by Ginger Booth
We still didn’t have shoes. But the previous owners had left clothes behind, including two pairs of slippers. One pair even had enough rubber on the sole to walk to the mailbox if the mud wasn’t too deep. Not that we were allowed to walk to the mailbox. None of the clothes were the right size for Brandy or me – Blake got lucky – but they were heavenly compared to the rags we wore before. So we all dressed from the wardrobe that fit Blake.
Dressed for bed, anyway. The first couple days we weren’t interested in much besides the Tylenol and vitamins and orange juice left in the kitchen. For clothes, we were grateful for Blake-sized pajamas and sweats and layers of socks. I’m not sure if this Tylenol was the same as the stuff Canber had given me, but its ‘extra strength’ was codeine. We slept comfortably.
One fairly sane soldier and several of Uriel’s freaky devotees visited a couple times a day while we were sick, to make sure we were still alive and bring us more food. We carefully stashed the food to eat when we could keep it down, and to keep it coming in the meantime. I got the impression Canber had left firm instructions that there would be dire consequences for the Judgment sect if any of us died without permission.
My fever broke after a couple days. Brandy and Blake had been more badly mistreated, so they would take longer to mend. Alright, then, we didn’t want to be rescued just yet. I selected a personal project in the meantime. I would develop the world’s fastest case of Stockholm Syndrome to earn my captors’ trust.
I would identify with Canber’s crusade, not Uriel’s, thank you very much. Canber was safer. He wasn’t there.
Besides, I did understand what Canber was doing. Mind-game aficionado or not, it was just too big a stretch to pretend to believe I was Satan’s minion and aspired to roll around copulating in the mud. Loving nature, wanting to defend the Earth from an infestation of humans, I could relate to, more than I felt comfortable admitting.
I found a pen and an old composition book in our lovely manufactured home, and tore out the used pages. Someone had built a big deck onto the side of our tiny house, with resin deck furniture of the thrift store variety. I sat out there, wrapped in a blanket, to make myself ostentatious in my contemplation. Yes, I remember that thing where Jesus taught we should pray in the closet. But I wanted rewards on earth, not in heaven. I sought a physical salvation.
The deck was a good place for prayer, for me. Our little scrap of level lot was barely wide enough for the mobile home and a pickup truck. The broken mountainside resumed its forested climb not thirty feet away to the right, brilliant in its autumn colors. Squirrels and chipmunks cavorted there. A heavenly chorus of unseen frogs and toads, insects and bats and birds, and a hidden burbling brook all sang to me. To the left, downslope, perhaps the soil was too shallow for trees. Wildflowers still bloomed among the ripe grasses and herbs, tiny and pale, in white and lavender and yellow.
I wrote about my prayer progress with Brandy, that I was one with God in natural beauty. Within minutes, I’d forgotten that I was ever pretending. I felt the Earth’s reassuring pull, the sun on my face, breathed the deep air. I smelled the woods, listened to the wildlife. I felt my way back across the Earth to Long Island Sound and its gentle waves, to Burlington Vermont and its cold lake, to the tides of New York Harbor lapping Brooklyn, the broad Monongahela River flowing through Pittsburgh. As my fever climbed back a little in mid-afternoon, I could soar with the little wisps of cloud in the deep blue sky. I could hold out my hand and feel the waves of WiFi stroking me. Tenuous here, but my body was still connected to my native cyber world, too.
I was as big as the Earth, greater than any captor could possibly be. And I blessed them.
The soldier and Judgment guards returned in the evening with more food. The latter were much put out by my assertive euphoria, and fled as quickly as possible. The soldier, Thomaston, nodded quizzically as I conveyed my epiphany.
The codeine in the Tylenol helped a lot.
-o-
I was blessed with a teacher.
Uriel dropped by the next morning, the leader and preacher of Judgment. A gray drizzle had returned, making the brilliant red and orange leaves glow, throbbing bright against the wet-darkened tree trunks and grey skies. We sat at the diminutive dining booth in the kitchenette. Brandy and Blake still huddled in their beds behind closed doors.
And Uriel explained to me the tenets of Judgment.
I played along, honestly admitting that Christianity left me rather flat. I told him about my attempts to understand the fighting sects of Pittsburgh, and my colleagues’ efforts to explain to me the differences they fought over. In turn, he admitted those Christian distinctions were minor. It had taken sustained effort on Judgment’s part to keep the Pittsburgh militias fighting one another. But they were slaves to fear, addicted to coddled comforts, weak sheep pathetically looking to a celestial shepherd to save them from themselves, instead of watching where they stepped. Judgment in Uriel’s metaphor were the wolves that thinned the weak, purified the stock, until only those select who deserved Eden would remain.
“Eden,” I pounced. “A wild world. Returned to the garden. Unfettered by asphalt and agriculture. Where people are rare. Small against the majesty of nature.”
“Yet always the top predator!” Uriel exulted. “It is the nature of man to rule the Earth, red in tooth and claw!”
“I still have trouble with that,” I admitted. “I mean, I love the goal. But I still can’t see myself killing people. Maybe I have a different calling? To persuade people over the Internet? Instead of culling overpopulation directly.”
Uriel scowled at me for derailing his oratorical climax. But he nodded reluctantly. “You’re a woman. Women bear an excess of compassion, in order to tend to men, and nurture children. Killing is man’s work. But the world needs no children now. You must struggle against your womanly nature, to find within yourself your murderous true nature, and bring it forth.
“Defense, is the key for a woman. A man can easily grow to embrace offense. But as a female animal, your instincts are to defend. You will bear no children. The world has more than enough people. Instead, claim the wild and feral beauty of the Earth as the fruit of your womb. Feel Earth’s head cresting, aborning from your birth canal.” Ouch. “See yourself defending your baby with your whole heart and soul.” He tapped my composition book. “Write on this. And contemplate. We will speak again.”
Brandy emerged from our bedroom after Uriel left, and plopped down across the table from me, swaddled in a blanket. Her eyes were still glassy with fever and congestion, but she was on the mend.
“Dee, what in hell are you doing?” she asked.
“Developing my spirituality,” I told her in dead earnest. “I think I’m finally getting a handle on religion.”
“That man is pure unmitigated evil,” she countered. “Dee, all this defense of nature claptrap is a crock. What animal besides man preys on its own species? What predator besides man kills except to meet its needs?”
I frowned at her. “I’m working toward salvation, Brandy. Our emancipation from physical bondage.” Further than that I refused to go, to speak that this might be an act. I’m a terrible liar. Therefore to be persuasive, I must believe.
“I pray for your soul,” Brandy whispered. Then she grabbed the white bottle of codeine-laced Tylenol. “No more candy for Dee.”
“Hey! That’s a fever-reducer. We need that!”
“There’s good clean old-fashioned aspirin in the medicine cabinet,” Brandy countered. On second thought, she reluctantly moderated her stance. “We save the opiates for enduring abuse. Promise me, Dee. No more opiates unless you need them. Because your brain is turning to cottage cheese. These people don’t care about me and Blake. Emmett and Hudson don’t, either. Without you, we’re dead here.”
I had to concede she had a point, though I glared at her until she shut herself and the codeine back into our tiny shared bedroom. I had plenty of practice lately invoking nature-worship euphoria. I could get h
igh on life.
Opiate withdrawal truly sucks. I hadn’t abused it long enough for any of the dangerous withdrawal symptoms to appear. But by evening I was blessed with the full body itching, as though fire ants marched under my skin. Even the backs of my eyeballs itched. I scratched deep gouge tracks down my arms, then washed them with soap to avoid infection. Which made all of me itch all the worse.
The moody irritation helped with my homework, though. I easily got in touch with my inner murderous mama. I wrote it out in my composition book, in complete honesty.
-o-
I was blessed with a technophobe.
Technophobes bemuse me. I myself was born under a computing planet, innately dancing to the music of the spheres. I naturally perceive the world in the mathematics of pattern, and exult in the power of a remote control. I saw the computer and the computer was good. We understand each other, technology and me. We complete each other in a synergistic whole, where together we are so much more than either of us apart. Technology sitting dormant calls to me a siren song. Come, let us play together!
In contrast, technophobes seem to believe that the innocent friendly tech is out to get them. One of my grandmothers suffered from the affliction. Utterly convinced that she was unequal to helping with simple math homework, preparing a tax return, or mastering a new TV remote.
Of course, I couldn’t get too cocky. Bathroom plumbing issues left me feeling like a gibbering idiot. But my prayers and diligence at cultivating Stockholm Syndrome were rewarded. I had established trust.
“The meshnet isn’t working,” Canber’s soldier Thomaston confided to me anxiously. “I can reach Canber on the computer in his office, but everything else says this.” He stuck his phone out toward me.
I firmly tucked my hands into my lap, seated in my kitchenette. “I’m not allowed to touch technology without Canber’s permission,” I reminded him piously. “Though I could talk you through it,” I allowed, with a gurgling sniff.
Brandy and Blake were well on the mend, and I was downright well. We’d lost a few pounds during our fevers, but we’d gained weight at Mrs. Wiehl’s buffet in Pittsburgh. And we were eating again now, so we came out about even. But we didn’t want to look too healthy yet. So I’d chopped an onion, and we rubbed the onion juice on our eyes when we heard boots crunching up the gravel road. Onion-induced tears and general tail-dragging might eke us out another couple days of looking too snivelly to work.
I gently probed Thomaston’s computer savvy on the way to Canber’s house, about a mile. But the fact that he’d walk a mile before I even looked at his phone gave me hope. He cannot think straight if technology is involved. Yes!
“OK, so first, show me how you know the Internet is working here,” I coached Thomaston at Canber’s desk. I stood behind him as he showed me Canber’s last three emails, opening each one for me to read on the big monitor. As of three hours ago, Canber was in Greensboro North Carolina, and planned to spend the next two nights in Charlotte before heading south to Savannah. Good to know.
“But see, I can’t get that email on my phone,” Thomaston complained, demonstrating on his phone. Of course he couldn’t see the email. The computer was reading Canber’s military IMAP email account, and Thomaston had the meshnet up on his phone, logged into his own account.
I prayed I could spin this out for a while before someone texted him over the meshnet. He might get a clue if that happened. “Wow, that’s bad,” I assured him. “Here, I’m going to give you some commands to type in. Let’s use the computer, so I can see. The screen’s bigger.”
Without ever touching the keyboard, I eventually got Thomaston logged in remotely to meshnet102, the small testing meshnet we ran at Amenac headquarters. Popeye used it to test and attack meshnet101, the software development team on Long Island. My password was unmemorable gibberish – which I failed twice, intentionally, on login – and he didn’t write it down. Those login failures would write to the error log. But I feared no one would notice that. Instead, we brought up the meshnet’s arcane command line interface.
“OK, sorry, this next command is really long,” I warned him.
SEND @POPI DEC10911DEEBEMLSOSCBI79SWV
I worried that I’d laid it on too thick with that one. Surely Thomaston would notice something fishy in it. Dec 10 was the date that Penn went dark, scribbled all over the walls by Station Square. The 911 was simply a 911 emergency call. Deeb for me, EML for Emmett MacLaren, SOS, CB for Canber, I-79 south to West Virginia.
But Thomaston was too focused on his laborious hunt-and-peck typing. He didn’t blink at the gibberish content. I’d already cured him of asking for explanations. “It didn’t do anything,” he complained. “God, I hate computers.”
“I understand completely,” I commiserated. “I feel the same way about plumbing. All the gibberish they spew in the instructions, you know? Allen wrenches, O-rings, washers.” I shuddered melodramatically. The soldier sighed and nodded sadly. Apparently Thomaston was an equal-opportunity technophobe.
“Next step,” I encouraged. “Could you bring up maps on the phone? Yeah, that one.” I had him look up our current GPS coordinates, and carefully transcribe them into the next command.
SEND @POPI LOC39.5914264,-79.8309698QT
I could only hope Popeye would take the hint of the QT part to be quiet about this. “Now we’re getting somewhere!” I assured my victim. “Uh, what’s your meshnet address? Like, I’m ‘at-Deeb’, you’re…? OK!”
SEND @POPI &MESH666@KTHOMASTON TESTDEEB
“Drat, that was dumb of me. I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant…”
SEND &MESH666@KTHOMASTON TESTDEEB
“Oh, I got a text!” Thomaston said, astonished. “‘Test Deeb.’ Oh, did we just send that? And another one. ‘POPI911 RCVD.’”
I grinned and traded high-fives with the soldier. “OK, type control-Z three times, that’s right! And close that window! You’re all set!” Yes, by all means, close that window quickly. Thomaston was starting to think, and I couldn’t have that.
“But I still don’t have my email from Canber,” Thomaston protested.
“Well, I can’t fix what happened before I got here,” I reasoned. “So that’s just gone. Good thing you have it here on the computer.”
Thomaston looked very frustrated. So I offered, “Well, we could set up an email forwarder bouncing system, so every email duplicates and echoes to your phone. Using an IMAP Internet pipe. That would take a lot more typing.” Actually it would take two minutes, and likely get him killed for stupidity when Canber came back. Of course, Thomaston might not live to see Canber again anyway. The real risk was that email forwarding was so straightforward that Thomaston might understand it.
“No!” Thomaston quickly assured me. “No, this is good enough. No more typing.” He was all too eager to walk me back to our single-wide mobile home, and wash his hands of me for the rest of the day.
Our deck sported a flagpole. With a ballpoint pen, I drew a faint tree on a white pillowcase and affixed it to the top of the pole. To proclaim my allegiance to the natural world, as I explained to Uriel later when he dropped by for my catechism lesson. He was pleased with me.
Brandy and Blake didn’t need to ask. Anyone who’d followed Project Reunion would recognize the point of a white flag. The day Emmett landed on Staten Island a year ago, without any other communications available, the starving city survivors used white flags to send a welcome to the relief forces, to promise they wouldn’t fight. Emmett’s forces sent in drones to peek in on Staten Island before landing, and spotted the white flags. I imagined Emmett would send in a drone here, too, to snoop around before coming in.
As much as possible, all three of us sat on the deck the rest of the day, under the flag. Brandy’s hair was such a brilliant red, and Blake’s so beautifully dark. As a threesome, we were readily identifiable.
I could hardly have said it any clearer: Hey Emmett! Rescue us here!
Chapter 27
Interesting
fact: A study attempted to prove that it was the culling of the American people that led to increased religiosity after the Calm Act – that the devout were more likely to survive. But although fewer religious people committed suicide, most of the change was from people becoming more religious as a result of their experiences.
Brandy and Blake and I woke to the sound of rotors overhead in the small hours before dawn. As we scrambled to pull some clothes on, most of the choppers passed us, headed toward the center of Nowhere. I never learned the real name of that town. Guns started chattering thataway. It sounded like one copter remained hovering right over our heads, the noise and wind rattling the poor little trailer home.
We were debating whether it was smart to peek out the door, when someone started pounding on it. “Ohio Army! Open up!”
Blake opened the door. We all grinned welcome. “So good to see you!” I cried. “Would you happen to be looking for –”
“Dee Baker, Blake Sondheim, Brandy O’Keefe?” he demanded right over me, checking to identify our faces. “Come with me! Nowhere to land, we’ll need to pull you up.”
It wasn’t my imagination. The huge attack helicopter was hovering just feet above the mobile home. Rope ladders hung down both sides. Blake ran for the other side. I pushed Brandy ahead of me to go first. She didn’t wait for them to pull up the ladder, just scrambled up as fast as she could go. Once she was secured inside the chopper, an arm from above waved for me to come next. The Ohio soldier stayed behind, anchoring the rope ladder. The climb wasn’t too bad, only about 25 feet, though there was a disconcerting jerk halfway up.
The arm that waved me up also grasped my arm at the top and yanked me in, pulling me to fall onto his body. In the dark and crowded copter cabin, I tried to pull away apologetically, but he held me tight against his chest.
“Thank God, darlin’!” he yelled in my ear over the noise, and kissed me hard. “You alright?”
