06/07/2000
Dear diary,
We're in the middle of nowhere. Actually, more like in the middle of Nowhere, Michigan. And yet, I probably have never seen as much people as I saw today.
Wait, this isn't good. I'm getting ahead of myself. I haven't wrote in here for two weeks, so now I should explain what happened.
Two weeks ago, Gen. Sykes sent me and the rest of our corps in a border-patrol-thingy. Things in Canada were heating up again, and our intelligence confirmed that the Soviet military would occupy Ottawa at any moment. Gen. Sykes contacted the R.A.C and told them they could enter the US by boat and reach a checkpoint.
Thing is, he didn't know what the checkpoint was going to be, so he just sent us to whichever place in the region looked the most like a military base. The only place he found was an old hospital used by the Army of Freedom during the Civil War.
The hospital is every bit as dirty and leaky as everything that seems to come from the Civil War-era. The windows are broken, electricity barely works, the grass is already two or three feet high and the whole structure seems to be sweating goo.
We didn't have much to do for the first 13 days so we just tried to make the checkpoint look presentable to our fellow freedom fighters. I used my spare hours to do some patrolling- that is, to hike around the woods. The area is really quite beautiful- though I can't really say that about the guy I found wearing an Army of Freedom uniform. Rank: major. Status: been dead for some 20 years. I gave him a proper soldier's burial.
It was yesterday that our work really started. Gen. Sykes probably imagined that a few brave Canadian freedom fighters would come through the border, and that then he would train them, give them better weapons and send them back to continue the fight against the Reds. Well, I fear for him if he planned everything in advance like this, because he is probably gonna be a bit disappointed. Instead of the few hundred freedom fighters we ordered, we got a few thousand refugees. And then some more. And then a thousand more. They didn't stop coming for the last 48 hours and probably won't stop anytime soon.
Right now my mission is to do the head-counting. I really preferred to do something where I didn't need to look at them. Their faces are lonely, hopeless, filled with sorrow. And there are so many of these faces. The last time I saw faces like this was in... well, ironically, when me and Aunt Jasmine went to live in Ottawa. A truck driver let us go with him, and we passed by a lot of people going in the same direction as us, by foot, with miles of road and open field in front of them. They were all wearing basically rags, some of them tainted with blood, as are the Canadians now. I never thought I would be seeing this again.
I never would have seen all those hopeless faces if instead I had gone to the "worker's paradise" with Mom; nor would I be seeing them now. I should probably visit her. She hasn't talked to her son for 18 years now.
Besides, they say California is great this time of the year.