“A little.”
“Loving Morrow preached over the airwaves,” he went on. “She had a cable TV station in Nashville and raised enormous sums of money on it from her Foxfire Church of the True Holy Light pulpit. She used that to finance a news operation, which was just nonstop hateful propaganda inveighing against the Wall Street Jews and the Won’t Work Nigger monkeys, as they called them, and the fags, ditto, and also against the federal government, of course. We know a great deal about Loving Morrow. One thing we know is that she has a weakness for young men. And that is why we are sending you down there to kill her.”
President Harvey Albright looked right at me as he said this and I didn’t flinch or make a peep because I knew clear into the center of myself that this was exactly what I was going to do. I also knew that it was at the heart of the training I had received. Odd, isn’t it? To know that your mind has been meddled with and still feel like you have free will?
A New Faith sister brought their food order to the booth. As she leaned forward to slide the plates onto the table, Daniel noticed her shapely figure, her breasts straining against the cotton fabric of her blouse. The emotion it aroused seemed to exhaust him momentarily. When she was gone, he turned his attention to his bowl of steaming soup. He closed his eyes and savored the journey of the warm, smoky-spicy bean mush down his gullet into his belly.
“You were programmed,” Robert said. “We used to do that with computers. You enter a set of coded instructions and the machine just executes them. They used to do that with people too. They called it brainwashing.”
“Brainwashing,” Daniel said. “Yes. They certainly scrubbed it good there on Channel Island.”
Daniel’s Story: In Enemy Territory
Much later that night, after Albright left the house, I had trouble sleeping. The wind banged around outside. Moonlight skittered all over the walls and ceiling as it played among the windblown tree branches through the window. The door to my room opened and Ms. Estridge, Valerie, appeared in a robe, like a vision or a dream. She let the robe slide down her shoulders and fall at her feet. The moonlight flashed over her naked body for a time before she came onto the bed as though she was purposely putting herself on display. I just yielded to her like she was a force of nature. I felt that this was something I must let happen with the greatest urgency, something beyond my own desires and intentions—as you said, programmed into my brain. No words were spoken. She overwhelmed me. It went on a long time, I think, and when it was over I fell asleep immediately. I never got to say good-bye to her, at least in words, and in the morning when the sergeant came to get me she wasn’t anywhere in the house.
We started to Cincinnati that morning, an infantry company of 120 men, officers mounted. I was permitted to ride, too, but I received many a resentful glance from the men marching. I was in civilian clothing, good clothing. Over the days to come we passed through Flint, a ghost town, Ann Arbor, where the big university was all closed up, Toledo and Columbus, everything smaller, reduced, struggling. Cincinnati’s riverfront was alive, at least. The vast parking lots between the ball parks had been turned into a stockyard and several new concerns had been built for salting pork and making sausage. They were brewing beer too. Many were employed at these operations and lived close by in the blocks behind the vacant district of skyscraper buildings in the old row-house district. But the city was very much compressed, as were all the places I had been to over the months, into the habitable precincts of its old center, with everything beyond a half mile walk from the riverfront empty and deserted. Many had died in the epidemics there and malaria was now also a seasonal visitor.
From down in the stockyards, across the Ohio, you could see some fortifications over on the Kentucky side and soldiers slouching on the parapets with rifles. Nobody was shooting at anybody yet, but Kentucky was a Foxfire Republic state and there was a sharp feeling of animosity in the air, like something could bust out at any moment. Cincinnati had its garrison, too, between a swathe of disintegrating elevated highway and the river, east of the stockyards. The prevailing winds prevented the place from being overwhelmed by the odor of hundreds of confined pigs. Fort Schenck was very much a makeshift establishment, still under construction. Some two thousand soldiers were billeted there in tents, shacks, and half-finished barracks. After a month living with at least some electricity it was back to candlelight for me.
But I wasn’t there long. They took me across the river the second night about ten miles downstream from Fort Schenck where a little creek called Rapid Run spills into the Ohio. The Kentucky side was just some farms with the old Cincinnati airport behind them. It hadn’t been used for over a decade. Nobody was around. The bank across the river down there was known by the federals to be unguarded. I was rowed across in a pilot gig with a Lieutenant Ainsley. There was just a sliver of moon above the horizon. A horse was waiting for me on the other side. Kentucky had its share of federal sympathizers, people who objected to the Foxfire methods and religious persecution and didn’t like being pushed around. My horse was furnished by two men, not young, dressed in town clothes. No one told me, but I got the feeling they were lawyers. Lieutenant Ainsley gave them a pouch that contained hard money. The horse was a chestnut gelding named Ike. He was tacked up with an unmarked military saddle on him. I was also given a money pouch. Not a large amount, because the Foxfire region was said to be infested with bandits and pickers, but enough to cover my meals and lodging, if I could find any, in the two weeks it would take me to get to my destination, Franklin, Tennessee, a town south of Nashville, now the Foxfire capital. These transactions on the Kentucky side were completed very quickly and all these men were strangers to me so, having no further business, I just thanked them, mounted, and rode off.
I had memorized the route during my training. I was not carrying any maps, which might suggest I was a spy. I had a compass and a few documents: false identification that indicated I was a merchant of Covington, along with bills of lading and promissory notes pertaining to fictitious business I had in Franklin, in case I met up with any Foxfire military along the way.
I soon made my way beyond the abandoned housing tracts south of the airport and followed a set of back roads through deeply forested, crinkled hills to Big Bone Lick, where I caught up again with the south-turning Ohio River. I slept out that first night in a cemetery, in warm weather, and had plenty of rations for my breakfast and some oats for Ike, who I’d hobbled inside the cemetery fence with me. The next two days I made excellent progress to Frankfort, Kentucky. It rained hard there and I stayed inside the Meeting House Tavern where I put up for an extra night. That was the first place on my journey I encountered a painted image of Loving Morrow, set up like a little shrine on a table in the common room, with Foxfire flags, some old plastic flowers, and a statuette of Jesus Christ. The painting was done by an obvious amateur who depicted the Leading Light of the Foxfire Republic, as she called herself, with a sort of golden halo, as if she were a saint. The artist had put a slightly mad look in her eyes. Her figure was pictured as very generously filling her robes, such as to be an object of desire. Her physical presence was not a small part of her appeal, I was given to understand. Anyway, the food was very good there. I got a plate of fried chicken and three ears of sweet corn. It was that time of year.
Aside from a little rain the first week of my journey was easy. The route I passed along was sparsely inhabited between the towns, almost like a wilderness, and many of those towns were reduced to very meager terms. At one crude tavern at Campbellsville, I overheard talk of “confiscations, tithings, and oppression,” and I believe they were referring to their own Foxfire government; the Brunswick stew I was served there fetched up on me afterward. Two days farther down the road I met bandits coming through a rocky defile outside of Horse Cave, Kentucky, about a day’s ride from the Tennessee border. I was walking Ike to take in the rugged scenery when I heard hoofbeats. They rode up behind me and I r
eined Ike around to face them. I believe they were all younger than me. The youngest reminded me of Evan, which sent a pang of remorse through me because I would have to defend myself if it came to it. They were a scruffy-looking bunch in country clothes and mean little hats, and one rode a mule. The youngest rode up closer to me on his squatty swayback nag with just a blanket for a saddle and a rope bridle.
I’m like, “You’re following a little close, aren’t you?”
He was apparently their spokesman. He might not have been older than sixteen, with peach-fuzz whiskers. “That’s a nice horse you got, mister,” he goes. The other two looked blank, slack-jawed, like they might be drunk. Their heads appeared a little lopsided too. We all just swapped eyeballs for a long moment, one to the next.
“If you’re in hurry, pass on by,” I say.
“How much you take for him?” the young leader says.
“He’s not for sale.”
He goes, “We got something in trade I expect you can’t resist.”
“What would that be?”
“A five-minute head start,” he says. “On foot.” And then he busts up laughing.
I’m like, “I don’t think so.”
He’s like, “We’ll see about that.” He goes directly for the butt of a pistol that’s jammed in the side of his trousers and he can’t withdraw it. It’s stuck. His cohorts guffaw. When they do, I see they have no front teeth. Finally, he frees up his firearm and draws it out. It’s some kind of homemade piece of junk, like out of a piece of steel pipe, with a crude wood grip and an awkward assembly of levers and springs at the breech end. Meanwhile, I’ve drawn my own pistol, which is an old-times factory-made .38 caliber military revolver, and my heart is sinking as I am about to use it on this pathetic boy. As my gun comes out, his two cohorts rein around and ride off up the road, apparently unequipped with any firearms of their own. The boy doesn’t even look up or see me brandish my weapon, he’s so intent with that piece of junk. He has to pull the hammer contraption back with both hands to set it, like it was a crossbow. I fire into the air just to get his attention. A split second after I do that his gun misfires. The discharge vaporizes one ear of his poor old horse in a little cloud of red mist, and the recoil blows him off his mount in the process. His nag bolts away, screaming and bleeding from the stump of her ear, up the road where the others skulked off. The boy is squirming in pain on the road. He must have landed hard on something. The road is fissured old blacktop that hasn’t been repaired in his lifetime.
Now I dismount to attend to him. As I do that, out comes a dark steel blade that he would have stuck in my liver had I not been lucky to kick it clean out of his hand, and then I was on top of him with my knee in his chest and my hand on his throat. He is fulminating at me, blowing snot on my jacket. I strike him in the head repeatedly until he stops it.
“Keep it up and you’ll get yourself killed for certain,” I say.
“Why don’t you then?” he says, and his voice is all strangled with my hand on his throat.
“Because I don’t want to,” I tell him.
“Why not? It’s your right. Look who’s on top.”
“Is that how it’s done around here?”
“Sure it is,” he says. “Anyway, I don’t care if I live or die.”
“Well you ought to,” I say and cuff him on the head one more time. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothin’. If it was me on top I’d kill you.”
“You come at me with one more weapon, I might change my mind.”
He quits struggling and I get off of him. He’s got a pretty bad powder burn on one side of his face. He sits up and spits some blood out of his mouth. Up close, he smells like those pigs back in the Cincinnati stockyards.
I’m like, “You’re a poor excuse for a bandit. Why don’t you take up some other line of work?”
“Like what?”
“Farm. It’s safer.”
He spits. “Person like me can’t get land. It’s all owned by the masters. They run your ass off if they don’t kill you outright. That’s why I’m up to robbing folks.”
I go, “Looks to me like this country is ninety percent empty, woods coming back where the fields used to be, nobody around. I’m telling you, just grab yourself some acres and settle in, raise some chickens and corn.”
“You can’t just set down on a place,” he says. “Them Foxfires’ll get you and put you in their damn army and send you off to fight the niggers.”
“Maybe the army wouldn’t be such a bad place for someone like you.”
He squints up at me like I’m out of my mind. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he says.
“I’m from up in Covington, Kentucky, on the Ohio.”
“You sound like a damn socialist.” He spits again.
“Well, I’m not.”
He’s like, “Just kill me and get it over with.” He squeezes his eyes shut, with blood dribbling down his chin, and waits for the bullet.
“You’re a dandy, you are.”
“I’m sick of it all is what I am.”
“Don’t you have any interest being in this world? It’s a gift, you know.”
“It’s just affliction and a torment,” he says, eyes still shut. “Go ahead. Do me like I would have done you.”
I’m like, “I’ll just be on my way now, if you don’t mind.”
“You a preacher?”
“What if I was?”
“Then I would hate you double,” he says. “They just serve the masters is all. I don’t know what you are, mister, but I’m real sorry I failed to kill you. You want to know a secret? I like that even better than robbing folks. I’ve killed seven men since I took up this career. What do you think of that?”
“Life must be cheap in this part of the country,” I say.
“It ain’t worth nothin’,” he goes. “Guess I’ll be on my way now too.”
When he stands up fully, I doubt he’s over five and a half feet tall. He dusts himself off and picks up his mean little chewed-up-looking hat, which is like a cloth bowl on his head. While he’s doing that, I go get his firearm, which is lying in the road.
“You gawn keep that?” he asks.
“I’m going to throw it in a creek at the first opportunity,” I tell him.
“Why not give it back to me then?” he says. “I’ll just have to make another one.”
“You do that,” I say. “Maybe you’ll get better at it, if someone doesn’t kill you first, and you’ll grow up to be a gunsmith, with an honest trade.”
He just snorts at the idea and begins humping back up the road where his cohorts and his nag ran away. When there’s a hundred yards of space between us I mount up and go on my way. I did throw that pitiful gun away at the first chance I came by. The land there was full of limestone sinkholes, like perfectly round little ponds, from all the caves that ran underground in that part of the country.
Judging by what I saw on my journey from the federal states, the Foxfire Republic was even more deeply impoverished and run-down than the north. Some towns had nobody whatsoever in them. One evening by the fireside of a crossroads tavern in Owen’s Chapel, I heard talk for the first time of a smallpox visitation that passed over the region a few years back. They had new diseases that had never been seen there before. Snail fever, dengue, whipworm, black jaundice, sand fly rot, chagas, yellow fever, and malaria, on top of all the other sorts of epidemic flu plus the encephalitis and meningitis that was everywhere.
I finally came into Nashville on a hot morning late in August. The very center of the town around the north side of the old statehouse had mostly been parking lots when the collapse happened. Men were at work erecting buildings of two and three stories in red brick that they salvaged from elsewhere in the deserted quarters of the city. Many stra
ngely shaped skyscrapers loomed balefully over the blocks between the old capitol and the Cumberland River. They were empty now. The glass had been removed, starting from the lower floors. The sort of office work they were built for no longer existed and they contained a lot of material that nobody manufactured anymore. You could imagine the work of careful disassembly going on for decades, centuries. I know from my history classes people were still pulling marble off the ancient Roman monuments a thousand years after the empire fell. The smallpox outbreak had devastated Nashville. The survivors fled, and the Foxfire government had moved to Franklin, some twenty miles south. Nashville was the headquarters of the Foxfire military these days. In the distance on a grassy mall down the statehouse hill, a company of foot soldiers drilled. Their drumbeats and shouts carried in the still air. Their formations were slapdash. They didn’t seem like a match for the federals back at Fort Schenck. Officers on horseback came and went. Their uniform jackets looked homemade, as if they were trying out all different styles, which is to say they were hardly uniforms. I got a meal of fried potatoes and ham at the makeshift outdoor market that operated next to the statehouse, patronized almost entirely by workmen and soldiers. I saw very few women in the city passing through that day. I didn’t want to linger where so many soldiers casually gathered.
I got to Franklin in the early evening. I came in straight from the north on old State Highway 31. The asphalt pavements were stripped off the surface starting some five miles out from town, and a gravel road was laid the rest of the way, which was well maintained, excellent for horses and wagons. Closer to the old center, the highway eventually became Main Street and I had to wait my turn to pass through a gate manned by soldiers, who were checking cargoes and persons wanting to enter. There was considerable traffic with wagons backed up from that point, most of them commercial but some military. They were especially on the lookout for people who showed signs of ill health. The gatehouse was a substantial, handsome structure of red brick that made a graceful arch over the street with offices on each side for the soldiers to do their business and congregate and a room in the arch itself, where a soldier sat in a window with binoculars surveying the procession down the road. It was clearly built to impress, to send the message that Franklin was a special place, exclusive, orderly and well protected. The soldiers manning the gate wore gray tunics that all did look the same and hats with the brim tacked up on one side, giving them a dashing air. I dismounted and felt nervous waiting. My sidearm was stashed in my blanket roll but, when my turn came, they barely searched my person or asked more than my name and my business in town, which they recorded in a ledger and then said I could go in.
A History of the Future Page 25
