Reboot

Message sent by radio: “My name is Robert Morgan. I was witness to the worst of crimes. I witnessed the actions of one man that led to this horrible war that killed so many people. These actions were done solely for the purpose of personal gain. I have irrefutable proof of this. It will be made available to all of you. President Mooney is directly responsible for the war. President Mooney is responsible for billions of deaths and must stand trial and face his peers. President Mooney is a murderer and must face justice.”

We left it on repeat. It would keep going until the juice ran out.

“Now what?” asked Dutch when we walked out of the radio station. It was a sunny day, blue skies. We’d just crossed a serious line. One we’d wanted to cross ever since the attack on the island. So now we deflated a bit. No one answered for a while. Tony, Rudy, Rourke, Dutch, William and I were standing together in a group in the middle of the street, but we were all lost in our own thoughts.

“How many people will hear this?” I asked.

“Everyone within a hundred miles in every direction,” said Rourke. “I’d say about twenty thousand people. Maybe more.”

“What will they do?” asked Dutch?

“Not much I suppose. What can they do?” continued Rourke. “One thing is for sure, the message will be rebroadcast. People will talk. Hundreds of thousands of people will hear it in the end. But you’ll have to keep at it. You have to follow up on this, make the rounds, go show your proof, hold absentee courts. Everyone must see your proof. More importantly, stay alive.”

“Well. I guess we might as well start with Veneta,” I said. “Then, we’ll tour these United States. What do you say Dutch? William?”

“I had nothing planned on my agenda. You?” William looked at Dutch.

“Sounds like fun,” said Dutch.

“What about you, Rourke? What’re you going to do?” I asked him.

“I’ve got my own responsibilities, I have to organize this rabble of mine, but I’ll be around. I’ll help on another front.”

“So you won’t stay here then?” Asked Dutch.

“No. No. I don’t think so. This place is blown now. Maybe I’ll head east. Go check out Idaho Falls. Nice place Idaho Falls. Sounds peaceful.” He smiled. “Or maybe west. Veneta you say? Nice town? I’ll keep track of you. I’ll get my group ready for what I’m pretty sure will happen.”

Despite Dutch’s efforts, there was a somber mood in the group. A feeling of inevitability, of consequences out of our control. We decided to stick around for one or two days to gather information and tools, useful things that could benefit Veneta. But it quickly became clear that the whole place had already been carefully pillaged. We decided to spend the night in the house that had given up its generator for us and then we’d split up the next day. Rourke would go back to his camp to talk to his people, to decide on a new place to go, and we’d go exploring around Eugene. We wanted to get a better picture of the results of the war.

But first, that meant an evening together. We headed back to the house and got ready. We all had jobs to do. Tony and Rudy were in charge of the table, plates cutlery, glasses. They even found a crystal decanter. Rourke was in charge of the BBQ. Dutch and William went to gather wood. I organized something to drink. We had brought various fruit drinks with us.

Dutch and Rourke built a fire in the back yard and put together a nice meal of bbq’d corn and other veggies courtesy of Mr. Rourke and then outdid himself. He brought out an absolute luxury, ribs. Beef ribs for the BBQ.

“How on earth did you get that?” I almost cried as he put them on a grill to roast.

Rourke smiled. “One of the things we did at our camp was to take very good care of the animal population that was available to us. We have beehives; we grow many different kinds of crops, sheep, cattle, chickens. Hell we even have a fish farm. We don’t have ribs every day of course, but we manage the herd, and once in a while, we allow ourselves a little something special.”

My mouth was watering.. It would be the first time I ate beef in…

“Bees?” asked William, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yep. We figured that most bees have probably been wiped out because of fallout and lack of food. So we harvested bees. Pretty important if you ever want fruit again,” answered Rourke.

“Of course. What do you mean ‘harvested’?” asked Dutch.

“Well, all you need is one queen and then you can make others.”

“No shit? How do you make a queen?” Dutch was really interested in this.

“Interesting question actually.” He kept talking as he basted the ribs. “You take an existing queen, clip off one wing to ground her and move her to another hive that’s been organized with soon to hatch nurse bees, brood cells and honey and pollen. That’s about it,” said Rourke.

“You know Rourke, I really didn’t see you as a beekeeper. You’re full of surprises,” said Dutch. “What happens to the queenless hive?”

“That’s interesting too.” Rourke was like an eight-year-old kid, all excited. “They simply create a new Queen. Worker bees and queen bees, you see, come from the same type of eggs. A worker is a sexually undeveloped female, while the prolific queen—an Insect that can lay up to fifteen hundred eggs a day during the height of the summer season—is a fully matured reproducer. The “secret ingredient” that makes one female egg develop into a lowly laborer and another into the hive’s highness is a bee-made food called royal jelly. No one understands how royal jelly works, or even exactly what it contains—but we do know that queen bees are raised entirely on royal jelly, while workers-to-be are fed the stuff for only the first three days of their lives. Within ten days, the bees create other queen cells. You simply take out the queen cells, and use these—along with some brood—in order to start more small colonies.”

“I’ll be damned,” said William. “That is fantastic news. It means we can resupply entire varieties of flowers vegetables and fruits.”

“Absolutely.”

“Spices, tomatoes…” added Dutch. “mmmmmm…”

“Speaking of which, here we go..” And Rourke reached into a backpack and took out a few huge tomatoes and threw one at each of us. We reverently ate them whole, like apples. They tasted much better than any tomato I’d ever had before.

Rourke went on talking while he basted the meat. We were sitting around the table, listening. “The problem isn’t growing food, we can do that easily enough; the problem is the amount. We can’t grow food like we used to, for millions of people. But a small community can sustain itself readily. Just takes a bit of organization.”

“And you have all that up there in your camp, so why leave it?”

“Because it was never meant to be our home. It’s a hiding place, that’s all. And it’s also a place full of bad memories. We need to find a home. Big towns will be more trouble than they’re worth so a small-ish abandoned, more or less clean town is what we want. We’ll simply rebuild it.”

“Who grows the food?” I asked.

“Everyone. It’s a community project. The kids help too. Frankly, our people are happier than ever. We’re back to working and playing together instead of separately. Like before…”

“There must be the occasional slip up?” asked William, skeptical.

“Of course. Some people are difficult, or want to be left alone, but since they have no TV, they need something to do and they help out in other ways. TV was the great destroyer. It probably led to the war I think. People grown accustomed to being alone, social culture gets wasted, it’s easier to push a button when your value of life has deteriorated to nothing from lack of saying fucking hello.”

“I think sunglasses caused the war, or maybe Wi-Fi signals,” said Dutch. But everyone ignored him. Rourke kept going.

“Without television, people seek each other out and want to keep busy. You don’t keep busy by yourself. Even the more grumpy people in our group eventually became more social. There was this one older man, Judge Herman, a ratty ol’ fart, you know, the typical ‘get off my lawn’ mean ol geezer; used to sit on his porch alone or sit inside all day. One day he saw a kid playing with a broken doll and he went up to the little girl and he asked her if he could play with it for a day. The girl said yes and gave him the doll. He went back inside. Meanwhile this story made the rounds and everyone was wondering what the heck Judge Hermit was doing with that doll. Well the next day the little girl came ‘round again to get her doll back and ol’ Herman had fixed it. It was like brand new. You should’ve seen the girl. Her reaction was priceless. So after that kids started playing around that house more often with their broken toys. Now that man is a prized member of our community. What do you think would’ve happened to him if he’d had a TV? Nothing, that’s what. He would’ve died in his chair watching that damn thing as it sucked the last remaining light in his mind.”

“Nice,” continued William.

“We had a few hard cases that didn’t fit in no matter what.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We are a survivalists group. Militia. Some of those people are simply nuts and there isn’t much you can do about it.”

“What kinda nuts? Asked Dutch.

“Paranoid. Delusions of grandeur. Bullies. Some people were simply twisted buttfucks who wanted to kill. People who don’t play well with others. You know… We had to take steps.”

“Steps?”

“We exiled some. Executed others.”

“Exile? Yeah. We had to do that too. What happened to those people? How did you decide to exile them?” I asked.

“Dunno what happened to them, but my guess is they died. It was bad out there and we all knew it. In fact, the threat of exile scared everyone into behaving. I decided everything. We had a committee, they made suggestions, but in the end it was me. After a while, when people stopped trying to get in, some of our people left to start on their own. I think they did ok. They saw themselves as settlers, like pioneers in the old west you know?”

“How bad was it? When people tried to get into your camp,” I asked.

“Let’s just say I had some tough decisions to make and leave it at that,” answered Rourke as he stared sadly into the fire.

“Musta been pretty bad,” I said.

He shook it off, shivered and looked up at me. “Tell me about more about Mooney? You’re absolutely sure it wasn’t an accident or policy gone wrong?”

“We thought about every possibility. The fact is, we don’t know exactly who sent the message through my translations, but Mooney is the only person who could have benefited. The client companies used were indirectly headed by Mooney. The messages were clearly meant to start troubles, but we think that he didn’t mean to start a war. He just wanted to make President Davies look bad and things went out of control too fast. He caused the war because he wanted to be President. It’s as simple as that. And now that man is potentially the most powerful man on Earth and I can’t have that.”

“The staggering stupidity of the man. The risk he took. He killed billions. Count on me. I’ll do anything I can to help.”

“Yeah,” added William. “We’ll need it.”

The ribs were delicious. So good that we didn’t talk while we ate. We went to bed. I took what must have been the bedroom of a teenager from all the heavy metal posters on the wall. It felt a bit creepy sleeping in his bed. But I was exhausted.

In the morning, we had breakfast, lots of coffee and then it was time to go. Rourke stood up and came to face me.

“I want to tell you to be careful and I’m sure you’ll be tested. You’re about to become famous, and that’s not good. Not yet anyway.” Then he looked at William and Dutch. ”But I have a feeling you’ll be ok.” And with that he clapped all three of us on the shoulders one after the other and left to go back to his people.

Rourke told us not to go east, there’s nothing there. Walterville was a wasteland. So was Bend. North was bad also. Junction City, Harrisburg, they’re ok, but Coburg, Halsey, Brownsville, all gone. All the same fate as Eugene. So we’d head south for Cottage Grove twenty-two miles away…“Nice covered bridges”, said Mayor Stevens.

So we hopped in the car and Tony drove us on the 5-South.

“It’s a small place,” said Rudy. “Only ten thousand people. And it’s a typical small American town. And yes, something about covered bridges, small wooden cottages, wooden church, rivers and forests. “

“Have you been there before?” I asked.

“Yes. They survived, like us, by securing their town. I think we’ll have no trouble getting in. We’ve been in contact. Mostly with engineers and mechanics so far. We talk cars.” He smiled.

“It won’t take much of a leap for people looking for us to guess that we ended up in Cottage Grove,” said Dutch. “Christ, we could be bringing hell to every place we visit.”

“Can’t be helped.” I said. “If they hunt us down, if they make enough noise, they’ll be doing us a favor.”

“How’s that?” asked William.

“They’ll piss people off.”