The Revolution Chapter 5
The fire is lit.
This is a Work In Progress draft of a novel in progress
Man, this dose is hitting hard. Let’s go for a walk, J." David Hancock said suddenly. Jackie had no real objections, and the psychedelic leaf he had just smoked had him feeling real social. They both grabbed their bags and left David’s fifth floor suite.
"This is really a nice apartment for a drink slinger."
"It pays to cater to certain 'deviences' around various Friends of Gaia Fogs." It was the first time David had hinted at making any money outside of the pub he worked in publically.
Jackie, being the ever cautious person that he was, knew what he was talking about, but didn’t want to say outloud. There always seemed to be a camera around when he least expected it. Not to mention the listening and recording devices he could not see. The state of Grandville and the FOGs were watching everything.
The outside air was thick with stormsign. Stacy Fairgold had been running nonstop segments about being "Storm Aware" and supplies to have if a big storm happens.
David broke the silence first, "You asked about my bankroll, so tell me about your job. What does a financial analyst do?"
Jackie thought for a moment. How much does he need to know? For that matter how to explain it without boring his friend.
"Everything around you is part of a system. If you look at it one way, the flow of money is all around you. You pay for a sandwich, you leave a trail. And that trail connects you to that store. Then that store exchanges capitol for goods and services from another chain. That trail starts to look like a web. I get paid to determine the reason mass amounts of money move from one place to another."
Jackie suddenly became serious, "there are some odd things happening in the flow of money. Especially in the stock market. It’s odd that The Collapse happened 2 months ago and the stock market moves on like it never happened. If I was a paranoid man, I’d wonder if there was some conspiracy to keep the stock market propped up, but that’s just speculation."
"And you never know who’s listening." David said, his voice hushed as if sharing a secret.
As if to prove his point a couple of Grandville City Police officers turned the closest corner to their north, their sand colored collared uniforms pressed and their black boots polished to a mirror sheen. As they passed, one of them stared at David with hard, suspicious eyes. The four men passed without incident.
Jackie pulled out a small flask of cheap wheat liquor and took a stiff shot from it. He offered it to David who waved it off. He had found his new focus.
David had walked over to a propaganda poster looking for army recruitment. It showed a twisted and evil looking man pulling strings around a cartoon rendition of Gaia. The caption said, "Don’t let the Gaiacrats take your freedom. Sign up today." This one still was slightly tacky from the paste adhesive used to afix a poster to a wall and still be somewhat weatherproof.
David seemed transfixed by the poster, lost in thought and somewhere else. His face was sullen and slightly angry. Suddenly he was back to his usual self.
"You know the recruiters put blades behind these posters so you can’t pull them down?" David asked.
"I did not know that, but I believe you. Listen, is something bothering you? You sure stared at it for a while."
"Nah, just remembering my time in the Grandville regulars. It’s not something I want to talk about."
Jackie was always impressed by David’s sheer amount of life experience. Jackie had always thought that he had wasted his life a bit tied to the farm and then to work
"Must’ve sucked, huh?"
"It did." David said curtly.
They continued walking in the general direction of home. Every block had large cameras set up to have the fewest blind spots as physically possible. The presence of police and their weapons and vehicles was heavier than Jackie had ever seen before. It made his stomach do loops from anxiety.
"This storm is looking like a bad one, huh?" David asked.
"That’s what Stacy said in her T Mail newsletter today."
"I don’t remember so many storms being so destructive when I was a kid."
"Yeah. My brothers seem to always be complaining on the farm the few times a year I talk to them."
"You should get in touch more often. Family is important."
"I just don’t have anything in common with them anymore. If I ever did."
From somewhere far off came the ascending klaxon of the Storm Alert System. One by one, in a seemingly random order, the others within earshot activated, causing a cacophony of high-pitched noises that cut through Jackie and made him grit his teeth.
Jackie looked at David and yelled, barely audible over the sirens at this point, "Let’s find some shelter."
"My bar is down the block. It’ll be closer."
Jackie nodded, thankful for the shelter.
The air smelled heavy with soil as Rebecca James tried desperately to finish her chores before a storm the local meteorologist had that morning been calling "one for the record books."
The truth of the matter was that she was behind on her planting duties after the irrigation system had exploded a couple of weeks back, flooding the front 5 acres of crops and drying out the swine’s grass in the back 20. Her suspicions of DSI "sabotage" had fell on the deaf ears of a now bedridden Michael James.
His lungs now held barely any oxygen so any exertion was often followed by a long coughing fit. His stomach often felt like lava and there were solid weeks when he was unable to keep any food down.
In some of her most private moments, it was devastating to Rebecca to think about the shell of a man her father had become. She didn’t usually have time to dwell on those thoughts. Although she thought about selling and washing her hands of the whole thing. Those thoughts always brought a kind of shame at her perceived cowardice.
She rode the tilling machine up and down the rows of the field. Trying to get this acre ready to plant and hoping she wasn’t wasting energy and the storm would leave her work alone.
The sky was suddenly noticeably darker and the wind began to pick up, bringing with it a smell and feel of electricity. From some where far away came a high pitched alarm. The sound was familiar from the weekly testing done at the same time every week at noon on the dot. The storm alarm, she thought to herself, I’d better hurry and get dad and I to the storm shelter.
She disengaged the tilling blades and began to drive the tractor toward the house, filling her time on the drive with a weird feeling in the pit of her stomach. These storms usually give more of a warning.
She put the tractor in park and ran toward the house, up the porch stairs, and threw open the front door of the house before hollering, "Dad you ready? We’ve gotta get below."
From her father’s bedroom in the far end of the house she could hear her father grunt in acknowledgement.
She ran toward the direction of his voice. When she found him she scooped him in her arms, pushed down the thought he’s so light, and headed downstairs toward a special designed bunker by Michael before the cancer got too bad to be able to accommodate a broken Michael and however many caretakers for weeks in the case of a major storm. Rebecca hoped to leave that test for another time.
The entrance to the shelter was outside the back door, not an easy trek with her father in her arms but she managed with minimal discomfort to either.
Rebecca flipped the harsh florecent lights on in the bunker. She laid her father down on the bed in the middle of the chamber and because he began to cough again she wrapped a couple of tubes under his nose to deliver pure oxygen from an aging tank hidden behind the northeast wall.
The heavy sound of rain and thunder began to come through the door to the outside.
After a couple of minutes in silence save for the rhythmic sound of rain and the more than occasional sharp crack of thunder there was a way more heavy, explosive sounding crack from outside.
She looked at her father and said, "that doesn’t sound good." And her father nodded.
"I’m gonna go see if I can see what that was by just cracking open the door." Rebecca said.
She crossed the room and ascended the stairs to the door on the ceiling, but there was a heavy something, log, debris, who knew what, but she could not open the door.
"Becca?" Her father’s voice came from behind her. She swivled on the stairs she was standing on to look at him. He was pointing at a sudden and fast leak coming in from the opposite wall.
Things looked dire, but Rebecca knew she could find a way out of this mess.
Earlie Jackson, Dirty Earlie to the transient community and several law enforcement officers, only had one desire at the moment--find shelter. He was a transient and had seen storms all over Pangea and there was nothing quite like a Grandville storm.
The loud, shrill sirens drowned out any other noise on the streets and Earlie knew that he needed to be inside now or he ran the risk of being struck by lightning, pelted by hail, or in especially bad cases washed away in one of Grandville’s patented flash flood. He had seen it before when one of his friends had been washed away a couple of years ago.
It took a couple of minutes of being pelted by the cold rain and falling hail to decode to try to take shelter in the church down the block.
Tonight was the Southern Church of the Holy Baptism of Fire’s weekly midweek night service, so the church was filled with worshipers.
He threw the door open and was immediately assaulted by the stares of the parishioners. A voice from the back said, "What the hell is that Fire awful smell?"
It was true that Earlie had not had the opportunity to bathe in several days and the sweat of his clothes had a particular musk to them. He began to be slightly embarased.
The pastor spoke from the front pulpit in Earlies direction, "Can I help you my son?"
Earlie’s voice came soft and unsure to the crowd with their judgemental eyes trained on him, "I was just hoping to get some shelter, I won’t bother nobody."
"My son, the followers of Gaia must hold themselves to a higher standard of dress and hygiene than you seem to be capable of. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave."
"Please don’t ask me to leave. There’s death out there."
The clip that spread like wildfire through the metanet begins here.
"My son, you are scaring my other children. Please leave quietly."
"I can’t. I can’t. I CAN’T!!!!!" He began beating on his head out of frustration. "They say I’ll die if I leave."
"Who says you’ll die?" A voice from the crowd asked, barely audible on camera.
"The voices, they’re scared of the storm." Earlie’s face contorted in a wild mask of terror and anger and frustration.
Another barely audible voice can be heard saying, "Yes, the SCHBF on southeast 45th and High."
A scream is audible as Earlie begins growling.
"Buddy," a forceful voice can be heard off camera, the camera than swings around to see a man in a Grandville Army uniform, a slug thrower in hand pointed in the assumed direction of Earlie. He continues, this time the audio is more clear, "you’re pissing us all off. It’s time you left."
The camera swings to get Earlie’s reaction, "I told you, I CAN’T!"
From behind Earlie the sanctuary doors burst open and two policemen enter, their clubs held over their heads. One of them makes a half hearted attempt to say, "Leave or face the consequences," before his comerade brought his club down on Earlie’s head, knocking him to the ground.
The beating from the officers was swift and brutal. Several clubbing blows to and around his head caused massive internal and external bleeding and a couple of higher ribs would be found to be shattered.
The video ends on a shot of a barely recognizable Earlie. His face mangled beyond recognition. More quivering meat than man.
"Dirty" Earlie Johnson would eventually perish of the injuries sustained in the beating while en route to the closest hospital.
The storm shelter was opressively dark and the only sound Rebecca James could hear was the rushing of the water. The cold water was up to her ankles in what had to only have been a matter of seconds. It was obvious that she had very little time to figure out a way to get her and her father, Michael out.
It took some odd angles to ascertain what was actually blocking the twin door from opening as there was very little space to open before the obstruction wouldn’t allow any more. Eventually, though, she was able to see a thick log wedged into the door.
There was no way to get enough torque to move the log with her bare hands, she could only squeeze maybe a finger or two through the gap. Now to see if there was something to help in the shelter.
She found her portable lighter and flicked the ignition. The light was flooded with a dim light, but enough for Rebecca to see an old flashlight on the work bench to her right. Michael moaned softly as he covered his eyes to let them adjust to the new light.
Rebecca flipped the flashlight to its on position which flooded the shelter with more light, enough that Revecca had to squint her eyes to protect them.
On the wall behind the workbench she saw, sitting next to the batteries designed for it, a cordless reciprocating saw. If she could fit the cutting blades through the gap in the doors she might be able to clear the wood away.
"Dad, I know you’re hurting, but can you push the doors open as best you can."
Michael weazed out an "Of course," and began the arduous process of returning to a standing position. The water was shin level now.
It was a lengthy process to cut the brush away, but progress was quickly and often albeit minorly made. Each time the door opened a bit more, Rebecca was able to get more of the saw and eventually her body to attack the branches. Eventually the doors swung open and Michael and Rebecca were free of the hostile storm shelter and into the just as hostile environment of the slapping rain and howling wind of a Grandville electrical storm.
The air was heavy with the smell of wood smoke, "Do you smell something burning?" Rebecca asked, spinning around to meet her father. She had barely gotten the words out before she saw what had demanded her father’s attention. For the next couple minutes both of the Jameses stood looking at the burning husk of their barn.
Far off lightning broke the silence and Rebecca somehow noticed her father silently weeping.
"Go in the house, dad, the bathroom should be safe enough. I’m going to get a look at the barn."
"Be careful, Becka."
She really wanted a look at the generator in the barn. The explosion they had heard in the shelter before losing power made her think that would be a good place to start.
She couldn’t actually get inside the structure due to the fire burning so bad. But the exterior wall behind the generator was exploded outward, debris laying in a circular pattern around the burning wreckage of their Flux power generator. The black, sticky, and highly flammable fluid of spent flux--a fluid that a man had to come by once a month to collect--had coated the walls and was burning, the propellant for a still burning barn in the middle of a torrential downpour. Lightning? She wondered.
As she tried to get closer she stumbled on something especially wet and sticky under one of the wooden planks. She picked up the debris and had to stop herself from vomiting when she realized it was a severed hand with a familiar ostentatious Flux stone ring.
The one owned by the man from DSI.
"Fuck!" Rebecca exclaimed.
After the initial shock wore off the magnitude of what she saw hit like a concussive grenade.
DSI tried to sabotage our farm. If those bastards think this’ll make me sell, they’ve got another thing coming, She thought cynically to herself. I bet Billy would want to hear about this.
A hurried knock on Jackie’s door caused him to bolt upright. He glanced at the clock and couldn’t see it in the post sleep haze and nighttime darkness. He’d fallen asleep at midnight, and it couldn’t be more than an hour past that.
It was David, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week.
"You hear about this transient murdered by police?" David asked, no greeting.
It had been all over the news all day. David pushed his way in and sat on Jackie’s bed.
Jackie handed him a beer in a green glass bottle.
"I have something I need to tell you. You know the Fires of Heaven?"
Jackie opened his beer. He felt like he knew what was coming. He nodded as he took the first drink.
"My friends I’m always talking about is them."
Fuck. There it was. Live and in living color. Jackie took another slug from the bottle. He asked, "Did you have anything to do with Reverend White’s murder?"
"Ah, that wasn’t us. It was someone who wanted it to look like us. We mostly just slash the tires of government vehicles."
They were getting off track. David lit a SmokeStik and Jackie tried to dissipate it with his hand. Jackie decided to not make a fuss about smoking inside his apartment.
"What does this confession have to do with Dirty Earlie?" Jackie walked over to his computer and yanked the power cord from the wall, just in case the microphone was on.
"Don’t call him Dirty Earlie. That name’s degrading." David said, a flash of anger crossing his face. He composed himself in an instant and continued, "two days from now a protest for him will walk down to the Flux market to show Governor White we won’t allow him to step on us like they did Earlie."
"Mmm. And why this homeless man?"
"All he wanted was shelter from the most damaging storm since we invented the scale to measure them. Grandville’s finest killed him for it."
"He was trespassing."
"At a church?" David snapped, getting heated.
For a moment Jackie thought about giving in and going with David, but he decided to double down.
"Listen. Just trust me, alright? You do not want to go to that protest." Jackie waved at a stack of paper on his coffee table, "i know you won’t understand, but that web I follow has a lot of money going out from Grandville State government to various manufacturers of weapons and munitions and vehicles the day Earlie’s death hit GNN. It was almost immediately. It’s a trap."
David threw up his hands, "OK, J. I won’t go."
As they hugged and David went back to his apartment, Jackie and David both knew it was a lie.
The mass of human bodies moved in unison, a rushing tide of humanity constrained only by the brick walls of the massive towers of commerce that lined the streets leading to the massive center of the Pangean economy, the Flux Market. A mixture of extreme emotions, hatred, fear, and anger, crackled through the crowd like an electrical charge. Each individual in the crowd had their reason to be there, but in The Throng there was just one will, the will to be heard.
From ground level, The Throng stretched as far as the eye could see, a total approaching 10,000 souls amassed in protest. They spoke in many voices but with only one message: the government of Grandville had been too liberal with the Civil liberties of the population.
The last time David had talked to Jackie, he had promised his friend that he would not go to the protest. Jackie had an idea that Governor White would be likely to use violence to suppress what he had called "a gang of terrorists" to the press. Despite all of that, he found himself optimistic that a show of protest was all it would take to show Governor White and his cabinet that the people in the supposed "democracy" of Grandville were not happy at the latest violence done in the government's name. David hoped this passive action would be enough to make them reverse course. This was a sentiment that Hackie could only scoff at. He remembered the military action brought down on the farms of family friends who found themselves in the crosshairs of the government during the Farmer Insurrection. Their last conversation ended with David promising not to go anywhere near the Flux Market.
It would ultimately be a promise that David would be unable to keep, Jackie would just have to be mad about it when he found out. After a brisk three-block walk from the PubTrans stop he found The Throng about half a mile from the Flux market. He dropped into an alleyway and pulled off his shirt and pants, leaving him wearing an all-black set of athletic gear. He put his shed clothes in the bag he was carrying while donning a black mask to conceal his face from any cameras from said bag. He had been sure to wear clothes he could wear if need be as he was going to be ditching this bag until after the protest. He took a couple of quick breaths to steady his nerves and took his position among the marching mass of The Throng, melding his body with the rapids of humanity.
The Flux Market had been the site of one of the bloodiest confrontations of the Second Flux War 140 years ago. According to legend, a small Grandville militia had delayed an overwhelming force who were targeting the capitol in an attempt to force Grandville from the war just long enough to allow for critical fortifications to be built. Even then, the lines of strong, towering buildings were a tempting place to ambush one's enemies.
The Throng marched ever on, pushing toward their goal while chanting simple slogans to show their message. Many held signs commemorating the man whose life had ended at the hands of the Grandville police department during the wind storms; many others displayed political slogans proudly. David struck up a quick conversation with two men he saw holding hands near him who he was able to find out were a married couple named Mark and Billy. David complimented the purple flowers both wore over their hearts, which he found out symbolized their love in the face of hate. As David was pushed away in another current of people, he smiled thinking of Jackie. A small twinge of nervousness flopped in his stomach wondering if Jackie knew or felt the same way he did.
The voice of The Throng was suddenly suffocated by a sudden cacophony of loud pops and glass shattering from the second and third-story windows of the office buildings as a large number of Grandville Army Infantry opened fire on the crowd below. The air became a wall of death.
A high explosive round exploded close enough to David that he could feel its heat and was forced to catch his footing from the sudden rush of air that threatened to knock him to the pavement. The air tasted like metal and dirt and had a sticky wetness to it. With dawning horror, he realized through the smoke and flame and gore that he had just witnessed human beings who had recently been chanting slogans and holding signs be vaporized. A flaming purple flower landed at his feet and suddenly his heartbeat was in his throat and he struggled to breathe. David's thoughts took on a singular mantra, "Run. Hide. Escape."
The stunned silence of The Throng at the opening Salvo of this ambush would not last long as the screams of panic and pain began and the animal instinct of survival took over the protestors. The once orderly procession began to scatter in any direction it could, the walls cutting off many avenues of escape, waves of men and women crashed against each other and the walls, crushing many under its movement. The crowd began to realize there was little escape from the violence being perpetuated on them. Many people who survived the first few moments tripped on the uneven ground or the already dead or wounded where they were easy prey to being trampled or to the hail of indiscriminate gunfire from the floors above. Their fates meant little to the masses of men and women trying to survive.
David had positioned himself somehow, against logic, in the perfect position to see a pack of protestors begin flowing through the nearest intersection between two buildings to his left. It took a second or two that seemed to stretch to eternity to find a small nearly imperceptible break to integrate himself into this new current of humanity. This seemed to David to be the kind of situation that Jackie would take advantage of. For a brief moment, he worried that he should have listened to Jackie’s advice not to come to this protest, but he pushed these feelings down deeming them unproductive. He took a few sharp, quick breaths to steel his nerves to prepare for one more push to freedom. He ducked into the crowd and allowed himself to be swept away, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the panicked men and women. He picked up his pace to match their pace.
Quickly, a nervous energy began moving over the people around David. Several people scattered and David was able to see the hell that awaited him and his comrades. A line of black, armored artillery vehicles blocked the road just ahead. The weaponry attached to the vehicles was pointed directly at the stampeding crowd of protestors.
A line of fire erupted from the weapon platforms, firing a volley of rockets directly at David’s position. David’s final thought before the rocket hit and violently ended his life was a vague hope that his funeral would be an open casket.
Check out chapter Six.
