“Now, one more thing I want to talk about,” Johnson went on in a serious tone. “I know there are a lot of folks here in Missoula city and county who suffered during the war, even though they weren’t actually NVA. Their only crime was to have white skins. There was an especially nasty FATPO unit stationed here in Missoula, commanded by a monkoid colonel named Pimpin’ Sam Porterfoy, as he called himself. Gang-banger from the L.A. Bloods. Fine upstanding Amurrican, was Pimping Sam. You may also remember his second in command, Major Michael Bonaparte, the Haitian voodoo man. I know I sure as hell do, and his magic necklace of white babies’ skulls he got from abortion clinics. We all remember what the Americans did, at least to ordinary white people who didn’t have one of those nasty-ass little immunity cards issued by Mayor Kirschbaum and his cronies in the liberal University clique who used to run Missoula. Note my terminology there: who used to run this town. Not any more!” Johnson said with a sudden grin.
“Oh, my God, our cards! Our cards!” cried Amber in sudden fear. “We have to destroy them!” She ran upstairs for her purse.
On the TV screen, Captain Ricky Johnson was speaking on. “There are those of you who have lost loved ones because of what the United States occupation forces have done. There are others who have had loved ones disappear, either shipped to the concentration camps in Nevada, or else simply buried out in the landfill by Porterfoy and Bonaparte and their thugs. You know who among the community fought against the Americans, and you know who helped them. No one on earth could blame some of you for wanting to take vengeance against those who oppressed and tortured and tyrannized you for five years, but since the actual perpetrators are gone, you will be tempted to take it out on those collaborators who remain here. Folks, on behalf of the new government of the Northwest American Republic, I’m asking you not to do that. Let us handle it. Actually, we’re already doing so. Among the first of our men into the city last night were some gentlemen from an outfit called Force 101. Those boys specialize in making right what has been wrong for so long. I’m not going to get into details, but there are some of your fellow Missoula residents who you won’t be seeing around any more, and we’re not going deny or conceal that fact. It’s time Amurrica learned that what goes around, comes around.
“Don’t worry, if you or someone you love was murdered, if your family was robbed or injured by the Americans during this time, you will have justice and such compensation as it may be possible to make. If you have something to say, if you have a serious accusation to make against anyone who helped the tyrant to do actual harm, or who profited from tyranny, or if you know some white man or woman who has defiled their body with an animal or someone of the same gender, then bring it to the new administration down at city hall. Ask for the Force 101 guy or the Bureau of State Security rep. I promise you will have our full attention.”
Amber ran into the living room with her purse and Clancy’s wallet in her hand. “My God, do you hear that?” she cried in a shrill voice. “I heard that! They’re coming after anyone who stayed loyal to America! We have to get rid of the evidence!”
She pulled out her own wallet from her purse and extracted a laminated card the size and shape of a driver’s license, bearing her photograph and small embossed symbols, a Missoula city seal and a FATPO ID number. This was what had been known in Missoula as a Get Out Of Jail Free Card, or more earthily, a Back the [expletive of choice] Off Fattie Card. The text asserted that Ms. Amber Escott-Myers had been fully vetted and triple background-checked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Bureau of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization. She was known to be a loyal citizen of the United States, and was therefore entitled to all due courtesy and assistance from FATPO and the assorted other alphabet soup agencies who had attempted to suppress the NVA revolt for the past five years. “Give me yours!” she ordered her husband. Bemused, Clancy handed Amber his own card from his wallet. She ran into the kitchen, got scissors, and then coming back into the living room, she meticulously cut both cards into small strips. Then she balled up several pages of newspaper, threw them into the fireplace, and lit them on fire with a match, after which she threw all the little pieces of plastic into the flames.
“Ick! That stinks!” said Georgia, wrinkling her nose.
“They can find out who had the cards from computer records at city hall or at the old Fattie HQ,” commented Kevin.
“They destroyed the records! They promised they would before they left us here at the mercy of these kill-crazy Nazi thugs!” wailed Amber.
“Yeah, they promised, but the Fatties were mostly stupid niggers, and they probably screwed it up,” said Kevin.
“Kevin!” screamed Amber hysterically. “Don’t you ever, ever say that horrible word in this house or in my presence again, and especially in your sister’s hearing!”
“Uh, Mom, it’s all right to say nigger now,” said Kevin, gesturing at the television. “Don’t you get it? No more politically correct bullshit! White people can say what they really feel now!”
“Get out!” said Amber frigidly. “Get out of my sight, Kevin! Go to your room and don’t come out until I say you can.”
Kevin complied, shuffling up the stairs. “I’ll just keep on watching the news on my laptop!” he called down defiantly.
“Clancy, we have to make a decision,” demanded Amber, clicking the television into mute mode with the remote. “We have got to work up the courage and make a plan to get out of this city and back into the U.S.A. Even now, even with the snow, it may not be too late. The news, at least the news channels that are still in American hands, have been reporting that the roads heading east and south are still clear. I know that Nazi on TV said the banks will be closed, but we did take the precaution of drawing that five grand in cash out two weeks ago. Families have started over on a lot less. We can get to my mother in D.C. on that, for sure.”
“Just leave everything we have here, except what we can get in the Range Rover?” demanded Clancy. “Ammy, look, we have talked about this and talked about it. Hell, we’ve talked about nothing else since Longview. I thought we had finally agreed to stay in our home and not allow ourselves to be driven out.”
“That was before I heard our son utter that—that—that word!” shouted Amber. “What in God’s name will he be like after a year or two being raised with Nazi propaganda all around? I’m not going to have a little Hitler Youth in the house! And what about Georgia? She has blond hair, so these monsters will probably use her for breeding stock!”
“What’s breeding stock, Mom?” asked Georgia, looking at her own hair with interest.
“They’re going to make you have blond babies!” wept Amber.
“Uh, Mom, I’m not old enough to have babies yet,” said Georgia. “My sex education teacher says I have to be at least thirteen or fourteen and wait until my…”
“Probably better than Kevin being raised by a Gameboy Play Station or whatever the hell it is he spends all his time with,” sighed Clancy. “I repeat, Amber, we discussed this at length and we decided to stay.”
“That was when I thought there was still a chance,” argued Amber. “That was when I thought we were going to fight. When I thought you were going to fight!” she added bitterly.
“Well, pardon me for being alive,” said Clancy in irritation. “Ammy, I know a Nazi bullet would have been a lot cheaper than a divorce lawyer, not to mention providing endless opportunities for you to play the drama queen off the whole patriotic American widow shtick for the rest of your life, but I’m sorry, I just couldn’t see my way to going down in a hail of lead gibbering like Sydney Carton about how it’s a far, far better thing I do!”
“Are you guys talking divorce again?” asked Georgia sadly. They had forgotten she was in the room,
“Georgie, honey, I think you need to go to your room and get dressed as well,” said Amber.
“Are Kev and me going to school?” asked Georgia.
“I don’t think so, dear,” said Amber. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We don’t even know if the schools are open, and when they do open back up they will probably start teaching you to worship Adolf Hitler and hate black people and Mexican and Jewish people, which we are not going to allow to happen under any circumstances whatsoever,” she added with a fierce look at her husband. “Right now just go upstairs and get dressed, honey, and then we’ll have breakfast and you and Kevin can make a snowman in the back yard. I don’t want you leaving the house for a while. It’s not safe outside.”
“And where would we go? Just sponge off your mother?” demanded Clancy. “Both our jobs are here.”
“Do you still think they’ll let you teach?” Amber asked him. “UM has been using an inclusive and multiculturally diverse curriculum for years. Do you think the Nazis won’t find out? What will they do to you when they find out you’ve been teaching Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou? What will they do when they see tapes of your seminars on Armistead Maupin and gay literature?”
“Send me back to teaching Chaucer, Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Stephen Crane?” suggested Clancy. “I could do that. In fact, I really think I’d like to do that. Teach real English literature that has stood the test of time and not just passed a politically correct litmus test. Or Ambrose Bierce. God, I’d love to do an Ambrose Bierce seminar again!” Amber looked like she was about to explode into a liberal hissy fit, but she was interrupted.
“Look, Mom!” Georgia cried out suddenly, pointing to the television screen. “It’s Jenny! Jenny’s on TV!”
Sure enough, Amber looked up and saw Georgia’s former babysitter Jennifer Campbell standing beside the NDF captain Johnson behind the desk and taking his microphone. She was wearing not tiger stripes, but an NDF female garrison uniform with dark green skirt and a khaki blouse, Sam Browne belt, a holstered pistol, and a black beret. The ever-present eagle was over her buttoned right pocket. Amber clicked on the sound. “Now didn’t I tell you they’d be sending in somebody who’s a lot easier on the eyeballs than me?” Johnson was saying with a laugh. “It’s all yours, ma’am. Take her away!”
“Thanks, Rick,” said Jenny, seating herself behind the desk. “I’m Captain Jennifer Stockdale, General Macready’s press secretary, and I will be doing the morning and evening news for a while here on KPAX-TV.”
“I thought Jenny’s last name was Campbell,” said Georgia.
“She must have married that psychotic killer Jason Stockdale, the man whose picture those FBI agents showed us when they came here that time,” said Amber. “In which case her name is now Jennifer Campbell-Stockdale. I don’t suppose these NVA bitches have the guts to stand up to their Neanderthal men and demand to keep their own names.”
“They seem to have stood up to the FBI and FATPO well enough,” remarked Clancy. “It’s probably part of their political and social program. I would imagine that under the new order we’re going back to the old ways, as contradictory as that sounds.” His own wife’s feminist refusal to take his own family name had always irked Clancy, and he suddenly felt the germ of a suspicion that life under the Northwest American Republic might have its compensations after all. Not to mention avoiding the necessity of throwing the family on the tender mercy of Amber’s ghastly mother, a Washington, D.C., socialite who had never met a left wing or liberal cause she didn’t like, no matter how far out.
* * *
The next morning Dr. Clancy Myers got a call from Doug Raeburn, one of his colleagues in the University of Montana English department. The department head, Dr. Benjamin Levy, had fled to New York a year before, after the campus sniffer dogs had discovered a radio-controlled bomb taped to the bottom of his Lincoln Town Car. Whatever NVA person was watching for him to get in decided to go ahead and detonate it anyway, to send a message, or possibly just for the pleasure of blowing up a Jew’s automobile. The bomb hurled shrapnel and a burning tire through the window of the lecture hall where Dr. Levy was discoursing on the Class Consciousness of John Milton, based on his own definitive tome Marx in Paradise. The message was received loud and clear, and from then on Dr. Levy delivered his class lectures on how Milton was a closet Commie from Brooklyn, via a large plasma satellite video screen.
“Did you get the e-mail from that General Macready character to the UM faculty?” Raeburn asked him.
“No,” said Clancy. “Amber spent yesterday wiping the hard drives on all our computers clean and reformatting them and closing all our e-mail accounts, and so I haven’t bothered to log on today. She thinks that she can hide her politics from the Nazis, which I rather doubt, but in a way, I hope she’s right. She’s hysterical, she’s a bitch, and we probably would have ended up divorced if this catastrophe hadn’t happened, but I don’t want her dead. Or me.”
“Full meeting at eleven in the faculty lounge,” Raeburn told Clancy. “We can’t fill up the auditorium any more. Not enough of us left. Odd, how he would know that. I get the feeling these guys have really done their homework. Somehow I don’t think Ben Levy will be sitting in on this one by satellite hookup.”
“Why?” asked Clancy. “Are we finally getting a new department head? Well, I suppose we would, wouldn’t we?”
“Rumor has it we’re getting a Chancellor as well, courtesy of the new brooms in town,” said Raeburn.
“Boy, they don’t waste any time, do they?” said Myers. “Nazi efficiency, eh? What happened to Frobisher? Or dare I even ask?”
“Oh, he cleared out with the mayor and his compatriots on the Patriotic Committee,” said Raeburn. “He didn’t stop running until he got to Minneapolis. I got a call from him this morning. He sounded drunk.”
“So?”
“Well, drunker than usual. He was sobbing that it was all over. It probably is, for him,” said Raeburn with a chuckle.
“Oh, I wouldn’t count Lord Frodo out,” said Myers. “He will now spend the rest of his career sucking off the teat of martyrdom, singing for his supper by re-telling over and over again on countless talk shows how he had to flee into the night from his beloved Big Sky Country with the hellhounds of the SS nipping at his heels. By the time he gets his book deal, the story will probably end up resembling the scene out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and our illustrious Chancellor will be crossing the ice like Eliza, pursued by Simon Legree and a pack of bloodthirsty dogs. Hell, Doug, we’ve got another Holocaust industry in the making here.”
“As recently as a month ago I would have hung up the phone and erased your number if you’d said something like that, for fear Homeland Security would be listening,” said Raeburn with a grim chuckle.
“Well, Doug, I don’t know how long it will be before the Gestapo is listening instead, but I have to admit, for the moment it’s a good feeling to be able to have a simple phone conversation without self-censorship,” agreed Clancy. “See you in a bit.”
Clancy walked into the meeting at 11 a.m. and found about 50 of his colleagues from all departments gathered in the long, spacious lounge. The University’s pre-war teaching staff had numbered over 400, including TAs and grad students. Now all the blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians and open homosexuals were gone, as well as about half of the remaining white faculty whose views and curricula, like that of the quondam Chancellor Frobisher, were sufficiently left of center to cause them to depart from the Northwest before the arrival of the NDF.
Myers recognized some of his closest friends like Raeburn, Dr. Peter Klosterberg of the history department, Dr. Jan Renner from the School of Engineering, Professor Heidi Winters from his own English department, and the elderly Dr. Charles Luger, who seemed to be the sole remaining member of the Political Science department. The lounge didn’t have an actual bar, since that would have required such formalities as a liquor license. However, a generous miscellaneous upkeep fund courtesy of the taxpayers provided a long antique sideboard filled up with rows of bottles, decanters, and glasses, as well as a discreet refrigerator beside the sideboard full o
f bottles of imported beer and chilled steins. Even in a fairly minor grove of academe like the University of Montana, America’s intellectual élite had always lived well. Myers saw that virtually every faculty member now had a drink in their hand, in violation of the genteel “yardarm rule,” which had always prohibited liquor consumption in the lounge before 5 p.m. He walked over to Luger. “Boozing already, Charles?” he asked, helping himself to a Scotch. “Even Frodo always confined himself to the bottle he kept in his desk drawer before five.”
“We have no idea what our new masters intend, Clancy,” replied Luger. “You realize this thug Macready may have called us all together here so he can arrest us all in one fell swoop, and save his men the trouble of running us down in sub-zero snow? This may be the last chance for me to enjoy a large Chivas Regal with a twist before I face the firing squad, and I intend to take advantage of it.”
“If you’re that worried, why are you staying?” asked Myers.
“I’m sixty-seven years of age, Clancy,” said Luger with a rueful chuckle. “I’m far too old to pack my grip and start over in some eastern school, where my learning and my experience, not to mention my race and gender, are now considered obsolete. I hold five university degrees, two of them doctorates. I have been teaching the art and science of politics and statecraft for the past forty years to blockheads, some of whom were barely able to read and understand the TV guide, never mind the Federalist Papers. I admit I used to subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s theory about the end of history. I assumed that Western man was pretty much stuck with liberal democracy for the duration, a form of government by and for extremely wealthy men and global corporations, controlled and guided by an obscure tribe of Hamitic Semites who managed to survive into the twenty-first century with a Bronze Age religion and the cultural ethic of a school of sharks intact. Yet this bizarre Party that started with one middle-aged eccentric sitting in a flophouse and pounding on a computer keyboard, has now invalidated everything I thought I knew and everything I’ve been teaching, through the simple expedient of pulling a few triggers and planting a few bombs. It appears that Jefferson, Rousseau, and Locke got it all wrong and Chairman Mao got it right: power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and that still holds true even for us pale over-civilized types, no matter what we thought. I confess that now that these bomb-throwing, race-baiting maniacs have captured the machinery of state power, I will be fascinated to see what they do with it. Unless, like the Khmer Rouge, they decide to slaughter everyone who wears spectacles for being intelligentsia.”
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