Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (2 page)

Three months after the terrorist attack and the beginning of the run on the banks,
China simply took down the North American power grid.

It was not a permanent or
total attack, but it did enough damage and would be time consuming to repair, given that most of the replacement equipment would have to be shipped in from abroad where it was manufactured, mostly in China. This resulted in massive infrastructure failure with essential commodities such as food and fuel unable to be distributed.

When the shortages hit the stores, combined with the inability of the Regime to
distribute and honor electronic benefit checks to the entitlement classes, the effect was massive civil disorder and rioting, on a scale that the Regime could not fully control. The collapse was self-promulgating; it was not easy to fix once the dominos started falling.

The main rioting took place in the urban centers where the mass of entitlement dependents resided. The Regime was brutal in its crackdown on its
‘children’. Millions perished from a combination of lawless violence, the brutality of the Regime’s response, disease and starvation.

The Regime wrested control back in the main u
rban centers across the country. By executive order exception was written to Posse Comitatus, invoking the Insurrection Act, thus declaring Martial law. The Regime commenced to consolidate its power. Given the general food shortage, it aided the Regime that they controlled the food reserves, and according to the ‘dictate’ of the executive orders and the NDAA, Federal agencies such as FEMA and the DHS were able to commandeer private and commercial food reserves.

Many citizens ‘bugged out’ of the urban centers into the countryside to escape the violence, and thus out of the immediate control of the Regime, which precipitated another crisis of refugees and transit gridlock by those unprepared and bugging out to ‘nowhere’.

Out of the ashes of this disaster, the Regime was able to rise. Federal safe zones
were created under martial law, along with FEMA camps where food rations were distributed. While the grid was being rebuilt, the FEMA offices and camps ran on emergency generators to support the registration and tracking process.

Outside of those zones were the contested areas where military operations were conducted to subdue the population.
The Regime concentrated on controlling these main zones as well as mobility corridors connecting them.

Outside of the zones, the country was divided into sectors of martial law, each sector the responsibility of a military governor backed by a political commissioner
from the Regime. The Department of Homeland Security was responsible for domestic military operations. National Guard and active duty units were allocated to the DHS as necessary.

FEMA also made use of the FEMA
Homeland Corps. This was primarily a youth organization of armed paramilitaries, formed before the collapse, which was trained and indoctrinated by the Regime and given paramilitary police powers. They were not old enough to understand the real history of the United States beyond the propaganda taught in the school system and they had no familiarity with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

They became inoculated against brutality and were used for the more flagrant breaches of liberty, such as house raids to confiscate weapons
and food stores, where often whole families were killed. In their blue SWAT style overalls, these young thugs became known as the ‘blue shirts’.

The major
ity of the country’s armed forces remained under Regime control, with the exception of the ‘enlightened’ that were already awake to the reality. Why was this? The country was under attack, now under martial law. The soldiers were indoctrinated to obey orders; they were in the system, part of the machine. In the same way that the mass of the people were fed their news from the mainstream media, so was the military.

True, there were mass desertions wh
en the collapse happened, with many army National Guardsmen staying home to look after their families. But by and large, the active duty units remained on their bases, loyal to the system. The chain of command never flinched: orders came down as usual, situation briefings were given, and before they knew it, the active duty army was deployed domestically under martial law, protecting the country from terrorism. Why would they think any differently?

In fact, the Regime
did experience problems with many of the actual combat veterans among the ranks of the National Guard, active duty army, and even law enforcement. Some of them took their oaths seriously and refused to act illegally against citizens. These types were severely cracked down upon, those that had not deserted or escaped out of the zones.

Those
deserting veterans that were captured or those who dissented, refusing to obey illegal orders, were often taken into mental institutions against their will, on the pretext of mental illness or PTSD, for ‘treatment’ that often involved severe drug therapy that left them mentally incapacitated, shadows of their former selves.

Others saw the writing on the wall and
deserted, getting out and away from the zones, often taking weapons and equipment with them.

However, there was a flip side to the refusal to obey orders to fire on citizens: as good Americans, many of these veterans actually found it easy to fire on the entitlement ‘eaters’ that they came across in the worst of the inner city
riots. In their eyes, these eaters were the antithesis of how America was intended. Once they had pulled the trigger though, there was no going back, and they were lost on the slippery slope.

A new constitution was written, termed the ‘Homeland Charter’. This new document rejected the original Constitution and declared all those supporting it to be domestic terrorists.

There was much deliberate obfuscation between sleeper cells allegedly related to the ‘Iranian’ terr
or attack on DC, and domestic ‘constitutionalist’ terrorists, who were often simply Patriots and preppers.

The old Constitution had led to the destruction of the country
, according to the revisionist agenda of the ‘progressive’ Regime and the ‘doublethink’ mental illness that plagued America. Individual liberty was the enemy; the only salvation was in the collective. The agenda of the progressives was complete.

‘New Citizens’ had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Regime, to obey all laws and orders given to them by those in authority. They were fitted with subcutaneous
RFID chips containing all personal information. Cash and firearms were outlawed and the chips allowed the GPS tracking of people. It was therefore easy to determine someone’s status simply by scanning their forearm, and if no chip was present they were an outlaw, to be arrested or shot on sight.

As part of this new direction, the flag was redesigned. Rat
her than the stripes, there was a red and white sunray effect radiating out from a central, slightly offset to the left, sun-like circle in blue and white. The lower part of the ‘O’ like circle had an effect similar to the radiating red and white stripes, but more horizontally across the bottom of the ‘O’: A shining symbol of the bright future of collective socialism. The new flag was supposed to signify ‘hope’ or some similar progressive garbage.

The star spangled banner was relegated to the newly demonized ‘Patriots’ and subversives. Patriots, constitutionalists, libertarians and anyone who had prepared for the collapse were targets of the Regime, to be tracked down. Those who were not sworn to the new regime were either interned or executed if they were under direct Regime control.

The
citizens of the new Regime lived hand to mouth on government handouts, working in State sponsored jobs and living in camps or state controlled housing, cowed but grateful that they were being kept safe from the outlaws and terrorists outside of the zones.

Many who had not been aware of the true danger of the creeping progressive agenda were rudely awakened
after the collapse. ‘Normalcy bias’ was swept away and their eyes were opened to the true horror of where their great country had descended to.

The FEMA camps were no holiday camp: those who had elected or been forced into them found that due to a combination of corruption, incompetence an
d simple brutality, rations were meager and conditions basic. They were more like concentration camps, with oppressive rules enforced by sullen guards, quick to violence. Many in the camps were simply taken out and killed for being trouble makers, tossed into mass graves and left to rot in piles.

Many could not understand how the military could be used against citizens.
With rioters, it was easy. For the innocent preppers and Patriots who were considered domestic terrorists, it was also easy: it was all a matter of information management. Regime strike teams under the DHS were simply briefed that a ‘target’ housed ‘domestic terrorists’ who were harboring food, weapons and even explosives.

The target
s were hit hard in ‘no knock’ raids with unrestrictive rules of engagement, often resulting in everyone at the target being killed, including whole families in some cases. If the target was found to contain innocent preppers, it was no problem. It was not the first time, even before the collapse, that the wrong address was hit or ‘intelligence’ was found to be incorrect. Heavy handed SWAT ‘kill squad’ tactics were fine as long as ‘department procedures’ were followed.

C
hapter One

B
efore the DC terrorist attack, Jack and Caitlin Berenger were thirty-something professionals living in the Northern Virginia suburbs. They had three children; a teenage boy and two toddlers. The eldest, Andrew, was sixteen, Connor was four and the youngest, Sarah, was two.

Jack
was a former Captain with the Army Rangers, a veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he had gained considerable combat experience. He was very tactically adept and he continued to keep himself fit since resigning from military service, despite his sedentary job as a crisis management consultant. Caitlin was a veteran with a military intelligence background, now working as a civilian for the Department of Defense.

They had always been an active and outdoors type family
, hiking and camping often. Jack also liked to keep his hand in with shooting and they owned several firearms, which he had also been training Andrew to use.

More
recently, they had woken up to the fragility of modern society, the threats faced by the potential for economic collapse and the advance of the socialist agenda of the progressives in the supposedly free United States. They were both Patriots who had served their country and sworn the oath to protect the Constitution from ‘enemies foreign and domestic’.

They had started to make more extensive preparations for a potential collapse, like many other
preppers, and had been stocking up on food and supplies. They were shocked to find that this otherwise sensible endeavor would categorize them as potential ‘domestic terrorists’ for having more than seven days’ worth of food, among other things.

The sane answer to this was that they were simply making preparations for
potential hard times ahead. They were loyal citizens and bore no ill intent towards their country; in fact it was just the opposite. But the lunacy appeared to be spreading, and there was no other way but to ignore and resist the madness.

The Berengers li
ved in a relatively well to do middle class area, some twenty five miles south of the DC beltway. The sub-division consisted of a maze of residential back roads situated in a forested area. It was actually very beautiful, surrounded by lakes and woods and giving no hint of the nearby urban sprawl. However, the malls and shopping centers were only a short drive away, and the I-95 was only five miles to the east.

Their house was a two
story four bedroom colonial from the 1980s, with basement, on a half-acre wooded plot, similar to most of the other surrounding properties. They were situated on the north west corner of a residential four way junction, with the house itself set back about thirty to forty meters from the road, oriented towards the junction to the south east, with the wooded yard to the rear and extending along the two roads to the left and right of the property.

The house was on a slight rise and looked down towards the junction, which was a four way stop where the kids congregated in the mornings to wait for the school bus.

The slope down to the two roads was grassed with a couple of wooded islands that gave some cover from view from the road, but otherwise there was just a drainage ditch and grass between the house and the two roads. The driveway was on the right side as you looked towards the road and sloped up over about thirty meters towards a double garage on the right side of the house.

The neighborhood was a mix of professional and retired types, some families with kids and others
living in empty nests. One of the big problems the Berengers had encountered, when they got into prepping following the purchase of the house, was the local Homeowners Association.