Chapter 531: The Thunder Rolls

Just a few streets away from the courthouse in Shelton was an irish pub. To tourists and locals, it was a gathering place for people to drink their worries away, eat "ethnic" cuisine, and, on St. Patrick's Day, celebrate by gulping down cheap beer with even cheaper green dye added.

But to the cult of the progenitor, it was a beginning. Its basement was where Rick had first begun preaching his ideal of a new utopia where the progenitors would live hand-in-hand with the human descendants they'd left behind when they left to explore the vast universe. It was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage, and the closest thing to a holy site that the cult had, and it was why not just one, but two of Rick's inner circle were present in such a flea speck town that was only included on maps out of a sense of obligation.

One of them was hidden, masquerading as the chief of police, and the other was the Hartstene Pointe Maintenance Association's vice president.

The phone on the police chief's desk rang, but sadly, the chief had already left. He was on his way to the basement of the pub, where he would rally with the cult members in town and arm themselves for a confrontation with the incoming raid. He was under no illusion that the cult forces would survive, but when cornered, even the mildest rabbit would bite. However, had he been in his office to answer that phone call, things might have perhaps played out differently.

But he wasn't, so his fate was sealed.

He had about forty young, strong cultists, and another fifty or sixty old and young who were willing to sacrifice themselves, if necessary. Whether they actually would sacrifice themselves in the end was a question the chief was unwilling to ask himself, in fear of the answer, but at least they claimed they were. And that was all that mattered at this junction.

"They're coming, hurry!" he said, waving the stream of people into the pub as people walking by curiously looked on, wondering what was happening.

"Can we make it through this, chief?" a panicky-looking youth asked as he passed the chief.

The chief only looked at him with a grim expression, then slowly shook his head. "Not likely, son. But at least we can spit in the devil's eye while he drags us down to hell," he solemnly said, then continued counting people and waving them past him into the pub.

The young man, already on the verge of full-blown panic, paled and fell weeping to the ground. Then a purple light flashed in his eyes and he stilled, then robotically climbed to his feet and trudged into the pub.

The chief had already put the boy out of his mind. In his opinion, it would be great if the kid ran; that way at least one person would survive what was coming to them. But it would also be good if the kid stayed, because it showed that the faith they had in the progenitors was strong, unbreakably so. So when he saw the robotic movements, he thought nothing of it, thinking that it was just the boy's way of dealing with his fear.

He was an Iraq War veteran and had seen men break before, so the mindless zombie-like stumbling was nothing new to him. He couldn't hear the voice in the boy's head encouraging him to pick up a weapon and martyr himself for the progenitors, nor could he feel the internal struggle currently going on in the boy's mindscape. To the youth, it was already a fight to the death even before the actual fight to the death began. A fight, it had to be said, that he was gradually losing.

Soon, the struggle in the boy's mind ended and everything about him had changed. He was no longer David Taylor, a promising high school graduate and star pitcher headed to the University of Washington on a baseball scholarship, but Rick Ashley piloting a meat puppet. Everything about him had changed except his body, but no one was around that could notice it.

Shelton was a small town, sure, but it wasn't to the point where everyone was intimately familiar with everyone else's goings-on. And David was the only cultist in his family and circle of friends. He had been meaning to bring others into it, but his belief had never been that strong in the first place.

(Ed note: It's a common misconception that small town life means everyone knows everybody else. That's patently untrue; think about it for a minute. Can you possibly know everything about everyone in a town with a population of even a thousand? Would there even be enough minutes in the day to gossip about everyone?)

It was common for teenagers to flit from group to group, hobby to hobby, and place to place. Youth, before the mass awakening event, was meant for discovering the place people would fit for the rest of their lives. But now, Rick had taken that choice from David, forcing him to fight against an unreasonable force that would soon reap his life like a farmer scything through a field of ripe wheat at harvest time.

And it was all because of a single, simple fact: David was blessed. He had awakened and, after his awakening, his parents had fled with him to the small unincorporated bedroom town of Matlock, Washington. Though they had panicked and joined the empire in hopes of saving their only son, after he had come out of his medical pod, they quickly reverted to their anti-imperial beliefs and their desire for some illusory "freedom" had driven them to take their boy and run.

Thus, "David" walked up to the chief and said, "Let me help, chief. I'm blessed by water." As he spoke, ten baseball-sized balls of water condensed behind his head and shoulders and began rotating, spinning faster and faster until they became indistinguishable from a wheel and began to hum through the air.

"You sure, son?" the chief asked.

The boy nodded his head and looked to the north, where the reaper team would soon appear. "Yes, chief. I'm sure," he said.

......

[Targets have congregated and are grouped up. Suggest indirect fire.]

"Roger that," the reaper team leader said. He marked the pub on the battle map and waved his hand at the heavy and demolition experts in the team.

No words needed to be said; they had access to the same information as the team leader did and immediately took a knee. A firing tube extended from each of their backpack-

mounted indirect-fire modules, loaded with a single round.

The heavy had a "bunker-buster" that would penetrate three meters into the ground before rapidly filling the space it fell through with a mixture of jet fuel and methane and detonating in a single fireball that would collapse everything around it thanks to the vacuum left behind after it petered out.

The demolition expert, on the other hand, had a more conventional high explosive penetrator round. It would fly over the heads of its target and explode, driving shrapnel into the ground much like a shotgun blast would into a target in front of it.

"Ready," the two men reported, then waited for the fire order.

The squad AI, after confirming that civilian casualties would be kept to an absolute minimum through Overwatch, gave the team leader the green light.

"Fire, fire, fire," the man ordered, and two streaks left two launch tubes.

The firers stood and rejoined the rest of the team, then everyone continued on their way to their destination.