by Karl Wenclas

(image c/o tutorperini)

He took the job for the money.

From the first day, for Stewart it was go-go-go, like being pushed through a tunnel. Beginning with the Academy, which crammed four months of training into 47 days. A hiring blitz was on. 120 were in his class, which was one of more than a dozen classes at the facility. New agents ranged in age from 18 to 60. If you were an adult, willing, and breathing. Many of them, like Stewart, were roomed outside the facility’s packed dormitories at nearby motel rooms, where they tried to sleep.

They ran, or tried to run, around a quarter-mile track. Then quick pistol training, aiming at a target: a human silhouette ten feet away. An instructor yelling, “You’ll stay out here until you qualify!” But they didn’t stay out there, and Stewart was certain not all of them qualified.

In classrooms and at night they read, or tried to read, books on law and regulations, and were given several exams. Stewart worried if he would pass or not. But everybody passed.

At the end of the last day of training they were handed their uniforms. The next day, at the center of campus on a green lawn, surrounded by dormitories and the administration building, a graduation ceremony took place, under a hot, late-autumn sun. Stewart looked around at fellow members of his class. Most of them tried to look clean and elite, but for many the attempt was hopeless. Many uniforms didn’t fit. The result was a group that was half polished-and-ready and half unkempt. Stewart himself wasn’t in tip-top shape. He’d hoped the experience would take a few inches off his gut, but it hadn’t. At the front, a lean middle-aged man approached a just-put-in-place podium.

“Who’s that?” a graduate behind Stewart whispered to another.

“I don’t know. From somewhere. A supervisor.”

Not hearing clearly the man’s announced name, Stewart thought of him as the Supervisor. The man looked angry.

“Forget everything you just learned here,” he said, as instructors standing in a line behind him frowned. “We have a job to do and a short time frame to do it in. Out in the field, I don’t want to hear from any of you about regulations. Fuck the regulations. Let those at the top worry about regulations. If someone asks, ‘What’s the regulation?’ tell them, ‘Here. Right here.’”

He tapped his badge, twice.

“Two years, people! We have two years, maybe less to save this country. Round up twenty million illegal criminals and ship them out within a two-year time frame before the Communist shitlibs and the leftist cunts in the media make enough noise to stop us. If we can’t accomplish the mission it’s over. The mission.”

The mission! In coming days it would be drummed into Stewart’s head on an hourly or even minute-to-minute basis. He was to hear fellow agents, recent trainees like himself, whispering it to themselves. “The mission.”

Through the process and then on the job Stewart was put through a maze of facilities. Squares and rectangles of cold buildings, from where he’d been trained, to federal buildings in various cities, of myriad flows of narrow corridors and men in ties and shirts or in suits and women in business attire: their own kind of uniforms. Culminating in the cold, crammed, heartless facilities in which they locked up people.

“Forget empathy!” the Supervisor’s voice rang out to Stewart in his memory, echoing through the corridors of his mind. “I want never to hear that word. It’s a word for wimps, traitors and cowards. Root it out of your head.”

Then came their newest, most important mission. Three thousand agents hustled onto planes and flown into a new city then hustled into vans and cars, taken to crash space– hotels surrounded by protestors– then after too-little sleep into Official vehicles (Official because they had government plates; that’s how you knew) and driven in their dull green uniforms into neighborhoods, down narrow streets, performing their mission.

“This is the worst hellhole shitlib city of them all,” a familiar voice had shouted to a large group of them at the airport. The Supervisor had arrived there ahead of them. “A city infested with human cockroaches. We’re the exterminators. Our job is to root them out.”

Stewart couldn’t see the man from near the back, in the vast airport terminal. He only heard his voice coming from a megaphone. Someone found a table for the Supervisor to stand on– then all of them could see his close-cropped hair and ruthless expression. Stewart determined to be as ruthless.

As he stood in the group at the airport and listened, phones taking photos, Stewart looked for any familiar face, someone he’d known at the Academy. He spotted two. They shrugged to one another without shrugging. They were in it. All of it. All the way, come what may. No going back.

The next day– now, today– he bumped along in a packed Official vehicle surrounded by uniforms, vests, and masks. Where were they going? What was the target? One of them knew.

They were strangers, all on the same mission. In the same boat, the same fix, compelled by forces out of their control. Forces which Stewart felt moving his arms and legs, controlling his brain. As Stewart looked around at the others, he could tell by their eyes that some were more into this adventure than others. Eyes gleaming with anticipation. Enthusiasm. Hate.

“We’re almost there,” the senior agent said as they plunged further into the snow-covered city. Suddenly: people shouting and blowing whistles. Mobs of communist agitators. Stewart recalled the Supervisor’s voice: “Remember: their job is to inhibit our mission. Don’t allow it! Stay focused on the mission. Everything is the mission.”

The driver slammed on the brakes and they rushed from the SUV in heavy boots onto a narrow, quaint-looking street, joining a hundred other agents rushing from other stopped vehicles, knocking on doors for the sought criminal. A name: “Carlos Z—–.” Stewart couldn’t pronounce all of it, but they shouted it as they pounded on doors. “Where’s Carlos!”

Stewart had no doubt that the man was one of those they’d sworn to deport. Rapist. Gang member. Murderer even. Not just a name on an administrative warrant, a document signed not by a judge but by one of them. Signed by the Supervisor, maybe. Head of the pack.

“Where’s Carlos! Where’s Carlos!!”

Stewart believed in the existence of Carlos. That Carlos wasn’t just a name on a paper, someone already locked up. Had to believe in it.

People from houses poured onto the street. Interferers. Disruptors– blowing whistles and disrupting the mission. Vehicles soon appeared with them. The Communists! Yes. Not neighbors. Not residents of the city. Communists! Shipped somehow into this targeted city, as they, the uniformed government officers, had also been shipped in. Purveyors of chaos.

Stewart told himself this as he joined his colleagues, brothers in badges, vests and masks, heavily armed, guns at the ready, Stewart sweating from the excitement and his layers of gear. Stop the Communists!– he wanted to yell, many of his fellow agents already yelling, pulling disruptors from vehicles: women and children screaming: actors; undoubtedly they had to be bought-and-paid-for actors.

“Stop that one!” a colleague yelled, Stewart’s immediate team leader, pointing toward a red crossover driven by a white middle-aged middle class woman: key demographic of the most likely disruptor. Stewart had seen photos in classes of the criminal immigrants to be deported– brown-skinned or black– but he’d also been briefed on the profile of a classic disruptor. This woman fit the profile! An exact match!

Fragments of applicable law raced through Stewart’s head– 18 USC-something or other– as he leapt to the side of his team leader to show loyal support, despite his heavy boots and vest, and weapons: pepper spray and loaded pistol at ready. He noticed he panted, gulping large breaths of cold air, heart racing, red color from the car implanting itself in his brain. 

“Out of the fucking car!” his team leader yelled. “Get out of the fucking car!!”

“No, I’m not coming out,” the woman shouted back through a smashed side window. “I don’t have to come out.”

At the refusal to obey instructions Stewart had his pistol drawn and pointing at the loud red dangerous vehicle as if pointing at a target at the academy pistol range, his fellow agents also with weapons drawn, pointing, seven or eight of them, all of them knowing something might happen or was about to happen in this mad chaotic fragment of a second of time. Stewart tightened his grip on his weapon; wanted instant release from the indecision and tension.

The law breaking Communist woman ten feet away in the red vehicle looked angry yet simultaneously, to Stewart’s surprise and confusion, terrified. In an obscure almost forgotten corner of Stewart’s brain a stray thought appeared: “Why am I doing this?”

Karl Wenclas is the Editor at New POP Lit. His latest book is The Loud Boys.