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  As the official filled out the paperwork, Tom looked around the room. In addition to the other signs, there were at least a dozen of the now ubiquitous stylized drawings of Ohmshidi, all of them over the words “Obey Ohmshidi.”

  “What do we do now?” Sheri asked as they went back outside to their bikes.

  Tom unlocked the padlock. “We start getting things together for the trip. Food, water, clothes, matches, sleeping bags, a small tent. Things we will need for camping.”

  “How are we going to carry all that on a bicycle?”

  “I’ll make us a little trailer that I can pull behind the bike.”

  Over the next few days Sheri did some shopping, buying tins of sardines, coffee, cans of beans, and hard rolls. Tom bought a couple of sleeping bags, some camp cooking utensils, and a canteen. He also bought a used baby stroller, and using the wheels, attached them to a trailer he made from plywood. The last thing he did was put a false bottom on his bicycle seat, creating a small pocket where he could keep his pistol and the two boxes of ammunition he still had.

  Packing the trailer required some very careful folding and placement, but he managed to get everything in. The last thing he put in the trailer was a copy of the Koran, placing it on the very top so it would be the first thing anyone would see when the trailer was searched. And Tom had no doubt but that the trailer would be searched.

  They left St. Louis in the pre-dawn darkness, and encountered their first roadblock on Highway 61 just north of Ste. Genevieve.

  “Tom?” Sheri said anxiously.

  “I see them, just keep your cool, they’re not SPS, they’re highway patrolmen.”

  As Tom and Sheri approached, one of the five highway patrolmen held up his hand.

  Tom got off his bike and gave them the closed fist across his chest salute. “Obey Ohmshidi,” he said.

  “Obey Ohmshidi,” the state policeman replied. “Where are you going?”

  “We’re going south,” Tom replied.

  “Don’t be a wiseass,” the patrolman said. “I didn’t ask which direction you were going, I can see you’re going south. I asked where you were going.”

  “We have relatives down in Sikeston. We’re going down there to see if I can find work.”

  “Let me see your papers.”

  Tom and Sheri showed their papers to the man who examined them carefully. One of the patrolmen stepped back to the homemade trailer.

  “Did you build this?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Just things we need for the trip. Food, clothes, that sort of thing.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “Yes. We can’t afford to lose what’s in there.”

  “Open it up.”

  Tom unlocked the padlock, then lifted the lid. The first thing the patrolman saw was the Koran. He reached for it.

  “Please treat the Koran with respect,” Tom said.

  The patrolman nodded, and handed it to Tom. “You hold it while I go through the trailer.”

  Tom held the book with both hands, keeping it close to his chest as if it were his most important possession. He watched as the patrolman unloaded his trailer, tossing everything aside until he reached the bottom.

  Fortunately, none of the patrolmen made a very close examination of Tom’s bicycle. If they had, and they had discovered the false bottom, they would have found his pistol, a Beretta Px4 Storm Type F Sub-Compact pistol taped up under the seat.

  “All right, you can go,” the patrolman said when the trailer had been thoroughly checked.

  It took a few minutes for Tom and Sheri to refold everything compactly enough to repack the trailer. Then, making a point of “reverently” putting the Koran back, he mounted his bike, and he and Sheri rode on.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Firebase Freedom

  One of the things Bob Varney was most pleased with was the fact that the electricity provided by the solar panels that James and Marcus had installed allowed him to use the computer again. And though he knew there were no longer any publishers for his books, he was back writing again. Some of the others wondered why he spent several hours each day writing, and they asked Ellen about it.

  “You don’t understand,” Ellen said. “Bob doesn’t write just to be published. Bob writes because he must write. It is a part of his DNA.” She chuckled. “Believe me, you don’t want to be around him if he has to go for an extended period of time without writing.”

  Bob smiled as he thought about the conversation he had overheard. Ellen was right, of course, and back in the “before time,” when Bob went all over the country giving writing seminars, he always told his students that he and they were just alike. Maybe he had been published, and they had not, but they all shared what he called a “divine discontent to write.” He told them that, even if he had never been published, he would still write.

  There were times when he thought that perhaps he was being a little disingenuous by making such a comment. But in the time since the collapse of the U.S., and the disappearance of the publishing houses, he had proven to himself that he meant what he said.

  Of course, there was another reason that he wrote every day. Every time he sat down to the computer, his dog, Charley, would lie under his desk, just as he had done for the last six years. For Charley, the world had not changed, and Bob leaned on that bit of continuity to keep himself from falling into a deep and unrecoverable depression.

  The problem now was that it was difficult to find a theme for his books. He had written mostly Westerns, mysteries, and thrillers, but in order to write that kind of book, the characters and story had to be laid against a matrix of reason and normalcy. Only against such a background could you develop conflict and drama. But there was absolutely nothing reasonable or normal about the country that had once been the United States.

  In the “before time” there had been many post-apocalyptic novels and movies, not one of which had created a world more bizarre than the one they were living in now. Perhaps Bob should be writing an apocalyptic novel now, but he was writing about the Old West, finding escape in his novel of stoic and decent men and women carving out a nation where good triumphed over evil.

  After a full day of writing, he checked his word count, 57,524, which meant he had written three thousand words today, a good day. He shut down, then walked out into the quadrangle of the fort where Deon, Marcus, and Willy were tossing a baseball back and forth.

  “Finished with your book?” Deon asked, catching the ball, then throwing it over to Willy.

  “For the day.”

  “Hey, Bob, when you finish that book, will you print it out and let the rest of us read it?” Willy asked.

  “Yeah,” Deon said. “I’d like that too.”

  “A good book is always welcome,” Marcus said.

  “Who says it’ll be a good book?” Willy teased.

  “Willy! What a thing to say!” Becky scolded.

  “Don’t mind him, Becky,” Marcus said. “I don’t think he’s ever had a book where you couldn’t color the pictures.”

  The others laughed as Bob took Charley out of the fort and down onto the beach, where he began digging for crabs.

  Alexandria, Virginia

  When Chris Carmack got home from the store, he was in a good mood. He had been able to buy a steak at the market, and he intended to cook it out on the patio of his Jordan Street apartment. The steak and a baked potato would make a fine meal for him and his fiancée, and though it was a bit extravagant, he figured it was worth it.

  Margaret had finally agreed to a wedding date. Raised a Roman Catholic, she had not wanted a civil wedding, but Christian weddings were no longer allowed, and neither she nor Chris wanted a Muslim ceremony. So Margaret finally agreed to a civil ceremony, and the steak, potato, and bottle of wine—which, because all liquor was outlawed, had cost him more dearly than he was willing to say—was for the celebration.

  It was costing Chris Carmack and Margaret Malcolm twice
as much to live as other couples, because they had to maintain separate apartments, though both apartments were in the same building on Jordan Street in Alexandria, which allowed them easy access to each other. Neither Margaret nor Chris had converted to Islam—and merely converting to Islam wasn’t enough; it was necessary to convert to the Moqaddas Sirata branch of Islam—but neither were they active in any other religion. They thought this would be the best arrangement, because, for the time being, the war being carried on against Christians, Jews, and noncompliant Muslims was even more intense than the war against nonbelievers.

  In the “before time,” Chris had been a “non-affiliated contract source” for Homeland Security. On the surface, Chris was a research analyst. But secretly, so secretly that no more than three other people ever knew exactly what he did, Chris was euphemistically known as an adjuster, someone who settled accounts for Homeland Security, doing so “with extreme prejudice.” There was not one person still alive who knew of Chris’s particular occupation. His last contract had involved Ali Bin Jabril, who proudly identified himself as “Jabril the American.”

  Jabril had been born Adam Jason Clark in San Francisco to parents whose American roots went back several generations. Clark converted to Islam while attending college, then declared himself to be allied with Al Qaeda. He bragged that he had provided shelter for the “heroic hero martyrs of 9/11” and made a DVD which he sent to all the TV networks.

  On the DVD he was sitting in a chair, wearing a full face mask, dressed in black, and holding an AK-47.

  “No, my fellow countrymen, you are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,” he said in the tape. He went on:

  “After decades of American tyranny and oppression, now it’s your turn to die. Allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood matching drop for drop the blood of America’s victims.

  “You see here the fate that awaits you all, if you do not convert. This was the McKenzie family: father, mother, son, and daughter. Only the father sinned in that, while he was interrogating a brother Muslim, he put the Koran on a table where lay a bacon and tomato sandwich. Putting the Holy Koran next to pork defiled the Holy Word. McKenzie paid for this heresy, not only with his own life, but with the life of his wife and children.”

  The picture on the screen showed the masked man murdering the family. Homeland Security used voice analysis to identify Jabril as Adam Clark. Already, many on the left were defending Jabril’s “freedom of speech,” and the ACCR, the American Commission for Civil Rights, had declared publicly that if Clark/Jabril was found and arrested, they would defend him in court.

  Homeland Security located Jabril in Springfield, Oregon, but they had no intention of arresting him. Instead they issued a contract to Chris Carmack giving him information as to how to find Ali Bin Jabril, and authorizing him to handle the American Al Qaeda “with extreme prejudice.”

  Clark/Jabril worked in a health food store and was going by the name of Benjamin Cowell. He kept his Al Qaeda affiliation secret from the other citizens of the small town. Chris had arrived in town driving a ten-year-old pickup truck, its bed filled with firewood. He parked on the street just in front of “Health Alternatives.” Wearing coveralls, a Los Angeles Dodger baseball cap, and a week’s growth of beard, he got out of the truck, then walked to the back to adjust the ropes that held the wood in place.

  When Clark/Jabril came out of the store a few moments later, Chris reached down between two stacks of wood, grasped a CO2 pellet pistol, and aimed it kinesthetically at him. Pulling the trigger made a sound no louder than a quiet sneeze, propelling a curare-tipped pellet into Clark’s neck.

  Clark/Jabril slapped at his neck, took about three more steps, staggered, then fell. Chris had parked the truck over a storm drain, and, unobserved, he now quietly dropped the pellet pistol down the drain. Then, tying off the rope, he got in the truck and pulled out into the street, driving off slowly.

  That had been a little over two years ago, just before Ohmshidi was elected. When the ACCR learned that Clark/Jabril had been killed, they began a Freedom of Information search to find out who had ordered the killing, and who had actually carried out the operation. Ironically, the American Commission for Civil Rights, which had been ardent supporters of Ohmshidi, quickly became one of the first casualties of the new Ohmshidi administration.

  Because both his handler, the FBI director, and the Secretary of Homeland Security had all been executed by Ohmshidi, there was no one left, except Chris, who knew the truth about the Clark/Jabril case.

  Chris checked the steak, wondering if he should move it away from the heat so he didn’t finish it before Margaret got back.

  Margaret was on her way to a friend’s house to invite her to the wedding. Just because it was going to be a civil ceremony was no reason why friends couldn’t come. She would have invited relatives as well, but she had no relatives remaining. Her older brother had been on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11, when it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Her parents, and all her remaining relatives, had been killed during the nuclear attack on Baltimore.

  Before Ohmshidi, Margaret had been a civilian data-systems analyst at Fort McNair. She lost her job when the military ceased to be. Now, jobs for women were so restricted that her only source of income was as a private contractor, and even then, her jobs had to come through Chris.

  Margaret was wearing a dress which was modest by any description in the “before time.” Her skirt came to just below her knees. Her neck and arms were bare, but the dress was not particularly low-cut. Nevertheless, she tended to stand out, because she was a very attractive young woman, and most women were now wearing veils or burqas. She was walking down Massey Lane, just at Huntington Creek, when suddenly a man jumped out from behind a building, grabbed her, and dragged her back into an alley.

  Margaret screamed, but the man hit her so hard that it nearly knocked her out. Her head was spinning, and she was only partially aware of what was happening to her. She was dragged behind a Dumpster, then her dress was torn from her. The man seemed young, late teens or early twenties at best.

  “No, please, you don’t want to do this!” Margaret pleaded.

  “Shut up, whore!” the young man said. He smiled manically at her, and, pushing her up against the brick wall, dropped his pants, and moved against her.

  “No!” Margaret pleaded as she felt the forced entry. “Please, don’t!”

  The young man didn’t reply. Instead he continued to use her until, with a few grunts, he finished. Then, spent and satiated, he stepped back from her and pulled his pants back up.

  “I’m finished with you, whore,” he said. “You can go on to wherever you were going,” he added with an unsettling cackle.

  As best she could, Margaret put her dress back on, but it was so badly torn that one of her breasts remained exposed all the way to the nipple. Covering herself as best she could with folded arms, Margaret staggered back out onto the sidewalk. As she did so, she saw a car with SPS markings, and she called out.

  “Help me! Please, help me!”

  The car stopped, and two men, in SPS uniforms, got out. They weren’t just SPS, they were wearing the black uniforms of the elite Janissaries.

  “What are you doing on the street like this?” one of them demanded, his voice angry and condemning.

  “I’ve been raped,” she said.

  “Where did it happen?”

  Margaret looked around, intending to point out to the officers where the rape happened. To her amazement she saw that the rapist had made no attempt to flee. Instead, he was insolently leaning back against the building with his arms folded across his chest, looking on in bemusement.

  “There!” she said, pointing to the young man. “He’s the one who raped me!”

  One of the two Janissaries walked over to the man that had just raped Margaret. The man rendered the proper salute. “Obey Ohmshidi.”

  The Janissary returned the salute. “Is what she is saying true? Did you have sex with this
woman?”

  “Yeah, I had sex with her.”

  “What kind of question is that? What do you mean, did he have sex with me?” Margaret called out to him. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? He didn’t have sex with me! He raped me!”

  “Then, you admit that you had sex with him?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Madam, did you, or did you not have sex with this man?”

  “He raped me. By definition, that means we had sex. But it isn’t like that, it’s . . .”

  “Get in the car, Miss,” the other black uniformed officer said. This was the first time he had spoken.

  “Well, thank you, finally you understand.”

  As Margaret sat in the backseat of the car, trying unsuccessfully to keep herself covered, she saw the two Janissaries go over to talk to the man who had raped her. At first she thought they were going to arrest him, but they seemed to be involved in nothing more than casual conversation.

  Then the man who raped her nodded and, amazingly, walked away. Why didn’t they arrest him?

  The two Janissaries got back into the car.

  “I live on North Jordan,” she said.

  Neither of the men answered, but a moment later the driver turned in a direction that was totally opposite of the way he should go to take her home.

  “This is the wrong way,” she said. “I told you, I live on North Jordan.”

  “Shut up, whore,” the one who wasn’t driving said.

  Margaret Malcolm was taken across the river into Muslimabad, and into a police station. The desk sergeant, seeing two Janissaries come into the station, jumped up quickly, and saluted.

  “Obey Ohmshidi!”

  Only one of the two Janissaries returned the salute. “Obey Ohmshidi,” he said.

  “What have we here?” the desk sergeant asked.

  “We found this woman . . . ”