American War(19)

In the quietude of the long highway drive, Martina thought about all the things she had forgotten to do in her rush to escape the night before. She’d packed canned food but no can opener; she’d held the shipping container doors shut with a lock whose combination she’d forgotten long ago. She hadn’t raised the tarp over the solar panels, or drained the rainwater tank. The chickens remained locked in their coop.



TWO HOURS LATER, the bus reached the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Here a drab, prefabricated building stood at the center of a network of guard posts and concrete chicanes. All vehicles were slowly ushered through this bottleneck. A smattering of armed guards—some of them Louisiana Reservists, others bearing the red, three-starred insignia of the Free Southern State—milled about on either side of the border.

The bus slowed to a crawl as it slalomed between the chicanes. A white minivan made the same journey a few feet ahead. The minivan’s roof was marked up with lines of black electrical tape that spelled out the word PRESS. At every third chicane the path straightened for a few feet and the vehicles crossed a set of tire shredders aligned northward. An FSS soldier looked on from a nearby guard tower, indifferent.

The bus idled, waiting on the guards to inspect the minivan ahead in line. The soldiers ushered a group of four men out of the vehicle and then stepped inside. Two of the soldiers began removing equipment from the back of the minivan—cameras, tripods, satellite phones, bright green flak vests, and helmets. A third guard stood nearby, inspecting a few sheets of paper given to him by one of the minivan’s occupants. He flipped through the pages with no discernible interest in their contents or the various notarized seals upon them. Occasionally the man who’d handed the papers over tried to interject, but was told to keep quiet. More soldiers began to congregate around the minivan, gawking at the equipment now strewn on the ground. Eventually the soldier reading the papers folded them up and placed them in his pocket and ordered the vehicle, its passengers, and contents moved to a small building off to the side of the road. The passengers protested, but to no avail.

Another soldier waved the bus forward. The driver inched closer until he was ordered to stop. The driver opened the door and the soldier came inside.

“Good morning, sir,” the driver said. “Just making the run up to Patience. Gonna stay north till Grenada then cut northeast to the border towns. Got my permit from Atlanta right here…”

The soldier ignored the driver. He nodded in the direction of the rebel fighter.

The soldier inspected the bus and its five occupants. He was just as spindly as the fighters Martina had seen in Eliza Polk’s house. His red Mag uniform, with its gaudy overabundance of copper buttons and stars, hung loosely on his frame. He wore a box military cap with a flat visor that shadowed his eyes. He looked like a child.

“Ain’t supposed to bring any in from the Purple country,” he said.

“They’re the only ones, sir,” the driver said, fumbling through his stack of permits. “Just a couple folks displaced by the fighting out near the Texas border. We got an approval order right here from the Mag rep in Baton Rouge, if you’ll take a look…”

The rebel fighter motioned for the driver to stop talking.

“It’s all right,” he told the soldier. “They’re Red.”

The soldier nodded. He took the permits from the driver and walked out of the bus. “Go on,” he said.

The driver closed the door and the bus crawled forward toward the gatepost. One of the soldiers untied the post from its moor. The concrete counterweight at the other end dipped and the gatepost opened. The bus passed into the clearing and for a moment it transited through the silent gray suture between two worlds.

Soon they were on the other side. Martina saw out the west-facing windows the mass of refugees packed against the southbound crossing, held back by a small army of Louisiana Reservists. The bus moved forward, gaining speed, and soon the border crossing disappeared.

“Welcome to the Mag,” the driver said to his passengers. “The last real set of balls in the whole of God’s green earth.”



THEY MOVED NORTHWARD. Sarat looked out the window. The water that inundated so much of southern Louisiana was gone, but in other ways the land looked the same. The fields they passed were empty and browning, the trees limp and bare. Curls of blown-out tires littered the ditches by the side of the road.

But there were different sights too, things she’d never seen before—craters ten feet in diameter splitting the highway open, covered over in places with haste: sometimes with concrete, other times with crude wheel bridges made of wood and steel planks. An old, fossil-powered muscle car screamed past the bus, its hood decorated with a stylized rattlesnake.

There were strange billboards on the side of the road. They bore images of destruction and carnage: city blocks reduced to rubble; the dust-lacquered corpses of children; soldiers from the Free Southern State assisting the destitute families who lived in the border towns. Affixed to all these images were no words except: Nehemiah 4:14.

Near Jackson, the driver steered the bus eastward. Soon they were in Alabama, and once again headed north. When they reached Huntsville, not far from Alabama’s wartime border with the Blues, the driver slowed and turned into town.

“This the North, Mama?” Sarat asked.

“Not yet, baby,” her mother replied. “Soon.”