2043

The country shattered like glass, the jagged pieces scattering, full of sharp edges that cut and drew blood.

After the Dissolution, a parade of new nations stepped forward, clad in their threadbare finery and wrapped in their faded glory. Like looters hurriedly searching through the trashed aisles of an already picked-over store, hunting for a treasure that was somehow missed, they scrambled for power, for strength, for acknowledgment, for territory. They were tiny kingdoms that jostled one against the other, their flags rising and falling, their borders expanding and contracting like the labored breathing of the dying.

The only laws of the land still actively enforced favored the wealthy, the cruel, the vicious, the white, and their enforcers trembled with anticipation at the thought of hurting others, leather-gloved fists creaking as they gripped their truncheons.

The public sector had long ago been abolished or privatized. Everything was expensive. Everything was synthetic. Everything was automated. Everything was AI-generated. And all while the corporations fracked pure data out from beneath every interaction. From sea to shining sea, society crumbled and collapsed as its underpinnings weakened. It was all too late.

There was nowhere to go. There was no help coming.

There was no way out.

The corporations own everything, from politicians to property. There was no living wage. No safety requirements. Nothing but pennies to break your back for as many hours as you could stand before you fell. The signs in the breakroom tell you that you’re family here, but a bottle of water costs more than you make in a day.

And taking breakroom snacks without paying means jail.

The Gig Economy only puts you in a hole and then hands you a shovel. Any side hustles you might have are good for a time, but they also mean avoiding the narcs and the Public Compliance surveillance drones for as long as you can, which you can’t do forever. Eventually, the city buries you in e-fines. Those either drive you out, or into the long queue of slouched and shuffling humanity, slowly navigating a labyrinthian shake-down at the hands of the disinterested bureaucrats in the City offices, and all to get your stack of permits and licenses.

Because not having your papers means jail.

None of which matters if you’re unlucky enough to cross paths with the iron-fisted LEOs that staff the Community Crisis Response Teams. The black-booted thugs troll the streets like sharks in the shallows, scrolling their phones, glowering from within the air conditioned and armored carapaces of their APCs. If you make eye contact, they pounce, and they won’t let you go until either your cash is clutched in their fists, or your blood is painting their knuckles as they drag you away.

Failure to pay your fees means jail.

Raiders start to appear once the supply chain breaks down and the shipments to the fast food restaurants dry up. Frothing from fear and hatred, driven from the heavily armed safety of their white enclaves in the outer ring suburbs by their entitlement and their greed, they slip down the freeways in long caravans of SUVs and pickups with the license plates removed. They speed into city neighborhoods with the coming dawn, HOA viking tweekers in cargo shorts, flip-flops, yoga pants, and designer tactical gear. Sweating and wild-eyed, they hunt for essentials, for extravagances, for anything they might might want really, but mostly for blood. They revel in the death and destruction, it makes them feel good and powerful.

But you can’t fight back, because fighting back turns them into the victim.

Fighting back means jail.

Any work that you manage to find, especially if it’s within the service industry, means potentially exposing yourself to the Theta variant of SARS-CoV XBB 3.2. The Friendly Face Law means masks are illegal in public areas, because masks can block the Facial Recognition Scans, and also, they make the customers feel bad.

And making white people feel bad means jail.

The Theta variant surged amongst the muddy, sagging tents and open cesspits of the FEMA camps. It decimated the refugees from the wildfires, the floods, the droughts, and the border wars, leaving sloping drifts of slowly rotting, still-infectious bodies in its wake, and dark clouds of birds slowly circling above them.

When your loved ones finally do get sick, the financial intake scan at the Quick-E-Health means you don’t even get offered most treatments, and the ones they do give you, do nothing but rack up costs by delaying the inevitable for as long as you able to pay. Eventually, all of the bodies are stacked behind the clinics, waiting for the trucks that haul them to the collection points, where bulldozers push the boneless tangles until they tumble into open pits that reek of the sharp stink of gasoline. The flames burn day and night. The smoke smudges the skyline, turning the sun into a hazy pale yellow disc. The variant took your family. The medical bills took everything else.

But camping outside without also having a premanent residence means jail.

To avoid debtor’s prison, you have one week to sign some kind of an Occupational Contract, so first, you enroll your last surviving child in a private boarding school. It’s Christian Nationalist Evangelical denomination, staunchly anti-modern science and medical care, with a focus on Fundraising and End Times Militarization, but it’s that, or the meatgrinder that is the Public Work Crews. After that, you use one of your last crypt-o-scrip cards to cram onto a bus headed downtown to one of the old shopping centers that has been turned into a Corporate Recruitment Zone.

The line stretches for blocks.

While waiting, you use your last crypt-o-scrip card to buy a bottle of murky yellow water and a stale churro from a street vendor, then step away quickly when a clenched fist of screaming LEOs push through the crowd and curb-stomp the vendor for not producing her permits fast enough. The LEOs leave her to pick up her teeth, and happily munch on her churros as they swagger off.

Inside the mall, no one is sure where to go, the lines tangle. It’s crowded, slow, and hot, punctuated with sudden frustrated outbursts and the violent repraisals of LEOs. The air is stale and stifling and motionless, reeking of too many people crammed into a place that has been boarded up for too long. The place throbs with bright lights and pulsing noise. The stores blare out cheerful promises of a carefree future, their doors flanked by heavily armed security, and staffed by smiling young representatives, their foreheads branded with a cross and their arms scrawled with tattooed scripture.

Everyone is coughing.

The choices all boil down to either servant, guinea pig, or soldier.

You sign a Ten Year Indenturement as a Private Security Contractor with the TimeWarner-Grumman Defense Services Group. It comes with an annual Disney Studios Amusement Park pass. The smiling young representative, the cross brand on her forehead a livid pink, hands you an officially branded granola bar and a bottle of FuckSauce energy drink, and points you towards the line for the health exam. You get dozens of shots, even more pills, and a scalding hot shower and delousing. At the far end, they hand you a brand new pair of L.L./REI Chameleon Camo Smart-tech Footed-Onesies that smell like plastic and are still stiff and sharply creased from being folded up. You also get Mattel’s new XM-12 “Marauder” assault rifle with the nano-ammo, which you’ll be paying off for years. You sign so many papers, leave thumbprints, and try not to blink for the retinal scans.

Along with a couple hundred others, you change into your new onesie in the damp dim of the mall’s underground parking garage, standing next to a dusty Lexus that’s up on cinder blocks. You leave your old clothes behind in a heap, as shouting voices and sparking tasers hustle you up the ramp and into the blinding sunlight, pushing you toward the roar of the waiting transports. The rotors start to kick up a swirling maelstrom of trash and grit, as more shouting voices aggressively point you toward the transport’s open maw and the lines of quickly-filling-up seats within.

They’re flying you west to fight in the Water Wars along the Colorado River.

You wish you had peed before take-off.

The Southwest is a near-empty wasteland of cracked hardpan and abandoned cities half-buried in sand, criss-crossed with long ribbons of broken asphalt all headed for somewhere else, and inhabited by vicious, leather-faced desert trash clad in shitty turquoise jewelry.

It’s a pleasure to kill them,

You’re assigned to the mechanized infantry. First platoon, Alpha, 1st and 33rd Strykers, “The Chonky Bois,” one of three support gunners in first squad. Along with a mech-tech, a medic, comms, a drone pilot, and the mech-pilot and the gunner, you follow along in the shadow of one of the four huge lumbering armored mechs in your unit. The food is shit, and the pay is worse. You send home what you can. It’s hot and dry, the world baking, shimmering with heat. You suggest naming your squad’s mech Harambe, because of its long arms and its hunched posture, but no one else gets the reference, and google only returns an endless amount of MLM sites desperate for new members, the mad din of Influencers begging for attention, and a deluge of AI-generated celebrity porn.

You watch Hermoine and Megatron go to town on each other for awhile until a swarm of drones grab your signal, and swoop in like locusts to carpetbomb the area.

You stay off the internet after that.

The Chonky Bois patrol the wind-swept ridges above the brown trickle of the Colorado River. Your days are mostly spent hunting shade, food, and water while looting abandoned towns, or robbing civilian convoys. You leave the bodies where they fall. Every once in a while, someone triggers an IUD, or they get jumped by a feral methhead, or they peek over the wrong ridgeline, there’s a hiss, a snap, and the sound of distant thunder, and they’re turned into a red rain splatter because of some miles-away sniper with a railgun and a working satellite connection.

Some days, you get to unleash a thunderous cacophony of fiery hell down on some group of contractors sponsored by a rival corporate interest, or you dash for cover when they unleash hell upon you. On a good day, you get to blow up some Eastern Nevadafornia Pump Station, or burn out one of the last of the lawn-watering holdouts in an unnaturally lush gated retirement community.

Mostly, you just try to avoid the drone strikes.

Mostly, you sleep.

TimeWarner-Grumman’s defense contract ends suddenly when the Free Arizona Government collapses overnight in a bloody coup. The AI-enhanced Newscasters blame weak borders and the influx of immigrants. The feed shows the leaders of the Sovereign Constitutional Originalist Party being crucified and set alight on the lawn of the capitol building to the south of you down in Phoenix. The Aryan Bannerman of the Kingdom of God are all over Facebook, cavorting in the flames of their crucified rivals, “Splitters!” they yell at the screaming human torches, while drunkenly singing a mix of hymnals and country music, and painting themselves with blood and ashes.

Home-base while you’ve been stationed within the Laughlin-Bullhead Disputed Territories for the past few months has been FOB Sinema. It’s an ad-hoc fort next to the airport runways, a hodge-podge of Hesco barriers, old shipping containers, and high pressure inflatable tents like a scatter of fresh mushrooms after the rain. After the coup, TW-G/DSG issued a return to base order, and the transports flew you back in a rush. Hurry up and wait. Hunker down. Man the walls. Eat a forty year old MRE. All while leadership attempts to negotiate a new contract with the Aryan Bannerman of the Kingdom of God.

But then long lines of military surplus vehicles, police cars, and jacked-up pickups rolling south down Interstate 15, all festooned with the favored banners and flags of the Burning Cross Brotherhood, start to trend on TikTok.

The Burning Cross Brotherhood stretches from what used to be Nevada, up north and east through what used to be Utah, Nebraska, and up into the Dakotas, then back west across the Canadian border, almost to the Pacific, then south into what used to be Northern California, and back east again to Nevada.

It’s a lot of territory and they’re always looking to expand.

The Brotherhood claims to have nukes, and they aren’t friends with anyone who isn’t white and Christian, so they aren’t what you’d call good neighbors. They’re using the fire and smoke of the Aryan Bannerman’s coup in Arizona as cover for their own full out assault on Vegas. Vegas is only an hour or so north of FOB Sinema. This pushed the cost/benefit algorithm too far in the wrong direction, so TW-G/DSG decides to stop negotiations, pull the plug on the whole operation, wash their hands, and get the fuck out of Dodge, but the waiting transports on the runway are reserved only for Executives, their families, and their security teams.

Any objections are met with gunfire.

There’s more than a few objections. Things start moving very fast.

All Security Contractors, Support Personnel, and Personal Assistants receive notifications on their phones that, effective immediately, their employment status has been changed to Independent Contractors, and their contracts have been terminated. Attached to the notification is a copy of all outstanding debts that are still owed to the TimeWarner-Grumman Defense Services Group, including today’s lunch. After that, they point you towards some picnic tables stacked with Separation Forms.

The stacks of papers tumble away in the sudden swirl of grit as the transports hurriedly begin to lift off. There’s shouts and gunfire. Stingers thump and whoosh, and hissing missiles arc skyward. Explosions bloom midair like fiery flowers, and the heaps of burning transports wreathe the runways in oily smoke. FOB Sinema crackles with automatic weapons fire.

The lucky transports fly away. You watch them go, black spots in the setting sun, and with nothing else to do, you drop your empty launcher and walk away.

FOB Sinema burns behind you.

You head vaguely east, sleeping during the day and crossing the desert at night. Without the sun, the temps cool, dipping down into the 90s. You walk. You steal cars. You kill for gas and food and water. You avoid the highways and the packs of high-octane bandits that roam there, the broken asphalt smeared with the bloody wreckage of their two-lane blacktop wars. Truck stops are given wide berth too, the automated ones are protected by their remorseless weapon turrets, and the rest are just a haven for the trafficking gangs to rest and refuel and to do their business.

It’s harder to avoid the methed-out little towns, those sand-blasted garbage dump oases that dot the arid stretches of sun-baked nothing. If there’s water or food to be had, that’s where it will be. You move quickly and quietly and only under the cover of darkness. You stick to the long jagged shadows that stretch across the dead suburbs, scurrying between the burnt-out shells of former family homes, watching from cover as gangs of rabid locals whoop, spewing beer, firing guns, and waving their tattered MAGA Stars and Bars rags.

They mostly just fight and fuck each other until they finally pass out, or they blare music and do doughnuts in their rusted cars, chewing up the dirt of the old football fields next to the boarded-up schools, but they’ll drop everything to hunt any stray dog or outsider they see.

Once they catch a scent, they scream as they chase their prey, braying like starving wolves, their engines rumbling and revving, tires squealing, headlights painting the abandoned buildings, whooping wildly.

You hide as they roar past.

Eventually, a howling dust storm, squatting over the desiccated corpse of some forgotten little desert city, forces you to seek shelter in the half-collapsed ruin of a glass and steel office building. A pack of ICE Quad-dogs that patrol the downtown corridor catch a scan of you breaking in.

Metal feet click-click-clicking, the robotic beasts run you down in the upper floors, dust and wind blasting in through the shattered windows, old papers swirling through the empty hallways and offices. The Quad-dogs growl through their digital speakers, their sensors unblinking, flamethrowers dripping with oily blue fire, their auto-guns trained on you. Mini-drones zip in through the hazy murk, buzzing, hovering above the snarling Quad-dogs. The blinding spears of their halogen spotlights pin you as the AI-generated voice of a dead celebrity cheerfully explains that you are being detained for Trespassing, Failure to Correctly Identify, and Improper Heritage, all sponsored by Chick-fil-A and the Joe Rogan Action Newstainment Hour.

You’re sent to an ICE Job Fair, shuffling in a long line of chains, sitting within a barbwire square in the middle of a parking lot, frying under the sun, until you are hired with hundreds of others as a Seasonal Conscript for the CHRISTmas Rush in the Republic of Texibama. They shove you into the broiling heat of a railway car, crammed in shoulder to shoulder, and ship you the long way back east, so that you can make inspirational candles and positive affirmation wall décor for Goop Platinum Subscriber pre-orders.

Half the car dies during the commute to the job site.

In less than a week, your Seasonal Employment Contract ends early due to an unforeseen outbreak of the Theta variant of SARS-CoV XBB 3.2 spreading among the workhouses’ managers and guards—a sunburnt flock of vacantly smiling and eagerly cruel Missionaries from The Liberty Alliance of Montanaho. They had been coughing from the moment you got off the train.

They’re all dead within three days.

You search their bloated corpses for the key to one of the battered old Cybertruck S3XY 2.5s they drove here. The one fob you find opens the one that has “God Penis” air-brushed over a mushroom cloud across the battered and scuffed gray steel hood. You drive farther east, coughing and bleary-eyed the whole way. Your throat burns. Your nose won’t stop running. You might have caught Theta, but you aren’t sure.

It could be from the wildfire smoke.

You sag behind the wheel, fading and swerving, delusional, the world burning on both sides of the old highway. A slat-ribbed deer, its antlers a crown of fire, runs beside you for a time with rolling eyes and a face of bone and gristle.

Eventually, the Cybertruck loses power. Clanking and falling apart, it rolls to a stop, and the battery immediately catches fire. You get out and walk, stumbling away from the merrily burning wreckage along the weed-choked gravel edges of the road. The smoke from the burning Cybertruck blends with the darkening sky, the rising column torn apart by the growing winds. Rumbling thunderheads the color of a deep bruise pile up to the south of you, far out over the Gulf. Within that massive wall, pops of lightning flicker and flash, and the clouds growl and boom, bloated with rain.

You pass lines of traffic all heading in the opposite direction. Rusted hulks of old gas vehicles and EV pickups with truck nuts hanging off the hitch, all packed with people, piled with sodden living room sets, and pulling trailers of ATVs and jetskis. Wide eyes in round and pale moonpie faces peer out at you from behind the rain-streaked glass as you stumble past.

The air is thick and stifling, like wading through cotton, heavy in your lungs, pressing you down. The sudden downpours are freezing. A cold wind snaps at your muddy, ill-fitting clothes, it crackles with ozone. You shiver with the chills.

Floodicane Britney makes landfall just before you make it home. The streets are empty, except for the looters wading through the tidal surges of oily sewage, shooting quick vids in front of tangles of dead bodies and garbage while they cling to TVs and soaked bundles of sportswear. The looters eye you as you stumble past, growling, lit by forks of lightning, but when they see you have nothing, they ignore you. The dark skies thunder and flash, shaking at you like the clenched fist of an angry God.

Soon it’s just you.

No more looters. No more last minute evacuees. The lights are out. The houses are empty. The storm howls, the winds tearing buildings and palm trees alike up by the roots, and they tumble away before its fury. At the last corner, waist-deep in water, gasping and soaked and wind-chapped, you sag against a bent stop sign, and watch as your Amazon+ Dispos-a-Yurt washes away in Britney’s storm surge…