1The Mutts of the Capitol
By Col Mike Fuser, P.A. (ret)
Apoptosis : The Scheduled Death of a Cell Within an Organism.
Tbe Buffalo armored fighting vehicle rolled slowly along a smoking block of ruined apartment buildings in the Capitol.
"Ell Tee, mutts at your ten o'clock!" called gunner Woolsey.
"Three lizard mutts at ninety yards, hold your fire," called Lt. Meredith Jackson. "Sir, the ride is about to get rough", she told me.
"Don't mind me, Lieutenant, just looking for my unit out here."
I was cramped into the front seat of the AFV, the Lieutenant commanding the vehicle at the wheel, and wedged between us, behind the fire extinguisher and the first-aid kit, was a trash can filled with Number 74A remote detonated sticky grenades. I snugged the seatbelt tighter around my waist and grabbed hold of the overhead mount assist handle for support. Sgt Lindsay Woolsey, in the turret seat, scanned 360 degrees around our position, and called "No Friendlies in sight."
"Engaging for capture," said Jackson, as she accelerated over a curb and across a debris-strewn playground.
The Lizard Mutts ran in a pack. This was news, for lizards. Natural lizards aren't social. These mutts are, for some reason. Also lizards aren't thermic. Natural lizards are asleep in the winter months. These mutts are wide awake, roaming outdoors, and hungry.
The mutts wheeled left as we pursued. We bounced through the snowy playground into an alley, the mutts running flat out, and the AFV gaining on them.
One mutt stumbled over a patch of ice and fell. Lt. Jackson drove over it, pinning it beneath the front left wheel. "Mason, you're up."
"Roger that." Soldier Johanna Mason dismounted the vehicle through the rear hatch, brandishing a diamond-edged axe, tricked out to the same weight and balance as the one she used in the Quarter Quell, this time with a metal matrix composite head made of armor plate. The newer kind of armor plate, that's reinforced with depleted uranium-carbide monofilament. Sputtered with carbon plasma to put down a diamond finish and laser polished to get it as sharp and as smooth as humanly possible.
She decapitated the snarling mutt with one swing. Lizard mutt hide was tougher than leather. It would make tool steel dull. It was partially bulletproof. Dr. Beetee Latier had made a damned fine axe for Mason. A little brute force is most helpful, with the right tools to deliver it.
Sgt. Woolsey climbed out of the turret seat, reached into the trash bin beside me, pulled out two sticky grenades and passed them to Mason, who stuffed one grenade in the dead mutt's mouth, the other between the hind legs, and remounted the Buffalo in a smooth motion, closing the hatch behind her and belting into the troop seat. Time from start to finish, by my watch, was eighteen seconds.
Had they kept running, like most wild creatures, the surviving mutts would have outrun us by eighteen seconds.
Instead, they turned at the sound of Mason's axe, and came straight at us.
Lindsay Woolsey, an impish grin on her face, called "Clear to the rear, Ell Tee."
Jackson turned to me and said, "Watch this, sir. Sergeant Woolsey figured it out yesterday, the same time as Sergeant Boggs from your unit did."
Jackson reversed the AFV down the alley back toward the playground, got about fifty yards and slowed. I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look.
Both mutts sauntered up to their dead comrade. One began eating the severed head, throat first. The other immediately went for the belly. The sight was amazing. Lizard Mutts are programmed to destroy their own dead.
Jackson flipped the Weapons Switch to HOT, and pressed the firing button on the steering wheel. Both grenades detonated on her signal.
And the carcass of one lizard mutt flew directly at us and struck our bullet - resistant polycarbonate windscreen with a thump.
"Crap," said Woolsey from the turret. "We're blind up here."
Lt. Jackson gave a disgusted look. "I would like to end this war today," she muttered.
Several pounds of maroon – red, lumpy, frothy stuff came out of the dead lizard mutt's rear end and ruptured guts, and smeared the windscreen.
Lindsay Woolsey climbed out of the turret seat. "Permission to decon the turret cam, ma'am?"
"Decon the turret camera and the windscreen. We can wash the rest of the mutt crap off once we return to base. And post an overwatch. I'm blind to the rear, without that camera," Jackson said, sounding mechanical. Doesn't sound like career officer, I thought. Or a Career Tribute, for that matter. She seems capable and commanding enough, but like she belongs somewhere else. She sounds like she can run things, but not…an army.
"Roger that. Cleaning cam and windscreen here, the rest when we RTB," said Woolsey.
Mason reached into another trash bin, this one full of rags, passed two to Woolsey and checked her own rifle to see if she had rounds in the clip. Mason dismounted out the rear hatch and climbed the running boards and ladder to the roof. She made some clunking sounds as she dropped into position, tummy to the armor, to watch our rear. Then she gave three sharp taps on the roof with her fist. On that signal, Woolsey followed her up the ladder with a water bottle and the rags. Jackson's HUD, short for "head up display," went from dark to red to blurry to clear. Lt. Jackson panned the camera 360 degrees, getting a brilliant picture of the soles of Mason's boots, the left of which had a chunk of mutt crap stuck to the toe and instep. Woolsey reached into the picture with a clean rag and wiped the mutt crap off Mason's boot. Mason said, "That tickles, Sergeant."
"It makes you stink like mutt shit, too, soldier." Mason giggled. Woolsey did too.
Jackson and I resisted the urge to laugh. Just in case we had to holler at them to get back inside. Somebody has to stay aware at all times. Right now that was us.
Peering around a big lump of maroon mutt poop, I got a good look at the remains of the three lizard mutts.
"Lieutenant, I count three heads."
Jackson panned the camera forward and checked her HUD.
"Yes, sir, I make out three heads as well."
I was quite sure that the maroon color of their fecal matter, meant these mutts had been eating raw meat. Likely Capitol citizens, maybe our fellow rebel troops. Definitely not cooked meat taken from the Capitol's trash.
"Would you have waited to return to base if it was a hot day in summer?"
"Sir, I probably would. There's no smell in here, with the air filtration system running," Jackson said.
"Your crew is pretty quick. Been together long?"
Jackson seemed to think for a moment. "Johanna joined us our third day in the Capitol. She lost a friend to lizard mutts. So she begged some scientist in Special Defense to get her a job hunting them, and he pulled some strings and got her sent here. Lindsay Woolsey is with the armored infantry because she's a crack shot. And she's tiny enough to fit in the turret of a Buffalo AFV. She's been promoted three times. She's been my gunner since General Gray started down the Appian Way. Knock on wood," said Jackson, tapping her fist on her forehead. "She started as a private, and made lief-corporal by Day Five of the Battle. She saved us from an antitank rocket by shooting it down with the fifty. She's quite a shot, and I know some good shots. She made sergeant in the counter-attack, when we were rear guard and had to hold Lewis' Bridge or lose a third of the rebel army." Doesn't sound like an officer giving a report, I think. Too literate. Too many words.
I nodded. If I knew Meredith Jackson well enough to confide in her, I'd repeat the ugly conversation I'd had with Col. Boggs, the last time we both had an hour off duty. General Gray, a political appointee who had defected from District Eleven, where he was Head Peacekeeper, considered himself the equal of Napoleon. Col. Boggs said that his actual command abilities were on a par with Napoleon's achievements at a battle called Waterloo, where Napoleon had been utterly shattered.
Gray supposedly came perilously close to losing his entire army, when a coup de main by enemy armored units following the railway line, nearly retook the bridge to District Seven, which his parachute force had gained at immense cost. Had that counter-stroke been successful, it would have cut his supply line and left him surrounded. Snow in the mountains grounded our air support during the first day of battle. It was quick work by the heroes of the rear guard unit with whom this quiet lady had served, who kept the enemy from reaching the bridge, until air support could bomb them to a standstill.
They were outnumbered four to one by AFV's and had to dodge 155mm copperhead rounds from five main battle tanks. They made good use of the terrain, communicated amazingly well, and used the mountainous terrain to extend their guns' range, but stayed mobile. The force avoided taking much damage, and kept the enemy force pinned in a canyon below, until the weather cleared and our pilots had at them.
One of my former students from Thirteen, a captain named Hawthorne, paid attention during weather class and remembered that the dry snow on top of a mountain, does not compact as well as the wetter snow that falls down in the canyons, and he reminded all the Buffalo commanders in the rear guard, to stay high and keep moving, because the enemy below, got stuck in the mushy ice and could not move well. And all of these tankers were bright enough, to learn Hawthorne's snow lesson over our radios, without the enemy figuring out what they were talking about.
The bridge held, the Capitol lost half its AFVs and all of its main battle tanks, and Gray took the credit for the win. But his absence may be the sole reason that he wasn't defeated. We then had all seven of our tanks, the enemy had none, and we rolled into the Capitol against heavy resistance. It needs to be written up as a textbook study in tactics. Capitol survivors were convinced that our force was larger than theirs, solely because our armored infantry made good use of tactical deception, and they were tactically deceived.
I never got to speak with Boggsy again. He got killed making a propaganda film that we didn't need. And I miss the son of a bitch.
So I changed the subject. It's a survival skill.
"Where are you from, Lieutenant?"
"District Eleven, sir," Crap. Probably a Gray crony, I guessed. Gray's whole staff were all his old and new cronies. But you couldn't say bad things about him, because he was winning the war. Singlehandedly, according to Plutarch Heavensbee's propaganda, if you read that stuff. At least those fliers made good toilet paper, I thought.
"Ever see snow there?"
"Not often, sir. It had to get very cold. Sometimes it did." Her voice trailed off. She was clearly touching on something personal. Her voice tightened.
"How did you learn about powder snow in the mountains?"
"My top instructor back in the officer training class told us some stories about wars of the past, to explain the battles we are facing now. It helped build up morale," Jackson said. "He talked a lot about old wars. He used to teach military history and tactics to Peacekeepers. So he'd tell us about battles like Anzio and Austerlitz."
I'd ask Hawthorne to tell me the story sometime, since he wasn't about to get credit for it here. "Speaking of axes, I remember making Mason's axe."
"Sir?"
"My office partner, Dr Beetee Latier, worked in the Special Defense Lab In Thirteen, that I was commanding, right up until this mutt situation got out of hand and we all got sent here to spearhead the offensive. We built Mason that battle axe, so she could use it in the Battle of the Capitol." Dummy. Keep it to yourself that it was for a propaganda film we didn't need. "She got red-flagged by a medical issue that turned out to be unimportant" (meaning the thought of killing Snow made her unable to follow orders, which is now a non-issue because the humans stopped fighting and the mutts are just getting started) "and I'm sure Beetee Latier put in a word for her."
"Yes, sir, I noticed that she was very dedicated to the mission." Was I imagining, or was Jackson also making thoughtful pauses as she spoke, weighing the words she could utter? If she was in that rear-guard action, crony or not, she knows what sort of crap Gray is made of. There had better not be a war, with him in command of it, or the Republic is finished.
"Mason never mentioned why she shakes all the time, sir. She didn't want to talk, and I didn't want to ask." She paused quietly. "I'm not a journalist, although I do know one." She smiled slightly, leaving the comment hanging.
"I'm not a medical doctor, Lieutenant, but as I understand it, Mason was held prisoner in the Capitol and got tortured with electric shocks, which screwed up her nerves. Commander Aurelius medicated her with something at our Infirmary, which keeps it manageable. And there was some concern over whether she could obey orders quickly enough to be any help invading the Capitol. Although I must say, your crew moves very smoothly and do not need a lot of supervision to get their duty done. I didn't even notice the shaking until you mentioned it." And I'm not going to mention the repeated rapes, the disruption of anything resembling sleep, and the decision to use her to provoke Soldier Mellark to stop empathizing with Katniss Everdeen so that they could reprogram him to target her as a mutt. Not because of the War Crimes trials that would enquire into the evils of Coriolanus Snow's regime.
But because the assassination of the Mockingjay that the Capitol planned, meant that the enemy had at least one mole, one agent concealed among us, whom we trusted as our own. The hunt for the Mole was Strictly Top Secret. The only way that the Capitol would have spent months torturing Mason and Mellark, was if they knew we would raid the prison and rescue them. Which required at least one spy, to tell the Capitol what our thinking was, about coming to raid the prison. And probably to plant that idea in our heads in the first place.
Knowing Snow's history, our inclination was to presume Mason and Mellark dead. And certainly to inform the Capitol to weaken their grip on the prisoners, just enough for us to carry out the raid, required a spy. Guesswork would not have gotten the job done. If the Capitol did all that, we have no idea what this enemy might do. Until Snow is put to death, any mutt outbreak, like today's, could be cover for an attempt to break Snow out of prison. Or to replace Snow with someone worse, who is yet hidden in the shadows.
This latter case is our biggest worry. A hidden enemy who expected the revolution. Who planned to use our revolution to create just enough disruption so that they could seize power. An enemy worse than Snow would be quite fearsome, indeed. Capitol citizens seemed silly and harmless, yet somehow they managed to rule us for seventy-five years. It is hard to imagine that they all are as harmless as they look. Some, undoubtedly, have ambitions to rule as Snow had, and his coming trial and execution are their chance of a lifetime, to seize power. Stupid opportunists will emerge spontaneously and we'll deal with them as they emerge. Really clever opportunists have been planning to take over Snow's regime, since Snow first began to stink of blood and roses. Some might be unhappy with our vision of a federation of the Districts, with an elected government.
Jackson interrupted my worrying.
"Thank you, sir. We're the Buffalo Soldiers. We keep moving on." Well, Ms. Jackson certainly has a grasp of morale-building phrases. When uncomfortable silence is felt, she fills it with a confidence-building statement. I guess "Buffalo Soldiers" refers to her vehicles. May as well find out.
"I assume that 'Buffalo Soldiers' refers to your vehicles?" I ask.
She straightens, if that's possible. "No, sir," she says quietly. "It refers to something I learned about military history from my instructor…about the all-black regiments on the Old West. The Native Americans they fought called them 'Buffalo Soldiers.' So I adopted that for my particular unit. It works."
I'm not sure what the terms "Old West" and "Native Americans" mean, so I think I'll shut up right here. Clearly Ms. Jackson is some kind of bookworm-turned-warrior.
Woolsey and Mason finished cleaning the crap and lizard blood off the windscreen and turret, doused their rags with fuel and lit them afire. The mutt crap didn't look like crap, but it certainly stunk like crap.
Just then Jackson spotted a squad of soldiers walking down the alleyway toward us. Not walking. Marching. They were in double file, weapons shouldered, as if this was a parade. And they were singing one of those awful parade-ground songs from Thirteen, that Commander Talbot favored.
"Canned milk is the best of all
No tits to pull nor hay to haul!
No shit to shovel nor straw to pitch.
Just punch a hole in the sonuvabitch!"
"Sound off!"
"One, two!"
"Sound off!"
"Three, Four!"
"One, Two, Three, Four!"
"Squad halt!" That clear voice was familiar. I'd heard it on every visit to Col Boggs' quarters, since the days when we we were freshly-commissioned Lieutenants in District Thirteen. I had heard that voice grow, from a child's playfulness, to a young soldier's determination, to a grown woman's seriousness. And it now had the slight tremor of a daughter in mourning. Sergeant Laecania Boggs, six days after losing her father to a booby trap, had found my lost squad, safe and sound.
Woolsey saw the squad approaching and waved a greeting, then walked out to meet them. She and Laecania shook hands in greeting, gesturing at the carcasses. Mason unsheathed her axe and removed the ears from the mutt that struck our windscreen, and presented them to Laecania Boggs. They assisted her in wrapping the rest of the bloody mess in waterproof bags, and brought them aboard for the genomic study we were running in Thirteen. We'd had a shortage of mutt organs to dissect and study, and thanks to Woolsey, we knew why. The damned lizard mutts that ate Finnick, destroyed their dead, purposely. It was programmed into their DNA somehow. Which explained why we recovered no remains, from the tunnel where Finnick had died in a rear-guard action. The mutts ate the corpses. They ate their own dead and wounded. And then they wandered off in search of other targets. That was quite a feat of eating, even by prewar Capitol standards.
"Lieutenant, would you kindly give these soldiers a ride back to base?"
"Certainly, sir," she said, still quiet. Distant and reserved, I thought. Almost dispassionate. She had golden brown skin, straight hair, and her uniform concealed what seemed to be an attractively formed, if somewhat muscular body. What they sometimes called a "jock-ette." Maybe a runner, I thought. What appeared to be headphones for a music chip and player was jammed in her front pocket. Probably company for her when she hit the running trail.
I tried to open her up a little. "Anything special on that chip, lieutenant?" I asked.
She patted the chip. "A couple of songs by Bruce Springsteen head the list, sir."
Him I'm vaguely aware of. His music is popular with some of the grunts. He's hundreds of years gone, but his working-class tone speaks for them. "Which ones?"
"'Rocky Ground' and 'If I Should Fall Behind,' sir."
The former I know. I've heard it sung by grunts in the evenings. Very appropriate to this war. The latter, I don't know. "What's that about?" I ask.
"It's…it's the song my boyfriend and I sing, sir. It's our song." She smiles slightly. "It's a promise we made to each other. If I should fall behind, wait for me. We promise to meet up after the war."
"I'm sure you will," I say, trying to sound sincere. But I'm not doing that good a job. How the hell can I promise that to anybody?
Forget it. Drive on.
"Let's saddle up, lieutenant."