American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline Page 10

  “Okay…” Cassandra sighed. “Maybe you didn’t misread it.”

  “I mean, the message seemed pretty clear,” I answered. “It came to the email I registered with for my Citizen ID, as a message in my social media inbox, a picture of the email to our TV screen, and a text message to my phone. They wanted to make sure that I saw it.” Everything had popped up at once. It was crazy.

  “That’s… Um, I don’t know what,” she admitted.

  “Overbearing. Big Brother-ish? Cyber bullying? Spying? Douchebaggy? Take your pick.”

  “Yeah, all of those,” she said.

  “I didn’t join the Army for a reason,” I grumbled. “I love our country, but I’m not cut out for all that taking orders and marching around crap.”

  She searched the palms of her hands in her lap for a minute, finally settling on, “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Sucks.”

  We’d seen notices on the television that the US Government was reinstituting the draft to fill the ranks of the military and in the back of my mind, I’d been concerned with getting drafted. Was this new CEA thing better than that?

  “Look on the positive side,” Cassandra offered. “It says that you can choose where you want to go after you graduate from the course. That’s pretty big. I mean, you can come back here, or we can move to any city that we wanted to.”

  “What about school?”

  “It sounds like your education was just put on hold.”

  “Are you going to get one of these notices too?” I asked, holding up my phone.

  “I don’t know. I mean, maybe. It sounds like you were specially selected for the position, I’d bet it was because of your football history.”

  “Maybe…” A thought occurred to me. The email had said that the bills would be taken care of for my family, but I didn’t actually have a family. I could see it as some sort of crazy government loophole that would enlist both of us into separate branches of the government and send us to opposite ends of the country. Cassandra was only about eighteen months from finishing her degree if she went through the summer term.

  I set my phone down on the table and sank down to the floor. “Cassandra?” I asked.

  “Hmm? Yeah?” She looked down at me.

  “I don’t have a ring yet, and this is spur of the moment. Will you marry me?”

  Cassandra said yes. We didn’t know the first thing about what the next steps were, but luckily, the Travis County Government website provided answers, or at least a link to the newly-created Federal Citizenship Portal. From there, we were able to request a wedding application. Because we both had our Citizen ID numbers, everything went smoothly on the site, but there were plenty of indicators on the page that if you didn’t have it, then you’d be out of luck in obtaining a wedding license.

  Texas was still under state and federal quarantine orders and social distancing mandates, even though we’d personally witnessed the various government agencies violate those orders on several occasions. Given the compressed timeline we were under—less than a month until I had to report to the bus station to get shipped off—the ceremony would need to occur while the quarantine was still in effect. But the government had a solution for that.

  Agent Goodman from the Bureau of Citizenship Registration returned to our apartment unannounced on a Tuesday afternoon. When I opened the door, she was all smiles and her goons with guns weren’t in sight. It’d taken almost the full week after her last visit for my head to clear after getting butt-stroked to the forehead, so I definitely was not happy to see her.

  “Good afternoon, Citizen Haskins,” she said, beaming.

  “Um, hello, Agent Goodman.”

  “Is Citizen Ortelli home as well?” she asked, chuckling at her own little joke since we were under quarantine.

  “Yeah…” I turned and called out to Cassandra in the bedroom. She was folding laundry. “Cassandra, Agent Goodman is here.”

  “Who?”

  “Goodman. The citizenship registration officer who collected your biometrics last week. You know, the one that had her goons beat me with a rifle.”

  “Oh.” She appeared at the bedroom door, holding a pair of sweatpants. She tossed them onto the bed and walked down the hallway toward us.

  “That was an unfortunate lesson, Citizen Haskins. But necessary.” She glanced beyond me. “Good afternoon, Citizen Ortelli.”

  “Good afternoon,” Cassandra replied.

  “I have great news to pass along.” If possible, Goodman’s smile got wider. “Your application for marriage has been approved! Isn’t that wonderful news?”

  “Yes,” Cassandra replied. “Thank you for telling us.”

  “And I hear you’ve been selected to join the CEA. That’s a very prestigious assignment.” Agent Goodman leaned forward and put a hand to her cheek like she was sharing a secret. “I’ve applied for a transfer there. Don’t tell my protection specialists.”

  I glanced around her to the walkway. Sure enough, the two men were there, almost out of sight from our doorway. They were wearing masks, so I couldn’t tell if the one who’d hit me was with her today or not. “Thank you for telling us the good news, Agent Goodman,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Your ceremony will be at 4 p.m. I’ll be the officiant, Sergeant Dobbs and Specialist Chu will be the witnesses.”

  “Four o’clock?” Cassandra blurted out. “Today? What the hell?”

  “Yes, today, Citizen Ortelli. I have a few more visits I need to make not far from here, then we’ll be back to perform the ceremony.”

  “But my family—”

  “Is under quarantine,” Goodman cut her off. “There will be a State video crew to record the event, so we can broadcast it live to them if you’d like.” She glanced back at me. “To your family in Alabama as well, Citizen Haskins.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. My parents had flat-out refused all the Citizen ID bullshit, as had many farmers in their area. They were self-sufficient and didn’t need further government interference in their daily lives. Dad said the few times that they’d gone to town for luxury items like ice cream, they’d gotten around the citizenship requirements through their extensive network of friends. He hadn’t been happy when I told him that I’d been forced to register, but understood the dilemma we were in all the way “out west” as he’d put it. He’d been proud of me for putting in a false address about two hundred miles south of their location. I wondered if the Citizen Registration folks had seen through my ruse.

  I sidestepped the agent’s statement about my parents. “I’ll have to see if they’re available. It’s getting near planting season that far south.” It wasn’t a far stretch to think that if the citizen registration people had pulled my picture from an out-of-date UT football page, then they could find my parents’ real address from my student loan paperwork.

  “Please do, Citizen Haskins. We’ve been trying to track down your parents to offer them citizenship, but agents in the more rural parts of the country have been less than successful in obtaining full cooperation like we have been in the cities. All in good time, I suppose.”

  Agent Goodman clapped her hands together and then looked at her wrist. “Alright, Citizens. You’ve got about three hours to get ready for the ceremony and um…” She leaned in slightly. “I’d recommend you clean up the place a bit. Yours will be one of the first, if not the first, wedding ceremony performed by the Bureau of Citizenship Registration. We’re standing in the doorway of a new era in American history. So exciting!”

  She didn’t wait for us to answer. Instead, she executed an abrupt turn and walked quickly toward the stairwell. She was still limping slightly like I’d noticed the last time she was here, but I could tell she tried not to let us see the weakness. The sound of her shoes gave away the disability, though, as one of them thumped louder than the other on the concrete walkway. I shut the door and turned toward Cassandra.

  “Um… Yay?” I said, posing the word as a question.

>   “This is bullshit,” she replied. “Hurry up, throw everything that we don’t want on camera into the bedroom. We’ll get the place cleaned up quickly and then get ready.”

  I nodded. “I’ve gotta call my parents. This is crazy.”

  “It’s bullshit,” she repeated. “But, I’m also happy. I love you, Bodhi.”

  “Love you too, babe,” I replied automatically. I couldn’t believe I was actually getting married in a few hours. I was only twenty-one. It was all so sudden. I did love her, but it seemed like everything was crazy right now.

  As I rushed around, gathering textbooks and laptops, I thought about our future together. Apparently, we would be one of the first sanctioned weddings under the new government. What did that mean, if anything?

  And what about my immediate future? For the thousandth time since I’d gotten the emails and texts the other day, I wondered what the CEA, and more pressing, the CEA Assessment and Training Course, had in store for me. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to do it, but that was a decision that I’d have to make during the course of the training. I mean, they threatened jail time if I didn’t report, but if I failed out during the course, what then?

  There were so many questions that I simply didn’t have answers for. The one I’d have to address first was what I was going to wear during the ceremony.

  TWELVE

  March 7th came quickly. Too quickly for my liking, but then again, does a mandatory report date for any type of training ever arrive slowly? I bet my grandfather, who’d been drafted into the Marine Corps for Vietnam, or my dad, who’d volunteered for the Army, would have told me the same thing I was thinking. As I sat on the bus, driving northward up the 35, I could hear my Grandpa’s rough, gravelly voice. “Bodhi. What kind of damn fool hippy-dippy name is that anyways? Listen here, kid. You’ll never have enough time to do all the things you want to do. Before you know it, you’re shipping out to get the piss kicked outta ya at bootcamp. No women. No cigarettes. No sleep. Salt Peter in the damn food—you’ll learn about that. It's terrible. Then the real fun begins when they send you out to win the peoples’ hearts and minds, but a bunch of boneheads are trying to kill you. That’s when you learn what kind of a man you are, son.”

  My eyes watered slightly and I wiped away the tears. I missed my grandfather. He died of lung cancer when I was a sophomore in high school. Tough old son of a bitch beat COVID-19 a couple of years before only to get the shit kicked out of him from the lifelong cigarette habit he’d picked up as a grunt in the bush. It was a raw deal, but that’s all I expected any of us to get anyway, so what did it matter?

  I tried to keep track of where we went, but after crossing into Arkansas and then driving past Little Rock more than two hours later, I gave up. Asking the other passengers was no help because the government hadn’t contracted the bus exclusively for its use, there were only a smattering of CEA recruits aboard. Everyone else was just traveling on their newly-approved US Citizen quarantine clearance authorization. I learned that several of the people had been stuck in Austin for almost four months when the quarantine hit. I probably would have violated quarantine and just left if I was them, but I couldn’t say that to them. I was going to be a Civic Enforcement Agency officer—whatever the hell that meant.

  The bus climbed into the Ozark Mountains, going higher and higher into the hills on the switchback single lane roads and I swear to God I heard the dueling banjos from Deliverance. I saw a sign that said Harrison was forty miles away and I hoped that was finally our destination. As we got closer, the driver announced that all CEA-ATC students were to get off at the next stop, so it was at least somewhere near the small city.

  The bus drove through downtown Harrison, Arkansas. The city was hilly, lots of ups and downs as the developers simply paved over whatever natural feature had been in their way when they arrived versus leveling things out like normal city planners would have insisted upon. The bus engine revved at each stoplight where it had to start on an uphill. After about ten minutes, the driver flipped on his turn signal indicators and I strained my neck to see if we were turning left or right.

  We went left and turned into the parking lot of the Hampton Inn Hotel in downtown Harrison. The government had commandeered the entire hotel, 67 guest rooms and just one meeting room, for the Civic Enforcement Agency Assessment and Training Course. A man wearing a dark utility uniform, like what the soldiers wore, but in all black, stepped aboard the bus with a clipboard in his hand.

  “Good evening, Citizens,” he said. “If you are here for CEA-ATC, this is your stop. There should be eight of you on this bus from Central Texas.”

  I’d already collected up my few meager possessions and placed them into my backpack, so after one more quick check, I stood up and shuffled toward the front of the bus. The officer took each of our names as we walked by and told us to meet the driver outside to retrieve our bags from under the bus.

  Once I’d gotten my duffle bag with the required five days’ of civilian clothing and personal hygiene gear, I walked a short way away from the bus to stand with the others who’d arrived with me. We seemed to be an eclectic bunch, with no real unifying features among us except the fact that we were all men and all of us were tall. Most were muscular as well, like they’d been athletes or personal trainers before all of this went down. That seemed a little weird to me and I recalled the email saying something about my unique physical attributes. Apparently, they weren’t that unique.

  The officer stepped off the bus and put on his black ball cap with a logo of some type emblazoned in red and blue on the front. He made his way toward us while the final student got his bags. He seemed to ooze confidence and authority, like he’d been doing this sort of stuff his entire life instead of being part of a new organization, just like we were. I saw he had a name tag sewn to his shirt that identified him as Sergeant Collins.

  Collins waited for the straggler to arrive and stared hard at us. The bus pulled off and went around the circle. Then we descended into Bizzaro World. Sergeant Collins went apeshit. He screamed at us like he was insane. Maybe he was. He forced people to do pushups. Those who wouldn’t had a cattle prod applied to their calf muscles by a second and third officer dressed the same as he was, compelling them to comply. It was the craziest twenty minutes of my life, doing pushups, squats, and crunches to fatigue on the pavement outside of a hotel while under the threat of physical pain.

  And just like that, Collins flipped the switch again. “Welcome to the Civic Enforcement Agency Assessment and Training Course, ladies. I am Sergeant Collins. Behind you—don’t you fucking look at them! Behind you is Sergeant White—the black guy—and Corporal White—the white guy. Somebody in the head shed thought it would be funny to get two drill instructors with the same last fucking name for the same fucking class.”

  A student raised his hand and Collins closed the gap instantly to get in his face. “Can’t you see I’m fucking talking here, dipshit? What is your name?”

  “Jesse Newman,” he answered.

  “Jesse Newman. Jesse Fucking Newman? You are so fucking clueless, aren’t you Jesse Newman?”

  “Um, this isn’t what I thought it would be,” Newman continued. “I don’t want to be in the military or whatever. I thought we’d be helping people. I want to go home.”

  I watched in shock as Collins kicked him hard in the nuts and he crumpled to the ground. The Smiths went to work, kicking him repeatedly in the body. Thankfully, they never landed a blow to his head or else they might have killed him.

  “Alright, that’s enough,” Collins told the two instructors. “Stand him up. Anyone else not know what the word ‘compulsory’ means?” Sergeant Collins yelled. Nobody said anything. “Remember the email that told you where to be this morning? It stated right there in the letter that your service was compulsory. I have ten weeks to transform you maggots from pot smoking, farm animal fucking, college athletics dropouts into CEA agents capable of enforcing the laws of this great land of ours.”
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br />   I didn’t know where Collins came from, but I was reasonably confident that he’d been a drill instructor for the Marine Corps and they brought him over like the rest of us. The man was a lunatic. He went on for about ten minutes, discussing the merits of the new organization and what our role in the NAR would be. It was the most I’d heard about the CEA, or our supposed “new society,” so I listened as intently as I could in between furtive glances at Jesse Newman. The guy was obviously not doing well. They’d done a number on him.

  Finally, the first lesson on the CEA, standing in the cold March evening, was over and Sergeant Collins told us to go check in with the hotel staff. We had a zero-five hundred formation with the other students who’d already arrived earlier in the day. Everyone was expected to be clean-shaven and ready to go for a run before breakfast.

  We were bunked up three trainees to a room with one rollaway bed in the rooms appointed with two queen sized beds and two rollaways in the king sized bed rooms. I got lucky and was assigned to a king-sized room with a couch, giving us an option to sit and study without constantly being in a bed of some sort. Others wouldn’t be so lucky.

  I could see the indentions on the carpet where a dresser, and presumably the television, had been, but that was gone. In their place were three upright lockers for our things. Each one had three drawers on the bottom and a set of double doors that opened to reveal a wardrobe space for our hanging clothes. The wall lockers were empty except for ten hangers which were permanently attached to the crossbar and a small mirror.

  My new roommates were a burly farm kid named Gentry, from Mississippi, and an older black guy named Wirth, from Maryland. They seemed nice enough and we worked out a rotation schedule to decide who got to sleep in the king-size bed each night. Two nights in, four nights out. Simple. I drew the short straw, so my first four nights would be on a rollaway. Oh well, might as well get used to it.