Behind the Bastards - After the Revolution: Chapters One & Two

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

This week's chapters from Robert's fiction podcast, "After the Revolution."Podcast Feed: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-after-the-revolution-82966686/Book Website: https://atrbook.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Manny smiled the way the British journalists face blanched as the old Toyota hit the pothole. Reggie wasn't used to bad roads, cars driven by actual humans, or the way the heavy metal of the gun mount in the truck bed made the aluminum frame groan. That was all familiar to Manny. He'd grown up in Ciudad de Muerta, back before the lake would blast, back when people had still called it Dallas. The truck's driver veered around the bloated corpse of a large dog lying in the middle of the road. Reggie gripped the truck bed with white knuckles and eyed the swaying ammo belt of the 20mm cannon like it was a coiled snake. The gunner, Manny's cousin Alejandro, grinned down at the journalist. The suspensions a little fucked, yeah? The Brit nodded and turned greener when the technical hit another pothole.

Manny supposed he should offer a comforting word to the man. That would be good business. But a louder part of him looked at Reggie's brand new boots and thought he can stand a little less comfort. The journalist would brag about this ride for months once he got home. Escorting reporters from the safety of Austin to the sundry hotspots of the old Metroplex was not Manny's ideal career. Two years ago he'd been working on a bachelors in business administration from the University of Austin. The plan had been to get a job with Aegis Biosystems, then charm his way into a working visa and a gig in the California Republic. But the fighting had started up again and ruined all that.

The culprit this time was the Heavenly Kingdom, a loose assortment of Christian extremist militias. They'd boiled out from the suburbs of the old Metroplex and all but broken the Republic of Texas. The autonomous city of Austin had stabilized the situation with the help of an alliance of leftist Texan militias, the secular defense forces. Beating them back had cost a lot in blood and time and forced Manny to change every plan he'd ever had for his life. So he'd embraced the situation and started his own business, hiring on some friends as employees. Together they'd built the best network of stringers in North Texas. His boys fed him video, contacts and news updates and he sold what he could to the big foreign media conglomerates. In a couple more months he'd have enough saved up that he could fuck off, fly to Europe and apply for a refugee visa.

My odds are pretty good as long as the war doesn't end too soon. The technical rolled to a creaky stop in front of a checkpoint that had clearly been erected within the last few days. It was just a collapsible electronic gate and two sandbag emplacements on either side of the battered highway. A street sign nearby announced that they were on the edge of Richardson, formerly a suburb of Dallas, and currently a forward position of the People's Protection Army, a local anarchist militia. Manny could see the PPA's red-black triangle emblem stitched onto the jackets of the soldiers guarding the checkpoint. One of the PPA men walked up to the driver's side window and started chatting with Phillip, the driver. Phil and Manny's cousin Alejandro were both with the citizens front, a more or less apolitical militia from the suburbs of Austin.

Both militias coexisted under the broad umbrella of the secular defense forces. The SDF had been organized by the Canadian government to lump all of North Texas's palatable militant groups into a single package that could be conveniently armed. While the first guard talked with Phillip, his partner did a circuit around the back of the truck. The man was big, bulging with muscles so sculpted and prominent they had to be vat-grown, and he moved with the twitchy ungrace of a man who'd replaced his nervous system with circuitry. His weapon was a very old, very battered AR-15 with an M243 grenade launcher below the barrel. The latter was old U.S. military gear. The former had been someone's toy before the Revolution gave America's half-billion civilian guns a new rise on debt.

The man moved back to the barricades when he'd finished his lap. Reggie looked up at Manny and asked, Was he a...was he chromed? Manny smiled. That was always one of the first questions as soon as any foreign journal saw a trooper with a large enough build, skin with an offshade, or who just moved a little too fast to seem completely right. Anything beyond basic aesthetic and medical modifications were banned in civilized countries, like the UK. The real chrome, the implants that would let a man lift a truck or take a rocket to the belly,

that shit was locked up tight. Few national militaries even used the stuff these days. Not after the Revolution. He's got some vat-grown muscles, Manny said, in an offhanded way that suggested such things were common. Aftermarket nerves, too, probably. His stuff is low-grade. That's why it's so visible. Reggie nodded. His eyes stayed locked on the big man. He was quiet for a while before he spoke again. You just...live right alongside them, don't you? Manny shrugged.

It's something out here, and the wet wears what lets us hold back the martyrs. They'd own the whole city if it weren't for half-vats like him. The journalist nodded, and his gaze stayed fixed upon the militia man until a troubled look crossed his face. He glanced back to Manny. Are you a...crowned? Reggie asked. Manny smiled. I don't expect either of us as stock sapien, eh? But I doubt I've got anything you don't. Reggie seemed somewhat comforted by this.

Most of what I've read about the really heavy mods says they cause a lot of, well, unstable behavior. That's why...that's why this city's such a shithole, Manny asked. The journalist had the grace to blush. Manny looked away for a moment. His eyes landed on the bones of three large public housing buildings. A barrel bomb had detonated in the center of the courtyard, all three shared. It had peeled away the walls, some of the floors, and the resulting firestorm had burned up everything that wasn't concrete, steel, or rebar.

For just a moment, Manny felt bad about hoping the war hung on in other six months. The old government blamed a lot on roided-up veterans with military-grade mods, he told Reggie. Most was just propaganda, fear-mongering. People were pissed after twenty years of plague, disaster, and poverty. Manny shrugged. It's true, though, a lot of chromed-up vets turned on the government. You can't make men into gods and expect them to keep fighting for men. Reggie pointed back to the bolding militia man.

A ticket mussels there is pretty far from a god. Nah, Manny laughed. He's just a guy with too much meat money. Gods don't man checkpoints. The Brit was excited now. These were the questions he'd wanted to ask since they met yesterday. Do you know where some of those people are? Reggie couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice.

Could we talk to them? Manny didn't have any of those contacts, nor did he know any other fixers who did. He tried to let the Brit down easy. Most of those folks live on the road, in between the civilized parts of Texas and the Republic of California. Oh, Reggie looked disappointed. The truck rolled past the wreckage of an old Catholic school. It bore signs of being fortified, destroyed, re-fortified, and re-destroyed several times. The Brit was inches from asking another question when the gate man waved them on and the battered Toyota farted its way into drive,

belching and complaining passed a network of potholes until it hit a relatively straight chunk of asphalt. Only a few minutes now, Hefe, Manny said. The PPA's forward position is about five minutes out. He'll be in the shit then, or at least shit-adjacent. The journalists' face washed over in an even mix of anxiety and pride. One of the first lessons Manny had learned at this job was that phrases like the shit made Rich Gringo writers unreasonably excited. And excited journalists always called Manny the next time they were in country,

giving white kids and Kefi as a lifetime of bragging rights for surviving a couple of days in his home, killed his soul just a little bit. But Manny pushed down the anger and told himself that a chip on the shoulder was a lot less useful than money in the bank. The technical rolled off the old highway. Manny could see 23 and Spring Valley Road emblazoned on a weather-beaten bullets-guard sign. The technical pulled to the right. The gun swayed in its mount. Manny couldn't help smiling as the Brit instinctively pulled away from it. They rolled up to what had once been a strip mall and was now a forward operating base for the People's Protection Army.

An old laundromat, a bookstore, and a half-dozen restaurants now had their roofs ringed with barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. Manny could see a line of bullet holes stitched across three of the shops. None of the windows were intact, but otherwise the buildings had weathered the war rather well. Three M198 Howitzers were parked next to a taco shop that had once served the local college kids beer and sheep grub. There was a flagpole out in front of the shop, and from it hung the blue and white starburst flag of the SDF. Three men in uniform stood, waiting as the old Toyota rolled to a stop and Manny and Reggie disembarked. Two of the men were officers in the PPA, Colonel Jacob Milgram and Major Deshaun Clark. Milgram was a boring, tight-lipped nerdy type, but Deshaun was one of Manny's favorite sources.

He was an old infantry guy, a consummate brawler with a face full of scars and three published books of poetry to his name. He actually had a base of international fans, mostly in Spain. The third man was Hamid Mohammed, an advisor from Syria in Kurdistan. The Kurds had been giving aid to the sundry militias of the secular defense forces for years now. Manny considered Hamid almost a local. He shook hands with Jacob. Since Manny knew Deshaun better, he met the man with a full embrace and used it as an opportunity to palm the major a packet of his favorite cigarettes. Deshaun gave him a wink and a smile. Manny shook Hamid's hand next and then kissed him on the cheek.

Hamid returned the kiss, clapped him on the shoulder and said, Emmanuel, my friend, you really should get out of this business. One of these days you'll come up here and it won't be safe. Manny frowned a little at the use of his birth name, but he didn't make an issue out of the matter. There's still a war on, right? He smiled at Hamid. You'll get that shit under control. Maybe I'll work a straight job again. Not too soon, though, he thought. The least this war can do is last long enough to get me out of Texas. Hamid smiled back and Manny introduced Reggie to the officers. The journalist was clearly awkward in that special way Manny had come to expect from new war correspondents. It was the norm for young writers to be intimidated by grizzled military men.

Some of them got over that. Manny had worked with a middle-aged Der Spiegel reporter last week who'd probably taken as much incoming fire as Major Clark. Colonel Milgram led them into the militarized taco shop. A brief blast of nostalgia squeezed Manny's lungs. The place had obviously been closed since the Revolution. The drink specials and meal prices printed on the wall were given in U.S. dollars. A currency as dead as the last American president. Manny recognized ads for bands and movies he remembered from his childhood. The glass facade had shattered years ago. The kitchen had been gutted and replaced by wall-length screens displaying maps of the city. At least a dozen uniformed men and women milled around the space in small groups. He and Reggie sat down at a long picnic table with Hamid and the two officers. Reggie set his camera up on the table. It was just a small silver sphere, but Manny knew it could record everything happening around it at a higher resolution than the human eye.

An orderly brought in three beers, shinier box from Austin, and one dark brown tea and a glass cup for Hamid. The Brit raised his glass in a friendly salute. Thank you for meeting with me. And then he started to ask questions. Manny leaned back in his chair and enjoyed a long gulp of cold beer. If he wasn't needed to translate, he generally checked out during interviews. He used the free time to activate his deck and check in on the two stringers he had working right now. David Allenby was up in Addison today, taking a Californian documentary crew on a tour of an SDF training facility. He'd messaged Manny to let him know they'd gotten through the checkpoints without any issue. Oscar Martinez didn't have any journalists with him. He was embedded with a Republic of Texas police unit, getting footage from inside a neighborhood that had recently been liberated from the heavenly kingdom. There were no new messages from Oscar. His last check-in had been the night before. It was probably nothing, but it concerned Manny nonetheless.

What if Oscar got a better offer for his footage? He'd always been loyal before, but if that fuck from the Guardian had gotten to him? I'm interested in the Abrams Road bombing, Reggie told the Colonel, and Manny's attention swung back to his reporter. That's an odd thing to ask about. The bombing had occurred two weeks back. It had been big news for a couple of hours. Manny had paid one of his contacts in Raza Front for a video of a walkthrough of the wreckage. It had brought in about three grand profit. The Abrams Road bombing was not a martyrdom operation. Colonel Milgram sounded almost angry. Terribly sorry, Reggie said. You're right, of course. There was no driver, so no martyr, right? Right, Deshaun Clark said. He pulled a folded piece of white paper out of his pocket, opened it up, and smoothed it out on the table. It was a map of the DFW area, color-coded to show the positions of the various militias in the region.

We operate eight checkpoints on that part of the Richardson line, Deshaun said, as he pointed to each one. Five of them border Republic-controlled territory. The traffic from there is mostly autonomous, and those vehicles slave themselves to our traffic management system before they can enter our territory. The other three checkpoints border territory controlled by the martyrs. They don't see much traffic, and they're all heavily manned. Reggie was quiet for a few seconds. Many could almost hear the gears turning in the journalist's head as he struggled to find the words for his next question. Would it be fair to say the autonomous checkpoints are less secure than? Deshaun smiled a thin, quiet smile. Amid grimaced, Colonel Milgram responded in a terse voice. The autonomous checkpoints have fewer defenders, but they border Republic territory. The martyrs haven't pulled off an attack on one in quite some time. Was Abrams Road not one such attack? Reggie looked eager now, like a hound following a scent. We don't know who bombed Abrams Road, Colonel Milgram said. No one's taken credit, but we doubt it was the martyrs. Why? The journalist asked. Many leaned in a little, interested in spite of himself at where this was all going to lead.

Perhaps, Amid said, you should read a bit more about this heavenly kingdom. They reject all autonomous technology. They even use remote human pilots for their drones, like it's 2000 and fucking three. That's why our skies are always clear. We jam them. Reggie asked, is it possible they found some way to hack your defense system? Amid laughed. We bought this system from the Israelis. If you're telling me one of the martyr's brigades has a hacker who can crack that, then I'm the king of Albuquerque. But something still went wrong, Reggie insisted. Amid's smile turned cold. This is war, Mr. Reggie. It's mostly things going wrong. That's where the line of questions petered out. Reggie asked them for access to the security footage from the destroyed checkpoint, and Colonel Milgram agreed to send it over. We'd like to speak to the survivors as well, if possible, Manny interjected, not waiting to see if the journalist would ask. He knew those men were all stationed behind the line now, which would make for a safer, easier rest of the day than heading up to the wire. Of course, Colonel Milgram said with a smile to Manny. They said their goodbyes, and then Major Clark walked them out to their waiting Toyota.

The Texas heat hit like an oven as they exited, and Manny was glad they'd be spending most of the rest of their day indoors. D'Shaun clapped a hand on Manny's shoulder as he lit one of his new cigarettes. It's good to see you, Emmanuel, he said, and then he smiled at Reggie. And it's nice to meet you, my British friend. I'm sorry you've come to the front at a boring time. Why? Reggie asked. Because this, D'Shaun gestured at the gun emplacements and loitering militiamen of the command post. This is not war, not really. Your job is to help your people, children of peace and plenty, understand what is going on here. You must teach them the language of war, and to paraphrase a dead poet, the language of war is a language made of blood. To be spoken, it must be earned.

There was an awkward pause. A little of the blood drained from the journalist's face. It was really old fuck, Manny thought, with more amusement than fear. Classic D'Shaun, he said, and laughed to ease the tension. The Major bid them both a good day, hugged Manny, and sauntered off back to the command post. Smoke from his cigarette curled up into the air behind him as he walked. Manny's eyes lingered on it for a second before he turned back to Reggie. Ready to go, he asked, chipper as he could manage. Three hours, a handful of interviews, and one short drive later, Manny and Reggie arrived at their home for the night, the Richardson Autonomous Project. Once a Walmart, now a 22-year-old experiment in sustainable urban living, the project was the furthest island of civilization on the SDF's side of the front.

Its militia steadfastly refused to involve themselves in the region's greater conflicts. They'd been targeted a few times by the heavenly kingdom. The SDF, by contrast, left them alone, so when a fixer like Manny found himself on the wrong side of the LBJ freeway after dark, he could usually trust the project to provide food, booze, and shelter. For a price, of course. Sleeping arrangements in the project were broadly communal. The bulk of the old Walmart had been converted into an indoor meadow with grow lights hanging from the rafters and a wide, lush field of native grass, sprawling across most of the inhabited space. Fruit trees, bushes full of berries, cannabis plants, and copses of bamboo lined the edges of the space.

The center of the field was dominated by a large, circular kitchen surrounded by a handsome oaken bar table. Tables, gazebos, and sundry personal structures dotted the field, along with a pair of dance floors. Reggie's face lit up when he saw the bar. By the time Manny had dropped off their bags and paid Charlie and the driver for the night, the journalist was already three beers in. The Brit wasn't precisely drunk or sober, but at that productive twilight in between. He'd unrolled a portable screen and had a holographic display up, looping four separate sections of the security footage Colonel Milgram had sent over. The journalist alternated between typing furiously, scrawling notes in his journal, and taking huge gulps of something brown and foamy. He stopped working when he saw Manny approach and waved him into the adjacent seat.

Hey, brother, check this out. Manny pulled up a seat and the journalist directed his attention to a six-second loop of footage from immediately after the bombing. It showed two man-sized silhouettes standing on top of an old garage. Manny remembered the building. It stood maybe 200 meters from the Abrams Road checkpoint. One of the silhouettes had a rifle. The other held a short squat tube that Manny recognized as a camera lens. Notice anything? Spotters, Manny said, probably trying to get a kill count. No, man, look at where he's pointed. That cunt's not looking at any post. He's looking straight back, deeper into the old town. And I'll bet you he's high up enough to be staring right at Colonel Milgram's command post. Manny looked again. He thought about the angle.

Okay, so what? He asked. You think this was a probing attack for some big action? The journalist shrugged. Maybe. It's something new, is what interests me. Two years of modernum operations that all look more or less the same, and now this weird one, an autonomous vehicle bomb from a group of fanatics who think autonomous vehicles are the devil. Yeah, Manny agreed. That does seem weird. The bartender walked up and offered Manny his pick of the finest liquor in this particular war zone. Manny ordered a Shiner. It was the one beer a drinker could find across both the Republic of Texas and the Austin Autonomous Region. He looked back at the looping footage. They both watched it twice more. Then Reggie spoke up again. What have you heard about Pastor Mike? He asked. Manny stiffened a little bit at the name.

He'd heard it, of course, vague stories of rioting in Kansas, a fundamentalist uprising inside the southernmost territories of the United Christian States. He hadn't thought much about it at first, but two years ago Pastor Mike had moved to Texas, shortly before the heavenly kingdom had declared itself. It was hard to say what role exactly the preacher played in the organization, but he was certainly its most visible face. I know who he is, Manny said. I know the Republic let him in because they thought his followers might provide a buffer against Austin's influence. I know that blew the fuck up in their faces. Manny took a long drink and continued. That's an old story around here. The Republic using those gone fondling nut fucks to push back against the leftists. The journalist raised an eyebrow, and Manny instantly regretted his crude response. He didn't really care about religion one way or the other, but whenever he came out to the front, it was hard not to get a little angry, especially after a drink.

Sorry, he said. It's been a long day. Reggie looked down, coughed, and took a sip. He looked back at Manny, took another sip, and said, You know, that's another subject I'd rather like to cover. What, Manny asked, anti-Christian sentiment in North America. Manny grunted and looked down at his drink. The Brit barreled on. You're not the first North American I've heard express anger towards Christians, he said. In California, Cascadia, the North American Federation, I've just seen a lot of hate. Look, Manny interrupted. Me? I'm a man of peace. I love everybody.

But this continent's been torn apart and bleeding for the last 20 years. A lot of people hate Christians. The ones that don't hate Christians hate leftists. And everybody outside the American Federation hates capitalists. Hate, hate, hate. Manny took a gulp of his beer and set it down a little harder than he'd intended. He looked Reggie in the eye and finished. There's exactly one thing all the broken bits of this continent have in common. Hate. The journalist arched an eyebrow at Manny and returned the gaze. He had the look of a man peering into the enclosure of a particularly exotic zoo animal.

Manny wanted to resent it, but he'd been doing this job long enough to know it was just how journalists looked at people. Reggie downed his drink. He reached a hand up to signal the bartender and then looked back at Manny. Can I buy you another? What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Browned. Man, he shook his head. No, thanks. I'm tired. And I don't want to drag ass at the front tomorrow. He downed the last of his beer, bid Reggie a good night, and headed over to the spot of turf where he'd set up his sleeping bag and gear. He popped off his shoes, his pants and his shirt, and rubbed himself down with a handful of wet naps. Then he grabbed a night shirt and sweatpants from his bag and slipped them on. Manny considered clean pajamas a necessity. He fired up his deck again once he was swaddled in his sleeping bag.

There was a juttering start, and then the corners of his vision were populated by a series of small, partly translucent screens. Each one bulged with updates, friends asking about his weekend plans, spam from his college, notifications about the new video uploads and headlines from the local news. David had messaged him twice more to let him know he and his journalists were headed back to Austin, and then that they'd arrived. Oscar still hadn't responded. Manny's initial concern was over his loyalty. I got that fucker started as a stringer. If he sold that video and cut me out of the deal, I'm going to, going to. But the longer he thought about Oscar, the more Manny worried something might have happened. He'd been working in Plano today, near a very stable chunk of the front, but this far out, almost anything could happen. Manny closed his eyes, sighed and tried to purge the anxiety from his mind.

There was nothing to do now, other than get to sleep so he could wake up tomorrow and make more money. That thought prompted Manny to pull open his banking app and check on the status of his savings account. The numbers glowed, fat and happy, and the space in front of his head. Another five months in the field, maybe six, then I buy that plane ticket. He started to think about the pictures he'd seen of Dublin and Berlin and Barcelona. All the places he thought he might live if this war would just hang on a little longer. He soon fell asleep and slept pretty well until the first mortar landed. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron.

Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross and Shaquille O'Neal, I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in-depth and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know.

We talk to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about how they got their start and, most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

But hell is real, we're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to the doctor's sex re-show every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter Two, Roland. He woke up suddenly aware of two equally pressing problems. The acids weren't off and eight people are here to kill me. Both of these facts concerned him equally. He couldn't remember his name or where exactly he was, which made the impending kill team all the more concerning.

He opened his eyes, his vision was blurry and unfocused, his head felt filled with sand. Roland, oh shit, that's my name, Roland, wondered how long he'd been asleep. He reflexively triggered his deck before the dim firing of a synapse reminded him that he'd permanently disabled his data connection. Well, a long time ago. 5,226,000 minutes. His hind brain, what Roland called the acres of microscopic processors and data banks spun into his blood, spat the knowledge out unbidden into his conscious mind. Roland tried to curse but wound up spitting out a wad of brackish flim instead. His eyes settled on a quarter full bottle of fungus whiskey.

He grabbed it, drained it and rooted around on the table where he'd found it until his digging turned up a sheet of acid. He ripped the sheet in half, ate one half and pasted the other on his sweat damp chest. Roland's brain didn't wait for the acid to do its job. Nanomachines couriered the lacergic diethyl acid directly to his synapses. The drugs took hold in a matter of seconds. Acid softened the world around him. His hind brain's running commentary faded into a sort of generalized hyper-awareness of the world around him. He sighed, relaxed and remembered.

Woman hovered over him. Her hands on his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body. Sweat dripped down from her short black hair onto his face and chest. Her pupils were the size of dinner plates. She smelled like acid and desire. She smiled, revealing a row of Damascus steel teeth. Roland pulled himself out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance.

His hind brain generated a map of the approaching assassins. They were still a solid minute from his hovel. There were six men and two women on the team. If he'd won it, a microsecond's focus could have told him which members of the group were vegetarians, where two of the team were on their minstrel cycles and how recently each of their firearms had been cleaned and oiled. But Roland didn't care about that information. He was trying to remember where he'd left his gun. The one-room hut Roland occupied was best described as squalid.

He knew he'd lived there for quite a long time, although he wasn't sure if the home was his in an illegal sense of the word. It's one room held a filthy mattress, a hot plate, several dozen empty bottles of liquor, and a tinkling carpet of spent whippets. A large knife was embedded in the door. Roland couldn't remember why. He knew he'd had a gun at one point, even though he couldn't currently find it. He stood up, still wobbly, from the massive dose of GHB he'd taken with his nightly tequila, and started kicking at the piles of bottles and drug paraphernalia in the hope that one of them might contain his gun. He found some bullets after a few seconds' search at the bottom of a Folger's coffee tin that was half filled with marijuana.

Next to the tin was a large metal bowl of stagnant water. Roland glanced in and caught sight of his own reflection. His black skin looked ashen and clammy. Unusually pale, he thought, but he didn't recall enough about himself to know if that was really true. His face was long and drawn, with wide, jutting cheekbones and a patchy, uneven beard. His head was covered in stubble. The center of his face was dominated by a crooked, heavily scarred nose. Roland had no recollection of why it was scarred, but he knew the injury must have happened back before the army filled him with chrome.

He turned away from his reflection and continued his search through the house, scattering food-encrusted plates, empty coke bags, and old-fashioned print pornography into even less organized piles. No dice. Did I pawn it? He wondered, as his machine assisted edetic memory, warred with his profound intoxication. Roland was now conscious enough to remember that not remembering much was pretty normal for him, and he should really worry more about the assassins coming to kill him. Oh shit, right!

The strike team was just 50 meters out now. He felt a gust of wind, and, in the same way, felt as two of the men began to assemble a large sound cannon behind a rocky hill that faced his hovel. He guessed it was a Callahan Mark 38. Roland didn't know how he knew the weapon's name, but he knew it could burn out even his armored synapses with a few seconds of continuous fire. One man was on overwatch for the Callahan team. He carried a two-bore, ruger-falsion, anti-vehicular rifle. The mingling odors of fear-sweat and baby formula wafting off him triggered sense memories of someone holding a newborn infant. Roland guessed the man must have a kid back home.

A kid, he's scared of leaving fatherless if some chromed-out acid-head fillets him. That was useful data. He filed it away in the chunk of his brain, least likely to lose that information over the next four seconds. Roland's memory was real good in four-second chunks. Over the next picosecond, he caught equally informative whiffs of the others. It was enough to suggest that two of the women in the main assault team were lovers, and they'd both had Milspeck's sub-dermal armor implanted recently. The accurate scent of fresh sutures hung heavy in the air around them. Roland could also tell that one of the men in the assault party took heavy testosterone supplements,

either because of a genetic abnormality or because he'd been assigned female at birth. The fourth man was moderately addicted to ephedrics and riding into battle on a high-stimulant wave. The last member of the assault team was the only one to give Roland any pause. He could guess the man's height and weight, 6'5", 240 pounds, from the sound of his footfalls. Roland could smell the Sig Sauer 500 submachine gun in his hands, but otherwise the man was a sensory blank. No sweat, no hydraulics, and black-to-thermographic sensors. The man was chromed. Not so heavily as Roland, of course, but the competent and well-armed squad he led might be enough to narrow the gap.

Where in the shitting shit shit shit did I leave that gun? The static balance in the air changed as the Overwatch team warmed up their sound cannon. The assault team was close now, barely 100 feet out, waiting in the cover provided by several large boulders at the base of the rise that held Roland's ramshackle home. He knew how this fight would go. They'd unleashed the Callahan for a good five seconds while the kill team moved into position and kicked in the door. Next, the big bruiser and the two women would enter while the remainder of the assault team fanned out to cover the sides. Textbook post-human kill team tactics, he thought.

He didn't actually remember any of the fights this conclusion was based on, but he'd clearly lived through similar encounters, and, if he trusted his body and hindbrain, he would again. Roland finished searching the apocalyptic ruin that was his kitchen sink. The pile of plates had been large enough to hide a short-barrel AR-10, but his gun wasn't there either. Fuck nuts, he cursed. The profanity brought a tiny serotonin spike, and Roland felt himself calm down even as the noose tightened around him. His combat wetwear did most of its work in the moments before Meat Met Metal, so Roland closed his eyes, slumped his shoulders, and relaxed while it cross-indexed his memories of past firefights with his current sensory data.

A moment later, Roland was presented with three potential counter-assault strategies. He selected the one that sounded like the most fun. The Callahan fired, blanketing his home in much of the area beyond it in a web of noise designed to assault and eventually fry the synapses of anyone dumb enough to stand too long in its wake. Pain lashed from Roland's inner ear and sparked out to every nerve in his body. It would have been enough to leave a strong man curled on the ground, shitting his guts out, but Roland just felt a distant ache. His experience of the damage was more akin to seeing the check engine light on a car than true agony. He was aware that if he waited too long, the sonic weapon would blow out the pain dampeners on his spinal nerve gates. Lucky for him, the assault team didn't wait that long.

Roland felt the big man arc his leg up to kick in the door. It crumpled in and Roland lunged left. This helped him avoid the first spray of covering fire as the chromed man and both women barreled inside. Roland flung himself into the hovel's main structural support beam, which ran up the building's left wall. He hit it with a rough speed and force of a light truck going 20 miles an hour. His momentum carried him and half the left wall into the rocky ground outside. Roland's filthy little home tottered and swayed. It collapsed first on the left side and then on the right as the whole structure failed.

Roland was already up with a jagged piece of 2x4 in his hands. He rushed the aphedric's attic holding down the left flank. The man got two shots off and, to his credit, both hit right where Roland's original heart had been. And then Roland was on him. He shoved the wood into the meat of the man's face. It gouged off enough flesh to fill a pint glass and shattered the poor fellow's jaw. He went down. Hard. Roland smelled the familiar scent of anti-hemorrhagic nanomachines as they rushed to save the man's life.

He caught a slight sour whiff of the cheap clotting agents in the man's blood. Roland guessed it was Traumax brand, which was convenient. Traumax had based their whole line off a piece of Brazilian military wetwear that itself was based on a crude synthesis of horseshoe crab blood. The organs worked well enough, unless you happened to be an amphetamine addict who'd suffered massive tissue damage. Then, your Traumax unit would flood your synapses with adenosine to knock you out, rather than risk pushing more amphetamines on your stressed heart. Something in the smell of the man's blood set off a powerful sense memory buried deep in Roland's hippocampus.

Vines slashing his face, boiling jungle heat in his fist connecting with the face of a heavily armed young woman. Her orbital bone broke into the blow. He smelled her blood meet the air and she dropped, dropped, dropped. The memory flashed by, free of context, in the time it took the other man to hit the ground. It was frustrating to only remember the what of an action, and not the why or the after. It was like knowing how to ride a bike without remembering who'd taught you and when, only for everything. Roland found it somewhat unsettling. A 12 gauge slug hit him in the thigh.

It dug deep, hit reinforced bone, and stopped. The little machines in Roland's blood were already cutting it apart by the time he stopped amusing and bound it over to the other flank man. Roland chucked the two by four hard as he ran. The wood impacted above the assassin's temple with an audible crack, shattering the man's phenoid bone. The battle drugs started to trickle into Roland's synapses now. A cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And an epinephrine concocted to make violence as addictive as a fat rock of crystal meth. Roland instantly wanted more and he knew he could trigger a greater dose by stomping on the downed man's skull and ending his life.

He fought down the urge and, instead, grabbed the man's AA-32 combat shotgun and rolled for cover behind a red rock boulder. He was almost fast enough, but either the overwatch man had some aftermarket parts Roland hadn't smelled or all the hardcore drug abuse had done long-term damage to his reflexes. Maybe no more crack-binges, Roland thought, as a massive two-bore slug that gave most of his left shoulder out into the desert behind him. Roland belted out several fuckwords as pain flooded the banks of his dampeners. And just that second, with truly exquisite timing, the Callahan crew swiveled their weapon round and poured sonic fire at him from above. For a fraction of a second, everything went dark. Roland's world was riotous red pain and little else. If his body had required the input of his conscious mind, he would have been in a real pickle.

During the milliseconds it took for his dampeners to cut through the pain-haze, Roland's body dove ten feet to the left, enough to take him out of the Callahan's spray and behind an outcropping of rocks. Two rounds cracked into the rock above his head. Roland came back to himself as the shards cut into his skin. He glanced down at the ruin of his shoulder. His little blood robots were already hard at work, rebuilding the muscles, bones, and sinews blown out by the giant slug. A couple seconds more and the limb would be usable again. But Roland had a better idea.

He used his intact arm as a flesh catapult and flung himself up over the boulder, towards the Callahan and its three guardians. The man with the two boar fired again. Roland had known he would and his hindbrain had already calculated the ideal emotions to avoid the dozen most likely shot patterns. He sailed over the half-pound bullets with ease and used the hand of his intact arm to rip his wounded arm free at the shoulder. Roland landed hard in front of the Callahan. He swung his own severed limb like a club and knocked the barrel to the left. Then he laid into the gun's crew with a mix of pounding swings from the arm and stomps to the other men's knees and ankles. Bones shattered, assassins screamed.

The man with the two boar and the newborn child at home wavered and broke. Roland had expected this. Many normal humans, even hardened veterans, found it nauseating and unsettling to see a man move as fast as he could move. Add, beating their friends half to death with a severed limb and, well, he predicted the guy would break. It's not your fault, buddy. Roland thought as he watched the man run. Don't feel bad. He'd wanted to say that out loud, but he was having trouble working his vocal cords.

In roughly seven seconds, Roland had eliminated five out of eight threats in the kill team. His hindbrain predictions had given him six more seconds, at least before the entry team cleared themselves from the debris of his collapsed hovel. But the other post-human, the man who'd shown blank on most of Roland's senses, had freed himself faster. Roland realized this when a trio of 50 caliber slugs burst into his chest cavity. He dropped, avoiding the last three rounds of the burst, and rolled behind another pair of boulders with his severed arm in hand. The two female assassins were close to freeing themselves now. Roland could hear them struggle out through the vibrations of their bodies in the red sand. He couldn't see the other post-human, but he'd triangulated his most likely location.

Unfortunately, the other fucker had him dead to rights. If Roland broke cover, he'd be shot to pieces, maybe more pieces than his trauma organs could put back together. Alright, oh boy, do we eat a bunch of lead and charge the bastards? Deploy the meat rockets and run for a gun while they're blind? He suddenly remembered the spring-loaded assault razor embedded in his left forearm, and then the 22 millimeter grenade pistol buried in between his small intestine and his sigmoid colon. Did I remember to load it before shutting it in there? But before he could take any action, the firefight was interrupted by an oddly familiar voice.

Hey, Roland, how's it swinging? I call the Union Hall, and I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story.

The authorities would parade over, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you got something to say, you could start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love.

And maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com. That's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today. Roland hadn't smelled or heard this new man coming. The voice was very familiar. Roland felt an aim on the tip of his tongue, but it just wouldn't come. Weapons down, lads and lassies. I've seen enough to guess the end. Roland smelled frustration waft off the two women, now free and angry.

The other post-human smelled like nothing, but Roland felt him lower his weapon. Some gray, dead strand of memory pulsed in the back of Roland's brain, and he guessed that it was safe for him to stand up now. So he did, and put eyes on the mystery man. The fellow had a lopsided, squarish jaw with a very deliberate five o'clock shadow. His nose was thick and bulby. His red hair was tangled into dreadlocks that were more the result of inattention than stylistic choice. He was tall, muscular, but lean with a bare chest that was covered in tattoos of black snakes.

They writhed in time with the beating of his heart. He wore nothing but a pair of red leather chaps and a broad, calm smile. His bare penis swung pendulous in the breeze. Both of his palms were extended, out front and visible. It was the kind of gesture one used to calm an animal. Roland's synapses fired and misfired, and a string of fragmented memories ran through his mind. He recalled a really good hot dog on a sunny day, push-ups in the mud, searing pain in his genitals and the taste of shitty ditchweed.

These memory fragments were all somehow tied to the man in front of him. It took Roland a moment, but as soon as he got a full look at those cold gray eyes, the man's name clicked into place. Oh, shit! he croaked, Jim! Roland hadn't spoken to a person in, months at least, maybe longer. He sounded more like a suffering cat than an English-speaking human, but Jim understood him. Yep, he said. Roland's side looked at his separate arm and crudely shoved it into place. It had clotted a bit, and his stub burned as the tiny robots in his blood got to work reattaching his once-in-future limb.

Jim! he said again, sounding a bit less like a frog after a six-day coke binge. You fucked up my house, man! That's not cool. Roland didn't know how long he'd known Jim. He couldn't even pin down the man's last name, but he was pretty sure they'd fought together, back before the Revolution, and he was certain they'd had a threesome with a devilishly handsome spetsnaz man. He couldn't remember that guy's name, or why they'd all been in Panama, but he didn't expect that was the sort of experience past him would have shared with someone who wasn't a friend. You remember me? Jim asked.

Basically, Roland answered. Good, because I got a favor to ask. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. I hope you just enjoyed the chapter you listened to. I hope you enjoy the chapters to come. If you would like to read the text version of this book, either on the web or on your e-reader as an e-pub, you can find those on the website atrbook.com. So again, the free, ad-free e-pub and the text of every chapter will be on atrbook.com. I'm John Gonzalez, the host of SI's new podcast, Sports Illustrated Weekly. Sports Illustrated has delivered some of the best storytelling in sports for 70 years,

and now that continues on our show. Each week, we'll dive deep into the best stories from around the sports world. Sports Illustrated Weekly is available every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.