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My regular article posted at 7AM.
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The Border


by D. Ritchey

Chapter 8

What now? Get organized, get out. Betts went to his library and withdrew a packet from a hiding place, his intelligence on escape, years of research. He spilled the notes and sketches on the table. The most important were his maps. He had drawn them himself, and was confident in them; they were accurate enough. Betts made himself a tea and sat down to go over things as the clock turned toward meridian.

He spread his maps out. Here is what he saw: the downtown center, and radiating from that, like a crosshairs, four freeways which went all the way into the Free Zone and the interior of the Federation. The sketch was vague but the best he could do. Betts had heard of the “Internet,” the televisual network of computers that dominated the world before the collapse of the United States; you could call up any map and tell it where you wanted to go and it would give you the shortest route. Amazing! Simply boggled his mind. It was the Internet that destabilized the old political order. When the Alliance of Councils, and its successor, the Federation, finally consolidated its hold, it made sure that there would be no Internet again. Not for the public. The “Internet” was now called the Metanet, and restricted. Every server was licensed and monitored; any content injurious to the system would result in immediate shut down. The punishments for server operators who passed anti-state content included death. And the secret police would be very interested in Betts’ packet; it would land him in a work camp.

He examined his maps, sorting among the dozens of sketches. In his focus he saw the increasing quality of detail over the years. The newer maps had more; his escalating hatred of the System did it. He decided on the West freeway, the one that headed for the mountains. North or south kept him on the filthy coast; the East Freeway, crossing the Franklin Bridge into Jersey, led to a deathland even worse than New Philadelphia.

He focused on the west end of New Philly. Much of it had burned in the Rebellion of ’45, and the Alliance decided to leave it despoiled, like Camden. Instead, it had concentrated on the inner core and gone up. Hence the majority of New Philly’s population lived in towers. Betts’ eyes wandered instinctively through the maze from Cherry Street, zig-zagging down to South Street… yes, maybe that was it. He’d take South Street out, cross the Schuylkill, maneuver around the old University City, now a psychiatric prison, then feel on. There would be no problem until he came to the first wall; the MOH vehicle should get him through that. The only problem he foresaw in the inner city would be the oddity of an MOH inspector out past midnight. But then again, in a city of 15 million degenerates the statistics guaranteed that nothing was strange and the police would be bored.

His eye cut on. Upper Darby was now a burnt wilderness. He was thinking railroads, and rivers. The old rail lines followed the watercourses, and rail lines had service roads. If he had to jump off the hard roads for security, he might find his way to a waterway, a transmission corridor, a rail line or service road. Maybe he could drive all the way out under cover. And even if the piece of shit MOH car failed him, or the road was blocked, he could continue on foot and take his chances.

Betts knew that an old Conrail line ran along the Schuylkill—but here was too close in. He moved his finger further west. He must plan to jump further out, after the first wall—in the Buffer Zone, that is. Therein was the most room; therein was the heaviest wilderness, and so the hardest to surveill. He concentrated his plans on the Buffer. The west side of it was along the Conshohocken-Radnor-Morton axis. How would he get through—and what did the walls do over waterways and gullies? Since the beginning of engineering men had found no sure way to block foot traffic along watercourses. Again Betts thought, look to water if you want to live.

Finally he decided he would seek a gate in the freeway wall near Conshohocken and catch the Schuylkill where it bent northwest. He would run up the valley. He would not risk trying to exit the final checkpoint via the freeway, before the Free Zone; the chance of being detected there was high. He must not try the final checkpoint under any circumstances with what he had. He started gathering up his things, feeling uneasy, but it was the best plan he could do. He would improvise as he went along. The main thing was action—get up and move. The MOH would soon notify DPS that one its inspectors hadn’t returned.

He made a list of what he would need. He imagined three jumpoffs, even memorizing gate numbers, and what might go wrong with each. He let his mind run, jotting whatever came up. He didn’t have a professional map of the city; only ministry personnel could possess them; the proles didn’t care about them because hardly anybody wanted to leave. Hyper-dimension television had displaced the desire to experience the material world. The population, monkeys with their hands on a banana, wouldn’t let go. Why risk becoming cold, wet, lost, raped by glue-sniffers, eaten by wild animals, separated from food and dope? So Betts had drawn his own maps, sketches from hearsay and friends inside—and from his days when he worked in DPS Communications. (How long ago was that?) Most of his knowledge of the terrain was in his head.

Betts flipped through the papers he had seized in the car, but there was no map, nothing that might help him navigate. He wondered how that poor fellow got around a city the size of New Philadelphia. There had been no navigation unit in the car. Raising his view to a bird’s eye, he imagined the four freeways connecting the city with the outside. He saw the inner ring; then the buffer zone, five miles deep. Then the outer ring wall. The Free Zone on the far side. Liberty, life. The purpose of the Buffer was to securitize the traffic. It was heavily patrolled and surveilled; some bureaucrats and business people lived in that privileged place. But the population density was low, and you barely saw a light through the trees. That environment could work against him; fewer fish in the barrel draw the eye. Betts had learned long ago to blend in, and it was easy in a herd of proles dressed like TV heroes. But any prole would freak out in the Buffer, a place the media made a tool of terror, like the edge of the Earth of old. Betts did not deceive himself with bravado; he knew he would be nervous in the Buffer and prone to make bad decisions. If surveillance came down on him he might not bluff his way out; his anxiety might blow it all apart.

Betts had not seen the outside since his army days, so how much did his experience count? Twenty years a prisoner in New Philadelphia since. The world had moved far and deep the past twenty years. How much had changed? His imagination took off; he began the debate in himself again, as intelligent people do when no one worthy of conversation is present. What would he do? Was it really better “out there”? The inner debate was circular; it would end nowhere, and he knew it. But his fear of risk and change was powerful. It kept rising from the profound programming by the System. He was used to talking to himself because few people would listen.; talking to himself because he was growing more nervous with each degree the Earth turned. He was telling himself why he hated the System, why it was going nowhere, justifiying what he might do.

Why? Because there was no place else for his mind to go. The same power ran every show. The hope for reform was a fantasy. The political parties were figures on a stage. He cursed the leadership and the people who owned them. Bloody cowards they were, degenerates hiding behind curtains, buying mercenaries and front men, rounding up beautiful young proles for sex slaves….

Well, get with it, Betts. The night is prime. Faster now he thought on, imagining what was coming. Much of this ground was familiar to him—he had imagined the ways thousands of times, walked the city perimeter. Now he had a vehicle; now he could move on his theories. Yes, the imagination is the most powerful weapon of all. He felt more confident, but still the nervous undertow. His bug-out bag was ready; it needed just a few items. He would rest, and leave after midnight. A Health Ministry car at that hour might attract attention. But New Philadelphia didn’t sleep. The traffic would be low, the human monitors bored and dozing, the cops taking it easy. A muggy springtime night in New Philly wasn’t much. He made a few notes on his primary map, and threw the rest of the packet aside for disposal.



In the early days of the Alliance of Councils, just when stability was being re-established after decades of death and fire, yet another movement arose, but this one would evolve into something extraordinary. It was part spiritual, part cultural; it advocated primitivism as the only exit from containment. Its founding theorists understood that prison begins in the mind, and so they advocated rejection of technology and System organization. The people of this movement were known as Heathens.

The spiritual component was based upon Celtic, Germanic and Nordic gods and myths, with some Greco-Roman. Social identity followed. All European religious systems predating the invasion of Europe by Christianity were examined and used. And the System feared Heathens above all dissident groups. Yet the System’s propagandists and policy makers never got the enforcement organizations to take suppression of heathens to heart. The Heathens were the most skilled practicioners of evasion warfare. Suppressing them was extremely costly. The Heathens did not resist, they evaded—until they were cornered. Yes, the System deployed terror against the heathens, but the heathens retaliated. The base of Heathen power rested in their indifference to the benefits the System used to enslave the population. Heathens did not want anything the System offered. When the System told them “You need this, you must do this to get it,” the Heathens were stirred to profound hatreds and exercised war of the most skilfull sort. The murder of a heathen resulted in the beheading of a System official—cop, detective, bureaucrat, media operative, soldier. The killing of a heathen woman or child brought ten beheadings. After several generations the System learned to leave the Heathens alone—and anyway, heathens were hard to find.

For the heathens had attained the ultimate weapon: invisibility. They had developed the ability to change their vibrational frequency; this bio-chemical trick came out of their deep attention to Nature. They learned to tune themselves to their surroundings so that they vibrated at the same rate. They were not only socially camouflaged, they were materially camouflaged. They learned the art of stillness and you could walk past them and not sense them. They preferred edged weapons and crossbows, although they did deploy incendiaries, mantraps, explosives and firearms. They cultivated silence, even in combat. A soldier, a cop, an official, an oligarch cruising for boys—marked for death—would pass a heathen and die before his knees buckled, with his spine severed, or decapitated. The Heathen movement’s founding theorists had developed the invisibility power by examining a paranormal mystery of North America in the 20th century: the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot.

Why was it, they asked, that in those rare fragments of film, the monsters dissolved in a few seconds? After years the principal theory emerged: the Sasquatch was a branch of early humans known as Neanderthal that had diverged from the tool-making branch. The tool-makers had continued on their path but ultimately were killed off by the Cro-Magnons. The occult branch of Neanderthals had, by whatever motive, gone more “animal.” That is, they developed their animal instincts in the natural energies rather than their tool-making instincts. But “animal” instincts driven by the Neanderthal’s high intelligence resulted in the ability to change its bio-chemical processes at will to match its environment. This meant molecular vibration. This, the early Heathen theorists reasoned, was the only thing that explained Sasquatch invisibility. In those films where a Sasquatch appeared, the Sasquatch had become nervous and vibrated out of tune, thereby making itself visible. It left footprints as well.



Just before Betts departed for this, his final journey, he found himself thinking about Heathens. Rumours said that there were large tribes living in the Free Zone, in the huge wildernesses that used to be inhabited in the old United States and Canada. He thought about the gods of the Europeans; he would ask for help. For a long time Betts never thought about God, or gods, until he became frightened of the death he was living; and because the Federation told the masses that equality of all human beings is the first will of God. But equality would do Betts no good. Equality had murdered civilization. Now he needed a god—a war god. A god of power, of violence and cunning, because without such aid he would not crack the System.

And he asked himself final questions in order to confirm his strategy. Again, why he should not simply stay on the freeway all the way to the last wall before the Free Zone? He answered: the farther you went into the Buffer the more record you made; and finally the last wall, and the tightest filter. All along there were cameras; the longer he stayed on the freeway the more surveilled he would be, the more he risked intervention. What he should do was get into the wilderness between the rings at the best point to trade speed for cover. That meant getting off the freeway after a time—when?—passing through a wall gate and into the wilderness. And only a stream could offer a path out—the Schuylkill, because there were railways along the Schuykill. That railway corridor was long abandoned; now the north-south lines were the only ones, up from Wilmington and Baltimore, through to Trenton and northern Jersey.

Reviewing on. There were gates in the barrier walls along all freeways, to allow access to the interior wilderness. There would be dozens along his route; some must be non-functioning. For the fact was that intelligence had declined in the generations since the Alliance built its security structure. Miscegenation, propaganda and toxins had dumbed the population down further. Maintenance crews and surveillance personnel simply did not possess the foresight and competence to maintain the original standards. They were besotted with pornography and liquor. There would be holes in the goddamn wall.

Betts went over his hand-drawn map a final time. His finger traced the route of the west freeway, about three miles into the Buffer, near to where it converged with the Schulykill. An open gate—there must be dozens. He would find one.

Assuming he got out a gate, he faced wilderness. Then what? How would he hold up in pitch black? How could he continue through wilderness towards the outer wall and the Free Zone? Wilderness would cover him from surveillance, but wildnerness was an unknown. System propaganda said there were monstrous animals out there, mutated by toxins and nuclear residue, like the squatters at the Spoils. All propaganda has elements of fact. So what might he encounter? He had a pistol. What was that on a 300 pound wolf? And how would he make his way in car? Well, he could continue on foot. That might be better… Tired of worrying, he lay back. Still, what might he encounter in that wilderness? Fuck it. Go. Sitting here and thinking too much was depleting his energy.

The gates. The elements would do a job on them. The sensors, locks, wiring, and cams dissolved under the forces of nature. Rust invaded, rodents chewed the insulation, birds built nests in camera housings, vines choked hinges and levers, trees fell on them. He was thinking more clearly. So he would choose a gate in the Buffer Zone and bail—leave the car, continue on foot. It was that simple. Even if he didn’t find a gate he could abandon the car on the freeway and scale the wall using a vine, a tree. The opportunities were there because the System no longer watched every mousehole. The population was locked down—again, monkeys with their fist in a box trap. They wouldn’t let go of the banana….

He would find the old rail line and follow that. Car or on foot. The biggest risk was that the service road would be blocked by trees or washed out. In that case he would walk on; maybe that would prove easier than driving. When he came to the Free Zone border he would have to leave the car anyway.

In the Free Zone, if he was real lucky, he might run into some heathens who would mentor him. He had not met a heathen that he was sure of, just as men could not be sure they were looking at the living or a ghost. A few still lived in the cities, but most had slipped into the rural areas decades ago. The movement started in the cities, developing out of the neo-primitive philosophies. Gradually Heathens became more practical, as they must; they began integrating their religion with technology—that their ancestors created—but never more than they needed. The formula had been reached, and the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon swept the diaspora. Heathenism had moved from an ideology to a cultural doctrine.

The next generation began moving as a tribe, the next grew into clans, and they formed effective self-defense and intelligence nets. Their investigations of the energies of Nature gained them understandings which technologized men had no chance to apprehend. The religion of the Heathens was honor of the Natural world. The trend was like that of Renaissance Europe in the 15th century after the execution of the Semite Christ in Jerusalem. The Europeans were throwing off the invader religion, alien to their souls. The Church weakened; heathen instincts resurfaced; the people began examining the Natural world. All technological progress was the product of heathen genius.



Rumors said the heathens had fantastic technologies. They lived in the center of the Earth, in caves, eagle nests, in the boles of trees. They were said to have developed a suit which made the wearer invisible to all scanners; Betts doubted that. They had anti-gravity aircraft. They could fly. Some lived in cities in abandoned structures which they altered to receive maximum sunlight; they lived on sunlight and air alone. They built solariums which made gardens flourish all year, giving them healthful food, which after several generations put their mental acuity ahead of the average best of the System. They went on and on…

In the Free Zone they preferred the mountains, as all exiles have. It was said they had stopped warring with the Christians out there and the peace had lasted over 50 years now—the Peace Of Heliopolis, signed at Sun Lake in the province formerly called Saskatchewan. The Federation’s Internal Security Directorate monitored Sun Lake by satellite, and deployed an extermination force, but by the time it arrived the Heathens and Christians were gone. One elite ISD team was inserted to track down and assassinate Heathen chieftains. The team disappeared. No trace of them—not a glove, not a casing, not a rations wrapper—was found.

Aerial surveillance sometimes alerted ISD, who would deploy rapid teams, and chase a few through the forests, but the Heathens always disappeared, unless the choppers lucked out and caught warriors in the open, and gunned them. A wounded heathen often committed suicide rather than be captured. Heathens never left their dead. They were collected and cremated with their weapons for their journey to Valhalla.

On the slave markets Heathen females were worth a fortune, especially the blondes and redheads. The greatest prize was a young virgin. A black or brown oligarch would pay a huge fortune for one. But fear was there; the Heathens would burn alive any white soldier trying to take their females for the slave market. But that did not diminish the hunt for Heathen women; a System goon could retire on the bounty for one Heathen girl freshly caught in the wild, the most wanted female on the planet.

Heathens did not take prisoners, nor did they torture to extract information. Torture was below their aspirations, just as they did not sacrifice animals to their gods. They did not waste time. They quickly beheaded System troops, and took their gear. They nailed the heads to trees, or left them along trails with a sprig of holly in the mouth. Even Executive Rescue feared heathens—and felt a kinship with them, but would not admit it. Betts wanted very much to meet them.