Manel Loureiro - The Wrath of the Just

“What’d you say?” Alejandra asked.

Lucia felt an ice-cold fury rush through her veins. “It’s something he used to say—”

“Explain it to me later.” Alejandra tugged Lucia’s arm. “Right now we have to hurry! Run!”

There was a screech of tires as a big army truck barreled around the corner with a group of militiamen perched in the truck bed. They’d painted Reverend Green’s cross over the white US Army star. The driver smiled sadistically as he mowed down anyone who wasn’t fast enough to get away.

“Run for it, girls!” cried the tall man. He grabbed a Molotov cocktail and planted himself in middle of the road. He lit the Molotov behind his back so the truck driver couldn’t see what he was doing and stood in the middle of the street with suicidal bravery. When the truck driver saw him, he looked daggers at the man and speeded up. The man didn’t flinch. He waited, lips pursed, eyes trained on the truck until it was ten feet from him. He darted aside as he tossed the Molotov cocktail through the open window of the truck that by then was less than five feet from him.

The bottle burst into a ball of fire that engulfed the driver and his passenger. The truck swerved, flames shooting out its windows. The guards in the truck bed held on tight to keep from being thrown out. Then the truck slammed into a house with the sounds of metal twisting and wood splintering. The soldiers in the back flew off in every direction like cannonballs. Most slammed into the house. Some soldiers broke their necks in the crash or were impaled on the house’s broken wood frame. Others fell into the flames devouring the house. You could hear screams of agony over the roar of the fire.

“We’re done here. Let’s go,” the tall man said matter-of-factly.

They shouldered their backpacks and continued to the next intersection. In a house on the corner, some helots were in a standoff with a group of militiamen who were trying to cross the intersection. The bodies of a dozen soldiers were sprawled on the ground. The surviving militiamen had taken cover behind their vehicles and were firing on the helots with assault rifles. Although the militia and the Green Guards’ firepower was far superior, the helots were well protected in the house. Suddenly a Humvee equipped with a 50mm M2 machine gun raced into the intersection. From about a hundred feet away, it trained the M2 on the house.

The helots fired on the Humvee, but it was too late. The M2 roared with a lazy cadence and the front of the house collapsed in a cloud of pulverized wood, cement, and blood. After a few seconds, the firing stopped. There was nothing left of the top floor.

“Wait here,” whispered the tall man as he lit two Molotov cocktails. “This’ll be a piece of cake.” With a bomb in each hand, he flattened himself against the building on the opposite sidewalk and edged toward the Humvee, out of its line of sight.

Just then a militiaman on the street spotted him and shouted an alarm. The tall guy let out a whoop and ran toward the Humvee, raising the Molotov cocktails over his head, but he was too late. The machine gun blasted away, nearly slicing the man’s body in half. He collapsed like a rag doll. As he fell, the Molotov cocktails broke and the flaming liquid spilled all over his body, quickly reducing him to a pile of burning flesh in the middle of the road.

Alejandra and Lucia stared, terrified. Before they could react, another Humvee roared up behind them. The women were trapped. Lucia gritted her teeth. Just as she was about to light a Molotov cocktail, the second Humvee turned and headed straight for the soldiers, who cheered when they saw it. The first Humvee screeched to a halt and its crew peered out the hatch. The soldiers’ faces froze in horror when the machine gun on the second vehicle took aim at them and opened fire.

The second Humvee mowed down the soldiers like a giant sickle cutting wheat, and kept firing until nothing moved on the street. Bullets penetrated the first Humvee’s fuel tank and it exploded in a raging fireball. The burning house and Humvee cast a spectral glow on the dozens of bodies lying in the street.

The Humvee door opened and a soldier cautiously stuck out his head.

Alejandra cried out, “Strangärd!”

The Swede sprang out of the Humvee, aiming his rifle. When he saw Alejandra and Lucia crouched behind a hedge, he breathed a sigh of relief and lowered his rifle.

“What the hell are you two doing here? I almost shot you, for the love of God!”

“What’re you doing here?” Lucia asked, incredulous.

“We came as soon as we could.” Lucia noticed he was wearing a white armband on his right bicep. “We learned that the ‘cleanup’ had started. We knew we had to try to prevent a slaughter, but this is way worse than I imagined. There aren’t many of us, but we’re well armed. Where’s Mendoza? I need to talk to him.”

“Gato took the trash convoy and went to get the Cladoxpan,” said Alejandra.

“Damn it!” the Swede snarled. “This is no time for him to disappear! What about the short, blond guy, the Russian soldier? Where’s he?”

“He’s with Gato,” said Lucia. “And he’s not Russian, he’s—”

“Ukrainian. I know, I know. So who’s in charge?”

“I have no idea,” said Alejandra. “We’re trying to get to the center of the ghetto to find out. And to get these to the fighters there.” She pointed to the Molotov cocktails.

“You won’t get very far on foot,” Strangärd replied. “Most of the fighting is in the center. Grapes brought reinforcements. Nearly a thousand men. Get in the Humvee. We’ll get as close as we can, and then, God help us.”

Once the women were in the Humvee, the driver sped off past the burning remains of the tall helot, who looked like a charred mummy. Then the street fell silent. The fallen on both sides gazed at each other with the empty eyes of death.

Malachi Grapes was finally happy. His life had never been easy. When he was a little boy, everyone had called him white trash. The son of a single mother addicted to crack, little Malachi learned to defend himself early—first with his fists, then knives, and then guns. Transitioning from a street gang to the Aryan Nations had been a no-brainer.

Grapes’s whole life had been violent, including his long prison term. He’d come to enjoy violence. Fuck it! He really liked it. The prison psychiatrist described Grapes’s personality in detail, his severe schizophrenic fits and his above-average intelligence. But none of that mattered to him. He was motivated by other people’s pain. That and power.

But nothing he’d experienced before compared to what he felt standing in the middle of a blazing street as his men hunted down all those losers in the Bluefont ghetto.

His boots splashed through a pool of helot blood as houses collapsed around him in an inferno of sparks and charred timbers. Grapes felt more alive than ever. He felt like a god. A violent, destructive god of war. He grew light-headed as the feeling of power swept over him.

He was going to kill every last one of those sons of bitches, including the two thousand helots Reverend Greene had told him to spare. He’d make up some excuse. They fought back, Reverend. They wouldn’t agree to your terms. They didn’t let us take them alive. He’d come up with something. He was so drunk on blood that only one refrain ran through his head: Destroy. Kill. Maim. Inflict pain.

“Hey, Malachi,” said a voice behind him. It was Seth Fretzen, his right-hand man. “They radioed that the streets on the other side are under control, but they’re having some problems in the center of the ghetto. Them assholes are fighting back.”

Grapes looked down at the phrase tattooed across his knuckles: HATE JEWS. He flashed a big, satisfied smile. Those morons had just given him the excuse he needed.