Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (2 page)

BOOK: Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy)
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“We’re about on time,” Curtis told them. “Smalls is gonna make his report.” He slanted them a look, and they could see his grin in the mix of starlight and streetlights just ahead of them.

“You know, you guys look good. Did you see anything?”

Chops smiled. “Funny you should ask.”

 

III

TOWN MEETING

 

They’d never seen
the Majestic this full—a quarter of the town must have been there. The movie-house seating was long gone. A half acre of folding chairs, stools, armchairs, and anything else that could be sat on filled the floor, with just crooked pathways branching between them. The tattered screen was still hanging in place, and the low dais in front of it was where Sheriff Smalls now stood waiting for the uproar to die down so he could speak.

Everyone was roaring at once. It was a motley mob Smalls faced, maybe six hundred souls. The majority were second and third generation mountain-born, and these ranged from sheep ranchers in boots and canvas coats, to machinists and lumber-millers in denim and leather, to bikers in leathers with rabid wolves painted on them. Mixed in were the town’s white-collar folks in neat flannel shirts and pressed jeans.

Then there were the relative newcomers to Sunrise, mostly ex-extras like Curtis. Most of these, unlike Curtis, had been Zoo, and hadn’t stopped looking it. Though interspersed with the natives, they were easy to spot, because down in the Zoo, flair is an issue. They had neck tats that put Curtis’s little necklace of blood-drops to shame: barbed wire, ouroboroses, battling squids and dragons wrapped their throats and branched down along their spines. Hair was anything, or half scalp tats, or nothing. Earrings were big—and sometimes
big
—usually of fierce ugly things devouring their own tails. Nose rings, lip rings clung to faces like crescent moons of gold or platinum. Denim vests tattered from wear bore on their backs demons in gorgeous brocade. Knives hung sheathed behind shoulders, and on some knuckles chromium impactors were implanted.

In all this hubbub Smalls, bulky and half bald, just stood on the dais facing the crowd, his big face slack and shoulders slumped. He made Curtis think of a chained bear, duty-bound to hear, humor, and help if he could this mad mob.

He caught Curtis’s eye, and shouted something twice before Curtis understood and went and closed the old theater’s doors.

Smalls’ mouth worked for a while, completely inaudible. Then he shouted. Then he really shouted, and everyone decided to shut up and listen.

“People … everyone’s been commed. I want as many as possible to hear it together and get some kinda consensus, so that everyone else gets the full picture straight.

“Now for shit-sake don’t interrupt me, please! Lemme lay the whole thing out, because it’s the whole thing needs talking through, because we are lookin at a serious disaster.” New shouts, questions, but just as quick, more voices shushed them. Smalls took a deep breath.

“Yesterday morning six strangers came into town while I was down-county on business. They showed up in pairs in different parts of town, but they were all eggs from the same basket. They all wore up-woods clothes brand-new, synthetic down vests, big new hiking boots, excetera. Four of ’em had face hair, but so barbered it looked just as store-bought as their rigs.

“They went everywhere. In all the bars, all the shops, even the public library. They asked all kinda sly and under-the-table where they could find a man named Elmer Rasmussen. Like it was a mystery.”

That woke some laughter. Any time after 3:00
P.M.
, Old Elmer would be down in one of the town’s three bars. Not a sot, just a reliable drinker once sundown hove anywhere in sight. Somber Elmer—sitting now right below the dais—ignored the laughter.

“The result,” said Smalls, “was that everybody they asked said they didn’t know any such fella. Then at least twenty of those people went right up to Elmer’s afterward and told him that some strange goons were in town lookin for him.

“Around eleven
A.M.
Hap Bolger came up half drunk from Shasta, said sure he knew Elmer, and told them where his house was.

“So. The six of those city boys came up on Elmer’s house and stood fanned out in front of it. Their jackets were open and they all had industrial-grade firearms in shoulder rigs showing, but they weren’t showin any I.D. Elmer stepped out on the porch. He had on a jacket but—I guess ten a.m. was kinda early by his standards—was wearing just his boxers.”

A female voice crowed out, “Oh Elmer! I sure wish I coulda seen those bony white legs a yours!”

“Elmer was unarmed,” Smalls went on evenly. “But he had three of his sons an’ four of his grandkids all standing at the front windows on either side of him, and all of them were holdin firearms.

“The lead city boy stepped out an’ told Elmer that him and his brother Rake were under arrest, Rake for murder and Elmer for accessory.”

“That’s a load a horseshit!” roared Elmer Rasmussen, brought out of his brooding by the sense of injustice that seethed in him. “Rake cut that guy with the guy’s own knife after he’d stuck it into Rake first! An’ they both walked away!—well, limped away maybe.”

“Guy just died,” said Smalls.

“More’n a year later!”

“We know it’s bullshit, Elmer!” shouted Smalls. “That’s my point! Just lemme tell everyone, OK? Anyway. Who opened fire first? Who knows? Once you got this kinda situation, someone’s gonna fire an’ everyone else’s gonna follow.

“Now the first important point for everyone to notice comes right here.” Smalls scratched his right arm, an older style motorized prosthetic, which of course never really itched—the scratching a tic of his when he was trying to sort out problems. “Body armor and all, three of those six fellas were riddled with thirty-ought and were dead or dyin before any of ’em caught on that their own guns weren’t doin anything. I want you to notice this point, folks. They obviously thought they had solid rounds. They were issued bogus ammo an’ didn’t know they were shooting powdered lead!

“The three who weren’t drilled yet took off when it dawned on ’em, commed down a jet-sled from somewhere, and were snatched off the mountain a hundred meters downslope. The only killing they’d managed was of three of themselves. They hit Elmer center-mass, and just gave him some big bruises.”

“They nearly took one a my eyes!” Elmer turned his gaunt, outraged face full on the rest of the audience for the first time. It wore an accent mark of thick red scab where half of his left eyebrow had once dangled its shaggy abundance. Amazed, aggrieved, he said, “They fuckin disfigured me!”

“Anyway,” resumed Smalls, “after the shoot-out we found that the three dead ones did in fact have state licenses on ’em and had the murder warrant. And now Sunrise is ‘corporately accused’ of three counts of homicide. That means all of us, individually accused. Of aggravated homicide against state officers of the peace in performance of their duty—a top-of-the-list capital offense.”

Smalls’ eyes swept the audience. “It seems to me pretty damn plain that all of us have just been framed. That those guys had blanks to ensure that they’d die. We’ve already been informed that the state has enough camera footage of the shoot-out for its so-called ‘deliberations.’ That raft that picked up the survivors must’ve been shootin the whole damn thing! But the short of it is, they’ve informed me—and I quote—that ‘the murder charge will be adjudicated unilaterally by the state.’ We should have a ruling in two to three days.”

Everyone’s voices woke up again, but the noise had a deeper pitch. Doubt and dread could be heard in it. Their voices churned like choppy seas, till someone stood up with the lungs to be heard.

“Why?” It was Cap. He stepped up on the platform.

Not quite Curtis’s height, but more heavily muscled, his and Japh’s Zoo-meat friend had bloomed up here in the mountains. He’d bought the hardware store when they all first arrived, and for all his Zoo toughness he loved being a shopkeeper.

His cue-ball head shone in the warmth of the jammed room. “Sheriff’s right, we’ve been flat-out framed. And it makes no sense! Why would the state wanna destroy us? I mean money-wise? We’re a thriving economy. State scarfs on our sales an’ income taxes, on the power they sell us.

“There was Cranktown, sure, but that was just trash-clearing, demolition. Nothing but shoot-outs an’ untaxable drug money. But why trash the cash they’re raking off us?”

Cranktown in San Berdoo was a statewide surprise. Not because the state had sent contract-cops into that hive, but because when some of these cops got shot it charged Cranktown, Inc. corporately with homicide, and inflicted “in-field capital punishment” on more than half of them. Jailed the rest and made their site state property—and a trashy, polluted piece it was.

Sunrise was an earning concern. Incorporated Rural Townships (IRTs) like Sunrise policed and fire-protected themselves, built their own roads and infrastructure, bought power from the state, and paid hefty taxes. Organic veggies, meat and dairy, natural textiles, specialty lumber, quality weed—all these sold as luxuries on the Coast.

Curtis stood up. “The state’s got us. But you wonder. Was it the state’s idea? I gotta tell you I don’t like bringing this up. I and a lot of my fellow ex-extras up here, well … we just hate this happening to everyone here, who took us in as neighbors. But it has to be said: Why the hell would the state frame a whole community like this? I hate saying this—you have no idea how bad it makes me feel—but what if it’s really a studio that’s behind this?”

Not everyone got this at first. A growl of conversation began to fill the theater. Sandy Devlin stood up. That’s all this hot-dog ex-payboat rafter from Panoply Studios had to do to get everyone’s attention. “Can I come up, Sheriff? You mind?”

“How could we mind?”

 

IV

I HOPE TO GOD WE’RE WRONG

 

Sandy Devlin mounted
the dais. Not willingly, but since she felt herself and other ex-Studio folk to be on the spot, she figured she might as well stand there. Before her now—she struggled to suppress the thought—there sat so many of the dead-to-be. She scanned their faces, trying to meet all of them eye to eye. Seeing ghosts-to-be, she found, led to seeing ghosts that had been.

A lean, bright-haired woman. Even with her eyes looking somewhat at a loss, her body was restlessly present, her weight shifting left leg to right and back again. “Give me a second,” she told the packed room. All her years of payboating for the studios were suddenly upon her, a fugue of images, of people dying in agony beneath her on the teeming pavements of a dozen different sets.

So many shapes of violent death, reaping a mad harvest of souls, their whole lives left down there, sprawled in that broken meat. For years her only help for them was paying fast, shouting warnings. Later she’d defended them, covertly killing APPs where she could. She could have quit. But then there wouldn’t have been even one raft to help them.

But look what she’d paid for staying in the game. How clear and individual those faces, hundreds of them, in her brain forever. Desperate people making their lives’ one big gamble and losing it, and taking in rage and grief the last look at the sky they’d ever get. The sky that she zipped through untouched.

She found she had to clear her throat before speaking. “I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve never thanked you, all of you, for taking me in here, me and the friends who came with me.” She paused again, but it had to be spoken. “I hope to god we haven’t somehow brought this here.”

“Nonsense!” An indignant old lady’s voice. She was in a motor-operated wheelchair with a high wooden back to it, like a judge’s chair. Iris Meyer, retired teacher of the Sunrise Grammar School. Three generations of grown Sunrise natives had been schooled and scolded by her through grades four to six. She glared around, a woman who had no problem talking to crowds. “Evil doesn’t need to be brought anywhere. It comes calling on its own.” A lot of the native Sunrisers’ heads, gray ones among them, listened slightly bowed in an ancient reflex of obedience and attention. “I don’t know about the rest of you”—a pause here just long enough to have added “boys and girls”—“but when evil comes here to my home, it’s going to have me to deal with.”

This brief declaration felt like a hand on Sandy’s shoulder. She cleared her throat. “Thank you, Iris. Friends, those who don’t want to stay, we’ll get you out. We’ll get you safe. For those who are staying … I’m not gonna say what I suspect. Not till I know for sure. I just wanna emphasize what Sheriff Smalls has already shown us: how … skillfully this whole thing was scripted. Six dip-sticks in phony costumes, with low social skills, perfectly cast to irritate and alarm everyone. And sent here for the Rasmussens. No offense, Elmer—we all respect you—but you and your family have been involved in more ‘firearm incidents’ than any twenty other families put together.”

Some chuckles here—some from the younger Rasmussens themselves.

“So. Look at it, friends. Perfectly scripted. The goons to alienate and threaten. The Rasmussens to return fire. This script worked like a charm, and we are corporately incriminated in first degree murder. And Cap’s exactly right. Is it likely the state wants title to our land? To our modest lumber output? Our alpaca flocks or livestock bloodlines? Our low-yield cinnabar mine? What’s left for them to want here, except our bodies? Except us? And of course, the state can’t want those either. If we’re evicted, or if we’re corpses, the state loses taxes. If we’re in prison, the state’s supporting us.

“So it’s plain as day. This isn’t coming from state. It’s someone who has the money to buy a murder warrant from the right corrupt people in state government.”

That caused a silence in the hall about three heartbeats long. Someone tall stood up—it was Japh. “Tell me if I’m off here, Sandy. If Sunrise is found guilty, the state can license any body of state approved corp-cops to enforce the sentence on us.”

“Correct. That’s the next step. And of course any sizeable corporation will have its own licensed enforcement arm. So. What corporation might want to own us?”

BOOK: Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy)
13.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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