The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  The “land of milk and honey.” Uncle Patrick and Aunt Vivien were missionaries, and I knew that phrase came from the Bible—it’s the way God described the Promised Land to the Israelites.

  So the Republic was supposed to be my Promised Land.

  Chapter 8: Jackson

  Three days later, our ship finally approached the harbor of the Republic. The grayish water was slick with oil and full of debris, and the smell of dead fish permeated the otherwise fresh sea air. I watched the shore approach from the deck, the indistinct shoreline sharpening as we approached. Fishing and cargo vessels stretched along the dock as far as the eye could see. I had never seen so many ships at once.

  Beyond the harbor, the landscape was a vast sea of gray, matching the gray clouds in the sky. I saw no trees at all, at least not close to the shoreline. It looked like the entire city was paved.

  When we got close enough to the shore, our ship entered a queue, waiting our turn for the man in the orange vest to signal our approach. I was struck by how skinny the man was: his clothes hung on his frame like he was a mannequin. He looked much too old to be working that sort of job, too.

  The slats of the dock were rotted, propped up with makeshift beams to keep them from collapsing. Presently the vested man coaxed and guided our captain into one very precise docking location with a baton.

  Once we pulled into the harbor, I joined the assembly line to pass cargo down onto the docks, careful of where I stepped lest the wooden slats give way. Nobody else seemed to be the least bit concerned about the stability of the slats, I noticed. This seemed strange to me… but I figured they must know something I didn’t.

  After we had unloaded, I shook hands with the captain and Jeremy.

  “If there’s ever anything I can do for you…” Jeremy murmured gruffly.

  I nodded. “Don’t mention it.” I released his hand and turned, making my way down past the harbor with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  The streets were cracked and worn, and in places the pavement buckled like something pushed it up from underneath. At the first intersection I came to, two gas stations reeking of petrol stood opposite one another, with matching smashed windows and peeling paint. Yellow tape with the word “caution” wrapped around the entire perimeter of one of them. Next door, a shanty pub with a sign in the window blinked “open.” A few midday drifters sat outside, unwashed and depleted-looking.

  This was hardly the type of place my mom had described in her letters. Surely the entire Republic couldn’t look like this.

  I retrieved my cousin Jennifer’s letter from the pocket of my coat and turned it over to the back side, where she had printed her address. Supposedly she lived about an hour and a half from where our ship docked—this was where she’d told me I should arrive if I could. She said something about sending her a comm when I arrived to let her know I was on her way, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. As soon as I could find a fellow traveler, I planned to ask how to send a comm, and also request a ride. That was how we did things in Frjósöm, after all: to us, there was no such thing as a stranger. Even in Reykjavik, for the most part that was how it was. I’d been raised on hospitality. It never occurred to me that this might not be the way of life everywhere.

  But I didn’t find any travelers—only shiftless creatures all wearing the same haunted expressions. I averted my eyes from every one of them, trying to suppress my growing sense of unease. Block after block of abandoned buildings bore sun damaged shadows where a sign once had been. ‘Bob’s Deli,’ one of them said. ‘Antiques,’ said another. A rat scurried into the shattered glass of a storefront. Just inside, I saw a vagrant grin at me, two of his front teeth missing.

  Shacks of stucco and metal lined the road a few more blocks up, protected by metal chain-link fences and bars on the windows. Yards of weeds, overgrown grasses and trash made them look abandoned, but brightly colored plastic junk and rusted spare metal parts implied that they were inhabited after all. Decrepit vehicles cluttered up a few of the driveways. A pair of children played in one of the yards, laughing and squealing. I took a deep breath when I heard them, relieved. A sign of life.

  An old man with a hump in his back crossed the street ahead of me, walking an emaciated dog. Emboldened by the children’s laughter, I approached him.

  “Excuse me!”

  The old man looked up at me, and his face broke into a broad grin that caught me off guard. “Good morning, young man. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  I blinked at him before I smiled back, cautiously. “Yes. Of course. I was wondering, could you tell me where I might find Eucalyptus Drive?” I pulled out Jennifer’s letter with her address on it and handed it to him.

  The old man stared at the address for a long moment. “Don’t believe that’s anywhere around here,” he said at last, handing the letter back to me. “Sorry ‘bout that!”

  I thanked him anyway, folding the letter back up and tucking it inside the pocket of my coat as the man walked away, whistling to himself.

  I should have been impressed at the old man’s determination to make the best of things, but something about his manner just seemed… off. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I walked for close to a mile, fighting the overwhelming impression that this Republic was like a creature on its deathbed, about to breathe its last. Even the air felt thick with chemicals.

  A small crowd bustled near a grocery store and a repair shop of some kind. The people were diverse, and yet everyone I saw looked like the old man: dressed in rags, hollow cheeks and incongruously cheerful expressions.

  Suddenly a crackling noise drew my eyes upward to an enormous flat screen, so out of place amid the desolation. An anthem sounded, and the dark screen lit up with the image of a stylized eagle. When the anthem finished, the eagle disappeared and the screen showed a plain brown news desk and a white background. A pretty woman with a blond bob cut gave the camera a plastic smile, and a title appeared underneath the picture: Jillian Reynolds.

  “Good afternoon, citizens,” she said, “and welcome to this evening’s national news syndicate, where we strive to bring you up-to-date stories from all across this glorious nation.” She took a long breath, indicating a subject change; while she did so, a photo appeared in the upper right corner of a bloated woman with piggy, bloodshot eyes. “Kelly Ferdinand nearly lost her seven-year-old daughter Gina to a rare blood disease,” said Jillian. “Fortunately for her, the government stepped in to save the day.”

  The screen cut to a live interview of Kelly beside a little girl with eyes too big for her face, a stark contrast to her mom. “I could never put a price on my little girl’s life, but the treatment would have cost twice my life savings,” Kelly sniffled, dabbing her eyes. “There was just no way I could pay for it. I applied for loans everywhere, trying to borrow from my neighbors… but then a wonderful agent came to my door one night”—here the camera cut to a clean-cut man in a gray suit, sitting on the couch next to her—“and he told me the government would pay for her transfusion and the whole operation!” Her voice broke and she buried her face in her tissue, hugging little Gina to her side fiercely. Gina glanced off camera and grinned mechanically, as if someone stood there holding a sign that said, ‘Smile!’

  The camera cut back to Jillian when the interview finished, and she gave a practiced compassionate smile. “In other news today, political prisoner Lyle O’Connor was released from New Estonia by order of the Potentate himself. Lyle has been held in prison for the last three months because of his loyalty to the Republic.” A photo of a disheveled, angular man with bright red splotches on his cheeks appeared in the corner of the screen. Then Lyle appeared in person beside Jillian, now wearing a different outfit than she wore in the previous segment of the broadcast.

  “How does it feel to be free?” Jillian asked him, and pushed the microphone into his face.

  Lyle shook his head. “I—can’t even describe it,” he murmured. “There is no p
lace like home. I can’t express the depth of my gratitude to the Potentate and the Tribunal. It’s like having a whole new lease on life.”

  I glanced at the faces around me, rapt with attention, and tried to ignore the prickling sensation at the back of my neck.

  The camera cut back to Jillian. “Now I’ll turn it over to our very own Kathryn Brandeis for stories of political prisoners and detainees who have threatened the security of our nation, and met their just ends. Kate?”

  The camera panned to a striking young woman with long dark hair and bright blue eyes.

  “Thank you, Jillian,” she smiled. “Yesterday, 29-year old Sean Kennedy was executed for collaborating in a conspiracy against the government. According to insiders, he made threats on the life of our Potentate, accusing him of unspeakable crimes. Today I have with me Sean’s sister Jackie.” She turned to the young woman beside her and said, “Jackie, what can you tell me about Sean?”

  The other young woman gazed back at the camera with chilling indifference. “Sean was paranoid,” she said flatly. “He made claims—ugh, I can’t even repeat them. But he was convinced, and he tried to tell anyone who would listen. Government agents tried over and over to calm him down and help him see reason, but he lashed out physically if they got too close. He was in reform school as a kid, but it never did him any good, I guess. I’m sorry he couldn’t have been rehabilitated, but he deserved what he got.”

  I watched Kate fidget. She looked unnerved, too.

  “I see,” she said, recovering herself. “Well—we are all glad that the Republic is a little bit safer.”

  She cut to the next story, interviewing the neighbor of a woman who apparently became convinced that the government had murdered her husband. The woman attempted to flee the country to join forces with known enemies of state, Kate reported.

  But she seemed distracted to me. Her heart wasn’t in this.

  When she’d finished her reports, Kate concluded brightly, “You can all rest easy, knowing that your government is doing everything in its power to maintain our security and prosperity.” She flashed a plastic smile at the camera and held it just a beat too long until the news team cut back to Jillian, who finished up the broadcast.

  Kate’s relief to get off of the platform was almost palpable.

  Who is she? I wondered.

  I felt someone’s eyes on me from behind, and I turned around to see the crowd jostle, parting before a man in a charcoal gray suit, just like the one worn by the man beside Kelly in the broadcast.

  “You there!” he called. He weeded his way toward me. When he came in closer range, he said, “Sir, I’d like to ask you to step to the edge of the crowd, if you would.” It was not a request.

  Baffled, I allowed him to guide me, ignoring the stares.

  “Where are you from, sir?” he asked me, hand clamped on my arm like a vice.

  “Iceland. I just came in on a cargo ship today…”

  “I see. Are you planning to stay in the Republic for awhile?”

  “I came for my mother’s funeral,” I told him, confused. Then I realized how different I probably looked from all the rest of the citizens. I wasn’t malnourished, nor did I wear that same doe-eyed, hangdog expression they all seemed to share. “Maybe a week, but I won’t know how long until I find my cousin’s house, and I don’t know how far away it is or how to get there.” Suddenly I realized this was an opportunity to get the information I needed. I pulled out the address from Jennifer’s letter and handed it to the man. “Could you tell me where this is, please?”

  The agent read the paper, his face impassive, and then he glanced back up at me. “Sure,” he said, his tone clipped, “that’s not too far from here, maybe a half hour drive. I’ll take you.”

  That seemed odd. Jennifer had said it would take an hour and a half, but what did I know?

  I followed him.

  Chapter 9: Jackson

  “I’m Agent Dunne,” the man told me once we got to the edge of the crowd, stretching out a hand with a terse smile. His lips were plump and red, in stark contrast to the thin skin stretched over the rest of his face.

  “Jackson MacNamera,” I told him, shaking his hand and simultaneously wondering whether I should have withheld my last name. The man turned his back on me again without another word—never a full step ahead, but close enough to keep an eye on me in his peripheral vision. I followed him deeper into the city, each block looking the same as the last.

  In my head, my uncle asked the sort of questions I knew he would have asked if he’d been there: “What’s his angle? What does he want with you?” In Frjósöm, I’d have told my uncle that he was being too cynical. People didn’t need a reason to help each other out. They just did it because it was the right thing to do.

  But Uncle Patrick was an American. Maybe he knew something I didn’t— after all, he grew up here.

  Well, he grew up in the United States, I corrected myself, which this apparently wasn’t anymore. Did that make a difference?

  “I understand the United States became the Republic of the Americas a few decades ago,” I called out to the man half a step ahead of me. “I don’t know much about how that happened. Could you fill me in?”

  The agent stopped, turned around, and gave me an odd look. Then he turned back and kept walking. Finally he said, “I thought you said your mother lived here.”

  “She sent me away when I was two,” I said. I left out the part about her letters describing its magnificence.

  Agent Dunne waited half a beat before he told me, “The United States economy collapsed two decades ago, as you said. The Potentate took over and rebuilt it from the ashes.”

  I didn’t think this was much of an answer. “Who is the Potentate?”

  “He is a great man,” said Agent Dunne matter-of-factly. “Probably one of the greatest who has ever lived. He leads the Tribunal, who implements his wishes and delegates to agents like myself. He is generous and egalitarian. Because of him, no one is in need.”

  It sounded like a rote response. I looked around at the concrete and shattered glass, boarded up or covered with plastic to keep out the elements. At the citizens who brushed past me: all skin and bone, some with bloated cachectic bellies, all with starry eyes. Was he not seeing what I was seeing?

  “No one is in need?” I repeated. “Maybe not in other parts of the nation, but this area looks pretty rough.”

  The agent turned and fixed me with a glare that stopped me in my tracks. “What did you just say?”

  I stared back at him, really confused now. “Um,” I said, gesturing all around me. When he didn’t, I added, “Look around.”

  “I am looking,” returned the agent, his voice clipped. His tone told me that the conversation was over.

  I held my tongue for several more blocks, running through the list of possible explanations in my head, none of which made any sense at all. Was this some kind of don’t ask/don’t tell game, to which I didn’t understand the rules? Was it a social experiment?

  At last we rounded the corner of yet another dilapidated block, and a gleaming black vehicle greeted us—the first sign of wealth since I’d seen since I arrived. Agent Dunne walked toward it purposefully, and I moved to the passenger side.

  “Not there,” Agent Dunne barked at me, gesturing to the backseat.

  Oh-kay, I thought, moving one door down and climbing in behind him. “Do you want to see the address again?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  The prickling sensation on the back of my neck returned, warning me that something was wrong—but I still didn’t know what.

  Agent Dunne had no call for anything other than disinterested benevolence toward me. I was only a stranded traveler. Wasn’t I? I tried to remember if I’d done anything that could possibly be construed as illegal since I’d gotten here.

  Bedraggled trees whizzed by the windows as Agent Dunne sped along on the mostly empty streets. I watched them, perple
xed. “My aunt and uncle always compared the United States to the ‘land of milk and honey’ in the Bible,” I murmured. “I guess things have changed a lot in the last few decades.”

  I saw the agent look at me in the rearview mirror. “What are you implying?”

  “Um.” I didn’t really see how he could miss my meaning. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

  “Clarify what you just said,” Agent Dunne ordered.

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect,” I said. “I’m sure that whenever a new government takes power, it takes awhile to grow the economy. I don’t know how these things work. I’m sure it’s much better than it used to be.”

  “What exactly is it that you see, Jackson MacNamera?” the agent demanded.

  What do I see? How do you answer a question like that? “Well, there’s… a lot more concrete than in Iceland,” I began, thinking perhaps he wanted a comparative analysis. “Most of the buildings… I mean, it’s great that there are so many businesses, but most of them look like they’ve either already failed or they’re on the brink of failure.”

  “And the people?” the agent demanded.

  They looked like they were on the brink of starvation, but I didn’t think that would go over well, since the agent was already clearly offended. “They are—quite patriotic. Making the best of things. That’s to be admired.”

  “What do you see when you look at them?” he pressed.

  I exhaled. “Maybe they’re just… genetically thinner,” I offered.

  Agent Dunne said nothing else for a few more blocks, to my relief. Lying for the sake of politeness was definitely not my forte.

  Finally the car slowed in front of a three-story gray building with multiple windows, and the car descended into a parking garage instead.

  “This isn’t my cousin Jennifer’s house.” I didn’t really know that for sure, but it didn’t look residential to me at all.

  “I’m afraid we need to ask you a few questions first,” said Agent Dunne. He got out of the car and gestured for me to do the same.