After America: Chapters 3 and 4
A Novella
Photo by Cavell L. Blood from FreeImages
Chapter 3
A spray of mud and blood ripped through the smoke as I heard the explosion and felt it’s concussion. It registered somewhere, but I was too busy to respond. I saw the flash and I saw fire and I saw a hand detached from its owner flying through the air. My back hit the ground before I realized I’d been thrown and my ears were ringing.
I rolled. I found myself on my feet. Mentally, I checked my body for injuries. None that I could discern.
Then something stung my arm and I hit the ground again. My head rang and I looked at the sky. So crisp in that morning air. My left arm hurt. I was glad it was my left. My right, to my own surprise, still held my gun.
Before I had time to think another thought, I saw an axeblade traveling in slow motion towards my face. It fell like the hand of fate, guided by a mortal arm – whose owner may have been an agent of fate, or its pawn, or perhaps a deterministic actor in his own right.
As it drew closer to my face, I realized for the first time all morning how cold the air was. I could feel the frost against my back. I noticed my ragged, panting breath. If this were a film – for all that that would change the inevitable plot arc that seemed to control my life – a bell would have been tolling in the background. Instead, I heard screams and yells and curses and gunshots.
But let me back up a moment.
On Thanksgiving Day, our ragtag army had gathered for an evening meal, officers and Congressmen and militiamen. A few of our snipers had gone out and shot some wild game, so we had fowl and squirrel and even venison. It rained that day. Perhaps we had little to be grateful for, but the human mind has enormous ability to normalize the strangest of circumstances. Our little gathering may have been sparse, but we had the good cheer that can only come from companionship with other human souls. Our fellow-feeling had been solidified by sacrifice and combat. And despite our humble conditions, we had a good time. Maybe all a man needs to be happy is a little fellowship and conversation.
December brought a cold snap. We drilled and did calisthenics to keep in shape and we dug a trench and made a mud wall to fortify our camp. We built a wooden fence atop the wall and set up the few machine gun nests we had. My beloved had ordered us to dig in for the winter.
In the center of our camp, we had an anti-aircraft turret. Aircraft were few these days, but we worried about drones. Quadcopter technology was a little easier to acquire than C-130s. Any fool with a good kitchen and a desire to do us harm could strap an improvised explosive to a quadcopter and fly it into our camp for some serious damage.
Our lot was bleak that December, but we made what efforts we could to be festive. Somehow, Christmas mattered more when all that tied you to America before the fall was a few old traditions and memories of happier days.
Corporal Khalid cut down a spruce tree and dragged it back to the center of camp. He and several of the regulars set it up and I helped string some colored beads on it. Not sure where those came from. It cut a sad sight for a lover of traditional Christmas trees. But even the most cynical Americans came to appreciate it. Someone carved a little wooden doll out of a knot of wood. We used a bit of wire twine to affix that to the top of our tree, but it looked a bit more like an agent of chaos than a messenger for the good news. Maybe that was fitting, given our lot.
We had a duel in December. Somehow, even with the complete collapse of government and civil society, none of us had ever seen a duel. Dueling had been out of vogue in America for so long – ever since that first Civil War – that neither Colonel Westfall, nor any of the congressmembers thought to ban dueling. Which gave us all license, I suppose.
Two privates got into a dispute – probably to do with a woman – and instead of a drunken brawl, they drew up terms, appointed seconds, and set a date and time for a duel. I turned up, along with half the camp. We didn’t really expect much. But Private Reyes shot Private Ferdinand dead. We were shocked. It fell to me to administer fifteen lashes to Private Reyes, but we felt we couldn’t do anything more than that, since we hadn’t outlawed dueling in the first place. After that, Colonel Westfall let it be known throughout the camp that she would shoot dead the next man to kill another man in a duel, and that she’d shoot both of them if both survived. We didn’t have any more dueling after that.
But perhaps the most interesting thing that happened in December was the return of the tic-tacs. Or the return of a tic-tac at least. That’s what we still called them then. Nobody had thought much about them since the collapse of the American constitutional order. But there was a period in the early 2020s when they were spotted almost daily, sometimes over major population centers. Enough people saw them – and recorded them with high-definition cameras – that governments worldwide could no longer dismiss them. There was talk of aliens and extraterrestrial visitors.
On the evening of the winter solstice, a large tic-tac-shaped object appeared over our camp. It hovered in the clear sky for more than two hours, prompting many of us to stare and speculate.
I’d seen tic-tacs up close on four separate occasions in my life, so I knew what they were. Once or twice, I’d also seen them in the distance – one of those times near an Air Force base in the Florida panhandle.
The tic-tacs had first showed up sometime in the years before or after 9/11, I think. It was before I was born. Navy pilots used to see them on qualifying flights off the East and West Coasts. They followed American aircraft carriers. Later it was confirmed that the Russians and Chinese had covered up similar incidents.
These sightings were different from previous UFO sightings in that they were taken seriously by policymakers and military brass. Also, FLIR cameras caught what appeared to be movements that defied the known laws of physics. There was an investigation into the incidents, resulting in a report that raised more questions than it answered.
But the sightings didn’t really pick up in earnest until after the COVID-19 pandemic ended across the world, at which point the U.S. debt crisis was already beginning to spiral and talks of secession were turning serious.
For a period of a few years – when I was in early high school, right before things fell apart – sightings became so common as to cause serious scientists to argue publicly that we were being visited by extraterrestrial intelligence. Influential politicians began speaking openly about their belief that the tic-tacs were operated by aliens. Militaries and intelligence agencies worldwide devoted massive resources to getting to the bottom of the tic-tacs.
But nobody had any idea where they came from or what they were doing. Research, observation, political debate, social-media meme-making, rank speculation among ufologists, all were equally unable to produce any new information. We still just didn’t know what was going on.
Before investigations could get too far, however, the debt crisis and the attendant problems tearing apart the fabric of American civil society took over. Soon, nobody had attention left to focus on weird-looking objects in the sky, especially not when there wasn’t any new information about them.
So, we moved on. As the nation broke apart and wars and refugee crises and pandemics began to rage across the globe, tic-tacs remained a commonplace sighting. But they faded in frequency. Within three years, not only were men not watching the skies, they weren’t seeing any more tic-tacs. While I have no idea – to this day – what happened in China or Africa those next few years, I doubt they saw any either. North America certainly didn’t see many.
That changed on the winter solstice. Some few of us gathered to gaze at the craft – for that is what I believed it to be – and to debate its origins and purpose and portent. I believed – and events vindicated me – that this was a sign of things to come. Whatever they were, the tic-tacs were back.
Since I had the most experience with them – as I mentioned, I’d seen the objects up close on four different occasions – my comrades listened with rapt attention as I explained what I knew about them, and what I believed. I’d been interested in them since the very first time I’d seen one in the sky, when I was six years old and living in Chicago with my grandfather.
“That one was a bit distant,” I told my audience as we gazed at the thing – which refused to move or do anything.
“But I saw it pass over our townhouse and head over the lake. Dunno where it was going. Maybe some nuclear silo or powerplant. A lot of ‘em seemed to end up at one of those back in the day.”
“You said you were with your grandfather, right?” asked Declan.
“Yeah. I told you he could be a strange guy sometimes. This was one of those times. He got all funny. Got this funny-looking expression on his face. I asked what the thing was, and he said, ‘destiny.’ He was always talking about destiny and shit. He said something like I’d learn someday. Then we went home and I pestered him until he told me the story about the Nimitz and the report released by the DOD and how they’d picked up after that.”
“When’d’ya seeone next?” grunted Blakely all in one breath.
“Well, I think I saw a few in the distance a couple times as a teenager or in middle school. I know I saw one up close when I came down to DC for college. Right above Lau – that’s a library. It was sorta creepy being so close to the Exorcist steps. But the weirdest time was when I was 13. Woke up in the middle of the night and looked out my bedroom window and one of those damn things was just sitting there – hovering like. Like Close Encounters or whatnot. Like it was watching me, I guess. Man I got kinda scared ‘cause it didn’t move. No sound. Nothing. Thought maybe it might abduct me. But, obviously, it didn’t.”
“How do you know? Maybe they wiped your memory?”
“Do you think they abduct people?”
“Dunno.”
“I mean have you heard any credible reports of abductions? Anyone say anything you thought wasn’t horseshit? Usually, it’s somebody who’s clearly batshit crazy saying the gray people stuck somethin’ up his ass.”
“Ha yeah. They always say that. No. I’ve never heard nobody say anything about an abduction that sounded remotely intelligent. But who knows? They probably do.”
“They don’t abduct people.”
Margaret – Colonel Westfall – had an eerie way of coming up on people unannounced. I think she knew the effect it had. Everyone stopped staring at the tic-tac and stared at her.
“They’re watching us. They’re here to observe. Without interfering. They haven’t made up their minds about us, yet.”
It was also eerie how authoritatively she could speak – about almost anything, to be honest. But perhaps that was what drew me into her orbit in the first place.
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer that. Instead, she looked me in the eyes and said, “They aren’t the cause for all the chaos these past years. Some people have raised that theory, but it’s false.”
“Have you been communicating with them or something?”
“They haven’t been communicating with any humans. Not with world governments. Not with any scientists. Not with secret military organizations or intelligence agencies – back when there were such things as scientists and intelligence agencies outside of Asia and parts of Europe.”
We talked amongst ourselves a little more and she stood apart from us, looking at the tic-tac for a few minutes. When she departed, someone – I think it was Jeffrey or maybe Jerrie – asked me, “Hey what about that last time you saw one? You said there’d been four times – up close.”
I stared off in the direction Margaret had headed, not looking at the thing in the sky. “That was after things had started to go to shit. It was near DC, somewhere in Maryland or NOVA maybe. Can’t remember precisely. That was when they were getting fewer and fewer and they stopped coming. Maybe it was the last time anyone saw one.”
“What happened? Were you alone?”
“No.”
I was quiet for a second, still not looking at them, and then I said, “Margaret, Colonel Westfall I mean, she was there.”
Nobody said a word. We all had a mixture of fear and awe towards Margaret, even Bartley. I shook my head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” I said, and turned away to get back to my tent before they could coax more information out of me.
Chapter 4
Before I could walk away, Dudley grabbed me in a headlock. He was one of those overly-physical guys who expressed himself better in violence than he ever could in words. I was lucky that he didn’t try to choke me.
“What’dya mean?” he bellowed.
“Yeah, what the hell was that supposed to mean?”
“You can’t just leave us hanging like that. The Colonel was there?”
“Alright, alright,” I relented, “Let me go, Dudley. I’ll talk. I won’t try to leave.”
“If ya do try, I’ll getchya agin,” muttered Dudley as he released me.
Massaging my neck, I said, “Okay. So it was right when Colonel Westfall was first trying to pull people together. Right around when the first major blackouts started hitting the Eastern Seaboard. Weird to think we thought that was such a catastrophe at the time.”
“Ha, I’d take blackouts now.”
“Shut up and let the man talk.”
I went on.
“I walked out of some building or other. Again, I can’t remember exactly where. And one of those tic-tac things was just hanging in the sky, pretty close to the ground. The closest I’ve ever seen. Looked like it was maybe twenty feet off the ground. It was small, too, smaller than I’d realized. Looked to be maybe ten feet across and thirty high. Maybe a foot or two thick, but I didn’t see it on end.
And she was standing there. Alone. Looking at it. Maybe two meters away. She wasn’t moving or making any noise, just looking at it. But she looked like she – what’s the right way to say it – she looked like she understood it. She wasn’t hypnotized or anything. Just watching it. No fear.
I think I walked towards her and tripped and called out. The thing bolted. She turned to look at me and I saw it – I swear it shifted or something and it was suddenly a speck in the sky. Like an idiot, I hit the ground, expecting some sort of shock wave. Pretty quickly, I realized nothing was happening – and that if there had been, I wouldn’t have had time to dive for the ground, it probably would’ve blown us into a wall – and I got back up. Colonel Westfall was looking at me – you guys, this is going to sound dumb, but you know what I’m talking about, you guys know how she looks at you in a way that I’d guess I’d describe as perceptive, like she really sees you…”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re not making much sense but we get the gist. It’s a bit creepy. Go on.”
“She didn’t say anything, just waited for me to speak. I probably said something dumb like, ‘what was that?’ cause I always ask dumb questions and never think of anything smart to say.
I want to say that she said, ‘you know the answer to that,’ and I think I said, ‘what were you doing?’ She said – and I remember this bit, she didn’t answer my question – she said, ‘They’re not doing anything. Not anything harmful at least. They’re observing us. They’re going away for a while – at least, we won’t see them.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked her. She didn’t answer that either. She did say, ‘They seem to have purposes that the human mind cannot yet fathom. It is too early to say whether they mean to help or hurt humanity, but I do not think they mean us ill.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked. And she never answered.”
“Holy shit,” Reggie yelled, “it’s gone.”
We all turned to look. The space in the sky where the tic-tac had been was now empty as if nothing had ever displaced it.
“Must have been while we were talking. We were all looking at Ward.”
“I was watching it,” said Reggie. “I blinked and it was gone.”
“Damn things move fast. They disappear and come and go at will – like spirits or devils.”
“That’s a load. Spirits?”
We began bickering and continued doing so for about an hour until everyone realized that morning was coming and we’d best get some sleep.
There was one other thing I’ll relate about that incident. It was the next day, I was sitting in on one of those staff meetings Colonel Westfall had asked me to attend. The subject of the tic-tac came up, and there was not much consensus or any new information about what it had been doing. But General Radboud did say something that stuck with me.
“It is commonly believed,” he said, “that they have an observer walking among us. This individual, whoever he or she is, looks like a human, speaks and acts like a human, and for all that we know is a human. Nobody knows where the observer is, nor does anyone have an idea of who it is or what this individual is doing. But the observer is here to interact with us, and perhaps to teach us and guide us.”
Nobody said anything, but I thought I knew a lot about those things, and I’d never heard this bit about the observer before. It gave me chills. Don’t know what the old man meant when he said, “it is commonly believed.”
That was a week ago.
We had planned to celebrate a small Christmas on Christmas Day. Just a meal, the way we’d done for Thanksgiving. But General Radboud had announced he’d let us use the last of our stores of alcohol, which meant we were all looking forward to Christmas Day evening.
Instead of a celebration, we woke up on Christmas morning to a horde of monsters raiding our camp, going from tent to tent to slaughter sleepers. They had painted faces and rode horses and old motorcycles and a couple pickups. Not sure where they got the gas. Some were tattooed and others had nose rings, but all of them were filthy. They stank and the smell washed over our camp along with panic. They even had some kind of old truck outfitted with machine guns, like something out of Mad Max.
They came from the west and nobody’d ever seen or heard of them before. We didn’t know what they were, but there’d been reports of new tribes and gangs out on the plains. One of them must have come east.
They surprised us and quickly overwhelmed our defenses. I walked out of my tent into a war zone and within seconds had my hands full trying to stay alive. It was a free for all, bodies everywhere, guns, spears, strange clubs and sick-looking hooks. I saw things you can’t unsee.
These creatures – who had once been humans – fought like animals. They had little regard for pain – perhaps they had a stock of amphetamines – and they would tear and gouge and bite and growl. I saw one of them bite a man’s thumb off, and I don’t think he spat it out.
There were hundreds of them. Perhaps fewer than there were of us, but they had the element of surprise and their makeshift assault vehicle gave them an advantage. I’m not sure how many I killed. I lost count. They set fire to some of our tents and they had grenades – or maybe they’d stolen some of ours. The rest you know.
You’re probably wondering by now what happened to me. Or perhaps you’re perceptive and you’ve guessed.
So, there I was, lying on my back, staring up at the arm of fate guiding the axeblade of eternal doom straight towards my face. But, as you may remember, my right hand still held my gun. Christmas Day, 2031, was not the day fate had selected for my death. Or perhaps free will isn’t an illusion and I did have some small deterministic power to, if not completely select my own fate, at least make a sally against the unconquerable. I delayed the inevitable. I would live to die another day.
My right hand came up and shot the owner of the axe-hand. At this close a range, it blew a hole through his shoulder, detaching his arm from his body. The axe hit the ground somewhere past my feet. I shot him again in the spine to make sure he was dead.
I’d learned to tune out the sound of my own gun over the years, but in this moment, it reverberated through my eardrums and reached my brain. It was like hearing my own shout into the oppressive vacuum, yet knowing that the shout would not last but the vacuum would go on forever.
As I climbed to my feet, I saw Colonel Westfall – Margaret – leading a charge up the lane of our tent city. Dudley was at her side, touting a machine gun he’d ripped out of one of the nests. They swept past me before I could fully understand what was going on, and the marauders began falling back.
I found myself caught up in the charge. We rallied most of our survivors together and the gang, or tribe, began falling back before us. We chased them to the tree line and then let them go. They left their pickups – which were out of gas – and their truck. One of our guys had blown up its engine.
When we let them go, we turned back to our camp to tend to our wounded, our dead, and our dying. Most of us had some medical skills, but two of our medics had been killed. Not many of our wounded survived.
A hundred or so that had been with us fled the camp that afternoon. More would follow in the coming days. I didn’t begrudge the deserters. We’d lost so many that day it would have been hard to carry on. Half our “Congress” was dead. Who had we been kidding anyway? We’d numbered just over a thousand total. Were we really going to rebuild America?
It’s strange how loss hits you. I saw Reggie’s body and Blakely and felt nothing. Someone told me Declan had been blown up. Still, nothing.
Then I saw that our flag had been torn in half and the pole fractured and I thought of their lives and that they were no more and I thought of what we’d been fighting and dying for and it hit me that it was all over and I began to cry. As I surveyed the wreckage of our camp, tears poured down my face and I wept as I assumed I would have had I been alive to watch 9/11. Only this time, it really was the end.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Margaret. She didn’t say anything, just let me weep bitterly. When I was through, she told me that the few remaining officers were gathering and she needed me there.
Though I knew what she had meant, my heart climbed up again from its depths when she said, “I need you,” even if it was followed with that mundane word, “there.” I dried my eyes and followed her.
General Radboud sat with a bandage around his head. Blood stained some of his white hair and mustache. He was smoking a cigar. I wondered how the hell that bastard had gotten a cigar out here, let alone how it had survived the fighting. But he had it and he smoked it as if it gave him life.
We all sat. Nobody said anything at first. Then Margaret said quietly, “Today is still Christmas Day.”
We all looked at her.
“There isn’t a Christmas anymore,” said Captain Wong, “it doesn’t exist. Except in the past and in our minds.”
“We lost friends today,” said Colonel Westfall, “but we’re still alive. They didn’t kill all of us.”
“It’s over,” said Captain Wong, “it’s over. We lost. We’re done. It was failed from the beginning but we can’t go on. There’s nothing. Nothing.”
“I know they’re deserting us,” she said, “you can too.”
“If I were smart, I probably would,” he responded. “Who were we fooling? We had what? A thousand?”
He swore an obscenity that I won’t print here.
“Bruce,” Margaret said.
Captain Wong apologized.
“You don’t have to apologize. We lost…”
“We lost everything. There’s no us, no America, anymore. It’s gone. It never really was there, not after the Nationalist Federation took Washington from us. How many do you think will be with us by February? Two dozen?”
“Perhaps.”
Wong swept his arm out at the camp as if to indicate that its destruction was a mirror reflecting the world’s destruction, with the burnt tents the bombed-out cities and the still-burning fires the radioactive zones that had once been metropolises. He shook his head as if to ask what the point of continuing on was.
Margaret was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It is true that we suffered a great loss today. And that perhaps our cause was doomed from the start. But why does that change anything? What are we fighting for? A nation that no longer exists? No. We are fighting for our future. And for our survival. And for the survival and future of the human race.
What do we have to live for? There isn’t a part of the world today that hasn’t seen nuclear war. Those few nations left with some semblances of order are all ruled by dictators who murder their own people. The rest of the world is fought over by power-grabbers, warlords, tribes of marauders like the cannibals we encountered today, autarkic survivalists who will kill anyone they don’t know personally, terrorists and petty feudalists, doomsday cults who believe their day has come, and other nihilists whose only goal is their own survival. If we are fighting merely for our own existence, then we are no different from them. And if that is the case, then you are right, Captain Wong, and there is no reason to go on.
But we do have something to live for.
We have a reason to go on. It is as good as any. Because we believe there is still something redeeming about human life, and therefore that there is some reason for the human race to survive. But if the human race is only to survive in slavery and the vilest despotism, if that is to be our fate, then we may as well lay down and die. For the human race is not worth preserving without preserving that in it which is worth preserving.
What are we living for? A dead nation? No. We are living for an idea. An idea that human life is worth saving because human life is good. That at their best, human beings are a light in the darkness. That there was a time when life was good. A time when people were happy and free and rich and lived lives of flourishing and they loved each other. That existed. It happened. And we are fighting because we believe that there can be a time when that way of life exists again.
And even if it never does, that is a future worth living for. It is an idea worth dying for.”
Captain Wong looked at the table. Finally, he grunted and looked at the Colonel.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve always felt I couldn’t ever just lay down and die. There’s something in me that wants to live. You speak of the human race. It’s lost so much. It’s lost everything. It’s hard to believe in the face of all that that we matter, humans, us, me. But I’ve always felt that, to me at least, my life mattered – even if it didn’t to the universe. So, I guess what I’m saying is… I won’t be going anywhere. You’ve got as good a reason to live as anything else I’ve heard. Might as well keep myself tied to this mast for a little longer.”
“Thank you, Captain. One final thing. You said that we had lost everything. And that may be so. Perhaps we have nothing left to live for and nothing left to love. Perhaps our only reason for going on is to pretend that we still do have those things in a vain attempt to give our lives meaning and justify to ourselves our desire for self-preservation. But I believe you are wrong. I believe we do still have something.
We have each other. And we can love each other. And while we have each other and love each other we can dream of a future in which we can live and love in freedom from the fear that others will come to kill us and take what we have.”
She looked right at me when she said this and my heart leapt and I loved her as I never had before and even as I knew that we would never be together. She made me want to live and for an instant I could dream of the future she described, a future in which she and I could actually contemplate bringing new life into this bleak world.
And I looked away and looked off at the horizon where the sun was beginning to sink and its light burned our fallen and it illuminated our survivors who were digging graves in which to bury our slain and I wondered to myself whether it was setting on us and our ragtag following, or on a once-beautiful nation, or on the world and the human race, or whether it was nothing but a flaming ball of hydrogen hurtling through a mindless void with neither significance nor design.