Alea Jacta Est: A Novel of the Fall of America (Future History of America Book 1) (52 page)

Rob moved
forward and put his boot squarely but gently down on the Arab’s throat.  “How
many more are there of you assholes?”

The Arab
smiled, his spit bloody, dust covering most of his face.  Rob put pressure on
the Arab’s throat with his boot and cut off the air.  The Arab tried to breath
but couldn’t and as the seconds ticked by, he began to struggle and twitch, but
couldn’t remove the dusty boot from his neck with his hands tied behind his
back.  At the point Rob figured the animal would pass out, he lifted his foot. 
The terrorist wheezed and sucked wind for a few seconds.  The color came back
to his face.

“How many
are there?”

“
Screw
—“ the boot
cut off the rest of the captives reply.  Rob let the man squirm again for a
while then took his boot off the man’s neck.  The Arab drew ragged breaths and
looked up at Rob with squinted eyes.  He was in serious pain.

“
How...many
?”
Rob waited for an answer.  Finally the Arab nodded.  In a voice hardly audible,
he spoke.

“I know
only ten…but there are more…
many
…in cells…do not know all.”

“See, was
that so bad?” Rob asked, stepping back.  He hating having to resort to this
kind of interrogation but his mind was made up.  The terrorists had started
this mess in his own backyard and by God, he was going to finish it.

“Why are
you going to Mexico?”

The Arab
shook his head.  Rob nodded to Lance with a sigh.  Lance strode forward, pulled
the Arab to his knees and held his head inches away from the fresh brain matter
that lay sprayed out from the open cavity of his comrade’s head.  The cherry
cobbler looking material was on the ground, rocks, and sage brush in a cone
shaped pattern.  The Arab vomited.  Lance dropped him painfully back on the
ground and stepped back.

Rob forced
himself not to throw up as well.  He hated doing this, but considered it a
necessary evil.  “Why were you going to Mexico?!”

The third
prisoner spoke up now, hoping to take the heat off his friend.  “We will get
our Mexican brothers to rise up against you!  A vast army is forming even
now!” 

Rob and
Lance exchanged looks. 
An army?  The Mexicans are going to attack?  With
all those people heading back home to Mexico…of course…the government down
there doesn’t want them in the first place…we’re weak now and they have an
excuse.  Jesus, if they join up with the UN invasion…talk about a beachhead. 
Open door into America…Oh my God.

The two
Arabs held a heated exchange in their native tongue for a few moments before
Rob interrupted by putting the tip of his Winchester against the nose of his
interrogation subject and turning his head back around.

“You’re
going to talk to me and no one else, buddy.” 

“Allah take
you!” said the third prisoner.

“Lance,
shut that asshole up.”

Lance stepped
forward and pulled out his own hunting knife.  He let it gleam in the sun in
front of the bound Arab for a second before drawing it across the surprised
man’s throat in one clean motion.  The blood was so thick, it was almost black
as it cascaded all down the man’s chest and in a spray to the ground before
him.  The body dropped to the ground and flopped a little as the dying man
tried in vain to draw breath through his severed throat.  The loud gasping
sound was grotesque but the Americans grit their teeth and ignored the
distraction.  This was payback.  Above them, hidden in the sage brush, one of
the Regulators threw up.

“
Sic
Semper Tyrannis
, motherfucker,” said Lance as he cleaned his blade on the
still twitching body.  All the tolerance, acceptance, benefit of the doubt and
forgiveness in his heart had been replaced by cold hatred the night he saw what
had happened to Jed and Bill.  He had no more compassion in him for anyone who
raised a hand against his countrymen. 

The sole
remaining captive howled in grief at seeing his second comrade dispatched
without so much as a trial or press conference.  He was beginning to feel
something he hadn’t felt before in his career as a Jihadist.  He sensed that
perhaps, just perhaps, they had pushed these Americans too far. 

They
weren’t backing down the way he and the others had expected.  As he saw the
American cowboy slit his comrade’s throat and send him to Allah, he finally
recognized something deep down in his soul that his trainers had thought
vanquished.  For the first time since he took up the scimitar against the Great
Satan, he felt fear.  A mind numbing, bowel emptying, totally petrifying fear.

“So you
thought you could just march in here, stir up the hornet’s nest and go home,
huh, Muhammad?”  Rob cocked the lever on his rifle again.  The loud
cha-chack
caused the Arab to flinch.  The last prisoner watched intently as the spent
shell tumbled through the air, glittering in the sun, before it impacted the
dusty ground in silence. 

“You
assholes thought if you hit us again like September 11
^th
, we’d just
roll over and give up on everything, right?  That you would rule the world…well
guess what, you piece of shit…” he leveled the long rifle at the terrorist's
head. 

Before he
could finish his sentence, somewhere deep in his mind, Rob questioned himself. 
What’s happened to you?  What’s happened to all of us?  We were good, decent
folk…before.  Now look at us?  We’ve killed women and children, those
Mexicans…we killed the others during the Battle…I just killed another, these
Arabs…these terrorists.  When did I become them? 

Rob held
the rifle to the Arab’s sweating forehead for a few moments as he debated with
himself. 
You
haven’t
become them.  They’re animals, they kill
indiscriminately.  You have killed, yes, but in defense of your land, of your
rights, of your country.  These…people…have attacked your nation, killed who
knows how many of your fellow citizens…Jesus, any one of the dead could have
been Leanne…

The Arab
saw Rob’s apparent indecision as weakness.  He grinned despite the rifle
pointed at his face.  “You shall pay thrice for every sin visited upon my
people, Yankee pig-dogs!  You will all die!   Infidels!” swore the Arab, one
last streak of defiance rising in his voice.

Rob pulled
the trigger.

“You first.”

ARTHUR “ART” CARILLION
looked over his radio dials in his small HAM shack.  He grunted and pushed his
wheelchair forward a few inches so he could reach the adjustment knob on his
antenna gain control panel.  The large headphones on his head crackled a little
less as he adjusted the frequency.

“Got it!”
the fifty-three year old exclaimed, closing his eyes to listen to the
transmission.  He had tapped into a ‘net’ one of his friends had set up in the
Midwest, just outside Chicago.  HAMs from Montana to Georgia had jumped on to
share news of local conditions.  Art was sure he was about as far away as any
of them could be from Ben Thompson and still hook into the net he had set up.

“…
CQ…CQ…Art,
you out there?
” static cut off the voice of a man more than a thousand
miles away.

“Yeah,
Ben…I read you five-by,” replied Art, full of excitement.  The darkness of his
radio shack matched that of the outside world.  He had the window shades drawn
to block out the faint glow of the electronic dials.  He didn’t want anyone
passing by at this hour of the night to know he had electricity.  The solar
charging system he had set up for his deep cycle batteries kept him in ‘juice’
indefinitely.  He wouldn’t have to worry about not being able to contact
anyone. 

That opened
a whole can of worms for him to worry about.   And he did.  Art lived by
himself.  Art was disabled—he had lost his legs in a car accident fifteen years
ago and was confined to his wheelchair.  He had a few firearms at his disposal,
mostly just pistols used to comfort him in the middle of the night when a
strange sound woke him. 

The radio
shack he was holed up in at the moment had been built as a tool shed before his
accident.  After he lost his legs, his wife left him, and he lost his job as a
truck driver.  But he didn’t lose his passion for radio, which he first picked
up while making long, lonely cross-country hauls. 

Radio, in a
way, had saved his life.  At the lowest point he could get—legless, jobless,
loveless, he turned to HAM radio as an outlet of grief and a tool for healing. 
He threw himself into it, got a license, got the gear and got involved.  He
came back to life.  Ever since then, for the past ten years or so he had been
volunteering with the local emergency services to provide backup emergency
communications in situations where normal channels aren’t available for the
police or EMTs.  He had been training every year with thousands of other HAMs
across the country for emergencies. 

Now he was
handed the mother of all emergencies.  Many of the HAMs Art had trained and
practiced with were off helping FEMA with communications.  Art, disabled and
chair-ridden as he was, had been delegated to the back burner. 

“
There’s
still folks
…” more static.  “…
by my place every day.  I give ‘em some
water and move ‘em on, but they tell me about the city.  It’s a war zone. 
Fella yesterday said half of Chicago is flattened.  Army rolled in tanks and
artillery and just leveled it trying to stop this rebellion
,”  Old Ben
Thompson’s voice called out.  "
When it's clear, I can hear 'em
fighting.  Scary as hell.
 
Reminds me of the stories my dad told me of
World War Two
."  The country drawl was unmistakable.  He waited, hand
by the microphone on the desk. 

“It’s been
two weeks now without power,” Art said into his table mounted microphone.  His
eyes moved to the right, spotting his ever present handgun laying on the table
ready for use.  He was always scared to transmit, fearing someone lurking about
in the darkness might hear him and figure out what was going on, even though he
was transmitting on a semi-concealed antenna.  It was cleverly hidden in the
branches and up the trunk of the large oak tree in his back yard.  He grinned. 

He had cursed
the home owners association for requiring his antenna be hidden from the
street.  Now he blessed them.  Only the tip and the lightning rod projected
from the top of the tree.  The wires and cables were all run underground and
came up through the floor in Art’s shack.  The building itself sat some fifteen
feet from the back door to his small ranch house.

“
Any
more gunfights down your neck of the woods?
” asked Ben.  “Heard about that
battle y’all had…” the old farmer clucked his teeth.  “
Having the Army roll
into Chicago and start up a little war didn’t do my nerves any good either
.”

“No…the
National Guard stopped by today though and wanted me to come to the local
shelter.  They said something about how the people over in that apartment
complex that had the big fight are turning that place into a fortress of some
kind.”

“Smart
folks…things
are only going to get worse, if y’ask me
.” Replied Ben’s voice

“They
already are.  I picked up a signal today from Europe.  There was a HAM over
there talking to a buddy about some sort of attack on one of airliners ferrying
our troops home from overseas.  Bunch of fighters intercepted it over the
Atlantic and shot it down...”

“
Those
European sonsabitches
…” muttered Ben. 

Static
faded into the signal as both men waited in silence, pondering the
ramifications of Art’s news, relayed from Europe.

“
It’s
gonna be
…” more static interrupted Ben.  Art waited patiently for a few
heartbeats.  “…
knew it.  World War Three
.”  The frequency gave out to
constant static.  Art figured somewhere between Florida and Illinois,
atmospheric conditions had changed just enough to scramble the radio waves. 
Art was alone again.  He turned off his equipment and sat in the dark for a few
seconds, thinking about the loss of so many American soldiers on that airliner
in the Atlantic.  If it was true.  Rumors flew over the HAM nets nowadays like
flies over dogshit.

“I wouldn’t
be surprised if they
did
shoot it down,” he mumbled to himself,
gathering his drink and his gun and preparing to go back to his house for the
night.  “Best chance they’re gonna have to hurt us.  Hit us while we’re trying
to get home and we’ll be half dead when they get here to invade.  Damn smart
idea…”

He rolled
his wheelchair to the door and opened it a crack, the moonlight from outside
creating a beam of light into the interior of the shack.  The humid night air
began to circulate.  He strained to hear over the din the local insects were
making.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Art was about to roll out the door and
make straight for his house about fifteen feet away when he heard it.

Pop. 
Pop-pop.
 
Someone screamed.  In the distance, more shots were fired.  Dogs began
barking.  Art paused, half in and half out of his radio shack.  It was becoming
a nightly occurrence, hearing the sporadic gunfire in the distance.  No one
during the day knew where it came from.  All he knew was that his neighborhood
was growing smaller and smaller by the day as more and more families moved into
the safe zones or simply left for parts unknown.

Art rolled
quickly to his back door, unlocked it with shaking hands, pushed himself inside
and shut the door.  Only after he locked and bolted it did he breathe easier,
despite the higher temperature inside the house.  The air felt stagnate. 

I can’t stand
this much more.  Keeping the windows and doors shut is making this house a
sauna.  But I can’t leave them open…someone could get in.

Art looked
at the gun in his lap.  An old police revolver he picked up at a pawn shop
years ago.  He considered ending it right then and there, the fear, the
depression, the loneliness, the uncertainty. 
Do it like old man Dawson up
the street.  Found him two days ago, lying in his own dried blood, all bloated
up.  He ended it with a gun…I could too.  I bet he’s feeling no pain—

The
rational side of his mind shoved the thoughts of suicide violently aside,
reminding himself that he wasn’t the quitting type.  If he were, he wouldn’t
have been able to make anything of himself after losing his wife and his legs. 
With a rueful grin, he rolled into the kitchen and peered out the windows to
the east. 

“Just a few
hundred yards that-a-way lies Colonial Gardens.  A fortress…people banding
together to stave off the darkness.  Christ it’s like
Mad Max
out here
anymore…” he muttered to himself.  “Think tomorrow I’ll go pay them a visit…”

WHY DO THEY have to
shoot their guns in the middle of the night like that?” said Brin, snuggling
closer to the solid warm comfort of Erik’s body. 

He rolled
over on the mattress they had set up on the floor.  It was cooler down on the
floor.  Erik wrapped his arms around the woman who had been his wife for only a
year and held her tight.  She burrowed her head into his chest and sighed,
feeling safe again.

“I don’t
know why they shoot ‘em off, baby,” he said softly.  Being a light sleeper by
nature, he was up instantly after the first shot while Brin didn’t stir until
the last shot echoed in the distance and the dogs began barking.  Everyone in
the complex slept with windows open, secure in the knowledge that with guards
patrolling all night, they were safe to have a little ventilation. 

The first
few nights after the Battle, whenever she’d heard the random gunshots in the
night, she’d scream and have a flashback to the night the gang-bangers tried to
break into the complex.  “Go back to sleep, Brin…” he whispered softly into her
hair.  It smelled of lilacs. 

“I won’t
let them hurt you.”