Pushed Too Far- Part 4
Part Four- Escape Attempt
Caleb ducked behind another parked car, listening to the grunts and thuds out on the street. The National Guard would not be coming; a spokesman had gone on every outlet that would carry the message to let the public know that the only operational station for the Guard, up near Duluth, had itself also been blockaded, and their supplies of gasoline turned out to have been smuggled away at some point prior to the start of the Twin Cities’ blockade.
Nobody in the media or online seemed to know how all of this chaos, entering the middle of its second week, was being orchestrated. People had scoured through all of the purportedly right-wing message board and social media alternatives, and while there seemed to be a lot of general support for what was happening in more and more major cities, nobody appeared to be coordinating via such services and sites.
What was more, from what Caleb had gathered over the last couple of days, the tactics weren’t universal. In Austin, Texas, for instance, the truckers using their rigs to block access in and out of the city had gone into the city afterwards, actively hunting down and assaulting people; they seemed, from reports, to be specifically going after people sporting bumper stickers or yard signs in support of Democrats and progressives, and associated signs.
Clad all in black with a backpack full of the last of his dwindling dried foods and a change of clothes, Caleb had cautiously maneuvered his way over the last twelve hours to the eastern outskirts of the city, using signs aiming to 94E as his beacon points. In the middle of the street, a group of men were presently beating the hell out of someone, trying to rip a backpack similar to Caleb’s from their victim. “Just give us the fucking bag,” one of them yelled, launching a kick that landed with a sickening ‘thud’ against the downed man’s head.
The victim ceased all movement, and Caleb watched from under the vehicle he hid behind as the four assailants, not seeming at all worried about whether the man was alive anymore or not, ripped the bag free from his limp arms and dumped it out on the street. Several pens, coins, a pair of beat up old notebooks and five bottles of water tumbled to the ground from within, and there was audible grumbling from the muggers. “Shit, not a single scrap of food on him,” one of them lamented.
“At least there’s water,” another said, snagging one of the bottles. “Hey, did you grab him at all? With your bare hands?”
“No, dude, I was going to, but I realized once Kevin had him on the ground that I couldn’t. Fingerprints and whatnot,” the other speaker said. Caleb took this as his own cue to start trying to make his way out of the area, and he crept along, keeping low and using the many parked and abandoned vehicles along the curb as cover for his escape. He continued to hear the roving ambushers’ voices behind him, but he was no longer paying specific attention to them; instead, he had put one of his ear bud headphones into his right ear in preparation for once he got to a solid hiding spot.
Within a few minutes and around a corner from those men, he opened up his phone’s native web browser (Google Chrome), and started looking for any live news feeds tagged to the Twin Cities area. One struck a nerve right away, labelled ‘Is The Guard Unable to Guard the People?’ He clicked on the feed and visually swept the area ahead of him, watching from the darkened archway of an office building front for signs of movement out on the street, the fading light of day playing tricks on the eyes.
“-no other way to put it,” a woman was saying in his ear from the news feed. “Until such time as the necessary supply of fuel can be brought to the base and used to fuel up our transports and other vehicles, there’s nothing much we can do, National Guard or not.”
“Major, major,” several voices called out, and someone cleared their throat as they were called upon. Caleb spotted his next likely bolt-hole to move to, making his way steadily to the east side of the city, hoping to escape the metro altogether. “Major, when did your people become aware of the situation regarding the theft of fuel reserves at the base?”
“When the blockade around the Twin Cities metros had been established for three days’ time, I tasked some of my most senior people with checking on our supplies, in the event that Governor Walz called us up to deploy to the region to effect a return to proper order among the populace. They informed me, at that time, that we appeared to have been sabotaged, that all of our fuel tanks had been contaminated.”
“What do you mean when you say, ‘contaminated’,” the journalist followed-up. Caleb double-checked for movement up and down the street, judged himself in the clear, and started a mad dash for his next ‘checkpoint’, as he thought of it. Trying to minimize his noise, he held his backpack straps taut, hoping that nothing inside would clatter around loud enough to give him away to other people nearby. He had no genuine hopes that any other person he came across would be someone to commiserate with; as far as Caleb was concerned, everybody was a potential assailant.
“What I mean is, upon inspection of our vehicles and the reserves of fuel in the tankers we maintain on-site, we discovered that a contaminant had been introduced to the fuel containers. Specifically, an inordinate amount of sugar had been mixed into the vehicles and tankers, thus making the vehicles inoperable, and the reserves useless to us. It seems apparent to us that, whoever has organized the situation which has left the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul isolated from the rest of the state, and the rest of the country beyond, they took preemptive actions to ensure that we would not be able to be called upon to assist the civilians of the areas affected.”
There was a lot of chatter from the press pool in Caleb’s ear, but the audio feed shortly cut out altogether, leaving him in the eerie quiet of nightfall proper. The streetlights began flickering on up and down the street in both directions, and Caleb took the earbud out to listen more intently to his surroundings; there was a slight, subtle wind, but nothing more. In the distance, further toward the downtown area of the city, he could make out some shouting and a few gunshots, but these were infrequent, widely spaced from one another.
Deciding that he could risk another move, Caleb looked east down South 9th Street. Metal sign markers up the way indicated that about a mile further along, 9th Street had an on-ramp that would connect to State Route 12 to take one over the Mississippi River and out of the city itself. The road would eventually merge with/become 94E proper, though many locals argued that the Dartmouth Bridge was itself where this change-over took place. Caleb had no interest in semantics, however; his primary concern at the moment was whether or not the bridge would be loaded with blockade guards or not.
Certainly it had been just a couple of days earlier, when YouTube and Twitter videos cropped up all over the place showing people trying to escape Minneapolis engaging in melee scuffles with such men and women, most of them being overpowered quickly and thrown over the sides of the bridge into the water below. This didn’t bother Caleb as much as it might have near the beginning of this whole ordeal; if he ended up in the river, he would just try to swim to the other side, or drown. Either way, he’d be out of the city, he reasoned.
When did that happen, he wondered as he moved cautiously down the street, checking this way and that for signs of other people. At what point did I decide that even death might be preferable to being trapped like a rat? He wasn’t sure, and decided that brooding on the question for over long wouldn’t help him now. Sticking to the shadows as best he could, he continued along toward the east.
When he finally did make it to where 9th Street South turned into 12, Caleb found himself once again taking cover behind a vehicle, this one abandoned in the middle of the street at an angle, the doors of the front seat both left open. Up ahead, he could just make out a cluster of people, seeming to have gathered around a kind of campfire they set up in the middle of the street. He could make out the rasp of quiet voices, all kept low, but he couldn’t make out anything specifically they were saying to one another. Risking being spotted, he rose up a little, and tried to take a longer look at them.
Three men, two women. All of them looked haggard and run-down, their cheeks sunken, deep shadows under their eyes, deeper even than firelight should have produced. They were dressed for the warmer weather still, yes, and none appeared to be armed with guns, though one of the men in the small group held a long-handled fire axe across his lap. Deciding that they didn’t look like the sorts of folks who had been acting as guards against those looking to escape the city, Caleb took a risk, and came slowly around the vehicle, approaching the group with his hands up to either side of his head.
“Hey, folks,” he said loudly as he drew within thirty feet of them, pausing as five sets of eyes tiredly swung toward him. “Um, hi. You folks trying to get out, too,” he asked, holding still and steady.
“Yeah, we are,” said the axe-holder, a latino fellow Caleb could now discern, his voice not accented or even infused with much in the way of emotion. “Heard from Gabby here that there’s no more guards on the bridge out of town now,” he added, pointing to a small, svelt young woman with purple-and-white streaked hair, wearing a thin denim jacket and jean shorts. She had returned her attention from Caleb to the sketch pad in her own lap, a pencil making slow, smooth strokes on the paper before her. “At least, not here. Other places around the city, yeah, they’re still keeping people in, turning them back, but the Dartmouth Bridge is free and clear all the way across the river.”
“That’s great news,” Caleb said, taking a few steps closer. “So, why aren’t you heading there right now,” he asked cautiously.
“We’re just waiting for a few more folks to meet up with us here, move as one big group,” the axe-holder said. “Strength in numbers, in case they’re just setting up an ambush for mid-sized groups, you know? I’m Travis, by the way,” the man said, setting aside his axe and rising from his makeshift seat on a turned-over tire, approaching Caleb with one hand out.
“Caleb,” he replied, stepping forth and taking the offered hand in his own, still not fully trusting the man or his group of comrades.
“So, have you guys thought to share out that there’s an opening here,” Caleb asked, pulling his phone from his pocket. As soon as it appeared in his hand, though, Travis brought one of his own up quickly underneath, pressing the phone back against Caleb’s chest with a queer kind of gentle insistence.
“Don’t do it,” Travis said, his eyes going from tired to haunted in an instant. “Don’t go on any of your socials, at all. In fact, if you want, you should trade it out right now,” he said, reaching one free hand behind him toward his companions. One of the other men in the group swooped forward, handing him something, and Travis held out an old-fashioned flip cell phone to Caleb. “Here.”
“You serious? Those phones can’t even get news updates,” he scoffed.
“And they can’t ping us, either,” Travis rasped, shaking his head. “Just trust me on this, Caleb. If you want to come with us, you gotta ditch your phone. Now.” Caleb stared down at the offered flip phone, wondering what it meant that he was considering participating in this societal backslide. He supposed it made sense; after all, if people started blasting out publicly that they knew a way out of the cities, wouldn’t the folks blocking them in just use that information to clamp down on their exit point? This was strange, he thought, but probably the best thing to do now, logically speaking. He took the offered flip phone from Travis, then opened his contacts list on his smart phone. He began the process then of manually transferring over some of his contact numbers. “Good call, brother,” Travis said, heading back over for his tire. “Once you’re done with that, come on over and sit with us. The other groups should be here in about an hour.”
**
Jayden’s father used a foot to push-roll the woman over, and another of the officers, all of whom, like their commanding officer, had changed from their uniforms into looser-fitting street clothes (a couple of them wearing bullet proof vests under longer coats, crouched down beside her to reach into the back pocket of her jean shorts. He flipped the wallet open and looked at the I.D. held in place behind a transparent plastic protector. “Sarah Edmunson,” the officer said, reading off her address right after and pointing toward a nearby apartment structure. “She was right outside of her place.”
Jayden felt his chest tighten, first in grief, and quickly thereafter in shock, as the seemingly-dead woman let out a dry gasp and half-sat up, her eyes wide, blood-caked teeth gleaming as she sucked in breath through them. She twitched her head to her left to look up at the people gathered near her, and she shook her head slowly. “Please,” she said, and it was the slur of her speech that made Jayden recognize that not all of her teeth were intact in her face. “Please, don’t hurt me,” she pleaded, drawing inward on herself, her knees pulling up, arms creaking up around her head in a defensive ball.
Christ, what happened to her, Jayden mused as he knelt down, the officer handing him the woman’s wallet like it was a cursed artifact. “Nobody here’s gonna hurt you, miss,” he said gently to her, trying to slip the wallet back into the woman’s lap without actually touching her. “Trust me, especially not these guys.”
“Yeah, they’re cops,” Seth said on Jayden’s left, and Jayden shot him a look that perfectly matched another of the officers’ slapping the other young man across the arm in warning. “What,” Seth whined, rubbing his arm. “You are, after all.”
“We ain’t shit right now, kid,” Jayden’s father snapped briskly, doubling down on the warning. “And you might not want to go advertising for us what we used to be, okay? You might not get it, but there’s plenty of people who’re gonna blame us for not getting this whole situation sorted out in the early going, okay?” He held a tactical rifle in the barrel-down ‘ready’ posture, looking down at the quietly sobbing woman, added, “And they’ll want to know why we let whatever happened to folks like her, happen.” Seth rubbed the back of his head awkwardly, taking a few steps away from Sarah Edmuson and his friend, who remained crouched beside her.
“We can’t leave her here like this, dad,” Jayden said, getting himself upright and squaring himself up to face his father, who even now, when Jayden was a 19-year-old young man, still towered a good five inches taller than him. “Whoever left her here like this, they could come back to finish what they started.”
“Not our problem, son,” his father rumbled, closing his eyes, sounding more tired than he had in years. “We have got to get going, and now, while the sun’s down,” he continued, opening his eyes and giving his son a hard stare. “It’s our best chance of getting out of the city with minimal impediments, and we can’t be dragging someone along who we don’t know, and who doesn’t appear to be able to provide us with any kind of skill set that will help to that end. You and your roommate here are lucky enough I know you, or we’d have probably shot your asses back at the station.”
Jayden hated admitting to any kind of his father’s logic, but the man wasn’t wrong here. He had been the one to inform Jayden and Seth that, while it might seem like a good idea to flee Saint Paul to the east, there was significantly more coverage by blockade militia people in that area than there was around Minneapolis. As such, the group, consisting of sergeant Parker, his four immediate subordinates, son Jayden and Jayden’s roomie Seth, had spent most of the day following their arrival at the station in Saint Paul making their way through little-traveled side streets and switchbacks into Minneapolis. Occasional chatter from MPD radios, like the one Parker kept clipped to his belt, let them know that other small groups of MPD officers had also abandoned their uniforms and were splitting into groups, trying to get themselves and small groups of survivors out of the cities.
From everything the sergeant and his men had heard, the best route out was going to be somewhat circuitous. It involved getting to the north-eastern part of Minneapolis, then taking Route 12 over the Dartmouth Bridge, and finally getting off of the main roadway just before it became 94E officially; going too far on 94 had already deposited several groups of people right into the hands of waiting militiamen, who simply corralled them all into cargo wagons attached to ATVs at gun point, driving them back into the downtown area of Minneapolis and kicking them off. The militia people didn’t rough them up, or steal what meager supplies the survivors had managed to scrounge up; the only things they confiscated, right where they stopped these would-be escapees, was anything that could be used as a weapon.
Jayden looked back over his shoulder as he followed his father and his men, meeting the battered woman’s eyes as she stared after them. He didn’t hear a single word from her, but her swollen eyes conveyed everything he needed to hear; ‘don’t leave me here, please’, those eyes cried out. ‘Don’t leave me here alone’.
**
“It was actually one of the last things I read before ditching my smartphone,” officer Hernandez said, walking alongside Jayden along a kind of makeshift corridor between abandoned vehicles approaching the bridge. “Thousands of people got out early on, and nobody tried to stop them. Or at least, there was minimal effort to stop them, anyway. It’s mostly folks like us, who hesitated, who got stuck inside the cities.”
“So does that mean they just don’t have big enough numbers to stop everybody,” Jayden asked, taking a deep breath as the group officially stepped out onto the bridge together. “Or did they screw up their timing?”
“Either way, it doesn’t matter,” Parker Sr. said gruffly, eyeballing the path ahead of them through the abandoned vehicles on the bridge. “If any of those good ol’ boys try to stop us, we got what we need to tell them to go screw,” he said, waggling his rifle faintly. “They’re not so tough when the people they’re up against are on an even footing with ‘em.” Jayden didn’t take as much assurance from this as he might have at one time, particularly given the state of the woman they had left behind just a short bit ago. There was movement ahead of the group, but from what he could barely make out, it appeared to be another cluster of people making their way out of the city.
“We won’t be the first folks to run into them at any rate,” Seth said, pointing ahead of them at said other group, perhaps three hundred yards ahead. There was a crackle then on sergeant Parker’s radio, and the group came to a halt, crouching down almost in perfect unison, listening intently to the radio.
“Attention, anyone listening on this frequency,” came a calm, even-toned male voice over the radio. “This is Samuel Jennings, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the forces that have blockaded the cesspit that is Minneapolis and Saint Paul. We have come to recognize that many of you have been making your way to various access routes out of the cities, routes that we do not presently have the manpower to barricade against. This was expected, given our limited numbers and resources. Be advised, we are no longer going to bar exit from the cities, and are drawing back from the perimeter of the metropolitan area. You are free to leave the city now, if you so chose.
“I would caution you, however, that if you should spot or come across any of our people outside of the cities, and we see you as any kind of potential threat, we will use lethal force against you. You are not welcome in our communities outside of Minneapolis and Saint Paul; even if you are not seen as a threat, we will not provide you goods or services, regardless of what you have on hand to offer in exchange. We are done with you, completely. If you attempt to take what is not rightfully yours, even to survive, you will be viewed as a threat, and dealt with accordingly. You are no longer welcome in our communities, just as we were no longer welcome in your society.
“You are hereby cancelled.” The radio went silent then, leaving Jayden taking a deep breath of relief. But the moment of relief was short-lived; if they were no longer welcome in the communities outside of the city, and they could not receive goods or services, then how were they expected to survive?