Page 86 of Shadows Reel

Randy felt a chill run through him. He felt as if someone had punched him in the chest.

Axel said, “Remember those child soldiers in Myanmar? How fucking incompetent and fucked up they were? Well, compared to the antifa guys I’ve met, those boys were highly trained warriors.

“There really aren’t that many of them altogether,” Axel continued. “It’s a media myth. There are maybe just a couple hundred in the whole country at most. Most of them are concentrated in Portland. The reason people think antifa is a big deal is because they keep recirculating. They get arrested but not prosecuted, and they’re back on the street in hours. It’s a shell game.

“And they’re only good for one thing,” Axel said. “They’ll help us destabilize the status quo, even though they don’t knowit. Them and the hard-core BLM guys. They’re a means to an end, as far as I’m concerned. Both groups are easy to manipulate if you press the right buttons. With BLM, of course, you need cops to confront them and injure or kill one on video. With antifa, you just turn them loose and don’t arrest them or prosecute them for anything. It emboldens them if they don’t get any pushback.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” the Blade said.

“Yeah. We can’t go at the leaders in D.C. directly for what they did to us. It’s impractical and they’re all hiding behind walls and fences. But we can light the cities on fire and expose them as weak and spineless. The media will be on our side. They always are.”

“So how’s this gonna work?” the Blade asked.

“We need to be in the right situation,” Axel said. “We need to be in the middle of a full-fledged riot. Fog-of-war conditions. That’s what all of this has been leading up to. We need a situation with absolute chaos. Cops fighting antifa or BLM. Or antifa just burning everything down.”

“Then what?”

“Then we light the fuse,” Axel said. “That’s why I’m dressed like this.”

“Like a golf pro or some such?” the Blade said, chuckling.

“Yeah. I need to look like a local white businessman who maybe found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally, I’ll choose to be on the side of the cops in their riot gear. I’ll keep my head down until the time is right. Then I’ll pull this,” he said.

Randy imagined Axel showing the Blade one of the guns they’d stolen earlier in the day. He imagined it to be one of the .40 Glock pistols Axel had claimed “were the weapon of choice” for law enforcement personnel across the country.

“You’ll be positioned in a window or on a roof with your sniper rifle,” Axel said to the Blade. “I’ll pop a couple antifa or BLM guys from within the crowd of cops. I’ll take down as many as I can without exposing myself. It’ll all get caught by people on the side with their phones and on police body cams. No one will know who did the shooting, but they’ll know it came from the cops.”

“Meanwhile,” the Blade said, “I’ll target a couple of cops in the cross fire.”

“Exactly,” Axel said. “The scene then will go absolutely ballistic with dead bodies on both sides. Someone will remember our Signal post of where to find the weapons cache. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s antifa or BLM. I just want them finding those guns and going back out on the street to hunt cops. A few citizens will get taken out in collateral damage, but that’s to be expected.

“It won’t stop here,” Axel said, his voice rising. “Not if there are actual bodies in the streets. Especially if there are bodies in the streets and actual video showing it started from within the line of cops. Maybe someday they’ll work it out and realize it wasn’t a cop that fired first.Maybe.But in the meanwhile the riots will spread from city to city like it’s done before. We’ll burn this motherfucking country to the ground, just like we swore we’d do when they left us over there to die.”

The Blade whooped. “You think big.”

“What’s the point of thinking small?”

Randy closed his eyes. He’d never felt so betrayed. He slumped against the wall and didn’t even care if his plastic bag wrap stuck to the wads of chewing gum.

Just then, his radio crackled.

“Anything going on?” Axel asked. His voice had returned to normal. It was the passive tone of a sociopath, Randy thought.

Randy had trouble speaking. Finally, he keyed the mike and said, “Nothing.”

“Shit. Shit-shit-shit. Keep me informed.” Axel keyed off.

Randy let the handheld drop to the pavement. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to stand back up and walk away. Then he heard Axel curse again from the shadows.

“What iswrongwith them?” Axel shouted to the Blade. “What kind of pussies are we dealing with? A littlerainkeeps them away?Rain?Imagine if they had to hike a hundred miles through enemy territory in a rain forest like we did? See what I mean about them?”

Randy waved his hand as if dismissing Axel for good. He’d had it. He wasn’t even going back for his phone. Instead, he’d find a pay phone somewhere and call his parents and beg them to buy him a plane ticket back to Denver. They’d object at first, but then he knew they’d cave. They always did.

That’s when a cop suddenly appeared on the other side of the street. One cop, on foot. Eyeing him. Randy turned his head away and picked up his pace. But instead of the cop giving chase, he turned toward the alley where Axel and the Blade were located.

Randy had no way to warn them, since he’d ditched the radio. And he had no good reason to do it anyway, since Axel had revealed his true colors.

—

---