The Bracken Anthology (22 page)

Iron hand-grips that doubled as steps were welded to the outside of one of the three main pillars, forming a ladder, rusty but still plenty strong. After giving another slow look around, I spat on my hands for luck and started up, one welded rung at a time. The rungs were ice cold, but my bare hands were tough enough. After fifty rungs I was even with the treetops. Fifty more and I was getting close to where the tower had buckled and twisted back down the mountain.

Below that bent and broken section, at the point where the remaining guy wires still held the tower stump erect, was an encircling array of what I guessed were microwave transmitters. A deck of metal grating had been welded between the legs of the tower as a working platform for equipment installers and technicians. With about six feet between the legs, it made a nice perch for me to sit on Indian-style, looking between two of the legs toward the southeast.

From within my coat, kept in its special pocket, I brought out my Leupold rifle scope, already turned to its maximum twelve-power magnification. The bolt-action rifle it had been mounted on was useless without its rare .264 Winchester Magnum ammunition. The scope, on the other hand, was priceless. I flipped open the lens covers and brought the scope toward my eye, assuming a rifleman’s sitting stance, elbows on knees, both hands on the scope for stability.

I could see a few miles across to the next ridges, and I did a slow, methodical sweeping search. The next mountains were miles out of the Nantahala National Forest, and homes were built on their slopes. But there was no visible smoke, no man-made sounds of planes or trucks or industrial machinery. No moving vehicles, no signs of life at all.

It was hard to tell from that far away, but it appeared that many of the homes had been burned or otherwise destroyed. The isolated vacation homes of urban retirees were low-hanging fruit for bands of marauders. The bandits who survived the first winter were hardened killers, practiced at stealth, sniping, ambush, and laying siege. All the homes I could see appeared abandoned, but perhaps that was long-range camouflage, crafted to discourage bandits from making the cross-valley hikes. It didn’t pay to advertise your continued survival in times of starvation.

The scope went back inside my coat. I partially unfolded my road map of South Carolina and spread it across my lap, compass on top to orient it, holding them down against the wind. It was from 2008; Governor Mark Sanford welcomed me to the Palmetto State. Once upon a time Sanford had pretended to be an Appalachian Trail hiker. Had he ever stepped foot on it? Now it was miles behind me in North Carolina, and I was heading in another direction, toward the sea.

The city of Augusta was halfway down the Savannah River. Navigation wasn’t going to be a problem, but encountering possibly hostile survivors would be. My map didn’t contain any population information—pre-collapse population, that is—but Augusta was big enough by the look of it on the map. As big as Chattanooga or Knoxville, and they had been horror shows by all accounts. I’d seen enough human bones in the national forests to be able to take the travelers’ words for what had happened in the cities. Atlanta and the other giant cities must have been Dante-esque hells. So what was Augusta like today? Depopulated entirely? Or did it go Mad Max, run by tribal warlords? Would I have to travel wide around it, on foot?

And on the other side of Augusta was an area marked on my South Carolina map as the Department of Energy’s “Savannah River Site.” This was a place where the federal government had made nuclear material for generations, with several nuclear reactors and countless pools full of radioactive rods. What had happened to all that nuclear material after the collapse? And what about the other hundred-odd nuclear plants spread across the country? Maybe I’d leave the river and head cross-country before I reached Augusta, but that was a decision for another day.

While pondering the distant hills, I tongued the gap where I’d removed my top left molar behind the canine. No dentist—just me, vise-grips, and whisky. Would I ever see another dentist? More of my teeth hurt most of the time. The bristles of my last toothbrush were worn nearly to the handle, toothpaste a long-forgotten luxury, a memory triggered by the scent of wild mint. I shot bearings on my compass to the most promising landmarks along my possible routes, and recorded them on the map with a pencil stub, folded the map, and put it away.

Next I removed my little solar-powered radio from my parka’s side cargo pocket. It was made of black plastic and was the size of a thick paperback book, with solar cells along the top edge. I aimed them at the sun and gave a slow turn of the dial on the AM and FM bands. Static crackled from the speaker. The old batteries inside no longer saved enough charge for the radio to make any sound after dark, but when the solar chips were aimed at the sun, the static noise it made proved the radio was still alive on some basic electrical level.

I slowly rolled through the radio bands again and again, straining to hear something besides white noise. There was nothing but static, not even from this position atop a radio tower atop a mountain. The absence of a radio signal on the tower wasn’t proof that no radio stations were broadcasting anywhere; AM radios transmitted more powerfully at night, a frustrating paradox with a solar radio that only worked in sunlight. Maybe I was still out of range of city radio stations.

Maybe when I approached Augusta, my radio would give me some advance warning of organized human activity. Or maybe not. Maybe the solar radio was capable only of producing static under any circumstances. So why didn’t I throw it away as useless weight? I suppose because it was one of the last technological treasures in my universe: a little radio that made static when it was aimed at the sun.

A funny thing about static noise is that you can start to hear things in it that are not real. Auditory hallucinations, Lisa had called them. Streams, waterfalls, and rustling trees can also play music or talk to you, when you’re ready to listen—and when you’re starving, you’re always ready to listen.

The static resolved into repeating fractal patterns, or maybe I was listening too intently. The old Pearl Jam song “Black” crept into my mind as I aimed the solar cells at the sun and slowly rotated the AM dial. The song’s refrain was playing clearly in my head, but I could recall only a few of the words: “And now my bitter hands cradle broken glass of what was everything.”

Why couldn’t I remember more of the lyrics, when the wordless chorus was so clear in my head? I tried to picture the band and the singer, and got nothing at all. They were just a rock band, so what? But I also couldn’t remember the faces of the missing
real
people in my life. Videos, emails, texts, skypes, youtubes, an infinity of images—all those faces turned out to be mass-deletable, both from the digital ether and from my own mind. I had believed that those memories were permanent and everlasting, and then they were gone in a blink. In my mind, only the faces of Roger and Lisa remained clear.

There were a thousand generations of humanity before the advent of photography, much less emails and the internet. Now even sending a paper letter was an impossible feat. Microchips, radio vacuum tubes, even ordinary flashlight batteries now belonged to the realm of science fiction.

The tower below me had once hummed with power. Down below, the easy copper had been hacked out where optimistic looters were able to get at it. They hadn’t gotten around to the cables in the conduits running upward between the legs before they’d quit. I hoped that the wire they did get did them some good. Part of a salvaged power grid? Bracelets and charms, more likely. The tower and all around it were ruins, already returning to the forest.

An electrical engineer I’d met during the first autumn after the Rupture had given one possible explanation for the cascade of technological disasters. Within a few weeks after the power went out, when the internet and telephones were a memory and nobody was getting paid, management and work crews of critical infrastructure sites began to melt away. With the cities on fire, the government could not keep infrastructure workers chained to their desks, not when their own families were in peril. Even the police and military deserted in droves.

The satellites, unguided by their ground control stations, began to tumble into irretrievable orientations, experienced orbital decay, and eventually came back down to earth. Without satellites, modern communications of almost every kind faltered and failed, and the world was no longer sufficiently knitted together to conduct the necessary technological business of the modern global society.

Billions of people believed that
Homo sapiens
had achieved a permanent higher station since the retreat of the last great ice age. Unlike destruction by a slowly grinding ice sheet, however, all our technological modernity was swept away in a blink. The last live radio programming I’d heard had been from an AM station out of Knoxville that lasted for a few weeks after the power went out. And there was a canned FEMA broadcast alleging to be from the nation’s capital, but that radio frequency, too, had gone silent.

How had it all happened so fast? I had a master’s degree in history, and I understood enough of it to come up with a few theories to explain what had happened, at least in the broad strokes.

Modern society was engineered for the maximum production of profits, providing the maximum comfort for the maximum population, using mankind’s most cutting-edge technical trickery and marketing magic for leverage. Maximum profits for producing maximum pleasures, and it would only get more maximum forever, as humanity’s greatest minds piled one technological miracle atop another, leading to ever-rising standards of living for most of the world’s billions of people. Onward and upward the towers of our modern cities soared into the sky as the suburbs spread outward and merged.

At least that’s how it was supposed to work. And it did work, for quite a while. But a few novelties unique to our time went almost unnoticed. Never before in history had so many been fed by so few, from so far away. By the end, our cities had grown into traps, with the easy creature comforts they promised as the bait. Billions of people moved into these technological beehives, where food, shelter, and (sometimes) work could be found in close proximity. City life was easier for the worker bees, and more profitable—and more controllable—for the queens.

That is, until the digital blood of the global communications network froze in all its infinite circuitry, and the machinery seized up and jammed in place. Suddenly left to their own nearly nonexistent devices, cut off from the food from distant agro-business farms, the inhabitants of our densely packed cities panicked and looted the stores and other food sources like locusts. After that, if the occasional travelers were to be believed, they literally consumed themselves. It was the modern consumer society’s final stage: Consumer, consume thyself. Did I, myself, see it? No. But what I saw with my own eyes in small-town and rural America left me in no doubt about what had taken place in the cities.

A popular historian from the end of the last century named Fukuyama had referred to the end of history, with an evolved mankind finally the master of the universe and his fate within it. Hardly the master, as it turned out. Instead, for decades we had lived inside an increasingly delicate techno-bubble, floating ever higher on digital money created from thin air, and we believed it was all as permanent as the pyramids!

As a history teacher, I considered it a massive conceit by modern man to denigrate as backward the long-lasting civilizations that existed before electricity, electronic gadgets, wireless devices, and computers. Earlier generations had built the great cathedrals, universities, and defensible walled cities on the surplus bounty of the nearby lands and the manual labor of the local folk. Buildings that have stood through the centuries, monuments to the past.

Modern man built
illusions
of wealth instead. In the end, the glittering high-definition wall screens were just dream merchants, presenting the convincing chimera of a perpetual cornucopia. But even the illusion of modern wealth was convincing when the abundance reached our doors. Thanks to the modern miracle of global communications and computer networks, the bounty always arrived just in time, from fish captured two oceans away to our daily bread trucked hundreds of miles to our tables. Fresh flowers and succulent fruit from other continents were jetted to our local markets within a day. And we believed it was all real, because it was real, at least for a while.

But the edible products that once filled our supermarkets typically passed through a dozen processing steps in a series of plants and factories before their final delivery. It was a networked ballet choreographed by powerful computers across thousands of miles. All the purchase orders and inventories existed somewhere in the cyber cloud. All payment was by electronic fund transfer, with digital currency zipping along optical fibers and between microwave antennas on mountaintops and satellites in space. Paper had disappeared so long ago that it didn’t even exist as a meaningful backup. At best, it was used for in-house emergency record keeping, and was useless for conducting modern trade.

For those millions of people without sufficient money, the government thoughtfully zapped electronic dollars onto their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards. Money for nothing, and your kicks for free—what could possibly go wrong? Especially with so many millions of the welfare recipients packed tightly into cities where nothing grew except illiteracy, crime, and rage.

A global delivery system optimized by the power of high-speed computation was a modern miracle that turned into a curse when it disappeared. The global network’s undeniable efficiency was a tempting siren, a fatal mirage that lured its victims into barren deserts or out onto stormy seas, far beyond safety or even rescue.