From the archives

The acrid sting of tear gas danced with pulverized concrete dust in the humid air as a Tactical Offensive Diversion Division (TODD) of the Orange Forest Law Enforcement Corps (OFLEC) assembled at checkpoint Alpha-Alpha just inside North Zembla’s (NoZa) breached Northgate. After overpowering the Keepers of the Gate, the black Kevlar silhouettes of TODD and OFLEC stood starkly against the grimy sundripped urban landscape. The radio chatter that had crackled through helmet speakers — coordinates, breach points, casualty reports —had faded out once they crossed through the Northgate. Beyond the razor wire perimeter that enforcers were erecting, NoZa had become a labyrinthine fortress that defied every manual on urban warfare known to OFLEC Chief Bumford “Bum” Loblolly.

Your ol’ pal Ambe here with some commentary: Keepers of the Gate? Wonder if they purposefully named that to be like cultural gatekeepers. Reminds me of the dumb debate about cancel culture. Such a redundant phrase — the generational force of “culture” already cancels what it doesn’t deem culturally important or necessary. By nature, culture is exclusionary, regularly rejecting ideas and practices as easily as a snake sheds its outgrown skin. History is littered with canceled attempts at cultural injections. The real way a culture cancels you is when they think you’re a threat to the culture, and they **wink-wink** cancel-cancel you.

Chief Bum didn’t sign up for this shit. And he certainly didn’t sign up for whatever the hell he was looking at that was decimating his corps. It was weird and alien and unsettling. He’d walked every block of NoZa hundreds of times on his beat during his rookie days, back when dirt and age was just starting to coat the buildings’ shine and luster. What used to be rows of familiar brownstones and bungalows and cafes and car dealerships now had an architecture of bewilderment.

The street grid was gone. Replaced with spiraling pathways that curved and climbed through structures that seemed to mock gravity itself. One building twisted skyward like a DNA helix frozen in concrete and steel. All the building facades were punctured with dozens of doorways that led nowhere and everywhere. Towering above it all was an upside-down ziggurat dominating the district’s heart, its narrow base supporting impossibly broad upper tiers that cantilevered over empty air.

The whole stinking sight gave Chief Bum a nauseating vertigo that made him want to toss his cookies. He was still trying to stomach the report from the sole survivor of the first TODD squad he’d sent ahead to scout. One out of fifty brave men and women. OFLEC Enforcer Bernie Cheggings. A good man. A three-year corps veteran who’d just been accepted to join TODD earlier this year.

Bum doesn’t think he’ll ever forget Bernie’s words: “My TODD squad never saw a single SMAW. But I know they saw every step we took. And those bastards were probably laughing their asses off at how many times we had to double-back down dead-end alleys that looked like they had exits, but then branched and curved and just stopped. Or at how many of those damn doors we tried to bust down. They rigged a lot of ‘em so they have a little pull and wiggle and feel like real doors, but it’s just a concrete wall behind them. Or they open to a hallway that twists and turns twenty times before dead-ending. And the whole time, we couldn’t even sniff a glimpse of those shifty bastards. No one in my TODD squad was saying it, but we all felt it. Felt that evil eye glaring down at us from every angle. Even though we were still moving around the neighborhood, we all knew we were already trapped like rats, and it was only a matter of time. And that matter of time announced itself like the fricking ball drop on New Year’s Eve, cuz one second it was just the sound of our boots marching, and the next second an upside-down dumpster fell from the sky. Like BOOM! It trapped about twenty of us inside it. Well, about twenty and a half. Bracken got herself chopped in half. Then, as the rest of us are trying to lift up that heavy-as-fuck motherfucking dumpster, those slimy rubblebunkers just unloaded on us. Emptied every fucking clip they had. Laguart and Misiko both got sniped standing right next to me. Thumping from inside the dumpster meant at least some of the TODD squad trapped inside were still alive, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help. You gotta understand, it was raining bullets, Chief! So I bolted. I ran and ran and ran, and I didn’t stop until I got back to Alpha Alpha. If you’ll excuse me, Chief, I need to puke my guts out.”

After taking it all in, Loblolly hesitated to advance another squad into the disoriented terrain. But orders were orders. At the in-person meeting, Mayor Maplemay had told Loblolly that he “need[ed] NoZa resolved yesterday.” The sole reason behind holding Bonus Day was to lure the families and children out of the neighborhood to make the NoZa Reconquista easier. And, hopefully, also lead to fewer civilian casualties and destroyed soft targets. The City’s much-vaunted CRYSTALBALL program failed to produce any results, let alone a solid reason to justify its bloated $1.5 billion price tag. OFLEC’s drone-a-copters failed to operate inside the neighborhood. Their comms failed inside the neighborhood. There was little to no planning involved in the operation. Maplemay might as well have sent the order in a text: Recapture NoZa at all costs on 9/1. But Chief Bum knew damn well why it wasn’t a text. Maplemay would never say, “If you don’t risk your neck in NoZa, you’re risking your neck with me,” in a text, unlike in person, when he said it to Loblolly very closely, very slowly, and very coldly. 

Inspecting the next TODD squad due to advance into the neighborhood, Chief Bum stopped in front of Lieutenant Colonel Zartinez, who was adjusting her rifle scope and scanning the city scene.

“How’s it looking, Zartinez? Get any of those bastards in your sights yet?”

“It’s… tricky, Chief,” she replied. “The team’s having difficulty maintaining target acquisition. Maybe it’s the humidity making the air kinda of squiggly, but we all keep seeing the skyline… shift in our sights. You track a line, hold it for a minute, and the next thing you know, you’re looking at a completely different spot. That’s even if we can sight a line.”

Chief Bum spat. “It’s like those fuckers deliberately avoided perpendicular intersections.

“Or predictable sight lines.”

Chief Bum nodded and moved along to continue his inspection. 

Ambe here: Since we’ve been talking about Funhouses, Dullhouses, and Superfun! Funhouses, why not check in on what Mr. Barth might have to say about this: “In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way. Even if you had a glass periscope, the image of your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see. The police will come; there’ll be a story in the papers.”

As Chief Bum watched his enforcers double-checking their gear and getting into formation, he had to fight from getting choked up. The City had just spent all that money on the CRYSTALLBALL surveillance system, and it was useless in NoZa. Meant it was total radio silence with the TODD squads he was sending into the neighborhood — sending to their most certain death. 

The second TODD squad had fared slightly better than the first. Four out of fifty had returned, one of them with a slug lodged in his shoulder. The hidden SMAW bastards ambushed the TODD squad as they marched in a column under a building’s arcade, gunning them down like wooden ducks on a conveyor belt in a carnival game, and forcing an immediate retreat. But as the TODD squad turned onto what was once just a solid street, the first couple of enforcers leading the retreat fell down a three-story drop to splatter into a courtyard. The rest of the squad all had to slam on the brakes to avoid the same fate. Only by hugging the side of a wall and relying on some learn-as-you-go rock climbing skills, a handful of the squad made it across the cavern littered with their dead and dying squad members. That treasonous workforce had somehow reconfigured the goddamn street while the tactical team advanced, sealing escape routes and opening new killing fields.

Afraid, a Frayed Bum Enters a Fray

Chief Bum remembered those first couple of years in the corps, back when his new line of work still frightened him. His beat here in NoZa. Patrolling Slagland in that V8 140-horsepower ‘82 Diplomat (A real beauty of a beast, he thought). It wasn’t until he got more experience under his belt and dirt under his nails, chokeholding enough vagabonds, high-speeding chasing enough gas station robbers, and shooting enough people, that Bum started considering himself a grizzled corps veteran.

But as he looked out at the heavy machinery appropriated during SMAW’s initial occupation that guarded strategic positions — articulated dump trucks converted into mobile barriers, crane arms modified into improvised artillery platforms, concrete crushers repurposed as defensive installations — Bum realized that he’d never been so afraid in his 46 years on the corps than he did at the moment.

Knowing full well it was death if he advanced and death if he retreated, the scared, yet duty-bound Orange Forest Law Enforcement Corps Chief, signaled for the TODD squad to follow his lead. And they advanced.

A few yards in, the terrain itself assaulted them when a building toppled over, dropping a pile of rubble on the TODD squad’s rear guard. The squad was shaken, but Chief Bum gathered the remaining forty squad members and directed them down a gangway. They hurried through the narrow corridor, heading toward the other end, which led to another street… only to realize upon reaching the end that a hyperrealistic wall mural had fooled the entire squad. 

On and on, the squad continued in a similar fashion as they tried in vain to find a weak point or an opening or a shadow or anything that could help them in this suicide mission.

As the squad explored an intersection of alleyways, an enforcer tossed a standard-issued flashbang grenade around a rounded corner. It detonated a few seconds later. The explosive sound echoed and ricocheted in every direction through the maze-like passageways, and then BLAM! the concussive blast swooped around and knocked the team on their asses.

SLKAT! SLKAT! SLKAT!

Three enforcers on the ground wiggled and flopped, and then went limp, blood puddling up next to each of their faces.

The squad scooted and crawled, trying to duck for cover, but there was none to be had.

Chief Bum cursed the SMAW and their shadowy, yellow-belly guerrilla attacks. “Sumabitches must’ve carved pathways through the walls or dug networks of underground tunnels. Only way they can keep popping out whenever and wherever they want. Burrowing around like the little burrowing rats that they are.”

An enforcer staggered and screamed and fired blindly at a building. The rifle bursts bounced between spiral walls and made muzzle flash locations impossible to triangulate.

Over an intercom speaker, a message began to play: “Why fall into trickster traps, right? This is the essence of life. We need to win. This is why we built it in a way to move through walls… Maybe, like you say, we are nothing more than rats, burrowing our way through the Earth, emerging at points and then disappearing. Zulkazan said to us, ‘SMAW! Forget moving along roads and sidewalks, forget them! From now on, we move through walls and under floors!’ So remember: You’ll never understand what leaves you and your comrades sitting ducks for Death’s scythe, you’ll never see what kills you, and your officers will never ever understand what killed you.”

The message was followed by a grinding hydraulic system of excavator arms, now modified as mechanical sentries, that roared an industrial symphony. The noise drowned out any tactical verbal communication amongst the TODD squad and forced them to rely on hand gestures.

Unabated, the squad continued navigating the urban maze until they approached the end of a road, where they had only one option: left. So, they carefully turned left and walked a bit, and the mechanical symphony stopped. Chief Bum realized he’d made a terminal mistake.

“Oh no.” Chief Bum thought back to what Cheggings had reported. Even though we were still moving around the neighborhood, we all knew we were already trapped like rats, and it was only a matter of time.

He signaled for the squad to reroute, and they spun around and retraced their footsteps. They carefully turned right, only for a wall to greet them that blocked the entire street from one side to the other. It looked like every other odd building wall in this neighborhood: a couple-two-three dozen doors and windows in slanting zig zags constructed out of repurposed building materials. Chief Bum directed some squad members to check the doors, and for a few others to carefully re-retrace their steps back the other way, even though he knew it wouldn’t matter, and only confirmed his worst fear.

“What the fuck?! Ay, Chief! Might wanna see this.”

Chief Bum went to investigate. The wall that had just appeared was moving forward. Then the squad members he’d sent to re-retrace the way they’d just come returned with news that a wall had appeared on the other side, too, and it was also moving forward. Loblolly had never been good at math, but he knew damn well what one moving wall plus one moving wall with no sign of an exit equaled. It equaled a pressed-person panini.

The wall from the other side suddenly swung through the intersection, around the corner, and was now oriented perpendicular to its previous position as it approached the squad.

Loblolly spat. “Did they really put a whole fucking building wall on hinges?”

As the concrete walls ground against the concrete ground and the TODD squad’s options closed in on them with unrelenting progress, they tried scaling unscalable walls, pleaded for help on dead radios, and frantically checked the dozens of fake doors (with one enforcer breaking a leg in a failed attempt to kick in a door). Room was running out for the squad. They huddled closer as the walls strangled the sunlight and left them in shadow. Once the walls got close enough, the squad members all spread their arms and, in a collective effort, tried holding off the walls’ ever-tightening vice. All to no avail.

The wall behind Chief Bum hit his back first and pushed his belly up against the wall in front of him as he thought, I wish I’d loved more.