CHAPTER FOUR
Jeanell and Ric trudged through the forest and finally found the trail leading into town. In the moonlight, Jeanell’s eyes adjusted and she at least could see where she was going and who she was walking alongside. A mountain chickadee fluttered by overhead, and Jeanell was gratified to see that such animals still existed.
Jeanell had so many questions, she hardly knew where to begin. But looking around, one thing seemed certain. “The air, it smells so… so fresh. Maybe that’s just me.”
Ric looked at her, saying only, “Maybe.”
They walked on, Ric carrying a mysterious air. Jeanell finally had to ask, “So, this… this chancellor? Not president?”
Ric huffed. “We haven’t had a so-called president since Trump. He was the first chancellor of the United States.”
“Really? They said he was dangerous.”
“When did you say you… left your time?”
“May, 2017.”
“So, you don’t know.”
“Um, if I knew… you still don’t believe me, do you?”
Ric shrugged as they trudged on. “It’s not an easy story to believe, Jeanell. Black hole pulled you through time?”
“Yet you use them here all the time, isn’t that what you said?”
Ric had to concede the point. “Anyway, Chancellor Kana was the first to take over after the Trump regime, though it’s hard to say what’s changed. Things are even worse, I suppose.”
Jeanell swallowed hard. “How bad did they get?”
Ric sighed. “Things went bad pretty quickly, actually. Russia… or somebody, nobody knows exactly who… blasted an EMP bomb over the country.”
“Electromagnetic pulse bomb,” Jeanell rephrased it. “I didn’t know they were that close.”
“As close as they needed to be. Sailed it right up to the Port of New York, everybody who should have known better looked the other way. Of course, the regime at the time claimed not to know anything, and nobody can prove anything either, so…”
“So… what happened? An electromagnetic pulse would have wiped out the electronic grid, thrown the whole country into darkness; no phones, no communications, no planes, few cars—”
“Sounds like you already know what happened.” Ric gazed around at the dark beauty of the woods around them. “Wasn’t long before warlords took over city blocks, going from house to house; they took all the food and booze and drugs and jewelry, killing the men and dragging the women off to be raped, sold, to be servants, slaves.”
Jeanell’s mouth went dry, hairs standing up on the backs of her arms.
“Ninety percent of the population of the U.S. was dead in the first year.”
“My God, you’re kidding me!” Ric looked at her, sharp brown eyes cold in the moonlight. He wasn’t kidding. And Jeanell could guess what happened next. “And the president came in and restored order?”
“He sure did,” Ric said. “Invoked Marshal Law, which was pretty necessary, I suppose. The whole country was comprised of warlord territories, terrible crimes. We call it the Great Darkness.”
“And the president said, ‘Let there be light.’”
“And there was. Things got better, over-population certainly wasn’t a problem, or lack of resources or employment. We had one-hundred-percent employment. Of course, it wasn’t really optional.”
“You mean… slavery?”
Ric shrugged. “Call it a penalty for taking early retirement.”
“Oh, Lord,” Jeanell said.
“That’s who everyone kept waiting for.” A coyote howled in the distance, the sound reverberating through Jeanell’s bloodstream. “Hasn’t come yet, far as I know.”
Jeanell could see how the rest of the history unfolded. “So it’s basically been totalitarian rule from that time to this?”
Ric huffed out a chuckle. “You make it sound pretty boring. But it was anything but.” Reading Jeanell’s impatient curiosity, he explained, “After order was restored, there was a series of… terrorist attacks. Every major city in the U.S. was hit, virtually in a single week.”
“How could terrorists pull that off?” But Ric just looked at Jeanell, his wordless response was all the answer she needed.
Ric went on, “Our infrastructure was pretty bad off anyway, so why not let some fake enemy take the blame while the government wiped out the cities…”
“So that they could be replaced and rebuilt,” Jeanell said, “by companies owned by the fat cats in the regime.”
“You really are smart,” Ric said. “You might just be Jeanell Glenn after all.”
They walked on for another two hours, the sun finally rising over the little Denver suburb of Boulder, Colorado. Even from a distance, it had a different look to it, and the closer Ric and Jeanell got to the end of the trail, the more closely she could see what she was looking at.
An invisible city.
As they hit the outskirts of the city, what struck Jeanell most was the lack of the suburban houses. They’d been demolished somehow, and the lots left empty. Street after street of empty house lots. There also no power lines and not a single car.
Jeanell looked around, stunned and sickened. “Wh—what happened? All the houses?”
“Demolished after the regime took the abandoned property.”
“So it’s just… empty?”
Ric looked at her with a grave seriousness on his handsome face. “There’s nobody to fill the houses, Jeanell. And they don’t want there to be.”
Jeanell could hardly breathe to imagine the course of events, and the shape of things to come. “But… aren’t there any people at all? Didn’t you say this Great Darkness was sixty years ago? The population should have bounced back by now.”
“Sure, but they live in the cities, near their work assignments. The suburbs were a middle-class thing, but that just doesn’t exist anymore, hasn’t for a long time.”
“So, they live in tenement houses?”
Ric huffed again. “Every ghetto in America was wiped clean, Jeanell. There’s no such thing as a tenement house anymore, not in this country.”
“Then—?”
“You’ll see,” Ric said. “One thing at a time.”
They crawled deeper into Boulder, toward what used to be the historic downtown district. It had been surrounded by skyscrapers and modern condos, the center packed with ornate historical buildings, Victorians and brownstones.
But now every building looked the same—tall, round buildings with rounded tops, huge clear capsules. And every one of them seemed to be made of glass and nothing but, no steel skeleton structure, no brick, no stone.
And, as with the suburbs, the streets were vacant of cars. Even the freeway had been wiped off the cityscape. “What… they replaced every building with these big glass things? How is this safe?”
“Not glass,” Ric said, “a polymer blend, super strong, invented by one of the companies from the original Trump regime. It’s quite brilliant—inexpensive and virtually indestructible.”
“And what about the cars, and the freeway? There are, like… no cars!”
“Don’t need ‘em. People travel by way of your black holes. We’re prohibited from using them for time travel, like I said; the chancellor would kill, literally, for that information.”
“He just did,” Jeanell said.
“Yes, exactly. But it works so well for space, people just use an app on either a tablet or a smartphone and boom, they’re where they want to be. Works for shipping too. This drove fossil fuel use down to next to nothing. After that, no more oil drilling, no more coal; it really cleared things up, Jeanell. You should be proud.”
“I suppose.”
“We used it to clear out the debris from the attacks too, just dropped it all out into space.”
“You… you’re kidding. But Ric, that was always one of the problems we faced; everything goes somewhere. It’s a law of physics.”
“It hasn’t bit ‘em on the ass yet.”
“Not yet. I just hope I’m not here when it does.”
And that wasn’t the only striking thing about the streets. They were spotless, not a bit of litter anywhere. “No trash on the streets either?”
“Black holes, Jeanell.”
“And also… no homeless?”
“Well,” Ric said, “there’s us.”
They walked on through the streets, a few pedestrians walking quickly in each direction, glancing around. All wore basically the same outfit—white pants and white long-sleeve shirt. The outfits were snug, if not skintight. Jeanell asked, “What’s with the people?”
“What? The clothes?”
“Um, well, yeah, okay, the clothes. Are they… uniforms?”
“No, that’s just the way everybody dresses. It’s basically all that’s available.”
They glared at Jeanell and Ric, she in her soiled lab coat and he in his threadbare rags. “They’re staring at us.”
“Yeah,” Ric said, “our kind isn’t welcome here.”
“You mean… they know who we are?”
Ric ushered her quickly down the street, heads low, faces forward. “They know we’re outsiders, that’s obvious enough. Who you are precisely? I can’t imagine.”
“Didn’t you say I was famous?”
“Yeah, you are. But a lot of outsider women wear that look, with the glasses and the lab coat. It’s nothing too alarming, unless…”
Jeanell’s stomach turned. “Unless what?”
“Unless they knew, Jeanell, that’s all. Don’t get upset over it.”
But more and more, Jeanell felt their stares, smartphones raised to take video as they scurried around the street corner as quickly as they could. But most of the pedestrians were cautious, almost frightened.
“They’re just trained to be that way,” Ric said, “after years of iron rule. Everybody thinks they’re being watched. If they’re out, it means they’re not at their jobs.”
“Don’t they get lunch breaks, visits to the doctor?”
“Sure they do. But it invited suspicion. If you go to the doctor, you better be able to show the results.”
“To who?”
“The board.”
“What board?”
“The Board of Internal Security, Jeanell. It’s half-Spanish Inquisition, half-George Orwell.”
“I’m surprised they even let anyone read Orwell.”
“They don’t. But you can’t destroy the written word; they couldn’t do it during the Dark Ages, and they couldn’t do it during the Great Darkness.”
“No,” Jeanell said, “but you can destroy just about everything else.”
“Keep that in mind.”