“No shit?” says an older founding father in the background, who wears his gray hair in pigtail braids like Willie Nelson. He comes forward.
“I did time with Avon DeWitt a few years back. Any relation?”
Felix, now Samson once more, nods. “He’s my father.”
Willie Nelson turns to the tall clown. “His dad’s good people,” he says, “solid.”
The tall clown takes a drag on his cigarette, looks at the Prophet. “What about your dad? Is he good people?”
“My father killed my mother in the kitchen with a shovel,” says the Prophet, “and then shot himself in the head.”
The tall clown smiles. “Epic,” he says.
Felix squints into the falling darkness. “Who are you guys?”
“We are War Boys,” shouts the oldest ash-white teen.
“War Boys!” shout the others.
Samson looks at the Prophet. He has heard that shout somewhere before. In the streets? On the news? Or wait, could it be from a movie? It is. It’s Mad Max. It’s the post-apocalypse. Aqua cola and the blood bag from the bullet farm.
WITNESS ME!
The War Boys take Felix and the Prophet to a low building, where a mix of soldiers and militia carry out the bodies of dead air force officers and lay them on the ground. Inside, they find six air force cadets hanging from the rafters, killed in the night by their own hand. This is what made the base so easy to take. The anarchy of self-sabotage, suicide as the body’s way of turning on itself.
The tall clown puts Samson and the Prophet in an office and posts a guard. Samson paces, desperate to get out, but the Prophet finds a corner and sits. He puts his head to the wall, listening to the hum of deep motors, generators, air filtration systems, and other more industrial overtones of war.
“I wanted to join the Boy Scouts when I was little,” he says. “I found this handbook at a thrift sale. A Scout Is Trustworthy. A Scout Is Loyal. I used to study the badges—Tenderfoot, Eagle—and the patches—Webelos, Senior Patrol Leader, Bugler—I’d mouth the words out loud at night under the covers, reading with an old metal flashlight. I wanted to be honorable. I wanted to be useful and self-sufficient. But there were no troops in my area. So I taught myself. Trail safety, the names of clouds. Then God spoke to me from a tree stump. I begged my parents to take me to church, but my father had been raised Catholic and he was having no part of it. Good thing, too. The church, the Boy Scouts.”
He taps the drywall, looking for hollow sounds. Samson grabs the doorknob, rattles it, earning a throat-cutting gesture from the clown on duty.
“What does it say about a society,” says the Prophet, “when it cedes its moral leadership to perverts and pedophiles?”
Samson balls his hands and presses them against his temples. “I can’t listen to this right now,” he says. “We have to get out of here.”
“He will free us in the morning. So, sit. Stop worrying.”
Samson looks at him. “Who’s gonna free us?”
The Prophet stares at him. “What you have to understand,” he says, “is that our captors believe they are right, that they are holy. They too believe they are on a mission from God.”
Felix rubs his eyes. His adrenaline levels are finally dropping, and suddenly he feels like he could sleep for a thousand years.
“And all I’m saying,” says Felix, “is what if you’re both wrong?”
The Prophet leans his head back against the wall, closes his eyes. “Get some rest,” he says. “Tomorrow will be very, very difficult.”
He is still after that, breathing deeply, seeming to fall asleep immediately. Felix, born Samson, stands at the glass, watching the mayhem of victorious militias. They’ve erected a bonfire on the tarmac out of office furniture and gasoline, and they set it ablaze with flare guns fired from three sides. It goes up with a whoosh that sucks the oxygen from the air. Then the bacchanal begins, death metal played through loudspeakers, insurgents surging in spontaneous mosh pits.
Through it all the Prophet sleeps, lips parted, face relaxed, angelic.
On the tarmac, fistfights break out, then dissolve into drunken celebrations, bottles of vodka and whiskey and gin swallowed and spilled and finally smashed. The boogaloo is here, and it is glorious.
Free at last, they shout, throwing their palms to the sky. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.
Kayfabe
In the hours after Senator LaRue martyred himself in the Senate, flags around the country were lowered to half-mast. Three hundred and forty-seven people had been killed by the junior senator from Idaho, including Judge Margot Nadir, her husband, and fourteen other US senators, including representatives from Maine, Nebraska, and Hawaii. Simultaneously, violence broke out around the country in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign. Police stations and army bases erupted with infighting, as true allegiances were revealed. Was this it? Civil war? And yet in small towns and rural communities around the country, life continued as normal. Farmers rose and milked their cows. Stockbrokers bought low and sold high. Suburban moms dropped their kids at soccer camp and drove to the dry bar, scrolling through Facebook posts telling them that the bombing was a false flag operation, a ploy by the radical left to justify the declaration of martial law.