Alea Jacta Est: A Novel of the Fall of America (Future History of America Book 1) (44 page)

Ted,
watching from his third story sniper perch, saw the bikers slice through the
gang-bangers and cheered as they roared past.  Hoss lead his crew down the
street, turned them as a group and headed back to chase down those thugs who
were scattering for safety.  The rest of the attackers poured into the gate to
escape the bikers. 

More than
one biker was shot, or somehow pulled off his or her bike.  The gang-bangers,
at least the ones in the front of the melee, oblivious to the noise and death
going on behind them in the street, pressed forward against Erik’s small band
on the ground.

“Let’s go! 
Get downstairs!” Ted said, ordering his snipers to help out on the ground,
where the shotguns would do the most damage.

ERIK HAD GIVEN
his spare magazines to
one of the others with a pistol.  In short order he tossed aside his empty
weapon.  Stepping calmly around his concealing shrub, Erik caught the attention
of the first three attackers.  They paused, seeing the big man suddenly appear
and walk slowly towards them.

“
Roma
Victa!
” Erik bellowed.  It was the code word for the others with swords to
attack.  Erik drew his
katana
in a slow, deliberate movement and walked
towards the closest thug.  A few of the attackers paused, trying to figure out
what they heard.  The rest of his hidden swordsmen followed their leader a
little nervously, but they screamed and made as much noise as possible, as it
appeared to shake up the attackers.

Baseball
bats, 2x4s and knives are no match for sharp, well cared-for swords.  The first
drug-crazed man to reach Erik swung a piece of wood with nails sticking out on
the end.  Erik side-stepped the first attack, then swung his
katana
in
an upward arc, slicing the 2x4 neatly in half.  The thug paused to look at his
worthless weapon.  He had used it earlier in the day to bludgeon to death a
woman trying to protect her daughter.  Now it was just a stump of wood in his
hands, cut with a smooth edge.

Erik’s
sword put an end to the man’s confusion as he reversed his swing, brought the
lethal Japanese steel downwards and caught the attacker on the side of the
neck.  The gang-banger dropped, gushing blood and writhing.  He would die less
than a minute later from the gaping wound near his jugular.

Slicing and
swirling to keep moving forward, Erik’s blade flashed in the torchlight,
chopping up and down, spinning, slicing, stabbing.  He didn’t have time to
notice the extra light coming from the fires beginning to eat at the leasing
office building.  They were shedding light on the battle and that was all Erik
needed to know. 

Man after
man charged, attacked and fell by Erik’s sword, bleeding and dying.  All around
him, the chaos of hand to hand combat erupted as the rest of the attackers not
cut down in the street by the bikers joined the fight.  Over the screams and
noise, Erik could hear shotguns and pistols still going off, albeit more
sporadically now.  It was a bloody free-for-all.  He stepped outside his
consciousness and dealt with the matter at hand.  It was the only way he could
function.  He was dealing death like it was his profession and a part of him
was utterly disgusted.  The part that demanded protection for Brin would not be
silenced.  This part of Erik’s soul took over.

Every few
seconds, Erik would glimpse one of his swords rising and falling, blood
stained.  His greenhorn troops were holding their own for the moment, cutting
down anyone foolish enough to charge them.  But they weren’t moving forward. 
An explosion on the other side of the battered down gate signaled the death of
one of the bikers.  Erik didn’t have time to ponder what happened before three
more men rushed him at once.

THE LEADER OF the
street thugs peered at the flaming wreckage of the last biker to go down before
his men were wiped out in the street.  He had been forgotten, hidden as he was
behind a tree just off the road opposite the gate.  He could see through the
dim firelight of the first burning building that his gang was through.  It was
only a matter of time, he realized, as those bikers dismounted and charged
through the gate. 

For some
damn reason they were on the side of the people living in the apartment
complex.  He couldn’t fathom why that was so, only shrugged.  He now knew for
sure this place definitely had something worth defending.  His greedy mind
wondered if it was money, drugs, food, water, girls…it certainly wasn’t a lot
of guns. 

He had been
watching and counted only six different muzzle flashes from the windows of the
two large three story buildings on either side of the fight.  There were a few
more on the ground.  He expected if they had guns, they would have been using
them.  Instead, he couldn’t quite make out what everyone was fighting with. 
Though every now and then he swore he saw a sword or two flash in the
firelight.

Either way
, he
thought to himself as he crept away in the darkness,
I’ll have to find some
new homies and come back to this joint…I don’t like it when people tell me
‘no’.  Maybe those bad-asses downtown I been hearin’ ‘bout might want to get in
on
this
action…

TED RUSHED FROM his
sniper building at full speed, blew the face off a man that tried to step in
front of him with his shotgun and continued to make his way towards Erik’s
position.  He could see roughly half the attackers had been dispatched, with a
good many of those lying in the street outside the complex, writhing and
wailing in pain.  The noise threw Ted back to the Gulf, back to Iraq, back to
Fallujah.  The screaming, the blood.  The chaos.  Ted shook his head and
cleared his mind just in time to duck the swing of an aluminum baseball bat. 
He stood up and crushed the thug’s face with the butt of his shotgun and jumped
over the crumpled body. 

The bikers
were beginning to park their rides at the gate, shining their headlights on the
battle before dismounting and joining the fray from the rear.  The enthusiasm
they had for revenge more than made up for the empty weapons they held in their
hands.  Shotguns became clubs as the bikers tore into the rear of the remaining
gang-bangers with a vengeance.  At the start of the battle, the attackers held
the slight edge in numbers.  Just minutes into the fray, roughly half the
attackers had been dispatched and the remaining thugs were going down fast as
more of the defenders and bikers were getting into the fight on all sides.  The
surviving gang-bangers were surrounded.  Blood and gore was splattered all over
the parking lot where the battle was taking place.

The
guard-in-training Erik had handed his Viking sword to suddenly appeared next to
him, staggering from a gash on his right leg, but holding the bloody sword and
smiling gruesomely.  Erik grinned between gasps for air and took a baseball bat
to his right shoulder. Cursing his stupidity for standing there grinning like a
fool, Erik ignored the pain, rolled to his left and sprang up from the ground
where he fell, sword stabbing blindly ahead of him in the direction of his
unseen assailant.

The fat
ex-con who finally hit somebody saw this and jumped to the side, swinging the
bat as he did so.  It missed Erik’s head by about two inches, close enough so
Erik could feel the breeze and be thankful it didn’t hit home.  Before his
attacker could finish him off in his off-balance state, a huge man wearing a
leather vest and bleeding from multiple cuts and scratches appeared through the
crowd and with one meat-hook of an arm toppled the fat dirty man who attacked
Erik. 

“Hoss!”
Erik said in relief as the biker finished off the thug with his own bat.  The
attacker’s head made a squishy noise as Hoss pulled the captured bat back. 

“Glad to
see you could make it!” Erik grinned, gripping the larger man’s forearm in a
shake.  Hoss flipped the greasy hair out of his eyes and smiled, dirt, blood
and filth partially obscuring his face.

“Heard
there was a party going on—“ Hoss said, smacking a smaller thug off his feet
with the captured bat.  “Wouldn’t miss this shit for the world, man!”

Erik saw
the defender with one of his Ninja swords turn to his right and hamstring a
gang-banger with a vicious down-sweep to the back of the leg.  The thug was
fighting someone else with an empty gun and went down in a heap, his leg
useless. 

The battle
was slowing.  Instead of two and three men attacking each of the guards, now it
was more one on one.  Two of the guards even managed to team up and attacked
one gang-banger.  In minutes it was all over.  Those that refused to flee,
died.  There were no prisoners.  No one had thought that far in advance.

Erik spun,
avoiding one last aluminum baseball bat—he could see the price sticker as it
sailed by—pierced the attacker through the chest with his
katana
and
jerked the sword free, allowing the man to slump to the ground with a  slow
gurgle emanating from his chest.  Erik prepared for the next attacker as the
man on the ground clutched feebly at the lifeblood seeping out of his chest and
onto the pavement. 

There was
no one threatening him.  On the ground, men were moaning and in various stages
of death.  The only ones still standing up were residents or bikers.  In the
distance, one of the bikers was on his knees choking to death a wounded
gang-banger near the gate and sobbing over a lost friend.

It was
over.

Erik looked
around and only saw people he knew.  Interspersed with the defenders were
bloodied bikers, holding guns like clubs or captured baseball bats.  Five or
six were down, being attended to by their compatriots.  In the street, one bike
was still burning, two others destroyed.  One guard was being helped by a
biker.  Four guards lay dead, surrounded by attackers’ bodies.  The Viking
replica sword was sticking up out of the still-warm corpse of a gang-banger,
the blood on the blade sending chills down Erik’s spine.  Seeing the sword like
that was like stepping back into time.

Everyone
was cut or bruised in some manner.  In the dim light of the fires all around
them, the ground appeared covered in bodies. The defenders were all panting and
suddenly tired.  Battle induced endorphin rush faded fast.  Everyone was
sucking wind and leaning against a building, a sword, a bat or someone else—it
didn’t matter if they were a resident or a biker.  They had survived.  They had
done it.

Forcing all
of the anguish over the dead, all the fears, all the worries and all the joy at
surviving into one hard knot, Erik pointed his bloodied
katana
at the
night sky, threw his head back and roared in victory.  In a heartbeat, his
comrades were all cheering and raising swords, guns, fists, and a few bats to
the sky to offer thanks and proclaim their triumph.  They had been challenged
for the first time and had bested the enemy. 

After a few
minutes of gruesome work, the dying enemy combatants were dispatched
mercifully.  With no doctors in sight, no real medical supplies worth
mentioning, many of the wounds the attackers received would be fatal anyway. 
Erik began to worry over the wounds his volunteers suffered, especially the man
with the gash in his leg who wielded his Viking sword so well.

Residents
began creeping out of hiding places deeper in the complex to see the result of
the battle.  Women ran to their men, crying in joy or falling over the body of
their loved one, wailing in grief.  Erik stood by, helpless and watched it all,
sinking to his knees.  Before he could piece together all the information his
eyes were seeing, Brin crashed into him and held him tight, crying in relief
that her husband was safe.

A fire
chain got started by Lentz and before long the fledgling fires trying to
consume the leasing office were put out, as were the brush and grass fires set
by the Molotov cocktails.

Fatigued as
he was, Erik managed to work out a plan with Lentz that entailed moving some
cars to prop the damaged gate back into place until the morning after dragging
the bodies of the attackers into the street.  The wounded defenders were taken
inside the rear of the leasing office to tended to by wives or anyone who
wished to help.  The fallen defenders were to be placed on the pool deck to be
cleaned and prepared for burial the next day.

Erik
allowed Brin to half drag, half walk him to their apartment, where she laid him
down on the porch and cleaned and dressed his minor cuts and scratches with
their extensive first aid kit.  Some alcohol swabs over the wounds, hydrogen
peroxide to follow, then clean bandages. 

“There! 
Good as new…” said Brin, admiring her crude handiwork.  She was thankful Erik
hadn’t received any major cuts, like that poor man with the gash in his leg.

She shook
her head with a smile and snuggled on the ground next to Erik, thankful to God
that Erik was home and safe and they would both survive to see the next day.

HAKIM STOOD IN the sun
near the little cantina and looked up and down dusty streets of the Mexican
town.  It had been days since he and Saldid had slipped past the American
paramilitary forces at the border and disappeared into the Mexican wastelands.    

Since then,
he and his partner in terror had been spreading the word of the now infamous
‘slaughter at Nogales’.  They had first heard of it in a little dive somewhere
south of the border.  It couldn’t have had better timing, so they picked up the
story and ran with it.  Heading deeper into Mexico, they fanned the flames of
anger and resentment.  Coupled with stories of the suffering and privation
wrecking havoc in America, the Mexicans were all too happy to have something to
gossip and get angry about.

The day
after slipping across the border, Hakim and Saldid had met up with their Al
Qaeda contact, a man who called himself Hassif.  He never referred to his last
name, nor answered to anything other than Hassif.  Long used to the secrecy and
tactics of a terror organization that spanned most of the globe, Hakim and
Saldid asked no questions.  They received their orders and using Hassif as an
interpreter, began spreading hate and lies among the gullible Mexican towns
they encountered, who were just looking for an excuse to shake a fist at the
Yanquis
.

Hakim shook
his head at the beauty of it all.  They had done only enough damage to knock
out the power in the United States, set a few forest fires, and the whole damn
country had imploded. 
Of course, my ‘Brothers’ in the inner cities had a
hand in that…civil war…it is priceless.

Every town
they had passed through, the three Arabs had caused quite a stir with their
stories.  When they arrived, the sleepy little communities were just going
about their business as usual—what business they had.  When they left, there
were marches, speeches and planned rallies in defiance of American aggression. 

Word soon
spread faster than the three terrorists could travel among a people desperate
for something, anything that provided relief from the day to day grind.  Hakim
figured it would only be another day or so before the Mexican government would
have
to do something.  The international media would be in on it soon.  After that,
Hakim wasn’t sure what would happen.  He knew damn well the Mexicans wouldn’t
stand a chance if they attacked America, weak though she was.

On that,
Hassif promised a great surprise, but would reveal nothing further.  With
typical Arab fatalism, Hakim shrugged, leaned against the wall of the run down
brothel, pulled out a cigarette and prepared to wait for Hassif and Saldid to
have their fun before they all moved to the next town south.

I only wish
the American news media were still broadcasting—how I long to see the chaos in
their streets!