First Light

CHAPTER THREE

Franklin Wheeler stood on a small wooden platform he’d built in the crotch of a massive oak tree.

He’d built the platform two years before, one of the first additions to the compound he’d constructed on national park land in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In those days, he slept in a tent that was tucked under a rock ledge, surviving out of a backpack that contained a collapsible fishing rod, ready-to-eat military surplus meals, a few basic hand tools, a Coleman liquid fuel lantern, a first aid kit, and a water-purifying system. His Snow Leopard sleeping bag was rated to forty below zero, but the summer nights had been warm enough for him to sleep under open stars. That initial expedition led him to choose the isolated ridge as the perfect site for his compound.

From the platform twenty feet above the ridge line, he could see miles in the distance, the great Appalachian ridges rolling away like blue-green waves into the distance before leveling off across Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. Although the haze of Ohio coal-burning plants often veiled the sky, on clear, cool nights the fuzzy lights of Charlotte were visible 150 miles to the southeast. Now, though, all he saw was the late-summer foliage, pocked here and there with great windows of speckled granite, and the tiny rooftops of distant homes burrowed in the slopes. A mile beneath him wound a ribbon of asphalt known on the maps as the Blue Ridge Parkway, a national scenic route, but which Franklin considered the tyrant’s racetrack for overland invasion.

Franklin scanned the road with his binoculars. The usual intermittent stream of tourist traffic passed below, Floridians and New Yorkers making their own type of invasion. But they were harmless next to the slumbering beasts in D.C., Beijing, and Moscow. But all dragons appeared to be sleeping in the day’s heat. The platform didn’t quite afford a full panoramic view, but between his makeshift crow’s nest and other lookout points on the ridge, Franklin figured his compound was secure for another day.

He climbed down the series of wooden slats nailed into the oak’s trunk and checked the gate. After selecting this ridge for his compound, he’d spent a year hauling materials via the old logging roads that crisscrossed the mountain. In his younger days, he’d protested the U.S. Forest Service’s granting of timber rights to private corporations, but now he was grateful for the limited access their abandoned roads provided. The transport had been a laborious process, often using an all-terrain vehicle, but he’d dragged enough chain-link fence and concrete mix up the mountain to enclose a two-thousand-square-foot perimeter among the trees.

The fence wouldn’t deter a serious military assault, and a drone could sail right over it and blast him to hell and gone, but the government had lost interest in him since he’d dismantled the Freewheeler Movement. He’d gone through a few fringe groups over the decades, and his first underground newspaper had been typewritten manifestos mixed with pen-and-ink cartoons, Xeroxed for three cents a sheet and sold for a nickel.

The Internet had granted him a cheaper and broader platform, and he’d blogged prolifically as Freewheelin’ Franklin, a nod to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. But while the Freaks were all about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Down With the Establishment, Franklin Wheeler saw the darker strains of threats and conspiracies. Politics was a wrestling match where the audience—the voters—cheered while the goons in the ring—the middle management bureaucrats—beat each other with chairs while the real thugs—the wealthy elite—picked everyone’s pocket from the skybox.

The 9/11 attacks had made every libertarian and patriot a target as D.C. seized the opportunity to roll the CIA, FBI, NCS, and the military into one big standing army called Homeland Security. As righteously offended as Franklin had been at the naked power grab and the militaristic streak that extended all the way down to school janitors and ambulance drivers, he was also wise enough to heed the shifting climate. The Freewheeler Movement was never a red-alert threat, since Franklin thought populist armed resistance was idiotic. What was the point of fighting for the right to bear semi-automatics when the government owned drones, tanks, and nuclear warheads? Franklin’s interests had shifted from domestic problems to the larger reality that the world probably wouldn’t last long enough for the Rise of Imaginary Hitler.

The dangerous and heavily armed cranks moved to Montana, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, drawing all the attention with their recruiting pitches in Soldier of Fortune. Franklin’s blog, on the other hand, became a Web destination for the discontent, bored, and deranged—an amalgam of losers that could never be forged into a real social force, much less a militia. The government soon tossed his dossier in the bottom cabinet with UFO enthusiasts and Bigfoot fanatics. As Franklin’s visibility faded, he embraced it not as a failure but as an opportunity.

The opportunity was this mountain compound he called Wheelerville.

Population: one, with the mayor also serving as street sweeper, minstrel, and shoe-shine boy.

Franklin checked the vegetables in the garden, picking some turnips to feed the goats in the adjacent pen. He often let the goats browse in the wild, but today he didn’t feel like hoofing it across the slopes to retrieve them at nightfall. Despite the ongoing crush of civilization and species extinction, the Blue Ridge was still home to predators like coyotes and bobcats.

And predators like the U.S. Army.

Franklin had heard the rumors of a secret installation for years. But even if it existed, Franklin took it as a good sign for his own security. The army was corrupt, but it wasn’t dumb. The army was smart enough to pick a safe zone for any secret bases.

As the oldest mountain range in the world, the Appalachian terrain was stable and unlikely to suffer earthquakes. Likewise, a megatsunami caused by the Canary Island volcano shelf plopping into the sea would never reach this far inland. Hurricanes and tornados were broken up by the foothills, and the climate was relatively temperate for a deciduous rain forest. Indeed, the biggest threat was a prolonged blizzard, but Franklin had enough firewood and stored food to hold out for months if necessary.

His one-room cabin was built with an adjoining storage shed that featured a series of solar panels on top, oriented toward the southeast. He opened the shed and checked the battery banks that stored the converted energy. The batteries were also connected to a micro turbine that Franklin operated on the windiest days, and he also had a backup generator with a paddle wheel that exploited rushing creek water to generate power. Seeing that the bank of batteries was fully charged, Franklin disconnected the solar panels and closed the shed, which was lined with thin sheets of copper and aluminum. The metal shielding acted as a Faraday cage, protecting the batteries and equipment from electromagnetic radiation caused by a thermonuclear explosion. If Al-Qaeda detonated a dirty bomb in the atmosphere over D.C., the pulse would wipe out half the country’s infrastructure but Franklin could still work his radios and computer, which were also stored in Faraday cages when not in use.

Franklin entered his cabin, opening the windows to catch the afternoon breeze. He sat at his table and connected his shortwave radio, scanning the channels. After a burst of screeching static, he zeroed in on a familiar voice.

“Charlie One-Niner, come in,” Franklin said into his desktop microphone. “It’s your buddy, the Unknown Soldier.”

“Soldier?” said the cracked and dusty-sounding male voice on the speaker. “What in the hell’s going on down in the land of cotton?”

Franklin had adopted the radio handle to throw any federal snoopers off his scent, and on the air he pretended he was based in Alabama, where even his most paranoid ramblings would not seem out of place. Shortwave radio signals were virtually impossible to track, so Franklin used it to network with like-minded people around the world. It was also his sole social outlet if you didn’t count the goats and chickens, and he tried not to count them too often.

“Probably about the same as up there in Canada,” he replied. “Only with worse health care and no moose to shoot.”

“We’re in a record heat wave,” Charlie said. “Bet it’s breaking a hundred and ten down there.”

Franklin glanced at the thermometer on his tiny weather station. Seventy-nine, with barometric pressure rising. Pretty seasonal for August in the mountains, although the humidity was thick enough to cut with a rusty knife. “Close,” he lied. “But I’ll live.”

“And some of those idiots still say global warming is just a goddamned theory.”

“If you backtrack on those assholes, you usually find a pipeline between their bank accounts and the oil and coal industries,” Franklin said. One thing he liked about his faceless friends is that they dispensed with small talk like the weather and immediately started solving the world’s problems.

If only we had an audience as big as Rush Limbaugh’s and Howard Stern’s, we’d save the human race whether they wanted it or not.

“Once you get your Alaskan pipeline built, maybe the U.S. will quit bombing the hell out of the Middle East.”

“Yeah, but then we’d have to invade you, good buddy. Got to feed those defense contractors.”

“Fine with me. Just don’t make me drink that watered-down American beer. Budweiser. Christ, I’d rather drink moose piss.”

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” Franklin said. “So what’s happening with the ice caps? Still melting?”

“I’m pretty high up here in Ottawa, but I’ll bet Alabama goes underwater in five years,” Charlie said. “Maybe you’ll have some nice beachfront property.”

“It’s a liberal plot to do away with the Red States,” Franklin said. “Take away the Deep South and the Democrats will hold the White House for the next century.”

“You never did tell me what party you support.”

“Lemonade Party. I think you ought to run the government like a lemonade stand. Serve it up on the sidewalk, cold and sweet for a nickel a glass.”

“That’s just the heat getting to you.”

“Could be. Don’t take much to bring me to a boil these days.”

“Speaking of heat, did you hear about the big solar storm?”

Franklin had adopted a policy of “Ignorance is bliss,” focusing mostly on daily survival and maintaining a sustainable compound. While he owned a tablet computer with an ethernet card that allowed him to connect to the Web via satellite, he rarely prowled the Internet for news anymore, simply because he no longer trusted any sources. Even Charlie.

“No,” he said into his microphone. “I’ve been too busy picking cotton and stuffing it in my ears.”

“Scientists say it’s going to be one of the biggest on record. Supposed to shut down radio communications and TV and shit like that. Government’s putting out official warnings.”

“Does that mean I won’t be able to hear your angelic voice for a while?”

“Careful, Soldier, or I’m going to sing you a lullaby and it might start the cats to howling.”

“Well, from what I know of solar storms, they can blow the hell out of the electrical grid. Can’t imagine what they’d do in New York if the lights went out for a week.”

“Come on, Soldier. You know how fragile the whole system is. You blow out all those transformers and you can’t replace them all for years. Plus, you need power to manufacture the new ones. Sort of a Catch-22.”

“Don’t sound so excited about it, Charlie. I might start thinking you’re one of those Doomsday nut jobs.”

“Well, that’s worst-case scenario. But if it happens…”

A pause filled Franklin’s cabin, a high band of white noise coming from the speaker. Franklin eventually completed the thought. “Total shutdown. No gasoline pumps, no grocery stores, no air conditioning or heat, economic collapse.”

“Now you’re the one getting all excited. I swear, you’re starting to breathe heavy, like a teenage boy with his first Penthouse.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault everybody got dependent on a government run by foreign bankers. But I’ll be ready when it hits, whether it’s an asteroid, a pole shift, World War III, or a Martian invasion.”

“Assuming you live long enough.”

“I’ll be around as long as I need to be.” Franklin thought of his family. His wife Bitsy had died of breast cancer, and their daughter Laurel had disowned him after his political views attracted too much notoriety. She wanted to protect her two daughters from him and his twisted views, she said.

Well, Chelsea had been taken from them all, leaving only Rachel. And Rachel was his hope. They’d maintained an uneasy correspondence hidden from Laurel, but Franklin felt a desperate need to leave some sort of legacy. Rachel wasn’t exactly a convert, but at least she was kind enough to humor his occasional emails.

“Well, you better research the solar storm,” Charlie said. “Even though you can only trust half of what the mainstream media tells you.”

“They feed you just enough of the truth to keep you stupid.” Franklin was suddenly anxious to get off the radio. “but I’m on it.”

The evening seemed to have grown warmer.