Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  * * *

  Across The Road the situation was a little more complex. Things had always been kind of nebulous on the immediate American side of the old McCurtain, where Americans lived in the shadow of the vile and satanic Racist Entity itself just across four lanes of asphalt. To be sure, now that white people had mostly cleared out of the big cities, things in the U.S.A as a whole weren’t anywhere nearly as bad overall as they had been 45 years before, at the time of 10/22, nor even as bad in some respects as they had been 28 years ago under Hunter Wallace.

  The American town stood on the eastern side of old Interstate 15, on the north bank of the Boulder River. Boulder was larger than its stroppy little opposite number Across The Road. Where Basin sat up in a high mountain pass, Boulder was down in a lush valley, surrounded by a rolling prairie broken with creeks and fine stands of cottonwoods and Balsam pines, the earth green with grass in spring, with blue-black mountain ranges towering all around. Jefferson County, Montana, had been almost evenly split between the United States and the Republic under the terms of the Longview treaty, but it had to be said that in this case it was the Americans who had ended up with the better and prettier half.

  Boulder and Basin were only a few miles apart, but when the two towns were separated by the border four decades before, it also separated families, homesteads and land, water rights, businesses from customers and people from the shopping and medical facilities they needed. It had cut children off from their schools and men and women from their jobs. Not to mention the physical and psychic scars caused by the murder and bloodshed of five years of guerrilla warfare in the district. The Northwest was always mostly white, and in many places throughout the Homeland, the War of Independence had been a civil war between whites, nowhere more so than in Montana. In Montana it had been bad: father against son, brother against brother, and sometimes sister against sister and husband against wife. A longstanding community that had once been whole was now cut in two by the Border Highway. There were graves on both sides of the border. In the minds of many, the earth of those graves was still fresh.

  Twelve years later had come the brief occupation of Jefferson County by the NDF during the Seven Weeks War. It had only lasted for a few weeks, before the powder-gray uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets had climbed into their tanks and trucks and Heeps and rolled back Over The Road on the signing of the armistice. That hadn’t been too bad; folks had mostly stayed indoors and avoided the visitors. General A.J. Drones had ruled his troops with an iron hand; God help the NDF soldier who took so much as a can of soda without paying for it, or who so much as looked cross-eyed at a local girl. Drones had his company commanders charging men and giving them fines and extra duty even for swearing or using foul language in front of a local.

  After the Seven Weeks the United States of America, while still technically in existence, had kind of slipped away from the more remote areas of the country as it struggled to wrestle with 150 years’ worth of demons and big, bad chickens now come home to roost. In the intervening years, the people of both communities had arrived at a modus vivendi. Before the Seven Weeks, the border of East Montana had been crawling both with troops and with the hated paramilitary private contractors, but under the terms of the peace treaty everything west of Billings had been de-militarized. The McCurtain had quietly withered away and was now largely a dead letter, although the Montana National Guard still patrolled the border and manned some of the checkpoints. But others were open, and it was no longer a case of shoot-on-sight for anyone with a white skin who set foot on the crumbling asphalt of Interstate 15 headed in a westerly direction. Most of the minefields and fences along the McCurtain had been destroyed by the NDF during the war, and were never re-built, nor were the ADL and SPLC’s mercenaries allowed back on the border. This had caused the level of tension and bloodshed to drop precipitously; the American-Montanans had welcomed the new peaceful life and absence of body-armored thugs from their midst, and the Northwest government had welcomed the ability to shift more of its own troop and police presence to the roiling Aztlan border, where the exact opposite situation prevailed.

  Not that there was much of an American military left in the years after the war. The Montana National Guard maintained a number of posts along the 400-mile frontier, one of them in Jefferson County, and periodically they and local police would pursue and sometimes intercept blockade runners on their side of the line. If the smugglers were Americans looking to make some cash by running microchips and antibiotics into the Republic and bringing back a load of Red Hook beer to sell, as most of them were, then it was their tough luck. They knew the risks of what was still legally Unauthorized Contact. But runners like the young Selkirk brothers posed a problem. They were Northwest citizens and residents, and under no circumstances did the NAR ever allow one of its own to face an American court of any kind. The memory of the black-robed and silk-suited tyrants of Zion, often excremental of skin and prominent of proboscis, had been seared into the Republic’s national consciousness until it was now almost genetically imprinted.

  In the past such incidents had sometimes escalated into cross-border rescue raids by SS commandos and retaliatory incursions by the NDF to grab hostages for trade, the kind of thing that might have started another war had there been any effective United States or Canadian military left. The East Montana state government was too weak to stand a chance against the Northmen, and there was virtually no help available from what was left of the American central government. The Americans responded by doing what Americans have always done best: they said one thing and did another. Over the years a strictly unofficial arrangement had been arrived at. When an NAR resident or citizen was arrested for blockade running on the American side of the line, their vehicles and the contraband they contained were confiscated, the proceeds usually ending up in the pockets of cops and local politicians, while the smugglers themselves were hauled down to the nearest border crossing and kicked back into the Republic.

  When beef had become illegal under One Nation Indivisible and huge swaths of Montana land had been confiscated by the federal government to be emptied of white people and given back to the Indians for casinos and the buffalo for grazing, most of the surviving Jefferson County ranchers had reluctantly switched to dairy cattle, crops such as wheat or sorghum if their land would bear it, or even fruit orchards and truck gardens. Now beef was legal again in the States. In some states. Well, sort of. Maybe. If you paid a tax on it. Or maybe not. Nobody seemed to know or even care. Nobody really seemed to be in charge any more on the once all-meddling federal level. For those ranchers who still elected to raise beef cattle, there were several abattoirs in town. Unmarked freezer trucks periodically showed up from somewhere, bought the meat, and drove off eastward, which was about all folks knew about it. When dressed beef was short in Jefferson, their friends and neighbors from Across The Road who still raised beef cattle by the ton to feed a nation of barbarian carnivores were always willing to help out.

  There had never been any border posts on the NAR side of the line, and the few crossings on the American side that were manned these days didn’t even have any customs officials, since technically speaking there wasn’t supposed to be any population movement between the two countries. A few jokers on the internet still posted maps of the region with nothing but a blank space where the Northwest Republic was, along with waves and mermaids and sea serpents, marked in archaic calligraphy, “Here be Monsters.” Washington D.C.’s wishful thinking to the contrary, after Longview travel between the two halves of Jefferson County had never completely ceased, even in the worst days of the McCurtain. Just as the Israelis had never succeeded in choking off the Palestinians completely from the rest of their people with Bremer walls and electric fences, neither did the United States government succeed in completely tearing Jefferson County, Montana, in two and boxing up both halves separately. When someone had property and loved ones on the other side, one found a way to get through the barbed wire and the minefields for the o
ccasional visit. And back.

  Since the end of the Seven Weeks War and demilitarization, travel back and forth across the Border Highway was now a regular if rather cautious and infrequent thing for some people, although there were those on both sides who as a matter of personal principle and bitter memory had never set foot on the other side of I-15 for the entire forty years. Both sides were acutely aware of the risk of incidents that might get blown up into something worse. There was a sort of hotline phone system between the Civil Guard commander in Basin and the Jefferson County sheriff; Ben Lomax and now Lieutenant Bobby Campbell the Third both carried their special phones with them all the time, just in case. Completely illegal in the U.S., of course, technically a Class A federal felony in fact, Unauthorized Contact, but American law was now more or less optional in East Montana. In Boulder and Basin, stores and business owners accepted New American dollars, Northwest credits, and usually East Canadian dollars, sometimes marking prices in all three currencies unless the Boulder folks got word that some kind of inspector or big-wig from Billings was coming, in which case they hid all such tell-tale signs until the suit was gone. The big nightmare was that something might happen somewhere out on the cat roads involving gunfire and hot pursuit and dead bodies. Everyone hoped something like that could be resolved without starting another war.

  Boulder was now a town of around ten thousand people, with as many more living outside the city limits in rural Jefferson County. In point of fact, Jefferson County was now more populous and more prosperous than it had been before the War of Independence, due in large measure to a lot of smuggling-related activity, and also due to people who were moving in to escape the diversity elsewhere, although the old American tradition of never, ever openly admitting to racial motivations for one’s behavior still held. Despite being perched right on the edge of the unspeakable Racist Entity itself—or perhaps because of it—American Jefferson County had seen a small but steady trickle of people moving in over the past generation, mostly young white couples with children. Although no such thing was ever mentioned out loud, it was quietly accepted that part of the reason for a young family to move to the Montana border country was to shelter beneath the bristling guns of the NDF if the instability which plagued the rest of North America ever tipped over into outright madness and chaos, as frequently appeared possible. At the very least, many otherwise patriotic Americans who officially hewed to the line about the Northwest Republic being the Dark Kingdom of Mordor made sure they were within an easy bolt of the Border Highway, if and when the U.S.A. finally came crashing down for good.

  * * *

  The rest of the United States was slowly crumbling away, like a wet and stinking trash heap in a landfill under a hot summer sun. Jefferson County and almost all of East Montana outside Billings and Bozeman and American Butte was still very predominantly white, a phenomenon which seemed odd since only about 25 percent of the U.S. population was white now. And yet there were whole huge swaths of mostly rural countryside like Montana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, as well as large sections of the Midwest in Illinois and Missouri and the Appalachian mountains that on a local county-by-county basis were demographically whiter than they had been a hundred years before.

  The pattern which had begun to emerge in the middle of the 20th Century had coalesced. Black and brown minorities were now almost all in the huge, sprawling cities that festered and crumbled like maggot-infested swamps, especially east of the Mississippi. The country’s remaining whites lived in enclaves, some spanning several states, consisting mostly of the small towns and remote wide-open spaces of flyover country. The acting federal capitol of Burlington, Vermont, at almost 400,000 people, was the largest wholly functional city remaining in the country. The legal and semantic acrobatics performed by the United States government to keep Burlington functional by keeping it 90 percent white offered some of the funniest and most bemusing reading in American history.

  The remaining 20th Century megalopoli lay on the continent like moaning, dying dinosaurs. They were like huge nature preserves, fenced off and patrolled by American military contractors in order to keep the savages on the reservation, although of course in a nation that still adamantly refused to admit that race exists, this was never explicitly stated. The majority of the American “defense” budget no longer went to maintain a sprawling empire of overseas bases, as in the past century, but for actual defense against the millions of black, brown, and bilious yellow inhabitants of the nation’s Designated Urban Zones (DUZs). There were for all intents and purposes no white residents left in the top 50 American cities, except for outside administrative personnel and a tiny number of completely degenerate whiggers who had merged with the darkness and became totally negrified; in another generation they would be gone, leaving nothing but a muddy stain running like diseased diarrhea through the ebony for a while.

  The true purpose of the massive security cordons around the cities was disguised in a farrago of political and legalese double-talk that whirled around the subject like Cossack dancers doing the Trepak. A colossal legal and administrative system had been created to disguise the fact that America’s main national goal was now to keep millions of non-whites corralled in huge urban detention centers so they would not break out and start wandering the land in gigantic migrations like so many locusts, roaming from place to place and moving on after they had consumed every resource and slaughtered everyone with a white skin. There had been a few such events in past years, which had been dealt with bloodily, and the survivors herded back into Atlanta, St. Louis, and Baltimore. These episodes were barely reported at the time and then swiftly erased from the national memory by the state-controlled media. Even in extremis, the American ruling class would not stop lying about race, so ingrained had the habit become. They would do anything not to have to admit that race was a deadly reality the United States was now desperately trying to survive.

  Electric power and as many basic utilities as possible were supplied to the cities, at least sporadically, by the United States Urban Administration Department (UAD), from heavily fortified generating and water pumping and sewage treatment facilities. Repairs were irregular, but when necessary were made under heavy armed escort from the various mercenary outfits hired by the government for the purpose. Local police were non-existent or completely negrified or mestizo, and therefore useless. The American military itself was too small and poorly equipped for this mission, since the United States government basically no longer had any income from taxation and was dependent on whatever the Federal Reserve decided to give them each year for pocket money.

  Living conditions in the cities for the teeming black and brown population were indescribable, like something out of a nightmare. Cannibalism was common when the government-issued junk food rations ran short. Infant mortality was believed to be about 50 percent, although no one knew for sure. The average lifespan seemed to be about 42 or 43 for both men and women, although the massive homicide rates for young males skewed the estimates. Internal government in places like Atlanta, Miami, Houston and Chicago had been more or less handed over to the ethnic gangs, who spent most of their time engaging in tribal wars through the grass-grown streets and the derelict buildings. The bitterest feuds were between the American-born blacks and the Africans, with both negro factions pausing every now and then to turn on the wretched Haitians and slaughter them.

  All DUZ residents automatically received EBT cards and lifelong welfare checks beginning at age 15; the system was riddled with fraud and abuse from top to bottom, of course, but then it always had been, and America’s social contract had always been clear: give minorities money, enough to keep them drunk and stoned and fed on junk food, or else the minorities riot. The original idea was to embed GPS and ID chips in each card so the authorities could keep some kind of track of what was going on in the concrete jungles, but now most of the spy satellite system from the past 70 years no longer worked, and no one seemed to remember how to repair them. As it had been with Egypt a
nd Rome, certain vital technological skill sets were being lost now, because the United States government had run out of qualified white techies due to the declining level of enrollment of white males in higher education. They had tried to train niggers and sub-continental Asians how to do things like maintaining satellite networks; the results were somewhat less than optimum.

  The cities were covered with sealed high-security ATMs that dispensed a purely local currency as a measure of influx control; you couldn’t spend Houston dollars in Baltimore or New Orleans dollars in Chicago. Keeping these ATMs supplied with local currency was a major function of the security forces and resulted in the most firefights with the locals who wanted to rob the armored half-tracks, or else who just wanted to kill white men.

  There was no heavy industry or major business remaining in the mega-urban areas, and only limited private enterprise in the form of Asian merchants who maintained private security detachments from their own ethnic groups to protect their fortified stores. These were re-stocked by cargo helicopter in most places; it was too dangerous to drive supply convoys overland into labyrinthine cities where the black and brown denizens would kill for a boxed mac-and-cheese dinner and sell their children for a case of bottled water.

  Supplies and provisions were also shipped into the cities in bulk by the superannuated U.S. government to favored local warlords, who were often designated as mayors or governors—or in the case of black-run DUZs like Detroit, Atlanta, and Birmingham, as Head Nigger In Charge. (A title deliberately chosen by the black strongmen who ran those cities, and by no means a humorous one. These men were bestial savages.) These American tributaries maintained personal power through the control of the food supply and also through the distribution or withholding of the welfare checks, AA batteries, cell phones, bottled water, sugary soft drinks, heavy gooey candy, salty grain and potato-based snacks, and other necessities of black and brown life. The whole situation was like dealing with about 50 Mogadishus.