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They rolled into town around evening. The swamp didn’t give way to a city so much as a series of controlled-access highways on raised mounds above plots of half-constructed shopping complexes. All surrounded for miles upon miles by endless fields of overgrown wetland.
The roads were wide, but sparsely populated. Built to manage traffic far beyond what a small city of this size would otherwise expect.
The limo’s exterior cargo started hollering at a specific exit, so they peeled off.
Once to ground and relieved of their hangers-on, they could finally make progress on the last leg of their journey. They received a token, a weird hand-painted ceramic thing, said to grant them passage and reduce hassle with the militia they'd just helped transport.
“Lotta wide open spaces here.” Soto motioned out the left-hand window.
“Most roads lead from the airport to this place south and west of town.” Dan pointed to a splattering of undeveloped land on their atlas.
Half-formed construction projects lined the road. Evidence of an old putt-putt golf course, kitschy family restaurant, or other tourist traps stood on the edge of the lots. Typically, these took the form of stucco and porcelain statues or overlarge signage. Larger, gaudier facades were all the better to attract tourists.
Only no tourists ever came. Or at least stopped coming with little warning. Speculative money had poured into this strip of exterior malls, two-floor hotels, and putt-putt golf lots for a projected late-eighties boomtime then sort of just ceased. Stucco aged poorly, and so the salvage crew could date their surroundings as they traveled backwards in time, like suburban wasteland archeologists.
From the boom-and-bust quarter, the limo continued onward into decades-old establishments on their third franchisee. More stores remained open here despite the lack of business, persisting on inertia.
While there were no tourists, the familiar militia types became a constant presence the further south and east they traveled. Tacticals – old Chevys (and the odd Toyota) up-armored with scrap metal and packing a chain gun in the bed – lined the road.
As the limo neared its turn-off, a truck stripped to its skeleton cut them off at an intersection. Two horses trotted by, tied to the front “engine” compartment. A beat-red shirtless man whipped at the horses as the truck-carriage inched through the intersection. Rounding out this bizarre amalgamation of a Victorian dime novel and an interior-Florida quagmire, the wagon’s bed contained fishing poles squeezed beside a homemade artillery platform.
“Great-granddad’s Model-T went faster,” Germaine said, then chuckled as he thought up a joke. “Hey, guys. They’re running on two horsepower. See? I said, two horsepower.”
He received no response.
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A three-story motel was thereabouts thirty years old. It sat ten meters away from a particularly large lake, well within the flood zone. It had the same symbol as their little ceramic token spray painted on the side of the front office, apparently meaning their motor lodge was on good terms with the militia parading about. Owner probably just paid a bribe.
It was here that they would stay overnight for one last meeting to iron out the contract, get their bearings, and proceed with the operation.
The trio shared one hotel room. Two beds and a couch – Germaine’s business partners volunteered him for the couch. He got settled fast. Only carried a stuffed-full rucksack with him after all.
Soto gazed through a slit in the blinds, looking out over the lake.
“Problems?” Germaine poked Soto with his own duffel bag.
“Feels like we’re marooned in a demilitarized zone.” Soto mused. “And these facilities haven’t been renovated since seventy-two, easy.”
“Patently untrue!” Dan pointed upwards. “They put steel plating on the roof.”
“What he said.” Germaine nodded. “Gotta be recent; first hurricane will turn those things into missiles.”
They’d all noticed the armor on the roof coming in. Couldn’t see it from inside, obviously, but it had to serve some purpose.
The crew spent the evening failing to get situated. The cramped quarters would be too tight for one guest. By eight, mere hours after they arrived, the sun was beginning to set.
“Militia really slowed us to a crawl, there.” Germaine threw his half-unpacked duffel bag onto the couch to stake a claim. “I’m going to look for something to eat. Wanna pitch in?”
Germaine held his hand out but received only a paltry sum of forty-five dollars across his two companions – practically pocket change! With this, Germaine fished out a room key and left. These stingy roommates were going to have to settle for convenience store food.
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A sense of festive revelry filled the air. Disparate bands of armed militia types loitered about in place of spring break tourists. Mostly they kept away from the hotel, and instead camped in a series of RVs and bivouacs on the lakeshore.
The mom-and-pop store across the street appeared open from a distance. Only after crossing the road did Germaine discover that the crowd out front was not waiting for gas.
The front doors sat bent on their hinges, glass shattered, both doors perpetually stuck trying to slide closed. A mob stood outside the store, chucking bottles into a flaming pile perilously close to the gas tanks.
“What’s the occasion, Doc?” Germaine asked a gawker at the flanks. “Wedding? Seen a funeral with a bonfire once…”
“This sin merchant deals in the devil’s drink!”
“Demon drink!” the chant echoed through the crowd.
Germaine looked over the bonfire. Broken beer bottles lay shattered atop a paltry pyre. Fire was mostly from lighter fluid and a bit of dry wood. Cheap booze covered the floor, not flaming spirits.
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Where were the police? A crew in piecemeal riot armor helped pour fuel onto the pyre. Two county sheriff’s sedans, the only “official” law enforcement vehicles Germaine had seen all day, provided the sledgehammers used to shatter the gas station’s doors.
Alright. Sheriffs are leading the baying mob. Not unheard of. Just keep my head down. Not so different from back home.
Indeed, the militia had a line of prisoners at the edge of a sunbaked sidewalk. Mostly women and one very fat club manager, having been taken prisoner from a nearby venue. A few looked like South American tourists. The women up front wore some costumes that weren’t too terribly suggestive – by Germaine’s heathen eyes, rather.
“What’re they in for?” Germaine asked the nearest militiaman, who appeared to be no more than nineteen, likely younger.
“Fornication!” the militiaman said. Always with the fornication. “Showing necklines. Dancing. And cohabitation while unmarried.”
An older militiaman frowned at Germaine. As if to say, ‘move along, outsider. This is how we deal with troublemakers in these parts.’
“Well, maybe this is a bit too much like home,” the salvager muttered.
Germaine walked, unaccosted, into the looted convenience store. Beyond a small corner that marked the booze aisle and some clutter on the floor, the store was otherwise pristine. He grabbed two sodas and a root beer for the road, then bagged them himself.
The walled-off clerk’s dugout was empty, with any employees long-ago having bailed before the teetotalers arrived.
Germaine marched out with his five-fingered discount in hand. The mob had moved away from the front door and were off to the side, where a new figure in folk-priestly vestments had come to anoint the convenience store as a godly establishment cleansed of alcohol and other forms of fornication.
The bonfire continued to smolder on the last of its meagre fuel supply. Germaine rushed back across the street just in case wayward embers reached the fuel lines.
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A makeshift camp had cropped up on the lakeside. Mercifully, the whoever-they-callsit liberation army had not declared affordable budget hotel-motel combos to be dens of iniquity. At least not yet.
Iterant preachers packing heat and handling snakes served as a fusion of commissar and company commander. Though they wore body armor, they also wore plain black, grey, or brownish robes underneath. At once priests and generals, they delivered commands to their flock in the form of great, mobile sermons.
Germaine loitered around the hotel parking lot, eavesdropping.
“Behold, brothers, a modern Gomorrah waits beyond yonder water.”
The lake itself was one-and-a-half football fields across from east to west and significantly longer than it was wide. Depth was hard to judge. Could be a particularly large sinkhole, could be a knee-deep drainage ditch. How many dozens of alligators lived there? The thought tended to discourage exploration.
The far shore was heavily forested. Beyond, artificial light bathed low-lying cloud cover in an orangish glow. Light pollution bursts out from a far-off city to the west. It had to be a regular metropolis in comparison to this swampy abode.
Further away, in the shallower portions of the lake, a crew was hammering away under a half-circle of floodlights.
“Build, brothers!” said the preacher, who transitioned seamlessly into a prayer. “Oh Lord, bless this dock as our ships depart to reclaim this Occupied Floridian Land and allow us to crucify the godless degenerate Manhattanite Yankee occupiers with their smoke and mirrors and carnival dancing and their devil machines, in your mercy."
A chorus of amens punctuated the preacher-commander’s every sentence.
Germaine was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking in on the camp. There was no real effort to protect this perimeter; the crew was more concerned with whatever awaited them across the lake.
“Hey, preacher man!” Germaine shouted, directly at the figure on the soapbox.
Their mysterious benefactor had yet to provide concrete info on even their reason for being here. Germaine received a massive advance paycheck. What he had not signed was any gag order.
“Yeah, you.” Germaine pointed at the preacher this time. “What’cha gunning for?”
The preacher’s face contorted. He scratched at his beard, as if trying to parse Germaine’s meaning.
“A modern Gomorrah waits to be cleansed beyond yonder lake,” the preacher said again, motioning westward.
“I got that part.” Germaine looked to the lake, then to the small fleet of appropriated bass fishing boats waiting by the waterfront. “But once you get there, what’re you going to do?”
“As we cleansed the modern Sodom that was Branson, Missouri, so too shall we purge this wretched hive of debauchery. For too long has this haven for out and proud thespians and other decadent, northern sentimentalities festered in the heart of God’s own country.”
The preacher continued his sermon. Germaine didn’t really pay attention, merely waited for a lull.
“Branson was too spicy for you, huh? Well, good luck with all that.”
As he walked away from the mob, Germaine noticed some signs staked out where the hotel parking lot met the camp perimeter.
‘The Lord condemns thespianism!’ read one sign on cheap paper.
‘The World of Tomorrow: A World of SIN!?!?’ read another.
Yet a third placard was ranting about New York again. They really didn’t like that place. It went on for paragraphs.
The largest sign, a diamond-shaped placard fused together from pieces of plywood, displayed a greeting in garish multicolor spray-painted lettering.
“The People’s Lord’s Resistance Liberation Army Welcomes You to the Dixie Oblast.”
Militia types gathered in front of this sign to take pictures.
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Germaine relayed these happenings to his partners. It was deemed not enough to warrant keeping watch overnight. Germaine’s accent was passably similar to the Appalachian-borne militia, so they weren’t too concerned about being marched out of the hotel at two in the morning and shot on suspicion of fornication, or whatever.
And yet, the young gun found himself thinking back to that interaction outside the convenience store. Those tourists and… dancers? Wait staff? Tied together like a chain gang. He couldn’t sleep, and not because the couch was stiff as a rock (though it was).
Germaine sighed. He looked for his watch. 1:59AM.
Alright. I’ve got time.
He tried and failed to think of other reasons to keep his head down. No excuses occurred to him.
Fine. I’ll go make some mischief.
Once more, Germaine gathered his effects. He snuck out, his two business and salvage partners none the wiser.
The hotel parking lot was dark, mostly abandoned. Not a lot of cars – militia action tended to scare off visitors.
A makeshift cage had been assembled amongst the militia’s lakeshore camp. Their war boats sat, under heavy guard. The holding cells by contrast had only a few sentries. Easy to sneak past, for someone of Germaine’s acumen.
Only major hurdle was a guard patrolling the sandy lot immediately outside of the cage. Germaine tip-toed around a modified Hilux and timed his steps to match the guards. It was grunt work for novices – sentry was probably sixteen by generous estimate.
Germaine held a finger to his lips, asking the crowd sitting in the cage for some quiet. They sat in the sand without so much as cots to lay upon. But they understood, acted casual; here meaning they didn’t react at all.
With a fluid motion, Germaine brought his hands around the sentry’s head and neck.
“Just a couple of seconds…” he said, dragging the guard off behind the hilux, out of sight.
The sentry’s struggles grew increasingly desperate. With his throat in a vice and his mouth covered there wasn’t much that could be done. Thankfully. One sound and the whole camp would come down on Germaine.
Over a period of eight seconds, the guard’s movements slowed. His arms went slack, and he fell unconscious.
“There we go.” Germaine shuffled over to the cage’s door, dragging the unconscious sentry with him.
The door was locked by a simple padlock. And a quick search revealed that this guard did not have the key.
“Eh, shame.” Germaine shrugged, then went for his bolt cutters.
A quick squeeze broke the lock, and the door swung outward.
“Keep low. Their guard patrols are lax to the west.” He threw the sentry onto the cage’s sand floor. “Don’t try to hide out in the brush. Orlando’s kind of a small town, but should have buildings, stores, and hotels for you to disappear in. Stick to populated malls and the like. It’ll be harder for the militia to track you down and harder still for them to prove you’re who they’re after.”
With those parting words, Germaine let the women file out. And they were all women, mostly tourists or temp workers. That portly club manager fellow was nowhere to be seen.
If the guard caught any heat for losing the prisoners, Germaine never heard any of it. He was back on the couch within minutes, sleeping sound as a baby, not a weight on his conscience.
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