The man captured with her tried to explain to the misbegotten lost souls around him in the basement of the Capital Building.
“The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars — they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur,” he elaborated. From his expression he could already picture his captors dissolving in cauldrons of the aforementioned ‘burning sulphur’.
The Intelligence Office was a fifty year old reservist who had been teaching Chemistry and Physics in Cincinnati at the time of the October War.
“Sulphur burns blue,” he observed. “In natural daylight it burns invisibly.”
The prisoners looked at him as if he was an idiot.
“The nations were angry, and your wrath has come,” the woman intoned. Her face was bruised and dirty, her left eye puffy and half-closed and her victim’s arterial life blood was liberally sprayed on her scrawny arms and her torn shirt. “The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small — and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”
“Yeah,” the Intelligence Officer murmured distractedly. “So what happens when you’ve killed everybody who doesn’t agree with your particular interpretation of scripture?”
“There is only one God. There is only one scripture… ”
“Revelation?”
“We are the only true people of the Book!” The man protested smugly.
The Intelligence Officer shook his head.
“They’re all like this, sir,” he reported, grimly.
“We’re through here,” Rosson agreed. He stood over the man and the woman. “You are hereby convicted of breaking the established rules of war by infiltrating US Army lines by falsely claiming refugee status. Thereafter you murdered one man and injured several others in an unprovoked attack. You are hereby sentenced to death by firing squad. Sentence will be carried out forthwith.”
The prisoners were under the misapprehension that they were entitled to a few last words. However, their captors had already heard more than enough. They were gagged before being frog-matched out of the bunker.
Several minutes later a volley of rifle shots rang out.
Rosson went above ground and walked across relatively open ground to make his daily report to Governor John Reynolds. The news the day before that Green Bay, the Governor’s birthplace had fallen into rebel hands had broken something in Reynolds. Although he was the younger of the two men by a couple of years the 36th Governor of Wisconsin was haggard, old before his time.
“We’re getting the same story from every prisoner, sir,” Rosson prefaced, dropping into the chair drawn up by Reynolds’s chief of staff. “It’s hard to credit but as my Intelligence people say, the ‘narrative is increasingly coherent and compelling’.” He quirked a rueful smile and shook his head. “It seems people returning to the Great Lakes area from the failed coup d’état in DC in December took control of the gangs in North Chicago and the bombed out badlands to the west. Religious nuts mostly… ”
“Or,” Reynolds countered quietly, “people so traumatized and terrified by the Cuban Missiles War that they were prepared to follow anybody who gave them hope, or offered to make some kind of sense out of the madness of that war?”
“Anyway,” the commander of the 32nd Infantry Division went on, keen to avoid the conversation sliding into a new metaphysical quagmire, “eventually a cult or a sect which bases its belief system around a thing they call ‘the end of days’ came out on top. It’s sort of a bastardized version of several fundamentalist Christian creeds. The breakout from Chicago was a spontaneous thing, something started by a small number of fanatics. There was never any plan to invade Milwaukee, leastways, not until it happened. It’s almost as if when the rebels seized Milwaukee they became, I don’t know,” he threw his arms wide, “self-aware. My Intelligence Chief likens what’s happened since to the viral spread of some kind of explosively virulent plague bacillus.”
Reynolds nodded thoughtfully but remained silent.
“The religious nuts followed the fanatics to Milwaukee,” Rosson expanded, “and hey presto, suddenly the pogrom against unbelievers was an organized thing.”
“And,” the Governor offered, “presumably, the people now leading the rebellion realized that unless the insurrection, uprising or whatever we want to call it, kept moving forward it would inevitably turn in upon itself.”
“Yes,” Bill Rosson’s throat was dry despite the bile threatening to rise. “If one was being cynical; expelling the whole population of Milwaukee, driving the unbelievers before them like Biblical Gadarene swine instantly solved the problem of what to do with the dead weight of the civilian populations suddenly under their control. Those that survived the expulsion could be used as human shields, or would convert and join the rebellion because anything was better than starving to death or being driven unarmed onto our guns!”
Reynolds groaned.
“The Gadarene swine into whom our Lord flung a madman’s demons, destined to run to their deaths at the cliff’s edge… ” He sighed. “My God, how many people must have already died?”
The soldier did not care to speculate on this topic.
A few minutes later Rosson made his excuses and departed.
A tide of human misery was washing across Wisconsin. It was spreading out from Chicago and Milwaukee; already the Michigan coast all the way to Green Bay was lost, and Fond du Lac too. Madison was being bypassed, to the south but mainly to the north, and there was little or nothing to stop the ever-growing horde from forging northwest to Minneapolis. The insurgency was moving across a landscape of woods and rivers, lakes and pastures, prairies and ground where no army on earth could mass and move with the speed and agility necessary to corral or even channel such a huge wave of people, even if it held Madison. Elsewhere there was little that the scattered, over-stretched US Army and Marine contingents in Wisconsin could do to halt the tsunami of desperation, misery and rage short of the great, distant city of Minneapolis.
Nobody had ever posited this sort of scenario at West Point; it would have been the vision of a madman.
Bill Rosson arrived above ground with two aides at his heels.
Engineers had thrown up rubble berms and trenches had been excavated in the grounds of the Capital Building. Positioned on a broad isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona the area was out of range of small arms fire from outside the perimeter lines and other than shooting speculative single artillery rounds onto the isthmus, the area remained the safest in the city.
Rosson involuntarily broke step and glanced to the heavens.
High above two dark silhouettes wheeled like albatrosses.
Skyraiders circling like hawks awaiting the call to action.
The first round caught him in the side.
He grunted, all the air knocked out of his lungs as if he had just taken a right hook to the solar plexus.
“Sir?”
Rosson sank to his knees, he tried to speak but no sound came out of his bloody mouth in the seconds before the sniper’s second round blew away the top half of his skull.
Chapter 30