SGT COLEMAN, Winter. D.O.B. 08/28/1988
October 2014.
Have you ever felt everything crumble and fall apart? I'm not just talking about masonry or vehicles, that's a regular occurrence taking fire from insurgents in the middle East. I'm talking about your whole f***ing world.
Until 2006 when I turned 18, my entire life revolved around making sure I was ready to be a soldier in the United States Army. It's what my Dad did so it was always what I was going to do, no ifs ands or buts. Failure wasn't an option. I wanted to be a Marine, but my Dad had some pretty strong views about that. Strong homophobic views.
I was proud that he saw me pass out as a soldier, Private Coleman, Winter. Proud to be deployed in service of my country, despite how ill-advised the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be. I served 96 months, eight years, the full minimum term. I made paygrade E2 in 7 months, Private 1st Class in 13. 21 months in they made me a Corporal and at 53 months I made Sergeant. I was hoping to make Sergeant First Class before I left, but it wasn't to be. No matter. Despite my gender I had matched my father.
I chose not to stay on further because I wasn't fighting for my country anymore. For the last 36 months, three whole years, my unit was on American soil on standby. Waiting. Wasting.
He made me promise on the day of my deployment that I would serve my term and not return home until that, at least, was completed. I knew I would miss him terribly. Worried how he would be without me, for we had no friends or neighbours or other companions. I wrote him every week, sometimes twice.
Now, as I return home to the off-grid ranch house at the foot of Mount Chiliad, I find all those letters piled up under the mailslot, barring the door so I have to force it open with my shoulder. That's when I see my Dad was inside, where he's been sat motionless since the day I'd left, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot with the .45 he'd carried all those years.
All those letters I'd written him and in return he'd left just the one for me.
He never let on that he'd have preferred a son, and he never gave any indication that he blamed me for my mother's death in childbirth. The knowledge of all he'd endured before he could let me go alone into my life so that he could finally end his hit me like a mortar shell and everything – everything – fell apart.
How long was I lost? I have no way of knowing. The whole time I'd served, I'd left my salary almost untouched, had only a hundred bucks in cash on me. I'd used a lot of it on the bus ride home, spent the rest of it on a crate of beer that I'd intended to share with my Dad. I downed two while filling the dry-stored Imponte under the tarp in the barn with coolant, oil, brake and steering fluid and gasoline and then I drank my way through the rest as I drove, fast and aimless, until everything faded to black.
I woke up needing to vomit, kicked the driver's door open to lean out and let go. Only then did I get to wondering where I was. , I found I'd crashed through a fence on a winding hill road into a field. My Dad had built the Imponte for survival in the harshest environments so its heavily armoured body and matt-black paint were barely scratched from the impact.
The last time I'd hurt like this it was shellshock from an IED but that had passed a lot more quickly once we came under fire and mobilised ourselves to fight back. The alcohol makes me sick and keeps me sick for a while, so it's some time before I got to wondering where I was. Looking up through the windshield, having to use an arm to protect my tender eyes from the burning sunlight, I found that I'd crashed though a fence on a winding hillside road and come to a stop in a field. Raising my gaze even further, I found myself staring down at the corrupted heart, the polluted homeland of unregulated capitalism; the city of Los Santos.
I didn't go to any liberal institutional school. My classroom was the wilds of Northern San Andreas, my lessons survival, homesteading, defence and endurance. My Dad taught me to hunt, camouflage, and to fight with bare hands as well as with bladed and projectile weapons. I was home-schooled math and the dangers of materialistic capitalism, trained to live on what I could gather and to be self-sufficient rather than relying on society to provide for me.
I've spent hours with only what I could fit in the pockets of my cargo pants and MOLLE vest in extreme heat, extreme cold, rain, wind, snow, lightning. I've hunted and been hunted, days spent covering my tracks and hiding my trail, drinking only what water I could filter or distil, eating only what I could forage or kill. My Dad had a clean, comfortable house on a ranch but as far back as I can remember, I spent barely a dozen nights in it.
Sometimes we'd drive in my Dad's Imponte down to Los Santos to watch America rotting from within, see the citizenship blinded and enslaved by unending consumerist excess. One time when I was fourteen I watched three men steal a woman's purse in a dark alley. They didn't know my Dad and I were there because we were camouflaged pretty good. My Dad sent me to retrieve it but I had to leave my gear. I wasn't in any real danger, he was watching with a silenced .45 and night-vision goggles, but it was a good test. I got to feel real pain from men that wouldn't hold back for the first time.
One of 'em caught me from the side while I was distracted and got my nose pretty good. I got chastised for losing track of him 'cos I was obsessing on the guy with the knife, who I identified as the primary threat, but my Dad went easy on me because I used that knife to cut the tattoo off the arm of its owner and then I used it to kill him and the one that had hit me. The third guy tried to run away and my Dad raised the .45, getting ready to end it himself but I hadn't gone that far to fail now – I pounced on his back and choked him out, holding on even though he tried to pound me into a wall until he collapsed on top of me. Then we returned the purse to the lady and my Dad told her how stupid she'd been, wasting her money on bags and high heeled shoes instead of buying a gun and learning to protect herself.
After that we went home and I got to cook a squirrel for supper. Not quite the chicken I'd been hoping for – getting my nose hit and my back bruised meant I'd fallen short of earning that – but it was better than rat. Better, my Dad had said, than being a rat in this unending, nightmare maze.
I'd been expecting to modestly enjoy some of my Military salary, waiting for me in an account I'd had to set up just so they could pay me, and to starting a job with the private military contractor Merryweather. Their US base of operations was down here somewhere in this traffic-choked melting pot. Before leaving the Army I'd bought a house, a modest little one bedroom on Sustancia Road in the Palomino Highlands. Its seller, a twitchy kind of a guy called Shaun Harvey, had wanted a hundred and sixty grand for it, but we'd settled on a hundred and forty three. When I felt strong enough, I got back in the car, carefully drove my way down to the city and found a gas station to refill the tank and get some directions.
The house had a battered old RV parked on the driveway with an equally battered Sanchez trail bike mounted on the back of it. When I rang the doorbell, Harvey answered the door, skinny in a white vest top and black pants, barefoot. Small arms but with some definition to his muscles. He greeted me with some surprise. "Sergeant Coleman!"
"Hi," I greeted him, a little bit sheepishly, before reminding myself who I was. "I need to move in sooner than I thought."
Harvey's mouth opened but it was a second before he found any words with it. "The money's still in escroe," he complained. "The place is still chaos, I wasn't expecting you for another couple of weeks."
I wondered how to play it but a quick read of him answered that question. "I have nowhere else to go," I said quietly, looked down, then away. That wasn't strictly true, of course, I could just as easily have pitched a tent and unrolled a sleeping bag on the lawn, but he didn't have to know that and anyway, I immediately got the desired effect as he started scratching the back of his shaved head.
"Sh*t… Alright, listen, come in," he said. "Excuse the mess. I'm still, er… I'm still finishing up."
I followed him over the threshold into the house. There was no furniture, save for a folding camping bed in the bedroom. A white sheet covered the floor in the living room and some cans of paint were stacked in the corner. He'd done a pretty nice job of making it invitingly blank to be honest, light neutral tones that were at once familiar and yet infinitely more homely than any barracks in the army, or my Dad's old house. He's starting to point out empty areas where he used to have his kitchen, dining room, sofa. Something he refers to as a TV. I've seen TV's at the barracks, small square screens with a large protruding rear end that scores of men and women sat around watching, mesmerised, yelling at some ball game or watching some Vinewood moving picture with a strange intensity. The thought that people would have them in their homes seems alien and unsettling.
"I was going to, um… say goodbye to the place," Harvey says. "You know?"
"Sure, I guess," I say, because I'm not really sure what kind of response he's looking for, nor really what the hell he means.
"Uh, have you got a bed or anything? I mean, I can sleep in the RV, but I'm gonna need my camping bed, and I'm still gonna need access to the house to finish up and use the bathroom…"
"That's fine," I say, eager to get him out of here. "I'll set up my sleeping bag in the bedroom. I warn you now though I'll be sleeping with my gear."
"No no, that's fine," he interrupts hurriedly. "Just, when you're awake, just knock twice on the door of the RV, so I know I'm clear."
"Alright. That'll work," I acknowledge, then remember to add "thanks."
We stand in an awkward silence for a few seconds. "So you're out now," he finally says.
"Yeah," I say, no less awkwardly.
"Not gonna change into civvies," he asks, meaning civilian clothes. I look down at myself, still wearing the woodland camouflaged pants, jacket and olive shirt I'd left the barracks in. "I, uh, don't have any yet."
"Oh," he replies. "Well, I, uh…"
He stands there for a couple more seconds trying to figure out how to end the sentence but then, finally, he shrugs and leaves so that I can go into the bedroom and set down my backpack to unpack.
Half an hour later I have to knock on the door of his RV because otherwise I'm just gonna sit in my room field-stripping and reassembling my pistol for a fourth time.
"Do you wanna coffee," I ask.
"Sure," he replies, and I lead him back into the house, fill my metal canteen with water from the bathroom sink and start unpacking my gas stove and cylinder. He takes them from me and sets them up, then puts the canteen over the flame to boil the water.
"Did you ever serve," I ask, noting his competency with the equipment.
"No," he replies. "I, er, spent a while living in the RV, so…"
"Okay," I reply as I tear open a couple of coffee sachets and add them to the hot water. We sit in silence while the coffee brews, then I serve him a portion into a filthy chipped mug he offers, pour myself the rest into the metal cup from my gear.
"So what are you going to do now you're a civilian," he asks me.
"An old contact of mine invited me to come see him at Merryweather if I ever got out," I say.
"Oh," he says and looks down into his coffee. "When was that?"
"A couple years back. Why," I demand, sensing bad news.
"They... kind of lost their domestic license last year."
Its ridiculously hot in the middle of the city even at this time of year, so I leave my jacket in the passenger seat of the Imponte and get out at the gates of where Harvey told me I'd find Merryweather's Los Santos base in an industrial rat warren of broken streets and warehouses. Theirs is a particularly big place and it's empty, save for some abandoned steel girders and a boat in an advanced state of neglect. I explore every inch of the place, front to back and upstairs, but there's not a soul about.
I feel again the unfamiliar constriction in my throat, a general sense of emptiness that I'd felt when I found my Dad's corpse and I sit down on the floor, overcome by crying. When have I ever cried before?
Not since I was very young, alone and failing to throw him off my trail in the desert. It had been four days. I was hungry, thirsty, exhausted. Strength was ebbing away, leaving my body. Failure would bring more discomfort, an inverted suspension from which I would have to escape in order to avoid further torment, just like if real hunters caught me to do the terrible things men do to young girls they catch in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I didn't know at that point that I'd already passed the test, I'd reached an area of civilisation. Of course, I'd ignored it, kept out of their sight like I naturally did, but when he finally found me, my father said that since I'd gotten there, I could have gotten help. That since that point he'd been trying to retrieve me to feed me and rehydrate me. When he carried me into my bedroom and tucked me into the bed that night, while I was too tired to do anything but cling to him, hanging from his arms like a rag doll, it had been too much and I'd cried all night until I blacked out.
The memory dissipates rapidly; something has caught my attention. I hold my breath and listen, but I can't really hear anything, nor can I see movement anywhere around me. I can't explain it, but I'm definitely on alert. I draw my service pistol and, keeping myself as covered as possible, slowly make my way back towards the Imponte.
There's an envelope tucked under one of the windshield wipers. It contains a cellphone that rings as soon as I unpack it and the voice of my contact says "welcome home Sergeant Coleman. You wanna go get a beer?"
I never knew his name. Most of us only ever knew him by his call-sign, Inquisitor, and by his Squadron number 253. The bar he's picked is an out of the way watering hole in the desert, just outside the trailer town of Sandy Shores. I've not seen him in three years, not corresponded with him for maybe two, when he emailed me Merryweather's info and told me if I get out of the Army I should seek him there. He still has the thick ginger hair he'd sported in spite of the Military, has since grown scruffy facial hair and he's wearing jeans, a black T-shirt that's seen better days and a battered black leather jacket wih a thick horizontal gray stripe and an off-red pinstripe above it, and he's sitting at the bar on a stool.
"Good afternoon Sergeant," he greets me before turning back to the woman behind the bar who I can only describe as rustic. "Get her a Logger. It's on my tab."
The woman busies herself with filling a glass from a draught beer pump while I settle onto a stool next to him. "It's just 'Winter' now," I tell him. "I'm a civilian."
He's got a half full beer glass himself, raises it halfway towards his mouth. "Well, we'll see about that," he says and then drinks a deep swallow before setting the glass back on the bar, only now a quarter full. The woman sets a full glass in front of me wordlessly and then takes a cloth from where it's draped over her shoulder and busies herself with 'cleaning' the bar.
"I'm sorry about your Dad," he says.
"You went in my house," I demand, slightly annoyed at the invasion of my privacy.
He picks up the glass again. "I only nudged the door open. It's not a big place. I could see without stepping in." He finishes the beer, holds it out in front of him slightly for the bartender to take and refill. "I went to try and find you before you went down to the Merryweather place. Tried to save you the trip."
I pick up my own glass now and drink the first quarter off the top. Set it back down. "Yeah. Too bad I'm left without a job."
He shrugs. "Rumor is Don Percival is still petitioning the government for new wars and a new domestic license. They'll be back. In the meantime," he says and fishes in his pockets, brings out his own cellphone. I watch him press something on the screen and then I hear the one I found on my car make a "ping" noise, feel it vibrate in my pocket. I bring it out and the screen comes on to tell me a new app has been installed on it. "You know, this was a nice touch," I say as I work the device.
"Ways and means, Sergeant," he starts.
"Winter," I correct, earning myself a scowl.
"You need to set up the biometric security on that thing," he continues. "Do that now. That way, if anybody gets the phone off you and tries to unlock it, the motherboard will cook itself."
I arch an eyebrow at him as I find the relevant menu settings on the thing. "What are you getting me into here," I ask.
He leans in and talks to me quietly now. "It's called SecuroServ. I don't know much about them, and I don't wanna know, but for certain... connected individuals it's a worldwide shadow logistics operation. One that can bring significant financial rewards for assisting with getting stuff where it's going. Those certain, connected individuals need muscle and that's where we come in."
I sigh, lean back, but I keep my voice low. "You mean it's a criminal network. That's contributing to the erosion of the country you and I fought for," I reply. "Probably directly funding the people we fought against? The very people that attacked us, on our own soil, on 9/11?"
"Don't be an idiot," he snaps quietly. "Do you think that attack went ahead without the government's precise sanction? America has been trying to create this political climate since Gorbachev neutralised the Cold War. An escalating threat level is the lifeblood of Uncle Sam Incorporated. Profits for the corporations that steer US policy go through the roof. We fund both sides to make serious returns on that investment. We always have. That's how America does it." He sits back and angrily gulps down half his fresh glass of beer.
"And what about the little people," I demand. "Increase the risk to them right on their own front doorstep? Not only do they have to worry about hostile countries, or the guy next door that might be planning to strap on a suicide vest and visit their kids' school. Now the criminal element is getting bigger financial incentives, getting better organised, getting better armed, getting more incentivised to plough over any poor a$$hole that stumbles into their way. The safety of the public is going to sh*t all because messing with Middle Eastern countries makes some rich white a$$holes more billions to go on top of the billions they've already got?"
"You want to see what the little people are doing," he snaps. "Come with me. I'll show you the little people."
We take my car. He gives me directions from the passenger seat while quietly admiring how well my Dad put the thing together. First he takes me to Mission Row where we see vagrants. So many vagrants. "Half of these guys have served their country. They get back, this is what happens to 'em," he says.
I stare, aghast. I don't have to worry too much about them noticing, the windows are protected by metal grids to protect the car's occupants from bullets. "How do they get this far, doesn't anybody help them?"
"Take a look at the folks walking by. They look like they're doing okay, don't they? You see any of them helping?"
I want to get out of the car and go do something physical, but he stops me. "Come on, let's keep going," he says and directs me to our next stop at Legion Square where half-dressed women stand trying to attract attention of passing cars in between shivering from the evening chill as the intense heat of the day seems to disappear completely as the Sun abandons us over the Pacific. All wear heavy make-up, most of it barely covering black eyes, swollen lips. "What are they doing," I ask.
"The oldest job in the world," he says. "Selling themselves."
"Slavery," I ask, feeling dumbfounded, sick.
"Not quite. Your old man never taught you about prostitution?" My blank stare answers his question and he laughs. "Okay, you know the girls that used to crowd around us when we were off-duty?"
"Oh, sh*t," I mumble as the penny drops. "Why?"
"Why? Cos they're too numbed by drugs to do anything else, or their no good boyfriends are too lazy to get proper jobs themselves so they beat their girlfriends into coming out here."
"Where are these 'boyfriends'," I demand.
"Oh we aren't done yet," he replies, and instructs me to set off again. The car's roar catches the attention of a malnourished brunette in a torn pink dress, one leg clad in a fishnet stocking, the other bare. For a second, my eyes meet hers through the slats, but there's nothing there. It's like she's just hollow.
He directs me to drive even further South, through a place called Strawberry down to Grove Street. It's getting late in the evening now, and dark. Young men, predominantly in cheap purple sportswear, line the street, hanging out in front yards. I recognise the stench of marijuana, see them openly drinking from beer bottles, hanging in groups of three to six, yelling things at neighbors that dare open their front doors or risk a peek through the closed curtains of their windows. All eyes are on the Imponte as we cruise through. At the end of the street is a semi-circular dead end, but before that there's a street heading out to the left. I take that and follow it up to a road split in half by the railroad and cruise back towards Mission Row past businesses that are dead or dying, the only lights coming from a pawnbrokers or a liquor store. There's no half-dressed women down here, but I see the same hollow stares in the faces of the people on the sidewalks. The fear of the gangs I've heard about.
"What do you think of America, Sergeant," he asks, as if reading my thoughts.
"How is this allowed to happen? Why don't the cops-"
"The cops'd be slaughtered down here, soon as they bought their squad cars. They don't have the numbers or the resource to police all this."
"Why," I ask. It seems inconceivable, given the obvious scale of the problem.
"Rich white dudes," he replies. "They don't make their money fixing these folks' problems. They make their money while all these folks can see is their problems."
"Somebody needs to put that right," I say.
"You haven't learned a damn thing tonight, have you," he replies, and directs me to one last stop.
In East Vinewood he has me park up outside a derelict motel. Across the street is what looks like some sort of auto-wreckage yard, except crowded on the sidewalk by it's walls, and beyond them in the yard are a lot of rough-looking guys. They're wearing an assortment of leather jackets, leather vests, T-shirts or Hoodies, but all have some variant of a similar design.
"Are you armed," he asks me. I draw my pistol. "Best leave that in the car," he says, and then gets out. I place the gun in the glovebox and get out, lock the car before following him across the road.
The two of us walk past the gathered guys, some of them turning to stare at us. One of them wolf-whistles and gives me a salacious grin when I turn to look at him, raises two fingers to his lips and sticks his tongue out at me between them, flicking it rapidly up and down. "You promise," I ask him and his buddies laugh.
Inquisitor leads me to a building at the back of the yard and heads inside. I follow him in, into a grimy bar. Now I can see the designs on the mens' clothes. The Lost MC. This is a biker clubhouse.
We have to barge our way through the assembled crowd to the bar, it's so tightly-packed. My clothes continue to draw attention. He has to yell at the young woman, barely out of her teens, standing behind the bar in an unbuttoned leather vest, lace panties and nothing else, but I still can't hear what he's ordered over the loud conversations and even louder hard rock music. A minute or so later a beer is slammed down in front of me which he pays for, expensive and heavily watered down.
It isn't long before I see what I'm supposed to. It's not the girl, naked except for tiny panties, "dancing" in the middle of the floor as everyone around her gets their hands on her flesh. It's the one being dragged by her arms, black mascara running down her face where an angry red welt splits her cheek, struggling against the men dragging her but unable to resist. She's bent over a pool table and her skirt is literally torn off of her while one of the guys picks up a pool cue.
He doesn't try to stop me as I barge my way through towards her. The biker holding her sees me coming and lashes out with a brutal jab that connects immediately with my forehead and I stagger backwards momentarily. But only momentarily. Then I hit back with a right jab of my own, this one directed at his throat, and that gets him off the girl. In front of me, the guy with the pool cue snaps it in half over his knee and comes towards me, swings first one at me, then the other. I get my elbows up to block both, remember my boxing training. He swings for me with the left a second time and I grab it, pull it from him and jab it back at his abdomen, making him double over and drop to the ground. Then a loud roar goes up and everybody in the place starts raining punches towards me. I look through the crowd towards Inquisitor for help. He's watching disapprovingly, sipping from his beer. Fine.
I try and protect myself with the cue as long as possible, but it's only a second or so before its pulled from my grasp and disappears. I take a punch to the nose and the pain makes my vision shrink to two small pinpricks, but they aren't done with me. Now they've got me, I'm lifted up and dumped onto the pooltable, the girl I'd tried to help shoved aside, out of the way. I lash out with boots and fists as much as I can, desperately fighting to get back up off my back, but I can't. They're forcing up my T-shirt, clawing at the fastening of my pants. I bite a hand that tries to clamp around my breast, headbutt another guy that's dumb enough to lean in, but there's too many of them. My wrists and ankles are pinned to the table. They've got me helpless.
The gunshot brings everything to a stop. Only then do I realise the music has stopped and a silence falls across the bar. Inquisitor is holding a pistol aloft and dust and bits of rubble rain from the bullethole in the ceiling. Pouring in through the door are four more men, but they're not bikers. They're all differently dressed, but each is carrying an automatic rifle with a laser sight, and wearing at least one item of clothing, be it a shirt or a hat, that's emblazoned with the same logo as the SecuroServ app Inquisitor put on my phone.
"There's a way of things, Sergeant," he growls at me, before producing a roll of cash, peeling off some bills and laying them on the bar. "A way of things, and a price. That's the lesson."
He takes the arm of the girl I'd tried to help and guides her gently to her feet, then leads her out of the bar. Gradually, the bikers release my limbs and I clamber to my feet and follow them out, but then the SecuroServ guys covering our rear open fire. I feel sick, but I know better than to turn back; the image of the massacre would haunt me like some of the things overseas. There's a heavy Insurgent parked in the yard, dead bikers on the ground. Inquisitor and the woman climb into the back, the other SecuroServ guys get in with them and it reverses back out, leaving me alone.
Quickly I run to the Imponte, frenziedly fumble with the key in the driver's door lock, then climb in, fire up the engine and floor it.