American Insurgent

by Phil Rabalais

  He exited the shower into his room to find his wife. He couldn’t read her expression: worry, relief, anger, contentment—every emotion mixed together was draped across her face. “What is it, honey?” John asked, braced for the worst.

  “I can’t decide if I’m happy you’re home, or pissed off at you for putting your life in danger and leaving us here,” Rachel replied honestly.

  John sighed. “Honey, we both know that the morning we shot those four agents there was no going back. The only way I see to put things right is to force a change.”

  “I know that,” Rachel said, her voice softening, “but it is how I feel. I want my husband back, and I wish I knew who to resent—him for leaving so willingly, or everyone else for not doing what he alone feels compelled to do. You always seem to be the one trying to do the right thing when no one else will.”

  John stared at his wife, wrestling with the words. “I’ll stay for a few days, honey; then I have to see this through. If I’m ever going to have a normal life for my family, this has to end on our terms, not theirs. If we give up before we finish, they will just come hunt us down and probably put me up against a wall for all the trouble I’ve caused them.”

  Rachel closed her eyes, nodding, a tear escaping the corner of her eye. “I know, John. I know. I just want you back when this is over. Don’t make a widow of me yet.”

  Later that evening, John and Andy sat with Mark and Kevin for the debrief, trading intel from the field for that which they could only get from Mark’s surveillance apparatus.

  “You two have made quite a bit of trouble for the local supervisor,” Kevin began. “Guy’s name is Shorts. I’ve been listening to the ass chewings he’s getting from on high, and they want his skin. He’s getting most if not all of the blame for the little campaign you two have waged. He also caught hell when you guys hit their storehouse and stole back all those confiscated firearms. Why did you guys do that, anyway? We had plenty of guns and ammo already.”

  Andy looked to John.

  “We do for now. Call it planning ahead. I concentrated mostly on handguns, smaller carbines, but I’ve got a plan. For now, let’s just clean, oil, and function check them and load the magazines, then store them away for a rainy day,” John explained.

  Kevin looked to Mark and shrugged his shoulders.

  “The interesting part is that the attacks have begun to spread,” Mark said. “Illinois, Michigan, East Coast, hell, even in California and New York. People are taking notice and fighting back.”

  “Casualties?” John demanded.

  “Some, but that’s unavoidable. John, you said it yourself, the choices are to fight or surrender,” Mark replied.

  “I know what I said, doesn’t mean I don’t have to wear it on my conscience.” John sulked. No one, other than perhaps his wife, understood how a man could so callously slaughter a man one moment and feel such deep remorse and responsibility for another death the next.

  “Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s working. World press is starting to report on it. The bloggers and alternative media have picked up the stories, and the government can’t seem to get them to shut up about it. Some of these guys even moved their blogs to servers outside the country to keep the US regulatory arm out of their business. The focus isn’t just gun rights anymore; people are outright pissed off about the invasion of privacy and the surveillance. Hitting the internet kill switch a month ago bought our government more bad press than anyone could have predicted. People from every walk of life were furious they couldn't pull money from their banks or even go shopping for that day, and a lot of people got sent home and lost a day or two of pay. That and scrubbing social media after everyone had already seen it. Free-speech advocates have been working three shifts protesting for weeks, and they show no signs of stopping. John, we are winning this fight,” Mark said emphatically.

  “The fight isn’t over till they yield. Those camps are still there. The searches have certainly scaled back a lot, but if their ranks get refilled, they’ll be back at it. They haven’t gotten the message yet, ’cause they haven’t changed course,” John stated flatly.

  “What do you suggest?” Mark asked.

  John looked him squarely in the eye. “I think the time has come to stop poking this bear and stab him in the eye.”

  A Chance Encounter

  Johns, like nearly all of the agents working out of the New Orleans detention camp, had lived on the premises even before the attacks began. Free room and board left him more expendable income for leisure was his way of viewing the situation. With attacks on agents nationwide becoming more and more common, his leisure time had become constrained to the camp. The only rub was the crimp that put on his social life, as visitors were strictly disallowed. That meant if he wanted to visit his girl of the moment, he would have to go to her.

  Johns, unlike the citizenry of the surrounding community, was fully authorized to carry a firearm concealed or openly. That privilege had been suspended years prior on a city level by many more liberal mayors, then nationally later. Working for the government, however, had its privileges. Johns wore his holster inside his pants up against the skin, with his Glock 19 under his shirt. He drew the keys from the motor pool for an unmarked car, wrote into the log some BS about surveillance and countermeasures, and left the base. He was not off post fifteen seconds before Mark and Kevin’s drone picked him up. What they could not ascertain was WHO they were following and vectoring John and Andy towards, only that it was an agent travelling alone in an unmarked vehicle.

  While John and Andy worked towards his position, Agent Johns absentmindedly drove towards his destination. Jody, Joanne, what the hell was her name anyway? He decided to stick to “honey” to avoid screwing up a good piece of tail. He stopped at a stoplight, and another vehicle pulled up behind him. As he sat there impatiently waiting and daydreaming about an evening in a real bed with a warm body, he failed to take notice of the person in the vehicle behind him.

  While the agent’s vehicle might not have been marked, it wore government plates and was the make and model nearly notorious for being used in government motor pools. The driver of the other vehicle was no one of note, just a retired firefighter named Randall who had grown tired of a government grown too big for its britches. He drew his old Smith and Wesson revolver from his glove box. It had been a gift from his friend, who had worn it on his hip for decades as a local police officer. The same firearm those pinheads had sent a letter demanding he hand over when they decided civilians couldn’t be trusted with handguns. He had tacked that letter up to the backstop on his range and used it for target practice. The last straw was when they came for his friend…

  Two years ago, the two of them were at Randall’s private range. It was so far out in the sticks no one would bother them. They were just doing a little plinking with their AR-15s. When they finished up, they loaded their cars and headed home. Randall didn’t get the call till later that evening from his wife that his friend had been pulled over, the firearms found, and they’d actually taken him to the detention camp and turned him over. No trial, no charges, just off to the camp. And it was HIS OWN department that picked him up. Didn’t matter how many favors Randall tried to call in from guys he knew; even the damned DA wouldn’t budge. They hung him out to dry.

  Randall had to wonder at that point what would have happened if they had picked him up instead. He’d spent thirty years of his life serving people in this city. Would an officer he had worked with on a scene hand him over to the damned gestapo just like that? What was happening in this country when people’s rights could be taken away by a vote, and then the people suffered the further indignity of having their right to trial by jury suspended too.

  Well, son, not sure who you are, but I wager you’re going to question your career choices here in the next few minutes, Randall thought. He sat there with his revolver in his lap; the light turned green. He contented himself with following the man to see if another opportunity arose to exact
revenge for the loss of his friend’s freedom. Two intersections later he saw a yellow light, pulled into the lane next to the unmarked car, pulled up alongside while rolling down the window, and raised the revolver.

  Agent Johns just barely glanced to the left when the window next to him shattered.

  “John, we have a situation,” Kevin radioed John while watching the drone feed. “Someone pulled up next to your subject and is shooting from his vehicle towards the subject’s.”

  Agent Johns slammed the gas pedal to the floor and shot through the intersection, nearly hitting crossing traffic. He was damned lucky not to have been shot, the window was blown out, and he was sure he’d be doing paperwork on all the damage done to the motor pool vehicle. He swerved left at the next intersection, abandoning his rendezvous and heading back to the safety of the camp.

  Randall cursed his shaky hand, rolled up his window, and went about his business. “At least I screwed up his plans this evening, little shithead,” gruffed the old man to himself.

  “Okay, John, reverse course back the way you came. Subject is moving at high speed directly to you, heading back to the camp. His assailant is proceeding on his way like nothing happened,” Kevin said into the mic.

  “Disregard assailant; focus on subject. Give us a vector so we can set up an ambush,” John ordered. “Andy, flip a bitch, he’s coming straight at us.”

  Andy stomped on the brakes and wheeled the Jeep around in an abrupt 180.

  “Step on it. We need to get enough gap to set up on him before he overtakes us.”

  They chose a spot as close to the camp as they dared, and rocketed up the back road to open the gap. Fortunately they found some concealment on the roadside for the Jeep, dismounted, and readied for their ambush. A raid on a local supply yard had yielded a set of “spike strips” like police used for stopping speeding vehicles, and now seemed a perfect time to try them out. On this dark road without streetlights (one shot with Andy’s suppressed .22 took care of that), the speeding vehicle would never see the danger in time to stop or swerve.

  Johns sped down the road, following his GPS back to camp. He took a moment here and there to brush the glass shards from his collar and shirt, cursing whoever it was who had taken a shot at him. He also cursed that he hadn’t taken the time to shoot back. Because his mind was distracted from the task at hand, he never even saw the spike strips when he hit them at sixty miles per hour, deflated all four tires, and careened off the road, struggling for control of the vehicle barely half a mile from the safety of the detention camp. He exited the vehicle and saw the small straw-like metal tubes impaling both tires on the driver side of the vehicle. “Aww shit,” he said aloud.

  He drew his firearm just as he noticed the two men approaching him. In the dark he could only make out the rifles they carried, and he raised his handgun to fire while he backpedaled. At a range of seventy-five yards, three times farther than his agency trained its agents to shoot at, his shots were woefully off target, but even a broken watch is right twice a day. One of the men was hit and dropped down to a knee. The other raised his rifle and fired two shots, both of which hit Johns. The shot in the shoulder knocked his handgun from his grasp, while the one in his stomach crumpled him.

  “Shit, John, you okay?!” Andy shouted, grabbing for his friend’s plate carrier. John was down on one knee, his right hand on his rifle to keep it out of the dirt while his left hand felt inside his carrier for anything wet indicating the round had penetrated. “I’m good. Plate caught it. Motherfucker, that hurts,” John groused. John rose unsteadily to his feet, and he and Andy approached their prey.

  John held his rifle covering Agent Johns as Andy rolled him over, and all three discovered familiar faces. “You two,” Agent Johns sneered.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t the one that got away,” Andy singsonged to the downed man. “John, I take back calling you a shithead for letting him go.”

  “You never called me a shithead,” John replied.

  “Not to your face,” Andy quipped.

  The back-and-forth provided just enough distraction for Agent Johns to fish his backup gun from his belt and raise it to fire.

  Rook Takes Knight, Check

  Hours later at Mark’s home, a very sore John sat in a chair while Vicky wrapped his ribs. “Easy.” John grimaced. Vicky surmised that John probably had several bruised ribs, no apparent fractures, no punctures to his lungs. He was sore and suitably grouchy, but he would be fine. As she wound the Ace bandage around his rib cage, the intense pain made him wonder how badly he was wounded.

  “What happened?” Mark asked. Rachel stood to her husband’s side, thankful he was alive and anxious at the obvious danger he had put himself in.

  “Hell,” John retorted, “I was going to ask you the same thing. Plan was to zap this guy when he reached his destination. All of a sudden some rando takes a shot at him and he comes hauling ass straight in our direction. We had to improvise.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Kevin offered. “The target was in an unmarked vehicle, but whoever pulled up behind him must’ve noticed the government plates and had an axe to grind. At the next red light, he pulled up next to him and shot two to three shots through his open window at the target vehicle. Target floored it through the intersection then turned in your direction, heading back to camp.”

  John wondered at the turn of events. They had managed to stir up so much anti-agency sentiment that a random citizen, with no support from the Minutemen and apparently purely on the spur of the moment, had decided to attack someone he merely suspected to be an agency man. At a red light. In traffic. In the middle of town. He couldn’t decide if he was bearing witness to incredible bravery or pure foolhardiness.

  “Well, regardless, we realized we had to improvise, so we backtracked and set up on him in his path. We used the spike strips we borrowed from that local agency supply depot to stop him cold, and they worked like a charm. When he exited the vehicle and saw us walking up on him, he got a lucky shot off on us, and I caught one in the plates,” John stated flatly. “Andy zapped him, and we walked up on him to finish it.”

  “And that’s when…” Rachel started.

  “And that’s when the shithead pulled a backup gun and took another shot at us,” John finished. He was pissed at himself, not Rachel. He couldn’t believe he’d let his guard down in that moment. He of all people knew how easily a dead man could still kill someone, lashing out in his last moments with a hidden weapon. It was a lesson he should have learned already, and one Andy would never forget. “He missed, thankfully. Andy and I put about three rounds each into him and he was done. It was the same guy we turned loose when we set up on Andy’s house the morning of his raid.”

  “You still don’t know who you got, do you?” Kevin asked. “Agent Johns was the second-in-command of the detention camp, Shorts’s right-hand man. Airwaves are lit all the way up with the reports of him being KIA, and the agency is pissed and scared. They’re talking about putting out a bounty on you guys.”

  “Well, we said we wanted to get their attention,” Andy said matter-of-factly. “I guess we got their attention.” He looked to John, his face betraying no emotion.

  John held his friend’s gaze as his mind replayed what happened.

  People always say time slows down, and their life flashes before their eyes right before they die, or when they come close to dying. It was a phenomenon John had experienced himself during the close calls he had seen in his life. The gun, a little Glock 42 380 ACP, came out of Johns’s waistband from under his shirt. He cocked his elbow, raising the gun, pointing it at his assailants. John had just registered the danger and lunged back when the shot rang out, the bullet narrowly missing John and the powder burning his jeans. The next shot snapped right between Andy’s shoulder and his ear, the force felt so clearly he initially thought he had been shot. John brought the barrel of his AR down decisively as he began tapping the trigger. At this range, he didn’t even need the sights. />
  Three shots from his rifle silenced Agent Johns, followed by a few more from Andy out of pure reaction. The two men stood there on the verge of hyperventilating, realizing how close they had come for the second time that night to being shot. Andy reached up to his face, feeling for a trace of the blood he knew must be there, while John shined his light down on his pants, looking for holes. Both men brought their heart rates back down to double digits and collapsed down to their butts in the dirt.

  “Andy, if I ever do that shit again, you be sure to slap the hell out of me.” John’s voice rang out. He could only hear the pulsing of blood in his ears, making his own voice sound as though it were underwater.

  “Do what?” Andy inquired.

  “I let my guard down, and that motherfucker damned near shot both of us. I should’ve known better.” That was John, always taking the blame for everything and always taking the blame alone. Andy knew there was no point arguing with his friend, who felt responsible for the safety of them both.

  “What do we do with him?” Andy asked, motioning towards the body next to them.

  John regarded the body of Agent Johns and spoke with absolute cold fury. “I say we send the camp a message they can’t ignore. Hope you don’t have a weak stomach.”

  “I still can’t believe you two did that,” Vicky intoned. She had happened to be near the radio when Kevin was listening to and transcribing the reports of what Andy and John had decided to do to “send a message.”

  Mark looked from his wife to John and Andy. He found it hard to argue with Vicky’s assessment of these two men as being “barbarians.” After shooting Agent Johns multiple times, the two of them had dragged his body behind the Jeep back to camp, written a note, tied it around Johns’s neck with a piece of string, and sat his dead body up against the front gate of the camp while rigor set in. He was found shortly after by a patrol, and the radio traffic was graphic. Vicky had asked her husband what kind of men he had thrown in with, and he wondered himself.