Drone Wars 1: The Beginning Read online

  Once in the tunnel, I switched the LED lights on and crawled forward. Near the end of the tunnel, I stopped to check on my leg and shoulder. One round had passed through the meat of my right calf but, as best I could tell, had not hit the bone. I stopped the bleeding by placing gauze pads on both the entry and exit wounds. Then I tied strips from the torn-off leg of my jeans around my calf to hold the pads in place. The strips worked better for this than paracord or tarred bank line from the bug-out bag.

  The hit on my shoulder was just a big nick so I covered it with a gauze pad and some tape. Neither wound hurt very badly yet, but I figured they would soon enough. I swallowed three painkillers from the first aid kit in the bug-out bag.

  The tunnel exited into a clump of bushes next to the cornfield at the edge of our lot. I crawled to the end of the tunnel and waited until I could no longer hear the drones. Then, I slid the hatch aside. It didn't open upwards, but instead slid sideways into a cavity, so it wouldn't draw attention when it was opened.

  I looked carefully toward our house. There was nothing but a pile of rubble where our cozy 1,200 square foot house once stood. There must have been more drones than I thought, or else some of the drones were larger than the one I shot down and carried more ammo. I was surprised no explosives had been used, at least I hadn't heard any.

  I was doubly glad that we had not filed for a permit for the root cellar and tunnel construction, and that we had done both in secret. Much of the dirt had gone into some of the many wooden-sided, raised beds in our gardens, and some had been dispersed into the cornfield behind us at night, one or two buckets at a time, usually after midnight.

  I quickly slipped into the corn and headed across the field toward the creek. I was limping on my right leg, which, despite the painkillers, was really starting to hurt now. It would be dark in another two hours, but I couldn't wait and be trapped here. I knew the authorities would be on the scene in just a few minutes. I did not want to be caught.

  I figured the morning news would say that a rural couple was killed in a gas explosion or that a homegrown terrorist cell blew themselves up making a bomb. I was glad the neighbors on both sides of us were gone that day. Otherwise, I assumed they would most likely be killed as part of the cover-up.

  I made my way to the woods that bordered the creek. I was hoping whoever sent the drones was so convinced that we were both dead that they would not be using the satellites to look for me right now. That would come later though, when they discovered the root cellar and the tunnel. Between now and then I had to disappear, and that is not an easy thing to do in a world filled with electronic surveillance.

  My cell phone was still in the house, or what was left of it, and I carried no electronics on me. My driver's license sat in my wallet securely wrapped in several layers of tinfoil, just in case it contained an RFID chip. I had only a non-RFID debit card and maybe a hundred dollars in my wallet. However, I grabbed the plastic bag of emergency cash that we kept in the tunnel. It held about $2,000, in 20s mostly. Not nearly enough for what I had to do now, but I had it to do anyway.

  I jogged and limped through the woods to the creek. We were in a mild drought this summer so the creek was low. It mostly just came up to my ankles as I walked along the creek bed. I stayed in the water for over a mile and a half, reconnoitering carefully when I neared the bridge on the county road to be sure no one was stopped there before I walked under the bridge.

  I was very careful to always walk in flowing water. I was now wet to my armpits from crossing several deep holes. The guns and bug out bag were dry because I held them over my head in the deep spots.

  When I came to the fishing hole, I climbed the bank, and made for Henry Butler's place. Henry was a farmer and a friend. He was one of those people who seemed like a real grouch until you get to know them. The first time I met him at the annual neighborhood picnic he made fun of my shiny new pickup truck and told me that only sissies drove fancy trucks.

  I looked at him and said, "Well, just what are you so fucking grouchy about?”

  He looked at me for a full 30 seconds, and then smiled and said, "Fuck if I know?” We have been friends ever since.

  Henry stood an inch or two taller than I but didn't carry the muscle I did. He was maybe ten years younger than I was. We shared the same political views, more or less. At my and Susan's urging Henry and his wife Martha were now quietly prepping as well. Prepping was not a huge change in lifestyle for a farmer anyway, or, at least, that was what Henry said.

  I carefully made my way across Henry's back field and then, after watching carefully for anything out of place, toward the back side of his house. One time I thought I heard a drone but decided it was just a small plane. Once I reached Henry's back yard, I knelt in the bushes and tossed some small pebbles I had gathered in the creek against his window until Henry appeared on the back porch with a shotgun.

  "Henry, don't shoot!"

  "Hey, I know you," Henry said. "What's wrong, Man?” I stepped out of the bushes and walked across the scorched grass carefully staying under cover of a couple of trees until Henry could see me. "Geez, what the hell happened to you?"

  "Henry," I said. "Please don't ask any questions. Believe me, you don't want to know. I need to borrow the Beast. I may not be able to get it back to you.” The Beast was Henry's pride and joy, a 1961 ¾ ton Chevy pickup that he had completely restored, and then carefully dented, weathered, and scratched up to fit his idea of what a good pickup truck should look like.

  Henry hesitated only for a second. "I'll get the keys.” Henry went into his house and came back out ten minutes later. Martha was with him. Henry handed me the keys and Martha handed me a large paper bag.

  "You may need this," she said.

  I took the bag and said, "Please, for your own safety, you didn't see me. You accidentally left the keys in the Beast and when you get up in the morning, after sleeping very late, you will report it missing."

  Henry looked me in the eye. After a few seconds, he said, "No. Martha and I are going in the car tonight to visit her sister—a spur of the moment thing. We will be gone for a week or 10 days. Maybe the Beast will be gone when we get home? If so, I will report it then."

  "Thank you Henry. Thank you Martha."

  "You would do it for us," Henry said.

  "How is Susan?” Martha asked.

  "You don't want to know," I said.

  I think Martha could see the pain in my eyes. "Oh," she said. "Oh my."

  "Please, for your own safety, don't mention this to anyone. Not in email, text, on the phone, or in person, ever."

  "Did this have to do with that loud roar we heard earlier?” Henry asked.

  I nodded but said, "Please don't ask."

  "Well, we were inside anyway and didn't hear a thing.” Henry looked at Martha and winked. "Had the TV too loud, you know. Take care Old Son, and stay away from those fancy trucks."

  I nodded then turned and limped across the dry grass doing my best to stay under cover of the trees while heading to the barn where the Beast was stored. I noticed Martha was crying on Henry's shoulder and his eyes didn't look dry either. If anyone saw him I knew Henry would want him or her to think it was over the loss of the Beast, but I knew better.

  I put the rifle behind the seat, threw the bug-out bag onto the passenger seat, and climbed into the Beast. Henry was right, of course. Compared to my more modern pickup truck, the Beast did almost everything better—except gas mileage.

  Henry had pulled the original engine and dropped a modified 454 cubic inch Chevy under the hood, replaced the brakes with modern disc brakes, installed power steering, and added a 100-gallon auxiliary gas tank in the truck bed. The Beast was also four-wheel drive and now had a 4WD shifter in the cab. It also had a front, bumper-mounted, 12,000 lb. winch, and another winch just like it mounted on the rear bumper. As always, Henry had both gas tanks full.

  Maybe the biggest advantage of the Beast was that it wasn't computerized and carried no electronics at all
. That meant that it couldn't be tracked electronically. Only by line of sight, automated tag ID software used with traffic camera feeds, or by satellite if you knew where to look. To the best of my knowledge, the feds had not started requiring RIFD chips on vehicle tags yet.

  I started up the Beast and drove away. I felt really bad about taking the Beast away from Henry, but I didn't know what else to do. I mourned Susan as I drove well within the speed limit to the interstate highway. Part of me still couldn't believe what had happened. I calculated I had maybe two hours before the feds figured out that I had survived. I hoped it would take them a while to expand the search. I thought I might have as long as six hours before they broadened the search, if I were lucky.

  I drove generally south on the interstate for two hours and then pulled into a truck stop. It was now past 9:30 P.M. and completely dark. I parked in the back part of the parking lot after making sure there were no cameras and waited until no one was watching. I then slipped out of the Beast and, using my Swiss Army Knife, removed the tag from the pickup truck beside me, as well as the tag from a truck two spaces over, nearly breaking the big screwdriver blade on the second tag. I switched the second tag onto the first truck and then quickly got back into the Beast with the first tag and left.

  While on the interstate, I avoided stopping at rest stops because the Federal Transportation Security Police (FTSP), otherwise known as the ‘Granny Gropers’, had been setting up checkpoints at interstate highway rest stops in recent months. I suspected it would not be long before they were setting up permanent checkpoints in the middle of the major highways, instead of just at random rest stops. Fortunately for me, they had not done that yet.

  I saw only one unarmed federal highway drone silhouetted against streetlights as I passed through Indianapolis, but it ignored me. The only stop I had made so far was to steal the tag, even though I had to pee so bad my tonsils hurt.

  Three hours out I turned onto the back roads. I stopped and switched tags on the Beast so that it would be harder for the feds to track me using license plate scanners if they had figured out I was now driving the Beast. I dropped the original tag from the Beast into a creek a few miles further along.

  I also dug into the bag Martha gave me. Inside were eight large sandwiches, a gallon jug of water, some first aid supplies, and a roll of bills held tightly together with a rubber band. The roll contained $432, probably all the cash Martha and Henry had on hand. The bag also held a clean white tee shirt and a pair of jeans; Henry's no doubt. I checked the waistband. They were a size too big, but that was better than a size too small. An hour later, I stopped in a secluded spot and changed clothes. The tee shirt was too tight across the shoulders, but otherwise it was fine.

  I wolfed down two of the sandwiches Martha had given me. They were good, but I was stressed enough I almost couldn't taste them. I had not had a single bite of wheat, or a wheat-containing product, in just over three years. I had read that GMO wheat, especially the newer, shorter varieties that almost all the farmers grew now, is just a chronic poison that slowly kills whoever eats it. Since I had stopped eating wheat, other GMO products, and drinking soda, I had lost weight without effort and my health had recovered. I felt like I was 25 years old again. For this reason, I believed what I had read about the wheat. However, the sandwiches were all I had and I needed to eat for the energy—at least that is what I told myself. Perhaps it was just old habits emerging under stress, perhaps it was hunger; I really wasn't sure.

  I put the rest of the sandwiches, the roll of bills, and the first aid supplies in the bug-out bag. I read about some folks who stuff their bug-out bags to the max. We kept ours half-empty because we felt they would attract less attention that way.

  I dug a hole with the Swiss Army Knife and my hands and deeply buried my old jeans and denim shirt. The blade was dull when I was done, so I quickly sharpened it on my pocket sharpener. I like to always have a sharp knife.

  My eyes teared-up at the thought of what Henry and Martha had done. Of course, I was still crying over Susan too.

  Yes, I would kill the bastards. Every damn one of them! I remembered when Congress passed the bill that allowed our government to kill our own citizens with no due process. I also remembered this president saying he would never use that power. What a lie that was!

  I wasn't sure why the government tried to kill me, but I had my suspicions. Although, if they chose to kill me, a pretty small fish, then there must have been others before me. Many, many others—all lost on the back pages of local newspapers and most likely never reported in the mainstream news. Hell, I didn't even vote, I just had a few strong opinions.

  I wasn't sure where to go. Then I remembered Roscoe. That was it. I would go see Roscoe.

  Roscoe was a blogger and a prepper. I enjoyed reading his blog and made it a point to seek him out once when Susan and I were on vacation in the West. Roscoe and I hit it off well from the beginning. That both surprised and pleased me. It surprised me because Roscoe and I had very different backgrounds. Roscoe grew up well off and was retired from the military. He had seen combat in several theaters. What he had seen around the world might have been what turned him against what we both perceived as fiscal irresponsibility and massive encroachment on individual liberty by our government.

  I, on the other hand, grew up poorer than a church mouse and worked hard to earn three college degrees. I was the first person in my family to earn a college degree. For many years I taught at the university before I became disenfranchised by the all too common, over-the-top political correctness and game playing at the expense of scholarship and education. At Susan's urging, I took early retirement, and we bought our small house in the country.

  In any event, Roscoe was the best chance I had for finding some help in hiding from whoever was after me until I could figure out how to mount a counteroffensive. Other than Henry, Roscoe was the only other prepper I knew.

  I kept driving south and then skirted the southern border of Illinois. I don't like Illinois. They have too many draconian rules for me. Illinois also had more surveillance drones in the air over the highways and more FTSP checkpoints than any other state in the Midwest.

  When I could, I turned right and drove north into Missouri. I drove on back roads all the way, navigating with a good paper atlas that Henry kept in the Beast. Henry called the atlas his old fashioned GPS. I kept driving north until I reached northern Missouri and then started working my way generally northwest. By now the sun was rising and I looked out over green pastures and rolling, forested hills. My leg ached, and my shoulder hurt, but I was glad to see the sun come up.

  I thought I should ditch the Beast and find other wheels, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. In Nebraska, I drove into a medium-sized town and stopped at the ubiquitous big box store.

  When I entered the store, I coughed a lot, and kept my head down and my hand over my mouth. I also stuffed some paper in each cheek before I went inside. I didn't know if it would work, but I had at least read about a few ways to prevent digital facial recognition. The feds have almost everyone's face on file from the new driver's license pictures, so it wasn't like they didn't have my picture, but maybe losing the weight would also be a help?

  I bought ten cans of ugly, rust-preventing spray paint. I paid cash and didn't talk to the cashier at all. Despite the fact I paid with cash, the teller didn't seem to think of me a terrorist even though the government said that people who pay with cash might be terrorists. I guess she just didn't feel threatened by a few cans of spray paint. I also bought a cap and sunglasses. I wore the cap and sunglasses out of the store with my head down to keep the feds computer facial recognition algorithms from identifying me from the overhead store cameras.

  About a hundred miles away, under some dense trees, I spray painted the Beast and buried the cans. Now the Beast didn't look like a dented and scratched old green truck, it looked like a patchy brown and green scratched and dented old truck. I kept the cap and sunglasses on while I was dr
iving in case there were cameras along some of the back roads.

  Nowadays, for the feds to search for someone was as easy as setting up a computer algorithm to process the incoming data stream at the giant central federal spy center; the center that our government built using a few billion of our tax dollars to spy on us, the citizens who provided all the money from their hard work, yet were not even told about it. The center wasn't officially acknowledged to exist, but the information had leaked, nonetheless.

  It was in the wee hours of the morning when I got close to Roscoe’s place a few miles out of Ten Sleep, Wyoming. I parked about a mile away and limped toward his house on foot, carrying the bug-out bag and the rifle, with the Browning holstered inside my pants under the tee shirt. I was still wired from everything that had happened, but I was wearing down fast.

  Roscoe's house was dark. No lights that I could see. I was careful as I crept close. I could just make out the house by starlight and—it was destroyed, completely destroyed, just like ours. I hoped Roscoe made it out, but I doubted it. I knew he did not have a basement.

  I had read where the feds wanted 50,000 drones flying the American skies. I was starting to believe they already had more than that—perhaps many, many more. Even if they didn't, it was undoubtedly easy enough to move a hundred or so of the smaller drones across the country by plane as needed. The drone operators didn't even need to move with them. As I understood it, the drones could be remotely operated anywhere in the world if they were equipped to operate using satellite communications.

  There was nothing I could do here, so I left. So far, I only had to fill the truck up with gasoline once. I chose an outlying station and paid cash for the 108 gallon fill up—over $500, plus another hundred to keep the clerk quiet about the cash transaction.