by Wilson, Cal
Table of Contents
Title Page
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
Untitled
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
Acknowledgments
Untitled
The
Camouflaged Cross
Tales of Christian Preppers In The End Times
Book One: Just Run
By Cal Wilson
The Camouflaged Cross
Tales Of Christian Preppers In The End Times
Book One: Just Run
Copyright 2015 Cal Wilson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission in writing from the author.
Unless specifically referred to, all of the characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events are entirely coincidental, unless a specific person, place or incident is referred to in the text of this publication.
This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The statements expressed herein are the opinions of the author alone and should not be construed as or taken to be legal, medical, or professional advice of any kind. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions.
The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or any of the contributors who worked on this publication.
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, by Biblica, IncTM. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.
At times this book will quote Scripture from other Bible translations that do not have copyright restrictions.
Neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of the purchaser or reader of this publication.
ISBN-10: 1511442182
ISBN-13: 978-1511442183
Dedicated to the One who is the way, the truth and the life
Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you … when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again… If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”
--Matthew 24:4, 15-22 (NIV)
Somewhere In The Continental United States
In The Near Future
CHAPTER 1
“So Mr. Wells, do you know what I really miss about, you know, the time before all this started happening?”
“Sean, you can call me David, unless your parents insist that you call me Mr. Wells. And you know we aren’t supposed to talk about what things we miss about the past. Jesse specifically asked us not to. We are supposed to look towards the future, not talk about what we miss about the past. I think you were at the meeting when that subject came up.”
David and Sean were serving their turn at the advance look-out post of a Christian prepper group, totaling 40 people, who had only recently retreated into the hills outside their town. A smaller, Mormon group had a retreat nearby, up a common road.
The country had recently gone through a series of calamities, some with religious significance and some without, which ended most of the rule of law from the federal and state governments in the United States.
The American president, who had been widely distrusted by the Christian community, was attending a conference in Jerusalem, to celebrate the mid-point of his much-heralded seven-year, universal peace treaty. Most other world leaders also attended. This treaty had succeeded in keeping world peace as never before. Even skeptics had been impressed with the peace kept by this treaty, engineered by the American president.
The location of this conference, believed to be the location of Solomon’s Temple from biblical times, was chosen to emphasize the historical significance of the occasion.
However, during the conference, nuclear bombs concealed inside shipping containers exploded simultaneously at several American east-coast port cities. For those who survived the nuclear bombs, full-scale rioting ensued, making the cities involved a vast wasteland of death and destruction. Fearing the same attacks, other port cities that had not been attacked halted all shipping operations, resulting in shortages of essential supplies and food. People in those cities also rioted.
All the rioters in American port cities not only demanded a resumption of the shipments of food, but they also resented the fact that any semblance of privacy they had had was gone, ostensibly in order to protect against terrorist attacks like what just happened. Rational observers of the situation agreed that this was one of the few times when the frustrations of rioters, if not the actions, actually made sense. Government snooping of phone calls, e-mails, texts, computer hard-drives, credit card and online purchases, and all other aspects of life in America had produced no noticeable increase in security, as had been promised. Facial recognition cameras had even been set up in city centers, recording the identities and travelling of drivers and pedestrians through the cities. Yet, this end of privacy had still not halted the attacks.
Soon after the nuclear explosions in the American port cities, terrorist sleeper cells inside the United States began operations in which they attacked electrical substations – those unprotected junctions of electrical power lines where the voltage in the lines is regulated for further movement into a nearby city – with machine guns in an attempt to cut off the power grid and all communications. At first, the nationwide coordinated attacks on power substations, dubbed “Metcalfing” after the location of the 2013 dry run, had scattered success. Nevertheless, several major American cities still had power. A few nights later, after further attacks on substations, those cities too were in the dark.
The lack of power and communications freed up the terrorists inside the country to attack in other ways, like poisoning city reservoirs, bombing refineries, crop-dusting downtown areas with anthrax and blood from Ebola victims, and sabotaging train tracks to cause derailments. Stinger missiles, which had been smuggled across the country’s wide-open southern border, were used to shoot down passenger planes. These attacks resulted in the deaths of millions of people, who kept drinking the tap water, taking trains, flying planes and attending work, in the vain hope that normalcy would soon return.
Meanwhile, the American president, still at the Jerusalem conference
, noticeably hesitated when asked by a reporter if he considered surrendering to the terrorists. The lack of seriousness of his answer to this question startled many, as it revealed the fact that somewhere in the highest offices of the country a surrender was even contemplated. Nevertheless, for a few days this open consideration of surrender seemed to work, as the terrorist attacks from within the country paused, and Americans looked forward to a return of peace and security.
But it was not to be. Once news of possible surrender fully reached the citizenry, several states that had always opposed the president and his policies, and even some counties within states that had supported the president, rejected any talk of surrender, and announced that they would not abide by any decisions reached with the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks. The American military was dispatched to quell the “disloyal” jurisdictions. It was another American civil war, except this time there were many fronts.
As with all wars, the United States government had to immediately spend much more money than it had, forcing it to go into even more deficit-spending than it had already been. In the most responsible of times, this would have led to inflation, as so many more dollars were chasing a limited amount of goods and services. But in this situation, the government had for years already been pointlessly overspending to provide government benefits to the citizenry. The result was inflation rates that fluctuated at 30% on up, depending on the week and month.
The people soon realized that their dollars and government benefit checks were almost worthless. Consumer spending for non-food items came to a stand-still, resulting in mass lay-offs. The official unemployment rate topped 35%, while the unofficial rate was much higher. The American economy plunged into a slow-down that was even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
By then, established Christian churches were long gone, either made to preach only from abridged Bibles, approved by the federal government, or shut down as purveyors of “hate speech.” The land and buildings of the churches that were shut down were confiscated and sold at government auctions. Many other religious groups, most of them Muslim, bought church properties at very low prices, and these groups began to establish and grow their congregations.
The shutting down of fundamentalist Christian churches as disseminators of “hate” ended any political influence the churches and their followers had, and this in turn enabled some state and local governments to restrict heterosexual weddings, so that such weddings may occur only after the couples trying to marry pay a high fee and take a course on “inclusiveness and tolerance.” Muslim weddings were exempted from these new rules.
Throughout the country, small pockets of Christians stayed together and worshipped in their homes. The “Bible study groups” from the Christian churches of old became the new Christian churches, except much smaller and underground. With these new churches, secrecy was second in importance only to the unabridged Bible that they studied.
These Christians, having read the many predictions in the Bible, realized that the End Times were here. Those who had prepared, like the group David and Sean belonged to, left their homes and jobs and met at agreed-upon retreat locations, where they hoped to survive the coming apocalypse. The coming days, weeks, months and years would see whether these families would survive as they had prepared.
One of the first observations made by the leaders of this group were that the people who came to the retreat were shocked and in many cases seriously depressed. After several weeks a policy was promoted at the periodic meetings the group had that they were to encourage humor whenever possible, and to minimize the talk of the “way things used to be.” Despite the obvious challenges, the leaders of this group began to highly prize a positive mental attitude among its members.
*****
“Oh come on,” Sean said. He paused. Both looked outside their hillside bunker, onto the empty dirt road below, without saying anything. A dark smoke cloud could be seen in the distance to the east.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” David broke the silence. “You don’t just go through life in a normal, you know, non-End Times world, and then begin what looks to be the End Times, and not talk about it. OK, I’ll bite. What do you miss, Sean?”
“All-you-can-eat buffets.”
“Yes, I can imagine. You are a very big, what are you, sixteen, seventeen years old?”
“Fifteen. And I can eat a lot.”
“I’m sure of it. If you weren’t being homeschooled, you’d probably be on a football team right now, being recruited by college teams. That kind of thing.”
“Every once in a while my mom would let me take a long lunch during my homeschooling, and she would bring me to lunch at a restaurant that had an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. She would just sit back and watch me eat. She would talk about how the restaurant felt bad about letting me in there because I ate so much. She worried that the restaurant would go under or something because I showed up.”
“I can imagine.” David chuckled. “It was probably a sight to behold.”
“Since all this started happening, we’ve eaten a bunch of vegetables and stored food, and some eggs here and there. And I haven’t really been full for a long time.”
“Same here, now that you mention it.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the people here who cook our food. Jose has been pretty good about killing deer and hogs and preparing it all for us to eat. But I really miss that feeling of being totally full of food. Completely full. Nothing more could fit in my stomach. Sometimes I would almost be in pain I was so full of food. It was a good pain.”
“You’re in pretty good shape. You’re blessed that you can eat so much and not get fat. As for me, now that I am in my 40’s, I can’t just eat and eat and eat like I used to, when I was your age. If I did I would get pretty big. You need to watch the old waistline when you get my age, you know.”
“That’s what I hear.”
A gust of wind blew the trees outside. Both Sean and David looked down onto the dirt road and watched a cluster of leaves get blown across the road in front of a roadblock made of tree branches and trash. There was another silent pause.
“Well, I miss a few things, that’s for sure,” David said. “I miss coming home from work and sitting in front of the TV or a fire with my wife, drinking some cabernet and eating some nice cheese and crackers. And olives. It was all so relaxing.”
“I never did like wine.”
“You will someday. Well,” David paused, “that’s what I would have said before all this started happening. Nowadays, who knows if you will ever have any wine?”
David changed the subject. “By the way, has anyone checked in with the other group over there?” He nodded to his right.
“Not in a while,” Sean said, “but the old school bus is there like always.” They both looked to their right and further up the dirt road. An old school bus, painted dark green, was barely visible in the trees on top of a hill nearby.
“Not exactly a great hiding place to listen and observe.”
“Yes, that is one of the things Jesse did right on this property, setting up these ‘el-pops.’” Sean banged on one of the metal legs that held up the dark green metal roof above them.
“Well, I for one feel like I am doing some good listening at this observation post.”
“Same here,” Sean smiled. “And observing, too.”
“Oh, yes, constantly observing. Maybe someday we will listen or observe something from this listening and observation post. That’s always possible. Right from under this car hood that Jesse had some welder turn into a roof for us.”
“If I have to spend a lot of time in a car, I would rather it be in the Whale,” Sean said, nodding uphill.
“What do you mean, a whale like in the book of Jonah?”
“No, the Cadillac that made it to the far back of the property.”
“Oh yeah, I heard about that. One of the families who made it up here drove up in their old Cadillac convertible. A
restoration project. And I hear that the ground clearance of that car was pretty bad, but they kept driving up the hiking trails and made it to the very back end of the property, then the car got stuck. I guess they didn’t want the car being visible from the valley below. Remember all the talk of camouflage and all. If I recall, that’s a red car.”
“It’s a really cool car,” Sean said. “People go to it and run the engine and charge their flashlight batteries and Kindles. It has cigarette lighters even in the back seat, for charging stuff.”
“Oh yeah. That car was made in the early 70’s. Everyone smoked a lot back then. And cigarette lighters were next to every seat, even the back seats. People certainly didn’t want to get caught unable to light up.”
“Apparently, the car has a great alternator. And while they charge the batteries they crank the CD player and turn up the AC or heater. It’s actually a fun place to hang out. Like a little vacation”
“Listen, that alternator will probably be taken out someday and hooked up to a wind turbine or something. You have to admit, it is a waste of gas to idle a big engine like that.”
