Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  The nearest robber fell into her narrow view between floor and seat. He appeared very close, though he was still four meters off. Odd, she thought, his eyes were different. His pupils were very small as their eye met, hers looking over the front sight, his recognizing the business end of the barrel. In her mind’s eye she visualized the physiology Dorek and Taj had taught her: skull, mandible, first few vertebrae, major brain lobes human brain, cerebellum monkey brain, brain stem lizard brain, and the path a bullet fired at this angle would take. Forehead armor should be avoided, and the thick bone of the mandible, too. Eye socket and higher brain lobes? No, he wasn’t using that much. But soft palate, thin lower skull, lizard-brain was a good path. When the lizard-brain gets shut down, the rest stops instantly. She shifted her aim slightly and put a shot through his mouth, open in a scream of pain from losing his knees, a path that would blow brain stem and bone out the back of his skull.

  The first thug’s suddenly lifeless body blocked her shot on the second robber, the wall blocked rolling out one way and the banker staring at her in shock blocked the other. Allonia slithered out from under table beside a closed-eyed fetal-position Sharon, and looked over at Skelton. He was moving slowly, as was everything in what Allonia now consciously recognized as tachypsychia. He could wait, only a flesh wound, she decided. Bringing the gun around the edge of the seat back, she lined up her sights on the second thug, now also on the floor. The simple mask he was wearing had come loose, exposing a young face stretched taut in pain and fear, his first ever robbery likely being his last. He had dropped his gun as he fell, clutching at his shattered feet.

  With a quick move out of her partial concealment and in two steps she kicked the gun away from the would-be robber holding his feet, then pulled out her com to push the call-back code. While it rung, she stepped back over to Skelton, ignoring the rest of the chaos around her. His arm would be fine, the bleeding was already slowing. She tucked the 10mm into the decorative belt of her outfit, then reached under the seat to grab Helton’s pistol, dropping the gum-gunked weapon into Sharon’s handbag. Retrieving the two robber’s guns, she did the same with them. Skelton had recovered enough to accept his with a croak of thanks as she returned it to him, painfully returning it to his inside-the-waistband holster. When Libra answered, she cut him off, talking fast and quietly, trying to muffle her words from the others around her. “They got snatched, just had a shootout, got one injured, get here NOW! We’ll be on the sidewalk headed west down 91st. Three of us, just one man. Gotta go!”

  She hung up, reached over and slapped Sharon, then grabbed her handbag with one hand and her upper arm with the other, jerking Heton’s sister to her feet and shaking her firmly. “Get a grip!” she hissed fiercely. Pausing a moment, she squatted and looked under the table at the banker’s amazed eyes and frightened face. “I’ll have to pass on those tickets. I’m kind of busy right now.”

  Skelton recovered rapidly as they exited the restaurant and started down the sidewalk, leaving the bloody carnage and wailing people behind. Allonia and the injured sub-legal businessman all but dragged the much more freaked out Sharon between them. They made a very odd-looking and mismatched trio.

  “Nice shooting. Thanks,” Skelton said as they moved, trying to appear at least slightly normal in the early rush-hour sidewalk traffic. Most of the people they passed were absorbed in their own little VR or personal com world, but some spared them curious eyes.

  “Who were those two?” Allonia asked, before abruptly stopping and fishing around in Sharon’s handbag.

  “Competition, I assume. Didn’t recognize them, not my normal turf around here.” Ignoring Sharon’s whimpering and glazed expression, Allonia produced a scarf from the handbag which she quickly tied around Skelton’s arm as a makeshift bandage, concealing the bloody patch from casual observation as well. “Ouch! Not so tight!”

  “Quit whining. It’s minor. Chest OK?” she replied briskly, looking pointedly at the bullet holes in his jacket and shirt. He nodded, grimacing. “Then look casual while we help our ‘sister’ here in her time of crisis.” Together they escorted her down the street side of the sidewalk, gradually blending in as Sharon started walking more normally so they had to support her less. Sirens screamed in the distance, approaching fast. A sleek looking silver muscle-car pulled in sharply to the curb right beside them, and the door was thrown open before it fully stopped.

  “Get in!” Brother Libra’s voice commanded firmly, easily recognized by Allonia.

  They stuffed the still trembling Sharon into the back seat, then Allonia slid in next to her. Skelton wasn’t even seated all the way before the powerful engine whined and they pulled smoothly and quickly away from the curb and into traffic. Libra was wearing faded jeans and a tee shirt, a was toothpick sticking out of one corner of his mouth, and he had one hand casually on the wheel in manual steering mode.

  “Hospital, or private care?” Libra’s sardonically smiling face asked, knowing the answer already, but tactful enough to ask for ambiguous directions.

  Skelton winced, buckling up while banging his injured arm as Libra turned the wheel hard, squealing the tires around a corner. “Make sure they aren’t any… we’re alone, then head for Stellar and South 45th.”

  Grinning in anticipation, Libra shifted the toothpick to the other corner of his mouth, flipped a switch on the dash, took a few quick cuts in traffic, then into a parking garage, out another exit, taking corners, exits, and unexpected paths with surprising acceleration. The maneuvering threw the two ladies around in the back seat like potato sacks until they got buckled in and held on, expressions tight, jaws clenched, Sharon pale and scared, Allonia more upbeat and excited. Screeching around another corner, Allonia saw a tattoo on Libra’s right biceps that said Hey! before she went back to watching things whiz by.

  “Careful! Driving like this will draw to much attention!” Skelton warned, as much in caution as to prevent further tossing around.

  “No worries!” Libra waved to the switch he’d flipped. “Spoofer. Recent model. Give me a minute!” Going around a hard corner and down into an underground parking garage, he took two quick corners and screeched to a halt. “Everyone OK?” Three bare nodded and a moment later, he flipped the switch again, then drove off at a normal pace, leaving through a different exit. Libra pats the dashboard. “Borrowed it from a friend. Used to live not far from here a long time ago.” Back out in the fading daylight, the car now appeared to be cobalt blue through the tinted windows.

  “What sort of friends have cars like this?” Allonia asked, more than a little bit curious and still hyped up by the shoot-out and hair-raising, if brief, drive.

  “I have to look for souls in need where they are. Usually the sketchier parts of town are a target rich environment. I wasn’t always a monk, you know. Spent more than a few years in these parts. I still know a few people.” After a brief pause to deal with traffic, and to silently watch a pair of passing police cars with flashing lights and blaring sirens, he continued. “What happened?”

  “And where’d you get the hardware?” Skelton interjected, looking back over his shoulder at Allonia. “I know you didn’t pack them in!”

  “They must have been arrested or taken by surprise. The guns were stuck underneath the seats. They’d only dump them if they were badly outnumbered without time to bail and thought they had to talk their way out.”

  “What do you mean they?” objected the slowly recovering Sharon, scandalized by the implication. “Helton doesn’t carry a gun!”

  Allonia dug through the handbag, pulling out a cheap polymer 9mm, on which she dropped the mag, racked the slide, and tucked back into the bag. “Not that one. I think it belonged to the guy that recognized you, Skelton.” Pulling out another one, a larger pistol with a longer magazin. “Huh. Five-seven. More serious.” With the same routine she dropped it back. “This,” she said, holding up a mostly standard issue polymer-framed .45 with custom scale-pattern texturing on the front of the slide, “is yo
ur brother’s piece. Normally with much less gum.”

  “No, it isn’t. He doesn’t have anything like that.” Sharon looked at the gun like it was a snake that might bite her, leaning far away in her seat. Allonia looked at her closely for a moment, then shook her head, dismissing the sarcastic words she was about to say. They would do no good; she wasn’t ready to listen.

  “Great. Just bogging great,” Skelton cut off the impending argument building on Sharon’s face. “Kam won’t peep. Can your friend keep quiet?” Allonia gave an affirmative. “Find anything out?”

  “Oh, yes. Guy wouldn’t stop talking. Lot of names. So many most are likely nothing but name-dropping, no real connection, but we can run through them after you are patched up and we find out what happened to my husband.”

  Skelton looked at the driver, studying him closely for the first time. “And you’d be…?”

  “This is Brother-” Allonia started, before getting cut off by Sharon.

  “Your brother?”

  “No, he’s a prie-, I mean a monk. Brother Libra.”

  “Call me Roy,” he said genially. “Not in the abbey or robes.”

  “He’s the man that married me to Helton before Dorek and I got hitched for good.”

  “Wait, you’re married to both of them?” Skelton asked, startled.

  Roy grinned broadly, the wrinkles on tanned face giving him a genuinely happy expression. “Not quite. Fastest wedding ever with an annulment almost as quick, then a much more proper one more recently. A minor legal matter to deal with for the first one, the latter for more conventional reasons.” He reached a hand out, which Skelton shook carefully while introducing himself, trying not to hurt his arm.

  “Skelton. Purveyor of goods and services on an as-needed basis, connector of needs with supply. I’m sure I could find a good deal on crucifixes if you are so inclined.”

  “Ah, so you’re Skelton. Good to meet you.”

  The crime boss looked askance at the driver, wondering who he was, really. “Should I know you?”

  The older man kept his eyes on traffic. “Not likely. Haven’t been in town long. Looking for lost souls takes us monks into some interesting places, listening to a lot of people. What happened? What do we know?”

  Everyone started talking at once over each other before Roy held up his hand firmly to halt them, then pointed to the one he knew best. Allonia briefly recounted events in the restaurant, with the two men listening intently while Sharon fidgeted in her seat.

  Just as she finished, Sharon blurted “I saw them get taken by the police!” The other three looked at her sharply. “Lots of police in riot armor, two hours ago. I heard someone say something about a sweep, a conscription press gang. They had Helton, Dorek, and three others in handcuffs and put them in a van!”

  “That would explain the guns,” Libra observed.

  “Wouldn’t that make the news, though?” Allonia wondered aloud. “Major criminal caught is usually a lead story.”

  “Stop calling my brother a criminal! He isn’t! The police didn’t seem to know who they were. They passed me as they left, and they ignored me when I called to them, the officer said it wasn’t who I thought he was.”

  Skelton pulled out a com and started to dial. “I might know somebody that knows somebody who can find out who’s been picked up.” He paused to look at it, surprised. “No signal.” Allonia pulled out hers and offered it to him, but he declined it. “This is a burner. Don’t want to call that number with a com you want to keep.”

  Allonia looked at hers. “No signal here, either.”

  Roy flipped down a concealed cover from the roof, exposing several switches, buttons, and another screen. Looking it over, he points at one of them. “RF sealed. Rig’s got an active built-in Faraday cage.”

  “Sweet. I’ve got to meet your friends,” Skelton said, impressed. “OK, call can wait. Nothing we can do this instant if they’re in lockup from a sweep. Medical, get you two out of sight so we can have a long talk about names and companies, and find out where Kam and Helton stand.”

  “Stellar and South 45th it is.” Roy took a corner hard, humming quietly to himself. The others were silent, deep in their own thoughts.

  Chapter VI

  Conscripts

  More arrestees were delivered several times that evening in groups of a dozen or more. Some were common street thugs, most are working class guys with work permit problems, a handful were well-dressed and well-educated but having some minor tax or alimony issues, the latter much more in shock than the blue-collar guys who knew things like this happened. With each group, Helton and Kaminski worked as a team, the Captain as the leader and the Sergeant as the low-key enforcer, to establish a basic order and discipline so that nobody was victimized further, and the anger-fueled self-destructive violence was minimized while brains were picked as to skills, knowledge, and background. At one point the two unconscious bodies that came in with them were hauled away. A few of the more belligerent types had to be rather forcefully persuaded to fall in line, but only a couple needed to be beaten into unconsciousness or choked out before they truly understood and accepted the situation fully. Between arriving groups Helton and the sergeant quietly compared thoughts and strategized on what to expect, what to do, and how to manage everything once they were out of the cell. Occasionally they’d ask further questions of their new and involuntary team of volunteers.

  When the sixth group was brought in, reducing the stifling and hot holding cell to standing room only and the cries of protest started to mount, Helton finally stood on the bench he’s been sitting on to get head and shoulders above everyone else, and gave the group a hard stare after the guards left. Gradually everyone fell into a sullen silence, eyes mostly downcast or curious. All looked stressed, hot, and tired.

  “Listen up! We’ve got about a company here, so I expect we’ll be stuck like this for about a day, not loaded up too soon.” The statement was met with a groan. “They want to beat us down a bit. Normal procedure then is to dump the unit into a pre-stocked and fully automated troop transport and put in a holding orbit. We’ll be given a bunch of basic instructional videos, and computer-lead physical conditioning exercises. In a week, maybe two, we’ll be dumped on a battlefield somewhere, and as we offload we’ll be handed weapons and ammo, maybe a pack with a few days food, and told what direction to go. If we get there, we might be picked up. Or we might be given another target.” The outcry was loud. He waited patiently for it to vent before even trying to quiet them down. After the immediate anger was spent and there was a general pause for breath he waved them into silence.

  “I know because I’ve worked with people who have been through it before, and did a lot of research after.” He jabbed his finger at one of the well-dressed men, a pallid thirty year old, who had complained loudly when he first came in. “I have no idea how you got to be as old as you are and still manage to think anything about government or war is fair. It isn’t. Get over it. It is done this way for domestic political purposes, not to win. They expect fifty percent casualties for little gain. They expect the other side’s conscript companies to suffer the same.” Another heated and angry outburst followed, shorter than the previous. “You can piss and moan and whine and feel sorry for yourselves, and we can mostly die. Or you can suck it up, soldier on, follow leaders who want to survive this, maybe win, and probably live.”

  One of the low-lifes who had to be beaten into understanding his situation earlier that night opened his swollen face. “Why not just run once we hit the ground?”

  “Desertion is a summary execution offense. Once you board the transport you are under military justice until properly discharged. Governments like expedited ways of removing problems. We are here because we are seen as problems. Some of us were picked up randomly… but some were, I’m just as certain, specifically targeted. Someone might be hoping you, specifically, are part of the fifty percent casualty rate. Only way out is through, unless you want to run forever. Either way,
the powers that be get their problem solved.”

  One of the well-dressed men, paunchy and balding, collapsed from the combination of heat, poor physical condition, and anxiety. Helton looked at two younger men standing next to him. “Loosen his clothes and splash a bit of water on him.” He paused while they cleared a small bit of space and do so.

  “War is hell, starting with this sweat-box,” Kaminski added. “But myself and Mr. Jones, here, might be able to increase everyone’s odds, if you can work as a team. Who believes us?”

  After a tense moment, about half the hands rise, tentatively. Helton nodded. “Fair enough. Honesty is good. We’ll be baked in here a while, then herded outside onto a transport like cattle into a slaughterhouse. We’ll get a recorded introduction that’s boring as hell. Then we’ll be herded aboard and offered a nice, cold, refreshingly sweet drink… laced with military-grade speed. They’ll slip us a cocktail with so many things in it you’ll be hopping like a freak-frog in a pharmacy. The evening meal will have a counter-agent and sedative. The steroids they’ll shoot you with itch like hell, and the combination will have twenty percent of you hallucinating by the end of the second day. They want to keep you unbalanced, hostile, agitated, and paranoid.”