Author’s Note:
The following is a work of fiction. Any persons, places or events appearing in this work are either fictitious or are used in a fictitious manner. No part of this narrative should be construed as an endorsement of any plan of action, events, or socio-political perspective.
Now, with all of that legal setup out of the way, allow me to say this plainly; this story and its component parts are going to make some folks rather upset. I’m aware of the terrain upon which I am about to trod. However, the perspectives and potential events and rationale expressed by character throughout seem to have no narrative voice representing them in the current space, and it strikes me as vital that these concepts be given exposure to the light of day. I’m sure that someone has thought of these things, after all. I also am sure that most folks who’ve thought about them, or similar expressions in the realm of fiction, have self-censored them out of fear of coming under public fire.
I am a storyteller. Sharing tales is what I do, even if there are folks who don’t like what those stories might imply or seem to indicate.
****
Part One- Signs of Trouble
Caleb swung into the parking lot in his powder blue Prius, a thin sheen of sweat forming on his forehead. The underside of his shirt sleeves clung to his armpits in a dissatisfying clutch, and as he angled into a narrow parking space, he found himself involuntarily asking God to allow there to be enough supplies in the store to see him through the week at least.
As he clambered up out of the vehicle, he spotted folks already half-running carts full of groceries toward their own vehicles, their visages bordering on feral, eyes widened and sweeping for potential conflicts. It had been like this for three days now throughout the city, no matter where one turned. And it isn’t going to get better any time soon, he thought. Taking a deep, steadying breath, Caleb headed toward the front of the Whole Foods, snagging an emptied cart from a parking spot just a couple of spaces down from him, its prior occupant peeling away at a high enough speed to squeal their tires.
It was only a little after nine in the morning, but that didn’t much matter. Regular store hours had become a non-starter for most folks the moment the local news had reported on the blockades into and out of the city. Caleb recalled the nervous look on the anchorman’s face when he had first reported the news; there had been something more to the professionally dressed and coifed newsman’s demeanor than simple anxiety. Caleb suspected the man had seen first-hand what was keeping supplies from getting into the metro, and it had left him marked.
Passing into the store proper, the first thing Caleb noticed was the state of the shelves. Almost everything had already been picked over near the entrance, and he spotted a pair of young men engaged in some sort of tug-of-war over a bag of organic apples. The two looked like they might well come to blows over the bright red fruits, and the mere sight of their borderline savagery turned Caleb’s bowels to water. He held himself in check with a fierce effort.
A third person entered his field of vision from the left, a broad-shouldered woman who looked like she might be right at home in a motorcycle club out of shows like ‘Sons of Anarchy’. She wore a countenance of ferocity as she yelled at the two gentlemen to “Calm the fuck down and remember to try and take only what you need for two or three days’ time!”
“But what if this isn’t over in two or three days,” one of the Apple Tuggers asked, his tone whiny, almost childish. “I can’t just go to another store!” Caleb thought about this, and realized that he, himself, didn’t need to be at Whole Foods. He had other options, and closer to his apartment. Recognizing this, he pulled out his phone, abandoned his cart, and started looking up the hours that the Cub Foods would be allowing people inside near his place.
He was perhaps fifty feet from his vehicle when, eyes glued to his phone, Caleb was scared into leaping between a pair of parked cars as a Honda Civic, horn blaring, came barreling at speed toward the front of the Whole Foods. He snarled as he felt the flesh of his elbows peel away on the hot pavement of the lot, tiny bits of pavement biting into his legs through his jeans.
“Jesus,” he rasped, getting up with a grunt, flinching at the sound of shattering glass. He looked to the storefront, where the Honda had crashed right through the glass doors, and realized that if he was going to have a prayer of getting supplies at the Cub near his place, he had to get going now.
**
“I’m telling you, I live here,” she said, hoping the burly man standing before her would at least hear her out. “I was visiting my sister out in Prior Lake, it’s all of twenty, thirty minutes from here. Just please, I’ve got to get back to my place.”
“You’ve got feet, lady,” the large fellow said with a snort. “Use ‘em. Nobody here’s budging.” As if to drive this point home, the big man reached up into the cab of his tractor trailer, pushed down the lock knob, and shut the door, stepping down in front of her.
“You can’t just block people from their homes,” Sarah snapped, planting her hands on her hips, her yoga pants not quite as comfortable in the high summer heat as they would be in a proper studio, or better still, in the privacy of her condo. “This is illegal!”
“Tell it to someone who cares, bitch,” he replied, walking away back the way she had come from along Route 169 North. He had his cell phone to his ear a moment later, and as Sarah began walking after him, she heard him say, “Hey, Jim, it’s Stan. Coming your way for extraction.” Then, in a move that confused her utterly, Sarah watched as the trucker hung up, turned to the left, cocked his arm back, and threw his phone as hard as he could off into the distance.
Too confused to respond, Sarah realized that the trucker had put almost thirty yards between them before she redoubled her efforts to catch back up with him to continue berating him. “You people can’t think this is going to actually accomplish anything,” she snapped, power walking just to keep pace with his long, lumbering strides. “I mean, what is it you people even want?”
“Maybe not to be called ‘you people’ for a start,” the trucker replied, not bothering to aim his mouth toward her to be heard. “Now leave me alone, lady.”
“What if there was an ambulance trying to get through all of this, hmm? Don’t you care about other people,” she asked, on the verge of begging, of breaking down and crying. “Please, I just want to get home!” The trucker finally halted, his arms folding over his barrel chest as he sighed and turned to look down at her.
“I know all about that feelin’,” he said evenly, though his brow was furrowed in barely concealed anger. “My brother Sam wanted to get home, too. You see, back on January 6th, in 2021, him and some of his friends got waved into the Capitol Building over in D.C. No breaking windows, no fightin’ with cops, none of that. A cop actually opened the door for them, and waved him on by, tellin’ him he didn’t approve of the reason, but he agreed with his right to be heard. And you know what happened to my brother?” Sarah said nothing, eyes glued to where the trucker’s fingers of his right hand were digging hard into his own forearm, puckering the flesh and muscle from exertion. “He got arrested. He got tossed in a squalid little solitary cell, and he sat there, without a trial, for twenty months. For over a year and a half, people called him a scumbag, an insurrectionist, a criminal. And when his public defender finally managed to get him released, on account of his Constitutional right to a speedy trial being denied, you know what happened? When he got home? He had no home. He’d been evicted, and his boss wouldn’t take him back at his job. So my brother, he took the little bit of money he still had, he rented a hotel room, and he cut his wrists open in the tub.
“So don’t talk to me about wanting to get home, lady,” the trucker said, now sounding like a revenant, a thing already dead but still walking around. “My brother wanted to get home too.” The trucker turned away from her then, and this time, when he started picking up speed, Sarah didn’t follow after him. Instead, she turned toward the city, and started the long walk home.
**
Another bullet smacked through the front of the house, leaving Jerry prone on the floor, right where he’d been since they started flying. He’d lived in this part of Minneapolis for eight years, and had never once thought of his own neighborhood as a dangerous place. That changes quick once folks miss a few meals, he mused, waiting for the gunfire to cease. It had been a rough couple of days for the once-proud insurance adjuster, an unassuming, middle-aged man who had always counted his blessings. He’d benefitted from loving parents who taught him the value of hard work; he’d managed to avoid bad relationships by learning early on how to spot trouble signs; and not least of all, he'd never gotten involved in some of the seedier elements of the parts of town he’d grown up around.
All in all, Jerry had been fortunate. He certainly didn’t feel very lucky at the moment, waiting for his heartrate to drop back down to a reasonable level, but all things considered, he supposed it could be worse. That first bullet could’ve hit me instead of the television, he mused as he crawled toward the hallway leading back to his bedroom in the humble two-bedroom home. Then where would I be? According to the evening’s news update, caught just before the gunfire had started up, he would have been in a very bad way indeed; HCMC was overrun with injured, and nobody on staff who lived outside of the city proper could get in to help out unless they abandoned their vehicles and found a safe foot path to the hospital.
Hank Jennings at Channel 4 had spoken with a doctor who had himself been roughed up by what he called ‘militia thugs’, roaming bands of fully kitted-out people concealing their identities with military gear who were patrolling the areas between roadways to turn people back into the city. “They shoved me around and warned me that once I was in the city, I wasn’t coming back out,” the doctor revealed on-camera. “But they can’t possibly just trap everyone in the city. This isn’t a prison. These people are thugs and criminals, and it’s high time Governor Walz called in the National Guard on them.”
The problem there, Jerry thought as he reached his bedroom and pulled himself up and over to his small desk, where he kept his laptop, was that he felt pretty sure that a good many Guardsmen and women were part of those militia groups keeping people penned inside the city, and keeping supplies from getting in. Minneapolis had been cut off from the outside world since Wednesday; as Saturday night settled in full now, Jerry thought it might not get any better until Monday at the earliest.
Jerry hopped online, navigated to Reddit, and opened up the r/Minnesota page. There were, as there had been for a couple of days now, dozens of posts showing pictures and short video clips of people trying to get out of the city, confronted in almost every instance by men and women in paramilitary gear. In the videos where people were walking the main roadways, they were met not by militia, but by burly trucker-types, each one carrying either tire iron or shotgun, yelling directions at people to turn around and go back to the city. A newer one that Jerry hadn't seen yet drew his attention, as the thumbnail showed a fellow African-American fellow in a blue-and-white checkered shirt holding a baseball bat at the ready, standing between two penned-in cars.
He clicked on the post and turned on the audio. Whoever was filming walked cautiously up toward the man, and a woman’s voice came from behind the camera. “Excuse me? Hi, um, what are you doing out here?”
“What has to be done, ma’am,” the bat-holding man replied solidly. “Now please, if you’d just kindly turn around, and head into the city, you’ll be fine.”
“But I’m trying to get out of the city, sir. My cousin said I could come stay with her until whatever this is is all over,” said the phone holder.
“Well, ma’am, I’m sorry to hear that. You should call your cousin and let her know that ain’t gonna happen,” he replied, still perfectly genial, almost weirdly polite. “Now please turn around and go back to the city.” Just to the right on screen, a Hennepin County Sherriff's patrolman in full uniform came into view, approaching the woman with the phone.
“Oh thank God,” the woman with the phone could be heard breathing. “Excuse me, officer? Officer? This man just threatened me,” she said loudly, pointing with her free hand at the bat-holder. “He just threatened me.”
“Um, no ma’am, he didn’t,” the officer replied abruptly, taking a step toward the road guard. “I was just over there behind you, I heard this entire exchange, he never threatened you.” The officer took a step toward the bat-wielding man, and nodded to him.
“But he’s holding a bat,” she screeched in response. “Why else would he be holding a baseball bat like that?”
“He has a right to defend himself, ma’am, and I think it’s admirable he’s chosen that over a firearm, don’t you,” the officer retorted, somewhat hotly. “Now sir, I’m going to have to ask that you let this young woman pass by you, however, okay? You can’t insist upon where she can or can’t go or be, all right?” The bat-holder slung his weapon up onto his shoulder, and stepped aside, leaning back against a parked white SUV. As the woman with the cell phone camera passed by him, turning the phone toward him, there was a strange, guttural noise, and suddenly, phlegm flew from the woman and splatted against the man’s cheek. Behind her, there came a shout of “Hey! Hey!”
The view from the phone suddenly got shaky and tremulous, and the woman started screaming as the view held steady, aimed at the sky. “What the fuck are you doing,” the woman shrieked. “Let go of me!”
“Ma’am, you just assaulted that gentleman, you’re being detained,” the officer could be heard saying, huffing and puffing. There was a metallic ratcheting sound then, and the cell phone camera view trembled again, quickly aiming down at the officer, his knee on the woman’s back as he secured the second handcuff. He quickly got off of her and maneuvered her into a seated position, revealing her to be a white woman of about thirty years of age, dressed in white jean shorts and a gray Aeropostale tee shirt.
“Hey, she dropped this,” the bat-holder said from behind the camera, which wobbled as it was handed to the officer. “She’s streaming all of this.”
“Ma’am, I’m willing to release you with a warning,” the sheriff said, at which point the video cut off. Jerry shook his head, vexed by mixed feelings about the video. Most of the comments on the thread were variations on a theme, calling the officer a ‘pig’ and ‘jackboot thug’ among more colorful terms. Someone referred to the bat-holding young African-American fellow as a ‘thug’, and they were subsequently castigated by 53 different commenters for being racist or just prejudiced.
But he was being a thug, Jerry thought. He was acting like a hired goon.
Jerry spent another hour on the r/Minnesota subreddit, then used his laptop to connect to his Hulu account for the latest situation update from Channel 4. There was still nobody claiming responsibility for what was happening to Minneapolis, but according to the anchors, similar blockades were popping up around Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, and Albany, out in New York State. The situations there apparently hadn’t gotten to the same level as that in the Twin Cities area, but there was a worrisome silence coming from federal law enforcement.
“CNN’s Cynthia Wilder reached out to the Department of Justice for comment, but so far, there has been no response from officials within,” the folks at Channel 4 remarked. “That’s all we have for now, ladies and gentlemen. Stay safe, and stay tuned.” And just like that, the live feed cut away to a rerun of Mike and Molly.
Jerry went out to his living room, now darkened, and latched both the deadbolt and the chain on his front door. With this done, he started wondering what he had around the house that he could use to protect himself.