Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “It’ll come to me,” said Bobby. He dialed Ben Lomax’s hotline phone, hoping the sheriff hadn’t thrown the phone into the nearest dumpster, or left it in his other uniform trousers. It rang and rang, and Bobby was about to hang up when Lomax answered.

  “What?” The sheriff’s voice was calm, presumably because there were others in earshot, but he didn’t sound pleased.

  “You owe me a favor,” said Bobby.

  “I do, but I know what you want, and it’s out of my hands,” said Lomax.

  “Yeah, it’s in my hands now,” said Bobby. “In about a minute you’re going to hear a loud noise in the rear of your station. Go out back and investigate it. Take all of your deputies with you. All of them, got it?”

  “And if I don’t?” asked Lomax.

  “Then we’ll see how it plays out. If you feel your duty to your men and your community demands that you be involved in this, then good luck, and I mean that. I just figured I’d let you know. One white man to another.”

  “Thanks.” Lomax hung up.

  Ray Selkirk’s nephews apparently had itchy trigger fingers; it was only a few more seconds afterward that two armor-piercing rifle grenades slammed out of the darkness into the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department prisoner transport van and it exploded into a ball of fire. “Okay, you men whom I designated as Gold Team, set up a perimeter around the Washington Street entrance and don’t let anybody except our own people in, which is anybody wearing a Civil Guard uniform or who is related to you. Go!” ordered Bobby.

  The front door was locked, but the brawny Sergeant Boardman swung the hand-ram and smashed it open, and the Northwest group ran past the empty reception desk and down a short corridor to the squad room, where they stopped. Bobby pulled a stun grenade off his belt. “John?” he called out.

  “Two nigger women and one buzz-cut boo-yah!” shouted Johnny. “The limey’s not here!”

  “Shut the fuck up, puerco!” screamed Mona James, somewhere out of sight around the doorjamb.

  “John! Jelly roll coming in!” called Bobby, knowing Selkirk would recognize the military term for a stun grenade and cover his ears.

  “Got it!” Johnny yelled back.

  Bobby threw the grenade and it detonated with a flash and a thunderclap. He and his team moved in. “Boardman! Get the rear doors!” The sergeant ran forward to make sure the doors to the jail section were locked, so Lomax and his men couldn’t re-enter the squad room that way. Bobby had his service automatic out. Agent Hornbuckle raised his head over a desk where he had taken cover and fired at him once, missing. Behind Bobby, the SS sergeant Cullen Selkirk shot Hornbuckle through the head once with his X-3 rifle. Mona James threw down her pistol and fled screaming down a short corridor which turned out to be a dead end; at least a dozen bullets splattered red goo over the locked door before she flopped down into a heap. Bobby found Gabi Martine hiding under a desk. He dragged her out by her hair, screaming fucks and muthafukkas, and he shot her twice between her bouncing black mammaries at point blank range. She gurgled and flopped and rolled over a desk onto the floor.

  Cullen Selkirk said “Never shot a nigger before,” and eased his rifle barrel over to put a coup de grace between Gabi’s gasping spoon lips.

  “No, wait,” said Bobby. “I don’t want her face messed up.” He pulled his own large Bowie knife from the sheath on his belt, grabbed the gooey lacquered negroid hair which was now dripping with blood, and with a few swift, forceful strokes he severed the negress’s head, causing a gush of blood to go cascading out onto the floor from the decapitated carcass. “Watch your feet, guys!” Bobby called out in warning. He glanced around and saw that the waste paper baskets at each desk had black plastic bags inserted in them; he grabbed several of them and double-bagged the head, tying them shut. He looked up. Ray Selkirk was coming in the door. “Captain Selkirk, find the keys and get your grandson out of here.”

  “No keys. It’s an electronic lock. There’s a button under that desk there,” said Johnny, pointing. “You’re not going to stuff that and mount it, are you, Lieutenant? That’s weird, even for one of us.”

  “No, I have another use for it,” said Bobby.

  “What’s in the bag?” asked old man Ray.

  “Nigger head,” said Bobby.

  “You a collector?” asked Ray. “I knew some Volunteers back in the day who collected nigger ears and whatnot. Never whole heads, though.”

  “No, I’m not going to keep it,” said Bobby. “This she-boon came to our house over there, and it still pisses me off, even if I did let her go for political reasons. I think I see a way to rectify that error. Where are Lomax and his guys?”

  “Out back watching their paddy wagon burn, and moving their cars out of the lot so they don’t get damaged if anything else blows,” said Ray. “They’ll take their time, but we need to go. Don’t want to embarrass the man too badly.”

  “We need to find Danny,” said Johnny, opening the door to the office. The girl ran out and embraced him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Are you?” she demanded,

  “Fine.”

  “Miss Tolliver?” said the old man, stepping forward. “I’m Raymond Selkirk, John’s grandfather. If you were serious about returning to the Republic with us, we need to go now. We’re not quite out of the woods yet.”

  “You better come with us, Danny,” said John, his arm around her. “If your grandfather finds out you helped us, he’s going to kill you. Maybe for real.”

  “How do you know I helped you?” asked Danny.

  “It was you who called Pop, wasn’t it?” said John.

  “Who told you?” exclaimed Danny.

  “Nobody told me,” said Johnny. “Who else would it be?”

  “You should come with us, Miss Tolliver,” said Ray. “I know your grandfather. When he finds out you have not only betrayed your country, as he insists on viewing it, but you did so for a member of my family and by contacting me, it’s probably not a good idea for you to be within his reach at that moment.”

  “I know,” said Danny sadly. “Where would I live?”

  “We’ve got a good government guest house outside Basin,” said Bobby. “My own family stays there when they visit.”

  “Horse hockey,” said Ray. “This family is in your debt, ma’am. You’ll stay with us out at our place, as an honored guest, where we can keep an eye on you for you in case there are any repercussions from this side of the Road, and where John’s mother can keep an eye on both of you.” Johnny’s eyebrows lifted and his eyes widened; Bobby got the impression that he would almost have preferred the custody of the FBI. “We’ll show you the ropes over there on our side. If you want to set up on your own for a while, we’ll help you with that. If you and John decide you want to join our family, then we’ll do that as well. But right now we need to get the hell out of here, before Ben Lomax remembers he’s a sheriff.”

  * * *

  On their way out of town, the Northwest convoy passed New Model Army Colonel Malcolm Hart driving toward the jail with the armored vehicle he had been sent to collect to take the prisoner John Selkirk to Billings. Hart didn’t recognize any of the faces in the vehicles that passed him in the autumn night, until he got a brief glimpse of Danny Tolliver, and he knew that something had happened. Five minutes later he was standing over the mound of bloody rags that was Mona James’ corpse. “You did nothing at all?” he demanded of Ben Lomax, his voice calm but of freezing Arctic coldness. “There’s a word for men like that, Sheriff. Men who stand aside and let women be murdered. They are called cowards. It’s a pity you don’t follow the Republic’s practice of dueling on this side of the Road. One of the few of their customs I could stomach.”

  “Listen to me,” said Lomax, furious with Hart not just because of his words but because he wasn’t sure there was no truth in them. “I have told you before, but now you need to get it even more. We don’t want America here. We never did, and I’m not just talking about the past few mo
nths. Truth be told, we didn’t want you here forty-five years ago when Coeur d’Alene went up, and a long time before that. It’s just that some of us decided to act on those feelings back then and some didn’t.

  “You say you were coming here to bring us all these new jobs and money and new opportunities to have better lives here and keep our kids from running off to the Ring Burbs when they left school, and that’s fine, but you did it in a way which was deliberately calculated to spit right in the face of these people whom we have to live side by side with, without chopping each other to pieces, which is what’s happened in the past. You didn’t come here to bring us a damned thing. You came here to start a fight. Why, I don’t know, but you did, and you can’t complain now when you got what you came for. A fight you lost, which I could have told you is usually the way it goes. I’m sorry about your friends and about Agent James, I know you were knocking boots together, but what you see here is what happens when you fuck with the Northmen, and you fucked with the Northmen. I think you should get back in your car and light out for Billings. I’d say your mission here is over.”

  “Not quite,” said Hart angrily. He walked outside and flipped open his phone, and he dialed a number in the fortified Green Zone of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, now a major refuge for white people fleeing from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the badlands of New Jersey. “Yes? May I speak to Captain Jones, please? Colonel Malcolm Hart.” He waited a bit. “Trevor? Malcolm here. I was wondering if you could get a few of the lads together and come out to Montana for a day or two. No, this is a purely personal matter. Some very unpleasant chaps have killed someone whom I was quite fond of, and I would like to return the favor. I’ll tell you when you get here. Let’s say that a certain Nation is about to lose a Daughter.”

  XXXVII

  “I KNEW THIS DAY WOULD COME”

  (40 Years, 11 months and seven days after Longview)

  Our duty is to preserve what the past has to say for itself, and so say for ourselves what shall be true in the future.

  —John Ruskin

  In the days following the nighttime cross-border raid, Lieutenant Robert Campbell III was concerned that he was going to be called up before a disciplinary review board for violating American territory, even though there were no immediate violent repercussions and the civil authorities on the Boulder side seemed to be taking a “least said, soonest mended” attitude toward the incident. The death of two FBI agents and an Affikin-Amurkin Power Womyn didn’t bother the NAR authorities in the least, but Bobby had risked his own men being killed or, even more embarrassingly, captured, which would have necessitated a further escalation on the Republic’s part wherein things might have spiraled genuinely out of control. In the Guard van on their way back into the Republic that night, Bobby had made sure that Johnny Selkirk understood what a lucky escape he’d had, and told him, “From now on, John, your blockade-running days are over. For some months, anyway, until everything settles down and those feds from Burlington clear out completely. You stay the hell on this side of the border. I’m not coming over and dragging your ass out of there again.”

  “Neither am I,” old Ray added.

  A little over two weeks after the incursion, Colonel Robert Campbell and Bobby’s Uncle Tom from BOSS came out to Basin again, and assured him that the Justice Minister had ruled in his favor. “He could hardly do otherwise, considering the way General Bill Vitale strolls over the border into Aztlan any time he pleases,” remarked Major Horakova. “Besides, you’re covered by Morehouse.” He meant that the Republic’s well-known Morehouse Doctrine, which had been endorsed by Parliament at the time of its introduction as an official policy and re-affirmed on several occasions since then, had been held to apply in Johnny Selkirk’s case, despite the somewhat less than clear circumstances.

  “The Morehouse Doctrine asserts that the Republic has two primary missions, providing a Homeland for white people here, and protecting them abroad to the best of our capability,” his father told him. “That capability has become pretty formidable down through the years, but occasionally our multifarious enemies need reminding who’s the meanest dog in the junkyard. Which you did with great panache I might add, and not a single Northwest casualty. Good work, son. Why should the Circus have all the fun?”

  “You guys ought to book a permanent suite at the guest house, you’re out here so often,” commented Bobby.

  “We have, actually,” said Tom Horakova. “I’m also going to be asking for a cubbyhole of some kind down at your Guard station. You’re going to be seeing quite a bit of us, especially me. We want to keep an eye on whatever is roiling and boiling Over The Road in this sector, especially with all this recent sound and fury. That British mercenary Hart is still sleazing around over there, for one thing, and I can’t figure out why. He bears watching. As little as we like having the FBI this close, the NMA we like even less. We need to try and find some way to work this so they bring all the jobs and money and yuppies fleeing diversity right up to our doorstep, but they leave their gun thugs behind.”

  “Uh, technically, since American Jefferson is out of the country, wouldn’t that be WPB or CMI jurisdiction, not BOSS?” asked Bobby.

  “Combined Military Intelligence concentrates on military matters, intel and analysis, so forth and so on,” Horakova told him. “The Circus, on the other hand, tends to gravitate to where the heavy political and economic action is going on. In the old days that meant the cities like New York and Chicago and whatnot, but since the cities became zoos and the Jews and influentials fled to the second-tier latté towns, WPB followed them. Since they evacuated the Manhattan Green Zone some years ago, D.C. is about the only traditional American city that still has a Circus station now, I believe. Well, okay, American Houston, as well. But these days the Circus acrobats mostly hang out in Burlington, Cambridge, the Hamptons, Ottawa, Fredericksburg, the Raleigh-Durham RTP, Montreal, Columbus, Denver and Aspen, Omaha, places like that. Basically they follow the Jews. So far what’s been happening here is a minor sideshow, and Vince is happy to hand it off to BOSS, since we’re right over the border and can coordinate.”

  “So now what?” asked Bobby.

  “Hopefully, now nothing,” said his father. “The government in Burlington may or may not decide to continue with the Prosperity Zone thingie, depending on how ticked off they are about us killing their pets, but my guess is they’ll go ahead with it. The Americans still need to resuscitate their commerce and industry, and they can’t do that anywhere near festering sinkholes that might boil over any time with angry and starving mud people. They really do need to scuttle out here with all their good stuff and the last of their white techie élite, and get their backs to the Road where they can shelter beneath the guns of the Republic in case their whole ball of wax crumbles into fragments.”

  “I have a question I just have to ask,” said Tom Horakova. “Bobby, what in God’s name did you do with the nigger head you took away that night?”

  “You’re not keeping it around the house where the kids might find it, are you?” asked his father anxiously.

  “Good grief, no!” exclaimed Bobby Three. “I got creative with it. I had Sweeney drive down to Butte, cross over to the American side—he’s got a day pass from some friend of his in the city cops down there—and from there he Fedexed the head to Seth Goldblum in Burlington, Vermont.”

  “The Director of the Office of Northwest Recovery?” laughed Bob senior.

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “I was going to put a cutesy little post-it note on her forehead, but after thinking about it, I decided that would be overdoing it. I figure Goldblum will get the message, him and whoever else in Burlington who was involved in the fiasco of sending that creature out here.”

  “I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Seth or whoever opens that package!” chuckled Horakova. “It will probably hit the news Out There, as an example of what horrible savages we are, unless the régime decides to suppress the story altogether rather than admit they made a
screw-up.”

  “How’s young Danielle Tolliver doing since she Came Home?” asked Colonel Campbell.

  “Okay, so far as I know,” said Bobby. “We’ve had her over to dinner a couple of times, to make sure she feels welcome, since she had to leave her own home so abruptly. The kids like her. Ally works with her at school, helps her with her tutoring, and she’s fairly well impressed.”

  “Danny’s started classes at Cataract High?” asked Campbell senior.

  “Yes,” said Bobby. “Like a lot of new immigrant kids, she’s going to have a hard time catching up. Most of her American education was unbelievably deficient by our standards—she was never taught how to multiply fractions or do long division in elementary school, although to be sure at least they did teach cursive writing in her fifth grade year, which is something. I understand that most American schools don’t any more. Danny’s high school science courses were about what we teach sixth graders, her language training was laughable and consisted basically of how to ask one’s way to the cantina and the bathroom in Tijuana, there was of course no tracking at all by scholastic ability, no serious evaluation of her skills, or any attempt to determine what she is really good at in life and how she could become a productive citizen.”

  “That’s a holdover from the days when there were niggers and Mexicans in Montana and the curriculum had to be dumbed-down to primate level,” said Tom. “Nor could there be any tracking or student assessment which made blacks come out on the bottom, so they did away with it. Kind of like dealing with the problem of constantly late trains by abolishing timetables. They actually did that in the United Kingdom in the last century, by the by.”

  Bobby went on: “Danny was told that Maya Angelou and the rap of Booga-Booga B constitute English literature, and needless to say, the history she has been taught Over There is one gigantic tissue of lies from beginning to end. Fortunately Danny seems to have spent most of her time for the past several years in home economics, auto shop, 4-H courses like animal husbandry and agricultural science, and she seems to have escaped the usual American adolescent ambition of running off to the city where she can live a life of debauchery away from family supervision and censure. She seems to be one of those girls who are just born good, with naturally healthy instincts.”