American War(7)

The war’s key precipitating events include the assassination of President Ki by secessionist suicide bomber Julia Templestowe in Jackson, Mississippi, in December of 2073, and the deaths of Southern protesters in a shooting outside the Fort Jackson, South Carolina, military base in March of 2074.

The secessionist states (unified under the banner of “The Free Southern State”) declared independence on October 1, 2074, the date often considered to mark the formal start of the war. Following a series of decisive Union military victories in the first five years of the war—primarily in East Texas and along the northern borders of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (“The Mag”)—the fighting largely subsided. However, rebel insurrectionist groups continued to engage in sporadic guerrilla violence for another half decade, aided in part by foreign agents and anti-American saboteurs. After a drawn-out negotiation process that was settled largely in the Union’s favor, the war was set to formally conclude with the Reunification Day Ceremony in the federal capital of Columbus, Ohio, on July 3, 2095. On that day, a secessionist terrorist managed to cross the border into Northern territory and release a biological agent (“The Reunification Plague”) that resulted in a nationwide epidemic. The effects of the plague, which claimed an estimated 110 million lives, were felt throughout much of the country for the next ten years. The identity of the terrorist responsible remains unknown.





CHAPTER TWO


On the porch railing the Chestnuts kept a bowl lined with oil to trap mosquitoes. Lured by the glistening liquid, the insects landed and became ensnared.

Sarat stood on the porch, the sun hot on her forehead. She watched the mosquitoes squirm. They were heavy black dots, plump as grapes. She picked one between her thumb and forefinger. She held it close to her eye. It showed no signs of what the little girl associated with living things; it said nothing, made no sound, unlike the chirping crickets or the chickens when they were worked into a frenzy. But she knew, nonetheless, that the thing between her fingers was alive.

Sarat pressed her fingers together and the mosquito burst under the pressure, leaving behind a black stain.

“What are you doing?” Dana asked, her approach from within the house unnoticed by her twin.

Sarat startled. “Nothing,” she said.

Dana inspected her sister’s fingers. “That’s gross,” she said finally, and walked away.

Sarat wiped her fingers on the rough denim of her overalls. They were hand-me-downs from her brother, their copper buttons turned black with age. She wore them plain with nothing underneath. When the weather was very warm, she undid the straps and tied them around her waist as a kind of belt, where they held at most for a few minutes before coming loose and dragging in the dirt.

She couldn’t understand why her sister derived no fascination from exploring the tiny living worlds all around them—worlds whose myriad secrets lay ripe for the taking: the flying balls of blood trapped in the bowl; the eyes of the pine floorboards laced with honey; worms picked by her father’s hand and impaled on hooks to teach the children a ritual from the days when the river still carried fish. Dana found such things tedious or repulsive, but to Sarat they were the veins and arteries through which life’s magic flowed.



MARTINA CHESTNUT stood on the grass between her home and the sorghum field. She hung wet clothes on a line drawn between a hook in one of the porch beams and the remains of a beach umbrella wedged into the dirt. Like the tarp that covered the roof panels, the beach umbrella had washed up on the shore a couple of years earlier and was immediately put to use.

Martina folded each garment over the line, pinching the clothes in place with pegs. Droplets fell from the cuffs of the pants and the ends of the shirts; here, under the line, the grass grew a little greener.

The clothes were plain, inoffensive: white and beige of varying shades. After so much use, many of the garments had taken on a ghostly translucence. In some parts of the Mag, where the rebels held most sway, there were families who dyed their denim red to avoid trouble. But to the sleepy Louisiana coast, such concerns had yet to come.

A thousand miles away, out by the eastern seaboard, there were newer clothes to be had, unloaded monthly from the aid ships that arrived from distant empires: cheap robes and polo shirts and track suits and baseball caps, many of them bearing the logos of the Golden Bulls or Al Ahly or the other popular sports clubs. But these were invariably snatched as soon as they reached the Georgia docks—and were, at least on paper, illegal to sell or transfer anywhere outside the three secessionist states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Of course this rule was routinely flouted, but by the time the garments made their way as far as Louisiana or Arkansas or west to the Mexican Protectorate, they’d already gone through multiple middlemen and were, for most residents, unaffordable.

Since the earliest days of the civil war, the secessionist states survived on the charity of foreign superpowers. Once, fossil fuels were a worthwhile currency, valuable enough to keep the Louisiana ports and Texas refineries economically viable, even if not flush with cash like in the previous century. But as the rest of the world learned to live off the sun and the wind and the splitting and crashing of atoms, the old fuel became archaic and nearly worthless. The refineries were shuttered and the drills were abandoned, even as the rebel states chose open warfare over prohibition. Now, with the South on the losing end of the conflict and its resources running dry, its people came to rely more and more on the massive ships that arrived every month from the other side of the planet stocked with food, clothing, and other human necessities.