Prepper's Crucible - Volume Six: The End (2 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“I sponsored the bill that required Arizona to not
rejoin the Union for at least twenty years. Ever since, the ban
is renewed
every year, and that needs to change now. You got
the ear of the people with your opinion column, and we need to get you on board
to get the votes out to overturn that bill I sponsored as governor.”

“Well, that’s not really what I wanted to talk
about.”

“I’ll give you what you want, if you’ll give me what
I need. When I passed that law, the reason I did it was because I wanted us to
have the time to be certain the country
wasn’t
going
to do the same thing that created the disaster that followed the EMP. I wanted
to buy some time for us to be able to judge if the country was going to head
down the same road as the one we had before.
We’ve
had
that phase, and it’s time for us to make the country whole again. We’re the
last territory still holding out.”

“Why now?”

“Two reasons. The first
one’s
important. So, I repeat. We need to be one country again, and if our territory
rejoins the Union, the country is whole. The second reason has to do with why
we’re
doing this interview at all, and is less important.
I’m
dying, and if I don’t tell the story now, it may never
be told. If I
don’t
help get that law passed, I’ll
never see the stars and stripes flying over our capitol again.
Also
, people have a right to know how we came back from the
EMP and won the war. It might help some other generation of Americans who face
another disaster like we lived through.”

“So, the deal is if I write the opinion piece
supporting rejoining the Union, you’ll give me the story of what happened in
the months before and after the EMP?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s a pretty high price.”

“You don’t give up anything valuable without a high
price. Make a decision and tell me what you want to do.”

Horace thought it over for a second. He realized
that this was his ticket to national fame and said, “
deal
.”
Cory ignored his outstretched hand and rolled on his side to face the
journalist.

“Where do you want to start?”

Horace flipped through the pages of his notebook,
stopped to consider things and then said, “how about we start with how you came
to live with Don Murphy?”

“I was in the right place at the right time. Two of
his friends were coming up the Black Canyon Recreational Trail as I was riding
down to check the trails. They picked up me and my family when I got out of the
trail and we all headed to the ranch.”

“What can you tell me about Don?”

“Well, I can tell you he was a great man with big
flaws. He was certain about things, but could change his mind at the drop of a
hat.” Cory paused for a moment and then added, “Don was the kind of guy you
would want in your foxhole, but not necessarily at a barbeque party. He was
intense and focused, and we needed that at the time. I’m not sure he would have
been a friend if not for the circumstances we faced.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him?”

Cory thought for a minute and then said, “
he
taught me tactics and strategy when it came to fighting.
He also taught me how to look at a leader, recognize their flaws, and still
acknowledge them as a leader. I suspect many people feel the same way about me.
He was incredibly brave and claimed to be cold-blooded, but nothing was further
from the truth.
It’s
amazing how we all can be so
unaware about ourselves. I guess his greatest gift to me was teaching me how to
understand you can be weak and brave at the same time.”

“Were you with him when he led the fight against the
biker gang?”

“No, he asked me to stay behind and protect the
ranch. He saw me as the only other warrior in the group, and
didn’t
want us both to be away from the ranch at the same time. I guess he was right
about that. I
didn’t
know it at the time, but I was a
warrior by nature. I guess he was one by training, so we sort of complemented
each other in some way; but I would never say we were good friends, although we
certainly needed each other.” Cory’s eyes grew dim, his head sagged to one
side, and he was immediately asleep.

“What is that?”

“Morphine drip.
It takes him
out from time to time.”

“Is he okay?”

“Does he look okay?”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“There’s your answer.”

“How long will he be out?”

“Could be ten minutes or it could be hours.”

“Since you were with him, can I talk to you about
how the resistance started?” Eric thought it over, shrugged, and nodded his
head. “First of all, can you tell me how you got to know the governor?”

“I met him after the invasion when we started to
ambush the Mexican Army in the forest. That was after the invasion took place,
so we ended up living in a cave in the Prescott National Forest for the first
few months.”

“Can you think of the event that caused the partisan
movement to start?”

“Not really. The first few months were
pretty calm
. We went back and forth to the ranch to care for
the livestock and get supplies, but mostly stayed hidden. We really didn’t know
much about what had happened.”

“When was the first time you fought a battle with
the Mexicans?”

“It wasn’t really a battle. We started out by
‘bushwhacking’ the soldiers after they killed or raped. It wasn’t organized or
anything.”

“Can you describe the first time you did a reprisal
attack?”

“Well it went like this….” He closed his eyes and
remembered those days.

EMP PLUS THREE MONTHS

PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST

Cory watched the column of soldiers through the
scope of his .308. They were moving slowly, as though fearful of their
surroundings. He noted the soldiers were not maintaining spacing discipline,
and there were around twenty men in the column. Cory lay flat on his stomach,
covered by a
ghillie
suit and invisible to the world
around him. The twenty-inch barrel of the rifle
was supported
by a Harris bipod. He slowly pulled his radio from the clip on his tactical
vest and whispered, “I’ll open up in about a minute. You close the L formation
now and do the cleanup.”

“Copy.”

“Copy.”

He again put his eye to the scope, sighted
carefully, and waited a minute. The head of the column, an officer, stopped and
looked around carefully. He apparently had a premonition, and Cory was not
about to disappoint the man. He slowly squeezed the trigger, the rifle barked
once, and the officer’s head met the
150-grain
hollow point and exploded in a red mist. Cory had already moved his rifle to
the next man in the column in a smooth motion, and fired again. He was aware of
the AR fire that pierced the bright sunny day, but was lost in the world that
existed in the scope of his rifle. He downed four more men,
then
moved up the ridgeline, taking a position twenty yards away from where he fired
initially. He saw the muzzle flashes from the ARs that fired from one side of
the column and from the rear. The L
had been closed
,
and the last Mexican soldier went down in a blistering hail of fire from both
sides of the ambush. The volume of fire gradually died and the men moved
forward to where the dead and wounded lay. The men moved quickly, stripping the
weapons and ammunition from the corpses.

“What do we do with
the wounded?”

“Kill them. They’ve seen our faces.” The men drew
their pistols and administered the kill shot to several of the soldiers.

“Let’s go,” Cory said. “Our work here is done.” The
group all melted into the forest and traveled separate directions to confuse
any attempt to track them. They now had several fully automatic M-16s, thanks
to the Mexican taxpayers, and thirty hand grenades. It had been a profitable
afternoon. After an hour, they all arrived back at the cave, after each
traveled over areas where the rockiness of the ground would throw off a
tracker. They parked the ATVs behind a stand of scrub cedar and walked up the
hill with weapons, ammo cans, and the grenades.

The killing and raping had started almost
immediately after the Mexican Army took control of the town and surrounding
areas. The level of brutality was beyond human comprehension. Anybody who
hesitated to surrender a weapon
was killed
. The raping
was just a given for any attractive woman. At first, they hesitated to kill
children, but even that taboo
was violated
by the
third week of the occupation.

Two weeks earlier, a column of ATVs that were going
to town
was backed up
at a checkpoint. For unknown
reasons, the column was strafed by heavy machine guns that
didn’t
stop firing until everyone in that column, including Cory’s wife and two kids,
lay dead. Cory spent a day in numb disbelief when Kate gave him the news, then
the rage started. He struggled to calm himself for another day, and then
settled into a seething, but controlled anger. He adopted the adage that
“revenge is a dish best served cold.” He and Ben collected the bodies of his
loved ones, took them to the ranch, and dug their graves next to
Don’s
. The entire group walked from the cave and the burial
ceremony
was held
. Everyone wept bitterly, except for
Cory. He had a smoldering rage to comfort him, and a need to extract revenge –
that was his only priority. In short, the humanity in him
was
ripped
away, and what was left was simply a killing machine.
And
there was lots of raw material for the death factory he
was planning to build.

The next day, they planned the first ambush. They
knew the Mexican Army was sending patrols into the National Forest to look for
the other “bushwhackers” who had taken revenge for the loss of family members,
and the number was growing rapidly. Cory knew, from early on, that they would
have to organize to present a real threat to the Mexicans; but he had a
personal score to settle first.
So
they scouted the
trail into the forest that was used most often, set up the ambush, and killed
them all. It was not enough for Cory. It was only a beginning. He had a hunger
that
would not be easily satisfied
.

They soon split into groups to increase the number
and frequency of the ambushes. Tim, the former Marine corpsman who then became
a doctor, commanded a group consisting of Rachael, Bud, Ed, and Mary. Cory led
the second group of Ben and his two sons and Kate. Ann generally staffed the
base radio and let everyone know who was where to eliminate friendly fire
incidents. The ambushes were often very fluid events and it was possible for
the two teams to meet along the three trails where the battles generally took
place. Each team had a sniper with a .
308,
and three
to four in the “cleanup crews” who carried captured M-16s.

The Mexicans wised up and formed special units that
trailed columns in Humvees armed with .50 machine guns, and formed a rapid
reaction force that would ride to the assistance of their trapped soldiers.
After very nearly losing
his entire team, Cory decided to
play chess with the Mexican commanders, and they began working as one unit,
with two teams. The first team sprung the ambush on the column of soldiers and
departed the area immediately. The second team hurled grenades from steep
ridges above the trail into the Humvees as they passed under them. A
two-month-long game of move and countermove ensued. As time passed, each side
modified tactics to try to gain the upper hand. It got more dangerous for both
sides as time went on; the numbers of casualties grew and the number of battles
increased.

Cory and Tim both understood the fundamental
problem: they
couldn’t
stand and fight. They both knew
that the first time they guessed wrong in the game of cat and mouse they
played,
they would lose and lose big.
Or
,
if the Mexicans ever followed them to the cave, that would also end them. The
Mexicans, on the other hand, could make mistakes and still survive. It was a
stacked deck against them and eventually their luck would run out.

The ambushes continued for another three months, and
often the group heard gunfire from other bands of partisans in the woods.
But
their tactics came at a cost. On their third ambush,
they lost Bud and Mary, who had run into another Mexican patrol while fleeing
the site of an ambush. They
were cut down
by automatic
weapons fire. The group attempted to recover their bodies, only to
be ambushed
themselves. They were lucky that the Mexicans
sprung the trap before they were in effective range, and they managed to
escape. Ed, during the following ambush, suffered a shoulder wound that Tim was
able to patch up. However, it took him out of the fight for a month and left
the team short-handed. Then, the Mexican Army suddenly stopped sending the
soldiers into the forest. It was the first acknowledgement that the groups who
chose to fight had an impact on their operations. They talked about whether or
not it was just a lull, or if their enemies really had given up on subduing the
groups that owned the National Forest for the time being.

“We can’t keep doing things this way,” Kate said one
night after another meal of MREs.

“What do you mean?” Cory asked.

“We need to either stop doing the ambushes or get
the others organized and mount a real resistance. All
we’re
going to do is get killed sooner or later.
And
, we’re
just stinging them. I want to bite them so hard they run back to Mexico and
leave us in peace.”

“Well, I guess you’re right. How do we do that?”

“We’re going back to the ranch tomorrow to grab some
supplies. Don had a whole library of war books.” She stopped speaking and fell
into a long silence. Don’s murder
was never solved
.
The night it happened, a rain started that went on for two days. Tracking the
killers was impossible.

“Does it still hurt you as bad as it does me?” Cory
asked gently.

“Yes, and it’s never going to get any better,” she
sighed.

“I know.” He patted her knee gently.

“And the worst part of it is I know I’ll never be
that happy again. There will never be anyone who can replace him.”

“I feel the same way.” Ben sat down next to Kate and
wrapped an arm around her as she started
to gently weep
.
Ed and Ann joined the group at the picnic table they had moved from the ranch
to the cave.

“We’ve lost a lot of good people,” Ben said gently.
“But we have to fight on.”

“We’re going to try to get more organized tomorrow,”
Cory replied. “Don had a bunch of books on guerrilla movements and we need to
study them and then find other groups who are willing to fight.”

“The Army’s coming!” Eric yelled as he ripped off
the headset from the ham radio. “They’ve taken the eastern part of Texas back
and are heading our way!” He approached the group with a look of excitement,
smiling as he stopped in front of them. “I just heard a ham somewhere in East
Texas reporting columns of our tanks rolling through.”

“Where is he?” Cory asked.

“He wouldn’t say. He just said East Texas.” Tim and
Rachael, hearing the yelling, joined the group at the table.

“Did he say anything else?” Tim asked.

“He’s spotted some aircraft and helicopters moving
west as well. He also said bombers were passing over his position, heading
west,” Eric replied breathlessly. “Lord, this is good news!”

“Maybe we can just hunker down and wait for the Army
to show up?” Rachael said in a wistful voice.

“That won’t work, Rachael,” Tim replied. “We could
all be dead before they get here, if they get here at all. We have to fight on
as best we can, and do everything we can to keep them out of the forest, at the
very least.”

“That’s not enough,” Cory stated flatly. “We need to
find a way to make sure they don’t even want to leave their bases. Until we can
move around freely, there’s no chance we can accomplish much.”

“How are we supposed to do that?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know, at least not yet. But we’re going to
find out tomorrow how to organize, and then hit them often and hard.”

“You mean those books?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Tomorrow we learn how
to use guerrilla tactics and get organized with the other groups.”