Camp America

By Lisa Kay Childers

Tegan Alice Slone is struggling to survive in the forests of Southern Indiana when Emperial Police capture her and take her to a reeducation center. The year is 2084, and the president is a madman that the people are afraid to stand up to. He has ultimate power over them all and will not surrender it. He created the Proclamation about Others. Others are "anyone who is a nontaxpaying citizen or noncitizen" and are to be put into reeducation centers. It is also a well-known fact that anyone who doesn't agree with him is relocated to a reeducation center. Everyone knows that these are really concentration camps, and despite what the government says, no one's reeducation is ever complete. Tegan decides to use her faith to not only get herself through the struggles at the center where she has been incarcerated but to try to bring others to faith in Christ and His ever-present love. By getting people to cooperate and get along, she paints a target on her back with the higher-ups. Will she survive, or will she die trying to bring others to Christ?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638607816

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Chapter 2: The War

Chapter 3: Daily Routines

Chapter 4: More Memories

Chapter 5: EPs

Chapter 6: PopPop

Chapter 7: Her

Chapter 8: Needle and Thread

Chapter 9: Herb

Chapter 10: Resources

Chapter 11: The Gathering

Chapter 12: Charlie

Chapter 13: Romance

Chapter 14: Moving Day

Chapter 15: Camp America

Chapter 16: Introductions

Chapter 17: Chocolate and Gold

Chapter 18: Lights Out

Chapter 19: The Guards

Chapter 20: Kindness

Chapter 21: The Word

Chapter 22: Shocking

Chapter 23: Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Chapter 24: 1 Peter 5:8

Chapter 25: Oh, So Hairy

Chapter 26: Breakfast

Chapter 27: Presidential Choices

Chapter 28: Luminous

About the Author

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Camp America

Lisa Kay Childers

Copyright © 2021 Lisa Kay Childers

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2021

ISBN 978-1-63860-780-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63860-781-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

I believe they did (believe) at first, then maybe not so much. The ones who came from other camps to Auschwitz II-Birkenau had no idea what they were getting into.

—Eva Mozes Kor, Mengele twin and Holocaust survivor, April 28, 2018, at CANDLES Holocaust Museum

In answer to my question about whether she thought her captors and guards believed in the Nazi dogma or if they were just doing their jobs to keep from being killed themselves.

—Lisa Kay Childers

Prologue

It is amazing that you can think that a day is the worst day of your life. In truth, it is the worst one up to that point. Very few people can pinpoint a single worst day in their life because worse will come. You just can't imagine it yet. That's how I felt about the day I was caught. But unlike most of you, when I say it was the worst day of my life, I mean it. Betrayal, loss of a loved one, physical pain, loss of freedom, and loss of choices were what I had to deal with on my worst day. Everything afterward was just expected.

Laying on my new pallet of woven grasses, I slept dreamlessly in the cool dry caves in Southern Indiana. I was hiding in the forests there because I was an Other, an outsider on the run from the government of the United Emperial States of America. I awoke only when a sharp painful fire in my ribs, accompanied by a crunching internal sound and a clicking of weapons, was heard. EPs! But how did they find us? Why hadn't Fee alerted me before they made it to the cave? I instantly considered fighting, but I knew that the EPs traveled in pods of four, and so we were outnumbered, especially since Morgan had told me that she had never had to fight before, and with her broken arm…

Get up, mental defect! a booming angry male voice shouted.

Of course, because of the Proclamation, I knew he was calling me a mental defect because of my bipolar disorder. But how did he know about it? The Proclamation was an executive order put into place by the then elected president Alexander Donahue to describe and ostracize Others. Later, it was used as an excuse to punish Others.

I now realized it had been a boot connected again and again to my ribs, this time on the other side of my body, making the barely banked fire in my torso arc and dance again and pierce along my side. While curled into a tight ball to protect my body as much as possible and without turning my head, I looked quickly over to Morgan's pallet of furs, which was empty. No Morgan and no Fee. Beside the pallet, against the rock wall, Morgan was standing with her nose touching the wall and a tall sandy blond man behind her, training a weapon on her. Morgan's right arm was extended out to her side as far as she could reach along the rock wall, and her left, still in its sling, was trapped between her slight body and the smooth limestone wall.

I got up as quickly as my burning and broken ribs allowed, an AR-53 barrel under my chin (the standard automatic power gun for the EP creeps, er, cops), wondering again why my dog, Fee, hadn't alerted me of the intrusion of these jerks. Where was she? I heard the slight grinding of cave dust under my handcrafted moccasins. Had the EP knocked Fee out? How had they snuck up on her? Looking furtively around the cave, I saw to, my dawning horror, at the side of the entrance of the cave hallway, the sprawled limp body of Fee on the ground, blood pooling around her head. As I watched in momentary shock, the pool of blood got bigger before my eyes. My baby dog, the half wolf, half German shepherd that had shared my life and adventures for this last three years on the run, was injured or worse. If I could get to her, there might be a chance to save her life.

A guttural, animalistic cry of anguish and promised retribution ripped from my throat at the sight.

I tripped forward toward her, futilely pushing at the man in front of me in my haste to get to her, no longer noticing the weapons and people around me in my panic to get to my baby. But after taking the first step and screaming again, a boot came down on my spine, making me faceplant into the cave floor, breaking my nose. Blood spurted everywhere. My hair, tied in its usual nighttime braid, flopped on the cave floor with a loud, thick flump.

I tasted copper as blood ran down my throat from my broken nose. I was pretty sure whoever kicked me and made me faceplant also broke at least one tooth. At least that's what I thought cut the inside of my cheek before I swallowed the piece along with the blood.

Shut up! the man above me roared, hitting me in the right side of the ribs again with his boot, making another sound of cracking. More ribs broken.

It was getting hard to breathe, the broken ribs and nose cutting off most of my oxygen supply. Crying didn't help, so I choked back my sobs of misery and tried crawling toward Fee to help her, my fingers scrabbling in the loose dirt and debris of the cave floor. My only hope was that she was merely unconscious. Head wounds bled a lot, right? The guy who had been kicking me stepped on my fingers, breaking some of them and making me scream. I heard laughter echo off the cave walls.

What did you do to my dog? I cried. My consonants were all messed up sounding through my broken nose.

Killed it. Slit its throat, the woman behind me said in a whiny, petulant sort of voice. She pulled my hair to make me stand up. Someone else painfully twisted my arms behind me. I didn't see who did it. I was so focused on Fee. Someone then cuffed my hands behind my back. The woman happily cackled at my apparent misery.

"Lousy mutt wouldn't eat the berries I picked that you threw away," a familiar voice chimed in.

There was one tall, salt-and-pepper-haired man who had yet to strike, standing to the side. His hooded eyes were just taking in everything as it all happened. I wondered what he was doing there, but I didn't pay much attention to him even though there was a part of me that was very interested in why he was there. All my rage and will to live was focused on the familiar figure.

Everything went black after lights exploded in my head as something heavy and hard hit the back of my head, where my skull joined my neck.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

AD 2084

I woke in the soft grey light to the same sight that greeted me every morning for the last three years—a cave ceiling covered by a series of solid stalactites. A heavy pressure on my legs told me that Fee—my part dog, part wolf and all lazy in the mornings pet—was still sleeping. She weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds, so I was thankful that she wasn't laying fully on me. With her added weight on the furs I was sleeping under, I was sweating in the early spring morning.

I patted her side and said, Okay, lazybones, time to get out of bed.

A loud huff and a pretend snore greeted my words, and I laughed out loud. Fee was a drama queen and an integral part of my life here in the woods. Some could argue that I wouldn't have made it here without her.

Up, up, up. I punctuated each word with a gentle pat on her side as I tried to heave her off me. She merely stretched farther across me as if trying to hold me down could hold onto more sleep. It was a morning routine battle of wills. I knew she enjoyed this as much as I did, our morning play.

Fee rolled, momentarily knocking the wind out of me as she landed on my diaphragm and bladder, squishing all the air out of my lungs and making me have to pee. I really did have to heave her off me then. She groaned and readjusted her position and rolled across my legs as I sat up, effectively trapping me in place.

Okay, Wolfie, time to get up officially. You've had your fun. It's time we both emptied our bladders as you have now woken mine up and flattened it at the same time. Fee knew when I called her by her full name that I wasn't playing games anymore. She stood up and balefully gave me side-eye then shook herself off.

She walked away then looked back at me as if she was saying, Well? What are you waiting for?

I stood up too and grabbed my backpack, bow, and quiver of arrows. I slipped on my very soft moccasins that I had made last year and followed her sleepy, droopy tail out of our abandoned cave system.

Fee and I lived in what used to be the very well visited Hoosier National Forest in South-Central Indiana, in what used to be called the United States of America. Now you must have a visitor's visa to go camping at a state or federal park per federal orders of the president of the Emperial United American States. The EUAS, or ES for short, was the new name given to the country after The War of 2075.

Fee and I were outlaws. Fee was one because being part wolf without a certificate of breeding was a criminal act punishable by death of the animal and me, because I was an Other.

As we walked toward the entrance of the cave to the area where we used as a latrine, I pondered the punishments for being an Other. I had run to this forest because I hadn't wanted to be placed into a reeducation center like all Others were to be placed, but as I had been on the run for these last three years, would I live long enough to make it to a center? Or would the EP just have me killed?

EP were the Emperial Police, a forceful military group formed by the government to police and punish the people in the stead of the courts. In 2081, all courtrooms were obliterated as the judicial system was abolished by President Donahue. President Donahue had been the sitting president for the last thirteen years now. He had been given emergency power during the strife before The War and hasn't set it down since.

Finishing my task, I observed the woods for a moment before striding back toward the caves. There was a bath awaiting me in the fourth cave, and I was looking forward to it. I could smell myself, so I'm sure the animals in the woods could too.

The fourth cave in the linear collection of caves that made up our home was made up of a deep spring. The entire cave was submerged in water that was quite temperate, a few degrees above a baby's bathwater, but not so hot you had to adjust yourself to the temperature. As I ran the bar of homemade soap over my weather roughened skin, I looked at Fee pacing the length of the third cave as sentinel and remembered how it was that I first found her.

I had been escaping my letter of intent to be relocated to a reeducation center because I was an Other because of the Proclamation when I had driven south from my home in Kokomo, Indiana. I had told everyone that I knew that I was going hunting with my daddy in Michigan and that he had the hunting visas for us. Little did they know, EPs had killed him years ago.

South of Indianapolis and a dozen or so miles south of where I abandoned the car, I saw a furry shape tangled in a barbed wire fence. I had heard the growling and whining before I had seen her. It turned out that it was a wolf and German shepherd looking dog. She was standing a couple of feet from the barbed wire fence and was tugging at her foot futilely. She would shake her entire body as if in some kind of fit, then she would stop and try chewing at her raw, sore, and tangled foot. I was worried that she would end up chewing her foot off to get free. She was thin and looked ragged, and my heart went out to her. Still, I knew that an injured animal, who was possibly wild at that, was something to be wary of.

The dog was grey with the shepherd black saddle on her back and beautiful sky blue eyes. She had a thin muzzle like a wolf but the pert ears of a shepherd, although they were smaller. At my initial approach, she growled low in her throat, eyed, me warily, and tried to back up, pulling on her tangled foot fruitlessly then squealing in pain. I set down my backpack, bow and quiver of arrows, and two other bags and approached her on all fours to appear less threatening. When I tried to untangle her foot, I must have accidentally hurt her, and she bit me.

I would have, too, in her place. The bite she gave me wasn't deep, but, boy, did it sting. It was a crescent on each side of the soft fleshy part of my hand between the thumb and pointer finger of my left hand. Again, it wasn't very deep, but, man, did it hurt!

The bite didn't even break the skin, thankfully.

That morning, I had shot a bobtail quail with my bow and arrow and cooked it over a small stick fire, but I had only eaten half of it. I tossed the rest to the dog, who sniffed it suspiciously as I slowly took wire cutters from my pack and snipped the barbed wire a foot from her leg. Then using as much care as I had and moving as slowly as I could, I unwrapped her front paw then withdrew, leaving her alone to realize she was free and unencumbered. She greedily ate the remnants of the cooked bird.

I repacked my bag, a large leather pack that had multiple pockets and side packs, and looked up at the quickly darkening sky. Keeping one eye on the shepherd mix in case the wild dog decided to attack me once she was finished eating, I crept away stealthily. Okay, I thought I crept away stealthily. Looking back now at the skills I had since learned, I crashed through the underbrush.

I couldn't hang about trying to tame the wild dog even though I wanted to. I needed to set up shelter for the night and treat my own wound. Over the last week, I had discovered how to create a lean-to that blended in with the scenery. The trick was to use and later discard items from the surrounding scenery. However, I still used my sleeping bag that I carried.

Had EPs been following me at that point in my travels, I was too ignorant to pay attention, because I never even noticed the dog following me that night, and she was limping! Oh, the woeful lack of knowledge I had at that point. It's truly amazing I found my forest home. I think if it hadn't been for the dog, I don't think I would have, honestly. If it hadn't been for her, I don't think I would have survived as long as I did, really.

In the middle of the night, as I lay in my sleeping bag in the lean-to made of cardboard and garbage under an overpass to keep the rain off me, I awoke to the warm solid weight of the dog snuggled against my back. When I rolled over and tried to touch her, she growled and ran off about fifty feet and eyed me malevolently. That epitomized the next month—her getting closer, sharing my food, then backing off if I tried to touch her. If she thought I was asleep, she cuddled with me. When I realized she was keeping me, I decided to call her Fee, short for Wolfie. She taught me how to notice if others were around. Really, she taught me a lot about survival that I thought I already knew.

By three months of our acquaintance, I could go nowhere without her at my side. At four months, she shared the hunting duties. And by five months that we had been together, she played like a puppy, her leg now healed and body well filled out, fetching sticks for hours on end until I was too exhausted to throw them anymore. Even if I was tired of the game, she still brought me sticks and tried to entice me by whining and giving me those sad, soulful puppy eyes with the beautiful blue eyes of hers, tail wagging playfully.

I assumed that we were moving at about fifteen to twenty miles a day, but my worry, lack of stamina, and the beginnings of the knowledge of how to hide my trail slowed us down in the beginning. We were probably moving only at about five to six miles a day. Turns out, I wasn't as in shape as I thought. I got faster as we traveled though. My muscles hardened, and I developed the stamina that I needed in the wild. I realized we were meandering, but there was no straight path to the forest from just south of Indy that wasn't populated somehow, and we had to try to stay hidden. Also, I had no idea where we were going. I just knew that hiding in the hills in Southern Indiana was our best bet. And I knew that there were some state parks that were sure to be abandoned somewhere in the south of the state.

All state parks were effectively closed the moment that the Proclamation was put into law. The national parks were shut down. Camping and rafting and boating were made illegal. Anyone found camping, especially without a state or federal visa, was taken to a reeducation center. It reminded me of elementary school, needing a hall pass or getting sent to the principal's office, except in this case, you would be sent to the concentration camps or worse.

As Fee and I were meandering, there were many fields we had to travail and many pastures we walked through, picking our way through the cow pies all throughout the pastures. Having been raised a farmer's daughter, I knew that it was best to step in dry cow pies rather than steaming ones, if you do step in one. I had to cut through the metal fences on either side of the pastures when we wanted to travel across them. I felt bad, but not bad enough to get all cut up trying to climb them or getting electrocuted. Yes, some wire fences were electrified to keep the livestock in. One that I cut recoiled and sliced my right hand with the barbs on the wire. I kept forgetting that, as I was forty, I didn't heal as easily as I used to. It took months for that to turn into a scar, and even after it healed, the knot that formed took even longer to go away. I still, to this day, had the habit of rubbing it when it rained.

I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for when I first set out, but when I found the Hoosier National Forest in Brown County in Southern Indiana, I was elated. It was one of the many state parks that Indiana had, despite the name. When I discovered our caves, I dropped to my knees, thanked God, and cried happy tears.

The entrance to the first cave was an optical illusion, as it looked as though it only opened to a place that was three feet deep, the walls fifteen feet high and ten feet apart, sort of an overhang type of thing. Fee, however, knew better and followed her nose. I followed her around the rocks that were colored as if they were one solid wall. Instead, it was a curving passage twenty feet long, sort of a switchback. The hallway looked scary with its twisting and turning walls, only about three feet wide. But once the hallway ended, ballooning into the main cave, it was so worth everything I had been through.

The walls were smoothed from thousands of hands touching the walls, and the ground was smooth from feet tromping it down. The stone was limestone and quartz and granite, what most of Indiana was made of. The limestone was smooth, the quartz and granite rough and sharp and jagged. It was summer. It was hot and humid and sultry outside, but a few feet inside the cave, it was darker and cool, the air fresh and clean, surprising me.

I pulled the pack off my back and rummaged around for my hand-crank flashlight. It was red and black and had a radio. Like I said, it had a flashlight as well as the ability to charge a cell phone, but since I left my cell phone behind, I wouldn't need that function. I cranked the flashlight until the red light indicator turned green. I heard the whirring sound of the crank then turned on the light, illuminating the darkness ahead and preventing a possible dangerous fall from walking around an unknown area.

The cave hallway opened into a ballooned space that was warm but not hot like outside. I looked around, taking in the space, looking up at the ceiling, hoping against hope not to see any bats. I loved all creatures great and small, but I couldn't abide bats. They creeped me out with their squeaking and flapping about. Luckily, all that was on the ceiling were hanging shapes, those cone things that I thought were called stalactites. I thought the hanging ones were stalactites anyway. Something from elementary school resonated in my head about them clinging tight to the ceiling while stalagmites were mighty big from the floor. Whatever that was.

As I swung the flashlight slowly around the cave, I noticed a sign on the wall, a hole to the right of me, and a niche to the left and sort of behind me, as well as a natural spring-fed body of water bubbling in front of me about twenty yards away. It was the size of a small lake, about thirty to thirty-five feet in diameter. Okay, it was more the size of a large pond. In the center of the pond, however, the water bubbled away.