'Yeah?'
'Well I mean if we've already been judged, right? If God has already decided who's good and who's bad and all that shit' then what we do from now on just doesn't matter. Like we could, I don't know, maybe you and I could. Well.'
'Yeah.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'I'll be right over.'
[Telephone call between two local customers in Boise, ID, 4/8/05]
'Fuck you!' With a baby screaming in the crook of his left arm he lifted his shiny pistol and fired again. Bannerman Clark wondered if the man was even aiming. He certainly wasn't hitting anything. 'Fuck you,' he yelped with every shot. His voice had gone hoarse with it.
With a hand signal Clark sent Squad Three forward to back the man up. The infected citizens of Fountain, Colorado spun and dropped and beat their heels against the sidewalk, one after the other. After the fall of Denver the soldiers knew to take their time and line up perfect head shots. Anything else was a waste of ammunition.
The man with the nickel-plated revolver couldn't seem to bring his arm down. He wore a blue buttoned-down Oxford cloth shirt and tan chinos smudged with what might have been engine grease. Clark was pretty sure it wasn't. 'Somebody'' the man rasped, 'somebody take this baby' it's not mine, oh, fuck.' He closed his eyes and Clark rushed up to grab the infant before the man dropped it. He knew that look, had seen it hundreds of times before. 'Fuck,' he screeched, and started to fold up, his knees turned to gelatin.
'Someone get this man a survival blanket. He's in shock,' Clark shouted but before anyone could obey the order Clark heard the chittering spring-loaded sound of a cheap firearm being cocked. He looked down and saw the revolver pointed up at his face. He could feel the heat coming out of the barrel, smell the spent powder.
Nobody moved. The members of Squad Three were too smart and too well-trained to point their weapons at an armed assailant. Sudden movements and implied threats could spur on a desperate man instead of convincing him to stand down.
'I'm Rich Wylie. I lived over there.' The barrel of the revolver dipped to the left. 'Nice place, you know? I kept the yard nice, fertilized it, watered it all the time. You have to in this climate. I' paid my taxes. Do you understand me? I paid my taxes every goddamned year, I paid your salary and you were supposed to come rescue me.'
'We're here now,' Clark suggested, his tone as soft and even as he could manage. Bannerman Clark had a full board of medals on the breast of his dress uniform. It didn't mean he could look into the barrel of a loaded gun without quaking in his boots. Absurdly the main thought in his head was that he hoped he wouldn't soil his BDUs. Someone would see it, which would mean everyone would know about it within twenty-four hours and the jawjacking would go on forever. Clark knew'he'd been one of those kids with nothing better to do than trade scuttlebutt about the CO. 'If you'll put that weapon down we can''
'If I put this down you won't listen to me! As soon as I do it your guys are going to tackle me, I'm not a complete moron. You need to hear this. You're coming from Denver, right? Yeah, I saw all about that on the news. You're coming from Denver. You were up there trying to do fuck knows what, you, you shot some dead people, ooh, how exciting but down here we didn't have any military to help us. Down here we had two cops, and one of them had diabetes! He didn't do so good.'
It wasn't so much news to Clark as the variation on a theme. The Adjutant General had drawn every troop in Colorado into the defense of Denver, leaving the rest of the front range without a military line of defense. Reinforcements from the east were supposedly on their way but for three critical days Colorado had stood alone.