Southern Republic (The Downriver Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramsay, Lex

  “So if you still want my help … if you still think I can be a part of what’s important to you … that I can be important to you … I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”

  Patrick released the breath he’d been holding for what seemed like an hour and shakily filled his lungs again. He’d been convinced Olivia would never speak to him again, or if she did, would only say enough to tell him to get lost.

  Knowing how little time he had to salvage his plan for the escape of the slaves, how much still had to be done and how he so desperately needed Olivia’s help, Patrick had been close to complete despair until he’d been rescued by Olivia’s words.

  “Olivia you know I need your help … and I need you. If we get through this, a lot of things are going to change, not just in your world, but mine. I’d say it’s time to put your old life behind you, and start one with me.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to leave the S.R. after it’s over?” Olivia asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll have a choice.” Patrick replied. “If the plan goes as I hope, you’re going to need to leave … I want to bring the S.R. down, or at least that damned Assembly.”

  “Okay …” Olivia drawled slowly. “But what exactly is ‘the plan’ and how are we going to pull it off?”

  Patrick was the one who started rambling now. He told her how the Assembly was counting on them to figure out a way to get the slaves onto the high-speed trains; and how they were going to use the container cars’ sanitizing feature to gas the slaves with S-18, only to blame it all on the R.A.

  He told her how he had created a program to co-opt the satellite controls to the trains so that they ferried the slaves from the protectorates to the regional hubs. And because those hubs are all located in border states, they’d carry the slaves from there on to nearby U.S. cities where the trains normally deliver international cargo—once there to be rescued by the R.A.

  He told her how the Assembly knew that much of the plan, but that they didn’t know they’d been found out. They didn’t know that Patrick knew of the plot and how to stop it.

  Just as the satellites could be programmed to activate the trains’ sanitizer feature and loose the fatal S-18, they could also be re-programmed to recognize only his imbedded command and not the original, murderous one.

  “The problem is how to get the slaves from the protectorates to the trains.” Patrick finished, shaking his head with frustration.

  “What we need is some way to tell the slaves to go to the trains. Each protectorate has a feeder line, and they have to be centrally located so that the crops can get to the trains from every point on the protectorate. I’ve worked out that it would take some time, but even the largest protectorate’s line is walking distance away, given a few hours.” Patrick was talking to himself as much as to Olivia.

  “What’s so frustrating is that we can’t use regular tech communication devices because the slaves know nothing of them, and we can’t use written instructions because they’re mostly illiterate.” Patrick complained.

  “You know, my women’s group, the Angels of Mercy? It’s a tiresome charity for F.F.C. women with too much time on their hands. Anyway, we were talking about the very same thing just the other day. We were trying to figure out how to get the slaves to understand how to use some first aid kits we’re distributing to all the protectorates.

  “Finally we just decided to train a few of them to teach the others.” Olivia started winding down, her train of thought leading her to a disappointing conclusion. “But that wouldn’t work here …” she trailed off.

  “I don’t know ….” Patrick said slowly. “I worked on a project once debugging a system that was part of an anthropology experiment on how to communicate with isolated cultures who’d never had contact with the modern world.

  “They hired consultants on early childhood education, developmental psychology, brain function mapping, learning methodology and that kind of thing. They were able to combine simple interactive programs with holograms to communicate with the subjects despite language barriers. Here, we wouldn’t have that problem, at least.”

  “I get it,” Olivia jumped in. “Maybe something like that could be done to tell the slaves how to get to the trains.”

  “They used a hand-held computer program with a built in holographic image to communicate with the people in the project I worked on. What if we could make something like that to tell the slaves to go to the trains?” Patrick wondered aloud, almost as if talking to himself.

  Olivia gasped excitedly, picking up the thread of the thought. “And I can get our kits distributed throughout all the protectorates substituting them for the first aid kits.”

  “How many first aid kits are your group distributing?” Patrick asked.

  “I’m the one who got roped into coordinating everything, and we worked out that the optimum number was 1 kit for every 100 slaves, so we ordered 250,000 kits from a supplier in the U.S.”

  “When are the kits going to be ready?” Patrick asked with mounting enthusiasm. “I mean, if you can get the supplier to deliver them to somewhere in the U.S. instead of the S.R., I can get our escape kits substituted for the first aid kits and then sent on to the S.R.”

  Olivia thought for a moment, then said, “The kits should arrive next week. I can give the supplier some story to keep the kits in the U.S. … and I can probably get the members to delegate the task of placing the kits around the protectorates,” she said contemplatively. “That way, they’d never bother to check the kits themselves … that would really be more work than they’d be interested in doing anyway.” Olivia explained sarcastically.

  Patrick had already started to pull up contacts on his computer. “I’ve got some ideas about who I can get to help us on short notice,” he said, feeling infused with new purpose and a new belief that they might just be able to make this thing happen.

  “Olivia, I can’t believe it. I’d been killing myself trying to find a way to get the slaves to the trains, and you come up with the answer inside of five minutes.” Patrick said admiringly.

  “That’s ’cause we’re one hell of a team, Watcher—Daniel—Patrick.”

  They both laughed, their spirits soaring toward the hope that it would all work out in the end, and each of them knowing that right now, they couldn’t afford to believe anything else.

  • • •

  The worst thing about being a slave, Sulla thought, the absolute worst thing, as far as she was concerned, was the fact that no matter how smart, slow-witted, honest, industrious, lazy or trifling you were, your entire fate and everything about your pathetic life was controlled by somebody else’s whim.

  White folk get to go as far as their natural talents will take them. Why, even Protector’s Assistants get to do what they’re good at.

  But the slaves, their lives were like water. Taking whatever shape they’re poured into, spilling and sloshing around in their wasted lives like dirty water in a rusty bucket.

  Sulla was sitting at the kitchen table polishing one of the silver patterns and methodically rubbing each piece after applying the polish. The Big House was mostly empty, so she had taken the opportunity to catch up on one of the tasks the kitchen staff never seemed to do to her satisfaction.

  Protector Askew was out in the fields with Mister Bryce, Eugenia was somewhere around here, probably with little Winston at her side; and Olivia had gone to the train to take delivery of some horse she had bought on her last buying trip.

  Such moments of relative tranquility gave Sulla time to think, and as always of late, her mind turned to the melodrama swirling around her, and the ever-present ten-year rule hanging over her head like a scythe poised over a cornstalk.

  Sulla knew she was despised by almost everyone around her. The other slaves thought her arrogant and spoiled—the women self-righteous or jealous and the men self-righteous or lustful.

  She knew Olivia blamed her for her father’s rejection of years gone by; that Olivia believed Sulla was the ra
ncor between her mother and father made flesh. And Eugenia favored her with the left over hatred she couldn’t expend on her husband, as if Sulla had been the only source of her troubles.

  But Sulla had learned long ago that she was all she’d ever have to depend on. She made her way in this world on her own. Not by hanging onto the coattails of ancestors’ plunder, not by growing rich and fat on another’s labor, not by a fine education and the finest of all things—the right to govern your own fate.

  No, not by any of the trappings of assumed superiority white folk took for granted. Sulla couldn’t depend on any of those things for her survival. All she could rely on were her wits and her wiles. That was it. And to this point in her life, they had proven to be quite enough.

  Now, though, Sulla wondered if she wouldn’t need more. The mood in the Protectorate House for the last few weeks had been as thick and rank as slop house mud.

  She’d heard about the delivery of a bunch of strange looking contraptions from the other slaves, and nobody seemed to know what to make of them. They all had the sense that a change was coming; and the old folk at the nursery were talking nonsense about deliverance to the promised land. Sulla had never put much store in, or had much patience for, that kind of talk. Far as she was concerned, if her people were going to be saved they were going to have to do the saving themselves, and that wasn’t very damned likely, was it? In fact, if all that Bible mumbo-jumbo was true, then how come the slaves hadn’t been freed already?

  Anyway, whatever the reason, there did seem like something new was in the making. Everybody could feel it, like the way the dogs and cats around the compound acted strange before a lightning storm, she knew folks could feel the change in the air. Sulla couldn’t put her finger on what it was, and neither could any of the other slaves she’d heard talking about it—but for a slave, new usually meant worse.

  And despite Protector Askew’s promise that he’d save her from the ten-year rule, she felt unsettled and anxious. Sulla told herself that her man had always protected her, and that she was just nervous because he’d been so irritable and mean-spirited lately.

  But Sulla knew it was more than that. She’d been plagued with nightmares recently, and although she couldn’t remember all of them, she seemed to always wake in a sweat from one particularly horrific dream that was actually more memory than nightmare.

  When she was about 11, and still on the Augusta Georgia Protectorate with her mother Antha, she witnessed her first Sinner’s Circle. All the women from the garment workers’ compound were told to report to the yard, to witness the wages of sin.

  Sulla looked to her mother for some kind of explanation, but Antha’s already pinched face had grown rigid, and she just pulled Sulla along with her down to the yard. There, standing in the center of the dirt yard, was a circle formed by 12 robed men like the ones who had terrified her as a little child being schooled in the Rules at the nursery.

  Each had the large hood of his robe covering his face, but Sulla thought she could recognize a few P.A.s from the garment factory work floor by their height and posture. Each of these men held in their hands rods about two feet long, held on their wrists by leather loops.

  The men were swaying and chanting the Obedience Hymn in a haunting monotone.

  “Obey the Lord thy God.

  “Obey thy Protector, thy Lord God’s disciple on Earth.

  “Obey thy superiors, whose white skin marks a spotless soul.

  “Obey the Rules on peril of death and eternal damnation.”

  Pushed into the circle was a woman named Mindy, a garment worker who worked in the same compound, but in a different factory house than she and her mother. She was bound at the wrists and naked. Her hair was matted on one side as if she’d just been pulled from sleep, and she frantically looked from one robed figure to another, seeming to know her fate but pleading silently with her eyes all the same.

  One robed figure stepped out of the circle toward the assembled crowd and announced, “This woman has committed the sin of disobedience. She has violated the 18th Rule and now must pay the price.”

  As he stepped back into formation, the robed figures all raised their batons toward Mindy, and as each thrust the baton onto her naked flesh, the wand lit up as if by magic and a blazing jolt passed from the wand into her body. The wands seemed to nearly lift Mindy from the ground with each touch, and cause her to throw her head back and scream in pain.

  As each pressed his wand against her, he intoned the 18th Rule:

  “Giveth your young, the fruit of thy wombs unto thy Protector to do with as he will. For his is the power and the glory and the wisdom and all good things come from his bountiful mercy on Earth.”

  Where the wand struck Mindy a scorched patch of blackened skin appeared, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air. With each touch Mindy jumped and attempted to evade the glowing tip of the thing, only to be pushed toward it again by the wand of another pursuer on the other side of the circle of pain. The words of the 18th Rule overlapped one another like the songs they sometimes sang together at night, where one group started slightly after the other and they all blended the verses together.

  So rapidly did the sparks from the wands begin to fall that Mindy could no longer even try to evade them, and she fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

  In her dream, she watched as she had as a child, but at some point in her mind’s nocturnal version, Sulla became Mindy, pleading to keep her children as Mindy had. Praying to be delivered from the pain as Mindy had. Struck down by blow after blow from the fiery wands and left a smoldering heap of stinking flesh in the center of the yard—already dead or soon to be dying, it didn’t much matter to Mindy or to her tormentors.

  Sulla would wake up as the last breath was expelled from Mindy’s overworked lungs in a defeated death rattle, and would bolt upright in her bed, covered with sweat and fearing the meaning of the dream. She knew she had to make sure she was never separated from Gabriel and Sarah the way Mindy’s children had been cruelly ripped from her. She had to get Askew to keep his promise.

  She’d already tried a couple of times to approach him about Olivia’s goings on, but each time he’d waved her off impatiently, too busy or preoccupied to hear her out. Sulla decided that in Protector Askew’s volatile state of mind, she needed more than just her say so that Olivia was up to no good—especially if she wanted Askew to make Olivia leave. Based on the threat she heard Askew make at the dinner table, it might not take all that much to get him to turn Olivia out of the Protectorate, but she couldn’t afford to leave such things to chance.

  Seemed like when she’d been snooping on Olivia lately, she’d been talking to folks who weren’t there. Sulla knew there had to be all sorts of gadgets up in the control room, she’d heard the rumors all her life that there were magical things behind the doors of every room of its kind in all protectorates.

  Must be that Olivia had stolen one of those gadgets from out of the control room, and that sure should be proof enough of Olivia’s guilt to present to Protector Askew. She just had to find whatever it was and prove it.

  Sulla finished polishing the silver and washed her hands in the china basin on the kitchen counter. Wiping her hands on her apron, she looked around to make sure no one was watching, jogged up the stairs and slipped into Olivia’s room.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‌Olivia returned from inspecting the horse she’d bought at Allenby’s. She was grimy with sweat, and the unseasonable heat had drained her energy. Walking up the stairs to her room, she couldn’t wait to shower and start planning for a future that didn’t include a single remnant of her current reality.

  Opening the door to her room, Olivia immediately sensed something wrong. Someone had been in her room. No—it was obviously more than that since several “someones” came and went into her room every day, cleaning, changing linen, delivering laundry. That wasn’t what she felt.

  Someone had been going through her things, rummaging around for something. N
ot that her furniture was askew or her belongings were disheveled. Nothing quite that obvious. Rather it seemed a more subtle shifting had occurred. It was as if someone had been frantically searching for something, had lost track of time, then had to scramble to set things right again.

  Olivia never locked her room, or anything in it, no one in the Protectorate House did, it was impractical. When you relied so heavily on others to see to your every need, locks became a bother. Besides, the only room in the Protectorate House that the S.P.s didn’t need access to in order to do their jobs was the control room. She had used subterfuge rather than locks in order to hide away those things she couldn’t afford for anyone to find.

  One benefit of living in an old house was the myriad of potential hidey-holes. A loose plank in the polished wood floor of her closet served as the hiding place for her tech contraband. When she needed more immediate access, she stowed her cell phone in the pocket formed by a slit in the hem of the heavy window drapes.

  This morning before leaving, she had replaced the phone under the closet floor. She raced there now, flipped back the rug, and pried the plank loose.

  Hearing her heart hammering in her ears, she reached into the darkened hole, and nearly fainted with relief when she saw that her cell phones, lock-pick and e-tablet were still there.

  Olivia jumped up from her squatting position on the floor, colliding with the rows of hangers above her, and swept out of the room, her rage stoking her actions and eclipsing common sense. She ran down the stairs like the tomboy she’d been twenty some years earlier, and pushed the swinging door to the kitchen so hard it bounced against the wall, rattling its hinges.

  There she saw Sulla instructing four kitchen staff on the menu for that evening.

  “Get out!” Olivia yelled, sweeping her arm around and pointing at the door.

  The kitchen staff vanished, running through the swinging door so fast the door didn’t have a chance to swing back the other way.