I am on block-hauling detail when I hear my number called.
“One-Fourteen!”
I straighten to attention immediately and shout, “Yes, Apprentice-Sergeant!”
He looks me over, flat-eyed, in a way that reminds me that if I am not useful I should be dead. Then he spits on my bare feet and says, “Report to App-First Carmody!”
“Yes, Apprentice-Sergeant!” I am already moving as I speak, wanting to get past him before it occurs to him to send me on my way with a kick. I’ve already had one of those today and my tailbone is sore. I mostly make it, receiving no more than a glancing blow from the side of his boot as I speed by.
My destination is the admin block just inside the main gate. As I approach the ramp that leads up to the door, the guards in the towers flanking the barbed-wire barrier train their M-16s on me, only standing down when I start to climb the incline. I come to attention outside the door, and knock the regulation three times.
Someone in the orderly room pushes a button and the door slides open. I step smartly inside, come to attention again, with my eyes fixed on portrait of Our President on the back wall and announce, “Loser One-Fourteen reporting to Apprentice-First Sergeant Carmody, as ordered!”
In my peripheral vision, I see an Apprentice-Corporal on the other side of the long counter gesture with a piece of paper he is holding. “Go stand by the wall,” he says.
“Yes, Apprentice-Corporal!” I go and stand, keeping my gaze blank and unfocused. It is a routine day in Camp 17’s admin center, the staff hunched over their keyboards, typing laboriously with two fingers, or staring into their monitor screens or at pieces of paper. I see a lot of knitted brows, some lips being chewed, one protruding tongue-tip.
And I see it all without focusing on any individual Apprentice. I never want to hear again the words: What are you lookin’ at, loser?
Something buzzes, the Apprentice-Corporal speaks into a phone, then looks up at me as if I am a turd that refuses to flush. “All right, asshole,” he says, “see the First.” He gestures to a door at the end of the counter.
“Yes, Apprentice-Corporal!” I double-time across the few yards, come to attention before the door, and deliver the three knocks with the required timing.
“Come in!”
I open the door, step within, close it without turning my back on the man seated at the desk, come to attention again, my eyes on the wall above his head, where a different portrait of Our President hangs. This one shows him looking up and out of the frame, in visionary mode.
“Loser One-Fourteen—” I begin.
“Shut up,” says Carmody.
I know better than to say, “Yes, Apprentice–First Sergeant!” Shut up means shut up and I have the bruises to prove it.
The App-First has a round face that ends in a blue-stubbled lantern jaw. His eyes are small—“porcine” is the word I would have used, all those months ago, when I was well paid for my columns in the National Commentator magazine.
I stand with my eyes on Our President, trying to keep the tremble out of my limbs. Though we are all at the mercy of these merciless men, it is always a mistake to show overt fear. Weakness often triggers a beating.
So I wait while Carmody studies me. Finally, he leans back in his chair—I hear it creak under his considerable weight—and says, “You used to work for that National Commie rag, dincha?”
Time to speak again. “Yes, Apprentice-First—”
“And that asshole Wedley was your boss.”
“Yes, Appren—”
“Shut your loser mouth! I already know he was.”
I say nothing, but my mind is racing. Charlie Wedley saw it coming, as soon as the TSA lost its funding. He packed a suitcase, transferred his accounts to the Bank of Montreal, and made it over the line well before the bus loads of black-uniformed bruisers from the Corps of Apprentices arrived to replace Homeland Security at all the airports and border crossings. Only the day before he had told me I should get ready to run, too, but I hadn’t seen it as clearly as he did. Besides, Arthur was in school and Sharon had just been promoted to a senior post at the Andrew Jackson Institute.
Carmody has leaned forward and is reading from a paper in a file spread open on his desk. “Says here you two were real close.” He looks up and makes a noise of contempt. “Couple of fudge-packers.”
I say nothing. It wasn’t a question, and I know better than to contradict an Apprentice’s judgment.
He studies me again for a long moment. I know he’ll be wanting an excuse to knock me down and kick me and I am beginning to wonder why he hasn’t. Usually, a call to the admin center involves at least some stains on fists and boots, which the recipient of the attentions are often required to wipe away—if they are still conscious.
Now he closes the file. “You make me sick, loser,” he says. “Was up to me, none of you pussies would be building the Wall. You’d be under it.”
I say nothing, think nothing, let Our President fill my vision. The chair creaks again. Carmody is closing the file. Now he says, “Somebody is interested in you, loser. Somebody upstairs, way upstairs.”
He picks up the phone and pushes a button. A moment later, he says, “Is the car here?” then grunts a response to whatever he’s heard and hangs up. He looks at me and says, “You’re going for a ride, faggot.”
The car is a shiny black Cadillac Escalade with opaque windows and doors emblazoned with Our President’s one-letter monogram in gold. An Apprentice wearing a tailored uniform and the shoulder bars of a captain stands waiting by a rear door. He favors me with a cold-eyed stare as he opens the door and moves his head minimally in a gesture that says: Get in.
I get in and the door closes silently behind me. For a moment I can see nothing, then my eyes adjust to the gloom and I see that the passenger compartment is self-contained. A pull-down folding seat faces the vehicle’s wide rear bench where a man in civilian clothes sits silently. Like his aide, who is now climbing behind the wheel and starting the engine, he says nothing—just uses one pale finger to indicate that I should sit on the jump seat.
I sit and reach down to grip the sides of my perch, which becomes precarious as the Escalade accelerates through the gate and turns sharply onto the road outside. I can hardly see the man opposite me, though I can smell him: cologne and powder. For the first time in months, I become conscious of the rank, sour smell that rises from my own body. I feel a louse move in my armpit but resist the automatic urge to pinch it dead with my long, broken-edged fingernails.
The road parallels the Wall and we drive past the segments that Camp 17 has built in the half-year since we were bused down here from wherever we had been arrested. Twenty feet high, its top festooned with sharp steel spikes, razor wire, and broken glass, it stretches on, mile after mile, running roughly east–west on this part of the border. A segment is one hundred and fifty feet wide, and as each is built and capped, the camp is uprooted and moved to the next piece of desert.
The admin block, the Apprentices’ barracks, and the kitchens are on wheels, towed by trucks. The razor-wire fences are lifted and carried by us, the three hundred losers of Camp 17. There is no need to move our barracks because we have none; we sleep in our rags on the bare desert floor, huddled together for warmth. Our latrines are slit trenches dug in one corner of the compound.
It is possible to get under the razor wire and escape into the desert. Some have done it. But the constantly circling drones that look for illegals soon spot them: their body heat shines against the dark cold of the nighttime desert floor. But no one wastes a missile on them; soon enough, the temperature differential equalizes. And no one bothers to collect the corpses.
The Wall-building project began in late January, just days after Our President took office and started signing all those executive orders. By the fall, he was ruling by emergency decree. The nature and extent of the “emergency” were never detailed; the Corps of Apprentices had been quietly forming even before the voting in November. As the leaves began to fall in Washington, the truck-borne squads were already rolling out to collect the losers who had failed to support his history-making campaign. As a staff columnist on what used to be considered an influential mainstream conservative magazine, I was a natural target. Journalists dubbed “enemies of the people” had already been dropping out of sight. Some said they were in hiding, but there were rumors that people had been snatched off the streets, hustled into black vans, and never heard from again. But nobody reported on it, because the fear had begun to set in.
Then came the emergency decree and Our President unleashed his attack dogs. In the pre-dawn, doors were kicked in, people hustled from their beds, wrists pinioned by plastic slip-on restraints. A few shots were fired, but the Apprentices brought overwhelming firepower. Besides, most of us couldn’t believe it was happening until it was too late. We climbed out of the boxcars in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to stand, stiff and blinking, hungry and dehydrated. The razor wire was already in place and the club-wielding Apprentices were more than ready to teach us the camp rules. Most of us learned quickly; those who didn’t were thrown into the latrine trenches we left behind when the camp moved.
As the months wore on and the Wall grew, more losers were captured and brought in, usually a dozen at a time. Some had been hidden in basements and attics by friends and relatives who weren’t on the lists—though their names certainly got added once their lack of devotion to Our President was discovered. Others had been caught making a wilderness run for the Canadian border; Washington state to British Columbia was the usual venue. And a few had tried to hide out in remote cabins, but even the remotest places were known to somebody and the rewards for turning in losers were attractive.
But in all the time I have spent in Camp 17, no one has ever been taken away in an Apprentice staff car.
I hear a rustle of paper then a discreet click. A small cone of light falls from a fixture beside the Escalade’s rear door onto a manila folder on the lap of the man opposite me. When he opens the file, enough light reflects from the white paper within for me to get a vague impression of his face: clean-shaven, lean, hollow-cheeked, high-browed, and white—almost a fleshless skull. He glances down at whatever is written there and when he looks up at me the skull impression is reinforced by the eyes remaining in shadow.
Now he closes the folder and turns off the light. He retreats back into obscurity. The voice that speaks to me from the darkness is cultured, intelligent.
“Your October fifteenth piece in the Comment,” he says, as I hear the sound of a finger tapping the file. “Good insight.” When I say nothing, he adds, “You may speak.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Good thing the mass of the punditry didn’t come to the same conclusions,” he says. “Or we might not have won.”
I say, “I think by then…” and stop myself from saying it would have been too late to opt for a more neutral phrase: “…the die was cast.”
He makes a neutral sound. “Perhaps.” Then he lapses into silence.
The article he referred to advanced an argument I’d been thinking about as I watched the presidential primary go from strange to bizarre and then seen Our President emerge as the most unlikely candidate in the nation’s history. Other commentators were focusing on demographics—older white males, evangelicals, libertarians, Tea Party activists—as well as economic and social shifts, but all of those factors taken together were not enough to account for the fundamental paradigm shift that was revolutionizing American politics.
And then, in mid-October, I was walking back to the office from lunch and passed a sportswear store. The window display was full of sweatshirts, and every one of them was adorned with a corporate logo of some kind. For some reason, I flashed on a sweatshirt I’d had in college: it bore a line-drawn portrait of Ludwig Van Beethoven on the front. I wondered for a moment what had happened to it.
And that’s when I noticed the obvious. Thirty-four years ago, when I’d been that college boy, we might wear sweatshirts with “Yale” or “Princeton” on them, because we were students at those schools, or pictures of Alfred E. Neuman if we were smartasses. But we didn’t turn ourselves into walking billboards for commercial products.
Over the decades, something had changed, and as I walked back to my office and sat behind my desk, the nature of that change emerged, full-blown, into my consciousness. I turned on my computer, powered up MS Word, and put my fingers on the keyboard.
We used to be citizens of a society, I wrote, but now we are just consumers in an economy. I thought a moment, then typed again. The society was ours; we had rights and responsibilities. The economy is everybody’s and nobody’s, and all we have is “likes.”
And as I sat there, following my train of thought, it led me onward. Our mental operating systems have been reset by the increasingly sophisticated, ever more powerful, and all-pervasive force called marketing. We have been conditioned to think—no, not to think, only to feel—only in terms of our own individual wants and needs—“You deserve a break today” instead of what’s good or bad for the whole.
I thought about the candidate who was to become Our President—even though the polls said he couldn’t crack the Electoral College. And it came to me. I typed, He is not a politician; he is a celebrity. His supporters do not follow him—he does not lead, but simply exists as a brand they can like. He does not have policies; he has marketable qualities that lead consumers to “like” his brand: it makes them feel good about themselves.
Pundits like me were prisoners of the old political system, the one created and sustained by our citizen ancestors. But their society was gone. It had been gradually washed away by the power of marketing, leaving only the economy with its different rules and mechanisms.
The man who would become Our President had recognized the paradigm shift. And he had done so years, even decades, ago. He had spent those years marketing himself as a celebrity brand, creating for himself a platform from which he could leap from the sinking society onto the command deck of the still accelerating economy.
The article poured out of me as if it had been gestating in the back of my head for ages. And perhaps, I thought, it had. I’d noticed, as a young man, when reporters had stopped asking the people they interviewed what they thought and began asking, “How do you feel?” I remembered the slight sense of disconnect I’d experienced the first time I saw a clothing label on the outside of a collar instead of the inside, and when I’d first realized that my conservative shoes had the brand name stamped on the heel, so that anyone walking behind me would see it flashing at them with my every step.
Marketing, I wrote, is now our complete environment. We are marketed to thousands of times a day, and we no more notice it than a fish notices the water that surrounds it.
But the candidate had noticed it. He had seen the new age rising around him and had made full use of his vision. As I finished the article, I complimented him. I said the rest of us were like a passel of ape-men huddled in night’s darkness while one of us—a genius—rubbed two sticks together and made fire.
I polished a few phrases and sent the copy to my editor, Charlie Wedley. It ran in the next edition. Two weeks later, the election came and then the months of interregnum while we wrote speculative analyses and profiles of the strange collection of folks with which Our President intended to fill his cabinet. And we waited to see what a celebrity brand would do if granted the leadership of the free world.
It got pretty crazy right away, but people said he’d grow into the office. Nine months after the inauguration, we found out what had been gestating in the White House.
“We want you to do something for us,” says the cultured voice from the darkness.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is that ‘Yes, I’ll do it’?”
I don’t have to think. Months of building the Wall have made me compliant, as it was meant to do. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
“It will involve betraying a friend.”
A year ago, I would have been brave, would have given a short answer: Forget it, or another two-word phrase that began with “F.” Now I scarcely hesitate before saying, “In the loser camps, friends are no help. They’re just another liability.”
“Good,” says the voice. “If you deliver, you won’t have to go back to the camp. You’ll be declared fully rehabilitated. Actually, we can use you at Apprentice Central. And your wife and son will join you.”
I am too numb to feel anything yet, but I notice that my cheeks are wet. I raise a hand and find that my eyes are full of tears.
“What do I have to do?” I say, then listen closely while he tells me.
A week later, they have cleaned me up, deloused me, cleared the worms from my intestines, fed me, and shot me full of vitamins. They have flown me from San Antonio to Fairchild AFB near Spokane, Washington, where a special forces helicopter delivers me silently to a spot on the Columbia River south of the Forty-Ninth Parallel. It is a moonless night and overcast. We touch down in complete darkness, one set of hard-handed men unloading me from the copter into the equally hard hands of another crew. I assume they are all wearing night-vision gear because they move me swiftly down to the water’s edge, put me in a rubber boat, climb in with me, and push us out. It is only when I feel the slight breeze of our passage on my face that I realize they have started a motor as noiseless as the helicopter’s.
I have no idea how long we are on the river. I see few lights on the shore until we pass a small airport on the eastern bank, then we are back into blackout travel. Eventually, I see the lights of a town and the boat angles in to the west bank and grounds on a patch of gravel. There is enough illumination from the town reflecting off the overcast for me to see the men in the boat as vague shadows.
One of them presses something into my hand—the strap of a half-sized duffel bag—and whispers, “You get out here. There’s a road up a little ways. Find the bus depot. There’s money in the bag.”
I don’t hear them go. I climb the bank, push through some low scrub, and come to a two-lane blacktop. I turn toward the lights of the town and start walking. They made me memorize a rough map of the place—it’s called Trail—and I find the bus depot easily enough; it is on Bank Street, which is a continuation of Riverside Avenue, the road they directed me to.
The depot is a little blue-and-white frame structure. I wait outside until a tired-looking man in jeans and a cotton shirt opens up. As I hitch up my bag and step through the door, he says, “Where to?”
“Vernon, then Kamloops,” I say. If he asks, I will tell him I am meeting my brother in Vernon, but he just punches some buttons and hands me the paper slip that his ticket machine printed out. I pay with one of the used Canadian bills they put in my wallet and go to sit on one of the benches. The ticket says the night bus from Alberta will arrive and depart in about an hour and it will reach the Vernon depot in midafternoon. I will then catch another bus to Kamloops and be there before evening.
I sit, looking straight ahead, my inner eye replaying the images of Sharon and Arthur on the phone of the man in the A-Corps staff car—I never learned his name. My wife and son looked worried but unbruised and reasonably healthy. They hadn’t been put to punishment labor as I was.
The street door opens and a man and a woman come in. She has a rounded figure but looks strong; he is taller and leaner but moves like an athlete. They both wear holstered automatic pistols, khaki shirts, dark trousers with a yellow stripe, and matching flat caps with shiny leather bills.
I see them from the side of my vision and the dark pants with the stripe—identical to those worn by the Apprentice guards in the camp—almost trigger an automatic response. But I manage not to leap to my feet and stand to attention. Instead, I look straight ahead, a man with some thinking to do.
Until they stand over me. “Hey, there,” says the female Mountie, “who are you?”
I look up then and give them the name that matches my ID.
“Where you from? And where are you headed?”
“To Kamloops, from Eastend, Saskatchewan.”
I say the name of the latter place easily, using the pronunciation my handlers drilled into me: “It’s Suh-skatch-uh-one. That’s how the Canucks say it. Americans say Sass-katch-uh-one. Dead giveaway.”
The male cop already has his phone out and is working its icons and keyboard. “Who’s the mayor there?”
I tell him.
“Where’s the co-op store?”
“Corner of Maple and Railway.”
He flicks the screen a couple of times. “Tourist attraction?”
“T-Rex Center,” I say “Listen, what’s this all about, eh?” Canadians are polite but don’t stand for police harassment.
“Border jumpers,” the female Mountie says. “Let’s see your ID.”
I show them my Saskatchewan driver’s license. It is good enough to fool them and they hand it back. “Watch out for anybody tries to be too friendly,” says the male cop, putting his phone away. “Some of these jumpers, they’ll steal your identity. And you won’t complain because you’ll be dead in a ditch.”
I tell him I didn’t know it was that bad, which is true. But I am not surprised. I know what motivates most Americans who come over the Forty-Ninth and how far they will go to keep from being sent back.
“I’ll be careful,” I say.
My “brother” is waiting for me in the bus depot at Vernon. He catches my eye then steps into the restroom. By the time I follow him in, he has checked all the stalls; we are alone.
He hands me a leather belt that is identical, right down to the stainless-steel studs set along its length, to the one I take off and hand to him. Squeezed between the new belt’s two layers of cowhide, I know, is a web of circuitry. While I am putting it through the belt loops of my jeans, he unscrews one of the buttons on my denim jacket, fills its hollow with a small, shiny battery, and screws the button back on. Through all of his, we do not speak and his gaze does not meet mine. When he is finished, he turns on his heel and leaves the restroom. Our association has lasted less than thirty seconds.
Not long after, I am on the bus to Kamloops.
“Loops,” as the locals call it, is where two major rivers—the North Thompson and the South Thompson—meet to run as one down to join the Fraser on its way to the Pacific. Long before the whites came, the river junction was a gathering place where native tribes met for peaceful trade, making it a perfect site for the Hudson Bay Company to establish a trading post. After the fur traders came the gold-seekers, and when the placer deposits were all played out, the high, dry plateau country around the junction of the two rivers was recognized as good cattle country.
Today, the city has spread from the river bottom up into the surrounding hills. It’s a prosperous place, peaceable in the Canadian way. And home to a colony of American asylum-seekers granted “landed immigrant” status—the equivalent of a US green card.
All this, and more, I know from the briefings given me in San Antonio. I never saw the Escalade man again, though I heard his voice in the hallway outside the room they put me in once I was cleaned up. That’s where the “more” came from. The door had been left ajar and I could hear him giving crisp, clear orders:
“…don’t tell me your problems, Major,” he was saying. “Just get it done. The snatch team will be in the safe house on the twenty-second. Every hour they’re in-theater, they’re in danger. We know the senator is in the vicinity, but they move her constantly. I want our Judas to find him not later than the twenty-first.”
There was a mumbled reply, but he cut it off. “I don’t concern myself with that level of detail. If you can’t cut it, I’ll have you transferred to one of the Wall camps, and you’ll find yourself nitpicking for real.”
A moment later, a worried-looking Apprentice-Major came into the room and took the other chair across the table from where I sat. He placed a thick file of papers between us, opened it, and said, “Straighten up, loser. We’ve got work to do.”
Kamloops’s Greyhound depot is on Notre Dame Drive, just east of the intersection where the street widens and turns into a divided boulevard. And not far west of that is the White Spot restaurant. It was getting on for evening and this far north the spring sun is long gone when I climb the concrete steps from the sidewalk and push through the front doors. The place is half-empty, not too brightly lit, but I can tell it’s a family-friendly restaurant from the scattering of parents and kids in the booths and at the tables.
There is a counter with stools near the kitchen walls and I make my way to it, setting my duffel down at my feet as I sit. I pick up a folding menu from the steel rack that holds salt, pepper, and vinegar and flip to the burger section.
I’m only doing what the Apprentice-Major and his subordinates told me to do, but the sight of the illustrations and the waft of cooking fat coming from the kitchen door behind the counter, brings not only saliva to my mouth but tears to my eyes. I remember, when Sharon and I were newlyweds, we loved the burgers at Le Diplomate on Fourteenth Street a couple of blocks from Logan Circle in the northwest part of DC. It seems like a thousand years ago now.
That’s not going to help, I say to myself, knuckling my eyes as a young man in waiter’s garb emerges from the kitchen, sees me, and comes over to give the counter in front of me an unneeded wipe. “How’re ya doin’?” he says. “Coffee to start?”
“Yeah,” I say, then have to say it again to make it come out clearly. I look through the menu again and say, “Didn’t you use to have a blue cheese burger?”
He has his back to me, pouring coffee from the carafe on the shelf behind the counter. Now he pauses halfway through before finishing. He turns and passes me the cup and saucer along with a spoon and two little containers of half-and-half cream. He is not looking at me but glancing around the restaurant. Finally, he says, “You must be thinking of the A&W.”
I say, “You know, I might just be at that.”
“Okay,” he says, and now he’s looking directly at me, “order some food and stay where you are.”
I point to a burger on the menu and he brings out a handheld device and pokes its screen then asks me if I want fries and coleslaw. I nod and he pokes again. Now he puts the handheld away and reaches into another pocket, coming up with a basic cell phone. He turns it on, pushes a speed-dial button, waits for a long moment, then says, “Sorry, wrong number.”
He turns off the phone, slides the back off it, slips out the SIM card and puts it on the counter, then reaches under and comes up with a pair of shears. He cuts the SIM into small pieces and throws them into a trash basket.
“Okay,” he says, though I think he’s talking to himself. Then he says to me, “I’ll get that burger platter. More coffee?”
The coffee is strong and flavorful, better than you’d get in most American burger joints. I’ve worked my way down to the bottom of the cup when he brings my food on an oval platter. Despite the coffee, my mouth is dry, but I take a big bite of the burger and find it juicy, with some kind of sauce beyond the usual mustard and ketchup. It tastes good. It tastes like freedom, and my eyes begin to tear up again.
I swallow another bite, then try the fries. Good again, and the coleslaw is chunky and chewable. My San Antonio trainers fed me decently, the same as they ate, but that was institutional food; after the slops in Camp 17, this is heaven.
The waiter is hanging around the counter, pouring me more coffee, but his attention is all for the front door. I see him come to alert and my hand holding the coffee cup shakes so I have to use the other one to steady it. I take a sip and wait.
A man slips onto the stool to my left, another takes the one on my right. They both order coffee and the young fellow brings out cups and pours.
The one on my left sips his black while the one to my right is stirring cream and sugar into his. Then the black coffee drinker puts down his cup, turns his head my way, and says, “How’s it goin’, eh?”
“Gettin’ better,” I say, careful to drop the “g.”
And the one on my right says, “Holy shit! Is that really you?”
I turn, and I’m looking into the surprised and delighted face of Charlie Wedley.
They take me to a house in the old part of town, down by one of the rivers. Charlie has already hugged me before we get into the car and he sits beside me in the back and chatters about a dozen different things. How did I get over the border? How are Sharon and Arthur? How he and Jeannine broke up after they got to Montreal and he immediately signed up for the Resistance that was already beginning to form. What kind of camp was I in? Was it as bad as they say?
The other man, sitting in the front passenger seat, leans over and tells Charlie to lay off. There’s a procedure for debriefing and he’s screwing with it. Abashed, my old editor puts up his hands in a gesture that says sorry. But he pats my knee and says, “We’ll catch up later.”
The debriefing is what I’ve been told to expect. First they take my bag and every stitch of clothing off me and examine it minutely. They scan my belt and boots with an electronic wand, the same with the buttons on my jacket and jeans. They find nothing and let me get dressed again.
Then come the questions, but the trainers have drilled me well. I tell them about how the A-Corps began shipping selected “losers” from the Wall camps to new places in Oregon and Montana for “special handling.” We didn’t know exactly what that meant, but those of us familiar with the history of the Holocaust had a pretty good idea.
They shipped us in boxcars, I say, and the one I was in had a hatch at one end of the ceiling. It was loose, and one of us had hidden a four-inch nail in his rectum. We stood on each other’s shoulders and managed to slip the latch. Then we climbed out and lay flat on the roof of the moving car until it slowed on a long bend somewhere in southern Oregon. One by one, at half-mile separations, we dropped off the boxcar and went into the woods.
I tell them I stole clothes and a pickup from the back yard of a rural house in Deschutes County and made my way north and east, traveling mostly at night and taking logging roads and two-lane highways, cadging food from Dumpsters behind roadside eateries. The truck had a full tank and it took me all the way to Whitefish, Montana, where I ran it into a lake. Then I hitched a ride to a lumber town named Fortine and walked through the woods along Highway 93.
“What about A-Corps patrols?” my interrogator asks.
“I could see their lights coming up the road,” I say. “So I’d just duck back into the trees. They were dogging it.”
I crossed the border at a place called Roosville, I tell them. An eastbound Canadian trucker picked me up and took me all the way to Lethbridge, Alberta. He told me to look up Quakers in the phone book and contact them. They would help me.
“They did,” I say, “and they told me about Kamloops and what to say at the White Spot.” I know it’s safe to tell him that. Quakers won’t talk to anybody about refugees they help, not even to the Resistance. What they do is between them and God.
There are more questions. I give more answers. Finally, they put me in a room with a lock on the door. I’ll stay there until they can check my story. Charlie tells me not to worry. I tell him I won’t. That’s the truth because the A-Corps has fitted my story around elements of truth; there are new camps up north and people are being sent to them; there was an escape in Oregon, though most of the escapees were killed or recaptured within hours, some of them shot by local patriots alerted by radio and TV bulletins; Apprentice agents stole a truck in Deschutes County and left it in a Montana lake; their border-watchers at Fortine are due for replacement and punishment duty.
Eventually, as new information comes in, they might pick apart my cover story. But by then the senator will have been snatched and the Resistance will need to find a new leader. And I’ll be back in the States, with my wife and son, writing for some organ that supports Our President and the new order.
I won’t like myself, but Sharon and Arthur will be able to live like human beings again.
It takes two days to vet me. I spend the time reading and resting and eating. My system is beginning to recover from the abuse and neglect of Camp 17. Charlie comes by each day but the people watching me won’t let him do more than put his head around the door and say hello. On his third visit, he comes right into my room and says, “You’re cleared. Get your stuff. You’re staying at my place till we get you set up.”
“I’ll need a job,” I say. “Won’t I have to apply for legal residency and so on?”
“You’ve got a job. You’re going to work for the senator. I’ve been telling her about you and we figure you’ll fit right in.”
“A writing job?” I say. “That all seems like a million years ago.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” he says.
Charlie has a house up in the hills overlooking the junction of the two rivers. He shows me my room then says, “We’ll need to get you some more clothes. Tonight we’ll have dinner with some of the other staff, people you’ll be working with.”
I tell him I like the clothes I’ve got. “I see a lot of jeans and denim jackets on the streets. Dressed like this, I blend in.”
He shrugs. He was always more fashion conscious than I was. “Whatever,” he says. “The boss wants to meet you, too. We’ll go out tomorrow.”
“Out where?” I say, but Charlie doesn’t know. They move the senator around constantly and only her closest inner circle know where she’ll be at any time. When she’s ready to see me, Charlie will get a call on a burner phone with the code name of the meet’s location.
“Is all the cloak-and-dagger stuff really necessary?” I say.
“They would love to get their hands on her,” he says. “A few sessions of waterboarding, then they’d trot her out for a show-trial confession. It would undercut all the work the Resistance has been doing all these months.” His face turns bleak. “Or maybe they’d just kill her, get her off the internet, shut her up.”
The next day is the twenty-third of April. According to that conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear, an extraction team—maybe even the same Navy Seals who brought me up the Columbia River—should be in the area now. It won’t be long now before I’m back with my wife and boy. Once I’ve done my job, I’ll need to get down to Vancouver and present myself at the American consulate. I don’t like to think about the way Charlie will feel, or the other good people I had dinner with the night before. As for the Senator’s fate in the hands of A-Corps operatives like the Escalade man… well, plenty of people are suffering worse building the Wall—if the rumors are true, what is happening in the new camps is worst of all.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Just do what you have to do and get back safe with Sharon and Arthur.
It is not my fight anymore. Camp 17 kicked all the fight out of me. I just want to live and see my loved ones safe.
In the late afternoon, Charlie and I are driving around Kamloops. He makes sudden turns and U-turns, watching to see if we are being followed. Before we got into the car he used a handheld electronic device to check for tracking bugs. The car’s built-in GPS has been disabled.
The sun is just touching the dry hills west of town when the cell phone in Charlie’s pocket vibrates. He pulls into a service station and answers the call. After a few seconds he says, “Got it,” then strips the phone’s battery cover and removes its SIM. He tears the little piece of cardboard into several pieces and has me throw them out the window as we drive on.
We get onto Highway 5, heading north, paralleling one of the Thompsons. Traffic is light. If anyone is tailing us, Charlie says, we’ll see them miles back. But nobody is following us and after ten minutes or so, Charlie turns off the highway, crosses a cattle guard and goes through an open wire gate. We’re on a dirt road that winds up into hills covered in dry grass and sagebrush. The landscape is eerily similar to Texas where the Wall is still being built.
We’ve left a dust trail in the air but in two minutes of bumping over the rough track we’re between two hills and out of sight of the highway. We continue to snake our way through the hills, climbing as we go, until we come to a fork in the road and go right. Five minutes farther on, and we’re meeting trees, some scrubby conifers growing on top of a ridge. Now the road levels off and up ahead is a clearing with a log house too big to be called a cabin. It’s getting dark and I see lights from the windows.
We pull in. There are men on the porch and in the trees at the edges of the clearing. They are wearing clothes like mine, but they have the look of soldiers. Some of them have rifles like the ones the A-Corps guards used to point at us in the camp.
I follow Charlie up onto the porch. A man stops us there and tells us to put our arms out while he searches us. Charlie does as he’s told—throwing me a look that says What are you gonna do?—then it’s my turn.
We’re clear and we go inside. The senator is in an inner room; I can hear her distinctive voice through the closed door. Then it opens and she comes out and offers me her hand. She looks older than she did back during the campaign: there is gray in the short brown hair and lines around her eyes and mouth. But she still has energy and her grip is strong and warm.
She is talking, saying we’re going to do great things together, and how she’s glad I made it out of “that hell they’re making of our country.”
I agree, nodding and smiling. I’m sure my smile looks wrong because inside I’m numb. The senator is saying something about getting my wife and child out of the devil’s grip, and I can only nod and say, “Thank you, thank you.”
And then it’s over. She goes back into the inner room and I hear other voices as the door closes. Charlie touches my arm and says, “That went well. Let’s get going.”
“Is there a toilet?” I say. “I need to pee.” My voice sounds shaky. I clear my throat but it doesn’t help.
The man at the door says, “Just go out to the treeline.”
I do as he says, going over to where the evergreens start. There is a man with a rifle standing nearby but he turns his back when I pull my zipper down. That is when I undo the button on my jacket, remembering to push in and turn to the right as I do; it’s a reverse thread.
The top of the button comes off and the little battery hidden inside it falls into my hand. I use my other hand to lever up the phony hinged rivet on my belt, making a hole exactly the size of the battery. I push the little disk in until it makes contact; then I wait, counting off fifteen seconds.
Now I pry the battery free and put it back in the button and close it up, snap the false rivet back into place. I zip up my fly and turn back to where Charlie waits. I want to get him away from here before the snatch team comes. I can see that there will be shooting and men will die.
“Okay?” he says to me. But before I can answer there are shouts from inside the house. A man comes out holding what looks like a phone, but probably isn’t. He is holding it up, pointing it here and there, then looking at its screen and cursing.
Now everybody but Charlie and I are in motion. A knot of men, the senator at their center, come running out of the log house, heading for one of the cars. The guards around the perimeter are at full alert, weapons up, sighting along them, looking for targets.
“You!” shouts the man with the scanner, looking at me. “Stay where you are!”
“What’s going—” says Charlie, but that’s all there is time for now.
The Hellfire missiles look like two shooting stars coming down from the evening sky, white flame against the yellowy red, trailing ghostly smoke worms.
“Sharon,” I say, “I’m sorry.”
And then it’s all fire.