Chapter 17: Holly
“I’M GOING TO TELL you a story. I suspect it’s the reason you were sent here. It can’t be a secret, or this country will continue to fall into great despair, and the second we let our guard down, the enemy will come knocking. The AMAN, they’ve done some terrible things, but at the end of the day, we’re all just Americans looking for leadership and guidance. That was stripped from us in the worst of ways.” Gunny began. “What he’s about to tell you, few actually know. But it’s something that needs to spread like a wildflower,” Michael grinned at her. “Something that can’t be stopped. Something that needs to pierce through the darkness. People need to know the truth of what happened to this nation so we can move past it and begin to heal and regrow. Maybe we’ll never be the United States of America again, but your message of hope and a better way of life is already helping to heal our area, and it will continue to spread to others.”
Gunny nodded as Holly sat, listening carefully. She feared the amount of hope they seemed to place in her. She was just a girl. Strong, stubborn, and even opinionated maybe, who liked to be in control, but the impact they were looking to her for was too overwhelming to even consider.
“Right now, the state of our once great nation is this.” He pointed to the map tacked to the wall behind him. “From what little we know, people west of the Mississippi weathered the destruction far better than us. High levels of radiation still cause interference with our radio frequencies, so information from the west is minimal at best, but from what we can tell, they are far more stable than we are. Their metropolitan areas are spread out much further, leaving vast space between them virtually unaffected. The brunt of the war hit the coast, and they are still struggling, though we recently received word that Mexico has moved in to claim much of it for themselves.”
“Mexico? So it’s truly just a US issue? The rest of the world is still alive and well? I’ve been told that when the bombs began dropping, America would have retaliated, and that if we were this bad off, the rest of the world would be far worse. I mean we were the greatest nation in the world. We had the most firepower and destruction capabilities. I don’t understand.”
Gunny sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “From our intel, the rest of the world was untouched, and they wait”—he pointed to the circles in the Atlantic Ocean—“for the radiation to lift enough to attack and take control. Right now, it’s better to let us fight amongst ourselves. Kill off the leaders and give years necessary for safer living conditions.”
“We’ve managed to pull enough power to reset most of the monitoring systems. Several of the US ships that were deployed when the shit hit the fan are still operational. Only five that we are aware of are still US military controlled. Two subs that have met up with a carrier and two destroyers. They banned together with enough firepower and tracking capabilities to avoid or destroy anything that comes after them. But the rest? We don’t know. We can only assume the enemy has taken control.”
“Why didn’t we fight back and deploy bombs at those who did this?”
Michael and Gunny shared a look she didn’t like.
“There’s no easy way to say this, but the United States imploded, Holly.”
“Imploded? You mean we collapsed from the inside? You mean …”
“Yes, it was our own government that deployed the bombs on us, not an outside force. Approximately ten years earlier, the US began to fall. Two factions, polar opposites in opinions, caused great friction amongst the people. The media played up the division. Great for ratings and all. Look around you and you’ll still see the impact of that. I have two men in my ranks, Holly, two … that are Caucasian. And how many black men did you see fighting for the AMAN?”
Holly shook her head, “None, but Gunny, that’s a show in power. I’m telling you, I wish you could see the tent cities. There’s no room for that nonsense there. It’s just people trying to survive. People of every race and color. People who were once millionaires and others who lived off the government. The survivors are just that. There’s no room for those divisions out there.”
He smiled. “Oh, what I’d give to see it. I’ve faced racism my whole life, Miss Holly, but never as bad as just before the collapse. It wasn’t even just race that divided us by then. People drew extreme lines regarding economics and political ideology, too. No one knew if the person next to them was fighting on their side or not. It was a very scary time and the bloodiest in our history. And I know that you know our history, probably better than just about anyone at this point. You know the vile and destructive path we took to carve out what came to be a great nation. This was worse.”
Holly understood that. Others had shared similar stories.
“The most pivotal moment, for me,” Michael shared, “was while you’ve got all this going on, neighbors were fighting neighbors and people just saying and doing whatever the hell they wanted in the name of their rights. Congress battling for power. Nothing is being done to fix the problem and everything to escalate it, the President comes on the TV and makes this speech saying, ‘If you’re not standing with me, you’re against me. Anyone against me will be considered a threat against the United States. It’s up to you, my fellow Americans, to help us weed out our enemies. We cannot continue to live in fear and chaos by our own rules. By this command I’m invoking Martial Law in all major cities across the country.’”
“I’ll never forget that moment. He was Latino, you know? Following the first and only female President we ever saw. The Latino community, they rose up and turned in anyone that spoke against the President. Kind of ironic given many had come illegally into this country and lived under the radar hoping people wouldn’t turn them in.”
“Whole neighborhoods were rounded up at times, and the media, they played it all on the big screen. The white folk, they didn’t take too kindly to it, neither did many colored folks if I’m being honest. The people fought back and stormed the White House. Strung him up with a noose right on the White House lawn. That’s when all hell broke loose. Martial Law no longer meant shit. They tried raids and gas and even water hoses. They stopped the food trucks from coming in. Everything just shut down. No help was coming to the cities, in an attempt to either calm people down or have them kill each other off in short order, but they kept fighting back, because it was too late.”
“Mass hysteria set in, and you had millions of people trapped together. The division had escalated beyond control. The militia fell back and quarantined off cities in a parimeter several miles outside city limits. No one in, no one out. The bombs began dropping shortly after that. Some people say it was the Chinese, the Russians, the Iraqis, or North Korea. But we know. We know it was our own government. The world ain’t had to attack, we destroyed ourselves.”
“All he says is true, Holly. We had a great system of checks and balances in place. A whole line of succession should something happen to one of our leaders. That line was systematically destroyed in a matter of two days. Two days! I was working in the White House at the time, but was on leave. Still, back then, ‘on leave’ didn’t mean shit. Tied to a smartphone, constant communication. I knew everything that happened, while it was happening.” Gunny said.
Holly had been impressed with the man before her since the moment they met, but she suddenly found a new level of respect for him. He was there at the collapse. He really did know what happened.
“The Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense were scheduled for a meeting over brunch to discuss the next steps of the quarantine and how to calm people down, a last-ditch effort of unity. The SecDef didn’t make it. Three hours later, give or take thirty minutes, the others were rushed to the hospital. Poisoned. Dead shortly after arrival. In those three short hours between their meeting and their deaths, there’s an attack on the Secretary of Defense, but he escapes and survives. A bomb goes off at the home of the Secretary of Treasury, killing him and his family. It’s the first suspicion we have that there could be a threat to the Presidential line, but before security measures can be put into place, the people, angry, hungry, scared, and now confined to a quarantined DC, unable to leave, stormed the gates of the White House. They hung the President and celebrated as he struggled for his last breath. The Vice President was chicken shit. He ran. Still in hiding today as far as I know. Many thought he was behind the attacks, but I knew him. He didn’t have the balls or the brains to pull off such a conspiracy.”
Gunny paused and let all they had said sink in. Holly was numb to it all, just listening and absorbing, knowing she’d have to sort through the details and emotions at a later time.
“We scrambled to get as many of the rest of the line on lockdown as possible. They were in route by helicopter when a ground missile launch took out five more. The Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense made it. There was some sort of disagreement in options and the SecDef killed the AG. We were so lost by then that no one even made a motion to stop him. The SecDef was responsible for the launching of bombs on the cities but he had no plan beyond that. The reality of what he’d done finally sank in, and he took his own life the next day. The remaining members, gone. No one knows what happened to any of them. They could be dead. I know the Secretary of Education refused to leave her home, and it was in the blast zone. There were rumors for a while amongst the upper tiers that the Secretary of Homeland Security was suspiciously missing through it all, but to this day, I have no idea what happened to him.”
He took a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose again. “You see, Holly. No one knows what the end game was supposed to be but it was years in the making to reach that boiling point. In the end, our government failed us.”
“And that’s the story you want out?” Holly asked. “Forgive me sir, but I fail to understand how we can unify our nation with the knowledge that it failed us the first time. It’s easy to focus on an external source, to channel that anger outward, but to put sole guilt internally? What can you possibly hope to accomplish with that?”
Gunny thought long and hard about her questions. “Well now, Miss Holly, I reckon that’s where you come in. You don’t know the power you already have over the people. Right now we’re disjointed, at war within our own borders. The people responsible for this are dead or long gone, never to be seen again, but we’re still here, and we need to pick up the pieces and begin to heal, to rebuild. To do that, we need hope.”
“Hope? Hope never accomplished anything,” Holly told them.
Both men laughed before Michael spoke again. “With hope, a little town called Wythel, VA rose up from the ashes. Its people are said to be cared for, working in harmony. They’re growing their own food. Putting everyone in that town to work. They’re reopening schools, a clinic, security, and they are spreading the idea of hope like the wildflowers. We are hundreds of miles from there, Holly, yet even before your arrival, we’d all heard the stories. Other towns and groups of people are banding together to recreate the same. We want to take that message of hope to a greater level. We want to create an even greater nation than before, and understanding the past and what went wrong is only a first step. Maybe these people never need to know the full extent of what happened. You have the knowledge now and we entrust you with what you feel is best to do with it.”
Gunny interrupted. “I’d like to task you, Miss Holly, with an ultimate test. Get the AMAN and my men working together. Truly together. Combined, we hold a great monopoly throughout the mid-Atlantic region and under your leadership, we could turn things around and rebuild from the ashes of the destruction.”
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