Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

However, granting women a voice in decision making and then institutionally ignoring them is actually sort of comforting, a familiar precollapse blanket. After being elected leader of the Cabinet of Women, Dorsal Vent wrote, “Being teased by inclusiveness and then cruelly shut out reminds me of Christmas morning.” Dorsal Vent is a former escort with a weird cut on her neck that at first everyone took for a gill-slit, a harbinger of our collective impending mutation. Even Larry Our Leader was sure we’d soon morph into semiamphibious quadrupeds, and so a mildly hysterical Base Omega spent weeks obsessing over various moles and armpit lumps.

“How can we be amphibious in the desert?” Jeff asked.

“Will my gill-slit breathe sand?” Pink Lady asked.

“This is just the sort of hysteria that keeps us from accomplishing the simplest of goals or improving our situation in any way,” Young Nick Drake said. “Which, unfortunately, points to a vacuum in leadership.”

“Quiet,” I whispered, but Young Nick Drake just spoke louder.

“My friends, if we cannot express ourselves plainly here, in the apocalypse, then why bother having mouths at all?”

Larry fumed, twirled his scepter, marched around with that Someone Wants a Taste of the Wheel look until I ran for the Freon rag and lured him back to his yurt.

But Young Nick Drake was right about one thing: turns out Dorsal Vent’s vent was just old pimp retribution uninclined to heal, which she insisted all along, but no one listened.

Because, really, what else would a mutant say?

4. Fuck your own gender, Base Omega. Gay is okay! In fact, it’s a massive biological advantage. Just keep your dance moves to yourself, Alphonso. Just don’t put any cilantro on Larry’s rat-on-a-stick, Julian.

At first, Base Omega was all, Hey folks, forget outdated societal norms concerning public fornication and scripture-based monogamy, we need to repopulate, stat! Larry’s favorite affirmation was Don’t waste it in the sand, go ahead and put that seed in a pal! But then one morning we woke up and three women were pregnant (four if you count Pink Lady, who kept shoving a pillow under her dress) and suddenly Base Omega was all, Oh, shit, we need a doctor! Plus vitamins and less-restrictive maternity wardrobes! Base Omega was all, Exactly who in this godforsaken sand pile is going to provide basic health services, let alone comprehensive postnatal care? Six months later the preemies all came together, as if by prearranged signal, pushed between bloody thighs and into the dirt. Base Omega was all , No, you bite the umbilical cord! Even so, the babies were hearty and thrived. Tiny miracles! At least until Osiris disappeared without a peep, his bucket-seat crib empty and undisturbed. Base Omega was stumped. Maybe God lifted him back to heaven on a silken throw pillow? But then Ranxerox was dragged off by a reptile that Jeff and Pink Lady swore was the size of a German shepherd. During the Day of Uncontrollable Crying, while a twenty-four-hour detail was formed to watch over Aegisth, she seems to have spontaneously combusted. All that was left was a tiny briquette, still warm, like it was just waiting for a match and stalk of mesquite.

After that, Base Omega was all, Fuck this shit , and, Hey, no one get pregnant again, ever. Okay? Please?

The future is frottage.

5. There will be games.

Every Sunday during Low Radiation Season there’s a tournament + festivities. Four teams, one bracket. The lizard jerky stores are plundered, and someone unearths two fingers of backwashed Johnnie Walker. Jeff wears his lucky cummerbund. Pink Lady puts on her was-once-paisley frock. The Penalty Box is filled with soup cans and rusty scissors.

Young Nick Drake refuses to join in.

Young Nick Drake says sports are an anachronistic vestige of the blood plunder of black lives, a sweatshop of concussions and splintered bone, and that the continued thirst for random violence after the Collapse is something any decent apocalypse would repudiate.

Larry laughs and says Young Nick Drake is just mad because he was picked last.

Larry laughs and says Young Nick Drake throws like a girl.

Young Nick Drake begs me not to play.

“Why?”

“I’m scared you’ll get hurt.”

A tear rolls down his cheek.

An actual tear. In the middle of the desert. He dabs it and rests it on the tip of my tongue as the Clanging Pot of Beginning clangs.

I make it to the opening ceremonies just in time. There are fireworks (throwing lots of sand in the air) and a speech from Larry Our Leader about not hiding random scavenge from Larry Our Leader ( You tell them LOL! ).

Then Dorsal Vent rolls out the first iguana bladder.

I play for Team So What. We’re young and fast. Bob Her New Boyfriend Who Swears He Didn’t Kill Dad plays for Team Dreaming of Waffles. They’re old and slow. It’s the first to a dozen, win by two. Winners get double rations for a week. Losers are sent on Go Hike Twenty Miles Looking for Food That Isn’t There patrol.

Last year’s losers never came back.

Same with the year before.

The smart money is not on Team Dreaming of Waffles.

6. Do you really give a crap about #6? No, you want to hear more about Young Nick Drake.

Fine. He’s fifteen. He has soulful green eyes and a wispy goatee and plays delicate songs about collapse and redemption on the lizard-tendon guitar. He wears a black trench coat, always, even in the worst of the heat. Jeff and Pink Lady say it’s because he’s hiding a gill slit. So not! Young Nick Drake speaks with a delicate lisp and lives in a ’68 Citroën that smells like old man hospital sac (which he burns various desert herbs to get rid of, but only makes it smell 40 percent more like old man hospital sac + lightly seared with new potatoes and pistachio chutney). Young Nick Drake sits near the Dictate Crate during tribal meetings and stares at me with an expression that says he’d happily carry all of apocalypse on his thin shoulders if I’d only ask.

Which makes it hard to concentrate.

Jeff and Pink Lady say, “We don’t trust him! He’s not one of us! You know nothing about his sensitive poet ass!”

Which is true, because Young Nick Drake refuses to say anything at all about his past except that his sister jumped off the Ninety-Seventh floor of an unnamed Steve Wynn property two days after the Collapse. And I only know that because it’s also the chorus of his best song, “My Sister Jumped Off the Ninety-Seventh Floor of an Unnamed Steve Wynn Property Two Days After the Collapse Blues.”

Base Omega was all, Yeah, chief, that’s a real sad story.

Base Omega was all, Yeah, champ, that’s totally tragic.

But they knocked off the crap once Young Nick Drake strummed those gila tendons around the campfire. Then Base Omega nodded in time and sang along with the catchy hooks and hooky melodies and forgot that they didn’t trust Young Nick Drake as far as they could throw him, which probably wasn’t high enough to clear the fence anyway.

Young Nick Drake tells me he’s working on a brand new song.

A ballad.

He says it’s called “Krua by the Glow of a Thousand Burning Well Fires.”

Sure, it’s pure corn.

But there are times when I watch his fingers ping ping ping over the strings, nails polished black with melted tar, lips parted wetly in song, and think, well, you know, maybe .

7. Stealing is venal. Thieves will be flayed. Food thieves will spend a week in the Box. Minus a hand.

The Box is really just the trunk of a Kia Sorento buried up to the wheel wells next to Base Omega’s latrine. Which is really just the camper shell of an Isuzu Trooper dragged over a hole in the tar that’s not nearly deep enough.