The War Whisperer: Book 2: Black, page 31
Bob looked at me. “Jerry?”
I stood and walked around the table and stopped next to Bob. “I saw the first bunch of hounds go down to the Zoo and get reinforcements, Keith, and none of the reinforcements were wearing beamer gear or had beam attachments on their rifles. Those who had sensor tees shucked them and their rifle modifications. Then they loaded up on mag belts, each pocket filled with a magazine.”
“Tell him about your test shot,” said Jaz.
I nodded. At the time I hadn’t thought of it as a test shot, but that’s what it had been. “My first shot was an armor piercing round into an ATV’s engine block. Return fire a split second later came in the form of a live .454 round. We concluded the hounds were out to kill the fox.”
Bob faced Keith. “Satisfied? At least on that account?”
Keith shrugged and looked down at his hands resting on the table.
“I didn’t quite hear that answer, squib. Are you satisfied that Monkey House knew its lives were in danger and that they had to defend themselves?”
“Yes,” Keith answered. “But . . .” he held out his hands, “all of the dead—”
“Those who were responsible for that are dead, as well,” said Bob.
He pointed his finger around the room at everyone. “If you cannot hold it together, people, if you can’t stick it in a box, then Misty doesn’t need you. If you injure or take out someone Misty does need, you will be terminated. Those of you who know me know when I am joking and when I am just as serious as a hair-trigger firing squad. Our job right now is to pick up the pieces, heal, and rebuild. America still needs Misty, Misty is still in a war and needs agents. Black Academy is Misty’s main source of field agents. The school and its student body need to be built again almost from scratch. I’m depending on all of you to get the job done.”
No offers of a few squads of counselors to hold our hands and give us permission to feel. No weeks off to redecorate, build a memorial, or hold candlelight vigils. We were Mambas. We ran on Black time, and the only stretch Black time allowed was time in which to get the job done.
There were bodies to bury, bodies to heal, evidence to conceal, property owners out at Johnson & Johnson to mollify, and a lot of heads remaining that needed to get back into the game.
I looked up and saw Heller’s “Kill The Fox” sign on the wall above Reb’s head. I went to the easel next to the serving line, grabbed the red and black markers, then went to the table where Reb was sitting, moved one of the chairs beneath the “Kill The Fox” sign, climbed up on the chair, pulled the pins from the sign, turned the paper over and pinned it back on the wall. On the blank side, in big heavy black letters, I wrote, “Fuck The Alamo!” in black. With the red marker I circled the sentiment eight or ten times.
I got down off the chair and replaced the markers on the easel. “What’s that supposed to mean?” called an angry voice.
I turned and looked at the faces in the room. “It means that no matter how lopsided the odds, nor how certain the ending, losing is not a given.”
“What makes you think that?” asked the same voice.
Someone else, also out of view, answered by saying, “He’s still alive, asshole. He’s still alive.”
Crabs
After the meeting broke up and the crews went back to Johnson and Johnson to collect the remainder of the bodies, Monkey House gathered at one of the back tables, ate sandwiches, sucked down more coffee, and kept looking at each other, reassuring ourselves that we weren’t in some kind of fantasy reality—all of us really were still alive. Tex had a scratch on his upper left arm from the broken branch of a tree he ran past in the dark, and that was it. I had to place hands on Tex, Lorena, Reb, and Jaz simply to get it through to myself that we had made it. I got hugs in return. We were all still alive.
Afterward, I wasted a good many moments trying to figure out how to repair things with Elena. But there had been nine girls living at Eagle House before Heller’s press gang showed to draft them into fulfilling her vision. There were now only four left alive. Elena’s world had been blown to pieces and burned alive and I had nothing for her but excuses and lame-sounding rationalizations—if preserving the lives of myself and my loved ones were rationalizations.
Heavy sighs, then I got up, slung my D16, and picked up my 42 from the table and holstered it. “I need to talk with Bob.”
“Bob’s suggestion was a good one,” said Tex. “Let’s bunk down in the back of the armory stock room.”
I nodded and left before anyone could say anything else. Stumbling out of the cafeteria, I stood at the edge of Cat’s Cradle and looked around. A few bodies moving from here to there, no one looking at me.
I didn’t think I really needed to talk to Bob. What I really needed was to put myself in front of the remaining students, arms outstretched, and say, If it’s all you can do to end your pain, let me have it.
But it wouldn’t be their pain I would be ending.
Jeff, Tami, Lonya . . . so many others. “What a waste, Heller,” I whispered to the night. “What a god damned waste.”
What to do about it was hidden behind black mirrors. The students moved on the cat’s cradle paths, every door of every building connected to every other door. From satellite imagery it looked like a cradle made of white yarn. My gift, my Mr. Fixit solution-maker presented me with an answer, a way to heal the student body. Just then I was too damned tired and scared to work it.
I moved myself with slow steps toward the Armory.
Jayden had been gone for some time. Soon he would be back with the last of the bodies. I crossed the Cradle, walking the path from the cafeteria to the Armory, crossing seven other paths on my way. At the Armory I walked the path around the building and went to the parking lot with its eastern view of the roads coming from Shutdown and the Johnsons.
Bob Stiles was already there waiting for the vehicles to return. No one yet knew for certain what the total number of casualties was. Several students, to avoid the press gangs, had made it into the woods and hid. Some could be seen because of their locators. Some had used versions of Jazmín’s blocking technology and were missing altogether. A full headcount would take some time.
When he saw me, Bob turned, grunted at the bandaged wound in his side, and held out his hand. We shook and he said, “Jerry. Let me say it is damned good to find you alive.”
I shrugged and said, “Right now it’s damned good to find anyone alive.” I put my hands into my pockets.
“Sad day,” he said, “but I’m damned proud of you and Monkey House. You kept your head, Jerry, made a plan, went for the rescue, kept your people alive, and won the battle against some of the best shots in the world. Where I come from, that’s getting the job done.
“Those best shots were badly used, Bob. Heller practically did a banzai charge at the end and I wound up killing a lot of kids I didn’t want to kill.”
“I know.” He thought for a moment, nodded once, and looked up at the stars. “Only some psychopaths believe killing is fun.”
“What about the bring-it-on, come-and-get-it, scalp and ear collectors,” I said, “the jihadi head snatchers, the I want to walk in the enemy’s blood and eat his brains killers you see on the news?”
“There are religious sects, military and paramilitary training units, Jerry, whose primary purpose is to turn out people who are eager to kill.”
“Do they? I mean, do they succeed?”
“They do manage to turn borderline psychos into full fledged joy killers and get most of the remainder to play along. Many take on the group zeitgeist of being eager killers in order to please their instructors and to fit in with their fellows and in their time.”
“Tough to stay seated in a room when everyone else stands and shouts ‘Heil Hitler,” I said.
Bob nodded. “A very high percentage of trainees even come to believe they are there to kill, to celebrate the murders, and die martyrs. The killing-is-fun thing, though, simply doesn’t fit anywhere, not in society, not in the halls of government, not even on a battlefield. That’s why so many troops and even agents crack while in service and don’t fit in and commit different kinds of suicide when they get out.”
“Why don’t the jihadis we hear about so much crack up from remorse and kill themselves, except, you know the suicide bomber thing,” I said.
“Most of them don’t live very long, for one.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “I know what you mean, though. Don’t confuse what you hear from a controlled media with what you hear from a freer media by awarding both equal credibility.” He shrugged and lowered his hand. “The suicide rate among jihadis is one of the highest among any military force in the world, according to those who are supposed to know.”
“You believe that?”
“About eighty percent. It came through Misty. Still, in my opinion, when the god you believe in tells you to love killing through an authority you absolutely trust, for someone who never thought for him or herself it makes a difference.”
I nodded to myself and looked toward the east. I couldn’t see any flames but we could all smell the smoke from Little Johnson Nub. There was even a very slight haze visible in the illuminated areas of the parking lot. Must have been a shift in the wind.
A lot of what I was feeling had to do with things that hadn’t yet happened. Tex hadn’t been killed. Reb, Jazmín, and Lorena hadn’t been killed. Bob and Killer hadn’t been killed. Heller and Simon were dead.
We had prevailed —Won. But a great many very special boys and girls, kids like me, were dead. I felt sick wondering how many of them had been burned alive. I mentally lingered on that for as long as I could before I had to push it away. My job had been to keep my people alive; Not to bleed for those who were trying to kill us. I put it in the box hoping to get to the contents before they reached critical mass.
I wondered for a moment if Dr. Guzman would consider selling himself into Misty’s kind of service to shrink heads at Black.
“Your plan,” Bob said, interrupting my thoughts. “Out on the Nub. Jazmín filled me in on what went down. She said you read a lot of military history, battles and such. What was your inspiration for what you did at the Nub?”
I shrugged and said, “It’s going to sound risky—stupid.”
“Can’t be that stupid, White Cloud. You won.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “It was modified from a stupid old joke my brother once told me back at the Uvalde Children’s Home.”
“A joke?”
“You know. How do you get rid of a case of the crabs?” I said, sadness filling me.
“Case of . . . ? What? —You’re kidding.” He thought for a moment, wrestled with it internally for a second, then looked at me frowning in astonishment. “I know the joke. Jesus. That was your inspiration? And it worked?”
“It seemed to fit the situation.”
“You tell your people where you got the idea before the fight?”
“No. I just handed out orders. I’m a big planner savant dude, haven’t you heard? No scientific genetic editing; A little suffocation and cooking in a Dumpster are all. Monkey House trusted me and now a hundred classmates are dead.”
“Monkey House is damned fortunate that they did let you lead. Any other choice and . . .” he let the sentiment finish itself. “But, Jesus. Crabs.”
We saw the distant lights of a truck slowly coming toward us on East Shutdown Loop, its bed filled with more bodies.
“Crabs,” Bob repeated to himself. “And it worked.” He looked down at the ground, thought for a moment, then shook his head. “You know, while that battle was going on, Alabama’s legislature ratified the Electoral College Automation Amendment? That put it over the top.”
“So now we know who the new asshole is going to be once enough states have certified their votes,” I said. “I guess those terrorism, poverty, and cancer cure matters have already been resolved.”
“The Capitol Building’s stove has a very crowded back burner, Jer. Always has had.”
It seemed so far away, Washington, that playground in Uvalde, Dylan and I laughing at old jokes, he talking about wanting to be a chef, and me —what had been my big goal? It was to have Dylan as my brother. And what was my goal now?
Suddenly I felt weary—beyond goals. “I need sleep, Bob. We’re crashing in the armory. I don’t want to go in Monkey House until it’s been cleared.”
He nodded. “Sure. Some of your people are already set up back there. You know where the sleeping bags are.”
“Thanks.”
I stumbled into the armory, headed for the stock room and the last aisle in back, saw Jazmín standing guard and Tex, Lorena, and Reb on the floor, unrolled sleeping bags beneath them for mattresses. Jazmín nodded at an empty sleeping bag and said, “I’ll get you up for your watch.”
I placed my weapons next to where the bag was, and while I cleaned and reloaded my weapon, Jaz leaned back against a shelf containing dozens more sleeping bags. “How did you know?” she asked.
“How did I know what?”
Jaz studied me for a moment. “The joke, with the crabs? How did you know it would work?”
“I didn’t. It just seemed like the best thing to do given that Heller had gone insane.”
“You assumed she’d gone crazy?”
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I assumed she was crazy my first day at Black. It seemed to work for her, though.”
“Jaz, if she had surrounded Johnson and Johnson with her original fifty snipers in good hides at six or eight hundred meters from the mountain perimeter, the way she taught us, and had them wait for their shots, they could have picked off the lot of us in a matter of days. We had only a little food and almost no water.”
Jaz frowned at me. “But she didn’t come at us the way you would have done it.”
“No.” I put a full mag in my weapon, cycled in a round, and placed it next to me on the sleeping bag by my right hand. I stretched out next to the rifle.
“You got in her head, Jer. You saw what she was going to do even before she knew what she was going to do.”
“No, Jaz. It wasn’t that clear to me. What I saw was she was throwing away her shooters. She was crazy. What she couldn’t do through sabotage and subterfuge she was going to try and accomplish through direct force. What does a sniper instructor know about small unit tactics?”
“Judging by the outcome, not much,” she said.
I rolled over, my back toward her. “Crazy,” I said, then fell into a dreamless and stormless sleep.
So, how do you get rid of an infestation of Pthirus Pubis, the pubic or crab louse?
You shave a path down the center of your pubic hair with a razor, set fire to one side, then as the crabs run to the other side to escape the flames, you stab them to death with an ice pick.
That, according to my brother Dylan, is how you cure a case of the crabs.
No Star Hill
By eight the next morning, everyone was accounted for. Of the five wounded on the nub, one died before being put on the ATV, another died on the way in bringing the total student body count from the Battle of Little Johnson Nub to ninety-five students plus Heller. Around Cat’s Cradle, it was four students and Kelly dead. Kelly and his four students attempted to bust out Bob. Simon killed them all. And then I killed Simon. Total casualty count: One hundred and two students and faculty killed, three students and one faculty wounded.
There had been a genuine battle out on the nub; War. There had been a forest fire, too, blessed by the winds and the backfires a couple of the hounds set such that it burned itself out once it hit the clearing, not even turning left a little to climb Little Johnson Mountain. There had also been a lot of shooting.
No response: No cops, no firefighters, no National Guard, no Homeland Security showed up. After our own discreet investigation we found out why. It had to do with the “new normals” of life in Somerset County, Maine.
—Well, see, Black Academy is over that way and they’re always shooting up something. Some kind of military school I hear.
—The fire? What about the fire?
—Just four or five hectares of woodland went up in smoke. Burned itself out quick like, didn’t it? This is Maine. We get lots of wildfires up this way under drought conditions. Four or five hectares at a pop isn’t even worth turning on your garden hose.
—What if it spread?
—It didn’t.
—But what if it had spread?
—Figured if it was something serious someone would call it in. Wasn’t serious so no one did.
And these were the human resources official U.S. Government policy relied upon heavily for early warning of terrorist plots and activities. Bob did point out to me that it wasn’t all bad. There were a few retired Misty agents in key posts in and around the state, in the media, in the state police, in the State House in Augusta steering, shading, and editing reports before they reached either decision makers or news media.
Also, a curious facet of the information age was the rise of a certain breed of human so skilled at phrasing, shading, misdirecting, and dating information that, after awhile, black often did remind one of white as well as all the other colors in the spectrum, depending upon the audience.
If a citizen murdered someone for revenge or profit, there was no statute of limitations for his or her crime. If a government official screwed up and caused the deaths of thousands, it only needed to be reported late Friday rendering it “under investigation” and “old news” by Monday. Same with mishandling classified information, peddling influence to America’s enemies, or even murder for political gain.
The above seemed like a problem to me then, as it does now. But for most persons, news is gossip in print; History is gossip with footnotes. Both were stories no more real than slasher movies or Sasquatch. Winners write the histories leaving the world covered in losers who could believe nothing they read or were told unless it already conformed to their already existing sets of beliefs.
