by Nova
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE - EARTH PEOPLE
CHAPTER TWO - WHO CAN KNOW THE MIND OF A WOMAN?
CHAPTER THREE - SURPRISES IN THE WOODS AT NIGHT
CHAPTER FOUR - GARDENER
CHAPTER FIVE - SKIZZER
CHAPTER SIX - ROOM, BOARD, AND A QUICK EDUCATION
CHAPTER SEVEN - WHEN THE PUPIL IS READY . . .
CHAPTER EIGHT - SHEEP AND WOLVES
CHAPTER NINE - VENGEANCE
CHAPTER TEN - TOMORROW, THE WORLD
CHAPTER ELEVEN - PEACEKEEPER
CHAPTER TWELVE - WORKING THE BEAT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - MARKED
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - BARBIE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - DIVISIONS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - AN INVITATION
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - NIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - A DRIVE THROUGH OLD AMERICA
CHAPTER NINETEEN - DELIVERY
CHAPTER TWENTY - TOASTS
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - TAKEN FOR A RIDE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - IF ANYTHING CAN GO WRONG . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - DYING
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - POETRY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - RETURN
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - ALY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - WHY BURN?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - GRAIN
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - HELP IS ON THE WAY
CHAPTER THIRTY - TIN FOIL HAT
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - W.T.S.H.T.F.
OTHER BOOKS FROM ULYSSES PRESS
Copyright Page
For Marilyn and Elizabeth
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a series of posts on Calculated Risk, the economics blog. They began growing in length, and it was suggested I move them to another site and link back to them. This book was written and posted to the After the Crash blog site, and then moved to the American Apocalypse blog.
I wrote this “live.” I would write a section, proof it, and post it. I usually had no idea of what I was going to write until I started. The news of the current financial crisis influenced the direction, as did comments from the readers, and the comments in general at Calculated Risk.
When I say “comments from the readers” it does not convey the amount of inspiration and story ideas they provided. I could not have written this without their help and encouragement. I would like to thank, in no particular order:
Max, reticentlurker, FSHB, zapoteca, rsj, tj and the bear, bobn, LA Confederate, D^2, pdxr13, Lergnom, Mike in Long Island, unhappyCakeEater, Kevin John, Jim in Mo, Hoopajoops LTD, kidbuck, Joanna, CounterPointer, The Notorious AIG, Jerry, TampaSteve, WWIRUgger, bohica, and everyone else. Thank you.
I would also like to thank Bill at Calculated Risk for allowing me to post my stories and the link backs without complaining. I would also like to thank him for providing the blog that opened my eyes to the world of economics, and all the people who comment there. You cannot mention Calculated Risk without mentioning Tanta, who is no longer with us, for writing posts that made my head hurt. Tanta vive!
Most of all I would like to thank Jon Dansie. Not only for his comments from the very start, but for the outstanding job he did in pulling it all together. Without his help, this book probably would never have happened.
CHAPTER ONE
EARTH PEOPLE
Looking back now, it’s clear when I began to lose it—it being my grip on the American lifestyle. Previously, I would have said life but now I see we all have one. Even the six-year-old kid picking through the refuse dump outside some smoldering, intermittently powered Asian city has a life. Lifestyle—now that is different. Lifestyle, it rolls off the tongue, all cocky and aerobic; say it to yourself and smell the fine women, taste the magazine food, and imagine life under a roof that does not leak. Take away the money and you take away the lifestyle. What is still amazing, to me at least, was how much of my life then was really lifestyle and how totally blind I was to it.
Please, don’t get me wrong: I was never rich by the prevailing standards of the time. I had a job, a car, some cool toys, a girlfriend, and a condo—what I thought of as the basics of life. Nowadays . . . well, we all know; the standards changed—and changed so very fast. The “good old days” seem like a dream to me, as I am sure they do to so many of us. Some of us, especially politicians, seem to believe they will be coming back—or maybe they just want us to believe that. Maybe they will come back, but not in my lifetime.
Have you ever been standing still, yet still you feel as if you’re falling? It is a terrifying and helpless feeling, especially when it is your life. You know it’s slipping away, but there’s nothing to grab on to. Being helpless makes you feel so small. That feeling of being helpless—it steals part of your soul. Partly because it leaves you feeling like less of a man; you end up wanting to embrace the tawdry, self-pitying idea that you were a victim, just another of Fate’s bitches. I told myself I could have done something if I could have only gotten a physical handle on it. There was no handle, there never is: a bitter truth—one that I found out the hard way.
I had this job—not a great job, but it paid the bills most of the time. Nowadays you find people who either do not want to talk about what they did or want to brag about from what heights they have fallen. Me, I dropped from the first step to the ground, and it still broke something inside me.
I was working for a financial company—never mind the name—doing tech support. Like everything in life, it had its food chain, and I was somewhere above the mail room and cafeteria help. Above, but not by much. The good thing was, I went everywhere. You called, and if they could not fix it over the phone, then I was summoned to take a look. Most of the time it was an easy fix, and I got to meet some very attractive coworkers. Not that my willingness to be affectionate was ever returned. Their attentions were bestowed on the guys pulling in those fat commissions. I used to envy those people.
Money raining down on them . . . nice cars . . . good drugs . . . beautiful women—it puzzled me then, and it still puzzles me.
I mean, I know I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but how did they do it? I know now: fraud, lying, easy money. But how did they personally end up sitting in a thousand-dollar chair, making it big, and I didn’t? They were not smart. God knows, that became obvious after my fourth or fifth call to go see someone on the broker floors. They were basically freaking idiots.
But I digress, which means I am also not watching my perimeter. Nowadays you have to have eyes in the back of your head, especially when you are out and about in the areas I frequent. Everybody carries maps in their heads of the areas they spend a lot of time traveling in. I never really moved away so I have my old map and my new map. My old map had where the nearest Starbucks was, where traffic backlogged, and where I could get decent Chinese. My new map has bike paths, bad areas divided into different types of bad, food—preferably free—and shelters.
Traffic is not something I worry about a lot anymore. Eating at least one meal a day and avoiding getting any open wounds—or getting dead—pretty much occupies my time. Sometimes I talk and hang out with a few of the guys I can trust. Today I am hoping to run in to Carlos. Word is he has a throwaway cell that he is bartering time for; it would be nice to call my mom and listen to the disconnected message again.
I am sitting on a milk crate. Milk crates are not comfortable to sit on. My ass probably looks like a waffle but I don’t have any cardboard handy to pad it with. My back is to the wall of a closed gas station and my bike is laid down flat next to me. A guy I hung with for a month or two taught me to do that, back in the beginning, w
hen I was a rookie.
He taught me a few other things: Keep a low profile. . . Don’t advertise the fact that luck favored you with something extra that day. . . Always watch your perimeter. . . Trust your gut. Those were his rules, and they have become mine. Too bad he didn’t follow them. That’s all it takes: Screw up once, and you go down for good. No medkits, restarts, or extra lives in this game.
His name was Shaun. He was a pretty cool white kid who had it together, especially for so early on in “the Crash.” Back in the first days of the Crash, people were more likely to help each other out. That lasted, oh, about eight months or so. When the hope around here ran out, so did the caring and sharing. Kind of a bitch. It was the only thing that made my life almost tolerable on some days, especially since I don’t drink or do drugs. Shaun liked getting high and he liked women. So when the girl suggested that she knew a safe place where they could go and get high, well, he was all in. The rest you can guess—although I think cutting his head off was a bit excessive.
I’m waiting here to check the free clothing room at the shelter, hoping to score a pair of shoes. I’m not going for food. Maybe tonight I’ll come back for that. The shelter is county run so I won’t have to dance for Jeebus to get them to give me a pair. Plus, I have a friend there; that always helps. At the Salvation Army, well, Sally makes you listen to a prayer and a short sermon. That is as far as I am willing go—at least so far. Lately, the fundy-run shelters and food stops have been getting a little weird. They really push hard for you to come to Jeebus.
Actually, everything is getting a little weird. Some days I am not sure if I am crazy or the world just slipped yet another gear. I guess it will help if I explain what my little part of America is like today—with an emphasis on today, because who knows what it will be like in six months. One thing I am sure of: It won’t be better. So, what is the most important thing in my world? Water. It’s also my number one pain in the ass. Water is bulky and heavy, and it can’t be just 95 percent okay. Plus, you always need it, especially when you are using a bike for transportation. Come summertime, I need a gallon of water a day, and that’s just for drinking. I am long past pre-Crash cleanliness standards, although I try more than most people in my condition, I think. The only time you need to get really cleaned up is when you visit the “Earth People” in their natural habitat. That’s what we call those lucky clueless who still have a house and a job. They still live on the planet. We just kind of exist in limbo.
Water is important because you need it to live. That simple fact came as quite a surprise to a lot of people. There are still idiots and noobs who drink from the streams—them and people who came from countries where the water quality is even worse than here. The rest of us, well, who wants to spend a year with the shits when you’re homeless and your bathroom is the closest clump of trees? So yeah, water is a big deal for us.
We are not one mass of happy homogeneous poor; there are clans and groups—our own special hierarchy of poverty. The younger ones gravitate to the clans, especially the males; it is their old gamer world made real. The media calls them “gangs,” but when has the mainstream media ever gotten anything right? They probably wanted to avoid the word clan, as that still has a lot of baggage associated with it, especially among their viewing demographic. A lot of the younger ones are not wrapped too tightly. Once they lost high-speed Internet access, iPods, and texting—well, I think their brains crashed. When they rebooted them—and not all managed to do that—they did not come back quite . . . right. Sometimes, I watch them talk: Their lips move but so do their thumbs.
Also there are the “Tree People.” They are generally okay. The ones who aren’t, well, you hear about them soon enough. The Tree People live in the woods, mostly in shanties they built themselves. They love plastic: Showing up with a blue tarp for trade sets off group orgasms. They generally survive off of government paychecks, theft, and charging tolls for the use of bike trails that run through “their” woods. Lately, they’ve started asking for water for the toll; one eight-ounce plastic bottle will get you through.
I go around them. Like I said, water is a pain in the ass.
We also have “Squats”—the squatters. Some of them like abandoned housing developments; others go for the commercial real estate, especially the bigger office buildings. They are a lot like the Tree People except that their roofs don’t leak as much. When I first started out I would always hear stories about them blowing themselves up or being found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Some people have to learn the hard way not to build a wood fire in a gas fireplace without making sure the gas is really off. The rest of the denizens of my magic kingdom are either insane, stone-cold druggies, or alkies. A few are all of the above.
Then you have the random predators—random only in the sense that they show up in your life especially when it will make a bad day worse or when you have something they want.
Some of them want whatever you have; others, all they want is your youth. They are vampires preying on the poor, the defenseless, and the drug addled. They want to drain their quarry of any innocence they still have after descending this far down. The kids—the prized prey—usually have some of that special quality left, which is surprising, as they have followed mom as she bounced from one bad decision to another. Usually, they never make it as far down as the Tree People. Most often they stop somewhere around the Car People level. That’s not so bad; at least the Car People try to look after their own—especially at night. Plus, “Baby Moms” will get something from the county and maybe a little from the state. The problem for them is getting into the system. For that, you have to have remnants of an earlier and luckier life. The system wants a checking or savings account to deposit the benefits to and an address so it can come and check on the kids—kind of hard to do when the drop to the bottom has been so fast and ugly. Some of the shared addresses have twenty or more moms listed.
Then you have “Drug Mom.” She blends in because this is where Drug Mom was destined to end up. Some of her kind were already here before us. Sometimes, I think Drug Moms just have the kids so they can make money off of them both ways: government money and predator money. Lucky Drug Mom kids end up in the clans that will protect them; unlucky Drug Mom kids disappear. Some clans actively recruit the kids, partly because a lot of them understand from experience what a bitch life can be when you have a Drug Mom, partly because the little ones can be more vicious than you would ever want to believe.
I may have come across so far as a person who is somewhat decent. I agree, although others may not. You see, I hate these predators. When I find one—sometimes him, sometimes her, less often him and her—I kill them. Usually painfully. They have always been with us; they never go away. It gives a purpose to my life . . . I like purpose.
CHAPTER TWO
WHO CAN KNOW THE MIND OF A WOMAN?
I sat there on my milk crate watching what passed for traffic nowadays go by, waiting, for The Woman. That’s how I thought of her in my head—always in capital letters, each letter edged with a faint glow of white light. At other times it was her name: Carol. She was one of the few people from before the Crash that I knew and liked. She knew me by, and actually used, my birth name rather than my street name. She was the only person left in my life that I allowed to do that. As far as I was concerned, the person who had worn that name died a long time ago, except to her.
We had gone to high school together. It really didn’t seem all that long ago, yet it was. Time may have passed but she was still the same beauty I had seen standing in the door by the cafeteria so long ago. I had loved her from afar ever since I was a freshman—afar, because we did not travel in the same circles. She was smart and funny and actually attended classes; I was one of those guys on the edge. We were there one day, gone the next, our absence passing unnoticed except to the handful of others who were just like us.
Occasionally we would run into each other. Sometimes we talked, usually at parties, where she would be inside a
nd I would spend most of my time outside—unless I knew she was there. Then I had to go inside, just to see her. We would go outside and get high and drink a few beers. Well, she would drink a few and I would drink a lot. Then she would leave the party and I would let her go. Given a choice then, I always went for getting numb. To be honest, I knew I wasn’t what she needed or deserved. My life was about one thing: getting high.
I had loved her. It didn’t amount to anything then, and it wouldn’t amount to anything now. Yet she was a memory I clung to during the dark days that followed. I knew she had liked me. The idea that someone that good, that beautiful, had once liked me gave me hope that perhaps someday it might happen again.
I had moved to a lot of places after that brief year that I had known her. I asked about her when I was able to make my way back to the area, but the chaos that was my life kept dragging me down streets that I did not want her to know about. I did find out that she had stayed here, gone to college, and had gotten married. Her current life was as alien to me as mine would be to her. Sometimes, I thought, the only thing we had in common was the same language and a few faded memories—memories that I clung to. I had not been making any good ones lately that I could replace them with. That was for sure.
While I waited for her arrival I kept an eye on a group hanging around and occasionally slipping into an abandoned 7-11 about a half block away. They would have been there whether or not there had been a Crash. If there hadn’t been a 7-11 to stand in front of, one would have magically appeared. A 7-11 and these guys went together like a born-again and intolerance.
This group in particular always made me feel better about life, because one of them was a mortgage broker from my old company—one of the clueless idiots who had everything until he woke up one day and no longer did. He didn’t recognize me then, and he doesn’t recognize me now, but I had happily watched him from the first day of his arrival. I asked around about him after I spotted him standing there. He didn’t go directly to the corner. Very few did. He had been one of the Car People for a while until he had pissed off the wrong person, probably from boring everyone about how he once been somebody. Maybe he couldn’t let go of the fact he was no one now and still expected to be treated like he was someone important. That has a tendency to grate on people, especially as most of the Car People had also once been someone, somewhere else. One day he found that he had no car, just some metal and broken glass. He was lucky they hadn’t torched it with him in it. After that he showed up wheeling a grocery cart, the poor man’s Cadillac of the streets, and wearing a suit—a nice suit at that.
