After America Chapter 1

A Novella

Photo by Cavell L. Blood from FreeImages

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This is a serialized novella that some might categorize as post-apocalyptic. It may also differ in key regards from some of the tropes of that genre. The first few installments will be free, and the later installments will be behind my paywall. In some ways, this story is timely, and yet my goal is not to depress or inspire fear. I can say with all certainty that I do not wish for a future that looks like this one. I hope readers can come to the story in a spirit of openness to the fantastical. I write it not to darken spirits but rather to illustrate the depths and the heights of the humanity, and the potential for elevation in the midst of even the greatest of pits. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy it.

                Some say it was the moment when the governor of California announced the referendum. Others say it was when that referendum actually passed, by a 52% majority, and the California legislature began drafting articles of secession. Still others say it was the moment when California officially declared independence from the United States of America, and the California legislature voted unanimously to dissolve itself and re-constitute as the National Assembly of the Independent Republic of California.

                But I say it was the moment just before the referendum when the President of the United States announced that America would no longer honor its debt obligations.

                “In recent years, our national debt has ballooned to $40 trillion. It is an obligation that we as a nation are no longer willing to meet. If we were to even attempt to pay that off, we would enslave our grandchildren to lifetimes of penury in service to foreign debtholders. From this moment, I am erasing that debt. American bondholders will still receive their money. But foreign creditors will no longer profit off of our spending,” he said in part.

                In other words, he announced a national default.

                Nobody outside of a close circle of economic advisors knew the decision-making process that had led to this moment. But even small children knew that the disruption caused by a national default would be catastrophic.

                The fallout was immediate.

                The stock market went into freefall in the middle of the president’s short speech and continued plummeting, eclipsing the collapses in 1929, 2008, and 2020. By the time the New York Stock Exchange shut down, halting trading for the day, fully one third of the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already disappeared. Thousands of investors and hedge funds were wiped out. People were jumping from skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan.

                Credit ratings agencies immediately downgraded the United States’ credit rating to a C. The U.S. dollar collapsed in hours as banks and pension funds failed. Thousands of businesses, including many Fortune 500 companies, would declare bankruptcy in the coming days. Bondholders panicked. There was a run and the bond market was completely destroyed overnight. In cities across America that week, there were runs on national and local banks. Savings accounts were FDIC insured, but what did that mean anymore? Banks closed their doors and in Omaha and Houston, mobs killed tellers.

                Inflation reached historic proportions.

                With the rapid depreciation of the dollar, international markets went into flux. Global commerce could no longer rely upon it as the unit of account. Various multinationals, individuals, conglomerates, and international bodies flocked to the pound, the yuan, and the euro.

                Within days, Japan, China, and Brazil called in the debt they were owed and demanded payment from the U.S. Government. Per an executive order, the Treasury Department refused their demands. The governments of the U.K., Ireland, and Switzerland publicly announced that they would not demand immediate payment, but would wait for the U.S. to sort out its domestic crises, which were rapidly multiplying. They urged other creditors to do likewise. But individual investors and nations with smaller holdings did not follow suit. Some called for war.

                War did not ensue immediately. But markets tanked around the globe. Shortages hit shelves as supply chains collapsed and people walked off their jobs. College students began posting videos of themselves burning their cash to TikTik and Instagram.

                Despite its own financial situation, the government of California promised its citizens that if they voted for the referendum, California would be able to wall itself off from the depression descending upon the rest of America. What had originally been a fringe movement became popular – to the point that a slim majority of Californians voted to secede, in a referendum with 65% turnout.

                I can remember sitting on my couch, watching the livestream results and thinking that the world had just fundamentally changed. Then again, it was the second time in weeks that I had thought that. Or maybe the third. Soon enough, I would forget what normalcy was – or what it ever had been. And now, just thinking about the luxury of watching a livestream on a tablet – or of sitting on a couch in a home, for that matter – is enough to make me sneer.

                At least I had the forethought to buy a gun and a truck that wasn’t networked. Then again, I’ve had both of those stolen since that day. And I’ve driven other vehicles and shot other guns since then, too.

                After California, the Texas state government drafted articles of secession too. Then things started happening too fast. I think Oregon and Washington were the next to go. They wanted to join California to form a new “West Coast Republic,” or something like that. In the midst of this, a number of counties in Eastern Oregon decided to make Greater Idaho a reality. I think they wanted to stay in the U.S., but that wasn’t exactly in the cards.

                When California and Texas left, their exits were (at first) mostly peaceful. But in the Pacific Northwest, a pre-existing tinderbox of radical groups ready for battle exploded into open, armed conflict. Fringe anarcho-syndicalists were fighting extremist militia groups and preppers. I want to say less than a hundred people died in those first skirmishes, but I can’t remember.

                I do remember that Greater Idaho never ended up staying in the United States of America after all. Sovereign citizen groups in Idaho and Eastern Washington declared that they were also seceding from the U.S. Government (to be fair, the sovereign citizens claimed the U.S. Government had never had a claim upon them) to form the fabled American Redoubt. As it became clear that the United States of America was about to collapse, the legislatures of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas voted to join Idaho. Parts of Utah joined as well.

                You might ask, in the midst of all this, what the hell was the U.S. Government doing? Was the most powerful military in the world taking this lying down? (At the time of the crack-up, America’s military was still considered by most analysts to be more powerful than China’s, but it was close.)

                Well, I’ll tell you. At first, the president didn’t want to intervene in California or Texas. Some said he was weak. Others said he was prescient. Maybe he just didn’t want to make things worse. I think he was just caught flat-footed. He didn’t have a clue what to do. Besides, the whole country (or what was left of it) was reeling from the financial panic and the ensuing depression. The guy had his hands full. Didn’t help that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer to begin with. Our first “nonideological, independent,” president, who had campaigned as a “disruptor.”

                He was a disruptor. After him, there wasn’t an America anymore.

                By the time the first stirrings of war were hitting the Pacific Northwest, chaos was ripping across the continent. The U.S. military had enough of a time just trying to clamp down on desertions and keep their bases open. They did enter into conflict with militias in Oregon and Washington when those militias assaulted U.S. bases. But the ranks were experiencing crises all over the country and the top brass couldn’t shift any resources over to deal with the crisis in the Northwest.

                Hold on a second. You may think I’m dumping a lot of information on you. But you have to understand all of this first in order to understand my story. I promise we’re almost done with the preliminaries. You’ll just have to bear with me. The worst is yet to come. I’ll try to go quickly through that part.

                Realizing he would be unable to maintain power, the President of the United States abdicated. The Vice President immediately announced that she would declare war on the West Coast Republic and the American Redoubt and the Lone Star Republic. The Speaker of the House and several high-level cabinet officials tried to invoke the 25th Amendment in an attempt to avert war. When that failed, the House impeached the Vice President, voting before she had even been sworn in. It was a mess.

                Meanwhile, New York State and Manhattan parted ways. Manhattan formally declared independence, becoming an independent city state. The rest of the New York state legislature began looking into potentially petitioning Canada to be admitted as a province. Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Vermont reportedly made rumblings to that effect too. The Canadian Prime Minister quickly came out with a statement that under no circumstances would Canada be accepting any delinquent U.S. states. She deployed the Canadian military to police Canada’s southern border as thousands of refugees began fleeing the U.S.

                Faced with a political succession crisis, a complete breakdown within the military, and also insolvency, the U.S. Government stopped making any attempt to rein in states that wanted to break away. Within months, a new nation of Appalachia had been formed, along with a Second American Confederacy in the Old South. There was talk of a new Great Lakes Republic. Alaska quickly announced its farewell, too.

                After that, it got hard to keep track. For several years, the borders and centers of power fluctuated so rapidly that it was impossible to pin down at any one moment an accurate map of continental North America. There were small wars and fights over nuclear material and skirmishes over land and who was in charge of a given location. There were warlords and terrorists, and I think that was when the first use of a nuclear device by a nonstate actor occurred. It was the United Separatists of Greater Florida, I think, and they blew up Miami.

                What was left of the U.S. Government managed to claw out a small fiefdom around Washington D.C., but the rest of the country cracked up into warring duchies. There were no laws. There was only chaos. At that point, I was just struggling to survive. Everything between my 17th birthday and my 23rd was a blur.

                I think it was around the time the president abdicated that China invaded Taiwan. Obviously, the U.S. Military was unable to come to Taiwan’s aid. When it became clear to the world that nations could act with impunity, without any repercussions from the U.S., the globe went crazy. North Korea invaded South Korea. Russia invaded the Baltics and Ukraine. The Russians would’ve taken Poland, but the combined threat of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and a coalition of other former NATO-members convinced them to stand down. They settled for small land grabs and cyber disruptions.

                The Middle East exploded as Iran and Israel took the gloves off. Soon, much of it was engulfed in war, and European nations were debating whether or not to send troops. Since they had their own economic depressions and some fringe nationalist groups to deal with, none did.

                U.S. Military bases around the world collapsed as soldiers deserted in high numbers. Bases in Africa and parts of Asia were overrun by local populations. Military bases here in the States became sources of conflict as some servicemembers deserted to join their families, others joined local militias, and a few remained loyal to the Constitution and the government they had sworn to uphold.

                I stopped paying attention to anything going on outside of the U.S. at that point – I think most Americans did. Or former Americans. We had too much trouble at home to bother with what was happening on other continents.

                We had a new kind of refugee crisis in what was once America: swarms of refugees leaving. Some died in the cold forests of Canada. Others tried to make it across the sea to Australia and Japan. I believe China actually took over the state of Hawaii, along with much of the Pacific, but I can’t remember. The Chinese control it now and they have a frosty relationship with the Austro-Japanese alliance and with India. Some American refugees fled to Europe. They were turned away. Most developed nations began shutting down their borders.

                The economic and political fallout was only just beginning. The entire world went through a period of destabilization. Global GDP bottomed out. Upheaval hit even the richest countries. Warlords made power grabs across the developing world. It was a boom time for terrorist organizations and organized crime.

                Nuclear material and warheads began falling into bad hands. American fiefdoms squabbled over them and many were lost. Some were later used. Within a year, the idea of preventing nuclear proliferation was a joke. Nukes had been proliferated. It was impossible to say which nations and organizations possessed them and which did not.

                But forgive me. I still haven’t introduced myself yet.

Read Chapter 2 here.