“I’m on the site of the construction of the Pacific West pipeline. As you can see, the right-of-way has been cleared in this area, and the trench is being dug. Construction began two months ago and has been dogged by demonstrations and legal actions. Despite the protests, the pipeline owner, Montford Pipelines, is proceeding with the controversial line. But sometime early this morning, someone planted explosives below the access road where it traverses a hill. Nobody was in the area at the time, and there are no casualties, but the explosion crumbled the hillside and took out about half a mile of the roadway. Here’s what the project manager, Kent Dilbridge, had to say.”
Cut to a man wearing a hard hat and construction jacket. “The landslide took out most of the road and destabilized the hillside. We can’t re-build the road. We’ll have to cut a new one across the north side, which will add several miles to the route.”
“Will this delay construction of the pipeline?”
“Absolutely. It looks like it will cost us at least a month.”
“Are you concerned about other acts of sabotage?”
“Of course. Whenever anyone is willing to blow things up, we’re worried. But we’re going to strengthen security. This will delay the pipeline, but it won’t stop it.”
“Sheila Thompson reporting from the Pacific West pipeline right-of-way.”
9
EVOLUTION OF COLLAPSE
Darius made his way out of Mandy’s after the other patrons became too drunk to notice he was gone. The liquor affected him, made him woozy. He’d have a headache the next day. From other visits to Mandy’s, he knew the best antidote was fresh air.
He walked away from the earthen wall that guarded the village, past the crumbled ruins of the old town. Years earlier, his aunt and uncle had strolled the town with him. The streets seemed endless, rows of houses, flower beds tended amidst carpets of grass. Parks with play areas and even greater expanses of green. Today, he wondered why anyone would waste good land just to grow grass. Every piece of ground within the village that wasn’t occupied by a house or used by a path was seeded with potatoes or carrots, onions or yams.
His uncle had said that about five thousand people lived in the town. Today, he couldn’t imagine that many, but at the time it was normal. And they were rich. They lived their lives filled with possessions. Houses, cars, boats, clothes enough to start their own stores. They didn’t have to weave, to shear, to butcher, to sew. They didn’t use candles. Light was theirs to command. They didn’t have to burn wood. Heat was a switch away. As a child, he couldn’t have said what these people did. Now, as an adult, he still didn’t know except it had something to do with a distribution centre, whatever that was.
The first change came when the distribution centre closed. Darius didn’t know why, but as he found out, neither did his uncle. It was part of the Collapse. Within months, most of the people in the town left. Where had they gone? His uncle said somewhere they could find work. For a time, the only signs of their departure had been the houses where the grass overran the lawns, and the flower beds yielded to plants their owners had struggled to eliminate. The occasional house was tended, the lawn mowed, smoke curling from chimneys. People still managing to live amid the desolation of abandonment.
The next change had been the looting gangs, a swarm of motorcycles descending on the empty houses. They smashed windows and doors, carrying away whatever the owners had left behind. Remnants of furniture, carpets, drapes, wire stripped from walls, wood torn from studs and roof beams. To the people who remained, it was no longer safe to ignore the roar of engines revving. And when the gangs left, and the empty houses tottered as ripped shells, they came back. This time, they attacked the few houses with intact windows, flowers, curtains. The only ones with anything left to loot.
So the people moved. They picked an area in the middle of the town and claimed the houses that sat there. They boarded up the shattered windows with sheets of plywood from the ruins of the hardware store. They moved in what furniture and dishes they could scrounge. They salvaged wood-burning stoves from the lumber yard, from the town’s museum, and from the deserted houses in surrounding farms.
And they built a barricade. It had started as a jumble of packing crates, used tires, and pieces of equipment that no longer worked or had any use. It was ramshackle, but it served its purpose as a defence against the looting gangs. Over the years, it evolved from a pile of cast-off detritus to an earthen wall complete with niches for the villagers to deploy themselves, armed with the guns they had gathered from their own collections and from those who had left the town. They established a sentry schedule, and they shot anyone who dared approach. The advice to shoot first and ask questions later was puzzling to them. Being able to ask questions meant only that somebody had missed.
The barricade wasn’t impregnable, but the looters weren’t organized enough to outsmart it or numerous enough to overrun it. So it stood as a bulwark against the outside world protecting the villagers who learned that people they didn’t know were their enemies.
The village had been transformed from a welcoming collection of homes to a canker of fear and suspicion.
When Darius was thirteen and his aunt and uncle had moved to the village, the Peaks arrived. They rolled into the village on big, square vehicles, their blue uniforms spotless, their black boots shiny, their weapons gleaming, their faces hidden behind polished helmets and dark visors. The villagers cheered them, welcomed them. They were the protection against the looting gangs. They would keep the countryside safe. They would provide fuel, open the markets, stock the store shelves. Now the villagers could return to their farms, could resume the lives that had been ripped away from them even before they knew it was happening, before they had been able to protect themselves.
None of that happened. To be sure, the looting gangs stopped, but since the village had set up protections against them, they hadn’t attacked for a couple of years, so Darius figured the Peaks couldn’t claim credit for that. Within weeks, the Peaks started to demand that the villagers pay them part of their crops. They called it taxes. Supposedly, they were for the benefit of the village. But the threat was real. Pay up or we’ll take it.
10
ROOTS OF CONFRONTATION
Todd Baxter completed his first week. His job was to pull an error report from a queue, fix the software, and notify the sender. His efficiency rating was based on the number of errors he fixed and getting the person who submitted a problem to sign off.
Despite the dungeon quality of his surroundings, the work was stimulating. Software maintenance had always been the poor sister of techies everywhere. It was more fun to write your own code than to correct someone else’s. But Todd had always respected maintenance. Writing code was easy. Figuring out what someone else had written, searching for the error in it, and fixing it without affecting the rest of the code was far more challenging. As far as he was concerned, maintenance should have been on the top floor instead of mired in with the ventilation ducts and furnaces in the basement. Still, even though these were his surroundings, he enjoyed the work, and even though the pay wasn’t princely, it was money.
On his first day, a whistle blew at five p.m. As if they were responding to a puppet master, the other staff rose from their desks and headed toward the door. Baxter was in the middle of a tricky bit of code when Whatford strode by and snapped, “Quitting time. Go home.”
“I’m right in the middle of something.”