Макс Брукс - Devolution - A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

From everything I’m hearing, the army and the cops are being “redeployed” to Seattle to “restore order.” And they’re recalling some of our troops home from Venezuela, but it sounds like that’s going to take a long time. Some reporters are speculating about how long it’s going to delay relief efforts in the actual disaster zone, and how many more people are going to die while they wait to be rescued.

I feel so bad for all these people, and guilty that my first thought wasn’t for them. We’re really gonna be stuck all winter. No doubt about that anymore. That mental needle I’ve talked about, it’s pointing 100 percent toward Mostar. We’re stranded. That’s it. Everything we do, everything we think about, has to be devoted to surviving.

At least we don’t have to worry about injury or exposure. That’s what the radio said will be the number one and number two causes of death out there. But for us it’s food.

Food.

Last night, over a dinner of rabbit stew, I showed Mostar my “calorie calendar.” Applying her ration plan to how much edible material we had, I figured we’d run out somewhere around Christmas Eve.

“Okay.” Mostar just nodded at what I thought was a devastating fact. “Good to know.”

“Good!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How is that good?”

Mostar chewed a mouthful of stew, winced at something, then spat a shard of bone into her napkin. “Good to know if we’re getting to that point with no relief, we can half our rations, then half them again. People have lived on a lot less for a lot longer. Trust me.”

She raised her stew mug, downing the last gulp, then ran her tongue around the inside border. “Bowls next time. Easier to lick.”

“But what about when our food does run out?” I pressed. “When there’s nothing.”

“Then we eat nothing.” Mostar poured the remaining water from her glass into her mug, covered the mug with her palm, then sloshed it around for a few seconds. “We can live for a month or so like that.”

She drank the cloudy contents, licked her palm, then added, “But it’ll probably never come to that, Katie, because by that time the garden should be ready for harvest.”

“Will it?” was all I could manage. “And how much can we expect to get from two sweet potatoes and half a handful of peas?”

“No idea.” Mostar shrugged, completely unfazed that the whole endeavor might have been a giant waste of calories. “But I’m sure some of our neighbors will have come around by then and even if they don’t have too much extra food to share, some of that food might have seeds for the garden. And”—she raised her well-washed mug to the window—“there’re always more opportunities out there.”

I saw the target of her toast was a skinny squirrel poking through our now-empty apple tree.

“I might be able to make more of those traps,” she mused, “but we’ve got to be careful that none of our neighbors step in one. We can’t afford to alienate anyone. Cooperation’s more important than a quick meal.”

I’m not so sure. There are a lot more rabbit stews out there. And how long could we live off just one deer? I know Mostar’s at least considered it. The way she looked at the doe sniffing around our yard.

That’s exactly how I looked at the buck Palomino was feeding.

As I watched the girl giving away more precious apple slices to that walking feast, my eye caught a couple squirrels just chowing down on the Boothes’ herb garden. Bobbi was at her kitchen window, doing dishes, I guess. She was watching the rodents with this pained expression. Was she afraid to chase them away while her neighbor was being so “kind and generous” to these poor defenseless creatures? Or was she genuinely conflicted, caught between ingrained ideology and the cold hard truth?

I don’t know, and right now I really don’t care. I know what I was thinking, and what I saw, and smelled! I thought maybe I’d go over there to save the herbs. I wasn’t going to be aggressive, just walk loudly enough to scare the squirrels, then claim ignorance and maybe later accept a belated thank-you. I was trying to do something nice. That’s all. But as I got closer to her house…

I know she saw me. Her head didn’t move but I saw her eyes flick in my direction. I know that’s why she closed her window, and the curtains. And as she did, the faintest breath of warm air from her kitchen wafted past my nose. Fried food. Hash browns.

Potatoes!

Bitch! Yes, I said it! Fucking liar! That’s why she’d been so uncomfortable when I’d asked her. She knew she had some. She knew and she lied!

And as I write this, I don’t know who I’m more angry at. Her or me. I could have confronted her about it. Knocked on her window, totally gone apeshit in her face. Or maybe just called her out in that cold, judgy, sarcastic way Mom used to use. “Oh hi, Bobbi, I just wanted to let you know I was trying to save your herb garden just now ’cause, you know, we gotta look out for each other, right? Sharing, pulling together. Community, right? RIGHT?”

Why didn’t I do that, do anything? Why do I never—

What the hell is Dan doing? Coming around the side of the house now. This giant, bamboo pole.

Wha

At this point the a ends with a long, deep squiggle that extends to the bottom of the page.

From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

Mrs. Holland’s probably too young to have seen Fantasia, but that’s what went through my mind when I saw the animals migrate… and freeze. Remember that scene, the plant-eaters smelling the T. rex? That’s what I saw, all those skinny, starved deer suddenly raising their heads to smell the air, just like Mrs. Holland described in her journal.

Again, like with the bone fragments, I didn’t have the time or mental clarity to dwell on it. I do remember feeling sorry for them. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many animals look so hungry before. First the berry harvest, then having to flee. You could understand why so many of them were getting aggressive. I witnessed a couple squirrel fights that seemed to go on forever. Buddy of mine in another team saw two black bears just rippin’ the shit out of each other over an elk carcass. I kept praying I wouldn’t find a similar situation but with the corpse of a human refugee.

And that almost happened, not with a person, but a deer. I stumbled across this pack of coyotes gnawing on a skeleton that’d already been gnawed by something else. Coyotes are pretty wimpy by nature. They’ll almost never confront a large adult human. But this pack did. They stood their ground, growling and snapping at me. I don’t think they were looking to hunt me, but they woulda definitely fought for the last strips of meat on those bones. Even when I yelled back, made myself big, threw a couple rocks, and finally fired a shot in the air, it took the rest of my team showing up for those little buggers to finally bugger off. I’ve never, in my whole career, seen animals be that bold.

Shows you what hunger can do.

I can’t stop shaking. Half a day later and my heart still won’t slow down. I’m glad I decided to keep writing in this journal. I know you won’t see it for a while, and I know it’s probably silly to pretend like I’m still writing it to you, but just the act of writing, putting everything down on paper where I can see it, is so helpful in organizing my thoughts.

And I have so much to organize from six hours ago when I got interrupted by Dan trying to clean the solar panels. This all goes back to last night, when Mostar and I were discussing the ration plan. As she was talking about the problems of making more rabbit traps, Dan said, “We got a bigger problem.”