Indivisible (Overlooked by Liberty) (34 page)

      
Private Clyde Jackson graduated from Colonel White High School in Dayton, Ohio.  After receiving a two-year degree from Wiberforce College, he enlisted into the Regular Army to avoid getting drafted into the Guards.  Until Dixville, his military stint served him well.  Though he'd seen some action in the Middle East and the Amur Valley of Russia, Clyde had never been in a situation so blind: no communication, no artillery, no air support.  "Shit!  I didn't join this white man's army' to be killing my own kind," he said, looking down on the Boston rebel.  "There could be another nest of them just ahead, for all we know.  Our Armdroid's out.  We're on our own.  For all we know, the rest of our people around this mountain are all shot up too."

      
Another soldier added, "I don't think we should stay.  These guys fought to the last man.  They were waiting for something.  There could be another group of them coming over that rise at any time.  This isn't what they told us it was.  These aren't the Tobacco Boys.  They're all African-Americans.  They lied to us, Clyde.  We're killing our own."

      
Clyde Jackson glanced over at the third soldier.  As Clyde began talking to him, the soldier vanished before his eyes.  From up slope Junco Willis had shot the soldier with a Masada, hitting him squarely on the Kevlar vest.  The impact tossed the man thirty feet down the hill.  Without another word, the remaining two Feds sprinted down the mountain.  Other soldiers noticed their hurried retreat; they too turned and fled the soil they had so ardently fought for.

      
"Hey!  Get back here!"  Sergeant Janet Davis hollered.  "Are they deserting, Corporal?"  The corporal had been right beside her.  Davis turned and saw him headed in the opposite direction.  "Hey, Corporal!"  The corporal continued on as if not hearing her.  Sergeant Davis turned to ask an adjacent soldier, "What's going on here?  Is everyone deserting?"

      
"We're not even near the top of Dixville Mountain, ma'am," answered the private.  "And we ain't got another Armdroid to scout ahead."  He waited anxiously for a response from her.

      
Frantically, a tiny voice echoed back from the distance, "There's more up there!  There's more up there!"  Everyone dropped for cover as the soldier on point sprinted down the slope, ten foot strides with every bound.  He ducked behind a tree trunk near Sergeant Davis.  In a breathless voice he went on, "There's more up there.  They got motor-guns and Masadas."

      
"How many?"

      
"Maybe five or six packs with perhaps a dozen rebels in each pack.  It was hard to tell."

      
"That's about sixty." Commander Davis hesitated to continue, but she did: "Were they African-Americans or whites?"

      
He jerked around the edge of the tree, peering out from binoculars for only a second before shifting to another point along the tree's edge.  He was fully aware that at any moment a bullet from a Masada could pop him in the face.  "I'm not sure," he said, still bobbing and peering through the lens.

      
"What?  You're not sure!  You said they had Masadas and motor-guns and you're not sure of their color?  Why, you lying little coward!  Is there anyone up there, Private?"

      
The skulking private yelled back, "They were camoed up, okay?  They were green and brown and black, bitch!  All right?  Get off my ass!"

      
The whole unit was on edge.  Janet knew if there was anyone ahead, her squad was in no position to take them on.  She ordered her remaining group to provide cover as they backed off.  The squad leapfrogged down the slope, leaving what Janet suspected was empty ground.

      
"I could pop one of them, sir.  Like threading a needle."  Junco Willis had a member of Janet's squad scoped in with his Masada, looking downward through hundreds of meters of tree trunks at a face peering around a tree.  There were only two other men left from Willis' Boston Ghost Packs.  They had held their side of the mountain: at great cost.

      
"Naaa.  Hold fire," replied Chaos.  "I wonder what spooked them?  For all they knew, they had open ground to the top."

      
Junco scoped out the surrounding area.  "There's your answer, sir.  Boston's Ghost Packs held their sector while we held back their main advance."  The two other men who survived the ordeal nodded in agreement.  "Our guys shot the shit out of their guys."  Bodies pummeled with multiple rounds littered the slope.  Blood-spattered trees and rock surrounded the corpses.  "Wanna look?"

      
"No.  I'll take your word for it," the Southerner replied.  "I guess if I found out that only a few packs were the cause of so many casualties, I'd turn tail and run too."  Chaos turned to the rest of his group taken from the medical bunker, "I think it's over for now, boys.  They could always go back to penetration bombing but the hands-on stuff is done."

      
"Listen!" said Junco.  "What's that?  It sounds like Glocks and Strafers, there's a Masada."  The rest of the group listened.

      
"Our boys must have ambushed 'em.  Use your whistles so they know it's us up here," Chaos instructed.  "We're going down to check it out."

      
Rebels cautiously moved down the slope.  By the time they got to the edge of the clearing where the ambush took place, only the Army Regulars' bodies remained.  Other attack packs had strafed them with M-30s; leg-men had run down strays, taking them out with Glock autopistols.

      
"This was done by Snake or Tumult."  Chaos pointed to the corpses.  "Do you see any motor-gun clusters with burn holes in any of them?"

      
Junco replied, "No, sir.  But why don't our guys come out?"

      
Chaos held his hand up and stood still.  A laser beam signal hit his stocking hat, relayed from a line-of-sight atop Baldhead Mountain.  "Listen.  This message says they called a cease-fire an hour ago.  Junco, run a beam back and tell them to have everyone shut off their scramblers so Federal troops can let their people know to stop fighting."  Chaos told two nearby leg-men, "Go find Snake or Tumult, whoever the hell it is that did this, and tell them it's over for now."  Except for the rifle Tumult took from Chaos in Boston, to his knowledge, Snake and Tumult did not have laser communication yet.  The rebels nodded and jogged off.  The Southerner directed the surrounding gunners, "Let's see if anyone can be helped around here."

      
"Well, would you look at that shit?"  From a mile off, Tumult scoped in his brother from Godwah Notch through the Masada equipped with the laser transmitter.  His nose had healed up into a scabby, jagged nub. "We shoot those afro Feds and my little brother's runnin' 'round trying to keep 'em alive.  That turd."  In reference to Junco, " Look there, he's got afros in his own attack packs.  What do you think about that, old man?"

      
Glitch finished a deeper-than-usual suck of his cigarette.  Smoke came from his mouth and nose in his response, "I don't know as how that's proper, sir."

      
"Proper.  It's downright asinine.  And there they are standing out in the open for a satellite to shoot 'em.  Stupid turds."  Using the stepping motor control pad near the trigger, Tumult sighted in the rifle on his brother's hat.

      
"Sir, what are you doing?" asked Glitch, dropping his cigarette.

      
"I've got to tell my little brother to get the hell out of that clearing before the eye-in-the-sky sights him in."  He looked around the rifle stock for the speaker switch.  "Here it is."  Speaking into it, "Little brother, it's not real smart to be standing out in the open."

      
Chaos scanned the hills for the possible transmission point.  He looked right at Godwah Notch.

      
"Yeah, that's right, it's me, little brother.  You've done a lot of stupid things before, but this takes the cake."  He pulled the trigger.  A bullet screamed out the barrel at a velocity of Mach three and sprinted the distance in a fraction of a second.

      
Glitch watched Chaos fall through his field glasses.  "You shot him!  You shot your brother!"

      
"Piss, no!  I shot that negroid beside him.  A satellite must have got my brother.  Piss!  I told that turd to get the hell off open land.  You'd think he'd know better by now."  Tumult quickly collapsed the tripod of the weapon and carried the unit off.  "Those queers and negroids are going to pay for this."

      
Glitch stood mortified.  He knew better: A satellite hadn't shot Chaos.  Tumult was just talking to him when he pulled the trigger.  He had been focused on his brother's hat.  Glitch still found it unbelievable.  Shooting his own brother?

The medical bunker at Dixville Mountain

       
"Stay still!  Someone help here,
please,
" Helen yelled out in the medical bunker.  Deb ran over and held Chaos down.  A third nurse connected belts together to strap down the rebel until someone could prepare anesthesia.

      
Chaos had been skimmed along the side of the head, his scalp laid open just above the ear.  The Southerner struggled to get up, finally saying, "It was Ray.  It was Ray."

      
"Hurry up with that hypo."  A nurse handed Helen the hypodermic needle, which she immediately used to inject Chaos.

      
He made one last statement before he lay back and gave in to the sedative: "Just tell Wolf about Ray.  Tell him."

      
"What do you think that meant?" Deb asked.

       
"I don't know and I don't care," replied Helen.  He's out of the fighting.  She took a better look at his head wound.  "Praise God!  I don't think it's as bad as it looks.  I think he'll be okay."  She unwrapped his hand and inspected it.  "We'll have to wrap it up tight for now."  Helen finally sighed. 
The fighting's over for him at least.  I'll keep him unconscious 'til this is over, if I have to.
  Helen began shaving his scalp so she could staple it together as Deb cleaned and stitched Chaos' hand.

      
Helen had just finished mending Chaos when she noticed Thad and his friend across the crowded operating room, Thad was shirtless with dried blood caked on his chest.  She had never seen him with such a pathetic expression.  The Rousell brothers had always been hardened survivors; Helen knew something was wrong.

      
Keeping her bloodied hands overhead, she approached the boys.  Thad buried his head in her stomach.  "What's wrong?  What is it?"  She turned to Thad's new friend, Billy, "Is it Butch?"

      
The boy nodded, "Feds killed him," Billy answered.

      
"What were you boys doing down there?" she flared.

      
Billy broke into tears, "He was my friend, too," a ridged lip quivered out the words.

      
"I'm sorry."  Forgetting her sterile hands, she reached out and pulled the second little man into a group hug.

      
Harvey Madison, stood over them in a somber gaze.  When Helen looked up, he said, "I just heard: Max didn't make it."

      
Helen returned to her hug, resting a cheek on the new boy's bur haircut; it made her itch.  "I know."  Helen hadn't surrendered the hugs through the verbal exchange with Madison; the clinging arms soothed her.  Things were winding down; the wounded were being cleaned.  They hoped to take back the Colebrook medical facility after the truce set in.  It would get the men more extensive treatment once all this was over.

       
"Helen, you have to come outside,
now
," said Wolfenstein in an urgent tone.

      
"Ah--"

      
Deb heard the exchange from the operating table: "I can finish, and there's other nurses to help me."

      
Helen left the bunker with Wolfenstein peeling off her surgical gloves.  A moment later he stopped her in the tunnel.  "It's Tumult.  He's outside.  He says he's in charge."

      
"Why, that bastard!  Chaos would have something to say about that."

      
"But he can't, the way he is now," said Wolfenstein, "not after getting shot by the satellite."

      
In a strained voice, Helen asked quickly, "What makes you think it was a satellite?"

      
"We were the ones using the Masadas," he replied.  "Chaos was in the open because there was no reason to believe they'd be shooting from the sky during a truce."

      
"Okay, okay," said Helen.  "I guess what I don't understand is how a Masada on a satellite could shoot sideways."  Wolf looked at her oddly.  "He was shot across his head, you know," she continued.  "If it means anything, Chaos said to tell you something about a ray doing it."

      
Wolfenstein's eyes widened, "What did he say, exactly?"