Ten minutes after the first SUV left with a serious abdominal wound, Dale’s cell rang.
“What do you mean the ER won’t take the wounded?” Dale shouted into his iPhone. Turnbull turned to the EMT.
“You keep evacuating these wounded. I’m going to the hospital,” Turnbull said to the ex-EMT. He motioned to Langer and Dale; they headed out to the parking lot at a sprint toward the insurance salesman’s Dodge.
What had been Memorial Hospital and was now Chuck Schumer People’s Health Center, was a modern-looking building on West 9th Street. A crowd of SUVs was bunched up by the emergency room entrance. Dale parked and Turnbull and Langer were out the door.
The wounded were still in the backs of their vehicles.
The pair rushed up to the glass doors, which were shut tight. Several parishioners were pounding on them, but a severe-looking nurse was standing inside, just shaking her head.
“Everyone, get back,” Turnbull said. The crowd retreated a few feet and Turnbull rotated to face the nurse through the glass. He motioned her forward with his index finger.
She stepped up tentatively, shaking her head and shouting “We’re closed.”
Turnbull smiled, reached behind him, drew his .45 pistol and shouted “You’re now open.”
She stood, terrified.
“I’m counting to three, and then I’m shooting out this door. One!”
She shook, but did not move.
“Two!”
Nothing.
“Screw it,” Turnbull said. He fired six shots down the pane of glass, then kicked it hard. It shattered and fell inward. The nurse screamed and cowered. Langer slipped in and hit the OPEN button and the doors slid apart.
“Get stretchers and get them inside. Dale, put someone on security. If the blues show up I want to know.” Turnbull stepped up to the nurse.
“Where’s your boss?” She pointed. “No, take me.” Turnbull and Langer followed, Turnbull holding his guide by the rear of her uniform collar.
She led him to a tall, thin man in a white coat. His badge said “People’s Doctor Dr. Gorman.” He was probably doing an involuntary hardship assignment down here in Jasper – after all health care providers had been nationalized post-Split, the government simply ordered them to work wherever it needed them at its pleasure.
“Hi,” Turnbull said. “We have multiple gunshot wounds. You better call everyone in, and you better do it right now.”
“We are not authorized for this level of treatment. We’re officially closed. You need to take them and go to Indianapolis.”
“Oh,” said Turnbull, releasing the nurse. “Larry?”
Langer drew his .357, grabbed the doctor and pressed him against the wall. Then he stuck the massive pistol under the doctor’s chin.
“You open now, doc?”
“Okay, okay.”
“And unless you want a firefight in your ER, you should probably not follow through on that idea you had about calling the PSF,” said Turnbull. Behind him, people were starting to wheel in the wounded. “Larry, can you hand me the doctor’s wallet.”
Without removing the pistol, Langer reached into the terrified man’s pocket and withdrew a black leather billfold then passed it to Turnbull.
“That’s my ID – I need it!”
“You sure do,” said Turnbull, selecting his driver’s license. “Okay, Dr. Ronald Vernon Gorman of 1324 Heathcliff Street in Indianapolis, let me tell you how it’s going to be. Now we know where you live. So, if you don’t do a really good job on these wounded people, one of us will come visit you, and you are not going to like how that turns out. If you’re lucky it’ll be me because all I’ll do is shoot you in the head. You do not want it to be him.”
“No sir, you do not,” reiterated Langer, shaking his head.
“Now go do your job,” Turnbull said. Langer released the doctor, who fled down the hall toward his patients.
They stood outside the hospital, Larry taking a drag off of a smoke he had bummed from an orderly – in fact, the terrified orderly had generously given over his whole pack. Dale was still shaken. Turnbull causally slid a fresh mag into his pistol and put it back in its holster. He slipped the mag with three rounds into his pocket.
“Well, we got us a war now,” Larry said.
“Yeah,” Turnbull replied. “We need to get ready. Dale, you’re a pretty useful guy.”
“I want to fight,” Dale said, his words still muffled.
“I don’t think fighting is your strong suit. I think you can do more for me on the intel side than on the shooting side. I can get plenty of trigger pullers. You know almost everyone around here. I need you to start gathering information on the enemy. The PSF especially, since they stay here. Where they are, what they are doing, their chain of command.”
“I can do that,” Dale said. “So what’s your plan?”
“Plan?” said Turnbull. “My plan is to kill them all.”
8.
Larry Langer walked out of the woods and into town at 10:38 Monday morning, careful to avoid the enhanced patrols that went up to try and keep a lid on the town in the wake of the First Baptist massacre. There was an obvious increase in the number of PSF on the street, but Langer kept to the residential streets and approached downtown from the north. A fair distance away, the checkpoint in the middle of town was still operating, but there just weren’t enough officers to completely cover even a small burg like Jasper – much less the other villages and townships within their zone.
Everyone knew what happened the previous morning, even though the licensed news outlets made no mention of it. Moreover, Jasper was small enough that everyone knew at least one or more of the dead or wounded. Only a few people were outside on the sidewalks – those who worked were working and most others simply felt it was better to stay indoors that day. But some of the ones who still had permits for animal companions were walking their dogs, while others felt simply being outside was their own act of moral resistance.
They all recognized Larry Langer. He wore a loose shirt over his familiar tee, and wore a tattered backpack, but it was Larry all right. Some people went to school with him, others knew him as a town fixture – usually the subject of a parent’s warning to behave lest “you end up like one of those Langers!”
They knew he was wanted by the PR, so they knew his presence out in the open meant something was up. Most simply looked away. Some nodded at him, with approval, while others stared. If they looked too long, he stared back. They got the message.
No one reached for his phone to call the PSF.
The city’s administrative annex had been taken over by various People’s Republic agencies, which had largely displaced most of the old city government. The mayor still had his office, but the city council wasn’t necessary, they had been told. Now that freedom and social justice had descended upon America, there was no need for local control. The bureaucracy would take good care of them.
Langer hung back across the street and checked his watch. It was 10:43. The annex itself, was a storefront located in a plain, one-story brick building with the latest version of the PR flag flying outside. Next door was a closed Subway sandwich restaurant and a shuttered vacuum cleaner repair shop.
The agencies it housed were listed on a sign out front – the Fairness Commission, the Inclusiveness Bureau, and the Truth Agency. There was no security, no PSF in sight in front or anywhere along the street in either direction.