BY LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ
Angeles National Forest
Los Angeles’s jagged terrain exists because this ground is volatile. Quakes and other ruptures have crunched land, lakes, rivers, forests, savannahs, up and down, back and forth, over millions of years into the Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountains, the Verdugo Hills, with uneven mounds dotting many of the city’s communities—Echo Park, Elysian Park, Hollywood Hills, City Terrace, Silver Lake, Topanga Canyon, Malibu. I can name many more neighborhoods where homes precariously hug dirt and granite along the most daunting street curves. Then there are the San Gabriels, the mountain range that separates the woody and biodiverse northern Los Angeles and western San Bernardino counties from the Mojave Desert. This range is part of the larger Angeles National Forest, skirted on the north by the San Andreas Fault.
So, it was bound to happen. The Big One. The world burping and heaving like a sick dog. An upheaval of biblical proportions. Still, nobody imagined it would be like this.
I’m Lorenzo Salas, but everyone’s called me Lencho since I was a kid.
I’m thirty-five and have lived in LA for thirty years. As a migrant from Mexico, my first neighborhood was Watts.
Then we moved to LA’s harbor, surrounded by refineries and port smells and container ships. My father worked in a steel fabrication plant. He picked up skills—fixing old engines and forges and cutting machines. Skills he passed on to me. Finally, after leaving home, finding my own prospects, getting married, I ended up in northeast San Fernando Valley—Sun Valley, to be exact.
One morning, I awoke to a particularly beautiful day. Low eighties. No clouds. The brightest blue canvas above our heads. Smog missing, but not missed, brisk winds had pushed the dirt haze to the ocean. I walked outside of my ranch-style home and took a breath; I felt my lungs hang on to every air molecule like long-lost family. It had been ages since this atmosphere bellowed with health. Somewhat surreal.
“Want your cafecito, Lencho?” my wife Betina asked from the other side of a screen door.
“’Horita voy,” I said, hesitating a little as I reflected on that day of all days.
Then God lifted up His shoulders, on a Richter scale of ten. In pajamas, Betina and our two small kids ran out of the house to my arms. Terrain and structures crumpled like paper. Paper buildings, paper homes, paper streets, paper people. A noise erupted like a giant machine gear had broken in midturn. Fires exploded—gas pipelines ruptured, electrical lines crackled in swinging arcs, freeways tumbled. Dust swirled upward, covering the sky. The quavering may have been around five minutes, who knows, but it felt like forever. After the first jolt, other shakes of seven to six kept everything unstable for days. Panic and fear gripped the city. Violence and looting followed.
The City of Angels turned into hell’s smelter.
“Santos, mi’jo, do you see anything?” I whisper to my thirteen-year-old son, who cradles a laser-bullet automatic on his lap while peering past a ridge overlooking the crevices and canyons of a particularly dense section of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Our guerrilla resistance group is “Jaguar’s Breath”—jaguars being those preconquest animals that roamed the forest and jungles with ease, close to Tonantzin, Mother Earth, close to seed, sprout, and greenery. The battalion consists mostly of people with Mexican and Central American origins. My first lieutenant, Rufino, is Guatemalan—with Mayan roots—a hardened survivor of the child concentration camps along the border whose parents were deported. My wife Betina is a long-haired, dark-eyed Salvadoran who grew up in the Valley. My brothers Lalo and Chilo, also Jaliscienses like me, are among our warriors. Until the Big One, most of us worked hard and followed the law. But then the laws became chains that enslaved us. My children, Santos and Carolina, are growing up in mountain caves, where their homeschooling includes wilderness survival and armed defense.
“Papa, something’s moving,” my son says.
Through the thick brush I notice the shiny back of a walking drone guard with the letters AFP—for “America First Party.” This is a killing machine. The AFP—which we call “Amfirpas”—controls the US military.
I radio back the drone’s location. Santos and I then scramble beneath the entangled branches. Another routine patrol.
I didn’t expect to spend my middle age with a young family living under nature’s whims like a hunted animal. After the Big One and the series of quakes that followed, we thought the worst was over. Boy were we wrong!
When the dancing finally stopped beneath our feet, the roaring and whirling from above became daily occurrences. Weaponized helicopters and jets flew by in formation, like a flock of synchronized birds. The government used the disarray throughout Southern California to implement martial law, including curfews. All civil liberties suspended. Any person or group that dared to protest was gunned down, jailed, never heard from again.
The commander in chief—a dude named Woodson—declared himself “president for life” with Amfirpas’ blessing. People took to the streets in most states; soon the whole nation fell under his dictatorial grip.
“We will bring law and order, no matter what it takes,” Woodson stated on every TV and radio station. Bespectacled, with blue eyes and black hair drifting toward gray, in another time or place he’d have been a stern school headmaster.
The state of siege included registering anyone who needed work into a mandatory national job database called LifeSecure.
I found my way to the LifeSecure offices that popped up in a clearing among the rubble.
“I’m here to sign up for work,” I told the uniformed agent who manned the door. I ended up in a vast cavern with plastic chairs filled with unemployed men and women.
“How does this work?” I asked another uniform behind a desk.
“Private companies in need of work go through our database for possible employees—especially now after all this mess,” she said. “You may work a few days, several months, or even years. We provide a small stipend when you aren’t working, but only if you keep registering.”
What she didn’t say—and I found out soon enough—was that we worked for starvation wages. More importantly, we had no choice about registering. Those who tried to opt out were caught and held in giant “noncompliance centers”—a new name for what used to be prisons. They were caged behind razor-wire walls, no news in or out. You didn’t even have to commit a crime.
People forget how industrial Los Angeles used to be. LA wasn’t just Hollywood, beaches, sunshine. Even the Valley once had a GM auto plant, a brass foundry, aerospace assembly factories. This kind of employment was all but gone by the year 2035. I understand that in the 1980s, the whole country swung dramatically from manufacturing to technology. For most of us the jobs went toward Walmart, Home Depot, and Target. Then those disappeared as well.
LifeSecure replaced what used to be Social Security, Medicare, housing subsidies, and employment offices. It controlled everything from work to education to public health and transportation in a seamless partnership between corporations and the state.
When I signed up for LifeSecure, I wrote down the skills I had in machine repair—digitized, remote-controlled machines soon dominated the landscape, and this seemed viable as jobs went. Nonetheless, most work became robotized. The rest of us competed for the few jobs that programmed machines couldn’t do. I’m still young, but I became less and less important for the economy. Nobody had to say this—you felt it with every fiber of your being.
“Lencho, come back to camp with Santos—we have food,” Betina’s voice is cracking on the two-way.
“Got it—over and out,” I respond.
Santos obeys dutifully when I tell him to fall in. I’m sad he and Carolina, age eleven, have to be soldiers, missing out on childhood, innocent memories, and even things like normal fear—of the dark, the bogeyman, fairy-tale creatures. Here fear is real, but we can’t stay afraid for long. Fear has to turn to focus, determining the best course of action to take. Then we have to flow—the two other “f’s” added to the reptilian brain reactions of “fight, flight, or freeze.”
In the mountains, we train to think on our asses, as we say, and figure out the best option among many as quickly as possible. Over time, this becomes instinctual.
A large kitchen sits below a canopy of trees. Other battalion members gather to eat. Besides the modern descendants of Mayans, Aztecs, and other first peoples from Mexico and Central America, many mixed with African, European, Asians, from centuries of forced and unforced mestizaje, there’s a Korean-Japanese father who helps serve food. A former Crip from the 40s streets in South LA is setting up buffet tables. A family of Oaxacans who used to pick our food in sun-drenched fields, now cook our food. A white skater punk kid, who grew weed in his backyard, now grows veggies hydroponically underground in our caves. Even a few bearded bikers with their leather jackets still on their backs help maintain weapons and machines along with me and my brothers. Most of us are hard-working, law-abiding people who finally said, “Enough is enough.”
With everyone’s hands, backs, and ingenuity, we’ve built tunnels for miles embedded with sleeping quarters, storage rooms, weapon stashes (mostly holding stolen ordnance and guns), and central living cavities where we can hang out away from the “eyes” of drone guards.
On my way to the food tables, I stroll over to Betina and kiss her. Carolina runs up to me for a hug. The other fighters greet Santos and me with yelps and handshakes. At times like this, we are family, compas, safe. But they are brief moments, snatched in time.
“Man, every day there’s more aircraft,” Betina complained just weeks after the first earthquake struck.
“They’re bombing areas outside the city,” I said. “I hear there are people in the deserts and mountains fighting back.”
“Pobrecitos … I hope they get away,” Betina said as we slept on blankets—our boy and girl nearby—on the floor of a massive compound. These structures were hastily erected by civil servants no longer bound to the government. People in clusters made their way to the compounds with what little they had. Betina and I arrived with the few things we salvaged from our buried and largely burned-out home in Sun Valley.
Betina had a hard time leaving behind our family photos that weren’t destroyed. For me, it was the books I’d spent years haunting secondhand shops to collect. I loved every frayed page, black ink on white, and their unfolding secrets. I only managed to take one box. Many nights I spent reading a bio of my favorite historical person, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. I wasn’t one to write in books, but then I found and underlined his famous quote: It’s better to die on our feet than to live on our knees.
This gave me courage for what was to come.
Most people in the outlying areas were the poor and pushed-out—every race, color, political view, and creed. The central city was now white, all money, people who didn’t work but owned everything. Okay, there were some black and brown people among them, since the salient feature was wealth, not skin color.
Anyway, another earth-shattering event occurred that had nothing to do with tectonic plate shifts. The America First Party—the white supremacist group holding all the political reins—declared war on “undesirables.” At first they targeted the usual suspects—Muslims, blacks, gays, antisocials of any color, and those who opposed martial law. As things go, these included whites who wanted equality for all. Amfirpas thought by dividing us, pitting races or genders or some other divide against one another, we’d be too busy quarreling to fight back. For the most part they were right! Many people—those who have not been killed, jailed, or exiled—were doing just that. But a growing number of fighters from all over the country united against the “One Party, One Law, One Way” culture that Amfirpas manufactured.
They were all now “enemies of the people.”
“Amfirpas has attacked City Hall, the police station, and killed elected officials in LA, the county, and the state,” Betina gasped, echoing the news on the radio.
Most stations had been closed down. Only “official” reports were allowed, especially from Fox News, which took over all major TV news outlets. A lot of regular radio bands were also gone within weeks of Amfirpas’ invasion, but new guerrilla stations sprung up—the airwaves were one place where clandestine broadcasts continued to report.
I suspected this wouldn’t last long.
Just then my younger brother Paco made an announcement. “I’m joining the protesters,” he said. “I can’t just sit here day after day, not knowing what’s going to happen. I got to get out there.”
Lalo and Chilo both responded in unison: “Don’t go.”
“They’re coming after anybody who goes against Amfirpas,” Lalo said.
“Lalo’s right,” I said. “Maybe wait a few days. When we can see how things are going, we’ll all go together.”
“I’ve had it up to here—since I lost my wife and daughter in the earthquake,” Paco said, tears welling in his eyes. “I’m just a walking ghost.” He grabbed a hooded jacket and made his way to the exit. “I’ll be back. I’ll let you all know how it goes.”
Paco traveled to Downtown LA with a group that wanted to peacefully challenge Amfirpas’ rule. This group had placed flyers on walls and utility poles for the demonstration. With Paco gone, the rest of us waited anxiously around the radio listening to a clandestine station. At first everything about the protest sounded fine. No police or soldiers appeared on the streets. Then a reporter said that gun-toting machines were moving along Broadway toward the throng of people.
“Oh no!” Betina shouted.
Soon blasts rang out. Voices and shouts followed. The radio signal died.
We found out later that Paco had been killed along with hundreds of others. Bodies were piled up and burned. For days on end, I drowned in depression. Most days I couldn’t get out of bed. Lalo and Chilo reacted in their own ways to this pain. Yet Betina helped with her quiet but palpable strength. She was always the steadier of the two of us. She was also fierce when she had to be—I never doubted she’d be able to handle any painful event or decision.
“It’s time to fight,” I told Betina after the drones in the air and on land decimated much of what we loved in LA. “I don’t see any other way.”
Each week, more of those in the compounds left for the deserts or mountains, melting away until these places felt half-abandoned.
“What if the neighbors in and around here turn us in?” Betina said. “Like they did with the Reyes family.”
She was right. Government agents had come as the Reyeses had loaded up their minivan to leave. Officers led them out in plastic cuffs, bruises already forming on their faces, off to the noncompliance centers—where they were subjected to forced labor and indoctrination.
“We’ll take only essentials and sneak out in the dead of night,” I said.
“And the babies … we can’t leave them here or with others,” Betina said. “They’ll have to join us.”
“Entiendo … they’ll be trained if they’re to survive,” I said with a dry throat. “If we don’t prepare them now, even as small as they are, they’ll be picked off like baby turtles.”
The four of us—followed by my remaining brothers and their loved ones—wound up on the mountain range, living off the land, digging tunnels for days and days, as well as gathering supplies, weapons, and whatever else we could get in our city raids. With hundreds, then thousands, who came our way, we got everything done.
As we labored on our defense preparations, the whole world became engulfed in the cataclysm. Several nations came together to stop Woodson and Amfirpas. The US government pulled their immense resources as the world’s largest military and struck back. Nuclear attacks destroyed the major capitals of Europe, except Russia, which as a capitalist oligarchy was allied with US interests. Israel and Saudi Arabia were also in cahoots. Latin America was rained upon by conventional bombs and most countries capitulated early. But many provinces and states continued to push back. Same in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Japan also didn’t go along, but a nuclear blast annihilated Tokyo, and the traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought government surrender.
China was fractured. And the Koreas united with US prodding, although bands of heroic fighters dogged such unities. The Philippines also joined officially with the US, but the population became hostile, with armed groups surrounding Manila, close to retaking her. Mexico and Brazil were in similar conflicts, although deaths there became considerable.
The United States’ much more technologically advanced war machines just mowed down as much as they could, with collaborators in those developing countries massacring villages and poor people.
Pervasive death proved to be a great restraint to organized defiance.
However, here—in the good old United States—all was not well for Amfirpas and their metal unmanned “soldiers.” The resistance was spreading everywhere. I heard of battles won, lost, land taken, retaken, and heroic efforts against vast odds. The larger Native reservations had not fallen. Many outskirt areas of big cities were in the hands of guerrilla fighters. Interestingly, units formed in rural areas, rife with Evangelicals and right-wing ideologues, and took up arms.
From our forest hideouts we descended into the cities and suburbs for midnight raids, moving in and out undetected, then hiding in interlocked tunnels and dense foliage that extended to the Tehachapis. Jaguar’s Breath became a scourge to the vast hydra-like government and economy that were destroying and controlling most everything else.
But for us whose allegiance is Jaguar’s Breath, the America First Party will never control our souls, our minds, our capacity to stir in strategic silence. Like a jaguar stalking.
“Pass the chile, carnal,” I exhort Lalo across the way from the makeshift table made of downed trees.
“Hey, where are Santos and Carolina?” Betina asks with scowled forehead.
“They were just cleaning up,” I reply, looking around. “They should have been here a long time ago.”
I get on my radio to contact Santos. No response.
Then we hear it—the chortle of a large machine as it breaks through a cluster of trees. A walking drone. We pick up our weapons, of which only the laser-bullet guns can penetrate and damage these metallic monsters.
Suddenly I see the terrified faces of my children. They are inside the drone behind bullet-proof plexiglass. I can’t hear them, but I see Carolina’s mouth is open, screaming. This hulk of a drone has found them and with its powerful springlike arms picked them up and pulled them in. I move swiftly to the side and begin firing around the base of the drone so as to immobilize it without hurting the kids. Others around us also move, but a few are gunned down by the drone’s automatic blasts. Betina leaps around to the back of the machine—it looks like it’s alone. But we know it’s signaling our location.
Rufino manages to shove a magnetized digital bomb below the drone’s underbelly and then scurry off. With the push of a button, the device goes off, creating a precise hole in its main body, spreading shrapnel in all directions while we jump for cover
The detonation stops the drone dead in its tracks. I climb up and begin forcing the outer door open so my kids can get out. Betina scurries to join me. We have no time to lose. Our warriors are already entering the tunnels and sealing them; one entrance is left unsealed for us. With grunts and yells, we jerk the door open. Santos and Carolina jump out of the drone and rush toward the tunnel. No time for hugs.
In a minute or two, this area will be saturated with bombs and fire. Only the tunnels can keep us safe, although we also have to move deeper and deeper, away from our outside kitchen and dining stations, which will be utterly destroyed. We leave the dead outside; the wounded have been hurried in, bellowing with pain.
“These fascists are such cowards,” Betina says after we find haven in a darkened section of back tunnel. “They have machines do all the fighting. They only face their victims in camps and isolation wards when their captives can’t fight back. I’d like to see one of those Amfirpas people up close, stare straight into their eyes, while I cut their throat. For now, we’re only destroying machines. What we need to do is get the people who created those stupid drones and robots.”
“You’re right,” I respond. “I just don’t know how.”
I feel helpless. Most of what we’re doing is defending ourselves with a few forays to the closest communities to get what we need. We have to do something wildly unexpected to get to the heart of our enemy. It’s time for us to strike.
Months later, we would unleash a desperate plan. We would move against Woodson’s son who lived with his family in the Bel Air section of the city. There were unpaid workers from noncompliance centers, those who supposedly “took” to the indoctrination, in the fancy homes of this neighborhood—one of the few that had been rebuilt after the Big One. These people did the landscaping, kitchen work, laundry, and house cleaning—many consisting of the same Mexicans and Central Americans who used to do this, albeit at low wages, before the natural and unnatural upheavals.
Unbeknownst to the exceedingly well-off owners—made up of corporate heads, investors, financial officers, and high-end government bureaucrats—we had most of these workers on our side. They only pretended to comply so they could infiltrate such places.
Nathanial, an older black veteran and scrappy computer genius, who had ended up homeless until we recruited him to our cause, created electronic communication devices that linked our agents among the obscene rich to Jaguar’s Breath in the mountains. At our command, these agents were to disable security systems and open electronic gates—and subdue any human security guards they found.
“Nate, are you set up to signal our people when I give the word?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said. “But remember to wait till everyone’s surrounded Woodson’s home—everything depends on timing.”
Our plan was to kidnap the younger Woodson family and bring them back to our confines as leverage to end this madness—or at least buy time to replenish our numbers so we could conceive and implement more brazen actions.
Carrying this out was risky since the Woodson family was hardly ever alone—but we had to try.
Slowly, quietly, in measured moves, we climb up a green section of newly carved-out canyons and ravines surrounding Bel Air. There’s an enormous house on iron stilts. Opulent, with nice cars lining the road leading to the mansion, people in party attire are going in and out. They’ve been partying here on a weekly basis. These are the money-and-power people, who let the generals direct the drones for our demise, yet never have to see the wreckage, blood, and gore those machines inflict. They have a copious amount of leisure time—to party, play golf, watch screens that show their wealth accumulating on our backs.
What the machines end up doing in the mountains or deserts—or even what happens in the noncompliance centers—doesn’t mean a thing to these people. They are secure that “business is taken care of,” and never have to know what actually occurs.
Betina is leading a group of fighters up a ridge. Rufino is in charge of another group. I’m leading the third. This time around, Santos and Carolina are left in a new tunnel we just excavated in the mountains. Going to the very heart of the rich enclaves in Los Angeles, heavily guarded, will mean many of us won’t make it back. We make the dangerous trek through debris and wildlife to get there, avoiding machines, to get as close as we can. Even with razor-wire fences, concrete and steel walls, and drones scattered about, we finally get to the house. It’s the first time we’ve gotten this close to our adversaries.
“Wait for my signal, everyone,” I say carefully into my radio.
I’m thinking I won’t come out of this. But I see Betina’s determined look; Rufino’s leadership; Lalo and Chilo and all the other fighters climbing diligently toward who knows what. This inspires me.
“Ready … on my mark: cinco, cuarto, tres, dos, uno,” I say as we all jump up and fire toward the house; drones hear us and rush over to where we are. Most thoughts leave as I aim and shoot, and the uproar removes all other sounds and sensations from the air and ground. But we’re Jaguar’s Breath, we’re the guardians of soil, sun, and whatever decency is left in the world.
For a dreamlike second, Betina, Santos, and Carolina appear like faint apparitions in my mind as drones begin training their guns on me. But they don’t fire. With Nate’s expertise, our agents in the house managed to hack into the control boxes and digitally disable the drones.
We realize that electronically run machines have a weakness—humans.
A loyal team is there alongside us filming everything, including the taking of the family. They’ll relay the video to guerrillas in our new hideouts, who in turn will broadcast the images as far as they can to embolden other rebels wherever they may be. It’ll show that Amfirpas is vulnerable, that it can be gotten, that others can carry out similar attacks on an ongoing basis. It shows there’s a way to win.
Jaguar’s Breath is not just fighters, we are planters and nurturers of seeds for a final victory that we may or may not all live to see, but which will sprout and one day bring forth a prodigious harvest. When all hope appears gone, due to earthquakes or oppression, as long as there are these seeds, the world can always be renewed.