He heard a deep thrumming in the distance: the steady whump, whump, whump of a helicopter . . .
7
The retching finally subsided. He spat the sour taste onto the ground and shook his aching head, then glanced up at the SUV. Three women stared at him, his mother having unbuckled and crawled to the edge of the open door. If he hadn’t already been on his knees on the gravel shoulder, the sudden memory would have knocked him down. He used the door to pull himself back up. He didn’t trust his legs.
The SUV’s engine hummed as Jake slid back to reality. The night air felt cool on his fevered skin. The surrounding desert sat black and silent beyond the range of his headlights. He blinked and shook his head, then gingerly levered himself down onto the seat.
Mary looked at him with maternal concern, but said nothing, and handed him a bottle of water. Molly nuzzled his ear from the back seat and he felt Dani’s hand fall lightly onto his shoulder. The comfort of women, he thought. If that wasn’t something worth living for, then nothing was.
He washed the gross taste out of his mouth, spat it onto the ground, then shut the door, put the SUV in gear and pulled back onto the road.
They drove in silence for what seemed like an eternity (more like twenty minutes), and then Mary said, “Thanks.”
“For not barfing inside the truck?” Jake asked.
“No. That’s not . . . Are you okay?”
“Yeah I’m fine.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Yeah,” he replied, and was kind of surprised that he actually felt okay - not great, not perfect, by any stretch, but sane, and that was a good feeling. The blood lust lay dormant, somewhere deep. The memory hadn’t hurt, like so many of them did.
And that was it. Nothing more was said, except for Mary’s simple question: “When did you steal my gun?”
8
Truck Stop
Winnemucca, Nevada
A freshly-showered Charlie made his way through the Halogen-lighted parking lot, and back to his truck. The clean tee-shirt beneath his coat bore the inscription: Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge, Say No More; a reference to the classic Sixties British TV series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He carried a backpack, containing his dirty clothes and shower things, slung over one shoulder, and a travel mug of fresh coffee in his other hand.
He had shifted from the Maxi-Mart to the truck stop so he could take that shower in preparation for meeting Jake. He didn’t really care if Jake thought he stank, but Jake’s Mom, on the other hand, deserved the courtesy.
As he approached his truck, he happened to glance toward the Interstate. What he saw stopped him in his tracks. The eastbound lanes were, for all intents and purposes, empty. The occasional car or truck would whiz by, but that was all. The westbound lanes, however, were jam-packed. Two lines of headlights stretched back toward the dark Eastern horizon. Two lines of tail lights stretched forward toward the West. It hadn’t been that way an hour ago.
Refugees, he thought. People evacuating Wyoming, and Idaho, and Montana. People evacuating the volcano. He’d been expecting increased traffic, but this was beyond even his fertile imagination.
He imagined, but couldn’t see, that every car was filled with the strange and sometimes silly things people deemed to be most valuable. They had left their homes and their lives behind, hoping this would only be temporary, but fearing that it would be forever. And so they had packed their cars with heirlooms and photo albums and favorite toys and all manner of things they wanted to have with them that made them think of home and family and the comfort of a life they may never see again.
What they probably had not packed, Charlie thought, were the things they would actually need if the volcano blew and if life as they knew it ended. Things like camping gear, food, water, medical supplies - if, indeed, they had been packed at all - would almost certainly be inadequate to survive the end of the world.
People were morons, by and large, in his estimation, but he couldn’t really blame them. Nothing in the cushy life of the average American could have possibly prepared them for what was coming. Hell, he wasn’t really prepared for it, and he, at least, had enough training and experience in natural disasters to give him a leg up on Joe and Jane Suburbia.
Things were going to get ugly, and the thought made his balls tingle and feel as if they wanted to seek refuge inside his chest cavity, but he willed them to remain in their proper place as he unlocked his truck and tossed the backpack up and over the driver’s seat. It fell to the floor beyond with a clunk. He unzipped his coat (because it was easier to do while standing, rather than sitting with the steering wheel in his way) and was about to climb up himself, when the phone in his pocket chirped with the electronic strains of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
He had chosen the song to indicate a call from Jake as a bit of sarcastic affection for his friend. The original title of the song had been In the Garden of Eden, but (so the story went) the singer had been so drunk the first time they tried to record it, that it had come out as unintelligible nonsense. Since Charlie and Jake had spent many a night in a similar condition, he deemed it appropriate.
He flipped the phone open and said, “Yo.”
“Charles?”
“Last time I checked.”
“We have arrived,” his friend said. “Where are you?”
He gave a general description of his whereabouts and hung up. The black SUV rolled to a stop in front of him within moments. It clunked into park, the driver’s door popped open, and Jake stepped out.
He looked off, somehow - tired, of course, but there was more to it, as if something really bad had happened.
“You look like shit, dude,” Charlie said.
“Thanks. So good to see you, too,” came the reply, along with an outstretched hand.
They shook. Charlie was about to ask what was up, when Mary stepped out on the other side.
“Jake’s Mom!” Charlie exclaimed. “You’re looking gorgeous, as always.”
“Hi, Charlie,” she waved. She looked tired, as well, and carried that same sense of something not-quite-right. And then the rear passenger door opened and another woman got out. In the glow of the interior light, he could see what looked like cardboard covering the window on the opposite side. He wondered at it, but lost the train of thought as he got a good look at the woman.
Her clothes were in tatters, her coat hanging open and revealing a torn tee-shirt with dark stains on it. One look at her damaged face told Charlie the stains were almost certainly blood. He tried not to stare, but it wasn’t easy. She and Mary joined Jake, followed closely by the dog. He used the animal as a distraction.
“Hello, Miss Noodle,” he said, scratching her ears, as she planted both front paws on his chest. “Still furry I see.” She answered with a furiously wagging tail, and a lick toward his face.
“Charlie, Dani,” Jake said with a jerk of his thumb toward the woman in question. She gave him a crooked smile.
Molly’s enthusiasm had opened Charlie’s coat wide, making the inscription on his shirt visible.
“Your Python is showing, Monty,” Dani said.
Jake and Mary looked on in confusion as Charlie gave her a wide grin. He glanced at Jake and said, “I like her.” A thought occurred. He pushed Molly to her feet and said: “Back in a second,” and then climbed into the truck.
He returned a moment later, carrying a tee-shirt (black, of course). He handed it to Dani. She unfolded it, saw the inscription, and laughed.
“You want to let us in on the joke?” Jake asked.
She turned the shirt so the other two could read it. It said: It’s Only a Flesh Wound. Jake got it immediately. Mary didn’t.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Charlie explained. He turned to Dani. “It’ll be big on you, but probably better than the one you’re wearing.”
“Thanks,” she said, and then frowned, hesitating. “I don’t suppose I should change into it right here in front of everybody.”
> “I don’t know. You’d be pretty popular, if you did,” Charlie said. Mary backhanded his chest. “Okay. Okay. No need for violence,” he said, backing away from her. He indicated the truck with his thumb and said to Dani: “There’s a curtain in the sleeper. You can change in there.”
He escorted her to the truck, let her in, then closed the door behind her. He was about to ask Jake a firm what the fuck, when he thought about the cardboard-covered window. No reason it should be anything more than a temporary repair of damage caused by a rock, or something equally innocuous, but instinct told him differently, and he walked to the other side of the SUV. Three beveled holes decorated the fender near the damaged window.
He looked up and Jake, and said, “Very white-trash. Were you going for the shotgun wedding-look, or something simpler, like Drunken Americana?”
“It’s nothing,” Jake replied.
“Right,” Charlie said. “And I’m going to win the Nobel Prize for truck driving.”
Jake laughed. “You’re such an asshole.”
“A well established fact,” Charlie agreed. “Now tell me what in the wide, wide world of sports happened.”
Fourteen
“It’s the end of the world as we know it,
And I feel fine.”
William T. Berry/R. E. M.
1
Police Headquarters
Medford, Oregon
The Major stood behind the lectern at the head of the squad room. He had called everyone who wasn’t absolutely needed at the murder scene to come in for the meeting, including the Day Shift. This was the height of insane stupidity, in Bobby’s estimation, given everything else that was going on, but it seemed innocuous, compared to the words coming out of the racist idiot’s mouth.
“There are obvious racial overtones to the murder,” he was saying, and had he stopped there, the briefing would have remained nothing more than a monumentally stupid waste of time. Those actively working the murder could receive a more detailed and cogent briefing from the lead Detective, without bringing in the entire force, who were already stretched so thin as to be transparent, and those assigned to the Day Shift could have gotten a little more sleep. But then the idiot continued by saying: “So I want you to round up every black male between the ages of fifteen to sixty.”
There followed a moment of stunned silence, as this edict stretched the incredulity of the room beyond the breaking point. Then a chorus of shocked voices uttered: “What!” and “Fuck me!” in a jumbled cacophony of sound. Confused and angry faces looked from the lectern, to each other, and back to the lectern. A tall man with a booming voice asked: “How the Hell can that be legal?”
The Major scowled at them all, slapping the flat of his palm against the lectern again and again, trying to restore order. Finally, he yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” and the room gradually quieted. “In light of the disaster and the racial tensions caused by the murder, the Mayor has declared Martial Law. A strict curfew of Ten P. M. is to be put in place immediately.”
The murmuring resumed. Bobby said to Conelly, “Is he for real?”
“Apparently so,” the man replied.
“How is this possible?”
“Don’t know,” Conelly said. “But Major Asshole’s brother is the Mayor.”
“Then insanity must run in the family.”
The Major slapped at the lectern again, and again, the room quieted. “For the rest of the night, we’ll just tell people to go home. Any black males caught out are to be detained, questioned and held until we can confirm their alibis. Tomorrow morning, we’ll start rounding up the rest of them.”
The Medford P. D. had seventy-three officers, mostly white. Three were Hispanic, two were Asian, two were Natives, and five were black. All of them had hired on under State Diversity Guidelines, according to what Conelly told Bobby. And The Major had been none too happy about it.
One of the black officers shouted the truth of the matter.
“This is an outrage!”
“Calm down,” The Major said. “Under Martial Law, we are granted a wide degree of latitude to deal with situations as they arise,” he explained. It sounded to Bobby like the purest bullshit, but some of the officers began to nod. “This step isn’t taken lightly, but if we don’t do it, we’re likely to have a riot on our hands. Hundreds of refugees have already arrived. Hundreds more are likely to arrive in the coming days. We need to get this under control, right now.”
“So, what? Are you going to arrest and detain us, too?” the black officer demanded, indicating himself and his four brother officers.
The Major gave them his best disapproving scowl. “This is only a temporary measure,” he said, as a way of not answering the question.
The tall man with the booming voice repeated: “How is any of this legal?”
“It’s the same thing they did with the Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor. It’s only a precautionary measure,” The Major argued, clearly exasperated.
“It’s bullshit!” the black officer, whose name, Conelly told Bobby, was Davis. “And I won’t be a part of it!” He turned and stalked out, followed by his four fellow black officers, as well as both of the Natives, and three white officers.
Four members of what Bobby had taken to calling The Asshole Squad (the ones who seemed more than willing to bust black skulls) moved to intercept them, but The Major called out: “Let them go. We’ll deal with them later.”
Bobby didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “Fuck this,” he growled, and moved to join the exodus, but Conelly grasped his arm and held him in place.
“Not yet,” the man said. “Let’s see how this plays out.” Bobby looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, so he elaborated. “We can do more from the inside than we can from the outside,” and then he added, “There’s no way the County Sheriff lets this stand. And in the meantime, maybe we can stop those jackasses,” he indicated the Asshole Squad, “from making things worse than they are already.”
Conelly then turned toward the lectern and asked the obvious question, without bothering to raise his hand or otherwise show The Major courtesy. “Where are we supposed to put them all, sir?”
The Major blanched at the interruption, but answered anyway. “For now, we can put them all in the sports stadium at Grosvenor High School. It’s surrounded by a high fence, and I want ten officers guarding it at all times. Anyone trying to escape is to be shot.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Bobby murmured to Conelly. He glanced around the crowd and saw at least a dozen other incredulous faces. He also saw several who were nodding in agreement.
This was madness.
And it was just getting started.
2
Dietrich, Idaho
Gerald Maurice Smoot, age 64, stared at the man tied to the chair. Hatred filled him like a steam pipe ready to burst. A great many things made him angry: politicians, liberals, the Main Stream Media, gays, the ACLU, the government in general, and cops - especially cops. But topping the list with a bullet, were traitorous bastards, like the son of a bitch tied to that chair.
Gerald had been born the son of an Eastern Indiana factory worker, and grew up in rather mundane circumstances, except for the fact that his father, two uncles, and two grandfathers were members of the Ku Klux Klan. One of those uncles and one of those grandfathers had been ordained Baptist ministers. Gerald, himself had believed in only this: My Race is My Religion.
The KKK gradually declined during the Seventies and Eighties, and by the beginning of its slip into relative local obscurity, the constant bible thumping had quite frankly gotten on his nerves, so he’d drifted westward where - ironically - he’d found a home in the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which later became known as the Aryan Nation. There, he found the writings of Wesley Swift, the single most significant player in the early formation of the Christian Identity movement.
Christian Identity was based upon the notion that the early European tribes (otherwise known as
White People) were the actual descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. They became lost when, in the year 745 Before Christ (none of that Common Era bullshit for Gerald Smoot), the King of Assyria deported them out of Israel for having failed to honor the First Covenant, as given to Moses by God. As the story went, these tribes became the Celtic-Germanic hordes who ravaged the Roman Empire, and then populated England, Germany, France, etc.; in other words, the ancestors of White America. And so they - and not the Jews - were the actual Chosen people of God.
The movement gained national attention when, in 1984, an offshoot led by Bob Mathews, known as The Order (named and partially modeled after a fictional group in the novel, The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce) went on a crime spree, including bank robberies, the murder of talk radio shock jock (and Jew) Alan Berg, and an armored car heist that had netted them over three million dollars, before being taken down by the FBI. It resurfaced into the mainstream in the Nineties, when a tenuous connection to former Green Beret and Christian fundamentalist Randy Weaver was unearthed by the news media in the wake of FBI debacle at Ruby Ridge. What wasn’t widely circulated was the reasoning behind The Order’s crime spree.
One of the central Christian Identity beliefs (shared by Gerald and his sons, even though he thought the Lost Tribe thing was probably bullshit) had to do with the End Times - but not The Rapture, which they didn’t believe in. The upshot of the whole Lost Tribes thing was the idea that the Final Battle would be waged between the forces of the Anti-Christ (the Jews and their allies: anyone not white and/or any white traitors to their race who disagreed with the Truth of Christian Identity), and the Pure White soldiers of the True God. The crime spree had been an effort to fund the acquisition of enough weapons and the training of enough soldiers so they would be ready when this Final Battle began.
It had been for this same purpose that Gerald and his sons, James, and Eddie, had been at that bank on that fateful day in 2004. The same day Russell fucking Barnes had tried to hand them over to the FBI.
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 20
