Survival (5 page)

“With Fausto,” Norton replied
without hesitation, drawing a laugh from Verlander.

“Wise answer. What do you say,
Fausto?”

“Ok,” he replied simply. “Present
your case.”

They stacked their dirty dishes
at the return and followed Alain back to his office. The big man made a call,
turning his back and speaking in hushed tones. He poured himself a drink when
he was finished.

“This should be interesting,” he
chuckled. “C’mon. We’re headed down to the media room.”

The place was packed. The first
three rows of seats were filled with heavily shackled bulls in white jumpsuits.
They looked grateful for the relative warmth of their new uniforms.

Aside from a few soldiers
monitoring the Labor field, the rest of the resistance crowded the seats behind
them, making catcalls at the downtrodden men.

Verlander strode to the front of
the auditorium. “Ok, ok,” he said, “settle down. It’s movie night in the
underground, boys!”

This brought a roar from the
crowd; the bulls looked around nervously.

“Skinny, you ran platoons up
there on the Labor field. We know the regional general is in town. We know he’s
here
tonight
. When you’re through watching this, I want to have us a
serious talk—see if you can’t be a little more cooperative.” He motioned to the
back of the room. “Roll the film, Trent.”

The room went dark and the screen
filled with white light.

“Labor,” a voice intoned. It was
that same animatronic voice that the Authority used in all of its promotional
materials. “The experience of a lifetime for dedicated fathers!”

The first image was of an open
field littered with the decomposing bodies of men. They covered a huge swath of
prairie, the familiar white jackets and sky-blue jeans marking them as hopeful
fathers. The ground was like rust with the stains of their blood.

There was a cut to a shot of
bulls advancing on a group of fathers, muzzles flashing. The men fell in a
heap. A close-up on the smiling lead bull as he lit a cigarette.

The film was about twenty minutes
in length—a mixture of carefully edited Authority propaganda juxtaposed with
pirated file footage of carnage and chaos on the Labor fields. There was an
image of a smiling father holding his recently delivered child juxtaposed with
a dead man spread-eagled on the ground, his intestines a slippery coil piled on
his midsection.

There were shots of families
walking in city parks on sunny days interspersed with footage of headless
torsos, victims of promise sensors, likely the result of unplanned pregnancies.

“Labor is flawed public policy,”
intoned a man near the end of the documentary. He was frail, bearded, propped
up in a hospital bed. “It’s barbaric. It’s antiquated. It doesn’t fix our
population crisis.” He launched into a prolonged coughing fit. “It needs to be
stopped.”

Fornoy.

Bryan watched the bulls. They
were transfixed by the images on the screen. Many of them winced at the
visceral shots of the dead. When the film had run its course, the room was
deathly silent.

Verlander stood, the white light
from the projector casting half of his face in shadow. He looked out at the
crowd, his gaze one of unfiltered sadness. There was also an element of anger
there. “And who among you is a killer?” he asked softly. “No penalty. Be
honest.”

The bulls looked at each other
nervously. After a tense moment, a single hand went into the air. Soon, every
one of them had raised a hand—more than thirty of them.

Verlander shook his head. “God,
but it’s just such a waste. It’s a horrific fucking waste! They train you to
kill without conscience. They take away
your
ability to become a
father
.
They
use
you. And, in the process, they demean us all.”

Some of the bulls nodded their
heads slowly.

“We’re going to make a statement
tonight. If you’re willing to stand with us, we’ll have you. If not, you’re
free to leave when this is over, one way or the other.

“Skinny?” He locked eyes with the
platoon leader. “Can we have that talk now?”

The bulls turned in their chairs,
studying their leader. The man, indeed a rail of a human being, nodded slowly.

“Very good,” Verlander said. He
freed the man’s wrists and they disappeared down the hallway. Soldiers stood
and busied themselves with herding the bulls back to their cells.

When it was just the two of them
alone in the media room, Ruiz trained his eyes on Norton’s.

“Do you want to join them?”

Norton directed his gaze to the
ceiling. It took him a long time to reply and, when he did, it was with a
simple nod of the head.

Fausto chuckled. “You surprise
me, Bryan. And I agree. It’ll be dangerous, but we’ve made it this far. I guess
this is our chance.”

Bryan nodded. “I think I’ve
sensed that something like this was coming for some time. I’m…I’m only now
opening up to it.”

They found their way back to the
operations center. Around them, men were laying out kits—weapons, backpacks,
helmets. A one-armed soldier chattered into a headset, cataloging the inventory
as the room hummed with anticipation.

Forty minutes later, Verlander
and Skinny stepped out of the bearded man’s office. The room fell silent;
Verlander looked at his men, making eye contact with each of them. “We have
what we need. Skinny’s offered his assistance on this morning’s mission. Make
your farewells as best as you can; put your affairs in order. We depart at 0100
hours.”

There was a moment of perfect
silence and then the room swelled with a fresh sense of urgency. Soldiers
scrambled back to their barracks, presumably to follow Verlander’s advice to
make their farewells. The enormity of it all weighed heavily on Norton. He
envied them, and he searched for a pen and paper.

Before he could procure them,
Verlander was at their side. “I need your decision.”

“We’ll fight with you,” Fausto
replied. “This is bigger than any of us.”

Verlander clapped their
shoulders, his eyes smiling in the fluorescent light. “Thank you,” he replied
sincerely. “I was hoping we’d have you along. I have a feeling you two play a
larger role in this than anyone here can imagine. Is there anything I can do
for you in the meantime?”

“I’d like to write a letter,”
Bryan replied.

“Me too,” Fausto said.

Verlander nodded. He left them
momentarily and returned with pens, paper and blank envelopes. He pressed them
into their hands and left them without another word.

Ruiz and Norton found separate
corners of the room, away from the bustle of preparation, and bunkered down to
write the story of the war they’d stumbled into.

Bryan felt the writing difficult
at first, but soon the words were flooding out of him and he had dappled the
pages with a few of his tears as well. When Verlander’s booming voice broke the
trance of his composition, he’d penned six pages, front and back. “Time to get
you outfitted, Bryan.”

The thin boy looked up. He
cleared his throat. “Ok. I’m just going to finish this...this last thought.
I’ll be there in a second.”

Verlander smiled and Bryan turned
back to the page.

And
so we’re leaving soon. I just wanted to say that I love you and little Eli so,
Maggie. More than anything in this world. If I don’t find my way back to you,
please let our boy know that his father died in an effort to make the world a
better place for him.

Love
Always,

Bryan

 He folded the note into thirds,
sealed it in an envelope and wrote his wife’s name on the front. He placed it
into the bin with all of the others—the last wishes of a small band of
idealists—and went to get fitted for doomsday.

When they were equipped,
Verlander stood before them. There were maybe fifty of them in total, including
about a dozen of the bulls who had made the choice to fight with them.

“Fatherhood isn’t a game. It’s
not a prize,” Verlander began. “It’s not a political platform or a social
policy. It’s not a...not a
carrot
to be dangled over the heads of the
people to keep them obedient. It’s not a privilege; it’s a right. It’s
your
right, granted by your biology,
not
by your republic.”

Heads began to bob in agreement.

“In these first moments of a
brand new day, we will marshal our resources and challenge the Authority. It’s
been done before. Fornoy stood against them, on this very battlefield, all
those decades ago. There are cells of resistance just like ours, all throughout
the country. Throughout the world, for that matter!

“And I’m proud of each of you. So
damned proud. Our resolve is absolute. Our will is outstanding. Our mission is
righteous. Many of us will die today, but the nobility of our actions will not
perish from this Earth.”

This brought a roar from the
crowd and Norton felt himself swell with pride. He could see the words finding
their mark with Fausto as well.

“Skinny believes the bulls are
operating out of the old Willamette brewery. It’s fortified with four times our
number of guards. The general himself will be heavily protected by the
Authority’s finest. If you get a shot—any shot at all—you take it. If we can
topple the regional general, we wound the Authority. This mission is about
creating momentum—momentum for others to push for the things that should be
ours by right.”

Revolution, Bryan thought. They
stood on the cusp of a revolution.

Verlander bowed his head and
those assembled followed his lead. “God, give us the strength to fight like
demons from hell, but with the grace of heaven’s angels.”

He crossed himself, turned
abruptly and strode down the long hallway on the far side of the operations
center, flanked by a pair of square-jawed soldiers with red bandannas tied
around their biceps. The remainder of the soldiers fell into line behind them
and, just like that, they were on the move.

They were quickly topside,
trotting through the forest, night-vision goggles locked in place. Norton was
amazed at their ability to move so quietly, given the size of their company.
They stole across the forest floor like wraiths, the world in front of them lit
in shades of eerie green. Bryan occasionally saw the phantom outline of bulls
in the distance, but Verlander cut quietly through the trees, deftly avoiding
the small platoons of trained killers.

They pounded over pine straw and
pushed through blackberry brambles. They moved quickly, efficiently, covering
territory at a steady clip. After an hour, Verlander stopped the company at the
base of a granite bluff. A shallow creek passed by at their feet; they waded it
and massed on the far side.

Bryan and Fausto were winded. Men
passed canteens back and forth. They tore into energy bars, clustered around
their leader, who spoke in hushed tones. “The brewery sits atop the bluff above
us. There are digital moats on three sides of the facility; there’s a razor
fence on the fourth. Our intelligence shows about one hundred soldiers
stationed around the perimeter of the place. The authority has stationed hover
lights above us. There are stun canopies in the entryways. Our fight happens
here.
This
is where we make our stand.

“Gather your strength, men. Pray
to your god. Think of your family. Then…then orient yourselves to the task. We
fight hard and we strike the head from the body of the snake.

“There,” he pointed at a gentle
hill. Norton wondered what it had been all those decades before—before the
Labor fields had been created. Maybe a golf course fairway? A lawn at a local
college? “That is our route. We move in single file. We stay low—we stay
concealed. Stump here has the codes to disable the eastern moat. That’ll be our
way in.”

Stump grinned in the dark, his
teeth dual strings of luminescent pearls. Norton didn’t like the smile—it was
unnerving—but he was thankful the slight man was on his side.

Verlander allowed the men another
ten minutes of rest, then they were moving again. Adrenaline coursing through
his veins, Bryan fell in behind Fausto at the rear of the line, the muzzle of
his weapon angled toward the ground.

Their objective awaited them at
the eastern boundary of the brewery, an ivy-strewn building that was slowly
melting into the reaches of the forest. Bryan swallowed heavily. His eyes
watered.

Before them was a shimmering
field of energy. It looked like black water, but he knew it was electric
current—a mirage of deadly technology. On the far side of the illusion, at
least thirty or forty soldiers milled about campfires. A line of bulls stood,
still as topiary, on the edge of the camp, their eyes trained on the forest.

Here it was. Here it all was,
Bryan thought. It was the place where his story would be written—one way or the
other. The emotion seemed misplaced, he knew, but he felt calm—satisfied that
things would be resolved one way or the other very soon.