Constitution 20Xx

By Allen H. Brown

This fictitious story starts with a cataclysmic decimation of the world adult population by an uncontrolled biological event. A surviving old man in Angel Fire, New Mexico, helps the school children of that village survive in the wilderness using pioneer-like skills. As the youths mature they seek out other surviving groups, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and develop rules to live by — a new constitution for a re-born nation. The complete Constitution, applicable also to us today, is presented in the appendix.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483632070

Allen H. Brown

Allen Brown was born in Connecticut in 1931. In his early years he lived on Staten Island, New York City. He graduated from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, with a degree in mathematics and later received a Master’s Degree in Personnel Management from Troy State University, Alabama. He is also a graduate of the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. After 4 years in the Army his work life began as an electronics engineer working mostly on classified programs. His early work years were in Buffalo, New York, where he worked for Sylvania, Calspan Corporation and Sanders Associates. His last 25 work years were as an avionics engineer with the Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. He and his wife of 54 years, Suzanne, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, retired to the Oregon coast in 1997. Suzanne died of breast cancer in 2008. Allen currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, near his daughter and her family.

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Copyright © 2013 by Allen H. Brown.

First Edition 2013

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.

Rev. date: 04/25/2013

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Mom, Dad… Where Are You?

Chapter 2 - Help Me?

Chapter 3 - The Start Of Survival

Chapter 4 - First Night

Chapter 5 - Life In The Wilderness

Chapter 6 - Seven Years Later

Chapter 7 - Exploration, Santa Fe

Chapter 8 - Exploration, Albuquerque

Chapter 9 - A New Beginning

Chapter 10 - A New Constitution

Chapter 11 - A New Nation

Epilogue

Appendix - Constitution Of The United States, 20Xx

Author’s Comments On The Need For A New Constitution

Reader’s Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My father, Beckwith Allen Brown (1900-1975), gave me the foresight to think about what might be.

Katherine Quintana Ranck has encouraged me to keep thinking in my advancing years. She suggested that putting my thoughts about constitutional change into novel form might get wider attention than would an epistle in classical John Adams or Ben Franklin style. She has also been the primary consultant for this novel. Thank you, Kat.

My grandkids encouraged me without knowing it. Their continual Are you nuts, Grandpa gave me further impetus to get my thoughts into print.

And to the many others who have suggested ideas and provided critical comments, especially:

Ellis Powell—Technical Consultant

Natalie Baca—Graphic Design

Phil Baca—Editor-in-Chief

Kathy Taylor

Patricia Westfall

PROLOGUE

The stalemates in politics in recent years, the bickering in Congress, the use of our military overseas without the Declaration of War, the recurring national financial crisis, unpopular Supreme Court decisions, discriminatory voting law changes and voting irregularities, increased mass killings, the world’s highest incarceration rate, more than $16 trillion in national debt, foreign ownership of more than 20 million acres of our farm land, and the many other political, financial and social issues present today show us that some things are simply not right in our system of government. The starting point for positive change seems to be revision of our archaic Constitution. A new Constitution is proposed herein.

The following fictitious story depicts starting our nation anew after a cataclysmic decimation of the world adult population by an uncontrolled biological event, The Happening. A surviving old man in Angel Fire, New Mexico, helps the children of that village survive using pioneer-like skills. As contact and communication increase among surviving groups of other young people the need for rules becomes evident. Starting with their library copies of the U.S. Constitution, the New Mexico Constitution, and the French Constitution the now young adults develop a new constitution applicable to their current lives. That constitution is presented in the Appendix to this novel, and is applicable to us today.

I hope this book will be impetus to the readers, their families and their friends to think about how to improve our Government and our lives.

Other aspects of our lives today that deserve serious thought are presented on the author’s website:

www.thinkpeoplethink.org

The Angel Fire of this story is fictitious. The actual Angel Fire is a beautiful resort community in northern New Mexico at 8,000 feet altitude in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, 50 miles south of Colorado. The 2010 census showed it had 1,216 permanent residents. The Angel Fire of this story has similarities to that mountain village but has a school, a library, stores and a central village park that would be found in a somewhat larger community.

Book-1-Map.jpg

CHAPTER 1

Mom, Dad… Where Are You?

Jason had a hard time crying and holding his nose at the same time. The smell was overwhelming. The grownups used whatever face-coverings they could find; towels, handkerchiefs, painter’s masks, sweaters. Jason was just pinching his nose. But that made him breathe through his mouth, like when he had a winter head-cold. He could taste what others smelled. He wanted to throw up. He wanted his Mom and Dad. He pee’d his pants. Mom and Dad, he gasped, Where are you? The same call came out again as a whispered whimper. It came out again and again and again.

They had been kept in the school and told to just wait for their parents. They were being let out early. It was almost summer vacation. Many of Jason’s classmates had left for vacation earlier in the week; there were not many of his friends left in school. Parents that now came to pick up their children looked different. They seemed very serious, not with the big smiles that were typical when picking up and hugging their children. Now they didn’t hug. Some even seemed rough in pulling their children by an arm or shoulder. They seemed to want to get the children away from school as fast as they could. Jason looked for his parents—but they did not come. No more moms or dads came. Then the teachers started leaving. Mrs. Allin from the kitchen left, almost running, crying. Then Mr. Batham the principal, left. He didn’t talk to any of the children. He walked out, slowly, like he was careful where to place each foot. He didn’t even look at any of the remaining bewildered children.

When there were no more grown-ups in the school the children started to leave; at first just a few in small groups of friends, then a rush like after the final bell. Jason couldn’t find his best friends Max and Amy as he was swept outside. The park was not far from the school and the children seemed to naturally go there, some running, some just shuffling. A few had something to cover their noses; others just held their noses like Jason did. Most threw-up until there was nothing more to come out. Then they just gagged.

The make-shift face coverings of the grownups turned their faces into lifeless forms with only eyes to hint at an underlying human. Jason was scared. They didn’t look like people. To Jason they looked like a new computer game.

Bodies were everywhere, but many of them didn’t look like people. The few emergency workers that lived in Angel Fire had no training that fit this situation. They soon changed their operations from attempted bio-control and decontamination to body disposal. In a desperate attempt to stop the catastrophe they began burning the bodies. That added to the strange smells already permeating the area. The multiple burning pyres of bodies reminded Jason of the burning of corn stalks on his uncle’s farm, except the smell was different. The smell was something like the bubbling hot springs his family had visited last year, but sweeter. It was terrible. As the emergency workers themselves died, their bodies joined the others lying in the streets and buildings—there was no one left to burn their bodies.

All catastrophes are unique. A peculiarity of The Happening, as it came to be known in history, was that those affected quickly became very old. As one watched, a young adult would morph into a very old person, wrinkle and shrink in size, and slowly collapse. The body would then gradually disappear, vaporize. The clothing remained where the people had fallen, but often there were no bodies in the clothing. If someone looked closely, which nobody did, in some piles of clothing they would just see a lump of something. It would be human remains of some kind, just not recognizable as such.

Another strangeness about this happening was that it did not affect the very young.

It would be years before Jason learned that the source of the happening to Angel Fire and the rest of the world was mishandling of a biological weapon in a foreign country, Upistan. The world had been worried about the secret testing of nuclear weapons in Upistan. They should have been worried about the development of the even more secret biological weapons.

Word of the world-wide disaster had come to Angel Fire, New Mexico, only shortly before it struck that mountain village. The leisurely pace of life in Angel Fire did not lend itself to keeping up with world news. Lunch-time life was slow and peaceful. Then there were brief e-mails or phone calls from friends or family saying to watch TV. News on television seemed to portray an Orwellian fairy-tale; something was enveloping the world. It was reported to have started in Upistan and swept as an invisible cloud through India and China, across the Pacific Ocean and now into the United States. There was no cloud to see, nothing to see, just its deadly effects.

The invisible cloud was said to have first circled the earth in the temperate zones, then it spread northward and southward toward the poles. One television station was reporting that within 40 hours the entire earth would be veiled. The TV reporter was in the middle of saying, Is this the end of life? Is this the… when the screen went blank, showing only white noise dots.

Confusion and fear quickly replaced afternoon calm in Angel Fire. Was this real? What was happening? Panicky telephone calls came from distant relatives and friends. The calls were often filled with screams. Sometimes the calls just ended suddenly. Realization came soon enough to Angel Fire, when people started collapsing in the stores and on the street, some turning quite white, looking old, and beginning rapid ablation.

But some did not perish immediately. A few gravitated to small groups in the park or just stood alone like dazed zombies, covering their faces with whatever they could grab, torrential tears soaking the face covers. They were afraid to go near a building, to try to give aid or comfort, or to do anything but stare and cry. Some of the children from the school were there, some standing, some sitting, trying to cover their noses, all of them crying until they couldn’t cry any more.

Jason thought he might wake up, just sit up in bed. It just didn’t seem real. Something was wrong. Jason shook his head. It must be a nightmare. But the smell was real. Someone might fake what you see, like on television or in a computer game, but the smell told the truth. A smell making him throw-up.

Through his tears and the long blond hair partially covering his eyes Jason could see on his Mickey Mouse watch that it was now almost three o’clock. But there was no bus, no lines of his friends waiting to go home. Normally his small frame would have been jostled by friends, but he had been the only one standing between the yellow lines designated for bus #2 before he also headed for the park.

Jason had not been one to think much about the goings-on around him. He just enjoyed life as it came. But now he felt the quietness. It made him shiver. There were no birds twittering, no flapping of wings. The usual pigeons in the park were not there. And there were no human voices. The few grown-ups that went past said nothing. They were just sobbing, like he was. And then one-by-one they fell to the ground.

A man and a woman approached Jason slowly, bending low to be more at his level. That is what his grandfather often did. Each of the grownups had a large cloth in one hand that covered nearly all of their face. The cloths were wet, even dripping water, their flood of tears having soaked the cloths. Their free arms were out-stretched as if to touch him. He withdrew quickly, a new fear gripping him. As he watched they got older, thinner, their faces became wrinkled. Then their skin began sagging. With a small shudder, as if they were suddenly cold, they slowly collapsed to the ground. The man fell first, then the woman on top of him. Jason stared at the pile. He stopped crying and just stared. Slowly the pile seemed to get smaller. The smell got worse.

When his own tears started again Jason turned and trotted to the middle of the park, averting lumps of fallen bodies as he went. He stopped where a small group of his classmates sat on the ground looking at an old man sitting by himself on a park bench, his arms resting on the weathered wooden table. The old man held no cloth to his face.

Book-2-Gustov.jpg

Penny’s drawing of old man Gustov (Grandpa)

CHAPTER 2

Help me?

He wasn’t really their Grandpa. He wasn’t anybody’s Grandpa, as far as they knew. He was just an old man in the park to whom the children drifted. The other adults in the park, those that seemed to have been surviving, dropped one-by-one until he was the only old person alive there. When Jason came close to look at the old man, there were no tears on the crevassed tanned face. His head was crested with long white hair that seemed wind-blown although there was no wind. His unblinking gray eyes looked only straight ahead. He was surrounded by children, perhaps thirty in all, but unlike the happy school children of a few hours ago they were all quiet except for muffled crying and coughing. Not all the children from school were there. Many had run in different directions, looking for mothers or fathers or grandmothers or grandfathers. Jason did find Max and Amy there. Amy didn’t look so pretty now. Her face was white, like a mask. Her reddish hair hung to her shoulders as always, but now was disheveled like when he had mussed it at recess. Chubby Max as his friend was known didn’t look at him. Max didn’t look at anybody. He was terrified and not looking well. Jason’s eyes kept returning to stare at the old man.

One pale little girl, smaller and younger than Amy, with short blond hair, crawled up beside the old man and whispered, Help me? That seemed to break the old man from his trance-like stare. He took the little girl in his arms and held her close. The little girl whispered again. I want my kitty. Her name is Misty.

The old man now remembered seeing some local cats and dogs scurrying into the nearby woods as the humans fell. But he saw animals fall also.

I saw some animals earlier. Maybe we can find Misty. What color is she?

Gray. But sometimes she looks blue, answered the girl.

And what is your name, asked the old man.

Angel, answered the little girl. Like our town name.

The old man pulled the little girl close. Finally he cried, letting tears flow into the little girl’s hair. When he slowly got up holding both her small hands, he looked all around—stopping to stare at some places, at some bodies, at some children, but then turning ever so slowly to take in more of the