Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office

by Nathan Poell

  It’s starting to stay cool during the day and getting cold at night again. The stream out back is running yellow now. I have had to stop drinking it because it’s obviously been poisoned. You can see the poisons floating on the surface so obvious. They keep trying this. Trying to flush me out. It’s natural, it’s where you live, it’s fine. That’s what they’re trying to say to me. I never fell for it yet and I’m not about to now. Not now. I can manage just like before I’ll just eat snow.

  I’ve actually got a counterattack planned. Going to knock out their surveillance. The smart way. I’m leaving the windows all open all the time now. I think the morning frosts will attach to them and melt on them and short out their nanocircuitry.

  I’m going to take this to Doc Smythe to relay forward to you via the underground. I’ll be in this guise but without the glasses. I know for A FACT that Doc Smythe has surgically and neuronically altered his own face and so it’ll be a difficult task trying to locate him but I’m up to the challenge. And like I said he doesn’t understand anything but he does know people. There are almost no people in town. They have mostly escaped east I think through the underground or maybe they’re in Colorado Springs now. All the water in Colorado Springs tastes like metal. There’s metal in it and the aliens can’t locate the people there because their waste streams are masked by the iron metal in the water.

  I’ll find Doc Smythe OK. Everyone who rides a bike can be trusted everyone. Send some more food as soon as you can in cans. And tell Amy I said hello and not to worry.

  I’m committed to winning here.

  Theodore A. Alstott, Ph. D.

  PS - Take the glasses off now, or they’ll get suspicious. OK?

  PPS - You have to destroy them not, too, in case you get caught.

  PPPS - You shouldn’t have been able to read that PPS without the glasses on. I’m not sure who you’re working for, but you’d better get rid of those glasses. Wait, put them back on so you can read this. OK?

  PPPPS - Now destroy this letter, then take the glasses off. Have you done this, yet? OK.

  To: Barry Booker, St. Joseph, MO

  From: Ned Roundtree, Amarillo, TX

  July 7th, 20+3

  Barry,

  Hey, pal. Ned from Amarillo here. Another year, another letter. Things have been getting steadily worse since the blackout happened, but we’re stuck here for the long haul.

  We still don’t have the irrigation problem fixed. Some go-getter windmill experts – those guys who used to work on the wind turbine generators, you know. They’ve been trying to convert one or two of those big turbines to pump water from Lake Meredith down to town. Don’t see quite how they’re going to do that. I figure it’d be a tall order, and even taller with no electrical equipment to work with. All the same, having a stable source of water down here would be a hell of a good thing, particularly for the ranchers and farmers (not surprising). I got an idea to help, but more later on that. And it’s just an idea, so until we get some way to pump water, we just have to cross our fingers, wait for rain and keep the gutters funneling into barrels. It’s precious little when I think about how much we used to use around here, but it gets us by. The garden in the back yard isn’t too much, and it seems like it took us forever to get any real produce out of it, but it keeps the kids halfway busy. Jenny and I have enough trouble keeping them in line, so anything that’ll keep them occupied is a Goddam blessing. Teddy’s been running with a bad crowd lately, and it’s like moving heaven and earth to get him to help out with anything at all. Just lazes about, smoking dope. Goddam shame, he used to be a bright kid. Shouldn’t write him off so quick, I suppose, but it’s been hard. I used to bash ‘em blue at PTA and district meetings, but I guess the public schools were useful for something after all.

  Bandits have been getting worse lately. The first year or so it was just street gang stuff, vandalism and looting. Bad enough, you know. But the last couple years they’ve been organizing, and a couple of the larger groups apparently have horses now. Rustling cattle, hijacking shipments of grain and other staples. Even killed a few folks earlier this spring, just west of town. Some indians coming in from New Mexico, killed for some dried chilies and parched corn. Bad business. Can’t even seem to get any good whiskey in here without trouble, and there hasn’t been any beer to be had for the last two years, at least. Most of the hold-ups and attacks have been between here and Lubbock, and a handful west of town, one as far out as Tucumari. The sheriffs haven’t been much help, and even the rangers can’t seem to pin down the more organized packs.

  I told the folks in Washington, those chickenshits in Austin, everybody who’d listen, that building a stupid little fence in the middle of the desert wouldn’t stop anyone determined enough to make it over here. Now I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. For the most part, the Mexicans that come over are hard-working folk trying to make a living. Can’t very well begrudge them that. Putting up a fence just makes it harder on them. I hate regulations and big government as much as the next guy, but we could have put into place some kind of system to weed out the good folk from the drug runners and other scum criminals. And that’s the majority of the banditos now. Well, there are of course a large number of no-good white and black knuckleheads mixed up in that business, but the plain fact of the matter is that most of these banditos are Mexican-American, and those that aren’t speak good Spanish or, at the very least, Spanglish. And this is up in the Goddam panhandle, not down in the belly of the beast.

  So, our pumps still ain’t pumping. Not a huge surprise to you, I’m sure. They’ve been sitting still for almost three years, now. I had to cut loose pretty much everybody on staff, and it hurt to do that. But, you know, when you try running them manual and all they do is pull up that Goddam nasty sugar water stuff, there’s no profit and no way we can keep folks on. Again, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already, but small-time oil was always hard enough when what was being pumped was oil. Well, without the oil... Doesn’t make any sense to them, either, when they can be off gardening best they can or fixing up bikes and running mail or just heading out of town for good. And a lot of them have.

  Lately, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about those pumps. I’m so damn dense that it hadn’t occurred to me until I heard someone else talking about something really similar. But, you know how those wind wranglers are trying to convert their turbines to run water to Amarillo and elsewhere? Well, I been imagining that we could convert them pumps of mine to move water instead of petroleum. Just gotta get the oil residue out of them – flush them out good, and that sugar water seems to have done a pretty good job of that – and move them to good locations from which to move the water. The wind turbine boys seem to be pretty well-organized, so I don’t believe I’ll be able to compete with them directly. I’ve been thinking more along the lines of a partnership with them. Been trying to draft up a proposal for them to look at. Connecting the turbines to readily available pumps seems to me to make a lot more sense than getting new pumps made and moved all the way cross country. Risky business there. Simpler and safer to move my pumps out to their turbine(s), hook them right up and get the water pumped that way. I have a hunch it’ll be a little more involved, of course, but it could make life a lot better around here, and keep us aright financially, too.

  What have you been doing with your pumps? Reckon you’ve got plenty of water up in your neck of the woods, with the Missouri right in town, but it’s probably still hard for you to get it moved around to the right places. I think this wind turbine-pump operation has a lot of promise. As a matter of principle, I never used to give free advice. Much less to a seasoned competitor such as yourself. But, I think that the situation over the last three years has changed most folks, me included. So I say you ought to seriously consider doing this. You’ve got windmills and turbines up there, right? You got enough wind, I know that, with all those loess hills. All that good earth, just piled up all around you. Heh.

  I’v
e still been wondering how in the hell all of this came about. I know there’s been tons of talk about the Chinese, and how they had some weapon that worked on us but backfired on them, too. Now I think that’s just a bunch of bull, and let me tell you why. Here we have one of the Goddam biggest economies on earth that’s growing by leaps and bounds a year – China’s economy, that is. And they’re doing it by selling everything they make to the United States AND bankrolling the debt that we’re accruing in purchasing that stuff. They had us over a Goddammed barrel and not even given us a reacharound, and took our cake and were eating it too. Preposterous situation for us to be in, and all to China’s advantage. They knew it, we knew it, Europe knew it. Hell, I bet even half of Africa knew it. And then they make a weapon that can molecularly alter all our domestic energy mineral deposits and our bullets, and hose up magnetic interactions to mess up the grid... all of these things that even American weapons manufacturers couldn’t do... well, that we know of. But they make it, don’t tell anyone about it, don’t test it (that we know of), then just up and decide to use it on the biggest cash cow of a nation that ever existed? Doesn’t make a lick of sense.

  Heard some crackpot up north is saying that mushrooms are to blame for the whole thing. Well, that doesn’t even rank debunking. Just hogwash. I look around this range and don’t ever see hardly a single mushroom blooming up out of the red earth. There’s just no way it could have happened.

  No, I have to tell you. It’s aliens. Couldn’t tell you how they did it, but sure as my name is Nedrick Roundtree, they did. The few real astronomy eggheads will tell you it might have been something else. Moving into an unmapped and magnetically unstable area in space, weird chemical reactions from comets or whatnot. Simply doesn’t add up. Couldn’t tell you why they did it, either. All’s I can say is, I sure hope it was an accident of some kind. Some intergalactic bureaucrat’s clusterfuck. Because I can’t imagine all this that’s happened being on purpose, and a friendly one at that. They still haven’t showed their faces – if they got them – around here that we’ve been aware of. Hope they never do.

  Used to be, Jenny and I would get the kids all piled into the Suburban with picnic blankets and telescopes and drive up near Lake Meredith, just to the southwest of it. There was, still is for that matter, nice wildlife refuge up there, and we’d camp and take turns looking at the stars and planets. Had to head out of town to see them well, because you couldn’t see them very well from Amarillo – too many lights in town. Now we can see them almost every evening from in town – huge islands of diamonds on an ocean of oil – but I don’t want to look up, much less through a Goddam telescope. I’m scared to death I might see something looking back.

  All the best from out west.

  Ned and family

  To: Andrew Mactarnahan, Olathe, KS

  From: Sylvia Mactarnahan, San Diego, CA

  April 20, 20+2

  Andrew

  John didn’t try to stop me from writing you, but merely asked that I not try to reason with you again. I conceded. This is no longer about us writing every other week, repeatedly asking for some acknowledgment of what we’ve been through these last 18 months or more. Knowing you’re there and waiting for some sign that you understand what’s happened here. You have moved on, apparently. So shall we.

  We’re departing tomorrow. The Scottish Lass is rigged up and decked out. We’ve got water to last us months, half a year at least, and a solar oven to cook the fish John catches.

  Don’t write. We’re sailing.

  Sylvia

  To: Natalie Vried, Lincoln, NE

  From: Bert Gunderson, Philadelphia, PA

  January 18, 20+2

  Nat-

  This will be the last time I write you, from Philly at the very least. I’m not sure where I’m going to be a month or even a week from now. Things have become simply intolerable here, and I need to find someplace different.

  It’s been a while since we last talked. Lack of e-mail, phone and an even remotely reliable postal service is partly to blame, I think. Maybe I should have tried carrier pigeon, but I’ve heard they hunt those things out where you live. Or maybe it was doves. Regardless, it’s probably not a good bet.

  Just remembered you the other day. Not that I would really forget, it’s just that recent events have brought thoughts of you to the fore. You were preternaturally cute at SFSU, checking out your Weldon Kees books when I worked in circulation. I had no real idea who he was then, no clue why you’d be interested in such a depressed but clever person. I’m glad you came back to check out more, so I could ask you about him. Once I finished my thesis, the chance to work near the APS library – and maybe there, eventually – was too good to pass up. We’ve been over this, and I hate to rehash it, so I will not. You had your priorities straight. Going back home to care for a loved one may be one of the few things I understand anymore. Wish I could put it into practice, but I don’t even have a goldfish. Ha.

  I don’t know why you would have had this urging, but if you ever thought making a trip anywhere out here was a good idea, please reconsider that. I haven’t got good, reliable news from anywhere on the east coast, but I’ve heard enough conflicting rumors to last me two lifetimes. Boston’s gone up in flames, and then Boston’s fine and they’re still playing intrasquad Sox games. New York has had a month straight of rioting and anarchy, and two weeks later New York has had six months straight of rioting and anarchy. (OK, to be honest I don’t hear much about that place that conflicts – I’m willing to believe it’s become a veritable hellhole and far, far worse than the mere cesspool it used to be.) Hundreds, thousands of murders in DC this year alone, and the Pentagon has become a giant hotel for bigwigs and the lights are still on there and they’ve got a regular plantation farm going inside the building grounds, and there are still helicopters choppering to it and out to destinations unknown. Of course, I have no reason to believe things are horribly bad in most other cities, but the converse is also true.

  It used to be that, when I worked at the Free Library, patrons would rarely ever come to me to find out about really current events or news, other than questions like, “Hey, where do you guys keep the New York Times?” I can count them on one hand. One was a little old Volga German lady who wanted to know what was happening in Berlin – this was just after the Wall fell. Well, she sat down with me and by the time we’d found out the relevant newspaper articles and gone through them – she was not a native speaker/reader, nor had the best eyesight, so it was plodding work – she was in tears. It was the oddest thing – I couldn’t tell if she was happy that the Soviet Union was falling or saddened by the violence and turmoil, and you can’t really ask that sort of thing or even offer any solace. “Professionalism” guidelines, best practices and all that rot. Of course, I can name this instance where those guidelines were an abomination, but the hundreds of times where they were the right way to go remain anonymous.

  Now – well, after everything went to shit and then up until a couple weeks ago – at the Am. Phil., patrons would come in all the time saying, “I heard alien mushroom people were spotted in Yonkers. Are they just in Yonkers, or have they infiltrated the entire metropolitan area?” And I could say, “I have heard no reliable reports of alien mushroom people sightings in Yonkers or anywhere else, you fucking loon. Get out.” But a lot of other folks would come in and ask, “My family lives in Yonkers, and I heard there’s been almost a full year of rioting and anarchy in New York and I wonder if it’s spread somehow to spread out there. Do you have a paper or any word from there?” And then all I could do is look at them and tear up because I just couldn’t say, didn’t know, and that we weren’t really the kind of library that could help with questions like that. But I guess at least I could tell them that much and show them some empathy.

  The entire seaboard – hell, the entire world – outside this meagerly gray city has become completely unknowable to me and pretty much everyone else in every city, and I can’t speak for others, but
that fact makes me feel smaller than I can even fully relate. May as well be a hydrogen atom in the sun for all I can see going around me.