A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Scranton, Pennsylvania

  Limping on his bad leg, James Nail paced his one room digs, glowering at his watch and aimlessly stopping to look out through the window at the sunrise over Scranton. He felt weak and nauseous, having suffered a relapse after Sharon left. The doctor no longer visited, but he had left a supply of antibiotics. They seemed to help, but his injuries were still suppurating yellow exude.

  He returned to the sagging sofa and the stack of books on the end table that Sharon left for him to read before she returned to New York. He hadn’t realized how woefully ignorant he had been. He and—presumably, most other Americans—until Sharon took it upon herself to oversee his education on the major issues of these troubled times. He picked up the copy of Bloodland’s Europe: Between Hitler and Stalin and turned to a dog-eared page. He tried to read to keep his mind occupied and off Sharon and what she might be up to concerning the secret international meetings and her determination to infiltrate and expose them.

  He thought of Jamie and how he had failed her. She took after her mother Connie, who had been a Progressive rabble rouser in college. Jamie and her goofy boyfriend Rupert with their Che Guevara and Mao T-shirts rabble-roused a new generation through ACOA, PEIU, Open Societies and other Leftwing networks. The most enthusiastic supporters and enforcers of Josef Stalin’s destructive policies in the old USSR were the younger people who had been “educated” in the Soviet schools and believed in the promise of the new system.

  Socialism had failed wherever it was attempted, commonly in the deaths of millions. Karl Marx predicted that free enterprise and the ruling middle class would be overthrown into a classless society in which all means of production would be publicly owned. There would be no need for government in such a perfect society. Everyone would be “equal.” There would be “social justice.”

  Only, government under socialism never seemed to wither away; it only grew stronger and more oppressive. The results of socialism in the United States, if the nation continued down this path, were as predictable as they should have been in the old Soviet Union or in Hitler’s Germany. Stalin and Hitler were directly culpable in thirteen million deaths.

  “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it,” economist Thomas Sowell wrote.

  Between 1931 and 1933, Nail read in Bloodlands, the Soviets created famine when the Communist government seized food from farmers to feed city industrial workers. The famine, along with deportations to gulags and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of resisters, almost wiped out the country’s food producers. A similar series of events might be playing out in the United States. There were already warnings of impending food shortages due to inflation and Federal regulations against farmers. According to this morning’s Zenergy News, more than three thousand people were lining up in Washington, D.C. waiting for food handouts.

  Bloodlands painted a grim picture of America’s likely future under Marxist control.

  As the state police, the OGPU, found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine “families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating...” One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. One six-year-old girl, saved by other relatives, last saw her father when he was sharpening his knife to slaughter her...

  The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow men died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children... The boys and girls lay about on sheets and blankets, eating their own excrement, waiting for death...

  Several women...formed “something like an orphanage... The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs; their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets, and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried...”

  A black market arose in human flesh; human meat may even have entered the official economy... In the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their members... More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: “Mother says that we should eat her if she dies...”

  Fellow-traveling Progressives in the United States had aided and abetted Stalin. Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, covered up the Great Famine and Stalin’s effort to “socialize” the country. He maintained that the mass deaths through hunger served a higher purpose.

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he was famously quoted as saying.

  “To such people and their counterparts today,” Sharon liked to point out, “the ends justify all means.”

  Restless as a caged rat, Nail rose from the sofa and paced to the room’s single window, slipping the curtain aside to let in a thin bar of morning sunlight. He tried raising Sharon again on his new TracPhone. She hadn’t called him last night as she usually did to let him know she was okay.

  He reached her voice mail. He dialed the studio and learned she was “on assignment.”

  He tuned the TV to Zenergy, hoping he might learn something. Someone with a British accent was explaining how the Federal Reserve was monetizing the national debt by printing and distributing another nine hundred billion dollars in “job stimulus funds,” making gigantic inflation as certain in the U.S. as monetizing had in Weimar Germany three quarters of a century previously.

  “By the end of the year,” the Brit predicted, “one quarter of Americans will not be able to afford food. A loaf of bread will cost twenty-three dollars, a small can of Folgers coffee seventy-five dollars. Orange juice will be going for forty -five dollars, Domino sugar for sixty-two the pound, a chocolate candy bar for fifteen dollars...”

  Time was running out. For the nation. And for Sharon. At least three times she had survived attempts against her life because, as she put it, God and James Nail were looking out for her. Opposition media had strived to dig up dirt to smear her reputation. That wasn’t working fast enough. She was still on the air shining the light on cockroaches.

  Sharon needed him. Nail had not felt this helpless since the helicopter gunmen opened fire on the crowd at ORU and he couldn’t reach Jamie in time to save her. He should never have let Sharon return to New York alone. Like a wounded fugitive ex-cop could do anything to help her when he barely had the strength to cross a parking lot or a street.

  Nail returned to the sofa. On the battered coffee table in front of him lay two snapshots side by side—one a publicity photo of Sharon, the other of his daughter Jamie. Nail rubbed his eyes. Suddenly prompted by the chilling thought that the proximity of the photos to each other might in some way foretell a common tragedy, he separated them by the length of the table.

  He had never cried for his lost daughter. Cops didn’t cry, couldn’t cry. Now he did, all alone, wounded and feverish, hiding out in a rented room. Sobbing into his hands, his body wracked with the effort, ashamed for his weakness, yet unable to help himself. What had happened to him and to all the other Americans that they could allow this to be happening here?

  After awhile, he stopped weeping for Jamie, for all those long-dead Russian children, for himself, for his country. He lifted his wet face from the palms of his hands. His blue eyes hardened as they settled on the 30.06 Winchester leaning in a corner of the room.

  My God, what fools people were.

  Impending Food Crisis Predicted

  (Washington)—“Is the Earth running out of food? That’s what sociologis
ts warn if world leaders don’t act now and negotiate food security policies at this week’s Climate Change talks in Cancun.” Time magazine.

  Scarce food, like oil and energy, could shape global politics over the next decades. That’s the warning coming from Washington as global food demands collide with strained supply sources. High prices or shortages could destabilize not only poor countries but richer ones as well. The present food price surge is the highest in 38 years. It has already triggered food riots in about two dozen countries around the world and prompted demonstrations and protests in American cities...

  “Americans have no Constitutional right to produce, obtain and consume the foods of their choice,” said Sam Shrader, head of the President’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “There is no deeply rooted historical tradition of unfettered access to food of all kinds...”

  In a statement today, President Anastos promises to recruit unemployed workers, using conscription if necessary, and truck them to rural areas to work on communal farms for the American people...

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Colorado Rockies

  Big C and Tom Fullbright broke camp and were up and on the march as soon as dawn provided enough light to illuminate the trail. They munched energy bars and sipped water from canteens for breakfast. They emerged into open elk pastures and rocky outcroppings above the tree line and continued climbing heavily to bare ridges spotted with old snow that made Big C think of Sno Cones.

  He took out binoculars to glass the opposite ridge. According to Carolyn, the detention camp should lie about fifteen miles further, in a valley between two lesser mountain ranges. He still had difficulty wrapping his mind around the idea of death camps in America.

  Detecting nothing so far except more timber and hills and a herd of elk in a clearing, he and his sidekick dropped down from the Divide and worked their way west through rugged, boulder-strewn forest. It took little imagination to see why these were the Rocky Mountains.

  At mid-afternoon, they climbed out of a steep canyon to the crest of a low mountain range. While they took a break and gnawed on strips of high-protein beef jerky, Big C scanned for the camp with binoculars, finally locating some kind of new construction all but concealed in conifer trees. The largest building, as best he could tell at this distance, was five or six floors tall. Possibly a hospital nestled among long, two-story barracks freshly painted in camouflage green. High razor wire-topped fences with guard towers enclosed the compound.

  He handed the binocs to Fullbright, who took a look.

  “We need get closer,” C said.

  They worked their way to the next ridgeline, reaching it an hour or so before nightfall. The new position provided a better view of the installation. The two men lay side by side bellies down on a boulder-strewn outcropping.

  Big C estimated one hundred acres or so of fenced compound with at least a dozen buildings, including the hospital and a large round structure made of brick and concrete that resembled a power plant. A stubby industrial chimney protruded from it. Big C saw no signs of “patients,” although Carolyn had said six thousand people might be incarcerated here. The only people moving about were armed Green Shirts in combat garb. Big C counted nearly two hundred engaged in various military and security activities, plus others manning six guard towers on stilts overlooking the cantonment area. “Fields of fire” had been cleared on all approaches. Patrols in Humvees with mounted machineguns roved the perimeter.

  A black-and-white camp robber bird making strange little sounds from a nearby thorn bush caught Big C’s attention. It seemed to be warning them.

  While they continued to watch, two buses trailing each other arrived on the narrow unpaved road from State 160 and stopped at the security gate. Guards armed with M2s mounted the buses to walk through and apparently check passengers. The setting sun was in Big C’s eyes, preventing him from making out details of the passenger loads other than that both vehicles appeared packed.

  Big C pointed out a thick electrical cable that ran from a kind of utility building near the guard shack to the fence. Fullbright nodded grimly. A raven soared in and landed on the top strand of wire. There was a flash, a puff of smoke and fire. The raven vanished.

  “Damn!” Fullbright exclaimed.

  After being admitted into the compound, the buses drove to a tunnel beneath the hospital, into which they disappeared. Big C took a closer look through the binocs at the power plant and its chimney. Shocking how much it resembled a more modern version of the furnaces he had seen in photos of Auschwitz or Dachau.

  The bus drivers and accompanying security apparently intended to spend the night, as they did not reemerge from the tunnel. As evening’s purple began to spread across the valley, a column of oily smoke issued into the clear Colorado air from the power plant, turning anvil-topped as winds aloft across the Divide caught it. Big C put down his binoculars but continued to stare at the camp as the reality of what was happening down there slowly sank in. He turned to look at Fullbright.

  “Tom, you need to leave at first light to bring in our men,” he said. “If there must be war, there no better place than this for it to begin.”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Scranton, Pennsylvania

  The early afternoon sky over New York City was overcast and threatening when Nail pulled his old Toyota onto the parking lot of Hampton Arms. He sat behind the wheel looking over the stately Redstone complex. The swimming pool and rear courtyard were unoccupied. The old saying about a criminal returning to the scene of his crime was largely unproven, yet he was back to where he shot and killed the Homie who menaced Sharon’s life.

  Feeling as exposed as a streaker in the Super Dome, he got out of his car and limped painfully toward the apartment building’s rear doors, alert for anything out of place or potentially threatening. He was unarmed, having lost his sidearm in the alley dumpster the night he was shot. Carrying the 30.06 into a New York building would have been too conspicuous.

  Sharon’s apartment was the most logical place to begin his search. He didn’t know what he expected to find. His face edged sharp dread as he took the elevator to the third floor. He smiled at a young couple who got on the elevator with him. They ignored him. He was grateful for the New Yorkers’ proclivity to mind their own business.

  He stopped at Sharon’s door to take a long, ragged breath. He didn’t smell anything; a corpse didn’t start to smell for about forty eight hours or so. He let himself in with the key Sharon had given him.

  The telephone was ringing. He waited inside the door until Sharon’s answering machine picked it up and he heard her recorded voice inviting the caller to leave a message. The caller hung up.

  Nail swept the apartment, looking for a body, although he didn’t want to think of it that way. There was a bedroom, a study, a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and a bath with a Jacuzzi tub. The only thing he found out of place was the desk light shining in the study. At the end of his search, he leaned on the kitchen bar to catch his breath, unaware that he had been holding it the entire time out of trepidation for what he might discover.

  He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not.

  He went through the apartment a second time, this time looking for some clue that might indicate where she had gone. Her haunting fragrance lingered in the bedroom. He crushed her pillow to his face and drew in her scent until it seemed to fill his entire being. They were engaged to be married, yet this was his first time in the place she lived. The prospect of her having vanished as a result of hostile intent drove him to near panic.

  A cop had to keep his head.

  Her answering machine was full of messages. He listened to them. There were several from various people at the Zenergy studios, several more from the security service that provided bodyguards, the content implying that she had given her security the slip, others from a “Rose Marie” and a “Lakisha,” several from Jerry Baer’s widow, and at least a half-dozen from Carl Patton, her executive produ
cer.

  “Sharon, this is Carl. Pick up if you can hear me...”

  It troubled Nail that her landline automatically transferred unanswered calls from her home phone to her cell and apparently she wasn’t answering her cell either. Nail had been dialing that number all day.

  He checked the closets for empty hangers and missing luggage. Whenever Connie packed for a trip, she left discarded items in her wake to be picked up on her return. She claimed all women were like that. Everything in Sharon’s closets seemed to be in order.

  Carl Patton had provided two callback numbers on the answering machine. Sharon had said that Patton would always know where she was. “You can trust him,” she said. “If you have to call him, identify yourself as ‘Mr. Harker.’ He’ll know who you are.”

  Nail tried the office number first and was advised Patton was on assignment. He dialed the other number. Just as he was about to give up, Patton picked up in a breathless voice. From the background noise, he could have been in the middle of a riot or some natural disaster.

  “This is Harker,” Nail said. “I promised to call if I came to New York.”

  There was a pause on the other end, as if Patton was trying to remember. Then he said, “Oh! Mr. Harker! Good to hear from you. We need the extra sound system you promised. I’ll meet you in Central Park.” He forced a laugh. “You’ll recognize me. I’m the skinny dude in front of the Zenergy News camera.”

  Obviously, Patton was wary of his cell being tapped.

  “I probably won’t see you in the crowd,” Patton added, “so you’ll have to look for me. I’m up to my butt in alligators.”