There is a lot of head nodding, followed by handshaking, and back patting; then Rita and Mark are alone.
“What do you think?” asks Mark.
“I think that no matter what we say, the evil in the world will try to kill us,” says Rita, “and maybe they will succeed.”
“Doesn’t that bother you? I mean, compared to most of us, you’re still something of a kid.”
“Look Mister! If you’re gonna want some hunni later, you may want to cut back on those disparaging words.”
“Well, I do love my hunni, Honey!” he says as she slips into his lap. She puts her right arm around his shoulder and strokes his face with her left hand before giving him a kiss to launch the day.
“Let’s go talk to the others,” Mark suggests, and Rita gets off his lap. Hand in hand, they head through the door, knocking on the doors of the other coaches in their caravan, calling a meeting of the minds. They knock on every door on their way down, and then every door on their way back, then heading into the woods, Mark and Rita wave for them to follow, and they do. They only walk a few hundred yards into the woods before they come to a clearing where he can address them. Together, they number nearly twenty.
“Most of you are rather young, and if normal in the world was anything like normal used to be, most of you would have another sixty years of life ahead of you. But, sadly, this is not the case. For those of you who are Christians, you have an excellent expectation of life in the near future, in that time that Rita calls E-Day.” He looks at her for validation and gets it in her smile and nod. “For those of you who are not Christians, life is about to suck, so look around, and see who are the believers in the crowd.” He pauses a moment as some of the folks raise their hands. “Talk to these people about what the difference is, what it means, how you can be on the right side in this conflict, because it is going to be terrifying.”
“Later today, there is going to be a news van here, and we are going to attempt to put together some interviews to be used to attack the Kremlin and the Ayatollah, along with everything and everyone who has brought this ruin to the world. If you are up for the fight, we would love your help. Understand that this hilltop is likely to become a personal target to those people and that means that we will be a target too. If you are not up for that, we can arrange transport out of here, but, to be really honest, I expect that the entire world is about to go to shit in a sack, no matter where you are.”
He looks around to see how his words are affecting them, and then he asks, “How many of you want to be in the video, and how many of you want to be armed when the fight arrives?”
“Wait!” says a young man, Teague, standing next to Boot, who spins around and raises his hand. “If the world is going to shit, why would we want to leave? And who decides what goes into that video? And who says who gets to be in the thing?”
“Well, Teague,” responds Rita, “I think anyone can be in the video, and pretty much say whatever is on your heart, but there will be some editing done by some of the grownups.”
“So, you’re not in charge?”
“I’m not even one of the grownups,” says Rita. “Have I ever done anything that makes you think I am a grownup?”
“Well,” says Boot, “I’m a g’oneup, jus’ like you!” and he comes to hug Rita. “Maybe?” he says, glancing around each side of Rita’s head. “I wanna be in the movies!” He spins left, steps to the right, with a slight bob in his step. He puts his hand up in the air, pulls his fist down by his side, like a champion scoring a shot, and says, “Yeah! Makin’ a movie!” dancing a bit before returning to Rita. “Movie,” he says quietly.
“That’s right, Boot . . . movie,” she replies, giving him a hug. He twitters and spins a couple times after that, strutting around like a proud papa.
Teague asks, “When are these news people supposed to be here?”
“Four!” says Rita.
“It’s almost two now, should we get ready? What do we need to do?”
“Tell ya what, guys,” says Mark. “I would suggest you work up what you would like to say in a few sentences, so that when asked, you will be ready. Write it down somewhere. Also, those who want to be in on the fight, but have no real weapons experience, meet up with me in half an hour at my coach and we will see what we can do.” He looks around, seeing a little stirring, and asks, “Are there any questions?” No hands are raised, so he says, “Half an hour at my coach.”
The crowd disperses, trailing back to their homes, and when a half hour is passed, several people, twelve in all, find themselves at Mark’s coach, meeting with Mark, Lundt, Griffin, Grubic, Carlos, and Sylvia, who takes the lead.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to teach you how to shoot two weapons today. We are not going to make you experts, and we don’t expect you to be soldiers, but we do expect you to listen to the safety training most, and learn not to shoot your own foot, or your neighbor. Do we understand?”
There is some murmuring in the positive, but very indistinct.
“Do We Understand?” she asks a little louder.
There is more of a response, to which she says, “I will not consider you having replied if I cannot hear all of you reply. DO WE UNDERSTAND?” she shouts like a Drill Sergeant.
“Yes, ma’am!” comes a unified and legible reply.
“Excellent! We are going to head down to a clearing which Sergeant Schwarz has found, and there we will load and fire our weapons. If you will follow me to our coaches, we will issue you some weapons and ammo to get you started.”
Boot looks to Rita, saying, “Boot – computer weapon.”
“Sure, Boot,” says Rita. “Go find Marcos. Tell him I said you can hack. See what he has.”
Boot spins right, takes off to the left, with a slight hop in his step about every six paces. It is sort of a skip when watched, but not every step, just every so often.
“Rita says Boot hacks,” he tells Marcos.
“Boot?”
“I Boot!”
“Oh, okay. How hack? Er, I mean, how do you hack?”
Sitting at a workstation, Boot points to the screen, saying, “Paris hotel network?”
“Who does hotels?” asks Marcos. A hand goes up and a young man comes over. “Can you get us into the hotel networks for Paris?”
“Sure,” says the boy, sitting to stroke the keyboard a few hundred times, before saying, “Viola!” He waves his inverted hand across the screen.
“Boot!” says Marcos, gesturing his access to the keyboard.
Boot sits down, takes the keyboard in hand, after a dozen mouse clicks and a few hundred keystrokes, he is looking at flashing streams of hotel security footage, which he freezes. “Enemies!” he says.
Culver comes over, strokes his keyboard and few times, click-click with the mouse, and he has access to a bank of photographs.
Boot clicks his way through all two hundred photos, in about a two-minute span, seemingly to get a look at everyone. Then, returning to his hotel game, he begins scanning trough twelve frames of video at ten times natural speed, all from different hotels, all at once. As he finds what he was seeking, he minimizes the screen. If he reaches the end of a video, he closes it, clearing the space to load another video stream. He keeps twelve running at all times, minimizing screens from time to time, till he has gotten to the end of all the footage he has, and there are twenty-two windows open with video on them. He has been there for about two hours.
“So, what are these?” asks Marcos.
One at a time, Boot brings up a video screen, then a photo of a target, showing the video beside the photo. In all of these videos, there is a target, getting frisky with someone – not a spouse – entering a hotel room. Because the hotels are in Paris, there are visitors from dozens of nations getting a little sumpin-sumpin. “Oh,” says Marcos. “I get it.”
“Russia . . . Moscow!” says Boot. Marcos snaps his fingers and the same guy comes by, gets into the network, and Boot does it again, and again, and again
. In the next two days, Boot will access thirty cities hotels, finding compromising video of hundreds of major players. A new website will be set up for Super Cheaters, and it will go online in just a few days. All of what is now Social Media will be inundated with it.
At the end of the lust hunt, Boot says to Marcos, “Satellites?”
Marcos figures, “what the heck?” and he connects him to Culver. Culver leads him to their satellite access systems, and he asks about designations. She plugs him into all the Pentagon backups from Carlisle, PA, and watches as he does what she did not even think possible, so she never dared dream.
He pokes around into records and finds management systems for satellites from the 1980’s, discovering some of the old “Star Wars” initiatives. Everything there is extremely theoretical, except where it isn’t theoretical at all. With an uplink from their satellite TV hack, he connects to a French communication satellite, which had originally been a phone connection for Southeast Asia, and it taps into the old network that “never existed.”
“Holy shit!” says Culver.
“Holy shit!” says Boot.
“Mike!” shouts Culver.
“Mike!” shouts Boot.
“What do you got?” asks Mike.
“Holy shit is got!” says Boot.
“You are not going to believe what this guy stumbled into,” says Culver.
“No stumble!” says Boot. “Boot g’oneup! Walk fine.” He spins out of his chair to the right, steps off to the left, and is gone in a few seconds. Culver has to explain what they have found, and Mike is glad and amazed, maybe even somewhat terrified.
But three days earlier . . .
There drives into the confabulation of buses another coach, a 2002 Winnebago with seven different colours of beige paint on it, a satellite uplink on a pole, fastened to the rear, and a logo on the side of a flying unicorn with a rainbow spraying out its behind. Across the front of the coach, above the windshield, it says in chrome looking letters, “Incontinent Unicorn.” Two people emerge and walk through the dust clouds to introduce themselves, just as Boot has come from one of his hack sessions.
“Ran Dather and Caulder Walkright!” says the larger of the two, shaking hands with Boot as he comes by.
“Boot!” says he, shaking their hands, walking on, ignoring them. He’s heading for his dinner, in his coach, with Teague.
Teague has stepped out, crosses the ground, saying, “You want Mike.” Continuing past them, pointing in the direction of the bunker, “Lemme show you.”
They walk in a column of three, not wanting to be lost, and when in the bunker, Teague shouts for Mike, who comes right away. “Ran Dather and Caulder Walkright,” says the other guy this time.
“You’re kidding, right?” asks Mike.
“The names have been changed to protect the innocent, ma’am,” says the larger one.
“We are all out of innocent, here.” She looks at him, saying, “We are making everyone here into a stone-cold killer, or a thief, or something worse, to bring about the proper conclusion.”
“Conclusion to what, ma’am?” asks the other.
“Yes, perhaps we should talk outside, with some of the others,” she suggests. They agree and everyone is following Teague back out the door. Mike whistles, heading for the door, holds up a single finger, indicating that she wants the leaders, and those in the bunker follow. They bang on Mark’s door as they pass, headed for Lundt’s place, and pretty soon, they are following Mark down to the clearing for a confab of the decision makers. “Everyone, this is what is left of the news world, and they are here, at our request, to tell the story of the end.”
“What?” asks the smaller.
“E-Day is coming,” says Rita, “and we want to bring it off with a bang. We think you can give a hand. Are you in?”
“What the hell are you talking about, little girl?” asks the larger one.
“Here’s the deal, guys. The world is about to turn into one great-big, giant-sized septic tank, and we want to burn it down before they do.” Looking around to see the expressions, Mike concludes, “We figure there is a week at most before it all goes to Hell.”
“So, Mister Newsman, what do you want to do about it?” asks Rita. “If you just want to report it, there won’t be anyone to report it to. But if you want to be a part of it . . .”
“Why are we talking to this child instead of grown-ups?”
“I be g’oneup!” says Boot, entering the clearing, with a hop in his step.
“Are all of these people defective?” asks the other one.
“Here’s the news, men,” says Mark. “These people have managed to make inroads to every military channel of the world. They have gotten the goods on everything needed to attack almost anyone, almost anywhere, and to do it all from here. And if you say one more disparaging word about any of them, I’m gonna shoot you in the foot, and that kid there is going to take over your equipment to do the job anyway. Do you want to join us?”
“I don’t get it,” says the other. “What do you want from us?”
“We have a few days before the defecation strikes the rotary oscillator, and what we want to do is make news.” Mike steps toward them, putting her arm around each of them, saying, “We want to record and deliver several messages, using your news channels to get it out to the rest of the news bums. Then we will infect the rest of the news world – you know; the legit news people as they’re now called– and we are going to start some global scandals. And there is a lot of money to move.”
“So you want to rob these people?”
“No! We want to rob everyone and dump the money in the laps of the axis powers, publically, in a humiliating way.” She looks the larger one dead in the eye, and she asks him, “Would you like to help? Or should we find someone else?”
The other one says, “We’re in!”
The larger one slaps him a sharp one on the head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re in. We really have no choice. The girl is talking about the end of the world as we now know it.” Turning to Rita, he says, “Right?” She nods and smiles, as does Mark, Mike and the rest. “So, that being the case, we have to choose a side, and I choose this one.” Putting his hands on his friend’s chest, he says, “If you want, you can do this job and go.” Turning back to Mike, he says, “My name’s Putnam.”
“Is that the first or last?” asks Rita.
Turning to her, he says, “The last name is Weiderstein.”
“So, Put, how do you feel about your enlistment?” asks Rita.
“What are my options? I think you are right, there is no neutral ground in what is coming.”
“G’oneup,” says Boot, patting him on the back.
The Final Message
They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.[30]
E-Day Minus 1 Week
The newsmen configure five cameras identically, and pass them out, with brief instructions on how to use them, and dozens of people from the enclave have a few sentences to share. There are hours of film that have to be edited into specific messages for the purposes proposed. It is during this time that Boot finds his way through the Pentagon firewalls to their greatest weapon. He only takes a break long enough to film his own message, a very simple message about who are the bad guys and who are not. Good message.
It takes two days, almost, to get all the bits of video into coherent packages, to play together like some PSA commercials on old school TV, but taking the UberWeb by storm is a little harder than it used to be. In a free web, people could come up with something catchy and, like a cat chasing a yo-yo video, it could go viral, and millions would watch. Marcos and Tommy write a few worms that help the videos load onto every connected device in the world, so that, whenever a device would do a time verification, part of the confirmation would be a video link and a launch Trojan.
Altogether, there are about sixty different collections of clips, many with
no military people in them at all. Lots of them are just people, talking about life with people. Some of them are analysts sharing what they have seen, know, and can prove. Others are just sharing what has changed their lives. When it is time for the military to speak, they do so without guns or weapons of any kind in the video, and they tell of the horrors they have seen, sometimes of what they have done. Mike tells the world about the evil that killed her sister, devastated her family, and how her cantankerous response was one, the doing of which she regrets, but the result of which she applauds. Would she do it again? Who’s to say? It is a different world; the evils are larger now.
Starting on Tuesday afternoon, the phones and desktops, tablets and even point of sale computers, all over the world, began playing tirades of what has been stolen from everyone, who’s having affairs, how many, and with which sex or sexes, who has really been running the world, and how it is run into the ground, and why.
The first hint of it Ayatollah Rashid hears is from one of his personal lieutenants. He went to an ATM to get some cash, and the machine started playing video of his wife with one of Rashid’s wives, and two of the guards of the palace, both of whom are about to become eunuchs. The video had been snagged from one of the guard’s phones. The delivery begins in a targeted way, and what the Ayatollah and his lieutenant don’t know is that their escapades have been broadcast to their constituents, so that they are losing favor by the minute. But Rashid still holds the power.
He orders the destruction of the sources, though no one knows how to find out how it got out, his ire is sacrosanct to his followers. Soon, the world is flooded with video of indiscretions, by all manner of leadership, in every major city. There are allegations of financial improprieties everywhere, even the notion that all of the political power players are thieves, and the numbers begin hitting the world.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 31
