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WELL, OKAY, MAYBE “RIOT” was an exaggeration.
Forecasters say conditions are right for a tornado when they see rotational patterns forming along the leading edges of an apocalyptomous wall cloud. That’s what we had here. A solid wall-cloud of protestors lined the sidewalk along Roosevelt, marching in a rotational pattern in front of the OBW office. Surrounding them and blocking the street at both ends were platoons of HSA storm troopers (storm troopers... heh) in full riot gear and ball-crushing attitudes.
The marchers chanted, “We. The. People!” in cadence as they looped an oval track along the sidewalk. I bumbled through the office door and straight into a college-age scruffball with a monster beard and thick, black-framed glasses who carried a sign reading, “Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness.” Each word was crossed out in bold, red strokes.
“Sorry.” I staggered back into the doorway—a space large enough for one anorexic ferret—avoiding collision with the next protestor, whose sign said, “Land of the Freeloader.” At the bottom edge, the words “Children of Liberty” were printed in block letters.
Ah, hell no.
The next person in the parade, a dumpy, plain woman of thirty or so, lifted and lowered her poster in time to the chant. A snicker bubbled up my throat when I read, in green-lettered words: Choked by the Yolk of Tyranny. The lady glared ice picks into my brain without breaking stride or losing her place in the chant when I asked her, “What have you got against eggs?”
“We. The. People!”
Protestors. More irritating than a salty ass-crack.
Argh, I so hated politics.
Any kind of politics was a waste of time, but especially fanatical politics—always so fucking earnest, always so fucking sure about everything... It made me sick, the way they acted, as if they held the One Truth. Here, their recruiters said, sign on the bottom line; check your brain at the door. The acolytes of the Children of Liberty were the most bug-eyed zealots in the Wacko Parade, an anti-government gaggle of anarchists and extremists bent on tearing down the protection and safety guaranteed by the Constitution. What a crock of shit. These people were worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses, who would at least dress nicely before allowing their dogma to hump your leg.
“We. The. People!” The chant had grown stronger as the police completed deploying at both ends of the block. The protestors’ faces were red and sweaty with effort and enthusiasm. Or maybe orgasmic release.
The Homeland troops appeared a little edgy, slapping palms with riot sticks and fiddling with face masks. I breathed in a strong odor of Head Busting tinged with Whip Ass. I was allergic to that scent. The revolving idiot line crammed me into the shallow portico of the OBW offices; I could shove my way out, go back inside to Rogair’s warm embrace, or don my Cloak of Invisibility and sneak away.
“We! The. People!”
The damned chant sanded my last nerve and squeezed lemon juice on it.
Blue sawhorses barricaded Roosevelt at both ends, and blocky vans with light bars and shiny black sides waited behind them. I counted six of the brontosaurus-sized trucks and a plethora of smaller squad cars. No gas rationing for the police, now was there? A small army of riot-suited robots cracked their knuckles and grinned with fangs dripping venom. No, I’m joking; what they really did was form up in lines from one side of the street to the next, in front of the barricades, and lift shields like some medieval line of pike pokers.
“We! The! People!”
Match, meet gasoline.
Time to scoot.
“Excuse me!” I shouted and shoved into the deck full of jokers, knocking a skinny true believer out of line and interrupting him the middle of “PEE-pull.”
“Hey!”
I ignored him and squeezed past the next guy in line, a balloon-shaped dude with frizzy hair, not old enough to shave.
“We! The! People!”
Holy Mother of Thesaurus, couldn’t these fuckers find another three words?
I bumped and tussled, bouncing between protestors and the concrete wall, making my way upstream, which in hindsight, seemed a poor choice of direction. I had come from Michigan Avenue, so like a salmon returning to his home stream to get laid, I went back the way I came. It would have been better to use the line’s momentum to shoot me out toward Wabash and go south from there. Hindsight is a brass-balled bastard.
“We! The! People!”
A few more Children of Little Brains and I’d be in the clear. The cops, I hoped, would ignore me as small beer and go for the brewery of demonstrators. I could slip away and head for the clinic and my date with the dragon lady, Cherise.
A body blocked the sun and cast darkness across the land. I flattened against the wall to avoid being crushed under the mighty heels of the biggest human I’d ever seen. This seven-foot giant strode the earth in tan shorts and a blue jersey with the number twenty-seven stitched to it. The jersey’s sleeves strained against the pressure of arms bigger than my waist, and each of the man’s legs must have weighed more than I could lift. Red-haired with a light, freckled complexion, he was jock handsome, with a square jaw, straight nose, and green eyes. He didn’t bother carrying a sign, merely thrusting one sledgehammer fist into the air at every word.
“We! The. People!” Thor thundered as he passed.
Holy fee-fi-fo-fum, the guy was huge. I blinked and drew a shuddering breath. Back plastered against the wall, I slid toward daylight. Escape. Freedom. Happiness. A few more meters would do it.
A can bounced and rolled under my feet, spewing smoke.
“Oh, hell no.” Tear gas, or vomit gas; either way I was fucked.
The once-orderly lineup broke apart, flying into a demolition derby of scattering, panicked humans.
Now, it was a riot.
The first taste of gas hit my nostrils and burned my eyes from their sockets. No shit. On fire. Like hot pokers jammed in my face.
“Get out of my way!” I screamed. Blindly, with acid fear squeezing my throat, I stiff-armed the milling, formless, shrieking crowd. Gibbering in the back of my brain, my own little panic-monkey rattled the bars of his cage and threw turds against the wall, threatening me with eviction from Planet Sane if I didn’t get out of this scrum of... stupid... assholes!
The crowd decompressed for a heartbeat, and I made one violent push between two unseen bodies, breaking into the open. Blinking streams of water from both eyes and coughing up bits of lung, I caught a glimpse of clear pavement ahead... for a meter... until a wall of police black filled my blurry vision.
“Wait,” I yelled between coughs, “I’m... not with... them!”
Whap!
The dull, meat-like thud of hard object meeting soft skull sounds like nothing else. Once you’ve heard it—
***
COLD FLOOR.
Smell of vomit. Blood.
Crying. Low-pitched voices. Muttering. Bitching. Pleading.
Jail. I was in jail again. I’d recognize the je ne sais quoi of the atmosphere anywhere. Aromas of industrial cleaner and human waste. Greenish fluorescent lighting (which I avoided by keeping my eyes firmly shut) and gray iron bars everywhere. The technology of jails hadn’t really changed in nine hundred years: you built cages, you shoved people in, and you locked the doors so they didn’t wander off.
Incarceration ensued.
“Fuck me,” I grumbled under my breath. How did I get in these situations?
I opened one crusty eye, and a shoe filled my entire range of view. I cracked the other eye, doubling my perspective and adding stereoscopic depth, and it helped not at all. Shoe. Athletic. One. As seen from the side.
I lifted my head, peeling one cheek from the slick tile floor with a sound like ripping masking tape. “Ow.”
The shoe stirred, and a voice rumbled from above, “Are you all right?”
I tracked the sound up one tree-trunk leg, over a bowling-ball-sized knee, and found a cheerful, freckled face looming over me. The giant from the protest march. I deduced he was seated on a bench while I, on the other hand, abided in peaceful repose on the floor, along with enough germs to take down a bull elephant.
“Mmurphh,” I grunted and sat up. “Oh, shit, that hurts.”
“I believe it.” The giant spoke with a deep, resonant voice, with very distinct enunciation. No accent I could detect, which made him a freak in more ways than his size. Who grows up without an accent?
“My ribs.” I winced and probed the tender spot under my arm, where it felt like—
“Yes, they kicked you after you were down.”
“Oh, you think?”
He nodded gravely. “I do. I saw it happen.”
My head chose that moment to remind me of its recent meeting with a hard object; pain lanced from one temple to the other. “Aw, jeezus-pleezus, that feels like a knitting needle through the brain.”
“The brain has no nerve endings,” Gargantua informed me. “It would feel nothing.”
“Thank you, Mr. Literal.”
“You’re welcome. But my name is John.”
“Of course it is. You wouldn’t happen to be Vulcan, would you, John?”
“No, I’m from Idaho.”
“Good. Good to know.”
John the Prodigious Pedant and I inhabited one corner of a ten-square-meter holding cell occupied by two dozen fellow prisoners. I recognized Bearded Guy and Yolk Lady among the detainees. Three solid brick walls and one of bars surrounded us. A tile floor and a gray concrete ceiling capped top and bottom. If I stood on John’s mighty shoulders, I might’ve reached the steel mesh cover that protected a bank of fluorescent lighting. Not that it would help, but it was nice to know I could.
“Because it’s there,” I grumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing, just babbling.”
“That’s typical of head wounds,” he cautioned me with the seriousness of a mortician. “You should see a doctor.”
“First thing on my to-do list, Little John.”
John smiled and reached out a frying pan with fingers to help me up. “Everybody calls me that.”
“Hnhh,” I grunted and let him haul me to my feet. Swayed there. Examined the pretty colors in my head. “Imagine that. People have no creativity these days. What the hell happened?”
“We got arrested for protesting.”
I could see I would need to phrase my questions more precisely with John. Standing—listing—in front of the big man, I could zero in on his earnest green eyes without getting a crick in my neck. “John. Pay attention. Why did we—meaning you, since I was a bystander—get arrested? Didn’t you have a permit?”
John’s mouth thinned out, and his pleasant expression evaporated. “We couldn’t get a permit. Every time we tried, it was denied, so we decided to practice our right to free speech without it.” He shrugged. “You see what happened.”
“Well, yeah. But permits are sort of required—”
“We—”
“Hold that thought.” I held out a palm to stop whatever cockamamie protest would come out of his mouth. Debate lunatics and you become a lunatic debater. Besides, a commotion at the cell doors stirred the crowd; everyone bubbled up for a look-see, including me. I left John and joined the group close to the front of the cell.
A pair of guards flanked a white-haired sergeant, who held a key fob in one hand and a tiny reader in the other. The guards carried stun batons and wore flak jackets and helmets with face shields, and the sergeant displayed three stripes on his sleeve and a chunky belly over his belt. His nametag declaimed Ledbetter in bold white letters.
Sergeant Ledbetter consulted the reader before he regarded the prisoners. “Warren, Joseph,” he yelled. My heart seized up. “Warren, Joseph, front and center. Agents want to see you.”
My feet froze in place, and intelligence derailed from the main line, crashing into a steaming pile by the gateway to coherent thought. A metallic taste invaded my mouth, and I clenched up to avoid an embarrassing accident. It was never-ever-and-for-all-eternity bad to come to the attention of the Homeland Security Agency’s higher echelons. Get ass-kicked by a cop? Sure, any day. Get noticed by the guys in suits? I’d rather stick my dick in a disposal.
After the Department of Homeland Security had transmogrified into the Homeland Security Agency and swallowed up the FBI, ICE, and the DEA, they’d become more powerful than an avalanche and equally as likely to bury you alive if you didn’t get your miniscule ass out of the way. Local police departments had been absorbed into the collective as the HSA seeped across the country and assumed a greater role in law enforcement. Cities went broke, and the feds swooped in, amalgamating their infrastructure along with the commensurate budget required to operate them.
I’d come close to serious encounters of the judicial kind more than once, scraping by with help from Lucky the Leprechaun and a lack of real interest by the Men in Black as my crimes were juvenile in scope and pathetic in execution.
I had the feeling my little friend Lucky was running for his life, hands over his charmed green hat, headed for the nearest bomb shelter.