The Crest

The Antisis moved steadily westward and the Antisis press corps, all one of them, moved with it. On a hilltop overlooking the ghost town of John Day, the Antisis Commander took out an old glass jar with a piece of cloth tied over the lip. He set the glass container into a seep and waited while the jar filled with a black slurry. He looked stoic and dignified as he poured the liquid into another jar with a comparable piece of cloth overlaying the lip. He held it up to the light and sloshed it around. He removed the covering and sat on a rock overlooking the town.

Solemnly, he drank the water, bitter but potable.

“Hold that pose.” The journalist Vark took a picture of the Commander drinking. “Perfect. The water collection scene with the jar is classic.” He shot another picture. “Good for the folks out there reading our broadsides.”

“That’s how we collect water from tainted sources. That’s not publicity, that’s survival, son,” the Commander said, getting irritated with the journalist.

“I know, Commander, no offense, and that’s great stuff, but I’m just the guy who sells your story. That’s how I think is all. My mind looks at what the public wants. Now give me something with a little more drama,” the photographer pressed.

“I don’t know what you want,” the Commander replied.

“Well, how about you stand beside those cattle carcasses over there on the flat?”

“Really?”

“Yea, that’s definitive climate nightmare shit and don’t scare away the turkey vultures, the public loves vultures eating entrails.”

“Okay.” The Commander posed in between the dead cows. “Here?”

“Yea, that’s good. Now cross your arms and look like you’re gonna kick some ass.”

The commander did as the photographer suggested.

“All right, let me get the vultures in the background. Hold it right there…. got it.”

Vark was ecstatic. “Perfect. You’ve got the charisma, Commander, and the vultures in the background, wow that’s hot stuff.”

The Commander didn’t know if Vark was serious or joking. He didn’t like to be made fun of, but the man was the best in climate-collapse journalism so he hired him.

Vark covered everything from Cat 6 hurricanes, to collapsing glaciers in the Himalayas, to epic dust bowls. He’d seen hundreds of towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Eastern Colorado abandoned for want of water. He covered that, photographed it, wrote about the entire scene, screen doors flapping in the wind, dust blowing down the street, old folks left to fend for themselves, a dustbowl mommy holding her baby. Dorothy Lange, eat your heart out. As a kid, he’d been a big fan of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and the Joad family. He reminisced. My hero Tom Joad, and Henry Fonda. God that guy could act.

The Grapes of Wrath grabbed him hook, line, and sinker. He’d always wanted to live in a dust bowl after that. Odd, to have as your leading life goal to live in a dried up shithole of a town. Maybe that’s what lured him into this field. He was a callous son of a bitch. He knew he had to be mean during the Shift, but he did have a soft spot for the victims, particularly the wildlife. In Vark's mind, the animals had no choice in the matter, they suffered, but humans created the Shift, they were indifferent to the Shift, they were shall we say...expendable.

They no longer called them “Okies” either, they had other nasty names for all the migrants of the Shift: nomad scum, Cali-trash, empath pussies, Antisis psychos, science-dicks, carrion eaters, crow eaters and so on. They even had a word for those groups who were cannibals, they called them wendigos. The wendigos fucking scared Vark. He came across human bones in a giant pot one day while out in Nevada. He remembered the scene, nope, he didn’t do cannibal stories, he drew the line.

“We’re gonna be at the Crest in a week,” the Commander told Vark. “I expect some good stories.”

“You got it. I’ll get you overlooking a canyon and looking fucking stoic as hell.”

The Commander smiled.

“Time for the broadcast. All right, let’s start in a half hour.”

Vark unpacked the portable radio transmitter and cranked up the portable generator. After getting the microphone ready, he called over the Antisis leader.

“All set, Commander, you ready?”

“Yep.”

Vark held up five fingers and spoke. “Five, four, three, two, one. We’re live,” he said. “To our listening audience across the wilderness of good old Oeste Americano. We bring you the Commander of the Antisis.”

The leader spoke into the microphone. “To our fighting men and women on the front lines. We are the sons and daughters born of the desert, and blessed by God almighty. With this announcement, I have created a new state called the State of Peregrine. A new day has begun. Under this new state, there will be no science, no agriculture, no factories. People will live as free men and women.”

“So, tell me, Commander, what do you hope to accomplish with this so-called State of Peregrine? Isn’t a state contradictory to your decentralized anarcho-primitivist worldview?” Vark asked.

“Not at all, we believe that individuals should de-escalate civilization’s scientific momentum and disengage from its apparatus entirely—which includes the abandonment of agriculture for a hunter-gatherer existence. The State of Peregrine is set up to implement that decentralization, giving power to small groups and clans.”

“Really, Commander, the listeners out there should give up breakfast cereal for camas bulbs and grasshoppers?”

The Commander laughed. “Well, we’ve already destroyed most of the GMO corn. We rely on heirlooms as our seed supply, passed down from generation to generation. As for the food companies, we’ve burnt them to the ground, and others like them. Permafrost is next.”

“Okay, all jokes aside, what if there isn’t enough food to hunt and gather for the population we have.”

“We imagine that 50 million people could live on the North American continent adequately.”

“So, you’re saying that 300 million of us are going to have to go off and disappear in the woods somewhere. Now that’s a population crash for sure.”

“Not saying that, in fact, most will die of disease and old age. We won’t have to resort to anything drastic.”

"What about the Alberta Complex?"

"What? A bunch of communists up in a defunct Canadian province. Ha, you've got to be kidding me. The State of Peregrine is the future for our wandering friends."

"Not kidding, I just know that it's a new place for migrants."

"As I mentioned before, the Alberta Complex is a fairy tale, a manufactured fiction for the uneducated millions on the road, to give them false hope."

“What else does your Antisis movement want?”

“Well, we’d like to live in communities that are in harmony with nature and unshackled from the rules of civilization. We Antisis favor hand tools, minimal housing from the elements and of course food sources we collect ourselves.”

“For our listeners out there, we are talking to the Commander of the Antisis army. Well, that’s interesting commander, you want to live in caves, tents, teepees, and lean-tos?”

“These will suffice for our needs since we won’t own anything and everything will be shared, and we won’t have to live in a thing called a house anymore. We want to live in accordance with the planet’s natural rhythms rather than at the expense of them.”

“No houses, how will we shield grandma and grandpa from the elements?” Vark asked.

“We will take care of our elders in a humane way. The Antisis are all about family units, passing information on from generation to generation, and legacies.”

“Okay, so one last question, Commander. What are your plans for the Greater Portland Enclave once you take it over?”

“Of course, we will have to re-educate the people there, but we will not harm them. Remember, our goal is to liberate nature and in doing so we free mankind.”

Listening to the broadcast in her Nature Liberation Church, the pastor named Rose of the Forest fumed. She’d heard enough of this philistine. “The State of Peregrine? Are you fucking kidding me?” she said to herself.

She pulled out her satellite phone and began talking to church leaders across the west.