Authors: James Hunt
***
Brooke was marched forward to the patrol station with her hands cuffed behind her back. She turned around to see where they were taking her kids, but the officers had kept them in the patrol cars. She could see John holding Emily, who was crying, in the back seat. The cruiser was parked right next to the patrol car her children were in, and she watched another officer drive it into the confiscation lot and close the gate.
She was thankful the officers had the decency not to handcuff her children, even though she and Eric were both restrained. The officer pushed her in the back and told her to keep moving. She and Eric had been separated as well once they were brought to the interrogation room. She was pulled in first.
A tall, bald, clean-shaven sergeant stood next to Brooke in her chair. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her. Her eyes found the pistol at the sergeant’s side. She suddenly became very aware of the tightness of the cuffs.
“How the hell did a woman with two kids get ahold of a Claymore mine?” the sergeant asked.
Brooke remained silent. She eyed the name on his badge. Meyers. He took a seat across from her. There was no table between them. A piece of one-way glass covered half of the wall next to her. She looked slightly to the left. Under the florescent lighting of the interrogation room, she could see her reflection. Her sundrenched cheeks, wind-whipped hair, and the thin layer of sand covering every inch of her made her look as if she was coming home from work after a day in the solar fields. What she wouldn’t give for it to be the end of just another work day.
“Looks like you guys have been through it,” Meyers said. “I’m assuming the bullet holes etched across your car weren’t part of some restoration plan?”
She’d given all she had to make it across the border. Well, she had done it, but the ending wasn’t what she’d hoped. She’d traveled almost half the length of the country, but her sister’s house felt farther away than ever before. Brooke started retracing the past few days in her mind.
Where did I foul up? When did I turn left when I should have turned right? When did I rest when I should have pushed through?
“Look, lady, I know what’s going on is messed up. I get it. But you know that I can’t let you stay here. The federal boys have been hovering around, and I can’t even take a piss without some DC prick checking on me. We’re not going to charge you with anything. You’ll spend the night here, and we’ll be shipping you back to San Diego in the morning. I’m sorry,” Meyers said.
“It’s dead.”
“What?”
“San Diego. There isn’t anything left there to go back to.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Please. There… there must be something you can do. Anything.”
Brooke’s voice cracked. Her desperation had peaked. She couldn’t have her family sent back to where they had came from. As bad as it had been before they left, San Diego had no doubt descended to something lower than hell.
“We’ll give you details of the trip in the morning. In the meantime, I can give you and your family a cell together. The man you’re with, is he your husband?” the sergeant asked.
“What about my belongings? My car? Will they be returned?”
“No. They’ll be staying with us.”
Once they were deported back to San Diego, their only hope was to head north, up the coast of California, to what remained of the redwoods. That small sliver of the state was the only green left in the Southwest. She desperately wanted to avoid that area because she knew that’s where everyone would go. That part of the state was the wealthiest, and the only way for someone to get in was with money—or service, which was more akin to slavery.
The sergeant escorted Brooke to a cell where her children were waiting and unlocked her cuffs. She dropped to her knees. John and Emily rushed to her. She clutched her children, pulling them close. This was what she still had, and it was more than enough to get her through whatever happened next.
***
Brent rubbed his eyes. He’d caught himself nodding off twice already. Since Tim and the others had left, there were fewer people to handle the guard shifts. He’d been pulling double duty to pick up the slack.
He couldn’t get what Brooke had told him out of his mind. It’d plagued him for the past twenty-four hours.
This place is dead.
Was it, though? Brent had made it this far. His family still had food, water, and shelter. The Mexican gangs were still too unorganized to pose a serious threat. But each time he pushed Brooke’s comments out of his head, a cloud of doubt would reappear, triggered by some primal fear deep within him.
Brent tried distracting himself by taking a walk around the perimeter. Loosening up his muscles and breathing the night air might offer some relief. He pulled his jacket tight to fend off the chilled air and walked softly around the building. Everything was quiet. They hadn’t received an attack from anyone since Brooke had been here. The stress of the past few days rolled off him. They were fine.
After a few laps, Brent decided to head back inside. His hand was on the door handle when the roar of jets sounded overhead. He couldn’t see them in the night sky, but the boom from their engines shook his bones. He could hear the fighters zooming back and forth in the sky. The sound of gunfire echoed in the darkness.
The noises stirred the others awake, and Linda came outside, along with a few other group members. His daughter, Kara, rubbed her eyes and held Linda’s hand.
“Brent, what’s going on?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know. Take everyone back inside. Find a sturdy central room with no windows and stay there. Go,” Brent said.
Linda ushered the group inside, and the small cloud of doubt that Brent had had in his mind grew into a raging storm. In the distance, the terrors of his imagination were brought to life as bombs exploded over Phoenix.
She was right.
***
Sergeant Meyers scanned Brooke’s and Eric’s IDs into the system. When he saw that Eric had been an officer in the military, he let out a long whistle. “So that’s how they got the Claymore.”
Once he notified the federal authorities of the deportation and completed the paperwork on Brooke’s transportation, he tossed Eric’s file onto another officer’s desk.
“This one was military. Have fun with that, Chuck,” Meyers said and walked outside.
The condensation from Meyer’s breath puffed sprays of the frigid desert air. He never could understand how it could get so cold after being so hot. He lit the tip of a cigarette, inhaled, and felt the fire burn in his lungs. He let out a long, satisfying drag and watched the still-smoldering brush burned by Eric’s bomb.
Nothing he did sat well with him anymore. There was always a sour pit in his stomach, no matter what he ate or drank. It was a perpetual disdain for the country he was living in. He knew the poison of DC had spread to every corner of the United States. Everyone had made their bed, and now they were stuck sleeping in it.
Meyers smoked the cigarette until it was half gone then dropped it to the ground and snuffed it out with the toe of his boot. The twisting motions of his foot stopped when a series of gunshots was fired. His hand instinctively reached for his pistol. He squinted out into the darkness. He could see flashes from gun barrels in the distance.
The headlights of the patrol cars illuminated what looked like hundreds of people marching in their direction. The sound of tank tracks cut through the night air, and one of the tanks blasted a guard tower. The explosion decimated the post, causing a rainfall of glass, wood, and metal.
“My God,” Meyers said.
Jets roared overhead, and Sergeant Meyers rushed inside the building. Officers were scrambling everywhere. He burst into the captain’s office, where the captain was screaming into the phone. “I don’t care who you have to wake up! We need the goddamn military!” The captain slammed the phone onto its cradle, pulled a gun out of his desk, and loaded a magazine.
“Captain, what the hell is going on?” Meyers asked.
“Mexico.”
***
The first explosion sounded distant from inside the cell, but the next one rocked the entire building. Bits of concrete from the ceiling fell to the floor, and Brooke instinctively covered John and Emily’s heads.
Officers ran back and forth down the hallway. She rushed to the front of the cell, reaching her hands through the iron bars, trying to grab somebody’s attention.
“Please, let us out of here. Hey. Stop!”
Brooke managed to grab hold of the shirt of one of the officers, but with one powerful yank, he escaped. Another explosion, louder than the first, shook the building. The lights flickered on and off. This was too intense to be some gang. Before she had time to think about it further, Sergeant Meyers came barreling down the hallway, fumbling the cell keys in his hand.
“Sergeant!” Brooke said.
“You guys need to get out of here now. The Mexican military is marching right toward us,” Meyers said.
“The man that was with us. Where is he?”
“Look, lady, I don’t have time for this.”
Meyers pulled out the keys to Brooke’s cell.
“Please, where is he?” Brooke asked.
Meyers’s hesitation gave her hope, and after a few moments he finally headed down the cellblock. Eric was being held at the far end of the hallway. The building continued to shake from the blasts outside. Brooke cradled the back of Emily’s head as her daughter’s arms clutched tight around her. When Meyers returned to unlock the cell, Eric was with him.
“I knew I was growing on you,” Eric said.
Meyers gave a quick nod, then the four of them rushed outside. The border fence was destroyed. It had been replaced by an advancing army shooting anything that moved.
The soldiers were grouped with tanks that rolled over the Texan soil, blasting into the border patrol compound. In between themselves and the Mexican army, Brooke could see the fenced in-lot where her cruiser was parked.
“There!” Brooke shouted.
Brooke tried to stay focused on getting to the cruiser, but with the gunshots and explosions, she found her eyes roving the compound for any soldiers that were close. The compound was completely overrun. Blood-soaked officers retreated to whatever cover they could find.
If what Sergeant Meyers had said was true, and it really was the Mexican army, then this wasn’t a test of defenses. This was a declaration of war.
During the chaos, the guard at the gate of the confiscation compound had abandoned his post. Brooke found the cruiser’s keys stashed in the empty security booth and then rushed to the car with Emily in her arms. She set Emily in the back seat of the cruiser, and John helped buckle her in. She was shaking and crying hysterically.
Brooke cranked the engine to life. She glanced at the fuel gauge. They had a quarter of a tank. It wasn’t enough to get them to North Carolina, but more than enough to put some distance between themselves and the bloodbath.
“Shit!” Eric said as Brooke reversed out of the lot.
“What?”
“They took the rifle.”
The moment they were clear of the confiscation lot, Brooke turned and almost swerved into a patrol car fleeing the scene in the same direction they were headed.
Bullets continued to rip through the night air, and explosions lit up the sky in her rearview mirror. Brooke flicked on the headlights. It didn’t matter if they were spotted now. They were the least of the authority’s worries.
The cruiser was topping almost eighty when the familiar boom of jets roared in the distance. Then Brooke watched as a bomb ignited the entire compound, turning night into day with a blast that shook the ground they traveled on.
Brooke drove for an hour before she felt comfortable stopping. When the cruiser came to halt, she could feel her arms shaking.
“You all right?” Eric asked.
No.
She wasn’t all right. She wasn’t okay. Her family wasn’t safe. They had barely escaped with their lives and were fugitives in a country that no longer recognized them as citizens. Her breath came out in pants, and she grabbed her chest. Everything felt tight.
Brooke closed her eyes and focused on drawing in deep, steady breaths. With each expansion and deflation of her lungs, she could feel the tightness loosening. Her pulse slowed.
When she opened her eyes, she could see Emily and John’s reflections in her rearview mirror. Emily had cried herself exhausted. John was in shock. Despite what was behind them, they were one step closer to North Carolina. They had made it onto U.S. soil. They were alive. They still had the cruiser. All wasn’t lost.