The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  Dell caught her breath, leaning with her back against the cool brick wall and slowing her panting down to controllable gasps. That had been a close one. Every step she had expected to first feel, then hear the bullets, but they never came. On one level she wondered why, but she had learned not to question small miracles, or even count her blessings. She hated that she had dropped the second bag, but the one she’d held onto would feed herself tonight, with some left over to trade for smoke or juice.

  Temporary escapes from her reality, such as the ones she got from the fermented hooch or locally grown pot, were her little rewards for staying alive another day, and some days they were all that she had left to look forward to. Her father had brought Dell and her mom and her two older brothers out here when she had been just a kid. Some old dude on the internet had said this was the place to be. Well, they had come here. The local job market had favored hiring people a different color or sex than her dad, but her mom had been able to get hired where he hadn’t. Then the guy who told them they should come out here had died, and the group he had been building fell apart. Her dad had gotten depressed, and started drinking. Maybe she had inherited that. If so, it was about all he had passed on to her.

  When he went to jail for having a hidden pistol in his car after a traffic stop, things had gotten worse for the family. Her mom had an affair, but her dad didn’t even notice. She and her brothers did, though, and never forgave her for it. When the war started it seemed like he might perk up, things were finally happening, he said, just like they had known it would. But all the action seemed to be going on in other parts of the country, and he was getting down again when the announcement came that the U.N. was coming.

  There had been rolling blackouts and electricity rationing for a few weeks by that time. They had power in the mornings from six to seven am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and from seven to eight am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then they got an hour from five to six pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and from six to seven pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Different neighborhoods were on different schedules, to spread the usage out, but there was usually no power on the weekends, so people charged all of their devices and took their showers and did their laundry and cooked when they could. Nonessential businesses were ordered closed during non-usage hours, effectively shutting them down for good. It sucked.

  Worst of all, they were nearly cut off from the rest of the country, with the net freezing up, lagging, then shutting down completely, and cell service becoming spotty at best. The little news that did come in was heavily censored by the government, so they believed the Mayor when he announced that the President had requested the United Nations come and help out. Her dad was suspicious, of course, but he thought their retired neighbor worked for the FBI, too.

  Before they got there, the grocery stores had all nearly closed or been emptied, with deliveries dwindling down to little or nothing. The same thing happened at gas stations. Bars and restaurants sat empty, new construction stopped, and then people started protesting. It was the fault of the Republicans, or the Russians, or it was an environmental catastrophe, various voices shouted. Some groups marched on city hall in an attempt to overthrow the government and establish an anarcho-communist tribunal to run things. Most of the city cops hadn’t been paid that month, and half of them had stopped showing up for work. A lot of the rest walked away when the mob showed up. They turned the Mayor out of office and began issuing orders that nobody could or would enforce. It was to be a new dawn of socialist utopian equality. Her dad finally admitted that it had been a mistake to come here. He talked about taking them back home to Georgia, but the little news from down south sounded even worse.

  Then the next week the Chinese had arrived, their United Nations peacekeeping force saviors, and the Antifa lefties had found out very quickly what real communism looked like. Their leaders were arrested, and this time when they arranged a mass protest, there was no media to cover it; they had all been arrested, too. The blue helmeted troops opened fire, and when the Antifa who couldn’t run away surrendered, they were summarily executed in the street as terrorists. Shot down, over a hundred of them. That kind of let folks know there was a new set of rules in town.

  Word filtered in that the same thing was happening up and down the coast, all over. Her dad figured the time was right to take a stand. He still had a couple of guns that the Seattle Police Department hadn’t confiscated hidden, and a few buddies left over from the old group who had all moved here with the same ideas in mind. They got together and planned a complicated assault on the Expeditionary Force headquarters at Fort Lewis down in Tacoma. There were eight of them, the last of their kind. All of the rest had already left the city or were in hiding. She still remembered the night her dad left. Her mom had been furious. She had told him that if he went, to not come back. He hadn’t. Dell liked to think that he had died a hero, but of course they never heard anything about it. At least that meant he hadn’t been traced back to them, since when the soldiers showed up, it was only to ask politely if a platoon could share their living space, not to take them in for interrogation.

  Neither of her brothers had really shared their dad’s views or beliefs. They did what they wanted and couldn’t care less about politics or that kind of stuff. But when the Chinese soldiers moved in and their family moved out, with no place to go, suddenly they were all about becoming revolutionaries and avenging their father. She had known it was fake, they just wanted an excuse to leave. Chinese authority ended where the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest started, so that was where they were headed, to join the resistance. Dell never heard from them again.

  Her mom had lasted two days on the street before she was having dates with Chinese soldiers for food for the two of them. Dell didn’t want to be a part of that, or a cause of it, or even an excuse for it, so she told her mom she was going to catch up with her brothers. There was a half-hearted offer for her mom to come too and reunite the family, but they both knew it wasn’t sincere. She took off headed north for a few blocks, then doubled back. There wasn’t rally anywhere to go.

  By herself, without another mouth to feed, her mom had ended up getting a permanent place at a brothel up by Lake Union, she’d found out by following her unseen one day when Dell had caught her mom downtown. She didn’t talk to her. Like the rest of them, she just let it go.

  For the last few weeks, she’d been staying in her very own plywood shelter in the park. It wasn’t much, so there wasn’t anything there to steal when she had to leave to “go shopping”, but it mainly kept the rain off. She’d gotten the material by going places the rest of them were afraid to go. A half pallet of lard had been left outside a soup station for pickup after an electric outage made it go bad. She had dragged it, by herself, three blocks at night after curfew. The lard had gotten her a good jacket, new boots, and a wicked knife. The pallet had become the roof of her new home. Stacked milk crates made two walls, leaving the other two open so she wouldn’t get cornered. It was easier to watch her back than to fight with it against a wall.

  Some days she pretended to be going to assigned duties, walking purposefully to the communal garden plots or the recycling centers, then disappearing in the crowds. Scavenging was easy. The Chinese acted like they had no idea that anyone might steal from them. Maybe that was because they weren’t used to having anything worth stealing. They sure did now.

  The gold and silver and jewels and other valuables that they did guard were useless to Dell. She went after their food, and from places where it wasn’t watched. She also had created three cache points around town in empty buildings. Each of them held food and clothes and in one of them, she kept her family pictures, her most prized possessions. She could have moved out of the park and had her own building, but there was safety in numbers. Nobody in the park would rape or murder her, she was pretty sure. There was a code among them. She shared her food to make sure to stay in their good graces, just the same.

  Several of the guys were alway
s making passes at her, or blatant offers to her, of course, but she preferred not to be dependent on anybody else. She had a family, once, and that hadn’t worked out so well. Avoiding the advances of the soldiers was harder because most of them couldn’t speak English well enough to take no for an answer, even if they had been so inclined. She stayed away from them as much as she could, especially when they weren’t on duty. Ironically, that was when they were the most dangerous.

  It had seemed like common sense to slip around back of the old hotel where the chink bigwigs held their receptions and banquets while all the other sheep stood out front to hold their hands out. She’d rather steal than beg, even if it was from the dumpsters. There was usually good stuff there, too. Not just the best food in town, but other interesting things. Documents that probably would have been fascinating to somebody if there had been any kind of resistance, and if they could read Chinese. She couldn’t.

  If this was a movie, her brothers would come back, having made contact with the rebels, and together they would decode a secret file she found in the dumpster that would hold the key to driving the yellow bastards back into the ocean. They would liberate a classified prison where her dad was still alive, being held hostage, and she would be a hero. But this wasn’t a movie, and there was no resistance. At least, not around here. Her dad was dead, in a mass grave somewhere, and her brothers were probably halfway to Idaho. Dell regretted not going with them.

  After another week of moping around, Jian bowed to his father’s wishes and took a position as an officer-trainee supervising a work detail of political prisoners. These were the families of homosexuals who had been found guilty of trying to hide them from justice, prior to their executions. If they worked hard, they might regain their freedom in a few months, assuming they displayed the proper attitude. He had already gone through the basic training as a Young Pioneer, and due to his family status just had to formally accept a post. It was easy enough. He got to stay at the ambassadorial residence in his own room instead of sleeping in the junior officer’s quarters. His father was proud of him for a change and that took some stress off of his mother. And, he had two enlisted men to do the hard work of watching the prisoners, while he watched them.

  There were sixteen of the prisoners in his work detail. Their job for the first week was to clear out a block of rubble where a burned out building had stood, before the rioting and reprisals. Jian felt like he could have used a couple more men to watch that many, but then he would have had more men to watch, and more paperwork. The building had been a worker’s solidarity aid station, before the locals had looted it, then tried to hold onto it when reinforcements showed up. They’d burned inside it.

  One of the prisoners sorted and piled concrete blocks and bricks. Another three dug into the collapsed pile of warped metal shelves for anything salvageable. You had to watch them, they were likely to hide something to use as a weapon, or to escape. These Americans had no concept of honorable surrender or acceptance of defeat. Some of them didn’t even act guilty, even though their relatives had all been justly convicted of perversion. Probably they secretly condoned it. Such people deserved to be conquered.

  His father said that the Australians and New Zealanders had asked for a cease fire to discuss terms. Beijing was willing to be generous with them, so long as they didn’t try to interfere with the Co-Propserity Sphere expansion any longer. Of course they would have to pay reparations, and be garrisoned.

  Mexican gangs had been caught trafficking weapons stolen from Chinese bases in Oakland, and dealt with. The Aztlan regional commander was upset. It wouldn’t be long before that front heated up again. He might find himself sent south, if his father couldn’t protect him from the military. There were always internal rivalries to navigate.

  He missed Lee Ho, his only friend here. None of the enlisted men could understand how he felt, they were all peasants, and the other officers considered themselves superior to him, which, they were, in rank if not in station. Jian kicked a blackened rib cage aside in frustration, then cursed at the scuff it made on his boot. He’d have to have that cleaned. He had just turned to pick a prisoner for the job when he saw her again. At first, Jian thought he must be mistaken. Surely it couldn’t be the same girl! But, yes, it was. Here she came, straight towards him!

  Dell had had a bad day. First, it had rained all night, something she had never gotten used to about this place. Then, she had woken up needing to go the restroom and there had been a line at the latrine. She found a clump of trees and squatted, but it was that time of the month so she didn’t stand feeling as clean as she would have liked. It just felt like everybody knew, when they looked at her, even though she knew they didn’t. Back at her shelter she washed up as best she could, quickly and discretely, then ate some leftover bread and noodles from the night before’s shopping. A diet high in carbs wasn’t ideal, but you ate what you could find.

  She had stopped at one of her caches and eaten a can of oranges for the vitamin C and sugar boost, then blended in with the working pedestrians. Up ahead was one of the burned out soup kitchens, being cleared out by a work crew under guard. She decided to cross the street and walk up the other side instead of waste time by going around the block. There were some commercial dumpsters behind an officer’s club she hadn’t checked in a couple of days that should be good pickings today. The morning’s blunt still had her mellow, and she didn’t notice the young Chinese officer staring at her even harder than most of them did until she was almost even with him. Then, she recognized him, too.

  His father was old-fashioned, as most of the higher-ranking Party leaders who had been trusted to administer the conquest of North America’s west coast were. He frowned on soldiers fraternizing with the local women. Even the domestic staff all had to be Chinese-born, instead of just from Chinese ancestry. Jian’s first romantic experience back home had been with a maid who understood she had to do whatever she was told. Second generation Chinese girls here were too Westernized. They wanted to believe it was love, or be paid, instead of simply their duty.

  It must be because of Hollywood movies, he thought, and their promotion of fairy tales. A proper relationship was arranged and structured by family and Party interests. Sentimentality was a weakness. Just look at what it had done to America. His mother might not agree, but it never would have occurred to him to ask. She was fulfilling her responsibility, too. At their rank, his father could request a waiver of the one child policy and have another son, if he wanted, so she still served a future purpose.

  Still, there was something exciting and attractive about arrogant and free-spirited Western women, like a wild horse at full gallop was prettier than one in a stable. That fact had cost many peacekeeping force soldiers a lot of their pay in the brothels over the last few months as the occupation settled in. The fact that many of them were from a generation in which males outnumbered females three to one was a factor, too. Young men who had faced a future of involuntary celibacy and bachelorhood now had as many women before them as they could buy, often for as little as a missed or shared meal.

  The puppet United States ambassador to the United Nations, in exile in Brussels with the rest of the general assembly until New York could be pacified, had requested the peacekeeping mission be extended for a year. Jian’s father had openly stated that when that year elapsed, an additional year would be requested, and another, until there was no longer any pretense of a U.S. government to claim sovereignty over the occupied territories. If the remaining bandits out west could be bought out or starved soon, they might even push all the way to the mountains.

  Some of them were the rags of actual military units which had disobeyed their orders to demobilize and go home when they had been pulled out of their bases as a part of the negotiated armed forces evacuations. Others were just outlaws who hadn’t given up their guns when their government had told them to. From time to time they slipped into the city for raids, and every week or two a patrol was ambushed, but those events lessened
all the time as the reprisals for them increased. You just had to know how to deal with these people. If a Chinese soldier was shot by a sniper, then ten American civilians were publicly executed in response. If a warehouse was broken into, three food distribution centers were closed for a week. Pretty soon their own people stopped supporting them, as the price of resistance got too high.

  Really, this was the ideal area to conquer. For decades it had drawn the most liberal and submissive Americans like a rotting carcass drew flies. Radical environmentalists, homosexuals, and those who thought they were Communists, had weakened the local population down to the dregs, before the first Chinese landing craft touched shore.

  The old corporal who drove by the embassy to pick him up every morning after breakfast had been one of the first to enter the city. He had told Jian how they had accepted the surrender of the Antifa government, patted them on the back, then placed them under arrest pending their executions as potential trouble-makers. By the end of the first week they had mopped up the bravest protesters block by block, then the raids on the gay clubs and adult movie theaters and book stores had begun. Anyone who spoke out against their actions was arrested and never seen again. It had been brutal and efficient, and very effective.

  Jian’s dad now met with the surviving Chamber of Commerce leaders, whose stores served the occupiers and were allowed to stay open at the mercy of the occupational government, and the new Mayor, who held office in name by its pleasure, regularly. He gave them their orders, and they helped provide a White face to the administration for public consumption. Segregating the obviously black and brown people on the southern edge of the city through mass relocations had been even more unpopular in their communities as the purge of perverts had been, but no other alternative was offered. The peacekeeping force’s experience in the bay area had shown them that the darker people couldn’t be trusted to stay calm and follow commands. Whites made better, more docile slaves.