Fail State, page 7
part #2 of End of Days Series
It was a short walk, maybe five minutes along Main, from Big Al’s to the hastily erected timber tower and stockade just beyond Doc Cornwell’s little cottage on the very fringe of the forest. Jonas took a quarter hour getting there, stopping twice to help out with heavy lifting along the way. Jacques Loubert and Lachie Saunders were trying to wrestle a diesel-powered generator off the back of a Toyota pick-up, and they were fucking up a simple lift and carry job the way only a couple of lentil-eating weed-fags could. So Jonas plastered on a smile and hurried over to help them, which mostly meant doing the job himself. It was almost like being back at the ol’ Amazon fulfilment centre. He then lost a few minutes rescuing Selectwoman Natalie Bochenski, who was trying to push a shopping cart full of old wooden cheese moulds and churns from Melanie Miles’ Genuine Colonial Knick Knack Depository across the freshly ploughed and planted town Common to Darren O’Shannassy’s Red Apple franchise.
“The direct route isn’t always the fastest, Councillor,” Jonas grinned as he lifted the metal shopping cart out of the muddy ditch in which it was stuck.
“Thank you, Jonas. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she gushed. Selectwoman Natalie was always a little gushy around Jonas, and although she wasn’t his type—she was more like the Anti-Tomi—he still made time to indulge in some tactical flirting with her. She was a close ally of O’Shannassy, and worth cultivating for that alone, if not for her vote on the Emergency Committee.
“Nat, a fine looking woman like you shouldn’t even have to think about this stuff when there’s lugheads like me going spare for want of something useful to do,” he said, putting just a little bedroom growl into the words “a fine looking woman.”
She gushed and fluttered around some more and asked if he was coming to the ‘EC’ meeting at nine that morning. It was a rhetorical question, asked mostly to extend their conversation a few moments more after Jonas had deposited the shopping cart back onto solid asphalt with a metallic crash. They both knew he would be there. The last week and a bit, Jonas Murdoch had very carefully positioned himself inside the machinery of Silverton’s official response to The Emergency.
That’s what people around here were calling it now, with a capital ’T’ and a capital ‘E’.
For a while ‘the national emergency’ and even ‘the war’ or ‘the cyberwar’ had been preferred because it’d been all over cable news, before the cable and then the terrestrial news broadcasts went dark. Nobody, least of all Jonas, had a clue what anybody outside of Silverton was calling it now. Privately, he thought of it as ‘this Chinese clusterfuck’, since it seemed a laydown certainty that the slants in Beijing had kicked the whole thing off, but nobody was talking much about them anymore. Nobody in Silverton anyway. Their war had become this weird, almost medieval struggle, a bizarre sort of siege, with the town sealing itself off against all outsiders and everybody inside the barricades reduced to acting the part of muddy peasants, frantically grubbing for sustenance.
Beyond the wooden palisades? Who knew?
“Yeah, Natalie,” Jonas grinned. “I’ll be there, with my notepad if you need me to sit in your lap and take dictation, Councillor.”
“Oh you,” she blushed, pushing him away, and getting a nice squeeze of his pecs in as she did so.
Jesus, he thought, as he left her to deliver the antique cheese-making kit to O’Shannassy. The things I do for macronutrients and defensible shelter.
He resumed his trek to the gate works, or the small fort, or whatever the hell you called the structure safeguarding the town's north-western exit. The Cascades Gate was its official title. Twin to the Seattle Gate back up at the other end of Main. Jonas allowed himself a small private grin. But exactly what kind of gate or fort or barricade it was, he couldn’t tell you. For a guy who styled himself as The Centurion not so long ago, the last week had rubbed his nose in just how ignorant he actually was about all this shit. Even more embarrassing to admit? It had been Doc Cornwell, Moonbat-in-chief to the town’s yoghurt weaving liberal faction, who’d come up with the plans for both structures. And not just plans in a general sense, but actual fucking schematics. Her late husband, three years dead of prostate cancer, had been something of a Roman Empire nut. Most amusing of all, at least to Jonas, he’d even had a pretty popular podcast about it. And in his extensive library at home, three books on Roman military engineering. Sheriff Muller had prevailed upon the good doctor of Silverton to turn them over to the Emergency Committee after two of his deputies were injured by refugees armed with baseball bats who swarmed the much simpler crowd control barrier he’d erected on the second day of The Emergency.
The fortifications had gone up as quickly as an Amish barn. Jonas, along with most of the able-bodied men available had helped out under the direction of Dan Meehan, a retired carpenter who'd 'come up the hill' from Seattle ten years ago to escape all of the 'hipsters and latte nerds down there”. Along with the cars packed bumper-to-bumper in a great steel semicircle enclosing most of the town’s playing fields, the twin forts were the most obvious expression of changed circumstances.
But not the only ones.
Every food business along Main Street and in the half dozen little side-streets that ran off it had closed. Not through lack of wares to sell, or some panic buying spree, but in accordance with another bylaw passed by the Emergency Committee requisitioning 'all foodstuffs and resources for the duration of the current crisis'. Every store owner from Darren O'Shaughnessy to Ginger McCauley, proprietor of Get Fudged, had been issued receipts for the full value of their stock – due compensation to be paid by the town ‘when the current difficulties allow’. Some of the businesses, like the Red Apple, were boarded up and constantly guarded by 'special deputies'. Others had simply been closed as if for the winter. Their stock, however, now sat in three secure locations. O’Shannassy’s Red Apple. The big vault of the Farmers Mutual. And the holding cells of Sheriff Muller’s lock up. The only previous occupant of the county jail, Eladio Morena, had been turned out of the Seattle Gate on the third day of the Emergency. Nobody could justify feeding him anymore, and Sheriff Muller forestalled any suggestion that he should simply be hanged given the exigencies of the current situation.
Jonas had no idea where the greasy fuck was now, but he did not doubt that Morena was still alive. Cockroaches like that would survive a nuclear war.
His stomach grumbled as he approached the soup line for those workers who had taken the early shift tilling the Common. He estimated that about thirty people were waiting on their bowl of barley and corn broth. A similar line snaked away from an open fire out on the playing fields. There was heavier work out there, he knew. And a better breakfast, with some bacon and potato chunks added to the broth. Jonas had done his fair share of labour out in those fields, and on the long arc of automotive steel and glass twinkling in the morning sun.
He’d been a little surprised at how quickly everything had come to evoke a frontier theme. Not just through the obvious imagery of the two mini-forts, but the open-air cooking, the haphazard market gardens, the constant din of carpentry and even ironmongery, and of course the weapons. Everybody with access to a firearm now carried it openly. Those without handguns or hunting rifles, or the guards assigned to internal strongholds like the three food stores most often carried improvised clubs. As his boots crunched up the tarmac of Main Street and he took in the details of early morning all around him, Jonas could not help thinking that people did not look nearly as frightened and confused as they had in the first few days after everything went sideways. The faces in the soup line smiled as people chatted to each other, waiting for their handout. They did not look like the bums you saw, or used to see, waiting for handouts in the city. The guards at the parapets, and walking the boundary secured by the long curve of bumper-to-bumper cars glowered at the outside world, but their expressions softened when they turned to anybody within the town limits.
Made sense, he figured. These people were slaves two weeks ago. They didn't know it. They thought themselves free. But they weren't. They were owned by the banks, the government, the media, the big corporations, the whole shitty fucking system. Now they were free. Was it any wonder they were smiling? Even if they didn't know why.
As he approached the Cascade Gate, he watched a small hunting team breaking down a deer carcass, stripping off the hide and opening the stomach cavity to empty out the guts for a couple of dogs which had joined them on the hunt. There was good game to be had in the forests around Silverton, but previously only during short official seasons, determined in the state capital, and strictly so. The Emergency Committee had waved away all that bullshit about five minutes after Doctor Cornwell had testified under oath that even with rationing the town did not have enough food to sustain itself through the coming fall, let alone the winter. Jonas didn’t know any members of the hunting party, and they were too busy to bother with the usual courtesies as he passed by, but in spite of the gore and the sight of their dogs tearing at the deer’s entrails, he found himself salivating at the prospect of fresh meat.
He shouldn't have. He was almost certain all of this protein would be salted, or vacuum packed, or somehow stored for the coming months. In the same way all of the milk in town, which really meant whatever milk was left in O’Shannassy’s little supermarket, was being turned into cheese, and the local baker had given up on artisanal loaves for the tourist trade, instead converting the last of his flour into hardtack.
The Cascades Gate loomed over him, looking a bit like set dressing for a B-movie. It was not a fully enclosed fort, of course. More like a log palisade raised to support a firing platform. The logs, the first of which had come from Silverton’s main tourist attraction, a long defunct sawmill turned into the town’s Forestry Museum, sank their footing deep into the road surface. Road maintenance workers from the County Council had jackhammered a trench clear across Main Street, to provide a structural foundation. The main construct consisted of a tower, very obviously moved from a kids’ playground, the firing platform, and a rudimentary gate system that looked like it had once been somebody’s garage door. The palisades ran into the forest on the right, all the way down to a steep fall, and on the left ending at a natural rock formation where another rifleman kept watch. Both guards on the firing platform had their backs to Jonas and he called out to them as he approached.
"Yo, guys. Jonas Murdoch going through to see Brad Rausch and Chad Moffat at the auto-shop.”
Only one of the men turned around.
Leo Vaulk. Jonas grinned.
Leo was for sure the most heavily armed man in Silverton and he rattled with personal artillery when he waved at Jonas. They’d met a week earlier at Big Al’s, where the Vaulk had taken a big hit off the chemtrail bong and was laying out an amazingly dense and complex logarithm of QAnon talking points about the real reason Hillary Clinton had invited the Chinese to attack America. Jonas started grooming him immediately.
The other guard maintained his watch on the road, even though nothing ever really came from that direction. Jonas recognised the more disciplined rifleman as the dad who had looked after his bike back on his first day in town, when he had crash tackled Morena and earned his place on this side of the barricade. Jonas still didn't know the guy's name. Maybe it was Tony.
“You are clear through, Jonas," Leo called down. “We’re almost done here, man, but I'll brief the next watch that you’re out in the field.”
"Thanks," Jonas called back.
He walked towards the crazy-built garage door thing, which was secured with two long, thick wooden bars and lots of rope and chain. There was a kid sitting reading an Avengers comic. No way he could lift those railway sleepers. It would have been a heavy lift even for Jonas. But the kid hopped up and moved his chair aside, giving Jonas access to the wicket gate, a small door cut into the much larger main gate. The smaller gate was secured by a couple of big modern padlocks which the kid opened with a key. Jonas bent down, stepped through, and heard the gate closed behind him before he could turn around. Both padlocks snapped back into place with muted, metallic clicks. He looked up at the wall of the fort. From this side it looked formidable.
9
The human wave
The sun was on the rise when they came over the hill. Tammy was tired from a long night of driving. Roxarne snored quietly in the front seat next to her. The four kids were asleep in back. They all came to when she slammed on the brakes.
The Oldsmobile’s tires bit into the road surface, but they did not bite hard. They’d been as bald as a baby’s ass when Tammy drove out of the Vale, and she’d put some hard miles on them in the days since. The thin rubber skin of the ancient Goodyears screeched on the asphalt. The Olds started to drift across the surface of the highway. And Tammy Kolchar screamed.
They all screamed; the kids in waking confusion and terror; Roxarne because she blinked open her eyes and saw what was happening. The car slid, uncontrolled, for what felt like forever as Tammy fought the wheel and tried to remember what to do when you lost control of a vehicle.
The dangerous skid probably lasted for just a few seconds, Tammy conceded later, but it felt they were about to fall into eternity. The road ahead was blocked — not by a stalled car or a big accident. God knows they’d seen enough of them the last few days. And later, thinking back on it, she did recall that there were in fact plenty of vehicles blocking the way ahead of them. But that wasn’t why she hit the brakes.
She crested that hill, and even with the sunrise suddenly burning into the back of her tired, watery eyes, she could see they were about to plough into whole damn crowd of people. These idiots was everywhere, lots of them just laid down in the middle of the damn road. She pumped the brakes, wrenched the wheel in the direction of the skid, tried not to wrench too hard, tried to remember all of the lectures her dad had given her about what he called ‘driving defensive’.
In the end they lived, and so did the dumb asses who’d just laid themselves down on the road ahead of her. The Oldsmobile planed across the surface of the highway, tires squealing and smoking, passengers crying out in alarm, Tammy cursing fit to shame a pit boss in a coal mine, but ... they came through.
The car finally lurched to a halt, three, maybe four feet from the nearest body. Then that body stirred and slowly lifted itself from the road surface.
"Holy shit," Roxarne whispered. "It’s the walking dead."
Tammy’s mouth hung open.
"Mom," one of the children cried out. "Mom what’s up with them?"
Tammy had no idea who said that. She was paralysed by the scene in front of her.
She was not entirely sure of where they had fetched up after a long night of driving and stopping to sleep when she and Roxy were too tired to safely go on. Somewhere in Ohio? Maybe? And not far from a big city either. She could see the high rise towers shining in the morning sun all the way off on the horizon. A vast plain stood before the city. Miles of suburbs stretched away from the shimmering mountains of steel and glass, but the tree lined streets gave way to open fields and farmland. Great ribbons of highway ran away from the metropolis, one heading in her direction. It was choked with traffic, none of it moving. None of it having moved in days, from what she could tell.
Tammy Kolchar dry swallowed her shock. Between the hill she had just crested, and the edge of that far away city, a great but quiet army of humanity lay all atop one another in the dirt, and on the road. Some obviously dead. Others stirring to life, possibly at the noise of her long, screeching slide. There was tents out there. Whole tent cities. And little forts made out of cars, circled like wagons in a TV western. And there was people. So many people.
"Back up, Tammy, back up now," Roxarne urged.
"Mommy, what’s happening? What’s up with all those people?" Jakey asked Roxarne from in back.
Tammy could not back up, because she was so tired and so unnerved by the sight of so many human beings just sort of lying there out under the open sky that it short circuited all the wiring in her head.
"Back up, Tammy! They’ve seen us," Roxarne said, her voice rising in panic.
Well of course they’d seen them.
The Olds had been just about the only thing moving in that part of the world.
Except for the folks who was dragging their asses up off the ground just ahead of them. Dozens of folks.
No. Scratch that. Hundreds.
There was hundreds now that Tammy took the time and had the slowly returning presence of mind to do a quick and dirty headcount. There was easily a couple of hundred people within a hundred yards of where they fetched up, and they was all of them getting up now and pointing, and shuffling, and in a few case even half stumble-running towards Tammy Kolchar. It was like a wave rippling over the surface of the world. A wave made of human bodies as knowledge of something happening transmitted itself back through the vast host. There were thousands, tens of thousands of people moving out there.
"Sweet baby Jesus," Tammy whispered.
Was the whole damn city camped out there in front of her? Had a million people come pouring out of those high towers and the miles of suburbs and flowed out across the plain looking to escape the same way she had led Roxy and the kids away from Dillonvale?
Roxarne punched her in the arm. Hard.
"Bitch, move! They’re coming!"
"Ouch," Tammy protested. Her arm jangled with the pain. Roxy had put the fucking knuckle in, and she was strong. Freaked out strong.
And with good reason.
They was coming, all of them as could still move, and they was coming for the Olds. The only damn vehicle anywhere within ten miles that was still able to move. The nearest of them had laid hands on the vehicle when Tammy threw the stick into reverse and gave the engine some sweet gasoline. The car roared back to life and the tires spun in the dirt. She feared they might blow out, they were so thin, but they held.
