The truth of it was that she was more than a little excited at the thought of becoming a martyr. It made her happier than she had ever been, and the thought of herself being interviewed on 60 Minutes by a somber-faced Ed Bradley made her feel as if her body were expanding endlessly, ballooning into space. There was always the possibility that the Illuminati would get wind of what she was doing and shoot her instead of taking her alive. There was an even better possibility that they would make sure she died in prison, and early, in one of those prison murders the authorities always claimed it was impossible to solve. She would have to be careful about both those things.
At the moment, she had to be careful to be as normal as she always was, a middle-aged woman who worked at Price Heaven and wasn’t even a supervisor, although women half her age who had been working at Price Heaven far less long had advanced that far. She had checked and rechecked the guns and the explosives. They were safely in place in the hollows between the walls, under the floor in the basement, disguised by wads of yellowed newsprint in the old woodstove nobody had used for as long as Kathi could remember. It was not the arms she was worried about. Nobody could claim she was about to shoot anybody any time sooner. It would take a good half hour to unearth anything useful. She wasn’t worried that the arms would be confiscated, either, because of course this was not the only house where they kept weapons and explosives. There were houses all around the city, and only Michael knew where they all were. Everything was ready. Everything had been carefully planned. If the need arose, America on Alert—or at least the core of it— could be out of sight and undetectable in an instant. What worried her was the police, slithering as they were in bushes and bathrooms, staying out of sight. Something was about to happen. She could feel it. She didn’t know what it was. It was one thing to wait in expectation for martyrdom. It was another to just wait, not knowing what would happen next, not being sure what you were supposed to do.
It was seven o’clock in the morning. Her shift started at ten. She had taken her shower, and eaten her breakfast, and gotten dressed in plain black slacks and a white blouse. Later, at the store, she would put on the green apron she was required to keep there and be in full uniform. The uniform bothered her to no end. For one thing, she had had to buy it, or rather the slacks and blouse, from Price Heaven itself. She had been told she was being given an “employee discount,” but there was no way to prove that. Price Heaven didn’t sell its uniform pieces to the general public. The pieces weren’t out on the floor with price tags on them so that she could check to see if she was getting any discount at all. For another thing, there was the simple fact that it was a uniform. That was what the Illuminati liked to do to people. They liked to turn them into cogs in a machine, ciphers without individuality. Ending individuality was one of the things they cared about most.
She did not have a television set. She’d thrown out the one she had at the end of her first month in America on Alert. She’d finally understood how that set was destroying her, because it was sending out the signals that brainwashed her into passivity while she thought she was just watching Golden Girls. She didn’t get the newspaper, either, because she didn’t want the newspaper delivery man coming to her door. Everybody knew that newspapers were one of the greatest bastions of evil in America. Even people who would say that America on Alert was full of kooks knew that. Kathi didn’t want to give the newspaper a chance to plant a bug on the premises. As it was, Michael came in once a month while she was at work and swept the place for bugs and did whatever else had to be done to make sure that any bugs he didn’t catch wouldn’t work. She knew he’d been there because he always left a little box of four Russell Stover chocolates on the dining room table for her to find. She was restless and a little upset. She could read The Harridan Report, but she’d read all the issues of it she had. She could look through the longer literature America on Alert put out for the public, but she’d read all that too. She could recite some of it by heart. This was how she knew television was an addiction. It had been years, but the simple fact that the set wasn’t in the house for her to turn on to pass the time made her the next best thing to panicked.
The phone rang. She had call-waiting—Michael paid for that; she couldn’t have afforded it herself, since Price Heaven paid not much better than minimum wage and never gave anybody enough hours to be “full-time”—and she raced across the dining room into the living room to look at the numbers on the little screen. Sometimes she just turned the ringers off on all the phones and left the machines on. If it was somebody from America on Alert, they would said “bloody wrong number” into the machine and then hang up. She would turn the ringer on on one of the phones and then wait until it rang. Nobody from America on Alert would leave a real message on an answering machine, of course. It was virtually impossible to erase an answering machine tape, at least in any practically useful way. That was the kind of thing that showed up in evidence at trials and, worse, got used to track down the members of an organization when one of their number was captured but would not talk. She wished she had kept just one of the guns out for herself to use. She understood why Michael got upset at the very idea of that—if she had a gun on her, they could shoot her dead and claim she had shot first. They could claim that even if the gun was in her purse and her purse was lying on the ground next to her—but she would have felt safer if she had been armed. She found it hard to sleep knowing that there was no longer a loaded Luger on her nightstand next to the glass-based table lamp with its sky blue polyester shade.