Liberty's Last Stand (42 page)

The man in front of Greenwood said he had parked on the grass across from the main entrance, and the store was not yet open. The clerks were just coming to work, he thought.

Around the corner, out of Greenwood's sight, the manager of the store stood in front of the locked doors and spoke to the crowd. “Folks, we are going to open the doors in a few minutes and admit ten shoppers a minute from the front of the line. When two hundred are inside, we will admit one additional shopper when one customer comes out. We have to comply with the fire codes, and besides, our checkout clerks can only work so fast. Due to the number of people waiting, we are limiting each shopper to the contents of one grocery cart, so there will be items on the shelves for everyone. Thank you for your cooperation and your patience.”

Then, five minutes later, as he unlocked the doors, the crowd, many of them white-collar workers from the vast bureaucracies of the federal government, scientists from the nearby Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, or mathematicians from the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, ten miles away, rushed the door. The surge was unplanned and unstoppable. The manager was swept out of the way. The exit door, on the other end of the store, shattered, apparently broken by someone in the crowd. People surged in through that door too.

Behind the people in front shoving to get through the doors, the queue disintegrated and became a mob as people ran, shoved, pushed, and forced their way forward. Lincoln Greenwood gave way to panic. His daughter
needed
the baby supplies. He and his wife
needed
food and bottled water, and so did his daughter and her husband. Without it,
they might starve if the power went off and water once again stopped coming from the tap
.

So Lincoln B. Greenwood fought his way forward. He threw several women to the ground and stepped on another who had already fallen. As he came around the corner of the building he could see the huge supermarket doorway, now standing wide open. A man took a swing at him but Greenwood parried the blow and continued his odyssey through the human sea.

His shirt was torn and his face was bleeding from a woman's fingernails when he made it through the door. People were already pushing shopping carts containing whatever they could grab, pushing them not toward the checkout counters, but toward the doors where people were trying to get in. People coming in began looting the carts. This milling, pushing, shouting, screaming swarm of humanity was no longer a group of civilized beings who attended church, obeyed the traffic laws, and were courteous to strangers; they were a primal force, much like a herd of charging elephants, driven only by their survival instincts.

The store manager who had unlocked the doors and been swept aside ran into the parking lot and used his cell phone to call 911. Within two minutes a Howard County police car rolled to a stop with lights flashing and siren wailing. The officer killed the siren and met the manager, who ran toward him. Seemingly oblivious to the presence of the officer, the crowd surrounding the doors continued to push, shove, and fight.

The police officer stood silently, watching the melee in disbelief as the manager shouted to be heard, “You have got to stop this madness. They'll kill each other in there.”

Indeed, the officer could see several people sprawled on the sidewalks and in the loading lane, apparently trampled or injured. They were being ignored by the surging mob. The officer tried to estimate how many people he could see, and concluded there were more than a thousand people outside the building.

“What the hell do you think I can do?” the officer asked the manager without taking his eyes from the panicked mob.

“Tear-gas them. My God, people are going to be
killed
in there! Can't you see that?”

“Tear gas isn't going to stop them,” the cop said, and began talking to his dispatcher through the radio transmitter pinned to his lapel. He got into the patrol car and locked the door so he could hear better. The manager tried to jerk the door open, then pounded on the window with his fist.

What the dispatcher knew and the officer didn't was that this scene was being played out in supermarkets all over the county. Smaller mobs, but equally frightened, were looting hardware stores and stealing gasoline at service stations as quickly as it could be pumped.

At the police station, the chief listened to the calls describing the looting and shook his head. Nothing could be done.

Throughout the Pepco service area, similar scenes were being enacted. What the violent looting would have looked like if the crowds had known that just hours before Barry Soetoro had ordered electrical power shut off nationwide is something that defies speculation.

Inside the Clarksville supermarket, Lincoln B. Greenwood managed to fill his pockets with little jars of baby food. He grabbed one box of six-quart cartons of Similac Infant Formula from a shopping cart and made for the door. He had to fight his way out, just as he had fought his way in. Now he had to keep both hands on the box of infant formula to keep it from being torn from his grasp, hug it into his belly, and use his elbows to create a pathway. When he finally reached his car, he still had the Similac, but two of the glass jars in his pockets were broken. He was bleeding from the nose where he had been punched and his shirt was in tatters.

He got into the car, started the engine, and tried to get out of the parking lot, only to find that people trying to get in had abandoned their cars in the entranceways and ran for the store. He began bumping cars, trying to shove them out of the way. And succeeded. He got to a median, jumped it with his car, and drove away quickly. He was an animal fighting to survive, and he suspected he wasn't going to make it.

When Greenwood did get home that evening, the power was off again. Officers from the Department of Homeland Security had visited Pepco headquarters and demanded at the point of a gun that power be shut off throughout Pepco's multi-county service area. When the lights again went out across the Pepco area, they handcuffed every executive they could find and led them away. Everyone else was told to leave the building immediately. The last officer out of the building seized the keys from a terrified janitor and locked the doors behind her.

Oblivious to the panic that had seized suburban Maryland and was spreading like an internet virus across America, on Friday morning, the second day of September, Barry Soetoro went before the cameras in his best gray suit and blue tie, a combination that his makeup artist had once assured him was flattering.

It would take hours, probably at least twenty-four, before the power went off all across the lower forty-eight states, or forty-six since Oklahoma and Texas had tried to go their own ways, so the president and his advisors thought he should use the time to build political support for the battles yet to come. “Comfort your friends and afflict your enemies,” Al Grantham advised; Soetoro thought that nugget summed up his mission. He had his best speechwriter prepare the remarks, and they were on the teleprompter, so he could look the unseen audience straight in the eyes as he delivered his truth.

“My fellow Americans. As I address you today, many of our fellow Americans sit in the dark, sweltering in the heat, with food rotting, without any access to electricity because of the violent acts of desperate and dangerous men. Our nation is at war—at war with ideological fanatics who take the slave-owning Confederate States of America as their model. They want to destroy not only our nation's electrical power grid, they want to destroy this country in pursuit of an extreme ideological vision that would deny women, minorities, and everyday Americans their basic rights. Already they have attacked United States military installations and killed brave servicemen and women who were defending freedom.

“As you know, I have said repeatedly through the years that the two greatest threats to our nation are right-wing constitutionalists and climate change. I have been ridiculed in the conservative press for those statements, but as I foretold, the threat from the Right has become a deadly peril to our national life.

“Tonight I ask all loyal Americans for their support, patience, and understanding as we fight to preserve the Union. One hundred fifty years ago, one of my predecessors had to fight the same battle against an enemy that would have kept half our nation as a haven for slavery. Today we battle a similar enemy, an embittered minority who cannot break with the past, whose political beliefs are grounded in ignorance, hate, and bigotry, and who are now in open rebellion against the United States. We face trying days ahead. But I pledge, as President Abraham Lincoln did before me, to preserve our Union and ensure that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Have faith, and I will lead us through the fire to the promised land. Thank you.”

Where electricity still flowed through the wires, people nationwide sat staring at their television screens as picked liberal commentators talked about the president's resolve, his vision. His forceful delivery struck just the right note, one woman said. Another commentator, a tenured university professor infamous for urging all white people to commit suicide so the nonwhites of the earth could flourish, pounded the racial drum. Only through Barry Soetoro could the promise of racial justice and equal rights be realized, and white privilege once and for all be defeated and banished from the land.

Where it was seen, the presidential speech had the opposite effect from the one he presumably intended. Panicked people quite beyond rational thought got in their cars and joined mobs looting stores.

General Martin L. Wynette watched the speech on television in his Pentagon E-Ring office and shrugged sadly. Climate change!

He asked himself, Were chaos and anarchy the president's real goals, so he could build his socialist dictatorship upon the rubble? Or had the damned fool miscalculated once again? Was he a sublime evil genius, or simply a bumbling, incompetent believer in his own bullshit that fate and poisonous racial politics had raised to a very high place? Not that it mattered—the result was the same in either case. The apocalypse had finally arrived.