Ella Aquino is the CEO of Aquino Associated Salvage, the largest salvage company in the State of Arizona. Her wealth shows - she sits behind her elaborately carved desk in a perfectly tailored suit, in an office with numerous oil paintings of the Arizona landscape hanging on the walls. A bottle of wine sits in a bucket of ice between us.
People are surprised to hear that most of this is local. I want to create an image of supporting a new economy, instead of just feeding on the leftovers of the old one. It's all about image.
These clothes were made from cotton grown on tribal land, the desk was made by a local carpenter, the paintings were bought at an auction held by an NAU alum.
That said, I have a weakness for Old World wine. Care for a glass?
[Maybe after the interview.]
Good call. So, what do you need to know?
[How did you found Aquino Associated Salvage?]
I was a freelance scavenger, one of the small teams that are a dime a dozen. We would go into Prescott or maybe way North Phoenix and dig through the rubble looking for valuables and intact trade goods. I made about three good scores, and in exchange we only got into one shootout with raiders. I've still got the scar on my wrist, it's about the size of a quarter. Fingers never bent quite the same as before, but that's the risk you take.
Well, after three good scores, I could've put the money into a bank, but I figured there was a way to stay in the business. I found a partner - he runs the Safford office - and we pooled our money to buy the gear we needed. See, anyone can go after trade goods, but I had a bigger job in mind.
[Raw materials?]
God, there was so much of it! An ocean of asphalt, concrete, brick, and steel that nobody was using! And in this climate, you'll get some minor erosion but ninety percent of it is still there! We started small - marked out a small town that'd been abandoned, got the permits, hired some old salvage buddies and a few workers straight off the deconstruction of the Flagstaff suburbs.
In year three, Aquino Associated Salvage completed its first job. We brought back slabs of concrete, a couple hundred feet of piping, absolutely truckloads of bricks and lumber...plus all the contents of those leftover houses. Even the seemingly useless stuff we kept in storage, and it paid off when they started looking into that plastic recycling plant. The haul was like nobody had ever seen before. I'm still not convinced we were the first to think of it, but we were the first to do it, and damn if we didn't reap the rewards.
[At what point did you get government subsidies?]
When we wanted to move into Phoenix. Paradise Valley, one of the richest parts of the city back in the Old World, and it was home to, what, five to ten survivalists, maybe a mountain lion, some packs of feral dogs? Cost-to-risk analysis took no time at all.
[Still, those were actual dangers.]
Oh, I'm not saying they weren't serious threats. But the constant flow of resources we were going to be sending back to Safford and Flagstaff, that we're still sending to this day? The government was practically salivating when they cut us a subsidy check.
But still, threats. Environmental hazards - floods, fires, sandstorms - those you just have to prepare for and have a backup plan. We don't worry about wild animals either. Sure, a lot of them were feeding on human corpses for a while, and they still have a taste for it, but unless you're an idiot who goes off on his own, and you keep your gun with you, you'll be safe. Mountain lions weren't exactly an endangered species in the Old World and now there's a whole hemisphere without humans hunting them, so we can bag as many as we want, theoretically. But we're not a hunting party, we're salvagers, which means the priority is protecting our workers.
And fuck me if survivalists don't make that a problem. Animals you can fend off, and in a fight they're easy to take, but the survivalists...they're the mad, crazy bastards who lived through the apocalypse, most of them by being lucky and killing anyone in their path, with a frighteningly high rate of cannibalism thrown in.
And so even through most of the city is fucking wasteland, they're still holed up out there, and they're all scary good at fighting, sneaking, breaking and entering, and at doing absolutely anything necessary to survive. Most of them wouldn't come back to society if we wanted them to. You think raiders are bad? Try a guy who's lived off canned food and bottled water for two years, then rainwater and rabbits after that, and now some people come rolling in to kick down his door looking for loot?
You feel bad for them, sorta. And then you realize that to them you're probably just two hundred pounds of meat, and they've got a gun and more ammo than they know what to do with. Fuck, you would not believe how many guns we find.
If there's any advantage, it's that most of them are loners. You get a few gangs, maybe a couple enclaves, some of them even making attempts at farming, but they're isolationist and they stay in one place, unlike the loners who move around a lot, or the gangs who have turfs they patrol. But the gangs have more to lose, and they clear out when an armed convoy rolls into the neighborhood.
And then of course there are the raiders themselves. They come into the city, doing the same thing we're doing but with cars. Hundreds of thousands of cars, and in a hot dry environment like this where corrosion is muted, they'll have spare parts for the next generation, maybe two if they know what they're doing. And they have permanent bases on the east end of the city...we haven't encountered any, but we know they can get pretty far into the city, clearing the roads to make things easier. I'm pretty sure at the pace things are going we'll meet right in the middle, and then things'll get...interesting.
[That's why you hire private contractors?]
Call a spade a spade, darling, they're mercenaries. But yes, we employ bodyguards, actually we employ lots of people. Drivers, deconstruction workers, sappers, not to mention we're at the point where we can starting specialize our salvage experts. We've got a government contract to cooperate with Flagstaff's intelligence agency, because we do stumble on some valuable intelligence. Which requires scouts and spies and people who know the terrain, which is to say we employ a lot of people.
We've also been doing a nice side business in acting as guides for, oh, ecologists, water management experts, you know, people who want to study the Dead Zone to see how the plants and animals are doing, and to check the waterways to see how much crap has been washed out of them. And we'll probably be looking at that a lot more thanks to the new environmental regulations, which...
She rolls her eyes.
Okay.
[Could you explain?]
Well, keep in mind that there are a lot of useless materials, things that were broken or that are completely worthless. Expired stuff, you know, just general garbage, and then of course all the houses and cars that've been ruined by floods and fires and the elements in general, where the best thing to do is to just tear it down and move on.
Well, they want us to properly dispose of all that stuff. Dig a hole and dump everything in it and cover it up, make sure we're not leaving piles of garbage exposed. I guess I can see why, we don't want more crap getting into the water down there, and if the eventual hope is to resettle it...
Still, you just gotta question at what point we're putting a bandaid on a missing limb. These are the same people who make such a big deal about human remains. Even though there's something like three million sun-bleached skeletons, we gotta make sure all of them are "respectfully interred", which means no dumping them in a landfill, and like, I get it, really, but skeletons don't stay together, especially when animals and birds have been at them, and half the time they're way too scattered to collect all the fragments of a skeleton. Skulls stick around, we've buried a lot of skulls. But you just can't find all the bones, they just keep turning up, and we're not going to have a funeral for every rib or vertebrae, so yeah, we make some mass graves, what do you want us to do about it?
Phoenix will always be the Corpse City, and no amount of picking up litter will change that. All we can do is take what's useful and leave the rest to rot.
She glances at the wine.
I'm sure this is all terribly interesting, but if you fully intend on meeting with our Safford office...?
I nod. She opens the bottle of wine and pours me a glass.
A toast to good business, then.
