By the sound of the uproar, Francisco could tell his boys were taking over the prison. Even the roaring noise sounded Latino.
He wondered why that was. Why did white people and black people sound different from brown people when it was just a roar of a crowd?
Francisco loved everything about being Latino. He had grown up in Los Angeles—so close to Mexico you could almost smell the tortillerias. All Latino pride aside, though, he thought Mexico sucked ass. For whatever reason, the people there lived like sheep. They had nothing in common with great Mexicans like his namesake: Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
Francisco harbored a personal belief that most Mexicans with cojones had emigrated to the U.S. over the last twenty years, leaving Mexico alone with the spineless cowards. The cartels stood out as the last shining hope against American imperialism. He and his gang family, Los Latigos al Norteños, did whatever they could to help the cartels and the cartels paid them well for their loyalty.
Pancho, short for “Francisco,” had dedicated his life to La Revolución, and crime had paved his way. During several sabbaticals in prison, he had studied the life of Pancho Villa, particularly the way Villa set up his own estate. Bucking the trend in Mexico, Villa eschewed the hacienda system of lords and laborers and made his own lands into idyllic social experiments, the common soldier elevated, children educated, and respect given to all.
Francisco’s own vision borrowed from Villa’s, bringing it into modern times. He dreamed of being an aristocrat who labored alongside his soldiers, educating their children and respecting them as men. Noble Mexicans, enjoying their birthright of self-respect and self-determination.
Other than his stops in prison, Francisco lived the dream. He had risen through the ranks of the Norteños gang, achieving lieutenant rank at only twenty-five and now captain at thirty-six. He was the top-ranked Mexican Mafioso in the State of Utah.
With each act of crime, he struck at the heart of the American system, feeding the gringos their drugs and taking advantage of their moral decrepitude. He didn’t know what had gone wrong with the prison over the last week, though he knew it was serious. In his revolutionary heart, he dreamed that the concrete world of the whites had cracked open. He would flow into that crack, hard and strong, breaking the whites’ hold on this prison and even this state.
He didn’t bother getting off his bunk to look out his cell through the grating. His men would come get him when they defeated the mag locks. If he stood at the bars, he would look weak. Pancho Villa never looked weak.
Francisco laid back on his bunk, confident he would see freedom soon enough.
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Jacquelyn roamed around the Homestead with a shirt full of potatoes. It seemed like she spent a lot of time doing this—walking around looking for a particular person. She had even started developing a route.
Start at the kitchen, head toward the clotheslines, loop over to the showers, then walk to the big greenhouses, then the small greenhouses. Head up the drive to the big house. Check the office. Go by the infirmary. Finish at the bunkhouse. If that failed, start over again at the kitchen.
The simple truth was, as much as everyone bitched about cell phones, life sucked without them. She ached to send a simple text and locate Amanda, the gardener. She spent half her day looking for people, even though the Homestead proper only occupied about five acres and fifteen buildings.
Finally, Jacquelyn saw Amanda off in the distance, carrying trays of vegetable starts.
“Hold up…” Jacquelyn trotted over to Amanda, awkwardly cradling the potatoes in her shirt and trying not to let her ample boobs peek out the bottom.
“Hey, Jackie.” Amanda stopped. She didn’t know Jacquelyn well enough to realize she hated being called “Jackie.”
“Hey, sister. We were about to throw the last of the potatoes from the cold storage into today’s stew, and it dawned on me that we might need them for potato starts. I wanted to make sure before we boiled them.”
“Oh, crap.” Amanda covered her mouth with one free hand. “I was supposed to pull some seed potatoes out a couple of days back and it slipped my mind.” She giggled. “That would’ve been some kind of screw-up, right?”
“No harm, no foul. I grabbed these,” Jacquelyn told her. “Do you need more?”
Amanda looked over the spuds in Jacquelyn’s shirt. “Yeah. We need three times that many for seed potatoes. Are they already in the stew pot?” Amanda gritted her teeth.
“They’re chopped up, but I asked the girls to hold off putting them in the stew.”
“Oh, good. It doesn’t matter that they’re cut up, but we’ll have to put them in water right away for them to sprout. I’ll meet you over at the kitchen.”
“Disaster averted,” Jacquelyn laughed. “See you at the kitchen in a minute.”
In truth, cooking the seed potatoes would’ve been a catastrophe. At this point in the collapse, potatoes would be rare, bordering on non-existent. Every potato in or around cities would have been gobbled up by now. The potatoes in her shirt might be the last raw potatoes for a hundred miles. If they ever did find anyone with potatoes, they would cost a fortune in trade.
Jacquelyn and Amanda would have to drop everything right away to get these potatoes cut into “eyes” and sprouting in water. Each whole potato would make six to ten sprouts. Then, each sprout would grow six to ten whole potatoes when planted. Luckily, Jacquelyn had been the one to get the potatoes out of cold storage. Otherwise, the Homestead would have eaten the last of their potatoes without a second thought.
Damn close call. How many of these close calls are we screwing up? she wondered.
She laughed out loud as she remembered her and her husband’s fantasies about When the Shit Hits the Fan. Admittedly, she had romanticized the Apocalypse. She and Tom had read at least a dozen books about the post-Apocalyptic world, and she had woven together an idea that it would be like Swiss Family Robinson meets Little House on the Prairie, but with guns. She had imagined the joys of “rough living”—the pace of life slowing down and enjoying little things like playing with the kids, the dew on the grass and long sunsets.
In reality, she had never been so busy in all her life. There was nowhere near enough time for making the rough-hewn improvements to daily life, like learning to whittle, then carving a butter churn out of old wood. What a joke! There wasn’t even time to plant the greenhouses. Just cooking, cleaning, sanitation, and getting living arrangements set up consumed every minute of every day. They all worked by lantern into the night.
She had daydreamed about just spending time with good people after modern society collapsed. The people around her were certainly good people, but half the time they wanted to strangle one another. Almost every person in the Homestead was in some stage of losing his or her mind, and culture shock took a devastating toll. Under this level of stress, even moderate personality disorders, largely dormant before the collapse, were going ballistic. She was the only therapist in the group, a major oversight by Jason Ross. She fielded the entire responsibility of helping three dozen destabilized people pull their minds back together, as though talk therapy was some one-stop solution.
Before the collapse, she and Tom had, admittedly, glamorized the guns. Back when the world was sane, owning guns felt like some stand for individuality and self-sufficiency. Now, with the shit actually hitting the proverbial fan, the guns felt dangerous to her. Sooner or later, someone would die from a bullet wound, either by accident or from a gunfight.