Jump: The Fallen: Testament 1 (2 page)

It’s easy to stay in front of them—standard gear for a Protection agent has them humping thirty pounds of black and gray armor, not including the helmets and goggles, and five pounds of gun. How do I know that? It’s not important right now. Let’s just say that I don’t have their burden. But I
will
tell you, forty-eight doesn’t run like it used to, so sooner or later . . . I grab the railing on another corner with my left hand and clamp down hard on my Kimber .45 caliber handgun with my right.

Keep going. You might make it.

Make it to where?

The Kimber—my pistol—thirty ounces, give or take with the bullets. Two pounds of steel pain in my ass. It’s actually part of the reason I'm in this mess. Now it’s the only thing keeping it from getting worse.

Sure, I guess I could do it with the gun, but my mind still believes I’m gonna find a way to escape, disappear—turn invisible or some shit. Everyone thinks they'll get away at the end—somehow they're “special” and they’ll never bring us to Protection’s version of justice. Wouldn’t that be nice? Voila—poof! . . . Not a chance. In the end, everyone gets judgment. If they're lucky, they don’t get condemned.

I halfheartedly point my pistol over the railing and—
Boom-boom-boom!
I send three, two-hundred-and-thirty-grain, Rufflon-tipped bullets ricocheting down the middle of the stairwell. I know I’m shooting at nothing, but it keeps their heads down. Might hit somebody, ya never know. I hope I do. Give me a little more distance—extra time to figure out what in hell I’m gonna do. This chase won’t last long. No matter what I think of them, these guys are pros—they’re gonna bag me at the end of it. Once they do . . . when they’re done . . . there’s no redemption from this. The world’s way past “due process.”

Thirty-three
. . .

That annoying little voice in my head again, reading the big, white letters as I pass the gray metal doors to each floor—all locked. Nothing like having someone counting floors while you run for your life, though. A city crammed full of glass scrapers and I gotta pick the one building with a Protection sentry who gives a shit.
Sentries, hah!
I think.
Wannabe agents.

I’m actually happy none of these doors are opening up. By now, they got the second team in the elevator, and if those guys get above me. . . let’s just pray that doesn’t happen, because. . .

Praying, where did that come from?
I shake the thought, because I barely have energy left to run—pure adrenaline flight. That doesn't last long.

I stop, hunch over, and hold the railing, struggling to get a breath of air. Suck for salvation is more like it—just enough to keep going. Steam rolls up off my brow. It’s colder and muggier in this staircase than it was outside, and the water from the rain mixes with my sweat, and they both pour down my face and neck. My lips are curiously dry and tasteless. Funny what you notice. What I can taste, is the empty and pointless bitterness of the end.

They followed me along the wharf—black van creeping behind me. It was about as subtle as ripping someone's heart out. They were probably trying to see if I was meeting someone. On another day, they might have been in luck. Today, I knew they were coming. It was the only move they had left.

I walked through the flow of filth on the streets. The rain had all the sins of Seattle washing away. Dripped oil from ten million rolling guzzlers and the shit and piss of thousands of homeless Protection veterans living in cardboard “barracks,” spending the last years of their miserable lives drinking themselves into a dream world so they can forget the nightmare that they lived in the Middle East.

It all leaked down the gutters along the streets, pulled by gravity to the only place left to shove anything we don’t want—the humanity in the Northwest Quarter’s huge cesspool of sin—the salty shit of the Puget Sound, gateway to the Pacific Ocean.

Seattle in the winter. Welcome to the cold, shit-steaming, pearly gates of the Emerald City. It’s still better than the granite hole they wanna cram me in for interrogation. More pointless rant, but this one’s not helping, and I’m running out of fire to fuel my legs.

Now I’m like a drowning cat, struggling to get out of a burlap sack as I float down the last mile of the hopeless river of my life. That’s a little too poetic for me, probably my little voice.

I can hear the boots below me, still stomping their way up, climbing. Shit, where would they go? I peek over the side and catch a glimpse of a black helmet—a few floors down, but they’re gaining.

That’s because you’re not running.

My inner critic—master of the obvious.

I aim this time, try to hold my breath as I squeeze. I can feel my heart, trying to rip its way out of my chest and—
Boom!

Bullets make a particular sound when they hit meat. No way to describe it unless you’ve heard it before. A sloppy “whump,” maybe. I heard it plenty of times deer hunting when I was a kid, not to mention the other places. But there is no more hunting now, so not many citizens know that. The guy that just took that round . . . he knows it. Only difference when you hit a man is the—

And I hear him scream, and then there is yelling and shouting and bullets come flying up the center of the stairwell—undisciplined fire. It’s angry and there’s a lot of it. Now I know I hit him.

Maybe you can lose them.

Ten floors later, barely able to draw breath, dizzy from the lack of oxygen to my brain, and wincing from the burning acid melting into my thighs, losing them is a little girl’s dream.

You’re gonna have to
—

I try not to think about it, and I drag myself, clawing at the railing with whatever I got left. It ain’t much.

You got her there okay.
Kelly
. . .
she’ll make it.
That's what I tell myself. Or is it my annoying little voice again? It’s getting harder to tell the difference.

Kelly. My only salvation in this fucked-up dream of life. She needed a head start—time to get clear of all this shit, clear of me. If I didn't give it to her, they would have her raped and tortured. I’m not letting that happen.

Amy is ok.

That is definitely not my annoying little voice, because Amy . . . my little angel . . . is gone. That was over a year ago? I wonder if the lack of oxygen is starting to make me hallucinate.

I can’t let them take me—torture me into talking. Because the truth is, no one can outlast a Protection interrogation team. To them, torturing and raping a citizen is just a coffee break. Once the snatch and bag team. . . When Protection’s Citizen Compliance unit hands you over to interrogation, you’re talking, squawking like a chicken with its wings copped off, telling them anything they want to know. They would break me before I had a chance to piss myself. Whoever I used to be, I’m nobody on the wrong side of an interrogation room.

Nobody. That’s who I turned myself into after I ran. That is, until two days ago. Then my name came up on Protection’s “list.” Couple of bad keywords later and the monster Protection data-farm in Utah, spit out my data on some cube-monkey's screen. Then he ran thirty-seven years’ worth of stored and indexed email, text and wave information and he found the word—“Guns.”

Never mind that I buried all of mine three years ago. Any idiot could see that coming. But that’s what they want, the buried ones. Shit, there are no more guns above ground. Not enough that it would matter, anyway. You can’t get two citizens to agree on coffee, much less shoot a gun in the same direction. But that was Protection's plan—divide and crush. It’s easier to snatch and bag citizens when no one will help them. Too bad the old Mary Jane, Berkeley dumbasses couldn’t figure that out until it was too late.

— IV —

“PRY IT FROM my cold dead fingers.” That was what my dad used to say when he was drinking the state swill. Nobody can afford the good stuff.

I talked a lot of shit with him about something no one thought would ever happen. Most citizens wouldn’t know what to do even if something did. But we didn’t care because we figured it never could happen to us. Then . . . it did.

Protection massacred all those grade schoolers—blamed it on some single-parent momma’s boy whose overindulgent mommy just happened to have an AR-17 assault rifle, lying around in her closet. So much for the nine-foot fences and armed Protection sentries, guarding every state conditioning campus in existence.

Give me a break. I bet if you checked those agents’ weapons you could match up the bullets they pulled out of those kids pretty well. But Protection marched the parents out in front of the PIN cameras so the idiots could beg all the citizens to turn in their weapons . . . for the sake of the children, of course. That’s how the State and Protection get everything done—threaten a hen with her chick—she’ll kill a priest if she has to.

Then that bitch senator started squawking for tougher laws and more Protection enforcement again, and everyone bought it—ate it up like kindergraders mowing through All Hallows candy.

When they finally got all the sheep baa’ing in the right direction—begging for safety—everyone’s favorite uncle tipped his red, white and blue riot helmet and smiled at his ignorant nieces and nephews. “Uncle Satan” was what we called him now. The State asked for them all back.

“Asked”. . . not the right word, because in his left hand were the bastards over at “ratfuck” and in his right was Protection. Neither of them was “asking” for shit.

Ratfuck? It’s not pleasant, I can tell you that. Hah, one of the only freedoms a citizen has left—sarcasm and bitching. They do it in private and mostly to themselves, of course. No one wants to get remanded for unlicensed dissent.

R.R.A.T.F.—Revenue, Religion, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. None of them are sanctioned anymore, and they took control of them in that order. Okay, that's not entirely true. They nationalized the most profitable ones—the ones they could keep people drunk, diseased and devout with. Take a guess which ones those were. And the revenue. . . the State gives just enough back so that the citizens don’t pull out their pitchforks.

Most of us—I guess I'm one of them now—just handed our guns over. Not much more than fussing and cussing. Sure, the few faithful left, yelled and bellowed about tyranny and the old Constitution.

Eddy and Muffy dummy, tucked safely in their habitat in one of the State Scrapers downtown, had never even read the relic, much less wondered what might happen after State dissolved the damn thing. They didn't miss a lick of latte, watching the nightly snatch-and-grab playbacks on the PIN. To them, we were dangerous, old wolves. They were happy to see us lose our teeth.

A few hardcores knew it was all over—downhill for the red, white and bruised from then on—grizzled old Iraq Protection vets, or Iran and Syria amputees—they knew the drill.

In haji-land, the first thing they did was limit each Muslim household to one AK-47 each . . . for “protection” purposes. Then, after too many insurgent “incidents,” they took those away, too . . . for protection purposes. A few Syrian citizens protested the wrong way and ended up on the business end of some nineteen-year-old’s M7 riot rifle.

Didn’t much matter—after Iraq and Afghanistan, we were all used to seeing bearded Middle Eastern dudes lying dead in the dust. We sipped our coffee while unmanned drones blew the living shit out of anything that looked remotely unfriendly. One less “terrorist,” the media dogs told us . . . over and over again. Shit, we barely winced at the images of dead babies that slipped out through the State wavewall. We just clicked away as fast as we could—pretended we never saw a thing—hoped our browse history didn’t show up in Utah. Then the drones started flying over us, and that finally got our attention. The “sheeple” went bat-shit crazy.

What did they think would happen when the wars were done? Let’s just shut down a multibillion credit industry because the fighting is “over.” Hell no! You gotta find a new enemy to point the revenue at, that’s all. And they did. Only they pointed it right at us, “We the People”—enemies of the State.

I keep the rant in my head burning as hot as I can. It’s all I got left to help me climb. Nothing like some pointless rage while you run.

They tested the waters in Wyoming first. Hardly anyone in the little hamlet of Kaycee to cause much PIN media attention—some guy bakin’ up some judgment in his shed—last ditch effort to get someone to pay attention to the people.

They sent a Vengeance drone and launched a couple of Hellfury missiles at that guy. I doubt he knew what hit him before the angels collected his ass. His wife and daughter did, though. They were out in the yard feeding little cherub chickens—just far enough away to escape disintegration . . . not far enough to live. That must have been something to see—feathers and guts flying through the air with their own arms and tits.

Then some remote pilot—joystick jockey in Syracuse, NY—sipped coffee in the break room when he was done. Probably gave him a Feathered Phoenix, the coveted Protection medal of valor. Bet his initials weren’t at the top of that arcade game for more than a week.

When the PIN reporters finally showed up, the “powers” told them to say it was “Domestic Terrorist Weapons Cache Explosion.” And they printed that shit like they were told to. We’re way beyond investigative journalism, too. An investigative journalist is just code for “Future Detainee”—Foxtrot Delta—more commonly referred to as . . . “Fucking Dead.” And no one wants to be a protectant at that prison.

We all knew that Wyoming was bullshit. Didn’t matter—average citizen has the attention span of a three-year-old in a balloon factory. It only took a couple weeks for the story to get shoved out of their overstimulated minds. And if the beehive doesn’t sting you when you go in for sweet nectar the first time. . . Any citizen who didn’t voluntarily give up their guns got a visit from a Hellfury. That was how they dealt with the rural zone holdouts. I only heard those stories from my dad. They weren’t any prettier in person. I can hardly remember the first ones.

Sending a missile at a farmhouse in the rural zone caused less collateral damage. Not that anyone at Protection gave a shit, but the paperwork is a bitch. I remember that.