“You’re not so old that I can’t wallop you,” the Colonel said. He started to walk out of the room, and then paused. “Tell Albert that we are thinking of him and praying for his safe return.”
Shaking his head, he walked down into the common room. He had no idea what the farm’s original designers had intended for the room, but it served as a convenient place for the group to meet. They’d never given themselves a name or a purpose. It had suited them better to remain an amorphous group with no official standing of any kind. Official positions meant that they would be noticed and notice meant trouble. It hadn’t been that long since another survivalist group had run into trouble by possessing weapons that were — technically — illegal. The fact that the difference between legal and illegal weapons was minor hadn’t impressed the judge. Colonel Sanderson loved his country, but if there was ever a long period of civil unrest he would take unholy delight in shooting down some of the agents of the federal government. Didn’t anyone ever read the Constitution anymore?
There were seventeen men and five women in the room. Each of them was the head of a family, either elected by his family or simply the oldest and most experienced man in the group. Like the Colonel, they mostly were ex-military, with only two exceptions; a former cop from Chicago and a former officer in the CIA. The Colonel was not generally inclined to trust the intelligence services — there had been too many incidents of imprecise or outright inaccurate information served up to allow him to feel any respect for the CIA — but he made an exception for Bob Packman. Packman had quit the CIA when the Agency had become infected with the disease known as political correctness, where restrictions handed down from Congress and an untested President had crippled the Agency’s ability to react to foreign threats. The entire country had paid a price for their foolishness on 9/11.
“Thank you for coming,” the Colonel said, as they rose to greet him. It struck him as slightly absurd, but as the one who had shaped their little group, they tended to give him considerable respect. “Please — be seated.”
It struck him, sometimes, that he had shaped something not unlike the insurgent cells that proved such a bane to American and European military and police forces. The group didn’t share the same farm; that would have been absurd. Those who didn’t farm were positioned in Mannington and a handful of other towns, with little apparent connection between them. The outer edge of their families barely knew anything of the group. Toby hadn’t been the only youngster to abandon the farming life for the bright lights of the city.
“I got a dozen or so friends staying with me,” he said, once he had opened a can of beer and took a swig. There would be more serious drinking later, but any discussions would be had without more than a can or two of beer. This was no time to drink himself senseless. “How many did you all get?”
He smiled at their responses. They all had relatives who lived in the cities — and had fled, following the arrival of the alien ships. Some of their relatives provided money for the farms without ever understanding the true purpose of the survivalist group and had a fair claim to stay, provided they worked on the farm. Others had no real claim, but couldn’t easily be turned away. Family was family. They all knew that.
“I think we won’t bring them into the group,” he continued. “Does anyone see a problem with that?”
There were none. Those relatives who had had military training and experience had already been recruited, apart from a couple with suspect political views. The Colonel respected a man’s right to make his mind up about anything he liked, but if someone had a political view that the Colonel found suspect — communism or transnational progressivism — he wouldn’t allow them to know anything about the group. He knew what he would do if he discovered someone planning an attack on America — being a patriotic American was part of what he was — and someone who truly believed in communism, or that the federal government was always right, would follow their own conscience. They might not be bad people, but they couldn’t be trusted.
“Vanessa may be a problem,” Lucas Dawlish admitted. He was the oldest in the room, a Ranger who had served in Vietnam as a young man, before returning home to raise children and farm his parent’s farm. “I think she truly believes that the aliens are here to help.”
The Colonel winced. Vanessa Dawlish had been a charming child and a beautiful young woman, with enough intelligence to enter any university in the United States. She’d plumbed for Berkley, in California, right on the other side of the country. And there the trouble had started. Like so many other young girls, she’d fallen under the spell of a radical professor who had taught her that communism — however disguised — was the only path to a fairer new world order. Her parents hadn’t known what to do and — given her willingness to lecture her family and friends on her new beliefs — they’d been devastated when she’d decided to move in with her former teacher. Professor Cavendish had, in just three days, earned himself a place in the spotlight as one of the foremost supporters of the Galactic Federation. The fact that no one knew much about the Galactic Federation — beyond the fact that it existed — had largely passed unnoticed.
“I think that we would be wise to deny her entry, if she returns to Virginia,” the Colonel said. Even as he spoke, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. Dawlish wouldn’t be keen on abandoning his grandchild and her parents might be willing to take her back in, as long as she wasn’t escorted by her lover. There was no way that anyone as impractical as Professor Cavendish could be trusted. Besides, with at least two wives in the past — one of whom was still, legally, his wife — his morals were highly suspect. “If she does…”
He looked around the room and briefly outlined his conclusions about the alien ships. “I may be overreacting,” he concluded, “but I think we have to prepare for trouble. They may simply intend to demand our surrender in New York… or they may be overtly friendly.”
Some of the group looked puzzled, so he hastened to explain. “They may not mean us harm, but what happens if they give us… oh, I don’t know — perhaps a way of producing synthetic oil? It sounds great — we’d finally be free of the ragheads — until we realised that most of the oil companies would go out of business. The economic effects would put millions of Americans out of work. Businesses would go bust, banks would crash, ordinary people couldn’t put food on the table… it would be nice to believe that the Galactics would wave a magic wand and all our problems would be solved, but can we rely on it?
“We founded this group because we all believed that a crash was coming,” he added. “We disagreed about why the crash was coming, or what form it would take, but we all knew that something would shake the foundations of the entire world. And now we have been confronted by the existence of alien life. The Galactics may be hostile, they may be friendly, yet their mere presence is going to shake us worse than anything else in recent history.
“And we’re the ones who prepared. We may end up fighting an insurgency against the aliens, or merely struggling to survive while the world is reshaped into something adapted to the post-Contact world. I need to ask; will you all stay with the group, bearing in mind that we didn’t prepare for this?”
“I reckon we didn’t prepare for anything specific,” Packman said. “I’m in.”
The Colonel didn’t relax afterwards, not during the dinner prepared by his daughters or during the brief drinking and swapping lies session that followed. At base, survivalists worked to survive; they would emerge from their hiding places and remake the world after the crash had been and gone. Not very brave, perhaps, and maybe not very patriotic…