A New Day in America Read online

  A New Day in America

  By Theo Black Gangi

  Dedication

  For KBG, my true New Day.

  “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.”

  —William Faulkner

  Table of Contents

  BOOK ONE: NYC

  Chapter 1: Things Past

  Chapter 2: Day of Black Sun

  Chapter 3: A Pregnant Visit

  Chapter 4: The Things They Carry

  Chapter 5: Blue Traffic Lights

  Chapter 6: Bensonhurst

  Chapter 7: The Greenes

  Chapter 8: The Romance of the Nursery

  Chapter 9: The Pyre

  Chapter 10: Downtown

  Chapter 11: Woe to the Vanquished

  Chapter 12: Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect

  Chapter 13: The Big Apple

  Chapter 14: The Cure

  Chapter 15: Infected

  Chapter 16: The Three Deaths of Nostradamus Greene

  Chapter 17: The Opiate

  Chapter 18: The Creature

  Chapter 19: Dreams

  Chapter 20: Junk-Sick

  Chapter 21: Return of the Controller

  Chapter 22: Leviathan in the Depths

  Chapter 23: The Chef

  BOOK TWO: HEARTLAND

  Chapter 1: The Flaming Chalice

  Chapter 2: Well Fed

  Chapter 3: The Needle

  Chapter 4: Clans & Flocks

  Chapter 5: Nosotros

  Chapter 6: Snakes

  Chapter 7: Fort Dan

  Chapter 8: Parlay

  Chapter 9: Danger Pay

  Chapter 10: Cry Later

  Chapter 11: Overwhelming Force

  Chapter 12: Lucky Lefty

  Chapter 13: Frames

  Chapter 14: Secrets

  Chapter 15: Laws

  Chapter 16: A Prince

  Chapter 17: Blackout

  BOOK THREE: OLD WEST

  Chapter 1: What They Deserve

  Chapter 2: Civilization

  Chapter 3: Treating the Rash

  Chapter 4: His Wrath

  Chapter 5: It’s Not My Blood

  Chapter 6: The Narrows

  Chapter 7: Many Rivers to Cross

  Chapter 8: A Christian Man

  Chapter 9: Within Reason

  Chapter 10: The River’s Edge

  Chapter 11: St. James Infirmary

  Chapter 12: Blood Brothers

  Chapter 13: Kindred Spirits

  Chapter 14: The Unborn

  BOOK FOUR: SAN FRANCISCO

  Chapter 1: In with the Trash

  Chapter 2: Tourism

  Chapter 3: Tattoos

  Chapter 4: Heads Up

  Chapter 5: Born Again

  Chapter 6: Lost in the World

  Chapter 7: One Set of Footprints in the Sand

  Chapter 8: Dust in the Basement

  Chapter 9: Reasons

  Chapter 10: Cut the Chord

  Chapter 11: The Hills

  Chapter 12: March on Cisco

  Chapter 13: Candy

  Chapter 14: Docking Bay 13

  Chapter 15: The Chase

  Chapter 16: The Water

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  BOOK 1–NYC

  Chapter 1

  Things Past

  The camera and the TV are hooked up to the generator. Won’t hurt much to let it run. At least that’s what Nos tells himself. He cuts out the lights so the living room flickers with home movies. Waste not.

  Nos knows each episode by heart. Jay, his middle child, is holding the camera and the frame is shaky. Mike, his eldest, fills the screen, tall and lean, walking to the kitchen, ignoring Jay, as always.

  “I totally love this, Mike,” Jay calls to him in a squeaky voice. The camera is Jay’s favorite new toy. Mike turns over his shoulder, too cool for the room. Mike, with his tight-end build—six-four by sixteen, wore a size fourteen sneaker when he was thirteen years old. Mike was graceful, had great hands. You could see in the video how he grabs the refrigerator door and backhand tosses a granola bar at Jay behind the camera.

  Nos watches the TV with the face of a cadaver. The rifle lies across his lap. His fingers run a cloth along the barrel, and he thinks the gun is the only clean thing in the whole brownstone, even though it reeks of CSL lube.

  Mike was his oldest—he would have been sixteen. About six years ago. He’d be finished with college by now. He glances to his own greasy hands and compares them to Mike’s hands. Mike’s were soft, could catch a football with just one from three feet over his head. Nos’ hands are rough and callused like the pigskin.

  The next video is of Jay and his friends. Jay was thirteen. The makeshift credits roll—markers on pages reading Denzel Washington is Denzel Washington as Denzel Washington in ‘Denzel is Pissed.’ Opening scene—Jay as Denzel in a rolled-up button down with his partner, who is immediately killed by another of their friends in a ski mask with a plastic gun. Jay yells “Nooooo!” Scene two: Jay questions a bar full of thugs, and they each attack him. He beats them all up and snaps their arms (poles tucked under their sleeves). He accidentally punches his buddy in the face, and his buddy gets pissed. Jay apologizes, and the scene cuts off. Scene three: climactic battle between Jay and the arch villain: goes on way too long and they are constantly giggling.

  Nos is the next cameraman. Makes him nervous every time Jay’s Denzel movie wraps up. He always considers turning off the TV. He is concerned about the dwindling power. He should check the street. He should check on Naomi. Video is suddenly unaffordable. Should shut it off right now.

  But he never does. At least not right away. He always sees the shot of his own feet in red Adidas socks and hears Jay explain to him, “It’s on. See the red light?” He sees his home as he once saw it. The hallway he painted gray. The brown coverlet Yvette insisted they buy from Target instead of Macy’s. The bedroom walls he’d painted the green that Yvette chose and then always hated and yet refused to let Nos repaint, too ashamed of her poor choice. Naomi is on the bed, sinking just so into the memory foam mattress. The camera gets closer. She is barely a year old. Everything is so small. She has a few scant curls and still looks like a boy, so Yvette had her ears pierced, and she wears two tiny studs. She is in an OK mood. Nos says nothing to her, only watches. She stares back at him like she doesn’t quite recognize him.

  Nos wonders if Naomi ever knew what was coming. Was there a night when she dreamed there would be nothing at all but the two of them?

  The camera pans from Naomi to Yvette as she fusses in her closet. The bedroom closet was all hers, as was the bedroom bathroom. The south side of the second floor was no boys allowed. Nos slept there and not much else.

  Yvette has her back to Nos. Supple slope, narrow waist, shoulders getting heavier, much to her frustration. “Any words for the camera?” he asks.

  She glances over her shoulder. One dark eyelash flips to him.

  Nos mouths the words. Hi camera.

  “Hi camera.”

  The power cuts. The screen clicks blank before she can ask, How did you get that thing away from Jay?

  The room goes black.

  Chapter 2

  Day of Black Sun

  The generator is empty. Nos is pacing.

  Around four a.m. he’d heard the window rattling. More scavengers. He’s lost count of the families he’s turned away and jaws he’s busted. He’s well sheltered-in-place, f
ollowing the Army Rangers Handbook to a tee. He’s fortified his two stories with barred windows and reinforced the locks. But it’s pointless. His home is needless responsibility. For a year his doors and gates kept the outside out and the food in. Now the food is near gone. The outside is inevitable.

  It’s a Friday in November, Black Friday. He’d forgotten, lost track of the days. Nos realizes—it’s the anniversary.

  At least tomorrow is the anniversary. Yvette refused to shop on Black Friday, but preferred the day after. Next sunrise, it will be a year since the blast devoured the city. A year since he felt the heat of Manhattan burning. A year since the over one hundred thousand tons of what was the city was tossed into the sky and all of New York City went black.

  A year since the Day of Black Sun. Since Christmas shopping.

  When he thinks of Yvette and Jay and Mikey leaving for the city he believes he wanted to stop them. Nos remembers a feeling of doubt as she kissed him goodbye and his boys waved from the hallway. He thinks he should have listened to his intuition and stopped her. Told her I don’t know why, but you have to stay home today. I know this doesn’t make sense, and I never tell you where to go, and you wouldn’t listen anyway, but you have to stay home today.

  Instead Nos kissed her and didn’t think to watch her walk out before locking the door behind her.

  The only miraculous insight came from Yvette. For once, he was glad she was such a hypochondriac.

  Naomi was sick, she insisted. Too sick. A little flu was all. A runny nose. Nos didn’t think it was a big deal. Still, Naomi would stay home. They were only going Christmas shopping. Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Bloomies—names now silly with nostalgia like Pompeii or Carthage. He let them go into the fire. Naomi stayed home. Shouldn’t have let them go.

  Even now, as he eyes the strangely peaceful street below with his rifle close by, he knows he’s kidding himself. Memory is only wishful thinking. Something to pass the time.

  Better than dealing with the day outside. Nos hears people padding through the water and shuffling through the grass that broke through cracks in the sidewalk. A patchwork trail of weeds makes way to Ft. Greene Park. The street itself has cratered. Water soaks through from underneath. A channel runs down Lafayette Avenue, following the underground route of the C train.

  The subways flooded after just a couple months. Pools spilled from the station entrances. The pumps, people said. Electric pumps that had quietly been pumping water from the underground, like so many city workings that went unnoticed. No power, no pumps; water flooded the whole subway grid and rose and soaked the soil beneath the pavement. Now when it rains, the water washes through the sewers and pours out of the subway and fills the crater. The water is rising. Smells awful.

  Should be a river soon. Brooklyn makes a piss-poor Venice.

  He unlocks Naomi’s door and watches her sleep. She is huddled in pounds of blankets and sweat clothes. Daylight breaks through the fenced window. Naomi’s eyes are still closed, but Nos can’t tell if she is asleep. Her face is a saintly mix of spheres and angles. Her round eyes repeat her round cheeks. Her lips are a sharp slit across her face.

  She has chores to do this morning. Has to clean the water filter. But she looks so comfy he lets her sleep for now.

  Nos climbs down to the living room to get a fire going in the fireplace so there will be some heat when Naomi wakes up. He’d stopped burning fires past sunset because the smoke made the house a target. His is the last occupied brownstone on the block. The lunatics are never far.

  The fire crackles and the flue sucks up the smoke. Flames tremble along the logs.

  There’s pounding on the door.

  “Help!” cries a woman. “Whoever’s in there, listen! I’m pregnant and I need food! Hear me? Help!”

  Chapter 3

  A Pregnant Visit

  Nos spies the woman though the bars of his second floor window. She is indeed pregnant. A large black woman wears a gasmask and pounds the door and its hinges cough up debris.

  Nos brings his .50 cal rifle to the window as S.O.P. He used to entertain desperate families, roaming bands, and abandoned children, some of whom made off with a can of beans, until he stopped responding all together. Waiting out the noise of beggars is better than giving up a can of food he doesn’t have.

  The pounding stops. Silence rings in its place.

  Naomi unlatches her locks and comes out, blinking, sleepy, and confused.

  “You brush your teeth?” He asks.

  A colossal roar breaks the air. Naomi snaps alert, frightened by the sudden barrage of noise.

  A motor? A Harley?

  For an instant, Nos is deathly terrified. Like he’s coming under heavy fire. He whips his neck. His muscles clench. Then he relaxes. Blinks. Breathes.

  There’s nothing in the street below.

  No cars or bikes. Not even the pregnant woman.

  Still, an invisible motor revs louder and louder, ripping the air. Then another joins the menacing chorus. And another. At least three.

  And mine is the only building on the block that hasn’t been gutted, scavenged, and abandoned. And I’ve got conspicuous-as-hell smoke burning from my chimney.

  Nos straps his own gasmask to his face and bends to secure Naomi’s mask.

  “Nay, back to your room!” he barks, sounding like Petty Officer First Class Nostradamus Greene. He is more on edge than he wants to be.

  Calm down, he reminds himself. Control your pulse.

  Naomi bolts to her room. Before she shuts the door, Nos touches her shoulder.

  “It’s going to be OK,” he soothes. She is shaking with fear. “Just stay inside until I say it’s OK to come out. Breathe. In—nose, out—mouth.”

  Nos demonstrates. He sucks air in his nose, fills his diaphragm, and releases through his mouth.

  Naomi does the same.

  The Harley motors rev and roar outside.

  Nay jumps.

  “Pretend they aren’t there, my love. Breathe.”

  Nay breathes in, breathes out, her small ribcage fills and deflates.

  “Daddy will take care of you.”

  She nods.

  “OK?”

  She nods and looks inside her room, knowing she will be all alone in there. “I’m scared, I’m scared OK? I don’t want to go.”

  He turns to look at her, frustrated that he cannot touch her face through her mask, that her tears now stain her goggles.

  “The basest of all things is to be afraid,” he says, as much to tell her as to tell himself. “’Knowing that, we must forget it forever.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s OK to be afraid. But then we have to forget it,” says Nos.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You’re afraid, right?”

  “Un-huh.”

  “OK, be afraid, and now forget that you are, that you ever were.”

  She stares at the green veneered eye shield.

  “Do I seem afraid?” he asks.

  Nay shakes her head. “No, pa.”

  “But I am. Only I’ve forgotten that I am. That I ever was.”

  “OK, I’m trying. I’m trying.”

  Something massive slams into the front door and kicks drywall off the hinged wall.

  She panics. Her breathing does double time, triple time.

  “Inside, love, inside!” Nos urges.

  Nay steels herself, sucks in her tears, goes inside, and slams and locks her door.

  Be safe, my love.

  Nos scopes the street, hoping her fear is just fear. He hopes wrong.

  Three bikers circle across the watery street with guns and machetes. One biker backs up away from the door, revs, and burns up the steps and smashes into the wood like a battering ram. The building shakes.

  What I get for burning a fire for my daughter.

  Exit the father and enter the soldier.

  Subdue or deter with lethal force if necessary. High ground—check. Rifle—check.
<
br />   Nos cracks the window and steadies the barrel of his .50 cal M82 semi-auto anti-materiel Barrett SASR, also called the ‘light fifty.’ The rifle is a thirty-pound monster. Nos’ fave. Pure overkill. Shock and awe with a scope.

  Nos bolts a forearm sized bullet and aims at the lead biker. Asshole is using his wheels to bust open the front door. Nos pulls, the rifle kicks, and a round bursts through the raider’s leg and cracks the bike off its axel.

  Before he can target the next, pistols fly and blast at his location. He ducks and flattens. Bullets punch through his boarded windows.

  They actually want this fight.

  Another motor rumbles from the distance. No wonder. Backup.

  Nos spies a U-Haul truck speeding up to his doorstep. Its doors glide open and a half-dozen rugged men stomp through the water. Gunshots repeat pop at his location. Nothing close. But he’s holed in.

  Another bike slams into his door. He hears the motorcycle reverse, rev, and then slam again. The door takes a pounding, hinges crack. Bullets burst through the window just above his head—can’t get another .50 cal shot off.

  They’re coming.

  The door crumbles at its frame. The hinges give and snap open like a button fly. A wheel splinters through the top and spins.

  Nos breathes. In—nose, out—mouth.

  His Sig Saur sidepiece is drawn. He doesn’t remember pulling it out.

  A bike burns through his living room. The raider howls a battle cry.

  “Yeaaah, motherfuckaaaa!”

  The hoard rushes in behind him waving machetes and pistols. Nos kneels and fires from the second story. His trigger snaps and his gun jumps. Bullets slam into the oncoming crowd. Looters are kneecapped, spun by shoulder hits, dropped by headshots. Bodies streak across the hardwood.

  There’s a momentary lull. Bastards realizing they picked the wrong fight.

  “Everybody get down on the fucking ground!” he shouts.

  Nos covers the mass below with his Sig, mag empty. It’s hard to tell who’s hit and who’s not. Some stay down. Some scavengers crowd by front door. Nos spies his crowbar by the window.

  Time to crack skulls.

  He grabs the metal bludgeon and speeds down the banister and wades sideways into the mob. He traps four of them in a corner, arms pinned so they can’t swing their knives. He cranks back and wails the crowbar like a bat. He breaks legs, ribs, shoulders, heads—anything as long as he can get a clean swing. He feels bones crush and splinter at the end of his makeshift maul.