[Warning: This tales contains strong languages and imagery intended for mature readers. If you are not comfortable with this, please do not proceed. - Ed.]
Before the meltdown people like to say things were normal. They’re full of shit, of course. Things were fucked before the meltdown. Maybe they were less fucked up than they are now-they were surely less, in fact-but they were still fucked up.
I think a clock started ticking the minute we came down from the trees. Great, you built a hut. Ooh, the first farm. My goodness, a lawn tractor. Nuclear weapons, they’ll stop wars for sure. Who would beat on their chest and drop bombs if they knew a hydrogen bomb would be headed back to wipe out everything they loved? People, that’s who.
The irony is that it wasn’t even nukes that wiped the whole thing out. It was accountants, bankers, traders-guys in suits who came up with ever-more-clever schemes to pass money around electronically, adding no real value while siphoning off profit and sticking other people with the bill. Their systems built an imaginary pyramid of dollars that were really just hot air and eventually the whole thing came tumbling down around us.
It didn’t help that we were raping the land repeatedly the whole time. There’s only so much Mother Nature can take. She’s a bitch and a whore, but she has limits. Greenhouse gases, rising oceans, dying species, the whole lot. We had all that, and when the financial system that supported the food system broke down little things suddenly became more important.
Like getting your next meal, for one. Who the hell knew how to grow anything anymore? Not me. Oh, we tried. We stuck seeds in the ground and poured water on them. But even if anything came up, it just meant someone else wanted to come along and take it. If you didn’t want a shotgun shell hole where you head was or a gaping wound in your throat, it was best to look as if you didn’t have anything at all. And it turns out the best way to pull that off is to have nothing.
Which is pretty much what I have.
I’m better off than most, I guess. All four limbs are intact and in decent working order, although my left knee is a little gimpy at times. Some teeth are chipped but none have fallen out yet. I’ve never managed to lie with a girl but my dick isn’t scabby, either. I get moments of pleasure from it when I’m holed up somewhere safe, like the culvert no one knows about or the roof of the old Subway restaurant where there’s a nook in between two rusty fan housings that I covered with a piece of plywood. Good times.
I used to have a proper human name. Two names, in fact. Now I just go by Blinder, a good one-word name like the rest of us Leftovers use. That’s what they call us and that’s what we are. Leftovers. Two-legs who live like animals, no longer supported by the social system we had grown to depend on.
There are still those who live in glass castles, pretending the world’s still the same as it was. Office building fortresses made of bulletproof glass, sustained by underground supplies, hydroponic gardens, solar power, and spite for the rest of us. Haves, we call them.
I think the Haves knew this was coming. Hell, they made sure it was coming once they figured out they no longer needed consumers to play their reindeer games with them. Stamps says they ran into a dead end once there was nowhere else left for them to expand into. The system was built on eternal growth and when you can’t find that growth you have to change the game. You can acknowledge reality and share what you have or you can make everything so fucked for everyone else that what you have feels like more and more. One compared to zero is infinitely more than two compared to one.
I can say that kind of shit because I’m edumacated. I had two years of high school before the place shut down. Kids coming up now know less and less. It’s amazing how fast book learning fades away when you find you no longer use it or need to.
A prison education, now that’s fricking useful. How to make a shiv. Or bathtub gin. Those are skills that can keep you alive and eating. Reading a book or writing a thesis: not so much in demand.
I heard there are other parts of the world that aren’t as bad off as we are. It’s probably a lie, but it would be nice if was true. Like if there countries that still lived closer to the old ways so they could grow their own food and survive without at ATM.
The ATMs were one of the first things to go. Fuckers took pickaxes and crowbars to them when the banks started to fail. They could even spend the stacks of twenties they pulled out, for a while at least. Some Leftovers still hang on to that stuff like it’s going to come back into style someday.
You know what I would like to come back into style? A hot bath. I haven’t sunk so far that I can’t tell I stink most of the time. You try jumping into a dirty river in wintertime. I don’t want to be a clean corpse; I’d rather be a living stinker. But it would be nice to sluice away the dirt and emerge shiny and wet from warm, bubbly water.
I don’t know why I’ve stayed around the old city. There are a couple black castles that you see dimly lit up at night but you can’t get close to them unless you want to get shot. Further out, I hear there are some farms starting up. I could work on a farm, I guess. But somehow I stay here. No different than when we were humans, I guess. Still trying to follow the old paths that used to bring us comfort.
It’s not like I love this place. I don’t think you could say I was surrounded by friends. Wasn’t popular in high school and am less so now. Maybe I’m somewhere between human and Leftover, and in times like these you need to pick a side.
Someday, I will.
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Thus ends part 1 of Meltdown Leftovers. Come back next week for the next installment–but before you go, please vote on this story. Our readers are the final editors on serialtales.com. Vote for one of three options:
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(c) 2009 David C. Lee. All rights reserved.