Steven Clark Bradley  

I hope you enjoyed the first two installments of Last Full Ounce of Devotion.  Today America is in need of heroes.  We do not need tough guys, we need Patriots who are willing to lay down life and limb to defend freedom. 

Yet, there are those who do not just lament the loss of the freedoms that were enshrined in the document that these self-proclaimed constitutional warriors now regarded as a mere relic of a free nation that had died several years earlier.  Len Garret was about to hatch a plot that, if brought to its explosive finality, would bring crashing down, the evil government of American usurpers who had proclaimed freedom from one corner of their mouths while doing all in their power to weaken her at the same time out the other corner of their collective voice.

Now, finish this exciting chapter and see what this young Len Garret  is about to carry out as his dream of a lifetime.  The way to stop him will demand resolve and courage.  Nothing will work short of some hard won battles, hard won through lethally inflicted blows that are nothing short of Patriot Acts.

Patriot Acts by Steven Clark Bradley - The Last Full Ounce of Devotion Part Three

. . .After all the hugs and well wishes, Len walked out into the Great Hall again.  There were no more armed guards or fears of saying the wrong thing.  In fact it had been easy.  He had realized earlier that all he had to do was say the opposite of everything he really believed and felt with as much passion as he really felt it.

He started watching the TV screen as C-Span reported and broadcast the speeches and the debate.  Laws to take charge of the millions of loose guns were about to usurp the statutes of the document that gave power to all other statutes that followed it.  The TV was echoing in the low roar volume that slightly resonated throughout the Great Hall, but the boy could make it out.

“You Americans have too many guns, it is dangerous.” One talking head declared in an Asian accent.

“In your country, who has guns?” some unknown radio talk show host enquired.

“Police…police have the guns.”

“Who else has guns…do you have a gun?  Do criminals have guns?” the talk show guy asked.

“No, I do not have a gun, the police have the guns and they protect me.”

“Then, if only the police have the guns, perhaps you need protected from the protectors, what ya think?”

“You don’t understand, we don’t need guns.”

“Look, the truth is, the police have guns, the criminals still have guns, but the good, hard-working people, like yourself, have nothing but trust in the police.  There, see!  Gun laws are impotent!  The people who need the protecting have no means of doing so and are a dependent mass.  They dare not piss off the ones keeping them alive!”

The boy took his eyes off the tube and looked deeply into his not-so-long life and memory and lowly repeated the words he certainly recalled since they had been forced into his head in his home school around his mom’s kitchen table, back when such things still mattered, at all.  The document, in which the words were both enshrined and entrusted, stood out in his mind!  These words had been stated by Jefferson that no people should easily throw off the authorities of one’s traditional political bands.  In fact, he understood what Jefferson meant.  His daddy had made sure of that.  Jefferson had even stated that a people ought to long suffer even certain injustices than to haphazardly rid themselves of a system that had, for so many years and through so many trials and tribulations, served them well.  Nevertheless, Jefferson had used that very argument as his catalyst to cast off the bonds of abuse in order to create the nation. Even this young man knew and understood the words of Jefferson.

“How long is long suffering?” Young Len Garret angrily asked himself.

Now, those verses rang out in the young man’s mind and declared the necessity to once again cast off the bonds that now threatened to overwhelm humanity forever and which had destroyed his life.  It was time, just like Daddy had said, time to end what now did not resemble, in any manner, what Jefferson and his brothers had envisioned or enshrined in the constitution.  It needed to be ended or perhaps rediscovered.  That was an issue to be decided at a later date.  At the moment, the boy was in the eye of an amassing malaise caused in part from his knowing what was ahead and sorrow at having come to the conclusion that all rational options had been exhausted.  Jefferson’s words rang loud and rang clear in his mind.

“And Why not?” he demanded to know of himself.

The boy remembered his daddy.  His father had only recently come back from the first Iraq war, mentally.  It all flooded his young head.  He had only been 14.  He had seen his father go away in 91, only to eventually become like a spent shell, after he came home.  It pissed Len Garret off!

“There isn’t even the very slightest scrap of mercy or anything even slightly resembling mere pity in the eyes of modern day lady liberty!” he lamented and raged at the thought.

It infuriated him that after having only come to life a few short years earlier that he’d have to shed his skin and live life on the rough, to get ready and to maintain the image of his family’s massacre before his mind both day and night.

“My mother and sister there, blown apart without mercy!”

What his daddy had done did not merit his last ounce of devotion, which the young man was fully determined to save for a much more important, more opportune moment that would surely require the laying down of body and soul for the purpose.  Yet, the words rang out in his head and he spoke them with his voice echoing and resounding in the marble-walled building in which he waited to know his fate. Throughout and around the dome as young Len Garret stood, he knew he would grow into his shoes.

He  looked directly up into the dome, recalling the words.  He had thought about just blowing the place up, one day, as any hard fighting, devoted soldier would when feeling as betrayed as he did.  He didn’t want to be just a Bin Laden who took no care for innocents, though he knew one day, he’d probably have to kill a few.  He wanted a more massive plan with a far more extensive outcome.  He had already had years to plan it.

“I gave my time in the box!” the boy declared to himself, while not even uttering a sound.

“I got myself thoroughly checked out.” the boy told himself in a congratulatory manner.

He let the words run through his mind, he remembered the fully armed guards who had surrounded him.  He recalled his shackles and cuffs and again the small army that had kept anyone from getting to him or from him getting away.  It made him almost chuckle at the comparison of the words of Jefferson to his present state of affairs.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

That day so many years before the vision in his sleep, in the dark and dusty land of rebels who were headstrong about bringing down the Union!  The child now believed in himself to be doing his duty as a young man, though his heart was burdened, as any grown and tried man should be.  At the right time he’d be free, reformed, a true blue ‘how do you do’ man.  There would be no doubt, he’d be ready to give himself for a nation that had ceased to love itself, or at least portray himself as such.  His time way back then, the moment that had brought about the time in which he now waited for his moment to bring Jefferson’s maxim into reality, once again.

Those days would never leave his mind.  He saw his home again.  He heard the chopper in the air ready unleash death upon him and the ones he loved!  He saw himself aim at the chopper and then heard the sound of the explosion that was the death of his kin and Len Garret’s eyes flew open and he heard the sound of knocking at his front door.

Len came to himself and stood up and wiped the sleep off his face.

“What a day!” he thought as he stretched and heard another, more forceful pounding at the front door. He walked to the door.

The scope and massive consequences both petrified and electrified Len Garret as his eyes opened and he remembered the day.  His arm flayed outward from his slumbering position and reached out for the bottle that he nearly knocked to the floor. He turned it up to his mouth and set it back down.  His guest would certainly not want any.  He worked at remembering the details of the dream he had just seen.

“But, tomorrow, that will be no dream.  I’ll have to store that one up in the memory banks as an operation of great magnitude! A great shaking of the Earth, and it all commences tomorrow”

His eyes looked up and remembered the scenes of his father, mother, his sister, all blown away in mercilessness of the political beast.  The vision of the night seemed to hang out in front of his eyes.

He thought “Damn, it was nice to be a kid again!” as he opened the door.

Len Garret extended his hand to his guest.

“Mr. Ambassador, pleasure to you meet you.”

The guest looked cautiously from a side view at Len Garret and returned the greeting.

             “Salaam Alekum, Mr. Garret.”

All of Steven Clark Bradley's novels are widely available all over the net. Here are a few links to help you read these exciting stories now.
Amazon.com
booksamillion.com
powells.com
bordersstores.com
barnesandnoble.com
copperfields.com