“I shot two that were hiding in the ditch,” he said. He looked shaken and uncertain.
“You did good,” Turnbull said.
“There’s one alive in that car, I think,” Kyle said.
“Did you shoot—” Turnbull began, but the PV in the car was upright now with an AK and he was firing. Three slugs slammed into Kyle’s side; the young man, stunned, dropped his AR15 and fell.
Turnbull was on the shooter and firing fast, two handed, the rounds ejecting out of his action as fast as he could pull the trigger. He was scoring hits. The PV twisted and shuddered under the impacts, and he fell back out of the driver’s door onto the pavement.
Turnbull’s slide was locked back and he dropped his mag and reloaded the Wilson with the one with three rounds left after he had blasted out the hospital door.
He glanced right and Kyle was there on the concrete, pale and coughing as he bled out. Two of his friends were with him, and Banks was coming fast.
Turnbull came around the vehicle and found the PV leader, his chest riddled with .45 slugs, twitching on his back. The hyphen in “D-Yazzy” on his hamper-fresh concert tee had been obliterated by one of Turnbull’s hollow points.
“I told you that if you came back here we’d kill you all,” Turnbull said evenly. The dying leader’s eye went wide and Turnbull shot him right between them. Then he walked west toward the field.
“Kelly!” shouted Banks. Turnbull raised his empty hand, waved him off and kept walking through the grass. Banks went back to his business in the kill zone. From behind him, Turnbull heard the loud report of a big handgun. Langer was taking care of loose ends too.
Do-Rag had run a good distance and, from the blood trail, managed to crawl another few meters after taking the slug. Not bad for a guy with a .308 crater where his spleen used to live.
Do-Rag was on his face in the dirt. Turnbull put his boot on the man’s rib cage and kicked him over onto his back. Do-Rag groaned. It was not clear if he recognized his tormentor.
“Fuck you,” Turnbull said and shot him in the face.
Turnbull walked back across the field, now shaking in anger. He noticed the intense ringing in his ears from all the firing. That only made him angrier.
They didn’t get it yet. They didn’t get what war was, and that misunderstanding of its fundamentally brutal nature would get them killed.
He leapt over the ditch and was back on the road. The guerrillas were gathering up guns and ammo from the dead. Banks was talking to two men holding something heavy wrapped in a blanket – Kyle.
He caught movement to his right as he passed the lead car. One last wounded PV was trying to crawl under the Chevy. Turnbull causally fired his last round into the back of his head, and a pair of the local guerrillas just stared, horrified.
“What?” asked Turnbull. “You wanted war right? That’s fucking guerrilla war. If you can’t take it, go back to being the PR’s bitches!”
He noticed the slide on his .45 was open, his last mag empty.
“Does anyone have any .45?” he bellowed. “I’m fucking out!”
10.
Lieutenant Kessler was in her office with the door closed, one hand holding a Starbucks cup, the other the phone. She was doing substantially more listening than talking.
Cannon watched her through her glass window, as inconspicuously as possible, from the squad room – but then, everyone was trying to watch her without being caught watching.
He had been called back to the station at 9:33 p.m. along with everyone else – Cannon had a suspicion about why, but it was not until he got back to the station that he learned that four carloads of People’s Volunteers had been wiped out on Route 231 not ten miles north of town. He wasn’t sure how he felt, especially knowing that his information probably led to it, but he had heard whispers about what the PVs intended to do to punish the locals for the sniping, and he knew exactly how he would have felt about that.
As a real cop, it was hard for him to accept that he just didn’t care.
It was obvious Kessler cared, but only about her own hide. The PVs were expendable – that and the deniability the ostensibly extra-governmental PSF provided the authorities were precisely why they were so useful for getting rough with the recalcitrant citizenry. But sixteen dead? That was clearly raising questions, and Cannon watched through the window as, inside her office, Kessler tried to answer them.
Outside, in the nearly empty squad room, the few remaining PSF officers who were not cleaning up the bloodbath out on 231 were scared – there was no other word for it. A week before, the station’s reinforcements had swaggered around town, unchallenged, unconstrained. But now? The locals were fighting back, and they hadn’t signed up for that.
First, the Langers had waxed three of them. Then the sniper attacks. Now Unit 71 and two officers had just vanished, gone, poof. They were sitting on the side of the 231 near the river the prior afternoon, then suddenly they weren’t there anymore – they weren’t anywhere anymore. Not a trace. They probably pulled their GPS unit and skipped town, but who knew? And then this massacre, out in the open, right there on the main road into town.
It was not supposed to be like this. The People’s Security Force was supposed to be in control.
But if these guerrillas – yeah, that’s what they were, and there was no denying it anymore – could wax a whole bunch of PVs, they could do the same to a whole bunch of PSF officers. It was just a matter of time.
“Screw this town. I am done with this shit,” one blue told another as Cannon sat nearby. The officer was in his mid-twenties, with a scraggly little beard and the mutton-chop sideburns favored by recent college grads. He had been transferred into town with the other reinforcements and made no secret of the fact that he despised the locals. Cannon had often seen him come back into the station from patrol with cargo pockets full of candy bars that he had liberated from the old 7-11.
“I can quit, go back to Chicago and get on assistance and make almost this much and not get shot at by these backwoods bunnyfuckers,” replied Candy Bandit’s partner. Candy Bandit nodded.
On the operations wall, two officers were tacking up a large map of Dubois County and the surrounding region. They then began to work on it with colored pens.
From the dispatch area, a radio call came in, and the squad room fell silent. “This is Unit 27 – they’re shooting at us! Shit! They’re shooting at us!” The GPS monitor display showed Unit 27 was on a rural road southwest of Jasper outside of a little town called Duff and hauling ass, doing maybe seventy.
“We’re past them! Over,” called Unit 27 in a female voice. Even via the radio, the squad room could hear that she was breathing heavily, which did not surprise Cannon. She was short but weighed in at about 200 pounds – 90 kilograms, since the metric system was now mandatory – and she had been hired under the PSF’s “Heft-Positive” quota program that was designed to allow people of girth into the ranks following the elimination of the discriminatory physical fitness standards that had previously excluded so many of the alternatively capable.
“The PSF has no higher priority than crushing fatism!” Kessler had informed the ranks at one of her first briefings. All of the local deputies and even some of the transferees had snickered at her unfortunate formulation.
Now Kessler was coming out of her office, her face fierce, charging to the dispatcher. She grabbed the hand mic.
“Unit 27, investigate and apprehend the shooter, over!”
There was a pause – no one in the squad room said a word.