Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

“I’m not some hysterical female who faints at the sight of blood, Red,” replied Bonnar dourly. “Neither was my sister who died at Ravenhill. I think you all know that about me. It’s just that there has been so much terrible suffering and injustice in this land for so long, and I don’t mean only for the past five years of the revolt. I know there still has to be more blood. I just want to make sure it’s the blood of the guilty.”

  “As much as it is humanly possible for us to make sure of that, it will be,” Morehouse assured her. He stood up. “Right, let’s take a supper break and see if we can be back here by seven o’clock.”

  “Frank, could you check around outside and see if you can buttonhole that fellow Mackintosh for me?” Ridgeway reminded him.

  “Sure thing,” said Barrow.

  “Oh, one more thing, before I forget,” said Morehouse as they arose from the table. “I have the honor to report that the Old Man has now arrived on the Republic’s soil. I was told that his plane landed at Sea-Tac just before we began tonight’s meeting.” There was an outburst of applause and cheering from the people in the room.

  “It was that threat to send O.C. Oglevy and the boys down to Florence to collect him that made the bastards let him go,” chuckled Morgan.

  “Probably,” replied Morehouse with a smile. “We were going to schedule a big formal welcome at the airport, brass band and speeches and the whole nine yards, but he vetoed it. There will, however, be a formal welcome for him tomorrow night at six p.m. in the Reception Room, down the hall here. Dress uniform for those of us who have them. And guys, I know General Order Number Ten goes out at midnight tonight and so there will be beer and cocktails and whatnot tomorrow night, but let’s not let him be confronted by the heroes who won our Homeland as a bunch of staggering drunks whooping and waving guns in the air, shall we?”

  “He’d probably just think he’s back on Glenn Miller’s farm,” said Morgan.

  II

  DALY AVENUE

  (34 days after Longview)

  “Mightier than the tread of marching armies is the power of an idea whose time has come.”

  —Victor Hugo

  The Northwest American Republic arrived in Missoula, Montana, in the early morning hours of the Monday after Thanksgiving, along with the first major snowfall of the year. Forty-year-old Amber Myers awoke in the bedroom of her affluent middle-class home on Daly Avenue in Missoula’s University District, with the first soft snowy light outside whitening the windows. She had not slept well; it was known that the Nationalist army was approaching the city, but no one seemed able or willing to give the public any details. As she lay in bed she heard muffled noises in the street outside, men’s voices and the rumble of engines. She got up, put on her robe and looked out the window.

  A thick white curtain of snow was falling on Daly Avenue, obscuring everything in a floating white curtain, muffling the sky and houses and rooftops. Out on the street in front of her house, Amber could see a number of trucks and Humvees with snow tires and rattling chains rolling slowly by, painted in camouflage, with blue, white and green roundels on the doors. By the glow of their headlights, and beneath the streetlights that were still on in the white dawn, Amber could see files of armed men in camouflage field jackets and coal-scuttle helmets moving eastward down the street along both sidewalks. Their breath frosted in the freezing air, and their rifles were held at the ready. The column was moving toward the University of Montana campus a few blocks down.

  Amber woke up her husband, Doctor Clancy Myers, and whispered to him in terror, “They’re here!”

  “Are the kids all right?” demanded Clancy, lifting himself up in bed, still groggy from sleep.

  “Yes,” Amber told him. “The Nazis haven’t come in the house. They’re out on the street. I think they’re occupying the campus.”

  “I thought we had more time,” mumbled Clancy. “At least until the Christmas break. Not that there are many students left on campus. The news reports said the towns and cities to the west of here were resisting them. They weren’t due for weeks!”

  “And where were the media getting their information?” raved Amber. “Six months ago they were telling everybody that the FBI and FATPO had the racist terrorists on the run, and everything would be returning to normal soon! Then the President went on national television and told us she was talking to the sons of bitches, but oh, no, not to worry! She was just doing that to get them to play nice, and be reasonable, and stop murdering people. Chelsea and her mother would never hand us over to be ruled by fascist sociopaths, oh, no, that would never happen! How many times were we assured of that? The goddamned media don’t know anything about what’s going on in this country, any more than anyone else does! They’ve spent the past six months reading government press releases like parrots, while that bitch in the White House and her hag of a mother sold the Northwest out because keeping us free was getting to be too expensive! And the so-called Missoula Patriotic Committee have had their heads up their asses ever since this horrible thing happened. We should have at least tried to resist!”

  “Yes, so you’ve said,” snapped Clancy, sitting up on the side of the bed. “Resist with what? All the Patriotic Committee was ever able to put together was a bunch of drunken cowboys waving their deer rifles and American flags in the air like John Wayne, all of whom seem to have vanished when the first fascist tanks actually rolled over the Bitterroot. Guess when it came time to shit or get off the pot, or should I say shoot or get off the pot, our wannabe John Waynes had more sense than they let on. Come on, Amber, you saw what these people did to Portland! They defeated the United States Marine Corps, for God’s sake! How the hell are we supposed to fight that? They seem to have conjured an army up out of the earth, God knows how.”

  “Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!” snapped Amber.

  “I wonder if you would still say that when the artillery shells and the bombs started falling in our own back yard?” asked her husband. “Where would we have hidden the children? Where would we be safe?” His wife remained silent. “Oh, yes, I forgot, I’m not supposed to be safe. I’m supposed to be showing my middle-aged macho in this time of crisis. Yes, I could well see me on a barricade out on Highway 93, freezing my ass off in the snow,” Clancy went on with a sigh. “With my forty extra pounds, and my varicose veins, and my glasses all fogged up, fumbling around in mittens with some rifle I’d just fired for the first time the day before, maybe. Going up against thousands of bearded, tattooed, homicidal psychopaths armed to the teeth, with tanks and artillery to back them up, who have just run the entire United States military out of the Pacific Northwest. That would be a truly Quixotic way to throw away a PhD in English literature. My doctoral thesis on Jack Kerouac would stand me in good stead out there on the ramparts of glory, for all of two minutes, and then you would be a widow and my children would be without a father. A rather high price to pay for a moment of drama, don’t you think? I’m sorry if you think I’m a coward, Ammy. I’m not. But I just don’t see anything brave about throwing my life away and leaving you guys behind to live with the result.”

  “Then if you won’t fight for them, what’s going to happen to our children now, Clancy?” sobbed Amber. “I don’t understand! How could President Clinton have betrayed us like this?” she wailed.

  “She’s a politician, she’s a Democrat, and beyond that she’s a Clinton,” said Clancy wearily. “It’s what she does.”

  Amber and Clancy went downstairs into the living room, where they found their two children Kevin and Georgia, both still in their pajamas and staring out the picture window through the snow at the column of soldiers and vehicles. “Mom, Dad, they’re here! They’ve got tanks!” cried ten-year-old Georgia in excitement.

  “Silly Peanut, those aren’t tanks, they’re Strykers,” said Kevin with the superiority of a 13-year-old video game expert. “They captured them from the Americans.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! You are an American, Kevin Myers, and don’t
you ever forget it!” snapped Amber angrily.

  “Then so are they,” said Kevin, pointing to the passing NDF column outside the window.

  “No, they are not! They’re all foreigners and criminals and crazy people!” said his mother. She stopped herself; Amber was angry and terrified, but she wasn’t stupid. She had followed the news over the past five years, and she knew her statement wasn’t true, as irritating as she found the fact. She also knew that her son knew it. As shocking as Amber still found the fact, the Myers family had actually known neighbors and friends, or at least acquaintances, who had gone with the Nationalists and even the NVA itself. “All right, maybe some of them were born here,” she conceded. “But they’re certainly criminals, and what they have done to the Northwest and to the country as a whole is unforgivable. I don’t know why they have done this. I never had anything against people with a different skin color, and we have raised you children not to harbor that kind of hatred either. They have to be crazy, that’s all. Anyone who commits terrorism and murder for any cause is by definition insane.”

  “Is Jenny crazy, Mom?” asked Georgia in a small voice. Jenny Campbell had been Georgia’s favorite babysitter in the days before she had to go on the bounce with the NVA. “Is she bad?”

  “Honey, Jenny is—well, she’s very wrong to do what she’s done, is all,” said Amber lamely.

  “Does this mean that I can hang out with Bobby Campbell again now?” asked Kevin eagerly. He had been forbidden his best friend’s company for a long time. “It might help you guys to get on the good side of the new bosses.”

  “You know, that might not be a bad idea,” said Clancy slowly.

  “Oh, for… Clancy!” yelped Amber. “We cut the Campbells off when we found out they were terrorist sympathizers and their daughter was a murderer, and that is still the case! We will never, ever associate with people like that!”

  “I don’t know how much choice we will have, dear,” said Clancy soothingly. “People like that, as you put it, seem to be in charge now. Let’s see if we can find out what’s going on.”

  They turned on the television to their local CBS channel, KPAX-TV, expecting to see handsome morning newscaster Brad Jensen with his flawlessly capped teeth, as usual. Instead, what they saw was the KPAX news desk, but no Brad in the Morning. Seated behind it, fiddling with a clip-on microphone he was trying to attach to his tunic, was a young man with a sandy beard, wearing NDF tiger-stripes and a billed Alpine cap. The sight of the dreaded National Socialist eagle emblem on both cap and fatigue tunic jarred Amber and Clancy Myers; somehow the eagle right there on the sacred screen itself made it all seem real, in a way that none of the news over the past few months had done.

  The young man looked up at the camera, startled. “Huh? We on the air? Oh, okay.” He sat up straight, “Uh, hey there, all you folks out in TV land. My name’s Captain Ricky Johnson, Tenth Infantry Brigade, Northwest Defense Force. I’m originally from down Anaconda way. Mr. Jensen can’t be here this morning. He’s kind of indisposed. Well, folks, if you’ve been looking out your windows this morning, you know that here we are, and here we’re staying,” the young soldier told them cheerfully. “Over the next few months, we’re gonna be bringing the city of Missoula formally into the Northwest American Republic, as per the Longview Treaty. I guess by now you people living here all pretty much know the details of that treaty as it applies to Montana, but just to re-cap, everything west of Interstate 15 is now part of the Republic, and everything east of 15 still belongs to the goddamned Jews. Helena and Great Falls get split right down the middle.

  “In case you’re wondering why you didn’t hear any shooting or sirens or explosions last night when we moved in, it’s because your so-called Patriotic Committee, your mayor, the city council, and that bunch of clowns they called a loyal Amurrican militia all skedaddled when it came down to the wire. They didn’t want to get what Portland got. But don’t get me wrong, I ain’t criticizing. We’re all glad they ran. There’s been enough fighting and killing, and it’s time to stop all that shit and get this show on the road. Huh?” A female voice off camera was saying something to Johnson. “Well, ma’am, in case you hadn’t noticed, the Federal Communications Commission don’t have no say any more about what words we can say on the air, but you’re right. Folks, I apologize for my language just now. No point in taking the Northwest away from the niggers if we’re gonna keep talking like ’em. I’ll do my best to keep it clean from here on in. Don’t worry, you won’t have to put up with me for long. We’ll be getting somebody in here to do the news who’s more professional than me, and a da—a sight better looking, as soon as we can.”

  Johnson went on, “For now, I just want to let you folks know in a general way what’s going on, and talk at you about how you can make this a whole lot easier for everybody. I know those yay-hoos from the Patriotic Committee have been telling you for the past month that the NDF is gonna come in here whooping and shooting up the town, and rapin’ your grandmothers, and all kinds of crap like that. Pardon me, all kinds of nonsense like that. That’s just not true. We are now the legitimate government in Missoula, and you folks out there are our fellow white people and fellow citizens. Truth be told, we’ve been doing all this for the past five years as much for you as for ourselves.

  “The first thing we want to do is make sure that essential services remain open,” continued Captain Johnson, as Clancy and Amber Myers stared at the screen in stupefaction. “We’re asking first and foremost, that snow plow and salt truck drivers report to work as scheduled. We have men who can drive them in the army, true, and if we have to we’ll clear the streets ourselves, but it’s not really our job, is it? We also ask that those of you who work in certain fields and provide essential services report to work as normal. That includes all medical personnel and firefighters, employees of grocery and hardware stores so people can buy food and supplies, sanitation and landfill workers so garbage doesn’t pile up in the streets, and also city utility workers at the power and water and sewage plants. We don’t want any of those vitally necessary services disrupted in any way, and we are relying on you to do your duty to your fellow Missoulians, even if you may not think much of the new Republic or its people at the moment. Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt anybody unless you try to hurt us first, or unless you’ve got skin the color of excrement, in which case you brought it on yourself by being a dumb-ass and not getting the hell out of our country when you had the chance.”

  Johnson paused. “Now, on the other hand, there are in fact some people who we’re asking to take a few days off until things get sorted out. That includes police, Missoula County sheriff’s deputies, city and county employees in the administrative fields, and employees of banks. We want to make sure we don’t have any unfortunate incidents with police officers who still think they’re the law in these parts, which they ain’t. There was a bit of a ruckus at the central station and the county jail last night when we moved in. Don’t worry, nobody was killed, the boys just had to go upside a couple of dumb-ass Amurrican heads to get them to look at the clock and understand what time it is, but we want to make sure nothing worse happens. You guys are going to have to accept the fact that you’re no longer in charge here, we are. I know it’s going to be hard, so we figure it’s best we just stay out of each other’s way for a while and let things settle down a bit. Cops will be called in to your stations in shifts, and we’ll explain to you how things will work. You’ll be given a chance to go back to work at your old jobs in law enforcement under the new Northwest Civil Guard, unless it turns out you did some really bad acts against us back during the war when we were the NVA. But we’ll deal with everybody on an individual basis.

  “I have been told to assure you folks that the bank holiday won’t last more than a couple of days. We just have to secure all the branches and whatnot on orders from the Finance Ministry in Olympia, make sure no die-hard Unionist types go and filch all the cash in the bank vaults and try to drag it off to t
he U.S. Not to mention just plain thieves trying to take advantage of the situation. Your deposits are safe; we’re not confiscating or stealing your money, we’re just making sure nobody else does. So far as I know, the computer lines are still up and running in stores, so you should still be able to buy stuff with plastic. In a couple of places where we’ve moved in the kikes were able to crash the credit and debit card networks from outside the country, but we got some real slick computer guys in the NDF, and they’ve gotten the drill down for hacking into these financial systems and building necessary firewalls and fail-safes, so we can hopefully prevent that from happening here.”

  Johnson leaned forward into the camera. “As far as civil authority goes, for the time being there ain’t none, since the mayor of Missoula, the city council, and most of the Chamber of Commerce have lit out for parts unknown. In their absence, the military administrator for Missoula will be General Dan Macready. Some time within the next few months, as decided by the provisional government in Olympia, there will be an election throughout the Republic where all kinds of public offices will be filled, including municipalities, although candidates and voting in that election will be restricted to people who meet the new citizenship requirements, and who are willing to swear an oath of allegiance to the Northwest American Republic. I don’t know how many of you have actually read the new Constitution, or at least the bits and pieces of it that have been published in the newspapers and on the internet, but from now on we don’t just hand out the vote to any dimwit who happens to have two arms and two legs and a head. That’s how we got into all the trouble before, letting niggers and drug addicts and illegal aliens and any damned body vote. Garbage voters vote in garbage politicians.

  “No more. From now on citizenship and the right to vote is something that has to be earned, and right now the only ones who have earned it are those who fought in the NVA and the NDF. I have been told that there will be ways in which non-NVA veterans may apply for and receive third-class citizenship, which will get you one vote. Us guys who put our lives on the line for our race and our new nation will have two or three votes each, that’s true, but that’s as it should be. And there’s other ways you can get a vote. For example, one of the things they’re talking about at the Convention in Olympia is allowing mothers with children to get third class citizenship right away, so long as you’re willing to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic. We understand that the results of an election that allows only NVA and NDF people to vote would be considered morally questionable, and so for the first couple of years until we can work up a whole new order of society and a whole new way of doing things, we’ll be kind of playing it by ear.