What Your Future Looks Like, Lefty-Lib Assholes

     [I'm sorry, I know this looks narcissistic,  but that last excerpt got so many shrieks of rage and fear and loathing in the comments section from the lefties and loons, and I laughed so hard, that I just can't resist giving it another shot. They HATE a vision of the world to come where their kind no longer rule the roost. - HAC]

XXXI. – Running The Cat Roads
(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.

            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.”


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