15- Resistance

Resistance

 Rampart Division, Los Angeles Police Department

They were dressed out in full kit; body armor, flash bangs, with assault rifles slung, locked and loaded. The black uniforms had always given these men and woman a sense of superiority, but now they were brands marking them for extermination. The Chinese were hunting any form of law enforcement. They were arming the disenfranchised youths that had made up the Occupy Movement with small arms and intelligence and providing air cover as they assaulted the police stations.

The Division Captain was also decked out in full kit as he addressed the people assembled in the briefing room. The smell of whiskey from him as he walked unsteadily down the isle was very strong. The officers looked at each other with raised eyebrows and concern as he passed.

He gained the podium, where he rested his rifle, where he normally discussed a weekly crime blotter that was 75% petty theft and the balance on average of gang crimes and sex assaults. He paused, drunk. A look over the room brought out the insecurities full force; he felt he was not equipped to lead these men and women. A buckling knee lent credibility to the feeling. No one noticed the insect like vehicle stuck in a high corner, as if glued to the wall.

" Men, woman. It has been my pleasure to be your captain. You all know now that the city is swarming with Chinese soldiers. We have no contact or support from Washington..."

He couldn't hardly bear to look at them. This announcement was not sanctioned or authorized. 

"...I am suggesting you, for your own safety, get your normal clothes back on and go home. "

Normally he would have looked out at them with his position suggesting authority and commanding respect. He felt like a neutered dog in a room full of bitches in heat. They wanted to fight, to patrol, to use the armored vehicles they had been given and do their jobs, mostly. The few who placed their families  at a priority got up immediately and stripped their gear where they stood, relieved to be relieved. The rest, some unsure and some determined to be a part of the solution stayed. In the end the result were similar.

The two windows in the briefing room area blew out and small quad rotor drones entered the room, maneuvering aggressively. 

They darted to the ceiling and stuck there. The police had just enough time to register that they were caught before they exploded. 

Other small drones clouded the doorways and machine gunned the retreating officers in civilian clothes as they tried to flee; each cop stepped over the bodies of his and hers comrades and walked into the bullets in calm disbelief and mindless denial that this was happening. This couldn't happen here.

This was America.

Outside the building fires were beginning to rage and the sound of jets overhead began to diminish. The freeways were clogged with cars and trucks and Jeeps tore new paths along side the freeway when there was a lack of fences as all who could began to flee towards Las Vegas and into the Mojave desert.

The invasion was now three days old. 

On a battery powered radio next to a slain receptionist inside the station the president of the United States spoke about trade deficits and Somali pirates. There wasn't one word about the Chinese. Eventually the fires consumed the radio and melted its plastic.  

Chaos reigned; except in the areas occupied by the Chinese troops. They delivered water and food and admonished the citizens to maintain social harmony. Some noticed the irony of men with rifles talking about social harmony with blood stains on the pants, but they took the water anyway because the power was gone and without power Los Angeles had no water from her spigots and the wells not on generators ran dry.

14-The Hollywood Hills Have Eyes

The Hollywood Hills Have Eyes

The pilot of the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk tried to glide the disabled aircraft to a landing on the Pear Blossom Highway but the angular bird was not particularly aerodynamic and when the controls died she dropped like a kite in a tepid wind. The controls and the electronics were just gone. Even the ejection handles in the cockpit were unresponsive, so Colonel Henry Blake braced for impact as she dropped, glancing at the photograph of his daughter and grandson taped to the only spare area on the control panel.

She clipped some dry pine trees and crested a low rise just missing an outcrop of grey granite. The silent plane skidded down a low hill, bounced over the roadway and nosed over. The glass of the cockpit shattered and the compartment began to fill with dirt and rock and the plane slowed and ground into the parched mountain soil.

It was pitch black and his arms were pinned. He could hear the sound of crackling flames and he tried to pray as he resigned himself to a pilots worst fear; burning alive. They had all imagined death. Combat deaths tended to be quick and painless. Bodies got blown apart by heavy rounds from airplane cannonfire, bodies were disarticulated by bombs and people were vaporized in an instant by incendiary fuel-air bombs. He knew as he had watched through night vision lenses as precision guided munitions rended concrete and steel and any bystanders, some admittedly innocent. Pilots blackout and died oblivious as an airplane flat spun into the ground. But surviving a crash landing and cooking alive was the worst.

He struggled against the harness but the dirt and rock immobilized him. He distantly heard shouts and just as quickly as the crash had happened, sunlight burst into the ruined cockpit and the flames were extinguished. Rough hand grasped at his harness and the dull flash of a sharp blade released him from the safety harness. He was pulled free.

Aside from the left arm with the bone protruding just in front of the elbow everything seemed okay. He gasped for air and was surrounded by a circle of faces with fatigued floppy hats.

He could hear them shouting as if from a great distance and he felt hands shaking him. They bore him up and away from the flaming wreckage, his left arm gracefully silent even though he could feel the bones grinding together. He felt it with his right hand and it felt like a bag of loose gravel below the fracture. Blood jetted from around the white bone and he began to fade into shock.

“Who? Who...are you people.”

One of the men in camouflaged clothing leaned toward him. He had the thick stench of beer on his breath.

“Sir?”  The colonel faded back in briefly.

“Sir? We are the Pasadena Paintball Club. Your plane crashed. “

He managed to look around at them. Behind them, through a thickening black haze of smoke the City of Los Angeles was buzzing with helicopters and the roar of jet planes. He looked over at his burning plane that lay upside down, its belly smooth with the landing gear tucked away. He saw it. It was a magnetic drone attached near the exhaust port. Somehow that thing had brought him down.

“E.M.P.!” he said, waving the unruined arm in a delirious fashion. “They killed my electrical system!” The men gathered around looked at each other in confusion. “Electromagnetic pulse device. See! Stuck to my bird. Brought me down! Ahhhh…”

He unzipped a chest pocket and tossed a tourniquet out. “Bind my arm. Please! Quickly! I am going to bleed out. “

They began to work. The colonel looked past them at the city and watched puffs of smoke spring up in various areas as other planes fell from the sky, the pilots not as lucky as he.

The blood loss overtook him and he passed out.