James Rawles - Liberators

“You know that I feel a strong connection to you and your boys—even your sister. But what are you proposing?”

“Five minutes, I’m in that door and back out again pour toujours . I can call Malorie on the ride home, and we can be ready to get out of Dodge by tomorrow morning.”

“Go where?” Joshua’s passion had given way to the onset of anger. “Your native Maine is a thousand miles at least from here and your Accord is not ideal transportation. What family do you still have there anyway? Winter is coming, and if the power went out you would not be in a position to cut enough firewood to survive. Once you were there, I’m sure that you could find some pocket of backwoods Maine where you speak the local dialect and blend in; heck, you may even get across the border to Canada. But it’s the getting there that is your biggest hurdle. You’d have to get through Baltimore, Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, New York City, and then Boston—in case you haven’t heard, law and order is not in vogue there anymore.”

Megan smoothed her brown curly hair back and said, “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of the urban deathtraps en route. You’ve seen what it’s like leaving this area on a holiday weekend with the traffic; the situation now is ten times more hopeless.”

“Maybe not, because I’m actually one step ahead of you on this one.”

“How so?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Sure, we could ask the Honorable Clarence Thomas to perform the ceremony, I hear that he has a lot more free time these days.”

“Look, I knew that you were marriage material ever since we met for lunch after the morning I busted you in the Friedman Auditorium. Moreover, I’m a serious Christian looking for a godly woman. I’m also smitten with your boys. Maybe it’s my upbringing in the orphanage, but I don’t want them to be without a father—I’ve seen what that can do to a boy trying to figure out how to become a man.”

“How long do I have to think about it?”

“Probably about as long as it takes for me to go turn in my weapon and come up with a convincing excuse why I need to leave early today. We could beat traffic if we left now.”

“And for the ring?”

Joshua pulled out a zip cuff and handed it to her. “I wasn’t sure what size you were, but this is adjustable.”

Megan walked up to the turnstile and swiped her badge across the reader, and the green light lit up with the accompanying audible relay click allowing her to pass. The sun seemed to shine especially warm that early autumn afternoon and the air seemed to be that much more refreshing knowing that she had picked the day and time when she left—rather than stick around and hope for the best. She envisioned an ostrich with its head in the sand getting shot in the butt and giggled nervously as she realized the magnitude of what had just happened.

Joshua pulled up to PG-165 with the Jeep passenger door facing her; the small act of chivalry was not lost on her. She handed him her green badge without saying a word, and he knew it was destined for the box holding the rest of the visitors’ badges. “Uncle Sam will want his ID back,” she said to herself.

“Ready to go?”

“Not without my effects.”

“What?”

“I need you to go over to the visitors’ overflow parking lot, by the static guardrail display, which is where our commuter van is parked. Chuck did not want to wait in the long vehicle line this morning, so he parked over there and we simply walked across Canine Road through the visitors’ center gate. I have some things in there that I don’t want to do without.”

Megan reached into her satchel and found a spare key to the van. She pulled out a scrap of paper and scribbled a note to the van pool saying that she had a family emergency and would be taking some unexpected time off. Next, Megan went around to the rear of the van and opened up the two doors. There in the back was a wooden crate with some stenciled Chinese characters that Joshua could not recognize next to the words “Snew Chain Made in China.” Megan reached for the tire iron to break the metal bands securing the wooden crate closed. Inside the crate Joshua was pleasantly shocked to see Megan discreetly pull out a rough cotton cloth bag that she briefly opened to give him a peek at the collapsed AR-7 inside. Taking up the rest of the space in the wooden crate was one hundred rounds of carefully packed .22LR ammunition and a small cleaning kit. She put the contents in her satchel as she commented, “One of my friends from B Detachment was a Chi-ling”—Chinese linguist. “She works in one of the shops that deals with tracking new Chinese communications technology or something like that. Anyway, I had her print out the Mandarin characters for ‘snow chains’ and then I made the stencil misspelling to hopefully give the box enough credibility to not be opened should we have a random vehicle inspection like you were doing this morning. Since they usually cancel work when it snows, I thought it would be good cover with low probability of ever having someone who wants to open it. The rest of the van pool thought that I was just being overly cautious. This van is the only thing that keeps me going home nightly to my boys, so I prepare accordingly.”

Also in the back of the truck was a .50-caliber ammo can with one of those tamper-evident serialized metal one-time-use bands that was used to seal the door on a cargo truck. Written in a black marker across the top was BREAKDOWN BOX. Megan just smiled and said, “A girl has got to be prepared, you know.”

“So, as an NSA cop…”

“ Former NSA cop—you just quit, didn’t you?” Megan quipped.

“Not formally; if the SOCC knew what I was doing right now, I would likely need that zip cuff back for my own wrists. But as I was saying, you can’t bring firearms onto the NSA campus. Should I even ask what is in the ammo can, Miss LaCroix?”

“You are not read on to that compartment. Just kidding. It’s a fuel pump from a junkyard for the same year as this Ford Econoline van, along with a forty-five-foot roll of wire with alligator-clip terminals and thirty-five feet of three-eighth-inch tubing. Malorie fabricated it all for me, soldering the connections, and then mounted it to a piece of plywood cut the same size as the side wall of the can to give extra static electricity protection if I had to use it. The fuel pump is for extracting fuel out of a tank if ever needed and there was no grid power. I also keep a can of Slime fix-a-flat, a tire plug patch kit, a spare serpentine belt for this van, multitip screwdriver, pliers, a ‘shifting spanner,’ as our Brit friends say”—she held up an adjustable wrench—“a tube of RTV silicone, a small LED Maglite, a road flare, nonemergency contacts for every county sheriff’s department between here and home, and a small box of blade fuses.”

“Megan, I have certainly grown to love you, but after seeing you produce a gun that was hidden in plain sight this whole time, I love you all the more.”

“I think it was God’s providence that brought us together. Let’s saddle up; we’re burning daylight here, cowboy.”

Unceremoniously, Joshua’s Jeep pulled out of the overflow parking lot and turned right onto Canine Road, and then headed toward Columbia on 32.

“I don’t take it lightly that you trust me; I want you to know that I’m committing myself to the success of you and your boys. I’ve done my growing up and lived life. Leo and Jean are likely going to grow up in some austere times ahead—you know it and I know it. To that end, I wanted to tell you what my plan is.

“You remember me telling you about my buddy Ken Layton, from the Catholic summer camp that I went to years ago? Well, he and his wife, Terry, have been hooked up with this guy named Todd from Idaho. He said that if things ever went really bad, that he and Terry were going to drive out West to ‘bug out.’ He’s been trying to tell me for years about the survival retreat, but I just thought that was all Chicken Little–type stuff. I mean we made it through two World Wars and the wheels have not fallen off of the bus yet, so what was he talking about? As it turns out, he has been texting me these past few days in one last attempt to reach out to me. Ken, Dustin, and I have always loved each other like brothers, so I don’t discount Ken’s sincerity and his fervor to try and win me over to his point of view.”