We are hoping to feature new fiction on Super Collide from time to time. Today we are excited and proud to bring you the work of one of our own, Guy Benjamin Brookshire. An excerpt from his new novel follows. Please contact supercollide@gmail.com for inquiries on the novel or Guy's work.by Guy Benjamin Brookshire
I was pushed forward by someone trying to get to the front of the crowd. The bell of the horn turned towards me. People around me hunched their shoulders, almost cowering. It seemed too late for me. I saw the eyes of the soldiers.
“Do you want to ask something?” the man on the bullhorn challenged, uninvitingly. People looked at me. I saw them looking at me and felt a wave of nausea. I answered, in a loud, clear voice:
“It seems like a lot of people are missing. Where'd they go?” JLI pulled on my arm.
I don't know how many people heard me, but at that moment, I thought everybody did.
“I'm not sure I understand what your question means. Are you suggesting we are responsible for the recent depopulation?”
“We just want information. We want to know who means to govern us, you know. We used to govern ourselves.” JLI pulled on my arm harder and hissed. There was some talk amongst the soldiers, more of them were drifting over, the better to hear the idiot talk. They were jeering at me. I went on: “Are you from the provisional government? Are you here to help us?”
“We're here to control this roadway. That means keeping the peace. That means ensuring that traffic laws are obeyed. It also means ensuring that way-stations such as this provide essential services and remain free of any subversive activity that could compromise our control over this roadway. We are not providing aid. We are providing security.”
Though he was not reading from a piece of paper, the statement seemed prepared. A tittering swept through crowd. People who hadn't heard were asking people who had what he said. There was an unintelligible shout that sounded angry. The bullhorn scanned the crowd, looking for the culprit.
“Will the provisional government be helping people relocate?” I asked.
“We aren't relocating you, we are pacifying you.”
“What have we done that we need pacifying?” the exasperation in my voice was not hidden.
“What have you done that you need relocating?” the bullhorn asked, with killing wit. The other team leader, who had been squatting over the body of the flier distributor they had shot and going through his pockets, stood up and snatched the bullhorn from him. He said loudly,
“This area is now under security control. Please disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business has been completed. Please disperse. This area is now under security control. Please Disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business here has been completed . . .”
The low words bubbling through the crowd became louder. The words “killed” and “murder” were heard repeatedly. The crowd hushed and in the silence, the bullhorn sounded that much louder and the closing of car doors was like an echo of a book being dropped in a library. Perhaps because I had spoken, many people were looking at me.
“Ask him who the president is.”
“Ask him where we can find a hospital.”
“Ask him if there are any new maps being circulated.”
“Where—can we find—a representative—of the provisional—authorities—who can answer—our questions?” I asked very loudly. I couldn't shout down the bullhorn, but I was heard by some. People at least heard that I was shouting. JLI whispered something plaintive I didn't hear.
“Disperse. This area is under security control. Disperse. This area is under security control . . .”
I thought about walking up and trying to ask my questions face to face, but the body of the man in the Santa Claus get-up lay at their feet in a pool of his own blood, his head like a broken eggshell. It gave me pause. A round man with large red eyes behind his glasses, who had clearly been disturbed by the shooting, climbed up on a car to shout:
“What the fuck is going on? What the fuck is going on?”
A gray woman who could have been his mother, scrambled to pull at his pant leg, so that he kept slipping as he attempted to get up the windshield and stand on the roof.
“Must've knew him,” I heard a voice near me say.
“This guy isn't getting us anywhere,” I heard a woman say, gesturing at me as she turned away. The soldiers holding the perimeter near us began to crane their necks, taking interest in the man shouting as his mother pulled at him. One made a gesture like turning an invisible doorknob over his shoulder. The leader on the bullhorn hardly broke the monotony of his repetition with a simple:
“Yeah, bring him in.”
The three closest troops closed up their intervals and moved forward. Their bayonets flashed. The crowd melted away at their approach. They swept their guns back and forth as they moved, rehearsing a massacre. People were pushing and shoving to get away from them. Isolated horn-blasts increased in frequency. When the soldiers got to where the man was scrabbling up his windshield, struggling against his mother like a child throwing a tantrum, a ring of people were standing, watching.
“Come with us, buddy,” said a soldier.
“What the fuck is going on?” The man had finally kicked away his mother and was flapping his arms up and down to punctuate his yowling like a deranged cheerleader.
“Come down, sir—you're frightening people,” said another and gestured with his finger to the ground. He wasn't even looking at the man, but was watching the crowd, which was watching his every move. He didn't like it.
“Who the fuck are you? What is going on?”
The soldier who hadn't spoken was holding his hand to the side of his helmet as if trying to listen to a transmission. He nodded, looked around, stood on tip-toes, found the officer with the bullhorn, gave him a thumbs-up and received one in return, then pointed his rifle at the man and said:
“You are disturbing the peace and must come with us. Get down now.” He turned his rifle up a few degrees and fired. Women screamed. The warning shot had a remarkable effect on the man. Despite the cold, he began to undress. His coat came off fast, but he got frustrated with the buttons on his shirt and just tore it open. Tears were streaming down his face as he began struggling with his belt. His mother was reaching up to him as if he were a cat stuck in a tree.
“Who the fuck—Ahhh!—what's going on? What's going on?”
When he whipped his belt out, he swung it around his head in a vaguely menacing gesture and they shot him at least thirty times before he even fell over. A mist of blood hung in the air for an instant. The ring of their casings hitting the ground and bouncing was musical. The man's mother sat on the pavement. The crowd had all hit the ground or crouched behind cars and only slowly began to raise their heads again. As they did, the clipped clucking of cowed disapproval filled the air. The soldiers began to back away. As they did so, they passed me. I was standing in something like awe of their ability to turn the world to hell.
They saw me looking at them and approached me as I wondered whether it was safer to stand or retreat.
“Hey, what the hell was this guy talking about?” the one who had fired the warning shot said, pointing at me with the barrel of his rifle.
“I don't know, but it sounded kind of, uh, subversiony,” said another, over his shoulder, walking backwards, “like, uh, he said something about government: isn't that subverting?”
“I don't think it works like that,” I said.
“Well, how does it work, buddy?” he snarled.
“Not very well, apparently.”
“Should we take care of this?” The other was speaking, I realized, into his helmet-mounted intercom. “I'm sorry I didn't get that. Sorry, could you repeat that? One more time?”
“No, we asked him if he had a question,” said the man with the bullhorn. “Over.”
The mood of the mob had changed and now pressure from the crowd was pressing everyone forward, and it was difficult to fight back against the press of bodies without being violent. The soldiers began to back away towards the man with the bullhorn. The two teams united in a huddle and the man with the bullhorn pointed back towards the exit and the tank. They moved out across the parking lot towards it. The crowd, simultaneously pushing towards the soldiers from behind and back from the soldiers' advance where it occurred, was in a state of maximum compression, as in the scrums of rioting. The soldiers could not pass.
There was an explosion and a car flipped in the air. It landed nose first on another car and demolished it. The explosion ruined every car within its radius of contact. Burning debris was everywhere and many people expressed fear that there would be another explosion. As they were calling out over the noise of the after-blast, another car did explode and the whole thing happened all over again. When the two blasts had died in reverberations that continued only in the mind, it was clear that many people had died. My side of the crowd was unharmed. But on the other side of the parking lot, the dead closest to the cars were just heads and limbs and chunks of torso. The blood of those closest to the explosions had instantly broiled into a sizzling goo that was difficult to distinguish from the burning oil. Further out where glass and pieces of metal had flown the blood flowed audibly from dying and grievously wounded bodies. The soldiers charged forward into the stunned, prone masses and proceeded through them, at a jog, to the exit. Bits of flaming rubber were falling, smoking, through the air like brimstone.
A man who seemed to think that I was to blame, rushed me even as debris was still falling.
“You're getting people killed for bullshit. That was bullshit. What are you saying? You're not making any sense. You're not making any sense. You're gonna get us all killed. What do you mean 'we mean to govern ourselves'? Who is 'we'? Who are you? People are dead because of you!”
He tried to strangle me, but others in the crowd restrained him. I could see veins in his eyeballs and stood as if hypnotized. There was a moment when I realized the people who were restraining him were waiting for me to say what to do with him. He was an older man. I did not hesitate in thinking that he might be right. Perhaps the tank shelled us because the soldiers had radioed in that a madman was trying to confuse people into attacking them, the people were blocking retreat and closing in: do something. So they shelled us and the troops slipped away in the chaos. My fault? Why not?
JLI led me away by the hand. There were men tearing their shirts for bandages. Under JLI's silent instruction, I began to tend the wounded which meant pressing handfuls of clothing into a woman's gaping wound and dragging her away behind the restaurant, out of the tank's line of sight. Some people's blood smoked in the cold. The sounds of men shouting just barely drowned out the sounds of women screaming. There were doctors in the crowd. Three to be precise. They made a makeshift surgery in the garage. Napkins, knives and pots of boiling water were brought from the restaurant. Several casualties who had been blinded were placed together in the game room and they sat as if potted, listening, waiting for something, while lights from the video games flashed on their bandages. A man, about my age, had a shirt wrapped around his head. He looked as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over him. He was calling out. I think it was a name. No one answered him.
There was the sound of gunfire from somewhere in the distance as if many balloons were being popped. One of the doctors came to me with bloody hands. He began to wipe them on a dishcloth. A little boy with a bowl of black hair came up and stood next to him, hooking his index finger through the doctor's belt loop. I was ready to swear this was the boy I had glimpsed underground.
“Where are you going now?”
I looked at his face. Under a shock of iron gray hair, nobly weather-beaten features were arranged with a regularity that suggested intelligence. I knew that face, he was the man I had seen in the survivor's tent. He must've known all about the relief efforts. I wanted to ask him what he thought I should do, where he was going—essentially, to lead me. But I saw that for whatever reason, he was asking the same of me. To my surprise, I told him my destination, though I had not known it myself.
“I guess Arkansas. It seems like that's where I should go. If I have family left, that's where I should look for them.”
“I'm heading that way.”
Thank you to Broken Silence, USA Today, and The Daily Mail Online for the images of European Peace Keepers in Africa, A car bombing in Iraq, and French Rioters on Sarkozy's election night.
I was pushed forward by someone trying to get to the front of the crowd. The bell of the horn turned towards me. People around me hunched their shoulders, almost cowering. It seemed too late for me. I saw the eyes of the soldiers.“Do you want to ask something?” the man on the bullhorn challenged, uninvitingly. People looked at me. I saw them looking at me and felt a wave of nausea. I answered, in a loud, clear voice:
“It seems like a lot of people are missing. Where'd they go?” JLI pulled on my arm.
I don't know how many people heard me, but at that moment, I thought everybody did.
“I'm not sure I understand what your question means. Are you suggesting we are responsible for the recent depopulation?”
“We just want information. We want to know who means to govern us, you know. We used to govern ourselves.” JLI pulled on my arm harder and hissed. There was some talk amongst the soldiers, more of them were drifting over, the better to hear the idiot talk. They were jeering at me. I went on: “Are you from the provisional government? Are you here to help us?”
“We're here to control this roadway. That means keeping the peace. That means ensuring that traffic laws are obeyed. It also means ensuring that way-stations such as this provide essential services and remain free of any subversive activity that could compromise our control over this roadway. We are not providing aid. We are providing security.”
Though he was not reading from a piece of paper, the statement seemed prepared. A tittering swept through crowd. People who hadn't heard were asking people who had what he said. There was an unintelligible shout that sounded angry. The bullhorn scanned the crowd, looking for the culprit.
“Will the provisional government be helping people relocate?” I asked.
“We aren't relocating you, we are pacifying you.”
“What have we done that we need pacifying?” the exasperation in my voice was not hidden.
“What have you done that you need relocating?” the bullhorn asked, with killing wit. The other team leader, who had been squatting over the body of the flier distributor they had shot and going through his pockets, stood up and snatched the bullhorn from him. He said loudly,
“This area is now under security control. Please disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business has been completed. Please disperse. This area is now under security control. Please Disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business here has been completed . . .”
The low words bubbling through the crowd became louder. The words “killed” and “murder” were heard repeatedly. The crowd hushed and in the silence, the bullhorn sounded that much louder and the closing of car doors was like an echo of a book being dropped in a library. Perhaps because I had spoken, many people were looking at me.
“Ask him who the president is.”“Ask him where we can find a hospital.”
“Ask him if there are any new maps being circulated.”
“Where—can we find—a representative—of the provisional—authorities—who can answer—our questions?” I asked very loudly. I couldn't shout down the bullhorn, but I was heard by some. People at least heard that I was shouting. JLI whispered something plaintive I didn't hear.
“Disperse. This area is under security control. Disperse. This area is under security control . . .”
I thought about walking up and trying to ask my questions face to face, but the body of the man in the Santa Claus get-up lay at their feet in a pool of his own blood, his head like a broken eggshell. It gave me pause. A round man with large red eyes behind his glasses, who had clearly been disturbed by the shooting, climbed up on a car to shout:
“What the fuck is going on? What the fuck is going on?”
A gray woman who could have been his mother, scrambled to pull at his pant leg, so that he kept slipping as he attempted to get up the windshield and stand on the roof.
“Must've knew him,” I heard a voice near me say.
“This guy isn't getting us anywhere,” I heard a woman say, gesturing at me as she turned away. The soldiers holding the perimeter near us began to crane their necks, taking interest in the man shouting as his mother pulled at him. One made a gesture like turning an invisible doorknob over his shoulder. The leader on the bullhorn hardly broke the monotony of his repetition with a simple:
“Yeah, bring him in.”
The three closest troops closed up their intervals and moved forward. Their bayonets flashed. The crowd melted away at their approach. They swept their guns back and forth as they moved, rehearsing a massacre. People were pushing and shoving to get away from them. Isolated horn-blasts increased in frequency. When the soldiers got to where the man was scrabbling up his windshield, struggling against his mother like a child throwing a tantrum, a ring of people were standing, watching.
“Come with us, buddy,” said a soldier.
“What the fuck is going on?” The man had finally kicked away his mother and was flapping his arms up and down to punctuate his yowling like a deranged cheerleader.
“Come down, sir—you're frightening people,” said another and gestured with his finger to the ground. He wasn't even looking at the man, but was watching the crowd, which was watching his every move. He didn't like it.
“Who the fuck are you? What is going on?”
The soldier who hadn't spoken was holding his hand to the side of his helmet as if trying to listen to a transmission. He nodded, looked around, stood on tip-toes, found the officer with the bullhorn, gave him a thumbs-up and received one in return, then pointed his rifle at the man and said:
“You are disturbing the peace and must come with us. Get down now.” He turned his rifle up a few degrees and fired. Women screamed. The warning shot had a remarkable effect on the man. Despite the cold, he began to undress. His coat came off fast, but he got frustrated with the buttons on his shirt and just tore it open. Tears were streaming down his face as he began struggling with his belt. His mother was reaching up to him as if he were a cat stuck in a tree.
“Who the fuck—Ahhh!—what's going on? What's going on?”
When he whipped his belt out, he swung it around his head in a vaguely menacing gesture and they shot him at least thirty times before he even fell over. A mist of blood hung in the air for an instant. The ring of their casings hitting the ground and bouncing was musical. The man's mother sat on the pavement. The crowd had all hit the ground or crouched behind cars and only slowly began to raise their heads again. As they did, the clipped clucking of cowed disapproval filled the air. The soldiers began to back away. As they did so, they passed me. I was standing in something like awe of their ability to turn the world to hell.
They saw me looking at them and approached me as I wondered whether it was safer to stand or retreat.
“Hey, what the hell was this guy talking about?” the one who had fired the warning shot said, pointing at me with the barrel of his rifle.“I don't know, but it sounded kind of, uh, subversiony,” said another, over his shoulder, walking backwards, “like, uh, he said something about government: isn't that subverting?”
“I don't think it works like that,” I said.
“Well, how does it work, buddy?” he snarled.
“Not very well, apparently.”
“Should we take care of this?” The other was speaking, I realized, into his helmet-mounted intercom. “I'm sorry I didn't get that. Sorry, could you repeat that? One more time?”
“No, we asked him if he had a question,” said the man with the bullhorn. “Over.”
The mood of the mob had changed and now pressure from the crowd was pressing everyone forward, and it was difficult to fight back against the press of bodies without being violent. The soldiers began to back away towards the man with the bullhorn. The two teams united in a huddle and the man with the bullhorn pointed back towards the exit and the tank. They moved out across the parking lot towards it. The crowd, simultaneously pushing towards the soldiers from behind and back from the soldiers' advance where it occurred, was in a state of maximum compression, as in the scrums of rioting. The soldiers could not pass.
There was an explosion and a car flipped in the air. It landed nose first on another car and demolished it. The explosion ruined every car within its radius of contact. Burning debris was everywhere and many people expressed fear that there would be another explosion. As they were calling out over the noise of the after-blast, another car did explode and the whole thing happened all over again. When the two blasts had died in reverberations that continued only in the mind, it was clear that many people had died. My side of the crowd was unharmed. But on the other side of the parking lot, the dead closest to the cars were just heads and limbs and chunks of torso. The blood of those closest to the explosions had instantly broiled into a sizzling goo that was difficult to distinguish from the burning oil. Further out where glass and pieces of metal had flown the blood flowed audibly from dying and grievously wounded bodies. The soldiers charged forward into the stunned, prone masses and proceeded through them, at a jog, to the exit. Bits of flaming rubber were falling, smoking, through the air like brimstone.
A man who seemed to think that I was to blame, rushed me even as debris was still falling.
“You're getting people killed for bullshit. That was bullshit. What are you saying? You're not making any sense. You're not making any sense. You're gonna get us all killed. What do you mean 'we mean to govern ourselves'? Who is 'we'? Who are you? People are dead because of you!”
He tried to strangle me, but others in the crowd restrained him. I could see veins in his eyeballs and stood as if hypnotized. There was a moment when I realized the people who were restraining him were waiting for me to say what to do with him. He was an older man. I did not hesitate in thinking that he might be right. Perhaps the tank shelled us because the soldiers had radioed in that a madman was trying to confuse people into attacking them, the people were blocking retreat and closing in: do something. So they shelled us and the troops slipped away in the chaos. My fault? Why not?
JLI led me away by the hand. There were men tearing their shirts for bandages. Under JLI's silent instruction, I began to tend the wounded which meant pressing handfuls of clothing into a woman's gaping wound and dragging her away behind the restaurant, out of the tank's line of sight. Some people's blood smoked in the cold. The sounds of men shouting just barely drowned out the sounds of women screaming. There were doctors in the crowd. Three to be precise. They made a makeshift surgery in the garage. Napkins, knives and pots of boiling water were brought from the restaurant. Several casualties who had been blinded were placed together in the game room and they sat as if potted, listening, waiting for something, while lights from the video games flashed on their bandages. A man, about my age, had a shirt wrapped around his head. He looked as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over him. He was calling out. I think it was a name. No one answered him.
There was the sound of gunfire from somewhere in the distance as if many balloons were being popped. One of the doctors came to me with bloody hands. He began to wipe them on a dishcloth. A little boy with a bowl of black hair came up and stood next to him, hooking his index finger through the doctor's belt loop. I was ready to swear this was the boy I had glimpsed underground.
“Where are you going now?”
I looked at his face. Under a shock of iron gray hair, nobly weather-beaten features were arranged with a regularity that suggested intelligence. I knew that face, he was the man I had seen in the survivor's tent. He must've known all about the relief efforts. I wanted to ask him what he thought I should do, where he was going—essentially, to lead me. But I saw that for whatever reason, he was asking the same of me. To my surprise, I told him my destination, though I had not known it myself.
“I guess Arkansas. It seems like that's where I should go. If I have family left, that's where I should look for them.”
“I'm heading that way.”
Thank you to Broken Silence, USA Today, and The Daily Mail Online for the images of European Peace Keepers in Africa, A car bombing in Iraq, and French Rioters on Sarkozy's election night.
