Strange Company by Nick Cole (best ebook reader for ubuntu txt) 📕

something completely different than one ever imagines it to be. And that it is starting today, whether you like it or not.

None of them realize they’re just pawns being used by the Monarchs to show that the Resistance, Strange Company’s employers, are nothing but murderers of children.

Everyone must play their part. And yes, there are regrets. It was just a dream I once had that there weren’t any.

We know what’s happening down there. And this isn’t even the Stinkeye magic of Psyonix outlined in his self-aggrandizing drunken op order back at the FOB. Chief Cook making sarcastic remarks from the back of the briefing room and saying things like, “You call that a plan, you old lush?”

Stinkeye barking at Chief Cook that he’d turn the psyops specialist into a junkie who craved nothing but tales of the outer dark until he was little more than a gibbering mass unrecognizable to his own mother. If he even had one. Chief Cook laughed and waved Stinkeye off, all very theatrically. “I read that stuff for fun already, you old fraud. Your feeble powers are nothing more than cons to pull on weak minds. Admit it, Stink. You couldn’t suggest your way out of a paper bag, even with a hull torch in one hand, you ridiculous old carnie. You know nothing of how to really break minds and bend hearts.”

This last part was pure sinister.

Trust me, we’re all brothers in the Strange Company. We really are. But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.

So, we know the plan even though the horrified kids down there on the mall don’t. They’re just sitting around like the children they really are, stunned and crying, as the horror that they are under attack begins to spread like an out-of-control grease fire across the milling crowd. Us in the technicals, Reaper and Ghost, we’re shifting to new positions to shoot some more. Playing our part in this opening scene of the tragedy we’ve all come to act out today for the galactic stage. Adjusting to how the crowd is now trying to develop its response. Some of the leaders down there are trying to explain that everyone needs to go to their fighting positions. That they are under attack. The street festival is definitely over today. It’s time to play war, gang.

The kids would like law enforcement and the adults to take over now that there are owies. Someone’s not playing fair and that isn’t right. Didn’t you hear our slogans about equality and justice when we smashed your stuff and looted your businesses? You can almost hear them think this silliness about the universe and how it really works.

We make our next position, for us in team four it’s a three-story parking garage. We hit the shadowy darkness of level two, which is open and guarded only by flex wire along the open edges. The lot is empty. Since the riots, no one has been coming into downtown much. The children have gotten dangerous. Tarp back, weapons ready, the snipers begin to do their work again. This time shooting down more of the enemy along the edges of the mass of angry and frightened “soldiers” who’d just won the “war” before it even started. Driving them to panic and run for the center of the mob now.

Only now do they realize the war is just beginning. And that they are the enemy.

What happens next is terrible to behold. At least it is for me. Some of the Strange find it funny. If only because distance lends perspective and we’re able to watch the terrorized and terrible children who are in it suddenly react out of utter mindless fear. They have no training to speak of. They are not actually soldiers, like we are, and no amount of sloganeering is going to do that for them. They’ve merely been dressed up for war to play war. Now they are really in it. War. People, friends, their comrades, are dying along the edges of their “army” and the kids at the edges want to be anywhere but where they see people dying all around them.

So of course they run toward the center seeking help.

Both edges of the same army down there do this at once.

And for some unexplainable reason, they just start shooting each other. And this has to be pure Stinkeye mind-voodoo down there. Within seconds, using his mental powers no doubt, he has confused enough of them to mistake comrades for sudden predators amid smoke, heat, and blood spray. Or what some call the Fog of War. A series of accidental firefights break out as both sides try to get away from the edges. Must get away from the edges. Must own the center.

A girl who had been a Molotov thrower, probably targeting spike shops and banks in the early days of the liberation as she thought of it, unslings her rifle and dumps a whole mag into her compatriots coming straight at her. Un-aimed and wild she does credible damage for an amateur. She’s screaming and telling them something as she spends all her ammo and gets a dry click at the end of the party, no doubt. All we can see from up here is her mouth and lips moving in an angry snarl that suggests she would kill more if there were unlimited bullets. She has more mags, but swapping out for a full one doesn’t even seem to occur to her. A moment later some guy, a good-looking dude with wire-rimmed virtu-specs who was probably just there for the chicks and had learned to talk a good game about the literature of Early Sauvagan, blows her brains out. And in seconds both sides of the same team are tearing away at each other viciously, shooting anyone they can, and running for their lives straight at those trying to do the same in that terrible-to-behold moment.

It is everyone for themselves down there. Get back to the Mom and Dad you turned your back on