Worth the Price

by Fredrik Haerne

22 November 2003

The hero looked around. This part of the ship's deck was empty, deceptively calm, but he knew that the enemy was closing in. A hatch opened, and he fired in that direction; the hatch quickly slammed shut again. He could hear shouts from a building in the harbor, and he realized that guards would soon be on their way to back up the crewmen. He was running out of both time and ammunition, but he was not prepared to give up just yet.

He ran to shelter and glanced at his watch; five minutes left before the bombs he and comrades no longer alive had set up would go off and blow the ship to smithereens. And him with it, should he remain onboard. He looked out over the ship's railing, down at the dark water, but he realized that a jump would not save him from the shockwaves. His chiseled features tightened in grim determination as he reloaded his automatic weapon for a final stand.

Wait, what was that? The sound of rotor blades above startled him, and he was surprised at the speed at which the enemy had brought in reinforcements. But when he looked up a smile crossed his lips, because up there in a stolen police helicopter was his good friend William, looking down at him.

"Quick, grab hold of this!" William shouted, rolling out a rope ladder. The hero fired at an enemy soldier who appeared in a doorway, killed him quickly, and then bravely threw himself through the air to grab hold of the ladder. As the pilot steered the helicopter away from the ship the hero looked at his watch, and then, just as they had reached relative safety, the bombs went off. The ship, a majestic Navy cruiser, was transformed into a ball of fire and molten steel.

William helped him climb onboard the helicopter: "I thought you could use some help, Andy!"

"Willie! I thought you were done for!" Andrew Davis said, shaking his friend's hand. William laughed:

"It will take more than a few ZOG lackeys to kill this old rebel. And I'm glad to see you're alive as well. That was a dangerous stunt, Andy! I came as soon as I heard."

"The show must go on," the hero said soberly, "and our struggle is far from over. They got Michael, Willie. And they got Caithlin too. Their deaths must be avenged."

"You are right. Where should we go now?" William asked, and Andrew looked out into the distance.

"To Texas," he said finally. "That's where the next battle will be fought. We will make our enemies wish they never set foot in America." William nodded, and the helicopter sped off toward the sunset.

The audience applauded, as was the custom even though the actors in the movie could not hear them. They grabbed their soda cans and popcorn and left as the credits started rolling. Brian Cray, his wife, their three children and his father lined up with the rest and headed for the exit.

"That was great, dad!" Brian's eight-year-old son Matthew chimed. "I wanna be a rebel too!"

"You can't be a rebel, stupid," his older sister corrected him. Two years older, she acted like the boy's mother. "There are no rebels."

"Are too!" her brother said, waving an imaginary gun at her.

"No there aren't!" she insisted. "Dad, tell him!"

"There are no rebels now, Matthew," Brian said, "but the army was founded by them."

"Can I be a soldier then?" Matthew said. "Like grandpa?" He looked at his grandfather, and the old man harrumphed.

"Bah, the army! A bunch of brats with guns. In my days we didn't even have uniforms, and we weren't pampered like they are today. We had to fight for real, but it was nothing like that!" He waved at the credits rolling by. "Andrew Davis blowing up a ship with bombs? Right!"

"Didn't you like the movie?" his son's wife asked him, and the old man shook his head.

"It's no good showing kids that, they have no idea what real war is like. What it was like. A gun in one hand and a woman in the other? Hah!"

"It's only a movie," Brian told his father.

"Nothing is ever only a movie, son. Now, Matthew," the old man went on, turning to the young boy, "if you want to learn real warfare you should go to Europe and join the Legions. They are doing real duty. It would do you good."

The boy shone with anticipation and looked at his father. "Can I go to Europe, dad?"

"No, you can't!" Brian said sternly to the boy, with an annoyed glance sideways at his own father. "You'll stay right here, young man. Move along now." He gave his son a gentle push, and the boy ran to join his sisters ahead.

"Don't tell him things like that," Brian warned the old man. "You'll put bad ideas in his head."

"And that movie didn't? I'm telling you, a couple of years in the Legions would do wonders for the boy when he's in his teens. At the very least he won't have time to watch bad attempts at making a hero out of Andrew Davis."

"Andrew Davis was a hero!" Brian's wife insisted, shocked by the old man's irreverence. It was Victory Day after all; the movie release had been timed for it. "He saved Texas! He fought at Denver!"

"Worst slacker I ever saw," the old man went on, unconcerned by the looks of some of the passers-by as they reached the streets outside. "Cheated at cards, too. It surprised me they never put him in the can. But then, when your father is one of the leaders of the revolution you get all sorts of privileges." Not much of it was true, but he couldn't stand the idolization of Davis in a trilogy of movies, of which they had now been watching part two.

Brian let the matter drop, knowing that a discussion about the war could go on forever. "Anyway," he said quickly before his wife could speak again, "are you coming with us back home?"

"Nah, I think I'll go for a walk." The older man pointed with his cane down the street, where they had watched a parade pass by a few hours ago. "I'll go buy a newspaper. See you in an hour." And with that he said goodbye to his son and his daughter-in-law and went on his way.

"Andy Davis, a hero! They'll make movies about anything these days," he muttered, buttoning his coat while walking. A slightly chilly September breeze reminded him that the nights would soon be getting colder. "Next thing you know they'll be making movies about Albertans." He walked down the street heading for the town square, his cane beating at the cobblestones; shrapnel in his hip had made the sturdy cane a necessity many years ago. He had no conscious plan for his stroll, but he soon found that his legs were carrying him toward a familiar statue at one end of the square. It towered over him, a man in a general's uniform smiling into the distance. An ocean of flowers had been placed around its base.

"And you," he said to the statue, "you would have liked that movie, wouldn't you? But he was your son. We forgive our sons anything. It's our fathers we can't forgive. . . ."

Robert Cray didn't like being old, but he accepted it as a fact of life. And generally, life had been good to him. His wife had been a wonderful woman, who had given him many loving years before the cancer took her. They had two sons together, Brian and Arthur, who had both gone to Rockwell to study law. Six grandchildren, with one more on the way. He lived in a peaceful town in a peaceful country on a continent that had hopefully seen its last war. That last one had been enough for a while. In Robert's mind the scenes would never rest: the fires, the screams at night, the blood in the snow where White women and children had been massacred when the rebels had been too late to protect them.

"Oh, God. . . ." he muttered as he remembered. Even today, so many years later, the screams of the wounded and dying would not be silent. Anything could bring them back; a book, a name, or this statue.

He looked up once again at Thomas Davis, one of the men who had brought on the war when peace would have meant slow death. A captain turned agitator, and then general in an uprising the like of which had never been seen; a man who had led thousands and inspired millions. Robert Cray had been one of the young men who had followed this leader away from Chicago on a march to Minnesota while civilization staggered and fell around them. Terrorism, depression, riots, martial law, and a plague spanning a continent -- in a few years the gates to hell had opened and swallowed entire nations. Finally the war had come, a war of races that many had warned of but few had had the power to imagine. There were many sides and little organization; many factions that were simply forced to work together by the necessity of the moment. In some places the conflicts had been low key, while in others cities had crumbled to dust.

Robert Cray had lived through it all, and he remembered the anger he had felt back then, even as a young boy in the relatively peaceful nineties. Anger at who? The government, mainly, but also at those who had done nothing to stop the slide toward disaster. Those like his father. "We were the children of cowards," he told himself now. "They saw it all happen, but they did nothing. They went along . . . went along with it all. We had to pick up the bill." He looked down at the ground and tried to recall when he had last seen his parents. Communications had broken down quickly in his native Chicago, and he had had to make a swift decision: follow the man who promised freedom, or go back home to bondage and relative safety. He had chosen freedom, and his decision turned out to be the right one: soon there had been no safety left anywhere.

"You led us through hell," he told the statue, looking up again. "And there was no glamor in it. There had been no glamor before that either. 'White Nationalists' we had called ourselves -- 'racists' said the media. I don't remember any high-sounding oaths, or cheerful jokes, like in the movies today. Nobody was itching to die for the cause. We didn't know what would happen; we despaired. We wanted the war, but couldn't imagine what it would be like. Most of the time it looked like we were losing." He thought of the first part of the trilogy about the young Andrew Davis, a movie where White Nationalists had gathered in secret to prepare a revolution. They had all been full of confidence on the screen, and the only doubter had turned into a traitor who was killed at the end. The old man shook his head.

"We all had doubts," he told the statue. "It wasn't just the evil traitors who left. Many good men quit because they couldn't handle the pressure. People on the streets didn't smile at us, didn't nod in secret confidence; that scene about a family hiding Andrew from the police, that's bull. They hated us . . . our own kind did . . . and that was worse than anything else. . . ." A name and a face came back from the recesses of his mind, a young woman who he had loved and been loved by in return. They had been engaged, but she couldn't take the pressure, couldn't handle his fighting for a cause that seemed to be doomed from the start. That was long before any armed conflict had begun. If only they had known!

A young boy and girl passed by, hand in hand, and they smiled at him. Robert smiled back. The boy, seventeen, looked strong and promising in his Sunday suit; the girl was beautiful in her long, sleek dress. Kids from the neighborhood; he knew their parents. They took for granted what had been called "extremism" when Robert was their age, and when they watched the movies or read the novels about those dark, final years they couldn't possibly know, couldn't possibly feel the fear all Whites had felt back then. When a war is long since over and you read about it, when you know how it is going to end, you have already lost the most important ingredient for understanding what it was like: that uncertainty where the future is a black hole about which you know nothing.

That was what had cost them so many before the war started, Robert thought. Not knowing if you would win or lose was a far bigger drawback for recruitment than the anti-White laws. People are, paradoxically, prepared to do anything for a cause they know is going to prevail, but they will do much less for a cause the future of which is uncertain.

"Perhaps that's why you were successful," Robert said to the statue of Thomas Davis. "Not because you were a mean old bastard who chewed grenades for breakfast. Not because your son was a superhero, which he sure wasn't . . . even though he had his good points, I suppose. But you told us we would win, and you made us believe you. It's all in the presentation, eh, you son of a bitch? How many died under your command? But they died willingly, 'cause they knew they would be remembered as heroes. Because that's what you told them. Well, you had to do it, and you saved us. I don't care for those other leaders much; you were the first, and you showed the results that made the rest follow. So I suppose I should salute you." He brought his cane up, and its handle touched the side of his forehead. He smiled, even as tears threatened to well up in his eyes. The memories of the dead were still hard to handle.

Robert leaned on his cane again and paused for a while, listening to the sound of laughter and light conversation coming from a coffee shop not far away. Above him the general was smiling in a way Robert knew had been characteristic, making him wonder who had created this statue. "You've made it possible for me to go home and enjoy the pot roast my son's wife has prepared today. No one is starving anymore. It's the results that matter, right? I just wish more people could have known it was worth the price; we would have had more on our side then from the start. Well . . . sleep tight, wherever you are."

Heaven must be too calm for a man like Thomas Davis; he was probably down in hell right now, his son by his side, sending his troops out to destroy some remaining knot of devilish resistance. Robert chuckled at the thought, as he left the town square in Jefferson City to join his family. It was a peaceful evening.

FREDRIK HAERNE

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