A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, then the worst of times, and we didn’t see the change until it was too late.

I was in third grade when the fires started. Dozens of people died, and the pictures looked like the end of the world. Our school ran a clothing drive for the victims. My sister Janelle donated some of her less-used teddy bears.

“They lost everything, Jacob,” she told me. “That means they lost all of their stuffies, too.”

My parents were so smug. “Why would they build those McMansions in the middle of the forest?” my mother asked. “They know it’s a fire zone, yet they build there anyway. Nature will always win.”

“Or it’s a punishment from God,” my father suggested. My mother rolled her eyes. My father said nothing more, but I knew he believed it. He was the one who had us baptized and took us to Easter services.

My parents weren’t so smug when the waters came five years later. The storm surge came so fast it was like God had dumped a bucket of water on our town, crushing everything in the splash zone. Thousands of people died, including my parents. They were coming to pick us up early from school when their eco-friendly compact car was swept away in the deluge. Before you think they should have gotten an SUV, those were also swept away. The first floor of our school flooded, but Mrs. Mayhew herded us up the narrow service stairs to the roof. Where we stayed for three days before the National Guard rescued us. We huddled together for warmth, and Mrs. Mayhew taught us to use giant plastic tarps to gather water to drink.

I’d say thank God for Mrs. Mayhew, but the second we got to the refugee camp, she bailed. She cried as we begged her to stay, but she left anyway. I think she knew something the rest of us didn’t yet understand.

“What was that?” the interviewer asks. He is hooked on my story, which is good.

“That it’s everyone for themselves,” I say. The interviewer frowns. I’m supposed to say we can overcome anything by working together, which is what communities want to hear, but I can’t make myself say it.

“I heard about that school,” the interviewer says. “Forty-eight children died there.”

“Was it that many?” I ask. “I remember three kids getting washed away down the street. We watched them from the roof.” The interviewer winces, so I put on a traumatized face. I’ve seen so many terrible things it’s easy to forget.

“You were in that camp for three years?” the man asks.

“Yes, and I am so grateful to God for preserving us,” I say. “Those people cared for a bunch of orphans with a kindness and generosity of spirit that can only be inspired by the Lord himself.” I’m laying it on thick, but he laps it up.

“Then you left and traveled on foot nearly 1,000 miles to the Greater Chicago Camp,” he says. “That’s a big trip for two kids to take.”

“We started with six people,” I admit.

“What happened to the others?”

“They didn’t make it,” I say. “We stopped in Tennessee and spent over two years on a small goat farm. A good Christian couple took us in.”

“Why did you leave?” he asks.

“It was taken over by a gang,” I say. “They killed the couple, but we ran away.”

“And then you and your sister went to Chicago,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I heard Chicago was rough, but you stayed for a year and a half?”

“It was rough,” I say. “The stories are true.”

“And now you’re applying for residency in our fair city,” he smiles. “It sounds like you and your sister are a couple of survivors. We respect that here. And we have your baptism records, which is good. You wouldn’t believe the number of people lying about their relationship with the lord.”

“We were raised to respect the Lord and live by his holy mercy,” I’m not even sure what I’m saying, but it sounds good.

“And have you applied to other cities for residency?” He wants to know if we applied to the second city on the godless side of the river.

“No, my sister and I wish to live with God,” I lie. “We want to live good, god-fearing lives. Our relationship with the Lord is the most important thing. We are grateful that a sanctuary like this even exists, and it is by the grace of God that we made it here safely.”

“And last question, what’s your favorite Bible verse?” he asks.

I am prepared. It is a well-known secret that they ask this to trip up nonbelievers. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth, Mathew 5:5,” I tell him.

The man wraps up the interview and thanks me for my time. He tells me that it will take several weeks for them to make a final decision, but he does tell me I’m “good people”. I thank him and leave. My sister is waiting under a tree on the banks of the large river. She stands and walks around a group of people.

“How’d it go?” I ask her. Before she speaks, she looks up at the giant cement wall rising out of the wet earth behind me.

“I think they know we applied to the other side, too,” she says. I glance across the river to the walls of the second city. From the outside, the cities are identical. Enormous cement fortifications rise out of the floodplain. Armed guards patrol the tops of the walls of each city, and the rotting corpses of looters hang from the sides. The only difference is the giant crosses on the walls above them.

We walk back to our tent, which is a tarp attached to a branch of a dead tree. It’s more than some people here have but less than others. Two crates are next to each other.

“What time is our interview tomorrow?” my sister asks as she sits on a crate.

“It’s in the afternoon,” I say. “But we’ll have to make the crossing tonight. They don’t let people travel between.”

“I’m ready,” she says, though I know she’s lying. She hates the water, which is understandable.   

Three hours later, it is dark and we are crowded in an inflatable boat with a dozen other people. The people stink because even though we live near a river, no one bathes in it. Cholera ran through the camp last year.

We cross half a mile upstream to cross, well out of range of the wall guards. The boat bounces jerkily in the waves, and we crouch low because the guards occasionally patrol the river. We land and walk the distance to the city in darkness.

The Left side of the river is chaotic. People drink and laugh between their FEMA tents, and rock music blares from a small speaker. We join a large group watching a poker game when a scuffle breaks out. People start pushing, and knives come out. Janelle and I hurry away. We find a spot next to the wall that is somehow not occupied. Janelle dozes, but I stay awake.

At dawn, we walk to the interview tents. Though we have an appointment, we are directed to a line that wraps around the enormous tent. People are seated on the ground, which is a bad sign. The line hasn’t moved in quite a while. A woman in a long flowery skirt and an orange vest walks up and down the line with a barrel of water strapped to her back. A hose is attached to the barrel, and she squirts water into the mouths of anyone who wants it. She is careful not to let the hose touch anyone’s mouth. The water is clean, if warm, and I drink it greedily before she moves on.

The sun is high in the sky when we reach the front of the line. The tent has been divided into sections with worn plastic walls. Janelle gives a small wave as she walks toward another screening room.

A petite blonde woman greets me and hands me a protein bar. I thank her, open the bar, and take a quick bite. It’s chocolate-flavored and dry, but my brain needs the calories. I haven’t eaten since my free bowl of soup yesterday morning on the other side of the river. I put the rest of the bar in my pocket. The woman writes something on her clipboard, and I realize the interview has already started.

I tell her the same story, but it’s different this time.

The farm in Tennessee was paradise after the refugee camp. Built behind a hill on the side of a mountain, we wouldn’t have found it, but we were avoiding the road. A caravan of violent assholes had blocked the highway that ran along the bottom of the valley. We climbed high on the rocky ground above them, walking hunched over so they didn’t see us. It was sunny and hot, and we were out of water. My lips were cracked and sore, and my neck peeled from a brutal sunburn.

The caravan had blocked the road and had caught a couple of women traveling alone. We could hear the women’s screams halfway up the mountain. My sister cried silently, tears streaming down her cheeks as we picked our way through the scrub brush. We were exhausted mentally and physically, and I considered stopping in the sun when I spotted a scraggly tree.

I don’t tell this interviewer that, by some miracle, the tree was an apple tree. I don’t want her to think that I am religious. But it was miraculous.

We ate several sour apples and sat in the shade of the tree. We removed our worn and holey shoes, letting our raw, blistered feet air out. Then we leaned back and fell asleep in the shade.

We awoke to a shotgun being racked above us. “You’re on private property. These are our apples,” a man said. “You’d better keep moving.” He was over 80 years old, and the skin hung off his face as if he had once been fat, but those days were gone.

“We don’t want any trouble,” I said. “Please don’t shoot us.”

“He’s not going to shoot us,” Janelle said. “If he were, he would’ve done it while we slept.”

“I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to,” the man said. We sat up and gathered our shoes while he watched with the shotgun pointed at us.

“Could we have some of that water?” Janelle asked, pointing to a water bottle hanging from the man’s shoulder. “We haven’t had any all day.”

The man stepped back, but he slipped the water bottle off of his shoulder and let it fall to the dust. He kicked it over to us. Janelle grabbed it and flicked the lid off. She drank deeply and then handed it to me. I drank the warm water, eyes watering in relief.

“Were you with that convoy?” he asked as he lowered the shotgun.

“No, we were trying to avoid them,” I admitted. “That’s why we’re up here. We’ll keep going. Thank you for the water, sir.”

“Finish it,” he said. “And here.” He reached into his pocket, removed a plastic baggie full of jerky, and tossed it to us.

“Thank you!” Janelle scrambled over and grabbed the bag. The man stepped back, so we climbed to our feet and started limping gingerly down the hill.

“Wait,” the old man said. “We have some old shoes you can have. Your shoes are so bad you’re basically barefoot.” He led us up the mountain until we arrived at a small log cabin nestled behind a hill. It had fruit trees and an enormous garden. A chicken coop with chickens and a shed with goats stood nearby.

Howard and his wife Claire were old hippies who had moved to the farm long before the world had gotten weird. When Claire saw our bloody feet, tears welled up in her eyes. She sat us down on the house's front step, and Howard carried buckets of water to us. We were horrified when they told us to wash our feet in that beautiful, clean water. We tried to drink it. Howard got us water to drink, and Claire got down on her old knees and cleaned our feet herself.

They taught us everything about farming and caring for goats and chickens. Howard showed us how to fix electronics and maintain solar panels. They became the family we had lost, and we would have lived with them forever, except luck wasn’t on our side.

“What happened?” the interviewer asks. There are tears in her eyes, and I mentally high-five myself.

“The convoy finally found us,” I tell her. “They murdered Howard and Claire. They used the goats for target practice and had BBQ chicken for a week. They held my sister and me captive for weeks, but we escaped.” I don’t tell her what they did to my sister. I don’t have to tell a woman what happened. She already knows.

The interviewer is openly crying now. “These stories never get easier to hear,” she admits. “Look, I can’t promise anything, but you and your sister have the skills we need in our community. We’ll let you know soon.”

She gives me several more protein bars, and I leave. Janelle is waiting in the sun. All of the shady spots are taken.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“Really good,” she admits. I believe her. She’s even better at this stuff than I am. We walk down to the river and sit on an empty rock. We eat the protein bars, hiding them from the others loitering around us. The dead bodies hanging from the wall above us reek like rotten garbage, and I know why no one is sitting here. Across the river, the walls of the other city stand, their giant wooden crosses sprouting out at even intervals.  

“Which city do you want to live in? Jesus town or Secular city?” Janelle teases. “It sounds like we have options.

“I don’t want to live in either,” I admit.

“They’re better than outside,” she says with a shrug.

“Are they?” I ask.