After the revolution, p.2
After the Revolution, page 2
There was an awkward pause. A little bit of the blood drained from the journalist’s face. You old nutty fuck, Manny thought, with more amusement than fear. “Classic DeShawn,” he said, and laughed to ease the tension. The Major bid them both a good day, hugged Manny, and sauntered off back to the command post. Smoke from his cigarette curled up into the air behind him as he walked. Manny’s eyes lingered on it for a second before he turned back to Reggie.
“Ready to go?” he asked, chipper as he could manage.
Three hours, a handful of interviews, and one short drive later, Manny and Reggie arrived at their home for the night: the Richardson Autonomous Project. Once a Walmart, now a twenty-two-year-old experiment in sustainable urban living, the Project was the furthest island of “civilization” on the SDF’s side of the front. Its militia steadfastly refused to involve themselves in the region’s greater conflicts. They’d been targeted a few times by the Heavenly Kingdom. The SDF, by contrast, left them alone. So when a fixer like Manny found himself on the wrong side of the LBJ Freeway after dark he could usually trust the Project to provide food, booze, and shelter. For a price, of course.
Sleeping arrangements in the Project were broadly communal. The bulk of the old Walmart had been converted into an indoor meadow with grow-lights hanging from the rafters and a wide, lush field of native grass sprawling across most of the inhabited space. Fruit trees, bushes full of berries, cannabis plants, and copses of bamboo lined the edges of the space. The center of the field was dominated by a large, circular kitchen surrounded by a handsome oaken bar. Tables, gazebos, and sundry personal structures dotted the field, along with a pair of dance floors.
Reggie’s face lit up when he saw the bar. By the time Manny had dropped off their bags and paid Charlie and the driver for the night, the journalist was already three beers in. The Brit wasn’t precisely drunk or sober, but at that productive twilight in between. He’d unrolled a portable screen and had a holographic display up, looping four separate sections of the security footage Colonel Milgram had sent over. The journalist alternated between typing furiously, scrawling notes in his journal, and taking huge gulps of something brown and foamy. He stopped working when he saw Manny approach and waved him into the adjacent seat.
“Hey brother, check this out.”
Manny pulled up a seat and the journalist directed his attention to a six-second loop of footage, from immediately after the bombing. It showed two man-sized silhouettes standing on top of an old garage; Manny remembered the building. It stood maybe two hundred meters from the Abrams Road checkpoint. One of the silhouettes had a rifle. The other held a short, squat tube that Manny recognized as a camera lens.
“Notice anything?”
“Spotters,” Manny said. “Probably trying to get a kill count.”
“Nah, man. Look at where he’s pointed. That cunt’s not looking at any post. He’s looking straight back, deeper into the old town. And I’ll bet you he’s high up enough to be staring right at Colonel Milgram’s command post.”
Manny looked again. He thought about the angle. “OK, so, what?” he asked. “You think this was a probing attack for some big action?”
The journalist shrugged. “Maybe. It’s something new, is what interests me. Two years of martyrdom operations that all look more-or-less the same and now this weird one. An autonomous vehicle bomb from a group of fanatics who think autonomous vehicles are the devil.”
“Yeah,” Manny agreed, “that does seem weird.”
The bartender walked up and offered Manny his pick of the finest liquor in this particular warzone. Manny ordered a Shiner. It was the one beer a drinker could find across both the Republic of Texas and the Austin autonomous region. He looked back at the looping footage. They both watched it twice more. Then Reggie spoke up again.
“What have you heard about Pastor Mike?” he asked.
Manny stiffened a little bit at the name. He’d heard it, of course. Vague stories of rioting in Kansas, a fundamentalist uprising inside the southernmost territories of the United Christian States. He hadn’t thought much about it at first. But two years ago Pastor Mike had moved to Texas, shortly before the Heavenly Kingdom had declared itself. It was hard to say exactly what role the preacher played within the organization. But he was certainly its most visible “face.”
“I know who he is,” Manny said. “I know the Republic let him in because they thought his followers might provide a buffer against Austin’s influence. I know that blew the fuck up in their faces.” Manny took a long drink and continued. “That’s an old story around here, the Republic using those god-fondling nut-fucks to push back against the leftists.”
The journalist raised an eyebrow and Manny instantly regretted his crude response. He didn’t really care about religion one way or the other, but whenever he came out to the front it was hard to not get a little angry. Especially after a drink.
“Sorry,” he said, “it’s been a long day.”
Reggie looked down, coughed and took a sip. He looked back at Manny, took another sip, and said, “You know that’s another subject I’d rather like to cover.”
“What?” Manny asked.
“Anti-Christian sentiment in North America.”
Manny grunted and looked down at his drink. The Brit barreled on.
“You’re not the first North American I’ve heard express anger toward Christians,” he said. “In California, Cascadia, the North American Federation, I’ve just seen a lot of hate…”
“Look,” Manny interrupted. “Me, I’m a man of peace. I love everybody. But this continent’s been torn apart and bleeding out for the last twenty years. Lotta people hate Christians. The ones that don’t hate Christians hate leftists. And everyone outside the American Federation hates capitalists. Hate, hate, hate.”
Manny took a gulp of his beer and set it down, a little harder than he’d intended. He looked Reggie in the eye and finished, “There’s exactly one thing all the broken bits of this continent have in common. Hate.”
The journalist arched an eyebrow at Manny and returned the gaze. He had the look of a man peering into the enclosure of a particularly exotic zoo animal. Manny wanted to resent it, but he’d been doing this job long enough to know this was just how journalists looked at people.
Reggie downed his drink. He reached a hand up to signal the bartender and then looked back at Manny. “Can I buy you another round?”
Manny shook his head. “No thanks. I’m tired, and I don’t want to drag ass at the front tomorrow.”
He downed the last of his beer, bid Reggie a good night, and headed over to the spot of turf where he’d set up his sleeping bag and gear. He popped off his shoes, his pants, and his shirt and rubbed himself down with a handful of wet naps. Then he grabbed a nightshirt and sweatpants from his bag and slipped them on. Manny considered clean pajamas a necessity.
He fired up his deck again once he was swaddled in his sleeping bag. There was a juddering start, and then the corners of his vision were populated by a series of small, partly translucent screens. Each one bulged with updates; friends asking about his weekend plans, spam from his college, notifications about new video uploads, and headlines from the local news. David had messaged him twice more, to let him know he and his journalists were headed back to Austin and, then, that they’d arrived.
Oscar still hadn’t responded. Manny’s initial concern was over his loyalty: I got that fucker started as a stringer. If he sold that video and cut me out of the deal I’m going…going to… But the longer he thought about Oscar, the more Manny worried that something might have happened. He’d been working in Plano today, near a very stable chunk of the front. But this far out, almost anything could happen…
Manny closed his eyes, sighed, and tried to purge the anxiety from his mind. There was nothing to do now, other than get to sleep so he could wake up tomorrow and make more money. That thought prompted Manny to pull open his banking app and check on the status of his saving’s account. The numbers glowed, fat and happy, in the space right in front of his head. Another five months in the field, maybe six. Then I buy that plane ticket.
He started to think about the pictures he’d seen of Dublin and Berlin and Barcelona, all the places he thought he might live if this war would just hang on a little longer. He soon fell asleep, and slept pretty well until the first mortar landed.
Chapter 2
Roland.
He woke up, suddenly aware of two pressing problems:
The acid’s worn off.
And,
Eight people are here to kill me.
Both of these facts concerned him equally. He couldn’t remember his name or where, exactly, he was, which made the impending kill-team all the more worrisome. He opened his eyes. His vision was blurry and unfocused. His head felt filled with sand.
Roland (–Oh shit, that’s my name! Roland!) wondered how long he’d been asleep. He reflexively triggered his deck before the dim firing of a synapse reminded him that he’d permanently disabled his data connection…well, a long time ago.
Five million two hundred twenty six thousand minu–
His “hindbrain,” what Roland called the acres of microscopic processors and databanks spun into his blood, spat the knowledge out unbidden into his conscious mind. Roland tried to curse but wound up spitting out a wad of brackish phlegm instead. His eyes settled on a quarter-full bottle of fungus whiskey. He grabbed it, drained it, and rooted around on the table where he’d found it until his digging turned up a sheet of acid. He ripped the sheet in half, ate one half, and pasted the other on his sweat-damp chest.
Roland’s brain didn’t wait for the acid to do its job; nanomachines couriered the lysergic diethylacid direct to his synapses. The drugs took hold in a manner of seconds. Acid softened the world around him. His hindbrain’s running commentary faded into a sort of generalized hyper-awareness of the world around him. He sighed, relaxed, and remembered.
A woman hovered over him, her hands on his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body. Sweat dripped down from her short black hair onto his face and chest. Her pupils were the size of dinner plates. She smelled like acid and desire. She smiled, revealing a row of damascus-steel teeth–
Roland pulled himself out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance. His hindbrain generated a map of the approaching assassins. They were still a solid minute from his hovel.
There were six men and two women on the team. If he’d wanted, a microsecond’s focus could’ve told him which members of the group were vegetarians, where two of the team were on their menstrual cycles, and how recently each of their firearms had been cleaned and oiled. But Roland didn’t care about that information. He was trying to remember where he’d left his gun.
The one-room hut Roland occupied was best described as “squalid.” He knew he’d lived there for quite a long time, although he wasn’t sure if the home was “his” in any legal sense of the word. Its one room held a filthy mattress, a hot plate, several dozen empty bottles of liquor, and a tinkling carpet of spent whippets. A large knife was embedded in the door. Roland couldn’t remember why. He knew he’d had a gun at one point, even though he couldn’t currently find it. He stood up, still wobbly from the massive dose of GHB he’d taken with his nightly tequila, and started kicking at the piles of bottles and drug paraphernalia in the hope that one of them might contain his gun. He found some bullets after a few second’s search, at the bottom of a Folger’s Coffee tin that was half-filled with marijuana.
Next to the tin was a large metal bowl of stagnant water. Roland glanced in and caught sight of his own reflection. His black skin looked ashen and clammy. Unusually pale, he thought, but he didn’t recall enough about himself to know if that was really true. His face was long and drawn, with wide jutting cheekbones and a patchy uneven beard. His head was covered in stubble. The center of his face was dominated by a crooked, heavily scarred nose. Roland had no recollection of why it was scarred, but he knew the injury must’ve happened back before the Army filled him with chrome.
He turned away from his reflection and continued his search through the house, scattering food-encrusted plates, empty coke bags, and old-fashioned print pornography into even less-organized piles. No dice. Did I pawn it? he wondered, as his machine-assisted eidetic memory warred with his profound intoxication. Roland was now conscious enough to remember that not remembering much was normal for him, and that he should really worry more about the assassins coming to kill him.
Oh shit, right!
The strike team was just fifty meters out now. He felt a gust of wind and, in the same way, felt as two of the men began to assemble a large sound cannon behind a rocky hill that faced his hovel. He guessed it was a Callahan Mk. 38. Roland didn’t know how he knew the weapon’s name, but he knew it could burn out even his armored synapses with a few seconds of continuous fire.
One man was on overwatch for the Callahan team. He carried a two-bore Ruger Falchion anti-vehicular rifle. The mingling odors of fear-sweat and baby formula wafting off him triggered sense-memories of someone holding a newborn infant. Roland guessed the man must have a kid back home. A kid he’s scared of leaving fatherless if some chromed out acid-head fillets him. That was useful data. He filed it away in the chunk of his brain least likely to lose that information over the next four seconds. Roland’s memory was real good in four-second chunks.
Over the next picosecond he caught equally informative whiffs of the others. It was enough to suggest that the two women in the main assault team were lovers, and they’d both had milspec sub-dermal armor implanted recently. The acrid scent of fresh sutures hung heavy in the air around them. Roland could also tell that one of the men in the assault party took heavy testosterone supplements, either because of a genetic abnormality or because he’d been assigned female at birth. The fourth man was moderately addicted to ephedrix and riding into battle on a high stimulant wave.
The last member of the assault team was the only one to give Roland any pause. He could guess the man’s height and weight (six foot five, two-hundred-forty pounds) from the sound of his footfalls. Roland could smell the Sig Sauer .500 submachine gun in his hands, but otherwise the man was a sensory blank. No sweat, no hydraulics, and black to thermographic sensors. The man was chromed. Not so heavily as Roland, of course, but the competent and well-armed squad he led might be enough to narrow the gap.
Where in the shitting shitshitshit did I leave that gun?
The static balance in the air changed as the overwatch team warmed up their sound cannon. The assault team was close now, barely a hundred feet out, waiting in the cover provided by several large boulders at the base of the rise that held Roland’s ramshackle home. He knew how this fight would go. They’d unleash the Callahan for a good five seconds while the kill-team moved into position and kicked in the door. Next the big bruiser and the two women would enter while the remainder of the assault team fanned out to cover the sides.
Textbook post-human kill-team tactics, he thought. He didn’t actually remember any of the fights this conclusion was based on. But he’d clearly lived through similar encounters. And if he trusted his body and hindbrain he would again.
Roland finished searching the apocalyptic ruin that was his kitchen sink. The pile of plates had been large enough to hide a short-barrel AR-10, but his gun wasn’t there either.
“Fuck-nuts,” he cursed. The profanity brought a tiny serotonin spike, and Roland felt himself calm down even as the noose tightened around him. His combat wetware did most of its work in the moments before meat met metal. So Roland closed his eyes, slumped his shoulders and relaxed while it cross-indexed his memories of past firefights with his current sensory data. A moment later, Roland was presented with three potential counter-assault strategies.
He selected the one that sounded like the most fun.
The Callahan fired, blanketing his home and much of the area beyond it in a web of noise designed to assault and eventually fry the synapses of anyone dumb enough to stand too long in its wake. Pain lashed from Roland’s inner ear and sparked out to every nerve in his body. It would’ve been enough to leave a strong man curled on the ground, shitting his guts out. But Roland just felt a distant ache. His experience of the damage was more akin to seeing the check-engine light on a car than true agony. He was aware that if he waited too long the sonic weapon would blow out the pain dampners on his spinal nerve gates. Luckily for him the assault team didn’t wait that long.
Roland felt the big man arc his leg up to kick in the door. It crumpled in and Roland lunged left. This helped him avoid the first spray of covering fire as the chromed man and both women barreled inside. Roland flung himself into the hovel’s main structural support beam, which ran up the building’s left wall. He hit it with the rough speed and force of a light truck going twenty miles an hour. His momentum carried him and half the left wall into the rocky ground outside.
Roland’s filthy little home tottered and swayed. It collapsed first on the left side and then on the right as the whole structure failed. Roland was already up with a jagged piece of two-by-four in his hands. He rushed the ephedrix addict holding down the left flank. The man got two shots off and, to his credit, both hit right where Roland’s original heart had been. And then Roland was on him. He shoved the wood into the meat of the man’s face. It gouged off enough flesh to fill a pint glass and shattered the poor fellow’s jaw. He went down, hard.
Roland smelled the familiar scent of anti-hemorrhagic nanomachines as they rushed to save the man’s life. He caught a slight sour whiff of the cheap clotting agents in the man’s blood. Roland guessed it was TrauMax brand, which was convenient. TrauMax had based their whole line off of a piece of Brazilian military wetware that itself was based on a crude synthesis of horseshoe crab blood. The organs worked well enough, unless you happened to be an amphetamine addict who’d suffered massive tissue damage. Then your TrauMax unit would flood your synapses with adenosine to knock you out, rather than risk pushing more amphetamines on your stressed heart.
