Disclaimers: The grammar in this story is exactly as I intended it to be. This is not a stroke story so if you're looking for one, look elsewhere. Any character involved in sexual activity in this story is of legal age for whatever jurisdiction you live in. Never wear white shoes on a ranch. Gold and silver are hedges and not investments, try to know the difference. And I like feedback, even if it's not complimentary.
January 16, 2074
The next few weeks after my new life started saw Mr. Evans going to visit the Deseret Republic to do some trading. He was going to go see Salt Lake City and maybe even go as far east as Cheyenne. Maggie told me that Mr. Evans made a lot of money by trading things between the Deseret Republic and Aztlan because the two countries hated each other and refused to trade directly. Living with my family like I did I never knew much about the DR (the nickname for the Deseret Republic) or Aztlan past the fact that both countries had occupied Nevada at one time or another.
A long time before I was born the two countries went to war with each other because Aztlan said that the land the DR was on belonged to Aztlan. The DR didn't agree. The result was that a lot of people died and Nevada got left alone between the two countries. When I was living with my family we used to go gathering and we'd sometimes find the remains of old military camps and we'd scavenge them for things we could use. Once in a while we found guns and other weapons that worked but we had so many of them at home that we usually left them where we found them. What we really wanted were medicines and radiated foods that were still good even forty years after the war.
Maggie told me more about the two countries over coffee and I was pretty happy to listen to her talk about them.
"The DR started up almost immediately after the Collapse when the state of Utah and the LDS Church merged to better deal with the crisis. The state had things the church needed and the church had people and relief supplies the state needed so it just made sense to everyone to have the two of them combine. I remember two boys on bicycles in Reno telling me that Utah had become the DR and I cried knowing that it meant the old USA was over. One of the boys told me that the President of the LDS was now the President of the DR and that things were getting better in Salt Lake City."
Maggie stopped for a moment here and just stared like she was trying to remember something.
"Things did get better in the DR and I think it was the next year when we saw our first DR soldiers come into Elko to trade and visit. They were pretty peaceful and polite and no one thought too much about them. Some of them were kind of cute, as I recall. They were the first soldiers I ever saw who wore white shirts and ties under their camouflage jackets. Well, anyhow, the DR boys didn't go unnoticed because we had some spies in Elko from Aztlan."
"I guess it was maybe a month later when Aztlan attacked Reno and tore it up pretty bad. Those Aztlan soldiers were just plain mean. They'd shoot people just for fun and God only help you if you were black. They really had a hate on for the black folks. See, we didn't know about the Limpia back then and didn't understand what was going on. "
"What was the Limpia?" I asked.
"Well, to understand that you got to know about Aztlan. See, about sixty years ago in Los Angeles some of the Central American people wanted the black people out of their neighborhoods. They did some things to the black folks and the government prosecuted a bunch of the Central Americans for ethnic cleansing crimes. It was one of those things about the old government that they would punish people for doing things without understanding why they did those things so the real problems never got taken care of. So comes the Collapse and Los Angeles just went to pieces from what everyone said. They had bandits and militia fighting all over the place. Someone told me that one of the bloodiest battles took place in Disneyland and that was just wrong to have all that killing in that place."
Maggie took a moment to tell me about Disneyland but I didn't understand it all that much. A city where people dressed up in costumes and rode things that didn't go anywhere just didn't seem right to me. I think she just made that up.
"The battles were so bad that lots and lots of people got on the road to go north or east and then bunches of them died in the desert when bandits raided them or they got killed by border guards at Nevada and Arizona. The ones that went north over the Grapevine mostly got killed by the warlord in Santa Clarita. She killed a million people I hear."
"I heard that it was a year after the Collapse when some of the Mexican Army came north and took up with the gangs that were calling themselves Aztlan by then. There wasn't anyone to stop them because they were the biggest force left by then so everything south of the Grapevine became Aztlan. Oh, yeah, and that warlord woman got herself roasted alive when the Aztlan took over Santa Clarita. I ain't going to cry for her any because she had it coming. We used to call that karma."
Maggie smiled as she said that.
"About that same time the Limpia started up. That word means 'cleanup' in Spanish and that's what Aztlan did was clean up all of their territory. Anyone who was left in Aztlan who wasn't a Central American had it really hard. White people and Asian people got rounded up and put to work on farms. No one noticed that all the black people and all the Jewish people just up and disappeared. Regular people in Aztlan thought that those folks had left and us folks outside of Aztlan all thought they had thrown in with the Aztlan. About the same time the Mexicans cut off being friends with Aztlan and word got out that it had something to do with the Mexicans being upset about something called the Limpia."
"Next thing we know the DR and Aztlan went to war with each other. God bless the DR people because they went and did a bunch of raids into Aztlan to rescue the people who were forced to work on their farms. Mr. Evans family was rescued, too. Now when those people got out they told us stories about how the Aztlan soldiers would talk about the Limpia and how some of those soldiers didn't seem to like the idea and how those same soldiers would sometimes get shot. That Limpia thing was a big secret to Aztlan and they didn't trust anyone who didn't like it."
"About that time a lot of people in the DR noticed that there were no black folks or Jewish folks in with all those rescued people. The President got some really brave volunteers whose families were Mexican and those folks walked into Aztlan during the war to find out about the Limpia. Most of them never came back but the ones who did all told the same thing that the black folks and the Jewish folks all went missing when the Limpia started. I don't rightfully remember how it all worked out but a bunch of countries got together to help the DR fight Aztlan after that. Aztlan took a big beating and agreed to stay in their territory after that."
"One of those countries was Israel. I heard it said that they had taken it hard after the Collapse but they still sent an army all the way around the world to help the DR against Aztlan. When the war ended one of the things the Israel army did was they rounded up all the surviving Jewish people and took them all back to Israel. I hear tell they only found a few hundred people to take back with them. You don't hear much about Israel anymore but I imagine they do fine or else you'd hear about that for sure."
"With the war over the DR pulled back to their land and Aztlan pulled back to theirs. Nevada and north California mostly got left alone after that and that's because all we got is dust and we don't even want it."
