by R E Kearney
“Screw you!” Rube shouts, as he shifts his truck into gear and shoves his foot against the gas pedal. In a cloud of blue smoke and with a squawk, the truck jolts forward. Snarling, Rube bounces across his yard’s cactus and dead weed clumps crushing an ancient, bent, barely-readable, metal sign declaring Property of Farmer’s Bank into the dust.
He is angry. His rage is not with Farmer’s Bank, particularly. After all, if the bank, itself, had not gone bankrupt and disappeared many years ago, leaving nobody to collect his debt, he could not have continued living in his old trailer. No, at this moment, he is furious with the world. His anger is driving him mad.
It is a long and lonely drive to Lymon punctuated with pain and panic. With each mile on the rough road, the pain of Rube’s ankle rages. Simultaneously and too quickly, his fuel gauge races toward empty, forcing him constantly to the edge of panic. He knows by running on gasoline, his truck is running out of time.
The FUS states and Russia are the only nations still allowing the manufacture and sale of gasoline powered internal combustion engine vehicles. Yet, despite their government subsidies and legal protections, few ICE vehicles still exist. His ancient truck is one of those very few.
Beyond his backward boondocks, all transportation is electric and self-driving. But, Rube could never afford an EV truck. He needed twenty years of low payments just to pay for this truck, and by then, it was obsolete. Although only sixty-three years old, Rube is out of date and out of place on his land - a foreign object where he was born and raised.
The reality of Rube’s isolation hits him hard as he enters the remains of the derelict, county seat of Tribyoon. Home to less than eight hundred people at its height, Tribyoon did not take long to disappear during the desertification droughts. Like most of its residents, it silently and simply died. Now, it is a ghost town that even the ghosts have forsaken.
Entering Tribyoon reminds Rube that his short-time wife, Shirley, was not the first woman to run away from him and the wastedlands. He remembers the day his mother deserted him and his father. On his sixteenth birthday, she wished him a happy birthday and then told him that she just couldn’t stay with them any longer. Then she kissed him on his forehead and told him she believed that to live and die in the same small town renders you dead at birth. After hoisting her small bag of clothes onto her shoulder, she added that she had no plans to die in Tribyoon. Throwing him a kiss, she disappeared forever into a swirling dust storm.
A panting jack rabbit dying at the edge of the road is the only living creature watching him pass. Tumbleweeds leap and bounce across the road in front of him. He slows, carefully dodging the marauding six-foot-high balls of thorns while zigzagging through the chasms and holes eating away the ancient asphalt. Ahead, he sees the sign for the closed Tribyoon travel and convenience store has collapsed onto the pavement. To Rube, it is another distressing sight.
Passing the boarded up building, he remembers being that store’s final and only customer. When he heard the store was closing and selling off its stock, he collected all of his barterable valuables and raced to town. He knew it would be his last chance for finding food, locally.
Every day another source of victuals had vanished, leaving him and the other dwindling holdouts struggling to find food in a mushrooming grocery desert. So, he grabbed every drop of gasoline and all the snack food, Joey, the store owner would trade for his father’s antique guns, his saddle and some tools.
Their dealing done, Joey departed for Denver’s exchange shops with his life’s meager assemblage. When he waved goodbye to Joey’s back, he did not realized that he would be the last human he would see. At that moment, he became emperor of emptiness.
Rube returned home with his truck loaded with boxes of assorted convenience store groceries. Elated, he added his convenience store goodies to the cases of military meals-ready-to-eat he had procured with the last of his cash when the local National Guard Armory closed. Storing his provisions left little room for him in his trailer. But, reassured that now he would not starve, he was willing to be cramped. Over time, he contentedly ate his way back into his house and home.
Seven months ago, he exhausted his military meals. Since then he has survived by eating package after package of chips, crackers, cookies, beef jerky and canned, fatty meats, and drinking warm, bottled water. Food preservatives and empty calories kept him fat and alive. Then, this morning, Rube ate his last bag of chips and Twinkies for breakfast. It was when he swallowed his last bite of stale, dry Twinkie that he decided to end his misery and his life. Now, with his ankle aching, he discovers that suicide is not painless, although it does bring on many changes.
Oil Pumps Life, declares a collapsing, badly faded, dust-covered billboard at the bitter end of Tribyoon’s town limits. Rube sighs. Oil pumps death is his experience. He remembers building this billboard and four more of them for the oil companies seeking public support and permission to drill and frack in the area. The oil companies won and the farmers and ranchers lost.
For a little, immediate cash, Rube and his neighbors cheered the drilling rigs arrival. For a few coins, they had sold their souls to those devils. When they drilled and fracked, they pumped a high-pressure water and chemical mixture deep into the ground to fracture the shale and force out the oil. For two years, the oil companies pumped in and sucked out, poisoning the Ogallala aquifer – Rube’s region’s underground river of life.
No rain. No snow. No water from the aquifer. Rube’s soil burned into dry, hard rock. Rube, his friends, his neighbors and his enemies - almost everybody lost everything - including their minds. When the aquifer died, so did the ranches and the farms followed shortly by the ranchers and the farmers. Suicide swept them away.
As a member of his church’s appointed pall bearers, Rube carried one farmer friend’s casket after another to their graves. Then, he noticed that he, and a disappearing number of pall bearers, were pushing carts of the caskets of fellow pall bearers to their final resting places. Too few men remained to physically lug a coffin. They dwindled away until he stood alone. He buried the undertaker.
Looking in his rear view mirror, Rube studies the rotted billboard. Two of the four poles supporting the sign are broken off at ground level with a third one cracked. The billboard is crumpling to its right, reminding Rube of his horse when she dropped onto her front legs, whinnied one final time and died. Dry, hot dust strangled her.
Past Tribyoon’s ruins, he is alone. Mile after mile, he bounces across the desolate flatlands. Derelict, deserted equipment and vehicles appear and disappear. Tumbleweeds and trash collect and cover the crumbling buildings that were once the treasures of his fellow farmers and ranchers. Hanging from the collapsing buildings, fading For Sale and No Trespassing signs flap and flutter.
In peeling, vaporizing paint, the angry comment, “1-20-17 the day America died” is scrawled across the rotting boards of one, dilapidated barn. In agreement, Rube groans. Shaking his head, he recalls how fast his hopes and optimism that day, years ago, were crushed. Within a few hours, before dawn on one, twenty-one, seventeen, the United States was no longer united. It rapidly ripped itself apart – disintegrated - leaving Rube’s neighbors with the less than nothing that eventually killed them.
Back in 2018, before the US completely crumbled into bits and pieces, Rube remembers some Canadian military guy calling the US government a Kakistocracy, instead of a democracy. He was drunk from celebrating his twenty-first birthday then, but he still recalls what that smart-mouthed Canadian told him in that tavern in Junction City. He told him Kakistocracy meant government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us.
He and his drinking buddies then beat that Canadian for insulting the US and them with his big words. Words, they all admitted later they did not understand at the time. Now decades later, Rube knows the Canadian spoke the truth.
Past that barn sign, it is mind melting bleak. Mile follows mile follows mile. Deadly dull. Hypnotic. Only the in
tense pain of his ankle, keeps him alert enough to remain on the rough, pot-holed pavement.
Bwahhh! Bwahhh! Blasting from behind, a blaring air horn shatters Rube’s mental wanderings. It is a warning. Seconds later, a platoon of twelve, mammoth, self-driving, freight transports are flying by him. Protecting and observing them from above are six accompanying aerodrones.
Rube considers transport platooning to be today’s version of the railroad freight trains from his childhood. The transports maneuver cooperatively in chains at less than one second apart and run at speeds exceeding one hundred miles per hour. The sound of Rube’s own struggling engine and rattling parts drown out the swooshing silence of the passing, titanic transports.
They rush in a hush. Their spherical tires and solar-powered, electric motors emit no sounds or smells. Engineered with the aerodynamics of an airplane wing, the air flowing below the transports floats them above the ancient asphalt’s holes and bumps. As the last transport passes him and then slides back over in front of him, Rube is facing the words, Nóngyè Corporation, in ten foot tall letters.
“Rotten Chinese,” he mutters and shakes his fist in the air, as the platoon races away from him.
Far off the road, heat-shimmering in the distance, Rube notices a row of wind turbines and Warka water generators. It is equipment powering a newly-constructed, one-hundred thousand acre, robot and drone tended SPEA-Chinese grain plantation. Just one of their many plantations spreading across the Desert Plains.
Across this drought stricken zone, the Chinese bought thousands of acres from bankrupt American farmers, like Rube, for a dime on the dollar. Unlike American farmers, with SPEA technical help, the Chinese abandoned the traditional farming methods that laid waste to this land. SPEA-Chinese agricultural corporations are striding full speed into the future by installing the innovations and improvements necessary to restore this parched, depleted soil to productivity.
“From the bread basket of America to the bread bakers of China.” Rube angrily mutters. He presumes the transport platoon, he just encountered, is hauling grain from one of the SPEA-Chinese farms to the Lymon outpost. “And not one single grain grown here will feed Americans.”
On the horizon, on the other side of the road, a wall of smoke climbs into a sun blocking cloud, warning him of yet another roaring range fire. Range fires are burning everywhere and seem to burn forever. The boom of an explosion and flame flaring high into the sky, tells him that another abandoned gas well has erupted. Across the Desert Plains, thousands of forsaken natural gas wells have detonated to eternally spew forth deathly flames and fumes. Endless fire.
Rube wonders if anybody other than him sees it or cares. Probably just the rabbits and rattlesnakes racing to escape, he reckons.
LYMON
At last, Lymon’s, ten, gigantic, whirling wind turbines bloom across the distant horizon. Apparitions shimmering in the sun and dancing in the waves of heat. Rube rubs his eyes hoping it is not a mirage. His ankle pain is excruciating. Stretching three hundred and fifty feet into the sky above tabletop-flat plains, the turbines appear deceptively close, but remain twenty miles away. Rube rattles ahead.
The towering turbines stretch higher and higher into the sky. Sunlight glistening off the security fence safeguarding the International Commerce Consortium’s Throughway-Hyperloop 70 tells Rube that he is finally nearing the ICC’s Lymon outpost. But, his fuel gauge is not encouraging. His truck’s engine is sucking fumes. He hopes it can roll at least a few more miles.
“Come on baby. Come on. Just a little farther.” Rocking back and forth in his seat, he encourages his limping, wheezing truck.
He is not immediately allowed to travel that little bit farther. Before he can pass through the security fences and barriers surrounding the throughway and Lymon, he must clear inspection at the outpost’s southeast checkpoint. Two International Commerce Consortium Enforcers entirely encased in positive-environment, ballistic proof uniforms block his path while two ICC robotic Insurgent Disorder Device detectors advance toward each side of his truck.
The ICC Enforcers approach his truck slowly, cautiously, suspiciously. They stop and face each other, turn toward Rube’s truck, and then face each other again. The robotic IDD detectors roll to a halt. Rube cannot see inside their helmets, but he assumes that they are discussing him. Maintaining a safe, ten-foot distance, the Enforcers again return their attention to Rube and his truck.
“What is this?” The taller of the two ICCEs broadcasts his question toward Rube after pointing his directed energy weapon toward him.
Rube sits silent, confused by the question. After some thought, he questions their question. “What is what?”
“What is that thing transporting you?” The shorter ICCE inquires, while raising a small, rectangular device eye high. “How does it function? Why is it emitting dangerous toxins and gases? Why is it making that awful noise? Is it preparing to explode?”
Now, Rube comprehends their apprehension. His truck is so old and so outdated that these ICCEs, who are obviously much younger than him, no longer recognize or understand it. Scratching his head, he considers what to tell them.
With the pain in his ankle increasing, he attempts to quickly explain and ease their fears. “This is my pick-up truck. It has an internal combustion engine powered by burning unleaded gasoline. It won’t harm you. I promise.”
After conferring with each other, the two Enforcers advance. The shorter Enforcer motions the robotic IDD detectors ahead. Still hesitant, they creep up to the front of the truck and inch around it until they stand next to Rube’s window.
“What brings you to Lymon? Where are you headed?” One ICCE questions him while another scans and records his face, eyes and response for entry into ICC’s biometric database. Operating independently, the two robotic IDD detectors carefully scan and search his truck for explosives.
With pain contorting his face, Rube nervously answers, “I’m going to the clinic. I think I broke my ankle.”
“Which ankle?” The lead Enforcer shoves his helmeted head inside the truck window.
“My left one. See how it’s swollen.”
The second Enforcer operating the scanner nods his head. “His facial heat signature and retinal scan indicate that he’s telling the truth.”
Slapping a magnetized tracking device on top of his truck’s engine hood, the taller ICCE waves Rube forward. “Command your old pile of junk to transport you directly to external parking lot ME and wait. That’s the medical emergency lot. Stay in the ME lot. Exit the ME and you will be arrested and expelled…”
“…and this…whatever it is…will be ionized. Understand?” The other Enforcer adds with a nasty chuckle.
“Yes sir.” Nodding, Rube cautiously inches his choking, bucking truck ahead, through the gates and past the Enforcers. They watch him intently. Rube wonders if they have seen a human drive a vehicle before. He considers honking his horn just to see what they will do, but quickly reconsiders. He decides sounding his horn might startle them into lasering him.
Rube has been told that the few operating human driven vehicles or transports remaining are not allowed near the electrically powered ICC throughways. Too dangerous. Too erratic. Too slow. Humans cannot be trusted. Human drivers cause collisions.
After searching his truck so intensely, he is surprised when they allow him to keep his antique pistol and rifle. Perhaps, the ICCEs did not recognize them as weapons. Or maybe they do not believe they still function. There are many old firearms scattered around the wastedlands, but few still work and even fewer have any ammunition. After all, his ancient type of weaponry was replaced by lasers, pneumatic armaments and sonic sounders, many years ago. They left bullet shooters behind.
Rube is a paranoid rural regressive. Although, he lives isolated from other people, he still believes it is not safe to live in the deserted wastedlands without his few, old weapons. The more alone he is, the more paranoid he has become. Keeping a tight gr
ip on his obsolete armaments psychologically comforts him, as they substitute for the security blanket of his childhood.
He does not wait for the ICCEs to change their minds. He increases his speed hurrying away. He drops his head and looks away when passing additional ICC Enforcers regulating the entrances and exits to the throughway-hyperloop.
Rube has never traveled on any of ICC’s throughway-hyperloops. When the Chinese, Saudi Arabians, and Russians comprising the International Commerce Consortium purchased Mid-North America’s entire nationwide transportation system from the bankrupt Abaddon government, they converted them into tolled, closed throughways. Access is expensive and strictly restricted.
Only solar-electric-powered, long-endurance, autonomous, human and freight transports are authorized. Humans ride in high-speed, multi-passenger, self-driving vehicles powered via the electrified rail embedded in the throughway or at six hundred miles per hour on the Magnetic Levitation hyperloop train. Heavy and bulky freight ships in self-driving transports attached to the electrified rail or in the hyperloop paralleling the throughways. Lighter materials and small packages are flown ten feet above them in autonomous aerodrones.
Passing beneath the throughway-hyperloop’s overpass, he hears the transport platoons hurtling past above him. Whoosh. Whoosh. Swoosh. They fly inches above their magnetized track and just inches from each other.
Sensors built into the transports and vehicles protect them from each other and outside interference. Rolling at an average speed of one hundred and fifty miles per hour, the freight transports and multi-passenger transporters stop for nothing and nobody. Rube has heard that the few attempts to hijack the transports ended with grisly deaths for the hapless thieves.