A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (47 page)

Responses to the increased violence have been vocal across the country.

“I don’t see why we even got a discussion in the black community over whether or not we should arm ourselves against the crackers,” said Aziz Muhammad, leader of the New Black Panthers in Los Angeles. “The answer is: Yes! We are arming ourselves for survival.”

“We got to take to the streets like we did in the 1960s,” said Matthew Underall of New Weather Underground. “We got to force the government to move toward peace and social justice.”

The World Socialist Web predicts worse times ahead: “The whole global fabric centered on the U.S. for 60 years is collapsing, generating turmoil of all sorts. What is this social unrest? War! It’s as simple and horrifying as that.”

“Anastos is my man because he can change America,” declared a PEIU union member, whose last job was as a Federal census taker. “I pray to God America will listen to Patrick Wayne Anastos. He is the true salvation for America, to bring us beyond the negative, nasty and injustice.”

White House spokesman Dewey Gubbins said internal security forces such as AmeriCorps and Homeland Security must be further beefed up to counter growing civil unrest...

Chapter Eighty-Four

Colorado

The gravel road that led to the “mental health facility” made a sharp, narrow bend between a ridge and a noisy canyon creek. Whippoorwills were starting their mournful tri-syllable exchanges in the purple twilight of evening when Dennis Shook on watch from high on the ridge gave the signal by flashlight that the buses were coming. Big C and several other Defenders got to work on a massive boulder to get it moving. Once they got it moving, it thumped the short distance downhill in a shower of dust, gravel and smaller rocks and came to rest in the middle of the road. The bus drivers would have to stop to clear the mini-avalanche.

Headlights cut through the gathering darkness as the buses eased into the curve at the base of the ridge. Militiamen scurried out of sight. The lead bus locked its wheels at the last moment and skidded to a halt only a few feet short of the obstruction. It appeared the second bus might either ram the first or pitch off into the canyon. The driver managed to brake his coach mere inches from his leader’s rear bumper.

The two big vehicles sat rumbling while the dust cleared. From concealment, Big C heard the whoosh of air brakes released and saw
Gray Travel Charters
emblazoned on the sides of the carriers, below which appeared happy illustrations of families vacationing at Mount Rushmore and Monument Valley.

Hydraulic doors opened. A hefty man crammed like a sausage into a gray bus driver’s jacket stepped out onto the road. Big C heard him swear. He walked up and glared at the boulder. He slapped it with his open palm in frustration. Swearing like the proverbial sailor on shore leave, he turned around and motioned toward his bus.

Two AmeriCorps Green Shirts wearing holstered sidearms got off and walked up to the driver. One of them made a joke and they laughed. The driver was in no mood for it.

“Don’t stand there, assholes!” he snapped. “Help me push it off into the creek.”

“Watch who you’re calling assholes, asshole,” one of the Green Shirts warned.

They put their backs into the rock, but could not budge it. Panting, the driver straightened and beckoned toward the second bus. That driver and two additional guards got off and strode to the front. Falling rocks in the Rockies were not an unusual occurrence.

Enough light remained in the western sky for Big C to observe that passengers on the buses appeared to have no interest in what was going on. Heads behind the tinted windows remained as stiff and unmoving as department store mannequins. The guards seemed unconcerned about their charges escaping.

Once Big C issued the order, his band of armed rebels leaped out onto the road, brandishing weapons and shouting like savages. They rushed the surprised drivers and guards, yelling and shoving and throwing them face down on the road while skillfully relieving them of their weapons. Other militiamen scurried aboard the buses. Little Tump Kinsey, the old Vietnam vet in charge of boarding, looked stunned when he stuck his head out the bus door a few moments later.

“Brown, you need to take a look at this,” he called out.

Big C’s was an imposing large figure in the road. The captives clearly understood by his demeanor that he meant business and was prepared to execute the lot of them if necessary. He made sure his men had the situation under control before he climbed on the bus to see what Tump was clamoring about.

Tump had switched on the interior lights. Bus seats were packed with men and a few women, none of whom exhibited the slightest curiosity about what was going on around them. Several who had been thrown from their seats remained sprawled in the aisle or jammed unresponsive in the leg spaces between seats. For all their reaction, they might have been zombies staring into the void, without emotion or intelligence.

“They drugged!” Big C realized.

“They’re in Heaven, for all they care,” Tump noted, overwhelmed.

“Or hell.”

“They ain’t what I wanted to show you,” Tump said. He pointed to a seat about halfway back.

Big C’s breath caught in his throat. “My God! Sharon!”

Sharon Lowenthal didn’t even look at him when he rushed back and grabbed her in an embrace, repeating her name. She wore jeans and a light yellow jacket. Her dark hair looked used and there were bags underneath her eyes. A bruise on her cheek suggested she may have resisted arrest.

“Sis? It’s me. Corey. What happen to James? Have you seen him?”

There may have been a flicker of awareness in her dark eyes when she heard Nail’s name, but that was all. She was completely disengaged, passive. On her way to the “death camp” and she didn’t even know it.

* * *

Earlier, before Big C’s militia ambushed the charter buses, a Humvee occupied by three AmeriCorps goons had passed on the road outbound toward State 160. The Green Shirts inside it were buttoned up against the chill of arriving evening, smoking and joking. Clearly, they expected no trouble. Who would be interested in a nut ward kept secluded for the Public’s safety?

“That hummer be coming back,” Big C had predicted.

Sure enough, he was still inside the bus trying to revive Sharon when Dennis Shook came bounding back down the ridge with the Devil hot on his ass. He attempted to leap the drainage ditch, stumbled and fell flat in the gravel on the road. He scrambled to his feet, his nose skinned and bleeding and the whites of his eyes walling.

“The Hummer!” he shouted.

Big C bounced from the bus. “How far back?”

“Maybe three miles. It just rounded the bend near the State 160 junction.”

Four minutes. Perhaps less. Big C was already moving, barking orders. “Leave the boulder in the road. Drag those people in the woods. Gag ’em and tie ’em to trees. I take the big Green Shirt’s uniform. Bias, Combs, Turner, you put on the other uniforms. Delbert, you and Headshot are bus drivers, okay?”

“What about me?” Tump Kinsey interrupted.

“I got a mission for Shook and you, Tump,” Big C said. “It too important for just anyone to handle.”

He explained as he hurriedly shed his shirt and jacket and replaced them with the larger AmeriCorps tunic, ball cap, gun belt and pistol. The shirt stretched thin across his torso, but he doubted the Hummer patrol would notice in the dark.

“Tump, I need you and Shook take Sharon back across the mountain to where you stashed your cars—”

“Brown, she can’t walk!”

“That’s why Shook going with you.
Carry
her you have to. Build a stretcher. I don’t care what you do—just get her out of here safe.”

“Can’t we wait for you to come back with the buses and the other prisoners?”

“What if we don’t come back?”

That sobered him. Shook and Tump followed him aboard the bus. Sharon sat unmoving on her aisle seat. Big C picked her up in his arms and carried her off the bus like she was a child. The bus lights pooled shadow around the boulder still in the road. The other militiamen so designated were already stripped and drawing on their purloined uniforms while still others dragged trussed bodies into the tree line. The Hummer’s headlights were not yet visible coming around the ridge road.

“Tump, this woman going to be our most influential voice for the underground resistance when it all break down,” Big C continued as militiamen gathered around for further orders. “People know her from TV. They trust her like they did Jerry Baer. It up to the two of you, Tump, to make sure she get out.”

He set Sharon on her feet. She was wobbly but managed to stand unaided. Big C pressed his go-cell into Tump’s palm.

“We don’t have a signal out here,” he said. “James Nail and girl name Judy know this number. One them be calling when you get signal again. Go to Oklahoma and hide out in the hills. Take Sharon to Nail when he call. Understand?”

“Brown, I ain’t too old to fight—”

Big C slapped him on the shoulder. “I know you ain’t, Tump. Sharon will make people listen if we bring back Lieutenant Ross and some of the other survivors of that death camp to spread the word. We didn’t stand up for the Jews when Hitler began rounding them up. No one paid attention to what Stalin and Mao was doing. It not going to be that way this time. If we have to fight, let the war start here. Tonight.”

The old Vietnam warrior’s wizened face looked gray in the yellow light from the bus headlights. Shook, then Tump, gripped Big C’s hand with hard emotion.

“If we don’t see one another again—” Tump choked up.

“You’ll see me, man. Hurry, now.”

Together, the two militiamen hustled Sharon off the road and into the trees. A halo of brighter light bounced off the sky and road as the Humvee roared around the curve, chasing its headlights. Big C ripped his eyes free of the darkness into which Sharon disappeared. He had to believe that Sharon, Nail, Judy and he would all be together again. Some day.

Chapter Eighty-Five

Colorado

The Humvee’s headlights washed across the two stalled buses as it crunched gravel and slid to a halt behind the last carrier. It sat growling in the middle of the road like some beast of prey posed to strike, its turret-mounted Two-Forty machinegun manned and aimed at the coterie of bus drivers and Green Shirts who appeared to be struggling with a boulder blocking the road. Big C looked up, waved casually, and strode toward the new pair of headlights. He grinned and shrugged.
Hey, shit happens.

He stepped out of the glare of the lights as he approached. The 40mm Glock that previously belonged to a Green Shirt remained holstered, but the thumb strap was loose. Just in case these guys in the vehicle didn’t buy his rap.

The driver’s door swung open. A shadow stepped down onto the roadbed. A black kid. “Wassup, bro?”

“Big mother rock blockin’ the road. You homes wanna give a hand?”

The driver bent back inside the Hummer, said something to his passengers. Two other Green Shirts in full combat got out and moved around into the headlights to gaze down the road. One carried a 5.56 SAW, Squad Automatic Weapon, while the turret gunner was armed with a holstered handgun.

“Ain’t never saw you in this ’hood, bro,” the black driver said to Big C.

“Ain’t never been in this ’hood. This my first transport.”

“Fucked up place,” the driver said.

Big C maneuvered a look inside the Hummer to make sure there were only three men in the crew. These were obviously not trained soldiers. Only a few short weeks ago they might have been hijacking liquor stores and ripping purses off old ladies in the cities. After drilling for a couple of weeks in some camp like the one in Arkansas, they were tossed out to guard detention camps or make raids on militias and obstructionists.

When the driver hesitated as though to stick with his vehicle, Big C said, “Hey, bro. It gonna take all three ya’all to help us move that big fuckin’ rock.”

“Dude, you the Green Hulk. You big ’nuff to pick up that rock you own self.”

Big C laughed. “I promise my dear mammy I don’t be showin’ off.”

The three fell in step with C and they headed for the boulder.

“You play for Forty-Niners or what, bro?” the driver asked.

“Dude, my game’s cricket.”

“Say what? You some kind of big pussy?”

Big C chuckled. At the same time, using the chuckle as diversion, he took a quick side step to grab the SAW gunner by the raised neck rib of his battle rattle vest. He yanked back violently and slammed the guy to the ground while relieving him of his weapon. He sprang back and thumbed the SAW’s Safe lever to
Fire
. The Green Shirts gaped at him.

“Some a us pussies play rough,” Big C gibed.

The three prisoners were soon stripped, bound, gagged and stowed with the other captives in the woods. The commandeered Humvee was a valuable added asset. Big C assigned Bias, Turner and two of the Colorado fighters to man the armored truck. He huddled with his small band to amend their plans.

“Bias, follow the buses to the gate but stay back out of sight. We going on through the gate. Give us five minutes to roll in the tunnel under the hospital. Then you come up
on foot
, else Campione might open up on ya’all with the .50-cal. Take out the gate and disable the power shack to cut electric to the fence so Fullbright and his bunch can get in. Us on the buses will break out Lieutenant Ross and as many others we got time for. You cover us again with the hummer while we pick up the men from our other two elements. All vehicles rendezvous back here at the rock where we get on the highway and haul back across Wolf Creek Pass. Take out anybody that get in the way. We have one hour from when shooting starts to get across the pass before Apaches come on us like flies. Got any questions, better ask ’em now. This thing is going down fast and furious.”

“What happens if the Trojan Horse don’t work and they smell a rat?” Bias asked.