seymoure

Poor Losers

“With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.”

- Antonin Artaud

I now knew one thing about this church and its members. They didn’t seem willing to take defeat without an argument. This argument was explosive.

Did I ever tell you I lettered Varsity as a freshman? Having taken the slip of paper out the bull’s head it had become nothing more than just a heavy object, begging to be thrown. My aim was amazing, it surprised even me, and it caught the drone just as it entered the room.

The weight to the head-piece shoved the small flier back about three feet, and set off the explosive. That wasn’t as much as would be hoped.

The explosion knocked us all down and covered us with shrapnel. I found a couple of nails in my arm and plaster covering most of me.

I couldn’t hear a thing. The room had acted as a sound chamber and amplified the sound of the bomb.

I looked around the room and saw Hugo signaling that none of us had been killed. We were however, to a man, wounded and covered with debris. They had hurt us, hurt us badly.

It seems that these guys were persistent if not terribly efficient.

Police officers flooded the room. They were filled with silent questions that we had no answers to give.

I hope I told them to keep the new reports at bay for the moment, but I needed to speak to Sheriff Babbo as soon as I could.

I circled the room reviewing the injuries, and found that we were lucky the drone had its explosive in the rear, rather in the nose. They had probably wanted to put the largest amount of charge possible aboard, and putting it up front would make it harder to pilot. Luckily the charge in the rear gave us a good foot farther away from the charge.

Max was the closest and he was bleeding from the ears. He was also cut heavily around the face and shoulders.

Harry was unconscious, but breathing. He had been smacked against the wall by the concussion.

Len was covered with glass, and thousands of tiny cuts. But he was up ministering to the others. Just like him. Just like all my guys; they were my family.

Sheriff Babbo entered the room and escorted me out into the hallway. I explained that I couldn’t hear him, but I needed him to do something for us.

He appeared willing to do whatever he could to stop the destruction. The building wouldn’t take much more, and he was concerned about the local impact this war would have. I couldn’t argue with that.

We discussed my plan, which he approved of. We would take my whole crew in ambulances right under the eyes of the news people. We would lose them just before the sheriff would release word that we had all been D.O.A. at the hospital. We would make our way in cars we would have standing by to a safe-house I had set up in case it would be needed.

We had to have the police physician set Chester’s ankle, broken by the explosion. I passed around the plan in the form of written instructions. Everyone, including the recently awakened Harry, agreed to act dead and be carried out to the recently called ambulances.

The biggest problem I saw was security of the ambulance drivers. The last thing we needed was to have any of us kidnapped by followers of the church before we could vanish from sight.

We used drivers that had been vetted to work guarding our floor already. If they were going to try to kill us, they would have done it already.

I hoped.

We set up the move quickly, and, through the blaze of camera flashes and questions (aimed at the Police and attendants, since we all looked dead, we hoped) we were loaded into four vehicles.

We set off in a caravan and all looked to be working flawlessly.

Until the last ambulance in the group veered off down a side street.

It was being taken. It was gone by the time we realized it wasn’t with us.

Len and Hugo had been taken.

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Continue on to Chapter 35