Make a unique print by cutting up a potato or sponge, and use it to stamp on a material of your choice.
After a while of silence Bart and Jamie got up and went into the back alley to smoke a cigarette. Genie and I stayed at the booth, with the pistol, the candle and the pile of maps. I sat in silence with her as she studied each highway, bypass, road, and street.
“They were shooting people over in our neck of the woods.” Bart said out in the alley. “We woke up around 3 to the firing of guns and explosion of bombs. We slipped out of the back door and came immediately here. They had already been here. Trashed the place looking for people.”
Bart was packing back and forth , his hand shaking violently as he dragged his cigarette like he was being timed. Jamie put his hand on Bart’s shoulder to calm him down. Bart stopped pacing and looking dead into Jamie’s eyes. “They killed everyone, those bastards.”
“Who?” Jamie asked. “Who’s killing everyone?” But Jamie already knew the answer to this question. The new military. Jamie rubbed his head in angst. It’s worse than he had thought.
“What are we gonna do?” Bart kept going. “What are we going to - .” He was thinking about his family.
“Look man, we’re gonna be straight. Genie’s gonna be straight, Diego’s gonna be straight, Your gonna be straight. You gotta be strong for those two women in there. We are gonna make a plan, figure out where the fuck to go and get the hell outta this town. But first, you have to be strong. You got it man?”
He shook his head. “Yeah Man. I’m just. . .”
“I know, I’m scared too, but you’re smart we can figure this out. Now, what have you seen? Tell me everything.”
“Not much man, just that. I got the hell outta there. What was it like on your end?”
“Quiet, like everyone was hiding.” The calm before the storm.
“I heard an announcer on the radio say it was as far North as Silvana and he had a cousin down in Sacramento he couldn’t get in touch with. I heard all this right before the airwaves got dispatched. He was telling people it was the rapture. Telling us to pray to our god for forgiveness. How have we not seen it coming? The military’s been swarming all over the place the last few years. Showing up randomly in their uniforms replacing every single street cop. Man you remember when we fucking hated street cops, we’ll there aren’t any more around to hate. Now it’s the fucking military. They’ve swooped in here and turned us into fucking target practice. They’re everywhere too, they were all over NY when I was up there last fall. They are taking us all out. Shit’s collapsed and they are taking us all out and starting over.”
“We don’t know that man.”
“We knew our government was going to collapse, but we didn’t know the logistics or how people would react. Our government has collapsed and this is how they’ve chosen to deal with it.”
Bart was right. It had been happening for years. The increased military involvement on every level. The decrease in state and local funding coupled with the increase in military support. The continued recession. The unemployment rate has been increasing since the housing bubble collapse. It is greater than 50 percent. And the poverty level is much worse. It was well known that the collapse of our economy was happening in its own time, but no one ever knew when the collapse would actually happen or what would happen after. Did they throw the master switch, turn everything off, completely shut off access to funds? How has it occurred so quickly? Or has it been occurring elsewhere and we just didn’t know. They have the ability to control it all. But wouldn’t we have noticed? Have we all been so blind?
Jamie told me all of this after our dinner of baked potatoes, raw vegetables, and hamburger buns. Genie had been resourceful, she took inventory of every food item at Frankie’s. We ate the food that would go bad first and the food that could be eaten without being cooked. It was a well rounded meal for what we had and after 6 potatoes I was stuffed.
Jamie and I pushed the bench seats together and made a bed one for him and one for me. I snuggled deep down inside of my sleeping bag and turned to him.
We had sat silent all day camouflaged in our surroundings to avoid being noticed. The boys had decided we needed to lay low for a few days, let things settle down. That made me nervous. Each breath I took I felt like something was gaining on me, getting closer, sniffing me out, hunting me. I had failed with getting through to my family and finally Jamie told us all to turn off our cell phones. Save the batteries, he said. We took the batteries out of our phones and laid the pieces in a pile on the table. Later Genie put them all in the front pocket of her book bag for safe keeping. We had decided to take shifts watching the doors. Every two hours we would change up. Bart was on first shift. We were all scared. All shaky and it scared me that any of us would have to stand guard with a rifle ready to shoot down intruders. But we all agreed, I mean how could we not? It was their life or ours.
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