Prologue
January 8th, 2026
Four more journalists were publicly executed last month to honor Premier Alexander Kenton’s eightieth birthday. One of them had been with what used to be CNN. He had met his fate less than eight hours after bloodhounds and a small flock of drones tracked him down until he was discovered in a bayou cabin southwest of Baton Rouge. He was hanged for treason after appearing for fifteen minutes before a back county kangaroo court. He had editorialized on truth and common sense up until a few years back, just before the major news outlet went “rusty”—its signal reduced to a crackle of static and snow on one of the few remaining underground UHF European networks left.
The other three journalists were from an AM radio station set up in an abandoned MTA station under Boylston Street in Boston. It was literally underground so as avoid detection by the “censor/sensor” drones. The station broadcasted excerpts from the outlawed U.S. Constitution—and subsequent violations of it—from 8:PM til midnight. For their sins, the three were shot by a hail of AR-15 and Soviet AK-47 bullets from firing squad in Fort Worth. They had awaited sentencing for over a year in Unqutuck, a tundra gulag 300 miles northeast of Fairbanks. Even that frigid tundra place may have been better than the stifling, overcrowded gulags in Guantanamo, or Delaxuma, in the Arizona desert run by the infamous eighty-eight-year-old “Sheriff Jeff” Lupera and his grandson Zach. Usually no one was ever released from Unqutuck, or any gulag, but in this case the optics of a public execution were important to celebrate what the Regime had accomplished in such a short time. And, of course, to honor the Premier on his birthday.
Both executions had been ceremoniously televised on the ubiquitous Kenton/Fox News and Entertainment Network, now the only television network broadcast available. The citizens of Real-America had been compelled to stop and watch, nearly as a requirement, as though they would be tested on it.
There had been no free elections since 2020, when President Kenton took full autocratic control, before anointing himself Premier. The Electoral College, with the aid and endorsement of the New Soviet Republic, also won that one, as they had the election in 2016. The popular vote in 2020 was never even considered, because then President Kenton had lost this by over seven million votes, so they didn’t count. The emasculated, reigning Repubs had painted Democratic Candidate Marcia Lewis as an outcast, because she was a woman of color with a “forged birth certificate”—faked and filed by President Kenton’s staff. For the sin of challenging the president, Ms. Lewis had long since been sent to a cushy minimum-security gulag on St. John’s Island in the Caribbean. It was once the estate of one of the Premier’s many seedy “friends,” who had hung himself under never disclosed circumstances.
1
The Bronze Star
January 8th, 2026
Death Before Dishonor”
The brand on my forearm plagued me every time I saw it, but I needed the reminder. I had it needled into me back in 2006, inspired by my resolve that I’d stay in the army forever to complete my life as a Real Man.
That was a week before that morning in 2016 in Jaghatu, twenty miles south of Kabul. I had been sitting in the back of our Hum-Vee and was the one least hurt when it trundled over an IED. The explosion left the driver and my two buddies trapped not-quite-dead in the vehicle. A shot of adrenaline surged through me, and I managed to pull the driver and one of my buddies to safety before the Hum-Vee blew. My reaction had not been as delayed as the second explosion from an RPG fired from a craggy rock knoll above, followed a stream of bullets from AK 47s fired by at least two Taliban goons from some ruins on the side of the road. For that I got a Bronze Star. From the shrapnel in my thigh, I got a Purple Heart. The Bronze Star made me a temporary hero; the Purple Heart prevented me from re-upping to continue as a Real-Man-in-The-Army.
There were a lot of Bronze Stars awarded back in the day. Up until 2022, my award got me invited to an annual district Congressional Breakfast. I hardly attended it after 2010, after I’d married Tricia to settle down into a fat life in the burbs of New York City. I worked in the city as an ad exec, convincing kids to eat their Wheaties, and housewives to douse themselves daily in Oil of Olay to feel twenty years younger. During those times I had recurring visions—and nightmares—of my remaining buddy’s body twitching and juddering as he was pumped with AK47 shots from the fucking ruins on at the roadside in fucking Jaghatu. No amount of Pretty in Pink Bubble Bath could sud that image away.
The Bronze Star Congressional Breakfast invites ended in 2023, because that was when Premier Kenton ended Congress and then the Senate. Shut them right down because they weren’t part of his plan for the authoritarian regime, he’d renamed Real-America, like some sort of pet project.
After 2020, the prospect of making choices had turned me to stone since that one I’d made to vote a second term for President Alexander Kenton. I wondered how I could have ever allowed myself to contribute, even in a small way, to the diminishment of what had once been a democratic America.
I glanced through our dining room door toward the living room mantle and the display case housing my Bronze Star. While he was shutting down Congress, and then the Senate, Kenton started revoking licenses for the newspapers and TV networks, those carriers of the blights of “fake news” and “alternative facts”—except for his own Kenton/Fox News and Entertainment Network. That’s when, while looking over at my medal, l tried to stifle my regret. What had I sacrificed for it? And my Army buddy shot up in Jaghatu? He’d sacrificed his life for a now dead ideal that once used to be worth the invaluable parchment The U.S. Constitution had been printed on.
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Now it had all hit closer to home. Through a recent Regime edict, a culling of seven-year-old children had become crucial for stocking the premier’s newly formed BlueShirt Youth Brigade. Yesterday was our youngest child’s birthday—his seventh.
A week before, we found we’d been one of the lottery-selected families to receive the dreaded hand-delivered “Greetings, Real-American!” message, stating that they would be taking away my son for training to serve the greater good of the Kenton Regime in the BlueShirt Youth Brigade. The Regime had outlawed the public Internet in 2025; leaving us no chance for us to contest this, as protesting any of their edicts was illegal. What did that even mean? Kenton had gutted the Department of Justice to stack it with his personal choices back in 2020. Now there was no law except the impulsive directives imposed by the Premier at his whim— “Serving at the Pleasure of the Premier” he had called it. The stock message printed on the postcard had only announced some BlueShirt officials would be showing up at our door sometime on Tuesday—today—a date penned in on a fill-in-the-blank line. We weren’t told what time they would be coming by, so we’d waited around all day listening to the ticking from our grandfather clock in the hallway—each like another tick on a time-bomb.
We knew what would happen from what some other families in our neighborhood who now had one less child had told us. The BlueShirt guards would be taking the entire family to the district processing center two towns away, in Bridgeport. Once there, the Public Reform and Immigration Control Enforcement (PRICE) agents would take and examine our child to be “acquired.”
Tricia and I knew that Steven, our seven-year-old wouldn’t be the one of our three kids acquired. He was on the spectrum of being mentally under-developed, and if PRICE deemed the child “deficient” or “sub-standard,” it became the solemn duty of the parents to choose which of their remaining children would be chosen. It was the most dreadful choice I could imagine, and I’d come to feel there was nowhere else to turn but into the darkness of solitude to drink my helplessness away after Tricia and the kids had gone to bed.
They never showed on Tuesday, but Tricia and I knew that didn’t mean they’d forgotten. The PRICE (Population Reform and Immigrant Control Enforcement) -controlled BlueShirts never forgot their duty; they just used it as a bludgeon. The cost of my drinking well past midnight into Wednesday was a wicked, surging hangover. I sipped my grapefruit juice and cringed back another hot wave of headache. “You know there is nothing we can do,” I croaked dryly to Tricia, knowing it was just about the dumbest thing I could say. “Just like that?”
The tone of her voice jabbed me into a cringe. “You think I want to go through with this, Trish?”
“I know you don’t want to, Robert. It’s just you’ve seemed to’ve given up your will to fight this anymore.”
“...anymore,” I echoed. I thought back on that scene in Jaghatu over twenty years before and had that same helpless feeling now. Just as I would have sacrificed my life for my buddy then I would have sacrificed it for Tricia and our kids now. But, like then, I had felt powerless against the grinding Machine of fate.
The scrape of the knife was deafening through the silence Tricia buttered a slice of toast. “They are going to take one of our children from us, Robert,” she enunciated pointedly.
I felt numbed beyond words. The only defense I could afford to offer was my solemn silence.
“Well, I won’t let them, God damnit!” she said. “Certainly not because that sloppy, Big-Mac-eating, fat fuck lounging on his gold-plated palanquin like some sort of Nero in his tower on Fifth Avenue says I have to.”
The chill that our place may have been bugged momentarily seized me. Four months back, one of the interns of a partner in my neighbor Bill Davis’ law firm was reported saying leftist things during lunch in the building’s cafeteria. That afternoon, the PRICE took him—hopefully not to one of the twenty or so gulags Kenton’s PRICE people had set up in the nation’s most inhospitable regions. No one or no-thing could be trusted anymore; not even the potted plastic plants bolted strategically on corporate lunchroom tables.
And even at home. I’d been suspicious since that plumber showed up to monitor our water pressure two months before. I wondered if a mic could have been placed behind one of the display plates hanging on the wall behind me. But then what if I did find a mic? I couldn’t exactly report it, because the cops were all accountable to PRICE, and many of them were themselves agents.
“Christ, Trish. Don’t even say that kind of shit.”
“What, Robert? You afraid they’re gonna hear us and come drag us away? Maybe put us in some gulag up in the Alaskan wasteland?” She turned the sink faucet on to full. “There!” She shouted over the sound of running water. “You happy they won’t hear us now?” Concerned the stream would run over from the sink already filled with dishwater, she turned it off. “Jeee-zus...You are so paranoid.”
“It’s the way times are, Trish.”
“Well, they don’t have to be, and we have to do something.”
“Like what? Take the kids and leave the country? Leave what’s left of my job and live somewhere else like a family of ex-pats?”
“Well, why not? We could go somewhere else and live a normal life.”
“Like where? Canada?”
“Too cold, and too close.”
“Where, then? Where would we go?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Robert. Maybe Australia?”
“No, Trish. Neither Canada nor Australia. You know as well as I that we have those tense moments even at the border stations even when we drive from Connecticut into Massachusetts— and that’s not getting any easier. We’d never be cleared to leave Real-America.”
“Ameri-CA, you mean, Robert.” She glanced at a hanging plate. “‘Make America Great Again’, my bony ass!” she scoffed at the invisible mic. “We were great to begin with twelve years ago, before that dickhead pledged to ‘Drain the Swamp’.”
“Tricia, please...shhh!”
“Don’t go shush-ing me, Robert! I don’t care who the fuck is listening.”
I sighed with the Naugahyde cushion of my dinette chair as I settled back and listened to the cartoons Steven was watching in the living room. They were old Eisenhower-era reruns of Popeye the Sailor, and Mickey Mouse. But no Betty Boop—she was too controversial and subliminal-liberal for developing minds.
I took another sip of my grapefruit juice and savored its bitter taste as I dreaded our appointment with destiny at the processing center. Then came the knock on the door. It sounded hospitable enough. I peeked through the window. Parked in our driveway was their black Hum-Vee with a a yellow P.R.I.C.E logo emblazoned on its driver’s door and hood. My numbness turned to paralysis. It had come two hours earlier than we expected most likely to catch us off guard and un-prepared.