Pentober 2026 - Day 30: Wall

Ok so, what is Pentober? Promptober? It's a writing tradition that's been around the web for a while where you write up a short story every day in October based on prompts. Some go for pen and paper, some digital; everyone has their own style. I'll be posting here, and I'll be using the prompts from https://www.topinfiction.com/p/pentober-2026 

House rules are that I vomit-write the story; no planning, just taka taka taka on the keys. I get ONE edit at the end of the draft (if I even have time, lol), then we post it. House rules also say that I get to play catch up and do multiple days separately on one day or combined if work gets wild and I can't write. Get it? Got it? Good! Here we go.

---

Walls. Wealth was all about walls. Specifically, it was about how many walls you could put between you and the rest of civilization. The cruel thing was that nature had a way of putting up its own walls and, when those curtains fell down, decide who got wealth and who got ruined.

When the Sandstone Curtain fell down on America, it ruined millions. The Horseshoe Desert stretched from the Columbia Basin down to the Mexico's deserts and bent back up all the way to the Canadian border in North Dakota. From LA to the Missouri River, it was spaghetti Western scenery. Anyone of means fled to the Cascadian strip, anyone without means learned hard living if they were lucky.

The Blue Wall came down, too. The Gulf Coast, Florida, and the entirety of the Atlantic Coastal Plain were marshland and best and open ocean at work. Anyone with means there fled to the Great Lakes Green Zone, also known as Megaregion One, which stretched from the Minnesota all the way to the White Mountains in Maine, down as far as the Missouri-Kentucky border in a 'V' shape.

For Texas, that left the corridor. That left a narrow strip of land between the flooded Gulf Coast and the dried out husk that was West Texas. That left Austin: semi-arid, transitional, and the one gateway north along what was now called the Scrubland Highway, that narrow stretch of land that allowed for the passage of goods and people north, through Austin, and northeast to the Missouri river. From there, you could try to go North along the desert and make it through the narrow stretch between the desert, the river, and Minnesota's green regions to try and enter Megaregion One, Canada, or continue northwest to loop back to the Cascadian strip. Survival rates were low.

Walls. Wealth was all about walls. America, or what was left of it, what was now mostly called The Lakes and Cascades Coalition, had spent its time building wealth. Now, it needed more walls. Specifically, it needed walls south of Austin. It needed to make the Scrubland Highway impassable. Specifically, it needed to buy off one man that had built many walls between his compound at the top of Covert Park and the increasingly rough population he controlled: Jaxson Sorola.

There was one problem the Federal emissaries had when arriving to the Mount Borrell compound that morning to negotiate: Jaxson Sorola had been found dead.