Gonna be a long, slow walk back to Dominatus.
Mac shuffled back toward the now almost completely extinguished campfire, the Remington rifle resting in his right hand. His eyes and ears still strained for any sign of the grizzly but found none.
Probably crawled off out there somewhere to die.
Mac continued to scan the area around the campfire before slowly easing himself into a sitting position on the ground. He removed the remnants of the short wave transmitter from his right pocket. The thing had been crushed at some point during the bear attack. The trip back to Dominatus would have to wait until the morning. Until then, Mac focused on remaining awake, the rifle at the ready.
Bear has to be dead – but just in case. Just in case…
Mac Walker had hunted many times in his life, though the vast majority of those examples involved the hunting of other armed human beings such as Somali pirates, Eastern European human slave traffickers, Egyptian arms dealers, and Mexican drug cartel members. So his over willingness to believe a wild animal, even one the size of an Alaskan grizzly, to be dead without confirmation of that death, is somewhat understandable.
It was a mistake Mac Walker would never make again in the proceeding twenty years he was to call Dominatus his home.
Mac sensed the bear’s presence just a half second before the beast lunged at him from behind, the animal hoping to kill him in the same manner of attack as it had killed Trevor Pennington days before. Where Pennington had likely panicked when realizing he was facing the great predator of the Alaskan wilderness, Mac’s survival instincts once again re-asserted themselves, pushing aside all fear and returning Mac to full on kill mode.
Mac fell forward as the bear’s jaws snapped shut just inches behind his neck. He attempted to roll to his side and bring the rifle around to fire point blank into the grizzly, but the beast’s great paws ripped the weapon from Mac’s hands, leaving him scrambling to once again unholster his handgun.
The top of the bear’s head smashed into Mac’s chest, throwing him back with his right leg folded painfully underneath him and leaving him staring directly into the outstretched, toothy jaws of the great grizzly. The bear’s breath enveloped Mac’s face as the weight of its upper body pinned the former Navy SEAL to the ground.
“NO! I’M NOT GOING OUT LIKE THIS!”
Mac bellowed the words into the face of the bear while his right hand emerged holding the seven inch SOG SEAL blade which he plunged repeatedly into the side of the bear’s neck and upper body. The now familiar screaming howl of the bear fully encased Mac’s senses, but still he imbedded the knife to the hilt over and over again.
Even as the beast rolled away from him, its breathing labored and shallow, Mac’s blood lust continued unfettered, his right hand a blur of deadly movement that found its mark within the grizzly’s flesh, leaving both Mac and the bear soaked in the blood of the conflict.
Finally Mac’s humanity re-emerged from the depths of his focused chaos as his right hand dropped to his side where it remained, his chest heaving from the effort of the kill, each breath sending another searing line of pain from his broken rib.
Mac placed both of his hands on the grizzly’s body and was amazed to feel the thing’s pulse still beating, though erratically. The bear let out a long, deep sigh as it moved its head slightly in order to stare back at Mac with its remaining eye.
The two alpha males held one another’s gaze for several minutes before the grizzly let out a final breath and then lay completely still.
Years later, sitting alone with the Old Man inside the comfortable, rustic confines of Mac Walker’s own beloved Freedom Tavern, Mac looked out a window into the cold, dark, Alaskan night exterior outside, his thoughts returning to that battle with the grizzly.
By some means of intuition that Alexander Meyer possessed, the Old Man knew what Mac was thinking of.
“You never really spoke of what happened that night Mac – when you killed that bear.”
Mac’s eyes remained fixed on the world just outside Freedom Tavern, though his mind had already returned to those final moments of the great grizzly’s life, when Mac was certain the bear looked back at him with some primordial version of respect. The two had fought, and Mac had won. Such was nature, and the bear seemed somehow aware of that reality, understood it, and accepted it.
Mac Walker straightened in his chair, the dull, aching throb in his left foot that never completely went away, whispering to him again of that brief war between man and beast.
“That bear was just doing what any of us would - trying to survive. It was either him or me. We both understood that. He was long in the tooth, but still had plenty of bite. I hope to be half the fighter he was when my own time comes. No hard feelings between us. Just two warriors doing what comes natural – kill or be killed.”
The Old Man briefly closed his eyes, digesting Mac’s words, and sharing in the understanding of what those words communicated regarding what really happened between Mac and the bear. Alexander Meyer knew more challenge awaited the residents of Dominatus, far more deadly, and far less honorable, than any natural creature of the wilderness.
Frightful, relentless, ever hungry tyranny was coming for them all…
END.
DOMINATUS
By D.W. Ulsterman
Editing by Louise Broda
2013
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
-George Washington
I.
April, 2037
Going through the door of the aptly named Freedom Tavern was actually a movement of stepping back in time. I had seen photos of places like this in America, locations where people gathered, paid for alcoholic beverages, sought out conversation, companionship, or simply a moment away from the countless other distractions and responsibilities of life - environments of rough hewn communion where both the best and worst aspects of humanity were openly on display.
While the practice of owning a business that served alcohol had not been formally prohibited by the New United Nations’ mandates, the taxes and unavoidable fines levied against those businesses made their existence increasingly prohibitive until, inevitably, they simply died out. The last privately owned drinking establishment I had witnessed was nearly fifteen years ago when I was not yet fifteen years old. And that one was for the very wealthy only, as the cost of alcohol had increased multiple times in just a few short years following the N.U.N. mandates and resulting taxes so that only the rich could afford to purchase alcoholic beverages. Everyone else was left like me – looking at pictures of an America that once was, but would never be again.
Here in this remote and secretive Alaskan community of some 100 people, a tavern still stood, though, privately owned and its doors open to the public. Music came from an antique contraption I knew to be called a “jukebox”, where a song from generations before titled Sweet Home Alabama played in the background.
Above the jukebox hung an original fifty-state American flag, another example now forbidden by the New United Nations mandates. A few years ago a man in Portland, Oregon had been arrested for refusing to take down an original American flag that he displayed outside his apartment balcony. Soon after he was found dead from what authorities described as a robbery. The only thing taken had been the flag.
I am certain my face registered clear shock as I took in the unmistakable smell of burning tobacco, and saw no less than three men seated at the bar smoking IN PUBLIC, with open bottles of beer sitting in front of each of them. These men were smoking cigarettes! Unlike alcohol, cigarettes had been banned outright by the mandates – cited as dangerous public hazards and “prohibitive to the well being of society”. That was just over 20 years ago. I remember lessons on the ban during my final years of high school, the teacher reviewing all of the reasons supporting the ban, and how it was our responsibility not to question, but to simply accept these newly developing rules
of the world society. We were also instructed to turn our parents into the authorities if they continued to smoke inside their homes because by doing so, we were told, they were putting our lives at risk and were in fact guilty of serious child abuse. One of my boyhood friends in fact did just that – his father was charged with the crime of smoking/child abuse and spent six months at an adult education facility. By then the government no longer used the term prison, or jail – almost all forms of discipline were simply called “education”.
Apparently the men with cigarettes dangling from their mouths didn’t get the lesson. The tobacco smoke hung over them in the low-ceilinged structure like their own personal clouds of defiance. Each of their faces, weathered, worn, and hard, also appeared quite content. One of them laughed at the ending joke of a story told by another, clapping his hand on his shoulder and shaking his head while the third of them gestured to the person behind the counter, the “bartender” if my memory was correct, for another beer.
It was all so remarkable. As I said, I was convinced I had somehow literally stepped back into time. An America where personal freedoms still existed in some form and all those rules to protect the “well being of society” were not yet fully implemented. An America that still governed itself.
An America before the New United Nations.
The man behind the bar looked directly at me as I noted both the intensity of his stare and the familiarity of the face from the few photos of him my dad had shown me. Through the dim lighting of the tavern, I could make out his face was now far older than those photos, more gaunt, but I was certain it was him. He was nearly my own height of six foot, the years having bent his back just a bit, with a narrow, deeply lined face framed by square-rimmed glasses and shortly cropped salt and pepper hair. I raised my eyebrows in an attempted greeting, hoping he was in fact the one I had come to see.
His right hand motioned for me to come down to the far end of the bar where only an empty stool resided. Before sitting down I extended my own hand across the bar to further communicate I came in peace, this time including what felt to be both an awkward and nervous smile on my part.
“Sit.”
It wasn’t an offer – it was a directive. I found myself following the order without even thinking about it. Though the volume of the word was barely audible, the tone of authority was unmistakable.
Again I gave up the same weak smile as I further looked over the man I had traveled some four thousand miles to interview – the individual my recently deceased father had worked tirelessly to free from prison for the manufactured crime of defending the defenseless. A soldier wrongly accused, sent away to serve as an example to others – keep your mouths shut. That event was long before my own time, but my father had shared it with me often. It had become for him, and then for me, one of the critical examples of how America had gone so wrong, so quickly, and so completely. The events of the trial took place almost twenty five years ago. My father had now been dead for just over a year.
“Go talk to him, in Alaska. He owns a bar up there. Actually owns his own bar! Imagine that. Might be the last privately owned bar in the country. Let him tell you his story. Some of it is my story too, but it’s mostly his. I just played a part in it. If people are going to wake up, we all need to hear those stories. How things were. How they changed. You say you want to fight. I’ve protected you from that, but I won’t be around long enough to stop you now. So, you go talk to him. I have the location in the file, his file. It’s all there. Kept it hidden away from the U.N. audits. After the trial, he disappeared for quite a few years. Then I received a brief message, and we have been communicating on and off ever since. He’s a hero, you know. And that’s why they did to him what they did, our own government. They killed others. Benghazi, the purge. They set him up, sent him to prison. But I got him out. The last real thing…the last real work I did as an attorney. The rest was bullshit. But I did something good there. And so, if you really want to do this, I can’t stop you from learning the truth. So you go see him. I told him you were coming, so go ahead. You have my blessing. Take the information…I’m not sure what you think you can do with it, and you’ll be watched, you know. They’re all being watched. The entire community up there. Sooner or later there will be a conflict. He knows it. They all know it, and, you might find yourself in the middle of all that. You WILL find yourself part of that just by having been there. But, I should have taken you with me back then when I visited him up there. I should have taken you, your brother, your mother…all of us. We should have gone away from here – from all these rules, the spying, the damn government…and never looked back. Don’t end up like me in some bed with your body wasting away into nothing. I’m already gone. Your mother, brother…you’re all that’s left of us. If you want to go talk to him, you have my blessing. And once you get there, maybe…maybe you don’t come back. Make your stand with them. Make your life count for something.”
My father would be dead within a month of speaking those words to me, the victim of an extremely rare form of cancer resistant to any of the latest treatments. One in a million, the doctor told me. Never seen anything like it, said another specialist. It took him from relative health to his deathbed in just over six months, and though he never came right out and said it, his eyes told the truth of it at the end – that cancer was no accident. It was no one in a million happenstance. Or just bad luck. Funny how nobody within the government dies from cancer anymore.
He, like so many already gone before him, knew just enough to make him a liability. And if what he knew was enough for them to kill him, what then of me? How long before I too was eliminated as a gesture of “just in case” by the N.U.N. operatives?
And so, just as Mac had done eighteen years earlier after my father secured his release from a federal prison, I too travelled to Alaska to interview one of the now last few survivors who had dared challenge the system that eventually swallowed nearly all the world whole.
“You got your dad’s way kid. Saw him as soon as you walked in here. I promised him we would talk. Not sure what good it’s gonna do you, but I owe him a hell of a lot more than that, so we’ll talk.”
His hand shot across the bar and took my own in a firm handshake, and I noted the small Seal Team Six tattoo on his forearm.
“…And I’m sorry to hear about his passing. The bastards finally took him out, huh? That’s on me too. What he did for me. Your old man, he always called me a hero. I want you to know – you look at me now, and you hear what I’m sayin’. Your old man – he’s more of a goddamn hero than I ever was. He was good people, the kind of people this world is in damn short supply of these days. And they’re killing them off, all of us off…one by one.
“…Welcome to Dominatus, Alaska son. Let’s talk.”
The sound of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song now enveloped the interior of Freedom Tavern as I prepared to ask the first of my many-many questions.
“Let’s go to my office in the back.”
I followed the tavern owner down a narrow hallway leading to the opposite end of the small building where a door stood partly open, noting the holstered handgun that hung from his waist. The temperature dropped considerably as the heat from the coal burning stove in the tavern’s main room seemed hesitant to make the trip down the hallway I was now taking. The door was opened and I followed the man inside where I was greeted by a small but tastefully furnished office space where a large oak desk and leather chair sat swathed in the warm glow of a single incandescent light bulb. Very old school. I hadn’t seen one of those light-bulbs lit up for nearly twenty years. They, like so many other things in America, had been banned from use by the general public, though it was well known a thriving black market was available to those still wealthy or influential enough to purchase such items.
The room’s walls were lined with photos from what appeared to be locations spanning the globe. Behind the desk was a framed copy of the American Declaration of Independence, and above that hung what appea
red to be a genuine musket rifle. One photo was placed prominently in the middle of the wall showing four men with their arms draped over each others’ shoulders with Egyptian pyramids as backdrops – the man on the far left a much younger version of the one who now sat across the desk from me.
“Many lifetimes ago, a whole different world then. I’m the last one left alive in that picture, even though I was the oldest of the four of us. We saw a hell of a lot of shit together. They had us dropping in everywhere. Congo. Malaysia. Greece. Then came Benghazi and it all went to shit. And after that, one by one, we were gettin’ picked off. Suicide. Traffic accident. Heart attack. So I came up here, before they got to me too. And I ain’t been back since. Hell with it. Hell with all of it. And if they want one last fight with this old boy…bring it.”
For the first time I took in just how tired this man I had been told stories of for so long, now appeared and sounded. My notes indicated he had just recently turned seventy-three, but there was a fatigue in him that suggested a man who felt the burden of years even beyond those of seventy-three, especially in the eyes. Deep crevices shot out from the cornered rims of his glasses, and equally deep lines encircled both sides of a mouth that inclined downward into a permanent frown. The closely cropped salt and pepper hair was much thinner than the photos my father had shown me, and certainly more sparse and grey than the man he once was in that photo on the wall. The shoulders remained broad though, and the firmness in his grip during our recent handshake hinted at a significant strength that still remained in a body trained decades ago by a government to seek and destroy those who would do that government harm, until eventually, that same government deemed him and those like him to be a threat as well.
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