On the mainland, more trucks were in use since trains didn’t work. Ships, always the major transporters of goods still worked. They became the only way to transport overseas since there was no more air service but they were a lot slower than before because as another of the after effects of the Event, ship engines were no longer as efficient and there were occasions where they completely stalled before getting passengers or goods to the destination. People who could fix them and keep them running were in high demand and sails and oars made a comeback as more than a sport or hobby since the fear was that ship engines would eventually quit completely, as had television, cellphones, and other technologies.
Oddly, there was plenty of oil and therefore gasoline, which was cheap, but the price of fresh water got more expensive as time went on. No one could really explain it.
As to my book going out of print, well it wasn’t only mine that sank into the morass of the aftermath of the Event. It was simply that unknown or new authors – like me – were the first to sink. Many books were no longer in print. Adam Jones, my writer friend who’d acted as my agent, survived the Event, and his books were no longer in print, either, and he had been writing for twenty years and was better known than I was. In our post-apocalyptic existence, he became a courier. Writers better known than either of us were in the same boat – those that survived, that is.
In fact, by three years in, publishing had almost ceased because it wasn’t only the small publishing companies that folded, most of the large ones also went under. There were a few magazines and the occasional newspaper still hanging on, and the libraries were still there, but there weren’t many new books, and hardly any were novels. Most were works by someone who’d come up with a new explanation for the Event. I didn’t read them.
All but two big bank corporations folded. It was three and a half years in by then, and due to our struggling government, the FDIC promised backing for the banks was sparse. Folk with money stashed in the busted banks and hadn’t thought to get it out were left with pennies on the dollar. Or, as Adam put it, they were up shit creek. That was a term with which I wasn’t familiar, but since he was born right at the turn of the century and I was born twenty-two years later, I gathered it was one that had fallen out of general use by the time I came along. It certainly fit the situation, though.
Of course, the stock market took a big dive right off. It rallied a little once goods started being moved again but there were a lot of new poor people; that is, those that didn’t go up and fly from the top of a tall building without a flight suit or a parachute or that went for a permanent swim, or used some other such self-destructive process. It was no surprise that most of the very rich who survived, remained rich. The rest of us just tried to hang on – or we got poorer.
When the majority of the banks tanked, the rich used the banks that were still open but didn’t keep all of their money in them. They hired armed guards to protect their private treasuries, a job I sometimes took when the tracking business was slow.
Like other people in my position, I didn’t have any money in a bank by the time they went under so I had none to lose. Once I used all the cash I got from my parents’ estate, there hadn’t been any point in putting any new earnings into a bank because most of it went as soon as I got it. After paying rent, utilities, and buying food, or as I did for a while before I began tracking, buying whisky or spending it on women, I used a money belt for any small amounts I had left.
Once I began earning more than it was prudent to carry with me, I bought a safe and installed it in the back of my bedroom closet. Yes, my closet-sized flat had closets – two of them. Of course, the safe didn’t always hold cash. I was terrible at saving money, but it was useful for stashing other things, such as items I could sell. It also held the few pieces of my mother and father’s jewelry I’d retrieved from their house, and my old refrigerator magnets and that final note from Zoni. And my extra firearms and ammo. It was a large safe.
Our going-to-hell government still gave lip service to the greenbacks and coins they cranked out, but some areas of the country began using their own kinds of money and a few would only deal in silver and gold or precious stones. With some, it was strictly barter. You couldn’t blame them, especially after that nearly non-existent support from the FDIC when the banks crashed. Barter is how I obtained my jeep. One of my clients paid me with it in lieu of cash. The jeep came in handy when I needed to go somewhere that my old Honda couldn’t handle.
By four years in, the job market had gotten ridiculous and unemployment moved far into double-digits but surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly since it offered one explanation of why there was no longer public education or some of the other amenities from before, the government kept social security going. Moreover, there was still a type of welfare, which was a good thing even though the stipends weren’t much.
If not for that, there would’ve been a lot more starving citizens because the price of food increased and food stamps no longer existed. But, everyone knew it probably wouldn’t continue because by that point, no one thought the federal government would last much longer considering the state of the country and society as a whole.
I was surprised it had lasted that long.
Part Three: Blue Heaven
Chapter Fifteen
LIFE STAGGERED ON. HEADING INTO THE eighth year after the day the world took a dive down the sewer, and much to everyone’s amazement, our government was still hanging on though it was by a thread.
When I began my tracking career, I got a lot of business, but about a year ago, things got… let’s just say the slide continued and work slacked off.
Not getting as many tracking assignments was a pain in the ass. I saved when I could but since saving wasn’t one of my strong points, I sometimes had to do other work to get by. Working as a guard was my first choice for a side job but when that wasn’t available I took others, such as dishwashing, or street sweeping, for instance – anything but grave digging, though had it come down to it and there was nothing else available, or I had nothing to sell, I suppose I would’ve done it again.
Doing work outside my main line was what took me to Blue Heaven. It was a subdivision within the city limits positioned near the eastern border, but it managed to avoid being a part of it, mostly because of the wide gully and stone wall that separated it from everything. I hadn’t thought about it since the Event but once I got there, I remembered it was the neighborhood in which Zoni and I had been thinking of one day buying a condo.
Don’t ask me how the place got that name. It was probably one of those cutesy designations the developer came up with. I’d never gone there and I don’t know how it was before, but by the time I went, it was about as far from being Heaven as any place could get without actually being Hell.
On my first visit, I observed that, while things were slowly slipping down through shit everywhere, in Blue Heaven, the descent was faster. It was a neighborhood that seemed to have travelled farther in that shitty direction than anywhere else.
Of all the shitty places in this city, Blue Heaven was probably the shittiest. The only reason somebody wouldn’t have agreed would be because they’d never been there. Of course, outside the immediate vicinity, most didn’t know much about the place, and those that did never had a whole lot to say about it.
Yes, I know that was a lot of shitting, but, I feel it was justified. The only thing I knew about the place at first was only what everyone else knew – that hours after the Event, the heavy fog that pervaded everywhere lifted, and the weather went back to normal. Except in Blue Heaven.