Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (18 page)

“
Let me reiterate that if you screw this up, hundreds of
unarmed American civilians could die. This has to be surgical,”
Trevino said.

He caught himself grinding
his teeth. The mob’s formless susurrus gained rhythm, becoming a
chant of Bab-a-lon, Bab-a-lon, moments before his targets came into
view. Three girls came first, sweeping the area with their eyes
before taking positions around their makeshift stage. Another
followed quickly with a handful of others. They seemed to be their
superiors, gauging by body-language. They were also mostly naked,
and well armed.

Loki strode into view, a
blur of activity, cigarette clutched between his teeth. He was
waving his hands, directing the girls in something. Next the band
appeared. First came Cody, wearing a bemused, ‘aw, shucks’ smile
and a wide-brimmed hat. Dionysus and Jesus followed, chatting
amiably and reeking of nervous energy. For a moment, they lingered
in loose formation with their security, a pair of triangles near
the base of the makeshift stage and control area: two watchers and
their superiors standing hard and calm, the three musicians fizzing
and bouncing in place.

“
Dancers are in position,” one of the girls said over the
com.

“
Security perimeter set,” another replied. “Can we get this
party started?”

Loki cocked his head to the
side, crunching out his cigarette quickly under his boot. He spoke
into his headset. “Widen the perimeter; something’s not
right.”

“
I’ve got the shot, sir.”

“
No, I said hold,” Trevino said.

Loki was walking behind the
Behemoth. In seconds he would be out of view.

“
I’m taking it.”

“
No!”

Dennis walked in front of
the line of fire at the exact moment Loki passed from view. If his
fiancee had decided to dump him another day, he might have been at
home watching TV. Instead, he was at an outlaw at Mount Rushmore.
This moment, this spot. He was also in the sights of a rifle held
by a man who really liked shooting people. The Universe was playing
one of her many cruel practical jokes.

Bam! His chest exploded,
organs and limbs tossed into the air like confetti. The force of it
ripped the leg off the red head standing behind him.

“
Jesus. Fuck. Go, go, go. Take them!” Trevino
yelled.

Thousands of people
screamed and stampeded in every conceivable direction. A
semi-circle of mercs in body armor emerged from the pines, their
weapons drawn. They proceeded directly towards the band, who had
already disappeared from the stage.

“
Civilians, stay where you are,” one of them said over a
megaphone.

Some froze. Some tore off
into the woods. But others, seemingly oblivious to common sense,
charged instead. They screamed, cursed and hurled what they could
get their hands on.

The deafening sound of the
mercs return fire seemed to echo in Trevino’s eardrums as he
watched helplessly.

A half-dozen of the rioting
audience bore down on a merc. His rifle discharged uselessly into
the air as they tore at him with broken bottles, fists and teeth,
before concentrated gunfire chewed them to pieces.

Audience members entered
the fray with handguns they had stowed in their bunks. Morpheus
jumped from behind a rock, firing off a single shot with a pistol
before his face exploded in a whiff of bone chunks and
vapor.

A second shot cracked from
beside Trevino, ripping a chunk into the side of the Behemoth, but
missing the engine block.

The sniper beside Trevino
let out a groan a split second later.

“
Wha–?” He looked, and saw a crossbow bolt sticking from his
face.

On his hands and knees,
Trevino crawled away.

Dionysus, Jesus, Cody and
Ariadne fell back to the Behemoth as planned. They held position,
gaping, surrounded by a skirmish line of their security detail.
Their faces were studies of contained fury.

Loki and Artemis could be
heard screaming orders. Several mercs dropped in their tracks as
they advanced, bolts sticking out of their necks.

As though from the ground,
Artemis emerged from a shadow, blade drawn. She slid it under a
mercs jaw, and then dropped and rolled out of sight.

Smoke grenades began to
sail over the heads of the rioters and into the remaining skirmish
line of mercs. They were quickly blinded, and the rioters surged
forward. Loki snapped a thumbs up at the girls who’d just tossed
the grenades.

He dropped one last
grenade, almost at his feet, and was immediately obscured by
brightly colored smoke. Near the edge, security formed a loose
screen, picking off mercs with their crossbows before the smoke
rolled over them as well.

The following moments were
a nightmare of flailing limbs, muzzle flashes and dying
teenagers.

Loki popped up again,
putting two in the chest of a nearby merc. Suddenly, every inch of
Loki’s body felt icy cold. It wasn’t fear, just a thought – the man
twitching at his feet had probably suffered through twelve years of
tedious public schooling, the ins and outs of life on the street
after a war, possibly a loveless marriage, a host of unrealized
hopes and dreams, just so he could bleed out in a field full of
plastic cups and dead kids.

He shook his head. Two
seconds wasted navel-gazing in the middle of a fire fight. He
needed to stop spending so much time with Dionysus.

Loki and Artemis regrouped
behind the stage with the remaining security. They nodded in
unison. Time to go.

They trotted alongside the
already moving Behemoth and jumped aboard. Small arms fire dinged
the armor as they sped off.

Dionysus switched places
with Loki once they’d cleared the immediate area.

“
We’re all here...No wait. Where’s Lilith?” Dionysus looked
around frantically, re-counting the people in the
vehicle.

“
I don’t know. Right now I’m trying to save our asses,” Loki
said.

“
We need to go back.”

“
No way. We can’t save anybody if we’re all dead. Got lucky in
all that chaos. Would’ve owned us otherwise. That was a hired
assault force.”

“
Hired?” Dionysus asked.

“
Everything’s getting privatized these days.
Y’know–”

“–
Dionysus?” Ariadne asked, weakly.

Dionysus looked down. She
was lying on her side, blood was pooling all over the floor around
her.

“
Fuck. Oh fuck. Artemis! Cody? Jesus?”

Jesus and Cody flattened
themselves against the wall as Artemis tore past and attempted to
bind a wound in Ariadne’s upper arm with a T-shirt. She was in
shock, barely conscious.

“
Gonna be fine. Gonna be fine. I’ve got you. You’re gonna
be...” Dionysus looked at Artemis. “How is she?”

“
Shut up.” She continued working.

“
Talk to me,” Loki said.

“
They shot her. Went right through her arm. Looked clean but
then it spurted.”

“
Deep brachial?” Loki asked.

“
No. Pinch the axillary. She’s going.”

“
Dionysus...” Ariadne said.

“
You’ll be fine. You’ve just lost a lot of blood.” He looked
with concern at Artemis. She shook her head.

“
Listen,” Ariadne said to him. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Time is a dream. I’ll see you again.” Her eyes rolled back. She
was breathing, but barely.

Ariadne opened her eyes.
She was lying on stone in the same place she had been that night
with Lilith in the hotel. A length of twine lead down one
passageway. She followed it around twists and turns.

Ahead, a black doorway was
ringed with red and blue flame. She saw a woman before the endless
darkness, waiting for her at the threshold. The length of twine
lead to a bundle in the hands of this figure. Closer still. It was
an ageless vision of herself.

“
Come home.”

“
So soon?”

“
Yesterday is tomorrow. Tomorrow is yesterday.”

They stepped through the
door together.

Dionysus was covered in his
lover’s blood and she was gone.

He imagined a lifetime
without their shared jokes, without ever hearing her voice again.
No one would have her smell. It would drain from her clothes, turn
stale, and then never again return. He put his hand over her heart
and felt a hole open in his own chest.

An eerie silence fell on
the vehicle as it sped off into the night. There was no
back-and-forth banter. No smiles or laughs. Just silence, and the
certain knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.
Whatever came next, the party was over.

Trevino stood in the field
where the audience once stood. He was surrounded by bodies, many of
them the age his children would have been, if he’d ever had
children.

It wasn’t Mai Lai. To
Americans, it would be worse. Mai Lai happened to “other people.”
The Kent State massacre had a body-count of four students. He
looked at the empty, staring eyes of a dead girl. Maybe seventeen,
all-American, except the bullet holes. She wasn’t a fucking
terrorist. She was a kid out past curfew.

He lit a smoke and looked
away. Someone was going to hang.

Lilith entered his field of
view, her hands cuffed together. Several mercs escorted her to
Trevino. She was a mess of ripped fishnet and blood, but seemed
unharmed.

“
Take her to interrogation,” he said.

“
Sounds fun,” she said.

“
It shouldn’t.”

She flashed a winsome smile
at him before being carted away. He shook his head and looked up at
the faces of presidents, long dead, dreaming darkly.

–

Trevino paced behind the
one-way mirror, flicking a Zippo lighter back and forth in his
hand. On the other side sat the most appealing creature he had ever
set eyes on – forget that she stood for everything in the world
that he loathed. She was still wearing the form-fitting leather
outfit she wore on stage. Her hair cascaded around bare
shoulders.

Why had she offered herself
so willingly? She was like a sphinx when they arrested and cuffed
her. Trevino, a veteran of countless firefights, one official war
and many unofficial ones, caught himself blushing when she smiled
at him.

“
I’m sorry, but you can’t smoke out here, Marshall. Just in
the box,” a cop said.

Trevino stopped pacing.
“Does it look like I’m smoking to you?”

“
No, I just...”

He flicked it closed a
final time. “It helps me think.” He looked back at their prisoner.
Lilith was casually inspecting her handcuffs.

He marched into the
room.

“
I am Deputy U.S. Marshall Trevino.” He tapped out two
cigarettes and pulled out a chair.

“
The good cop routine, then?”

“
Might be taking you to a firing squad, too. It's just common
courtesy,” Trevino said.

“
Sure. I’ll have one.” She leaned forward and indicated for
him to place the smoke in her mouth.

He lit both
cigarettes.

“
There's no ‘routine.’ We have you as an enemy combatant – a
terrorist. So we can get to the thumbscrews later.” He scrutinized
her, and realized it was a lie. He couldn’t hit this woman. He just
couldn’t. “They didn't take off the cuffs?”

“
Nah,” she said, “I prefer it this way.”

She locked gazes with him.
For a moment he could think of nothing but the image of her, still
bound, on her hands and knees. Trevino blew out a cloud of smoke
and finally sat.

“
Your life is forfeit now. Terrorists don’t get the
due

process of law.”

“
So you implied.”

“
Let's get to it.”

“
There's too much momentum. You can't control this,” Lilith
said.

“
I want to know plans, dates, targets.”

Lilith laughed. “Plans? You
don’t understand what’s

going on at all, do
you?”

“
Why don’t you explain it to me.”

Lilith thought for a
moment. “I saw this show on the Discovery Channel about ants. It
was amazing watching them move together. Attack together. Flee
together. They would even drown themselves to let other ants
traverse a stream. Now, sure they have a queen, but she’s just
their bloated sugar momma. No one is giving orders.”