The Mountain Dawn
For the third time in forty eight hours Fixit woke up in pain. Each time was worse than the one before but this one seriously took the championship by unanimous decision of the judges. Not only was he sick, sore, starving and lying painfully on something very hard and cold, but his grimy tattered clothing seemed to be stuck to his legs and chest with some kind of crusty adhesive and his back, when he tried to shift it squished around in a slimy oily wetness. He felt as though someone had beaten his face with a baseball bat. Several teeth seemed loosened, one eye was swollen shut and as soon as he had been able to begin to salivate again he recognized the metallic taste in his dry mouth as gummy blood. A chilly pale light announced to him that the mountain dawn was about to arrive. He went back to sleep.
Later he woke again. His one good eye had been staring up for perhaps ten minutes before it occurred to him that he was looking at the underside of a roof. Another five minutes went by as he tried to remember why this struck him as so very odd. The now more advanced light revealed the roof to be first class work. Clear fir joists on gracious eighteen inch centers, nicely milled and chamfered if somewhat old-fashioned knotty pine tongue and groove planking laid neatly over top. No cheap plywood here. handsomely varnished. A professional job.
Still, there was no explanation for the fact that he was looking up at a ceiling at all. Try though he might his most recent memories were only of having run in a panic for what seemed like days through the forest and having arrived at the edge of a steep cliff in the deepest remotest part of that forest. It was night time he remembered. The stars were twinkling in the black night sky and he had been preparing, quite enthusiastically as he remembered, to throw himself over the cliff to the moonlit stones far below. He had been more physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted he recalled than he had ever imagined he could be, and now, the situation having apparently only deteriorated, he was filled with a profound regret that he had for some reason failed in what should have been a relatively simple leap to his death. He thought it might be good to cry again but he was cried out.
An agonized lifting onto his elbow and a torturous turning of his head allowed him to see in the gathering light that this was indeed a garage. A large garage. Three car maybe. With a small workshop area. Other things that he had been wondering about were becoming susceptible to explanation as well. With his returning ability to see his sense of smell was returning which informed him that the sticky stuff on his clothes and the floor was his very own blood mixed with the contents of his very own bladder which must have been unusually full. This effort however gave him a sudden headache and he laid back down again.
Though this nap lasted less than twenty minutes when he woke up again he was much more alert. He realized that he had stumbled into and through a now smashed door unintentionally using his head, face and shoulder for that purpose rather than the door handle, and had landed in someone’s summer cabin. There had been hundreds of them here in the Santiagos. Many had fallen down in the quakes, many more had burned down and all had been stripped of anything useful. Food, tools, cooking utensils and clothing had simply evaporated in a day. Even things of doubtful utility like electric stoves and refrigerators disappeared in the aftermath. Front doors and fences went for firewood along with beds and furniture.
But that was not the case here. Like Howard Carter peering through a small opening into Tut’s tomb, Fixit could tell that no one had been here since the place had been closed up by the owners at the end of some now distant season. Even the Jeep Cherokee parked there still shiny under it’s thin film of dust suggested that it had been left there to drive some dead Pharaoh on his final camping trip to the underworld.
Dimly, but with rapidly increasing luminosity a realization was gathering in the fuddled brain of Mister Fixit.
“If,” he thought,”this is a garage, could a person reasonably assume that it is, or once was, connected to a cabin, cottage...or house? And, that being the case, might there not be a food preparation area, a kitchen, or,..” and here he paused, realizing that he had stopped breathing, ”Pantry?... And if that pantry is in the same state of preservation as this garage?”....
Only minutes earlier his life had had no meaning, no value, no purpose. He would have expired on the floor without a qualm. Now, in less time than it takes to tell it, life was pregnant with possibility, glowing with the promise of gratified desire. He could see the connecting door in the far distance. Having thought he was cried out, he now began blubbering.
The incredible machine that is the human body produces an amazing variety of bodily fluids. At any given moment we may be sweating sweat, weeping tears of either joy or sorrow, drooling saliva, wiping drip from our noses, urinating, expectorating, lactating, ejaculating or exsanguinating. As Mister Fixit shudderingly lurched across the three car garage, the early morning light from the broken doorway behind him, he was leaving behind him on the cement, snail- like, a glistening trail composed of almost all of those fluids, blood and urine predominating. Every step caused his filthy tattered soaking pant legs to slap against the floor with a wet splatting sound like the windshield cleaning flappers in the automatic car washes he still faintly remembered.
The door, when he finally reached it, was unlocked. He turned the knob and pushed it open. As he stepped through, the journal containing his previous life and adventures slammed decisively shut and an unimagined new one opened.
Dawn on the Ruined Highway
Henry Fowles leaned his chin on his folded hands which rested on top of the handle of his comfortably well worn round point shovel. It was a beautiful morning. The residual atmospheric pollution from the thousand volcanos continued to make sunrise and sunset incredible displays of scarlets, vermilions, russets, pinks, oranges, violets and purples. He was working with the crew attempting to rebuild the road across the Santiago Mountains to the San Ignacio Valley where some small farmers and cattle ranchers had, against all odds managed to scrape together a small bit of prosperity. Leon the second of that name and current Lord of the desert community wherein Henry had been busy trying to survive had decided that the San Ignacio boys had lived too long without the benefits of his merciful brand of centralized governmental pillage and that a roadway capable of allowing mercenaries to march over to their township was just the thing to rectify that want. The Quakes had pretty much destroyed the road and that was the good news for there would be at least a year of work and Henry was glad to get it. In the devastated city of the plain that he now looked down upon from the first reconstructed viewpoint on the mountain highway, life was hardscrabble indeed.
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It had been eleven years since the political wars began and nine years since they were made redundant by the Great Seismic Event. It was estimated that more than four fifths of the world’s population had perished. But then, who was counting? Who was left capable of a census? Possibly twenty million had died from principal or secondary involvement in the Political wars as their popularity blossomed worldwide, and new fatality records had been set daily thanks to scientific advancements in devices for killing and their increased commercial availability. Indeed, it was possible at that time to have G-18 grenades and Bazookettes delivered by drone to your backyard so long as your bank account remained active.
Rachel had succeeded to the captaincy of the Anti-Fascist Woman’s Rifle unit at the second battle of Paulo Alto while trying to protect the vital internet nerve center. It was the misfortune of the Bader-Ginsberg battalion that the first wave of shock troops consisted of the Black Loyal Republican Guard, volunteers from south Chicago. The sight of the faces of the oppressed for whose liberation they had been willing to give up their lives and fortunes moving purposefully toward them with weapons drawn caused such confusion and conflict within their separate bosoms that some troopers threw down their weapons rather than violate their most deeply held values. They were quickly overrun and annihilated. Julia, Rachel’s partner in Henry’s affections had been so upset by the news that she determined to pick up the sword that had fallen from Rachel’s hand and continue her battle. She left Henry as Rhett had left Scarlett on the road to Tara to commit herself to the glorious cause and was never heard from again.
Second Paulo Alto was a great victory for the AntiCommunists but was occasion for only brief celebration as it was just two short weeks later that the seven tectonic plates decided that their two million years of relative amity were now as unappealing to them as peace and prosperity had become to the generality of the human inhabitants of the earth. Their first thirty six hours of angry discord removed more people from the face of the planet than all previous wars combined. By a long chalk. The often promised relocation of much of California to the oceans bottom happened so quickly that the victors and the vanquished of San Jose barely had time to scream their last accusations of either criminal ecological indifference or satanic moral delinquency.
The North American Continent and the European Continent had been drifting apart at the dignified rate of one inch per year since the Jurassic age. This year they moved nearly a mile and a half. The Alleghenies rose by eighty feet and the Rockies by nearly two hundred. Florida became a small island and all of the Atlantic islands from the Canaries to Tristan da Cunha were washed clean to their bare rock. Leftover bits of Gondwanaland rose to the surface again. In the Pacific large new volcanic islands boiled up and old ones from Bora Bora through the Hawaiians to Japan greatly increased in size due to being covered with an additional thirty foot deep layer of two thousand degree magma. Vegetation and any signs of previous human occupation disappeared entirely.
Still, the most significant loss of life was in locations close to the edges of the plates now excitedly grinding together.
If one drew a line on a map one hundred miles inland from the the seacoast in almost any part of the world as it would have been represented up to that point and then greyed the resulting space in, one could then put a red “X” in those greyed areas with an explanatory note that the “X” meant “Now Missing Or Uninhabited”. Since over seventy percent of the world’s population had chosen to live in proximity to the coasts an eighty percent mortality estimate for those years was probably not too far out of line.
Now imagine that a two thousand mile long iron chain with links a hundred feet wide was lowered a few hundred feet into the earth at one end of the continent and jerked rapidly underground to the other end of the continent so that even those who were living in the central areas could get the full disruptive rollercoaster experience and you will have an idea of the geological and socio- economic situation under which the inhabitants of Leon II’s dusty kingdom now sweated and survived.
Henry himself had survived the wars pretty well. The riots and murders remained for the most part confined to the cities. He bulldozed the road leading to his property, planted cactus and made sure the fencing didn’t betray a gate. The well, solar power and vegetable garden, though not built with the end of the world in mind, performed as if they had been. He read, puttered, designed circuits in his mind and missed the girls. The coming of the quakes was altogether a different matter. The adobe walls dissolved like a sand castle hit by a strong low wave, the Tin roof abruptly rested on eighteen inches of dirt rubble, crushed furniture and squashed books. He moved into the Airstream which had merely bounced on it’s 7.00 x 15’s through most of the shocks. However, though some electricity was still being generated by the solar panels, the batteries had been ruined and worst of all the small aquifer supplying his well was no longer located at the end of his sucker pipe. Henry had suddenly become just another refugee with no choice but to move back into the ruined villages his city had become.
In the brief period while some gasoline was still available he had a man tow his Airstream to a vacant lot close to where his tool filled industrial space now lay buried under tons of bricks and collapsed roofing. He spent his days excavating a tunnel into the debris and began to bring out hand tools and usable materials which he gathered in his trailer. After a while word began to get around that there was a guy who could make you a box to gather and compress the methane from your chicken’s poop that you could use to power your generator or small scooter for a while. Music from portable electronic devices with long dead batteries could be could be rewired to the generators so that people could dance or at least sigh to their melancholy memories. Other things could be made to work as well. Perhaps not as well as back when they were taken for granted but now valued so much more. Behind his back and initially unknown to him he began to be called “Mr. Fixit”.
Cars littered the landscape by the thousands. If you were to offer a man who owned a horse a hundred automobiles hauled to his property in exchange for his horse he would just laugh and rightly so. On the other hand, if you were a relative of Leon or another of the Cienfuegos dynasty or your fealty to them was valued, you would simply put a gun to the head of the horse owner and lead the animal away. The old lesson that security is bought with the hard coin of submission is easily forgotten but quickly recalled. Here, there and everywhere in the tremulous new world.
Henry planted his shovel into the pile of gravel next to him and reached into his pocket for the morning snack issued by the security supervisors a few minutes earlier. It was a pair of cellophane wrapped crackers with peanut butter filling that had probably been already old when the world began it’s descent into madness. The crackers were the bright orange that only concentrated industrial chemicals could achieve and so it would probably be a hundred years or more before they could be again duplicated. In the meantime the stomachs of the road crew would receive the illusion of having absorbed something containing nutrition. There would be a vegetable soup around lunchtime using produce from the community farms down in the valley which would probably be pretty good and he was looking forward to it. He was remembering a story his mother had once told him. She said that when she was a young single mother she anguished about her situation much of the time. One day she looked in the mirror and said “Mary, all this worry just gives you lines in your face.” “After that” she said, “I just didn’t worry anymore”. Teenage Henry had looked at her dumbstruck, his jaw hanging slack. “People don’t just decide not to worry!” He thought. Yet, now, three decades later he realized that he was truly his mother’s son. The world was ruined, most of it dead, destroyed and the remainder thrown back societally several hundred years conservatively estimated and yet here he was enjoying the sunrise and looking forward to a watery soup.
He was inwardly thanking his Mom for the blessing of a positive attitude when he was distracted by a curious noise behind him on the crumpled blacktop.