Muster

by Christoff Orr

Captain Hunley looked down at the picture which laid on the table in front of him. He too wondered about his loved ones, where they were, if they were okay and if they still believed that he was coming for them. They had spent such a long time underwater, not knowing, and only hoping that they would be able to someday raise up from these depths, be born again and find some sort of familiarity when they returned home. Now, however, it would appear that the worst case scenario that they all feared was a mild concept compared to the horrors of reality. “Where are Lt. Preen and the rest of the men now?”

  XO looked down at some papers he had brought in with him, read the notes then looked back up, “They were last at the northern portion of Utah, or at least what was Utah. They are heading to what is referred to now as Free Montana, where they will join up with other like-minded souls and put together a plan of attack. At that point, we are hoping that will be able to coordinate with them and figure out how we can blow those invading SOB out of our homes, and get our country back.”

  “I can’t help but think what it would be like for us if another boat was sent on that mission. Where would be right now?” Captain Hunely said as he sat there. He reached down and picked up his coffee mug, blue with yellow lettering emblazoned across it spelling out, NAVY. He let out a slight chuckle as a thought entered his mind. This caused the XO to look up at him with a confused look on his face. He raised his his mug as he spoke up, “I just realized, that if things were still normal, that the Army/Navy game would be coming up soon.”

  The two laughed for a moment as they thought about those days, back at Annapolis. How their biggest worries seemed to focus on being on time and keeping everything immaculately clean. Now as the submarine silently sliced a hole through the belly of the Pacific Ocean, their depth teetering on critical, they sat and wondered what happened to their families, their homes, their nation. They had spent so much time, buried under the dark watery depths of the mighty ocean, that they had missed one of the most critical events in their lifetimes.

  “You know,” XO started to say as he paused for a second to finish his internal thought. “That game was everything to me my senior year.”

  “I thought you had missed that one,” Captain Hunley said as he tried to remember the conversation which they have had during their time together.

  “Yeah, the game before, against Notre Dame, one of the linemen came in low and took out my knee. Nothing career ending, but caused a pulled ligament in my knee and had to sit out for two weeks to ensure there wasn’t any real damage to it. I begged Coach to let me play. I even suited up, holding out a microscopic bit of hope I would be put in, even for just one play. As I sat there, snow coming down covering me, and watched that ball drift to the left. Well, when those cannons went off and I helplessly watched the ball harmlessly fall to the turf, I wanted to throw up. Not just because we lost, which I mind you all my uncles are Army, so trust me when I say I heard an earful at Christmas. No, it wasn’t just because we lost, it was the fact that I had to sit there, and watch, that I couldn’t do anything about it. All those years, I was the top running back on the team, I helped in every single game. But not that one, that one I was useless.”

  “I remember seeing that game on TV. I was aboard the Reagan, parked just outside of North Korea, as a matter of fact.” Captain Hunely said as he thought about that tidbit of irony.

  “You know, like I said, it's not the fact that we lost, it was the fact that I was a nonreactor in it all. That all those early mornings I spent as a kid waking up to run, or head to practice or late nights spent working out. All through high school and my first few years at the academy. I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the NFL, even when I was in High School. I knew I didn’t have IT, to make it there. But I knew that I was good enough to go somewhere good. It got me into the academy and got me where I am now, I will forever be great full for that. But that game, the game against Army, my senior year. That was my Super Bowl, that was MY game. I was going to tell my kids and grandkids about. How I came off the field of play, covered in mud, and most likely blood. How I would tell that, how I gave it my all, how I left everything on the field. Instead, I will only be able to tell them how cold I was sitting there, watching.” XO paused as he relived the disappointment he felt on that cold day.

  XO took in a deep breath and looked back up towards the Captain, then continued, “That’s how I feel now. That all this time spent in the Navy, all the training, and the studying and so forth. I fill that once again I’m sitting on the bench. I’m all suited up, but still, I have to watch. This time I do care if we win or lose.” He shook his head as he slammed his fist onto the formica, fold out table. “I have to get in this one. Not just for me this time, for my kids and my future grandkids. It’s not just about talking to them and telling them what I did, but more importantly, I want them to have a life where this war is a memory, not a living terror.”

  “We will,” Captain Hunley said as he calmly sipped more of his coffee. “I promise you, we will get into the game. We just have to wait a bit longer, we need to know how to get into it. Like it or not, we have been sitting on the sidelines, it’s nearing the fourth quarter and we haven’t even so much as stepped onto the field of play. We have a lot of catching up to do first. At this point, I feel like we haven’t even read the playbook. Hell, we barely know who’s on our side and who’s not. Even now, I’m not 100% sure that these Zion people are truly our friends or if they are just a bunch of power hungry wack jobs who want our weapons.” He placed his coffee mug back down on the small table between him and XO. “When the time is right, I will make sure you are the one sending the first savoy. I promise, I want these bastards hung by their necks till they are dead, till their ideas are dead. But, we can’t make any mistakes.”

  “Yes sir,” XO quickly answered back, with a slight nod of his head.

  Captain Hunley let out a long sigh, “You know, in all of my years in the Navy, all that I have been through never once did it cross my mind that I would have to fire missiles at American targets. What is this world coming to?" He stood up, as he picked up the picture of his family from off the table. He turned and tapped the picture back up to the cabinet above is a workstation. He paused a moment longer as the looked at the faces of his wife and daughter. He turned back around towards XO, still standing he continued, “I fear for my family, I fear for my nation, but I also fear that we will rush into action, knowing so little.”

  “When will we know enough to go in?” XO asked, not so much accusingly, but honestly wanted to know, when will the time come.

  “That will be my decision, and mine alone. If we do rush in and destroy friendlies, I want that to be upon me alone. If there is still any resemblance to the America we knew and loved, and this goes down bad, I will stand upon that stage alone and suffer the consciousness of my actions. However, what I need you to do, is make sure the men are ready. For too long we’ve just sat around, allowing our fears crush our minds. Filling them with horrors and doubt. I want you to start-up drills, I want everyone sharp and ready to go at a moments notice. Remind them, that despite our prolonged plunge, we are at war. If Lt. Preen calls in an air strike, I want to be able to respond within seconds. All of our loved ones might very well be relying on our ability to respond quickly. Understood?”

  “Aye Captain,” XO said eagerly.

  “Very well, get it done, and let me know if you receive any more word from Lt. Preen or anyone else on the team.” Captain Hunnley said as he stood there, arms crossed behind his back in a parade rest position.

  “Yes sir,” XO said as he quickly raised out of the seat and found his way out of the Captain's quarters and back into the cramped hallways of the Michigan.

  XO Jacks bobbed and weaved his way back towards the Box. Each time he stepped over a knee-knocker, he instinctively pulled his right hand inward, as if he was still carrying a football in his right arm. He couldn’t help be think back to all those practices on the field, as the coach would remind him, to keep h
is knees high. How he missed those days, the smell of the field on game day, the feel of the ball in his hands. It’s funny, he thought, how life moves on thousand of pivot points. Just one moment, he saw the lane open and for the briefest of seconds, he knew he was going to score, then out of nowhere, pain shot up from his right knee and instantly he was down. Everything changed after that.

  XO Jacks was born and raised in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, the disputed birthplace of famed Jazz musician Muddy Waters. Prior to going to Annapolis to attend the Naval Academy, the only body of water XO had ever seen was the dark rolling waters of the Mississippi River. The chocolate churning current of the grand river often called to him in his youth. He would sit along the river banks as large ships, mostly riverboat casinos, rolled on by. Despite his love for his mother, his three brothers, and two sisters, he knew he had to get out of Mississippi. He always had the unexplainable pull to leave. As a kid, he would run the full twelve miles to the Mississippi at almost a dead sprint. By the time he was in ninth grade, he would do it with his baby sister on his back. His friends nicknamed him Thunder, because of the grunting sounds he would make when he ran. A name that stuck with him all the way through his cadet years and into his Navy life.

  When he was in tenth grade, a few of his friends were down at the Mississippi when one of them was dared to swim across the river to the Louisiana side. His friend got half way before the strong current started to pull him further down the river. The friend quickly panicked and tried to turn back around and get back to the shore, but he was already worn out from fighting the current. XO was a unyielding young man, and even at the age of sixteen he was plowing through opposing defensive lines during High School football games. As he watched his friend being pulled and yanked further down the river, he jumped strait way into the Mississippi. He never once questioned his own physical ability to save his friend in trouble. It would be an early lesson in the danger of listening to a hubris mind, for it was already too late. The current was to strong and the dark churning waters grasp was to tight, he, himself was nearly pulled down river before the XO was able to turn around and make it back to shore.

  Once he was finally back on solid ground, he realized that he had been hauled over a mile down river by the deadly waters of the famed river. It was a week later before they found the body of his friend near a small town in Louisiana. That moment forever changed him and instilled a desire to fight for those who can’t protect themselves. It is a drive that had pushed him every single day, and helped him graduate the Naval Academy in the top two percent of his class. Now, there he walked along the narrow passages of a US nuclear submarine, ready to rain terror down upon those who threaten his family. He had come a long way from a poor child, number five of six kids. Growing up as a black child in the South, he knew if he truly wanted to make his mark, he would have to push himself harder than anyone else ever could.

  By time the XO reached the control room, his mind was off of the memories of the past and refocused on his duties at hand. Like the Captain said, it is better to know all of the facts, before they went charging in, guns blazing.

  19 Big Sky

  Free Montana border

  “There has to be at least a hundred of them if not more. They had wagons, and horses, plus, they had a lot of women!” Mason said with a grizzly smile. Neither he nor his clothing had received a proper washing in the past two weeks. The smell of his aura could be detected a good fifty yards away, and that was before he opened his mouth to talk. The few teeth he had were well into the process of decay, and have either already fallen out, or were somewhere in the procession of doing so. It would be one thing if he could blame his disheveled appearance on the loss of power and the accompanying collapse of society, but truth be told he was like this long before that. The only difference now is that he had something to blame it on. If it wasn’t for his unnatural ability to track any living thing, two legs or four, he most likely would have been killed or at lest kicked out of this group some time ago.

  “Don’t worry Mason, you raggedy, snaggle tooth freak, I won't let any of those big scary women hurt you,” Tucker said as he dropped an armful of firewood on the ground.

  The band of two dozen Highwaymen had watched the wagons leave Free Montana, and have since been waiting for their return. They had picked an area that put their numbers to the maximum effectiveness. Now finally, after waiting for what seemed a substantial amount of time their composure had seemed to have paid off. Highwaymen, by nature, did not sustain prolonged habitats, instead lived a vagabond lifestyle. Thus as their moniker implied, they lived their lives in perpetual motion, though always within striking distance of any heavily traveled highway. They prayed upon those who for some reason or another, traveled with less than adequate protection.

  The actual term Highwaymen wasn’t coined until the FOX Wars when members of both sides of the conflict started to suffer losses due to their hit and run tactics. They were referred to as jackals and eventually Highwaymen, in regard to those who use to hit stagecoaches during the Wild West days. Their activity and strength peaked during the final days of the FOX Wars when those on the losing side tried to eventuate towards some form of safety. Since then though, they have continually seen a decline in their profits and membership. Due to the decline in ownership and use of personally owned vehicle, the concept of the American road trip faded along with the loss of the FOX Wars. They now survived off of scraps of those who foolishly attempted a run for the boarder, and occasionally a lightly guarded Regional transport.

  The whole concept of Highwaymen was nearly on life support. This type of parasite needed a living host to sustain its life, and with America dying, it began to see its own survival fade away. They were never a collaborated organization, majority of them were groups of families or friends who bonded over the concept of taking rather than earning. However when the glory days of the Highwaymen started to fade, some organization banded together to ensure their own survivability. The uncomfortable unity helped keep their threat moderately recognized, but even those who still wore the red armband of a Highwayman, admit their days were numbered.

  This particular band of Highwaymen was one such organization that had joined out of necessity. Theirs was an uneasy pact, that while ensured sustainable life, for a bit more, also proved unnerving at times.

  Tucker stood up, after getting a gentle fire to emerge from the wood he recently deposited. He dusted his hands off as he looked around, “Where’s Sneaky Peet?” He asked in his typical gruff voice.

  “Here,” Peet said as he continued to zip up his pants, “had to take a piss, my back teeth were floating.”

  Tucker just shook his head before continuing, “I want you and your people to be ready to move by sundown.” He paused as he looked up towards the sky. There were only a few shadows of clouds still hanging in the blue canopy, which stretched out seemingly from one end of the earth to the other. He thought back to when he was a teenager, to when his dad took the new job and they left their urban home in New York City and moved to Montana. He had never seen so much grass in one place. The air was so clean and the sky was a peaceful color of cerulean blue.

  Growing up in Queens, it amazed Tucker that he could stand upon the ground and see more than a hundred yards without seeing another building. It both astonished him and frightened him at the same time. Now, as he looked back up towards that same sky, he no longer felt that same tug of nostalgia, now he only felt sick. This is not how he wanted his life to be, this is not the legacy that he wanted to leave for his kids, but life has a funny way of mucking everything up. “All right, there is a new moon tonight, I want everyone in position as soon as the sun goes down.” He paused as he turned to find Mason, “Especially you.”

  Mason smiled an unbalanced smile and gave a weak salute, “Yes sir. I’ll be where I need to be. Just promise me, that I get mine when this is all done.”

  “If you do our job,” Tucker started as he turned slowly in a circle as to be able to look at
everyone, “If you each do your job, everyone will get exactly what they deserve. As toothless said earlier,” He hitched a thumb towards Mason, “They have plenty of women in their group, they will make top quality prizes to the local Farm House’s.”

  “What about me?” Shelly said a bit disgruntled, as she stood with her arms folded.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you liked woman,” Tucker said with a smile.

  Shelly spit a bit of her chew down towards the boots of Tucker before she made a very un-lady like gustier to him with a single finger on her right hand.

  Tucker just smiled and blew her a kiss. “Listen up. Like I said I want everyone in position soon after sundown. We will wait for the new moon to reach its peak. By then they will have gotten comfortable and ready for bed. They have the numbers, but we have the angles and the element of surprise. Plus we know this terrain. We hit them with surprise and an overwhelming support of firepower, and it won't take long till we have control of the whole group. I’m guessing that once we take out a few of their shooters, the rest will surrender, hoping for some form of the quarter.” He paused as everyone laughed at the notion The one thing that made Highwaymen so fearful, back at their apex of success, was the fact that they implemented Tarlton Quarter. Even if their opponent buried their swords, and pledged fortitude, they would still be struck down. Save it be the rarest of occasions.