Choose Freedom: A Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Series (The Boston Brahmin Book 6) Page 21

  Sarge dashed up the marble stairs, taking them two at a time, totally disregarding the potential to slip and fall. He ran down the hallway toward the second master suite. Julia’s screams of pain emanated from the room and echoed off the ornate marble walls.

  “I’m here. I’m here,” Sarge repeated as he rushed into the room.

  “Thank God,” screamed Julia. “Get over here and suffer with me, Mr. President.”

  ARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH.

  It was brutal.

  Surrounded by Donald, Susan, and J.J., together with a specially picked group of obstetricians and nurses, Julia labored toward the birth of their child for the next thirty minutes.

  Then he emerged.

  A boy! A son! A little Sarge the Fifth.

  The nurses immediately placed their son against Julia’s breasts. That skin-to-skin contact was a bonding moment mother and child would cherish forever. The doctor clamped his cord and Sarge ceremoniously cut it. Their baby was then lovingly wiped down, swaddled in a birthing blanket, and returned to his mother.

  Everyone stood to the side reverently as Sarge and Julia cried tears of joy. They’d been through so much together. Now they were married and had started a family with a healthy baby boy.

  Sarge kissed the tears off Julia’s cheek then planted his lips on their baby’s head. He whispered into Julia’s ear, “If I could give you one thing right now, I’d give you the ability to see yourself and our son through my eyes. Then you’d know how much I love you.”

  Julia touched his cheek, looked to their son and responded, “I love you.”

  Sarge turned to accept congratulations from Donald, J.J. and Brad, who’d just entered the room.

  “Damn, I missed it!” Brad exclaimed.

  “Well, I’d say it’s all over but the shouting, but you missed that too.” Donald laughed. Susan pummeled her husband for that joke.

  Morrell gently knocked on the door and waited to be invited in. Sarge approached the man he trusted with his life. The two exchanged whispers and Morrell stood to the side.

  “You have to go back, don’t you?” asked Julia.

  “Yes,” replied Sarge as he approached her bedside. He took Julia’s hand and squeezed it. “But only for a short while. I just need to make an appearance at the inaugural ball at the State House. It won’t take long, I promise.”

  “Honey, I understand,” said Julia. She snuggled their baby a little and then looked back to Sarge. “We’re in good hands. I love you and I’ll miss you.”

  “I love you more,” said Sarge and he kissed his wife and child once more.

  Sarge buttoned his jacket and started out the door when Donald asked, “Do you need me to go with you?”

  Without turning, Sarge replied, “No, I’ve got this, DQ.”

  As Sarge followed Morrell out the door, he didn’t see the puzzled look that suddenly came over Donald’s face as he realized Sarge had referred to him as DQ, just as Steven used to.

  As Sarge reached the first floor of the Morgan home, Morrell led him down the hallway toward the kitchen instead of out the front entry to the awaiting presidential limousine. They entered a pantry closet and made their way down a spiral staircase to a dark basement corridor.

  Two members of Sarge’s security detail flanked a metal door at the end of the dimly lit hallway. As he approached, he took a deep breath. He’d waited for this moment for a long time. He looked through the small eight-inch-by-eight-inch window in the door. It was time.

  “Thanks, gentlemen,” Sarge said as he entered the room.

  The room was padded with sound insulation except for the polished concrete floor. There were no windows; only a single light illuminated the room from above. The room was empty except for a solitary metal chair and a gagged Rory Elkins bound to it.

  For several minutes, Sarge stood and stared at the man who’d stabbed his brother in the back. For a man who had the gift of eloquence and who’d replayed this moment over and over again in his mind, he was at a loss for words.

  Sarge paced the floor and circled Elkins, who could only follow Sarge’s movements with his eyes. Sarge began to pepper him with questions, despite Elkins’s inability to respond.

  “You didn’t have to kill my brother. You had no cause to. Did you do it for money? To gain favor?”

  Elkins didn’t move or attempt to speak. He sat there, his eyes growing wider as Sarge became more agitated. Sarge became angry. He’d waited so long for this opportunity to confront his brother’s murderer.

  From all sides, Sarge circled the solitary chair and began screaming at Elkins.

  “You’re a traitor! A coward! You betrayed us all!”

  Sarge continued to circle.

  “You killed my brother!”

  Then, as quickly as the anger rose, it subsided. Sarge exhaled as he put his hands in his pockets. He stared at Elkins for another moment, then turned and walked toward the door. He reached for the metal handle and then caught himself.

  He looked through the small glass window at his security detail, which waited outside. He shrugged his shoulders and chuckled to himself.

  Sarge’s family was upstairs—Julia, his loving wife and their newborn baby. He was in the home of his mentor—John Morgan—the man who helped guide him since the death of Sarge’s dad.

  His brother, Steven, was killed in cold blood by this treacherous murderer.

  Sarge unbuttoned his jacket, reached for his shoulder holster, and removed Steven’s gun, which he’d retrieved from Katie. As he gripped the handle, Steven’s voice swirled through Sarge’s mind. Fuck me.

  “What the hell,” muttered Sarge as he turned and shot Elkins between the eyes, unceremoniously toppling his dead, worthless soul to the concrete floor.

  With that, Henry Winthrop Sargent IV started day one of his presidency.

  Thank you

  Thank you for joining me on this journey and reading The Boston Brahmin series. I hope you’ve found this six volume work both entertaining, as well as informative. If so, please take a moment to leave a review for each of the books in the series by following the links below. They are so important to me.

  Thank you my friends, and remember, always

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  APPENDIX A

  THE IMPACT OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  “All revolutions are failures,” George Orwell once wrote, “but they are not all the same failure.”

  A revolution, from the Latin word revolutio, meaning a turnaround, is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place over a relatively short period of time. It is typically used to refer to political change. Revolutions have occurred throughout human history and vary widely in terms of methods, duration and motivating ideology. There results include major changes in culture, economy and socio-pol
itical institutions. Here are what I consider to be the ten most influential revolutions.

  Most revolutions—those in France and Russia spring to mind—certainly didn’t end well. But the American Revolution was a success by all standards and measures. It created a stable and prosperous nation state, under a constitution that is still the law of the land two centuries after its adoption. New men, in a New World, violently shook off the bonds of monarchy, yet restored order in good time—something the peoples of old Europe never managed to achieve.

  The American Revolution (1775-83) is also known as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown. Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

  THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY

  For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.

  In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent, and issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War.

  DECLARING INDEPENDENCE - An important first step

  When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates–including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson–voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston. The engagement (known as the Battle of Bunker Hill) ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause. Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

  By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’ flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

  THE WAR'S TURNING POINT - The Battle of Saratoga, New York

  British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack, aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army aimed to march south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

  Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm (known as the first Battle of Saratoga). After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

  THE WAR DRAGS ON - 1778-1781

  During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington’s troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington’s army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d’Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

  The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates’ American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green’s command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

  DESIRE FOR FREEDOM AND PERSEVERENCE PREVAILS

  By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties i
nto Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O’Hara, to surrender; after O’Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

  Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that October, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

  IMPACT - AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

  America is an exceptional nation. It stands out when compared to all other countries in the world. And while it stands out on range of indicators—the U.S. has the biggest economy, its military is unmatched, and Americans give more to charity than anyone else—the true meaning of American exceptionalism is not to be found in the country’s achievements. America is truly exceptional because, unlike all other nations which derive their identity and purpose from some narrow unifying quality—an ethnic character, a common religion, a shared history—America is built on the universal ideas of equality and liberty. America is the only nation in the world founded on a creed that is applicable to all men and all times. This is what makes America an exceptional country.