Jump: The Fallen: Testament 1 (3 page)

A Hellfury for breakfast was bad, but it was better than a “3@3.” If you lived in the vast concrete prisons of the new urban zone—and who didn’t—the countryside around them got bought up long ago by the rich and unaccountable. But if you rested your chest anywhere it would be hard to lie about a missile strike, you got an official “three-at-three.” We called it a “TAT for tits.”

Only this tat was a bit more painful than a little needle and some ink, because a trio of black-suited, hard-booted Protection Citizen Compliance agents would bust down your front door at three o’clock in the morning. Then they ripped you, and whoever you happened to be on top of, right out of your bed, shoved a black sack over your heads, crammed you in a diaper, and stuffed you into the black van they had waiting outside. No one came back from that.

We only heard stories from the neighbors, cowering in their homes, glad as shit it wasn’t them, while they watched a Protection cleaning crew gut their neighbor’s house. After I got done training them, those guys were thorough.

Sure, being blown up in a drone strike is probably pretty scary, but killing you leaves everything about you behind. And when you think the wrong way, we gotta make sure it was like you never existed. Cleaning crews. . . Hah! Dirtiest sons a bitches you ever wanna meet.

I can see the door to the roof, and there’s a poem rolling around in my head as I trudge up the last set of steps.
And when they came for me, there was no one left. . .
I think that’s how it ends. My father used to tell it to me when we talked about all the wars. It wasn’t because he believed that anyone could be saved by the realization that if they worked together no Protection military on the planet could control them. He knew that.

“People want to believe that warriors think like they do,” he used to say, “that they make decisions based on morality and mercy.” And he would get a faraway look on his face, before he continued. “But an eighteen-year-old with a rage rifle, scared shitless and afraid for his own life every day, does what he’s told. Shoots anyone who gets in his way . . . as fast as he can. Mom, dad, princess or puppy—dead things can’t kill you. We teach them that first.”

He told me how they used that knowledge in his war. “Divide, demoralize, destroy” was the Protection procedure for subduing a civilian populace. “Shoot one person in the head while the other ones watch,” he said. “That’s how the Nazis did it. Controlled thousands of people in concentration camps. People with absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting back, marched into gas chambers without lifting a finger.”

Man, he could go off on a rant. Probably where I got it. One of his favorites was, “They taught us how to control a civilian population with nothing more than a platoon of hard Protection vets.” Then he showed me the Protection manual for creating prisons—concentration camps just like the Nazis had. I read it. Learned the theory later. Make each citizen-protectant believe that their best hope of survival is compliance. Then no one will help anyone else, and when it’s their turn, no one will help them.

I fall to my knees—I’m spent.

Get your sorry life moving, soldier, or I’ll end it for them.
That sounded like Kelly’s voice in my head and I shake it. The delusions are starting.

Whoever it was, she’s right. That’s how this is going to end for me if I don’t finish this climb. Alone against the lie—as good as dead.

Occasionally—about every third day—the Utah data-farm spits out the wrong address—the wrong citizen gets tagged for a 3@3. It doesn’t matter. Once Protection snatches a suspected “Whiskey Hotel”—Weapons Harborer—they don’t risk letting them talk about it. They simply change all that guy’s data in Utah and lickety-split, he
is
a “DT”—Delta Tango—Domestic Terrorist. But that’s pretty old jargon—I’m an old dog, I guess—because the Protection Citizens Relations department just shortened everything to “protectant.”

The State and Protection keep telling us they
are
protecting us—keeping us safe. Protection? Safe from who?

When it all started, a lot of ex-Protection war veterans barricaded in their habitat cubes, figured it would be better to shoot it out. Then dozens of thugs in black from Protection—the one agency that all of the other country and citizen-saving services were rolled into—rammed down doors and made quick meat of the “mentally disturbed” vets.

“Tragic” but “unavoidable” was what the flapping faces on the PIN called it. Most of them were labeled as a “PDTS—Person Dangerous To Society.” A society whose freedom they were told they fought and got maimed to secure, coincidentally. Protection agents had a code for it. During every pre-PDTS takedown briefing, they would joke about the objective—“Put Down The Shithead.” And that’s what they did—buried him. Technically, we burn the condemned now—no more room for the bodies. Don’t ask me how I know that.

The first few were just a warning—let the rest of us see what resisting looked like. They made sure to let the PIN cameras get a glimpse of the carnage as they wheeled out the bullet-bloodied bodies. And when no one bellyached too bad about it. . . From then on, Protection killed anyone who talked or fought back and made up their own version of events after. None of the guys on the gurneys were disputing much, anyway. History of slavery, written by the guys with the whips. It happened so often that most citizens just flipped the damn wavebox off. Then they guzzled State swill or went to bed, prepared for their next daily dose of judgment—anything to help them deal with the lunacy of it all.

Then Protection agents, dressed in their perfectly pressed black uniforms, would come out and spread all the guns across tables for the cameras, like they busted some South Continent drug lord and piled up the bales of bud before they burned it all—show the citizens what a public service they had done.

Only they didn’t burn it. They kept it and sold it back to the same muchachos they took it from. Follow the money—the only law left.

We knew they didn’t destroy the guns either. They sold or gave those to “freedom” fighters, battling on the right side of a debate on someone else’s continent. And if the argument went the wrong way, if “Uncle Satan’s” favorite new buddies looked like they were gonna get their asses kicked. . . Protection sold that government some drones and let them wipe that inconvenient truth right off the map.

Once they got the guns, they pried the ammunition out, too. Every crevice where a “GOGO”—God-fearing Gun-owner—Protection citizen stompers have an acronym for everything, too . . . anyplace a citizen could think to stash bullets, they found. Under a concrete patio, in the attic, or up someone's ass, it didn’t matter. They draped it all out for the cameras, like jackass Rural Zone rednecks strapping an unauthorized animal harvest over the hood of their pickup. Never mind that two years ago and for two hundred and fifty-some years before that, guns were how the country—shit, the whole planet’s civilization—was built. Unfortunately, I was a big part of that. Hindsight—head up my ass and couldn't see.

To those of us who got a clue, there wasn’t much to the dog and dipshit shows—relic hunting rifles, a few postwar pistols a guy was dumb enough to bring back from his tours in one of the Eastern Continent “ ’stans,” sometimes an AR-17 the guy had never even shot before. Hell, we all black-marketed AR’s when they started confiscating them. Not anymore. Now we are all “safer.”

Way back in the day, there were a hundred million private firearms in the country and the guzzlers and smokes killed people like guns were never invented. They barely got the cigarette lighters out of the guzzlers. No “Mothers Against Guzzlers and Puffs” happened, either. No “MAGPIE” the vote, to stop Ms. Tasty Tobacco and Mr. Rolling Steal from driving around by themselves, murdering helpless citizens. That would be . . . ludicrous.

I don’t think we were very far away from the day when a drunk could’ve gotten himself out of a slaughter charge by saying, “The guns made me do it.”

Driving drunk while you smoke a cigarette? Might as well put a gun to your head.

My inner voice is getting more sarcastic and annoying as I stand back up. And I realize that I got caught up in the rage in my head for too long, because the bastards are only a couple flights down.

Shoot it out with them.

Fuck that!
Dead Protection vets aside, none of what’s left of us is going to trade bullets with half a dozen overtrained judgment junkies, jacked up at the thought of putting a DT—“Domestic Terrorist”—on their kill sheet. Bullets can kill you, that’s a universal constant.

The worst of it was, your neighbor would rat you out if they knew you still had a pistol stashed somewhere around your house. Backyard barbecue with a citizen for twenty years, get too drunk on State sanctioned swill. . . Little slip of the tongue later, and the first chance the guy gets, he screeches you to a Protection agent to save his own ass . . . for as long as he can.

We used to be able to deal with a nosy neighbor like that. A little visit from the faithful, that guy stopped squawking. But in the end, none of it mattered. It was all for nothing, because once the president sicked his tax-hounds on the National Resistance to Authority dudes—cut the head off the only guys left in the fight—that was that. We went the way of Aussie Islanders—Protection said jump and citizens hopped like kangaroos. And Simon and Cindy citizen watched on the PIN like the rest of us.

They said it over and over—guns
were
the enemy. Anyone who had them was too, simple as that. Repeat something long enough . . . pretty soon, that’s gotta be the truth, right? Truth or lie, we all got the message. They were taking the guns . . . and defiance equals death.

“Citizens”—uneducated nation-trusters—I used to think they were all a bunch of idiots. Out here among them, though, they're starting to get the picture—sooner or later, the boot finds its way to everyone’s neck.

Once the State had most of them, things got worse. Unfortunately, they had that plan worked out for decades. The final phase—if you took too long turning yours in—they would dispatch three Protection agents into your house. Those guys would snatch you out of bed and wipe the inside clean. Then you were just gone—disappeared. So was your family.

To the State, citizens—anyone who questions their authority, really—were the dangerous ones. Someone who doesn't obey? Shit, to a slave owner, that’s dangerous. But with ten billion of us on the planet and the dial spinning like a crooked cabbie’s time-ticker, no one noticed one less mouth to feed . . . until it was theirs.

— V —

WHEN THEY SLAM open the metal door to the roof, I’m almost to the ledge. I look for another way down, but it’s a
roof!
Doesn’t matter—they’re here and I’m fucked.

I’m almost to the ledge and it’s my “sooner.” I wince at the cramp in my side, then turn as I stumble and fire two rounds, back over my shoulder. Miracle if I hit someone, but I only want to get to the ledge. And that’s it, counting the ones I fired in the alley, I’m out.

I chuck my Kimber and it lands with a metallic clank and bounces to a stop in a pile of useless metal misery next to a big heating and air-conditioning unit. The rain’s really coming down now.

Then I hear the words behind me, “Jacob Oliver Blake, you are hereby remanded. . .” I wince at the sound of my middle name and his voice trails off in my head—I don’t hear the rest. He could’ve saved his breath, though. I memorized the whole thing at the academy. So did every other agent and citizen. If they didn’t—

“State your compliance!”

Submit to judgment—that’s what he wants. I know how that ends.

You’re going to die with an empty gun in the rain. Isn’t that a bitch? Cliché.

The critic. I’m seriously tired of his shit. I’ll be glad to shut him up. A bright little star—silver lining to the sludge-filled clouds in the sky? Just a couple more steps and—

I feel the punch in the back of my shoulder as the first bullet hits me. Hell, the son of a bitch only fires one. They have good training, I made sure of that. The Rufflon-tipped lead rips through my back and out the front of the top of my chest, and my arm catches fire and I spin to the ground and yell. I slice my left hand on the sheet metal of the heating and air-conditioning unit on the way down, and blood’s pouring out of the gash in my palm. For some reason, I’m more concerned with my hand. Maybe because I masturbate with that one. Who knows what’s in my head at this point, because my mind is spinning.

I look, and the blood looks dark—darker than it should be. I’m no blood expert.
Hell with it.

The bullet isn’t gonna kill me, it’s not supposed to. And I can hear the boots and I’m crawling on my knees and pulling with my good arm as fast as I can drag myself and—

“State your compliance!” As if I didn’t hear him the first time.

Then—
Bam!

The second bullet tears across my ass. “Son of a bitch!” I yell it at no one. It flips me over and onto my back and I roll sideways, to get on my stomach, take a last look at them. Ten of. . .? No, eleven.
I did drop one in the stairwell
, I think. And they are mean-looking, hard-hearted bastards, dressed in all black everything. They look like little demons—my brothers—agents, coming for my soul.

And they got their singe-spray and billy clubs, and their goggles and their MP7’s—squatty little, toy-looking machine guns—9mm, nice weapon. And there they all are, fifty feet away, maybe. But they’re still coming, so I use all the ranting rage and adrenaline I got left to yell through the pain and stand back up, and then I limp two more feet and wince my way onto the ledge at the edge of the roof.

Someone behind them yells, “Stop!” and they all freeze. When the guy steps out from behind the pack of hard-hearts—
PAIC
, I think. And I should know, I used to be one of them. He knows that.

Officially, neither of us ever existed. That’s the other power they have in Utah. They can make a man disappear, but you’ll swear you can see him right in front of you as he shoves a knife in your gut. This ghost, he doesn’t want a corpse. He can’t interrogate a dead body.