They became inoculated against brutality and were used for the more flagrant breaches of liberty, such as house raids to confiscate weapons and food stores, where often whole families were killed. In their blue SWAT style overalls, these young thugs became known as the ‘blue shirts’.
The majority of the country’s armed forces remained under Regime control, with the exception of the ‘enlightened’ that were already awake to the reality. Why was this? The country was under attack, now under martial law. The soldiers were indoctrinated to obey orders; they were in the system, part of the machine. In the same way that the mass of the people were fed their news from the mainstream media, so was the military.
True, there were mass desertions when the collapse happened, with many army National Guardsmen staying home to look after their families. But by and large, the active duty units remained on their bases, loyal to the system. The chain of command never flinched: orders came down as usual, situation briefings were given, and before they knew it, the active duty army was deployed domestically under martial law, protecting the country from terrorism. Why would they think any differently?
In fact, the Regime did experience problems with many of the actual combat veterans among the ranks of the National Guard, active duty army, and even law enforcement. Some of them took their oaths seriously and refused to act illegally against citizens. These types were severely cracked down upon, those that had not deserted or escaped out of the zones.
Those deserting veterans that were captured or those who dissented, refusing to obey illegal orders, were often taken into mental institutions against their will, on the pretext of mental illness or PTSD, for ‘treatment’ that often involved severe drug therapy that left them mentally incapacitated, shadows of their former selves.
Others saw the writing on the wall and deserted, getting out and away from the zones, often taking weapons and equipment with them.
However, there was a flip side to the refusal to obey orders to fire on citizens: as good Americans, many of these veterans actually found it easy to fire on the entitlement ‘eaters’ that they came across in the worst of the inner city riots. In their eyes, these eaters were the antithesis of how America was intended. Once they had pulled the trigger though, there was no going back, and they were lost on the slippery slope.
A new constitution was written, termed the ‘Homeland Charter’. This new document rejected the original Constitution and declared all those supporting it to be domestic terrorists.
There was much deliberate obfuscation between sleeper cells allegedly related to the ‘Iranian’ terror attack on DC, and domestic ‘constitutionalist’ terrorists, who were often simply Patriots and preppers.
The old Constitution had led to the destruction of the country, according to the revisionist agenda of the ‘progressive’ Regime and the ‘doublethink’ mental illness that plagued America. Individual liberty was the enemy; the only salvation was in the collective. The agenda of the progressives was complete.
‘New Citizens’ had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Regime, to obey all laws and orders given to them by those in authority. They were fitted with subcutaneous RFID chips containing all personal information. Cash and firearms were outlawed and the chips allowed the GPS tracking of people. It was therefore easy to determine someone’s status simply by scanning their forearm, and if no chip was present they were an outlaw, to be arrested or shot on sight.
As part of this new direction, the flag was redesigned. Rather than the stripes, there was a red and white sunray effect radiating out from a central, slightly offset to the left, sun-like circle in blue and white. The lower part of the ‘O’ like circle had an effect similar to the radiating red and white stripes, but more horizontally across the bottom of the ‘O’: A shining symbol of the bright future of collective socialism. The new flag was supposed to signify ‘hope’ or some similar progressive garbage.
The star spangled banner was relegated to the newly demonized ‘Patriots’ and subversives. Patriots, constitutionalists, libertarians and anyone who had prepared for the collapse were targets of the Regime, to be tracked down. Those who were not sworn to the new regime were either interned or executed if they were under direct Regime control.
The citizens of the new Regime lived hand to mouth on government handouts, working in State sponsored jobs and living in camps or state controlled housing, cowed but grateful that they were being kept safe from the outlaws and terrorists outside of the zones.
Many who had not been aware of the true danger of the creeping progressive agenda were rudely awakened after the collapse. ‘Normalcy bias’ was swept away and their eyes were opened to the true horror of where their great country had descended to.
The FEMA camps were no holiday camp: those who had elected or been forced into them found that due to a combination of corruption, incompetence and simple brutality, rations were meager and conditions basic. They were more like concentration camps, with oppressive rules enforced by sullen guards, quick to violence. Many in the camps were simply taken out and killed for being trouble makers, tossed into mass graves and left to rot in piles.
Many could not understand how the military could be used against citizens. With rioters, it was easy. For the innocent preppers and Patriots who were considered domestic terrorists, it was also easy: it was all a matter of information management. Regime strike teams under the DHS were simply briefed that a ‘target’ housed ‘domestic terrorists’ who were harboring food, weapons and even explosives.
The targets were hit hard in ‘no knock’ raids with unrestrictive rules of engagement, often resulting in everyone at the target being killed, including whole families in some cases. If the target was found to contain innocent preppers, it was no problem. It was not the first time, even before the collapse, that the wrong address was hit or ‘intelligence’ was found to be incorrect. Heavy handed SWAT ‘kill squad’ tactics were fine as long as ‘department procedures’ were followed.
Chapter One
Before the DC terrorist attack, Jack and Caitlin Berenger were thirty-something professionals living in the Northern Virginia suburbs. They had three children; a teenage boy and two toddlers. The eldest, Andrew, was sixteen, Connor was four and the youngest, Sarah, was two.
Jack was a former Captain with the Army Rangers, a veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he had gained considerable combat experience. He was very tactically adept and he continued to keep himself fit since resigning from military service, despite his sedentary job as a crisis management consultant. Caitlin was a veteran with a military intelligence background, now working as a civilian for the Department of Defense.
They had always been an active and outdoors type family, hiking and camping often. Jack also liked to keep his hand in with shooting and they owned several firearms, which he had also been training Andrew to use.
More recently, they had woken up to the fragility of modern society, the threats faced by the potential for economic collapse and the advance of the socialist agenda of the progressives in the supposedly free United States. They were both Patriots who had served their country and sworn the oath to protect the Constitution from ‘enemies foreign and domestic’.
They had started to make more extensive preparations for a potential collapse, like many other preppers, and had been stocking up on food and supplies. They were shocked to find that this otherwise sensible endeavor would categorize them as potential ‘domestic terrorists’ for having more than seven days’ worth of food, among other things.