“Thanks!” Two plainclothes cops moved to the runner, cuffing his hands behind his back with emphasis. Jean-Jacques turned to move away, wondering why he’d mechanically sided with the fucking law. One of the plainclothes looked up.
“Oh my God. It’s you. The Volunteer, right? Dash.”
The young, fine-boned policeman stuck out his hand. Jean-Jacques gripped it with a quick squeeze.
“You—you wouldn’t remember. But I was with 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines. In Cyprus? I briefed you on targeting packets a couple years back.”
“Semper Fi,” Jean-Jacques said. Of course he didn’t remember this babylon who’d been a marine. “Good to see you again.” But a warfighter connection could be of some use tonight. “The hell happened here, brother?”
The policeman shared what he knew. The ECPD had been alerted to the anti-colony demonstration; there’d been a recent increase in them, for reasons unknown. They tended to be loud and acrimonious, a lot of sound, a lot of excitement, but nothing more than that. Never violent. A great way to earn overtime, the policeman explained. Tonight, though—tonight had been different. He’d shown up late to the scene, just as the fists began.
“The protestors started it,” the policeman said. “Definitely.”
“With who?”
“Oh. You’ve been away. The Sheepdogs, of course.”
The Sheepdogs? A group of ex-military and retired police. They considered themselves keepers of peace, guardians, in a way, men with both a history of service and plenty of free time. They followed around various protests across the city, across the country, to fill the gaps of order. Protect private property. Serve as augmentee security for local police. Citizen’s arrests. That sort of thing.
“Some can be assholes,” the policeman told Jean-Jacques. “Have a hard time remembering they’re not still in uniform. But they mean well. And they’re handy in spots. Like tonight.”
Jean-Jacques hadn’t come to Xavier Station to talk about wrinkled-ass babylons playing at the past. He asked if the man had heard of the Mayday Front.
The policeman shook his head. “Protest groups, especially the anti-colony ones, they’re kinda all over the place. Always a new group, a new name. Always splitting into different factions. It’s what the angry left does.”
Jean-Jacques thanked the man for his time and kept moving. Radical war veterans attacking the homeland? Organized peacemonger militias? A gang of ex-police that called themselves fucking Sheepdogs? It was tough to keep straight. Get me back to combat, he thought. Get me back to the damn war.
Still. Some of it seemed familiar to Jean-Jacques. America, abroad, it was all the same, even as the rules varied and the players changed. One name to the game. Pouvwa. Power.
Anything to get it. Anything to keep it.
Away from the station steps, Jean-Jacques approached the final group. It was the only place he hadn’t searched for Emmanuel. His steps were measured, his hands as clear from his pockets as he could get them. The police outnumbered the citizens two to one, but there was a force still churning here that suggested anything but aftermath. The resignation of the teens and the neutered energy of the white kids became harmless contrast. Fewer were handcuffed here, but there was shouting, throaty noise being tossed around like firecrackers. And it wasn’t coming from the police.
He narrowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Sheepdogs. Most looked big and thick, wrapped in tactical vests and camo wear. A few had walkie-talkies on their hips. He spotted a couple of iron cross tattoos and holstered pistols. Protestors or not, there was no way the teenage scarecrows he’d walked past had started tonight’s brawl.
The Sheepdogs seemed to be arguing with the police over two of their own being handcuffed. “We came here to keep order,” one said, his finger in a young police’s face. “You’re doing this wrong.”
A tall Sheepdog with a walkie-talkie turned, his face cratering as he took in Jean-Jacques. “What you looking at, milk dud?” he said. “This don’t concern you.”
The young police told the Sheepdog to calm down, but he persisted. Then some of the others saw Jean-Jacques, too, and began shouting themselves. Jean-Jacques started walking toward them. Milk dud, he thought. Funny. Because I’m bald. His blood turned fast as he repeated the slur in his head. Anger didn’t fill him so much as the cold thrill of reckoning did. This would be fun.
“Wouldn’t do that, cousin.” Kreyol scratched at the air behind Jean-Jacques. He turned sideways to find Emmanuel rising up from a crouch. He’d been in the shadows. “Unless you want to end up in the back of a law rider.”
“Where you been? What kind of gang shit you into here?”
“Gang?” Emmanuel winced and crossed his arms over his stomach. The accusation seemed to pain him. “I’m no thug, man. I’m one of the good guys. Like you.”
“Really.” Everyone thinks they’re the good guys, Jean-Jacques thought. Even wogs. He tried to get Emmanuel to explain the riot.
“No time now. Follow me.” Emmanuel took off at a slow trot down a dark path, away from the station and siren lights. His body turned to silhouette in seconds. Jean-Jacques held still for a moment, considering his options. Then he followed, belligerent slurs trailing his steps.
* * *
Jean-Jacques didn’t care for regrets, nor did he have many. Not being with his mother when she died was one. Not keeping up with his kreyol was another. But from the wars? Regrets were foolish. Regrets were weakness. Duty trumped all, and duty meant looking forward, to the next mission, to the next room, to the next pull of the trigger. It meant being ever ready and staying vigilant. Regret got in the way of all that.
Though there was the boy.
In the days before the botched Tripoli raid and the cythrax bomb, the Rangers had stopped at a nearby base to finalize their prep. A base worker found Jean-Jacques there, picking up his laundry. Despite himself, he stopped to listen. Something about her desperation. The way it pierced her reserve. The way it penetrated his skepticism.
Insurgents had taken her eleven-year-old boy. Not hostage, exactly, but not unlike it, either. They’d drafted him into jihadist school. But her child, her only precious child, was no soldier. She showed him a photograph. He had big, soft eyes and a smart angular face. He was to be a doctor, she said, or an aid worker. Someone who served others. That’s why they’d come here, to Tripoli, fleeing the lawless terror along the border. For a better life.
Jean-Jacques couldn’t help it. He thought of his mother doing the same for him, getting them on a boat bound for land or bound for death, but bound for something different. He said he’d look for the boy. No promises, he said. But he’d try.
After the cythrax bomb fell from the sky, Jean-Jacques had been the first survivor to find consciousness. He hadn’t wanted to. He remembered that more than anything. He’d wanted to stay lost in the other side, tucked into the cocoon of forever gone. But death forced him back to life, that specific blend of propellant, hot blood, and emptied bowels splintering his nostrils and then his mind.
So he rose from severed ground and took in the end times.
Before he found an alive Pete Swenson, before he found an alive Sebastian Rios, before a still-alive Grady Flowers stumbled from the helicopter wreckage with a still-alive Mia Tucker, Jean-Jacques found the boy with big, soft eyes. He lay in a field of rice stalks, less incinerated than the other bodies but no less dead. And because of that, and because of the boy’s photograph and because of the boy’s mother and because of the boy’s mother’s desperate, desperate need and because in that minute Jean-Jacques felt certain he was the last person left on earth, he cradled the boy’s body with his own and wept.