by Celi, S.
Holy God.
“From this day forward, no one leaves Harrison Corners without correct papers!” The General yelled. I snapped my head back to toward the front. “The government will issue mandatory papers. We will not give them to Undesirables!”
I shuddered at his words. Everyone knew Undesirables included the sick, the old, people who couldn’t work, and traitors. For months, news reports on the 4-D TV had described how terrible it was to be one. No one wanted that distinction. No one.
Another chirp came from the whistle.
“All able bodied men and women will now work for The War Effort,” he continued. I wondered if The General’s voice could get louder or more strained. Seconds later, he proved it would. “Work will begin in the factory Monday morning, and will be six days a week from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Sundays will be a day of rest. From now on, Harrison Corners will contribute shirts to The War Effort! Do you understand? You will all strive to be exemplary workers.”
Our town already had the factory structure for shirt making, having once been the headquarters for Coleman Athletic. People in Harrison Corners talked about Coleman Athletic like a marker of prosperity from some distant, better era, like maybe the Roaring Twenties. The main factory, after all, shut down during the original Great Recession. I heard people say the factory closed the same year the sheriff’s office foreclosed on the 200th home in 18 months. Of course, that happened more than four decades ago. I shut my eyes and blocked the memory from my mind. No more thinking about the past.
The General shook his fist in the air to emphasize his next point. “All government rules must be followed to perfection. No exceptions.”
Behind The General, two of the soldiers unfurled a huge American flag almost as tall as the two stories of City Hall. Instead of horizontally, they hung the flag so the stripes flew vertically and the stars made up the top. Black stripes replaced the red. I had never seen the flag that way before.
My nostrils flared a little as the sight set my teeth on edge.
“Work begins on Monday. Everyone will participate, even school aged children. You will all meet back here for a mandatory count before you devote your energy to The War Effort. All of this for the great favor of our Supreme Leader!” He saluted. “All Hail the Supreme Leader!”
“All hail the Supreme Leader!” we repeated back to him in our loudest voices. Then the whistle sounded again.
“Dismissed!” screamed one of the soldiers. No one moved.
One speech, one meeting, and everything changed. I used to love the end of winter, the cusp of April against the blush of spring. In the past, it brought me so much hope. After that day, I hated it. Hope left my town and my country. I wondered if we would ever get it back.
For the next three days, I sat at home and stared at the 4-D TV — the only way to pass the time. The TV had four channels: two for news and two for government approved movies. One morning, a channel showed a three-hour film about greedy Canadians throttling the Keystone pipeline in an effort to sabotage everyone else. Another day, a miniseries drama set in Canada told me how arrogant Canadian people acted when it came to money and power. After a while, it overwhelmed me. Seconds became minutes. Minutes turned to hours. Hours lasted an eternity.
On the fourth day, the 4-DTV stopped working. Again.
Two hours after I tried to turn it on, a short man I didn’t recognize came to the shack we called home and went through every room. He carried a crate and flashed a badge at me when I opened the door. He forced his way in before I knew what he had done. Fifteen minutes passed before he came back to the front door with a full crate.
“You can’t keep this stuff,” he said when he saw the surprise on my face. Inside the crate lay two cell phones, a stereo, an old CD player, a DVD player, my mother’s iPod, an e-book reader, and two automatic alarms. “It’s illegal. As of now. The state now owns all electronics except that 4-D TV.”
“What?” I leaned against the wall and gaped at the loot he held between both of his hands. Then I nodded at the 4-D TV. “Do you know when the outage on the TV will be over? I turned it on today and just got that government screen that says we’re going through another sporadic outage on the signal.”
He shifted his weight. “No. Don’t ask questions.” His robotic voice spit out the words to an explanation as if he’d said them a few hundred times before. “Outages are for our protection. The Canadians jammed the signals, using radio waves and cell phone towers and satellites against us. We can’t have that. So we also have to take this stuff.”
“But half those things haven’t worked in years. I don’t remember a time when we even tried to turn on those cell phones. The CD player and stuff — my mom owned that as a kid. She told me that stuff was junk.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I didn’t offer a response, so he plowed through to his next point. “If you find other electronics in your house, you must hand them over at The Count. You will find two Hologram Watches on the bed in the first room. The face stands up when you read it and they run on a solar battery. The internal alarm will wake you up each morning. You must wear it at all times. No exceptions.” Then he gave me a quick nod and pushed his way out the front door.
My mother stared at the wall behind the chrome kitchen stove from her place at the kitchen table. She didn’t react, even after I sighed. I walked over to her towered over her shrunken body. She looked like she’d break if I grabbed her arm. “Did you hear what he said? Did you see what he just did?”
“It doesn’t really matter. We can’t use it anyway because most of it needs the Internet to work.” She shrugged and slurred her words. “I can’t remember the last time we had the Internet. Three years ago?” She took a sip from her glass. I almost saw the vodka slide down her narrow neck. “Yes, I think it was three years ago when the outage started.” Her hollow eyes shifted from the table to me. “Just leave me alone, Charlotte, okay?” Her grating voice struggled to form the words. “Leave me alone.”
I blinked at her a few minutes before I walked away. She had always neglected me. Why did I think she would change? Every day she sat at the small metal table in our kitchen staring at the last vodka bottle we owned, willing it to fill back up with the elixir she needed to blot out the miserable life we led. I gave up on her a long time ago.
Outside the house, tanks and Humvees rumbled by every half hour or so. Each sound served as a reminder of what had changed around me. At night, we heard nothing. That’s when I slipped out of the house and took walks; I didn’t think as my feet found the dirt path from our house to the small street. We lived on the outskirts of Harrison Corners, so I would see the town lights glowing in the distance, about a quarter mile from the front door.
On most nights, I wouldn’t walk to the center of town. That path was too dangerous and too risky for just me. The Party only allowed us out at night in prearranged pairs, anyway. The soldiers couldn’t see me defy the rules. Instead, I hiked left toward the overgrown farm fields that no one planted anymore. Two years ago, the rules changed for farmers in our area. No more planting or farming for these families.
During these evening walks, the stalks of the remaining plants and the sway of the leaves in the breeze comforted me. They reminded me of the life we all once lived. Most nights, I picked a spot off the road and walked into the crops. I just wanted to disappear.
I strolled past the old plants and the earth found its way through the crevices in my sandals. Sometimes I walked in circles, hidden from street view in the overgrown plants. On those nights, I walked a mile or two before getting tired. Other times, I sat down in a small clearing of the field. Every night, the stars fanned like freckles across the sky.
Alone with my thoughts, I reflected on the reasons we got here. I remembered the past.
The month I turned ten years old, then Speaker of the House Maxwell Cooper went on a modern wh
istle stop tour. He told people in city after city he had no faith in President Mary Anne Phillips, and that it had been a mistake to elect the senior senator from Washington State as the first female president of the US. He said she didn’t know how to handle the oil barons and greedy cartels controlling foreign governments.
I thought a lot about the day he roared in town for the Harrison Corners stop. June. One hundred degrees. A crowd of at least 500 people. My mother had the weirdest grimace on her face as she and I stood in the back of the crowd listening to the stump speech. Maxwell Cooper stood on an elevated platform at the train station, surrounded in red, white, and blue bunting. I guess someone found it at the Coleman Athletic and trucked it out for the occasion.
A man next to me spoke over my head to my mother. “I’m glad someone’s got their head on straight,” he muttered as he chewed on a piece of grass. “Instead of the crazy lady who’s in office right now. Cooper is an Ohio boy, you know. Born down across the river from Point Pleasant.”
Everyone cheered when Cooper stepped up to the microphone. The band behind him trumpeted a few patriotic bars. He appeared to be in his early 50s, with an unnatural tan that glowed even in the shade. His white hair still had flecks of black in it and his face grew red when he yelled.
Oh, how this man yelled. None of that seemed to matter to anyone at the time. This man had a plan.
This man would save us.
Cooper stood at the helm of the microphone and closed his eyes. All of us focused right back at him. The man next to my mother flicked his head in the direction of Cooper in an obvious gesture of support. I didn’t catch my mother’s reaction. Back at the platform, Cooper took one deep breath.
“Friends, it is with a heavy heart that I come here today; a heavy heart that makes me share what I no longer want to ignore.” His words echoed through the crowd and then over the radio waves and TV signals of the media gathered with all their gear on a podium to his left.
“We share a history of being a great nation, a beacon of light, a ship unsinkable in a storm.” His voice rose with each word. “But that, my friends, is no longer our life today. We, the great people of the US, fell away from the principles of freedom and honor, making us first among barbarians. We, a great nation, became lost and afraid. Our leadership in Washington, the Phillips’ administration, they don’t know what to do. Friends, Mary Anne does not have a plan.” I didn’t miss the derision when he called President Phillips by her first name.
Cooper paused and then smiled a Cheshire grin. “My fellow countrymen, today I must tell you, I know a way to lead us out. I know a path to a better life, a way to regain our economic freedom, our personal freedom, and our freedom from the tyranny of an administration in cahoots with those who would keep us down!”
Talk at the time centered on oil, diminishing natural resources, and the price of gasoline at the pump, which hovered at around $7 a gallon and plunged the U S into a recession for more than seven years. Then the US ended up in a mess with the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s hoarding of the few oil resources left. The War followed.
Of course, I didn’t understand all that as a kid. We didn’t own a car because it cost too much. Mom sold the old Honda Accord years before. Most people in Harrison Corners did the same. We got around on foot like everyone else.
After the speech, I asked my mother why everyone looked angry. We walked on the dirt path about two blocks from the house.
“It’s been tough.” She sighed. “For everyone. Gotta get money somehow, survive some way.” She shoved her hands in the pockets of her khaki skirt — a nervous habit. She shook her matted brown curls. “You’ll understand when you’re older — when you do things you don’t like.”
Even at age ten, I knew. I saw the money on the kitchen table, the men coming in and out of her bedroom. I heard stories at elementary school about how my mom had been a big draw at The Handful, when the bar had been open on the road between Harrison Corners and Robertstown, back before the government issued a ban on gentleman’s clubs. The other kids made sure I knew my mother danced topless, that she had been the center attraction, even though she never told me herself.
I thought about all this on the walks. Things were so very different then, only a decade before. At the time, it all seemed so innocent.
After all, who would fight a War over gasoline?
Back then, no one knew how much power Maxwell Cooper had, how much influence he wielded over The Party’s generals. No one anticipated the ice age between Canada and U S, one that worsened each year. No one thought gasoline prices would climb even higher. But the world ran out of oil faster and faster as the months flew by, a catastrophic mistake. Eventually, the price topped $15 a gallon and stayed there, despite President Phillips’ pleas for an increase in production. The Middle East’s oil supply had dried up. Gone. Venezuela refused to increase production. Reserves across the world ran dry. We miscalculated the remaining supply and had no viable alternatives to make up for it. No negotiating in the world would push the price down even one cent.
“Please limit what you use,” Phillips pled in a series of public service announcements and speeches. “Don’t drive unless you must. Don’t waste our precious resources. Together, we can beat this.”
Of course, a plan had already been set in motion: the assassination of President Phillips and two-thirds of her cabinet. Right afterwards, The Party coup forced our vice president, Drew Morgan, into exile in Canada. Maxwell Cooper seized power, and he reigned as leader of The Party and all of us.
Now, years later and a few nights after the big announcement in the center of town, I walked to the middle of the old cornfield about a half mile from our house. I took off my jacket, spread it down in the field and lay down on top of it.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered to myself. “There has got to be a better life than this.”
I slowed down my breathing and tried to put fear out of my mind. Seven hours remained until I must report to The Count and an hour after that I would start my first day at the converted factory. I was like a death row prisoner on the eve of my final hours of life. Working at a factory was the last thing I wanted to do.
I closed my eyes. My whole body relaxed into the dusty ground. I almost fell asleep in the spring twilight. Then sometime around midnight, I heard the snap of a dried corn stalk and then the crunch of dead leaves under a foot. The sound came from behind the left side of my head. I stopped breathing and my eyes flew open. All the muscles in my body tensed.
Crack.
There it came again — closer this time.
Crunch.
I didn’t move. I didn’t blink. My mind raced.
What if they found me? What would I say? How would I save myself? How would I explain it all away?
Snap.
A few seconds later, the sound came even closer, and then, right on top of me. The moon illuminated a dark, shadowy figure towering over me from the overgrown weeds circling my hiding spot. I closed my eyes and flinched.
Did he know I lay there?
Then he spoke. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
CHAPTER THREE
I didn’t open my eyes even though I knew Fostino’s voice. Instead, I struggled with whether to be afraid or relieved. The emotions pulled me like two opposite ends of a broken rubber band. After a moment, he spoke again.
“Charlotte! Can you hear me? What’s going on here?” He bent down and shook my shoulder. “Charlotte!”
I opened my eyes and looked straight at him, hoping to hide my surprise and terror. “What are you doing here, Fostino?” I kept my voice even as I sat up. “Wait. How do you know my name?”
“Patrols.” He shrugged his answer to my first question.
Oh, right — Homeland Guard Patrols.
“Now, why didn’t you answer me?” He still loom
ed over me.
I ignored his question. “Isn’t it really late for patrols?” I picked the leaves and debris out of my long blonde ponytail. Then I threw what I found to the side. Fostino sat down on the hard, dry earth and didn’t answer me.
“I’ll ask you again. What are you doing here?” He paused, and looked around the clearing in the field. “Do you come to this field to hide?”
I frowned. I didn’t want him interrogating me. After all, as a ranking officer of the Homeland Guard, I knew he and the others spied on everyone at school. Even so, I took in the sight of him and it made me light headed. Fostino looked so handsome, even now, as he wore the Homeland Guard uniform. Medals and commendations adorned the left side of his jacket.
“No,” I lied. “I got lost. That’s it.” Then I tossed him my brightest fake grin, hoping to distract him. Fast.
“Getting lost happens to a lot of folks these days. Lots of them.” He sounded suspicious. “So what are you really doing here?”
“Really. I just got lost.” Then I remembered something. Something important. “Wait. Don’t you all patrol together?” I looked around after I asked him and didn’t see anyone else from the Homeland Guard.
He scooted a little closer to me. “Not tonight. It’s just me.”
An acrid scent wafted over me, and I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “What’s that smell? Ugh.”
Fostino sniffed the sleeve of his uniform and grimaced. “Fire.” He cleared his throat. “We burned some of the electronics we collected today in a big bonfire behind the school.”
My eyes bulged and I gaped at him for a few seconds. “Should you have told me that?”
Fostino brushed some of his hair out of his eyes. “Probably not, but it’s not like the fire wasn’t obvious. Just one more thing we have to do to win The War.”