All Write, Already!

Would the real William Wallace please stand up.

"Most of the 34th's armor will be on top of us by tomorrow afternoon," Luis reported listlessly. "I'd say we can expect them to pour through the eastern approaches, tanks up front, and just ride right on up to the gates. I mean, it's not like we have anything that could do more than give the crews a headache - those Abrhams might as well be indestructible for all we've got to throw at them."

It was the truth, too; but that didn't make it any more palatable. The 34th had allowed at least three platoons of main battle tanks be spotted on their way here from their distant camp - a camp far enough out that it took considerable resources to reach them by jeep and by salvaged pickup truck, but close enough that their AH-64s could've simply incinerated this whole valley if they'd so chosen. Bill wrote the fact that they didn't off to the scarcity of missiles and 30 milimeter shells, rather than any actual courtesy being extended to him by the remenants of Uncle Sam's weekend warriors.

This was the new reality of the world, when the chaos began, it looked like the police and national guard would've been enough to keep order but it only took a couple of years for infastructure to simply begin to fall apart faster than the military could keep it together. A cartoon published in one of the last newspapers to go offline, showed then-dictator General Hardy desperately trying to keep a New York skyline (which was made entirely out of wobbly stacks of fine china) upright while they spilled right over the top of him. No caption had been needed.

The whole thing wound up being self-fulfilling. The artist was incarcerated for Contempt, then died mysteriously. The rioting which had up until that point been a commonplace, almost daily occurance, became both pandemic and constant. Even the mighty military of the USA couldn't keep all those people at bay and still maintain control - there was just too much angry meat to kill, and not enough willing bullets to do the killing. Desertion quickly swept through the nation's defenders as orders became too desperate, too extreme, and the continent was polarized into those who had big guns, and those who hadn't. For a while, those who hadn't just hid and ran, and those who had fought their own civil war - an ugly affair given that both sides knew each other so well. Many factions tried to care for the civillians cought in the crossfire, but ultimately the battle was won by the side most willing to do whatever it took to survive - including feeding off of the civillian's meager attempts at rebuilding. It wasn't long before the polite soldiers were long extinct in any sufficient quantity to matter.

For the next few years the forces that were left spent the time quietly consolidating their new territory. At best estimates, 25% of the old USA was back under control of roughly six faction, each of which claimed to be THE legitimate American government. Of course, not one of them included anyone who'd survived from the Congress, or the Executive. (The courts had been amoung the first casaulties.) Two members of Congress had gotten together and formed a seventh faction, in Philadelphia no less, which held the most obviously consistent claim to the title 'American Government Reborn' but with nothing more than a few thousand partisans with bolt-action rifles and IEDs, it lasted all of a week according to survivors.

The only saving grace of the whole situation was that each of the six 'generals' (it was doubtful any of them had actually been promoted to the rank save by their own doing) were so convinced of their own superiority and soveregnty that they wound up in a stalemate, constantly having to vie against each other. Else they'dve long ago consumed the ashes of the old republic and built their own M.I.C. vision for the new one.

"I need thirty volunteers, in squads of five, sub machine guns, IED satchels, field kits and bush trained. The rest should prep the fields to be burned and salted, and the evacuation of the noncoms."

"Thirty on Three thousand, Bill? Why even bother?"

"These bastards don't want our crops, we offered to trade it to them for weapons and medicine. They don't want this land, they wouldn't know how to use it anyway. They just want control, they want /us./ And so long as we remain free, we're an insult to them and their whole way of life. So long as their missiles and choppers and tanks can't keep us in chains, they live in fear of losing their grip on the world."

"So.... we should just run, why the thirty?"

"Because if we just run, eventually we'll trip and they'll pounce."

"But if we feed ourselves to them thirty at a time we politely save them from the indigestion of eating us all at once?"

"Hey! I'm the metaphor junkie here, you go back to being cynical and pratical. I just can't let them destroy everything we've built here without making it cost them. Our food for their boys, that's the trade they want? Fine. I'll take their blood."

"You realize you're just a little psycho right?"

"If I'm wrong? You've my permission to shoot me."