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  There was an area in the middle of town that was highly illuminated. They had put up fenced areas for keeping locals by day and had them well lighted at night. Those were around the State Patrol Office. Dad had mentioned that the patrol office had a larger jail than the town facility so they were likely to be keeping prisoners in that place. We watched for a while and saw that there were only a few guards. Everyone else seemed to be asleep. One came out to take a leak. He was pinned to a tree by the arrow from the crossbow that went through his head.

  Someone came out to look for him. That guy made the mistake of stepping into the shadows and taking a nine millimeter bullet from my dad's pistol through his head. A third guy stood in the door of the jail and yelled for his buddies. That gave us the clue that he was the last of them. I took him inside very quickly with a knife in my hands and at his throat. I asked who was being detained there. He told me. I had him take me to the mayor and the two State Police Officers. We got them out of their cells, took them outside and asked if they were willing to try for Missoula or maybe even further south depending on what was going on in Missoula. They all agreed and we armed them and took them back to the trucks after creating a Semtex event that would happen within half an hour. The mayor took one truck and left. The Statie's took another truck and left vowing to kill those at the roadblock on Hwy.93. I told them of the raping and murdering that these militia people had been doing. They left determined to do damage to those on the roadblock that we had attacked repeatedly.

  One thing the Sgt. of State Police did say before leaving was “They think you guys are an army of thousands and they are scared shitless. They want to negotiate with someone but they put out people in an attempt to do that and their people disappear or show up dead. You guys are doing great work.” The one thing we asked him to do if it were possible was to get us a couple of people who were Seals, Marine Recon, the like, to reinforce our battle group. They said they would try. We told the Statie's we would look for them once a week in the area of the dead Jeep that was still sitting on Hwy. 93, the one we took out.

  We took the truck we had left, full of dead bodies, and drove north toward Arlee to see if there was a roadblock there. Four guys manned it in two trucks. Only two of them were visible and we found out the other two were in their sleeping bags in the beds of the trucks sound asleep. When we pulled up to the stop area one of each of the guys came to the door on each side of the truck. Dad shot one of them and I shot the other. We talked to one of the sleepers for a little while and then set his truck up for him to take it home. It was getting on toward 4:30 a.m. by that time.

  We left them there, heard the truck explode, drove the truck we were in back to the town perimeter and went back into the forest. We only had two hours in which to find a place and hide out. It was not hard. We were asleep most of the day while we listened occasionally to the helicopter or other men running through the woods as fast as they could to avoid traps and trying to avoid getting killed by some boogeyman!

  Near to 7:30 a.m. we heard a loud explosion reverberate through the trees. We knew what that was. It was the State Police building. When we emptied the night before we booby trapped it with a large amount of the Semtex we were carrying. There would not be much left of that place we thought. It narrowed the militiamen's possibilities for incarcerating people. That might mean they would allow townspeople to live in their homes. That would eventually be good for us. We had to marshal some support amongst the townspeople, at least over time, to keep up this barrage. We were largely self contained but in time we would need to be in town and have places of refuge there.

  On this sortie we had marked in our memories several homes that appeared to be unoccupied and boarded up which would be suitable for a momentary rest stop. But we had to be able to trust that our enemies would not find our places of refuge easily. If we could depend on some of the locals to hide us out it would be a lot less daunting.

  When we got back deep into the forest this time we heard a flurry of activity coming along the trails. There were many ATV's being used this time instead of the pick-up trucks. There were a few pick-ups to be sure but many more ATV's. We went to ground in a natural cave that we had discovered in our travels.

  It was shallow, probably had been a refuge for a bear in the past, and might well be the same again in time as our scent wore off. It was in a heavily shadowed area of the forest. It was in an area where there was much undergrowth and it would be ripe for a forest fire if one got started in that area. Dad and I worried some about the idea of a forest fire.

  With all the gunfire that was coming from the people searching, misdirected gunfire, shooting just to be shooting, we hoped no tracer rounds were going out of those guns that might set a fire. The forest was our friend, our ally, our place to be free to move and sally toward the town. Without the forest we would have been spotted very easily and probably have been dead meat a long time ago.

  We watched from our hidey hole as two ATV's came by our place several times. They never stopped, never looked in our direction, and never paid any heed to who might be hiding in the area. This was all a matter of form to them. They had been attacked and they assumed the attack came from the forest. So they set out to make whoever was assailing them know that it was not safe to do so. The same two ATV's came by again. We had timed them the first two times they came by.

  We had about thirty minutes before they came back. It was full daylight and yet in that area it was dark enough so that visibility was at least impaired to a small degree. We set up wires across the area where each of the ATV's would cross which would hit the riders, two to an ATV, straight across the faces. The wires worked perfectly.

  The ATV's were knocked down and the kill switch that each driver was wearing worked perfectly. It was still noisy in that area, but not nearby. We dispatched the riders, took their equipment, and hid their bodies in leaves and branches in a small depression near the trail. We took the ATV's and hid them back in the trees with branches covering them. They could be seen but only from a very short distance. We went back to our copse. Soon it would be dark and we would head home as the militiamen gave up the forest and ran for cover.

  Both dad and I were tiring of the killing. It was not what we would have preferred to be doing. But we saw no other way to deal with these bastards. Every time we went to the roadblock we found at least two or three carloads of dead bodies, poor travelers trying their damndest to get home or close to home or friends. We kept telling each other war is hell. It was the label, that of war, that made this so strange. How could we call this war? It was our own people?

  No, it was not our own people. These people were some kind of aberration. They were some devil's seed as far as we could tell. The several of them that we had interrogated were fearful of death but proud as hell of their accomplishments as killers and rapists. I will never forget the look on the face of that young boy who when I asked him about getting some of that tight stuff was simply evil looking in his satisfaction and the remembrance of his conquest. What other term could we use but war? No matter, if they caught us they would kill us all, rape and murder our wives, murder my sons. We would not see that happen, not as long as we could fight, could take them out two or three or ten at a time. Attrition would eventually take care of the bastards, I thought. And who knows, maybe in time the Statie's that we let go would get us some reinforcements in here. We would check that out every other night from now on if it were possible.

  Both dad and I had been neglecting our brides and the children. We took them all down into the cave where the acoustics were naturally shut down and let them all plink with twenty-two caliber rifles and pistols. Then after shooting the smaller twenty-two shells for a while we let them cap off a clip each of the .223 rounds that fired from the AR-15's, the M-16's and the SAW weapons. Those were louder and produced more recoil. They surprised my wife quite a bit and scared my sons a little. That was okay with me for the present. The boys needed to begin to learn but they were sure as th
e world too young to have to aim a rifle at a man and shoot.

  My mom and my wife were not the kind of people who could do the work that dad and I had been tending to but they would be able, in a dire situation, to use a weapon. We were just making sure they could do it without flinching from the noise or the recoil. At that point we had enough .223 ammunition that we had confiscated from the militiamen to start another war in the next county.

  After practice that afternoon we listened to RUSA again for a while and tried the television but got nothing. We had heard no more about the “invasion” of our country for over a week. We were all a bit anxious about that. We rested until around 7:30 that evening, ate a few bites of some delicious baked chicken that my mother and Ruthie prepared for us from canned foods combined with MRE's and geared up.

  We were both carrying crossbows all the time now. Dad had been practicing with his and if anything was a better shooter with that tool than I was. We left the house and headed toward Charley and Berneice's place where we could be close to the highway without being seen, to await the possible arrival of any new troops. None came.

  On the way to the potential rendezvous site we had seen and dispatched another six of the sentries that the militia was putting out into the forest each night. We dragged them out of the forest after we waited for any newcomers and took them to the other side of the road past Charley's house to throw into a depressed area. It took a little while to do that but got the bodies away from the sites where they had died.

  We had to dodge a patrol that was going up and down highway 93 consisting of a bunch of variously dressed idiots in a Humvee that had a top mounted machine gun. I had been coveting a machine gun, light weight .223 variety that some of our military was using now, for quite a while. There were, as it turned out, five men in the unit. As the RPG we had begun to carry with us on a regular basis entered the driver's door I could see there was no armor. The RPG was fired from such a short range no one even cried out. The four inside the Humvee were killed instantly while the top gunner had his legs cut nearly off by the explosion. We sent him on his way by being at the vehicle within five seconds of the explosion occurring. I dismounted the belt fed gun and took it with me.

  It turned out to be a thirty caliber weapon, 7.62 millimeter is the NATO designation I believe, and therefore was a little heavier but it was it good shape. There was an extra canister of ammunition in the Humvee. Dad took that and we left the area. No one was coming that night except for more militiamen and then only as a body recovery detail. They were pulling back out of the woods at night more and more. As the song says which we used to sing in Vietnam all the time, “Another one bites the dust.” Only in this case it was ten more. Damn, where the hell were all their men coming from?

  We knew that the military base up the road near Arlee was virtually gone now. We had seen a Humvee, a larger truck and a lot of camo painted ATV's already. But the militia was still using its favorite transportation, the pick-up truck for the most part. We had seen the helicopter change and become equipped with military weapons, particularly machine guns. We assumed those were mounted by members of the National Guard since it was unlikely that the militiamen would have known how to do that.

  And they had machine guns that had to have come from the base as well as SAW's and M-16 rifles with selector switches for burst, single or full automatic fire. We could not know how much of the armory was already in our hands. There was a lot. But the percentage of that taken by the militia? Impossible to know unless we went to Arlee and found some records of what had been there before the war started. But we could look at the population figures for Frenchtown if the internet was still operating.

  We had dad's wi-fi setup dialed up the next morning, trying to find out what population figures existed for Frenchtown. We got into Wikipedia without too much ado which was very surprising to us. The estimates of population were a little over 2500 people of which about 55% were male and of that group about 35% were less than forty years of age. We had not seen any large, fat men, banker types, lawyer types, in the trees. All the men we had encountered were under 40 years of age or at most in that range. We estimated that the number of men potentially available in Frenchtown at the outset of the nuclear war would have been about one thousand, three hundred and seventy-five and that was all of the men that were there. The population that had existed which was less than forty years of age was about eight hundred and seventy five people.

  The total that we came up with included such men as the Statie's that we had let go, the town policemen which we assumed were dead, the mayor and a few of his friends, again we had let him go with the Statie's. As near as we could tell at that point we were averaging about ten to fifteen of them a night. Some nights there had been more, some less than that number. But the number that we had eliminated had started to swell drastically. We had taken care of well over a hundred of those people. If we made the assumption that some of the town's men refused to serve in this army of northwestern Montana we felt that it was possible we had eliminated at least a fourth of their strength. Knowing those things we also knew that it had to continue for a time.

  Chapter 6

  Eileen Powers

  Mom said to dad the next morning when all of us were having a brunch together “Gene, do you remember the lady that ran the library? I think her name was Eileen Powers.”

  “Sure. She was always very pleasant to deal with, courteous to you and I both in every way. And she helped us with setting up our projects out here a couple of times.”

  Mom looked at him and in a low tone of voice said “I wonder if she is still alive.”

  Dad probably was thinking about exactly the thoughts mom was having. He said, “Oh crap, she would know exactly where we are, wouldn't she?” Mom nodded her head. Dad said “Didn't she come out here two or three times when we were working on the place?”

  “Yes, honey, yes she did. She and I talked a lot about the kind of plants I could grow in artificial light and whether we could find a way to have a garden with things like tomatoes, turnips, melons. Crap, she even knows a lot about the cave I'm afraid. She and I spent a lot of time down there exploring and trying to figure out whether the salinity in the cave would damage plants or assist their growth.”

  “Do you remember exactly where she lived in town?”

  “Yes. She was about two streets in from the outside circle and was about three houses to the south of the library itself.”

  “Didn't she have a son?”

  “Yes,” mom said, “and as I recall he was a bit of a ne'er do well. He would be a natural for the kinds of things you two have told us were happening to the outsiders coming through the area. Oh God, honey, if she talked to him about us it would be because he was in the militia movement and she figured out that it was probably you that was knocking them down so badly.”

  “Well I guess we have a mission for tonight, Will. We have got to see to it somehow that she gets the hell out of here and that her son is eliminated without her knowing it was done by us. God this is a ticklish one.”

  We both knew that unfortunately the death of Eileen Powers might have to rest on our consciences. Certainly her son was one of our most likely candidates if we could find him. What a quandary to be in! A nice woman, a woman with class and a sense of courtesy that was remarkable, a woman with a son whose likely membership in the militia could not be refuted! Would both have to die? God how I hoped that horror of war would not have to be visited on our home. But of course the issue lay heavy in the air that Eileen Powers had information about us that no one else possessed, that no one else could have if we were to continue to survive and fight the war.

  Dad and I went to bed that late morning and slept into the middle of the afternoon. We spent the rest of the afternoon thinking carefully about everything involved in the situation with Eileen Powers. But she was not a murderer. Or was she? Was she a militia person? Was her son a militia person? Had he attempted to query her about whether she might know som
eone capable of doing what we were doing if he was militia? There were too many unanswered questions. We had to find the answers to some of them at least. Then we could take whatever action was necessary to bring this potential threat to an end.

  Sleep was difficult that day. My kids were loud. My mind was churning. My heart was heavy for my mom. Finally I slept and then in what seemed no time at all, dad awakened me. Around eight p.m. we geared up, said our goodbyes to our wives and kids, and took off toward town. We were mentally in a bit of a hurry, but physically we were careful as usual.

  That was imperative and it was for a necessary purpose as we soon learned. The ring of sentries was further into the forest this time. This time there were three sentries in each camp. We went first to the camp furthest away to the north. It was neutralized in seconds.

  The next camp found all three militiamen asleep and a few minutes later they were permanently so. We worked our way across the camps which were set within minutes of each other, taking our time, watching for booby traps or mine placements. We did find one set of Claymore mines placed toward the house that could have been destructive to us had we come in that direction. But we didn't. We came from behind them and they never knew we were there. We saw the cords going to the Claymores, disabled them, stowed them and the prima cord in our packs and went on to the next group.