Joshua wasn’t proud of what he had done, but there seemed to be little choice. “Okay, I can take your critique here—but what would you have done?”

“Well.” Malorie swallowed hard before she continued. “Maybe he would’ve taken one of our guns in trade.”

“True, Mal, but we’d run out of guns before we ran out of corrupt people looking to take them,” Megan replied.

“No, I get that our resources aren’t inexhaustible, but the rules are different right now under martial law,” Malorie said.

“Why, exactly, should we follow these rules?” Joshua asked.

“Well, for starters they have guns—that seems to make it persuasive. Also, they are the governing authorities, which also makes it biblical according to Romans 13.”

“True,” Megan replied, “but those rules, having the teeth of law in our circumstance, are they just or unjust?”

“What does that matter? Are you taking his side on this?” Malorie asked her sister.

“I think that my thought process is pretty rational here, so I’ll try to explain. Now, if a law is a law, what gives it power over people? If the answer is just guns and more of them, then all we need to do is get a whole lot of people with guns to agree with us and just declare the Constitution legal again. If it were that easy, then it would’ve been done by now. I’m talking about a battle of ideas here, not the profession of arms.”

“Wait a minute, big sister.” Malorie was no longer helping to watch the road for deer or other two-legged hazards; now she was facing Megan in the backseat. “What’s right is right, and this is not situational ethics.”

Joshua grew up in a boys’ home and didn’t have sisters, or he might have known never to get between them in an argument. “What if they demanded something more than a gun or food or fuel to pass through? What if they demanded one of you women or one of the boys? Do you think that human trafficking only happens somewhere else and not in America?”

“That’s absurd!” Malorie retorted.

Joshua took a breath and calmly continued, “Perhaps it seems like a far reach right now, but this whole ‘Crunch’ is a permanent situation. There are multiple generations raised on the idea that government is an inexhaustible fountain of money. Did you see the president’s ‘Inequality Agenda’?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with lying to the mayor?” Malorie was calmer now but was not giving any ground.

“This is what the Founding Fathers were fighting for—life and the sanctity of it. If I gave him a gun (that I bought fairly), then I’m giving him part of my life that I traded to earn money to buy that gun or food or fuel or whatever. The ‘right’ to demand money through taxation is legit, but the practice of corruptly taking from one to buy votes with another or to feather one’s own nest is criminal and outside of the lawful purposes of government. Government is not there to be the guarantor that everyone gets theirs; that’s not what Romans 13 was talking about. So whether taking money in the form of taxation or bribery—which is paramount to taking someone’s life—or ‘selling’ the notion of security by getting people to trade their unalienable rights for such a notion is unjust. Governments are there to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent.”

Malorie bit her lip and thought about that as Megan continued. “It’s like the NSA. They want you to think that they’re doing what’s in their charter—to protect our national security by keeping our government’s communications secure and by analyzing our adversaries’ communications that are contrary to our national interests. This is not all that they concern themselves with now. After 9/11 they quietly added domestic communications to their charter, in the name of security, of course. But when the camel’s nose is under the tent, you cannot convince him to stay out. They stood up the Cyber Security Service (CSS) to keep track of everything and everyone by archiving everything just in case they needed it later to find a correlation with ‘retrospective searching.’ Where in the Constitution do they get the right to do that? Technically it falls under U.S. Code Title 50, which was no doubt enlarged by the Patriot Act to serve their purposes.”

“So the rules are not the rules, then? Is that what you’re saying?” Malorie had her feet tucked up on the seat with her arms around her knees in full contemplation.

Joshua added, “Pretty much. Have you ever read either Runyan’s book or Chuck Baldwin’s book—both about Romans 13 and the Christian duty to oppose wicked rulers? And consider the guy who blew the whistle had to flee to Russia for protection. Think about that; he had to go to the former Soviet commies and get asylum from the U.S. in the land of the gulag to protect his and everyone else in America’s right to free speech!” Joshua paused for effect. “If they get to make the rules, then they can move the target when it suits them—this is called positive law, something any libertarian can tell you about. However, when man agrees to follow God’s rules, then the law no longer becomes an entity to itself; it has an anchor in God’s character, which does not change. Me having to lie is wrong, and I’ll stand before God for that. However, I deceived Mayor Simons because if I held my ground in the face of his corruption, I would have put us all at a much higher risk of getting stuck in the West Virginia wilderness, facing death by exposure.”

“So you lied to save our collective hides, then?” Malorie had reconnected with her sarcasm.

“Joshua did what he did to preserve our lives,” Megan said. “This is why we had to leave D.C. If we stayed, our life expectancy would be about as sure as the value of the dollar. As soon as the welfare checks stop cashing and the full faith and credit of the U.S. government is exposed to be the fraud that it is, we would be run like grist through the mill. Rome would be burning, but at least the inequality agenda would have reached its final populist conclusion—we would all be equally miserable.

“That’s the dirty little secret of socialism, Mal.” Megan had her hand on her sister’s shoulder and gently squeezed it. “You must become what you hate to enforce the rules of equal distribution. It simply cannot and never will work. That is why God’s model depends on productivity in conjunction with true Christian charity.”

As they pulled up to Wayne, West Virginia, it was still early in the morning, and the sun was just starting to paint the horizon a pinkish orange hue. Malorie got out of the Jeep; she was getting good at dealing with the guards. The checkpoint was hastily set up near Wayne Veterans Memorial Park with “God Bless America” clearly displayed to indicate a bygone era of America. Megan had drifted asleep and Joshua thought, “America bless God!”

Malorie approached the checkpoint to the sound of a catcall that only she could hear over the idling engine. The exchange was taking longer than it should have with one rather large young man at the gate near the volunteer fire department. Joshua could only see what was happening from a moderate distance.

Malorie’s body language showed that she was tense. The guard, who turned out to be a former star linebacker for the local high school football team, was easily a foot taller than Malorie. The other guards just stood there chiming in on what they’d like to do with such a pretty young lady. When he grabbed her arm, Joshua immediately got out of the Jeep and in his NCO voice said, “Hey, let her go, we don’t mean you any trouble here.” Megan awoke with a start and secured her carbine.

The guard, who seemed to be keeping warm by drinking Wild Turkey, let loose a long string of foul-mouthed words before issuing a challenge. “What do you plan on doing about it?” Joshua had the .270 out and resting in the V between the open door and the A pillar rather quickly, but not as quickly as some of the other guards were able to draw a bead on Joshua with their rifles.