by D. J. Molles
Walter, seeing no other recourse, ran after him.
On the other end of the bridge, the tires of the first guntruck hit the first metal support.
Roy was stupid and impetuous and courageous. He stood at the side of the bridge in plain view and reared back as the convoy roared across the bridge, the bottle already swelling in his hand, and he threw it with a good overhanded arm, putting arc and speed on it. Walter watched it fly through the air.
“Fuck the CoAx!” he screamed brazenly at the top of his lungs.
Walter was terrified, but he wanted to see what would happen.
He never saw the bottle. Maybe it hit the ground. He couldn’t tell. Everything was suddenly drowned out by the screech of truck tires, then a microsecond later, a horrific, ear-shattering boom that made them both flinch.
Walter moved past his brother and grabbed hold of the bridge abutments with just enough time to see a little cloud of smoke or steam quickly dissipate into the air.
And then the three vehicles—a guntruck, a personnel carrier, and then another guntruck—rocked to a halt on the bridge.
The lead guntruck was less than twenty feet from the two boys. The huge, armored grill seemed so massive to them, suddenly, like metal teeth on a beast that could swallow them whole.
Walter could see through the reinforced windshield, and he saw the driver. He was American. The Fed was usually the lead vehicle. The driver was wearing his helmet, but not his battleshroud because he was behind the armored walls of his guntruck. He was wearing sunglasses. There wasn’t an ounce of fear on his face. He just stared right back at Walter, his mouth pressed down into a thin grimace of disgust or irritation or both.
Walter again felt that it was possible that he might piss his pants.
He and his brother, standing dumbly at the side of the bridge, as the chemical smoke from Roy’s little homemade firecracker blew away on the breeze coming off the river. The convoy, laid out in front of them—guntruck, personnel carrier, guntruck.
The hatch on the top of the personnel carrier slammed back. Walter’s eyes were drawn to the movement and the sudden noise. A figure burst out of the top of the machine, and Walter could tell from his fatigues that he was Chinese, though his face was covered by his battleshroud.
The Chinese soldier had a long, black shotgun in his hands. He lifted it to his shoulder, yelling at them in Mandarin. Walter thought maybe he was telling them to get off the road, though he didn’t speak a lick of the language. He reached over to grab Roy and try to pull him away.
Roy lifted both arms, giving the Chicom soldier both middle fingers.
And then the soldier shot him in the gut.
Walter watched his brother double over with a grunt and collapse forward onto the bridge abutment.
Walter panicked. Started screaming his brother’s name.
His feet were moving underneath him, wanting to run, but he wasn’t going to leave his brother there, lying on the bridge.
The world shrunk down to Roy. Walter didn’t register the vehicles, or the opening doors, or the sound of boots. He was focused on his brother, his chest hitching, at first trying to breathe, and then letting out a pathetic groan.
Walter grabbed him by the shirt with every intention of trying to pull him to safety, imagining himself backpedaling up the embankment, hauling his brother’s body along with him. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he had to…
Roy came upright and gasped for air. He clutched his chest and coughed.
“Fuck…” he groaned, his body kind of wilting to one side so that Walter could see his stomach. There was no blood. Roy was staring down at his stomach, too, his eyes mystified.
The sound of boots scuffing on concrete.
“Don’t you fuckers move.”
Walter looked up.
It was one of the Feds. He stood there in front of Walter, his compact battlerifle pointed at the boy’s head, his shroud undone so that they could see his face. He was not the driver that Walter had seen earlier.
“Lemme see your hands!” he shouted.
The two boys complied.
The soldier grabbed them by the back of their necks, a second Fed coming to keep them under cover of his rifle while the first effortlessly planted them face-first into the ground.
Then Walter was staring at concrete, feeling the smart of his chin after it scuffed against the ground.
He fixated on pebbles and dirt on the road. He wondered when his brother’s mortal chest wound was going to start bleeding. He wondered how long he had until Roy died. He was on the verge of tears, and probably would have been there already if it hadn’t been shocked out of him.
Roy was still coughing, but he seemed to be slowing down, almost like he was getting his wind back.
A new voice: “What the fuck is this? Some fuckin’ freedom fighters?” The voice was American. Northern. It was full of sarcasm and personal amusement.
Walter craned his neck to see, but he couldn’t see the soldier that had spoken.
Instead he saw a Chicom standing a few yards away, picking up an orange bean-bag round off the roadway. He waggled it in the air and laughed at Walter and Roy.
A gloved hand pushed Walter’s face back into the ground. “Don’t fuckin’ look at us, you little shit.”
The first voice again: “PDs?”
“Nah, too young.”
They checked the boys’ arms to make sure, even though nobody could get a Personal Device before they were fifteen years old. Legally, anyway.
“Sit them up.”
Walter felt himself lifted completely off the ground, and then set back down so hard that his head hit the concrete abutment of the bridge. He was staring at two Feds, the Chicom that shot his brother with the bean bag round, and a little gathering of Russian soldiers off to the side, noticeable by their plain blue-gray fatigues and lack of battleshrouds.
The Fed soldier with the northern accent stood closest to them. He looked down, his face full of irritation. “Names. Now.”
Roy had regained a little breath now. “Don’t give ‘em our names!” he blurted to Walter.
The Fed responded with a kick to Roy’s legs. “You shut the fuck up! You think this is fucking funny? You think this is a goddamn game? You come out here with your fucking poppers and try to scare my guys and now my command tells me I can’t keep rolling, I gotta hang my ass out in the wind and get your fucking names! Fuck you, and fuck your backwoods pops if he’s sitting up in those trees with his fucking deer rifle. Let him take a goddamn shot. I’ll turn your daddy to pink mist before he loads a second round, you hear me you little redneck shit?”
Walter was crying now.
Roy was trying hard not to.
The Fed kicked his legs again. “Fucking names, or I swear to God, I’ll send you and your entire inbred family off to Sweetwater, I shit you not. I will have you disappeared.”
They’d all heard the horror stories about the Domestic Terror Internment Camp in Sweetwater, Wyoming. They came up in the news occasionally, but domestic terrorists have no rights. They are barely even human, and the stories were glossed over and quickly forgotten.
Being “disappeared” was the greatest fear. It was the boogieman under everyone’s bed. Because “domestic terrorist” could be applied to whoever the Fed wanted it to apply to, so in that moment, it seemed very real to Walter that this soldier might actually report them as domestic terrorists for making a homemade bomb and have their entire family sent to Sweetwater DTI.
Walter couldn’t handle the idea.
Pops with his hands dirty and stained from regulator cleaner, his Ma smelling like fry grease from the diner…he couldn’t handle the thought of someone coming into their house in the middle of the night and throwing black sacks over their heads, hauling them out to a waiting gunship to be whisked off and never seen or heard from again.
“Walter!” he sobbed. “I’m Walter Baucom! He’s Roy Baucom! Please don’t send us to DTI!”
&nbs
p; “And where’s your pops right now? Huh? He in the fucking woods with a gun?”
“No, no! He’s working in the fields! He’s just a grower. That’s all. That’s all we are.”
Beside him, Roy’s face had gone stoic.
“Is there anyone in the woods? Is this a trap? Don’t fuck with me, kid.”
“No. It’s just us. I swear. I’m sorry. We’re both sorry.”
The Fed looked at Walter’s brother. “Yeah, he don’t seem too sorry.” He reached out a gloved hand and just kind of mushed Roy’s face in irritation. Not hard enough to cause any pain. But enough to show his displeasure. “How old are you?”
“I’m eight, he’s ten.”
The Fed straightened a bit. He keyed his coms. “Hey, copy the names of these two little shitheads, please.”
Walter figured he was speaking to someone in the lead guntruck because he looked over his shoulder at it. Walter saw the driver—the one with the sunglasses—lean over and access a monitor that glowed inside the guntruck. He watched the soldier’s lips move as he transmitted something back.
“Yeah. One: last name Baucom, first name Roy, all of ten fucking years old. Two: same last name Baucom, first name Walter, eight.” He waited for a second, eyes scanning the trees all around them. A bead of sweat was making its way down his nose. He swiped it off. Heard something on his comms. Then looked back to the two brothers. He pointed a gloved finger between the two of them. “You two. Go the fuck home. I’ll be forwarding your names to the sheriff. He can decide whether your family needs to go to DTI or not.”
He seemed to just notice the marijuana cigarette still hanging on Roy’s ear. He bent down and swiped it off. Gave it a sniff. “The fuck is this?” he asked with a smirk. “Chaps can’t be smokin’ the Devil’s lettuce.” He tucked the cigarette in a sleeve pocket of his uniform. “Mine.”
Then he turned and started walking back to his guntruck. The Russians were already in their truck, and the Chicom was backing up towards the personnel carrier, grinning at the two boys and saying something neither could understand.
The lead guntruck driver had his window rolled down. As they passed by, the driver shook his head at them. “Hope your family ain’t goin’ to DTI, boy,” he called out as he passed by.
Then they slammed on the gas, their big engines hurtling the heavily armored guntrucks forward. The three vehicles got tight again, got back up to sixty miles per hour, and disappeared around the corner of the highway.
Walter helped Roy up. The older boy shrugged him off as soon as he’d gained his feet. Walter wasn’t quite sure why Roy was mad at him, or even if he was mad at him, but it seemed that way. Probably because things had not gone as intended. Probably because Walter was someone that Roy could exact his control over. And that was what he needed in that moment—control.
On some juvenile level, Walter understood all of this. And a part of him wanted to fight against it, wanted to push back. But he was the good boy. He didn’t rock the boat. He preferred to let things lie.
Roy kept glaring at the road where the patrol had disappeared, rubbing his stomach. Then he whipped around and faced his brother again. “You don’t ever fucking talk about this.”
“But—” Walter stammered.
Roy jabbed him in the chest. “No! If Pops finds out about this shit, he’ll beat us both ‘til Sunday. You want that? You want to get your ass beat by Pops?”
“No,” Walter said, holding his chest where it’d been punched and backing up a step.
“Then you better hush-up.”
Roy gingerly lifted his dirty shirt, looking down at his stomach with a morbid, wincing curiosity. Just above his navel was a swollen, off-color mark. Walter could tell just by looking at it that it was going to be nasty and purple-yellow by morning.
“How you gonna explain that?” Walter asked.
Roy just shoved his shirt back down and made his way back off the bridge and into the woods. “We was playin’ baseball and one of the other kids hit me in the stomach with a fastball. That’s it.”
It was a weak story, but Walter simply followed his brother off the bridge and said nothing.
He was the good boy.
He didn’t want to rock the boat.
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