Max agreed, “Me too. It would be good to know if the social fabric is torn beyond repair.”
“Oh, believe me, it is,” Ada said. “Nurse Jean, she’s a black woman too, lives in a predominantly African American section of Toccoa. I was almost to her house when three black men ambushed me, grabbed me. Luckily, I knew one of them.
“Max, when I say lucky, I’m not kidding. A gang formed and took over the black area. The three men took me to their boss. He turned out to be another guy I went to school with. A real asshole named Ruben.
“There are only about a thousand blacks in Toccoa. Ruben and his gang rule the community with the biggest concentration of them. Rule with guns. He and his thugs, there’re maybe thirty in his gang, rob, rape, and kill. That’s what they do. They’ve got the people cowed and beat down.”
“How are they feeding themselves?”
“Hell, Max, like all the bangers do, like the Dobbs and the Simpsons did. Go out at night, invade peoples home, kill the men and children, and rape the women. They take whatever they want. Food, weapons.” Tears began streaming from her eyes.
“Do you want to finish this later?” Max asked.
Ada blotted the tears with her hands. “Ruben remembered me. Remembered I’d been his biology tutor for a semester. I asked him about Jean and he said since she was a nurse they treated her as high class. I told him I wanted to go see her. He told me I wasn’t going nowhere. That I was going to replace his number one ‘ho’. Said he needed a fine, high classed bitch to ride.”
Max broke the flow of her words. “How did you deal with someone like that? Was there no humanity in him at all?”
“No Max, no more than there was in Billy Ray. None. You asked me how I dealt with him. It was easy. I sank to his level. I’m not going to repeat the trash talk I fed him, but I told him Jean said he was top dog. I let him know my family was dead and convinced him that I came to Toccoa to be his woman. It took some serious flattery and ego stroking to get permission to see Jean. Bottom line I told him I was the finest thing he would ever have in bed with him.
“Ruben slapped the guy standing next to him on the shoulder and said, ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about. Girl, get your tall fine ass over to Jean’s. I’ll see you tonight.’ He had one of his ‘boys’ escort me to her house.”
Ada paused to blot tears again. “I felt so degraded, but there wasn’t any other choice.”
“Ada, take a break while I make the coffee.”
“Thanks. Oh. The creamer and sweetener are on the cot. One spoon of creamer and one packet of sweetener in mine.”
At the counter beside the stove, Max poured the hot water into the cups, added the coffee, and fetched the condiments from the cot. He took his coffee black, but prepared hers the way she requested.
He set her cup on the table and resumed his seat.
Ada took a sip and then fanned her tongue with her hand. She added a bit of water from a bottle to cool the brew and continued her story.
“Jean’s close to forty, but she looks younger. As soon as she opened the door and let me in, she fell apart. It was thirty minutes before I could get her talking. I found out that Ruben’s main dogs, four of them, visited her nearly every night. There’s no need to go into details concerning her treatment, but at least they weren’t beating her.
“Jean had internet access until night before last and then it stopped. No connection. Phones went out too. Here’s what I learned from her.
“The President, the Vice President, and a great many other high-up political figures are dead.”
“The President’s dead?” Max blurted. “How?”
“Bomb. Two mornings ago inside the White House. It was an attempted coup d'état. A General, Jean couldn’t remember his name, declared himself interim president. A congressman shot him. Again no name. However, until Jean lost her connection, no one had claimed the office.
“So we have no president?” Max shook his head in disbelief.”
Ada said. “Why does it matter? What good would it do us to have one? There’s no social infrastructure left for one to work with and very little physical infrastructure either.”
Max was still stunned. “No Federal government. State and local governments impotent. Nothing but the law of the gun.”
“Max, it doesn’t matter. It gets worse. I don’t know if you heard, but ‘God’s Head’ promised further acts of terror. They followed through on their promise. They released a tailored plague of some sort, virus, bacteria, Jean didn’t know. She did hear the plague is both airborne, and contagious through contact with body fluids.
“The lungs fill with thick mucus and you die from cyanosis. Jean said the common name is the Blue Plague because the visible symptom is you turn blue from lack of oxygen. Once a person is infected, the disease runs its course in four to five days. Basically, you cough to death.
“It’s nearly a hundred percent fatal. Like most disease-causing pathogens, the young and old are most susceptible, but even the rest of the population has at most a ten percent chance of being immune. The agent was released in only a few major cities worldwide, but the CDC in Atlanta, which is somehow still functioning, predicts the plague will globalize within six months.”
“Okay Ada. I see what you mean when you keep saying things like having no government doesn’t matter. Everyone’s going to die. Does Jean know what cities were infected in the US?”
“Only two cities in the US are infected, New York City and Los Angles.”
“It’ll take a while to get here.”
It was Ada’s turn to shake her head. “Nope. People are fleeing those two cities in droves. Some portion of them will make it to all parts of the nation. The CDC predicted Atlanta will start seeing cases within two weeks.”
“Is that it? Do you have any more bad news, other than doomsday for humans?
“Max, there’s plenty more. Israel and Iran went at it with Nukes. Pakistan and India followed suit. We can add that radiation to over twenty nuclear power plants melting down worldwide, three here in the good ole USA. No, there were three in South Carolina. Five in the US. For all I know, there could be more.
“On top of that, ‘God’s Head’ declared a Jihad against corporatists and false religions.
“Well at least the plague will kill them too,” Max, said.
“Nope. All members of ‘God’s Head’ received a vaccination. It turns out that the speculation that ‘God’s Head’ was a religious cult was false. I mean, it did start out that way, with someone named Ham something or the other—.”
“Reggie Hamiler.”
“Yeah, Hamiler. The Feds caught someone close to Hamiler and made him talk. It seems the Chinese had some dirt on Hamiler and forced him to use his organization for their purposes. Here’s where it get’s nasty.
“With God’s Head, the Chinese had a ready made army spread all through the democracies. Hamiler was already planning the attack on the refineries, probably not on as large a scale as what happened.
“Max, plane loads of cult members were flown into China for training. There was a cabal within the US and other intelligence groups that knew it was happening, but squashed the information.”
Max asked, “Why would they do that? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The Vice President and Secretary of Defense didn’t like the President’s soft stance on China or the coming change to the monetary system. They wanted a major incident to happen.”
“Well just fuck.” Max said, almost shouting, stunning Ada to silence. After a moment, Max began speaking in a calmer voice. “I’m sorry Ada. That was, to put it lightly, an overload of information. We sure as hell got a freaking major incident.”
“Our President said steps were being taken concerning China, but he was killed soon after and now the Federal Governments screwed.
“Okay Max. That’s the update. What are we going to do?”
“Oh. It’s on me?”
“You got it. You’re right. It’s an overlo
ad. I don’t know what we should do. My family’s dead and there’s no place in the world that’s safe and I’m stuck with a man I don’t know.”
Ada bowed her head to crossed arms on the table and began to cry. Max sat watching her blistered shoulders quake. As he sat there without a clue as to what direction to run, he had an epiphany. When you have nowhere to run, no sanctuary, no hole in the ground to pull a cover over and hide, the answer was to simply continue to live.
Max stood, gathered their empty coffee cups, and took them to the counter. “I’m having another cup. Was that the right amount of creamer and sweetener?”
Ada didn’t answer. Max went to her chair and spoke softly. “Ada, dear, I asked you a question. Would you like another cup of coffee?”
Ada lifted her head to glare at him. “How dare you use this news, this disaster to express terms of endearment to me?”
Max was undeterred. “Got your attention, didn’t I? I most assuredly consider you a dear. Look at all you’ve done for me. I would like to make you another cup of coffee. Were the condiments okay.”
Still glaring, Ada stood, her hand poised to slap him. The expression on his face, his blue eyes focused on hers, his soft voice, caused her to lower her arm.
“You better have something good to say.”
***
The moment of conflict was broken, but it sealed something unspoken between them.
Max whispered to her, “We’re not lost Ada, simply adrift. We are the captains of our voyage and we already have our heading. Was the coffee made correctly?”
“Yes, it was,” she whispered back.
Max touched her cheek with his fingers and spoke in a normal voice. “Earth calling. We can stop whispering now.”
Ada shoved him. “Jeez Max. Talk about fucking up a moment. Yeah I want my coffee exactly the same way.”
He took the pot from the stove and she regained her seat. Max spoke from the counter. “You know, King chastised me for, ‘ticket to hell words’, but you sure seem to use a lot of them.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I’m a heathen.”
“Gramps and Hattie were deeply religious, but the rest of us were definitely heathens away from them.”
“How come you never married?”
“What makes you think that? I could have married and divorced.”
“Naw, you’re a virgin.”
“Shut up. Jeez, Max. How many different things have I told you to shut up about already?”
“Come on, cough it up. Why haven’t you?”
“I never found anyone good enough.”
“What’s good enough?
“Good looking, smart, witty, fair.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Yeah, but finding that combination didn’t seem to be in the realm of possible. There were a couple of candidates, but in the end, it was nothing but a false front of winning impressions without continuity. It seems the fair part of a relationship eludes most men.”
Max brought their cups to the table. “I added a dollop of water to cool it for you.”
Ada took a tentative sip and then a bigger swallow. “Perfect. Now talk to me Max.”
“I have some questions for you. Give the simplest answers you can. Where do you run to when there’s nowhere safe. Simple answer.”
“The question answers itself, nowhere… No. If nowhere is safe, the answer is anywhere you like.”
“Great. Then the next question is, where do you hide when there’s nowhere to hide. No need to answer. There is no direction to run and there’s nowhere we can hide. The radiation, the plague, crazy people. They may find us, kill us, but until they do, we are as alive as we ever will be and will stay that way till the day we meet our end.”
“So, you’re saying, we just live.”
“Live, but not just live. Life without purpose is death standing on two feet. Your father asked something of us. He wants vengeance for the murder of his family. I want revenge. Want it bad. What do you want Ada?”
“Daddy said, “Kill them all.” That’s what I want to do.”
Max nodded. “I can see myself pulling the trigger and feel no remorse, man, or woman if the person deserves it. Can you picture that? Have you pictured cold-blooded shooting someone to death? Shoot ‘em in the back. Shoot ‘em while they take a shit. I’m talking about killing robbers, murderers, rapists, slavers. Pure, down and dirty evil people.”
“Max, I killed in the heat of battle the night of the attack. But in the presence of Ruben, I know, given a chance, I’d cold-bloodily blow his brains out.”
“Then you and I are going to work as a team. Kill as a team.
“Let’s spit in our hands and shake on it,” Ada said.
“Is that a rural custom?”
She laughed. “No silly. I was joking.”
Max laughed with her. “Well, you got me. Let’s do it anyway.”
“Not happening.”
He sucked his lips for saliva and spat in his right hand. “We do need to seal the deal. Double dog dare you.”
“You know that’s stupid.”
Max wiggled his wet hand. “Double dog dare you.”
“This is crazy.” She spat in her right hand.
Max looked at the tiny spot of saliva on her palm. “That’s not enough spit. Suck you lips and make a real offering to the deal.”
Ada worked her lips and spat a copious amount into her cupped palm. “Yucky. Let’s get this over with so I can wash my hand. What are we shaking to?”
“Nos fides nos.” Latin for ‘we trust us’.”
“I like it,” Ada said. She reached her hand toward Max. “Nos fides nos”
Max grasped her hand and squished their palms together causing spit to drip to the table. “Nos fides nos.” He burst out laughing.
“What.”
“I can’t believe I talked you into spitting in your hand. You should’ve seen your face when I squeezed the spit from between them. It was worth it just for that.”
Ada glared at him. She took a bottle of water from the table and used the nightgown she’d tossed into the corner to wash her hands and returned to the table. “I’ll get you back. You wait. The handshake counts though. We trust us and no one else.”
“Nos fides nos,” Max agreed. He knew the literal translation was ‘we trust we’ but the essential meaning was the same.
Following the handshake, a mutual silence ensued, broken only by the sounds they made with their coffee cups. Ada tilted her cup for the last dregs and set it down, and then slid it toward the center of the table.
“That’s enough caffeine. I’m already starting to feel jittery.”
Max agreed. “The day’s young. It’ll burn off. Ada, these have been a rough three days. Rough on you too.”
Ada said, “Rough on everyone in the world. You and I are entering dangerous territory. The attack ripped and shredded our spirits. We’re playing a serious game between us. The fact that you’ve lost your wife and two children, and I my father and most of my kin is still a raw festering wound.”
Max said, “If what you’re referring to as dangerous territory is about you and I, well, I call it difficult territory rather than dangerous. As far a calling it a game, perhaps it is, but it’s a game I want to engage in. Our spirits are ripped because our loved ones were stripped from us. My emotions are raw. I avoid thinking about my family in order to make it from one minute to the next.
“While you were gone, I came to an understanding with Dorrie and Kelly and Bobby. I told them I was sorry. I came to some understandings about myself too.”
Ada leaned forward in her chair. “What sort of understandings?”
“Mainly that I wasn’t real. No, that’s not it. I was real, but I was entirely self-absorbed. Nope, that’s not it either. Are you sure you want me to talk about this?”
“Yes I am. I want to know. Take your time.”
“Okay. I wasn’t real. I was play-acting life. Doing the normal things
an average Joe does, following a set pattern, school, job, marriage, car, home. When I met Dorrie, I was young, full of hormones and fell in love. Looking back, she was living according to a set of patterns too.
“In a normal world, we would have continued to follow patterns. The people in my life were props on my stage. The same for Dorrie, we were her props because we were caught in her part of the web. We were raising our children to be just like us.”
Ada spoke. “Life draining the life out of us.”
“Exactly. We were living life simply to live, one day flowing into the next. The realization I had, is people are not props. The four of us lived in our own self-centered bubbles. It wasn’t a bad or abnormal thing. It was a normal way of life, and that is what burst for me, the bubble. I came to life, to awareness for the second time in my life.”
“When was the first, Max?”
“The moment I was born. One second later I was caught in the web of deception. Life’s deception.”
“Do you believe you escaped the web? That you actually changed?”
“Not changed, changing. Let me give you an example. I’m here in this room with you, across the table from you. You are a beautiful, intelligent woman. Because of circumstances, possibly available to me, the person I was before would be weighing those possibilities based on what I wanted. What role I wanted you to play, imagining a plot of patterns.
“The person I am now says lay everything on the table. Be real and let life unfold and live it. I am open to you being in my life, as you, not as an actor in my play. I am also open to you not being in my life if you decide on a different course, a different pattern of your own making.”
Ada stood and reached across the table for his cup and collected hers too. “Maybe this is a three cup day. I want to continue this discussion.”
While Ada made the coffee, Max excused himself, went outside to the edge of the woods and rid his bladder of the two cups he’d already drank. As he finished and turned to the cabin, he heard the sound of distant gunshots. He rushed into the cabin to inform Ada.
She told him, “I’ve heard them yesterday evening just before I called for you to come help me the rest of the way in. We’re only six miles from your farm. There’s no telling what’s happening over there.” She gave him his cup. “I need a trip outside too. If I hear shooting, I’ll be able to tell if it’s from the direction of your place.”
DISASTER: Too Late to Prep Page 14