CHAPTER 20

Cheyenne, Wyoming
 
Candace high crawled on her hands and knees through a deep roadside drainage ditch. Tethered to her belt on a short rope, she dragged a heavy seabag behind her that forced her to lean forward to gain ground as she muscled her way around boulders and wet puddles.
​
The foreign army she had seen escorting a loaded freight train just a few weeks prior, had set up camp at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base just as she had predicted. Clearly a forward operating base. They had made themselves right at home in the intercontinental ballistic missile base and begun fortifying perimeters and internal renovations immediately which revealed that they planned on being long term residents.

Researching at a Cheyenne public library, within minutes Candace confirmed that the military vehicles bore the nations flags of Russia and China. That was when she had first learned of the B.R.I.C.S. alliance. Candace borrowed every book from the library that referenced eastern military weapons, vehicles, tactics, government practices and history of eastern foreign policies.

Sure, she had heard the rumors that Persians had been responsible for the EMP attack that had caused the vehicle accident that killed her entire Emergency Service Team. The B.R.I.C.S. invaders had even stapled up propaganda fliers around Cheyenne announcing their peace keeping mission to help aid America’s suffering caused by evil Arabs.

But none of that made sense. The military force occupying her town were not Arabians. If the foreigners were truly here on a humanitarian mission a hospital for medical care or a football stadium would make for an easily defendable logistics center. Why would a strategic Air Force base be their first priority?

Held up in some nearby apartment buildings Candace conducted surveillance on the foreigner’s activities. She watched droves of dirty and malnourished survivors ramble up to the gates, begging to be let into her former place of employment. All of the refugees were let inside the safety perimeter of chain linked fences, razor wire, armored personnel carriers, roving patrols of Russian Army, and newly constructed guard towers equipped with PKM machine guns.

Shortly after being provided with safety from the crazed infected world, along with comforts of shelter and nutrition, the American refugees were assigned heavy lifting jobs and dirty work that the invaders did not care to do. Soon, there was enough American workers inside the base, that the Chinese took over as labor management.

Candace didn’t know what to think of the Americans, or how to mentally process what was happening in her city. Conflicted, she couldn’t blame her countrymen and women, for accepting foreign aid. Although, some seemed more eager to help and friendlier towards the foreign army than others. But what was the cost? The more civilians who entered the base, the quicker the invaders became comfortably entrenched.

From what Candace could tell, all of the Americans that worked inside the base had been disarmed. Apparently, the foreign military didn’t trust the locals with weapons, but trusted them with shovels and brooms. The elderly and frail Americans kept the base clean and tidy, and the women had the honor of offering maid service for the foreigners. American men were tasked with dangerous outer perimeter work while Russians made a sport out of killing the infected who were just outside the reach of the American workers. The closer the Grays got to the frightened workers, the louder the Russians laughed after dispatching the threats.

American children spent most of their days away from their parents. Half of the day the children spent in a classroom in the care of Russian and Chinese teachers, being taught who-knows-what? When not in the classroom, the children performed military style training. B.R.I.C.S. obviously planned to occupy the Cheyenne region for generations, and eventually turn the indigenous population into cannon fodder.

Candace was in a race against time. From the first day BRICS rolled into town, she had begun emptying weapons from the Security Forces armory, and ammo from the ASP bunker. But she was solo, stealthily dragging one bag away at a time while avoiding predictably patterned patrols. The invaders had secured the missile silos first, then the housing areas, and then slowly began clearing and securing the rest of the base. It was just a matter of time before they found the ammo supply point or her stealing from it.

Did she really need loads and loads of M4s, a bag full of Sig Sauer M18 pistols, crates of ammo, a pair of Browning M2s? Was the effort to acquire a pile of AT-4 rockets worth the risk? Or the seabag full of claymores that she dragged through the snowy ditch behind her? She could only fire one weapon at a time, but Candace didn’t plan on being an Army of One for much longer.

The foreign troops were lackadaisical inside the protection of their tall perimeter fences. Guards in the watch towers propped their feet up while rarely looking away from the books that they read on post. Roving patrols walked with rifles slung on their backs while laughing and shoving each other jokingly. It was only when they ventured outside the protective perimeter, with a real threat of infected, that the soldiers presented a professional security posture.

The careless foreigners’ actions made it clear that they had not encountered any sort of real resistance thus far. Sadly, that went against her perception of the American rebellious nature, but that also gave her an advantage. Candace desperately yearned to start sniping the invaders to stall their expansion progress. But as soon as she initiates hostile actions, their defensive tactics would change drastically which would greatly increase the chance of getting caught while proliferating her cache. Unfortunately for her, commercial sporting goods and gun stores had been emptied months ago. Personal firearms could be found in most Wyoming homes, but raiding the base armory and ASP was much easier and fruitful.

She still had a lot of important work to do before launching guerrilla operations against the BRICS invaders. Supplies to gather, routes to recon, safe houses to secure, and most importantly recruitment of local patriotic rebels sympathetic to her cause. When the time came to hit the invaders, she needed to hit them hard, fast, and with the least amount of American civilian casualties. But the longer she waited, the more BRICS improved their stronghold.

Yes, Candace was preparing for violence, but she had not fully convinced herself of her own mission yet. If there was a slim chance that BRICS forces were truly humanitarians, she couldn’t set a plan in motion that could potentially hurt Americans.

Candace felt like she was preparing a strategic multinational military campaign way above her paygrade. She could kindle a brush fire that could easily spread out of control. What if a revolution was sparked that successfully drove BRICKS from Cheyenne, all the way back to the west coast? What would the Russian and Chinese retaliation look like? Warfare escalation against citizens? Bombing of cities, murder of civilians, nuclear detonations, or a genocide to wipe the land clear of western ideologies?

Even though the local population were collaborating, Candace felt empathy for them. Considering the apocalyptic circumstances, people needed basic human survival needs to feed and shelter their families, and the foreigners had provided where the US government had failed.

She would continue preparing for war, but she needed more information. Candace wished that she had verified intelligence that the BRICS military was uninvited invaders who were responsible for the July 4th EMP attack. As much as she never wanted to see her husband Gavin again, he could be a source of information. But how could she make contact with him while he worked inside the base perimeter?

Her mind raced, while she crawled steadily through the slushy roadside ditch towards a large culvert. Using the deep micro terrain for cover, she also wore a long poncho made from survival space blankets to hide her heat signature, incase Russian BTR-90’s used thermal imaging to scan the outer perimeters. Her warm body against the frozen ground, would stick out like a neon sign on a dark night. For a Russian armored personnel carrier’s thirty-millimeter autocannon, she would be an easy target.

On the other side of the upcoming highway, she would be safely out of view from the base and be able to stand upright again. The culvert was dark, and narrow. Just large enough that she could squat in the center without hitting her head, but she continued forward on her hands and knees.

Wet gloves sloshed through standing water in the culvert, made her reminisce back to cold wintery days in Chicago. Candace wasn’t overly religious and had mix feelings about destiny versus free-will. But she wondered if her fatherless childhood, all of her studying in high school, the disciplined efforts put into training, suffering through multiple EST selection screenings, the recent loss of her daughter, had all brought her to that freezing moment, of sneaking stolen military ordnance through a slime infested tube. She hoped that her life bore more meaning than that.

Eager to get home and into comfortable warm clothing, she breathed a sigh of relief at the culvert’s exit. A fat tire bicycle with attached pull cart was still where she had previously hidden it. Another successful mission that would add a few dozen claymore antipersonnel mines to her war fighting arsenal. She looked forward to untethering herself from this load and stretching out her cold fatigued muscles.

Like the birth of a newborn baby, Candace flopped out of the culvert, rolled and landed on her side. Laying in the fetal position, confused, she staired at a pair of well-worn cowboy boots planted firmly in the snow.

“Don’t move a muscle young lady.” An elderly man wearing a wide brim cowboy hat ordered her, while holding a double-barreled shotgun in her face.