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A Fictional Account of American History 2008 to 2018
Old Jake continued with his story:
"The fundamentalist crazies (sorry, that's redundant) of every stripe soon lost interest in blowing themselves up and took up full time the task of staying alive. That was right after the Transition began."
"What shot you through?" Josh asked, in reference to a Post Transition belief in Divine Intervention during the chaos.
"You don't believe in that rot, do you?"
"OK, Mister agnostic, what was the defining moment when you knew the Transition was here? Things that happened that had to happen that way for you to come through?
"It didn't happen that way. You know it took hundreds of years to come to that point, and in a continuum, no one event could be said to trigger…."
Josh held up his hand and jerked it back and forth, "You sound like a spinner."
"Suspension of the '08 elections."
Josh almost missed it.
"What?"
"The American Democracy Dog and Pony Show" was billed as the most exciting democratic event in our history. The campaign lasted twice as long as any ever had, the election was full of firsts, from first woman to most money raised and spent. Never had the media had such a target rich environment. Nobody knows if he planned it, but if he did, GW Bush must have enjoyed watching the democratic process strut its stuff while he knew the election would never be decided."
"Who were the candidates?"
"What does it matter?" Their story was over when Bush declared martial law. They were never elected, and if an election had been held, it would have been undecided for so long Bush would've been "forced" to step up for a third term. He saved everybody the trouble by suspending elections as his October Surprise."
"That's when I knew along with anybody else who had a brain that the twister was gonna hit the outhouse. At that moment, even though nobody knew how it would all go down, everybody knew it would."
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Now it was early morning and Jake was outside his hacienda, barefooted on the Mexican tile. He carried a mug of café y leche, stopping every few steps to listen to the small sounds of the awakening land. The air was clean and sharp, not dry and dusty as it would have been at this same spot in the edge of the Chihuahua Desert just a decade ago.
Old Jake saying he didn't know what the date was had been a lie; but since the Transition it had been convenient to avoid getting too detailed in his memory of it. It was now the year two thousand eighteen, popularly called "twenty eighteen," at least by those who believed it was indeed, 2018, PT (Post Transition but popularly called, ”Present Time").
He hoped that everybody would increasingly forget the past and look ahead, even though the past was really all he had left. Then, as always, the thought came unbidden: it's not about me.
He looked up at the pale sky, bereft of a single cloud . If any of our satellites are left up there, one of them could take a panoramic photo of our great Ex-American Southwest. Who says we don't know where we are? It's just that nobody else knows and maybe that's a good thing.
The sun was well up, brazenly poking its rays over terrain it had not risen over from that azimuth in over thirty millennia.
Jake was waiting for Josh and Dog Soldier to get up so he could debrief them. They had been gone for nearly four days, going over country that nobody had seen since the Transition, traveling east, or what used to be east, but now appeared to be more northeast, if his compass wasn't broken.
They had a crude map left by a passing trader a year earlier. "I want verification," Jake had told Josh before they left. "Don't worry about what we think or have heard before. Just bring back what you witness. It will or will not verify other information we have. Above all, you two are more important than anything you could bring back, so don't get in harm's way. Above all, don't be seen. If seen, don't be captured; if captured, don't speak the language. If you aren't a deaf mute when they get you, you will be when they get done with you."
"Who?" Josh had asked with a one sided grin.
"Anybody. You'll know when you see them."
And now they were back. Back with all or none of the knowledge he needed. Jake was sipping his second cup of café when they came into his office behind the bar. He embraced each of them, pointing to two steaming cups on his desk.
"Jeez, you two look like you're on the wrong side of the used-to-be border." They looked at him blankly and at each other, still not realizing that they were burned a few shades darker than when they left.
The story they told was a story unto itself, one a writer could spend years on if done in proper detail. It was fortunate that Jake had trained Josh in the art of "rich economy" in using the written and spoken languages. A story that might have taken the morning in the telling was tantalizingly brief. He would commit the details to writing and archive them.
Josh looked at Dog Soldier and raised his eyebrows in query. Dog shook his head and signed he would talk after Josh, who spread a map on the desk and tapped their location in Paradise. He moved his finger east and north to a location in Texas near the former Interstate 35 corridor.
"There was nothing but rough country," he said, before sitting back in Jake's chair and sipping from his cup, "Heavily wooded and choked with brush and wild grass. Overgrown fence lines and roadways, ruins of buildings. No sign of man or beast until we got to the corridor."
"Here's the news: the corridor is active." He looked at Jake, who nodded for him to continue."It is active: People. Vehicles. Traffic."
"Like we heard."
"Yeah, but not. We heard and imagined the I-35 as velvet ribbons of asphalt crossing green pastoral landscapes, interspersed with businesses and rest stops and towns that ran together for two hundred and fifty miles."
"And?"
"And if it was like that before the Transition, all that's gone and in its place is an effing tube, partly covered with a glass dome, like the old malls and some sections were partly open like a concrete trench with no top. We got up real close to it, there was no danger of being seen. Even the videocams were all trained inside."
"You were taking a chance."
"We thought so too, but then we found this: He handed Jake a brochure that was folded and flattened. It was the work of a private developer that was building the "Secure Travel Tollway; the fastest, most secure way to get from Houston to the Metroplex" It was being heavily used, but was also under construction.
"There was a high fence a half mile out on either side. We defeated that, but never found a way to cross over the corridor and there were no lateral connections as far as we could tell."
"This brochure was probably dropped by one of the big shots on the project;it was such a boring trip we read this for entertainment."
Jake looked at Dog. "You read?" Dog ducked his head in shame and shook it. Jake regretted asking. He knew better. Crap.
Josh bumped the young man with his shoulder. "But he can still tell you every word of it, can't you?" Dog's answer was a shy smile.
"OK, Dog, What is in the brochure?" Dog began his narrative, looking at Josh for support. He gained confidence as he went on, telling from memory now and telling it all to Jake. Jake had that kind of pull on people.
"The U.S. Government is using this huge construction project to establish a political policy that forever alters the democratic, constitutional government they had before the Transition."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the government has restructured its sovereign territory to include only "City States" and the connecting corridors. They are not accepting responsibility for anything outside.
"Nobody is allowed in, nobody is allowed out. Security is the watchword, privacy no longer exists.
"Plans are in progress to "Go Deep" with both States and Corridors, meaning to go deeper underground."
Jake interrupted: "The final mistake."
They waited for him to elaborate.
"The final mistake of every vanished civilization was to draw into defensive positions and abandon everything on the outside to invaders. Rome, Little Big Horn; fire bases in Vietnam; walled cities and countries in the Middle East, enclaves in countries at war; city states, where safety in numbers finally became the weight the system couldn't sustain. The Titanic.
"They are going down. They are going deep. How long will it take until they forget they were surface creatures, not reptiles. How long 'til we forget they're down there. How long will they burrow and tunnel down there until they choke on their own garbage?" Ask some other Prophet.
Dog was stoked from giving the report to Jake. Going on the recon was one thing and giving the report was bigger. It gave him the courage to ask, "What does all this mean to us?"
[to be continued]
