Cody knew this much to be true. “The day the Gulf War started, he was raging around the house as though someone had swindled him.”
Cabot was nodding. “He felt absolutely betrayed. He knew better than to air these things in front of the whole camp, but he told me he thought the whole thing was a setup. That Saddam would never have risked invading Kuwait unless he thought we’d given him a free hand. For him, it was just another military-industrial con, wasting young lives to enrich the corrupt.”
“If that’s what he thought of the first intervention, the one that had UN backing and public support, what the hell did he think of the second one?”
“He was too angry to speak for three days,” Cabot recalled. “Just stomped around the place and took long hikes in the woods. One night, I didn’t know if he was coming back, and I started to worry. Those things bothered him intensely, you know? He took them personally, like an insult to his intelligence. He showed up at 2 am, and we finished a bottle together, worked things out. After that, he was a bit more sanguine, but I know it bothered him that our government used lies to send men to their deaths. Again.”
“It sure ain’t a good recruiting tool for the army,” Cody noted.
“Only for our enemies,” Cabot added, trying to let the anger subside. But after their third glass, Cabot was soon unselfconsciously in full flood. “I hated to see a man’s passion for his own country become dimmed, but I’m afraid he went through some of that. He clung to the past, like most of us do in one way or another,” Cabot said with a self-deprecating gesture to himself. “Like I say, he saw the good ol’ USA of 2003 as the same nation that defeated Nazism and Japanese imperialism, faced down the Soviets and landed twelve men on the moon. We were fated to be an example to the world. It was our destiny, according to Grover, to be a light in the dark, wherever that might be. And, oh, boy,” Cabot whistled, “you should have seen his reaction to the internet when he first saw it.”
Cody tried to imagine, but he already had a ready comparison. “Probably about the same as his reaction to comic books, or Saturday kids’ TV. Grover didn’t have a lot of time for frivolity.”
But Cabot was shaking his head. “He didn’t think it was frivolous, or if he did, that came second. He was worried about how much of it was just plain wrong.” These complaints became a theme during their fifth glass of scotch. “People claiming that the world was flat. Folks with ‘proof’ that there are Nazis living on the moon. The last straw… well, this was quite something. I can’t remember when it was,” Cabot said, as though memory were a caprice trying only to trip him up. “Some British dude, a guy people had taken kinda seriously until this point, wrote a book that said the queen of England is actually an alien reptile. It wasn’t the book that got Grover angry. It was the reaction from people on the internet, saying, ‘Yes! I’ve suspected this all along! Finally, the truth is told!’ Grover just about lost his mind. He raged about it for days.”
“I can imagine.”
“Gave us all lectures about the education system, and how people who believe this stuff ought to be arrested.”
“Arrested?” Cody spluttered. “For believing in a nutty theory?”
“For ‘polluting the intellectual environment,’ he used to say. And he didn’t want them to go to jail. The punishment would be community service, in the form of going back to school and doing the GED again.”
Cody laughed over the lip of his glass. “He was a firm believer in education, that’s for sure. Emphasis on the ‘firm.’”
“I don’t doubt it. But that was all before, you know.”
He stopped. “Before what?”
“You know,” Cabot said again. “Before he met Alice, at the VA in Manchester.” When Cody just stared, Cabot blinked a few times, wondering if the man was just inebriated. “Alice,” he reiterated. “You know. Before they met in… what would it have been, ’95? And then she decided to come up here to live until ’99, I believe.”
Cody set down his glass on the broad arm of the chair, leaned forward, and looked Cabot straight in the eyes. “John, who are you talking about?” he asked. “Who’s Alice?”
27
TThe Russell Homestead wo Days Later
“How come I don’t get one of those?” complained Fawn. “They all have one. Where’s mine?”
The three patrolling boys didn’t even slow down as they left camp. “Because you’d shoot yourself in the knee,” said Charlie, “and my grandpa would definitely decide it was my fault.”
“No, I wouldn’t!” Fawn insisted, but the boys were striding down the path and were soon gone. All they heard from Fawn was a colorful admonishment before she rejoined her sister for yet another foraging trip.
“What about you two?” Charlie asked the Russell youngsters. “You gonna whine about not having a gun?”
“Don’t want one,” said Emma. She’d been hoping for lots of exercise and minimal stress, so the boys’ decision to bring their weapons felt as bizarre as bringing poisonous snakes. Emma assumed the boys were just trying to show off. “Not really my thing.”
“Dad says I have to wait another year,” said Jacob.
“Better make it two or three,” advised Emma, “just to reduce the risk to the public.”
“I’m responsible!” said Jacob defiantly. “Besides, they have safety catches and all that good stuff, right?”
“Not enough of them. I mean,” Emma laughed, “didn’t you already set fire to our cabin?”
“That,” Jacob stopped to explain, “was nothing. Old dust that caught fire when I got too close with my soldering iron. No big deal.”
“Only here three days,” Emma lamented, “and he’s already trying to burn the place down.”
He would take these barbs too seriously, she knew. Jacob’s sense of humor was certainly developing, and he could be outright hilarious at times, but he had no patience for anything that resembled bullying, having been through more than enough at school. His glasses, and the seemingly ingrained “GeekLord” moniker, were symbols which were only magnified by the kind of friends he’d gained—rocket enthusiasts and nascent software programmers who binge-watched National Geographic documentaries about living on Mars. They were all easy targets for those kids, the short-tempered, low-information types who couldn’t name all the planets, and didn’t care, but would passionately deride anyone else’s attempts to see beyond their current horizon. “Small thinkers,” Jacob called them, or just “nobodies.’ These were the kids he’d be leaving behind when he went to college and anticipating that long-awaited moment quietly thrilled him.
“At least I didn’t turn up my nose at the very first task I was asked to do,” Jacob decided he would fire back. There was no reason to let Emma bolster her status with these three young men by stealing social power from him. Besides, why would she—a volleyball captain, sometime track star, a tall, smart blond with a strangely attractive green streak in her hair—even bother putting him down? Unless, of course, she wanted to look mature and significant in front of these potential suitors?
“It was fish, Jacob. They wanted me to flake smoked fish into a salad. Even you,” she said, “must have noticed that I’m a vegetarian.”
The oldest of the three boys, Charlie, wanted to know more. “How’d you decide to do that? Giving up meat and everything?”
The decision hadn’t been simple, but she summed it up. “I became uncomfortable outsourcing the inevitable cruelty of meat-eating.”
“How’s that?” asked Charlie. “Outsourcing?”
“Buying meat in shops outsources the cruelty to the poor people who work in meatpacking plants. If I were going to eat an animal, I’d prefer to kill and deal with it myself.”
“No problem,” said Charlie. “We can show you.”
Promptly back-peddling, Emma said, “Well, I didn’t necessarily mean…”
“A young deer, maybe?” Charlie asked his patrolling comrades.
“Let’s get her a rabbit,” recommended Max. “S
maller, easier to handle.”
“Yeah, we’ll find her one today, no problem,” agreed Bryce.
“Really, guys, it’s okay…” she was saying, but the patrolling trio was resolved, much to Jacob’s amusement. He and Emma horsed around, punching each other’s shoulders and calling names until Charlie brought them to a halt.
“Listen,” he said quietly. “I know you’re getting used to the place and everything, but when we’re on patrol, we got some rules, you know?”
“Sure,” said Emma. “Sorry.”
“We ain’t angry,” said Max. “But we don’t like to get distracted. That’s the thing.”
The remark made her regret coming along. Apart from tomfoolery with her brother, Emma’s very presence seemed to be a distraction; one of only a handful of young women who’d ever visited the camp, she had attracted gazes and attention since before the Dodge’s engine had even cooled on their first day. She only assumed that some kind of prohibition from Cabot was restraining the boys from expressing more interest, and their admonition made her feel invisible, suddenly, when in truth, her sense of self-worth could have used a boost.
They spent the next twenty-five minutes in near-silence as the boys closed on their improvised “listening post” not far from the road. Once they found it, Charlie motioned for the other two to scout ahead while he counted the duffel bags they’d hidden under branches behind the foot of an ancient tree.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Max, Bryce, on me.” The two scuttled over to where Charlie was kneeling by their bags of camping gear and basic supplies. “I don’t think anything’s missing, but someone definitely took a look through our stuff.” He spat angrily on the base of the tree. “Bastards think they can just do whatever they want.”
“What’s going on?” asked Jacob. “We get burglarized?” He found himself thinking back to the old veteran they’d encountered at the Lewis’ house, and hoping the old man was safe.
“No, but we’ve had some visitors,” Charlie explained. “Time to do what we’re here to do.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Emma.
“Security cordon. We’re gonna put traps and flares where we think enemy’s gonna be. They’ll probably just run off as soon as they trip something, but if they don’t, we can double-time it from the camp in… like, twenty minutes, if we’re quick.”
“And if they’re here when you arrive?” asked Jacob.
“Then we’ll have,” said Charlie meaningfully, “a discussion with them.”
“About…?”
“About whether they should really be up here. Or whether they should turn around and go back to where they came from.”
“But don't they have the right to be here?”
“Nope,” said Bryce simply. “Trespassing.”
“And they’re often armed,” added Max, “so Papa Cabot calls them more than ‘trespassers.’ He calls them ‘insurgents.’”
“That sounds a bit much,” Jacob opined. “Aren’t they just doing the same sort of stuff that you are? Keeping away from cities and ‘society’, doing their own thing, living in their own way?”
Shaking off his frustration, Charlie brought the four others into a huddle. “All right, everyone take a knee. Seems it’s time to educate our two newcomers.” They knelt in a small circle around their listening post, which was little more than an A-frame bivouac and five stashed duffels of gear.
“Educate us? About what?” asked Jacob.
“About who, I think he means,” Emma corrected.
“Yeah. We don’t know what they’re called at the moment,” Charlie explained. “Grandpa Cabot says they used to be called the ‘Aryan Nations,’ or the ‘Cabot Brotherhood,’ or sometimes ‘The Northerners.’ They’re still basically all-white and hard-right, but things have changed a bit.”
“What do they want?” Emma asked. “I mean, besides a comfy place to sleep and food they can just pluck out of the ground.”
“Anarchy,” said Charlie Cabot. “Or nihilism.”
“Which is worse?” asked Jacob, unsure as to the meaning of either.
“They want a United States that’s not so very different from what we had before the Civil War, or maybe around 1950. Cabot people running things…”
“But only the dudes,” added Max. “They never let their women run things.”
“That’s true,” agreed Charlie. “It’s worth you knowing,” he said to Emma, “that they’re not exactly famed for respecting the ladies. If they came here, and I mean, in force… I can’t even guess what they’d do on that front.”
She said nothing, but fear rippled in her torso. The woods seemed as enfolding and protective, in that moment, as an open plain. Surely, in the twenty-first century, she need have no worry over bands of armed men, literally raping and pillaging? It seemed like something from the Middle Ages, but then, Emma realized, their technology had just been shunted back to exactly that era. In the darkness of Medieval ignorance, base human selfishness flourished unchecked; modern humans looked the same, and in many ways behaved the same, and so, in extremis, could hardly be expected to transcend their own limitations. We’ve all become secretive dwellers of the forest, desperate to feed but equally desperate not to be fed upon.
Charlie noted her depressed demeanor and handed her what looked like a tall, thick pencil with some wires on the end. “This is how we’ll stay safe: trip flares,” he explained. “This part connects to this wire.” He played out a length of thin cable from a spool, wrapping one end around the base of a shrub, and asked Emma to attach it to a large rock on the other side of the path. “The flare’s supposed to shoot straight up into the air. We should be able to see it from camp, even in the daytime.” Throughout, he kept his voice low, so that each of their plans had a conspiratorial air.
“I thought trip wires were supposed to blow people up?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, we’ve got some of those too,” Charlie said. “But for now, we just want to make the enemy announce themselves. The violent bit comes later.”
“We’re not really gonna…” Emma asked as she tied off a second wire, “I mean, come under attack or something, are we? I mean, all the way up here?”
“You told Hope and Maddy about what happened in Flannigan,” Max recalled. “Hope you didn’t mind, but I was eavesdropping. It sounded like you’ve been attacked already.”
“Sure, I mean, that was…” she said, reaching into her memories to bring the incidents to mind. But nothing came back; it was like someone else had borrowed those volumes, leaving the shelf empty. “Pretty epic,” she managed to say.
“A policeman nearly shot her,” said Jacob. “By accident, I guess. And at the checkpoint, those lunatics were shooting at everything. You should have seen…”
Jacob found himself grabbed firmly from behind and a hand over his mouth. “No need to relive all of that,” Emma said, though she’d have been forced to admit to having almost no memory of the events. “All right, GeekLord?”
“Sure,” he said, muffled by her hand. “Do you mind…?”
She released him, then grabbed three more tripwires with flares and headed off into the woods.
Charlie promptly followed; they weren’t supposed to go off alone, of course. “Hey, hold up a second,” he said as he tracked Emma down, thirty yards along the path. “We don't want to get separated or wander too close to their OP. Dunno if they’re in residence right now, but if it were me, I’d be patrolling all day and circling back to the OP two or three times.”
“You sound like a soldier,” Emma said, looking for a suitable tree to act as an anchor for her tripwire. “Are you gonna join up?”
“The army, you mean?” asked Charlie. “Nah. My grandpa talks about it, tells us stories. But every time he brings up something cool, like jumping out of a plane or riding around a warzone in an armed helicopter, he’ll say something else to balance it out.”
“Like what?” asked Emma as they worked on the wires together.
“His f
riends dying. Or trying to help someone who was fatally wounded, with blood everywhere. I don’t think he even told us ten percent of what he went through. The cool parts sound great, but the rest just sounds…”
“Barbaric?” she tried.
“I was going to say devastating. I’ve met veterans before, lots of times, and every one of them was carrying some kind of damage. Hidden or obvious, mental or physical, mild or serious. No one comes back the same.”
“Sounds like a great reason not to go to war,” Emma decided.
“We might not have a choice.” Charlie finished tying another tripwire, then stepped back and offered Emma his AR-15. “Here. Feel the weight.”
“No thanks,” she said, folding her arms as though he’d offered her a lit cigarette. “Not my thing.”
“If things get messy,” Charlie insisted, “we’ll need everyone to…”
“To what?” she almost shouted, surprising him. “To run around in the woods like Rambo?”
“To be able to defend themselves,” he said, lowering the weapon. “We think about that a lot up here.”
Jacob was arriving, attracted by the raised voices. When it came to Emma, he’d be on alert for anything that sounded untoward; these older teenagers seemed nice enough, but he’d heard adults say it a million times: “boys will be boys.” If Charlie, Max, or Bryce stepped out of line, Cabot’s retribution would likely be severe, but that was curative, not preventative. The only true weapon against unpredictable behaviors was vigilance. “What’s the problem?” he asked tentatively.
“Nothing,” said Emma. “Just talking.”
“I heard shouting.”
“I wasn’t shouting,” she nearly shouted.
“It’s my fault,” said Charlie. “I guess I thought Emma should try holding the AR. Just to feel what it’s like.”
Protecting Our Home Page 16
