Getting off the line, back to Cheyenne, made the difference. If we killed people trying to smash their way across the border, seeing the folks in Cheyenne, alive, struggling to go on with their lives gave us a justification. Others died that these might live.
And the madness and total despair were held at bay.
Barely.
When the only thing left is a hopeless battle, the will to live vanishes. When I, or the other girls, asked what made me any different from the desperate starving wretches trying to sneak across the line, we had no answer.
I’d committed ugly acts. Lost my balance. I had nowhere to go. The hole was too deep, too dark to find my way out of. I was just falling, with no bottom in sight.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Thirty
Sam awakened when Court entered the room. The bedside clock read 11:38. Sam sat up in bed, squinting in the harsh light. Court closed the door and flipped the lock closed before walking over to his bed. There, he dropped onto the edge, head hanging.
“You look like it’s the end of the world,” Sam told him.
“It is.” Court rubbed his tired eyes.
“How bad?” Sam propped himself on the pillows.
“The east is gone, Sam. All of our people. The cities, Washington DC, New York, Boston. They think it was two nuclear strikes. And the EMP took out all the rest. As far west as Iowa.”
“What the fuck? When? How? I mean...”
“I’m just telling you what General Kyzer told the governor. So this is hearsay. Best guess is that everyone was caught off guard trying to deal with the economic crisis. It was bohungus brilliant. See, they destroyed the money. Who would have ever thought money was vulnerable? It’s just there, right? Money is faith. People believe in it. But a dollar bill’s just a piece of paper. And the electronic accounts? They were corrupted. So the president declared Martial law to keep order.”
“I thought money was backed by gold or something.”
“Nope. Not since Nixon. A dollar is worth something because you, Sam Delgado, and everyone else, believes it is. It’s an abstract. A measure of account for perceived value.” He paused. “They didn’t have to corrupt all the accounts. Just enough to shake confidence in the system. Then it all cascaded after that.”
“But the records?”
“Couldn’t be trusted not to have the malware. By the time it could be fixed, the country had already come apart. Whoever did this played upon American distrust of other Americans. Democrats and Republicans, liberals against conservatives, East against West, Antifa against Proud Boys, Q-Anon against BLM, urban against rural, racial resentment, distrust of government, you name it. We were ripe to turn on each other.”
Sam pressed a hand to his gut, thinking about what he’d heard about the line. Americans. Down in Colorado. Starving. Being shot by Americans. From Wyoming. Trying to protect their homes.
“Meanwhile”—Court interrupted—"some humongous container ship unloads an entire Chinese army in San Francisco.”
“A what? A whole army?”
“Yeah. Right there. At the port. Container after container, all holding troops, guns, tanks, fuel, food. A whole fricking army. In a container ship! And the longshoremen do the heavy lifting.”
“Chinese? So...it was the Chinese who did this to us?” Sam tried to concentrate, to kill the images of Hempstead. Of what his parents’ last moments might have been like. About the immensity of everything he’d known. Just gone.
“Nobody knows.” Court stared at his pudgy hands. “Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Pakistan? Maybe all of them working in unison for all anyone in Wyoming can tell. Those four missiles that were launched by the missile command at Warren Air Base? Rumor is they went to China. That the order to launch came from the Joint Chiefs.”
“Holy shit.” Sam suffered through the image of what Manhattan would look like after a nuclear blast. The glass blown out of the towering buildings. The fires. People burning alive by the millions. Washington DC. The Capitol collapsed into rubble, the Smithsonian buildings and all they contained, incinerated. The Washington monument blown away. An entire history and heritage vanished in an instant.
“We’re it,” Court told him. “Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada down through New Mexico and Arizona. Most of Texas. That’s who still has electrical grids, working infrastructure. Any kind of social cohesion.”
“What about California? Oregon and Washington?”
“All Agar knows is that there’s supposed to be fighting around San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Agar wasn’t sure. Might have been additional Chinese landed at other ports. It’s all pretty confused with the chaos, rioting, and looting.”
“So...what do we do?”
Court met Sam’s gaze, a vision of Hell lingering in those wounded brown eyes. “We save what we can. Who would have thought it would be out in the wasteland of the West, but if there’s any chance for who we are as a people, it’s out here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does,” Court told him. “I tried to explain it to Agar, but I don’t think he quite got it. Any place with a large urban population is doomed. So what if the army is fighting Chinese outside San Francisco? There’s no infrastructure to send them ammo, food, spare parts—and the civilians around them are starving and turning on each other. If China was nuked, the EMPs would have blacked out the entire country. Just like the US, China’s economy stopped in its tracks. They can’t resupply their army, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because nothing works, Sam!” Court gave him a half-panicked look. “Don’t you get it? Everything with a computer chip, phones, banks, cars, trucks, clocks, airplanes, trains, industrial robots, power plants, cargo ships, tablets, the cloud, security systems, traffic lights, pump controllers, washing machines, TVs, anything electric.” He swallowed hard. “It all stopped.”
“All of it?”
“Everything that ran on transistors or a chip. Which is everything. Talk about the Achilles heel of the world economy.”
“Then why would anyone have started the cyberattack in the first place? I mean, they had to know we’d retaliate.”
Court’s shoulders slumped even further. “Name a war, any war, that anyone’s started in the last century that worked out the way it was supposed to. Hitler didn’t figure he’d be living in ruins within four years. Japan didn’t anticipate we’d blast their cities to radiated ruin. Korea was supposed to become a paradise. Vietnam? Did the Russians stop Islamic radicals by invading Afghanistan? Did Bin Laden initiate world-wide jihad on 9/11? Is Iraq a shining example of democracy that reshaped the Middle East? Did Iran neuter Saudi Arabia by turning Yemen into a conflagration?”
“Guess not.”
Court sighed. “So, I can guess a thousand reasons why another country would want to knock the US off the top of the heap. As far as plans go, the bank cyberattack was pretty good. Destroy the money. Then step in with a way to stop the chaos.”
“But?”
“But it worked too well.” Court pulled off his shoes and flopped onto the bed. “If American banks went down completely? They’d take the international banking system down with them. Maybe the malware doesn’t stop in the US, maybe it spreads across the globe? We’re talking a world disaster. Like a fire that burns out of control. Chaos everywhere.”
“And someone panics?” Sam suggested.
“Could be. They know the damage to the US is so great it will require retaliation, so they hit first. Try to disable our ability to strike back by taking out the East coast, the White House and Pentagon.”
“But it doesn’t work. We launch missiles.”
“And there’s the submarines, the strategic bombers.”
“Or it could have been someone besides the Chinese who nuked the East Coast. Maybe North Korea or Iran who wanted to capitalize on our weakness?”
Court made a snuffing sound. “You’d be a pre
tty good gamer yourself.”
“Yeah. Lucky me.”
Which didn’t ameliorate the fact that everything he’d ever known, home, Mom, Dad, Sammy, Tico, Paco, and all the kids he’d grown up with, his high school, the New York skyline. All those people and places. Dead.
As it sunk in, the keening began in his soul. He closed his eyes as Court got up, flicked the room lights off, and left him in miserable darkness.
To cry.
And mourn.
Rock Bottom
It is going completely numb and senseless. Can’t think. Can’t comprehend sight, hearing, smells, sensations. A total blank out.
I’d seen it on the line. That point when a human being finally lost the last glimmer of hope. The empty despair beyond which they couldn’t feel. Like flicking a switch. The brain just turns off. Goes dark. Doesn’t process.
I was that way.
The night I was pulled off the line.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Thirty-One
The raucous snore—like someone strangling on jelly—jerked Sam from a tortured sleep. He blinked awake, could see gray morning light filtering in past the curtains.
The wracking snore repeated, almost shaking the walls. Sam winced, sat up in bed. Across from him, Court lay with his arm across his eyes, mouth agape. As Sam watched, Court sucked in another snore that might have been chainsaw teeth clattering on metal.
“Jesus,” Sam whispered, dressing in the half-light. Sure as hell, there was no sleeping with that kind of caterwauling. Besides, his dreams had been tormented enough. Mostly consisting of dark visions, imaginations of death, billowing smoke, and misery.
The worst part was knowing. And not knowing. His brain worked overtime with memories of his childhood. Times that Mom smiled, or Dad had been beaming with joy. About their upstairs home on the second floor of the restaurant. It had been a warm place to grow up.
The time they’d gone into the city, to Cipriani. The three of them. “Tonight,” Papa had declared, “we celebrate. As of today, The Yucatec is ours! The bank has sent the title. We owe no one for anything! Ninguno para nada.”
Sam ground his teeth, fought down the grief. Busied himself with brushing his teeth. Tried not to dwell on the painful knowledge that he was alive. Safe. And they... They...
No. Don’t think it.
Stepping out into the hall, he took the stairs down to the ground floor. Looked out onto Lincoln Way. No traffic this morning. A soldier—Guard from his uniform—stood by a silver and yellow motorcycle. Obviously, a sentry of some sort.
“Can I help you, sir?” the doorman appeared at Sam’s side. He looked barely old enough to be out of school.
“Must be a pretty important bike to merit a guard like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sam?” Frank called from the elevator. “You’re up early.”
“Court snores, and I couldn’t sleep.”
“Coffee? According to the story, two semi loads made it as far as the Pilot truck stop when the crash hit. For the time being, Cheyenne has it in spades.”
“Until it runs out,” the doorman said. “Makes us the premier hotel in Wyoming.”
Sam took one last glance out at the street. Across the way a woman sat on the curb, her head down, blonde locks falling over her knees. Beside her was another of the hastily scrawled signs proclaiming WFFF.
“What does that mean?” Sam pointed.
Frank had come to stand beside him.
“Will fuck for food,” the doorman said uneasily. “Cheyenne police will be along soon. They try to keep them away from the hotel. It’s just...well, the way things are.”
Sam put a hand on the door, started to push it open.
“What are you thinking, Sam?” Frank asked.
“I’ve got twenty dollars. It’s not much. It’d keep her fed for a couple of days.”
“We’re supposed to discourage that sort of thing,” the doorman told him. “The hotel doesn’t want to get a reputation for handouts.”
“Yeah. Right.” Sam stepped out, glanced up at the heavy sky. Smoke haze hung low, somber and threatening. The silence was equally oppressive. This time of morning, before the crash, Cheyenne would have been alive with traffic. People on their way to work in any of the state and federal offices, or the support services that made the city function. Now the streets were empty.
“Hey,” Sam called as he walked up to the woman. “Excuse me.”
She started, looked up with bleary hazel eyes. “’Scuse me. Guess I nodded off. You got somewhere we can go?”
“Go?”
“Don’t want to do it here on the sidewalk, do you?”
She might have been in her early thirties, would have been attractive if she’d been washed and dressed in something besides a filthy tee-shirt and stained jeans.
“Here’s a twenty,” he told her. “Go buy yourself a meal.”
“But?” she frowned at him. “You mean, like, just take it?”
“Yeah. No strings.”
She snapped the money away, muttered, “Thanks.” Before he might change his mind, she was trotting away as fast as she could. Didn’t even look back.
Sam chewed his lips as he watched her go. How many like her were there? Where was the food going to come from?
He found Frank in the restaurant and asked exactly that as he seated himself at the table and signaled for coffee.
“Agar’s trying to figure that out,” Frank told him, rubbing his temples. The rancher looked as haggard as Sam felt. “We’ve got the beef out there. More than enough. But the cows are still nursing calves. And how does the state compensate the producers for the beef? And if they do, the animals have to be hauled to a slaughter plant, who has to be paid, and the boxed beef has to be trucked from there to the consumer. So, in a state with very little cash floating around, how do people—most of whom have lost their means of income—earn enough to pay for a steak?”
“It’s kickstarting an economy from nothing,” Sam agreed, thankfully accepting the cup of coffee from the waitress. “And here we are, room and meals paid by the governor, drinking coffee, and living large.”
Frank tilted his head in the direction of the street. “She taken care of?”
“Yeah. I guess.” Sam fought down the turmoil in his chest. “Just got too much to get my head around. Been thinking about my folks. Home. I mean, I know they’ve got to be dead. But there’s that part of me that can’t believe it. And worse, I’ll never really know. That’s maddening.”
“Yeah.” Frank was staring at something way far away in the distance of his mind. “It’s the not knowing.”
The words were no more than out of his mouth before old Bill came rushing in, hitching along on his bad leg. He had his wide-brimmed hat clamped down on his silver locks, a passion burning in his Tappan eyes. He pulled up, saying, “Come on, Frank. Move your ass.”
“What’s got your tit in a wringer?”
“Got word. About Breeze. I think she’s here. In Cheyenne.”
Frank leaped to his feet, crying, “No shit? I was just thinking about her. Where? How? I mean, where is she?”
“That Guard captain, Ragnovich. Heard the name Tappan, asked if we were related to Breeze. Come on. I’ve got the truck running out front.”
“See you, Sam. Be back as soon as we can.”
Breeze? The missing daughter? The center of the great Tappan mystery?
Sam watched them go, then stared down into his coffee. When this was gone, there would be no more. Along with things like toilet paper, oranges and bananas, pepper, canned soda, tires, running shoes, movies, and how many other things? The dying of his world. So much was going away, he had to wonder what would remain. Well, outside of pain, loneliness, and suffering.
He’d seen it in the woman’s eyes as she took his twenty.
Desperately, he hoped that if Bill and Frank found Breeze, she wouldn’t be standing by a WFFF sign.
Essence
Prior to the collapse, very few people ever asked themselves: When it comes down to it, what would I do to stay alive?
And, even if they did, any answer they came up with—with the exception of ‘I don’t know’—would have been meaningless.
You really don’t know. Not until you’re there. Face-to-face with the ugly reality. From my direct experience, some do draw the line. Accept to die rather than debase themselves. Too appalled by the prospects of their situation. Unwilling to live with the consequences.
Others surrender to whatever is necessary, groveling, accepting any humiliation to keep breathing.
Once upon a time, I would have scorned those poor wretches. Told myself, “I’ll never allow myself to stoop that low.”
It’s like being shot at. You might insist to yourself, “I’ll do this,” or “I’ll do that.” But until the instant that bullet snaps past your ear and you get that runny feeling in your gut, you don’t have the foggiest clue.
Anything you tell yourself until that moment is a lie.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was maybe an hour and three cups of coffee later that Court showed up. Looking rumpled, he pulled out Frank’s chair and dropped his bulk into the seat. Around them, the restaurant had picked up. Most of the tables occupied. But for the creeping reality that lay just beneath Sam’s thoughts, it might have been a normal morning. Plates clinking, silverware on ceramic, the low conversation of the patrons. Even the waitress hustling about in her uniform, with the pot of coffee.
“You snore,” Sam greeted. “I thought I was sharing the room with a buzz saw.”
Court gave him a sheepish look, his brown gaze slipping away. “I can’t help it. I’m, like, asleep when it happens.”
Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One Page 24