The Devil's Highway Read Online Free Page B

stuff.”  
    ‘Anybody’ meant her brother Brad, I supposed. I nodded. “Don’t worry. It’s our secret.”
    “Cool. Later, man.”
    With that she nodded and whirled, and left without looking back.  
    I took Brad’s belongings up to my office and sat down. First of all, I thumbed through The Redemption Manifesto. Colonel Elihu Tolbert, it seemed, was a decorated veteran, having served three tours of duty in Viet Nam. The Colonel had disliked the direction that he perceived his country, and the world, to be heading in.
    Tolbert wrote about a government grown too large, and too far from the people, to effectively represent them any longer. He saw the steady erosion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other cherished institutions, and the steady encroachment of Big Business, endless corporate expansion, and a general decline in the fabric of society and the quality of American life. The answer, he felt, was in what he described as the Redemption.
    The Redemption he wrote about was to be the aftermath of a violent upheaval in the very fabric of the United States. This was going to be precipitated by a collapse of the dollar, and a complete loss of the ability of the nation to project its military power around the world. One had to get ready now to survive what was coming, and to the Colonel that meant declaring one’s self separate from a corrupt and untrustworthy government, resisting at every turn the government’s attempts to grow ever larger, and impede by whatever means necessary its attempts to restrict the freedom of its citizens.
    But most importantly, it seemed, was getting ready for the Day of Redemption, an all-consuming conflict that the Colonel prophesied as coming, rather vaguely it seemed to me, “soon,” a conflagration that would engulf the United States on the day that the True-Believing citizens—regardless of race, gender or religious and political affiliations—would rise as one and cast off the chains of bloated government, in an apocalyptic bloodbath that would reboot America, destroying the corporate-controlled Government forever, and level the playing field for all time, for those who survived.
    I had to put the book down after a bit. The Colonel was breathing a lot of hellfire on every page. His list of those who had to go was long, exhaustive, and familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a conspiracy theory web site: The Big Banks, the Bilderburg Group, the G-20, the International Monetary Fund, the Freemasons, The Illuminati; you know, the usual suspects in the Great Conspiracy, whichever version the tabloids wanted us to believe in a given week.
    I opened up Brad’s laptop. Briana hadn’t given me a charger, but Brad’s laptop was the same model as mine, so I plugged in my own, and powered up the computer. I opened the browser and checked Brad’s bookmarks. There it was, all right; in the midst of saved links to websites about cars, girls, sports, and all of the other things typical young men enthuse about, a bookmark for something called the Redemptionist Online.  
    I clicked on that and a page opened up featuring a black background with a flaming skull and crossbones emblem superimposed over a ragged depiction of Old Glory. Underneath that were links to General Discussion, Weapons, Survivalism, Redemption Chat (moderated) and something called Random.
    I also noticed that the site automatically logged me in. At the top left of the screen, a message appeared that said Welcome back, Stronghold89. Your last visit was 52 days ago. So, in the rarified world of the Internet, Brad was Stronghold89; or, at least, in Redemption circles.
    I surfed around the web site a bit. There were posts about militia meetings from around the nation, long discussions about recent political goings on, links posted to news stories, and comments about how they revealed the truth of Tolbert’s vision. There were no dissenting voices. Everyone who was a member of the site was apparently a true