Prepper's Crucible - Volume Six: The End

by Andrews, Bobby

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s a pretty high price.”

  “You don’t give up anything valuable without a high price. Make a decision and tell me what you want to do.”

  Horace thought it over for a second. He realized that this was his ticket to national fame and said, “deal.” Cory ignored his outstretched hand and rolled on his side to face the journalist.

  “Where do you want to start?”

  Horace flipped through the pages of his notebook, stopped to consider things and then said, “how about we start with how you came to live with Don Murphy?”

  “I was in the right place at the right time. Two of his friends were coming up the Black Canyon Recreational Trail as I was riding down to check the trails. They picked up me and my family when I got out of the trail and we all headed to the ranch.”

  “What can you tell me about Don?”

  “Well, I can tell you he was a great man with big flaws. He was certain about things, but could change his mind at the drop of a hat.” Cory paused for a moment and then added, “Don was the kind of guy you would want in your foxhole, but not necessarily at a barbeque party. He was intense and focused, and we needed that at the time. I’m not sure he would have been a friend if not for the circumstances we faced.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about him?”

  Cory thought for a minute and then said, “he taught me tactics and strategy when it came to fighting. He also taught me how to look at a leader, recognize their flaws, and still acknowledge them as a leader. I suspect many people feel the same way about me. He was incredibly brave and claimed to be cold-blooded, but nothing was further from the truth. It’s amazing how we all can be so unaware about ourselves. I guess his greatest gift to me was teaching me how to understand you can be weak and brave at the same time.”

  “Were you with him when he led the fight against the biker gang?”

  “No, he asked me to stay behind and protect the ranch. He saw me as the only other warrior in the group, and didn’t want us both to be away from the ranch at the same time. I guess he was right about that. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was a warrior by nature. I guess he was one by training, so we sort of complemented each other in some way; but I would never say we were good friends, although we certainly needed each other.” Cory’s eyes grew dim, his head sagged to one side, and he was immediately asleep.

  “What is that?”

  “Morphine drip. It takes him out from time to time.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Does he look okay?”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  “How long will he be out?”

  “Could be ten minutes or it could be hours.”

  “Since you were with him, can I talk to you about how the resistance started?” Eric thought it over, shrugged, and nodded his head. “First of all, can you tell me how you got to know the governor?”

  “I met him after the invasion when we started to ambush the Mexican Army in the forest. That was after the invasion took place, so we ended up living in a cave in the Prescott National Forest for the first few months.”

  “Can you think of the event that caused the partisan movement to start?”

  “Not really. The first few months were pretty calm. We went back and forth to the ranch to care for the livestock and get supplies, but mostly stayed hidden. We really didn’t know much about what had happened.”

  “When was the first time you fought a battle with the Mexicans?”

  “It wasn’t really a battle. We started out by ‘bushwhacking’ the soldiers after they killed or raped. It wasn’t organized or anything.”

  “Can you describe the first time you did a reprisal attack?”

  “Well it went like this….” He closed his eyes and remembered those days.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EMP PLUS THREE MONTHS

  PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST

  Cory watched the column of soldiers through the scope of his .308. They were moving slowly, as though fearful of their surroundings. He noted the soldiers were not maintaining spacing discipline, and there were around twenty men in the column. Cory lay flat on his stomach, covered by a ghillie suit and invisible to the world around him. The twenty-inch barrel of the rifle was supported by a Harris bipod. He slowly pulled his radio from the clip on his tactical vest and whispered, “I’ll open up in about a minute. You close the L formation now and do the cleanup.”

  “Copy.”

  “Copy.”

  He again put his eye to the scope, sighted carefully, and waited a minute. The head of the column, an officer, stopped and looked around carefully. He apparently had a premonition, and Cory was not about to disappoint the man. He slowly squeezed the trigger, the rifle barked once, and the officer’s head met the 150-grain hollow point and exploded in a red mist. Cory had already moved his rifle to the next man in the column in a smooth motion, and fired again. He was aware of the AR fire that pierced the bright sunny day, but was lost in the world that existed in the scope of his rifle. He downed four more men, then moved up the ridgeline, taking a position twenty yards away from where he fired initially. He saw the muzzle flashes from the ARs that fired from one side of the column and from the rear. The L had been closed, and the last Mexican soldier went down in a blistering hail of fire from both sides of the ambush. The volume of fire gradually died and the men moved forward to where the dead and wounded lay. The men moved quickly, stripping the weapons and ammunition from the corpses.

  “What do we do with the wounded?”

  “Kill them. They’ve seen our faces.” The men drew their pistols and administered the kill shot to several of the soldiers.

  “Let’s go,” Cory said. “Our work here is done.” The group all melted into the forest and traveled separate directions to confuse any attempt to track them. They now had several fully automatic M-16s, thanks to the Mexican taxpayers, and thirty hand grenades. It had been a profitable afternoon. After an hour, they all arrived back at the cave, after each traveled over areas where the rockiness of the ground would throw off a tracker. They parked the ATVs behind a stand of scrub cedar and walked up the hill with weapons, ammo cans, and the grenades.

  The killing and raping had started almost immediately after the Mexican Army took control of the town and surrounding areas. The level of brutality was beyond human comprehension. Anybody who hesitated to surrender a weapon was killed. The raping was just a given for any attractive woman. At first, they hesitated to kill children, but even that taboo was violated by the third week of the occupation.

  Two weeks earlier, a column of ATVs that were going to town was backed up at a checkpoint. For unknown reasons, the column was strafed by heavy machine guns that didn’t stop firing until everyone in that column, including Cory’s wife and two kids, lay dead. Cory spent a day in numb disbelief when Kate gave him the news, then the rage started. He struggled to calm himself for another day, and then settled into a seething, but controlled anger. He adopted the adage that “revenge is a dish best served cold.” He and Ben collected the bodies of his loved ones, took them to the ranch, and dug their graves next to Don’s. The entire group walked from the cave and the burial ceremony was held. Everyone wept bitterly, except for Cory. He had a smoldering rage to comfort him, and a need to extract revenge – that was his only priority. In short, the humanity in him was ripped away, and what was left was simply a killing machine. And there was lots of raw material for the death factory he was planning to build.

  The next day, they planned the first ambush. They knew the Mexican Army was sending patrols into the National Forest to look for the other “bushwhackers” who had taken revenge for the loss of family members, and the number was growing rapidly. Cory knew, from early on, that they would have to organize to present a real threat to the Mexicans; but he had a personal score to settle first. So they scouted the trail into the forest that was used most often, set up the ambush, and ki
lled them all. It was not enough for Cory. It was only a beginning. He had a hunger that would not be easily satisfied.

  They soon split into groups to increase the number and frequency of the ambushes. Tim, the former Marine corpsman who then became a doctor, commanded a group consisting of Rachael, Bud, Ed, and Mary. Cory led the second group of Ben and his two sons and Kate. Ann generally staffed the base radio and let everyone know who was where to eliminate friendly fire incidents. The ambushes were often very fluid events and it was possible for the two teams to meet along the three trails where the battles generally took place. Each team had a sniper with a .308, and three to four in the “cleanup crews” who carried captured M-16s.

  The Mexicans wised up and formed special units that trailed columns in Humvees armed with .50 machine guns, and formed a rapid reaction force that would ride to the assistance of their trapped soldiers. After very nearly losing his entire team, Cory decided to play chess with the Mexican commanders, and they began working as one unit, with two teams. The first team sprung the ambush on the column of soldiers and departed the area immediately. The second team hurled grenades from steep ridges above the trail into the Humvees as they passed under them. A two-month-long game of move and countermove ensued. As time passed, each side modified tactics to try to gain the upper hand. It got more dangerous for both sides as time went on; the numbers of casualties grew and the number of battles increased.

  Cory and Tim both understood the fundamental problem: they couldn’t stand and fight. They both knew that the first time they guessed wrong in the game of cat and mouse they played, they would lose and lose big. Or, if the Mexicans ever followed them to the cave, that would also end them. The Mexicans, on the other hand, could make mistakes and still survive. It was a stacked deck against them and eventually their luck would run out.

  The ambushes continued for another three months, and often the group heard gunfire from other bands of partisans in the woods. But their tactics came at a cost. On their third ambush, they lost Bud and Mary, who had run into another Mexican patrol while fleeing the site of an ambush. They were cut down by automatic weapons fire. The group attempted to recover their bodies, only to be ambushed themselves. They were lucky that the Mexicans sprung the trap before they were in effective range, and they managed to escape. Ed, during the following ambush, suffered a shoulder wound that Tim was able to patch up. However, it took him out of the fight for a month and left the team short-handed. Then, the Mexican Army suddenly stopped sending the soldiers into the forest. It was the first acknowledgement that the groups who chose to fight had an impact on their operations. They talked about whether or not it was just a lull, or if their enemies really had given up on subduing the groups that owned the National Forest for the time being.

  “We can’t keep doing things this way,” Kate said one night after another meal of MREs.

  “What do you mean?” Cory asked.

  “We need to either stop doing the ambushes or get the others organized and mount a real resistance. All we’re going to do is get killed sooner or later. And, we’re just stinging them. I want to bite them so hard they run back to Mexico and leave us in peace.”

  “Well, I guess you’re right. How do we do that?”

  “We’re going back to the ranch tomorrow to grab some supplies. Don had a whole library of war books.” She stopped speaking and fell into a long silence. Don’s murder was never solved. The night it happened, a rain started that went on for two days. Tracking the killers was impossible.

  “Does it still hurt you as bad as it does me?” Cory asked gently.

  “Yes, and it’s never going to get any better,” she sighed.

  “I know.” He patted her knee gently.

  “And the worst part of it is I know I’ll never be that happy again. There will never be anyone who can replace him.”

  “I feel the same way.” Ben sat down next to Kate and wrapped an arm around her as she started to gently weep. Ed and Ann joined the group at the picnic table they had moved from the ranch to the cave.

  “We’ve lost a lot of good people,” Ben said gently. “But we have to fight on.”

  “We’re going to try to get more organized tomorrow,” Cory replied. “Don had a bunch of books on guerrilla movements and we need to study them and then find other groups who are willing to fight.”

  “The Army’s coming!” Eric yelled as he ripped off the headset from the ham radio. “They’ve taken the eastern part of Texas back and are heading our way!” He approached the group with a look of excitement, smiling as he stopped in front of them. “I just heard a ham somewhere in East Texas reporting columns of our tanks rolling through.”

  “Where is he?” Cory asked.

  “He wouldn’t say. He just said East Texas.” Tim and Rachael, hearing the yelling, joined the group at the table.

  “Did he say anything else?” Tim asked.

  “He’s spotted some aircraft and helicopters moving west as well. He also said bombers were passing over his position, heading west,” Eric replied breathlessly. “Lord, this is good news!”

  “Maybe we can just hunker down and wait for the Army to show up?” Rachael said in a wistful voice.

  “That won’t work, Rachael,” Tim replied. “We could all be dead before they get here, if they get here at all. We have to fight on as best we can, and do everything we can to keep them out of the forest, at the very least.”

  “That’s not enough,” Cory stated flatly. “We need to find a way to make sure they don’t even want to leave their bases. Until we can move around freely, there’s no chance we can accomplish much.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know, at least not yet. But we’re going to find out tomorrow how to organize, and then hit them often and hard.”

  “You mean those books?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Tomorrow we learn how to use guerrilla tactics and get organized with the other groups.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  EMP PLUS 39 YEARS

  PRESCOTT, ARIZONA, TERRITORIAL CAPITAL

  Cory was still sleeping as Eric and Horace continued talking about life in the cave and the conduct of the ambushes. Finally, Horace said, “I’m hungry. You want to get some lunch?”

  “I guess. He’s probably going to be out the rest of the day. He’s been going downhill pretty fast lately.” The two men tiptoed out of the room and softly shut the door. A large man, who carried a shotgun at quarter arms, guarded the door and stepped aside to let them pass.

  “Why the armed guard?” Horace asked.

  “A lot of people try to see him, and he doesn’t want to be seen right now.” They left the facility and made their way downtown, passing Whiskey Row and the Superior Courthouse on the way. Downtown had grown busy, with people bustling along carrying bags, and shops filled with people making purchases. When Cory moved the capital back to Prescott, the railroad opened operations again, and the town was a stop on the Los Angeles route. The hotels were usually full, and with a few exceptions, life was much like it had been before the EMP and war.

  “It’s amazing how these buildings get destroyed and then rebuilt just the way they were,” Horace said. They entered the Palace Saloon and Restaurant and took seats at a table in the back of the cavernous dining room. The décor was Western themed, and it still had the original swinging doors in front. The massive bar was more than two hundred years old.

  “This place was totally destroyed during the final assault on the Mexican Army.”

  “I know,” Eric replied. “I was here when it happened. I was one of Cory’s unit leaders.”

  “What was a unit?”

  “We operated with basic groups of four fighters. Ten groups were a unit when we formed the militia. The unit I had was responsible for assaulting the rear of this building and then the courthouse.”

  “That must have been bloody.”

  “It was.” The two men fell silent for a moment; Hora
ce shifted nervously in his seat.

  “He could have been president, you know,” Horace said. “Why didn’t he run?”

  “You don’t understand Cory very well,” Eric replied after a moment. “He never wanted to be governor. Hell, he didn’t want to be anything. He’s a quiet man who enjoys his privacy, doesn’t need or want social things. If it were up to him, he would have gone back to the forest and hunted and fished the rest of his life. Which is what he did when he left office.”

  “Then why did he run for governor?”

  Eric sighed, thought for a moment, then said, “the only other person who was willing to take the job was a former congressman from Flagstaff. Cory didn’t want us to be led by the very people who allowed the country to get weak in the first place. He felt like he had to run to make sure we never went back to the kind of politics and leadership that got us into that mess. His attitude was that if you break it, you own it. He felt like his generation bore responsibility for the corrosion of the political system that preceded the EMP, so they had to fix it.”

  “Why didn’t he run for a second term?”

  “He tried to put term limits in when he was governor. He didn’t think anybody should be reelected. It was his way of making a point. And I think he hated becoming something that he despised. He once told me that sometimes you have to become what you hate in order to succeed.”

  After they finished lunch, both men ordered coffee and sat sipping from their cups. They both ordered refills and finished those as well. Horace was replaying both the conversation with Cory and the one with Eric. “Can I ask you your last name?” he said.

  “Anderson.”

  “Are you Ben Anderson’s son?”

  “I am.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You were there from the beginning.” His voice filled with wonder, as though he discovered a rare gem in a pile of rocks.

  “No, I arrived after the invasion. The beginning was the EMP.”