Death Springs Eternal: The Rift Book III (36 page)

The guy then took a page from the back of his clipboard, set it on top, and began scribbling on it. His eyes took on a wild, frenzied look as he worked. When he was finished, he slid the paper across the table.

“Congratulations, Mr. Mahoney,” he said. “You’ve been chosen.”

“Huh?”

David stood up. “As a fit young man of suitable lineage and faith, you have been selected to join the civilian ranks of the COC division of the SNF. You will join your outfit immediately, be given a uniform, bunk with your new brothers, and learn the art of civil defense. Your group is set to train under the 3
^rd
Combat Division of the SNF Ground Forces—otherwise known as the Marauders.” He cupped his hand to his mouth. “Most of them are actually what’s left of the 42
^nd
Airborne, from back when the
US
was still the
US
, so you got great teachers. But be careful. They’re vicious.”

“What the hell?” Christopher gasped.

“After your training, you will be regulated to the
Lakeside
area, where the rest of the COC resides. Your escort will be here to retrieve you and the rest of the recruits in a half-hour. God bless you.”

David saluted, bowed his head slightly, and turned to walk away.

“Wait!” Christopher shouted.

David came back over to the table. “What is it, Mr. Mahoney?”

“What the hell
is
this? What’s the COC? What’s the SNF?
This don’t
make sense!”

“Oh, kid,” said David, grinning. “You guys really
were
kept in the dark over there, weren’t you? Anyway, COC is our segment of society—The Church of Creation, under the leadership of Reverend Jacob Handley.”

“And SNF?”

“Those are the initials of the military arm of the New United Brotherhood. To most it stands for Soldiers of Newfound Freedom, but to us…let’s just say we’ve changed the meaning to fit our mission statement.”

“What’s that?”

David pointed at the paper he’d slid across the table, his fingertip resting right above the letterhead. He then swiveled and marched away. This time, Christopher didn’t call him back.

He read the words on the paper instead.

Society Nigger Free.

Christopher’s world began spinning, and he slammed his forehead against the desk.

-5-

Racism is dead.

I could not tell you how many times I have heard that very statement over the years. I argued with my colleagues endlessly while they waxed poetic, speaking of the advancements the African American community had made over the years in education, living conditions, and earned wages. Many of them thought these facts to be self evident, yet all one must do is peel back a single societal layer to see the river of ugliness flowing beneath.

No more do I question why they made such claims, for I now understand fully the nature behind them. The individuals who purported these statements—including a small number of my fellow African-Americans—were afraid. They were afraid of becoming insignificant, afraid that within the ills of society they might find those same ills inside themselves, afraid of upsetting the
Status Quo.
 
It is this last fear that is most ubiquitous, for now I sit here, in a place that had once been beautiful, and all I see is ugliness disguised as splendor.

I have been watching. For ten days I have glimpsed around corners, snuck through trails, peered over the walls that separate us. What I see is a lie, a culture built upon falsehoods and communal fear, both perpetuated by the chain of command. Most non-black faces I see greet me with one of three emotions—scorn, dread, or apathy. The scornful cast daggers at me with their eyes; the fearful cower, quickly moving as far away as possible; the apathetic do not give a second glance. And of all these emotions, the third—the lack
of emotion—I find to be the most common. Why is it they pay me no heed, even though there are none other like us in all of the city, so far as I have seen?

I ask myself why. Why do I find those of Hispanic and Asian descent, but none of African or Middle Eastern? And afterward, when I have thought on it for long enough, I think myself obtuse for not realizing that the answer is plain to see, and should be for anyone with a cognitive mind..

We have become scapegoats, a tool to unite the people, nothing more.

It is like slavery all over again.

So now I think back to that statement—racism is dead—and cannot help but laugh at how erroneous it was. Of
course
racism is not dead. It has been bred into the populace since the day the first society bloomed. Our great-grandfathers taught it to our grandfathers, our grandfathers taught it to our fathers, our fathers taught it to us. And we have facilitated the stigma every step of the way, embracing our role as the subjugated, the helpless,
the
flawed. Even when we attempted to pull ourselves up and out, we fell back into the same old traps. Modern rap music is a textbook example. The movement began as a tool for our youth to chant to their brothers, to poetically tell the tale of their struggles, to let those like them know
you are not alone in what you feel.
But through popularity and a media culture always seeking the next throwaway moneymaker, it became tinted with self-hatred. For every black man made rich beyond belief, there were still thousands who starved. For every black youth forced to contemplate their path in life, there were ten white children for whom
NIGGER
became a common and acceptable term
.

Racism is dead? What an absolute joke. To utter such a thing is to draw the shades of your own mind, to huddle in the warm, wet darkness of ignorance and denial, telling yourself you are not a bad person, not a bad person, not a bad person. That same mantra is what allowed the situation here in
Richmond
to occur, for all the militias and hate groups that had been rising in popularity over the years to band together and form the core of what we now see. And to think we are only in the south. I cannot imagine what it is like right now out west…

“William?”

Billy glanced up from his notepad, squinting against the afternoon sun. He put down his pencil—now just a nub, one that hurt his fingers to use—and rubbed his hands together. Grass rustled under the blanket he sat upon as he shifted to a more comfortable position. A hand fell on his knee, and he turned to the woman beside him.

Cloris
Adams was a nurse. She had a thin nose, wide eyes, well-manicured eyebrows, and skin many shades lighter than his. She was older than him—forty-nine, to be exact—and yet her flesh held not a single ripple, making her seem ten to twenty years younger. The first time she spoke to him back at the Omni, she’d seemed cold, shrewd in her choice of words. Her shrewd Pakistani heritage bled out with every word she uttered. Almost immediately he wanted to find out more about her.

Her initial approach to speaking with him proved a defense mechanism, a logical way of approaching a man that fascinated her without opening herself up to pain. After the ice was broken, their relationship became one built around lighthearted banter and fond recollections. Their courtship was glacial-slow, as Billy often found himself in short supply of both. They hadn’t even
so
much as held hands.

And yet he couldn’t deny the attraction. She was intelligent, beautiful in a non-traditional way, and somehow the weight of the world seemed to fall off his shoulders when he saw her. That was the reason he asked her to join him on his daily jaunts into the woods, where he would lay out a blanket and sit for hours, notebook spread out before him, writing. She was the only person other than his triumvirate of close friends who could pull him back from the dark places his thoughts brought him to.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think you should put the pad away now.”

“Why?”

Cloris’s
eyes widened.

“Listen,” she said.

Billy closed his eyes, and the sound of crunching pine straw came to his ears. Someone was coming toward them—many
someones
, by the sound of it. He tossed the used-up pencil over his shoulder, shoved the binder into his waistline, and covered it with his shirt.

“Why are you so frightened?” he asked. “It is most likely one of those from the apartments come to check on us.”

Cloris
shook her head as she rose to her feet. “No, it’s not.” Her eyes gazed off into the trees. Her jaw was locked tight.

“How do you know?”

“I grew up at
Fort
Benning
, William. I know the sound of marching when I hear it.”

Billy stood up and slung the bag over his shoulder.

“Should we run?” asked
Cloris
.

“I would say no,” he replied. His heart pounded with excitement. It had only been a few days ago that First Airman Lumley had come to him, informing him that he was searching for transportation to get them out of the city unnoticed. He’d told Lumley when and where to find him if he wasn’t at his apartment, so the preparations must have been made already. He rubbed a hand over his bald pate and smiled.

Lumley didn’t emerge from the surrounding woods. Instead, a group of men wearing civilian clothing stepped out, led by a man dressed in
preacher’s
black. Billy recognized the shock of white hair, the haunting blue eyes,
the
jaw that ceaselessly worked back and forth, back and forth, as if he was chewing something.

“It is worse than I thought,” he whispered.

“What is?” asked
Cloris
.

Billy shook his head.

The man in black leaned against a tree, ten feet away. “William,” he said, his voice hinting at mockery. His entourage formed a semicircle around him.

“Reverend,” Billy replied.

“You know this man?” said
Cloris
.

“
This man
is named Reverend Jacob Handley,
m’dear
,” Handley said. “And yes, the professor and I know each other quite well. Don’t we, William?”

Billy eased back a step. Handley had made a name for himself as a political go-getter, a reverend for a small but influential Baptist church in
Mobile
,
Alabama
. When Billy was promoted to head of the English department at Penn State, it had been Handley and the Church of Creation who railed against his appointment, stating that a man who’d written books like
Last Night’s Train
and
The New King
, tomes that expressed in detail the virtues of black power, righteous indignation, and the possibility of a last-gasp violent revolution, would poison the students of that great institution with his anti-American rhetoric. Billy hadn’t been afraid of the man, thinking him a redneck of underwhelming intelligence, but he and his followers were a major annoyance early on, protesting outside the campus in the same way they would the funeral of a dead soldier. It wasn’t until a couple years later, after a run-in with the man at a book signing in
Fayetteville
where Billy made a fool of him in
public, that
the harassment stopped.