Burning Nation

by Trent Reedy

  Cal sat back down, and Crow spoke again. “It has been a difficult time for all of us through the United States blockade and occupation, and I want you to welcome a man who has been strong and held it together to help our children. Freedom Lake High School principal, Mr. Garrett Morgan.”

  There was applause again as Mr. Morgan made his slow, injured way up to the podium. “Thank you for that introduction, Mr. Crow, and thanks to all of you for working together to get us through the past challenging months. One thing we’ve always believed in at Freedom Lake High School is the power and importance of the arts. That’s why, when our band teacher fled the state — um, well, when she fled the Republic of Idaho— I took it upon myself to keep the music playing. Ladies and gentlemen, the marching band of your Freedom Lake High School, augmented by dedicated musicians from the junior high and upper elementary.”

  Down the street, horns and clarinets took up the new Idaho national anthem. Everyone lining Main Street stood and removed their hats. The band led the parade, but behind them marched a formation of armed Brotherhood of the White Eagle soldiers, nine across shoulder to shoulder and maybe twenty-five ranks deep. They wore civilian clothes and carried mismatched weapons diagonally across their chests, but their identical armbands showed they were all one. They even marched mostly in step.

  Our band played okay, but looked strange without the American and Idaho flags flying before it. The Brotherhood soldier marching front and center carried a big black flag with a white eagle, though.

  “Shouldn’t the Idaho flag be out there too?” I asked Cal.

  Crow must have had the sharpest ears in town, because he turned to me and said quietly, “We haven’t received the new Republic of Idaho flags yet. When we do, you can bet we’ll be flying them. For now, this is the best we can do.”

  When the band finished with the anthem, the drum section tapped out a simple march. Caitlyn Ericson led the band in front of the stage. When everyone was assembled, she called out, “Mark time, march.” The giant procession marched in place. “Group, halt.” With a final two steps, they all stopped, the band at once, the Brotherhood a little rougher.

  Nathan Crow took the podium again, looking out from the stage over his men and the silent assembly. He read from a piece of paper. “Brave soldiers of the Brotherhood of the White Eagle! You are honored today as our liberators, and history will forever remember and honor your sacrifice and your struggle. You are unique among men, in that it has fallen on you to take charge of your destiny, to fight to secure freedom for your children and for their children. On your shoulders rests the awesome responsibility of the protection of a new and great nation, and never, not even for one tiny moment, have any of you shirked that responsibility.

  “On this day, we celebrate a great victory, hard fought and painfully won, but our celebration is tempered with the knowledge that our struggle is not yet over. Our fight goes on! We will continue the battle until every last vestige of the United States military is driven from our land, until every traitor and Fed sympathizer in our midst is brought to justice. My brothers, I salute you!” Crow held his left fist up at an angle over his head. The Brotherhood soldiers in formation immediately brought their rifles straight up and down in front of their bodies as a salute. My own left hand ached. They’d turned part of the memory of my worst, most painful day into a salute? “My brothers,” Crow said.

  Crow ordered them through military movements until the huge column of soldiers stood with their feet shoulder width apart and their rifles leaning forward, with their right hands near the top of the barrels and the buttstocks on the ground. Crow smiled and motioned me to the podium. He put his arm around me when I joined him. “I believe no introduction is necessary for Idaho Army Private Daniel Wright!”

  I’d had a crowd cheer for me before at football games or rodeos. I’m not gonna lie. Back then, I liked the attention. Now, I wished Cal and me could have been back with our friends having a steak.

  “And when I said we would bring the traitors to justice, I said so on my honor as a Brother.” Crow motioned to someone off to the side, and six Brotherhood soldiers dragged three people up the steps onto the stage. Their hands were zip-tied behind their backs and heavy cloth bags pushed down over their heads. Then four other Brothers carefully pulled down the enormous black-and-white flag behind the stage, revealing a thick wooden beam with three nooses dangling from it.

  After a nod from Crow, the hoods were yanked off the three prisoners. One of them was a terrified Fed specialist who I didn’t know. The second was Sally, the owner of the Bucking Bronc, who sold me out to Alsovar. The third was Captain Peterson, who had been with me in Alsovar’s torture chamber. What I couldn’t figure out was, whose side was Peterson on? I had this vague idea that he’d said something nice to me. Or had he only helped Alsovar make the torture worse?

  “These two United States soldiers were found hiding in a basement in a farmhouse outside of Freedom Lake,” Crow said. “The woman accepted United States ransom money to betray Private Daniel Wright. All three have been convicted of high crimes against the Republic of Idaho and will be hanged immediately.”

  Hanged? A lot of the people in the crowd clapped and cheered, but it was clear that not everybody was happy about this. JoBell was out of her seat and rushing for the stage. Two Brotherhood guards stepped in front of her. I looked to Cal to see if he was as shocked as I was, but he only smiled and nodded.

  “Come on, I’m just a grunt,” the specialist called out. “I’m on a six-year contract.” Tears started to roll down his cheeks. “I was supposed to be out already, but I got involuntarily extended. What was I s’posed to do? They’d put me in jail if I didn’t follow orders.”

  I stepped up to Sally and Captain Peterson, my heart beating so heavy it throbbed in my ears. The sounds of the crowd died away a little. “Please, Danny,” Sally said, sobbing like the specialist. “I’m sorry. I was broke, okay? My bar was shut down. I got a kid at home to feed.”

  “She says she has a hungry child at home!” Crow shouted. “How many of you were hungry? How many of you watched your children go hungry!? And yet you didn’t betray us.”

  “I’m sorry!” Sally shrieked.

  The captain didn’t beg. He didn’t cry. He just looked at me. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Danny. I told you that, remember?”

  I remembered the heat. I remembered almost drowning. “You were there the whole time.”

  “This man helped torture Private Wright, in violation of every treaty on the treatment of prisoners of war!” Crow called out to the crowd. More of them cheered now. A bunch of them held their fists up at an angle over their heads.

  “How did you get out?” the captain asked me calmly, even as Brotherhood soldiers slipped a rope around his neck. “Do you remember, when you escaped, how your restraints were unlocked? How the door was unlocked?”

  I couldn’t remember. TJ had shot the door open? He’d fired a round, I think. Stolen a key? From where? None of this made sense.

  Now a rope went around Sally’s neck. “Please,” she cried. “I’ll do anything. I’m so sorry!”

  “A public execution is not going to help!” JoBell’s dad pushed his way through the crowd. “These people haven’t even had a trial.”

  Mr. Shiratori stepped up by Mr. Linder’s side. “This is blatantly unconstitutional! And if we don’t have an official Republic of Idaho Constitution yet, it is at least contrary to the very spirit of freedom and democracy!”

  Two Brotherhood soldiers rushed at the two men with rifles, but Crow stopped them. “The teacher I recognize, but who might you be, sir?”

  JoBell’s dad took a deep breath. “Brandon Linder. I’m an attorney.”

  Crow smiled. “I appreciate your concern, gentlemen. I truly do. We can’t be lawless like the United States.” He looked up and called out to the crowd. “But the fact is that this is a whole new country in an emergency situation where Fed traitors could cost us all our lives, and we ha
ve no legal system in place. Now I promise you that we know without a doubt that these three are Feds or traitors.”

  “I was Spartacus!” Captain Peterson yelled.

  “What did you say?” JoBell shouted back. Even Crow turned to him, looking shocked.

  “The guy on the inside who told you that Wright and Sparrow were still alive,” Peterson shouted. “The guy who told you where to find them. Your source on the inside identified himself as Spartacus. That was me. I’m a traitor, all right. I turned on the Army to save two of your soldiers.”

  “The source did call himself Spartacus!” JoBell said.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean this guy is innocent,” said Jake Rickingson.

  “But you have a reasonable doubt now, don’t you?” said Mr. Linder.

  “Private Wright, listen to me,” said Captain Peterson. “The attack on the mountain base had just begun. Major Alsovar rushed out of your cell. Before I left, I released your restraints and left the door unlocked. I told you to wait until the time was right. Do you remember?”

  I did sort of remember, but it was like trying to remember the details of a fading nightmare. I didn’t know what to do. The last of the three ropes went over the neck of the specialist. A huge wet spot formed in the crotch of his uniform.

  “We can’t just let them go,” said Jake Rickingson. “And it ain’t like we can give them a full trial. We don’t have enough people to man the jails. We don’t even have courts. They are the enemy.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to kill them,” JoBell said.

  “The soldiers tortured Daniel Wright.” Crow pointed at Sally. “She sold him out.”

  “Do it!” Cal yelled. “They deserve it.”

  That look was back in Cal’s eyes. The one he’d had when he cut up those soldiers with his sword. The one he’d had when he killed Major Alsovar. Cal was losing everything that had made him good. He’d managed to dodge the bullets so far, but the war was killing him inside.

  We couldn’t allow ourselves to go down this road. These people with ropes around their necks weren’t combatants anymore. We had to disengage. They at least deserved a trial. “Mr. Crow,” I said. “Maybe we should put this off until —”

  “Now!” Crow yelled.

  The floor under the three prisoners dropped away, and they dangled on their taut ropes like fish gasping on the line. Their faces went red and veins bulged in their foreheads.

  “Mr. Crow, please.” I ran a couple steps toward the gallows, but Jake Rickingson and a couple of his guys blocked my path.

  “Let justice be done!” Crow offered the bleeding fist salute to his men. “Long live the Brotherhood!”

  I watched helplessly as the life passed out of the three prisoners. We’d fought hard, risked everything, to win our freedom and start a new country. What kind of society was this?

  Hundreds of Crow’s men held their left fists at an angle above their heads. “Long live the Brotherhood!”

  TRENT REEDY served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, where he often thought about the possible conflicts embedded in the Guard’s oath, which swears loyalty to both the U.S. president and a state’s governor. Those reflections led directly to the Divided We Fall trilogy. His other novels include If You’re Reading This and Stealing Air, both Junior Library Guild selections, and Words in the Dust, which won the Christopher Medal and was featured on the Today Show.

  Trent lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family. Please visit his website at www.trentreedy.com and follow him on Tumblr at trentreedy.tumblr.com.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Trent Reedy

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reedy, Trent, author.

  Burning nation / Trent Reedy. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Sequel to: Divided we fall.

  Summary: Idaho is a war zone under Federal occupation, and Danny Wright and his friends in the Idaho Militia are determined to fight back, running guerrilla missions against the army — but what at first seemed like a straightforward battle against governmental repression quickly grows murky, and Danny finds that even winning the war does not mean an end to tyranny.

  ISBN 978-0-545-54873-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-545-54875-5 — ISBN 978-0-545-54876-2 — ISBN 978-0-545-75282-4 1. Idaho. National Guard — Juvenile fiction. 2. Government, Resistance to — Juvenile fiction. 3. Guerrillas — Juvenile fiction. 4. War stories. 5. Idaho — Juvenile fiction. [1. Idaho. National Guard — Fiction. 2. Government, Resistance to — Fiction. 3. Guerrilla warfare — Fiction. 4. War — Fiction. 5. Idaho — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R25423Bu 2015

  813.6 — dc23

  2014027134

  Littoral combat ship image by James R. Evans via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

  First edition, February 2015

  Cover art © 2015 by Shane Rebenscheid

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-54876-2

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.