by Trent Reedy
Among the tens of thousands of Idaho citizens drafted into military service, several thousand have registered as conscientious objectors who will serve the nation, but will not be placed directly in combat roles. Where will most of these conscientious objectors serve? The forest service. Idaho’s top military official, General McNabb, recently announced that with summer on the way, Idaho faces a new danger in the form of possible wildfires. Preparations are being made to take as much preemptive action as •—
—• From the information we can gather here at ANN in Atlanta, here is the most up-to-date map of the Pan American territory. Please note that some of these borders are in flux, while fighting continues among nations, often breaking out between rival citizen militia groups battling for territory and valuable resources. Certainly under the leadership of General Vogel, the old Florida Panhandle will soon be Atlantican territory again.
—• For generations, American farmers have grown corn that was used for animal feed, automotive fuel, and sweeteners in everything from cookies to soda. None of it was useful as human food. Many farmers throughout all the new nations across the Pan American territory still have not broken free from this pattern of growing only corn and soybeans. As a result, we are heading for a food crisis the likes of which this continent has never experienced. •—
—• Fellow patriots, welcome back to the Buzz Ellison Show. The number to call if you’d like to be on the program today is 1-800-555-INDY. That’s 1-800-555-4639. It’s … Forgive me, Buzzheads. In the many years I’ve been bringing you the truth on this program, there have been times when the events of the day have been so painful that it has been a challenge to offer my brilliant commentary. I know that I make this seem easy, but it was difficult to step up to the microphone to talk, for example, about the election of Barack Obama, or about the recent nuclear attacks. Even then, though, calling upon my superior skill and intellect, I was able to pull through.
Today … You know they say, when someone has lived a great, full life, it is not necessary to mourn his death. Daniel Wright’s life, while great, wasn’t full. He was so young. And yet, what he lacked in years, he made up for in courage, strength, and integrity. He inspired millions of people to stand up to the oppression of the US federal government, and in many ways, he was one of the most important catalysts of this war, our conservative revolution.
Daniel Wright was a close personal friend of mine. When I heard the news of his death, I couldn’t help but remember the several meals I shared with Danny and his fiancée, JoBell. How we laughed … JoBell was the kind of girl who brightens up any room. Danny absolutely adored her, and I could see why. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also full of the most thoughtful conservative insights. She and I got along like we’d been friends for years, like family, really. I … Excuse me, it’s …
It’s times like these that we all have to remember how PFC Daniel Wright inspired us. Raise your fist in salute with me, and rise up!
Because I can see hope coming to all of us! The Buzz Ellison Show has always been about optimism and hope through solid, time-tested, conservative principles. And I know we are going to win this war, and build the prosperous conservative society we’ve been dreaming of for years. The United States can no longer triumph. How will Lazy Laura Griffith bring the new countries back into the United States? With her feminine charm? Ha! General Jacobsen has more femininity than her. No, people will never forget what the US has done to them, how many the United States has killed. None of the newly independent countries are ever going back. The United States may have taken Daniel Wright from us, but they will never kill the spirit of independence that he has sparked in all our hearts. Peace and freedom are right around the corner if we just keep up the fight! •—
The fight through McCall left us with three dead and many wounded. At first, I tried to keep away from everyone who was talking about how it had all gone down, but then I figured I should hear the victims’ stories. I owed them that much, at least.
Casey Hayes was twenty-four and a plumber. His girlfriend split shortly before the war, leaving him with a one-year-old daughter named Josie and no explanation. They say Casey held his daughter down out of harm’s way with one hand, and fired back at the Brotherhood with the rifle he held in the other. He was shot in the neck. Angeline Atkins, who graduated with Casey, promised him she’d take care of Josie as he bled out.
Steph Ollins was a tough-as-nails bus driver — never the one you wanted for a school field trip because she was so mean. But she drove safe. And brave. She’d held on until well after Dr. Nicole had treated the gunshots in her shoulder and chest. She kept talking about how she was going “to make damned sure everybody made it to the school.” She said it over and over again, until finally she didn’t say anything else.
Harold Gates had served in the infantry in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He loved his granddaughter Crystal Bean, and Crystal’s siblings, the twins Mara and Micah. The man was in his nineties, but he still picked up a rifle and fought back against the enemy. They say rounds hit the bus all around him, and a few zipped right past him, but he stood his ground. He told his family that he was grateful to have fought in three wars and he was happy to know they’d be safe. “I’ll be with Jesus, waiting for you, years from now when your time comes,” he’d said as he died shortly after the battle from complications following a heart attack.
I watched Becca and Doc Nicole taking care of our wounded in the feeble light from a couple flashlights. Our high school English teacher, Mrs. Stewart, had fired at the Brotherhood with a twelve-gauge Remington 870 shotgun. They say she was silent and vicious, getting off six or seven shots before being taken down by a bullet in her belly. Dr. Nicole said she’d survive, but I worried. We’d thought Specialist Danning would survive when we’d done that surgery on his abdominal wound back when we were stuck in the dungeon. Mrs. Stewart was in a hell of a lot of pain, but still in good spirits.
One of the wounded who was not in good spirits was Jaclyn Martinez, who had picked up Casey Hayes’s rifle and fired round after round, screaming like mad, maybe hitting the enemy, maybe not. Her arms were cut up pretty bad from the glass in the broken bus windows.
“Hey.” Mr. Grenke pulled me aside between Pale Horse and bus one. Bandages covered his left shoulder and left side, next to his ribs. Both bullets had gone clean through. Even though the guy was kind of a jackwad, he’d gotten that bus out of town after Steph Ollins had been shot, people applying makeshift bandages to his wounds while he drove. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“I’ve been throwing gas on the fire in our meetings. I know you’ve been kind of pissed at me.” I started to answer with some sort of denial, but he held his hand up. “No, it’s okay. I get it. And I’m sorry. And … When we were cut off from the group, and then stopped out there in front of that last roadblock bullets were flying at us from all directions. I looked at Skylar. At my wife and at Skylar’s mom. At everybody.” The guy’s eyes were tearing up, and he turned away from me to hide it. I knew the feeling. “I thought I’d got them all killed. I shouldn’t have argued with Mrs. Pierce about the recon. I should have figured out how to get the bus back on the right road without getting us pinned down.” He shook his head, and his voice was full of tears. “I got people killed.”
“No, the Brotherhood killed them. You helped save everybody else.”
He looked up at me. “No. You saved us. You guys in Pale Horse came in like something out of an action movie and got us out of there. That’s what I’m trying to say. My family is alive because of you, and I won’t forget that.”
I wished he hadn’t said that. For all I knew, Grenke was right, and me and him had both screwed up by going against the recon before McCall. But we couldn’t have known that then. We’d made the right call at the time. Hadn’t we? I didn’t know, but I did know I didn’t want the man’s gratitude. It was stupid, but I almost preferred Mr. Grenke when he was pissed and arguing with me.
I’d promised JoBell that I was getting out of the war, but so far I’d done a terrible job living up to that promise. The truth was, I’d gotten used to fighting. If someone wanted to mess with me or with the people I loved, I was ready to throw down. Give me anything but gratitude. After all the wrong I’d done, all the pain and death I’d caused, I didn’t deserve thanks.
But that wasn’t the kind of thing Mr. Grenke wanted, or needed, to hear. Instead I offered him a standard line, the kind of shit I’d been barfing out all over the morale-boosting tour Montaine put me on, the kind of slogan Mr. Shiratori had warned me about. “We’re all in this together, Mr. Grenke. No big deal.” I gave him a little punch to his uninjured shoulder.
* * *
The morning sky had just begun to brighten when we reached Hindman. The place was a ghost town. I mean, it must have been a ghost town before the war too. A sign at the edge of the village boasted a population of forty-four, with just a handful of scattered houses and sheds, a post office, a little grocery-bait-mail-combo-type store, a small diner, and a log-cabin-style bar. Most of the buildings were boarded up, and there were no other vehicles in sight.
“Veer right here,” Mrs. Pierce directed. “We’re close now.” We rolled on in silence for a few miles. “Slow down,” she finally said. “The turnoff is around here somewhere. There.”
“There’s nothing here,” I said as I stopped Pale Horse and the convoy.
“Come on,” Mrs. Pierce said. “I’ll show you.”
Kemp radioed over the Motorola. “Standard security perimeter like we discussed at the camp outside of McCall. Everybody else, stay in your vehicles. Be sharp. We don’t know if we’re alone or not.” He clipped his radio to the pocket on the front of his uniform. “Wright, Riccon. Go with Pierce. The rest of us will keep a lookout.”
Mrs. Pierce, Cal, and me climbed out of Pale Horse. She led us a little ways off the road.
“Here it is, by this white wooden post sticking out of this cement block,” Mrs. Pierce said at last. We could barely see a dirt road there, blocked by a tall pile of scrub brush. “Someone pulled these branches over the entrance to hide the place.”
Whoever hid the road must have done it a long time ago. The pine needles on a bunch of the branches had long since rusted to orange. Cal slung his rifle and walked up to the pile. He patted the trunk of a tree that lay on its side. It had to be a solid eight inches thick.
“I’ll go back and get some help,” I said.
Cal widened his stance and grabbed a couple nubs on the trunk. “Pussy.” He heaved and the brush pile shook. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” he grunted as he pulled.
“You’re never gonna get it,” I said.
“Bull —” He yanked the tree hard and it started sliding. He dug in his feet and worked like an ox to haul the tree out of the way. “— shit.”
“Damn, Cal.” I grabbed a much smaller tree, more of a shrub, and hauled it away.
After about ten minutes, we had it cleared. We moved the convoy onto the dirt road, which rose sharply up into the wilderness. It took another ten minutes to conceal the road again, and then we drove on. Tree branches scraped the sides of our vehicles. Cal had to duck down out of the turret inside Pale Horse to avoid being hit.
We passed a brown sign that read DESIGNATED WILDERNESS AREA. NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT. After that, there wasn’t a road anymore, but two tire ruts filled with pine needles.
“Is this even passable for trucks?” I asked.
Mrs. Pierce only laughed. “Just keep driving. We’re getting closer.”
The road was steep going up the mountain. Pale Horse’s engine strained. Sometimes the road would level off and turn a little, but it kept going up and up. I worried that the big buses and the heavy fuel truck wouldn’t make it. We bumped over some small washouts in the road, and I radioed to everyone else to keep driving no matter what happened. If someone chickened out and let off the gas, they might get stuck or start rolling backward.
Finally we rounded a corner to see a closed and locked cattle gate. If I stopped the convoy to get out and open it, the vehicles behind me might not get going again on the slope. I gave her more gas, drove past the NO TRESPASSING and AMS signs, and busted right through the gate, pulling into a small, loosely graveled parking lot surrounded by giant fir trees. I parked at the far edge of the clearing. The first bus was right behind me, and Kemp got out to direct it to park next to us.
Kemp tapped on Norm’s bus door and he opened it. “We’re gonna have to pack ’em in tight. There’s not a lot of room.”
The other bus rolled in, then Derrick Blake in the fuel truck, Hooper’s RV, and finally the pickup hauling the horse trailer, with the bikes and a bunch of luggage.
The sun had finally begun to come up, and golden streaks of light made their way sideways through the trees to light up what everybody hoped would be our new home. It was a sort of flattish shelf sticking out from the mountainside. Gravel paths led back through a thick stand of trees, I guess toward the school. There on the mountain in the cool morning, the sunlight on this last day of May promised that it might be possible for the war to be over for us.
But we weren’t stupid enough to take any more chances. We immediately created a security perimeter around the parking lot. A couple people set out five-gallon-bucket toilets behind nearby trees as a hundred hungry and exhausted people piled out of the vehicles.
“What do we do now?” Mr. Morgan asked. His voice echoed across the quiet parking lot, the only sound besides the whisper of a gentle breeze in the trees.
Mrs. Pierce was about to say something, but Kemp squeezed her hand and stepped ahead of her. “It’s been a long trip, and not without a terrible cost. I know everybody wants to find the nearest rack and get some sleep, or maybe see if there’s a kitchen —”
“There is,” Mrs. Pierce said.
“— and get something to eat.” Kemp unslung his rifle. “But we have to make sure nobody else is here. We’ll take a small group to do a proper clearing of the buildings. As soon as we know the place is secure” — he smiled — “we’ll make ourselves at home.”
“Is all this security really necessary?” Mr. Cretis’s wife asked. I couldn’t remember her name, but it was clear that a lot of people agreed with her. “The last road up here was hidden. The pine needles on the road were fresh enough. The place is abandoned, and we’re tired of waiting around.”
“Please be patient,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Someone else might have had the same idea about hiding up here. We have to make sure.”
“It won’t be much longer,” said Mr. Grenke. “For now, we’ll all get something to eat. Some of us will pull guard duty while everyone else rests. We made it. Let’s just be happy about that.”
I nodded him my thanks.
“I’ll take Wright, Sergeant Crocker, and, um, Private Wells.” Kemp smiled. “You all have some experience at clearing buildings.”
“I’m coming too.” Mrs. Pierce held her AR15 with the butt stock on her hip and the barrel pointed up.
“Mrs. Pierce.” Sergeant Kemp fought to keep the laughter out of his voice. “We’re going to run through these buildings really fast. I’m not sure —”
“I was in a war before you were born, boy. I’m not even eighty, and you won’t be able to find the buildings without me. Anyway, nothing you can do to stop me.” She started for the edge of the parking lot. “Come on, we’ll begin with the guest dorm building.”
“Stay sharp. Don’t let your guard down,” Kemp said to Mr. Grenke. “Monitor the radios. We’ll call if there’s any problem.” Then me, him, and Becca took off after Crocker and Mrs. Pierce.
Mrs. Pierce led us down the trail through the woods until we arrived at a clearing with a giant old wood-sided, two-story rectangular building that had been painted a kind of tannish yellow. Next to that was a much smaller cabin with the same paint job and white trim.
Pierce stepped up to the door of the cabin and ji
ggled the handle. “Locked.”
“That looks like some thick wood,” Crocker said. “It’s going to be tough to break down.”
“Shooting the lock will draw too much attention if there’s anyone else up here,” said Becca.
Glass broke behind us, and we all spun to see Mrs. Pierce smashing a low window with the stock of her rifle. “Come on then, hotshots. Do your thing.”
I laughed. The whole point of sweeping a building was to take any hostiles by surprise. If there had been anyone in the cabin, they’d have heard us by now. Still, Kemp led us into the cabin through the window. There wasn’t much there. An open room with a couch, a couple chairs, shelves full of paper books, and a desk. The only other room was a simple bedroom with one small bed, a nightstand, an empty closet, and a dresser with a mirror behind it.
Mrs. Pierce was in the cabin for about thirty seconds. She reached into the tiny closet and felt around until we heard a jingling sound. She pulled out a giant steel ring with like a hundred keys, then held it up and shook it. “You guys did a bang-up job of searching the place.”
“We were mostly checking for people …” Kemp started to say, but Mrs. Pierce had already left the cabin. “You know, people hiding here who might want to kill us?”
Becca was laughing. I found it hard to hold back too.
“Oh, come on,” Kemp said.
By the time we caught up to Mrs. Pierce, she was up on the big covered wooden porch of the guest dorm building, the door already unlocked and open. She waved us inside. “Have fun. And can you check the main-floor library first? It’s to the right. I want to sit down and take it easy while you all run through the rest of the place.” She laughed, and we joined her. We still had to be careful and clear the building, but we were starting to believe we’d finally come home.