The Ethnic Wars

By Peter Carnahan

The Ethnic Wars were in their ninth year by the time Fazen became Awurade or Chieftain-in-Charge of Philadelphia....So begins a story set in the near future, 2021 AD, when central authority in the country has crumbled and various ethnic groups control regions or cities. Philadelphia is under long-term siege and Fazen begins negotiations with Florida, leader of the besieging forces, to find a way out of the stalemate. Their efforts develop into a personal crusade for peace that takes them on many adventures, ending in the Twelve-Mile Mall in Minneapolis, where they find the beginnings of a solution.

Excerpt is Chapter Two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 7, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462802975

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Copyright © 2001 by Peter Carnahan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

BELMONICO STREET

EXODUS

THE BATTLE OF MALVERN

TROPICAL ISLAND

GILDED CAGE

CROSS COUNTRY

DAWG IN A MEATHOUSE

SAM, THE FATHER

PLANS AND PLANS GONE AWRY

THE MOST BORING MAN IN THE WORLD

EPILOGUE

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to

change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a

thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded

as . . . courage . . . to think of the future and wait was merely

another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of

moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly

character; ability to understand a question from all sides

meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical

enthusiasm was the mark of a real man . . . Anyone who held

violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who

objected to them became a suspect.

....THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian Wars

PROLOGUE

2021 AD

The Ethnic Wars were in their ninth year by the time Fazen became Awurade, or Chieftain-in-Charge of Philadelphia. Originally the wars had nothing to do with Philly or with the A-A Sibros. It was strictly a honkfight, bible-squeezers in North Carolina come out of the hills and cut a swath through every abortion clinic in the Research Triangle, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, back to Winston and Salem. He had to admire the technique, massed pick-ups with gun racks bunkered by bales of hay, for god’s sake, hayseed heaven, John Wayne muvafuckas corny as an antique movie. Yowee! It worked, but it would have little utility here. In those days, in North Carolina, the roads were still open.

But that had started it, that had brought the ammunition laws rammed through Congress by the Yumcies, the party that took the Democrats entire and a third of the Republicans and became the United Middle Coalition—or what the folks called Yumcies, that they knew really meant Upper Middle Class. The UMC controlled seventy percent of the Congress, a crushing majority, but never had more than forty percent of the people, just the college crowd, black and white, and some of the really scared crackers that didn’t want to fight. Luke had laid it all out for Fazen, over late night fires when they were headquartered in Nicetown. Luke was the political officer, and it was interesting to Fazen, the politics, but all now ancient history.

The connection with democracy. As Luke told it, the whole history of the previous century was of the world’s peoples becoming aware of democracy—or what we come to call self-rule, cause the honks had turned democracy into one more con, majority rule just one more name for nigger-stay-down.

It wasn’t clear until the end of the century, all those crazy dudes like Hitler and Stalin seemed to be the big men, but they were just left-over imperialists. What was going on under it, all along, was this new swell of the peoples, all over the world, who began, like we did, to look at each other and say, hey man, we a people. In that simple statement, Luke say, the seed that crack the reinforced concrete of the twentieth century.

And the Yumcies thought they control the information highway. Like man, we got all the technocrats, you guys can use smoke signals. Some things they didn’t know: 1) It only take one television set in each village. Ideas spread like a bushfire, Luke say, through the air, always have, air heats up and then that next tree, it just explode. A fireball. 2) It easier to snip wires than to batter down the Great Wall.

Now they started calling it the Ethnic Wars, but that a late tag, come over the white road, that we still watch, most of us, cause they got a lot better coverage, simply cause they got a lot more territory bein out there, outside, and cause Step Man can step in his window at any point and correct what’s bein said—so folks don’t get the wrong idea. And that window on the old TV screen, it can be small, like Step Man just shakin a finger and laughin, or it be large, and take over the whole picture, and he mad, man, and tellin what the word really is, so none of the Sibros get led off into that fantasy land, that white world we not goin back to in this life or any other.

Fazen rocked back in his chair, the big, high-backed chair that had belonged to the chairman of the board of Holtech, Inc. That why they call him the chair-man, he had said, looking at the brown leather chair that stood as high as he did, and now I got the chair, and I’m the man. The breeze of a May morning, fresh as old childhood, came in through the ragged opening, six foot high, twelve foot long, in the glass wall of what had been the corporate board room.

His weapon with its digital scope lay on the board room table, next to it, his communo, its small screen on scan alert, ready to beep up if there were any action. But out there, the flat cityscape of Philadelphia glowed yellow-green in the morning sun. Amazing that there were still so many tender leaves coming on the trees after the blastings of the last eight years.

He was looking south, toward the border with South Philadelphia, despite the fact that smart shells could come up from any one of those rooftops beyond the Greaser Line and smash right in here. The five floors below him and the eleven above were mostly gutted. Nuts & Bolts worked round the clock to keep one elevator running. Fazen, she say, You showin your ass again on the communo, them RNs try to send an Einstein up it. Despite all that, it looked peaceful and green in the heavy sun, that moment’s pause when the earth seems to come back with special sweetness because of all the hell it’s been through.

And the next moment, he heard that friendly voice, You get your black ass back out of the sunlight, Faze-un, or it’ll be fazed right out of here. I get to nail it up on the wall as a warnin to the next nigger come this way.

He felt her grab the chair back and yank him back toward the wall, the chair rollers cracking on the broken glass and he was spun around to face the woman, a head taller than the chair, size 44 tool belt loaded, cables slung over one shoulder, hard hat painted lavender, that they called Nuts & Bolts.

I like your hat, he said, setting the weapon that he had instinctively picked up down again in his lap.

It’s the spring line, she said, Someone tol me women over forty wear purple. Guess it’s true.

That’s not purple, it’s lavender.

Whatever. What you doin here, dreamin?

Just come up for a look at the line.

Hay-sus, Commandro. You got it mapped and videotaped and ultrasounded and sonogrammed and whatever yo tech boys and girls do. They got every land mine and mouse hole mapped six ways. What you got to look at real reality for?

Just come to look. And somethin, I don know, the weather, the light, remind me the way it used to be when we walk there, he stretched and shook his head, I had a hard night.

H Sector?

Yeah. Night stalkers. Three families, two of them with kids. Those muvafuckas can sure hurt you, and it don do them any good, for Christ sake, a house here or there, scoot back across the line by the time we get our sight back. They’re not up to takin Wynnefield and they know it.

Well, you the strategist, but I jus take em at their word. They like to kill niggers. What do you need to know?

Well I know that. But Florida’s got something in mind.

Yeah, kill niggers, that’s what he got in mind.

He’s not dumb. He may sound dumb, may look dumb, but that cracker not dumb. There’s something more.

She put a hand over the back of the chair and patted him on the chest, Honeybunch, get some rest. I got to run another line to the bunker for the Telly Girls. She clanked off toward the hallway, And stay away from the wind-ow. The wind that come through that O don’t blow you no good.

* * *

You coined the phrase, the host said, and now you’re not happy with it?

Exactly.

Why not?

I had thought at the time that it had a better sound than The Racial Wars. More genteel, I suppose, but also less inflammatory. You know, things have a tendency to become what we name them. But it became inflammatory anyhow. But mainly, I think I oversimplified. Ten years later it’s clear there are a lot of things going on here in addition to race or ethnicity. A lot of familiar things, if I may say it.

We’re talking with Mr. Windbert McMillan, historian and social commentator, from his home on the beautiful Gulf Coast in Fairhope, Alabama. Back after these messages.

During the break the host leaned forward and talked to McMillan solicitously, as if he’d never been on TV before.

When we come back, he said in his famously soothing voice, I’m going to take you back over the beginnings. You know, a lot of people don’t watch the news that closely and don’t remember how we got into all this. They just know that one day we woke up with this mess.

If they had watched the news, McMillan might have said, they wouldn’t have seen very much, and what they did see they would have thought was just another crime story. And if they reacted at all it would have been to e-mail their senators and demand more prisons. Well, now they’ve got their prisons. Five big ones. Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, East St. Louis, Washington. He smiled gently at the host, Ask away, as the red light went on.

I’m going to ask you the one question that I think is in the minds of all our viewers—how did we get into this mess?

Do you want the long answer or the short one?

How long is the long?

About a week. All right, the short answer. Begin with the ammunition laws.

Those were the laws passed in ’12, after the abortion raids.

Right. Briefly passed, until the American Rifle Club got energized. You know, we all thought they were dead. They’d had a whole series of defeats in the previous twenty years and wisdom was they were just down to a few crackpots. Well, never underestimate an idea whose time has come back. That should be the RN motto.

The host’s glance flickered ever so lightly to the director, sitting back against the bookcase wall. The director’s hand was on the edit marker.

The ARC roared into Washington like nothing ever seen since the Civil Rights marches of the previous century. I don’t expect anyone’s old enough to remember that, but your viewers can pull them up from Archive if they’re interested. That’s where that ‘I’ve got a dream’ clip originally came from.

No kidding? The Martin Luther King one? I thought he was contemporary with Hitler and Marilyn and the other World War One footage.

No, that’s just the way they package it. History is medley now. You’re looking at an old gaffer who thinks history is sequence, that one thing leads to another.

You’re not so old.

At any rate, the Congresspeople never knew what hit them. They weren’t used to physical threats up there and they didn’t realize the whole country had gone physical, no longer had any patience with their abstract rights and wrongs, and the committee games they played so everyone could be on every side of an issue. After a few rather nasty beatings, not unlike the caning of Senator Sumner back in Civil War times, but excuse me, that’s really ancient history, we’re going to keep this modern, the ARC won hands down. Not only the ammunition laws repealed, but parole and appeal laws as well, and the God’s Country Statutes enacted. That’s when they established Redneck TV.

Through whose auspices, we’re coming to you today.

Exactly. I can remember a day when the term redneck meant crude, uneducated, just plain dumb. If you had a redneck working for you . . .

While today, the host broke in, It’s the greatest thing you can say about someone. If a ballplayer is really great, you call him a redneck pitcher. Jimmy Sponson, he’s a real redneck on the mound.

Where the UMC made a mistake, McMillan changed the subject, "Well, they made a lot of mistakes, but a big one, right at that time, they thought they had things like the communications highway all wrapped up. This was high end stuff. In their tunnel vision, fatal tunnel vision, blacks could load trucks and rednecks could drive bulldozers, but things to do with the binary code, and parallel processing and fiber optics just naturally belonged to them. It’s a long history, if you’re interested in history, of something called Divine Right. When the RNs took over the AR347 satellite, just highjacked it right off the net and put their own locks on it and came on the air with Aiming Right, all prepared, with graphics and visual interaction, within the hour, that was a bigger blow to the Yumcies of this country than taking over Congress. They just couldn’t believe that people who called themselves rednecks could do that.

And now even the A-A Sibros are in the act. You’ve seen their Step Man. He’s a top performer. Yumcies, when I go over there, tell me he’s the third rated show in their area. They’re all wearing Step Man tee-shirts in Minneapolis. And even the RNs sneak a look occasionally.

We have to take a break here, for your local stations, the host said smiling at the camera, a smile that died as the red light went off, "Professor, you’ve probably lost us about ten minutes with your fancy definitions of rednecks. And Step Man is never mentioned on this network. You know that."

I don’t know a lot of things I know. And I’m not a professor, never have been, never will be.

The broadcast’s no problem, we just keep talking and scalp it out. But man, you live here. Don’t you know how to watch your mouth?

Windbert McMillan smiled, but looked a little tired, It’s in the genes. My daddy stood up for school integration when he was a young man and lived to be appointed county attorney. His father before him set his manservant up in business, kept ten percent and ended up a rich man, thanks to the industry of Rowald Johnson. It’s an old tradition, here in the Deep South, not to be bound beyond your own conscience.

The host looked at him irritably. When Windbert McMillan started talking about the old times, he seemed to delight in contradicting the truths that everyone knew. Nice guy, but basically a nut.

Five seconds, the floor man said, Three, two, one.

* * *

Fazen heard the elevator door clang shut and the car start down with a groaning sound, like his grandmother getting up off the sofa to come to dinner. Nuts & Bolts reminded him of Gran Sukey, always talkin about these old bones, but Bolts meant by that her antique Jeep Cherokee or the hydraulics down in the bunker that worked the shields. She wasn’t being cute about it. Bolts’ talent was internalizing machinery.

It was just a vague fluttering, a blip down there in the beige haze of heat and dust rising from the Line as the sun’s rays came down more and more from overhead, but so conditioned was he now that his eyes locked just to the left, so his more sensitive peripheral vision could pick it up and at the same time his hand went to his machine belt and the digital nocs rose into the line of his sight without his losing the point. The nocs zoomed in as if on their own, and he swung them to the right. It was a chicken—calm again after apparently being thrown over a gate, and strutting and pecking industriously at the loose earth of the G Line, just for a moment, peck, peck, peck, against the brown earth until it crossed one of the optic triggers and the land mine went up in a vertical eruption of soil and a rain of pulverized meat and feathers. The sound came as he lowered the nocs, a rolling thud, thud, thud, as it bounced off the other high-rise walls around him. Good-bye, chickie.

They must be bored down there, Fazen thought, the BCs like those games and they can waste a chicken, but the next moment he brought the nocs up again. No, the chicken was just the attention-getter. He saw two heads above the dark green gate, just for an instant before the gate opened and a figure flew out, all arms and legs, stumbled forward and fell face down into the hole where the chicken had been. The figure pulled his arms and legs carefully in and his head came up, quivering with shock. Fazen pressed the idento button, and his screen in a moment, as the man looked around slowly, came up with Julio Delgado, PRs, age 31, B Sector, Reliability 20.

Fazen relaxed. You never knew about the PRs, or the other Spans for that matter. The much-vaunted dominant new minority, they had been eating into the Sibros’ share of the old welfare and affirmative action programs for years, but when the Ethnic Wars started, they were the one group to opt out. Didn’t join any of the sides, foreplayed with all of them, kept talking about their own divisions, the Mexicans against the Guatemalans against the Cubans. Shit. There was a time when Fazen assumed they would be with them. That was Luke’s influence, he guessed, people of color of the world unite. All that crap. Luke had been furious when they shrugged their shoulders the way those Spans do and crapped out. By that time, Fazen didn’t waste any anger on them.

The result was, the Spans were everyone’s double agents. They had black guys who were just like brothers, to walk the city, and white guys who shaved off their mustaches and put on old fashioned undershirts and were just that many more greasers in South Philly. They did a lot of the trade across the G Line. And that was a help cause you can’t get everything you need from Kuwait and Libya. Mainly food. It was interesting, and puzzled Fazen, that the RN’s didn’t want to starve them out. According to Luke’s scenario they would. But they didn’t. But doing trade, the Spans became the movers, being the movers led to couriers, and that to intelligence. You had to be careful what you told a Span. And what you believed. Julio Delgado, reliability 20. Out of a possible 100.

Delgado remained on all fours, looking like a Muslim at his prayers, except that his head was up and turning mechanically from side to side. Fazen could see the lines in his forehead working and the light glancing off the sheen of sweat on his face.

You want to be white, man, he thought, looking at the features that stood out on his bloodless skin like a cartoon, You white today.

As he watched the figure contorted and curled up, holding his left foot. A moment later, the sound came up to where Fazen was, a squishy electronic zap that reminded Fazen of the weeks and months he’d spent in the Videochip as a young man, playing first Packman and then a hundred clones of Packman. That was one of the great techno contributions of the Ethnic Wars, the Four Stage DEW or Directed Energy Weapon. A brilliant concept, like you can play war at any level. It was an RN invention, by those people who made paint guns the RNs used to go out on weekends and play war with, zap, zap, you’re dead. Then they got serious.

A brilliant idea, really. Stage one was just the paint gun, only zap, you’re paralyzed, you can’t move it for five minutes. Stage Two was really zap you’re dead, and you were but instantly, with one of those little electronic bleeps that we all got high on in those days, bleep, bleep, bleepo, there go the space invaders, nice and clean and sanitary. Phase Three was cowboys and Indians. It was death but not so fast. The beam somehow solidified the blood and strangled the voice, so that the victim just gargled and keeled over like a kid pretending to be hit by a cowboy. It seemed painless. No one ever came back to say. And Phase Four was the frizzler, five seconds and the body looked like it’d been embalmed, mouth usually open, limbs shrunk to just the muscles and ligaments, the whole thing pulled taut over the skeleton in a way that still spooked Fazen, still made him think of that week on Belmonico Street.

Delgado had struggled to his feet by now, and dragging his stunned foot behind him was taking his chances with the mine field. This wasn’t the usual Thursday night Turkey Shoot, Fazen thought, when the RNs brought all their local criminals down to the G Line and just tossed them over and they were a few minutes sport for both sides, if you liked that sort of thing. For some reason, with Delgado they weren’t waiting until Thursday. This was execution and Delgado was finally realizing it.

He pulled his left foot across the loose earth with some success. He’d actually gotten half way to the Sibros wall when the earth all around him erupted, one, two, three, four, five explosions in quick succession, the sound that reached Fazen resembled an old fashioned assault rifle until it ricocheted and rumbled among the former office towers. A cloud of dust and smoke drifted up from the G Line, and when it cleared, he could see Delgado, in the middle of a field of craters, sunk to his knees again, his face covered by his hands, completely freaked out by the explosions, waiting for the last one.

He’s given you a way home, you stupid Span, Fazen muttered as he watched through the binocs.

It had taken him only a moment to recognize the pattern. That was Orangeman’s sector, and Orange had set up a program that targeted every mine in the Line and could set off blasters to trigger them if he ever wanted to just open a hole. Or if one of us was over there, he had said to Fazen, and had to get back.

So he’s used it for a Span, Fazen thought, something special about Delgado, something not on the idento? Or Orange just tired of killing? He’d seen that happen. Strange, inexplicable acts of life-saving. Brothers actually endanger themselves to save somebody. Sometimes nobody, even an RN. Some days, he could understand that, some days, even he felt like that. Just tired of it, not chicken, just wondering if there wasn’t, if there hadn’t been some time in the past, some other way to live. Live and let live, sounded like something that Gran Sukey would have said. He would have dismissed it as Yumcie piety, but as he got older, he had developed a real respect for logic, for things that connected, A led to B which led to C. Or did it lead back to A? Live. Let live. Logic was leading him into some unfamiliar haunts lately.

There was no sound associated with a Phase Three shot. If you were close up, you could hear a kind of pwssh, based on the sound that kids make when they aim their fingers. But through the nocs he saw Delgado’s mouth contort with the guttural augghh! that came from the kids too, as he grasped his gut in perfect imitation of an eight-year-old, as the phase three bolt hit him in the back and pitched him forward into one of Orangeman’s holes. One less Span. Somebody better hitch a rope around him and drag him off to the dump. An RN job. We don’t do that cowboy shit.

* * *

Was it the Klan coming back that brought things into the open, the host asked, I sure remember those cross burnings on TV, in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and what was that other one? I can’t remember all the old names, Tennesippi?

Tennessee. No, it wasn’t really the Klan, Windbert McMillan said, Where is the Klan today? Do you see it among the leadership? Anywhere?

Guess not.

The Klan was just a useful symbol, at the beginning. Part of our heritage, you put something like a flaming cross on the screen, it projects across the room. You could stir a lot of people with that. At least, that was the theory. No, give the Rednecks credit. They recognized right away that the real battle was with the broad Yumcie middle.

But they’re our friends!

For the moment. But originally there was a lot of fighting with the Yumcies. Remember the quarantining of San Francisco?

That was years ago. And now there’s a cure for AIDS.

Ten years ago. Same time we’re talking about. Part of the general unrest. Remember the Boston uprising—Neo-Nazis firebombing the colleges?

That didn’t go anywhere. You can make all you want of these little fringe disturbances, professor, the fact is what you call the broad Yumcie middle are friendly to us.

Nominally.

But we travel there. No border restrictions. You can go to San Francisco or Boston or Iowa without a visa. You can even take your side arms.

More a matter of disarray than friendship. They’ve been neutralized. Very clever on the part of the RN leadership—with one big ‘but.’

The host threw a nervous glance across the room. The director had his head down. It must be getting impossible to edit this.

OK. What ‘but?’

But—the price was this war with the five cities. Let’s be plain about it, the war with the blacks.

But they attacked us! You saw the pictures, everyone’s seen the pictures—the bodies hanging in the subway, the children at the museum, the attack on the First Baptist Church in Quantico. Good lord, if there’s one thing we know, it’s who started this!

Windbert McMillan