Requiem

1. Crashing Down-3

Drew tried desperately to figure out what to do next.

The Chief Advisor stared with unspeakable rage at the faux President at the podium, then turned to the closest Secret Service agent, a member of his detail. “Kill him!” he ordered, pointing up the steps.

The agent stared back at him with puzzlement that slowly turned thoughtful, and the Advisor realized giving the agent such an order had not been his brightest move. The agent looked like he was considering shooting him, as if he were responsible for this hoax.

Of course, since the Advisor was responsible for the hoax, the possibility that the agent would arrive at this conclusion was perhaps his foremost problem—a problem even bigger than the mob tearing down the fence.

The Advisor turned to shout for Darron, only to watch the chief interrogator fall as he got hit by… Oh, Christ, he’d been shot by one of the Marines.

Moments later, Darron’s men broke. One of them ran toward him. The Advisor started to shout for the interrogator to go up and shoot the actor lying flat at the podium, but the man tossed his rifle aside to enable a faster withdrawal.

The Advisor felt the Secret Service agent step up behind him. He tensed, expecting to hear and feel a bullet, but he’d underestimated the Service.

The agent said quietly, “Sir, we should withdraw to the White House until we understand what’s happening.”

The Advisor stared at him for a moment, then nodded crisply. “Quite right.” He walked with confident haste back to the building as his security team formed up around him.

Wolf scanned the situation with the eyes of a professional though his heart kept trying to leap in his throat.

The crowd was shifting to the east, away from the Marines shooting them, growing into an impossibly denser mass between Wolf’s little group and Drew’s east-side Marines. Reaching his friend Drew had become an unattainable objective.

Searching the situation for something useful he could do, Wolf concluded the main source of slaughter was the west-side Marines, and specifically the major who was encouraging them. If he could take out that major…

His eyes settled on Jonathan, who had pulled a pistol from somewhere and was swinging the firearm wildly, trying to protect his family. Wolf stepped around the wife and child and laid his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “Put your arm down, friend. You can’t make things better with your gun, but perhaps I can. Please give it to me.”

Eventually, Jonathan’s eyes settled on Wolf’s face, and a look of sanity entered them. He handed Wolf the gun.

Wolf gripped his arm. “Stay here with your family. Let me see if I can start fixing this.” He pushed toward the west-side Marines through the crowd streaming in the opposite direction until he had enough clearance to take a decent shot. He knelt, steadied, and fired.

His bullets hit the major in the chest. The major’s body armor stopped them but knocked him down, taking him out of the action.

The problem with getting a clear shot at the Marines was, of course, the Marines now had a clear shot at him. He hit the dirt and prayed.

Surprisingly, his prayer was answered. As he fired, Mother Nature drowned the sound of his shots in a crescendo of thunder as the storm burst to life. Rain pummeled the city, the drops falling so thickly you could barely see your outstretched hand through eyes shuttered against the violent splashing of the water.

After a moment, the rain lessened enough to allow Wolf to look up and see lightning cascade in giant arcs across the sky from horizon to horizon, forming the spiderweb outline of an inverted bowl above the crowd.

In a moment of silence between thunderclaps, Wolf heard another staccato roar behind him when Drew’s troops started firing. Wolf looked around and saw Drew leading them across the field, their weapons pointed straight into the air as they used the sound and their disciplined momentum to push through to the other Marine force. Between the fall of their commander and the pelting of the storm, the west-side soldiers had paused for a moment, and Drew was risking his team to reach them, take charge, and call a halt to the slaughter.

The west-side troops, seeing they were not being attacked by Drew’s platoon, continued to hold their fire. Soon Drew had them backing away from the thinning crowd.

Wolf started to push himself up, grunted with pain, and lay back down on his stomach. A fierce burning ran down his back: one of the Marines firing at him had connected.

A female voice that sounded like a drill sergeant’s yelled over the noise of the rain and the thunder and the crowd. “Stay down! You’ve been hit.”

Jonathan knelt next to him. “Better listen to her,” he said with considerable pride. “She’s a nurse. She’s also my wife.”

The drill sergeant/nurse inspected his back. “It’s a flesh wound, but it’s the longest flesh wound I’ve ever seen.” She touched his shoulder blade. “From here,” she ran her hand down to his buttock, “to here.” She turned to Jonathan. “Take off your shirt and cut it into strips with that ridiculous knife of yours.”

As Jonathan meekly cut his shirt up and she started working on Wolf with the makeshift bandages, she muttered, “Men. Always trying to be the hero. Unbelievable.”

The rain saved tremendous numbers of lives that day, not just Wolf’s. The foremost survivors of the crowd, having pushed down the fence and stomped over the bodies of those in the first wave, had started running after the Chief Advisor and his small security team. The Secret Service called in the overhead gunships to mow down the rioters. At that moment, the storm erupted. The crowd slowed to a stop, and the copter gunners, who couldn’t see a damn thing through the rain, held their fire.

The Chief Advisor made it back to the White House intact. Shaking off the rain that had soaked him to the bone, he muttered, “Well, that could have gone better.”

Dr. Everest forced herself to lower her hand from her throat and speak calmly. “You’re getting quite a treat. Never in history has the SmartCoin system made two deflationary adjustments to the currency in such a short period of time.”

The displayed winked again and returned with 1.0003.

Erika grabbed the edge of the podium in horror.

A young woman’s voice rose from the audience. “Dr. Everest, could someone have broken your Oracle algorithm?”

Erika nodded. “It’s not impossible. I hope that that’s what’s happening because that would merely be a disaster.” She took a sip of water and noticed her hand was trembling. “But this is almost certainly not an attack on SmartCoin. Something far more terrible than that has happened.”

She choked as she spoke her next words, addressed to the people at the sides of the stage. “Folks, could you turn the wifi and cell networks back on, please? We need to see the news. I’m afraid we’ll be cutting our lecture short.”

The young woman called, “Why? What’s wrong?”

Erika looked out at the crowd grimly. “Something terrible has just happened in the world, and it has triggered a long-overdue global economic readjustment.”

Another voice shouted, “Uh, what does that mean?”

Erika stared hard at the speaker far in the back of the room. “It means the world’s financial systems have just shattered. We’re looking at the beginning of an economic calamity far worse than the 1929 Great Depression. It will be like nothing you have ever imagined in your darkest nightmares.”