Reconquista
A short story from the anthology After the War
[This story first appeared in the anthology After the War: Stories From the Next Regime from Passage Press]
“On the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, peopled by a race of giant golden-tanned women living in the fashion of Amazons. They are of strong and hard bodies, of ardent courage and force. Their island is the strongest in all of the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their arms are all of gold, and so are the harnesses of the majestic beasts they have tamed and ride, for on the whole of their island of California, there is no metal but gold.”
-Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, Las Sergas de Esplandián (1508)
The depleted company calling themselves the Cali-Yuga made camp at a bonfire pit on a wide-open stretch of empty beach with the briny sweet smell of misty Pacific Ocean air filling up their lungs. The bluff behind them was dotted in opulent seaside mansions, all concrete and glass, built in the era of fanatical decadence now brought to a bloody and brutal end by the war, and whose wall-size picture windows returned the setting sunlight back across the burning sky. Each soldier could have claimed one of the empty mansions for himself, and perhaps soon would, but for tonight the men would celebrate together on the beach.
They had spent the day marching west from Corona where they’d fought their last battle, and likely the final battle of the war, two days before. Their final objective had been to clear and sweep remaining enemy encampments along the 91W corridor between I-15 and the coastline, but it had been a quiet two days, the enemy dead or scattered eastward like dried leaves to the gale-force Santa Anas ripping through the palms.
Some of the men swam in the choppy surf while others gathered driftwood to make fires and prep the public grills, sooty and long neglected and covered in seagull shit but plenty suitable for the stocks of meats and produce taken earlier that afternoon from an abandoned Gelson’s freezer room, while others stood in the cold wet sand of the foreshore, pants rolled to their knees, the lapping water locking around their swollen and tired feet and then folding back again into the surf, the men like monuments in a row looking up and down the shoreline unobstructed for miles and miles south and north until the misty air made a blur of the sightline, and west over the wind-capped ocean to the adumbrated rump of Catalina, realizing for the first time that their dream of coming home, of taking back what was theirs, every last square inch of it, from San Diego to Shasta, the birthplace of their grandfathers, a dream they’d held at a distance for generations because of its seeming impossibility, finally, after all of these years of helplessness and relentless longing, was no a dream at all.
Their leader was Captain Tom Sepúlveda. Big Tom, they called him. He had been born Thomas Cole, after the painter, in a small town in eastern Oregon but according to (likely apocryphal) family lore traced his lineage back to the great Californio patriarch Francisco Xavier Sepúlveda who had settled much of Los Angeles in the late 1700s and whose immediate descendants had fought alongside the Bear Flaggers and Commodore Robert F. Stockton to claim California from the Mexicans nearly a century later.
Big Tom, in his 50’s, achy from the two-day march from the desert, smoked a cigarillo and drank from a Jennie of 2019 Screaming Eagle commemorating the last year a Cole-Sepúlveda had lived in California and which he’d been saving his entire adulthood for just this moment. The wine was woody and in its advanced age had ripened to a flavor of gamy stew. It reminded him of the kind of thing he might have eaten as a boy with his father after a winter deer hunt along the Grande Ronde. He relished every sip.
While the men feasted and drank and the plasma streaks of last light gave way to coming night, Big Tom coordinated on his radio with the rest of the infantry division garrisoned in various locations up and down the state. The bases at Beale, Travis, Edwards, and finally Vandenberg had all been secured. The militias from the State of Jefferson were still engaged in low-level gunfights with holdout cartels in Humboldt County but otherwise had control of every major chokepoint and supply route north of Sacramento. For their efforts, the State of Jefferson would annex everything south to the Alpine County border on the east and the border of Mendocino County on the west. The new NorCal Republic would govern everything south of there to the edge of Monterey in a straight line across the state to the Inyo-Nevada border. Finally, New California, the Golden Land, the Terrestrial Paradise, including Captain Big Tom Sepúlveda and the men of the Cali-Yuga, would occupy the rest.
Growing up in eastern Oregon, the sum of Big Tom’s family lore, the Sepúlveda’s last physical connection to California, was a box of insurance paperwork and photos of buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area destroyed in the 1989 earthquake and presumed to have at one time belonged to the family. As a kid, Tom obsessively studied these photos with a morbid fascination, imagining what his forefathers had built and maintained of the glorious sun-drenched Eden that had been their home a century earlier. The significance of those idle daydreams was only now coming into focus. The history of California, Tom realized, was the history of cataclysmic tectonic shifts, and though he had never experienced an earthquake as his great grandfathers had, not as a kid and not yet as a man, he knew them in his bones and blood. He understood their nature. He understood the power of slowly accumulating pressures. He understood that while on the surface what you saw was an enigma of innocuous and random fissures, and what you felt was the sudden and unpredictable explosions of bedrock earth, that deep down underneath your feet, the continents were always moving. He understood that geological time and human time are two different things, but every once in awhile they converge to make history.
[You can buy After the War: Stories From the Next Regime from Passage Press, which also contains stories Bronze Age Pervert, Raw Egg Nationalist, Mike Anton, and dozens of others, plus a foreword from Zero H.P. Lovecraft. The anthology is dedicated to Douglass Mackey, AKA Ricky Vaughn, a victim of the current regime, and to whom all author royalties for this book will be donated in support of his ongoing legal defense fund.]
Hits different this week with LA burning....