Liberty's Last Stand

TWENTY-SIX

A couple of days after our first visit, Armanti Hall and I decided to call on Angelica Price to deliver a deer haunch. A little fresh meat always goes well, we thought, and maybe we could trade for some fresh potatoes and beans.

We were in civvies and wearing our web belts that morning, and each of us had an M4 beside us in the cab of Armanti’s pickup. There weren’t many vehicles on the roads, but the pickups we passed were piled high with firewood and one was hauling a steer. I wondered if it was stolen.

We followed the little ribbon of asphalt into the hills. When Angelica Price’s house came into view, we saw three cars parked nearby. One looked as if it were about eight years old, the other two were show-room new. The new cars didn’t have license plates.

We coasted on by for about fifty yards, then Armanti stopped and I got out with my M4. “I’ll go look the cars over. How about you snuggling up against the bank there and give me cover if I need it.”

“Notice that there are only two cows in the pasture now?”

I hadn’t, but a quick scan showed he was correct.

I strolled back with the M4 under my arm, just in case. The new cars weren’t locked. One had 170 miles on it, the other 180. The older car, a gray Toyota, wore a Maryland license plate.

“Hey, man!” A black guy with a rifle was walking toward me from the house. At a glance, the rifle looked like Angelica Price’s old lever action.

“Get away from them cars!”

I was partially shielded by the front end of the old one, and I retreated one step to get a little more metal between us. I snicked the safety off the M4.

“Where’s Mrs. Price?”

“Never heard of her.”

“This is her house.” I was scanning on both sides. I could see someone at the window of the house watching, and the window was open. If there were anyone to the right or left in the pasture or garden, I didn’t see him.

“You mean that old white woman? She’s out in the chicken coop, man. Gave us some shit, she did.”

“She dead?”

“Not yet. If you don’t get the fuck outta here, you—”

That’s when I swung the M4 up and fired a burst at his legs. He went down hard and lost the rifle.

Someone fired from the house. I heard the bullet smack into the car. The report sounded like a pistol to me. The distance was about sixty yards, and whoever fired wasn’t a good pistol shot.

I couched down, used the car hood for a rest, and put a burst into the window. Silence followed.

On my right, I could see Armanti removing two AT4s from the back of his pickup. Apparently sneaking up on the house and taking a chance on getting shot didn’t appeal to him, either. I hoped the thug lying in the yard had told the truth about Mrs. Price.

Armanti ran up the road, using the embankment of a drainage ditch as cover.

To keep their heads down, I fired another burst through the window.

The guy lying in the yard was moaning, holding on to his left thigh. I could see blood at this distance, about twenty yards. Looked like a bullet had clipped an artery.

I moved aft along my mobile fortress, with just the top of my head showing. Armanti was about a hundred yards away now, looking back at me. I gave him a thumbs-up.

He stood. He had one of the AT4 tubes on his right shoulder. Five seconds, six, then the exhaust blast behind him raised a cloud of crap from the road.

He had fired at the base of the chimney of the house, which was probably the only thing hard enough to trigger the detonator of the armor-piercing missile warhead.

The windows blew out, flame gushed forth, and the roof rose a few feet, then crashed down. In seconds the house was on fire.

I began a bent-over trot toward the house. Looked at the guy lying in the yard with blood pumping between his fingers.

“Help me, man,” he pleaded.

I grabbed the pistol in his waistband and left him there.

The house was blazing nicely. No one in the yard or garden. One of the exterior walls of the house was tilting out, falling slowly. I glanced through the open door into the fire. Anyone in there was too far gone to save, even if I wanted to be a hero, which I didn’t. Near the garden was a hole with a fire smoldering. Looked like a barbecue pit. Pieces of cowhide and half a carcass were lying near it.

I went on around to the chicken coop, the M4 ready to go. Only one chicken was in sight.

Mrs. Price was lying on the hay in the shed. She had been smacked in the side of the head with a pistol several times; one of the blows had laid open her scalp. Now her gray hair was matted with blood.

Beside her were a dead white man and an unconscious white woman. Sparks from the house were causing the hay to smoke. I stepped on the hot spots, and pulled the two women and the dead man out of the shed.

“Mrs. Price. Mrs. Price, it’s Tommy Carmellini. We were by to see you a couple of days ago. Remember?”

Armanti walked up, looking grim. “The one in the front yard is still alive.”

“Find out who these people were,” I said. He trotted off.

I went through the dead man’s pockets. His driver’s license in his wallet, which was empty of cash, said his name was Lincoln B. Greenwood, of Clarksville, Maryland.

Mrs. Price was stirring. She was a tough one.

“They killed him for the fun of it,” she said. “He refused to beg. That’s his wife, Anne.” Only her left eye tracked. “They got here an hour before the others showed up.”

“Mrs. Price, I’m going to carry you to the pickup. Then I’ll come back for Mrs. Greenwood. We’ve got to get you two ladies to a doctor.”

She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. After I deposited her in the truck, I stopped by where Armanti was squatting beside the wounded man.

“He says they’re from Baltimore,” Armanti told me. “Four guys and a whore. Stole the new cars from a dealer and hit the road. Nothing to eat in Baltimore. Stopped here because they were about out of gas.”

Blood was still pumping from that hole in the guy’s leg. He had three or four other holes in his legs, and the right leg was obviously broken, but the one high in his left thigh was a real bleeder. His jeans were sodden. He was lying back on the grass and had relaxed his hold on his thigh.

“Let me have the keys to your truck. Got to get two women to a doctor. I’ll be back for you after a while.”

Armanti handed me the keys from his pocket. “This one’s gonna be gone soon.”

“They pistol-whipped the women and killed the man driving the gray sedan,” I told him. “Don’t forget Mrs. Price’s rifle.”

I went on to the chicken coop, picked up Anne Greenwood, who had been struck at least twice recently. She also had an old welt across her face. I carried her to the pickup. The wreckage of the house was completely aflame when I drove off.

Dr. Proudfoot was in at the clinic in Greenbank. I carried Anne Greenwood in first. The doctor was attending to his nurse, who had been whacked on the head.

“Got two women for you, Doctor. They’ve both been pistol-whipped. This is Mrs. Greenwood.”

“Just like my nurse. An hour ago. We were held up at gunpoint by a gang of pill-billies looking for drugs. We didn’t have any painkillers, but they took every drug I had.”

I carried Mrs. Greenwood into the examining room and put her on a gurney. Went back to the truck and brought Angelica Price in. I put her on a gurney in the second examining room.

“My God,” the doctor said. “I know Mrs. Price. Why on earth?”

“Baltimore thugs. They were after her food. Have you called the law?”

“No phone. They wouldn’t have come, anyway. Everyone is busy getting robbed or robbing the neighbors. It’s anarchy. Maybe the lawmen are home taking care of their families. I would be if I were one of them.”

He finished bandaging the nurse and sent her home. Then he spoke to Mrs. Price. “Can you hear me, Angelica?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“I want you to just lie here quietly and let me look at Mrs. Greenwood. Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

I sat holding Mrs. Price’s hand while Proudfoot worked on Mrs. Greenwood.

“Pills,” she said bitterly. “The hollow trash is on meth and OxyContin. Surprised they aren’t robbing drugstores.”

“No doubt they are,” I said. “This little clinic looked too good to pass up, I suspect.”

“Thanks for coming by, Tommy,” she said.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Twenty minutes passed before the doctor returned. “Mrs. Greenwood is in a deep coma. She needs to be in a hospital, but the one nearest here is closed.”

“What can you do for her?”

“Pray.”

He began examining Mrs. Price. “You have a concussion too, Angelica. I’m going to clean up that cut on your scalp and stitch it up, but that’s about all I can do. You should be in a hospital too, but since there isn’t one around, you need to stay in bed. You’re going to have a terrible headache. We’ll pray for you too.”

“I don’t think much of prayer,” Angelica Price told him. “I’ve been praying every night that Barry Soetoro would wake up dead, but apparently God hasn’t taken him yet.”

I went out to the pickup while Dr. Proudfoot worked. Clouds were building over the mountains to the west.

I changed magazines in the M4 and examined the pistol I had taken off the bleeder. A 9-mm, and the magazine was full. God only knows where the bastard got it, but I would have bet a thousand to one he didn’t buy it. I decided to give it to the doctor. We were getting a nice collection of weapons, but no matter how hard you try, you can only shoot one at a time.

Another guy pulled up in an old truck. His son was in the right seat, shot once above the heart. I helped him carry the boy inside. He was maybe fifteen. People were stealing the cows, the man said, and the boy put up a fight.

“It’s like trying to stop an avalanche,” the old man said. Tears were running down his weathered cheeks.

I emptied my wallet for the doctor, who tried to wave the money away. “Got nothing to spend it on,” he said.

“It won’t always be like this,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. I told him I would be back tomorrow to check on Mrs. Greenwood, and carried Angelica Price out to the truck. I got the deer haunch from the pickup that I had intended to give Mrs. Price and gave it to the doctor instead.

I took her to the CIA safe house and made the introductions.

After Sarah had Mrs. Price in bed, I made sure Yocke and Molina were standing by the machine guns in the pits and drove down to the guard shack where Travis Clay and Willie the Wire were playing gin. “Big-city punks are out, hillbillies are hunting drugs, and scared people are looking for food. All of them are armed. You guys better cowboy up and be ready.”

Willie was appalled. He wanted to argue, but I told him, “It’s us or them, Willie. If you want to keep on living, you’d better be willing to shoot.”

Mrs. Price’s house was down to smoking boards when I got back. The bleeder was dead, and Armanti Hall had dragged him around the house and put him beside Lincoln Greenwood.

There were four corpses in the remains of the house, burned beyond recognition. The boards were still hot and smoking, and we didn’t have body bags, so we left them there.

We buried Greenwood and the bleeder up on the hill in the Price family plot. Before we tossed the bleeder in the hole, I checked his pockets. He had a nice roll of bills on him.

“You can’t take it with you when you go,” Armanti Hall said with a sigh.

Some of the bills were blood-soaked. I peeled them off and tossed them in the hole. “He can take these,” I said, and handed the rest to Armanti. “Grab his feet.”

We tossed him in, then went down the hill to the garden gate for the man lying there. He stunk to high heaven. Each of us grabbed a foot; we dragged him up the hill and dumped him in on top of the bleeder.

I heaved my cookies before we got the holes filled up.

As we walked down the hill for the last time, Armanti said, “I don’t want to live in Barry Soetoro’s new empire. I’m thinking of going to Texas.”

The taste of vomit was strong in my mouth and the smell of death in my nose. “Maybe I’ll go with you,” I said.

He had picked some potatoes and green beans from Mrs. Price’s garden while he waited for me, and had them in five-gallon buckets. We loaded the buckets into the truck and headed up the road to find a place to turn around.

On the way back by Mrs. Price’s, before we got there, a pickup pulled up below the three cars in the parking area and three white males got out. The oldest one had a rifle. He aimed it at one of the cows in the pasture and pulled the trigger. The cow staggered a few feet, then went down. As the younger males, apparently teenage boys, climbed the fence, the guy with the rifle turned to face our stopped pickup. He held the rifle in both hands and looked at us defiantly.

“Protecting his kill,” Armanti muttered. “I could drop the bastard before he gets a shot off.”

“To what purpose?” I asked, and put the truck in motion.

We drove on by. The shooter never took his eyes off us.

“This place is like fucking Syria,” Armanti remarked.

I didn’t argue.

The evening after the Tomahawk strikes, Jack Hays held a press conference at an “undisclosed location,” which was the bottom floor of an underground parking garage in Austin, which fortunately was still on the electrical grid. Three print reporters were there, and two local television reporters, whose cameramen were set up with lights and sound and all the bits and pieces, including a set with a podium for the president of Texas and folding chairs the reporters.

Jack Hays started by reading a statement about the progress of the government in converting a state in the United States to a standalone nation. Much had been accomplished by the legislature, which was in session twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A new currency had been approved and a Texas Border Patrol and Customs Service established. The tax department was expanded and statutes passed adopting federal tax rates for the new nation.

“Everything has to be done at once,” Jack Hays said, “and we are up to our elbows in it. Inevitably there will be glitches, but we will try in good faith to correct any mistakes and injustices, if everyone will help us find them.”

The first question was, “Mr. President, what can you tell us about last night’s missile strikes in the Houston area?”

“The missiles were launched from at least two United States Navy surface ships, both of which were subsequently damaged by an attack from a Texas naval vessel. We know that much because crews on nearby oil-production platforms radioed what they had seen to their companies, who passed it to news media. We are doing our best to get power restored in the Houston area. We understand that at this time of year, loss of electrical power in that area is a humanitarian crisis.”

After a half hour of answering questions about the measures the legislature had passed and was considering, Hays said, “One more question and we’ll call it an evening.” Three hands went up and he pointed to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.

She asked, “Under what circumstances would Texas consider rejoining the United States?”

“Under the old Constitution?” Jack Hays asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t think of any,” Hays said curtly. He had learned long ago that the best tactic for a politician was to just answer the question asked or evade it. In the silence that followed that short sentence, he reconsidered his answer. Texans deserved to know his thinking, and if they didn’t like it, they could say so.

As he tried to decide what to say, the reporter followed up with the question, “What if it was no questions asked, all forgiven?”

“I’m certainly not going to engage in international diplomacy via your newspaper,” he said tartly.

“Even if President Soetoro were removed from office?”

“My answer stands.”

“You mean, sir, there is no peaceful way to restore the Union?”

Jack Hays weighed his answer as the cameras scrutinized his face and the reporters watched.

“The old nation was seriously divided,” he said, “with political power split between large urban populations and the people in the heartland. Even Texas has some of that. Some of the policies that the elected politicians in Houston wish to follow have been resoundingly rejected by the rest of the state’s residents. In a free nation there will always be the push and pull of conflicting views, conflicting desires, conflicting interests. Yet in my judgment, in the old nation the system had broken down, irreparably, and that is why Barry Soetoro chose to become a dictator, to force his political vision on people who rejected it repeatedly at the polls and in the Congress.

“Be that as it may, the reality is that if the people of Texas wish to continue to enjoy the rights granted by the old Constitution, such as free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to own a gun, the sovereign right to control our borders, the right to be ruled by elected representatives and not be dictated to by the executive or the courts or bureaucracies… if Texans want those things, they need to be an independent nation.”

Jack Hays paused, gathering his thoughts. “Our parting from the United States has not been amicable. Barry Soetoro is raining Tomahawk cruise missiles on the people of Texas. If he wants Texas back in the Union, I would tell him what the citizens of Gonzales, Texas, told Mexican army Colonel Ugartechea in 1835 when he demanded return of a cannon. If you want it, ‘come and take it.’”