by J. L. Bourne
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For My Shipmates
You have the watch. May the wind be always at your backs and may your black flags remain stowed—mostly.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Welcome back to the world of Max, a world possessing DNA very similar to our own . . . maybe a chromosome or two off.
One of the reasons you’re reading this is because you want to know what happened to Max, and we’ll get to that shortly, I promise.
First, let’s deconstruct and analyze some of the other reasons you might be reading these words right now. You’re worried. Your candidate maybe didn’t get elected. Hell, your candidate maybe wasn’t even on the ballot. The economy is still on the ropes and firearms sales records continue to climb almost congruently with your uncertainty about the future of this country. Legislators are trying to outlaw unbreakable encryption while tech giants feign resistance. Less than nine months after Tomorrow War hit bookshelves and e-readers, Syria’s grid was brought down nationwide by what many experts claim was a cyberattack. You’d like to think that none of the events in Tomorrow War could ever happen here, but the news headlines are a little too close to those fictional events for comfort, aren’t they?
I don’t blame you; I remain concerned, too. This is why I wrote Tomorrow War in the first place: to make you and yours aware of what might happen if we do not remain vigilant of the powers that We the People loan to those who govern us and our way of life. As before: “The thought crime ahead goes beyond the paradigm of right, left, Democrat, or Republican, the outdated behavioral placement control mechanisms, forcing us to choose between two heads of the same serpent.”
If you are new to the series, allow me to give you the one-minute version.
The first novel began with reading the account of a man identified only as Max as he was sheep dipped by a CIA recruiter to be a member of the Agency’s premier “dirty tricks” squad. After meeting up with his mentor, Maggie, Max soon found himself on an unacknowledged deep black mission inside the sovereign border of Syria. The mission for which Max was sent was a straightforward instability operation at first, but the events that transpired in Syria soon spread to a global catastrophe unlike any the world had ever seen.
Taking Maggie’s advice, Max returned to his home in the rural hills of Arkansas, where he made last-minute insider preparations with his cousins Jim and Matt right before the United States grid collapsed. As his area of influence began to crumble all around him, so did the oaths of the servants who swore to support and defend the Constitution. Max witnessed a series of heinous crimes committed by a desperate government. Stricken with guilt from his accidental influence on the collapse, Max swore to take the fight to the state-sponsored murderers. Along the way he encountered a man of means by no means named Rich, surviving on an abandoned train loaded full of provisions, hidden in plain sight from the turmoil unfolding in the city around him.
Together Max and Rich eventually brought down the regional tyrannical faction that had a death grip on the throat of freedom, but not without blowback.
Stack deep, load those carbine mags, and be ready for anything. War is just a page away.
Data Recovery
Director,
This data was pretty corrupted; what is meant is that it should have been, considering the circumstances. Spinning metal discs with metal particles arranged to provide binary if/then statements can be fragile when exposed to extreme electromagnetic pulse energy. This tech has utilized all recovery algorithms, but this may be the final chapter in what is known of Max —————————————, at least currently known. Most of his original scans, transcripts and support data has been defragmented and chronologically sorted based on encoded metadata.
Everything seems to be in order for your review.
Very respectfully,
—————————————
Lead Tech, Big Iron
PART ONE
* * *
SHADY REST
Cold.
Alone.
The hills of Newton County, Arkansas, were a remote place before the implosion of civilized society, which was why I chose to hole up here now. The train still exists as sort of a mobile base of resistance in western Arkansas, but I’m far from the reach of the locomotives. It’s not that I don’t feel that it’s a righteous calling; hell, I helped them bring down the federal government in that area. That winter of resistance was harsh, killing many of us off by common cold and infection. With the spring came organization and purpose. After we figured out that we couldn’t go past Fort Smith to the south because of fallout from a reactor meltdown near Russellville, we ended up going north. There the feds had blown out a large bridge just outside of Belle Vista. This effectively limited the mobile command center’s travel to about a hundred miles of north–south track. It was fall when I decided it was time to leave. It had been long, dirty months since we neutralized the feds at the prison.
My cousin Jim and I took our gear and said our good-byes when the train made its stop back in Fayetteville; we then watched it resume going south to the exclusion zone on its endless back-and-forth route. It was rough to leave Rich; he said he wasn’t ready to ditch his comfy boxcar quite yet. I shook his hand firmly before Jim and I trekked back to my shelter, safely buried in the rocky Arkansas ground a half-day walk to the east.
Jim and I held up for about a week when we got word from Rich via Radio Free Ozarks that a federal hit squad was looking for me.
Rich used verified code words, so I knew the threat was real. If they found me, they’d also kill whomever I was with.
It was time to go.
I left Jim enough to get him through the winter, and loaded up some dry goods, water, guns, and ammo into the back of my derelict Toyota pickup that I’d left covered with camo netting since the shit really hit the fan. Despite the cold, the engine cranked over, waking from a long dormancy. I let it run and embraced Jim one last time, promising to see him again soon, then crunched through the woods, down the trail leading to Black Oak Road. Jim had buried my shelter back before all this; I just hope it won’t become his grave.
The only one besides me who knows the exact whereabouts of the cabin I now inhabit, Shady Rest, has been dead for a while. My father used to bring me here in summer. Back then there was no electricity here, no running water besides the river down the holler. If you had to take a number two, you did it in the nearby outhouse. Dad told me I was spoiled to have a magazine rack inside Shady Rest’s outhouse, and that it was a fancy structure because it was a “two-seater.” I still laugh, thinking about all this luxury Dad used to tease me about when compared to his Spartan childhood growing up in these mountains.
UMBRA
Notice to All Fusion Centers
Target number one in OPERATION HAYSTACK, Max —————————————, will heretofore be referred to as CONDUCTOR in all applicable op-intel reporting and tippers. Your compliance with this intelligence directive is mandatory until such time as CONDUCTOR is apprehended.
Director sends.
CABIN FEVER
4 Nov
I left the confines of Shady Rest early this morning. My food stores are running low (except the emergency stash in my go bag), so I decided to run a trotline. The sky continues to spit flurri
es, reminding me of the grim fact that I need to stack a few ricks of firewood. I’ll go up periscope tonight to listen for chatter. Rich knows I’m listening at dusk on most days I can get to high ground in time.
5 Nov
Three fish on the line! I cleaned them and tossed them in the pan pretty fast. After scarfing them down, I grabbed my axe and felled two medium-sized trees. I had an old chainsaw in the side shed, but couldn’t risk the noise. The sun was getting low when I was done hand-sawing the trees into lengths that would fit my woodstove. I split enough to last me until morning and cooked my last can of train soup. Exhausted. Gonna catch some shut eye and take the bolt gun out in the early morning to see if I can’t scare up some game.
SHORT ACTION
6 Nov
The wind was blowing a cold breeze when I stepped off the cabin porch in the early black of another Ozark mountain morning. My .300 Blackout bolt gun was secured to my pack along with a set of trekking poles.
I quietly made my way up the mountain opposite the direction of the wind. Crunching through the frozen grass, I concentrated on stalking my way into my hunting grounds. I had a deer blind set up there and planned to be in it before the sun came up. I fumbled around for my night vision device (NVD) and positioned it over my right eye. The Milky Way came into green focus when the device powered on, calling attention in bright detail to Earth’s skewed relative rotation.
The blind’s IR signature jumped out from its organic surroundings. Inside, I was half tempted to kick on the small propane heater we’d kept at the cabin for years, using it to keep us warm while hunting. Fuel was very scarce, so I resisted the urge to stay warm the easy way. I closed all but one of the blind’s fabric windows to keep as much heat inside as I could and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The sun had been up for an hour when I caught my first look at wildlife through the small binoculars I kept hanging around my neck.
I watched a yearling and a doe quickly traverse the field in front of me. I dropped the binos and cranked my rifle’s optic up to 9x. I rested the gun on my crossed trekking poles and began to track the doe as she moved left to right across the blind’s opening. They both looked pretty skinny, so I decided to pass. I’ve been pretty lucky with the river. I’ve heard no shots in the mountains today . . . not like it’s a common thing anyway.
—————
Sundown
Trotline had a fat catfish on it. Not as lucky as earlier with that trio, but it still smells damn good on the fire. I split another rick of wood and stacked it neatly on the cabin porch. Covered in sweat, I built a fire inside and then stripped down to nothing and went to the side of the house where I had a hose running from a 55-gallon steel barrel fed by a larger cistern. The flat black–painted barrel absorbed enough heat to take some of the chill out of the water, but my God it was still brutally cold. I took a thirty-second shower and ran back inside the cabin into the starlike blistering heat of the woodstove.
Time to eat.
—————
Midnight
Keep hearing something outside, even over the wind that’s no longer a breeze but now blasting through the valley. Sounds like a woman screaming.
Big cat.
The shrieking sound along with the flickering kerosene lantern light, from which I write this, makes for an unsettling scene. The wind is blowing hard enough to shake the thick wooden door on its hinges. The two-by-fours I have bracing the door should hold any potential intruder back, but I’m still sleeping with my gun.
That hasn’t changed. Ever.
Something wild is out there in the dark, and something even more menacing searches for me beyond it.
Should have burned my table scraps.
November 6
Notice to All Fusion Centers
The search for CONDUCTOR continues. Although we know the day-to-day general location of the supply train where CONDUCTOR was previously located, we can confirm via quadcopter reconnaissance that he has not been operating in the area for some time. We cannot risk flying or engaging our larger Reaper drones in that area as new intelligence reports suggest that the Northwest Arkansas Irregulars (NAI) have received a shipment of Stinger missiles from a group of recently arrived Redstone Arsenal deserters. As our limited Reaper fleet is a high-density, low-volume asset, they do not meet the commit matrix for employment over Stinger threat territories.
We now have CONDUCTOR’s agency contact in custody and have been interrogating this individual for actionable intelligence. We will notify the director if any new information comes to light as a result.
FREE MASON
10 Nov
Last night’s storm toppled a tree right into my rock chimney, knocking off a couple cornerstones. I’ve been using the woodstove anyway, but still need to keep up on the repairs as winter sets in. Don’t want a heavy snow to put the roof down on me some midnight in January.
I’ve heard the cat outside every night, so I haven’t been getting much sleep. I’ll bet a lot of the meat has been hunted out of the territory since the breakdown of just-in-time shipping; that’s probably another reason why the cat is hanging out near the cabin. I found half a bag of cement in the small storage shed in the back. Got to go down to the river and get some water for the mix to repair the damage. The repairs won’t last without fireclay and type S, but it’ll have to do.
11 Nov
The old wooden ladder I was using to repair the rock chimney yesterday is missing a rung. This resulted in more than one near mishap ten feet up on the side of the cabin. After a couple hours of cursing up and down the crappy ladder and dropping my makeshift wooden trowel a few times, I finally got the missing rocks set back into the side of the chimney. I’m no mason like Jim, but it’ll hold.
I hope Jim is holding up okay at Black Oak.
Time for a radio check.
—————
11 Nov (Later)
Bagged a deer.
I was walking up the mountain this morning the same way I always do before a hunt when I saw him limping through the trees. The buck wasn’t that big, but he was enough to fill my cooler. I raised my bolt gun, glassed him, and noticed deep claw marks on his flanks.
Injured.
I didn’t want to spook him, so I got low and stalked in, circling around to the high ground. The wind was not in my favor. The buck’s ears twitched when he caught my scent. One snap of a twig and the deer would run off and probably die anyway. I braced the gun against a nearby oak tree and aimed for the heart.
I slowly squeezed the three-pound trigger.
The suppressed rifle thumped some bass just before the loud thwack of the 208-grain round hitting the deer’s flesh. The animal ran ten yards or so before dropping like a sack of potatoes.
Thinking of the marks on his flank, I cautiously approached the kill. Cats like to attack at dawn or dusk when we humans can’t see very well; right now, the sun hadn’t been up too long. I quickly made sure the buck was dead and really inspected its injuries before starting my expedient field dress. They were fairly fresh and not yet infected. Four deep claw marks gouged through the deer’s left flank; this was clearly the work of a predator. Might be a black bear, but I doubted it, based on the bloodcurdling sounds I’ve been hearing at night.
I felt eyes on me as I removed most of the animal’s organs, tossing the steaming mass into the nearby bushes.
With the carcass now a good bit lighter, I rolled it onto the tarp I was carrying and started dragging it down the mountain. It was a brutal, freezing trip.
My cleaning station was set up a hundred yards from the cabin. I didn’t want the smell of blood and guts near where I slept at night. Using some cordage, I strung the deer up at eye level and moved on to butchering the meat for tonight’s stew, careful to drop the heart and liver into a Ziploc bag. I then hoisted the animal high to cool it off. The tarp was littered with blood, bone, flesh, and guts; I’d need to dispose of that a good distance away fro
m the cabin before going in for the night.
After a few hours and some struggling, I eventually got most of the meat in an old Igloo cooler that I kept full of chunks of river ice for this occasion. After securely tying the cooler closed, I hoisted it high off the ground using a tree branch.
By midday, I’d gotten rid of the carcass and was cooking deer stew with chunks of heart, liver, and a cup of rice. It wasn’t a lot of variety, but it was calories. If the weather stayed cold, I could keep the meat frozen, maybe stretch it a month or two. There was propane in the cabin’s tank, enough to keep the freezer running, but there was no use keeping it active until the meat was at risk of being spoiled. I doubted it would warm up in these mountains anytime before February.
After heading back down the hill to get more ice, I saw the impressions clearly in the clay of the riverbank.
Mountain lion tracks.
I gathered chunks of river ice in a canvas rice bag, feeling my Glock on my hip, taking comfort that it was fully loaded with heavy 147-grain 9mm rounds.
—————
Midnight
Candlelight sucks when you’re scared and alone.
I’m laying here on a straw-filled mattress looking at the ceiling. I think I can hear something outside trying to get at the cooler full of meat, despite it being off the ground, but I can’t be sure. The wind is going at it and there is no window on the back side of the cabin. If I wanted to know for sure, I’d need to go outside in the snow and see for myself.