Our deputy is regularly fired on by well armed men in army surplus camouflage clothing. No doubt the idiots think he’s a “Russian Lackey” or some such nonsense.
They have taken to hunting game on a massive scale, killing everything in the forest and doing a typically rotten job of butchering and preserving the meat. Our own hunters come back disgusted over the waste, often having been shot at without provocation.
I know it’s a lot to ask, but when you can spare a platoon from relocation riot duty, could you send them up here to help us root out these self-centered, hoarding, romantic scoundrels from their little filtered armories? Maybe a unit or two of the US Army will convince them that we won the war, and have to cooperate with each other from now on…
He put the letter down.
So it had been that way here, too. The cliched “last straw” had been this plague of “survivalists” — particularly those following the high priest of violent anarchy, Nathan Holn.
One of Gordon’s duties in the militia had been to help weed out some of those small gangs of city-bred cutthroats and gun nuts. The number of fortified caves and cabins his unit had found — in the prairie and on little lake islands — had been staggering… all set up in a rash of paranoia in the difficult decades before the war.
The irony of it was that we had things turned around! The depression was over. People were at work again and cooperating. Except for a few crazies, it looked like a renaissance was coming, for America and for the world.
But we forgot just how much harm a few crazies could do, in America and in the world.
Of course when the collapse did come, the solitary survivalists’ precious little fortresses did not stay theirs for long. Most of the tiny bastions changed hands a dozen or more times in the first months — they were such tempting targets. The battles had raged all over the plains until every solar collector was shattered, every windmill wrecked, and every cache of valuable medicines scattered in the never-ending search for heavy dope.
Only the ranches and villages, those possessing the right mixture of ruthlessness, internal cohesion, and common sense, survived in the end. By the time the Guard units had all died at their posts, or themselves dissolved into roving gangs of battling survivalists, very few of the original population of armed and armored hermits remained alive.
Gordon looked at the letter’s postmark again. Nearly two years after the war. He shook his head. I never knew anyone held on so long.
The thought hurt, like a dull wound inside him. Anything that made the last sixteen years seem avoidable was just too hard to imagine.
There was a faint sound. Gordon looked up, wondering if he had imagined it. Then, only slightly louder, another faint knock rapped at the door to his room.
“Come in,” he called. The door opened about halfway. Abby, the petite girl with the vaguely oriental cast to her eyes, smiled timidly from the opening. Gordon refolded the letter and slipped it into its envelope. He smiled.
“Hello, Abby. What’s up?”
“I — I’ve come to ask if there is anything else you needed,” she said a little quickly. “Did you enjoy your bath?”
“Did I now?” Gordon sighed. He found himself slipping back into Macduff’s burr. “Aye, lass. And in particular I appreciated the gift of that toothbrush. Heaven sent, it was.”
“You mentioned you’d lost yours.” She looked at the floor. “I pointed out that we had at least five or six unused ones in the storage room. I’m glad you were pleased.”
“It was your idea?” He bowed. “Then I am indeed in your debt.”
Abby looked up and smiled. “Was that a letter you were just reading? Could I look at it? I’ve never seen a letter before.”
Gordon laughed. “Oh surely you’re not that young! What about before the war?”
Abby blushed at his laughter. “I was only four when it happened. It was so frightening and confusing that I …I really don’t remember much from before.”
Gordon blinked. Had it really been that long? Yes. Sixteen years was indeed enough time to have beautiful women in the world who knew nothing but the dark age.
Amazing, he thought.
“All right, then.” He pushed the chair by his bed. Grinning, she came over and sat beside him. Gordon reached into the sack and pulled out another of the frail, yellowed envelopes. Carefully, he spread out the letter and handed it to her.
Abby looked at it so intently that he thought she was reading the whole thing. She concentrated, her thin eyebrows almost coming together in a crease on her forehead. But finally she handed the letter back. “I guess I can’t really read that well. I mean, I can read labels on cans, and stuff. But I never had much practice with handwriting and… sentences.”
Her voice dropped at the end. She sounded embarrassed, but in a totally unafraid, trusting fashion, as if he were her confessor.
He smiled. “No matter. I’ll tell you what it’s about.” He held the letter up to the candlelight. Abby moved over to sit by his knees on the edge of the bed, her eyes rapt on the pages.
“It’s from one John Briggs, of Fort Rock, Oregon, to his former employer in Klamath Falls. … I’d guess from the lathe and hobby horse letterhead that Briggs was a retired machinist or carpenter or something. Hmmm.”
Gordon concentrated on the barely legible handwriting. “It seems Mr. Briggs was a pretty nice man. Here he’s offering to take in his ex-boss’s children, until the emergency is over. Also he says he has a good garage machine shop, his own power, and plenty of metal stock. He wants to know if the man wants to order any parts made up, especially things in short supply…”
Gordon’s voice faltered. He was still so thick-headed from his excesses that it had just struck him that a beautiful female was sitting on his bed. The depression she made in the mattress tilted his body toward her. He cleared his throat quickly and went back to scanning the letter.
“Briggs mentions something about power levels from the Fort Rock reservoir… Telephones were out, but he was still, oddly enough, getting Eugene on his computer data net…”
Abby looked at him. Apparently much of what he had said about the letter writer might as well have been in a foreign language to her. “Machine shop” and “data net” could have been ancient, magical words of power.
“Why didn’t you bring us any letters, here in Pine View?” she asked quite suddenly.
Gordon blinked at the non sequitur. The girl wasn’t stupid. One could tell such things. Then why had everything he said, when he arrived here, and later at the party, been completely misunderstood? She still thought he was a mailman, as, apparently, did all but a few of the others in this small settlement.
From whom did she imagine they’d get mail?
She probably didn’t realize that the letters he carried had been sent long ago, from dead men and women to other dead men and women, or that he carried them for… for his own reasons.
The myth that had spontaneously developed here in Pine View depressed Gordon. It was one more sign of the deterioration of civilized minds, many of whom had once been high school and even college graduates. He considered telling her the truth, as brutally and frankly as he could, to stop this fantasy once and for all. He started to.
“There aren’t any letters because …”
He paused. Again Gordon was aware of her nearness, the scent of her and the gentle curves of her body. Of her trust, as well.
He sighed and looked away. “There aren’t any letters for you folks because… because I’m coming west out of Idaho, and nobody back there knows you, here in Pine View. From here I’m going to the coast. There might even be some large towns left. Maybe…”