Freedom TM

seen a hundred hours of footage showing violent conflicts in various parts of the world. What would the world think? Probably that America had finally lost its mind. But otherwise things would continue as they always had.
    In the brief lulls in the fighting, Ross had used his HUD display to follow the unfolding farce that was mainstream news coverage. They were apparently being “liberated” from an insurgent occupation. Someone had created a darknet feed of mainstream news beyond the blackout.
    Ross and a group of forty or fifty other men and women had spent much of the morning moving the ample numbers of abandoned cars from the fields in town to create blockades around the downtown perimeter, while the mercenaries busied themselves razing outlying areas. He also helped fill sandbags that were apparently intended for floods and packed them outside the walls of the middle school.
    One mercy was that the helicopters had gone away some hours ago and not returned. The Cessna with Hellfire missiles had also flown off. They’d either gone to re-arm or had finished their role.
    Luckily the mercenaries had not seemed to care about the unmanned surveillance drones Ross had brought with him. Neither had they been able to jam darknet radio communications.Ultrawideband was proving quite resilient. But then, the mercenaries appeared more interested in killing everyone than jamming their radios.
    The chattering of gunfire punctuated by the louder cracks of hunting rifles filled the air. Ross leaned out from behind a masonry support pillar, looking both ways down Greeley’s empty Main Street.
    It was littered with broken glass, debris. A burning car stood in the middle of the road at the end of the block. Bullet holes had chipped the concrete and bricks, and several of the buildings on Main Street were already burning from rocket and missile attacks. Beyond that was a wall of roiling black smoke and flames. Burning houses. Every few moments he heard another deafening
boom
, and debris would fly hundreds of feet into the air.
    They were destroying the town block by block.
    Ross looked to the center of the road where a fenced green with a World War II memorial and benches stood. The street ran around it to either side. The memorial was a tall granite obelisk with a thick square base about the width and height of a man and was flanked by defunct cannons plugged with concrete.
    Ross could see OohRah and Hank_19’s call-outs behind it. He clicked on their call-outs and spoke into the comm channel. “Hank! You guys need me?”
    OohRah’s call-out flashed as he replied.
    [OohRah]: “We could use another set of eyes behind us. Come on over. Move quick and stay low. We’ve been sniped.”
    Ross took another glance and ran to the center of the street at a crouch. He hopped the low iron fence at the edge of the green, and dove behind the monument, using the smaller Vietnam memorial nearby to provide cover from the opposite direction.
    Hank and the sheriff nodded to him.
    Ross brought his AK-47 to bear, watching their flank. “Where are they?”
    The sheriff was pushing rounds into a spare clip while Hank kept watch down Main Street. “Pick a direction and start walking. You’ll find ’em soon enough.”
    Fossen nodded. “Crazed gang members to the east, professional military to the west.”
    “Or so the costumes tell us.…”
    Ross examined the memorial stone. “This should be good cover.”
    The sheriff shook his head. “Not from a grenade it won’t be. We can’t let them get close in.”
    Another ear-stabbing
boom
sounded from the east end of town.
    “What the hell are they doing?” Ross brought up a D-Space video panel that showed an overhead view from a surveillance drone. He could clearly see the line of advance and the wasteland the private contractors were leaving behind them.
    The sheriff ground his teeth. “They’re tossing demo charges into houses. Shooting flamethrowers into cellar windows. Burning everything.”
    Ross could clearly see it when viewed from above. Then the drone flew into a cloud of smoke and the image was lost. He nodded behind him. “What happens when they reach the middle school? There must be six hundred people in there.”
    The sheriff peered through his M16 scope over the rim of the memorial. “We’ll either have to stop them from reaching it or die trying. Everyone else is digging in, too.”
    Hank_19 kneeled down and nodded grimly to Ross. “My wife and daughter are in there. I