CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Tim Vanderhart stopped watching television the previous morning. Appropriate signs he’d waited his entire life to receive had manifested. Now, he would fulfill that destiny.
Seeing each of the two stories looping on every channel sealed his conviction (the other six views helped diminish his shock). First, some crackpot from England murdered his family to trap their souls in a machine. A horrid, atrocious act. Humanity at its worst; but Alex Cutler—the man responsible for it all—assisting in another blasphemous suicide rocked Tim.
He reacted by loading his .45 semiautomatic, and chambering a round before he could sit and watch any more.
Hearing that Glen Daniels—a boy the same age as Tim—had screamed about immortality in a false device scared the bejesus out of him.
Reverend Carmichael’s internet sermon nailed it dead on. Those events marked Satan’s push to take over the world in the manner T. S. Elliot predicted: not with a bang, but with a whimper. A quiet marching of marked souls to awaiting chairs.
Tim joined the Northern Michigan Christian Defense at birth. Though their slogan, pamphlets, and mission statements lacked the identification, he prided himself on being part of a militia. A militia of pure genetics fighting for the rights of noble, Christian people.
Although he hadn’t seen the coverage—was done with the trappings of civilization—everyone talked about the head of Atlanta’s Atrium, who killed herself that morning.
For those with open eyes, clearly, the Devil lived among them.
Today, all of Tim’s fantasies animated. At nineteen years old, he knew, despite weighing a hundred and ten pounds, he was the perfect age to soldier, and he trained hard to be the best. The NMCD’s property covered ninety-three acres, located twenty miles east, and a tad south of Traverse City, in the state shaped like a mitten.
He’d been practicing every form of warfare conceivable since he could carry a rifle down a wooded trail. Hell, before that he unsuccessfully stalked rabbits and chipmunks with a rubber knife he’d gotten one Christmas.
The difference between him and the dozens of other men that had recently arrived to the clubhouse: he knew this day had been coming for a long time; and that he’d play a major role in their future.
Every time he squinted down a rifle sight, shimmied up a rope, cut around the anus of a deer, boiled and drank his urine, or built an improvised explosive device, he employed ultimate reverence. For he knew someday it would all come into play for him. He simply hadn’t dreamed up such a magnificent scale of importance.
He sat in a fold-out chair, alone, inside the clubhouse garage, a gray wooden barn that lost all remnants of its red paint decades ago.
It normally stored a tractor and miscellaneous obstacle course equipment. The now useless stuff had been emptied, left in the elements, the remaining space lined with two rows of eight chairs.
Twenty minutes ago, those chairs held charter heads from nearby militias and motorcycle clubs, along with their second in commands. Morally sound, hardcore, God-fearing men. Tim felt honored to be the youngest among them.
His father had been a founding brother of the NMCD. Regrettably, having battled alcohol and prescription pills his entire life, he died of cirrhosis before Tim’s eleventh birthday. Tim accepted that had been God’s way of showing him the detriments of polluting your temple, and he intended to heed the warning.
Alan Cox, head of the NMCD, acted as a second father to Tim. His speech today hoped to unite all of the nearby forces into one.
The summoned heads had pledged allegiance to Alan Cox. Others would follow. In a short time, the many factions would relinquish their names for one much grander: The Lord’s Thorn.
The Lord’s Thorn would be fully dedicated, life and limb, to the eradication of the Lobby and the downfall of the Broumgard Group.
Tim wasn’t sure who the man in the gray suit had been—short, stocky, a receding hairline, a fierce look of intelligence; more hawk than man—but he provided the launching pad to the recent events.
Most of the compound slept past five in the morning; Tim always woke at the slightest provocation. Even with rotors modified to suppress sound, the noise of a helicopter setting down in a nearby field woke him in time to see the Man in Gray enter Alan’s house.
Tim had crept along the edge of the window and overheard enough to know the NMCD was stepping into the big leagues. The two men of authority spoke until six thirty. When his guests departed, Alan sought Tim out, shared the plan of unification. They’d been in high gear ever since.
Alan told him things he already knew. The Man in Gray worked for the government and brought a deep commitment to stopping the Lobby. He also shared classified documents to help convince Alan they gathered to wage a war for the immortal souls of the world. He promised Alan a stake in that fight by backing him with money, personnel, and weapons.
The vacant barn offered Tim the privacy to take in all he had heard, but soon he’d raise out of his chair and commence to walking his path.
The Man in Gray, who called himself Smith, had given Alan a list with names of nearby civilians planning to join the cause. A computer program identified individuals willing to act in the defense of everything sacred on God’s Earth.
Tim remained awed by the number of like-minded individuals near him.
Waves of unknown men and women approached. Tim would organize arrivals; establish their temporary shelter before the big relocation; locate natural leaders to oversee food rations, marksman training, suppression fire techniques; important logistical imperatives for soldiers.
Their immediate mission: to forcefully unseat the famous man responsible for this evil.
Smacking his hands on his thighs, Tim stood. He had worked to do.