American Apocalypse (9 page)

I was in the bathroom shaving, thinking about how my money was running low again and that I needed to figure out what I was going to do next. When my laptop finished booting, it was set to bring up my browser with CNN displayed. From where I stood, the bathroom mirror reflected the screen. Two-thirds of the CNN page was taken up by a photo of a mushroom cloud. Cold chills ran through me. There was no way this was going to be good. I sat down on the bed, my half-finished shave forgotten. The freaking Arabs had gone ahead and done it—they had nuked Tel Aviv.

I started reading the news. There wasn’t a lot of information yet, or the Israeli government wasn’t releasing it. Whoever had done it had timed it for just before nightfall. It made for a spectacular photo, and at least three people had filmed it. Jeebus: YouTube, Twitter, and CNN better have upgraded their servers lately, because they were going to take a pounding. This was the kind of event that you didn’t want to watch and then sit around thinking about by yourself. I went in search of company. Apparently,
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way; the clan break room was full. Even the owners of the motel had wandered in and were sitting with Night on the sofa.

It dawned on me: This was more of an extended family than a true clan. The owners were not being nice to strangers; they were helping out their family.
Damn
, I bet Night was their daughter. My excitement over my analytical skill was quickly reduced by the cold splash of history playing out on the screen in front of us. Someone had hooked a laptop to the big screen and was using that to display the info feeds. Night was somewhat reserved in her greeting, while the two ninjas gave me polite nods and big smiles. So did the other two kids, who I hardly knew or even talked to.
What the hell?
Something was going on here under the surface. I knew I would figure it out or someone would explain it to me sooner or later. I gave the owners a polite nod. I guess I was going to have to mentally start calling them “the parents.” I looked around for a place to sit. One of the ninjas hopped out of his seat next to Night and offered it to me. That was nice of him.

I asked Night, “Have the Israelis retaliated yet?”

She shook her head. “Anytime now is my guess.”

The screen was showing aerial views, probably from a satellite, of Tehran, Mashhad, and Damascus. People were streaming out of them, apparently in anticipation of the Israeli payback. This was going on in cities all over the Middle East.

“They have any idea of who is responsible?” I asked her.

“No. The Americans, the Russians, and the UN are all analyzing the fallout, looking for the signature.”

“I bet the Israelis already know. They are just clearing airspace and tanker support with us.” I rubbed my eyes.
“Did anyone think that maybe we should be watching this from the basement?”

Mama-san surprised me by answering. “No, we are okay—this time.”

Okay
, I thought,
she seems pretty certain
.

Night, much to my surprise, reached over and patted me lightly on the arm. “You’re a good guy. I am sorry for laughing at you yesterday.” Everyone in the room—including Mom and Dad, to my surprise—nodded in unison.

“Okay, whatever.”

We watched the death of Tel Aviv for a while—watched the first responders in their protective NBC suits; saw the images of the dead and wounded; saw people who looked okay now, but who were walking dead, because of radiation. People were wailing as the government officials of various Middle Eastern countries took turns denying any involvement.

A report from Saudi Arabia had someone on who was promising a billion dollars in aid. Then it happened: The Israelis and the Americans were reported to have landed at purported Pakistani nuclear storage facilities and begun to raid them. Predator raids and Tomahawk missiles were hammering the Pakistani border area, as were landand carrier-based aircraft. The Israeli air force was reportedly busy in Iran. Multiple strikes were being reported in numerous areas, mostly suspected uranium enrichment or possible bomb assembly areas. There were also minor air strikes by the Israeli air force reported in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The Israelis had decided to run the table while they had the opportunity.

Hours later, just as I was getting up to go back to my room, the Israelis nuked Islamabad. As Pakistani cities
go, it was not huge—not like Karachi and Lahore, which had almost twenty-five million people combined. But it served to make the Israelis’ point to the world’s governments:
Control your borders and your people, or you pay the price.
This did not all play out in a matter of hours: It took days. I would sleep, get up, and sit next to Night while we all ate soup and watched it unfold. The Iranians at first had a very muted response. Then it was as if someone had flipped a switch or shot the current leadership, because they did a complete turnabout and came out swarming like hornets.

The Iranians had lost any chance of real surprise, and they were eventually slaughtered. One U.S. army battalion did get overrun. That was primarily from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Iranians took an estimated four thousand casualties taking out that battalion. The United States may have been on its way to declaring bankruptcy but there was still a lot of inventory left on the shelves. Later, I read it was old-school five-hundredpound bombs dumped from B-52s that really wreaked havoc on the Iranians. They were being led by someone who concentrated all their forces into one area as they rolled over the hapless American infantry battalion. That did not have a history of working out real well against American air power.

Life went on. The craziness level ratcheted up a notch. There was no point in going into Washington D.C. and spending any time in the Federal Triangle or the Mall area, unless you either had a government ID or didn’t mind standing in line to get a visitor’s pass. Getting a visitor’s pass meant having a retinal scan, getting fingerprinted, and giving up a DNA sample. Government workers were
having the same done to them and then having it downloaded to a chip on their IDs. The D.C. tourism board ran commercials and covered the metro system with print ads to promote it: It was called the Freedom Pass. European tourists really loved it, especially when they found out they had to pay for it. Not that there were that many tourists anymore. Europe was busy having its own version of a nervous breakdown.

On another level—the one most people lived at—the systematic failure of so many things that people took for granted was beginning to intrude on lives that were already stressed.
Calculated Risk
, my favorite blog, had called this well in advance, as it had so many other things that were happening. The supply chain was breaking down. Most people had no clue how fragile the entire mechanism was for keeping people fed and clothed. The “Just in Time” delivery system was predicated on the assumption that each part of the machine would never break down. Major cities did not keep food stockpiles. At best, they had two days of food on the shelves or in transit at any given moment. The problem was, the machine was beginning to break down. Why? I am not smart enough to completely understand everything that was happening, but two of the main drivers were the lack of liquidity and the death of the dollar.

Wal-Mart was one of the first and biggest casualties. At one time it seemed invincible. It was the giant that came into small towns and crushed local merchants like the economic dwarves they were. There was only one flaw: an Achilles heel—one that was so glaringly obvious that once it was exposed, people were amazed they had not seen it. Virtually everything on Wal-Mart’s shelves came
from China, and China now wasn’t exporting anything to the United States. Since Wal-Mart stores lived by the just-in-time import model, they died by it—not a long, lingering death either. One day the trucks just quit coming. Within a week the stores began to look like a poorly stocked rummage sale. There was another side effect. Wal-Mart was the largest U.S. employer. Once you had that pointed out—and you realized the company
made
nothing—you began to grasp how truly insane things were and the scale of what we had let happen. Of course, by the time people figured it out, it was far too late.

My world, which was a tiny, insignificant piece of the big world, was rapidly changing. The government had created four zones for the metro D.C. area: Zone One was the Mall area; Zone Two was the rest of D.C., except for Georgetown and most of the NW portion of the city, which were considered Zone One; Zone Three was Maryland inside the Beltway; and Zone Four was Virginia inside the Beltway. We were outside the Beltway, barely, so we became a border town.

This had both its advantages and its drawbacks. Some days you would see the good and the bad of our location in a single day, like today. I was sitting under a big oak tree. It was two blocks south of the shelter that bordered the market parking lot. From here, my seat gave me a nice view of the shelter entrance and the market across the parking lot. Under the oak tree there were a couple of chairs, a board balanced on cinder blocks, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a broken handle. The market was mostly folding tables set up under the overhang of an empty strip mall. Sometimes it was busy; most times it wasn’t. I sat
there, my back to the oak, watching a whole lot of nothing pass by.

Max and an old man named Aly, who said he’d been a department manager at the Home Depot in Seven Corners, were keeping me company. Max had me wearing a real gun. I had shot about a thousand rounds through it and had practiced dry-firing draws until my arm felt like it was going to fall off. I didn’t like wearing a handgun: It was heavy, awkward to wear, and attention getting. Max told me I would get so used to it that eventually I would notice the weight only when it was gone. He turned out to be right. He had told me a couple months ago, “From here on in we are going to be seeing a lot of firearms; you carrying a bayonet to a gunfight is not really a good idea.” I liked steel, but what he said made sense. Plus, I could always carry both. I was carrying a Ruger Vaquero in a nice leather holster and belt. Max had gone as close to ballistic as I had ever seen him when I came back with that.

“What the hell is that? I told you to go see Sarge, pick out a gun you felt comfortable with, and see how much ammo he would let you walk away with. I expected, oh, I don’t know, something useful. Not a freaking cowboy gun from a hundred years ago!”

That last part he blasted at me at maximum volume. His face had turned red, and a vein was standing out on his neck. I was rather impressed with how riled up I had made him. “This has got to be Sarge’s sick freaking idea of a joke,” he continued. “Well, gimme the gun, and I will go find Sarge and exchange it.” The way he came down on the word
exchange
made me pretty sure what he really meant was he was going to find Sarge, stuff the gun up his
ass, and pull the trigger. He had his hand out, waiting for me to hand over my gun.

“No,” I said. We both stood there, staring at each other. “I went to the NRA building in Fairfax like you asked me too. I found Sarge, dropped your name, and he took me into the armory. I must have fondled twenty handguns. This is the one I liked.”

He stared at me and then said very slowly, “You do realize that weapon”—the word
weapon
was drawled with unmistakable sarcasm—“is a single action?”

“Yes! Isn’t it cool?” I proceeded to show him how completely idiot-proof it was. A single-action revolver can’t fire unless it is cocked. I demonstrated the cool clicking sound it made as you pulled back the trigger. “Plus, it is really easy to tell when it is loaded. Look at how well it fits in my hand, and it works for me left-handed. I shot it at the range, and Sarge said I was a natural with it. You really ought to think about getting one. After all, that Colt .45 of yours is almost as old.”

He looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Okay, tomorrow we go back to the range and you can show me what a ‘natural’ you are.”

We did, and I was. Although when he saw me wearing it I thought he was going to bite his tongue in half to avoid laughing. As if he had any room to laugh—“Mr. Marine” with his “operator” leg holster. I got a lot of stares and the occasional snicker on the street. But before long, people learned that it took a life just as easy as any black plastic, foreign-made, action-movie weapon. Plus, getting hit upside the head with what was essentially a five-inch piece of forged steel was an attention getter by itself.

It was amazing how much the pace of our lives had changed. The frenetic edge was long gone. A day would pass slowly, almost lazily, and then go into turbo overdrive in a matter of seconds.
Snap!
Five minutes later someone would be dead, and time would begin to fall back into place. Slowly, Max was becoming the sheriff of our little area and I got the role of his trusty sidekick. I say
slowly
because Fairfax County police still patrolled the area—not often, not well, but they would come through. They were not happy at seeing anyone carrying openly, but there wasn’t a lot they could say. Virginia was still an open-carry state. Plus, Max had a concealed-carry permit and usually found a way to work in his Marine Corps background.

There were a lot of vets working for the county. As we got known, they got friendlier. It helped even more when we became official. Fairfax City had its own police department. We fell within their jurisdiction. The department had been losing officers pretty steadily over the last six months since it couldn’t pay them, and they didn’t want to work for free. Last week Max and I had gone over to the Fairfax city hall and been sworn in as officers of the law—well, as volunteer auxiliaries at least. Which meant—as far as pay, health care, and retirement benefits—exactly nothing. We did get to wear a uniform when we were active, and we had credentials.