“Oh.” Britt took a long sip of wine and hummed her lips. “That’s too bad. It really wasn’t his fault. One of your campaign people let in those Mayday freaks.”
Mia tilted her head. “Did your friend say that?”
He had. He’d told Britt that he’d been standing near the back entrance when the veterans dressed as Home Guard rolled up through the kitchen. Their credentials checked out but his supervisor had seemed perturbed by something. They’d begun a deeper verification when a campaign staffer intervened, saying he’d vouch for the Home Guard.
Mia was going to let it go—twisted gossip, almost certainly, from someone with a grudge—but the old army officer in her wanted confirmation. She asked Britt to clarify with her friend.
“I’ll text him.” He responded within the minute. “Older dude in a tuxedo, he says. Had a bunch of military medals on his lapel. Didn’t get his name. But he acted important? I don’t know.”
And the supervisor? One of the people killed in the gunfire. “It’s a sad thing. He had kids.”
There’d been plenty of important older men in tuxedos with military medals in the ballroom that evening, Mia remembered. And this information, if she could call it that, was at best roundabout. Still, though. Something felt off. It seemed too weird to dismiss outright. Her leg that wasn’t there began to ache with phantom pain.
The waitress came with their meals. Mia tried to hold off a yawn. It’d been a long day; coming out tonight was a mistake, she thought. Four bites in to her sliced beef and broccoli her phone started buzzing from her purse. “Jesus, Linda,” she said out loud. She explained for Britt. “My stepmom. She won’t leave it alone. I don’t want to talk about being pregnant with her. I wish she’d just get that.”
Whatever Britt responded with, Mia didn’t hear it. Her eyes had taken her focus to the television screen above the bar.
The chyron was loud, clear, decisive. No room for misinterpretation.
“Governor Mills Harrah Succumbs in Surgery,” the chyron read. “American Service Presidential Candidate Dead at 57.”
FREEDOMBOOK
Your state-approved source for information and factual content
The Sheepdogs are a constitutional militia made up of former military and retired police officers, firefighters, and first responders. Founded in the aftermath of the Palm Sunday attacks to serve as volunteer civil guard, the Sheepdogs organized from various ultra ideological movements.[1] The organization encourages its members to take direction from state security authorities, unless in conflict with U.S. constitutional law. Occasional armed disputes have arisen due to the inexactness of that guidance, such as the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the Redoubt Siege, and the Valdosta marches.[2]
The Sheepdogs claim a national membership of 250,000, though that number has been disputed by researchers at the McNamara Institute.[3] Detractors of the Sheepdogs have alleged it is an organization that “borders on [being a] paramilitary, incapable or unwilling to know the line between keeping order and political violence.”[4]
Various media reports have drawn a connection between the organization and Western separatism [5] In response, the organization’s national leadership began requiring its members to reaffirm their oath to the U.S. Constitution to maintain affiliation.[citation needed]
CHAPTER 15
DUTY HAD HUMBLED Jean-Jacques many times. His first day in the Legion, he’d been ordered to sweep sunshine off the sidewalks. He’d been kept awake long past the point of sanity on combat patrols, all his weaknesses and failures exposed in the aftermath. His decision making in the Balkans had gotten two junior Rangers shot through their chest plates, only the miracles of modern medicine keeping them alive. Duty took many forms and faces, but it always led to humility.
Today’s looked like canned fruit and a church lady.
“Labels out, please.” The pantry manager of the food bank was steadfast in her politeness while unwavering in her exactness. “The cans in the back, too. They’ll be pushed to the front soon enough.”
Jean-Jacques was on day twenty of volunteering for Mayday. Each morning he was assigned to a different community program across the city, from soup kitchens to public libraries. Each evening he returned home and awaited instruction for the next morning. He didn’t get to ask questions in Mayday and he hadn’t gotten one whiff of its mysterious underground leader. Mayday was structured on tiers, not unlike ranks in the military. He was Tier 1, and had an orange-stickered lanyard to prove it.
“Good, Mr. Saint-Preux. Only thirty more racks of diced pears. Then we’ll get to the grains.”
The pantry manager ran the Ash Valley Food Bank for the underserved, and she ran it with disturbing attention to detail. She was seventy or so, ninety pounds dripping wet, a smiling pixie in a gardening hat with the heart of a tyrant. Jean-Jacques’s old slipped disc in his back had been aching all afternoon from stocking the pantry but he wouldn’t say a thing. The food bank mostly served wog refugees from the Mediterranean. That seemed worthwhile. And the pantry manager held sway in Mayday. He needed her support for Tier 2 and a green-stickered lanyard, which might, perhaps, bring him closer to Jonah Gray.
For the Legion, he thought. For a platoon command. Then he picked up three more racks of diced pears and carried them to the pantry.
The food bank lay across gun-metal-gray concrete that absorbed window light rather than reflecting it. Ten rows across, ten rows deep, the shelves were all marked with laminated signs naming their goods. A dull hum of industrial refrigerators and an ice machine in an adjacent room gave the space its only sound. Jean-Jacques had asked earlier about a radio for music and been told there was no time for an indulgence like that.
The pantry manager watched as he stocked from a stepladder. She’d proven to be anything but a talker but Jean-Jacques decided to try. He couldn’t work his way up Mayday the diligent way. He needed access to its leadership ASAP.
“Ma’am. Gotta say. Your pantry. As clean and organized as anything I’ve seen. Even in the army.”
The right play. “Navy daughter,” the pantry manager said. “And marine mom.” She bowed her head. A thin silver cross hung from her neck.
Her father had been a retired navy petty officer, supply, a veteran of the Pacific campaign in World War II; her mother, a devout farm girl for whom “cleanliness as godliness” was no mere phrase. She herself protested Vietnam as a young woman, something she still felt great shame for. She’d earned clemency through a peacemonger camp, she said, but it’d been the lectures by Vietnamese refugees at the camp that remained with her all these years later.
“They taught me that force can have purpose. That it can protect the weak,” she said. “As the Bible teaches, too.”
Her son had joined the marines on his eighteenth birthday. Because of his grandfather. Because of his mother, too.
“He still in or did he get out?” Jean-Jacques asked. Something like a shadow bladed across the woman’s face, and as quickly as it went away, Jean-Jacques knew he’d misread her and her commitment to her post. “Oh, ma’am. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Her son had been sent to the Mediterranean three times. Syria. Greece. Cyprus. Upon his discharge, he was assigned to a rehabilitation colony. She couldn’t visit, only write letters and call once a week, but he’d sounded like he was getting better with the mental therapy sessions there. He was released after three years, having met the criteria for a return to the citizenry.