Sons of War

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “Thank you, Deputy,” Doberman said.

  “Four more coming in!” Press shouted. He reached into a box and pulled out yellow plastic bracelets. “Put these on.”

  The gate opened, and Vinny followed the three Moretti soldiers through metal detectors. Two more deputies watched the men as they passed through the final checkpoint.

  “You do that again, and I’ll snap your neck,” Carmine said.

  “Dude, your English is shit,” Doberman replied. “No way in hell that guy was going to believe your story.”

  Frankie raised a hand. “Both of you shut the fuck up already. Do you not realize we just got in without even having our bags checked?”

  Carmine shrugged. “So?”

  “That means getting product in is going to be easy as hookers.”

  “Yeah, but we still got those to deal with,” Doberman said. He pointed his chin at one of the recruiting centers the deputy had mentioned. A line a dozen long stood outside a UCLA building with the Los Angeles Police Department logo.

  Officers came and went through the front doors. A California flag hung on a pole outside, beside another pole that now had only a chain. This was rebel territory.

  “Let’s go,” Frankie said, walking around the campus buildings and into the heart of the camp.

  The place bustled like a beehive. A half-dozen FEMA trailers were parked side by side, and tents of all colors and shapes had popped up in the open areas.

  The only unoccupied spaces were around designated fire zones, where flames rose from fifty-five-gallon metal drums. People stood around in circles, warming their hands in the chilly evening air. Vinny spotted the mansions on nearby hillsides, the glaring juxtaposition hard to miss. Lines waited outside hundreds of portable toilets that he could smell from across a huge lawn.

  “Let’s split up and meet back at the north exit in two hours,” Carmine said. “Vin, you’re with me. Doberman, you go with Frankie.”

  Carmine tilted his head, and Vinny followed him deeper into the camp, toward a cluster of white tents being set up under generator-fed lights. The people doing the work all had the same uniform. They were foreign aid workers.

  Vinny was surprised to see white UN tents going up. Europe was in dire straits too, like most of the world, but these men and women had come to America to help a country that had so often rendered aid all over the globe.

  He felt a pang of shame for the reason he was here. It certainly wasn’t to help these people.

  Carmine pulled out a notepad as they made their way through the maze of tents and buildings. Vinny didn’t need to ask what the old gangster was doing. There was a reason his uncle had selected Carmine to be captain. He was old-school smart and was a loyal soldier that never questioned an order to pull the trigger.

  Keeping in the shadows, Carmine noted the locations of guard posts, and where and how often a patrol of soldiers passed. Vinny stood under a palm tree, watching and learning.

  “I started as a scout almost forty years ago,” Carmine said in a low voice. “Just a runt kid, barely a hundred pounds. They posted me on the corners. My job was to look out for cops and rivals.”

  He put the notepad away. Vinny walked side by side with him into an open area of matted grass, where people warmed their hands around fire barrels.

  “Once I proved myself, I started working at a dealer spot,” Carmine said. “This was back before all the hybrid shit we’re selling. I ended up taking over that spot and making your uncle millions of euros.”

  They finally stopped at the north edge of the camp, where an armada of tanker trucks waited, guarded by a dozen soldiers. Hundreds of people with buckets waited in line for fresh water.

  With the power out in most of Los Angeles, the city’s biggest problem was the shortage of clean drinking water. Vinny and Carmine stood watching the lines for several minutes before Vinny realized that the older gangster wasn’t watching the people standing in line, but rather those outside the portable toilets.

  A pair of Latino men wearing long sleeves to cover their gang ink, and watch caps over their buzzed heads were slipping packets to people in the shadows.

  “Latin Kings?” Vinny whispered.

  “Or MS-Thirteen, or a clique with the Norteños. Who knows? I can’t see their tats from here, but you realize what this means, right, kid?”

  Vinny nodded. The Moretti family wasn’t the only crime organization looking to prey on these camps.

  They had competition here.

  The two Latino gangbangers walked away and headed into another zone of the camp, outside the stadium. Vinny and Carmine followed at a distance.

  The next area was zone 4, just outside the UCLA basketball stadium. Hundreds of tents were erected around the perimeter. The two men approached a green multifamily tent, where a third banger stood guard. Tattoos showed on his neck and face.

  He lifted up the flaps, and the two dealers slipped underneath and into the tent.

  Vinny and Carmine moved behind a cluster of portable toilets to watch.

  “Stay here,” Carmine said after a few minutes. He walked into zone 4 and disappeared from view.

  The industrial floods provided plenty of light in the camp, and Vinny used the opportunity to scan the faces while he waited.

  Some people sat in chairs outside their tents, talking quietly or sipping from steaming mugs. It wasn’t all that cold, but most of these people were used to their perfectly regulated HVAC systems. Sleeping in a tent had to be a tough transition.

  Carmine appeared again, this time outside the large tent the two gangbangers had gone into. Vinny waved at him when he saw two police officers walking toward the entrance, hands on their holsters.

  “Oh, shit,” Vinny muttered.

  The sentry standing guard acknowledged the cops with a jerk of his chin and opened the tent flaps, letting them inside.

  Carmine motioned for Vinny, and they walked behind another tent, where they could watch while remaining in the shadows, out of sight. The cops went out of the tent shortly after.

  They hadn’t gone there to arrest the men, Vinny realized—they had gone there to make a deal.

  Vinny followed the two cops as they melted back into the tent city. It was his turn to do some investigation. He walked casually up along their right flank, trying to discreetly read their name tags and memorize their faces.

  Both men were young, about his age. One had sharp Sicilian features. The other guy was short and dark-skinned, with an athletic build.

  Shouts broke out in the distance, and the cops rushed toward the fight, but Vinny was able to spot the name on the black officer’s tag before he vanished into a crowd. Clarke.

  Vinny and Carmine ended their chase, heading in the opposite direction to finish casing the camp. The recon was sobering—this wasn’t going to be as easy as he had thought.

  Not only did they have competition, they had dirty cops already in bed with that competition.

  Vinny went down a sidewalk, cutting through zone 3, and pulled up short. A girl sitting on a chair outside a yellow tent glared at him in the moonlight.

  “Oh, shit,” Vinny said, backing away. As the girl shot to her feet and pointed at him, he bolted for cover, not stopping until he was a good distance away.

  He stood behind a tent, heart pounding for several seconds before Carmine found him.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I saw Carly,” Vinny panted.

  Carmine looked over his shoulder. “Who the fuck’s that, one of your girlfriends?”

  “No,” Vinny said. “She’s Enzo Sarcone’s daughter.”

  -15-

  A week had passed since Ronaldo and his family returned to their home in Downey, and Ronaldo was up before the sun. The house been ransacked, of course, along with almost every other dwelling in the neighborhood. Only a few
of their neighbors had stayed through the chaos.

  “We’re alive; that’s all that matters,” Ronaldo had said. It took him a while to convince his wife that they were safer here than in one of the camps, where most residents who hadn’t fled the city were now living.

  Elena was taking it better than he had expected, and the kids didn’t seem to mind much. They were just glad to be home and off the roads.

  For the past few days, they had worked together to clean things up. Ronaldo had fixed the door, and Dom had boarded up the broken windows. But the boards didn’t keep out the shouts, gunshots, and sirens—the sounds of a city gone mad.

  Ronaldo sat in the darkness of the living room on their eighth day home. At five in the morning, he turned on a battery-operated lantern and walked into the bathroom, where his uniform hung on a towel hook.

  For a moment, he just stared at it, remembering all the places in the world he had worn it, and the brothers who had fought by his side. Marks, Bettis, and Tooth were out there, and he was going to find them.

  But first, he had to report to his new duty station at Downey High School, where, in a few hours, he would receive his first orders. He would also learn whether his new CO had any luck tracking down the Desert Snakes.

  Ronaldo quickly got dressed and brought his boots out to the living room, where he sat on the couch and laced them up.

  A voice from the dark hallway made him flinch.

  “You weren’t going to say goodbye?”

  He let out a sigh as Elena stepped into the kitchen. The moonlight illuminated her features, and even in her nightgown, with frizzled hair, she was as beautiful as when they first married. All their arguments were forgotten, and his resentment seemed to vanish in that moment.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he whispered. “Dom is going to watch over you guys while I’m gone. I’m about to wake him up.”

  She walked over to the front door and stood between Ronaldo and the exit.

  “You promised me we’d be safe if we came back here,” she said.

  “And we are safe, especially now that Governor McGehee has declared sovereignty. We’ll make it through this; we just have to be patient. I promise. You just have to trust me.”

  “I do trust …” Elena shook her head. “I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s all one big nightmare. Maybe we should go to a refugee camp. At least, they have security.”

  “No way,” Ronaldo said. “We’re safer here. Trust me.”

  He finished tying his boots and then walked over to her.

  She stared at him for a moment, then gave a half smile and rested her head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around her.

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you guys,” he whispered in her ear. “But I have to put food on the table. The only way to do that is to go back to work, doing what I do best, and the Marine Corps is the only way I can get us more than those god-awful rations.”

  “I hope you can find Marks.”

  “Me too, but knowing Zed, he’s just fine out there.” He kissed Elena on the forehead. “I’ll be back tonight.”

  Dom walked into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Good, you’re awake,” Ronaldo said.

  Dom yawned. “Kind of …”

  “Better wake up, because—” A scream cut Ronaldo off. He bolted through the kitchen and into the hallway, not stopping until he got to Monica’s room.

  She was sitting straight up, gasping for air, staring in the dark.

  “Sweetie, it’s okay,” Ronaldo said. He sat down beside her and pulled her close. “You were just having a nightmare.”

  She sobbed against his chest.

  Elena lit a candle, bringing it over to the bed.

  “She’s okay,” Ronaldo said. “Everything is okay.”

  Dom moved into the hallway to stand guard with one of the AR-15s they had taken off the raiders on Mount Baldy.

  “I keep seeing those burned people,” Monica whimpered. “They keep trying to touch me … to burn me too.”

  “It’s okay, baby,” Elena soothed. “No one’s going to hurt you. I’ll never let anyone hurt you.”

  She looked over at Ronaldo, and again he felt the guilt wash over him. He wanted to be here for his family, but they needed to eat. He couldn’t protect them if he couldn’t feed them.

  “Go back to sleep,” Ronaldo said.

  “Where are you going?” Monica said.

  “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “I’ll stay here by your side until you fall back to sleep,” Elena said.

  Monica relaxed and laid her head back on the pillow, eyes still on Ronaldo.

  “Please be careful, Dad,” she said.

  “I will,” Ronaldo said, kissing her on the head.

  When he got to the front door, he spoke in a low voice to Dom. “Make sure they get some fresh air in the backyard today, okay?”

  “Okay, will do, but there’s something I have to ask you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I really want to join the police department,” Dom said. “My friends Camilla and Moose have both joined. I’ll work nights so you can watch Mom and Monica while I’m there. The extra paycheck or rations or whatever they’re paying will help keep us all fed.”

  “When will you sleep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just hold off one more day, okay?” Ronaldo said, trying to hold back his frustration. “We’ll talk about this when I get home.”

  “Okay, Dad. Be safe.”

  Ronaldo grabbed the mountain bike he had borrowed from a neighbor and set off to Downey High School in the darkness. Dog tired, he would kill for a hot coffee. But when he saw the Marine Corps flag flying from a pole at the school, he snapped awake.

  The marines at the gate shined a light on him, and he stopped to show his ID. Then he peddled into the parking lot outside the gymnasium. A tarp rippled over the gaping hole where an Abrams tank had blown out the wall.

  He ditched his bike and walked to the entrance, where two sentries watched a patrol of army soldiers making their way back from the night shift.

  Even in the low light, Ronaldo could see that several of the men had been injured. One pressed gauze to his head where something had struck him under the rim of his helmet. Another guy limped with his arm around a buddy.

  Ronaldo followed the men inside and made his way to the classroom, where his new commanding officer, Lieutenant Blaze, had set up the Tactical Ops Center.

  “Good morning, sir,” Ronaldo said, coming to attention in front of Blaze’s desk. The lieutenant acknowledged the greeting with a nod and went back to looking at the papers in front of him. Ronaldo relaxed and went to stand by the windows when the platoon sergeant, a guy named Tom King, walked in holding a bloody field dressing on his shoulder. He stopped and snorted blood out of his nose into a wastebasket.

  “Damn, what happened to you, King?” asked Blaze.

  King winced as he touched the dressing. “Everyone out there wants to kill us, LT.”

  “You good to go for this morning’s mission?” Blaze asked. “If not, we can have Salvatore here fill in for you.”

  King looked at Ronaldo and then shook his head. “I’m good to go, sir.”

  Ronaldo grabbed a chair at the front of the classroom where his son had learned algebra and geometry.

  The room began to fill with mostly marines and a few army rangers and army infantry sprinkled throughout—men who, like Ronaldo, had been separated from their units in the chaos of the fighting.

  None of that mattered anymore.

  They all were here to fight together.

  When they all were seated, Blaze walked over to a city map that hung over the blackboard. He was a big man with a clean-shaven head and a deep voice.

  “All right,
listen up, everyone,” he said. “We’ve still got several pockets of AMP soldiers hunkering down in multiple locations. The largest group is here in Anaheim. Command wants us to take this real estate back this morning.”

  “Why don’t we just drop a bomb on their asses?” asked one of the Army Rangers.

  “Because one atrocity doesn’t justify another—and they have hostages,” replied Blaze. “Governor McGehee has given us strict orders: hunt down AMP soldiers and clear the cities while avoiding civilian casualties at all costs.”

  “Even the civilians that are trying to kill us, sir?” piped up a soldier who looked young enough to be just out of basic.

  “The gangbangers aren’t civilians in my eyes,” King added. “We deal with them like we deal with AMP. But you protect noncombatants, such as these hostages, like your own family. Got it?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Speaking of gangsters,” Blaze went on, “I’m dispatching Team Hammerhead to this area controlled by the Crips. A group of those animals stole a cache of weapons, and I want ’em back.” He tapped the map with an unlit cigarette. “The rest of us are heading to Anaheim.”

  Blaze let King explain the situation in more detail. The remaining AMP forces had retreated to an elementary school and had posted several snipers in houses surrounding the campus.

  “I’m not sure how many hostages or how many hostiles we’re dealing with,” Blaze added, “but two platoons are already there engaging the AMP forces on the perimeter of the school. They are dug in pretty good. This time, we’re bringing in the armor. Got two Abramses on the way.”

  A chorus of hearty oo-rahs went up from several of the marines, and Ronaldo felt the urge to chime in. It was good to be back in the Corps again. He kept quiet, though, not wanting to get pegged as too moto.

  Blaze turned to Sergeant King, who moved to stand at the front of the room and scan the assorted soldiers: airborne Rangers, army infantry, and marines. “Gear up, men; it’s time to finish taking back this city.”

  The room started to empty as the anxious soldiers and marines prepared for action. Blaze called out to Ronaldo before he could leave.