Ashley Fox - Ninja Orphan
Chapter 24 – No Retreat, No Surrender
Thursday, September 22, 2310
Dawn came and the sun rose on the fourth day of the student's strike from school. The guards and children steered clear of each other. Their interactions dwindled to hard stares across yards of open ground.
The chow halls remained mostly closed. The few broken into by the residents remained open and crowded.
Apollo continued his journey to the center of the sky without a single violent interaction between orphan and guard, a first in the memory of anyone living on the district. There were kids in the terminal buildings, and even kids in class, but the guard presence was minimal and teachers had been asked to stay home for a variety of false and deceptive reasons. The truth that their safety would be in danger remained a confidential secret, but of course, they all knew the situation for exactly what it was.
A lot of the kids hadn't yet heard about the administration's amnesty and looming deadline. None of them knew the security forces were gearing up far a major assault, but by eleven o'clock the word had spread.
The pigs were going to release Ashley Fox if everyone turned in their weapons. Many versions of the message stated only that Ash would be released at noon. Soon the twisted message was that the administration had completely folded.
Over the next hour, thousands of kids flooded into the mall. They waited, chattering in a dull roar, anticipation charging the crowd. At the center of the mall was a raised platform housing the elevator bank, where the long garden crossed the short one. It was there that the orphans expected the release of their underdog hero.
In the center, stood four platoons of shock troops at parade rest. Perfectly still, their armor made them appear like shiny black statues. They were arranged in four separate blocks, each of them facing a different direction, down one of the long four lanes of the garden. Their assault rifles stood on the deck, aligned along legs, perfectly still.
Everyone was there.
Even Dante and the devils had come down.
The children wore all kinds of protective sports equipment, in addition to the stolen police gear. They carried makeshift shields and spears hacked from tree limbs. Many held stolen batons, kitchen knives or broken table legs. Almost everyone had something.
Yet despite all their looted and pilfered equipment, it was obvious that the kids did not present any real challenge. The one thing that everyone had noticed was that the shock troops do not have Ashley.
From inside her cell, Ash heard an alarm blare, followed by the sound of a heavy gate being opened. That was her signal that they were coming for her. She heard the predictable sound of heavy boots running over cement and metal floors, coming closer and closer. Then they reached her door and stopped.
She wished that just once they would keep going, down to some other cell, but they never did. Ash suspected she was the only prisoner in this section of the district.
Outside, on the mall, Jones stood atop one of the planters and rallied the kids. He began to chant. "Free Ashley Fox!”
The kids picked it up in seconds.
"Free Ashley Fox”
"What?" He yelled.
"FREE Ashley Fox”
"Who?”
"FREE ASHLEY Fox”
"Amen!”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"Hallelujah!”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"Merry Christmas”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"I said!”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"Yes, Brother!”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"One more.”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"My Sisters!”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
It was noon.
The battalion commanders shouted orders to their subordinates, who repeated them. The companies of shock troops snapped to attention.
All over the district, the vid screens lit up, displaying the district seal, an amalgamation of the national eagle, the California state bear and Angel City coyote.
"Residents of district zero one three," a female voice announced over the loudspeakers. "This is your governor speaking. It is after twelve and you haven't turned over any of those weapons you took from the legal guardians of the state.”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX" the kids shouted.
"This is your final warning.”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"Put all your weapons down immediately.”
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"You really want me to Free Ashley Fox?" the Governor asked.
"FREE ASHLEY FOX”
"Very well then," the Governor replied.
The kids heard the microphone thump as it was set down. They heard muffled voices, instructions given to someone on another line.
Far down the mall, several levels above the chanting kids, a sniper centered his crosshairs on Kaz's forehead.
On the screen, the district seal was replaced with a live vid stream. A squad of riot-suited guards was dragging a hooded and straight-jacketed female down a hallway.
The kids lost steam and the chant disintegrated.
On the screen, the guards reached the lethal injection chamber and the hood was pulled from a gagged and enraged Ashley.
Colonel Keller stood before her and read from a clipboard. "Orphan Twenty-three ten, zero nine one five, zero three, Ashley Erin Fox, you have been found guilty of murder in the first degree. You have been sentenced to death by lethal injection.”
Ash went berserk.
She thrashed herself loose.
She kicked one guard unconscious and head-butted another, shattering several teeth.
With electrically charged batons they subdued her.
The kids watched as Ashley was beaten to the ground, shocked, and struck over and over again.
The heard the meaty strikes.
Her broken and unconscious body was then lifted onto the table and strapped down.
The guards left the room and two male nurses entered. One of then opened her shirt and affixed heart rate monitors. The other attached blood pressure sensors and brain frequency scanners.
They swabbed the girl's exposed elbow with an iodine and alcohol solution on a cotton pad. The nurses stepped out of frame.
The kids were silent, horrified, but glued to the screens.
The shock troops remained at attention, their gazed firmly fixed on the great beyond.
On the monitors, two more doctors in surgical scrubs entered, Dr. Mallus and the brute Morgenstern. The surgical scrubs concealed their identities, but it was easy to tell who was who. Morgenstern was six and a half feet tall. While anyone who’d ever met Dr. Mallus would have found it difficult to mistake his cruel and violent eyes for anyone else.
Dr. Mallus took another alcohol-doused cloth and again swiped at Ashley elbow, regardless of the fact the nurse had just done it.
Hambone asked, “Why do that if they’re just going to poison her?”
No one answered him.
On the video screens, Morgenstern handed Dr. Mallus a syringe.
He held it up.
Morgenstern handed him the vial of poison.
In the background, Ash woke up. She was panicked, terrified.
The Doctor pierced the vial with the needle and pulled the syringe's handle out, filling it with the oily liquid.
Strapped to the table, Ash whimpered and struggled, but to no avail.
Mallus approached her with the syringe.
In the open-air mall, the kids all watched, stunned into silence as the screen displayed Ashley's futile last moments.
Several looked away.
Earlier, Sky hadn't let Geoff go with Kaz and the others. She'd been forced to slap him across the face to stop him, but he stayed with her, in the recreation room.
Now he hugged her, and screamed through gritted teeth, but couldn't turn away, as they publicly killed his sister on live stream.
The guards were called to port arms, their rifles coming up
across their chests. Behind them, the stairwell doors popped open. Several guards rushed out, unrolling empty fire hoses.
On screen, Ashley wasn't making it easy for them. She struggled and lunged at Mallus and Morgenstern.
Several guards came to assist them and helped fight to hold Ashley down.
She screamed into her gag and fought against the restraints.
She fought with everything she had, she was fighting for her life.
Dr. Mallus abandoned all formalities and jabbed the needle directly into Ashley’s neck, hurriedly injecting the foul poison.
Ashley's fury became wild panic, followed by uncontrollable seizures. Her body snapped into vicious convulsions, her mouth frothed and her head snapped black and forth.
Then she lost the fight.
Overcome with toxins, her organs gave out, her muscles seized up, her heart stopped. The medical machines behind her screamed in protest as their patient ceased life functions; blasting out their mournful minor-chord death-note.
The piercing sound, designed to bring able-bodied nurses, doctors and staff, all running at a dead sprint, now screamed at a room full of people who did nothing.
Outside in the mall, the video screen switched back over to the District Seal but the audible death tone lingered under the still-frame broadcast.
Then the tone cut out and the voice of Colonel Keller boomed over the mall. "The convicted murderer is hereby declared dead at twelve hundred hours and four minutes, September, twenty second, year twenty three-ten.”
The vid screens then powered down.
The kids were stunned.
They continued to stare at the screens.
A single shot rang out. Kaz was taken from his feet as if hit by a truck.
That was the signal for the shock troops to move in. They attacked the front ranks of confused children, blasting the kids with wooden slugs the size of a fist, plastic pellets and beanbags filled with pepper balls. For almost three minutes, the soldiers reigned rubber-projectile-hell down upon the orphans.
Soon the kids were driven behind waist-high planters, benches and fountains, umbrellas of cover in the otherwise open space.
The troops, having taken a heavy bite out of their enemies' ranks, donned gas masks and fired tear gas grenades at the knots of holdouts. This was quickly followed by a torrent of horizontal water from the assembled fire hoses.
Without any central command, their hero martyred, the formerly unstoppable children were reduced to a panicked rabble, picked off and humiliated in their futile retreat.
The soldiers chased them down and beat them into fetal positions, only to move on, chasing after kids who dared to hurl rocks in an effort to distract the guards from their brutality.
The tear gas canisters sputtered out and the fire hoses were turned off.
Then the stairwell doors were held open for dozens of waiting troops.
Fresh from a few days of rest, dozens of lightly armored guards poured out, flooding the mall. At a full sprint, they pursued the fleeing orphans all across the district.
The heavily armored troops and the guards spent the early afternoon hours beating the orphans and stripping them of their state-looted gear.
Throughout the rest of the day, the guard presence remained oppressive. They were everywhere, joking with each other, and pounding any kids who stumbled into arms reach.
Detective Cole, First Sergeant King, and Lieutenant Grey sat around a hacked terminal in the sergeant's basement. Using Grey's pass-codes they had piped the district security feeds into the civilian residence. They watched everything leading up to Ashley's execution and now witnessed the aftermath. They watched as the orphans were decimated, ruthlessly gunned down and beaten.
They watched the chamber feed where Ashley's body was disconnected from the monitors and wheeled away, under a sheet.
"I have to go meet two of these assholes in a couple hours," Cole complained.
"You're undercover?" King asked.
"Yeah, I'm tight with a couple fuck-ups who ran off a farm.”
"Shit, you can walk off the farms," Grey said.
"You want any help?" King offered.
"I'm cool, but I really gotta go," he said, scooping up his jacket.
Grey thought about what he'd just seen. He stared hard at the ground.
"There was nothing you could have done," King said.
Cole looked over from his place halfway up the stairs, "Some things I don't know, some things I can't tell you, but I'll bet you everything I own, she's not dead. Don't believe everything you see. This ain't over yet.” The detective left King and Grey with a nod and headed up the stairwell.