Part IV: The Sounds of Silence
Armageddon + 14 Days
The Stars at Night [2]:
On The Pioneer: Continue the Tradition leaflet passed out to college students post-hunger times.
The small mobs of disaffected youth that broke windows and wrote graffiti had now become orderly lines stretching from the “Emergency Service Volunteer Centers.” The promise of something to do, food, and the surprisingly prevalent hope to, as one Pioneer put it, “rebuild America” caused many of the students at Texas A&M and people of all kinds from the area surrounding Bryan to volunteer for the military, on local agriculture projects, or the Pioneer groups.
The Pioneer groups were an unusual way of tackling the problems sure to follow a nuclear exchange. Sending vitally needed young people out into what was essentially a large black zone, seemed a large waste of manpower and resources. But, the provisional government out of College Station was left with few choices and none of them were better. The rag-tag units of the Texas National Guard supplemented by the Corps of Cadets and new military recruits were not in fighting condition, that would require a few months, and were too small in number to reasonably pacify the region of Texas they wished to control. With few natural barriers, their loosely defined border leaked like a sieve and required almost inhuman work to control.
Refugees from all across the state poured in through these gaps and found themselves squatting in one of the many squalid and unsanitary refugee camps. Fears of disease soon spread and many “squatter camps” were attacked and razed by people on both sides of the loosely defined border in the hopes of preventing the outbreak of cholera, dysentery, and other newly deadly diseases. Some refugees by the end of the second week were coming from the destroyed Midland-Odessa area where food and water were quickly becoming scarce. Permitting or “volunteering” refugees into the Pioneer program quickly provided an excellent solution to the refugee crisis. They too could now go and reconstruct as much of their shattered country as they possibly could.
Pioneer groups, loosely defined, were bands of volunteers spread out among many small rural communities in the Brazos valley, in the hopes of alleviating some of their desperate problems. Most of these farms and ranches relied on gas powered vehicles to till their fields and round their livestock. The average size of an American farm pre-Armageddon was a little over 400 acres. With gas running out, thousands of acres of lightly irradiated soil would be left untilled and barren for the next years. Pioneers were expected to provide a jump start to post-Armageddon agriculture. Their collective man power would till the fields and plant the crops so desperately needed to feed the population. Their lives would be harsh, and the work was backbreaking and desperate, however Pioneers were once again settling the American west.
*The Cadet, now a Lieutenant, was holding the rear of column. It had taken the Ranger, now a Captain, and the Lieutenant nearly a week to gather the people needed for their scouting party, and they had made slow progress heading north. Most of the people in their scouting party had little experience riding horses, and their late start was compounded by the need to spend a night in every small town they passed through. The day long layovers were of two purposes, to gauge the acceptance the locals would have for the newfangled Pioneer groups. In most cases their acceptance was at most reluctant, however the promise of a tractor-trailer full of foodstuffs at regular intervals persuaded most if not all people to at least tolerate the Pioneer bands.
There were other towns from which they were nearly run out. Most people saw any form of government they couldn’t touch illegitimate, and were dead set against extra mouths to feed. These towns would be cracked later by “integration” units of the military or the raw necessity of starvation.
The band of scouts was now about to enter the last town before they spied Waco. The little town of Elk is the last stop on their list, after that they would be getting far too close to Waco, the radiation was already far too high. They were quite fortunate that there were enough radiation suits for them to procure on per member of the team.
The Lieutenant, followed the rest of the column into the small main street. A small cluster of people armed with assault rifles sat poised behind overturned cars and wood piles blocking their entrance into the town. Hanging limply off the town’s city hall was a strange flag. A blue triangle cut the flag into two sections, one white, and the other blue. A white Star of David sat in the top left corner. The flag itself puzzled the Lieutenant more than the armed roadblock. Armed roadblocks were common, any flag besides the American or Texan one was not.
The sun baked the soldiers in their radiation suits. The rubber gloves provided little grip, and the eye pieces combined with the cheek filters made it practically impossible to aim. In the middle of the road, on a horse, and unable to fire back, the scouting party were sitting ducks.
Out of nowhere the Captain leapt off of his horse and pulled his gas mask off. Following his lead most of the other troops clamored off of their horses and pulled their masks off. The Lieutenant pulled his mask off and practically fell off of his horse. Quickly they preformed the dance of trading all the horses to one person, the Private, and slowly walking toward the barricade.
“United States Army!” the Captain shouted, the Lieutenant quickly brought himself along side.
“Yeah Right Brother!” bellowed the response “There is no United States, only those God saw fit to leave on the Earth! The Most Holy and the Most Damned, Which do you fit into?”
At least that explains the weird flag, the Lieutenant thought, some kind of religious nut had taken over the town. The noon day sun beat down on his neck and neither side was moving. He and the Captain were standing right in the middle of a firefight with nowhere to run.
