by Billy Roper
A second Civil War was going on. All right thinking people knew that race was just a social construct and everyone was the same inside, but until things returned to normal, it would probably be better if the kids who weren’t from around there didn’t come to school. Just for a while. The handful of Mexican kids and even fewer mullatos looked around themselves warily, some of them for the very first time, and saw how outnumbered they were in this 96% White Appalachian town.
The teacher covered up his embarrassment by quickly talking about how the Army and Navy and Air Force had defended the country against attack, and only a few major cities had been bombed. If any of the students had relatives in those cities, the counselor was available to speak with them after the assembly was over. Nothing had been said about what to do or who to talk to if your mom and dad just hadn’t come home. He kept looking at the girls like always, trying to peek up the armhole of one’s shirt to see what color her bra was.
The county government over in Madisonville was still running and they still had law and order, so they were better off than most parts of the country, thanks to the Sheriff, the teacher said. They all should be grateful that their law enforcement were still on the job, and give them all of the cooperation they could until things returned to normal. He wouldn’t hold his breath for that.
The cat was waiting for him on the steps when he got home from school. The cash register in the convenience store didn’t work and they were only taking cash, but he had bought all the Reeses they had left and a two liter coke he struggled with while unlocking the door and letting the cat in. It must have seen some things, it didn’t run off again. The thought hit him that he could probably have bought a beer if he wanted, but when he went back to see they were all sold out.
A few more kids came to school the next day. His friends wanted to use his house to party in since he was home alone, but he kept putting them off. The classes were more emotional: In English class they read the Declaration of Independence, then the U.S. Constitution, then the Gettysburg Address. In Math they came up with formulas calculating how to divide boxes of dehydrated mashed potatoes into as many servings as possible without dropping under different caloric intake levels. There were armed guards at all the stores, after a citywide block party barbecue that first week when all the freezer sections of every store and restaurant went on the collective grills and the Mayor told them that by pulling together, they would pull through. That became the new city motto for a while. In a week most everything was gone from the Sav-A-Lot’s shelves, and people started bartering, bringing in their greenhouse produce and canned and preserved food to trade for non-food items, so it stayed open.
The police department set up roadblocks at the city limits and the County Sheriff’s department stopped patrolling outside of the routes between the two biggest towns and only responded to emergencies, to save gasoline. There weren’t any more tanker trucks coming. Some news still spread like rumors from shortwave radio operators or the few travelers who came in. None of it was very encouraging. It sounded like the government had thrown up its hands and gone home from the state capitol, pretty much. Hungry refugees were spreading out into the countryside. All of the Pastors from every denomination got together to discuss what to do about it. The Baptist preacher was the only one who wasn’t in favor of taking down the roadblocks and letting them all in. It was kind of a blessing that the Captain had gotten there, first. Who knew what might have happened?
The exiled young teenager, who within the context of this story remains nameless, experienced a mirror image of the circumstances lived through by his unknown peer Daniel, hundreds of miles away in north Arkansas. Daniel happened to be a few years older and from humbler origins, but as young men growing up during the Balk, their involvement and participation with the ShieldWall Network evolved into parallel encounters. This isn’t too surprising when one considers the very similar demographics, culture, and topography between Ozarkia and Franklin.
Indeed, the lives of young people cast into a world where civilization as we know it is grinding to a halt must follow familiar courses, just as water always flows to a lower level by natural default. Their reactions to the loss of luxury as a formerly high tech society devolves into a daily struggle for survival are nearly universally identical. Therefore, their stories are all but variations on a theme. Theirs is the eternal biography of the war orphan, the refugee, the victim, and the survivor.
Along with closing down the churches, the army had cancelled school, too. Public gatherings except those ordered by the government were dangerous, as well as unproductive. People were put to work building up the barricades and making a wall connecting the houses on the outskirts of town. Tear down the front walls of the buildings for material to make a wall along the back of them, and such craziness. It kept them busy and occupied so they couldn’t fuss about the confiscations and rationing, too much. They didn’t have the energy for it.
He worked all day, got his tray of food at the Hardees they used for a ration kitchen, ate, talked to his friends about nothing much and asked if anybody had heard anything new from outside, then went home to feed the cat a bit of his food he’d stuck in his pocket. It probably ate other stuff too while he wasn’t around, maybe birds or mice, but he hadn’t seen any around. The cat talked to him, and he let it sleep curled up with him every night. He thought about the girl working beside him all day and how the shirt had stuck to her in interesting ways. His muscles were getting a good workout, and the food was almost enough. Mainly local raised meat and cheese and some vegetables, and that damn bread. He missed his X-Box, and his mom and dad, in that order.
He wondered what he would have done differently, if he had been in the Captain’s shoes. Not much, maybe. He might have tried to use more convincing and less violence on the farmers and ranchers, and might would have let people keep their guns. But he could see the risk in that, too. They’d even stripped the gun collection out of the Charles Hall museum in town, which irked folks.
Things hadn’t been that bad, really, until he messed up. He just couldn’t resist the temptation. The crazy urge was too much. It hadn’t even been that good of bread, anyway. Now he was stuck camping out and sleeping in sheds and never hardly being dry. And he’d even forgotten the cat when he left. He’d gladly lift and carry concrete blocks all day for a good hot meal. Winter turnips and their greens and left over acorns and every once in a while a small fish or crawdad was all he’d had for…how long had he been exiled? Weeks, maybe a month or more, he had lost track, as well as more weight than he had thought he could stand to lose. He was out of toilet paper, too, and leaves didn’t cut it. He’d taken to just using the creek and washing in it, French style.
The richest houses in the county, belonging to people wealthier than his own family in their small gated community, were on the ridgelines overlooking the valleys. The views were expensive, in terms of real estate, just like live water. Some of them were empty because of suicides or heart attacks and strokes, and stood occupied only by the drying corpses of their owners. Others still had living inhabitants who watched from on high, hungry and cold and waiting for the lights to come back on in the valley below. Most had either been vacation homes, or the people had moved out when the electricity failed. Probably to double up with their kids somewhere, if they could get to them. Some of them hadn’t taken their food with them. He got lucky a few times in those, taking a break from the mines and barns and his tent for a night or two at the time, but he knew to keep moving, and hardly ever slept in the same place twice. Even out here, he was outlawed, and any who found him could kill him.
One night he might be shivering in his tube tent waiting for wilty turnip greens to boil in a pan of brackish creek water over a low campfire. The next he would be nesting in a dry Jacuzzi eating cold ravioli from the can. Most of the old rich people had died in bed, so after a cursory search he usually left the bedrooms alone and focused on the kitchens. That was where the real action was at. All the places near
the roads had been looted bare, but there were plenty that had been overlooked.
It was a strange world, now. He left bags of jewelry and gold coins and little silver bars hidden in holes near disused patios in case he ever had access to get them and trade them anywhere again, and considered a bag of rice and a can of beans greater treasure. One of the places had a truck that he was able to get started, but he didn’t know where to go. Eventually, he was going to have to make up his mind, that was for sure. The hidden treasures he found wouldn’t last forever.
Even if he found a gun, the noise of it would bring the soldiers’ patrols up on him, unless he decided to leave the area completely, then it might be somebody else. He found an archery set in a dark garage, and practiced with it, but he never saw any deer, and the wild dogs that followed him during the daytime to bark around his fire at night were too fast. Bigger fires kept them further away. Only big breeds were left. He figured they must have eaten the purse dogs during the winter. Maybe a few folks, too. Or the folks may have eaten the small dogs and were working their way up, hard to tell.
He saw a couple of hunters, but hid until they passed. You couldn’t tell about what people would do, these days. He was living proof of that. Going down to see what the strange soldiers were up to seemed better than just staying up on the ridgeline and wondering.
The empty houses that the new army had searched, they had marked with their symbol, kind of like an arrow pointing up, except just the head of it. He had seen several examples as he came down at night to snoop around. Another of those urges, and it got him caught all over again.
He had just wanted to see, and hear, what the spies said when they came back to their base camp to report. Curiosity, and he was the cat. The two doored outbuilding they used as a toilet seemed like a good spot to hunker down and wait. He never counted on them having ladies with them who would need to use it, or have to have a light to see what they were doing, and catch him there. Man, she sure could scream, though. They had come running, too.
At first he expected them to just shoot him. He did get kicked around a bit, at that. But cooler heads prevailed and they questioned him, instead. It didn’t take much to get the whole story out of him. Hell, he was an honest person, what did he have to hide?
They gave him two bowls of soup with some meat in it and a biscuit and a pen and a notebook. He had made three or four steadily improving maps of town when the scouts got back. They verified what he’d said and drawn, as much as they could. He got another bowl of soup and a rug inside, by the fireplace, to sleep. They kept his backpack and his boots, just in case.
There was another exile who had joined up with them, a burly former truck driver who had been kicked out of Madisonville by the Captain’s men there for not turning over all the fuel he had saved back in his truck tanks. They’d taken his rig, too. He had met up with the new army as they circled wide around the county seat and told them all about the Captain’s setup. He had a wife and two kids with him.
One of the fathers from the families from around those parts who had latched onto the new army told the teenager about them over breakfast: fried eggs and ham, as much as he wanted, and real milk! Must have been from a local farm. Seems they called themselves the Shield Wall, and had been around for a long time before the war even happened. They had some funny ideas about things that were different from what he’d been taught in school, but he didn’t care so long as they fed him like that. They planned on talking to the Captain and seeing if they could work together or not. After breakfast they asked him everything he knew about the Captain, and his men, and he told all he could think of.
The Captain was young, maybe in his late twenties, and always shaved. Unlike most of the men with him, he didn’t drink much, but he did smoke a lot, whatever cigarettes he could find. He didn’t have a wife but there were a bunch of girls in town who had thrown themselves at him like they always do at guys in power, and he had gone through one or two of them, not settling on any one in particular. He wasn’t really cruel, but he was hard and could be tough. His men were loyal to him, mainly out of habit, and because they didn’t know what else to do. There had been a lot more of them, but most had gone home when the war started, to take care of their own families. The ones who stayed didn’t have any way home or any home to go to. They’d stuck with the Captain on the road and they stuck with him now. They were mainly city boys, but they had survived. Most of them had local girls attached, too. They were all White guys, and he wondered if something had happened back along the road to divide the unit up that way. They didn’t ever talk about it.
He hadn’t gotten anything for Christmas. In fact, he had hardly marked it passing, except a couple of the workers half snarkily wished him a Merry one while they were stacking blocks. There was snow on the ground, melting in the day and refreezing at night while he burned wood chips in the oven and slept with its door open towards him on the dining room floor. The cat curled up next to his feet and helped keep his toes warm on those nights.
When the Sheriff’s department ranks thinned from officers quitting or just not showing up any more, then one of them getting ambushed and shot dead outside of Madisonville, some of the people up there had wanted to move south to be under the Captain’s protection, since they couldn’t talk him into moving north. He’d compromised by sending half his men up to garrison the county seat. That spread him thin, even with the local and county cops, trying to cover both towns and the road in between. The new army already knew that, it was why they had bypassed Madisonville when they came down. But it told them what kind of position the Captain was in.
All of the nonWhite families had quietly picked up and left town a couple of days after that first school lesson about the war, which was just as well for them, since the new army didn’t want them around, anyway. They asked him about that, too. No, the Mexican families and the Indian doctor and his family and zebra kids being raised by their White grandparents all melted away in the space of a few days. The Captain had let them take their vehicles and whatever they could carry in them. That doctor had been alright, but the stupid White grandparents were no loss. Come to think of it, maybe the soldiers had exiled them all, too, without making a big deal about it publicly. It seemed like the new army were real happy to hear it.
They told him that a bad sickness had broken out in Memphis, something out of the Middle Ages caused by fleas on rats. The Black Death. Rats the size of cats. He didn’t know if they were teasing him or not. Some of the things they said just couldn’t be so. A new black country starting not far south of where he stood, running out the White folks. Chinese out west. The Mexican army in Arizona. The world at war overseas. It couldn’t have gotten that bad so quick, could it?
There were other units like theirs, in different areas, some in the Ozarks where they already had settled down and taken over a few counties together to run, and others in Texas and Missouri and Kansas and other spots. He asked their leader if he was old enough to join. He said ‘almost’.
That leader kind of reminded him of the Captain, or the kind of man the Captain might be in twenty years or so. A couple of the soldiers joked around with him in a friendly way, but they all gave him respect. He was just the Regional Coordinator, one of several they had in different places, but they seemed to be doing pretty good. Nobody was sick or hungry, and they were clean and disciplined.
They had a doctor with them who checked him all over for the pox and plague and said he had the beginnings of scurvy, so they gave him some Vitamin C pills and told him that he would live. The nurse took a couple of splinters out of his back that he hadn’t been able to reach from when he’d slid down a tree trying to rob a squirrel nest and put some antibiotic cream on the sores from them. His job was to draw maps, over and over, more detailed every time, naming streets and landmarks. They were getting ready to go in swinging, just in case, He could tell.
If there was fighting, would any of his friends from school be hurt? Why should he even care, when non
e of them had said a word as they had kicked him out?
His dad had always encouraged him to draw. He was pretty good at art, and entered a couple of sketches in the County Fair and got a ribbon for one of them. The maps helped out a lot, they said. He didn’t really see what the big deal was. They had the Captain and his men outnumbered nearly four to one, but he did have the defensive position. He remembered from Fortnite, when you wall up, you’re good.
He’d been with them three days when they sent a pickup truck flying a white bedsheet forward down the highway to the roadblock. He kept straining his ears, but didn’t hear any gunshots. Finally they came back. They were gonna talk.
Their leader and a couple of his men went up there and were gone most of the afternoon. Then they came back with the Captain and a squad of his soldiers following. Probably he had to see for himself how many they had. It was clear from his face that he wasn’t happy. He knew there were too many of them. They were too well armed. And he didn’t have any backup, unless he abandoned Madisonville and pulled his dozen men there down, but even then, he didn’t have enough. There hadn’t been time to disarm the larger town, it might rise up if he left them to their own devices. His play was obvious.
At best, he could hold them off until they starved him out, he must be thinking. If they didn’t slip people in, if his soldiers didn’t mutiny, if the people in town didn’t rebel. He would have to make the best deal he could.
The exile watched from the back of a truck while the Captain got the grand tour, to impress him. He walked right next to the truck but didn’t seem to recognize the teenager. Likely he had other things on his mind. Should he ask for a day to think it over and pull out in the middle of the night, taking his most loyal men with him?
There was another big town meeting, with the Shield Wall people being introduced, and welcomed by the Captain, as “reinforcements” for their “combined law enforcement” efforts. The empty school was big enough for all of the new army to make into their home base. Patrols further out into the county were scheduled, to enforce the authority of the town. They were made up two-thirds of the new army and one third of the old, by agreement. Pretty soon they all worked together okay. Especially once the Captain got sick and died. Noone ever did figure out what it was he ate that disagreed with him. His girlfriends had already kind of found other things to do among the new army soldiers.