2041 The Peoples' United States

by T W Powell

  “Beth, I didn’t say she moved. I said Ms. Warner is gone.”

  “Oh no, she died?”

  “Beth, I didn’t say she died. I said Ms. Warner is gone.”

  “Tasha, I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Look, when The Collective decides to eliminate you, you go away.”

  “What you’re saying is, they kill you.”

  “No, it’s not quite that simple. You never know. You could end up in a reeducation camp, or a labor camp, or just relocated. I’ve even heard they have like ‘ghettos’ where they just take old White people and drop them. No services, no food.”

  Tasha stared intently at Beth, “And whatever you do, don’t ask about it. Our new neighbor is the new Block Coordinator, and my first impression is that she’s a total bitch.”

  Tasha paused, carefully examining Beth’s every facial expression, “You know that kid in my class, Akeno? You know, the one we talked about last night. The one The Collective corrected yesterday?”

  “Yes, how was he today?”

  “He’s gone, just gone.” Tasha just stood there shaking her head, then she continued, “Beth we have to be careful. We’re doing OK for ourselves considering our Whiteness. You have your job at the Clinic, and I have my teaching gig. One slip, just one little slip, and that flaming bitch next door could fuck things up for us. Gone.”

  By late afternoon Junior and Bobby Ray had made their way to the I-64 and the Mountain Parkway interchange just north of Winchester. Here, US 60, now renamed Peoples’ 60, ran alongside I-64 for a bit. A creek had been impounded to form a small lake on the north side of Peoples’ 60. Just a few suburban single-family homes lined a lane that led from Peoples’ 60 back to the lake.

  Before the Revolution, these homes had been middle class showplaces with neatly manicured lawns, late model cars in the driveways, and kids playing in the lane. Now, the homes were in disrepair, the paint was peeling, roof shingles were lifted and missing, and the yards were overgrown. Goats and chickens freely roamed about.

  The lane ended in a circle down by the lake. The rest of the lake shore was farmland and woods.

  “Let’s camp over there where that little limestone ledge sticks out over the lake.” Junior had assumed his typical command personae. “Those trees will block the line of sight from those houses.”

  Junior shook his head in disgust, “Man, did you see that mess? I know you probably can’t remember the real world, back before the shit hit the fan, but this ain’t it.”

  “No, I can’t remember, but my Dad told me stories about those days. He talks a lot like you do.”

  “Bobby Ray, you gather some wood, and we’ll get a small fire going. The operative word is ‘small’. Try to find some dry wood that won’t make much smoke. I’ll go cut a pipe cane and see what I can scare up.”

  Junior cut a sturdy cane pole about 6 feet long, then unscrewed the pommel from his knife and removed the hook, line, and sinker. He pulled a small cork bobber from his pack and attached it to the line about 18 inches up from the hook. He hopped the barbed wire fence to a neighboring cow pasture and found some “made earth”, a mixture of rotting log and cow manure. He dug down a few inches and scooped up some wriggly redworms.

  The sun was now low in the sky and the woodland critters were perking up.

  “Perfect timing!” thought Junior.

  Within a couple of minutes of wetting his line, the cork bobber went under. Junior paused for a moment, then set the hook. A nice fat rock bass about the size of Junior’s hand was the first catch of the day. As he moved from spot to spot along the rock ledge, Junior quickly added another half dozen Goggle-eye to his tally.

  It was now sundown and the panfishing slowed down. Junior was just about to call it a day when his bobber twitched just a little. Junior froze. Then the bobber twitched again.

  “Is that you Mr. Whiskers, tasting those redworms?”

  The bobber started to slowly move straight away, then slowly submerged. Once again Junior didn’t yank the pole. He gradually applied resistance to the pole until he felt a solid tug from the other end of the line. Then he set the hook. The cane pole bent but didn’t break.

  “Bobby Ray, get your ass over here and get ready to grab him. I don’t want to lose him.”

  Junior’s guess was spot on. A sleek, speckled, silver, whiskered form broke water.

  “He’s going to be slippery Bobby Ray, don’t lose him.”

  “I don’t need you telling me how to handle a channel cat.”

  Junior continued with the unsolicited advice, “Don’t let him fin you.”

  Bobby Ray breathed a sigh of relief and yelled, “I got him,” as he threw the catfish up onto the grassy bank.

  “He’s at least 3 pounds, good eating size.” Bobby Ray already had his Swiss Army knife out skinning and cleaning the channel cat.

  Junior chuckled, “Boy, you ain’t so green after all. I’ll take care of these sunfish, then we’ll get that fire going and have some supper.”

  After supper, Bobby Ray began to spread his bed roll out on the smooth limestone ledge around the campfire.

  “Hang on Bobby Ray, it gets cold up here in Kentucky and, by morning, that limestone’s going to feel like an undertaker’s slab.”

  Junior walked over to a nearby fence row and gathered up a double armful of dry fallen leaves. “Put a good layer of these under your bedroll. That’ll make it a lot warmer and softer.”

  “Thanks Junior. I’m sure lucky I met up with you today.”

  Junior was already making himself comfortable when he asked Bobby Ray the question that had nagged him ever since they met, “How is it Bobby Ray, that a young man like you is up here in these Kentucky hills?”

  Meeting Bobby was too much of a coincidence if this Bobby Ray Skipper was who Junior thought he might be.

  “I had to get the hell out of Macon fast and then I just kept going. Me and my buds were out in the Ocmulgee Swamp bow hunting hogs, or anything else we could scare up. When I got back home and opened the front door, there was a damned Mexican bunch in there. Hell, I don’t really know if they was Mexican, but they were speaking Spanish and didn’t understand English. So, I ran over to the neighbor’s house and I’ll be damned if there weren’t a bunch of Somalis, or some such, living in the neighbor’s house. I had only been gone for a couple of days and my Mom & Dad, Grandma, and brother were gone. The neighbors were gone too. We lived a ways out of town. We thought we were OK. For 15 years that Collective bunch had left us alone. Now my family’s gone, just gone.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.” Junior’s voice broke as, unseen, he wiped away the tear running down his cheek.

  Round Mountain

  Toward the southern end of Nevada’s Big Smoky Valley, about 45 minutes south of Stonewall Ranch, huge mounds of earth rose from the valley floor. Giant dump trucks formed a steady procession along a haul road that ran up into the Toquima mountains on the valley’s east side. This was Round Mountain Gold Mine, one of Nevada’s richest.

  When conversation turns to gold mining, most people think of old prospectors, mules, and dank, dark, dangerous shafts below ground. Most modern gold mines are large open pit mines, and the gold is recovered by a heap leach process. The ore is mined, hauled, crushed, and piled up on an impermeable leach pad. A cyanide solution is percolated through the leach pile and collected after it has made its’ way through the pile. The cyanide grabs gold, platinum, palladium, silver, and other valuable metals as it percolates through the ore. It’ s sort of like making coffee. The gold and other valuable metals are then stripped out of solution and the cyanide solution is recycled back through the ore.

  The Round Mountain gold resource was discovered in 1906. The initial discovery was vein gold. That’s the stuff the old timers mined underground. The prospectors looked for quartz veins in rock. As volcanic activity forced molten quartz up through fissures in the native rock, gold would segregate itself to the outer edges of the quartz vein.
The underground miners would follow the quartz vein, mine the vein, haul the ore to a crushing mill, then separate out the gold, usually by a wet gravity scheme. In other words, they panned it.

  Modern gold extraction is much more efficient and captures all the gold that is present, not just the vein gold. Many modern gold operations cover their costs from the ancillary metals recovered; silver, palladium, platinum, copper, to name the most common. Round Mountain produced about 350,000 ounces of gold per year and 120,000 ounces of silver.

  The company town of Round Mountain, Nevada was located about a mile away, just across NV 376 from the mine. Due to Round Mountain’s remote location, many employees lived in the town of Round Mountain. Most, but not all, of those employees were White. The Hispanic portion of the workforce had steadily grown and there were a few Black employees, many of whom had worked there for many years. None of these employees expected, or approved, of the events of March 12, 2027.

  After being discharged from the Marines in early 2026, Thomas Jackson returned home and got a job driving one of the huge haul trucks that moved gold ore from the mine to the mill for processing. He usually arrived home about 5:00 p.m., but today he arrived home about 3:00. His wife, Patty, saw Tom’s truck turn off NV 376 onto their gravel lane.

  Patty was waiting on the front porch as Tom got out of the truck, “Tom, what are you doing home so early? I haven’t even started supper.”

  “Patty, honey, get into the house.”

  Patty and Tom had only been married 6 years, but Patty had a pretty good read on Thomas and knew something was wrong.

  “Sit down honey, you won’t believe what went down today.”

  Patty poured them both a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to hear Tom out.

  “About 10:00 a.m. two olive drab school busses rolled up to the Main Gate at Round Mountain. I believe those buses were surplus from the closure of the Mercury Test Site, you know, when The Collective unilaterally dismantled all our nukes back in January. The buses were packed with Peoples’ Militia, probably from Las Vegas. They looked more like an armed mob than a militia.”

  Patty leaned forward and listened intently, not speaking a word as Tom continued, “I’ve heard tell that since the Revolution, The Collective controls the big cities, especially along both Coasts, maybe Chicago too. We haven’t seen them until today, but everyone at Round Mountain, you know, the Crew, expected The Collective would show up sooner or later. Now, so far, we have adjusted to the situation, waiting for the next shoe to drop. That shoe dropped today.”

  Tom’s hand was shaking so hard the coffee was splashing out of his cup.

  Patty put her hand on his, “Tom, whatever happened today, we’ll get by.”

  “Let me finish, we may not have much time. Behind the two school busses was a fancy motor coach, like one of them tour busses, and it was full of Chinese sons-of-bitches. Round Mountain only has a few armed security guards, and they didn’t know what to do when that bunch demanded entry. The Collective is supposed to be the government, right?

  “Management called the Nye County Sheriff’s office in Tonopah. Those guys can get here in 45 minutes, or less. All they got over the phone was a recording saying, ‘Good Day, Member. The Nye County Sheriff’s Department has been defunded. Local Coordinators will contact you with details of your liberation.’ Can you believe it?”

  “Good Lord, Tom. They’ve taken over Tonopah.”

  “That’s not the half of it. The Militia started rounding up the Crew at gunpoint. Some of the guys wrecked the mill and the gold recovery circuits as best they could before those video game playing bastards knew what was happening. We soaked four of those idiots with cyanide solution and they dropped like flies. We wrecked all the heavy equipment too and just in time.

  “They announced over the radio that all employees should assemble in the Front Office Parking Area, like we were going to follow their instructions. Most everyone just left the mine and headed to town. Guns came out of glove boxes, out of gun safes, off gun racks and even out of purses. Guess The Collective’s ban on firearms didn’t work out so well.

  “It didn’t take long for a bus load of those Peoples’ Pricks to drive the short distance from the mine over to town. When their bus started up Electrum Blvd. toward town, they ran into the roadblock we set up using a dozer and a front-end loader. The Militia piled out of the bus. Most all of the 4x4s in Round Mountain were out in the desert circling the Peoples’ Militia, so I hopped in the Dodge and joined in. We were kicking up one hell of a dust storm, like Indians circling a wagon train.”

  “How could you see anything?”

  “Couldn’t see much, and the noise from the trucks was deafening, but then the trucks stopped. So, I stopped the Dodge, listened, and tried to peer through the dust. Everything was quiet for a few minutes, except for the wind.

  “Then, from our roadblock, someone called out over a bullhorn, ‘Peoples’ Militia, throw down your weapons and put your hands in the air.’

  “Those Militia assholes just opened up on us. So, we unloaded on those Pricks. After about 10 minutes, no more gunfire was coming from the bus. Not a single Militiaperson was left alive, we made sure of that.”

  “Honey, you didn’t…”

  “Patty, this isn’t a game. All our lives are at stake. We did what we had to do.”

  “Tom, it was self-defense, but killing people is so senseless.”

  “As far as I know that scum is still lying out there along the road. I hope the coyotes, buzzards, and crows have a feast.”

  Tom took a big sip of coffee, then went over to the cupboard, pulled out a bottle, and “sweetened” the coffee just a little bit before continuing.

  “We climbed back into our trucks and returned to the mine. As we approached the Front Office parking lot, the other busload of Militia had a few prisoners, mostly our office staff, lying on the ground at gunpoint. We surrounded the parking lot. Then the Mill Lead Man, Frank, called out over the bullhorn for the Militia to stand down if they didn’t want to join their friends in hell.”

  “Did they give up?”

  “They just stood there for a few tense moments, then one of ‘em dropped his gun, put his hands in the air, and went down on his knees. The rest of the Peoples’ Militia gradually followed suit.”

  “Thank God, Tom, you didn’t have to kill any more of them.”

  “Honey, that’s not the end of the story. Frank then called out over the bullhorn, radio, and PA System for all Chinese volunteers to assemble in the parking lot. We forced one of the Militia who spoke Chinese to repeat the order, just to make sure everyone understood.

  “As the last of the Chinese ‘advisors’ joined us in the Round Mountain parking lot, two A-10 Warthogs made a low pass over the town of Round Mountain. I have no idea where they came from. Wherever they came from, they got there quickly. Maybe they were based at Groom Lake, Fallon, or Indian Springs. Probably not Nellis, too far away. Who knows?”

  “Honey, I thought The Collective shut down Groom Lake and Indian Springs.”

  “I’ve heard different stories about that. Some say Chinese advisors are out there stealing our technology. That makes sense considering what they did next…”

  “What did they do?”

  ‘’A few minutes after their first pass, the Warthogs came back in low and slow and napalmed the town. The school, church, post office, and general store are all gone. On the next pass, they strafed the town with their 30mm gatling guns. I’m afraid there aren’t many survivors.”

  “Tom, Round Mountain has a couple of thousand residents. What American would do that?”

  “You’re right, that would be hard core, even for The Collective. I think the Chinese just sent us a message. You know, it would take a while to prep a Warthog for an actual combat mission. I wonder if those planes were on alert, or else already ‘on station’ near Round Mountain. Looking back on it, I think they were going to bomb the town regardless. But now it’s a moot point.
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br />   “We hogtied all the Militia and Chinese in the parking lot and lined them up. Most of the Chinese spoke better English than the Militia. Some of that Collective bunch couldn’t speak a word. All those bastards were begging and crying. Every Round Mountain worker and surviving resident joined the firing squad. We shot the Militia, one-by-one, in the back of the head. Then we killed the Chinese real slow. Each of the ChiComs was dragged behind a pickup and given a little tour of Round Mountain. We piled all the bodies up on NV 376 and planted a real American flag in the middle of that stinking pile.”

  “Tom, that’s barbaric.”

  “You’re right. It was barbaric. The worst part of this whole mess is those bastards caused me to break my Oath. That will never happen again.

  “Babe, they could be here any moment. This is war. Take Mom and the boys up the creek to the shelter. When you get there lock the door, load a 12 gauge, and blast anyone that comes through that door.”

  “Tom, what are you going to do?”

  “Me and Dad have to get ready. I’ll come get you when it’s all clear.”

  Stonewall Ranch

  Big Smoky Valley was initially settled after the Civil War. Some settlers were Mormon, some were fortune hunters, some were refugees from the California gold fields. Some, like Thomas J. Jackson, were Southerners looking for a new life. The fortune hunters were drawn to the Valley by the gold and silver strikes.

  Thomas drifted west from his family home in Winchester, Virginia in the mid-1880s. He was only 20 years old. Along the way, he stopped for a few months in St. Joe, Missouri. That’s where he met and married Abigail Smith. That’s also where he heard about gold and silver in Nevada.

  A couple of years later, after saving up a grubstake, the Jacksons continued west and stopped for a while in Salt Lake City. From there they traveled the Overland Trail to Austin, Nevada. Parts of that trail coincided with the Pony Express Trail, which can still be seen just north of Austin. For a couple of years, they worked in and around the various gold and silver camps in the Big Smoky Valley, from Austin in the north to Manhattan in the south.