Chapter One
After all, now there are much more important things to irritate me. And tonight, I should be thankful that Lulu, Bertrand, and Sasha have made it through one more day and we are safe for now. Night is reserved for bandits, rats, and crazed coyotes now called wolfotyes. Even though looting, rape, and murder are downtrending, I have to remind myself every night at this time to stop holding my breath. Bertrand works where he worked before 2020, nine blocks away at Good Samaritan Hospital. During the day, within a half-mile radius of our apartment, everyone knows each other, watches out for each other. We’re the “take chocolate chip cookies to the neighbors because they’re the folks you’re going to need” people. We’ve become a neighborhood watch, banding together to protect each other from everything—Anomie to Zombies. But, if he can’t get home before dark—and he usually can’t—Bertrand is escorted home by the Angel Avengers, the local vigilantes who maintain some semblance of order. I assume that in exchange, Bertrand doctors them from time to time.
I move from the kitchen back to a stool at the bar to work on turnip bean dip. When we have food, it’s mostly seasonless vegetables that make for cigarette-sized dumps that we turn into fertilizer. No matter what anyone tells you makes life worth living—God or marriage, children or work you love—it’s really butter, salt, and sugar. Anyway.
I try not to think about the hope that everyone felt just a few years ago. We were so close to perfecting the solar chip that would jettison fossil fuel forever. And then there was the rather timid (5.5 on the Richter scale) earthquake. The faults that run on both sides of the Willamette River shifted. Of the ten bridges that connect east and west Portland, the Steel Bridge was the only one still standing. We assume it’s because, well, it’s steel. The concrete bridges, long overdue for infrastructure updates, collapsed, leaving millions of tons of debris in the now mostly unnavigable Willamette River. Building bridges around fault lines was a bad idea. We thought it would be months before things got back to normal. And then, the caldera blew.