Langer checked his watch. 10:44:13 a.m. It was all good. It was going to go down in about 45 seconds. He walked gingerly across the street, leaned back against the brick and lit a cigarette. It was a Marlboro, a real one, from a pack his cousin the trucker had brought back from Kentucky and that Langer had been saving. Then he listened.
The clock hit 10:45 a.m. and from the southeast he heard a “pop.” Then, cig clenched between his teeth, he drew the .357, pushed open the glass doors and walked inside.
There were several agencies sharing the open space. The Truth Agency was to his immediate right. A sad woman with mousy hair was marking up the Dubois County Herald with a red pen for her meeting with the editors later that day. She had been particularly irritated by the paper’s total invisibling of trans citizens’ experiences in the front page corn harvest story.
A young male in a vintage dress coat and sporting a goatee was in the Fairness Commission section, staring at some approved pornography. He would never admit it, but he liked smuggled-in, unapproved red state porn DVDs much better – too bad you couldn’t get that stuff on the blue internet. The approved porn always took ten minutes to get started while the participants obtained express consent and discussed how what they chose to do sexually should not be construed as validating traditional patriarchal sexual power structures. And you could not fast forward through any of that to get to the good stuff.
Darcy Puig, the county Inclusiveness Inspector, was seated nearby. Her name plate gave her name, her job, and alerted all that her pronouns were “her” and “she.” A poster on the wall behind her featured a cartoon crew of multi-cultural children dancing on some prostrate Scandinavian-looking guy with a moustache and, for some reason, a top hat. It declared that “All Peoples Reject White Cis-Het Male Privilege.”
Puig looked up at the strange man, wondering what he was doing there, since no one ever came inside willingly. Most of the other workers simply ignored him; they were not being paid on the basis of customer satisfaction, and they acted accordingly.
Langer aimed his big revolver and shot out the monitor on Puig’s desk, which exploded in a shower of sparks.
That got their attention.
The dozen bureaucrats in the office froze at their desks, staring.
“Don’t do nothin’,” Langer instructed them. The workers were mostly young, having been hired at their colleges to come and run Jasper since the townspeople were obviously incompetent to do so themselves. Over 40% of blue college grads found jobs in the PR bureaucracy.
The porn boy slowly reached for his Android 29 phone, and the barrel of Langer’s .357 found him with his hand hovering in mid-air.
“Y’all think that’s a good idea?” asked Langer. Porn Boy withdrew his paw and placed it back on his lap.
“Okay, everyone on your feet. All of you. Stand up.” They did. Langer motioned them to the corner to the right of the door around the Truth Agency desk.
“I’m gonna tell you all this once, and one time only,” Langer said. “If I see any of you around here again, I’ll shoot you. You understand?”
The dozen PR bureaucrats stared in horror, silent.
“We’re not playing and negotiating,” Langer said. “You ain’t welcome here anymore, and I’m giving you fair warning so you can leave and go back wherever the hell you came from. If you come here again and mess with our people, I’m going to put a bullet in you. You all feel me?”
Nothing. So Langer shot Porn Boy in the kneecap.
Porn Boy screamed, falling to the ground, clutching the ruined joint in his hands as blood poured through his fingers. Their ears rang; cordite wafted through the room.
Some shuddered, some cried, some begged.
“Please, don’t hurt us!” the Truth Agency woman whimpered, confused and terrified.
Langer stood calmly, his weapon trained on them, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “Take a good look at him,” he said. “Your job ain’t worth limping for the rest of your life.”
The wounded man rolled, and moaned.
“You all might want to help your friend. Go on! Wrap something around it so he don’t bleed out. Now you—” Langer pointed at Puig. “You, come here and take this pack. Come on, I won’t hurt you.”
Puig stepped forward, shaking, streams of tears running down her face.
“Take it,” Langer said, handing her his back pack. She took it, reluctantly. “Open it up.”
She unzipped it.
“Quick, take out that jug.”
She removed a gallon milk jug full of pale yellow liquid – the reek of gasoline was already escaping from under the twist cap.
“You just open that top up and spread that gas around the office. Don’t forget the computers. Get everything nice and wet down,” Langer instructed.
She did as Langer instructed while he covered the others. He took a puff on his dying cig.
“Get the file cabinets – open them up and splash a little on there. You don’t need a lot. Get those computers. Come on. Hurry up, now!”
He could see what they were thinking – someone had to have heard the gunshots, so where was the PSF?
Langer smiled. The PSF wasn’t coming anytime soon.
It took her two minutes to empty the jug, and after she splashed the last out on Porn boy’s computer Puig looked up and stared. The place reeked of petrol fumes. The wounded bureaucrat was still crying on the floor.
“Pick up your friend and y’all get out of here. Like I said, this is your one free pass. If I see you again, you’re going home hoppin’ on one foot. Now get going!”
The ones who could run ran out the door; two others helped their injured co-worker out onto the sidewalk. Langer walked to the door, turned, and took his fading cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it onto the Truth Agency womyn’s gasoline-soaked desk. It bounced across the surface, kicking up some sparks, and then the whole desk erupted in a fireball.
Langer jumped out the door and the fire roared through the office. Outside on the sidewalk, he could hear sirens wailing, but he knew they were not coming for him. He slid the pistol into his belt, covered it with the flap of his shirt, and strolled away as if nothing happened.
“You sure you can make a 500 meter shot?” Turnbull asked Davey Wohl. Turnbull was watching the mid-town PSF checkpoint at Main and 5th through a pair of Bushnell binoculars he had borrowed. Wohl was lying next to him with the Winchester 700 rifle the man had dug up from his cache out in the woods the previous evening. The shooter was peering downrange through a Nikon Buckmaster II 4-12x40 scope – deadly to deer, but not so pricey that it was deadly to him when his wife saw it on his credit card statement a dozen years before.
“Oh easy,” Wohl said. “I was the designated marksman in my unit back in Desert Storm. Shot an Iraqi major in the temple at 400 meters outside of Kuwait City. He was just sitting there on the edge of his hatch on top of his BTR. Dumbass.”
There were four PSF officers around their patrol cars at the roadblock in the middle of the intersection. One was talking to the driver of a silver Toyota Corolla they had stopped. The other three were lounging around, barely engaged, their AKs either leaning on their vehicles or strapped across their backs. They were clearly expecting another fulfilling day of hassling locals.
Turnbull and Rogers had selected their shooting position on a small rise in a wood line that offered a view a straight up the street to the north. They would be hard to see from the roadblock, and far enough away that it would be hard for the officers to effectively engage with their AKs. Naturally, there were good routes for withdrawal.