by Jeff Kirkham
“Now sit your asses down.” The guy who’d been shot squealed as he flopped into the chair.
“Where are the other guards?” Chad yelled at them.
“There ain’t no one but us.”
“Well, if anyone else shows up, I’ll be ventilating your fool heads. So speak up now or you’ll get some brain juice in your lap.”
“Honest. It’s just us.”
Chad slipped off his go-bag and pulled out a roll of duct tape, still soggy. He stepped to the side of the biggest cowboy, a sloppy-gutted giant of a boy, and dropped the duct tape into his lap.
“Okay, Lennie Small, you’re going to tape these two other shitkickers real tight to their chairs and you’re going to do it without looking at me. I’ll save you the trouble. I’m a Special Forces operator and I have a huge hand cannon and night vision goggles. You’re about as fucked as it gets, so your best play here is to go with my program. If you don’t believe me, it’s all good. I’ve got plenty of night-night pills in this hand cannon.”
Even though Chad was positive the hicks wouldn’t catch his Steinbeck reference to Lennie Small, it amused him and he had to take his pleasure where he could get it.
As soon as the big cowboy finished, Chad ordered him back to his chair and taped him up, too.
Chad refocused his NVGs and walked around to the guns the boys had left on the ground.
“Hot damn,” he said and whistled. Two AR-15s and another long rifle with a scope. “Now that wouldn’t happen to be a 30-06, would it?” Chad looked at his prisoners and one of them nodded.
“Sweet.” Chad scooped the guns up and ran them over to the Blazer, popping the back door and awkwardly tossing them inside. Next, he ran back and grabbed the handguns and knives, dumping them in the Blazer, too.
Chad whistled and Pacheco came running.
“I’d love to stay and drink with you, boys, but we gotta git. At some point, I imagine your mamas will come looking for you for breakfast, and I wouldn’t want any of them to be tempted by my sweet loving and maybe bail on your papas.”
Pacheco jumped in the Blazer, moving to the “getaway” phase of the plan. He fired up the SUV and flashed the headlights four times, Audrey’s signal to drive the Jeep forward.
Chad hopped in one of the beater trucks and backed it out of blocking position. Audrey rolled though the gap and Chad climbed out. Before he shut off the ignition, he paused.
It was a stupid idea, but he couldn’t help himself. He ran over to the big cowboy and pulled off one of his boots. Chad ran back to the old pickup, still idling.
He jammed the boot on top of the gas pedal, making the engine scream like a chimp on fire. Chad shut the door, reached in the window and threw the gear selector in reverse.
The truck launched into gear and just about ripped Chad’s arm off. It caromed into the other truck, crossed the lanes and punched through the guardrail, falling eighty feet into the Medicine Bow River.
Chad couldn’t hold back his shit-eating grin, even though his arm hurt like hell.
Audrey gave him the look of death. “Asshole,” she said.
He ran around to the driver’s side of the Jeep, switching places with his ex, and sped off into the night, westbound, with Pacheco following behind him in the Blazer.
• • •
Ten miles down the road, Chad turned onto a dirt road, and Pacheco followed him. They pulled over and Chad came round to the passenger side of the Blazer. He yanked the door open and the dome light came on.
“Lookey here.” Chad could see that the backseat and the rear cargo compartment were full of supplies. Ammo, food, booze, and the guns Chad had taken from the men. Apparently, the Blazer was where the cowboys stored the “road tolls” for the day.
Pacheco hopped out and opened the tailgate. Chad joined him.
“We’re in business. High five, amigo.” Chad held up his hand. Pacheco smiled big, looking like he was twelve years old. He gave Chad a big high five.
“Good swim?” Chad joked. “Was it like when you swam into los Estados Unidos?”
Pacheco had no problem understanding the insinuation and he glared at Chad.
“I crossed the border in a minivan.”
9
[Collapse Plus Eight - Wednesday, Sept. 27th]
Shortwave Radio 7150kHz 12:00 am
“THIS IS YOUR HOST AND humble servant, JT Taylor, getting the evening started with a brown bottle and a bunch of news―none of it good.
“Two days ago, Turkey decided to roll into Iraq with their main fighting force, blowing past the Kurds and working their way toward the oil fields. Not sure there’s much of a market for oil right now, boys, but old dreams die hard, I suppose.
“Here’s where I read the list of cities that’re now burning: San Fran, Sacramento, San Diego, San Antonio―shitty night for ‘S’ cities, apparently. Phoenix is burning. There’s a ‘P’ city for you. So, that’s pretty much all of them. All of the cities are burning, so please stop calling me and asking which cities are burning. You’re harshing my mellow.
“Oh, and Europe. I got a questionable call from one of our Army bases in Germany saying that ISIS is taking down civilian targets. How the hell did ISIS get to Germany? Weren’t they in Syria?...”
Peña Residence
Rose Park, Salt Lake City, Utah
Life was serving Francisco a fleeting opportunity, like a beautiful woman across a room—once she walked away, the threads of fate would whither to dust and there would be nothing but regret. He needed to act now and act with boldness.
The American ways were quickly dying. The blood of white Americans had grown thinner each decade with greed, wealth and too much power. They turned their backs on their poor. They cast their elderly aside. They slaved away in corporations to buy one week per year on a beach in Mexico, sipping drinks and tanning their lily-white skin in the sunshine.
His people, los Mexicanos, always had sunshine. They always had one another. They honored their elders. They never turned their backs on family. Their food remained wholesome and fresh. Their claims on the land stayed pure.
The white Americans didn’t know who they were. They only knew selfishness. The gringos had no compass, no culture of their own. They straddled the lands of others and fed themselves on dreams of money.
Like Pancho Villa, Francisco would begin his attack with the haciendas. Poor people usually destroyed their own neighborhoods when they rioted, but Francisco would riot with intelligence. His violence would have meaning. His violence would carry the seeds of revolution.
Francisco and his men would sweep the haciendas clean, and then turn the palaces of white greed over to his soldiers and their mothers. And the white people would die with their diseased culture on their breath.
On the ten-mile walk from prison to his home in Rose Park, Francisco’s gang had moved through the white people like a snake through water. The gringos couldn’t function outside their controlled civilization; they thought rules still applied and that the police would come. They were not prepared for the violent decisiveness of Francisco and his men. They were unprepared for men who didn’t hesitate.
Soon the white people would understand the true way of the world, but for now they were like children, wandering and unsure. Francisco and his people would take back as much as possible, as quickly as possible. It would be easy at first, but it would grow more difficult as time passed.
He knew he must attack today, even though he lacked information. His instincts told him that he and his men could take the entire wealthy area above the capital—the Avenues—within a day or two. Hundreds of homes and many tons of supplies would be theirs. And he had always dreamed of moving his mama into a big home in the Avenues.
With a great victory on the winds, he could expand his numbers with the tens of thousands of Latinos in the Salt Lake Valley, giving him a true army. This morning, Francisco would spread the word among all Latinos: gather in Rose Park for food and shelter.
He awoke early. Prison hours force
d early sleep and early rising. It had actually become his preference and, as a side benefit, he had gotten to watch his first sunrise in three years. The men who had been with him in prison were waking up, too, walking out into the yards of their host homes.
“Crudo, come here,” Francisco ordered the first man he saw.
The man jogged across the street. “Buenos dias, Jefe. Tell me.”
“Get all the lieutenants here in fifteen minutes.”
Crudo’s eyes widened. “Okay, Jefe, I’ll wake them.” He took off at a run.
• • •
It had all the makings of a historic morning. The lieutenants were in fine spirits, many of them warming their hands with hot coffee or maisena, compliments of their host families. The early morning air had just begun to chill enough to see their breath, and a thick head of steam came off the hot drinks. Just as they began their meeting, the sun peeked over Mount Olympus on the Wasatch Front.
“Hermanos, today we take back this land.” Francisco looked at each of them. They smiled like kids on Christmas morning.
“The gringos’ world is broken and they’re like puppies without their mothers. Now is our time to take it from them. All of it. And we will give it to our mamas and our sisters. All their wealth and their homes will soon will be ours.”
The men all nodded. In truth, most of them preferred money and drugs to visions of social justice, but it sounded like they were going to get both.
“First,” Francisco said, “we need to call the Latinos in this valley to join us. Any man who wants food, water and a chance to better his family should go to the county fairgrounds on North Temple Street. Bring guns, ammunition and all the food they can carry. That will be our base of operations. It has plenty of room and the river is close for water and washing.”
“Bastardo,” Francisco turned to one of his older lieutenants, “you’re in charge of the fairgrounds. We need to turn the river water into drinking water, and we need to settle all the families that come. Send me fighting men. We’re hitting the Avenues today or tomorrow.”
“Si, Jefe.” Bastardo nodded. The men shifted back and forth, their eagerness rising with the mention of raiding.
“Kermit, I want you to gather all the teenagers, and send them out as messengers to the Latino neighborhoods. Let them know we have food, water, and that Latinos are gathering at the fairgrounds. Don’t mention fighting to the people. Most of them will need time to get used to the idea.”
Kermit nodded.
“Digger, you’ll be in charge of sending men to help us in the Avenues.” Francisco pulled a map out of his back pocket and stepped over to a picnic bench. He opened the map and rotated it. The men gathered around, curious and excited.
“The fairgrounds are here.” Francisco poked the map. “We’ll be moving up Fourth Street, then turning north onto Seventh East.” He drew a line on the map. “From there, we’ll head up I Street and start jacking the Avenues, one block at a time. We’ll run the gringos off and take everything we want. For now, leave the electronics. No TVs or stereos. We want food, booze, guns, ammunition, money, cigarettes… anything we can eat, drink or trade.
“Digger, you need to keep some men along this route to make sure we don’t lose our road back to the fairgrounds. We need to be able to move men and supplies back and forth. It’s only about two miles. Grab anyone you need from the reinforcements to keep these streets under our control. Position men with guns every block, right?”
“Sure. No problem, Francisco.”
“Mad Dog, I want you to organize men to load the stuff we capture in pickups and bring it back to the fairgrounds. If we start handing out food and supplies to the families at the fairgrounds, we’ll have thousands here within a day. Word will spread. You understand?”
“How do I decide who to give supplies?” Mad Dog looked confused.
“It doesn’t matter, hermano. Give them to anyone who’s Latino. You’ll be just like Santa Claus—an ugly brown Santa Claus.”
The guys laughed. Mad Dog was indeed ugly.
“The rest of you lead the home invasions. Start with your crew and, when more Latinos arrive in the Avenues, put them to work. ¿Comprenden? Meet back here in an hour with as many men as you can. Go.”
The lieutenants turned and headed out to find men. They weren’t clear on the plan, but they all knew how to fight, and they knew they would figure it out along the way. The chaotic tempo of violence was nothing new to them.
• • •
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Jeff watched morning light work its way across the valley. In a bit, it would peek over the hill and the day would start in earnest. He had that feeling of the calm before the storm. It would be a long day but, for now, he enjoyed his coffee and the view—orange-tinted oaks and maples, rolling up and over the hillsides and dropping into the muted valley, backlit by the dawn.
There were deer out everywhere, nipping at the mountainside fields of grass and wild alfalfa. The Homestead managed their perimeter security, and the deer were pouring into the safe zone created by the defensive line, an unintended but welcome game preserve.
Jeff didn’t know a lot about wild game. He had spent his adult life chasing prey of the two-legged variety. Even though he was a native son of Utah, he had never gone hunting with his dad or brothers. Since he graduated high school, he had been deployed overseas or training somewhere during hunting season. Maybe now that he had retired from all that crap, he could get around to hunting.
Jeff smiled, noticing how even his mind hadn’t adjusted to the new world. There might never again be a state-regulated deer hunt and here he was, thinking about the annual hunting trip with his brothers.
If Jeff could see the deer, so could the neighbors. Sure as hell, they would start trespassing, hoping to shoot some meat. It would be impossible to tell the difference between a neighbor and an invader. Both would be wearing camo and carrying scoped rifles. He would need to nail down a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to hopefully avoid shooting the locals.
Jeff’s job was to keep the Homestead from being overrun, and that meant keeping strangers out of the Homestead and away from seeing their supplies. He couldn’t allow anyone to even look at the Homestead grounds. If Jeff wanted to attack this place, he would recon it, nail down the security patterns, and hit it when it was most vulnerable.
Step one of defense, and perhaps the most important step, was to keep anyone from conducting a proper recon. That meant shooting people before they got a look/see. If the weak-willed jack-offs back at camp didn’t like that, too bad. Jeff didn’t want to kill anyone who didn’t need killing, but that desire ran a distant second to fulfilling the mission and protecting his men and his family.
For now, the threat level hadn’t risen to shoot-at-first-contact because Jeff hadn’t seen anything to make him believe they were facing organized opposition. They had seen and deflected dozens of hungry wanderers. Almost every one of those wanderers had been carrying a gun. But they had responded like one would expect―like starving idiots heading to the hills. But if he were going to recon this place and take it down, that’s just how he would make himself appear, like a lost soul wandering onto private property.
The SOP he would implement today would order a single warning shot to give trespassers one last chance to turn around. It would require more men, since they would need one position to provide the warning shot, while another position would be preparing to kill the intruder. It would be dangerous to have a warning shot come from the primary position, forfeiting surprise and putting that man at risk.
Adding more duty slots meant adding troop fatigue, and adding fatigue meant degraded readiness. Morale would dip, and that mattered quite a bit, especially when almost all of his men were civilians, and half of them were crippled by culture shock as it was.
Jeff toyed with the idea of using megaphones to give verbal warnings, but he didn’t think they had enough megaphones to cover the perimeter. Plus
a verbal warning would take several seconds, and that would give an enemy shooter time to dial in the location of the megaphone. He would be putting his guys at too much risk.
He could use non-combatants as the megaphone operators. But, if just one woman or kid got shot through the head while blabbing on a megaphone, the civilians back at the Homestead would lose their ever-loving minds. He might well lose a third of his civilian gunmen to the psychological trauma of a dead woman or kid. He couldn’t rely on any level of discipline or mental toughness. These civilians were fragile, whether he liked it or not. A lot of them had trained to shoot fairly well, but that didn’t mean a damned thing when it came to facing the foul realities of killing.
The best option would be a single warning shot. That was still bad, since a good enemy sniper could use that information to locate the shooter. Most of the perimeter was comprised of steep hills and canyons. That would work to their advantage, making the sound of a rifle bounce around like a racquetball.
On second thought, they could set up dummy locations around the perimeter: fake bunkers with shiny stuff, maybe make a dummy that resembled a dude’s head. Perhaps they could sucker a shot from anyone meaning harm to his defenders. Decoys might be a good option.
The sun broke the hilltop, and that meant time for philosophizing had come to an end. Jeff would now have to talk to other human beings, not his favorite kind of work.
In fact, Winslow was walking up the drive, beelining toward him.
Jeff reminded himself of his priorities today. Get the security guys briefed. Assault the three targets down in the valley. Hospital. Pharmacy. Refinery.
Assaults… the word made Jeff smile. He could use a little adrenaline today, and he was pretty sure nobody would get shot rolling up on a hospital and a refinery. Easy stuff. He would get to put the wood to some targets, and it would be for their own good. What could be better than that?