Phoenix Rising

be tomorrow. This may be our last meal out, so I say let’s enjoy it.”

Monday, May 28

Bob and Ellen Varney owned a house on the beach and a condo in St. Louis. They had a condo in St. Louis because they had a son who lived there with his wife and son. Every summer they rented out the beach house, earning enough rental income to pay for their St. Louis condo. The idea was that when they got too old to be able to live in the beach house, they would sell it, then move to St. Louis and live there full time.

Normally by this time of the year their house would be rented and they would already be in St. Louis. But so far not one person had booked their house for the summer. In fact, Sunrise Properties, who handled the rental for them, confided to Bob that not one of the thirty-six houses they managed had been rented.

Bob was sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching television. His wirehaired Jack Russell, Charley, was on the sofa with him, lying up as close to Bob’s leg as he could get. Bob was rubbing Charley behind his ears.

Bob watched World Cable News almost exclusively. His son, who was considerably more liberal in his thinking, had often teased Bob about watching the most conservative of all the cable news channels, but Bob believed, sincerely, that WCN was the most accurate in their reporting. Besides, WCN had George Gregoire, and Gregoire was Bob’s favorite commentator. But Gregoire did not come on until six o’clock, and it was just a little after five, so Bob was watching the Evening News Report with Sherman Jones.

You are looking at pictures of the many Liberty Party rallies held across the country today. Although the Liberty Party has neither national organization nor officers, they have sprung up since the election of Ohmshidi to make their feelings known. This rally, held in Chicago, had well over two hundred thousand in attendance. Similar rallies have been held in Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, and Houston so far, and they are planning a large rally in Washington, D. C. But if you didn’t watch WCN, or didn’t know someone, personally, who attended one of the rallies, you wouldn’t know anything about it. Not one of the other networks has carried so much as one minute of news pertaining to the Liberty Party rallies.

Well-known conservative talk show host Royal Peabody spoke at the rally in Houston.

The picture moved from the rally in Chicago to the one in Houston. There were several signs on display:

Impeach The Foreign Imposter

We Need Fuel

Fuel Now

Royal Peabody was standing behind a podium on a flatbed trailer as he addressed the crowd.

We are the heart and soul of America; we are the voice of the people. Some are mocking us, saying that we are in the pocket of a political party, but I say no, a thousand times no! We are beholden to no political party or ideology other than the principle of freedom, common sense, and the right to pursue happiness.

You know what would make us happy now? Fuel!

Peabody shouted the word, and it came roaring back on two hundred thousand voices. “Fuel!”

There are literally hundreds of billions of barrels of recoverable oil in the Bakken range, and nearly that much oil in Anwar. In addition we have more usable coal than the rest of the world combined, to say nothing of our huge gas reserves.

Ladies and gentlemen, our nation is collapsing around us, while our salvation is before our very eyes. We have enough energy to last for one thousand years without importing so much as one drop of oil. We have forty trillion in pre-Ohmshidi dollars worth of energy.

We were at the beginning of a monetary windfall that would put to shame anything we have ever experienced before—then we elected Ohmshidi. My friends, Ohmshidi promised us change, and he has delivered on that promise. We have changed from boom to bust. Ohmshidi’s misguided policies, his insane order to halt all drilling and refining, even the importation of fossil fuel, has snatched financial disaster from the jaws of economic boom.

“Supper’s ready,” Ellen said, and Bob muted the sound as he and Charley went into the kitchen. Though they had a dining room, they ate there only when they had company. When it was just the two of them, they ate across from each other at a small table in the kitchen.

“Bob, what’s going to happen to us?” Ellen asked.

“Nothing. Except we will probably spend the summer here, instead of going up to St. Louis as we normally do. With the cost of fuel it would be foolish to go up there for no reason. Besides, if it actually comes down to a condition of survival, I think we could survive better here, than in St. Louis.”

“It is going to come down to that, isn’t it?” Ellen asked. “A condition of survival.”

“I wouldn’t have said this six months ago, but yes, I believe it is.”

“Are you afraid?” Ellen asked.

“No.”

Ellen smiled wanly, then reached across the table to put her hand over his.

“Good,” she said. “As long as you are not afraid, then neither am I.”

“I think we need to start getting ready, though.”

“Getting ready, how?”

“You know how. Just like we do when we are getting ready for a hurricane. The only difference is, this time we are going to have to be prepared for a much longer time than we ever had to with any hurricane.”

“We’ve got the freezer nearly full now.”

Bob shook his head. “The freezer won’t do it,” he said. “When it goes, everything is going, including the electricity.”

“But we’ve got our own generator, and one hundred-pound propane tank.”

“Which, if we run it full time, will last us for about two weeks. I believe we are looking at a year of being totally on our own.”

“A year?” Ellen gasped.

“Or longer,” Bob said.

In the living room they could hear the TV still going.

A suicide bomber blew himself up today in Grand Central Station in New York. Nineteen were killed and at least thirty more were injured. That is the fourth terrorist attack in the continental United States in the last twenty days, bringing the death toll total to eighty-six.

President Ohmshidi lodged a strong protest with the government of Yazikistan, but President Rafeek Syed dismissed the protest as the meaningless whining of a nation of kafirs, or unbelievers.

CHAPTER NINE

Base Hospital, Fort Rucker—Friday, June 15

“Hello, Colonel Chambers,” Karin said, putting on as cheerful a front as she could. The patient, Colonel Garrison J. Chambers, a veteran of World War II, was ninety years old. One week earlier he had cut his leg on a