CHAPTER TWO

 

Wednesday, June 30th 2038

11:52

 

“SO, THIS IS the worst mistake of my fucking life, how about you?” Judge Jones screamed at the deputy beside him, not that either of them could make anything out over the roar of gunfire.

While Ezekiel’s training at the Academy had taught him much, he’d learned this trick—to feign a connection with what amounted to a glorified citizen with a gun—much earlier in life. The two were crouching—cowering—behind a row of shattered lockers, and Jones was trying to calm the kid who’d insisted on getting involved in the Judge’s business. It might have worked, if not for the glint of death in the officer’s eyes. It was a look that reminded Ezekiel that nothing at the Academy could possibly undo the one truth of the world: stupid will always find a way.

 

 

MCCANDLESS HIGH WAS among the last remaining 2A Schools, which armed educators with semi-automatic weapons to protect their students. Ezekiel had found himself in the midst of a D- decision over a C+ student.

The call that’d brought Judge Ezekiel Jones and Deputy Einstein together was one of the many, many wounds left by a former president. Unfortunately, the details of that time are murky at best, and those who are keen on mental disability and development history know why, although the illness known as “Collective National Ubiquitous Trauma” wouldn’t be described and named until decades later. The disease is marked by a selective amnesia, sudden bouts of existential dread whilst looking up, and uptake in dopamine production when snapping tiki torches in two.

Far on the other side of the hallway, the student who’d kicked off the whole ordeal after flashing his side-strapped pistol at his English teacher was a mouthy GenSlag Gang member. Roy ‘Fuck Y’all’ McElroy had decided to educate his teacher, Mr. Reynolds, with the back end of his pistol after a subpar grade for his paper on Samuel J. Battle.

Bullets thundered, and tore. They shattered. They forestalled any chance of communication.

“I… I think we should charge, sir—or, um, Judge, sir? I—I—I can take out the one on the left if you—” Deputy Aristotle was stopped when the side of a ricocheting bullet clipped a chunk of his ear off. Judge Jones snatched at the Deputy’s neck, yanking him down below the line of fire.

“You mean my left, the fifteen-year-old with a pea shooter? Or your left, the English teacher who has, at best, three shots left, and hasn’t stopped shooting to realise we’re not with the gang member who probably isn’t even here any more?” Judge Jones asked Deputy Sagan, who trembled, and shook, and held onto his bleeding ear.

“Well?” Judge Jones asked even more loudly, but still, Deputy Newton didn’t have an answer. He let the young man stew in his embarrassment; embarrassed was a whole hell of a lot of heartbeats better than the alternative. It also hadn’t hurt to give the English teacher a chance to run out of bullets.

When he had, Judge Jones unclipped his helmet and hurled it at the student, who’d apparently figured out how the safety worked on the gun he’d claimed.

The student shot his embarrassingly small load of bullets and stopped short of anyone’s lost life—and, to Ezekiel’s satisfaction, not a scratch on his helmet.

Judge Jones hopped up in the bullet-broken air from behind the lockers and bolted as fast as he could for the student. He slammed into the GenSlag runt, shoulder first, full of force and a dash of nostalgia from his offensive line days back in college. The chump slumped, wincing the whole way down. When Ezekiel turned to the teacher, a thirty-something with a tweed blazer, the man twitched and clicked at the trigger in nothing like logic.

Deputy DeGrasse Tyson sprung up from the hiding place, mimicking a guy who knew what the hell he’d been doing, his pistol clutched in hand and his sanity slipping free. He aimed it at the teacher, who naturally had another firearm tucked underneath his tweed jacket. He yanked it out, ready to fire. Ready to make mistakes of them all.

Ezekiel was tired of mistakes.

Maybe he shouldn’t be so hard on the old guard, or the young genius. It was one of their tools which Fargo took control of that brought him to the 2A school in the first place, after all.

“Shots fired.” It was the automated voice system chirping to life in Judge Jones’s helmet that had brought him to the school. Back sometime before 2020, the Chicago PD had instituted a system that responded to the noise of bullet fire. The system, Shot Spotter, utilised an amalgam of audio and visual surveillance set up in key areas throughout the city to respond faster to gun violence than eyewitness reports.

When the Judges came to the public, one of Fargo’s first initiatives was to place his new avatars as the primary gatekeepers of all such technologies. Like everything the plebs couldn’t process, there was a resistance to the new oversight. There was that hope again—hope that swelled their superstition of Chief Boogeyman Fargo—that he was amassing too much access, too much technology that was meant for the masses, and not for a trumped-up army of vigilantes. The truth of the matter, though, was that they were all playing a part: that Fargo had stuck to the same ideals that had—bit by bit, bullet by bullet—garnered him the popularity he’d needed to become Chief Judge under President Gurney. Judge Jones learned that well enough at the Academy, where he was free to learn all he’d ever wanted about Fargo.

One of the Academy instructors made it a point to open his class with a review of three principles that Fargo once discussed that would change the future forever.

For control, technology.

Nuclear, biological, biblical or otherwise, the means and progress of production must be maintained by those detached and trained enough to understand it isn’t superiority that guides them, but wakefulness.

For peace, blood.

You cannot hope to have their cooperation if you don’t offer something equivalent in turn. Judges must be prepared before anything else to give their lives, to bleed themselves of the idea they are worth more than the machine.

For progress, power.

They will never save themselves, but they don’t know how to, do they? They only know that there is an end, and everything they breathe or hear or fuck or fight must be in the service of preventing just that. They have too much power. They are smashing sandcastles and pulling cat tails; they don’t deserve power, not yet. You must take it, if only for a while: they will understand one day, if you can keep the order intact enough for that day to eventually come.

Another saying came to mind, though it’d been an old acquaintance of his father that’d given him it: God made men, but Samuel Colt made men equal. That wasn’t exactly true. Ezekiel proved that with the nigh-invisible draw of his left-hand weapon: being a southpaw himself, he made sure to keep the one with non-lethal rounds in that holster. He fired first at the deputy’s hand. It was a small target, but compared to the crud his weapons trainer back at the Academy had him shoot at, it may as well have been a parked car. While the plastic round tumbled towards the deputy and cracked into his hand, Ezekiel rolled across the ground and came up a handful of feet away from the teacher, close enough to lift him from the ground with a well-aimed roundhouse kick to the chin.

This is going to be a hell of a report to write, Ezekiel thought, and it broke his tight lip, his tight everything, the laugh bubbling from a part of him he’d written off as terminal long ago.

There was a knowledge in that moment, that he’d carried with him all this time. It all amounted to busy work. It was reassuring, sure, to read articles month after month, year after year, documenting the decline in violent crime since the Judges program rolled out. It wasn’t enough, though. Would it ever be enough? It didn’t feel like anything was changing, or not by any vast degree. This had been the fifth school he had to intervene at that year, which wouldn’t have been so terrible if they hadn’t all been in the same quarter. He persisted, though, or at least something like it. He remembered that every gym teacher with a revolver he took down, every eighth-grader with a semi-automatic, every art ‘guide’ trying to make a scarlet Picasso with pedantic paints, was one less he’d have to worry about killing a citizen.

The gang member—Judge Jones wasn’t even sure he was a student—started to rustle about the ground, wincing like anyone would who had been hit with a perfectly aimed inch-thick helmet. Ezekiel went over to him, knowing there wasn’t a bullet left in the gun by the perp’s side, and picked up his helmet. After latching it back on, he cuffed the kid; young as he was, he’d decided to play an adult game, and as such Judge Jones may have tightened the cuffs so the only thing that could pass through, barely, was the blood in the boy’s veins.

“You think this was a good idea, punk?” Ezekiel said.

The strangest part of Ezekiel’s training in the Judges program was their public relations techniques, which pretty much entirely contradicted the training he’d received as a police officer.

When he’d been an officer, he’d have chalked up maybe five weeks of mandatory sensitivity training for talking to a suspect like this, but as a Judge? It was invited. It was important to separate them as something less, not by colour or creed or anything else that didn’t put that gun in his hand. As schoolyard as it seemed, name-calling boiled their blood, kept them off balance. Any amount of reckless rage was easier to deal with than steely resolve.

“I think that you don’t know what you put yourself into, you fuckin’ Rambo-ass fascist,” the kid said, spitting at what he’d probably meant to be Ezekiel’s eye. Reason 35, Article B, to always have your helmet, Ezekiel thought, and grinned as the spit ran down to the edge of his visor.

“I think you’re going to tell me where the others are. I’ve only taken three of you down so far, report said there were eight,” he grunted.

“That what your report says? That what they tell you? Eight? Nigga, we a fucking army. We a fucking maelstrom of the end. We are a brotherhood, The Brotherhood, you couldn’t hope to stop, not any more. Once we rise—”

Ezekiel stopped the ramble with a swift backhand to the face. It did what it was meant to: the student sucked in his lip and started sobbing like the child he was. Jones grabbed at the boy’s forearm and dragged him to his feet, before grabbing the back of his shirt and pushing him ahead. This was generally the part where the excuses would swell, or the attempt to tug at the old heartstrings as if Ezekiel hadn’t worked his ass off to burn those away. What Ezekiel got this time, however, was chuckling.

“Laugh it up, punk. Gives me more to work with to keep your ass behind bars.”

“You ain’t gonna ask why? You ain’t thinking, why the hell would anyone try to shoot up a 2A school?” the kid said, still laughing his bruised, beaten ass off.

It had crossed his mind, but Ezekiel just attributed it to the same old shit he’d dealt with in any suit, blue or black. Reckless hormones and a weapon to fire them through. Fear. It was what he’d hoped for, this whole experiment, which was becoming less of an experiment every day and every crime prevented. The emotion was what drove them, on either side of the lane, to be utter dumbasses.

“No. I’m not,” Ezekiel said, which only made the boy laugh more. Ezekiel tried to ignore it as they walked through the halls—cautiously, not sure how many other teachers were in wait, hiding behind their classroom doors ready to pop out of them before blowing a Breakfast Club’s head off.

The 2A schools were never a firm idea, more like a rattled, taco-bowled brainfart that affixed onto recorded law like a malformed tumour. Like an angry scab, they were one of many things left around by the hazy yesteryears. It was the simple fix, like many, to show tolerance of the intolerable. Years ago, when Ezekiel was still as old as the cackling perp he wandered the halls with, he was privileged enough to see the seeds of 2A schools. There was, as always, protest, resistance, hashtags and heartfelt monologues. It was a hell of a surge for weapons sales, of course, teachers arriving at ranges in droves to complete eight hours of weapons training for the right to tuck a firearm in a desk formerly reserved for cell phone confiscation and flasks.

While Gurney had worked to break down the practice, it didn’t change that the schools who had come to rely on the aid weren’t apt to give it up.

“Hope you know you’re not gonna get far, you think I’m in this shit alone? You think a teacher can wave a gun in my nigga’s face and get away with that shit? You think—man, you think I’m the only one tired of this shit, tired of your shit?”

“You learn any other words in this school, or is shit about the end of my tax dollars?” Ezekiel said, twisting the perp’s arm as they walked, closing in on the door. He would have laughed, if the perp hadn’t first, when he opened the doors to the outside world at the end of the hall. He would have laughed, if not for the three kids standing in the doorway, clad in black jeans and grey robes. He would have laughed, if the firepower each of them held in their hands squashed every thought that didn’t serve to keep him alive.

The punk laughed, though. And laughed. And laughed as the hooded three raised their weapons. Move, Ezekiel thought, staring desperately around at his surroundings.

Lockers, four without locks, the closest ten feet to the right.

Loose papers on the ground, one text book

One woman, two men… boys? Boys.

Only one of them is holding their weapon right—priority target.

Ammo low. Unfamiliar firearms.

Left boy, trembling, fear.

They swarmed, like Ezekiel’s thoughts had when on the other side of the reaper, at once and with a cyclical kind of chaos. He kicked the cuffed kid forward with the flat of his boot, sending him soaring off the ground, slapping face first on the terrazzo flooring. A small part of him was curious to see how the new bullet-proofing would work out, but he tabled that inquisition to cover his ass. As one of the hooded men took aim, Judge Jones had already darted to one of the unlocked lockers, opening it to allow the door to shield him.

Then?

God bless the educational system’s inability to progress past back-breaking text books. Ezekiel snatched a small brick of a book and chucked it at the closest armed, hooded suspect. It stuck them in the face, making them fall back for a moment.

“Gia!” one of them screamed, because Gia couldn’t.

Judge Jones tumbled out of cover, snatching at the text book on the ground. He popped up again and chucked the other text book at one of the hooded punks. It cracked against their skull, making them keel over and lose grip of their gun; Ezekiel never felt as indebted to Algebra II in his life. As the weapon skidded across the ground, Ezekiel made a note where it stopped then leaped forward, coming down, like the hammer he was, foot-first on the prone thug’s knee. It popped. The punk screamed. There was still work to do.

“You’re dead, yo—” And you should have just taken the shot, Ezekiel thought as he thrust a flat palm into the next thug’s throat, snatching their gun hand and ramming his head and helmet into the hooded punk’s face. Teeth shattered, and a saliva string tinged with maroon trailed from the thug’s mouth and across Ezekiel’s helmet. He wobbled for a moment, but Ezekiel helped him on his way with the steel toe of his boot.

The last one, the scared one, who couldn’t have held a gun more than a handful of times, took aim at Ezekiel. Death filled the hollow of him as he considered his waning options. For a Judge, this wasn’t such an uncomfortable position to be in. For peace, blood.

He felt the sharpness of the air, a promised heat like the red phosphorous on a matchbox waiting for the strike. Judge Jones waited with as the threat grew stale, his hands raised. From the hooded one, the click, and then? Nothing.

Your lucky fuck, Judge Jones thought, staring at the empty gun in the punk’s hand. He slowly let his hands fall to his side, and unclicked one of the pouches on his belt, drawing his reserve pistol.

“Put it down, now. Not gonna ask twice. I’m well within my rights to blow your ass to hell. Don’t make me,” Judge Jones said, taking aim, but the punk didn’t seem too scared of it. They pulled back their hood, the sides of their head trimmed and nearly shaved with a spindle of pink at the top twisting down. Whoever she was, she was young; no older than twenty from what Ezekiel could tell.

“Gia? Ray? Get your asses up, only got one shot at this. Get the kid on my signal and haul ass.” She didn’t flinch, but her finger wasn’t even over the trigger. It rested over something on the weapon’s side, a red button he’d never seen on a firearm.

“You’re not going—”

“Burn,” the young woman said, low. She clicked the button and a line of flame tore out of the weapon. Judge Jones did the only thing he could, and leapt to the side. He dodged the worst of it, but as the heat licked across the whole of his left leg he screamed out, the searing pain breaking the supposedly unmalleable grit for which Judges were known.

The pain. It tumbled across all avenues of his mind while he twisted on the ground, the steel of the locker at his back cool through his uniform in all the wrong places. Get up, he commanded, but his body—like the hooded punks helping up the kid who called them—didn’t give two shits. He tried to fight the darkness, the blinking black that rode on a pain he’d never tasted. For as long as he could, he fought, but as they kicked the door open to the light outside, his vision slipped, his everything fell, and the darkness came.