Broken Horizon

Part Two:

"That which doesn't kill me, makes me...OW! Hey, that sunofabitch is sharp!"

Tell me something: What’s the difference between cowardice and common sense? If someone sticks a gun in your face, it seems like common sense would tell you to duck. No dishonor there. If you are fighting a war you can’t win, why should you stand there and die because some fuck wearing a couple of stars on his shoulder said so? What is it about retreat that makes people think you lost? You stayed alive to pull the trigger at a later date, why is that wrong? To me, that’s just prudent planning.

Fort Haven, Three Weeks Ago

The jarring ring of the early 1980’s style phone shattered the office doldrums exactly the way a gentle breeze wouldn’t, giving both Severs and I a good startle. "3rd Battalion, 25th Armor Company, Specialist Edwards speaking." I answered.

"Edwards," an angry voice came through loud enough to deafen me “Who is the most senior officer on staff over there?” I shot a glance at Severs. “That would be Captain Charles Severs, sir.” At this, Severs shot me a glance back and started making a chopping action across his throat. I don’t care if it's God, me no talkie today.

“Put him on.”

“Sir, Captain Severs is on patrol right now, may I take a message?” I could hear the officer on the other end in the beginning stages of a coronary. “Well if he’s on patrol, who the hell is in charge over there?”

“That’s me, sir. First Lieutenant Robbie Edwards, Chief of the Watch.”

"Listen up, Edwards, I want you to call all the sections in Fort Haven and get their people down to the Olympic Center and start drawing out weapons. Get your guys to go all over that building and confiscate every phone, radio and television. I don’t want a singe weapon or communication device among the civilians.”

That brought me to attention. “Sir, the civilian population is almost double our entire battalion strength. If they decide they’re not going to lay down arms peacefully, we could be gutted from the inside without too much trouble on their part.”

”Edwards, listen to me carefully: I will have weapons and communications control by sunrise tomorrow or I will sign the orders for your execution to be carried out by noon, are we clear?”

”Yes sir. And who am I talking to?"

"This is Major General Salinger, you ass." he growled.

"Yes sir."

"Get to it."

"Yes sir."

Severs stared at me as he sucked down another beer. "What was that all about?”

"Uh, I think I just pissed off one of the head onions.”

Severs chuckled, “What is it with you and breathing? ‘Cause that seems to be what sets everyone around you in a foul mood.”

“Dunno, maybe it’s my natural charm and good looks.”

“Oh yeah, maybe it is that. I was just thinking it was because you’re a self-serving prick who has problems with authority figures.”

“That too.”

Chuck "Bo” Severs had been a Marine Force Recon commander, and was great at all that sneaky shit you see in spy movies. He could make a sizable bomb out of regular cleaning supplies found in an average household, and handy with a knife. Not one to flinch at a little domestic wet work, if you follow me.

I was in the Motor Pool for the Navy. Yeah, I know, you were expecting me to say “Navy Seal”, or “Captain America” or some shit like that. Well, sorry kids. I was a grease monkey for the squids. I filled ‘er up and cleaned the windshields. I rotated tires. I bitched about ranking officers and drank beer after hours in the shop with some of the guys.

Until the fireworks started. Then there wasn’t much need for separate services anymore, and after the remaining military elements had been cobbled back together everything was lumped together under “Army” no matter what they had been before, and we were all given new specializations, training and reassignment.

The Eastern Seaboard is fucked, and if there’s to be any semblance of honest record laid out, that should be made clear right here and now. No one knows how it happened, but a series of small nuclear detonations occurred in a week of each other. Not attacks. Detonations. No one knows how. No one knows why. Or maybe, someone does, but they sure as hell ain’t sayin’. But it was our own nukes, that we know for sure. And the entire East coast is ground zero.

Here’s a damned thing to think about, they say single nuke went off at the White House, of all things. At least, that’s what the initial reports said. For all I knew, it could have gone off in Jersey.

Naaah, what am I saying? If that had happened, no one would have noticed. Or cared.

Anyway, everything East of the Appalachian mountains is clicking hot, with moderate patches of atomic snow that could last for, oh, they say 300 years. The Florida Keys, already famous for alligators the size of boats now have giant green things with teeth like razors and a temper worse than your Catholic mother in law whose just been told her daughter’s husband is a Mormon who wants to abort the baby. The cloudless sky over the Florida panhandle has a hole in the ozone layer the size of Hawaii, and ultraviolet light there either eats you to the bone with cancer or makes you grow a third eye. Sometimes both. Plus the water’s completely filthy now, the only reason to go there would be to die of scorching heat, starvation, or a full course meal for some mutated critter.

New England? Forget it. Cold as shit to start with, and even colder now that nuclear winter has lasted over half a year. The prevailing winds had swept most of the radioactive clouds northward and left them in the atmosphere for months on end. Some people tried to stick it out, and at last report they were frozen to their beds. As for Canada, well, let’s just say they won’t be speaking to us for a long time. Québec probably will never speak again. The radiation doesn’t start to die down until you pass the Ruined Sea (formerly the Great Lakes) and even then it’s risky. Most of the population in that entire region were dead within the first week. Everyone else headed west as fast as whatever transportation they could beg, steal or hijack could carry them. Over a third died from radiation sickness before they reached Colorado, many more were killed along the way.

Which was where Severs and I came in. Fort Haven, Colorado. The county line between what was left of our ridiculous nation and Armageddon. I was gonna say “civilization”, but that’s long gone.

“So, how do you wanna play it?” Severs outranked me, so the burden of command should have been his, but we were a team. Rank didn’t mean shit when you were brothers of the red skies. I looked over the layout of the Olympic Training Center, and I didn’t like what I saw one bit. So many little crevices, hidey-holes and alleys that curved into a network of hallways. A small fire team could keep our unit occupied for weeks in there, possibly longer. And there were almost two thousand men, women and children living there for the past two months now. They’d know every inch of that place, especially with the rise in looting around town. If they realized what was coming, we’d be in deep shit.

I downed another beer, and glanced at my watch: 1300 hours. “I do have an idea, but I want you to hear all of it and give it a few minutes to sink in before you arbitrarily put two rounds into my brain for suggesting such a thing.”

Severs leaned against the table a popped another brew. “Let’s hear it, asslord.”

Olympic Training Center, 1900 Hours

“The choice is yours” my voice echoed through the loudspeakers across the converted training hall that all the males had been herded into. Since it was my plan, I was put in charge of the public relations. “I do NOT want to execute your wives and children. I repeat, I do NOT want to execute your loved ones.”

”But if you do not comply, we will start with the women and the elderly.”

I had sent a six teams in earlier with the ruse of separating the men from the elderly, females and children. The easiest way to do that was call a meeting of the menfolk in the community, have them gathered into the center training area and wait there for an hour and a half. I had the teams start several rumors as they were herding them into the hall; We would start issuing weapons, there was a new shelter being built, more bathrooms, food supply, whatever it took to get them separated from their wives and kids, whatever loved ones they had.

The plan was simple: Take hostages. Force compliance. Mission accomplished. Man, it’s so easy to dream up these things when you think someone else will be doing the dance.

The crowd was becoming riotous. “Cocksuckers!” “There’ll be payback!” “You have to sleep sometime!” Any second now, and we were going to have a small-arms firefight on our hands.

I was prepared for this. I nodded to Severs, and he led three kids up on the stage. They couldn’t have been older than four or five. They were stripped naked, and they’re hands were bound together with plastic zip ties.

The noise dropped to nothing. Everyone stopped moving, and the hall was filled only with the gossamer echo’s of the crowd just seconds before. Suddenly, I didn’t have to shout anymore, and it took a second for me to scrape together the composure necessary for my next line.

“I said we would START with the women and elderly. The children, we will save. For later.” Leave it at that, let them wonder what “later” meant, especially with the visual aid we had just given them. I was praying that would be all we needed, because I just wasn’t prepared to carry out the threat I had just given. I wasn’t very good at poker, but Christ let my bluff work here and now, please.

“We have numbers. They will be filled. You have one hour, at the end of which we will proceed with our motivational factors if the numbers are not met. Cell phones in bin “A”. Radios and music players in bin “B”.

“Firearms in bin “C”.

“The soldiers with the green armbands will be taking inventory.”

”As I said, you have one hour. I suggest you begin now.” I clicked off and tried to resume my place among the unit on the podium without breaking character. This was not the time for them to see me sweat. Of course, we didn’t really have any estimates or numbers at all. But they didn’t know that.

After several minutes, the first civilians returned, and the bottom of the bins were slowly beginning to fill. The firearms can looked like a museum of boomsticks, everything from a Colt Python to a Walthers P38 to a .22 rifle was in there. I saw a German Luger that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Normandy. Several Glocks. A Baretta that I made a mental note of for later recovery. A samurai sword. Knives out the yang.

Severs leaned in close. “You know we ain’t getting’ everything. Gonna be some contraband somewheres.”

“I don’t give a shit. We get the major league out of the way, anything left won’t be enough cause for me to get out of bed.” I just wanted this to be over, too many people had seen my face as an authority figure, and that was making me nervous. I sure as hell wouldn’t remember any of these fuckers. I glanced over at the guard with the kids, and realized with horror that he was eyeballing them hungrily. They were still unclothed, and crying. I tried to remember his name…Hoskins. Private. Skilled in carpentry. “Severs, take charge of those kids. They’ve served their purpose, get them the hell offstage and put some goddam clothes on them.”

“You got it, man.”

“Status on the henhouse?”

“The hens are roosting without a feather ruffled. Having a grand old time.”

We had taken everyone else to the great hall on base in Fort Haven, half a mile away from the Olympic Training Center. They were told that while the meeting was in progress, they were to be treated to a nice dinner and clean showers. It was all I could think of to get that many people to go willingly to an unfamiliar place for several hours without violence. If I timed this right, the men would be disarmed and cowed before they realized we played them. I was starting to think we might pull this fucker off without a single loss of life. Damn, I’d drink to that.

“Hey…Severs?”

“Yeah?”

“After this is over, wait for a few days. When you get a second alone, find Hoskins, take that bastard somewhere secluded and kill him.”

Severs nodded and walked towards the kids. Without any warning or preamble at all, he walked up to Hoskins, pulled his sidearm and shoved it in the private’s mouth. “We will act ONLY if they fail to comply, do you understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he shot the soldier through the mouth, the back of his head exploding like a red pudding and covering the children in grey matter and blood.

There were gasps in the crowd, and among the unit as well. The doorways suddenly filled even faster than before, as people rushed to dig out anything they had resembling a weapon or a radio. So much for my loss of life pipe dream.

As for me, it was a few minutes before I realized that I had shit my pants.

Something you have to understand about the early days is that we always thought this was going to end. The insanity, I mean. We figured that the extreme measures we took today would serve to trim the boat later. You have to have some kind of deal like that with your subconscious, something that let’s you sleep at night. Otherwise, how could you get sane men to open fire on one another, day after day? There had to be some order, somewhere. Otherwise, this was all just prolonging the inevitable.

And that was the one thing I couldn't accept.