Character #1

I had glimpsed her from the base of the hill. I had pulled over to the side of the road to pull my chain back onto my bike, when I saw her. Immediately, I jumped into the ditch and pulled my bike in after me.
She was standing on a high hill. She had black pleather skirt, scuffed and tattered, hiked up almost to the point of showing off ev'thing underneath. She had a garter belt, mended with a long, brown leather string. Tucked into the top of her thigh-high stocking was a small knife and a metal flask.
I stared at her from the bushes.
She didn't move for a long time. She just gazed into the darkening storm to the west.
Suddenly, in one fluid movement, she shifted her weight forward to her left foot, slid her hand down to the knife, grasped it between two fingers, and flung it down at me! It flew right between the spokes on my bicycle, and slicing my wrist neatly from side to side.
As I was jumping up, she called down to me.
“You, get along now. I don't need no trouble, and you neither, I suspect.”
I picked up my bike and shifted it onto the road.
“No, ma'am,” I called, “I don't need no trouble.”
I pedaled my bike down the cracked pavement, looking back over my shoulder after every turn in the road.
While on one of the switchbacks, I looked back up the cliff. She was just standing there, turned, so she was facing me.
I just couldn't leave without at least talking to her a little. I hadn't seen another human being since I left INSERT NAME OF TOWN, 'round 'bout ten days ago; and I was craving the contact, and convo of another human being something fierce.
I decided to take a chance.
“Hey,” I yelled, “You mind if we eat some lunch or somethin'?... Together?”
No answer.
“I haven't seen another human being for days...we could trade!?”
She made a slight movement, a shift from her strong posture, to a more relaxed one. She was still clearly on guard though.
“What d'ya have to trade, mister?” She called.
“Oh, a lil' somethin' of this a lil of that, mostly cans and some leather.”
“Well, we'll see, and maybe we'll talk,” she replied.
I moved my bike off the road and under the shade of a large boulder. I crouched down on a rock and gestured to her to come on down. She nodded and started descending nimbly down the rock strewn slope.
Meanwhile, I pulled my pack out of the crate on the back of my mountain bike and dug through it, looking for the cans of beans and pork I knew i had in there. I also pulled out a huge hunk of goat cheese I had traded for a ratty old hat in INSERT NAME OF TOWN.
“So what's for lunch,” she asked, brushing her hands off on her leather jacket and adjusting her skirt.
“Pork and beans, and I got a lil bit of cheese too. Goat cheese, and pretty fresh to boot.”
“Sounds good”
I had opened two of the cans of beans by now and as I handed one to her, she exclaimed, “Oh, goodness, I clean forgot to introduce meself! I'm BLANK.”
She grabbed the hand I was holding the can out in and ended up shaking my wrist.
I spluttered out, through a mouthful of beans, “BLANK, I'm BLANK.”
I settled down on a rock to eat my beans, hunk of cheese in hand, and she stood there, in the dust of this world, looking uncomfortable with the can in her hand. She seemed much more natural with something deadly riding through those fingers.
“So where were you from originally,” I asked, “I mean... before...”
She was silent. She looked at the can, and kept eating. Every once in a while glancing up to look at the yellow sky. Finally she said, “Georgia, I was a Georgia Peach. I was homecoming queen... before, right out of high school when it happened. All set to pack up and go the state school. And you?”
She looked pointedly into my face when she asked. It was a little unnerving.
“I worked in a gas station. I never went to college, went straight to high school to working in a gas station. Nothing more to my life really. I wanted to be a bio major... if I were to go, of course. But I just never got around to it.” I thought about the day the crazy men came to the station, around back, and caught me leaving one night. They put a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if I didn't go out and register for classes by the next week. That had been just before...
She snapped me out of my reverie.
“Hey, so are we goan' trade or what?”
“Yeah... you got anything that's not food, that I could use?”
“Well.... I have some oil... not for running nuthin', but for yer bike chain... it might be helpful.”
I thought that a little oil might keep it from slipping off so much.
“Yeah that sounds like sunthin' I could use,” I said, “You want some food, or the leather... I could see what else I've got. I was just in town, you know.”
We ended up trading just enough oil for the chain for two cans of my beans, and settled back to smoke our own cigarettes. I'd considered quitting long ago. But now, with the radiation and everything, and we're all gonna die early anyway, what's the use of trying to stup ourselves from getting cancer? We're gonna die before it sets in and cigarettes do tend to make the day a little better. And they are a hot comodity. The town I had come from grew it's own tobacco and I had to give over some of my largest furs just for a single pouch of the loose stuff. I rolled a cigarette now, using a page I had torn from one of the many cheap New Testaments I had found in a box in a shed deep in the woods a few months ago. They had so far gotten me out of plenty of jams. Books were also of great value now... and the Bible was now just a book. Everyone who had believed in God was dead and gone now. But people still did crave a bit o' readin' material now and then. And the pages are great for rollin' papers.
“What did you do, before,” she asked suddenly.
I was startled. It was custom now to avoid talking about.what we were then. Sure, when the Blip first happened, all we talked about was the before time. But that quickly got old. Soon instead of talking about the before time... we didn't talk at all, and the campfire circles grew quiet and the bartering crossroads that cropped up around the nation got silent. People only talked if they needed to. We didn't need the comfort of the fantasy from before... we were too tired from trying to stay alive in the today time. Tired of killing for water, for food, for gasoline. We were tired of the bandits and the renegades... even the renegades were tired of renegades and the renegade life.
“I... why do you want to know?”
“I just... I collect the stories. I want to keep that world alive in my mind.”
“Why,” I asked, “Everyone else started to forget it. They needed to forget it. They don't need the escapism the dredging up of those memories provides. We need to live now. Rebuild some semblance of society.”
“I feel like our past is still an important thing we need to learn from,” she retorted. “What if what happened before happens again? What if the whole cycle starts over after we bring back government and schools and taxes and everything else?”
“Alright... It all goes to hell again... but cycles are how the world works,” I replied. “Everything comes around in a circle. I firmly belief we will rise out of these ashes. We were up there once. We'll be on top again. That's not to say this apocalypse will not happen again. It will and...”
“But!” she stopped me. “But I really just want to keep the culture. I don't know, call me a historian or something.”
“No, I think that's fine,” I said, getting up, and brushing off my pants. “I can tell you what I did. It's boring as Ash, but if you are collecting culture... I guess, well it fits in nicely.”
“Wait,” she held up her hand, as she dug through the satchel at her side. She came out with an old ball point pen cartridge and a leather bound journal, with poorly made paper, all different shapes and sizes. Some pieces were even sticking out past the leather binding. “Alright, so where did you work?”
I told her about my job at the gas station. How near the end, when people mobbed the stations for gas, when it was running out. About how I always carried the store-provided shotgun at my side, the risk of being shot or stabbed every day being so high. About how right a the end, when the final gas trucks came in, a man shot a driver in the chest, climbed in to the cab and proceeded to drive the tanker through the gas pumps, causing a catastrophic explosion that I only just avoided. I told her about living at my parents house, about my lonely life, about my Stars Wars figurines and about my compulsive movie watching habits.
She wrote everything down, quickly and precisely. I could see her small, cramped writing zipping down the uneven pages. She would turn the pages quickly, but unhurriedly. And when I had finally run out of things to say, she set the notebook on her lap, and sighed.
“You know, the only regret I have regarding my approach to this apocalypse thing, is that I didn't immediately go to the library, and start carting out truckfuls of books. All of that evidence of humankind's past, and most of it is all gone.”
“So, you're interested in books?” I asked.
“Oh, very much so,” she exclaimed. “I have a few I've picked up here and there.”
I pulled out one of the New Testaments and handed it to her. “Here, it's yours... I have plenty. I don't need so many copies. To tell you the truth, I've been using them to roll cigarettes out of.”
“Oh!... Thank you,” she said meekly, peering through the dusty pages. “This is in amazing shape for such cheap paper.”
“I found them in a tape-sealed box in a shed, far from any impact zones. Do you already have Bible? I would think they would be the easiest of books to find.”
“Yes, well, I have a hymnal and King James with both Testaments,” she gushed, “but I cherish and book I come across. Thank you.”
We settled back. It was almost dusk.
“I guess I'm going to go make camp,” I said, moving off toward my bike. “Will I see you tomorrow morning?”
She shrugged, and got up. “Maybe you will, maybe you won't.”

Character 2

Carl woke up in the morning, to the squealing of pigs in his yard, and groped around for glasses.
“Honey,” he called, “my glasses! Where are they?”
“Check under the bed or table. I may have bumped them off when I got up this morning.”
Carl got up and reached under the bed.
“Found them,” he shouted, as he picked up his glasses, tied together with leather, and pieced together out of one of the lenses from his glasses from Before and, after months of searching, a lense he found in a trade town, about 70 kilometers north. He had scoured the trade towns for months and months, trying to find a lense for less than 20 cans.
As Carl walked into the kitchen, he tapped his femm'iko on the ass and grabbed a plateful of eggs and bacon. As he walked into his shop next store, he shoveled breakfast food into his mouth with the bent fork Charlotte tossed him as he walked out.
“See you in a few hours, darling,” she called out, as she turned to the stove to stir the pork chili she was making for dinner.
They were lucky, she thought, as she poured more dried oregano from their summer garden into the pot. They had almost a self-sustaining life here in Oprah Town; they had their own animals and their own garden. They only relied on the town for the electricity and the clean water, though they did have an adequate filter themselves, if it ever came to the point where they would have to use it.
After the CATASTROPHE, she had learned the importance of having your own access to clean water. She had been one of the Unfortunates, women, who after the Fall, had turned to the oldest profession to survive. She had found a bordello, in New York's Chinatown, after she had left her home in Rochester in the middle of the night, running from the mobs. She didn't know why she went to New York City, she felt like she wanted to get as far away from people as possible, and while New York had been bombed in the Fall, there were still plenty of people both flocking to the city, and hanging around still. There was plenty of destruction to create in New York, maybe that's why they came. Perhaps she had gone because it was a cultural center and now... well, it wasn't much. Now it was a mass of shaken and precarious skyscrapers and destroyed buildings. When she had gone there, though, besides the bomb destruction, it was relatively free from mob defilement. People were so shaken up from the Castastrophe, they hadn't thought to destroy what was left of the Big Apple. So she went to Chinatown; the most intact part of New York.
After her first night on the streets of New York, she realized the importance of protection. She wasn't up to carrying a gun; she knew nothing about them, and was afraid she would kill herself accidentally the first day she had it. Instead, she found the bordello. They offered women protection from the slowly blossoming gangs and crazies that roamed the streets of New York. And the price wasn't too high. Her body was really the only thing she had left to trade. True, she had some jewelry, but that didn't mean much then, not like now, and the jewelry had been in her family for generations.
So she traded her body. And it wasn't as bad as she imagined it would be. Sure, the men were scary sometimes, but the bordello was high class. She doesn't know how it survived in this world, being so upright and all. She had a sneaking suspicion that the owner had a group of men go around to the other houses of prostitution and crush or threaten them out of business. It was really quite noble of him, and quite suprising for a pimp; he made the men pay for baths, made them wear condoms, everything was fairly safe for the whores. And her life there was very pleasant.
But, the one thing the pimp didn't have, was his own access to unradioactive water, for himself, and for his women. He payed for his rights to a lead-lined watertower on top of a hotel that was run by the self-proclaimed Mayor of New New York. Charlotte's pimp payed for the water with girls, when they were wanted, and when they weren't, (which tended to happen more frequently than one would think) he would pay with cans of food, for there was plenty of that left in the Chinatown's supermarkets, which were all a part of the pimp's territory. Charlotte was lent to the Mayor for a few nights, replacing her friend Sandra, who was sick. Sandra had been his favorite of the girls and the most tolerant of his kinky tastes. Charlotte, well she couldn't care less, though some of the girls would dread going to his room.
There was an issue once, with the water supply. It was running low and the Mayor couldn't afford to give the same amount of water as usual; there was only enough for The Mayor's people, and the pimp and a few choice girls, namely Sandra and the other big grossers. So the rest of the girls dehydrated. It wasn't as if they were going completely without liquids. The canned fruits provided more than enough water but they were too sweet and some of the girls got tired of liquids from cans.
A week into the drought, Charlotte ran into one of the other Unfortunates, lying in the gutter, lapping up rain water that had just run through the radioactive dust throughout the streets. The next week, her condition slowly worsened. And the next week she was dead of radiation sickness.
It happened to the other women too. They were sick and tired of not taking baths and having men that didn't take baths, and soon they started to go a little crazy, each one going out into the streets without dust masks, and dancing in the water falling from trees, swimming in water in contaminated fountains. And soon, they all died.
The fallout from the three metanuclear bombs that were set off before the Fall was only supposed to last 2 years at the most. The radiation from those bombs ended up sticking around for five years in places far from the drop points and was just fading away ten years later where the bombs were dropped. So, the dust was radioactive, and the water was radioactive but metal didn't hold the radioactivity, basically only earth products did; so the government, right after it happened, and before the Yellow Fever hit, distributed masks to help on the dust front and water filters that took out all the radioactivity. Unfortunately, there weren't enough filters, they dropped off maybe a hundred per town, after the bomb hit Denver. So people fought over them, like they fight over everything else. But, after the Yellow Fever, one didn't need to worry about the lack of filters. There was no one around to use them. They were free for the taking, basically the hot commodity in the New World, the new currency.
Charlotte left Rochester right after the bomb hit, with only a dust mask on her face, the family's jewelry and an extra pair of underwear in the pocket of her jacket. When she left Chinatown, New York, she had a water filter, and an entire backpack full of things; cans of food, water bottles, clothing, a tent, sleeping bags, everything she could need to start a new life for herself. Most importantly, she left Chinatown with her husband, Carl.
Carl had found her crying in a stairwell, right after most of the women had died. She had spent the day burying them in Central Park, and eventually the look of their flesh falling off their faces, and the bubbled eyeballs... she just couldn't take anymore. She ran through the streets, crying, and ended up in a stairwell to a ratty apartment building.
And that's where Carl found her. He was only passing through New York. Seeing what he could scavenge on his way. He needed more food and he had an extra water filter to trade for cans. And he found her.
So they left New York, together. And went off into the sunset, driving in a jacked up red pickup truck with their backpacks in the back.
And they found Oprah Town, in Pennsylvania The price for living there was small and there was some semblance of civilization, with laws and a police force even. Carl had an auto shop where fixed cars and motorcycles etc and they had their own garden and animals. True, Czarina Oprah charged them exorbitantly for their first seeds and land, but they were out of debt now, and, she thought as she patted her swelling belly, about to start a family.
Charlotte was smiling as Carl walked in.
“Just grabbing that wrench I left in the mudroom,” he said, brushing past her to move to the hallway. “There's some drifters in and one needs his gearshift fixed.”