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The stores had no food on the shelves, order broke down, and only the militia had a steady supply of gasoline. And the society that once believed that male and female were complementary rather than interchangeable had been labeled as misogynist. Owners of private property were tagged as being greedy. But they were now the victims of mobs and roving gangs, and the militia itself. There wasn’t much private property anymore. It belonged to the people. As he knocked on Larry’s front door, he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to Caesar Chavez State when the water pumping stations went off line the way that the power had. The state itself consisted mainly of land that could be classified as ‘desert’.

Larry opened the door and ushered him in. There was a smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen, and, feeling a bit like Pavlov’s dog, he began to salivate.

“Something smells amazing.”

“It’s the most important meal of the day, boss.”

“Where did you find bacon?”

Larry smiled, “It’s canned bacon. I have a few cans. I have chickens living upstairs since my wife left me and headed to the U.S., so we have eggs too. I also purloined some bread from the Militia commissary so we will have toast. I just don’t have butter.”

The milita captain cooked breakfast on a fuel-powered camp stove.

“This is great, Larry. Really great.”

They sat down and Larry handed Mike a canned beer. “I thought this might be welcome before we headed into the office — hair of the dog and all that.”

“Yes, that’s great.”

They ate in silence until Mike asked Larry the question that had been on his mind all morning. “What do we do when the water system fails?”

Larry smiled, “What do you mean?”

“You’re not stupid, Captain Marcus. You know that the natural gas doesn’t work and that we don’t have electric power. Those are inconvenient, but when the water system fails, things will get ugly. No water to drink, no water for sanitation, and near as I can tell, only the militia will have water from the storage tanks.”

Larry said, “I expect an outbreak of cholera. Hundreds of thousands will die in Caesar Chavez State alone, people will become desperate and it will get very bad. These are city people who are used to turning on a tap and flushing a toilet. When they can’t do that, what will they do?”

Mike forked a huge wad of scrambled eggs into his mouth and washed it down with his beer. “No, what will we do?”

“What can we do?”

“It’s our responsibility.”

“I know that we have a water system, Mike, but I don’t know how it works. Do you?”

“No, not really.”

“We’ll rely on the wisdom of the Cali National Assembly and that of President Newman to save the nation. The militia will keep order as best we can, but our salvage operation phase will come to an end and I can see us bunkering up inside the Sheriff’s Offices.”

“Militia compounds.”

“You know what I mean.”

CALEXIT

D+45

Gary Simpson understood that he was simply one of many when he placed each sock containing five pounds of C-4 plastic explosive where the diagram told him to place it and inserted the blasting caps at either end. The caps themselves had been crimped to det cord and led into a timing mechanism. His instructions had been specific, and he set the timer for midnight, one hour from now.

A water treatment plant is complex with its system of valves, pipes, pressure reduction and chemical treatment, but when you eliminate the input and the output with the proper explosive with the brisance; the hydraulic force will shatter the whole.

CALEXIT

D+46

With fifty-seven detonations at midnight, at the beginning of the 46th day of the Peoples Republic of Cali, the greater Los Angeles area became unlivable.

CALEXIT

D+48

By the 48th day of liberation from the United States, the dim bulb of bureaucratic thinking suddenly burned brightly and senior public servants, newly anointed by the new nation were invited to a meeting that was convened in the recently renovated Los Angeles Coliseum. Major Mike Sanchez and Captain Larry Marcus drove along nearly deserted freeways with Colonel Dorris Johnson and his aide, Luther Calder sitting in the back seats of the otherwise empty armored vehicle.

“I don’t see why everyone is so hysterical,” Colonel Johnson said, “it’s just a little water.”

“You’ve been busy. There’s a lot on your plate. It was in the message traffic, sir. The U.S. blew the waterlines from the Colorado River and a saboteur took out the California aqueduct somewhere up in the San Joaquin Valley.” Larry Marcus looked into the rear-view mirror that gave him a view of the passenger section of the Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (MRAP) that he drove. Colonel Johnson still didn’t get it and Luther Calder, his life partner did, but didn’t seem inclined to help explain. “All of the water pumping stations in the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and San Fernando Valleys and what used to be Orange County were sabotaged too. What few wells there are fed through pumping stations and from what the inspectors said, it will take months to repair them because they don’t have all of the pipe and parts necessary. The U.S. isn’t going to provide them and we’ll need to source them from China or elsewhere.”

“You mean no water at all?” Johnson seemed confused. “I had a long hot shower this morning.”

“You’re in the militia compound, Colonel. Everybody is on rationed water for drinking only except for you — and Luther, of course.”

“Okay, then that’s fine.”

“But we will run out of water long before the pumping stations come back on line, whether you take long showers or not. I think that’s the point. The emergency water tank was installed to provide a hedge in the event of an earthquake, not against a regional system that, from all accounts, was destroyed.”

Mike Sanchez chimed in, “Things are going to get ugly. When the power went out, swimming pools were no longer filtered, so people are sucking what water there is out of those algae sumps, toilet bowls, and hot water tanks.”

“What happens when all that water runs out?” Luther’s question was rhetorical. “The desert reclaims the LA Basin?”

“We can’t let that happen!” Johnson was suddenly feeling every bit the colonel and the military governor of Caesar Chavez State.

“Definitely not,” Luther echoed. “What are you going to do about it, Major Sanchez?”

“I’m going to the same meeting as you are. But we need to start thinking about relieving some of the militia of their duties. They’re sucking down the rationed water and once that’s out, we’re out of business altogether.”

“Before the present system was in place there were two or three thousand people here. Now there are fifteen million in the affected area, less those who have been killed in the rioting and looting and those who took the big bounce and left Cali.” Larry Marcus looked though his mirror. “It gets worse. We’re down to under a thousand gallons of gasoline in our storage tank and there’s none to be had outside of government rations. I called Sacramento and they said they hoped to have a truck to us within a month or two. They’re dealing with widespread shortages since the port facilities were sabotaged and ships off-shore can’t unload.”

“Who do they think did the sabotage?”

“They know who. The Navy did it before sailing over the horizon to the U.S. They blew the facility and sank a civilian tanker to block access. We don’t have the capacity to move the sunken ship and don’t have spare parts to fix what they damaged. The Navy did it in full view and there wasn’t anything that Cali could do about it.”