For this trip Thad was carrying one of the MP5’s captured from the raiders. He had his trusty coach gun with him as well. He was riding in the back of Sarge’s buggy, the H&K looked ridiculously small in his big hands. Since I knew the route, once again I took the lead. Danny would ride parallel to us, keeping to our east as we moved north. We all had radios and could maintain contact, though it was understood we would keep transmissions to a minimum.
The trip to the north side of the range took a couple of hours. Every road we crossed required security precautions to be taken, slowing things down even more. We didn’t see anyone on the way, and that surprised me. As we got closer to the range, I got more nervous, remembering the Humvee I had seen at the barricade and what the hippies had told me about the DHS troopers coming out and making sweeps. I remember the kid with the messed-up teeth saying if you went along with them they wouldn’t bother you, but if you crossed the line they’d drop the boot on you. We were almost a mile to the west of the range, moving down small trails that rose and fell when Sarge called me and told me to stop on the next rise for a piss break.
At the crest of the hill I stopped and climbed off the Polaris. The two buggies soon pulled up and shortly after Danny came out of the woods as well. Sarge used the break to give a few last-minute instructions. We would leave the rides on that side of the road that ringed the range and go in on foot. Two men would stay with them and the rest of us would go in. Ted and Doc volunteered to stay behind, and Sarge liked that idea, Doc staying back in case anyone got hurt.
We loaded back up on the rides and headed for the point we would leave them. It didn’t take too long and again Sarge called for a halt. The two buggies each had a SAW mounted on them. Mike picked up Sarge’s SPW, the shortened version of the same weapon, and slipped the sling over his head. Little was said as we trotted off towards the range, with Sarge in the lead and Danny and I bringing up the rear. At the road that separated us from the range, Sarge paused, taking a knee and checking the road. After a moment, he waved Mike forward and he sprinted across the road.
After another short pause, Mike gave a thumbs up and one at a time we crossed the road. Once we were on the other side we immediately set off again. Mike stayed in the lead, working his way towards the fence. Once we were at the fence, a new problem revealed itself. On the inside of the fence and immediately behind it, the ground had been plowed up for about twelve feet and drug with what was probably a piece of fence weighed down with something. What this did was create a track trap; if anyone walked across it, it would be obvious the ground had been disturbed. This was a problem.
The best solution was to wait out the patrols and time them and see if they were regular or random, and then plan an entry, but we didn’t have that kind of time. Instead, Sarge positioned Danny at the fence where he could see down it in either direction for several hundred yards. If he saw an approaching patrol, he was to call it in and we would bug out. Not the best plan, but all we could do at the moment.
Mike cut a small hole in the fence and we quickly moved through it. The final approach was made much slower. Mike set the pace and we slowly made our way through the pine brush. Eventually the trees started to thin and the camp started to come into view. We spread out in a loose line and crawled up on our stomachs, staying just inside the tree line but with a full view of the camp from a small sandy hill. What stretched out before us was impressive and intimidating at the same time.
Rows and rows of tents, the big military style, ran off for what looked like a mile. There were neatly painted signs that I could read through my binos. They were marked with letters and numbers and at intersections there were posts signs that read MEDICAL, MESS HALL, SHOWERS and LATRINE. The place was not what I had expected; it looked nice. I had been expecting a concentration camp.
I told Sarge that.
He said, “What do you see down there?” looking through his binos.
I scanned the camp again. “Tents, people, chow halls and latrines. Looks like a well-run refugee camp.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Thad said.
“I see that too, but there’s more,” Sarge said.
I scanned the camp. “Like what?”
“You see the yellow tape?” Sarge asked.
“Yes.”
Yellow caution tape like you’d see on a construction site ran down the two sides we could see, supported intermittently supported by four-by-four posts.
“See anyone outside the tape?”
I scanned the area, then I saw what Sarge was getting at. There were guard towers at the corners with machine guns mounted in them.
“You see across the camp? See those towers?” Sarge asked.
I looked across the camp. We could only see the tops of several towers, but coming out from behind a row of tents was a part of a cage made from chain link fence. It even had a top on it. Inside I could see two people in orange jumpsuits. they looked like inmates at the county jail.
“I guess they probably have some bad apples,” Thad said.
I grunted.
“Alright, do you see that group of people down there working, the ones with shovels?” Sarge asked.
I looked down on the camp and did see a group of people that were filling what looked like sandbags. They worked in twos, one holding a bag, one filling the bag with white sand. Standing around them were several armed men forming a lose ring around them. I still didn’t think it was as bad as Sarge was making it out to be. A cloud of dust rose from the front of the camp, and all the people looked towards it, which is what caused me to look that way.
A row of four white buses came rolling to a stop, escorted by Humvees with gunners and machine guns in their turrets. Hearing faint shouts, I looked back to the group that was working. The armed men were shouting at them, pointing and running around. The workers went back to their task, though most of those holding the bags kept an eye on the buses.
A group of armed men gathered around the buses before the doors opened. The doors soon opened and people began to pour out. The group of armed men waiting on them began to drive them towards a fenced area with kicks and shoves. It was obvious the people getting off the bus were disoriented, and that’s when I noticed the windows on the buses were blacked out.
“How’s that look for friendly?” Sarge asked.
I scanned the camp again, looking back to the group filling bags as shouts drifted across the camp. Two women were working together; an older looking woman was holding the bag as another filled it. The one filling the bag paused for a moment and looked up towards the woods. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, then looked down at her palm and rubbed at it. She turned a bit and I could see her face. I reached over and hit Thad. He looked at me and I pointed.
“Look at those two women,” I said.
“Where?” Thad asked, looking at the group.
“On the right side, she’s looking this way, see her?”
Thad stared through the binos for a second. “Yeah, I do.”
The radio cracked. “There’s a truck on the fence line,” Danny called.
“Let’s go, move, now!” Sarge barked.
We crawled back from the trees and rose to a crouch and began to sprint back to the hole in the fence. Sarge called Danny asking for an update. He told us to hold inside the trees. There was a small hill the truck would start down in a moment and we would be able to cross without being seen. Mike was kneeling at the edge of the drag, the SPW pointed down the fence.
“Move, move now!” Danny called.
We sprinted across the drag and pulled ourselves through the fence. It seemed to take forever with mag pouches hanging up and other things snagging. As soon as we cleared the fence we all started moving towards the road in a sprint. Mike hit the road first and took a knee, scanning the road. Once everyone was at t
he road, Mike sprinted across and I followed him. Just as I cleared the road, Thad started across. He was at a full run in the center of the road when a Humvee rounded the corner less than one hundred yards from him.
The truck gunned its engine, and even over the sound of the diesel I heard the gunner yell, “Contact front!” and then his machine gun opened up. The driver drove hard and fast and was between our two groups in a flash. Mike immediately opened up on the truck. We gave them fire from both sides of the road and the driver began to back out as the gunner shouted.
Mike was screaming for us to move, and in the radio I could hear Sarge say he was moving south to cross the road. The firing let up on his side as they started to move. Mike called out, “Reloading!” and suddenly it was real quiet, with only Thad firing. I hadn’t even pulled the trigger. The Humvee roared its engine again and the gunner brought his weapon to bear on our side of the road. The amount of lead slapping into the trees around us forced the three of us onto the ground. Leaves, pine needles and debris fell on us like a storm.
The sound of all those bullets cracking over our heads was terrifying. Mike was screaming into his radio and suddenly Ted appeared, standing over me. He fired the SAW from his shoulder in long bursts and brass spewed from the hot weapon down around me.
He let off the trigger for a second, looked down at me and screamed, “Get up, get up and fire your goddamn weapon!” then brass was pouring from the weapon again, a constant flame erupting from the muzzle. Mike had his weapon reloaded and joined in. I pulled myself up and flipped the carbine to fire and began firing at the windshield of the now-retreating truck.
In my radio I heard Sarge call out, “Let’s go dammit, get your asses to the buggies!”
Ted called out, “Reloading!” then looked at me. “Go, go go go!”
Thad was just as wide-eyed as I was. The two of us took off at a run towards the machines. We broke out of the trees to find Sarge and Danny already there. Somehow they had crossed the road and made it there before we did. In a flash, Mike and Ted were there as well. Everyone mounted their machines and Sarge called out for us to follow him. He took off wide open to the north, with Danny and I behind him, and Mike and Ted bringing up the rear this time. We ran hard and fast, not knowing if they had a reaction force on the way or not. Any minute I expected to see a helicopter overhead, but we were moving too fast to be too worried about it.
We ran north almost to Highway 40, then turned east, going as fast as we could on open trails. Without slowing or waiting, Sarge crossed over Highway 19 with the rest of us hot on his tail. As I crossed the road, I looked both ways real quick and was relieved beyond words not to see anything. We were on the backside of Grasshopper Lake, a good six miles from where the shootout happened, when Sarge stopped. Ted and Mike pulled up beside him and were talking. I pulled up on the other side of them and stopped beside Thad in the rear.
I looked in at him and said, “Dude, was that Jess?”
Epilogue
Jess grounded the tip of her shovel in the dirt and looked over at the buses that had just arrived. Mary hissed, “Come on! We gotta meet our quota!” She held out the sandbag she and Jess were filling.
One of the DHS goons barked, “It’s not break time! Keep working!” and Jess went back to digging. After the raiders had hit her neighborhood and killed her parents, she had been happy to get on the bus to the FEMA camp. There was nothing left at home: no family, no food, no hope. But at the camp, things didn’t turn out the way the black-uniformed men had promised. Families were split up, malcontents were beaten or disappeared, and there was no going outside the fence. After a week of denial, Jess understood that she had volunteered for a prison sentence. A week after that, she thought something different. It wasn’t a prison: it was a concentration camp.
People she had met who couldn’t keep their opinions to themselves—libertarians, old-school liberals, Reagan conservatives—became scarcer and scarcer. And rumor had it that on the other side of the detainment area was a series of trenches dug by bulldozers. People pointed out that the detainees, what the DHS goons called the “resisters,” never seemed to increase in numbers. You could see them through the chain link, but no one was allowed close enough to talk to them.
Mary asked her the question that got her thinking: “We see them arrest people every day and send them to detention. So if there’s more people going into detention all the time, how come it’s always the same number of people you can see through the fence?” Mary was black, and she followed that question with another one: “You’ve seen how many black people get off those buses. So where are they? How many black people you know in this place?”
“Just you,” Jess said,
“Right, just me. And how many black people do you see in the detention yard? Not so many, right?”
Jess’s stomach had done a flip; she knew where this was going, and she suddenly knew she had known it for a week without admitting it to herself. “Yeah, not so many,” she said.
Mary said, “I was a math teacher, but anyone can work those numbers.”
Jess said, “Maybe they’re sending them to different camps.”
Mary snorted scornfully. “Sure. Maybe they’re putting all the black folk in another camp. What’s that sound like to you? But if they’re doing that, how come we never see lines of black people being loaded onto buses? I’ll tell you why: this place is a DHS roach motel. Blacks check in, but they don’t check out. And it ain’t just black people, we’re just easier to notice. It’s the ACLU and Second Amendment people too. Anyone that’s doesn’t have the sense to toe the line. Anyone that’s not going to be a good citizen of the New America.”
Jess wondered how it had gotten this bad this quickly. Wasn’t anyone standing up to the government? But she knew the answer, and it was the same answer to the question people had been asking for seventy years: why did the average German go along with Hitler? And the sad thing, Jess thought, was that it was the same stupid answer that every teenager gave when they got caught doing something stupid: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She thought about Morgan and Thad and hoped to God they were okay. She knew they’d never agree to take their families into one of the camps, but she knew too that meant they were probably dead.
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