CANISSIA: THE DAY AFTER
Chief Karl Tigh spat, and this time it was only blood.
No teeth this time, he mused,
I must be getting better. He knew that was far, far from the truth. He was getting worse; caught outside when the blasts hit, far enough away to be damned to survive. For awhile, at least.
The SPS Chief had been on his way back from a briefing on the recent SWINE activity when the bombs started to fly. He and his two assistants had shot the lock off a industrial cellar and ducked inside as the blast wave rolled past moments later-- even as the room filled with dust and particles he knew, from that moment, he was a dead man.
Tigh grabbed his assistants and they ran outside, and contemplated "appropriating" a car to get to either Police or SPS headquarters, but the sudden panic if traffic trying to get out of the city had foregone that. They were faster walking.
All through the streets, dust and debris settled, car alarms were going off, and dogs barked-- the expected panic of voices and shouts were, surprisingly, non-existent. Cars were flooding the road as people hastily packed a handful of belongings and tried to escape, but so far it was almost eerily quiet.
Soon, however, fear created a crescendo of its own as cars began to honk at obstructions, and drivers shouted impotently from behind their stalled vehicles. They continued to walk, and found stunned survivors-- not fo rlong, they wouldn't be-- and people stumbling around, coated in dust. A man wailed, flailing, unable to see-- he'd happened to look right at the blast. His eyes were dead, it was a matter of time before he'd follow.
The SPS officers reached deep into the part of the city where the EMP had rendered cars useless. The lack of low electronic whine, a constant in every industrialized society and never really noticed until it was absent, seemed deafening.
"What's up, officer?" Tigh asked almost jovially as he approached a stalled squad car. It was dead, the cops technically were, too, and they seemed to know it. They stood in the street, as if directing non-existant traffic; one with the car shotgun, one with a rifle. The one with the shotgun, who had two chevrons on his sleeve, shrugged.
"Waitin' for orders," he said, "But the radio's broke. This is our patrol base," he said, with a shrug towards a small precinct office nestled on the urban corner, "But they all took off."
"Well, I'll give you instructions," Tigh said, and showed them his badge. "C'mon. Leave this piece of shit," he said, with a contemptuous kick towards the patrol car.
The small group, now five, wandered into the city. Ahead, they saw a pair of M-1117 armored cars race down a corner-- some military unit from outside the blast area had already begun to respond. The five police officers shared glances, and by unspoken agreement, raced forward to catch up.
They did not have to race for long. Soon, the sound of machinegun fire guided them towards their target-- the M-1117's had stopped outside the joint UAR Consulate, a high-walled and barb-wired monstrosity of post-industrial
Sturm und Drang architecture. The Canissian armored cars were pouring fire into the gate guards, who were fighting back helplessly with small arms.
As Tigh and his small force arrived, it became evident that the Canissian armored cars were operatingon their own-- the highest-ranking person was a sergeant, and organization was based more on anger and vengeance than careful application of tactics against a fortified, fixed position.
"Sergeant, you better pour some goddam HE frags into those upper windows before they get an RPG on you!" Tigh bellowed. The sergeant was scared into a sense of propriety by the arrival of Tigh and the uniformed police... but he quickly issued the order. The turret gunners stopped their blood orgy against the UAR Marines and security guards and chewd into the building's glass facade. Tigh and the other cops laid down fire into the crowd of UAR personnel, keeping them away from the cars.
"Let's go!" Tigh said, waving everyone forward with his pistol. The cops, and a couple of dismounted soldiers, strode through the small swarm of bodies on the ground, pumping follow-up rounds into their skulls in methodical fashion.
"They didn't even avacuate their own people," one cop muttered, kicking a dead UAR man in the head, hard.
"They don't give a fuck about anything," the other cop, the one with the corporal stripes, said. "WHY!?" he suddenly screamed, and pumped his entire magazine into the head of a UAR body, reducing it to pulpy gore. "WHY! You ignorant, servile, fascist fucks!"
The M-1117's drove over th ebodies like so much road debris as they came through the gates, continuing to pump machinegun rounds and grenades into the building until their guns ran empty. The soldiers then dismounted, grabbed their rifles, and joined the cops entering the building.
The Canissians went through the lower floors, putting rounds into anyone they encountered, living or dead. It did not take long-- the UAR had no formal embassy in Canissia, only the small consulate to handle the minor amounts of trade between the nations, and to serve as a point of contact during rare moments of cooperation. Several posters from the recent Olympics were all over the walls, showing the Saddamistani team with their couterparts from other nations, all laughing and enjoying one anothers' company.
Days of naivete, now long gone, Tigh though as he reached out and tore one of the posters down. A soldier spat on it and went on by.
They reached the top of the small building-- it was only three stories-- and cornered the Chief Consul and his family in the spacious suite the UAR provided them. His name was Gerd Huber, and he was a native of Shepnukistan.
All the better, Tigh said. Consul Huber seemed unconcerned for himself, but tried to shield his terrified wife and the two kids hiding behind his large oak desk.
"Get out, Huber," Tigh barked, almost choking on the man's name as his mouth suddenly filled with bitter, metallic-tasting liquid. He spat out blood, looked at it, and grunted. "Get yoiur goddamn nappy fascist ass out from behind that fucking desk and die like a goddamn man."
Huber stepped forward.
"Do what you want to me, just don't--" Tigh punched him.
"Goddamn it," Huber said, trembling in fear, "We're all already dead! What's good's it gonna do--?" Tigh punched him again, then, jumped on the man, pinning his shoulders to the ground and pummeling him with his fists, repeatedly. Huber's face was a mass of blood when Tigh paused.
"It'll make me feel better as I slip into the cold void," he said, and punched Huber one more time. The Consul lay on the floor, panting, sobbing, shivering. Tigh looked up at the man's family.
"Get your bitch ass over here," he said, pointing at the woman. She fell to her knees, wailing, trying to hide her children behind her.
"I said get your goddamn slack-cunted Mongoloid hausfrau ass over here, you fucking Shepnukistani skank!" Tigh said and got up to reach for her. Huber tried to grab at him, but a soldier kicked him, hard, on the side of the head. Tigh grabbed the wailing woman over and punched her, hard, in the face. She sank to the floor, dizzy, mumbling incoherently. Tigh went over to the children, backing away from him, their eyes wide with terror. They backed up against the far wall and could go no further.
Tigh grabbed the boy, about 8, and dragged him over in front of the parents.
"First thing we're gonna do," Tigh mumbled, "Is we're gonna clean up some of the goddamn Shepnukistani pollution you subhuman little cockgoblins have been spilling all over the world," he said, and squeezed the trigger, creating a bloody starburst design on the boy's chest as th .45 round went through his spine and erupted out his lungs. The SPS cops exchanged sober glances, and looked around-- the Canissian soldiers' face were set with bloody rage, and predatory, fierce grins-- they wanted revenge, and this was as close as they were going to get to Shepnukistani personnel, ever, before they died as well. The civilian cops were impassive, a mask of contempt for the victims. Tigh was in his own world, a world of rage and boil, and he was going to make Shepnukistan pay in whatever way he could.
Tigh raised his pistol and fired again, putting a bullet clean thrugh the neck of the girl against the wall. She slumped to the ground, gurgling, dying, dead.
Tigh calmly reloaded his .45, then stood over the Consul and his wife. He put a round in Huber's abdomen, then one in each leg, and then shot his wife in each leg.
"Enjoy your stay, you genocidal fuckers."
He led them down the stairs and to the first floor, where the pile of Olympic posters were. He lit them on fire, and kicked them around, until the curtains caught on fire, and the carpet, and the wood desks. The small band ran outside, and stood, and watched, making sure the whole building went up in flames. It took a long time, and by 10pm that night the hellish yellow-red glow still illuminated much of the block.
It provided Tigh with the only warmth he would ever know, again.
He spat blood, and a tooth, and watched as the people burned, wishing he could have done more.
SIX WEEKS LATER
Chief Tigh dragged his broken, decaying body into a basement. With amusement, he realized it was the same basement he and his assistants had first taken refuge in on the day the bombs fell. He coughed, a deep, liquid rumble in his lungs. He had no more teeth to spit out, and his bloody sputum was now almost black.
A fitting reflection of my soul, he decided.
Tigh was now thin, gaunt in fact, and dying. He'd been subsisting on what he found in stores, in homes... most people were like him-- weak, toothless, and so things like soup and stew had been consumed in a ten-block area. He'd cooked a stray dog over a hobo barrel one day, but it had cost him one of his few remaining teeth at the time.
His SPS assistants had long since left, probably dead; they'd been deeply disturbed by the events in the Consulate. The cops had disappeared, presumed killed in a firefight. He found the one corporal's shotgun, empty, the buttstock covered in clumps of bone, hair, and gore. And maggots.
The soldiers had departed almost immediately, and Tigh caught only fleeting glimpses of other military units. For a few days, it was a brutal air war, as bombers flew over from Shepnukistan, being intercepted by RAF F-22 fighters, and then bomber missions were being counter-flown by massive aircraft bearing the Red Technocracy markings.
Everyone wants to play! Tigh realized.
But eventually, there were no aircraft left. No missiles. No traffic, no voices, no gunfire. The silence, in the middle of the big city, was preternatural. Huddled clumps of moldy, mummified, dust-covered bodies lay where they'd fallen; for a couple of days citizens had tried to round up and organize the dead but it proved an impossible task. Then, for a couple weeks, there were the endless suicides... and even the stray dogs, rats, cats, and other scavengers seemed to lose the will to eat, or even live. Even the dull buzz of the flies was muted.
For the last week, Tigh had seen no other person, alive at least, or heard any evidence of anyone else remaining. For all he could tell, he was the last man on Nova Terra, although he knew that to be wrong, but he did not have the energy to go find anyone else. Or the desire.
He spent his last days drinking, setting up shop in a ransacked liquor store, smoking cigar after cigar, and drinking uncooked canned soup when he could find it. He raided vending machines, and spent his nights curled up, contemplating his .45 and the last three rounds he had.
Then, one day, six and a half weeks into his ordeal, while stumbling around on a fire escape, drunk, looting a last can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, he fell two stories and shattered his left leg. He lay there, passed out, well into the night, in agony, watching the moon creep up and into the sky. Karl Tigh dragged himself out into the intersection, and leaned against a crashed delivery van. He smoked his last cigar, drank every last drop from his jacket flask, shot two stray dogs that came up to him, hungry, and put the last round in his head.
The next day, a military recovery team rolled in, driving away a pack of dogs feasting on the body of a hobo leaning against a delivery van, an empty .45 still clutched tightly in his hand.
"
- PeZook
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