The Ragnars

The Ragnars come at night. During they day, they are individual men with no connection to each other. Some are cops, others are survivalists, some are college professors, judges, all outsiders, all disenfranchised by society and forced from the skills and knowledge that would have made them giants during their day. They are the forgotten ones, the disappeared ones, the outcasts and the romantic loners and Robin Hoods.

Their enemy is the society that had been on a long march against them. This society had sought to remove them because they didn’t fit in. When society had destroyed everything of value in life, when there was nothing but rubble and darkness in the cities, they started meeting in the corners, they started talking about the unfairness of things and about the men in charge, the men who had stolen their money, their ideas and their futures would soon know who they were. They planned on what they could do about a society in which justice was reversed, where conformity was praised and plunder was the order of the day.

They started training. The cops and the athletes demonstrated self defense, strategy and mortal combat against incompetents who knew only one thing, to hold guns on men and give them orders. These incompetents are the men who need to disappear, they thought. They studied war, they studied strategy, they studied finance and they studied the philosophy of independence. They planned, they strategized and they began to act.

During the day, they were the watchers, faceless men who read the newspapers, watched the videos and identified those key men among the exploiters who benefited the most from theft and legal plunder. People saw them but they didn’t know who they were and what they were about. They could not tell that they were the men of justice in society and they were the executioners of thieves and criminals.

Slowly, they began to strike. Once they identified a key player, the idea man, the leader and the thief, they watched him, recorded his schedule, researched his finances and learned how to hack into his life. They identified his confederates and made plans to deal with them individually and all at once. Once the data was in, they met and decided what to do.

They waited for their moment and struck like a thief in the night. They would grab him in the night or during a drive or a walk and throw him into a van. They would isolate him and read him the crimes he had committed and then taken him many hundreds of miles to an isolated wilderness. They would smash his communication devices and leave him there to fare for himself. They would transfer his finances to a safe place where they could be used to reimburse the people from whom they had stolen values.

If they saw a thug smashing in a store window, they would grab him in the middle of his violence. They would warn him to disappear because they knew where he lived, they were watching his every move. They made sure they meted out the same injuries he had inflicted on others, a bloody face, a burned home and a burning car. They also forced him to give up whatever money he had made so they could contribute it to those he had harmed.

These are the Ragnars and they are coming.