by Steven Smith
"Does anyone know much about bikes?" asked Alex, stepping through the door onto the shards of broken glass.
"I had one when I was a kid," said a voice from the back.
Alex nodded. "Very helpful."
The store was large, with hundreds of bicycles from expensive racers to small training-wheelers with little baskets. Accessories and action posters hung from the walls and ceilings, and shelves were lined with helmets and other supplies. One row of cruisers toward the front had toppled over, either from wind coming through the broken-out windows or a kick from a previous visitor.
Alex saw a pennant hanging from the ceiling toward the rear that said Mountain/Terrain and waived the rest forward. "Okay, guys, it's Christmas morning. Take your pick."
"Everybody grab a couple of spare tubes for your size bike, too," said Aaron. "And a tire pump."
The chain that had been run through the frames to prevent theft was quickly cut by one of the scouts' bolt cutters and within half an hour all three teams were formed up in the parking lot checking out their bikes and bringing the tires up to proper pressure with hand pumps.
"You want us to stay here or go back to the church?" asked the base team leader as he walked up to Alex and Aaron.
The brothers looked at each other.
"We can just go up Mission Road from here, but that puts us farther away from them if they go back to the church," said Aaron.
Alex nodded. "Yeah, but if they stay here, Mike and them won't know where any of us are. Plus, the church is high ground and easier to secure."
Aaron nodded. "True. That’s the better choice."
"I agree," said Brandon. "Best to keep everything as close to the original plan as we can."
"Okay," said Alex, looking around, then back at his brother as an idea occurred to him. "How many bikes are left?"
Aaron shrugged. "Thirty or forty mountain bikes, probably. Plus, a whole bunch of others."
Alex turned back to the base team leader. "Load all of them you can into the truck and the bus. Don't bother with the fancy racer stuff, just the stuff that would be useful out our way. Kids bikes too, if you have room, and all of the spare tubes and patch kits you can find. Then head on back to the church. We'll stick with the plan."
It took them another half an hour to make sure all the bikes were squared away, and they mounted up and headed north.
8
Barre Magan Samatar rested his hands on the concrete half-wall that surrounded the balcony and looked out over the expansive manicured grounds below him. Men dressed in white trimmed bushes and groomed flower beds, careful in each of their movements under the watchful eyes of the ilaalada guriga, the house guards, lest they commit an infraction that would incur the wrath of the ever-watchful sultan and result in one of the many punishments the guards administered with frequency and relish.
His eyes rose above the massive pine trees that surrounded the grounds to a sky as clear and blue as he remembered from his homeland, and he imagined all of the land that lay beneath the sky ready to be taken now that the gaalo, the infidels, had lost their technology. The shell that had once been St. Cloud smoldered on the near horizon, and the even more massive destruction that had been the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul lay farther to the southeast.
He returned his attention to the slaves tending his garden. They had been an easy people to tame. So trusting. So giving. They had welcomed him and his brethren into their midst, providing them with homes, food, community programs and, most importantly, tolerance. And he had used the blindfold of their tolerance to work against them from within their own country, their own city, their own homes. When they had welcomed him again after he had gone back to his country to fight against their own sons and daughters, then returned, he knew that there was no limit to their naivety, their weakness or their self-loathing. Such people deserved to be subjugated, for they were slaves at heart.
He turned at the giggling of several of his children as they ran out onto the balcony playing a game and he stood still, smiling with pleasure as they circled him, attempting to hide themselves in his robes. Their laughter filled his heart with joy and reminded him that his jihad would bring this new land under their future authority.
The children ran off squealing and he looked back to the south.
His brothers in the faith had done well in Iowa, Nebraska and northern Missouri. Their centers and communities had been ready when the great blessing came, and within a few weeks the unbelievers had dissolved into frantic refugees in their own land, struggling to survive from one day to the next, their once-great society a shambles.
Eventually, fear and the threat of starvation had brought many to the faith as converts, though he knew that their belief was no more genuine for their new religion than it had been for their old. Others had attempted to resist and were slaughtered. The fair-haired daughters had been brought in to bear children for the brethren as second and third wives if they were agreeable, or sent to be sold at the market in Iowa if they were not.
The towns with colleges and universities had been the easiest, so filled with those who had been taught to despise their own culture and heritage that they not only welcomed but celebrated anyone or anything that joined them in their hatred of that culture and heritage as they proudly advanced the insane notion that their strength came from diversity and partnership with those unlike them.
How often had they been warned? One of their own presidents had stated over a hundred and fifty years ago that America's demise could only come from within. He, himself, having seen the commitment and ferocity of their warriors in his own country, had doubted that America could ever be brought down until he had arrived in Minnesota posing as a refugee and seen how much of America's policies were driven by the softest and least competent of its people. Then, he knew it was possible. And, when the great blessing had occurred, he gladly accepted the calling that he knew was his.
He turned to the East, still smiling. It was time for prayers.
9
Force watched as one of his crews surrounded a house where they had seen movement at a second-floor window. Movement sometimes meant an animal, but he had learned that movement on a second floor or above almost always meant people.
They were coming close to Troost Avenue, the western edge of his area of control, and he thought back to where he had started after his return.
The “hood” had had few resources to begin with and had quickly become a wasteland of violence and human misery. With no government, men killed each other with even greater frequency than before, and women and children fared worse, the former being seized by men and the latter often being abandoned to die of starvation, exposure or as collateral damage of the adults' violence against each other.
Disgust had risen up through the layers of apathy he had developed over the years, and anger had erupted from his belief that the current suffering of those he again started to think of as his people stemmed from both the injustices and mis-guided social programs under which they had been forced to live for generations. But within the chaos, he had seen opportunity. He knew that he could not bring the madness as a whole under control, but he could make his own small world more stable, little by little, and he would do it by doing what he did best - killing.
At first, he killed at night and in secret, watching the streets for the shadows that flitted between houses and listening for the screams and wails that penetrated the darkness, each announcing another instance of human suffering. He rarely arrived before the depravity was either over or beyond the point of making any difference for the victims, but he slaughtered the slaughterers with a relish that filled his soul, and each morning he returned to his hide to sleep a deeper, more contented sleep.
That had changed one day when he was awakened by screams outside the building he had secured as his own fortress. Looking out the window, he had seen a woman standing in the middle of the intersection trying to hold three men at bay with a stick. Two young children clung to her
in terror, clasping onto the only safety they knew, but hindering her efforts to protect them.
The scene had made him think of his own mother trying to protect him and his brothers against a world that seemed to always be against them. She hadn't been able to, and she had died while he was in prison, but she had tried.
Enraged, he had picked up the long piece of angle iron he used on his night-time forays and went into the street. So intent were the men on the woman that they did not see him until the first swing of the angle iron opened up the back of one of the men's skulls, dropping him to the street twitching and spraying blood from the horrendous wound in his head.
It had not taken long, his rage having overcome him, and the three soon lay in the street lifeless, the blood pools and splatters from the ferocious onslaught covering the intersection.
He had held the blood-covered angle iron out in front of him, seeking another target, when the tip came to rest on the woman's face. He saw the mixture of confusion and terror in her eyes, heard the crying of the children and saw the blood slowly traveling down the length of the iron toward his hands.
He had lowered the iron and looked at the woman. "Do you have a man?" he had asked.
The woman had shaken her head, her eyes never leaving his face.
He nodded toward the children, a boy and a girl. "Do they have a father?"
The woman shook her head again. "Gone."
He nodded in understanding. That had been the norm even before things had changed. "You have a man now. They have a father. Come with me."
He had taken them back to his hide and fed them, the food only slightly lessening the woman's fear but easing the children's greatly. He had watched them as they ate, imagining what they had been going through, seeing himself and his brothers in the boy and a sister he had only heard about in the girl. "What are your names?" he asked.
"Jasen," answered the boy, trying to sound brave.
"Jada," said the girl quietly, edging closer to her mother.
"Yours?" he looked at the woman.
The woman held his gaze, wary but strong. "Sarena."
He watched her for a moment, seeing if she would falter. She didn't. "How have you survived?"
Only then did she lower her eyes for a moment, but quickly raised them again to look at him unflinchingly. "God has protected us."
He looked at her in near disgust. His mother had talked like that, but he had seen very little proof of it in their lives of hardship and suffering. "He wasn't doing a very good job out in the street."
She looked at him for a moment before answering. "He sent you," she said simply.
They had rested throughout the day as he kept watch and talked throughout the night. There were others, she said, though she didn't know how many. Some families. Some groups of women with their children. Some groups of men who preyed on the first two and fought against each other.
She said they had lived on whatever food they could find, which wasn't much, then on dogs and cats, then rats and racoons. They had drained water from hot water tanks and caught rain in buckets. But these efforts were providing increasingly smaller results and she didn't know what they would do when they couldn't get enough to live.
The children had fallen asleep shortly after dark, and she shortly before sunrise, but he had stayed awake thinking. He had watched their faces as they slept, and by the time they awoke he knew what he should do.
He had opened cans of corn, lunchmeat and ravioli with meatballs to give them something to eat, each of them sharing his one spoon, before taking them with him to implement his plan.
They had walked back into the intersection where the three bodies still lay, beginning to off-gas in the sun. Several large black birds picked at the gaping wounds and he swung the iron to clear them away.
He stood in the middle of the intersection, raised his arms out to his side, the iron still extending from his right hand, and spoke.
"I am The Force!" he yelled, his booming voice echoing off the houses and buildings around him as he began to turn slowly in a circle. "Women and children, you will be safe with me. Men, you can either join me in the daylight or meet me in the night when I will kill you. Decide!"
He stayed in the intersection for about an hour, repeating his invitation about every fifteen minutes. No one came, so he took Serena and the children back to the building by a circuitous route before sleeping through the day.
He went out that night scavenging.
The next day was a repeat of the first, but on the third day two women with four children came out and joined them. On the fourth day, several more women with children and several men came forward.
Within a week, their group had outgrown the building Force had started in and he moved them to a stone church on Linwood Boulevard. The corner stone said the church had been built in 1919, and the massive stone structure was exactly what he needed; large, impressive and easy to defend.
The move, in addition to his daily intersection invitations, had resulted in more and more people coming to him, a positive coupled with the challenge of feeding them and leading them.
He had addressed the first by assigning the men into teams to scour every house, building and vehicle for food. He explained to them that, as men, they were responsible for the survival of the women and children, by both providing for them and protecting them.
An increasing amount of food items began coming in, from forgotten snack machines in businesses that had been quickly abandoned to candy bars and snack crackers found under car seats to canned food unexplainably left in cupboards, drawers and garages. He had wondered at first why any food had been left behind, then came to the conclusion that the violence had been so explosive and so complete, many had died before they had used up their food, and that same widespread violence had drastically diminished those searching for it.
The house searches revealed another food source - rats. It had been difficult to catch them at first, but Serena had showed him a trapping method she had used, and the results had been good. Getting the men to kill and process the rats for food had been another hurdle that Serena had helped with, and protein had soon been re-introduced into the diet of the growing tribe.
He had dealt with the second challenge with rules and discipline. He had seen how the prison gangs of all races had functioned smoothly and productively under strong leadership and strict rules with swift and decisive discipline, and he made his rules clear. Children would eat first and would be protected and nurtured. Neglect of a child would result in banishment from the community with the child staying under the community's care. Abuse of a woman or a child would result in death. Starting a fight would result in banishment. Injuring another would result in death. Men and women would treat each other with conspicuous courtesy and respect, addressing each other either with the honorifics of Mr. and Miss, or the familial brother or sister. Laziness or slovenliness would not be tolerated.
The days started at sun-up. Children were fed, some men began scavenging runs while others remained to guard the church and make repairs, and the women cleaned the church until it was gleaming, then taught the children from the books in the church's library. By late afternoon, the men returned from their runs, put all of the collected items in a large common room for the women to organize, then washed up for the communal dinner the women prepared. After dinner, they would tell stories about their lives, their family histories and the hopes they had for the future before turning in to bed.
Force watched over it all, and the community grew.
One day, when he was passing the open door of the church library, he looked in and saw Sarena reading a large book. He had watched her for a moment, then asked her what she was reading.
She had looked up at him, her dark eyes seeming to hold a hidden knowledge that drew him in. "It's a book about the history of this church," she had said, her voice sounding to him like warm caramel. "It was built between 1912 and 1919." She looked back at a page and traced some lines with her finger.
"It says that the mahogany in the sanctuary had first been meant to make rifle stocks for the army, but when the war ended it was diverted here to build the sanctuary."
She had looked back up at him, saying nothing more until he had simply nodded, not knowing what to say.
"God can turn man’s evil into blessings," she said quietly.
She had waited for him to say something, and, when he didn't, she asked if the community could begin starting and ending its days with a prayer.
He still didn't answer, but simply nodded. And the community continued to grow.
10
Alex reached the top of the hill, slowed down and button-hooked to a stop to watch the teams coming up the hill behind him. He didn't know that he was only a block from the police station where Jim had stopped on the day of the event, but he was glad to have an excuse to rest.
The rest of the scouts were spread out over several blocks, only partly due to tactical considerations - the other part being a broad spectrum of experience on bicycles. Still, they had covered in twenty minutes what would have taken a couple of hours on foot, and the added speed had not only benefited them time-wise, it made them more difficult targets for anyone wanting to take a pot-shot at them - at least on the down-hills.
They had seen no movement since leaving the bike store. Like everywhere else, cars sat abandoned along the streets, trash lay where it had blown across unkept yards and houses gave off a general feeling of emptiness. Whether they were all actually empty they had no way of knowing, but their task lay ahead and they didn't take time to check.
"How much farther?" asked Aaron as he pulled up and stopped next to his brother.
Alex pulled a map out of a side pocket and found their location. "This is 75th Street and the turn-off into the country club is at 71st Street." He looked down Mission Road. "Should be right down there."
