Liberty's Last Stand

TWENTY-TWO

With the power out again in suburban Maryland on Friday morning, Lincoln B. Greenwood was a changed man. His adventures the previous day in the supermarket had shaken him to the core. To be in the midst of a mob of people savagely fighting for basic necessities — and fighting just as hard as anyone else — had given him a glimpse of the monster in all of us.

Eat or starve. Move or die. Kill or be killed.

Those monsters were waiting out there in the darkness now. Evil people, unrestrained by the bonds of civilization or religion. People willing to do anything to survive.

“We gotta get outta here,” he said to his wife, Anne.

“Where will we go?” she asked reasonably as she placed candles around the house for the coming evening.

He gestured vaguely. He hadn’t the foggiest idea, but here there was chaos, so instinct told him to leave. To run. To escape.

“What about Suzanne and her family?”

The daughter, the son-in-law, and the baby; Lincoln B. Greenwood hadn’t thought about them all morning. He glanced guiltily at the box of Similac powder and the baby food jars still resting where he had put them on the kitchen counter.

“She married that moron; they are going to have to take care of themselves.”

His wife glowered at him, but Lincoln didn’t notice. He walked around the living room looking out the windows at the darkness. He could see faint light in a neighbor’s window across the cul-de-sac. Candles, he figured. The other houses on the cul-de-sac appeared dark. Maybe the neighbors had already left. Maybe that was the smart thing to do. Get in the car and go. Somewhere. Escape.

He felt the urge to run, to flee. Adrenaline. He broke into a sweat.

“Get packed up,” he said to his wife. “Your meds, some clothes. Some food. Nothing else. We’re leaving.”

“But where are we going?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. We can’t stay here. They’ve been rioting in Baltimore all week. They rioted at the supermarket yesterday. Power is off, phones are off, internet is off. When the inner-city thugs come to the suburbs to loot and burn and rape, we had better be gone.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“Dear wife, we don’t even have a gun, because you wouldn’t have one in your house.” That’s when Lincoln B. Greenwood lost it. “I don’t give a shit what you want!” he roared to his shocked wife. “I am not going to sit here waiting to be murdered or die of starvation. Now get upstairs and pack what you want to take.”

Greenwood ran upstairs and threw three pairs of jeans and some shirts into a bag. Some underwear and socks. He added his blood pressure medicine and his prostate pills to the bag, his toothbrush and toothpaste, his razor and shaving cream, plus some laxatives and a bottle of aspirin.

Then he went to a safe in his closet, opened it, and got out the strips of gold he had invested in when the economy was going to hell in 2008 and 2009. A few Krugerrands. It was damn little, but paper dollars weren’t going to be the coin of the realm and credit cards were worthless. Not that it mattered. He had maybe fifty dollars in his wallet and, since the power was out, no prospect of getting more from his bank, even if the ATMs worked or the bank was open and willing to convert every dollar in his savings and checking accounts to cash, which they wouldn’t be.

He stuffed the gold into his pocket and zipped up his bag. Carried it downstairs. Anne was still upstairs packing.

A car pulled up in the driveway and he went to the window. His daughter, Suzanne. He opened the door for her. “We’re leaving, Dad. Going to Gerald’s parents’ place in Front Royal. We’re going to ride it out there.”

“Good idea. We’re getting ready to leave too. I got some Similac and baby food for you. I’ll put it in a bag while you go upstairs and say goodbye to Mom.”

When Suzanne left, Lincoln Greenwood went upstairs to check on his wife. She was sitting on a stool in her bathroom crying.

“Are you packed?”

“Oh, Lincoln. I feel as if I am saying good-bye to my life. What is to become of us?”

“If you don’t get a move on, woman, we’re going to be dead.” He could feel the evil out there in the night. “Pack your meds and a few clothes and let’s get in the car and go while there is still time.”

She sobbed, trying to pull herself together. And nodded. “You’re right. Another few minutes.”

So he went downstairs and put his bag in the car, which was in the garage. He would pull the handle that disconnected the door and raise it to get the car out. But not until they were ready to go.

Five long minutes later, as he threw all the dry and canned food they had in garbage bags and stuffed them in the car, he heard engine noises.

He ran to the living room window and looked out. A police car and a late-model pickup were examining the houses in the cul-de-sac. Lincoln Greenwood went back to the kitchen and helped himself to a carving knife from the block on the counter. He put it up his left sleeve, leaving only a bit of the handle sticking out.

Then he went back to the window. Four young black men were coming up the walk, and all four had pistols in their hands.

One of them pounded on the door. “Open up in there or we’ll kill all of you and burn this goddamn thing down around your bodies.”

Greenwood unlocked the door and they rushed in. One of them pointed a pistol in his face. “Hello, asshole. Who else is here?”

“My wife is upstairs.”

He jerked his head at his compatriots and they went charging up the stairs.

“You and me are goin’ to the kitchen, motha-fuck. We want the food. All of it. And anything else you got.”

Greenwood led the way.

The man immediately began opening cupboards and rooting through the pantry. He turned on Greenwood and pointed the pistol in his face. “Where is the grub, honkey? Don’t tell me you people ain’t got no grub in the house. Cause if you do, I’ll just shoot you now and be done with it.”

“In the car in the garage. We were just about to leave.”

“So we got here just in the nick of time. Ain’t that sweet? You lead. Get it out.”

He went into the garage and began emptying the garbage bags of spaghetti noodles and cans onto the floor.

“Pick it up. Take it to the front door.”

Greenwood hoisted a bag in each hand and led off. The thug picked up another and followed him, gun in hand.

When the bags were at the front door, the man said, “Let’s go get the rest of it. Seems like you oughta be carryin’,” and he laughed.

Another trip cleaned out the car. The men who went upstairs were rooting around and shouting to each other, as if they were on an Easter egg hunt.

In the kitchen, the punk with Greenwood said, “You got any guns?”

“No.”

“You better not be lying, ’cause we’re gonna look. If I find you lied, I’ll just shoot you like a dog and that will be that.”

“I’m not lying.” Lincoln Greenwood was scared and his voice was an octave high and quavered.

“Pills. We want all the pills you got, motha-fuck. And your grass and powder and smack.”

“Pills are upstairs.” That was a mistake, Greenwood realized. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet in his bathroom, and if the man looked, there would be hell to pay. “We don’t have any dope,” he added.

“Like shit! You lyin’ asshole. All you white motha-fucks got shit to get high on. You buy it in Baltimore from the guys in the ’hood. Us niggers ain’t got the money for nothin’ but pot. It’s white trash like you that buy the high-dollar shit and then convict the poor dudes sellin’ it who ain’t got no other way to make a livin’.”

The man, who was perhaps twenty or twenty-one, looked around, surveying the crystal and kick-knacks in the kitchen. He pointed his pistol at the counter television that Anne watched every morning when she made breakfast and pulled the trigger. The shot sounded like a cannon. The front of the television showered glass on the counter.

Then the gunman turned his back on Lincoln B. Greenwood. Greenwood pulled the knife from his left sleeve and rammed it between the man’s ribs on his right side up to the hilt. Gave it a savage twist and jerked the knife out. Blood squirted out, under pressure.

The young gunman turned with a funny look on his face, tried to bring the pistol around. Greenwood pushed his arm up and rammed the knife into his solar plexus, then jerked it loose. The gunman collapsed on the floor, bleeding copiously.

“Hey, Joey!” A shout from upstairs. “You havin’ fun, man?”

Lincoln B. Greenwood removed the pistol from his victim’s grasp and went to the hallway, with the stairs on his left. He crouched against the wall so anyone coming down the stairs wouldn’t see him. He waited. When they came down each had an armload of stuff. After the first two got down the stairs and went through the front door, he shot the third one in the back from a distance of three feet. At that range he couldn’t miss.

The man fell the rest of the way down the stairs and piled up on the floor. Greenwood shot him again.

He ran to the door of the house and tried to align the sights of the pistol, a black thing without a cylinder. Greenwood had just fired the first two shots of his life, and now the problem of hitting anything or anyone who wasn’t five feet away became a bit much. He pulled the trigger and the gun kicked and to his amazement the closest man fell flat on his face.

He aimed as well as he could in the darkness and began firing. Missing. The pistol bucked with every shot and the muzzle flash blinded him. He kept squeezing the trigger anyway.

The fourth man jumped in the right seat of the pickup and roared off as Greenwood emptied the pistol in that general direction. The truck rocketed out of the cul-de-sac and down the street with its engine howling.

Greenwood walked over to the man lying face-down on the lawn. He had a red spot dead center in his lower back, just visible in the dim evening light. Sheer dumb luck, Greenwood thought, and helped himself to the man’s pistol, which lay on the grass by his outstretched hand, along with Anne’s jewelry box. Without thinking, he began scooping up the baubles and dumping them back in the box. Most of it was junk, but she had a few nice pieces.

“I can’t move my legs,” the man whispered.

“Tough shit,” Lincoln B. Greenwood said, and began going through the man’s pockets. He found an extra magazine for his pistol. A roll of bills. A pack of Marlboros with one cigarette missing and a lighter. Some more jewelry, whether Anne’s or someone else’s, he didn’t know. He put the money and jewelry in his pocket. He almost left the cigs and lighter on the grass, and changed his mind. Someone might trade him something he needed for them.

“Don’t leave me like this,” the man pleaded. “Please.”

“Die slow, black mother-fucker,” said Lincoln B. Greenwood, lately of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Upstairs, he found someone had smacked Anne across the face with a pistol. She was half out of it, with a terrific welt, but apparently otherwise uninjured.

He threw the rest of her meds in the suitcase and looked at her stuff. Everything neatly folded, dresses and sandals like she was packing for Paris. He shoved some underwear and slacks into the suitcase and closed it. Took it downstairs, walked around the man he had knifed and the man he had shot, and loaded it into the car. Then he began the chore of reloading all the food bags. That took three minutes. He tracked in the blood on the kitchen floor, now a small lake, and began leaving footprints.

The man he had knifed was apparently dead, his eyes focused on infinity, his face a grimace. Greenwood went through his pockets and found two magazines for the pistol, a wad of bills, and a cellophane baggy that apparently contained marijuana. A lighter, keys, a pack of cigarette papers, some change.

He took the pistol and a spare magazine from the man he shot coming down the stairs and dragged him into the living room, leaving a bloody streak on the carpet. The guy was still alive, apparently, because he was still bleeding, but Greenwood didn’t check. Or care.

Greenwood went back upstairs and used a wet towel to bring Anne around. Helped her downstairs and through the kitchen, trying to avoid the puddles of blood. In the garage he put her in the passenger seat and belted her in.

After he got the garage door raised manually, he backed out, put the car in park, and went over to the police car and looked in. Piles of electronic gear, some silverware, and bags of food. He pulled out two bags of canned goods and left the rest. Stowed it in his car and drove off. He didn’t even look to see if the man sprawled on the lawn was still alive.

As he went through Clarksville on Route 32, Greenwood turned off the highway and threaded his way past darkened fast food joints and a closed filling station into the parking lot at the mall. Three cars sat in the huge lot.

Greenwood got out of the car, taking a pistol, car keys, and a flashlight from the glove box with him. He passed a darkened wine store with its windows smashed out. An AT&T store had received similar treatment. He adjusted the pistol in his belt as he walked around to the front of the supermarket. The doors were open, the glass smashed out, and there were no lights.

He went inside, using the flashlight. The place had been ransacked. Not a crumb was left on the shelves, not even in the candy section. No cereal boxes, bags of flour, cans, none of that. The freezers were empty and the doors standing open. The pharmacy windows were shattered and the door that led behind the counter was wide open. A glance with the flashlight was enough. The pharmacy shelves were completely empty.

Near the back of the store he found a body lying in the aisle. It was a man, in his sixties, perhaps, balding, a modest spare tire. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, and a dried trickle of blood showed on one corner of his mouth. He looked to Greenwood as if he had been trampled.

Greenwood started to turn away when he realized he recognized the man. He couldn’t remember his name, but he saw him occasionally in church and they nodded to each other.

We’re all going to end up like this, Greenwood thought, and used his flashlight to leave the store and walk to his car.

Anne was fully conscious. “Where were you?”

“In the supermarket. They cleaned it out.” He didn’t tell her about the body.

He used his flashlight to inspect the pistols. The empty one was a Glock with a fat handle. There didn’t appear to be a safety. He managed to get the empty magazine out and a full one in. Pulled the slide back and let it go. He guessed it was ready to go, but he would have to try to shoot it to find out.

The other pistol was an old army .45. He tried to pull the slide back, but it wouldn’t move. He found the safety. Clicked it off and now the slide came back, showing a gleam of brass. The hammer was all the way back. He carefully put the safety back on. The third pistol was similar, and also loaded.

Lincoln Greenwood started the engine of the car and steered through the empty parking lot and out onto the road that led to the highway, Route 32. Turned west and fed gas.

In Arizona that Thursday night, a crowd of four thousand people carrying candles marched on a Homeland Security detention facility. The facility, on an unused corner of Luke Air Force Base, was off-limits to the public, which tore down the fence with chains and trucks so the crowd could walk through.

The crowd stood in the darkness with their candles singing hymns for almost an hour. Then they walked up to the gate and went through it, even though the Homeland employees tried to stop them by threatening to arrest the whole crowd.

The officer in charge gave orders for his employees to fire upon the crowd, yet not a single shot was heard. The prisoners were released and accompanied the crowd, as did many of the Homeland Officers.

In Pittsburgh a similar crowd of peaceful protesters intent on storming a detention facility were fired upon by several guards. Two people died and three were injured. The crowd pressed in relentlessly, and when it left with the prisoners, two of the guards were dangling from light poles with barbed wire twisted around their necks.

In Michigan two people were trampled and three shot to death by guards when a crowd attempted to storm a detention facility. The crowd didn’t get the prisoners, but all involved knew there would be a next time, and when it came the crowd would be armed.

The widespread power outage never became total, and neither did censorship at local radio and television stations and newspapers where federal censors had been driven out. It was small towns served by small power plants that informed the larger public about what was going on, and that became the equivalent of the colonists’ committees of correspondence before the Revolutionary War.

More radio and television stations said whatever they pleased on the air. They were becoming more strident over Barry Soetoro’s attempts to muzzle them or force them to report only government propaganda as contained in press releases. Of course, for every rebel radio or television station, there were three or four that obeyed the government’s edicts, either because ownership or management were progressive liberals who believed wholeheartedly in Barry Soetoro or the censors had them buffaloed: it was impossible to tell which was the case by listening or watching the broadcasts.

Radio audiences were almost exclusively in automobiles and pickup trucks. People at home who had solar power or an emergency generator watched television. The satellites were on the air, and a set of rabbit ears could pull in a local television station if there was one. Some of the rabbit ears were made out of coat hangers. Television audiences tended to be large: family and neighbors gathered in a living room that had service.

And in some rural communities served by small local power plants, the electricity stayed on. Either the managers of the plants ignored federal orders or intimidated the Homeland Security or FEMA Gestapo. As long as the natural gas continued to flow through the pipe or the stockpile of coal lasted, the power plants were still in business, supplying hospitals, nursing homes, residences, and everyone else who used power, which was everyone, within their service area. In a blacked-out nation, a few islands of light continued to defy the darkness.

Dinner on Thursday evening at our hideout was another culinary masterpiece of MREs, hot sauce, and canned beans. I sat down beside Sarah with my plate. Everyone else was talking about the political situation, damning Soetoro, wondering what the tidbits meant that Willie and Armanti had gleaned from the short-wave.

Times were tough and getting tougher in Soetoro land. Power seemed to be off in all directions — and the guys weren’t hearing any utility repair crews chattering back and forth.

While the others gabbed, Sarah whispered, “What is going to become of us, Tommy?”

Sarah Houston never needs an arm to lean on, but still she made the gesture, and I was touched. “Hey, babe, I wish I knew.”

“When do you think Admiral Grafton will be in good enough shape to travel?”

I thought about that. I’m not a doctor or trained medic, so I didn’t want to move Grafton until it became absolutely necessary. And we had no better place to go. We were in a tactical trap with only one road in and out, yet being on the dead-end of a road to nowhere meant we would have to entertain few tourists. I didn’t think the feds were looking for us; I suspected they had a lot of bigger problems to keep them busy. I explained this to Sarah.

“They could find us from the air,” she pointed out.

“If they are looking. In the right place, that is. They probably aren’t looking for us at all.”

Counting on an enemy’s incompetence struck me as foolish, yet expecting efficiency from a bureaucracy was the definition of insanity.

Grafton was definitely in less pain this evening. If he had to, he could walk to the restroom. Every other minute was spent sitting or lying down, and talking. Just now he was in the corner of the living room with Jack Yocke on one side and Sal Molina on the other. They were discussing all things Soetoro.

It seemed that Grafton’s adventures with Sluggo Sweatt and his friends had loosened his tongue a good deal. In my on-and-off association with Jake Grafton in the past, I never heard him express a political opinion, which was proper for a serving officer. Don’t criticize your superiors in front of the troops. Aye-aye, sir, and all that. However, after his boss fired him and tried to frame him for a murder plot and coup, he probably felt he owed his former superior nothing — not deference, not respect, not silence, not the benefit of the doubt.

I suspected that deep down Grafton thought he owed Barry Soetoro a bullet, the same debt he had paid to Sluggo Sweatt.

“So explain what is happening to America,” Jake Grafton asked Sal Molina, the career White House insider.

Molina took a moment to gather his thoughts. “What we are seeing,” he said, “is a classic political reaction to a threatened loss of power. Politics as usual meant that the progressive liberals, who have captured the Democratic Party body and soul, were going to be voted out of office and would probably be out for decades, if they ever got back in. The world is changing quickly, which has profound implications for the Democrats’ power-base, which rests solidly on the uneducated and unskilled in the center cities who are being increasingly marginalized in a world economy that is going to grow like a mushroom on steroids in the years ahead.”

Jack Yocke, Washington Post columnist, made a noise with his lips that sounded a bit like a Bronx cheer.

Sal Molina ignored the columnist and continued: “You remember Moore’s Law and what happened to computing power in the past fifty years. Gordon Moore was a tech executive who made a prediction in nineteen sixty-five that computing power would double every two years. It was a prediction for exponential growth, and those kinds of predictions rarely come true, and if they do, the growth doesn’t last long. But the growth Moore predicted has lasted for fifty years, and the end of exponential growth is not in sight. Intel’s latest microprocessor is thirty-five hundred times faster and ninety thousand times more efficient than its first one, the Intel 4004, which came out in nineteen seventy-one.

“Moore’s Law applies to all technological applications, although no other technologies grow at such a multiple of efficiency. The one that will change our world is hydraulic fracking of shale formations. Drilling a well two miles deep and running horizontal lines out as far as fifteen thousand feet in undulating formations is becoming more efficient, more technologically advanced, and cheaper. The cost for these wells keeps dropping. The ocean of oil and gas being produced drives the cost of these commodities down. Shale wells produce over half their output over their lives in the first year, so that makes the frackers the marginal producers; when the market can absorb it, they can supply vast quantities of oil and gas at lower and lower prices.”

“I think I see it,” Jake Grafton said. “Traditional oil-producing nations will find they get less and less for their oil and their economies will stagnate.”

“Ah,” Molina replied, “but as the price of oil drops, the world benefits in countless ways. Industries can develop, billions of poor people will get better-paying jobs, prosperity will lift a great many boats. America will prosper. Natural gas is so cheap and abundant that industries that need lots of feed stock are coming back onshore. Low prices for gasoline and natural gas will stimulate every industry in America.”

Yocke shook his head slowly. “All that may be happening, but who can see it coming? Only fortune-tellers or readers of tea leaves.”

“Barry Soetoro and the people on his staff see it coming,” Sal Molina said bitterly. “Why do you think he continually says climate change is one of the worst problems facing America and the world, when in fact there is no scientific proof whatsoever that man’s activities on this planet have any statistically significant effect on the climate? Because the world of cheap oil and natural gas, with frackers here and in shale formations worldwide providing more production any time it makes economic sense to do so, is a direct threat to the Democratic Party power base. Good-paying new jobs at home mean the unions lose power, which means less money for Democratic candidates. The oil and gas industry’s demand for skilled workers will require the companies involved to demand the school systems be reformed to teach the skills required, or they will teach the workers themselves. That threatens the teachers’ unions, who are one of the main fund-raisers for Democrats and a huge source of votes, and they indoctrinate the young. So Soetoro has been trying to slow the oil and gas tidal wave with cries of climate change, which polls say eighty percent of the public think is a hoax, and by refusing to approve pipelines or allowing the bureaucracies to issue permits, and causing the bureaucracies to issue reams of regulations that drive up the cost of production. Still, as the cost of drilling and fracking goes down, more oil and natural gas can be produced at cheaper and cheaper prices.

“In our lifetimes — indeed, in the remainder of the century — oil and natural gas, like coal, will never be scarce; these commodities will become progressively cheaper, like computing power. And as they become cheaper, the economic and technical hurdles for renewable energy, such as solar and wind, become higher and higher with every passing day. In this brave new world we live in, once you get behind the technological curve, you can never catch up. Never, because the state of the art is progressing at an exponential pace! That’s a corollary of Moore’s Law.”

“All this will drive the leftists bonkers,” Grafton said.

“Indeed,” Molina agreed. “And they fund the Democratic Party.”

Yocke jumped in again. “So you are saying that Soetoro understands all this and has bet everything on his ability to turn the country into a socialist dictatorship?”

Molina frowned. “I don’t know that he understands what is happening. He is not a brilliant man. Average intelligence, perhaps. But he understands the political pressures he is getting from unions, from big-city Democrats, from environmentalists, and he can read polls. He hears from OPEC nations worried that their domination of the world oil industry is coming to an end, and with it their prosperity, of which, by the way, only a little trickled down. Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, and as prosperity in the Arab world drops, it will become more virulent. Barry Soetoro understands that!

“The future of socialism is on display in Venezuela, which will collapse one of these days, done to death by cheap oil. Socialism depends on a huge percentage of the population being unable to survive in a changing world without government help. Entrepreneurship and technical progress promise a world with abundant cheap energy that will raise prosperity for everyone who has the education to participate. Two centuries of cheap energy have made America the most prosperous nation on earth.

“At heart Barry Soetoro is a socialist, and he loves power. Soetoro understands that in this evolving world of cheap energy, the Democratic Party as it exists will become an anachronism. So he is trying to change the game and come out on top. He and his allies are screaming about climate change and proposing regulations and taxes on energy as a way to increase the cost of energy. Regulations and taxes have devastating consequences on the poor because all those costs must be passed on. In effect, the climate changers have declared war on the poor people of the earth, and they blame the carnage on evil capitalists, banks, hedge funds, and the like: those rich bastards are the enemy.”

“All this was discussed in your presence at the White House?” Jack Yocke asked.

“In and out of my presence.”

“And you fought Soetoro’s political vision?”

“Why do you think he threw me in a concentration camp?”

“So why did Texas secede, or declare independence, whatever you want to call it?”

“Texas is going to do well in the cheap-energy future,” Sal Molina said. “The people there understand that. The legislature didn’t vote for poverty. They voted for a new, better, more prosperous future for everyone in Texas that felt threatened by Barry Soetoro’s vision of a socialist utopia, with himself at the helm. Socialism drives taxes up — to fund social justice, the socialists say — and that makes everyone poor. That is socialism’s fatal flaw. It has others, but that one always destroys socialism eventually.”

“You are implying everyone is an economist,” Yocke scoffed. “They aren’t.”

Molina made a gesture of impatience. “Politics is about macro forces. Texas and the plains states are responding to macro forces that people feel. All thinking people do that, even the uninformed. When you fill up your car, you don’t need a PhD in economics to understand that something profound is happening to the price of gasoline, and that something has huge, sublime implications.

“And you don’t have to be a computer scientist to see and understand how computer technology has changed the lives of everyone on earth, except perhaps some pygmies in darkest Africa or headhunters in the Amazon. Cell phones are bringing the internet to places without electricity or running water. People in central Asia are selling goods worldwide on eBay. Computers are revolutionizing life on earth, and that revolution has just begun. Changes are going to happen faster and faster — that’s Moore’s Law — and change threatens politicians who are invested in the status quo.”

“So Texas’ actions after the declaration of martial law was the monkey wrench in Soetoro’s plan,” Jake Grafton said thoughtfully. “That they didn’t expect.”

“They didn’t,” Molina acknowledged. “They also thought the paramilitary police they installed in every federal bureaucracy would be able to control the population. And they thought the military would be loyal; they have been purging independent thinkers from the top ranks for years, people in whom they had political doubts.”

“Civil war,” Jack Yocke mused.

“Like Crackerjacks,” Jake Grafton said. “Remember those, with a surprise in every box?”