Take Back Denver Read online

  As McLean had learned the night before, the Correctionists didn’t actually hold direct control of much of Denver. They relied on periodic patrols and constant harassment to keep crowds under control. Now that everyone was banding together in the streets at once, it become obvious how outnumbered the soldiers were compared to the population they were oppressing.

  On Alameda Avenue a group of hundreds marched toward the Correctionist bastion where Maughan’s second-in-command had his offices. The soldiers opened fire to disperse the crowd, killing a few men and wounding several more. But once blood was in the water, the sharks frenzied. Men and women sprinted toward the bastion, a former police station, while others hurled stones and firebombs from cover. In spite of the advantage the Correctionists’ firepower had over the clubs and missiles of the people in the street, the place was quickly overrun and the commander called for a hasty retreat back to Maughan’s headquarters to regroup and rearm.

  All over the city the tide was turning against the soldiers. They were being shot at from the perimeter and being threatened by angry mobs in the center. Many Correctionist checkpoints and barracks were cut off from their fellow soldiers, and forced to surrender. Once their weapons got into the hands of the men and women of the city, they were immediately turned against the Correctionist positions that were still under Maughan’s control.

  McLean and Carrie were moving along Federal Boulevard behind a row of empty buildings when Maughan’s retaliation broke out and the citizens began to feel the brunt of his wrath. They were leading a small squad of citizens to surround a facility where they hoped the leadership of the Correctionists had assembled. At least, that was the aim of a fraudulent radio transmission they had sent out that morning with the help of a hacker and radio expert Calhoun had introduced them to. They already knew Maughan wasn’t there, and that his second in command was with him instead of at their target. But as they approached the facility, a former hotel, the number of troops outside the building showed that at least a few officers had responded to the ruse.

  They had contacted Carl to have his men attack the hotel from the other side. But before they could get in position to fire on the soldiers manning the fence, a convoy of military trucks came down the street.

  “Back up!” McLean yelled to the men and women with him. “Into deep cover!”

  The trucks were filled with Correctionist soldiers out for blood, and they were firing into buildings up and down the street, killing anyone they could see.

  “Hold your fire,” Carrie cautioned the others. There were only ten of them, but they all had guns and a little ammunition, except for one man that carried a compound bow and arrows. “Wait until they’re close before letting them know we have guns.”

  There were six trucks, and they were moving quickly. McLean had learned that Maughan seldom used his vehicles because of fuel limitations, instead saving them for long distance troop transfers or supply runs. But today he was pulling out all the stops. The trucks came to a stop outside the hotel, and several soldiers disembarked to speak with an officer that came out of the building.

  “Okay, pick your targets,” McLean told the riflemen with him. He and Carrie had their pistols out, but they were still too far from the hotel to use them. “We’ll let them have it all at once on my command. When we start shooting, they will scatter and get to cover, so you’ll only have a few good shots. Then we’ll need to move out so we can’t be flanked and boxed in by those trucks.”

  A moment later gunfire erupted from the other side of the hotel, and some of the soldiers left their positions at the fence.

  “NOW!” McLean yelled, realizing that Carl’s men must have gotten in position and found an opportune moment to begin the attack. “Fire, fire, fire!”

  The rifles blazed away around he and Carrie. Calhoun had hand-picked the shooters for this team, mainly former army and police along with some skilled hunters. One grim-faced old man coolly dropped three Correctionist soldiers in a row. Then the soldiers got to cover and scrambled back into their trucks, and McLean called it off.

  “Let’s circle around to our Position B, the gas station to the east. Regroup there for another strike, and then we’ll fall back farther to the east.”

  The squad split up, maneuvering quickly through the desolate city streets and ruined buildings of this part of Denver. By the time the trucks passed their firing position, it was empty.

  Another hour’s fighting convinced the ragged Correctionist remnants to leave the hotel and hitch a ride with the convoy back to ground they still held. McLean and Carrie met up with the guerrillas Carl had sent to the hotel fight. Among them were Ron and Brad.

  “You guys made it!” Brad yelled, clapping McLean and Carrie on the shoulders. He wore camo face paint and had a shotgun slung across his chest.

  “Yeah, any word on how things are going?” McLean asked. “We haven’t heard much since Carl called for radio silence to avoid giving ourselves away.”

  “Oh, it’s going,” Ron said. “Hard fighting to the northeast this morning. We lost a lot of guys. I think Gordo was up that way. Hope he’s all right and that Maria’s with him.”

  “We sent a scout up one of the old office towers,” Brad added. “He said it looked liked the whole Glendale area was clear. No Correctionist soldiers in sight, and everything quiet. In fact, I just remembered-- the scout said he knows you. Where’s he at?”

  A man with a camo bandana over his head and a rifle in his arms, came around the corner. Smoke was still swirling from the muzzle of his weapon.

  “Bosin!” McLean called, recognizing the scout. “Yeah, that’s Micah Bosin. We met up down south.” Bosin waved and then ran to join two other riflemen for some counter-sniper activity down the street.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Brad said. “He helped set up our attack, and it went off without a hitch.” A sudden, loud whump in the distance signaled the detonation of some kind of heavy ordnance. “Whoa. Hope that was ours and not theirs,” Brad said.

  Ron shook his head and grimaced. “None of our guys have anything that big. Sounds like Maughan is bringing his big guns to bear. Not good.”

  They moved north together until they came to another patch of heavy fighting and spent the rest of the morning battling some Correctionists that had entrenched themselves along a canal with a cinderblock wall behind it. Try as they might, the freedom fighters couldn’t dislodge the soldiers from their fortifications. If they had had more ammunition and manpower it would have been a quick battle, but using the hit-and-run tactics that had gotten them this far in the day’s fighting, they couldn’t pick off enough enemy troops to route them. The open canal ditch was a killing ground that no one wanted to enter, as the dead bodies in it attested. Carrie and McLean recognized many of them; they were the Tigers, the gang they had first contacted upon entering Denver. Now it seemed the Tigers were no more, having rushed headlong into battle without scouting ahead.

  McLean was consulting with Carl’s squad leader, a veteran named Erickson, about pulling back and seeking another fight, when the sound of a truck engine behind them got their attention.

  “Watch your six!” Ron yelled to the fighters scattered behind various pieces of cover. “Correctionist truck coming up the road behind us!”

  The two squads rapidly rearranged themselves so they wouldn’t be exposed when the truck arrived, some of them sprinting to get into safer positions.

  “Man, how did they get around behind us?” Brad asked. “I thought we cleared those streets!”

  The truck was slowly making its way around obstacles in the streets the fighters had crossed to get the canal area. It stopped at the intersection behind them, and they could see its driver hesitating and looking around as if trying to decide where to go from here.

  “Wait a minute,” Erickson told the others. “That looks like one of our guys. Isn’t it?”

  Carrie stared. “Oh my gosh, that’s JD! McLean, it’s JD!”

  She stood and waved at thei
r friend. McLean yanked her back down to safety, but JD had spotted her and waved back. Another of Carl’s men was in the cab next to him, with more in the back. He gunned the engine and pulled the truck up behind some trees near the guerrilla fighters’ positions.

  “Fancy meeting you here, friends,” he called out through the truck’s open window. “We managed to commandeer this bad boy several blocks west of here, and we’ve been having a blast driving it all over town. Rammed three Correctionist checkpoints so far and scattered a troop of them marching the road. Turns out it’s pretty well armored, and man alive it’s good to feel a steering wheel again after all these months.”

  “You’re lucky we didn’t shoot you,” Erickson scolded.

  “Oh, come on,” JD protested. “Didn’t you see the flag?” He pointed to a scarlet banner flying from the truck’s exhaust pipe, the remains of a colorful old sweater picked up off the street.

  “No, we didn’t,” McLean said with a grin. “But leave it up there, maybe it will bring you good luck or something.” Then a thought struck him. “No, wait. Take it down! Your truck is going to help us get past this canal!”

  Several minutes later, the truck roared across the canal where it ran under the street, and swerved behind a large building just beyond. Having past the enemy lines and using the cover of the building, several guerrillas leaped out of the back of the truck and took up positions around the building. Meanwhile, the rest of the fighters moved up and began firing at the Correctionists guarding the canal. Trapped between two forces and being shot up from their exposed rear, the soldiers gave up their positions and fled. While a more hardened military might have quickly surrounded and subdued the small team in the truck behind them, Maughan’s mercenary forces were beginning to show their weakness. They were effective bullies and petty tyrants when they controlled the streets, but in a pitched battle they lacked the nerve to stand and fight a determined foe.

  McLean and Carrie’s group fought on throughout the afternoon. Picking up weapons and ammunition left by fled or fallen Correctionists replenished their ability to cause havoc, and more civilian fighters and guerrilla liberators joined up with them as they progressed. Erickson made sure they stayed spread out and only bunched together where it would be advantageous to concentrate firepower. This tactic saved them several times from meeting Correctionist platoons head on and losing.

  After taking one office building by successfully cutting off reinforcements and avenues of retreat from behind, they found Denver’s former mayor cowering inside with a few of his loyal aides. The greasy politician was a changed man from when McLean had locked horns with him the previous year. His face was now sallow and baggy, and he had lost a lot of hair.

  “General Maughan will deal very harshly with anyone that threatens me!” he cried out. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later when this little uprising has ended!”

  McLean shook his head. “This little uprising is the end, for you,” he told the mayor. “But I’m not your executioner. You’ll be fairly dealt with.”

  The guerrillas took him away at gunpoint to a basement where they were collecting prisoners. Shortly after, despite McLean’s words, the man was found dead in a ditch, the victim of harsh street justice at the hands of the citizens he had betrayed.

  As the sun began to sink toward the horizon, the liberating forces converged on a final Correctionist stronghold, a row of buildings that lined the road leading out of town toward the airport. Maughan’s soldiers were holding this northeast corner of Denver as their rear guard moved vital equipment out to the airport.

  McLean, Erickson, Calhoun, and other de facto leaders in the day’s fighting gathered in the basement of a bakery to figure out how they were going to advance in the face of concentrated defensive firepower.

  “We’ve got to move out and around somehow,” Erickson argued. “We’ll never force our way through this gauntlet. It’s just what they want us to try, and they’ll cut us down no matter how many men we throw at it. There are two layers of barricaded fences across the road, the buildings on both sides are hardened, and the roads to either side of those are mined.”

  “We don’t have time to spread out and find our way around the mines,” Carl said with a shake of his head. A bloody bandage around his right arm showed that he’d been in the thick of the fighting despite being the top commander of the resistance. “We’d have to creep along for miles, and it’s open ground out there with no cover once you leave this section we’re in. They’ll just snipe at us, and by the time we get anywhere it will be dark. They’ll have finished moving all their men and gear to the airport, and we’ll face a long, hard siege with no way to get at them.”

  Calhoun agreed. “I’d say we have half an hour to break through and pin these guys down. After that they’ll have slipped through our fingers, like General Maughan already has. We’ll have taken back most of the city, but with the airport as his stronghold, Maughan can begin striking back at his leisure wherever we’re most vulnerable. It won’t take many men to defend that airport, and we can’t sit there watching him forever. The momentum we have today won’t last; people are going to get tired and begin looking for a sense of security again soon.”

  “We need a way to smash their roadblocks, get past all those gates and fences, and flood the buildings with close-quarters fighters,” Carl said. “The Correctionists aren’t good at fighting up close, we’ve learned today. They’d rather retreat and pick us off with sustained rifle fire. I don’t mean to give them any more chances for that. We’ve lost too many good men today as it is.”

  “Well, what are you going to break the fences with?” Erickson asked. “We have no explosives, no rocket launchers, just a few hand grenades and some homemade firebombs. A bulldozer could do it, but I haven’t seen a working piece of heavy machinery in over a year.”

  “We’ve got one truck,” McLean offered. “It doesn’t have much gas left, but it could make a run at the blockade.”

  “And whoever’s driving it could get a hundred rounds in his body by the time he was done.” Calhoun frowned. “We’ve seen a lot of bravery today, but I don’t think any of us are interested in suicide.”

  They finally settled on a plan to provide covering fire while a team moved forward behind the truck and attempted to dismantle the barricades and cut their way through the fences piece by piece. No one was optimistic about it and few volunteered to be on point. Ron and Brad were among those that did, and they gathered around the truck.

  Ron had his ever-present sunglasses on and accepted two Molotov cocktails from another fighter. “If I’m going to be within spitting distance of their front door, I might as well heave these puppies at ‘em and see if they’ll back off when a wall of flames is blocking their view.”

  Brad had a bandana on his head and his sleeves rolled up. With a huge pair of bolt cutters in one hand and an ax in the other, he looked like a human wrecking ball. His shotgun was slung across his back.

  They put the plan into action, but it was ill-fated from the start. Two of the men carried steel plates they had scavenged from a destroyed garbage dumpster with the idea of using them as shields for Brad to work behind. Once they got up to the first barricade, however, it became clear that neither the truck nor the plates were going to provide enough cover to get anything done. A hail of bullets poured out of the buildings, pelting the truck and hitting one man in the leg immediately. The freedom fighters poured back their own wall of lead, but the Correctionists were holed up indoors, shooting from windows and doorways.

  Against all odds, Brad managed to cut the chain closing the main part of the rolling fence gate, but then he was hit in the chest and went down with a moan and a gurgle of blood. Ron launched a lit firebomb, fired his M16 one-handed toward the buildings, and threw his other bottle after the first without bothering to light it. Then he bent to drag Brad back behind the truck. The man behind him was hit and killed instantly.

  “We have to get them out of ther
e,” Carrie screamed, unable to tear her eyes away from the scene. “Tell them to pull back, Carl! Please.”

  Carl watched the debacle, squinting in an expression of disappointment and regret. He nodded. “This isn’t going to work. Tell those boys to get back here if they can.”

  A team of gunmen rushed forward to help, blasting away at the shooters in the buildings. But they couldn’t approach the truck without exposing themselves even more than Ron’s team was. They ended up just shouting at the men to retreat.

  Everyone watched as Ron and another survivor pulled Brad and the man with the leg wound into the truck. They were forced to leave the dead fighter where he had fallen near the fence. Ron backed the truck up, but its front tires were shot out and it careened into a mailbox. With bullets still zinging into the cab and engine block, Ron and and the others slid out the doors, keeping their heads down. Brad wasn’t moving.

  McLean and Carrie watched, biting their lips, as Ron leaned back into the truck for a moment. Then he tumbled out and scrambled away to the safety of a stone wall.

  McLean and Carrie ran to him. “Are you okay?” Carrie asked. “Where’s Brad?”

  “Still in the truck,” Ron said, unable to hold back tears. “I was trying to put pressure on his chest wound and help him out, but he shoved me out with his boot and told me to leave him. He was pale and losing buckets of blood. I think he’s gone, Carrie.”

  Ron was bleeding from the shoulder and limping. Carrie began preparing an emergency field dressing for his wounds. McLean pounded his fist on the wall and turned to aim his rifle into the vicious gauntlet of Correctionist firepower.

  The truck’s engine had been idling, but suddenly it roared to life, came back down, and roared again, RPM’s screaming at the limit of its capacity. Everyone looked up and then heard the old military transmission drop into gear. The truck lurched forward and gained momentum as it hurtled back toward the barricade.