Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  Finally, the first of them came around the box. He peeked around first, cautious because he knew she was armed, but his face was exactly the height she’d pre-aimed at. She neatly holed his forehead, point-blank, just as his compatriot came around behind her and grabbed her with his arm around her throat.

  Instead of struggling or reaching for his hands, she kept her cool and let her knees buckle, weighing him straight down and throwing his balance forward, then raised her handgun and squeezed a shot behind her head. Blood spurted over her shoulder and his right arm immediately went limp, but his left hand grabbed her hair. With panicked strength, he threw her to the ground.

  “Shit!” he screamed, clamping his left hand where his neck met his right shoulder, “You fuckin’ bitch!” Arterial blood spurted popsicle-red between his fingers. She rolled over, brought the gun up once more, and hit him dead-center of the chest.

  She had two shots left in the little five-shot gun, and there were one or two attackers left. She was about six feet from the electrical box now, and she saw one man standing an equal distance just off the gravel roadbed, a wood-stocked hunting rifle leveled in her direction. She made an instant decision and fired at the muzzle of the long gun just as he squeezed his own trigger. Both shots missed, and she was rolling back towards the box as he vaulted up the little embankment towards her. He came around the box, and she squeezed off her last shot…a hit! But a short-lived win.

  Someone seized her ankles and dragged her belly-down across the gravel towards him.

  Get the Paper, Hon

  POTUS rubbed his hands in glee. “Newspapers!” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Steve. “That’s what they said.” The reconnaissance team had been quartering the surrounding territory in an expanding spiral. Their last report on conditions in the nearby village of Highfield-Cascade (formerly a bedroom community, but now a functional town, by virtue of having its own spring-fed water system). When they reported that the locals were actually generating media in the form of newspapers, POTUS almost did a little dance. It was the happiest Steve had seen him since the day they’d produced his wife and children.

  Steve was overjoyed as well. His forte was public relations. The lack of any media, not just electronic media, was one of the most frustrating things in this new situation. Newspapers weren’t the internet, of course: they couldn’t be stacked with volunteer or paid advocates, bloggers, and commenters. Once something was published, it couldn’t be made to go away. But still, empires had risen, wars had been fought, and entire peoples had been massacred and imprisoned based on what was printed in simple newspapers in centuries past. A newspaper would have media connections with far-flung cities.

  Steve had already made the techies build him a giant reverse-engineered biobattery-powered FM generator. He and some of the more talented aides were broadcasting live every day as the “Voice of America in America.” They’d actually had a few people show up on their doorstep looking for “The America That Has Been Lost.” Mostly people looking for handouts, who were praised and pep-talked and gently turned away—but some people with useful talents and skills had been welcomed to the team in exchange for room and board.

  He got one of these to accompany him: Tyler, a former machinist turned amateur blogger, and they drove into Highfield-Cascade. Steve liked Tyler. He was one of those big, muscular young men whose size is the only threatening thing about them. Tyler, Steve sensed, would calm any situation he was in, and in favor of whomever he was with.

  Heads turned as they drove down the main street of the little village in a full-sized sedan. Since they were making their own fuel, most everyone had gone to smaller vehicles. It ran like crap, of course; with no pickup or power and having been refitted for 100% ethanol, and being heavily armored, had no pickup or power, but it ran.

  Steve and Tyler pulled up in front of an old 1930s brick building with its tall windows open, letting the sunlight and fresh spring breezes in. They mounted the steps and walked through the heavy wooden doors. The brass door hardware was tarnished and blackened where its plastic sealant had been eaten by p davisii, but the leaded-glass windows were intact.

  Inside, someone had carefully restored the interior, scraping every trace of degraded plastic from the walls and windowsills—although the polished marble countertops and floors were deeply stained by the residue. No one was in the lobby, so Steve swaggered up to the counter and struck the tabletop metal bell’s button twice.

  A man in the next room responded to the musical ring. “Hello?” said the man, his smile-creased face putting him well past retirement age. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” said Steve unctuously. “Is this the office of the Register?”

  “Yes, Hello.” The man stepped out of his office and extended a hand. He wore canvas slacks, wood-soled shoes, a wool argyle sweater, and a collared shirt with horn buttons. “Lou Stonegood, editor-in-chief. What can I do for you?”

  Steve took Lou’s hand in a firmly dominant grip and introduced himself and Tyler. The editor showed no spark of recognition at his name, which surprised Steve just a little, because he’d been in the news quite often as POTUS’s right-hand man. “I’m the president’s chief of staff,” he stated, arching an eyebrow expectantly.

  Lou gave a quiet little smile. “Is that so?” He asked. “Well, come into my office and we’ll talk about that.” He turned and walked into the spacious high-ceilinged room. Behind a large, dark wooden antique desk, he took a seat in a big wooden chair with a metal base. The two visitors took their seats in leather-padded seats across from him.

  Steve sat loosely in his chair and steepled his hands. “I’ll be frank with you,” he said. “You’re the first person to re-establish the free press locally, and I have to ask you: are you a loyal patriot?”

  Lou smiled. “Of course.”

  Tyler and Steve smiled in return. “Good.” Said Steve. “We’re looking for a way to get the message out that the USA is still alive and well. We trust that you would be interested in having exclusive press rights to the president?”

  To Steve’s surprise, Lou didn’t act excited. “That would certainly be a privilege,” the man said in a neutral tone. He rose from his chair. “Are you regular readers, then?”

  The two government men looked at each other sheepishly. “Not regular, no,” began Steve.

  Tyler blurted, “I’m not much of a reader. I prefer video.”

  Lou refrained from commenting that there were no videos available anywhere anymore, and instead stepped to the doorway. “Let me get you a few copies of the Register to look over before we speak any more.”

  With the editor out of the room, Tyler said, “He’s playing it cool. Wonder what he wants?”

  Steve shrugged. “We’ll find out in a few minutes.”

  Lou came back in with three thin newspapers. “Here are the last three days’ editions.” He laid them side by side at the top edge of his desk in front of his two guests, nodded, and sat. “Go ahead and read them. I have some work to do while you’re familiarizing yourselves.” He bent his head over a yellow legal pad, the top page covered with neat writing that had been scratched out in places, with symbols and comments in the margins and carets where things were inserted. Like the President’s clerical staff, he used a quill with a metal nib inserted, dipping it into a bottle of charcoal-based ink frequently as he wrote. Unlike the clerical staff, he didn’t spill a drop of ink or smear the page at all; he obviously spent all day, every day, doing exactly this.

  The main headlines of the front pages were the first things the men scanned:

  MILITIA ROUTS MARAUDERS

  BIOLOGICAL FUEL CELLS ARRIVE

  ELEMENTARY SCHOOL OPENS

  Tyler looked at the pages with interest. Steve grunted, “No pictures. That’s why the pages look naked. You probably never read a newspaper in your life, did you, Tyler?”

  “No, sir.”

  “This looks like a newspaper looked when I was a very little boy. No phot
os, all black and white…” He inspected his blackened fingertips. “Vegetable ink, I assume?”

  Lou nodded without looking up.

  “They’re big,” Tyler said.

  “This is the size they were when I was a kid, too,” Said Steve.

  “We couldn’t get the narrower presses to run without synthetic lubricants. Plus, they had electronic controllers. Had to resurrect the old mechanical ones,” explained Lou.

  Steve unfolded the first paper. Below the fold, the headlines were even less exciting:

  Farmers Market to Open Earlier

  Tips for Best Ethanol Fuel Efficiency

  Growing Corn Without Irrigation: The Indian Way

  He opened the paper, finding it to be one folded sheet, four pages including front and back. Most of the inside front was occupied with recipes and quilting patterns. There was a four-by-five inch ad for a funeral parlor. He snorted. “People keep dying no matter what, don’t they?” The inside back was continuations from the front page above the fold, and the entire space below the fold was taken up by a single long story, entitled, “Visitor’s Tale from Beyond the Rockies.”

  Steve reflected that people’s priorities had changed since the machine sickness hit: of course, survival was topmost in their minds. He flipped to the last page, figuring that was where the news of elections and public policies would be—even if they were local. But the visitor’s tale was continued on the back, taking up two thirds of the page. The bottom third was classified ads: LOST DOG; BARBED WIRE FENCING; FRESH EGGS; CANNING JARS; ADULT ARITHMETIC CLASS.

  That made Steve wonder something and he flipped to the front. The price of the paper was in the top right corner, or rather, three prices: 1¢ silver, 1 amox, and 10 cal. He got stuck on that last one, but then realized it had to mean calories.

  They had two more years of stockpiled food staples at Camp David and Site R, and vegetable seeds to keep their diet tasty and varied. Tending gardens kept the staffers occupied during the long doldrums between messengers. But of course, most people had few grains and starches put away, and those had gotten eaten last winter. As the summer sunlight began to turn golden and darkness came earlier, everyone’s minds had to be turning to what they would eat over the upcoming winter.

  The other two papers were overall much the same. Tyler had picked up the one with the headline about the biological fuel cells and was reading it with his eyebrows up. The existence of the cells was need-to-know around Camp David, and Steve knew he’d have to warn Tyler about that. This particular paper could not make it back to the Camp.

  “Mr. Stonegood, we’re prepared to give you full exclusive access to the President’s daily press briefings.”

  Lou gazed at him enigmatically. “And?”

  Steve said, “Of course, being that we’re still in a national state of emergency, we’d need to review the contents of your paper before it went out.”

  Lou said, “Very well.”

  “Great,” said Steve. “You can send someone up to the camp tomorrow morning for the first press briefing.”

  “You misunderstand me, sir,” Lou said gently.

  “How so?” Said Steve.

  “I meant, ‘Very well. You may leave now.’ Sorry, I’m not always the clearest communicator face-to-face. That’s why I prefer writing and editing.” He gestured to the inky pages in front of him as he stood.

  “Why? Do you have to discuss this with your editorial board? Your owners?”

  Lou smiled again. “Come with me, gentlemen.” He led the way past the elegant lobby and into the back room. A behemoth of steel dominated the room. There were sorting trays of tiny square metal beads on a counter next to one end of the huge machine. An enormous rope wrapped around a huge steel wheel at one end of the machine and passed through a slot in the rear wall of the building.

  A tall, grey-haired man in a rough canvas apron stood at the counter. He was picking the individual beads into the trays from a metal drum of some type using tweezers.

  “This is our pressman, Gabe,” said Lou. “Gabe, Steve and Tyler.” Gabe nodded, but didn’t stop what he was doing to shake hands. “Gabe is probably one of a handful of living Americans who knows how to run a movable-type press nowadays. Gabe and I are the Register. We resurrected this museum piece cog by cog.” He patted the giant steampunk-looking device. “We can produce 2,500 newspapers a day, and we sell all of them.”

  Gabe nodded in agreement. Lou continued, “The news we have in this paper is what people are interested in. It’s what they need to know, so they buy the paper from us. There’s no need to include anything more.”

  “But,” Steve began, and paused. “But,” he resumed. “I couldn’t help but notice that you had no election news, no city council meetings, no political commentary…”

  “And why would we?” Lou asked. “When the machine sickness happened, all at once people were on their own. The cities became Hellholes: rioting, bloodshed, starvation, violence, disease. Even outside the cities, people starved due to lack of food deliveries and there were plenty of raids on households that left them ill-supplied. And the police were among the worst of the raiders. The sick and elderly who depended on pharmaceuticals and things like medical oxygen, they’re no longer with us.” He stopped for a minute, his eyes far away and his mouth twisting in some private grief.

  “But now, the people who’re doing okay, they’re the ones who not only had useful things and supplies set aside, and the skills to cope, but also–and this is very important! –they were the ones who were prepared to share and trade with others. No one is around any more, except for a few criminal gangs,” he stabbed his finger at the headline about marauders, “who wants to have anything but a win-win with anyone else.”

  “That’s what I’m offering you,” said Steve. “A win-win!”

  Lou interrupted him, his diffident temperament overwhelmed for a moment. “No. You are not, sir.

  Do you think we don’t all know you’re up there? Do you think we don’t all see your messengers running through the area on foot or bicycle, looking paranoid and guilty as burglars about what they have in their pouches? Do you think we don’t know that you have food and water, and yes, sterile fuel, stashed up there?

  “Do you think we care?” He shook his head in disgust. “The people who lived around here mostly worked long hours in good, secure corporate or government jobs. They turned their children over to the public schools (or private ones, if they could afford it), spent seven hundred hours a year driving back and forth on roads they didn’t own but had to pay for, in cars they didn’t own, back and forth from houses they didn’t own, and did jobs full of trivial, meaningless jabber in exchange for a paycheck. That check was in a dollar which lost value every year due to the nature of debt-based money, and they were compelled on threat of imprisonment to give half of it away before it ever reached their hands.

  “Who stole that money from them? You did, gentlemen. And you had a nice pile of stuff for yourselves, too, bought with those hours you stole out of all these peoples’ lives. Still have most of it, I suppose. You can close your gates and post your perimeter guards and play your silly spy games with your silly messengers all you like. But in the end, you will be left sitting in the wrappers of the junk food you fed people’s minds for hundreds of years.

  “You can take your exclusive press briefings, gentlemen…” He stepped over to the doorway. “And feed them to the squirrels. Let me walk you to your car.”

  Visitor From Beyond

  The Highfield Register, Wednesday, September 7, Year Two

  Wendy Harkavy

  The Rocky Mountains were once a scenic drive, hazardous only for those with bald tires or worn brakes. No longer! From the last installment, readers will recall the travails we experienced in crossing the passes—including bear attacks, rockslides, altitude sickness, and an ambush by bandits—along with the beauty of the landscape and the kindness of our hosts and rescuers along the way. Today’s installment will give a broad ov
erview of our journey across the high plains of Utah and the deserts of Nevada to reach the West Coast. Each section will be expanded in future installments.

  The Vast Desert

  Once we descended from the mountains, we stocked up with as much water as our wagons could carry before crossing the vast deserts of Utah and Nevada. Cities and towns that once relied on water pumped from deep wells or diverted from faraway rivers are ghost towns. It was eerie to see homes abandoned and skeletons of dead beasts (and sometimes humans) everywhere. The roads are still paved in many places, though, because even the machine sickness bacteria seems to require a minimal level of water to survive.

  Tahoe

  We stopped and rested here before continuing. Coming upon the clear blue waters of Lake Tahoe after crossing the dry desert mountains of Western Nevada was like arriving in Heaven. The machine sickness has destroyed macadam in this wetter region, but many resorts and luxury hotels have turned into small villages. The dirt and gravel roadbeds are well-maintained by the local people. There are several large private compounds as well, and we were welcomed to one of these. The area has a robust militia to protect it from marauders who come from the north and west, and we will report on some of the frequent skirmishes and battles they have fought.

  San Francisco

  We were advised by many not to venture into San Francisco. Our journalistic curiosity took us as far as the hills overlooking the once-beautiful metropolis. Along with San Jose, the city was reportedly subject to a vicious wave of pillaging, looting, and violence following the machine sickness, due to the large number of very poor juxtaposed with the very wealthy of Silicon Valley and the city itself. Sources describe fires burning unextinguished—some for months afterwards—and millions unable to defend themselves from unspeakable atrocities.