A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “What did you do?” asked Kelly, fascinated.

  “I looked away and the games went on, that night and other nights. But I never looked at the door again. No matter what the girls and I were doing, I always made sure I never faced the door to my room while we did it. One more thing. From little things that Karen and Leah let slip over the years, I knew that on certain nights they weren’t in my room, they were in Larry’s room with him and Gina. Doing a foursome with variations. Those two didn’t sleep in their own beds much. So don’t tell me that Newman’s death won’t make you feel better, Kelly. Because I know. I promise you, it will be taken care of.” He stood up. “I’ll go see how Farmer’s doing. We need to be gone from here. I don’t want the Fatties to catch us in your house, or they’ll kill all of you too once they realize your dad has helped a wounded Volunteer.”

  Shipman agreed that Farmer Brown could be released. He even lent Brown a shirt against the night chill. “Thank you again, Doctor,” said Cody. “And you, Kelly, and Mrs. Shipman for the supper and for your patience. Again, I apologize for this intrusion. Doctor Shipman, as soon as we have some kind of open offices in the city, please feel free to send the NVA a bill. I promise you, it will be paid. Now, I’d like to ask you one more favor. I’d like to ask if you would say nothing at all to anyone about our being here tonight. There’s no good purpose to be served by speaking of this incident. If you call the FBI or Homeland Security, you’ll get on the wrong side of the Feds for having helped us, even at gunpoint, and although we ourselves would never repay your kindness with harm, there are some in the NVA who would consider it informing, and you don’t want that. Kelly, I am assuming that drama school will continue, although I don’t know who’s going to want to see those stupid one-acts with a revolution going on in the streets outside. But I ask that you keep our little secret when we get back in class, Kelly. You know why. There’s something we need to take care of.”

  “And that would be?” asked Doctor Shipman.

  “I think you know, sir,” said Cody, looking at him steadily.

  Shipman looked away. “Yes, I know. And to my shame, I have to admit that I want it to happen. We won’t say anything about your visit here tonight. I suppose that when it comes right down to my own family, my veneer of civilization is no thicker than yours and all I want is vengeance against the monster who hurt my child. I’m a savage just like you.”

  “Oh, no no no, that won’t do at all,” said Jack Flash. “Niggers are savages, Doctor. We are barbarians. A much braver and more noble article.”

  As they were driving away in the Cadillac, Emily asked him “What was that all about? I noticed your little intíme with Kelly in the den. What is it we have to take care of at school?”

  “Newman,” said Cody. “The son of a bitch raped Kelly this afternoon after class.”

  “Bloody hell!” cursed Jack Flash.

  “I’m sorry, Cody,” said Nightshade sincerely.

  “We’ll get him, son,” said Farmer. “If you don’t mind a hand on your first independent hit, I’d like to be in on this one myself. I have at least one left to lend, and this left isn’t as bad as it looks. Or feels.”

  “Could we possibly make it a foursome?” asked Nigel Moore. “That is a lovely lady indeed and I would consider it a privilege to assist in rendering this particular sheeny dead, dead, dead. Oh, I say, there’s a thought! Any chance of a good old English topping?”

  “A what?” asked Brown.

  “A hanging,” explained Nigel enthusiastically. “The old Tyburn ticket. Make this Red Sea pedestrian dance Danny Deever.”

  “A Jew lynching!” laughed Brown. “The old Leo Frank trick!”

  “Precisely!” agreed Nigel.

  Cody mulled it over. “Mmm, yeah, that catwalk in the auditorium ought to take the weight of a body. I don’t know if Bells will go for something that exotic, but we can at least make a plan and run it by him. But there’s a problem. Nightshade and I are still on special intelligence assignment, unless they decide to call it off now, and going to that stupid drama class and listening to that kike spout off about Stanislavsky and The Method may be essential to maintaining our cover with those people at the Assembly of God.”

  “Jesus, how long do you think the school can keep on with this summer school gig anyway, trying to pretend that nothing has changed?” asked Emily.

  “Hopefully long enough for you to make your acting début as a duckbilled platypus,” said Cody.

  “And I was so looking forward to your opening night,” said Farmer Brown from the back seat. “I was going to play the proud parent and sit up front and applaud,” he added wistfully.

  Cody drove slowly, and along the way back to Medina they watched for signs of the street fighting they had heard from all over the area. The bulk of it seemed to be over. Here and there were burning vehicles, some FATPO and some civilian, and shattered glass and debris filled the streets, but they didn’t see any more bodies. The street lights were still on in most places, and the houses were all dark in that they had their porch lights turned off and their window shades pulled down, but through the shades could be seen the lambent glow of television screens. “Unbelievable. History is happening right on their doorsteps, and these people are all inside watching it on CNN,” growled Cody, shaking his head.

  “It’s the American way,” said Jack Flash. “The white man has become almost complete passive. Life has become a spectator sport, when it’s not a video game.”

  “They’re all watching Fox News if they’re Republicans, and CNN if they’re Democrats,” said Emily. “All the Assembly of God people watch CBN and 700 Club religiously, of course, no pun intended. We need to try and catch up on what Pastor Renfield and Billy Benbow said on the tube tonight, Cody, so we can mention it in church. We need to let them know we’re good Christians, and in a crisis a good Christian always turns to the pastor to be told what to do.”

  “A Judaeo-Christian does, honey, yes,” said Brown. “A Christian-Christian turns to the Bible.”

  “I didn’t know you were religious, Farmer,” said Jack Flash.

  “I’m not,” the wounded man replied. “My wife was.”

  As they approached the NVA safe house in Medina through the empty neighborhood, they came to a crude but bulky street barricade which had been built under a street light using what appeared to be a picnic table, lawn furniture from nearby houses, garbage cans and plastic recycling tubs off the street, and part of a chain link fence which had been ripped up from somewhere. Behind the barricade was a large FATPO truck, but even as they pulled up they could see a man busy with several cans of spray paint, covering over the Federal insignia and spraying onto the doors a crude target-like rondel in green, white, and blue. A Northwest Tricolor flag was rammed on its staff down into the junk on the home-made barrier. “Looks like they’re already making use of those Fattie vehicles we impounded at Eastgate,” said Cody. There was a crude sign spray-painted on plywood, barely readable in the dim light: NVA - STOP OR BE SHOT. Cody slowed the Cadillac and a Volunteer in civilian clothes he had never seen before approached the car with his Kalashnikov at the ready. Another couple of Volunteers covered him from the open roof of the truck with the M-60 machine gun which up until that evening had been U. S. government property. Cody rolled down the window. “We’re NVA!” he called out. “A Company, Number Three Seattle Brigade.”

  “Yeah? Got the password?” asked the armed man.

  “Ragnarok,” said Cody.

  “Okay,” said the rebel. “We’re with Slim Jim in E Company. You guys heading back to the brigade HQ?”

  “Yes, we have a wounded man.”

  “Farmer Brown? Yeah, we heard. How ya doing, Farmer?” the man called into the back seat.

  “Still frosty, thanks to my personal posse here,” replied Farmer. “You’re Jason Miller from the phone company, right? Yeah, I remember you. How’s Slim Jim doing?”

  “He’s a captain now, like Bells,” said Miller. “I guess now
we’re in an open war we’ll all get promotions. I wanna be an Übergruppenführer.”

  “Uh, what’s that in American?” asked Farmer.

  “No idea, it just sounds cool.”

  “We had a local quack I know patch Farmer up, but we still want Mary Beth to look at him,” said Cody. “How’s it been going tonight? Any Fatties around?”

  “Not for an hour or so,” said Comrade Miller carelessly. “The Commandant told us to set up these barricades to guard the approaches to the safe house, to make sure if there’s an attack on the headquarters they get some warning, but I don’t think Fattie’s got the stones for it. They can dish it out, but they never could take it. Heard on the news that they’re flying in some Fattie general to try and get them to pull back and establish the truce that bimbo Chelsea was talking about on TV tonight. I heard him broadcasting a while ago, telling the Fatties they’ve made their point with their so-called protest. Protest, my ass. They stuck out their arm and they got it chewed off, is what. You drive careful going into HQ. Some of the guys are still a bit psyched on adrenalin, and that Cadillac looks a little official.”

  “Anybody shoots it up, there will be hell to pay,” said Cody. “It belongs to Bobby Bells. We’re all expendable, but so much as scratch the paint on this Caddy and you sleep with the fishes.”

  They arrived back at the safe house without further mishap. After the NVA field medic Mary Beth checked out Farmer Brown, she said, “This Doctor Shipman knows his stuff. Not much I can do for him that hasn’t already been done, and I’d say he’ll be okay. I have been told that we are actually going to more or less move in and take over one of the local hospitals, and use that for all our wounded, as soon as things calm down enough and we can get the FATPOs back in their cages, so he’ll be sent there for recovery whenever that happens. I’ll change his dressing before we send him over, but he should be back on his feet in a couple of weeks.”

  “Uh, I gather from the flag out front and the party-down atmosphere inside that this safe house is no longer maintaining any pretence of secrecy,” commented Cody.

  “Yeah, tonight we make like the queers and come out of the closet,” said Mary Beth. Someone actually hung another sign cut from a cardboard box on the front door of the mansion, written in magic marker, that read Northwest Volunteer Army, No. 3 Seattle Brigade HQ. Please Wipe Feet Before Entering. Someone else had gotten up onto the roof, run up a Tricolor, and then turned one of the lawn spotlights shining onto it so the rebel flag was visible in the night.

  The house was full of people now, running around the rooms, sitting on all the available furniture and on the floor, sleeping in all the beds, and gabbing with one another out on the floodlit lawn in total disregard of the possibility of a sudden hail of bullets from the surrounding darkness. There were weapons stacked in every available corner, and the garage had been turned into a full-scale armory and auto body shop where several FATPO Humvees were being re-sprayed with NVA rondels and insignia. There were people Cody had never seen before sitting in corners banging on laptops, talking on cell phones, and the big living room was occupied by officers who were poring over maps spread all over the tables. “Christ, I never realized there were so many of us!” said Cody to Emily, shaking his head. Everyone who wasn’t talking seemed to be eating. There was food, paper plates containing bits and pieces of food, and food containers everywhere, as well as what seemed like hundreds of plastic soda bottles in various stages of consumption. There were also big huge piles of McDonalds’ burgers and sandwiches and fries in the kitchen, heaped up next to the microwaves, as well as Chinese and subs and pizza. This would be a truly American revolution, fueled on junk food.

  “That kid from Number Two Brigade, Ted, went back to the food court at Eastgate and cleaned it out along with the other burger-flippers and counter hands, to feed the NVA on this momentous night,” said Eddie Hagen.

  “Is there any order in this chaos?” Cody asked Hagen. “Is anybody in charge?”

  “Yeah, it’s bit more organized than it looks,” Hagen told them. “We got a rota system, four hours out on the street, four hours back here or in another safe house where they can catch up on shuteye, but nobody is sleeping. They’re all watching it go down on CNN. I think maybe some of the guys are hoping to fulfill the great American ambition of seeing themselves on TV.”

  “How are we doing?” asked Emily. “Are we winning?”

  Hagen laughed. “The sitch is still kind of fluid, but yeah, we’ve given the Feds a good bitch-slap. Our crew at Eastgate turned in the best performance yet, but the Fatties seem to have been caught by surprise at the level of resistance. I think we’ve killed at least twenty of them besides that big bunch we whacked in the mall. There’s been another interesting development as well. In several cases that we know of, local citizens who were being terrorized by FATPOs took matters into their own hands, brought out whatever guns they had hidden away, and opened fire on their asses. Plus there have been reports of some of the few remaining non-whites in Seattle getting attacked and chased down the street by white gangs. Everybody heard the President’s speech and everybody understood. The word has gotten out that the times they are a-changin’. Bells has got ‘em lined up down at the mall wantin’ to join the Volunteers, and it’s two in the morning! It will be really interesting to see how the white population reacts now that the lid is off and they can stand up and say nigger again.”

  The two teenagers went into the crowded den and watched TV for a while. It had been hours since the President’s speech, and yet the cable news network talking heads were still screaming at the top of their lungs about it. The general tenor of the reaction was sheer, utter incredulity. Commentators both liberal and neo-conservative were literally spluttering and stuttering. Red Morehouse wandered in for one of his periodic visits to check up on what was going out via the media, and he chuckled with delight. “Actually, this idea that the entire North American continent is some kind of gigantic single political and social entity and destined to be ruled from Washington, D.C. is a very old one, even pre-dating the destruction of the Constitution in 1861,” he explained. “Back in the nineteenth century it used to be called Manifest Destiny. That’s what the War of 1812 was really all about. It had nothing to do with Britain impressing American sailors, it was a straightforward land grab. The United States wanted to conquer Canada. Fortunately for the Canadians, gross incompetence was already an established feature of American government and military strategy.”

  “Yeah, all these Amurrican yay-hoos can claim that the United States never lost a war,” said Emily. “Bullshit. The U.S. lost at least a couple of times that I know about. The Canadians and Brits kicked American ass in 1812 and burned the White House to the ground. The Bolsheviks defeated American troops when they tried to invade Russia in 1919. And I have never understood how any moron can claim that Vietnam was an American victory.”

  “It’s pretty clear the United States is also going to be run out of the Middle East eventually,” added Morehouse. “But this idea that the North American continent always has to be in one piece politically speaking is almost a religion with these people. The fact that a President of the United States is willing to sit down with separatists of any kind is astounding to them. They can’t wrap their minds around it.”

  “Every other continent on the face of the earth has more than one nation on it,” said Cody. “Even northern Australia was handed to the gooks recently and became South Irian. Why, exactly, should North America be any different?” After a while Cody and Emily got bored with watching all the gibbering negroid and liberals and blow-dried neo-cons on TV, and they went and found Commandant Dortmunder, who was in the kitchen pouring out the last cup of coffee from the coffee maker. Several other officers, new to Cody, were sitting around the table talking on cell phones or among themselves. “Sir, do you have a minute?” he asked. “What do you want me and Nightshade to do now? If it’s all right we’d like to be put on one of those duty rosters for street patr
ols, or else go back over to Eastgate Mall and re-join Captain DiBella’s team.”

  “Hmm,” said Dortmunder, thinking while he pulled out a paper filter and made another pot of coffee. “According to the news media all public school functions have been canceled due to the unsettled conditions, as they put it, so you don’t have to go in to that silly drama class tomorrow, or I suppose I should say this morning. Kind of like a snow day, I guess.”

  “That’s good,” said Nightshade. “Once you’ve been an urban guerrilla, it’s kind of hard to go back to being a duckbilled platypus.”

  “Should we report to Captain DiBella back at the Eastgate mall?” asked Cody again. “I hear he’s running a regular recruiting station for the NVA out there now.”

  “Mmm, normally I’d say yes, but there’s still this church investigation thing you two are involved with,” said Dortmunder. “You have to remember, Cody, that organizationally speaking, Nightshade isn’t part of A Company, she’s Third Section, and until I hear otherwise we don’t want her doing anything that might get her recognized and blow her cover. Technically, you two shouldn’t even have gone on that expedition to Eastgate, you know. I didn’t realize you were going when Bells put together his crew, although I suppose even if I’d caught it in time I wouldn’t have had the heart to stop you. You’re still young enough to think war is an adventure. Well, that’s spilt milk, but it’s now more important than ever that we find out if ZOG is trying to set up some kind of counterrevolutionary movement through these Holy Joes. So I want you and Nightshade to stick here and stay out of sight. Don’t worry, we’ll find something for you to do, and then if they re-open the schools and start that silly drama class up again, you’ll have to try and resume your life as American teenagers, although God knows how long that’s going to be possible. I know it’s hard for you to go back to being ducks after a night like tonight…”

  “Duckbilled platypus,” said Emily.