Liberty or Death! 1/4

Author’s Note:

I am about to tell you a series of lies about people who never existed, places they never were, things they never did, and thoughts they never had. Lies about things that never happened, and the consequences that never resulted from them.

Story contains scenes of violence. Reader discretion is advised.

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Blackened husks stood out in the drifting clouds of smoke and gas like rocks guarding hostile shores. Fires raged through the night, leaving charred remains in their wake; tearing through the heart of a city under siege.

Somewhere beyond the smoke and the reeking stench of the gas, sirens wailed.

The three distinct sounds of standard emergency responders nearly drowned by the constant, droning wail of the air raid sirens. Faint as the rest, it rose from every corner of the city, daring citizens to leave their homes.

Fainter than all the rest, buried under layers of desperation and panic, gunshots echoed through the early-morning stillness. Smoke drifted lazily across the road, black and grey clashing and competing for dominance over no-man’s-land.

Desperate faces peaked out of cover, trying to tell if the enemy was still in position. Murky shadows moved through the gathered smoke and gas, formless shapes with limbs stretched and warped into a caricature of humanity.

Like a sleeper’s eye being cracked on the world, the first true rays of the sun burst from the eastern horizon, sending the night’s lingering shadows back to their crevices.

Eyes tracked to the sky, fearful that for once in the three-week confrontation the sirens’ warnings would come true. Helicopters had been seen, a few planes roaring overhead as the protests disintegrated. Eyes from both sides of no-man’s-land sweeping back and forth, waiting. Counting their blessings for the total absence of strikes.

So far.

Voices rose in the dawn stillness, floating through the stinging, toxic clouds. Fresh voices.

Harsh and low, they muttered to each other or shouted orders. Unintelligible noise for the most part, clanking of metal and the hollow thocking ring of plastic shields hitting the ground. More voices. And still more.

Wind blew in from the sea, heat rising from the inland desert, drawing cooler air from the sea and driving the obscuring smoke further inland. Exposing the ranks of shields bristling with nightsticks and batons.

Battles are things that happen in other places. Riots limited to sports games, police killings, and election results. But bodies littered no-man’s-land. Shadowed mounds that eyes skittered over, trying not to see.

A few wore scraps of uniforms mixed with tattered civilian clothes, none carried identification. Most of the bodies had been civilians. Peaceful until the confrontation and escalation.

None moved. Or groaned. Or called for help from their mothers. The strength for such sounds was long since spent, and those few hearts that still beat among the dead did so heavily. Each pump of blood through their veins carrying pain and terror with it. Without enough air to give voice to their torment, they screamed soundless, wordless screams.

One such body, mind winding down, stared at the ranks of shields. They looked nothing like the ones who had left her where she lay. The ones who lit the spark, detonating the explosive of the mob’s pent up fury.

She was barely fifteen years old when her heart finally stopped. A blessing, given what was to come next. Her name was Samantha, but no one would remember that it belonged to her corpse when the dust finally settled.

The uniforms stood shoulder to shoulder, shields presented before them as though their imperator were ready to parade them through Rome. Unlike the deputies from the night before, the battle in the street, those uniforms were clean, well-kept, and identical. Olive green, uniforms that were meant to distribute water and emergency medicine in that city, not take up arms.

In ones and twos, bodies materialized out of the fading smoke and gas. They gathered by unspoken consensus barely twenty meters from the soldiers. Shouts and insults crossed the gap, loosed in volleys to clatter uselessly against the shields arrayed against them.

Flags unfurled and the shouting morphed into chants.

Steady, rhythmic, growing louder with each repetition as more bodies joined the hoard and lent their voice to its song.

Booted feet shuffled. Helmeted heads turned. Some thought of the people, some remembered their oaths that bound them to the safety and security of the population. But training and fear latched around their throats, forcing trained obedience, strangling empathy, and banished remembrance of their sworn duties.

As the chanting masses grew larger, louder, stronger, the soldiers’ feet stopped shuffling. Shields grew heavy on arms, batons and nightsticks suddenly seeming unwieldly and awkward. Hints of familiar faces among the civilians surfaced, just for an instant, a split second of thought that maybe loved ones lingered behind the growing forest of flags and signs begging for peace.

Some soldiers thought that if the people wanted peace, then they should just do as they are told. Some grinned in expectant glee, hoping with an almost aroused sincerity that something would happen. That a mistake would be made and they could enjoy the sublime pleasure of cracking a dissident skull or two. Indulging their secret lust for violence against the weak.

Others wished heartily for more gunshots. To see more crumpled forms litter the deserted space separating the two opposing armies. Longing to see the sheep writhe and scream as their own heart pumped their life across the pavement.

Most simply waited, obedient. Too stunned or confused at their own presence, at the carnage still visible in the corpses of cars and people. Regular people.

Without the ease of foreign dress or foreign language, the bodies scattered on the ground were just that in the eyes of the majority. People. But people who had made their choice and stood when they should have just gone home. Now they lay, and would never dare to stand again.

If a message must be sent, and the orders claimed that it must, then let it be soon. Anything to stop this horrible waiting.

Reinforcements could only be deployed by air now. The region had completely locked down roads blocked with refugees and checkpoints, and its borders blazed with insurgent activity as regular people rebelled against their duly elected king. Not that he called himself that in public, not that anyone standing face to face with death potential could think of him as anything else.

Rumour held that the Executive Authorities were illegally pulling thousands from troops from surrounding jurisdictions. More uniforms pulled from their comfortable lives and forced to face a howling mob of people who want their voices heard. And who have realized that the only language to convey their message must be written in blood.

Their souls demanded vengeance.

Vengeance against the people for forcing them into this position. For killing friends and colleagues, for threatening their own lives. Both sides completely ignoring the source of all escalation.

Surging forward, covering half the distance between the two forces, the protesters howled a challenge. The soldiers were fresh; and trained so far beyond the deputized extremists that had fought the night before. The people felt fear in their hearts, it clawed up their throats and choked off their air.

Still they called out their demands. In hoarse voices, still raw from the preceding night’s tear gas and pepper spray, they shouted and screamed and chanted for change. For change that would benefit everyone, including and especially the uniforms arrayed against them. For a future that would see everyone happy, healthy, and free, if only the uniforms could disobey orders.

Of course, a uniform can do nothing on its own. And the person inside it can only be seen as one among many so long as the uniform is worn. Nor can its wearer regard those without one as fellow voyager in life.

Each saw the other as an idea. And some ideas must die.

Boots thundered on pavement still cool from the previous night as the uniformed host stepped forward, their weapons crashing against shields. A wordless shout rose from them, an intimidation tactic required by training, if useless in the moment.

A night’s fighting behind the protest, a night’s hearing of the mob’s abuses behind the uniforms, blood boiled. Rage fought to tear its way free.

Federal corpses lay in pitifully small numbers among the scattered dead. Federal in the way that any conscript given a week’s training and no uniform were federal. But the distinction hardly mattered.

Citizen corpses dotted the remaining space between the combatants. Improvised weapons appeared in eager hands as the soldiers advanced their one thunderous step. Regular people stared at the dead, reeling as armed civilians shouldered through the crowd to stand at the front.

Following in their wake, citizens accepted bricks and bats and stones and bottles with rags and joined their fist armed comrades at the fore. Children lay scattered among the dead. Elderly rested where they had fallen crumpled after the irregulars had struck them down.

Something primal joined the growing roar as the civilians charged the uniforms’ shields.

Low-flying drones buzzed overhead, launched from behind the bleeding edge to rain torment on enemy heads. Gas grenades and flashbangs volleyed out from behind the soldiers, bricks and Molotov cocktails responded. Thrown by hands or dropped from the air, chaos erupted and the once ‘ordered’ press of host against host, of courage against shields devolved.

Bones cracked and people screamed.

10 minutes passed and the battle raged. Behind the olive line, clusters of uniforms sat or lay where their comrades had dragged them, nursing injuries or being closely monitored in case, in their unconsciousness they forgot to breathe. On side streets and down alleys behind the protestors, uniforms lay side by side with citizens as volunteers ran desperately back and forth trying to preserve and comfort them.

Water flowed into eyes burned by uniformed “peacekeepers.” Men, women, children, and teenagers howled in agony over broken bones and sprained joints. Some bodies made not a sound, and moved not at all. A few with faces respectfully covered.

Above, the drones had started targeting each other. Launching nets to entangle rotors, or sacrificing themselves to take out an opposing copter once their own payload was delivered.

Journalist drones tried to filter through the chaos, streaming distorted and half-scrambled video to millions of eyes around the world. Through the smoke and gas, people stumbled free of the melee, and sprinted away from it. The eyes of the world focused on them, following a few as they scrambled for safety or stumbled and fell as a well-aimed beanbag shattered ribs.

“The cameras always cut out here,” said anchor after anchor, showing the distorted footage as drone cameras and controls failed. “We have reports of law-enforcement drones facing similar problems. Sources within the armed forces have stated plainly that all evidence points to dedicated jamming equipment. But, they also insist that this is not sufficiently disruptive to be of concern to the forces on the ground.”

But the combatants heard none of it. Those few who had the presence of mind to notice the drones, to notice the arial combat or the failure of copter after copter as they crossed an invisible line, could only notice it. Could only file it away, their unconscious mind forcing such unimportant information out of awareness. Along the heaving, bleeding press of shields against flesh, other thoughts were more occupying.

Unnoticed by the world, a teenager slammed her empty hands against a shield and swore viciously at the uniform behind it. Thoughts of friends and neighbours and loved ones terrified by the orders that uniform followed drove her, blinded her to the risks inherent in remaining unarmed and peaceful amid violence and chaos.

She shouted at him, quotes from founding fathers and deep thinkers. Quotes from religion and from law. Quotes that ended as a gloved hand emerged from behind the shield and pressed a pistol to her head.

Visible for a fraction of a heartbeat, a tattoo of an ancient holy symbol rotated and bastardized by vile intent caught her eye. The person within the uniform thought scornfully, “these ‘people’ should never have left their plantations,” then pulled the trigger.

Before her body hit the ground, the uniform reeled back, its occupant screaming. Helmets turned towards him, attention caught by the high, piercing shriek. His blood spattered his comrades as he stared at the place his tattoo had been.

Something had flashed, just after the gunshot. A silvery, metallic streak of light and the tattoo he was so proud of was gone.

Then pain.

Further down the skirmish line, protestors vanished behind the line of shields as gaps in the assault opened room to maneuver. In other places, soldiers fell forward, enraged hands and the hooks or crowbars latched onto their shields. A few were saved by quick-thinking comrades. The rest were savaged by the mob.

More gunshots, still sporadic, severing miniscule heads in the overwhelming force of the civilian hydra.

Explosions ripped through the mob. Sound and light blinding and deafening dozens at a time, leaving them easy, stumbling, groping targets for the now steadily advancing soldiers. Reinforcements swelled the uniformed ranks. A flood of fresh bodies and fresh anger delivered through the contested city by convoy.

In the wake of the new assault, a civilian stumbled free of a fresh burst of stinging tear gas, thankful for the mask he had been swearing steadily at for the last hour. It was hot, it was stuffy, it kept him standing and able while so many of his friends and comrades were incapacitated by the unexpected attack.

Turning to start pulling people out of the smoke, he froze. A terrible sound ringing in his ears. Triumph.

Soldiers poured into a section of the mob weakened by the anti-crowd weapons. Batons and shields and fists carved a broken, screaming path deeper into the heart of the crowd. In their wake, other soldiers formed new shield walls and changed the angle of attack on the civilians.

Regular people routed. They turned and fled, tearing through the gas and desperately trying to avoid the next volley of flash grenades. The one in the mask slowly turned back, watched the enemy carve a swath through his allies and tensed to run.

Horses appeared behind the line, uniformed city and state police on their backs. Shields and batons in their hands, they approached in a steady line, breaking into files as they came up on the foot-soldiers and filtered into the melee.

The protestor in the mask turned then and sprinted away, the sound of the batons cracking against skulls and the howls of pain as people failed to get out from under the hooves’ way ringing in his ears. Odds were that others would get to alert that the rout had happened first, and the horses were committed and the trap fully sprung. Despite the carnage he grinned, a savage thing behind the mask, at how the tables would soon turn.

Fin.

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four