Foreign Enemies and Traitors (58 page)

There was a hardness and aloofness to Jenny that did not match her devotion to the orphan baby.  Maybe it was a case of compensation.  Maybe caring for the baby filled a vacant spot in Jenny’s personality.  That would be understandable.  Maybe the infant was a substitute for her missing family.  It was too bad that Jenny was so cold toward him.  They were the same age, almost eighteen, but Jenny barely acknowledged his existence.  Still, she had not protested Boone’s decision for the two of them to hike south on their own with the baby.  At least not that he had heard.  Privacy was hard to come by in the cave.  Maybe she was keeping her feelings about the planned trek to herself, until he was out of earshot.

During the last few months, Zack had not thought much about the opposite sex.  Staying alive was higher on his list of priorities.  Now, in the relative safety of the cave, surrounded by warriors, he felt the familiar urges return.  Jenny was tall and strong, even if she was on the skinny side.  Who wasn’t, these days?  Her face was kind of bony and angular, but her blond hair was still pretty, and matched her wide-set honey-colored eyes.  He wondered what a few months of good eating would do for her looks.  Her chin and her cheekbones would not be so prominent, but she would be nice-looking either way.  Zack could not help the lustful thoughts he felt toward her.  He wondered if she was undressed inside the blue tent.  Did she have underwear on, or maybe long johns?  He tried to imagine her naked, inside the tent.  Long legs she had for sure, he could see that even through her oversized Russian camouflage pants.  The rest of her body’s shape was almost a complete mystery to him, and that was unlikely to change, so he was left to his teenage virgin’s imagination. 

Zack had little hope of arousing romantic interest in her.  Girls like Jenny McClure always went for an older guy, somebody like Doug Dolan.  Somebody from a big city, who had gone to college.  Like Doug, Jenny was also a city girl.  She’ll never be interested in me, Zack thought.  Especially not with my bad complexion and my messed-up front teeth that keep me from smiling much.  She would travel with him until they reached safety somewhere in Mississippi, and then she would go her own way.  That was the unfortunate truth.  At least he would be close to her for the days that this quest might take.  And he was honored that the older men had thought him capable of performing this mission.  They consider me a man, Zack thought, or they would not let me guide Jenny and the baby to safety in Mississippi.  Perhaps more importantly, they trust me to get the second camera with the massacre pictures to the right people.  Zack had seen the photos, on the little LCD screens on the backs of the cameras.  He understood how important they were.

The chunk of C-4 beneath the stew pot gradually diminished in size, until the flame guttered blue.  Doug Dolan gently placed another thumb-sized piece of the white plastic explosive beneath the pot, and it quickly ignited from the last of the old fire.

****

“I can’t believe all the foreign militaries that are in Tennessee,”
said Carson, examining the dead traitor’s notebook.  “There’s Albanians, Bolivians, Kazaks, Koreans, Egyptians, Indonesians, Nigerians, Pakistanis…”

“Yeah, those countries have all sent over at least a battalion of ‘volunteers.’  There’s about a battalion of mercenaries in each ‘unpacified’ county.  And the Russians are behind the Kazaks, you can be sure of that.  The Kazaks are just Russian puppets.  You can bet their officers report straight to Russian intelligence—if they’re not Russians posing as Kazaks in the first place.”

Carson asked, “And the president doesn’t care?”

“Jamal Tambor?  Tambo?  Hell, my guess is that J.T. reports to the Russians too.  He’s been a closet Marxist since he was wearing red diapers.  He’s a good talker, he’s smooth, but just look at the friends he picked all his life.  Communists and one-worlders.  America haters, every one of them.  That’s no coincidence.”

“I don’t even recognize this country anymore,” Carson replied with a sigh.  “What in the hell are all these foreign troops doing here?  How could our own president have sold us out like this?”

“Tambo’s an internationalist down to his bone marrow.  The depression and the earthquakes are his big chance to finally destroy American sovereignty once and for all.  That’s what the push for the North American Union is really all about; it’s not just about the new currency.  Hell, there’s more NAL troops in Tennessee than all the other foreign contract battalions put together.  Anybody that can speak Spanish can join the North American Legion, with no questions asked.  That basically covers everybody from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn who wants to move here and become an American citizen.  But the Legion troops are mostly Mexican illegal aliens who were already here.  Mexicans and Central Americans.  There are thousands of them just in Tennessee.  Tens of thousands.”

Carson asked, “How’s that going over with the locals?”

“It’s not going over well with the whites and the blacks, but hey, Tennessee has changed a lot in the last few years.  Did you know there’s more Hispanics than blacks in Middle Tennessee now?”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, it’s true,” said Boone.  “And not just in Tennessee.  That’s the trend in almost the whole United States…or what’s left of it.  Hispanics are starting to outnumber blacks almost everywhere.  So now that we’ve been invaded—that is, now that our traitors
allowed
us to be invaded—we’re supposed to just suck it up and become part of the North American Union.  Canada, America, and Mexico.  One big happy family.  Just like the NAL motto: ‘Three Nations—One America.’  Canamexico, they might as well call it.  It’s in Congress, and it’ll pass.  The president already said he’ll sign it.  Tambo’s been pushing the North American Union for years.”

“When did we ever get to vote on this bullshit?” asked Carson.

“We didn’t.  But it’s happening anyway.  The whole North American Union, it’s part of some kind of master plan, it has to be.  That’s why they’ve kept the border with Mexico wide open, and that’s why we’ve had all the amnesties.  That’s why we’re going from dollars to that new North American money, the Amero.  It’s been planned for years.  This was no accident.”

“Boone, what the hell happened to America?  I don’t care if they’re from Mexico or Timbuktu, foreign troops don’t belong here!  What was the president thinking, to bring in foreign mercenaries?”

“You have to understand Jamal Tambor; he’s a globalist at heart,” said Boone.  “Has been all his life.  There was never a U.N. treaty that he didn’t support when he was a senator, and it’s worse now that he’s president.  The same goes for his cabinet and most of Congress.  The depresssion just gave them the opportunity to finally push it through, once and for all.  Hell, they probably wanted this damned depression—they’d never have been able to do all of this otherwise.  I don’t think they even consider themselves Americans anymore: they’re ‘citizens of the world.’  Give them a choice between an American solution and an international one, and they’ll choose international every time.  Just on general principle.  That’s who they are.”

Carson said, “You’re telling me that Americans couldn’t handle the earthquakes without foreign help?”

“Probably, at least before the depression.  But even considering how weak America is now, the earthquake response was totally bungled.  Not that the problems weren’t enormous—they were.  With all of the bridges down, it was damned near impossible to bring in relief supplies, especially to Memphis.  Helicopters just couldn’t bring in enough tonnage to make a difference, not when law and order totally collapsed.  Not to millions of people.”

“Doug and Jenny told me all about it.”

“Yeah.  So you can understand how hard it was.  No bridges meant no fuel trucks could get in.  And no fuel trucks meant you couldn’t run the equipment to fix the bridges.  With the bridges all down, the rivers were blocked.  Catch-22.  It was just terrible from Nashville to Little Rock, but inside Memphis, it was unbelievable.  Memphis went totally
Mad Max
in about the first three days.  To the outside world, Memphis looked like a living nightmare.  Media from all over were covering it from helicopters.  They were calling Memphis ‘America’s black eye.’  All those dead bodies lying all over the place, and where was Uncle Sam?  Why didn’t the Feds rush in with FEMA and fix everything?”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I’d be asking too,” said Carson. 

“The honest answer is that nobody could wave a magic wand and fix it.  Maybe not even
before
the Greater Depression, when the dollar was still worth something, and we could import enough fuel to run the helicopters and the transport planes.  But no matter how you looked at it, the Feds were just pathetic in how they responded.  There was no hiding it from the cameras up in the helicopters.  It was complete anarchy down on the streets.  Memphis was just dog-eat-dog.  The mainstream networks filmed it all, and every day people were screaming, ‘Where’s the government?  What’s taking so long?  People are dying and the government is doing nothing!’  And that’s not all they were asking.  People were asking why so many bridges collapsed, why the dams failed, and why all those government housing projects in Memphis and St. Louis collapsed.  If you looked at it honestly, it seemed like a lot of the blame really would have to be pinned on the government.  Bridges and dams: that’s the government’s job.

“So, what Washington needed was an excuse for why they couldn’t get FEMA into Tennessee and save the people in time.  Something more than just natural causes, more than the earthquakes, more than the dams and bridges collapsing.  They needed a scapegoat.  They needed a bad guy to take the blame, to take the heat off of FEMA and the Feds.  Tambo didn’t want to wind up like George Bush, getting blamed for what happened after Katrina.  Especially not with him being a minority president, and all those black victims in Memphis.  That’s when they came up with the white racist genocide angle.  That was their excuse for everything: they couldn’t get the relief in because the white rednecks started shooting at everybody in sight, including the rescuers.  And of course with no police around, those rednecks reverted back to their own true white racist selves and just started blowing away every black person they could find.  And that’s the story that was put out in the media wall to wall.”

“And this worked?” asked Carson. 

“Hell yeah, it worked!  The genocide story got plenty of traction, since the TV networks were beating the drum 24/7.  I mean, there were plenty of black bodies to film, that’s for sure.  Bodies were everywhere, and nobody was organized to collect them.  Not to bury them or to burn them.  They just lay where they died, in droves.  Phil, I don’t have to tell you that after a few days almost
every
corpse turns black.  So with every passing day, it looked more and more like whites were gunning down blacks wholesale.  That was the big lie, and the big excuse for the government not getting FEMA in.  And you know what?  It worked.  The big lie worked.

“Hey, it wasn’t the
government’s
fault that the rescuers couldn’t get into Western Tennessee—it was because of those gun-toting white rednecks!  It was perfect.  And once that excuse became the official line, well, it’s pretty easy to see why the government wouldn’t be in a big hurry to go in and rescue those white racist killers, right?  Southern whites became the perfect group to blame.  Anything that happened to us, we had it coming, because of what we supposedly did to the blacks. 

“After the second quake, most of the relief supplies for Western Tennessee were flown into Memphis International.  They fixed Doug’s bridges again and Memphis got the big rescue operation, at least what was left of it.  But in the end more than a hundred thousand people died in Memphis, and who got blamed?  Whites!  It took the federal government two months to get Memphis halfway under control, and then the relief and reconstruction supplies started pouring in.  But those white rednecks out in the sticks?  Forget it.  They were the racist killers who caused most of the mayhem, right?  So forget them!  And the rural white folks were mostly from the ‘religious right,’ so screw them twice, they never voted Democrat anyway.  It was perfect.  Doug calls it ‘the convenient lie.’  You know, like the opposite of ‘an inconvenient truth’.”

Carson quietly said, “Well, to be fair, you can’t ignore people like Web Hardesty and his vigilante group.” 

“Maybe, but they were a drop in the bucket.  They were blown all out of proportion.  I’ll give you an example.  I saw a television documentary about a month after the quakes.  It was called something like ‘America’s Shame—The Evil That Walks Among Us.’  Documentaries like that made it sound like the KKK was riding again all over Tennessee and Kentucky.  That’s all you saw on the TV news, week after week: white rednecks with rifles, and black bodies on the ground.  A few blacks were hanged by vigilantes, that’s true, but so were whites.  I mean, there were no police!  People
were
hanged for looting, and for cannibalism, there’s no denying that.  But not just blacks, it was whites and Mexicans too.  People did what they had to do to bring back some semblance of law and order when things were totally out of control.  It’s not easy to get a society back on the rails when it goes
Mad Max
and the police have skedaddled.  It takes some vigilante justice, there’s no doubt about it.  What else can you do when there are no police?  But all you ever saw were the blacks that were hanged.  Over and over, the same handful of hangings, until it looked like thousands of blacks were lynched just for being black.  They never showed the whites that were hanged—never.  Just the blacks.  The same five or six hangings were shown about a million times on TV.  It was like the Rodney King video.  They just played those same hangings over and over and over.

“It was classic scapegoating, and it worked.  Nobody was pointing fingers at Washington anymore.  Anything bad that happened after the quakes was our fault.  Rural whites were Public Enemy Number One.  So when they finally got around to ‘pacifying’ us, they sent teams of ATF agents out with the National Guard to collect our so-called illegal firearms.  That was only logical, from Washington’s point of view.  It was because of those illegal guns that we were able to kill all those poor defenseless black refugees, right?  Without our illegal guns, we wouldn’t be able to slaughter those poor defenseless blacks anymore, right?  Well, you can just imagine how the gun confiscation went over in a state where there’s more deer rifles than houses.