The Crest

Up on the Crest, they sat on the crude wooden benches in the stone flanking tower, drinking their coffee, deep in thought.

“But some survived, right?” Lenore asked her battlement partner, Ben.

“I assume so. Maybe pockets.”

“They were beautiful.”

“Many thought so. The temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest were famous. Everybody around the world knew about these magnificent forests. They saw the images of the moss, ferns, and bearded lichens that hung from the trees. The amount of carbon they removed from the air was phenomenal too.”

“What happened?”

“Society became complacent. They disappeared quickly, right before our very eyes.”

“That fast?”

“Yep, and while the rest of the country was drying up, the Pacific Northwest was cutting its forest like Brazil was slicing and dicing the Amazon. The parallels were spooky, two of the biggest carbon sinks deteriorating at the same time.”

“And after that?”

“Right now, is after that. The Shift hit and the fires burnt most of the rest. You know there were always myths about the Pacific Northwest.”

“You mean like Sasquatch and all that?”

“Kind of, but I’m talking about mostly the myth of the pristine wilderness; the idea of the endless misty mornings on the Puget Sound, and the orcas jumping. The myth of the rain. In short, people came for the water, even though they may not have explicitly expressed their intentions as such. All that fairy-tale shit captured the imagination of others and brought, guess what... busloads of immigrants.”

“So why? It’s a wasteland now.”

“But it wasn’t always like that, but even when things started to get hot and dry up here, people couldn’t believe it, they were in denial. They still held this image in their minds of that mossy primeval forest. They romanticized about it even though it was no longer true. There’s something about the human consciousness that can’t grasp the truth. I don’t know what psychologists call this phenomenon.”

“Humans believe what they want. That’s why we have science.”

“True, but that didn’t stop the migrations. They kept telling themselves in So Cal., Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, that if shit hit the climate fan, they always had the Northwest to fall back on. We were the Plan B, the contingency.”

“And so, they came, just like my mom and dad. But there was no Plan B.”

“Sorry, but correct. And when they came, the population density increased, and each additional person destroyed a little piece of the environmental fabric and soon, the Pacific Northwest started to look like the shitty places they came from.”

“But the shift was the main culprit, right?”

“I'm not going to give you the answer you want. The land lost its resiliency because humans cut the trees, paved the roads, overhunted the forests, overfished the streams, and everybody continued to think everything was okay, and even more denial. God, after all the evidence they still thought there were endless forests and resources to be had out there. We exacerbated the Shift with our ignorance.”

Ben grew alarmed. “Fuck, we’ve been in here talking too long. We gotta go.”

Ben and Lenore went back to their patrols. They paced their own respective sections. Lenore spotted something out in the abyss with her binoculars. It was a human-form silhouette swinging from a blackened tree trunk. She focused her binoculars and saw turkey vultures sitting on it. She noticed that it was a human body on a rope. Vultures sitting on the torso pecked their eyeballs and faces. Below the corpse a pack of dogs tore at the legs, chewing the flesh off the feet, leaving nothing but bloody pulp and bones.

She grew sick to her stomach. From the uniform, it looked like a defender. Nearby, she saw a painted sign. It read.

Crefor, surrender now. You’re doomed.

She spoke on her handheld radio. “Do you see that?”

“Yep.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“FORC stalker. Gotta be him, hunting us down one by one, and then hangs the body up for all to see.”

Lenore looked unnerved. “How does he do it?”

“He lives inside the enclave. Antisis psycho.”

Lenore looked stunned. She stared at the body hanging from the tree again, fixated. The wind blew dark clouds and shadows crept over her; she felt a shiver up her spine.