American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent Read online

  The Ascent

  American Dreams

  Book 2

  Written by

  BRIAN PARKER

  Illustrated by

  AJ POWERS

  Edited by

  AURORA DEWATER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Notice: The views expressed herein are NOT endorsed by the United States Government, Department of Defense or Department of the Army.

  The Ascent

  American Dreams, book 2

  Copyright © 2020 by Brian Parker

  All rights reserved. Published by Phalanx Press.

  www.PhalanxPress.com

  Edited by Aurora Dewater

  Cover art designed by AJ Powers

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  Works available by Brian Parker

  Five Roads to Texas

  Five Roads to Texas ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B07CV411SH

  After the Roads ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B07FPWD1L7

  The Road to Hell ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B07N9563CV

  The Days Before (a prequel) ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B07W94Z32T

  Easytown Novels

  The Immorality Clause ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01HWOH1VC

  Tears of a Clone ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01NBDUZSH

  West End Droids & East End Dames ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B07436C21L

  High Tech/Low Life: An Easytown Anthology ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B0787D6ZY6

  The Path of Ashes

  A Path of Ashes ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00XATPU9E

  Fireside ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B015ONZOU8

  Dark Embers ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01CPSAI1A

  Washington, Dead City

  GNASH ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01ACTBBZQ

  REND ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01AYEQRUI

  SEVER ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B01C7VEMG2

  Stand Alone Works

  Grudge ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y5QS6J6

  Enduring Armageddon ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00XZA2UQY

  Origins of the Outbreak ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00MN7UFBW

  The Collective Protocol ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00KUZDY4O

  Battle Damage Assessment ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00PCND2RI

  Zombie in the Basement ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00H6DUXY2

  Self-Publishing the Hard Way ~ www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNQCZ9I

  Plus, many more anthology contributions and short stories.

  PROLOGUE

  Director Goodman clasped her hands behind her back as she paced in front of the windows of her corner office. Sixteen floors below, at ground level, a veritable army waited on her commands. Officers and soldiers from the Civic Enforcement Agency, Austin Police Department, and the Texas National Guard stood shoulder to shoulder with one another, guarding the entrance to the building against the separatist mob. She debated having the Army guys open up with their machine guns and blast all of those people to Hell, but her command over them was tenuous at best. It would be a terrible thing to lose the support of the Guard right now like some offices in other parts of the nation had.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She’d worked for years—over a decade, in fact—to help bring about a reorganization of America’s government. The new government, officially called the New American Republic, or NAR, was simply called the System by most and was completely egalitarian. Everyone was equal under the System as long as they accepted citizenship. The System provided food for the needy and made sure that the rich didn’t hoard it for themselves. Everyone was entitled to have a place to live, homelessness had virtually disappeared. Healthcare was provided by the State, free of charge to all. Students could continue their education freely without a massive student loan debt upon graduation. Racism and bigotry were eliminated and punishable under the law. It was a perfect society for all.

  She sneered as she looked down upon the thousands of people in the crowd. They’d been given the world on a silver platter and they were spitting on it, throwing it back in the faces of their benefactors. They were the ungrateful mob, the unwashed horde. They were an anathema to the NAR and everything it stood for.

  “Agent Newman,” she intoned without turning back to the senior officers seated around the conference table.

  “Yes, Madam Director?”

  That did bring a smile to her face. Newman had begun calling her that several months ago once they began sleeping together and it had stuck. Now, most of the agency here in Austin addressed her as such. Given the level of power the NAR had bestowed upon her, it was appropriate.

  “I want this filth cleared away from my building. In fact, I want a three—no, four block exclusion zone for protestors established in all directions, to include the State Capitol grounds.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Newman said. She could hear his pen scratching against his pad of paper on the table. The utter silence in the room was comforting to her.

  “Any word on Agents Rogan and Plummer?”

  Newman cleared his throat in embarrassment. He may give her the good dick behind closed doors, but Director Goodman thought it was better to remind him of his place in the agency’s hierarchy and she did so daily. It made him redouble his efforts to please her at night.

  “Ah… No, Madam Director. The two agents on my team who’ve gone AWOL are still missing.”

  “And their families?”

  “Ghosted, ma’am. The same as what happened with Haskins.”

  The mention of the man’s name made her blood boil. He was the only person who’d dared to defy her orders when she took control of the CEA in Austin. The only person, until recently, who’d gotten away from her wrath. He’d been up on charges of insubordination and mutiny, scheduled to be publicly hanged. The media was on site to witness the event and everything was ruined when he’d been rescued along with his wife. It was a blemish on her otherwise perfect record.

  And now these two.

  “We have a spy in our midst,” Goodman said, whirling on the nine officers seated behind her. She had to lean down onto the table to catch herself. It was a calculated move, meant to convey authority, when in reality, it was to keep her prosthetic leg from collapsing. Deputy Director Stansbury sat with Agent Newman and the heads of the other teams. “Agent Cooper, I want you to go through the cyber logs with a fine-toothed comb. Fuck that. Go through them with a goddamned microscope. Haskins, Rogan, and Plummer had help.”

  “We haven’t had any luck identifying the two women who helped Haskins escape, ma’am. But we’ll go through it again.”

  “Yes, you will. None of your people will leave until we determine what the hell happened,” she told the Cyber Team lead.

  “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me, Cooper. You couldn’t figure out what happened back in May because one of your people was in on it. I’m sure of it.”

  “All of my team has been vetted and—”

  “I don’t want to hear another word on the subject, Agent Cooper. Rogan and Plummer were vetted, but the way things are shaking out, I’m convinced that they were part of the operation to free Haskins. If that’s the case, then somebody with major cyber coding skills has been a busy little beaver altering camera footage and changing computer logs. Find out who it is.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She bent over and placed both of her hands on the table. “We need to clean our own damn house before we can even think about cleaning up the mess outside. Unfortunate
ly, we have to do both at the same time. Fix this mess, people. Fix it.”

  Goodman pushed herself upright and turned back to the windows. “Dismissed,” she said loudly, her heated breath fogging the glass.

  The ungrateful heathens below needed to be cleansed. Maybe she would order those machine guns to open up after all. That would make her feel better. She smiled at the images the idea conjured in her mind. That would clear the area quickly and let these damn Texans know that she wasn’t to be fucked with.

  “Maybe…” she sighed, running three of her fingers through the condensation on the glass. The NAR needed to step up its game and crush this revolution bullshit. The people didn’t have the power, the government did. She should be allowed to wield it and eliminate the protestors below.

  She walked stiffly to her office and picked up the phone. “Get me Senator Bradley’s office,” she ordered. She would try to get the authorization to end this right here and now.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  I sized up the man in front of me. His bushy red beard hid the lower half of his face, concealing all but the upper part of his cheek bones and eyes. The tattered baseball cap covered up the rest of what the hair didn’t. If it had been any other person, I doubt I would have recognized them after the transformation from clean-cut special agent into a hairy woodsman, but I would recognize Jason Rogan anywhere. He and Chris Plummer were the only reason I was alive after what the CEA and Director Goodman put me through. Man, it felt good to see him.

  “You look a whole lot better than the last time I saw you, Haskins.”

  “So do you,” I said, grinning as I clasped his outstretched hand. “Last time I saw you, you had a weird red hue to your skin… I mean, everything I saw had the same tone because of all the hemorrhaging in my eyeballs, but whatever.”

  Rogan sighed. “Well, I can see that the months in hiding haven’t increased your sense of humor. That was pretty damn stupid.”

  I continued to grin. I’d only known Jason Rogan for a year or so before my arrest, but the Special Forces sergeant was almost always taciturn and his sense of humor was much different than mine, so the fact that he called me out on attempting to make a lame joke was no surprise. He’d been on an interagency loan to the CEA when everything started to really go to shit and had decided to quit the agency to help overthrow the illegitimate government we found ourselves under.

  “I like the beard. Fits your rough persona.”

  He shrugged. “It helps with the cameras and when I get the opportunity to visit Trish, she says it makes me look like a rugged mountain man. I kinda like it.”

  I ran a hand over my smooth chin. If I tried, I might be able to grow a solid layer of peach fuzz. Life wasn’t fair sometimes. “So, how’s Goodman?” I asked.

  “That bitch is out of control,” he replied. “Plummer and I jumped. We got our families out with Taya’s help. They’re off the grid now while we fight this war.”

  I nodded. “Smart. What does ‘jumped’ mean?”

  “We went AWOL, abandoned the CEA, joined up with the Resistance.”

  “Oh. So, you’re traitors?”

  “Yup. Just like the filthy Colonials two hundred and fifty years ago. Now all we need is a harbor and some tea to get things started before the shooting begins.”

  I laughed at his lame joke. His sense of humor was way worse than mine. “Where is Plummer?”

  “You mean, The Man?”

  “Huh?”

  “Plummer is Every American. He’s the mastermind behind all of this.” I’m sure my face betrayed my emotions. “Okay, mastermind is a little too much credit, but he really got the ball started, first with the Fraternal Order of Police and then with the fire department. He convinced me to begin talking to my buddies back in Third Group at Bragg. It all just kind of snowballed from there.”

  “Wait,” I said, glancing at my brother, Rowan, beside me. “You mean to tell me that the guy who was on the TV two days ago was Chris Plummer?”

  “Yeah, but keep that shit to yourself, okay? Taya’s been disguising his appearance and voice, re-recording them with different programs so there’s no way to decipher who the actual person is behind the mask.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Good for now. She refuses to leave the CEA. She says she can keep us protected while she’s there, but I think the net is going to start closing around her now that Plummer and I are gone. Goodman went apeshit for weeks after you went missing and she doctored the security camera footage to make it look like two women broke you out. There was a witch hunt for females at the CEA. Of course, nothing came of it because it was less than circumstantial. But now that we’re gone too… Goodman is a terrible person, but she isn’t stupid. She’s probably already figured out that it’s somebody on the inside with major computer skills. There are only three or four of the Cyber Team folks who have that skillset.”

  “Cyber Team? What’s that?”

  “They reorganized once they brought the third team on board. There are eight teams now—seven tactical and one cyber. All are at full strength, and most of them are NAR fanatics.”

  “Must have been a fun place to work,” I commented.

  “The best,” he replied with a grin of his own. “Who’s this?”

  He pointed at Rowan and I made the introductions. “Sorry, long drive,” I said.

  “Yeah, let’s get you guys set up with a sleeping area. We’ve got a few safe houses around the city, we’ll get you guys into one of those. Once we pick up a lot more people, we want to expand outward from the safe houses and begin taking over entire neighborhoods, linking them together, then on to taking back the government. Plummer’s got a plan, Haskins. He sure missed his calling. The big guy should have been either a politician or a motivational speaker. He’s turned into one charismatic son of a bitch.”

  I laughed. The guy had certainly been the comic relief on our team before everything went down and I was running for my life.

  “Come on,” Rogan said. “You’ll have to ditch your truck. We’ll take care of it. I’ll take you guys to a clean vehicle that’ll transport you to the safehouse.”

  “The safehouse isn’t in the Autonomous Zone?”

  “No way. The protestors set up that A-Z bullshit on their own. It’s no-go territory for police and System folks, but that’s just because they don’t want to deal with the hassle right now. There’s no way it would withstand even a minor push from NAR loyalists. Those of us planning for the long-term think it’s too early for creating something like that. The Resistance simply doesn’t have enough people yet. The safehouses are all over town, most of them are nowhere near the A-Z.”

  We followed along behind Rogan as he led the way toward a parking garage. People milled about everywhere, much different than the last time I was in Austin after they’d cleaned out all of the homeless. “So, like I was saying,” Rogan continued. “Taya is too close. She needs to get out of there. She’s got the camera feeds cut off in the parts of the city where we operate, but I don’t know how they haven’t traced it back to her yet. She says it’s impossible, but I know Goodman will be looking for her. She needs to fry their systems and get out of the CEA.”

  I thought about what I knew of Taya. She was a very private person, but as far as I knew, she was single and lived in one of the NAR bachelor apartment buildings. It should be easy for her to defect since she didn’t have a family to worry about moving too. “What’s her deal? Why won’t she jump?” I asked, using Rogan’s term.

  “Her mom’s in an assisted living home here in Austin. She’s afraid that if she leaves, they’ll kill her mother. You know, the standard NAR guilty by association bit.”

  “Man, I hate the System,” I groaned.

  “Yes, sir. Most of the people in the Resistance do.” He pointed at a spray-painted symbol on the wall. It was a capital A surrounded by a circle. “Some people are here just for the sheer chaos that can be unleashed. Plummer has brought a lot of eclectic and
traditional enemies together under the banner of revolution and reform. We have soccer moms, gangbangers, rednecks with way too many guns, Black Panthers, white supremacists, BLM supporters, drug dealers… Hell, I think the only people he turned away were the true anarchists, the ANTIFA types who made such a stink in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago. We don’t need their filth.”

  “Oh yeah. I remember them,” Rowan said, attempting to contribute to the conversation.

  “They crawled out of their mom’s basement and came looking to be a part of the Revolution, but they didn’t want to be a part of the change. They just wanted to destroy property—which is absolutely not what this is about. We want to preserve as much infrastructure as possible so it won’t be so hard to rebuild once we get rid of the NAR and the New Constitution.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “How do you know who’s genuine and who might be a NAR agent trying to infiltrate the Revolution?”

  Rogan grunted. “When I say we take people in and turn people away, I don’t mean like we have some type of recruitment center or something. All of our protests are organized through social media, cell phone, and word of mouth. We’ve just declined participation from the anarchists, but if they show up, they show up.”

  I regarded him skeptically. “How long until the government simply turns off the internet and cell phone service? Or like, jams it or whatever.”

  “Yeah. That’s why it’s so important to get the movement started early, with established leadership in each city. We know they’re going to flip a switch soon and shut everything down. We’ve had those capabilities for decades in the military, so it is absolutely an option for the administration.”

  We walked in silence for a moment until Rogan asked, “How’s Cassandra?”