People's Republic

by Kurt Schlichter

  Amanda braked and the cruiser skidded to a stop. She got out of the cruiser, Beretta in hand, and walked back to the shattered officer, who lay groaning in the middle of the road, bloody, his legs at terrifying and impossible angles.

  “You shot my brother, you fucking dick” she screamed as she raised the pistol and shot him again and again, until the slide locked back on the empty gun.

  Satisfied that the PSF officer was off to his final reward, she turned and ran over to Junior, who had managed to stand upright, sort of. Putting her arm around his shoulder, she helped him to the idling Explorer and put him in the rear passenger seat so he could cover the station door with his M4 through the open window.

  On the street, shadowy human shapes swarmed over the dead officer.

  Junior checked his watch. It read 10:50 p.m. And the sirens in the distance were getting more numerous and louder.

  Turnbull took a vest off a dead thug and put it on Abraham and warned the kid to keep behind him, but to always remain close. The Evidence Room was at the end of another corridor; he had seen it going to the cellblock. Smoke was starting to fill the station. There were still occasional gunshots. A PSF officer came up in his blind spot, looked at the pair, then simply decided – for whatever reason – to continue on his way. Someone had gotten very lucky in that encounter.

  The Evidence Room door was closed, and it looked reinforced. A grenade might not take it down. Turnbull approached slowly, weapon up, covering each room he passed. Inside Detective Room C were four desks, and on one was Abraham’s backpack.

  Turnbull charged in. Two detectives had taken cover inside behind a desk in a corner. They had no intention of going out to look for trouble, but trouble had come to them and they fired their Berettas. One’s rounds both went off the mark, but the other managed to hit Turnbull in his vest an inch left of his front Kevlar trauma plate just before he squeezed the trigger and emptied an entire magazine into both of them.

  “Shit,” said Turnbull. He knew what a broken rib felt like. He also know what a gunshot wound tearing through his flesh felt like, and at least this didn’t feel like that. He dropped the empty mag and seated another.

  It occurred to him that his hip still hurt. That’s what he got for pissing off a Texan girl. He looked at Abraham.

  “That’s your pack, right?”

  Abraham nodded.

  “Please tell me the hard drive is in there.”

  “It was.”

  “Look.”

  Abraham unzipped it. “It’s here.”

  “Take the pack and let’s go. Stay behind me.” Turnbull moved to the door, but the kid didn’t budge. He was staring at the dead detectives.

  “He’s the one that hit my face,” Abraham said.

  “He’s not going to hit anyone’s face any more. Now we have got to go.”

  The smoke was getting very thick as Turnbull led the kid toward the impound lot exit. There was a lot of yelling now, and some more shooting. Down the hall, shadows appeared – people, but not PSF. Turnbull held his fire and the intruders, already carrying spoils, rushed past them as if they weren’t even there. The civilians were looting the station. Good, he thought. Harder to figure out just what we were doing here.

  They found the exit to the impound lot, and Turnbull went out first. A brown SUV was idling at the gate. Shadowy figures were rushing by, swarming the cars, lurking at the foot of the stairs to go in the door when the big man with the big gun got out of the way.

  “Kelly!” Junior yelled, waving from the window.

  “Come on,” Turnbull said, pulling Abraham outside and down the steps. Before the door shut and locked, several civilians had come up, pulled it open and rushed inside.

  Turnbull ran around to the driver side and put Abraham in the back next to Junior, then jumped behind the wheel. He hit the gas, accelerating into the street past the dead officer and dodging the civilians running across Wilcox to join in the chaos.

  “Abraham, this is Amanda. Amanda, Abraham.” Turnbull said.

  “Where are we going?” the boy asked.

  “We’re taking you out of here, like I promised your father.”

  “He’s gone, isn’t he?” Abraham asked.

  “Yeah, he’s gone. I’m sorry.”

  Turnbull turned right on Sunset, entered the freeway, and headed east. They said nothing for a long time.

  18.

  “They found two dead officers in the street just a half mile from here,” said Larsen, puzzled. “Their cruiser is gone. They were part of our perimeter operation.”

  “And nothing to the west?” asked Rios-Parkinson.

  “No, we flooded the zone with personnel. Nothing.”

  “Why would they draw attention to themselves by shooting two officers here and getting on the radio pretending to be a regular citizen telling us it happened elsewhere?”

  Larsen shrugged. “They wanted to draw us away?”

  “But we were never going to be drawn away from this raid by a couple of dead PSF,” the Director scoffed. Larsen shrugged again.

  Rios-Parkinson took a few minutes to change out of his soiled suit and into a tactical PBI black utility uniform. He felt it was good for the men to see him like that – it might inspire them, though he had absolutely no tactical training himself. Then he waved over a sergeant.

  “Get me a gun,” he ordered.

  Adjusting the SIG Sauer on his hip, he admired himself in the SUV’s window. He had never fired a SIG before taking Lou’s from his corpse tonight and turning it on one of the spies before it ran empty. The big spy had called him weak and untrained. The Director of the PBI intended to prove all that irrelevant.

  He would not let some racist, sexist, red brute take away everything he had earned.

  Larsen trotted over to him.

  “Have you found it?” Rios-Parkinson asked.

  “No, nothing,” Larsen replied. “But we are getting strange reports from the Hollywood PSF station.”

  “What kind of reports?”

  “Gunfire. We can’t reach anyone inside.”

  “That’s the PSF station for this area. What would be…?” Rios-Parkinson paused. “They would take anyone arrested around here there for booking?”

  “Yes,” said Larsen, confused.

  “You usually secure the outer perimeter with two vehicles per location, correct?” asked Rios-Parkinson, although he knew the answer.

  “Where was the other car when they killed those officers?” asked Larsen.

  “Perhaps it was transporting an arrestee who has something they wanted,” said Rios-Parkinson. “Get my team together. Get everyone back to the Hollywood station! Now!”

  The SUV convoy pulled up parallel to the station on Wilcox. The security team got out and set a perimeter around the vehicles. There were scores of civilians still running around in the shadows, fleeing as several dozen cruisers with lights flashing descended upon the scene.

  Flames licked out of the building’s roof top. A pair of civilians were carrying a couch out the public entrance in the front.

  Larsen came to the window of the SUV as Rios-Parkinson stared at the disaster.

  “It appears from witnesses that a terrorist group burst in and attacked the station by surprise. Most of the officers were out in the field looking for the shooters. They must have taken out a dozen PSF, sir,” Larsen said, slipping back into military mode. Rios-Parkinson let it pass. That military mode might come in handy in the coming hours. He could deal with Larsen’s moral and character flaws later.

  “What do the central server records say?”

  “They arrested several people tonight. The one who fits best was male-identifying, cisgender, not a person of color, and flagged as Jewish. Age 14. John Brown, obviously a false name. It says he was disturbing the People’s order and disobeying the People’s will, which could mean anything.”

  “The arresting officers?”

  Larsen jerked his head toward the burning building. “I don’t think
they made it.”

  “And what was he carrying? What did they take into evidence?” “It says a backpack, $353 dollars, and ‘electronics.’”

  “Electronics?”

  “That’s all it said.”

  “Did David Kaplan have a son?” “There’s a birth record of an Abraham Kaplan, but he never registered in a school, was never in the Young Progressives, never joined any of the voluntary committees on racism or gender justice or climate change like he was required to.”

  “Let me guess. He was born around 2020.”

  Larsen nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Then they will have the hard drive,” Rios-Parkinson said, unable to fully conceal his fear.

  “But we have the tracker,” Larsen said.

  “Is the system working again?” Rios-Parkinson asked, hopefully.

  “They say it will work, but you were very clear – do not start it outside your presence.” “Listen,” Rios-Parkinson said. “Get it transferred to your tablet and encrypted. You have to be the only ones who can track them. No one else can know. And we will follow them and we will get back the drive ourselves. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Larsen said, again slipping into old habits.

  “And have our forces clear this building. Find out what you can from whoever they catch, then eliminate them. I want to demonstrate that the culprits have been caught and punished.”

  Larsen nodded. He called over the PSF senior leaders and gave them their instructions. Their forces began to surround the building. Next, they would go in and retake it. And woe to whomever had not yet escaped with his lucre.

  Larsen next directed the drivers of the SUVs to the gas pumps in back of the station to top off. Then he proceeded to contact the techs at headquarters about transferring the tracking program to his tablet, and to his tablet alone.

  Early Friday morning on old Interstate 15, the traffic was sparse. There were a few cars roaring out to Las Vegas on spontaneous trips, the kind only those wielding Privilege Levels of 7 and up could plausibly explain at the frequent checkpoints. By Barstow, they had hit four of them, the bored PSF guards scanning their passes and then waving them through to keep heading out across the desert. The stars were subdued and obscured through this part of the journey, since the dozen coal plants that at least intermittently powered Southern California had been located out here in the middle of nowhere. They were out of sight, well off the freeway off in the desert, the better to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about why the government was essentially eliminating private vehicles from the non-elite citizenry in the name of climate sanity while it was also pouring many tons of carbon into the air every hour of every day.

  They had switched seats after taking a rest break in the abandoned town of Victorville. Turnbull had pulled the Explorer off the road and behind an old, abandoned fast food place.

  “See,” he said to Junior, pointing out the two untrimmed palm trees growing at a weird angle that created an “X.” “This was an In-N-Out. Now I’m going to go take a leak. See if that spigot still works. We need some water.”

  They continued down the freeway, having filled several discarded plastic bottles they found lying about, with Abraham holding a flashlight from the front passenger seat while Amanda tried to dig the buckshot pellets out of Junior’s leg with the forceps from the medical kit.

  “How about a pain pill?” Junior hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Nope, need you fresh. Have a Motrin. And give me one. Damn rib hurts like a motherfucker,” said Turnbull. “So does my hip. Thanks, Amanda.”

  Outside Barstow, they passed a broken down sign for Fort Irwin Road.

  “Ugh,” said Turnbull. “If the old US Army had a rectum, Irwin would be it. It’s all gone now since the blues decided they didn’t need a real army.”

  “Shit,” Junior said, wincing as Amanda bandaged his leg.

  “You were always such a baby,” she replied.

  “Will you be able to walk?” Turnbull asked.

  “I think so, as long as it’s not too far.”

  “Yeah, well I’m driving this to as close to Utah as we can get, off road if necessary.”

  “What, we’re going back the same way we came?” asked Junior. “We don’t do that.”

  “I know. Amanda’s boyfriend Rios-Parkinson may be a hack, but he probably has one or two real soldiers working for him, and they are going to tell him that there is no way we will ever go back out the way we came in.”

  “Do they know we’re coming?”

  “Nope. But once we cross the line, Meachum will pick us up and vector in some of his guys to check us out and they’ll bring us in. Now all we gotta do is get there.”

  They got through the Vegas checkpoint without a problem shortly before 4:00 a.m. and drove through the heart of the city on the freeway. The Strip was so bright it cast shadows in the desert. The rest of the town was a black hole; the power went off overnight, and the masses were left to swelter while the elite partied in icy comfort.

  About 20 miles out of town, they ran into stopped traffic that extended over a ridge to their front. The high flyers had all turned off in Las Vegas. This was mostly trucks and locals. And the line of vehicles was simply not moving.

  “I’m going forward to see what’s up.” Turnbull tossed Amanda the remote. “I’ll be ten minutes, tops.” He got out and crossed over the median and the westbound lane into the dark of the desert.

  He moved out about 100 yards from the freeway and climbed up the ridge parallel to it. He did not stop at the top of the ridge, but instead crawled over top, sliding down a few yards to the military crest where he would not be silhouetted against the sky on the ridge line. The line of vehicles descended down the hill maybe a quarter mile and stopped at a roadblock of four vehicles with blue and red light bars, probably PSF.

  But the PSF officers were not doing anything. Turnbull watched them through the binos. They were just standing there, walking around their vehicles, not checking documents, not interacting with the people they had halted, nothing. The westbound lane was open; every once in a while a truck passed through going toward Vegas. But eastbound was completely stalled – and there was no indication anyone was in any hurry to get it restarted.

  What the hell?

  It was maybe an hour and a half until dawn. He took his binos and turned them toward the desert. There was a little bit of moonlight, maybe enough, he decided.

  Fifteen minutes later he was back at the Explorer.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked from the driver’s seat.

  “It’s a problem. Get in the passenger seat.” Turnbull said, going to the back of the vehicle and opening the rear hatch. Inside, he opened the access panels to the rear lights and pulled the bulbs out of their sockets, then shut the hatch again. Behind him, a trucker watched him curiously from his seat above the road. Turnbull gave him the stink eye, and the driver averted his gaze. He didn’t see anything. This was none of his business.

  Back in the driver’s seat, Turnbull killed the headlights, cranked the ignition, and engaged the four wheel drive, then pulled a hard left over the shoulder and into the median and across the westbound lane and then into the desert. The brown Explorer soon disappeared from view. With the bulbs gone, he was able to brake without flashing his red lights. Slowly, but faster as his eyes adjusted to the moonlight, he drove north around the far spur of the ridge.

  “The freeway turns north. If we go east here maybe five miles, we hit it again way past the roadblock,” Junior said, squinting at the map by the light of a small pocket flashlight with a red lens.

  They passed the roadblock lying a mile to their south; there was no reaction as they bypassed it. No one was looking out into the desert. Turnbull pressed on, concerned that they would be making the crossing well-past dawn. And the fuel indicator was dropping much faster than he had hoped.

  The SUV convoy roared through Las Vegas at 80 miles per hour. They were making up lost time. Larsen convince
d Rios-Parkinson to refuel in Baker to ensure they had gas for the entire conceivable route. The station had been closed and two of the ten PBI tactical team members had had to kick in the door of the gas station’s proprietor’s trailer to convince him to fuel the vehicles.

  The tracker now indicated that their quarry had left the freeway.

  “This can’t be right,” Larsen said, looking at the screen on his tablet. “They were sitting there on the road for 20 minutes a mile south of the roadblock and now it’s showing them north of the freeway, off-road, heading east.”

  “They are bypassing the block,” Rios-Parkinson said. He had ordered the PSF to seal I-15 outside of town to the east, where no one who mattered would ever be at this hour. Then the tactical team could easily take them trapped in traffic and no one would ever know what happened. A few civilians might get killed in the crossfire, but that was acceptable. Except these bastards were refusing to cooperate – again.

  “I don’t get it,” Larsen said. “He’s a professional, obviously. But it looks like he’s heading to cross in Utah. He’s going out the way he came in.”

  “So?”

  “So professionals don’t do that,” said Larsen. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe he is not as professional as you think,” Rios-Parkinson said, dismissively. But Larsen had been inside the PSF station, and he had had personal experience in Indiana with the kind of people who were able to conduct operations like that. He clutched his own M4, and he began to be afraid.

  Turnbull wheeled the Explorer back onto the 15 and accelerated northeast. There was almost no traffic in their direction, and only a few occasional vehicles heading west. The sun would be up soon. Turnbull hit the accelerator and pushed it to 90. The fuel economy dipped, but he had few options with daylight coming.

  They drove for almost a half hour before the gas station where he and Junior had eaten their first meal on the blue side came into view. He passed it and then, down the freeway out of sight, turned left and again crossed the westbound lane to head north. Using the nav system on the Explorer, he made some rough calculations of where he needed to go and headed in that direction.