This Fallen World, page 18
part #1 of Fallen World Series
“Yep.”
We pulled two sets of black riot gear from the trunk. Jimmy had said it would just get in the way so he’d just worn a pair of slacks and a t-shirt.
We donned the Kevlar suits and helmets. I pulled a shotgun from the trunk and put it in a holster on my back. It was a riot gun with ten shots in the pipe. My .45’s were holstered on right and left hip. Grady had blacked out the Police lettering on the front and replaced it with Farmer.
“Really?”
“Seemed fitting.”
I shook my head and took the other rifle from the trunk. It was a sniper rifle from the SWAT team. Our little town had a SWAT unit of one. Grady had ordered it just in case. It seemed that ‘Just in case’ was definitely here.
“You do know we’re just doing surveillance, right?”
“Well, yeah,” I answered. “If we were going to attack, I would have brought the bigger guns.”
“What bigger guns?”
“You’ll have to ask Pop, Lawman.”
He chuckled and picked up another riot shotgun and a rifle.
We both jumped as Jimmy appeared right behind us. “Everything’s clear.”
As I turned around, he looked at the stencil on the front of the armor.
“I would have loved that before,” he said, pointing at my chest.
“Yes, you would have.”
We exited the house from the front door. The rain was steady, and I was glad for it. It would make sneaking around the town easier. As we made our way through the abandoned streets I was beginning to worry.
“Where are the people who lived here?”
“Seems like there would be some left,” Grady said softly.
The stench was almost overbearing as we neared the center of the small city.
“That’s de-comp,” Grady said.
We neared the building that was giving off that odor. I slipped inside, Grady right behind me. The inside of the building was piled with bodies. Grady barely flipped his mask up in time to spew. I felt like I could very easily follow suit. Jimmy just looked at the pile of corpses. They’d had the muscles stripped from them. The meat.
We turned and exited as quickly as we could.
“I think that was the people who lived here,” Grady said, his face ashen. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Nothing good.” I was feeling a familiar rage building inside me. I’d felt this when we found the civilian casualties in the Riots. I felt it when I’d heard twelve men planning the death or worse of my family and friends. We crossed the street and kept moving in towards the city center. I remembered a square in Destil with the Obsidian Justice Center right in the middle of it.
Peeking around the corner of a building I could see the Center. It was a lot different than before with iron fortifications around the building. They were fortified three stories high and the gate was ten feet tall by about twelve wide.
“They’ve been busy,” I said.
“Slave labor,” Grady pointed toward a massive set of pens that held captives.
“Gotta be a couple hundred people in those cages.”
A group of men left the fortified Center dragging two girls. They were naked and could barely move.
I snarled, and Grady grabbed my arm.
The men threw the girls into one of the bottom cages. They dragged another from the cage, and I raised the SWAT rifle.
“Oh shit,” Grady muttered as I put a round through the left eye of the guy who was dragging the woman from the cage.
Grady shot another, and I motioned for him to go up inside the building to our left. “Once you reach the top, let me know, and I’ll join you.”
I shot the third and fourth as Grady ran the stairs. When he shot the last man in the group, I headed up the stairs, Jimmy by my side.
A speaker on the outside of the building buzzed.
“Alright, that’s about enough of that! Who the hell are you, and why are you shooting my boys?”
The actions I took finally caught up with me.
“Now what, Boss?”
“Shit.”
“You really gotta stop doing things like this,” Grady said.
“You would’ve if I hadn’t,” I said.
“Probably,” he answered.
The voice on the speaker spoke again, “I have forty armed men in here, whoever you are! We have enough slaves in here to keep us going for weeks! If you think you can get to those slaves in the pens, you’re sadly mistaken!”
A shot rang out from the Center, and the woman the men had been trying to drag out toppled.
“Bastard.”
“Now you either back out of here and leave us be or we’ll kill all of them! If you want to try to come in here…well, come get some!”
“Would you like for me to go get some, Zee?”
I turned to look at Jimmy, who had a completely serious look on his face.
“This is what I’m made for, Zee,” he said.
“Can you get that gate open?”
“Certainly.”
I looked at Grady who was looking at me with a “what the hell” look.
“Alright, Jimmy,” I said. “Go get some.”
As I watched Jimmy jump from a two story building to the street below, I had a feeling there just might be a way to bring some justice to this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 8
“Jesus Christ!”
I fully understood the reaction from Grady. I’d seen the aftermath of an Agent during the wars. Seeing one in action was surreal.
Jimmy was across the clearing so fast I could barely track him. Then he went up the side of that building like a monkey. They’d armored three stories. Jimmy went through a window on the fourth floor.
Like the night he showed up, the screams began. I heard shots, but not many.
“We gotta get to the gate.”
“Yep,” Grady answered, and we ran back down the stairs.
There was still a lot of noise from the building but no one shot us as we ran across the clearing. People in the cages were standing at the doors watching bodies begin flying out the windows. They impacted the bars hard enough to send bars and broken bodies both into the street. He was on the second floor.
The gate opened, and fleeing bandits were met with fire from two riot guns. There was a thought of mercy, but it was fleeting as I remembered the charnel house and two battered women.
Dropping the empty shotgun, I drew my .45 and shot two more before they turned to run back inside.
There were more screams.
Then one form walked out the door. His arms were soaked with blood up to the elbows. There was blood on his t-shirt. You couldn’t see the blood on his black slacks.
“Probably should wear black,” Jimmy said.
“Damn it, Jimmy.”
“Gate’s open,” he said.
Grady looked inside the door. “Damn it, Jimmy.”
“Let’s clear the rest of the building,” I said.
“It’s clear,” Jimmy said. “Figured it was easier to just clear it on the way down.”
“Top floor?”
“That’s where prisoners are kept. I killed the guards but haven’t opened the doors yet.”
He tapped the side of his head. “Jimmy thinks you should do that part. I’ll clear the rest of the area.”
I nodded.
Grady and I went through every room on our way to the top of the building. Sure enough, there were no living raiders. There were bodies, guns, knives, and holes in the side of the building where windows used to be.
“What the hell did they do to him?” Grady asked.
“No one actually knows,” I said. “They used nanotech, biotech, and any other tech they could. Who knows what went into the Agents? I just know what the aftermath looks like.”
We reached the last two bodies. They had been standing guard on a door with several locks. I busted the locks with the butt of the SWAT rifle and opened the door. The whole upper floor was open and there were people scattered from one end to the other. This used to be four huge courtrooms, and they’d knocked down the walls between the rooms.
“I’m glad we have Jimmy,” he said. “I don’t think the two of us could have done it.”
“Some of these folks are going to need Doc,” I said. “I need you to go take one of their cars and get to the Farm as fast as you can. We need everyone to help get all these people out of here. There has to be a hundred and fifty or more in the cages and thirty or forty up here.”
“I’m on it,” he said and ran back down the stairs.
The women and children huddled in the corners, watching me. Others were chained to various devices. I wished Jimmy had left some of the raiders alive so I could kill them again.
“We’re here to rescue you,” I said. I went to the first torture device and carefully started unhooking it from the young woman who was bleeding from a number of cuts.
“A-Are you r-r-really here to rescue us?” she stammered.
“Damn right I am.”
I pointed to one of the other women. “You.”
She jerked.
“Help get these ladies off the damn racks.” I pointed at another. “You help her. Hell, everyone help get them down.”
They were slow to start releasing the others, but, after the first one was removed from the torture rack and I didn’t harm them, they all pitched in. The stronger women helped me bring the weaker down the stairs. I had thought the blood and death would bother them, but I actually saw smiles on many faces as they recognized their captors.
Jimmy met us at the bottom. He was accompanied by a bearded man who looked intently at the faces as they exited the building. He was almost panicking until he saw the young woman I was carrying. She was the one with all the cuts.
“D-Deli?”
“Daddy?” the girl in my arms asked.
“What have they done to you, Deli?”
“I’m okay now, Daddy,” she said. “These men saved us all.”
* * *
“They’re in rough shape, Zee,” Doc said. “A couple aren’t going to make it.”
I frowned.
“Even with the medication we found, I can’t save them,” he said. “Three of them have sepsis and are dying. Internal injuries are the worst thing. Even if I could do a surgery, it wouldn’t help.”
I leaned my head back against the headrest on the chair as he spoke. “Save the ones you can, Doc.”
“I’ll do my best, Zee,” he said.
“I know you will, Doc,” I said. “You always do.”
He nodded and left the room I was using to command the operation. First, we had to get these people patched up. Then we could move them back to the Farm. How did the world get so bad in so little time? I knew humanity was always on the verge of barbarism, but less than a year, and there was cannibalism and torture, slavery and rape. How did we fall so quickly? This had once been the greatest country in the world.
What were good people to do in this Fallen World?
* * * * *
Chapter 9
“She has a total of thirty-seven different cuts, Zee,” Doc said. “I stitched them up but this girl has been through hell. She’s lost a lot of blood. We need to find a donor or she’s going to die.”
“What’s her blood type?”
“O negative.”
“She’s a universal donor? Good for others, not so good for her. But she may be in luck, I’m O positive,” I said and rolled my shirt sleeve up. “Let’s get to it.”
“I hoped you would say that,” he said. “It’s rare, but I knew both you and Jimmy are the right blood type. Unfortunately, there’s no telling what they’ve done to his.”
“Very true.” I nodded.
I always hated donating blood but this was something that needed to be done. Delilah Chaney had suffered more than any person should have. She deserved a chance to survive this.
The process didn’t take very long, and Doc returned to his patient. I felt light-headed. He’d taken a good bit of blood.
“You go drink something,” he said. “And eat some meat to rebuild yourself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t be a smartass.” He waved me off and returned his attention to the young woman. “What the hell were they doing to these people?”
“Just about any awful thing they could imagine,” I answered. “Gonna be hard for these people to come back from what those animals did to them.”
“There’s truth to that,” he said. “What are you going to do with them?”
“I guess I’ll make them an offer.”
He nodded as I rolled my sleeve back down over the small bandage.
I looked one more time at the battered girl and shook my head. This was ridiculous. How did it happen so quickly?
I walked from the room and made my way to the center of the square.
“Listen up, people!”
The people spread around the square turned to me.
“You folks have some decisions to make!” I yelled. “We’re going to help any of the injured we can. By the time we treat them, you’ll need to make a decision. We’ll turn the town back over to you, no questions asked. But if we see the same kind of shit from you people, I swear I’ll burn it to the ground with you in it.”
I had their attention. “Now there is different option you can choose. If you come back with us, there will be plenty of food, and we’ll see to it that there will be shelters built. This option comes with a few rules. We are farmers. There are crops to plant and harvest, and our machines are dead. If you come with us, everyone works. You’ll work every day, just as we do, but you’ll eat every day too. That’s Rule Number One.”
“Rule Number Two!” I said while pointing toward them. “This world is an unforgiving bitch and I will teach you how to stand in it instead of be stood upon. We’ll teach you to fight, and we’ll put weapons in your hands. And the most important thing about this is, everyone fights! Every person on our farms is trained or is in training to defend them. If you come to join us you will be expected to do no less than the rest of us.”
I looked out on people who had been enslaved, watched their neighbors eaten, probably been fed those same neighbors, and lived the last four months in cages. They were hurt and some of them broken, but I could see a gleam in several sets of eyes that gave me hope. We would train them to never be victims again.
“As I said, you have about a day and a half to decide what you’ll do. We’ll have several vehicles coming in within the next hour or so with enough to get your bellies full. We’re heavy on vegetables and light on meat but I think you’ll all feel a little better after dinner.”
I felt that rage inside again as I saw some of the haunted looks as I said the word meat. If I could kill the group that had been holding them in cages again, I would.
* * *
The man who had been waiting outside with Jimmy when we came out of the Justice Center was the one who came back to see me a little over an hour later.
“We can never thank you enough for what you have already done,” he said. “I used to be the mayor and I failed my city. I thought we could deal with those animals. They made bargains then they took more and more from us. Finally, it became what you saw here.”
He pointed back toward the Justice Center.
“I don’t deserve the trust these people gave me, and I certainly don’t deserve the position they have placed me in.” He shrugged his shoulders then they slumped in misery. “They still look to me for leadership, and I can’t give it to them. I told them what I planned to do, and they all agreed. We would join you if you’ll let us, after what we’ve done. I told them I would tell you all of it before going back with you. You need to know what we’ve done.”
“You survived,” I said.
“But we…we ate…”
“I know.” I stopped him. “I figured that the moment I saw the cages. They made you?”
“We could have refused,” he said in despair. “We should have refused.”
“You survived.”
“At what cost?”
“Hopefully, one you can live with,” I said. “Because I won’t lie to you. We need people at the farms. We need growers, we need workers, and we need fighters. Most of all, we need survivors.”
“We’ll come with you,” he said. “And burn this place to the ground on our way out.”
I looked back toward Justice Center. “That might be for the best.”
“What do you know of my daughter, Deli?”
“Doc’s watching her closely,” I said. “She improved a great deal after the transfusion.”
“Transfusion?”
“She’d lost a lot of blood.”
“That’s why your doctor asked my blood type?”
“Yes.”
“She has one that’s hard to find donors,” he said.
“There was one that worked.”
“Can you tell me who it is so I can thank them?”
“I’d rather keep it confidential,” I said. “But Doc is going to need to keep a register so he knows who to go to in the future. Right now there’s no way to store blood without any electricity. All the fuel would go pretty quickly if we tried to use generators.”
“Understood,” he said. “If you know the donor, please thank them for me.”
“I’ll let Doc know.”
“Thank you.”
He turned to go.
“What’s your name, Mayor?”
“Sampson Chaney.”
“You’re Sampson, and you named your daughter Delilah?”
“My wife’s idea.”
“She out there?” I motioned toward the door.
“She passed before all of this, thank God,” he said. “She was such a sweet woman. She wouldn’t have done well in this place. Not that we’ve done too well, ourselves.”
He walked out the door and closed it behind him.
My thoughts went to Neave and her father. There is no lack of people who will struggle to adapt to life in this Fallen World.
