"Fair Thee Well" Chapter 1

“How old do you think she was Jim?”



“I don't know...late forties.”



“She'd be flattered, she was always vain about that shit y'know. They shouldn't have even bothered



with this.” Seneca said looking down at the bundle of twigs and vines in the shape of



a cross that would be the only monument to the life of a woman who had been lauded



as a genius in her time, quite possibly humanity's savior, but that was before the hour of our



tribulations.



In the end she couldn't have been much more than a hundred pounds, terminal cancer that she fought



long and hard, praying for that last minute miracle. It hadn't taken much effort for the two of us to



carry her up the steep trail to the bone yard. Normally they would have let us use one of the mules, but



Seneca didn't even ask. There was something comforting to him in carrying her there himself. I only



helped with the digging.



“She would have been, I don't know...maybe an ankh or something. She couldn't stand the Jesus



people, but she didn't let on. Too scared to piss him off, thought it would come back on me, she was



probably right.



Fucking Aranson and all his bullshit. You seen he's still flying that goddamn flag lately. He really



thinks he's going to bring it all back.”



I didn't say anything. I just wanted to get back to camp, where there was shade and we would be shielded from the dust and the UV's. There was relief under the canopy. I had been on too many of these burial details, no reason to linger, even for someone I was friendly with.

“A goddamn pile of rocks.” Seneca stood there in the swirl of grit and I could tell from his face that in better times what they had would have been called love. I thought I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye and knew that even in the heat, there were hungry things that knew that they would have food if we would only leave them to it. A tiny black dot hovered overhead between us and the wicked sun, waiting for it's share.

Whatever remained out here exposed would be hard to kill. The survivors would be the ones who could get by on the least and by necessity cunning as hell.

“We'd better get moving.” I suggested, no need to explain the reasons, we all knew what we risked by having this place, but Aranson insisted on maintaining rituals although most of the men and women left in this redoubt were not eager to cling to the past. Most of us would be just as happy to become dust and be forgotten. I didn't judge the ones who had chosen to die, although I still couldn't do it myself. I wanted to believe that any day, a line of buses would come snaking over the horizon. They would stop and open their doors with a hiss from the temperature controlled environment inside and people in uniforms with patches would spill out wrapping blankets around our shoulders and whispering comforting phrases to us as we lined up to be loaded onto our transport home. We would stumble out at the end of our long journey, faces haggard and timidly glancing at the cheering throngs greeting us with warm hugs and fresh cups of steaming coffee.

Seneca lingered for a moment longer and then his body seemed to tremble as if something that was clinging to him had suddenly let go and he turned, his boots crunching in the pebble strewn earth, kicking up little whirlwinds of sand. We each kept to our own thoughts as we made our way to the rim of the plateau and the path that led us down into the sanctuary.

I thought of all of the ones I had helped to bury there and how difficult it was to resurrect the faces. I was often chosen for burial detail having long lost my status as a favorite. It was hard to believe how different it was now, how many of us were intimate with death, when before it had been such a private affair, locked away behind closed doors. I was thirty years into my life before I had seen a dead body. I had shown up too late to see my father's final moments, held up by traffic on the way to the medical clinic, a ridiculous thing to ponder now. I had walked into his room to discover swollen, teary eyes and surrounding his corpse. What I remember most was the stillness, the empty lungs no longer rhythmically inflating and deflating inside the chest cavity. It seemed unreal and frightening. I outlived all the people that had been in the room, and as far as I knew, the hospital itself.

As we descended, the air became cooler, almost pleasant, but not quite. The canopy maintained the humidity, but could do nothing to shield us from the heat of the sun unsheathed. The earth here was damp, a closed system that could sustain the precious few who inhabited the crevice with the help of the recirculators. It was her gift, she had found a way to sustain life in an ever more harsh environment and done all the work of engineering the system and she had bequeathed us the schematics and all the detailed notes on how to maintain a closed ecosystem indefinitely.

“In the end, I forgave her.” Seneca said, between labored breaths. There was no reason to pursue it any further, we had all been victims, as well as accomplices.

In the incestuous duchy that Aranson had established, we had enabled his feudalism, existing as impotent vassals on his lands fearing what lay outside more than the humiliations we faced by staying.

“You're whistling...that's good. Maybe you're getting it back music man. If you could get back in your groove, maybe you'd be back on the mothership instead of down in the trenches with the likes of the garden bitches.”

I hadn't even noticed it really. It was “Straight, No Chaser”, the Thelonious Monk version, one of my old man's favorites. I hadn't heard it in a decade, much less played it because Aranson had strict preferences and his was the only piano for a hundred miles in any direction.

I remembered that I had practiced it, trying to duplicate every nuanced turn of phrase and emulate the emotion, but I was too rote, too spoiled, too sane.

“Hey man, let's stop here, take a break, we got time. Have a seat. You smoke?”

It was a question loaded with possibility. I watched as he pulled out his pipe and saw the remnants of something sweet, half smoked. I had been amongst them, but still not quite there long enough to know.

“It's been years. I can't...”

“Don't fucking worry so much. The bushmen won't kill us, they'll just take our shit. They're out here every day. They know.”



Seneca took his incinerator and lit the pipe. I watched as the blackened husk took on a orange hue and smelled the scent of the leaves as smoke trailed away. It was as irresistible to me as it had always been and I took it from his hands unconsciously.

“That's it Jimbo, what the fuck have you got to lose?”

He was right. I had no good reason to cling so tightly to a life that had become so bitter and spiteful. I breathed it in and felt the warmth deep in my chest as my lungs expanded to accept the intrusion of a thousand chemical compounds as old as our race, a handmaiden to our spirit of recreational cultivation.

I held on to the stone pipe too long, oblivious to the heat until I expelled the smoke in a life affirming coughing fit. “I knew you'd appreciate that shit. We all wondered...you being the music man. I don't think I ever knew a motherfucker that played music that didn't, but that's how it is now. Everybody's scared. They know what it means to go out there. It means you won't be coming back.”

Seneca waved his hand outward as he took the pipe from my hand. It meant beyond the border, and none of us knew what was there, but from the beginning there had been the occasional runner, and of course the exiles, though we could scarcely afford to lose them.

In the early years we had traded with settlements to the north, but most of our face to faces had ended badly, and Aranson called them off and cut radio transmissions after the perimeter had been breached and they had gotten as far as the worker's compounds before the bushmen finally got them all, most dead, others forcible detained, stripped and expelled.

“You don't talk much Jimmy. That's alright with me, but it sure as hell doesn't make it easy.

We all got our pecadillios brother, you don't have to carry it alone man. I just buried the only person here that meant a goddamn thing to me, but I ain't gonna let it be the end. I can't do that. That's not how I was raised...to be a quitter. I'm an optimist y'see. Every damn day that I can wake up and see the sunshine, it means there's hope. I gotta keep headin' towards the light. Here, have another hit man, there's enough to do us both. We got a ways to go, helps pass the time.”



I took the pipe and took another long draw. I felt my face go flush and my heart begin to race in my chest. My mind began to trail away, as I expelled the second breath, I began to feel a fear that had been pent up inside me for a long time and I started sweating. I felt a wave of anticipation like something was going to happen, and I rose to my feet without a word and started to pace.

“Chill out. You gonna get 'em after us. They only pay attention if you act like you're doing something you ain't supposed to.”

“Sorry. I'm just...”

“You don't even gotta say it man. They got us all trained like fuckin' dogs. I'm not any more eager to die than you are, but I just know a little bit more about how things work out here, I know how to keep my head down.

You ain't been out of the big house long enough to know. They only made an example out of that Filipino dude because they didn't like the motherfucker. As long as they get their taste, they won't fuck with us. We have to kick back half the shit to them, so they better not complain, they ain't got the patience to grow it themselves. You hear that motherfuckers! Better not fuck with us!” Seneca said to whatever ears, real or imagined that were listening in.

I took a seat facing him and did my best to keep from twitching.

“She used to talk to me up there.” I said in an effort to get away from the subject of our possible imminent death.

“Don't tell me you used to fuck her too.”

“You're kidding, right.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“She was one of the few that saw the edge of the cliff, back when nobody wanted to believe it. I remember seeing her blog.

The forum was full of crackpots; a bunch of cynics. That was back when people could afford to put their heads in the sand.

I bet they all felt like assholes when they couldn't get their fucking cheetohs and goddamn hot dogs.”

“Yeah, but what good was it too her. You know I used to hate that shit. She was always right, it pissed me off.”

“How the hell did you two end up together?”

“Unlikely pair huh? The jughead and the egghead. Let's finish this off and then we can walk and talk. I don't like being out after dark.”

I breathed the smoke in deeply, finally savoring the experience just as it was almost cashed. I swooned when I stood up, dizzy from the buzz and the heat.

“You probably didn't know much about the other side of Maria Elena, by the time we came here, she was different, we had all sobered up to what it meant to come here, but I was just glad she saved my black ass. You know Aranson wasn't exactly the most PC motherfucker in the world, he wouldn't have put me on the ark if she hadn't insisted. What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah, how we met.

We went to the same gym. Probably seen her a hundred times before I got the balls to talk to her. I remember the first time we went out. We were making small talk. She asked me what I did, at the time I was working for a food distributor. She said in ten years, I'd be looking for another job.

I laughed at her then, but she was right on the money. She knew that it was drying up, and all of a sudden food was gonna be a lot harder to get and we couldn't ship it if we wanted to with gas going through the roof. Hell it was her business to know.”

“I know she wished she hadn't been right, she told me as much.”

“She tried to save us all though. She thought she could engineer our way out of it but in the end it came down to who had the deep pockets. We better chill, the first line of monitors is right down here at the tree line. They'll be watching from the plantation.”

The humidity hung heavy in the air in the stand of hearty evergreens that marked the border. We were back in the climate loop, where the moisture was contained so that life would be possible for the precious few.

I couldn't see the lenses, and for all I knew it was just a trick to maintain order, as artificial as everything else in the valley.

“You ever wonder if they'll find us and try to overrun us again, what if somebody got away?”

“I don't know Jim. I've thought about it, but we haven't heard a transmission in over a year. For all I know, we're the last ones left. It sounded like things were going to shit there at the end. You know how at first, everybody was trying to make it work. You'd here them bartering, saying we've got a little bit of this over here, we'll trade you for some of that over there, well is wasn't like that when the stations started going dead. They were more like pleas for help, and all sorts of religious ramblings. Anyway...there wasn't shit out around here to begin with. It's desert for over a hundred miles in any direction. Probably more now. They'd never get enough people together to overrun the bushmen. Those are some scary motherfuckers, and what's left out there ain't that organized. What the fuck does it matter anyway? It can't last forever, can it?”

The mist shrouded the trees of the primal landscape. It was ripe stuff for the imagination and I was lost in mine when I saw the flaring nostrils of one of the horses appear from out of the mist not more than ten feet away.

“Howdy boss!” Seneca had seen it too, but the man who sat atop it didn't answer. He looked past us as we walked by, transfixed by the sight of the spectral rider.

We both quickened ours steps even as the trail got steeper and we heard him take up a saunter behind us, he was intimidating us, watching us, and listening for anything to hold over our heads.

“My dad would have laughed his ass off at the thought of me walking around here like some runaway slave, but at least things have evened out. They even got white slaves on this here plantation.” Seneca said in a half whisper. It wouldn't have been a punishable offense, they allowed us a measure of freedom of speech, but it would focus their gaze, and that could lead to bad things if you weren't careful.

My knees ached as we wound our way down, downhill was always the harder.

The trees thinned out the lower we got and more of the valley revealed itself. We did our best to manage our resources, but there was no denying that trees took a long time to grow and even Aranson hadn't been prepared for how quickly things came to an end when the well went dry. We had had to improvise, using some of the wood for housing for the small army of workers that produced just enough food for everyone to get by. There were also the fires for when there wasn't enough light for the solar arrays, or when we had a glitch in the system. The arrays were up top and it wasn't an ideal place for anything that required regular maintenance, not to mention we had retool all the parts ourselves. We were in a spring fed oasis in what had formerly been known as the state of Utah, until the union had spun apart when there was no longer enough fuel to keep airplanes in the air, trucks carrying cargo, and people happy and secure. Somewhere out there was Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Amarillo.