Outside the Capitol Building, between the amassed police, military, and security contractors, no one knew who was in charge. All chain of command had been lost, and many of them could only stand around gazing at the nightmare in the floodlights. Others itched to add a few more bodies to the pile. EMTs and medics were finally allowed onto the Mall, and they worked past their shock and disbelief. As dawn broke and the first dim light peered over the horizon, a heavy fog rolled in. The infrared cooling of a humid air mass created a dense, smoky cloud that cloaked the combatants, the blood, the living and the dying alike. Soldiers wandered in and out of the smoke. Ghosts disappearing and reappearing. The last person to die in the assault would be killed when a police horse accidentally trampled her to death. She lay on the ground crying for someone to help her. The horse got confused.
Kate Morris never saw any of it. While sleeping in the Speaker’s office, one of the new Blue Bands rushed in to tell her there was shooting, and they needed to get to a windowless room. When she heard the pops of gunfire, Kate had a moment to wonder if this was what she’d wanted: to goad them into the unthinkable. Now she was trying to push past this girl, who was blocking her way like she was her bodyguard, begging her not to walk outside.
“Listen to me,” said Kate, trying to slip past her.
“No please no please, stop, stop,” the girl pleaded. Her name was Krystal Robison. She was nineteen and had left her second semester at the University of Maryland to join the occupation and earn her blue band.
“I need to surrender. I need to tell them we’ll come out.”
“They’re killing people, Kate, they’re killing people,” Robison begged, her eyes enormous moons of terror. “Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t.”
“I think they’re coming in,” someone cried.
Then there was an explosion.
The mayor had usurped the chain of command and demanded that Metro Police be in charge of retaking the Capitol. He was gulping and sweating and feeling dizzy from the images beaming back to him from the Mall. The media blackout, enforced by helicopter, drone, and a five-mile perimeter, would never work, he realized. People in his office were weeping. His public affairs specialist had simply walked out. Quit in the middle of a crisis. He felt like he was giving orders in a dream where nothing obeyed the laws of physics, like a stapler might just float past his vision in this realm of selective gravity. But he barked the order into the phone. City SWAT would take the Capitol. They were not to use any more lethal force unless absolutely necessary.
After the flash-bangs sent everyone to the floor, these officers stormed into the Rotunda. Occupiers dove down and clutched the marble with their faces and begged not to be killed. Many were sobbing, certain these men were going to murder them while they lay there. Overcome with terror, a few ran. They were tased or shot with beanbag rounds. Not a single live bullet was fired in the Capitol. But when Tom Levine saw the cops grab a small woman and practically rip her arm out of its socket as they threw her against the wall, he reacted by instinct, leaping to his feet and screaming at them to stop. The first blow fell across the side of his head, ringing his ear, sending his vision spiraling to dark. Then the clubs and boots descended, and he felt something in his body crack irreparably, and he never recalled anything else.
The occupiers were zip-tied and hauled to buses on the east side of the Capitol grounds where there were fewer corpses and a niveous fog obscured most of the blood. Kate had fallen when the flash-bang erupted, and her daze was such that she’d stumbled away, losing consciousness briefly. She came to at the gift shop. She saw the flashlights cutting through the smoke, so she put herself down on her stomach with her hands on the back of her head and waited. No one realized who she was when they brought her to her feet. They were putting sacks over the heads of the arrested. The last thing she saw was the sweaty upper lip of the cop, then the darkness of the cloth, the world reduced to chaotic white noise, sirens, screaming, weeping, and pounding helicopter blades. She smelled the overpowering sewage scent of their takeover and something coppery and wet overlaying it. She’d never smelled that much blood before, so she couldn’t place it in context. To keep herself calm, she thought about the top of the last mountain she’d climbed, when Matt had fallen well behind her, and she stood on the peak, and how gorgeous and eerily silent it was when the wind died away. She was trembling inside her black hood all the way to the bus—right up until she was thrown bodily into a seat beside a weeping man. She apologized for banging off him. The man said nothing. Kept crying. She had to say something. She was, after all, the reason he was there.
“It’s going to be okay,” Kate said. “Really, it is.” She just wanted to be helpful.
“I couldn’t find my wife,” he sobbed, and he thrashed in shame and fury beside her. His voice cracked: “They were shooting and I fucking ran. I fucking ran, and I don’t know what happened to her! I don’t know where she is!”
Finally, within the halls of the Capitol, Quinton Marcus-McCall made his way to the House Chamber. He went to a spot just in front of the Speaker’s dais. The Blue Bands had kept it immaculately clean, preserving this image of a sacred space of democracy while their members took to the global stage to demand revolution. He waited, smelling the fumes on his clothes and reading the Daniel Webster inscription etched on the wall behind the dais. He held a lighter. He had three cameras discreetly set up in various positions in the chamber, including the gallery level. He’d talked to Liza Yudong about how to beat the government’s signal blocking, so the footage could be downloaded to an encrypted drop box. He flicked the lighter open and closed with a shink-snap. He heard the authorities coming down the hall. He got to his knees.
The men entered the House Chamber, channeling down the aisles like quick water. Demanding all the usual things. Ordering him to get down on the ground. Hands in this place or that place. Not entirely unfamiliar to a Black man who’d once been a teenager in Detroit. He held up a palm. “Fellas, stay back. For your own safety.” And though they were confused, the police did indeed stop. “Just know I’m doing this outta love,” he said. He had such a calm disposition, his face downcast but also still as water. “And for anyone watching, forgive them. Forgive everything they’ve done today. Love this fallen world as hard as you can.”
And he flicked open the lighter and touched it to his blue sweatshirt.
He’d jellied the gasoline himself not long after the first aborted effort to clear the Mall, siphoning from the Guard vehicle captured in the first intrusion. He knew they’d come again, and maybe this idea had been in his head a long time. Maybe as far back as his childhood when he was just an odd, bookish kid who spent too much time alone. That morning, when he heard the first shots ring out, he retrieved the can from its hiding place and soaked his clothes. During his six months of training in nonviolent resistance, as he prepared for this action, he’d also studied this process. Burn hot and burn fast. Go up quick, and the pain will only be a forgotten moment.