Red and Blue

Mobilize for Phoenix, appeared on the channel reserved for the militia. The Free Born Discord servers had been blowing up for over seventy-two hours. Incessant be-boops were driving me up the wall. I mean, how much can you say about ammunition stores and meeting points? The clamor of it hurt my brain. Finally, I muted all media channels except for one. When the be-boop signaling the orders to move out sounded, it was loud and clear.

At least two hundred protestors were on the way from Las Vegas, California, and Colorado. Free Born spies had infiltrated several western Kin organizations and our brothers and sisters broadcast the plans of the threat moving toward us. Az City had incorporated only two short years ago in 2053. The sprawling collection of homesteads had spread its values to major metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson. Our growing desert stronghold rejected the social safety net and shunned invasive government redistribution. The founding principles of Az had jumped like sparks across dry grass to closeby federal cities. The Kin didn’t like it. They were coming for us.  

I punched 4546 into the bunker keypad. The door whooshed open with a pneumatic hiss sending knee-high dust devils dancing across the landscape. I kicked a captive tumbleweed from the bunker entrance and hitched up my Carrharts. Fumes of gun oil and ethanol mingled in the dry desert heat. My nose pinched shut instinctively even though these were among my favorite smells. 

Bowing at the waist to fit my six-foot-two height through the five-foot bulkhead, my boots rang loud as I descended steel plate stairs. Lights and air filtration kicked on triggered by sensors. Monitors lined the back wall and surveyed the entry points to my property. A jackrabbit passed in grainy black and white across one of the screens. What gave me the most pride down here was a glistening wall of vegetables grown by my hand and preserved in shiny mason jars hued in reds, greens, and golds. My greenhouse gave me pride, but the adjacent wall of pistols, shotguns, rifles, and automatics, that’s where I found safety and comfort. The plan was no violence. The guns were a deterrent, but they spoke far louder than pleas or demands. The irony that I was heading to battle didn’t escape me, but my Free Born settlement was under attack. I had to go.

With a .38 in a pocket holster and a .45 strapped to my chest, I loaded rifles into the back of a GMC pickup that had the color and personality of an old ginger tomcat. Pre-autonomous gas-powered vehicles were the choice of the Free Born. Modern cars were too dependent on the grid and could not be serviced without monitoring stations. A cloud of fine dust plumed the air as I applied steady pressure to the accelerator. Nothing to hit here, just far-flung mesas. I could fishtail and waste all the gas I wanted for a little stress relief. Our meeting point was Independence Hall on the skirt hem of the Phoenix metropolitan area. The Kin were converging there and we were going to turn them back to where they came from. This was our territory. We didn’t need outsiders to tell us we were wrong. 

The truck jumped the shoulder and onto the crumbling highway. By my watch, it was a forty-minute straight shot. At t-minus twenty minutes, the city skyline came into view. Mega growth in the 2020s had been unsustainable and the north side had disintegrated into disuse and decay. Plumes of smoke marked my destination. My hope was the invaders had turned back without an exchange of fire. But by the looks of it, the engagement had already accelerated. I pressed my boot to the floor and the old tom lurched into fourth. The truck climbed the embankment road that led to the south gate. 

A blunt thud quick on the heels of a booming clap crumpled the front end of the GMC in a blink. Red and orange turned to searing white, then black. When my sight returned, a shower of diamonds hailed from the windshield. The passager compartment compacted around me. A moment of vivid beauty was snatched back into darkness. When I came to, the world outside had inverted—sky below and dust above. I studied a rivulet of brilliant red that flowed in a living line down the deep brown of my arm and pooled in my palm cupped on the headliner of the truck. The ghostly hand seems to rise on its own accord. First, to find the source of the blood, then to trace along the tight curls of my close-cropped hairline and probe at cubes of glass peppering my temple. The hand traced up the side of my body to the seatbelt release, but no amount of pushing set me free. 

“Hey!” I heard.

Her eyes were the palest blue. Thin black lines edged around her irises to form rings. Fine blond hair haloed her face, the electricity of the dry desert heat lifted the individual strands and the sun made her glow.

“Are you alive in there?” She asked. 

Mingling with the strong smell of blood and gas, her amber scent was barely perceived but seemed to overpower everything else. 

“I think I’m okay, but I'm stuck,” I said.

“Do you think you can hold your weight with your arms? I’m going to try to cut you free,” she said.

“I’ll try. I feel dizzy.”

“Hang in there. Oops. Wrong thing to say.” Her laugh was musical.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m Blue. What’s yours?”

“No way. I’m Red,” I said.

“Blue and Red! What are the chances? Well, Red, I’m going to cut you down.”

“Is that your real name, or your party?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Both,” she said. “And I know you’re a Free Born, but I don’t care.”

Blue’s knife flashed brightly. The quick glint of sun pained my eyes but I noticed it was a beaut—Damascus bladed and ebony handled. She sawed through the thick nylon strap across my lap. I tried to keep my own weight from crushing down and managed to lower myself without too much pain. Blue pulled me free from my ruined truck.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You hit a mine. I had no idea there would be mines, Maltoz cocktails, and shooting right out of the gate. Took off as soon as I saw the chaos. I was leaving when I saw your vehicle blown off the road. No one else was going to help you, so I climbed down. My car is up there. Do you think you can walk?” Blue asked.

“Can you help me up?”

Blue was slight. She wore a Baja hoodie and shorts and stood about five-foot-four. I could stand, but any weight on my ankle sent a bolt of pain through my body. 

“I don’t think I can walk up without your help. Can you hold my weight?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, Red. I’m a nurse. I can handle someone twice your size.” 

She was pure and bright. Such honest pleasure in a smile took my breath away. Our progress was slow. The hillside was dune-like and each step slid and sank. My ankle hurt like murder, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t broken. The sound of automatic fire and more bombs surrounded us.

“We can’t go through the city,” Blue said. “It’s barricaded.”

“My settlement is less than half an hour the other way. Even if the fight stretches that far, I have a fully stocked bunker.”

“Good,” Blue said. “Let’s go. I can treat your head wound and look at your ankle there. For now, I can dress that wound with my handkerchief.”

Blue pulled a white bandana from her back pocket, folded it lengthwise, and secured it around my forehead. I was grateful, but her vehicle was a problem. 

“Even if you turn off the GPS, they can ping my settlement if we use your car. Autonomous cars are never truly untrackable. I can’t have the Feds following us back to my place.”

“I don’t know what other choice we have, Red,” she said. There was no hidden message in her words.

“Yeah, you’re right. Paranoia is my trope.” I joked and she laughed.

The car suited Blue. It was an Econ, but to me, it was a clown car. I banged my head against the door frame trying to contort myself to fit inside. A road flare of pain shot through my ankle as I pulled my knees toward my chin. Blue laughed sweetly at the sight of my predicament. 

“Good thing it’s not a long drive,” she said. 

Blue started the vehicle with a button push. She had to maneuver around the crater from the bomb that blew my GMC off the road. Losing that rust bucket was like losing a trusted friend. Workhorses like that were hard to come by. 

I had a lot to say to Blue, but I didn’t want to come off as backward and dumb. She was going out of her way to help me. 

“Blue, why are you here? We leave you alone. All we want is privacy and land. We don’t even take good land. Just patches of desert.”

“I did not come to take your land, Red. Your ideas are dangerous to some people. That’s the part your missing. There are a lot of folks in Pheonix. You may be all right. But with heat over 100 degrees year round and overpopulation, those who aren’t self-sufficient like you are suffering. Phoenix may have declared itself Free Born, but many people in the city are not served by secession. I’m a medical professional. I came to help. I respect your lifestyle, Red. really, I do. More than you know. But some can’t tend to themselves like you do.”

More minutes passed in silence. I wasn’t used to this type of discussion, at least not out loud. Most of my conversations were text-based. And the ones with Kin weren’t of the understanding kind. The knock to my head must have been doing a number on my defenses. I liked Blue and wanted to be open to what she had to say.

“I didn’t ask Tuscon and Pheonix to join us. Honestly, they are more trouble than it’s worth,” I said.

“My thought is you don’t have to identify yourself as Free Born. You can just run your homestead, right? Do you need Discord chats and rallies and that stuff?” She asked.

“Let me turn that question around. Do you need that?”

“I guess not. But I consider myself social—a member of a larger community—so it makes sense for me to organize and provide.”

“Yeah. I reckon. Honestly, I guess I get lonely, that’s why I’m on Discord.”

“It’s a trade-off. Total autonomy means less connection. You’re a very handsome man. You seem kind and intelligent. You shouldn’t be lonely,” Blue said.

“Right now, I’m not.”

Blue glanced at me and took my large, weathered hand in her small one. She was about to say something, but I had to interrupt.

“The turn is here. It’s that dirt path up about 100 feet,” I said.

Blue turned the car onto the unpaved track that led to my farm. Warning, please return to the map. Vehicles can not operate off the autonomous grid. The alert repeated three times and the car rolled to a gentle stop.

“Shit, what do we do now?” Blue asked.

“Walk.”

“But your ankle,” she said.

“This is the life I chose. No doctors or Ubers. The sunrise out here is spectacular and there’s nothing like fresh eggs and goat cheese for breakfast. My place is about three miles up. I could use your help, but I can make it by myself. What do you say, Blue? Stay until it’s safe to go back. You can stay as long as you like.”

Hope filled my lungs. She looked like an angel in a Mexican pullover, her gold hair lit by the sun. She was the enemy, but she stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. 

“Of course, I’ll walk you home, Red. We’ve come this far,” she said.

Blue reached into the open window of the Econ and popped the bonnet. She grabbed a large Maglight and a backpack. I admired the surety of her movements and how prepared she was. I always imagined Kin as dependent and neurotic. Blue was not that. She came to my side and hooked her shoulder under mine. We fit together perfectly. Blue was my crutch.

I tentatively put weight on my bad foot. The pain was immediate and sharp, but after a few steps, it mellowed into a dull throb. Fortunately, the terrain was so flat we could see the tiny rise of my farmhouse from miles away. I took one step with my good leg. With the next step, Blue supported my bad side. Our rhythm was off at first, but a clear note rang out. 

“One,” she sang like a crystal bell. The sound shimmered and rolled like water over the dry, cracked earth.

“Pill makes you larger, and the other makes you small.” I turned to her in stunned silence. Her voice was beauty invisible. She smiled up at me. Her hand gestured for me to sing along. We joined our voices in a marching beat, mine low and hers high and clear. 

With the rhythm, now set, we made good time toward the farm, but the day had grown gloaming and cool. The sun kissed the horizon. We were out of bottled water and I craved to drink straight from the well. The farm was so close now, I could see the pump handle sticking out of the dirt. My thought was interrupted by a hum so loud it vibrated my teeth and wiped my thirst away in an instant. 

“Drone! Run!” I yelled.

Blue and I broke apart. I pointed to the bunker entrance and we dashed for the door. Anti-personnel rounds ricochetted off the hardpack throwing geysers of dust into the air. These drones were indiscriminate about who we were or what we stood for. The Feds were here to quell the uprising no matter what. Blue’s Econ must have pointed an arrow straight at us. I reached the door of the bunker a few seconds before Blue did.

4546 ENTER!

The bunker hissed open. Blue was on my heels down the stairs. We tangled on the last step and went sprawling across the metal floor. The automatic door snapped shut with a whump, and we clung together. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat echoed through the large domed space. I sat up.

“They’ll be out there for days looking for movement. This has happened before,” I said.

Blue’s breath came in jagged bursts. She faced me from her cross-legged seat on the floor. I took her hands, but mine were trembling too. I was just as scared as she was, and that seemed to reassure her. Her muscles relaxed and her inhalations deepened. She scanned the space taking in the wall of jars, the monitors, the table with the red checked oilcloth, the sconces throwing circles of light, and the flannel-covered bed. 

“This is nice. It feels safe like an animal den. When I was a little girl and I couldn’t sleep, I’d imagine myself as a squirrel or a chipmunk curled up in the hollow of a tree. I’d build a nest of soft grass and pile nuts all around me. Once my burrow was comfortable, I could settle in for the night. That’s what it feels like here.” 

Now calmed, Blue spoke in a whisper so low I had to lean in to enter her dream world. Our eyes met with a jolt, and she kissed me lazy and long. That kiss erased all pain and separation. Blue’s kiss was home.