by Billy Roper
The Heirs of Tomorrow
By Billy Roper
Introduction: The title of this collection was suggested by Frank L. De Silva, a member of ‘Die Bruder Schweigen’ and author of nine published books in his own right. It is the sixteenth work by Billy Roper to be published, and explores a future world where the thin threads of civilization which hold us all together have been snapped by the weight of diversity. Today it is fiction. Tomorrow, it may be a memoir.
Chapter One
The tires always went first. Especially the ones that were dry-rotted or under-inflated to begin with. The winter hadn’t just killed off lots of older people weakened by their prescriptions running out and chilled by the lack of electric heat. Abandoned cars had suffered, too.
Many of the smaller tires on equally smaller cars, ones that couldn’t carry a wood gasifier or run on filtered grease through their diesels, weren’t even stripped by salvagers. They hadn’t been worth the time and effort or caloric burn. They’d just been shoved to the side of the road by the county road crew dozers to clear a lane down the center and left side of the highway. All of the stalled traffic had been in the right lane, headed north. They’d ground to a halt in a ragged clump two miles long in front of the county line, where the hastily deputized volunteers had set up their roadblock when things fell apart.
The gouges and scrapes along the crunched in side panels where they’d been so rudely shoved aside after the mobile refugees dwindled to a trickle were showing streaks of red rust within the raw metal. But somehow it was more fascinating to watch the tires go down, the ones that hadn’t been scavenged or pushed off their rims. Every day there might be one or two more new ones gone flat to count as the hooves clopped on cold asphalt in rhythm.
For some people that sight might be depressing, a reminder of the decay of entropy and the failure of civilization. Not for Daniel McCleary. Counting tires gave him something to do besides swatting flies off himself and his horse. And looking for fresh places to loot. He pushed his cap back and scratched at the close-cut brown hair where his mom’s scissors had left a scratch.
The gas had all been siphoned out first, then the batteries, then the alternators to charge them that could be rigged for a hand or bike crank. Nobody bothered with the stereos. There was nothing on the radio any more.
When he’d first been assigned this duty, the patrol had seemed interesting. First, there had been the empty shell casings to gather once he was let through the road gate to the older barricade. Reloaders had traded him twenty fresh rounds for his dad’s .38 in exchange for the big saddlebag full of brass he collected along the ditch bank. It had taken another week of counting and recounting the different out of state license plates from Louisiana and Mississippi and Texas before he’d cracked his first car. Not that taking spoils was frowned on, he just didn’t want to seem too eager about it. Not at first. It would look greedy to the other deputies. Unprofessional.
It helped that the refugees who’d been accepted had eventually ventured back out to drag in what they could from their cars, including in some cases the seats and upholstery. They bribed the roadgate guards to get to do that. You could tell who had been let in and who hadn’t. The lucky ones had been gutted down to the frame. The unfortunate refugees, those who had been turned away because they were the wrong complexion or had answered a question wrong in the interview process, had only taken back what they could carry on foot, unless they’d had enough gas left to maneuver out of the congestion and head back south. That accounted for the gaps in the line of hulks.
There lingered a breath of cold in the breeze, enough to make him wish his beard would grow faster. It was still sparse and downy, even though he would be twenty in August. The mottled green and brown collar kept out the worst of its bite, though.
What made it easier rooting around through their stuff was that they wouldn’t be back, and also that they had been disqualified for entry. Some of them never made it past the gate. Mike and the boys had stopped them cold. It also made it easier when he could get the crunched driver’s doors unjammed and tie the reins to the top of the door frames while he searched through the debris. The stuff on top was usually ruined from moisture or picked over by accepted refugees who didn’t limit their salvage to their own vehicles, not that he blamed them. Daniel had gotten efficient at picking through the layers to get to the treasures underneath over the last three months. There was a system to it, and it had paid off for him. It had paid off for his whole family.
The deputies at the roadgate would smirk at first when he came back from his four mile round trip patrols every afternoon with a bundle tied behind his saddle. Then curiosity got the better of them, and they started asking what he’d salvaged. After teasing them for a day or two he relented and began exhibiting his finds. That stopped the smirking. They would have probably wanted part of what he brought in as the tribute of seniority if he hadn’t seen that coming ahead of time and handed over a bottle of unopened whisky he found to Mike, the Captain of the Guard at the roadgate. People might eat everything they could find and then drink their last liquor, but Mike figured they had it backwards.
Since they were all senior to him, some of them even being original Phalanx, he told them a few tricks of how to find hidden stuff in trunks under the spare tire cover or under the seat frames. He also didn’t pick within sight of the roadgate, leaving those cars nearest them alone. The guards appreciated the courtesy, and soon had them gone over.
Daniel didn’t spend much time wondering where the rejects had ended up. The counties south had foolishly waved them through, giving them free passage so long as they didn’t stop, if they had bothered to man roadblocks at all. But somebody had had to draw a line, and they had. If the rejects ended up coming back through once they hit that wall of grim faced men and rifles, that was on the counties south who’d tried to pass the buck.
Before the Balk he’d shared a single-wide trailer with his two brothers and his mom. After a month of probationary duty as a deputy, he’d moved into the vacation cabin of a rich family from off who weren’t likely to be coming back for concerts and trout fishing any more. Squatters rights under the Emergency Powers Act the Sheriff had declared were graduated, more space for more family members, and allocated to “essential personnel” first. That was him, now. He’d only gotten the job because he was recommended by a founding ShieldWall member, his sponsor. Sometimes it really was a matter of who you knew. Or whose horse you shod, in this case. The one thing his daddy had done before he got sent away that still helped the family was teaching his oldest the farrier business.
The two bedroom rustic-looking A-frame with its big fireplace was plenty big enough for him. Allie, the sixteen year old daughter of a refugee family of five, had been acting like it suited her just fine, too. That suited Daniel, along with her eager to please and cheerful disposition. She didn’t care that he was three years older than she was, and neither did her parents. They had been accepted, but were still camped out at the crowded fairgrounds until they were assigned housing. At best, their prospects might be an empty rental cabin like his, for the five of them to share. At worse, they could be jammed into a nursing home room, as more senior citizens were dying off without their medications. They’d lost most everybody over eighty before the first thaw. A lot of babies, too.
The A-frame, along with his mom’s trailer, had been decorated with his loot: blankets and quilts, suitcases and duffelbags full of clothes and shoes, books and board games and all the silly things people think they can’t leave behind when the world comes apart around them and their neighbors turn mean. Momma and his bratty brothers bartered the clothes downtown at the swap market and kept what they got for themselves. His youngest sibling, Doug, had b
een whining to move in with Daniel, and his mom probably was in back of that to give herself one less mouth to feed, but Danny figured that might scare off Allie to some place less crowded, so he tried to help his family out how he could without going that far with it.
Daniel had first met the cheerful out of towner at his mom’s spot, matter of fact. He’d hauled a cartload of salvaged pots and pans and cleaning products from the kitchen of a partially looted house by the side of the road to the market for them to get rid of, after keeping one of the best of each for his own place. His middle brother David’s normally vacant stare had been caught by the shiny metal as he unloaded the reverse wheelbarrow contraption, and their mom was about to slap him back to work when Allie walked up to their piles of used clothes and started digging in. She was more athletic than skinny, but whip-strong looking. Not normally the type that caught his eye, but there was something about the way she moved.
He had been tightening the saddle’s girth, pretending not to stare. She had on no makeup, but her skin was healthy and clear, and her eyes bright. Most importantly, she was smiling. Nobody seemed to smile much lately, so that was a big plus, along with her straight blonde hair that hung halfway down her back in a braid. Blue jean shorts, tank top, tennis shoes. Nikes. She hummed a song he didn’t recognize while she sorted out women’s clothing by size. By her wiry frame, she would need petites.
Little Doug was also staring in open admiration, his mouth gaping like he was just as touched as Davey. Their mom watched her just as closely, but with more suspicion. Refugees had little to barter, at least that she was interested in, and were suspected of not being above stealing, when they could get away with it. She walked over closer to keep an eye on things after walloping her two younger sons and telling them to finish unloading. Her oldest walked around the other side of his horse, to intervene. He didn’t want to see the girl ran off.
Danny spoke first, before his mom could. It was the moment that changed things for him, forever.
“Howdy, Ma’am. Can we help you find something?” he asked, as his mother scowled sideways at him. Why wouldn’t Davey stop picking at his pimples?
The newcomer looked up from her own body, where she’d been holding a ladies’ white silk shirt up to her by way of trying it on. She smiled and shook her head, looking him in the eye.
“I like this one, and those, too!” she answered enthusiastically, nodding to a stack of several dresses and blouses she had set aside already.
“I bet you do!” His mom interjected. “But what do you got to trade?”
Danny blushed in embarrassment but the girl just smiled bigger and took off her watch, offering it for inspection.
He showed he was a gentleman by letting her ride Blue back to the fairgrounds while he walked alongside to keep the heavily laden cart from turning over. She had surrendered the watch and her earrings and a bracelet. Along with the clothes for herself she had picked out a pair of man’s coveralls that had caused Danny’s spirit to dampen until she announced they should fit her father, a pot and pan and skillet from his recent load, and three blankets, along with a plastic doll. She and his mom were both satisfied with the trade.
“Why do you call him Blue?” she asked over her shoulder, catching him staring at how her shorts pulled up high on her leg wrapped around the horse. She smiled, making him stumble a step. Danny was taller than average, just over six foot, and before she had climbed up she had been eye level with his chest. That had felt better to him than this perspective. He noticed that her legs were muscled and smooth, the hair light and downy on them in the sunlight. Lack of running water had loosened personal hygiene standards a lot, including women’s shaving, but her legs just looked…glisteny. He wanted to touch them.
“Uhm, because he’s so black, he’s nearly blue.” It sounded stupid the way he said it, but it had made sense at the time. “What’s yours?”
“My name?” she turned back around to steer widely around a tired family walking down the street in the same direction they were going, downhill. “I’m Allie. Allison Dupree. Allison Dupree, the refugee”, she made it like a sing-song rhyme. Somehow that made him feel guilty and ashamed and self-conscious. That’s how she had come to think of herself, he guessed. An old Tom Petty song. That’s what she had been humming. …No you don’t, have, to live…
As they plodded from the market to the fairgrounds she kept up a nonstop chatter about herself and her life near Shreveport before “everything happened”. They had lived in a White suburb but were surrounded by diversity, and had made it out before the worst of the violence began. Her family had been in town for two weeks, after working their way north from one camp to another, only staying a short while at each. He told her he hoped they didn’t move on again anytime soon, which earned him another smile.
Her tired mother looked sad that she had given up her jewelry, but grateful for the cooking utensils. Allie’s dad was at work, he’d been hired onto a construction crew adding wood cooking stoves to houses, building them by hand, she said proudly. Allie told her two younger sisters, also tow-heads, that they had to share the doll, which Danny, as the oldest of his own family, didn’t think was at all likely. In fact, giving them the one doll to fight over made him look at her more closely. She had a mischievous side, apparently. He liked that. She caught his eye and winked at him as he watched them them fuss over it. He liked that even more.
The Dupree family were experienced refugees. They had a sturdy canvas canopy staked out to the side of a flatbed dually king-cab powered by a gasifier rig that was worth more than most houses these days. Without it, though, they were stranded wherever they happened to be. Danny hoped they got stranded right there. The parents slept in the truck cab, Allie and her sisters under the tarp, which was okay now that Spring had come, she said. They’d all huddled up through the Winter in the truck. He asked why they hadn’t squatted. There were plenty of empty houses in between here and the front lines. She just shrugged, smiling. “If we’d done that I wouldn’t have met you, though”, she flirted.
The real reason, he figured, was because four walls and a roof wouldn’t fill an empty stomach, or five. Without civilization people needed other people to survive. Even the best hunters had found out that surviving on deer and rabbits and squirrels barely passed for the first few weeks after groceries ran out. The whitetail population had collapsed last Fall, and would take years to recover. Bambi had nearly been hunted to extinction. So much for survivalists bugging out to live in the woods indefinitely, like they’d thought they would.
Salvaging the houses close to the road took longer than the cars had, but he eventually had everything that he could take on horseback out of them of any use, and had to branch out. The pots and pans had come from a doublewide a mile off the pavement down a long gravel driveway. Some of those places were still inhabited, whether they looked like it or not. Without electricity it was hard to tell. He was always careful to make plenty of noise and approach the places as if he was on official business, looking for and sniffing for woodsmoke. More often than not he’d been met with a gun when folks were still around. Even out here they recognized the county deputy uniform camo getup, but people were still mighty cautious. If they hadn’t have been, they wouldn’t have made it out here for so long.
All of the neighboring counties barely had enough manpower to keep something like law and order in their towns, or at least one town where they called it their government seat. The country areas outside of town were left on their own. Nowadays you went to town for stuff, including help. It didn’t come to you. Once he crossed the roadgate barrier, Danny was in another county, one where most of the real estate was outlaw country.
Most of the time he could bluff his way through easily enough when people were home by identifying himself as a county deputy doing a well-check on homesteads in border areas. The story line was that they were thinking of annexing that stretch and wanted to take a census of who all still lived there. Other deputies were close by, doin
g the same thing he was, he told them for his own safety. That excited most of them, who were happy at the idea they might come under the protective umbrella of the roadgate perimeter without having to move. A few though, didn’t like that prospect at all. Those were the ones he knew were up to no good and didn’t want any scrutiny or laws to hinder them. Meth cookers. Slavers. Maybe worse. There had been plenty of young girls taken in by other families when their folks couldn’t feed them any more, and sometimes by single men. Nobody asked many questions about how that worked out. He came on a couple of houses with one man and more than a handful of teenaged girls at home, but went about his business. There was more evil stuff going on in the world, these days.
The rumors of cannibalism that had started during the darkest and coldest weeks of the winter, when just about everybody was dropping weight, were worse. Maybe it had been people floating trial ideas to see how others responded, but the old taboo had mainly held, behind the roadgate. Word was that hadn’t always been the case out beyond. Families had gone missing, and their neighbors had nothing to say about it. Some of the parents of those girls who got taken in, too. Everybody he saw out here was still awfully skinny and raggedy looking.
Many of the places had already been stripped bare, too. There was still plenty of opportunity for trade, though. The homesteaders craved pre-Balk food of any kind, canned or boxed or bagged, it didn’t matter. That, and the luxuries, of course. The sight of a can of ravioli and a roll of Charmin from his saddlebag got him offers of everything from a good time in a back room to a pile of furs, but usually he just asked for information. Where were some places that hadn’t been salvaged yet because they were “too far away” or “too dangerous”? Had they heard any news from outside?
A few of them were just as hungry for the news he could share of what was going on out off as they were for dried spaghetti and rice and beans. Danny had developed a circuit between a few places, places where he was known and, if not exactly welcomed, then recognized and tolerated. He made sure not to seem like he was after anything they had that wasn’t up for trade, including the “foster girls”. Since the homesteaders were so afraid to venture out much, they had missed some good places to pick over.