Pete Conrad: Survival of the Sparrows

At least the war wasn’t nuclear — yet.

To get further into their heads, the PLA had systematically placed radicalized sleeper cells into hundreds of tiny American towns spread throughout the country, from rural Kentucky mining towns to upscale Californian beach communities to Mississippi delta villages and every place in between. No American was safe from the PLA’s reach, and no American intelligence agency had discovered the PLA’s cunning strategies until the bombs started to detonate and it was too late. Radicalized martyrs sacrificed themselves at crowded shopping malls, post offices, grocery stores, travel hubs, and other public gathering places, taking with them thousands of civilian casualties. The PLA’s scheme worked exceptionally well — Americans took to their homes, hunkered down with their loved ones, hoarded whatever food and supplies they could find, and prayed that the war would soon be over, hoping the invasion would stay clear of their town, wishing the fight on their neighbors , be they some other local township or a state they would be hard pressed to identify on a map.

The PLA consisted of five hundred thousand soldiers divided into six armies that invaded U.S. soil via Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Seattle, Washington; Niagara Falls, New York (via Canada); Chicago, Illinois (again, via Canada); Brownsville, Texas (via Mexico); and Tampa, Florida. It was the PLA that had invaded Tampa, successfully knocking out MacDill AFB and Central Command, that concerned Winston as he stood over the neatly-stacked pile of the barn’s leftover lumber in the driveway. That army was currently marching northward, its mission to sack Atlanta and take control of its international airport, and getting closer and closer to Johnsonville with each passing hour. The trouble with Johnsonville, Georgia was that it was a very small town located directly off Route 75, just twenty miles south of Atlanta. Route 75 ran directly through Johnsonville, cutting the town right down the middle. Heading north up Route 75, the PLA had an estimated eighty thousand well-armed troops, tanks, and other wartime apparatus that made such offenses effective. And although Winston and May lived in a quiet neighborhood that bordered a large body of water — Robin Lake — Route 75 lay just one thousand feet due west of their property, with a clear sightline of the highway.

Stories of the PLA looting, raping, and murdering all Americans that crossed its path were corroborated by PLA-produced videos uploaded onto the now-crippled internet — expertly-made videos depicting, in gory high-definition detail, the horrors the PLA committed against America’s citizens. Winston watched several of these videos on Scotty’s cell phone just before the entire Georgia power grid went offline, and he imagined these horrific images as he fired up his small generator, flipped the power on the table saw, donned his safety glasses, and started cutting the leftover tongue-and-groove boards. He need not consult the modest diagram he had scribbled down earlier, for his and May’s survival plan was simple — he’d build a false wall inside the barn to conceal a three-foot-wide living space that he and May could hide in while the PLA marched on through Johnsonville. If they remained quiet and prayed that the barn — their hiding spot — wouldn’t be torched or otherwise discovered, they would remain safe, and life as they knew it would go back to relative normal in a week or two or three, after the PLA had marched on through. Winston’s strategy was genius in its simplicity and form — with one man’s love for his wife the only incentive required. Winston looked up between cuts and across the lake at the hundreds of vehicles that clogged Route 75 — vehicles stuffed with people desperate to flee the atrocities of the PLA. There was just no place to go unless you owned a helicopter or private aircraft — and the FAA had restricted all private aircraft from taking to the air while the military attempted to resurrect the systems that would let them engage in aerial combat. The chaos of attempting to flee the invading army was further complicated by the use of Russian SCUD missiles, lobbed from mobile launchers at targets both strategic — large cities (Orlando, Tallahassee, Macon, Jacksonville) and random — small towns (Florence, AL, Miramar, FL, Spartanburg, SC, Laurel, MS) as it marched north. Across the country, no American citizen within five hundred miles of any PLA division was immune to its vast, reaching devastation.

The American military complex forgot about little Johnsonville, Georgia — there was no sight of U.S. forces either in the air or on the ground, and Johnsonville’s residents were simply on their own. It was likely that the PLA would take a week or more to file through the town, so their hiding place needed to be stocked with enough provisions to last, in Winston’s estimation, three weeks, though that number was just his best guess. May’s job was to gather water and as much food from their kitchen as she could find, just in case the PLA was driven back by a resurgence of American military resistance, which was proving to be minimally successful in other parts of the country.

Winston had framed out half of the false wall with Medusa’s leftover lumber and was now cutting the pieces that would be used for the slender door when a car pulled into the driveway. It was Ben Rollins, the crotchety old man from two doors down who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s a year ago. He was probably ten years older than Winston, which put Ben into his eighties. He slammed the car door and wandered toward Winston, who had switched the generator off.

“Mornin’, Winston,” Ben said.

“A fine morning it is, Ben.”

“Wha’ kind a project you get yourself into now?”

“Jes’ cuttin’ up these here boards from Medusa. Figure they be good ‘nough for the fireplace this winter.”

“A shame…”

“Yep.”

They shook hands. Ben picked up a short two-by-four and scrutinized it. “That tree helped bring this community together.”

“Sho’ did.”

“You can tell an engineer cut these boards. Very precise. Hope you’re not one a them moody Virgos, too? June was a Virgo. Temperamental, moody…” the old man teared up, “Jesus, I miss that woman.”

Winston put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Us, too. And as a matter a fact, Ben, I’m not a Virgo. You wanna sit for a spell? May’s cookin’ up some lunch.”

“I don’t wanna put you out or nothin’.”

“No trouble at all. Thank the Lord for that Coleman stove. A man can’t live on cold coffee and soup for long, and that’s what’s comin’.”

“It’s inhumane, Winston.”

Winston escorted Ben to the stump and pulled out a chair, Ben plopped down, huffed because old men huff, and Winston paced up the back porch steps and spoke through the screened door.

“May, we got a guest. It’s ol’ Ben. You got another slice a cheese and some iced tea for him?”

“That’s the last of the cheese and we got no more ice,” May said from the kitchen.

“Fine, then,” Winston said, “whatever we got’ll do,” and he rejoined Ben at Medusa.

“It sure is frustratin’ when you go and throw a piece a wood in the stove and it don’t fit ’cause it’s too long,” Ben remarked, and staring out at glimmering Robin Lake.

“Yep. Sure is,” Winston replied.

A moment of silence passed as the two men watched the sun’s reflection pirouette across the surface of the lake. Hundreds of dragonflies hovered and darted above the water like silent helicopters. The sun was warm, the breeze was temperate, the company gracious — it was a perfect Georgian autumn day.

“By the way, Ben, I’m a Gemini.”

Ben chuckled. “Witty and curious. I should a guessed.”