Days of Anarchy

by J. D. Martens

  “With a gun?”

  “Especially with one.”

  She quickly showed Jeremy the safety, the ammunition release, and the trigger. Since Jeremy was left-handed the ammunition release required him to wrap his pointer-trigger finger all the way around the handle of the gun. Noreen taught him quickly how to use the sights.

  “So, you line the middle bump all the way down the barrel with the two next to the barrel. Make sure the middle bump fits exactly in between the other two. It should make a nice little line of three bumps . . . ”

  As she spoke, the old grandmother-looking Noreen shut her eye and aimed the gun around the room, finally settling on Jeremy. His heart unconsciously skipped a beat—it was the second time someone had aimed a gun at him in one week. It was a mystifying sensation to stare down the barrel of a gun. Then she lowered the gun and handed the hilt to Jeremy.

  “Now you try.”

  Gingerly he held the weapon—guns always seemed heavier to him than he first thought—and took it up. He closed one eye and took aim at the kitchen cabinets.

  “Remember, it’s a big responsibility to hold that thing. With it, you can choose who lives and who dies. It’s important to know that you should never play God. Only use it as a very last resort.”

  “Thank you, Noreen,” Jeremy replied. “I’ll be careful.”

  Jeremy put the gun in the waistband of his pants, pulling his shirt over it just like he always saw in the movies. His pants sagged a little bit until he tightened his belt so the gun wouldn’t fall out.

  By this time the others had woken up, their eyes also red and puffy from crying, and got ready to leave. Together they said goodbye to Pastor Jack and Noreen. Noreen gave Jeremy a knowing nod as they wished each other good luck.

  “Are y’all sure you don’t want to stay here?” Pastor Jack asked. “You know all of God’s children are welcome here.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Anna began, “but we must make our way up to Denver. Thank you for everything.”

  “Well, all right, then, but be careful. And remember that just because it looks like the world is about to end, we must still remain good, and follow the path to righteousness. Treat people the way you would want to be treated, or better. And good luck. It’s a dangerous world out there, now more than ever.”

  Jack and Noreen waved from their porch as the group got into the car and started their long drive north.

  Robert walked toward the cafeteria to refill his cup of coffee. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He’d been awake all night working with the rest of NASA and the military on the disaster in Miami. The events of the past day were devastating. It was unclear if Robert’s team would even continue to work as the lead in the project to avert the comet.

  One wall of the cafeteria windows pointed west toward the New Mexican scenery. He saw Suri drinking her coffee, staring at the New Mexico hills surrounding Los Alamos. They were truly breathtaking.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project and created the world’s first atomic bomb, had chosen this area to lead the project partly because of its beauty. He thought it would be calming for the scientists. Now, instead of creating an atomic bomb that would destroy people, they were trying to figure out ways to build new and better ones that would save people by destroying a comet.

  Robert had been pleased with their progress with Shiva. In the past two months they had launched fourteen rockets out of Earth’s orbit and toward Shiva. Four of them malfunctioned on their way, and communication was lost. Nine of them were on course as planned, with two of those acting as observational satellites. The last one, however, was the source of Robert’s despair. It was the rocket that tumbled back to Earth, destroying an entire city.

  “Hi, Robert, I found it,” Suri said, as Robert walked up to Suri’s table.

  Though she was in the cafeteria, she had her computer and was hard at work going over the engine’s computer code. It was hard for her to think of anything else besides, Miami is gone. It was hard to believe, and the effect that it had on the population in just one day was terrifying. President Chaplin enacted Martial Law. Gangs overthrew major metropolises. Los Angeles and Chicago fell to the gangs, joining San Francisco and Seattle as places which no longer referred to themselves as part of the United States of America. Suri couldn’t believe how fast it seemed anarchy was setting in. Despite all of this, Suri worked diligently on figuring out the exact reason for the IMP’s failure.

  Thus far, they had linked the IMP’s engine failure to a faulty O-ring in one of the rocket boosters, which incidentally had also been the cause of NASA’s Challenger disaster three decades earlier. Suri had begun searching the code they wrote for this particular booster for inconsistencies or some further mistake.

  The search took only a few hours, because Suri found a patch in the code forcing the engine to malfunction and fall back to Earth. Suri showed the patch to Robert, who asked, “Who did we assign to do this code?”

  Robert stared at the patch incredulously. Could this be a sabotage by someone here? he wondered.

  “I did the code,” Suri muttered. “This was me, but it wasn’t. I didn’t do this patch, I swear. Someone else went over it—see? Here’s the time stamp, two days after I finished the rest of this code. And this IP address—it’s not mine.”

  Robert read from Suri’s computer, astonished.

  “So someone else hacked into our servers and inserted this code, or someone at NASA did it.”

  “It looks like it, but who would do that?” Suri asked aghast.

  “Let’s talk to Brighton,” Robert replied.

  Suri closed her computer and together they hustled over to Secretary Brighton’s office, who looked like he’d aged a year in only one night.

  “It wasn’t an O-ring failure,” Robert began. “I won’t go over it in too much detail, but this highlighted code here . . . ” Robert showed the Secretary of State Suri’s highlighted code. “This patch that goes on for around a hundred lines wasn’t Dr. Lahdka’s.”

  “So what does that mean?” Secretary Brighton asked, squinting at the screen.

  “It means,” Robert replied impatiently, “that either someone at NASA wanted to prevent this missile from entering the orbit, or someone else hacked our servers.”

  Secretary Brighton spoke very slowly. “And Miami? Are you suggesting that the destruction of Miami was a terrorist attack?”

  Robert and Suri looked at each other.

  “I don’t know,” Suri began. “The code they entered was programmed to flood the engine all at once, which put the O-rings past the normal pressures they were meant to handle. But I don’t know how it drifted back toward land and hit Miami. I think that was just—” Suri paused, unable to finish her sentence.

  “—really, really,” Robert grimaced, “really bad luck.”

  Inside, however, Robert still felt like there was something missing about the incident.

  Secretary Brighton closed his eyes, rubbing his temples. Then he got up and closed the door to his office, and turned around.

  “Doctors, you are aware of the hacker by the name One Union Anarchist? The one that ultimately forced us to reveal the truth about the comet?”

  Robert and Suri nodded.

  “Okay, well, the peace and security of the United States is not as stable as we’ve been advertising it to be. The Union Anarchists and other terrorist groups have been active in many places around the United States. Los Alamos is now one of the most heavily guarded places in the world, aside from the White House.”

  Robert tried to contain his anger. “What do you mean? Is it possible that we are compromised—that there is a traitor in our midst?”

  “It’s unlikely, but possible. I’m sorry, right now there’s not much more I can say,” Secretary Brighton answered. “Thank you for bringing this news to me. I will tell you more when I can.”

  Robert and Suri excused themselves from the Secretary, and went back to their joined office
. From now on, we’ll have to double and triple-check everything, Robert thought. There might even be someone against us on the inside. Unbelievable . . .

  “That project to use the LSST, do you have any thoughts?” Robert asked, referring to the telescope they were using to take photos of the comet.

  “Yes,” Suri replied, but her mind was elsewhere. “It could be good to get it up and running. But if it still doesn’t work that’d be a problem.”

  “Maybe.”

  Later in the day, Robert and Suri sat next to each other, both working on their computers, feeling numb. Neither of them had typed anything for a full minute.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Robert asked.

  Suri said yes, and they took the car to a nearby trail. Robert saw footsteps on the ground. He imagined they were J. Robert Oppenheimer’s. They walked in silence for a while, feeling the hot New Mexico sunlight against their bodies. As they walked along, both of them had Miami on their minds. Both of them wanted to say something and nothing at the same time, and ask each other what they were thinking about. When they turned a corner in the trail, they saw a small deer, who froze upon noticing a human intrusion on the land.

  As the deer—a mature, strong doe—stared back at Robert and Suri, they froze as well, and for a moment both of them forgot about the largest nuclear disaster ever on American soil. Then, as fast as it froze, the deer leapt away, back into the forest of trees and undergrowth. Suri and Robert looked at each other, and realized the deer’s presence made them each forget about Miami for a few seconds. Then they both burst into tears.

  As Jeremy drove north along the freeway, he saw the great Rocky Mountains looming in the west, while to the east lay the great plains of eastern Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, which stretched all the way to the Mississippi River. Everyone’s minds were fixated on Miami, but no one managed to say anything. The casualties were reported to be in the hundreds of thousands, but the military’s use of the anti-ballistic missiles had drastically reduced the death toll. Even so, people in the area were notified to evacuate and there hadn’t been enough time. The freeways were bumper to bumper, so people got out of their cars and began to run. It was hard for the group driving along Interstate 25 not to think about it, but they had problems of their own to deal with, too.

  At twenty-five miles to Denver, things began to change. The first thing they noticed were the road signs, which were entirely spray painted in black. Jeremy also noticed that the interstate signs, posted every few miles to remind drivers what road they were on, were blacked out as well. Then, as they passed under one of the signs for Grand Junction, they saw the symbol for Anarchy—the letter “A” with a circle around it across the entire sign.

  There was a normal amount of traffic for a major American city. If it wasn’t for the increase in the anarchist graffiti, they wouldn’t have noticed anything different about Denver.

  The rest of the signs were even less helpful. Whoever had been spray painting the signs must have gotten a little overexcited, because the closer they got to Denver, the higher the frequency of the black signs. By the time they got within five miles, every sign was an ominous black rectangle. It was so obvious that eventually Jeremy had to ask the question, “Guys? Are we sure we should go through Denver? These blacked out signs are kind of creepy. Maybe we should avoid the city.”

  Having grown up in the world of cell phones, everyone reached into their pockets to grab the little metallic computers to check other routes to Vail. They were all dismayed to find that they were not functioning.

  “What should we do?” Dustin asked.

  Jeremy thought for a moment before taking the road that looked like it headed toward the mountains.

  “Let’s go this way. Also, Dustin, I stuck a road map in the glove compartment. Try to find out where we are. Vail is in the Rockies, so for now, let’s go toward them.”

  “Nice,” Dustin agreed.

  They took an exit that headed in the right direction, but before long they had to stop for gas.

  “I guess we can make sure we are on the right path,” Anna remarked.

  “I know where we are going,” Dustin said, looking at the road map.

  The gas and lodging signs pointing toward the off-ramp were not blacked out like the interstate’s and the larger signs near Denver. As the road veered off to the right, Jeremy became aware of an obstruction in the road—a row of overturned shopping carts. Jeremy slowed and drove around it.

  “Did you guys see that?” he asked.

  “Weird,” Karina agreed.

  Jeremy drove under the freeway and went two blocks until he saw the gas station. The town looked a lot different than Dallas, with boarded-up windows and anarchy flags everywhere.

  “Maybe Denver knew about the comet before everyone else?” Dustin mused. “Otherwise, how could it look like this so fast?”

  Jeremy didn’t reply, but did agree with him. He continued to drive until he stopped at a light. Then he turned right to enter the gas station, and slammed on the breaks, just in time to avoid a collision.

  Standing in front of the car was an incredibly disheveled homeless man. He looked drunk, leaning left and right, and was sweating profusely. He wore several overcoats, even though the temperature was balmy.

  “What the heck,” Dustin yelped. “Can you just drive around him?”

  “He’s pretty close. Here, I’ll back up.”

  Jeremy looked down at the stick shift and flung it into reverse, but as he looked back through the rear window, he shuddered. A second figure blocked their escape route, and for the third time that week, he found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

  This time it was much larger than the small barrel that Noreen had given him. This time it was a shotgun. So now it’s two barrels actually, Jeremy thought randomly. Jeremy raised his hands from the steering wheel and looked at the owner of the gun. Whoever it was wore a mask.

  When he looked forward again the apparently homeless gentlemen had pulled a shotgun from inside one of his many overcoats. The robber in front of the car tilted the barrel to the side. Then the man behind the car walked over to Jeremy’s window, and motioned for Jeremy to lower the window. Dustin cursed.

  “What do we do? What do we do?” he whispered frantically.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

  Jeremy slowly moved his left hand over to roll the window down. It seemed like such an insignificant thing to do, but the last barrier between him and that gun was gone. The man reached in with his hand and grabbed the keys to the car. Then he unlocked the door.

  “License and registration, please,” the mask said.

  “What?” Jeremy asked, confused.

  On the other side of the car, the homeless drunkard, who seemed completely sober at this point, had opened Karina’s car door.

  “Stop it,” the homeless-looking robber said to the masked one. “He’s just messin’ with you. Get out of the car before we blast you! Now!”

  Jeremy looked back and forth between the two. He guessed the masked person was female judging by the voice.

  When Jeremy played basketball, he could always tell the caliber of player by the way they held the ball in their hand. It was a comfort thing. The best players held the ball like it was just another part of their body. This is what the shotgun looked like in this woman’s hand—like it was just another part of her body. Jeremy gulped.

  “Let’s just do what they say . . . ” Anna coaxed.

  “Listen to the pretty one, bud,” the masked woman said.

  Slowly they exited the car, making sure to make their hands steady and visible at all times. They got out of the car and stood in a row with the two thugs opposite them.

  “The earrings,” the woman said slowly.

  Anna took hers off and placed them in the man’s free hand.

  “Yours too, sweetie,” she said to Karina.

  “But . . . ”

  “Jesus, Karina, just give it to them,” Jeremy b
reathed.

  Slowly, the masked woman walked behind the foursome. Jeremy could feel her walking back toward the trailer still hitched to the Acura. He could hear the couple whispering about something. Then he heard more footsteps. Suddenly, there was a loud “Bang!”

  Anna and Karina screamed, Jeremy whirled around, wincing in anticipation of an incoming shotgun blast. Dustin closed his eyes.

  There was a sharp metallic bang, and Jeremy saw that the masked woman had not shot them, but opted to shoot the trailer hitch of the U-Haul instead. There were a few more blasts of the shotgun, followed by an argument between the two robbers, where both of them shouted at each other. Apparently, shooting the trailer hitch hadn’t released it. Jeremy looked on, thinking that it would be amusing if they weren’t getting robbed. Then the masked woman unhitched the U-Haul with her hands.

  Jeremy watched in despair as the couple hopped into his car and drove off, leaving them stranded in the middle of the road.

  “I can’t believe it . . . ” Jeremy muttered to himself. “Gas stations suck.”

  “Well, at least they didn’t take the U-haul . . . ” Dustin conceded.

  He’s always seeing the glass half full, Jeremy thought.

  “But they did take the key to it. It was attached to the key to the Acura,” Karina reminded the group.

  Jeremy slowly walked over to the U-Haul and the preposterously large padlock he had purchased. On the plus side, Jeremy’s overly careful packing list paid off because inside the U-Haul, they had four fully loaded backpacking backpacks and enough water to last them several days. Unfortunately, water is extremely heavy, and you need a lot of it to live. Luckily he’d put the backpacks in the U-Haul instead of in the trunk, which had been Dustin’s idea. Jeremy stared at the bolted padlock while Dustin searched around for a rock to smash it with. Slowly, Jeremy pulled up his shirt to reveal the gun he had.

  “Woah,” Anna exclaimed.

  “Where did you get that?” Karina asked.

  Jeremy shared the story of his conversation with Noreen and the gift he received shortly after. The gun felt heavy.