quick enough for the second man, Keeley, to not even have time to react. She felt speckles of blood hit her face.
Jason gave a little shout of surprise and stared at the two men on the floor, blood pouring out of their heads. One of them kicked once, then was still. The other lay where he fell.
“Molon fucking labe,” one of the dogsoldiers in the room spat at the dead men. Then actually spit on the bodies. He looked up at Sarah and gave her a nod. None of the other dogsoldiers had much of a reaction.
“Anything in their gear we can use?” Hannibal asked her.
“I don’t think so, but I’ll double check,” she said, nudging the bodies with her toe just to make sure.
“Do it yesterday, I want to get the fuck away from those radios and those tracking chips,” Ed said to her. “Any other day I’d be happy to grab their pistols and that sniper rifle and all their ammo, but the thought of picking up anything else makes me want to throw up.” All the weight on his back made it seem like he was on an alien planet with extra gravity.
He looked at Jason, who was still openmouthed at what seemed to be a cold-blooded execution, nearly at his feet. “They were the traitors, son. Enemies of us, and the country, and people who just want to be free. Live free. These two blindly obedient men just following orders might have been competent soldiers, but what they were doing made them honest-to-God bad guys. They didn’t think so, they thought they were patriots. And they’d never be convinced otherwise, even if the end of the war saw them packing us all into boxcars heading toward a reeducation camp, or worse, for our own good. That’s why we’re fighting a war. The polite disagreements ended a decade ago. There’s nothing less civil than a civil war. One minute,” he called out just loud enough to be heard by the men outside the home. He checked his watch. They should have plenty of time to make the tunnel before the next satellite flew overhead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lydia walked through the tunnel. Occasionally she wore skirts to work, even high heels, and when she would walk through the tunnel wearing those her steps would echo off the brick walls in front and behind her, making it sound like she was part of a crowd. Most often, though, she wore slacks and comfortable shoes. Today she was in jeans and running shoes, the one pair she had still in good shape. Not only was it casual Friday but wartime deprivations often made simply washing he
r clothes a trial. She really couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes of any sort; no one inside the city could. She checked her phone. She was on time, or at least not running late.
She entered the Concourse of the Fisher Building, a name which she’d always found confusing. Concourses in her mind should be above ground; this Concourse, on the other hand, was immediately below ground level. In fact, she’d heard once that the tunnel she’d walked through was officially an “underground pedestrian concourse”. It was a freaking tunnel, and the Concourse level of the building should be called the First Basement or some such, something not confusing to people. Wasn’t it in Europe somewhere where they called the first floor the ground floor, and the second floor the first floor? Idiots.
She continued north through the empty and echoing Concourse, vacant offices and long-defunct retail stores to either side. The staircase was on the left, wide and shallow stone steps. She took it up to the lobby and glanced to the right. There, by the old security desk near the south entrance were two soldiers. They weren’t paying attention to anything. They rarely did.
Lydia moved left, to the coffee shop. There was a short line, and she looked around while she waited. She hated to spend the money on coffee, but it was a loitering excuse and a prop both at the same time, in addition, of course, to being coffee. Once she got her cup she stood in the lobby for a bit, sipping it, then headed out through the east entrance, past the bank of elevators.
Outside, the pedestrian walkway to the New Center One building was right over her head. With Lothrop barricaded off at the end of the block the overhead walkway wasn’t really necessary to avoid traffic, but people still used it, especially in winter. She walked down to the corner of the building and casually looked around, sipping at her coffee. A Growler was parked about twenty feet away, at least one solider in it. Across the street, in front of Cadillac Place, where she worked, was another Growler. She’d seen four soldiers there earlier. There were maybe fifteen people on foot within two hundred yards of her, people who worked in the area. Mostly government employees, she assumed.