One Second After

The explosion seemed to tear off the side of the house.

With harsh, guttural screams a dozen militia were up, charging, pushing through the wreckage and into the smoke-filled house.

Seconds later several Posse poured out the front door; none made it more than a dozen feet.

Two more houses to go at the top of the ridge. A couple of dozen holdouts within, surrounded now on all sides. A barrage of Molotov cocktails rained onto the buildings; from within one there were bursts of automatic weapons fire.

The assault teams waited. In just eight hours they were veterans, no dumb-ass heroics, no “follow me” charges. One of the buildings finally started to burn, and then the second, suppressive fire pouring in through every window to keep those within down.

It took ten minutes, a dozen more Molotovs tossed against the side of the wooden structure to feed the flames, which finally went into the eaves of the house. It was ablaze now. Screaming from inside. The front door burst open and the militia was waiting. Half a dozen were gunned down as they came out. The last two out were women, falling to their knees, hands up.

No one fired and they crawled away from the inferno, then fell on their faces, crying for mercy.

One house left, the one with the automatic fire. John, watching the fight, had a gut sense of who was in there.

He picked up a megaphone.

“I want prisoners from that house!” he shouted.

The house was ablaze.

“Come out and we won’t shoot!” John shouted.

Seconds later the door burst open and six men and a woman staggered out, throwing weapons aside.

“Down on your knees, hands over heads!”

They did as ordered and the student militia circled in around them.

The thunder of the battle was dying away now, a burst of shots from down near the second railroad tunnel, a volley from up on Rattlesnake Mountain, the louder sound now the forest fire sweeping both sides of the interstate, driven by a westerly breeze.

He looked around, some of the militia coming out from cover, standing up cautiously, looking around, most ducking when a sniper round zinged down from the ridge atop the pass. It was greeted seconds later with an explosive roar of fire and then silence. One of the militia then standing atop the ridge, rifle held high, waved the all clear.

John rose up from the side of the bridge over the interstate, walked around to the side, and slid down the slope and onto the pavement of the interstate, his action almost a signal that the war was over. Dozens more were standing, dazed, silent.

He looked up the road to the pass but a hundred yards away. It was a road paved with horrors. At nearly every step there were bodies twisted into the contortions that only the dead could hold, rivulets of blood pouring off the road into the storm gutters. It was a seething mass as well, hundreds of wounded.

He turned and looked back down the highway towards Exit 66 and raised his megaphone.

“Medics! Bring up the medics now!”

They had been waiting several hundred yards to the rear while the last of the Posse were wiped out from the ridge, which they had successfully seized in the opening round of the fight.

There must have been someone local with them, either willing or unwilling. Two hours before dawn fifty of them had emerged on the little-used Kazuma Trail, known only to hikers and mountain bikers, a path that led from the Piedmont below to the highest point on the crest overlooking the interstate and the flanking roads.

Seizing the half-dozen houses up there, wiping out the defenders in a matter of minutes, they had enfilading fire down onto the gap itself, with the defenders there pinned, unable to fire back.

Minutes later the main assaults came in, fifty vehicles up the flanking road, men and women on foot going through the railroad tunnel, and a column of nearly two hundred vehicles roaring up from Old Fort, led by a diesel truck with a snow plow mounted to the front.

The forward barrier fell, and then the next fallback position, where he was standing now, the bridge over the highway, since the houses above were perfect positions to fire down on it.

Though they were caught off guard by the surprise seizure of the houses and ridge above the gap, the rapid retreat had been part of his and Washington’s plan all along.

Washington was a superb marine, a superb trainer and leader, but John did realize now that all the crap about his being colonel .. . Washington had been right on that, too.

Washington’s plan was a classic defense on the high ground and John had vetoed it.

“Almost as bad as losing would be our winning too easily,” he had said. “We repulse them at the crest, they’ll take losses, retreat, and then do one of two things: either head off somewhere else or wait until the time is right and get us, and I think it would be the latter. Whoever is leading that band cannot afford even a single defeat; his own people will turn on him, kill him, and then come back yet again.”