by Billy Roper
There were a lot of good spots, bluffs, where he could see the road without being seen, from high above them. People still used them. Trucks filled with farm produce or pulling trailers carrying cows. Soldiers in army vehicles. One army or another. There never were so much that traffic was a problem, though. None of them ever stopped or helpfully dropped a bag of potatoes or a cow off for him, so watching was just an idle hobby. It was how he remembered that he was human. Better yet, it was how he reminded himself that there were other folks. He could rejoin them, if he wanted to face the consequences. The consequences for being an outlaw and breaking exile was death. It was always an option.
When the rain was bad he hid out in a couple of the old gold mines in the hills, hoping they wouldn’t fall in on top of him. So far they hadn’t, but then again he hadn’t found any gold, either.
Sometimes in life you just get those impulses that are hard to beat down. Least ways, he always had. It had been more that the silly urge to say something inappropriate out loud. He had shook and raged inside, every time the bread truck drove by. Not just from famine, either. From resentment. An itch he couldn’t scratch.
Every morning the bakery had worked their wood-fired ovens from dawn to noon, then loaded the still warm loaves onto racks, slid the racks into railings in the back of their grease-burning van, and chugged through town, dropping off bags of bread at the three cafes, two of which used to be the Subway and the Hardees, and the Sav-A-Lot that was still open, and then to the garrison and the courthouse, before finally making special stops at a couple of the wealthiest citizen’s houses. That’s what he had resented the most.
It wasn’t the grocery store or cafes, even though he hardly ever had any money to buy food in those places except for when he could hire out to the army as a guide. The soldiers could have shared theirs, since he was always showing them the easiest ways through the hills on their patrols, around the mud and fast-moving creeks. But he didn’t begrudge them what they had, nor even the Mayor and his staff. What had drove him to becoming an outlaw was the rich people getting theirs delivered right to their doors. Just like life was fine and they were still on top of the world.
Every day he had watched the routine, until the schedule was memorized. It was dependable as clockwork. The problem was, what caused him his temptation, was that you couldn’t just kill an oil drip engine and start it back up easy. They left it running. Security got paid to be needed, so with nothing else going on in town to justify their existence, the rich folks’ unarmed guards made a big deal about letting the delivery guy in. Every single time. It was a big delay. He’d counted to two hundred or more, each stop, each day. Plenty of time.
That was why he had suddenly found himself trying to steer from one ditch to another with a mostly empty rack of bread in back, not knowing where he was going, not really thinking that part through. He’d never done anything like that before. Hell, he’d never even had so much as a parking ticket, before the world got choked down to this little town and the countryside around it.
Besides, what were they going to do when the flour ran out, plant wheat? Pick the wild oats from the pasture and make bread from it? Bread was an endangered species, he was just helping its extinction alone by eating some himself.
He had been born here, and grew up in a big house that would have had bread delivered to it every day, except his mom and dad had figured that he was old enough to stay by himself for a week while they took a flight to Jamaica for their anniversary. If their plane had been delayed by an hour it never would have left the ground. Things would be different, now. He’d have all the bread he wanted.
The neighbor lady had been nice for a while. She had her own problems too, though. The casseroles stopped being dropped off when the internet went offline and the tv news switched over to the Emergency Broadcast System. Their church was the last to stop visiting him, once the soldiers showed up in town. All public meetings, including religious services, were suspended under martial law.
The Captain who had met with the Mayor and called down martial law like a hammer of the gods had only brought in about twenty soldiers with him, all that was left of his National Guard company. They were more of them and better armed than anybody else, though. At the town meeting they had scared folks with stories about the outside and how things were until people let them get away with it. Oh, a few had tried to buck the new system. Some of the local redneck boys didn’t like their guns being confiscated in city limits, temporarily. They resisted. The Captain made an example of them. Jail for a week on bread and water. Then exile. They could never come back to town again.
At first it seemed alright. They set up a rationing program of all the food in town that they collected, house to house and store to store. He got extra rations for helping them build up the police station once they’d absorbed the local cops into their army. Mainly hauling concrete blocks and mortar and building walls out of them. Then they won people over back again when they put a couple of the known local drug dealers up against one of those walls and shot them. But the next week, they shot old man Griffin, for hoarding canned food.
One nearby farm and ranch after another got visited in force, and the message had been the same: tax a quarter of all your crops and livestock, in exchange for protection, access to the city’s market, and getting to keep the other three-quarters. Those who were too stubborn to go along with the program suddenly weren’t allowed to buy or sell in town, and then their cattle got rustled and their barns mysteriously caught on fire at night. Their neighbors were afraid to help. Fire could spread too easily. Sooner or later, pretty much the whole county had got into line. It seemed to happen pretty fast, before first frost.
It was nearly a day’s ride by horse up to the courthouse in Madisonville, but the deputies did keep 68 clear for travel, so the two towns could stay connected. The county seat was too big for the Captain to hold onto, though, so he chose to let it go its own way. The Sheriff ran it pretty much as he saw fit, along with its own city government.
If he had taken off in the truck before it had delivered to the barracks, they probably would have shot him. If he had wrecked the truck, almost definitely. But the only real loss was in the half loaf he managed to wolf down before they caught up with him behind the old CVS, so they just beat him up and hauled him to jail. There weren’t any other prisoners, because crime had taken a real nose-dive under the new regime.
Even for small trials, attendance was mandatory for all non-essential workers. All of his friends from school, and his neighbors from the gated subdivision where he had still lived in the big empty house alone, were there. They all acted like they didn’t know him. Well, he was embarrassed, too. He had a chance to speak. Told them he didn’t know what had gotten into him. Said he was sorry. The Captain sat right next to the old judge in the Mayor’s office and whispered something to him for a bit.
That was how he had been exiled and his family’s house confiscated as new officer’s quarters. He reckoned the Captain lived there, now. That was okay. It would have been nice if they would have let him take more of his stuff with him, though. Truth to tell, his backpack was heavy enough without sentimental things to weigh him down. He’d been given one hour to leave town, and spent it packing just what he needed to survive. His dad’s camping knife and sleeping bag and his old one person tent he had used when his parents took him camping and they wanted some privacy in their big tent, which was too big and bulky to carry. A quilt his grandma had made, before she passed. A couple of small pans from the kitchen. Toilet paper and cigarette lighters and a flashlight with all the batteries he could find. His dad’s shotgun he had handed in when the soldiers had come around asking. Another thing to regret. The rest was room for food.
As an afterthought he had stuffed a few other small things in the pockets of his dad’s heavy waterproof jacket during his last walk-through, saying goodbye to the place. He crossed the city limits sign and passed through the barricade under the watchful eyes of the soldiers
with fifteen minutes to spare. He could have stopped off to see anybody he wanted to, but nobody wanted to talk to him on his way out. He had never even had a girlfriend to say goodbye to. That would have made it harder, but at least someone would have cared.
He had an uncle up north, maybe sixty miles away, but they hadn’t heard from him since the cities started rioting and he had called to say he was worried about having taken the new job in Knoxville. Mom and dad had been busy packing for their trip and laughed him off, saying he watched Fox News too much. Knoxville burned, too. The Captain said so. How bad, and whether his Uncle and Aunt and cousins were still there, he didn’t know. Sixty miles was a long way to chance it, on foot.
There would be all kinds of people in between here and there, too. Like the other soldiers, the ones who definitely were not just patrols from the Captain’s army. He knew all of them by sight. These were different. They wore different kinds of camo all thrown together, except for the leaders, who wore the same kind of camo pants and black boots and black shirts with red badges on them in the back and over the heart and on the sleeve. They must be the officers. Some of them had red laces in their boots, maybe to show rank.
They had come from the west, about a hundred of them, in big army trucks escorting a couple of eighteen wheelers, probably just chock full of food. They seemed like reasonable folks, too. Every time they saw woodsmoke they’d stop and detour to it, going a couple of miles out of their way. He hadn’t heard any shots or seen any house fires when they done that, not yet. A couple of time it looked like the people had gone with them. He planned on checking that out.
What he found in the cabin surprised him. Of course they had taken all the food with them, but nothing was busted up. It looked like they had maybe left of their own free will. There was a good wood stove and plenty of dry wood inside, out of the mist. He took a chance and stayed for the night, giving all his clothes and gear a chance to dry out and using the tub to wash up in after heating up buckets of runoff water from the cistern. He lay on the big old couch staring at the dead tv set by the light of the fire and wondered what would happen to the new people when they got to town. And what would happen to the people who had thrown him out. He hoped they all died.
From high above on his blufftop perch he watched them send out scouts ahead. The folks they visited and traded with or took on must have told them what to expect, because they stopped before they got within earshot of the roadblocks and got out on foot. They were well armed and took off into the woods almost as easily as he did, while the drivers turned around and headed back to their camp. He thought about going back to the cabin, then had a stronger impulse.
They had chosen well, a circle driveway off a gravel road uphill from the highway and just out of sight, the driveway ending at a big two story log cabin kit house that had been some retiree’s dream place until the lights went out and their prescriptions had gone empty. It had been a bad winter for old folks out in the country by themselves. Then the looters and robbers had come through, and made it worse.
The summer tourist season was over, so his parents got discount rates for their tropical island vacation. He had already started back at school, his sophomore year, and looked forward to having a week to do all the things a teenaged boy can’t do when their parents were around. The lady next door was supposed to check in on him if he needed anything. He had plenty of money for ordering pizza and getting snacks from the convenience store in between his house and school, just a three block walk. They trusted him. He promised he would be good and feed the cat.
At first when the war started he figured his parents would turn around and come back home, so he waited up for them. People had been talking about something happening like this for years. Now it was finally happening, and everyone was out of place, unprepared. He wondered what his mom would have to say about it. She and his dad didn’t agree on politics. He had voted against President Harris, and she had found out. They’d argued about it. Bad scene.
In the morning when it got light outside they still hadn’t gotten home from the airport, and neither one of them had answered his texts. He tried to call them but the call kept dropping before it could connect. Lots of people must have been trying to call folks about then. He went online and had a hard time telling what was fake news and what was real. It all seemed like trolling. One site said that White people were attacking black people asking them for help getting out of the cities. Another said that the President and Vice President were both dead. Most of them were taking one side or another, blaming one race or another for the spreading violence. The United Nations was meeting in an emergency session in New York when a bomb went off. Then he started getting 404 errors. By that afternoon the internet was down, at least every site he knew. Even Google quit opening. He couldn’t get a cell signal. The cat meowed, reminding him to feed it.
A knock at the door startled him from trying, over and over again, to send a text to one of his friends. He shuffled to it, hoping it would be his mom and dad, but then why would they bother to knock at their own house? It was the lady next door. She frowned at his rumpled sleep pants and stained t-shirt. She had stopped by to see if he was okay and if he had heard from his parents. He told her that he was and he hadn’t. She told him that the tv channels were all off, and the last thing they had reported was rumors that Russia had launched nuclear missiles. It was the apocalypse, and she wanted him to come over and pray with her, before the rapture took her and he missed his chance. He told her that he wanted to be home in case his parents called the land line, and would pray right there. She was satisfied with that, and left.
That evening the lights went out and came back on. He ran both sinks full of water and filled every jug and bottle he could find, too. There was still no cell phone signal, just a steady screeching tone on the land line, and the same repeated EBS message on the tv. “This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency”…he changed the litter box because it stank too much to ignore.
When it got dark he slipped on his jeans and a clean t-shirt and Nikes. There were lights outside on the street, darting and dashing. Once again he had an urge to check it out. He didn’t lock the door, leaving it partly open so he could hear it better in case the phone rang. That was when the cat slipped out. He never saw it go.
Three or four seniors were out there, impressing a couple of girls with them by going door to door to check on folks, “making sure everyone was okay”. They ran off when a police cruiser crossed the side alley in front of them, before they had made it to his house. How had they gotten in the gate? They must live here, too. That was an unsettling thought. He went back inside and locked the door, this time. He hated them for the way the girls had looked at them more than for what they had been doing, or thinking of doing.
Two days later the electricity went out and didn’t come back on. He’d seen people walking by on the street outside, but hadn’t gone out. The cat was gone, and his mom would kill him if he didn’t find it before they got home. No cell service, no internet, nothing on any channel on tv, no landline service. There had been one more issue of the newspaper, with the front page reporting a list of cities hit by the riots: Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, and nearer: Charlotte and Nashville. He had picked it up from the front steps as soon as the guy drove by and tossed it, before anyone could see that he was in the house by himself.
Some of it seemed to be guesswork. A story about U.S. military troops being withdrawn from South Korea and Japan to help stop looters and arsonists. The Stock Market had plunged to rock bottom before trading was suspended indefinitely. The weeklong weather forecast predicted a slow cooling trend and an excellent fall foliage season coming up. More tourists and their dollars to keep the local economy afloat, in other words. Who thought tourists would be coming back, after all this, ever?
On the bottom of the fold was a notice that the Monroe County Sheriff was calling up his auxiliary deputies for an emergency meeting and the National Guard had been activate
d. They were needed to enforce the quarantine. Of what, it didn’t say. He stomped around the house, then opened the door and called for the cat. Just going through the motions.
He had kept the paper, reading it many times through the winter. It was the last one they ever delivered. That had been on a Thursday, he remembered. The neighbor lady had come over the next day with a big casserole she had made for him out of the stuff going bad in her freezer, and prayed with him. That reminded him of all the stuff in the fridge, and he ate himself sick. There had been another casserole, then a note left on his door that she was going to her sister’s house and would pray for him. Her church group would look in on him while she was gone. They did, too, right up until they were disbanded. None of them squawked too much about it at the time. It was almost like they were relieved. They took it as a sign of the Great Tribulation, and awaited their rapture.
The casseroles and the food in his mom’s freezer that was already cooked lasted him through the weekend. Monday morning he had shouldered his backpack and took off to School Street after cleaning up the best he could, just like life went on. There were a few other kids there, too, and the principle, and his secretary, and a handful of teachers. With the electricity off they couldn’t do as much, but the science teacher got all of them together in the auditorium, which had big windows to let in light enough. She gave them verbal instructions from a couple of textbooks on how to sterilize drinking water using bleach or chlorine, and the Ag teacher talked about how soon they could plant crops and what to plant and how to garden by hand, if it came to it. Then one of the history teachers got down to it, sharing whatever they knew that it had been decided the kids should know, too.