3
Elvis Clagg saw the whole thing, from the beginning, right there in front of him. It was incredible. It was like a movie.
At twenty-three, Elvis Clagg wasn’t the youngest member of the Christian Renewal Defense Force (CRDF), but he was the most recent recruit, having joined up only four months ago, bringing the CRDF’s strength up to twenty- nine, its highest enlistment in more than fifteen years. Still, not one of those guys had ever themselves seen anything as amazing, and they were the first to admit it. Even Captain Bob, in his years in Nam, had never seen the like, and Captain Bob was over fifty years of age.
Captain Bob Hardawl himself had founded the CRDF not long after he’d come back to Florida from Nam and had seen that the blacks and Jews were about to take over everywhere from the forces of God, and that the forces of God could use some help from a fella equipped with infantryman training.
Armageddon hadn’t struck yet, thank God, but you just knew that sooner or later it would. You could read all about it on the Internet, you could hear it in the songs of Aryan rock, you could see it in the news all around you, you could read it in all the books and magazines that Captain Bob insisted every member of the CRDF subscribe to and read.
That was an odd thing, too. Reading had always been tough for Elvis Clagg. It had been one of the reasons he’d dropped out of school at the very first opportunity and got that job at the sugar mill that paid shit and immediately gave him a bad cough like an old car. But now that he had stuff he wantedto read, stuff he likedto read, why, turned out, he was a natural at it.
They oughta figure that out in the schools. Quit giving the kids all that Moby Dickshit and give them The Protocols of Zion, and you’re gonna have you some heavy-duty readers.
But the point is, with all the reading everybody’d done, and all the sights that everybody’d seen and three of the CRDF troopers had done time up at Raiford, so you know they’re not exactly pansies still and all, nobody had ever seen anything like this.
The entire troop of twenty-nine, Captain Bob Hardawl commanding, was deep in the Everglades on maneuvers, keeping up their tracking skills, learning jungle infiltration, when they heard the car. There was a road over there, of course, they’d just marched out on it, but you never heard a caron that road, it didn’t go anywhere. Just to some fallen-down shacks used to belong to alligator hunters or maybe even older, egret hunters, from when the fancy ladies up north liked to wear egret feathers in their hats. So why was a car coming this way?
Billy Joe, one of the more excitable members of the group, called, ‘Captain Bob, interlopers! Suppose they’re Feds?’
Feds! The deadly battle with government lawmen, always a possibility, always the threat out there waiting. Was it here now? Elvis searched the sky, clutching his Uzi to his chest, but he saw no black helicopters.
‘Easy, boys,’ Captain Bob called to his line of men, and held his Colt .45 automatic up in the air to signal they should stand where they were. The rest of them all carried Uzis adapted to fire only one shot at a time, to make them legal, which of course would be unadapted in a flat second once Armageddon started, but Captain Bob, as the leader, was the only one with a side arm.
‘I see it!’ Jack Ray called, and then they all saw it. A white utility vehicle, it was, looked foreign, moving along the road toward the curve where they themselves had turned off into the glades not five minutes ago.
Captain Bob gestured downward with the .45, and they all crouched, twenty-nine men in camouflage uniforms with greasepaint and Off! on their faces. In a minute, the car would go around that curve and on out of sight.
And then it happened, astonishingly. Instead of slowing, the car abruptly speeded up, and its right front door opened, on the side away from the CRDF, and a man fell or jumped out of it.
The car yawed this way and that, brakes on hard, tires slipping on the muddy road, and the nearside rear door opened and anotherman came rolling out, and this one was clutching a rifle in vertical position against his chest, exactly the way Captain Bob had taught the CRDF to do, if they ever had to bail out of something big, moving fast.
The car slewed around, the first man started to his feet as though to run off into the glades, and damn if the second man didn’t come up on one knee, aim, and shoot the first man in the back. Whang! Down he went; son of a bitch!
And tried to get up. They could see him struggle as the man with the rifle got up and walked toward him and the white car finally came to a stop, and the driver stuck his head out to yell something to the shooter.
Captain Bob started yelling then, too: ‘Hey! Hold on there! You men stop there!’
But they couldn’t hear him, or they were concentrating too much to pay attention, so the whole CRDF watched the rifleman kick the man he’d shot to roll him down into the water, and then take aim to shoot him again up close.
That was when Captain Bob fired his side arm into the air to attract their attention.
Which it did. The driver of the car and the rifleman both turned to stare at the crouching CRDF, and then, quick as a wink, the rifleman whipped up his rifle and fired at them!
A fella named Hoby that had bad teeth and was three guys to Elvis’s left flopped backward like a cut line of wash. Just back and down.
The truth is, if it wasn’t for the CRDF, Elvis personally would have panicked at that point and gone running like a greyhound into the glades. But there wasthe CRDF, and he was part of it, and he stuck.
‘Two lines!’ called Captain Bob while the rifleman fired again and a fella named Floyd did the back-flop thing, and the remaining twenty-six troopers, with Captain Bob tall at their right end, quickly formed into two broad lines facing the foe. The front rank dropped to one knee.
‘Front rank!’ yelled Captain Bob as the rifleman suddenly took off running toward the car. ‘The vehicle!’
Which meant the rear rank, which included Elvis, was to take out the rifleman. Okay. Not much leading at this distance. Hands steady as a rock.
‘Fire!’
Thirteen bullets went into the driver and thirteen bullets went into the rifleman.
