And Thy Mother

by John Bromley

  In the “Second White House,” Buck Keller and Mike Wilkins were briefing General Chambers and “Dirk” Tedeschi, who had arrived earlier. The tank they had been following had succeeded in crossing the minefield and blowing a hole in the inner Wall, though it had taken many shots to do so. Even then, the hole did not go all the way to the ground, and the two officers had to climb over the pile of debris to enter the Ghetto, but they had wanted to be present for this historic telecast. The other soldiers of the unit and their Secret Service captives were busy taking the hole down to ground level so that the vehicles could pass.

  “How do I look?” Jim asked Angela as he nervously adjusted his tie for the fifth time. His uniform tunic had been left in the command tent outside the Wall when he had been “shot,” but General Chambers had been good enough to bring it with him.

  “You look wonderful, Jim,” Angela reassured him again. “So many medals,” she added in awe. “What are they for?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” he answered as the general and President Thompson stepped into the doorway.

  “Show time,” Chambers said, and the four people headed toward the sitting room where the camera crew had set up. As they approached, they could hear the reporter Miguel Johnson already on the air, telling the viewing audience that the telecast was in fact originating from behind the Wall, and that a “special guest” would be on the show.

  They could see that not everyone who had been invited had arrived yet. As he led Thompson to the front door, Jim saw several troops standing guard. Mike and Cynthia were also standing on the porch, waiting for the Mike’s father, who was coming down the path with a lady whom he had met and befriended that afternoon.

  Suddenly a shadowy figure emerged from the corner of the next building over. He did not make the same mistake he made at the Department of Education. No small talk this time; instead, Ted Billings simply raised his Uzi and raked the pathway and the front of the house with gunfire.

  Jim immediately stepped back through the door, unconsciously shielding Angela’s body with his own, but realized a second too late that he had lost his grip on the President. Captain Wilkins instantly fell to the floor of the porch, forcefully pulling Cynthia down with him. Moans of agony could be heard from the path, as Mike and the other soldiers prepared to return fire.

  Then Billings himself cried out in pain. Sam, anticipating that Ted might be stupid enough to try something like this, had stationed Peter behind a bush to the left of the path. When Billings raised his weapon, Peter once again attempted to shoot the gun out of Ted’s hand, but this time the bullet actually went through Ted’s palm, and the Uzi dropped to the ground.

  Ted, now with a broken right arm and a hole in his left hand, looked around quickly and saw Army troops with guns drawn aiming at him from all sides, except the way he had come. He ran back that way and disappeared into the gathering darkness. The troops prepared to give chase, but Sam stopped them.

  “No need, boys,” he told them, “he ain’t going anywhere.”

  The entrance to the “Second White House” was a scene of mass confusion, and the TV cameraman, attracted to the front door by the commotion and somehow managing to protect himself and his equipment, was broadcasting all of it to the nation. Jim had too many other concerns to worry about telling him to stop.

  The people outside the house had not been as lucky as the camera. Not everyone had survived the assault intact.

  The President had been hit.

  CHAPTER 55

  Medical personnel, both Army and female, attended to the wounded. The President was fortunate; he had suffered a flesh wound in the arm and was able to enter the house under his own power.

  The two most seriously injured had been the ones on the pathway, the most exposed to Billings’ gun. They were carried into the kitchen, which became a makeshift emergency room. The elder Wilkins did not have his son’s Army training and lightning-fast reflexes, and had been struck by four rounds. His companion, also hit several times, was the female Dr. Waddington, whose story Jim had heard that afternoon and had asked her to share it with the nation.

  “What do I do? What do I do?” Johnson said in a panic, hovering around the edge of the crowd

  Jim took charge. “You go down the hall… I don’t know… splash your face; have a smoke; take a few deep breaths. Collect your thoughts. We’ve got the situation under control.”

  “Yeah, but I was going to introduce you—”

  “I’ll handle that,” Jim responded, taking the man firmly by the arm and pointing him toward the bathroom. “You just… go.”

  Jim sat down before the TV camera, which had returned to its assigned place.

  “I am sorry that all of you had to see that,” he told the audience. “What you just witnessed was not staged—it was a very real assault by Edwin Billings, a highly deranged member of the Secret Service. Clearly, feelings run very deeply, in some people at least, concerning the information you are about to hear.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Colonel James Parker, and I’m happy to say that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. My ‘execution’ yesterday morning, for which I must apologize, was staged in the hope of precipitating the kind of reaction you just saw, but it seems we seriously overestimated Billings’ rationality.

  “In my last debate with the President, or more accurately, Mr. Billings speaking through the President, I mentioned ‘the Wall’ and challenged the men to reveal to you what goes on behind it. Tonight I, and the President if he is able, plan to do exactly that.

  “In fact, as Mr. Johnson mentioned, at this moment we are behind the Wall. I have asked some of the people who live in here to join me tonight.” As he said this, the camera panned back to show several women standing behind him.

  “These people are human, just as we are,” Jim continued, “but they are different from us in that they are called ‘females’. They are the other half of the human species. The younger ones are referred to as ‘girls’ and the older ones are called ‘women’. Let me briefly explain to you how they came here, and how ‘here’ came to exist at all.”

  Jim began his narrative by recounting the accidental release of the virus in Phoenix seven hundred years earlier. He told of its symptoms, its rapid spread, the efforts of Dr. Russell Norman and the CDC to contain it, and their ultimate failure.

  He raised many eyebrows with the true history of Kenneth Thompson, and how he was not quite the “saint” that he had been portrayed by “Thompson history” to be. He told how the man seized power, declared martial law, and with the guns of the Secret Service behind him, had his opponents eliminated, abolished democratic government and created the dictatorship that still governed the country today.

  This led Jim to tell the story of “the Wall” itself. He told how it had been constructed by the government, rather than ancient Native Americans, to complete the long-forgotten “Great Isolation,” and how that tragic event was the true basis of “Freedom Day.” He made sure to emphasize the point that the “Isolation” had been completely unnecessary, ordered by Kenneth Thompson despite the fact that the virus he was “protecting” the men from had mutated to a harmless state almost twenty years before the Wall was complete.

  Jim also mentioned how other nations of the world had been pressured to implement similar measures “for their own protection,” and how Thompson made it clear that their failure to do so would be “unwise.” Facing what they perceived as the very real threat of invasion by an American military on high alert, those countries quickly complied. In fact, Parker pointed out, according to recently uncovered documents, the female enclave for Europe was constructed near the Polish city of Auschwitz, previously the site of another infamous concentration camp.

  Next on the list was the history of “Treatment,” and how the Thompsons felt it necessary to remove the knowledge of the existence of women from the male consciousness “for their own safety.”

  Here he mentioned something that he had
only learned that day. It seemed that a few women, knowing that they would never see their families again and would probably be forgotten by them, had come up with a way to at least claim some kind of moral victory. They had the middle names of their children changed to their own maiden name, and made their husbands promise to ensure that this “family name” was carried through all the generations to come, even if the offspring could not know why.

  “In at least two instances that I know of,” Jim commented, “that promise was kept. I had asked Dr. Waddington to be here tonight since her family was one that took part in this ‘silent rebellion’. She mentioned during our conversation that she recently was asked to take sperm samples from a Secret Service official. She did not feel it right to do that with her own brother, whom she knew by his resemblance to her, and by his name – G. Waddington Wellington.

  “I have been fortunate to meet my own mother—an experience that every person should, and must, have. From her I learned that my middle name—Reynolds—has been passed down through our family for that same reason.”

  All over the country and all over the female compound, men and women sat glued to their chairs. Taken as a whole, the story sounded preposterous; but then, so did the story of Nazi Germany. In both cases, you had to wonder how a so-called “advanced” country could allow something like this to happen. But Jim’s script, prepared with the help of Sam, Angela and his mother, made the pieces fit together so logically that almost no one found himself disbelieving it. Very few people even noticed that, despite being as brief as possible, it took Jim over ninety minutes to get through the background material.

  At this point, Jim asked the “powers-that-be” at the network to give him a two-minute break. When the camera was turned off, he sat back to take a sip of water. At this point, the President entered the room. His wounded arm had been bandaged. He shyly shook hands with Parker and Miguel Johnson and took a seat to Jim’s left. Sam Swenson and “Buck” Keller followed close behind.

  “What have you got, Sam?” Parker asked.

  “Just thought you’d like to know that that bastard Billings is dead.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Jim allowed, adding, “I just wish it could have happened about two hours sooner. Was it one of our guys that got him?”

  “No,” Sam replied. “You heard that I had a meeting with all the SS goons in the Ghetto this afternoon, right? I told them that there was an imposter inside the compound, and that they would know him by his broken arm and his insistence that he was the ‘late’ Edwin Billings.”

  “So, you made Billings the ‘special assignment’ for his own men?” Jim chuckled.

  “Yep, and a little while ago they cornered him out by the well around the corner. He was trying to get the cover off so he could pour a vial of poison into it, but with a busted arm and a shot-up hand, he was having a devil of a time.”

  “In that twisted mind of his,” Jim theorized, “he probably thought he was doing everybody some kind of favor by sending the human race that much closer to extinction.”

  “Anyway, they found forty rounds in his body before they stopped counting. Now I gotta figure out who gets the ‘reward’ for doing him in.”

  “Serves him right. Good job, Sam,” Jim said, shaking his comrade’s hand.

  He then turned his attention to Captain Keller. “What news from the medical front?”

  “Good and bad,” Buck answered. “On the good side, that Dr. Waddington looks like she’ll pull through. And, as you can see, the President just got banged up a little.” His tone became more somber. “But… Mike’s dad didn’t make it.”

  Jim’s expression mirrored Buck’s as they both grieved for their friend at the loss of his father, the last victim of Edwin Billings.

  “Cynthia’s with Mike now,” Buck concluded his report.

  “That’s good… that’s very good,” Jim said. “Tell Mike how truly sorry I am, and that I’ll be down to see him as soon as I finish this.” Buck nodded and left. A few moments later, with the message delivered, he returned and took a seat near the back of the room near General Chambers.

  When the camera came back on, Jim sadly relayed to the nation the news that Buck had given him concerning the elder Mike Wilkins’ death. After a suitable period of silence, he returned to the topic at hand.

  “We are telling you all of this now because, finally, we can. Until very recently, the entire area of the ‘Wall’ was blanketed by electronic jamming devices, making any kind of communication between this compound and the outside world impossible. For hundreds of years, no attempt was made to breach this barrier, for the same reason that no one tried to contact the women—if you don’t know there is something to look for, you don’t go looking for it. But now, thanks to the efforts of...”

  Here Jim looked over his shoulder, preparing to acknowledge Sam, but saw Swenson adamantly shaking his head and mouthing the words, “no names.” Jim understood and faced the camera again.

  “...my colleague Sam and his team of electronics experts, who have labored for years to defeat this system, tonight’s broadcast is possible.”

  He referred to Sam’s nonexistent “team,” understanding that people would have an easier time believing that the system had crumbled under the assault of many men rather than the determined efforts of one individual.

  “The second reason we are revealing all this is that we must. In fact, we may already be too late.”

  Jim then went into an explanation of why the women were merely “caged” rather than exterminated. He told how each gender is vital to procreation and the continuation of the human race. His explanation of the sexual act, and the role each person plays in it, was quite generalized and in some cases erroneous, for he did not yet fully understand all the specifics himself.

  Jim revealed the presidential decision that only capital criminals, those men already sentenced to death, would be allowed to enter the Ghetto and commit another “crime.” Contributing to the sperm bank is not illegal, he pointed out to the audience; looking upon a woman is.

  He related the amazing story of “Stork,” and how President Robert Thompson turned a basic human function into a profit-making “proprietary technique” for the well-to-do only. His brazen plan succeeded to the extent that the Thompson family was by far the richest in the country, with a family fortune in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

  He spoke of the “assassin Edwin Billings” and his misguided attempt to increase the sperm supply while simultaneously lining his own pockets by creating “Section Fifteen,” the only law ever passed that contained a punishment but no specific crime.

  “The procreation processes I’ve mentioned obviously work, since we are here,” Jim went on, “but they don’t work nearly well enough. The problem is that the number of men contributing to the gene pool is far too small. At no time in the past seven hundred years, in any country of the world, has a majority of men been involved in the procreation process. But that is what we need if we are to survive as a species.

  “With limited diversity in the gene pool, intelligence diminishes through the generations. News footage from seven hundred years ago, recently uncovered by Army units in the Midwest, show that American men actually went to the moon, and not just once, but often enough that the event became almost routine.

  “A fictional TV program was discovered in that same vault, which depicted a group of men—and women—of the future, traveling to nearby stars and dealing with alien cultures. The people who created the characters of Captain Kirk, Spock and their ‘starship’ felt that within three hundred years, given the rate of technological progress, such things might be possible.

  “Yet, their ‘future’ is now our dim past, and we are nowhere near accomplishing feats like these. Our own space program died because we no longer had enough intelligent people to sustain it. Without the ability to work in space, our satellite system failed, spelling the end of the Global Positioning System, the global economy, and world-wide communication.
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br />   “We have evidence of this lowered intelligence level right here in this room,” Jim said. He turned his head to his left and the camera followed him. “I’m sure you recognize the man next to me as William Thompson, the President of this great nation. I am glad to see that your injuries were not too severe, sir.”

  “Me, too,” Thompson replied in his thin, reedy voice. “I just wish everyone had been so lucky.”

  “As do I,” Jim concurred. “Would you like to tell the people of North America what is going to happen next?”

  “The general told me what you have in mind,” Thompson replied, never once looking into the camera, “and I think it’s a good idea.”

  “And that is why those three documents are on the table?” Jim asked, referring to the leather-bound portfolios placed in a pile between Thompson and him.

  “Yes, I’m going to sign them,” the President replied, nervously playing with the pen he planned to use.

  “What we ‘have in mind’,” Jim addressed the TV audience, “is nothing less than the complete and total reintegration of the male and female societies and the destruction of the ‘Wall’ which separates them. This first folio contains the law which will allow this to happen.”

  Thompson took his pen and waited while Parker placed the document in front of him, open to the last page. He then, very slowly and deliberately, signed his name.

  When he sat back in his chair, Reunion had become a reality.

  “Now,” Jim intoned, “the real work is about to begin.”

  CHAPTER 56

  The second document that Thompson signed ended the “Treatment” process, repealed all the other laws which made it a capital crime for a man to look at or speak about a woman, and granted amnesty to any man who had done so in the last fifty years.