American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline Page 5

  “Hang up!” I screeched. “Hang up!”

  I heard her finger punch the glass surface on her phone and the phone in the soldier’s hand went dark. The four of them conferred with each other for a moment until one of them reached over and grabbed the phone from the other’s hand. He threw it violently into the ground, which set them off on a series of erratic gestures. They’d obviously had a disagreement about what to do with the phone. I guess the guy who smashed it won that one.

  The screen illuminated a millisecond before the sound of another single gunshot reached us in the apartment. They’d shot the female again, in the head this time to make sure she was dead.

  A soft whimper beside me caused me to look back at Cassandra. “Who?”

  “Kelley,” she muttered. “I saw Alex, so I knew it was her. They just murdered them.”

  Kelley and Alex were friends of ours. Well, actually, Kelley was Cassandra’s friend, so Alex and I had hung out several times. He wouldn’t have been my go-to phone call if I needed help with something, but he was an okay guy. Given the suitcases on the ground, I assumed they’d been trying to leave the city. I glanced at the clock on Cassandra’s nightstand. It was 2 a.m. Kelley and Alex had been trying to sneak out in the middle of the night.

  We watched the scene for a few more minutes in silence until the bodies were dragged to the opposite side of the street where there weren’t any cars parked. Then the Guardsmen walked back to wherever they’d been stationed.

  As they disappeared from view, the realization hit me that there’d been no way the soldiers had talked to Kelley or Alex to ask them why they were outside. They were too far away from each other. Our friends had been murdered simply for violating the curfew.

  That fact made me feel like a rat trapped in a cage and I wanted out.

  SIX

  I called my parents the next day after Cassandra and I had watched the video a few times. My mom wanted us to leave right away and come back home, but my dad cautioned against it. The soldiers were obviously amped up right now after this apparent new order came down to stop curfew violators. As long as we had enough food to last us, we should stay put in the apartment until the National Guard had a chance to settle itself out. He figured that the soldiers were likely violating their own orders since no commander would ever tell his men to kill unarmed Americans.

  I believed my dad’s assertion that the soldiers who’d murdered Kelley and Alex were criminals, acting on their own without orders. He’d served in the Army for eight years before he went back to work on the family farm, so surely he knew what he was talking about, right? The soldiers would be arrested and brought up on murder charges once their commanders found out about what they’d done.

  Dad wanted me to email him the video we took. While he didn’t really think it was officially sanctioned, he still wanted us to be smart about giving away our location in case of reprisals by the individuals in the video. He’d send it to the news media and the Texas legislature from Alabama where he was safe from their reach. It made sense in a messed up way, so I told him that I’d email it immediately after we ended our phone conversation.

  The last thing my dad told me to do was to prepare a go-bag for both me and Cassandra. He said to fill it with supplies like food and water, changes of clothing, a blanket, rain jacket, and that sort of stuff. “Think of it like you’re packing for a long camping trip,” he said over the phone. “You’re not one hundred percent sure what the weather is going to do, so you’ve gotta bring a variety of clothing—but not too much! Most of your weight and space should be taken up by food and water. A water purification system if you’ve still got it after that big trip you took last summer. That’ll save on weight. Hell, if you have it, or can get it, throw a case or two of bottled water in your truck and just leave it there.”

  I did still have the water jug and filter from our Big Bend hiking trip buried somewhere in the closet. I hadn’t ever needed to use it because Cassandra had insisted that we take a massive amount of water instead of trusting to the water purification system I’d spent seventy bucks on. At the time, I’d been mad as hell because all that water added a lot of weight to my backpack, but I was grateful for it now since we had the thing and it was ready to go.

  “Last thing, son,” Dad continued. “I want you to plan to leave in a hurry, that’s what the bags are for. Plan now, don’t go doing it unless the you-know-what hits the fan. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but we might be on the verge of something big here. This bird flu thing is bad. I keep watching the news and it’s way worse than that coronavirus from ten years ago—and that almost destroyed our country by the time it’d run its course and the politicians had gotten in their licks.”

  “I understand, Dad. We’ll stay low and keep our heads on a swivel.”

  “That’s my boy. Watch the quarterback’s eyes. Don’t pay attention to where he’s faking you out with his body.”

  “Got it, Dad. Thanks.” He always knew how to break things down so I’d understand it. Putting things into football terms told me that I needed to be careful about how things appeared on the surface, to watch the periphery and not take it for granted that what I thought was happening was actually what was going on. It was a warning. He wasn’t saying it aloud, but he just told me that he didn’t trust our government anymore.

  “Alright. You take care now, son. I love you.”

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  “Hold on, your mother wants to say bye.”

  I waited as he passed the phone to my mom and she went over a few warnings about staying safe and to keep our door locked before telling me how proud she was of the man I’d become. “I love you, Bodhi. You keep Cassandra safe and we’ll see you when this is all over.”

  “I love you too, Mom. Don’t worry about us. We’re being smart and following all the rules. Talk to you soon, okay? Bye.”

  “Bye. I love you!”

  “Love you too. Bye.” I hung up before she could continue with trying to get the last word of the conversation in.

  “So, what does all that mean?” Cassandra asked, pointing to the phone. I’d had it on speaker so she could hear what my parents said.

  “It means we need to get ready for the shit to hit the fan,” I stated. “It’s going to get worse.”

  “You be super careful about what video you’re sending your dad, okay? Don’t accidentally send some of the other ones we’ve been recording with that night mode.”

  “Oh. Oh yeah,” I chuckled. “That would be embarrassing.”

  “That would be mortifying,” she corrected. “And if that happened, we sure as hell wouldn’t be making any more of them ever again.”

  I nodded in understanding and triple-checked the video file that I uploaded into the email I sent my dad. That would have been embarrassing, but I really did want the video of what had happened to Kelley and Alex to get released to the public. They deserved that at the very least.

  We watched the news relentlessly over the next several days. The video I’d sent to my father never appeared anywhere, and there was no mention made by the media about soldiers shooting unarmed civilians in Texas—or anywhere for that matter. I confirmed with my dad that he’d emailed it to the media, which he had. The story was being repressed.

  We were in shock that something so big was willfully being ignored by the media. Wasn’t it their job, no, their duty, to report the truth, whether it was good, bad, or ugly? How had it come to the point where they got to choose what the public saw? A couple had been murdered in cold blood, one of them receiving the final killing shot on video. Why was the news only covering the stories of doctors and nurses on the front lines at the hospital, imploring their viewers to stay home and stay separated from everyone outside of their nuclear family? It was insane.

  I began to get paranoid about the Crud. Was it even a real virus or was there something else afoot? This was America after all. Why were we being forced to isolate? If somebody chose not to do so, wasn’t that a r
isk that they took upon themselves? It reminded me of the stuff that happened when I was a kid under the first quarantine. After a few months, people called bullshit on it and just decided to live their lives. After that happened, the mass paranoia of the virus faded, even though people still died from it every day. It became just another thing.

  We turned off the news. It was worthless. My thoughts went off in truly weird directions over the next several days of boredom and disappointment. I turned to the Internet for answers and there were conspiracy theories aplenty. From secret government takeovers to the New World Order, nothing was off the table in the minds of bloggers with a platform. The most credible, yet ludicrous, theory I read was that there was a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with the Earth and the Crud was a manufactured crisis to keep everyone from rioting during our last days alive.

  In the end, I didn’t believe any of it. I knew the Crud was real. I’d seen people in the building across from us evacuated by ambulances and first responders dressed in biohazard suits. Literally hundreds of people displaced by just as many first responders and police officers, and the building emptied of residents until it could be decontaminated. That would have been a major undertaking just to perpetrate a lie.

  Almost two weeks passed by with colossal slowness. Cassandra and I did what we could to pass the time. Each hour was maddeningly slow, yet somehow the days seemed to be over quickly. Neither of us could really point to anything particular that we’d accomplished each day, they just sort of happened, and then it was time for bed.

  At some point, I let my coursework slip. It seemed like a waste of time and effort to continue trying to get the A or B when a C, or even a D would suffice for graduation. There was something obviously happening in the wider world that we didn’t understand and I wanted to focus my attention on what that was. For some unknown reason, though, I continued with the journaling, despite thinking it was completely stupid. It did actually help me to get my thoughts out of the dark recesses of my brain and into a format where I could see them more clearly. Maybe I’d start wearing a black leather trench coat in July and put on black fingernail polish to match a pair of oversized black boots with way too many straps and buckles so I could be like all the other goth kids who journaled about their feelings.

  I fixed the wagon. It took a while using an old Swiss Army knife to loosen the bolts and my new baseball bat to gently straighten the cheap metal bar that made up the wagon’s axle, but we had time. The only downside was the barrel of my matte black baseball bat now had a few red marks from the paint. No big deal.

  I took up reading. It wasn’t the happy-go-lucky, comedy books or fantasy adventure novels that I should have been reading to distract me from all of this mess. Instead, I started with an innocuous title that I’d seen on several of the online forums. Let me just say that the book 1984 by George Orwell is scary as shit if you’re living through a crazy time like we were right now. Then I read his book Animal Farm. It was okay, but not as pertinent to the present problem—or maybe it was, depending on the reality of the Crud. The Road by McCarthy was really good. It represented everything that was wrong with humanity and how you can’t trust anyone. That book was a real boon for my growing paranoia, let me tell you. Finally, I tried to read The Stand by Stephen King but it was a bitch, so I ended up watching the made for TV miniseries instead.

  The time spent in isolation, drifting between watching people scurry about on the street in fear and watching television, was also a time for physical self-improvement. Cassandra and I spent a lot of time working out. In addition to the regularly-scheduled daily workouts, we implemented a “flash workout” system. Bored? Do fifty air squats. Time to move from the window to the table? Do forty push-ups. Ready to strangle your boyfriend or girlfriend because they breathe loudly when they’re supposed to be sitting quietly beside you? Do fifty crunches. Hey, we love each other, but spending every moment of every day together with zero separation can get on anyone’s nerves. Ask Jack Torrance from The Shining.

  Finally, Monday rolled around again. We still had plenty of shelf-stable food after my back-to-back grocery trips, but we were beginning to run out of the refrigerated stuff and fruits and vegetables. I decided that we needed to make another grocery store run.

  Given the problems I’d had with the two National Guard guys and the address on my driver license, I decided to take my student ID and an old electric bill with me that had my name on it. If there were any questions about my current address, I’d show the bill and explain that I was a student. Hopefully, that would suffice for any overzealous soldier enforcing the stay at home order.

  The temperature had hovered in the low-fifties during the day recently. As a Southern boy, I was cold, so I put on two layers of clothing in preparation to go out. Cassandra was worried that I’d say or do something stupid, and coached me through several scenarios and recommendations about what to do as I stood by the door.

  I was beginning to sweat from all the layers of clothing. “Cass.” I reached out, slipping my hand under her arm to pull her close to me. “I’ll be fine. I’m just going to the grocery store.”

  She nodded into my shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t want to take the gun?”

  “We don’t know what they’ve got going on out there. They could have metal detectors or stop and frisk orders… It’s better that it stays here with you for protection while I’m gone.”

  “Do you have any weapons?” she asked, looking up at me.

  “Um…my cell phone has a drop-proof titanium case. I can bludgeon a mother fucker to death with one of the corners.”

  She chuckled. “You’re an idiot.”

  “I’m just worried about what they’ve been doing over the last two weeks, babe. We don’t have a lot of self-defense items and I don’t want to lose something if it gets confiscated.”

  “At least take the bat,” she said.

  “I want to. I mean, that’s what I ordered it for, but I don’t know. It’s probably best if I just leave it here this time.”

  “Dammit, Bodhi.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I promised. “I might die of heat stroke if I don’t get out of here though.”

  “Ugh,” she groaned. “Fine. Be safe. Don’t do anything stupid. And if something doesn’t feel right, just walk away.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Babe?”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “I love you, okay? I just want you to know that.”

  “I love you too.” I pushed her away from my body. “I’ll be fine. Be back in a couple of hours, yeah?”

  With that, I grabbed the wagon’s handle and unlocked the door.

  SEVEN

  The walk to the grocery store was uneventful. I had a moment of trepidation when I passed the spot where the gangbanger was killed, but it passed quickly enough that I didn’t have a panic attack. Maybe I was becoming accustomed to seeing death.

  The National Guard Humvee was parked in the same spot it had been in the last time I was at the store, but it was empty. I looked around to find them, but they were nowhere in sight. I really didn’t like not being able to know where they were—as if that would have helped me if they decided to shoot at me.

  There was a line outside of the store, so I walked up to the back of it and pulled out my phone to wait. I was used to this routine by now.

  “ID,” a woman’s voice said, startling me. I looked up from my cell phone screen to see a female sheriff’s deputy.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “ID card. Let me see it,” she stated, holding a gloved hand out.

  I turned off my phone and slipped it into my pocket as I dug out my wallet. “Here you go, ma’am,” I said, handing her my driver license. “And this is my electric bill that shows me living at twenty-five-forty New York Drive.”

  She took both documents and looked at them for a moment. “Does Ms. Ortelli still reside with you at this address?”

  “Yes,” I replied woodenly. I wondered wh
at the point of this was.

  “Does anyone else live there with you? Children, relatives, other students not on the lease?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s just us.”

  “Remove your mask, Mr. Haskins.” I did as I was told. She compared the picture for a moment, then said, “Okay, cover back up. I’ll be right back with your ID.”

  The deputy went over to her car and placed my card into a device, then typed on the small keyboard. I assumed she was updating the address information, but I got a weird vibe from the whole thing, like my life history was being catalogued or something. I hated feeling that way just because the woman was doing her job.

  “This is the first time your card has been scanned,” she said when she returned. “How have you gone two or three weeks without getting pinged somewhere?”

  “Um… I came to this grocery store two weeks ago and got food.” I pointed at my wagon. “I always get a cartful and it’s just the two of us, so I mean…”

  “Are you hoarding food, Mr. Haskins?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have more food than just you and Ms. Ortelli need for the next week?”

  “Uh, no. I uh… I’m at the grocery store because we’re out of food.” It was a white lie. We had plenty of food in the pantry, but something was off about the questions so I felt the need to lie to the deputy.

  “If we were to go to your apartment right now, we’d only find Ms. Ortelli and an empty kitchen? There wouldn’t be anyone else not registered on your lease living there?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no. What’s going on?”

  “There are people who are hoarding food while others are going hungry, Mr. Haskins. We’re just trying to make sure that people only have what they deserve.”

  The words sent a chill down my spine. She’d said, “what people deserve.” That was a major departure from saying what peopled needed or wanted. It was almost like she was talking about redistributing the… Oh shit, I thought. It was like what had happened in the book 1984. People got exactly what the government wanted them to have, but the key to everything was misinformation.