Take Back Denver (17 page)

“
We need a way to smash their roadblocks, get past all those gates and fences, and flood the buildings with close-quarters fighters,” Carl said. “The Correctionists aren’t good at fighting up close, we’ve learned today. They’d rather retreat and pick us off with sustained rifle fire. I don’t mean to give them any more chances for that. We’ve lost too many good men today as it is.”

“
Well, what are you going to break the fences with?” Erickson asked. “We have no explosives, no rocket launchers, just a few hand grenades and some homemade firebombs. A bulldozer could do it, but I haven’t seen a working piece of heavy machinery in over a year.”

“
We’ve got one truck,” McLean offered. “It doesn’t have much gas left, but it could make a run at the blockade.”

“
And whoever’s driving it could get a hundred rounds in his body by the time he was done.” Calhoun frowned. “We’ve seen a lot of bravery today, but I don’t think any of us are interested in suicide.”

They finally settled on a plan to provide covering fire while a team moved forward behind the truck and attempted to dismantle the barricades and cut their way through the fences piece by piece. No one was optimistic about it and few volunteered to be on point. Ron and Brad were among those that did, and they gathered around the truck.

Ron had his ever-present sunglasses on and accepted two Molotov cocktails from another fighter. “If I’m going to be within spitting distance of their front door, I might as well heave these puppies at ‘em and see if they’ll back off when a wall of flames is blocking their view.”

Brad had a bandana on his head and his sleeves rolled up. With a huge pair of bolt cutters in one hand and an ax in the other, he looked like a human wrecking ball. His shotgun was slung across his back.

They put the plan into action, but it was ill-fated from the start. Two of the men carried steel plates they had scavenged from a destroyed garbage dumpster with the idea of using them as shields for Brad to work behind. Once they got up to the first barricade, however, it became clear that neither the truck nor the plates were going to provide enough cover to get anything done. A hail of bullets poured out of the buildings, pelting the truck and hitting one man in the leg immediately. The freedom fighters poured back their own wall of lead, but the Correctionists were holed up indoors, shooting from windows and doorways.

Against all odds, Brad managed to cut the chain closing the main part of the rolling fence gate, but then he was hit in the chest and went down with a moan and a gurgle of blood. Ron launched a lit firebomb, fired his M16 one-handed toward the buildings, and threw his other bottle after the first without bothering to light it. Then he bent to drag Brad back behind the truck. The man behind him was hit and killed instantly.

“
We have to get them out of there,” Carrie screamed, unable to tear her eyes away from the scene. “Tell them to pull back, Carl! Please.”

Carl watched the debacle, squinting in an expression of disappointment and regret. He nodded. “This isn’t going to work. Tell those boys to get back here if they can.”

A team of gunmen rushed forward to help, blasting away at the shooters in the buildings. But they couldn’t approach the truck without exposing themselves even more than Ron’s team was. They ended up just shouting at the men to retreat.

Everyone watched as Ron and another survivor pulled Brad and the man with the leg wound into the truck. They were forced to leave the dead fighter where he had fallen near the fence. Ron backed the truck up, but its front tires were shot out and it careened into a mailbox. With bullets still zinging into the cab and engine block, Ron and and the others slid out the doors, keeping their heads down. Brad wasn’t moving.

McLean and Carrie watched, biting their lips, as Ron leaned back into the truck for a moment. Then he tumbled out and scrambled away to the safety of a stone wall.

McLean and Carrie ran to him. “Are you okay?” Carrie asked. “Where’s Brad?”

“
Still in the truck,” Ron said, unable to hold back tears. “I was trying to put pressure on his chest wound and help him out, but he shoved me out with his boot and told me to leave him. He was pale and losing buckets of blood. I think he’s gone, Carrie.”

Ron was bleeding from the shoulder and limping. Carrie began preparing an emergency field dressing for his wounds. McLean pounded his fist on the wall and turned to aim his rifle into the vicious gauntlet of Correctionist firepower.

The truck’s engine had been idling, but suddenly it roared to life, came back down, and roared again, RPM’s screaming at the limit of its capacity. Everyone looked up and then heard the old military transmission drop into gear. The truck lurched forward and gained momentum as it hurtled back toward the barricade.

“
Is Brad driving that thing?” Carrie asked, face ashen and lips quivering.

Ron sat up. “How is that lunatic still going?”

The truck smashed into the barricade at forty miles per hour, tearing down the fence and dragging razorwire after it. Stacks of tires tumbled and scattered, and sections of reinforced fencing clattered all over the road. The big rig continued straight through to the next fence, slamming into that one at even greater speed and knocking it over as well. The truck drove up and over the fallen second barricade, came down with a thump, and swerved left right into the side of a building where a rolling sheet metal door closed off a cargo bay.

Those watching couldn’t see where the truck ended up after it blew through the door into the building’s interior, but they heard crashing and yelling in the deafening quiet on the street as even the Correctionist shooters looked on in stunned silence.

Then Carl was shouting and waving his men forward. The backup team was first through the breach. Soon guerrillas were dashing past the shattered barricades and pouring into the buildings. In a matter of minutes, the whole row of buildings was overrun and Correctionist prisoners were being escorted out into the street, arms in the air.

Chapter 19  :  Walking Away

They found Brad’s bullet-riddled body in the cab of the truck deep inside the cargo bay, and pulled him out and laid him in a grassy field alongside other martyrs of the liberation. All told, some seventy guerrillas had lost their lives in the fighting throughout Denver, and over two hundred citizens. More deaths followed as wounds that might once have been treated in a modern hospital turned septic and slowly killed their recipients.

There was more fighting that night and into the next day, but it took place mostly outside the city. Maughan was run to ground at the airport by Carl’s men, and without enough men to defend all sides of the airport, he was captured and summarily executed on the battlefield. McLean and Carrie were there, and stood close enough to make sure the man recognized them.

“
That’s right,” McLean said, staring the general in the face as he was walked past them to be shot. The defeated leader squinted at them as if unsure where he’d seen them before. “Your convoy almost broke up our rally yesterday, just before you had your men take that girl’s water supply. Maybe now you wish you’d handled this city differently.” The general merely grunted and kept on walking.

Carrie turned her head away as Carl pulled the trigger, but McLean watched as the regional leader of the Correctionists met his end. He had seen many good people die violent deaths in the past two days, and the closure felt good. Finally, victory had come, and it was decisive and complete. They had taken back Denver from the enemy.

For many residents of the once thriving and now hopeful-once-more city, the next day was a celebration. The people had come together after all the months of chaos, hardship, infighting, and tyranny, and they had taken back their city. Everyone in the city declared a truce in their neighborhood conflicts, and although it didn’t last perfectly, Denver was by and large a city back on its feet by the week’s end.

For McLean and Carrie, the rush of victory quickly turned to sadness as they learned how the rest of the battle had gone for their friends. Of the people they had met during their infiltration of Denver, many were dead. These included the Tigers, several allies in Dartmouth and Pinehurst, and the friends of Calhoun whose house they had stayed on the night before. JD had been shot in the foot but would recover. Gordo and Maria had both been caught in the terrible firefight on the northern side of the city, and bled to death in each other’s arms without time for either to administer a tourniquet or chest seal. Their friend Rory had pulled through with a concussion and a grazed scalp, but his brother in law was dead.

“
I feel guilty that we came through unscathed,” Carrie told McLean after helping to treat a couple of fighters with burns from a fire that broke out during the battle in Aurora. “Are we cowards for not getting more in the thick of it?”

“
We
were
in the thick of it,” McLean told his wife. “We’re just lucky. That’s all there is to it. Nothing glorious about any of this.”

“
But it was worth it, right?” she asked. “Please tell me this was worth losing Brad, and Gordo and Maria, and all these other people.”

McLean thought about telling her it was up to the people of Denver to make it worth it. Or that of
cours
e
it was worth it, because they had won. Or that nothing was worth losing so many lives. Instead he just hugged her.

There was a victory ceremony during which some of the city’s residents were to officially thank Carl’s guerrillas for freeing the city, but neither Carl nor McLean and Carrie stuck around to attend. They had burials to take care of and a long journey ahead of them before they could rest.

Before leaving the area, they buried Maria and Gordo in the cemetery near their home in Littleton. Brad was laid to rest atop a hill overlooking the city, where many other fallen fighters were also buried with a sign designating the place as a memorial of heroes. Then McLean and Carrie helped JD and Ron back to the horse ranch where they joined up with DJ. He had decided to stay with a group in the city that was attempting to get a communications network up, so he said goodbye-for-now and took his things back into Denver.

The others waited at the ranch until Ron’s and JD’s wounds were beginning to heal, and then headed south to find Darren Bailey. They arrived at the prison to find it empty, with only a crew of former partisans answering to Carl. They reported that they were preparing the place to hold some of the Correctionist prisoners that were awaiting trial in whatever kind of justice system emerged. By asking around in Pueblo, the group of travelers finally located Darren moving southwest with a band of escaped prisoners. He was overjoyed to hear all their news about his family and eagerly joined the ranch-bound group.

The journey westward was long. Ron and JD couldn’t travel fast or hard, and Darren was malnourished after his time in the prison camp. The group had to stop frequently to forage, hunt, and beg. The begging was the most helpful, once they got over their pride. When people learned the part they had played in the liberation of Denver and the defeat of the Correctionist regime, they opened their larders to the half-starved travelers. One small-town mayor offered to nominate McLean as the governor of a new regional territory he was proposing.

McLean laughed it off and told the man it was too soon for anything like that to thrive anyway. But as they followed the highway to the west, Carrie asked what the others thought about the future of their area. “Is it all over? Are the Correctionists done? And when do you think we’ll see improvements in infrastructure and government like we used to have?”

JD shook his head. “I’m afraid there are a lot more where those soldiers came from. They might steer clear of Denver for a good while, but there’s no telling how deep they’re sunk in back East, or in the South or Midwest. Fights like this will have to happen all over the country, wherever they or some other oppressive group has taken power. No, I think this battle for Denver was just the beginning of a larger conflict.”

“
As for government, I say the less of it the better,” McLean said. “We’re doing okay in our little communities and regional agreements. It will be a long time before we truly need a federal government regulating anything. I foresee a small-scale, town by town electric grid coming back at some point. Solar powered, probably, and just enough to power what we really need. But even that is probably a few years away.”

“
I don’t know anything about all that,” Darren said. “I’ve been locked up the whole time and the guards never told us anything. But honestly, I’m more interested in getting to the bottom of who’s behind all this, and what caused it. We used to trade rumors and theories in the prison-- had nothing better to do-- and I’ve heard some doozies. Sooner or later, though, I want somebody to tell me just exactly what happened, and who’s responsible. Then I could die happy.”

“
That’ll be a long time coming,” McLean muttered.

When they finally arrived at the ranch they found a new foal and three baby goats, not to mention about a hundred freshly-hatched chicks and a newly-planted garden and potato field. The Baileys’ reunion with their husband and father was tearful and sweet, and many nights were spent around the living room fireplace swapping stories of all that the various parties had been through in each other’s absence.