Holly Pietrus had been told by the AI to deliver more water to the core, where the fires were still blazing, but she’d looked off into the anarchy of smoke, gas, fire, and stun grenades and found herself paralyzed. Finally, when the fence behind the trailers was toppled and people began sprinting toward the Capitol, she followed. To her shock, the National Guard who’d been defending the Capitol were fleeing east, north, and south, scaling the fence trying to escape. When she made it inside, the first thing she found was a guy spray-painting a dick on a white marble wall.
“Stop!” she shouted at him and slapped the can from his hand. “What are you doing? Get the hell out!” He looked baffled by this but did as he was told. She moved deeper into the building. It was in the Rotunda that she found Dougall with his axe. Amid the fractured marble of two toppled statues and three or four paintings with huge gashes in the canvas, Dougall worked methodically to shred another. “No!” Holly cried. “Cut it out!” Like this guy was her little sister scribbling in her books with crayon when they were children. The kid ignored her, and without another thought Holly ran at him, grabbing his arms from behind to wrest the axe away, pulling herself onto his back, her legs clenched around his waist. He smashed his elbow into her face, which would purple her eye, and she fell. He tried to recover the axe, but Holly was back on her feet, tackling him to the ground so the blade shrieked across the marble floor. “Stop it! Just stop it! Stop!” And she pushed Dougall’s face and scrambled after the weapon. They both got to their feet and stood there, heaving breath. Clutching the weapon, Holly gave a little checked-swing thrust of the blade.
“Get out of here before I chop you up, kid!” How ridiculous that sounded, but Dougall had an abdominal muscle strain. He’d felt the pop when she landed on him. Holly watched him limp out of the Rotunda clutching his side. Then she ran around the building for the rest of the afternoon with the axe, threatening to murder anyone who was destroying, damaging, or defecating, which she found several guys doing in the Senate Chamber and ran at them like Lizzie Borden.
By the time the president and his advisors learned that not only had their show of force failed to clear the Mall but that the protestors had erupted out into the city in an orgy of destruction, he was on his third pill of the day. Sometimes he took Klonopin, sometimes he just lay awake calming himself with memories of how satisfying Afghanistan had been. For the first time, the stochastic processes of war frightened him. He went out to the grounds of Camp David to take in some air and beat his feet in the dust. Then Caperno called to tell him that somehow, the fucking SJWs had taken the Capitol Building.
Kate Morris and her team arrived inside the Capitol a few hours later. This was not what she’d wanted. Looking over the vandalism, the shattered sculptures, spray paint, and shredded paintings, she knew what happened next would define their movement in the eyes of those watching. Many of the hearts and minds she hoped to win would be reliving memories of men carrying Confederate flags through the halls of Congress. “We get this under control,” she told Levine, Pietrus, Young, and Yudong, “or we lose everything.” They secured the dozens of entrances throughout the building, including all the tunnels that led elsewhere in the city, posting their most trusted Blue Bands throughout the perimeter and blocking entrances wherever possible. They barricaded the tourist tunnel that connected the Library of Congress and overturned the trolleys that shuttled senators and representatives between their offices and the Capitol to block those routes. They established a command center, erected sleeping spaces, and commandeered all available food and supplies in the byzantine structure. They set up a hospital in Statuary Hall, where states provided looming statues of their most historic citizens, archetypal of their role in the American experience. The space had undergone a similar transformation during the Civil War, when wounded Union soldiers had pulverized limbs amputated among the marble and bronze figures. Now any volunteer with medical training treated the gassed, beaten, and rubber-shot.
As for the destruction, Kate put Holly in charge and impressed upon her how crucial it was to fix this as best they could. Damaged paintings and sculptures were carefully removed and set aside. When Kate was young and first learning from her dad about the genocide of Native peoples, she would have thrilled at seeing these paintings wrecked. Now, it filled her with a sadness she couldn’t quite explain to herself. Even more dismaying was what had happened in the House Chamber. Behind the Speaker’s podium, drawn to enormous scale with spray paint was a blue flame and the words 6DEGREES IS COMING.
“Clean this off,” Kate told a group of Blue Bands. Yet in the days and weeks that followed, that symbol would be found everywhere: in the destroyed D.C. lobby shops, graffitied onto the sides of buildings, chalked and stenciled onto every street and sidewalk, frequently found beside her own words. No matter what she tried or how much she decried violence, even against property, she would never again be able to separate her movement from theirs.
CHAOS THEORY, read the New York Post’s headline the next day with her picture. Subhead: MORRIS MELTS DOWN, TAKES COUNTRY WITH HER. Said Renaissance, THE LEFT’S HATRED KNOWS NO BOUNDS: POLICE BRUTALIZED, ASSAULTED BY INVADING ARMY. THE CAPITAL HAS FALLEN, said Fox; D.C. ON LOCKDOWN read the grim CNN chyron; CLIMATE ZEALOTS TEAR D.C. APART trumpeted the Wall Street Journal. Stories of police and patriotic Guardsmen beaten, gassed, stripped, humiliated. One iconic front-page photo showed a big chubby boy in tighty-whities, bleeding from the head, weeping and pointing in the direction of an overturned XAV. The outrage reigned alongside a very specific historical amnesia.
“The Weathermen have multiplied into an army of terrorists,” said Senator Russ Mackowski. “This lawlessness cannot stand, and our president must act with overwhelming force or God help us.” Renaissance begged patriots to arm themselves and patrol the streets of their towns and cities lest other provocateurs emerge. “The left-wing war on our country has reached a crisis,” said Jennifer Braden in her white-hot VR worlde. “President Love owns this disaster. He’s proven an utter coward. Arm yourselves while there’s still time.”
In the days following the aborted effort to clear the Mall, emboldened by the video of Kate beating the hood of an urban assault vehicle playing on every screen in the world, would-be revolutionaries and right-wing counterrevolutionaries attempted to break into Lockdown D.C. in droves. They were met by a massive influx of the US Army, police, and increasing numbers of Xuritas security personnel. Fencing and checkpoints were erected on all roads within fifty miles, from the highways to the county two-lanes. Homes and businesses were cleared in a five-mile radius around the city. The Coast Guard patrolled the Potomac and the Anacostia in a thick web of boats, tracking searchlights over the shores. And still people managed to find ways in.