Download an audio version at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

Two days after Future Peace, when they’d gotten rid of the reporter and the Nationalist and were down to the girl, an old friend of Carson Cutt’s came to visit. Perhaps “come to visit” wasn’t the most accurate phrase for blundering through the hills near Green Mountain Falls until one of Cutt’s men picked him up and brought him in blindfolded, but it was the one Gus used: “Hope it’s okay I came to visit,” he said. He’d been an AA regular but Cutt hadn’t seen him in years. He’d moved up north of Berthoud Pass, and then the Feds had locked him up for a while.

The trouble had started when, in the middle of a drought, a federal judge ruled that the states of the Upper Colorado River Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah) had to let most of their water flow away to California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico. To Coloradans, this meant no water to sustain fly-fishing, run snowmaking machines, or grow fodder for cattle, all so that a quarter-continent away some agribusiness barons could get even richer growing vegetables and watermelons in the Mohave Desert.

The end of that summer—the same summer Cutt spent walking behind bulldozers—Gus was organizing a human chain at a slough gate substation; staging a sit-in on the Interstate; going on the radio to encourage his neighbors to fill every forbidden swimming pool, bucket, bathtub, and cistern they could. He was much better than Cutt at getting TV crews to show up, and Cutt saw his face lots of times on the local news, being hauled away by National Guardsmen or shouting at engineers as they opened some spillway.

It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Gus’s followers had stuck to losing protests. But someone must have decided that if the people of Northern Colorado couldn’t keep their water, nobody else could have it either: the control gates were dynamited on the Alva B. Adams Tunnel, the giant pipe that carried water from the uppermost part of the Colorado River, under six miles of Rockies, and down the Eastern Slope to Denver. The gates didn’t open completely, but the mechanism was damaged and they stuck halfway, hundreds of acre-feet a day rushing past. The casement dam was blown too, and the diversion gates.

To the Feds, Gus was the obvious suspect. He’d been the face of the protests. They arrested him and held him without charges. Meanwhile, for weeks Posse snipers and saboteurs hiding in Rocky Mountain National Park, just north of Adams Tunnel, kept the Corps of Engineers from making any progress on repairs. The Army had to send in 200 regulars to guard the crews and the site.

Gus’s lawyers took their habeas petition all the way to the Supreme Court and eventually got him out. Cutt met him for coffee two weeks later on the outskirts of Denver. It was obvious he’d gone back to drinking. He looked angry, sad, and humiliated all at once. They’d kept him in strict isolation and near sensory deprivation all those months he’d been inside, trying to force him to surrender information he didn’t have about the Possemen shooting at them. Cutt only knew this because Gus’s lawyers had publicized it. Gus himself never mentioned it, he just kept ranting about this extremist bill in Congress that Cutt was sure couldn’t pass.

That bill was the Military Control Act, the one stripping away Colorado’s rights as a state. When it did pass, the President got on TV talking about the “strategic importance of north-central Colorado”—its water, yes, but even more its Green River coal and the vulnerable rail lines that carried it. A permanent deployment of 20,000 would be in the Territory within two weeks, he said, with a colonel in command.

Cutt had heard from Gus one more time. He’d called to say he was leaving for New Mexico, and that he’d call again once he was settled. He hadn’t.

Now he was back to tell Cutt that some boy was going around Roswell telling people he’d been kidnapped and taken to Area 51 in a giant white bus, and that while he was there he’d found out what the Feds were doing to soap and why. Cutt couldn’t figure out for the life of him why his friend believed something so dumb. And it was even harder to swallow the second half of his story: that a bunch of other Posse leaders also believed the kid’s tale, enough to call a gathering at the Four Corners Market.

“The way I see it, there’s two possibilities,” Cutt told Gus. They were alone on the slope above the mine’s mouth, chickadees squeaking and buzzing in the firs around them. “Either you’re working with the Feds to get me and a bunch of other Sheriffs into some ambush, or else a bunch of Sheriffs really do believe this bullshit and are getting together to waste everybody’s time. Let’s say your boy’s story is even true. You really expect me to give up on everything here to go storm an Air Force base?”

Gus shook his head. “You’ve got nothing to give up,” he said. “You’re doing the same thing you did as a cop, finding a cause to be passionate about. Back then it was getting other addicts into treatment instead of working on yourself. Now it’s this war-camp survival game. You’re miserable but you don’t want to change anything because you’re afraid you’ll lose your sobriety and be even more miserable.”

Cutt stood and brushed pine needles from his seat. “You could be right about that,” he said. “But you’re still full of shit on the rest of it.” Besides, Gus was right only to the extent that he’d described the basic condition of any alcoholic when he wasn’t drinking, a tissue of meaning wrapping and hiding a cold, empty space. The trick was to convince yourself to believe in the solidity of that tissue, not to think of how easy it would be to tear it. It didn’t help to be reminded, and anyway, Gus was calling Cutt a black kettle when he was about the blackest pot in the world. “Don’t come to visit anymore.”

He told his men to drop his friend on the road five miles from the Wilkerson Pass Visitor’s Center—the other side of the Forest from where Gus had come in. That might have been vindictive, he supposed. He didn’t care.

The development girl had been docile since her friends left, content to sit on the floor of the hawk pen and eat what was given her. She knew Cutt would send her home soon enough and was willing to wait. When it was time to take her down to Cañon City he merely handed her a strip of cloth to tie over her eyes and opened the cage.

She ran at a dead sprint for the mine mouth. One of his men tried to block her and she aimed a kick at the side of his knee, meant to cripple. More men tried to wrestle her down; one earned a gash on his wrist when she bit through a flap of skin, another a cut on his cheekbone from a jabbed thumbnail that just missed his eye. Finally they got control and started to beat her. Cutt let them for a moment. She deserved it. But he soon realized that if he didn’t stop them they might beat her to death. Marsh was already trying to get an angle among the others to stomp on her head.

One of Cutt’s worst fears was that someday his collection of bruisers and petty crooks would simply quit obeying him. Most of the time he avoided giving orders they’d be tempted to disobey—such as trying to halt a seizure of violence mid-spasm. He took a deep breath, stepped forward, and shoved Marsh away as hard as he could. “Stop!” he yelled. His men paused, and Cutt had a few seconds to worry that this, finally, would be the time they ignored him. “Stop,” he said again.

The girl lay in the fetal position, blood on her lips.

Cutt addressed her. “If you make me, I’ll tie you hand and foot and throw you across the back of a mule like a sack. With whatever’s left of your concussion you’ll get a hell of a headache, hanging upside down.”

This time she let him put the blindfold on. He sat her on a horse with a real saddle, not just a pack-mule’s blanket, her hands tied to the pommel so she could hold on. He couldn’t see any reason why she’d fought, but she’d fought like a real hellcat. He’d been right to see potential in her. A few friends like her and she could put a real hurt on the Denver Guard, force the Army to send regulars over there instead of up here.

They rode for an hour, slowly, Cutt in the rear, until they reached one of the Posse’s trucks, an old Forest Service Bronco. He unblindfolded her, put her in the passenger seat, and walked around, making sure the rims were locked. His Posse kept only four-wheel-drive vehicles with manual-locking rims. The servomotors in the automatic-locking kind stuck when dirt and water got in them.

He got in the driver’s seat. “I could blinker you again, but even if you did know where you are, you wouldn’t go to the Feds, would you?”

The girl shook her head.

“I took it off because I want you to know how to get back here,” he said. “With a couple of friends, if they make them as toughas you. We’ll train you up, you can go home and wallop the Feds in your own backyard. You come right where we are now and hang your hat, chill your buns, and someone will see you in a couple of days.”

“Fuck you. I don’t have any friends,” Veronica said.

Cutt started the truck and put it in gear. They weren’t even on a dirt road, only a track his men had marked with blazes that showed where the trees were wide enough apart for a truck to pass; they had to creep, the four-wheel shifter on Low. “What do you think this war is about, Veronica?” he said.

Veronica jerked a little at the sound of her name but said nothing.

“When do you think it started?”

Veronica looked at him.

“It goes all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he said, “our first Socialistpresident. Roosevelt made something called the Bureau of Reclamation, which built Hoover Dam and about a hundred others. He started handing out cheap water and electricity and all of a sudden there were farmers all over where before there were just ranchers and trappers, in places where it’s nuts to farm. And then we get whole cities in the wrong places.”

They were headed down a 20 percent grade now, exposed rock in places, and he shut up to drive it. Wet patches here could be disastrous, and although it hadn’t rained in four days, water could hide in the moss.

“See, it all went wrong when we forgot about profit, about letting the market work. If corporations owned all this land and resources and had to make money out of it, you’d see all timber and mining, not dams and cities. We might have figured that out except in the Sixties, when LBJ was busy handing out free lunches to welfare kids and dropping napalm, the Communists invented environmentalism, which taught everyone that to protect this land we needed to keep logging and mining companies away. Meanwhile, did you know that the Sierra Club said okay to the Glen Canyon Dam? You know what a complete ungodly fuckup that was.”

They reached a Forest Service road, a good one that in pre-Occupation days had been graded annually, and Cutt stopped, shifted up to the higher set of four-wheel gears, then rolled downhill again. The truck was soon rattling on fifteen years of washboards.

“We didn’t even wake up and see we were losing that game of checkers until we got Reagan and the greatest Interior Secretary of all time, Mr. James Watt. They saw you had to fight radical enviros if you wanted to beat Communism, because the economy has to use resources. They stopped building those dams that made no economic sense and they brought back the mining and drilling and timbering and grazing leases. So we won the Cold War. But environmentalism didn’t go away. It fought back with Deep Ecology, which says we’re going to clear all these companies off the land and herd all the people into cities and lock them up in developments. That’s what’s happened to you, Veronica. They’ve got you fenced in a human zoo.”

Veronica raised her bound hands to shoulder height and with her left elbow on the seat-back swiveled her body toward him and held them out accusingly. “You locked me in a cage, asshole,” she said.

He left her beside Route 50 in Cañon City, like he’d promised, and went to see his friend Jack, the chef. They smoked cigars and strolled along the Arkansas River. He was about to suggest maybe they should have a brandy, too, when he heard the unmistakable hydraulic whir of a bus engine. He looked up the slope to the highway and saw it passing slowly, gargantuan, white, and windowless, Moby Dick on land. Until that moment he hadn’t fully considered the thing his friend had said first but not lingered on—he’d said the boy had found out why the Feds were tainting soap. So there was a reason after all. And if they had a reason for doing it, there was a reason to stop them. The rest of what his Posse did might be questionable, but that at least could be worthwhile.

Anyway, going to Four Corners would keep him busy and not drinking for a few more days. He’d almost slipped there, probably the fault of his friend’s visit and the reminder of his old life. Maybe by the time he came back to Pike Forest the urge would have passed.

The gathering was in nine hours. It’d take at least seven to drive to Four Corners if the roads were even open. No time to return to the Forest and tell his men where he was going. He could probably buy a disposable cell phone if he needed to relay anything, but someone at this end would also need a clean line and the number to call.

Cutt had a working relationship with a fixer in Denver named Elliott. For a fee he handled negotiations with Nuevo Sindicato dealers, Acadian truckers, and the like. Cutt called from Jack’s phone and left a message on one of his many dummy voicemail accounts saying only, “Come down to the train soon.” He told Jack that someone washed and shaven except for a mustache would come asking for him. Jack should tell that man where he’d gone. Elliott would know which chat rooms to check for a cell number, and how to get word to the rest of the Posse.

Jack sold him a tank of diesel and he left.

Two and a half hours later he came to a crossroads on a plain. At one corner was a convenience store. Through its window he could see a man behind a counter, nothing on the shelves. A lamppost on the opposite corner extended an arm from the end of which hung a darkened traffic light. An old corpse leaned against the base of that pole, crumpled sideways, flesh and parts of limbs taken by coyotes and vultures, clothes in tatters about its bones.

Until recently Cutt had never seen anything like it, but this was actually the third such corpse he’d seen this year. People in desolate counties were reverting to barbaric practices, displaying dead bodies to warn the living. It was sad to see people reduced to vigilantism, but this far into the no-man’s-land between Fort Carson and the Wall, empty scrub for a hundred miles, he wasn’t surprised. If law ever returned here it would come slow. And of course Cutt himself wasn’t helping.

He parked in front of the store and entered. He hadn’t brought food when he left the forest and he could never ask Jack for it, not unless he wanted to wait an hour while Jack prepared something absurdly fancy. To Jack, who spent all day in the kitchen, a meal in an hour was fast food.

“I’ve got venison sandwiches,” said the man behind the counter. “That’s it.”

Cutt nodded and the man opened the door on the propane-ammonia refrigerator behind him, took out a home-baked loaf of bread and a brown-paper-wrapped hunk of meat, and cut slabs from both with a long, serrated knife.

“What’d that guy do?” Cutt said, pointing out the window at the corpse.

“Werewolf,” the man said, piling up slices of bread and meat into a sandwich.

Cutt didn’t say a word, just paid, took his sandwich, and got back on the road. When you met a man crazy enough and free enough of the law to admit to murder on suspicion of lycanthropy, there wasn’t much to do but put distance between the two of you. The only other choice was to shoot him on the spot as a kind of public safety measure.

On the lower slopes of Wolf Creek Pass rocks from fist to basketball size littered the road, and on the upper slopes three inches of powder covered it. The only piece of luck was that the snow sheds built to protect the curves most vulnerable to slides hadn’t collapsed.

Beyond the pass the road cleared and he sped to make up time, doing the last stretch at eighty with one feeble headlight. He was late all the same.

He’d been to Four Corners twice before. The Posse had saved some cash and he’d come to invest it in Park County water and timber rights. It was a fine place for a market during the day, a spit with box canyons on two sides that left a single, easily controlled point of entry, the highest point in the landscape except for a facing jut of land, where the Navajos kept a sniper. But at night it was a terrible place for meeting: a single escape route, no cover, constant wind to drown the noise of coming vehicles. So Cutt was reassured when he found the bridge over the San Juan River, which marked the reservation’s western border, blocked by two loaded haytrucks. He was even more reassured when he stopped and was instantly floodlighted and ordered from the Bronco. At least they’d set up a perimeter. Most other Sheriffs were, after all, ex-military men; Cutt was the only actual former law-enforcement officer he knew of. (The others made him a little uncomfortable, candidly. They’d been trained to wantto kill and he couldn’t talk to them without thinking of all the Fed soldiers who’d been through the same homicidal brainwashing. When he’d been a true sheriff he’d considered himself ready to shoot if need be, but had also considered himself lucky never to have done it.)

The sentries took the keys to his Bronco and drove it down a side road, behind some brush. They made him kneel on two bales thirty inches apart while they frisked him, taking his pistol, collapsible baton, and hunting knife. Then one of them directed him around the haytrucks, and when they reached the other side of the bridge he was surprised to see no lights on Four Corners Monument hill, only a couple hundred yards away. Instead the Posseman who’d followed him now led the way to another side road, where a Jeep was waiting. They drove onto the reservation.

“They’re not at the Market?” Cutt said.

“Helicopters,” the Posseman said. He didn’t specify whether they’d seen them or were just being cautious.

Eventually they stopped before a wooden church. Inside, one woman and twenty-five men—mostly Posse but a few civilians—sat on folding chairs. There was no altar and there were no pews. Up front was a corkboard with a road map of Nevada tacked to it, a blue X showing, Cutt imagined, where Area 51 was supposed to be. A clean-shaven man stood beside it facing the others, a mountain hippie type wearing a fleece vest and his hair in a ponytail. He put up his hand for quiet when Cutt came in. “Who do you ride for?” he said.

“I’m a Sheriff, I ride for myself,” Cutt said. “Douglas, Teller, and Park Counties.”

“All right, Sheriff, pull up a seat. You’re in time for the demonstration.”