by Jeff Gunhus
So, when he looked at the sea of faces in front of him, men’s, women’s and even children’s, he refused to see victims or casualties. He saw only the faces of patriots. Once he cemented that thought into place, he didn’t feel the slightest amount of guilt.
“My fellow Americans,” he said into the microphone. “I was assured minutes ago that every person here has received their vaccination. Because of that, I just received my own.” He held up his left arm in the air to show the green wristband there. “Please hold up your wristbands now.”
All of the people in the entire square raised their arms in unison. Keefer was happy he’d thought of the detail to have the wristbands go on the left arms. The last thing he wanted was this moment to be ruined for him because the crowd looked like a bunch of goddamn Nazis.
“Now look around at your neighbors,” Keefer said. “We’re all relying on each other here. Make sure every person in your line of sight has a wristband. That no one is hiding their wrist.” He waited as the crowd did his bidding. Soon, they fell silent again. There was a minute left.
“Excellent job. You’re all to be commended for your efforts and for your service to your country.” Keefer was surprised to feel the emotion creep into his voice. He choked up and had to pause before continuing. “These have been dark times for America. We all know that. Our leaders have proven ineffective. The policies of our past have caught up with us. Cities in decline. Crime rampant. Our military disrespected around the world. Other countries have taken up the mantle we once wore so proudly. Superpower.” He saw he had thirty seconds. “Super. Power. Remember those words? Those words were our destiny. Those words are who we are meant to be. And through the grace of God and through your sacrifice, we will not only be a superpower once again, but we will be one for eternity.”
An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd, but it was too late. The last ten seconds ticked down.
“The world is about to change forever. And, because of all of you, America will reign, now and forever.” Keefer saluted the crowd. “God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”
The clock hit zero.
And the screaming started.
PART III
34
“Oh my God,” Cassie said next to him.
They were in the second-floor storeroom above the jail with a clear view of Town Square. Rick pressed his hands against the window and pushed up. As the window opened, the screams filled the room. His mind reeled at the sight playing out in the square below.
The instant the clock hit zero, hundreds of people in the crowd slumped over and fell to the ground. Some were right on the street below the window. Rick watched a man’s eyes roll back in his skull until only the white showed. The man tensed for a second and then went completely limp.
Like someone had flipped a switch.
The people that remained standing grabbed at the people on the ground. Some tried to move away from the bodies as if they were contagious.
But then hundreds more fell.
More screaming.
“No … no … no …” Cassie whispered.
More people dropped to the ground. Sprawled out. Lifeless.
Everywhere Rick looked, people fell. Tumbling in waves.
He searched for Dahlia in the chaos. What were the chances she’d listened to him? What were the chances she somehow hadn’t had the shot?
People ran in all directions, stepping on bodies. Some of them dropped in mid-stride as if picked off by a sniper. Rick looked up at the roofline. The soldiers stood with their guns pointed up in the air, watching the carnage below.
No guns were needed for this slaughter.
He searched more desperately for Dahlia and Charlie. He raised the rifle and pointed it to where he’d last seen them, using the scope as binoculars. The area by their tent was already littered with bodies. Then, through the thinned-out crowd, Rick spotted them. They were still standing.
“Dahlia!” he cried out, even though it was impossible for them to hear him.
When he shouted, the rifle moved and it took him a second to find them again in the high magnification of the scope. But when he did, he let out a whimper.
Dahlia was on her knees now, her face stretched into a soul-rending scream. Cradled in her arms was Charlie’s lifeless body.
“Oh God,” Rick said.
As he watched, Dahlia’s back arched. Her eyes rolled and she dropped Charlie to the ground. A second later, she fell to her side, her arm draped over her little boy. The protective mother, even in death.
The image jumped as a sob wracked his body. Tears streamed down his face. He looked away to wipe them and saw Cassie crying next to him.
“Why?” she said. “Why are they doing this?”
Rick shook his head to clear it, calling on the soldier in him to take place of the man who’d just watched the woman and little boy he loved die right in front of him.
The screams were dying down. A quick look over the crowd showed why. Only a few hundred people remained on their feet. These remaining people looked shell-shocked, some on their knees crying. Others picked their way through the piles of bodies all around them. Rick saw a man crawling on all fours over the carcasses, looking like an insect. He’d almost made it to the edge of the sea of bodies when he tumbled and landed prone on the ground.
Soon there were only a few dozen left. Then only a handful, ten maybe.
Finally, there was only one man left standing. He was near the stage, toward the center of the square. As he turned slowly in a circle, taking in the sight of two thousand dead people piled all around him, Rick realized who it was.
Old man Roberts.
“He didn’t take the vaccine,” Rick whispered.
It made sense. If there was anyone in the town who would tell the government to go to hell, it was him.
Rick swung his rifle back to his shoulder and found Roberts in the scope. Whatever fire and defiance had made the old man not take the vaccine was gone. He visibly shook, his mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping in air.
“Look at Keefer,” Cassie said. “That son of a bitch.”
Rick turned the gun and saw Keefer on the stage. The man looked at the wasteland of bodies in front of him with a blank expression on his face, chin thrust forward, eyes squinting as if he were looking into the sun. Keefer raised a hand in the air and made a slicing motion.
“No,” Rick said, looking up from the scope.
A shot rang out and Roberts lurched forward, holding his chest. A second shot sent him flying backward, sprawled out among the other dead.
Rick moved to the side of the window and slumped against the wall, out of view. He closed his eyes, his breath coming in short gasps. Then he punched the wall next to him. Then punched it again. His legs thrashed out, kicking the air. Out of control.
It only lasted a few seconds, the rage taking over his body. But he brought it back in control. He couldn’t save them. He couldn’t bring them all back. But he could punish the man who’d killed them.
When he opened his eyes, he expected Cassie to be staring at him, but she wasn’t. She was looking out the window, frozen.
Rick slid next to her and she startled at his touch, as if she’d forgotten he was in the room. Their eyes met, and somehow she knew what he planned to do. She nodded and he gently nudged her to the side so he had room to set up. He lowered the rifle and steadied himself against the window frame. The distance was only two hundred yards, a simple kill shot as long as the M-1 was even close to being sighted properly.
Rick moved the crosshairs from Keefer’s chest to his face and back again, trying to decide how he wanted to see the man leave the world.
Once he took the shot, he and Cassie were as good as dead. He glanced over to Cassie and she nodded. “Kill the bastard.”
He slid the safety off and exhaled slowly as he’d been trained to do.
Everything went silent. A calm came over him, a feeling the soldier in him recognized.
/>
Rick made a decision and moved the crosshairs to the man’s head. His finger slid to the trigger. Time to end it.
“Wait,” Cassie said.
Her voice was so acute and urgent that his body responded to the word involuntarily. His finger moved from the trigger and he sucked in a sharp breath. “What is it?” he said.
“They’re not dead,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at them,” she said. “They’re not dead.”
Rick aimed the rifle scope down to the street below. He picked a random body and watched. The man’s chest heaved up and down.
Rick moved the scope over to a woman. Her mouth opened and she licked her lips.
Quickly, he sought out Dahlia. From the distance, it was harder to tell, but as he watched he thought he saw her rib cage expand and contract.
She was alive. They were all alive.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “What is this? What the hell is going on?”
35
Keefer watched the helicopter fly over the Town Square, thick bands of white smoke trailing behind it from canisters locked onto its landing skids. The smoke hung in the air, just as it was designed to do, spreading laterally like oil on top of water. The helo banked hard and made another pass, distributing more of the smoke. Before long, a hazy cloud hung suspended over the town.
In a world of spy satellites, low-altitude unmanned aerial surveillance drones, camera blimps, and geosynched constant cams, it was nearly impossible to do anything in secret. While it was doubtful any of the algorithms designed to analyze the incredible amounts of data collected from the surveillance systems would flag the strange occurrences at the Fall Festival in Resurrection, Colorado, for review by human eyes, Keefer wasn’t taking any chances. The smoke might fool the computers, but if a human was involved, there were other settings to use on the cameras to burn through it. If there was one thing the military was good at, it was creating countermeasures to its own weapons.
Even though Keefer was reasonably confident that the smoke screen would deter the cams, the goal was to get the bodies racked and stacked as quickly as possible. There was a contingency plan if they were discovered early, but it got messy in a hurry. Keefer knew a firefight might be inevitable at some point, but he’d prefer to avoid one as long as possible. Better to get underground and out of sight. Once that happened, there was little that could be done to derail the plan. It was all about speed.
He was pleased to see his men snap into action once the last civilian was down. In conversations with the psychologist on the team, he knew this moment could prove tricky for some of them. Most of them only knew the broadest outline of the plan ahead, so seeing so many Americans drop to the ground carried the risk of sowing doubts in a few of them. Team leaders were on the lookout for body language or any comments that might indicate someone losing their religion.
Shooting the old man hadn’t been in the plan, but Keefer knew it would help reveal any weakness in their ranks. On one level, killing the man had been a shame. Keefer recognized the gunnery sergeant from his interaction with him earlier. Out of two thousand people, the old man had been the only one to defy the order to get an injection. Keefer liked the man’s spunk. In another time, he would have pinned a medal on the man’s chest for bravery, and facilitated his travel to Denver to see his granddaughter. But in front of his troops and at this delicate time of the mission, it’d been necessary to reassert his authority and demonstrate to his team that nothing would get in the way of them moving forward. The old gunnery sergeant had served up that opportunity on a platter. And his men hadn’t missed a beat afterward. If there were any reservations in the ranks, he hadn’t spotted them yet.
The AAVs pulled into the square towing three long flatbed trailers. These were fitted with five layers of horizontal shelving with two feet between layers. Once the AAV had rolled into place, soldiers ran to the sides facing the square and pulled on iron handles, sliding the lowest levels out. The surfaces were segmented into rectangles, six and a half feet long, two feet wide, with six-inch tall edges on them. Each shelf was eight rectangles wide and five rectangles deep.
The unit carried forty bodies per level with five levels, yielding a capacity of two hundred bodies per trailer, six hundred per AAV. Considerable analysis had gone into the math as to whether the AAV’s significant towing capacity would be adequate for the weight load, but the machine was built to do the impossible. Pulling three trailers filled with unconscious human bodies up a gravel mountain road flirted with its stated capability limits, but didn’t exceed them. Once the trailers were reengineered using a lightweight polymer instead of metal, then the loads plummeted and the conversation turned from whether the AAVs could do it into a question of how fast they could make the journey.
The soldiers, now out of their bulky hazmat suits and wearing only black jumpsuits, moved efficiently in pairs, picking up bodies and carrying them one-by-one to the trailers. People fit easily into six and a half by two foot spaces. In the rare case of someone taller, setting the person on the side with bent knees and a curled spine worked to get them in. The two-foot width was more of an issue.
Keefer walked over to see how the trailers were working. The proper width of the spaces had been debated during the design phase. Going to three feet would have reduced capacity on each trailer by forty percent, but America led the world in obesity and there was a concern that there would be too many bodies outside the design tolerances. Fortunately, the human body, especially those cushioned with extra layers of fat, was extremely malleable. In the testing phase, it was determined that a three-hundred-pound woman could effectively be jammed into the allotted space if turned on her side and forced in. If anything, she would likely have the safest ride up the mountain while the smaller bodies were expected to jostle around as the trailers hit bumps in the gravel road. Keefer was happy to see the bodies fit in just as they’d hoped.
A medic was assigned to each quadrant of the square. As expected, there were minor injuries here and there from people falling, but nothing major. A few cuts and scrapes. A bloody nose or two. The medics cleaned the wounds and applied bandages. If anyone was seriously injured, the plan was to load them into the last trailer. The one set aside for infants.
The little kids posed a problem. Until age five, they served no use to the operation. The psychologist had warned Keefer to tread carefully here. Kids, particularly small babies, tended to give rise to unexpected reactions among soldiers. A Navy SEAL team could decimate a village of civilians without compunction if there was a Jihadi warlord hiding among them. But hand that same SEAL team a newborn infant and tell them to dispose of it and there might be a mutiny. The message was clear. Walk carefully.
For that reason, all babies and small children were loaded on a single designated trailer. This still had six and a half by two foot compartments, but the babies were loaded five or six to a segment. Given injections just as their parents had been, they lay in piles, unmoving. The team psychologist watched this trailer closely, noting which soldiers laid the babies down carefully, supporting their heads and propping them up with the blankets stored on that special trailer. The psychologist also noted the men who tossed the babies in as if they were no more than firewood to be stacked. These were the soldiers who would be tasked with taking the trailer with the kids to an isolated part of the mine and emptying the contents down a shaft. The other members of the team wouldn’t ask what happened to them and, if they did, they would be told they were being taken care of. And then they would go on a watch list.
Keefer stood in the center of the square, pleased with the activity swirling around him. The men were focused on the job at hand and sticking to the plan. He was grateful that his own self-doubt, that had consumed his sleepless nights, seemed to have disappeared, perhaps held in check by the adrenaline of the moment. He believed the only real threat to the operation now that they’d gotten this far was someone internally getting cold feet. The m
en were handpicked by Keefer and Estevez and had demonstrated by their deeds, not their words, that they were willing to do anything to take their country back. Still, none of them knew the true extent of the plan. Once they did, the psychologist predicted ten percent of the men would turn and need to be eliminated.
Keefer put that number at zero.
These were his kind of men. Patriots to the core. He guaranteed that when it did come time to share his plan, it would be greeted with only applause and adulation. The rest of America would have a different reaction at first, but they would come around. They’d have no choice in the matter.
He watched with pride as the soldiers worked efficiently through the square, aided by the AAV dragging the trailers forward slowly to minimize the distance the bodies had to be carried. Once a platform was filled with bodies, a button was pressed and it slid up on hydraulics to the top level as the empty levels moved down to accommodate it. Then an empty shelf slid out from the bottom level. All of it was painstakingly designed to maximize the speed of picking up two thousand bodies.
Twenty minutes after the clock had reached zero, the last body was loaded up. The AAV motors whined at the effort, but they surged forward, pulling the trailers behind them. The helo passed overhead dispensing more of the smokescreen, marking the roads that led out of town and up the mountain. There was one last loose end to tie up. Inspired by seeing his men’s single-minded focus, Keefer realized he needed to follow their example. He saw Estevez and waved him over.
“Looking good, right?” Estevez said as he walked over.
Keefer kept his face unreadable. It appeared that Estevez had tangled with someone not long before. His nose was bloodied and swollen like he’d taken a few punches to the face. He didn’t have time to ask what had happened. And he didn’t care. They were in a crucial phase of the project and Keefer wasn’t about to let himself get distracted.
