GWOT Armistice

The War is over. We signed a peace treaty, an armistice. With the end of the War, people are free to go home, to resume their lives. To code at the projects they choose. To work at the tasks they choose.

The trucks do not stop coming. They deliver food for all. A stream of ambulances start whisking our wounded away, to proper care in real hospitals. The ATM machines are restocked with honest greenbacks. Site Ops meetings discuss how to shift back to normal peacetime operations.

Security's task is now to demobilize, disarm and reintegrate into society. Mohammed's grin as he rigs a phased detonation sequence, with the storage shed the last in the daisy chain. Buddy's fiercer grin as he takes a blowtorch to the barrels then the receivers of our automatic weapons. The Hate Truck being backed up for the last time, then lifted with a forklift to rest on her pedestal.

I proudly set up a burn barrel and toss our blood won Intelligence files into it. Let it all burn, we don't need it any more. I can dimly smell the smoke.

The bells are ringing.

We don't have bells.

I concentrate and hear the words on the PA which accompany the chimes.

"... in the Data Center. Fire alarm. Fire in..."

I sit up bolt upright under my sheet in my cage in the Data Center.

I immediately fall sideways and kiss the floor, without taking a breath. My face and scalp are hot and crinkly and there is no light - none at all - in the room.

"Fire alarm. Fire in the Data Center."

And I am nearly naked in a steel cage behind a padlocked door.