Allan Hancock College Santa Maria, California
Ozias “Ozzie” James Walker drove into the campus parking lot in a black Oldsmobile coupe. It was not his vehicle. He had hot-wired it two hours earlier. One thing he loved about old trucks –- they’re easy to steal. None of that high-tech anti-theft jazz. All it takes is a dent puller and a screwdriver. Whack off the outer ring on the ignition switch, screw the dent puller into the key slot, and give it a light tap. Boom — free truck. Five second investment.
This one sported a custom dual exhaust that made it growl like a beast of prey, and it had a killer sound system. Ozias played “Weed, Whites and Wine” through the truck’s Bluetooth as he pulled out a glass pipe. Stocky, clean-shaven, with a head of thick blonde hair, Ozias Walker could pass for a typical college student. Except for his attire. He wore a black hoodie, black cargo pants, and black tactical boots. A black neoprene ski mask covered his mouth and nose, and wraparound sunglasses obscured his eyes. He thought of it as “the Uni bomber look”.
He took a deep hit. Crack cocaine, his favorite. Cooked it himself. Four parts coke, one part baking soda. As easy for him as rolling a cigarette. He peered out the windshield at a line of students outside the Student Health Center. It was the first day of school, and vaccines were mandatory. Fucking sheep, he thought.
None of the students milling about noticed the vehicle. They lined up to get their shots out of the way, chatting about everything else that college students talk about. What classes to take, which ones to avoid. Who to date, who to avoid. The latest internet stars; the latest apps; the latest drugs. Where to drink without ID; where to get fake ID; where to get free birth control.
Ozias kept track of the people entering the vaccine line. Every time a student entered the line he made a chicken scratch on a yellow legal pad. Every now and then he snorted in disgust as the numbers climbed. He hated vaccines. He was idealistic about it, in a perverse way. Years of viewing online “skeptic” websites had him convinced that they were the thin end of the wedge. A means for the elites to render the populace docile. A means to install world government. A means to world dictatorship. Ozias Walker wasn’t one to sit by and watch the ruling elites take over the world: he meant to do something about it.
His views were fringe. After the controversy around the COVID-19 pandemic settled down, public opinion shifted in favor of public health prevention strategies. The remnant of the anti-vaccine movement was widely regarded as lunatic. This shift was made worse as numerous outbreaks cropped up in places where lots of people shunned vaccines. College campuses were hit especially hard by an assortment of bird flu, meningitisC, coronavirus-2027, a new variant of polio and Ebola.
The North American Ebola epidemic marked a sea change. Not as deadly as the earlier outbreaks, it didn’t kill off its hosts and so it was able to spread far and wide. It replicated rapidly and caused considerable damage throughout the Midwest. Just as the first vaccine came out, the virus moved into the Bible Belt. Politicians of every stripe were falling over one another to pose in front of scientists in white lab coats, pretending that they had been in favor of vaccines all along.
After many stormy public meetings, university rules had been tightened. No one was permitted to attend class without a proof-of-vaccine card from the Student Health Center. Covering seven mandatory vaccines, it was officially called an POV-7. Ozias called it “ze Death Paper”. He was convinced the certification was a draconian imposition straight out of Nazi Germany, and he affected a German accent whenever talking about it.
For a while, he tried setting up card tables on the campus “Free Speech Walk”. He provoked heated arguments with outrageous signs predicting mass death from vaccines. His favorite: “Got Jabbed? Might as Well Get Stabbed”. He filmed and posted these arguments online. He used software called “Jack the Ripper” to hack websites and replace them with his own memes and screeds denouncing the government and the pharmaceutical industry.
These antics were fun for a while but then he got kicked off of various social media platforms. People complained on campus. At first, the Hancock College Police Department treated him with bemused tolerance. This became an avuncular concern, and then outright alarm as reports piled up. Someone notified them of certain videos which had been downloaded from Ozias’s web presence and these showed him knocking a woman’s phone out of her hand. That clinched it.
A detachment of officers served him with a trespass warning. There were also some enrollees from the Hancock Police Academy present — it seemed like the perfect learning experience. The presence of all these cops was extremely intimidating. There were deputies from the Sheriff’s Department and officers from every city between Carpenteria and Guadalupe to Isla Vista.
To Ozias, their presence was confirmation that the deep state was all in on suppressing him. Ozias thought of contacting the ACLU but didn’t think they would support him because they were “new world order liberals”. He was going to handle this his own way.
He had a nail bucket filled with handguns and magazines: a Charter Arms Blue Diamond .38 Special and .44 Bulldog. The dog was a Heller vs. Washington Limited Edition. Named after of the famous court ruling in which the Supreme Court made it easy for anyone to buy almost any kind of gun. Wildly popular among firearms enthusiasts, it was beloved for being ironically named after the court case. It was his most expensive, most collectible revolver.
A Galil sniper rifle occupied the passenger seat and Mossberg 12 gauge lay on the floor, barrel neatly sawed off at 26 inches. The shotgun had a pistol grip that was modified to exploit a legal loophole: it extended back to the end of the butt stock. It was thus not classified as an illegal shotgun pistol-grip. Ozias loved the way that modification figuratively gave the finger to the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms.
The Mossberg was, as modified, nevertheless illegal. The National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a sawed-off shotgun as 26 inches or less; the California legislature added four inches in the parallel state law.
Ozias also had felony convictions: possession of methamphetamine; possession with intent to sell; operating a meth lab. He also had a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction and had done thirty days for violating a restraining order. These convictions made him ineligible for gun ownership, and, for that matter, public housing and most jobs.
These restrictions didn’t get him down- he simply operated a business of his own. He dealt guns: hot guns, stolen guns, and on rare occasions, legitimately legal guns. The bucket contained several made with parts ordered online and made with a 3-D printer. It cost about $400 in parts for a gun he sells for a thousand in profit. No serial number, no names — cash and carry. Ozias Walker didn’t plan on using the weapons. Not this day. He was there strictly for purposes of surveillance. Or so he planned.
He had conducted similar surveillance at other locations. He mapped and photographed colleges up and down the coast, from Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington to San Diego Medical College. His main focus was to figure out where the vaccines were stored, when they were delivered, and how to identify the delivery vehicles.
He had set fires at several Health Centers during the summer and he knew that the FBI and the California Bureau of Investigation were probably watching every campus on the West Coast. He also knew that there was not much they could do, and there was no reason that a nondescript van would arouse suspicion. Besides, the three-thousand-mile coast was a long border, and there were thousands of colleges.
If things got hot, he planned to shift his target to vaccine distributors and suppliers. Or regular public health clinics. It was what he considered a “target-rich environment”. If the bloodhounds came after him, he would shift his focus to the high-value target: the CDC itself. But that was down the road. This place in Santa Maria was a special project in its’ own right: it had the Allan Hancock Police Academy on site. This presented the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: hitting at vaccines and cops in one operation.
He took out a pipe and took another hit of meth, scrolling through articles on his phone. Nothing like a bit of meth early in the morning. Coffee just didn’t do it for him. He had tried cocaine and it worked nicely, for a while. The effect wore off pretty fast, so he turned to amphetamines. To his delight, it maintained the desired effect much more effectively.
He riveted attention on a website with instructions on making a homemade bomb. All it took was regular fuel oil and fertilizer. He searched and found that there were plenty of stores where he could buy these items. What he wanted was small local suppliers, more likely to take cash, no questions asked. The amount he needed to buy might raise eyebrows, and it would be wise to avoid national chain stores.
He took another hit and sneered at the students exiting the Health Center. Two years and they’ll be dead, he thought. Lambs to the slaughter. Ozias Walker was anti-vaccine in the extreme and had no apologies. He was fired from his job as an orderly at Atascadero State Hospital. They caught him faking his vaccine certification. He was denied unemployment benefits and, to top it off, he got in trouble about a claim he had filed with the Vaccine Injury Compensation fund. Someone called him claiming to be an FBI agent — an FBI agent! She wanted to know why he filed a claim with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund.
“Mister Walker, the Bureau has been provided with a request to investigate you for filing a fraudulent claim. How can you have a vaccine injury if you did not receive the relevant vaccine?”
“I filed a claim because I was injured by the vaccine, lady.”
“The name is Special Agent Abimbola, Mister Walker. According to your discharge from Atascadero, you never got that vaccine. That is why you were fired.”
“Mister Walker, the FBI has been provided with a document claiming you were vaccinated at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. But they have no record of treating you, ever. The signature on the vaccine card is not the name of any phlebotomist they employ…”
“What the…what is a phlebotomist”
“Mister Walker, you wrote a very sophisticated Vaccine Injury Claim. You know full well what a phlebotomist is.”
“ I just wanted to know if you knew.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to get smart with me, Mister Walker. I don’t like being lied to. This is not the Department of Social Services. You are speaking to the FBI. I’m trying to help you avoid a criminal referral. You can talk to me now, or hang up and I will hand your file to the Federal attorney for the Southern District. “
“My lawyer tells me never to talk to the police so I don’t know whyy I’m talking to you in the first place. And there isn’t any law that says thatI have to be polite. So how about you lay off and go after a real criminal? Like bank robbers. And how about those cartels?”
“We can charge you with insurance fraud and forgery. Would you like to mind your manners or shall we file for an arrest warrant?”
“OK. Look. I did get the vaccine when I was in Mexico. I put Cottage on the form because I couldn’t remember the name of the hospital there. And I didn’t think that they would accept it. I was just trying to get a job. Is that a crime?”
“You also filed a fraudulent Vaccine Injury Claim. We can charge you under US Code 18 Section 1001.”
“I didn’t sign it. Someone else submit the claim for me. ”
“Really, Mister Walker? Who? Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck? Did you know you can be charged with lying to the FBI?”
“No, I’m telling the truth. It wasn’t even my idea.”
“OK, so who was it that put you up to this?”
“It was ACAF — The American Childrens’ Anti-Vaccine Front. They asked me questions and typed everything in. They said the vaccine caused my headaches and insomnia. I don’t even know exactly what they put on the claim .”
This was a lie; they both knew it was a lie. They both knew that they both knew that it was a lie. But they also knew that it would only take one juror to believe this lie, and the Federal prosecutor would lose.
“Mister Walker, I am going to report this to my supervisor. I advise you not to do anything that would create an appearance of guilt, such as leaving town in a hurry. If you do, and we want you, we will find you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong, so why would I leave town?”
There was a click and the line went dead. Walker wasn’t afraid of prison. Atascadero was a mental institution, and he reckoned that things were worse there for employees than they could be for inmates at any facility. A Federal joint would be easy time. Three hots and a cot, he thought.
He contemplated a sign near the front gate. It advised that state law prohibits “any pistol, rifle or weapon within fifty feet of any institution of higher education.” He took another hit on the pipe. What genius came up with the “fifty feet” rule, he wondered.
The vaccine line finally died out. Ozias counted his chicken scratches. Ninety nine, one hundred, one hundred and one new suckers, he thought. One hundred and one idiots taking the Death Needle. Clenching his fist, he stared up at the sky. I tried to alert them. Took all the abuse at the card table. Slaved to create the online videos. He noticed the last of the stragglers leaving the building. Used every non-violent tactic in the book. None of them worked. Two people locked the door and walked away. The gullible hordes lined up to walk the plank.
Ozias Walker was finished with non-violent protest. It was time for “propaganda of the deed”. Soon. He fired up the engine and headed out to stash the guns and return the truck. The owner was out of town and would never know the car had been “requisitioned”. They would, however, notice that their Galil was gone from its’ usual hiding place in the master suite. Ozias had plans for the weapons.
This is Chapter Three of Anthropocene Memoir: Ghost of the Forgotten Snows.
Chapter Four here on my Author Page at Neocities.
Chapter Two: https://medium.com/@geofbard/icefjord-rendevous-9e38ad353eb8
Chapter One: https://medium.com/@geofbard/anthropocene-memoir-ghost-of-the-forgotten-snows-d4b6bd5d3276