J. Curtis - Calexit - The Anthology

He’d been instructed to apply at the Militia’s motor pool in San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles.

Captain Larry Marcus, whose job included overseeing the vehicles that hauled members of the newly minted militia, interviewed him for the job, approved his hiring, and put him to work.

Captain Marcus had been cut from a different piece of cloth than the other former cops who ran the militia. He seemed organized, thoughtful and had a streak of kindness and thoughtfulness that appealed not only to Gary, but to the rest of the people who worked for him as well.

“Did billeting find you a place to live, Gary?”

“Yes Captain.” He stood and wiped his greasy hands on a rag.

“How is it?” Captain Marcus had an easy way and Gary responded warmly.

“You know, Captain, things have changed. There hasn’t been power there since Cali went on its own but I have running water.”

“You’re eating at the Militia’s commissary, right?”

“Yes, Captain, and it’s a lot better than most of the people out there have. I wanted to thank you for the job.”

“Gary, you were qualified and we’re fortunate to have you.”

You wouldn’t be if you knew what I’m going to do. “Thanks all the same.”

“Don’t you have work to get back to?”

Gary smiled and went back to patching the sheet metal on an armored car that had taken fire. Cleaning the blood out had been a grizzly task, but Gary did it with a chastened, holy, joy. Adding thin metal swatches to the clearly inadequate pierced metal skin did not strike him as odd in any way. The cops that left sabotaged the department’s armored cars and the American military took theirs with them. That left the Calis with the job of putting together patchwork armor. Since none of them knew how to do that, there had been a lot of trial and error that led to a lot of militia personnel being shipped to the crematorium.

CALEXIT

D+43

When Major Sanchez drove up to the home that Larry Marcus lived in, he noted changes. Masonry buttresses had been constructed here and there. Shrubs, dug into the soil didn’t do much to hide them. He opened the chain link gate and walked onto the property and it was only when he came up to the front door that he noticed that the concrete reinforced cinder blocks were backed by Claymore mines. Apparently Larry didn’t want the back blast to rip the skin off his house. He sighed. It had come to this. He hadn’t taken precautions, but he’d been drinking so much lately that often as not, he pissed the bed while he slept these days. The depression that closed in around him felt like a steel net. Southern Cali had fragmented and was coming apart before his eyes.

The stores had no food on the shelves, order broke down, and only the militia had a steady supply of gasoline. And the society that once believed that male and female were complementary rather than interchangeable had been labeled as misogynist. Owners of private property were tagged as being greedy. But they were now the victims of mobs and roving gangs, and the militia itself. There wasn’t much private property anymore. It belonged to the people. As he knocked on Larry’s front door, he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to Caesar Chavez State when the water pumping stations went off line the way that the power had. The state itself consisted mainly of land that could be classified as ‘desert’.

Larry opened the door and ushered him in. There was a smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen, and, feeling a bit like Pavlov’s dog, he began to salivate.

“Something smells amazing.”

“It’s the most important meal of the day, boss.”

“Where did you find bacon?”

Larry smiled, “It’s canned bacon. I have a few cans. I have chickens living upstairs since my wife left me and headed to the U.S., so we have eggs too. I also purloined some bread from the Militia commissary so we will have toast. I just don’t have butter.”

The milita captain cooked breakfast on a fuel-powered camp stove.

“This is great, Larry. Really great.”

They sat down and Larry handed Mike a canned beer. “I thought this might be welcome before we headed into the office — hair of the dog and all that.”

“Yes, that’s great.”

They ate in silence until Mike asked Larry the question that had been on his mind all morning. “What do we do when the water system fails?”

Larry smiled, “What do you mean?”

“You’re not stupid, Captain Marcus. You know that the natural gas doesn’t work and that we don’t have electric power. Those are inconvenient, but when the water system fails, things will get ugly. No water to drink, no water for sanitation, and near as I can tell, only the militia will have water from the storage tanks.”

Larry said, “I expect an outbreak of cholera. Hundreds of thousands will die in Caesar Chavez State alone, people will become desperate and it will get very bad. These are city people who are used to turning on a tap and flushing a toilet. When they can’t do that, what will they do?”

Mike forked a huge wad of scrambled eggs into his mouth and washed it down with his beer. “No, what will we do?”

“What can we do?”

“It’s our responsibility.”

“I know that we have a water system, Mike, but I don’t know how it works. Do you?”

“No, not really.”

“We’ll rely on the wisdom of the Cali National Assembly and that of President Newman to save the nation. The militia will keep order as best we can, but our salvage operation phase will come to an end and I can see us bunkering up inside the Sheriff’s Offices.”

“Militia compounds.”

“You know what I mean.”

CALEXIT

D+45

Gary Simpson understood that he was simply one of many when he placed each sock containing five pounds of C-4 plastic explosive where the diagram told him to place it and inserted the blasting caps at either end. The caps themselves had been crimped to det cord and led into a timing mechanism. His instructions had been specific, and he set the timer for midnight, one hour from now.

A water treatment plant is complex with its system of valves, pipes, pressure reduction and chemical treatment, but when you eliminate the input and the output with the proper explosive with the brisance; the hydraulic force will shatter the whole.

CALEXIT

D+46

With fifty-seven detonations at midnight, at the beginning of the 46 thday of the Peoples Republic of Cali, the greater Los Angeles area became unlivable.

CALEXIT

D+48

By the 48 thday of liberation from the United States, the dim bulb of bureaucratic thinking suddenly burned brightly and senior public servants, newly anointed by the new nation were invited to a meeting that was convened in the recently renovated Los Angeles Coliseum. Major Mike Sanchez and Captain Larry Marcus drove along nearly deserted freeways with Colonel Dorris Johnson and his aide, Luther Calder sitting in the back seats of the otherwise empty armored vehicle.

“I don’t see why everyone is so hysterical,” Colonel Johnson said, “it’s just a little water.”

“You’ve been busy. There’s a lot on your plate. It was in the message traffic, sir. The U.S. blew the waterlines from the Colorado River and a saboteur took out the California aqueduct somewhere up in the San Joaquin Valley.” Larry Marcus looked into the rear-view mirror that gave him a view of the passenger section of the Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (MRAP) that he drove. Colonel Johnson still didn’t get it and Luther Calder, his life partner did, but didn’t seem inclined to help explain. “All of the water pumping stations in the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and San Fernando Valleys and what used to be Orange County were sabotaged too. What few wells there are fed through pumping stations and from what the inspectors said, it will take months to repair them because they don’t have all of the pipe and parts necessary. The U.S. isn’t going to provide them and we’ll need to source them from China or elsewhere.”