by Steven Bird
As everyone at the table said, “Amen,” Vanessa wiped a tear from her eye and kissed young Audrey on the head. Audrey seemed to be lost in another world as she stared at the table in front of her, barely interacting with her family around her.
“Okay, folks. Let’s eat,” said Carl, as he patted Vanessa on the leg, giving her a loving and supportive look.
~~~~
Shortly after breakfast, Carl said, “I’ve got something to show you gentlemen out in the shed. Come on outside and take a look.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Jason as he and Evan joined Carl and Ted outside.
As they strolled over to the shed, Carl said, “I feel like I can trust you fellas; I hope I’m not mistaken about that.”
“As long as you don’t side with the occupiers or their masters, you can trust us to the grave,” Jason replied sharply.
Carl stopped and faced them, looking them square in the eye. “Good. I have one question for you.”
“Go right ahead,” said Evan in reply.
“Who was the coward who abandoned you… at the farm? What was his name?”
Glancing at Jason with an intrigued look on his face, Evan replied, “Dustin.”
Carl looked at Ted with a smile. “Good. That checks out. Who else escaped the barn with you?” he asked, this time looking at Jason alone.
“Kyle and Quentin.”
“I’m sure Q will be pleased to hear you boys are still in one piece,” Carl replied with a satisfied look on his face. “It seems we have a friend or two in common. Q has been a big help to us for quite some time. We met him when the Blue Ridge Militia first started reaching out to folks like us in the outlying areas.”
Surprised by Carl’s announcement, Evan asked, “How did you get in touch with Q so fast?”
“I took a ride this morning on my horse. We’ve got some things in place that allow us to get comms back and forth semi-discretely. Setting up contingency communications plans was why the BRM, uh, the Blue Ridge Militia, reached out to us, in particular. Our location on this mountain gives us access to his COM equipment as well as being a prime location to observe from the ridge behind us. As far as anyone else knows, Ted and I are just hunters milling around in the woods looking for our next meal.”
Evan and Jason shook their heads in amazement at just how small the world had become. Even without social networking and the internet, people were still making the connections that needed to be made. Evan often wondered if that would be the saving grace of America—that patriotic Americans, even those who like to keep to themselves and live on their own terms, still tend to seek out like-minded individuals with whom they share a common cause. Even the founding fathers, who sought a world where individual rights and freedoms would trump the rule of the majority, understood that without standing as one when the times required it, they would all fall to tyranny.
“If it’s not too much to ask, how exactly are you able to communicate with Q?” asked Jason, afraid he may be overstepping his bounds by asking the question.
“I’ll let Q answer that himself this evening when he comes by. He wants to talk to you two before you head home.”
“This evening? We are very grateful for your hospitality and help, but our families are not that far away at this point, and we don’t know how things are going there. We’ve really got to be getting home.”
“You’ll want to stay until Q gets here. Trust me on that. It will do you both good to talk to him. If the occupiers start to put the screws to people around here, you’ll need to be connected to friends you can call for help. I know you’ve got friends near your homestead, but you’ll need more help than that. Fighting off thugs and criminals is one thing, but fighting off an army is another. You really need to stay for Q’s visit.”
Sharing a mutual concerned, but understanding, facial expression, Evan nodded and Jason replied, “Okay. You’re right. We’ll stay to hear him out and then be on our way after nightfall.”
Chapter Twelve: Incarceration
As the quad leader reached the upper level of the central structure, he signaled to one of the guards below to open the lower level’s steel security door. Once the door had slid open, the guard motioned to those inside to exit the building. Slowly, individuals dressed in orange jumpsuits, with bare feet like Ed and Nate, began to exit the building into the courtyard area.
Nate leaned on Ed’s shoulder as they both watched their new neighbors file out of the building. “I count thirty-three,” whispered Nate.
“Me, too,” Ed replied. “They sure are a rough-looking bunch. They don’t look like they’ve shaved or showered in quite some time.”
“I imagine that will be us soon, not that we are fresh as daisies now.”
“As Josey Wales would say, ‘I reckon so,’” replied Ed, attempting to inject humor into their dire situation.
Ed and Nate were immediately approached by four of their fellow prisoners who walked with swagger and determination to greet them. “The name’s Tate,” the man in front of the other two said firmly. “Let’s get something straight around here. If you mess up and piss them off, we all suffer. That being said, going by the quad leader’s rules, if either one of you piss us off or cause any trouble, we will beat your asses. You will then be relocated to another quad where your fun will start all over again. And trust me when I say your new quad mates over there won’t be thrilled to have troublemakers in their midst and they will deal with you in the same manner. Just stay the hell out of our way and keep us all out of trouble, and you’ll get along just fine here. Understood?”
“Sure thing,” Ed said, crossing his arms and standing tall.
“Good. Now that we’ve got that settled, the new guys lie down to sleep last. You wait until everyone else has found the cot of their choosing and take what’s left. The same goes for seating in the chow hall. If you don’t like it—tough shit—that’s how it goes. Then when more fresh meat arrives and someone else is rotated out, you will move up the chain.”
“Rotates out? To where?” Nate asked.
“Different places. Release, transfer… or hell—for all we know—execution. Just play things by the rules while you’re in here and you can worry about what goes on outside when, and if, you get out.”
The men then turned and walked away from Ed and Nate as quickly as they came. “What the hell was that?” Ed asked. “Didn’t we just get the same damn speech from the Gestapo boys in blue just a few minutes ago?”
“Yep. If the quad leader is Colonel Klink, I guess that loser has dibs on Sergeant Shultz.”
Sharing a chuckle, Ed turned to Nate and said, “Yeah, and if anyone tries to make you drop the soap in the shower, it’s gonna be that guy. C’mon, let’s find a wall in the shade to lean on.”
For the next half hour, Ed and Nate sat silently in the far rear corner of the courtyard. Ed stared blankly at the ground while Nate tossed pebbles aimlessly onto the dirt, one by one. Almost completely fixated on his pebble-throwing task, Nate was startled by a fellow prisoner who was passing by as if he was out for a stroll and then changed course to stop and talk to them.
“Good afternoon. Aaron Lacy; nice to meet you,” the man said.
“I’m Ed, and this is Nate,” replied Ed, snapping out of his trance-like state.
“I saw that you met our resident rulers earlier.”
“Which ones? There seemed to be two sets of them,” replied Ed sarcastically.
“Yeah, well, the only ones around here with any real authority are the blue bellies topside. Tate’s only authority around here is based on the strict adherence to the camp’s policy on dealing with disturbances involving quad mates. Lots of people have rotated in and out, but he and his entourage have been here the longest, basically giving them immunity in the event they get into an altercation with a new guy. It’s bull, but it is what it is.”
“Well, it sure is good to see a genuinely friendly face around here.”
Aaron smiled. “Most of the guys in here are
pretty decent individuals. Most seem to be confined for affiliation or political reasons. Outside of these walls, they would have been the guys you teamed up with to get out of a bind, if you know what I mean.”
Ed looked up to see Aaron staring him square in the eye as if to drive his last statement home. “I can see that,” Ed said looking around at the other residents. “So what’s your story?”
“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” Aaron said as he shuffled off in the direction he was originally headed.
“That was weird,” said Nate as he began to throw his pebbles once again.
“Yep. It sure was. I would venture to say we will encounter many more awkward moments over the next few days… or weeks… or hell, months.”
As the sun began to set behind the camp’s walls, a whistle blew from the upper level of the central building. Ed and Nate looked up to see their fellow prisoners begin to walk toward the steel door on the lower level as if they were a group of mindless zombies.
“They look like trained rats, heading off to get their cheese at the sound of the bell,” Nate said, throwing his last pebble. He looked down to see that he had picked the area directly in front of him clean.
“If our cheese is a good night’s sleep, let’s fall in behind the other rats. It’s been a long day.”
~~~~
After a long and sleepless night on wornout cots, Ed and Nate were awakened by the lights in the room being switched on, followed by a metal trash can flying across the room and bouncing off of the opposite wall. “Rise and shine! Up! Up! Up! It’s time for roll call,” a guard in blue BDUs shouted as he walked into the center of the barracks room.
As the other residents of the camp stood in front of their cots, Ed and Nate quickly followed suit. The guard standing in the center of the room looked around to ensure everyone was standing, and then motioned for two of the other guards to proceed. Each of them had one of the handheld scanner devices and as they approached, each of the residents would hold out their left hand to allow themselves to be scanned. After scanning Ed’s hand, one of the guards read the display and said with a chuckle, “Did you enjoy your first night at the Four Seasons?”
“Yes, sir,” Ed replied smartly, fighting his natural urge to make a wise crack in response.
Once everyone had been scanned and the two guards with the scanner devices gave the thumbs up to the guard in the center of the room, he shouted, “Chow time. Let’s move.” Everyone began to file out of the barracks building in a single-file line. Nate fell in behind Ed, reaching forward and placing a hand on the back of Ed’s shoulder to allow him to hop forward on his leg while in line without losing his balance.
They entered the chow hall located in the center of the complex, which was accessed from their quad from the right-rear corner. Ed and Nate observed everyone flowing through the chow line and then sitting down to eat in what resembled a military mess hall.
“This reminds me of the aft galley of an aircraft carrier,” Nate whispered. “Only with higher ceilings and fewer pipes and valves. I just hope the food doesn’t taste like JP-5 like on the boat.”
“Huh?”
“Jet fuel… JP-5 is the mil-spec term for jet fuel. Anyway, purple pipes ran all through the ceiling of the aft galley. The purple pipes carried the jet fuel throughout the boat. For some mysterious reason, more often than not, the food had a hint of jet fuel taste and smell.”
“Damn, maybe that’s why you act the way you do. You’ve ingested way too many chemicals.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
After getting what appeared to be a crude form of steel-cut oatmeal plopped hastily onto their trays, Ed and Nate saw several open seats next to Aaron Lacy. Nodding to them as a quiet way to ask them to join him, Ed and Nate sat down for their first meal as residents of Camp Twenty-one.
“Good morning,” Aaron said.
“Good morning,” they both replied.
“So what do you know about this place?” Aaron asked.
“Not much,” replied Ed. “We were yanked off the street while traveling with some friends of ours and were taken to a building on what seemed to be an airfield of some sort. After trying to get us to spill the beans that we didn’t even have, they tossed us in here. We’re freakin’ clueless as to what sort of mess we’re in.”
“This place is known as Camp Twenty-one,” Aaron continued to explain. “It’s located near what used to be the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which is now a forward operating base for the UN troops in the region. Camp Twenty-one is operated internally by the federal government under the guise of the NDAA. The blue bellies are all civilians who have taken jobs as guards. They all come from various backgrounds and just sold their souls to the devil in exchange for a more comfortable place in the world… at least that’s my opinion. Anyway, the UN troops protect the immediate area outside of the facility and the blue bellies operate the day-to-day operations inside.”
Aaron took a bite of oatmeal and then continued, “I think the original plan when they dreamed all this up was to have it operated by our own military, but as you two probably know, their attrition rate is through the roof. Hence the fed’s willingness to bring the UN boys in to lend a hand. The problem is they are lending a fist.
“Anyway, back to the camp,” Aaron said, getting back on track. “The reason they keep referring to everything as a ‘quad’ is because if you picture the camp from an aerial view, there is a square outside wall with a guard shack above the walls in each corner. The walls are topped with razor wire. Inside of the first wall, there is a kill zone. That’s where you were in-processed at the trailer. It lies between the two walls in the kill zone. Inside of the second wall are the quads. The second wall makes up a second internal square, which is further divided into four units or ‘quads.’ Each quad is a separate housing unit, identical to ours, with its own guard team that resides above us on the second level. The chow hall that we are in now is in the center of the four quads, accessible by each, but only accessed by one quad at a time. Don’t be surprised when they rush you in and out. They’ve got to feed all four quads separately in the same facility. One of the quads—quad one, I believe—is where they house the women detainees, and two, three, and four are for the men.”
“What happens to the people being held here?” asked Nate.
“It depends on what they find out about you. Everyone here is being held for a reason. Generally speaking, it’s because you were involved in activities that are deemed a threat to the agenda.”
“The agenda?” Nate asked.
“The agenda to tear down the nation in order to rebuild it in a different form,” Ed interrupted. “Those attacks and the subsequent actions taken by the powers that be were premeditated and coordinated, in my opinion. Everything that happened over the past ten years led up to the final events that pushed us over the edge. Now that they have succeeded in tearing us down, they won’t let those loyal to the Constitution and to the founding principles stand in their way. Hence, NDAA—indefinite detention without due process.”
“Exactly,” replied Aaron, glad to see that Ed and Nate were on the same page as him.
Ed leaned back in his chair, paused, and asked, “Forgive my rudeness, but how exactly do we know you aren’t a fed planted in here to turn on people after you’ve befriended them and earned their trust, getting them to admit to some sort of insurgent activity?”
“You’d be a fool not to think that is a possibility. I don’t have much time so I have to be rather upfront with you guys. Besides, that concern goes both ways. I should be equally concerned that you two are here for the same reason—to flush me out. I just don’t have time for that these days.”
“Don’t have time for what?”
“I just don’t. When the time comes—follow your gut.”
As Nate began to ask another question to clarify the confusing statement, Aaron stood up, collected his tray, and walked away. “How many times am I gonna have to ask ‘what the hell was tha
t about’ around here?”
“I just keep waiting to wake up from the bad dream, brother.”
Chapter Thirteen: The Meeting
Pushing their way through the thick brush, following closely behind Carl, Evan and Jason made their way through the woods for their meeting with Q at the pre-arranged rendezvous point.
Looking back at Evan and Jason, Carl said, “Sorry it’s so far out here, guys, but the golden rule in regards to meetings where there is a potential for aerial surveillance is to not be seen anywhere near your loved ones. If I run into trouble and get taken out, they won’t be able to pin down my homebase at a glance, and Ted will still be there to provide security for the women and children. He and I generally alternate who will be making the trek.”
“How much further?” asked Evan, trying not to show weakness by acknowledging the fact that the pain was slowing him down.
“Over the next ridge we’ll drop down into a wash. At the bottom, there is a shallow cave. It’s only about twenty feet deep, but provides excellent cover from visual and sensory detection. We use this place along with a few others on a random, rotational basis to keep them from being able to pattern us like a deer. It’s by no means a fool-proof system, but it’s what we have.”
Reaching the top of the ridge, Carl signaled to Evan and Jason to hold their position lower on the hill. Scanning the sky and the steep terrain below for potential threats, he pulled a deer call from his cargo pocket and made a series of doe bleats, directed at the terrain below. Hearing a similar response, he put the call away and motioned for Evan and Jason to continue.