The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  He didn’t think they would have had the same kind of success further west, or south, but the Party knew what it was doing. His father always said so. Trusting the Party and his father would keep him on an upwardly mobile promotion path, and out of the bad mess his lower-ranked peers down in California had inherited.

  The fermented bean curd had ripened well on its trip over, but he suspected the boiled mutton he picked for his lunch was really beef. There were more cows than sheep in the occupied territory. As he sat with his men eating lunch to show solidarity and pretended class unity, Jian wondered why he hadn’t ordered them to shoot the girl. He at least should have approached her. In his mind he imagined giving her a wink and a smile, then placing her under arrest and submitting her to prolonged personal interrogation. Instead, he had let the chance slip by, allowing her to walk past. They had made eye contact for an instant, and he knew that she was preparing herself to take off running, again. Maybe not doing what she expected was more clever, after all. It had to have her guessing why he had let her go. Little could she know, he didn’t know, himself.

  After the lunch break, eaten at outdoor tables next to an open café serving peacekeeping forces but operated by old White people, they fed their prisoners rice and noodles and passed out buckets of water for them to drink in, then relieve themselves in. He only hoped they were smart enough to remember the proper order, this time. Ten minutes later, they were back at the burned out block, sifting rubble. It was the most boring thing he had ever done. The worst part was the paperwork, though. Individual reports on each of his men every day, and accounting for every prisoner, too. By the end of the third week on the one-week project, at least you could see the concrete pavement in some spots, and he had gotten faster at completing the progress reports, if not the progress itself. One of the prisoners got sick and had to be euthanized during the second week, but she had been weak from the beginning. The others had to work that much harder and faster, to make up for the minor loss.

  He did tell Lee Ho about seeing the girl again, but somehow it wasn’t as interesting a story to him as it felt like it should have been to Jian Ying. Lee nodded gravely and changed the subject back to their problems with fuel supply routes between the garrison and Vancouver, where Triads were sabotaging trucks and stealing their cargoes. After the secession of Quebec, the Canadian government had become just as compliant as the American puppets, but that still left some problems on the ground to deal with, up there.

  One month after his commission began, Jian declared his operation a success at last, and received a commendation for a job well done, if tardily. He expected to be moved on to another area for cleanup, but instead he received orders to join the teams cataloguing abandoned material and equipment at the Kitsap Naval base. He would be staying in spacious American officer quarters instead of at the embassy, and supervising a platoon of bureaucrats making lists of what they needed to keep on hand for their ongoing operations here, and what would be shipped back home as mission reparations.

  As he soon found out, the base was largely a ghost town. The trident submarines had pulled out with their nuclear missiles and were on long-term autonomous patrol without orders somewhere in the south Pacific, or maybe even in the Atlantic by now, if the rumors were true. They might have to deal with them at a later date, but for now they were out of the ballgame. The fuel depot had been drained by their support ships before they headed up to Alaska, themselves, where American forces were still in control. Most amazing, however, was the massive aircraft carrier still in drydock for maintenance when the occupation had begun. There hadn’t been time to get it seaworthy and underway, and it had been too big to scuttle. Touring it was like visiting a horizontal city. It was larger and more advanced than anything the Chinese navy boasted, and engineers swarmed over it like ants deciphering its secrets so they could replicate one of their own, after they got it back into action again under a different flag. The Stennis was being renamed The Long March, and repainted with red banners on its stern.

  Despite his Party rank, Jian had to go through the same security clearances as everyone else, followed by a complete physical and medical checkup which was used as an excuse to show off the captured Naval hospital on base. It turned out that he was healthy and not an American spy, so he was able to stop being a tourist and get to work. The channels cutting through natural and manmade islands around the area made navigating his way around the huge facility confusing, but he soon learned to just be in uniform and ready to be picked up by his (new) driver, follow his men into the warehouses, and look impatient.

  Everything that couldn’t be eaten, burned in a motor, or shot at the enemy was being unbolted and crated and loaded onto two container ships to head back to Beijing as war booty. His job was to decide what to keep and what to send back. An amazing amount of personal effects and artwork made it back home, as well as luxury automobiles, museum pieces from the base’s historical exhibits, and other trophies. The truly amazing thing was that it had all been surrendered without a shot being fired, unless you count the base commander, who had committed suicide in his office as the first armored personnel carriers of the Peacekeeping Forces rolled through the opened gates past the empty guardhouses.

  Higher ranks had already gone through the strategic storage facility, so if the Americans had left anything there, he didn’t know about it. Jian did arrange for a truckload of rare old books he personally selected from the base library to be delivered to his father at the ambassador’s residence, however, which earned him honor. Piles of decadent Western dvds and cds and modern books and magazines were burned in the incinerators in order to protect the men from their influences. At the end of four weeks there, as he was monotonously cataloguing his sixth mechanical parts warehouse, Jian received new orders. This time we was going to be transferred to the country, supervising the border perimeter around the green zone. Maybe he would actually get to see some wild American outlaws, before they sent him off somewhere else for his next month.

  Dell came to the grudging acceptance that she hadn’t been recognized. It was an understood fact that many Whites all looked the same to the Han Chinese, especially those who didn’t speak Mandarin and so didn’t interact with them enough to achieve status or identity as individuals. That’s what living on the edge for so long did, it made you paranoid.

  Still, she had decided to go back to the park and lay low for a few days, and avoid the block where she had seen the Chinese teenager like the plague. Speaking of which, an epidemic had broke n out among the squatters, so she abandoned her shelter there and became nomadic again, taking her chances in abandoned buildings each night. So far, nobody had bothered her. All of the Mexicans and Africans being moved out of town probably accounted for that, when she considered it.

  It was actually easier, not having to defend a territory, and just relying on caches and what she could carry, instead. Over the course of days as she scavenged her way through already-claimed territory eastwards, she made a course to the Central District. There were lots of empty places there, up and down MLK, where the residents and shop owners had been relocated. Some of them still had a lot of fat to trim by careful looting. The blacks had been forced out at gunpoint in the middle of the night, and chosen to carry their home electronics with them, largely useless though they were, instead of the food in their pantries. She benefited from their short-sightedness.

  She worked her way in a circle around the park with the stagnant wading pool, avoiding the living as well as the occasional dead she found where the residents had resisted their eviction order and put up a fight. Why, in the midst of trying to occupy and govern a city, the Chinese had gone to such lengths was beyond her. They barely had enough soldiers to hold down their safe areas as it was. But maybe that was precisely the point. They had moved out the people most likely to fight back, away from the edges of their control.

  Dell wasn’t the only refugee left homeless by the invasion who had turned scavenger, of course, or the only one wh
o by chance or design ended up in the emptied black neighborhood. She saw the lights of other’s cookfires at night and their smoke by day, and sometimes came across their spoor or rubbish. At first she made an effort to keep at least one empty house between herself and her nearest neighbor at all times. It was just like Fortnite, as she remembered. Some people may just be mining and run right past you, and others might kill you just because they got the drop on you. She considered herself a mighty cautious citizen.

  The second and third months homeless had gotten easier, and by the fourth it seemed natural. Strangely, her memories of her mom and dad and her brothers faded until they were no more real to her than something she had seen on Youtube. The rainy season of winter was warming marginally into the rainy season of spring, when she didn’t have to build a fire for warmth and give away her position every sundown, or focus so hard on staying dry and getting plenty of calories.

  The sun had peeked out for a few hours one day, and found Dell soaking up its weak rays as she sprawled on the second story roof of a quadplex she’d hacked through the ceiling and roof of. The hot water heaters in the upstairs units hadn’t drained out, and the connected lines gravity-fed down to the bottom units so that she had enjoyed a cool bath the day before. The opportunity to do some major personal hygiene, including trimming and shaving and shampooing, had become a rare treat, and she had taken full advantage of it. There had been all kinds of hair care products in the place, straighteners and gels and dyes, and she now sported a shock of purple fringe on one side to her shoulder, with the other half of her scalp cut down to stubble.

  Feeling particularly girly at being so clean, she had also taken the time to paint each of her fingernails and toenails a different color, and try on some makeup that most definitely did not match her skin tone. The people who had been removed from here had been fond of canned tamales and greens, it seemed. She had learned early on never to open refrigerators or feezers. You had to abandon the whole house if you made that mistake.

  The closets were a mess, as some looters had done a once-over, but she had found some clean tights that fit her, even if they were a little garish, and underwear that she tried not to think about too much, as well as some shirts and lighter summer clothes. Nobody had died here, so she had made herself at home for a couple nights.

  Drowsy in the sun, clean and with a full belly, she almost didn’t notice the faint and unfamiliar distant sound of laughter drifting from below. It had been a long time since she had heard it. Realizing that it was real and not just a hallucination, and that it was n ear and getting nearer, she rolled over and rested her chin on the lip of the eaves to peer across the park. Sure enough, walking through the gray-green grass that had grown over its normal city-approved height, were three men.

  From the distance she couldn’t be certain, but they all looked White, which meant that they were scavengers like her, not holdout natives. One of them carried a baseball bat, and the others might be armed, too. Over the winter she had picked up a machete, a cheap thing of poor metal, but she had sharpened it to a wicked edge night after night, and it hung always across her back by a leather purse strap from a real Versace. It’s caress was reassuring, now. Every house she searched, she hoped to find a hidden gun, but she hadn’t had any luck so far. Either they had taken them all with them, or more likely, since they had left under guard, other people had found them, first.

  Dell watched the young men, who had scraggly beards and wore multiple layers of old clothes that had all turned dingy gray, cross the park to the edge of the trees near her. They were just exploring, and obviously had no idea they were being observed. Their backpacks looked sunken in, and so did their cheeks and chests, but they were in good spirits. She was jealous of their companionship. They looked like they didn’t get enough to eat, which seemed strange at first to her, since she always found enough to get by and more, but then again she didn’t have to split what she found three ways, and she wasn’t a man, either.

  Quietly she scooted herself backwards on her belly, away from the edge of the roof and back towards it center, where she lay controlling her breathing and waiting for them to pass. They didn’t stop at her street, but kept going east, she could tell by the sound of their voices. She caught herself listening hard, trying to make out what they were saying. It had been a long time since Dell had talked to anybody. She missed it.

  When she was sure they were gone, she rolled back to the ragged hole in the roof and dropped herself down to the top bunkbed she had pushed over into the corner of the room below as a ladder. That night she read a black romance novel then used it for kindling. It was getting too crowded around here. Time to move on.

  Jian’s first few days on patrol were eventless. Row after row of empty houses, many of them with their doors hanging open like faces with shattered mouths. This was the area that had been cleared out of potential outlaws and bandits, the black ones who were little more than animals. They had done it by squads, house by house, street by street, timed to perfection. One squad would knock on each door and inform whomever answered, or the blank door if noone did, that by order of the United Nations Peacekeeping Authority this neighborhood was being vacated temporarily and its residents relocated at no expense of their own to temporary housing while their homes were secured from the threat of terrorists. Each squad had one good English translator who had to repeat himself, down each block, over and over again. He would say his speech, then step out of the way while the other soldiers in the unit dealt with the cursing, screaming, threatened violence, or quiet submission which resulted.

  At first some of the violence was more than threatened. Two or three instances of black residents opening fire on the column of armored cars inching slowly down the streets or the blue-helmeted, yellow-skinned soldiers on their doorsteps, followed by immediate and overwhelming reprisals on that home and every house adjoining it with flamethrowers and concentrated machine gun fire got across a message that moved across the community faster than the soldiers themselves could.

  Either way, peacefully accepted or protested, ten minutes later the second squad arrived to forcibly remove the black residents, ready or not. Here again some examples had to be made, especially in the first hours of the operation which went on all night and the next day before the herd of thousands of angry blacks were pushed southwards all the way to the 405. Those who stopped and refused to go on were shot where they stood.

  The following week, the same now experienced battalion was used to clean out the smaller Hispanic neighborhoods in a similar fashion. Word had gotten around by then, and there was a lot less physical resistance.

  There were no aid stations or food kitchens out there for them, of course, and none here in what was officially a depopulated cordon sanitaire bordering the green zone, either. Some day they would have the manpower to occupy all the way to the lake, but for now they needed to limit foot traffic in and out. Jian’s job for this month was to supply that official military presence both a s a deterrent as well as to remind the locals on both sides of the line who was in charge.

  His patrol consisted of an uncomfortable and loud diesel engine armored personnel carrier that duty compelled him to usually ride up in the exposed cupola of, two open Humvees with machine gunners in back, and ten seasoned men who had been in America a lot longer than he or his father had. They were a part of the force which had cleared these streets, so they knew them better than anyone. He felt confident that they knew how to do their duty without him interfering, so he let them do their jobs and took in the sights. The sights were depressing.

  Only in a corrupt and degenerate capitalist country could so much wealth and prosperity exist next to such squalor and poverty. It was almost like he was going from one continent to another by crossing a narrow avenue into the black sections, which he could identify even months after their departure without any blacks even being present.

  Had it always been so trashy, so ragged, and so dirty, even before America’s fall? How had the Wes
terners been silly enough to believe that these people were their equals and should be handed an equal role in their governance? He shook his head for the thousandth time at how pathetic and disgusting it all was. Such as waste. Well, the Party would make better use of this place, as it did every piece of land it conquered, from Seoul to Honolulu.

  Each night they returned to base, where he had a small but private room of his own and shared a bathroom with his Captain, a friend of his father’s brother. He ate with the other officers and not with the men, but he still felt out of his place in the cafeteria because they were all equally beneath him, officers and enlisted alike. Each morning they went out on patrol again. Down one street and up another. The noise of their engines gave any squatters plenty of time to escape, avoiding both sides the awkwardness of an encounter. Only once did he get a glimpse of a couple of children running away as fast as they could, and he did not order pursuit. After all, it could be an ambush. His father had told him how here in America the stone aged savages had tricked the United States cavalry into death traps that way. He didn’t want to be another George Armstrong Custard.

  He was just thinking about how he would dislike his second week, when they had to alternate over to night patrols, when one of the men in the front Humvee called for his attention on the crackling headset. It was easier than shouting. There was something in the road up ahead. They were slowing down to make their way around it.