by J. F. Krause
The problem of smaller settlements dissolving as newly created families move to larger settlements isn’t going away. With winter around the corner, we can’t ignore it. While most of the small settlements, which used to be mid-sized cities by the way, may not have a discernable effect on the rest of us, at least in the short run, losing some of them might be inconvenient eventually, and we are going to have to figure out how to maintain them somehow.
For instance, oil is currently refined in several places, and all of them are small and in danger of depopulating. Because we don’t want that to happen, the Coalition, working in tandem with the Texas regional community group has established a ‘station’ in Corpus Christi. We didn’t call it a fort for connotative reasons, but it is essentially a Coalition naval and air force facility. Since we have both civilian and military wings of the navy, air force, and military, there are both sides operating in Corpus Christi. Once it was clear that the navy and the air force were coming, the population stabilized and actually grew a bit. The same thing happened in Wyoming. However, in Wyoming there wasn’t a regional group of Coalition Communities strong enough to provide the bulk of the military presence so we have a more prominent Coalition role there than in Corpus Christi. There’s a regular oil refinery in North Dakota, too. It’s also pretty Coalition heavy, just like in Wyoming.
For that matter, there’s a need for a stable community in a number of places like Darwin and Alice Springs in Australia, and Invercargill, New Zealand. Chile, Brazil, and Argentina’s regional Coalition Communities keep a presence in Ushuaia down at the tip of South America, and there is a Coalition military, Air Force, and Navy in Iceland. In every area, the Coalition or the regional communities have provided the military and the Coalition has provided either the Navy or the Air force or both.
No matter what we think of it, we can’t stop the abandoned cities, towns, and farms from falling into ruins and returning to the wild. In some areas we intervene as we have with kudzu in the south, the American Chestnut Trees in the east, and pythons in Florida, but in others nature is working things out on it’s own. Wolves are making a noticeable comeback as are bears and cougars. Dogs, are slowly being brought under control by natural forces, and domesticated animals are going feral and surviving, or, more commonly, dying out in the wild. We still have an abundance of them on our farms, regardless of what happens in abandoned areas and we make a concerted effort to let them live out their days with us by their side. Bison are forming larger herds, some of these include cattle and I suspect the bison herds will be somewhat mixed in the future, but only time will tell on that front. We couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Any number of animals that were listed as endangered appear to be doing better, but that’s only based on anecdotal evidence. We don’t have enough people to do all the scouting and researching we need to do to get better information. I guess it stands to reason that animals that were being negatively impacted because of pressure from human population growth are now getting a positive lift since that pressure is gone.
That’s one of the things I worry about but don’t really talk about, except to Kevin. We are having to abandon so many places and projects that are near and dear to who we are or were as a people. We have no space program at all. When it comes time to start replacing some of the communications satellites, I don’t know if we’ll be up to it. Fortunately, that will be a long time from now. At least, I hope it will be.
We don’t have anything going on with conservation. We set most of the mammals and birds free in the zoos when The Sickness struck. That was done just as we were getting organized, and I didn’t have anything to do with it. I would have suggested we be far more cautious had it been up to me, but it was a done deal before I even thought about it. So far, we don’t have much of a problem that I’m aware of. Interestingly, the Australians, probably because they have a long history of dealing with troublesome introduced species, didn’t do any zoo releases. The people in San Diego managed to move many of their zoo animals to their wild animal park, but some of the ones at the Balboa Park facility were allowed to die or were euthanized. We just couldn’t take care of them. Even the park animals have now mostly been repatriated to their homelands. With our populations so devastated, they are safe, at least for the foreseeable future, in the wild. But there are areas of the country that have all manner of wild animals that appear to be establishing themselves. In California, we have fewer species trying to establish a new homeland than most areas simply because we really aren’t very environmentally friendly to most nonnative animals. We are pretty dry without the importation of water. But, in a generation or so, there are going to be a lot of unexpected animals roaming the hills and valleys of North America, even here in California. I saw a heard of zebra up by Hearst Castle not long ago, but I think they were there even before The Sickness, only now, they’re not being culled as they were before..
We’ve also had to create a new worker group. We don’t really research anything new anymore. What we do is we research what we were researching. Someday all the cataloging and storage of research notes and experimentation will be useful after we start forging ahead once again, but right now, what we need is a salvage crew for research and development. We’re getting started just in time I suspect. We have a lot of sharp people, people who can do this kind of work, but we don’t have enough qualified scientists who can devote themselves to pure theoretical research, let alone practical research. Someday soon, perhaps, maybe even in my lifetime research just for the sake of research will take off again. A lot of our young people are going into science. With the near death of Hollywood, Bollywood, and the entertainment business in general, our kids play and make-believe with each other again, and youthful imagination is king once more.
I should also mention that almost no one is overweight anymore. I’m fifteen pounds lighter than I was. I wouldn’t have said I was fat or even chubby before The Sickness, but I’ve certainly lost weight, and I’ve even got a few muscles. I don’t think I’ve ever had those. We can all thank LaWanda and her fellow dieticians for that, and of course, the militia training.
September 23
The family is back together and the kids are all in school again. Kevin has started taking courses to become a nurse practitioner. He spends four days a week at Stanford where the first year of the medical school is located. We’re hoping that he will be able to complete all of his coursework at Stanford, but that’s still a little up in the air. Thank goodness my job isn’t that strenuous. Being a single parent four days a week is pretty tiring. The older kids are wonderful, but Dinah is a handful. She’s past the terrible twos, but the three’s aren’t much better.
Kevin started coursework right after we got back from Argentina to pick Charlie up. Before we came home, we spent several days skiing in Bariloche, Argentina. I can’t ski, at least not well, but Kevin is pretty good at it. This wasn’t Charlie’s first time skiing since his family took skiing vacations before, and he looked like he was born on them. Bariloche looks like it’s been transplanted from Switzerland and the tiny community there seems pretty content.
A few months ago, several Chinese communities formed a new government expressly to recreate the old China. Except for the areas around Hong Kong and along the coast north to Shanghai and a little beyond, most of the Chinese communities that speak Mandarin have joined New China. That isn’t a problem since there’s lots of room for everyone, but it does indicate a need for people to have choices. New China’s goal of recreating a China harkening back to a time before Westerners began carving up the country into hegemonic trade zones triggered some consternation among our Coalition partners as well as with people from the New China communities that didn’t want to go back to the days of old China. Cantonese speakers were particularly affected. So naturally, over the last several months, there have been literally thousands of Cantonese and even Mandarin speakers migrating to Coalition communities in order to stay with us. Of course, there are also people goi
ng the other way.
We now have almost 600,000 citizens in about 350 communities as consolidation continues. New China has just under 200,000 citizens and is quite a bit larger than we are on the Chinese mainland. Both sides have a bit of room to grow as we reach out to unorganized clusters of survivors that didn’t manage to preserve electricity and communications with the outside world. We’ve exchanged offices with New China, and, in addition to an office in SLO, they have opened offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen, two Mandarin speaking Coalition Communities that is affiliated with us. We get along well with New China, and I don’t foresee any problems, at least not for a long time. There just aren’t enough people to have big problems, not yet, anyway.
There is also something similar going on in India. We have a Coalition Community in Mumbai, but there is now a Hindi speaking group centered on New Delhi. New India, as I think of it to myself, is mostly in the north, and our Coalition communities are mostly along the west coast and along the south east coast. We get along with New India very well, too. Both New China and New India are built around language, culture, and, at least in the case of New India, religion. As in New China, there were thousands of transplants coming from the Hindi areas to our Coalition partners. Most of them came because Hindi wasn’t their first language or they weren’t devout Hindus. Both of these new governments are democratic, but they are both much more centralized than we are. In the end, I think that will be a mistake, but time will tell. I’m also a little afraid that in the long run New China and New India aren’t going to be happy with Coalition settlements on their coasts, but each settlement made their own decision to remain in the Coalition or to leave, and we will honor their choices. Right now, due to the fact that no one has the numbers to do anything about what individuals and individual communities choose to do, there shouldn’t be problems. We really are talking about tiny populations of people compared to before The Sickness. In the case of the Indian subcontinent, the entire area has always been diverse with many languages and numerous religions. I think there’s plenty of room for New India and the Coalition.
Later this week, we have four bad North American guys to ship off to Tristan along with several marauders from Africa. We’ll do it the same as before. We caught two of the American men by accident in Nevada. Again, it was a salvage crew that noticed quite a lot of equipment was missing from Elko. The two bad guys were very nicely set up in a resort just outside of town with four captive females, two adults and two adolescents. What a nightmare this must have been for them all this time. It’s been over a year and a half since The Sickness. All of the females had given birth at least one time, and two of them were pregnant again. Several counselors are looking after them. My mind just boggles at the thought of what these women endured.
The other two males who are being sent to Tristan are both unusual in that they were both employed as health care workers. One was an orderly studying to be a nurse, and other was a dental hygienist. The orderly looked perfectly normal, but he started killing older people that he deemed were useless to society. He was quite clear about feeling that we didn’t have the resources to keep people alive after a certain age. He killed four people before the hospital where he worked figured out that something was going very wrong. Since his youngest victim was 75 and all the others were older than that, I’m guessing that after age 75, he thought we had lived long enough. The victims died quickly and no one suffered. At least, that is what I was told.
Unfortunately, the dental hygienist was harder to catch. He was into torture and apparently had been doing horrible things to victims even before The Sickness. He was found out because the Salvage Crew in Providence, RI was examining his former residence as part of their usual salvage reconnaissance and discovered some of his victims who were, perhaps mercifully, killed by The Sickness. In the beginning, it was assumed that the torturer was killed right along with almost everyone else even though we didn’t find his body at the scene of the crime. But just to be sure, the crime bureau out of Washington, DC checked to see if the owner of the torture home showed up on any of the initial survival lists. That’s when it came to light that the owner of the house had, in fact, been one of the initial survivors, but that in the chaos of the first few weeks, he had simply dropped off the map. The DC forensics team doesn’t really have a lot of detective work to do nowadays but when they do, they’re good at it. They managed, after several months, to trace him all the way to Las Vegas. It helped that even though he was living under another name, he was doing the same job as before. That was the biggest clue they had. We have a number of dental hygienists, but not so many that a small team of determined sleuths can’t look at each of them individually. The dental torturer was finally identified by his fingerprints. DNA was pretty useless in this case, but since most hygienists have their fingerprints on file dating back even before The Sickness , it was just a matter of diligently checking to see if the John Carmichael in Las Vegas still had the same finger prints as the John Carmichael supposedly from Boston, Massachusetts where he claimed to be from originally. Instead, what they discovered is that the John Carmichael in Las Vegas shared the same fingerprints with Harold Gunther, originally from Providence, and the former owner of a torture house there. We don’t know what happened to the original John Carmichael, but we know that the current man claiming to be him in Las Vegas was originally a murderer from Providence named Harold Gunther. I understand he was a decent dental hygienist, though.
Unfortunately, in the last year or so in Las Vegas, Harold had managed to kill at least two more victims. In his case, the preferred victims tended to be older white gay men. Since the set up in his new home was similar to the one in Providence, it may be that all of his victims were older white gay men. People noticed they were missing but just thought they must have moved on to another community. That’s another of the things we have to be watchful of. With so many people moving around still, its easy for people to fall through the cracks.
We also have a female who murdered her boyfriend after he got one of her friends pregnant. We’re not sending her to Tristan, so she is in the jail in Chicago. We keep several short termers there, but I don’t see her getting out any time soon. She didn’t even try to claim he beat her or anything like that. She wanted him all to herself, and he wasn’t signed on for that so she shot him. Gun safety education doesn’t work if the student wants to kill someone.
The Coalition Navy will take care of the transportation to Tristan along with the Coalition military. If you don’t look too closely at our Navy and our Air Force, they appear to be pretty much like pre-sickness days. We purposely keep a fairly large Navy up and running because it helps us keep a wide range of civilian skills in good order. Since we need lots of people to maintain our commercial shipping as well as our armed shipping, we lump them all under the ‘Navy’ umbrella with an armed wing and a civilian wing. The governing boards of all three forces have members from both civilian and military wings, but they don’t really make decisions affecting each other. We don’t have much need to show our muscle, but there is a bit of piracy now and then, so they know how to work together as need be. An example of civilian and military cooperation is the World Emeritus Program that seems to be growing by the month. There is an armed presence nearby for every WEP vessel which is now part of the civilian side. We also have a regular civilian shipping schedule that is always accompanied, convoy-like, by one or two armed Navy ships as part of the little flotilla.
The same is true for the Air Force. We have a civilian wing and a military wing. They work together and coordinate all activities. There are a large number of personnel in both the civilian and armed sides of our Air Force. The civilian managers, like armed Navy and Air Force officers, are both trained at the same schools, whether Navy oriented or Air Force.
A slight exception to this procedure is the Army. Here, the civilian wing is made up of the local community militias. The locals are five times as numerous as the unified professional Army. We agreed earl
y on that we were just a little anxious about a huge Army (remember that huge is relative) so their numbers are purposely kept quite a lot less than the combined local militias. The
Army is professional and they train full time. They also follow the old Roman model of maintaining quite a bit of our infrastructure, particularly our roads, dams, levies, ports, airports, and rail lines. The militias are trained by professionals such as Marco Coletti who is no longer part of the Army. The militias are pretty good, but they are almost completely volunteer and only train part time, albeit continuously. We further break the professional Army down into continental divisions. They draw their recruits from all over the world, but there is a European-African division, an American-Oceania division, and an Asian division. An example of how recruits come from all parts of the world is Enrique. He’s now a Legionnaire and is stationed in Europe. He’s still claims citizenship in SLO and comes home to visit us from time to time, but he’s assigned to the European division and is called a Legionnaire. The Europeans also have Komandos as well as a few others, depending on where the soldier was trained and where he is stationed.
