Polar Strike: A Tale of the Great Crisis Read online

  “Peters,” Mackenzie replied. He closed and locked the door and then shook the young man’s hand. “What brings you ‘round here?”

  “You get any work?”

  “Yeah,” Mackenzie replied, and led the young man into the living room, “Obuyi and I both.”

  “Good job! Uh … do you know where?”

  “We never know that until we get there,” Mackenzie replied, sitting on a plain wooden chair. “You know that.” He motioned for Peters to sit on the couch. “You were right about the new checkpoint. Those soldiers, they’re Airborne. Never seen them around here before. Kind of hardcore, really. Up until now there have only been auxiliary troops in the city.”

  “I think something big is gonna happen,” Peters said in a quiet voice. “These new guys are well-equipped and experienced.”

  “Hello, Graham,” Margaret said as she emerged from the kitchen with two steaming mugs. She handed a cup to each man. “Some nice hot tea.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Mackenzie,” Peters said. He accepted the cup but didn’t drink. “Listen, I need you to do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Peters put down the cup and opened his backpack. He pulled out a commcomp. It looked like any other. “I need you to carry this commcomp. You can insert your control chips into it, and it can interface with the network just like any other.”

  “Why this one, Peters?” Mackenzie asked. He felt a flutter of fear in his stomach.

  Peters reached into his backpack again and pulled out a wad of paper. “Here is some calorie scrip, worth about the same you paid for the boys’ commcomp.”

  “What are you doing?” Margaret asked. She sat down on the couch next to him.

  He reached into his pack and brought out another package; something wrapped in plain brown paper. He handed it to Margaret. “Here, another gift for you.”

  Margaret unwrapped the paper and set the gift on her lap. “Oh my.”

  It was something Mackenzie, or his wife, had not seen in years.

  Meat.

  “Pork,” Peters said, “frozen, not cured, about two kilograms.”

  Fear struck Mackenzie like a slap. What was going on? Who was this man? A spy? For USNORTHCOM or some enemy? The fear stoked his anger. He stood.

  “What do you want?” he said quietly, but his body shook. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You hated the Americans, didn’t you, Mackenzie?” Peters asked softly. “The atrocities you and your comrades committed near Sudbury, when you fought as guerrillas under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Crews.”

  Mackenzie felt he had been slapped again. He sat down, his stomach roiling. “Who the hell are you?” he whispered. How could this man know these things? He had never told his sons about this.

  Peters continued. “You couldn’t take prisoners, you couldn’t feed them or hold them, or even afford the ammunition, so you slit their throats in cold blood. But some of you took trophies while the men were still alive: fingers, and ears, and noses, and scalps.”

  The young man paused, picked up his cup, drank, and then set it down. Mackenzie sat frozen, unsure of what to do.

  “Do you still hate them like that?” Peters asked.

  The memories flooded back. His parents and siblings had died in the initial assault on Toronto in the spring of ‘44, the titanium projectiles from the orbital weapons platforms striking the earth like meteors until the city became riddled with craters. His regiment dug into the heights surrounding Sudbury in the summer of ‘44 to hold the western end of a defensive line that extended across the northern Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River all the way to Montreal. A few years before that the National-Progressive Party had taken power in the United States. It sought tribute and reparations from any nation that had benefitted from U.S. protection the previous two hundred years. High on the party’s list was Canada. With most U.S. forces engaged around the globe, and the diseases sweeping the world seriously affecting force strength and expertise, Canada managed to hold out for three years against the larger and more experienced military force.

  Then the diseases came, almost certainly released by the Nationalists: virulent swine and bird flus, pertussis, tuberculosis, and megameasles. But that strategy backfired as a quarter of the population of the northeastern United States, including the enemy troops, succumbed to the weaponized plagues. These deaths were in addition to the natural epidemics that swept the globe at the time.

  The things he had done to survive those three years in Sudbury haunted him. Food and medicine was scarce, and the soldiers took everything from the surviving civilians. Rumors of traitors and spies swept the city every few weeks, and the soldiers found themselves battering down doors to summarily arrest and confine people without any evidence. On several occasions they lined up suspects, a dozen at a time, and shot them for treason, just on the word of their paranoid officers.

  After the Americans had taken Sudbury, the surviving regiment fled to the forests and lakes north of the city. Here they had lived almost like animals, taking food and fuel from the remaining civilians, attacking the enemy in the dark or bad weather, executing prisoners, all of whom were NP scum in their eyes. By the time he was finally captured, he was one of only a dozen remaining, gaunt from hunger, on the edge of madness. Expecting death, praying for it, the conquerors pardoned him.

  The pardon: that is why he hated them most of all. They made him live with and suffer for his sins.

  Mackenzie saw the faces of his sons: the two oldest, Stephen and John, wore the gray camouflage uniforms of auxiliary troops, with the old Kevlar helmets with the outdated uplink attachments and night vision goggles. The newly raised battalion of auxiliary troops marched south along Centre Street, across the Bridge and to the downtown rail yards, where they boarded trains to the Southwestern Front. An entire generation had disappeared from the city in a matter of days, both boys and girls, most no older than nineteen.

  Not a year later his youngest, Jeremy, lay just in the next room, coughing so hard that his eyeballs almost popped out of the sockets. At the end the blood from his mouth and nose covered the entire bed, but Margaret still sat holding him. A third of the people in the building, and a quarter of the city, died that winter, given no assistance from USNORTHCOM. The army claimed and used all medicines.

  Mackenzie looked at Peters. “Yes. Yes I do,” he whispered.

  Peters handed the commcomp to Mackenzie. “All you need to do is carry it. Tell no one, not even Obuyi.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Humanity, all of humanity, has a noble destiny,” Peters replied, “not this savage existence immersed in barbarity.”

  After Peters had left, Mackenzie retreated to the bedroom, curled up on the bed, and wept himself to sleep.

  AFTER USNORTHCOM released Mackenzie from the prison camps, he travelled west and got work as a rig hand, working for the drilling companies taken over by members of the National-Progressive Party. He started out at the bottom as a rig hand: filling fuel and water tanks, cleaning, heavy lifting, and collecting the samples of rock cuttings from the shakers. He worked his way up to floor hand and then motor hand, connecting and disconnecting the drilling pipe using the tongs and the connector. The work was dirty, physical, and dangerous. He saw many men maimed or killed; management cared more about results than safety.

  In Mackenzie’s early thirties, during the drilling of one hole, the night geologist was hit on the head by a “rig apple” while inspecting the sample catcher on the shakers. A bolt, bar, or similar piece of hardware that worked its way loose and fell, rig apples struck more often than most men liked; the drilling rigs were decades old.

  As everyone stood around watching the man twitching and dying, the company man, Sowalski, emerged from his trailer, his breath smoking in the cold and the snow crunching beneath his boots. He strode over to the spot, looked at the wounded man on the ground, looked at everyone in turn, and then pointed at Mackenzie.

  “You’ll do
just fine.”

  “Huh?”

  “Go talk to old Lenny Shaw,” he barked. “He’ll tell you what to do.”

  Old Lenny Shaw turned out to be a bent old man smelling of urine and old clothes, sitting in a small decrepit trailer surrounded by vials, bags, old computers and microscopes, and piles of books, papers, and maps. He peered at Mackenzie from beneath bushy white eyebrows, broken spectacles perched on the end of his nose.

  “I guess you’ll have to do.”

  The old man walked Mackenzie through the process of washing and drying the samples and looking at them under the microscope. At first Mackenzie did nothing but copy the old man’s work, but he quickly learned to identify the rock types, and after a year was familiar with such concepts as structure, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. The rig stayed in one place for a few weeks or a month, maybe, drilling several horizontal holes, then the trucks would come and the men would break down the rigs and stack the metal monsters onto flatbeds and hook trailers up to ancient pickup trucks. They would move the whole operation to another freshly cleared spot in the pine forest, or on the cold and windy prairie, or nestled between foothills with the Rocky Mountains looming in the background.

  One time, late at night, when drilling had stopped and the rig pulled the bit out of the hole, Shaw emerged from the bunkroom of the trailer and sat in the light of the computer monitors. The rhythmic sound of the rig generators pulsed in the background. Mackenzie leaned back in his chair, his feet on the desk.

  “I was born in 1983,” Shaw began, looking out of the small window into the darkness beyond. “When I was young all I cared about was music and gettin’ laid.” He chuckled. “People are nostalgic for the past; they think it was so much better. And it was, in many ways, I guess.” He coughed and remained quiet for a few moments, his eyes lost in memory. “But you need to remember that today’s world is a result of choices made yesterday. The horrors of today, those seeds were planted in the past.” He paused again, deep in thought.

  “The details don’t matter now,” he continued, “but it wasn’t Peak Oil, or Global Warming, or overpopulation, or any of the other bullshit the so-called experts kept telling us would be the end.” He looked at the darkness outside the window. “It was people, and the institutions they were a part of, that failed to do what they were supposed to do. Our society, all of Western Civilization, had all the laws and rules it needed to survive and thrive. But for various reasons, greed, incompetence, laziness, political correctness, whatever, people just didn’t do their fucking jobs. Or they were too stupid to do their jobs at all. They cared more about what they thought others owed them, rather than what they really owed others.” He looked at Mackenzie. “It was their grossly inflated sense of entitlement. Does that make any sense?”

  Mackenzie just nodded.

  “When were you born?” Shaw asked.

  “2020.”

  Shaw sniffed. “By then it seemed like everything was getting better. The old generation of terrorists had been hunted down and killed. The economy improved, they say. But I thought it was bullshit. The central bankers stoked their economies by printing hundreds of billions. Everything was so interconnected, no one nation could produce food, build transportation, and make medicine. Everyone traded for everything. After the crash of ‘32, things just went to shit. The politicians panicked. They raised their trade barriers but found they couldn’t produce all they needed. Then came the hunger and disease. It was inevitable.” He paused. “Then the God-damn NP came into power. All those people who used to have comfortable lives in the suburbs, they just went nuts. They elected President McManus, that Nationalist prick, who promised them a return to the good old days. Any idiot could see the good old days were long gone. What really happened was war, the nastiest in a hundred years, and it is still going on. Who knows how many hundreds of millions have died? I once heard the wars caused the displacement of over a two billion people. Two billion! Can you imagine?” He shook his head.

  “Why didn’t they use more nukes?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Who? The Nationalists?”

  “Anybody. The Chinese, the Unificationists, the Iranians, whoever.”

  “You have to understand that countries went to war to find resources. They didn’t want those resources destroyed. But the biggest reason was the diseases. Many of the people crucial to the military infrastructure died. The weapons became unusable.” He paused and blew his nose on an old handkerchief. “The diseases were the worst. My wife died of tuberculosis in ‘43, and I lost touch with my daughter. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. Everyone has lost someone.” He looked at Mackenzie. “The dead are dead. It is the living that remain, and there must be hope. Without hope, there is nothing but death.” The two men sat in silence for a few more minutes, listening to the sounds of the rig. Then Shaw rose, patted Mackenzie on the shoulder, and retreated back to his bunk.

  With the morning came a bang on the door. Two soldiers entered. One grabbed Mackenzie by the arms and pushed him outside into the morning light. The other soldier soon appeared pulling old man Shaw by the arm. A squad of soldiers rounded up the rig crew while an officer stood beside two old Humvees. They lined everyone up facing the vehicles. Mackenzie remembered thinking the air felt much warmer than it had been for weeks. Tall lodgepole pines, the branches heavy with snow, surrounded the rig and the camp.

  The officer walked in front of the rig crew as the squad of soldiers assembled and stood at attention. The man’s deep black skin contrasted with the white snow. Mackenzie had seen this man before, six years ago, on a lakeshore north of Sudbury. The fear and hatred bubbled up into his throat.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Colonel Benjamin Clark. I am here to announce the National Progressive Party of the United States no longer exists. It is being liquidated, as it has proved to be an enemy of USNORTHCOM through inefficiency and incompetence. USNORTHCOM is now taking over management of the company that owns this drilling rig. It seems that the National Progressive Party and its cronies have grown sloppy; production over the last few years has dropped by 62% while they have looted the organization and grown fat with corruption.” He paused, opened a canteen, and drank.

  “Now, most of you are valuable contributors in supporting USNORTHCOM. You know how crucial it is to supply the armed forces with energy so they can defend and secure the United States. The world is filled with criminal and terrorist scum that want nothing more than to destroy our great nation. But some of you are responsible for this sad state of affairs.”

  He barked orders and soldiers moved forward and stood beside the assembled crew.

  “David Sowalski!” he called out. The soldiers grabbed the company man, cuffed him, and led him to a spot in front of the vehicles. The Captain stood in front of him. “As representative of Decollement Drilling, you are hereby sentenced to death for gross negligence and inefficiency.” The Captain casually pulled his pistol from its holster, then smoothly pointed it at the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. With a loud pap! blood and brains sprayed deep red onto the snow as the crew cried out in fear.

  “Leonard Shaw!” the Captain called out. The soldiers grabbed the old geologist, cuffed him, and led him to a spot beside the corpse of the company man. The Captain stood in front of him. “As chief geologist for this rig, you are hereby sentenced to death for gross negligence and inefficiency.” The Captain pointed his pistol at the man’s temple and pulled the trigger.

  Mackenzie cried out in fear and anger. He woke from the dream, his body shaking.

  THE PROPAGANDA droned on. “Reports are coming in of a devastating swine flu wreaking havoc in North Africa, the fourth such epidemic in a decade. USNORTHCOM is hoping this weakens the Islamic Caliphate enough that it falls to the Persian Empire. With the Caliphate gone they can no longer provide aid to the Guarico Cartel, currently on course to destroy its rivals and conquer the entire continent of South America.”

  “USNORTHCOM operatives have intercepted and detained a nu
mber of spies and saboteurs. Here we see General Clark speaking with the USNORTHCOM intelligence officers who will interrogate the captives. There is wild speculation as to who these operatives work for. The Unificationists? PAC-COM? Be certain that our brave intelligence officers will find out who these criminal scum are, and take the fight to their leaders! To keep us all safe from terrorism, remember, if you see something, say something! Report your suspicions to any one of our soldiers. Remember, USNORTHCOM is watching out for you!”

  Mackenzie and Obuyi walked in silence east along 16th Ave. The prop screens seemed louder than normal today, and Mackenzie did his best to ignore them. But the two men walked in silence. Many walked with them, toward the food depot set up on the bridge crossing over the old Deerfoot Trail freeway. The prop screens had announced the arrival of rations from the south, and the two men immediately left their home to get their share.

  Though the sky was a clear blue, the wind cut like an icy knife. The two men had wrapped themselves up as much as they could. They had to go out and get food; if they didn’t serious hunger would start to set in.

  The soldiers were everywhere. They had set up multiple checkpoints using Humvees and trucks, which Mackenzie and Obuyi had to pass after waiting in line. How much can change in three blocks? Mackenzie thought as they waited in line to pass another checkpoint. “See something? Say something!” the Voice intoned between every propaganda story.

  The wind picked up as they walked down the grade toward the food depot. Suddenly, a sound echoed through the air.

  An explosion, but it sounded muffled, distant.

  Many of the people in the street crouched and looked around in alarm. The soldiers swarmed over the street and yelled for everyone to get down and stay still. Mackenzie and Obuyi slowly lay prone on the pavement and cautiously looked around. A few moments later several plumes of smoke rose on the horizon, north of their location.