Post by redsycorax on Oct 6, 2021 3:16:36 GMT
In 2002, members of the Justice League of America liberated Seaboard City from the idyllic conservative hallucination imposed on it by Ray Thompson, an unscrupulous mutant who sought to preserve the facade of the Justice Guild of America, a heroic ensemble who sacrificed themselves to protect their centre of operations from a nuclear strike that occurred during the Third World War, which had escalated during a misstep in the conduct of the Cuban missile crisis. Thompson was defeated and the simulacra of the Justice Guild faded into nothingness, breaking the heart of Justice Leaguer John Stewart, who had avidly followed their exploits while a child. Thompson died from an aneurysm after the conflict against the Justice League and Justice Guild proved too much for him. The inhabitants of Seaboard City left their devastated, ruined city to its fate. This is not going to be a comforting account of its aftermath. There had been a nuclear war and billions of people had perished in the course of the exchange, including its sole three metahuman groups- the Justice Guild, Young Justice Guild and Injustice Guild. Radiation poisoning is pervasive, medical infrastructure is non-existent, cholera and typhus stalk the survivors and surviving nations like Canada zealously guard their borders against refugees. No new metahumans emerged to replace those who had earlier sacrificed their lives.
++
Sargeant Patrick O'Shaugnessy looked out across the ravaged hills, with their skeletal trees, sterile and lifeless soil, and demolished remnants of housing. He hadn't asked for any of this. Granted, the Justice League had had no choice but to bring an end to the facade, and to the tyranny of Ray Thompson. But Seaboard City had become uninhabitable and its former inhabitants had had to become refugees, traversing the broken roads north, trying to find settlements. Inevitably, the weakest members of their group succumbed to hunger and opportunistic infection and were buried en route. And then, as if by a miracle, the Canadian border appeared, but that proved a cruel setback. There was probably no need for the Canadian border guards to be so derogatory and stentorian in their tone, labelling the Seaboard City survivors 'greenbacks' and 'gyppo scum.' Shots were fired above their heads and the group beat a hasty retreat.
(There were reasons. One of the Canadian guards had recently lost his grandmother, who had been on the vicinity of Vancouver when it had become one of only two Canadian cities to perish during the War. Her ordeal from radiation-induced cancer had been hideous, even with the benefit of legalised euthanasia available across the border. He had lost his father, an earlier border guard, when an American raider gang had laid siege to the border a decade before. Canadians bitterly associated the remnants of the United States with lawlessness, anarchy, pandemic cholera and typhus and the death of hundreds of thousands of Canadians in Ottawa and Vancouver and although Tina Turbine and Catwoman, the world's last surviving 'superheroes' had lived there since the early sixties, they were regarded as naturalised citizens.)
After the Seaboard City refugees had gone, one of the guards, Harry Bolton, lit a cigarette:
"Damn them. Do they think we're a soft touch, Rita?"
"Hey, now. They might understand that we had to do that, otherwise we'd be overrun by disease and criminal violence. One of them looked like he had been a police officer."
"I wish they'd died en route. I hate them for what they did to grandma, to Ottawa and Vancouver, to our parents. They can starve for all I care."
"Just make sure that you don't say that in public. We're supposed to be doing this as a national service, for positive reasons. Not because we hate the Yanks. I don't."
"That's easy for you to say, Ri. You're young, Toronto wasn't hit. It was different for me. Mum hit the bottle after that greenback gang murdered Dad and Rick Gallows that day. I had to leave school and go to work early to help keep my brothers and sisters fed, clothed and housed. Can you blame me for hating their guts?"
"That'd come as news to my Aunt Sonia and Uncle Mike, Harry. They feel the same way as you do. I don't. The Yanks and Russians suffered during the War, more than we can possibly imagine. Canada is still a reasonably intact nation and a civilised country. That cadaver across the border isn't. I'm just here to do my job."
"Yeah, and let them in to overrun our country. Well, they can stay the hell out as far as I'm concerned."
Rita bit back a reply she knew she would regret. Harry was good at his job, despite his bitterness and anger at what had happened to his family in the past. He just overpersonalised it. She wished she could help some of the refugees, particularly the children they encountered. But they couldn't. Most of them were too far gone, anyway. All she could do was hand out pediatric euthanasia pills. Once, she'd even rocked a little girl as she peacefully drew her last breath in her arms.
On the other side of the boarder, Jake the plumber was started to cough up blood. Helga Aronson, formerly a nurse before she'd settled down to marry her soldier husband, tried her best to deal with his declining health. From what she could remember, he was suffering from cancer. He had been for quite some time, although Ray Thompson's unnatural regime had kept it from progressing while Seaboard City was under his thrall. She turned to Paddy O'Shaugnessy as he entered the ragged tent:
"He's no better?"
"It's cancer, Paddy. He isn't going to improve."
"Damn those Cannucks! They don't care if we live or die!"
"I don't think that woman guard agreed with her pal. And frankly, Pad, those of us who lived through the last few weeks can see what's happened out there. The JGA may have represented the gold within us, but we've seen cannibalism, starving children, raider gangs, the shadow that was cast over our country by the holocaust. That man might have suffered because of that. From that radio broadcast we intercepted, Vancouver and Toronto were hit. Hundreds of thousands of people died, perhaps even millions."
"Are you going to let Jake have those pills? What sort of an outfit is a 'Green Star,' anyway?"
"I know you're a Catholic and you don't believe in euthanasia. I wish there were some other way out of Jake's dilemma, but there's not."
"Yeah, and there's no hospices this side of the border. God, Helga. Did we make the wrong choice when we abandoned Ray Thompson's lotus land?"
"We knew it would be hard when we set out."
"You're a good woman, Helga. You shouldn't have to make these sorts of choices."
"We don't live in a world full of gaudy, larger than life mystery men and wonder women any more, Paddy. That false innocence is gone forever."
"They were my friends, Helga. I miss them sometimes. Even after they died, they still managed to free us from what Thompson forced on us."
"I'm sorry. I need to make Jake as comfortable as I can." A look passed between them. If the world had been different, Patrick O'Shaugnessy and Helga Aronson might have fallen in love and married one another. But after their recent ordeal, they were too exhausted by their arduous struggle for survival to be anything other than friends. Patrick knew what was coming and he chose to look the other way, despite the fact that Helga was about to commit what he would have regarded as a mortal sin in the old days. But when he tried to pray these days, there was nothing but an empty void and nothing left to believe in on the other side. Rather like old Howie Bronson had told him he felt like after he'd been in Auschwitz and seen the stacked corpses. How could a merciful deity have permitted an obscenity like the nuclear holocaust? After three minutes or so, Helga slowly walked from the tent entrance:
"He's gone. He's not suffering any more."
"You're a good woman, Helga. It's been good to know you."
"Paddy, now don't do anything foolish. The rest of us rely on you. We wouldn't have survived through this without you."
"Leave it to me, Helga."
And later that day, on the border, there was another in a long line of incidents. It was recorded in the consequent official report that an unidentified elderly American man, armed with a shotgun, had rushed the Canadian Niagara Falls border post. He had evidently been a professional, because he used his remaining strength to evade the fusillade of fire from the manic Canadian guard, his face in an enraged snarl of rage at the defiance of his authority and bitterness at habitual experience. But Harry Bolton eventually found his target and shot Patrick O'Shaugnessy through his side- but not before he aimed his own firearm upward, hitting Bolton in the heart. Rita broke protocol and ran across the border clearing to try and assist the dying man:
"Is there anything I can do...? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That man there, Harry, he was consumed by what had happened to him in the past. There was no need to treat your group like that."
"Th...thank you. I know I'm a goner. Look, I know you're only doing your job, but..."
"I think I can make an exception. Are any of you suffering from any sort of disease?"
"No, we didn't enter any towns. We relied on our own food stocks. Getting...hard to breathe..."
"Paddy!" Helga Aronson gasped, as she ran across the clearing and took in the grim spectacle.
"I didn't..."
Helga knelt by Paddy's fast-ebbing body: "Why?"
"To...get the rest of you to safety..."
"At far too high a cost." Helga sobbed. Silently, as she held his hand, Paddy O'Shaugnessy slipped into oblivion and silence.
"Look...I'm risking my own neck here. But I think I can make an exception in this case. Bend the truth a little, make a white lie about what just happened."
"Do you mean...oh, thank you! Thank you so much!"
"I'm Rita."
"I'm Helga. Thank you, Rita. For restoring my belief that even if there are no flying men and virtuoso female acrobats left, heroism is still alive and well in this world." Slowly and surely, then, the ragged survivors of Seaboard City joined her. They shambled toward the border and Rita opened the checkpoint guardline.
I wish there was a definitively happy ending to this story. I would have liked to write one. I would have liked to write that the Seaboard City survivors all lived long and happy lives after they found sanctuary and a new home across the Canadian border. But Earth-109 was not a world in which such inexplicable mercies of fate occurred often in those days. Several died in comfortable hospital beds from cumulative radiation poisoning. Three more passed away from endstage cancer. But Helga Aronson went on to become the head of the American Survivors of Nuclear War NGO and often talked about her experiences, although certain details had been modified to protect the memory of absent friends. Not all heroes wear capes and technicolour outfits, however. Some wear ragged clothing and carry worn expressions but their hearts are as great as those that they once witnessed striding and flying before them.
THE END
++
Sargeant Patrick O'Shaugnessy looked out across the ravaged hills, with their skeletal trees, sterile and lifeless soil, and demolished remnants of housing. He hadn't asked for any of this. Granted, the Justice League had had no choice but to bring an end to the facade, and to the tyranny of Ray Thompson. But Seaboard City had become uninhabitable and its former inhabitants had had to become refugees, traversing the broken roads north, trying to find settlements. Inevitably, the weakest members of their group succumbed to hunger and opportunistic infection and were buried en route. And then, as if by a miracle, the Canadian border appeared, but that proved a cruel setback. There was probably no need for the Canadian border guards to be so derogatory and stentorian in their tone, labelling the Seaboard City survivors 'greenbacks' and 'gyppo scum.' Shots were fired above their heads and the group beat a hasty retreat.
(There were reasons. One of the Canadian guards had recently lost his grandmother, who had been on the vicinity of Vancouver when it had become one of only two Canadian cities to perish during the War. Her ordeal from radiation-induced cancer had been hideous, even with the benefit of legalised euthanasia available across the border. He had lost his father, an earlier border guard, when an American raider gang had laid siege to the border a decade before. Canadians bitterly associated the remnants of the United States with lawlessness, anarchy, pandemic cholera and typhus and the death of hundreds of thousands of Canadians in Ottawa and Vancouver and although Tina Turbine and Catwoman, the world's last surviving 'superheroes' had lived there since the early sixties, they were regarded as naturalised citizens.)
After the Seaboard City refugees had gone, one of the guards, Harry Bolton, lit a cigarette:
"Damn them. Do they think we're a soft touch, Rita?"
"Hey, now. They might understand that we had to do that, otherwise we'd be overrun by disease and criminal violence. One of them looked like he had been a police officer."
"I wish they'd died en route. I hate them for what they did to grandma, to Ottawa and Vancouver, to our parents. They can starve for all I care."
"Just make sure that you don't say that in public. We're supposed to be doing this as a national service, for positive reasons. Not because we hate the Yanks. I don't."
"That's easy for you to say, Ri. You're young, Toronto wasn't hit. It was different for me. Mum hit the bottle after that greenback gang murdered Dad and Rick Gallows that day. I had to leave school and go to work early to help keep my brothers and sisters fed, clothed and housed. Can you blame me for hating their guts?"
"That'd come as news to my Aunt Sonia and Uncle Mike, Harry. They feel the same way as you do. I don't. The Yanks and Russians suffered during the War, more than we can possibly imagine. Canada is still a reasonably intact nation and a civilised country. That cadaver across the border isn't. I'm just here to do my job."
"Yeah, and let them in to overrun our country. Well, they can stay the hell out as far as I'm concerned."
Rita bit back a reply she knew she would regret. Harry was good at his job, despite his bitterness and anger at what had happened to his family in the past. He just overpersonalised it. She wished she could help some of the refugees, particularly the children they encountered. But they couldn't. Most of them were too far gone, anyway. All she could do was hand out pediatric euthanasia pills. Once, she'd even rocked a little girl as she peacefully drew her last breath in her arms.
On the other side of the boarder, Jake the plumber was started to cough up blood. Helga Aronson, formerly a nurse before she'd settled down to marry her soldier husband, tried her best to deal with his declining health. From what she could remember, he was suffering from cancer. He had been for quite some time, although Ray Thompson's unnatural regime had kept it from progressing while Seaboard City was under his thrall. She turned to Paddy O'Shaugnessy as he entered the ragged tent:
"He's no better?"
"It's cancer, Paddy. He isn't going to improve."
"Damn those Cannucks! They don't care if we live or die!"
"I don't think that woman guard agreed with her pal. And frankly, Pad, those of us who lived through the last few weeks can see what's happened out there. The JGA may have represented the gold within us, but we've seen cannibalism, starving children, raider gangs, the shadow that was cast over our country by the holocaust. That man might have suffered because of that. From that radio broadcast we intercepted, Vancouver and Toronto were hit. Hundreds of thousands of people died, perhaps even millions."
"Are you going to let Jake have those pills? What sort of an outfit is a 'Green Star,' anyway?"
"I know you're a Catholic and you don't believe in euthanasia. I wish there were some other way out of Jake's dilemma, but there's not."
"Yeah, and there's no hospices this side of the border. God, Helga. Did we make the wrong choice when we abandoned Ray Thompson's lotus land?"
"We knew it would be hard when we set out."
"You're a good woman, Helga. You shouldn't have to make these sorts of choices."
"We don't live in a world full of gaudy, larger than life mystery men and wonder women any more, Paddy. That false innocence is gone forever."
"They were my friends, Helga. I miss them sometimes. Even after they died, they still managed to free us from what Thompson forced on us."
"I'm sorry. I need to make Jake as comfortable as I can." A look passed between them. If the world had been different, Patrick O'Shaugnessy and Helga Aronson might have fallen in love and married one another. But after their recent ordeal, they were too exhausted by their arduous struggle for survival to be anything other than friends. Patrick knew what was coming and he chose to look the other way, despite the fact that Helga was about to commit what he would have regarded as a mortal sin in the old days. But when he tried to pray these days, there was nothing but an empty void and nothing left to believe in on the other side. Rather like old Howie Bronson had told him he felt like after he'd been in Auschwitz and seen the stacked corpses. How could a merciful deity have permitted an obscenity like the nuclear holocaust? After three minutes or so, Helga slowly walked from the tent entrance:
"He's gone. He's not suffering any more."
"You're a good woman, Helga. It's been good to know you."
"Paddy, now don't do anything foolish. The rest of us rely on you. We wouldn't have survived through this without you."
"Leave it to me, Helga."
And later that day, on the border, there was another in a long line of incidents. It was recorded in the consequent official report that an unidentified elderly American man, armed with a shotgun, had rushed the Canadian Niagara Falls border post. He had evidently been a professional, because he used his remaining strength to evade the fusillade of fire from the manic Canadian guard, his face in an enraged snarl of rage at the defiance of his authority and bitterness at habitual experience. But Harry Bolton eventually found his target and shot Patrick O'Shaugnessy through his side- but not before he aimed his own firearm upward, hitting Bolton in the heart. Rita broke protocol and ran across the border clearing to try and assist the dying man:
"Is there anything I can do...? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That man there, Harry, he was consumed by what had happened to him in the past. There was no need to treat your group like that."
"Th...thank you. I know I'm a goner. Look, I know you're only doing your job, but..."
"I think I can make an exception. Are any of you suffering from any sort of disease?"
"No, we didn't enter any towns. We relied on our own food stocks. Getting...hard to breathe..."
"Paddy!" Helga Aronson gasped, as she ran across the clearing and took in the grim spectacle.
"I didn't..."
Helga knelt by Paddy's fast-ebbing body: "Why?"
"To...get the rest of you to safety..."
"At far too high a cost." Helga sobbed. Silently, as she held his hand, Paddy O'Shaugnessy slipped into oblivion and silence.
"Look...I'm risking my own neck here. But I think I can make an exception in this case. Bend the truth a little, make a white lie about what just happened."
"Do you mean...oh, thank you! Thank you so much!"
"I'm Rita."
"I'm Helga. Thank you, Rita. For restoring my belief that even if there are no flying men and virtuoso female acrobats left, heroism is still alive and well in this world." Slowly and surely, then, the ragged survivors of Seaboard City joined her. They shambled toward the border and Rita opened the checkpoint guardline.
I wish there was a definitively happy ending to this story. I would have liked to write one. I would have liked to write that the Seaboard City survivors all lived long and happy lives after they found sanctuary and a new home across the Canadian border. But Earth-109 was not a world in which such inexplicable mercies of fate occurred often in those days. Several died in comfortable hospital beds from cumulative radiation poisoning. Three more passed away from endstage cancer. But Helga Aronson went on to become the head of the American Survivors of Nuclear War NGO and often talked about her experiences, although certain details had been modified to protect the memory of absent friends. Not all heroes wear capes and technicolour outfits, however. Some wear ragged clothing and carry worn expressions but their hearts are as great as those that they once witnessed striding and flying before them.
THE END