The Red Truck Cavalry had been flying flags since before it was cavalry: “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Thin Blue Line” and all. Once we had built up rigs of our own, we’d learned the joy of it and done the same ourselves. But theirs were all mostly the same color scheme, red/white/blue, occasionally even more reduced to black and white. We city folk had gone the other way. Every flag we flew was all the colors of the rainbow and then some. The basic pattern was the same as it had always been, though the number of stars or stripes often changed. But every flag was different in terms of color and message.

“When the shooting started.” Would you date it to Malheur? January 6? The Pullman Massacre(s)? The Self-Coup? No agreement, naturally. This was America—forget the start time, we can’t even agree on what to call the war.

A man was standing at the back, up by the cross, looking down at a pew. He looked up as I came through the door. For a moment, he scowled. Then he smiled broadly and earnestly and hospitably, and the moment of ferocity was buried. Another person might have excused it. I couldn’t afford that luxury. This man was not going to be my friend.

“You know, I speak a little Spanish. Used to, anyway. One time I ended up in a Mexican restaurant out in Yakima and I thought I’d try and order in Spanish. Ended up getting my order totally scrambled. Turns out I knew just enough to get me into trouble.”
I sighed. “Look, Hank, can we just drop it? Making it all subtle and coded and such is just going to make this take longer. What’s going on?”

Liberty’s a nice town, if you can look past the fact that the people only come in one color. Or that church is recommended and high school football games are mandatory. Or that they’d kill us if they could.

The sun was setting westward when we turned onto 202 and came to the Last Lonely Liberal East of the Lakes, sitting at the top of his hill and at the bottom of his signal tower and his immense satellite dish.

“Where’d he hijack that dish from, SETI?” Tink asked, as we paused at the foot of the driveway.

“Something like,” I said, switching my phone on. The Last Liberal’s equipment was known to my phone, and always reliable. That equipment was, after all, his business model and five-year survival plan.

A memory swam back to the surface: I was young, young enough that a real soccer ball was something of a challenge to handle, running around on a grass field—real grass, fresh-mowed. I could even remember the smell of it. I’d loved that ball. I’d had jerseys with names on them. Morgan? Something starting with an R? Or a P? Those names had been important.

Was that the last time I’d kicked a ball?