An hour and a half later, the two petty officers, Vasquez and Ramos, came out of the conference room, shaken and pale. Ramos handed the master chief four sheets of paper, “Master Chief, this is the best we can do. The audio sucks, but it looks like the guy with the machete is Miguel, and the Indio female with the baseball bat is Esmerelda or Estrella. There was somebody behind the camera giving them directions, but we couldn’t pick out enough to say for sure what he was saying. I can’t believe they killed, they murdered the Captain’s wife and son.”
Vasquez nodded, clenching and unclenching his fists, “We goin’ after them?”
The master chief shifted the unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth, “Not right now. We’ll turn this over to the PD and see what they do with it. You sure she was Indio?”
Vasquez said, “Yep, I grew up around them down by Julian. I saw the scene yesterday. That was fuckin’ brutal, Master Chief, that was fuckin’ animal.”
He nodded, “Thank you for doing the translation for me. I’ll pass along to the Captain that you helped.”
Mike sat at the head of the table in the conference room, waiting as the rest of the department heads came in. Glancing occasionally at the papers in his hand, he looked idly around the room, fixing it in his mind. When everyone had filed in, it was standing room only, and he stood up and stepped to the lectern, “Okay folks, we’ve got a MOVORD. This is direct from Admiral Clayborn. We are going to abandon Coronado and move onboard NAS North Island. We are to secure the spaces and other facilities as well as we can, in the next seventy-two hours.”
He waited for the hubbub to die down, and continued, “Everybody is moving. We’re consolidating down to Pendleton, Miramar, Thirty-Second Street, and North Island. They are all defendable. Coronado isn’t. Too much beachfront, and not enough people to patrol or control the perimeters.”
“Bullshit!” was heard from the far end of the table, and Mike looked up sharply.
“No, it’s not. Logistically, we can’t do it with the manning level we are down to. Now what I want to do is…”
Seventy-three hours later, Chief Shell activated the last booby trap on the command building, backed out the front door, carefully locking it and pulling it closed. He made a notation in the book he held, turned around, and saluted Mike, “Captain, the next to last charge is set. This makes one hundred and three emplacements. We are ready to clear the base. Once we do, I will set the final charge at the gate.”
Mike came to attention and returned the salute, smiling, “Chief, you and your folks are to be commended for your initiative, your attention to detail, and the fact that you didn’t blow yourselves up. Carry on.”
An hour later, Mike reported to Admiral Clayborn, “Sir, we have officially completed the evacuation of our Coronado facilities. All of our sailors have been relocated to North Island, and a supplemental watch has been stood up to support the security forces.”
The admiral nodded, “Thank you, Mike. I’d like for you to be a member of my direct staff, if you don’t have a problem wearing another hat. Something like an executive assistant to me, since you’re the senior officer present with ground combat experience, and command level experience.”
“No, sir. I don’t have a problem with that.”
“Welcome aboard, Mike. There is an open office just down the hall.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
The rest of Mike James’ story is told in the novella, “The Morning the Earth Shook”.
Last Plane Out
Bob Poole
Michael Garabaldi and his wife Myra huddled in the corner of the bedroom of their single story house in the south El Monde neighborhood where they lived for the past 25 years. He heard the crash and screaming from the house two doors down, and raucous laughter from the people surrounding the house.
It was a ‘Retribution Visit’. Basically a raid/theft given an officious name by the local watch captain, who was also the leader of the “Brownies”, the local paramilitary militia that Moonbeam’s people started. He slid over to the covered window, moved a corner of the blackout curtain to survey the house, and saw the mob flowing out of the house carrying the belongings of his neighbor into the street, as they hollered and yelled to each other.
Michael wanted to take the baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire that he kept near him, and charge into the mob to save his neighbor, but he knew that to so would mean death to him and his wife, and wouldn’t change anything. Michael felt tears of shame course down his cheeks as he stood by and watched as his neighbor’s house was ransacked, and pillaged in a way that would have made Attila the Hun proud. All he could do was watch impotently as his neighbor’s house was set on fire, as a warning to others not to oppose the edicts of the neighborhood watch captain.
The next morning Michael got ready to go to work. He made himself a small breakfast as the coffee maker spat out the “near coffee substitute”, because that was all he could get from the local market. Michael dressed in his work uniform, went back into his bedroom, and gave his sleepy wife a hug as he got ready to leave. He went into the garage, opening the door with the manual release because power was intermittent due to the rolling brownouts. He couldn’t leave the car outside when he got home from work—that was risky because, the mob of ‘youths’, as the media calls them, would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, and trash the rest. The older model, nondescript Ford Focus was vitally necessary for him to keep his job. Riding Public Transit would be dangerous for him, being a white guy in an area that hates whites. He knew a couple of his coworkers had gotten a ‘retribution’ beating on the Green Line on the way home from the airport.
Michael backed the Focus out of the driveway, shut the car down, got out, closed and locked the car door, and double checked to make sure that the garage was secured. He climbed back into the car, cranked it up and backed out of the driveway. He wasn’t allowed to leave it running; that was one of the edicts passed by Moonbeam’s people to combat climate change, and Michael knew that some of the neighbors would snitch in a New York minute to the watch captain to curry favor. He surveyed what was left of his neighbor’s house as he slowly drove by, headed out of the subdivision, following the secondary roads that would take him to the access road and onto Interstate 10 to go to work.
As he neared the interstate, he saw a roadblock ahead. It was the local “Brownies” running an ID checkpoint. He drove up slowly, grabbed his papers to present to the young unshaven Hispanic man wearing a Brownie uniform. As Michael handed his papers to the guard, the other two guards were walking around the Focus, examining the car. He inwardly nodded as they noticed all the progressive causes and Moonbeam for Governor stickers that plastered the car. He’d grabbed them off of EBay real cheap, in a bundle package. He had joked to a coworker after they saw it on his car at work, “Its camouflage, to not get hassled or the car vandalized.”
He watched as the guard looked at his paperwork; he could see that the guard couldn’t read the ID, but went through the motions. The other guard walked up and asked him, “Where are you headed?”
Michael glanced at him and replied, “Going to work like you are.”
The guards laughed as if it was a joke, then one asked, “Where is that at, Señor?”