American War(115)

For weeks, we drove westward. The men refused to travel during daylight hours, or to take major roads. The landscape turned alien—vast trays of sand, pierced by mesas colored caramel and orange. The desert was endless and littered with the wreckage of tanks and planes and makeshift camps from the earliest days of the war. They fed me nothing but old ration packs: meat in the form of powder and sickly sweet apricot gel that was designed never to go bad.

Sometimes we stopped in small, run-down villages manned by soldiers whose uniforms I’d never seen before. The people spoke a different language and I couldn’t read the street signs. Sometimes the soldiers pointed their rifles at my two kidnappers and asked them what their business was in the Protectorado. It was during these times I thought of screaming for help, but the shorter man told me if I opened my mouth he’d kill me.

One day the desert ended and a parched, desolate forest replaced it. The forest too seemed to stretch forever, but there was not a single living thing within it. Everywhere around me I was surrounded by the aftereffects of a fire.

By the time we reached the Pacific, I could no longer tell the days and weeks apart. The men camped in the concrete remains of a desalination plant half-submerged in the water. The sound of waves crashing against the side of the building became maddening as the weeks went by. I gathered from the two men’s conversations that the smuggler’s ship that was to take us from this place had capsized, and it would be another month before the next one came. We waited.

Every night, the men listened to a small radio for news. For weeks there was nothing, and then a burst of reports of a mystery illness radiating from Columbus, and then nothing again.

A vessel arrived in late October. It was an old fiberglass crabber, badly beaten and ill-suited for the ocean. From the moment the men dragged me onboard, I was green with seasickness.

The trip north was slow and rough. The captain kept close to the shoreline, and often the men cursed him and said he was going to run us ashore.



THEN ONE DAY I looked out the cabin window to see a strange city alight with floating glitter. As we neared the port, I saw places in the water where previous ships had run into the submerged barrier reefs.

“You made it, kid,” the shorter man said. “New Anchorage—the neutral state. Welcome home.”





Excerpted from:

HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE FOR TRUTH AND REUNIFICATION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS (DECEMBER 1, 2123)


Members Present:


SENATOR ELI THOMPSON (New Reunificationist—Arkansas) Chair

SENATOR BARBARA AIKENS (Democrat—Cascadia/Oregon) Vice Chair

SENATOR PETER JINDAL (New Reunificationist—Missouri)

SENATOR CLAY NORMAN (Democrat—Illinois)

SENATOR BERNARD WILLIS (Democrat—Indiana)





Witnesses:


COLONEL BARRET SINGER (Ret.)



SEN. THOMPSON: Good morning, everyone. If we can get the screen up and running, I think we can pick up where we left off yesterday. Senator Aikens?

SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Colonel, before we go back to the surveillance footage, I just wanted to ask you about something you mentioned yesterday. About the two soldiers who were manning the Rossville checkpoint—Private Martin Baker and, what was the other one’s name again?

COL. SINGER: Bud Baker Jr.

SEN. AIKENS: That’s right, thank you. You mentioned yesterday that they were—let me see…in your words, “wired for kinetics,” rather than border guard duty, is that correct?

COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.

SEN. AIKENS: And what exactly did you mean by that, Colonel?

COL. SINGER: Well, certain young men, as soon as they arrive at the recruiter’s office, you can tell…What I mean is, if it had still been a hot war, I wouldn’t have assigned those boys to guard duty.

SEN. WILLIS: I think it’s pretty clear what the Colonel is saying, Senator. Those two boys were mean sons of bitches.

COL. SINGER: That would be an accurate description.

SEN. WILLIS: Can’t say I blame them, with what they’d been through.

SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Colonel. Let’s go back to the video. Now, my understanding is that this is the only surviving footage of the crossing on that day?

COL. SINGER: That’s all we’ve got left, is the overhead. No ground-level, no audio.

SEN. AIKENS: So at the end of the day we’re left with what, exactly? Conjecture? A guess?

COL. SINGER: Well, ma’am, what we do know is that, shortly before the first cases appeared in Columbus, the same sickness was noted in the hospital to which this particular bus was headed. So there is some reason to believe that the person responsible for the virus could have come across the border on that bus.

SEN. AIKENS: But we have no manifest, no hospital records. Colonel, we don’t even know the name of anyone on this video except your two soldiers.

COL. SINGER: That’s right, ma’am. Obviously the decade of the Reunification Plague decimated many parts of this country, and countless records were lost. We’re left only with what survived.

SEN. AIKENS: Very well. Let’s play it. So the medical transport bus arrives at the checkpoint that day at around noon, is that correct?

COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.

SEN. AIKENS: And there were no other vehicles or convoys of any kind cleared for passage to the North that day.