June 23, 2433
Dear Mother:
Old Jacob and I have been getting along famously. He's taught me to shoot, and I'm getting pretty good with both pistols and assault weapons. They're very different from the pacifiers that the grunts use: they're actually designed to be lethal. They go off with a bang and throw a small pellet of lead or copper or, in some cases, uranium out the front. As you might imagine, hitting something the first time is a skill, and hitting something moving is an even greater skill, so assault weapons make up for this by allowing you to fire many times, quickly.
They get hot, though, when you do that. They have a mechanism in them that compensates for the recoil, but it generates heat in addition to the heat that the explosion of the propellant causes. They have heat dispersal units, usually located at the front where your hand won't fall on them. This is a good thing, as some of them glow red after only a few shots. It depends how powerful the weapon is: the less powerful ones generate much less heat.
I'm typing slowly for this very reason. I burned the fingers of my left hand on the heat dispersal unit of a Kharkov 77, and there's no doc out here. Jacob gave me some ointment to put on the burn, but it's painful, and it makes typing slow.
It's late now, well after dark. In spite of my burn, we worked hard today, and did a lot of business. Jacob took in a lot of food in exchange for ammunition. I guess there's a bit of a turf war going on between some of the farmers east of here.
He also got water. There is none here, but I was mistaken in assuming that this whole area is called the Wasteland because it is a desert. It is called the Wasteland for several reasons, none of them having to do with the lack of water. One is the lack of government. The formal government, I was astonished to discover, resides in the City, our (ok, not mine any more, but your) city, the City of New LA. But it's shut up behind steel walls and only comes out occasionally, usually in the form of grunt raids, so this whole area effectively has no government.
Another resson it's called the Wasteland is that it is where the City dumps all of its waste. Of course, that's obvious when you think about it, isn't it? And I guess that's what I am: waste. City waste.
I realized after I sent the last e.letter that I hadn't really told you what had happened after I left the walls of the City. There's not much to tell. My water was gone, and I started across the sand, following what looked like a faint trail north along the beach. I was getting pretty desperate for liquid, but the huge expanse of water was salty, and I knew I couldn't drink that.
It was late that day, maybe six hours north of New LA along the ocean (that's what it is, Mother, an ocean. That's where New LA gets its water from, apparently. They have a way of taking the salt out) when I saw something ahead. Up at the ridge at the top of the beach, there were some houses, low things. And there were people.
They took pity on me. I guess they were used to seeing refugees from the City. They gave me water and a little food in exchange for my light, and told me that the best way to go was to head inland until I found a road.
They let me stay the night. I gathered, from their conversations, that they harvested fish from the ocean. From the smell of the place, that they processed the fish in some way. Everything had the pong of fish on it. Everything, including the oily coffee they begrudgingly gave me the next morning.
It was clear that I wasn't wanted there, so I walked toward the rising sun. My water bottle was full, and I had the dried fish and bread that they'd traded to me, plus a little of the Delta food left, so I was in pretty good shape. On this, the 11th day (or was it the 12th? I'm not sure) my feet were starting to toughen up, and I walked with less pain.
Almost immediately after leaving the beach, I realized that I wasn't walking through any ordinary desert. Not that I know all that much about deserts, of course, but you'll know what I mean when I explain.
Only a little way back of the beach, I found a wall of crumbling concrete. Then some twisted and rusting metal. Then more and more, until I was walking through what looked like a parody of a city, broken walls, all crumbled, none of them over a meter high all around me, the whole covered with drifted sand.
There were other things, too: the occasional ancient and rusted vehicle, badly decomposed road surfaces, empty cans, bathtubs, those sorts of things. I wondered how long it had been ruined, and what had happened.
It slowed my progress until I found a section free of ruins that led east. I suppose it had been a roadway at one time. Now it was merely a section without broken walls sticking up through the sand.
I followed it east until, late that evening, I found a road. A road that looked like it saw at least some use. There were tracks in the sand, and it looked like major holes had been filled in.
It was getting dark, so I found a sheltered spot near a broken wall, and ate a little of the smelly dried fish (you'll eat anything when you're really hungry, Mother). I crawled into the bedroll, and slept like a log until I woke with the morning sun just starting to come up.
I was warm and comfortable in the bedroll on the sand, so I lay there, wondering what had awakened me. I realized that there was a low sound penetrating the early morning silence. It was a sort of rumble that got louder and louder.
I decided that I should probably stay where I was until I could determine what was making the noise. Before long, the grumble got very loud, and a wheeled vehicle appeared in my line of sight, moving along the road.
It was large, with three sets of wheels that I could see, one set near the front and two near the back. There was a glassed-in box near the front, in which I could see two heads. The back part of the vehicle was flat and piled with boxes, crates, and bundles. Two more men rode on top, carrying what looked (to my then-uneducated eyes) like weapons. Their heads swiveled as the watched the horizon.
Behind the first vehicle was a second, smaller, wheeled vehicle. It had two sets of wheels, and no roof. It was crammed with men, probably at least eight. All of them seemed to be armed with similiar weapons to what the men on the first vehicle had, glittering black and silver in the orange morning light.
As an aside, Mother: that's something we really miss in the City. The walls block out the early morning light. The only way you can know it exists is look up to the tops of the towers while going to or from your work if you should happen to be on A or C shift. Then you'll see the polished steel lit up, pure and golden and sweet.
It is beyond gratifying, almost mystical, to stand in the cold and feel the warmth of the sun, to let the warm red rays fall on your face, and then to turn and see the world bathed in warmth, the cold blue of night pushed up into the far sky, or skulking in the shadows.
Anyway, the two vehicles passed by, silhouetted against the sun as they made their way north. They rumbled and squeaked by, wheels bouncing over the rough parts of the road, and were gone again in a few minutes. They hadn't seen me, concealed as I was.
I got on my way quickly, and walked to the road. A smoky smell, thick, lingered in the air. I decided that since the vehicles had gone north, I would head that way too.
Inland from the ocean, it got hot. Eventually, I had taken off both my jacket and my shirt. I drank sparingly, not knowing when I was going to find water again. The road was rough in spots, and it appeared to have been repaired in places, most noticeably where it ran over a bridge, or through an area where water drained on those years when it rained a lot.
I walked along this road for three days before I saw anything other than road, ruins, sand, and encroaching, tough vegetation.
On the morning of the fourth day, I was starting to worry that I might not find anything to eat or drink before my now-thin supply ran out when I saw what looked like a human figure in the hazy distance ahead. I walked steadily toward it as it squatted down on a sandbank a few feet from the edge of the road. Distances in the flat, sunbaked open are deceptive, and it took me a good few minutes before I was within hailing distance.
"Hello!" I said. After the wary fishermen, and the guys armed to the teeth in their odd vehicles, I thought perhaps that caution and early warning were appropriate.
The figure turned its head toward me and raised a brown arm. I took this to be a sign of greeting and walked cautiously closer until I was perhaps five meters away.
True to my suspicions, the figure had a gun, a lethal looking blue-steel and plastic implement resting against a large bundle or pack.
"Sit down a while," the figure said, the voice that of a man. It was hard to tell, for the face was so weathered and time-cracked that it was impossible to guess a sex. Except, of course, for the lack of a beard.
The man motioned to a soft-looking spot to his left, in the shade of a fragment of concrete slab. I sat.
"Where are you heading?" he asked. His white hair was drawn behind his head into a queue that went all the way down his back, outside the filthy upper garment he wore. He had not bathed in months, I would guess.
"I'm not sure. North," I said, hesitantly.
"Not sure? What the fuck are you doing wandering around this country if you're not sure? This ain't a place for those who ain't sure they either need or want to be here," he said.
"Well, I guess I need to be here," I replied, "and I guess I need to be heading north. I'm from the City."
His eyes darted at me, seeming to notice my clothing for the first time.
"Well," he said, "that explains it." He didn't seem to be worried about me. "You'd best keep going north, then, son."
"Why?"
"Because you'll be looking for a place to live, I'd think, and this here's no place for anyone who ain't a lunatic to live."
"Do you live here?" I asked, indicating with my hand that I meant right here, this spot right here.
He shook his head. "Nope. I live that way," and he pointed to the east, out across the sandblasted ruins. "A long way that way. Three days walk."
"I've come more than three days from the City," I said, as if that made me equal to him.
He nodded. "Yep. You've another couple of days to go till you get to the City of Angels." His skin was burned deep copper brown by the sun. For the first time, I realized that it wasn't just his person that was malodorous: his bundle reeked of something pungent, too. I sneaked a peek at it. Under the sleek blue steel of the gun, there was a grubby bedroll and a sack of heavy cloth, but the bulk of the bundle, I saw, were what looked like animal skins. Lizard and snake-skins, mostly.
"Do you have to be a lunatic to live where you live?" I asked, in what I hoped was an inoffensive way.
He laughed, exposing a mouth with less than half the normal number of teeth. "Even more so, son."
I must close for now, Mother. More anon. Hope you are keeping well. Have the Powers That Be filled my bunk yet? The bunk right under yours? The bunk where I grew up?
Old Jacob and I have been getting along famously. He's taught me to shoot, and I'm getting pretty good with both pistols and assault weapons. They're very different from the pacifiers that the grunts use: they're actually designed to be lethal. They go off with a bang and throw a small pellet of lead or copper or, in some cases, uranium out the front. As you might imagine, hitting something the first time is a skill, and hitting something moving is an even greater skill, so assault weapons make up for this by allowing you to fire many times, quickly.
They get hot, though, when you do that. They have a mechanism in them that compensates for the recoil, but it generates heat in addition to the heat that the explosion of the propellant causes. They have heat dispersal units, usually located at the front where your hand won't fall on them. This is a good thing, as some of them glow red after only a few shots. It depends how powerful the weapon is: the less powerful ones generate much less heat.
I'm typing slowly for this very reason. I burned the fingers of my left hand on the heat dispersal unit of a Kharkov 77, and there's no doc out here. Jacob gave me some ointment to put on the burn, but it's painful, and it makes typing slow.
It's late now, well after dark. In spite of my burn, we worked hard today, and did a lot of business. Jacob took in a lot of food in exchange for ammunition. I guess there's a bit of a turf war going on between some of the farmers east of here.
He also got water. There is none here, but I was mistaken in assuming that this whole area is called the Wasteland because it is a desert. It is called the Wasteland for several reasons, none of them having to do with the lack of water. One is the lack of government. The formal government, I was astonished to discover, resides in the City, our (ok, not mine any more, but your) city, the City of New LA. But it's shut up behind steel walls and only comes out occasionally, usually in the form of grunt raids, so this whole area effectively has no government.
Another resson it's called the Wasteland is that it is where the City dumps all of its waste. Of course, that's obvious when you think about it, isn't it? And I guess that's what I am: waste. City waste.
I realized after I sent the last e.letter that I hadn't really told you what had happened after I left the walls of the City. There's not much to tell. My water was gone, and I started across the sand, following what looked like a faint trail north along the beach. I was getting pretty desperate for liquid, but the huge expanse of water was salty, and I knew I couldn't drink that.
It was late that day, maybe six hours north of New LA along the ocean (that's what it is, Mother, an ocean. That's where New LA gets its water from, apparently. They have a way of taking the salt out) when I saw something ahead. Up at the ridge at the top of the beach, there were some houses, low things. And there were people.
They took pity on me. I guess they were used to seeing refugees from the City. They gave me water and a little food in exchange for my light, and told me that the best way to go was to head inland until I found a road.
They let me stay the night. I gathered, from their conversations, that they harvested fish from the ocean. From the smell of the place, that they processed the fish in some way. Everything had the pong of fish on it. Everything, including the oily coffee they begrudgingly gave me the next morning.
It was clear that I wasn't wanted there, so I walked toward the rising sun. My water bottle was full, and I had the dried fish and bread that they'd traded to me, plus a little of the Delta food left, so I was in pretty good shape. On this, the 11th day (or was it the 12th? I'm not sure) my feet were starting to toughen up, and I walked with less pain.
Almost immediately after leaving the beach, I realized that I wasn't walking through any ordinary desert. Not that I know all that much about deserts, of course, but you'll know what I mean when I explain.
Only a little way back of the beach, I found a wall of crumbling concrete. Then some twisted and rusting metal. Then more and more, until I was walking through what looked like a parody of a city, broken walls, all crumbled, none of them over a meter high all around me, the whole covered with drifted sand.
There were other things, too: the occasional ancient and rusted vehicle, badly decomposed road surfaces, empty cans, bathtubs, those sorts of things. I wondered how long it had been ruined, and what had happened.
It slowed my progress until I found a section free of ruins that led east. I suppose it had been a roadway at one time. Now it was merely a section without broken walls sticking up through the sand.
I followed it east until, late that evening, I found a road. A road that looked like it saw at least some use. There were tracks in the sand, and it looked like major holes had been filled in.
It was getting dark, so I found a sheltered spot near a broken wall, and ate a little of the smelly dried fish (you'll eat anything when you're really hungry, Mother). I crawled into the bedroll, and slept like a log until I woke with the morning sun just starting to come up.
I was warm and comfortable in the bedroll on the sand, so I lay there, wondering what had awakened me. I realized that there was a low sound penetrating the early morning silence. It was a sort of rumble that got louder and louder.
I decided that I should probably stay where I was until I could determine what was making the noise. Before long, the grumble got very loud, and a wheeled vehicle appeared in my line of sight, moving along the road.
It was large, with three sets of wheels that I could see, one set near the front and two near the back. There was a glassed-in box near the front, in which I could see two heads. The back part of the vehicle was flat and piled with boxes, crates, and bundles. Two more men rode on top, carrying what looked (to my then-uneducated eyes) like weapons. Their heads swiveled as the watched the horizon.
Behind the first vehicle was a second, smaller, wheeled vehicle. It had two sets of wheels, and no roof. It was crammed with men, probably at least eight. All of them seemed to be armed with similiar weapons to what the men on the first vehicle had, glittering black and silver in the orange morning light.
As an aside, Mother: that's something we really miss in the City. The walls block out the early morning light. The only way you can know it exists is look up to the tops of the towers while going to or from your work if you should happen to be on A or C shift. Then you'll see the polished steel lit up, pure and golden and sweet.
It is beyond gratifying, almost mystical, to stand in the cold and feel the warmth of the sun, to let the warm red rays fall on your face, and then to turn and see the world bathed in warmth, the cold blue of night pushed up into the far sky, or skulking in the shadows.
Anyway, the two vehicles passed by, silhouetted against the sun as they made their way north. They rumbled and squeaked by, wheels bouncing over the rough parts of the road, and were gone again in a few minutes. They hadn't seen me, concealed as I was.
I got on my way quickly, and walked to the road. A smoky smell, thick, lingered in the air. I decided that since the vehicles had gone north, I would head that way too.
Inland from the ocean, it got hot. Eventually, I had taken off both my jacket and my shirt. I drank sparingly, not knowing when I was going to find water again. The road was rough in spots, and it appeared to have been repaired in places, most noticeably where it ran over a bridge, or through an area where water drained on those years when it rained a lot.
I walked along this road for three days before I saw anything other than road, ruins, sand, and encroaching, tough vegetation.
On the morning of the fourth day, I was starting to worry that I might not find anything to eat or drink before my now-thin supply ran out when I saw what looked like a human figure in the hazy distance ahead. I walked steadily toward it as it squatted down on a sandbank a few feet from the edge of the road. Distances in the flat, sunbaked open are deceptive, and it took me a good few minutes before I was within hailing distance.
"Hello!" I said. After the wary fishermen, and the guys armed to the teeth in their odd vehicles, I thought perhaps that caution and early warning were appropriate.
The figure turned its head toward me and raised a brown arm. I took this to be a sign of greeting and walked cautiously closer until I was perhaps five meters away.
True to my suspicions, the figure had a gun, a lethal looking blue-steel and plastic implement resting against a large bundle or pack.
"Sit down a while," the figure said, the voice that of a man. It was hard to tell, for the face was so weathered and time-cracked that it was impossible to guess a sex. Except, of course, for the lack of a beard.
The man motioned to a soft-looking spot to his left, in the shade of a fragment of concrete slab. I sat.
"Where are you heading?" he asked. His white hair was drawn behind his head into a queue that went all the way down his back, outside the filthy upper garment he wore. He had not bathed in months, I would guess.
"I'm not sure. North," I said, hesitantly.
"Not sure? What the fuck are you doing wandering around this country if you're not sure? This ain't a place for those who ain't sure they either need or want to be here," he said.
"Well, I guess I need to be here," I replied, "and I guess I need to be heading north. I'm from the City."
His eyes darted at me, seeming to notice my clothing for the first time.
"Well," he said, "that explains it." He didn't seem to be worried about me. "You'd best keep going north, then, son."
"Why?"
"Because you'll be looking for a place to live, I'd think, and this here's no place for anyone who ain't a lunatic to live."
"Do you live here?" I asked, indicating with my hand that I meant right here, this spot right here.
He shook his head. "Nope. I live that way," and he pointed to the east, out across the sandblasted ruins. "A long way that way. Three days walk."
"I've come more than three days from the City," I said, as if that made me equal to him.
He nodded. "Yep. You've another couple of days to go till you get to the City of Angels." His skin was burned deep copper brown by the sun. For the first time, I realized that it wasn't just his person that was malodorous: his bundle reeked of something pungent, too. I sneaked a peek at it. Under the sleek blue steel of the gun, there was a grubby bedroll and a sack of heavy cloth, but the bulk of the bundle, I saw, were what looked like animal skins. Lizard and snake-skins, mostly.
"Do you have to be a lunatic to live where you live?" I asked, in what I hoped was an inoffensive way.
He laughed, exposing a mouth with less than half the normal number of teeth. "Even more so, son."
I must close for now, Mother. More anon. Hope you are keeping well. Have the Powers That Be filled my bunk yet? The bunk right under yours? The bunk where I grew up?
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