Globall War of Terror: Greyhound
Mar. 19th, 2018 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGloball War of Terror: Greyhound
There were exactly forty tickets to get on this bus. The driver, one client HR manager, four security personnel and forty authorized passengers.
The VP of Human Resources and I had very carefully gone over the paperwork. Each of these forty company employees was being transferred from our San Jose offices to our Colorado offices. A charter bus was waiting in Bakersfield for the transfer.
No dependents. One piece of baggage. All other personal effects to be abandoned. Relocation costs paid by the Company.
What was not obvious was that every single one of these employees was in terrible danger every moment they remained in San Jose.
I was in full battle rattle: BDU pants and blouse, harness and gear, pockets bulging and Velcro fetish on blatant public display. Underneath, my leg still hurt but the staples had come out a week ago, with a thin trickle of yellow pus. The vet had resisted the temptation to yank as she removed each one. She hated me with a passion she usually reserved for animal abusers.
Of the nine critically wounded enemy prisoners I had forced her to care for, three had survived what passed on the site for medical care. Two had been successfully turned - actively working for us now. The third had been given to Homeland and after a brief identity check, shot on the sidewalk to avoid the bother of calling for medical transport.
That had been a bit of drama I had carefully avoided being present for. The vet however had watched.
Each employee showed their badge as their one bag was stowed. Then the employee was escorted aboard and seated according to the seating chart. Two security personnel in the front row - one of them me. One in the emergency exit row center right. And a ringer -- to all appearances an employee, but actually a plainclothes member of the security team.
I was giving my paranoia free rein. We had a solid, mapped route into and out of the Bay Area. We had paperwork that would withstand any official scrutiny. We needed no escort beyond Morgan Hill, and would have no problem getting to that town's border safely with the escort we could ourselves provide.
Then we had a problem.
An employee was starting to get aboard the bus with someone who was not an employee.
This was exactly why I was standing in the aisle, taking up the entire space and making it impossible to get past me without physically moving me out of the way.
"Stop," I warned, as if casually. Next to me, my nominal bodyguard Shane shifted his grip on his shotgun, taking his hands away from the trigger. The bayonet was in his pack.
"She's coming with me," the employee ordered. Or thought he did.
One of the three guards who had been supervising baggage ran up to the stairwell, horrified. "Sir, she's not on the list!" She had that wrist twitch that told me that she couldn't decide whether to get out her baton or her pepper spray or her handcuffs. Mental note: needs more training.
No, indeed, I had a copy of the list on me, and she was not in fact on the list.
Nor was she an employee. In a vain attempt to hide her status, she had taken off her DEPENDENT badge and put it in a pocket.
And it was even worse than that.
"John," I said quietly, "you have a ticket on this bus. She does not. Say your goodbyes right here, or give up your ticket on the bus to another employee."
That's when he tried to push me and things got real ugly real fast.
The driver made a desperate grab at the back of his belt but missed. An impressive trick given that the driver was sitting.
I could see that his hands were empty and so were hers, so I didn't have to kill him.
But Shane hit him with the stock of the shotgun in his left shoulder, not quite hard enough to dislocate it.
As John fell back, I followed him, and he bounced twice: once off the handrail, and once off me.
The dismounted guard grabbed John's woman in an arm bar hold and perp-walked her off the bus, propelling her with a push into the hands of the reaction team I'd had on standby in case of drama like this.
The guard then showed great presence of mind by drawing her handgun in the low ready position, with every evident intent of double-tapping anyone who tried to get onto the bus without proper authority.
Having been bounced twice, John was easy meat for the driver and Shane. They applied pain compliance strikes, followed by a double arm hold, a quick frisk for weapons and perp-walk to the back of the bus, where he was thoughtfully handcuffed (hands behind) and belted into a particular seat. Not his original seat assignment.
Stripped of antiseptic language, they quickly but carefully hit him several times in very painful ways, shoved his shoulders so far up with his arms that he had to walk on his tip toes, ran their hands all over every part of his body long enough to count as second base, and _then_ handcuffed him and strapped him down.
John's woman - anonymous to protect the guilty - started screaming. Not about her love for him, or fear of being separated, but in graphic detail about the favors she had paid him to go with him on the bus.
He was in no condition to reply to her even if he had heard. He was screaming instead about brutality and how dare we touch him and keep our hands off him. He was gasping and starting to cry.
"Sorry, folks," I announced from the stepwell. "Let's resume boarding. Authorized passengers please."
The line moved very smoothly after that. I dismounted briefly.
"Escort her back to the dependent camp. I want to interview her after I return."
That would buy her a little time before, by my own procedures, I would have to kick her out on her ear into a savage city bordering a dead one.
The VP of Human Resources and the HR manager escorting our movement had seen what had happened. That would save some time if not some paperwork.
Said VP met my eye and ran a single finger across her throat. I nodded.
We finished boarding without further incident. We rolled out the South Gate, the J barriers on kick-out rollers moved out of the way of the long bus. Ahead of us and behind us, pickup trucks with racks mounting what appeared to be machine guns. Sadly, only one was. We were working on that.
Under normal conditions it would be a five hour drive to Bakersfield. Given the route we had to take and the papers that would have to be checked, more like eight.
A little less than an hour later, we made it to the Morgan Hill PD roadblock.
They waved us through.
But as we passed, I heard muffled screaming from the back.
As soon as I was out of sight of the bored police, I low-crawled frantically down the bus aisle.
John was trying to yell and shout and someone was trying to discreetly shove a sock in it. As in literally shove a sock down his throat without being obvious about it.
I thought about it. I couldn't stand so I would have to strike from this position. His legs were not secured and were flailing. I couldn't guarantee that a shin shot would have the immediately necessary effect.
So I broke several laws of unarmed combat. "Never hit a man if you have weapons. Never hit a man with your hand unless your feet have been nailed to the floor. Never hit a man with anything but a closed fist, and be prepared to break fingers."
My half fist, knuckles out, sank wrist-deep into the center of his groin. I didn't want to rupture him but I wanted to silence him immediately, by putting him in so much pain that he could not even squeak.
His open mouth gaped like a landed fish which allowed the sock full access.
Thirty seconds later, I whipped out a length of paracord and tied his ankles together, then secured them to the footrest. Then I -- carefully as he was biting -- removed the dirty sock. Not his. Another employee's.
"John, what the fuck do you think you are doing!?!"
"Fuck you," he scroaned, and continued in filth about my probable family and parentage. Then he started making threats. He would have me fired. He would beat me up. He would kill me. He would kill all my employees. He would tell Homeland what we were doing. He had hoped to tell Morgan Hill PD that we had kidnapped him and he was certainly going to tell every roadblock we encountered.
The employees listened, quietly and aghast.
It's not every day that you hear a man, alone and bound, threaten to kill forty-five others surrounding him. And it's not every day that he could actually do it, too.
I let him ramble on and on and on, taking mental notes to back up the audio recorder I had started on my belt.
It took about half an hour before he started to run down.
"John, that would kill everyone on this bus. You applied for a transfer. The company is moving you for your protection, at great risk and expense. We will keep you safe. How much have you had to drink? What drugs have you taken?"
This set him off again, as I expected. I calmly, professionally ran the checklist. Intoxication? Drug use? Medical condition? Head injury? Mental illness? (Cue another full bore rant.) Missing his medications?
I had another guard bring me the medical kit. I pricked his arm - couldn't reach his finger - for blood sugar. 110. I carefully checked him over head to toe, looking for the head injury he denied, evidence of syringe drug use, pupillary reaction, smell on his breath. Giving him every possible excuse, every possible out. I documented the medical history I'd attempted to take and my head to toe examination.
He eventually calmed. But his face had frozen in that hate stare, of barely suppressed fury at the world. I knew it well. I looked at it every day to shave.
"John, we have a serious problem. I am trying to help you. Is there anything you can tell me that can help me understand why you are making these threats? Any excuse, any mitigating circumstances, any stress you are under?"
More ranting, more improbable anatomic commands.
I withdrew, trading places with Shane to talk to the HR manager up front, in as much privacy as we could manage.
"What are we going to do?" he asked, horrified.
"I need you to terminate him."
"Huh?"
"Is there a part of the Employee Handbook he hasn't violated? Threats and acts of violence, both before we left and on this bus. He's not drunk or high, he's not having a medical issue, he's just throwing a tantrum because he didn't get his way and that tantrum could easily kill us all."
Homeland would simply intern us all while they checked his story out. But they wouldn't have a bus to put us on. They would pick the most valuable prisoners and ... sidewalk ... the rest. Not as a punishment, just convenience in the investigative phase. Later in the phase the survivors would all have clamps hooked up to testicles and labia and nipples. By then they'd regret not having been sidewalked.
"What do you mean terminate him?"
"Fire him. As in no longer employed."
"Oh.... of course." Apparently HR thought I'd had something more direct in mind.
"Go do it. Go tell him he's fired."
"Will it help?"
"Lots."
"OK."
Predictably this caused another temper tantrum. I waited an hour of boring travel before trying my last chance.
The employees were horrified. They were using the restroom a lot if seated behind John, but not at all if they had to get past him. They were not talking to each other openly, but whispering. No one had taken cell phone photos, everyone looked away.
I crawled back to John again.
"You no longer work for the Company. That means I am no longer responsible for your safety. If you want, I will put you off this bus at the side of the road, right here right now, with your bag. No badge, no Company property. But alive and free for as long as you can manage it."
"Fuck you. See you at the checkpoint, asshole." And cue more crudity and filth.
I looked him in the eyes and said something very quietly, so that only I and the guard next to him could hear.
"Fuck me off as much as you want. Try to hurt one of my people and you will die for hours in agony and terror."
He bit at me as I moved back to the front.
I gave Shane the paperwork for the convoy, relying on his utter stupidity as a more formidable protection than any lie I could concoct.
I then came back and made a brief announcement.
"Folks, I'm so sorry but I need your help. Please look away and cover your ears."
Compliance was swift.
I looked John in the eyes and said, "Last chance."
After the third swear word I gagged him with the sock. I then carefully, lightly slapped him in the face a number of times to bring the red up. Then I had one guard pin his legs, a second pull down his pants, and both hold him still as I injected him with the Halidol I'd been carrying in a pocket. As the drug took effect, they pulled his pants up and re-seated him. I untied his ankles first, then we leaned him forward and removed the handcuffs. I chafed his wrists to reduce the red marks. As the final insult, I opened a tiny hotel bar sized bottle of vodka and sprinkled it over his face, neck and chest.
Now he was a drunk, not a combative prisoner.
The boarding by Homeland was anti-climactic. Each of us showed photo ID and Company badges that matched the manifest. We couldn't waken the drunken John, whose Company badge was artfully on display. I offered to get out his wallet and the Homeland inspector shook his head, eager to get to the next one.
The employees filed off the bus for the charter. No one looked at John or at me, or at the guards or driver.
The HR manager and I verified the handoff. He and I shook hands and he got on the charter bus, to escort his charges to safety under hopefully more civilized conditions.
John's lone piece of luggage joined us on our bus as we pulled away. Myself, four guards and one guard-driver driving us purposefully to an empty parking lot.
I searched his bag, quickly, wearing gloves, destructively. No electronics had been permitted in the transfer and we had searched accordingly, but buried in the lining of the bag were four USB sticks, carefully cut out of their plastic. And cash - bluebacks. And female jewelry. And in a tube of shaving cream, a pair of micro SD cards wrapped in a twist of plastic.
Before John's cocktail wore off, we stripped him and searched him and his clothes. More cash, more jewelry, more USBs. A knife strapped with medical tape to his inside left ankle. Three sets of fake ID, all pre Firecracker, in addition to his non-US passport. Nothing that would stand modern scrutiny.
As the final insult to my gloves, I did a cavity check. Nothing foreign.
We dressed him again. I spotted him half his cash and the worst of his fake IDs. All his other items, including his badge, ended up in his bag. The bag ended up in a false compartment we had built into the overhead.
He gained consciousness and realized the bus was empty.
"You assholes!"
I solar-plexus punched him back into his seat.
Narcotics for prisoner management are dangerous. Good old fashioned beat downs are not. We administered one.
"Forward and rear lookouts, please. Driver, get ready for a drop."
I'd run through a number of emergency drills with the guards I'd picked for this run. One of them was kicking someone off the bus without actually stopping. This required coordination with the driver opening the door, someone pushing our victim into the shoulder, and spotters to make sure our reverse kidnapping was not noticed.
As John was dragged to the front, he complained, "What about my bag?"
"Fuck your bag. You tried to steal from the Company," I explained.
This was going to take careful timing.
"You know I'm just going to go straight to Homeland," he bluffed.
And that did it. I knew what I had to do, and I knew how I was going to do it.
Shane was in the aisle with shotgun at the ready, just in case. This time bayonet fixed. Driver watching the road. Forward spotter behind the driver, aft spotter using a hand mirror to see around the engine pack.
The bus started to slow to a stop and I expertly jabbed John in the right kidney with my fist. He opened his mouth to yell.
The door hissed open and I pushed John's body forward at speed, using the residual energy of the bus as we came to a halt.
I then grabbed and held his head in both hands, ferociously yanking it around and to the right even as his body flopped forward and to the left.
Like twisting the top off a 2 liter bottle of soda, if not for the sickening snap under my fingers.
I gave his back another push. I knew he was dead before his body hit the dust.
The driver closed the door and pulled away.
I gathered my team up front.
"Listen up. If we get jacked up in the next 24 hours, John went crazy on the bus so we fired him. If we don't, the last time we saw him was when we dropped him at the transfer point. Copy?"
Everyone nodded. They knew the stakes as well as I did, if not the bet I'd placed.
The plan was for us to take the bus in where we had purchased it for maintenance, rent hotel rooms for the night, and then load a convoy run of groceries in the morning.
So we stuck with the plan.
Just as I had. Before I'd agreed to this transfer, I'd put together thirty four contingency plans for emergencies on the bus, ranging from medical through equipment failure through a Homeland boarding through an engine fire. And also a disruptive passenger.
I hadn't planned to murder him. That was the kind of detail that would normally be the difference between life in prison and a last gasp while strapped to a chair.
Not in Apocalypse. Not with forty-four lives in play and thirty five hundred in question.
God help me. It was getting easier and easier.
There were exactly forty tickets to get on this bus. The driver, one client HR manager, four security personnel and forty authorized passengers.
The VP of Human Resources and I had very carefully gone over the paperwork. Each of these forty company employees was being transferred from our San Jose offices to our Colorado offices. A charter bus was waiting in Bakersfield for the transfer.
No dependents. One piece of baggage. All other personal effects to be abandoned. Relocation costs paid by the Company.
What was not obvious was that every single one of these employees was in terrible danger every moment they remained in San Jose.
I was in full battle rattle: BDU pants and blouse, harness and gear, pockets bulging and Velcro fetish on blatant public display. Underneath, my leg still hurt but the staples had come out a week ago, with a thin trickle of yellow pus. The vet had resisted the temptation to yank as she removed each one. She hated me with a passion she usually reserved for animal abusers.
Of the nine critically wounded enemy prisoners I had forced her to care for, three had survived what passed on the site for medical care. Two had been successfully turned - actively working for us now. The third had been given to Homeland and after a brief identity check, shot on the sidewalk to avoid the bother of calling for medical transport.
That had been a bit of drama I had carefully avoided being present for. The vet however had watched.
Each employee showed their badge as their one bag was stowed. Then the employee was escorted aboard and seated according to the seating chart. Two security personnel in the front row - one of them me. One in the emergency exit row center right. And a ringer -- to all appearances an employee, but actually a plainclothes member of the security team.
I was giving my paranoia free rein. We had a solid, mapped route into and out of the Bay Area. We had paperwork that would withstand any official scrutiny. We needed no escort beyond Morgan Hill, and would have no problem getting to that town's border safely with the escort we could ourselves provide.
Then we had a problem.
An employee was starting to get aboard the bus with someone who was not an employee.
This was exactly why I was standing in the aisle, taking up the entire space and making it impossible to get past me without physically moving me out of the way.
"Stop," I warned, as if casually. Next to me, my nominal bodyguard Shane shifted his grip on his shotgun, taking his hands away from the trigger. The bayonet was in his pack.
"She's coming with me," the employee ordered. Or thought he did.
One of the three guards who had been supervising baggage ran up to the stairwell, horrified. "Sir, she's not on the list!" She had that wrist twitch that told me that she couldn't decide whether to get out her baton or her pepper spray or her handcuffs. Mental note: needs more training.
No, indeed, I had a copy of the list on me, and she was not in fact on the list.
Nor was she an employee. In a vain attempt to hide her status, she had taken off her DEPENDENT badge and put it in a pocket.
And it was even worse than that.
"John," I said quietly, "you have a ticket on this bus. She does not. Say your goodbyes right here, or give up your ticket on the bus to another employee."
That's when he tried to push me and things got real ugly real fast.
The driver made a desperate grab at the back of his belt but missed. An impressive trick given that the driver was sitting.
I could see that his hands were empty and so were hers, so I didn't have to kill him.
But Shane hit him with the stock of the shotgun in his left shoulder, not quite hard enough to dislocate it.
As John fell back, I followed him, and he bounced twice: once off the handrail, and once off me.
The dismounted guard grabbed John's woman in an arm bar hold and perp-walked her off the bus, propelling her with a push into the hands of the reaction team I'd had on standby in case of drama like this.
The guard then showed great presence of mind by drawing her handgun in the low ready position, with every evident intent of double-tapping anyone who tried to get onto the bus without proper authority.
Having been bounced twice, John was easy meat for the driver and Shane. They applied pain compliance strikes, followed by a double arm hold, a quick frisk for weapons and perp-walk to the back of the bus, where he was thoughtfully handcuffed (hands behind) and belted into a particular seat. Not his original seat assignment.
Stripped of antiseptic language, they quickly but carefully hit him several times in very painful ways, shoved his shoulders so far up with his arms that he had to walk on his tip toes, ran their hands all over every part of his body long enough to count as second base, and _then_ handcuffed him and strapped him down.
John's woman - anonymous to protect the guilty - started screaming. Not about her love for him, or fear of being separated, but in graphic detail about the favors she had paid him to go with him on the bus.
He was in no condition to reply to her even if he had heard. He was screaming instead about brutality and how dare we touch him and keep our hands off him. He was gasping and starting to cry.
"Sorry, folks," I announced from the stepwell. "Let's resume boarding. Authorized passengers please."
The line moved very smoothly after that. I dismounted briefly.
"Escort her back to the dependent camp. I want to interview her after I return."
That would buy her a little time before, by my own procedures, I would have to kick her out on her ear into a savage city bordering a dead one.
The VP of Human Resources and the HR manager escorting our movement had seen what had happened. That would save some time if not some paperwork.
Said VP met my eye and ran a single finger across her throat. I nodded.
We finished boarding without further incident. We rolled out the South Gate, the J barriers on kick-out rollers moved out of the way of the long bus. Ahead of us and behind us, pickup trucks with racks mounting what appeared to be machine guns. Sadly, only one was. We were working on that.
Under normal conditions it would be a five hour drive to Bakersfield. Given the route we had to take and the papers that would have to be checked, more like eight.
A little less than an hour later, we made it to the Morgan Hill PD roadblock.
They waved us through.
But as we passed, I heard muffled screaming from the back.
As soon as I was out of sight of the bored police, I low-crawled frantically down the bus aisle.
John was trying to yell and shout and someone was trying to discreetly shove a sock in it. As in literally shove a sock down his throat without being obvious about it.
I thought about it. I couldn't stand so I would have to strike from this position. His legs were not secured and were flailing. I couldn't guarantee that a shin shot would have the immediately necessary effect.
So I broke several laws of unarmed combat. "Never hit a man if you have weapons. Never hit a man with your hand unless your feet have been nailed to the floor. Never hit a man with anything but a closed fist, and be prepared to break fingers."
My half fist, knuckles out, sank wrist-deep into the center of his groin. I didn't want to rupture him but I wanted to silence him immediately, by putting him in so much pain that he could not even squeak.
His open mouth gaped like a landed fish which allowed the sock full access.
Thirty seconds later, I whipped out a length of paracord and tied his ankles together, then secured them to the footrest. Then I -- carefully as he was biting -- removed the dirty sock. Not his. Another employee's.
"John, what the fuck do you think you are doing!?!"
"Fuck you," he scroaned, and continued in filth about my probable family and parentage. Then he started making threats. He would have me fired. He would beat me up. He would kill me. He would kill all my employees. He would tell Homeland what we were doing. He had hoped to tell Morgan Hill PD that we had kidnapped him and he was certainly going to tell every roadblock we encountered.
The employees listened, quietly and aghast.
It's not every day that you hear a man, alone and bound, threaten to kill forty-five others surrounding him. And it's not every day that he could actually do it, too.
I let him ramble on and on and on, taking mental notes to back up the audio recorder I had started on my belt.
It took about half an hour before he started to run down.
"John, that would kill everyone on this bus. You applied for a transfer. The company is moving you for your protection, at great risk and expense. We will keep you safe. How much have you had to drink? What drugs have you taken?"
This set him off again, as I expected. I calmly, professionally ran the checklist. Intoxication? Drug use? Medical condition? Head injury? Mental illness? (Cue another full bore rant.) Missing his medications?
I had another guard bring me the medical kit. I pricked his arm - couldn't reach his finger - for blood sugar. 110. I carefully checked him over head to toe, looking for the head injury he denied, evidence of syringe drug use, pupillary reaction, smell on his breath. Giving him every possible excuse, every possible out. I documented the medical history I'd attempted to take and my head to toe examination.
He eventually calmed. But his face had frozen in that hate stare, of barely suppressed fury at the world. I knew it well. I looked at it every day to shave.
"John, we have a serious problem. I am trying to help you. Is there anything you can tell me that can help me understand why you are making these threats? Any excuse, any mitigating circumstances, any stress you are under?"
More ranting, more improbable anatomic commands.
I withdrew, trading places with Shane to talk to the HR manager up front, in as much privacy as we could manage.
"What are we going to do?" he asked, horrified.
"I need you to terminate him."
"Huh?"
"Is there a part of the Employee Handbook he hasn't violated? Threats and acts of violence, both before we left and on this bus. He's not drunk or high, he's not having a medical issue, he's just throwing a tantrum because he didn't get his way and that tantrum could easily kill us all."
Homeland would simply intern us all while they checked his story out. But they wouldn't have a bus to put us on. They would pick the most valuable prisoners and ... sidewalk ... the rest. Not as a punishment, just convenience in the investigative phase. Later in the phase the survivors would all have clamps hooked up to testicles and labia and nipples. By then they'd regret not having been sidewalked.
"What do you mean terminate him?"
"Fire him. As in no longer employed."
"Oh.... of course." Apparently HR thought I'd had something more direct in mind.
"Go do it. Go tell him he's fired."
"Will it help?"
"Lots."
"OK."
Predictably this caused another temper tantrum. I waited an hour of boring travel before trying my last chance.
The employees were horrified. They were using the restroom a lot if seated behind John, but not at all if they had to get past him. They were not talking to each other openly, but whispering. No one had taken cell phone photos, everyone looked away.
I crawled back to John again.
"You no longer work for the Company. That means I am no longer responsible for your safety. If you want, I will put you off this bus at the side of the road, right here right now, with your bag. No badge, no Company property. But alive and free for as long as you can manage it."
"Fuck you. See you at the checkpoint, asshole." And cue more crudity and filth.
I looked him in the eyes and said something very quietly, so that only I and the guard next to him could hear.
"Fuck me off as much as you want. Try to hurt one of my people and you will die for hours in agony and terror."
He bit at me as I moved back to the front.
I gave Shane the paperwork for the convoy, relying on his utter stupidity as a more formidable protection than any lie I could concoct.
I then came back and made a brief announcement.
"Folks, I'm so sorry but I need your help. Please look away and cover your ears."
Compliance was swift.
I looked John in the eyes and said, "Last chance."
After the third swear word I gagged him with the sock. I then carefully, lightly slapped him in the face a number of times to bring the red up. Then I had one guard pin his legs, a second pull down his pants, and both hold him still as I injected him with the Halidol I'd been carrying in a pocket. As the drug took effect, they pulled his pants up and re-seated him. I untied his ankles first, then we leaned him forward and removed the handcuffs. I chafed his wrists to reduce the red marks. As the final insult, I opened a tiny hotel bar sized bottle of vodka and sprinkled it over his face, neck and chest.
Now he was a drunk, not a combative prisoner.
The boarding by Homeland was anti-climactic. Each of us showed photo ID and Company badges that matched the manifest. We couldn't waken the drunken John, whose Company badge was artfully on display. I offered to get out his wallet and the Homeland inspector shook his head, eager to get to the next one.
The employees filed off the bus for the charter. No one looked at John or at me, or at the guards or driver.
The HR manager and I verified the handoff. He and I shook hands and he got on the charter bus, to escort his charges to safety under hopefully more civilized conditions.
John's lone piece of luggage joined us on our bus as we pulled away. Myself, four guards and one guard-driver driving us purposefully to an empty parking lot.
I searched his bag, quickly, wearing gloves, destructively. No electronics had been permitted in the transfer and we had searched accordingly, but buried in the lining of the bag were four USB sticks, carefully cut out of their plastic. And cash - bluebacks. And female jewelry. And in a tube of shaving cream, a pair of micro SD cards wrapped in a twist of plastic.
Before John's cocktail wore off, we stripped him and searched him and his clothes. More cash, more jewelry, more USBs. A knife strapped with medical tape to his inside left ankle. Three sets of fake ID, all pre Firecracker, in addition to his non-US passport. Nothing that would stand modern scrutiny.
As the final insult to my gloves, I did a cavity check. Nothing foreign.
We dressed him again. I spotted him half his cash and the worst of his fake IDs. All his other items, including his badge, ended up in his bag. The bag ended up in a false compartment we had built into the overhead.
He gained consciousness and realized the bus was empty.
"You assholes!"
I solar-plexus punched him back into his seat.
Narcotics for prisoner management are dangerous. Good old fashioned beat downs are not. We administered one.
"Forward and rear lookouts, please. Driver, get ready for a drop."
I'd run through a number of emergency drills with the guards I'd picked for this run. One of them was kicking someone off the bus without actually stopping. This required coordination with the driver opening the door, someone pushing our victim into the shoulder, and spotters to make sure our reverse kidnapping was not noticed.
As John was dragged to the front, he complained, "What about my bag?"
"Fuck your bag. You tried to steal from the Company," I explained.
This was going to take careful timing.
"You know I'm just going to go straight to Homeland," he bluffed.
And that did it. I knew what I had to do, and I knew how I was going to do it.
Shane was in the aisle with shotgun at the ready, just in case. This time bayonet fixed. Driver watching the road. Forward spotter behind the driver, aft spotter using a hand mirror to see around the engine pack.
The bus started to slow to a stop and I expertly jabbed John in the right kidney with my fist. He opened his mouth to yell.
The door hissed open and I pushed John's body forward at speed, using the residual energy of the bus as we came to a halt.
I then grabbed and held his head in both hands, ferociously yanking it around and to the right even as his body flopped forward and to the left.
Like twisting the top off a 2 liter bottle of soda, if not for the sickening snap under my fingers.
I gave his back another push. I knew he was dead before his body hit the dust.
The driver closed the door and pulled away.
I gathered my team up front.
"Listen up. If we get jacked up in the next 24 hours, John went crazy on the bus so we fired him. If we don't, the last time we saw him was when we dropped him at the transfer point. Copy?"
Everyone nodded. They knew the stakes as well as I did, if not the bet I'd placed.
The plan was for us to take the bus in where we had purchased it for maintenance, rent hotel rooms for the night, and then load a convoy run of groceries in the morning.
So we stuck with the plan.
Just as I had. Before I'd agreed to this transfer, I'd put together thirty four contingency plans for emergencies on the bus, ranging from medical through equipment failure through a Homeland boarding through an engine fire. And also a disruptive passenger.
I hadn't planned to murder him. That was the kind of detail that would normally be the difference between life in prison and a last gasp while strapped to a chair.
Not in Apocalypse. Not with forty-four lives in play and thirty five hundred in question.
God help me. It was getting easier and easier.
