Citizen Second Class
Apocalypse Next
Robert Chazz Chute
Citizen Second Class
Copyright © 2019 by Robert Chazz Chute
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Please address media and all rights inquiries to [email protected].
ISBN (paperback) 978-1-927607-67-1
ISBN (Ebook) 978-1-927607-66-4
What readers say about Robert’s work
Chute sucks you in from word one and pulls you down his post-apocalyptic rabbit hole! You will sleep with the lights on, covers pulled over your head and dust off the old teddy bear for comfort. Chazz ranks among the top tier of our generation's storytellers. ~ Alex Kimmell, Author of The Key to Everything
Robert Chazz Chute is such a skilled spinner of tales that the reader is more than willing to suspend any possible disbelief to go along for the ride. ~ David Pandolfe, author of Jump When Ready
It's not very often one finds a writer with such a dark side that has such a great sense of humor. ~ Glenn Roberts, Amazon reviewer
The author has a definite talent with words and ideas. ~ Love to Read!, Amazon reviewer
His words lift and dance off the page, bringing the story to life. ~ Kindle Customer, Amazon reviewer
The world-building is horrifically well done with twists and turns and deceit around every corner. ~ Wanda, Amazon reviewer
RCC blends characters' beliefs & worries concerning society's failures, plus vivid action scenes skillfully. ~ RMerkl, Amazon Reviewer
Nothing but sheer exhaustion could tear my eyes from the captivating dance of words choreographed by Robert Chazz Chute. ~ Halph Staph, Amazon reviewer
Wonderful action constantly holds your interest. ~ Sharon Finn, Amazon reviewer
The complexity and attention to detail throughout absolutely blow me away. ~ Kindle customer, Amazon Reviewer
Very few authors impress me with their actual writing style, it's usually always about the story. But this author paints such beautiful vivid pictures with words that I found myself not only enjoying the story but enjoying the way the words created images in my mind. I know that sounds corny, but it is true. ~ B.H., Amazon reviewer
Chute gives us story worthy of Stephen King. A read both thoughtful and fun. ~ Linda Beer Johnson, Amazon reviewer
The author does an excellent job building the characters and getting you invested and involved. ~ Michele L. Hebert, Amazon reviewer
I just can't say in words what a powerful author this is! ~ Delinda L. Calkins, Amazon reviewer
Robert Chazz Chute writes so skillfully as to make the supernatural seem perfectly logical - and terrifying! There are twists, turns and surprises galore. You will be glad you bought this book - until you lose sleep because you can't put it down. ~ johligo, Amazon reviewer
When I want to read apocalyptic books or zombie stories, those books have to also be extremely well-written and something that I could recommend with zeal and confidence to everyone I know. Robert Chazz Chute's books are exactly that. ~ Mazie Lane, Amazon reviewer
He makes the stuff that is obviously fiction, believable. ~ W. Nickels, Amazon reviewer
I am a lover of paranormal, dystopian novels and depth of story as well as intelligence in writing style, and Robert has it all. Humor, wit, depth, intelligence and an awesome way with words/writing. ~ Amazon Customer, Amazon reviewer
Contents
What readers say about Robert’s work
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Afterword
If you enjoy apocalyptic fiction…
All Books by Robert Chazz Chute
Dedicated to the children of Flint,
unwilling emblems of a criminal lack of empathy,
lasting symbols of the rot in the pipes.
That corruption is everywhere and
it has to stop.
Epigraph
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
“The American dream is dead.”
~ Donald J. Trump
“At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime.”
~ Balzac
“When the rich rob the poor, it’s called business.
When the poor fight back, it’s called violence.”
~ Mark Twain
“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
~Frantz Fanon
Chapter One
The last time my whole family was together, my mother still had both legs and Grammy still remembered we didn’t have a president anymore. The pictures, taken in the soft light of early morning, show my sister and my parents standing together, looking sharp in their uniforms. In our old gray dresses, Grammy and I seem washed out, present but somehow incomplete, diluted. By the time the sun rose to a hard glare, the ones in uniform were on their way to their posts, answering the call of duty. I was left to care for my grandmother.
“They’re off to close the distance between ought and is,” Grammy said. “Good luck to ’em, cuz, good God, that’s a need! All our lives we’re told to make stacks and save wads and now we can’t even make change. Sometimes life feels like we’re set to fight a forest fire with nothing but a water pistol and a box o’ dry crackers, dudn’t it?”
She put her thin stick of an arm around my shoulder and said, “And here you are, stuck in the sticks with an old lady to watch out for, makin’ sure I don’t wander off. Won’t exactly be your halcyon days, huh? You feel left behind? Or left out? You could stick me on an ice floe, maybe.”
“I don’t think there are any ice floes left, Grammy.”
She chuckled. “Looks like you’re stuck, then.”
I didn’t mind. I loved her and I didn’t want to be a part of any battles. However, in the war for the future, we are all drafted.
I thought I was relatively safe growing up in a little town in Georgia. However, the tendrils of conflict wound their way everywhere, even to our tiny part of the world. I had to leave my little town of Campbellford. If we were to survive, we had to take drastic action.
“They say this winter will be the warmest yet.” Grammy fanned herself on her rocking chair on the front porch. She used to rock for hours out there. Grammy didn’t have the energy to rock in her chair anymore. She sat still, listened to the quiet and complained that her nightly conc
ert of frogs and crickets was gone. The marsh had dried up.
“Lots of traffic used to come through Campbellford on their way to some damn place, to and fro. By times one or two of those automatic trucks still blows past, just ugly gray boxes they are, all speeding, all dangerous and never stopping around here. Not a single driver in them. That used to be our number one job by population: drivin’ truck and deliverin’ things hither and thither. Now that there’s more trucks barrelin’ up and down the roads and no drivers, I think that’s why we got stuck with all this extreme weather. The air, Kismet! It’s so darn close.”
“Humid, you mean?”
“The air never used to be so close!”
“I know. The humidity makes my hair all frizzy.”
“You have quite a mop on you, more of a hair don’t that a hairdo. Get the scissors, I’ll give you a trim.”
Grammy wasn’t dangerous but I wasn’t about to hand her scissors. Her creeping dementia had already made me elder-proof the house. If she cut my hair, I’d worry she might not stop cutting when she got to my ears.
“I’ll get you your hand fan to keep the heat at bay,” I said.
“I got no energy to be wavin’ that thing at myself all day.”
“Then I’ll fan you.”
“I don’t pay with anything but smiles and a nod. You goin’ out lookin’ for a job tomorrow?”
She said tomorrow like tomorrah. I once asked her where she got her expressions.
“Wasn’t always stuck in a rocking chair in this little town. My family lived on turd stew sometimes but we used to move all over and live all over. I talk same as I did when I was your age. When I was young, so was the world. The world’s as old as me now and lookin’ no better. I don’t care for it.”
“You look lovely, Grammy.”
“My grandmother would have called that statement a bunch of horsefeathers.”
“What would you say?”
“I say, break all the mirrors!”
I ignored her and ducked into the house for a moment. “I can’t find the fan!” I called. “Where’d you put it?”
By the time I returned she’d forgotten what I went searching for. “Ah! A fan,” she said. “Can’t keep the stink off but maybe we can wave it downwind. Good idea.”
She gave me a smile and a nod as I fanned her. It was payment enough, but where memory failed, habits took over. She didn’t leave her favorite topics alone for long. Whenever she was annoyed, she would bring up my lack of employment. I helped out at the town’s food bank but the work wasn’t steady and paid in tins of fake fish.
“Maybe there are still things to do like changing tires on those robot trucks, huh?”
“I think the robots pretty much take care of the robots,” I replied.
“Incestuous business,” she said. “Or is that … what’s the word?”
“Nepotism?”
The way her eyebrows knitted together, I suspected that was a word that was now lost to her vocabulary.
“All you got is odd jobs, Kismet.”
“All the jobs are odd now. It’s not like when you were young and Jesus was still a carpenter running his own business.”
“Ain’t that so,” she said. “Even his business went bad. Nobody’s paying our savior any attention anymore. Everybody needs Jesus but we’re past the point of no return, aren’t we?”
“It’s not that bad. Not quite yet, anyway.”
“Isn’t it? You only say that because you don’t remember how it was before.”
“Then I guess I’m lucky. When you don’t know how good it was, you can’t miss it.”
I didn’t know how much worse things could get. Not then. We called it the Slow Apocalypse because the troubles had taken so long to mount. The future was a dark and looming cloud, but its shadow had taken over the landscape for so long, we were more fatigued than frightened.
The collapse started slow, like when the swamp and the jobs dried up at the same time. Lots of people’s jobs were going away and who’s really going to miss a swamp? With the frogs dead and the crickets gone to wherever crickets go, the nights were quieter. When the power rationing began, we told ourselves that was just the way it was and, with not a light in sight all the way to Atlanta, the stars seemed brighter.
“No shine from the humankind,” Grammy marveled. “No light to compete with the Milky Way. I haven’t seen the night sky so well since my eyes were good and I was younger than you.”
The cost of chicken was the first thing I really noticed. Grammy used to prepare chicken breasts for me, skin off and baked not fried. It was supposed to be healthier that way, for those who cared, for those who still clung to the idea that a longer life was important.
“I prefer the old way, Southern done, fried up with lots of grease,” Grammy told me, “but we gotta keep you strong and healthy for what’s ahead.”
“What’s ahead?” I asked.
“A whole lot less than what’s behind.”
Then Grammy stopped buying chicken. The price climbed too high. “We used to keep chickens in the yard back in Raleigh. We were poor but we never went hungry. Mostly we lived off the eggs but even the eggs are getting up there.”
“Up where?”
“Up where we don’t belong, with the rich folks.”
The pig fever epidemic had hit hard the first fall that Daddy, Mama and Sissy were away. China slaughtered almost all of them.
“They got a few pigs left in a special zoo underground somewhere,” Grammy said. “Keepin’ ’em around so’s they don’t go extinct, preserving the DNA so they can bring ’em back someday. If that grand resurrection happens, it’ll be long after my day. Too bad. My mother used to make me bacon on grilled cheese when I came home from school each day. I used to love head cheese and trotter stew.”
“Trotter stew?” I made a face and she laughed. Later, when all was quiet and I had some time to think, I wondered if Grammy was trying to turn my stomach on purpose, maybe to make me miss bacon less. The veggie bacon from the food bank wasn’t quite the same.
Then, when the embargoes began, the grocery store changed. There was still stuff on the shelves but nothing was fresh. “Food all tastes the same now,” Grammy complained, “as if it’s the same crap in different molds, processed up the wazoo and bland. Even the packaging is bland now. They don’t even have to bother with making the labels colorful and pretty anymore. You get what you get and you’re told to be grateful. Unless it’s the outhouse, I forget why I walked into a room these days. My memory of better days is still good, though. That’s kind of cruel isn’t it? Makes you think God got tired of us and wandered away to work on more interesting projects.”
A little weary of her whining, I reminded her there was a war on.
“Always was, always will be,” Grammy spat. “And when do you think your mother, father and Sissy will get back from it? You listen to the news. How we doin’?”
“They say we’re winning.” Even as I said it, no strength bolstered my words. “Let it alone, Grammy.”
I missed my parents. Rich and Kacy Beatriz were both Army infantry.
“We met while we were on containment duty,” Mama told us. “I looked over and here was this big man with a jaw like a steam shovel and I thought, ‘Now that’s a man.’ Rich looked over at me and our eyes met. We knew right away, like we’d been spending our lives waiting for the other one to show up.”
Mama and Daddy were married by an Army chaplain in a tent on the side of a hill looking out at Alcatraz. They had one night of leave, conceived Sissy and went right back to manning the barriers the next morning.
I loved that story. Despite the demands of their work, my parents saw each other’s best selves. Bad times don’t always build heroes but they met at a time when they could still believe in their mission to protect our country.
“Your daddy and the propapundits say good times are comin’ back,” Grammy said. “They’re taking their damn time and mighta gotten lost along the way. I wonde
r where they all are right now.”
“Leave it alone, Grammy. They’ll be back when they can come back.”
“You gonna look for a job, Kismet?”
“Leave it alone, Grammy.”
My sister found work following my parents into the service.
“Smart as a whip, that girl,” Grammy told me. “But too good for this place, always had her eye on the horizon. Your sister always wanted to be somewhere else even though all places are pretty much the same.”
Sissy was born Susan. She got her new moniker after I was born. I couldn’t pronounce her name properly at first and Sissy stuck.
She joined the Air Force. She wanted to take the training in New Chicago to be a doctor. They call it New Chicago but they really mean North Chicago. Chicago officially became two cities but they say it was always two cities, anyway.
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