“There’ll be people living there,” Mark told him. “There are people living everywhere. Still. I don’t understand it.”
“They just never left,” Quentin said. “It’s their home.”
“But no power, no water? War zone?”
Quentin shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t say they were smart. The military still runs the distribution centers, handing out just enough food. Those are keeping a lot of people in place, and dependent, just like they like ‘em.”
Spread across the city, the three distribution centers operated by the government handed out food, medicine, and bottled water to the residents, but they never seemed to have enough. They didn’t charge for anything, it was a “humanitarian” gesture, but the foodstuffs and antibiotics had always been in short supply, and from everything they’d heard and seen the supply seemed to be drying up. There’d been reports of near riots.
ARF had never attacked the soldiers guarding the distribution centers, or the centers themselves. If there was one sure way to turn the citizenry against you, it was disrupting or destroying the one government organization that was trying to help them as opposed to jail them or kill them…
“I wonder if there are any fish in it,” Ed mused.
“The river?” George blinked. “That’s a good question.”
“I’m thinking we keep to the neighborhoods on the east side of the river. Quarter, half a mile out from it, far enough that we won’t be bumping into anybody that lives near the water. Once we cross into the city it’s, what, six miles south and a little east to the general store?”
“More or less.”
Mark knew the area well and pointed at the map. “For the first couple of miles there are houses galore, no vacant lots. Even though there are a lot of people still living in those hoods, only maybe a tenth of the houses are occupied, so we’ve got lots of places to bail if we hear a chopper. Every house has a basement. Pretty much all the blocks are rectilinear.”
“Rectum what?” Quentin said with a smile. George snorted.
“Rectum? Damn near kilt ‘em,” Early added.
“Rectangles, they’re fucking rectangles,” Mark said, rolling his eyes with no little bit of exasperation. Then he paused, and got quiet.
“What is it?” Ed asked, seeing the look on the big man’s face.
“I grew up in that neighborhood,” Mark said, pointing. “I mean, it was kinda shitty back then, suffering from decades of high taxes and high crime, people being paid to do nothing, which kills your soul slowly, and then taught in public school that the country sucked, that it had never been great, all our heroes and founding fathers were racists or whatever, but at least it was a neighborhood, you know? Now…” He got an ugly look on his face, and glanced at Jason. He wanted to make sure the young man understood.
“Humans need government kid, get more than four of us in the same place at once and you need somebody to take charge. But government is a necessary evil. Both necessary… and inherently evil. Government cannot exist, cannot function, without restricting the freedom of the people it governs. But that’s the agreement that we as a society make, setting up a government to do what individual people can’t, with that famous ‘consent of the governed’.”
“But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” George said.
Mark nodded. “When the government stops trying to govern and help the people and instead starts trying to control them, that’s when wars start. Or genocides. The two things governments do best. Perhaps the only two things they’re good at. Our government stopped trusting us decades ago, treating us like misbehaving children instead of citizens with rights. And then we weren’t stupid kids in their eyes, the government started acting, starting passing laws that made it clear it considered us all incipient idiotic criminals who couldn’t be trusted. With guns, with our money, choosing our doctors, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas-guzzling cars… with freedom.
“They’ve been putting people on our side in jail for years for violation of this or that law, none of which had any effect on public safety, and for years, maybe even decades, we just took it. And took it. Until we didn’t. It wasn’t until police, federal agents, politicians, prosecutors and judges started getting shot that most people woke up to the fact that there was a war on. Had been going on for decades actually, but for most of that time it was a cold war. And most everybody in the country except those in the middle of the fight had no idea it was even going on. Until the shooting started.”
“There was more going on than just that,” Quentin said, cocking his head. “But… that was a lot of it.”
Jason nodded. “They did that with my dad, and our farm. Since they nationalized all the ‘food producers’ five years ago, because of the wartime food shortages, every day there was a new regulation he’d have to follow. He couldn’t keep up with them. He was doing all the work, and yet all the corn and soybeans belonged to the government. They decided what we could keep, even though we grew it.” Even though they needed a tractor to work the farm, his dad could barely afford any gas for it due to all the taxes and carbon offsets being levied, not to mention the reparations assessments. Government agents who’d never in their lives planted a seed walking the rows of corn, telling his father what percentage of the crop he was allowed to keep. And no matter how mad it made him his dad just took it. And took it. He’d never had much fight in him, and what little he’d had left had disappeared after Jason’s mother had died. The cancer should have been survivable, but she’d had to wait eight months for treatment under the national health care system, and by the time they scheduled her surgery… it was too late for surgery. And his dad just took it. Didn’t even seem to get mad about it. Jason had never forgiven him for that.
Mark heaved a big sigh, then went back to the map. “Mile or two south of the border the place was a war zone before there was a war, and less than half of the houses are even still standing. Great thing about those blocks is the almost complete lack of fences. We can walk through the yards between and paralleling the streets, and with all the trees and bushes no one’ll see us.”
After the soup was finished Ed sent Quentin and Weasel back to the river to refill all the pots. “I want everyone to drink everything in your canteens, then we can refill them.” To Jason’s questioning glance he explained, “The best place to store water is inside your body. It’s not bad right now but it’s early. It’s been hot and humid all week and likely to stay that way. Before we leave here I want everybody so hydrated they’re pissing clear.”
Jason didn’t have a sling for his rifle and couldn’t carry it and a heavy pot of water, so Ed detailed him as security for Quentin and Weasel.
“What kind of gun is that? Where’d you get it?” Jason asked Weasel quietly as they walked through the trees to the water. His black submachinegun, if that’s what it was, was slung across his back as he carried the big pot.
Weasel looked at him and thought about how to answer. “When the war started, it wasn’t a ‘war’,” Weasel told him. “We weren’t soldiers, we were just violent criminals, according to the police and the news media. At first, the military wasn’t involved at all, it was just cops. Cops doing the house searches and riot control, federal agents shutting down the websites they didn’t like because they were criticizing the government and exposing the truth. National Guard only got called in when the riots got out of control and cops were getting ambushed. Then, for a while, military and the cops were working together. Because it still wasn’t a war, we still weren’t soldiers, we were murderers. Domestic terrorists. Fundamentalist cultists. They called us all of that, and worse, not just the cops but everyone in the media and all the useful idiots that were happy to believe the shit they were being told. Then came martial law, and they suspended habeas corpus, which meant they could lock up anybody for any reason, for as long as they wanted, which is about as wrong as it gets.”