Liberty's Last Stand

THIRTY-FIVE

The trek up the mountain was the most frustrating experience I have ever had. We averaged two miles every hour. I would move the truck ahead a couple of hundred yards and shut off the engine to save fuel.

The western side of that mountain, the crest of which ran generally north and south, was a mix of pastures and woodlots with farm houses and ramshackle barns thrown in, and here and there a mobile home surrounded by the owner’s junk collection. Rotting tractors, curious cows staring at us over fences, abandoned pickups manufactured during the Truman administration, stray dogs, yards full of weeds, fences covered with poison ivy, it was rural America in late summer in all its glory.

The fat people had it worst. They began dropping out, just sitting down. Some of the skinny people put their weapons in the truck and on the army trucks behind us carrying mortars, MREs, and water, just to lighten the load. People trudged and trudged up the edge of our road, raising clouds of dust.

Grafton sat in the rear seat and was on the handheld radio constantly. He gave Sarah and me updates on the southern army. They were through Leesburg and had collected another two or more thousand civilians, who were walking and driving cars and pickups and vans. Everyone seemed to want to go to Washington. Our ambushers, Martinez’ bunch, were in position blocking the roads into and out of Camp David.

The power was back on in eastern Virginia and Maryland, and television and radio reporters were giving their audiences the blow by blow. Dixie Cotton was with the army marching through Leesburg, heading for the eastern Virginia suburbs, and she was on the air and on fire, urging all loyal Americans to join with the army of volunteers on its way to liberate Washington.

It was nearly one o’clock when I saw Travis Clay standing beside the road. I stopped beside him.

“This is like herding cats,” he said. “Got any water?”

“In the bed. Help yourself.”

When he had guzzled a bottle and had another bottle in his hand, he came back to the driver’s door. “You going to sit there riding along in your limo, or are you going to help?”

“I’m an officer. Rank has its privileges.”

“I’m going to write a letter to your mother. ‘Tommy doesn’t play well with other children.’”

I told Sarah to drive the truck and got out with my M4.

I helped Travis and Willis herd the troops up the road. Every little bit a shot would echo around. The wannabe warriors got bored and shot into a tree or a deer or whatever. I saw a guy with a shotgun drop a crow that was flying over.

“Save your ammunition,” I admonished the trekkers. “You’re going to need every damn bullet before the day is over. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot the cows: they don’t vote, don’t have guns, and can’t shoot back, so it isn’t sporting.” Some listened, some didn’t.

We came upon a farm where the lady of the house had gone all out. Apparently she knew the column was hiking up the road, so she had a folding table set up by the gate and she and her daughters, both early teens, were pouring good well water for anyone who wanted a drink. And serving homemade cookies.

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said as I helped myself to an oatmeal raisin cookie and filled up my water bottle. “How’d you know this mob was coming?”

“Your scouts came up the hill at dawn this morning, and I met them coming back. They said a lot of people would be along.”

So I sipped water and munched my cookie as the troops did the same, then we moved along while other people crowded the table. Everyone had a good word to say to the lady and her daughters, and she had a good word for everyone. America walking by your door, on a dirt road that leads nowhere in particular. It was a strange experience.

Two miles farther up the road, I found a woman sitting with her shoes and socks off, looking at broken blisters, now leaking blood. A double-barrel shotgun lay beside her. “Are you going to be able to keep going?” I asked.

She looked to me to be in her fifties. She cocked her head to eye me, squinting against the sun. “I’ll make it, Jack,” she said.

“My name’s Tommy Carmellini.”

“Betty Connelly.”

She took a pair of dry socks from her backpack. “My daughter died in that parochial school in Arlington Heights a couple of weeks ago. She was a teacher. One of those jihadists Soetoro let into the country shot her in the face. I’ll get up this mountain if I have to crawl it.”

While she put her shoes and socks back on, I inspected her shotgun, an elegant old side-by-side. I opened the breech and extracted one of the shells. Number six birdshot, perfect for pheasants. I put the shell back in, snapped the breech closed, checked the safety, and put her on the tailgate of our truck. Gave her a bottle of water and her shotgun. “You ride there until we get on top,” I told her.

She nodded and brushed the hair back out of her eyes. “Thanks,” she said. I just hoped she didn’t get shot.

After two hours, I got back in the truck. Although the temp was only seventy-five degrees, according to the truck’s thermometer, I was hot and sweaty, and so was everyone hiking up that low mountain to get to whatever fate awaited us. I guess I was a little nervous, right along with everyone else.

Somehow, someway, we made it up the grade. The dirt road got worse and worse the higher we went, until it was just a rutted road full of dried-up mud-holes. No farms up here, just woods. I glanced at the truck’s odometer. It had driven fourteen miles to cover the twelve miles direct distance to the edge of the bald.

Grafton had received radio messages from the Predator crew long before. Soetoro’s army was on the crest of the mountain, and at least three hundred yards of cow pasture lay between the forest on the top of the western slope and the naked crest.

It was four o’clock by my watch when I first sighted the bald. Sarah was at the wheel of the truck, so I got out and started directing our tired volunteers into the woods. I estimated we had lost at least half through straggling and heat exhaustion, but that was just a guess.

“Get the troops spread out,” Grafton told me. “Link up with the people on the other road and stay in the woods. Have the mortarmen take their weapons out there a ways for max coverage.”

Already the people on the crest were popping away at us. The bullets pattered on the trees and leaves like rain, but if they hit anyone, I didn’t see him or her go down. With all the dust and engine noise and gunfire all afternoon from our crowd as they climbed the mountain, there was no possibility of surprise. Not that Grafton wanted surprise.

Our troops retrieved their weapons from the vehicles and went scurrying out through the woods as the distant firing and pattering of bullets encouraged them on. The howitzer was turned and set up in the road. The truck pulling it had already run over the cattle gate, flattening it. A three-strand barbed-wire fence on ancient, half-rotted posts ran away on both sides of the gate. The artillery officer, a captain, came over to confer with Grafton. “Not yet,” the admiral said.

I went into the woods, trying to show the civilians how to take advantage of cover, advising them not to fire their weapons, but to wait. Some of the fools huddled down behind a bush or sapling that wouldn’t stop a BB, so I moved them to rocks and behind big trees. Inevitably a few of them began banging away at the distant crest, wasting ammo; they probably had no idea how far their bullets would drop at that distance. Some were shooting into the air at a thirty-degree angle; maybe they were trying to hit Camp David.

One guy was walking around like it was Sunday afternoon in the park, shouting to his fellow warriors, “Hang tough. We’ll kick the shit out of those stupid sons of bitches.”

“Get down, you idiot,” I told him.

He looked at me with distain and struck a pose. “At this distance, they can’t hit—”

Whap! There is no sound on earth like that of a bullet striking a living body.

I heard the sound and saw the hole appear in the side of his head. Blood began leaking out. He swayed like an old oak in a storm, his eyes fixed on infinity, dead on his feet. He fell beside me.

He had a nice rifle, an old 1903 Springfield with a four-power scope. I laid it across his chest and moved on, shouting, “You morons get behind something solid and stay down! Save your ammo!”

After twenty minutes of that, when I had positioned the men and women who had made the climb on the left side of the road, I went back to the pickup.

“Get out your sniper rifle, Tommy, and look at the people on the crest,” Grafton said. “When the action starts, shoot anyone who looks as if he is directing troops.” That was always the advice to snipers: kill the officers.

“Yo,” I said and got out the best rifle, deployed the bipod, filled my pockets with cartridges, and set up using a pile of dirt that some snow scraper had deposited there in past years.

I lased the crest. Three hundred fifteen yards, give or take.

“Start shooting, Tommy,” Jake Grafton said.

I picked out some fool who was standing up looking this way with binoculars and let him have it. After the recoil, I didn’t see him. I scared or hit him.

I had fired ten shots when Grafton said, “Do you have a machine gun in the truck?”

“Yes.”

“Put it up there and get ready.”

I had no more than gotten the bipod deployed and the belt in it when the howitzer began firing at a high angle. I saw the shells popping on the crest. Then the mortars opened up, dropping their shells along the crest too.

This is it, I thought. They’ll break for the woods behind them and we’ll charge up there to take the crest.

Grafton was running to the left, telling everyone who would listen that we were going to charge the crest, but to stop there. In all likelihood, the people on the crest would retreat to the woods on the other side and be waiting for our bunch to charge them.

But…

I was astounded when the enemy on the crest stood up and began running downhill toward us. They charged, at least two thousand of them, screaming at the top of their lungs and firing wildly. They were dedicated Soetoro fanatics, not professionals.

I hunkered down over the M249 and began firing bursts. They went down in handfuls. To my right and left the woods came alive as the civilian volunteers let loose with everything they had, shotguns, rifles, and pistols.

The charge broke halfway to the trees. The ground was carpeted with people when, suddenly, the survivors began running back up the hill en masse, some of them carrying and dragging wounded people.

I shot the whole belt at them as the howitzer banged away to my left and the mortarmen dropped their shells among the survivors. Then the artillery shells that had been popping viciously moved their aim point and I no longer saw the shells land. They were obviously shooting to land their shells on the back side of the ridge.

All along our line a shout went up and people who thought they didn’t have another erg of energy left in them left the trees in a trot, charging up that hill. That’s when my admiration of the American volunteer went through the roof. By God, they had guts.

They swarmed up that hill.

Sarah motioned to me, so I grabbed the machine gun and belt and got in the back. She put the truck in motion and I hung on. I wanted to change the belt in the machine gun but with the uneven ground tossing the truck around, there was no way. I grabbed my M4 and squirted a burst at any of the enemy who paused in flight to shoot at people charging up the hill.

When we made the crest, it was empty. The enemy was running down the other side. Sarah stopped the truck. I dumped the carbine and grabbed a belt of ammo and slapped it in the M249 as bullets snapped around the truck. People running, guns blazing: it was the damnedest battle I have been in yet, like something from an American Civil War movie, blues versus grays. I dismounted, set up the gun, and shot at the retreating people dashing into the trees on the east side of the bald.

“Hose the tree line,” Grafton shouted. He was outside the truck, crouching, watching everything. “They may have an ambush there.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him run over to the howitzer crew and point. In seconds the artillery shells began falling just back of the treeline: explosions, clouds of dirt, trees falling. The mortarmen came up to the crest in the pickups that they had used to transport their tubes, recoil plates, and ammo. After taking a moment to get set up again, they began lofting shells into the woods below.

To my amazement, our guys who had scaled the crest stopped for only a moment to get their breath, then set off running downhill for the trees.

I finished the belt and got another into the gun, which was getting damned hot.

Grafton jumped into the truck and Sarah raced it downhill. I sprayed lead, then grabbed the gun and followed them.

She stopped forty feet from the edge of the trees. I threw my machine gun in the bed and picked up my M4.

Willis Coffee came running up. Grafton shouted at him, “Get some AT4s and shoot them into the trees.”

“We’ve got about a dozen.”

“Get them running for Camp David.”

Willis did as he was told. Stood in the bed and launched the rockets as fast as he could.

When our troops were no longer in sight, Willis got down. Our guys and gals had gone into the trees. They had literally jerked the old fence posts out of the ground rather than climb over or through the barbed wire.

Grafton, Sarah, and Willis each got an M4, and we trotted toward the trees. We hadn’t taken five steps when Willis grunted and fell. I stopped and went back to check on him. He had taken a bullet in the chest. He looked at me and said, “Tell my wife…”

“What?” I demanded. “Tell her what?”

But he was dead. I realized then that I really didn’t know Willis Coffee very well. And I would never know him better. “God bless you,” I whispered, and ran on toward the trees.

Dead and wounded lay everywhere. We disarmed the wounded and kept going. Our troops were in front of us, driving the enemy toward the perimeter fence somewhere in the woods ahead.

When we hit the fence, it was down. Who tore it down I never learned. It was down when we got there and that was the reality of it. We kept going.

Somehow in the woods amid the smoke and bodies, we lost Grafton. He must have run on ahead. I was too old a dog for loping through the woods when people could be hiding behind any tree praying for a good shot at their pursuers. Ahead I could hear the cacophony of gunfire. Bodies lay every which way, a lot of them shot in the back. The wounded were groaning. The rocky forest floor looked like hell’s half acre.

A moment later I saw the first body that had been scalped. The head was a bloody mess and the hair was gone. At the time I thought, maybe shrapnel did that.

I kept going, and soon found another. Scalped.

A hundred yards later, I met an unarmed man wandering amid the shattered trees and rocks. He had long hair, at least on the fringes; his scalp had been cut and torn off. The top of his head and his face were masses of blood.

I stopped him, forced him to lie down. “Whoa. What the hell happened?”

“A shell hit near me. I was out for a bit, and when I woke up some guy was ripping the top of my head off. He had a big knife. He left me there.”

“Lie still. The medics will be along after a bit.”

“Help me, mister! For God’s sake!” He clutched at me but I drew back and scanned the woods.

“Lie still,” I repeated. “Your war is over.”

I picked up the pace. I had covered maybe two hundred yards when I came upon a big tattooed guy with a long knife and a black rifle. He had a bag on a strap over his shoulder. I could see hair protruding from it. He was bending over a figure on the ground, a woman in shorts with long blond hair, and he had his knife out. She had an arm up, trying to fend him off. “For God’s sake,” she screamed. He grabbed a handful of hair, lifted her head a little, and jabbed the knife into her scalp.

“Stop,” I roared. He turned toward me and I shot him.

I ran toward him as he went down. The woman on the ground looked at me stunned, then she was dead, as if someone had turned a switch. He had her scalp half off.

He was still alive. He looked at me with the strangest expression. I kicked his rifle away.

Then a shot rang out. He took the bullet in the head. I turned and saw Sarah Houston standing there with her carbine at her shoulder.

She shot into him three or four more times, turned, and began walking downhill, east toward Camp David and the rolling racket of gunfire.

The woman on the ground was wearing a Penn T-shirt — University of Pennsylvania — now soaked with blood from a mortal wound caused by a large shard of a tree that was still sticking two feet out of her chest. She had bled a lot before the scalper got to her. Blood, almost black, was everywhere. She and the scalper lay in it.

The sun was already behind the bald crest above me, leaving the woods in dark shadow. Below on the slope, Sarah threaded her way through trees still standing and those blasted by shellfire, around downed trees, limbs, and rocky outcrops, and disappeared from view. I got myself in motion, following along.

Grafton must have passed these wounded people on his trot down the hill, sore ribs and all, trying to get to Camp David before the mob killed Soetoro. He was a man on a mission.

I wasn’t. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Barry Soetoro.

It got dark as I went through the woods. There was just enough moon and starlight to allow me to see trees and rocks except under dense foliage, when I had to literally feel my way along. I wished I had some night-vision goggles, but I didn’t. And of course, neither did anyone else. I only tripped and fell four times.

After a while I got glimpses of fires burning around the presidential enclave. I moved carefully, the M4 at the ready. I came out of the trees and walked along a graveled path toward the biggest of the fires. People were everywhere, and all of them were armed. I figured they were our guys, and was sure when I saw fifty or sixty people sitting on the ground wearing white plastic ties around their wrists. There must have been a thousand people in the lawn and flower beds, most of them shouting like fiends.

Near the front door of what I took to be the main building or lodge, I saw Grafton and some of the people from the camp this morning confronting a knot of men and women in business attire. They had to be Secret Service. Barry and Mickey Soetoro were not in sight. I went around the corner of the house away from the group. The house, or lodge, was a two story. Looking around and concluding I was unobserved, I leaped for the bottom of a balcony. Got my hands on the concrete floor of the thing and pulled myself up with every muscle screaming about all the exercise I hadn’t been getting.

Checking over my shoulder, I decided I still didn’t have an audience, so went up like I was climbing a rope. Hooked an ankle over the top of the rail and voila, I was in. The door, unlocked, led to a bedroom. The lights were on inside and it was empty.

I closed the balcony door and stood listening with my pistol in my hand as I scanned the room. Actually, it was the sitting room of a suite. The crowd noise outside was now only a murmur. First I checked the bedroom, which was dark and empty. So was the bathroom.

The interior door of the sitting room opened into a hallway. I could hear voices from my left. That was the way I wanted to go, but only after I checked these other suites, for there appeared to be four of them off this hallway. When I went toward the voices, I wanted to know that there was no one behind me. The second suite I checked was empty of people, but the bed and bathroom had obviously been used.

In the third suite I found the body. It was lying beside the wet bar, as if it had fallen off a bar stool. The remnants of several drinks were on the bar. His throat was cut and he had done a lot of bleeding. I tried not to step in the blood, but to get a look at the face to see if I could recognize it. Yep. Al Grantham, the chief of staff.

Whoever cut his throat knew exactly how to do it. It looked like just one vicious swipe had severed the carotid arteries and his windpipe. Apparently done from behind. Unconsciousness had followed within a second or two as blood pressure in the victim’s brain dropped toward zero.

I reached and touched his hand. It was still supple, although just beginning to cool off. He hadn’t been dead long, not more than a few minutes. The blood was red and sticky.

I found that the palm of my hand on my pistol was sweaty. I dried it on my jeans and checked to make sure the suite was indeed empty of living people. A surprise by a knife fighter of that caliber was something to be avoided.

The hallway still empty, I tried the door of the fourth suite. Sucked it up and went in fast with the pistol ready. No one there.

Back down the hallway, gliding along beside the wall, listening intently. The voices got louder as I moved.

I could see that the wall I was against turned into a railing, and the hallway became a balcony leading to a stairway down into a great room. I got down on the floor, and after crawling, inched the top of my head around the edge of the wall and peeked between it and the first balcony upright.

There in the main room below, no more than fifteen feet from me, were Barry and Mickey Soetoro… and Sulana Schanck and a male aide I didn’t recognize, talking to a couple of Secret Service types carrying M4s. Vice President Rhodes was there, the veep from central casting, with the superbly barbered white hair and square chin, in a gray suit that fit perfectly. Two other people were facing the agents: I couldn’t see their faces and didn’t know who they were. Rhodes’ aides or politicians, no doubt, and true believers to the core.

“… There are at least a thousand of them, Mr. President. Perhaps twice that. They have the buildings surrounded and have complete control. We have six people left. The rebels can come into this building anytime they decide to walk over us and do it.”

“Have you called for reinforcements? Assistance? Whatever you call it?”

“Yes. No one answers our radio transmissions, and no one is picking up the scrambled landlines.”

“You’re going to have to talk to Grafton,” the veep said to the prez.

“I am not going to surrender,” Soetoro declared. I thought I could detect a slight tremor in his voice, but it may have been only the acoustics. “Where are our supporters? Where are the liberal armies that were going to preserve order and support the federal government against the reactionaries? Where are they?”

I thought that his loyal supporters lying dead or maimed on the mountainside or sitting outside with their hands shackled by plastic ties were beyond caring how much they had disappointed ol’ Barry.

Which of these people killed Al Grantham with a knife, and why? If you were going to do it, why not years ago? Truthfully, his mother should have done it way back when she realized what a twisted, diseased monster she had foisted upon the world, but that was water under the bridge, until today.

Of course, the knife artist could be somewhere else in the building, not down below. I glanced back down the hallway, a bit nervously, I suppose, to ensure that it was still empty. I certainly didn’t want that dude within twenty yards of me.

Meanwhile they were jabbering away just below me. Everyone talking at once. Just beyond the door was a seriously unhappy crowd, or if you were inside looking out, an angry armed mob. These people in the lodge had no idea what fate awaited them. Jake Grafton didn’t know either. Not only did I not know, I didn’t give a damn.

I became aware that Sulana Schanck was having a serious private conversation with Barry Soetoro, just a few steps away from the others. No one else was apparently paying attention to what was being said, and they were talking too low for me to eavesdrop, even though my hearing is excellent. I tried to read lips and body language. She was adamant and he was resisting.

Whatever fate awaited these two, it would probably be worse for Soetoro. Schanck was merely a bit player. Or so I thought.

Then, in a twinkling of an eye, I found out how wrong I was. Sulana Schanck pulled a large knife from her sleeve and with one vicious backhand sliced Soetoro’s throat from ear to ear. Blood geysered forth, showering Schanck, as the president sank toward the floor.

I scrambled to my knees and pointed my pistol, but I was too late. She spun like a ballet dancer, took one bound, and used the knife on the veep’s neck, with similar results. John Rhodes went down in a welter of blood.

One of the Secret Service agents beat me to the trigger. He put a burst in Sulana Schanck’s chest, hammering her to the floor.

“Drop it,” I shouted. I had the Kimber .45 at arm’s length pointed right at his head. If he tried to swing that carbine in my direction he was going to die.

“Drop the weapons,” I roared again. Both carbines hit the floor.

The outside door swung open and a man appeared there with a pistol in his hand. I shouted, “You in the door. Get Admiral Grafton and send him in here now!”

Down below, Mickey had freaked. The aides and pols were fluttering around uselessly, staring horrified at the corpses of Barry Soetoro and his vice president. There was nothing anyone on earth could do for them. Sulana Schanck hadn’t twitched since she hit the floor. Maybe she was in Paradise now or shaking hands with Muhammad in Hell.

To my eternal relief, Jake Grafton and General Considine walked into the room accompanied by four guys carrying weapons.

I sat down on the floor and holstered my shooter.

About two hours later the bodies of the president, vice president, chief of staff, and chief political advisor were carried out of the house and placed on a stack of firewood in the middle of a grassy area. The crowd had raided the presidential woodpile. They piled the bodies on that rick of wood, poured a couple of gallons of gasoline on them, and set them afire.

The National Guard had arrived by then and the volunteers had stopped shooting their guns into the air. The prisoners were loaded on trucks and driven away. I didn’t ask where they were being taken.

A huge silent crowd encircled the fire. As I watched, the woman from the hike up the mountain, Betty Connelly, stepped from the crowd, leveled her shotgun into the fire, and fired twice.

Then she turned and walked away.

Grafton and Considine came over to where I was standing.

“Tell me what happened in there, Tommy.”

So I told it, from climbing the balcony, to finding Grantham’s corpse, to watching the Soetoro party trying to decide what to do… to Schanck’s unexpected knife work.

“So you didn’t hear what she and the president said?”

“No, sir. It looked like she was urging him to do something that he didn’t want to do. Maybe she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Workplace violence,” General Considine remarked flippantly.

They had a few more questions, but I had no more answers.

“ISIS or Al Qaeda will claim they got him,” Grafton said gloomily.

“Soetoro is the one who chose Sulana Schanck to sit beside him and whisper in his ear,” Considine remarked. “The true believers are going to have to swallow that, Jake, whether they want to or not.”

“Et tu, Brute,” Grafton muttered.

I scored a flashlight off a soldier on the water truck and went looking for Sarah. Meanwhile she found Grafton. The funeral pyre was burning steadily now. The admiral had a handheld radio up to his ear, so I gave him the Hi sign and he acknowledged. With the fire illuminating a thousand faces, Sarah and I turned our backs to it and plunged into the darkness.

It was a five-mile hike through the woods, all uphill, and we came out on the bald about a half-mile north of the pickup. A sliver moon was hanging in the sky and the stars were out. This old earth just keeps on turning. Walking toward the truck, I asked her, “How are you feeling?”

She didn’t reply.

“If that truck isn’t hors de combat, I thought we might head west.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You got the keys to the truck?” I asked.

“I left them in the ignition.”

Oh boy.

That half-mile hike through the grass in the moonlight, with corpses lying on the ground in a random pattern, was one of the memories I will carry with me all my days. There were at least two army trucks out there, lights ablaze, looking for wounded. The whole scene was surreal. The dead didn’t even whisper.

We passed a young woman wandering along, trying in the moon and starlight to see the faces of the dead. She didn’t have a weapon. Maybe she never did, or threw hers away or lost it. She didn’t speak to us, so we passed her and kept hiking. I wondered which side of the fight she had been on, then decided that really didn’t matter.

It was a little after midnight when we got to the truck. The keys were dangling from their slot. Is this a great country or what? All four tires had air. The windshield had taken at least three bullets and was in bad shape. One of the bullets had gone through the windshield and out the rear window. Fortunately Sarah had been lying on the seat at the time, protected by the motor and lots of metal, so she wasn’t tagged. One of the truck’s headlights was shot out. Some of the sheet metal had holes or gouge marks from bullets, and the radio aerial was missing, shot off. I opened the hood and examined the radiator and hoses with the flashlight. No visible leaks. Maybe the antifreeze all ran out. I looked at the ground under the engine, which was dry. We were good to go.

About a hundred yards to the south was an army truck with every light on. I walked over and saw a white cross painted on the side. Dr. Proudfoot was there, and he said the medics were out looking for wounded.

“We found some guy who had been scalped,” he said. “Hell of a wound. He’s a professor from some little college in New England. I sedated him.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“Probably, if infections don’t kill him.”

I shook Proudfoot’s hand and walked back to my stolen FEMA truck. Sarah was already in the passenger seat, buckled up.

“Idaho,” Sarah said.

“Idaho,” I agreed.

I fired up the motor. The lone headlight bravely stabbed the darkness.