The Devil’s Bargain had seemingly been sealed in the previous decade and the witch’s concoction that passed for a vaccine was seen as a Godsend, by the bulk of the poorly educated, ignorant masses that had bought the numerous fallacies and the propaganda surrounding the Covid-19 Vaccine hook, line and sinker, despite the significant deaths and all the bodies headed down the conveyor systems and into the furnaces. The government and its prostitutes in the boardrooms of the country’s media outlets and all the local newsrooms were touting its success and the final unbelievably low death rate of only ten percent among the vaccinated, although nobody could, or was even trying, to prove otherwise.

The government quack in chambers, Dr. Antonio Fauci, attributed the deaths to other ailments, and he noted that the deaths were primarily among the elderly. No matter that every single rational minded individual in every town across the country knew different and reason had many noting that too many people of all ages had already seemingly just vanished from the face of the earth.

Curiously enough, certain dissidents had become aware of a memo, asserted to be the genuine article, that was circulated at the highest levels of government, that supposedly read:

“Fauci is still really fucking things up, every time he opens his fat mouth. He’s out of control and acts as if he’s running things around here. He contradicts himself every few days. We will probably need to cancel him, before long. Give him an honorary medal, a Nobel, and then be sure he disappears in Lubyanska Psychiatric Hospital. Which new fake virus are we releasing for the next phase, Kaus?

The ‘new Covid’ fantasy isn’t selling. We’re thinking about a resurgence of Ebola and Zika — BOTH. We already have a lot of propaganda associated with them, and the hemorrhaging and bleeding that comes through Ebola already scares the hell out of everybody. That’s really useful, a real winner.

Are more lockdowns scheduled for America?”

Aside from this, regardless of what one knew or thought they knew, the one thing everyone knew for sure was that it was dangerous as all hell to speak up or ask any questions these days. Times had changed faster than Br’er Rabbit could hop to the next briar patch, the year Maggie McGuire had turned fifteen in 2021, and ten long years afterwards, here in 2031, Americans of any real age were troubled, sick with fear most days and largely on the brink of poverty, on any given day, depending on the path they had chosen at the Turning, the day America’s republic faded into the sunset, destroyed by Her enemies.

On the bright side, if one was to be had, the pandemic had come to an end, finally defeated, or so they were told – HURRAY – even though the virus was still out there in its “natural form”, ever changing and mutating, the other Big Lie they’d all been sold. Many wondered in private why the masks and lockdowns were still being mandated ten years later, as they seriously doubted that a cloth mask was much of a safety feature or that it would stop a resurgence of any disease. And so, nobody objected or said otherwise, at least not when strangers were near or the Federal Covid Certificate Inspectors who all wore insignia on their uniforms of a sword and a shield.

The CCI were mockingly known as “State Boys” or “Stasi” in association with the old communists of East Germany and the stories that still found their way through the community, despite the constant suppression of all history, other than the approved “knowledge” from the Ministry of State Security.

Maggie often found herself shaking her head at the incredible number of her countrymen she now rejected as foul sheep and traitors to everything good and decent that her parents and grandparents had impressed upon her from birth, as they seemed to not mind so much the turning away from liberty, simply donning their masks each day as if it was another piece of clothing. She knew it as a sign of submission to what her Grandad Grover called “the Leviathan”, just as she reviled those Americans who blindly followed the regular lockdown orders to stay indoors.

The constant hated refrain she always heard from those who saw her as some unclean, unwashed thing was “Rules are rules”, as they warned her that bad things would happen to her and her family, if she didn’t soon fall in line and “get with the program”. She avoided all government controlled areas, except for the most exceptional cases of any real emergency, that required something she couldn’t find elsewhere, like real and effective medicines under lock and key and controlled by government owned doctors, some of whom were secretly sympathetic to the dissenters and rebels, such as herself, her family and all of her close friends.

Of late, Maggie had noticed the Stasi were increasingly worried these days. Most Americans had rushed to comply with the Democratic Party Communists’ mandatory vaccination campaign, but pockets of people had flatly refused to take the vaccine, as they stated a host of reasons that mostly concerned health and religious reasons. Those who understood the vaccines were being used as a means of control over people had instead chosen to find refuge in the secluded countrysides of America, far off the grid in many cases, abandoning the use of the internet, cellphones and electronics in general so they couldn’t be traced by the Stasi goons they’d grown to hate. And, since the Turning had forced the economy to go completely cashless, the dissenters had returned to a trade and barter economy, that, to date, had worked out just fine and resulted in a fairly wonderful – if difficult – lifestyle, in many respects.

The Government hadn’t seen them as any real threat at first and they were largely ignored, because the Ministry of State Security didn’t expect them to manage to survive, as well as they had, outside the comfort of the State’s ever watchful domain. The Stasi had initially simply seen them as a bunch of country-bumpkin losers and “anti-vaxxers”, who could never possibly make their way through such a harsh lifestyle outside the relative “comfort” offered by embracing the Ministry’s welcome blanket. Dissenters were still not plentiful enough to be seen as an existential threat to the Ministry’s total control of all America and all Her resources and wealth.

Rumors had begun to fray at the Ministry’s nerves, and Chairman Joe, never right in the head, was even more unhinged these days, as his 90th birthday, than he was in 2021 when he and the Marxists and Maoists took control of the nation. They were all becoming near apoplectic over discovering that many small communities now had grown somewhat prosperous, even in the face of a harsh lifestyle, within the liberty they had chosen long ago for themselves and their families; it angered Chairman Joe right into another stroke, and now the Czar of Ministry and Truth, Kami Herod, would be damned if she was going to stand by and allow them to continue to dance and smile, enjoy their natural and delicious food or enjoy their lives, as the people were actually falling in love and going forth and procreating, populating their little niche of God’s Green Earth, just as mankind had always done, long before Big Brother.

Oh yes, Maggie knew all about Big Brother. Even though the book was banned and many thousands of copies had been burned over the decade, Granddad Grover had told her the story many times.

And so the persecutions began within a matter of weeks, as the Stasi rounded up the “unclean anti-vaxxers”, or the “Free Born Americans”, as they called themselves to anyone with ears to hear.

Communities everywhere were raided and too often destroyed outright for the crime of objecting to the tyrannical violation of simple common decency, after their Inalienable God-given Rights had already been so sorely abused and abrogated. Anyone the people considered a leader, even in the slightest of manners, was arrested and imprisoned for many days, sometimes weeks, and planting anything not specifically approved by the Ministry of State Security was declared “ILLEGAL” in big, bold, red letters and signs that were rapidly erected.

The Stasi were sent out to “educate” the masses, as they lectured that natural seeds not genetically modified under government oversight were dangerous and could lead to many other illnesses and birth defects. And, as they made their way, community by community, a good many men and women who had previously lived free, outside the government mandates, asking and wanting for nothing from the Leviathan, were arrested and vaccinated against their will, or they died in their attempts to escape the Stasi.

Free Born Americans were saddened and struck another hard mental and spiritual blow at the loss of so many of their brothers and sisters, so needlessly and only because they existed. The anger that coursed through their ranks, wherever they were found, was unlike anything the country had seen in centuries, white hot anger that was sure to wreak vengeance upon any government agents, wherever they could be found.

In the end, the Stasi couldn’t arrest and vaccinate all the renegades and rebels spread out throughout the land, since they had now taken to hiding among “the New Normal” masses, using fake Covid Certificates. And, as they word spread that the new resistance was growing and effective, these rebels connected with others who were also unvaccinated and in hiding from the Stasi, who had missed locating and identifying them over the past decade.

Maggie was one of them. From the first day of her birth on September 15th 2006, literally born in a barn, in Irish Town, Tennessee, she had never been vaccinated. Now that organic farming was illegal, she was forced to move to a small village, just up from her long-time home, and now she was just getting by doing whatever work she could find available, along with teaching art classes for several of the local middle school aged children. An extremely talented artist, much reminiscent of the style of Cindy Press, who was executed as an “Enemy of the State”, she had learned to draw and paint from her earliest years, and she could sing in divine fashion too, with a voice like an angel.

As soon as it became apparent that the Turning brought an evil wind with it, danger and death, Granddad Grover had seen to it that Maggie was provided with a fake Covid Vaccine Certificate, that was virtually undetectable from the real deal. The only thing that could expose her was a bio-test, that could determine if anyone had received their prescribed “jab”, but she was careful to avoid any situation that would place her in any position as this, so unwelcome. It was the sort of position that had cost her parents their own lives and left young Maggie to the care of her Granddad, who loved her more than life itself.

For the next five years, Maggie and hundreds of others managed to survive and avoid any close calls with government agents, but it was far from a desirable way to live, and hard as all hell on many days. She had never had it so hard in her own community, where she and her kind had lived freely by their own rules. And now as others were forced to hide, wear masks in order to go undetected and basically follow the diktats of Chairman Joe and the Ministry of State Security, Maggie flitted in and out of the shadows and avoided contact with anyone she didn’t know, having already received thousands of dollars in fines, and, more recently, threats of imprisonment, which implied almost certain death. She wondered what was the point, if they all weren’t to be free anyway, and as she waited for her Granddad Grover who promised he’d return for her, after he’d been forced to flee Stasi security forces in a pitch battle one late night.

But Maggie had promised her parents, who had died in a fierce fire-fight with State Security soldiers, that she would always remain faithful to the principles, virtue and honor that they had instilled within her, those same principles and virtues that America Herself had been founded upon. And so, there would be no compromise for her. She resisted and refused to comply, since she knew deep within her heart of hearts that this current tyranny could not go on forever, without something breaking hard like an explosion all across their society. She hoped that she and her people would one day be free again.

Call it “Fate”, call it pure, damned bad luck, the Stasi finally snagged Maggie in one of their sporadic dragnets, one early morning in something she recognized as her own stupid mistake. She was out to retrieve one one the many “survival packages” Granddad had been leaving for her, near an old oak tree they had long marked as an agreed point for meetings and drops of letters and supplies, and such. The patrol had approached her and asked to see her Covid Vaccine Certificate, demanding “CV mam!” As she slowly reached into the inside pocket of her new jacket, she automatically realized her CV Certificate was at home in the pocket of her old jacket.

Appearing anywhere in public without one’s CV was strictly illegal, and so they scanned her arm, only to find no sign of vaccination. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing, so they administered the test again and once more, they found no trace of antibodies in her system. Unable to explain it away or produce a valid CV, and with the Certificate at her home discovered to be a counterfeit, Maggie was arrested and unceremoniously prodded along to a cell in Lubyanska Psychiatric Hospital, the federal prison operated by the Ministry of Truth, resolved to hold herself erect as the wind blew through her auburn hair and the morning light glinted off her steely-blue eyes, that flashed anger with each strike of a rifle-butt that hit her shoulders.

Later, in one of Lubyanska’s infamous interrogation rooms, Maggie sat face to face with Captain Alex Ocasio-Guevera, Chief of the Vaccine Enforcement Unit, as he suggested to her:

“There is an easy path out of all of this, dear Maggie. Just take the jab and You’ll be free.”

Granddad’s ire raised up in her, as did some of his salty language, which came in handy at this moment, and Maggie harshly retorted:

“Like Hell! That’ll be the damned day. Never! You can go fuck yourself, ’cause You’ll have to kill me first.”

Alex closed his eyes, placed his hands to his lips as though praying and smiled a wicked smile, as he thought to himself, it certainly was an option, and legal too, with the recent change to the Constitution. But it wasn’t his preferred option, because he needed Maggie to freely choose the vaccine to keep her from becoming a martyr and an inspiration to a growing rank of rebels, an neither did he need anyone to start thinking the vaccine really was sinister in any way. He was one of the few of his ilk who actually believed that winning by persuasion was better than resorting to force, and he was also a true believer in his own righteousness.

For the life of him, he failed to be able to understand her stubborn refusal, her firm refusal to comply, especially since he had voluntarily taken the vaccine himself, as he told her. Hadn’t all the other members of the upper classes voluntarily taken it, too? Well … Hadn’t they? He had taken it because he believed in law and order, but also and primarily, he believed in the vaccine.

Captain Guevera was essentially as honorable a man as one could find in the ranks of these Cancel Culture Marxists, and he truly believed that sooner rather than later, he would convince her of the rightness of doing as he asked. He felt certain he could make her see that her reluctance was a result of the trauma of her adolescent years, a harsh life by many people’s standards and the unfortunate experience of witnessing both her parents die in a hard fought gun-battle with the State Boys, and while he had hit on part of her reasoning, for Maggie, the clincher to never abandon her principles and her own righteous conscience came when she heard her dear, loving parents named “criminals” and “outlaws”, by real criminals and outlaws, traitors to America, who weren’t worth the spit in her mouth.

She meant it, when she had thought to herself that she’d “die and go to Hell first” before she would comply and submit to any injection. She had slowly looked up as she awakened from her own thoughts and told Capt. Guevera that she preferred prison to vaccination and refusal to compromise. She even refused to see a State psychiatrist, and so, Maggie sat in that prison for many months.

It was her birthday, the day that the warden brought Maggie the book she had requested, entitled Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. As she glowed inside, she started to read, and there, inside the first few pages, she found a handwritten note that suggested, “Ask for salt tonight, when they deliver Your dinner“, and it was signed, “A friend”.

It left her puzzled, since it had been years between the time she had any contact with anyone from her former life. She decided to see what would happen, and indeed, she asked for extra salt that evening. Her jailer didn’t flinch or give the slightest hint of recognition or suspicion, and she brought Maggie a small white salt-shaker, that appeared to be a normal shaker in every way. But upon opening it and poking about a bit, she soon found a small key and a note inside, covered in the salt.

The note explained that the key was to her cell door and all the guards had either been bribed or drugged, in order to secure her safe escape from the prison. It continued with instructions and directions to a cabin in the surrounding woods, where others like her, members of the resistance, would meet her. And about midnight, her adventurous journey began, as she made her successful departure from the place that she hated, hiding her face in her hair and a cloth wrap, that had been her Granma’s headscarf.

Several hours later and many good miles covered, even though she walked every step of the way, the sun was rising in the eastern sky, when she reached he destination, knocking on the door in anticipation. No one answered and she finally just turned the handle and walked on in, quite cautiously so as not to disturb the silence. And then she saw him, a man in an armchair, with his back to her, as he promptly exclaimed, “So You’re finally here”, in a voice she seemed to recognize. She was hoping it was an old patriot from her community, but turning to face her, it was none other than Captain Alex Ocasio-Guevera.

Of course it had been a trap. Part of her knew it would, but she had to play out the hand God had shown her and damn the consequences, for at least now she knew beyond all doubt. Her adversaries had wanted to raise her hopes, only to dash them, as a cruel form of mental torture, in their own elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, and now they would accuse her of sedition, for attempting to join the resistance and the rebels, who were now fighting guerrilla campaigns in nearly every town in the country. Maggie could easily be tried in a military court and sentenced to death.

In a matter of days, she was condemned to death by firing squad.

With each new rising sun, Maggie was offered a full pardon in exchange for her acquiescing to take the Covid vaccination on national television to be broadcast on every major station, and with each new setting sun, she refused. if she was to die, Maggie intended to die on her own terms. She would rather die like the early Christian martyrs or Saint Joan D’Arc, thrown to the lions or burned at the stake, than to submit to the tyrants who had taken everything from her in life, except her own free will and her righteous conscience.

Try as they might, there was no convincing Maggie to receive the jab. They knew this was fast turning into a major fiasco, since there was no way she could leave Lubyanska without either taking the vaccine or being executed, and at this point, with the rebel cause gaining momentum, they couldn’t withstand Maggie being turned into a hero for the Free Born Americans — Maggie who at age thirty-two had spent over half her life, by this time, either resisting or actively fighting against the tyranny imposed upon Free Born Americans, by those who had been born here only to betray the country of their birth that had given them so much, those mentally deficient, spiritually void, subhuman communists, traitors one and all.

So, a decision came down from no one less than Chairman Joe himself, that Maggie would be executed on Christmas Day in secret, and the official report would note that having never been vaccinated, she was not immune from Covid-19 and contracted it and subsequently died from its effects.

Christmas arrived fast, faster than Maggie wanted. She had worked and prayed for a new opening and a good, viable escape plan to no avail, and so she was now preparing to meet her appointed time with the Grim Reaper, thinking of a song Granddad used to sing about being offered “one last sup from the potter’s cup, when The Man comes around”, and the verses Granddad would recite, from Luke 22:18-20:

“For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given to you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

The sun was just coming up over the horizon, as the Stasi snipers escorted Maggie into the prison courtyard, to be shot. She had refused all offers to “allow” her to announce her regret publicly and she had even refused a last meal. She also refused the blindfold, not wanting anything to be covering her face on this fateful morning, to later be mischaracterized by State Media and the propagandists of the Ministry of Truth, as a face mask voluntarily donned in a final act of contrition to the State.

Maggie’s steely-blue eyes pierced into the eyes of each of her executioners, just before they raised their rifles. She was not afraid as she knew she had long ago found her own salvation, through Jesus Christ, Her Lord and Savior. Her hair flowed in the wind and she smiled at the soldiers with a confident smile that said “You may kill my body but You will never touch my soul”. And as she awaited the arrival of the bullets, that would send her on to her Maker, she remembered a song her own mother used to sing, in the years before she died.

In a flash of her mind’s eye, before the orders came to make “ready”, to “aim” and “fire”, there came the thunderous roar of two helicopters bearing the State Security emblem with guns a blazing and cutting the executioners in half. A second later a massive whole is blown in the side of the wall and men on horseback charged on, firing every firearm imaginable as the troop ran from quarters to meet the attack. And there was Granddad Grover sitting tall on Ol’ Smokey with his Browning automatic rifle cutting men down left and right as he bore down upon her, stopping just long enough to help her up behind him, as the entire group simultaneously turned and showed them their horse’s rumps on the way out, with answering bullets whizzing past them and into them.

Maggie squeezed her Granddad tight as they rode into the woods, telling him how much she loved him and how she feared she would never see him again, this side of Heaven.

The band of Free Born Americans, rebels in the best sense of the word, drove on ’til nightfall and the breaching of the perimeters of a clearing, where other men and women had fires going and food cooking. What a sight it was for men who had just so narrowly escaped death.

Granddad pulled Smokey to a halt and slid to the ground behind Maggie, after she dismounted. Pulling a sheath of papers from his shirt, he said, “Maggie, My Dear Lil’ Sweet Maggie … You rest for an hour here and then You must follow this map to the last destination marked. I’ll meet You there in Levasy, but first there is much I have left to finish here.“

Maggie responded, “OH GRANDAD … I thought I’d never see You again!” … Grabbing him and squeezing him tight to her finding it hard to believe that he was still going so strong at 80 years old. She released him only to discover her hand was covered in blood and her Grandad had been shot. But he wasn’t complaining … Oh no … you’d never hear Grover Judea Smith utter the first word of complaint, even if he was dying.

He gently smiled and said, “Don’t you worry none, Sweetie. Your ol’ granddad ain’t done by a longshot, no sirree … not by a long shot. Say … would You sing Your Momma’s song for me, before You have to be on Your way? You know the one.”

And with a voice that could summon angels to earth, Maggie sang the song…

“And when You come and all the flowers are dying – If I am dead, as dead I well may be – You’ll come and find the place where I am lying – And kneel and say an Ave there for me.”

April 2, 2021

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.