Scott Nicholson - First Light

From the platform twenty feet above the ridge line, he could see miles in the distance, the great Appalachian ridges rolling away like blue-green waves into the distance before leveling off across Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. Although the haze of Ohio coal-burning plants often veiled the sky, on clear, cool nights the fuzzy lights of Charlotte were visible 150 miles to the southeast. Now, though, all he saw was the late-summer foliage, pocked here and there with great windows of speckled granite, and the tiny rooftops of distant homes burrowed in the slopes. A mile beneath him wound a ribbon of asphalt known on the maps as the Blue Ridge Parkway, a national scenic route, but which Franklin considered the tyrant’s racetrack for overland invasion.

Franklin scanned the road with his binoculars. The usual intermittent stream of tourist traffic passed below, Floridians and New Yorkers making their own type of invasion. But they were harmless next to the slumbering beasts in D.C., Beijing, and Moscow. But all dragons appeared to be sleeping in the day’s heat. The platform didn’t quite afford a full panoramic view, but between his makeshift crow’s nest and other lookout points on the ridge, Franklin figured his compound was secure for another day.

He climbed down the series of wooden slats nailed into the oak’s trunk and checked the gate. After selecting this ridge for his compound, he’d spent a year hauling materials via the old logging roads that crisscrossed the mountain. In his younger days, he’d protested the U.S. Forest Service’s granting of timber rights to private corporations, but now he was grateful for the limited access their abandoned roads provided. The transport had been a laborious process, often using an all-terrain vehicle, but he’d dragged enough chain-link fence and concrete mix up the mountain to enclose a two-thousand-square-foot perimeter among the trees.

The fence wouldn’t deter a serious military assault, and a drone could sail right over it and blast him to hell and gone, but the government had lost interest in him since he’d dismantled the Freewheeler Movement. He’d gone through a few fringe groups over the decades, and his first underground newspaper had been typewritten manifestos mixed with pen-and-ink cartoons, Xeroxed for three cents a sheet and sold for a nickel.

The Internet had granted him a cheaper and broader platform, and he’d blogged prolifically as Freewheelin’ Franklin, a nod to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. But while the Freaks were all about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Down With the Establishment, Franklin Wheeler saw the darker strains of threats and conspiracies. Politics was a wrestling match where the audience—the voters—cheered while the goons in the ring—the middle management bureaucrats—beat each other with chairs while the real thugs—the wealthy elite—picked everyone’s pocket from the skybox.

The 9/11 attacks had made every libertarian and patriot a target as D.C. seized the opportunity to roll the CIA, FBI, NCS, and the military into one big standing army called Homeland Security. As righteously offended as Franklin had been at the naked power grab and the militaristic streak that extended all the way down to school janitors and ambulance drivers, he was also wise enough to heed the shifting climate. The Freewheeler Movement was never a red-alert threat, since Franklin thought populist armed resistance was idiotic. What was the point of fighting for the right to bear semi-automatics when the government owned drones, tanks, and nuclear warheads? Franklin’s interests had shifted from domestic problems to the larger reality that the world probably wouldn’t last long enough for the Rise of Imaginary Hitler.

The dangerous and heavily armed cranks moved to Montana, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, drawing all the attention with their recruiting pitches in Soldier of Fortune . Franklin’s blog, on the other hand, became a Web destination for the discontent, bored, and deranged—an amalgam of losers that could never be forged into a real social force, much less a militia. The government soon tossed his dossier in the bottom cabinet with UFO enthusiasts and Bigfoot fanatics. As Franklin’s visibility faded, he embraced it not as a failure but as an opportunity.

The opportunity was this mountain compound he called Wheelerville.

Population: one, with the mayor also serving as street sweeper, minstrel, and shoe-shine boy.

Franklin checked the vegetables in the garden, picking some turnips to feed the goats in the adjacent pen. He often let the goats browse in the wild, but today he didn’t feel like hoofing it across the slopes to retrieve them at nightfall. Despite the ongoing crush of civilization and species extinction, the Blue Ridge was still home to predators like coyotes and bobcats.

And predators like the U.S. Army.

Franklin had heard the rumors of a secret installation for years. But even if it existed, Franklin took it as a good sign for his own security. The army was corrupt, but it wasn’t dumb. The army was smart enough to pick a safe zone for any secret bases.

As the oldest mountain range in the world, the Appalachian terrain was stable and unlikely to suffer earthquakes. Likewise, a megatsunami caused by the Canary Island volcano shelf plopping into the sea would never reach this far inland. Hurricanes and tornados were broken up by the foothills, and the climate was relatively temperate for a deciduous rain forest. Indeed, the biggest threat was a prolonged blizzard, but Franklin had enough firewood and stored food to hold out for months if necessary.

His one-room cabin was built with an adjoining storage shed that featured a series of solar panels on top, oriented toward the southeast. He opened the shed and checked the battery banks that stored the converted energy. The batteries were also connected to a micro turbine that Franklin operated on the windiest days, and he also had a backup generator with a paddle wheel that exploited rushing creek water to generate power. Seeing that the bank of batteries was fully charged, Franklin disconnected the solar panels and closed the shed, which was lined with thin sheets of copper and aluminum. The metal shielding acted as a Faraday cage, protecting the batteries and equipment from electromagnetic radiation caused by a thermonuclear explosion. If Al-Qaeda detonated a dirty bomb in the atmosphere over D.C., the pulse would wipe out half the country’s infrastructure but Franklin could still work his radios and computer, which were also stored in Faraday cages when not in use.

Franklin entered his cabin, opening the windows to catch the afternoon breeze. He sat at his table and connected his shortwave radio, scanning the channels. After a burst of screeching static, he zeroed in on a familiar voice.

“Charlie One-Niner, come in,” Franklin said into his desktop microphone. “It’s your buddy, the Unknown Soldier.”

“Soldier?” said the cracked and dusty-sounding male voice on the speaker. “What in the hell’s going on down in the land of cotton?”

Franklin had adopted the radio handle to throw any federal snoopers off his scent, and on the air he pretended he was based in Alabama, where even his most paranoid ramblings would not seem out of place. Shortwave radio signals were virtually impossible to track, so Franklin used it to network with like-minded people around the world. It was also his sole social outlet if you didn’t count the goats and chickens, and he tried not to count them too often.

“Probably about the same as up there in Canada,” he replied. “Only with worse health care and no moose to shoot.”

“We’re in a record heat wave,” Charlie said. “Bet it’s breaking a hundred and ten down there.”

Franklin glanced at the thermometer on his tiny weather station. Seventy-nine, with barometric pressure rising. Pretty seasonal for August in the mountains, although the humidity was thick enough to cut with a rusty knife. “Close,” he lied. “But I’ll live.”