Battered And Trounced... barely able to Stand

This is a new short story... rough.


The children were sitting on the floors, wooden and cold, waiting....Their odd upbringing had finally come to fruition.

They were all raised by what they called The Hundred.  A group of leaders in an underground army.  The embodiment of a plan set up seventy-nine years before,  by a group of rich philanthropist/mystics, high Masons and Mormons, who believed that there would be a time when the people would need to revolt, and they wanted to use the event to institute their dream of world wide peace.   Their families became the people in place to take command and institute the much feared One World Government... which was benign, really, or at least the version they were told.

He is a teenager and there were times he wondered if he was is in a Cult.  He doesn't really think that so much anymore, since most of what they had been expecting to happen in the world, sooner or later, had come true. There was every reason for them to exist now.   No one ever told them exactly what they were going to do.  They seemed to be four friends who went to school together, whose single fathers took them camping.   He lived on and off between his parents.  His mother was in the room going over maps, and the evidence of their betrayal, the double agents discovered on their steering committee itself.  FBI.

 No one outside was told they trained in survival tactics, weaponry, how to live through nuclear wars....  They were third generation in an organization that had no name, to keep people from referring to them at all.  They were raised to be a modern order of warrior monks of sorts... or were supposed to be.  Some of them had a hard time believing there was any  mission at all now...  They could hear the adults arguing and the word Fed's being thrown around.

.  Evidence surfaced that their order had been hijacked, at the top, by the FBI, thirty years before.   Their mother had told them three days before, then driven them to meeting.  The old rumor that the reason they did nothing was because that was just what they were supposed to do, nothing... almost seemed to come true.  His mother did not think so.  Told them, "Those old dudes who crafted this army probably used the FBI.  They are falling apart.  That is why they want to use us.  We're not joining a lost cause.  We're all too pissed for that."

There was no question about what they would do... they would continue their Missions.  They were trained for the contingency of total security breaches.  The soldiers would splinter into groups, and concentrated on their singular survival, until contacted and ordered to surface...

   They were about twelve hours ahead of the FBI figuring out they had went rebel.   They were not going to aide them in herding the poor into camps... the brutal policing of the refugee camps.

The philosopher who first envisioned creating their army claimed that Christ appeared to him and told him to make this happen, so someone would be prepared in case of a nuclear war, or alien attack, or even great waves of disease.   A lot of present crop of soldiers were practically agnostic.

There was something new in their lives that day.   All of their parents gathered at once.  That was a security breach.  They pretended they could barely stand one another in public, and avoided being seen together for their entire lives, if possible.  They were in a house in Northern Indiana, come down from Chicago, Wisconsin, and Iowa....  ten men and women, and fifty-seven children.  The house is far from any town with police, off the road back in some trees.  People around there thought it was abandoned, so they all had to stay inside and couldn't use lights, or heat.

Only the highest security clearances were allowed to see the papers being passed around in the living room.


After an hour of sitting silently, as ordered, and trying to hear the hushed conversation in the other room, the youngest among the children were impatient. They are armed, with live ammo, and keyed up.
"What are they talking about?"  They are all startled to hear one of their own speak, let alone loud enough to make sure she was heard in the living room. The girl who speaks up is hidden in the shadow of a black hoodie.

 They are listening from the stairs, the dining room.  Look up at her from their silent reveries..  All of them thinking the same thing, This was serious, and everything was going to be Need To Know.  They had protocol in emergencies.  Had to worry about losing soldiers to enemies torturers who would learn anything they wanted to.  They never defied orders at a gathering.  Those were some of the first lessons they learned.

From the dining room., someone yells,  "This concerns all of you.  You are right, Shelia.  All of you children..
You need to hear this. You will be briefed more at safer locations.  For now, you need to know that we have discovered that our organization has either been hijacked... or it never was what we have been told.  The FBI has been... behind the last thirty years. When we found out the network was compromised, we decided it was better for everyone to strike out on their own.  You are all prepared to stay off the radar.  Have the training and equipment to survive... and you'll continue our mission.  You have all been reading the news, and know the time has come.  The nukes can't be far behind the missiles Russia and the States are lobbying back and forth.  Alaska gone.  They tried to hijack the mission... the FBI...  so from here on out, you are on your own.   From this day forward, we are at war.  No one is better prepared to survive.   That is all you can know for now.  Your group leaders will tell you the rest.  Our location will be discovered in hours... so, pack up.  Now."


His mother and sister were old enough to be in on all the discussions.  At seventeen he was still three years out from being able to access the security clearance.    He had a lot of questions for them.  They gathered their gear, weapons, said goodbye.   They were not supposed to discuss anything to do with the mission after the meeting.   Cars were leaving in waves of four, every twenty minutes, off toward the four point of the compass.

The Collapse had come.  The original vision of the men who put together their order was in evidence all around them.  The FBI may have been part of their plan for all they knew... but they were not going to work for the government, not then...  FEMA camps had been activated in the Central Western States, after the Sand Andres Fault Line split off half the state, dropping it into the ever-rising ocean, flooding cities all up and down the Western seaboard, pushing the waters inward and swamping San Francisco, LA, Portland....  Martial Law was in place everywhere else in the states.  Law Enforcement, instead of being the Ruthlessly Efficient Machine that the Right Wing Paranoia crowd expected, turned out to be overwhelmed, out-gunned, and more interested in saving their own families than standing up to crime waves they cannot stop, as looting broke out  everywhere.... desperate people were trying to assure their survival by hoarding anything they could, including toilet paper... starting riots....

"Where are we going?"
"We are supposed to get away from here before we talk about that too much... so no one else... knows."
"How far?"
"A thousand miles, at least."
"Where is my Dad?"
"Time for you to hear something."  She turns from the front seat and looks back at him.  "The man you think of as your father... is not.  Hank is your father.  They did that in case... your parent was forced to eliminate you, for security purposes.  No more secrets, Jake.  You don't have to wait any longer... all that pomp and shit is gone... good riddance." She had always bitched to them about the rituals... they were never sure if she was serious, and she never let on.  Now they knew. 'Let them know,' she thinks.

"If we all leave from the same point, Mom, and go one thousand miles, won't we all end up at the same place in the end?"

"I am going to flip a coin and go city to city, erratically, for a thousand miles.  I have a place in mind where we are going to end up.  They were put together years ago, each of us a safe house that no one else knows about.  We have a bomb shelter, communications... ten years of provisions.  Some of us, like me, inherited mine.  This has been in the family for three generations"

They went to their shelters and lived ten years... as ordered.

When they came back up they found the other humans had mysteriously disappeared....  leaving behind literally everything else...  after months of research, it was determined from newspapers and government files that other humans had been culled by an advanced race that considered them a food source.  Later scholars would come across further evidence proving that their organization itself had been started by the aliens, as way to reseed their crop of humans....

This is a true story.  Happened to a neighbor of mine. He didn't tell me this about him, but I knew... yea, I knew....