Ok, folks... as promised, here's the next chapter. It isn't quite as long as I thought it was going to be, but long enough. I spent a fair amount of time editing, adding a bit here, taking out a bit there, which explains why it took so long; I'm introducing some new people, too, so bear with me. As usual, I fully expect to piss off some liberals, but to be honest, I don't care. I hope you enjoy it.
In other parts of the country, rebellion was brewing. In northern California, far from the liberal centers in Los Angeles and the Bay area, people who had long been independent of the democrat machine that had run the state before the war had kept their heads down, quietly living off the land while the southern part of the state took a hammering during the war.
There had, of course, been a fair few cases of radiation sickness; it was inevitable, considering how many nukes the state had taken, and the wide range of wind spread fallout.
Gene Anderson had lived in the north country all of his life. His great great grandfather had moved out to a cabin in the foothills of the mountain country to get away from what he referred to as 'the goddamn commies who are ruinin' this state!' He had blankly refused to turn in the .45 automatic and the select fire M3 carbine he had carried from Omaha beach to the heart of Germany during World War two; telling anyone who would listen that he'd fought to protect his right to do so, and any asshole in Sacremento who said he couldn't keep 'em could damned well kiss his ass.
He'd moved up to the north country, built a cabin that backed up to the opening of an old gold mine, and had financed many of the improvements he'd made through the simple expediency of expanding his home into the mountainside, using the small amounts of gold he found on semi-annual runs to Vegas, where he would buy more guns, ammunition, long term storage foods, solar panels, and anything else that struck his fancy, smuggling the goods back to his hidden cabin in the woods by the pick-up load.
Gene still lived in the small community that had grown around his great granddad's place, most of which had been former soldiers like his ancestor. All of them had followed his ancestor's example, honeycombing the mountain with tunnels to the point that it was hard to tell where one home ended and the next began. Outside there were a dozen or more small, cleared fields, growing everything from corn and wheat to tomatoes, potatoes, and hay for the numerous animals they kept.
Gene's son Donny made his living through farming, hunting, and prospecting, though not in the older meaning of the word. Every day he was out with his metal detector, looking for buried caches of people long dead; people who had buried stashes of weapons, ammunition, and other survival supplies.
His optimism wasn't entirely unfounded; he carried a Thompson sub machine gun, which had come from the first such stash he had found, while actually looking for gold. He had since found several others, containing everything from semi-automatic 9mm pistols to fine shotguns to several crates of fully automatic M16s. He'd long since lost count of the number of hidden stashes of ammunition he'd found.... he still had at least twenty different calibers that he didn't even have guns for... yet.
His father had joked, once, that he could easily open a sporting goods store. A fair number of his neighbors, in fact, traded with him for some of the ancient ammo, among other things.
He even found a little gold, on occasion.
Several of their neighbors had been talking about forming their own militia; they had heard, over the past year, of a militia group to the east that was driving the Chinese to distraction, and many of them wanted to form their own group to help in the fight to drive the Chinese from their country. Most had little experience with military training, it was true, but they were disgusted with what they'd seen in the more low-lying areas of the state to the south of them... and most were, at the least, experienced hunters. Chinese soldiers were well known, to the south, for keeping much of the civilian population in virtual slavery.
A few of them got together, every week or so, for barbecue, homebrewed beer, and home made wine, and more and more, the talk amongst them centered on what to do about the Chinese.
It was becoming obvious to them that the time for action was fast approaching, as the Chinese were forcing their way further into the mountains, looking for 'troublemakers'. Rumors were flying, of course, but they knew there was a grain of truth behind them. Anyone caught with a firearm was immediately arrested... Hell, they'd known that. It had been California public policy for years before the great war.
Patrick Murray, a long time resident, knew it firsthand; his great grand father had been threatened with arrest for refusing to turn in a semi-automatic Bushmaster AR 15.... while serving in the US Marines, at a military base in the Bay area. His CO told the Sheriff's deputies that if they didn't get the hell off his base, he'd arrest them and put them in front of a military tribunal on the charge of Treason against the US Constitution.
Treason, he had reminded them, was a capitol crime, punishable by hanging.
Donny and many of his neighbors were hunters already, and knew a thing or two about camoflage, blending in with the landscape while they stalked deer and other animals in the foothills area. Now they dug out many of the old books that had been hidden away by their ancestors; books on outdoorsman skills, novels about various fighters and scouts from previous wars, military surplus textbooks for soldier training, ranger handbooks, and training guides for such exotic groups as the British SAS, the Green Berets, and the Russian Spetznaz, combing through them for any little nuggets of information they could find.
Meanwhile, far to the east, in rural Texas, another such group was forming, along quite similar lines. Texas had, before the war, been a 'machine gun friendly' state. A fair number of residents had been collectors of automatic weapons, and many of those had scoffed when the feds had informed them that such weapons were to be turned in for destruction, in the days leading up to the Great war, basically giving the liberal democrats the finger.
One conservative candidate for the state legislature had, in fact, taken it a step further. During a debate with his liberal democrat opponent, who had been a long time advocate of gun control and confiscation; prior to a mid-term election, the flamboyant republican had produced a large rubber dildo and had invited his openly lesbian counterpart to go fuck herself.
She was not amused.... but the voters were. The conservative candidate won by a large margin.
The video of this incident, while heavily censored by the TV stations, had gone out on the internet in it's raw form. Within two hours, it had been viewed and shared well over a million times. It had been titled 'A good answer for the gun grabbers.'
Mike O'Connell, whose great-great-grandfather had been a World War Two veteran, was one of the founding members of this particular group. He was also the current owner of his ancestor's collection, much of which he'd brought back when he came home from his march across Europe.
Among his collection were several Thompson sub machine guns, four Browning Automatic Rifles, an M2 Browning .50 cal., a Finnish Lahti 20mm anti-tank cannon, which had been obsolete by the time the war started, and a German MG42 belt-fed machine gun, which he'd had a gunsmith re-chamber to take .308 rounds. It hadn't been cheap, but the trade off was that ammunition was cheaper and far more plentiful for it. He'd also brought back a fair number of bolt action rifles, from Germany, England, and the US.
Mike's grandfather had told him, once, that when his father had come home from the war, the three big crates he'd brought with him had taken up almost the entire bed of his uncle's old farm truck... and a good portion of the weapons he'd brought back had been won from other soldiers on the ship home, playing poker.
Most of these were still hidden, in the cellar of one of the barns at the ancestral farm in west Texas, carefully oiled and put away for the day they might be needed... Mike's grandfather, Frank, had had fond memories of firing the many machine guns in this collection... and adding to it.
There had been a thriving black market for such weapons in Texas for decades, before the war, and great grandpa had taken full advantage of it, reasoning that he was getting the full automatic M16s and Uzis and Mac 10s off the streets and away from the hands of the gang bangers and the drug cartels. He had also spent much of the money he'd made working in the oilfields on reloading equipment, supplies, and case upon case of ammunition, stashing it all in the cellars beneath the several old barns on the property. The dry Texas climate was perfect for long term storage of such things.
Mike himself was trained in gunsmithing by his own father from an early age, and had in fact grown up scavenging the nearby towns for lead, much of it in the form of old wheel weights taken from the tires of old, abandoned cars and several local junkyards. This he melted down to cast bullets from.
