She Bleeds for Us: The Galactic Consortium 3

Chapter 20

A shot rang out in the city of Freetown. Issa Holloway pressed himself against the wall of the hut and listened for any sound of activity from around the corner.

"Are they coming?" Ishmael asked nervously. "Will they charge the ghetto?"

"It will be bloody for them if they do," Daniel growled. He brandished a G3 assault rifle.

The G3 was a German rifle. It had been a common weapon in the civil war but was old now, outdated. Daniel, on the other hand, was young. The rifle had been his uncle's. Daniel had been a child during the war. He had no clue.

"They are not coming," Issa said.

"You think a handful of guns wielded by the likes of you will stop them?" Ishmael said. Ismael had been in the war with Issa. Ishmael had an AK-47. All Issa had was a small pistol, a Baretta. Ishmael was right, they had an assortment of aging firearms. The police and military had bulletproof vests and new assault rifles. They couldn't hold the line if the authorities wanted to flush them out, take back the ghettoes.

An older man named Abraham came from behind them, from deeper in the ghetto. "The gun shot?"

The men all shrugged.

"It was a ways off. And isolated," Issa said.

"Not an attack," Daniel said, though a moment ago he'd been thinking the exact opposite.

"There are others, places like us, with protestors holed up. Throughout the city," Abraham offered. They knew this much. They knew little else, having been isolated in their own ghetto for days.

"If it had been an attack on any of them, there would be more shots," Issa said. "Besides, they will move on all of us at the same time, if they move on us at all."

"Eventually they will have to," Daniel said.

"They have other weapons to bring us to heel," Issa said. He turned to Abraham, "Speaking of which, how did it go?"

Abraham shrugged. "I saw it done with my own eyes, every family shared. There was much grumbling and tomorrow there will be more."

Issa shrugged that off. Of course, there would be. He'd been elected the ghetto's war chief, in part because he'd served in the war and in part because he was the Blind Witch's son. His first order had been that everyone must share food, from the richest to the poorest.

"It's not charity," Issa had argued. "It's survival. They will try to starve us out. And it will work if we don't stick together."

To the men gathered in the alley now he added, "one starving man can betray us."

"They wouldn't," Daniel growled.

You don't know what starvation is.

"You don't know what hunger can do to a man," Ishmael said. "Hasn't Issa told you about how he got his sister back from the rebels?"

Ishmael launched into the story, told with much embellishment and dramatics. Issa crouched and peered around the corner, watching the empty alleyway. The police had set up barricades further down and he could see them moving behind them.

The story of how he got his sister back, without the embellishment, was that he bought her. For two large bags of rice, the rebel bastard was glad to return his pregnant child-wife. But other demons had already gotten their hooks into his sister; despair, heroin, PTSD. Those couldn't be so easily bribed.

Issa tried to look after his nephew, Gabriel. He owed his sister that much, at the very least. And now he was gone too, trapped somewhere out there while they were trapped in here. He prayed that this stand off could be ended in time to find and save the boy before something terrible happened.

As if God himself were listening, Issa spied the boy. He ducked around the barricade and came creeping down the alley towards where Issa and his men were holed up.

"Gabriel," he hissed, leaning out.

The boy saw him and broke into a run. "Uncle Issa."

Then Issa saw a man in SWAT gear rise up behind the barricade and raise his gun. Fear clutched at his gut. "Hurry, boy," he shouted, leaning out to grab Gabriel.

The shot cracked and Gabriel was thrown forward into Issa's waiting arms. They fell together in a heap.