A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  As history tells us, it was nothing of the kind. It was Gus Singer’s neighbors, good Americans all who finally decided they no longer wanted to be Americans, good or otherwise. Ordinary people who said to hell with America. Slaves who in the light of a Northwest dawn pulled their cherished guns out of hiding, and who at long last, for the first time since 1865, fired those guns at the hirelings of the United States. Ordinary and decent men and women who heard the call to heroism and answered it, who fought and died in an attempt to save the Singer children from being kidnapped and sold as chattels and toys to rich yuppies and perverts. That attempt failed, and the Singers died that their race and nation might live. But at the time I had no idea what the hell was going on. Neither did anyone else. For all we knew, the Party had decided to start the revolution without us. I disobeyed Rooney and stared at the tube for several minutes, trying to wrap my mind around it all, until the phone rang on the side table. I picked it up in a daze. “Yeah?” I said.

  “Hello, darlin’. No names on this phone,” drawled Carter’s voice. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

  “Is it us? Is it us?” I yelled.

  “Don’t know. The government says it’s us, and that’s all that counts. They’ll be coming after all of us now. You need to get out of that house and over to the gym.”

  “Got it,” I said. Needless to say, the gym was anything but a gymnasium. One of our people ran a franchise for a major shoe store chain in a local shopping mall, which included a capacious warehouse and storage area in the back. One of the best places to hide when you’re on the bounce is in plain sight, in the middle of as many people as you can find. We had all been provided with employee parking stickers in case of need. Mine was in the glove compartment of the Toyota Corolla.

  “Wait, don’t hang up,” said Carter quickly. “You know the rapture kits I made for this kind of sitch? My big boy got ‘em out of the barn and got ‘em mostly ready for you. He didn’t do ‘em up completely because he knew you’d be coming into the house. They’re under the sink. You need to take care of that for me, son.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “It might turn out to be a false alarm. You all might want to come back.”

  “Dead FBI lying in the street ain’t no false alarm, no matter who done it or why,” Carter replied grimly. “We ain’t coming back. This thing in Coeur d’Alene may be us, it may be some kind of staged incident like 9/11 to give ZOG an excuse to do us all in, who the hell knows with these people? But either way, our old lives are gone, son. We all knew we’d have to move on someday soon, and we’ve been trying to prepare everybody for that. I’ve got some good memories of that home of ours, your home too as we tried to make it, but an old time has ended today and a new one has begun. Do it. I’ve showed you how.”

  “You got it,” I said, and I hung up.

  A major rule of urban guerrilla warfare: when un-assing an area, always booby-trap everything you possibly can. The reason for this is not so much to inflict casualties per se as it is psychological warfare. You want to wrack the nerves of the man who’s pursuing you and keep him on edge, never letting him forget that while he’s hunting you, you’re hunting him as well. A cautious enemy is dangerous. You don’t want him calm and cautious and deliberating. You want to take him beyond cautious and way into paranoid. He needs to see you around every corner, behind every bush, never knowing when you will strike or how. Every moment of his day, ZOG’s hired lackey needs to be sweating, wondering where Jerry Reb is, what he is doing. His neck needs to have a permanent itch from those invisible cross-hairs on it.

  Booby-trapping everything in sight also has the effect of slowing them down to a crawl while they check out every nook and cranny for any unpleasantries you may have left behind. Time spent calling in the sniffer dogs and sweeping for explosives and manipulating clumsy handling equipment to open a door is time ZOG is not chasing you, time you are using to put distance between yourself and your last tickle and prepare for your next, or even grab some much needed shut-eye. Nor need you restrict yourself to pyrotechnics. Booby-trapping is fun and it allows you to get creative as you destroy. With a little practice we learned to open bottled beer, spike it with cyanide or sulfuric acid, and then reseal it so carefully that thirsty cops and Fatties breaking into one of our safe houses would pop the top and go for the gusto, for the last time. (They knew we didn’t allow alcohol in the Volunteers. I am amazed the idiots never wondered why there was beer in our fridge and never figured that one out, but it worked more than once.) Then there was the old exploding crapper trick. The famous Dr. James Cord cooked up a little powder we’d sprinkle onto the surface of the water in toilets or urinals which exploded when it came into contact with uric acid. We blew the family jewels off a Marine colonel that way once. My personal favorite was to booby-trap a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall with a white phosphorus grenade set into a recess behind it. When some red, white, and blue-blooded all-Amurrican boy ripped it down in righteous rage for Mom, God, and apple pie, then he got a truly Herzliche NS-Grüsse. Cars were especially dangerous for Uncle Slime. It got to the point where they wouldn’t even examine a vehicle they knew the NVA had abandoned. They’d just back off and shell it with their grenade launchers. Not too good for collecting evidence. But I digress.

  I looked under the sink and pulled out the rapture kits, two OD green ammunition boxes, each one of which had a 9-volt battery attached to the side by an aluminum bracket and both of which contained a large shaped block of Semtex high explosive. On both batteries, one red wire from one terminal led directly to a detonator cap inserted into one end of a stick of dynamite, which had in turn been inserted into a hole in the box and which would act as a larger detonator for the main charge. So did the blue wire lead to another detonator cap at the other end of the dynamite. But the blue lead was really two wires, one attached to the battery terminal and the other to the blasting cap, connected in the middle of the strand by an alligator clip. The jaws of the clip were clamped down on a small patch of lead sheeting about an inch square and the thickness of a dime, and in the head of each lead tab was bored a small hole, through which was run a heavy thread, about eighteen inches long. At the end of the thread was a looped thumbtack. I carefully placed the first ammo box to the left of the front door, out of sight under a raincoat of China’s I found, and firmly pushed the thumbtack into the door as low as I could so hopefully any Fed or cop trying to ease the door open wouldn’t see it. Then I did the same at the kitchen door in the back. Anyone kicking open either door would then yank the little lead tab out of the alligator clip, complete the circuit, and fly up into the sky to meet Jesus. Hallelujah, brother!

  After I rigged up the rapture boxes I took a last check around the house to see if anything obvious had been missed. The only thing I could see was Chompus, whom I knew to be China’s favorite stuffed animal from her childhood that she’d hung onto. Chompus was a threadbare, battered and faded green alligator in a sitting position, wearing a stupid grin and a purple tie that said South Carolina on it. He struck me as an odd thing to be carrying into an armed insurrection against the United States government, but in spite of her father’s acute observation about an old time ending and a new one beginning, I figured Chine might want to keep at least that one thing from her past, so I grabbed Chompus off her bed. Then I climbed out a ground floor window, got into my car and left the American part of my life behind forever. I knew whatever happened, I wouldn’t be unloading any more trucks of plastic junk for the Mighty Mart.

  When I got to the gym, i.e. the shoe store in the mall, I parked off to the side and scouted the place out first to make sure, going into the mall and scanning the few employment ads in the window of the useless Worksource job center. Nothing unusual seemed to be happening in the mall, no police or commotion, and the shoe store looked open for business. There was a crowd in front of Radio Shack silently watching a television in the display which I ignored. I sauntered into the shoe store like I was a customer and ignored the mid
dle-aged woman at the counter as I walked into the back room. But I was stopped by Tom Burnham, a teacher from Mossy Rock who jammed his pistol barrel in my belly before he recognized me. “I’m glad to see you came fully prepared to begin our struggle for racial freedom, comrade,” he said somberly, nodding downward. I looked down and saw Chompus the stuffed alligator in my left hand. So much for my calm, cool and debonair revolutionary insouciance as I cased the lay of the land like a pro. I didn’t even realize I had been doing my first recon while carrying a child’s toy. “There’s secret microfilm jammed up his butt,” I told Tom with a straight face.

  It was crowded in the back storeroom. There were at least forty people present, including all the Wingfield family. Most of the comrades there I knew, or at least I’d seen around, but some were unfamiliar. They were gathered around a television set in the little backroom office, spilling out into the warehouse section, leaning against metal shelving and sipping on Styrofoam cups of coffee and canned soft drinks from a vending machine. There was a sliding glass window in the office which was open so we could all hear what was on TV. Somebody had hung a Northwest Tricolor flag up along the ceiling beams and the blue, white and green swayed over us, billowing gently in the draft. I felt a cold, wet nose in my free hand and saw that Caprice was there as well. Glancing around, I saw Porterfoy lying asleep on a bottom shelf like some big furry bedroom slipper. I went right to Carter. “What the hell is happening?” I asked.

  “White people are fighting ZOG in Idaho,” said Carter. “I think it may be our people.” He looked down and saw Chompus, and he said nothing. Not then or ever, but I think he understood, and I rose another notch in his estimation.

  I saw China in the press of people, went up to her, and gave the toy to her. “I didn’t know if you wanted him or not,” I told her.

  She took the stuffed gator and said quietly, “I was already down the road in the car when I remembered I had forgotten him. Thank you, Shane.”

  Rooney appeared by my side. Her face was flushed and her green eyes bright with excitement. “It’s just rumor so far, unconfirmed,” she said, taking my hand. “But CNN says the Old Man is in Coeur d’Alene! And Mom and Dad say China and I can wear jeans for the duration of the whole revolution!”

  “Red is trying to get hold of somebody out there to find out what’s going on,” said Carter. For the next few hours we simply watched, stunned at what we saw on TV. About noon Ma and Adam came in with arms stacked high with pizza boxes, the fruits of Lewis County’s first act of revolutionary expropriation of the War of Independence. One of our guys was a delivery driver for the Pizza Palace, and he absconded with his entire noon lunch run of hot pizzas for the entire town of Dundee and delivered them to the rear loading dock of the shoe store, which gave us about thirty pies of various sizes and toppings, not to mention a number of plastic jugs of rotten sugary soft drinks and baskets of bread sticks and buckets of red sauce, which sustained the insurrectionary forces of the Rebel County for the first hours of the revolution. Fine with me; junk food or not, I liked pizza of any kind that didn’t have pineapple on it. Dundee’s yuppies went hungry that day, and we ate their lunch while we stared at CNN.

  About one o’clock Red Morehouse came out of the corner where he had been dialing cell phone number after number, and he confirmed that the Party was involved in the revolt in Idaho. “It seems to have started when Federal thugs from It Takes A Village tried to grab this guy Singer’s children and the locals reacted by shooting at the Feds. Singer is an Old Believer although not affiliated with us in any formal way, but the Party has done the old carpe diem trick,” he told us. “Fortunately we had some men on the scene with some cop-on and some testicular follication. The Idaho boys seem to have gotten tired of waiting, so they followed up on what the people in Gus Singer’s neighborhood started. The leader of the insurrection appears to be Comrade Winston Wayne, who as some of you may be aware is one of the Walla Walla 43, the men who broke jail awhile back. The Coeur d’Alene police station and government buildings have been occupied by the Party, and in addition to Party personnel several hundred local people have come in with whatever weapons they could scrounge up and have joined the revolt on our side. By a fortuitous coincidence, the Old Man was in Spokane at the time along with the whole mobile GHQ entourage. Some of our people jacked a chopper and brought the Old Man in, and the rest of General Headquarters has been relocated to Coeur d’Alene by road. I have established contact with someone who in turn has contact with what’s going on in CDA, and so there is now a line of communication open between this unit and the center of military operations, and there is now an official chain of command. I have been informed that we should stand by for an important public statement from the General Secretary.”

  Ma Wingfield alone among us dared to voice our hope: is this the day we become free men again? “Is the Old Man gone proclaim the Northwest Republic?” she asked bluntly.

  “I have no idea, ma’am, but I don’t think he’s going to sing hey nonny-nonny and a hot cha-cha,” replied Red. “One more thing. It goes without saying that Winston Wayne and the fighters in Coeur d’Alene need every bit of help they can get, and they are already calling for volunteers from the Party from around the Homeland. Based on my assessment of our present situation here, I am asking for six volunteers who will take two vehicles and the best of our weapons, go to Idaho, and try to get through to CDA.” It was too crowded for anyone to step forward, but in silence every hand in the place went up, including mine and every member of the Wingfield family, including Ma. “Thank you, comrades. I expected nothing less from all of you. Comrade Wingfield and I will make the decision as to who will go based on who has combat experience with the imperial forces in the Middle East or other relevant skills, and also on our own need to begin military and support operations here in Lewis County. Carter, could I see you in private?”

  “Just a minute,” said Carter. “I need to take care of something.” He beckoned to me and I followed him into a small loading dock area stacked with cardboard cartons of shoes and wooden pallets. “Shane, we’re going to be here for a while until we can get our ducks in a row and find out where we stand, but I’m a bit nervous at having this many of our people in such a small space. By now the local cops will be on the lookout for those of us they know, and I’m worried they’ll spot a bunch of our cars in the parking lot here, as big as it is and surrounded by other vehicles as they are. We’ve got some contacts in the Dundee police department and the Lewis County sheriff’s office as well, whom I think we can trust to keep us posted on what’s happening on their end, but until we can get dispersed I need sentries. I’m sending the girls out into the mall to hang around the record bar and the Burger Shack and giggle like typical teenagers while they watch that side, but we need someone on the back as well. Keep the roll-up door closed, but you sit out there. Take a chair and sit just behind the dumpster, which will shield you somewhat from view but lets you see both entrances into the back parking lot. It’s still kind of exposed, but we’ve got to have some reliable eyes out here to let us know if any law is coming.”

  “How will I let you guys know if the cops do try to come in this way?” I asked.

  “Slip back inside if you can, but if they come in fast hollering and screaming and trying to do their dynamic entry shit, you’re going to have to cover down behind the dumpster here and hold them off as long as you can, make some noise, to give us time to escape and evade.” I would also probably be killed, which I forebore to mention because I knew Carter knew it full well.

  “Make noise with what?” was all I asked. He opened a drawer in the bottom of a steel shipping and receiving desk and handed me one of my favorite weapons from his private collection that I’d fired at our little impromptu training sessions at the seaside and up in the hills. It was a Chinese-made Tek-9 machine pistol knockoff, but quite well made and a lot more accurate than some versions of that weapon. It had interchangeable barrels up to ten inches, but Carter had alread
y attached the shortest barrel, the five-inch one. Best of all, it had a selector switch that let me fire it on full automatic. It gobbled ammo like popcorn when I did that and the burst was short, but it was devastating, and with practice I’d gotten some pretty good patterns with it at up to fifty yards. It already had one twenty-round clip of nine-millimeter rounds in the well, and Carter handed me two more magazines that I stuck in the back pocket of my jeans. He jacked a round into the chamber and put it on safety. “Put it in your belt under your jacket and don’t take the safety off unless you see something nasty coming. I know you’re tired after working a full shift, son, but you’re going to have to stay awake and stay alert.”

  “I’m not sleepy, believe me,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Good. I am not totally out of touch with the cops’ minds here, and I don’t think they really relish tangling asses with us, and not just because they’re yellow like that motherfucker Sorels. Some of them are at least half-way sympathetic and we’ll need to figure out how to play on that. But if the police come in here in force and they attempt to enter this building, with or without weapons drawn, you’re going to have to open fire on them and kill them if you can, because they are enemy soldiers and they will be coming to do harm to your friends and your country and your race. I know you assisted in Red’s little legal problem a while back, Shane, but this won’t be like killing a lawyer. These will be real people, men and maybe a woman of your own race, and they will be shooting back at you. If I didn’t think you could do it, I wouldn’t have called you out here in the first place. But there’s no shame in not being a killer, Shane. Most people aren’t. Nor does it mean you can’t be part of the revolution. Killing is only a small part of what we have to do to get our freedom back. But this is it, son, the real thing is here, and if you already know in your heart that you can’t pull that trigger on a man if you have to, then for God’s sake, tell me now.”