The revolutionaries laugh. In their eyes no one is innocent anymore. The tall clown lights a cigarette.
“Which side are you on?”
“Which side?” says Felix.
“We have no side,” says the Prophet, “in your war.”
The tall clown puts his cigarette between his lips, lifts his rifle.
“Wrong answer.”
Over by the motor pool, gunshots ring out. The seditionists have started executing prisoners. War whoops can be heard, along with the ringing bicycle bells of the BMX Avengers. What unites this diaspora of grievance warriors? They are primarily white, but not homogeneous. They have come from near and far, running the gambit from teenagers to the elderly. Seventy percent are male, thirty percent female. Are they poor, downtrodden? Some, but among the cosplay soldiers are doctors and teachers, lawyers and police officers, men with 401（k）s and investment portfolios, soccer moms and pharmacists. They are anti-government or pro-authoritarian, or both. Some have high school diplomas. Others advanced degrees.
They carry flags—the green flag of Kekistan and the VDARE, thin blue line flags and the long-defunct flag of South Vietnam, the Gadsden flag and the flag of the South Carolina Militia, the AF Flag and the Dues Vult—or God’s Will Flag—and everywhere you look is Q.
RELEASE THE KRAKEN, reads one banner, but whether they are the Kraken, or the Kraken is still coming, is hard to parse.
Those that aren’t fundamentalist Christians are pagans, a chaotic mix of puritans and hedonists. It is a strange alliance of what once would have been considered fringe thinkers from all walks of life. But they share one essential ideal. All believe that something has been stolen from them, that they are outcasts from the respected majority. All believe that they have suffered a lifetime of hatred at the hands of a powerful elite. They are victims of a vast conspiracy.
More than anything they believe they are acting in self-defense, that if they don’t strike now they will be wiped from the face of the Earth tomorrow by military forces of the global pogrom.
Stand your ground.
It is the castle doctrine writ large, the conceit, recognized in twenty-five states and growing, that Americans have a legal right to use deadly force if they feel threatened. Those who view themselves as imminent victims can strike first without legal consequence. And so today blood has been shed, blood that is still warm—unarmed men and women beaten to death in their beds, zip-tied and shot before they can free themselves and finish what these revolutionaries believe others have started.
If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
Don’t let your eyes fool you, in other words. The civil warriors who took this base are not the aggressor here. They are besieged patriots, defending their country against tyranny.
Can’t you see?
Nothing is what it seems.
The tall clown raises his Luger.
“Wait,” says Felix. “We’re sovereign citizens. Born without documents to right-minded people. Free men.”
“Anti-government?”
“Why do you think we’re in cuffs?”
The tall clown swings his rifle over to the Prophet.
“What about you?”
The Prophet squints into the last rays of the sunset, the sky scorched and bloody.
“Are you familiar,” he says, “with the painting Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya? You’ve seen it probably. If not in real life, then in a dream. In the painting Saturn, the father, is a giant. His eyes are wild as he holds his boy’s limp, naked body aloft. There’s blood on his mouth, the child’s torso at his lips. He’s already eaten his son’s head and his right arm. What he holds in his hand now is a corpse.”
Felix puts his hand on the Prophet’s arm—Jesus, stop talking—but the Prophet continues.
“We’re the next children in line, waiting to be devoured.”
The tall clown looks at Felix. “So he’s the crazy one?”
Felix can barely feel his hands anymore, the cuffs are biting so deep. “Can you get these cuffs off, brother?” he says. “They’re killing me.”
The tall clown studies him, then nods to the heavyset clown, who goes over to the dead agents, searching their pockets. When he finds the key, he holds it up, as if saying, Where’s my prize? Then he comes over and sets Felix and the Prophet loose. Felix rubs his bruised wrists, shakes his hands, trying to get the feeling back.
“What’s your name, kid?” says the tall clown.
Felix thinks about that. “Samson,” he says, “Samson DeWitt.”