21
When I arrived at city hall, Mrs. Compton was waiting for me amid a sea of staff scurrying to their offices.
“Good morning,” she said. “Hope you slept well. There’s a ton of work waiting for you. Mr. Wilcox, who used to run the Office of Hispanic Helots, died on the golf course three months ago of an aneurysm. Mr. Talbot, head of the Office of Black Helots, has overseen the two departments since then, but he doesn’t know a word of Spanish and has made a huge mess of everything. Hope you can make sense of all that paperwork.”
“Paperwork?”
“You’ll see. Follow me.”
Mrs. Compton led me to a large office in the northwest corner of the building. When she opened the door, my heart sank. Mountains of folders were stacked on top of every surface and sticking out of overflowing filing cabinets. Some of the stacks were on the verge of falling over.
“Sue Anne will be your personal assistant.” Mrs. Compton pointed to a blond girl in her early twenties sitting at a nearby desk. She was smiling nervously and chewing gum. She reminded me of a cow chewing its cud. “Ask her anything. She’s here to serve you.”
After talking to Sue Anne for a few minutes, I realized I couldn’t entrust the girl with anything more complicated than making photocopies or bringing me coffee. She looked very Aryan, so she fit right in, but the Creator had apparently forgotten to give her a brain.
“Well, let’s sort through this mountain of paperwork and determine what’s a priority and what can wait. Write down the titles of the folders, then create an index, OK?”
Sue Anne looked at me dumbfounded, as if I’d asked her to piss into a glass and give it to Mrs. Compton to drink. She even stopped chewing her gum.
“You know what an index is, don’t you, Sue Anne?”
“It’s a type of music, right?” she said and nodded, feeling more confident. “The Music Index. My cousin Norma loves them.”
“Forget it, dear,” I sighed. “I have a better idea. Find me some coffee that’s better than this swill.”
As soon as Sue Anne left (oh, God, let that coffee be very, very hard to find), I sat down in the middle of my office and started to divide up the folders. After a while, I worked out a system. An hour later, I’d made three piles. One group of files contained the expenditures of the Hispanic helots. Another group referred to supplies and living conditions in the Bluefont ghetto. The third group of files pertained to the regular supply of Cladoxpan.
As I sorted through those folders, I got a clearer picture of how Gulfport was run. Twenty-three thousand white people lived in Gulfport. Seven thousand people lived in the helot ghetto of Bluefont, about twenty-five people in each of the three hundred houses. That was too many, even for those spacious houses. Bluefont was inside the Wall, but was separated from the rest of the city by a fence and a river they’d channeled alongside it like a moat. The bridge where I’d negotiated with Carlos Mendoza connected Bluefont to the rest of Gulfport.
Every week, helots gathered at the south end of the bridge, and Green Guards gave them the weapons they needed. Then they headed out on expeditions to towns within a hundred-mile radius. Sometimes they were gone for several days. When they came to a town, they loaded their trucks with any supplies they could find for insatiable, affluent Gulfport. When they returned, they parked the loaded trucks in the town’s warehouse and turned in their guns. As payment, they received Cladoxpan, which kept them from changing into Undead.
On those expeditions, there were inevitable casualties, not from TSJ—nearly a hundred percent of the helots were already infected—but from the terrible wounds the Undead inflicted.
Due to these losses, the population of helots remained more or less stable. Every so often, like a steady drip, individuals or groups of people showed up at Gulfport or crossed paths with the supply expeditions. If they were black, Native American, Latino, or Asian, they were offered shelter and companionship in Bluefont, where they were compelled to live a life of semislavery. The few who were white, like Lucia, Prit, and me, joined the population on the other side of the fence.
The helots outnumbered the Green Guard, which comprised just forty Aryan Nations ex-cons and a militia of a hundred and fifty soldiers. Charged with maintaining the safety of Gulfport, the guards and militia would have been powerless to control the crowd of infected helots. So, from time to time, they carried out a Nazi-style “cleansing” in the ghetto. As I read, my palms grew clammy and I broke out in a cold sweat. I found numerous folders with “EXPELLED” written in big red letters across them, but no explanation inside. I hesitated, then picked up the phone and called Mrs. Compton.
“Oh, those are the helots who break the rules. Murderers, drunks, thieves, and rapists, the scum of the earth,” she replied cheerfully to my questions. “The Office of Justice processes those files.”
“I’d like to see those files.” The lawyer in me had awakened and was trying to figure out what sort of twisted justice the Reverend Greene applied.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Mrs. Compton said primly. “That department answers directly to the reverend and those reports are confidential.”
I hung up, intrigued. After making sure Sue Anne hadn’t returned, I prowled the halls until I found the Office of Justice. The door was locked. A number of people milled around in the hall. If I lingered too long or tried to force the door open, they would get suspicious. I’d have to find another way to get my hands on those files.
I returned to my office, brooding. One of the file cabinets was labeled “Certificates of Residency.” I opened it and skimmed through folder after folder. After a while I stopped, gasping in horror. The papers told of a monstrous crime.
Greene and his thugs realized they couldn’t rule over the helots by force. Controlling the Cladoxpan ensured some degree of submission, but it wasn’t enough. And it didn’t solve the problem of what to do with the thousands of helots, especially women, children, and the elderly, who were useless on those supply expeditions. So they hatched a diabolical plan to quash any chance of a rebellion.
At first, the Green Guard conducted random raids. The helots watched helplessly as dozens of Bluefont residents were arrested for no reason and put on trial. All of them disappeared and “EXPELLED” was written on their files. When the tension in the ghetto reached explosive levels, Greene’s advisors took the next step. Half of the helots received certificates of residency and half didn’t.
From then on raids affected only those without a certificate. So there were two groups in Bluefont: those who slept peacefully at night and those who feared there’d be a knock at their door and the Green Guard would drag them off to the unknown. When there was a raid, the privileged simply showed their certificate, thus ending their solidarity with the undocumented helots.
But that was not enough. One day, the guards started handing out two different types of certificates: with a photo and without. The helots could choose which they wanted. Many thought that a certificate with a photo seemed more official. The next raid rounded up the helots without a photo certificate. Those who had photo certificates breathed easier, thinking it had saved them, but a week later, the photo certificates were replaced by red certificates. Many were suspicious of the new document, so they declined it. Then, two weeks later, there was another big raid and everyone without a red certificate was dragged off.
That plunged the ghetto into despair and distrust. Soon, red certificates were replaced by two kinds of blue ones: “soldiers” or “no qualification.” Since each helot could choose his or her classification and would then receive the corresponding document, doubts about which were better gripped Bluefont again.