There was a weird transition where for a while I was waiting at the sawhorses Schlossman was ferrying a block down the road to set up his new barricade, then I actually pitched in for a while and helped until another cop told me I wasn’t allowed to be behind the lines (even though the lines weren’t actually established yet), and then I was waiting, bored, for Schlossman to finish humping up his sawhorses while sweating buckets in his armor.
And then, once we were all set up one block farther along, he called me back to him and made me stand, just a few feet away. I asked if I could go sit on the curb and he said no.
“What? Come on, I’ve been standing here the whole time, it’s not like I’m gonna run away.”
He just shook his head and listened to his radio. I inched away from him and he snapped his head to me and shook his head. “Don’t play games,” he said.
I got out my screen and texted Phuong.
> Get out of there then!
> I can’t, the cops say I can’t go
> What?!!? Are you under arrest?
> No
> Are you being detained?
> Uh I am not sure
> Ask!
>??
> Just say, AM I BEING DETAINED?
> Really?
> BROOKS!
“Am I being detained?”
Schlossman rolled his eyes. “No, you aren’t being detained.”
> I’m not being detained
> Say AM I FREE TO GO?
> Really?
> DUDE
“Am I free to go?”
“Really?”
I reread Phuong’s texts.
“I guess so?”
“Sir, you are free to go. But if you go, that might constitute probable cause. We’re having kind of a tense moment here, in case you haven’t noticed, and if you make things complicated or difficult, it’s hard to say how that’ll work out for you. I don’t know who’s texting you a bust card there, but I seriously recommend that you just sit tight until we’re done with you.”
I looked from the screen to the cop. “How about you let me sit on the curb over there, then?”
He shook his head and puffed out his cheeks. “You do what you gotta do, kid,” he said.
> They’re letting me sit on the curb
> This is a load of bullshit you should just go
The ruckus from the drone van rose in pitch and intensity and I stared at them. So did Schlossman.
The hubbub died down then, and Schlossman listened to his radio. “They got it,” he said. “All done.”
“Really?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s what they tell me.”
But I still wasn’t free to go. I sat back on the curb and texted Phuong and posted about the bomb and waited for one of the bomb specialists to come by. After an hour or so, I got a call from the SPECIALIST JEONG FT WORTH ANTITERRORISM CENTER and I picked up.
“Well, that’s all done,” he said.
“What is?”
“The bomb. Thank you for phoning it in. I have to gather a little more data from you and you can be on your way.”
I stared at Specialist Jeong. He wasn’t much older than me, and he’d helped disarm an IED from three states away.
“Hey,” I said. “Before we begin, let me just say thanks, okay? That was scarily efficient. It feels good to know that even with everything going wrong right now, people like you are keeping us safe from the whack jobs who want to send us back to the 2020s.”
He grinned and ducked his head. “That’s really nice of you to say, Mr. Palazzo, but that one was especially easy. It’s a standard design, the militias just download the plans and build ’em. I’ve dealt with eleven of them this week. Yours was my third for the day and it’s just after lunchtime here.”
“Oh.” So much for my warm feeling about the competence of my government in the face of a wave of terror attacks. I felt suddenly hopeless and tired. So tired.
“All right,” I said. “Well, that’s a hundred percent terrible.”
He shrugged. “At least they’re not very creative. At this point, we know exactly what to do when one of these things pops up. Now, let’s get you out of here.”
* * *
Three bombs went off across the state of California that day: Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, and Mendocino. Eighteen more were caught and defused.
I thought it was bad before, but by the next morning there were bomb-detector drones zipping through the sky and the bullshit checkpoints got much less bullshitty, with hardcore bag searches and pat-downs for everyone, not just people who fit the profile.
“How long can they keep this up?” I said to Phuong, as we cooked dinner for her housemates.
“Judging from past experiences, a hell of a long time,” she said. “I mean, put yourself in their shoes—how’d you like to be the police chief or the mayor who says they can stand down … and then a bomb goes off?”
“You make it sound like they’ll never stop, then.”
“Brooks, do you know how long this country made people take off their shoes to fly? One failed shoe bomber, twenty years of business travelers wading through slush at airport checkpoints in their socks.”
I scraped the habaneros I’d been mincing into a little pinch-bowl and washed my hands three times to get the oils off my fingertips before I forgot and picked my nose or (yowch) wiped my butt. “But they stopped eventually, right?”
“Eventually. After they came up with body scanners. As far as I can tell, we’re still operating under the presumption that shoe bombs are a thing, even though they’ve literally never been a thing, or at least not a successful thing.”
Dinner was a success in that the food was good—green Thai chili over zucchini noodles—but even Phuong’s housemates were too glum to make much of a meal out of it. It didn’t help that the house got buzzed by bomb-detector drones twice during the meal. I’d made coconut cream to put over mango for dessert and everyone made a show out of enjoying it, but we all knew it was just a show.
Arina floated the idea of watching a movie or playing a game after dinner, but Miguel said he had to work early the next day and was going to bed after he finished dessert. I didn’t blame him. The sooner this stupid day ended, the better.
Jacob and Don were just clearing the table when all our screens started going crazy.
They’d bombed City Hall.
* * *
The first impressions were crazy: aerial shots of City Hall with its facade and east wall just gone, rubble and smoke all around. On-the-ground shots from the sawhorses, smoke and dust and people on stretchers. Later, we found out that this wasn’t a gigantic bomb going off, but rather six or possibly seven well-placed demolition charges planted by someone bent on maximum damage.
The Net of a Thousand Lies swung into full effect, with conspiracy theories and secondhand hot takes piling up, and we all did our bit by pitching in on a Reality-Based Community channel that vetted the social flurry and boosted the stuff that was well-cited and factual. This, of course, attracted brigaders who created their own channel that supposedly showed our bad faith in downranking the conspiracy theories about this being a false-flag op, citing examples where Blue Helmets had supposedly set off bombs and made it look like it came from plute-backed militias to drum up support for their cause. I tried wading in there to argue with them but Phuong pointed out that I kept holding my breath whenever I typed in those channels and told me that if I was having rage apnea, I had to step back.
The bombs went off during a committee meeting. They killed a councilor and the deputy mayor and hospitalized the mayor and the city attorney, along with nine city employees, including two people from planning, a security guard, and a cleaner. One of the bombs was hidden in the supply cupboard where they kept their cleaning products. They lost an eye and a hand.
Riverside’s city hall was bombed, too, almost at the same time. Anaheim’s city hall had twelve bombs, but they didn’t go off and after the Riverside and Burbank bombings, every city hall in the state got a top-to-bottom search by millimeter-wave drones. Six more had bombs in them, though in the case of La Jolla, they later determined that the bombs were years old and were left over from an unsuspected, long-failed bombing plot. No one could figure out if that was cause for alarm or relief. Or both.
* * *
The next day, militias seized a solar farm in Mojave, a decommissioned Camp Pendleton auxiliary armory, and a desalination plant near Santa Barbara and declared them sovereign territory. There was a lot more viral video nonsense about fringed flags and deep states and the need to get back on “sound money”: the gold standard or at least gold-backed cryptocurrency.
Compared with LA, we had it easy in Burbank. Across the city-limit line, there were National Guardsmen and whole neighborhoods ordered into lockdown when “credible threat intelligence” indicated some shit might be about to go down. The LAPD officers mobilized for the emergency were clearly incredibly glad to be back in command of the streets after more than a decade of being sidelined by social workers and addiction counselors and child and youth specialists. Finally, a public emergency that demanded a massive show of force.
Burbank PD took its MRAP out for a single spin down Magnolia but the stunt generated so many downvotes that it got parked for the duration. But the checkpoints got more serious still, and then we got a notice saying they were overflying with high-altitude scanners as well as low-flying drones, and cautioning us to steer clear of sewers and other utility spaces as these were now also drone-patrolled and we didn’t want to create false alarms.
Heaven forfend.
I’d been spending so much time at Phuong’s place that Ana Lucía texted me to tell me that my houseguests were worried that they’d crowded me out of my own home and I felt horribly guilty and then stupid about it. I decided to channel all that anxiety into something productive and invited Phuong’s housemates and Ana Lucía over for a big dinner at mine, with all my sleepover guests as guests of honor. I made three kinds of stew: lentil, tinga, and chili with cornbread dumplings. The kitchen was still a wreck, but I’d bought some standalone induction burners and I set them up on a couple of Gramps’s card tables and borrowed big pots from the library, along with some long folding tables and plates and chairs that my houseguests helped me set up in the backyard.
A woman called Emily—shy, hardly said a word to me since moving in—emerged from her room with hand-cut colored streamers, like paper-doll chains but more intricate and beautiful, and she strung them from tree to fence to tree in the backyard, making it look enchanted. She taught Moises, who slept in the other room, how to make paper flowers, and they created one for each place setting.
Phuong’s housemates brought whiskey (of course), but also some actual brewed booze, a ginger-habanero kombucha that they warned me was 7 percent and that was so spicy it made my earwax runny (but in a good way).
The dinner was a good reminder of just how funny and fun my new housemates were, and to make things even sweeter, Milena and Wilmar came by for dessert, with homemade granita in a huge cooler that they lugged into the backyard from a three-wheel cargo bike they’d booked. It had real chunks of lemon peel in it and turned our faces into delighted, sour puckers. Guitars came out, people clapped time, some people danced.
Drones buzzed us, first a couple, then a flock of about twenty, because I guess we fit some kind of AI profile or because someone who was watching their feeds wanted to get a better look at the gathering. As they got louder and lower, we all took out our screens and started livestreaming them and then someone must have gotten the message that they were coming off like assholes and the drones pulled back.
We brought out washtubs and everyone took turns washing the dishes—they’d go through sterilization at the library anyway—and wiping down the tables and before long we had it all packed up, and my houseguests went off to bed, and Wilmar and Milena gave me long goodbye hugs.
“Still some granita left,” Wilmar said, grabbing three bowls off the dry rack and dishing up the last of it for me and Phuong and Ana Lucía, before setting off.
The bottom of the granita was the most sour of all and so we washed it down with the last of the fiery ginger beer, and the spice and the sour and the sweet just wrecked our mouths, again, in the very best way, and then the booziness of the kombucha settled over us and we just lolled there for a while on our folding chairs, sweating in the nighttime heat, mouths afire and apucker, until Phuong said, “Wow. That was a hell of a dinner party.”
Ana Lucía and I giggled. A drone buzzed us and just hovered for a long time. It killed the mood. They had mics and cameras, millimeter-wave, and some of them did gas chromatography, looking for black powder residue. Supposedly nothing we said was listened to by a human, but if something happened later, a judge could issue a warrant that let the cops go back in time and listen in on us.
“I want to throw a rock at it,” I said, after it had hovered for five minutes.
“Don’t joke,” Ana Lucía said. “It’s listening to you.”
“I. WANT. TO—” That was all I got out before Phuong clamped a hand over my mouth, then she turned it into a caress and ruffled my hair.
The drone flew off. Ana Lucía picked up her chair and brought it in close to ours, so she was facing us, making a knee-to-knee triangle.
“I need to talk to you guys.” In the dim light of my backyard, her face was all shadows and planes, cheekbones and hollows.
We nodded in the shadows. She looked up at the sky, checking for drones, then brought out a screen and turned on some white noise. I got a premonitory thrill.
“Look,” she said, then drew in a deep breath and stared at her hands for a moment. “Look. It’s not a coincidence, you know. How could it be a coincidence? Things being what they are, people like us losing our homes and coming to places like this, it was always going to be a trigger. There are plenty of people in government and especially in the police who have been playing nicey-nice with all your GND stuff, but who never believed it—whose version of saving America is kicking all the people who look like me out of the country and squatting on top of all the wealth they stole from us.”
She broke off, stared at her hands some more, cranked up the gain on the white noise. “I’m not saying white people, middle-class people, they can’t be allies. I mean, obviously. Look at you two. I mean, that’s why I’m talking to you now. But before I say the next part I need to know that whatever I say, it’s not going to spread without us all agreeing on who it spreads to.”
“I promise,” I said, and waited for Phuong, whose face I couldn’t read in the dark.
“Ana Lucía, I agree with everything you just said but now you’re asking me to make promises without my being able to understand what I’m promising. I take my promises too seriously for that. I trust you to be reasonable and to stick to your personal code of ethics. Will you trust me?”
Ana Lucía thought it over. I felt like a nitwit for making a promise instead of saying what Phuong had just said.
“I trust you,” Ana Lucía said. “God dammit. Okay, here it is. This isn’t the ending, this is the start. First burning crosses. Then takeovers. Then bombings. They’re ramping up, escalating. There’re so many guns out there, and mostly in their hands. And this is us-or-them time. Us or them. They want to push me into the ocean, me and everyone else like me. Then they’ll make you clean their toilets. And the world will burn. They’ve got money, they’ve got organization, and they are making their move.
“When it’s you or them, you have to choose a side. There aren’t any bystanders. I’ve chosen a side. There’re some of us, lots of us, all across the country, who are ready to do this thing. Hide in the hills. Fight back. Resist. Fight. Fight like our lives are on the line, because they are. Fight like we can’t depend on the cops and the government and the army and the National Guard to stand up for us, because they won’t. You know they won’t. When have they ever stood up for us?”
“What about when they kept the polls open for Uwayni?”
Ana Lucía gave me a withering look. “We kept the polls open. Brown people. Black people. They showed up because there would have been a civil war if they didn’t get out in front of it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good point.” I felt stupid and white.
“Yes, it is.” I couldn’t tell for sure, but it sounded like maybe she was choked up. She took a few deep breaths. “They’ve never changed. Uwayni didn’t change them, she just made it socially unacceptable to call for genocide. For a while. No more. Genocide was hibernating, not dead. It’s coming for us. Think about Florida.”
There’d been so many bombings in Florida, I’d lost count. All targeting the seawalls and pumps that protected the reparations zone, and there were thousands of Black and brown families on their way out of the state, looking for somewhere to live now that their homes were ankle-deep in water. But that was Florida. The South. This was California, right? I thought of the Flotilla, all those Californians. This was California.
This was California.
Phuong said, “What, exactly, are you asking? Like, will we join a militia and shoot people?”
“That’s what I’m asking, Phuong. If they come for your homes, if they come for your future, will you defend it?”
“Ana Lucía—”
“Phuong, I know you’ve been overseas, you’ve seen people lose everything, but I have lost everything. Twice. I was six years old when my parents lost their place in Washington State to the fires. Both of my uncles and my grandma died. Then we came here, built up again. Lost it. Lost it slow and hard. First my parents’ farm went, dried up because they couldn’t afford water rights. They were doing everything right, permaculture, passive atmospheric moisture capture, rotation, drought-resistant crops. Meanwhile, the big farms nearby just outbid us on water and grew fucking almonds, making a big deal out of the fact that their drip irrigators had reduced the water need to half a gallon per nut.
“Have you two ever fought and fought, knowing that the cause was lost, but fighting on anyway, because surrender isn’t an option? That was us on our farm, going without, working such long hours, taking the train to Sacto to beg the Department of Food and Agriculture for a bridge loan and having the nice man look you right in the eyes and tell you that a bridge loan was just going to put off the inevitable, because it’s a bridge to nowhere.
“When the bank took the farm, they sold it to the big guy next door, Mr. Moneyball, who promised he’d leave it fallow and collected a big, fat carbon credit. He generously let us live in a trailer on his farm, and he generously gave us piecework picking for him, and my mom and dad picked like they had on their own place, but they never could get ahead. Never could afford to take care of me or my brother—not just things like college admission prep or school trips, but real basics. Clothes. Food. The Jobs Guarantee was just getting started and we lived on unincorporated land, so there wasn’t any city government to do outreach to people like my parents, not for years.
“By the time anyone came around to tell us about it, it was too late. My dad’s heart condition, my mom’s diabetes. We were still stuck in single-payer land out there, and the clinic didn’t bother to tell them that they could apply for Medicare for All to get their procedures and meds covered. They both got good care once Uwayni just socialized the motherfucker, but by that point all they could hope for was a halfway comfortable death.
“That’s when I became an activist, and of course the landlord didn’t want a mouthy brown girl living in his trailer anymore. The Jobs Guarantee meant I could get decent work as a community organizer, and so that’s what I did, getting all those other people in their trailers up to speed on their rights, but everyone knew it was too late for the whole county. We lost rights to the Colorado River water, then the deepest wells went dry, and then there were seasons of such heavy rain that everything washed away—crops, topsoil, houses and trailers.
“So we came here. My idea. I did my homework, found the places with affluent tax bases, active DSA chapters, low density and room to build in and up to absorb us. I got DSA lawyers to help me figure out the internal refugee stuff, convinced the other kids in town that we had to go, and then they convinced their parents.”
She heaved in a huge sigh. “This was my fucking plan, okay? This plan that left us sleeping in tents in parks while Nazis light up crosses and fire guns and set off bombs? My stupid plan.” Her shoulders shook.
Phuong put a gentle hand on her knee. “You did the right thing. This thing that’s going down right now, it’s statewide. It’s national. Hell, it’s global. Go or stay, you’d be caught in the avalanche. Here, at least, you’ve got solid bedrock to stand on. People who care about each other. Decent people.”
Ana Lucía snorted. “Decent.”
“Yes,” Phuong said. “Decent. Some of them are scared and some of them don’t know what to do when things go wrong, but the mean ones, the hateful ones? They’re loud because they have to be, because there just aren’t that many of ’em. Babe, the shit you lived through, it’s hard trauma, and all this stuff, it’s gotta be triggering. How could it not?”
Ana Lucía pushed her hand away. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not patronizing you,” she said. “Trauma’s the real deal, and there’s a lot of it around here.” I felt her eyes on me in the dark and my heart went thud-thud-thud as I thought about my parents’ death, the shelter, my journey to Burbank. “But you’re talking about a war, Ana Lucía. A war, right here. Is that what you want?”
“Listen to yourself,” she spat. “We have a war. They’re out there with guns and bombs and they are about to steal your revolution back, you fucking complacent idiots! You think you get a choice about whether it’s going to come to fighting? You think power ever gives up without a fight?”
Her voice had risen to a shout. We were all shocked by it, including her. She muttered “Sorry” and looked at her hands.
“Ana Lucía,” I said, then swallowed hard, feeling the lump of grief I got whenever my parents were on my mind. “I, shit.” I heaved breath against tears, got them under control. “I’ve been through death. Mass death. The people out there, the bombers and the shooters, they’re a death cult. They’d rather die, rather drown or cook or shit themselves to death of some disease than give up the ‘freedom’ to pollute, to destroy the planet, to wreck everything. They want to kill us. We want to save them. That’s the difference.”
“So what do you want to do, Brooks? Show them your belly when they come for you, dare them to shoot you? They will shoot you, Brooks. They’ll shoot us all.”
“They can’t shoot us all,” I said. “Even they don’t have enough ammo for that.”
She smiled and sniffed back tears. “Okay, not everybody. But a lot of us. Makes no difference.”
“It does make a difference,” I said. “It makes all the difference. If they get their way, it won’t be by killing everyone who disagrees with them—it’ll be by convincing people that resisting will hurt worse than it will help. If they can’t scare or demoralize or traumatize us into submission, they can’t win.”
Phuong slipped her arm around my shoulders and it felt so good, like a handrail at a cliff’s edge.
Ana Lucía shook her head. “Just words, Brooks. What the hell does that mean? How is that a plan?”
I made a set of balance scales out of my hands. “It’s an equilibrium. The better the alternative seems, the harder they have to fight to crush it. If we want to preserve what we’ve made, if we want to save the world, we can’t just hide in the hills and take sniper shots at these fuckers. That’s the world they want. If we go and build the world that we want—”
“What does that mean though, Brooks? What do you want to do?”
“We should live the fucking revolution, that’s what I want to do. I want to go rebuild City Hall, whether or not the city is there to help us. I want to tear down this idiotic house and build an eight-story mid-rise for families. I want to put streetcar tracks down the middle of Verdugo. I want to rebuild Burbank so it has the capacity to house every displaced person from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and build bomb sensors into the fabric of every road and sidewalk and building so that we can catch these fuckers the instant they start mixing some black powder. I want to stop fighting with these assholes and start fixing the world, saving the country and rescuing our goddamned species.”
I realized I was pacing, declaiming to the night, waving my arms.
“That’s what I want to do, Ana Lucía. I want to stop being afraid of the future.”
“Shit,” Phuong said, and though her face was lost in the shadows, I could hear her smiling. “That sounds way better than starting a war.”
Ana Lucía looked at the sky and said “Aaaaah” but in a theatrical way that let me know she wasn’t angry, just overwhelmed with all the bullshit. Fair enough. There was a lot of bullshit and it was seriously overwhelming.
Phuong got up out of her chair and went around behind Ana Lucía and rubbed her shoulders. She let her head slump and groaned in pleasure.
“Babe,” Phuong said, “don’t let Nazis live rent-free in your head. If you want to exterminate those fuckers, start with fumigating your brains. Brooks is right. They win if we let them define the terms. We win if we show everyone that their terms are bullshit. I’ve seen what happens when you let those fuckers decide what the fight is about and how it’s fought. My first Blue Helmet placement was in Victoria, Australia. Barely lasted a month before they airlifted us all out. It was the wildfires, but not the fires themselves—it was the disinformation machine that said that us ‘greenies’ were setting the fires to prove that the climate was fucked, to clear out the cities and turn them over to refugees, to sell out to the Chinese. A million theories, none of them made any sense, all of them mutually exclusive. Today, you’ve got the militias saying the fires in Oregon and Sonoma are being set by refugee arsonists. I’ve seen how that movie ends. We can’t let it turn into a shooting war or people will choose sides and let fly.
“Today, there are more Blue Helmets than ever in Australia and no one will even admit to having chased us out the last time around. That’s because Australian comrades did the hard work, the solidarity work—evaccing people, building camps, and land care. They backed the Aboriginal landbackers hard, reestablished the controlled burns. They didn’t fight for the revolution, they lived it.”
All the while, she’d been kneading the knots out of Ana Lucía’s shoulders and now worked her way up to her scalp, burying her fingers in her hair as Ana Lucía went limper and limper, the fight draining out of her with the rage. She lolled her head forward, exposing the tension at the base of her skull, and as Phuong went to work on those steel-cable tendons, she said, “Hard to live the revolution with a bullet in your back.”
“It is,” Phuong said. “But it’s also hard to live the revolution when you’re playing Che Guevara in the hills.”
I’d had a feeling coming up in me ever since I’d gotten out of my chair and started pacing, a wild feeling. It was all the fear and sadness from the last days of my parents, mixed with all the rage and helplessness I’d felt in my years under Gramps’s roof and under Gramps’s thumb. It was all the joy and the ferocious new-relationship energy I got whenever I was near Phuong. It was the taste of Don and Miguel’s whiskey and the feeling I got when I slammed the door in Kenneth’s and Derrick’s faces. The feeling I got when Ana Lucía tore a strip out of me for calling the cops when the Magas burned a cross in our backyard and the feeling I got at City Hall when the council came back from their closed-door session and fucked us all. It was the feeling I got when I buried Gramps’s guns and the feeling I got when Phuong and her roommates showed me how to design a fantasy Burbank, one that would support people and the planet.
A wild feeling. Such a wild feeling.
“Let’s just do it. Come on, we can do it. If we’re going to get popped by the cops, let it be because we were doing guerrilla refugee shelter, not guerrilla warfare. ‘If I can’t build, I don’t wanna be a part of your revolution.’”
That made them both laugh. Or maybe it was the wild feeling and the way it had me jerking around Gramps’s backyard like a marionette with a seizure.
“You’re an idiot,” Ana Lucía said around her laughter.
“He’s our idiot,” Phuong said, and tackled me to the grass, covering my body with hers and my face with her kisses.