Matthew Tysz - The Last City of America

“Closed” signs started popping up on storefront windows.

The streetlights came on as she made her way to the White House.

Businesses had been springing to life in Penn Quarter. Entrepreneurs took interior designers into the early morning to execute their vision and start making money. Workers installed signs, replaced doors, painted windows, constructed overhangs. The pursuit was relentless. Until tonight.

The workers were gone. The work abandoned.

A net of armored cars, tanks and rows of soldiers entrapped the green lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She circled it once, making sure the net was tight, then stopped at the gate, approached the commanding officer.

“My lady,” the officer saluted when Angela removed her helmet.

She passed him, surveyed the scene. Some of the aggressors were walking around outside. Some of them seemed to make eye contact with her. She said to the officer, “It makes you wonder if we should have left them on Long Island.”

“This will be taken care of, my lady. It’s just a matter of how many have to die in the meantime.”

“Then take as long as you must,” she slid her helmet back on. “Don’t make martyrs out of these pests.”

She rode back into town, passed a small bar. The Harleys parked outside it caught her eye. A popular name among the mercs. She pulled in.

They stayed amongst themselves in Obadiah, building neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, a culture disciplined, but generous. They partied like fools but cleaned every mess they made. Houses full of guns but not one shot fired. They were so grateful to be where they were, yet they didn’t seem to change at all. Maybe what they had yearned for all this time was someone to watch out for them while they watched out for each other. To know that the world had their back.

The first lesson in survival every merc learned was music.

“Pick your tune and stick with it,” some of the elders used to tell her. “Keep it always on your lips. Remember it when you’re afraid. Let a song be resonating in your heart unto death.”

Even the rascal mercs took their music seriously. It was an effective way to encourage them to work with their merc rivals, to unify them under Obadiah.

Any merc could have recognized the music playing in the bar that evening. Pure 1980’s. A popular choice. She took a stool, asked for a beer.

One of the men sitting next to her—stocky, short gray beard—hollered to the bartender that he had her covered. He turned to her. “A privilege to meet you in person, my lady.” He shook her hand. “My son Keith was with you at the siege on Chicago.”

“Then the privilege is mine,” Angela smiled wryly. “Did Keith make it home?”

“Sure as hell he did!” the man downed the last third of his bottle, a vial in his massive hand. “Nothing’ll kill that kid. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

The man wore the badge of the Dune Sailors, a small band of rascal mercs from Nevada with whom Angela was well acquainted. Chances were, she and Keith had already met. The row of six men to the right of him wore the same badge.

The few minutes she spent sipping her beer, listening to bubblegum music over conversation with Keith’s dad helped set her mind at ease better than the ride did. She would have loved for it to last a little longer, but given the manner in which it ended, it really didn’t matter.

“Hail, holy queen…” came a careless voice from behind her.

She turned.

A man stood, his smile as slovenly as his posture, a bottle in his left hand, his empty right hand swaying in the vicinity of his holstered revolver.

“Hello, friend,” Angela turned her body to face him. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but I’ve killed enough men this week.”

Keith’s dad and the men beside him laughed. The laughter was carried on with spit by the swaying drunk before them.

“Does your husband like jokes as much as you do?” the drunk’s eyes became strangely focused for the amount of alcohol in him. For how exhausted he seemed. “Did he laugh as hard when he killed my boy… As I will when I blow your jugs off?”

“Alright, I think you’ve had enough, pal,” said Keith’s dad. “Why don’t you head on home now. Sleep it off. Go on.”

“It is you, isn’t it?” A man looked up over a table across the room. He was sitting with two other men, who were also looking at her. “How many people do I have to murder to suck on those tits?”

The bar grew quieter. The faint sound of 80’s music carried on.

Keith’s dad brought his fingers over the sawed-off shotgun on his belt.

The man at the table gave a look at his two friends, who nodded back.

The other dozen patrons kept their eyes on their glasses and bottles. Some glanced at the door. Nobody got up.

“It won’t end…” the drunk wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What won’t end?” said Angela.

“It never ends.” The drunk grabbed his gun. Keith’s dad drew and shot him in the shoulder. The shoulder exploded. The arm fell to the floor. The drunk dropped his bottle as he reached for his gun with the other hand. The three men across the room overturned their table and drew their weapons.

Angela put a bullet in the drunk’s head.

The Dune Sailors laid a volley of bullets on the other three men.

The last body fell. A few casings rolled along the floor to the music. People looked up from beneath their tables, the bartender from behind his station.

Looking around, Angela noticed the television over the bar, watched it for a moment. “Turn the volume up.”

An anchor was urging people to get home, lock their doors and stay away from the windows. The picture cut to a man in a ski mask screaming into the camera, calling for the Sons of Manhattan to destroy the kingdom of the wicked. The camera went past his shoulder, panning into the White House. Flames were pouring from some of the windows on the second floor.

Outside, in the distance, sirens sounded.

“I think the Manhattanites have finally snapped, my lady,” Keith’s dad looked on with her.

“Go back to your part of town,” she said to them. “Protect it.”

The seven retired mercenaries mounted their bikes alongside her and went their own way. Angela cut straight through downtown.

Scattered throngs of rioters threw bricks and Molotovs at businesses. Others were tearing down a statue of some man, more still were throwing the contents of a museum into a pyre.

Commanding officers accosted her as she climbed the steps to her home. She dismissed them, rushed to the Executive Office. Adrian wasn’t there. What she needed was the intercom. She grabbed it.

“People of America,” she slowed her breathing, calmed her voice. “I know it was a long journey that brought us to where we are. I know you are exhausted. You have every right to be afraid of the future. To be afraid of the now. But there is still more work that must be done. I don’t know how long this uprising is going to last, but I need your support until it ends. All I ask, to you former citizens of the Seven Cities, to you mercs, who have done so much for all of us, to you tribals who spent generations in darkness, is that you protect the homes you have been given. Protect your communities, if you can. And I assure you, penance will be made for those who would keep us from the happiness we’ve pursued for far too long.”

The officers caught up with her when the intercom shut off. They spouted plans for protection, countermeasures, predictions of enemy movements and containment. She silenced them.

“Where is my husband?”

They took her to the library on the second floor. Adrian was standing at the window. Silent. Motionless. Other officers were already pestering him. Angela threw them all out and stood at his side. She crossed her arms, following his calm stare out the window.