Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises

by Velocity, Max

  In fact, the Regime did experience problems with many of the actual combat veterans among the ranks of the National Guard, active duty army, and even law enforcement. Some of them took their oaths seriously and refused to act illegally against citizens. These types were severely cracked down upon, those that had not deserted or escaped out of the zones.

  Those deserting veterans that were captured or those who dissented, refusing to obey illegal orders, were often taken into mental institutions against their will, on the pretext of mental illness or PTSD, for ‘treatment’ that often involved severe drug therapy that left them mentally incapacitated, shadows of their former selves.

  Others saw the writing on the wall and deserted, getting out and away from the zones, often taking weapons and equipment with them.

  However, there was a flip side to the refusal to obey orders to fire on citizens: as good Americans, many of these veterans actually found it easy to fire on the entitlement ‘eaters’ that they came across in the worst of the inner city riots. In their eyes, these eaters were the antithesis of how America was intended. Once they had pulled the trigger though, there was no going back, and they were lost on the slippery slope.

  A new constitution was written, termed the ‘Homeland Charter’. This new document rejected the original Constitution and declared all those supporting it to be domestic terrorists.

  There was much deliberate obfuscation between sleeper cells allegedly related to the ‘Iranian’ terror attack on DC, and domestic ‘constitutionalist’ terrorists, who were often simply Patriots and preppers.

  The old Constitution had led to the destruction of the country, according to the revisionist agenda of the ‘progressive’ Regime and the ‘doublethink’ mental illness that plagued America. Individual liberty was the enemy; the only salvation was in the collective. The agenda of the progressives was complete.

  ‘New Citizens’ had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Regime, to obey all laws and orders given to them by those in authority. They were fitted with subcutaneous RFID chips containing all personal information. Cash and firearms were outlawed and the chips allowed the GPS tracking of people. It was therefore easy to determine someone’s status simply by scanning their forearm, and if no chip was present they were an outlaw, to be arrested or shot on sight.

  As part of this new direction, the flag was redesigned. Rather than the stripes, there was a red and white sunray effect radiating out from a central, slightly offset to the left, sun-like circle in blue and white. The lower part of the ‘O’ like circle had an effect similar to the radiating red and white stripes, but more horizontally across the bottom of the ‘O’: A shining symbol of the bright future of collective socialism. The new flag was supposed to signify ‘hope’ or some similar progressive garbage.

  The star spangled banner was relegated to the newly demonized ‘Patriots’ and subversives. Patriots, constitutionalists, libertarians and anyone who had prepared for the collapse were targets of the Regime, to be tracked down. Those who were not sworn to the new regime were either interned or executed if they were under direct Regime control.

  The citizens of the new Regime lived hand to mouth on government handouts, working in State sponsored jobs and living in camps or state controlled housing, cowed but grateful that they were being kept safe from the outlaws and terrorists outside of the zones.

  Many who had not been aware of the true danger of the creeping progressive agenda were rudely awakened after the collapse. ‘Normalcy bias’ was swept away and their eyes were opened to the true horror of where their great country had descended to.

  The FEMA camps were no holiday camp: those who had elected or been forced into them found that due to a combination of corruption, incompetence and simple brutality, rations were meager and conditions basic. They were more like concentration camps, with oppressive rules enforced by sullen guards, quick to violence. Many in the camps were simply taken out and killed for being trouble makers, tossed into mass graves and left to rot in piles.

  Many could not understand how the military could be used against citizens. With rioters, it was easy. For the innocent preppers and Patriots who were considered domestic terrorists, it was also easy: it was all a matter of information management. Regime strike teams under the DHS were simply briefed that a ‘target’ housed ‘domestic terrorists’ who were harboring food, weapons and even explosives.

  The targets were hit hard in ‘no knock’ raids with unrestrictive rules of engagement, often resulting in everyone at the target being killed, including whole families in some cases. If the target was found to contain innocent preppers, it was no problem. It was not the first time, even before the collapse, that the wrong address was hit or ‘intelligence’ was found to be incorrect. Heavy handed SWAT ‘kill squad’ tactics were fine as long as ‘department procedures’ were followed.

  Chapter One

  Before the DC terrorist attack, Jack and Caitlin Berenger were thirty-something professionals living in the Northern Virginia suburbs. They had three children; a teenage boy and two toddlers. The eldest, Andrew, was sixteen, Connor was four and the youngest, Sarah, was two.

  Jack was a former Captain with the Army Rangers, a veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he had gained considerable combat experience. He was very tactically adept and he continued to keep himself fit since resigning from military service, despite his sedentary job as a crisis management consultant. Caitlin was a veteran with a military intelligence background, now working as a civilian for the Department of Defense.

  They had always been an active and outdoors type family, hiking and camping often. Jack also liked to keep his hand in with shooting and they owned several firearms, which he had also been training Andrew to use.

  More recently, they had woken up to the fragility of modern society, the threats faced by the potential for economic collapse and the advance of the socialist agenda of the progressives in the supposedly free United States. They were both Patriots who had served their country and sworn the oath to protect the Constitution from ‘enemies foreign and domestic’.

  They had started to make more extensive preparations for a potential collapse, like many other preppers, and had been stocking up on food and supplies. They were shocked to find that this otherwise sensible endeavor would categorize them as potential ‘domestic terrorists’ for having more than seven days’ worth of food, among other things.

  The sane answer to this was that they were simply making preparations for potential hard times ahead. They were loyal citizens and bore no ill intent towards their country; in fact it was just the opposite. But the lunacy appeared to be spreading, and there was no other way but to ignore and resist the madness.

  The Berengers lived in a relatively well to do middle class area, some twenty five miles south of the DC beltway. The sub-division consisted of a maze of residential back roads situated in a forested area. It was actually very beautiful, surrounded by lakes and woods and giving no hint of the nearby urban sprawl. However, the malls and shopping centers were only a short drive away, and the I-95 was only five miles to the east.

  Their house was a two story four bedroom colonial from the 1980s, with basement, on a half-acre wooded plot, similar to most of the other surrounding properties. They were situated on the north west corner of a residential four way junction, with the house itself set back about thirty to forty meters from the road, oriented towards the junction to the south east, with the wooded yard to the rear and extending along the two roads to the left and right of the property.

  The house was on a slight rise and looked down towards the junction, which was a four way stop where the kids congregated in the mornings to wait for the school bus.

  The slope down to the two roads was grassed with a couple of wooded islands that gave some cover from view from the road, but otherwise there was just a drainage ditch and grass between the house and the two roads. The driveway was on the right side as you looked towards the road and sloped up
over about thirty meters towards a double garage on the right side of the house.

  The neighborhood was a mix of professional and retired types, some families with kids and others living in empty nests. One of the big problems the Berengers had encountered, when they got into prepping following the purchase of the house, was the local Homeowners Association.

  The HOA, although ostensibly well meaning, was in fact a microcosm of the problems in the country. It appeared to attract to its employ those petty authority types who enjoyed wielding power over others in the small tyrannies.

  Go against the HOA at your peril, because they had the money to afford the attorneys, which funnily enough came from the dues that those same homeowners paid for the HOA to serve their best interests. Sounds familiar? It was almost laughable if it were not so tragic.

  The presence of the HOA was another reason that they had to keep their prepping low key. Operational security, or OPSEC, was always a factor in prepping anyway. But if they had lived in the country they could have aspired to a vegetable garden, goats or cows for milk, and chickens. Instead, the prepping was confined to the purchasing, and storing in the basement, of food and equipment.

  The Berengers had discussed this problem at length but they were not financially positioned to sell up and move to a rural retreat, they were too tied to the golden handcuffs of the beltway rat-race, with the kids in school and all the rest.

  They always said that if the slide began, it would get to a point that the HOA would not matter anymore, and they would get chickens and goats then. They had heirloom seeds ready to start a garden. But in the end it had all happened so fast there was no chance to buy any animals. Luckily, they had about a years’ worth of food stored in cans and buckets in the basement.

  As part of their prepping, Jack had worked diligently on the tactical side: defense of his family. He had two 5.56mm Colt M4 rifles, two Remington 870 pump action shotguns and three Glock 23 handguns, chambered for .40 caliber rounds. He had amassed a sizeable quantity of ammunition for all the firearms, plus an ACOG x4 magnification combat optic for his M4.

  He had acquired a set of body armor plates and he had used them recreate his old rig from his Ranger days, creating a tactical plate carrier vest in ranger green. He had ammunition pouches attached across the front of the vest, allowing him to carry eight magazines, along with some other utility pouches for various items.

  As well as the plate carrier rig, he had created a battle belt using a tactical belt, a padded hip pad, and several types of pouches. On the battle belt he had his handgun and spare magazines, three double rifle ammunition pouches allowing carriage of six thirty round magazines, and a dump pouch for used magazines, plus several other utility items in their own pouches. He could wear the battle belt on its own or with the tactical vest, allowing him to rig himself according to the situation.

  Basically, Jack stuck to what he knew and felt comfortable with. For him, weapons and equipment had always been tools that he had been ‘issued’, so he stuck to familiarity and he was by no means an expert on all the various firearms, optics and equipment on the market.

  Jack had also collected various amounts of web gear and other tactical supplies that he fitted to Caitlin and Andrew for when the time came. They both had battle belts; Andrew’s rigged up just like his, while Caitlin’s was specialized for her handgun and also shotgun ammunition carriage. Andrew also had a chest rig for carriage of additional ammunition for his rifle.

  Jack worried about having only one set of ballistic plates but whenever they discussed, or more rarely ran through a tactical situation, they practiced for Caitlin to act as protection to the young kids, while Andrew moved to cover and a fire support position with one of the M4s. Jack would always do the maneuver and thus it seemed right that he wore the set of armor.

  Whenever they went and did paintball games it always worked out that Andrew liked to stay back and snipe from cover while Jack would always run about doing bounding over-watch like he had been trained to do in his soldiering days, which inevitably got him killed in paintball, usually by a twelve year old hiding in a bush.

  Jack was terrified of any harm coming to the kids. He worked on close protection drills with Caitlin as much as he could, and although they both understood the need to prep, it was never easy with inter-marital politics to actually train together. Wives and teenagers did not make ideal training buddies, and it was all too easy for him to put his foot in it and unintentionally cause offense.

  He was also very mindful that Andrew was a teenager, his son, with no combat experience and he wanted to keep him safe as much as possible. He always had him in a fire support role working from cover.

  Andrew was actually a very good shot. He wasn’t an experienced combat shooter like Jack, but he had the basics and had been on the air rifle team with the ROTC before Jack had introduced him to range shooting with the M4.

  One of the aspects of preparing his family that Jack gave a lot of thought to was their mental preparation. Although he did not want to discuss specific aspects of his combat experiences with them, he felt a strong need to try and make them understand what it may be like, and what could be at stake, should violence come to them.

  He talked to them and had them visualize combat situations, attackers coming at them bent on their destruction. He explained that in the absence of law and order, and facing armed marauders, it was a simple ‘them or us’ situation. On the range, he had them fire at photographic and realistic targets, and when simulating combat through training such as paintball, he had Andrew actually aim and fire his ‘weapon’ at the ‘enemy’.

  Jack explained that if or when it came, the violence would likely be sudden and unexpected, and they would probably not be ready for it. They needed to visualize their reactions in advance, train muscle memory, and be ready to ‘turn it on’ in an instant should the need arise.

  In the three month period between the terrorist attack and the Chinese attack on the power grid the Berengers had found themselves out of work. Jack worked as a consultant for a corporation and as such he was one of the first to be let go, before the full time employees.

  Caitlin should have had a secured job with the DoD, but what happened was that government employees were not fired, but put on furlough without pay ‘until further notice’.

  They had planned to fall back on their savings but the hyperinflation that followed the bank run soon wiped those out and they were solely reliant on their preparations and food stocks.

  They had never got as far with their prepping as buying precious metals, but they figured that you couldn’t eat them anyway so what was the use? Better to buy more ammunition.

  When the grid went down, Jack wished they had been able to afford the generator they had planned for, but by then it was too late. It was the beginning of fall and luckily they had a wood fire, a woodpile, plenty of propane and some camping style wood burning stoves and a rocket stove.

  Jack had also stockpiled enough gas to refill both their cars once each. They had a Suburban and a Dodge grand caravan, and when the lights went out they moved the two vehicles to the rear of the house to keep them out of sight.

  The plan, given that they did not have an alternative place to go, was to hunker down in place. None of their family was near and the only suitable place that Jack could think of was the farm belonging to their friends Bill and Cindy, who lived out in the country past Manassas towards Shenandoah. But they had made no plans and they did not want to impose uninvited. How would they feel if the roles were reversed, after all?

  Bill was an old friend from Jack’s army days. He had fully embraced the prepper thing, but had gone beyond that to writing a libertarian blog highly critical of the Administration. Jackagreed with him, but given that he and Caitlin worked in DC and had security clearances, he didn’t want to make any waves.

  Jack and Caitlin worked on getting their place ready to sit out the coming chaos following the cyber-attack. They did not in fact know it had bee
n a cyber-attack, they just knew that the power had gone out and that it appeared to be widespread. They were getting FEMA updates on their wind-up radio, which were mainly transmitting locations for FEMA refugee camps and food distribution areas.

  There was no more fuel in the gas stations so there was a network of pickup points for FEMA buses that would take people in. The unofficial word was that firearms were now outlawed and you had to turn them in, and anyone in receipt of handouts had to be RFID chipped.

  Apparently, you did not have to go into the camps permanently, but if you took food handouts and returned home on the buses, you had to be chipped and file your address and details with FEMA.

  Initially after the blackout their street had been pretty social, more so than in normal times. The situation had drawn a lot of neighbors out of their homes to talk and pass around information and rumor. There was talk of mass exoduses from the cities and gridlock on the roads, with many ignoring FEMAs request to concentrate under their control.

  They had not seen much traffic, either foot or vehicle, through their sub-division and so far no rioting or looting had spread their way. However, there were rumors of mass violence as the mobs tried to get out of the cities into the surrounding country.

  The remainder of the utilities had all shut down a couple of days after the power went out. There was no longer any water service. As the days dragged into weeks this took its toll, along with the beginning of starvation, and activity dropped on the street. Some families drove to the FEMA reception center downtown, or took the bus there instead. Others decided to head out and try to make it to relatives or simply into the country. Many stayed in place.

  Jack had boarded up his ground floor windows internally with plywood and barricaded his front door, including moving an upright piano from the opposite wall in the foyer to block the doorway. They had shifted to cooking on propane tanks on a camping stove in the kitchen. It was the start of fall and they had firewood, but it wasn’t really cold enough to need it yet.