A short-story for lack of any socially redeeming content

The Meta-locust were working his section of the township this week. Chase expected a visit within the week.

All taxes were collected as metal scrap. Private ownership of all metals had been effectively outlawed with the escalation of the Black/Caspian Sea wars. Portable metal detectors had been set up at all businesses and people caught with so much as an inch of fine, metal chain or a wedding ring were thrown into prison until they could be bailed out...with metal, of course.

It had started out as Patriotic Duty. First the government made it illegal to own silver and gold. They were needed to make computer processors for drones and AI. Then drives were held to turn in copper and lead, brass and stainless steel “For the war effort”.

Then laws were enacted “To save the environment” that required yearly inspections of vehicles. The inspections cost of several thousand dollars each year and that did not include the cost of making the vehicle compliant with the increasingly stringent laws. Most people grudgingly gave up their personal vehicles. 

The war continued to escalate as American and European and African blood mixed with Russian and Chinese and African blood on the shores of the Caspian and the dirt of nameless Mongolian slopes.

After the vehicles were stripped from the roads, the bridges and roadbed were no longer needed and they were demolished to extract the steel.

People were herded into cities to more efficiently render “services”.

Then, taxes were enacted.

The early adaptors flourished. They quickly and ruthlessly responded to the new order. They organized roving thugs to collect those "taxes", the thugs known locally as metal-locust...or the Meta-locust. The Meta-locust were given wide latitude in "collecting" the booty.

In order to not be deported to “the front” or raped or summarily executed, people stripped the wire from the walls of their dwellings. Then steel roofs were stripped away. After that was all gone, rooms were demolished and burned with the steel being extracted afterward with magnets.

Gangs free-ranged urban areas. They carried clubs and hurled rocks. The police had no-go zones. They were no more armed than the gangs. Politicians fear police and military as much, or more, than the rank-and-file citizens.

Chase and Leeza were considered mentally ill. They had refused to leave their rural home.

There was nothing left for Chase and Leeza to burn. The ground was barren. There were no more fences or tin-cans.

It was a good day to die.

A few of their closest neighbors had been informed. They would dart in after they heard the explosion and cart off the iron that the tax collectors had already collected. They would also hack apart the horses and distribute the meat.

Chase’s small mutt barked. Looking up, Chase saw the freight wagon being pulled up the grade of the hill. Kissing Leeza, Chase wiggled into the breast-work of windfalls that had been destined to heat his hovel, all that remained of his tidy ranch house, that winter. Fireplaces of rock and clay use a lot of wood for the tiny amount of heat they give off and the lack of iron tools to cut the wood made it difficult to burn it efficiently.

His plan was to immobilize the wagon by shooting one of the draft horses with his bow.

Then, when the guards charged his position, he would detonate the claymore mines he had fabricated from crude, home-made black-powder and pebbles from the creek. Chase did not expect to survive the encounter.

Leeza was to finish off the driver and any of the guards who stayed with the wagon.

It was a VERY good day to die, although the Meta-locust might not agree.