Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

When two of these guards spotted Thomas and his group, they appeared to exchange words. Then one of them raised his hand.

“YOU MEN WANT TO PASS?” yelled the guard.

“YES,” answered Seth, apparently because Blaise was too weak to project his voice. “HEADED EAST.”

The guards raised their rifles into shooting position and addressed the throng of walkers.

“STOP!” one of them yelled. “All of you niggers behind this line, STOP NOW and let these white folks pass.”

Dread bloomed inside Thomas, settling into his fingers and toes. Now he could see the crowd wasn’t just black. There were Asians and Hispanics and Indians and a few Caucasians.

Somewhere to the south, he guessed, a terrible battle had been waged to arrive at this orderly procession of hatred. Was perhaps still being waged. Thomas looked up and down the road and wondered if he might spot possible cues, like duplication in the crowd, like artifacts where the scene had been stitched together by a digital effects team. Not because he was surprised something so backward could happen, but because there was a similar scene in The Pulse that had been faithfully recreated here.

Both guards were dressed in army fatigues and wore hats emblazoned with the Lone Star flag of Texas. One guard continued to face the crowd with his weapon in firing position while the other spoke.

“Welcome to the Republic of Texas. We have always been a sovereign nation illegally annexed by a tyrannical Federal government. While you are permitted to pass, we invite you, as white citizens, to join our great Republic.”

Thomas was so taken aback by this announcement, by this bizarre mix of reality and fantasy, that he didn’t know what to say. Even Seth seemed lost for words. It was Blaise who finally answered.

“Thank you for the kind invitation,” he croaked. “We respect your sovereignty and also reject the oppression of the United States. But we are on a long journey and request passage at this time.”

Thomas had written this scene one night after watching a shouting match on FOX News, after the passage of a law in North Carolina meant to disenfranchise black voters. He couldn’t remember the details of the law or the argument on television, but what he did recall, with vivid clarity, was the smug look on the face of the FOX host as he defended a concept that any human with a pulse knew was meant to be oppressive. Here was a self-righteous jackass born into wealth, a genetic lottery winner, whose job it was to convince millions of loyal viewers to hand their money to advertisers of aspirin and herbicide and high-interest credit cards, and the most effective way to keep those viewers tuned in day after day was to sell the idea that brown people made the country poorer and dirtier. And Thomas wasn’t stupid. He understood racism was alive and well all over the country. He could see it in the angry faces of rednecks who drove pickups jacked six feet above the road, as if to declare superiority by way of physical elevation. He could read it in the bitter expressions of the upper-middle-class elderly, who could remember brighter, cleaner days when those damned niggers had known their place. He could watch it on election day, when hordes of suburban parents piloted minivans to the local church and cast solid-red ballots to counteract the galling reality of a black man being elected (twice!) to the most powerful and important office in the world. Thomas could still remember the joy he’d felt the night of President Obama’s victory, the rush of optimism that the United States (and humankind itself) had taken an evolutionary leap forward. He remembered the dignity with which that President had served his country, in spite of bitter opposition and resentment championed by Republican legislators. And of course he could recall the awful night, eight years later, when angry voters responded to Obama’s Presidency by installing a hateful and disgusting man to replace him, as if to dishonor the office and, by association, the black man who served before. Still, he had never imagined, in modern times, that a well-known host could go on national television and defend state-sanctioned racism with little fear of retribution.

So it didn’t seem like a stretch, during civilizational collapse and with no force to oppose them, that certain armed racists would attempt to reverse America’s progress toward true equality. Thomas had written the idea into his script and now it had happened in real life. if this was real life. For the first time since the pulse, he was overcome by a genuine sense of déjà vu, as if reality had been overlaid by his fictional version of it. He wondered if Skylar was right. He wondered if this moment was really happening. But the problem with accepting such an idea was it left you with no course of action. What was there to do when you believed the world wasn’t real? Sit down and wait for it to end? Behave in spontaneous and absurd ways? Live life as if it were fantasy? And what if you were wrong?

Unless a director appeared from nowhere and ended the scene, what could Thomas or anyone do? If they didn’t pretend to be on the side of these racist “Texans,” they would never make it across the road. They could be stripped of their weapons and supplies and made to join the group of walkers. Or engage in a very short and bloody gun battle.

“Very well,” the guard finally said to Blaise. “You folks are free to pass.”

When they were out of earshot of the road, Thomas waited for someone to comment on what had happened. But no one said anything. Even when he looked at Skylar, she would barely make eye contact with him. None of them seemed to know what to say or do.

For hours the landscape had remained unchanged, mile after mile of the same flat, dead pasture broken here and there by stands of trees. But now the road divided itself into multiple east and westbound lanes separated by a grass median. The surface changed to newly-poured black asphalt bordered by bright white concrete curbs. Soon they saw a 7-Eleven on the north side of the road, where a large group of people was gathered in the shade of the covered fueling area. Across the road, on the south side, Thomas saw a sizeable pond that until then had been hidden by trees. Several hundred people were gathered around it, all of them white or Hispanic.

As they walked past this gathering place, Thomas heard snatches of conversation.

“…entire area north of the George Bush turnpike between the tollway and 75…”

“…Brett told me there may be a thousand bodies at Preston and Frankford…”

“…I don’t understand where the army is…”

Indeed, Thomas had been wondering the same thing. The military had surely been hit hard, but some of their equipment was built to withstand a pulse. He knew from research that the Army had even developed plans to deploy small-scale EMPs for warfare use. So where was the military now? Called into action elsewhere? Waiting on orders? Or was the lack of presence its own kind of strategy?

By now the heat and smoke felt like a solid physical presence. At Colt Road they encountered another large group of northbound walkers, and Thomas was dismayed to see every single one of them was either white or Hispanics that were nearly white. What was the point of reaching the warehouse, of surviving the apocalypse, if the leftover world was a blasted landscape where armed idiots divided themselves by color like a box of crayons?

“We’re not that far from 75,” said Blaise a little while later. “Maybe two or three miles. Maybe I can make it after all. I feel a bit better.”

“How much farther to the warehouse after we reach the highway?” Seth asked.

“Maybe ten more miles.”

Considering their modest progress, this distance seemed to Thomas like an insurmountable obstacle. They stopped occasionally to drink water, but even so all of them were suffering in the heat. Brandon had cried off and on for the duration of the trip, while Ben walked stoically, as if the experience had matured him. Natalie spoke to the boys occasionally but was otherwise quiet. Larry was also quiet and lurked behind Skylar, presumably waiting for Thomas to disappear so he could finally make his move. Skylar herself seemed bemused by everything around her, as if she had experienced a psychotic break.