The Tree of Liberty

By Michael J. Scott

Captured by Federal Authorities, Peter Baird finds himself incarcerated in a FEMA Camp run by the corrupt officials who've taken over the government. But even here he is aided by the remnants of the militia, still struggling in a seemingly hopeless battle against those who've seized power in the wake of the failed revolution.

Peter joins forces with other victims of the government crack-down and plots to seize control of the camp to free them all. The only question is whether any of them will survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael J. Scott
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301154869

Michael J. Scott

Michael James Scott is a Professor and Chief of Critical Care Medicine in Penn Medicine, USA. He has over 25-year experience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and his research interest includes pathophysiology of surgery and perioperative outcomes, analgesia, functional outcomes and opioid sparing. Dr. Scott’s work in basic sciences and quality improvement has led to worldwide acceptance of a new approach to care of the surgical patient – Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS). In 2003 his department’s published work has helped build the evidence base that rapid recovery after surgery leads to improved outcomes, reduced complications and reduced costs.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Pain and darkness.

Rough hands jerked me back into an upright position, and then came the inevitable blow to my gut. It’d happened exactly the same way several times now. I’d lost count. When the blow hit, I felt a rib crack, and I fell forward, striking the earth with my forehead. I tasted blood.

My hands were bound behind my back. My feet shackled. A rank, black hood covered my face and shrouded me in darkness, and all I knew of the world around me was pain.

And voices. Too indistinct to make out, but I concentrated on them nonetheless. It was the only way I could keep my sanity.

Had I stopped thinking of the voices, I’d start thinking about how I deserved everything I was getting. It happened twice already—the inevitable flashbacks to the compromises and choices I’d made during the past six months—choices which drove our country into hell.

It was all my fault, and I was the only one who knew it. I was the one who killed the President. Sure, it was my brother Martin’s idea, and he was the one in prison awaiting trial—but he’d only run interference so I could take the shot. I couldn’t even blame Grant Collins—or Commander Marks, or some other alias—I had no idea who he really was. Grant may have planned the op and manipulated me into being the patsy who pulled the trigger, but when it came down to it, I was still the one who killed the man.

The man who succeeded the comparatively moderate Democrat we’d elected was a thorough-going Marxist, a man committed to remaking the country according to his own defunct ideology, pursuing a collectivist utopia rather than the individuality and freedom our founders had envisioned. We’d replaced a socialist with a communist, and this was the consequence.

The President was dead. Long live the President.

They lifted me upright and a cry escaped my throat. I tensed for the blow, but instead a voice said, Give it a rest. He’s had it.

Screw that, said another. He killed fifteen good cops.

A sharp blow hammered my gut. I fell forward again and vomited blood into the hood.

And if you beat him to death, we won’t get any intel outta him.

A bar shoved beneath my chin, pushing my throat.

Fine then, the second voice said. You deal with him.

The bar dropped. A second later it bashed into my head, spinning me to the floor. I think I passed out.

When I next came to, my ribs were wrapped and my head was covered in a thick, gauze bandage. I felt parched, and involuntarily licked my lips.

He’s coming around.

Good. Maybe he can tell us who he is.

Peter Baird. The man who shot the President. That’s who I am. If my tongue weren’t swollen and jaw broken, I might’ve told them that. But I was in no condition to talk.

I tried to see where I was, but all I could make out were fluorescent tubes glowing dimly in the ceiling and obscure faces I wouldn’t have recognized even if I could see them clearly.

Water squirted across my lips, down my throat. I savored it like ambrosia.

Slowly, someone said. A woman's voice. She didn't sound familiar. The water went away, and someone shone a light in my eyes.

Where was I?

Gradually, my memory came back to me.

Last I recall I was driving a stolen cop car along a narrow stretch of road outside of Syracuse, New York. I’d just freed two militia men from federal custody, narrowly losing a third, after we’d blown a transformer substation that evening and plunged the northeast into darkness.

The lights in the ceiling meant I was either someplace that had a generator, or they’d moved me to a different state. I had no idea which.

After losing control of the police cruiser, I’d crashed into a field where I was taken into custody. For a moment, I'd woken up and found myself in a van, handcuffed in the back, but then came the hood and another crack to my skull that left me dazed and slightly less than conscious.

I think there was a plane ride, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought I felt the queasy pressure of an air flight, but it might’ve been just my insides wanting to puke all over the floor. Which I did anyway.

Now I was in some kind of room in God-knows-where, being interrogated within an inch of my life.

What’s your name?

My lips were parched. I could barely form a sentence. I tried anyway.

What? The man didn’t hear me. Couldn’t make out what I was saying. I had to try again. This was important. I wanted them to understand.

Clearing my throat, I pushed air through my mouth, shoving a ragged gasp into the words they needed to hear.

Go to hell, I rasped.

They probably would’ve kept beating me, and I think on some level that’s what I wanted. Do your worst.

But I couldn’t talk to them. No way. There was too much at stake. Too many lives of people I cared about on the line.

Besides, I’d already betrayed my brother once. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

Even so, they did nothing more to me after that. I next found myself lying on a barren, cement floor with painted concrete walls on all sides and a steel door with a square, plate glass window in it.

I lay there for hours. I was given rancid food through a slot in the door and commanded to eat by a gruff voice whose face I couldn’t see, and left to sleep.

I didn’t touch the food.

After a few days of this, I heard more voices outside the door. One of them sounded feminine. It’s completely unacceptable, she was saying. There was a rattle in the lock, and the door opened.

I didn’t move.

Oh my God, she said.

I wanted to lift my head, turn my head to see who’d uttered such a prayer on my behalf, but it hurt too much to bother.

What did you do? she said. Try to beat him to death?

It’s no more than he deserves.

This second voice I recognized. It came from the man with the stick. The one who’d kept hitting me while my face was covered by that damn hood. This man I wanted to see. I wanted a good look at him, because if I ever saw him again, I would kill him.

He didn’t hit me because I deserved it, or because he was angry or injured. And certainly not to protect himself, like I was some kind of imminent threat, handcuffed to a chair and hooded.

He did it because he enjoyed it. And a man like that didn’t deserve to live.

Gentle hands probed my wounds, gradually turning me over to examine my face and chest.

She had blond hair and pretty eyes, but no smile. Her lips were pressed into a tight frown, and worry lines knit her brow together.

This isn't how we do things, she muttered. Turning, she said, He’s got a cracked jaw, at least one broken rib. Maybe more. I want him in the infirmary now.

The man with the stick sniffed. Go ahead. Mollycoddle him.

I heard her whisper harshly, Fear of pain is more effective than the pain itself, you idiot. All you've done is set us back.

I realized then she was no friend of mine, no matter how pretty her eyes. She called for a gurney, and a pair of orderlies in blue scrubs lifted me onto the stretcher. As they lay me down, I caught sight of the stick man. I fixed my eyes on him, memorizing the shape of his jaw, the set of his eyes, the narrow wedge of his nose. I could picture myself driving the heel of my palm into it, and the bone into his brain.

Except that would kill him too quickly, and I wanted him to suffer first. I continued to stare at him even as they wheeled me out of my cell. As we passed into the hall, he met my gaze. His eyes narrowed, and a sneer curled his lip.

Bastard, I thought.

In the hall we passed by several other steel doors painted white just like the one to my cell, each with a plate glass window in the front. The guard followed us, keeping an even pace with the gurney until we came to a stop before a set of bars.

Stick man walked past me, his eyes flickering briefly in my direction. Then he pulled out a ring of keys and inserted one into the electric lock mounted on the wall. There was a buzz, followed by the grinding of gears, and the bars in front of us rolled to one side, allowing us passage.

We rolled down another corridor, and then into a room that looked a lot more like a hospital room or doctor's office than the cell I'd just left. Here they hefted me onto the bed, and the nurse or doctor or whoever she was inserted a needle into my arm, connecting me to an IV drip. She filled out a chart and clipped it to the end of the bed, and then left.

I was all alone.

Chapter 2

I don't know how long I lay there. A different nurse came back at regular intervals to check my blood pressure and other levels, and feed me Jell-O and other liquids until my jaw started working again. This was the first one who'd given me water in the cell. I recognized her voice. The other, it turned out, was Dr. Julia Caulfield. She was concerned for me as a patient, not as a person. I figured this out when I asked her where I was. She flat out told me she wasn't permitted to tell me anything.

The nurse, Beatrice Lewis, was a little more cooperative.

You're at the FEMA center in Watertown, she said. You've been here about two months.

FEMA? I croaked.

Federal Emergency Management Agency.

I nodded. I know what it is. I want to know why. Why FEMA?

That's above my pay grade, sweetheart.

No, I mean, why is there a camp at all?

Oh you have been out of it. You know about the black out, right?

I frowned. They must not have told her who I was.

She went on as if I knew nothing. Which was just as well. Seems a bunch a terrorist wackos done blowed up some substations. Whole northeast is still without power. Some others tried to do it in the Midwest, but they caught 'em. That's when the President ordered a national emergency. Looks like there's some kind of national terror group behind it all. Feds are trying to root 'em out. I expect they'll be wanting to bring them here if'n they ever catch any more of them.

I furrowed my brow. Who's here now?

She gave me an amused eye. You tell me. Most folks I seen come through here are just normal folks in the wrong place at the wrong time. People who shouldda gotten rid of their guns when they was supposed to. Most of 'em cycle right on through, though. The jury panels give 'em a slap on the wrist and send them on their way.

How many are here?

You sure do ask a lot of questions.

I've been out of it for a while.

Yeah, and I shouldn't even be talking to you.

I nodded. She'd already taken a huge risk for me. I just hate not knowing what's going on.

Not me. I keep my head down and do my job, and I get to go home at night. Looks like they'll keep rounding people up until they get to the bottom of all this. Keeps me busy though. Now, I've talked long enough, and I got to get back to work. I got between eight and ten thousand others to look after, not just you.

Thanks, I mumbled as she left.

Eight to ten thousand? It was good intel, more than I should've expected. I wondered where her sympathies lay. Wincing, I pulled my knees to my chest, and then swung my legs out of the bed. Dr. Caulfield would probably kill me if she saw me up and moving around, but I had to know how mobile I was. And I had to look outside the window. It stood in the wall on the left, with the blinds pulled so I couldn't see outside. But maybe I'd get a better sense of where I was at and what was going to happen to me if I could get a look.

I plodded over to the window, dragging the IV bag stand with me, the clear plastic tube trailing from my arm like a tether. At the window's edge, I pushed my fingers through the blinds, peering outside.

What I saw took my breath away.

Six weeks later I was finally discharged from the infirmary. The guards, including stick man, insisted on calling me cop-killer. I deserved it, I suppose, but it left me puzzled just the same. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t know who I was. My fingerprints were bound to be on file at the FBI. I’d been interrogated there, and they had to have a record or something.

It’s not like I’d ever made a big secret of my identity. Sure, I’d used the alias Joe Warren when we planned the initial assassination that started this whole mess. And lately I’d used a spray-on tan and gone by the moniker Pedro Sanchez. Both ID's were courtesy of Grant’s computer guru Rick Svenson, a man whose hacking skills new no boundaries. I wondered if he hadn’t somehow changed or deleted my file.

The more likely explanation was that the feds were overwhelmed with fingerprint requests right now. The whole NFLA—National Firearms Licensing Act—required fingerprints as part of the necessary background checks in order to keep your gun. The President meant to use it as a tool to get some of the two million guns out of the hands of private citizens, but it also meant a good number tried to jump through the new legal hoops to keep their second amendment rights anyway, thus bogging the system.

That, and the members of the National Service Reserve Corp all had to be duly fingerprinted and processed as well. And then there were the arrests—people who resented the fed’s intrusion into their rights and resisted—winding up in camps like the one I was in.

My brother had foreseen all this—not necessarily the part where I wound up incarcerated, but the rest of it—the whole takeover by the federal government and push to control the citizenry. After Martin was arrested, things started happening fast—like the NFLA and the Reserve Corp. As predicted, the Leftists exploded in rage and began trying to root out the vast, right-wing conspiracy that dared take out one of their own.

That these same Leftists had openly called for the assassination of Republican presidents evidently didn’t matter much. Hypocrisy never does when it’s your own side that does it.

Naturally, I joined the resistance. I’d become part of the New York militia, committed to disrupting and harassing the federal government. I’d done so because I wanted to convince Grant to help me save my brother—rescue him from federal prison before they stuck a needle in his arm. In fact, the only reason I’d gone along with Martin’s crazy scheme in the first place was to save his life.

Martin thought that assassinating the President would so enrage the Leftists in power that they’d declare martial law and seize full control of the country. The President’s advisers had said, Never let a crisis go to waste. We felt certain they’d use this excuse to fully implement what they’d been doing to our country incrementally for the last eighty years—make the United States a Communist dictatorship.

Antonio Gramsci had said that after the long march of Marxist ideology through the culture, changing the institutions, that power would fall into our laps like ripened fruit.

And now they'd finally realized their dream. The American citizenry, once the most productive, free, and responsible people in the world, had been weakened by the slow poison of Cultural Marxism, lulled into complacency as it stole the cultural institutions that supported our republic. Now people were dependent on the government for everything from health care to food stamps and welfare. Those that did work either served the bloated federal or state bureaucracies, or had jobs with the major corporations and banks whose task it was to support the system in exchange for tax breaks and federal subsidies. The free and independent small business owner was being squeezed to death—falsely labeled the rich, and having their income confiscated through appeals to pay their fair share. Like anything was fair about paying ninety percent of the national income taxes.

But now the time had come to shut it down completely. Capitalism was declared greedy and pronounced defunct despite all the evidence to the contrary. The free enterprise system had created more wealth, health, and freedom than any other economic system in history, but this had to go because it wasn't equitable. Some people won and some people lost. How could that be fair? Therefore, everyone had to lose. Or so it seemed.

The Marxists were ready to pluck the fruit of power. We'd given them the excuse they needed. Thing was, they'd miscalculated on just how ready the American people really were to embrace collectivism.

So we hoped, anyway.

After being led out of the infirmary I was sent back to a cell. Stick man, whose real name was William Kremer, had been ordered to keep away from me—probably through the influence of Dr. Caulfield. For the next few weeks I still faced a daily interrogation from the others—faceless bureaucrats seated behind a screen while they asked their questions. I soon figured out this was the citizen jury panel, hiding their faces to protect their anonymity.

Cowards.

I wondered if they knew the nature of the beast they served. Were they really that far gone? Or were they just doing their time, putting in their requisite community service so they could go home and try to forget about what they'd been made a part of?

The questions were rote. Read aloud, it sounded, from a cue card, with no real interest in the answers given. Not a one of them was trained in interrogation, as evidenced by the amount of information I was able to glean from them while giving them nothing useful to go on.

I routinely made stuff up, leading them down wild rabbit holes, testing their knowledge and ability, and even sometimes whether or not they were paying attention.

Who ordered you to blow up the transformer?

Simpson. It was his idea.

And who is Simpson?

The ring-leader. We called him 'Shorty,' sometimes. And sometimes 'Spike,' on account of his hair. But never to his face.

Go on.

Ah, he's fluent in French, I hear. You wouldn't think so, 'cause he sometimes talks like a juvenile delinquent. His old man was connected in Nuclear Energy back in the day. We were hoping to use his connection to acquire some radioactive material. The man is a classic alcoholic. Spends most of his days drinking himself into oblivion. We wanted to use that. We were hoping to set up a meet in Springfield. Place called Moe's.

Illinois?

I shrugged. I'm not sure. They were never clear on that. The whole deal fell through when Shorty's sister Lisa blew the lid. Frickin' liberal. She's like the exact opposite of everything Simpson was. If we could have turned her to our cause, we'd have been unstoppable.

This guy Simpson got a first name?

Bartholomew, I think. He never used it, though.

At this point, someone behind the screen figured it out. Was the Dad's name Homer?

It might've been. I never met the guy.

There was swearing behind the screen. I struggled not to laugh. Someone still didn't get it, though, because a new voice asked, How did they contact you?

Through coded messages on television. Tuesday nights at eight.

More swearing as the people behind the screen argued. What is your problem? I'm trying to conduct an investigation here.

He's playing us, you idiot.

You don’t know that. Parker said to write down everything he says. Anything can be useful. Pay attention, damn it!

I am paying attention. The Simpsons? Bart, Homer and Lisa? Tuesday nights at eight? It's a frickin' cartoon show.

I tried to do the same thing with Bugs Bunny, but it was harder to keep up the ruse. But I had some information. These citizen jury panels were trained and run by a guy named Parker. I had to learn more about him.

They let Kremer take me back to my cell that time, which was a mistake. He prodded me with his baton, shoving me forward.

Think you’re funny, don’tcha? he said.

You wanna take it easy with that?

He turned me around and shoved me against the wall, thrusting the stick in my face. What'd you say?

I said, 'Take it easy with that.'

Or what?

Chapter 3

I met his eyes, quickly inventorying his person as I did so. His keys dangled from a ring on the left of his belt. His eyes were bloodshot, and his breath smelled faintly of beer, which meant he’d come to work drunk again. I’d noticed it more and more these past couple of weeks. I wondered if he wasn’t having some kind of trouble at home.

At this spot in the hallway, we were just out of the range of the cameras. I wouldn't get a better chance. All I needed him to do was hit me again.

You and I both know that stick will never substitute, I said.

What?

It's obvious you've got a hard-on for me, and it ain't got nothing to do with those cops I killed. I bet you didn't even know them.

So what?

So that stick of yours is your substitute. Sorta like a prosthesis, don’t you think? You’re compensating. Built like a white man, right?

Oh now you’re in for it. He reared back to hit me, and as he came forward I lunged, ramming his nose with the only weapon I had. My forehead. I felt the bones in his nose break as I collided with him. Blood spurted from his nostrils as he fell backward. I rammed him a second time, pinning him against the far wall even as I spun and grabbed his key ring with my hand.

He reacted. Pushed me back against the wall. Swung overhand with the club. I dropped straight down, catching his foot and knee in a scissors-kick. But instead of falling forward, he dropped down on top of me, cracking my skull with the baton. I saw stars, and then blackness.

When I woke up I was back in the infirmary, courtesy of Kremer, no doubt. I caught him leering at me from the window in the door, a thick bandage over his nose and two black eyes. It was a marked improvement. I flipped him the bird. He scowled at me and left.

Nurse Betty came by to check on my vitals. You’re awake, she announced, examining my chart.

I shook my head. Can’t be. I see a friendly face. I’m still dreaming.

She laughed and put the chart down. Sure do have a way with people, don’tcha? She checked my pupils with a pen light.

I try.

Mm-hmm. Hear you been trying out them jury panels. The Simpsons? Really? She began unwrapping the bandages on my head, checking the wound and putting fresh dressings in place.

I winced as she worked and muttered, Guy’s got to entertain himself somehow.

She pulled back and regarded me. You don’t take much seriously, do you?

I take serious things seriously. I met her eyes. But citizen jury panels? C’mon. Who’s the real prisoner, here? I get to play dodge-stick and tackle with Kremer, while those poor schleps have to pretend they know what they’re doing. You think any of them really want to be there?

Well, it’s not like they got much choice.

I raised a finger, accentuating my point. They used to. We all had choices. It was called freedom. You remember freedom? You could go where you wanted to go. Do what you wanted to do. Buy what you wanted to buy. Or not buy something if you didn’t want it. It was your choice. You didn’t have some bureaucrat in Washington telling you what to do or how to do it. I miss freedom.

She clucked her tongue. That’s cause you’re a prisoner.

I stared at the window, thinking of the thousands of people I'd seen milling about in the camp outside. We’re all prisoners now. Some of us just have invisible chains.

Well, I think I prefer my chains to yours.

I prefer no chains at all.

She rolled