A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  all the others went into the target. I saw Blaisdell twirl, a red spray of blood from his mangled torso twisting into the air like a corkscrew, and then he disappeared out of sight as he dropped to the floor. Somewhere in the house a woman screamed in horror. Without being told I accelerated slowly and cruised on out of the neighborhood, sticking to the speed limit, as cool and leisurely as could be. I understood from the woman’s screams exactly what we had just done and I didn’t give a flying fuck, because I still felt Sorels’ nightstick on my side and I knew that man would have hurt Rooney and China if we’d let him. Blaisdell made his choice and drew his paycheck, and now the bill had come due, so to hell with him. Two minutes later I was heading towards the I-5. “Which way?” I asked.

  “North,” said Carter. “Head for Dundee. Farrow is on patrol tonight. Let’s try for a double header.” About twenty minutes later we cruised into Dundee on Harrison Avenue and right by the Burger Doodle where I’d worked in high school. We saw a police car in the parking lot. “Number 491. That’s Farrow’s unit.”

  “That’s him standing in line for his grease and cholesterol,” said Red as we cruised through the lot. I saw a tall blond figure in a blue uniform. Even through the foggy windows of the restaurant I could see the big 9-millimeter Glock in its black leather holster on the thick utility belt, the canister of mace and the handcuffs in their case, the shiny black patent leather shoes. I think I could even see the creases in his trousers, although maybe that was just from growing up in Dundee and seeing those swaggering apes before.

  “Do we park and go in after him?” I asked.

  “No, too many white people in there,” said Carter. “I don’t want to start our campaign in Lewis County with innocent bystanders maybe getting shot. Shane, cut your lights. Now very carefully, back into that space two cars down from the patrol car. Keep the engine running. Let’s hope he’s getting takeout grease for supper and he doesn’t decide to sit down and enjoy the formica ambience. The shorter time we’re here, the less chance of somebody remembering the car or our faces.” A few minutes later Farrow came strolling out of the Burger Doodle, carrying a bag of food. We could smell the fries from where we were. “Pull out and cruise past him, slow. I’m going to have to go for a head shot, since he’s probably wearing his vest.” I did as he told me, and when we were level with the cop I slowed to a stop without being told.

  Farrow had his hand on the door of the squad car to open it and when he looked up he had just time enough to see the barrel of the Tek-9 and scream like a woman, throwing his hand up with the burger bag in an effort to protect his face. Carter fired on semi-auto this time, carefully aimed marksman’s shots. The first shot blew the bag wide open and scattered hot coffee, fries, and a Super Burger in fragments. The second bullet went into Officer Farrow’s mouth and he spewed blood and teeth, gurgling and clawing at the roof of the squad car. We saw the third shot pop brain and bone into the air in a fine spray. I pulled back onto Harrison Avenue and eased our bods back out onto the interstate, effortlessly blending with traffic, and headed back to our latest holeup in a house just outside Napavine. I leaned back and said to Carter, “Hey, before you shot that bastard you should have yelled for him to say hello to his butt buddy Sorels. Or at least hasta la vista, baby.”

  “Why would I do that?” asked Carter. “I didn’t come here for conversation. I came here to kill the man and leave. That’s all. If I’d stopped to chat, that might have given him just the necessary moment to react, to jerk the squad car door open and cover down behind it, to get his gun out. It might have turned into a fair fight, and a fair fight is what we can’t afford to have.”

  Red Morehouse spoke up. “I agree, absolutely. Shane, in the context of what we’re doing, fair means slanted in favor of ZOG. They hold all the cards and we can’t afford to give them a single inch or a single second we don’t have to. We are not knights in shining armor on a quest seeking the Holy Grail. We are freedom fighters trying to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. That means we are attempting to achieve a very specific political objective, not personal glory. We are not out to engage in single combat with the enemy and prove what a man we are by defeating him in some Viking epic. This isn’t about you or me or Carter or Farrow or Sorels, it’s about the Republic. When the media call us cowards, as they no doubt will be doing tomorrow, to hell with ‘em. Cowards don’t rebel in arms against the most unspeakable tyranny in human history. Remember the rule of one of our greatest racial heroes, General Francis Marion of South Carolina, the Swamp Fox. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”

  “And no conversation,” Carter reminded me. “Two in the head, make sure they’re dead. Badda bing, badda boom, as the hoods on TV say. By the way, son, you did damned good tonight.” That night was in fact the foundation of my reputation as an NVA wheelman with a steady hand and a cool nerve, and eventually E Company started getting requests from crews all up and down the I-5 corridor for my chauffering services.

  Red was right about the media screaming and hollering to the high heavens after we whacked those two blues. On top of the Mexican and the two niggers, that was five dead coppers, and they went ballistic, like they’d just noticed that Lewis County law enforcement officers were dropping dead with lead poisoning. When we were still on the road Carter took out a prepaid, untraceable cell phone and called one of the TV stations in Olympia. He gave them a code word that he had somehow arranged with them beforehand. I think it was the old I.R.A. wheeze of calling himself Captain O’Neill. Anyway, Carter gave the code word and a quick little speech about the forces of the Northwest Republic striking down the minions of ZOG tyranny, the spirit of Coeur d’Alene lived on, so forth and so on. This was right after they had spent the past week crowing and cackling in triumph about how that unpleasantness in Coeur d’Alene was pretty much all mopped up now, the wicked Old Man was in prison where he belonged and the wicked forces of racist fascist domestic terrorism had been smote hip and thigh and the NVA were on the run. Hell, if you listened to the Centcom press releases, they had us on the run for all five years right up until they surrendered. The powers that be were embarrassed by little escapades like what we’d just done, and they freaked. We always had a knack for embarrassing ZOG like that.

  The next day the newspapers and the TV news were full of our previous evening’s dashing derring-do. Various top coppers appeared as talking heads on TV, practically stuttering and gibbering as they vowed swift and bloody vengeance against us evildoers. I swear I saw one of them sweating from his quivering jowls in December. “Bluff. He’s scared,” said Rooney with a satisfied smile, standing with her arms crossed as we watched him on the six o’clock news. Damn, she was fine.. .I wish you could have seen her standing proud and tall like that. Warrior women don’t wear armored bikinis. They wear jeans and pullover sweaters and Reebok runners.

  “Good,” I said. “It’s about time they were scared. They been dishing it out for a mighty long time. Now let’s see if they can take it.” Sorels’ nightstick in my kidneys had left an impression beyond the physical, and I was not at all inclined towards the milk of human kindness where cops were concerned. I’m not kidding, though, those media reptiles laid it on thick. The two slain officers were both living saints, of course. The beatings, the perjury on the stand, the corruption and the arrogant bullying by a couple of badge-toting assholes with nothing but pork fat between their ears were air-brushed out of the picture. Of larger political or racial context there was not a hint. We were just evildoers who had popped up from nowhere and done bad acts for no reason other than the devil made us do it. Oh, yeah, the NVA were just the most horrible two-legged critters in the world. To hear the pundits tell it, we were the very embodiment of that Satanic force of evil white male racism and non-diversity, come to bright and pristine Lewis County, Washington at the behest of that evil Old Man to commit horrible acts of domestic terrorism and general political incorrectness against the loyal and patriotic A
frican-Americans, Hispano-Americans, Native Americans, gyno-Americans and bugger-Americans who resided therein. But never fear! The gallant and strong-jawed forces of the red, white and blue would smash the evil fascist insect beneath the talons of the mighty Amurrican eagle, and life would soon be worth living again! It is always darkest before the dawn! There’s got to be a morning after! Onward and upward! O beautiful for spacious skies.. .blah blah blah, ishkabibble.

  That kind of moo was to be their standard propaganda line for the next five years. It was utterly ridiculous, a revolting and stupid display of sentimentality over two men whose deaths, I grant you, were pretty brutal, but who didn’t deserve jack shit by way of sympathy. Those guys chose to be soldiers for a tyrant and take the tyrant’s shilling, they chose to beat and persecute their neighbors for money or because they just plain liked it, and they paid the price.

  The most revolting thing the media did during that particular little circus was that some liberal principal at a Chehalis elementary school led his little kiddies from the second grade out to Blaisdell’s house. There they stood in front of the crime scene tape, with the television cameras rolling on a nationwide live feed, where they all held little Stars and Stripes and sang “America the Beautiful” and “The Star

  Spangled Banner.” There was hardly a dry eye as all of Amurrica went aaawwwww! Carter watched in silence and made a note of the fool’s name. The media folded up their klieg lights and their cameras and went away. The Northwest Volunteer Army didn’t. A few weeks later the principal got a blanket party in the parking lot of his school as he left for the day. We threw a blanket over his head and thumped him gentle and artistic with bats and iron pipes, until the blanket was bloody and he stopped screaming and begging us for mercy like the yellow piece of shit coward he was. Like all of them were, deep down. I don’t think I ever met one of those red, white, and blue Rambo John Wayne wannabe creeps during the entire war who had as much courage in his whole body as one NVA Volunteer had in his or her little finger. I guess you might say that’s one big reason why we won. When push came to shove, we were willing to die for our cause. They weren’t. When the principal got out of the hospital he found himself unable to resist the lure of I-5 South and sunny Californ-i-yay. Five years later those same children were in middle school, only now their school chorus was singing Homeland and A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Music to our ears indeed.

  On Christmas Eve we went out a-hunting with two precious gifts from the Army Council, captured RPGs from Iraq. We went into Centralia, down on Pearl Street, and fired them into the windows of the police station. They were about forty years old, Soviet manufacture, but they still worked and the bangs were most satisfactory. Carter figured I was up to trigger-pulling capability now and so I was one of the gunners, after he carefully showed me how to use the sight and switch even though it was all in Arabic. I violated Carter’s precepts against conversation and yelled “Bah, humbug!” as I cut loose with the rocket-propelled grenade. To top off that merriest of Christmases, when we got back to holeup number four since 10/22, a trailer out in Bucoda, Ma Wingfield and the girls had a tree set up and somebody had hung a sprig of mistletoe, and I got a very demonstrative kiss number four from Rooney to general cheers and commentary. I might have gotten more that night, but it was only a singlewide trailer and there were nine of us bunking therein, plus regular wakeups for sentry duty. Everybody politely ignored it when Rooney and I slept together snuggled on the main faux leather sofa. In our clothes and with our guns in our belts, but we did sleep together. By then it was pretty much understood Rooney and I were an item.

  The next morning in the pre-dawn hours a team of us consisting of myself, Carter, Rooney, Mack the Knife, and Brett Sills crept out of the trailer early. We drove through the mist in one car and one pickup truck along quiet and deserted back highways up to Olympia, and in the glorious light of rising dawn on the birth date of Christ, we kicked in the doors of the synagogue on Jefferson Street, poured gasoline on the floor and fixtures, and torched the building. Some bearded hebe from nearby came running in screaming, and somebody shot him. Wasn’t me; I just looked up when I heard the shot and saw the kike flip-flopping in his blood on the floor before he croaked. Brett took his yarmulke for a souvenir. Noël, Noël! Ma wouldn’t let China come with us to burn the synagogue because she needed help with the full Christmas dinner she welcomed us back with, replete with turkey and ham and sweet potatoes and stuffing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

  The night after Christmas Carter beckoned me to the door. “Tonight we go out for conversation,” he said. The necessary conversation was to take place in Chehalis, with a Lewis County sheriff’s deputy I had never seen before and whose name was completely unfamiliar to me. He lived in an apartment building up along the hill above Main Street. Carter had procured a key from somewhere and let us into a side door, and we waited silently just outside Apartment #103 until the deputy left at ten o’clock in full uniform to go on shift. Carter grabbed him from behind and I belted him in the belly—fortunately he hadn’t gotten to the station and put on his vest yet—and before he knew it I had his gun out of the holster. Carter slammed him against the wall, his arm twisted behind his back, and stuck the barrel of a .357 under his ear. “Hey, Greg,” he said. “You and me need to have a word.”

  “What the fuck are you doing, Carter?” snarled the deputy bitterly. He was scared but he was angry as well. “And why the hell are you doing it to me? I always liked you! I never did anything to you or your people!”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Carter. “That’s why you’re not lying dead on the carpet right now. Be quiet and listen. You saw what went down in Coeur d’Alene on October 22nd’? On TV?”

  “Of course I did,” said the deputy.

  “The grand and glorious President of the United States says the Party is beaten.” He gently pressed the gun barrel. “Does this feel like we’re beaten, Greg? Does it?”

  “No,” said the cop.

  “You saw our Christmas present to the blue boys in Centralia. Did that come from anybody who was defeated? You figure Bob Blaisdell thinks we’re beaten? You think Des Farrow considers us beaten? Does he?”

  “You yellow Nazi cop-killing bastard!” hissed Greg.

  “Let us define our terms, O my brother in Christ,” said Carter gently. “I am not a National Socialist, although as it happens my young associate here is. I am a believer in what used to be called muscular Christianity. I am also a lean, mean, redneck motherfucker. Bastard yes, yellow is a matter of opinion, cop-killing for sure. Are we clear on all these distinctions? Now, there is one more distinction which it is important you recognize. I kill bad cops, Greg. Cops who beat our people in their cells. Cops who plant evidence and frame our people. Cops who lie on witness stands. Cops who lie to grand juries. Cops who cooperate with the FBI to commit crimes and violate the rights of white people. Cops who take money from certain local businessmen to sweep the streets clean of us white trash and keep all pleasant for the Mexicans who are taking the bread out of the mouths and the shoes off the feet of white children. Don’t piss me off by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “You mean Blaisdell and Farrow were dirty?” said the deputy with a sneer. “So what the hell else is new? Yeah, sure, everybody in Lewis County knew that. Them and umpteen others. But dammit, Carter, they were cops! You don’t kill cops! You done time, you ought to know the rules! What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Criminals don’t kill cops, true,” said Carter. “But I’m no longer a criminal. I’m a patriot.”

  “You mean you’ve found a fucking flag to wave,” said Greg the deputy contemptuously. “That blue, white and green thing you people flash around.”

  “As you say. It is a good flag and a righteous one, but the rules have still changed. Police officers are now no longer obstacles to be avoided. Criminals evade cops. Patriots don’t. They are soldiers of the establishment, military targets to be destroyed. You signed on to
be a policeman, Greg, not a soldier. No one ever mentioned anything about a war when you decided to go for a pension. Now you listen to me and you take this to the sheriff and whoever else it needs to be taken to. You are hereby served notice that from this point on, units of the Northwest Volunteer Army will be operating—let me repeat that—we will be operating in Lewis County. We are the law now. The United States is not. You will not, let me repeat that, you will not in any way interfere with the operations or movements or other activities of the Northwest Volunteer Army. You will not, let me repeat that, you will not co-operate with the Federal forces in any way, shape or form. Anyone who does will get exactly what Blaisdell and Farrow got. And if you should succeed in taking out me and my family and anyone else, then others will come from elsewhere and take over where we left off, and they will not regard you with a kindly gleam in their eye. The revolution is forever. Is this quite clear?”

  “I’ll pass it on, but you don’t seriously expect.”

  “I expect nothing,” Carter told him grimly. “Expectation don’t come into it. I am simply telling you what is going to happen if your superiors don’t wake up and smell the coffee. No law enforcement officer in Lewis County will be safe, on duty or off duty. Unless you agree to a live and let live arrangement with the Northwest Volunteer Army, then every time you step outside your house to do your shift, there is a very good chance you won’t be coming home. If you make us your enemies, then we will treat you as enemies. This goes beyond any question of who’s breaking whose laws, Greg. This is a war. Can’t you understand that? I repeat, you guys aren’t soldiers, you’re cops. You’re supposed to fight crime, not serve as cannon fodder.”