In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  Thank goodness that’s over, Thomas thought, and waited impatiently for the regular programming to come back on. The news story reminded him of how much travel abroad had decreased since the Zero Tolerance amendment had been added to, and radically changed the Constitution. Incidents like this were regrettable and unavoidable, but it was far worse overseas.

  The Navigator passed another reflective sign, and Thomas slowed the SUV as his exit came up on the right. He took the off ramp, rattled over a metal cow crossing, and turned left under the interstate. Now they were on two lane blacktop, and the leafy woods to either side crept closer to the road as they entered the back country. The hills were more pronounced here, but the big vehicle slid over them without hesitation.

  Thomas’s thoughts returned to Howard MacDonald. Howard’s execution made him think of how clever a person Howard had been, which made him think of how he would have believed he could pull it off, which reminded him that Howard’s eight-year-old son Deke had placed the call to the police, telling them about the bad thing Daddy had done, which made him think of his own son Edwin, and that made him smile.

  Just before they left for vacation, Edwin was honored by his school with a citizenship award, for turning in a pair of high school boys he had seen vandalizing a car while he was walking home from school. At the PTA meeting later that week, Principal Halsey showed the assembled parents the video he took during the electrocution of the high school boys two days later. Halsey went on to tell everyone that Thomas and Bianca’s little boy had served his community well, and that the nine-year-old had a big future ahead of him. Thomas’s heart had swelled with pride for his youngest son.

  “Tom?” He was jerked out of his reverie by his wife’s alarmed voice.

  “Wha…?” Then he saw the twin flashes of yellow ahead. The headlights had frozen a whitetail doe in the center of the road, and the Navigator was hurtling towards it. “Jesus!” Thomas stomped on the brakes and gripped the wheel to control the skid, the squealing of rubber on asphalt filling the car, rivaled by Angela’s terrified scream from the back as she held on to the back Bianca’s headrest. The Navigator shuddered to a halt, turned at an angle in the road, headlights illuminating the trees on the left side. Thomas caught a glimpse of a white tail as the doe bounded into the safety of the woods.

  The smell of hot radials crept in through the air conditioning, and the only sound was the soft purring of the big engine. Thomas released his breath. “Jesus,” he repeated. For once his children were speechless.

  “My God, Tom, do you know what could have happened?”

  Thomas looked over at his wife and tried a weak grin. “It’s okay, honey. The deer’s fine, and we’re fine.”

  “But Tom!” Her voice was rising. “Do you have any idea what something that big would have done to this car? We would have been killed!”

  “Honey,” Thomas patted her leg, “I’m in the insurance business, remember? I know perfectly well what would have happened, and it’s not as bad as you think. This is a 2034 Lincoln, built like a tank, with every possible safety feature. A broken grill, maybe a wrinkle in the hood at the most, not even a full day in the shop. It would have been fine.” He kept his voice and face relaxed as he told what was probably a lie.

  Bianca was shaken and not easily put off. “You should pay more attention to the road.”

  Christ, not another fight. Better head this one off at the pass. “Bianca, don’t take me to court over it, okay?”

  His wife looked away, but Thomas could see the grin spreading over her face in the reflection of her window. It was an old joke between them, one of those silly things between married people. Of course each had seen stories in the news about people who lost cases in small claims and divorce courts, or were found delinquent with their child support payments, only to be shipped to penal colonies on islands off the Alaskan coast. The thought of the two of them arguing in front of a judge about anything was so ridiculous it usually broke any tension between them.

  “Well…just be more careful.” Bianca couldn’t hide her smile, and Thomas knew everything was alright. She turned around in her seat. “You kids okay back there?”

  Angela spoke up, still burning over the pretzel incident. “Daddy almost got us killed, but other than that, no big deal.”

  “Wow, Dad,” Carl leaned over the front seat, “if the car can take it, why didn’t you just smash the deer?”

  Thomas was about to lecture about unnecessarily damaging the car, and how it was wrong to senselessly waste the lives of living creatures, but Edwin cut him off from the back.

  “Because it would have been considered poaching, fart face, and you know the penalty for that.”

  “Shut up, geek, nobody asked you.”

  Thomas looked into his rear view and saw his youngest son looking calmly back at him. If he hadn’t stopped in time, if he had hit the deer, would Edwin…? He hoped this citizenship award wasn’t going to the boy’s head. Then he thought of Howard MacDonald. Howard’s boy was younger than Edwin. He tried to shake off the goosebumps rising on his arms, telling himself they were only an after-effect of the close call, and got the Lincoln moving again.

  Half an hour passed and silence filled the SUV. The kids were trying to sleep, except for Edwin who was reading his pamphlet with the aid of a small flashlight, and Bianca, who just sat quietly, watching the headlights pierce the night. Thomas allowed his mind to wander again.

  He didn’t usually think about the Zero Tolerance Policy. It was something that had lost its glamour long ago and taken its place alongside trivialities like shoveling snow in the winter and keeping gas in the car. Just one of the many things that makes up a life. But now, with Howard’s execution only a few days in the past, he was thinking about the whole thing again.

  His children weren’t around when things were different. Hell, he had only just been born when the rhetoric of the presidency had been A kinder, gentler America. Presidents change, however, just like national policies and national thinking.

  It wasn’t really that long ago that the president who first voiced those words was in office. He was followed by a popular, two term president riding high on a fat economy (as well as a fat intern), and was succeeded by the son of Mr. Kinder-Gentler, who had to face 9/11. That had been the real start of it all, a collective ending of what was left of American innocence. Or so it seemed. As it turned out, America had another soft layer yet to be peeled away. Following the Texan, America elected its first black president, a man whom the cameras loved but who accomplished a great deal of nothing. Behind him came a one-term Republican who was even more lackluster than his predecessor, and who managed to crush the economy even further. A wave of extreme liberalism began sweeping the country, and Americans elected a far left Democrat who disappointed everyone by dying of aggressive bone cancer nine months into his term. His young vice president stepped into his shoes, and if possible he was positioned even further left. This one lasted all of four months before a man who wrote a rambling, far-Right blog lifted the top of the president’s skull in Seattle with a sniper rifle.

  Up stepped the Speaker of the House, another African American with extremely liberal views, a reverend who had fought hard over the years to reach the chair he now occupied. His term lasted slightly longer than his predecessor’s – nine months. A man later linked to an Idaho-based white supremacy group managed to slip through the Secret Service coverage of a state dinner (exactly how he managed this would be the subject of investigation and speculation for years, and would fuel conspiracy theories for decades) and used a pistol-grip shotgun to turn the president’s face into chopped meat. The assassin was captured, but was shot and killed by a black agent later that night while allegedly attempting to escape.

  Race riots sparked by the killings tore the country apart for the next two years, and America entered one of its darkest periods. Liberalism was shunted aside in the struggle for survival, and the United States might just have ceased to exist had not John Sawyer arr
ived on the scene.

  John Sawyer was a politician with a dream, and the charisma, finances and contacts to make it happen. When he took the presidential oath during a special election, he promised Americans that he was going to put the country back together again. And he did, but back then no one except he and a select few knew where his plan would lead. Sawyer adopted some rhetoric from the eighties, and put it to work in the present day. His dream was Zero Tolerance, and with the pendulum swung hard to the right again, he went about making it a reality.

  The first order of business was to repeal presidential term limitations and broadly expand the powers of the Chief Executive, legislation which met with surprisingly little Congressional resistance and overwhelming public support. Americans were worn out, and bought into the idea that getting things fixed would take time and the steady, long-term commitment of a single man. The Zero Tolerance legislation which quickly followed struck a chord with citizens who were sick of uncontrolled violence and crime, and as a majority they readily and eagerly gave their consent and sacrificed most of the freedoms their ancestors died for. The plan was simple. No tolerance for crime. Period. Capital punishment became the order of the day, and when, instead of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were put in charge of approving Supreme Court Justice nominees, everyone knew that the times, they were a-changing.

  Thomas slowed the SUV as he approached a railroad crossing, watching a long freight creep by. Carl and Angela had exhausted themselves with their squabbling and were asleep, but Edwin was still perky enough to count the passing cars with his mother. Once the last boxcar rattled past, the family was underway again. By Thomas’s calculations they were a little less than an hour away from their vacation cabin in the Carolina woods.

  The changes were dramatic and effective. When American troops invaded Colombia in order to stop the drug cartels – Stop it at the Source! was the bumper sticker slogan of choice - the American people stood by their president. Even after it was decided that the mountains of that country were too difficult a place to conventionally root out the drug lords, and the U.S. resorted to the use of several tactical nuclear weapons – much to the dismay of the Colombian government – the American people didn’t put up much of a fuss.

  As Zero Tolerance expanded from the drug trade to the everyday aspects of crime in America, the people continued to support their president. When they saw convicted murderers being executed promptly, without lengthy appeals, they rejoiced. When the death penalty was applied to rapists, arsonists, armed robbers and child molesters, and later to shoplifting and other petty infractions, the public was euphoric. The crime rate plummeted and Americans saw that Zero Tolerance was directly impacting their lives, so they proclaimed that they would support their national leader in any way possible. It was the mandate Sawyer was looking for, and certain Constitutional amendments were swiftly eliminated, modified or created anew. Concepts such as Reasonable Search and Seizure, Miranda, Cruel and Unusual Punishment became historical footnotes.

  During this period, the federal government simultaneously poured staggering amounts of funding into educational programs aimed at transitioning the public into the new way of thinking. Certainly there were individuals and groups – some of them prominent and famous - who opposed the changes, but they were quickly branded as threats to national security and silenced. No one seemed interested in the details of how they seemed to simply vanish (the why was obvious), and the government felt no need to offer explanations anyway.

  There were also protests from the United Nations (which resulted in their immediate ejection from U.S. soil) and members of NATO (which quickly dissolved after the U.S. withdrew from it), as well as countries not so friendly to the United States. Things had gone too far by then, however. America, its people supporting their president with a near religious fervor, had rapidly reclaimed a position of world leadership both militarily and economically. Those countries that protested through peaceful means were either ignored, or crushed financially. Those that protested through threats of force were dealt with in kind. In those days, America handled its problems with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles (Germany, Yemen, Pakistan) or invasion (the oil-producing nations which were now jokingly referred to as America’s Middle East Mobil Station.) Popular “peasant” uprisings had long ago caused the Chinese to lose their grip on economic dominance (but not their trigger – millions of insurgents perished at the hands of the Red Army), and the Russians had surprisingly little comment. To hard-liners who longed for the good old days of the Soviet State, America had finally begun to think like a Russian. In the end, no one wanted to cross the U.S.

  The country had certainly changed over the years, but Thomas was sure it was all for the better. America was prosperous and peaceful, they had a leader they could trust and respect, and they didn’t take shit from anyone. Crime, though still present, was terrifically low compared to the past. And with the way citizens were encouraged to take part in the justice system, everything from reporting crimes to preventing or actively stopping them (“Vigilante” was no longer a four-letter word), crime would continue to decline while quality of life for upstanding Americans continued to improve. Sacrifices would have to be made of course, like blowing up a plane and killing two-hundred-sixteen civilians just to get at two terrorists, but that was all part of progress, and at least the message was clear to anyone who intended harm.

  Thomas saw the silhouette of an old barn in a field on the right, a landmark that told him he was almost there. Only a few more miles and they would be at the cabin. Now even Bianca was asleep, and only the occasional bob of a flashlight in his mirror told Thomas that Edwin was still awake.

  The Navigator rounded a gentle curve, and well up ahead the headlights picked out the reflectors at the end of the long gravel drive which led to the Kirkland’s summer home. Thomas saw a man in shabby clothes and a backpack walking on the shoulder about fifty yards beyond the curve. He turned at the sound of the approaching vehicle and stuck his thumb out. In the wash of headlights, it was clear he hadn’t had a decent meal – or a bath – in some time. Thomas started to ease the Navigator to the left, so as not to pass too close to the hitchhiker, when he heard the penlight click off behind him. He glanced in his mirror and saw Edwin leaning intently over the seat, staring back into his eyes. Edwin had enjoyed turning in those two criminals, and seeing they got their punishment. And he was happy about his citizenship award and his bright future as an upstanding American. Very happy. Howard’s son was probably just as happy about turning in his own father.

  Thomas jerked the wheel right and hit the gas. The headlights seared the hitchhiker with their glare, and he threw his arms up over his face. A second later the heavy bumper and grill slammed into him, flinging his limp form into the trees to smack against a pine, killing him instantly. The THUD awakened the family, and Bianca looked over at her husband, who guided the big Lincoln back into the center of the lane and slowed for the approaching gravel road.

  “What was that?” she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.

  “Nothing, hon.” He switched on the washers, and the wipers cleared the windshield of red.

  “Are we there yet?” mumbled Angela.

  “Couple more minutes.” Thomas guided the Navigator up the long driveway, thinking that he would have the mechanic in the nearby town take a look at the Lincoln in the morning, confident that the damage would be minimal. He glanced into the mirror and saw Edwin smiling at him. He suffered a brief chill, then forced himself to grin back and wink.

  Hitchhiking was illegal.

  But so was tolerating it, and he knew the penalty for that.

  TROPHY WIFE

  Everyone said she was crazy to marry Dean. The newspapers called her Cooper IV. Her mother, for whom marrying money was the greatest achievement a woman could hope for, expressed her fears and reservations. Her girlfriends told her she was not only crazy, but stupid. Even that detective from the District Attorney’s office tried to warn her off. Monica hel
d her ground, professing her love and standing them off. It cost her those friendships, and gave her no one to whom she could turn when the papers got really ugly and hurtful. It left her isolated, and the last thing Samantha, her closest friend since childhood, said was, “That’s exactly what he wants, Monica. For you to be all by yourself.”

  That friendship ended bitterly.

  After four years she proved them wrong. Dean was a loving and faithful husband. He had his serious moments, of course, and liked things the way he liked them. A forceful personality was the best way to describe it. But then a man didn’t reach the pinnacle of wealth and power in the New York real estate market by being timid. It was one of the things which attracted her to him in the first place.

  “NAIVE,” the Post had said. “BLINDED BY LOVE,” the Daily News shouted. “FATAL BEAUTY,” said The Times. The tabloids were far more unkind. Monica didn’t care, and Dean was patient with her, explaining how a man in his position, who had experienced so much tragedy in his life, was an easy target for the media. He was there to calm her down after that TMZ reporter accosted her on 5th Ave, shouting, “Monica, how long do you think before he strikes again?” And Dean’s lawyer, Saul Kessler, took the time to walk Monica through each case, explaining all the details and answering every question she had.

  Yes, Dean Cooper, real estate billionaire and New York mover and shaker, had been married three times previously. Yes, his first wife Darla had run off and never been seen or heard from again. Yes, so had his second wife Piper. And yes, Antoinette had been jumped in the dark and murdered during a robbery in the parking lot of a club. Her assailant took her jewels, and used some kind of cutting tool to snip off her left ring finger, stealing the massive diamond and taking the finger with him.

  Dean Cooper was investigated in every case, and more intensively each subsequent time. No evidence of his involvement could ever be found, and he had never been charged. The police didn’t buy it, and Dean told her they would never stop trying to make their case. But, as he explained, an innocent man had nothing to fear.