The Last Pilgrims

by Michael Bunker

  David wiped his forehead with the ample sleeve of his tan cotton blouse and remounted his horse. He looked at Piggy, who was tossing his razor sharp knife up and then catching it and spinning it on his hand, mindless of any danger.

  “Nobody else throws knives from horseback, Piggy, so why are we doing this?”

  “Because you are training with Piggy, David Wall! If you were training with someone else, you wouldn’t be throwing knives from horseback. It’s really quite simple.”

  “I mean, shouldn’t I learn to throw knives from standing on the ground first?”

  “Some might believe that. I don’t. I believe that you should train for the way you would fight. When you learned to ride, did you sit on a saddle on the ground first, or did you climb up on a horse? Piggy’s way is to do.”

  “I’m not sure that those things are the same,” David said, frowning.

  Piggy waved off David’s objection. “Nothing is the same with anything it is not. Besides, it doesn’t matter if they are the same. This is Piggy’s Way!” Piggy laughed and spread his arms wide. “If I can train you to throw knives effectively from horseback—and there is no telling if I can, as I’ve failed with all these monkeys I live with—but if I can train you to do it, then you will have a skill that will help you and even feed you for the rest of your life. If I fail—which I am likely to do—then you can learn to throw a knife from the ground like any one of the monkeys.”

  “Ok, Piggy.”

  “Again!”

  The training, both mental and physical, had been brutal and consistent. In a very short time, David had learned to sleep on his horse without falling off; how to stay up all night on watch; how to move almost soundlessly through just about any environment; and, most importantly, he had learned how to blend in. To blend in, you first had to move without being seen; and, if seen, you must move without being noticed; if noticed, you had to move without raising suspicion; however, if you raised suspicion, you had to move without any risk of being caught.

  Phillip’s teaching was simple in its philosophy, and difficult in its practical application. He wanted an army that was as natural to the environment as the mesquite tree or the diamondback rattlesnake. It needed to be able to stand perfectly still and be unnoticed; it needed to be able to move quickly and definitively without being tracked or monitored; and it needed to be able to strike anywhere, in any direction, at any time, from a position of strength and surprise.

  Phillip taught David that the primary battlefield was that of the mind; thus, his military needed to be able to overwhelm the minds of the enemy. He firmly believed that, if you triumph in the mind, you would almost certainly triumph in battle.

  Like Stonewall Jackson’s brigade, Phillip wanted to be able to break every maxim of war. He wanted to be able to divide his forces and simultaneously attack two or more enemies, dozens of miles apart, each with superior numbers. He wanted to be able to attack one enemy in the evening and then move rapidly 80-100 miles over rough terrain overnight to attack another. In this way, his forces would seem to be 10 times larger than they were in reality. By traveling light, living off the land, and blending seamlessly into the environment, the Ghost militia would be everywhere and nowhere. He did not believe in ‘campaigns’ as they were traditionally fought. He believed in attrition—slowly and methodically destroying the enemy’s will to fight, and thus their effectiveness.

  Phillip always told David that the militia’s greatest asset was Texas itself. He would say, “The land and the people of Texas are, by their nature, ungovernable, except by God.” They had, for well over 150 years, allowed themselves to be ruled over by their lust, greed and covetousness; however, that period was an anomaly never to be repeated so long as he lived.

  David threw the knife at the target again, this time forcing himself to keep his elbow high, his arm path short and under control. He had a mental image of the rotations as the knife left his hand, and, as it stuck in the board, he felt an elation run through him that he had never felt before.

  “Excellent!” Piggy exclaimed. “Now, the trick is to do that repeatedly, so that you develop muscle memory and thought memory. It needs to be as natural as brushing your teeth.”

  David smiled broadly, “When do I learn to hit a moving target?”

  “New Rome wasn’t built in a day, Brother David. Training is our credo and our life. Now… do it again!”

  Around midday, the men gathered in small groups spread around the perimeter that Phillip had outlined for them. Their meal was a large hunk of pemmican—ground up and powdered meat solidified into chunks with rendered fat and berry powder. It was to be eaten with hard, dried, flat biscuits that would be dipped in water to make them soft. At each mealtime, one small group out of the entire unit would elect a single member in rotation whose job it was to try to move around the perimeter without being seen by the other groups. It almost never happened, but it was a constant reminder to stay focused and alert even when relaxing. Still, this exercise was never attempted at night because, inevitably, the scout would have been killed by the hyper-alert militia watches. On occasion, different members of the militia would be invited to have a night off, when they were expected to dine at his father’s table.

  The only unit that was exempt from the usual training regimen was the small unit of personal guards assigned to the Wall family. Since he was now a member of the militia, David was excluded from this duty. Piggy was generally a regular member of the protection unit due to his expertise in close quarters combat, but he had requested training duty with David, and Phillip had conceded to the request.

  After they had eaten, as the sun reached its apex in the sky, Piggy mounted his horse and called him over to resume training.

  “Up you, Master Wall! The day is still young and we have only just begun.”

  “So, no siesta then?”

  “Ghost militia men sleep only after death, sir.”

  “I’ve heard that before, but I thought I’d give it a try.”

  “We’ve more training to do, and you might like what I have planned for the afternoon.”

  “Throwing knives from the back of a flying bird?”

  “That, sir, is a skill I keep to myself. Let’s ride.”

  As they rode off eastward, Piggy made light-hearted banter and they discussed the history of the Ghost militia, and the events that lead to Phillip becoming the fly in the soup of the King of Aztlan.

  “At some point, at least a decade before the collapse,” Piggy said, “your father and Phillip split up… for reasons we can all imagine, but which no one ever really talks about. Phillip, just as your father did, saw what was coming and that the collapse was inevitable, but they disagreed on what to do about it. They both believed that the collapse would bring on a long period of chaos, disorder, and lawlessness, which it did. However, Phillip believed that only through armed resistance and group defense could the free people remain free.

  “Your father, obviously, believed that by building a new and separate infrastructure, and by focusing solely on obedience to God in life, living, and worldview—without any plans or designs for violence or defense—people would be defended by God supernaturally.”

  David scanned the horizon and pushed his hat further forward on his head. “It’s hard to argue who was right. It seems contradictory, but I sometimes wonder if combining both approaches were necessary,” he said.

  “If you believe in the sovereignty of God,” Piggy nodded, “then you have to submit to the fact that God has everything under control, and that, perhaps, we overreach ourselves when we try to intervene or figure it all out.”

  Pulling up on the reins, David brought his horse to a halt. “Prince Gareth is intent on finding a way to get my father and our people to fight. It consumes his thoughts. How can so many people, with so many agendas all be right?”

  “I’m not sure that this is about ‘right’ in a moral sense, David. I mean, if one man says to skin a cat from the bottom up, and the other says
from the top down, which one is morally right?” Piggy asked. “We’re in this fight, and we’re all trying to obey our consciences and do what we think God wants us to do without selling our souls. Some people can argue this morally, but I am not one of them—I’m too simple for that. The Prince believes that the only way that his father the King will be overthrown is with the moral authority and numerical might of the Vallenses, but… does he risk and harm that moral authority by encouraging them to fight? I don’t know.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You chose to fight, and by doing so, you obeyed your conscience, which is the only safe thing to do. As for us, we are the Ghost militia. This is our life and our lot. We are King David’s mighty men. ‘Obedience is ours,’ as they say, ‘and results belong to God.’”

  David began to be increasingly curious as the pair rode farther and farther away from the camp. After about five miles of conversation, he turned to Piggy and asked him where they were going.

  “About five more miles to a small rise the boys have come to call ‘Mayberry Mountain’. I’ll tell you why we are going there when we get there,” Piggy replied without breaking his own train of thought in the conversation.

  “Your father and many like-minded families started their off-grid life and community about ten years before the crash, and about five years before you and I were born, David. Phillip left the community almost immediately after the schism and started to recruit only the men that fit his vision of what the militia should be.

  “Phillip was well aware of most of the failures of militant ‘anti-government’ groups that came before the crash. One-hundred percent of those groups were fully infiltrated by government agents or paid informants, and almost all of them were founded on some really dodgy political and cultural philosophies and ideals. Phillip never received anyone into his group unless he himself had recruited them, initiated contact with them, and knew them in a way that precluded them being an agent or a paid informant. He recruited just like the intelligence agencies recruited. He focused on intelligent and resourceful men that were disenchanted and powerless. Surprisingly, he recruited heavily from the military and law-enforcement. So many of those men had an insider’s view of what was wrong with the world.

  “He trained his men very carefully, and avoided anything that looked or seemed openly militaristic. Moreover, he only recruited Christians that rejected politics as a solution. He did not want anyone who wanted power or leverage in the post-crash world.”

  David listened intently as they rode. Some of this he knew in a kind of superficial way, but most of the details that Piggy had just revealed were new to him. “How did they stay under the radar?”

  “Well,” Piggy continued, “as I said before, they avoided political involvement and almost never used the Internet, except for very innocuous reasons. They spent little of their time or money on guns, other than to purchase basic hunting and self-defense weapons. They never appeared in public or trained as a complete unit.

  “The government had—by using government grants, think-tanks, social media, executive orders, secret legislation, and other such machinations—created the most immense and omnipresent data mining entity in history. Very complete and in-depth files were kept on any person or any group that even smelled faintly of being militant. Phillip diligently taught his men how not to ‘smell’.

  “When the crash happened, almost every so-called ‘anti-government’ group was taken out by the government or their private contractors in the first days and weeks—during the brief period when command and control was still quasi-available for them. This was easy for the government, since, as I said, almost 100% of these groups were already infiltrated and corrupted by imbedded agents and informants.

  “In the thirty years prior to the crash, the government had, in fact, become the anti-government/militia/patriot movement. Most of the leadership, and most of the ‘stars’ of that movement were what were known as agit-props—agents of agitation and propaganda. These people stirred up dissent, while managing to keep people engaged without ever really motivating them to do anything productive or relevant. They put out videos and other materials exposing the wrongdoing of government agencies, but they did so in a way that allowed them to manage the fall-out and keep track of anyone who stepped too far over the line.

  “Militia meetings, militant anti-government radio programs, and even survival and preparedness groups were started by, and remained under the control of, agents or agit-props of the federal government.

  “This is where your father and Phillip were in perfect concord, for they are still seen as the only ones capable of recognizing someone that was a witting or unwitting agent of the enemy. They both said, ‘If anyone stirs you up but gives you no concrete solutions on how to live in and through the troubles that are coming; if anyone fails to encourage you to provide for yourself and your family, to obey God, and to separate yourself from the corrupt system that is bound to fail; then, whether they know it or not—and usually they do—those wicked counselors are nothing but puppets of the corrupt system they pretend to oppose’.”

  “Both Phillip and Jonathan Wall preached that in order to separate from the beast, you had to live separate from it, and you had to quit enabling and supporting it.”

  David looked at Piggy, surprised that the militia soldier was so educated on the history of the collapse. He encouraged Piggy to continue by making a rolling signal with his right hand.

  Piggy shrugged and continued, “Phillip knew all of this before he got started, so he was way ahead of the game in the art of remaining invisible and off the target map. Phillip was probably already the foremost expert in the entire world on being invisible when the crash happened. The Central Intelligence Agency could have learned something from him!

  “Having been a special forces operative and a highly paid mercenary, he was well aware of what governments looked for in the way of opposition, and what mistakes insurgencies made in opposing governments. Phillip’s credo was ‘Know what they are looking for, and don’t be that. Know what they are not looking for, and try to emulate it.’ It helped that Phillip had no plans or designs on actions against the government, and never planned on using violence towards that end.”

  “So when the crash came, Phillip was ready for it?” David asked.

  “Surprisingly, no,” Piggy answered, shaking his head. “He knew that the crash was coming, but there had been so many drops and mini-crashes and soft-landings as precursors to the big one, some of them preceding the crash by a decade and a half. After so many years of false alarms, even Phillip had let his guard down. When the crash finally occurred, he was up in the mountains of New Mexico, in the heart of what would become New Rome, recruiting a former British SAS soldier that he had known some years before. He never expected to be so far from home when it happened, but, as it turned out, it ended up working out for the best.”

  David stopped his horse and took a big swig of water from his leather bota, turning to look at Piggy. “So, he had between 25 and 40 men when the crash went down, but there are very few oldlings left in the Ghost militia today. Where did they all go?”

  Piggy took a drink from his own bota, before turning around in his saddle to scan the area they had just covered. “Well, there are some of the original militia men left, but many of them died shortly after the crash. While they were all well trained and earnest, they had lived most of their lives within the comfortable realms of the industrial/consumer pre-crash world. They weren’t indigenous militia, raised in the bush. They were more susceptible to sickness and disease, their bodies accustomed to the world’s diet. Their senses weren’t as highly attuned to nature. There were many reasons, but it was a matter of attrition.”

  Piggy strapped his bota back on his horse and resumed the ride eastward. He gestured towards David, “Most of the militia men who fight today are even younger than you are, making you a middling. Being 25 years old in the militia today makes you an old man. But it also makes you a su
rvivor, and worthy of honor and respect.”

  As they approached the low rise called Mayberry Mountain, Piggy reined up about a quarter of a mile to the west, in a small, low draw surrounded by brush and boulders. The draw had a small amount of water in it, so they dismounted and let the horses drink. Behind them and to the north stretched the almost impenetrable area known as The Big Thicket—an area that David grew up hunting in, and knew well. Ahead of them was the low Mayberry mesa.

  “Ok,” David said, “so what is the plan?”

  “We often use this mesa as a tower to watch out to the east. From near the top, you can see for almost 20 miles out, past Lake Penateka and towards Comanche. If the enemy marches this way, you’ll be able to see them from up there.”

  “So I’m to keep watch?”

  “You are.”

  “This doesn’t sound like training,” he said, doubtfully.

  “Remember what I told you, Piggy trains by having you do.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “Only if you fail in any of the duties I assign you… which you will not.”

  Piggy squared up and looked David in the eye. “You will not sleep. You will not go to the top of the mesa unless it is pitch black outside with no moon. Keep the sun to your back during the day, but do not go up to the top because you will be silhouetted in the sky. You will not start a fire, and if you urinate or defecate, you will do so on the west side of the mesa, and bury the evidence.”

  “Ok,” David said, “and how long will I be here?”

  Piggy made a high piercing sound mimicking a hawk and, within a minute, a Ghost militia soldier appeared next to them, having crawled around to the west side of the mesa.

  “You will remain here until you are relieved of your duties, or spot the entire Aztlani army, in which case you should hurry back to inform us.”