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<center><h1>CHAPTER TWO</h1>
<h3><i>Guns, Blurbs, and Steal</i></h3></center>
I AM JEREMIAH STUMPF, I am an American.
I am Jeremiah Stumpf, I speak the truth.
I am Jeremiah Stumpf, you don’t fuck with me.
I am Jeremiah Stumpf, and someone is fucking with me.
That’s OK, because I needed a fire under my ass to get things started today, and everything starts at my open gun safe. It’s also where I stash my coins and silver bars. I am expecting a package from the United States Precious Metals Exchange, $10,000 in silver rounds to be precise, being delivered sometime around noon. Even though I told them to remove any labeling that could inform my neighbors that I’ve stockpiled enough silver to kill every werewolf from here to Transylvania, I can’t leave the package lying in front of my door, not with the neighbors I have.
My Caballo Signature 1776 gun safe stands proudly in my bedroom next to my California king-sized bed, my poster of the United States Bill of Rights, and the framed and autographed picture of me and Paul Ronsen taken in Philadelphia during the Redumblican Primaries. Ronsen is the only member of Congress worth a damn, despite the fact he hasn’t started his own Tea Party group, which he should. I remind him of this at least once a week with email, my website that’s dedicated to him, my @paulronsendude Twitter account, and the Facebook fan page I created for him.
Within the safe are five handguns: a Hi-Point 995 Carbine 9 mm with thirteen 10-round magazines, a 9 mm Intratec TEC-9 semi-automatic, a 9 mm semi-automatic Glock 19, a Glock 23, and a .22-caliber Walther P22 semi-automatic; three shotguns: a 12-gauge Savage-Springfield 67H pump-action shotgun, a 12-gauge Stevens 311D double-barreled sawed-off shotgun, a 870 Remington pump-action shotgun; and four rifles: an AK47, an AR-15 assault rifle with a high-capacity drum-style clip, and two Ruger 10/22 rifles with rotary magazines. All my guns are in the safe except for the Glock 26 that I carry on me at all times. Wherever I am at any given moment, I know that I have my cock, my Glock, and my pocket version of the United States Constitution with me. These are the three essentials of life.
I look at the text message again.
I don’t know who sent this or what they meant, but they are right. 9/11 changed everything. It was a switch that was flipped in my head and in every other American’s. In preparation for the mission, I’ve been visiting websites that have pictures of the 9/11 jumpers. I don’t know where the owner of the site got these pictures, but they’re all grainy color photos of people jumping from the South Tower of the World Trade Center as it became engulfed in flames. There are people who jumped alone, people holding hands, people who tried to fall with some amount of grace, while others who flailed their arms with mouths wide open as they screamed in indescribable terror. I feel I have an obligation to look at these pictures. If I don’t look, it’s like I’m trying to pretend it never happened. I wish it had never happened and the country I love could be the way it was before. Had it never happened, Justin and I wouldn’t have to do what we have to do today, and I wish that were the case.
“Hey, I brought you a Pepsi.”
Georgie stands in my bedroom doorway with a drink in his hand that I can smell from here.
I wave him in and over to my computer.
“Check this out,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“People jumping off the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11.”
He looks at it and starts to drink the jet fuel he brought.
“That’s fucked up, init?”
“Very.”
“No, I mean it’s fucked up that you’re looking at them. Let those people rest in peace.”
Georgie is getting too comfortable with me. He doesn’t know what I’m capable of. It’s time he did.
I pull up an old photo I’ve been meaning to upload to my Facebook account from the brief time when I was a professional wrestler. I needed a catchy moniker and I was working as a plumber’s assistant at the time, so I named myself Roto-Rooter Man. It was great. I bought one of those plumber’s snakes—also known as a toilet jack or electric eel—and brought it into the ring with me and told my terrified opponent that I was going to clean his pipes, which always made the crowd laugh. I wore a plumber’s outfit with lots of ass crack showing, and my signature move was called the Plumber’s Crack Draw and Quarter where I’d stuff my opponent’s head down the back of my pants and run around the ring, ultimately dropping on his head and strangling him with the electric eel. It was killer. The picture is of me performing such a move on my nemesis, The Pipe Cutter.
“That’s you there?” asks Georgie. He looks at it with his mouth open. “Brilliant! Ha ha! That is very, very, very American.”
He chugs half his drink and then walks across the hall to Justin’s room.
In addition to my arsenal, I have all my assets in the safe, and it’s time to take inventory ahead of the shipment. I have approximately $112,000 in silver, USD, Euros, Swiss Francs, Canadian dollars, and Australian dollars. $50,000 is in paper and most of the rest is in 100 oz silver bars, but I do keep a stash of silver Canadian Maple Leaf coins on hand for when our currency hyperinflates. It’s only a matter of time before it does. As Paul Ronsen famously pointed out in his groundbreaking book “The Revolution Will Be Televised On Pay Per View”, our national debt has reached such outrageous proportions that Ben Bernanke (and now Janet Yellen), that waste of skin chairman of the Federal Reserve, will have no choice but to keep printing money indefinitely. Gas will be at $1,000/gallon, bread at $800 per loaf, and while the bulk of our clueless, unemployed citizenry make paper airplanes with their worthless fiat currency, Justin and I will have gold and silver, the only money with intrinsic value. We will need coins to exchange for goods like food, clothing, and ammunition. Yet even these coins now seem a bit weighty at 1 oz, so I bought $10,000 worth of 1/10 oz silver rounds. They should be easy to barter. If the shit really hits the fan, I also have $1,000 worth of nickels, which have a melt value of 6 cents—one cent more than the face value of the coin. You have to think ahead for every contingency.
Justin is the only one who knows what I have in my safe, but I have to increase the number. When the U.S. economy collapses, I will need a group of people who are as prepared as I am, a group of at least four. Less than that and it would be too hard and survival would not be ensured. Unfortunately, decades of brainwashing by our government is difficult to reverse, so it has been difficult to identify viable candidates.
I have one thing left to do and that is send the draft of an email to Paul Ronsen.
> Dear Congressman Ronsen,
> It’s me again. I was wondering about how we can prevent terrorists from using our own rights against us. I’m just thinking out loud, but I’m wondering if we can do something preemptive that can root out would-be evil doers before they have a chance to organize and attack.
> What I propose is allowing airport security personnel to follow their gut instincts. I’m not talking about profiling. I’m just saying we should be able to target people who look like they could commit terrorist acts.
> You don’t have to give me any credit for this idea.
> Sincerely,
> Jeremiah Stumpf
Send.
In Justin’s room Georgie sits on Justin’s monstrously large bed. When he sees me, he stuffs his hand into his pocket in as suspicious a way as possible. My suspicion is confirmed by some white stuff around his nose.
Across from Georgie are two posters that are among Justin’s few possessions. One is a large portrait of Ayn Rand, the black and white one where she’s young and looks almost bangable. At the bottom of the poster is my very favorite quote:
> “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.”
That is the best explanation of the evils of compromise that has ever been written. It is also the best use of the word “knave” in modern times. I wouldn’t know anything about Ayn Rand if it weren’t for Justin.
The other poster is of Constantine XI swinging a sword into someone’s face while defending Constantinople during its siege by the Ottomans. They are taped next to one another and overlap a bit at the white edges. Justin says he hung them this way because they balance each other because one of his heroes disgraced herself by living too long and the other glorified himself by dying too young. He often says that how you die is as important as how you live—tough words coming from a man who’s afraid of spiders.
I can’t judge because Justin’s background is different than mine. He’s a first generation American, while my ancestors came to America in the 1700s. Justin’s family was from Russia and were very educated and wealthy until they were forced to flee the Bolsheviks and give up all of their properties—something that he still talks about with bitterness. I came from a long line of laborers. My father was a smart man who could’ve amounted to something, but he was drafted and sent to Nam and came back all fucked up. As a result I didn’t get much of an education—just the book of Revelation shoved down my throat.
“Justin’s a strange geezer, isn’t he?” says Georgie.
“Justin is a genius. Geniuses can be eccentric.”
“A genius? You sure you’re not exaggerating a bit?”
“He graduated from Penn with a degree in Physics. You think they give those to just anyone?”
“Every school has the person who graduated at the bottom, mate.”
As usual, Georgie doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“Is that where you met him?” he asks. “In school?”
I laugh through my nose, and not just because Justin is almost twenty years younger than me. It’s because my father wanted me to go to Penn in a way that only a man who never went to college could want his boy to go to an Ivy League school. I never applied because it was pointless, but then acted like I had and told him I’d been rejected. I even forged the rejection letter. I cashed the application check and used the money to buy a case of beer that I drank by myself in the woods near my house. It was the biggest lie I ever told my father and it was the last time I ever drank. I got really sick.
“Ready to go to Big Jugs?” asks Georgie.
“I’m sure you know the way.”
He gets up from the bed.
“So what is it you want to talk about?” he says.
“We can’t talk about it here.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll explain when we get to Big Jugs.”
“Then I guess it’s off to Big Jugs.”
“Your favorite place.”
He smiles. “Sure, my favorite place. I know why you want to go there.” He winks in a very annoying way. Well aren’t you the smart one, Georgie Old Boy.
When we’re downstairs, Georgie walks over to my old stereo and CD rack (I have a Bose sound dock now) and looks through them.
“Faster Pussycat? Damn Yankees? For real, mate?” he says.
He looks through more CDs until his gaze moves outside.
“Remember how you said you’ve never met your neighbors?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Here’s your chance.”
“What?”
“Your neighbor. He’s right outside. I think you should introduce yourself.”
I can’t tell if he’s serious.
“Get away from there,” I say.
“Sometimes it takes a third party to bring people together,” Georgie says. He knocks hard on the window pane.
“I said get away from there.”
I run at Georgie, grab him, and throw him to the floor.
“What’s this? Am I on the floor? And if so, why?”
“You do as I say. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
“Apparently not. Why do you act like you’re afraid of your neighbors?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“You act like you are.”
“I’m not!”
I look out the window and see a brown man in jeans wearing a gray hoodie that covers his head. I can’t see his face. There is a plastic Acme bag hanging from his hand, which doesn’t make sense because the Acme is on the other side of the fence.
“What’s he look like?” asks Georgie.
“I can’t tell. He’s wearing a hoodie. He doesn’t want me to see him. This has something to do with what I want to talk to you about.”
“Then let’s make our way outside,” he says. “It got a little creepy in here.”