Ted Nugent's Army

After Trump won reelection in a landslide he declared himself president for life and suspended all civil liberties. Resistance leaders contested the election, alleging massive voter fraud. Trump called them fake news, and ordered their public execution on the White House lawn.

After that, everyone shut the hell up.

All over the country, disparate bands of men and women sprang up in support of the president. The most aggressive called themselves Ted Nugent’s Army. They were loosely affiliated and heavily armed, and wore camouflage jumpsuits with their logo silk-screened on back – an electric guitar fashioned into an ArmaLite AR-15 assault rifle. Or maybe it was an ArmaLite AR-15 fashioned into a guitar. Whichever, a great cleansing began.

We fled beyond the outskirts of town carrying short supplies of food and water, the few clothes at hand, a portable solar panel, and little else. We took refuge in the ruins of a concrete foundation, pulling a sheet of corrugated metal over the top. At night we slept huddled together covered by winter coats, afraid to build a fire.

A few hundred others lived as we did, in hidden encampments scattered through the area. None of us were armed. I remembered all the gun control petitions I had signed. We could hear distant gunshots and spoke warily among ourselves. For news we had a laptop hidden in our hovel, but Internet service became spotty after Ted Nugent’s Army disrupted its infrastructure. Of course, no one really knows how the hell the Internet works. But they burned data centers to the ground, and this proved very effective.

Next they began building a big beautiful wall with forced labor, to keep out the likes of us.

Food was a finite resource but we had options. In Never Cry Wolf Farley Mowat described surviving the Arctic wilderness by eating mice he caught and cooked. Similarly I once saw a documentary about a man who fled society to live off the land as a hunter-gatherer. He ate nuts and berries. He set traps. And he ate forest slugs: flip a rotten log and dinner is served, a timberland haute cuisine. They taste like bacon, he said.

Then there was that woman who trekked across the Australian outback and ate much the same thing. Hers did not taste like bacon. To make this voyage, she explained, you must learn to like ’em. Or at least learn to choke ’em down without puking.

Ted Nugent’s Army roved the frontier day and night in jeeps, and soon enough began closing in. The sounds of automatic gunfire and agonized screams grew closer and more common. Then came word that Trump had choked to death on a Quarter Pounder with cheese. This was not fake news, but Ted Nugent’s Army continued the slaughter. Ivanka was sworn in amid great pomp and circumstance: the nation’s first woman president!