In The Falling Light (12 page)

Now, the reporter explained, the crisis was
over. In support of American foreign and national policy, the
Canadian government permitted two U.S. fighter jets to enter their
airspace – better late than never, Thomas supposed – and they
attacked without warning. The fighters came in low over the airport
and loosed a pair of smart bombs which impacted the 787’s fuselage
near both the cockpit and coach seating. One bomb would have been
more than enough, and the big white aircraft disintegrated under
the double blasts, leaving a massive crater in the runway. There
were no survivors. A low-ranking spokesman for the U.S. Department
of Justice made the usual, tired speech about how the United States
would tolerate absolutely no terrorist activities which affected
American interests or citizens, directly or indirectly, and would
respond to all acts of aggression swiftly and without compromise.
An unwavering message of strength, the government proclaimed, was
U.S. policy.

Thank goodness that’s over, Thomas thought,
and waited impatiently for the regular programming to come back on.
The news story reminded him of how much travel abroad had decreased
since the Zero Tolerance amendment had been added to, and radically
changed the Constitution. Incidents like this were regrettable and
unavoidable, but it was far worse overseas.

The Navigator passed another reflective
sign, and Thomas slowed the SUV as his exit came up on the right.
He took the off ramp, rattled over a metal cow crossing, and turned
left under the interstate. Now they were on two lane blacktop, and
the leafy woods to either side crept closer to the road as they
entered the back country. The hills were more pronounced here, but
the big vehicle slid over them without hesitation.

Thomas’s thoughts returned to Howard
MacDonald. Howard’s execution made him think of how clever a person
Howard had been, which made him think of how he would have believed
he could pull it off, which reminded him that Howard’s
eight-year-old son Deke had placed the call to the police, telling
them about the bad thing Daddy had done, which made him think of
his own son Edwin, and that made him smile.

Just before they left for vacation, Edwin
was honored by his school with a citizenship award, for turning in
a pair of high school boys he had seen vandalizing a car while he
was walking home from school. At the PTA meeting later that week,
Principal Halsey showed the assembled parents the video he took
during the electrocution of the high school boys two days later.
Halsey went on to tell everyone that Thomas and Bianca’s little boy
had served his community well, and that the nine-year-old had a big
future ahead of him. Thomas’s heart had swelled with pride for his
youngest son.

“Tom?” He was jerked out of his reverie by
his wife’s alarmed voice.

“Wha…?” Then he saw the twin flashes of
yellow ahead. The headlights had frozen a whitetail doe in the
center of the road, and the Navigator was hurtling towards it.
“Jesus!” Thomas stomped on the brakes and gripped the wheel to
control the skid, the squealing of rubber on asphalt filling the
car, rivaled by Angela’s terrified scream from the back as she held
on to the back Bianca’s headrest. The Navigator shuddered to a
halt, turned at an angle in the road, headlights illuminating the
trees on the left side. Thomas caught a glimpse of a white tail as
the doe bounded into the safety of the woods.

The smell of hot radials crept in through
the air conditioning, and the only sound was the soft purring of
the big engine. Thomas released his breath. “Jesus,” he repeated.
For once his children were speechless.

“My God, Tom, do you know what could have
happened?”

Thomas looked over at his wife and tried a
weak grin. “It’s okay, honey. The deer’s fine, and we’re fine.”

“But Tom!” Her voice was rising. “Do you
have any idea what something that big would have done to this car?
We would have been killed!”

“Honey,” Thomas patted her leg, “I’m in the
insurance business, remember? I know perfectly well what would have
happened, and it’s not as bad as you think. This is a 2034 Lincoln,
built like a tank, with every possible safety feature. A broken
grill, maybe a wrinkle in the hood at the most, not even a full day
in the shop. It would have been fine.” He kept his voice and face
relaxed as he told what was probably a lie.

Bianca was shaken and not easily put off.
“You should pay more attention to the road.”

Christ, not another fight. Better head this
one off at the pass. “Bianca, don’t take me to court over it,
okay?”

His wife looked away, but Thomas could see
the grin spreading over her face in the reflection of her window.
It was an old joke between them, one of those silly things between
married people. Of course each had seen stories in the news about
people who lost cases in small claims and divorce courts, or were
found delinquent with their child support payments, only to be
shipped to penal colonies on islands off the Alaskan coast. The
thought of the two of them arguing in front of a judge about
anything
was so ridiculous it usually broke any tension
between them.

“Well…just be more careful.” Bianca couldn’t
hide her smile, and Thomas knew everything was alright. She turned
around in her seat. “You kids okay back there?”

Angela spoke up, still burning over the
pretzel incident. “Daddy almost got us killed, but other than that,
no big deal.”

“Wow, Dad,” Carl leaned over the front seat,
“if the car can take it, why didn’t you just smash the deer?”

Thomas was about to lecture about
unnecessarily damaging the car, and how it was wrong to senselessly
waste the lives of living creatures, but Edwin cut him off from the
back.

“Because it would have been considered
poaching, fart face, and you know the penalty for that.”

“Shut up, geek, nobody asked you.”

Thomas looked into his rear view and saw his
youngest son looking calmly back at him. If he hadn’t stopped in
time, if he had hit the deer, would Edwin…? He hoped this
citizenship award wasn’t going to the boy’s head. Then he thought
of Howard MacDonald. Howard’s boy was younger than Edwin. He tried
to shake off the goosebumps rising on his arms, telling himself
they were only an after-effect of the close call, and got the
Lincoln moving again.

Half an hour passed and silence filled the
SUV. The kids were trying to sleep, except for Edwin who was
reading his pamphlet with the aid of a small flashlight, and
Bianca, who just sat quietly, watching the headlights pierce the
night. Thomas allowed his mind to wander again.

He didn’t usually think about the Zero
Tolerance Policy. It was something that had lost its glamour long
ago and taken its place alongside trivialities like shoveling snow
in the winter and keeping gas in the car. Just one of the many
things that makes up a life. But now, with Howard’s execution only
a few days in the past, he was thinking about the whole thing
again.

His children weren’t around when things were
different. Hell, he had only just been born when the rhetoric of
the presidency had been
A kinder, gentler
America.
Presidents change, however, just like national
policies and national thinking.

It wasn’t really that long ago that the
president who first voiced those words was in office. He was
followed by a popular, two term president riding high on a fat
economy (as well as a fat intern), and was succeeded by the son of
Mr. Kinder-Gentler, who had to face 9/11. That had been the real
start of it all, a collective ending of what was left of American
innocence. Or so it seemed. As it turned out, America had another
soft layer yet to be peeled away. Following the Texan, America
elected its first black president, a man whom the cameras loved but
who accomplished a great deal of nothing. Behind him came a
one-term Republican who was even more lackluster than his
predecessor, and who managed to crush the economy even further. A
wave of extreme liberalism began sweeping the country, and
Americans elected a far left Democrat who disappointed everyone by
dying of aggressive bone cancer nine months into his term. His
young vice president stepped into his shoes, and if possible he was
positioned even further left. This one lasted all of four months
before a man who wrote a rambling, far-Right blog lifted the top of
the president’s skull in Seattle with a sniper rifle.

Up stepped the Speaker of the House, another
African American with extremely liberal views, a reverend who had
fought hard over the years to reach the chair he now occupied. His
term lasted slightly longer than his predecessor’s – nine months. A
man later linked to an Idaho-based white supremacy group managed to
slip through the Secret Service coverage of a state dinner (exactly
how he managed this would be the subject of investigation and
speculation for years, and would fuel conspiracy theories for
decades) and used a pistol-grip shotgun to turn the president’s
face into chopped meat. The assassin was captured, but was shot and
killed by a black agent later that night while allegedly attempting
to escape.

Race riots sparked by the killings tore the
country apart for the next two years, and America entered one of
its darkest periods. Liberalism was shunted aside in the struggle
for survival, and the United States might just have ceased to exist
had not John Sawyer arrived on the scene.

John Sawyer was a politician with a dream,
and the charisma, finances and contacts to make it happen. When he
took the presidential oath during a special election, he promised
Americans that he was going to put the country back together again.
And he did, but back then no one except he and a select few knew
where his plan would lead. Sawyer adopted some rhetoric from the
eighties, and put it to work in the present day. His dream was Zero
Tolerance, and with the pendulum swung hard to the right again, he
went about making it a reality.

The first order of business was to repeal
presidential term limitations and broadly expand the powers of the
Chief Executive, legislation which met with surprisingly little
Congressional resistance and overwhelming public support. Americans
were worn out, and bought into the idea that getting things fixed
would take time and the steady, long-term commitment of a single
man. The Zero Tolerance legislation which quickly followed struck a
chord with citizens who were sick of uncontrolled violence and
crime, and as a majority they readily and eagerly gave their
consent and sacrificed most of the freedoms their ancestors died
for. The plan was simple. No tolerance for crime. Period. Capital
punishment became the order of the day, and when, instead of
Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were put in charge of approving
Supreme Court Justice nominees, everyone knew that the times, they
were a-changing.

Thomas slowed the SUV as he approached a
railroad crossing, watching a long freight creep by. Carl and
Angela had exhausted themselves with their squabbling and were
asleep, but Edwin was still perky enough to count the passing cars
with his mother. Once the last boxcar rattled past, the family was
underway again. By Thomas’s calculations they were a little less
than an hour away from their vacation cabin in the Carolina
woods.

The changes were dramatic and effective.
When American troops invaded Colombia in order to stop the drug
cartels –
Stop it at the Source!
was the
bumper sticker slogan of choice - the American people stood by
their president. Even after it was decided that the mountains of
that country were too difficult a place to conventionally root out
the drug lords, and the U.S. resorted to the use of several
tactical nuclear weapons – much to the dismay of the Colombian
government – the American people didn’t put up much of a fuss.

As Zero Tolerance expanded from the drug
trade to the everyday aspects of crime in America, the people
continued to support their president. When they saw convicted
murderers being executed promptly, without lengthy appeals, they
rejoiced. When the death penalty was applied to rapists, arsonists,
armed robbers and child molesters, and later to shoplifting and
other petty infractions, the public was euphoric. The crime rate
plummeted and Americans saw that Zero Tolerance was directly
impacting their lives, so they proclaimed that they would support
their national leader in any way possible. It was the mandate
Sawyer was looking for, and certain Constitutional amendments were
swiftly eliminated, modified or created anew. Concepts such as
Reasonable Search and Seizure, Miranda, Cruel and Unusual
Punishment became historical footnotes.

During this period, the federal government
simultaneously poured staggering amounts of funding into
educational programs aimed at transitioning the public into the new
way of thinking. Certainly there were individuals and groups – some
of them prominent and famous - who opposed the changes, but they
were quickly branded as threats to national security and silenced.
No one seemed interested in the details of how they seemed to
simply vanish (the
why
was obvious), and the government felt
no need to offer explanations anyway.

There were also protests from the United
Nations (which resulted in their immediate ejection from U.S. soil)
and members of NATO (which quickly dissolved after the U.S.
withdrew from it), as well as countries not so friendly to the
United States. Things had gone too far by then, however. America,
its people supporting their president with a near religious fervor,
had rapidly reclaimed a position of world leadership both
militarily and economically. Those countries that protested through
peaceful means were either ignored, or crushed financially. Those
that protested through threats of force were dealt with in kind. In
those days, America handled its problems with nuclear-tipped cruise
missiles (Germany, Yemen, Pakistan) or invasion (the oil-producing
nations which were now jokingly referred to as
America’s Middle East Mobil Station.)
Popular
“peasant” uprisings had long ago caused the Chinese to lose their
grip on economic dominance (but not their trigger – millions of
insurgents perished at the hands of the Red Army), and the Russians
had surprisingly little comment. To hard-liners who longed for the
good old days of the Soviet State, America had finally begun to
think like a Russian. In the end, no one wanted to cross the
U.S.