Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Whatever Britt responded with, Mia didn’t hear it. Her eyes had taken her focus to the television screen above the bar.

  The chyron was loud, clear, decisive. No room for misinterpretation.

  “Governor Mills Harrah Succumbs in Surgery,” the chyron read. “American Service Presidential Candidate Dead at 57.”

  FREEDOMBOOK

  Your state-approved source for information and factual content

  The Sheepdogs are a constitutional militia made up of former military and retired police officers, firefighters, and first responders. Founded in the aftermath of the Palm Sunday attacks to serve as volunteer civil guard, the Sheepdogs organized from various ultra ideological movements.[1] The organization encourages its members to take direction from state security authorities, unless in conflict with U.S. constitutional law. Occasional armed disputes have arisen due to the inexactness of that guidance, such as the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the Redoubt Siege, and the Valdosta marches.[2]

  The Sheepdogs claim a national membership of 250,000, though that number has been disputed by researchers at the McNamara Institute.[3] Detractors of the Sheepdogs have alleged it is an organization that “borders on [being a] paramilitary, incapable or unwilling to know the line between keeping order and political violence.”[4]

  Various media reports have drawn a connection between the organization and Western separatism [5] In response, the organization’s national leadership began requiring its members to reaffirm their oath to the U.S. Constitution to maintain affiliation.[citation needed]

  CHAPTER 15

  DUTY HAD HUMBLED Jean-Jacques many times. His first day in the Legion, he’d been ordered to sweep sunshine off the sidewalks. He’d been kept awake long past the point of sanity on combat patrols, all his weaknesses and failures exposed in the aftermath. His decision making in the Balkans had gotten two junior Rangers shot through their chest plates, only the miracles of modern medicine keeping them alive. Duty took many forms and faces, but it always led to humility.

  Today’s looked like canned fruit and a church lady.

  “Labels out, please.” The pantry manager of the food bank was steadfast in her politeness while unwavering in her exactness. “The cans in the back, too. They’ll be pushed to the front soon enough.”

  Jean-Jacques was on day twenty of volunteering for Mayday. Each morning he was assigned to a different community program across the city, from soup kitchens to public libraries. Each evening he returned home and awaited instruction for the next morning. He didn’t get to ask questions in Mayday and he hadn’t gotten one whiff of its mysterious underground leader. Mayday was structured on tiers, not unlike ranks in the military. He was Tier 1, and had an orange-stickered lanyard to prove it.

  “Good, Mr. Saint-Preux. Only thirty more racks of diced pears. Then we’ll get to the grains.”

  The pantry manager ran the Ash Valley Food Bank for the underserved, and she ran it with disturbing attention to detail. She was seventy or so, ninety pounds dripping wet, a smiling pixie in a gardening hat with the heart of a tyrant. Jean-Jacques’s old slipped disc in his back had been aching all afternoon from stocking the pantry but he wouldn’t say a thing. The food bank mostly served wog refugees from the Mediterranean. That seemed worthwhile. And the pantry manager held sway in Mayday. He needed her support for Tier 2 and a green-stickered lanyard, which might, perhaps, bring him closer to Jonah Gray.

  For the Legion, he thought. For a platoon command. Then he picked up three more racks of diced pears and carried them to the pantry.

  The food bank lay across gun-metal-gray concrete that absorbed window light rather than reflecting it. Ten rows across, ten rows deep, the shelves were all marked with laminated signs naming their goods. A dull hum of industrial refrigerators and an ice machine in an adjacent room gave the space its only sound. Jean-Jacques had asked earlier about a radio for music and been told there was no time for an indulgence like that.

  The pantry manager watched as he stocked from a stepladder. She’d proven to be anything but a talker but Jean-Jacques decided to try. He couldn’t work his way up Mayday the diligent way. He needed access to its leadership ASAP.

  “Ma’am. Gotta say. Your pantry. As clean and organized as anything I’ve seen. Even in the army.”

  The right play. “Navy daughter,” the pantry manager said. “And marine mom.” She bowed her head. A thin silver cross hung from her neck.

  Her father had been a retired navy petty officer, supply, a veteran of the Pacific campaign in World War II; her mother, a devout farm girl for whom “cleanliness as godliness” was no mere phrase. She herself protested Vietnam as a young woman, something she still felt great shame for. She’d earned clemency through a peacemonger camp, she said, but it’d been the lectures by Vietnamese refugees at the camp that remained with her all these years later.

  “They taught me that force can have purpose. That it can protect the weak,” she said. “As the Bible teaches, too.”

  Her son had joined the marines on his eighteenth birthday. Because of his grandfather. Because of his mother, too.

  “He still in or did he get out?” Jean-Jacques asked. Something like a shadow bladed across the woman’s face, and as quickly as it went away, Jean-Jacques knew he’d misread her and her commitment to her post. “Oh, ma’am. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Her son had been sent to the Mediterranean three times. Syria. Greece. Cyprus. Upon his discharge, he was assigned to a rehabilitation colony. She couldn’t visit, only write letters and call once a week, but he’d sounded like he was getting better with the mental therapy sessions there. He was released after three years, having met the criteria for a return to the citizenry.

  He killed himself five weeks later, running the car engine in her garage while she weeded the backyard vegetable garden.

  Jean-Jacques didn’t like touching strangers, but he put his arm around the woman’s shoulder. She didn’t move into his hold but she didn’t move from it, either. He looked again at the thin silver cross around her neck. He felt her agony. He sensed his opportunity.

  “He’s in a better place,” he said. “You must take comfort in that.”

  “I do,” the pantry manager said. Her resolve lingered, but was softer. Jean-Jacques pulled out the teardrop pendant under his shirt and told the story of his mother, and his mother’s courage, and his mother’s death.

  That he welled up during it was not part of the plan but it still happened.

  “She’s with the Lord now,” the pantry manager said.

  “Do you believe that? Like—for real?”

  Jean-Jacques didn’t feel good about exploiting this woman’s faith. It wasn’t a good thing to do. It wasn’t an ethical thing to do. But he’d killed. He’d destroyed. What was one more little sin in the name of duty?

  She told him that yes, yes, she did believe and he needed to, as well. It didn’t take much more to get her to the Chaplain. Jean-Jacques needed a holy man to find holiness, after all. Did she know of anyone like that?

  “He’s… it’s tough to explain. I was raised Presbyterian. We show our belief and love through deed. We don’t talk. We don’t share. We live in the quiet, and consider. Then we act. The Chaplain, though, it’s different.”

  As she talked about him, her face took on a look similar to those Jean-Jacques remembered from the isolated beachhead on Big Mullet Key, where all the Haitian adults on the sailboat sang and prayed for their safe deliverance.

  “It’s—well, it’s divine. I don’t know what else to call it.”

  Jean-Jacques nodded and asked if there was any way he could hear this man preach. The pantry manager didn’t seem to hear him, though. She’d slipped into the free association of people on the cusp of oldness.

  “It’s not true what they say about him, you know. None of it is. The news. The government. They’re all liars. They’re all atheists. They made up that story about kidnapping the politicians in the ballroom. To make him look bad. To
make us look crazy.

  “The federals?” The woman sniffed with a righteousness so pure it could’ve pierced glass. “They killed my son.”

  With that she told Jean-Jacques they needed to get back to work.

  * * *

  Jean-Jacques was already in line for the subway body scanners when Emmanuel texted. “Meet at the bus stop on Myrtle Road.” So Jean-Jacques walked up the stairs to the street and met him at the bus stop on Myrtle Road.

  They took seats in the rear of the bus, the only other riders a wild-eyed boho girl high on something and an old man in a collared linen shirt and straw hat who reeked of cigar smoke. Jean-Jacques had figured they’d be Little Haiti–bound, but the bus sliced southeast instead.

  He turned to his cousin. “Can I ask?”

  “Sure.” Emmanuel shrugged, taking off his crimson-stickered lanyard and sticking it in a pocket. He was Tier 4. “I can’t tell, though.” Jean-Jacques stared hard until the younger man coughed out more. “Lamar Pierre asked for us. I don’t know.”

  Jean-Jacques nodded, and settled into the window seat, sliding down and tucking his legs against the seat in front of him so his knees were horizontal to his eyes. The city passed in flashes of iron and cement. Lamar Pierre, huh. It wasn’t the Chaplain. But it was leadership.

  Maybe he’d spooked the pantry manager over his inquiries during their holy talk. She could’ve called Lamar Pierre as soon as he left. He hadn’t seen Pierre since the first night Emmanuel brought him into Mayday. The older Haitian man had greeted him with a full hug and a solemn “Be home, brother.”

  Pierre had mapped a similar journey as Jean-Jacques, with one major distinction: after Haiti, after Empire City, after tours of combat duty with the International Legion and the U.S. Army, he’d been sent to a rehabilitation colony. Block Island, to be exact, which must’ve been where he met Jonah Gray. Jean-Jacques hadn’t mentioned that, though, during their time together over asosi tea. Instead he’d listened to the older man hold forth on the importance of service, about how too many warfighters got lost in the margins of America because they forgot that true power came from working for others. Too many warfighters, Pierre opined, wanted to be celebrated. Too many warfighters wanted to be served themselves. It had had a corrosive effect. On souls and society alike.

  “Selfless service is one of the army values,” he’d said that night, deep in his speech. “When’s the last time you heard anyone say that out loud?”

  Despite himself, despite his mission, too, Jean-Jacques liked Pierre. He even admired him, in those long, dark minutes he’d listened to the Mayday pitch. The way he talked about duty was pure Legion, and Jean-Jacques agreed with much of it. The group before the individual. The mission before the group. Quiet professionalism, no matter what. But there was something off about the man, and it wasn’t just the way his face always twitched when he shifted from kreyol to English and back again. The singularity in his vision smacked of fanaticism, and Jean-Jacques reminded himself that Pierre had failed the medical tribunal for a reason. They had a lot in common, true enough. But he was an active warfighter. Pierre was a veteran with troubles. That difference mattered.

  The bus continued through the far districts of the city, miniatures of street life and human rumpus at every corner. The neon glam of a boho district somewhere between up-and-coming and trendy. The punk grime and graffiti of the district just beyond it. The tidy bedlam of the market in a Taiwanese district, an old lady holding a dead rooster by its neck in one hand and a designer purse in another. Wide avenues, overpasses, chrome and mortar. Then thin arteries of bumpy road among a haze of concrete. People got on the bus, people got off. Emmanuel listened to music through a phone while Jean-Jacques kept to the window. They crossed into a district made up of wogs, the kind that went to food banks. Did Jean-Jacques hear a faint prayer chant of a muezzin or was he imagining it? He couldn’t tell. They passed a landfill set along a row of sunken houses raised above ground level, old dirt backfilled around the buildings. To Jean-Jacques, it looked like a row of urban igloos. Antennas spotted the houses’ roofs while droopy power lines connected them.

  He thought about Little Haiti, and it being nicer now than it had been during his boyhood. Maybe Pete was right about that, he thought. Maybe home should get nicer.

  They crossed brown water over a high bridge. On the other side was a big green park with big green trees framed by a big empty sky. The road widened out into avenue size again. Pylon dividers became strips of grass. Wood houses with front yards and mailboxes sprang forth. Jean-Jacques cracked the bus window. He smelled wind and sea.

  He turned to his cousin. “Where are we?”

  Emmanuel took out his earbuds. “Cape Hope,” he said. “Never came here for a beach day or crazy Irish girls?” When Jean-Jacques didn’t respond his cousin just laughed. “Need to get out more, homie.”

  They got off at the next stop and their fellow travelers headed toward the ocean. He and Emmanuel walked the other way. Gulls drifted through the sky like monitor drones and Jean-Jacques inhaled deep from his chest, sea air rushing his nostrils. If he didn’t know better he’d have sworn he was somewhere in the Mediterranean—one of the Greek isles, maybe along the Turquoise Coast—not his home city-state. They walked a gravel path to a field of thistles and turned left. At the end of this path was an old brick building with a fading red sign: CAPE HOPE FIRE DEPARTMENT.

  “We really are everywhere,” Emmanuel said, impressed. “Mayday, Mayday.”

  Emmanuel believed in the cause. He was earnest, eager to move up tiers and not just because of the stipend increases. That the Bureau had promised to protect his cousin once all this was over mattered some to Jean-Jacques now. He wasn’t one for mercy, not usually. An exception could be made for blood.

  The firehouse proved abandoned, smelling of rot and mildew. Pierre waited for them in a conference room. A loud lime paint from disco times chipped from the walls and a dull metal pole plunged through the center of the room. He was alone, feet up on a long metal table, eating a deli sandwich and listening to what sounded like state radio.

  “Podcast on nonprofit management,” he explained through a mouthful of roast beef and lettuce. “Tax deductions, my brethren. We gonna get legit.”

  Pierre was shaped like a bull walrus, all paunch and gullet with short, stubby arms that belonged on a man half his size. He wore a denim jacket over a white tee, black pants folded over wide construction boots. A small pin with three antifascists arrows glinted from his jacket lapel. His beard was thick and snarled, so much so that Jean-Jacques almost felt grateful for the cythrax killing off his own body’s hair follicles. Pierre took one more bite of sandwich, then motioned for the cousins to join him at the table.

  “That story you told of the child in Tripoli.” Pierre was talking to Jean-Jacques. “Checked out. Sounds like a fucked-up scene you woke up to over there, boy.”

  Jean-Jacques nodded but said nothing. Of course the story checked out, he thought. It happened. He’d used it as justification for why a dedicated soldier of the state might be interested in helping out a ragtag band of social-service homeland guerrillas. That Pierre had sought to verify it meant some things. One, he didn’t yet trust Jean-Jacques. Two, Mayday had people in the War Department who could pull up files, even top-secret files, which meant these fuckers weren’t necessarily as ragtag as they presented.

  And three, Jean-Jacques thought. He wants me to know all that.

  Pierre asked about their weeks. Emmanuel spoke of the work going into another anti-colony protest, the permits collected from the parks department, the meeting with other protest groups and the inroads made therein, the official and unofficial security measures being put in place to counter any Sheepdog presence. They weren’t going to be caught unprepared again. They had former police in the ranks, too.

  Pierre shifted to Jean-Jacques. No more devoted follower, he told himself. He was here to stop these peacemongers. Not become one.

  “I moved some boxes,�
�� he said, voice coiling. “Made some soup. Got spit on breaking up a fight over a cot.” Jean-Jacques stopped a beat to let that settle in. “Yessir, all my best skills being put to use. Who knows when the War Department sends me back overseas. In the meantime, I serve my community.”

  His cousin made a sucking sound with his teeth and turned his attention toward the ground. Jean-Jacques hadn’t meant to embarrass him, but he needed to get moving. A man with super speed didn’t like being patient. Hell, a man with super speed wasn’t supposed to be patient.

  Pierre didn’t look angry, though. He didn’t even look surprised. All he did was fold his arms across his chest and sigh.

  “You ever visit a colony, Saint-Preux?” he asked.

  Jean-Jacques had not.

  “I have. Six years of my life I’ll never get back. All ’cause I said the wrong thing at my tribunal. All ’cause I dared to tell the truth about my ‘good kills.’ Don’t get me wrong—it ain’t all bad. Clean living, prepared meals. No bills. Gyms and trees and hand-job nurses. But there’s no change. No freedom. It’s lockdown, sanitized. You know that warfighters sent to colonies are disproportionately veterans of color? Fourteen percent of new vets go to colonies now. That number’s closer to twenty-five if you’re brown or black.

  “Our brethren who don’t make the jump from the Legion? Forget about it. They fail their tribunal, it’s back to where they came from. No cush colony for them. Just a shiny piece of tin and a certificate of achievement. That’s how America really Honors the Warfighter.”

  Jean-Jacques leaned forward to break in—he’d known some Legionnaires who experienced that, true enough, but they’d almost all been scumbags who hadn’t put in the work for citizenship. Pierre left no space for it.