A DISTANT THUNDER Read online

  I took a strong, balanced stance, legs at shoulder width, ninety degree angle to the target. Rifle to shoulder, good sight picture, even at point blank range aim a wee bit low to compensate for the slight recoil. Fire-a-burst-of-six. Rothstein could eat now, because by God he was dancing like Fred Astaire. Fire-a-burst-of-six and Big Jew he shimmy and he shake like a bowl full of jelly. Then he’s down on the asphalt, his stick-like legs and arms waving in the air like a cockroach who just got hit with the Black Flag, which I suppose isn’t a bad way to describe this whole gig. He’s down and wallowing in his own blood and piss and shit. I heard Tank Thompson’s voice, far away. “Shane, you got him! We’re done here! Let’s beat feet!” Dead babies. Babies! What kind of monster that calls itself a man kills babies? I walked up to the quivering thing on the highway and put the barrel of my weapon to its head. Fire-a-burst-of-six.

  “Shane, God damn it!” somebody else yelled. “They’re coming after us from the airport! Let’s go! “

  I remembered something else from that one play in drama class. I looked down at the corpse. “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” I remarked conversationally, to no one in particular. Then we beat feet.

  Oh, yeah. Lurch got copter number three that day. Johnny told me later a piece of the rotor blade crashed into Henderson Boulevard about eight feet from me and damned near took off my head. I didn’t notice.

  Woodchuck Kid

  Woodchuck Kid

  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law ‘s delay,

  The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes....?

  -Hamlet, Act III, Scene One

  Good morning, ma’am. You all set up? If you’re ready to record I’m ready to ramble.

  I suppose it’s best to start at the beginning. I’ll go ahead and get the family and childhood stuff out of the way, so I can get on with the real story. My full name is Shane Alan Ryan. I was born in Providence Hospital in Dundee, Washington, ninety-one years ago last month. I’ve lived in Dundee most of my life except for my tour of military duty during the War of Independence with the Northwest Volunteer Army, and again when I was called up by the Northwest Defense Force during Operation Strikeout, when I got as far north as Chilliwack in B.C. and as far south as Chico in California. We had to pull back from Chico after the armistice. Never particularly wanted to live anywhere else than Dundee. Grow where you’re planted, I always figured. Oh, yeah, I been to Spokane and Coeur d’Al ene and Jackson Hole, Wyoming since then, but that was on vacation.

  Married twice, widowed twice, no children from the first marriage to my lifelong regret, eight from the second and something on the order of twenty-four grandchildren, number twenty-five coming along next week sometime, and six great-grandkids, including that little three-year-old imp of Satan who is about to pull the tripod out from under your camera, and whom you have my permission to smack. I been retired for more years than I care to remember. I’ve worked at the methane power plant out on Clark Highway, and I also ran a vacuum sealer at the cannery down on the harbor. Worked for the Party as well. For some years I was chief immigrant housing officer for the Bureau of Race and Resettlement. I always had a partiality for German Homecomers, and my efforts are one reason why we have one of the biggest Oktoberfests in the Republic and why you can buy the Lëwischer Zeitung from a rack right beside the Dundee Advertiser. After I retired from the Bureau, just for something to do, my last job was as a night watchman at a Ministry of Agriculture cranberry processing plant. I have three pensions, one from the Veteran’s Fund and one from the cannery, plus my usual government Codger Credit. When I croak, which should be sometime fairly soon, the Sons and Daughters of the NVA will bury me for free beside both of my late wives and give me a nice marble headstone with the Volunteer seal and the little statue of the guy in the fedora hat holding the Kalashnikov on top, which in my case is accurate because I did tote an AK on a few occasions, like the Rothstein hit I told you about yesterday. Once a year on October twenty-second, the local school children will come and pull up the weeds and replace the little vinyl Tricolor on my grave before their class goes off and eat themselves sick at their Independence Day party, so I’m pretty much taken care of. Not a bad way to end up at my age, I’ll give the revolution that. Damned sight better shape than I would have been in if we’d stayed with ZOG.

  My birth in Providence Hospital was notable in being the last major medical expense my family ever had that was covered by health insurance. Lucky for us, I was the youngest of three children. Two months after I was born, my father was downsized from the last living-wage job with full benefits he would ever hold. From then on he worked at a series of temporary jobs with no bennies until each job in turn was lost to India or China or Guatemala when they found some mud who could do it for fifty cents a day. My father was an architect and a drunk, then he became an architectural draftsman and a drunk, then he was a consultant and a drunk, then a warehouse freight checker and a drunk, and finally he was just a drunk. We went from a split-level ranch on Country Club Drive when I was a baby, to a roomy but rundown two-story 1920s fixer-upper we lived in until I was ten, then a four-room renter house, then a series of smaller and smaller apartments, By the time that, to everyone’s surprise, I made it to high school graduation, we were in a twenty-year-old mobile home out on Dead Dog Road.

  My mom was a secretary, then a bookkeeper, and finally she ended up working behind the counter in a laundromat run by a Pakistani. She was a bad drunk too, but she always held her liquor a lot better than Dad and usually you couldn’t tell when she was sloshed except by how mean and hateful she talked, about everyone and everything. Dad alternately raged at the world and wallowed in self-pity, but he never did anything about it. Didn’t even get in fights. I always had the impression that at some point in time he’d just given up on it all in sheer bafflement. He once told me when he was really plastered that life is an endless ordeal of meaningless suffering, and the only advice he could offer me was to save string, which might have been pretty profound if I hadn’t learned later on that he’d gotten that line from a Woody Allen movie. Mom on the other hand would do things, evil nasty things, like spiking her office rivals’ coffee with a little plastic pack of shampoo, sending people anonymous letters and e-mails telling them their spouse was cheating, that kind of petty malicious crap. In later years she took to calling government snitch lines anonymously to accuse people she didn’t like of being drug dealers, child abusers, and later on of being with the NVA, whether it was true or not. During the war I was always scared Mom would really ID one of our people by accident and rat them out, and then I’d be the one sent to whack her. I didn’t particularly like her, but it would have been very disrespectful.

  One day the FBI rocked up at the trailer and enlightened her that I wasn’t traveling the Northwest as a Secret Shopper for Mighty Mart, and that I was really a Volunteer. I like to think that she never turned me in because I was family, but I have to admit I always suspected it was because she knew what would happen if she did. Death would have seriously interfered with her drinking. But after that, on my brief and infrequent covert visits home Mom kept nagging me to shoot the neighbors, or her co-workers, or whoever was on her hate list at the time. So I had to stop coming around, because I’d say no and she’d start whimpering about how I didn’t love her, trying to make me feel guilty because I wouldn’t be her private angel of death avenging all her petty hatreds and disappointments in life. Eventually another NVA crew from Centralia caught up with the Paki owner of the laundromat where she worked. The boys thumped him gentle and artistic with baseball bats, an axe handle, and a piece of steel rebar. After the wog got out of the hospital he decided the grass was greener in Los Angeles, so Mom lost her job and she quit speaking to me, which I was frankly glad of. After the revolution I had a word with a comrade I knew on the Lewis County enemy property e
xpropriations committee, and he gave the laundromat to Mom. She hired some new migrants from Switzerland to run it for her, it made her the boss and kept her in booze until she died of cancer, and so from that point on I was just the best and most loving son in the world, a heroic fighter for our people’s freedom, blah blah blah ishkabibble. That kind of relationship. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever had to deal with an alcoholic in the family.

  Dad was euthanized a few months after I went on the bounce. I don’t think it had anything to do with me being NVA. I hope not, anyway. He had been admitted to the hospital for liver failure due to severe cirrhosis. He had no medical insurance, and needless to say he couldn’t afford a liver transplant. Medicare was long gone and Medicaid had finally folded up completely a year before, so Dad was certified as terminal by a Jew doctor named Friedman, and one morning my Mom got a call at work saying Dad had been given a lethal injection of sodium pentathol the night before under Article So and So, Section Ishkabibble of the Senior Citizens’ Quality of Life Act, which I always thought was a strange name for a law that gave doctors the right to kill old people who annoyed them or who had no money. Basically, the United States government realized that unless something was done there would be millions of elderly white people from the Baby Boom who had no money and no insurance and who constituted a potential drain on the economy that might wreck the whole apple cart. So rather than stop pouring money down the Middle East rathole in a futile attempt to make the Arabs love Israel at gunpoint while we stole their oil, the government of the United States solved the problem from the other end by cutting expenses, i.e. by simply killing off the sick and the old people.

  It wasn’t hard to do, since the precedent had already been set with massive legal abortion. There was a certain hideous logic to it. If you can kill a baby, then why not an octogenarian? What’s the difference if the human life being snuffed out for reasons of general inconvenience is minus three months or plus eighty-four years? By Amurrica’s warped logic, there was none. The precedent was set with Roe v. Wade that certain individuals in society had the right to decide to take certain other human lives, and from then on it was only a matter of deciding who pitched and who caught, as the faggots used to say. The new law gave the medical profession a hunting license, with an implicit understanding that they were to eliminate the problem caused by millions of non-productive codgers and crones who were waving their canes and screeching their demands that they be taken care of as promised in exchange for a lifetime of submission and conformity. There are no statistics available as to how many Baby Boomers were shunted into the nursing homes and shortly afterward given the hot shot by mostly Jewish and Third World “medical professionals,” which towards the end could mean any Filipino who had gotten through a sixteen-week nurse’s aid course and who could write English well enough to fill out the zillion necessary forms after he’d whacked the old folks. By the time I was growing up, us white kids all had a pretty good idea of what was waiting for us at the end of the trail if we left ZOG in power. I always kind of suspected that was a large part of what made my generation finally decide to pick up a rifle. Some of us figured we might as well die from a bullet now as on the end of some kike’s hypodermic needle fifty years on.

  As a joyful kicker, Dad’s one remaining life insurance policy was invalidated. The company refused to pay, because they said my father’s death was an Act of God. No, my father’s death was an Act of Jew, which isn’t quite the same thing. Mom screamed and hollered for a while and ran to this jackleg lawyer we had in town named Stevens, who took the last $27,000 she managed to scrape up from somewhere in retainer and billable hours before informing Mom that the statute specifically forbade civil relief for acts of euthanasia committed in “good faith” and that since it appeared that Dad had been an alcoholic (well, he was) and was therefore really responsible for all of it himself, she had no case. The son of a bitch had known that all along before he took my mother’s money, of course. It was well known that Stevens made a habit of scamming people on those Quality of Life Act wrongful death cases, but Mom chose not to believe anyone who warned her. There was at least that much desperate, ruined love for Dad left in her, I think.

  I filed a murder complaint on Doctor Friedman with the War Prevention Bureau after the revolution, and I got him put on the Hit Parade. Me and a couple of hundred others whose old folks that kike bastard murdered. A few years later my father’s killer was found dead in his Lexus in a parking garage in Philadelphia with a skull full of .22 hollow points and a Tarot card, the Prince of Wands, tossed on his dashboard. Always hoped I’d find out who the Prince of Wands was so I could thank him, but the WPB keeps such matters pretty close to the vest. Lawyer Stevens got his as well, even before that. During the Cleanup, the NVA (no, I tell a lie, I think we were actually NDF by then) kicked in this legal beagle’s office door as he was stuffing a big suitcase full of documents, either to destroy them or to flee the country. An hour later Stevens was turning slowly in the wind on an elm tree in the downtown park. The boys hung him with piano wire, so he twirled and danced like fish on the end of a hook and line for a long time, bobbing and gasping and pissing, while the crowd of onlookers cheered and applauded and laughed and cursed his soul on its journey down to hell. Like I said, this particular jurisconsult had a reputation in our little community. Alles wird abgerechnet. What goes around, comes around.

  My mom told me something odd once. She said, “Your father was secretly very proud of you, Shane, although he would never have dared to say it out loud, to you or to anyone else. You were doing what no man of his generation had the courage to do, least of all him.” What struck me as odd was that Mom was sober when she told me this.

  I had two older brothers, neither of whom figure in my story. One of them became a drug addict. The year after I graduated high school he OD’ed in Seattle on a speedball, a mixture of cocaine and heroin that his equally trashed-out girlfriend injected him with. It wasn’t the drugs that killed him. She’d just been so stoned there was an air bubble in the hypodermic and his heart seized up. I never had to track her down and kill her. She wasn’t a bad or uncaring young woman, she was just screwed up like a Chinese fire drill. When she realized what she had done, she got on the computer and typed out a seven-thousand-word suicide note full of gibberish, e-mailed it to everyone in her address book, and then she turned up the boom box full volume with some nigger rap song and committed suicide by shooting herself up with pure air. Her address book was mostly spammers and Usenet groups for lunatics, and so no one noticed the suicide e-mail, but my brother’s Bengali landlord found the bodies after he broke into the apartment to shut up the boom box. After paying out the last of her savings to that goddamned attorney my mom couldn’t afford a funeral, and so she sold my brother’s body to an organ chop shop at the hospital for spare parts. God knows what they could harvest out of his drug-sodden carcass. The girl’s too, after no one claimed her. Mom stayed drunk for three months on the proceeds.

  My other brother fought on the other side. Well, joined it, anyway. He was too chickenshit to get his hands wet. He became a lawyer, to the eternal disgrace of our family. He married a chink and fled the country after Longview rather than end up swinging on a length of piano wire like Mr. Stevens and his other fellow officers of the court. Not to mention the crime of racial treason through miscegenation. I’ve no idea where he ended up, nor do I care. Somewhere I probably have half-breed Asian nephews and nieces. If I’d ever met any of them in my gun-toting days I would have wasted them without a moment’s hesitation. Garbage is garbage, no matter whose blood happens to be intermingled with the yellow piss. So that’s pretty much my biological family taken care of. They were all a pretty revolting bunch, truth to tell, and I’ll try to keep them as much out of this from now on as I can.

  The Wingfields were my real family.

  * * *

  Damn. How can I explain to you what life was like back then?

  The little girl from the univers
ity tells me the purpose of me sitting here maundering into the videocam is to preserve all this clutter for posterity, and also so future historians can listen to me and from my babbled fragments reconstruct the reason for The Awakening, as they’re starting to call it. Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty interesting question, if you think about it. For almost three generations the white race ate every serving of shit that ZOG chose to dollop out to us, grinning like egg-suck dogs while we scarfed it all down and licked the plate. So what changed? Just why, exactly, during the early decades of the twenty-first century did the white man finally decide to fight, at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute and the fifty-ninth second? What made the white man finally get up off his ass and pick up a gun after a lifetime of allowing the Federal government of the United States to do pretty much any damned thing it wanted to do?

  Hell if I know.

  I keep getting asked that all the time. I think some of us even talked about it among ourselves back then, to while away the hours on the bounce. Can’t really remember what we ever decided, if anything. Young people look at me like I have the key to some great secret. If I knew it I’d share it with you, believe me. It’s sure something we need. Whatever the hell it was, our race didn’t stumble across it until it was almost too damned late. But really, I don’t know. When you live through something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand every little thing about it. I’ll tell you this much: I don’t remember the war as being this big long heroic adventure that our NBA films and books and documentaries portray, that’s for sure. You want to know the truth of the matter, it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. War isn’t. Long periods of paranoid and nervous boredom broken by brief outbursts of madness and horror. But as to why white people finally revolted? The best I can tell you is that there wasn’t any one reason, it was a whole combination of things that just happened to fall into place just right. Or wrong. You can only push people so far. At some point, there was just some final straw that broke the camel’s back, and thanks to the Party and the Incomers, the white racial settlers from around the continent who came to the Northwest, we were able to reach critical mass and blow. But precisely what that ultimate straw was, I haven’t got a clue. Didn’t then, don’t now.