Author’s Note: This story first appeared on my Rumble channel, Byronofsidius, as an audiobook/story reading presentation. It will, I do not doubt, ruffle some feathers. Art does that from time to time, though. If you have presumptions to make, you are invited to ask questions wherever this story appears.
You might not like the answers you get.
We Accept Your Terms
An Amelia City Story
By Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy
If one paid even a modicum of attention to the socio-political arena in the United States in the years 2020 and 2021, they would invariably have seen dozens, perhaps scores or hundreds of videos of riots in major metropolitan areas. Scenes of masked, black-clad rioters hurling bricks into buildings, smashing windows and cars, pummeling police with bottles of water, rocks, and in some instances, stampeding people underfoot. In Portland, Oregon, during the ‘Summer of Love’ as some coined the summer of 2020, a man named Aaron Danielson was approached by a total stranger, identified as ‘one of them’, and shot twice in the chest.
The maniac who performed the slaying was tracked down and killed in a firefight with authorities a few weeks later. This was just one example of what would become a trend over the next few years, and no major city in America was immune to such things.
In the early days of June, 2023, Amelia City, Iowa, became one of many cities to become soaked in a similar stew of tension and rising potential for violence, thanks to an incident involving a member of law enforcement and what was perceived by the general public as a potentially ‘bad’ shooting of a suspect. The officer, Jacob Donovan, was currently in an undisclosed location somewhere in the city, placed immediately on paid administrative leave. As she sat down in her office to review the day’s agenda on the morning of Wednesday, the 14th, Carmen Ruez, the City Council member representing the city’s 6th District, let out a long sigh.
One of the youngest people ever to be elected to the Council, Carmen had been inspired to get involved in politics back in 2022 by her role model, the notable New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sharing a similar background both ethnically and professionally as a latina bartender, Carmen had initially assumed that she had about a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting elected to the Council. What she hadn’t factored in initially, however, and what proved the determining factor, was the fact that an overwhelming number of public school teachers lived in her district, and they had overwhelmingly supported her bid for the open seat over her Republican opponent.
Her agenda for the 14th included only a couple of items on her ‘quick sheet’, a document that had been placed on her desk by the lone secretary shared between herself and the Councilors repping the 4th and 5th Districts; the previous Council had saved some funding from the city’s budget by reducing the number of support staffers working for the Council, leaving one secretary working for every 3 districts. There was one exception, as one might expect with 16 total City Districts, and this was Gloria Fender, the senior-most secretary and the only one who everyone on the Council had agreed could simply not be replaced.
The items on her quick sheet were as follows:
Item One- Hold debate on allocation of Amelia City Sanitation Department budget
Item Two- Discuss city library expansion project proposal (Councilman Ford)
Item Three- Discuss the Jacob Donovan Situation
Carmen had immediately formulated her own response to the Donovan Incident, and effectively emulated exactly the sort of response she expected her political role model would employ. She took to Twitter, and within hours of the news breaking, she tweeted, “This is yet another example of a Black Man being HUNTED DOWN by an overzealous white cop! These injustices must stop!” Carmen didn’t have a very large following online, but she rapidly received plenty of both praise in the form of ‘Likes’ and condemnation in the form of literally hundreds of nasty comments from locals on the service. More than a few had labeled her a ‘disingenuous beaner’, targeting her for her ethnic background, and she had dutifully reported as many of those as she felt she had the time and energy to focus on.
The rest she roundly ignored. Much as she despised him, she largely agreed with comedian Joe Rogan’s approach to her online activity- ‘Post and Ghost’. The vast majority of interactions she had on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were only with those users who were what she considered decent people; everyone else she gave little if any consideration to.
“Ginger,” she said, catching the secretary just as the other woman was about to slip out of her office. “Is councilman Ford in yet?”
“I was just about to bring him his copy of the day’s quick sheet,” the short, rail-thin young secretary replied. “Did you have something for me to pass along to him?”
“Just ask him if he has a few minutes before the morning session to talk to me about some of the specifics of his library expansion plan,” Carmen said with a smile and a nod. Ginger gave her a quick thumb’s up and bounced her way out of the modest chamber, leaving Carmen to her work. Situated just in reach to her left stood a dual-level document basket, the top labeled ‘IN’ and bottom labeled ‘OUT’, and from the upper layer she took up a sealed manila envelope, stamped to indicate that it had come from the Amelia City Police Department. She tore the end of the envelope and pulled out a set of three sheets, a short, simple report that she had requested a few days earlier. There had been some strange graffiti tags showing up in her neighborhood of late, and she thought a couple of them were vaguely familiar from her years growing up in the city. As such, she had asked the ACPD’s Organized Crime Unit if they could compile any information on them, and she had provided pictures, taken with her cell phone.
She started reading over the first page of the department’s report, which began with a symbol that looked like a blackened skull ringed in flames. ‘This symbol is sometimes present in a modified form in tags associated with an outfit calling themselves The Burner Crew. These individuals are not generally seen as a threat by the Unit; from what we can tell, they appear to be largely focused on cloning and re-selling counterfeit electronic devices and equipment to other organizations and gangs,’ the first part of the report read. ‘It is believed that the symbol originally was lifted from some kind of urban legend about a kind of ghost or poltergeist that literally burned its victims to death’.
The rest of the first page showed several variations of the insignia, all of which seemed to run along a similar theme, including the last one, which caught her attention. Looking almost photorealistic, it was a mural of a figure standing in front of a wooded area, engulfed in flames. The figure himself stood before it in a sleek pinstriped suit, black with thin red vertical lines, his hands layered in flames, with eyes that burned with matching fire.
As she turned to the second page, a clearing of a throat brought her eyes up from the page. Standing a few feet away was her colleague on the City Council, Councilman Peter Ford. Stern of countenance and temperament, the gruff, wind-burnt 56-year-old Republican stood at parade rest in one of his usual charcoal gray suits with a blood red tie, his close-cropped hair calling back to his earlier decades of service in the United States Army. “You wanted to talk to me, Ms. Ruez?” She nodded quickly, scanning her desk for the binder-clipped papers she had set aside from Councilman Ford’s proposal from the previous month. She spotted it, flipping to the second page, and tapped her finger on the portion of the text she had used Highlighter on.
“I was wondering about this part of your proposal, Mr. Ford,” she said amiably. Much as she didn’t care for Ford, she had to admit that when the man had a good idea, it was usually really good. “I don’t understand much about construction or architecture, so I wasn’t sure how this part of the Hawkins Library could be knocked down to expand on.” Ford gestured to the papers, and she slid them toward him. He turned them around, then flipped to the next page, where a diagram had been drawn up.
“Ah, yeah, I wasn’t entirely sure about this either, at first,” he confessed. He set the papers back down facing her, leaning down and pointing to the diagram section she had mentioned. “The man I consulted with on the idea, Trenton McDowell, owns and operates McDowell Building and Company? I asked him what he thought about trying to spruce up and improve the library, and he took a look at the original plans, went over a few ideas with me. He says this isn’t what’s called a ‘load-bearing wall’, you see.”
“So what’s that mean?”
“It means that wall isn’t holding anything else up, nothing else relies on it being right there.” The two Council members touched on a couple of other things before Ford stopped her, saying that they’d go over the rest of the details during the morning session. Bidding him farewell for the moment, Carmen returned to her papers from the ACPD until it was time to head to the Council chambers for the day’s morning session. She barely paid attention throughout, reserving herself for the afternoon, when they would be discussing the Donovan Incident.
She had plenty to say on that score.
**
Carmen hadn’t expected him to be present, but when Richter Steinman stalked into the City Council meeting chamber just minutes before they’d scheduled the afternoon session to start, she felt a small surge of energy pulse through her mind. Steinman had been the Mayor of Amelia City for three years now, and would be up for re-election in just under eleven months. Steinman was a moderate by most accounts, and he rarely interfered in Council hearings; most times, he would carefully review the votes of the Council, and make his own input known, but even when he disagreed with their conclusions, he often said that he would not ignore the will of the public, who had voted for these very same Council members. “If the will of the people passes through the Council, then it isn’t my place to deny them that will, even if I don’t personally agree with it.”
In three years serving as Mayor, he had, in fact, only once used the power granted him by the city’s charter to override a decision made by the Council; back in late 2020, when the Council had voted to defund the city’s police department in a historic 12-4 vote. When Steinman had been invited to the Council chambers to comment on the decision, he had come with a photocopied portion of the most recent version of the city’s charter, and read aloud from it.
“’Wherein, at his or her sole discretion as Mayor of Amelia City, the current serving Mayor determines that an ordinance or administrative procedure decision has been made by the City Council that would imperil the safety and well being of the citizenry, the Mayor may make a motion to strike down said ordinance or decision prior to implementation. The Mayor may do this as many as fifteen times per calendar year, and must do so within 48 hours of a final vote taken by the Council. No explanation for such an action is required on the part of the Mayor of Amelia City.’” Steinman had then cleared his throat, and regarded the members of the Council with a cold, steely half-lidded glare, one that seemed almost alien. “You will not foist this kind of foolishness on the people of Amelia, folks,” he had said softly, his voice barely carrying through the room that day. “They already have enough problems without worrying if the police will help them with troubles of the mundane.”
Now, as Carmen watched him move a wheeled desk chair into one corner of the chamber and take a seat on it, looking relaxed, she wondered what he had meant by that last bit; ‘troubles of the mundane’. She was brought back to the moment suddenly, as Gene Crispin, of the 1st City District, gaveled in the afternoon session. “All right, folks. Council secretary, please note the start of our afternoon session here, date and time.”
“So noted,” said the secretary from her own corner of the room. The Council chamber was dominated largely by a rounded table with a single break in its outer perimeter, which would allow people or props to be set up in the middle of the Council, and so that all members could easily turn to look at and address one another. Additionally, it enhanced the atmosphere of equality among the Council members, since there was no ‘central’ seat with a round table.
“There’s been a lot of outcry from the public these last couple of days, since the incident with Officer Donovan,” Crispin said with a heavy sigh, shaking his head. “And it’s pretty reminiscent of what happened here just three years ago. There’s a stink in the air, and everybody can smell it.”
“Could be you need to switch deodorant brands, Gene,” quipped Shelly Hargrave, Councilwoman from the 12th City District. This got a couple of chuckles around the table, including from the Mayor. “Look, much as I’d love to make light of things, Mr. Crispin is right. We’ve got the makings of a really bad situation here. Mayor Steinman,” she said, partly turning in her seat to look over to the tall, brooding figure in his fudge brown suit in the corner of the room. “What, if anything, has been said between you and Commissioner Norris?”
“Well, Abigail doesn’t want to put more cops out on the streets, not just yet,” Steinman replied, sitting up straighter, setting his right foot back down on the floor from its place on his knee. “She says that people don’t really want to see even more folks in uniform, folks they don’t necessarily very much trust right now.”
“Was Officer Donovan wearing a body cam,” Councilman Ford chimed in.
“No, he wasn’t,” Steinman answered. “Unfortunately, when the department requested additional funds for just exactly the purpose of purchasing that equipment last year, you folks voted the proposal down, 14-2. Peter and Gene here were the only ‘Yes’ votes on that one, as I recall.”
“That’s not exactly fair,” Carmen piped up, waving her hands side to side. “They also wanted the money to upgrade their firearms. I hardly think our men and women in the department need better ways of killing innocent black people in Amelia City.”
“Why do you feel compelled to make everything about race when it comes to the police, Carmen,” Councilman Ford barked.
“Folks, let’s keep this civil, okay,” Steinman said evenly, rising from his seat. “Here’s what I can tell you for right now. For one, Commissioner Norris has people in the Anti-Crime and Cyber Crimes units telling her that there’s a lot of chatter both on the street and online about protests, starting tonight. We’re talking chanting, marching around, smashing stuff up, people probably starting fires, the works. This is not a ‘maybe’ scenario; to coin a phrase people your age use, Ms. Ruez,” he said, looking pointedly at Carmen. “Shit’s going to ‘pop off’, starting tonight. There’s no call for rain in the forecast, and people are pretty quick to snap since the George Floyd thing up in Minneapolis.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Mayor,” asked Hargrave.
“I’m saying, wrap this afternoon session early, and get home, folks,” he said, starting to make his way out of the chamber. “And once you get home, lock your doors and draw the blinds. We’re going to have all kinds of shenanigans and goons out on the streets of this city tonight, and even if nobody wants to admit it out loud, you and I both know there are going to be worse things than rioters out there. This is Amelia,” he said, pulling open the door. “You all know what I’m talking about.”
**
There were benefits, Carmen had found, to being anonymous as a member of The Cause. For one, even on the two occasions where she had been questioned by her fellow black-clad group members, she had not been asked to remove her balaclava or other face concealing clothes, keeping her identity secret even from her comrades. In the end, she had been able to easily prove her loyalties to them, and continue on partaking in the tasks required for the promotion of the change they sought.
The black and red flag of Antifa stood out on her hoodie as she moved with her small squad down Paris Avenue, keeping to the right flank of their formation, her black umbrella open and held to her side to shield them and herself as much as possible from people trying to film them with their phones as they passed by. Spotting one civilian doing such filming of her group with a bright red MAGA hat on his head, she used her free left hand to pull the pepper spray can from her belt, quick-stepped over toward him, and proceeded to give the stupid Trumper a face full of chemical pain. The man shrieked and flinched away, dropping his phone to the sidewalk, where she swiftly stomped it several times before moving on to rejoin her group.
“What the fuck, man, you can’t do that to people, you fucking thug,” someone else yelled from behind her. Carmen’s pulse quickened, recognizing that, while her group hadn’t encountered much pushback in the hour they’d been on the streets, things could quickly turn hairy. Back in the summer of 2020, they had been met with limited resistance to their righteous havoc around the city; now, with no national Covid-19 emergency to keep large swathes of people in their homes via government decree, there were more regular, everyday civilians in evidence on the streets, and some of them were showing no signs of cowering away from the anonymous Antifa crusaders.
One of her cell members raised his bullhorn up near his masked mouth and began chanting through its amplification unit, “No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!” Carmen and the others joined in the chant as they roved down the street, and as they neared a Dollar Tree along Paris, near the intersection with 4th Street, one of them hurled a lit Molotov cocktail through the front window of the discount store. A quick scan of other storefronts across the way told Carmen that another small clutch of her people had already passed through the area, with several other windows busted out, graffiti tags and slogans of The Cause in evidence; ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Fuck the Police’, ‘ACAB’, and ‘TOGCDC’. She felt a small swell of pride seeing this one, as it was her own personal contribution, and was shorthand for ‘The Only Good Cop is a Dead Cop’. It hadn’t picked up much traction outside of Amelia City, but she was proud of herself for it nonetheless.
Of course, she had never even attempted to take credit for its proliferation. One did not do that as a member of The Cause.
The chant of ‘No justice, no peace’ continued as the group crossed to the other side of the street, watching together as the Molotov’s flames spread inside the Dollar Tree. “Pretty fucking cool, man,” one of the males said from behind his face mask.
“Agreed,” she replied. After a couple of minutes, however, something curious caught her eye- movement, inside the store. “Wait, was there somebody in there,” she rasped.
“Oh, shit,” someone else croaked. “The lights were off, the sign said they were closed, I just assumed there wouldn’t be anybody in there, man!” The group started spreading out a little, each of them well versed in what they were expected to do if authorities came en masse to a location their particular Antifa cell couldn’t establish total control of. Carmen could feel that they were on the verge of separating and bolting, but she found herself locked in place as a figure made its way out of the Dollar Tree.
The figure stalking out of the burning store wore what she could tell in the light of the flames was a well-tailored suit of some dark hue, and its hands and head were covered in swirling pockets of fire. Its head didn’t appear to be that of a normal human being, but was instead a char-blackened skull, twin dots of white light shining out from its eye sockets. “I heard your little bit of sloganeering there, boys and girls,” the burning man declared loudly, his solid, cultured accent only slightly betrayed by a hint of a growl. “Very modern, I must say, very in vogue. I myself am fond of another axiom- fight fire with fire,” he snarled.
He’s the man from the Gang Unit symbols, Carmen thought numbly, barely able to draw enough breath to gasp as the flaming man-thing flung a ball of flame at one of the members of her group. The fireball struck her comrade full-on, blasting a gory, smoking hole through what had once been his chest, dropping him instantly dead to the street. Carmen felt the scream of terror tear from her throat, and preservation instinct kicked in, allowing her to turn and bolt for the nearest alley to get away from the monster that had emerged from the burning Dollar Tree.
She felt the concussive force of bricks being blasted apart just half a dozen steps behind her as she made her way safely out of the creature’s immediate field of targeting vision.
**
With distance between the Dollar Tree and the passage of a good fifteen minutes in the presence of another cell of her comrades around her, now located in a semi-residential area, she felt both safer and more in control of her imagination. It was just some freak with a flamethrower or something, some kind of modified weapon, she thought to herself. Some local yokel who’s just been itching for a chance to show off his shiny new toy. Yet a tinier, quieter inner voice whispered to her, a voice that quickly reminded her of what Mayor Steinman had said before leaving the Council meeting chamber; ‘worse things than rioters’, he had warned.
Her position as a City Councilwoman wouldn’t protect her from getting into serious trouble, legally speaking, if she was arrested in the course of taking action on behalf of The Cause. It would for damned sure not protect her from flamethrower-wielding maniacs, likely right-wing fascist nutbags in her view.
The cell she had now joined up with didn’t appear to be carrying any Molotovs or improvised weapons of any sort, and wandering across the greens of Hopkins Park with them confirmed this as she took a more careful look at each of the members in this cell and the gear they carried. Like her other comrades around the city that night, they were dressed mostly in black, faces concealed, some wearing gear that bore the black and red striped flag of Antifa, like herself. But in their duffel bags and backpacks, from what she could spot, they carried bottles of water, first aid kits, and in total, dozens and dozens of cans of Krylon brand spray paint.
One comrade in particular, curiously dressed in a long leather duster, knee-length black skirt covered in columns of silvery metal studs and black fishnet stockings over shin-high buckled leather boots, carried a sizable navy blue duffel bag positively loaded down with cans of paint. Unlike the others, however, Carmen also spotted several nozzle attachment straws, kept neatly bundled together in a couple of sandwich baggies among her cans. Carmen briefly noticed the little trans arrow pin the woman wore on her lapel as well, and found her choice of face covering curious- it was a sharp-beaked plague doctor’s mask, the eye ports shielded with blood red lenses.
“I really like your outfit,” she said as the group neared the west end of the park, nearing the city’s 4th Precinct Police Station just beyond the public greens.
“Thanks,” the masked woman replied with a nod. “I always try to stand out.” Somewhere in the middle distance to the north of them, Carmen heard a blood-curdling scream, followed by the unmistakable sounds of gunshots, three of them. Then, silence, the members of this tagger cell all having come to a half crouched stand still with the exception of the masked woman, who simply ambled on unperturbed. “Probably just another trigger happy cop, brothers and sisters. Come on, we’ve got work to do,” the masked woman said.
Carmen found herself curiously drawn behind the woman, her level tone seeming to imbue them all collectively with a momentary sense of calm and purpose. As they exited the park, Carmen realized that this woman was guiding them directly toward one of the exterior walls of the police station, which seemed to have emptied its lot entirely of patrol vehicles. They’re probably all busy with our people around the streets. This circumstance couldn’t have worked out better for her on a personal level; the longer she was out here with her comrades, the greater the risk was that she would ultimately be apprehended and exposed for her connection to the collective.
Peter Ford already didn’t much care for her in terms of their political stances; such a revelation would only pour gasoline on the fire he already had smoldering when it came to butting heads with her in Council sessions.
Arriving at the precinct, the taggers began deploying their chosen tools for expressing their disdain and distaste for the current state of affairs, with one member of the group going immediately for a curly presentation of the letters ‘BLM’. It was simple, effective, and coincided with the aims of the Antifa movement as an overall ideology. Moreover, she looked forward to listening to her political rivals commit the consistent error of trying to mix and match one group for the other.
Meanwhile, separated by a dozen yards from her compatriots, the woman in the leather duster and fishnets set up shop, going to work quickly with her cans and specialized nozzles, entirely focused on her efforts. Lacking in artistic talent, as well as the tools necessary to produce her own piece, Carmen hung back a little, standing in the middle of the street and acting as a lookout. Keeping an eye out, however, didn’t last very long; within mere minutes, her comrade in the coat and fishnets had created a stellar image, a masterpiece as far as Carmen was concerned.
The image the artist had crafted was a stylized cartoon of a massive, broad-shouldered ACPD police officer with a machine gun in his hands, and the head of a pig, blackout sunglasses obscuring his porcine eyes. The exaggerated nature of the illustration saw folds of fat peeping out along the visible hip on the picture, and the glow of the cigar jutting out of one corner of its mouth almost looked like it was actually burning on the brick of the station exterior. “Holy crap,” Carmen said, shaking her head in disbelief. “That is fucking gorgeous,” she said, applauding her artistic comrade openly. The artist turned to face the other taggers, all of whom joined Carmen moments later in the middle of the street, also applauding the piece.
“I’m so very glad you all like it,” the artist said, taking a measured little bow, stepping further to the side of the painting. “Especially you, Councilwoman,” she added, and Carmen felt a twisting in her gut. The painting shimmered for a moment, and like some queer optical illusion, it stepped off of the wall and onto the sidewalk, the pig-thing squaring itself to face the Antifa cell, weapon aimed at them at the ready. “It’s the last thing you’ll ever see.”
Instinct alone saved her life in the next instant, as Carmen threw herself to the ground behind her comrades a split second before the painting/creature opened fire, its machine gun belching metal death into them. The others twitched and grunted as round after round pelted into them, and Carmen, relying on their side-by-side bulk to shield her, bolted away as fast as she could. Before she could get back into the park, however, she felt the sharp agony of a bullet crashing into her left calf, causing her to stumble and fall to the grass, rolling sideways in a flurry of limbs before she came painfully to a stop on the benighted greenery. She sat up, adrenaline compelling her, and looked back the way she had come; the only tangible sign that anything had happened were her dead allies, lying in a spreading pool of their comingled blood.
“Get up, now,” she grunted at herself, pushing to her feet and almost immediately falling down again. The pain in her lower leg was atrocious, but adrenaline and sheer, bladder-relaxing terror at now having survived not one, but two encounters with things that should not have been able to exist in the wide realms of reality, compelled her to get moving once again. Carmen spotted one of the park’s public use restroom huts just a couple of hundred yards away, and she swiftly made her way to it, flipping on the light inside and locking the deadbolt in place as she cringed at the sour, foul odor of the public toilet. She quickly pulled the Antifa hoodie off over her head, using her teeth to rip one of the sleeves to use as a makeshift bandage to tie tight against her bullet wound. She groaned, feeling the bullet still in there, and she realized that she was going to have to get to an emergency room to get proper treatment.
She had her burner cell phone still in her backpack, as well as a full change of clothes, a small canister of lighter fluid, and several books of matches. She got changed, using a pen she kept in the bag as well to rip a hole in the left pant leg to try, as best she could, to match the area she’d been shot. With this task done, she crept back outside, slipping the burner phone into her back pocket and sidling a little away from the toilet hut. Casting about to make sure she was alone and in no immediate threat of being spotted (by eyes human or other didn’t make much difference at the moment), she sprayed down the backpack with the lighter fluid, making sure to soak the remains of the sweatshirt, black sweatpants and balaclava and bandana, following the soaking with a lit matchbook. The whole ensemble quickly went up with a ‘WHOOMPF!’, and Councilwoman Carmen Ruez limped her way to the nearest public sidewalk away from the police station, dialing 911 as she hobbled along.
**
“You got lucky, Ms. Ruez,” the paramedic said, trying to put on a grin despite the haunted look in his eyes. “We’ve seen some pretty fucked up stuff tonight. Believe me, I know fucked up,” he said with a pause, locking eyes with her as he finished cinching up the stitching. “I was a corpsman in the Marines for five years.”
“Aren’t you going to take me to Amelia Memorial,” she asked, watching as he used medical tape to secure gauze in place over the sewn-up wound. She had initially wanted to wave off his offer to dig the bullet out, but when she remembered where the bullet had come from, she realized that she wanted whatever cosmic weirdness had produced such a thing out of her body. The paramedic had handed the crumpled remains of the bullet to the uniformed police officer who had accompanied the ambulance to her location. Carmen had managed to limp her way out in front of a coffee shop that had put up boards in front of its windows in anticipation of the evening’s unrest, waiting there for the EMTs to arrive.
The officer, a husky fellow whose name tag declared him ‘R.Brunhaus’, had his hands on his hips. “Their ER is only taking the worst injuries right now, Ms. Ruez,” the officer replied with a snort. “Saint Christopher’s and East Metro have it just as bad, and the urgent care clinic over on the north side got torched by a bunch of these rioters and thugs before the sun even went down. Which begs the question, Councilwoman,” he added, scratching at the dense, push broom mustache under his flaring nostrils. “What the hell’re you doing out here?”
“I know how to talk to these people,” she said evenly, wishing she’d taken up the EMT on his painkiller offer as he and his partner climbed back up into their ambulance. “I wasn’t expecting some vigilante maniac to come out and mow a bunch of them down, and almost me too in the process.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe folks wouldn’t feel like they had to take matters into their own hands if you and the rest of the Council weren’t always these Antifa and BLM punks get away with practically anything they demand to get away with,” officer Brunhaus groused. “Go home, Councilwoman; I imagine you’ve had enough excitement for one night.”
“Can’t you give me a ride to my building,” she asked, rising from the patio chair she’d been sitting on to receive her triage treatment. The officer kept walking toward his patrol car, speaking back over his shoulder to her.
“I could, but I don’t really want to. I’m pretty sure you just blew me off when I pointed out why someone might feel the need to resort to being a vigilante. Stay safe, Ms. Ruez; it’s dangerous out there.” And without another word, he was down into his cruiser, following behind the ambulance rig as they pulled off from the curb and wheeled away, leaving Carmen by herself.
The burner phone in her pocket, provided by her comrades, had been like dozens of others distributed to various cells throughout the city, complete with a pre-loaded set of contacts. She scrolled down the list, landing on one listed as ‘OUR Taxi’, and she dialed. The line rang twice before clicking over. “Where are you, comrade,” asked a younger man’s voice on the other end of the line. She rattled off the location, and the other fellow responded with a brief phrase in a language she didn’t readily understand.
All she knew at the moment was that she was tired, still in pain, and trying to look this way and that at anything that made a noise she didn’t like the sound of.
**
Carmen didn’t hear the dark green van moving along the street when it pulled up, but when the driver came around the front of the vehicle, dressed in plain dark blue jeans and a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, his nose and lower lip standing out thanks to shiny piercing studs, popping the handle on the sliding rear row door, he said, “Electric, doesn’t make a peep coming and going. Where you headed?”
“At this point? Home,” Carmen said with a sigh, limping toward the vehicle as her driver headed back for his side of the van. She clambered up into the back, pushing the familiar button along the door jam to slide it shut, taking note of the vehicle’s peculiar set up. There was an opaque divider running along the top of the front seat bench, and a video screen centered in the back of the driver’s side, so that passengers could watch something on it. Tucked under the rear bench were what she recognized as mobile cooler units, hosting beverages for potential passengers. This fellow clearly had turned his side gig into a full-time job; despite being a comrade, she had spotted the little Uber sticker in his front windshield.
As she buckled in, the driver asked for an address, and she relayed it quickly. He then snickered a little, pulling an ear bud out of his right ear. “Hey, did you hear about Donovan?”
“No. What happened to him?”
“Apparently he was on his way to his brother’s, you know, trying to be incognito and get to a new place so we couldn’t get him surrounded. Anyway, he stops into a little store to grab something on the way over, jumps in the middle of a disagreement between our people and the store owner, got clocked in the head with a brick.”
“Oh, wow,” said Carmen, feeling a little sick. “Which hospital did they end up taking him to?”
“None; he’s dead,” the driver said with a wolfish smile that she caught in his rearview mirror. “Eye for an eye, right?” She couldn’t bring herself to offer a reply, and the opaque divider slid shut between them a few moments later, cutting off any further dialogue. She cast her look out the tinted back seat window, watching the city roll by, catching sight of clutches of her comrades causing mayhem and mischief around Amelia. This is too much, she thought. Nobody had to die tonight.
The screen embedded on the back of the seat in front of her flickered to life, showing a man and woman pair of news anchors in some sort of studio set up, the man in mid-sentence as the screen shimmered. “-ning that the following video is graphic and disturbing. Chris?” The image cut away to a shaky cell phone video playback, and the anchor’s voice came in layered over the video. “Previously unseen footage from a witness of the incident, which resulted in the death of Keenan Thomas, was received by several area news outlets just about an hour ago, and as you’re about to see, it casts fresh doubts on the public’s perceptions of what happened between him and Amelia City Police Department Officer Donovan, who was just killed in an altercation with rioters about an hour and a half ago at a downtown convenience store. Thomas, seen on screen here, is in the process of ruthlessly beating a woman right after she’s retrieved cash at an ATM on Quentin Street, swinging what has been confirmed to be an old claw hammer, striking her multiple times about the arms and body. The video here was captured by somebody who had been waiting at a distance to use the ATM themselves, and when they witnessed the beginning of the attack, they began filming.”
Carmen watched, revulsion twisting her gut as she watched the young man on screen now kicking and howling, cussing out the woman he had chosen to victimize. Flashing red and blue lights appeared on screen as a squad car, Donovan’s car, drew up, and the camera swung toward him, showing officer Donovan getting out of his vehicle, hand on the butt of his gun, but not drawing it. He yelled several times at Thomas to drop his hammer and step away from the victim, but Thomas, on screen, just barked several epithets at Donovan, now stalking toward the officer. Several more warnings were yelled, and Donovan finally cleared his firearm from its holster, but kept the weapon pointed down at the street, backing away from Thomas, who was gaining speed, stomping toward the cop.
The suspect swung his hammer in a wild arc at Officer Donovan’s head, and still, right there, captured on camera, the officer did not even raise his firearm, instead angrily screaming at Thomas to drop his weapon, to stand down and surrender. The witness filming cursed several times, the audio bleeped for broadcast, and Thomas swung two more times at Donovan before the veteran police officer finally, while in retreat, opened fire with two back-to-back shots, dropping Keenan Thomas to the pavement.
“We got it completely wrong,” Carmen rasped, staring dumbfounded at the screen. She didn’t realize the van had stopped until the sliding rear door to her left whirred open, the divider coming down between herself and the driver up in the front seat. Before even pausing to look at her surroundings, Carmen lunged out of the van and doubled over, throwing up all over the sidewalk. Stumbling away from her own sick, she finally blinked rapidly, looking at where she was; this was not her building before her.
She was standing in front of an ATM kiosk set into the outer wall of a Huntington Bank branch. She started to turn back toward the van to address the driver, but the vehicle and man were both absent, as if scrubbed from reality. A preternatural fog had settled over the area, and before she could start to assess her situation, she felt eyes upon her. Turning around, she yelped as she came face-to-face with a very familiar middle-aged man, dressed in a blood-flecked patrolman’s uniform, one half of his head staved in, flecks of crumbled red brick visible in the wreckage of his skull. Carmen tried to backtrack, but came into contact with a nearby street lamp, and without time to react, the officer, his eyes milky yellow, a sickly heat radiating off of him, snapped on hand out to press her head back against the poll, while the other took out his handcuffs.
“What the fuck,” she croaked, trying to pry the undead hand off of her throat. The dead man’s cuffs came up, one snapping shut on her left wrist, and with uncanny speed for a dead man, the officer moved her other hand around behind her, and she was bound to the street lamp in no time. He stalked out around her, and Carmen Ruez found herself looking at a shambling specter of a man step back away from her, his hands on the hips of his patrol uniform. She screamed for help, casting about for some sign of other people nearby. She paused, spotting a vaguely man-like shape approaching the dimly lit area near the ATM from behind the clearly dead Officer Donovan.
But as it drew nearer, she could tell that it was no ‘man’, per se. What drew toward her looked like some kind of lycanthrope, a slender, towering thing in a black-and-white checkerboard suit, a salmon pink button shirt underneath, and a fat black tie with some kind of shiny metal pin keeping it in place. The creature had the head and clawed, feathered hands of a raven, and a broad smile full of needles filled the gap between upper and lower beak portion. It its left hand, cocked up on its shoulder, was a now-familiar claw hammer, likely the exact same one Keenan Thomas had been using to assault an innocent woman, and to then swing at Officer Donovan. The smell of the raven-thing hit her nostrils when it was still a dozen yards away, a blend of cinnamon and putrid meat.
“Councilwoman Carmen Ruez,” the creature said, coming to a halt only a yard or so away from her, too-human eyes flashing wide, bloodshot. Its voice was a mix of cultured and gleeful, some hint of an accent she thought might be British threaded through it. “I must say, I have wondered a few times if our meeting might be inevitable! Particularly given the numerous subtle hints from your good and venerable Mayor,” it added, twirling the hammer now on its feathery palm like a basketball.
“He, he tried to warn us,” she stammered, trying to struggle against her cuffs.
“Oh yes, he did. Not really a surprise,” said the raven-thing dryly, eyes drooping somewhat as it scrutinized the hammer in its hand. “He’s had a couple of close encounters with my little friends over the years, fancies himself an expert in them. He has no idea, really, how little he knows. But he’s not my concern tonight, young Carmen,” the raven-thing crooned, waggling the hammer back and forth in front of her, leaning in and pushing the flat metal top of the tool up under her chin. “You and your friends, very much are.”
Carmen felt sick again, and with a quick back step on talon-like feet, the raven creature narrowly avoided being puked on. Carmen’s body was racked by tremors of terror, and she stiffened suddenly, screaming at the skies overhead and the demonic creature before her, “What do you want from me?”
“Oh, not much, dear lady,” said the bird-thing with another of its needle-filled smiles. “We just want to let you know that, well, we’ve decided to agree to your terms.” Carmen blinked rapidly at him, shaking her head slightly to convey her confusion. “You know, the terms you were chanting all evening?” The creature reared back with the hammer, and in a savage arcing swing, buried the claw end in her left shoulder, blood splashing out along its sharp, angular beak and checkerboard blazer. Carmen shrieked and buckled, head whipping back and forth as the tool was yanked free with a thick, wet ‘plop’ coupled with a savage ‘CRACK’ as the collarbone was snapped apart. “No justice,” the raven-thing said, raising the hammer high overhead. “No peace!”