Free Blood Soaked and Contagious by James Crawford

at?”
    “How detailed do you want?”
    I didn’t like the derision that crept into his voice. Occasionally, when you interrogate people, they get little sparks of feeling ballsy. This usually happens if you don’t follow through on a specific threat you’ve used to loosen their lips. Unfortunately for the interrogator, this means you’ve fucked up and let the drama lapse.
    This situation can be corrected once, and only once, in a single-session, linear interview. Unfortunately for the subject being interrogated, the interrogator must now follow through on the aforementioned threat. Any threats after this correction must be executed without fail, unless the subject breaks entirely.
    I stabbed downward with the skewer, lodging it about two inches into the rubble of his shattered knee.
    He screamed and it was a good one. Long and high-pitched, and you might even say that it was “cleansing.” I felt as though he had missed a possible career in professional yodeling.
    I tapped the skewer with my finger and the entire beach chair danced on the concrete with the convulsion that ripped through his body. He stopped moving after a moment but was breathing like a bellows as he tried to keep the pain under control. If he had been a normal human being, I would have been worried about shock setting in, but I didn’t see anything that looked like typical symptoms. I put that worry aside and kept right on going.
    I looked down at him and called him a dickhead. His face turned beet red and he clenched his jaw so tightly I expected teeth fragments to explode upward.
    “I didn’t like doing that. I won’t like anything else you make me do. Your pain is your fault. All you have to do is answer honestly, and you won’t feel anything worse than me pulling that skewer out before I splint your leg.”
    He started chanting “Fucker” at me in a very low voice. I could tolerate that, because it meant he was capable of being vocal and the skewer had done what I wanted: re-established the order of business.
    “Vehicles?”
    “Cars, one armored Bradley, a couple of SUVs, and seven Humvees. Three school buses.”
    “A Bradley? Nice. How about the plan to come and wipe us off the face of Arlington?”
    He rolled his eyes, and I reached for the skewer. He stopped rolling his eyes.
    I took a deep breath.
    “There isn’t a plan to wipe you all out. There’s just a plan for a surgical strike to snatch and grab your friend and his wife. The rest of you aren’t on our radar, unless you become food.”
    I nodded. It did sound reasonable from a tactical standpoint. A bunch of suburban sharecroppers is not much of a worry for even a semi-trained military; at least, that is what you would think if the world were remotely normal. All I could think about was Bugs Bunny saying, “Eh, he don’t know us very well. Do he?”
    Their poor intelligence about our little community was a possible saving grace in the midst of a steaming pile of gopher intestines. We had some interesting aces up our collective sleeves, in the form of our population and our products. For example, Gina Halperin, five houses over, makes nitroglycerin. On top of her skills, a few of our group have done extensive study of improvised explosive devices in the Middle East.
    Don’t ask what is in the bottom of the trash bin you pass on your way into the neighborhood from the Route 29 side. There are about 50 similar surprises around the major entry points into the community. I like it here.
    “Do you think you could tell me where the strike will penetrate?”
    “Before you grab that skewer or anything else, I can’t. I just go where I’m told. The black ops guys have that job, not us.”
    Again, I nodded. Black ops personnel were trained to go into unknown situations and do nutty things, like extract people while keeping them alive in the process. I wasn’t entirely sure that my boy was being completely on the up-and-up, but I also had to consider the possibility he didn’t