Excerpt from “The Last American (Part 1)”
Quick note: For those of who might take notice, I have just self-published the first part of my first book entitled “The Last American.” It is a novel aimed at providing a word of warning in these troubling political times (what else is dystopian fiction supposed to do?), and serves as a critique of the emergent campus left and its conservative companion, the alt-right. You can purchase the book through the Kindle app on Amazon for only $3.49. Please consider purchasing and giving it a read before the results of the 2016 presidential election have been revealed, as it includes considerable commentary on the matter. The following is an excerpt from one of its chapters. Enjoy it for what it’s worth.
The link to the book’s Amazon listing can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Last-American-Part-1-ebook/dp/B01M7049H2/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1477513474&sr=8-5&keywords=the+last+american.
1-6
The trip was almost instantaneous. So much so that Josik had no time to appreciate his view of the stars, nor the mountains, ocean, and the clouds below him.
It made little difference in the end to Josik. He stepped out of his silver pod only to realize that he had been forced to trade one version of hell for another. For one, his lungs tightened within seconds, choked by the thick dark yellowish haze that surrounded him. He was barely able to see his hand in front of himself, let along make out north from south.
Still, he had hoped there was some way out. Surely, he thought, they wouldn’t let me die this quickly. Led by his arms in a feeble swimming motion, he made it out with just enough oxygen left in his brain to keep standing.
Evidently, his pod was slightly off-target—he had crashed in the once-wooded hills high above the settlement to which he had been banished. As it turned out, he ended up in the middle of the wake of a tall smokestack’s toxic fumes. Despite being outside of town, he was surrounded by tall concrete walls on all sides leading away from there.
As usual, Authority had figured out how to give him a choice by giving him no other choice—he went down to join the people down below, all too naively embracing his exile.
The town, when he stepped through it within a few minutes, could be described as dingy at best. All of the people wore roughly patched overalls, many without adequate shirts underneath to provide a barrier between the crude denim and bare skin. All were missing at least one or two teeth, and not one person could be found with shoes. The entire town rested on a giant patch of asphalt, now almost completely black from absorbing centuries worth of pollution. The buildings consisted of neat rows of shacks, of which its material was an ugly combination of canvas, tree parts, and old pieces of lumber.
Every shack, however, was ornamented with the town’s symbol of patriotic pride—a simple orange and gold-starred flag. He continued walking down what could be figured to be the town’s main street towards its town square. The square itself was an appalling contrast to the rest of the towns slums, as it was lined with flashy stores and restaurants with glass windows at the front and all matter of overdone electric lighting, its ground paved with cobblestones.
But the open space drew the most attention towards the town’s lone monument, a single pile of stacked marble blocks less than twenty feet tall. It featured a strange orange clump of fur in a glass display case on its top. It was flanked by an even taller pole, with the orange town flag wavering at its top.
His attention was also drawn to the imposing black cube house to the west end of the square, behind the strange neon-orange fur monument, whose façade was gilded with golden steps and columns supporting a balcony. The house’s exterior consisted of giant, black, tinted marbled windows, which roughly gave this residence the appearance of a giant, darkly tinted Rubik’s cube.
From the steps he spotted an older man wearing a tattered top hat and tie, flanked with two taller, younger men carrying shotguns and wearing straw hats. They still wore the overalls underneath, however. They approached Josik within minutes as he simply pondered their strange attire. He quickly realized that he had little basis to critique, however—the gray Authoritarian form-fitting elastic jumpsuit he was wearing wasn’t much more of a fashionable choice.
The top-hatted man gave a careful gaze up and down at Josik. “Wonderful,” he finally sighed. “Welcome to our town. You would seem to be in the wrong place, though. The Reg office is back towards the factory plant.”
Josik didn’t respond but blankly stared back.
The top hat man gave a wheezy chuckle. “This prissy Bohemian still doesn’t get it, does he?”
“We’re actually referred to as the Bohemx,” corrected Josik.
The comment fell on deaf ears. Instead, the man aimlessly took out the pistol from his pocket to check its bullets.
“You’ve been banished here, son. But you’re in luck, because as this town’s mayor, we’ve built an amazing town that you’ll be proud to live in. You’ll start working here and you’ll love it, and it’ll be a beautiful thing, I guarantee it.”
Then, as if saluting, this mayor stretched out his right arm in a thumbs-up along with a ridiculously approving facial expression. But Josik didn’t know the proper response, and stood dumbly still.
The mayor turned immediately into a full red-faced bout of rage, ordering his guards to pounce on the innocent new arrival. The hillbilly guards moved swiftly, smashing Josik’s cheekbone against the concrete, keeping their feet on his back and head. Josik peered up once he finally caught a breath, could see the mayor standing over him.
“You have a lot to learn, pussy. And rule number one in my town of Appatown—law and order always comes first. Our government’s not a joke, like yours is.”
The mayor ordered that Josik be dragged down to the Reg office, where he was given his set of overalls and directed to consult the desk for job openings, all while trying to ignore the swelling pain in his jaw.
“Any kind of work are yer interested in?” asked the women behind the desk, whose hair seemed to have not been brushed in years.
“I can do anything with a college degree,” Josik said hopefully.
“Aw, right. There’s a lot I’ve seen of those that come from that tin station of yers. Haven’t met one that’s lasted more than a year.”
Josik decided to settle on a job as a lumberjack. Workers in this industry were in high demand, as the wood he and his coworkers collected was burned alongside any other fuel the town factory could get its hands on. These other fuels unfortunately no longer included coal, as the town’s mines for it had been exhausted for several decades. The first week turned out to be physically grueling but invigorating more than anything else. Despite the twelve hour days he’d spend chopping with his axe, the fresh air allowed him to regain his strength quickly.
Even with his meager earnings, he was quickly able to buy enough pieces of refuse to make his own tiny shack. And while he wasn’t able to afford enough food for three square meals, he at least was able to buy enough food so as to not to go to bed hungry.
Perhaps, he reasoned, this town was not quite the hell he had made it out to be. Perhaps the town was a second chance for him after all.
Another few weeks past. Fall turned into early winter, and that brought the first frost and snow flurries. In the wake of the colder temperatures, the factory was in need of more fuel. Josik’s boss and his foreman started keeping him and his workers even longer past sundown, bringing the average work day to well over 16 hours.
Josik’s coworkers had their suspicions of where the large demand of wood was really coming from. The average poor resident of Appatown had no way of burning firewood, as doing so was illegal in the streets and hardly anyone could afford a chimney. They could pretty easily guess that the government officials and company elite—who were often one in the same anyway—were burning it for their own personal comfort.
One morning, as the festival the people of Appatown called New Years’ Day approached, the company gathered all the lumberjacks with an urgent bit of news. In order to keep the factory and the town’s economy alive, they would have to leave their measly huts and be kept under the close eye of the company at all hours of the day. They would all have to travel deep into the forest and sleep overnight in tents pitched in the snow during the time when they weren’t chopping, which was getting to be less than six hours a day.
Josik had overheard from a coworker that the company was struggling to find new trees to chop because of the fast rate at which all of the ones closer to town had been decimated in the name of Appatown’s economy. But what difference did this plausible rumor make? The workers would never complain, much less rebel against their town, because even speaking out against the practices of any town leader was considered unpatriotic. Appatown believed the right things, did the right things, and the mayor did an amazing job doing it on the town’s behalf. The mayor and the mayors before him knew how to do a great job as they had done since its beginning over 800 years ago. The current mayor would often put it best: “Every mayor has done an even greater job at making Appatown even greater again, and I have made it even greater.”
But all of Appatown’s greatness could not save the lumberjacks forced to wander in the wilderness. The first to be lost from their work group succumbed to frostbite, the company even forcing some of them to keep working even after having a hand or foot amputated. Those who survived the frostbite often finally fell victim to hypothermia, along with more in the group who often died in the middle of the night. Still more lives were taken by those who tried to escape this traveling labor camp by felling trees on themselves, affording them a quick yet gruesome death.
Finally, with less than a third of the original group left, the company brought the lumberjacks back to town. Rumor had it that all of the trees of the surrounding area had been consumed, the supply line of wood slowing down to a trickle as the company struggled to transport product from places outside of the town’s surrounding valley.
Within a week, the factory had to shut down. Combined with the large layoffs of the lumber company, more than half the town was now without work and without a way to survive. Josik turned to begging near the few lavish buildings near the town square, often pestering the patrons of the stores where large-chested women were on display. Everyone else turned to looting and clashes with the police force. In fact, with a few days, Josik witnessed such disorder becoming commonplace, as it started to become a distraction to his alms collection. When the police fortified a barricade around the mayor’s house on the fifth day of them being pelted with rocks and sharpened stick spears, Josik realized—he was witnessing a society on the verge of collapse.
That night, it seemed a truce had been struck with the rioters. The police had apparently found and arrested a group of saboteurs (everyone in Appatown referred to them as “sabotagers,” as they preferred the more English version of the word), whose black skin served as a definitive proof of guilt. The blacks, they explained, were historically a problem. And it had become their logic that it was far better to arrest any blacks—or any unusually colored people, for that matter—found near their town as a precaution so as to nip any chance for them to commit crime in the bud. It just so happened in this case that these blacks were found to have intentionally started their own shadow lumber operation in the area, with the full knowledge that they were causing the town to descend into chaos.
The four they convicted were hung publicly in the town square that night, in front of the backdrop of a burning wooden cross. The whole town turned out to become frenzied with the spectacle, but Josik stood towards the back of the congregation. His every instinct was simply unbelieving that these people had to treated as the enemies of mankind.
Now he knew for certain that he didn’t belong in this place. It was only a matter of time before he would be purged for his mixed appearance. Josik had to escape, and soon.
