Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office (18 page)

ROD

Rod’s stew

• Four cups pearled barley
  
• Two pounds fatty beef (or pork or whatever, just make sure it has a bone in it)
  
• Three turnips
  
• Three carrots
  
• Two onions
  
• Three or four cloves of garlic
  
• 2 tablespoons of salt if you have it
  
• Plenty of black pepper if you can find some
  
• One gallon or so of water
  

Bring the water to boil on top of stove and add barley, meat (cubed up best you can) and bone (if it’s whole, crack it open to expose the marrow) and boil for a few minutes. Move the pot to the edge of the stove and simmer it for an hour or two, then add the rest of the ingredients, all sliced up thin as you can do it, and bring it back to a boil for another few minutes. Then let it simmer for another hour or as long as you can stand smelling it before breaking down. You can remove the bone at this point. The stew will look oily on top – soak up the fat off the top with good barley bread and eat that first with a little bit of salt. Keep the pot on the edge of the stove so it will stay warm but not boil off. You can add more water afterwards to stretch it into a soup, if you need to.

To: Berringer Axehead, Kansas City, Kansas

From: Teddy Alstott, Golden, CO

Day 1056, Day 1057, Day of the Yellow River

Berringer Berringer A.,

Before I begin, I want you to put these glasses on. OK.

Now put the glasses on. Did you do that? OK. Now you can read the rest. I tested it before sending the letter to you.

Here’s the situation. The cans are almost all empty now. Almost all of them! And I can’t use just the cans as sustenance. But I could really use some down home Kansas sustenance. You’re in Kansas City so you have some, I know. I’d like some more, please.

I told you told you that those would come in handy some day. Some day has some how been happening for some thing like more than two years. The notches on the wall tell me as much. I counted them all three times before writing to you. Wanted to be certain that today was the write day to right. Right, right.

Nobody wanted to believe me. When they brought the pallet to my cabin they laughed and laughed. I told them that the pallet would serve my palate just fine, and that they should be so lucky to have such a backup when “some day” happened. They laughed again and waddled off. Jumpsuit crab people. I wish somethymes that I had different flavors to eat, different and maybe some pepper or powdered parmesan cheese. An egg or a steak or both even would be nice, too. But you can eat the cans all cold, so that’s a clear advantage. Just need a can opener and a fork. Don’t even need a fork, but I do have one and do use it. And I think they would notice the difference in my waste if I ate something different. The meatballs would show up on their scanners too easily. They found Almond Charlie that way. When I ran out of dog food I had to start feeding him what I eat and he liked it but it changed his waste signature. One night I heard him barking outside and there was growling that didn’t come from him. The next morning he was gone and never came back. I’m pretty sure they got him.

Doc Smythe didn’t believe me when I told him what was going to happen. He said that I should have known better than to buy so much of one thing at one time. He said he understood why I did it – that I had done this thing, but was not responsible for doing it. I tried to convince him that what I was doing was important – oh how I tried I tried, but he would not listen. He was not a bad man... and he was a man. A human. I’m certain of it – I have ways. He just would not listen to me. I don’t think he understood anything at all. I pleaded with him. His jacket got ripped and he said he had to go and that he’d get me a new and better script. Not sure what he meant by that – this is real. I saw him talking to Amy on his way out. I saw but I could not hear it. Doc Smythe mumbled mumbo jumbo boyardee. Amy didn’t look at me at all when they were talking, she just kept her eyes closed.

Then, two days seven hours and ten minutes later, some day came. It was dark in the cabin. Not even the night light came on that night. Even then I could tell. I could not see any lights coming from the city. No noise coming from the highway. They always sounded like I thought the ocean would sound like, the cars coming down from the mountains. Sounded like waves, like my head being pushed by waves of sound being pushed by waves of water being pushed by God.

The water didn’t work when I went to use the bathroom. It didn’t work in the kitchen, either. So I went outside to go and get a drink from the creek. I used a cup so I didn’t have to drink straight out of the creek. It was cold, the water. I sat there a minute and a half I remember with my teeth hurting. Then it got so quiet outside I was afraid to move. I knew that some one was watching, nearby. So I ran back inside and locked the door and shut the windows and bolted the door to the bedroom and hid beneath the covers and still I was cold and my teeth hurt.

I resisted breaking the pallet up for a long time. Afraid that the cubic symmetry had to be kept – any asymmetry in something that large increases the risk of detection. This is a fact. But I thought I had found a way around it, found a win win. I take off one can from each corner of the pallet at a time. Four! North south east and west and the order matters. It seemed to have done the trick for quite some time. I can’t eat four at a time, of course, but I was certain the single cans by themselves presented no issue. The empties presented a different challenge, but I was able to find some symmetry in stacking them in the corner of the room. The loss of mass in the cans compensates somewhat for the asymmetry, I’m sure of it. I had a proof somewhere around here but it eludes me now. Regardless, I believe I’ve been found out, or at least they’re getting much closer to determining my location. Fortunately, I was recently tipped off to more surveillance activity.

Just last Tuesday morning I was eating and had almost finished off can number one thousand and fifty three. I heard a coughing sound and ran around the cabin three times trying to find out who made it. I hadn’t made it. I waited a while, then sat back down to eat the last ravioli and I saw something moving on the can. The man on the can was moving. He was motioning to me... me of all people. And then, once we got really face to face, he pointed at his name and then stroked his chin. He just stroked his chin twice and smiled and winked and then stopped moving and I knew he had given me an important clue.

Boyardee
]
BoyRD
]
BoERD
]
BERD
]
BEARD!

Thanks to the tip off I started grooming myself a bit more regularly. The day after I got the tip I took a good bath in the creek. It was so cold that I couldn’t sleep for two nights straight I just shivered the whole time.

I thought I had caught one of them in my facial hair this morning. Chitinous exoskeleton. Red exoskelton. Bug. I dropped it in a glass of water, but didn’t hear it squelch the way it’s supposed to do. It has to make a staticky sound like shhh. So I think it was a decoy. The real bugs real surveillance bugs they’re machines are harder to get rid of. Scatter in the light when I open the blinds or door. I hold my breath when I see them and then try to sneak up but they always seem to escape between the cracks in the floorboards. They seem to cluster around the corner with the empty cans, trying to sniff out asymmetries. They’re either self-assembling or the entities behind them know they’re getting closer, because there are more and more of them patrolling the corner every day. It’s clear to me why they’ve got my place staked out. I’ve got the high ground, overlooking all of the town and even further down to Denver. It’s a unique spot and that’s why they want it and that’s why they have to get rid of me.

Denver, can’t trust anyone in Denver. Denver’s trying to contact them. Sent a huge message this summer, not even trying to be discrete. I saw it – it lasted for several days. Several days it did last. If someone comes to you from Denver turn him turn IT away. Contaminated or converted or worse much worse I don’t even have to imagine hard how much worse.

They got Denver, they did. Might be why they’re getting more aggressive with me. Trying all different methods. Calling my name out at night, even in the middle of the day. I don’t hear it hear it, but they can talk directly to my brain. It’s some kind of wave form they send out that can go through logs and bone. I don’t know how they learned my name. I didn’t tell them. Sometimes they communicate to me using Amy’s voice and have manage to even project her image into my brain. But I know it can’t be Amy because she’s in the underground now and I’m pretty sure is in Kansas now and besides we obviously can’t be seen with one another so I just ignore the projected image until it stops yelling at me and goes away. It’s possible that they subverted one of my compatriots in town and learned my name that way. People in town should be used to dealing with aliens, though. You know, there used to be a show about an alien and it took place here. I don’t remember much about it because I was too young then but Amy watched it a lot. The woman in it – she wasn’t the alien – looked kind of like Amy, but with brown hair and she was a bit skinnier. The alien looked like a man and he wore a vest. That was fiction, I know. But this is real I know this is real.

It’s starting to stay cool during the day and getting cold at night again. The stream out back is running yellow now. I have had to stop drinking it because it’s obviously been poisoned. You can see the poisons floating on the surface so obvious. They keep trying this. Trying to flush me out. It’s natural, it’s where you live, it’s fine. That’s what they’re trying to say to me. I never fell for it yet and I’m not about to now. Not now. I can manage just like before I’ll just eat snow.

I’ve actually got a counterattack planned. Going to knock out their surveillance. The smart way. I’m leaving the windows all open all the time now. I think the morning frosts will attach to them and melt on them and short out their nanocircuitry.

I’m going to take this to Doc Smythe to relay forward to you via the underground. I’ll be in this guise but without the glasses. I know for A FACT that Doc Smythe has surgically and neuronically altered his own face and so it’ll be a difficult task trying to locate him but I’m up to the challenge. And like I said he doesn’t understand anything but he does know people. There are almost no people in town. They have mostly escaped east I think through the underground or maybe they’re in Colorado Springs now. All the water in Colorado Springs tastes like metal. There’s metal in it and the aliens can’t locate the people there because their waste streams are masked by the iron metal in the water.

I’ll find Doc Smythe OK. Everyone who rides a bike can be trusted everyone. Send some more food as soon as you can in cans. And tell Amy I said hello and not to worry.

I’m committed to winning here.

Theodore A. Alstott, Ph. D.

PS - Take the glasses off now, or they’ll get suspicious. OK?

PPS - You have to destroy them not, too, in case you get caught.

PPPS - You shouldn’t have been able to read that PPS without the glasses on. I’m not sure who you’re working for, but you’d better get rid of those glasses. Wait, put them back on so you can read this. OK?

PPPPS - Now destroy this letter, then take the glasses off. Have you done this, yet? OK.

To: Barry Booker, St. Joseph, MO

From: Ned Roundtree, Amarillo, TX

July 7th, 20+3

Barry,