CHAPTER 5

With nowhere to run, and no hope of finding out the truth, I immersed myself in my work. Every raid we conducted in the backrooms and hidden lots of the City became my personal way of settling some score for what had happened to my family. For all I knew, any of the people we found huddled in their little prayer groups could have been the ones that had taken from me my life. I pulled the trigger of my bright and shiny gun and didn’t bother to ask questions. Each sweep pushed me not further toward closure or contentment, but deeper toward the desire to eradicate all those who opposed the law I was paid to enforce.

My raids became notorious for never producing survivors that would stand trial and face the gauntlet that awaited lawbreakers along the crucifixion line on Broadway. I went for psych evaluations for a while, but they didn’t seem to help so I quit going. The more they analyzed me the angrier I became. The more they made me think about it, all the more I wanted payback. I found that alcohol seemed to dull the pain and make the dreams less vivid, that and my work. I figured as long as I kept myself busy being someone else’s nightmare, I didn’t have to think about my own.

I made squad leader in less than a year, and six months after that I was transferred to Special Operations. I worked alone more and more often, sent in undercover to flush out the secret dissidents and gather information so the Squads could move in and sweep away whole congregations at once. I had become comfortable with infiltrating the little groups as a lost soul in search of their God. It was easy. They were so trusting and gullible. I often wondered how any of them remained at all. I was treated as one of them, given more than enough information to wipe out hordes of the “praying scum” in the time it took to apply for a new credit voucher. The small flat I had taken near the station was lined with commendations, letters of award and service ribbons. In less than five years I became a legend around the squad rooms. Judas Hatcher, best damn MP that ever lived. But I didn’t care about my reputation with my peers. I didn’t care about how great my record made the brass downtown look to the higher ups. I didn’t care that it was my name making its way into some of the textbooks being used at the academy.

So often a man can walk through life and it just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that he has been on more successful sweeps than any other MP in the history of the Protectorate. It doesn’t matter that he is the hero of every rookie coming up the pipeline. It doesn’t matter that the captains and commanders come to you for advice and consultation on their most precious cases. It doesn’t matter that the Mayor has you over for dinner. It doesn’t matter that you spend your off time drowning your pain in a bottle and sleeping with anything that comes your way towards closing time. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does, in the end, except our souls. As far as I was concerned, hell was alive and doing well in the City and I could handle it.

At that point in my life my soul was far from being the top thing on my mind. I spent my days and nights killing and betraying people who risked everything to save their souls, but I had no indication of having one. I had no feelings of good will toward my fellow man. I would just as soon blast a hole in your head than ask the time of day. I would just as soon torture you to find out where your congregation met and who were in charge than shave in the morning. Killing seemed to come easily for me. It became the one thing that helped me out of the bed in the morning.

So I found myself in a bottomless pit of blood and death and I was the reigning king of all that crap. When I dreamt after passing out late at night, having fought to keep my eyes open for days on end, I found myself looking my daughter in the eyes and trying to find the words for why I was killing so many when so many had already been killed. I would sit before a five-year-old little red headed girl in a spring dress and colorful ribbons to listen to the judgement she set forth on me. I would wake in a cold sweat and curse my own soul until I had swallowed enough eighty proof to make it all blur into a rage that sent me back into the streets and the alleys in search of more pain to deliver.

By the time I was hard at work the dreams had faded from my conscious and been replaced by a rage that had to be fulfilled. I was the lion in the night, stalking those who could not run fast enough to get away. I snatched them up in my teeth, innocent and helpless, and I chewed them to shreds and spit them out to make the feelings go away. I was a god, and I saw no need for them to worship another. On my gossamer wings I caught them off guard and made them pay for what they had done to my life, the life of my wife, and the life of my daughter. Vengeance was mine, said I, an empty vengeance that satisfied my thirst for payment not once.

To put my life in a better perspective, perhaps the history books can help me out. After years of abortion clinic bombings, murders of homosexuals and terrorist actions all in the name of God, the government decided it was time to put an end to organized religion. They secretly debated trying to establish one religion, and then opted to go the way of the communists from the mid-twentieth century and simply abolish it all. The Protectorates sprang up from within what were once called police forces and slowly the laws were enacted with little fanfare. The Midwest rebelled and so the government used the subsidies to bring them around. The West Coast tried the same thing but they finally bent to the law. The Eastern Seaboard wasn’t as hard because it was already so dependent on the subsidies after the Crash that there was no other choice.

The South was a trouble spot but sheer numbers brought them into line with the rest of the country. The Net was controlled so tightly that it was used against the subservient groups that attempted to state their cases. The Reeducation Camps began to fill up and after several years of attempting to make the poor, Christian fanatics see the error of their ways; they simply sealed them up and burned them to the ground, occupants and all. The government made examples of the leaders by holding mass crucifixions along major roads and highways. In the City it was done on Broadway where the crowds still gather to cheer and curse the lawbreakers. Men and women are strapped to aluminum crosses and left to hang in the sun until the weather simply washes their bodies away. Mothers and fathers bring their children to teach them what happens when you don’t obey the law. Teen gangs come to make faces, call names and throw things at those helpless and unable to fight back. Old timers come to see just how crazy the world has become.

Metro Protectorates were well established by the time the reeducation camps were torched and millions murdered in the name of the law. Not as much manpower was needed to concentrate on the religious zealots who managed to elude capture, so the police forces and military units were blended into the Protectorate. For twenty years the Protectorate had little trouble with the religious holdouts. And then, about the time I was born, the riots started. They lasted for years. The people tried to rebel, but the Protectorate held strong and eventually established some semblance of order by moving all citizens of the country into four Metropolitan areas. Everyone in the nation was crammed into the four cities and special hunter-killer groups patrolled the countryside and destroyed whatever they encountered. I spent my two years in-continent on the squads.