Stephen Blackmoore: All Bad Things

“More waiting? They humiliated us!” Samson gets out of his chair and looms over Cyrus, slamming his meaty hands on the desk. “We’ve sat around too long as it is. We need to make them pay.”

“And we will,” Cyrus says, waving Samson down. “We will. But we do it smart. We get that bomb and not only do we have a weapon that we can use against them, but more important, they lose it, and everybody knows it.”

“Is this a propaganda thing?”

“Exactly. Now you get it.”

“No,” Samson says. “I don’t.”

“Do you trust me?” Cyrus says.

“Of course,” Samson says, though he knows he paused a little too long before he answered.

“Good. So we’re agreed. Send a small force out there, grab that bomb, and bring it back here. We’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

“I—” Samson stammers, not sure how he lost the argument. “Sure,” he says, but his heart’s not in it. “When’s this happening?”

“Sometime in the next week. My sources are getting me more information tonight, but it’s definitely going down soon.”

“I’ll pull a team together.”

“A small team.”

“Right,” Samson says. “A small team.”

“Sir, you wanted to see me?” Knight Captain Volkov stands at the doorway to Samson’s office in the Temple. Unlike Cyrus’s, his is simple, sparse. He has a single table, two chairs, and maps of Los Angeles pinned to the walls. In one corner he has a TV and VCR playing on a continuous loop of James King giving a sermon, the volume turned off. Samson has seen these so many times that he doesn’t need to hear it to know what’s being said.

“Come in, Knight Captain. I wanted your opinion on something.”

“The bomb?”

“Cyrus told you?”

“He did. He wants to capture it. Send a small team to bring it back here and send a message to Hollywood.”

The moment Samson stepped out of Cyrus’s office, he began to have doubts. The rout at Western came flooding back to him, filled him with uncertainty. He prayed for guidance, prayed for James King to come tell him what to do, but no one appeared. He needed someone else to talk to. Someone besides Cyrus.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Samson says.

“It’s not,” Volkov says.

Samson is surprised. “You don’t agree with him?”

“Sir, Hollywood humiliated us. They—” She stops, looks at her feet.

“What?” Samson says.

“They humiliated you.”

“They did,” he admits.

“There’s one way to fix this,” Volkov says. “One way to fix you. We go get that bomb, we drive it right into the middle of Hollywood and we set that fucker off. Then we go in hard and fast and we fight and we don’t stop until there’s nothing left but ashes.”

In his heart he knows she’s right. Knows that this is what James King would have wanted. “We’ll need the whole army,” he says.

“Just give the word, sir,” Volkov says.

“Get everyone together. Quietly. If Cyrus finds out he’s gonna shit a brick. Take a couple of days. Leave the people at the Bastion of Faith.”

“Are you sure? If we do this, we’re going to want everyone,” Volkov says.

“No. It’ll take too long to get all of them here without Cyrus noticing. We don’t know how quickly Hollywood will start moving this bomb of theirs, and I want to move as quickly as we can.”

“All right,” Volkov says. “You won’t regret this, sir.”

He knows he won’t. Not if it brings James King back to him.

It takes two days to get the army assembled without Cyrus knowing. Five hundred men and women armed with guns, clubs, hammers, machetes. They march down Alvarado, then turn west down Wilshire through the overgrown jungle of MacArthur Park.

The plan is to intercept the truck before it reaches Vermont, kill its crew with snipers, and take the truck and the bomb. Cyrus thinks they’re bringing it back with them. But Samson is going to turn it around and drive it up into the heart of Hollywood.

“Check those buildings,” Samson tells Volkov as they stop at the edge of the park. “Kill anyone you find. I’m not walking into another trap. And I want one squad sent up ahead to see if they can spot the truck.”

“Do you want them to engage, sir?”

Samson doesn’t answer her for a long moment. There’s something he’s missing.

“Sir?”

“No,” he says, finally, unable to shake the sense that there’s something important that he’s not quite getting. “If they see it, I want them back here on the double. Give them a radio so they can let us know.”

“Yes, sir.” She barks orders to her men, and multiple squads fan out to check the burnt–out husks along Wilshire Boulevard as another group heads down the street as quickly and quietly as they can.

Samson shakes his head. The road in front of him is a cratered mess littered with rusting sedans, mud–drowned rubbish, and downed wires that haven’t seen power in fifty years—the detritus of a civilization long dead. How these people expect to get a truck full of explosives through it all, he has no idea. If this is what Hollywood sees as a good plan, they should thank him for working to wipe them out. They’re too stupid to live.

“You think they’ll actually find anything?” Samson says after the buildings have been cleared out and the army is back on the move.

Volkov scans the road ahead with her binoculars. “I’m sure there will be some—” A burst of static from the radio at her hip cuts her off.

“We’ve found it,” a staticky voice says over the radio. “Wilshire and, uh, Normandy. About four blocks ahead of us. Orders?”

Samson takes the radio from Volkov. “Stay there, stay in cover. We’re on our way.” He raises his voice. “Move out!”

The army wends its way up the street slowly, Samson insisting on caution, on making damn sure that every single door, window, or overturned car that might be a trap isn’t.

Two hours later, he sees what they came for. An old Peterbilt, a dingy tarp covering something big and bulky on its flatbed trailer, sits parked in the middle of Wilshire. Must have taken them hours to clear the road enough to get it this far. Samson scans the rooftops, looks over the truck through his binoculars.

“There’s no one there.”

“Maybe they abandoned it?” Volkov says. “We should get closer.”

Samson says nothing. Stares hard at the truck, weighing his options. Possibilities bounce around in his brain until his head starts to ache.

“Am I being too cautious, Volkov?” Maybe that’s why King hasn’t spoken with him in so long. Maybe it’s not that Samson lacks faith, but that he’s simply lost his edge. Before Western, he would have run right into this situation, trap or not. He was untouchable then. But now…

“Perhaps a little, sir.”

“All right. Send a squad to check it out. I don’t want to move any closer until we know what we’re dealing with.” The army is spread out behind him, snaking along Wilshire halfway back to Vermont. He doesn’t want them bunched up, doesn’t want a few stray mortar rounds to devastate them all over again.

He watches as the squad runs up, gets to the truck, pulls the tarp off. His view is obstructed, but he doesn’t hear gunfire. A few minutes later the radio crackles to life.

“There’s nothing here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a bunch of junk on the trailer. There’s no bomb, and there’s nobody around at all.”