"In dead of night an unknown port we gain'd;
Spent with fatigue, and slept secure on land.
But ere the rosy morn renew'd the day,
While in the embrace of pleasing sleep I lay,
Sudden, invited by auspicious gales,
They land my goods, and hoist their flying sails.
Abandon'd here, my fortune I deplore
A hapless exile on a foreign shore..."
I liked those lines, in particular. I could see myself in Ulysses's position. Except I was abandoned in a tree instead of on a beach. And the guys who came up here with me, well, they took off, but they occasionally come back.
At any rate, right, the drivers. Well, their "Big 'Un" skills of not signaling ever and weaving ever so slightly, conjoined with their high speeds made it incredibly difficult to hit them, when we took our potshots to stay sharp. The weaving served two purposes, actually. In addition to making them a more difficult target, you couldn't always tell from a distance whether they were simply bad drivers or whether or not they were drunk. It was prohibited under Federal Law to shoot drunk drivers, figuring they would crash soon enough of their own accord, and didn't warrant the waste of ammunition. So you usually had to wait until some poor b**tard out of what used to be Iowa or Oregon or Nevada drove through your territory before you were able to get off a few good shots.
But the thing we were watching for wasn't drivers, reckless or otherwise.
No. They were about the same size, though.
Let me start at the beginning, or a reasonable distance away from it, anyway.
Because now, let me tell you, we're a hell of an unreasonable distance from the beginning.
This was all shortly before the 'quake that tore California apart. Snide cracks at the idiocy of geologists aside, it came at a good time: either the Earth was going to move what was California apart or men were.
At long friggin' last, to hear my father tell it, the Green Party had taken over most governmental offices. Including one half of the Presidency. That's right. Half.
Oh, wait, there's that, too.
In, let's say, 'quake date minus about eleven years there was a pretty hotly contested Presidential race. Another close one. There'd been a run of a few of 'em the preceding years, and, sure enough, this one was too. So contested that half the country backed one, half backed the other, and neither group was able to reconcile with the other. Separate committees to determine the true winner were formed, and neither bothered showing their results in the end, under huge public skepticism that either was particularly partial or effective in their methods of counting votes. Russia, as it had before, offered to lend an impartial third party opinion, but they were, once again, respectfully declined. A lot of people became quite disenfranchised with the whole process, believing that most of the votes were bought in the end, anyway. Come Inauguration Day both sides claimed victory for themselves, and separate ceremonies were held for each. I forget the candidates' names, hell, I was four at the time. But the bands that played at each ceremony were U2, who were still going and New Order, who were doing some sort of reunion thing for the event. Both bands gave it up shortly thereafter, when recorded music became outlawed, anyway. But that's besides the point.
The point is, there we had a very Great Schism-like situation. It wasn't so cut and dry as having an Avignon and a Rome, though, because the supporters of each candidate lived in and amongst each other. They supported the same sports teams, drank in the same (or perhaps neighbouring) taverns and bars, they walked the same sidewalks. One candidate was based in Washington, DC, the other took to Point Betsie, a lighthouse on Lake Michigan near Frankfort, MI. He ran most of his edicts out over the Internet, anyway, and there were rumours that he traveled around the country a good deal. The other President, hearing this, moved his base of operations to Basin Harbor, VT. Which worked for about a week, before he realised the best Internet access he could seem to get was spotty, tops, and he had to move out down to Miami. For some reason.
So that was that.
The Miami guy, for the record, was the Green Guy.
So the Green Party had taken over, and things were pretty swell. I had a happy childhood, anyway, in a Green State and Town.
Things got messy, though.
Those guys that would later thumb their noses at us, the ones from what was Santa Cruz, well, one of their brethren, sitting up in the Santa Cruz Mountains (which nowadays have this mirror Cliffs of Moher thing going on, apparently – I haven't seen the Moher ones, but these ones're pretty good), got the brilliant idea that it was high time someone brought back the Golden Bear to California. AKA, the Grizzly Bear. Which everyone thought was a great idea. And a good way to build support for using genetic material in more clever ways than cloning sheep, sheepdogs, and other things to do with sheep. No one's going to argue with a grizzly bear.
And that was exactly the problem.
At first, it was minor enough. The grizzly bears got out of their special breeding rooms, where they were being, I don't know, designed or something, for re-release into the wild or something. At least for the wild under the glare of the medias' numerous cameras and lighting rigs for recording devices.
They held up traffic. They damaged some property. They got stuck in trees. They fell out of the trees, injuring one, which was a miraculously low number, to be honest. All playful sort of bear stuff you shake your head and laugh at, because, after all, they're bears. Not quite Gentle Ben, but close enough for horseshoes. You'd be amazed how well those sayings get along now. They've experience a real revival, let me tell you.
But then, well, stuff went bad.
It is suspected that a load of the bears got into a farmer's field out in Modesto, where they were growing Genetically Modified Tomatoes. They weren't allowed to use that GM abbreviation any longer after that lawsuit from General Motors after the Great Schism II and everyone got a little lawsuit-happy.
So they ate the GM (I can use it... it's Fair Personal Colloquial Use) Tomatoes, and something must have reacted badly with the mildly GM'd bear cells they had in them. Because, one minute you knew you were watching the tape where the bear was taunting a little kitten in the tree it happened to be stuck in, the next minute it had fallen out, crushing four formerly innocent bystanders. Well, they were still innocent, they just weren't bystanding any more. Grizzly bears will do that to you.
And that one bear went nuts, and the next thing you know you were watching it unfold in really skakey video from the Channel Four camera guy as he ran back towards the van: the bear was joined by a second, then a third and fourth, then by what seemed like a whole army of bears. And man, you never saw anything as fast as those bears. As a Watcher, I can laugh, because I'm sitting high up in the Tower, pretty safe from any bears, but on the tape, just towards the end you can hear the camera man cursing out the "liberal b**tards that ruined everything with their damn bears and hydro-fueled cars." The last bit doesn't make much sense, because the hydro-cars pretty much flopped, causing no one any real harm, as the things never traveled fast enough to make accidents hazardous.
Well, that one incident seemed to spark some sort of primal thing in the bears minds, and that was it. What were normally peace-loving mostly vegetarians (like a lot of people I knew, once) overnight became a menace, eating people, small pets, children, and other things. People weren't sure, they started reporting all sorts of stuff missing that they probably otherwise would have just chalked up to having been lost. And quite a bit of it was. In the early days, just post-'quake (which was conspicuously convenient, most 'Mainlanders' thought, for the splitters), I answered a load of calls about missing tools, keys, toys, you name it, that were never followed up, and in all likelihood were found later that same evening on the kitchen counter, or under the kid's bed or something.
And then we started taking to the Towers, sitting up there, at the ready, when it became the bears were using our own damn transportation infrastructure against us. Luckily, for us, all of us, it hadn't improved much in the twenty odd years or so it had been going downhill, so the bears didn't have that easy a ride of it, but they still got around damn fast. The bears spread from California out across the south, and only reluctantly in these later years have they settled in the northern states, as well. I guess they were just bred for warmer climes. And that really unfortunate taste for the blood of humans that lay dormant, only to be awakened by the genetically modified tomatoes of Modesto.
So that's what I'm doing up here – Watching for the bears, dreaming, sometimes, of crazy Roman drivers.
disclaimer:
There, that wasn't so painful, was it?
That's right, the answer is "No, it wasn't."
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