A Record Of The Plague In The High Desert

[MidnightMantra]

PREFACE​

When my colleagues questioned my journey to the region known as the High Desert they asserted that only broad histories of the plague and the various nations that spawned from those years would be of any interest to the scholars in Sioux Falls. They were probably right, nobody was interested in personal tales of survival and horror anymore. People just wanted to move on and embrace whatever future they could build in the recovering wastelands of America. But I have always had a deep interest in the biographies of common people during this time, their memories providing snapshots of life which was quickly being lost forever. It's been said that whomever forgets the past is doomed to repeat it and historians today believe themselves honoring this ancient wisdom by writing endless histories of political and military leaders who often sponsor the creation of these books themselves. History is not just a series of events and how the leaders of the time responded but it is also the stories and experiences of regular people that lived through those events and under those leaders.

The High Desert is a region that roughly corresponds to the eastern portion of a territory called Oregon. At the time of its naming the region was drier than the western coastal portion of the same territory but was actually scrubland and steppe. However it was drier than the western region and the name "High Desert" stayed in place even through the plague years. For a depleted human population the lands of this region is quite rich with several rivers flowing through its patchy grassed landscape. At it's western boundary lies the Cascade Range of mountains which divides the High Desert from the western coastal valley. To its north are the Blue Mountains and at its south are the Steen Mountains. The northern portion of the High Desert is called the Columbia Plateau which receives the most rainfall and has therefore become a hub of settlement. When I arrived after three months journey on horseback and carriage, accompanied by my brother, wife, and two small children, escorted by trustworthy mercenaries, I found the region to be a sort of tranquil desolation.

It's a common feeling I have when traveling through the vast expanses of the middle west of America. I have learned that even before the collapse, this was a feeling shared by many. While the middle west is populated mostly by landowners and workers arranged under a feudalistic system and typically were weary of the presence of outsiders especially that of the learned class, we were not threatened or hindered after I told the local sheriffs that we had no business in their lands other than to travel further westward. Once we entered Oregon the political arrangements began to change and we found refuge with a confederation of progressive types calling themselves the Union of the Columbia River. Here in their capitol of New Kennewick I began my work which consisted of collecting important documents, listening to oral history either first hand or second, and reviewing what the city had managed to gather in their library.

New Kennewick would not be my only stop but the first of many during the course of many years. This project would take me from New Kennewick, down the Columbia River to the Deschutes where which I would find the greatest city of the High Desert in Cascade City. Then away from the relative safety of the river communities into the eastern desolation which contained their own communities and stories. My collection included numerous audio and video recordings which I transcribed for this book, written accounts and oral histories, I would meet the last surviving people who still remember life before the Great Panic and stand with them before the ruined homes of their youth. After nearly fifteen years of work, I have finished this book and as you are reading it then you know that it was approved for publication by my order.

 

[MidnightMantra]

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. Life Before The Panic
1. Robert "Vicious" Wilson

 

[MidnightMantra]

ROBERT "VICIOUS" WILSON​

In Cascade City there is something special hiding in the ruins, a school for the education of children in the art of music. It was founded in 2087 has for almost ten years churned out musicians of exceptional quality. The students learn classical fundamentals then move on to mastering the guitar, piano, drums, among other instruments. One of the teachers I encountered was a man approaching his 86th birthday, many of the teachers call him Robert but his friends refer to him by his childhood nickname, "Vicious". At his advanced age he might possibly be the oldest person alive for at least five hundred miles but despite this fact he has lost none of his characteristic tenacity and roughness.

VICIOUS
I was sixteen when I first heard about the plague. At the time I was living in a small town called Long Creek in the northeastern part of the state. I still call them states even now. It was March of 2024 and we were a bunch of rebels in our town, had a punk band called The Dirtbags, there were three of us, I was the drummer, Ned was the guitarist and singer, and Larry played bass. We were terrible but man we fucking hated that town and all we cared about was fucking shit up. It wasn't a picturesque small town, it was poor and there was a lot of broken homes. We all got in fights with our parents, Ned's dad was a violent alcoholic and I remember he would run away from home every six months or so but the sheriff would always catch him drinking underage at some shithole bar and bring him back.

They were my best friends and that summer when school finally let out we immediately went to partying with the other delinquents in town. We drank beer, liquor, smoked weed, even meth, tried desperately to get laid every night, we drove drunk and nearly killed ourselves running off the road into the woods. We weren't bad kids just lost then the plague happened and suddenly everything got fucking in focus, you better bet your ass they did. At first we didn't know shit about it until a few weeks after they found cases in Mexico and you better believe there was a fuck ton of racist assholes yelling about how illegal immigration would kill us all. We didn't think much of it in our stupor but over time our other friends started ditching us because their parents were scared and they were scared. Ned, Larry, and I were too stupid to be scared and finally sometime in late May we were the only ones left who would hang out.

I remember that night vividly because it was the last time I didn't have to think about reanimated corpses. We drank two bottles of vodka and a six pack, smoked a blunt and slam danced in the middle of a grocery store parking lot. If we were any smarter we would have probably asked why the cops didn't come and arrest us, we never partied out in the open like that. When we woke up in my car, there were police sirens blaring outside but they weren't for us. They were racing toward something, I thought probably some armed robbery by a tweaker but we came to find out that it had been the first infected in our town. This was three months before the Great Panic when cases were mostly isolated and the government hesitated to declared a nationwide lockdown.

You probably think that moment was the beginning of a breakdown in society but that wouldn't come until much later in my town. In fact we weren't part of the Great Panic at least not in the traditional sense, we had a bunch of gun toting rednecks in our town and while most of them were stupid as fuck, there was a few who kept it together enough to organize a militia when the big cities started to fall. But those three months in between us waking up in the car and when Joe Thompson started patrolling the streets with his boys, there was a strange forced delusion that nothing serious was happening or maybe they were too dumb to recognize what was happening. People instantly went down the conspiracy rabbit hole, not the smart conspiracies either, shit like Mexicans were purposely infecting people with the plague, that God was punishing us, or that the plague didn't really exist.

Eventually some of our gang got bored of staying home and for awhile we partied and hung out like before. They were the best parties we had which in retrospect is haunting, I realized later on that we partied so hard because we didn't really expect to be alive much longer. I hooked up with Sally Matheson, beautiful girl, I had been in love with her for awhile, she ended up getting torn apart by the zombies at her mother's house in November of that year. It's strange, I used to feel so much anger and sadness for what happened to my friends, to what I considered the stealing away of my life by this plague of reanimated corpses but I realized that there are positives. You see, my friends and I recognized how oppressive and alienated life was in that time, racism, inequality, imperialist wars, mass shootings. We stuck together and loved each other as a sort of rebellion against that world.

When the shit hit the fan for real and I had to survive, I never questioned the necessity of other people having my back but also of love. Not many people saw it the way I did and for a long time they ruled over the rest, they still do in most places.