Seth Young and Tom Levine planned to leave the next morning. They tasked themselves with moving through the ranks of the remaining Blue Bands, explaining the choice everyone had ahead of them. Liza Yudong and Holly Pietrus left at dusk. They walked to a checkpoint on Fourteenth and Independence, where they were told to drop their backpacks and put their hands on her heads. They were zip-tied, processed for three hours, interviewed, and then released as promised.
The authorities went in that night.
The operation began at 3:31 a.m. on August 1. One moment there was darkness and only the stark splash of stars reigning over the Mall and the Capitol, and the next floodlights and helicopters. The 1,250-watt fluorescent light towers switched on with a cacophonous chorus of thunks, turning four hundred acres of D.C. into interrogation-room glare. The choppers swooped in, hovering low above the Mall, uncovering dark corners with searchlights. The occupation’s drones were shot out of the air, replaced by law enforcement’s and armed with fifty rubber bullets apiece. Twenty-five thousand Guard, police, and private security forces surrounded the Mall, but it was a core contingent of Xuritas Special Ops that breached the barricades first, firing live ammunition, the crackle of gunfire foreign to these civilians, nearly all of them mistaking the sound for leftover firecrackers.
Kelly Pasquina was sleeping near the barricade at Third and Pennsylvania when the commotion began and crawled out of her miserably sweaty tent to see black-clad soldiers and the bright smatter of muzzle flashes. Fear took her by the throat, so that all she could really hear was her heart throbbing in her ears. Then her older brother, Walt, grabbed her by the shoulders and barked in her face, “Get down!”
The first round of Xuritas bullets punctured the lungs and heads and rib cages of people who’d just emerged from their tents to see what the deal was with the lights. It changed the very nature of the crowd. These bodies, once friends and comrades, became terrifying obstacles. Logan Dougall, penned in, saw the men in black, eyes hidden by visors, saw bursts of gunfire slicing apart people beside him, and now it wasn’t just the bullets that were dangerous, but anyone blocking his escape. He threw elbows and stepped on groins and swiped away hands reaching for him. People ran with the panic of spotting a predator in open savanna. They all spilled east in the direction of the Capitol, looking for safety within its walls, but another Xuritas unit had driven through the barricades from that direction, cornering them. Dougall tried to spin and retreat before three bullets tore out the center of his chest.
Bullets, Kelly Pasquina realized, watching from the ground, had an almost unthinkable impact on the human body. Even though she came from a military family, even though she’d grown up watching as many Hollywood gunfights as the next gal, even though mass-shooting drills had been a part of her childhood, she’d never really considered what it is bullets do, the way they move bodies in ways they’re not supposed to move, and what comes out of the holes is so ghastly, and how the wounds make noises bodies are never supposed to make. How they carve and pulverize and fragment tissue, bone, muscle. Her brother, lying prone beside her, knew this all too well. That was the whole point of a bullet. A cold reminder of the simplicity and suddenness of death. Not that he was trying to explain this to his kid sister, weeping with panic.
Those involved with the decision to open fire on the encampment ran the gamut from principled dissenters to avid enthusiasts to those already leaking to major newspapers that they had tried to stop it without actually having done anything of the sort. The architects of the plan simply wanted to send a message. They weren’t there to massacre all twenty thousand people, but there would be no inspirational stand going viral this time. This time, there would be absolute compliance and a decisive end to the situation. A display of loyalty by the dead. With conservative bursts of gunfire, they herded the terrorists into the center of the Mall, at which point loudspeakers began demanding that they drop to the ground.
“Lie down with your palms on the earth. Do not move. If you lie down, you will not be harmed.”
The running, screaming people began to comply, not because they were necessarily listening to the loudspeakers over the thunder of the helicopters and the moans of the wounded and dying but because they could hear the snap of bullets all around them, and they could see others falling, leaving mists of blood, which looked pink and orange in the harsh fluorescent light. Bridget Zeckhauser felt a bullet clip her arm, and then another punch through her back, and when she fell onto part of a collapsed tent, she buried her face in the dirt and prayed to be transported away from this. Walt Pasquina saw her spill across the ground, could hear her screaming as she whipped one panicked arm covered in butterfly tattoos. Kelly lay on her stomach whimpering, trembling with shock. Walt grabbed his sister by the arm and shook her so she would look at him. “Stay put, stay down,” he said. “We’ll get through this, Kel. I love you.” And he sprang to his feet and ran toward the gunfire to help the woman with the butterflies on her arm. Of course he did, Kelly thought. That was who he was. It was the last time she saw him alive.
As police and official military moved in behind Xuritas, bulldozing through the blockades on Third and Fourteenth Streets, they found the carnage. Dead bodies were indistinguishable from the terrified living until you got right up close and heard the sounds of their weeping or saw the death mask of the face. The D.C. Guard shot tear gas anyway. Metro Police coming in behind the first wave of Xuritas were told to zip-tie every pair of hands they found. They began dragging people away or serving up beatings with truncheons, but this felt almost ridiculous when you were standing in puddles of gore from people cut to ribbons by automatic weapons fire. Master Patrol Officer Andrea Sanchez, who’d worked every overtime shift she could that summer, who from the first day of all this had felt stirrings of dread, who told herself no matter what she would not do anything she could not explain to her seven-year-old son, took off her helmet and threw up. She would never forget what she saw there: The first body she came across was unrecognizable, just a sizzling pile of meat and blood. She stepped on something and had to stare at it for a second before she realized it was a piece of someone’s bit-off tongue, lying like a pink sponge on the sidewalk. The Xuritas forces stood around looking very self-satisfied, like, There you go, ladies, that’s how it’s done. Glad we could clean up your mess. Everything was so loud. So many terrified people screaming and crying and begging for help all at once. She stopped for a middle-aged woman who’d been shot in the arm and torso. She was shivering and crying. A dark pixie haircut and small butterflies tattooed on her forearms. A dead man with a crew cut was draped over her, like he’d tried to shield her with his body, but of course he’d probably just fallen there. Her eyes pleaded with Andrea Sanchez for help. Andrea got a tourniquet around the woman’s arm and told her everything was going to be okay. The woman’s skin turned a ghostly white, her lips purple, and she was dead long before any paramedics were allowed onto the Mall. Andrea stayed with her awhile, and then got up because there was a controversy brewing as their forces continued to the Capitol.
Loren Victor Love and his team had returned to the White House three days earlier after the heat storm had thinned their problem. He was getting his hair cut while he watched the live feed from the Situation Room. Everyone in there was very quiet. Secretary Caperno chewed on her forefinger. The national security advisor held a hand to his mouth and tried to breathe evenly. Vice President McGuirk excused himself after the bloodshed began. Meanwhile, President Love’s barber cropped his hair. He’d be going on TV in the evening to explain the severity of this crackdown, the necessity of it, and this was the only opportunity, he claimed, to fit in the trim. The barber wore white latex as he sheered the sides of Love’s skull and scissored the top. An assistant, also wearing latex gloves, carefully collected the hair in a plastic bag, using a forensic light to locate every last strand. He did the same with each of the president’s nail clippings. It was also why Love defecated in a special toilet with a disposable box. All of this organic material was taken to a kiln and incinerated. It was not exactly paranoia, given what could be done these days with access to a person’s genetic material, but to have the man there with the HandScope LED collecting stray hairs while the security forces of the president’s former company shot unarmed protestors “is fucking Bond villain behavior,” one unnamed source would later tell the Washington Post. And yet there were those who experienced a version of unadulterated ecstasy. The way some found joy in Kate Morris’s rousing speech, these men and women found such deep pleasure when news arrived of this decisive action.