We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled History…

October 30^th, 1938… It was supposed to be a harmless radio broadcast, or so they say. None of us really knew at the time. The blackout came without warning, cutting off the radio’s descriptions of an extraterrestrial ship which had just landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. As far as we could put together, aliens had just come down from space, and shortly after, we’d lost all power. The assumptions were widespread, resulting in a mass panic that had struck the city of Mobile, Alabama within minutes. A once beautiful city, now suffering the same fate as every other major metropolitan center in our country. Riots, looting, genocide, suicide, patricide, and every other ‘cide you can think of. It was just supposed to be a harmless radio broadcast. So why then, did so many people have to die?

My memories of that night still plague me like a demented song whose melody haunts your every thought. I remember the beads of sweat rolling down my daddy’s balding head, barely illuminated over his dark skin, yet only visible when we’d passed under the streetlights. His fingertips were nearly white, crushing the little bones of my hand as he pulled me behind him, while desperately gripping his grand-daddy’s six-shooter. Our bodies jerked from side to side, weaving between overturned cars and maniacal crowds. The smell of burnt rubber and seared flesh wafted through the humid air, forcing me to hold back the vomit that curled inside my throat. Flames spread over the passing rooftops, and billowed from every window.

I still remember the bodies whose shadows glimpsed the fire on the way down before impact. The child was first. Just a girl, like me, silently gliding through the air. I felt her thud vibrate through the concrete. The woman was next, unable to mask her terror through scratchy cries. Would my mother have done the same to me? My daddy told me not to look, but how do you not? His pull had to guide my steps as I stared at those corpses who swam in an expanding pool of their own blood, and the strangers who later ran over them without care or concern.

Several minutes passed. The heat was scorching our faces, and the rough terrain was ripping the blisters off my bare feet. We thought we could actually make it, having come this far, but our hope fell short the moment we saw the slobbering jowls of starving lions ahead. A group of young men, their skin pale white even amidst the darkness, with bleached yellow hair that contrasted the blood-stained letterman jackets. Roll Tide. My daddy jerked me to his side violently, bouncing the sights of his pistol between them. They laughed, taunting him as they circled around us, drawing my daddy’s grip tighter. I glanced up at his face which fell sullen, his shoulders dropping in a sort of defeat as a single tear mixed with the river of sweat on his cheek.

He nodded, meeting my eyes, and let a single word slip from his lips. Run. I hesitated, until a violent push thrusted me forward. The momentum strained my balance, but after finding my footing I broke into a full sprint. The man in front of me fell, and then the man beside him. I saw the holes open their chests and felt the splatter of warm liquid on my face, but I never heard the shots. I couldn’t tell you how many bullets my daddy got off before their rusted pipes and rubber soles drained him of his final breaths.

I just kept running, the minutes passing like hours, creeping through the shadows to avoid the cries and despair of the dangers around me. Eventually, when fear got the best of me, I dove into a pile of trash I’d found which was stacked against a brick building at the corner of some dark alley. I crawled deep inside, befriending the scurrying rats and a potent aroma of rotting food. My body curled into itself as I desperately held my palms over my ears. I thought I could drown out the noise, but it took all night for the screams to eventually stop. I was too scared to leave, so I let the fear keep me there for over two days, until the knots of hunger were so unbearable that I had to move, unable to keep feeding on the molded bones and maggots which carpeted my dry, split lips. When I’d finally carried myself out of the trash and into the street, the maggots and bones seemed a welcome treat. The streets had grown flesh, its bones poking out from the sidewalks, and the buildings had all but burnt away. With nowhere to go, and a belly wrought with hunger, I just started walking. It’s all I could do.

*  *  *

I toss, unable to find sleep. It’s been nearly thirty years since that night, and the shades of the past still drop by unannounced from time to time. I read a quote once, while sifting through a half-burnt book I’d discovered on the side of a desolate highway. It said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Well, that may be true, but we certainly found a way to destroy her in one. We still don’t know what knocked out the power that night, or why it happened to coincide with a harmless radio show about an alien invasion. Some say it was divine intervention, that God wanted to set back the clock to teach us a lesson. Maybe that’s true, but what happened that night didn’t set back the clock, it destroyed it altogether. Without electricity, we’d lost all sense of time, and had no communication systems to connect us. The number of minds who understood the science behind that craft were already slim, and thanks to the impulsivity of humanity, most ended up dying helplessly during the chaos, while several others were publicly executed for being part of the so-called conspiracy – giving up the world to invading space-folk.

Whether it was divine intervention or not, we lost ourselves to ignorance. Parents killing children, children killing their parents, religious cults killing themselves, crazed individuals running the streets killing each other, as they did my daddy. Every city was a victim, filled with so many bodies that within only a few weeks, the diseases started to spread rapidly. As if that night wasn’t devastating enough, millions more began falling ill and dying. We had few doctors, and less medicine, with no way of knowing which diseases were running wild. Still without communications, groups of survivors had banded together to increase their odds. It would be almost five years before reliable communication systems were set up in the big cities, and almost twice as long before the smaller colonies were gifted the same privilege.

Once we could communicate, we began to piece together the mystery of what happened. No one had any answers, at least none that made any sense. The closest answer that carried some semblance of scientific evidence came from a German scientist who somehow made his way over from Europe to meet with the former President of our divided states – which were now governed independently, each colony providing its own security forces and laws. After explaining how it wasn’t just our country who’d lost power, but the whole world, at least from what he’d gathered during his travels, he tried to propose that it was the sun who was the culprit for the electronics loss. A solar event, he called it. His evidence was slim, and only theoretical, based on weapons research they’d been doing in Germany under some leader named Hitler, but it made more sense than the non-existent aliens who wiped out our power just to disguise themselves as humans so they could take over our planet – which was the running theory up to that point.

Personally, I believe that scientist was on to something. I can’t prove it, because I’m not a genius, but when I discovered this place, I’d found stacks of old newspapers, many of the final headlines speaking about that Hitler guy and rumors of the advanced scientific research which were coming out of Germany before the blackout. In fact, I’ve found a lot of interesting things down here, including hundreds of stories, poems, and encyclopedias, conveniently organized and laid out on dozens of wooden shelves that line the entire room, just begging for someone to find them. Then again, if someone had, they wouldn’t be here anymore.

The first time I saw a library burned to the ground was a few months after the big cities had established their new communications systems. When copies of that fateful radio broadcast were found amongst the ruins, we stored them in order to provide a name to the man who’d killed an entire nation overnight. Orson Wells became the most hated figure in our recollected history, more despised than Ghangis Khan or Joseph Stalin. As soon as knowledge spread that his broadcast was based off one of his novels, War of the Worlds, a nationwide directive was ordered – the destruction of all literature. The colonies believed that if one book could destroy a country, then new safeguards must be put in place to avoid another incident. They claimed that books were necessary, of course, but new guidelines were needed to regulate their information. Since there wasn’t enough manpower to critique every literary work released up to that point, they decided to institute a law banning all books printed before the year 1938. In other words, a clean slate.

Every library and bookstore within our borders were sought out and set to flames. The amount of knowledge lost was devastating, which made it all the more surprising when I found this treasure trove underneath the floorboards of an abandoned house just outside of what used to be Fayetteville, Arkansas – now one of the largest black-only communities in the country. This basement held the clues to our past, and I knew that someone had to protect it for that reason alone. Since I’ve always preferred solitude anyways, I made it my home, and for the last fourteen years, while the states have relied on the nationwide education radio broadcasts or one of only thirteen books to have been published in almost thirty years, I’ve relied on these classics to educate me – which up until now, had been a soothing thought. Unfortunately, despite my “advantageous” education, I still failed to avoid a basic mistake that resulted in the blood of two more men staining my hands. I’m so tired.

I force myself to my feet, realizing that sleep is no longer on the table. I give a quick glance to the Anti-Orson Wells poster across the room which I’d conveniently stolen and put up a few years ago. It’s an irony in this kind of place, which adds a daily dose of humor to my mornings. According to the weekly broadcast I’d caught in town on my last visit, today was the day they are reinstating a new calendar system. We’re bringing in the dawn of a new age, they said. We no longer need to fear our history, because our history starts today!

Nice tagline, but it’s all a joke if you ask me. We’re supposed to be relishing in what should be 1967, yet our technology has barely surpassed the day we lost it, probably because it took a decade’s worth of negotiations before the states would finally work together. We have no more movies, no books, no fairy tales to teach our young. No princesses in need of help, or princes coming to save the day. No knights to protect us from dragons. No Shakespearean poetry to teach us about love, vengeance, or ambition. No whales to hunt down, or rabbit holes to fall into. No more God, science, or philosophy. They say our history begins today, but our history goes back thousands of years, and people chose to let it go because of one broadcast, which was prematurely cutoff before it could announce that it was only fiction, aired at the worst possible time.

I stroll over to the small window that’s carved into the concrete above. Peering through the vines and into the feint stars of the night sky, I wonder if my daddy’s up there somewhere. Can he see me? Is he proud of who I became? Would he be proud of what I’d just done? Or what I’ve had to do in the past? The moon peeks around the corner of the glass, drawing my attention. Would we have found our way to its surface by now? Could we have gazed back from that bright ocean towards an Earth whose face still remains a mystery to us? A shifting blanket breaks my focus.

My eyes hesitantly find the girl across the room, wearily lying on the floor. The gashes in her feet have stopped bleeding, and the bruises around her mahogany wrists seem less defined. I couldn’t tell by her words, because there were none before she passed out, only the frantic sounds of footsteps above before stumbling head-first down my staircase. I was so careless to have left the hatch open. I know better, and now, the two men pursuing her have donated their flesh to feed the insects outside because I slipped up. And worse, I must decide whether to add one more dish to the feast, a living witness to my illegal possessions sleeping only a few meters away.

If she wakes, she becomes my walking-executioner, holding a gun to my head with every breath of her existence. For all I know, this is one of the last collections like this to exist. When our country decided to burn away our history, the world followed, seeing some poisoned sense of reason behind the act. If a thousand holes with a thousand books still exist in these divided states, that’s still a thousand times less than what should be, and I am the one who came upon this house, meaning that I’m the one who God has chosen to protect this particular Holy Grail. I cannot take that lightly, nor can I let the impulses of a teenage girl erase what little stories we have left to rely on. It’s too risky, because I know how she has been conditioned. Every youth of the new world are narcs, squealing on those with a differing opinion or desire – basically anyone who wishes to return us to how things were before. No, I can’t trust her.

I spot my knife, sitting on the edge of the nightstand just beyond her body. My shadow creeps across the wall as I move through the dying incandescence of the candle in the distance. My feet are careful not to bump anything on the way over, their familiarity with the terrain being an unexpected advantage. Reaching the nightstand, her face comes into view, possessed by dreams which force a shuddering inside her eyelids. She’s gone, far away from this place. If I do it now, she’ll fade permanently into that dreamland, without suffering the terror of watching her reality disappear before her eyes. Just one quick stroke to the back of the neck and it’ll all be over.

I silently slip my knife from its sheath, then carefully step over her body. Her hair is parted down the middle, one side resting over a drooping shoulder, the other falling away towards the floor. The ridges of her spine reveal signs of malnutrition, but also deliver a clear view of the sweet spot my knife blade needs, as if God were granting me permission to carry out this saving grace. The edge of the steel hovers over her skin. I shift my weight forward, gripping the handle tighter, and as the nerves begin to fire my muscles into action, I prepare myself for a struggle.

The blade jerks as it enters, catching the tissues between the bones, but my force is still enough to separate the spinal cord. There was no movement, no fight left in her muscles. Her body accepted its final breath as peacefully as it fell asleep. My gaze remained fixed on the failing light of the candle, an eventual breath of relief falling over my lips. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, and by the looks of it, had been the prisoner of those two pigs who were chasing her down. From her markings, she was probably their slave, or toy. I can’t imagine the trauma they put her through, or the courage it must have taken to escape them. But that’s not a good enough reason. Not for me.

I know how this world works. You give it an inch, and it finds a way to hang you with it. She’s not the only one who’s been used as a rag then discarded when you’re no longer useful. The years following the fall were full of senseless murders, rape, theft, and torture. She’s only a teenager. She doesn’t remember when the rules were made by the evilest of men and women, all of which wanting their piece of the pie, with many of them transforming into the shining lights of hope that now run these divided states. This world isn’t fair, it never was. For those who remember, they’d understand why this girl is bleeding out on my floor, and why I must protect these treasures around me. She’s not the first life I’ve taken. Hell, I’ve lost count to be honest. But she won’t be the one who takes mine, nor the one who burns this house to the ground with our history still inside. I’ve made sure of that…

Well, I guess I better get the shovel. I need some sleep.