The gangsters decided to keep walking – there weren’t many cars to jack anymore out on the roads outside secure sectors, but something about this guy told them that the cost benefit analysis of potentially grabbing a working ride versus dealing with the hard case in the driver’s seat was not going to work out in their favor. Even dirtbags have intuition, and they prudently obeyed theirs.
The light turned green – naturally, one of the few working traffic lights left in Los Angeles had to be right there – and Turnbull pressed the gas. The Dodge was nearly 20 years old, but it still ran fine – Turnbull had made sure of that before he bet his life on it.
He had gone east right through this same part of Pico with his parents a thousand times as a kid, running errands, shopping, eating out. Most of Los Angeles was prosperous then, not just the parts behind the fences and the guards where the rich people now partied while everyone else fought over scraps.
On those drives – everyone had a car back then and you could always find gas – his dad used to listen to talk radio, before all radio came under the “fairness” guidelines and morphed into straight up propaganda. The shrunken media here – you didn’t need a lot of outlets when they were all spewing the same thing – merely regurgitated the government policy du jour, with a healthy dose of hate for the enemies within and without. The villains were always the same – the religious, the hardworking, the liberty-minded, the ones who refused to kneel. And especially bad were the ones over there, on the other side of the border, in the red.
Turnbull distinctly remembered being right on this very same block listening to KABC radio and hearing about how the country was about to collapse if the big banks didn’t get bailed out. That was late 2008, right before Obama was first elected and things really started heading downhill. Turnbull was what then? Twelve, thirteen?
Most of the small businesses that had lined Pico were long gone, some boarded up, others just abandoned when the owners fled east – they were usually referred to as “worms,” the ones who were beneath contempt for rejecting the paradise that progressivism offered. Now piles of trash lined the sidewalks, and a few people squatted in the urine-soaked doorways, glaring at those lucky enough to have cars. A few blocks north, running parallel to Pico, was the southern part of the wall that blocked off the Westside Sector from the rest of the city. These derelicts lurking in the ruined buildings along the road were just some of the people being walled out.
Inside the Sector, there was order and prosperity. But here, not so much. Here, graffiti helpfully informed passersby about the local gangs in charge of each little bit of turf. On this block, it was the Pico Deuce 40s. And up above it all, the billboards cheered the big gang that was in charge of everything. The blues.
The people who had been trying to kill Kelly Turnbull since the old United States broke apart.
They certainly loved their propaganda. One billboard looming over an abandoned coffee shop offered a picture of a bunch of unsmiling, multi-ethnic children with their fists raised into the air. Superimposed across their chests were the words “FREEDOM FROM HATE IS TRUE FREEDOM. REPORT HATEMONGERS, DENIERS AND SPIES TO YOUR PEOPLE’S BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION!” In the lower right corner lurked the People’s Republic of North America’s rainbow flag, or at least one version of it. The flag kept changing as one group or another agitated to add its color to the mix, or to move its color to some position of greater prominence; the billboard had to be six months old because the flag had changed twice since. This month, the color of the top stripe was orange; who or what group orange represented Turnbull neither knew nor cared.
After the United States split up, they called the half that inherited the two coasts a “People’s Republic,” choosing the same hoary old cliché every medal-bedecked Third World butcher had grafted onto his country’s name in the 1960s and ‘70s. The political/media elite resurrected the term as yet another jab at the hated bourgeois primitives who remained in the now independent blue states; it was a much more benign provocation than the various political pogroms and cultural assaults that followed. The blue elite was determined to grind the faces of their opponents into the dirt, even as most picked up and left until the blockade stopped the migration. Labeling their new country a “People’s Republic” was just one more way to do it. Take that, nobodies.
Of course, it was not the People’s Republic, but only some People’s Republic. And, in fact, it was not much of a republic at all. The blue elite had always felt that when the people have a voice, they often say the wrong thing. So, unrestrained by ancient parchments, they gagged those unworthy of input into their own governance – a group conveniently consisting of everyone not within the blue elite.
But none of the people cared much about what the elite was calling the country anymore. Its name was really the least of their problems. They were too hungry to care about the liberty they had lost. It was no longer freedom they were concerned with but survival. Reds, blues – what did it matter if your kids were crying because you didn’t have the ration coupons you needed to get them some dinner?
Turnbull glanced left through his window and observed a long line snaking out of what had been a Ralphs supermarket back twenty–some years ago. Now it was a “People’s Market,” with trash blowing across its nearly empty parking lot. The people in the queue looked like something out of an old photo from the Great Depression – gray, tired, sullen. There were always lines outside the secure sectors whenever Turnbull came over, but this time something was different. The crowd’s mood, even viewed from a passing sedan, seemed unsettled, tense, angry. A fistfight over a place in the queue broke out; everyone simply stared as two ragged men pummeled themselves into bloody heaps for priority in purchasing three cans of generic beans imported from Argentina.
“The store must have food today,” said his passenger. “You really don’t have food lines in the Flyover?” He was skinny, like everyone else who wasn’t elite, and maybe 17 years old, the kid of some rich guy back in Kansas City whose wife made off with him to leverage a divorce settlement and who got caught behind the border when the PRNA decided to shut it down for good. Daddy was willing to pay Turnbull’s price to get him out, an especially hefty one because mommy would certainly raise the alarm, and there’s nothing the People’s Bureau of Investigation liked better than catching an infiltrator. What the PBI did to infiltrators – “spies” – was distinctly unpleasant.
“Don’t call it ‘Flyover.’ That’s going to be your country soon. It’s called the United States of America.”
Of course, now there was no flying over it any more – the PR claimed it was the US that shut down the air corridors from the western blue states to the eastern blues, but that was a lie. They just didn’t want anyone to see what was happening in red America, even from 35,000 feet.
After a moment, the kid asked, “Will I really have to join the Army?”