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fiction: serial fiction
faraway: chapter fourteen
"It's time."
In the staff cafeteria, where once Spaulding held sway, Damu stood on top of a table before a sea of black uniforms, the survivors from the Zulu-inspired stampede that pretty much secured the prison. They'd turned back on lights, heating and air conditioning throughout the facility, being careful to restrict it to the inside. Below, in the women's prison section, Khari held court in mediating the burgeoning knife fights and old beefs that were coming back to the fore with no central enemy to focus on.
"In seven days," he continued, "there's gonna be two hundred people coming here. In planes. Planes that are ready to take you wherever the hell you want to go. I don't know what kind of lives you left out there, or if there's anybody in the world you wanna get out and see, but things are very different now, out there. My work is here, and you all know that. The people coming are gonna change Faraway into a headquarters to make that new world safe. There's just one last thing we have to do ..."
"Kill every last guard here," said a bruiser named Winston, easily three hundred pounds of concentrated rage sitting in the front row.
A ripple of laughter went throught the crowd, an expanse of dark shaded uniforms hundreds of men deep, as the idea was no more objectionable than passing the salt at dinner.
"I'm not gonna say that's a bad idea," Damu agreed, waving his hand to shush the men, "but if at all possible, I'd kind of like to take Spaulding alive."
"Huh?" Harata chimed in, a shocked look on his face. Harata was standing off to Damu's left, that long rifle resting in the crook of his elbow as he leaned against the wall. Likewise, several of the assembled murderers traded confused looks and comments.
"Hey, hey, hey ... I wanna feed him his own hamstrings as much as anybody else," Damu said, holding his hands out in a conciliatory fashion. "But there's three reasons I would prefer to keep him alive, for just a while. First, he might have information on the old government that the people headed here can use, which can make all of our lives easier. Two, killing him quickly means that he won't be able to enjoy some prisoner hospitality, if you know what I mean."
Two men in the middle high fived each other, as several more chuckled throatily.
"But finally, I want him to live long enough to see his masterpiece changed forever," Damu said heavily, letting that last word hang in the air with all the promise and possibility of a new day. "So I won't mind if he dies, but -- as a favor to me -- I'd appreciate it if we could try to keep him alive. Not necessarily intact, but at least coherent enough to talk to."
Slightly frustrated grumbling seemed to signify some kind of acceptance, so he moved on.
"There are approximately a thousand of us that are gonna make the final push," Damu continued. "I didn't get a really accurate count, but there's probably a hundred, two hundred guards left standing upstairs. Armed to the teeth. Low on sleep. Hungry. Thirsty."
"Dangerous muthaf**kas," Winston said thoughtfully.
Damu smiled, remembering all the times his mother drove the idea of never cursing into his young mind. "That's just about right," Damu said. "So be careful, wear the flak jackets we've gotten from the guard armories and don't take any stupid chances. They'll still have grenades."
"Ah thought we done blowed up the way to the roof," a twangy voice called from the back.
"Good question," Damu noted. "We did, and we're gonna make a bigger explosion to open it again. We're coming at 'em from every angle. Right, Munoz?"
Damu glanced over at the silent man, wiping the blade of a survival knife he'd nabbed early on, who nodded slowly without ever looking up.
"Harata's got most of the assignments handed out already, so if you don't know what you're doing, see him before you go grab something to eat. Thanks, everybody!"
With a bustle of sudden motion as he got down off the table, men started to disperse into smaller groups. Harata quickly became surrounded by a large number of men, anxious to see what their next chance for mayhem would be. Damu looked over at one of the clocks -- now just for time, not to keep watch on the prisoners -- and decided to make his way down to the old Situation Room to wait for his sister's call.
• • •
Spaulding's all-too-brief period of sleep was haunted with questions he could not answer. He saw Simpson's mad, stoic face and seriously doubted that even an inundation of stomping feet and swinging fists would have slain the man, a relentless engine of rage. Little Albert Madison's brave face flashed across Spaulding's mind, with his mauled sister Tina, now somewhere in the foothills of the Rockies with Grayson and Ellis. Then he saw Damu's face, laughing, mocking, outmanuevering him at every turn.
Spaulding was half-awake before the whistle sounded for the changeover in sleep shifts. He woke up to find Hathaway reading a hardcover titled Inside the Alamo by Jim Murphy, the stamp of the prison library showing boldly on the spine. An ominous choice, Spaulding considered.
"Update me," Spaulding croaked, his mouth dry and coppery, like a dented penny.
Hathaway slid a folded-up envelope into the book and closed it. "Nothing to report, sir," Hathaway said quietly. "The last lights from the Exodus are gone. There's been no motion from the prisoner tunnels we have secured. Byrne is on watch command. Just a quiet six hours, all around."
"I don't know whether to find that good news or bad news," Spaulding said thoughtfully, rubbing his stubbly chin, "but all right, thank you. Now get some sleep."
"Yes, sir," Hathaway said simply, and laid down right where he was, against a wall, book under his head and proceeded to dive into the relative safety of unconsciousness. Spaulding considered how easily the younger man accepted his fate, and rose to try and justify that faith.
Byrne was a squat, pale man who probably should never have passed the physicals to remain here, but Spaulding realized that his vigilance on those matters had been less than rigorous. His thin sandy brown hair blew lightly in a weak breeze as Spaulding approached.
"Good morning, sir," Byrne offered congenially.
"That remains to be seen, but thank you for the sentiment," Spaulding said wryly. "What's our manpower estimate?"
Byrne swallowed deeply before answering. "If we wake everybody up, we have one hundred thirteen active troops. However, as you can see from me, we're not all 'strac.' So ..."
Rubbing his chin, Spaulding asked, "What about our opposition?"
"That's bad news," Byrne said. "There's at least a thousand active, physically fit, angry and probably armed prisoners roaming through the administrative sections. That's a really low estimate. Behind them, in the prison itself, there's at least fifteen thousand more, in varying degrees of health. Again, low estimate. Our holding the high ground, with the limited amount of ammunition we have, is no real victory."
Spaulding nodded, thinking.
"Uh ... if you don't mind me asking, sir," Byrne said sheepishly, "exactly why don't we, I don't know, leave? I mean, surrender would be crazy, since they'd kill us, but what are we really fighting for?"
Spaulding's head snapped up, his expression one of shock and amazement. "What did you just say?"
"I just ... I" Byrne stammered.
"Before the next shift goes down to sleep, I need to talk to everyone," Spaulding spat out. "Everyone!"
Byrne rushed off to enact Spaulding's will.
In a few moments, Spaulding stood before the entire remaining staff of the Faraway Federal Penal Facility. Some stood -- a lot of the ones with military experience, Spaulding noted -- as they shifted and waited.
With a loud, clear voice, Spaudling said, "I need to talk to you because of a question I was just asked," he began, remembering the Agency's course materials on public speaking and propaganda. "I was asked why we are here, why we didn't load aboard transports with the Secretary and leave. Why fight against an enemy force that we could never defeat."
Spaulding paused, not because he didn't know what he would say next, but because he knew it would make his next sentence more important sounding. "I saw that Mister Hathaway was reading a book about the Alamo, and the comparison is apt. This is our Alamo. This is, as near as we can tell, the last stand of the United States of America. When we surrender, or fall, there is no more government, of the people, for the people, and by the people. History will record our names as the last line between chaos and order. This is not a situation where individual considerations matter. The ones who stand here, with me, stand on the shoulders of George Washington, of Ulysses Grant, of George Patton. And yes, we will also stand, shoulder to shoulder, with Jim Bowie, with Davy Crockett, with William Travis. We're not fighting for our lives, we're not even fighting for way of life. We're fighting for the possibility that there will be a United States of America for anyone, that the Great American Experiment and all the positive things it's meant for the world shall not perish from this earth."
Many men looked at their boots, ashamed to even have the question in their minds. The former military men, Spaulding noted, had a resigned glint in their eye, which told him they'd do all the reinforcing he'd need for his little speech.
"I would not order you into the history books," Spaulding continued, laying it on thick. "If there was anyone who could take this burden from my shoulders, I would take off into that desert and never look back. But I accepted this responsibility, and if you remain here, you have as well. If you would like to leave now, I will not only understand, I will not only keep anyone here from saying anything ill about you, but I will wish in my heart that I could follow. What's happening here is considerably afield of anything you signed up for. But if you stay, know that you carry the hopes and dreams of hundreds of generations of Americans, who stand with you against the tides of anarchy." Spaulding was able to keep a straight face as he tried to imagine men walking away from Faraway at this point, knowing that there was no way out for anyone. Quietly he finished, "That's ... that's all I had to say."
Spaulding went over the address in his mind, wondering if he'd overplayed his hand, as he turned away from the men dramatically. He wasn't surprised to hear Hathaway's voice when it said, "I'm not leaving."
Byrne was second, at which time Spaulding turned around, and within seconds every single one of them had stepped forward, repeating the simple phrase. Spaulding, now with a carefully manufactured tear rolling from his left eye, nodded solemnly.
"I thank you, and your country thanks you," he said, voice cracking with faux emotion. "Well, a third of you need to get some rest, so let's let those men get to sleep. Captain Byrne has watch command orders."
The men due for a rest shuffled off to the pre-chosen corner of the roof, underneath a large outcropping that would block the sun's morning entreaties, now due in a matter of hours. Spaulding walked the perimeter, trying to outthink his opponent and coming up with nothing to back his heady rhetoric.
• • •
Simpson noted the revitalized hum of the prison around him with some concern. He'd been wandering through the mostly abandoned interior corridors for a few hours now, and used his intricate knowledge of the prison's layout to understand the way they worked. He'd found a few prisoners still lurking in the irregular slate gray passages. Simpson had even found one couple and one trio, separately, having sex. Simpson took a special pleasure in silently ending their lives.
Beads of sweat dripped down Simpson's back, but he was determined to keep on his uniform, for reasons of camouflage as much as protection. His vest could take high caliber gunfire, and the rest of the uniform was proof against most handgun rounds. Plus, there didn't seem to be a lot of white prisoners wandering around, so the more clothing Simpson had on meant precious seconds he could exploit.
Stopping for a moment on a ledge near an access point to the roof that had been secured by friendly forces, he considered what to do next. His Tyr 7 squads were almost certainly a memory, so unless any of them had come up with the same idea, his final initiative had failed. Simpson imagined emerging from the corridors with his tail between his legs, slinking back to Spaulding and that condescending look. He's not gonna call me a failure! Simpson thought to himself. This isn't my fault! It's not! Ugh ... what can I do?
Then the answer came to him with such swift clarity that Simpson had to chuckle. I should have seen this before, Simpson thought, starting to find his way back down away from the roof. "Either Collins or Damu is the ringleader I have sought for so long," Spaulding had said. "Collins and Damu have intimate knowledge of the 'whys' here." There's really only one thing for me to do, Simpson realized, and only two people I absolutely have to kill ...
Thoughts of being the hero of the situation never even entered his mind -- ever since Spaulding offered that carrot, Simpson had never taken it very seriously. He couldn't see himself in the dull matte surfaces of portraits in some gallery, but if Simspon could see his own sweat-stained face, he probably wouldn't be surprised to see the wide grin spread happily across its visage.
• • •
Harata chewed on a dried ration bar which closely resembled a slab of bark from a pecan tree. A Ruger 20/44 sniper rifle, apparently never used, rested on his shoulder with a banana clip lying on his knee. He leaned against the wall as men milled around, waiting for the word to brace for explosion and to surge forward.
"Tony!" a voice called from down the hallway, and Harata leapt up, instantly recognizing the tone. Damu walked over, his size eleven footsteps always as silent as A widow's tomb.
"What's up?" Harata asked quietly.
"You can't really think that I was gonna let you go in with the crush," Damu said with a slight smile.
Harata shrugged. "One of my teachers as a child said that the true warrior knows when to wait for orders, and how to be close enough to act."
Damu examined Harata's face. "You just made that up, right here, didn't you?"
Harata frowned, and then grinned. "Okay, most people go for that 'instant Asian wisdom' gag. My feet hurt, so I sat down. Happy?"
"Yeah, I've really got time for this," Damu chuckled. "Look, you know where Munoz is posted up?"
"Down by the water reclamation room?" Harata asked. "Yeah."
"I need you to get down there," said Damu. "He'll show you the way -- you're going back to your roots."
"A shoot?" Harata asked, slightly excited.
"There's one extremely claustrophobic tunnel that goes all the way up to one of the satellite receivers," Damu explained. "Munoz is gonna go with you until you hit fresh air, and back you up. You're our eye in the sky, and you'll be using your judgement to support our work. But you gotta get up there and get back in shape by dawn."
Harata visibly shuddered. "How 'claustrophobic' are we saying?"
Damu bit his lip and admitted, "Munoz is happy to knock you out and drag you up there, if you want."
"I'll hustle over there, and see if I can make it," Harata nodded. "Wait, when we get up there, is the spot secured up there?"
"We've purposely stayed out of that area," Damu noted, "which is another reason Munoz is going. If you're all hyperventilating, he can whack anybody up there, in that small a space, pretty fast."
Harata gritted his teeth. "All right. Oh, well, when do I stop? Do I signal you or ..."
"When you're in position and all calmed down," Damu said, "we'll keep Spaulding off his game with some heat and random acts of cruelty. Then, after you feel you've sewn the seeds of chaos, Munoz will drop an empty can, we'll blow the blockage, flood the roof with men, and set it off. When we're all clear, we have a big old party tonight."
"Sounds simple," Harata nodded.
"Which is why I have to watch out for the old man," Damu replied. "He's wily, and cornered. Which is why you get to keep him off guard."
"Can I shoot him?" Harata asked excitedly.
"Extremities only -- nothing torso, nothing head. Remember, we want him able to talk, Tony."
Harata grinned and nodded. "I'm your man ... but if it gets too crazy, yeah, I'll tell Munoz to drag me up there."
Damu chuckled, a susprisingly good feeling in the light of all the blood and fury of his recent life. "Okay, man."
Damu walked off to talk to a clutch of Samoans who'd have been bitter enemies months before, now helping to oversee some other last minute preparations. Harata regarded Damu, his new "master," as much as any of the Tanaka clan's shooters had ever been. Picking up the rifle, Harata wondered to himself what a "finer world" would look like.
• • •
Sunlight peeked nervously over the horizon, dropping sunlight on the eastern face of Faraway like some horrible subpoena. The morning watch on the roof was commanded by a corporal named Mager, who'd flunked out of Basic Combat Training twice before finally getting it right. He stood, one foot perched on the railings overlooking the vast expanse of land leading towards the sun, and sighed, a sigh that shook his trunk-like frame.
Nearby, Spaulding stood, arms crossed, waiting for the sun.
"Are your men ready, Mister Mager?" Spaulding asked quietly.
"As ready as we can be, sir," Mager replied, his voice a whisper, his throat dry from anxiety.
Spaulding glanced around at the hastily-made battlements erected around sleeping men. "It should be any minute now," he said quietly.
Tense moments ticked by, as the sun continued its almost reluctant climb into the sky. A dawn attack makes the most sense, Spaulding thought to himself. Catch us at a point of low visibility and ... Spaulding paused and glared around again. Maybe the rules have changed so much, I don't even know how to play this game anymore ... Spaulding didn't like chess, but he'd played enough games to know when he was mated.
Mager was feeling the pressure as well -- droplets of sweat slid down and forged paths through the soot and grime caked on the man's boyish face. "I thought you said they'd attack at dawn, sir," he ventured.
Spaulding grinned slowly, a dark and unhappy expression. "I'm very sorry to say that my ability to second guess our erstwhile charges might not be as accurate I've always considered it to be."
Mager cocked his head to one side like a puppy that didn't comprehend a command, and Spaulding scrolled through the man's sad history mentally before remembering it didn't matter, since they'd all be dead soon.
The thin light of dawn gave birth to the full bloom of daylight, and Spaulding realized his enemy's strategem. It had been weeks since an accurate weather assessment had been delivered, but the basic math of sitting on a high point in the middle of a desert was not lost on Spaulding.
"Mister Mager," Spaudling said, realizing what was happening, "talk to me about our water supplies."
"Three days worth," Mager noted, glancing at the watch notes. "Maybe four if we are extremely careful. Why?"
"I think they didn't attack at dawn because they want us to sweat," Spaudling said, staring up at the highest spires of the prison. "I just noticed that some of the satellite dishes are moving. Remote power has been beamed in. It's still cool at dawn, and now it's surely still cool inside. We, on the other hand ..."
Mager went alabaster with horror. "I ... I ... sir ... I know that we all said we wouldn't leave, but if they've got power now ... shouldn't we surrender? I mean, haven't we already lost?"
"First of all," Spaudling replied with a kind of exhausted amusement, "we don't have the opportunity to surrender to anyone. We can't walk up to their front lines and wave a white flag. Second ..." Spaudling drifted off, gazing at the sun as it grew in splendor and intensity with each passing second, "it's quite possible we 'lost,' as you put it, long ago, with Reagan and Eisenhower and the road to empire, let alone the day we took custody of prisoner XV4012287."
Mager's face dissolved into a frown, and his shoulders slumped with dull resignation.
At just that moment, a guard a few yards over simply fell over apropos of nothing. Two men rushed over to check him, and one of them fell over on top of the first. Spaulding's eyes grew wide as he recognized the telltale signs, despite never hearing the crisp snap of the rifle's report.
"SNIPER!" Spaulding yelled, running for one of the warrens made of sandbags, where he hoped he'd left his binoculars. As men started to run, Spaulding felt the bullet dive into the meat of his left calf, felling him and introducing his leg to grandiose vistas of technicolor agony. He fell, hard, and split his lip with the impact.
But Hathaway, faithful Hathaway, has heard the alarm and was there, grabbing Spaulding's wrists and dragging him anxiously towards tenuous safety. "Sir, are you all right?" he yelled over the din of men and footfalls.
Spaulding swore under his breath and then said, "Yes, it's just a flesh wound, dammit! Get me some spotters or binoculars, we need to take down that shooter ..."
Hathaway scrambled through discarded ration packets and personal effects, and as soon as he said the word "shooter," he knew who was pulling the trigger.
"Hathaway!" Spaudling spat. "Belay that order, we'll never get a look at him until it's too late. They've got Harata at an even higher point than we are, which I'd have thought impossible with his claustrophobia. Tell the men to stay out of the open and stay down behind cover."
"But how will we be able to ..." Hathaway began.
"My earlier plans are not viable any more, Mister Hathaway," Spaulding grimly intoned. "We have to make due with what we have. Tell ... get Tannenbaum aaaand ... Dorchester. Tell them to do pop-up sniping at the highest points of the prison. Don't aim hard, just shoot and get back down. The best we can hope for is to throw Mister Harata's aim off for a moment, and try to ..."
At that moment, a huge explosion rocked the roof, cutting off Spaulding mid sentence. He looked up over the battlements to see a sight he'd pictured in his worst case scenarios back as a tactical planner, but never imagined he'd see in person.
Where once there was a door, there was now a gaping hole some forty feet across, with a seemingly endless stream of black-uniformed men, covered in riot gear and wielding DOC-issue small arms, swarming everywhere. Spaulding gaped at the scene in dumb awe, his mouth opening and closing as his brain stuggled to devise a way out, a counterattack, anything.
But as gray uniform after gray uniform turned black with spilled blood, as his memories of each guard's file mentally faded with their own passing, Spaulding was left without a repsonse, sitting helpless on the ground as his position was overrun. Mercilessly, with an efficiency Spaulding could really appreciate.
Over the cracks of handgun fires and the wet thuds of flesh being caved in, Spaulding overheard, "there he is!" Six black uniforms, their faces sheathed in helmets, rushed his way, and the last thing Spaulding remembered was being swept up in their arms, Hathaway screaming behind him ...
• • •
Down in what was once the women's prison, Collins oversaw the long lines for mealtime, which now were a bit tastier due to both the addition of the less-chemically stupifying guards' supplies and the attendant freedom that came with them. Collins watched as soup was ladled into bowls, carefully using the supplies they had, as the line stretched quietly out the doorway that opened into the women's mess hall and down the corridors beyond.
Jonesy was with Collins now, his ever-present laptop now wirelessly connected to a very different digital world than the one he left when his sentence began. Every few moments, he'd lean over and mention some new surprise to Collins, which the elder man would feign interest in.
"Holy crap, the Buffalo Bills actually won a Super Bowl," Jonesy said, shocked. "It's a strange story, though ... sniper in a blimp, had to end the game early and start over. But a win is a win, right?"
"Mm-hmm," Collins responded, glancing over a datapad with casualty estimates.
"Have you heard anything from upstairs?" Jonesy asked, the bright lights of scores of browser windows dancing across his face.
Absently, Collins replied, "Our dear brother has asked us to not pester combat units for updates and focus on fixing up as many people as we can."
Jonesy lifted his head and considered that for a moment. "You know, it seems kind of crazy to let a whole bunch of killers and stuff loose in the world, if you really think about it."
Collins frowned at Jonesy. "Go to the Freedom Project's site," he said calmly. "it's on a server in Finland, so it should still be online. Check the conservative estimates about how many inmates here, especially the high percentage of political convictions, are suspect as a matter of law. Fewer people here are guilty than even we believe."
Jonesy nodded, considering that. "Well, I guess, when you look at Uncle Mo and stuff like ... hey, what's that?"
Collins wondered at Jonesy's lean finger, pointing at the older man. On Collins' forehead, a bright red dot rested. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could form a word, his head exploded in a thick red mist and he fell down slowly. The sound of the shot sent a panic through the room, as a stampede towards the doors began. Jonesy deftly grabbed at his laptop, saving it from a probably fatal fight with gravity. He caught the movement in a ventilation duct out of the corner of his eye, and turned just fast enough to see the barrel of some kind of gun, smoke still curling from its round business end, pulling back out of sight.
He threw himself against the wall and hit his laptop's instant messenger call signal for Lira, up in the situation room.
CALL FOR HELP, his frantic message read in plain text, THEY KILLED KHARI!
• • •
As he squirmed through some of the tighter ducts he'd mapped, Simpson grinned madly at himself, enjoying the companionable bump of the MP5 against his back as he went. He'd planned the shoot perfectly, targeting and terminating the old man with the kind of efficiency he used to consider an everyday thing, now a wholly sinful luxury. He'd planned his escape route to take him far from every possible tactical area, giving him some time to recover until he could find out where Damu was hiding. Maybe even time for a snack. All things considered, Simpson thought to himself, I can probably eliminate seven or eight more, plus XV4012287. The thought of finally avenging his parents, godless hippies that they were, delighted Simpson so much he began to hum a tuneless ditty to himself as he crept along.
• • •
"He's been standing there a while."
Harata was watching Damu's back in relief against the bright eastern sunlight as he stood, much as Spaulding had hours before, simply staring off into the distance. Grant stood next to Harata, and had mentioned the obvious.
"I wonder when the last time he saw sunshine was," Harata said softly. "Plus, to be here, at the end of it all ... I can't imagine how he feels. He said he's been training for this his entire life."
Grant whistled appreciatively. "His folks musta been something else," Grant admitted.
Harata asked casually, "Did you get the old man stowed away?"
Grant frowned, "Who you callin' old, boy?"
Harata chuckled. "I meant the warden," he clarified. "Did you sock him away somewhere safe?"
Grant's expression softened. "Oh," he said. "A bunch of big burly ass girls got him in one of the guard apartments in T-section, hanging by his feet from a ceiling fan, using him as a punching bag."
Harata chuckled again, savoring the difference in free laughter, and said, "That's ..."
Just then, an exhausted man in a red jumpsuit ran up, gasping for air. He stopped in front of Harata and Grant, wheezing powerfully as he struggled to regain his composure.
Grant and Harata looked to one another. "What's a red doing all the way up here?" Grant wondered, scratching at his peppercorn beads of white hair.
Harata shrugged, and the man stood up, his full dark cheeks still puffing furiously. "You gotta ... come quick," the man managed through gasps. "Somebody ... shot Khari Collins."
Damu spun quickly, glaring at the man. "What?!?" he exclaimed.
"Somebody's in the walls," the man said timidly as Damu slowly walked over. "Somebody capped Khari while people was eatin' and then got away."
Grant started, "But I thought we got all the ..."
"Simpson," Harata whispered, realizing what had happened. "Nobody else could have pulled it off. Nobody else would have pulled it off."
Damu literally shook with rage. "Get ... get everybody," he whispered. "Get all the actives. Put 'em on every way in to the walls." Grabbing his handgun from his waistline, he stated, "I'm going in after him."
"Uh, Ish, that's kinda nuts," Harata said carefully. "We can get help, we can ..."
Damu just glared at Harata, an icy stare like the center of a glacier, heavy with his loss. "Do whatever you want. Just cover those exits now. I'm going in now."
Without another word, Damu marched off towards the huge hole in the roof. Harata rushed behind him, slinging his rifle over one shoulder and already dreading the tight confines of the prison's secret network.
Suddenly, Damu stopped in mid-run, causing Harata to almost run into him from behind. He turned slowly and stared at the Asian man, thinking.
"Ish?" Harata asked.
"Where's Spaulding?" Damu asked coldly.
"Down in the guards quarters ..." Harata started.
"Near any access points for the tunnels?" Damu wondered.
Harata considered that. "There's one about seven doors down. He's pretty deep in a section that's not well covered. T section, Grant said."
Damu thought for a moment. "Thor?"
"Uh, near there, if I remember right ..." Harata offered.
Damu was silent again, his brain working. "All right," he said finally. "Let's go have a chat with Spaulding first."
Without another word, he spun on his heel and headed towards T section.
• • •
Spaulding's stomach lurched with unease as he swung slowly, upside down, his head three feet from the floor. His tormenters -- Lucia and Ana Troncoso, a sadistic pair of sisters from Michoacan's branch of the Mexican Mafia, built like longshoremen, and the considerably more frightening lithe form of Danica McClellan, a lean blonde serving a sentence for skinning an ex-boyfriend alive and making him eat his own epidermis before he bled to death -- hovered around him in the darkness. He'd seen the lights switch on, which scared him because he couldn't grasp how that could be possible, but the Troncoso sisters said they could have more fun with Spaulding in the dark. He was suspended from the remains of a light fixture via an extension cord tied around his ankles, and he'd been stripped naked, handcuffed, tied with ropes and completely wrapped in duct tape before they started beating him with whatever came to mind, including a metallic standing lamp and their own fists.
When the door to the room swung open, with bright light rushing in, he couldn't believe it when he heard Damu's voice say, "I'll need a minute." The Troncosos pouted as they left, and Spaulding just caught a glimpse of McClellan blowing him a kiss. He shuddered, because at least he knew what he'd be getting into with the women.
The lights came on, and Spaulding was brought to a still point by someone he couldn't see. Damu sat in front of him, legs crossed, an expression of such rage on his face that Spaulding barely recognized his former charge.
His lip twitching with barely repressed emotion, Damu reached up and yanked the duct tape off of Spaulding's mouth forcefully. Despite the pain, the old man tried to show no reaction.
"Hello, Ken," Damu said simply.
Spaulding was off his game, and barely knew how to respond. "This isn't going to help you ..." he managed through swollen lips.
"What? The girls?" Damu wondered absently. "Oh, that's just for kicks -- we started a lottery, and they were the first ones to get a shot at you. No, I don't care about your passcodes or what have you. I can get all that in other ways, hell Paul will have your file encryption cracked by tomorrow." Damu paused to think, licking his lips absentmindedly "No, this is new business," he continued. "You're going to talk to me about Simpson."
"He's alive?" Spaulding boggled. "Then ... oh god, he's loose. You've lost track of him, and I'm not around to keep him under control." Spaulding actually laughed, and said, "Well, that almost makes it worth it. How many has he killed?"
Damu just watched Spaulding coldly before finally saying, "Too many." He looked away, trying to mask his fury, and said, "Talk to me about how he thinks. I want to get inside his head, like you do."
"What possible reason would I have to do such a thing?" Spaudling laughed. "Are you going to offer me my life? Safe passage to Union lines? Please. I've been dead since the second you breached the roof, and there's nothing I can do that will positively affect the scant remainder of my life. You've guessed at my training, so you realize there's no possible means of torture, deprivation or conditioning you could bring to bear that can affect me. Your even sitting here in front of me is a sign of your utter lack of options."
"On the contrary, Ken," Damu said quietly, looking away. "You know how I love to chat with you."
Spaulding chortled, specks of his own blood flying loose from his blooming lips. "You're not as good at covering your rage as you are your other emotions, Mister Damu. But I welcome the beatings and sodomy and ultimate death from internal bleeding that is sure to be my fate."
Damu snapped his head back up and glared at Spaulding. "Oh ho ho, I get it," he said grinning. "You'd love that! That'd be your out. No fuss, no muss, no guilt. Not that easy, Ken." Damu spun around and said, "Playtime's over, the lottery is suspended until after my sister gets here." The Troncoso sisters grumbled under their breath from just outside the door, and McClellan stood there, glaring, before following them down the hall.
"Send in six hardcases from Tony's detail to take this guy to solitary," Damu called after them. "They'll be wearing headphones and standing across the room, so none of your tricks, Ken."
Spaudling furrowed his brow and then nodded. "You're always a susprise to me, Mister Damu. Fair enough, I'll play nice."
Damu stood and walked out angrily.
• • •
Damu ran up to the junction point to see ten men in black and brown uniforms staring into the hole in the wall and talking nervously. In his hands he held an old-fashioned battery powered megaphone, freshly juiced up with the sattelite power being beamed in to the facility.
"Jonesy said you guys needed me here," he said, breathing hard. "What's up?"
Jackson had somehow made it out of the stampede alive, although he did have a number of dusty footprints on his uniform. One of his cornrows had been ripped free from the flesh of his scalp, which was pink and raw, but he didn't seem to notice.
"Some guard jackass comes out of this hole and blows away Ray Ray and Vic Money," Jackson said angrily. "He ducks back in, and tags Terry. Then we get the idea to tell somebody."
"You did right," Damu said. "We've got teams covering almost every exit now. I know how to get to him."
Stepping forward, Damu clicked the megaphone on and shouted into the hole. "Not bad for a guy who couldn't get a real military posting, Bart!" Damu's voice called through the desultory twists and turns of the hard gray hidden corridors. "I wonder if the guys you just whacked whimpered when they went down, like your dad did? It was different though, all that long brown hair fluttering in the wind as he fell."
Silence responded, as the prisoners nodded at Damu, encouraging him to continue.
"You know I got to shoot them, before the explosion, doncha Bart?" Damu continued. "The months of news reports, baffled by the mystery sniper killings. Different caliber weapons, different scenarios, nobody could pin it down. No clues. I'd actually been watching your folks for a while, since they were so goofy and so predictable in their routine. I almost blasted the three of you that day they got you a birthday cake at Safeway, remember the race car one? Yeah, I had you all in my scope then. Even saw your dad pulling your mom's hair as he did it from behind later that night, since they never would buy curtains that'd stay put when they left the windows open. Would you have liked it if I left your dad's brains all over the wall, his cooling corpse on top of your mom's?"
A hail of gunfire was the response this time, as everyone stepped back from the opening and Jackson pushed the steel panel mostly closed to shut off the ricochets. Simpson's scream could just be heard over the shooting as Damu nodded to a brown uniformed man with skin the shade of shopping bags, who darted off.
As the shooting slowed to single handgun rounds, Damu poked the megaphone over the crack in the panel left open. "I never did like the way your mom's gut wobbled when she rode your old man, but hey. Enough reminiscing, right? You've done all this, and you still can't kill the one guy in this whole prison you wanna kill more than anything else. How's about I give you a fair shot at me?"
The shooting stopped. "You're not that stupid," Simpson's voice came through, from a ways off. Probably has the guns on a string trigger, Damu considered. Crafty, he is.
"Or I don't think you could take me," Damu responded conversationally through the megaphone. "You know how I've mocked you, our whole stay here. Now, I'm sure you're not dumb and/or brave enough to go out on to the yard and face me, but I'll make it fair. You've been in there a while. Pick someplace. I'll go. We'll settle business."
Simpson's mad laughter came out of the thin slits in the wall like a gas leak, lethal and unrestrained. "This is your play? I completely overestimated you! You're ..."
The sound of bullets ricocheting off the insides of the walls showed that Damu's gambit was working, that angry prisoners with guns had foud a way to get behind Simpson, and that the last variable in Damu's carefully created plans was being cornered. Simpson yelled something incomprehensible and was clearly fighting back. Damu stood up and smiled.
"Now we just gotta go in and get him," Damu said confidently. "And hope the guns he has aimed down this way aren't on some tricky tripwire."
"I'll go first," Jackson quickly volunteered. "Snap his damned cracker neck ..."
"Whoa, whoa, big guy," Damu said, rushing in front of the larger man. "He wants to kill me, you'll just be a distraction ..."
"Look, I didn't go to no school like you probably did," Jackson said, looking down at Damu, "and I may not know a lot of stuff, but I can tell that any of us getting out of here depends on you." Jackson then jabbed Damu in the chest with one thick finger, saying, "You don't get a chance to die, potna. Move over."
Damu looked around and saw that the rest seemed to agree with Jackson, raised his hands and stepped aside. Inside, the gunfire was dying away -- there was a vertical shaft near where Damu guessed Simpson was holed up, so the guard was probably rabbiting.
Simpson hadn't had time to set a tripwire for the two guns pointed downwards, and Jackson was able to reach up and set the safeties on both, taking the handgun for himself, before Damu crawled in after him. "Come on," Jackson said. "I see a bunch of guys climbing up, he must be headed that way."
Jackson grunted as he pulled his huge frame through the cramped space, making the corner above. Damu grinned to himself, so close to being done, so near to a chance to finally not think about every single detail all the time.
As they reached the junction where Simpson had started climbing, Damu gestured for Jackson to wait and aimed the megaphone upwards. "Hey, Simpson -- how's the family? Hahahahahaha! No, seriously, if you surrender to my friends, I'll really let you fight me to the death, for real. It's kind of your only hope right now, dawg!"
Screams were the only response, punctuated by gunfire. Damu chuckled. "What's the chance they'll be able to keep from killing him?"
Jackson merely laughed in reply. "You funny," he said, lifting himself up, in the direction of the melee.
Simpson, firing wildly and crying out, was backpedaling down the tightest shaft he could see, moving away from the sounds of angry men advancing on him. He jammed his pistol in his waistline to flip the banana clip on the assault rifle -- he couldn't even remember model numbers, he was so harried -- and gasped when two pairs of arms encircled his, pulling him back as he kicked and screamed. Being pulled into a large open chamber deep in the prison walls, more pairs of arms encircled his legs, removed the purloined weapons they could see and held him firmly against the ground.
Thoughts roiled in Simpson's furious mind. Gotta get free can't stop no can't let them no kill hate can't ... Harata appeared in an alcove above, holding a sniper rifle with its barrel still smoking, smiling down at the scene. "I guess life really is like a box of chocolates for your punk ass, huh Simpson?" Harata teased. Munoz' form hulked behind the smirking Asian.
Simpson growled through his teeth and flipped his not-quite-held right wrist. Suddenly a small blade appeared in his hand from some unseen sheath, and he twisted his hand to flick the tiny point at Harata, who never saw it coming. It caught Harata in mid laugh, just as Jackson and Damu crawled in the same way Simpson was dragged, the blade catching Harata in the throat just right of center. Despite Munoz trying to make a grab, the Asian man's form fell right in front of Damu as the dozen prisoners around Simpson started tearing at his clothes to make sure no more surprises popped up.
Staring dumbly as he saw the blood geysering out of Harata's throat in quantities too large to hope for saving the man, Damu stood shellshocked as Jackson jerked the tiny blade out and futilely tried to stop the bleeding. Harata's body floundered around for a moment and then was still, the blood becoming a steady trickle as he left this life.
All eyes watched Damu as he stood, fists clenched, shaking, his own gaze locked on the now still body of Onuma "Tony" Harata, his best friend in these last crucial years at Faraway. The moment was still, as a crush of bodies lay atop Simpson, holding his now mostly naked form down. Damu's head finally snapped up, a tear rolling down the left side of his face, and he stomped over to where Simpson's exposed head poked out from under the mass of dark jumpsuits. He held his right fist back, cocked with the hand at a ninety degree angle, so he could use the base of his fist to smash Simpson's forehead, and held himself there for that moment, shaking, his eyes locked with Simpson's. Simpson stopped struggling for a moment, and slowly smiled up at Damu.
Damu just glared, his tears falling down onto Simpson's soot-stained face, his hand shaking as he tried to hold in his rage. With an anguished yell, he pushed his fist down just past Simpson's head to smash into the floor at the left of Simpson's ear. Growling, he stood up and gestured with his other hand to men standing nearby, who rushed towards Simpson as the guard's struggles resumed.
Despite his screaming and thrashing, within moments, Simpson's lips and eyes were sealed with thick perma-tape. He felt himself being bound and couldn't swing a fist or flail a foot well enough to connect with his captors. He felt a needle going into his arm once he was completely held fast, and just as consciousness slipped from him, he heard Damu's voice whispering in his ear.
"Now, Bart," the whisper said, still clearly furious, "your fun can really begin ..."
• • •
Seven days later, morning light made its first appearance, 67.4 miles east of Faraway Federal Penal Facility, as a brisk wind blew towards the sunrise. Keniston Spaulding, former master of this domain, was restrained by permatape to a sturdy steel chair and facing this oncoming sunrise.
"It's gonna be a good day, huh, Ken?" a voice came from behind Spaulding. Dressed in blue jeans and a Public Enemy t-shirt, Damu walked up on Spaulding's left and rested a hand on the older man's shoulder.
Spaulding grunted and said nothing. "Oh, right, I forgot ..." Damu admitted, reaching over and tearing off the permatape from Spaulding's lips, pulling out a fair amount of hair and a not inconsiderable amount of skin. Spaulding winced, but did not cry out.
"I'll let to meet my sister, Ken," Damu said absently, his eyes on the horizon. "She's flying ahead, to see me. Called in a while ago."
Spaulding merely glared at him.
"No more chats, huh?" Damu asked, grinning. "Well, we had a good run." He stared out at the sky, musing.
The heavy sound of Spaulding breathing amused him, so he turned back to the former warden.
"Probably got some fluid sloshing around in those old lungs, Ken," Damu smirked. "Now, don't you die on me while you still might have some use."
"This ... isn't over," Spaulding managed defiantly.
"You'd probably think that, wouldn't you?" Damu grinned. "You've been locked in that hole, and nobody can talk to you with those headphones on. It's over, Ken. Trust. Those Union morons sent most of their forces to try and 'liberate' a warhead and it blew up in their faces. Most of 'em died fast, and the rest have radiation poisoning. We've got satellites running again, which let us drop some surprises on your boy Grayson in the Rockies, you're one of the last three staffers alive here, my biggest problems are out of the way ... you lost."
"You're ... lying," Spaulding protested weakly. "There's ..."
Damu kneeled so he could look Spaulding in the eye. "You have no idea what you're talking about, Ken old boy. There's no more United States to fight for. It's a wrap. Our forces are in control of the entire country now."
"Not possible ..." Spaulding coughed, "contingency plans ..."
"... had to be enacted by military forces, which we've been infiltrating for more than twenty years," Damu smiled brightly. "You know, this is kind of fun. I don't have to hide my cards around you anymore. Do you know I've been playing my role for most of my life?" Damu stood up and swung his arms wide, chuckling. "FREEDOM!" he called out to the skies, cackling madly. "I've read about it, but there really is no substitute for the real thing."
Spaudling watched him with a look of utter disbelief. "How ..."
Damu spun back around and grinned madly at the battered warden. "If this were one of those badly-written movies my father so adored," he replied, "this would be the part where I'd tell your our insidious plan, and you'd miraculously escape, rally your forces and win in some improbable fashion. However, my father was also a writer, and taught me how to plan. So I had both of your ankles broken, both of your knees broken, and then pumped you with so much tranquilizer that you couldn't find your way to a bathroom, much less anything else.
"So here's the skinny, Ken," Damu continued. "You and your team got greedy. You gave up being subtle. You struck out at Black people and Latinos and China and even screwed the pooch with the EU. Spreading poison in Africa and shooting at your former allies in the Middle East. Because you had the 'superpower' and all the nukes. Nobody would challenge you. Not alone. But it was enough for one very crafty group of individuals to get all of those people to the table. All of them came to a common agreement: the United States had to fall. When we dreamed up a way for them to facilitate that without endangering any of their own troops, all under the radar guerilla style ... well, that did it. Or so I'd guess -- I've been here, but my sister heading this way is a good sign. I knew that was the plan, the one my father explained to me when I was seven, the one that I've dedicated my entire life to. Which, after all this time, seems to be proceeding exactly as he foresaw."
"That's not ... we were trying to build a safer world," Spaudling said dejectedly. "We weren't greedy, we ..."
"You may have bought into the company line, Ken," Damu interrupted, "but your masters had no such delusions. The subtext in the arguments about the Associative Guilt Act, the rhetoric they bandied about after those dirty bombs forced the DOC merge, even though those bombers grew up in Montana and Wyoming and Oklahoma, not Dubai and Saudi Arabia. I even heard about the drama after the Third Digital Crash when that shipment of investment bankers got sent in here. It's easy to see how desperate they were to set aside all pretense and sham and anoint themselves masters.
"We just weren't gonna stand around for it."
Spaudling boggled at Damu, and then managed a thin smile. "How ... long ... have you been holding in that speech?"
Damu considered that. "Since eighteen? Nineteen maybe? It gets updated with new data, but I've had to play nice since I went to college. So just around then, probably."
They both managed to laugh at that. "Under different ... circumstances," Spaudling said weakly, "we could have worked together. You're ... an extraordinary talent."
"I am my father's son," Damu declared. "'Forged and fired at the future,' he used to say."
"I'd very much like to meet this man," Spaulding nodded.
"Probably little chance of that, given his paranoia," Damu shrugged. "But yeah, he's something else."
A clamor of people struggling came from behind, and Damu turned to see Summers and Jonesy carrying a makeshift x-shaped crucifix with Simpson strapped to it, face down.
"You had a freaking vacation in solitary, compared to this guy," Damu chuckled. "We had to give the lottery winners something, and Simpson has made a lot of enemies." Absently Damu pondered aloud, "I will admit, with the women around, I'm surprised so many chose sodomy for him ..."
Jonesy and Summers propped Simpson up facing the eastern horizon. "We wanted to make sure you saw the end of things, you cretin," Damu called up to Simpson's broken form, real vitriol creeping into his voice. Just then they all saw it -- a speck of darkness at the center of the nascent sunlight, coming closer, moving fast. "See that dot heading this way? That's inevitability. Comin' for to carry us home."
"I already have Nosalira on IFF," Jonesy commented, "and if it's not your sister, it won't get near us."
Damu smiled and said, "It's her," his voice cracking a little. "I don't need IFF to know that, I can tell. She's waggling the propellers, like she did when we played video games. Drove my dad nuts."
They all remained, wordless, as the small blip resolved itself into a single combat helicopter, very much like the Apache that flew away from Faraway. They turned to watch it land on the still-bloodstained "H" in the circle, and cycle down to silence.
The front hatch opened, and inside a group of people could be seen scrambling around. A lithe mocha-shaded woman, her hair tied in two dreadlocked ponytails underneath a green flight helmet, climbed out. Damu stepped forward as she removed the helmet, and her dancing amber eyes lighting up at the sight of him. Tossing the helmet aside, she broke into a run and hurled herself into Damu's arms, hugging him relentlessly and laughing.
"Chis is your sis!" Chisisi Damu exclaimed as she stopped to look at Damu's face, repeating the childhood mantra that he'd invented, so many years before. "You look like hell, little brother!"
Ignoring the three men climbing out of the copter, he quietly said, "Chis is my sis." His eyes growing damp, he managed, "Yeah, I ... wow, I just ..."
She grabbed his head on both sides and kissed his forehead. "I know, Ishmael, I know." She glanced over and asked, "Uncle Morgan?"
Summers walked over, his dazzling smile as wide as a Kansan plain, and accepted Chisisi as she transferred her hug to the older man. As she pulled back, she said with a wicked grin, "I have something for you, Uncle." Summers turned his head to look right into a pair of eyes just like his own, standing off to one side.
"Hi, Dad," Little Morgan Summers said, the spitting image of his father twenty-five years before, all barrel chest and ebony highlights. Summers dropped Chisisi and grabbed his son with a fierceness that shook everyone. Spaulding simply let his head hang low, enduring this.
"Uh ... well," Damu stammered, an idiot grin plastered on his face, "Chisisi Damu, this young man is Mister Paul Jones Junior, and ... well, we'll deal with the mzungu in a minute."
Chisisi shot her brother a glare. "You forget, we've got the European Union on our side now," she chastized. "That'll have to stop." Turning to Paul, she beamed a smile and opened her arms for a hug. Watching Damu's face the whole time, Jonesy gingerly stepped in to accept.
"Where are the support forces?" Damu asked as his sister stepped free, smiling still.
"They're about twenty minutes behind us," Chisisi nodded. "I was in a hurry, sorry."
"No apologies neccessary," Damu returned. "Who's with you?"
Chisisi glanced back at the two men, checking the helicopter. "Oh, the guy on the left is Derek, our resident 'Paul Jones Junior,'" she said with a smirk. "The guy on the right is Floyd."
Damu's jaw dropped like a precariously perched stone. "Dad sent Floyd?" Damu asked incredulously. "The real Floyd?"
"His only two children are together for the first time in decades," Chisisi said dismissively. "Did you really think he'd let that happen without Floyd's level of protection?"
As if he'd heard, the nondescript man on the right turned and waved at Damu. Damu slowly waved back, aghast.
"Uh, who's Floyd?" Jonesy asked, curiously.
Chisisi started to answer and Damu stopped her with a wave of his hand. "I'm pretty sure you and Floyd will get very well acquainted later on. Do me a favor and head down to start the evac plans like we discussed."
Jonesy nodded and sprinted off towards the still gaping hole in the roof.
"Somebody's gonna have to fix that," Little Morgan said absently.
"In due time, cousin," Damu agreed, his eyes unfocused, disbelief at being at the end of this road holding him tight. "I'm still amazed that dad would send his 'first born' pride and joy, his 'finest creation' this far from his side."
"You underestimate his confidence these days," Chisisi noted conversationally, "and we're just as finely crafted as Floyd is, just in ... different ways. So how many you bringing out?"
"Huh?" Damu replied, still watching Floyd. "Oh, strategic pulls? Maybe eighty. Mostly pols and people with skills and histories we could really use. I guess I could see doing maybe fifteen or twenty more on tactical reqs." He held up a datapad and said, "Got it all right here."
"None of them know what's about to happen?" Little Morgan wondered.
Damu shook his head. "It didn't seem like a smart detail to mention, given the delicacy of the work, and your dad has been thankfully quiet on the subject."
"I still think it's wrong," Summers said quietly, his genial demeanor suddenly grim. "I ..."
Damu cleared his throat, and jerked his head towards Spaulding and Simpson.
"Oh, right -- who are these two?" Chisisi asked, walking over to inspect Spaudling.
Damu said, "The old guy is Warden Keniston Spaulding, late of the Department of Corrections, and apparently late of the National Security Agency before that and the Central Intelligence Agency before that. The bleeding moron on the cross is Bart Simpson."
"The variable?" Little Morgan wondered. "You let him live this long? I'm surprised you didn't have him shanked the second he got here. We all figured that would be a given, when we heard he got assigned this close to you."
"I had so little to entertain me," Damu said dryly. "I've been needling him with the death of his parents to keep him off balance, and his ambition just manuevered him into the right position for me to keep using it as a control mechanism."
Chisisi shrugged, walked over and pulled out her sidearm, an ancient Magnum revolver. She placed the barrel against Simpson's head and pulled the trigger, blowing out the front of his face in a huge wet hole, the remnants of his identity dripping down the outer walls of Faraway.
"Hey Floyd! C'mere!" she called over. "Well, that takes care of your 'variable,' little brother."
The mystery man walked over calmly. "You may as well kill me now, Ishmael!" Spaudling spat out, shaken from his anguish. "I won't cooperate!"
"You won't have to," Damu agreed. "Since I was able to keep you mostly intact, my dad's gonna take your brain out like a hard drive and strip every detail from it."
Spaulding blanched, considering that this might actually be possible. "This rag tag army of hooligans you've assembled will fall apart the second you leave these walls," he spat out. "Without a common foe, they will return to their natural behaviors, and kill and steal and burden you as much as they were a burden to me!"
"What makes I'm letting most of these people out?" Damu asked playfully.
Spaulding looked dumbly at Damu, which made the former prisoner laugh. "There is so very much you don't know, Ken. Not that it would help you to learn any of it, and we've done enough of the traditional 'super villain tells his whole plan' shtick. But maybe we have time for a quick round of Twenty Questions you offered, if you'd like." Nodding at Summers and Chisisi, he added, "Might be fun!"
Spaulding, blood and saliva dripping from his mouth like a rabid canine, glared around. "How long have you been involved with this 'Circle' or what have you?"
"Since I was eleven, probably," Damu agreed. "That about right, sis?"
Chisisi merely smiled and rubbed Damu's shaven head playfully.
Spaudling glared, and then drew back, eyes wide and mouth gaping as comprehension dawned on him like sunrise over the Potomac. "So you were never really captured at all ..."
"Sure I was," Damu said conversationally. "But I meant to be. I've spent a lot of my life, getting ready to come here. That's two questions down, Ken, you're doing great."
Spaulding's brain was working feverishly, and he spoke absently as his eyes searched the floor. "You're here at Faraway on purpose ... to take over ... and I never saw it, because I was so determined to hide out from the past ..."
"Our files on you were pretty extensive, Mister Spaulding," Chisisi added. "We had a feeling that if Faraway would have started ten years earlier, you'd have been much harder to fool."
"Not really a question, but we'll count it for argument's sake while we wait for the next 'copter," Damu shrugged. Floyd chuckled -- a dark, ugly sound like the breaking of dreams -- and said nothing.
"Who's responsible for this?" Spaudling asked, growing angrier. "Who's responsible for destroying my life's work?!?"
Chisisi and Damu looked at one another quickly. "Do you mean who decided to put an end to the goofball imperialist meddling you'd been doing for the Feds most of your life?" he asked. "Or who were all the players involved?"
"Tell him both," Chisisi suggested. "His reactions might be good for a laugh."
"We did a little of this before you got here, Chis," Damu explained. "My father, Dajan Damu, conceived of a plan to topple the United States Government when I was a kid. He paid particular attention to characteristics that would help out when he adopted my big sister Chisisi here." Dreamily, remembering back, Damu continued. "He sat me down and reminded me about talks we had, about how I could get a brother or sister, and how he wanted to bring home a little girl who'd had a hard time, and how he wanted me to help her and watch out for her."
"... and occassionally break the collarbone of a guy trying to kiss me goodnight ..." Chisisi laughed.
Damu shot her a wicked grin. "Look, how many times do you want me to apologize for that? Anyway, we were a team, me and Chis, and when mom died, Dad told us all about the Way of the Circle, a plan he'd been cooking up in some form or another since he was a teenager. He asked us for our help, and we said yes, and we've been working on it ever since."
"A born and bred insurrectionist," Spaulding said, aghast. "How old were you?"
"Call that question ... what, five?" Damu asked. Summer, disgusted, said nothing and turned away. "Mom died in 2015, and I was eleven. Chis was thirteen. These questions are boring, Ken, you can do better."
"All right," Spaudling laughed bitterly. "Do you really think you'll be able to run the United States of America with a ragtag coalition of ethnic interests? Within a year there'll be civil war."
"Within a year we'll have conquered Europe and built complete alliances with every national power in Latin America and Africa," Little Morgan spoke up. "Two years later we'll have the entire world."
"Impossible," Spaudling denied.
"Not once we refit Faraway for my man Floyd here, right?" Damu asked, grinning at the mystery man.
"Who is this 'Floyd' and why do you keep looking at him like he's something special?" Spaulding demanded testily.
"Floyd is more trouble than he's worth," Summers threw back over his shoulder.
"Don't be that way, Dad," Little Morgan returned, a hint of sadness in his voice. "They didn't have the resources to cover for mom's screw up."
"Floyd is ..." Damu started. "I guess he's kind of like our missing big brother, huh, Chis?"
"Big brother, best friend, watchdog," Chisisi agreed, grinning. "He's our guy."
"Floyd's probably a slightly more impressive product of my father's genius than either me or Chis," Damu allowed, "because Floyd's fully my father's creation. Floyd is the way we're gonna win this war with less bloodshed than anybody could have ever expected."
Disbelieving, Spaulding looked at the nondescript man, staring evenly back, and noticed that Floyd wasn't breathing.
"A robot of some sort?" the former warden wondered. "A lifelike cyborg, like the ones the Japanese have been trying to perfect?"
"Question seven, and no," Damu sighed tiredly, "but not a bad guess. Floyd is ... something else entirely. Something we're gonna build here at Faraway. By the thousands. A job so important, that my father so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son."
"Nice," Little Morgan smirked.
"That's enough on that count, little brother," Chisisi warned. "Remember what Dad always said, 'never too rich nor too paranoid.'"
"That's something his dad told him," Summers said, returning to the little circle as the next helicopter appeared on the horizon. "Quit toying with him, Ishmael. If we're going to do this, let's get it all over with."
Damu shrugged and turned, asking "Ready to pack this guy up, Floyd?"
Floyd was a lot taller when you got close up on him, a plain faced, expressionless brown skinned man in a black jumpsuit much like a prison uniform, but with no pockets or markings of any kind. Wordlessly, Floyd nodded and then lifted Spaudling's chair over his head in one simple motion, as easily as if he'd lifted an empty cardboard box, and carried the bewildered former warden to the chopper. Spaulding felt strange sensations along his arms, near where Floyd's sure hands held the chair, like a low level electrical current buzzed just beneath him.
"Gonna strap him underneath?" Damu called out. Floyd merely nodded. "Floyd's funny," Damu smiled. "I missed him."
"I still think it's wrong," Summers said, his voice quivering with emotion. "It's wrong what you're gonna do to those people down there. They believed in you. You're okay with the idea of Floyd killing thirty thousand people, most of whom trusted you to get them home?"
Damu smirked. "First of all, 'trust is the biggest liability of all,'" he said quietly. "Rule 99, you know that. Second of all, nobody goes home, because nothing out there is anything they could handle. Better to put them out of our common misery."
Little Morgan rolled his eyes. "Why are you getting all twitchy now, dad? You've known the plan for years, and now you're getting queasy? You want us to take thousands of crazy killers and rapists into our 'finer world?' Or leave 'em as slave labor or something while we build a hundred thousand more Floyds? How does that work?"
"It was different when it was just something Dajan talked about," Summers replied grimly. "Before I got to know these people. Before I lived with them."
"They're not all bad," Damu admitted. "if it makes you feel better, most of the people you really know are coming with us. I'm probably gonna take that big guy Andrews on a tactical request. I could see him being cool."
"Well, in ... a few minutes when the rest of the support staff gets here, Floyd and his 'little brothers' can sort it out," Chisisi said, glancing at the round white face of the old fashioned watch on her right wrist, ironically much like the one Spaulding had worn. "As soon as the next 'copter lands, Dad wants you outta here with us. Derek's gonna stay with Floyd."
Damu frowned as Floyd walked back over. "That won't work," Damu protested. "These guys don't know you, they won't listen ..."
Floyd laughed throatily -- a dark, heavy sound in the still morning air. "That's the other reason why I'm here," he said, before being enveloped in a thin shimmer of light and suddenly not looking like Floyd at all ... but exactly like Ishmael Damu.
"Dad fixed that flashing effect, huh?" Damu wondered, examining this replica of his own face as it smiled so close to his own, but from another body. "I'd have to guess the science of hard light holograms has come a long way since I last saw you."
"It has, but I fixed the flash effect" Floyd responded in Damu's own voice. "I was doing it for show, most of the time. Now there's seven, where it used to be just me. Now go get on the chopper so you can talk to your father. You've gotta get out of here."
Damu laughed and said, "A part of me will always be here, especially with you moving in as 'me.' Nobody gets away from Faraway ..."
Damu glared around at the angry skies, starting to darken, soaking in the end of his "sentence." Turning to his sister, Damu said, "Come show me how to work the com, Chis." Taking his arm in her own, Chisisi led Damu back to the 'chopper, pointing at Spaudling as he thrashed his head back and forth from beneath, with the two Summers men right behind.
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