Chapter 5

“Where the ever-loving Hell are we, anyway?” Becca wondered aloud as we stopped for the night at a motel off the highway.

“Fuck if I know, but maybe the desk clerk will. I’m not even sure which direction we took in such a rush. I just wanted to get us the hell out of Dodge,” I admitted now.

“As long as it was away from the danger, that’s what matters,” Taslima observed while hugging both of us tightly.

We approached the night desk and the clerk looked up at us with a bit of suspicion written on his face, though I could understand why. I showed him my ID and my companions quickly followed suit, which made him relax more than a little. He handed me the room key as soon as we gave him the cash, though the price was clearly a bit gouged due to the flood of refugees going that route. He looked curious, but chose not to ask any further questions, at least for now.

“Hamish Ward, Mr. Stein. Welcome to North Carolina,” the clerk dropped the real shocker now.

“We’ve left Virginia? I didn’t even see the state line,” I observed.

“Not gonna, either. Domies have been tearing them down. In case you missed it, everything in Virginia from Newport News to Franklin is now in Domie hands. They’re rapidly consolidating their control, now that ‘Brother Uriah’ has taken full command of the revolt. They’ve instituted a junta called the ‘Council of Elders.’ I hear that the National Guard has finally been called out, but that there is a full-scale revolution ... it’s gonna take more than that by now ... it’s too late for just the Guard to handle it,” Hamish snorted.

“In how many hours?” Becca exclaimed in disbelief.

“Well, it’s pretty clear that they struck in multiple areas at once, but do you know how long we’ve been on the road? There’s a reason that we’re tuckered out, ladies. They might have seemed like the Keystone Cops at first, but that was just one of their weaknesses, controlling the flow of information and media. They didn’t seem to slack on the firepower and manpower, did they?” I ruefully noted as we took our leave of Hamish and headed to our room.

“That’s a rather large chunk of real estate on the Atlantic Coast,” Taslima expressed real shock.

“It was possibly an inside job in some law-enforcement quarters,” Becca pointed out rather sharply.

“Most likely, yes. I wish I could say otherwise, but let’s be honest here. Plenty of great cops out there, but also more racists and other pricks and bigots in the thin blue line, too. I can see that and I’ve never even been on the butt end of most of it ... emphasis on the most part. The handful of county and city fuzz who’ve called me a ‘kike,’ not so fucking cool. As a Jew, I get a bit more grief than most white dudes, a lot less than minorities,” I related a minor anecdote.

“Gotta be rough, but, you’re right, nothing like being called a ‘nigger’ and worse, assumed to be a street walker by cops. Yeah, that happened to me a couple of times,” Becca told me with a sudden kiss to which she added no small amount of tongue, “I even got booked for soliciting while minding my own business during a sting. I don’t care how slutty I dress, that doesn’t give a cop a right to slap the cuffs on me and haul me downtown. They just assumed that a black girl in fishnet stockings and a miniskirt on a sidewalk in a mostly white neighborhood must be a hoe, you know.”