Azaleas Don't Bloom Here

by Frank Klus

  Azaleas Don’t Bloom Here

  A Dystopian Novel

  Frank T. Klus

  © 2016 by Frank T. Klus. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the author.

  Cover Design: BookStylings.com

  Formatting: BookStylings.com

  Publisher: Self-published by Frank T. Klus (ftklus@mail.com)

  Editor: Amanda Lyons

  This book is dedicated to my sister, Marianne, who so loved my first book.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: The End

  Chapter 2: An Old Friend

  Chapter 3: Into the Lair

  Chapter 4: Friend or Foe

  Chapter 5: The Face of Evil

  Chapter 6: Murder

  Chapter 7: Prison

  Chapter 8: Escape

  Chapter 9: Hell House

  Chapter 10: The Interrogation

  Chapter 11: Operation Rescue

  Chapter 12: On to the Future

  Chapter 13: The New Pilgrims

  Chapter 14: Hogs

  Chapter 15: The Face of the Devil

  Chapter 16: Stirrings

  Chapter 17: Trouble at Hell House

  Chapter 18: Flight

  Chapter 19: A Needle in a Haystack

  Chapter 20: A Big Hog Showdown

  Chapter 21: Kidnapped

  Chapter 22: The Conqueror

  Chapter 23: Another One Flees

  Chapter 24: The One Hundred Thousand Dollar Gamble

  Chapter 25: The Search for Truth

  Chapter 26: Plan Interrupted

  Chapter 27: Attacked

  Chapter 28: An Unlikely Hero/An Unlikely Villain

  Chapter 29: The Beginning

  Preface

  This is a work of fiction. It is not a prediction of what is to come, but a warning of what may come. All names are fictional and any resemblance to actual people is purely coincidental. Some geographic places are completely fictional.

  Acknowledgements

  Cover and formatting by Book Stylings—bookstylings.com

  Edited by Amanda Lyons—nightshades44637@gmail.com

  Special thanks to Saul Bottcher for help with the book title saulbottcher@indiebooklauncher.com

  Part 1:

  Radicalizing Eugene Sulke

  Chapter 1:

  The End

  Old Chicago, The Dead District, July 2065

  All that was is gone. All that remains is a monument to the past; a testament to what was. The skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue became tombstones, and a once thriving business district lay empty and dead.

  The streets are pot-holed and broken. Weeds grow out of the cracks, and no traffic traverses the boulevard. Looking up, the high rises are grey and dead, towering above, and occasionally dropping its debris like a giant animal disposing its waste. Looking down the street, one sees missing street signs, broken street lamps, and the occasional junker on the side of what used to be a road.

  In these monuments, where once an ornate stairwell stood as a testament of wealth and power, it now represents impoverishment and uselessness. In the old offices, tall windows that once stood grand watch over the bustling traffic below, now display only busted shards of glass. The pristine walls are covered with dirt, grime, and graffiti. Oak desks sit rotted and broken, and the once polished floors are caked with dirt, branches and leaves.

  Office doors are open and broken, and everywhere there is the stench of animal and human feces mixed with liquor brought in by squatters. Their leftover crumbs attract the rats that scurry across the spoiled floors. In massive open offices the artificial partitions are gone. The tiles on the ceiling are bent, twisted, broken, and missing; and everywhere, the stale smells of abandonment flourish. All that’s left are the ghostly signs of life here: an exit sign, a desk chair, an empty coffee urn, and the skeletal remains of a once thriving member of society, still sitting at his desk.

  Outside, the storefront windows along the neighborhood streets are boarded up. Keep Out signs are posted on the doors. Cobwebs replace the merchandise, and prostitutes and their johns are the new customers. In the shadows, drug addicts and their junkies would become the new trade, and where ladies once tried on their new gowns, the gamblers rolled their dice.

  Outside there is an eclectic mixture of putrefying smells like cooked up dumpster divings; maybe spiced up with skunk juice. The stench suggests it must have been sautéed over a dead carcass from something washed out of the polluted river and…well, you get the idea.

  This part of the city, the dead district, as the mayor called it, wasn’t completely dead. People are here, and there is noise. Talking and squawking, arguing and fussing over homemade music. They laugh and cry, yell and cajole, like regular people, but something isn’t quite right. They are dirty and feckless; their movements meandering and pointless. They are indigent, homeless, and lifeless. They were hordes walking aimlessly and listlessly in search of food, work, water, or shade. Where once they planned and hoped, they now improvised and feared.

  At the west end of the street the old residential buildings once housed the affluent, who left when the jobs at the other end of the street did so. The largest is the Hollins–Sloop Condominiums. Built as the answer to the city’s housing shortage at one hundred five stories, it’s called Howling Slums now by the squatters that live there, and bears all the scars of urban decay: graffiti, grease, grime, and boarded over and broken windows. Laundry hangs over the balcony rails, and there is no electricity or running water in the junk-strewn units.

  At night, one can hear the yelling, cajoling, and the pleading of the squatters. A wino would crawl out to the balcony and salute the night. A fight would break out and a woman would scream. Garbage would rain down from above like some medieval disposal system. By day, everyone left; too hot, too suffocating.

  July was a brutal time of the year where temperatures would often sore to a hundred degrees so often it felt normal. There was no future and no past for these denizens. There was only now. Every day was the same: relentless, certain, exhausting, draining. Get some food, get to the water, hold your nose, stay together, and find some work to do. Yesterday felt like today and no one thought about tomorrow.

  The unrelenting present consumed every thought and every desire. For most of them the present need was food: scarce, expensive, and horded. The spring storms would bring heavy rain that moved the debris around and washed the pollutants from the air, but it moved planting season farther back into the year. Summer droughts and heatwaves, punctuated by vicious storms, often ruined the crops.

  Most of the family farms that dotted the countryside and the rural areas of Illinois went broke more than a generation ago. Corporate farms bought them because they could afford the expensive irrigation to make the farms work, but produce was exported only to the people who could afford it. Long haul trucks didn’t make it to the dead districts, which now made up two-thirds of Old Chicago proper.

  Crafty people with running pickups would go to the corporate warehouses and purchase fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats; and then truck them to the cartwheelers. These were enterprising people who would work for the pickup truck people, carting their goods throughout the neighborhood. They’d buy the stuff that was ready to be thrown out, and sell to anyone with money, or trade with each other. Hawking their wares, these mean streets would be a noisy cacophony of sales pitches, arguments, music, and fights.

  The children were born with no knowledge of anything different out
side of when their grandparents would tell them stories of television, vacations, shopping, and going to work each day. The grandchildren would listen with amusement as they heard that people had to pay for the right to live where they were, and they howled when they heard they had to work all day so they could give other people their money. On rare occasion they would hear of a mysterious place called the New World that was like their grandparent’s world, and wondered who’d want to go there.

  To the young generation, this was their world, and it felt normal. They would work, play, and occasionally learn to read, while mom and dad would forage for food. Money was rare and many children in the neighborhood never saw it. If you wanted something, you gave something in return. Children would go to the makeshift stores the truck people set up in the abandoned shops, fetch the merchandise, and bring it back to the cartwheelers. The cartwheelers, in turn, would give the kids fruit or candy.

  Down by the lake, the teeming masses would gather on the muddy beaches to play, swim, and wash their clothes. The educated people would create informal schools to teach the children how to read, write, and do some “figurin”. The public schools were mostly boarded up now, replaced by private and semi-private ones. They were supposed to provide free tuition, but the modern educators would seek all sorts of special fees from the students. The poor couldn’t afford them, fell behind, and abandoned an education altogether.

  There wasn’t as big a need for teachers anymore, so many were dismissed. The best ones could get good-paying jobs in the private and semi-private schools, but many created outdoor schools to teach the children in parks and beaches. Most couldn’t afford to pay much, so teachers took fresh food as payment.

  Crime was everywhere. Without jobs, young people would join gangs and rob the cartwheelers of their property. There weren’t many of the old police anymore. They were replaced by roving groups of paramilitary organizations. The Lightning Squad patrolled this side of the city, but they charged the cartwheelers for the privilege of providing security. If they couldn’t afford to pay them, they had to provide for their own security. Many couldn’t; many wouldn’t.

  Is the dead district a sign of the decline and fall of the American Empire? Did some invading horde from the dark realm conquer and impose misery upon them? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. These denizens were the freest of people, the most powerful, and the most entrepreneurial. They couldn’t lose. They were the magnet for opportunists, industrialists, consumers, and immigrants. They were the best of the best, those who could not lose, and had the will to win, to conquer, and to destroy anyone who would threaten their great nation.

  Minds were made up and truth emerged. This would be the age of entrepreneurship. Lose the notion of finding a job, and create one instead. Unemployment was the fate of the lazy; certainly not the responsibility of government. Unemployment rates? No one knew. No one counted anymore.

  Business regulations were an impediment to success. Get rid of them! That was the clarion call. Taxes choked off success. Get rid of taxes on the successful; let the lazy and indigent pay them.

  Government handouts only encourage indolence. Get rid of them! If there are no government handouts, one has to create a job. If one couldn’t do that, too bad. Save the money to help out the thrivers. Help them boost their trade, replenish their inventory, and procure more markets. This is what success looks like—reward the winners and punish the losers.

  Schools should be built for children from successful parents. It’s wasted on society’s failures. Years of high dropout rates, failing pupils and poor test scores became proof that the public school system was broken and needed to be shut down. Create schools for the successful, and one can guarantee success.

  So what went wrong?

  Nothing went wrong, one would hear. They have NOGOV. With one hand on the pulse of the economy and another on the government, they would keep things right. Consisting of a group of the most powerful men in America, they knew the truth. That truth would be relayed to the political pundits, reporters, and educators. Things would be set right. Radio, television, newspapers, and the internet would be the shining beacon relaying the absolute truth to the thriving masses.

  So what of the “tombstones” one may ask?

  They were abandoned to escape the plague of illiteracy, sloth, and weak minds. Businesses moved where there were better opportunities. The truth is, according to those who know, is that the dead districts were created by the diseased; the people that can’t; the people that won’t. Those that will not, never will. Those who fail now, will always fail. The tombstones are a monument to the slothful, the lazy, and the apathetic; certainly not any failure of the truth everyone was so certain of.

  So where do the successful people live now?

  Most went to the suburbs, but the real goal was getting to the Fortress—now that represented opportunity. Looking like a medieval city from the outside, the brick walls, thirty-seven feet high, rise with sublime splendor above the rotting city. They were designed to keep the hordes of the hungry out while creating rich and lovely communities for the thriving affluent. They had the sandy white shores of Lake Michigan at the east end, a giant mall in the middle, and mansions decorated the lush lawns.

  Walled off from the detritus, these bastions of economic boom still held the promise of prosperity, and would be gawked at and glorified by the grungy dwellers nearby. They’d see some big, shiny black car driving in and out of the ornate gates and yell, hoot, whistle, and laugh at this strange instrument of wealth and power. The relationship these people on one side of the wall had with those of the other side was like a Dickensian tale of the haves and have-nothings; the wealthy and the wretched.

  Everson Consulting occupied the top stories of the Solariano Building that stood guard over the Fortress in what was left of the business district in the city. Standing before the massive window of the conference room, Eugene Sulke stood in his starched saffron shirt and amethyst tie and stared twenty-one stories below, wearing a serious expression.

  Standing next to him was his boss, Stuart Everson. Eugene made a point of going to the same hair stylist as his superior, mentor, and hero. He wore his hair the same way—slightly longish and wavy, but still in his mid-forties, he had his golden-dyed locks instead of Stu’s silver hair. Both had pot bellies, a sign of affluence in these times, and wore finely tailored clothes to mark their success.

  Stu playfully poked Eugene in the ribs. With a sly smirk and a sideways glance, Stu leaned over and said, “Thank heavens for the Fortress. Honestly, I don’t know how those other people can live that way. Look at them, Gene: dirty, naked, illiterate. Thank God I have the Fortress.”

  “Sure is something, Stu.”

  Stu smiled. “Why don’t you and Catherine come over for Labor Day—one final barbecue for the summer?”

  “Sure, Stu. We’d love to.”

  Eugene had been inside the Fortress many times, and dreamed of being vice president with a home inside it one day, but a sudden chill overtook him as he turned his head to the dirty and naked people outside. Could we be responsible?

  Chapter 2:

  An Old Friend

  Eugene raced to his car through the empty parking lot. His valise was bouncing off his right leg, and his oversized belly flapped against him. Sweat stained his shirt and poured off his forehead. His face was flushed and his heart pounded against his chest. It was late; very late as he reached the car door. With tires squealing, he headed for the open road.

  A quarter past seven. Oh why did they keep me so long? They must have known it was getting late. South side of Old Chicago and it’s fifteen minutes before sunset. Fifteen minutes! How long to the Tri-State? Yeah, I could do it. I just need a break with the lights.

  As Eugene reached the first traffic light, it turned red. Great! Come on, come on. Give me a few breaks. Come on green, come on. The light turned green; the tires screeched.

  Eugene glanced at the speedometer; fifty, maybe fifty-five. Forty mile speed
zone. Don’t let the Lightning Squad see me. They’ll ticket me for speeding, and then jail me for violating curfew. Oh why did they keep me so long? Come on green. Why did they keep me so long, answering senseless questions; questions I already answered? Just let me make it home.

  It was now twenty-five past seven, and probably several more minutes from the Tri-State Tollway. There was no other traffic and Eugene began to relax.

  Just then he heard the whistles of the Lightning Squad. His pulse rose again. Did the sun set yet? What’s my speed? Damn! One motorcycle passed him and moved just ahead of him, another moved alongside him and motioned for him to pull over, while the third parked right behind him. There was nowhere to go. He had been triangulated; the classic position of the Lightning Squad.

  Eugene waited. The cyclists were heavily armed with semi-automatic weapons strung around their shoulders. The middle cycle now pulled alongside Eugene, and its driver dismounted. He took off his helmet, grinning. Eugene’s frown began to melt. Dennis O’Reilly. Oh my God.

  Dennis and Eugene were childhood friends, but Eugene hadn’t seen him since he moved away from Countryside.

  “Hey, speeder, how’s it going?”

  Eugene climbed out of his Lexus and extended a hand. “Dennis O’Reilly. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I hope I’m not in too much trouble. I was just trying to make it out of the city before curfew.”

  “Nah. We’re buddies. I don’t think you would have made it anyway, Genie, my man. You see, most of the squads sit at the entrance ramps of the interstate. Even if the sun is still up they’d still stop and ticket you. They’ll just say you’d still be in their territory after curfew.”

  “What’s curfew for anyway?”

  “Keeps crime down. Just between us, it also boosts revenue for the Squad. Everyone’s out in full force near dusk, trying to catch somebody on their way home from work.”