shorter. So they sicced the Army on us. MacArthur was in front, chest full of ribbons, thumping a riding crop on his leg and giving orders like we was the Hun. Some of us met them on the way, waving white shirts like flags over our heads, begging for an hour to get the women and children out of the camp. The hotheads and the communists began throwing rocks and bottles so the Army threw gas bombs back. My head got split open with a club. I wanted to cut them so bad, just let my bones grow into claws and rip them to bits, like I was back in the war, but I didn’t. My brother’s boy turned blue and died the next morning from the gas. Nothing I could do. He was just too little… Folks wonder why we stayed. We were hungry and broke. Of course we stayed. We had nowhere else to go.
Washington D.C.
Their chosen meeting place had not been picked by chance, but rather because it seemed appropriate. The authorities hadn’t even bothered to clean up the mess left over from last summer. The shacks and tents had been burned, but the remains still sat there in their orderly rows, tattered or rusting, while the sun went down over the Anacostia Flats. It was a place where trust had been betrayed.
As someone who understood what it felt like to get stabbed in the back, he had wanted to see the place for himself. Jake Sullivan sat on the grass and savored a smoke while he waited for the others to arrive.
Lance Talon got there next, sort of. A mangy stray dog came trotting up to Sullivan like it owned the place. That was his first clue. Normally a cur like that would have skulked around in the shadows until it decided it was worth the risk to try and mooch food. The dog was brown except for where it was pink and it smelled like it had been rolling on something dead.
“Evening, Lance,” Sullivan said.
“Hey, Jake,” the dog answered with a deep voice. A dripping tongue hung out, but the dog’s mouth didn’t move as Lance spoke through the animal. “I’m on my way up the road. Figured I’d sniff around first.”
“How can you smell anything over that stink?” Sullivan pinched his nose. “Would you back up already? I’m dying here.”
“Smells like perfume and roses to me right now.” The dog trotted a few feet downwind. “Better?”
“Much. Why the mutt?”
“I’m guessing you haven’t read the evening paper yet.” The dog cocked its head at him and whined. “I was making sure this place wasn’t swarming with coppers first.”
“Haven’t seen the paper in days.”
“I’ve got one with me. You’re famous. Or is it infamous? Nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Dillinger.”
“That bad?”
“You think I’m exaggerating… Hang on a second.”
The dog’s manner suddenly changed. It blinked stupidly, as if trying to figure out how it had woken up here. The last thing it remembered was whatever wonderful dead thing it had been playing with before Lance had taken over its brain. The mutt saw Sullivan, yipped in surprise, and took off into the ruins at a dead run.
A Ford box truck came to stop nearby and shut off its engine. Sullivan tossed the butt in the grass and stood. Lance Talon limped up, his cowboy boots crunching on the gravel. They shook hands, both of them knowing better by now than to try to out-squeeze the other guy.
Though short, Lance was a tough fellow with a lumberjack’s beard and the shoulders to match. More comfortable in the outdoors than in the fake trappings of civilized society, the Beastie had adventured his way around the dark corners of the world, hunting exotic animals until the Grimnoir had put his skills to use hunting Imperium instead. “Nice view.” Lance glanced at the Capitol in the distance. The dome could be seen over the trees. “Formidable, even if it’s packed with liars and thieves.” He handed Sullivan a folded Washington Herald.
“What page?”
“Buddy, you’re the headline.”
DANGEROUS ACTIVE MURDERS FEDERAL OFFICERS
The next line was even worse.
JAKE “HEAVY” SULLIVAN:
Possible Conspirator in Magical Assassination Plot?
The picture was his convict shot from Rockville-the one that made his eyes look small, black, and dead. These people certainly moved fast.
Lance tried and failed to peer over Sullivan’s shoulder while he read the lies. Jake was nearly a foot taller, and it didn’t help that Lance had taken on a sort of permanent bad-posture stoop because one of his legs was shorter than the other. A particularly nasty demon had taken a chunk out of him and there hadn’t been a Healer around. “I heard talk you’re going to be declared public enemy number one. I saw that movie. James Cagney is too pretty to play the likes of you.”
Sullivan crumpled the newspaper in disgust and threw it on the ground. “Damn Hearst and his excuse for journalism. Whatever happened to reporters checking facts themselves? That man will print anything that makes an Active look like an animal.”
“Us being animals seems to be the popular sentiment over there today, too.” Lance nodded at the capitol. “The president is going to live, thank God, but all Actives are footing the bill. Dark times are coming, Jake.”
“Well, let’s go risk our lives finding this Pathfinder to protect all these ignorant bastards so they can sit around and bitch about our kind. You know this very spot should’ve been blown up by the Geo-Tel.. what, twice now?”
“Last year and ’08. Feeling bitter?”
Sullivan didn’t respond for a long time as he surveyed the wreckage of the camp. “I’m not going back to Rockville. I’m done breaking rocks. I’m not going back in a cage. I’ll die first.”
“I’m rather disinclined toward tight spaces myself.” Lance chuckled as he took a flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a swig. “Ahh… That’s good stuff. Well, you could always put out to sea. Pirate Bob said you’d make a fine executive officer.”
“Maybe I should. There’s no law out there except for what a man makes himself.” Sullivan took the offered flask and took a long pull of bootleg booze. It burned going down. He coughed. “You find that in a bathtub?”
“Turpentine gives it that special something.”
He took another drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and passed the noxious swill back over. “What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t rightly know that myself.” Lance was one that understood sacrifice. He had been a self-made man, successful and respected, and he’d given that up to protect Magicals. He’d lost his entire family in the secret war against the Imperium, yet here he was, still fighting, and he would probably keep on fighting until the day he died. “Nobody would blame you if you took off. Not with that kind of heat on your neck.”
Quitting was not a concept Sullivan was familiar with. “You know what this place is?”
Lance surveyed the ruins. “I took a look around through the eyes of that poor hungry beast. Tent stakes rusting away in the dirt, shacks in a nice grid all laid out with streets, latrines dug. Feels like a military camp.”
“Sort of. Ten thousand men dragged their families here because they tried to collect early on what was promised them. A buck and a quarter for each day served in the war. They were out of work and stupid enough to think that they could get what was theirs before the notes came due. Should’ve known better.”
“Ahh. The Bonus Army.”
Sullivan’s eyes wandered over the flats where a shanty town had been destroyed. A handful of the people here had been survivors of the 1st Volunteer Active Brigade, just like him. “An army.” He snorted. “They were just desperate folks looking for help from a nation that didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Congress said no. When the crowd didn’t leave, the real Army forced them out with tear gas and tanks, then put the whole damn thing to the torch… People got hurt. Kids died.”
“Sad day, that.”
Sullivan kicked at a rock. “They should’ve left peacefully when they lost the vote.”
“Would you have?”
They both knew Lance already had the answer to that. When a man like Sullivan set a course, it was seen through to the end. “They weren’t expecting to be treated like that. I know what they were thinking, the marchers
