American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent

by Parker, Brian

  I nodded. Somewhere in my mind, what he said made sense. All of my blood and the water that had been used on me had to go somewhere. Floor drains made sense.

  “You need medical help, Haskins. But our medics can’t see any of your injuries through the layers of…of stuff on you. Please, we need you to shower and get cleaned off so they can help you.”

  I nodded again. Words were still a precious commodity to me. Talking used up the water that was in my body. I allowed him to lead me to the corner, limping on my badly damaged ankle. I tried to remember how it had been damaged, but I couldn’t.

  “Promise me that you aren’t going to try anything,” Rogan directed.

  I nodded, leaning heavily against the wall as water flowed from the shower head above me. I stared in amazement as the puddle at my feet turned a dark brown and a slurry of feces, dried skin, and matted hair fought for supremacy to make their way down the drain.

  I lasted for a few moments before collapsing under my own weight. I sat there under the shower head letting the water sluice off my body and accepted a bar of soap that someone pressed into my hand. Dark brown cracks lined the mint green surface. It had been sitting there, unused, for a long, long time.

  “I’m going to leave you with Sergeant Crispin,” Rogan said. “We just found Plummer in another part of the facility. He’s in just as bad of shape as you are, so I’m going to go talk to him, okay?”

  I nodded, enjoying the feeling of lukewarm water on my body. How long had it been since I’d felt anything but ice cold or boiling hot water on my skin? I pushed the hair out of my eyes and began working the soap across my skin.

  Time was irrelevant to me. I washed and scrubbed my body for what seemed like hours. Each pass cut through a new layer of grime to reveal lighter skin beneath. I reveled in the feeling of being clean.

  Maybe I had been killed a little while ago because this sure felt like heaven to me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Rogan’s team allowed me the time to shower away the filth. They provided me with an orange prison jumpsuit and then we rushed out of the facility to a set of vehicles parked nearby. I stumbled and tripped enough that one of the soldiers, Sergeant Crispin I think, ended up supporting my weight on his shoulder. It wouldn’t do for me to fall and break every bone in my fragile body.

  The night air felt cold on my exposed skin. I had no way of telling how long I’d been in the—I looked at my surroundings. It was a prison. They’d kept me in a prison. “Where?” I croaked, lifting an arm toward the countryside.

  “You’re in Virginia,” the man helping me walk said. “West of Richmond.”

  I nodded. It was cold here, so that made some sense to me. I’d never been this far north. It had been December when they bombed the Resistance headquarters. “What’s the—” I had to take a breath. The walk had taken a lot out of me. “Date?”

  “March twenty-fourth.” He bundled me toward the open car door and assisted me.

  "Let’s go, ladies,” Rogan grumbled from the front passenger seat. “NAR troops are inbound.”

  “Hey,” I huffed.

  He ducked his chin and frowned before turning his attention back to a small laptop screen sitting on the dashboard. “Chris?” I asked.

  “Other truck,” he replied without looking up. “We don’t wanna put all of the assets in one vehicle in case one of us gets smoked.”

  I lifted an arm as the soldier buckled the seatbelt around me. “Any day now, Crispin,” Rogan griped. I’d known the man for years at this point and he remained taciturn, even when he drank. He always seemed to keep everyone at arm’s length. I’d often wondered if that was natural or if it had been a learned behavior after so many deployments where teammates were maimed and killed. I’d likely never know.

  The door slammed and Crispin jogged around to the back of the truck. The vehicle rocked slightly as he pulled himself into the bed. I turned and watched him shuffle forward and sit down against the cab before tapping the glass with his knuckle.

  “Go,” Rogan directed the driver. “Satellite says NAR forces are moving fast down both Highway 60 and 76. Need to melt into the sticks like fucking now. We took too long letting the boys get cleaned up.”

  The truck barreled through the gates of the facility and I saw a low white concrete sign declaring the place to be the Bon Air Juvenile Correction Center. I hadn’t seen any other inmates. What had happened to them?

  I knew what happened to them. The NAR had a strict policy on repeat offenders. Ask little old Jessica Johnson about that. Oh yeah, she was dead. Newman had killed her. Shit! Newman and Goodman! I’d been in captivity for four months. I was the only one who knew where those two were detained.

  I drank from a bottle of water I found beside me on the bench seat. I didn’t care whose it was. My stomach rumbled in response to the combination of hunger and the sudden twists and turns of the road. “Goodman?” I asked.

  Rogan didn’t hear me. I tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around, I repeated my question. “Goodman?”

  He shook his head. “By the time anyone figured out where the hell you’d stashed her, it’d been a few weeks. Bitch starved to death in that horse barn.”

  My heart dropped. I wanted her to face justice and be held accountable for her actions in a public court, not die like a rat in a cage. I’d condemned her to die in a horrible way.

  No, the NAR did that, I told myself. If they hadn’t bombed the Resistance headquarters and arrested me, then she would still be alive today. I would have continued to go out there and give her food and water until she could face trial. They killed her, not me. Maybe she had faced justice, in a way.

  “Newman?”

  Rogan looked up and winked. “He starved to death too, buddy. No worries.”

  What was with the wink? I’d beaten him severely, but nowhere near enough to kill him. I didn’t have the energy to talk about it right now and Rogan seemed to be busy directing the driver which way to go, so I leaned my head against the back of the seat.

  “Is Cassandra okay?”

  “Worried sick about you, but yeah. The baby’s doing good. I’ve been in contact with her every day while we’ve been searching for you.”

  I grinned. The baby. I still didn’t know if I had a little boy or a little girl. Rogan probably knew, but I wanted it to stay a surprise. I was sure that I’d see her soon anyway, so I allowed myself to relax in a way that I hadn’t been able to in months. I was safe. My old teammate was here and he’d brought a bunch of pipe hitters with him, dudes who knew what the fuck was going on and how to get shit done.

  I was safe and on my way back to Cassandra. That thought warmed me inside and I nodded off.

  “Go left! Fuck! I mean right!”

  I awoke to Rogan screaming at the driver as the truck skidded first one way and then the other, banging my head against the glass. “Get down!” he yelled.

  I ducked instinctively moments before the windows shattered and the sounds of gunfire erupted around us. In the back of the truck, Crispin opened fire with a large caliber machine gun of some kind. The rapid rate of fire made my head spin at the thought of how much death he poured into whoever had just shot at us.

  Another machine gun joined the fight and I assumed it was from the second truck. These guys weren’t messing around.

  “Take 607 to the left up ahead in two hundred meters.”

  “Got it,” the driver replied. “How much farther until the border?”

  “Three miles to Highway 60, then six miles to the border. Don’t expect these fuckers to respect the boundary.”

  “We got air?”

  “Inbound,” Rogan responded.

  I looked through the shattered rear window and saw a line of headlights behind the second truck. It sounded like their gunner was still hammering away with his machine gun, whereas Crispin had stopped. He didn’t want to risk hitting the trail vehicle.

  “Being followed,” I managed to choke out.

  “I see ’em.
Just keep your fucking head down,” Rogan barked.

  I grunted and turned back around to see what was happening. The second truck swerved back and forth, juking to avoid the incoming fire from their pursuers. I saw one of the sets of headlights veer off and crash as the machine gunner must have hit the mark. I pumped my fist in the air. Yeah!

  “Fuck! Ram it!”

  “Sergeant?”

  “Ram it, I said.”

  My head whipped around in time to see Rogan fire several rounds out the window in the direction of our travel and a blur of bodies as we sped past them toward spinning red and blue lights. Then the nose of the truck hit the center of a pair of police cars that had been parked across the road bumper-to-bumper. Metal shrieked and the truck shuddered horribly before it forced its way through, pushing the cars out of the road.

  Crispin whooped in the back before opening up once more. These guys were loving this shit.

  Rogan lifted a handheld radio to his lips and said something that I couldn’t make out, then said. “Okay, take 60 west. We need to make it to Powhatan about six miles down the road. That’s where the US line of troops has advanced to.”

  “They ain’t gonna shoot us if we’re coming in hot, are they?”

  Rogan shrugged. “They’re not supposed to, but you know tankers. Dumb fuckers wanna kill everything they see.”

  “Shit,” the driver moaned. After another minute of driving in silence, the truck’s suspension squealed as the driver turned onto an on-ramp for the highway. I didn’t know what kind of truck we were in, but once I found out, I was going to get one. It’d been shot, rammed, and put through the paces and was still kicking.

  “Put your IR strobes on,” Rogan shouted into the radio. “Fast movers will be here in less than a minute.”

  I knew that IR meant infrared, but I didn’t know what an IR strobe was. I assumed it was some kind of marking device to keep the planes screaming in our direction from somewhere beyond the border from killing us.

  “What border?” I asked, realizing I had no clue what the fuck was going on.

  “The United States—us,” Rogan clarified with a wave of his hand to indicate the three of us, “is officially at war with the NAR. Well, unofficially I guess since our government is technically illegal. It’s all a bunch of political BS and nobody in the international community is stepping in to assist, so we’re doing it ourselves.”

  “The Resistance?” I asked in confusion.

  “Yeah, sort of. But the revolution became a full-on shooting war when they escalated the conflict with a drone strike in Austin.”

  “I was there,” I mumbled.

  “Thought so. We weren’t sure. Took us forever to find where they—” He stopped and pointed up in the sky. “There they are!”

  I craned my neck to see out the window. Other than a pair of red and green lights in the sky, I didn’t see anything. I had no idea how he could discern military planes versus regular commercial ones.

  The truck shook as a pair of Warthogs flew low overhead. We had A-10s on our side?

  BRRRRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRRRT.

  The planes’ big gun rumbled and a hundred miniature explosions erupted all around the vehicles pursuing us. The cars went flying off the road and into one another as the passengers inside died instantly, plunging the road behind the second vehicle into an eerie mix of fire and shadows.

  Rogan lifted the radio to his lips once more and spoke before dropping it back down. “Okay, they’re gonna stay on station until we’re through the lines,” he told the driver, who nodded in response.

  “Like I was saying, man. Took forever to find where they kept you and Plummer. We knew it was somewhere out east near DC, but Richmond? That was a surprise.”

  I grunted. It didn’t matter where they’d kept me. All that mattered now was that I was free.

  “The US has been pushing the NAR back. There are all sorts of little pockets of resistance as you can imagine, but overall, it’s been pretty steady. Most people never wanted the NAR and their heavy-handed ways, so there have been plenty of volunteers to join the fight to kick those bastards out.”

  “We’re—Are we in a civil war?” My mind was still struggling to grasp what he was talking about. Full-on armed conflict, brother against brother, hadn’t happened in over a hundred and fifty years.

  “The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

  “Huh?”

  “Thomas Jefferson said that after the Revolutionary War. Damn, boy, your education was shit.”

  “So, this is the second Civil War?”

  “Yup. The patriots versus dickheads.” He pointed at me and finally broke into a grin. “I’m trademarking that for a t-shirt. Don’t steal it.”

  The truck slowed down to nearly a crawl and Rogan made a call over the radio. “Two victors inbound from the east. IR strobes visible on the cab of the trucks. How copy, over?”

  “Good copy. Maintain slow advance until you’re past the line of Abrams.”

  “Roger.”

  Up ahead was a checkpoint manned by a mix of soldiers and guys dressed in regular clothes. They pulled a few strands of concertina wire to the side of the road as we drove past. When the second truck was through, they hurried to put the wire back into place.

  Further down the road, I saw a pair of tanks on either side of the road, their big guns pointed in our general direction. A soldier in a helmet and goggles waved to us from the turret as we inched past them. Then we picked up speed once more, traveling westward.

  “Welcome to America, Haskins,” Rogan said.

  I couldn’t help but smile and feel an even greater sense of relief than I had before. I was back in the United States, the real United States, not the NAR’s perverted version of it.

  I was home.

  EPILOGUE

  I sighed in contentment, pushing the plate away from me. I’d eaten everything there was, even the sour cream. I used to hate sour cream. A car horn honked and I looked up idly at the street in front of the restaurant. Six months ago, I would have been diving under the table like a startled animal. I was truly on my way to a full recovery.

  “Better?”

  I turned my gaze away from the line of traffic—traffic!—vying for position along Austin’s San Jacinto Avenue so they could make it through the next light. Cassandra held our daughter, Ellery, to her breast, allowing her to suckle. We were coming up on the baby’s first birthday. The arbitrary date was a mark on the wall where we’d decided to try weaning the baby in favor of formula now that it was being produced in enough quantity to be affordable again.

  “Better,” I agreed with a goofy grin. I felt it spreading across my face. I couldn’t help it. I was grateful for every moment of life that I’d been given after surviving the ordeal in the NAR’s prison, regardless of the physical and emotional scars that the ordeal had given me.

  When I’d first been released, it had taken a week to travel from Virginia to Austin by car because we had to hide from NAR air support. The lack of reliable air transportation and overabundance of caution while moving overland turned out to be a blessing in disguise. During the trip, the government provided me with a shrink to talk to while we traveled. I’d wanted to see Cassandra right away, but getting all that time to talk to the psychiatrist each morning before we began movement, and at night when we stopped, helped to ease me back into the real world after all I’d been through.

  I learned that I’d been in captivity for over four months as the NAR fought a losing battle against the American patriots in the Resistance. The disappearance of the Inner Circle had been nearly catastrophic for the NAR and what had been low-level conflict escalated to a legitimate shooting war, kicked off by the drone strike to the Austin Resistance headquarters. The open hostilities only lasted for a few of months and the US military made quick work of the network of federal agents and loyalists that the NAR fielded against them.

  Historians will label
the fight as a civil war, but the entire period of the NAR’s control over our nation was more akin to a failed coup. We allowed ourselves to be led blindly into the System, welcoming the easing of quarantine restrictions in exchange for citizenship. Sitting in the sun back in Austin, sipping on a margarita with my lovely wife and baby girl, it seemed so incredibly obvious what happened, but when we were living it, the evidence wasn’t so black and white. The gradual policy changes and new directives were added purposefully to chip away at our American spirit and we gladly traded our freedom for perceived safety.

  According to the news, the NAR was on the verge of complete surrender. Their heavy-handed tactics had failed miserably. I often wondered what would have happened if they’d only waited another ten or fifteen years when more of the older generation was gone or too tired to fight back and people my age were in charge of the nation. It was a scary prospect and it made me vow to ensure that baby Ellery was taught everything about American democracy and our true history, not the watered-down politically correct version they taught when I went through high school. American history is ugly and rough, both heartbreaking and triumphant, but it’s up to us to tell the truth, warts and all.

  “Okay,” Cassandra said, interrupting my thoughts. “Ellery is done eating. You just about finished or do you want another?”

  I picked up my nearly empty glass and eyed the contents. “I think I’m okay…unless you want to have a drink now that she’s done.”

  “Mmm… Pump and dump? Nah, I’m fine.” Her eyes darted up and she smiled. “Hi, Chris!”

  I turned, following her gaze. Chris Plummer had just walked out from inside the restaurant into the outdoor seating area where we were. He held the door open for his wife and another man, whom I’d been told was his security. The guy was less than half of the big man’s size, so he must have been packing as a deterrent, otherwise I doubted Chris would have needed him.