Chapter 23
Roland looked down, over the deck onto the yellow grass that led up to the shores of the lake. The warriors of Rolling Fuck had started to assemble themselves there. A large group of men and women had started to unpack dozens of Quadrophracts. The four-legged robots had been built by Boston Dynamics, back before the fall of the old U.S. They’d been meant to ferry men and equipment up steep Afghan mountainsides. Roland stared at them, and-…
Chapter 21: Sasha
Sasha drew her gun, looked at it, and then hurridly stashed it inside her blouse again when she realized how dumb that had been. Godly women do not carry guns. A series of four loud booms sounded in the distance. Sasha didn’t know enough about weaponry to guess what those had been, but she knew they had something to do with Roland. People are dying so I can find us a car and get everyone to safety…
Chapter 18: Sasha
Sasha had read about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder back in school. She understood the mechanics of it, that people tended to cope with terrifying situations by suppressing their fear. But this didn’t feel like that. It felt like she was just doing her job. And she enjoyed her job…
Chapter 15: Sasha
The number of things that felt wrong about this place grew every day. The executions had been the first big shock to her system. But she’d accepted Helen’s justification. The Bible was filled with decent men doing awful things in times of war. The gallows weren’t pretty, but they were hardly without Biblical precedent…
Chapter 12: Sasha
“I’m sorry if this hurts you. But it was for the greater good. We must sometimes do distasteful things to serve God’s design.”…
Chapter 9: Sasha
The man had a thick drawl, he sounded ‘country’ in a way Sasha had only heard in movies. Her voice caught in her throat as she tried to respond, “Sir, I’m…I’m looking for David.”
“Ayep,” he grunted, “you’n every other teenager what’s come through my depot. I’ll tell ya the same thing I told them others: ain’t no David here.”
Sasha’s eyes widened. She squeaked and immediately hated herself for it.
“No…no David?”…
Chapter 6: Sasha
She recited that passage again and again, throughout what she now knew would be her last day at school. The words steadied her as she waved goodbye to Mr. Dane at the end of the day (“these are the doubts of the serpent!”). They calmed her when she looked into her backpack, which held the small ‘go-pack’ she’d put together that morning. It was just a change of clothes and handful of hygiene items. That seemed woefully inadequate, but anything more would’ve looked suspicious…
Chapter 3: Sasha
For the eleventh month in a row she was spending sixty-five AmFed dollars for the privilege of staring through a camera at nothing for a half hour a day. Sasha had been warned about this when she’d signed up to support the Woodlands Martyr’s Brigade. Their drone guns didn’t see much action; the front had been stable for the last year. Rumor said the number of backers who’d even gotten to fire during their turn was under a dozen. Sasha had hoped she’d be a special case…