Day 1

REBELS
by Roger Ostrander

- I -

1: Firefight

"It was like a prison. I don't know how else to describe it. I'd come there voluntarily but it was a prison all the same. Guards, watch towers, barbed-wire fences. No, they told me, this is to keep others out. It's in the middle of the desert. There's nobody to keep out. No, no, this was to keep me in. I was in prison."

I wasn't in a prison. It wasn't the right word for this, this waiting. Them outside, us inside. Them, with full view of the house, no doubt by this time provided from some unmanned flying camera doing loops thousands of feet overhead. Us, with the spaces between the boards in the window as our only hint to the outside. We hadn't boarded up the windows, we'd found the place like that, but John had decided that they only made it more defensible and thus we'd moved in. He'd been right, of course, the boards prevented them from storming right in, but they also prevented us from seeing much of what was going on outside. For that they'd been relying on me, and I'd let them down.

Siege. I was under siege. That's the word I'm looking for.

Two Troopers, full uniform, full of lights and action, had pulled up in front of the house - how long ago? It seemed like days, but it couldn't have been more than hours. They'd made a big show of it, mainly because they had no reason not to. It was impossible for Troopers to walk into a quarantine zone without everyone nearly instantly knowing who they were. Instead of subtlety, then, they relied on showiness and brute force. Their uniforms included bullet-proof vests and underarmor, and every one of them had those helmets they're convinced make them safe. They're wrong, and that's the only reason I wasn't in custody or - more likely - dead.

"How many?" came a low quiet voice next to me. I'd been concentrating so much on the outside that I'd let my awareness of the inside slip, and the voice - quiet but calm, low but insistent - startled me.

"I don't know." I replied.

Dana - even in the failing light I'd recognize her, her voice had been known to me nearly all my life - Dana frowned in understanding. "How long have they been jamming you?"

"Half hour." I said simply. There wasn't any more to say. I'd long ago learned how to get around the helmets, but the jamming was far more active, far more intrusive. It felt like a mild headache outside, and I could perceive nothing through it. More Troopers had shown up forty-five minutes before, I could tell without even trying that they were far more organized than the pair who had been standing vigil before. The more recent arrivals had been the ones to set up the jammer; I suspect more to keep the rest of the community in the dark than to stop me from doing anything.

I turned my attention away from the increasingly vanishing outdoors and back inside, trying to feel where everyone was, making sure they were okay. This I could do, the jammer thankfully didn't reach this far.

Dana, as I already knew, was next to me. There was no fear in her, she felt utterly convinced that we would find a way out - no, that John would find a way out. Then I found the fear, not for her, but for him. He'd find his way out blasting, he'd be riddled with bullets, he'd be tortured and then killed. There was fear there, yes, but none of it made it to the surface, and I felt guilty suddenly that I'd followed that thread so far. I turned my attention away from her.

John was in another room, toward the back, looking out to see if the Troopers had, as a loudspeaker informed us half an hour ago when the jamming began, surrounded us. They had. The two original policemen were back there, and they seemed none too happy. John toyed with the idea of coming back to us and saying that the cops had lied, that there wasn't anyone out back but if we wanted to make it out we'd certainly have to escape there before were. He discarded the idea not because it meant he'd have to lie to us, but because it would mean that Dana would be unprepared, and he'd need her fighting ability to get past the guards. Besides, he thought, Derek would catch the lie.

"Derek." Jamie spoke. She was in the back of the room, what we'd been calling the living room, and she'd been there pretty much the entire time. The color had drained from her face and you didn't have to have my abilities to tell she'd never seen combat before. A gun was on the floor next to her; John had handed it to her when the siege began, and she'd set it aside and not picked it up since.

"How can I help you Jamie?" I asked, as kindly as I could. John had read me the riot act over bringing Jamie along on this one. It boiled down to me thinking she was ready, and John thinking she was not. So far John seemed right.

"Am I terrified?"

I wanted to laugh at the question, but I knew instantly that she meant it in all seriousness. She wasn't terrified, she was strangely calm and I worried for a moment that she was going into shock or having some sort of breakdown. That didn't seem to be the case, though. She was calm, she was rational enough to know that she should be terrified, and she wanted me to check in to make sure that she was not, in fact, going to bits.

I should have been a psychiatrist.

"You're fine, Jamie. You don't need me to tell you that." She nodded at this news, and her eyes went back to looking at the front door. Though she hadn't picked it up or even looked at it since John had given it to her, her mind was constantly pulled back to the gun by her side. Could she use it? Could she not use it? Were the rumors of what they did in the interrogation rooms true? If they were, perhaps there was another use for the gun, another way out of the situation.

I got out of her head, then. I didn't want to hear what she was thinking. I turned my thoughts back outside to the dull pain of the jammer, trying to perceive anything beyond it. It was hopeless, I knew, but it was better than despair.

John came thundering into the room. "They weren't lying when they said they had us surrounded. There's two of them out back, those same screwups who started this damn mess." he smiled, briefly. "If we rushed them, we could punch our way out of this mess." The old idea of tricking us into rushing out the back had given way to a new idea where he'd tell the truth to get us to rushing out the back. It was novel thinking for John.

"What kind of weapons did they have?" I asked.

John looked annoyed that I should ask the question. What did it matter? It was four against two, we could take them. "Service pistols. Stunners. Nothing like this." he held his shotgun aloft.

At that exact moment there came the sound of gunfire, but John was too well trained to have let his gun go off by accident. The shots came from outside.

"It's Mr. Stahl." Dana said, a slight grin on her face. She'd never kept her eyes off of the events outside, and so had been the only one to see it. "He tried to leave his house. I think they want him to stay put. That first shot was up in the air, but the second one nearly hit him. He's back inside now."

"Serves him right." John said. "That'll teach him what happens to collaborators."

Mr. Stahl lived next door and was technically the one leasing us the house, though he appeared to have no legal ownership. He was also lending us his internet link, which is how Jamie learned he was the one who had tipped off the troopers to our presence. Stahl had claimed the hookup was a mere 'extension' but it was quite clear (at least to Jamie, who had made a living doing this sort of thing) that it was actually a very illegal tap. And so when Stahl sent the tip, we got a copy too. By the time Jamie had decoded it, though, it had been too late to run. She felt - again, I didn't have to do anything to know this - that the siege was her fault. She was wrong, of course. John and Dana had relied on me when they were dealing with Mr. Stahl, and I hadn't found anything. I should have delved deeper. Part of me knew that Stahl was just greedy, and the idea that he could have our money and Trooper reward money too hadn't occurred to him until later, but the rest of me insisted I should have looked harder.

There were twelve of them now, five in front, five in back, one on each side. Two of the most heavily armored in front were holding up a battering ram. They were right outside the door, and after straining so hard to feel anything in that numbing haze their knowledge flooded into me.

There was a 'Thud' and the door buckled, but held. John had found cover behind a table he'd overturned and Dana was on her way too. Jamie had her gun and I didn't dare ask what she intended to do with it. Me, I stayed where I was, because something was wrong, the door-breakers were a distraction.

The back window blew in. "That's our cue" the guys up front said, or thought, I couldn't even tell at this point, my head was ringing. Canisters of tear gas landed in the adjacent room through the smoking hole that had been a window. The door buckled again and then shattered. Jamie, bless her soul, shot the first man through right in the chest and John followed up with the shotgun blast. He went down, but he wasn't dead, wasn't even really hurt - though he certainly didn't know that. The second trooper fired up the stunner while more rolled in. The shotgun blared, I couldn't see it anymore, everything was getting dark and heavy. My arms twitched as the full power of the stunner was trained on me. My last thoughts before drifting into oblivion were that I didn't even have a gun, why had they picked me out first?

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