James Rawles - Liberators

The charter bus was idling and had its door open when Larry pulled up. They heard a siren in the distance. He jumped out of his Dodge and leaped aboard the bus, and it started to roll forward even before the hydraulic door had completely closed. Larry’s brother was at the wheel of the bus. He was wearing an N95 respirator.

Larry’s wife, wearing a nurse’s uniform and also wearing an N95 respirator, gave him a hug. The families cheered as the bus rolled out toward the Yellowhead Highway.

They carried with them two forged letters that were designed to get them past PLA checkpoints on their intended route. The first letter was an official-looking document that certified that the passengers onboard the bus were residents of Olway (just west of Prince George) who were quarantined H7N9 influenza patients being transported to an infectious disease ward at the seven-hundred-bed Foothills Medical Centre, in Calgary.

Just as they hoped, the mere sight of the mask-wearing nurse and the words influenza and quarantine were enough to get the guards at two highway checkpoints to quickly wave the bus through.

From Prince George the bus drove six hours southeast to the Highway 11 junction. Once they were there, the respirators and the nurse’s uniforms were hidden, and the second letter was readied. They stopped briefly to switch the license plates on the bus.

They continued, carrying a forged RCMP letter identifying them as wedding guests from the vicinity of Eckville traveling to the town of Smoky Lake (north of Edmonton) to attend a wedding. (Weddings were one of the few exceptions to PLA’s “no public gatherings” rule but required official travel documents.) This letter successfully bluffed them through three more checkpoints.

At 4:30 P.M. local time they reached their actual destination, Fort McMurray, in the heart of Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands region. They had been on the road for fifteen and a half hours and were near the end of the bus’s one-thousand-mile driving range. Seven cars, vans, and pickups were waiting to shuttle the Guyot families to their new homes and jobs, under assumed names, at the Suncor Mine. The mine was part of the recently reemerging oil industry in Alberta. The Suncor operation was already back up to twenty thousand barrels of production per day, with plans for much larger production in the months to come. (Back before the Crunch, Suncor’s Mackay River plant had produced thirty-four thousand barrels per day, and had plans to eventually produce three times that much. In anticipation, there had been a lot of “spec” housing built, which now was mostly vacant. The Guyot families ended up in these houses.)

After their baggage had been unpacked, the bus was immediately driven by a resistance man to the Suncor Fort Hills mine, where it was parked next to an enormous overburden pile. There, the conveyor belt arm was shifted temporarily to direct the flow over the top of the bus. They ran the conveyor for three hours, burying the bus under thirty feet of overburden soil and rock. The bus was never seen again.

DRM investigators quickly made the link from the Guyot shop to the “quarantine bus” described by the Sécurité Routière sentries, but they lost track of it from there. Their fruitless search for the saboteur families centered on Calgary.

The FM radio network—which had recently been renamed People’s Voice of Canadian Liberation (PVCL)—downplayed the severity of the rail sabotage, referring to it only as “a temporary railway disruption, west of Prince George.”

Larry worked under the name Larry Gwinn for many years, eventually reaching middle management with Suncor. His role in the Claw sabotage plot was not publicized until after his death in 2047.

Alan and Claire borrowed Ray’s pickup to go buy supplies in Bella Coola. They were hoping to spend some of their Chinese Occupation Scrip before it lost much more of its value to inflation. (Since the Chinese arrived, the new currency had already lost 70 percent of its value.)

The pickup hit a patch of black ice in a shady stretch of road and spun out. There was no damage, but it ended up perpendicular to the road, nose down in the borrow-pit ditch on the right side of the road. The slope of the ditch was quite steep. Alan put the pickup in four-wheel drive before attempting to back up, but the tires immediately cut through the thin crust of frost into the soft mud beneath. Experience told him that continuing his attempt to drive out would only dig his wheels in deeper, so he shut down the engine.

Alan said resignedly, “Prepare for a long, chilly wait, my dear.”

He stepped out of the cab and messily made his way up out of the muddy ditch. Now standing at the back of the truck, Alan lifted the camper shell’s glass and then flipped down the tailgate. He could see that Ray carried his usual oiled twenty-five-foot tow chain in a plastic box strapped with a bungee cord in the front end of the pickup bed. Along with it was a well-worn rectangular laundry detergent bucket filled with traction sand, an axe, a come-along, a short D-handle shovel, a hank of rope, a folded tarp, and a sheepherder’s jack. All of this gear was neatly secured by bungee cords. Seeing this assortment of gear made Alan smile. His son was prudent and methodical, just like him. He had raised him well.

Alan’s boots were a muddy mess, so he stretched out prone to reach down to the tow-chain box. Pulling the heavy box with him as he inched his way back up and out of the pickup bed strained his back. He muttered to himself, “Here we go again.”

Alan often reinjured his back, and recovery from each injury could last weeks; each episode began with two or three days of his back muscles in painful spasm. Taking valerian root helped reduce the muscle spasms and magnesium pills helped limit the inflammation. But each injury tested his patience; he was a man who didn’t like to slow the pace of his daily chores. Alan carefully set the tow-chain box on the lip of the icy road, careful not to further injure his back. He leaned back in on the lip of the open tailgate and waited.

Claire cranked down her window slightly and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Not exactly. I tweaked my back again. Getting old really stinks, you know that?”

Claire rolled up her window and began to hum the tune to the gospel song “This World Is Not My Home.”

Alan wondered how long he would have to wait until someone with a stout vehicle would come by and help tow them out. He reached into his coat’s front snap pockets and pulled out his camouflage hunting gloves and his green pile cap. After donning them, he let out a sigh.

The sun’s direct rays were beginning to strike the pickup. It was a cold morning, but the fog was beginning to lift. The landscape now lacked its recent autumn beauty. The aspens had lost their leaves, and the western larches had lost their needles. The dense fir trees on both sides of the highway still looked beautiful, wearing a coat of frost. Where the sun was hitting them, mist was rising from their boughs. He concluded that it was a still a scenic place to be stuck in a ditch.

A few minutes later, he heard a low rumbling accompanied by a higher supercharger whine from the east. Soon it became distinct: the sound of numerous vehicles in a convoy. In another minute, they came into sight. It was a convoy of four Norinco Type 92 wheeled six-by-six APCs followed by a canvas-topped Dongfeng 2.5-ton troop truck.