Battle Cry (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 4) Page 2

The code wasn't terribly clever, but anyone who was listening for keywords alone probably wouldn't have caught onto it.

  “Let's head inside,” Sim said, turning to walk in before Justin had a chance to respond.

  They entered the stadium and began patrolling the lobby. Citizens were still making their way through the area, scrambling through doors that would lead them to their assigned sections. There was a constant hum of conversation throughout the place, though Justin couldn't hear any one conversation clearly.

  The stadium was one of the nicer buildings that Justin had seen open to common citizens. The floors were clean. The walls weren't cracked. It was nice, but only because it was one of the few places that common citizens shared with the elite class, which included the Mayor.

  As he walked through the crowd of people, they moved aside for him. Some averted their eyes, choosing to look down at the ground rather than look at him. Kids hid behind their parents. Justin was in a position of power. He could choose any one of them at random, slap a pair of cuffs around their wrists and make sure that they were never heard from again.

  To some, this power was like a drug. They enjoyed people cowering in fear as they walked past. Justin didn't enjoy it at all. To him, it was a sign of everything that was wrong with the world. But it did make it easier to move through a crowd.

  “Four-Four-Eight, Three-One-One,” said a voice over Justin's earpiece.

  “Four-Four-Eight,” Sim replied, before Justin had a chance.

  “Four-Four-Eight, you have been assigned to section three, upper level entrance.”

  “Copy,” Sim replied. He raised his eyebrows to Justin and walked away.

  Putting a finger to his earpiece, Justin said, “Three-One-One.”

  He started walking before the dispatcher had finished giving him his new orders, and followed Sim to their new position.

  Guarding a doorway wasn't as thrilling as being a wandering patrolman, but Justin didn't care.

  “At least we can watch the game,” Sim told him as he took his spot on the left side of the door. He nodded toward a TV that was hung on a nearby pillar.

  Justin stood on the right side of the door. He didn't look to the TV. He scanned the crowd. That was what he was there to do.

  Four more HAND officers walked past Justin. None of them looked his way. While Sim might crack jokes with his old friend Justin now and then, he wasn't as jovial with the other officers while on duty.

  Justin and Sim stood by that door, watching as the last of the citizens entered the main stadium and took their seats. The doors remained open as music started playing and the crowd began to cheer.

  After a while, the music died down and a woman's voice came over every speaker in the place. Justin glanced toward the TV, seeing Tash Parsins, a major TV personality from a show that Justin had never watched, standing in the field with a microphone in front of her.

  “Welcome to the game to end all games!” she smiled before shrugging and adding, “Well, for this year at least.”

  A small laugh came from the crowd.

  “Tonight, I am honored to give the introduction to this amazing event. I have watched these games since I was a little girl...”

  Of course she had. The game was broadcast on every channel in the country, in an effort to promote a sense of community among the citizens. Everyone had been watching since they were little kids.

  Tash continued, “Before we get on with the game, I would like to welcome both our city's Mayor Northfolk, as well as our state's Governor Garrison. Our leaders are the torch that guides us through an ever-darkening night, and on behalf of the citizens of this city, I would like to thank them for all that they do to keep us safe.”

  After a moment or two, cheers roared through the crowd. To be fair to those citizens, they didn't have much of a choice. Not cheering for that comment would be like waving a Freedom flag.

  “And now, as is the proud tradition of the game, we have chosen a local child to come out here tonight and recite the pledge of allegiance. If everyone would please rise and give a warm welcome to Mandi Hollinger.”

  Tash turned to her side and began to clap. The crowd followed her lead as a little girl nervously walked out onto the field.

  Mandi was a small child, perhaps six or seven years old. She had golden blond hair and big blue eyes, which probably sparkled when they weren't filled with dread.

  Tash helped Mandi to the microphone and lowered it to the girl's level before stepping aside.

  Mandi stood silently, staring at the crowd for a moment. She looked as though she were about to burst into tears as she wrung her hands together. The sound of her heavy breathing echoed throughout the stadium.

  Mandi looked to her side, undoubtedly at her parents or someone else that she trusted. Then, after a slight nod, she said, “I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America. T—To those who lead us. To those who protect us. To those who give us food. I pled—um—I pledge my life to uphold its laws and to keep a watchful eye. I...” Mandi trailed off. She was getting lost in her words.

  Justin couldn't help but keep his eyes on her face as the stadium's cameras moved in closer and closer.

  She pressed on, with no other choice, “I... I mean... With liberty and justice for all.”

  Mandi looked to her side, just as the TV screen went blank. The stadium was absolutely silent. Justin's breath was caught in his chest.

  'With liberty and justice for all' was not how the pledge was supposed to end. It was supposed to end with 'For city, for nation, for all.'

  With that one mistake, Mandi exposed herself and her family as members of Freedom in front of thousands, of people. In front of the Mayor. In front of the Governor, who Justin didn't even know was there until Tash told the crowd.

  The silence was deafening. Justin had no choice but to stand where he was until he was ordered to do otherwise, and he couldn't see what was happening inside the stadium. The TV screen now showed only commercials, without the audio.

  Justin held his breath, waiting for whatever came next. He glanced over at Sim, whose eyes were narrowed. He was waiting as well. In that one moment, whether you were a loyalist or a rebel, you had to know that things were about to get ugly.

  2

  There was something about the day that seemed off somehow. The sky was clear, save for a few scattered clouds and the normal amount of drones that were flying overhead. The number seemed to grow each year, ever since the destruction of the Garden. After that, there wasn't much reason for the authorities to hold back. People knew that if they stepped out of line, they would be destroyed. If anyone thought that things couldn't have possibly gotten worse than they had already been, they were wrong. Things were worse.

  Still, something about this day felt different. There was heaviness in the air. Dor couldn't quite put her finger on what it was or what it meant, but she knew that something was happening.

  She would have loved to blame this on her journalistic instincts, or some stupid psychic powers, like those written about in comic books, but this wasn't a superpower. This was observation.

  Sitting on a bench across the street from KCTY, channel 14, Dor was watching the station employees come and go. She watched the journalists exit their cars—driven by specially trained chauffeurs of course—and hurry into the building. She watched producers and writers walk together, talking about the day's stories.

  She also watched an old sitcom playing on one of the TV screens inside the building, instead of the most important sporting event of the year. That wasn't right. She just didn't know what it meant.

  Several large-screen monitors that were attached to the sides of nearby buildings should have been showing the game as well, but they just kept scrolling through the normal propaganda images instead, with messages like 'LOYALTY IS REWARDED' and 'SECURITY THROUGH UNITY' being flashed in between images of happy citizens and smiling HAND officers.

  The propaganda campaign had been dialed up in the city for seve
ral years, since the destruction of the Garden. Maybe the authorities hoped that flashing images on giant monitors would pull peoples' eyes away from the drones flying overhead, or the newly redesigned, tank-like HAND vehicles that crawled up and down the streets.

  Dor was eating her lunch as she watched them. It was a sandwich, made from everyday rations, rather than the food provided by Freedom. The meat was yellow. The bread was full of holes, in the areas where she had been forced to peel away the mold. It was disgusting, but she was used to it. Breakfast and dinner were passable, but she usually ate lunch in public. That meant keeping up her cover, no matter the cost.

  Three boys walked by her. They were younger, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. As they passed, Dor spotted something familiar sticking out of one boy's backpack. It was a comic book called 'REBELLIOUS', about a small group of Freedom fighters who survived an attack on their base and have set out to rid the city of alien invaders who have been posing as government employees. The copy that Dor saw was issue number seventy-four: 'The Rise of the Ruby Empress.' Twenty-five pages long.

  Dor knew that issue like the back of her hand. She was the one who wrote it, after all.

  The teenagers were mumbling to each other, ignoring Dor as she sat there on the steps. They were laughing, like she had always imagined normal teenagers laughing. She'd never had that life.

  “Hey, kid,” she called to the boy with the backpack.

  The boys stopped and looked her way as she stood and stepped down from the steps. She walked over to them.

  “Any of you know what time it is?” she asked, innocently enough as she stepped closer and zipped up the backpack, hiding the comic book.

  “No, ma'am,” the boy with the backpack replied, seeming to understand what she had just done.

  “Thanks anyway,” she replied and moved past them, tossing the rest of her lunch into a nearby trash can.

  She crossed the street, just as a man and a woman were approaching the KCTY building. The man was slightly overweight and balding, wearing a poorly-tailored suit. The woman was thin, blond and had that plastic look to her hair that let the world know that she was on-air talent.

  The two of them were in the middle of a conversation as they approached the building, but Dor stopped short in front of them and put on her best smile.

  “Oh, wow,” Dor said, waving her hands in the air like an excited child. “You're her. You're Molly Jenkins, the voice of the nightly news.”

  The man and woman stopped walking. The man seemed amused by Dor, but Molly was visibly annoyed.

  “You have a fan,” the man said to Molly.

  Dor stepped forward and extended her hand, “The biggest. I'm Min. Min Powell. It's such an honor to meet you. I watch your show every night. Which, I know is dorky. My friends make fun of me, but whatever. I like to be informed.”

  “Knowledge never hurt anyone,” the man smiled.

  It was a true enough comment, but the nightly news didn't deal in knowledge. They dealt in propaganda. Dor would have rolled her eyes at the man if it wouldn't have completely blown her cover.

  “I wish I was assigned to the media. I always wanted to be. I wasn't that lucky though. I got stuck with food service,” Dor said, still smiling and trying to seem like an annoying fan.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you,” the man said to her, trying to take Molly's arm and move on.

  “I'd really love to ask you a question though,” Dor went on, ignoring his obvious attempt to pull Molly away. She looked at Molly and said, “About your hair. How do you get it to look like that? I try, but mine just flops all over the place.”

  “We really need to go,” the man told Dor.

  “Just that one question? Please?” Dor replied, then looked at the man and said, “Girl talk.”

  The man sighed, “We really—”

  “No, it's fine,” Molly chimed in, with an annoyed smile. She looked to her friend and said, “You go inside. I'll meet you there in a sec.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  The man hesitated for a second before walking into the building. Dor watched him go with that big smile on her face. As soon as he was inside and out of view, her smile dropped and she turned to Molly.

  “You have something for me?” Dor asked, now all-business.

  Molly looked around, to make sure that they weren't being watched before answering, “Something is going on with the food supply coming into the city. A lot of citizens have noticed their lists being cut back, so the authorities want us to spin the story. They want us to tell people that it was a Hate attack, but keep them from panicking.”

  “What really happened?”

  “I don't know. But as far as I can tell, there was no attack. All of the details about it are vague. No location. No victims being treated. I'm not even sure the train came in fully loaded.”

  “Could they be cutting supplies on purpose? Who's having their lists cut back?”

  “Old people. Sick people. But that's nothing new.”

  Dor took in the information, not sure how it would work its way into a story, but filing it away in her mind. As she considered what Molly told her, Dor's eyes moved to a TV screen inside the KCTY building.

  “I've been passing TV screens all afternoon, looking for the game. It's nowhere to be found. Why? What happened?”

  “I don't know,” Molly replied, once again looking around nervously.

  Molly was not a member of Freedom. She was merely sympathetic. This allowed her to help them without being one of them. She could keep a distance. Some considered this a cowardly position to put herself in, but Dor didn't see it that way. She saw a woman who realized that something was wrong with their world. Even if Molly wasn't willing to commit to Freedom, she recognized the flaws in the system.

  Molly didn't help Freedom, she fed information to Collin Powers. She trusted him, and eventually came to trust Dor, but she had a set of limitations that somehow allowed her to rationalize her actions to herself. In Molly's mind, she wasn't betraying her system when she fed information to Collin. She was just reporting the news.

  “Have you been inside?” Dor asked her.

  “Not since this morning. I was just called back from lunch early.”

  “Why were you called back?”

  Molly pressed her lips together. Part of her obviously wanted to tell Dor why she was called in, but she couldn't.

  The limitations that Molly had set allowed her to feed small stories to Collin here and there. Things that she wouldn't be allowed to report on the news, but nothing that would blow back on her. Nothing big.

  Her unwillingness to talk to Dor said quite a bit about what was happening. Dor's interest was piqued.

  “Did something happen at the game?” Dor asked.

  “I have to go. I can't do this now.”

  Dor turned and looked through one of the windows of the KCTY building. She saw an old sitcom playing on the TV and shook her head.

  “There is no game,” she concluded. “The Mayor was going to be there.”

  “The Governor too,” Molly allowed.

  Dor turned toward Molly. This was new. Dor hadn't heard anything about the Governor being in town.

  There was something about Molly that made her different than most news reporters. She wasn't one of the elite, who chose journalism for the thrill of it. She had grown up in the city, in the same type of apartment as anyone else, living off of the same horrible food as anyone else. Few people could make the transition from lowly commoner to being a member of the media. Getting that assignment was like winning the lottery. Molly was special.

  It was only after spending some time on the street, reporting false information and glamorizing atrocities, that Molly started to question the system. But she was too deep inside and could fall harder than most if she were ever found to be a Freedom sympathizer. Dor understood that.

  “I have to go,” Molly said to Dor, once again looking around the area.

  Molly
wasn't simply nervous about being caught this time, she was scared. Whatever was happening, it was important.

  3

  Someone got their hands on a large bag of chicken wings. Rose had no idea who got them or how they got them, but these wings were being fried up, covered in hot sauce and passed around the Underground while music played and people laughed.

  It didn't happen often, but the members of the Underground were riding high on a victory. Just one night before, a team from their base cut off a shipment of supplements that was headed to one of the hospitals in the city. If that meant that some citizens would have to go without supplements for only a day or two, it would make a difference. Those people might not have enough time to flush all of the mood enhancers from their systems, but they might feel something more than normal.

  Rose wasn't sure how big of an impact that mission would have on the people of the city, but she celebrated with the rest of her people, because it was an action against the authorities. After decades of compliance and cowering, Freedom was standing against the system in a real, tangible way, and they were victorious. At that moment, someone in a fancy suit was angry about the failed shipment, someone else was angry about the burning truck on the side of the road, and someone else was upset that Freedom now had the power to stand in the way of a federally sanctioned transport. Those thoughts made Rose warm inside.

  Well, the spicy chicken wings helped that too.

  These were the moments that Rose loved. The moments when everyone around her felt united. When she didn't have to look over her shoulder. When she didn't have to think about what was happening right above their heads. These moments were electric, and everyone felt the buzz.

  That said, Rose would have loved the moment even more if she'd been able to take part in the mission. She had been sidelined for weeks because of a broken arm, sustained while evading HAND officers during a mission to save a woman from being arrested. It wasn't quite as flashy as the time that she set off a series of smoke bombs and stole a HAND vehicle in order to save a girl, but it was a mission accomplished, so it was no less important.