Rage & Fury

by Darryl Hadfield

  “Ry, don’t fuck up.” I was still not sure about him, but… we’ll see.

  “We go any further, you shits better not fuck with me. I’m the boss, and I got this shit planned. Easy was gonna be in on it but he decided to share plans I didn’t want shared. Got it?”

  “Yeah, got it, makes sense. I’m cool.” Fathead was never going to be the problem.

  “Me too, agreed man.” Neither was Pug, not after his first response.

  Ry just nodded.

  “Sorry man, not good enough. Need to hear you say it.”

  He looked at me with a strange look on his face, nodded again… and added, “no probs from me boss.”

  We took a walk for a few miles more, and I watched them out of the corner of my eyes, seeing their reaction to walking past the schools with huge yards and play shit outside, the buildings that had been stores, restaurants, etc… mostly all ravaged now, but you could tell there was still stuff inside.

  “Man, why’n’t anyone ever raid this shit before??” Fathead was, clearly, not all that bright all the time.

  “And how are they gonna carry all that shit all the way to where they’re building that arkscraper? Why’s anyone gonna bother when the arkies will make their shit, throw away what’s left, that everyone collects and sells back to them?” It was hard not to talk like he was stupid, but I tried anyway. “And, for what it’s worth, we’re gonna start scrounging and storing it, and make only periodic trips over to sell what we decide to sell. Look at how it’s a good thing, not a bad thing."

  The look on their faces when we got to within sight of the big park on the other side of Broadway, though, was priceless. All that space, not used for anything, was like another Central Park – but one that we were WAY closer to. That might not seem like a big deal, but that much space was damn useful for stuff like practicing with crossbows, rifles, and the muskets that were getting popular as rifle ammo got more and more scarce.

  Their jaws really dropped, though, when we got to the Safe House. I told them to wait, and walked around back, fishing between my ass cheeks to pull the key out.. (Hey, I TOLD you it was a place no-one would ever look!) and then came back around front, unlocking the door and walking inside as they followed me. We closed and bolted the door when inside. No, I didn’t jam that fucking key up my ass again – I cleaned it off and it went on a small chain around my neck.

  The majority of the place was kind of messy; Easy and I hadn’t exactly focused on keeping the place tidy, so there were tools laying around – hammers and saws, other wood working shit since we’d been restructuring the interior (remember the mantrap, among other things). That was no biggie though, since the building Pip’s gang lived in wasn’t any kinda maid service either.

  I showed them through the house so they knew what was what. The room with the big table next to the kitchen was going to be our central command area. The bedroom upstairs was going to be my private space, and they got to choose rooms for themselves too. The place was big enough that us, as the people who were running the gang we were going to build, got comfortable digs – WAY more comfortable than we’d ever seen or heard of before.

  The real jaw dropper, though, was when I showed them into the basement, with all the gear stacked and in racks. With them standing there, I dropped the stuff I’d been wearing, and pulled out a new set of the black splotchy uniforms and pulled it on, adjusting it for my size. Fortunately, having grown as much as I had, it now fit pretty good. This time, I also grabbed boots – and when the first pair didn’t fit, I tried another one from a different stack, and they did.

  The others did likewise, and I continued looking around – and the new boots, unfamiliar on my feet, snagged on a small piece of metal embedded in the floor. There was what was obviously a handle, that I reached down and pulled, to open the door in the floor… and saw more boxes. Whatever. There were several of these, each with a smaller room below, that I had boxes with writing on them. I had no idea what it said – first item of business was to get Fathead to teach me how to read that shit. For now, though…

  “Hey Fathead, what’s this stuff say?”

  He looked, and got really excited… yelling and happy and shit.

  “The fuck dude? What is it?” I asked, a second time.

  “Dude… this is AMMO! Grenades! There’s shit here I didn’t even know existed anymore!” He was pretty wild about it, and I had to calm him down before he jizzed himself.”

  “Fine, whatever. Let’s address it later, we’re *ALL* going to be rigged out with this shit – because we’re going to take over the whole goddamned island. For now, I need to know more about it so I can figure out the best way for us to use it.”

  He laughed, still obviously excited – his excitement contagious to both Ry and Pug now, too, since they obviously caught on that we now had more powerful weapons at our disposal than damn near anyone short of the actual army.

  I’m not gonna bore you with all of the details that we went through – not just because it was so damn long ago I can’t always remember the details, but also because they’d just be fuckin’ boring.

  I learned to read. Not great, but enough to get by. I learned a bit more about math, too, since I needed to know more than just simple counting. That stuff was easy, and never really got into the hard topics – I did that later.

  We steered clear of any kind of actual battle; we focused on finding lone-wolf types and smaller groups (but not really gangs) that were out on their own, but wanted more security. Over the course of the next year or so, we went from just the four of us, to 6, to 7, to 13, to 20, to 30, to 50… As we grew, we consolidated our holdings, and branched out to surrounding buildings, gaining a bit more attention, but never really seeing any major attacks from the gangs found in the core Manhattan island area, right around the growing arkscrapers. We grew slowly and steadily, and stayed out of the Manhattan area, and out of sight of the arkscrapers.

  This was an odd way to grow, compared to most of the other gangs, and while in some ways it was harder, in other ways, it was far easier.

  We didn’t rely on the Arkscraper-centric economy; we grew our own food. Things had changed from how they were a hundred years ago – it was actually pretty nice, year-round. Sure, it got to be a bit chillier in the winter months, but only at night, and it meant you just had to wear sleeves rolled down, instead of rolled-up – or instead of wearing nothing at all. Storage was a bit problematic, but the SafeHouse – which we took to calling “headquarters” – had another room below, one that we didn’t discover till we’d been living there for a few weeks. This other room was generally cold, being underground, and it was a good place to store food that we grew. That was limited, but it worked for us at the time.

  We didn’t engage in any kind of significant trade with the arkies, either, since there was no point – things were still so isolated out here that a lot of stuff that people wanted, we could simply walk into houses and take. We didn’t need them at all.

  Security? Bub, you’re kidding, right? We were the best-armed group of people for hundreds of miles, except for only the armies that the government was still scared witless about using, despite the modifications to the Posse Comitatus law prohibiting it – there was talk about setting up a police-force specifically for the arkscrapers, but I doubted it’d ever go anywhere. While our training wasn’t great, just the material difference between automatic rifles and semi-automatic pistols, vs. the knives, muskets, and occasional semi-automatic rifles meant that nothing short of the army was going to push us out. With a retarded amount of ammunition (it turns out we had something like a million rounds for the rifles, and about a quarter of that much again for the pistols) even the army itself was going to find that we were no pushover – especially if they found out that we also had armor to protect us from their bullets.

  The training was an issue that I never did get around to addressing, but then again, by the time I was in a position to do something about it, that problem had already solved it
self.

  The biggest thing I want to mention about this timeframe was the preparations we made.

  Just like the dude who bought and prepositioned all the supplies in what we now called Headquarters, we wanted to make sure we were solid against all comers. This was a part of why I needed to learn to read – there were books here; the guy who stocked the place knew he didn’t know everything, so he had a ton of books, and I wanted the knowledge in them.

  Some might have figured it was just boss-man being lazy, but as I learned how to read, and always had Fathead close-by so I could get help on some of the other words I wasn’t familiar with, I began to consume all of the information I could get my hands on.

  A lot of the stuff was fake, just made-up stories, but some of it was weapons-specific (“This publication provides the framework and techniques for conducting pistol training; the components and cycle of function for the M17 service pistol; it’s characteristics, equipment, and ammunition”) and I wanted to know that stuff cold.

  More importantly, there were instruction booklets in a lot of this stuff. Grenades were okay, but kind of strange to me – they were a lot like the bombs that people would lob out of the buildings surrounding the arkscrapers. I didn’t really like them. Claymores on the other hand, I fuckin’ loved! Those things were utter hell. We didn’t use any up except for a couple when we were learning how to use them, but wow! We set up claymores all around the headquarters building, and wired them up to my room – I could retreat there and blow the fuck out of anyone trying to get in.

  Some of the books were about training for using specific equipment, but there were a few books that were even better than the manuals and instructions for the gear we had. Some guys called the green berts (what the hell is a bert?) had built up a kind of manual on how to use stuff you could find laying around to turn into traps and weapons! (maybe that’s why these guys were so special – they had figure out all this stuff and were just general all-around bad-asses.

  We used it, oh god, did we use it. We learned how to make Nitroglycerin; we figured out how to make gunpowder, we learned how to make guns… Why? We had a bunch of really cool ones already! Yeah, well, those wouldn’t last forever, and I wanted a LOT more than just 30 guys with guns.

  There was one book that stood out, though, and while it had some stuff that was totally useless to us, it was also better than a stack of dollars taller than me: The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It had lots of the same kind of stuff as the green berts, but it also had some really nasty other stuff – how to make poisons, how to fuck up people you really hated… that book was second only to Rage as far as my important shit was concerned. A lot of it was similar to the green bert books, but a lot of it was the kind of stuff you needed, before the green bert books got really useful. We had fuses (which was confusing at first because they weren’t stored with the other stuff, “Semtex” – they were stored in one of the ammo bunkers instead) but the Anarchist’s cookbook showed us how we could raid kitchens and stores for supplies to make more fuses, and more kinds of fuses.

  There was one other thing we did that no-one else ever figured out, outside the arkscrapers: We had power, ELECTRICAL power. Apparently, all those people taking old engines and motors back to the tennies to cut up and sell to the arkies to recycle, were screwing themselves. While you could get limited electrical power outside the arkscrapers, Fathead found out that the electrical motors worked two ways – you could put electricity in one side, and you got a spinning motor out the other; you could also spin the motor mechanically, and electricity would come out the other side. Somehow, he was always able to figure out which motors we could do that with, and which ones we couldn’t (because they didn’t all work like that), just by reading the label on them.

  It took us some trial-and-error but we figured out how we could leverage enough motors to power a house –which meant we started extending our days into the darkness hours. One more step on the path towards fucking up those assholes living in the arkscrapers. No, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here…

  Chapter 5: Growing up. No, really growing up.

  We needed more space. Headquarters was good for me and my guys – Fathead wasn’t really a gang leader, but he worked closely with all of us on “gadget” stuff; Ry and Pug had their own collections of streetgangers who were ALL combinations of both scrounger and fighters – but we really needed more space.

  Fortunately, there was lots of it – all around us. We’d already mostly demolished the houses immediately next to headquarters, as well as the houses across the street – HQ became the only house on our block; the only other nearby buildings were a smaller apartment to the south, with a warehouse kinda place past that, a school to the north, and some other stuff beyond it all.

  Bottom line, we tore down damn near all of the other houses in the area, to get the materials we needed to refresh HQ and make it even stronger; we also needed those materials – boards, stones, bricks, windows, you name it.. for expanding stuff inside the warehouse and inside the school. The school (and, yeah, a few other places) were where we expanded things… it meant we had our people closer, which made defense easier, but it also meant that we had better “lines of fire” (Reading was tedious but I learned some amazing shit from the books that the previous owners left in the house!).

  How’d we do it? We found a store that had shelves inside a locked area at the back (you wouldn’t believe how fast a bit of that Semtex stuff and a fuse goes through a locked door!) that had… tools. Yeah, TOOLS. Hammers, small ones, big ones… saws – some that had cords on ‘em, but we didn’t really have much in the way of power that would make those work – we stuck with the hand saws.. Pry bars, crowbars… It was like someone had put this shit there, locked it up and then left it, waiting, for us to show up. Creepy in one sense, but I know there’d been no-one around for a long time because the layers of undisturbed dust were thick on everything.

  So yeah, that got us the tools, but doesn’t really describe how we managed to get useful shit out of the houses we were tearing down. Trial and error, mostly did it. The windows were the big thing; it’s hard to get a window out without trashing it. Other stuff like pipes, boards, bricks… you always ended up damaging or destroying some, as a part of starting to cut that stuff out of the existing houses, but we didn’t care – we had a bunch of places we could always start on next, when it came time to pick up more stuff we needed.

  Mostly it was just about getting stuff torn down; I didn’t want to be in a place like how we were back by the ‘scrapers. Everything was cramped and squeezed and it meant that if a bunch of tennie soldiers wanted a nice easy way to kill us, they already had it. Normally, we’d do the same thing here.. except, we had way better weapons and it made sense to use that in the wide-open spaces, since we didn’t have to use shitty muskets. It worked both ways, too – when you have all kinds of stuff in the way, you’re easier to trap – but it’s also easier to sneak up on you.

  By this point, we’d buried (“Emplaced” was the term the book used) the claymore things around the HQ building – and the little training manual said they were good for about 100 meters. That took us a bit of figuring out, Fathead and me – turns out a meter is about the same as the yard, which was about the same length as the football field we had not too far away in the school yard. Fathead seemed to get it pretty easily, but I needed the visual example. Once I had that, yeah, it was a no-duh kind of moment; we put up claymores all around the house and it meant anyone dumb enough to take us on was just gonna come and break their balls on our walls, before we lit up the claymores and killed them like dumping a bag of puppies into a river.

  The other stuff we got, we used to reinforce windows and doors in the buildings we kept… Any good shit we found, all went to the warehouse, which we now had a solid group of fighters watching all the time, day and night.

  We had our scroungers, too, but I wasn’t stupid like Pip – you gotta be a fighter first, then you can be a scrounger when you’re
not working on guard shit. That third group, the tits ‘n ass? Yeah, we had those too, but they had to work, they couldn’t just sit on their asses while someone else did all the work for them. We found a couple of people who knew about food… now this part just weirded me right out: You can put shit in the ground and it turns into food. Fuckin’ magic, I tell ya. We had some of the T&A girls watching that because they weren’t really great fighters, but it meant that we didn’t use up all those packaged meals that were in the Safe House when we found it. We made sure we had some ground set up for nothing but growing food, between HQ and the warehouse – that way it was kinda protected, but wasn’t going to be too far away that we couldn’t defend it if anyone else decided to try to steal from us.

  Good thing, too, because with all the noise we were making, it wasn’t long until we had some shithead decide we were an easy target.

  That started and ended so fast, it was almost funny. The guards that were patrolling around the warehouse – with rifles held behind them so it wasn’t obvious that they had them – saw a mob of 20 or 25 people coming down Broadway. They didn’t have much – they were armed with pipes and sticks, with some of their bigger and meaner looking fighters carrying knives that looked like they’d been made out of scrap metal. Pathetic, really, but I can’t hold it against them because hey, you do what you can with what you got.