American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline

by Parker, Brian

  I stared at the screen, assessing the work I’d done. She was right about the assignment. I’d never admit it to her, but Cassandra was right most of the time about this sort of stuff. My teacher may have been a pretty cool person, but starting an assignment with slang and curse words would not earn me a passing grade. I made sure that the file with all the garbage I’d written was saved in case I wanted to use any of it later. Then, I closed it and opened a new document to start over from scratch.

  I typed for what seemed like hours, but in reality was probably closer to thirty minutes. The more I thought about our situation, the faster my fingers had flown across the keyboard. I wrote about how the current situation made me feel—frustrated, bored, lonely, even a little scared. The vibe in town was not one of mutual support as we all went through this together. It felt different this time. Austin was a city full of caged animals, waiting for their opportunity to strike at their keeper.

  As I journaled about it, the more convinced I became that Cassandra and I were in danger here. I didn’t own a gun to defend us if someone tried to come in and steal our food. Hell, that stupid wagon had made enough noise that anyone within two blocks could have known that I was carrying a full load of groceries.

  Unemployment was in the sixty percent range according to the news. In a city of almost two million people, that was a lot of hungry mouths to feed. Even a genuinely good person will do whatever it takes to feed their family, and there were a lot of very bad people who lived here. There was no limit to what they’d be willing to do.

  “Damn,” Cassandra said, right by my ear, making me jump again. She had to stop sneaking up on me and reading over my shoulder. “Sorry,” she said, putting her hands on my neck to rub the muscles there. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You, ah… You okay?” she asked, leaning over and tapping a finger on the laptop screen.

  I flushed in embarrassment. I knew my professor would read what I wrote, if I turned in this version, but I hadn’t been prepared for her to see it. “I just hate this, y’know? I’m ready for things to get back to normal.”

  “Are you done?”

  I nodded. “First draft. I need to go back through and edit it.”

  Cassandra shook her head. “No, you don’t. That’s not how journaling works. You type up whatever you have and then move on. It’s an exercise in getting whatever is in your mind down onto the page. That doesn’t include editing your thoughts after the fact.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. I took English Comp two years ago over summer semester—before we met. The teacher doesn’t care what you say, so much as how you say it and that you show emotional growth through the process of writing down your thoughts as they come to you.”

  Cassandra was a year ahead of me at UT. We’d met three or four weeks into my freshman year. She was one of the student trainers at the school’s MNAC facility, Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center, the fitness facility exclusively for the University of Texas athletes. She was one of my rehab trainers back when the coaches thought there was a chance of me playing ball again. She never even got a chance to see me play a single snap that wasn’t pre-recorded.

  “Same teacher?” I asked.

  “No. I had some nerdy, mouse-like TA. She was really good at her job though.”

  “You sure I shouldn’t edit it?”

  Her head shook side-to-side. “Can I read it? I mean, all of it?” she asked.

  “Um.” I wasn’t sure. Cassandra and I shared everything, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted her reading my private thoughts about how this whole situation was like a pot of boiling water waiting to bubble over.

  “No judgement, babe,” she assured me. “I just saw a couple lines of what you wrote and I’m interested in what you think about our situation.”

  “I don’t know. I wrote a lot of weird stuff since I was just typing whatever popped into my head. I’ll probably go back and delete a lot of it.”

  “Don’t you dare! That’s the point of journaling. You get those thoughts and feelings out of your head and onto the page. It’s supposed to be cathartic. If me reading what you wrote makes you nervous, then okay. I don’t have to read it. I just wanted to see.”

  Cassandra leaned back in and picked up a pen from the desk. “No big deal.”

  I groaned internally. That meant it was a big deal to her. I may be totally clueless about where women’s minds were most of the time, but I did know that if a girl said something wasn’t a big deal, then it actually was. “No, okay,” I said. “You can read it. Just… Please don’t make fun of me. I was just writing and one thought led to another.”

  She placed the hand holding the pen on her hip as it cocked out slightly. “Why would I make fun of you? If you feel a certain way about something, you may be wrong, but I would never make fun of you.”

  “That’s… That’s not really inspiring a lot of confidence.”

  Her lips parted, revealing her sparkling white teeth. “I promise. I love you, Bodhi. I’m interested to know what goes on in your head, what you choose to keep to yourself instead of sharing with me.”

  “That’s—”

  She held up a hand. “No. That’s not how I meant it. I just wanna know what all of this means to you.”

  I turned and picked up the laptop by the keyboard, extending it out to her. “Here. There’s probably a bunch of misspellings and run-on sentences. You know my grammar is terrible.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” I was sure that if I didn’t let her read it, there’d be a fight later on about what I was “hiding” from her, so it was just easier to let her read it now.

  She accepted the laptop and walked over to the couch. Her legs crossed under her naturally into a position that would have killed my knees after three or four minutes. I’d seen her sit in that position for hours while she read or studied.

  I walked down the hall to the bathroom to relieve myself while Cassandra read my most intimate thoughts about our situation. I tried to remember if I’d written anything that would set her off, like saying she was a terrible cook and I just wanted to go out to eat again, but nothing came to mind. It was mostly doom and gloom type stuff.

  My stomach rumbled, so I microwaved a frozen steak burrito, smothering it in salsa and chili lime hot sauce before devouring the quick meal. I still retained the size and most of the strength of a D1 college linebacker, but I’ll be damned if feeding the machine wasn’t a pain in the ass.

  By the time I’d finished the burrito, Cassandra had set aside the laptop. She read way faster than I could type. There was a far off look on her face as she stared at the blank television screen across from the couch.

  “So?”

  She didn’t look away from the TV, but began talking. “Do you really think we’re on the verge of like, an actual full-on societal collapse?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. I was just writing. I mean, maybe I should combine my original attempt and this one to say that this is the worst apocalypse ever. We have power, grocery stores, cell phones, TV.” I pointed at the television.

  She still seemed a little shocked, so I walked over and sat beside her, placing a hand on her knee. “We’re gonna be okay.”

  “We need a gun.”

  “What?”

  “We need a gun,” she repeated. “You said so yourself. We messed up by not getting a gun at that show that came through town over the summer.”

  “We got a great deal on our backpacks though,” I said, referring to the large packs we’d bought to go for a week of backcountry hiking down at Big Bend National Park on the Texas-Mexico border.

  “All those guns were right there. We should have bought one.”

  “And done what with it, babe?” I asked. “We had no idea that something like this was coming.”

  She looked at me and blinked. “We should have, though. Something like this—a disaster I mean, not like this—is always coming around. It’s always something
. We should have been better prepared.”

  “We’re college students, Cassandra. What do you—”

  “We’re not kids, Bodhi. We should have known better. Especially since we lived through this when we were kids.”

  “Okay…” I drew out the word. “So, what do we do about it?”

  She wiped a tear away from her cheek. “I don’t know. Are the gun stores still open?”

  “I’ll check online, but I think they closed a few weeks ago when all the non-essential stuff shut down.”

  Cassandra nodded vigorously. “Okay. If they’re not, we need to go. First thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m not a Texas resident though, isn’t there like, a problem with that or something?”

  “I’ll go with you,” she stated.

  “Babe, you haven’t been out of the house in over a month. We agreed that only one of us would be exposed.”

  “Call them. If you can’t legally buy a gun in Texas because you’re an Alabama resident, then I’ll have to go with you.”

  “Okay. Give me a few minutes to try to find out which store is the closest to us.” I pulled my phone from the pocket of my baggy shorts.

  “Bodhi?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s something else.”

  Oh no, I thought. Her tone sounded like she was about to tell me she was pregnant and we needed to protect our unborn child. Fuck.

  “Yeah?” I said again. “What is it?”

  “I’ve only got a couple days’ worth of birth control left.”

  Whew! Dodged a bullet there.

  Aloud, I said, “Okay. Um, if I have to go out tomorrow, call in your prescription and I can pick it up.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought I had another pack under the sink. I know you were just there—”

  “It’s okay. It’s just seven blocks away. Trust me, the last thing we need right now is a pregnancy.”

  “Can you imagine?” she asked, laughing hoarsely.

  I slid my hand from her knee to the soft skin on her thigh. “I can imagine trying to make a kid.”

  She leaned forward and set the laptop on the ottoman. For the time being, we could forget about all the dumb shit I’d written during the journaling exercise and just focus on how we made each other feel.

  I didn’t get any that night. Cassandra just wanted me to hold her in my arms and make her feel safe. I tried my best, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was the one who made me feel safe, not the other way around. I’d continue to keep up the charade for her sake, even though I knew the truth. Without her, I’d be lost, adrift with those demons that I’d written about earlier.

  Cassandra kept me grounded right now. She was my rock. She was…okay, insert random emotional saying here about strength, kindness, love, and protection and you get the idea of what she meant to me. I’d do anything for that woman. Anything.

  FOUR

  I trudged along in the mid-morning heat toward the pharmacy. Very few people were out today, which seemed odd considering how many had been out just the day before when I’d made the same trip. I wondered if there’d been another edict by the governor that we’d missed by deciding to forgo television and social media for the night.

  The announcements came sporadically, often disjointed at the state and local levels, and almost no national level orders about how to handle the Crud except for that declaration of martial law. I was reminded of the similarities of the COVID-19 scare when I was a kid. Everything had been crazy then too, with seemingly no concerted efforts and some states taking it seriously while others blew it off at first. We’d come very close to martial law back then, but thankfully, it had never been declared. This time felt different to me though, like I’d written in my journal. This time, it felt like we were barely hanging on by a thread and it would only take a little nudge to push us over the edge into chaos and madness.

  The wagon’s axle squeaked in time with my right foot. Every step I took, the axle rotated to the spot where the metal rod scraped against the body. It was incredibly annoying.

  Cassandra and I had decided that since I was going to the pharmacy in the grocery store anyway, I might as well get another load of food to stretch our need to go back out from a week or so to two, maybe even three weeks if we were smart about things. It would be another purchase on my credit card this billing cycle, but what the hell, I really didn’t want to go back out if I didn’t have to.

  You know that weird, tingly feeling at the base of your neck when something isn’t right or when you feel like something is about to happen? Well, I’d had that off and on all night long and it persisted through this morning. I’d been laughed at by one gun store and told flat out that I’d missed the boat by a couple of others that had bothered to answer their phone. Apparently, all the gun stores around Austin were sold out of everything and hadn’t had a single firearm in stock for weeks. All they could get now were sporadic shipments of ammunition, which usually got sold out in a matter of minutes.

  Getting a gun was out of the question. That was a concern that weighed heavily on my mind, but it was in the Can’t Do Shit About It column, so I had to focus on what I could do. I ordered a baseball bat online before I left the apartment this morning. You’d think a former college athlete and a sports therapy undergrad student would have a simple thing like a baseball or softball bat, but no. We had a whole lot of useless football gloves, cleats, and kinesiology tape, but no bats. I paid extra for next-day shipping, so it should be delivered in a couple of days.

  Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

  Man, the wagon was really getting on my nerves—and that was empty. I knew it would be worse once it was loaded and had weight on the axle.

  Behind me, I heard music over the sound of the wagon. That wasn’t odd, just different for the times we lived in, so I turned to see a lowered black car driving down the street toward me. It was blasting rap music with the windows down. I instinctively increased my pace. I was two blocks from the grocery store; just needed to get there.

  The car pulled up beside me and kept pace. I glanced over to see a Hispanic guy in the passenger seat staring right at me. I nodded, but kept on going. The music turned off.

  “Where you going, wagon boy?” the guy in the car said.

  I pointed ahead in the direction of the store. “Grocery store.”

  “Your wagon sounds like shit, man.”

  “Yeah. The axle’s bent.”

  “You should fix that.”

  “I will,” I replied. Only a block to go.

  The car pulled ahead a few feet and stopped. The passenger door opened and the guy got out. I saw the driver open his door and stand on the street, looking over the hood of the car toward me.

  “You need to give me your wallet, vato.”

  “I don’t have it,” I said, trying to push past.

  The gang banger swept aside his flannel shirt, drawing a pistol from his waistband as he did so. “No, you need to give me your wallet, bitch. You ain’t goin’ to the store with no wallet.”

  I stopped and held up my hands. “I don’t want any trouble. I just need to get food for my family.”

  “Oh? Hey, Caesar! We got us a family man here,” the one with the gun called over his shoulder to the driver. He raised his hand and put the gun in my face. “Listen to me. You give me your wallet and walk away, or your brains cover the sidewalk and I take your wallet anyways. Seems like a no-brainer to me… Ha!”

  He looked over at the driver again. “Hey, Caesar! You missed the joke I just made. It was great, man.”

  “What was it?”

  “I said to this dumb piece of shit that if—”

  A sticky wetness splashed across my face and I flinched, falling backward in shock. I thought I’d been shot. I clutched my face and rolled around on the sidewalk. The sound of wheels spinning out reached me and I slowly became aware of the fact that I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t really in any pain either.

  I opened my eyes in time to see t
hat the lowrider had flipped a U-turn and was speeding away. The Hispanic guy who’d pulled the gun on me was on the ground. Blood had already puddled around him and made it to the break in the sidewalk. It was oozing toward the street. I sat up.

  He had several holes in his chest and one—or more?—on his head. He’d been turned into swiss cheese. Footsteps on the sidewalk told me that somebody was coming my way from the direction of the grocery store. I saw two National Guard guys jogging quickly, but alertly toward the scene.

  “You alright, bro?”

  I wiped at my face, my hands coming away smeared with blood. “Yeah,” I replied. “He didn’t shoot me.”

  One of the Guard guys kicked the pistol away as he walked up to the body. It skittered across the concrete under the wagon. He nudged the gangbanger with the barrel of his rifle, turning the lifeless head from one side to the other. When he did so, the pink and orange mass of what I assumed was the man’s brain became visible. The sight reminded me of how a fungus grows on the side of a wall, the brain matter was, like, suspended there out of the side of his skull. It was absolutely the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen.

  “We got this mother fucker good,” one of the men stated.

  “Banshees!” The two men bumped fists before turning back to me.

  “What do we do with him?” the taller one asked, lifting his weapon slightly in my direction. His eyes were hard over the heavy-duty mask he wore.

  “I was just going to the store,” I protested.

  “Shut up. We gotta call this in.”

  I sat in stunned silence. My appreciation for what they’d done to save me was quickly turning into…something. I didn’t know what it was. Anger? Fear? Mistrust? All three? I’d nearly been a victim of a violent crime and they were treating it as if I’d been one of the criminals.

  The shorter Guardsman talked into a radio mounted on his shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the other one nodded and grabbed the gangbanger’s foot, dragging the body to the street. It fell from the curb down onto the asphalt.