Jake’s Monthly
(Part 3)
Post-Apocalyptic Anthology
Edited by Jake Johnson
***
Table of Contents
Less is More… Until It’s Too Much by John H. Dromey
Settlement Plan by Don Raymond
A Plutonium Record by Maria Stanislav
Sleeping Yoke by Ron Koppelberger
Body Builders Here to Stay by A. A. Garrison
The Word from Fire Valley by Kathleen Vyn
Sisters by Terrence Kuch
Something for Something by T. Fox Dunham
A Horse of a Different Color by John H. Dromey
A Home Coming by B. Ron Ryant
Second Chance in Potter’s Field by Don Raymond
***
Published by Jake’s Monthly on Smashwords.
All featured authors now receive their reprint-rights.
***
Welcome to Jake’s Monthly. Once again, this project reaches out to a new genre and sees what it can find. For the newcomers, this is the project’s third monthly installment, out of… Well, we’re not sure yet.
We’ve recently escaped the jaws of Lovecraftiana and are now sailing through much bleaker literary waters- Post-Apocalyptic fiction. Throughout November, writers have contributed a wide array of stories involving dead and dying worlds, and you’re about to be briefed on them. If you don’t want to read any details on the stories in this collection, please skip to the first story.
“Less is More… Until It’s Too Much” is a piece by talented author John H. Dromey concerning a young boy, an invention that will save the world, and how things go dreadfully wrong. It’s a delightful inversion of the classic world killed by pollution.
“Settlement Plan” is by author Don Raymond, and it answers a what-if question which I’ve yet to see asked. On top of that, it’s short and works like a good joke. What’s not to like?
“A Plutonium Record” by Maria Stanislav takes a wartorn wasteland and shoves it in a new direction. If a record goes “gold” or “platinum” after it hits so many sales, what happens if it survives the apocalypse? More importantly, who listens to it?
“Sleeping Yoke” is by the master of artful microfiction, Ron Koppelberger. It’s short, punchy, and open to interpretation.
“Body Builders Here to Stay” is A. A. Garrison’s successful combination of corrupt business practices and the aftermath of a zombie uprising in a future where you might as well be living in a graveyard.
“The Word from Fire Valley” is by award-winning author Kathleen Vyn. This is an interpretive story with a lot of interesting elements which combine to allow a vista into a dying, mysterious world.
“Sisters” is one of several flash stories in this collection, and definitely focuses on the darker aspect of the post-apocalypse. It’s a bleak glimpse of an original wasteland, and it was written by Terrence Kuch. It previously appeared in Lorelei Signal.
“Something for Something” is T. Fox Dunham’s combination of the fantastical and the gruesome. The story is mythological in its atmosphere and dark in its plot.
“A Horse of a Different Color” is John H. Dromey’s second contribution here. It’s a flash story which crams as much mythos and entertainment as a story can, given only a couple hundred words.
“A Home Coming” by B. Ron Ryant is perhaps the darkest story in this collection. It’s sad, bleak, and altogether the essence of a truly touching PA story.
“Second Chance in Potter’s Field” is the only story in this collection in which the Earth (probably) isn’t the world which has ended. Don Raymond’s second contribution tells a story of hope, religion, and redemption, all in a dark SF setting.
“Athena” by Maria Stanislav is set in the same universe as “A Plutonium Record”. Our final story is open to interpretation and involves a troubled young woman, a dark past, a love that may yet conquer all, and an experiment that turns thoughts into reality.
Afterwards, stay tuned for what genre’s coming up next month in “Next Time”!
***
Less is More… Until It’s Too Much
A group of ragtag survivalists were crammed inside a grocery store’s large meat cooler. They were uncomfortably warm despite the fact that the cooling units were operating at full capacity, and the insulated doors were closed tight.
“We’re all going to suffocate,” a woman said.
“No, we’re not,” another woman responded. “See that little box my son is holding? It’s a device that absorbs the carbon dioxide we’re exhaling and changes it into oxygen. Having fresh air to breathe in here is the least of our worries. It’s the global warming that’s taking place on the outside that poses the real threat.”
There was a lull in the conversation, and then the first woman asked a question.
“How did we get into this situation?”
“My daughter Susan knows,” a man spoke up. “She tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen to her until it was too late.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s right here beside her mother and me.”
“Is she willing to tell us her story?”
“That’s up to her.” His voice cracked on the last couple of words.
“It’s okay, Dad.” She patted him on the knee. “Maybe my talking will help pass the time.”
Susan took a deep breath.
“It all started about three weeks ago…”
***
“Carbon dioxide is bad,” Billy said. “Bad, bad, bad.”
“It isn’t all bad,” his lab partner Susan contradicted. “In fact, C02 is an essential element for life on Earth.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why do all the news reports on climate change say there’s too much?”
“You need to inform yourself beyond the headlines, Billy.”
“I don’t have time for that. I’m too busy working on a solution to the problem.”
They were both whispering in class, but then so were all the rest of the students. The young chemists had been paired off by their instructor Mr. Henderson and were supposed to be picking out a project for the science fair.
Susan sighed. “If we want to get a passing grade, I imagine we need to devise an experiment that has, or could have, practical applications in the real world.”
“That’s what Mr. Henderson said.”
“What?”
“I ran my idea by him a couple of days ago. He shot it down; said it was too radical.”
“Then why bring it up now?” Susan said in a stage whisper that carried throughout the lab and prompted a “s-h-h-h,” a “hush,” and a “keep it down,” or two.
“Because I built a prototype,” Billy whispered. “That’s why.”
He placed a shoebox-sized contraption on the table.
“What is it?” Susan asked.
“It’s a carbon separator.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know. It just does. The design is loosely based on the scrubbers used at coal-fired plants, but my version goes one step farther. Never mind all that. Get a whiff of its output.”
Susan cautiously leaned forward for a better look. A gentle air current came out of a grated aperture on top of the gadget with enough force to gently move a few strands of her long auburn hair.
“Do you have a tiny fan in there?”
“No. There’s no battery even.”
“What’s your power source?”
“I put a couple of refrigerator magnets in there, but that’s about it as far as hardware is concerned. I suspect cosmic radiation has a little something to do with the changes, but it’s mostly a chemical process I chanced onto through trial and error.”
“It smells fresh.”
Billy nodded his head. “It should. That’s pure oxygen you’re inhaling. At least, I think it is.”
Susan pointed to a hopper at the base of the rectangular device. “What are those tiny black flecks?”
“They’re the carbon particles… I guess,” Billy said. “Left behind when the oxygen escapes.”
“They shouldn’t be visible to the naked eye, unless they’re somehow accumulating in massive numbers. How quickly does the separation occur?”
“It’s instantaneous, once the final ingredient is added to the chemical mix. I’ve posted the exact formula on my website in case you’re interested. Anybody who has the skills to build a birdhouse can follow my simple instructions and assemble his or her own device.”
“How long does it keep going?” Susan asked.
“Indefinitely, as far as I can tell.” Billy looked at his wristwatch. “The box weighs almost exactly the same amount now as it did just over twenty-seven hours ago when I completed the fueling process. If anything, it may have gained a milligram or more from the carbon it’s been extracting from the air. That means the separator has been working continuously for over a day and shows no sign of slowing down. Maybe it’s self-sustaining.”
“There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.”
“Maybe not,” Billy admitted, “but when a chain reaction starts, who’s to say when the final link will be reached?”
Susan raised her hand to get Mr. Henderson’s attention.
“If you have a question about carbon dioxide, I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “The lab session will end in ten minutes, so you can’t have the hall pass either.”
Susan lowered her hand.
She leaned forward and whispered to Billy, “I think you should remove the formula from your website until we learn more about your invention.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport.”
Susan began to describe a number of worst-case scenarios.
Billy put his hands over his ears and refused to listen to anything more that his lab partner had to say on the subject. She wrote him a note, but he simply wadded up the paper and tossed it in the wastebasket.
The bell rang.
Susan started toward the teacher’s desk, but one of the other students got there ahead of her and Mr. Henderson motioned for everyone else to leave the lab.
That evening, Susan shared her concern about Billy’s experimental device with her parents. She spelled out to them some of the possible consequences if the device were cloned and put into widespread, unregulated operation. Her dire warning fell on deaf ears.
“Don’t tell me you’ve joined the fear-mongers,” her father said.
Her mother tried to be conciliatory. “One person can make a difference, Susan. That’s why you need to continue to recycle and be a responsible consumer. Let’s consider this a closed subject and not talk about it again.”
Susan went to her room. She went online and checked out Billy’s website.
She didn’t like what she saw.
Susan brought up the taboo topic again at the supper table.
“Billy posted a demonstration video on his website and it’s gone viral. The genie’s out of the bottle and he’s spreading infectious information all over the planet.”
Susan’s dad scoffed at the notion. “How bad can it be? Suppose Billy inspires some imitators, how much harm can a half dozen or so crackpots do?”
“Plenty, if they’re joined by tens of thousands of others who have already downloaded Billy’s step-by-step instructions. The number of hits was in the high six figures when his website crashed. The potential for disaster is eminent.”
“You really believe that?” her mother asked.
“I do,” Susan said. “I think young people all over the world are, or soon will be—pardon the pun—making carbon copies of Billy’s device.”
She was right.
Carbon dioxide destroyers proliferated.
Greenhouse gases were reduced and environmentalists everywhere rejoiced as the immediate threat of drastic climate change was eliminated.
Balance was restored.
Euphoria in the scientific community was short-lived, however, as the supply of carbon dioxide continued to decline precipitously as more and more of Billy’s infernal devices were produced in basement workshops and garages around the globe. Eventually, a tipping point was reached: the point-of-no-return ever to normality.
***
“… and that’s what brought us to our present predicament.”
With those words, Susan finished telling her story. “I can only guess at what’s happening outside, but I suspect conditions are getting worse.”
She was right again.
***
First the plants died. Then the vegans, followed soon after by the vegetarians. Carnivores thrived for a while. Eventually, only the vultures and other carrion-eaters survived, but even their days were numbered.
In the increasingly oxygen-rich atmosphere it took only a few well-placed lightning strikes to start the final conflagration. That all-consuming fire even cooked the cockroaches.
John H. Dromey was born in northeast Missouri. He’s had short fiction published in Woman’s World (a mini-mystery); online at Flashshot, Liquid Imagination, The Red Asylum, three minute plastic, and elsewhere; as well as in a number of print anthologies, including Gone With the Dirt: Undead Dixie (Pill Hill Press, 2010).
***
By Don Raymond
"Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Earth will never be recognized as a full Member of the Galactic Federation until you take responsibility for the pogroms that were conducted on your planet.
You must know what I am referring to. It's in history books across the Cloud, even if it isn’t in yours. Another fact, I might add, that does not do your case justice before the Committee to Represent Member Worlds.
The atomic testing from 1945 onward, of course. Well, they called it atomic testing, but even at the time that was little more than a thinly-veiled cover up for the real truth.
No, it was an attempt to drive out the alien settlers from the region.
I understand they weren't popular, lurking in disheveled trailer parks and drive-in theaters. But that doesn't mean you were allowed to violate their basic sentient rights by trying to poison them with radioactive material. I’m also given to understand that property values in the region have skyrocketed since the majority of them left, which of course only exacerbates your negative publicity.
Between 1945-1993, over 1,000 fission, fusion, and multi-stage weapons were detonated in the Southwestern desert, often near to population centers containing significant numbers of inhabits covered under the Indigent Refugee Alien Code of 22657. Las Vegas alone received nearly twenty times the normal level of background radiation- and as I'm sure you know, was also home to the largest population of offworld sentients on the planet.
It was your obligation, as a probationary member, to integrate them into your society.
And you failed.
Yes, of course I understand those actions were taken by a previous administration. However, they are no longer around to answer for their actions. And, as you are co- inhabitants of Earth, we will hold the cockroach delegation equally liable in the face of Intergalactic Law."
***
To John and Patrick
(probably the entirely wrong place for a dedication)
Some say we are the cursed generation. On some days, I am sorely tempted to agree. After all, we have faced global warming and ensuing climate chaos, the gradual destruction of the ozone layer and the melting of ice shelves. We have seen innocent numbers become symbols of the death of thousands, and female names growing to be associated with disasters. We have experienced trepidation as the end of the century and the millennium coincided, and some follow-up on that as different calendars forecasted their own versions of the apocalypse.
Did it make us less cursed, or even more so, that we tended to laugh in the face of all that? Too many fears, too many tragedies – could anyone blame us for becoming maybe a bit more callous than appropriate? Callousness can be both a blessing and a curse, in my experience. We could make fun of things we were supposed to be afraid of, and it helped. To an extent, at least.
Because all those scares, they were hardly sufficient to earn us the name we could have bragged about under different circumstances, as did some X-ers, and then Y-ers, and as would the Z-ers, if there were a generation Z. But the real reason we were dubbed cursed was the fact that among the things we had witnessed was the end of the world.
Even for us, that was rather hard to laugh off.
***
I lay the pen down and stretch my fingers, clenching and unclenching my fist a few times. Three years, and I still have trouble writing with my left hand.
Maybe my idea to write some of my thoughts down is not really worth the effort, considering the inconvenience it's causing me, not to mention the expense. For some weird reason, I decided to procure proper writing paper instead of settling for some bits and scraps put together, as people do now when they find themselves in need of writing something down. Stationery is not exactly a commonly traded good these days, and the pretty blue notebook decorated with pictures of cats cost me three days' worth of generator fuel. Even that was a rather hard bargain for me, as the sweet old lady out of whose handbag I had seen the notebook falling out, had originally refused to part with it for anything less than a week's worth. She went on and on about its sentimental value to her, while never actually refusing to give it up. She had obviously read me like a book and knew I'd haggle as best as I could, but not actually leave without 'one of the last things she had left in this world, a gift from her departed daughter'. Eventually, we reached common ground at three days' worth of fuel, provided I took it over to her place.
Going by her house was an experience in and of itself, as it was the first of its kind that I've seen even though I've certainly heard of her kind before. Such people were called clingers because of the way they clung to their former lifestyle, despite the hazards it brought. Clingers would stay in their old houses if the area was even remotely habitable, or drag to their new home as many of their things as they could, regardless of the contamination they'd carry with them. Their reasoning was such that they'd live out the rest of their lives, however long that was – or short, given their habits – surrounded by the familiar things. They were shunned for obvious reasons – even though despite the scary stories, I didn't see anything actually glowing, in this house, at least – but I found their rock-hard denial almost refreshing. Pretending to live in a world where one could eat fruits from a tree or drink water from a river or get caught in the rain – there was something to be said for this rather hard-core escapism. It had something in common with pretending to die of asthma rather than admit lung cancer – before, and of cancer rather than atomic disease now.
I left the house of the clinger lady thoughtful and somewhat disappointed. I hoped sincerely that there was never a daughter, or if there was one, she never gave that notebook to the lady who traded away a memento of her dead child for several cans of gasoline. If I had something of Patrick's left, I would never give it up so easily, or at all.
At home, I examined my newest possession, idly wondering how radioactive it was. Couldn't be much worse than some of my records or tapes, really, considering the multitude of places they were recovered from. Inside the back cover, I found a short description of the person who had originally created the artwork used for the notebook's cover, in the early second half of the twentieth century. She was one of those affectionately referred to as 'flower children'. The word itself smelled of summer, warmth and what smiles would smell of if they had a discernible scent. Stroking the unfaded colours of the cover, I found myself smiling as well. Believing that peace and love would save us all was probably one of the best illusions to live by. So what if they never did save us? It isn't like anything else did, either.
Remembering the story of my notebook was enough to let my fingers rest, so I get back to the writing.
Where was I? Ah, yes; the end of the world.
***
The end of the world was not biblical, or mythological, or spectacular, or complete, or, for that matter, a proper end at all. It was the end of the world as we knew it, and it came in stages, none of which were acknowledged for being steps towards the end, up until the moment when it became clear that this was actually it, and there was nothing left but to turn around and try to figure out when it all began. Or this particular bit, anyway.
At first, as usual, there were scares. Scares and rumours. They went through the normal life cycle of all scares and rumours in the world. Stage one: the first sparks, when only the most paranoid ones believe and try to convert the rest. Stage two: the kindling. That's when the number of believers becomes big enough to start growing quickly. At this stage, no one needs much proof to believe. In fact, denial works wonderfully as a fan for the flames. Stage three: forest fire. Everyone but the biggest sceptics believes and expects the onset of whatever the rumour is about, often in a completely mutilated form by now. And finally, the fourth stage. The ashes. Belief is no longer required, because the event in question has either arrived or utterly failed to. This is the time to either strut smugly or shuffle away in embarrassment, depending on whether you were in the paranoid or sceptical camp, and on whether your opinion was confirmed or overruled, respectively.
In rather rare and particularly nasty cases, the rumoured event arrives just when everyone stops believing in it. This was the case for us. War came just as the last of the ashes of its rumours were being swept up.
My husband was one of the moderately paranoid ones, I one of the moderate sceptics. Between us, we accumulated just enough of the popular survivor kit to, well, survive.
***
I pause as I look at the last two sentences. Barely a page into my account of the events, and I've already strayed into personal details, something I promised myself to avoid as much as possible. Then again, we were a typical enough family, and possibly a good enough representation of what was happening to our people.
***
The basic survivor kit at the time included water, rations that kept indefinitely and – this is important – a small power generator. Some of the more paranoid parts of the populace had equipped their basements for spending weeks at a time there, if necessary, complete with air recyclers. We had settled for a garage, accessible through a back door of the house.
Despite the horror that the word itself carries, war did not descend upon us like a many-headed beast, scorching the country and tearing lives apart. It was here, sure enough, but somehow, always on the other side of a television screen or an internet news portal. Whoever reads the following words will likely think me callous even for my generation, possibly nothing short of immoral, but I would be lying to myself if I wrote otherwise. The war was horrifying, and appalling, and more of those adjectives spoken on screens by stone-faced politicians and tear-struck female talk show hosts – but it was not personal. No one I knew was dying out there. No one I cared about more than one should love their neighbour – and anyone who recognises the reference knows how well most fulfil that particular commandment (in case this is read when no account of religion is available, this was a reference to Christianity, one of the world's major religions as of the time around the end; and the tone of my writing should give the reader a general idea of how devout the majority of the world was at the time).
So I was no more afraid than any wife and mother whose husband and child went to work and school every day – not to war. Perhaps I am generalising and tarring other American mothers, known for their patriotism, with the selfish brush of a born-European, raised-somewhat-American – but that was just my opinion. Everyone is entitled to one, after all.
So, I was afraid, but not terrified. I did not wake up at night thinking I heard an air raid warning or gunshots outside.
***
I stop short of writing 'maybe I should have been'. Even if I were, it would not have changed anything. My attempt at a semi-historical account is rapidly turning into a diary of some sort. No matter. In the Second World War, a young girl's diary survived her by generations and became widely known – at least, in her country. I have no such ambition. I just want my thoughts and memories committed to paper, carrying a small part of me –
Where?
I decide that just 'somewhere' is good enough for me.
***
On the last night before the world ended, I had gone to bed early. I wasn't sure what woke me up. In hindsight, it might have been the noise or the tremors, or both. I was a very sound sleeper then, and had gone to sleep wearing my favourite headphones. Big ones, the kind that blocked all sound from the outside world. I was not worried about Patrick waking up and calling me – John had promised to be there if our son needed anything, and told me to get a good night's sleep. Therefore, whatever had shaken me out of my slumber must have been pretty damn loud. Sleepy and confused, with headphones hanging around my neck, I waddled over to the bedroom door and pulled it open. At first I thought that the lights had gone out. As I rubbed my eyes, I realised that it was dark because I was looking outside. Half of the house was gone.
The remaining half contained the bedroom, on the doorstep of which I was standing, the kitchen underneath it, and the garage. The other half contained – had contained – the guest room, the living-room and Patrick's room. It would've been too much to hope that both John and Patrick had been in the kitchen at the time. I went there regardless, scrambling down the remains of the staircase and falling halfway down in the darkness. The kitchen was empty. I went to the garage, the only place left to search. Of the other half of the house there weren't even any ruins. As if it had been sliced clean off. Later, I would find out that that was exactly what happened. Weeks later, I would be told about the new generation vacuum bombs that imploded objects rather than exploding them, annihilating areas with surgical precision. At the time, all I knew was that the garage was the only enclosed room remaining in our house. So I went there.
John wasn't there. Neither was Patrick. And that was when my world had ended.
***
A knocking outside catches my attention. I get up and walk to the door. It turns out to be Ben, one of my regular customers. We exchange a few jokes, and he trades me two blank compact discs for one with a record. I have plenty of blanks at this time, and would prefer fuel or food, of course, but setting prices is against my rules. After all, nothing of what I trade is mine, so a blank disc is more than sufficient payment for the power spent copying a record. As for my time, I was never good at attaching price tags to it, even when I had to.
Another thing I get from Ben is a promise to keep an eye out for any old gear on his next trip down to the nearest city. Players, phones, hard drives – I check everything to see if there's anything to add to my ever-growing library.
Ben gone, I return to my notebook. The happy blue cats are smiling at me from the cover, just as before. The words I stopped at turn out to be 'end of the world', again. It really is time to move on from there, I tell myself.
***
Later, I would find out that the date of my personal apocalypse coincided with the official beginning of the new calendar for the rest of the survivors. At the time, I knew nothing, which was exactly as much as I wanted to know. I sat in the garage – it had seemed as good an option as any. From the sound of something hard colliding with the wall behind my neck as I did so, I realised I was still wearing the headphones. I pulled them back on.
It may seem ridiculous, but among the items in our survival kit were plenty of batteries and a few devices for charging them. For both John and myself, being able to listen to music was a need that fit somewhere between the first and second levels of Maslow's pyramid. Hiding in our garage with nothing to listen to apart from gunfire outside would be so boring, we had joked, and made sure we wouldn't be left in silence. Music had always been an important part of our lives. For me, who had no musical talent whatsoever - sad, but true - it was an eternal companion. John, now, had been blessed with a perfect ear for music, and even though he never made a career out of it, he played plenty and sometimes, when sufficiently pestered by myself, sang a little. And our Patrick, much to my delight, seemed to inherit his father's talent and his mum's passion, and but a few weeks prior to that night, when asked by someone what he wanted to be when he grew up, declared he wanted to be a 'muzizian'. At four and a half, his instrument of choice was a drum, and John and I had spent a lovely hour playfully arguing about what kind of band our boy would play in. I suggested punk rock, but John insisted I set my sights somewhere higher, like classic metal.
I digress, but only to explain how a box full of AA batteries ended up among the essential means of survival in our makeshift shelter. Moving to sit down next to that box was the only movement I had made, once the music in my headphones stopped. It could have been minutes after my arrival in the garage; it could have been hours. I stayed next to the box from there on, popping new batteries into my player whenever my headphones went silent. There were also some rechargeable ones there, I knew it, but starting up the generator and finding the charger was more effort than I was willing to expend.
For however long I had sat there, the music played relentlessly. I woke up whenever it stopped, changed the batteries blindly, and went back to sleep. It would later take me months to learn sleeping in silence.
The first thing capable of attracting my attention since I had sat down by the wall was a thud loud enough to be heard through the headphones, and swearing supplemented an instrumental part that had just come up. I looked up to see a man sprawled on the floor and realised he must have slipped on some of the batteries strewn all around me.
***
I decide to omit the conversation with my visitor – I must be ungrateful, but I fail to think of him as a rescuer, even now. After all, I was in no danger whatsoever, and capable of surviving for months on the food and water originally meant for three people, if only I could've been bothered to use any of it. Since I am incapable of describing my meeting with him – I don't even remember his name, how's that for the depth of ingratitude? – as a glorious rescue story, I will refrain from describing it altogether, lest I disappoint my possible reader even further. Besides, the conversation in question was basically a monologue. My contribution to it limited to shaking my head to answer questions as to whether I was injured, in need of help, or mute. Actually, later, the doctor at the camp I was brought to discovered that I had dislocated some joints in my right hand rather badly – no doubt when tumbling down the stairs – but setting them right proved rather difficult because of the time that had passed. He said I had to practice doing things with my injured hand despite the pain if I wanted to keep use of it, but I neglected that. Now I'm officially left-handed.
Using the pause to stretch my fingers again – this is more writing than I've done in one sitting ever, in the new world, at least – I think what would be a good point to pick up my story. Some facts are probably in order, as opposed to the opinions I'm giving out by the handful.
***
We arrived at a place best described as a camp, made up of cars and tents. I wasn't asking questions, but watching was enough to gather some basic facts. The people running the place – or at least, the ones most talked to, so I assumed they were in charge – were neither police, nor emergency services, nor the military. Just volunteers, average people who either gave up on hoping for the government's help or never expected it in the first place. Some went around looking for survivors, like the man who had found me. Some gave what medical aid they could to whoever needed it. Surprisingly, there weren't that many of those. It dawned on me very quickly that there were barely any wounded in this war – only the living and the dead. Or those beyond help, like the people from the big cities, those who survived the nuclear blasts.
No, I tell a lie. Those would be people from the suburbs and satellite towns of the big cities. Of those who lived in the cities, none survived. At least, I haven't met one city dweller in the three years that have passed since then.
There were also people in charge of distributing resources that originally came from the survivor kits of those brought over, as well as from empty houses. The stuff from my garage was taken for distribution as well. I didn't object. They had not taken any of my batteries, however, and I didn't bring any with me.
What followed was waiting. The kind of wait where, eventually, everyone stops caring what happens next – as long as something does finally happen. Nothing did. All channels of communication – telephones, radio, television, the internet – were dead. The camp grew slowly every day. In some time, we got our first suburban dweller who gave us a few morsels of information. He had learned just enough to tell of vacuum bombs used on the countryside, and of the nuclear ones detonated over the cities. His story was sufficient confirmation of the general belief that no help would be coming. It also earned him his rewards – as much food and water as he could carry, which was not much at all, and a request to stay far away from the camp – far enough to be unseen.