America's Demise 01 - Wasteland Read online

  Wasteland

  America’s Demise

  By

  Jacqueline Druga

  Wasteland

  America’s Demise

  By Jacqueline Druga

  Copyright 2011 by Jacqueline Druga.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image provided by: prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

  Thanks to Liz for her inspiration

  Ann, you rock, that’s all I can say. Thanks for taking this one on and being eagle eyes for me.

  1. The Home Front

  “Daddy, I’m thirsty.”

  “I know, baby, I know.”

  Falcon pulled the sheet up to the chest of his eight year old son. It wasn’t cold. In fact, it was very hot but he knew sometimes a sheet could make things seem cooler.

  His son Josh was thin and small for his age which wasn’t unusual. Falcon brought his fingers to his son’s cheek. It was dry and the skin looked pale. He ran his rough fingers over Josh’s lips. Then he reached over to his daughter Lilly, sound asleep in the same bed. Her skin didn’t feel dry nor did she look pale. Falcon then knew. “When did you have a drink last?” he asked Josh.

  “Two hours ago, after dinner. I saved my drink, remember?”

  Falcon nodded with disbelief. “Really? When? When was the last time you had a drink?”

  “This morning.”

  “Don’t make me wake your sister and ask.”

  “She’s six. She lies,” Josh said defensively.

  “She tattles.” Falcon said. “Now tell me. When?”

  Josh took a deep breath.

  “Aw, Josh. Did you give your water to that dog again?”

  “Daddy, his tongue was …”

  “Josh, Baby, you know the rules.”

  Josh nodded.

  “No wonder you’re thirsty.” Falcon lifted the glass from the night stand and then the canteen which he kept like a gun on a belt around his waist. He filled the glass a third of a way.

  Josh scooted up and took the glass. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Drink.” Falcon watched the child savor each sip of water until he had finished the glass, allowing the last drop to dribble on his dry lips. The boy bit his bottom lip bringing in that final bit of water. “Good?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Get some sleep. I love you.”

  “I love you too.

  Falcon placed his lips to his son’s forehead. He left them there for a moment as he closed his eyes and said a silent prayer, a prayer of gratefulness that God had given him another day with his children. Whether that was truly a blessing for them, Falcon didn’t know. But it was for Falcon. Without Josh and Lilly, Falcon would literally die, because he would take his own life. He had nothing else.

  He smoothed out the sheet, then stood and blew out the candle on the night stand next to Josh. The room was lit by the extremely bright moon. Falcon paused by the window, staring out, listening to Josh’s breaths. The boy was always fast to fall asleep but hard to get into bed. He loved to listen to the child breathe before he fell asleep. Normal breaths and then the breathing turned deep.

  It was hot, extremely hot, and Falcon wanted nothing more than to open a window but he couldn’t chance a dust storm. They blew in without warning and were devastating.

  The dust storms were like a blow dryer, blasting the dry dirt everywhere. It would carry in through the windows and Falcon couldn’t chance the children breathing it in.

  The moon was exceptionally bright. Falcon thought back for a moment to when he was Josh’s age, when the world was normal, busy, buzzing and alive.

  The moon back then wasn’t anywhere nearly as big or bright. Once in a while it would look huge in the sky, but it really wasn’t. Now, it was. It was always big. Instead of just a spot of white in the sky, it was like a planet that hovered nearby. At least that was how it looked. No one really was around to explain it, to explain if the moon was closer or if it was the change in the atmosphere causing an illusion.

  Often Falcon commented about the ‘baby’ moon of the past.

  Josh loved hearing tales of the past. Lilly was still too young to care about the story contents.

  Falcon hated telling the tales, but did so for Josh because the boy asked constantly, every day, to hear the same stories. It frustrated Falcon. Life was better in the past; it was easier.

  How do you tell a child he or she lives in a dying world? Falcon manipulated the stories, telling Josh it was better, when it wasn’t. One day when the child was older, Falcon would tell him the truth.

  That is, if he lived.

  Falcon was in his thirties, but he was considered old. An older body had a hard time tolerating the little food and the little bit of water, if there was any. The elderly, like children, were few and far between. They didn’t last.

  If someone lived to see sixty they were granted preservation.

  Or so Falcon heard.

  There was only one preservation camp and it was out west. It was run by the western government. But again, it was only what Falcon had heard.

  Supposedly it was a clean, cool, environment with water and food, where the elderly are taken care of but made to work. The work though wasn’t manual, it was memory based.

  They wrote down history— everything they could remember about the past.

  Journals composed for future generations to read.

  If there were any future generations.

  Falcon remembered a time when sixty wasn’t old. When people still worked at sixty and lived full lives, when children ran around, filling schools, playing in the streets and parks.

  Parks.

  Josh and Lilly would never know a park.

  They’d never know a lot of things. They could see a television, a computer and a phone, but they didn’t work.

  There was no power.

  All of that had been gone since Josh was two years old and Lilly an infant.

  Slowly, it went. It wasn’t as if it happened over night. It happened at the end of the Twenty Year War. Although the war was actually lasted twenty-four years, it was easier to call it the Twenty Year War.

  It was a world war like no other before it.

  Falcon fought fourteen of those years. In fact, he got the name ‘Falcon’ in the service. It wasn’t his real name. Falcon was given to him because he was quiet and quick.

  He joined the military at sixteen and served as a soldier in one capacity or another until the war was declared officially over.

  There were no winners in the war.

  Everyone, everywhere, in every country … was a loser.

  For the last two years of the war Falcon worked as a soldier in the ration centers of Kentucky three miles from his farm.

  His wife’s farm, actually. One she inherited from her family.

  It had its own well water. It was secure and it had survived the war.

  Falcon always said it survived because his wife Stacy and her family were generous. The land was blessed by God because they shared and helped others.

  When Stacy died in the new plague, Lilly was just born and Josh was only two. Falcon was called home to take care of his kids while still continuing to serve his country.

  It was a good thing to be home at that point. Things had started to shut down and die.

  But the war held on despite the lack of water and the natural obstacles. It kept going when the power diminished and gasoline was scarce.

  It went on until there wasn’t a drop of gasolin
e to power a plane or tank.

  Soldiers never made it home.

  Of course, most American soldiers had never left their country.

  America was the front lines.

  Falcon thought about getting on one of the boats that headed east to Europe. Boats of hope they were called, because it was said that Europe still had power and water.

  That they weren’t hit by the elements like America was.

  But nobody knew for sure.

  There was no way to communicate except by word of mouth.

  Europe was Utopia.

  Falcon didn’t know if he had enough to barter passage. Possibly he did, but did he want to waste it on a pipe dream?

  It was one of the many things that stayed on his mind.

  But for that moment, right there, that night, it was time to get back to his tasks. He had lingered in thought long enough by his children’s bed. Falcon had to get to work.

  He had only a little left to do and that would finish off the last of the crops. Then it was time to move on, to leave for a while. A simple task that in the old days would take a day at most could now take over a week.

  Then they would return home, hopefully.

  But the journey would begin, without a doubt, the next day.

  It had to.

  <><><><>

  His hands were rough and dry, his knuckles disfigured at the joints from early bouts of arthritis. Falcon’s hands looked like that of a man much older, in fact, he recalled seeing similar hands. They belonged to a grandfather figure he had when he was a boy.

  In fact, many times when Josh held his hand, he saw his own hand in the old man’s.

  That was many years ago.

  Falcon grabbed a beer from storage. It was old and warm and wasn’t the best thing to drink, but he was thirsty and he gave had given his share of water to Josh.

  He supposed he could take from the barter box, but that wasn’t fair to Josh or Lilly. The beer would work. He just hoped it didn’t make him sick.

  After a few moments of working his hands, Falcon began the task of rolling cigarettes. Drying out the tobacco was easy. Nature did that for him with the heat and the fact that it hadn’t rained in over a year. It was the last of the crop and cigarettes were almost as good as the tiny bottles of hand sanitizer and water Falcon had. They were three of the priceless items.

  The liquid sanitizer was funny to Falcon. He started collecting the bottles years before when he joined the service and they were handed to him regularly, like candy.

  He saved them. He actually had an entire duffle bag filled with the two inch bottles when he met Stacy.

  He was almost nineteen when they met. She was a field nurse and he had never heard the name Stacy before.

  Stacy was beautiful, rough but with an air of delicate to her. She told him that Stacy was her mother’s name and she took it when her mother died in the war earlier on.

  She had died New York.

  An immediate connection ensued because that was where Falcon’s father died as well.

  At the point when they had met, Falcon had been serving for three years. Still young, but far beyond ‘wet behind the ears,’ he had already seen battle after battle.

  He was shot in the arm and was sent for medical attention.

  Stacy removed the bullet.

  That was the beginning of their story.

  He entrusted her with the bag of sanitizer along with other items issued by the army. Items the older soldiers laughed about because years earlier they weren’t standard field issue.

  The bag contained soap, sanitizer and even little bottles of booze.

  It became a joke to Falcon and Stacy that they’d save what they could of these items until the war was over.

  Save them because neither of them ever imaged the war would span their entire marriage.

  Bag one, year one, bag two, year two and so forth. Each bag went into the barn.

  No one expected the war to rage that long.

  The barn was filled with bags.

  There was even a point, following the nuclear exchange, when Falcon was between tours, that there was a temporary cease fire.

  Everyone believed the limited nuclear exchange was the end. That had to be it. But despite the small cold front that caused temperatures around the globe to plummet, the war continued.

  The cold front.

  How many years before was that?

  Stacy wasn’t even pregnant, and she was canning things left and right in case the farm didn’t survive.

  It did, thankfully. And those jars of food saved a lot of people.

  She canned so much; Falcon still had a few things in storage.

  They weren’t for bartering.

  They were for survival. Only under extreme circumstances would he barter those.

  His fingers ached.

  How many cigarettes did he roll while thinking of the wife he lost? The only woman he had loved.

  It was late. Between the cigarettes, the preparations and the beer, Falcon was tired.

  It was time to go to bed.

  The next day was not only a new day but also the start of a new way of life for him and the children, at least for a little while.

  For that he needed rest.

  2. Nightmares

  A distant boom in the dead of the night caused Falcon to stir from his sleep. He sat up in bed. The room was quiet and still. Josh slept on his side and Lilly on her back. Their bed was across the room and Falcon, drenched in sweat, got out of his cot immediately and checked the children.

  Though Lilly snored, he still placed his hand on her chest to feel her breathing. Then he moved to Josh. He felt Josh’s little chest rise and fall and only then Falcon breathed out in relief. Not that he actually thought anything was wrong with them; it was just out of habit, and old habit from his Army days.

  Falcon flashed back to what had started it. It was a thunderous explosion just outside of camp in Virginia. He was fresh out of basic training and on his first tour

  “Incoming. We’re being hit!” A Sergeant cried out. “Falcon, get Stevenson.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Falcon was already dressed and tying his boots. He looked across the tent. “Stevenson. Get up.”

  Stevenson didn’t. His back faced Falcon as he lay on his side.

  “Stevenson.” Falcon stomped his foot into his boot and took the three steps across the tent. “Stevenson.” When he reached down, he knew.

  Stevenson was dead.

  He was just an unlucky target for a wayward piece of shrapnel that seared through the tent into his forehead while he slept. He never saw it coming.

  From that day forward, any time an attack happened at night, Falcon checked his bunk mates. And it carried over to checking on Josh and Lilly.

  Another ‘boom’ jolted Falcon and the room lit up with a flash of green.

  Heat lightening.

  A dust storm wasn’t far behind, but it was perfect timing. It was a brief opportunity that Falcon had to seize, a few seconds of wind before the dust kicked in.

  Falcon opened the window and a constant flow of blasting cool air rushed in. He allowed it to hit against his damp chest and it gave him some relief from the heat.

  Watching for the dust, Falcon stood by the open window, hoping it would cool the whole room down. It did. Then when he could see the clear sky get hazy, he knew he had to shut the window.

  The room would get dark; the storm would block out all light. Falcon, after scooting Lilly over a bit, lay in bed with his children just in case they woke.

  The pellets of dirt and dust beat against the window like rain, but it wasn’t rain. Rain would be a miracle. And the world was fresh out of those.

  Back propped up against the headboard, hand resting on Lilly’s head, Falcon closed his eyes.

  He dozed off quickly and woke just as fast at the sound of thunder. But during that brief dance with sleep he dreamt of war, just a snippet. Most of the time war was all Falcon dreamt abou
t.

  The war.

  How could he not? It was most of his life.

  Sometimes he’d dream of other things, but never anything good. When was the last time Falcon had a good dream?

  Each night he closed his eyes and hoped for one, but one never came.

  One probably never would.

  3. Early War

  When the war had first begun, no one expected it to go on. Falcon didn’t quite understand any of it. Not even why it started. He was young and only knew some bad country or bad guys came and attacked America. They brought the war to the shores of the United States.

  He was a war orphan who stayed in various institutes until he was sixteen and allowed to join the service. While he wasn’t all that sure on facts, he could recall hearing ‘grownups’ discuss things at the onset. How the bad guys were messing with the wrong country. How it wouldn’t take long before the mightiest military in the world would take charge.

  That was what he heard and believed, but later learned that, yes, the American military was mighty, and a good chunk of the three million soldiers were in American when it happened, but too many were reserve.

  Many soldiers were overseas.

  To call them all to duty and prepare them for a war took time. To bring forces back home … took time.

  American sustained massive strikes and was already at a disadvantage by the time the military was ready.

  To make matters worse, key American Allies had also been attacked.

  In the early days of war, when Falcon was a school boy, it was hopeful. Truly early on, American troops pushed back opposing forces.

  Then like always, like history dictated, others couldn’t keep their noses out.

  It would have been done and over, America would have cleansed the country of the enemy.

  But then another country stepped in and then another.

  Within a year it had escalated.

  Before Falcon was a teenager, every seaboard state in the union was a warzone. And by the time he was seventeen, ‘Nuclear explosion’ was a commonly heard phrase.

  There never was that nuclear holocaust depicted during the cold war era or in the movies of the fifties. It was always tit for tat, small weapons, usually aimed at bases or resistant points.