John Adams - Wastelands 2

The jeep was one of those reversed, driver-on-the-right types the post office had used back in the once-upon-a-time of before the Doomwar. The dead mailman—what was left of him—was slumped over on the far side. Gordon avoided looking at the skeleton for the moment.

The storage area of the truck was nearly full with canvas sacks. The smell of old paper filled the small cabin at least as much as the faded odor of the mummified remains.

With a hopeful oath, Gordon snatched up a metal flask from the shift well. It sloshed! To have held liquid for sixteen years or more it had to be well sealed. Gordon swore as he twisted and pried at the cap. He pounded it against the door frame, then attacked it again.

Frustration made his eyes tear, but at last he felt the cap give. Soon he was rewarded with a slow, rough turning, and then the heady, distantly familiar aroma of whiskey.

Maybe I’ve been a good boy after all.

Maybe there is indeed a God.

He took a mouthful and coughed as the warming fire streamed down. Two more small swallows and he fell back against the seat, breathing almost a sigh.

He wasn’t ready yet to face removing the jacket draped over the skeleton’s narrow shoulders. Gordon grabbed sacks—bearing the imprint U.S. POSTAL SERVICE—and piled them about himself. Leaving a narrow opening in the door to let in fresh mountain air, he burrowed under the makeshift blankets with his bottle.

At last he looked over at his host, contemplating the dead civil servant’s American flag shoulder patch. He unscrewed the flask and this time raised the container toward the hooded garment.

“Believe it or not, Mr. Postman, I always thought you folks gave good and honest service. Oh, people used you as whipping boys a lot, but I know what a tough job you all had. I was proud of you, even before the war.

“But this, Mr. Mailman”—he lifted the flask—“this goes beyond anything I’d come to expect! I consider my taxes very well spent.” He drank to the postman, coughing a little but relishing the warm glow.

He settled deeper into the mail sacks and looked at the leather jacket, ribs serrating its sides, arms hanging loosely at odd angles. Lying still, Gordon felt a sad poignancy—something like homesickness. The jeep, the symbolic, faithful letter carrier, the flag patch… they recalled comfort, innocence, cooperation, an easy life that allowed millions of men and women to relax, to smile or argue as they chose, to be tolerant with one another—and to hope to be better people with the passage of time.

Gordon had been ready, today, to kill and to be killed. Now he was glad that had been averted. They had called him “Mr. Rabbit” and left him to die. But it was his privilege, without their ever knowing it, to call the bandits “countrymen,” and let them have their lives.

Gordon allowed sleep to come and welcomed back optimism—foolish anachronism that it might be. He lay in a blanket of his own honor, and spent the rest of the night dreaming of parallel worlds.

Snow and soot covered the ancient tree’s broken branches and seared bark. It wasn’t dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren’t doing well. The end was near.

A shadow loomed, and a creature settled onto the drifts, an old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree.

Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest—a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ruined wood on the ground, piling the bits higher until it was clear that it was not a nest at all.

It was a pyre.

The bloody, dying thing settled in atop the kindling, and crooned soft music unlike anything ever heard before. A glow began to build, surrounding the beast soon in a rich purple lambience. Blue flames burst forth.

And the tree seemed to respond. Aged, ruined branches curled forward toward the heat, like an old man warming his hands. Snow shivered and fell, the green patches grew and began to fill the air with a fragrance of renewal.

It was not the creature in the pyre that was reborn, and even in sleep, that surprised Gordon. The great bird was consumed, leaving only bones.

But the tree blossomed, and from its flowering branches things uncurled and drifted off into the air.

He stared in wonderment when he saw that they were balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships. Dreams.

They floated away in all directions, and the air was filled with hope.

A camp robber bird, looking for blue jays to chase, landed on the jeep’s hood with a hollow thump. It squawked—once for territoriality and once for pleasure—then began poking through the thick detritus with its beak.

Gordon awakened to the tap-tapping sound. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and saw the gray-flanked bird through the dust-smeared window. It took him moments to remember where he was. The glass windshield, the steering wheel, the smell of metal and paper, all felt like a continuation of one of the night’s most vivid dreams, a vision of the old days before the war. He sat dazedly for a few moments, sifting through feelings while the sleep images unraveled and drifted away, out of grasp.

Gordon rubbed his eyes, and presently began to consider his situation.

If he hadn’t left an elephant’s trail on his way into this hollow last night, he should be perfectly safe right now. The fact that the whiskey had lain here untouched for sixteen years obviously meant the bandits were lazy hunters. They had their traditional stalks and blinds, and had never bothered fully to explore their own mountain.

Gordon felt a bit thick-headed. The war had begun when he was eighteen, a college sophomore, and since then there had been little chance to build a tolerance to eighty-proof liquor. Added to yesterday’s series of traumas and adrenaline rushes, the whiskey had left him cottonmouthed and scratchy behind the eyelids.

He regretted his lost comforts as much as ever. There would be no tea this morning. Nor a damp washcloth, or venison jerky for breakfast. No toothbrush.

Still, Gordon tried to be philosophical. After all, he was alive. He had a feeling there would be times when each of the items stolen from him would be “missed most of all.”

With any luck, the Geiger counter wouldn’t fall into that category. Radiation had been one of his main reasons for going ever westward, since leaving the Dakotas. He had grown tired of walking everywhere a slave to his precious counter, always afraid it would be stolen or would break down. Rumor had it that the West Coast had been spared the worst of the fallout, suffering more, instead, from plagues wind-borne from Asia.

That had been the way with that strange war. Inconsistent, chaotic, it had stopped far short of the spasm everyone had predicted. Instead it was more like a shotgun blast of one midscale catastrophe after another. By itself, anyone of the disasters might have been survivable.

The initial “techno-war” at sea and in space might not have been so terrible had it remained contained, and not spilled over onto the continents.

The diseases weren’t as bad as in the Eastern Hemisphere, where the Enemy’s weapons went out of control in his own populace. They probably wouldn’t have killed so many in America, had the fallout zones not pushed crowds of refugees together, and ruined the delicate network of medical services.

And the starvation might not have been so awful had terrified communities not blocked rails and roads to keep out the germs.

As for the long-dreaded atom, only a tiny fraction of the world’s nuclear arsenals were used before the Slavic Resurgence collapsed from within and unexpected victory was declared. Those few score bombs were enough to trigger the Three-Year Winter, but not a Century-Long Night that might have sent Man the way of the dinosaurs. For weeks it appeared that a great miracle of restraint had saved the planet.