Revenge of the Rocket Gang

As Told By Hess, the Big Human – Part three

Jaime was carrying a carafe half full of water. He looked at me, bleary from the night before, most likely. If my words had filtered through, they didn’t mean much to him. Still, acting like everything was normal would be like major gaslighting.

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three

When I got back to the garage, I found Wilt and a few others in the yard chilling around the patio crate that served as a table. They passed me the vodka and I took a swallow. I eased into their conversation before detonating the news bomb.

“Golly told them what he told us: that he wanted to do something different with his money. What I still can’t figure out is his motivation, man. I mean, is it ghosts in the head or some morality he wants to lay on us, or what? What is he getting out of it? Because altruism—” I got cut off.

“Yeah, maybe there’s something underneath, like, once he gets us trusting us and shit, maybe he has some ulterior motive,” said Robbie, who could be pessimistic at times.

“He said he would hit the road afterwards,” said Tom.

“Y’all are paranoid.” Wilt stood up, shaking his head.

“No, I’m not… just don’t understand why he’d throw good money away.” I really didn’t.

There was a contemplative silence here, so it was now or never.

“Jaime’s with the Carmens. Living in Fort Cracker.”

“We know,” said Wilt.

“Monty’s pissed,” said Robbie.

“Where is Monty? I need to talk to him.”

“He won’t talk to you or anyone—‘specially not about Jaime. I told you; he’s pissed.”

“So, what happened?”

“Monty says Jamie doesn’t like Golly. Says he has no right coming to Scottville like he’s taking it over. Says we don’t need help from outsiders.”

“As if there’s anything to take over,” said Robbie.

While he was saying this, the municipal sirens came on, our phones lit up with the shelter-in-place message, and all the dogs in the neighborhood started howling. Big capitals flashed across our phone screens:

CIVIL PROTECTION ALERT
DRONE RISK SIRENS ACTIVATED 
THIS IS NOT A DRILL                                                  

“Ah, shit,” said Wilt.

We got inside the garage, lowered the shutters and opened the locker. Wilt threw the vests at us. We put them on and went for the helmets. One of the boys, the gunner, who had taken this as his handle, grabbed a rifle out of the same locker and took the stairs two at a time to the roof, his partner, Harley, right behind him. The binocs were hanging on the wall on the top landing.

“How many do you see?” asked Wilt down below, spraying not saying it into a homemade walkie-talkie.

“Not in view yet, over.” The RF tracker bolted to the roof was doing its slow three-sixty. Harley uncovered the guns, eyes glued to the sky. They shot each other micro-anxious looks.

“If we’re lucky, they’ll just pass over us on their way to fuck up someone else.”

“Word.”

The sniper was getting the net launcher ready just in case. Gunner held his breath, finger on the trigger, forearms tensing. They had rigged six rifles in a tight circle on a swiveling armature with handles, a thing that Wilt had welded up himself. Badass for hitting larger, targets too.

The drones were close enough to hear.

“Eyes on ‘em,” said the sharp shooter. He held out a hand to Gunner, gesturing for the walkie.

“Wilt, it’s not a swarm. I count six bottle rockets coming from the direction of the strait. Must be recon, man.”

“Close enough to snag?”

“Naw, they’re veering off towards town.”

“Flying light?”

“Yeh.”

“Ok, don’t stand down just yet. When they’ve passed, get down here. Over.”

They watched the drones go overhead and get small as gnats. That was worth breathing a sigh. A swarm could have demolished the garage if that’s what they’d come for. The two of them had already survived a strike on their last settlement, something Gunner still woke up bolting out of bed from, like when you dream you’re falling. Everyone knew guys walking around in government-issue prosthetic “wonders”, touted as such, but he considered that a euphemism for outdated, glitchy relics from the last century. Harley locked up the guns and they went back down.

Golly was outside in his truck when Wilt raised the steel shutters. Oblivious, apparently. He explained where he’d been, and his sparkling convo with the Carmens. They weren’t interested in the seven arts. They were interested in money. The nonprofit-ishness of Golly’s vision was off-putting, but they promised to leave them alone, at least, for now. They liked the lechón.

Wilt told him about the IMI drone pass.

“You got no idea what us sanctuary states gotta put up with or fight for.”

“Well, I read plenty, and I did some protesting in college. Even back then things were bad and that was back in the twenties. Got this to remember it by.” Golly lifted his shirt to show off a nasty rubber bullet scar.

“What I do now is this. Try to level the—”

“Playing field, yeah, I heard that before. It’s business talk… ‘Cos you think like a businessman.” Wilt’s eyes were underlining the word ‘businessman’.

“Suppose I do. But you see I had a moment there, when I wasn’t so sure of what I was doing or why. My assets hit a certain figure, and I thought, okay, I’m gonna fold, but then I saw how for the guys around me, that was ludicrous. I was conflicted, see.”

“Yeah, so far, I see, and it’s boring me.”

Everyone laughed.

“Well, wait, the story gets more boring. I started getting these fevers all the time. Turns out I had Lymphoma.”

“Then more boring—the good kind, remission.”

“Cor—rect.”

“So all this here, like, you got religion, that it?”

“Let’s just say I got a five-year outlook now. More doesn’t make sense.”

“Changes things, dudn’t it?”

Golly looked at his hands and smiled a little. In his eyes, I saw all the words he did not want to say.

They had to explain to him what had just occurred. These government drones and IMI drone attacks weren’t common in Tennessee because the state had some of the tightest anti-immigrant laws in the land. Mimicking Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Ohio and Indiana. Wilt counted the states on his fingers.

“They’d made life impossible for black folk as well, so they’d all gone off to find sunnier prospects too.”

Wilt was a hold out, I was thinking.

“That’s almost three hundred thousand square miles of honky rind,” he said.

Golly was alarmed.

“So how often do you get these attacks? Do you have any warning or do they come out of nowhere? Why here?”

“Naw, we set up watches, and we have that radio frequency doohickey up on the roof, but we never know too much beforehand, as for the why…they hit anyone suspected of harboring illegals. That telephone civil protection jazz—some fancy tech shit right there—that’s not for us Ethnics. That’s for the Nativists streets and dudes like you, man. Dudes just happen to get caught in the area where they’re going to get nasty.”

Now George was dumbstruck.

“Why haven’t I heard of this?” he kept saying.

In a way, Wilt was enjoying this, watching the truth eat through the man’s sincerity and idealism. Golly wasn’t saying nothing about it, but I could tell it was going to take the starch out of his Hugo Boss. Tomorrow, when all this had sunk in for real, he wouldn’t be the same guy anymore.

“Yeah, they do what they want, man. They call it whatever they want, and the press back that shit up. That’s why the Cracker House is militarized. We got our joint too, thanks to you. And now you know how it is.”

I figured if Golly was balking, at least we had ourselves sweet digs to rival the Cracker House. The restaurant was a hit, and the Carmens ate there all the time. Another G. Golly genius stroke.

There was only one more bottle rocket incident that month. This time they flew real low and Harley the sniper snagged one with his net launcher. The only problem was that as it fell, it hit a protruding metal bar jutting out of the brick wall and was damaged beyond repair. Monty had the idea of spray-painting the drone red and mounting it on a pole, to be attached to the top of the Hollis. Boldest fuck-you flag I’ve ever seen. Gunner liked it so much, he started calling us the Bottle Rocket Gang, later just the Rocket Gang.

They named the restaurant ‘The Melting Pot’.

❈

Part four drops July 2