“In title only,” said his wife.
“Funny how we all have that same arrangement with our husbands,” said Linda. “As long as they feel like they’re in charge, they stay out of trouble.”
Everyone but Tim laughed. The joke even managed to drag Kate momentarily out of her funk.
“Amy’s group,” said Kate, twisting her head toward Tim, “will do two things. First priority is camouflage. We have to make this place look like it’s only housing Mom and Pops Fletcher, plus their grandchildren. The downstairs needs to be cleared of any evidence suggesting otherwise. The garage windows need to be covered from the inside. Nailed shut with ply board. The door to the backyard from the garage should be locked and somehow reinforced so it can’t be kicked in. We can’t have anyone snooping around and making a casual discovery. Can the big doors be jimmied open?”
“I tried last night,” said Tim. “They feel solid, but I have no idea what might happen if someone really put some effort into lifting one of them.”
“It should hold. Charlie was worried about the same thing at home,” Linda said. “He nearly broke the damn door, but it held.”
“Okay. This is going to sound weird, but are your daughters familiar enough with firearms to load magazines and match them up with Alex’s weapons?”
“Alyssa and Sydney have been shooting and cleaning all of Charlie’s firearms for longer than I care to admit. They can figure it out.”
“Perfect. I know he has two more ARs in the basement. One is a .223, the other is a .308. There are a few pistols and shotguns. I think everyone should be armed. Alex has a Ruger 22, which might suit you or your son,” said Kate, nodding at Samantha.
“Danny can handle the .22. I’ll take one of the shotguns,” said Samantha.
“Linda, can you tell your daughters to load the shotguns with—”
“Number one buck?” said Linda. “Way ahead of you.”
Samantha shrugged.
“Number one is easier on your shoulders and still has the penetrating power that makes Alex happy. That’s all I know,” said Kate. “Once the firearm situation is sorted and the house is secure, the kids on the general prep team will join us on the perimeter, installing the surveillance gear. I’d like to have everything up and running by sunset.”
“Sandbags?” suggested Linda.
“I think it’s worth looking into, but only if we have spare bodies.”
“Sandbags?” said Samantha doubtfully.
“Is that really necessary?” asked Amy Fletcher, looking to her husband for support.
“I thought Alex was kidding,” admitted Tim.
Kate nodded. “I did too, but it doesn’t sound so crazy now. Not if we have a price on our heads.”
“How many sandbags are we talking?” asked Samantha.
“I’d have to look at the logbook tossed in with the empty bags, but I remember him saying something about a thousand, maybe more,” said Kate.
Samantha frowned. “What is he planning to do, line the outside of the house with sandbags?”
“No. Unfortunately, he planned to drag all of that crap inside the house,” said Amy. “I thought he was joking about the sandbags! We’ll have dirt floors!”
“Inside?” asked Samantha. “This is extreme, even for me.”
“Alex came up with a plan to create firing positions around the house, in front of enough windows to cover a full 360 degrees. Each ‘position,’” Kate stated, using air quotes, “is three feet wide and two feet thick, with another foot coming back from the wall to give you some wraparound protection. You place a three-by-three piece of sheet metal against the wall under the window, then build the barrier.”
“He has sheet metal in the basement?”
Kate nodded slowly. “He has sheet metal in the basement. Pre-cut.”
“I thought those rifles could shoot through cars,” said Samantha.
“According to Alex, a bullet from an AR will lose enough momentum passing through sheet metal to burrow harmlessly into the dirt. He planned to build two or three larger safe boxes within the house, with sandbag walls on four sides. If you can’t get to one of the firing positions or hostiles break into the house, you throw yourself over the three-foot wall into the safe box and figure out your next move. With hostile militia in the picture, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to start filling sandbags once we finish the higher priority chores.”
“I’m sold,” said Samantha. “I think we should work on the safe boxes first, then key positions around the house. Once we get the surveillance system sorted out and the power running, I’ll put the crew to work filling sandbags.”
“What do you think about taking the screens out of the windows?” Linda asked. “For shooting and looking through binoculars.”
“Maybe just the firing positions?” Samantha suggested.
“If we do one, we have to do them all,” Tim countered, “otherwise they’ll be able to map out our gun positions.”
“We’ll give that to Amy’s group,” stated Kate. “Prioritized ahead of the sandbags. Now the hard part…”
“The hard part?” said everyone in near unison.
“Waking seven exhausted teenagers at 6:30 in the morning and convincing them to work for the rest of the day.”
“No convincing necessary. They work or they don’t get fed. Right?” Linda said with a smirk.
“Sounds good to me,” said Alex’s mom. “I’ll fix up pancakes and bacon. Fill them up with a good meal before we break the bad news. Slackers eat cold oatmeal moving forward.”
“Hard core! I like it,” said Samantha. “Need any help in the kitchen?”
“I’ll take all the help I can get. The quicker we whip this up the better,” said Amy.
“I can crisp bacon perfectly—on the grill. Meat handling is my specialty,” said Linda.
Samantha spit her coffee onto the table, immediately swiping her napkin.
“That’s not something you want to advertise too loudly,” said Kate, stifling a laugh.
“Good heavens,” mumbled Amy, blushing.
“This is why I pretend to be deaf around women,” said Tim. “The bacon’s in the basement freezer.”
Chapter 8
EVENT +52:01
Limerick, Maine
Eli Russell marched up the steps of the two-story red brick building and stopped at the entrance door held open by his deputy commander.
“The building is secure. We have one hundred and forty-three residents packed into the recreation hall. Standing room only,” said Kevin McCulver.
“Secure the door and post a guard. Nobody gets in or out without my say-so. We have to be on our toes,” said Eli, entering Limerick’s “Brick Town Hall.”
No longer housing Limerick’s municipal offices, the historical Brick Town Hall building had been recently renovated to house the town’s library and generate revenue by renting the large first-floor hall for private functions. The recreation hall served as the largest public meeting place within Limerick, aside from the elementary school a few miles to the east on the Newfield border. Eli had chosen the historical building for his debut public appearance because it was a familiar landmark located in the heart of town.
He strode into the room and grasped the podium, pushing aside the useless microphone.
“Citizens of Limerick. Please. I’ll keep this brief,” he bellowed.
The din of conversation diminished, but didn’t stop.
“Please. I don’t want to take up any more time than necessary! We all have enough going on at home,” he said, smiling widely at the crowd, which finally fell silent. “I want to thank Selectman Keithman for arranging this meeting and getting the word out on short notice. My name is Eli Russell. Some of you know me pretty well—I’m a Waterboro native. Several years ago, I started the Maine Liberty Militia. Our ranks are filled with hardworking, patriotic folks just like yourselves from all over York County. Gary Flannery is one of our original members,” he said, motioning for a thi
n man dressed in a MultiCam uniform to step forward from behind him.
“His family has lived in Limerick for nearly a century, and you’ve been eating his family’s pizza for three decades, for better or worse,” he said, slapping Gary playfully on the shoulder.
The tension in the room eased with the joke, setting the stage for Eli’s main event.
“Obviously, I didn’t come here to tell jokes. These are uncertain, frightening times for all of us, but one thing is certain: the hardest days lie ahead. Life as we’ve known it has come to an abrupt end and is unlikely to ever return to what most of you consider normal. This isn’t an isolated incident. The entire nation has been plunged into darkness. This has been confirmed by ham radio broadcasts.”
The crowd murmured in response to his statement.
“Trust me when I say that the situation out there will only get worse. The police and National Guard are overwhelmed at the border, which is leaking like a sieve right now, leaving us exposed to the same horrors that migrated into Maine during the 2013 pandemic. The sheriff’s department personnel assigned to these parts are nowhere to be found and—”
“They’ve been murdered. Haven’t you heard?” said an elderly white-haired man from the back of the room.
No kidding.
“We’ve been so busy helping the State Police at the borders, I haven’t—this is horrible. What happened?” said Eli.
“Three of them were killed at home. Assassinated along with their families. The other is missing, along with his car. He lived in West Newfield. Residents in town heard gunshots soon after that airwave hit us.”
The room launched into an uproar, which gave Eli the precious moments he needed to capitalize on the “news.” He couldn’t have planted a better link to what he needed to say next.
“This can’t be happening,” said Eli, feigning shock and indignation. “This has to be related to the massacre!”
“What massacre?” asked a woman near the front of the room.
“At the border,” said Eli, counting on others to eavesdrop.
“Where?” asked a young man a little further back.
“Milton Mills. The whole border checkpoint was ambushed. All of my men were killed. Completely wiped out! We also found a possible mass grave behind the Methodist church on Foxes Ridge Road, just a few miles from the New Hampshire border. We’d brought supplies over to the church, since it was so close to the border. Figured it might be a good place to feed and shelter the folks trying to get home to points north. Mainers have been showing up on foot from all over New England. By the time they get to the border, they’re spent and out of resources. We let at least fifty through in the first twenty-four hours, until I lost contact with the squad out in Milton Mills…” he said, trailing off for effect.
“What happened to them?” yelled a man from the back.
“What massacre?”
“Who was in the mass grave?”
One of the town selectman, standing along the wall near the door, shouted, “Everyone! Keep it down! This is important!”
“Once we realized that this was more than some freak power outage,” Eli continued, “I drove Route 11 to the border to see if I could offer any assistance and—”
“Where did you find a car that worked?”
“We have a big organization,” he lied, “and a few of our cars survived. We were lucky. Anyway, State Troopers at the border told me that they didn’t have enough personnel to watch some of the smaller crossings until the National Guard fully mobilized, which may never happen, but that’s a different story. They asked us to set up border checkpoints at some of the smaller crossings past Milton Pond, doing the same thing the police are doing—screening refugees for Maine residents. Nobody wants a repeat of 2013, right?”
The group nodded and muttered in agreement.
“I lost radio contact with the squad at Milton Mills the night before…” He faded off, shaking his head slowly.
The room fell silent, everyone holding their breath for Eli’s next words.
“I drove out there myself yesterday afternoon and found them dead. Twelve well-trained, heavily armed militiamen killed in an ambush—by extremely accurate gunfire.”
“Who killed them?” asked several citizens at once.
“The same unit that killed everyone at the Methodist church. We found fifty plus bodies in the forest. All shot in the head, execution style. I had a few guys helping out at the church. They put up one hell of a fight, but whoever did this…” another well-placed shake of the head, “I haven’t seen anything like this since El Salvador.”
At 58 years old, the closest Eli Russell had come to Central America in his lifetime was a one-time trip to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun, Mexico, with his ex-wife. He’d joined the army in 1981, completing the infantry basic training and airborne training in Fort Benning, Georgia. His airborne qualification earned him a duty assignment to the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he served in 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment as an M-60 machine gunner until 1986.
After an uneventful stint in the army, Sergeant Russell returned to Maine, immersing the local bars with nebulous tales of “classified” black-ops paramilitary operations in undisclosed countries. The Iran-Contra hearings in 1987 dovetailed perfectly with his newly created persona, and he quickly became an underground celebrity in York County. Sergeant Eli Russell, suspected military advisor to the Salvadoran counter-insurgency effort, was born.
“Death squads,” stated Gary Flannery, intimately familiar with Russell’s history as a military advisor.
“Worse. Special Forces death squads. It’s the only logical explanation for how my men could have been taken out so quickly. I can’t go into the details of what I saw in El Salvador. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it at all, but it fits the pattern and confirms my suspicions about this whole EMP thing. I think we’re on the brink of a government takeover.”
“Not this again,” said a middle-aged man near the back wall.
“I’m sorry, did I say something to offend you?” Eli said. “I’m just passing along what I saw. I’m concerned for everyone’s safety.”
Eli knew he’d have to handle this carefully if he wanted to prevent a public relations backlash.
“Look, I’m just as displeased with Washington as anyone else, but I draw the line at this broad-reaching conspiracy nonsense,” the man replied. “They blame the same bogeyman every time. That one Internet nutcase has thousands of people convinced that the 2013 pandemic was allowed to enter the U.S. by the CDC, with the help of—you guessed it—the biggest bogeyman in human history: Homeland Security. I suppose this is the latest in a long line of ‘false flag’ operations that never materialize in the militarization of America? Like the Jakarta Pandemic? The conspiracy lunatics were sorely disappointed when the thousands of armored cars allegedly purchased by the Department of Homeland Security didn’t take to the streets with the billions of hollow-point bullets supposedly purchased right before the pandemic. This is more of the same.”
“We lost a lot of good men out there! Mr. Russell’s youngest brother, Jimmy, was among the dead,” barked Gary Flannery, stepping toward the crowd.
Eli extended his right hand to hold Gary back. “It’s all right, Gary.”
“I’m sorry. I had, uh—no idea,” said the man. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. It just all seemed…I’m really sorry to hear about your brother.”
“I didn’t take it as disrespect, sir. Thank you,” said Eli, pausing to let the crowd think he was struggling to get past the death of his brother. He continued when he saw a genuine look of compassion appear on the doubter’s face, signifying that his last hurdle in this room had been cleared.
“I’ll be the first to admit that all of this sounds outlandish, but only a Special Forces team is capable of doing that kind of damage so quickly. They even took one of my men for interrogation.”
Eli let the implication of kidnapping and torture settle into the c
aptivated gathering of sheep. He hoped the rest of the townships would be this easy. He’d triple the size of his personal army within a few days.
“These are textbook guerilla tactics for rural paramilitary operations. Trust me, folks. I’ve seen this before, in another life. It’s a brutal, systematic process designed to strike fear into the local population and disintegrate your resolve. We can expect more of this until…”
“Until what?” said a woman clutching a young child.
“Until the new authority arrives to save and protect us from this terror. I’m telling you, this is by-the-book Spec Ops stuff. Psychological operations—PSYOPS. They want you afraid to leave your house. Afraid to close your eyes at night, lest you be snatched away,” he said, snapping his fist shut and pulling it toward him. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that our satellite phones don’t work? I have a full signal on mine—tracking nine birds, but all I can do is receive government transmissions. They don’t want us talking with anyone outside of our immediate communities. Keep us isolated until our saviors arrive.”
“A false flag ploy?” asked the town selectman.
“The bigger event is the false flag. Whatever they did to turn off the lights, that created the crisis.”
“The government announced that a space-borne object broke up over the U.S and hit the East Coast. It explains the shockwave,” said someone deep in the crowd.
“But not the EMP. I’ve studied this stuff. Meteorites don’t cause electromagnetic pulses. Only nukes and solar flares do that. Did you notice how they haven’t given an explanation for why your cars don’t work or why the lights are out? That’s because it doesn’t make sense. Instead, they say, ‘widespread power outages have been reported.’ No kidding, Sherlock. I couldn’t microwave my breakfast burrito this morning. Tell me something I don’t know.”
The group broke into open laughter.
Man, I love this, Eli thought.
“I’m not buying the asteroid story, and neither should you. They’re watching the skies 24/7, detecting and analyzing inbound space objects years away. Ain’t no way they missed one as big as they claim. Judging by the blast wave we all experienced, I’d say they detonated a nuke over the water in the Gulf of Maine. Far enough away to minimize civilian casualties, but close enough to let us know that something big happened. I bet they did this up and down the East Coast where most of the people live.
THE ALEX FLETCHER BOXSET: Books 1-5 Page 75
