Southern Republic (The Downriver Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  SOUTHERN REPUBLIC

  The Downriver Trilogy

  Book One

  Lex Ramsay

  SOUTHERN REPUBLIC

  Copyright © 2017 by Lex Ramsay

  All rights reserved. Without limiting rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, introduced into a retrieval system, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including without limitation photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. The scanning, uploading, and/or distribution of this document via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and is punishable by law.

  Dedicated to those whose reach exceeds their grasp and whose imagination eclipses reality.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

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  PROLOGUE

  Washington, D.C.

  October 1982

  ‌Patrick knew he was going to die. He knew it with the cold certainty of logic. He knew it even while another, more primitive side of his mind skittered from one fleeting scenario of salvation to another, grasping at some solution, some escape from what he was convinced was inevitable. He knew it, and he knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself.

  He walked the avenues in a measured gait, speaking softly into the headset of the voice-activated transcriber unit of his electronic tablet, avoiding the large intersections that were armed with street cameras and the drones that buzzed across the sky, erratic as hummingbirds.

  Patrick looked around at the city he would probably never see again, at the skywalks that linked the buildings that had started out as a way to evade the building height limitations of the Capitol and had ended up being one of the city’s signature features.

  Whenever he’d flown into the city he was struck by how the skywalks looked like little chain links, each connecting half a dozen buildings and forming a necklace from the sky.

  From street level the flying buttresses with their sleekly arched design lent a medieval grace to the glass and chrome temples of modern commerce they supported.

  How many times had he walked these same wide streets, seeing but not registering the mosaic of intricate shadows cast by these architectural marvels, hearing but not listening to the monotonous voice of the automated headline service, simultaneously secure in his sense of civilized entitlement and in his complete anonymity.

  Turning off his cell phone, activating the scrambler on his satellite monitored Personal Identifier Module; Patrick tried to blend into the waves of people surrounding him.

  That was easy. Patrick had been blending in to perfection all of his life. Medium brown, medium height, medium size, Patrick was all too readily analyzed, categorized and dismissed by most who encountered him. Patrick’s natural introspection and cerebral tendencies only bolstered the perception of invisibility, since it made Patrick likely to distance himself from other people and instead just observe.

  But despite all that, Patrick wielded an intellect far more finely honed than one would expect based on the caricature formed by outward appearances. He absorbed information about the patterns of things and how they worked as effortlessly as he sized people up. So while people assessed Patrick and drew their own conclusions; Patrick was doing the same to all he encountered—but with more unerring accuracy.

  At least usually. He’d certainly been suckered this time, though. Understanding how he’d been manipulated didn’t ease the sting of it. Patrick failed to see the tendrils of deceit until they were on him, now poised to squeeze him lifeless. And this lapse, this uncharacteristic blunder, would cost him his life.

  After going from shock to terror to rage, Patrick settled on the conviction that if he was going to die, he was going to make sure a whole lot of people didn’t. He had done the work the Assembly wanted, he had set the sequence and worked out the details of the plan to perfection. But Patrick had also programmed a failsafe of his own design in the system. A failsafe the Assembly couldn’t possibly be prepared for. He hadn’t planned it that way, but after all, he was a genius of tech. For most of his life he’d been developing systems, troubleshooting, refining, and devising failsafes for possibilities that mostly never happened. Now, it looked like this habit would pay off. Too late for him, though.

  He’d received the word from his contact in the S.R., and didn’t fail to appreciate the biting irony in that. But his contact couldn’t be sure exactly when the hit would come. The Assembly would find him in a few hours, if that. Patrick wasn’t taking any chances. He needed to act, and at least he had the comfort, chilling as it was, that he had one last parting gift for the world—and for the Assembly.

  Now he has to decide how best to preserve his testimonial to these events, his account of the thing, so that it would speak for him after death. Patrick pulled out his electronic tablet, found the site he wanted, and sent the file he’d been working on out onto the web.

  CHAPTER 1

  September 1982

  ‌Mason gathered the children around him, his charges, eager for their afternoon story. Eager to hear tales of places they would never go, places he had never seen himself in his 70-something years, but would tell about all the same. Every afternoon he gave the children a special treat, knowing that this too short period of their lives would be by far the sweetest. Knowing that what lay ahead for each of the bright, smiling faces in front of him were simply variations of the same kind of drudgery, humiliation, frustration and fear that had been his lot and his people’s lot for longer than Mason knew or his stories told.

  He perched on an upturned half barrel placed in the middle of the play area that had been carved out of what the white folk called the nursery. Not much more than a barracks, as far as Mason could tell, a big ol’ barn kinda thing with bunks lining every wall, with a square patch of dirt in front where they could all gather for inspections, or the tellin’ of the Rules, or, in this case, for the tellin’ of a story.

  “Come on ’round here now, chil’ren. Let ol’ Mason tell you a tale.” Mason waited until he had absolute quiet, for he was training the children to obey the first time. Sometimes, you only had one time to obey a command before feeling the wrath of the Protector.

  Here he was, doing their work for them. Teaching the young’uns how to mind right from the start. Hard as he’d tried his entire life to suss out some dignity in
his goings-on, to try and live like a man in a place where everything and everyone around you told you that you were nothing, here he was making slaves out of babies. Funny that now that he was an old man, not so full of piss and vinegar—well, maybe full of piss, but that was about all—he was given the job of looking after the young’uns, the ones too wee to do real field work or much anything else except get underfoot.

  Mason looked down at his gnarled hands, the veins popping out of his deep brown skin, the joints swollen to field hand size, and dredged up the memory of the tale that had been told him countless times. He’d been minded by such ol’ folks when he was a wee one; and had been told the same ol’ stories about the glory of the Southern Republic, just like he was doin’ now. Well, he would tell that tale. He would look into the big brown eyes set in the little brown faces, and tell them the story of the makin’ of the Great Southern Republic.

  The tale of how the South won the Civil War, how the Great Southern Republic vanquished the cowardly North, and fought for the right to be free. Mason had no learning, nothing that would pass for an education in anything but the school of hard knocks, and even he realized the pungent irony of those words. The South fought to be free—free to enslave his people—free to continue the atrocities practiced upon the Africans stolen from the Motherland—free to work them to death, beat them to death, rape them to death, torture them to death, and do anything and everything else their twisted souls allowed them to do.

  But these little ones were too young to understand all that. They were still shielded, in many respects, from the harshest ways of the Protectors. So while Mason minded his charges, he gently tried his best to prepare them for what lay ahead.

  “What tale I’m ’bout to tell y’all is the tale of the Battle of Gettysburg. That’s a place up North where the Big War was fought. The Big War, folks also called the Great War or the Civil War, ’cept wasn’t much civil about it, from what I hear. That was the war where the Southern Republic fought off the North, and sent them Yankees runnin’ back home. You see, way way back in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Sixty-Three, the Southern Republic and the North were in a great big ol’ war…”

  “How many years ago was that, Mason?” little Julius asked.

  “Well, right now this here is the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Eighty-Two, and also the Year One Hundred and Nineteen of the Southern Republic. You see, after this here Battle of Gettysburg, the South won the Big War and the Southern Republic was declared—that was Year 1. But even white folk ain’t arrogant enough to forget the year our Lord gave his life on the cross, so we also count time from that year and calls it 1982.”

  “What’s the Southern Republic, Mason?” a big-eyed girl no more than 5 named Lisbet asked him.

  “Why, it’s where we live, Li’l Bit. It’s the country where we’re all at right now. Anyway, the Big War raged on and on and folks was dying on both sides. There was gun battles and cannon battles and ship battles and all that, and the white folk seemed intent on wiping each other clean out!

  “Anyway, this here Battle of Gettysburg was run by General Robert E. Lee, and he ordered a fellow by the name of Longstreet to lead the main attack in the early morning hours of July 2nd. Longstreet crept up on them Yankees, and they were caught flat-footed and unprepared for the beating Longstreet and his army came to give ’em. Longstreet fought all the way to the Peach Orchard, then on to a place called Round Top and to Little Round Top.”

  Mason drew with a stick in the dirt down by his feet, and the little ones looked up at him like they really understood what he was talking about; like they really understood the battle strategy his dirt map described.

  “Just then, the South’s army came in from the right side of the Yankee army and a fellow by the name of Richard Ewell came through the Yanks like a sharp knife through a bag of cotton. This Ewell fellow took Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill and the South’s army was goin’ like a house a’fire.

  “That next morning, the morning of July 3rd, Lee ordered Longstreet and George E. Pickett to attack the Yankee army along with Ambrose Powell Hill and lead a charge that the Yanks still talk about—Pickett’s Charge. Ol’ Pickett and his troops ran straight through the Yank’s defenses and made the most glorious charge of the entire war.

  “On July 4th, the battle was won. Out of almost 70,000 men who’d been fighting for the North at Gettysburg, 50,000 were killed in that battle. They says Gettysburg was the turning point in the Big War, and eventually the Yanks surrendered ’cause of all the losses they done suffered there and at the battles that followed.

  “That’s why we celebrates Jubilee Day … you know chil’rens, the day when all the folks come in out the fields and all the food comes down out the Big House and we all have a high ol’ time. You see, the Yanks celebrates the Fourth of July ’cause it’s their independence day from the British; but the Southern Republic celebrates the Fourth ’cause it’s the day of the most famous battle in the most famous war that made the Southern Republic.”

  Mason paused to look out among the little faces before him. He had seen so many generations go from nursery to race-grading, to the fields, or the chain gangs, or the garment factories or up to the Protectorate Compound. He had seen the promise these little ones held ever since he was taken out of the fields and assigned to mind them—and year after year had seen the hardness settle into their eyes, the stoop set into their shoulders, the light leech out of their faces as the promise of their childhoods gave way to the misery of their forevers.

  He wished he could tell a tale about how his people, their people, had fought in Mother Africa. He knew stories about battles ’tween slaves and the white folk, knew ’um just like all the other slaves knew. Those tales had been passed down one to another, time after time. The white folk didn’t know that those tales, always told at night after the fields had wrung nearly every bit of life from you, spoke of a time of a great rising up.

  But these little ones were too young—too young to understand those tales or be trusted with the secret they kept. Hell, these little young’uns hadn’t even been race-graded yet, the little quarter-breeds playin’ and runnin’ around right alongside the half-breeds and the full stock. They didn’t even know that their work assignment and everything else about their paltry lives would depend on their race-grade—whether they’d be in the fields or up in the Protectorate, whether they’d be bred or fixed. These little ones only knew about today, didn’t know nothin’ ’bout yesterday and didn’t care much ’bout tomorrow.

  Mason wasn’t sure how many years his people had been kept in bondage. He didn’t know how long those tales of freedom had been passed down. He did know they’d been old tales for as long as he had heard them. Those old tales of freedom, of a great liberation, were about the only string of hope his people had. But they were just tales, he feared more and more as the years brought him closer to his final rest.

  Mason chuckled at the thought of that. It never ceased to amuse him how the white folk took a word or a phrase, and bent it ’round to mean somethin’ altogether diff’rent from the common understanding.

  “Final rest!” That’s what the white folk called it when they put an old or sick slave down. He chuckled and shook his head that he even bothered to think about it, ’cause all he could do was guess at when that time would come for him. He didn’t know exactly how old he was, only that he had tried to keep count by Jubilee Days from when he could first remember, and that made him somewhere in his ’70’s. As long as you weren’t too much trouble and in good enough health, the Rules said you didn’t go to your final rest until you were 75.

  Lord, how he wished he could see those old tales come true before they took him away. How many other old fools just like him had prayed for the same thing, Mason wondered. How many more would die before the old tales came true. Mason shook his head as he stared out at the children settling down for a nap. But they were just tales, that’s all … just tales.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‌Chloe Sutcl
iffe briskly reviewed her lesson plan for the day one final time before teaching what was, in her mind, the penultimate lesson her fourth and fifth grade students would learn under her tutelage. Chloe was a certified member of one of the First Families of the Confederacy—not a novel distinction she knew, since there were nearly 3 million in the Southern Republic who could make the same claim—but Chloe took pride in that fact nonetheless.

  She looked around her classroom, now empty of students. The room wasn’t really ever intended to be a classroom, but then this mansion had not always been a school. This was the Enoch Detlow School, named after some long dead Southern gentleman whose family home outlived the last of his lineage. The room in which she now sat had once been a grand library, lined on three walls with built-in floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases and dominated by a great stone fireplace on the fourth wall that went nearly halfway up to the ceiling—and the ceiling was 20 feet high.

  Chloe looked out over the student desks lined up before her in precise rows on the richly polished wood floor casually scattered with Persian rugs, and felt the same surge of historical pride she always felt when she came to this point in her course.

  “Civic Responsibility” was the name typically used to describe the study of their great society and its well-thought out and thoroughly symbiotic structure. Personally, though, Chloe preferred the sound of “First Families of the Confederacy: Our Rights and Responsibilities.” She felt it relayed the appropriate sense of importance to students who were at the age where history is often boring, but almost any type of self-aggrandizement is endlessly fascinating.

  She heard the students before she saw them, stomping down the hallway, squealing with either extreme joy or extreme terror, she couldn’t tell which. The first two to reach the classroom were Joseph and Evan, who immediately grabbed one of the rolling library ladders and tried to ascend at the same time, playing an indoor version of King of the Hill. One sharp rap of her ruler and a freezing look put an end to that game however, and they were transformed by their knowledge of Miss Sutcliffe’s presence from the beasts they had been mere seconds ago, to some semblance of civilized beings. The rest of the children, following their lead, found their seats quickly.