Escape
The creek was more dead than alive.
Weeds and brambles choked the water flow, which had dwindled slowly over the
years from a steady rush to a slow burble to a bare trickle. Jim thought it
seemed odd that all those years ago, when he played here as a boy, the crushed
beer cans and old Dunkin’ Donuts wrappers had no effect on the creek. They’d
get hung up on the bank, or bounce down a miniature waterfall and rebound out
of the water like a bull rider who had met his match. Left untended, unguarded
by the trample of feet on the banks and the splash of ankles in summer,
however, the waterway was filled with deadfalls and pricker bushes and marsh
grass.
Jim had played here as a boy
because Jim had lived here as a boy, and he only had to look up and across the clotted
streambed to see the back of the old barn that had housed everything from Jim’s
surfboard to Dad’s lawnmower, Mom’s classic record collection (“Keep those
under the tarp or they’ll get wet!”) to Dad’s work bench (“It may look a mess,
but I know where everything is. So don’t touch anything.”).
Through the cold sunshine and bare
tree limbs, Jim could even make out his now-abandoned childhood home – an old
Cape with white walls and a black door. Plenty of windows to let the world in when
you felt ready to take it on, and plenty of curtains to shut the world out when
you felt you’d never be ready for anything. Many of the street-facing windows
were probably smashed in by now, but Jim had come through the woods, and the
back of the house looked almost the same as the day he left. He remembered family
Christmases hosted here, and Thanksgivings, and Easter egg hunts which Jim and
his cousins had loved best of all. The short rock wall that lined the small
property had egg-hiding places too numerous to count, not to mention the bushes
lining the front walk and the old stone well in between the street and the sun
porch. Jim had read many a book out on that sun porch – Dennis Lehane crime
novels in the fall, Stephen King thrillers on summer nights –
Jim was shaken from his reverie by
the sharp blast of a crow.
Even in this remote town on the
very edge of the Northeast Quadrant, Jim had to be ever vigilant. The Chinese
stayed primarily to the main roads and population centers, but they weren’t
averse to sending out a patrol every so often. And if Jim were picked up as he
waited in the woods by his abandoned childhood home, they would take him in for
“questioning”. And they’d soon find the torn scrap of fabric hidden in an
inside pocket of his overcoat. The scrap of fabric with a hero’s blood on it.
And that would surely ruin everything.
__
So Jim waited, a forty-year-old
Caucasian American, sandy-haired and with blue eyes that had an odd ability to
mirror the color of the sky. A member of the second to last generation born
before the Takeover. He had no children, thankfully, and no wife or girlfriend,
which was probably for the best. Jim had been a relationship person in his
youth, and had been engaged to his longtime girlfriend Caroline when the
Chinese took power in 2015. She had been a human ray of sunshine, able to lift
his spirits with a touch and goad him into laughter with a glance. On June 15th,
2015, she was in Boston at a doctor’s appointment when the half city was
leveled by a series of carefully coordinated explosions. Her hospital hadn’t
been attacked, as the enemy didn’t want to inherit a country full of injured
and dying people with no medical care available. Unfortunately, she was on the
sidewalk directly in front of a major bank when it was targeted, and didn’t
survive the blowout. She was 24.
That was 15 years ago, and Jim
still ached inside when he thought of her. He had had other women since that
time, and even seen one of them for a few months once life resumed a regular,
if militantly regulated, routine. But he knew, in this society, emotional ties
weren’t worth the trouble. Plus, he didn’t get much time away from his desk at
the Northeast Quadrant Office of Public Relations. Always busy. When you take
over a country, you need to relate to your new public.
A lot.
So Jim waited. And then, from the
direction he’d come, he heard crunches. Dead leaves and twigs make for the
world’s noisiest red carpet, Jim thought, and he raised his head so his eye
level cleared the boulder behind which he had been crouched for twenty minutes.
If it was the Chinese, he’d at least have a concealed spot to shoot from.
It was not the Chinese. It was one of Jim’s oldest friends. Kyle Walters was three months younger than Jim, and the pair had met when Kyle moved to Jim’s neighborhood in third grade. Kyle was assimilated immediately into the neighborhood crowd, and could be seen stalking the sidewalk summer nights during games of manhunt, or hitting walk-off wiffle ball home runs in his backyard. Jim and Kyle had lived together after college for a year or so, in one of those great post-adolescent experiments in laziness and late nights and video games.
It was not the Chinese. It was one of Jim’s oldest friends. Kyle Walters was three months younger than Jim, and the pair had met when Kyle moved to Jim’s neighborhood in third grade. Kyle was assimilated immediately into the neighborhood crowd, and could be seen stalking the sidewalk summer nights during games of manhunt, or hitting walk-off wiffle ball home runs in his backyard. Jim and Kyle had lived together after college for a year or so, in one of those great post-adolescent experiments in laziness and late nights and video games.
Jim put away his pistol and stepped
out from behind the boulder. The two embraced briefly.
“Got it?” asked Jim quickly.
“Oh yeah,” replied Kyle, unzipping
his coat and removing a small plastic bag filled with a half-ounce of marijuana.
“You got my end?”
“Yup,” Jim said, as he pulled from
his coat the 2 inch square scrap of torn cotton smeared with a crimson
bloodstain.
They exchanged items.
“You’re sure this is the real
deal?” asked Kyle intensely. They’d been best friends for thirty years, but
this was the most important moment of Kyle’s life.
“I saw him rip it and mark it
himself,” replied Jim solemnly. He’d always been the solemn one. Kyle had
always been the goofy one, the one to rile Jim up before anything got too
serious. He didn’t disappoint.
“Wow, if your dad could see you
now, buying weed back by the old creek, huh?” Kyle laughed to himself. Jim
smiled weakly, and Kyle kept on: “Man, we had some good times here, though.
Sucks to see it gone to seed like this.”
“I know,” said Jim. “I remember my
mom complaining about how you’d come over our house and crack open the fridge
like you owned the place.”
“I definitely did that,” chuckled
Kyle. “Just wanted to check if she had any of her famous brownies in there.
God, those were good.”
A fleeting thundershower of
emotions passed over Jim’s face: nostalgia twinged with anger, followed by a
faint glimmer of hope. Kyle saw none of this, as he gazed through the trees and
up the small hill to the back of the centuries-old house.
“I kept the recipe, you know,” said
Jim. “But they’re different now. Can’t get good eggs or butter. Nothing’s as
good as it was before the Takeover.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘Nothing,’” said Kyle, pointing at the
side of Jim’s coat where the bag was now stored. “That’s my own private stash right there. Only
the best for you, bud. And for this,” holding up the precious scrap. “I’m just
confused why you’re basically giving it away. This is priceless, right here.”
“I got some stuff I have to do.
I’ll make the next one,” said Jim. “Promise. Now, let me tell you where to be
and when. Just buy me a couple of beers when you find out where the next one
gets in. I’ll be there”
__
And Jim told his best friend how to
escape from the Northeast Quadrant of what used to be the United States, and
was now the United Quadrants of New China, or NC for short.
He told him about the 60-foot long
cloaked hoverboat that would bob in the rocky shallows off the coast of what
used to be the town of Hull, Massachusetts, not 500 yards from the house they
had shared after college.
He told him to present the scrap of
cloth to the captain, who will look unmistakably like a refugee hoverboat
captain, for DNA confirmation. The blood on the scrap was the captain’s own, Jim
told Kyle. He gave 300 of these out each time he returned to NC, and they were
the most valuable items in the Quadrants. Possession of one guaranteed passage
to a French, British, or Dutch island in the Caribbean, where NC refugees were
given asylum.
He told him that the h-boat would leave at 1
AM sharp, on tomorrow’s high tide, and would arrive in Simpson Bay on the southern
coast of Saint Maarten by dawn.
Then the two embraced again, and
Jim repeated himself: “I’ll make the next one. Promise.”
__
Jim let Kyle leave first, back the
way they had both come, while he remained behind for a few minutes of
reflection with his old life. His housing unit now was not far from here, about
a twenty minute hoverbike ride, but he rarely came down anymore. The memories
lay around this town like cobwebs in the corners of a bare attic. He took an empty
oregano bottle from his coat and very carefully transferred the contents of the
plastic bag into the bottle. Then he wadded the bag up, stuffed it deep
underneath the boulder, and set off up the path away from his old house. He
found his hoverbike where he had stored it in a stand of trees near the road,
and drove himself back to his housing unit.
__
Aside from working, and the odd
solo round of golf or drive to the beach, Jim had lived, as much as possible,
in the past. Books were his sanctuary. Books from before the Takeover.
The walls of his 24’ by 24’ unit
were covered floor to ceiling with books of every kind: novels, biographies,
short stories, histories. Jim began to collect them well in advance of the
takeover, just for pleasure, and his collecting reached a fever pitch in the
weeks when the Chinese were threatening to take power. He had a feeling that
he’d want as many books as he could get his hands on, just in case.
The only space that was free of
books was the NC-mandated telescreen in one corner. With a full view of all
three other corners of his apartment, the two-way telescreen watched Jim’s
every move, as it did in everyone’s homes across NC.
In the beginning, when
insurrections were common, telescreens were the new regime’s first warning
beacons. Revolutionaries would gather in an apartment, armed to the teeth,
smash the telescreen, then wait for the troops to descend.
The beginning was bloody.
Now, most viewed these as nothing
more than an annoyance.
Jim was glad the Chinese weren’t
interested in books, because they had taken everything else.
Cities were re-planned and rebuilt
in regimented sameness. Television, radio, film, and the internet (as much as
possible) were in control of the EC. Government was unaffected in all but two
ways. First, the Chinese put one person, called a Controller, in charge of
every state. Every elected state official had to clear with their Controller
before taking any action, and their plans were almost always denied. Secondly,
the office of the Presidency was eliminated. The son of the Leader of China was
installed as the New Leader of New China. It was joked that he was promoted
from the Department of Redundancy Department.
But not very loudly.
__
With not much time left, however,
Jim didn’t have the luxury of reading any of his books. It was a good thing he
had done this hundreds of times before. He carefully set the oregano bottle on
the hard plastic counter next to the sink.
Then he set to work.
__
Two hours later, Jim Vorney walked
into what used to be South Shore Hospital in what used to be Weymouth, and was
now called NEQ Hospital 115. He had a parcel under his arm.
As he crossed the threshold and
triggered the combined x-ray/infrared sensors, his skin seemed to crawl across
his bones. I could walk through that door
naked, Jim thought, and still feel
guilty of something.
Jim had left nothing to chance with
this visit. Ping was sitting behind the squat, brushed aluminum front desk,
just as he knew she would be. Some of the front desk workers thought they
wielded all the power of the Leader himself, but Ping was an exception. Jim
could tell she was uninterested in enforcing every soul-crushing regulation and
restriction on hospital visitors. He thought she had a good heart, and in a
different world might have become a schoolteacher. He liked to think that she
and he could have been friends. He thought that maybe, fifteen years after the
Takeover, Ping was growing tired of watching downtrodden citizens shuffle in to
visit their dying loved ones in this dirty, understaffed medical facility in a
town they used to know.
Either that, or she was just lazy.
Whatever the case was, Ping didn’t
question the parcel under Jim’s arm. He had been coming in once or twice every
week for about three months now, and he made sure to chat up the workers as
much as possible. It pays to be friendly.
Especially when committing a
felony.
The guards behind the desk were a
study in that old Cold War tenet, mutually assured destruction. Ostensibly,
they were there to protect the building from rebels. In reality, no one had
attempted any sort of mass uprising or violent rebellion since the McCray
Rebellion in 2021.
That one didn’t go well for McCray.
The guard behind the right side of
Ping’s desk, on Jim’s left, was at least 6 foot 5 and looked like a tombstone
with a head. And several automatic weapons. He had close-shaven black hair and
ruddy, waxy skin. He was Chinese, sent from his home country as one of the
million or so peace-keeping forces who prevented anyone from “getting any ideas,”
as they would have said in the old gangster flicks. Jim missed those.
The guard behind the left side of
Ping’s desk, or Jim’s right, was probably closer to 6 foot 6 and looked like a
refrigerator with a head. He also was in possession of said automatic weapons.
This man’s name was Derek, and he looked to be in his mid-fifties, with an
old-school US Military flattop made of silver bristles.
In the roughly 25 visits Jim had
made to this hospital in the last three months, he had never seen one of the
guards talk to a person of a different ethnicity than them. Derek barely spoke
at all, but when an American visitor had a question, he would grunt a few
syllables in their direction. He left the Chinese visitors and staffers to talk
to, what Jim was sure Derek called, “their own kind.”
Jim signed the guest check-in book
and got his hand stamped with infrared ink, then casually (he hoped) went down
the right-hand hallway behind the desk and into the belly of the hospital.
He nodded to Derek on the way by,
and thought he saw a wink in return.
__
The Chinese took power because they
wanted to start over. It was as simple and as ruthless as that. A leader named
Xuanlong Shi bullied and battered his way to the head of the country while 99%
of America lived on obliviously. The thought of another nation attempting to
attack and colonize the United States was laughable. We had oceans, thought the Americans, they would protect us.
Xuanlong led a nation of almost1.4
billion people, and he was disgusted with it. The cities were stagnant, the
towns were worse, and the people were oppressed, downtrodden, and hopeless. He
didn’t want his people to live like this. He wanted them to live like
Americans. So, rather than try to create a more positive and forward-thinking
society in China, he just took over the United States.
The US never saw it coming, even
though they were basically dependent upon China for several decades before the
actual Takeover. They were like Blanche DuBois in that respect. Too reliant upon the kindness of strangers.
__
Jim reached the elevator, waved his
hand across the scanner, stepped into the metal car, and was buoyed on an expanding
column of gas up to the third floor. He stepped out, turned left, and counted
four doors down until he reached 314. He knocked once lightly, and entered.
His mother looked terrible, but at
least she was sleeping. Her small brunette head tilted to the right, she lay on
her back, an IV drip attached to the inside of her left elbow. Jim shuddered.
No matter how often he saw them, he always hated IVs. It was strange, but Jim
felt more comfortable allowing a doctor to examine his private parts than
letting a needle puncture the skin below his biceps. There was something so
vulnerable about allowing access to that part of your body.
There was no better word to
describe how Melissa Vorney had been until six months ago than the word vibrant. Before the Takeover, when Jim
still counted on his mother for all the things kids count on their mothers for
without really knowing it (food, shelter, love, food, encouragement, advice,
food, clean clothes, and food), she had been the best mom he could have asked
for. She was smart, experienced, and thoughtful, but also funny and completely
devoid of pretense. She could laugh until tears fell from her brown eyes at a
moment’s notice. She was outgoing almost to the point of being intrusive, but
everything she did was so well-intentioned that no one could accuse her of
being overbearing. She was only 5-foot-2, but she entered every room with a
flourish and left with new friends.
Since her husband’s death during
the Takeover, it had been a little harder. Jim, at 25, had to abandon that
young adult mindset of invincibility and comfort. He became a self-sufficient
member of society overnight, because he had to. You can change like that at 25.
His mother had been 64, and things
weren’t as easy. Her job was deemed “non-essential,” and she was fired.
More accurately, the company she
worked for was abolished. The new regime had no use for personalized greeting
cards. They were not in the business of sympathy, congratulations, or birthday
salutations.
Regardless, Melissa had soldiered
on. She was given a small monthly stipend on which to live, due to her husband’s
death. She augmented this with odd jobs that suited her: doing the shopping for
high-ranking Chinese officials, assisting in hospitals and food shelters, and
even returning to her beat-up Gibson guitar for a few gigs in coffee shops and
schools. She did not lose her sparkle, as so many of Jim’s friends and loved
ones had after the Takeover.
But now she was losing her life.
She stirred in her bed, as Jim sat
down in the hard plastic chair beside her. She had been feeling sick for
several weeks before finally relenting and going to the hospital, and it was no
great surprise to find out that she had cancer. It had most likely started in
her breast, but had spread to several other places as well. The Chinese had no
desire to save non-essential members of society, and it was only thanks to Jim’s
relative stature within the government that Melissa even had a hospital bed. It
was estimated that she had less than a month left.
“Mom,” said Jim quietly.
Jim’s mother opened her eyes, and
for a brief instant Jim saw the old Melissa: the passionate, engaging woman who
had guided him through his childhood. But then the pupil contracted from the
harsh light of the room, and she came fully awake and was hit, as she was every
time she awoke now, with the truth of her mortality.
Jim showed her the sealed plastic
container, which was brim full of his mother’s famous brownies. A weak grin opened
his mother’s sunken face like a flower at dawn.
“Grandma’s recipe?” she said, for
like all great family recipes, this was concocted by Jim’s grandmother.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “but I added a
little something. Let’s both have one, mom. I haven’t had one of your brownies
in years.”
Jim pried the top off the
container, removed two small brownies, and quickly replaced the lid. Then he
gave one to his mother and held one himself, and they ticked their brownies
together as if they were clinking glasses at a family Christmas party.
__
Through the thin hospital sheet it
was easy to watch Melissa’s body relax as the marijuana melted its way into her
system.
The ingestion of any
nonprescription drug was grounds for severe punishment, and so the marijuana
culture in America had dwindled to practically nothing. When Oxy was kosher and
weed meant a lengthy imprisonment, society adjusted accordingly. Jim hadn’t had
a hit of pot in nearly 13 years. And Kyle hadn’t been kidding. This was good
stuff.
“Jim,” his mother said to him after
a few minutes, as she sat up in her bed for the first time in weeks, “I feel
quite a bit better. Different, and tingly, but better. Why?”
And so Jim explained his meeting
with Kyle, his passing on of the scrap of cloth, and his reason for making the
brownies. He knew they had not bothered to give her pain medication, so these
were the best he could do.
In typical Melissa Vorney fashion,
her eyes welled up with heavy tears.
“Kyle made it out, Jimmy?” she
asked, hoping to populate a last, romantic adventure within her own mind with
Jim’s childhood friend and confidant.
“Yeah, mom. Kyle made it,” he said.
“He’s going to be OK. Now, tell me again how Grandma Claire came up with this
recipe.”
And so Jim and his mother began to
talk. Melissa had always been one of the great talkers, it was obvious that she
had lived her life in a constant state of conversation with everyone around
her. The words flowed smoothly from her, and though she had withered away to no
more than skin and bones, her mind and voice were as sharp and boisterous as
ever.
Jim and his mother had talked about
her passing in his previous visits. It was inevitable, she explained to her distraught
son on the day he found out, everyone leaves at some point. She had made it
longer than most. They had made their arrangements, those tedious and awkward details
that need to be taken care of before one can pass on in peace. And so in this
visit, they talked about better times.
Summer days spent diving from the
stern of Jim’s father’s little power boat, and puttering around the little islands
and rocky shoreline of their hometown. Winters curled up by the fireplace,
playing Scrabble (and losing to Jim’s erudite father) while the Patriots played
in the background. Family road trips to Melissa’s great aunt’s pecan farm in
Georgia – rows of pole pines and enough barbecue to feed a college football
team. They talked while the red blood raced through their veins and the nerves
sparkled and the fine hair on their arms lifted in salute to the marijuana within
them. Melissa said she hadn’t gotten high since June of 1969, and Jim laughed
because it was the first time she had ever admitted to smoking pot. Of course
she had smoked, she said, it was the 60s, and she hadn’t been a loser. Jim nearly toppled his chair in
laughter. The minutes dissolved into hours, as Jim and his mother shared the
contents of two lives – one that had run nearly all its course, and one that
still splashed and tumbled merrily in the valley of middle age. But at last, it
was time to go.
Jim wouldn’t be returning for any
more visits, he told her. The captain would probably already be back, and he
was only making one more trip from the Northeast Quadrant before moving on to
the Southeast. This was Jim’s chance. The chance that almost everyone in the
Quadrants would die for. Jim and his mother both knew that.
They said their goodbyes. They
weren’t long and emotional, because for all intents and purposes, the whole
visit had been a goodbye. It was a goodbye to every part of the life they had
shared, and indeed the entirety of Melissa Vorney’s existence. They embraced
for a time, and each promised the other the same thing that had been repeated
uncountable times before, and meant each time: “I love you.”
Melissa Vorney died in her sleep three
days later.
The container of brownies was empty.
__
__
Epilogue
Jim paid nearly his entire life’s
savings to secure a spot on the final h-boat from the NEQ. He arrived in the
Inner Harbor of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, on the afternoon of the
third day since he had left his mother.
He found
Kyle in a bar down the street, with two cold Carib beers for both of them.
“So what
did you have to do that was so important?” Kyle asked.
“Well," said Jim, "remember my mom's brownies?"
__
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