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The first thing I learned when the world started to fall apart was that I didn’t know shit about shit.
You would have thought I would have known something. After all, in the corporate world, I had been a big deal. I was the vice president of the human resources department at a huge investment and accounting firm in the city of Charlotte. I had the fate of over three hundred employees at my fingertips, and everyone knew it. Yes, I lived the good life. I had a corner office on the top floor of the twenty-story building, with my own attached bathroom and my assigned parking spot in the executive parking garage in the building’s basement. I had a high, six-figure salary, and stock options to boot. You would have thought that I might be one of those pretentious pricks that everyone complains about at happy hour, but that wasn’t the case with me. Everyone liked me. I made it a point every day to sit with people in the cafeteria over the lunch hour and find out about their lives and hopes and dreams. It was a goal of mine to meet everyone on staff, and I kept a spreadsheet with everyone’s name on it and as I met them, I tracked things like birthdays and company anniversaries and such. Granted, I could have looked up the information in the personnel records, but I genuinely enjoyed hearing people’s stories and getting to know them. I even instituted a rule that allowed everyone to wear blue jeans on Fridays. People revered me for that.
Then the shit storm blew in like a harsh winter, and the catastrophes started piling on top of each other like cars at the demolition derby. Let me try to remember how it all fell apart.
First came the global pandemic that our government severely mishandled. Those initially in power thought it was going to be just like the flu and that a person would develop the sniffles combined with a headache, and in seventy-two hours, they’d find themselves cured, but it took little more than an Internet browser and access to an international news source to see that was wrong. Since America had divided itself down party lines for so long, each party picked a side to fall on. One side wanted to follow the science; one side wanted to follow... Well, I’m not quite sure. Anti-science? Is there such a thing as anti-science? Witchcraft maybe? Although I believe witches used a lot of herbs and stuff in their spells, so there was probably a basis of science in that, too.
It was a Belgian entertainment reporter, of all people, who originally broke the first story of what would become the biggest news event of the twenty-first century. She was on assignment in South America, following a musician-turned-environmentalist around the jungle when they happened upon a village on the verge of extinction from clear-cutting in the Amazon. The native people put up a good fight, but then tribe members started getting sick, and they passed it off to the foresters, and the foresters took it out of the Amazon and back to their homes in Brazil, or Peru, or Bolivia and passed it on to family members. It didn’t take long for the virus to find out that it loved a human host, and it thrived there. By the time the western world took notice, the virus, dubbed the Brazilian Bombshell, had spread throughout South and Central America. Nations recommended their citizens return home, so the previously mentioned reporter got on a plane back to Brussels. She had no symptoms, but she carried the virus with her to Europe, and she wasn’t the only one. Thanks to the airplane, the virus spread like wildfire throughout the world. Well, certainly you know the story. Some countries shut down completely and closed their borders, and some didn’t. Here, we had a mix. Some people acted responsibly, wore masks, took vaccines, played it safe. Other people said ‘fuck it’ like they were going to hit the blackjack table in Las Vegas and bet the mortgage, the college funds, and the retirement money all on one hand. Some in the government wanted life to go on as usual, if for the good of the economy, even if at the time upward of sixty percent of the population came down sick.
It took five years for the virus to burn itself out, and it took just over sixty-eight million people with it in this country alone. Other countries fared even worse and lost over seventy percent of their people. Australia came out the winner since they locked down the country immediately and didn’t let a plane land or a ship touch its shores until the pandemic was over. Even today, anyone wanting to enter that country must isolate on a ship offshore for three weeks before entering.
After the pandemic subsided and the dead got dealt with, society started to get back to the way things were, and things were fine for a while until the poles started melting at a serious rate. Climate change in America was another one of those two sides of the coin issues. Again, half the people in the country felt it was an important issue, the other half thought it was a hoax. They believed in the Easter Bunny, but not climate change. When an ice shelf the size of Manhattan broke off of Antarctica, it barely made the news. When the ice melted in the Arctic, economists and businesspeople loved the new shorter shipping lanes. And when it rained instead of snowed over Greenland, practically no one noticed. The scientists noticed, of course, but the politicians didn’t take it seriously since to them, a degree or two of rising temperature or an inch or two of rising water didn’t seem like a big deal. Then hurricane Stephanie blew across the Florida Keys and sent a wall of water into Miami that never quite receded. The rising tides displaced millions of people along both coasts of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. A reverse migration happened, and rather than retire to Florida or Texas, people moved out to North Dakota and Iowa. If you want to visit Miami Beach these days, you need a snorkel to do it.
Once the seas rose and coastal cities could no longer hold a large number of people, they moved inward to the plains states. Omaha tripled, then quadrupled in size, and Oklahoma City grew from the largest city in Oklahoma to the largest city in the central United States. Of course, the influx of people from the coast caused another problem, and that was where to put them. Cities and towns needed to expand, and that meant farmland got plowed under at an astonishing rate until President Peterson put an end to that with an executive order that limited the amount of acreage that a non-farmer could own. At first, people got angered by that, but when bread and canned beans started to appear on grocery shelves again, the anger subsided.
Although she had the right ideas about the best way to rebound the country, President Peterson served only one term and lost her reelection bid to President Trenton, who was the last president before the country collapsed completely. President Trenton gained a following when he stripped off most of the Conservative party, promising a renewed dedication to the American values of God, guns, and freedom. Even though we had never lost our guns, could still worship whatever god we wanted, or no god at all, and still had as much freedom as we did in 1776. Although President Trenton and his underlings screamed from the rooftops that America was falling into socialism and communism, they themselves were authoritarians, and that was fine with their followers. As long as they were in charge, and they rigged the game so they would be in charge for a long time. Those at the top only craved two things: money and power, and they did all they could to make sure they’d have a never-ending supply of both. The first thing they did was shrink the size of the Supreme Court, stripped it from thirteen justices way back to five, and it just so happened that those five judges were ones under Trenton’s thumb. You may wonder how with a lifetime appointment, eight judges would all leave the bench in a year, but again, it came down to money and power. The three most liberal justices all came down with cases of bad luck, and each was involved in untimely, but fatal, accidents. The other five decided to ‘retire’ to pursue ‘other interests’. One brave reporter from a Washington newspaper smelled something rotten, did some digging, and learned that each of the retired justices had each received enough money to last several lifetimes. The newspaper refused to print the story, so the reporter posted it online. It only took fifteen minutes for the website he posted on to suffer a complete failure, and an hour later, someone found the reporter dead in an alley.
Once the court was in his grasp, Trenton’s people in Congress headed to work. They decided for the good of election security that elections needed to be tightened, and the way to do that was to go back to the country’s founding document, the Constitution. Since the original document provided no one the right to vote, Congress, with a wink and a nod, sent all voting decisions back to the states. Since more than half of the states were flag-waving Trenton lovers, the state governments threw as many people off the voting rolls as they could by going back to their original state charters, and that in turn meant that in most states the only people allowed to vote were white men who owned property. Of course, civil rights groups by the hundreds filed lawsuits, most of which boiled up to the Supreme Court. The Court initially played along and took the cases before siding for the State, but then stopped taking the voting rights cases all together.
Losing a right that only a third of the people used anyway angered a good many fine Americans, and the protests started. Congress, in the name of safety and national security, was in session taking a hard look at the right to assemble when the news broke that Russia had invaded.
For the few years before Russia decided taking on America would be a good idea, they had been busy waging war on their neighbors in an attempt to rebuild the old Soviet Empire. Although the United States didn’t get directly involved, they did supply Russia’s adversaries with an unending supply of money and weapons, making it hard for Russia to get the quick victories it wanted. So, Russia decided to go for the throat.
Russia went with a two-pronged surprise attack that brought their troops to the west coast and up through Mexico with the plan of taking over half of America before the other half knew what was happening. The Russians lost that war in short order. Not only were they overextended from having to occupy the countries they had recently taken, but they also underestimated not only the greatness of the American military but also the number of gun-toting, freedom-loving good old boys in every back burg of America. I actually felt sorry for the Russians coming in from Mexico. Not only did they have to trudge through the desert in the middle of summer, but by the time they crossed the border, thousands of patriots and soldiers had amassed and sat in air-conditioned pickup trucks waiting for them. Not a single foreign invader made it through that gauntlet. Of course, Russia threatened us all with nukes, and near the end of the war, they actually tried to use them. What they hadn’t counted on was the bravery of one Russian general, who, when ordered to fire the nuke, rerouted it for the Russian central command building instead of the White House. It wasn’t a large bomb, but big enough to take down the remains of the Russian Empire, and Russia surrendered to America the next day. The best part was, for reparations, NATO forced Russia to give land to the countries they had absorbed. Map lines got redrawn and all the countries that bordered Russia doubled in size. Estonia took control of St. Petersburg and Azerbaijan claimed all the land north to Volgograd. Finland stretched its borders east all the way to the White Sea, and Ukraine claimed Moscow. Kazakhstan moved north, and Mongolia took all the land to the northern shores of Lake Baikal. Even Japan got some long-disputed islands back in the Sea of Okhotsk. When all got said and done, the once-largest country in the world was only a fifth of its former size, and they formed the new Russian capital in Yakutsk.
After the war ended, things in this country got really bad. Prices shot up, inflation rose, and wages dropped like a rock. Even the people who had voted President Trenton and his ilk into office had enough, and protests started overtaking the country like dandelion fields popping up after the spring rains. The working class of the entire country went on a general strike, and practically every business shut down. Thousands of protesters turned up at the state capitols of every state, and in response, President Trenton broke the Posse Comitatus Act and sent the military in to deal with the protesters, which ended up with thousands of Americans dead. The president then declared Marshall Law and canceled the upcoming presidential election, which also didn’t go over well, and the protests widened. It’s said that four million people marched on Washington, which I can neither confirm nor deny, since all I saw was pictures of the aftermath. The capital city fell, burning and in ruins, and anyone involved in the administration of President Trenton, including Trenton himself, suffered the ultimate consequence. The United States of America had fallen, and all it took was the mismanagement and greed of one madman and his followers.
I saw it all coming because I had an excellent view from my office. It didn’t take a financial genius to see the market was going to crash, and it crashed hard. My firm, including myself, got wiped out overnight. I found out I was out of a job when I got to the office one morning and found access to the parking garage blocked, and a note on the front door that said some nonsense about the firm being closed indefinitely, which everyone knew was bullshit. Well, at least I didn’t have to wear a tie anymore.
When Washington fell, anarchy descended on the country like nightfall. Even though I lived in the suburbs of Charlotte, I could hear gunfire and sirens around me constantly. I knew I had to get away, find a place to hide out and lie low until someone got things back into some semblance of order.
I had gotten as far as laying out my suitcases on the bed and was deciding what to pack when the doorbell rang. Rather than rush right down and throw open the door, I crept like a thief into the spare bathroom across the hall. Just over the toilet was a window that offered a view of the landing below. I could tell by the top of the head it was my neighbor, Barry.
The doorbell rang again just as I reached to open the door. It was Barry, and he looked different, nervous, scared.
“Hey, Bar, what’s going on?” I asked as if it were just a normal Saturday, and he was over to see if I wanted to play a round at the country club.
“We’re leaving,” Barry said as he gestured to his house across the street. Over his shoulder I could see the garage was open, and his wife, Jill, was busy cramming stuff into the family minivan. “Jill wanted me to come over and see if you wanted to head out with us.”
The offer didn’t surprise me. For some reason, Jill was obsessed with me. I never knew why, and never bothered to ask, but I think it had something to do with the fact that I was a single executive and Barry was a mid-level accountant at the firm. I had financial freedom and my independence, and Jill was stuck at home with three kids and a never-ending pile of laundry. Jill was a fine woman, but she wasn’t my type, and I never once reciprocated anything toward her, even when she came over one Sunday morning looking to borrow a cup of sugar and she was wearing nothing but a raincoat.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
Barry wiped the sweat from his brow onto his shirtsleeve. “Jill’s folks have a place down in the mountains of Georgia, so we’re headed there.”
“Live off nuts and squirrels until things calm down?” I asked jokingly. I even chuckled after I said it.
“Something like that,” Barry deadpanned.
“No. Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got a different destination in mind.”
“Where?”
“Virginia,” I blurted out before I thought about lying.
“What’s in Virginia?” Barry asked.
“My great uncle used to live there. When he died, I inherited his farm,” I said.
I watched Barry’s eyes, and it looked like he was doing some accounting of his own. He opened his mouth and was about to say something when Jill appeared at his side.
“We’d better get going, honey,” she said to Barry. “Hey Baker,” she said as she finally acknowledged me.
“Jill,” I said. “I hear you’re headed for Georgia.”
Before Jill could answer, Barry interrupted. “Baker’s going to Virginia. We should go with him instead.”
“What? Why?” Jill asked. I have to admit, those same questions hit my thoughts at the same time.
“He’s got a farm there,” Barry answered.
Jill looked at me dead in the eyes. I saw a flicker of anger in her eyes at first, then that quickly passed, and her countenance softened. I imagine she was trying to picture herself as a helpless farm girl caught in the barn and me as the hearty farmhand there to save her.
“It’s less of a farm, and more of a homestead,” I explained. “I haven’t been there in years, and honestly have no idea what shape it’s in.” I hoped the truth would save me.
Jill looked at me, then back at Barry. From across the street, an infant began to cry.
“Barry, my parents are expecting us. It’s time to go. Now.” Jill gave me a last glance, then turned, ran across the road, and disappeared into the van.
“You sure you don’t want to come with us?” Barry asked.
“Thanks for the offer, but no, man. You go take care of your family.”
I extended my hand, and Barry shook it.
“Good luck,” I said.
“Same to you. You’re going to need it. I’m sure we’ll see each other in a month or two.”
“Probably,” I agreed, even though I doubted it.
Barry nodded, hesitated for a second, then returned to his family. I watched as he closed all the van doors, then slipped into the driver’s seat. A second later, the van backed out of the garage and into the street. Barry waited for the garage door to close, then he gave me a little wave and drove away.
I never saw Barry, Jill, or any of their three kids again.
