American Insurgent

By Adam Maciejewski

Stanley has a problem: growing up in the age of terrorism in America. After 9/11 his society is fractured and teenagers like Stanley struggle to find where they belong and what they believe in this satirical look at what could have happened after that fateful day. Over-the-top PETA demonstrations and English 101 homework are the least of Stanley's problems in this political thriller.

From a reviewer:

"A thought provoking read that leaves you contemplating where we are as people and as a nation. The recurring themes of facing alienation and finding ones place in the world make the story identifiable, while allowing you to care for the aloof main character."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Maciejewski
• Release date: Dec 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301661084

Adam Maciejewski

Born in Buffalo, New York and educated at SUNY Geneseo in English literature and education, Adam Maciejewski writes political thrillers, literary fiction and even dabbles with magical realism. To him, writing is both an escape and a challenge. There's nothing better than taking a reader's breath away with an unexpected twist or stunning turn of phrase that sparks something in a reader. When not writing or reading, Adam loves spending time fishing with his two boys and making memories with his wife.

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American Insurgent

By Adam Maciejewski

Published by Adam Maciejewski at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Adam Maciejewski

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Summer 2001

September 7, 2001

September 11, 2001

September 12, 2001

September 13, 2001

September 6, 2002

September 11, 2002

September 13th 2003

Sewer Retreat

September 13th, 2003 again

Present

Present But Reliving the Past

Present, Awaiting Death

Present Day, Hope Brings Death

Final Moments

About the Author

Prologue

If you're watching this, there isn't a moment to spare. My barricade won't hold long against Hope. When Homeland Security bags me and I disappear, receding into the national memory banks; absorbed into our collective amnesia, these facts will be struggling lights in the dusk of my life: I was there when the towers of LOST CAUSE were bombed, but I did not try to kill any one. I was there when American Insurgent was born, but I am not him. I disagreed with the extremity of our nation's momentum, but I am not a terrorist. I am a patriot.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have considered my life worthy of chronicling. However, when I’m arrested, I can point to this video stream and say I am not the homicidal wing nut I've been portrayed as. Unlucky. Weak minded, certainly, but not guilty. If I’m lucky, someone watching will contact a law school flunky from the ACLU to work my case pro bono and they might exonerate this innocent bystander who allowed himself to be swept up into one movement or another like a twig in a stream. Regardless of what National News Network reports of themisms from LOST CAUSE, the lines are no clearer than the visions of a drunk at three a.m. groping for any solid object in their brittle crystalline peripheral. Thief/survivor, victim/perpetrator and patriot/insurgent alike. They, we, have allowed the leveling of even the most polar of dichotomies. Therefore who I am is indistinguishable from that loser I was those years ago, watching stories of human rubble fall/jump one hundred ten stories to avoid the anticipated fate of non-existence imagined as worse than pain on the aptly named attaches of 9-11. And there I was, dithering about colleges. Maybe that’s why I found the Insurgent spellbinding at first. He was definitive in a world where you couldn’t find one truth about who was attacking us, but one for each cable news network. There was a bullet shot from a gun straightness about his truths and a lustful gratification in his antics.

Now the question is, when I stop broadcasting my story and tear down my impromptu barricade of this room, who will be there to great me - Hope? The military? I suppose the pertinent part of my story starts in the middle, like any good tragedy.

Summer 2001

The months before the attack, I was visiting colleges trying to figure out how to get out of leaving home for four years. You see, the thought of leaving all the comforts of home for an academically challenging program in whatever degree my parents picked for me just wasn’t appealing. That, and I nearly wet myself just looking at a co-ed, let alone see one walking through a dorm hallway with just towels on. But, of course, since Mommy and Daddy wanted me to get a PhD in work-ology I had to oblige them in visiting at least one campus. Really, it was the threat of taking my PS2's power cord that got me to hustle over to Colombia's campus with dad.

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They’ll never accept me here. I whined, sidestepping another member of the campus tour, bumping into the dorm room's dingy brown doorframe.

Your grades are just fine Stanley. Upper quartile even. Off handedly commented my dad, hoping the tour guide would hear and be impressed. He even winked at the poor girl as she was explaining the best way to get to the dinning hall from here. Seeing as her expression was somewhere between a Romero zombie and vegetable, it dawned on my father that she didn’t give a shit.

Blushing, I mumbled, I meant the students.

Walking through the campus on that August day was like seeing another dimension overlaid on my own. College just wasn’t on any of my plans. Playstation, Mountain Dew and contact rewetting drops to fight eye fatigue – those were my only plans. The dorm rooms reminded me of cable ready tombs for two. Hell, in one room if I stretched my arms out and took a big breath I could span the width of the place. The only feature of the campus tour that felt comforting was the crows. You see, while the whole campus was warming itself in a mild August breeze bringing the smell of summer’s last breaths – brine from the nearby ocean, hot dogs from the welcome tent and sunscreen – the crows were anathema to these. We were compatriots in our opposition. Both of us heavy, sporting black on a sunny day and equipped with annoying voices. My vocal chords crackled with puberty like a TV with out cable does static.

All of this makes the obligatory college visit kumbaya-get-to-know-you-touchy-feely-bullshit-game a lot like conscription. You hug your loved ones who wish you well and then cringingly step foot-in-front-of-foot until you locate an out. I learned this in fact from the very first circle-up event. So this particular game involved making a human knot by awkwardly holding hands with the person across from you with one hand and the person to your right with the other. S-sorry. I dithered; grabbing the girl across from me’s hand with my wet fish clammy hand.

Uh, yea. She said wiping her hands on her skintight thigh length jean shorts.

So t-this is pretty dorky, huh?

As she flipped her coal black hair, Dorky? She rolled her eyes at me and simultaneously batted them at the six foot two varsity letter to her right, I think it's alright. College visits felt like high school with even fewer adults around.

Wait, Stanley!

Hearing my name woke me from my flashback of the morning's drab gray walls and monotonous talking desks with floating heads behind them. You need to walk under my legs and stand behind me. After I got over the idea that Jordyn remembered my name, my eyes followed her inseam down from her low-rise jean waist to her three inch black stiletto heel. It was as if my adolescent hormones put a soft lens over the close up of Jordyn’s blue eyes, turned on a fan to blow her wheat blonde hair at precisely the right speed and faded in the song Pour Some Sugar on Me.

Somewhere, as if coming from above water, So are ya gonna move, or just stare at the girl? What happened to that sensitivity training you boasted about orientation leader Kevin? I crossed the ten feet between Jordyn and I - that gulf, that trench - like a cartoon dog spinning its hind legs kicking up a cloud of dirt then suddenly and unexpectedly gaining traction, lurching forward heading towards opposite sex oblivion. I crashed into her leg. Hard. In fact, it ended that inhuman knot game because she needed to be taken to the health center via stretcher.

Brilliant. They let shovel faced pansies like you here? Said Varsity, now with his hands around the size one hips of strawberry blonde girl who was gasping with laughter pointed at me.

They let hairy knuckleheaded Neanderthals like you in. That’s what I said back. Well, wanted to say back. Instead, all I could do was take note of the sky as the others walked away from me and up the hill towards the dinning hall holding dinner; worn jean blue, complete with faded whiskers of jet convection trails from planes taking off from LaGuardia. As I walked back to where my father’s temporary dorm room was located, it changed to blueberry mixed with steel cobalt. A storm front was colliding with the benign warm front keeping us at a balmy eighty degrees. The wind picked up. Debris from the campus welcome party skittered over my feet: mini-streamers, confetti shaped like metallic black graduation caps, red plastic cups and one ply paper plates covered with ketchup.

As it turns out, walking through the college green would change my life. Ambling along with my ketchup covered shoes I could hear shouts in the distance diffused through a PA system struggling with wattage. There was a small crowd of ten or fifteen aimless coeds staring indifferently at the five women standing on the stoop of the green wearing fur coats and, presumably, little else.

The woman with the microphone chanted, Fur is murder! As her mottled black, white and brown fur flattened in the breeze. I found myself mumbling the chant back in a hypnotized daze. To stand so strongly for your beliefs in the face of apathy – I was in love! "Stop the wholesale slaughter of our animal