It was June, nearly five months after her murder, the world continuing to unravel, Holly’s father taking to a podium in Sun Valley to reassure a terrified public that the experts were delivering a plan soon, when I opened my email and saw a message. The subject line: I’ll always be with you Matt. The sender: Katherine Morris.
Of course, Earl and Sonja had named her Kate—just Kate, no Katherine or Katelin or anything else—so I should have known better, but in that moment the anguish got the better of my judgment and I opened it. The picture loaded, and I was staring at it before I could even process what I was seeing. My eye found the background first: russets of blood on the wall, then a huge bullet hole in an office doorframe, and then finally what was left of Kate’s head. I’d find out later that it was the real thing because right-wing trolls were gleefully sending it around the internet, adding animation or little green frogs or Baby Breiviks urinating on her. The violence of her wounds, the nakedness, seeing someone you love in this way you were never meant to—I’ll never be able to excise it from my mind. I’m trembling now just trying to type this. I deleted the message, and later the email account. But right then, I had to leave. I walked far into the woods and crouched at the foot of a thick yellow poplar, a towering tree that might have been there since before our house was built. I was shaking so hard my bones ached.
When the Ecological Restoration and Solutions Emergency Act passed in the dark of night, during the panic following the Weathermen assassinations, I barely noticed. If anything, I figured the omnibus bill for another Trojan horse, so deep were my scars from PRIRA. Moniza and I were still reeling, and I was sure the country was headed for violent unraveling. Something like civil war but worse. Though I refused my dad’s entreaties to buy a gun, for months I’d stocked the house with water and canned food like some bunker-mad prepper. Of course, if law and order did break down, families like ours would be the least able to cope: comfortable, pampered suburbanites who had never plumbed a toilet, let alone grown a year’s worth of food. But ERASE worked as advertised, arresting the crisis without any new national security provisions other than increased security for congressmembers and their families. I found myself thinking often of Russ Mackowski, the arrogance and faux-backwoods toughness he’d oozed; it was hard not to wonder what his last moments had been like. I sent Ashir al-Hasan a note of condolence about his sister but never heard back.
The arrest of the Weathermen’s core leadership was almost a greater victory. Watching the FBI perp-walk Worthington, Ismael, and McCurdy on their way to maximum-security units, I marveled at how normal they looked—these three middle-class professionals who’d sowed such chaos. I darkly wished more of them had chosen the route of Kellan Harley Murdock. To think how much they’d cost us, helping to destroy not only our legislation but the spirit of unity and purpose we’d tried so hard to create. I know I allowed myself too much hate for them.
Crackdowns on the Patriot League and the white nationalist groups followed, the Hamby DOJ unleashing a wide-ranging effort to dismantle their networks, arms, and recruiting platforms. Moniza wrote a piece exploring the connections between Vic Love, Xuritas, The Pastor, Governor Justis of Kansas, and multiple members of Congress profiting off the rise of a murderous authoritarian movement. Democrats promised investigations, but there were an awful lot of people in the party who’d supported and shielded Vic Love.
Following the arrests of their leadership, 6Degrees released a new communiqué promising that they were not going anywhere, and no one in the “American aristocracy” was safe. “The assault will continue,” they promised. “And anyone profiting from this genocidal order is a fair target.”
They backed it up too. Three months after the ’38 midterms, the CEO of one of the major pharma companies was gunned down outside his home, his security detail also slaughtered in the ambush. A month after that, a bomb went off in the offices of one of D.C.’s premier lobbying firms. Sixteen people killed and three dozen injured. President Hamby promised the terrorists would be brought to justice. The establishment was near hysteria, their panic flooding every available medium.
Finally, Archie Bhattacharyya was arrested. Moniza was floored.
“She’s an extremely successful fund manager,” she explained. “One of the best. I simply can’t believe she was behind this.” On television they led Bhattacharyya out of her Manhattan town house, cameras flashing, the press clamoring for a word. She was tall and elegant with a blue pompadour and jewelry coating her wrists and fingers. She looked the part of a garish woman of wealth who’d be the target of these assassinations, not the perpetrator. According to CNN, the FBI thought she was the ringleader. Moniza held the remote with her arms crossed as she watched the meaty palm of an FBI agent pack Bhattacharyya into a black SUV.
“This is bad,” Moniza continued. “She was one of the minted toffs of the short-selling attacks on oil and gas. She practically undid Envige and Ohio Valley Power herself.”
“Why’s that bad? Those are both bankrupt.”
Mo only shook her head. “They were going to strike back anyway. They’ll use this.”
I didn’t need to ask who “they” referred to.
With the wind of trillions of dollars in its sails, the economy had righted itself, adding jobs at a rapid clip, but the old order would not go quietly. Big Oil, as always, led the way with the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Sustainable Future Coalition supercharging their advertising and dumping money into every political race in the country, from the Senate to city council. The Pastor had calmed himself somewhat and was promising another run in 2040. He demanded that as many provisions in ERASE be reversed as “physics and the laws of Jesus Christ allow.” All these interests scored a massive victory in April of ’39 when the Supreme Court sided with Republican attorneys general and proceeded to gut the shock collar and many of CORDA’s toughest rules. It was all unconstitutional, they said.
We’d feared this since the bill’s passage. The court remained packed with right-wing zealots, including Trump appointees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice Amy Coney Barrett. With one ruling, the most important components of the legislation were gone, stalling progress on the recovery. “That might be the plan,” Moniza explained. “Give the carbon lobby the kiss of life and instigate an economic downturn to get business back in the driver’s seat.”
It just so happened that I was going golfing with my dad in Wildwood the next day.
“How do you like this?” he asked when I got to their house. He stood watching Fox with his arms crossed and the delight of a kid witnessing the moon landing. Of course, my father had been railing against the RINO Hamby and the socialist agenda of ERASE. He hated the new CORDA taxes because his house was within the nine-foot border of projected sea level rise, hated the handouts raining down on the unworthy poor, hated even the suggestion that the climate crisis, after all this time, was actually real. He’d blamed the movement for scaring people about sea level—even though he could literally drive down the street and walk the ghost forests of the Croatan, the cypress trees wilting as the saltwater crept farther into the root systems. The entire coast of North Carolina was eerie and dying.