The Gaming Outpost

My name is Raymond Waters, or Big Ray to my friends, or Tech Sergeant Heavy Weapons Specialist R. Waters to my superior officers back at the base.  I was born big, and put too work early in the garden, and in the garage auto shoppe my daddy ran.

He would have none of those Official Charity People, because they wanted to give my mother money, but not him.  And because they wanted to put all sorts of rules on what he could do, and how he could do it.

“I’d take their filthy money, Ray, because I figured we had earned it from the way the governor’s family stole our land three generations back, but you be cautious. Taking another man’s money without work can make you soft.  The soft die quick in this hard world.  And freedom is worth more than money. Live free, Die hard.”

That was our family motto over the never used fireplace of our South Peninsular home. live solvo,  intereo ferreus written in solder iron by my father with a torch right on the blonde stones.

It looked like I might get a chance.

I was humping a full backpack, a SAW with a box of ammo under my arm, and a little girl, not more than four under my other arm.  She looked scared as she stared back at the pursuing mob who meant to kill her, and her older sister, and mom and dad, and a whole slew of other people.

All that stood between them and Judgement Day was Bill, our resident sniper, deerhunter and country music singer.  He was good enough to sing backup for some middling bands I had heard of, and I hate to say it, but he had convinced me  that country was not all bad.  Course, he had a voice that could go from honey to lightning bolt on your toes in one second, and he would have sounded good singing advertising jingles.

Bill was singing songs behind us to several of the girls in the escapee’ crowd as we headed toward the mini-rockets on the coastline five miles away.  Every now and then, he’d stop singing, plop himself down, and shoot three-four times to slow them up.

“YOU Slowing Them Looters Down?”  I bellowed back to him.  My voice is not pretty, but I can knock a hummingbird out of the sky at ten paces with a good shout.

“Three of them to zero.” He replied, and the girls with him, girls who had never before this morning seen any actual violence, they laughed at the killing of three men.

The path through the pastures and woods of the Presidential Palace was well-kept, even as the bills for all his expansive programs had come due, and he had tried to hack the interest out of the backs of the workers.  Behind them, the Palace and its now dead by a bullet in the bathroom atop his gold throne, they burned in a plume that reached into the sky.

The rich had cheated.  The poor had begged for money from the government.  The middle class had been destroyed as they lacked the clever lawyers of the rich.  Now, the rich had fled, and the poor had been hit for money to feed The Beast.  They responded by looting and executions.

Some optimistic fools overseas had left their banking families in the area until it was clearly too late.  Then they screamed to us to ‘do your patriotic duty’ as if we did not know that greed had motivated them to leave those families there.

My legs burned, and my arms did too, but I was not shaking, not yet.

We came on to the fourth mile, and Chen came by in his rapid step-step he said that save energy.  He was an odd one at times, but than any great commander was.  Thing was, I’d follow him anywhere.

“K? Big Ray?” I nodded, and kept to my steady breathing as he slipped on back to Bill, who had just shot another pursuer.