My father, bless his soul, had told me that dealing with my discharge would easier if I kept a journal. And so I found myself sitting on a park bench in the manicured though brown and wilted park surrounding Sticktown's City Hall on a scorching hot day during the dry season, writing in the leather bound notebook that he had given me while I waited for my increasingly late girlfriend to arrive. My father, Victor Crowe, had called in several favors in order to secure me civilian employment, since I had been unable to do so on my own. Indeed, since my discharge, I had been unable to cope well at all with the transition to civilian life. And so my father had convinced an old friend of his, the infamous Professor Freeman Harbinger to take me on as an apprentice and junior partner. Professor Harbinger worked as a private detective and occultist, apparently performing exorcisms and seances in addition to his well regarded work as an investigator of bizarre criminal cases. As a lifelong secular Buddhist, the occultist mumbo jumbo associated with my father's old friend was more than a little off putting. And so I had imposed upon my girlfriend to come with me for the initial meeting to provide emotional back up. But she was running late, which meant I was running late; or rather sitting in the park as I became increasingly late for what amounted to my first civilian job interview ever.
Couples walked through the park, generally oblivious to the wilting greenery begging to be watered. Newsboys shouted about the three cholera victims who had committed suicide this past week. With water levels low, even people who could afford indoor plumbing were forced to contend with water pressure problems and cholera was friend and housemate to stagnant water. None of stick town's residents ever longed for the monsoon season, with rains strong enough to strip the skin off a small child and flash floods that could result in missing pets or livestock. But on a day when the needle might easily clear forty degrees centigrade at noon and an ambitious cook might try frying bacon on their tin roof instead of their solar cooker; on such a day people did start to wonder if the monsoon was truly worse. And of course, in all of this I was waiting in my dress blues, because my wardrobe choices were still limited to my military dress uniform which I was currently wearing or camouflage uniform. The dress uniform was incredibly formal looking, and slightly off putting to civilians. The Camouflage uniform looked severely off putting to civilians, as New Jericho Military didn't normally wear camouflage in a civilian center. Wearing the camouflage uniform, I would have looked like either an invading soldier or a low level thug trying to appear as though I were an invading soldier. Soldiers were warned frequently that several street gangs had adopted military surplus camouflage as their unofficial uniform, with home made insignia and sashimono flags strapped to their back like samurai if they were feeling particularly swashbuckling.
I stopped writing momentarily and glanced at my pocket watch and then returned it to my breast pocket. Violetta had agreed to meet at noon. The hour hand had marched past one o'clock and the minute hand was now approaching half past the hour. Violetta disliked arriving late, something had detained my girlfriend. My mind leaped, as it did in the days since my discharge from the New Jericho Armed Forces, to all sorts of horrible ways in which Violetta might have been detained. Violetta Priest worked as a Constable for the Sticktown Sheriff's Office, metting out justice above and below the stilts that give the town its name and protecting the town's inhabitants from the seasonal flood waters that have become the norm in the centuries since the fall. I have never been fond of the unknown, the fog of war to steal a phrase from Clausewitz. But I learned to deal with that fog during my time in the field, for all the good it did me, but dealing with the fog of war as a civilian continually proved to be more perilous than dealing with said fog upon the battlefield. I didn't know what had detained Violetta. And given her profession as a police officer, I could plausibly imagine a great many horrible things unfolding within that concealing cloud.
My father had instructed me to write through the troubles associated with my discharge. He hoped it would help me deal with the unrest that had sat in my mind like an rabid wolf since I had entered civilian life. I had balked at the matter of course. I had told him that the problem was much more straight forward than he was suggesting, that I simply didn't know how to live a civilian life. My father disagreed with my assessment. He didn't dispute that I had little adult experience with civilian life, as was the way with children in the Crowe family going back to the founding of the New Jericho Armed Forces. He argued that other parts of the circumstances of my entering the civilian life bore responsibility for my difficulties. And so my father had instructed me to keep a journal and write through my troubles. I remain grateful that he never expressed any disappointment at this being the first time in almost two hundred years that a member of the Crowe family held no position in the New Jericho Armed Forces. The journal was filling up as I waited, but Violetta remained stubbornly absent.
Born in the year 198 after the Fall, I entered military service as a squire to my father at the age of twelve while he was still serving in the Dragoons. At the age of seventeen I had qualified for full service and, after completing basic training, been assigned to the 151st Infantry as a field medic- called the Dark Lords as a nickname. There I completed sniper training and cavalry training, and managed to arrange transfer into the 42nd Dragoons, by which time my father had retired from the unit and it was widely seen as my job to fill the vacancy. by the year 217 after the fall, when the House of Council announced Operation Canyonlands, I had completed officer training and advanced to the rank of lieutenant. The government sold Operation Canyonlands to the public as a measure to clean up and establish order in the steel canyonlands within the borders claimed by New Jericho. In the end of course, the old pre-fall cities lived up to their nicknames and my brothers and sisters in arms died like mayflys in those steelmine deathtraps. After three years of casualties, with more and more New Jericho soldiers coming home in oaks boxes draped in gold and red flags, the House of Council decided to retreat with their tail between their legs. The elites didn't call it that. They declared victory in pacifying the savages of the canyonlands and declared the abandoned cities within the borders of New Jericho to be much improved. They weren't. We had accomplished nothing, save proving to the rusties of the Bannerlands and the new boys in the Babylon Republics that Old Smoke was not the continental super power that we had once been. New Jericho had stumbled badly, and it showed. The Canyonlands stood between New Jericho and the Bannerlands, so the change there was mostly in one of diplomatic tone. The rusties were more brazen and less respectful of our heathen ways during interactions. New Babylon, being due north and sharing a large heavily disputed border become an issue for both the government and the armed forces almost immediately. Upon return from the canyonlands, the 42nd was sent into training exercises to retrain us for the border disputes had abruptly increased in the wake of our performance in the deathtraps. Our commander deployed the 42nd for training exercises in the Ashland region, which placed us in a conflict with other New Jericho units under a different command. Looking back, the situation should have bothered me much more than it did, and the situation bothered me a lot at the time. Rival commanders had used soldiers, human beings under their command, to advance their careers and act out their petty rivalry.
Glancing up at this point, I saw a familiar figure standing taller than the rest of the crowd. I spotted the leather stetson with the tin badge marking her a member of sheriff's office through the crowd and closed my book, sliding it into my messenger bag to return to later. Violetta stood just shy of six feet tall, making her nearly as tall as myself. We had, in fact been occasionally mistaken for sisters, both tall and strongly built with strong cheekbones and broader shoulders than other women our size. I didn't consider her, and by association myself, to be unnaturally built for our gender but that we had a certain physical presence was inarguable. Violetta never wore make up, and kept her hair shorter than most men I knew. She pushed through the crowd in her usual brusque manner. I could see that she was holding her police duster jacket rather than wearing it. It surprised me that she had even bothered to carry it with her on a day such as this, but then I looked down at my own dress blue jacket folded beside my messenger bag and decided to minimize my hypocrisy. I started to greet her with a salute, and then corrected myself and waved to her in what I hoped was a casual manner. Violetta's complexion had flushed from some exertion I noticed as she approached, perhaps running while late to meet me. I then noticed that holster to her firearm stood unclasped, the Allegheny Model .38 Special Revolver shaking in the holster as she jogged towards me. I refocused on Violetta and noticed that her boots bore fresh dark stains, what I immediately suspected to be drying blood. Her duster was also marked by the same dark stains, as were her leather gloves which Violetta was wearing despite the ridiculous heat.
"Sorry I'm late." She called out, once she was within twenty feet and didn't have to broadcast quite so loudly to reach me, "Police work never rests, you know?"
I sorted through the options that would explain the set of things I had observed and then asked, "Are you alright? You weren't hurt?"
Violetta raised an eyebrow, "Why would I be hurt? I'm untouchable."
I pointed at her jacket first, as it seemed the least suspect of the stains, "That looks like blood. Not yours I hope?"
Violetta looked down at her jacket, noticed where I was looking and quickly refolded the duster in her hands to cover the blood. She paused, and then before I could draw attention further, she removed her gloves and stuffed them hastily into the pocket of her duster.
"No, it's not mine," She lowered her voice to below conversational volume as she answered, "Just part of the job."
"Well, at least I know what kept you, if you were transporting somebody to the station house for processing." I said carefully.
Violetta didn't answer right away. I watched her eyes move, not meeting mine as she stared into the distance as though trying to process information. Finally she said, "Nothing that big, just a drunk who needed sorting out. Some poor sod couldn't afford the fuel to boil his water and couldn't keep off the small beer, you know?"
"You didn't have to shoot him, I hope?" I gestured as casually as I could the unclasped holster.
Violetta looked down and clenched her teeth for a moment, clasping her holster as she answered, "No, just needed to establish a chain of authority, or a chain of command, you know? Look Dahlia, just let it go. Police work is messy and sometimes you crack a few eggs in the process."
"If he was just a drunk I hope you didn't crack anything permanently, you're a peace officer after all." I could hear my tone shifting from worried to accusatory as I spoke, and regretted the shift as soon as I noticed it.
Violetta noticed it too and her face flushed, "It's not like you haven't killed people who disagreed with you too."
I coughed in surprise, "Excuse me. What did you say?"
"Oh come on Dahlia," Violetta said, her voice rising, "You were a soldier. Killing people who are problems is what you did. Are you telling me that you never used the authority of that uniform to make a personal problem disappear?"
I shook my head to clear it, "No, absolutely not. Killing in the line of duty was part of my job. Killing for myself would be murder. I'm a killer, yes. I was never and will never be a murderer. What are you implying?"
"Get off your high horse. You aren't a dragoon anymore Dahlia, you were dishonorably discharged, that kind of disproves your little speech there. We all get dirty occasionally. I get it, that was what happened in Ashland. You don't have to keep pretending to me. We're both a little dirty."
"I was not dishonorably discharged. My discharge was other-than-honourable, there's a difference. They used me as a convenient scapegoat and nothing more. Don't you dare compare being a corrupt cop with what I had to do in Ashland. People died under my watch because other people played games. I killed people to minimize the loss. I will never forgive myself for what I did, but I didn't do any of it for my own benefit. I lost everything because I did the right thing, not because I used my power for personal gain."
"Oh you lost everything, did you? You didn't lose me, you know? Not then, but you certainly lost me now. If you think I'm staying with somebody who thinks I'm corrupt, you're out of your mind. Keep on the straight and narrow Dahlia, because you're a civilian now- and I'm the law."
We hadn't even stepped close enough to embrace by this time, and she turned and marched off.
"That could have gone better." I muttered to myself. I stood up and slung my jacket across my messenger bag, before hanging the bag itself off my shoulder. Now I had to face Freeman Harbinger alone. Hell, now I had to face life even more alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment