no idea.

tom clancy meets action movie.

The country was in a state of collapse.  Years of political leaching had bled the country dry. Companies left, fed up with rules and regulations. Money left in the hands of those fleeing. Resources left as multi-corporations bought up everything with value and moved it.
The state of texas was collapsing, but into something else. The government always worried that the survivalists and militias would tear the state apart, but those groups banded together to hold public services together. It only worked because people wanted it to work. Store clerks showed up for work and were paid in cash, or groceries. Teachers showed up for class, and kept kids out of trouble. EMTs cruised the streets, and cops hung out with survivalists and gang members. It was strained at first, but mutual need required cooperation.
Fort Baker was bleeding to death. The base at Steelport was old, and the city proper was only slightly younger. Most military bases were designed with the basic necessities of life included, but viral communities sprang up on the outskirts, providing everything from tattoo parlors, pawn shops, and rent-to-own businesses, catering to newly enlisted soldiers.
Fort Baker had existed for decades. When the militas refused to murder or pillage anything, the units assigned to riot control simply went home. The sergeants had better things to do than stand in rows waiting for violence that just wasn't coming.  Most left, deserting to support their families. When the high command niced the soldiers leaving without fuss or theft, they ignored, then forgot about them.
Jason Foxley was one of the last soldiers assigned to 34th Special Troops Battalion. As a specialist, he had been stationed there long enough to settle down, but not long enough to start a family.  He told himself that staying was his duty, but it was just easier than leaving. Enough troops thought the same way, and Fort Baker became its own community.
The city of Steelport and the base didn't really mix, though.  You might see a pizza delivery guy on base, or a MedEvac truck in town, but it was an unwritten rule that everyone stuck to their own sides of the fence.
When it came to fences, Jason was pretty good at sitting on them. Instead of sneaking back home or trying to rebuild his unit, he was happy to sit in his barracks room. His life didn’t change much during the emergency. Days would trickle by while he alternated doing favors for the remaining non commissioned officers and playing video games with the few remaining lower enlisted soldiers.



Nearby in the city, a Max paced a small surgical theater. He was clean shaven, neat, and immaculate in both clothing and manner. At thirty years old, he projected the attitude of someone in charge. He whistled softly as he carefully marked off items organized on the benches along the walls, and only stopped when he heard something heavy shoulder open the door outside the theater.
The pencil clicked onto the clipboard he carried as he went to investigate. Outside, two men fought to drag a body bag down the hall, but the occupant of the bag was kicking, screaming, and doing his best to escape the tough plastic.
The prisoners guards snapped to a position of attention. They wore different colors of slacks and polo shirts, but combat boots and short haircuts identified them as former military. Their prisoner had rolled over and started inching across the floor when Max opened a locker and removed a short length of pipe.
“I’ve told you before, gentlemen, we have procedures going on at all hours, here. I would appreciate it if you kept the noise down when you moved subjects in.”
He stepped over the writhing person, took up a parody of a golfing stance, and swung the pipe into him. Swearing and threats turned into wheezes as the bag doubled over, clutching an abused stomach.
Max dropped the pipe on the floor. “Bring him in, strap him down, and sedate him.”


    Brian didn’t bother to knock when he walked into Jason’s room. “Bad news, brother.” He jumped over the couch and sat down next to his friend. “We are now the lowest ranking soldiers in the entire building. Also, Sergeant Ramirez wants to see us. Guess he thinks we can help out at the gate. He says the battalion commander wants the unit to post guards on the front gate for a few days.”
Jason dropped his controller and scowled, running a hand over his scalp. “Munday bailed, huh? I didn’t see that coming. I thought he was happy.” He shrugged dismissively, then got up to put a uniform together. “I suppose that if we have to stand at the gate, the noble sergeant would like us to look the part, yes?”
Brian nodded. “Yeah. He was serious, too. We are supposed to draw weapons.”
Jason didn’t reply. He started pulling on his uniform, including body armor and a helmet, then sliding a case out from under his bed. The case contained some of his own personal weapons, and since the fall of most military regulations, he found he could pull duty with his own gear, and no one looked at him any different. Back before the fall, wearing a piece of equipment that was the wrong color was grounds for a reprimand, but now no one batted an eye at his custom AR-15 rifle and pistol. Brian said nothing, but privately disagreed with the decision. He was more than happy drawing his M249 machine gun out of the armory for details, and didn’t deviate from the standard uniform. Once properly attired, they walked to the headquarters building.
Sergeant Ramirez filled them in on the plan. Odd reports were filtering in from the city, things like corporate mercenaries and abandoned businesses. None of it seemed connected, but it was enough to make the command decide to beef up the main gate with a few more people. The whole briefing only took a few minutes, and both soldiers piled into a company truck to head to the base entrance.
The situation was a bit worse than they expected. The usual gate guards were gone, and the gatehouse had more bullet holes in it than usual. A corporate truck sat across the road from the gate, still running, and you could see a body in the drivers seat. This only caused the soldiers to grimace. Events like this happened every few weeks, and it must have been recent. Gangs could be counted on to police up bodies and working vehicles, so the pair crouched behind a wall of sandbags and prepared to wait out the shift.
An hour later, the truck was still there.

The young man in the body bag woke up strapped to a table, bright lights illuminating his entire body. The last thing he remembered was being attacked and dragged out of his bus. Before that, he remembered cruising the city in a commandeered school bus, charging a dollar a passenger. Now his attention was focused on the well dressed gentleman cutting his hair.  
“Hey.” His voice came out hoarse. “Who are you? Where am I? Where are my clothes?”
Max smiled, put down the clippers, consulted a clipboard, then walked to a nearby table. “Good morning, Alex. It is very nice to finally meet you. My name is Max, and I am in charge of one of the experimental wings of…well, that’s not important. You are in one of my operating theaters, as a subject of one of my experiments.” He smiled, a genuine smile. “Your clothes are gone, but you won’t need them.”
Confusion finally gave way to to disbelief and anger, and Alex started to panic, speaking a bit too loudly for the small room. “What the hell are you doing? I’m…what are you going to do to me? Why the hell am I naked?”
Max ignored the volume and responded with another winning smile. He held up a small doll, crafted rather crudely out of burlap, and began fixing some of the clipped hair to the head. “Of course, I understand you are worried, and rightly so. I am working on a project.” His head bent in concentration. “You ever notice how some of the silliest rumors and legends have a bit of truth to them? Well, now that I no longer have a corporate board of directors or some restrictive oversight committee to worry about, I get to finally indulge myself with an experiment I have long wanted to accomplish.” His smile never wavered as he held the doll, a vague resemblance of the naked 23 year old in front of his face for inspection. “Voodoo.”
He replaced the doll on the table and began working on another. “You see, I am pretty convinced that voodoo is real, in one way or another. Forget magic and mystery. I am convinced I can replicate the results of the three most common attributes of voodoo through trial and error. I intend to prove that a subject can be killed by it, resurrected by it, and controlled by it. You were selected as a subject for the simple reason that you closely resemble our last subject, and we honestly made more of these dolls than we could use on one subject. Your hair color, height, skin color, and other characteristics meant my assistants picked you up.”
His tone and face took on a serious tone. “As for the last question, I admit to making mistakes. They were educational, surely, but the fact remains that a subject without clothing turns out to be a much more easily subdued individual. If you were to escape, your first compulsion would be to get clothing, not a weapon. Makes you more vulnerable. Second, a naked person in this compound is easily identified as someone who needs to be secured, no need to check credentials.” His grin returned as he finally examined the man in some detail. “Lastly, I like the view.”

At the gate entrance, things were turning sour. Ever since the base started falling apart, concessions had to be made to the new situation, and some of it was not agreeing with the new guards. There was far more gunfire from the city than they were used to. They hadn’t seen any vehicles in several hours. The radios hadn’t been issued in months for some reason, and cell phone service was sketchy.
The pair didn’t get nervous until they saw the fire. It was a block away from the gate, and the amount of gunfire was nothing compared to the steady chatter of an automatic weapon. Someone in that direction had an M2.
An M2 machine gun was not something that locals generally had. It is a belt-fed machine gun loaded with the largest bullets most military units had, exactly half an inch in width. It was normally used for destroying vehicles and had a range of nearly two miles in the right hands.
“Brian?” Jason broke the tense silence. “If that’s an M2, that means one of our trucks is in serious trouble. I don’t know who it is, or what’s going on, but I think we should check it out.”
Brian nodded. They both shouldered their weapons and started off at a ground eating jog, headed towards the gunfire. Within minutes, the machine gun had quit firing, but sporadic shots let them home in on the trouble spot. It was a gas station, and one of the pumps had spilled fuel across the parking lot. The fuel had ignited and since burned out. The parking lot also contained a beat up red pickup truck that had taken several dozen rounds of the .50 caliber machine gun. About thirty feet away from the truck was another vehicle, a military truck painted in drab grey and bearing the logo of one of the major corporations. Several company employees were gathered around it, in seeming good spirits.
A glance later showed it wasn’t as cheerful as it seemed. The machine gun they heard was mounted to the roof of the company truck, and the employees were armed with an assortment of rifles, no two alike. They were taking turns firing shots at the concrete, as if they were trying to get the newest spill to ignite.
Brian and Jason didn’t bother talking. They had hand signals to communicate, and Brian was indicating the area immediately behind the red pickup. There was a trio of locals huddled behind it, and as soon as Jason paused to catch his breath, he heard them screaming.
He sized up the situation with the scope on his rifle.  Three locals, tenatively dubbed “the good guys”. One was wearing the uniform of the gas station. Either his face was wet, or he was crying. He was armed, but the small revolver was left unattended on the concrete. He was holding someone with long hair who had to be injured but still alive. “Whoever it is has a deathgrip on that guys collar.” He thought. Third person hiding behind a tire, looks like he is screaming something at the corporates, and the facial expression seems more pleading than threatening. Panning over, he got a good look at the company men. One truck armed with a heavy machine gun. Can’t see inside. One subject leaning on the driver’s side door, smoking a cigarette. Polo shirt and cargo pants, drop leg holster, wearing a hard armor vest. Three subjects gathered at the edge of the spilled fuel, alternating shots with pistols and making bets. Same clothing. Different styles of body armor. All have military style rifles, including one particular rifle Jason knew was impossible to get as a civilian. It wasn’t until he finished scouting that he realized he was silently crying, and had thought of the company gunmen as “subjects”. It meant he had subconsciously decided to kill them.

Max was still whistling as he cleaned up the remains of the dolls. What was left on the table was no longer recognizable as a person, and would take more than a mop to clean up. He was as cheerful as he could be, considering the latest experiment was a success. While traveling to Jamaica, he heard several ways that local witches would commit murder by magic, and while he had yet to discover the scientific reasons why one of them worked, he was content to repeat the experiment until he did. His success with reanimation was slightly less effective, and his efforts to control anyone was a complete failure, but so long as the head office left him to his own devices, he was content to use the lab as he saw fit. Sooner or later, He thought, he would get more than vague twitches and strange vital signs from the dead bodies. Sooner or later, one of them would wake up, and he could get started on stage three.
He wheeled the gurney out of the room and down the hall, nodding at the occasional security guard and passing through checkpoints. The security men still followed his orders, and were good at picking up subjects for his experiments, but they still refused to adopt a uniform, instead picking an outfit of slacks, polo shirts, and an assortment of military gear that never seemed to match from one person to the next.  He sighed and swiped his card through a reader, but instead of a green light and an opened door, it buzzed and blinked red. Max frowned and tried again, but the signal repeated.
“Sir?” Max looked at the guard who addressed him. He was about to speak when the guard continued. “Sir, we need your opinion on something. We have an emergency in cold storage.”


Jason signaled a brief plan. He indicated a nearby building with windows that faced the street. Jason would get to the third floor, and immediately engage the three subjects who were loudly telling the locals what was about to happen to them. Brian would stay on the ground, around the corner from the trio of bettors, and engage the smoker as soon as Jason opened up. It was a pretty good ambush for a few seconds planning. If Jason got shot at, all he had to do was pull back into the room. If Brian went under fire, he could back into the building. Either trooper could adjust to help the other if it went wrong.
Brian nodded to signal his agreement, then Jason entered the building by simply crashing through it. The 190 pound soldier and his sixty pounds of armor didn’t even slow down as the door crashed open. He sprinted up the stairs and shouldered open a door at random. The height was right, but the angle was best from the far left window. He inched the window open, propping it open with the remote control from the television, then set up. He canted himself into a comfortable position, popped open the bipod on his rifle, and rested them on the window sill, taking care to keep the barrel from poking out the window.
Brian deployed the legs on his own machine gun and dropped into the prone position, then scooted as close to the wall as he could. He wiggled forward and crawled into a pile of garbage until the only thing visible was his barrel and his goggles.                                
Jason centered the reticle of his scope on the furthest subject, the crosshairs settling just over the collarbone. “Copper is non-sparking, Sir.” He whispered, as his target fired another shot at the ground. “But the thought’s what counts.”
When he fired, the tiny bullet left his rifle at just over 3000 feet per second. It didn’t weigh very much, but when anything is traveling at close to two thousand miles an hour, it doesn’t have to. The round punched a nearly invisible hole in the gunman’s neck, and he collapsed where he stood.
Brian had already pulled the trigger as far as he thought he could without firing when the louder crack of Jason’s rifle broke. His belt fed machine gun fired the same bullet as Jason, but at several hundred rounds a minute, he was even more capable than his friend. His finger only touched the trigger for a second, but it spat six shots at the smoker. The first shot was a tracer, and it splashed against the body armor and only shredded the cover, exposing the heavy bullet resistant plate.
This wasn’t effective. The only thing that round served to kill was the warranty on the bullet resistant carbide plate, and Brians target might have survived if it wasn’t for the other five steel core penetrators that crashed into, and through, the armor.
Jason had swiveled to the next target and lightly pressed his trigger another three times. His second target had also chose a light weight plate carrier for comfort, but the bullets entered his shoulder and neck. The only resistance was from a polo shirt and a shoulder strap.
Only seconds had passed. The smoker hadn’t finished falling. The first gunman only made it as far as falling to his knees. The second shooter wasn’t technically dead yet, and the third was being targeted when a hand reached up out of the hatch on top of the corporate truck. Brian saw it in horror and knew that someone was inside the armored vehicle and was gunning for his friend.
Jason was unaware that anyone was in the truck. He was too busy putting a pair of shots into the neck and head of the third gunman when the M2 fired a single round at him. This bullet traveled at nearly the same speed as his, but weighed over ten times what his bullets did. It tore through the window sill like it was tissue paper. The heavy bullet crashed into Jason’s helmet, breaking the chinstrap and ripping the armor from his head. The impact was just a glancing blow, but it served to snap the soldiers head to the side and carve a thumb sized gouge in the hardened kevlar, throwing it across the room. His reflexes kicked in and he fell backwards, curling up in a ball and holding his abused jaw. His first thought was that his rifle had exploded.
The turret gunner cursed at his weapon. It had jammed after a single shot, and due to the extreme angle of the shot, Brian could only watch as the weapon cycled without the gunner ever showing his head. It wasn’t until the heavy machine gun opened back up that he got an idea.
Jason was still trying to figure out what happened when the second burst tore the wall apart, blowing three inch holes in the window sill and showering the room he was in with splinters and chunks of brick as they tore into the ceiling.
Brian found a viable target. His burst hit the side of the mounted weapon and destroyed it, essentially welding the frame to the bolt. His next string was centered on the armored window and hammered it. The sandwiched glass clouded, spider-webbed, then caved in as the stream of lead and steel tore into the vehicle. He only stopped when his own weapon ran empty.
Jason rolled over, groaning, and opened his eyes. He happened to be looking into the kitchen, and His stomach turned sour. A teenage girl was curled up in the corner, a phone in one hand and a sleek looking silver pistol in the other. It at pointed at him, and the girl seemed far more angry than scared.
“Get out of my house.” She said. “Just….get out!”
He heaved himself to his feet, nodded, and collected his gear with trembling fingers. He walked out and carefully shut the door as best he could.
Down on the street, the pair linked up. They stood in the street, examining the bodies they made, and looked each other over. Jason tossed his helmet on the curb. With the straps broken and the shell damaged, it was worse than useless. His cracked goggles, facemask, and now broken electronic headset served to absorb most of the damage and shrapnel, but he still had a stripe of yellow that would eventually turn into a highly amusing bruise. Brian made out much better, only losing a drum of ammunition to the battle.
The locals didn’t fare any better. The employee, jeff, was working when the red pickup crashed. He went to help when the corporate thugs showed up and trapped him. Catherine was the driver. She stopped when she saw the long haired man fleeing something. It wasn’t until she picked him up that she finally saw what was chasing him. She said she only made it two blocks before crashing. Neither one of them knew what his name was. He died saying something, but no one heard it.
Jason took a few pictures on his phone, collected the weapons, and liberated the corporate truck. The soldiers were in the middle of a discussion about the seating arrangements of the vehicle when Brian noticed they were short a body. Somehow, the turret gunner had slipped out the far side of the truck and ran off on foot, most likely moments before the armored glass had shattered.
Everyone was in favor of following him. None of this was going to make any sense without someone to explain it, and both Jeff and Cathy were determined for either revenge, and explanation, or both.


Max was angry. One of his own guards had taken him to the garage, instead of cold storage. He had ignored Max’ questions, only pausing to listen to reports on his radio. They had hustled him into the back of a truck and sped off, following an access tunnel that deposited them outside the corporate offices.

The group had driven a few miles down the only street the runner could have taken, with no luck.

Reviews

[Wendy Seames Garner]

Great idea for a story, aj, I hope you finish the story. My only question is what happened to cause the country to collapse? I only saw one problem:
1. "When the high command niced the soldiers leaving without fuss or theft, they ignored, then forgot about them." (high command noticed)

I notice you are from El Paso and I suspect you are or were in the military there. My own son was stationed there, but has moved back here to Michigan after several years down there.

[Jack Isaac]

It looks like you have a terrific start to a story that reads like an autobiography. Everything here is well thought out and well ordered into a storyline that really captures the interests of your audience... and they do want to know what caused such a storyline to occur. Really, all you have to do for now is touch up the first paragraph such that it invites the reader into the story. IMO --You might want to present monopolies of multi-nationals rather than reserve "multi-corporations" at the end of the paragraph as if an afterthought. But that's just my humble opinion (MHO). Great job here... keep going!

[Shep]

Great back story and I love the details as it flows togeather. Can't wait to read the next chapter to see where you takes you. Awesome write so far. Just increase the font to 12 pt and you have winner here.