Ben knew these people were counting on him. He had to get them to a central location so they could be rescued. They walked for most of the day and set up camp in a vacant parking lot that was somewhat clean and free of debris. Ben tried to figure out what business had used this parking lot, but had no idea without any buildings nearby to use as a frame of reference. The group set up camp and built signal fires. Next they used debris to spell out the word HELP in big letters that might be seen by rescue aircraft. Slowly, people joined the group, a few each day. Safety in numbers was the key to survival.
They waited for almost a week for help to come. Ben knew that all they had to do was wait and they would be saved. Much like the employees at the Kissimmee Wal-Mart Supercenter, they slowly began to realize that no one was coming. They were cut off from the rest of the world. They were alone. They must take matters into their own hands if they would survive.
The first step was to find transportation. They managed to salvage a few damaged vehicles; some vans, an RV, and a SuperTruck. Next they had to find supplies. Doing so in the barren wasteland proved very hard. They managed to find enough food and water from the rubble to keep themselves alive. They sent out scouts in all directions in the hopes that they would either find supplies or someone to rescue them from this nightmare. One of the groups came back with the best news they had heard since before the storm. A Wal-Mart had survived Luther.
Ben and the group packed up and headed off to the Kissimmee Wal-Mart Supercenter. They arrived to find one of the entrances filled with cars, the other heavily barricaded. Ben understood the need to keep the store safe from looters. Maybe they were rationing out supplies from just one entrance for reasons of safety. They knocked on the door for the better part of a day waiting for someone to answer. No one did. Maybe it was empty. After the sun went down, they could see the beams from many flashlights bouncing around inside the store, so they knew it was occupied. Eventually, they managed to break down the glass door but to no avail. The barricade was far too strong to breach.
Ben decided to call off the attempts at getting into the store. He figured if they showed the people inside that they were civilized and posed no threat, surely they would see the error of their ways and let them inside.
One afternoon it occurred to Ben that they could go around to the back of the store to gain entry. He laughed at himself for still maintaining the polite relationship between owner and customer. The consumer did not go behind the counter with the owner; it was just rude. Ben and a few men went around to the back and were quickly greeted by a hail of BB gun fire. What the hell is wrong with these people? Are they crazy? They returned with trash can lids to deflect the BBs. They just wanted to talk reason with the manager, no need for violence. Ben knew exactly what kind of game these assholes were playing when his assistant manager had his foot blown off with a shotgun.
It was time for war. The Great Battle of the Kissimmee Wal-Mart Supercenter had begun.
The first stage of the battle was to take down the south entrance. Chester was incorrect that it would take a dump truck at full speed to breach the south entrance. It didn’t take a dump truck. It took one full-sized Ford 650 SuperTruck only ten minutes to breach the door. The angry mob had outfitted the grill of the truck with the rims of a full sized van. The battering ram they had constructed worked perfectly. The A-Team/McGyver SuperTruck sat on the opposite side of the parking lot and launched full speed at the barricade. It rammed into the first row of pallets and backed out. Next, a few people quickly moved in to remove the debris. Then a man with six-foot long bolt cutters came in and cut the chains and mangled shopping carts. He stepped aside and let the busy workers clear out the mess. The second trip of the battering ram slammed into the second row of pallets, sending debris flying into the store. Flying car batteries thrown from one of the pallets killed two of the blue-vested soldiers. The pallet had been selected because of its sheer weight. The employees never anticipated that the choice would kill two of their own.
The man with the six-foot bolt cutters joined three men on the roof, ready to pierce the trap door leading down into the store. The bolt cutters were not necessary since Chester had left the door wide open. The four men descended into the store and quickly stopped at the sporting goods section to arm themselves with guns. Finding all the ammo missing, they instead settled on baseball bats.
At the pedestrian entrance to the loading dock the four boys were quickly killed before any of them could fire a shot. The Florida State Bronze Medal Archer winner quickly shot the four boys. The first took an arrow to the eye, the second and third fell with arrows protruding from their chest; the fourth was shot in the stomach and crawled away to die.
The employees that could make it out of the store ran and ran until they looked over their shoulders and couldn’t see Wal-Mart in the distance. The unlucky employees that didn’t make it out were killed by the mob, angry at them for being so selfish and hoarding everything for themselves.
General Manager Chester Stephens held up both hands and managed to stop the angry mob from entering. They thought he was surrendering his gold mine. When Chester began demanding that they leave or face prosecution, the crowd replied by beating the man to death. Chester Stephens died a loyal and faithful employee of Wal-Mart. His last thought was of what he would say to Sam Walton when he greeted him at the gates of heaven.
The Kissimmee Wal-Mart Supercenter had fallen; in less than a day its shelves were almost bare. Benjamin Black and his renegades took what they wanted and quickly moved on to another target.
CHAPTER SIX
William Sanderson, Harvard MBA, and recipient of the Merrill Lynch Man of the Year Award, awoke in his cardboard home in the Central Park Obama-Camp. Having absolutely no outdoorsman skills to speak of, William had no choice but to learn how to be a successful homeless man. His first cardboard home was not able to repel the elements. He awoke one night to find his domicile a sopping mess, collapsing on top of him and his family. He knew he had to do better. He quickly constructed a new home and spent over a week adding to the makeshift structure. At sunrise the next morning, William cleaned up the sopping cardboard structure and instructed his wife to protect the children. He ventured out into the violent city of New York to scavenge building materials for his home. He returned just before sunset that night with a shopping cart stacked to the point of toppling over and greeted his wife with a kiss. Lindsay had just finished feeding the children a bountiful feast she had procured from the trashcans behind a local deli. She offered William his portion of the meal. William picked a few bites and gave the rest to his children.
William had been one of the lucky ones when The Second Great Depression came to take his four thousand square foot home along with all his cars and anything else of value. William considered himself lucky because he was a born survivor. He had grown up in abject poverty in Brooklyn. His father abandoned his mother and younger siblings, and William had to immediately assume the role of the family’s breadwinner and surrogate father figure. He was a star baseball player, attending Harvard on a scholarship. He worked two jobs to support himself and continued to send money home to his mother. He continued his studies and obtained his MBA. William was immediately picked up by Merrill Lynch and made a fortune investing money for both himself and his wealthy clients. He married and had two kids; his family wanted for nothing. William made so much money that his grandchildren probably wouldn’t be able to spend it all.
When the American economy came crashing down and soon after, the economies of most countries across the globe, he lost everything. He managed to stay in the fight longer than the men who threw themselves from the high-rises along Wall Street. Most of those men had no idea on their way down that their idea was far from original. If they had taken a few more history courses in business school, they would have known that during The First Great Depression over a century before, the idea had been executed many times.
William arrived back at the sprawling Ob
ama-Camp that covered most of Central Park and unpacked the contents of the shopping cart. The term “Obama-Camp” was meant as the worst possible insult to the former president. It was a throwback to the “Hoovervilles” built during the First Great Depression meant to insult President Hoover. President Obama wasn’t even in office when the camps sprouted up all around the country. The blame was placed on his shoulders due to the massive debt he piled on the American economy during his time in the Oval Office. Any time a camera was placed on them, the Democrats would point out that the nation’s first black president only inherited an already failing economy from President Bush. Fox News even made a logo for the camps depicting a starving, crying family cowering at the feet of an imposing and menacing looking Obama. It didn’t take long for the rest of the media world to follow suit, and the name stuck through two administrations after Obama left office.
William set about constructing his new home. He had managed to find some old pallets and broke them up into lumber. Also in his cart were old tarps, cordage from wire and rope, dirty blankets, and the most prized possession – a bundle of three rolls of duct tape. Duct tape had a thousand uses, and William knew he had a valuable asset. He took one of the rolls and buried it in a hole in the floor of his new home. With the help of his wife and children, they had not built an Obama-House; they had built an Obama-Mansion.
William never once gave his children the indication that anything was wrong. He simply told his five and seven year olds that they were leaving their house to go camping in Central Park. The people out there in the park really know how to live, he told them. They have Mother Nature to look at all day, and they could play as much as they wanted in what was left of the Park. We get to look up at the stars at night. Look! Over there - that’s the Big Dipper! His children had never been happier. They would spend more time with their father in the next year than they had the previous short years of their young lives combined. William cried when his little girl asked him if they could live in Central Park forever. She was having so much fun that she didn’t want to go back to the house to which William no longer had the keys. If children have loving, nurturing parents, they would be happy to live anywhere.
At first William was terrified to walk the streets of New York for fear of being mocked or even attacked for being a dirty homeless man. Much to his surprise, he realized that if you were homeless, you might as well be invisible. No one so much as looked at him or acknowledged that he was worthy of the dignity that came with being a human being. He thought back in shame to the many years he walked the busy streets in the financial district. He would turn his line of sight to pretend to look at something else or even pretended to talk on his cell phone waiting for the light to change rather than acknowledge that another of God’s creatures was asking for his charity.
One morning after warming up by an Obama-Furnace (a large metal drum with holes near the top for lighting fires) he returned to his one room home and told his wife that he would be gone for most of the day looking for food and supplies. This was partially true. He didn’t know how to tell Lindsay that he was very, very ill. He spent the previous week running a high fever and couldn’t stop coughing. William told her it was nothing, just allergies from the seasons changing. He set off to wait for what he knew would be the entire day at the Free-Clinic at the edge of Central Park. After finally being treated and given some medication to take with him, he stepped out of the medical tent to find the sun already setting. Lindsay was going to be very worried. She had probably told their neighbors he had not come home, and he was sure that his friends were out searching the park for him.
William made his way back to his wife and hugged and kissed her. Lindsay was crying and could not deliver the angry scolding she had rehearsed. William made up some excuse about getting lost and not being able to get directions from anyone. The excuse was believable since most citizens wouldn’t look at a homeless person if they were on fire.
William took his medication in secret for the next few days and managed to recover. He was determined to keep the illness from Lindsay, he didn’t want her to worry. One morning he asked his neighbor to watch over his house so he and his family could go for a stroll and get some fresh air. While his kids ventured off within eyesight to run and play, he held his wife’s hand and looked at the skyline of New York. He tried not to think back to the days of his old life of comfort and excess. Those memories served him no good; it was from another life that needed to be forgotten. He needed to look to the future, however bleak and depressing. He had to provide for his children.
William knew his job skills were utterly worthless, at least it would be for the foreseeable future. Not many people had need for an investment banker. William was willing to work any job that gave him minimum wage. The problem was his lack of residence. Charity groups all over the country petitioned to have the Obama-Camps incorporated into actual towns with street addresses. This was met with harsh criticism from all sides. We need to get rid of the Obama-Camps, not make them permanent. The charity groups countered by offering the Obama-Camp residents the use of their business address. The public saw this as fraud, and the idea didn’t last very long. Organizations that did offer jobs to the Obama-Camp residents treated them like illegal aliens and paid them next to nothing.
William knew that if he was going to give his family any kind of future, he had only one option – joining the military. The military was glad to take any able-bodied man or woman to join the fight. All they needed was some form of identification to start processing the new recruits. Expired driver’s licenses would do just fine. The thought of joining the fight in the Iranian Theater was a nightmare to William. However, the bigger nightmare was that his family would most likely be dead in a few years. It wouldn’t take long for malnutrition or a battle with pneumonia to pick them off one by one. He would fight his way to the gates of hell and back if it meant his family was safe and provided for.
The hardest part would be leaving his family behind while he was in basic training. He would have to count on Lindsay to keep the children safe while he was away. Once he made it through boot camp, William could move his family onto a military base, at least that’s what he hoped. They would have a real roof over their heads, electricity, running water, and warm beds. They would also have free health care. Everything was going to be fine. William would do anything for his wife and children.
William was due to leave for basic the next day. He spent the day playing with his children, hugging and kissing them as much as he could. He told them that he was going away for a while so they could move into a house and even go to school. His children began to cry, and William tried to think of anything to make them smile. He promised them they could get a dog. They smiled and wiped the tears from their eyes. William beamed and asked them what kind of dog they wanted. What are you going to name it? Whose bed will it sleep in? The children got very excited, and William knew he had done his job as a loving father.
The next morning William spoke with the neighbors on either side, and they assured him that they would keep a watchful eye over his family. It takes a village, they told him. William set off for the long walk to the recruitment center. His recruiter had agreed to take him on the subway to the processing center.
William traveled many hours to the military base in the south. He spent the better part of a week in orientation, physicals, testing, and all sorts of other bureaucratic red tape. When he got his first paycheck he immediately went to the Western Union station to send money back to his wife. A television was playing above the counter. William had never been so frightened in his life.
The Unified National Guard was evicting the residents of the Central Park Obama-Camp.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Once the Americans joined with the European Army to form the Allied Forces, The Great Empire of Iran launched an all-out attack on American soil. The invasion had no similarity to Normandy or any other invasion for that matter. Troops in uniform did not storm a
beach to be shot at by other troops in uniform. No tanks or heavy equipment traveled behind enemy lines to overthrow an enemy stronghold.
The invasion of America was done in secret. It was quiet. No alarms sounded. No emergency broadcast alerts to the public warning that the enemy was among them. The Empire of Iran sent an entire regiment of Muslim warriors to sneak into the United States to do one thing and one thing only - instill fear, panic, and paranoia in citizens of every walk of life. Their mission was clear and they did not discriminate. No one was off limits. They all had targets on their back.
The Silent Warriors did not act alone. American citizens helped them kill their own countrymen. Disgruntled and critical of their own government, large numbers of the American population aided the terrorists in their mission. Fed up with a collapsed economy, a failing infrastructure, and with their ineffective elected leaders, the newly branded warriors joined the fight, ready to focus their rage.
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