A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (36 page)

Peace officers and military who took a vow not to act beyond the reach of the Constitution even if the government ordered it.

“Jack and I took the vow together before all this started,” Big C said.

Marsha nodded. “About two weeks ago, my husband and several other lieutenants and sergeants on the PD were ordered to attend special in-service training in Wichita, Kansas. I’ve since learned they were all Oath Keepers. Jack was uncomfortable about it because he was told they would have to turn in their guns when they arrived.”

“But Jack went to Kansas anyhow?”

“Corey, I asked him not to. We have an FBI agent living next door to us—”

“Bob Nelson,” Big C recalled. “He was also an Oath Keeper.”

“A month ago, Bob parked his car in his drive and we haven’t seen him or his family since. Someone comes to mow the lawn and pick up the mail, but the Nelsons have disappeared. There’s a new Regional Homeland Security Director named Gary Philby who took Kimbrell’s place. I heard Jack and Bob talking one time about how Philby considers Oath Keepers unreliable should the government have to declare martial law.”

They weeding out the troublemakers,
Big C thought.

“Always before, Jack called me every night when he was away,” Marsha resumed, her voice strained from worry. “I haven’t heard a word from him this time since he left. I went to the police station to inquire. The new Police Chief—Earnest Bruton. You remember him, Corey?”

“Bruton the Crouton from Internal Security. Kiss-ass.”

“He
is
a kiss-ass,” Marsha agreed. “Jack said he was put in that position for when they federalize the police.”

People like Bruton easily became KGB or Gestapo running roughshod over people.

“Bruton told me it was none of my business where Jack was,” Marsha continued. “He told me to go home and keep my mouth shut. Corey, I’ve been hiding out in a motel since then. I’m afraid the same thing will happen to me as it did to Misty Nelson after they took Bob away.”

“You need find somewhere else safe to hide,” Big C suggested. “Probably another state.”

Marsha choked up. “I can’t leave without Jack.” She looked to her companion. “Carolyn, you want to take over from here?”

“My husband is an optical surgeon,” the grim brunette began. “About a year ago, he accepted a position in a mental health facility in the Colorado Rockies near an isolated little ski village called South Fork. The money was good, so we agreed we should separate for a year and build up a nest egg. We live in New Mexico. Cass comes home on weekends. I began to notice he seemed extremely stressed out. He has nightmares. Finally, even though the doctors there are sworn to secrecy, he told me what was going on. He said they would kill him, and me, if they found out he was talking.”

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves.

“This place,” she said, “is as bad as anything that might have come out from behind the Iron Curtain in the 1930s. Electrified fences surround it. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Cass was assigned to the hospital to remove corneas from patients. Apparently, they are political prisoners deemed dangerous to the government. Cass thinks there may be dozens of other facilities like it hidden all over the United States. People are... People are...”

It was like she found it so beyond belief that she couldn’t say it. Finally, she did.

“It’s something out of a SciFi horror movie. People are being executed as needed and their organs harvested for distribution to hospitals. What’s left of the bodies are incinerated. One hundred percent of those sent there will never leave that place. There’s a big turnover. More buses come every day filled with new prisoners.”

Tears ran freely down Marsha Ross’s cheeks. Judy turned pale, her mouth agape. Big C expected almost anything from Washington, anything but
this
. Incarcerating people who opposed government social policies started with World War I and President Woodrow Wilson, who tossed thousands of citizens in jail for no greater crime than speaking out. Until now, however, the U.S. Government had never resorted to political genocide.

“There was a boy in one of the cells named Smitty,” Carolyn went on. “He had been an AmeriCorps volunteer. Something had gone wrong and he was arrested and sent to South Fork. Cass felt sorry for him, but there was nothing he could do.

“About two weeks ago, Smitty’s cellmate was taken away for surgery. They moved a new guy in with Smitty, a Tulsa policeman named Ross. Smitty begged my husband to get in touch with Sharon Lowenthal from the TV show. He told my husband she would remember him from something that happened in Arkansas. She and you, Corey, and Detective Nail must have made some impression on him.”

Big C waited for her to go on.

“Cass forbade me to contact Sharon Lowenthal because he said she was likely next on the hit list and would end up in a place like South Fork, along with anyone associated with her. That could be dangerous for him. I just couldn’t do
nothing
, understand? I started trying to find Jack Ross’ wife and finally located Marsha hiding in a motel, scared nearly to death.”

“Trusted friends of ours on the police department put me in touch with her,” Marsha explained.

“I don’t blame her for being scared,” Carolyn said. “So, Marsha called you, Corey. That’s about it. I don’t know what you can do about it. That place is like Fort Knox or something.”

Big C had to ask it. “Carolyn, you know if Jack’s still alive?”

Marsha hung her head.

Carolyn said, “As of day before yesterday he was.”

“My God in Heaven,” Judy wailed. “Does things just keep getting crazier?”

Big C took her hand and squeezed.

“We may still have time,” he said to Marsha. “Carolyn, I going to need some information. I need the location the concentration camp, layout, guards, anything else your husband might have told you.”

United Nations to Patrol New York

(New York)—
Due to a series of events which has caused wide international notice, such as the anti-illegal immigration law enacted by the State of Arizona, the United Nations has announced that its nation members will begin patrolling the New York City borough of Staten Island to safeguard Mexican and Arab Muslim immigrants...

Chapter Sixty-four

Chicago

Dennis Trout had no one. Judy bailed out on him when he needed her most, making an excuse that she had to go to her mother’s in Bugfuck, Oklahoma, for a few days. Ever since she left, she kept sluffing him off when he cell-phoned her.

“Dennis, my mama and me is at the hospital. Can I call you back later?”

“Dennis, I’m cooking ’cause the whole family’s coming over for fried chicken and mashed taters.”

He lashed out at her in anger and frustration. “Are you fucking somebody else, Judy?”

She hung up on him.
The cunt hung up on him.

He called her back after he cooled down. “I’m sorry, Judy. I’ve been under a great deal of stress. This was a bad time for you to leave town.”

“Can we talk when I get back to Washington, Dennis?”

Can we talk?
was always a bad sign.

“You
are
coming back?”

“Where else would I go?”

She didn’t say she loved him.

The nervous tic in his left eye got worse. Wiedersham suggested he see a doctor. Marilyn said it made him look ridiculous.

What he needed was to escape this sham campaign for awhile. People around him ate, slept and lived politics twenty-four hours a day, even when they went to the john.

After delivering one of his canned speeches at a baseball field, he looked up to see a small private airplane flying over bearing a two-word message emblazoned on the underside of its wings:
Stop Anastos
. A “Freedom Rally” was being held on a soccer field at the same sports’ complex. Out of impulse and curiosity, he donned dark glasses and a hat so he wouldn’t be recognized and slipped away to take a look for himself. A first-generation Vietnamese man was starting to speak.

“Nearly forty years ago,” he said, “I left South Vietnam for political asylum in the United States. I still remember vividly the communist tanks rolling into Saigon, although I was only six years old. Trust me, such images can never be erased. My family was among the first one hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees allowed to come to America. It was a miracle from God.

“I am telling you right now that this is the greatest country on earth. Freedom and opportunity to succeed put me here today. This person standing in front of you could not exist in a socialist communist environment. But what I see now is that old nightmare of communist tanks rolling into Saigon starting to replay in America. If you don’t know it, if you think socialism is a people’s movement, I can tell you from experience that the only difference between socialism and communism is the caliber of the rifle aimed at your head...”

Trout felt sick. He fled to his hotel room and swigged from a bottle of Maalox, followed by a chaser of Jack Daniels. His eye twitched like crazy.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Scranton, Pennsylvania

The Jerry Baer Show w/Sharon Lowenthal
aired
live
from New York. James Nail was waiting for it so he would know she was all right so far. She appeared on the screen, beautiful and as high octane as ever with her curly black hair and dark eyes, wearing a blue-gray pants suit and a blue ribbon in her hair.

If anything ever happened to her...

Alone in his tiny hideout in Scranton, waiting to heal from his wounds, Nail rushed from the frig with a Coke and a bologna sandwich and plopped into an overstuffed chair that was no longer
that
overstuffed. Sometimes he thought the world might have been better off if TV had gone kaput fifty years ago for all it and its video game progeny had dumbed down and savaged the culture. Tonight, however, it allowed him to at least see Sharon.

She gave a cherry “Good evening, America!” She looked tired, stressed. With deliberate irony,
The Communist Internationale
played in the background:

‘Tis the final conflict,

Let each stand in his place.

The international working class

Shall be the human race...

An old video of Ronald Reagan filled the screen: “Those who have known freedom and lost it will never know it again.”

Sharon reappeared, perched on the edge of a table stacked with books. Behind her stood the well-used blackboards made famous by Jerry Baer.

“All over the world,” she began, looking directly into the watching eyes of America, “socialists and communists are coming out of the woodwork. Americans are being pitted against each other by those who seek complete power. When the United States was still on its way to becoming the freest, most productive nation in the world, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that the rich and the powerful would somehow find a way to kick the door of freedom closed. America, that door is closing.”

She was energetic and persuasive, but Nail was starting to doubt that anything could wake up a people gone asleep over the years. Big C liked to quote his old grandpappy.

“Give to a pig when it grunts and to a child when it cries, and you’ll have a fine pig and a bad child.”

Americans had become “bad children.”

Sharon peppered the show as usual with clips of the powerful and influential caught openly revealing their socialist mindsets and declaring their intentions, President Anastos had recently begun referring to himself as a “citizen of the earth.”

“International order is one we must achieve,” he said.

Former Black Panther Duane Smith, now current White House environmental czar and PEIU president, delivered his own prognostication. “Free enterprise has failed, never to be revived. America needs 21
^st
Century State Capitalism—like the Chinese.”

“The Constitution really doesn’t prohibit the government from doing virtually anything,” said Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham, a rumpled, obese man in a thousand-dollar suit. “Theoretically, nothing prevents the government from taking one hundred percent of your income.”

A prominent guest on a late night talk show was berating the rise of the Tea Party Movement. “The nice thing is that people who are too dumb or lazy or uninformed to cast a ballot aren’t compelled to vote; they can join a Tea Party. Far too many people are voting as it is. We’re going to have to drag the ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next century, which in their case means the 19
^th
Century. They’re too stupid. They are like dogs. They can understand inflection, they can understand fear, they can understand dominance. They don’t understand issues...”

Sharon lowered her head, as though in prayer. Nail felt her anguish. She looked up into the camera.

“America, if there’s one thing these good, tolerant, open-minded Progressives cannot stand, it’s Middle America. Your old-fashioned decency rubs a lot of lefties the wrong way. They look with suspicion on hayseeds in the heartland who fly the flag on the Fourth of July. They snicker at ordinary folks who like to go bowling or who pray or stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at a high school football game. They don’t understand why anyone would
want
to eat at Golden Corral or Red Lobster or shop at Wal-Mart...

“Government wants to tell you hayseeds what to eat, how much air to put in your tires, where to live, how high to set your thermostats, how much money you can make....Government takes away our personal sense of responsibility. While we were asleep, government through handouts taught people not to believe in themselves anymore—to depend on government instead. Progressives want us to believe in a Nirvana Utopia. They sell the idea by using envy and government checks like candy from their pockets, taking power in exchange for promises of ‘hope and change’ they can’t possibly keep. This is not fairness. This is lust for power, the face of tyranny in disguise.”