Neighbors & Fences
“Maggie, it ain’t gonna bite ya. Hold the damn thing tighter!” Eyes wrinkled from over fifty years of glaring at folk rolled at Maggie.
On a good day she tolerated old man Cranston because, like her, he didn’t need pleasantries or politeness. Two gruff, blunt instruments like themselves, however, rarely made sweet music together. Especially at godawful early in the morning.
Readjusting the rifle against her shoulder, Maggie aimed at the dummy target set up in Cranston’s backyard. Before the Frackture she’d only been here a few times since Cranston disliked social events, unlike his wife. They’d rarely invited anyone in the neighborhood over and typically hid in the dark on Halloween. Many were surprised after the Frackture when they had stepped up suddenly to do their part. Now she reported daily for strategy sessions and shooting lessons in their home, along with others from their Barrio seeking advice and guidance from the older couple.
Steadying her breath she aimed and fired. The shot missed its mark by at least a foot. Cranston grunted and shook his head.
“Why didn’t you ask Peter to learn this shit?” Maggie muttered angrily, fed up with her ineptitude. She’d never liked guns. Growing up in the suburbs in a city school routinely threatened by violence, they represented everything wrong with the fucked up second amendment world she’d grown up in. “He’s the redneck.”
″Pfft. The man bakes apology cupcakes for Christ’s sake.”
“Hey - they’re damn fine cupcakes.”
“My point is he ain’t learning this, you are. Now man up already and hold the damn gun.” Cranston came from an older generation. One that said shit like “man up” and held dumb binary beliefs about the division of labor. Maggie never allowed excuses like age or upbringing to stop her from correcting people, but she felt tired now. She knew he did it on purpose anyway to get her head back in the game. Maggie focused better when angry.
She tried once more, this time closer but still not hitting the bullseye in the center of the man-shaped target painted on thick wood. They had nailed it to a heavy metal drum filled with cement to catch most of their rounds. The empty field behind caught the rest.
“Better. You getting used to the recoil yet?”
“Yeah.” Maggie had shot dozens of times since Cranston had told her three weeks ago she needed to join the Snowflakes. The term still made Maggie snort inwardly. What had once been used as a term of insult now symbolized the white cover squad that kept the rebellion safely hidden underneath.
“Alright. I want at least five actual hits before you go on patrol with us. Don’t forget to dyke it up, too. I can loan ya some flannel.”
She growled. “Geezer, you’re pushing it.”
“You know what I mean. The Cains ain’t gonna like seeing a woman out on patrol. We’re only gonna make this work if you don’t attract attention.” He shortened the word “Americains” often, and as usual Maggie wondered if he did it out of frustration with the association his country had taken. The semi-Biblical insult had come easy to the rebels, most of whom knew the reference but held no such Christian beliefs. Yet for those who still saw themselves as “American”, or Christian as well, it held a bitter ring of self regret. Especially since several rebels pointed out they had let things get this bad in the first place. However the proposed opposition term “Abelcans” had never taken off, so it was what it was. Maggie had never felt that patriotic, but she knew Cranston had supplied their Barrio with all the flags necessary to make their whitewash cover possible.
“I don’t think I can do this.” Maggie set the rifle down gingerly on the folding table that completed their makeshift shooting range. It felt like death in her hands, and she wanted no part of it. “I’m sure Peter can manage to white boy march around better than me. Neither of us are gonna be useful in a fight, let’s face it.”
A heavy arm wrapped around Maggie’s shoulder. As it did she could feel the weight of so much more bearing down with it. “Maggie.” Gone was the teasing, prodding tone of before. Cranston stared at her with full seriousness now. He pointed over the fence. “What do you see out there?”
The fence was too high to see anything, making it the perfect place for their clandestine meetings. But Maggie knew Cranston wasn’t talking literally.
Outside the false safety of their Barrio fences the world had changed.
When the Americains had taken power and forced their views on the fifty former states of the union there had been resistance at first. A few states - California, mainly, with a handful of others - had managed to separate and stand apart, despite facing uprisings within their own borders. States didn’t split so easily into red and blue like they had on all those old election maps. Pockets of resistance had held out under seige from a surrounding flood of rural denizens, all armed and ready to tear down the shining cities they’d resented for so long. The smaller, flatter states without such urban strongholds had fallen easily of course, with floods of refugees heading for the coasts to provide backup for the tiring warriors there.
The midsized suburb Maggie and Cranston lived in - which they’d thought was a fairly liberal area in the foothills of the Rockies - had fallen more quickly than the big cities. Unfortunately none of them had made it out first.
Instead they’d adopted the same approach thousands of other Sanctuary Cities had - they built the Barrios. While the low income neighborhoods in their city had been wiped out - not without a damn good fight - the middle income neighborhoods hadn’t had the guts to mobilize that way. They’d done what suburbanites did best and hid, only instead of white picket fences it was a white picket line of sympathetic neighbors faking “control” of their respective areas.
The Snowflakes kept the Seeds safe - the non-white families, the immigrants, and the refugees. The Seeds of everything the former country of immigrants had once stood for and dreamed of being again one day. The refugees who hadn’t managed to keep their own homes they hid in guest rooms, in parked camping trailers and RV’s, and in the granny units that used to make AirBnB money. They had shuffled folks around and moved whole households so that the outer houses of the streets held only white familes; the inner blocks held the non-white ones along with most of the children. The Snowflakes patroled the perimeters of their carefully roped off areas, ostensibly to protect their homes from looters and refugees but in reality to protect their very way of life.
Forever hidden, the Seeds contributed as best they could. A few eventually found a safe caravan headed for the free cartels of the south or the Canadian border up north, which had locked down after the Frackture hit its southern neighbor. The Seeds that stayed behind helped build backyard Victory Gardens, tended makeshift chicken coops, or took on freelance work from the safety of remote desktop connections using their white neighbors’ social security numbers. Maggie herself currently held at least three full time jobs. Thankfully the Cains hated taxes so much they’d dismantled the IRS; nobody checked how many jobs she or the neighbors actually worked.
They homeschooled their children and coordinated efforts with other Barrios via ham radios and non-Internet communication methods like landlines, which thankfully still worked. Their cells had fallen silent since they were too easily tracked. Instead they’d taken up good old fashioned walkie talkies - and once again, Cranston’s experience as a semi-retired sound technician had come in handy.
Cranston repeated his question now, and Maggie’s gut wrenched at his words. “What do you see, Maggie?”
She sighed. “A bunch of Proud Boys in pickup trucks driving sixty through forty zones and yelling out racial slurs.”
“Uh-huh. And what would happen if your pretty boy toy stumbled across those gangs?” He forced her to face him, and she flinched. “All that raging homophobia and you think they ain’t gonna attack his cupcake-baking ass like they did that Latina woman last week?”
That attack hadn’t made any news reports. They never did. The Barrios knew because they reported every single death, every single loss, with record precision to each other. It provided a reminder of why they had to stay vigilant no matter how hard things got.
“You think Peter’s honestly gonna pass as one of them? Peter?” Cranston said his name with all the frustration and angst he’d expressed the first time Maggie had asked to borrow his power tools, and he’d realized she handled their home repairs instead of her husband. When Peter had joked his power tools were more like the food processor or the vacuum Cranston had visibly twitched. “Come on, Maggie. Half the man’s wardrobe is pastel.” He pointed at the target again. “You gonna let them take him from you?”
Wordlessly, Maggie lifted the rifle up and with a deathgrip she hit the target square in the chest.
Cranston slapped her on the back. ”That’s my girl. Knew you had it in you.” He went to get more ammo from the never-ending supply. The Cains shipped the shit to every household like clockwork, ensuring nobody went without. If only they did the same with food or medicine. “With practice we’ll get you up to hitting ducks soon.”
She grimaced. “Okay, neo Nazi’s are one thing, but I don’t think I can shoot animals.”
“You will when we all get hungry.”
Maggie fell silent again. Dammit.
Returning he helped her reload the weapon and smirked. “Don’t worry. We only have to shoot ’em. We’ll let Lizzy and Peter clean ’em up afterwards. That’s womenfolk work.”
“Cranston - knock it the fuck off.”
“What? Don’t get so sensitive on me, ya Snowflake.” With a grin he pointed at the target. “Now - do it again.”