A New Day in America

by Theo Black Gangi

  Steve sleeps soundly on the couch. No sound or movement yet from upstairs. Clair and Naomi are out cold in the bedroom.

  Nos sees Steve’s leg by the bed and picks it up. He examines it—a steel exoskeleton mimicking the structure and musculature of a human leg.

  He brings the artificial leg out to Steve along with his rifle and wakes him.

  “We’re under attack,” he says and Steve’s groggy eyes pop awake.

  The Ranger snaps his leg into place and takes his rifle in ready fire position.

  “Probably two on the second floor. Cover the stairs,” says Nos.

  “The fuck is this about?” he hisses.

  “Right now, it’s about the two upstairs.”

  Steve angrily nods.

  He goes to the front door and drags one of the bodies toward the south lakeside window and props the corpse to a crouch, staying out of sight. Cupping the back of the neck, he holds the head out into the open window. Sniper fire punches through the man’s forehead and out the back, just missing Nos’ fingers. He sees the hole in the back wall and judges the sniper is firing from twelve-thirty. He pulls the man at a duck below the sill and removes the night vision goggles, readying the thermal scope of the M4. He raises the punctured head once more and bullets blow through in perfect repetition of the previous shots. Nos presses the chin against the sill and aims the thermal scope past the lifeless shoulder. He finds the white silhouette of his target and fires. The action is so smooth there is no kickback. Bullets drive through the sniper’s crouched body.

  Steve’s gun erupts in thunderous blasts at the second floor. Nos takes a flash bang from the interceptor vest as bullets crack past Steve and rip through the downstairs wall. They lock eyes. Steve nods. Nos hurls the flash bang up the stairs and it pops with a deafening ring. Nos and Steve rush the stairs to the explosion of pure white and open fire on the blinded and staggering soldiers. They crank out bullets until the men are twitching bodies on the floor.

  Nos examines each one. Body armor, advanced gear. No flaming chalice. He pulls their helmets off. Not Lawlor.

  Steve is dumbstruck.

  “What happened?”

  Nos runs to the north window and aims the thermal scope down the road and past the trees. Nothing. The streets are desolate and quiet. Except for the angry crickets.

  Clair roars in the room.

  “What is going on?”

  “Just who the hell are you?” follows Steve.

  Clair holds Naomi in her arms, in a cold sweat. She is the calmest of the three.

  “We—I’ve put you at risk.”

  “Us at risk?” Clair yells, tears streaming. “And her? Your girl? Look at what you’ve already done to her!”

  Steve puts his arm around Clair to calm her.

  “I’ve got blood on my hands—I’ve killed for you! Now who the fuck are you?” he demands.

  “Nostradamus Greene. Former Delta Force. They tried to take my daughter for her rash. I fought back. We’ve been on the run ever since. Believe me that I am sorry, and I thank you deeply for your help. We have to go, now.”

  “We? You’re taking her into this? They’re hunting you,” says Clair, clutching Naomi to her chest. “You drag your little girl with you? You’ll be killed! She’ll be killed!”

  “I have no choice,” says Nos.

  “But you do,” says Clair, with a wistful smile. “I can take care of her.”

  She makes sense. The Revelation is hunting him at this point. He has killed too many of them. Lawlor won’t let go either. They won’t ever stop.

  “She would be safest here,” says Clair, quiet now. “We could give her a real home.”

  A place to die. And strangers to die with.

  Steve places a reassuring hand on Nos’ shoulder. “Really, think about it, bud. Though there isn’t much time.”

  The couple stands in earnest. Their nest is so empty that even with dead soldiers on their floor, they look to fill it. These are good people. Clair would make a lovely mother. Her protectiveness begins to remind Nos of Yvette, her anger an expression of Yvette’s old passions. Nos lives by the gun. He will die by the gun. Why should Naomi suffer the same?

  “It’s been so hard, we’ve tried for so long,” says Clair.

  Nos nods. Clair carries Naomi inside the bedroom and comes back out with a handful of photos.

  “Our first try was a girl,” she says. “She was stillborn.” She glances at her pictures, then looks away and hands them to Nos.

  They are of a dead baby girl dressed in the outfits they had picked out for her when they had believed they were bringing new life into the world. Now the End of the World. What else could they want?

  “Please,” says Clair. “She’s too precious. Don’t take her, please. She’s too precious. You’ll kill her.”

  Nos breathes in deep and his pulse rate skyrockets. He closes his eyes but still sees the vision of the dead baby girl.

  “There is no question in my mind that you would make a great mother, Clair,” says Nos.

  She sniffs in her tears.

  “But Naomi and I are two halves of a whole. I hope you can understand.” Nos unloads a stack of bills on their table. “I know this is only a gesture, but I hope it helps.” He reaches his arm to his daughter. “Come, Nay, we must go now.”

  Something bangs against his head. He hears a pop. A flash of white and then total black. Nos falls to the ground.

  Steve.

  Steve cocks his gun. Nos’ head throbs from where Steve pistol-whipped him. Nos looks up from the floor and sees the barrel pointed down at him.

  “I can’t let you go,” he says, his voice different: cold, commanding.

  Clair backs away with Naomi. Nos closes his eyes. Trust no one. Yvette was saying it all along. Trust no one. Abe made him sloppy.

  Nos presses the trigger of the small remote device in the palm of his hand. An explosion in Steve’s artificial leg blows him off his feet. The room rings. Steve and his bloody stump slam against the wall and drop.

  Nos had clipped the doughnut charge to Steve’s artificial leg before he’d handed it off. The explosive was meant for the door, but it blew Steve in half just as well.

  Their team had mobilized too quick for Lawlor to report in and make another move. Lawlor wasn’t among the dead. Yeah, Clair had me going for a moment. Bought in. But not sold.

  Nos quickly draws and fires twice into Steve’s heart.

  “N-no—no no no,” Clair repeats in hysteria. “No no no!”

  Blood pools on the hardwood. Nos walks beside Steve and kicks his rifle away from him. A soft groan escapes his dying lips.

  “I meant everything I said,” he struggles to speak through the agony of the oncoming. “I betrayed you, yes—but my condition was that the girl stay here with us and they leave my wife be. You must believe me. Don’t let my wife suffer alone. I beg you. Leave the girl…”

  “They never would have let you keep her,” says Nos. He shoots Steve one last time through his forehead.

  Clair runs with Naomi into the bedroom. Nos follows.

  “Stay back! Stay away! Animal! Leave now! Leave her here, you fucking monster!”

  Nos stands in the doorway. “Put her down, Clair. Please. Put her down now.”

  “Never, you savage! She can’t go with you. She has to stay here with me. She wants to.”

  “Just put her down. We have to go now.”

  Clair looks into Naomi’s wide-eyed sickly face and kisses her forehead. “You want to stay with me, sweetheart?”

  Naomi’s eyes soften, and her chin touches her chest. She turns to Nos.

  “Pa,” she says and begins to cry.

  “Yes, Nay we have to go.”

  Clair reluctantly lowers the girl, clutching onto her. As soon as Naomi’s feet hit the floor, they scurry to her father’s arms. They hold each other tight. He carries her through the kitchen, and she looks back over Nos’ shoulder as Clair follows in tears. She is unable to look at her husband,
only at the little girl’s blackberry eyes hovering over her father’s shoulder.

  Nos hoofs it down to the river as Clair watches them outlined by the kitchen light in the doorway. Naomi keeps looking back as though she can still feel her motherly touch.

  Nos boards an abandoned Revelation boat, starts the motor, and steers out into the lake. One last gunshot bangs a thunderclap into the night.

  The ravaged home is but a dot of light and chimney smoke on the hill behind. Nos drives on to the narrow, dark rapids ahead. Naomi stands starboard side with her hands on the hull of the boat, gazing back at Clair’s invisible ghost.

  BOOK 4—SAN FRANCISCO

  Chapter 1

  In with the Trash

  Nos passes his scope along the San Francisco Bay. Waters break on the island shore, and the city stands in the shadows of mountains. Nos is surprised to see Revelation checkpoints on the Frisco side of the bay. Shit, if Revelation has already seized San Fran, getting in would be virtually impossible. His heart sinks, and he sits in exhaustion.

  “What did you see?” asks Nay.

  “Bad guys. Bad guys where they shouldn’t be.”

  “That’s where they always are.”

  Nos sees the pegs of the Bay Bridge in the distance. Their only hope is speed. Blow around the Treasure Island outpost into the northern most side of the bay. Then there will be no way past the well-patrolled piers.

  Nos sits. Thinks. The boat rocks just beyond the range of the surrounding watchdogs. City debris passes them in the idle waters—dead fish and trash bags rippling in the wind. If he were by himself, he could easily swim beneath the patrolling boats to land. Their Revelation vessel has three wetsuits and oxygen tanks in the trap. The problem is getting Nay across with him.

  He watches a black trash bag hover in the whims of the water’s surface and it comes to him. He dives in and swims to the bag before it gets away. Nos swims back to the boat with the trash bag, drying off as the raincloud fog thickens.

  They abandon the boat. Nos has shaved himself bald. He’d spent the last two hours tying strings of deer tendon from their riverside hunts together. One end is secured around Naomi’s waist, the other harnessed is around Nos’ shoulders. Nos dives into the deep and unspools the yards and yards of tendon. Naomi hovers in her life vest, strapped to the backpack. A dry pair of clothes is inside, sealed with a plastic bag. Nay’s shoulders and neck stands above the surface, completely covered by the black trash bag, pocked with air holes.

  Nos swims in the deep with the amphibious rifle as slow and steady as possible, dragging Nay by the chord so she looks like innocuous water debris gradually drifting along the bay.

  As they pass patrol boats Nos turns and swims to the surface, watching the enormous hulls and Naomi’s small legs and hands holding still. Nos reads the course of the boats and drags her by the long chord between. Once they are past the first patrol Nos spots the bottoms of smaller fishing boats. Nos has to avoid the long concrete ceilings of rectangular docks jutting into the water. He swims beneath rows of parked boats, weaving Naomi in and out of their narrow spaces. The waters thicken with green as the shore approaches. Land rises to meet the wooden stakes of piers. Nos ascends beneath the cover of one pier and climbs up the shore. He then pulls his girl to him by her spool. He removes the bag from over her head, and she breathes.

  Chapter 2

  Tourism

  They change their wet clothes under the cover of the pier. Nos slides on his overcoat and loads the amphibious rifle and the disassembled Barrett .50-caliber inside the wetsuit and into the trash bag. There is, however, no chance the stretched and hole-ridden plastic could hold all that weight. He also doesn’t want to abandon the oxygen tanks—those could come in handy again.

  He shoves the bag in the small nook where the pier meets the ground and builds a wall of seaweed. Should cover it for now, but he will have to come back before the tide rises.

  The water dries like a layer of sweat beneath their clothes. They climb to the top of the pier and walk inland toward the promenade. Nos takes out the Motorola that Westbrook had given him and Leila back at Fort Dan. He scrolls through different frequencies that chirp with conversations. Delivery to Southern Pacific. Vigil at Christ the Savior. He dials onto Leila’s frequency. “Ghostface Killah, come in. This is the Wolf and Cub. Come in.” The radio is silent. Long shot. San Fran is a big place. Who knows if she even made it out of the hospital?

  Something tells Nos that she had. She’s a survivor, that one.

  Nos strolls along a red brick alley on 3rd Street, holding Naomi’s hand. They have to blink to adjust to the sun and culture shock. They have spent days alone on the river, living off fiddleheads, morels, wild leeks, and a deer Nos had hunted. The days were long and boring. They would play during their morning swims and then go all day without talking. Naomi would doodle a drawing of three waves with sticks in the wet dirt. Even when we’re on ground, she sees the river.

  The city has more people than they’ve seen in a while. The afternoon is drowsy with bums on Howard Street, black-suited Hasidim, plaster-stained construction workers, and women watching from second-story windows. An outdoor market buzzes with folks selling simple goods. Some sell guns: AK 47s and semiautomatic Glock 9s. A pastor outside a church shakes hands with a crowded congregation. A few of them sing: The rapture is getting close, God is shutting the door, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. One wears a T-shirt:

  kNOw

  Jesus

  kNOw

  Peace

  They wander back to 3rd Street that evening. An orange awning reads Grace Hotel, torn from its skeleton like flesh from the bone. A paranoid Asian in an out-of-place ascot sits at the desk in front of rows of dangling keys.

  “No rooms,” he snaps.

  Nos tries to imagine what they look like to the proprietor: the layer of bay water on their skin, the residue of wilderness on their clothes, the gradual blending with the countryside until they resembled the colors in which they traveled—the wild, hungry look on Nay’s face, his own bearing, like a mercenary.

  “No rooms,” he repeats.

  Nos takes his wad of bills and begins piling them on the counter.

  “Those keys behind you suggest otherwise. We’d like a room on the ground floor, please.”

  The cot is firm, and Nos lays face up as Nay sleeps in the crook of his arm. The feel of the river still courses through them. They are clean and dry. Nos longs for the water. They are so close to the end of land. He knows the Pacific rumbles in the distance, though he can’t hear it.

  ***

  In the morning they walk north toward the Port of San Francisco. Nay watches the blurred city as she awakes and yawns. They pass a patchwork of colors below: some neighborhoods are flat and gray, some are green with small gardens beside re-bricked homes with windmills and solar panels. Where the neighborhoods flourish, men and women busily work their gardens in sandals and Crocs, wearing hemp sweaters. Where the neighborhoods are ruined, underworld hustlers have swagger. On one corner, a pair of cureheads tell one another ‘good night’ and go their separate ways. It’s about noon.

  They see no Revelation presence until the seaside port. Revelation checkpoints line China Beach before huge ships, as families line up in mass with their lives packed away in overstuffed suitcases. Some look to hustle trinkets overseas where they can get more value. Some look to relocate for good and bid good-bye to their homeland. All head for Asia.

  The line spills from the mouth of a huge municipal building. Revelation Guards stalk alongside the travelers with heavy artillery and hard eyes.

  Nos and Nay double back toward the hotel. We’re wandering. Getting nowhere fast. He’d talked up a couple guys who were showing rashes so bad they couldn’t hide them: one on his wrist, the other on his neck like Nay. He asked about the Chef, but they didn’t know anything, or hadn’t said if they did. He didn’t bother asking them about a cure: if they knew about it, they wouldn’t be so blatantly sick. Nos works hi
s Motorola radio to Leila’s frequency with no luck.

  They pass a group of a dozen Hasidim in a circle beating down some poor soul on the sidewalk. Their black robes lift and wave as they stomp. A police car comes the wrong way down a one-way street with sirens blazing. Nos is impressed—there are real cops in Frisco. Then three more Hasidim jump out of the police car and join in the beat down.

  They walk until they see no more Hasidim. They’re in a run down neighborhood when Nos sees it.

  Another police vehicle is parked carelessly in the street. He can’t believe his eyes. A van. Not SFPD. NYPD.

  Same plates. Dirty and beat down as all New York.

  Leila. She made it.

  Chapter 3

  Tattoos

  The van is parked outside of a bar called The Bottom. When the river is blocked, try the sewer. He’d tried Leila on the Motorola radio, but still no luck. It’s evening out on the street but feels like three o’clock in the morning in the bar. Eyes scan the father and daughter and return to their idle business. Nos steps in and sees gangsters in booths with their backs to the wall, sipping clear moonshine from snifters with guns on the table.

  He sits at the bar, content to wait. Nay sits on the stool behind him, looking exhausted. She doesn’t belong there. Can’t be helped.

  He needs a drink. Can’t be helped.

  “Double Jamison and a Shirley Temple,” Nos tells the bartender.

  “All we got is moonshine,” says the bartender. “You want one or two?”

  “Make it two. For me.”

  A group of four loud black men walk into the bar behind him. They talk of last night’s fights and last week’s girls and P90 stand-offs. They wear bubble-coats that could hide anything from Teflon vests to mini-Uzi’s, with slim jeans with bright platinum sneakers that seem impervious to the dirty city. The Decepticon face from the old franchise toy line is etched on the backs of their coats. A shudder runs through the bar as Nos leans back with his arms folded and his chin tucked. Naomi doesn’t make a sound.