Thanks to the two ditches, when Kyle sealed off 231, there was no way around the block.
The lead sedan, a familiar Chevy with the black letters “PV” spray-painted on the front doors, waited too long to slow down and ended up screeching to a wobbly stop. The other cars did the same – the fourth car actually rammed the rear bumper of the third. Their doors flew open and 16 men in PV uniforms leapt out, waving their rifles and swearing in incoherent rage at the “cracker motherfucker” driving the truck blocking their way.
The rear truck slowed down too, and turned to position itself to block the way back north. The PVs, eyes fixed south, did not notice.
Turnbull aimed, exhaled, and fired a burst of 7.62 millimeter rounds at the targets 75 meters down and to his front.
The rest of the Kalashnikovs lit up, and then the other weapons too. Glass shattered, steel punctured, tires blew out, and the concrete exploded in a hundred tiny eruptions.
Turnbull’s first burst caught a short PV who had been looking up at the tree line while the others were shouting at the trucker. One of Turnbull’s guiding principles was to always try to kill the smart ones first. Whether or not the guy had actually figured out that this was a trap was a moot point; three rounds sunk hard into his chest and sluiced out his back, splattering blood and chunks across the concrete.
He didn’t fall right away, though; that took a second burst, which caught him in the shoulder, then the throat, then the chin, and then the forehead in rapid succession. That fusillade finally convinced him to sprawl on his back and die, freeing Turnbull to seek his second target, a skinny one sprinting for cover in the far ditch. His next burst of fire tore up the unlucky Volunteer’s spine like a series of five little red volcanos.
Skinny’s bladder and his legs were freed from their slavery to his faraway brain when Turnbull’s rounds severed his spinal column. His legs went in opposite directions as his sphincter relaxed. Skinny collapsed face-first in the dirt of the soft shoulder, his urine turning it to mud, his dignity taken along with his life.
Everyone was firing down the line, though fire from the AKs slackened as they ran their first magazines dry. Turnbull dropped his mag and inserted a fresh one, then sought a new target.
Was that Do-Rag there, near the front of the second car, with crazy, panicked eyes? He had no weapon, having dropped it when the shooting started. It turned out that it’s scary when they shoot back at you. Turnbull took aim center mass and pulled the trigger. Nothing. It was jammed. The former PV rifle was apparently trying to help out its former owners.
Do-Rag turned and bolted east, toward the open field. He didn’t stop at the ditch – he leaped over it and sprinted.
Do-Rag was getting away. No time to clear the AK.
“Sergeant, can I borrow your rifle for a second?” Turnbull asked.
“It’s almost dry,” Banks replied, handing it over without any questions.
“Oh, I only need one shot,” Turnbull said. Banks shrugged. He turned toward the man on his other side and began directing his teammate’s fire at the few targets still standing down on the road.
Turnbull lay flat and took up the heavy rifle. Banks was using iron sights, so Turnbull did it the old-fashioned way. He put the front sight post on Do-Rag’s back as the PV ran away and aligned it. Maybe a 200 meter shot on a moving target. Hard, but not that hard.
Turnbull exhaled and pulled. The trigger broke unexpectedly and the gun sounded like a howitzer as the .308 round streaked out of the barrel.
Do-Rag looked like someone had hit him in the lower back with a pile driver. He was down for good.
“Here’s your gun,” Turnbull said, handing it back and assessing the situation. There was still some shooting, but nothing was moving down there.
“Cease fire!” he yelled. Langer and Banks and then the rest of them picked up the “Cease fire” call, and the firing ceased.
Drawing his .45, he got on his feet. “Assault! Let’s go!” he cried, and he and most of the shooters charged down the embankment into the corpse-strewn kill zone.
Turnbull crossed the ditch and hit the asphalt, his pistol up, seeking targets. Nothing. Movement right – Turnbull pivoted. Kyle stepped forward from over near the ditch, AR15 in hand.
“I shot two that were hiding in the ditch,” he said. He looked shaken and uncertain.
“You did good,” Turnbull said.
“There’s one alive in that car, I think,” Kyle said.
“Did you shoot –” Turnbull began, but the PV in the car was upright now with an AK and he was firing. Three slugs slammed into Kyle’s side; the young man, stunned, dropped his AR15 and fell.
Turnbull was on the shooter and firing fast, two handed, the rounds ejecting out of his action as fast as he could pull the trigger. He was scoring hits. The PV twisted and shuddered under the impacts, and he fell back out of the driver’s door onto the pavement.
Turnbull’s slide was locked back and he dropped his mag and reloaded the Wilson with the one with three rounds left after he had blasted out the hospital door.
He glanced right and Kyle was there on the concrete, pale and coughing as he bled out. Two of his friends were with him, and Banks was coming fast.
Turnbull came around the vehicle and found the PV leader, his chest riddled with .45 slugs, twitching on his back. The hyphen in “D-Yazzy” on his hamper-fresh concert tee had been obliterated by one of Turnbull’s hollow points.
“I told you that if you came back here we’d kill you all,” Turnbull said evenly. The dying leader’s eye went wide and Turnbull shot him right between them. Then he walked west toward the field.
“Kelly!” shouted Banks. Turnbull raised his empty hand, waved him off and kept walking through the grass. Banks went back to his business in the kill zone. From behind him, Turnbull heard the loud report of a big handgun. Langer was taking care of loose ends too.
Do-Rag had run a good distance and, from the blood trail, managed to crawl another few meters after taking the slug. Not bad for a guy with a .308 crater where his spleen used to live.
Do-Rag was on his face in the dirt. Turnbull put his boot on the man’s rib cage and kicked him over onto his back. Do-Rag groaned. It was not clear if he recognized his tormentor.
“Fuck you,” Turnbull said and shot him in the face.
Turnbull walked back across the field, now shaking in anger. He noticed the intense ringing in his ears from all the firing. That only made him angrier.
They didn’t get it yet. They didn’t get what war was, and that misunderstanding of its fundamentally brutal nature would get them killed.
He leapt over the ditch and was back on the road. The guerrillas were gathering up guns and ammo from the dead. Banks was talking to two men holding something heavy wrapped in a blanket – Kyle.
He caught movement to his right as he passed the lead car. One last wounded PV was trying to crawl under the Chevy. Turnbull causally fired his last round into the back of his head, and a pair of the local guerrillas just stared, horrified.
“What?” asked Turnbull. “You wanted war right? That’s fucking guerrilla war. If you can’t take it, go back to being the PR’s bitches!”
He noticed the slide on his .45 was open, his last mag empty.
“Does anyone have any .45?” he bellowed. “I’m fucking out!”
10.
Lieutenant Kessler was in her office with the door closed, one hand holding a Starbucks cup, the other the phone. She was doing substantially more listening than talking.
Cannon watched her through her glass window, as inconspicuously as possible, from the squad room – but then, everyone was trying to watch her without being caught watching.
He had been called back to the station at 9:33 p.m. along with everyone else – Cannon had a suspicion about why, but it was not until he got back to the station that he learned that four carloads of People’s Volunteers had been wiped out on Route 231 not ten miles north of town. He wasn’t sure how he felt, especi
ally knowing that his information probably led to it, but he had heard whispers about what the PVs intended to do to punish the locals for the sniping, and he knew exactly how he would have felt about that.
As a real cop, it was hard for him to accept that he just didn’t care.
It was obvious Kessler cared, but only about her own hide. The PVs were expendable – that and the deniability the ostensibly extra-governmental PSF provided the authorities were precisely why they were so useful for getting rough with the recalcitrant citizenry. But sixteen dead? That was clearly raising questions, and Cannon watched through the window as, inside her office, Kessler tried to answer them.
Outside, in the nearly empty squad room, the few remaining PSF officers who were not cleaning up the bloodbath out on 231 were scared – there was no other word for it. A week before, the station’s reinforcements had swaggered around town, unchallenged, unconstrained. But now? The locals were fighting back, and they hadn’t signed up for that.
First, the Langers had waxed three of them. Then the sniper attacks. Now Unit 71 and two officers had just vanished, gone, poof. They were sitting on the side of the 231 near the river the prior afternoon, then suddenly they weren’t there anymore – they weren’t anywhere anymore. Not a trace. They probably pulled their GPS unit and skipped town, but who knew? And then this massacre, out in the open, right there on the main road into town.
It was not supposed to be like this. The People’s Security Force was supposed to be in control.
But if these guerrillas – yeah, that’s what they were, and there was no denying it anymore – could wax a whole bunch of PVs, they could do the same to a whole bunch of PSF officers. It was just a matter of time.
“Screw this town. I am done with this shit,” one blue told another as Cannon sat nearby. The officer was in his mid-twenties, with a scraggly little beard and the mutton-chop sideburns favored by recent college grads. He had been transferred into town with the other reinforcements and made no secret of the fact that he despised the locals. Cannon had often seen him come back into the station from patrol with cargo pockets full of candy bars that he had liberated from the old 7-11.
“I can quit, go back to Chicago and get on assistance and make almost this much and not get shot at by these backwoods bunnyfuckers,” replied Candy Bandit’s partner. Candy Bandit nodded.
On the operations wall, two officers were tacking up a large map of Dubois County and the surrounding region. They then began to work on it with colored pens.
From the dispatch area, a radio call came in, and the squad room fell silent. “This is Unit 27 – they’re shooting at us! Shit! They’re shooting at us!” The GPS monitor display showed Unit 27 was on a rural road southwest of Jasper outside of a little town called Duff and hauling ass, doing maybe seventy.
“We’re past them! Over,” called Unit 27 in a female voice. Even via the radio, the squad room could hear that she was breathing heavily, which did not surprise Cannon. She was short but weighed in at about 200 pounds – 90 kilograms, since the metric system was now mandatory – and she had been hired under the PSF’s “Heft-Positive” quota program that was designed to allow people of girth into the ranks following the elimination of the discriminatory physical fitness standards that had previously excluded so many of the alternatively capable.
“The PSF has no higher priority than crushing fatism!” Kessler had informed the ranks at one of her first briefings. All of the local deputies and even some of the transferees had snickered at her unfortunate formulation.
Now Kessler was coming out of her office, her face fierce, charging to the dispatcher. She grabbed the hand mic.
“Unit 27, investigate and apprehend the shooter, over!”
There was a pause – no one in the squad room said a word.
“Uh, say again, over?”
“Stop your vehicle and arrest them!”
“Uh, I can’t because…,” the voice began and then there was screeching and static-like sounds.
“Is she making those interference noises?” wondered Cannon, and everyone else.
Kessler was shouting now. “Unit 27, come in!”
More fake static.
Kessler threw the hand mic across the room, except it was connected by a wire and bounced back, hitting her in the chest. She stomped back toward her office.
Cannon noticed Kunstler of the People’s Bureau of Investigation, apparently just returned from the ambush site, watching from the shadows. He was holding a sheet of paper, and taking in the scene.
Sergeant Greely walked over to Candy Bandit and his pal. “You two, get rolling out there.”
“Hell no,” Candy Bandit said. “I’m not going outside of town. They’ll shoot us!”
“I said get out there!” shouted the sergeant.
“I’m not going! I quit!”
Kunstler approached and stood by Greely.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“I, I –” Candy Bandit began.
“You said you quit. Did I hear that correctly? You quit?”
“I just…I can’t,” the officer stammered.
“Can’t what?” asked Kunstler
“They’ll kill us!” Candy Bandit cried.
“You’re not willing to die for the People’s Republic? Is that what you are saying?” The entire squad room was watching now. Kessler came out of her office and watched too. Candy Bandit’s eyes darted frantically around the room.
“Look, if you go out into Indian Country, they’ll kill you!”
“Indian Country? Is that what you and your friends call it? So you’re racist too?”
“No, it’s just…other people call it that. I –”
“So, are you comparing Native Americans to criminal terrorists? Using an illegal stereotype in order to justify your criminal insubordination?”
“That’s not true!”
“Are you insulting President Warren as well? Wasn’t one of the racists’ lies before the Split based on attacking her Indigenous Peoples’ heritage?”
Candy Bandit couldn’t get any more words out. He just sat back in his chair at the desk, terrified.
“Take his weapon, Sergeant.” The sergeant reached down and pulled the Beretta from the quivering officer’s holster.
“Please,” whimpered Candy Bandit.
“Take him into custody,” Kunstler said. The sergeant nodded at Candy Bandit’s partner, who helped hustle the pleading prisoner back to the holding cells. Kunstler walked over to Kessler, who said nothing, and handed her the sheet of paper. She started reading it.
“These are the actions we are taking. We are going to put a stop to this, regardless of what it takes.” He turned and walked back to his office. Kessler kept reading.
Cannon’s eyes moved back to the map as a pair of officers were coloring it in with markers. They had colored everything except the city of Jasper itself in bright red.
Turnbull and Langer sat in the living room of one of Jasper’s many zombie houses, the homes abandoned in the dead of night by the owners who had fled south to the USA post-Split. It was comfortable, if a bit dusty. The power was still on, since the PR had decreed that electricity was a human right and no one at the newly nationalized People’s Power Cooperative had any incentive to make the effort to turn it off.
Turnbull was cleaning one of the 9 millimeter Berettas he had liberated from the PVs. Without any .45 rounds – why the hell no one had any .45 rounds was beyond him – his tricked out Wilson was just a brick. But there was plenty of nine mil. He had five mags full.
“I don’t understand why these people can’t clean a weapon to save their lives,” Turnbull snorted.
“I guess cuz you don’t get a participation trophy for taking care of your gear,” Langer suggested. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Turnbull said, releasing the slide.
“You seemed a little out of sorts.”
“Are we sharing our feelings now, Langer?”
“See, I go
t a reason to kill these sons of bitches after what they did. But you? Why are you even here?”
“To help you people help yourselves.”
“Yeah,” said Langer. “But you know, whenever the government sends someone to help people like us, they aren’t really coming to help people like us.”
Turnbull stopped wiping the pistol for a moment and looked over.
“No, when the government sends people to help us,” Langer continued. “It’s really trying to help itself.”
“I don’t work for your government,” Turnbull said.
“No, maybe not, but you work for a government, and in the end they’re all more the same than different, if you get my meaning.”
“I can’t make you people do anything you don’t want to do,” Turnbull said.
“No, I reckon not. And sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. But I know where this ends for a not-so-nice guy like me. I’m just not sure where it ends for all these nice people who are fighting your war for you.”
“Their war,” Turnbull said.
“Yeah, their war. But you’re more than happy for them to be having it.”
“My personal happiness doesn’t matter,” Turnbull snarled.
“No, but I’m just wondering how you want it to end, if you even do. I figure I’m going to keep taking payback until one day they surround me and I go down fighting. That’s okay with me – it ain’t like I’m throwing away any great future. I always figured I was gonna end up in jail or bleeding out on a barroom floor with a knife in my liver anyway. But these folks? Do they think if they cap some PVs and some PSF eventually the PR’s just going to let them be? Just gonna walk away and say bygones are bygones? How’s this end? And why’d the USA decide to send you up here?”
“I didn’t say I came from the red.”
Indian Country Page 16
