Black
The root of my anxiety was memory — the past, surfacing without warning. There was no rational basis for it at all.
I'd drifted off into those thoughts when Cody's voice pulled me back to the present.
"Boss! Boss!"
"Ah. Yeah."
"There are a few unusual developments online I thought you should know about."
"Yeah. Go ahead."
"First, the whole of Nevada has been buzzing since the battle at Fallon. In some ways, the atmosphere feels a little overheated."
Cody turned his laptop toward me. The screen showed the Polaris Union subreddit and several Nevada regional community boards.
A handful of posts with explosive view counts jumped out at once.
"These are all about you, Boss. Most of them are grounded in fact with a little exaggeration, but some of them paint you as a superhero. A being with transcendent power."
"What? A superhero?"
Dave jumped in.
"Haha, our Chan is a hero, though. You bet he is. Haha."
"I know, Dave, but some of these posts are a bit much. The way they're written, you'd think you were Batman or Spider-Man. And it gets worse."
"Worse?"
"It's a little embarrassing to say out loud. The public marriage proposals are the cute ones. There are posts that take the fact that you're from a country in the East, that you came down from the North, the polar bear, the North Star — they weave all those symbols together and package you as a prophet. A seer."
A hollow laugh escaped me. Just another face of an unstable world, I figured.
"Cody, don't worry about that stuff. Even back alleys have rumors, and rumors get exaggerated. That's all it is."
"Yes, sir. Still, I think you should look at this one. This post has basically become a shrine."
Cody clicked the post sitting at the very top.
I stared at the Reddit post Cody had shown me, then spoke.
"He's Union family. Of course you'd get a reaction like that. They're family."
Beside me, Mike had been quietly studying the screen. He shook his head.
"That's not it, Chan. It's not just because they're family."
Mike looked at me with those deep eyes of his and went on.
"When the world fell apart, everyone was too busy surviving on their own. The irony is, the ones who'd been gathering people, holding communities together, and showing off their strength all that time were the raiders. Force and fear. That was their glue."
There was a bitterness in his voice.
"And then a group gathered by goodwill won an overwhelming victory against a raider horde."
"..."
"And through that victory, they put real, tangible benefits in their people's hands. Folks getting excited about that — feeling awe — isn't strange at all. It might be the first hope they've ever seen."
Cody nodded at Mike's words and pointed at the laptop screen.
"That's right, Boss. Unless you're talking raiders or some religious group with a bizarre creed, it's hard to find anyone who's gathered strength the way we have. And... the situation down south is getting as complicated as the north."
"The south? Something else going on?"
Cody pulled up a map and pointed to southern California and the Arizona stretch.
"If the north has the 3rd Brigade and the Iron Kingdom, the south has armed organizations of a completely different flavor, sprouting up like weeds."
Every eye in the trailer locked on him. Cody tapped the screen and kept going.
"A few groups have cropped up claiming to carry on the lineage of the armed militias that were tied to the old MAGA movement."
"MAGA?"
"Yes. They're recycling names like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and recruiting members, but they don't have a clear purpose or platform yet. If they keep growing like this, they're a time bomb — the kind that could turn into a raiding outfit at any moment."
Silence settled over the trailer for a moment. Mike, arms crossed, asked the next question.
"They've got to have some kind of purpose if they're gathering people like that, don't they?"
"Yes. It's vague, but they do have slogans, of a sort."
Cody glanced back at the laptop.
"The Proud Boys, for example, are running 'Reclaim Our Order.' The Oath Keepers are pushing 'A Nation Under Constitution, Not Tyrants.'"
"What are they, then? Secessionists? Federalists?"
"That's why I said it's ambiguous. The slogans sound like they lean one way or the other. They're neither."
"...?"
"The one thing they have in common is this idea of building a world for so-called real Americans... but there's no clear explanation of what category of people 'real Americans' is supposed to include."
Frank snorted.
"That? That's just a roundabout way of saying anyone they don't like can be the enemy. Especially groups like us. Immigrants. Sounds to me like they're announcing who they're going to raid first."
"Who in this country isn't an immigrant?!"
Dave's voice jumped a register. Beside him, Gunner spoke, cold and flat.
"That's the trick the weak ones use when they've washed out of the pack. Invent a make-believe enemy and pin their own failures on them."
Mike added his piece.
"Same playbook Hitler used when he sold the Jews. Classic loser habit."
Tank had been sitting through the whole conversation without a word. He spat one out now, almost as an afterthought.
"That? Drugs."
"Tank, what's that supposed to mean?"
Dave asked. Tank answered like the whole subject bored him.
"Saw them holding a rally once, running a load down south. They were all bouncing off the walls. Looked like a bunch of junkies."
Frank clicked his tongue.
"Huh. The Road Warriors came at us doped to the gills, and now we've got guys peddling a different kind of high."
Tank shook his head like the memory still made his skin crawl.
"There were flat-earthers in that crowd. People screaming that the climate crisis was a hoax. The whole circus."
Conspiracy theories dressed up as ideology, all of it mixed with raw grievance — a carnival of chaos. I'd seen it on the news often enough before the Great Winter. Now that order had collapsed, those kinds of crowds were starting to gather real power.
Dave let out a long breath.
"Whew. North and south, it's kill or be killed out there."
Raiding starts as survival. But as a group grows, some belief gets used as a tool of control, and that belief becomes the justification for violence. Madness, wearing the name of justice.
I turned to Cody.
"So where's the main stage for these groups, as far as you can tell?"
"Putting the Reddit posts together, both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys seem to be concentrating in Mohave County, Arizona."
Gunner put a finger on the map.
"Right under Las Vegas."
"That neighborhood was already a mess, and now the Arizona state government has split into a Federalist Faction and a Southern Faction and they're in a civil war. Those guys must think they've hit the jackpot."
Frank clicked his tongue at Mike's words.
"They'll treat the refugees pouring out of Las Vegas like a honey pot."
While the talk went around, Cody still hadn't taken his eyes off the laptop. He spoke up again.
"Ah — and there's a very unusual organization that's cropped up inside Nevada as well."
Every head turned. Cody pointed to a thread and explained.
"Nye County, Nevada. An armed group calling themselves Bundy's Rangers. Looks like the core of it is local cattle ranchers."
At the name, Mike's brow furrowed. He sat with it for a moment, as if fishing an old memory out of deep water, then spoke.
"Bundy... huh. That stubborn old bastard's name, turning up here again."
He looked around at us and sketched, in a few strokes, an incident that had shaken the country decades ago.
"There was a rancher named Cliven Bundy. Grazed cattle on federally owned public land for decades and never paid a cent in grazing fees."
"..."
"Eventually the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize his herd, and the old man picked up a rifle and stood his ground. Types like the Oath Keepers poured in from all over the country, armed, and faced off with federal agents. The whole country was in an uproar."
The North American continent was fracturing into pieces. It was no longer Federal versus South. People were forming factions for reasons all their own.
If answering the question Whose side are you on? had been the first fight, now it felt like the land itself was going mad — a place where you never knew who would pull the trigger first.
Frank crossed his arms and picked up where Dave had left off.
"Point is, we're not the only ones who've been growing in this mess. Those guys are scrambling to survive in their own way."
"And it won't be a phenomenon limited to Nevada and the neighboring states."
Mike's deep, low voice filled the trailer.
"Now that the fence called the United States has come down, fifty states, hundreds of races and religions, and more creeds than you can count have all armed themselves and started fighting for their own survival. The justifications will differ. The essence won't."
Bill chimed in, looking out at the ashen sky beyond the window.
"It's July, and it still drops to twenty below at night. Before the next winter hits — while the trucks can still move — we need to stockpile or relocate. Something."
A lot had happened since we'd left Yellowknife in Canada and made it to Carson City.
Watching the world slide further into chaos was still hard to get used to, but it was a threat you could predict. It didn't frighten me.
My unease, though, was growing in a different direction.
Danger always arrived suddenly, from directions and in forms you didn't expect. I looked around at everyone and spoke.
"I'd like to run Code Black preparations for the entire Union membership."
Frank and Bill, startled, asked almost at the same time.
"Everyone? Code Black?"
"It's a contingency either way. If that situation actually hits, we won't be able to miss it. I'd rather we prepare in advance than mill around when it happens."
Everyone nodded.
Code Red, as it had been at Jake's farm, meant the enemy had entered the compound. Black meant the extreme case — abandoning the base entirely.