Building the Fire.

“The main trouble started when some representative from one of the rural districts proposed legislation that would either force SCABS to move out of the state, or strip them or all their property, and declare them dead. Right away, most of the usual groups protested, but somehow it managed to get scheduled for a vote instead of being dismissed straight way. SCABS were, until that point, mostly tolerated, much like the blacks were tolerated in the 1800s, and the gays in the 90's. But after it was made public knowledge that the bill had been put on the schedule for a vote, things started to happen...”

It had been a pretty good day so far. It was not only my 'freedom' day (marking the day that I left the ISP in a cloud of smoked rubber), but it was also my 12 month anniversary with the recording studio. In the 12 months that I had been there, our business had gone up quite a bit. And apparently, I was partly responsible for this. I still do not claim to have any real mixing talent, but between Kerry, myself, and the other new guy, José, we really did well. José is a bear in all senses of the word. Although his family was ok with him being a 40% bear morph, they pretty much kicked him out after he came out of the closet. The boss saw him working in a music/electronics store playing with the mixing gear that they sold and doing some pretty wicked stuff. He hired him on the spot.

Grumpy was actually in a good mood at the party. I was still trying to figure out just how they found a form of chocolate that I would eat, when a car pulled up to the front window, and the front glass exploded inward. A group had flung a large cinder block through the windows with a message tied to it before shouting “FUCKING SCABS!” and peeling out. That pretty much killed the party mood, and Grumpy ordered us all barefoot folks to stay back while he and the other shoe wearing people got the glass cleaned up. José and I went to the back, and found a chunk of board that fit the window, and hauled it up front. By the time that we got it up there, the glass had been cleared away, and someone had produced a drill of some sort. We got the board in place, and Grumpy sent us all home at that point. After Karry and I got home, we turned on the news, and saw that several other places had the same treatment: they had large concrete block tossed through windows with the same note tied to them: THE SCABS WILL DIE. “

Mr Ecker looked curious at this point. I stopped my narration, and let his ask his question.

“Who is Grumpy?”

I laughed at the memories that I had. “Grumpy was an inamorph. The Flu turned him into a walking, talking beer keg. God help you if you managed to get him mad, because no one else would. If you got on his good side, though, or caught him on a good day, he was a kitten. He hid that behind this seemingly 'forever pissed off' attitude, though. He did the books and ran the office. Helluva guy. I'll explain what happened to him later, as it had quite a bit of merit on the riots. José is another one. Out of the dozens of openly gay people that I know, I liked him the best. He was this quiet, friendly, furry bear morph. He was also the resident sparky, or electrician. What they did to him was also horrible, but that comes in a bit, if I may continue.”

Mr Ecker sipped his drink, wrote a few notes down on the pad of paper that he had on the table, and nodded for me to continue.

“As we did not have any clients the next day, Grumpy, myself, and José came down to meet with the owner and also the glass company. They were putting in bulletproof glass at the owner's request. As we were the 'senior' staff (aka the ones who made most of the money for the studio) it was up to us to decide what we wanted to do in light of the attack. We decided to keep going as usual. The chief of police had announced yesterday that we was stepping up patrols around the city, and was cracking down on anything perceived to be Anti-SCABS violence. The people that did the cinder block vandalism, for example, had been caught already. We all agreed that this was not too difficult, as they had been driving a stolen convertible Mustang in hot pink. Those folks were not too bright. We also finalized the plans for the move that we had been planning to announce in several months, but now agreed to accelerate those plans, in case something happened. We also made a shopping list for emergency supplies and other things that we should keep just in case we got trapped in the building and surrounded by a mob. A bunch of it sounded silly, and we all agreed as such, but José spoke up in his quiet voice, and said that we ought to do it anyway. Grumpy and the Boss went out to do the shopping, José went in the back to finish the panic room that he had started, and Kerry and myself supervised the glass installers and ran the office.

Grumpy and the boss came back about three hours later, with the back of Grumpy's truck filled with various and sundry supplies. All this went into the panic room, and in various parts of the studio. We also made arrangements for everyone to be there the next morning, as we were going to announce the move to the staff. We felt that we probably should privately let our clients know, as we might make things worse if we publicly announced the move. As it was set, we were to move in three months, but the process would be moved up by two months if we had to. We also made arrangements with a hotel about two blocks away if we could not go home for whatever reason. The hotel had a lot to lose as well: most of their clients were SCABS. Bands that were using our studios also tended to stay there as well, so we had a good working arrangement, and it was no trouble to have a standing reservation. All that having been done, we all went home.

Life got back to something approaching normal for the rest of the week, but there was a slowly rising trend: at night, the number of SCABS being victims of some form of violence, or other crimes had started to crawl upwards. People started getting restless. We kept on as usual, but we noticed that the bands that flew in tended to do their thing as quickly as feasible, and then left. Usually, they took their time to “get it right”, but we certainly noticed when a band that was notorious for taking vast amounts of studio time to get it right instead got it in two days. We even had a betting pool set up as to how long it would take, but they beat us all by doing it and leaving. Rather un-nerving, if you can imagine. All the staff, however, were happy about the move along with most of the bands that we told privately.

Things got increasingly worse over the 7 days leading up to the vote. Kerry and I packed up the car and the bike with “bug out” bags – These are packs filled with stuff that you would want to have with you if you had, oh, ten minutes to leave the house for 3-7 days. We also packed some of the more important stuff that we felt we had to have in the vehicles. We also freaked out the bank by pulling most of our cash out. (We explained it away as we were moving, which was true.) We took the boss up on his offer, and stayed at the hotel for the three days prior to the legislature voting on the bill. The studio had its last band play through two days beforehand. We decided to close the studio, and prepare to move the day after the vote if things went bad. Otherwise, we would take life as it came to us.

The day that the legislature voted was interesting. We already had the truck rented, we figured that we would return it if the vote went our way. Surprisingly, we had heard little from the governor in this, as his son has a mild case of SCABS. One would think that he would have come out on the issue, but he was keeping quiet on it. The vote came out with a very narrow margin, but it passed. We started packing that night. We had just gotten the truck packed and the boss had gotten on the highway when things went to hell in a hand basket. Grumpy stayed behind to finish closing out the last computer. I would take that with Kerry and myself. Kerry had taken our rented truck back to the apartment to clean it out. She took José and one of the burly norms with her. We had rented a bike trailer, and had left that at the studio, so that I could load the bike up. I had all the equipment backed up, powered down and packed, and was waiting for the truck to show up. It did, with a bunch of rather angry people about five minutes behind them! Fortunately, the studio had a rather sizable warehouse style door that the truck actually fit into, so I motioned for José to drive it right in. The hard part now was going to be getting the trailer from out front which was now surrounded by quite a few very angry people. Kerry told me that the police were already enroute to the studio to try and break up the crowd, and after locking things up as best as we could, we all retreated to the safety of the panic room.

From the panic room we watched with apprehension as the CCTV showed the crowds trying to break the glass in, or try to force the door. Fat change. That was the first thing that we had re-enforced. My bike was safely inside, and the back door was quite hard to get open, as we had moved the truck so that it was holding the doors shut. That was when we heard the scraping on the roof. My blood ran cold, and Kerry suddenly slapped my front paw. My claws had unsheathed apparently by themselves, and I had nearly punctured her. “I’ve got the built in weapons, I’ll go and deal with it. You three wait here.” Kerry, José, and Grumpy looked at me oddly. “Be careful, tiger, ok?” Kerry said quietly. I nodded, and stepped into the ante room. Closing the inner door, I shifted into my Taur form. Opening the outer door, I quietly stepped into the darkness, breathing a silent thanks to whatever powers that be that equipped this form with a cat’s night vision. It was quite dark in the back corner. Our internal cameras were set to night vision, and I was using the slight infrared light they used to see by. The scraping on the roof turned into a pounding. Whoever was on the roof was trying to get in through the air ducts. Time for a little chemical warfare. I had spent enough time in this building to know where the main duct that went through the roof was, and where the access panel for it was inside. So, I grabbed a couple cans of neon green spray paint, some plaster of paris (which we keep around the set to build fake pillars and such), and a few spray bottles and made a lovely green colored concoction that I could spray onto someone. It looked pretty gross in any case, which was a sticking point. I heard the guy finally break through the metal (He took a long time!) and heard him fall down to the lower curve. He came across the filter and the access panel, and worked the emergency latch. He got it about half way open when he got a face full of this green, goopy slime. He screamed out like he had just started to mutate or something, which made me break out in laughter. Have you ever heard an evil laugh from a cat? Probably not, but it’s freaky when you are in a metal tube and all you can hear is this screeching laugh along with echos of your own screaming and flailing around. I opened the panel the rest of the way, and saw this teenager with a rope around his waist. His flailing cause the rope to go tight, and I heard several grunts from the people on the roof as they pulled him back up. My victory was short lived. I heard more shouts, a light thunk, and I saw a can of something hit the bottom of the shaft. Tear gas. Crap I ran back to the panic room when I heard a not-so muffled THUD of the can bursting open with the gas. Hopefully, the cops were outside, but this just got much more serious.

I managed to get back to the panic room, and we watched as the idiots tried to take out the armored camera on the roof. (We had a break-in from the same air duct a few months back, so we had added it to the CCTV system.) They failed miserably, of course ( I mean, the casing was certified as tank-proof!), but we still got a smile watching them try while dodging CS canisters. Then I asked if one had gone in the duct, and Kerry nodded. Nice.

Eventually, the thugs on the roof gave up and climbed down and givin a nice spot in the Drunk tank van by a few officers. We then checked the parking lot again, and noticed that the police had mostly cleared out the area by the back gate. So, we starting shuffinling the stored items in the panic room into the truck in the back of the building where the truck was. There we got another shock. The thugs had managed to damage the door enough that we could not get it open. José and I managed to force the doors open just enough to get the truck by, and, with the police providing cover, managed to get the trailer attached, my bike on it, and get us out of the area. Now all we needed was a place to crash overnight. Our apartment was out, as Kerry had already turned in the keys and gotten the refund from the rent and deposits back to us as checks. José’s place was also out, as it was the first place he and Kerry went to with the truck. This left Grumpy’s place. So we headed over there, and crashed there for the night.

We figured Grumpy's house would be reasonably safe, as he lived out in the desert, and owned a good chunk of the land surrounding his house. The house was this short, brick structure that looked quite sturdy ( it was, it had survived the panic in 2001 when just about everything else around it burned to the ground), so we had pretty good assurances that the truck and all our stuff would be safe. The back yard had a massive wall surrounding it. This wall was almost 7 foot tall and nearly three feet thick, and Grumpy had put spikes on the inner wall before he changed to discourage people from climbing it. The inside of the house was pretty spartan. Grumpy did not have much in the way of furniture, but he did have a computer, TV, and a weapons cache (which even included stuff that we furries could use.) We loaded everything except the TV and the computer into the truck, and Grumpy gave us a quick checkout on the firearms. He also had a smallish metal case labeled “personal effects” which he did not talk about initially. My cell phone rang, slightly startling us. It was the boss. He had managed to get out of the city. He also had reports that everyone else was OK, and in various stages of getting out. This sure went bad fast, he had dryly noted. The TV showed us that the rioters had started to overpower the various police departments, and that things were very bad pretty much all over the city. The fire department had been one of the targets, and there were several places that just burned, without any real control. We found out later that night that the studio was one of them. Apparently, The thugs had managed to get in after all. Fortuantely, The real valuable stuff was in one of the trucks, or in a storage facility on the east coast.

We spent a night on edge. We all got woken up around 2 in the morning with the sounds of shots and general commotion. The rioters were heading this way. With a press of a switch, rollers shut on all the outside windows, and a loud clang was heard as the gates locked themselves. A few seconds later we heard a generator kicking on. Grumpy made us all get into this room in the middle of the house, and we sat and waited. We started talking about ourselves. Grumpy knew everything about Kerry and myself, but José did not, so we each repeated a brief histories to him. José then related his background to us in greater detail while Grumpy ventured outside the room to check his cameras and get some drinks.”

Mr. Ecker Asked me to tell him about José, so I told him what I knew of him.

“José came from a moderately well off family of hispanics in the Tucson area. He showed an affinity for audio electronics fairly early, and by the time he was 12 he had built his own stereo system. His parents helped him out as best as they could, and he graduated Technical school shortly before the Flu outbreak. Tucson was one of the last cities in Arizona to get hit with the Flu, but it hit them very hard. José nearly died, but his family was still by his side after he got out of the hospital. At least, they were until He annouced to them that we was gay. They gave him some money, and pretty much kicked him out of the family. We wandered up to Phoenix, found a job selling audio equipment at a electronics store, which was were Grumpy found him playing around with some of the equipment one day. The rest was history, pretty much. But back to the story at hand. Grumpy came in about 15 minutes later with some drinks, and some news which amused us. Apparently, the gang of rioters had tried to penetrate the outer wall with a large 1980 Ford Brono 4x4. Said bronco was now disabled, having fallen into the Bengal tiger traps that he had put around the outside. The drivetrain on the truck was completely totaled. Plus, the wall was designed to survive someone trying to ram through it, he said. We were all pretty impressed, and asked grumpy to tell us his story, in order to pass the time before we bugged out for the coast.