This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Carlos rubbed the starchy collar of his light blue Griffin Ventures work shirt, readjusted the reflective safety vest across his chest, and scratched his fake beard. It was midnight. He sat in the back of Monica’s van as they drove toward the Bulge. Cynthia, riding silently in the passenger seat, her eyes fixated on the empty highway leading them west, seemed just as anxious about their upcoming mission. Carlos’ mind reeled as it tried to absorb all the information Monica had dumped on them just a few hours earlier.
According to her, the Bulge formed an almost perfect circle with a diameter of about a mile. Its summit rose 150 feet at the center of that circle. It was bordered to the west by the Everglades’ submerged sawgrass expanse. To the north was an open lettuce field interspersed with a few tropical fruit orchards. The Poultry Point nuclear power plant sat to the south. Meanwhile, a still-intact suburban neighborhood abutted the Bulge’s eastern edge. This was where Monica would drop them off a few blocks from the main gate so as to not draw undue attention.
The Bulge’s circumference was ringed by a 30-foot-high electrified fence topped with razor-sharp rolls of concertina wire. Floodlights illuminated the entire perimeter up to 40 feet from the fence while cameras atop poles ensured there were no blind spots in security coverage.
Two different right-wing paramilitary militia patrolled outside the fence. The first was the Red Pillers. Its adherents had found each other in the darkest recesses of 4chan and 8kun, where they espoused violent bigotry against Jews, Black people, Latinos, undocumented immigrants, the queer community, Muslims, feminists, and anyone else deemed insufficiently white and/or patriotic via the then-edgiest edgelord memes and tongue-in-cheek prejudicial screeds. When that wasn’t enough for some of its members, they began doxxing, SWATing,[1] and flooding journalists’, civil rights activists’, and elected officials’ social media profiles with threats of sexual violence.
A hardcore, apocalyptic kernel decided online trolling didn’t sufficiently scratch their Rambo cosplaying itch or prepare them for the upcoming race war, and they began stockpiling and firing assault rifles at indoor shooting ranges on weekends. Some within the ranks wanted to style themselves the “Black Pillers” in a bid to brand themselves as dark and nihilistic, but that might conflate the organization with Black Lives Matters and other civil rights organizations, which was a categorical no-go. So, they instead adopted a term popularized by two trans women who directed The Matrix. Ipso facto: the Red Pillers. With an average BMI of 33, Santos derisively called them the Neckbeards but found them useful thugs to keep around political rallies to intimidate anyone she didn’t like.
The second group was known as Los Niños Orgullosos. They were South Florida’s Latino offshoot of the Proud Boys that still wanted to prove they were the “good ones” who supported their mother organization’s racial cleansing program while still hosting occasional domino nights and lechón roasts without taking flak from the Master Race for being too ethnic.
Both militias boasted arsenals of handguns, assault rifles, medium machine guns, grenades, and even more high-powered weaponry they acquired through semi-illicit backchannels. You see, following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had a righteous surplus of terrorist-whoopin’ armaments with a distressing lack of terrorists to aim them at. So, America’s elected leaders decided to aim them at the American people instead.
Much of it went to sheriffs and police departments across the country, which is how one-stoplight towns came to boast a fleet of up-armored Humvees or MRAPs designed to survive 500-pound improvised explosive devices. However, a decent amount of equipment fell off the backs of trucks, disappeared from warehouse ledgers, or was otherwise siphoned off by sympathetic supply officers and NCOs to arm domestic extremists.
Within the Bulge’s electrified fence patrolled the Sunshine Guard, Santos’ personal paramilitary force. Of the three groups, they were by far the best armed and equipped, from the tips of their combat boots to the tops of their Kevlar helmets. As the direct beneficiaries of the governor’s largesse, they received surplus National Guard kit, including digitized camouflage uniforms replete with bespoke unit shoulder badges. Despite their spiffy gear, Sunshine Guardsmen were barely better trained than their erstwhile colleagues in the militia, leading many actual military veterans to quit over the organization’s lack of professionalism, ambiguous mission, and dearth of democratic guardrails.
Given their vastly different outlooks and priorities, none of these groups liked each other very much, which is why the Red Pillers were assigned to patrol the Bulge’s northern sector, Los Niños Orgullosos monitored the east, and the Sunshine Guard was only deployed within the electrified fence. It was all a leaky powder keg in the middle of an industrial iron smelter, and Monica was currently barreling toward it 70 miles an hour.
The van came to a stop.
“Alright, kiddos, here we are!” said Monica in a chipper tone. “Have fun at school! Remember to put your earpieces in once you’re past the gate so we can communicate. And don’t worry, momma’s watching you.”
She pointed a finger at the roof as her drone took off.
Carlos placed a hardhat on his head, readjusted his glasses, grabbed a shoulder bag, and stepped into the balmy night air.
Carlos and Cynthia walked through a quiet neighborhood of one-story single-family houses surrounded by chain link fences, many of which leaned at exaggerated angles from lack of upkeep. Without a sidewalk, the two made their way down a dark, potholed street with only the occasional streetlamp providing intermittent illumination.
Carlos’ nerves—already frayed from Monica’s briefing—were at the point of splitting entirely when an unexpected sense of calm filled his body. He looked down to see he was holding Cynthia’s hand. He met her gaze. She seemed just as surprised as him but didn’t pull away. She gave him a tight smile. He returned it.
Though he was unsure who had made the initial move, he was glad someone had because only now did he have the presence of mind to focus on their plan rather than obsess over all the ways it could go wrong. Inside his shoulder bag were 18 vials. They would take eight air and soil samples apiece at the Bulge’s base’s cardinal directions. The next eight samples would be collected from halfway up the Bulge at the intercardinal directions. Finally, they’d collect the last two measurements at the Bulge’s summit. Should everything go according to plan, they’d be in and out in less than an hour.
“I like your glasses.”
This knocked Carlos out of his reverie.
“I’m sorry, what?” he asked, turning to Cynthia.
They were still holding hands.
“I said, I like your glasses,” she repeated with a smile.
Carlos blushed. He looked her up and down, desperately searching for something to complement but all he saw was a baggy work shirt, neon yellow vest, and oversized helmet.
“I um, I like your hat? I mean your mouth, I uh…”
“Oh, do go on,” she insisted, cocking her hardhat at a rakish angle. “You really know how to make a lady feel special.”
“You have beautiful eyes!” Carlos blurted out.
“That’s better, Adab,” she admitted with a grin. “You just have to work on your delivery.”
Two blocks from the gate, they could hear the high-pitched beeping of trucks in reverse mixed with the low rumble of heavy construction equipment on the move.
“We should probably…” she gestured at their hands.
“Oh, right,” agreed Carlos. His fingers brushed across Cynthia’s palm, lingered on her lifeline, and slid between her fingertips. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Cynthia shuddered.
“Oh…” she muttered. “That was nice.”
“Yeah, it was,” said Carlos after regaining his composure. “But we can’t exactly walk in there holding hands because then…”
“It’d be kind of weird, yeah,” finished Cynthia.
They rounded a corner, stepped out of the darkness, and into a blinding wall of white. His eyes watering, Carlos staggered back a step and blocked the floodlights with a hand.
As his eyes adjusted to the artificial sunrise, Carlos began to make out the gate complex. Two massive steel double doors, each wider than a city bus was long, stood ajar. A gatehouse between the doors controlled the Bulge’s traffic via two mechanical arms—one on its right that swung open to allow dump trucks, backhoes, and other massive machinery in and another on its left that allowed them out. 50 feet from the entrance was a smaller door where pedestrian workers swiped their cards at a fob reader before entering a guardhouse set in the fence.
They paused before the door.
“Gentlemen first.”
Cynthia smirked nervously and gestured at the door.
Carlos sighed, pulled out his counterfeit badge, and approached the fob reader. He waved it over the black plastic box, which blinked red and emitted the sound game show contestants hear when they give an incorrect answer. He pushed the door, which remained stubbornly locked.
Carlos spun around in a panic.
“Try it again!” mouthed Cynthia.
He swallowed.
Carlos scanned the badge again. This time, the box flashed a green light and Carlos heard the door unlock. His hands shook as he pushed it open.
Inside was a tired looking guard behind a counter.
“Badge, please,” she said without glancing up.
Carlos handed her the badge, which she inserted into a slot. She waited a few seconds. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at a computer monitor that blocked the lower half of her face.
“Richard Bottoms?” she asked, raising her eyes to his.
“Yep!” replied Carlos in the friendliest tone he could muster.
“Quality control?”
“That’s right!”
She glanced back at the monitor and frowned.
“You look familiar…” she started. “I don’t suppose you’ve been on TV, have you?”
“Nope!” Carlos was sure she could hear his heart as it tried to explode out of his chest. “Just quality control!”
The woman shrugged.
“OK, please take out your keys, wallet, and any other objects from your pockets and place them in the X-ray machine along with your bag.”
Carlos’s knees almost buckled but he did as he was told. His belongings traveled down the conveyer belt and into an aluminum box. Another guard operated the machine while a third stood on the far side of a metal detector with one hand raised, blocking Carlos’ way.
“Wait ‘til I give you the signal to pass through,” he said.
The man working the machine gave his colleague a nod, at which point the standing guard signaled Carlos to step forward. To his relief, the metal detector did not go off. Carlos fumbled with his effects as they emerged from the conveyer belt before stepping out a back door and onto the Bulge.
[1] Reporting a fake violent crime at a victim’s address so police raid the home in full SWAT gear. This occasionally leads to police accidentally injuring or killing victims.
