A quote: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” ~~ Philip K. Dick
I’ll start with a story …
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I finally fessed up on the third date. She nodded as if she didn’t care but her eyes gave it away. Never a #4
I’m a Shopper. One of the better ones, since I’ve been doing this five years and I’m still alive. No longer sane but still here. Still bringing home the bacon from City.
If too many years away, the more a shopper stands out. Standing out means getting dead.
Yet, I’m here, still shopping. Ya want a person? Intelligence? Count of dead kids on the City streets? My pleasure.
I want City to burn. Every m.f.ing bit.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Sheila Garrett says: Antonio looked at me; there were six of them. The one in front looked about fifteen, holding what looked like a chef’s knife; the rest in their twenties and thirties, two more with knives drawn. In Germany you can’t carry guns and Antonio is new to hand to hand fighting. I draw my karambits.
I guess we looked easy, a man and woman walking home after a movie, maybe. Maybe they wanted to blood the kid.
When I know what’s happening again the kid has flung down his knife and crawled behind a dumpster. He runs while I’m begging my bodyguard not to die. The police take forever to get there.
Autumn Belfontaine had spent the entire evening in the station offices, covering the election news as it came in. When she’d been young she’d dreamed of the exciting life of the ace reporter, scooping the competition with an exclusive lead.
The actual work of a reporter had turned out to be ninety percent tedium and ten percent sheer terror. She was pretty sure Mike had kept her watching the wire service feeds all evening because of concern about the after effects of her experience covering the demonstration in St Paul last month that had turned ugly. In particular, he’d slipped copies of her tapes to Governor Thorne out in California, so she could use them as evidence that the police had initiated the violence — which might make Autumn a target for some kind of black-ops action, especially given that she was herself the daughter of a clone of Alan Shepard.
However, it meant she’d spent the afternoon and evening watching in helpless horror as one after another state suffered violence at the polls — and while the national media tried to spin it as the work of the Sharp Resistance, Autumn’s experience at the Statehouse the previous month made her suspect those words.
Now she was facing the morning after. The elections were suspended “until order was restored,” which was effectively an open-ended suspension of the political process. The nation was now in uncharted waters. What would happen when the current terms of Senators and Representatives ran out, if the crisis continued? Would Flanagan rule by decree, or tell state officials to appoint replacements?
For that matter, what would be the status of state and local races? Could state governors or legislatures set new election dates and tell the Feds to go jump in an icy lake? Minnesota certainly had plenty to choose from.
On the other hand, Autumn took hope in the knowledge that both Governor Liebowitz and Senator Rostov had narrowly escaped being killed by their own bodyguard details, and were now reporting from safe places that they were alive and in the hands of people committed to the restoration of the Republic .
The City on the Hill might be battered, but it was not destroyed.
GWB says: If the dog hadn’t died, I’d be titling these missives “Travels With Charlie.” No, the dogs name wasn’t Charlie. It didn’t matter, though, since he had died a month before I began this journey – my journey through America in these times.
Each city or town visited reveals something of what happened in the Great Collapse, and something of the character that caused it, and the character that might bring us back. Each place has its own story. Too many are similar, but each one has something of its own, from NYC’s still standing Lady of Liberty to Detroit’s still burning flames to Eventown’s wooden palisade and cavalry unit to, in some places, vast fields once again golden in the late summer afternoon sun.
In each place, I break out pen and paper to write my discoveries down. I then break out the radio and read my words out to what remains of the world. Maybe no one hears (though I know some do, as they recognize my voice when I appear in their town). But I make a vinyl record, too, with my ancient equipment. And the paper copy and the vinyl record go in a sealed container in that town, location marked and recorded so that some future generation can judge me for my words and observations.
Tonight I will sleep securely, in an actual bed inside actual walls and under a roof. With my scribblings secured in the basement of this survivor and rebuilder family’s home, tomorrow I will move another step closer to the Cascades, and we will see what America’s remnant has to offer me. God bless and good night, America.
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