Divided We Stand (What's Left of My World Book 4)

by C. A. Rudolph

  “That doesn’t exactly leave me with a lot of choices, Janey.”

  Dave approached the group and pushed out his chest, his right hand falling perilously close to his sidearm. The crowd’s volume decreased to a murmur. “Gents, I understand you’re a trifle riled up, and it looks like the drinks I endowed you with haven’t exactly served to enhance your sense of calm. That’s all right, I suppose. All of us need room to vent every now and then. But you can all forget about round two. There isn’t going to be one. Unless, of course, we’re talking about a round of drinks. I’d serve them up myself if that were the case. But seeing as it’s not, the only way round two is going to happen is if I’m involved. And I mean right here, at this very moment.”

  “Shut uuup! You’re out of your league, old man!” the gruff voice shouted.

  Dave hung his head in laughter. “Now, which one of you peckerwoods said that?” he asked, his hands not having moved from his hips. “Go on now, speak up.” A pause for reply, though none was heard. “Okay. Remain anonymous then, pussycat. You might want to beware this old man, though, or any old man who works in a profession where men tend to die young.”

  No one said anything for a moment until the leader spoke. “Not meaning to insult your uniform,” Major Frank droned, “but do you honestly think any of us is stupid enough to tangle with you while you got a gun on your hip?”

  “Thanks for pointing that out, Major pain. How silly of me.” He unbuckled his belt and removed it, along with his holstered Sig Sauer, spare magazines, Gerber LMF fighting knife, and IFAK. Snapping the Cobra buckle back together, he tossed it, where it landed safely in Lauren’s hands yards behind. “It’s pretty irresponsible of me to be carrying a weapon after I’ve consumed a few adult beverages.” He held out two open palms. “See? Now I’m naked. You boys feel any better?”

  Dave used his index finger to count heads while he scanned the cluster of faces. “Let’s see…eeny, meeny, miney, moe, catcha, tango, by his, toe. Looks like six or seven brave souls with the eye of the tiger…along with one or two bigmouths still hiding in the middle, who may or may not jump in later on, leaving the rest of you to stand by as cowards. I’m just one man. I say that makes us even.”

  Dave squinted and stood erect, offering cocky winks to accompany his confident grin and sly brow. He did so without saying anything, anticipating an attack all the while, though none came his way. “So that’s it? All of you against me and no one wants to kick off the crusade?” He spit on the ground. “No one wants to be the first? What do you think about that, Major? Kind of funny, don’t you think?”

  “What’s so funny about it?” asked Frank, his mouth twisting into a scowl.

  “Wasn’t it you guys—the patriot militia and three percenters who came up with the saying about everyone wanting to be a patriot until the time comes to do patriot shit?” Dave badgered. “Gentlemen…wake the hell up! Time is of the essence! Here I am! A veteran! Right here in the flesh! From what I’ve overheard tonight, you’re pissed with me and others like me. Made us all objects of your hostility. I’ve just given you an opportunity to clean the slate and make things right, and not a single damn one of you stepped forward. Now, take one guess what that tells me about you.”

  Dave turned away after another moment of silence, motioning for Lauren to return his sidearm. She hopped over hastily with his gear and stood by him a moment before walking away, but not before taking several sips of his beer, making sure he saw her do it.

  “Now that I have everyone’s attention, I’m going to address some of the things I heard tonight,” Dave said, lecturing the crowd as a whole, the bitterness of his tone finding some calm. “I am a man who simply cannot allow things to slide by without delivering an adequate response. It’s my personal belief that continued lack of that very thing was the foremost reason this country transformed into a full-on idiocratic shitshow. And I’m talking long before the lights went out.”

  Dave broke off as one of his men approached with a fresh bottle of German lager. “I have a question for you fellas,” he began, cracking it open with his Gerber. “What did you really think was going to happen? I mean, it’s no secret. Your group and most others like yours have always represented the embodiment of government distrust. Did you really believe FEMA was going to come way the hell out here and save you when the world turned upside down? That the Red Cross, National Guard, and all the other federal, state, and privately run agencies were sitting around, waiting for something like this to happen, so they could respond in kind and make your lives better again? Tell me—when has that ever happened before? During which disaster? The countless wildfires and earthquakes in California? Tornado outbreaks in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma? The Mississippi River flooding? All the blizzards in New England? Hurricane Andrew or Katrina? When was the last time you ever witnessed a performance by any disaster relief agency, particularly FEMA, that displayed anything other than widespread incompetence?”

  Dave took a long drink. “News flash. It’s not the Army’s job to play rescue on the home front, and the National Guard is inclined to put down civil unrest before taking part in any recovery effort, if at all. Now, gentlemen, we can sit around here, argue, gripe, and complain. We can bitch about why this particular scenario happened and whether or not it was chosen for us, and why things didn’t happen the way they should’ve, why it took so long for some level of response to take place, and why things got so bad as quickly as they did. We can do that, or we can all choose to direct our collective focus to the future and concentrate our efforts on what matters and what we’re trying to achieve, because we can’t go back and change what’s already happened. It doesn’t matter who did it or who’s responsible. We could find out tomorrow, or we may never find out.

  “Let me clue you in on something. The folks who really rule this world of ours, the ones you’ve heard called all sorts of things—the elite, the one percent, the establishment—they play people in our government like game pieces on a chessboard, and the moves they make trickle down and eventually affect all of us. Every move serves to elicit a reaction from another player. They’re patient, and they think things through, and they’ve been at this business for a long damn time. They make a move, sit back and thumb their beards, and sip brandy, watch, and wait. If they don’t get what they want, they try something else. Changes come in increments. Not fast or in chunks, because the working class would take notice, and that’s not what they want. Consequently, for the past century or longer, they’ve been slowly planting the seeds of hate. Pitting us against each other and doing everything in their power to divide us as a people and as a country, to serve as a means to an end. And sorry as I am to admit it, they succeeded.”

  “So what are you saying?” the young man with the bruised face asked. “That the government and the elite did this to us? Or they didn’t?”

  “Neither,” Dave replied sternly. “I’m saying I don’t know. I’m saying nobody knows for certain. But I’m also telling you it doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. What if they really are sitting in a bunker somewhere, watching all this go down?”

  Dave took a long drink, grinned, and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “Do you know how stupid you sound right now? You actually ever been to Mount Weather, son?”

  “No…”

  “Do you know what’s really underneath that escarpment of limestone and granite? Nothing. Not one damn thing worth getting riled up about. I know because I’ve been there. Because I’m former SF—United States Army Special Forces, which is a subtle way of saying I know more than you do. During my stint in the military and my prior career as a civilian, I garnered one of the highest clearances attainable by Homo sapiens. I’ve been all over Area B. But I’ve also been to the sections that’ve never been declassified, to places so deep underground you can feel the effects of geothermal flux.

  “There’s a self-contained power plant, water and sewer, and even a desalinization plant, so they can utilize the saltwater a
quifers the Corps of Engineers dug up by accident during Operation High Point in 1954. There are hundreds of offices, sleeping quarters, a hospital, a crematorium, and they even got Wi-Fi. But there’s no city, no shopping mall, and no ultranationalist, all-knowing, all-powerful, new world order collective down there in some marble Noah’s Ark trimmed in gold and diamonds. You can believe that if you want, but it just isn’t so.”

  The young man hung his head and shuffle-stepped away, unwilling to say anything else.

  “What the facility is set up for is disaster mitigation and continuity of government. And for all we know, it could be in operation today,” Dave continued. “If so, fine. Whatever. Doesn’t change a damn thing for me, my men, or any of you. The government does not have our best interests in mind, and never did. And the greater good isn’t about us, and never was. They’re not coming to help us. All the government ever served to do was violate our rights and remove our freedoms systematically, replacing them with permission slips and illusions of security. Then they surveilled us and spied on us and turned our nation into a fascist police state. No. Our true enemy is an ethereal leviathan that’s never once shown its face, probably never will, and at least for now, remains untouchable. If this was their doing, well, I guess they got what they wanted. But they found their Zion a long time ago, and this ain’t it.”

  Major Frank inched closer to Dave, seemingly unimpressed with his speech thus far. “You know a lot,” he garbled, a newly opened bottle of liquor in his grasp. “Explain to all of us what happened, then…why the military, in all its might, didn’t get called in to help clean up the mess? Riddle me that with your la-di-da, ‘I know more than you’ security clearance.”

  Dave began again with a shrug of indifference. “The whole point of clearances is compartmentalization, Frank. They’re not set up for people to know things, its purpose is so they don’t know things. It’s echelons of information, treated as real, when most of it means nothing. It’s disinformation—mostly bullshit, like most of the stuff you think you know.”

  He paused before continuing and started pacing around the fire. “When the power went off, so did our lights. Cell phones stopped working. Cars idled to a stop in the middle of the roads. All the familiar and comforting sounds people were used to hearing just went silent. It was like time ended. And it didn’t take long for panic to set in and for people to lose their sense of normalcy, and their damn minds soon after. They tried to make calls, and they couldn’t. Tried to revive their cars, and couldn’t. They asked questions, and no one had any answers. They went to get money and found their credit and debit cards were useless. Most everyone depended on imaginary currency, and no shop owner was stupid enough to accept anything but cash, so people couldn’t buy the things they needed or wanted.

  “People found themselves miles from home with no way to get back, no means to buy anything or call anyone. Kids were stuck at school with no one coming to pick them up…and that’s just a smidgeon of what happened in the small towns and rural areas, Major. How do you think it went down in the big cities and outlying suburban areas? We’re talking millions upon millions of people stacked one on top of each other—crammed together like pigs in a slaughterhouse. Boston, Philly, New York, DC, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Miami. Need I go on? Those cities were turned upside down—transformed into war zones in a matter of days, some in the span of hours. And the National Guard, Army, and eventually even the Marines were called in. And that’s why they didn’t have time to show up to your doorstep in BFE to deliver food, offer protection, and wipe your ass for you. We sent our bravest men and women, our country’s finest, into metropolitan America to protect the cities and fight against our own people. Can you imagine what that would be like?”

  Dave paused, taking a breath. He cast a frigid stare beyond the tens of eyes staring back at him. “You trained for years to become a soldier, an infantryman. Trained rigorously to defend your country, its people, and value democracy, the republic, and freedom more than you value anything, even your own life. And then, one day, you’re being ordered to march in lockstep into one of your own cities and turn your rifle on the very people whose liberties you were trained to protect. That is the absolute quantification of a mindfuck. To make matters worse, you’re vastly outnumbered, and men, women, and even children are now attacking you because you’re supposed to be there to help, and you’re not, because you can’t.

  “You’re aiming a gun at them now, and you’ve been given strict orders to put them down. To save the cities. To save the country. To protect the so-called greater good. And I’m telling you, as God as my witness, it wore on them…in no time flat. I’d bet anything that the majority of them went unauthorized absence or AWOL, and I wouldn’t blame them. Officers relinquished their commissions and went back to their families. And, I imagine like most wars, there were thousands of casualties. God only knows what happened to the rest. Probably spread out all over, searching for another way to survive. Like us.”

  Dave poked the juiced-up major in his chest. “As far as veterans go, you’re looking at them,” he continued, motioning beyond to his men gathered in the darkness, most of whom had moved in closer to hear what was being said. “Those are your worthless has-beens, Major pain. Approximately ninety percent of the men and women in my unit have prior military experience. I spent years training with them, but it took a hell of a long time finding people who wanted to train. Before the collapse, almost a million vets across the country, men and women both, came home to nothing after their tours and had to struggle to keep their heads above water. Deployed, their skills were viable, but at home, it just wasn’t so. Most ended up on government programs, welfare, food stamps and the like, while the VA did its part in making them feel even more useless, diagnosing them with PTSD, manic depression, ADHD, sleep disorders, and mental health issues galore. Then they filled them up with painkillers, antidepressants or other psychotropics because they needed them.

  “About two hundred thousand veterans found themselves barred from owning guns because of one cheesedick psychiatric evaluation.” Dave continued, taking a look around. “Take a perfectly good man, a decorated serviceman who’s valiantly served his country, seen his share of blood and guts, then bring him home and convince him something’s wrong with him. Diagnose him with some bullshit psychosis and make him feel more alone than he already is, then drug him to the point he falls helplessly into depression or worse, and his only option is becoming a recluse no one wants to be around. Alone, he pops pills and drinks himself into oblivion every night and eventually turns a gun on himself, if he doesn’t manage to take a hundred other people with him purely for the goddamn hell of it.”

  Dave regarded all the watchful eyes in proximity. He had their undivided attention now. “People, last thing I want to do is spend all night long harping on you folks. I promised everyone here some downtime, and I meant it. If you have questions you want answers to, ask them and I’ll tell you what I know. Aside from that, I have no intention of allowing the division to continue between our groups, especially over something so petty. Before I started running off at the mouth tonight, everyone here was ready to rise up. Some of you probably for the first time in your lives. But it wasn’t against a real enemy. It was over inconsequential differences with a fellow human being—a fellow American. And for what? Because he disagrees with your opinion? Because his skin is a different color? Because he wears a different uniform?

  “Sun Tzu said that if an enemy’s forces are united, to separate them. That if sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Meaning an enemy divided is easily defeated. And that is exactly what’s happened to us on the grand scale. Those in power found innumerable ways to divide us. They showed us how to hate one another, and even found ways to make us feel good about it. Then they propped their feet up and enjoyed the spoils while we were left to quibble over the scraps they spoon-fed us. Well, fellas, I gotta tell you all…I’m done quibbling. My preference is to move forward, r
ise above all this, and see us all get what we want, but the only way that’s gonna happen is if we work together toward a common cause. There’s simply no other option. If you have a better one, please speak up. I am all ears. But the men behind me feel the same way I do; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here.”

  “Can we leave?” a voice called out. “Can we just go home?”

  “Of course you can,” Dave said. “All of you are free men, free to go anywhere you like. But it’s tough out there. That’s why I’m indulged to allow you to stay and join us. But if you decide that’s what you want, know now that I do not allow dissention within my ranks. Take a stand with us, we fight together. Go against us, or try to subvert us, and I’ll kill each and every one of you and let God sort you out. There is entirely too much on the line, and I intend to get my country back with or without your help. I don’t care what it takes.”

  Dave paused. “I don’t have, nor do I offer a panacea, but I do possess the means to get this done. I just need some more bodies. Able bodies with the proper mindset. Men and women who want to see the republic restored and our Constitution reinstalled as the supreme law of the land. It doesn’t matter what got us here. One-world government and the push for a totalitarian global system, population control, whatever. I’m telling you it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, and this country’s population has been decimated as a result. Those wanting to know how, use your imagination.

  “The whole point of this rambling is to clue you all in on something probably not many of you have given any thought to. That this country, up until the point the EMP took us out, wasn’t free. We were living under an illusion of freedom. You can scoff all you like, grumble and groan all you want, but it won’t change the fact that we had a fascist government at best. One that spied on us, stole from us, scared us into submission every day, and did so with complete autonomy. We were slaves then, but we’re not slaves anymore. If anything, that pulse installed some balance and allowed nature to take its course…while having done so at great cost.” Dave shrugged. “But that’s life. Such is history, folks. We cannot achieve the things we want without sacrifice. And if we want to continue getting what we want, we’ve got to build on that sacrifice and keep moving forward together despite our differences.” He paused, turning to Major Frank. “That’s all I got, Major. Mull it over in that melon of yours. I’ll be over there with that pretty young lady, enjoying a few more of these Bavarian beers, if you decide you want to talk.”