What Your Future Looks Like, Lefty-Lib Assholes
XXXI. – Running The Cat Roads
(40 years and ten months after Longview)
Man is born to live, not prepare for life. – Boris Pasternak
(40 years and ten months after Longview)
Man is born to live, not prepare for life. – Boris Pasternak
On a hot and
dusty afternoon in August, Civil Guard Lieutenant Robert Campbell the Third—Allura’s
husband, Bobby
Three—sat behind a sturdy wooden desk in his office, staring up at a huge map
that covered almost one entire wall of the room. It was a topographical chart
that showed his detachment’s entire sector in every detail that was possible to
put onto paper: every back road, every creek, every ridge and wash, every ranch
or farmstead, every building larger than a chicken coop, and most of the
chicken coops as well. Old Interstate 15, as it was still known in the United States—the Border Highway as it was known in the Northwest American Republic—ran
through the map like a burning crimson scar.
Bobby,
aged 33, was now the Guard’s station commander for the Basin, Montana border police detachment. His
father, the 54-year-old Colonel Robert Campbell Junior, was now commanding
officer of the CG’s entire Border Division, which included all the units and districts
abutting the Border Highway
on the NAR side to a depth of thirty miles inland. Bobby was only three months into
his tour as station commander in Basin, and so he hadn’t yet become completely
familiar with his turf. He studied the map as much as he could in his spare
moments in the office, trying to translate the lines and colors into a solid
landscape in his mind, matching it with what he’d seen out in the area.
His office was housed in the older and more picturesque part
of the station, a two-story red brick structure fronting onto the small town’s
single street. It had once been the local firehouse. Basin, Montana was perched
in a high, narrow canyon among scrubby, rocky hills along the Border Highway,
27 miles north of Butte and 35 miles south of Helena, and about ten miles from
the Continental Divide. Bobby
Campbell could go to the window at the end of the corridor and look eastward
into the Elkhorn Mountains
in the United States.
Somewhat to the south, visible if he were to stick his head out the same
window, was Basin Creek, which flowed through the center of the little town to
its confluence with a larger stream, the Boulder River, which in turn flowed
eastward Across The Road, as the local saying went, and past Basin’s opposite
number on the American side, the border town of Boulder.
Suddenly Corporal Mike
Sweeney, a brawny young red-haired man in Guardsman green, stuck his head in
the door. “Lieutenant? Just got a call on the sub frequency down in the commo
room. Johnny’s made it Across The Road.”
“Outstanding!”
said Bobby.
“His load’s okay?”
“Yes sir,
the load is intact. Hatch is right behind him in the truck. Looks like they had
no problem at all on this run, other than some greedy cops in St. Paul trying to shake them down, but
Johnny sorted them out.”
“He didn’t
shoot them, did he?” asked Campbell.
“No, sir.
At least he didn’t mention it if he did.”
“Any
problems with the Montana National Guard patrols?” asked Bobby.
“No, sir,” replied Sweeney. “I guess they were all on their
lunch break or whatever when the boys rolled on through. Jefferson County
deputies didn’t even chase them this time.”
“They must be really getting sloppy Over The Road, there,”
said Campbell. “Or
else the Selkirk boys are that good.”
“The
Selkirks are good, sir,” confirmed Sweeney, who had been in Basin for two years
and knew the gentlemen in question. “But County’s not really the problem. Ben
Lomax over in Boulder
doesn’t really give a damn. He’s the live and let live type. Likes to do a
quiet shift and go home on time at night. The Selkirks are local boys, or they
were before independence, anyway. Their grandfather’s an Old Fighter, and so
they ended up on our side of the line after Longview, but they’ve still got friends and
family all over, on both sides. I think the boys spend half their time in Boulder. Ben knows them,
and he knows they’re not bringing anything dangerous through his county, or
taking out anything more dangerous than untaxed weed. Once a runner makes it
into Jefferson County, they’re usually home free, so long as they don’t run
down people’s livestock or drive right down Main Street in Boulder and honk
their horns at him. Which is what precipitated that last chase incident.”
“Bet that
jackass in Billings isn’t okay with it,” said Campbell. “Keeps running
off at the mouth about those in what’s left of his fair state doing business
with the devil, and all.”
Sweeney
shrugged. “Yeah, well, Governor Wellman’s a tub-thumper who owes his election
to the evangelicals, and yeah, he probably does think we’re the devil, and he
gins up a big anti-smuggling campaign every couple of years or so. But he knows
as well as everybody that half his state’s income is related to moonlight
merchandising in some way, or some other dealing with the Republic. Hell, Longview did give us the best part of the state, as that
shower in Billings
never ceases to complain. Ever since the United
States went all funny about beef, Montana people have had two ways to make a
living: they can get hold of a government check of some kind, or they can
smuggle stuff in and out of the Republic. The lazy drunks go for the welfare,
the lazy crooks get a state job, and the crooks with initiative and a sense of
adventure run the cat roads.”
“They
coming in soon?”
“Yes, sir,”
said Sweeney. “About ten minutes, Johnny said.”
“Their
connections here already?” asked Bobby.
“Yes, sir,
since about ten this morning. The courier from the Health Service is here to
pick up the medical stuff, the revenue guy from Olympia is here for his cut and Ed Jones, the buyer from Nordstroms, got in about an
hour ago. They’re all down in the diner drinking coffee and stuffing themselves
with Shirley’s cherry pie. They always do when they’re here.”
“How often
is that?” asked Bobby.
“I thought the Selkirks only went out every three months or so?”
“They meet
other runners here, every couple of weeks,” said Sweeney. “Nordstroms gets a
lot of their specialty items through Basin. Lots of fancy booze, champagne and
imported beer, electronics and parts for electronics we don’t make
equivalencies for here in the Republic for one reason or another. Swiss and
Belgian chocolate, high-end ladies’ shoes and evening gowns and perfume, fancy
menswear, luxury items we don’t have the time or inclination to make here in
the Republic but which people still want to buy. When somebody wants to buy
something, somebody’s gonna sell it to them, and if we don’t make it here they’re
gonna smuggle it in. We’re a popular destination for international
entrepreneurs.”
“I haven’t
met the Selkirk brothers yet. I’ll go down and wait for them and introduce
myself. Professional courtesy, them being a criminal element and all,” said
Lieutenant Campbell, rising from the desk. He had just enough of a policeman’s
mindset so that conniving in a smuggling operation felt odd to him, but in
actual fact, as far as the Guard was concerned, none of this was illegal. The
Northwest American Republic was a free country, and if a citizen wanted to
butcher a steer and drive over to Boulder and sell it off the back of a truck
for New American dollars, or trade it for whatever he wanted so long as it wasn’t
Zionist crap or dirty videos, then it was his perfect right to do so. Or if he
wanted to drive a trunk full, or for that matter a whole truck full of
marijuana cigarettes purchased in bulk from the local co-op store at twenty
cents a pack, and sell them over the border for 24 New American or 30 East
Canadian dollars per pack, then that was his business as well, so long as the
Revenue Commissioners’ tax was paid on the purchasing end, which could easily
be done while still making a huge profit. The Republic could always use the
foreign exchange. The Northwest was very much a free enterprise-based society;
it was capitalism that had always been the problem, and the two were by no
means the same thing.
The NAR had very few laws. No one was allowed to kill or
abuse a child, or kill an unarmed person with premeditation or with poison. You
weren’t allowed to hold up liquor stores, or burn down people’s houses just to
watch the glow. No one was allowed to
advocate Zionism or agitate for the return of the Northwest to the U.S.A., or spy
for a foreign government. Boys and girls graduating high school went into the
Labor Service, and after that boys went into the army for two years, no
exceptions. Beyond that, the law didn’t take too much interest in how people
lived their lives.
* * *
Across The Road the situation was a little more complex.
Things had always been kind of nebulous on the immediate American side of the
old McCurtain, where Americans lived in the shadow of the vile and satanic
Racist Entity itself just across four lanes of asphalt. To be sure, now that
white people had mostly cleared out of the big cities, things in the U.S.A as a
whole weren’t anywhere nearly as bad overall as they had been 45 years before,
at the time of 10/22, nor even as bad in some respects as they had been 28
years ago under Hunter Wallace.
The American town stood on the eastern side of old
Interstate 15, on the north bank of the Boulder River.
Boulder was
larger than its stroppy little opposite number Across The Road. Where Basin sat
up in a high mountain pass, Boulder was down in a lush valley, surrounded by a
rolling prairie broken with creeks and fine stands of cottonwoods and Balsam
pines, the earth green with grass in spring, with blue-black mountain ranges
towering all around. Jefferson County, Montana, had been almost evenly split between the United States and the Republic under the terms
of the Longview
treaty, but it had to be said that in this case it was the Americans who had
ended up with the better and prettier half.
Boulder
and Basin were only a few miles apart, but when the two towns were separated by
the border four decades before, it also separated families, homesteads and
land, water rights, businesses from customers and people from the shopping and
medical facilities they needed. It had cut children off from their schools and
men and women from their jobs. Not to mention the physical and psychic scars
caused by the murder and bloodshed of five years of guerrilla warfare in the
district. The Northwest was always mostly white, and in many places throughout
the Homeland, the War of Independence had been a civil war between whites,
nowhere more so than in Montana.
In Montana it
had been bad: father against son, brother against brother, and sometimes sister
against sister and husband against wife. A longstanding community that had once
been whole was now cut in two by the Border
Highway. There were graves on both sides of the
border. In the minds of many, the earth of those graves was still fresh.
Twelve years later had come the brief occupation of Jefferson County by the NDF during the Seven Weeks
War. It had only lasted for a few weeks, before the powder-gray uniforms and
coal-scuttle helmets had climbed into their tanks and trucks and Heeps and
rolled back Over The Road on the signing of the armistice. That hadn’t been too
bad; folks had mostly stayed indoors and avoided the visitors. General A.J.
Drones had ruled his troops with an iron hand; God help the NDF soldier who
took so much as a can of soda without paying for it, or who so much as looked
cross-eyed at a local girl. Drones had his company commanders charging men and
giving them fines and extra duty even for swearing or using foul language in
front of a local.
After the Seven Weeks the United States of America, while
still technically in existence, had kind of slipped away from the more remote
areas of the country as it struggled to wrestle with 150 years’ worth of demons
and big, bad chickens now come home to roost. In the intervening years, the
people of both communities had arrived at a modus vivendi. Before the Seven
Weeks, the border of East Montana had been crawling both with troops and with
the hated paramilitary private contractors, but under the terms of the peace
treaty everything west of Billings
had been de-militarized. The McCurtain had quietly withered away and was now
largely a dead letter, although the Montana National Guard still patrolled the
border and manned some of the checkpoints. But others were open, and it was no
longer a case of shoot-on-sight for anyone with a white skin who set foot on
the crumbling asphalt of Interstate 15 headed in a westerly direction. Most of
the minefields and fences along the McCurtain had been destroyed by the NDF
during the war, and were never re-built, nor were the ADL and SPLC’s
mercenaries allowed back on the border. This had caused the level of tension
and bloodshed to drop precipitously; the American-Montanans had welcomed the
new peaceful life and absence of body-armored thugs from their midst, and the
Northwest government had welcomed the ability to shift more of its own troop
and police presence to the roiling Aztlan border, where the exact opposite
situation prevailed.
Not that there was much of an American military left in the
years after the war. The Montana National Guard maintained a number of posts
along the 400-mile frontier, one of them in Jefferson County,
and periodically they and local police would pursue and sometimes intercept
blockade runners on their side of the line. If the smugglers were Americans
looking to make some cash by running microchips and antibiotics into the
Republic and bringing back a load of Red Hook beer to sell, as most of them
were, then it was their tough luck. They knew the risks of what was still
legally Unauthorized Contact. But runners like the young Selkirk brothers posed
a problem. They were Northwest citizens and residents, and under no
circumstances did the NAR ever allow one of its own to face an American court
of any kind. The memory of the black-robed and silk-suited tyrants of Zion, often excremental
of skin and prominent of proboscis, had been seared into the Republic’s
national consciousness until it was now almost genetically imprinted.
In the past such incidents had sometimes escalated into
cross-border rescue raids by SS commandos and retaliatory incursions by the NDF
to grab hostages for trade, the kind of thing that might have started another
war had there been any effective United States or Canadian military
left. The East Montana state government was
too weak to stand a chance against the Northmen, and there was virtually no
help available from what was left of the American central government. The
Americans responded by doing what Americans have always done best: they said
one thing and did another. Over the years a strictly unofficial arrangement had
been arrived at. When an NAR resident or citizen was arrested for blockade
running on the American side of the line, their vehicles and the contraband
they contained were confiscated, the proceeds usually ending up in the pockets
of cops and local politicians, while the smugglers themselves were hauled down
to the nearest border crossing and kicked back into the Republic.
When beef had become illegal under One Nation Indivisible
and huge swaths of Montana land had been confiscated by the federal government
to be emptied of white people and given back to the Indians for casinos and the
buffalo for grazing, most of the surviving Jefferson County ranchers had
reluctantly switched to dairy cattle, crops such as wheat or sorghum if their
land would bear it, or even fruit orchards and truck gardens. Now beef was
legal again in the States. In some states. Well, sort of. Maybe. If you paid a
tax on it. Or maybe not. Nobody seemed to know or even care. Nobody really
seemed to be in charge any more on the once all-meddling federal level. For
those ranchers who still elected to raise beef cattle, there were several
abattoirs in town. Unmarked freezer trucks periodically showed up from
somewhere, bought the meat, and drove off eastward, which was about all folks
knew about it. When dressed beef was short in Jefferson, their friends and
neighbors from Across The Road who still raised beef cattle by the ton to feed
a nation of barbarian carnivores were always willing to help out.
There had never been any border posts on the NAR side of the
line, and the few crossings on the American side that were manned these days
didn’t even have any customs officials, since technically speaking there wasn’t
supposed to be any population movement between the two countries. A few jokers
on the internet still posted maps of the region with nothing but a blank space
where the Northwest
Republic was, along with
waves and mermaids and sea serpents, marked in archaic calligraphy, “Here be
Monsters.” Washington D.C.’s
wishful thinking to the contrary, after Longview
travel between the two halves of Jefferson
County had never
completely ceased, even in the worst days of the McCurtain. Just as the
Israelis had never succeeded in choking off the Palestinians completely from
the rest of their people with Bremer walls and electric fences, neither did the
United States government succeed in completely tearing Jefferson County,
Montana, in two and boxing up both halves separately. When someone had property
and loved ones on the other side, one found a way to get through the barbed
wire and the minefields for the occasional visit. And back.
Since the end of the Seven Weeks War and demilitarization,
travel back and forth across the Border Highway was now a regular if rather
cautious and infrequent thing for some people, although there were those on
both sides who as a matter of personal principle and bitter memory had never set
foot on the other side of I-15 for the entire forty years.
Both sides were acutely aware of the risk of incidents that might get blown up into something worse. There was a sort of hotline phone system between the Civil Guard commander in Basin and the Jefferson County sheriff; Ben Lomax and now Lieutenant Bobby Campbell the Third both carried their special phones with them all the time, just in case. Completely illegal in the U.S., of course, technically a Class A federal felony in fact, Unauthorized Contact, but American law was now more or less optional in East Montana. In Boulder and Basin, stores and business owners accepted New American dollars, Northwest credits, and usually East Canadian dollars, sometimes marking prices in all three currencies unless the Boulder folks got word that some kind of inspector or big-wig from Billings was coming, in which case they hid all such tell-tale signs until the suit was gone. The big nightmare was that something might happen somewhere out on the cat roads involving gunfire and hot pursuit and dead bodies. Everyone hoped something like that could be resolved without starting another war.
Both sides were acutely aware of the risk of incidents that might get blown up into something worse. There was a sort of hotline phone system between the Civil Guard commander in Basin and the Jefferson County sheriff; Ben Lomax and now Lieutenant Bobby Campbell the Third both carried their special phones with them all the time, just in case. Completely illegal in the U.S., of course, technically a Class A federal felony in fact, Unauthorized Contact, but American law was now more or less optional in East Montana. In Boulder and Basin, stores and business owners accepted New American dollars, Northwest credits, and usually East Canadian dollars, sometimes marking prices in all three currencies unless the Boulder folks got word that some kind of inspector or big-wig from Billings was coming, in which case they hid all such tell-tale signs until the suit was gone. The big nightmare was that something might happen somewhere out on the cat roads involving gunfire and hot pursuit and dead bodies. Everyone hoped something like that could be resolved without starting another war.
Boulder was now a town of
around ten thousand people, with as many more living outside the city limits in
rural Jefferson County. In point of fact, Jefferson
County was now more populous and more prosperous than it had been before the
War of Independence, due in large measure to a lot of smuggling-related
activity, and also due to people who were moving in to escape the diversity elsewhere,
although the old American tradition of never, ever openly admitting to racial
motivations for one’s behavior still held. Despite being perched right on the
edge of the unspeakable Racist Entity itself—or perhaps because of it—American
Jefferson County had seen a small but steady trickle of people moving in over
the past generation, mostly young white couples with children. Although no such
thing was ever mentioned out loud, it was quietly accepted that part of the
reason for a young family to move to the Montana border country was to shelter
beneath the bristling guns of the NDF if the instability which plagued the rest
of North America ever tipped over into outright madness and chaos, as
frequently appeared possible. At the very least, many otherwise patriotic
Americans who officially hewed to the line about the Northwest Republic being
the Dark Kingdom of Mordor made sure they were within an easy bolt of the
Border Highway, if and when the U.S.A. finally came crashing down for good.
* * *
The rest of the United States was slowly crumbling away,
like a wet and stinking trash heap in a landfill under a hot summer sun.
Jefferson County and almost all of East Montana outside Billings and Bozeman
and American Butte was still very predominantly white, a phenomenon which
seemed odd since only about 25 percent of the U.S. population was white now.
And yet there were whole huge swaths of mostly rural countryside like Montana,
the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, as well as large sections of the Midwest in Illinois
and Missouri and the Appalachian mountains that on a local county-by-county
basis were demographically whiter than they had been a hundred years before.
The pattern which had begun to emerge in the middle of the
20th Century had coalesced. Black and brown minorities were now almost all in
the huge, sprawling cities that festered and crumbled like maggot-infested
swamps, especially east of the Mississippi. The country’s remaining whites
lived in enclaves, some spanning several states, consisting mostly of the small
towns and remote wide-open spaces of flyover country. The acting federal
capitol of Burlington, Vermont, at almost 400,000 people, was the largest
wholly functional city remaining in the country. The legal and semantic
acrobatics performed by the United States government to keep Burlington
functional by keeping it 90 percent white offered some of the funniest and most
bemusing reading in American history.
The remaining 20th Century megalopoli lay on the continent
like moaning, dying dinosaurs. They were like huge nature preserves, fenced off
and patrolled by American military contractors in order to keep the savages on
the reservation, although of course in a nation that still adamantly refused to
admit that race exists, this was never explicitly stated. The majority of the
American “defense” budget no longer went to maintain a sprawling empire of
overseas bases, as in the past century, but for actual defense against the
millions of black, brown, and bilious yellow inhabitants of the nation’s
Designated Urban Zones (DUZs). There were for all intents and purposes no white
residents left in the top 50 American cities, except for outside administrative
personnel and a tiny number of completely degenerate whiggers who had merged
with the darkness and became totally negrified; in another generation they
would be gone, leaving nothing but a muddy stain running like diseased diarrhea
through the ebony for a while.
The true purpose of the massive security cordons around the
cities was disguised in a farrago of political and legalese double-talk that
whirled around the subject like Cossack dancers doing the Trepak. A colossal
legal and administrative system had been created to disguise the fact that
America’s main national goal was now to keep millions of non-whites corralled
in huge urban detention centers so they would not break out and start wandering
the land in gigantic migrations like so many locusts, roaming from place to
place and moving on after they had consumed every resource and slaughtered
everyone with a white skin. There had been a few such events in past years,
which had been dealt with bloodily, and the survivors herded back into Atlanta,
St. Louis, and Baltimore. These episodes were barely reported at the time and
then swiftly erased from the national memory by the state-controlled media.
Even in extremis, the American ruling class would not stop lying about race, so
ingrained had the habit become. They would do anything not to have to admit
that race was a deadly reality the United States was now desperately trying to
survive.
Electric power and as many basic utilities as possible were
supplied to the cities, at least sporadically, by the United States Urban
Administration Department (UAD), from heavily fortified generating and water
pumping and sewage treatment facilities. Repairs were irregular, but when
necessary were made under heavy armed escort from the various mercenary outfits
hired by the government for the purpose. Local police were non-existent or
completely negrified or mestizo, and therefore useless. The American military
itself was too small and poorly equipped for this mission, since the United
States government basically no longer had any income from taxation and was
dependent on whatever the Federal Reserve decided to give them each year for
pocket money.
Living conditions in the cities for the teeming black and
brown population were indescribable, like something out of a nightmare.
Cannibalism was common when the government-issued junk food rations ran short.
Infant mortality was believed to be about 50 percent, although no one knew for
sure. The average lifespan seemed to be about 42 or 43 for both men and women,
although the massive homicide rates for young males skewed the estimates.
Internal government in places like Atlanta, Miami, Houston and Chicago had been
more or less handed over to the ethnic gangs, who spent most of their time
engaging in tribal wars through the grass-grown streets and the derelict
buildings. The bitterest feuds were between the American-born blacks and the
Africans, with both negro factions pausing every now and then to turn on the
wretched Haitians and slaughter them.
All DUZ residents automatically received EBT cards and
lifelong welfare checks beginning at age 15; the system was riddled with fraud
and abuse from top to bottom, of course, but then it always had been, and
America’s social contract had always been clear: give minorities money, enough
to keep them drunk and stoned and fed on junk food, or else the minorities
riot. The original idea was to embed GPS and ID chips in each card so the
authorities could keep some kind of track of what was going on in the concrete
jungles, but now most of the spy satellite system from the past 70 years no
longer worked, and no one seemed to remember how to repair them. As it had been
with Egypt and Rome, certain vital technological skill sets were being lost
now, because the United States government had run out of qualified white
techies due to the declining level of enrollment of white males in higher
education. They had tried to train niggers and sub-continental Asians how to do
things like maintaining satellite networks; the results were somewhat less than
optimum.
The cities were covered with sealed high-security ATMs that
dispensed a purely local currency as a measure of influx control; you couldn’t
spend Houston dollars in Baltimore or New Orleans dollars in Chicago. Keeping
these ATMs supplied with local currency was a major function of the security
forces and resulted in the most firefights with the locals who wanted to rob
the armored half-tracks, or else who just wanted to kill white men.
There was no heavy industry or major business remaining in
the mega-urban areas, and only limited private enterprise in the form of Asian
merchants who maintained private security detachments from their own ethnic
groups to protect their fortified stores. These were re-stocked by cargo
helicopter in most places; it was too dangerous to drive supply convoys
overland into labyrinthine cities where the black and brown denizens would kill
for a boxed mac-and-cheese dinner and sell their children for a case of bottled
water.
Supplies and provisions were also shipped into the cities in
bulk by the superannuated U.S. government to favored local warlords, who were
often designated as mayors or governors—or in the case of black-run DUZs like
Detroit, Atlanta, and Birmingham, as Head Nigger In Charge. (A title
deliberately chosen by the black strongmen who ran those cities, and by no
means a humorous one. These men were bestial savages.) These American
tributaries maintained personal power through the control of the food supply
and also through the distribution or withholding of the welfare checks, AA
batteries, cell phones, bottled water, sugary soft drinks, heavy gooey candy,
salty grain and potato-based snacks, and other necessities of black and brown
life. The whole situation was like dealing with about 50 Mogadishus.
New York City had finally been declared unfit for human
habitation three years before. The last of the white and Jewish super-rich had
been evacuated to their mansions on Long Island, and then a massive wall had
been built along the Sunken Meadow and Sagtikos Parkways, severing the island
from the abomination. The rest of the five boroughs were sealed off with
minefields, Bremer walls and hundreds of miles of razor wire, guarded by the
New York Containment Corps of mostly European mercenaries, the most highly paid
and professional soldiers on the planet, with only one mission: whatever was in
New York, stayed in New York. The Big Apple had simply been abandoned as a
gangrened limb that had to be amputated. Most of its polyglot, half-insane
inhabitants had been sealed in, like locking the doors of a lunatic asylum,
walking away, and leaving it to the inmates. When a foreign journalist had
timidly asked an officer of the NYCC what the people inside the city would eat
when the grocery stores and restaurants were all picked clean, he told her
brutally, “What the fuck do you think? They’ll eat each other!” The occasional
sounds detected by sensors from within the city were sinister and chilling, and
hinted at horrors in the empty concrete canyons and dumps and residential
wastelands. Sometimes observers in the watchtowers saw dark forms loping in
packs amid the ruins in the distance.
There were a few exceptions to the destruction of the
cities. The greater Boston and Cambridge area and the states of Massachusetts,
Vermont, and New Hampshire had been transformed into a tightly-controlled
security zone called the New England Union, so that the remnants of America’s
left-wing, liberal and Jewish ruling élite could continue to exist in some kind
of physical safety, protected from the horror and chaos they had spent the past
century creating. Maine established a number of trade and legal agreements with
New Brunswick and the Ottawa régime, which made it more or less part of the
Canadian Maritimes, although the RCMP officers stationed in Bangor and Portland
wore local uniforms out of courtesy and diplomacy.
Another exception to the destruction was Washington, D.C.;
the Americans had stubbornly held on to their ancient capital and maintained
the Green Zone established by Hunter Wallace. The effective government of what
remained of the United States, basically all the government departments that
actually did anything and therefore needed to be maintained, had been
transferred recently to Burlington. But the anachronism of Congress and a
shadow government still existed in D.C., and each incoming President was
required by law to spend at least one night in the White House every year. (In
the residence; the West Wing had never been completely repaired after Vince
Cardinale and Duke had dropped mortar bombs on it. The roof was still open in
places, so there was a lot of water and snow damage every year.) Private
automobiles had been banned from the streets of the District to “save the
environment,” although it was actually due to the difficulty of obtaining fuel.
So each day bureaucrats rode trolley cars and bicycles in to their offices,
held long meetings where nothing was ever decided, and pounded on computer
keyboards as if anything they did really mattered outside the few scattered
enclaves that still maintained a tenuous allegiance to the old régime. In the
crumbling Capitol a few ageing congressmen and senators still sat in their
dusty seats, met in committee, deliberated and made speeches to the empty
galleries, like ghosts about to vanish at cockcrow.
America was finally dying, not in blood and fire, but slowly
drifting away into the fog of institutional Alzheimer’s.
In the meantime, the huge expanse of the American
countryside, largely emptied of its non-white population, was slowly beginning
to heal, now that the federal monkey was finally more or less off the backs of
what white people remained. Ironically, most government in the stable white
areas of the country was now state and local, which was exactly what the
framers of the Constitution had originally stipulated; the ghost of Abraham
Lincoln and the all-powerful tyranny in Washington, D.C., had finally been laid
to rest, although at a shattering cost. That suited the Northwesters fine,
especially the ones who were responsible for the border sectors. At least the
Montana and Canadian borders were white and quiet. Aztlan was a different story.
* * *
When the
Republic consolidated the entire 400-mile Montana border with the U.S.A. into a
single military and civilian administrative unit, the NAR built a new firehouse
and loaded up the station’s three professionals from the national fire prevention
service and the local volunteer fire company who made up the rest of the crew
with all the equipment they’d never been able to afford under the Americans. It
seemed a good trade for their crumbling old firehouse. The Republic extended
the rear of the firehouse, burrowing into the side of a small hill; a good two
thirds of the local Civil Guard post was now buried underground, a helpful
thing in the event of shelling or some kind of aerial attack, although the
Americans could no longer maintain much in the way of their once-mighty fleet
of drones and Cruise missiles.
Bobby
Campbell and Corporal Mike Sweeney
stepped out the front door of the station and walked three doors down the
street to a large, pre-fabricated hangar-like structure. Inside were parked a
number of levitational vehicles, including three from the men who were waiting
for the incoming load from the U.S.—the revenue officer’s government car, a
small enclosed pickup truck for the Health Service rep, and a large panel truck
from the Nordstroms department store chain, or rather the department store
chain of that name that still did business in the NAR under local ownership and
management, despite four decades of horrified screaming from the Jewish
corporate interests who had made the mistake of buying up the chain and the
name just before the War of Independence broke out. The Selkirks’ own flyers
were also parked in the hangar, which the boys had left before departing on their run.
The United States still had not been able to put together
levitating transport on any serious scale, outside a few experimental lanes in
the New England Union, which were used only by the super-rich who could afford
the incredibly expensive Chinese-made flying cars which were the only ones sold
in the remaining United States. The Selkirks had gone on their trip east
driving American ground cars, with a selection of license plates from East
Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota; in the Republic, vehicles didn’t have
license plates or any brackets to mount them on, so runners always had to use
American gasoline or diesel vehicles to get in and out of the United States.
Now Bobby
Campbell heard the rumble of those gasoline engines coming down the street
toward him. The Americans had some alcohol and methane and even a few electric
ground cars, but they still had never quite managed to break away from
petroleum completely. The multinational energy corporations still had too much
of a stranglehold on the Western world for that.
Corporal Sweeney slapped a large blue button and the hangar
door began to rumble upwards. In a few moments a low, sleek sports car pulled
in, followed by a large panel truck. The door to the sports car flipped up and
a slim, good-looking young man with light brown hair clambered out. “Hey, Johnny,”
called Sweeney with a wave. John Selkirk’s older brother, Hatcher Selkirk,
climbed down from the cab of the truck. “Hey, Hatch,” added Sweeney.
Johnny Selkirk was twenty years old, just out of the army,
clean-shaven and lean and devilishly handsome. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a
cowboy hat, and denim jeans along with durable boots Bobby recognized as custom-made
streetfighter’s footwear of the kind often worn by WPB operatives; they were
light enough to wind-sprint in, tough enough to walk through acid, and had
light but hard steel toes and heel insets in case somebody needed kicking.
Hatcher was some years older, bearded, married with two children and another on
the way. He was attired in simple and nondescript coveralls that would not
attract notice on either side of the line. Bobby understood that Hatch was in
the process of building his family their own home on land the boys’ rancher
father had deeded to him and his wife, and his cut of this smuggling run would
take care of all the supplies and materials he needed to do the electrical
wiring and the plumbing and pave a quarter-mile driveway up to the house. No
one seemed to know where John’s money went, but it went somewhere, and he would
probably try another smuggling run in a few months.
“Afternoon, boys,” said Bobby. He stepped forward to shake
their hands. “Welcome Home. I figured it was time we met. I’m Robert Campbell,
the new Guard lieutenant over at the station.”
“Yeah, we heard you were coming to Basin for a spell,” said
Johnny with a friendly grin and a strong grip. Bobby knew perfectly well that was
bulldust. What they’d heard was that the cop who was married to the Daughter of
the Nation was coming, but he was used to it and had long since accepted that
part of the price of having Ally in his life was to be known unofficially as
Mr. Allura Myers.
“Yeah, we heard,” said Hatch, also shaking Bobby’s hand. “Uh, your wife here with you?”
Bobby
chuckled ruefully. “Yeah, the whole family came along. Ally took some leave
from her job at UM; she could have done a long commute every morning and
evening, but we thought it would be good for the kids to see some more of the
Homeland besides Daly Avenue and the University, while they’re young. A tour of
duty in cattle country looks like just the thing. We want them to learn to ride
and do ranch and farm work while we’re out here, get closer to the land and
all. White kids shouldn’t grow up only in the city, if it can be helped.”
“Lotta land out here to get close to,” agreed Hatcher
Selkirk.
“Allura’s going to be teaching history at Cataract High
School this year,” Bobby
continued. “She wanted to do primary school because she loves small children,
but that would mean that she’d have two of our three in the same school where
she was a teacher. It might confuse Cathy, our little girl who’s seven, and our
twelve-year-old son Clancy made it clear he would find it excruciatingly
embarrassing to have his mom watching over him in school, so she approached the
high school and they gave her a temporary certificate. It’s not just the
Daughter of the Nation thing. Allura’s got a doctorate in archaeology, even
though nobody else in the world will recognize it. She was project manager for
the Lost Creek site for a couple of years, so she can tell her students all
about North American prehistory, and she knows every other aspect of our people’s
past inside-out.”
“There he is!” called out a voice. The three out-of-town
visitors had heard the American engines approaching and they had ambled over to
the hangar from the local diner. They were all middle-aged men, wearing
Northwest city togs that looked a little out of place in rural Montana, but
which would have marked them as oddball anachronisms anywhere in the United
States, East Canada, or Europe. After a great deal of discussion and debate,
some public on the floor of Parliament and a good deal of it in private
conferences within the Ministry of Culture, Northwest sartorial fashion had by
now come to rest somewhere in the Edwardian era. All three men wore three-piece
suits with sack coats (the Nordstroms buyer carried his coat over his shoulder
due to the heat), waistcoats, cuffed trousers, pocket watches with chains,
patent leather shoes, and wing-collar shirts with loosened ties and cravats.
The Nordstroms buyer wore a straw boater hat, the Health Service driver a gray
felt Homburg, and the Revenue Commissioner a black bowler.
“Excuse us, Lieutenant,” said John Selkirk. “We need to
settle up with these gents. Could you stick around for a bit?”
“Sure,” said Bobby.
It took about fifteen minutes for the National Health
Service man to load several cases of badly needed medicines and serums into the
back of his van, along with several more large boxes, spare parts for various
medical machinery and equipment needed in hospitals around the Northwest. He
left first; some of those hospitals along his route needed the medicines and
spare parts quite urgently. Every year the NAR manufactured more and more of
its own hi-tech medical gear and pharmaceuticals, but there were always little
bits and pieces that had to be imported and slipped past the sanctions, which
were technically still in force even if they were mostly a dead letter in the
real world. The Selkirks had picked up this load from a WPB subcontractor in St
Paul, an asset who specialized in acquiring and expediting healthcare
contraband. The Health Service courier did not offer the Selkirk brothers any
money, nor did they ask for any. There was an unwritten code among blockade
runners that medical freight for white children always rode free.
Then came the examination and checking-off of a wide list of
items from Gucci loafers and handbags to several crates of fine cognac and
champagne to small items of jewelry, Swiss watches, and several cases of rolled
Havana cigars. Johnny Selkirk pulled a box of 50 out of one case and handed it
to Bobby.
“You take bribes, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“If he doesn’t, I do,” said Corporal Sweeney. Bobby
chuckled and tossed him the box. It wasn’t actually a bribe, since none of this
was illegal, although technically Guards weren’t supposed to accept gifts of
any kind, for anything. The NCG had slightly more success in suppressing this
practice than other cop-shops around the world, but not much more. Actually,
absent Jews, real bribes in the Northwest Republic to either police or
politicians were almost unheard-of. There wasn’t that much spare wealth to
squabble over and misappropriate, and with taxes so low the frugal government’s
accountants and bookkeepers kept track of every dime from the time it went into
the Treasury until the time it was spent and returned to the economy. It was
not only less dangerous but simply easier to be honest. There was, however, a
kind of tradition that a runner coming in from a successful venture shared a
little of the loot with the local Guards, almost as a last vestige of times
past, when real and poisonous corruption had pervaded every aspect of American
life from top to bottom. Bobby
had already picked up on the fact that such gratuities were expected to be
shared among the Guardsmen at the station, and declining to honor the custom
was not calculated to improve his standing among the men.
“Just don’t tell my dad if he comes around on a surprise
inspection tour,” said Bobby.
“He’s old-school. As far as he’s concerned a Guard doesn’t so much as take a
sandwich or an apple from a civilian.”
“We won’t,” Sweeney assured him, and meant it. Just as
Allura’s story was known to the entire Republic, so was Robert Campbell Junior’s.
Operation Belladonna was a legend now, and no one wanted to cross a legend. It
was yet another thing that made Bobby Three more determined to
prove himself and come up to his father’s mark, but on his own merits.
Once all the goods from Nordstroms were loaded into the
department store’s van, the buyer pulled out his checkbook and wrote three
checks. The first, after some haggling, was given to the Revenue Commissioners’
man to pay for the import taxes on the luxury goods the boys had brought into
the country. The second and third were written to John and Hatcher Selkirk
respectively, an even split of the remaining amount due for the merchandise. “Old
man Ray Selkirk’s idea,” Corporal Sweeney told Bobby sotto voce. “The
grandfather. Saves them from arguing over the split.”
After the Nordstroms vehicle and the tax man had departed,
the Selkirks walked over to Bobby.
“Okay, we’re all yours,” said Johnny cheerfully. “You want anything in writing?”
“No, I imagine you’ve done this often enough to know what we
want,” Bobby
told him. “Kill anybody? Anything happen that might have repercussions later on
down the road? Anything you saw over there that might be of interest to BOSS or
CMI or the Political Bureau? You know the drill. Plus in my case I’d just like
to know if you felt anything in the general vibe. I don’t know how the hell
those people exist Out There. First off, any encounters with the American
authorities, such as they are?”
“Nope, this one was a milk run, except a couple of cops
pulled us over outside St. Paul,” John said.
“St. Paul cops? Tony Solano’s crew?” asked Bobby. “I
thought they were all paid off? The intel briefing I got said so, anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Hatcher Selkirk. “Tony has the St. Paul cops
and they’re squared, and the Circus squared Tony. His police ignore our
interstate commerce and Tony gets to keep on breathing.”
“Plus these days they have to spend all their time holding
down the lid on the new Minneapolis DUZ,” put in John. “The Minnesota governor
is screaming like a scalded dog to Burlington, by the way. Wants them to send
some mercenaries to seal off Minnie completely. That’s no secret, it was on all
the screens. It’s pretty bad. The wall’s not finished, they ran out of budget
money and too many workers were getting killed and wounded trying to get the
fences up. Niggers get out every night and attack white neighborhoods and
shopping areas. There’s some Somali warlord who’s taken over the downtown area,
he’s fighting off the Vietnamese and the American homeboys, and he’s promised
to pay his top gunmen in white female slaves. No, we never have any problems
from the St. Paul blues. This was Minnesota State Patrol. They actually stopped
Hatch, wanted to see what was in the truck.”
“What happened?”
“I saw Hatch get pulled over so I swung around, got as close
as I could, and snuck back with my gun out, but they were just talking,” Johnny
told him. “Turned out it was a couple of
rookie kids from the north woods who had been pulled down to help with the mess
in Minneapolis. They didn’t care what we were taking out of the state, just
wanted to make sure we weren’t bringing in anything to Kamal Mohammed in
Minneapolis. The state government is backing an American monkoid named Trayvon Jones or something over Kamal for Head Nigger In
Charge, once the DUZ gets formally recognized, and they’re trying to cut off
the Somalis’ supply lines, hence the increase in over-the-wall raids. Anyway,
these two guys are about ready to say to hell with Minnesota and Come Home.”
“They’ll have to do army training, but after that they could
probably get into the Guards,” said Bobby. “Anything else?”
“We stopped at Jerry Loudermilk’s place this morning for a
final gas-up and some breakfast,” said John. “Something’s going on over in
Boulder. Emergency combined meeting of the county commissioners and the city
council. Don’t know what, but you know this county. Whatever happens on one
side of the Road in the morning, everybody on the other side knows about it by
sundown.”
“Okay, well, if that’s all, I guess that’s all,” said Bobby. “Let
me know when you’re going out again, boys, and thanks for the cigars.”
“Will do,” said Selkirk.
“I’m calling Mom and Patsy to let them know we got back
okay, then I’m going to the bank and deposit this,” said Hatcher, lifting his
check from Nordstroms. “Let me guess, you’re going to the Emerald House to get
hammered? That’s fine, just give Mike
your keys and you have Linda call me when you’re on the floor so you don’t try
flying a car when you’re drunk.”
“No, I’ll go cash my check as well, then I got some business
to take care of,” said John with a smile. “Don’t worry, sober business.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Hatch, unsmiling. “Sure
you don’t want to get hammered? I think the Emerald House is a better option
all around.”
“Don’t worry about it!” snapped John.
“Let me ask you something, Lieutenant,” said Hatcher Selkirk
with a scowl, turning to Bobby.
“What happens if and when my idiot brother here gets himself killed Over The
Road some day, or night, because he’s doing something stupid? What’s the Guard’s
position on that?”
“If it happens Over The Road, we don’t have a position,” Bobby
replied. “Officially, anyway. Not our jurisdiction, not our country.
Unofficially, what are you talking about?” He looked at Johnny Selkirk. “Something
going on I need to know about, John?”
“Nope,” said Johnny. “Not a damned thing.” He turned and
walked away.
“Danny Tolliver?” Sweeney asked Hatcher, arching his
eyebrows. “He still on that kick?”
“So it would appear,” replied Hatcher.
“Danny Tolliver?” asked Bobby. “Don’t recognize the name.
Who’s he?”
“She,” said Sweeney. “Danielle’s her name. Stunning young
lady from Over The Road, sweet sixteen and stacked like a seam of grapes.
Johnny has been sneaking Across The Road for a good six months now.”
“Not illegal,” commented Bobby. “At least not on our end.
Technically speaking, under their law none of us is supposed to be Over The
Road at all, but nobody pays any attention to that fact any more.”
“It may not be illegal, but it’s stupid and dangerous,”
growled Hatcher in frustration. “If Elwood Tolliver catches John Selkirk with
his granddaughter, it doesn’t matter whether they’re doing the wild thing or
just sitting there reading Bible verses, he’s going to shoot, and either John
kills him or old man Tolliver kills John. If John dies then I and my brothers,
and my father and my grandfather are going Over The Road. You could call for
some backup from Butte and maybe stop us for a while, but not forever. You
understand, that’s not a threat, Lieutenant. God knows I don’t want anything
like that to happen. None of us do. We’ve all talked at John until we’re blue
in the damned face, and he just won’t listen. I’m just telling you how it is.
If any harm comes to John Over There, then we know there won’t ever be any
justice from the Americans, so we’re just gonna have to take it for ourselves.”
“Jesus, this sounds like some kind of blood feud!” commented
Bobby.
“Pretty much,” said Sweeney with a nod. “Goes back to the
war. The first war, forty years ago. The Selkirks were Nationalist and the
Tollivers were Union. Ray Selkirk was a Volunteer and Elwood Tolliver was a
Patty.”
“A Fattie?” asked Campbell, surprised. “And he dares to live
this close to the border? Why hasn’t the Circus cut his throat?”
“No, a Patty,” explained Sweeney. “Kind of local slang for
Police Anti-Terrorist Unit. Militarized police the Americans used as
auxiliaries. Beginning back in the 1990s, the Americans loaded local police and
sheriff’s departments up with everything from body armor to armored cars to
heavy weapons like .50-caliber machine guns, brought in military personnel to
train them, created SWAT teams and all kinds of special units that were
supposed to be a new law enforcement élite, trained them in fire and maneuver
and counter-insurgency, so forth and so on. Plus ideological indoctrination
from the Southern Poverty Law Center in how to recognize evil racist white male
Enemies of the People. After a while folks noticed that these militarized cop
teams and units were being set up not just in big cities where there was
certainly justification for it, but in remote areas of the country that were
majority white. Especially there. Montana got a lot of those. Elwood was a
Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy and he was offered an extra two hundred
dollars a week and better medical insurance for his family if he’d join the
PATU, which is what these special teams were called in this part of Montana.”
“Does Sheriff Lomax know about all this?” asked Bobby.
“He does,” confirmed Sweeney. “He says the same thing you
and Hatch say now. Number one, it’s not unlawful and there’s nothing he can do
unless somebody files a complaint, and number two, has Johnny lost his frigging
mind?”
“I know the first war was really bad here in Montana,” said Bobby
soberly. “In a way almost as bad as the second war, which was also largely
fought here. At least the second war was over in seven weeks. It was
conventional, and the lines were clear. Us against them, good against evil, no
gray area, no moral ambiguity. The first one lasted five years, and it
consisted mostly of a long string of individual homicides that just never
seemed to stop, killing after killing and horror story after horror story that
after a while poisoned the very air. My Aunt Jenny, Mrs. Stockdale the retired
university Chancellor’s wife, she was a Volunteer, and so was Jason. She and
Jason Stockdale were two of the few survivors of the Helena Raid, when Jack
Smith of the Regulators was killed. They never talked about it much.”
“Most people around here don’t any more, either,” said
Hatcher. “Talk about it, I mean. I’m almost thirty, and I think I can count on
my fingers the number of times my grandfather has even mentioned the Volunteers
or the War of Independence. But he wears his roundel with the ribbon any time
he dresses in a jacket. I think I was about ten years old before I got curious
and asked him what it was. But some people have a lot more reason not to
remember than others.”
“Elwood Tolliver and Ray Selkirk being two of those?” asked Bobby,
“Yep,” said Sweeney. “Elwood Tolliver was wounded during an
NVA contact in the fourth year. Not just wounded. He was deliberately
kneecapped, a punishment shooting. Crippled for life. He was given an
artificial knee which worked for a while, but then the U.S.A. fell apart and so
did Elwood’s artificial knee, and he can’t get a replacement that works. So he
just had some Hindu butcher at a clinic stick a pin in it to keep it straight.
He can’t move the knee at all now and he can barely walk, even with a cane.”
“Great Caesar’s ghost! The National Health could give him an
artificial knee that would have him dancing a Highland fling in no time!”
exclaimed Bobby.
“You know they’ll take any white man or woman, from anywhere. This guy lives
within ten miles of a clinic that can heal him for good, and he does nothing?”
“Elwood would literally die rather than take anything from
this Republic or any man in it,” said Hatcher flatly. “He almost did once, when
he had double pneumonia and the hospital in Boulder wouldn’t help him because
the Americans had run out of money and stopped the medical insurance for
veterans.”
“Well, okay,” conceded Bobby. “So the guy’s a
bitter-ender. I can see why he wouldn’t be too pleased to have the grandson of
a Northwest Volunteer squiring his granddaughter around.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Hatcher. “My grandfather, Ray
Selkirk, was the Northwest Volunteer who blew off Elwood Tolliver’s kneecap.”
http://www.northwestfront.org
http://www.northwestfront.org
6 Comments:
Oh, yeah, I can understand how the vision of the future Republic would get the lefties' kickers in a twist.
I am really looking forward to this whole book. When will it be published.
Is this published anywhere on line, because I want to read all of it.
You should tell us more about longview
as an event i don't know much
save it for a good rant on RFN :)
Do you like this one or The Brigade better, Harold?
Cataract High School? Haha,
V
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