Chapter Four

In which our heroine proves herself an immoral citizen of the CCSA.

Lorinda drove slowly in order to read the address numbers and ogle the fancy houses. “Three-fifty-nine,” said Emmie, “three-fifty-seven … here we are.”

There were several cars parked on the street and in the driveway, but Lorinda easily found a spot. The house was big, like the others on Righteous Pathway: two stories, a grand portico, lots of glass, a couple of chimneys, yard space on the sides to distance it from its neighbors. It looked brand new: no broken windows, no bad paint, no dangling gutters. They could see people inside dancing. They could hear the pulse of the music.

Lorinda saw Brad as soon as she walked in. Standing by the door, a Johnny Reb in one hand, a joint in the other, his gun hanging from a holster on his belt, cowboy style, he was hard to miss. His face lit up as she entered. “You’re here!” he said. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Of course I’m here,” she said. “Shall we dance?”

“Good idea. Let me introduce you to my friend Finn. It’s his house. His parents’ house.”

“First let’s dance.”

An hour later the lights were down low and the music had evolved from jumpy rhythmic numbers to slow, romantic ballads. Lorinda and Brad were pressed against each other, swaying to the music. She was halfway through her third beer and trying to remember if her limit was usually one or two. Emmie, slow-dancing with a guy she’d met a half-hour earlier, made eye contact with Lorinda and winked. Lorinda winked back, but her joy was interrupted by a sharp pain in her side. “Owww!” she blurted.

“What?” said Brad, who had turned to fetch his beer from a nearby table.

“You just smashed me with your gun,” said Lorinda, rubbing her hip. “That hurt.”

“Sorry,” said Brad, setting down the drink and attempting to resume full-body contact. At that moment the lights went bright, the music stopped, and the television on the wall lit up. “Shit,” said Brad. “What’s he up to now?”

“Who?”

“Finn. That’s him.”

Finn was a tall, skinny, teenage-looking man in his mid-twenties, with curly red hair, wearing plaid shorts, a black tee-shirt, and flip-flops. “Hey, everybody, thanks for coming,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but I figure none of you saw the debate earlier — you had better things to do, I’m sure — so I recorded it. I thought I’d show you the first ten or fifteen minutes of it now, cause it’s important to know what’s going on in the world. It’s the CEO debate. It’s important.”

This elicited a round of boos and good-natured attacks on Finn’s character from the people on the dance floor. “No, really,” said Finn. “Just a few minutes of it. People! The election’s in only three months! Okay, Murray! Play TV.” Most CCSA citizens assumed that the “Murray” in the ubiquitous command was simply a random, sort of amusing, sort of semitic name, a first-name appearing on the birth certificate of virtually no actual inhabitant of the country. In fact, it was an homage — paid by the engineers who adapted some legacy remote-control software for use in the CCSA — to Charles Murray, author of the classic racist book The Bell Curve.

As the partygoers grabbed their drinks or went for a refill, the show began, cued to the moderator’s first question: “Mr. Waldrip, why are you and the Divine Party better qualified to rule the CCSA than the incumbent, Mr. McWeeny, and his White Christian Party?”

“First,” said Ollie Waldrip, “we’re better Christians, despite the name of his party. Second, we’re absolutists. Fundamentalists. For instance, if we have to execute the woman to save the baby, then that’s exactly what we’re going to do. God personally told me that’s what He wants.”

“That’s exactly, word for word, what you always say,” Ezra Ferrell McWeeny interrupted. “Praise Jesus, we know better. We want those women to live. We need them.”

“Those are the words God implanted in my brain,” yelled Waldrip, “and who are you to contradict God?”

“You need to be hospitalized,” McWeeny shouted back. “You’re mentally ill. That’s not God talking to you. You’re hearing voices.”

“And third —”

“Third is, you’re a lunatic. Completely out of your mind ….”

“I didn’t come here to be insulted like this!” Waldrip said.

“No problem,” McWeeny said. “It’s free of charge.” To the moderator he said, “Come on, Earl. Next question.”

“All right! Gentlemen! Please.” The moderator took a breath. “CEO McWeeny. You’re on record as having called for the re-unification of the CCSA with the USA. What —”

Lorinda had trouble hearing the rest of the question over the boos and jeers of the partygoers. Finally she heard, “— think that’s a good idea?”

McWeeny’s bulldog face went mild and blasé as he held up a cautioning hand. “You’re mis-quoting me. As usual. No, I don’t call for re-unification. I said it’s something we should study —” More boos from the revelers. “— so that when the USA comes crawling back to us and begs us to re-join the nation, we know what our terms will be.”

“That’s not what you said, God damn it!” Waldrip began.

“Nice. Nice blaspheming, you fraud.”

“You said, ‘I look forward to the day we can knit the two halves of the country back together’ —”

“UNDER OUR TERMS. Is that too subtle for you? Earl, explain it to him.”

“Gentlemen!” The moderator banged his fist on the table. “All right, let’s talk about the North Dakota Purchase.”

“It’s a damn disgrace,” Waldrip said. “Our country is not for sale.”

“Spoken like someone who hasn’t the faintest idea of what our government is facing,” McWeeny said. “All I can tell you is that it’s still being negotiated …”

Lorinda had only a vague idea of what they were talking about. Apparently, during the fifteen years since The Split, even after the Moratorium, millions of undesirable people, not to mention white, upstanding Christians, had left the CCSA, some by climbing, burrowing under, blasting through, or hiking around The Wall, and emigrated to the USA — so many, in fact, that the other country found itself in need of real estate in which to allow them to settle. This coincided with the discovery, by the CCSA, that it was spending the bulk of its gross national product on building and maintaining its various border walls with the USA, Canada, and Mexico, and in a few years would be bankrupt. So a deal was in the works to sell North Dakota to the USA. The relatively small number of people living there would be free either to remain, and become USA citizens, or move at CCSA expense. Lorinda, when she thought about it (which was almost never) didn’t know whether she was for or against it.

 There was a brewing hubbub on the other side of the living room. Lorinda looked in that direction. She couldn’t see what was going on, but she did hear the growled names “Waldrip” and “McWeeny.”

“We didn’t engineer The Split in order to sell our own country for parts!” Waldrip shouted from the television.

“Do you even know what the word ‘default’ means?” sneered McWeeny. Just as Ollie Waldrip leapt out from behind his lectern, the hubbub across the room escalated to a loud kerfuffle. “Okay, Murray! Freeze!” shouted Finn. The image froze on an airborne Waldrip in the middle of tackling McWeeny. At which point it was clear that things were getting as serious across the room as they were on the screen. People were yelling. Fists were flying. Guns were being waved.

 “Hey!” yelled Brad, which had no effect whatsoever on the escalating melee. Sweeping Lorinda behind him, Brad yanked his gun out of his holster and pointed it up, not knowing what else to do with it.

“Don’t shoot the ceiling,” yelled Finn. “My parents will kill me.”

Lorinda spun Brad around, kissed him long and hard on the mouth, and said, “Put that thing away.” He obediently re-holstered the gun. She then took his hand, pulled him away from the fracas and toward the stairway, and led him up the stairs. In the upstairs hallway she looked around for a likely doorway.

“Finn’s room,” said Brad, pointing to a closed door. Lorinda led him there, opened the door, pushed him inside, closed the door behind her, and clicked the privacy lock. Had she remembered to stash the condoms in her pocket? She felt for them. She had.

“Take that gun off,” she said.

“Make me.”

“Do it, or I’m out of here.”

He laughed. “This isn’t your bar, where you get to be the boss.” He reclined on the bed, half-sitting up, his back against the headboard and fingers laced behind his head. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re just happy you’re with someone who obviously isn’t one of the UnVirs.”

“Uh-huh.” She turned toward the door and unlocked it.

“Okay, okay!” he said. “I’m taking it off. But I was going to do it anyway.”

She locked the door again.

No shots were fired during the half-hour they were in Finn’s room. Brad was now asleep on his stomach, his head buried in a pillow, his pale ass glowing in the moonlight sneaking in through the slats of the blinds. Lorinda, moving slowly so as not to wake him, gathered her clothes, dressed, and quietly opened the door. She took a moment to turn back and look at Brad. She wanted to feel something for him, the second man with whom she’d ever had sex. In fact, this was only the second time she’d ever had sex: once with Duke Simmons, in high school, and now with Brad. But she felt nothing except relief that she could slip out without having some icky conversation with him.

Downstairs, the party was circling the drain. Two couples danced, without enthusiasm, to some ancient rock-and-roll tearjerker. Emmie, talking to Finn on the sofa, looked up at Lorinda as she came downstairs. “Look who’s back,” she said.

“Let’s go,” said Lorinda.

“Right now?”

“Unless you don’t need a ride.”

“Ohhhh-kay,” sighed Emmie.

“You can stay,” said Finn. “My parents aren’t coming back till Monday.”

“You’re sweet,” said Emmie, “but I’ve got to go.”

“So?” They were already halfway back to Emmie’s house, and it was the first word either of them had spoken.

“So nothing,” said Lorinda. “Yes. I’ll answer the question you want to ask. Yes, we had sex.”

“Whoa,” said Emmie. “That was quick. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“And Brad?”

“He’s fine.” She hesitated and added, “— although he wasn’t that fine.” That cracked them both up.

“Did he use a thingy?”

“A thingy? Are you trying to say condom, Miss Nurse?’”

Emmie laughed. “Yes, that’s it. Condom. Safe. Protection.”

“Yes. He did. Because I brought one.”

“Really?” Emmie seemed truly surprised. Of course condoms were illegal. But, like so many illegal things in the CCSA, you could obtain them on the black market. “Where’d you get it?”

"I don’t know. A friend of my brother’s? Who remembers? Why?”

“Just …” Whatever Emmie was going to say, she thought better of it. “Never mind. I’m glad you had one.”

“Me, t—”

“What color was it?”

Lorinda stole a look from the road ahead to make eye contact with her friend. “White. Why?”

Emmie fluttered her hands dismissively. “No reason.” She settled back. “You sober enough to drive?”

“Well I am now!

”

Make us look good, if you like it. Hit up the authors with a one-time or recurring donation!

NEXT: Chapter Five. In which our heroine goes to church.

PREVIOUSLY in THE SPLIT!

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three.