Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Yes, it’s a real nigger!” shouted Bobby. “What the hell were you thinking, making a damned fool out of yourself?”

  “I thought it was some kind of joke, sir,” protested Boardman. “How the hell was I supposed to know? I’ve never seen one before, not a real one!”

  “Couldn’t you smell the damned thing under all that perfume?” Bobby heard moans and movement inside the closet. He went to the duty desk and pulled a long, heavy nightstick out from behind it. It was the only weapon the Basin Civil Guard ever actually used, and that only on rare occasions, to get the attention of rambunctious drunks who were too fuddled to understand what was being said to them. He walked back to the closet door just as it opened. He saw a bleeding black face looming in the darkness and he lashed at it savagely with the nightstick; it screamed and the door slammed shut again. Sweeney appeared breathlessly and handed Bobby his service pistol, a nine-millimeter chemical cartridge gun since smaller Guard detachments hadn’t been issued the new Wilkerson kinetic discharge plate weapons yet. “Oh, I got this phone off your desk as well, sir,” said the corporal. “It was ringing.”

  Bobby looked at it and saw a missed call. “Yeah, I imagine it was,” he said. “That’s the hotline phone. Wonder what Sheriff Lomax wants to talk about?” He stood there with his two fellow officers staring at him for ten seconds. His legal and constitutional duty regarding the contamination was clear, but he went ahead and called Lomax back anyway, on the wild off-chance that there was some reasonable explanation. “Sheriff? Lieutenant Robert Campbell here.”

  “Thank you for returning my call, Lieutenant,” said Lomax formally. “I’m afraid we have a problem.”

  “I’m aware of the problem, yes. Some of your livestock broke out of the pen. I’ve got the animal contained in our broom closet as we speak.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” muttered Lomax. “Is she alive?”

  “Not for long.”

  “What happened? Did you find her out on the road somewhere?”

  “No, she walked right into the police station and asked for me,” said Bobby. “Is she on drugs, or is she just so bird-brained stupid she doesn’t know who or what she is, where she is, or who we are?”

  “I don’t know about the drugs, but as to the rest, yeah, that pretty much says it all,” said Lomax with a sigh. “Look, Lieutenant, I have some government people here with me, who expect me to speak some razzle-dazzle or pull some magic beans out of my pocket and make everything all right. I have tried to explain to them that I have no such magic beans, and that there exists something called the real world, but I’m not sure they get it any more than that pathetic creature in your broom closet does. One of them is making signs that he wants to talk to you.”

  “This is a human being we’re talking about, right?” asked Bobby.

  “Yes, he’s white. Here he is.”

  A new voice came on the phone. “Hello, my name is Brandon Blackwell. Who am I speaking with?”

  “This is Lieutenant Robert Campbell of the Northwest Civil Guard,” said Bobby. There was a short but perceptible pause.

  “You’re the police officer who’s married to Allura Myers, the lady known in your country as the Daughter of the Nation?” he asked, to Bobby’s surprise.

  “I’m used to my wife’s fame preceding me in this country, but I was unaware we were known Out There,” said Bobby. “Not sure I like the idea.”

  “Nothing sinister intended, Lieutenant, just a routine intelligence workup as part of our assignment,” said Blackwell.

  “Yeah, well, fair enough. I know who you are as well. You’re this monkoid’s white minder, right?”

  “My official title is Ms. Martine’s personal assistant, but yes, something like that. Sheriff Lomax had you on speaker, so I understand you have Gabrielle locked in a broom closet?”

  “We don’t need locks on our broom closets in this country, because absent niggers and Mexicans, who’s going to steal janitorial supplies?” asked Bobby. “I have her in the closet, though, and I banged her nappy head a few times to settle her down.”

  “Are you going to kill her?” asked Blackwell bluntly.

  “I’m required to do so by the Constitution,” said Bobby. “Section One, Article Four, if memory serves.”

  “Yes, well, the letter of the law can be a bitch sometimes, I know, but Lieutenant, before you proceed, I’d just like to offer this for your consideration. You are not the only one who is puzzled and disturbed that Gabrielle was chosen to head a mission of this sensitivity. She is singularly unqualified for it. In fact, you might say she was almost guaranteed to make a dog’s dinner of it.”

  “So who chose her, and why?”

  “The who I’m honestly not sure of,” Blackwell told him. “The why is I think because of the very reason that she is unqualified and so virtually certain to make a mess of things.”

  Behind the closet door, Gabi seemed to have recovered enough to realize she was being talked about on the phone. She began to pound on the door and scream incoherently to be released, with many muthafukkas. As with most of her kind, her quasi-white conditioning didn’t hold up well under stress, and her diction was the first to go. “Go get some pepper spray,” Bobby ordered Boardman. “Okay, so your government is run by idiots. We know this. Why should this cause me to be derelict in my duty to enforce the primary law of this country’s very existence?”

  “Unfortunately, my government is not only run by idiots, Lieutenant,” said Blackwell. “It is run by some very nasty people who wish your country harm, some of whom don’t want this Community Prosperity Zone set up anywhere near you, when there might arise some genuine constructive engagement between people of the same race.” Boardman returned with a red canister. Bobby gestured towards the door. The sergeant shoved it open, leaned in, and let fly with a long squirt from the mouth of the can. Gabi Martine’s muthafukkas turned to screams. “After all, we might discover that neither of us are born with horns and pointed tails,” Blackwell went on. He could surely hear Gabi’s howls in the background, but he ignored them. “There are always those who profit by keeping hatred and mistrust alive, Lieutenant. I assume that they are responsible for this ghastly cock-up of sending Gabi out here, knowing full well that something like this would happen. Somebody wants you to kill her, Lieutenant, as part of some bizarre scheme or intrigue that might lead to something a lot worse than the death of one bureaucrat, or one monkoid if you prefer. I won’t quibble over terms. But you might want to think it through before playing into their hands.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll take it under advisement,” said Bobby. He closed the phone. He stared intently at the noisy door for a long moment. “Hell’s bells. All right, I will take responsibility for this. It’s a unique situation and I don’t like diving in until I know how deep it is. Sweeney, go get the paddy wagon and bring it around front.”

  Thirty minutes later a green Civil Guard van rolled down Second Avenue toward Boulder, and pulled up beneath the old interstate underpass. Sheriff Ben Lomax and a washed-out looking middle-aged white man in a rumpled suit whom Bobby took to be Brandon Blackwell were waiting on the American side of the old trailer, a squad car with flashing lights behind them. Lieutenant Robert Campbell and Corporal Mike Sweeney, both wearing sidearms just in case, got out of the van. Sweeney unlocked the rear doors, Bobby reached in and dragged a wailing and gibbering Gabrielle Martine out of the back, her hands cuffed behind her with a plastic tie. Her face was battered and still weeping from fear and the pepper spray, her Power Womyn suit was a bloody mess, and she had urinated and defecated on herself. He hauled her forward to the approximate location of the borderline between the two countries, shoved her forward at the waist, and with a mighty kick to her black buttocks launched her back into the United States.

  Bobby pointed his finger at the two Americans. “This only happens once, got that?” he told them in a steely voice. “The next time I find anything black or brown in my district I’m dressing it out like a deer, taking it out to
the Fish and Wildlife breeding and research station in Rimini, and feeding it to the thylacines!”

  “What about the car she came in?” asked Brandon Blackwell mildly.

  “We’re keeping that as a fine for trespassing and idiocy,” said Bobby. “I think Johnny Selkirk will buy it off us. He can soup it up and use it for his smuggling trips.”

  “Fair enough,” said Blackwell with a shrug.

  XXXV

  THE CHOICE

  (40 Years, 10 months and 19 days after Longview)

  He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.

  —Goethe

  The Montana Border District Operations division in Missoula was responsible for the day-to-day running of all the Civil Guard units in its command, uniformed, detective and support groups alike, including the collection and analysis of crime statistics. After some thought, rather than make a big to-do over the brief monkoid infestation in Basin, Lieutenant Bobby Campbell filed a complete account on the Gabrielle Martine incident, including a short but concise summary of the reasoning behind his decision not to kill the negress, and sent it up the line as part of his daily report. He considered calling his father privately and telling him what had happened, but that might look a little too nepotistic and ass-covering to BD Ops, who were his immediate superiors, so Bobby just did it by the book. In response he got a visit from his father and Major Tom Horakova of BOSS several days later, in his office at the Basin station, “I gather you read my daily for the fifth?” he asked after they were seated and duly supplied with coffee.

  “I did,” said Colonel Campbell with a chuckle. “I have to admit, Bobby, your Form Nines are always better and more efficiently written than mine ever were. One minor traffic accident, one stolen car from Northwest Butte found abandoned in a ditch, one four-year-old boy reported missing but said juvenile found unharmed at a neighbor’s house an hour later, one non-fatal shooting which you feel the magistrate will probably rule familial and therefore outside our jurisdiction, as I also think he will. And one animal control issue.”

  “Okay, so am I busted back down to Guardsman and headed for a substation up in Alberta near the Arctic Circle?” Bobby Three. “Look, Dad, I know I violated Guard regulations, not to mention the Constitution, by not wasting that spook. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time and it fell within the purview of a judgment call, but I know the higher-ups may not think so.”

  “Do you still think you did the right thing?” asked his father.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” said Bobby. “I think Brandon Blackwell was telling me the truth about somebody in Burlington trying to set up that nanny to get killed in some kind of suicide-by-Northman scenario, as part of some strange American political intrigue. As a matter of principle, I don’t believe we should play along with any of their moronic schemes if it can be avoided.”

  “Well, no need to start packing your gear or fitting Ally and the kids for mukluks just yet,” replied Colonel Campbell with a smile. “The official view both from Operations and the Ethics Office is that you handled the situation just right, although the Opposition in Parliament will probably heckle the Minister of Justice with it during Question Time next week. I concur with that view, even if the raging purists in the House and elsewhere may not. You’ll probably get some criticism from those quarters, but disregard it. I think you were correct in your comment about not wanting to dive in until you knew how deep it was, and we still don’t know how deep it is. Forty years ago we won the verdict that counts at Longview, and I think we can survive a contamination of less than an hour, although we do need to make sure they don’t start making a habit of this kind of thing.”

  “I told Lomax when I returned his wandering primate that this only happens once,” Bobby Three told them. “I’ve issued orders to the squad here to that effect. I told them straight up that this was a once-off for political reasons, purely on my own authority, not policy, and from now on if anything black or brown pokes its nose across the Road, we bury it.”

  “The Political Bureau agrees that Brandon Blackwell’s assessment makes sense,” said Tom Horakova. “The latest PB thinking is that if the Americans really are serious about creating this Prosperity Zone thingummy out here on the border, as far away from the mess they’ve spent the last century creating as they can get, and if they genuinely intend to bring a lot of their economic infrastructure and their technocratic ruling élite this close, where we will have easier access to the active and creative core of what remains of their society, then we’re all in favor of it, and we should smooth the way. Your sparing the life of a stupid she-boon might have been technically against revolutionary protocol, but it fits in with that policy.”

  “Pragmatic Tendency?” chuckled Bobby. “Old President Brennan would have been proud of me.”

  “Probably,” agreed his father.

  Tom went on: “I think we know why the American government’s internal opposition is attempting to create incidents such as your recent uninvited guest. The Americans want to set up this Green Zone, which is basically what it is, with its back to a solid wall, not a porous one which will allow people and ideas to flow back and forth between the U.S.A. and the Republic. As you tell me Blackwell stated, that would be the true constructive engagement, Northmen and the few remaining white Americans meeting on common ground. We want to encourage that. They want to shelter what’s left of their three-hundred-year-old inheritance behind the NDF’s guns, before the fruits of a century of folly break out of the concrete jungles and America finally has to pay the piper. But they don’t want to acknowledge the fact that they’re doing so, and they don’t want any real interaction between the people on the two sides of the Road. Or at least they want to control the level and the quality of that interaction through their own version of constructive engagement, which I gather is kind of like them becoming missionaries to the savages and showing us the evil of our ways.”

  “In other words, they want to make sure they corrupt us with their wealth and luxury and their shades of gray, rather than us stiffening the spines of their own white people, imparting some racial pride, and making them question their national belief system of everybody being beautiful and Jesus loving all the little children of the world, blah blah blah and ishkabibble,” said Bobby keenly.

  “That’s the nub of it, yes,” agreed Horakova. “Looks like these idiots are going to try to maintain some pretense of political correctness right up to the last, just before they sink out of sight under the weight of their own crapulence. Their ship has almost sunk, but when they hit the water they grab an anvil instead of a life preserver.”

  “There’s an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging,” said Colonel Bob. “The Americans have never learned that, but eventually that old devil reality comes knocking and will no longer be denied. Look at it from the Americans’ point of view: their country is on the brink of collapse into anarchy, and they do retain sense enough to realize the fact. But they haven’t got the political will actually to do anything about it. Oh, sure, there’s things they could do about the problem of the cities, even now. The Old Man always said that white America could save itself at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute if they ever somehow changed their thinking and recovered their ancient courage. Even the rump U.S. government still has enough muscle to deal with the urban problem, starting with that carpet-bombing you mentioned the other night when we were talking about this out on your porch. The first essential measure has to be to change the demographics, swing them back in favor of white people and drastically cut the number of non-whites consuming America’s substance while giving back nothing in return. But to take those measures that would be necessary to survive would involve the United States of America, its entire political establishment and intelligentsia and ruling élite, admitting that they have been wrong about race. Wrong for a hundred years. They will literally die before doing that. Unfortunately they’re going t
o take a lot of white people with them whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of that Road over there. That’s why we’re going along with this constructive engagement business. We may end up saving millions of our people’s lives by plucking them out of the massive flood of human excrement that’s about to burst the dams all over the eastern part of the continent.”

  “Or maybe do some carpet-bombing ourselves?” suggested Bobby. “That would be one way to change the continent’s demographics in a damned hurry.”

  “I know the Political Bureau is looking at all the possible angles and certain members of the General Staff have been sitting in on the discussions,” Tom told them. “Beyond that I have no idea, and wouldn’t talk about it if I did.”

  “Fair enough. You said we may have figured out who in their power structure is trying to sabotage the project on their end, by sending blackamoors to tempt us naughty racist fellows into sin?” asked Bobby.

  “I’m convinced it’s the Office of Northwest Recovery itself, and that kike who runs it, Seth Goldblum,” said his father. “Why the hell do you think they issued a black woman a travel warrant to enter the NAR, knowing full well what would happen to her? Or what would have happened if you hadn’t decided to look before you leaped?”

  “I just got back from a special briefing in Olympia, and I learned a few things I didn’t know, and which I am authorized to talk about, all the usual Official Secrets Act disclaimers being duly invoked,” said Major Horakova. “The fact is that the United States government is considering disbanding the whole agency, partly in the name of so-called constructive engagement, but more frankly as a simple cost-cutting measure. They’re on the bones of their ass financially, every penny counts, and by now it’s obvious that the ONR is never going to be able to fulfill its main function, which is to undo Longview and the War of Independence and bring the Northwest Republic back into the U.S.A. Not happening, no way, José, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify keeping a whole huge government department spinning its wheels and accomplishing nothing, while eating up millions of NADs. Any spying and sabotage they want done regarding the Republic can be attempted by half a dozen other agencies, the agencies that were originally created a century and a half a go to fulfill such functions, and who have always been jealous as hell of the ONR being cock of the walk on Northwest affairs. FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, the NGOs like ADL and SPLC, they have been eyeing that massive ONR budget and drooling for decades, aching to carve up that lovely pie and share it out amongst themselves. Of course, when that happens, those agencies will then end up cutting one another’s throats to see who gets the biggest and juiciest pieces of the carcass.”