American Apocalypse (24 page)

As he put it, “They light off a building, start dancing, and once it is really burning they go at it like wild dogs.”

I had tucked that little piece of info away in the back of my head, just in case I was in the neighborhood of a Burner light-off. That was what they called them: a light-off.

A helicopter zipped past, flying low and fast and headed for the fires. I could see the lights of another one over the largest fire. Word was Homeland Security had snipers in them and they shot anyone they saw dancing around a fire. It didn’t stop the Burners from celebrating. Of course, once the snipers started working, it meant Homeland Security had decided to let the fire burn. Otherwise, if they opened up from the sky prematurely, it made life on the ground hell for the fire response teams.

In California, the Burners reportedly brought in bands to play for the crowds when they did a big light-off. Sometimes the blogger who had started the whole thing would show up and preach a sermon about the rapidly evolving Burner creed. The fire department, if there still was one, would show up to assist in containment. Often firemen and Burners were the same people. The attitude in California was burn and let burn.

It was getting chilly, and faraway fires don’t keep you warm.

I headed back to the room. Max and Night were sitting there, talking and planning. Night smiled when I came back in. “Everything okay?” she asked.

By now I knew her well enough to recognize the two levels of concern in that one question. “Sure, the Burners are out tonight. Looks like Arlington is getting fired up.” I walked over and kissed her on the cheek.

Max replied, “Arlington never settled down after Homeland Security killed those women in front of that grocery store.”

I looked over Night’s shoulder at the pages of paper in front of her, covered with lists and notes. “I see you two have been busy.”

Max casually replied, “I think your woman here is a logistics genius.” She was smiling. I liked that.

“She sure as hell is smarter than me.”

Max laughed. “Hell, that makes the both of us.”

“Look, I’m not going to be of any help so you guys keep doing what you’re doing. I am going to go see if any of the ninjas feel like playing some
Halo
. I’ll be back in a bit.”

I kissed Night on the top of her head and went out the door. I hadn’t played in quite a while. Hopefully, my account was still active. I checked the break room, but only Shorter Ninja was there. He and some kid I had seen around, but whose name I never bothered to learn, were sitting there watching a video.

“Hey.”

I got a distracted “Hey” from each in response.

“I thought you would be gone by now,” I said to Shorter Ninja. He had his pack by his feet.

“Nah, they aren’t picking me up until 9 o’clock.”

“So, what’s so interesting?”

Shorter Ninja pointed at the screen: “Burner video.”

I pointed at the other kid, “Get out of my chair.”

He popped up, grabbed a folding chair, and brought it over to sit in.

“Start it from the beginning.”

Shorter Ninja restarted it. He told me, “It’s pretty cool.” Then he added hastily, “Not that I am, like, into it, you know.”

“Right.”

It was a well-done video. You could tell there was money behind it. As with a movie DVD, you could pick the scenes or play the entire video. I selected “Light-off
Video Metal.” It started with a progressive metal track in the background. The screen filled with a spot of fire that gradually grew, bursting in a huge ball of fire as the music crescendoed. The next shot was a burning office building or warehouse. Beautiful young women who bounced in all the right places danced past the flame. Young handsome men screaming and dancing, the girls watching with parted lips. Their moves a combination of Russian cossacks and break dancers. A spoken chant, “Burn! Burn! Burn it all away!” repeated in a loop in the background. Off to the side, half-dressed girls could be glimpsed swaying in the firelight. One of them ran into the scene, grabbed one of the young males, and dragged him back into the darkness. I looked over at Shorter Ninja and his buddy. They were transfixed. The video ended with a close-up of a face. It was tough to tell the gender. The camera went in tight and ended with an eye that filled the screen. A reflection of fire raging in the iris.

I went back to the DVD menu and clicked on the button labeled “Why Burn?”

It was the blog guy in a Jesus robe. He was sitting on a rock watching the wind blow patterns through an endless field of ripe grain. He watched the wind dance while a quiet piano piece played in the background. The camera went to a close-up. He smiled and said, “Hello.” It was a good smile—a smile you could trust. The eyes were a different story. They spoke to me, and I liked nothing they said:

“Why do we burn? Why not? What are we burning? We burn money. We burn the machine that has sucked our blood, our lives, and our futures. Devoured them, and then shit the poisoned remains back into our ecosystem.
The same poison that ends up in the food they expect us to eat. We become sick and they take more money from us. They work us, poison us, milk us, and then throw us away. If we protest, we are punished, and then blamed for not giving more!”

The scenes he painted changed with each new movement of music. Each new scene combined with his voice to weave a tapestry of corruption, greed, and selfishness as his hypnotic tone rose and fell with the video stream. All of it seamlessly integrated—it was beautiful: “We must purify our world of the machine, burn it out physically. Hunt down the servants of the beasts and kill them. We must purify ourselves so we will be worthy of it.”

Okay, I got the point. I shut it down. “You guys want to watch the naked girl video again?”

I think the other kid was going to say yes, but Shorter Ninja cut him off, “No, we’re good.”

“So where did you get this?” They both tried to feign innocence.

“Don’t even think about pulling that shit on me. You know what Max said about this. Max finds out about it and I may have to shoot both of you.”

I watched both of them go into shock. The other kid’s eyes actually bugged out. It was kind of cool.

“Just kidding. Come on, guys, breathe. I don’t do CPR on males.”

They looked at each other. The other kid took a deep breath. “It’s mine.”

“Go on.”

“Some old lady came by the market trying to hand them out. No one wanted to take them. They didn’t want Max to find out because then he would send you by to fix
them. So she just left them in a stack on the ledge where the dry cleaners used to be.”

Interesting
, I thought,
I am the boogeyman
.

“So you grabbed one?”

“Yes, when nobody was looking.”

“Did you see anyone else take one?”

He shook his head: He was back to being scared. He was also lying, but I let it go.

“Okay. Not a problem. Anyone want to play some
Halo
?”

“We can’t go online anymore.”

“What?” I was genuinely shocked and dismayed.

Shorter Ninja sighed. “Net won’t stay up. You get into the game and then you get dropped, like all the time.”

This was interesting news.

“Damn. Okay. See you later.”

I headed back to the room. I knew that on the East Coast a lot of the Internet went through Reston, which was ten miles down the road. I didn’t mind the roads and all falling apart, but I always thought the Internet would be there for me.

Back in the room I found Night alone, sitting at the table studying her lists. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

“You know the Internet is acting up?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look up from the paperwork.

“Hmmm. So what did you figure out?”

“That this is a lot more complicated than we thought.”

She put the piece of paper she was studying on top of a pile in front of her.

“Sorry, I wasn’t much help. I guess I am not real good at that kind of stuff.”

Seeing all the papers in front of her was kind of depressing. Knowing you may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier is one thing; seeing it confirmed is another thing entirely. Night heard the sadness in my voice, and she watched my eyes as I took in the piles of notes. She knew what I was thinking. She stood up and extended her hand to me.

“That’s okay. You’re the best in the world at other things.”

I woke up tired the next day—I look back now and remember the next month as the “month of scavenging”—partly for the future move and partly to find food to get us through to the future.

Historians will write that it was this period when we reached the tipping point. The graves from that time will provide the punctuation to the death sentence that the collapse of the American food transportation system passed on to so many of our citizens.

It was beyond ugly.

It was Leningrad.

Except the only enemies that surrounded us were our own greed, hubris, and incompetence.

That, along with the cold, was sufficient to kill us in droves.

Constant change was becoming the norm. Max and I would make plans and then have to drop them because the situation changed. Very rarely was it for the better. Our goal was to bug out in the spring. We were going to do a phased transfer of material and people to Tommy’s farm. That was still the plan, but right now we had to figure out how to keep ourselves fed and safe. Our first problem was food: Not only were we having to feed ourselves but we were also helping Carol feed the people at the shelter.

She had pleaded with us to help at a meeting at the motel. I didn’t mind feeding her; at this point she was spending more time at the shelter than at home. The commute to Leesburg had become too difficult and dangerous to do daily. I figured it would only be a matter of time before she went home and never came back—either because she was with her family, or because she was dead.

When I showed up for the meeting, Max and Night were already there. Carol was looking a lot thinner than the last time I had seen her. She had circles under her
eyes and she was wearing a gun, the first time ever that I had seen that. She was brusque. She didn’t want to ask for help. She knew that none of us were rich in anything. But she
had
to, so she did.

We were all busy. Night was also starting to look tired, I noticed. Our nighttime activities had abated a bit. I would come in and she would be asleep or vice versa. I thought about waking her sometimes but I knew what time she had to get up, so I would just slip into bed next to her. She had given up on appearances. Papa-san looked at me like he wanted to cut my balls off for a couple weeks but he got over it.

Carol went right to the point. “I need food, and I need enough to feed twelve women, twenty children, and seven men on a daily basis. Can you help?”

We all looked at each other. I didn’t want to say anything, at least not first. I knew we could feed ourselves and we had enough to do that for at least a month. Add in the extra mouths and we would be out of food in less than a week. Plus, some of the kids needed kid food. Night was the first to speak. She did the logistics. Her family owned the motel, and she knew more than any of us how many we could feed.

“I won’t let babies and children starve while I have food.”

She left unspoken whether she was committing us to feed the adults.

Max added, speaking very softly, “Nobody gets left behind. Never.”

Carol looked at me.

I shrugged. “Not a problem by me.” I wanted to add:
Maybe you should quit taking new people in,
but I didn’t.

She started crying. Then Night began. Next thing you know, they are both crying on each other’s shoulder. I looked at Max. He looked at me. We both shrugged and left. There was work to do.

The good thing was the manpower it gave us. The women—and it was mostly women—were very good scavengers. We split them into groups. Tito, Carol’s security guy, had stayed with the shelter. He and a couple of the men from the shelter escorted groups or helped provide security at the market. We issued the men shotguns and gave them the twenty-round course on how to use one.

We had the twenty-round course for shotguns and the twenty-four-round course for revolvers. That was how many times you fired it as part of the qualification class. That class and one rule were it. The one rule was: If you were seen pointing your weapon at anyone, including yourself, in a nonhostile situation, you lost the right to carry. That usually meant assignment to day-care duty, a powerful motivator for them not to screw up.

Max and I had already taught the remaining ninja how to handle weapons. He got a lot more than the 20/24 courses. We took an entire precious day with him. Plus, I worked with him at night down in the basement of the motel. He didn’t realize that when Max would show him something, he was also showing me. We wanted him to be good because We were expecting trouble. After Shorter Ninja left I began calling the older one Ninja. He liked it and soon everyone was calling him that. The ninjas had wanted to teach us—or least me—martial arts, which they were very good at, but I didn’t want to learn. Part of it was my pride, and part was that I didn’t care. I didn’t
see any use in it for me at this point. Max had taught me some basic moves, but that seemed like an eternity ago.

I figured that people were either polite or hostile. If you were hostile, then I shot you. It worked for me. If it didn’t, well, that would probably mean I was dead.

The ladies from the shelter proved to be excellent scavengers. When I went out with a team of them I always made sure I had Rosa. Rosa was El Salvadoran and beyond extraordinary when it came to finding food or other stuff we needed. We would be driving through an industrial park and she would say, “Stop.” She would sit there for a second and then point at a building. I never saw what tipped her off, but she could find the food. If there was a lot, we would call the other groups that were out and tell them to come to our location. We could usually come up with one functioning cell phone for each group. Ninja was usually with me and I let him handle our communications. He liked that.