Freedom (38 page)

He moved inside and came up to the shiny van doors. No sounds came from inside. He held the pistol in one hand, stepped aside, and tried the handle. It clicked open. He slowly pulled it open, peering in with the pistol aimed and ready.

“It’s you.”

“Me?” Sebeck stared at an oddly dressed man sitting on a folding chair in the cargo bay of the van. Mirrored sunglasses and a balaclava obscured the man’s face, and he wore a camouflage outfit with knee pads and body armor. Before him he held what looked to be a transparent video panel or glass screen through which he was viewing Sebeck. It gave the effect of carrying a huge set of spectacles in front of him. The Thread led right to the tip of a wand he was clutching in his gloved right hand. A nearby call-out identified him as
PangSoi
, a first-level Weaver with a two-point-five rep score on a base of three.

Sebeck was puzzled. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“I’m PangSoi.”

“I can see that.” Sebeck clicked his pistol into its holster and opened his visor. “But why the hell did the Thread lead me to you? And cause me to leave all those people to get attacked?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“You’re not a high-level, high-rep operative—you’re a weaver-trainee for chrissake. And what’s with the panel?”

PangSoi gazed at him, following Sebeck as he shifted on his feet.

“Why are you doing that?” Sebeck noticed wires running down from the panel to a large box draped in black fabric. It sat next to PangSoi’s chair like an end table and gurgled from some tiny motor.

“We must hurry.”

“What the hell . . . ?” Sebeck flipped up the fabric covering the box and came face-to-face with the severed head of a young Asian woman wearing HUD glasses—bolted into a metal frame. Her dead eyes looked forward, the lids pinned back. Tubes ran into her neck and wires into her HUD glasses. A tiny pump was burbling on a frame. “Oh my god. . . .”

Suddenly what felt like an entire football team tackled him from behind. He felt rough gloved hands prying at his face, but the van he was pressed against kept him from falling down. “You son of a bitch!” He pushed his open helmet visor against the van door to close it, and the weight of several people pulled him backward, where he fell onto the muddy floor. Several strong bodies piled onto him shouting, “Get him! Hold him!”

Sebeck spoke the keywords to electrify the surface of his armor. The tangle of men fell off him yelping, as he rolled free and stood.

Now he could see that he faced half a dozen commandos in full tactical gear. Some of them carried beanbag guns and Tasers. Clearly, they hadn’t expected Sebeck’s Armor of the Warrior—the gift of a faction supporting Sebeck’s quest.

He eyed them through his mirrored faceplate. “I could say I don’t want to hurt you guys, but I’d be lying. . . .”

He turned and jumped up into the back of the van, past the severed head of the young woman in the box. The soldiers pursued him. Sebeck grabbed the ghoulish PangSoi and drew his electronic pistol. “She was practically a child, you sick . . .” He fired a short burst into the man’s chest and watched him fall.

Sebeck suddenly saw Price being dragged in through the barn doorway—a gun held to his head.

“Detective Sebeck! We’ll kill him if you don’t put the gun down and come out peacefully!” The man had a vaguely Asian accent, but like the others his face was covered.

Sebeck kicked both of the panel van doors open to get a clear view of the situation.

Price looked very muddy and very irritated.

“Laney, they’re hired guns here to capture us. They’re not gonna kill us. We’re both too important to them.”

“Oh for chrissake, Sergeant . . .”

“They somehow figured out a way to hack into my quest Thread. No, there’s something big going down.” Sebeck noticed a row of several plastic ten-gallon jugs of gasoline in the cargo bay. “I guess with gasoline so expensive and hard to find, you guys planned ahead. Smart.”

The man with the gun pressed it into Price’s temple. “Don’t do anything you can’t undo, Sergeant!”

Sebeck grabbed a magnesium flare from his suit belt. “You gonna tell your commander you killed an irreplaceable prisoner because I fucked with your van?” He sparked the flare. “I don’t think so.”

He dropped the flare onto the gasoline jugs and jumped from the van as everyone ran for their lives.

Sebeck was clear of the barn doors by the time the gasoline flared up and filled the entire barn with a rolling fireball that lit up the night, destroying the van and all the hellish things in it.

The moment he came out of the barn he was faced by several dozen commandos charging at him from several directions simultaneously, trying to knock him down. He emptied his pistol at them, wounding several, but he got struck from the side and slammed into the mud. Someone stepped on his weapon hand, pinning it to the ground, and then two men aimed fire-extinguisher-like devices at him, spraying thick white foam all over his legs and arms.

One of them shouted, “Why didn’t you use the foam to begin with, asshole?”

“It’s impossible to clean up!”

The white gooey material quickly turned rock hard—trapping Sebeck in place. Then they knelt around him and twisted to pull his helmet off.

“You bastards, I’m going to—”

Something struck him on the back of the head, and he blacked out.

 

 

J
on Ross stared with a deep sense of dread at the two messages that had just now popped up in his HUD listing:

Ross had added Sebeck and Price into his friends list so he was alerted to changes in their network statuses. He’d been checking the progress of their call-outs across the county every few minutes. They’d gotten through enemy lines, but their call-outs disappeared a mile or so later.

He let out a deep breath and held his head in his hands, unable to conceive of a scenario where this wasn’t bad news.

It was mid-morning and the situation in Greeley had become dire. The sun was up now, and it was another burning-hot day. Almost all the outlying farms had been burned to the ground; columns of black smoke striped the horizon. Likewise, the homes on the edge of town were being razed.

Ross knew that darknet video of this event would get out to the Web sooner or later. He wondered what people in the outside world were going to make of it. But then it occurred to him that he’d seen a hundred hours of footage showing violent conflicts in various parts of the world. What would the world think? Probably that America had finally lost its mind. But otherwise things would continue as they always had.

In the brief lulls in the fighting, Ross had used his HUD display to follow the unfolding farce that was mainstream news coverage. They were apparently being “liberated” from an insurgent occupation. Someone had created a darknet feed of mainstream news beyond the blackout.

Ross and a group of forty or fifty other men and women had spent much of the morning moving the ample numbers of abandoned cars from the fields in town to create blockades around the downtown perimeter, while the mercenaries busied themselves razing outlying areas. He also helped fill sandbags that were apparently intended for floods and packed them outside the walls of the middle school.

One mercy was that the helicopters had gone away some hours ago and not returned. The Cessna with Hellfire missiles had also flown off. They’d either gone to re-arm or had finished their role.

Luckily the mercenaries had not seemed to care about the unmanned surveillance drones Ross had brought with him. Neither had they been able to jam darknet radio communications. Ultrawideband was proving quite resilient. But then, the mercenaries appeared more interested in killing everyone than jamming their radios.

The chattering of gunfire punctuated by the louder cracks of hunting rifles filled the air. Ross leaned out from behind a masonry support pillar, looking both ways down Greeley’s empty Main Street.

It was littered with broken glass, debris. A burning car stood in the middle of the road at the end of the block. Bullet holes had chipped the concrete and bricks, and several of the buildings on Main Street were already burning from rocket and missile attacks. Beyond that was a wall of roiling black smoke and flames. Burning houses. Every few moments he heard another deafening
boom
, and debris would fly hundreds of feet into the air.

They were destroying the town block by block.

Ross looked to the center of the road where a fenced green with a World War II memorial and benches stood. The street ran around it to either side. The memorial was a tall granite obelisk with a thick square base about the width and height of a man and was flanked by defunct cannons plugged with concrete.

Ross could see OohRah and Hank_19’s call-outs behind it. He clicked on their call-outs and spoke into the comm channel. “Hank! You guys need me?”

OohRah’s call-out flashed as he replied.

Ross took another glance and ran to the center of the street at a crouch. He hopped the low iron fence at the edge of the green, and dove behind the monument, using the smaller Vietnam memorial nearby to provide cover from the opposite direction.

Hank and the sheriff nodded to him.

Ross brought his AK-47 to bear, watching their flank. “Where are they?”

The sheriff was pushing rounds into a spare clip while Hank kept watch down Main Street. “Pick a direction and start walking. You’ll find ’em soon enough.”

Fossen nodded. “Crazed gang members to the east, professional military to the west.”

“Or so the costumes tell us. . . .”

Ross examined the memorial stone. “This should be good cover.”

The sheriff shook his head. “Not from a grenade it won’t be. We can’t let them get close in.”

Another ear-stabbing
boom
sounded from the east end of town. “What the hell are they doing?” Ross brought up a D-Space video panel that showed an overhead view from a surveillance drone. He could clearly see the line of advance and the wasteland the private contractors were leaving behind them.

The sheriff ground his teeth. “They’re tossing demo charges into houses. Shooting flamethrowers into cellar windows. Burning everything.”

Ross could clearly see it when viewed from above. Then the drone flew into a cloud of smoke and the image was lost. He nodded behind him. “What happens when they reach the middle school? There must be six hundred people in there.”

The sheriff peered through his M16 scope over the rim of the memorial. “We’ll either have to stop them from reaching it or die trying. Everyone else is digging in, too.”

Hank_19 kneeled down and nodded grimly to Ross. “My wife and daughter are in there. I don’t care about losing the farm. You can always rebuild buildings, but . . .”

Ross tapped him. “If you need to go back and be with them, I’ll understand.” Ross looked to the sheriff.

The sheriff nodded.

Fossen shook his head. “No. If we just hold out, we might still have a chance. Look at the darknet feeds. My daughter says they’re going haywire. These attacks here in the Midwest are a threat to the whole network. I’ll bet no single thing has ever been upvoted this high.” He looked to Ross. “The world is watching what happens here.”

The sheriff shrugged. “So what? So what if everyone
cares
? What does that do for us? The situation we’re in isn’t going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes.
Public outrage
has never stopped these bastards.”

Fossen looked determined. “Jon, we’re just second-level. What can a twelfth-level Rogue do that could help us?”

Jon cleared his throat. “I can get into and out of places and networks without being detected, but in this type of situation . . .”

There was suddenly a deafening explosion that broke the last of the windows along Main Street.

They all ducked down, but peered over the rim of the memorial to watch the far end of the street. An M1117 armored vehicle flanked by twenty or thirty well-equipped soldiers on foot suddenly rounded the corner. The ASV swiveled its top turret and fired grenades into the upper-story windows. The walls and windows erupted with flames and flying debris.

A camera crew in helmets and body armor rounded the corner as well, filming the action as soldiers fired grenade launchers into the doors of shops on either side and raced through the openings while their comrades raked the walls and streets with gunfire.

Tracer bullets whined past and Ross and the others ducked down as stone fragments rained down on them. Metal whined into the sky.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I see the propaganda unit is here to film our saviors in action.”

Fossen crawled on his belly to look down the side street. “They’re coming down the next block, too.”

There were more explosions in the buildings down the street. Ross snuck a quick glance to see the ASV turret and its coaxial machine gun focused in their direction. The rest of the soldiers were nowhere in sight.