While the men stood facing each other, dazed, blood began to pulse between his abuelita’s fingers in a great flood. Her shrieking tightened into a high-pitched gurgle.
Gabriel snapped back into the horrible reality, took three steps forward and thrust the muzzle of the assault rifle against the homeless man’s chest. The small room roared with gunfire, temporarily deafening everyone. The homeless man absorbed six rounds in and around his heart. He slumped to his knees behind the chair, wavered for a moment, then collapsed sideways.
Gabriel’s abuelita tried to stand, turning toward the chair, still holding her gushing throat with one hand. Gabriel dropped the rifle and held her. He grabbed the crocheted doily on her chair and worked it under her hand onto her neck, adding pressure to the gushing wound.
His mother and sister came running through the door and began screaming.
“Get me a towel,” Gabriel shouted over them. “Now!”
His sister disappeared from the doorway and ran back with a bath towel.
By then, his abuelita was fading fast, having poured much of her blood onto the carpet. Gabriel clamped the towel around her neck and pulled her onto his lap, cradling her head, tearlessly weeping. His mama and sister joined him on the floor and they held the old woman as she slipped silently from this world to the next.
Around eleven p.m., Francisco returned home to Rose Park from prison, along with a hundred and twenty of his men. They set up camp in the neighbors’ homes, the neighbors allowing the gang members to stay, like a quartering army of old. It wasn’t as though they had much choice. Without police anywhere to be found, any law was good law.
Abuelita lay out on the couch in her favorite dress, bloodless and dead. Their sister had placed a dusty bouquet of artificial flowers in her hands over her chest. Francisco’s mama and sister had cleaned the blood away and Gabriel had dragged the homeless man’s body outside and laid it carefully on the picnic bench in their backyard.
Francisco stood in the backyard, staring at the dead homeless man. Part of him was angry with Gabriel. His brother had promised to protect the family while Francisco was away. Another part of him knew that expecting an eighteen-year-old boy to stop a chance encounter with the Fates was absurd. He promised himself that he would not let Gabriel see his disappointment or anger.
“Hermano, I failed you. I’m sorry.” Gabriel stepped quietly out of the dark and stood beside Francisco. Francisco pretended not to hear the tears just beneath Gabriel’s words. Francisco looked back at the body, noticing how Gabriel had cared for this homeless dirt bag, laying him out with respect. The thought almost brought tears to Francisco’s eyes. His little brother had a beautiful heart. If it had been Francisco, he would have tossed the body of the man over by the garbage cans.
“Gabriel, sometimes things just happen and they cannot be stopped.”
“But I should have been watching the house more carefully, hermano,” Gabriel said with conviction, his self-judgment ramping. “I should have caught him before he came in. The window wasn’t even locked.” Gabriel cried openly now.
“No, hermanito. You’re wrong. You couldn’t have stopped him. Not in a million years and not with a million tries.”
You have no idea how cruel this world is, hermanito, Francisco thought to himself. I have protected you from the truth. Now you are starting to see. You and everyone else. I’ve lost my abuelita and worse, my brother has lost the untainted life I wanted for him. That can’t be changed now.
But now, no man is better suited to rule this place than I am. In this season, cruelty will reign and it will erase the fucking whites. Nobody is ready for this new world—a world of violence. Nobody but me.
Wyoming Road 713G
Outside Laramie, Wyoming
As Chad Wade approached the mountains of central Wyoming in the dark of autumn night, the back roads had gone from an orderly grid to spaghetti. For a terrible navigator like Chad, it was hell on earth.
But I’m badass at everything else, Chad assured himself.
He juggled back and forth between watching the road through his NVGs and reading the map. The goggles could only focus on one thing at a time—close or far—and they had to be manually re-focused to switch back and forth, a maddening process.
Chad, Audrey and their little girl occasionally drove by camps alongside the dirt roads. People were moving from one point to another during the day and flopping their stuff down at night. Some people headed east, others headed west, and still others headed south. Chad had no clue where they were going nor what they hoped to find.
While he drove, Chad periodically flipped through the radio bands—FM, then AM. He rarely found anyone broadcasting, which wasn’t surprising since they were in the middle of nowhere. Once in a while, he found a channel broadcasting from a great distance, always on the AM band.
The U.S. government ran a series of informational broadcasts on the public stations, but the information seemed contrived and contradictory. The federal government encouraged everyone to sit tight, that the power would come back on shortly. He caught a speech by the president, urging calm and condemning the rioters and looters in the major cities.
Some few radio shows told the truth: there had been a mass exodus out of the cities into the mountains and countryside with untold numbers of people starving alongside the roads. Police, fire and military had almost disappeared, presumably returning home to their families. So far, there were no reports of the federal government showing up with FEMA feeding stations. Those organizations, while certainly real, seemed to have vanished with the corporations and other governmental agencies. At this point in time, almost anything requiring organization any bigger than a local church or small town had ceased to exist.
Chad laughed at this last part. His prepper buddies were totally convinced the Feds would come racing in after the Apocalypse, eager to gobble up everyone’s constitutional rights. But Chad had experienced the government firsthand. In fact, as a SEAL, he had his PhD in how effective the government really was. In short, they could barely keep their shit squared away on a good day, with power humming, air conditioners running, and supply chains working. Like a hooker without hands, the United States government had trouble just getting undressed, not to mention the finer arts of seduction. In the midst of chaos, Chad guessed, just about everyone drawing a paycheck from “the Gov” would steal their staplers and head home.
The evil Feds might have intended to implement draconian FEMA camps, trampling on people’s constitutional rights. Who knows? But almost all the folks working for the government, on just about every level, were too inept or too lazy to make anything that nefarious happen, especially under unpredictable circumstances. Without the certainty of a paycheck, why would FEMA “stormtroopers” even show up for work, much less carry out an agenda of questionable oppression? What would be in it for them?
The United States military suffered from the same disease. The rank and file of the branches of the military, while good folks, were professionals. They weren’t fanatics, especially the POGs—People Other Than Grunts—the supply and support soldiers and sailors that made up the bulk of the U.S. forces. The POGs often enlisted in the military for free college tuition and a solid paycheck. If all the upsides of being in the military got sketchy, both the POGs and the grunts would start drifting away. Apparently, that’s exactly what had happened; the military had largely vanished like a hard-drinking party at clean-up time.