Cold Rush: Blizzard of Lead

Michael Panush

The Eco Commune lay nestled in the snow-covered valley like a bright jewel in a white field. The orderly houses, domes, halls and supply shelters organized in a semi-circle around a green strip of clear farmland. Trees sprouted amongst the structures, some planned and others not, created a community that was at once beautiful to look at and fully functional. The Communards were gathered in the center of their commune, flags featuring the green oak leaf and gold sickle and hammer flying proudly above them. They were dressed in their finest clothes, all the same color and make of course, but still an improvement over their usual unisex jumpsuits.

From atop the hill overlooking the valley, Crazy Earl Rogers stared at the Eco Commune through his thick snow goggles. He turned around and stared at his men, a small army of ragged snow-goers dressed in old parkas and mounted on snowmobiles. Everything about them was ragtag and patched, from their stitched jackets to their graffiti-covered snowmobiles and duct-tape layered automatic weapons. Crazy Early resembled his men. He wore a thick bearskin coat, a leather pilot’s helmet, and thick sideburns. He smoked a large cigar and carried a trusty Kalashnikov.

“Look at them Greenies!” Crazy Early shouted to his soldiers as he stood up and walked back to his own snowmobile, an old diesel vehicle with a bear skull mounted on the front. “Just lording it over us, they are!”

“How’d you figure, Earl?” one of the soldiers asked.

“They got all the food they want! Grow it right there in their fields and fancy hydro-ponics laboratories! We got to sweat and work for our food, patrolling and protecting the oil fields for the Islington fat cats. They think they can just show all their goods off! It’s disgraceful!”

Some of the mercs nodded their ascent. “I hear they got a load of gold and paper dollars, America, not Alaskan, all stored up in one of their sheds,” a soldier with a large top hat strapped to his chin mentioned.

“And they ain’t got a single gun in there! Greenies hate the things!” a second mercenary added.

“Damn right!” Crazy Earl held up his gun. “I say we ride down there and kill the lot of those Greenie communist freaks! We can take their food, and their gold! The way I see it, we’d be neglecting our duty as patriotic citizens of the Alaskan Free State if we did anything less!”

The mercs cheered. Crazy Earl leapt onto his snowmobile and gunned the engine, roaring down the slope of the hill towards the eco-commune.

Trotsky Greenleaf didn’t particularly like History Day. He had attended one History Day for every one of his eleven years, except for one he missed because of chicken-pox, and the young communard didn’t quite see the point of it. Every communard would put on their dress clothes, which didn’t provide much protection on a particularly cold Alaskan day such as this one, march out to the commune’s square, and stand in neat rows while the archivist told a long story about movements past.

The adults seemed to enjoy it, and Trotsky figured it gave them a needed respite from the hard work of running the commune. But the commune’s children, raised together in a cooperative school, found it a needless distraction. They learned about the past from a dozen multimedia sources, as well as everything else a good communard needed to know. Trotsky enjoyed it well enough, and he got along with all of his classmates.

They were all standing together now, the boys wearing uncomfortable ties, trousers, dress shoes, vests, suit jackets and newsboy caps, the girls in similar attire except they got to wear pleated dresses. Trotsky Greenleaf was small for his age, with curly brown hair, thick glasses, a freckled face, and shining braces on his teeth.

He and the rest of the children were kept apart from the adults, as usual, though children did spot their parents through the crowd and some of the younger ones waved. Trotsky spotted his two mothers, Dawn and Feather, in the forefront, but he didn’t wave or call to them, not wanted to embarrass himself. Instead, he turned to his classmate.

“If I want to learn about history,” Trotsky said aloud, “I could just go on the Net and look it up myself.”

The instructor overheard Trotsky’s comments. “Comrade Greenleaf, that is quite a bourgeoisie statement! The Net is an imperfect ally. It is full of capitalist and polluter propaganda, even with our blocking programs, and it doesn’t work on particularly snowy days, like this one. Besides, I know you enjoy storytelling.”

“I do, Comrade Instructor.” Trotsky had always enjoyed storytelling nights. He knew most of the fables and myths by heart, and loved hearing the longer serial tales that took months to complete.

“Think of this as a story then, but one which happens to be true.”

“I’ll try, Comrade Instructor.”

“Thank you, Young Comrade.” The Instructor moved down the line to break up some gossiping girls, just as applause rippled through the standing communards. The archivists, a stooped, bespectacled fellow, stood on the small natural incline that allowed him to address the crowd.

“Hello, Comrades,” the archivist said. “I do appreciate the time taken off from the harvest and other chores to hear me speak. I may not be as entertaining as the storytellers, or as fun as music nights, or electronic entertainment nights, but what I have to tell is important.” He held a thick book under his arm, and he opened it and began to read. “Our movement is but the end point of a great struggle for freedom from all manner of authority. Our forerunners sailed as pirates against all flags. They fought in Paris against the French Army, and in Mexico, and in Spain. They protested in the streets of New York and in the mines of England. And wherever our ideas appeared, every nation reviled them.”

At the mention of nation, a chorus of boo’s and hisses resounded through the audience. The archivist raised his hands for quiet. “We came here, in time. The snowy fields of a newly independent Alaska, and we have worked hard to create a world free of money, of force, of pollution. A system of twenty loosely linked collectives where all life, animal or human, poor or rich, lives equally, freely, and happily. No Gods, No Masters.”

“No Gods, No Masters!” the communards echoed their slogan, and Trotsky shouted it out with his shrill voice as well.

“But before our movement was victorious, the struggle went on.” The archivist flipped to a pre-chosen page. “I’d like to talk about the Anarchist Black Russians of the Ukraine, led by Nestor Makhno, who fought tanks with peasant pitchforks, and died for their ideals.”

Trotsky listened with one ear. He knew well the story of Nestor Makhno. One of his friends was named Nestor in the Ukrainian Anarchist’s honor. Trotsky let his eyes wander, looking up the snowy hills that surrounded the Eco Commune, and then stopped. Smoke, thick, black, polluting, was pouring from the top of one of the hills and coming down the slope fast.

Engines roared as snowmobiles zoomed into the commune. Each one bore a rider, some two, and every rider was armed with something Trotsky had seen only rarely on Net sites that had not yet been locked away by the commune’s webmasters. The things were assault rifles, and all of them seemed to shooting fire and death. The bullets tore into the communards, bodies fell, and all sounds were drowned out by screams and gunfire.

The snowmobile riders were like monsters from the darkest tale of the storytellers. They rode through the crowds, spraying bullets at random and cackling wildly. Some of them dismounted and shot the fleeing communards up close, some holding down screaming women and children and whacking at them with long machetes. They hurled small bombs, grenades, Trotsky thought distantly, at the orderly buildings, sending splinters of wood and shrapnel flying before the red flames.

“Trotsky!” Feather came running to her son. She grabbed his hand and pulled away from his classmates, many of them wounded or dying from the machine gun salvos. “Come on!”

“What’s going on, Feather?” Trotsky asked. Tears were clouding up his eyes and he shivered with terror at the carnage around him. “Where’s Dawn?”

“I don’t know! Come on!” They ran through the crowd, heading for the outskirts of the Eco Commune. Feather ducked behind a supply shed and pulled her son close. She held him to her as snowmobiles, engines blaring, tore past them.

“Trotsky, you have to run,” Feather whispered. “Run into the snows, find one of the other communes, and tell them what happened.”

“Run?” Trotsky couldn’t believe what his mother was asking him. “Just run away? What about you?”

“These are mercenaries for one of the oil corporations. They’ll kill you if they find you.” Feather brushed aside Trotsky’s hair and kissed him on the forehead. “Now run.”

Trotsky ran from the commune just as his mother had ordered. His short legs pumped below him, and even though the snow became thick and sucked his legs in after he left the commune, and the wind and constant cold of the falling snow seemed to cut through his thin dress clothes and freeze his every breath in his lungs, he still ran faster than he ever had before.

Behind him, Feather stood up and walked towards the massacre of her comrades. Fires were burning in most of the buildings, and the mercenaries were rooting out the survivors and executing them or worse. A snowmobile pulled up next to Feather and a man with red-sideburns and a pilot’s leather helmet jumped off, a bloody combat knife in his hand. He slashed her across the chest and laughed wildly as she fell.

“Like shooting goddamn ducks in a barrel! These Greenies go down easier than drunken moose!” Crazy Earl laughed. “Did you see that Greenie hag trying to get her brat to escape! I declare, these people do not know how real men operate! Rodriguez, Smith-get your behinds over here!”

Two mercenaries, each on a roaring snowmobile, pulled up to Crazy Earl. “Yeah boss?” one with a bowler hat and an eye patch asked.

“Go into the snow, find the Greenie brat and bring him back here. That kid’s gonna do some squealing for he dies.” Crazy Earl licked the blood slick edge of his machete. “I can’t abide those that run from their fates.”

The two mercenaries zoomed off into the snow, following the footprints up the sloping hill and onto the vast plains. They could easily make out the struggling, small form of Trotsky Greenleaf in the distance.

Another large figure made its way across the snow, one smaller figure in front and one smaller figure at the rear. The large figure was a shaggy wooly mammoth, a cloned beast of burden fresh from the vats of California. It was laden down with all manner of gear and weaponry, enough for a skilled traveler to survive for months in the most inhospitable environs on.

Before the mammoth walked animal’s owner, a tall man in a long dark colored duster. He wore a broad brim hat and layers of warm clothes under his flowing jacket, crisscrossed with a pair of bandoleers. He carried a cartridge belt with two stubby autorevolvers in the holsters, and a long precision rifle on his back. His eyes were cold and his close cropped hair was black. He wore a gold star on his breast. There was a grim expression on his face, mostly due to the loud grating voice of the third figure. His name was Ted Scarborough, and he was an officer in the Alaskan Rangers.

“You should let me ride mammoth!” His voice was thick with a Russian accent. He wore ragged clothes and a hooded sweatshirt, and he had a thin face with a neat goatee. He was handcuffed and the cuffs were chained to the rear of the wooly mammoth. “I would be Soviet cowboy on American horse-though horse got fat and hairy!”

“Shut up.” That was the only response the Russian got.

“Is abuse! Making me walk this far through cold snow just to go to prison! Is much unfair! Great country of Alaska better than that! You know, snow is really coming down. Soon to be big blizzard!”

Slowly, Scarborough turned around. The mammoth stopped. Scarborough gave the Russian and cold stare. “Why don’t you shut up?” he demanded.

“Because maybe I convince you of my innocence!” The Russian leaned forward and grinned.

“You are Chernobyl Chuck, wanted by lawmen from Hawaii to New Atlantis and every Russian Bravta gangster and Mafia capo in equal measure. You’ve been busted for forty counts of petrol theft. You’re a gas-siphoning bastard and you’re going to hang.”

Chernobyl Chuck shrugged. “Well, I’m not all bad.”

“Shut up.” Scarborough turned back to the trail. Skagway was on the horizon somewhere. The mammoth had a GPS device somewhere on its back, even though Scarborough knew the trail well. He was planning on reaching the oil boomtown by nightfall, and then sending Chernobyl Chuck to the big prison in Anchorage on the early morning zeppelin. He’d appreciate the quiet.

Scarborough looked forward at the clear white expanse of snow, dotted only with trees, a few abounded shacks and oil derricks, and the occasional rock. Strangely, there was smoke coming up from a nearby valley, where one of the Eco Communes was located. Scarborough had never much cared for the Greenies and didn’t know their ways, but the smoke was odd.

Then he looked down and saw a lone figure running through the snow, two snowmobiles close behind. Something was wrong about the whole situation. A quick glance through high powered binoculars carried in Scarborough’s coat pocket confirmed his suspicion. The Alaskan Ranger saw a small boy running from two rapidly approaching snowmobiles, running for his life.

“Goddamn,” Scarborough whispered. He ran to the mammoth’s side and climbed up, then held out a hand for Chernobyl Chuck. The gas-siphoning criminal helped himself up.

“Where we going?” he asked.

“Shut up.” Scarborough wedged himself behind the mammoth’s head and urged the beast onward. Soon the mammoth was rapidly plodding forward, approaching the boy and his two pursuers. As soon as they got close enough, Scarborough stopped the mammoth and slid off the side. He drew his precision rifle from the sling and his back and held it in firing position.

The boy was small, not older than eleven years old, and was dressed in a neat vest suit and tie. The snowmobilers were two hard-looking men with automatic weapons, snow scum. Scarborough knew the type.

“What the hell’s going here?” Scarborough demanded. “I’m an officer of the law! What’s going on!?”

The boy saw him and started running in the opposite direction, right into the one of the sprays of gunfire. He let out a small yelp and fell to the ground. Scarborough ran to the boy and kneeled down, holding his breath as he examined the wound. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that there was only one round in the shoulder and one in the arm. Still, he had to get the boy proper medical attention, and fast.

Scarborough stood up and found the two mercs staring at him, their guns leveled. “The boys ours, lawman,” one of them grunted. A second later he slumped back on his snowmobile, his brains leaking out of a large hole in his forehead. Scarborough turned his smoking rifle on the remaining snowmobiler, who was already zooming away, screaming at the top of his lungs. Scarborough let him go.

“All right, son,” Scarborough whispered, kneeling over the wounded child. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna get you help and get you safely home.”

The boy rolled over and stared at Scaborough’s badge. “C-capitalist!” he cried. “T-tool of the oppressor class!” He came to his feet and tried to run away from Scarborough. “Stay away from me, you polluting, oppressing monster!”

“Calm down, son!” Scarborough ran after the communard boy and grabbed his good arm. He held him fast, ignoring the yelps as he pulled a syringe from his boot heel and jammed it into the child’s back. Slowly, the boy sunk to his feet. He fell silent as he collapsed into Scarborough’s arms.

Slowly, Scarborough carried the youngster back to his mammoth. Chernobyl Chuck looked down from the back of his elephant. “What with Little People’s Republic down there?”

“He’s a Greenie. They’re all like that.” Scarborough clambered onto the mammoth’s back and set the boy down, strapping him in tight. He unzipped one of the packs and quickly bandaged the wounds. It would last until they got to Skagway.

“You know what, Mr. Alaskan Ranger, sir? I think that boy will be more trouble than he is worth!”

“What do you mean? He’s just a little goddamn kid.”

“Those men chasing him, I know their colors. They are Crazy Earl’s gang, bad, bad people. If they want him dead, he should be dead.”

Scarborough turned back to Chernobyl Chuck and worked the bolt on his precision rifle. “Shut up.”