by Nathan Poell
Post-Apocalypse
Dead Letter Office
by Nathan Poell
See the Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office online at
http://p-adlo.com/
Oscura Press
Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office
Copyright © 2011
by Nathan Poell
ISBN 0-9786283-9-X
Library of Congress Card Number 2011921042
All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States of America by the Oscura Press of New Mexico.
http://www.oscurapress.com
Acknowledgements
The following wonderful people are responsible for creating the handwritten versions of the letters herein and I thank them one and all:
Hiram Lucke, Aubrey Vaughn, Ray Barker, Mary Ann Hudson-Vadnais, Max Yoder, David Sofranko, Howard and Emily Lubliner, annaramma, Marc Epard, Mike Popovic, Jon Hamlow, James Billingsley, Matt Weatherford, Liosliath Manner, Dan Coonfield, Jason Gordon, Melissa Stucky, Nathan Hugh Girard, Jen Messier, Baudouin Van Humbeeck, Joe Yoder, Tabitha Grace Alterman, Willy Lee, Deathalicious, Colin Thacher, Dale Wheeler, Matt Lord, J.M. Picagli, Ellen Jensen, and – of course – Megan E. Phelps.
Cover design by Matthew Lord.
Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office
by Nathan Poell
To: The incoming “postmaster”
From: Randy McNally
June 7, 20+8
To whoever occupies this post next–
I can teach you nothing. Let me tell you why.
West to Hays and east to Columbia. North to Omaha (what’s left of it), southwest to Wichita and southeast to Springfield. And all the chainkilling, chalky gravel roads and bumfuck towns in between. Roughly. This is to be your range. Get to know it. The maps here are pretty good, but have been out of date for almost eight years now.
Mark the annotations and be sure to make new ones. Topography changes, roads wash out, bridges collapse, looters roam and settle, legs will drop routes and dead. Whatever happens in your range, make it explicit on your maps. Use grease pencil – the maps are laminated for a reason.
Fuck every chance you get, because you won’t get many while you’re working this job. Tell your boys and girls to stay selective or celibate, though – ‘cause it’s probably their ass if they impregnate someone, get the clap or whatever – and steer the hell clear of stopping in Junction City. Everything and everyone there is almost biblically unclean.
Holidays blow, particularly the winter ones. For some reason, people still want to celebrate Christmas and do so by sending stupidly heavy things to loved ones. They pay well for it, but it’s taxing. You’ve got several months to get ready, though. Use that time to your best advantage.
Running dope can be an exceptionally profitable sideline. Don’t do it. Almost any town over 500 people has a dedicated pot farmer, and if he’s not the same person they probably have an opium farmer too. Medicine’s medicine, at least in this range. Their products are typically pretty good, and they are viciously protective of their local markets. Even given some of the recent events around here, the syndicates might try to lean on you a bit to get you to run the stuff. Don’t budge. Don’t do it. They’ll back off.
Keep the pecking order as out of whack as possible. Everyone rides, including you. You can certainly get away with doing only in-town deliveries, but getting out of town regularly – once a month, at least – is the best way to keep tabs on your legs and encourages them to play it straight.
Trust your people as best you can. It’s really and obviously critical, but there are problems. I’m sure you know something about this, but it is the most difficult part. You’ll have chuckleheads and puzzlers by the dozens trying to get your ear, get you to assign them routes, then they take their first pack of parcels and disappear. Fat payoff for them, if they make it where they’re headed, but they’re scum, just scum. They’re not all that hard to weed out. You’ll also get a handful or two of tough-as-knots leggers from the far northeast, the southwest, the northern plains – wherever everything utterly and truly went to shit. Here’s the problem: those tough-as-knots leggers? They can be scum, just scum, too. Don’t rely on looking folks in the eye. Ask your current legs – word still gets around, and they’ll know more than you expect. But, can you trust them? Maybe, probably, who knows. Like I said, this is the most difficult part.
Regardless, set some ground rules. I’ve left things different than I found them. Maybe not better, probably not worse. Anyway, here’s a few of the most important things I can recall putting into place.
First and foremost: there is no such thing as a free delivery. My legs are taking risks by simply riding, I’m taking risks staying in one place – more or less – and not farming or ranching or chopping decrepit Hondas into buggies or whatever the hell it is everyone else does now. I never set a minimum charge, but everyone pays something. Food, grease, rubber, whatever. (Booze is especially nice. There’s still an outfit here in town, one in Springfield and one in Columbia that makes beer. Most everywhere else you’ll get decent cider or some shitty fruit wine. I try to make sure my legs don’t drink too much of it at one time. Pot is nice, of course – especially the shit they grow down near Carthage, MO – but I do my best to keep my legs off smoking it chronically. It’ll rot their lungs and they’ll want to quit and move to wherever it was farmed.) Bartering for services was fine with me, too, especially for doctor visits. But not for sex. That can wipe out your workforce pretty damned quick. Trust me.
Related to the above: legs assume risk on their own. I’ll help them out best I’m able, but that often isn’t a whole hell of a lot. Most of the roads are pretty safe, but there are still some bandits out there. Precious few of them might be decent bow shots, too, although I’ve never had a leg of mine die in that manner. But, if a leg of mine knocks up some skank or gets knocked up by some hayseed, that’s life. I can maybe keep the former idiot on, but pregnant women can’t ride for shit and they’re freaky loco.
No equipment loans. Ever. There’s loads of beggars everywhere – every single one of them with an excuse why they need a brake lever, a bottom bracket, even a whole damn ride. They even make their kids beg. Well OK, beggars might be harsh; most of them are just farmers and farmers’ kids. Regardless, you can’t just give away components. Your legs’ rides will wear out faster than you can really believe, and you can’t ever be without an ample supply of spare parts.
No parcel dumps. Ever. Legs deliver for me or they don’t come back. (Unfortunately, they occasionally don’t come back. See several places above.) For every trick some moronic bandit has up his sleeve, my leg has three and a spiked baseball bat should things get really ugly. Also, some of the larger syndicates out west and east (Denver and Cleveland, particularly) are not forgiving when it comes to non-delivery. They have eyes in places you wouldn’t expect, and a long reach. Bandits haven’t been much of a problem around here, anyway, so there’s really no reason for a leg to have to drop his parcels to effect a getaway.
OK, there is an exception to this last rule. Well, maybe a corollary or – shit, I’m not an Englishian, all right? That rule kind of goes with this one. If one of my legs can’t deliver, meaning “can’t actually locate the person the letter/package/whatever is to be delivered to” (no dead drops in my operation, by the way), they’re allowed to open the item, read it – they still ought to be able to read – to gather more information to complete the delivery, then try further. If they still can’t deliver, they bring back the item to me and only me and I keep it here. (It just saves me a ton of trouble and anxiety when I can produce the l
etter immediately if a syndicate comes asking rather than sending my most rested up leg several hundred miles afield and waiting for days on end for he or she to retrieve it.) Then I kill the leg that failed to deliver it. Just kidding – I only crush his or her kneecaps. Ha ha. Truth be told, I don’t have this dead letter problem very often. It happens so rarely, in fact, that only a few have not been delivered to their intended recipients during my brief but still far too fucking long time here. They – and the ones Biggs didn’t get delivered – are all sitting right under this note. I’ve tried to keep them in order timewise, but they might be a bit shuffled.
This should be enough information to get you hip deep in shit. You’re in charge now – HA! For how long, who knows. They ain’t making components anymore, and the horse trade out of central Kentucky is so much now that they might be phasing us out in the next few years. Have a backup plan if and when your gig here goes to shit.
Speaking of which, I’m heading out to bumble-humperton to work on a pot commune. If you ever want to ask me a question or drop by, don’t. Unless this is Beebee; if so, quit and come join me. You know the way.
Keep your wheels trued and your chain greased.
Randy “Rand” McNally
P.S. - Learn the maps already!
To: Dan Hoch, Elroy Fruit Farm, Wamego, KS
From: Ron Greenbud, Greenbud Farm, Cape Girardeau, MO
June 25, 20+7
Dan-O,
Hey, long time no talk, you know. Things have been busy here for a while, otherwise I’d have written you right back. Honest.
How’s Tammy been? Little Dean and Hattie? How about old Tom? Last you wrote, he was on his last legs. Not that I’d wish death on him, and I know you’ve been the real motivating force behind the entire operation for over seven years now, but are you now the co-owner of Elroy Fruit (and not even thinly disguised pot) Farm?
So yeah, sorry for not writing, but things have been god damn crazy here at chez Greenbud for the last four or five months.
Firstly, we had some syndicate courier douchebag come down here early this spring, trying to move in some shitty bud and opium. (OK, truth be told, his dope wasn’t too awful bad, but come on, his fatcat bosses were trying to move in on the fucking Cape, man!) We figured it was the St. Louis branch of the Cleveland syndicate, as the boys in Memphis wouldn’t be so dumb as to try and move shit upstream. Also, we heard that some folks up in Lincoln put a courier in his place and basically exposed an entire syndicate to ridicule last year. Figured it might be the same gang trying to move their product here on our turf.
Well, regardless of who sent him, we set him straight. Nice enough kid, I suppose. You should have seen him ride into town. He tried to be subtle as possible about it, rode in at dusk to what he thought was a safehouse... but Key-Righst you’d have laughed too if you’d seen the bale he was packing on his rack. He was seriously so weighted down on the back end that I was half-afraid his front tire would hit a rock and pop him into a perma-wheelie.
Of course, we captured him right away. He brandished this little butterfly knife like he’d gut every one of us. He seemed serious about it, too, but the opium-dosed joint he smoked with his safehouse “buddy” proved too much for him to bear. I guess I would have felt bad if he’d died... but not as bad as if I’d let some syndicate take over our pharmacultural affairs. Regardless, he came out of his stupor about six hours later, just after daybreak. And then we started with the torture. The application of goose feathers under his armpits and nose, sight of some of the leatherier girls on loan from the pool hall prancing about buck naked, and simple promise of another laced joint simply in return for a bit of information... dude had told us all we needed to know before two hours had passed. Of course, we weren’t satisfied, so we gave him what he wanted, then asked him to stick around.
Lloyd’s now one of our best fieldworkers. Hell of a nice guy, too. The stuff we took off his bike has been added to St. Francis’s drug stock, as it should be. The Nebraskans might have gotten the same result as we had, but there’s less violent ways of working, you know.
We’ve also been staving off this drought best we can. The farm itself is just a couple miles off the riverbanks, but we still play hell getting water out here if it doesn’t rain. The cannabis will do fine without irrigation, but the poppies need water, and so we had to implement a modified, bike-based bucket brigade. It’s kept the few hands we can keep and even sometimes me and Lisa riding four or so hours a day every day for the last three months. It’s worked out well, though. Good looking field of poppies.
Anyway, with regards to your previous letter, I think I know now what your basic cultivation problem is. You remember, how you mentioned that all the plants you been growing have all produced such shitty bud and gone all rangy-looking on you? Yeah, I figured it out. So, your farm is a mile or so south of town, right? Right down in the Kansas River floodplain? Well, I knew it before, but if you’d mentioned it to any friendlies in town they would have instantly and unmistakably pegged you as being a city boy. (You Lawrence kids never ever went down near the river, did you? Too many fucking junkie bums and cruisers down near the levee, huh? Made mommy too nervous to take you there, I bet.) That whole floodplain area along the Kansas – especially just off the banks – is just lousy with ditchweed and/or straight hemp. There’s no use trying to tame that shit, either... within our lifetimes, anyway. That shit’s always going to be just shit. Not good shit, not the shit, just shit. Trust me, an upstart farm in Cairo – not connected to any syndicate that I was aware of, and I am aware of most everything that happens in my market, as previously mentioned – just down the river, went through the same thing. They were sitting just off the river, and got terrible yields two years in a row. Got so bad that this year they switched to hemp and diversified to some other crops. I was personally glad to hear they didn’t go out of business completely, but had to change their focus. Competition is good, as long as it doesn’t threaten me. You know?
On the upside, you have a couple options. First is to bag up all the bud on your good starts before you move them out of your greenhouse (You have been keeping them in a separate space, haven’t you?) and keep trying to cultivate as usual. That’s a hell of a lot of work for what will likely be very little return at all, and given that the upshot of a whole nother failed crop might be losing the entire orchard, it’s a huge risk to be running.
Now, the second option, and the one I’d recommend has a couple steps. First, you get in touch with a couple other local farmers, preferably ones to the north of town. Not pot growers, of course, but folks who raise staples... OK, staples other than cannabis. Pitch this idea to them: you’ll be willing to trade, acre for acre, the land that belongs to them for the land that belong(ed) to your stepdad. You may not know it, but they definitely will that all that land right next to the river is some of the best, most fertile ground in the country, maybe the world. Now, you don’t need that land to grow your particular cash crop. It’ll do better the warmer, more light and humid it is, but it’ll grow just dandy in almost any kind of soil and as long as you can get it some water periodically. You know the old joke: that’s why they call it cannabis sativa... wait, what? The upsides to this one are obvious: you get a spot off the river and out of ditchweed pollen range for your plants to grow in, you’re less exposed to those few elements of the (almost entirely self-appointed) law who are not sympathetic to folks growing their own medicine, and last but not least is that your fellow farmers have way better land on which to raise grain, beans, squash and all other manner of edible vegetation. The only real downside is that you’ll have to give up your fruit trees, as the old ones won’t transplant at all and the young ones won’t very well. But you could get cuttings and grow clones. Just read up on how to do it – you still have a library there, right? – because it’s not that hard. Hell, the colonials used to do shit like that all the time, and in such a worse climate than we have. It’ll be a piece of cake for you to do. You owe me half a barrel
of cider, too, you chintzy fucker. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.
Oh, and you’ll have to move. But whatever, you’ll still be in greater Wamego, raising and smoking world-class bud. Hahhah.
I guess you could try just heading down to the Kansas and chop down all the ditchweed you can locate, but you may as well try emptying the river a thimbleful at a time for all the good it’ll do you.
So, yeah, just go ahead and use those plants you’ve got right now for fabric. I say again: they are no good. Just in case you haven’t been following my advice and haven’t kept the starts inside or someplace other than your main cultivation area, I’ve taken the precaution of sending a couple new cuttings with this letter. (Yeah, usually the couriers will bitch about hauling off anything that weighs more than a tenth of an ounce or some such shit, but you tuck a little Greenbudis greenbudis in their pocket and they’re just docile as lambs.) They’re both from a great cultivar, one that came over from the Netherlands a year or two before the all the shit went down. Can’t remember the name off the top of my head. It was some offshoot of Lebanese Blonde, but the new cultivar’s name wasn’t even remotely catchy. Some damned arbitrarically – maybe even capriciously, having known several cultivators from my time in Rotterdam – alphanumerically encoded nomenclature. Typical Dutch nonsense.