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  “Okay,” he said. “We stay on higher ground and find a path along the mountain. Maybe we can devise some way to chart our progress, so we don’t get lost.”

  Malina nodded, a hint of a smile on her face. Still, she said nothing and resumed her mountain-staring. She didn’t seem interested in scavenging for supplies.

  “Check this out,” Tenney said. He hefted a gas mask, a hard rubber shell with glass eyes and a cylindrical disc attached to the mouth area. Then he poked a finger through a hole in the top of the mask. A bullet had probably made that hole.

  Yorick crossed the interior to Tenney and accepted the gas mask. “What happened here?” he asked as he turned the heavy object over in his hands. There were no obvious bullet holes in anything else. Had a person been wearing this? If so, had someone taken it off that person’s head?

  “No idea,” Tenney said. “Every single thing we see out here is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Every day is new and weird.”

  Rosia joined them, and Yorick passed her the gas mask. “I know what you mean,” she said as she explored the object. Malina did not opt to take a turn examining the thing.

  Rosia passed the mask back to Yorick, and he chucked it across the plane. “We need to be careful. Watch each other. I don’t trust anyone except for the three other people standing here in this avión with me.”

  Rosia and Tenney nodded their agreement, and Malina turned to face them, at least.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rosia said.

  The four of them collected whatever useful items they could find to stuff in their packs… a length of rope, carabiner clips, a small knife, and other bits and pieces. Then, they set out the western edge of the plane wreckage, sticking to a trail battened down by the hoofs of four-legged creatures over an untold number of years.

  Single-file, they pushed forward, packs on their backs. Yorick listened to the sounds of nature and the stomping of feet, keeping his ears attuned for vehicles or any other unexpected sounds.

  As the sun shifted across the sky, he marveled at how it moved. Living within the tall walls of Wybert’s plantación most of his life, he’d never seen the sun rise and set from this ground angle. Always behind the walls or up high in his dorm room.

  “Wait,” Malina said as she came to a halt. The other three, all in front of her, stopped in the trail.

  “Up there,” she said, squinting against the light. She lifted a finger up the mountain, toward something jutting above a rock outcropping. “Do you see what I see?”

  “That’s a boulder,” Rosia said.

  Tenney shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s a structure. Man-made.”

  Yorick sighed as he narrowed his eyes to focus. Whatever it was looked like a triangle, definitely not a naturally occurring formation. “She’s right, that’s definitely something.”

  “If we spend the time to hike up there,” Rosia said, “there better be shelter. It’s going to be dark soon. Our next best bet would be going back to the avión wreck since we’ve been exposed the whole time and I don’t see any good caves we can sleep in.”

  “I don’t want to sleep back at the avión,” Yorick said. “We should push forward.”

  “I don’t want to go back either,” Rosia said, “but it’s our best chance at shelter. We could get up there and find out this man-made thing is the White Flames’ hideout.”

  Yorick smiled if only to mask his fear. “If that’s the case, we won’t have to worry about shelter at all.”

  He set off, and he could feel Rosia’s scowl boring into his back as he climbed the rocky side of the mountain. Three of the four of them had seen it one way. That was enough of a consensus to proceed.

  In five more minutes, the triangular structure became clear. It wasn’t a boulder, it was a roof. The roof of a house set back into the side of the mountain. It took a more defined shape the further they went. The terrain also steepened, making the last few hundred meters a challenge.

  When they’d all climbed high enough to see the front door, they paused. Yorick sipped from his water, breathless and panting. The house seemed quiet, no lights on in the windows.

  He looked at his three companions, and all of them seemed wary. He’d had a lot of practice reading their expressions over the last week out here.

  “You wanted shelter?” he said. “The land has provided us with exactly what we need.”

  “I don’t know about this,” Rosia said.

  Tenney drew his knife and pressed forward, grunting as he scrambled on top of a large rock to continue upward.

  Yorick shrugged at Rosia and followed Tenney. The decision had been made.

  1 Pinche: f*cking

  Chapter Three

  Yorick and the others watched the house. Tenney had volunteered to open the front door since he still had ammunition left in his rifle. Yorick and Rosia consented. Malina looked worried, but she said nothing, as per usual. She did give Tenney a kiss on the cheek before he stepped onto the porch.

  Then, they all backed away. Rosia raised her rifle and pointed it in the general direction of the house. It wouldn’t help much if someone shot Tenney as he walked across the threshold, though.

  The house itself was a small thing, maybe three or four rooms. Yorick had never seen a house in real life, other than Wybert’s mansion. This rickety thing made of wood and brick was considerably smaller than that one. White paint had flecked off, some in little piles in the surrounding grass. A rusted wheelbarrow sat in the side yard, the wheel flat and a puddle of stagnant water in the bed.

  They’d stood outside of the house for several minutes, listening for any sounds coming from within. Nothing came back aside from the light mountain breeze making the shutters on the windows sway. No hints of motion from inside those windows.

  Still, Yorick didn’t feel right about this place. Tenney glanced at him, and Yorick, the unofficial leader of their little wandering party, nodded his approval. One way or the other, they would know soon what was in there.

  Tenney kicked in the door.

  Yorick jumped up onto the wooden porch after him, followed by Rosia and Malina. Within five seconds, they were all inside, standing in a room not much bigger than the dorm room Yorick and Rosia had called home for the last few years.

  “Looks like it’s all…” Tenney began, then he paused. His face changed, the lines drawing down until his expression had morphed into one of unease. His eyes were focused on something on the far side of the room.

  Yorick was about to open his mouth and ask what he’d seen, when he saw it too. Near the living room’s fireplace was a lounge chair, cracked golden leather.

  And a corpse sat in the chair.

  Tenney pulled Malina close, and Yorick backed up to stand even with Rosia. For a moment, no one said anything. The thing in the chair was clearly dead, given that its body had half-rotten away. It had to have been dead for twenty or thirty years. Maybe more. Wisps of long gray hair still clung to the top of its dark scalp. The lower jaw was missing. A gold tooth shined under the waning light filtering in from the window.

  “What in the stars is that?” Rosia asked.

  Yorick now noticed the dead body in the chair was a man. He could still see the formation of the shoulders, the shape of the torso. The clothes were unusual, for sure. An older style, maybe?

  Everyone held firm, glued to their spots on the dirty wooden floor of this room. It seemed as if they expected the rotting remains of this man to burst from his seat and come straight for them. Yorick remembered reading about that in one of the fiction books. While the reanimation of the dead seemed unlikely in real life, the corpse in the chair did seem to have a wealth of kinetic energy simmering inside him.

  Yorick took a few steps in that direction, and Malina whimpered.

  “What are you doing?” Rosia asked. “Don’t go near that thing.”

  Yorick waved a hand behind him, letting them all know he was fine and nothing bad would happen. At least, he hoped nothing bad would ha
ppen. He had to get a closer look. No idea why, but something told him he had to.

  At a meter away from the body, he dropped to one knee and studied it. Then, he noted the holes in the man’s thick and fuzzy shirt. He reached out, pulled the shirt aside, and saw the matching holes in his chest. At least a half dozen of them. Safe to say that’s why he was a corpse now, not old age or other natural causes.

  “What happened to you?” Yorick said, musing. “White Flames? Some other gang?”

  Yorick had seen his first dead body when he’d been young. A while after coming to live at Wybert’s plantación. On a break from classes, he and the older boy Hamon—who would later become the leader of the Blue guerreros—had been walking along the plantación paths. On a clear, spring day, the weather crisp and cool. Hamon told Yorick stories about the great daily battles the older kids would have in the summer. It was almost enough to make Yorick excited about being inside the walls of the plantación. Becoming a guerrero was something to strive for. Purpose.

  And then, they had seen a collection of serfs put up against the wall to be punished for some unknown infraction. An expressionless firing squad opposite them pulled their triggers all at once, and the line of serfs collapsed in unison. Yorick could now recall seeing the bloody holes in the wall behind their bodies. He could remember the way the sound of the gunshots echoed along the curvature of the wall’s interior.

  His excitement about the future had evaporated on the spot.

  Yorick snapped back into the moment. He noted the odd way the man had been seated as if leaning a little to his right. There was a bump in the chair’s bottom. This wasn’t natural; he was shifted because of the odd angle of the chair.

  Something hidden under there.

  Yorick reached out and lifted the seat cushion up a few centimeters until he could see what was causing the bump.

  “Good news,” Tenney called out, and Yorick only now realized the three others had dispersed to explore the house. No one wanted to watch him inspect the creepy dead guy, apparently.

  “What?” Yorick said, craning his neck around.

  Tenney dragged a footlocker from a side room back into the entry room. It made scraping sounds as it moved across the wooden floor. He pointed at a padlock on the front. “Locked case. This has to be a good sign, right? Only the stars know what’s in it, but at least it hasn’t been looted.”

  Tenney dropped to one knee and set to work on picking the padlock.

  Yorick turned his attention back to the object under the seat cushion. Pinching his nose closed with one hand, he dug his other hand under the cushion and gripped the object. The bones clicked together as the corpse leaned.

  Yorick pulled out a set of pages. A notebook, or journal. Frayed and yellow, collected and held together with rusted clips. Had this been there the whole time, hidden by the man’s decaying body?

  A cracking noise came from behind. Yorick whipped around to see Tenney jabbing the stock of his rifle against the padlock. Malina jumped when he smacked it a second time. After the third attempt, it finally broke open. Yorick couldn’t see the contents, but he could see Tenney’s reaction. His face lit up with as much joy as if he’d discovered the finest cuts of rare steak inside.

  “What is it?” Yorick said, rising to his feet. He wandered over to Tenney and let his eyes adjust to take in the contents. Packaged meals, bottled water, clothes, and blankets. All of them organized and segmented by type of object. Someone had put a lot of care into assembling this emergency supply.

  But what must have made Tenney smile was the small collection of pistols underneath a blanket. Five of them, with several boxes of ammunition to match. Clean, new-looking weapons.

  “This is amazing,” Yorick said. He didn’t want to think about who had left it here, or whether that person or persons might want to come back for it. For only a moment, he wanted to feel a sense of victory. Since Wybert’s death and leaving the plantación, they hadn’t experienced many of those.

  Rosia and Malina gathered around, glancing down at the open trunk.

  “Is that really what I think it is?” Rosia asked.

  “Food and supplies to keep us going,” Tenney said. “This is good. This is very good.”

  “What’s that?” Rosia asked, tilting her head and the pages in Yorick’s hands.

  He squinted at them and now noticed the printed words near the bottom. The title of the journal. Yorick held it out and read the words aloud.

  An excerpt from A brief history of the decline of the United States of America

  by James Eppstein, Ph.D.

  History is told by the winners. That’s the old saying most people know. I wonder if they ever stopped to really think about what it means. About how much history has been erased because it didn’t serve the right purpose or because it made the victors look bad.

  That’s why I’m keeping this journal. So this history of ours won’t be deleted by the ones who have the power to do so. Most of it is already gone or has been relegated to the land of myth and half-truth. The young people born long after the crash have no idea of any of this. Who knows what they will teach a hundred years from now after all the books have been burned or wilted away? After all the servers have been wiped, and common people no longer have access to them, will we still seek out the truth?

  I’m an old man. I spent most of my adult life as a professor of history at the University of Montana in Missoula. It’s unfortunate that my chosen profession was one of those deemed non-essential and slowly phased out. It’s a miracle I was able to eke out a living, despite the decreasing need for education.

  In my younger years, as I learned about history, I suppose I thought the ship would right itself eventually.

  How wrong I was.

  Let me start at the beginning. The first installment of the tale begins with what the news media termed at the time to be the “Currency Crisis.” Some news networks spun it as a problem of external forces subverting American ideals, and other news networks spun it as a corruption from within. The truth is, at the time, none of them knew anything, so they blamed all the usual suspects and stoked the usual tribal anger in order to cultivate website clicks and video views. The clear loser was the American people, who never got the whole story.

  In the first half of the twenty-first century, cryptocurrency came into fashion. It arrived like an alien invader, thunderous and dominating, promising to solve all of the problems and ensuring prosperity for everyone. While many were rightly suspicious of how quickly and fully crypto propagated, they were wary for the wrong reasons. They thought it was a fad. They thought it was unstable. These were the same people who didn’t understand how we valued sheets of cotton fiber paper with numbers and dead presidents printed on them. Dollar bills had value not because they themselves had value, but because we believed they had value. The basic misunderstanding of value—driven in large part by the media—caused a lot of the early confusion.

  People held the same fallacious assumptions and fear-based hatred/love of crypto. Early systems like Bitcoin came and went, boomed and busted. Some people used these boom and bust cycles as proof it couldn’t be trusted. But many voices, growing louder and louder, insisted that these experiments would lead to the perfect currency, once enough testing had been done.

  It wasn’t until 2053 that eCoin emerged as a quasi-stable option throughout most of the world. When countries like France and Germany and China adopted it, that seemed to cement it as the global de facto currency.

  Skeptics in the US cried louder and louder as these other countries grew richer and richer. Globalists, however, nearly burst with optimism. The idea of one world currency spurred all manner of hope, some of it real and some of it nothing but fancy. Around this time, a huge shift in American philosophy occurred, and no one except for the looney conspiracy theorists seemed to notice: the complete deletion of the middle. There were pessimists and optimists, and the realists’ voices were drowned out. Everything that came along was either our do
om or our salvation. If there were rational, sane supporters of the middle ground, no one heard from them. They weren’t publishing articles online. They weren’t going on the TV shows to preach neutrality.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to ignore the United States, which seemed content to eat itself. Countries continued to fall in line with eCoin, whether through peer pressure or their own currencies falling farther and farther. Russia, Canada, Mexico, Australia… soon it seemed eCoin was inevitable. Every country that adopted it saw immediate success.

  Except for one holdout. The country still known then as the United States of America sat on the sidelines and watched. They waited. And, they could do that, because no matter what the rest of the world did, the dollar still held strong. Sometimes, to the complete and utter confusion of economists.

  Remember what I said about the value of currency having to do with belief? Belief in the dollar’s permanence was the first mistake we made. Or, rather, holding on to that belief past the point of realism. Ignorance and hubris make for terrible partners.

  If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you may have never heard of a book we called The Bible. I haven’t seen a copy in many years, but there’s a saying in it that goes like this: Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Something like that. It means thinking you’re better than the rest is a recipe for destruction.

  The next big mistake had to do with a single decision, something that could have so easily gone the other way. Maybe that’s the thing to baffle future historians: how one simple switch could have changed to save the country.

  President Madison Elizabeth Wallace took some bad advice. The name of the economist who gave it to her was classified, but the president decreed that the United States would not join the eCoin currency movement. The United States would adopt OneCoin, a newer currency that was, at the time, skyrocketing in value.