"All circuits are presently busy, please try your call again later," a tinny automated voice whined.
"I bet,” Joe mumbled sarcastically, "I just bet!".
A determination came upon him to warn his uncle at any cost. The old man would be a sitting duck if they came after him.
He ran to the front of his partially burning house. The north end was engulfed in flames, but the south end next to the two car garage was not yet on fire. He looked around before running flat-out to his beat-up old pickup truck. Without even thinking he ripped open the door, and saw something small fly up with a wire attached.
Pure instinct made Joe take a flying dive to the ground behind a nearby woodpile located a few steps from his truck. An earsplitting explosion followed hard on the heels of his mad dive, the blast itself followed by parts of his truck. Hot shards of glass and pieces of metal fell from the sky like demented and dangerous hailstones. A mile away, at the next farm, the Captain looked back at the echoed boom with a crooked smile.
"Gotcha!" he exclaimed as he crossed out Joe's name on the list of names and addresses he was carrying.
Joe, ears ringing horribly, was lying on the ground covered with eighteen inch long split logs from the now collapsed wood pile. He had one simple thought go through his mind.
"I'm alive. I have to be. This hurts too much to be dead.”
2. (Salvage)
Pushing and shoving the chunks of split firewood off of himself, Joe gingerly moved his limbs, checking for broken bones. Apparently the wood had absorbed most of the residual blast from the grenade. The main force of the explosion had been channeled away from him by the truck. The truck was a twisted, ruined mess, the whole top section seemed to imitate a Salvador Dali original painting.
Except for the horrid ringing still persisting in his ears, he could not find any initial injuries simply by feeling with his hands over his body. A tinge of pain, however, caused him to look at the calf of his leg, and he noticed blood on his jeans. A close examination showed him two small round holes through the denim, close together inside a bloody area located over his calf. Fearing the worst, Joe carefully lifted his jeans leg to examine the wound beneath and saw a thin crease where something had penetrated the jeans, grazed his calf, and then exited through the other side.
“Oh shoot that was close,” Joe muttered as relief flooded over him.
He could not afford to be seriously injured right now.
Looking up, he noticed the house was really starting to burn, and the whole north end was engulfed. Flames were pouring out of the tops of the broken windows, voraciously licking at the siding in a determined effort to reach the shingles on the roof. The far north wall looked as if the flames might eat through the siding at any moment and flames were pouring from the old attic vent in the gable. Joe didn't have any time to waste.
He knew the feeble pressure from his old, well used electric well pump would never put out enough water to stop the blaze, assuming it was even working at all. The main breaker box was in the center portion of the house by the back door, and was probably already on fire. The insulation should have burned off of the wires, causing everything to short out. Joe heard a loud 'bang' from the transformer on the pole as the fuse blew, and knew that the farm no longer had electricity available.
If he could still get to them, he needed a few things before he left including his gun which he had stored in the den on the very south side of the house. The only thing he could consider as a weapon that he had on his person right now was a Schrade brand lock-back knife in its sheath on his belt. Though he kept the knife razor sharp, he considered it more of a utility tool than anything else.
He knew he needed his rifle, yet he was split by indecision for a moment concerning what he should do. Joe had so many friends, family, and neighbors he wanted to warn or help somehow. He desired to see if he could do something about what had happened to both himself and his family.
He wanted to take out what he felt right now on those guilty of the act.
Torn in too many directions at once, Joe couldn't think, and therefore couldn't act. The sheer enormity of what had just happened was temporarily too much for his brain to assimilate. It was like some horrid dream he could not wake up from.
However, Joe was not one to panic, nor was he one to stay paralyzed with fear and do nothing. He was a very resourceful person, fixing whatever had ever needed repair, or making whatever he could not afford to buy. He was used to the necessity of figuring out ways around problems using whatever resources he had at hand, since his resources inevitably excluded extra cash.
“Focus you idiot! Focus!” Joe yelled at himself at the top of his lungs.
It was time to act, not worry. Red faced with embarrassment, he realized his outburst would have alerted anyone within a quarter mile, so he clamped his lips together in a grim line and burst into action.
Joe ran past to the screen door of the attached double car garage, and then inside through the garage to the entrance door that entered the den, at the south end of the house. He noticed smoke coming through the hairline gaps in the hatch for the attic entrance, and knew the fire was possibly throughout the whole house. The den itself might be on fire, which prompted him to be careful.
He touched the doorknob to the door leading from the garage to the den, but it was not hot. The metal doorknob conducts heat, and a hot doorknob is a sure sign of fire on the other side of the door. He then touched the top of the door itself, and it was still relatively cool to the touch, so he knew the den itself must have had the heavy interior door closed.
The den was an apparent add-on to the house, and the door leading from the den to the living room was actually a solid core exterior door, and a temporary fire barrier. That meant the fire was temporarily contained within the living space of the house proper, until it managed to burn through the door, the ceiling, or a wall. It was in effect temporarily isolating the den from the rest of the house. Even though evidence showed that the attic was on fire, the ceiling had obviously not yet collapsed or burnt through.
Just to be careful, he opened the door only a crack, fully expecting a ton of smoke to come pouring through. Joe was grateful that very little smoke was actually in the den, and that the little that was evident was hugging close to the ceiling in a thin translucent gray layer. However, he was terrified that the roof would collapse, and bring the ceiling down on him, so he moved as fast as he safely could.
He dashed to the corner of the room to his converted armoire slash gun case. Joe grabbed his deer rifle and the heaviest army surplus thirty caliber ammo box that he had. He then took his scoped crossbow off of its hooks on the wall and slung the bow over his other arm. With fifty pounds of equipment in his arms, he decided he was carrying enough and decided to leave.
Running through the garage, he almost broke his arm when the bow hanging from it snagged on the handle of his rototiller. This caused a few choice words to escape his lips as he freed both himself and the bow from the machine. After untangling himself he ran into the back yard and set his booty on the lawn. By this time, he noticed that the north end of the roof had already caught fire, and smoke was now pouring ominously from the south attic vent. At best, he could make only one more trip before the house would be completely engulfed in flames.
Mumbling a small hurried prayer, he ran back through the garage into the den, and then grabbed his full homemade leather quiver full of aluminum hunting crossbow bolts and his small canvas 'camping' backpack with his left hand. He threw his belt holding two sets of “Russian surplus” ammo pouches and a Leatherman tool in its pouch over his right shoulder, snatched his other two surplus thirty caliber boxes in his right hand, and left without even worrying about anything else.
An ominous cracking and groaning coming from the north side of the house signaled a structural weakening of the house's timbers. It was about to come down around his ears in a solid flaming mass if he did not hurry.
Joe had almost taken too long.... As
he ran through the screen door exit at the back of the garage, the roof finally collapsed. The glass in the screen door shattered as the wall dropped a few inches crushing the top of the door frame and warping the door. Intense heat blasted at his back spurring him to run faster.
The whole house proceeded to lean in slow motion, stopping at an ominous forty-five degree angle as he ran. Fire streamed out of the broken windows in the den in massive fiery tongues, any hope of gathering anything else from the house was gone.
Sitting on the lawn while catching his breath, Joe wondered what had spared the den, eventually drawing the obvious conclusion.
“That stupid, heavy, exterior door I hated between the den and the living room, that's what,” he thought to himself.
When Joe had originally moved in, he had noticed the house had been built over a matter of time, in three distinct sections. The house was built first, followed later by the den, and then finishing with the garage. The roof had been rebuilt so that it wasn't obvious there had been additions to the house. Instead of replacing the original exterior door after completing the den, the builder had simply left the original solid core exterior door in place.
He took stock of the supplies he had managed to salvage. He examined the gun and bow for damage; to his surprise he found nothing wrong. The cheap 150lb pull re-curve Chinese crossbow that he had bought years ago on Ebay could probably pound nails without breaking. Only a tank driving over his sporterized Russian WWII Mosin-Nagant bolt action hunting rifle would damage it. He had retrieved all his ammo for the rifle, and most of the bolts for the bow, as well as two spare bow strings.
It was necessary to leave a couple of unopened packages of new crossbow bolts. However he had all the broad-heads for the bolts in his pack, along with the rope and pulley cocking rig he had fabricated. The rig cut the force required to cock the one hundred and fifty pounds of pull in half, and was worth its weight in gold. Looking down at the rifle and the bow, he realized that excepting the somewhat expensive scopes on them, they were the best investment he had ever made. The gun, bow, ammo for both, combined with the all of the accessories he had bought minus the scopes, had cost only three hundred dollars. The scopes added another hundred and twenty by themselves.
“You really are a cheapskate,” Joe said softly to himself, remembering other guys complaining about spending three times that amount just for their rifle.
Spending a moment to look back at the house, now fully engulfed in flames, Joe silently watched it burn while touching his wedding ring with his thumb.
“I'll probably see you soon my sweet,” he softly whispered and prepared to leave.
His uncle was still in danger, and if Joe wanted to be of any possible help, he needed to get moving as fast as possible.
3. ( Journey To Uncle)
After inspecting his backpack and then lashing his crossbow to it, he put on his Ammo belt, making sure that three of the four pockets were filled with stripper clips of rifle ammunition. The last pocket on the ammo belt held the rifle's cleaning kit. That gave him seventy-five rounds stored on his belt, and five already loaded in the rifle. He shouldered the pack, slung his rifle, and took off through the field behind the shelter belt, heading west towards his uncle's farm.
It had been a long, nervous hike, yet the perception was subjective. In consideration of distance, he had not even hiked a full mile. Joe carefully examined the road to his north looking for parked vehicles or any kind of motion. The roads were regularly used in normal times, and several people had farms in close proximity. He knew at least one group was travelling the roads that he needed to avoid.
Without binoculars, he was nervous. His eyesight was okay but nothing to brag about, and he did not want to be in the middle of the road carrying his load and be surprised by a vehicle. He set out to the east for the back edge of the 80 acre strip of field he was in. Treating the situation as if he was hunting deer and trying not to leave a profile easily seen from a distance, Joe slowly and carefully took the long route circumnavigating the base of the hills. The shape of a man on the top of a hill is easily visible for a long distance, as his profile is framed against sky.
Standing close to the edge of the field after the long hike, Joe's outlook for his uncle was bleak. The road itself followed the top of the hill, and he could not avoid eventually crossing it.
After carefully topping the hill, column after column of thick black smoke were plainly visible in the sky. Black pillars arose like iron bars from the earth, curving and merging as they spread into a dense cloud as they hit a different atmospheric layer. A couple of these pillars of smoke looked within range of where he estimated his uncle's farm to be.
Instinctively, he knew that these were not controlled brush fires or some other mundane thing. Each column of smoke represented tragedy and death. Husbands, wives, children, friends, and neighbors composed each black streak on the horizon. There were so many pillars visible, that the carnage they represented was inconceivable.
He stopped, stunned, and could not help but stare for a few moments. Joe could not understand the magnitude of what he saw. There was just no way he could comprehend either the atrocity or the twisted logic behind it, or even the sheer scale. His brain could not even fathom the word this signified... The simple word called genocide.
Those pillars of black smoke were funeral pyres. They were the direct product of a nation that was going to war with itself; of a government that had stopped trusting and valuing those who granted it both purpose and meaning. Joe didn't yet grasp that his crime against this government was caring. The offense for which he had already been tried and convicted was actually patriotism, rebranded and renamed to terrorism. His outspoken love of both country and constitution were dangerous words and a suicidal political position, in a time when patriotism is but a tool and the constitution itself is viewed as merely an outdated, outmoded, irrelevant document in the eyes of those who govern.
All of the fires raging in his view were the burning homes of those who shared his general outlook and moral stance. They were those whose voices had been heard, either on the net posting comments or talking on social sites, or in person at events such as national tea-parties or town hall meetings, and their names tabulated by cold computer programs searching for keywords and phrases.
Any dissent or voiced dissatisfaction caused a name to be noted, or an IP logged. Databases combined with face matching computer software through a veritable network of interconnected local, state, government, and various commercial telecommunication computers quickly matched names and IP addresses to real faces with physical addresses.
These were all added to a separate database of 'suspected terrorists'. The government had eventually renamed the database, and those names and faces were now deemed as 'terrorist' with no evidence, nothing but suspicion was legally necessary. They disagreed with the status quo, and that had become enough.
A longstanding plan was being enacted, set in place by those wanting to rule and not content with the concept of public servitude. Rule, not service, was the order of the day. No warnings given, nor quarter. Hit them before they even know they are under attack. Every single person on the list had their proverbial technological strings cut. No phones, land-line or cell, and no internet. Carefully timed and coordinated scrambling of radio frequencies for radio, civilian CB, and shortwave bands removed the ability for anyone to even give warning to others. The planning and preparation had taken years to accomplish, but was coming now to fruition.
The patriotic military leaders had been eventually been weeded. True patriotism had been ultimately killed, by the simple expedient of carefully crafted questions for those being advanced in rank. Questions such as “If ordered, would you fire on American citizens”. The wrong answer was a blackball towards advancement and guaranteed an overseas posting for the remainder of their career.
America was under siege, besieged ultimately by itself.
…............................................
/> With only one mile yet to go, Joe's leg was already burning badly from the undressed wound, though it had almost stopped bleeding.
“I don't have time for this right now!” he grumbled.
Though Joe was stubborn, he was not stupid. He mentally kicked himself for not taking the time to properly dress the wound earlier as he should have. Dropping his pack, he dug out the small first aid kit he had stored conveniently in a side pocket.
The first aid kit was not a useless store bought kit--full of Band-Aids and not much else. A longtime ago he had accidentally sliced himself pretty good with a broad-head arrow while hunting, and found that his small commercially bought kit was functional only for small injuries. That experience had cost him a brand new tee shirt, and resulted in a nice scar.
Afterwards, he bought a small rectangular plastic box to make his own decent first aid kit, packing it with several gauze bandages, a small roll of athletic tape, a small suture kit, a tube of Neosporin, a small bottle of Everclear alcohol for use as a disinfectant, some alcohol wipes, and several Band-Aids of various types. It was not a massive kit mind you, but was definitely suitable for hunting.
Surviving in America: Under Siege 2nd Edition Page 2
