And sure, on the surface the situation hadn’t changed. On the surface it was
still the sec men’s paradise. On the surface everything was as it was, as it had
always been, since Jordan Teague first hijacked the burg way back when most of
today’s sec men were brawling brats.
On the surface.
But underneath, paradise was maybe not quite what it appeared to be. There was a
tension in the air—something you could almost feel, almost gnaw at—that none of
the old-timers had ever known. A population that had once been like rabbits,
cowed and submissive, seemed to have changed, seemed to have become insolent.
They always seemed to be watching you, except when you looked straight at them
and then they weren’t watching you at all. Except you always caught that twitch
of the face, that nervous flicker of the eyes, that meant they had been watching
you. And they always seemed to be whispering about you behind your back, except
when you swung around and they weren’t whispering at all, their lips were
closed. Except you knew they’d been whispering about you, insulting you. And you
got so mad at this sometimes that you took a whole bunch of them—men, women,
brats—and herded them into the trucks and took them back to the Cellars and you
stopped them watching you out of the corners of their eyes by taking their eyes
out. And you stopped them talking about you behind your back by sewing their
lips together.
But the funny thing was, it didn’t seem to do the trick, didn’t seem to stop the
watching and the whispering. And you couldn’t herd the whole town into the
Cellars.
And then there was the sniping. You’d be in a jeep and heading to the mines or
coming back from them, in the line of duty, and suddenly one of the guys with
you would keel over, one side of his head blown away, his soft nose and blood
and brains splashed everywhere. First time this had happened everyone had
thought it was a marauder attack, although marauders around this neck of the
woods were in fact very scarce; they’d been dealt with savagely years back and
now didn’t come around anymore because of Mocsin’s heavy rep. But it wasn’t a
marauder attack.
There were no damned marauders in the near vicinity or the far vicinity, and you
couldn’t figure out who it was. And then it happened again. And again. And
again. And it got to be a regular occurrence, although randomly timed and in
different places, different stretches of the road. And so all the open jeeps
were laid off and mine patrols only worked from secure buggies and land wags.
And now, over the past couple of months, three buggies had been blown to scrap
by mines, their occupants so much torn and bloody meat.
And then there were the disappearances. Every so often a buddy would fail to
return to barracks. At first this was thought to have been due to drunkenness,
perhaps. In the old days there’d been a great deal of drunkenness, but then it
was realized that although everything in town was yours, and free, there had to
be some discipline in the force, and you only got seriously juiced in off
periods, when it didn’t matter. But then it was thought that maybe it wasn’t the
booze because none of those guys ever came back, and at last count, over the
past two months or so, there were about twenty guys gone and it was as though
they’d never existed in the first place.
And the worrying thing was, no one at the top seemed to be taking much notice of
any of this, despite the rumbles of discontent from the lower ranks. And when
you put forward the theory to your unit leaders that maybe something ought to be
done about this, and it seemed to you that all of these weird occurrences were
maybe somehow linked, and it was just possible that there was some kind of
underground cell in town intent on sabotage and murder, all that happened was
you got bawled out and told to mean up your act, boy, or you’ll be on hog duty