She left, tears in her eyes.
“As Shakespeare said,” Steve muttered. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” The professor smiled. “Come on in, motherfuckers!” he yelled. He cocked the pistol.
Just off the campus of the University of South Carolina, in a private home, Lynne Hoffman spoke before a small group of men and women. Their ages ranged from fifteen to sixty. Lynne was the head of her particular cell of nonviolent Rebels. Although they believed quite strongly in what the Rebels were attempting to do, their jobs were in gathering supplies and caching them. None of her people carried firearms.
All that was to change this night.
“We don’t have much time,” Lynne told the group. “One of those captured in the Virginia raid has broken, telling Cody’s men about us. We’ve got to run and we’ve got to fight. We…”
The front door slammed open and the small foyer filled with federal police and Hartline’s mercenaries. “You’re under arrest!” a man yelled. “Get your hands over your head and get up against the wall. Move, goddammit, move!”
Lynne jumped for the back door just as someone plunged the room into darkness. Gunfire rocked the night and someone began screaming in pain. Lynne and two others made it out of the house, running into the night.
“Burn the goddamn house down around them,” a man yelled.
Out in the desert, the night animals began their search for food. The hawk for a rabbit; the snake for a mouse; the mouse for a hole. But on this night, another type of hunt was underway. Mike Medlow, a federal police officer from Modesto searched for Judy Fowler.
Ever since he’d handled her lush little body during a campus demonstration, Medlow had tried every way he could think of to get the pants off her. Tonight, he’d followed her old VW into the desert and forced her off the road. The rest would soon be history.
“Come on, baby,” he called. “I know you’re part of the local cell of Raines’s Rebels. I’ve known for months. But I haven’t said anything about it, have I? That ought to be worth some pussy, huh? If I turn you in, Hartline’s boys will gang-bang you day and night. It’ll be our secret, Judy. Just you and me. Come on, baby?”
A dozen yards away, trembling in the rough shelter of a barranca, Judy tried to still her ragged breathing. She had been so frightened when Medlow ran her off the road she had failed to grab the only weapon she had, a tire iron.
Medlow came closer. Judy panicked and felt her feet slipping in the loose gravel. She slid down into the dry creek bed and landed on her back. Medlow was on her in an instant, tearing at her clothes. The cool desert air fanned her bare hips and belly.
His fingers found her and entered her, spreading her. Then she screamed as his hardness replaced his fingers and drove deep. Medlow began hunching, panting in her face, his breath stinking. She screamed as his hands found her breasts and squeezed brutally.
Judy’s hands clutched at the dry gravel bed until she found a baseball-sized rock. She slammed the rock against Medlow’s head, just above his right ear. He slumped on her, unconscious, blood dripping on her bare skin from his torn flesh.
She wriggled from under him and covered herself with her torn clothing. She started to run, then remembered what a Rebel sergeant had told a group of them at a secret training. She pictured the sergeant and brought back his voice.
“Strip the body of all weapons, ammunition, and money. We’re preparing to fight a guerrilla war and we have no time for niceties. Take his ID, badge, everything we might be able to use. Then make damn sure he’s dead.”
Judy stripped the body and Medlow’s car. There, she found a shotgun and several boxes of shells for his pistol and shotgun. She walked back to the federal police officer and stood over him. She cocked his service revolver, a .44 magnum, and blew half his head into a bloody mass.
All across the nation similar events were unfolding as the federal police and Hartline’s men became more savage and brutal in their handling of any suspected Rebel sympathizers.
It had been raining off and on for a week, ever since VP Lowry had met with the military; ever since that damned demonstration that had turned into a riot. Two cops were dead, a dozen civilians dead. A hundred or more civilians hospitalized, several hundred arrested. And the press was really outraged. One of their own was on the run after killing a federal cop and many press-people were blatantly ignoring the government’s censorship order.
President Aston Addison was behaving as if nothing had happened. He had called a press conference; VP Lowry had cancelled it, refusing to allow any network to carry the president’s message. But Addison had not lost his cool; had acquiesced in style, without losing his temper.
Goddamn the man! What did it take for him to show some temper.
And now this.
Lowry turned in his chair and looked at the dozen men and women from the House and Senate seated around his desk.
Ben Raines had moved east and was in command of the Rebels in the Great Smoky Mountains Park.
The son of a bitch was really alive!
The bastard!
The VP looked like a man who had just bumped into death and couldn’t quite forget the encounter and ensuing chill. When he spoke, his words were slow, carefully enunciated.
“After the states of Tennessee and North Carolina lost so many police officers, I asked Colonel Cody to handpick a battalion of men from his own people and from those units of the regular military who remain loyal to us. Every man picked was an experienced combat man. Almost 900 officers and men. Late yesterday, 83 of them came staggering out of the park area… shot to pieces, frightened out of their wits, babbling about facing thousands of Rebels…”
“They may have exaggerated the number somewhat,” Senator Stout said.
VP Lowry looked at the man. “Shut up.”
“Aston Addison is behaving as though nothing has happened. As though he is still running the country. You people put him in office, you people may now remove him.”
Representative Alice Tyler shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“Something, Mrs. Tyler?”
“The… ah… military,” she said, “especially the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Calland, told us,” she indicated the other members of Congress, “President Addison is to remain in office.”
“Did he now?”
“That is correct, Mr. Vice President,” Senator Douglas said, his voice low and rumbling, almost matching in timbre the grumbling of the thunder outside the VP’s official residence. “I personally believe the military is waiting to see which way the action moves, so to speak.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Al Cody said. “I think the military is solidly behind Raines and his people.”
“The military is neutral,” Representative Altamont spoke. “At least in their actions toward this uprising. I can’t speak, of course, for their thoughts. But the military will stay out of any fighting—for the time being.”
“You’re sure of that?” VP Lowry asked. He knew Altamont had a brother who was a general in the Air Force. “You got that from family?”
“Yes, to the first; no comment to the latter.”
“All right,” Lowry smiled, rubbing his hands together. “The military told me the same thing, but I didn’t believe them.” He turned to Cody. “You know most of the Rebels, right?”
“A good many of them.”
“Know where their families are?”
“Certainly.”
“Start putting the pressure on the families,” Lowry ordered.
“That could backfire,” Tyler said. “That could really set
