Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office

by Nathan Poell

  And now even Philly has fully masked itself, putting on its own death shroud. Or maybe the blinders have been ripped off my eyes. In any case, the clincher came two weeks and one day ago. I left the apartment a little early to get to work on time, as there’s been a bit of snow lately. We haven’t had much at all this year, but it has been bitter cold, one of the worst I can remember since moving here. Well, I was halfway over the Benjamin Franklin bridge when I started hearing a commotion. It’s phenomenal how the sound carries without the noise of cars and other machinery, even inside the library. So I kept on and when I took a left on 5th street I could see that something really rotten was happening. By the time I got within a block of the library, the first few of the looters were walking off with their bounty. Cartloads, baskets full of books, papers, old loose leaf stuff. There was no point in even trying to stop them.

  I just fail to comprehend what got into all of them, and why they targeted our library of all places. Was it just easier to break into? Does older paper burn better or something?... actually, I don’t even want to think about that. Now, that stuff wasn’t Proust, or Bulwer-Lytton (HA!) – nah. Just Franklin’s, Darwin’s, Boas’s personal papers, among thousands of other absolutely unique things that some of the best minds ever found special and wanted to keep safe. And now it’s a couple cold nights’ worth of hibachi fodder for a bunch of Philly chuckleheads. After watching the objects of my work – oh, they didn’t take all of it, but you can bet they’ll be back as soon as the Charles Peirce is in ashes – get trucked out the doors, I meandered around a bit. No reason to go inside that place, no real reason to go home. Took a walk through Independence park, right across the street. Sat on a bench and watched a drunk pissing on another, who was passed out in the overturned Liberty Bell. Yeah. I haven’t been sleeping much since then.

  So now that there’s nowhere that I know, understand or have a real feel for, I find it’s time to leave and maybe search out some place where that’s possible. I’ve got a light tent, a warm sleeping bag, a sharp knife, a decent enough bike, a better bike lock and a will to leave this deathly place.

  It might be nice to ride out to San Francisco. See the country on the way, pretend for a while that I can still grasp it. But be at peace; I won’t trouble you on the way out west.

  Yes, San Francisco sounds like a good bet to me. Ride up that hill overlooking the Golden Gate bridge from the north, leave the keys in the bike lock, take in the view, taste that clean rock salt air and leave this unknowable world behind.

  -Bert G.

  To: Gary Eldridge, Lawrence, KS

  From: Dave Thibodeaux, Camdenton, MO (Bagnell Dam)

  September 23, 20+1

  Gary,

  Hey, it’s Dave Thibodeaux. Hope you remember me: Pi Tau Sigma, yeah? Donut Dave? I’ve attached a photo to help jog your memory. Hah, well, it might be a bit different from my picture in the Rollamo – if you still have a copy handy – but twenty years or so of barbecuing at Lakeside, the attendant beer consumption, a fried pastry habit and a slow metabolism are gonna do that. Although, in the last year, I’ve come to resemble that Rollamo picture a bit more.

  The other year someone mentioned that you were in Lawrence, Kansas. They didn’t know exactly what you were up to, just that you’d moved over to Lawrence from KC and were maybe working on something related to a Lawrence hydroplant...? Just thought about you the other day, figured I’d shoot you a note, see how you’re doing, what you’ve been up to, catch you up on happenings down here, etc.

  How is Lawrence? I only remember heading there once, to catch a Tigers - Jayhawks game. We won, big. Seemed like a nice enough town. Maybe a little low, most of it, nestled right up against the Kansas. Have you found some lady lovin’ there? They used to run screaming from us... well, me anyway. I bet now women are just throwing themselves at a guy who can make stuff work. (If you’re not using this to your advantage, man, you better start.)

  I’ve been well, as has my family. My wife Ellen just turned 40 two months ago. Don’t know if you ever met her. She wasn’t in a Greek house at all. I met her just before graduating – she was still a sophomore at the time. It’s pretty hard to believe we’ve been married almost fifteen years. (The last has been a bit of a bear, but that’s the norm here and, I’m guessing, everywhere else.) Most of her family is in the area. This has turned out to be a real blessing the past year or so. Hard to believe I used to loath them being around (then again, they did used to mooch my beer). Our eldest, Jake, is twelve and a half. John, the second and youngest, is ten. Life was busy enough with two boys running around being boys and asking silly questions. It’s even harder now that they ask questions I can’t really answer. Like, why does dad have to ride my bike to work every day? When are the lights coming back on? Why do I have to chop wood again? Fish, again? Damn, man, it’s impossible to respond.

  Other things down here in Camdenton are so-so. I’m still working at the dam. We’re maintaining our staff best we can, but money is tight and it doesn’t seem to buy much, anyway, with all the damned price gouging going on. The Lake was really quiet this summer. Hard to believe, I mean just a year or so ago thousands upon thousands of people came down here. Just to drink and make asses of themselves and record other people making asses of themselves. (It was almost a part-time job for some of our staff, too, to tell the truth.) Anyway, slow times, but that’s not all bad. We’re still actively trying to figure out what knocked out the turbines here last year, and how. We had a couple engineering profs come up from UMR to take a look at it. Took them a full week to travel up here, and that was after the week or so it took to get our message to them. I think they were happy to have something to do. Anyway, they checked everything out from top to bottom. One of the professors even strapped on some SCUBA gear and checked out the intake – not that it had been off, because we don’t have any power with which to shut the damned thing off. They gave it a clean bill of health, but no reason why it’s not pumping out juice. It’s just as we found before. The entire mechanism is completely sound, the turbines turn smoothly, everything runs as it ought to – it just doesn’t put out any electricity. It’s my understanding things are this way all over the country. Hell, all over the world, for that matter.

  Heard what happened up in South Dakota. Don’t know if you’ve gotten word or not. A buddy of mine who works at – well, who used to be employed by the MO dept of transportation in Lee’s Summit sent me the news just a couple days ago. Oahe Dam flooded, and the the whole thing failed. Washed out completely. No warning – really, how could there be, nowadays? I guess they got a ton of rain, but you’d really expect a dam like that to hold. Then Gavins Point failed, too. Upshot was that Pierre and Sioux City got taken out, as did a whole lot of Omaha. I don’t know who did the estimating, or how, but almost 12,000 Pierrans, 80,000 Omahans and 50,000 Sioux City folks got killed. With the food and medicine shortages after last year’s tragedies, Sioux City’s virtually wiped out. Omaha’s now got to be way less than half its population as it was this time two years ago. I don’t even think the people in the podunk towns all along the Missouri before Sioux City and between it and Omaha were even counted in the death toll, and to be honest, I don’t even want an estimate regarding those. Apparently, things were a little hairy down towards St. Joe and Kansas City, too, but the river never crested over the banks.

  I haven’t heard about any other dams failing. Of course, my view, like everyone else’s, is pretty limited right now. Maybe they weren’t maintaining the dam as they should have, maybe it was just a poor design. Still, it’s just not right for a dam to fail so completely and rapidly as that. I just... I’m terrified that the dam here is going to just up and blow. It keeps a hell of a lot of the Lake of the Ozarks penned up. My family’s place is up on a hill – we’ll be able to weather a failure. The towns downstream from the lake, though. Well, I’ve sent word as far as Freeburg to watch for a sign that the dam has failed. I’ve got in a heap of trouble for it, making people more antsy that
they are already, but I’m not going to have thousands of peoples’ deaths on my head. And we’re halfway organized now – far better off than before. Just for your information, we’ve got a couple big torches set up on top of one of the local mountains, right near Lakeland. Actually, they’re on a ridge with a bald face to the east. The torches are big, and both covered from the weather, they’re always loaded up with a mix of old phone books, pine and oak (it’ll light fast and keep burning bright) and we’ve got mirrors set up behind them to beam what light they put off as far as possible. Everybody on staff – hell everybody in town, now – knows that if the dam fails they’re to high tail it up to the ridge and light both fires. We figured that folks downstream might see one – or one nearby – and think it was a mistake. But two should get the message across. I don’t know, it’s really the best we could come up with. I hope it’ll save some folks, if it ever comes to that.

  Also, I’m also nervous for everyone else I knew who works near a river. I wanted to mail you and let you know that I considered you a really good friend in Rolla, and that I’m sorry we, rather I never kept in regular contact with you and that I think you should move the hell out of that floodplain. At least get up near the campus at the top of the hill there, whatever it’s called. Or, barring that, at least figure out some kind of warning system. I’m sorry if I’m being a bit of a prick about this – I just want to maybe help save some lives.

  Hope all is well for you and yours in Lawrence. If you ever get some mobility and want a vacation or something more permanent, look us up. We’ve got plenty of room in the guest house. Plenty of room. Plenty of food to go around. Another set of eyes on the dam would be more than welcome. You were always a hell of a good student, if I remember correctly – maybe you can pinpoint the problem. And hey, without the jackasses on the lake, the fishing’s been great here – best year ever for it. Hard to believe.

  Dave T.

  P.S. - This is really the first time I’ve used one of these couriers. Hopefully it’ll get up to you within a month or so...?

  To: Richard Osgood, East Omaha, NE

  From: Regina Osgood, Elgin, TX

  August 3rd, 20+1

  Hello from Austin. Haven’t heard from you since your last e-mail last year. Praying you’re still at this address and are well.

  I’ve got bad news, and there’s no use putting it off anymore. It’s difficult for me to write this, but Carl and Billy are dead.

  It happened about a month and a half ago. Carl went on a foray to pick up some water. All the local ponds and water holes dried up by mid-May and there’s now no way to pump water over from the reservoir, and no wells to speak of. We were hoping they’d somehow get that fixed earlier this year, but... there’s a small lake just south of Camp Swift, that old training grounds. There’s also Long Lake over on the eastern outskirts of Austin, but we head that that was getting a bit low, and we figured the one to the south (Bistrop) would be less used. So, Carl went down that way one morning to see if he could retrieve us some water. We never saw him alive again.

  After a week, Billy up and decided to go down and find him and also, we think, to also try to get some water. We’d all been nervous wrecks after Carl never came back, wondering what had happened to him. It was only 15 miles or so one-way to the lake, and Carl was never ever good on two wheels, but we still expected him back by dark that evening. Whether he’d gotten lost, had a crash or a heart attack – he always took after your dad, you know – or something worse, we had no idea. Anyway, Billy left in the wee hours of the morning, is all I can figure. Went off half-cocked, damned hothead like all you Osgoods. Took that stupid little little bike, the dirt bike he always used to do tricks with, and his backpack, the shotgun and a plastic one-gallon water jug. So then Billy disappeared, and Carlene and Sera and myself were all alone in the house. And then we waited. I didn’t let the girls out of my sight for the better part of a week.

  Five days later we had the local sheriff show up on a sad-looking Appaloose. Fat lot of good he was. They found Billy by the side of the road about halfway between here and the lake, half covered in dust and gravel. It appeared he was making his way back, because the jug was full. There were signs of a scuffle, some ripped clothing strewn about. Shotgun was still there at the scene. Apparently Billy either tried to scare them away with it or was fool enough to think it’d go off, as there were pin marks in the priming caps of the shotgun shells. That’s what the sheriff said, anyhow. Said he thought there were most likely half a dozen or more of them. They took Billy’s bike after murdering him, but nothing else. Used to be that getting killed over a bike was something you heard about in the city, not out here. How can a bike be so damned important to anyone that they’re willing to just up and kill a fellow man for it?

  I don’t know what we’re going to do. I can’t imagine staying here after what happened to my husband and son. Can’t even think about going out too far from the house yet, it’s terrifying. My mother and father are still in Houston, but we haven’t heard from her in almost half a year. Don’t think we’d be able to swing a move down there regardless whether I get over my fear of venturing outside. Still haven’t sent them a letter, will do that after this one. Thinking about asking your mama to move in with us. I could use another hand around here – just can’t seem to get much done, lately – and she’s always been lonely in that big house since your papa died. She and all her friends have been so kind to us. Always have been, it’s true, but even moreso since word about Billy and Carl got around. At least a couple times a week they’re over to our house, bringing casseroles and firewood and cans of food and even a taste of water for the girls and me.

  The girls have both taken things very differently. Sera just shuts herself in her room all day long, only comes out once a day to eat – if there is much of anything to eat. I listen from downstairs to hear whether she’s crying or pacing or anything else, but I think she just sits or lays in bed. Don’t know how she can stand it day after day up there with how hot it’s been. Might be reading, but what and why?

  Bad as Sera seems to be, though, Carlene is worse. She’ll help out with the chores, help make food when we have it and clean up after herself and me. But... she disappears for hours on end. Talked with one of the gals down the block the other day. Jeanna Gilmore, you remember her? She asks about you. Said she was out foraging for firewood a week or so ago and saw Carlene saunter out of a thicket. Now this was halfway up to Taylor Rock, almost five miles out of town. I asked Carlene about it and she didn’t say much, just that she was visiting with friends there. I asked her who and she clamped her mouth shut and I sent her to her room without dinner. Course, I took dinner up a couple hours later – it’s just too cruel to do that to a child. And child she is, but all the same, I think she’s not mine anymore. She’s only fourteen and I think I might have lost her already.

  I’m not sure this is the case, but if there is any upside, it’s that the sheriff’s deputies are patrolling out here a bit more. There’s even been talk about Austin sending a few rangers out. Rumor has it that some folks in high places are getting nervous about violence like this so close to the capital city, and that’s why the new patrols. I don’t know how much law enforcing they’ll actually be able to do without firearms, though. Most of them, the sherriffs anyway, are still so damned fat – despite the crop failures this year – that they look like they’d have trouble walking more than a quarter mile at a stretch, much less subduing an angry mob or fending off or getting rid of a determined pack of bandits. People have been saying that there’s a bunch of them hiding in some foothills just to the east southeast, and that there are some military deserters in the mix. Really hoping for some rangers, so that no one else around here has happen to them what happened to Carl and Billy. In any event, I’m still sleeping, but hardly, with all the doors – inside and out – locked, and a knife under my pillow.

  Why did they have to die? What point was there in it? Why in God’s name don’t the guns work? Bad
enough around here with no cars or lights or telephone or running water, but to have all the bullets turn into duds so law abiding folks can’t protect themselves?

  We’ve been hearing rumors down here that all this bad business is the fault of the Chinese. That they were working on some device or weapon and it went off accidentally, or even on purpose, maybe. I can’t say how that could possibly be the case without it backfiring on them, too, but maybe they’re cleverer than we expected. Haven’t heard that they’ve invaded anywhere, though, so that’s probably a good sign that they’re in as bad a jam as we all are here. Not that I’d wish this on them, not on anybody.

  The drought has been so horrible this year. Haven’t had a lick of rain since late February. No cotton, no wheat or corn in the fields, just cracked earth. The farmers may not have even bothered planting anything this year, it was so obvious it was going to be just terrible. Hardly even any weeds growing to hold the dirt together. So hot and windy, some days it’s just been an orange blur, just flames whipping by from dawn to dusk. I passed out in the kitchen two days ago while making supper. Dreamed I was in a furnace down in hell with a whole bunch of Chinamen, but they were all talking Spanish at me but I still couldn’t understand it. Woke up with Sera staring down at me and screaming, sweating and with tears in her eyes. Probably afraid she’d lost another...