The Standoff Read online

  Newbies heard of Abel and his followers in all kinds of different ways: the internet, the dark web, social media groups, and good, old-fashioned word of mouth.

  Word of mouth generally came from outside militia groups who were like-minded. Often people who joined militia groups were kicked out because they were too extreme or unhinged or they were searching for a religious element.

  That was when someone in the group would take them aside and tell them about this place in South Carolina.

  Someone would ask, “Have you heard of Joseph Abel?”

  It was the story of Abel that interested people, but it was his unexplainable, undeniable charismatic persona that captured them.

  Abel was a myth among the militant, among the conspiracy theorists, among the backwoods survivalists.

  New recruits came from all over. Most of them were lost souls with nowhere to go. Some of them felt misunderstood in their own lives. Some of them knew of the anti-government positions of Abel and they wanted to join for those reasons. They shared the same sentiments.

  Whatever the reasons for joining up, everyone who came turned into a true believer before long—all but one. And now he was caught, beaten, zip-tied, and marching to his own death.

  The undercover agent had ridden in with a small group from fifty miles north of Atlanta at a designated recruitment center, which was an old, run-down church with a pastor who favors the extremist side of religion.

  A building attached to the back of the church existed as a halfway house, used by the state for battered and abused women, as well as former junkies, and other lost souls.

  As soon as Pretty Boy got there, they tested him.

  It all went down like the whirling water in a draining bathtub. Before he knew it, he was sucked down the drain with the rest of them.

  First, he passed their tests. Next, they took all his earthly possessions.

  “Shake loose your mortal ways,” Abel preached the newbies, “This is a fine day for you. You’re no longer lost. We’re your family now.”

  Once Pretty Boy was sucked down the drain, they tore off his clothes and shoved him into brown garbs, like a new inmate joining the general population of a maximum-security prison for the first time.

  He believed they made all their own clothes. Later, he confirmed this when saw the women cutting and sewing and cleaning fabrics.

  The fabric and many other goods were picked up by two of Abel’s guys who went to Carbine, he guessed. They must’ve had several large P.O. boxes restricted for deliveries and shipments of materials they needed.

  The guys who went never came back empty-handed. There were always shipments of something—grains, ingredients, supplies, and fabrics.

  After they clothed him, Abel’s men asked him to do two things.

  First, they gave him back his old clothes and his wallet and his cheap burner phone, he had bought at a gas station. It was packed with fake contacts and phone calls made to numbers that correlated with his fake undercover identity—in case they went far enough to check all that out, which they didn’t.

  Over a roaring backyard fire, they made him toss his old things into the fire, including the burner phone, which the agency he worked for had anticipated—naturally. That’s why they gave him general coordinates of where he could expect the tiny radio he got to be airdropped in during the night.

  The radio was all he thought about as he watched his fake stuff burn.

  The second thing they made him do—over the fire and over his burning possessions—was pledge his undying allegiance to Joseph Abel and to the Athenian cause. All of that done in some weird half-religious, half-militant ceremony.

  He wished he could go back and turn down this assignment. But hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

  Wasn’t it?

  Pretty Boy started at the lowest level and, therefore, wore brown, representing the muck and the dirt.

  The Athenians considered all newcomers to come from the muck. All those from off the street, all those who were newly pledged, were the uninitiated, the unenlightened, commoners, the filth.

  Joseph Abel, however, wore all-pristine, all-white garbs—white pullover under a white winter coat and white pants with newly washed white underwear underneath. He wore all white all the way down to the laces on his boots and the threads in the socks over his feet.

  His uniform signified that he was the highest-ranking member of his cult, higher than a bishop in a church. He was the pope. Therefore, his uniform had to be the cleanest and most immaculate and the whitest of all the dress of all the members—always.

  Everything was designed to remind his followers of their lower station.

  Abel did as the kings and clergies of old history did by making their followers kneel or stand below them when conversing, only he did it with clothing. He showed them who they were, which was nothing. And he was everything.

  It was all about status.

  Abel’s dress and mannerisms and stature were to be held above all others.

  He was their leader, their king, their savior.

  Cleanliness is next to godliness. That was one motto he lived by. He exemplified it to them not just by making himself always appear cleaner than they were, but also by putting them to work every day so that their own clothes and bodies remained dirty and sweaty and beneath him.

  “You serve the Lord, and the Lord will provide,” he preached to them.

  Abel’s clothes were always clean. Theirs were not. It was that simple.

  His laundry was done every single day. One of his wives made sure of that. It was her job to make sure that it was so. And she did a fine job. They all did fine jobs.

  He would miss them—in a way—after the thing he planned to happen did happen.

  The discovery of the undercover agent ruined his plans in a way. He wanted to linger longer and enjoy his five wives, but that time had passed. The discovery of the undercover agent moved up the timetable. No big deal. He was ready. They were ready. It was time to act. The thing he planned to happen would happen soon, at least the first part.

  His followers knew of the first part. They were part of the first part. They didn’t know the exact plans of the second act. They thought both acts went together like a one-two punch. They didn’t know that their sacrifice wasn’t the main act. It was only the distraction, the announcement.

  The second part would come in the form of a major terror attack on the real terrorists—members of the US government. The Deep State was his enemy. They were the real enemy of the people, as he saw it.

  He promised his followers that the attack would send terror tremors across the United States and the world. It would echo through the halls of power. It would be worth their sacrifice.

  Abel tracked behind Pretty Boy through a field of snow, with the tops of dead wheatgrass, half-leafless trees, and white-misted sky.

  He slowed and stopped.

  He knew it wasn’t their final stop, but he had a flair for the theatrical, the drama of forcing the guy to walk to his own death, finding the right spot and then pushing onward to a different stop, teasing him, taunting him—predator and prey.

  It amused him, but this was nearing the end of the line for Pretty Boy.

  Abel couldn’t keep this up forever. Things needed to be done. Preparations needed to be made. And explosives needed to be checked and rechecked.

  Plus, it was no fun anymore. Boredom had set in and displaced the joy he had enjoyed.

  Pretty Boy lost all hope—mostly. Therefore, he lost his fear, and no fear meant acceptance, and acceptance meant no fun for Abel.

  A man at the end of his rope was no fun to torment with the theatrics of hope or last moments of life because he has no last moments. He had nothing left to lose.

  BEFORE THE MILITARY, before Abel rose through the ranks in the Army to the title of general, before he was a revered cult leader, he had been a hunter.

  He was a natural-born hunter. That was what he was good at.

  Way back i
n the Tennessee woods, as a boy, he’d hunted with his father. That was back fifty-plus years by now.

  For Abel, the fun in hunting wasn’t about the ritual or the cycle of life or any of that nonsense. The fun came from the savoring, the relishing of the kill. That was what he loved.

  Abel liked to hunt, and he liked to kill, and he liked to taunt—as simple as that.

  He saw war the same way. That’s what made him so good at it.

  In war, you can’t win by defeating the enemy. That’s where Abel and ninety-nine percent of the military disagreed.

  Simply winning never works, not in the long-term. Simply winning doesn’t work because enemies come back. They evolve.

  Victories last only until the enemy’s ranks replenish.

  Abel often preached in his sermons about defeating the enemy.

  Every Sunday he preached to his followers from the grand, white steps of the compound’s main building. He used to preach in the church that was off closer to the main driveway, but the population of his cult had grown too big.

  Now, he did his preaching outside, and he did it almost every day at the same time.

  Pretty Boy had witnessed one of these sermons. He remembered it.

  Abel stood on the steps as usual and preached.

  “You can't just defeat the enemy. You must do more. You must take the extra step. You can't just crush the enemy. You must crush the enemy's spirit. You must crush their hopes. You must dash all sense of who they are from the history books. You must beat them into unquestionable submission. That's the only true way to win a war.”

  As Abel finished this sermon, he stared down at the undercover agent. Chills ran down his spine, as if Abel was threatening him directly. This was the sermon he had heard before they set a trap for him. He should’ve known. He should’ve escaped then, but he didn’t.

  Abel used to be in charge of a special Army unit. They were assigned with cleaning up the insurgents in Baghdad. They were good at it. They had been dubbed the Baghdad Cleaners by their peers. Abel and his crew got a reputation as “shoot first, ask questions later” types. They killed a lot of bad guys, which explained why the Army hadn’t interfered with their unsavory methods.

  Back then, Abel had a motto that he preached to his guys.

  “Leave no enemy behind,” a twist on “leave no man behind.”

  Abel believed this principle down to his core. It was the same as “win at all costs.” That was why he was so good at war. At least, he thought so and so did the Army apparently because they kept promoting him. They kept protecting him from allegations of war crimes. They kept burying the truth as long as it suited their goals.

  He was good at his job. His team delivered results—no question. If they were given an Iraqi target to prosecute, they found him, and they killed him—period, point-blank.

  During his tenure in Iraq, the Army gave him freedom of action. They called it all Black Ops and turned a blind eye while he and his crew did their thing.

  Abel spent years in the US Special Forces, which let him do the things he loved to do—hunt and kill.

  He hunted the enemy, he killed the enemy, and they paid him to do it.

  As the war wound down, they couldn’t look the other way anymore, not with journalists having more and more access to company units within the military. When the dust settled, people noticed things. Questions came up, too many for the Army to ignore.

  They took away his job.

  They had to put the muzzle back on him, but they didn’t want to fire him. You don’t fire your broadsword. You sheath it and hope for the best. In the end, they didn’t fire him. They didn’t demote him. They promoted him.

  They made him a one-star general and gave him a medal and assigned him to his very own command. Essentially, they made him into a glorified desk jockey. They assigned him to one of the worst commands a general can get, a place with a bad reputation—bad because it was notoriously boring, which was spirit-crushing for a guy like Abel.

  They’d sent him to Fort Polk in Louisiana, which was nicknamed Fort Puke by those who served there.

  To other generals, there was no bad place to get a command, but that was because they were on a career path only, and Abel wasn't. He didn't join the army so he could advance his career and retire, not after having tasted what it was like to hunt and kill in the Middle East. Especially, not after it took him over a decade to meet like-minded soldiers and Marines and a couple of sailors.

  By this time in his career, Abel had assembled a like-minded group, a group that would follow him to the ends of the earth—blindly.

  He had found a core group of guys, of killers just like him. They all left their posts shortly after he did—all honorable discharges. Each of them waited out the remaining time on his contract. Then they left their respective military homes and joined up with him, becoming Athenians.

  By the time Jargo, the most recent addition, joined him, Abel was already established as the leader of a cult, right there in South Carolina.

  PRETTY BOY’S REAL NAME WASN’T CAIN like in the Bible. His real name was officially ATF Agent Tommy Dorsch.

  Abel knew his name. They all did. They knew everything about him that needed knowing. He couldn’t keep secrets from them. They had ways of seeing to that.

  Dorsch’s hands hurt from the zip ties. His face hurt from the fists he had endured the night before. His body ached. His mind ached.

  "Keep moving," Abel barked.

  Abel shoved him with a quick left jab. He had grown tired of his prey, and Dorsch knew it.

  Dorsch looked forward and to the right and saw old playground equipment covered by blankets of snow. Old metal pieces from a merry-go-round stuck up and out of the snow and dead grass. One end of a seesaw punched almost straight up and tilted a certain way as if it had been forever stuck in that position.

  The cult had lived on the compound for so long by this point that the latest generation of children had been born there and raised there. All of them were young, under six years of age. Older children were brought in by members from the outside but were sent away, off to boarding schools.

  Before six, they were trained and brainwashed into the ways of the Athenians so that when they went off to school, they would maintain their core beliefs and question everything else they were taught. But it was decided that they needed to be sent to boarding school every year for two reasons. The first was to meet the state's requirements for education for any child. The Athenians got tax breaks and all kinds of benefits for operating as a religion and church. And second reason was that Abel wanted them to learn the evil ways of the outside world in order to cement the community’s mistrust in it.

  It all worked in tandem like he was setting up the perfect biosphere of people who lived and breathed as he saw fit.

  In school, the kids would learn about evolution, but it was already instilled in them how false and fake the outside world was.

  In the far distance, a train horn blasted for a long moment, breaking the silence, giving Dorsch a newfound, but brief hope. This was a reminder of the civilized world; he had almost forgotten the outside world existed.

  Dorsch knew the train was far away because there were no sounds of singing tracks or train cars rushing by or a bell from street crossings.

  Still, he listened raptly, feeling his blood rush through him with the fury of a river. His heart pounded in his chest as if his body was gearing up for one last attempt to save his own ass, but he did nothing. He didn't run. He didn't fight back. He didn't resist. Nothing changed.

  The horn blared once more. Then it died away like an echo lost at sea. With the vanishing train horn, he was left with one image of the outside world. It vanished completely a long second later.

  "Move," Abel barked again, not ultra-aggressively, not authoritatively, not forcefully, just low and calm and commanding, like a doctor soothing a sick patient. Only, a gleam of joy sparked across his face as if he enjoyed it, which he did.

  He didn't
hide it from Dorsch. He savored it right in front of him.

  They walked on, continuing past the snow-buried playground equipment, past more leafless trees, far from the compound, far from the road, and far from the eyes of others in the community.

  They walked beyond the center of Abel's farm-sized property, beyond more empty fields of snow, past more trees until they came to another open field—the last one.

  They stood two-thirds of the way across the compound's entire property.

  Now, there was no chance that anyone who Abel didn't want to see would see what was going to happen next. Unless they decided to shoot Dorsch, no one would hear anything either.

  Dorsch felt the last remaining ounce of hope that he had left deflate from him like air from a balloon. He shouldn't have had any hope left anyway. He knew that because he was all alone.

  The only people there were the people who lived on the property and him—the outsider.

  His own people weren't coming for him. He knew that now. His backup wasn't coming. They were in the dark. They didn't know he was about to die.

  His boss and friend, Agent Adonis, wasn't coming for him.

  He wasn't going anywhere. He was Abel's prisoner till the day he died—today.

  The sky above became overcast and turned gloomy and gray, like a painter's used-up mixing pallet.

  South Carolina was in a polar vortex that swept across the nation, lasting a long time, turning the temperatures in the US down to record-low levels. Snow and violent winds bombarded states that normally never saw snow.

  Abel was grateful for the momentary release in weather. In a sick way, he believed the slowing of the snow was a sign from God. And he’d told this to his followers that very morning.

  Since the train horn, the air around them filled with sounds of whooshing wind and distant noises of cracking branches and swaying trees and dead silence and nothing else.

  Despite the hopelessness, despite the dead silence, Dorsch listened hard. He closed his eyes and slowed his walk to a shuffle.

  At first, Abel thought Dorsch was praying. He couldn't fault the guy for doing that. He was, after all, a man of God, himself. So, he said nothing, but Dorsch wasn't praying. He was listening, trying to make out another sound that he thought he had heard.