Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office (3 page)

The worst part was, the sailor was no longer breathing. Todd and I looked at each other – we both could just... tell. Nick seemed to be getting worse. We couldn’t both try to resuscitate the sailor and keep Nick from freezing to death at the same time. So, God help us Charles, we lowered the sailor out of the bed and huddled around Nick.

It was a few hours later when Deanne came home. She let out a little yelp when she saw us all together in the bed, not to mention the body on the floor.

In spite of himself – he’s not the brightest guy – Todd laughed and said, “Betcha wish she was in here with you instead of me, huh?” Nick turned his head just enough to catch Todd’s eye, then purred and smiled at him. At that point, I knew he’d recover just fine.

We buried the sailor two days later at the botanical garden entrance. Nick was still weak at the time, but wanted us to give him a pencil and paper. When we got back from the burial, he showed us a shakily written note and said the sailor had been yelling something at him, then talking to him, then whispering, and that he was trying to listen to what he was saying after he’d dragged the guy onto the shore. Nick says he wrote down the words phonetically so they’d make sense to him. He says he remembered it perfectly. Well... I don’t think Nick really knows what he’s talking about when he says phonetically, but regardless, we think the language is Mandarin.

This is borne out by the evidence recovered from the vessel itself. A couple sailors decided to tail the barge, which kept drifting south through the sound. Eventually it washed ashore on Bainbridge island. It was empty, except for some paperwork in the bridge.

We don’t mean to pressure you into doing translation work for us, but we paid quite a bit to get this missive and its accompanying bottle of cheer into your hot little hands. Two whole smoked salmon and a pint jar of roe. Steep, but totally worth it all the same. We think the couriers are upset that folks are giving them more to deliver in the early spring and late fall, when it really sucks to ride cross country. (We’re not saying that you shouldn’t send us more mail whenever you want, though!)

Anyway, we wouldn’t have mailed this to you, but we can’t get any Chinese folks to talk to us. A whole lot of people around here bought into the rumors that the Chinese were to blame for the lights going out, the cars stopping working, etc. Deanne said that she overheard a member of the mayor’s staff passing on the latest rumor – that he knew for a fact that “The Yellows” had seeded the clouds and somehow caused this year’s late hard frost (ruined the apple crop). Deanne apparently confronted him about it, asked how they could do that when no plane’s flown here or anywhere else for almost a decade. She swears he mouthed the word “gliders”.

Well, with idiotic ideas like that in abundance around here (even amongst some of the most progressive, decent folks in town), a bit of violence seemed very likely. And, sure enough, after word of the “saboteurs’ barge” got out, a pretty nasty mob took it to the international district. Thankfully, nobody got killed or anything, but some eyes were blacked and a few storefronts – previously abandoned, most of them – got damaged. The end result was that lines were drawn and pretty much everyone of Asian descent has sealed theirself up in the international district. It really does suck. The mayor, at Deanne’s urging, is making peaceful overtures to the leaders in the district. And, despite Nick’s honest-to-Christ heroic efforts to save the barge’s last survivor, it doesn’t seem that they’re coming around. There’s some old adage that goes like, “A million attaboys don’t equal one gotcha,” and it has certainly rang true in this instance. But, we’re not done trying. The pages attached are copies of Nick’s – we kept the originals, just in case the mayor’s efforts pay off. Regardless, if you can figure it out we’d really love to know what it says, if only to honor the memory of the men who died on the barge. Given, of course, that you can actually decipher Nick’s handwriting (you should have seen the original one he scribbled out when he was just coming out of his hypothermia). Hee!

All our love to you and Jean (and little Jean or Charlie).

Signed,

The Ballard Posse

Deanne Nicole Nick

“Neh-eee, kay. Yinyongkey. Yooawn shing meeawn bow. Keykey.” –Nick

To: Fred Whitman, Kansas City, MO

From: Olive Barnes, Eureka, CA

May 14th, 20+7

Dearest Fred,

Hello from me and all the Eureka Public Library crew. Well, what few of us there are still employed here.

Hope all has been well for you and your family down in KC. Haven’t heard very much from our super-extended family lately. Have you and Lisa tied the knot? Any little Freds on the way?

We are simply so isolated up here, so far off the major roads that we rarely get any outside news. Our courier only comes three or four times a year, and he or she is almost always forced to stay several days. It always turns into a rather weird event, with the courier getting brought all kinds of really good food and treats and even booze, if the local trees produce any fruit. Last time he (our courier is usually a he) relayed to us some weird rumors from up north... after gorging himself on salmon and cheese and lackluster perry, that is. Something about a boat full of Korean or Chinese saboteurs getting found out near Olympia...? So strange – what possible motive could there be? There’s almost nothing mechanical to sabotage now. Well, it’s doubtful that you’ve heard anything about that, you old flatlander. Bet you have some odd stories of your own.

We actually saw something extremely strange three weeks, maybe almost a month ago. Couple things, actually. It was mid-day on a Saturday, and Gary and I were working in the garden. I raise the veggies and a few chickens, and Gary has a booming ganja garden. (I don’t smoke it, and Gary smokes very little, but we get a great barter for it at the market.) Just both of us on our knees, toiling away when we heard an all-encompassing boom all of a sudden, then a roaring, rushing sound. Well, you just don’t hear those now, you know? So we both sprang up like a couple of meerkats and started looking up. Saw a huge ball of fire just streaking across the sky, trailing smoke and debris. It plunged out of our sight pretty quick and then we heard another gigantic boom. We had a town hall meeting that evening and discussed what it might have been. Most folks thought it was a meteorite. Others said they tracked it and saw it crash out in the bay. Well, most everyone is no longer very skittish about things around here, but I can say for us, anyway, that we didn’t sleep too well the next one or two nights. It was our understanding that meteors were prone to running in packs, so to speak, and we weren’t sure if the one that had buzzed Eureka was a loner or the alpha. Know what I mean? Well, four days went by, and neither we nor anyone else had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, until a young lady – maybe 14 – came up to the reference desk carrying something really weird looking. It took me a few minutes to recognize what it was, but finally I figured out that it was part of a small photovoltaic panel. She said she had found it down by the bay docks. We’ve all seen some odd things come out of the bay now and then, right? But the panel looked halfway melted. Things were a bit busy – more on that later – but I asked her to meet me down there around six. So I rode down there as the library was closing, but I couldn’t get near the docks. There was a huge crowd of people there, and it was impossible to get through.

I finally saw the girl I’d met with earlier in the day. There was this sparkle in her eye, and she breathlessly told me all about the satellite washing up to the shore. She seemed truly excited that what was basically a two-ton re-entry missile had missed razing and/or setting fire to of her hometown by the narrowest of margins and plunged into a nearby body of water.

Can you imagine the panic had we all had foreknowledge of this event? Mass media-type news reporting, I mean. I suppose the folks at NASA would have been able to guide the satellite elsewhere, further out to the Pacific, maybe, but who knows? Eureka would have been emptied out in half a day. Nobody here would have eaten fish out of the bay for months, probably at least a year. It would have been a superfund site or some such affair. There would have been congressional investigations, hearings, etc etc. And rightly so. But now? Now it’s a sideshow for kids and adults alike.

I guess that... things have shifted at such a basic level. For us, here, anyway – guess I can’t speak for you and yours. But I... but we – I’ve discussed this with Gary, so I think I can speak for him, as well – feel simultaneously empowered by our new relevance to everyone else in Eureka (and their reciprocally increased relevance to us) and diminished by both the disconnect we have with almost everyone else outside town (Except you, sweetheart! Well, and everyone else I write, of course. But it’s not immediate the way it used to be, you understand?) and our newfound ambivalent attitude towards nature. Again, maybe it is different for you and yours in Kansas City – is it still pretty big, or has there been migration away from it? Couldn’t be larger than it used to be, could it? (We had our fair share of deaths the first couple years here, but were spared the horrors of what happened in the metro areas. Especially Los Angeles – so depressing to think about.)

We still really love the fact that we’re in such a beautiful area, but there are a couple things that lessen its general importance to us. First, I mean, it can’t talk back. One of my most favorite patrons ever was this Nam vet named Tim. Hate using the word grizzled, but it fits him so well. Left arm amputated just below the elbow, had one of those crude, hook-like prosthetics but only wore it maybe once a month. It was always a shock when I saw it, because he came in almost every day before the lights went dark. Simply the nicest person you’d ever want to meet. Quiet guy, but not in a creepy way, just so low-key. First time I saw him was in 1999 or so. Seems like forever ago. Anyway, he’d come in an hour after opening and sit in one of the upright chairs at a table (not those cushy ones most of the others patrons prefer) and read the daily Times. The morning after the entire modern world went to hell he was at the front door a little bit late. Well, everyone else was a little bit late, too – had to walk! And he was at the periodical rack pretty quick but there was no paper for him. So he sat in his same chair for a minute, then came back and asked me what I thought was happening. Why it was so quiet. And I’d noticed that the lights were out – hard to miss, despite having pretty good daylighting in the library – but hadn’t even taken a listen to anything all morning. I’d just been in such a rush, thinking it was an above-average pain in the ass day with no alarm, no shower and a fritzing car. But then, I heard what he heard. In retrospect, there always seemed to be a rustle, a vibration that wasn’t even part of the air when everything was still running. It was in everything you touched, it seemed. Maybe a constant baseline subsonic automotive hum? Regardless, at that moment that he mentioned it, I noticed. It was gone – the surrounding air was so still, flat almost. I don’t mind telling you that in that moment, I got profoundly weirded out and asked him when he had noticed it. He said it woke him up, and when he woke up, he couldn’t see, and that he knew something was up at that point. And so we started talking, it seemed, to take the place of that lost noise.

He didn’t come in all that often afterwards. I think he treasured his Times more than conversation with me – and really, you can’t blame him, can you? But, maybe four or five times a month he would show up at the reference desk early in the morning, and we’d just chat. Just half an hour or so, maybe 45 minutes, but never even an hour I’m sure. And virtually always simple day-to-day stuff that, back when the lights were on and I was somehow so engaged with other things, I would have been not even impatient but downright confrontationally brusque with him over. (I still have mixed feelings about this – have I somehow plunged into welcoming full-on banality into my life to simply shut out the fact that there is no more buzzing everything-elseness vying for my attention? I’d like to think not.)

Well, so about a year and a half ago, he just faded out of existence, just disappeared. In the dead of winter, with no vehicle (bike I mean, of course), no extra food that we knew of – it was a lean harvest for everyone that year – no note left behind and no left arm. Only seeing him a few times a month, it took me at least a couple weeks to notice. And we never found him. He’s gone, no telling where. I actually contacted the lazy-assed police and they wound up checking out his tiny apartment. And now. The mornings are a lot quieter. I got really used to no coffee machine spluttering, no semi-trucks rumbling by to shake the whole library, no instant messaging software beeping at me, a myriad of nothings to listen to. Still haven’t gotten used to not hearing Tim’s voice every now and then.