The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  Becky smiled like a shark. “Are you okay, ma’am?” The others glanced at each other, committed. Any doubts were left behind, it was too late for second thoughts. Dana pointed at Tracy, wanting the oldest girl to draw first blood, to lead them. Tracy hesitated. Susan did not. She scrunched her face up and darted forward, yanking a handful of short hair, snapping Miss C.K.’s head back, then pushing it back forward. Like hens around a wounded pullet, they took that as their signal to frenzy. Her sweatshirt was red, like blood.

  One girl would step in, nudge their teacher with her foot, then step back. Another kicked her, lightly, and retreated. She responded with a mewling cough, gagging. “I’m okay, it’s all right…ugh, girls, ohhhhh, no, something’s wrong, I don’t feel soooo….”

  Tracy found her courage then. “Something’s wrong, oh, something’s wrong!” she mocked, laughing wildly, the others giggling nervously in response.

  “Oh, there’s plenty wrong with you, bitch. You were fat and ugly, and now you’re just fugly. But more than that you’re bitter and mean and snide and hateful,” Susan said.

  “Yeah! And you’re a lesbo. That’s gross.” Dana put in. She looked to Becky for approval. “Gross!”

  “Sick. Bull-dyke cunt. Sick!” Becky added. The other girls ringed her, joining in, while she vomited again nastily and tried to crawl away, dragging herself through it. Some hung from her chins. For the first time in a long time, Shawna laughed.

  “Wha-no, leave me, leave me, help, don’t jus…”

  “Pervert! Dyke! Sicko! Stupid!”

  “Don’ say that, doaannnn…”

  “How’d you like the eggs?”

  “No-how’d-you-like-the –shrooms?”

  “Wha, why are you…why…?”

  She tried to sit up, tried to focus on them, eyes crying, her mouth blowing like a fish, then doubled over again, falling on her side, holding her stomach and mewling. “No-why-no-why”…Miss Caldwell-Kline curled up into a fetal position, noisily broke wind, then groaned as she lost control over her bowels. The smell drove the girls back a step, but their verbal abuse continued.

  “You smell like you look, like shit!”

  “How dare you try to make him go? How dare you?”

  “doantouchmedoantouchmedoan…”

  “Nasty, ugly, shrill witch!”

  Suddenly Mrs. Joens stepped out from the shadow of the maintenance building, waving a shovel at them. “Now, you girls stop it! Stop it, this instant! Such language!” You all know better than that! You know he wouldn’t like to hear such filth from your mouths!”

  “Ohgodhelpohgodhelp. Sicksicksick…”

  Her fists balled up in anger, Tracy stepped forward. “I thought you said we wouldn’t tell him. You agreed. We made a deal. You promised. He would never know! You said!”

  “badgirlsrottenlittlebitcheshelpmeplease…” Her eyes were squeezed tight shut. They could tell she didn’t really hear what was being said.

  “You PROMISED!” Tracy repeated. Miss C.K. sobbed and choked, gagging on the ground, leaking from both ends. In the distance their neighbor’s cows mooed, mournfully. They sounded like they were dying.

  Mrs. Joens raised the shovel high over her shoulder, the edge aimed forward, and took two quick steps, bringing it down with a wet thunk into the side of Miss Caldwell-Kline’s head. The sound was like a limb falling into mud. The prostrate woman grunted and jerked, squealing, so the shovel came up and back down, up and back down, again and again, until the head was dented, caved, flattened in and the body stopped twitching. The students watched her die, in curiosity. She didn’t come back like a zombie, after all. Blood had sprayed over the shovel and Mrs. Joens’ bare arms like ruby sequins.

  “So I did, and I always keep my word. But he still wouldn’t like it. Watch your language, ladies.” Mrs. Joens was shaking, and sweating, but she smiled, pushing a lock of hair back under her bandana. “So there’s your dessert”.

  When Mr. Thomas got back with a handful of squirrels, the girls were finishing up the new vegetable plot they were trying out in an old flower bed out back. He found it hard to believe that Miss Caldwell-Kline had decided to leave. Something must have went on while he was gone, some kind of feminine mystery. Maybe they had taken another vote on it and he had won. He never would understand women. Still, he guessed he would stay. He had a whole tribe of them to look after. The thought was beguiling, he admitted to himself.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise that the little hybrid wouldn’t start and she’d left it behind to go on foot. He just couldn’t believe his good luck. Maybe the generators would crank up once he hauled them in. It felt like time for another movie night. The girls sure looked like they needed one.

  His sole trip into Staunton had been a nightmare. At a roadblock on 81 he and the vehicle were searched for food and his packed lunch confiscated by tired-looking National Guardsmen. They hadn’t found his shotgun under the floor carpeting, piled high with the debris from his former life, or the pistol stuck inside his waistband at the small of his back. They looked at him, looked at his windshield, asked him where he was headed, and waved him through without his lunch. At the moment they were just interested in filling their bellies.

  An hour earlier four equally hungry men, these not in uniform, had tried to block the street in front of him to force him to stop. One of them had paid the price for that miscalculation, bouncing up over the hood and into the glass before rolling off. Another pingballed around the fender. They had been black, the National Guardsmen had been White, so in this new civil war the radio was telling him about that made them enemies, but Robert didn’t trust any of them. He’d just finished cleaning out everything worth taking from four of his neighbors’: food and bottled water and even a box of ammo for his pistol. He figured looting was still a crime, if anything was, which he wasn’t really sure about at all. He didn’t intend to wait around and find out.

  He hadn’t bothered trying to look for his ex. She was long gone. Let her rot with that bastard who had pretended to be his buddy. His parents and grandma were a hundred miles away, and might as well be on the moon, the smoke and soot was so thick in the air in that direction. He hoped they were okay. Everyone he knew and cared about was out of reach. In fact, they were all in safer places than he was, when he thought about it. The only people he knew who really needed him were back at the school. It might have been crazy, but going back seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  Three miles of lonely gravel separated the school from the nearest paved road, and there were no other occupied houses but the Mathis’s closer in any direction. He had checked, driving to the nearest places on the tractor, fuel can riding in the toolbox, and taken the food and water from them before torching them to keep squatters out. They’d been left in a hurry. He had no idea where all of the people had gone to, but they hadn’t come towards him, and that’s all that mattered, really.

  The maintenance shed was half full of canned food and drinks and two rifles and mixed ammunition and three handguns from in between there and the road. He wasn’t proud of what he had done with the old couple who didn’t want to leave, but his girls came first. At least he had let them keep their old car and take some food with them. They should have sold him a cow. Things might have been different, he told himself.

  When Spring came he was going to try his hand at beekeeping with some of the wild bees hived up in the pasture as his first generation stock. The girls would like to have some sweets again, once the honey was made. He had to keep their morale up, keep them focused and busy and happy. He couldn’t let depression set in with them, like it had with that poor Wendy girl. The look on her face of gratitude as he covered it with her pillow was something that would never leave him, even though he knew he had been doing her a favor.

  As he figured it, he and the eight girls and Mrs. Joens should be able to get along just fine. He’d bring in some of the stray cows from the next pasture over, even. Some part of him felt a twinge of conscience over how
things might work out domestically, but that kind of thing tended to take care of itself. Maybe he’d start classes again. The first one on Mormonism.

  Day by day the leaves changed colors and fell. The nights grew chilly and the fireplace roared higher. On rainy days they worked together to empty out books from the interior shelves and dismantle the center four shelves to make a wider living space in the middle of the library. The couch and comfy chairs from the lobby came in, and everything got rearranged.

  The library became their central living area, and shared space for movies and meetings, but each of the girls got their own classroom as private living quarters. They moved their beds there and worked together to get the boiler heating system in the basement going so every room could stay warm. All they needed was water and wood, which God had provided both of in plenty. The girls helped haul in logs and cut tall grass from the overgrown soccer field and beyond.

  The shelves went into the gym, and after some coaxing and a wild time chasing them, so did the first of the cattle. They learned there was food and warmth there, and made it a routine. Classes resumed, with subjects on animal husbandry and crafts.

  Caren and Tracy and Susan and Becky stood in the big empty gym, watching Phyliss and Shawna lead the milk cows into the two bleacher stalls, one by one. There were six giving milk out of their herd of twenty-one, four of them with calves that weren’t weaned yet. Caren and Tracy each took a side and sat on their stools around one, while Susan and Becky took on the second. They only half drained them, and the next two, but the final two were calfless, so the four young women milked them dry. Snow was starting to fall outside, but the gym made a good warm barn, piled high with stacked sheaves of hay from the two fall cuttings.

  Angel and Dana carried the six buckets, one at a time as they were filled, to the concession stand where Mrs. Joens was skimming the cream off. There were cakes of cheeses drying in the dressing rooms, and plenty of fresh butter. They had done the research in the library and relearned how it had been made. The windmill for the water pump and charging the batteries had come about that way, too.

  Robert had three beef halves hanging to cure in the maintenance shed, at refrigerator temperature or below. They would last them until Spring. Behind the beeves were shelf after shelf of jars of canned tomatoes and potatoes and beans from the garden. The best peas had grown from the old flower bed out back of the main building. He was behind the rest of the herd, driving the cows in for the night. Caren and Susan went to help him while the other girls finished up bottling the milk. Then they would all go inside and eat dinner together, as a family.

  Tracy groaned as she stood up from milking the last cow, her growing burden creaking her back. She was due some time around the first thaw. That would be a good present. Becky smiled at her in understanding. She was only a few weeks behind, herself, and also beginning to feel the strain. It was Susan’s turn, and Caren’s. They stretched and moved their stools to the side so the lumbering cattle filing in wouldn’t stumble over them as the tallow lamp light dimmed. It had been a good day. Maybe if they asked, tonight he would let them watch a movie.

  Chapter Three

  Biloxi had been warned. All of the Redneck Riviera enclave had shrunk and expanded and shrunk again with the tides of war as New Afrikan troops besieged the White bubbles along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The hungrier they got, the harder they fought. Inside the pocket, food was getting scarce, too. A few shipments of supplies came in by boat from the Florida panhandle and North Texas, but they were in similar straits and couldn’t spare much, themselves. Some crates of ammunition here, some MREs and canned stuff there, and every once in a while, some fighting men.

  Back 250 years before in the Declaration, Jefferson had written about how people weren’t liable to easily change things they were used to. Instead, they put up with them so as long as they could. Nobody really thought the government would collapse, because they all had forgotten that they were supposed to think of themselves as the government, and that by extension that meant that the government was made up of flesh and blood people with priorities more basic than patriotism and paychecks.

  In many areas people thought things would settle down and go back to normal. No matter what might be going on in Washington or Atlanta, their local officials told them that the situation was under control. Even the declaration of martial law in order to temporarily allow the government extra powers was seen as a sign that finally things were going to be okay. Food deliveries to grocery stores became sporadic, then stopped. Then the lights went out. People huddled in their homes with candles and kerosene lamps, and the black mobs ate their way through the citied like a plague of locusts, into the suburbs and beyond.

  When the EBT cards stopped working and the police patrols evaporated, there had been nothing to stop the dark wave of chaos but time and space. In the deep south, there wasn’t enough of either separating the scattered White neighborhoods from diverse areas, and too much of both separating them from one another. Without cell phone service or the internet, most of them never even knew what was coming until the screams began next door. Then their doors were breached.

  Those who were able to left, abandoning their homes and hitting the highway, only to be caught in massive traffic jams where a swelling line of approaching blacks practiced their predation from one vehicle to the next. The word had gone out through the African-American community: it was reparations time, it was vengeance time, it was NOW.

  The ones who made it out sought White areas, wherever they could. As they shrunk away from the cities and trickled south, they fled to safe zones established by County Sheriff offices downstate. For a couple of weeks, they had stopped to rest and see what happened next. Would it be safe for them to go home, soon? When would the army be there to reestablish order? Noone knew. A month later, the black mobs had crystallized into an army, and were on the move again after stripping bare all of the territory which had been abandoned to them.

  At first they’d been able to hold their own without outside help. The Mississippi State Police had broken first, going home to take care of their families. Then the infighting within the state National Guard went racial. Mutinies and fraggings of officers turned into outright defections. Half of the soldiers went over to the other side, taking their weapons with them. The rest lost their uniforms and their will to stick together. Eventually, the city fathers in Biloxi had to ask for outside help. They swallowed their pride and sent the word out. Rescue was needed.

  The White ethnostate areas to their north were too far away to get there, even if they’d wanted to, with too much hostile occupied territory in between them. The Russians initially offered assistance as a humanitarian public relations stunt, but cancelled their plans when the competition swooped into the area first and took the other side, wearing blue helmets at that. Poland and Hungary protested at the Hague, but only the Republic of Texas was in a position to do anything tangible about the looming genocide.

  The Chinese were dropping container ships loaded with fuel and weapons in Mobile and reloading them with looted gold and silver and art from as far north as Atlanta, to keep the black liberation movement going. They hadn’t put any troops on the ground, yet. Probably because didn’t really trust their allies, since they were smart. Colonization would come later, as it had in other places. After the ethnic cleansing was long over, and they could wash their hands of it before the world diplomatic stage.

  Sgt. Robert “Bob” Barnes was one of those who didn’t hold it against the Mississippians that they hadn’t evacuated when the war began. Sure, there had been White flight for years, but the climate and the beaches and the tourist money kept many folks there longer than they oughta have stayed. His mom and dad had been caught behind the lines in San Antonio when La Reconquista kicked off, so he had sympathy for those who stuck around after it was no longer healthy. He’d tried to get reassigned with the expeditionary force of Texan volunteers and Guard who joined in the Rio Valley evacuation effort, but gover
nment employees from Austin were a higher priority to have their fat pulled out of the fire. Literally, in a few cases. He had never even got close to home again. At some point he couldn’t really remember, he’d given up hope.

  Sometimes in his bunk at night he dreamed about them. His dad barbecuing in the back yard, his mom washing dishes, or both of them bloody and dead. He would wake up wondering if the Ramirez family next door had been the ones who did it, or if it had been strangers. Which would have been worse, being slaughtered by people you thought you knew, or people you didn’t expect any mercy from?

  He’d done a tour in ‘Stan, before the Reconquista began. Earned his corporal stripes there, and seen some shit. The next rank came the slow way, three grinding years training and traveling and retraining, stateside. Troubles had started out in California, then picked up speed as they spread from city to city. Last Christmas he had been down to see his parents. His little brother the college liberal was there to ask them for money, and made snide comments about him being a tool for Uncle Sam. That soured the experience for Bob. He wished he had paid more attention to how his mom had started to show her age, and spent longer up that last night with his dad in the garage tinkering on his project car instead of going to bed early. Now he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get another chance. The stories that came out of there, behind the lines…well, better not to think about it too much.

  On the way over on the Exxon platform crew ferry, he’d been stacked in with Wilcox and Thompson and the rest of the men from his new unit. He didn’t like them very much and they didn’t cotton to him, being all upstaters. Still, they followed orders from their corporals, and the corporals followed orders from him, just like he followed orders from Lt. Bailey and whoever else was within hearing range, and they followed orders from on up the ladder, to the top of the feeding chain where the operation’s chain of command ended with the Colonel.