The Priest
Formerly known as Bob (part 52)
The Priest
Our next destination spot is a place called Wilbur Springs, Before the collapse it was advertised as a sanctuary from the fast pace, noise and information overload of our modern world. Wilbur’s ancient ceremonial land and medicinal healing waters offer a unique opportunity to slow down, quiet the mind, and relax into nature’s embrace. How’s that for a come on. The funny thing about this place and all the other places like it is, that right up until the end, they kept offering this experience at a rate that would eat up the entirety of a month’s salary for people who were still working. Even as the economy got worse with more and more people getting kicked out of their houses, more and more people unable to afford to buy food or pay their bills, retirement plans being wiped out, AI taking more and more jobs, they kept doing this shit. It never occurred to them that going to a sanctuary and relaxing was an offer that was lost on an ever-larger percentage of the population.
It was the same thing for obscenely overpriced fitness retreats. This group would offer week long stays, to teach people how to re-embrace the rapidly deteriorating natural world and rediscover their primal selves, for anywhere from 5 to 10 thousand dollars per week.
Anyone who was paying attention to what was happening found these grifters laughable. I always hoped that I would be able to see their faces when the bottom fell out, when they finally ran out of privileged people. I really wanted to see what they would do. Would they finally acknowledge that things had gone terribly wrong, or would they try one last push to see if they could get a sucker to come to one of the retreats or sanctuaries?
I didn’t get to meet any of them apres le deluge, that’s French, Stuffy taught it to me. It means after the flood or some such thing.
I wondered if any of them were even still alive because they were some of the first people to dump any type of precautions once the addled old man told them the pandemic was over.
It was going to be another hot day, but it looked like we would get to the hot springs just before dawn and find a place to settle in for a few days. I was looking forward to it. Maybe we would find some of that healthy, nutritious food the place was so proud of, but honestly most of us would settle for anything remotely edible. There may be water which would be nice, and they did have a pool, but who knew what shape it would be in or if there was even any water left in it.
Like everywhere else we had been, the apocalypse had not been kind to Wilbur Springs. Most of the little cabins had been ransacked, all the windows were broken, a few of them were burned to the ground and a fire had ravaged the hills west of the settlement. There were a lot of skeletons. It seemed like this place had been high on people’s list as a refuge. They chose wrong and that made me think of our destination. There was not much chance that Ft. Bragg had come through unscathed. The only thing that drew me there was the unexplainable lure of the ocean. It seemed to represent something that offered comfort and survival which I knew was wrong because the oceans had been mostly killed by humans in the years leading up to A-Day.
I suggested that we all get our own cabin since there were still enough to go around, and Dolly vetoed that because it would be unsafe for us to be separated, especially now since we still had no idea how far behind us the bad guys were.
I began to wonder about the bad guys. We hadn’t heard anything from them since the desert on the other side of the Sierras. That was both marginally comforting in that they may have given up on us, or really frightening in that they were planning something horrible and unpleasant for us.
Dolly seemed to think they were still back there. He had a feeling, and he told us his feelings about danger were rarely wrong.
I didn’t want to believe him, but my experience in the old world told me that whatever power is in play never took my feelings or beliefs into account when deciding what fucked up thing to try next.
There was a root cellar on the property and we decided to sleep there. It was hidden away behind what used to be the kitchen and would provide some shelter from the heat during the day. We stashed the carts in a barn type structure and got ready to bed down. Dolly took the first watch. By evening Stuffy had relieved him, and he was sitting on the porch with his head hanging on his chest, sound asleep, when the rest of us got up. Por kicked him, and he fell from the chair and came awake with a shocked look on his face.
“Why did you kick me?” He asked.
“Because you fell asleep on duty.” She said.
“I was tired.”
“And if those people were out there, you could have gotten us killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You certainly are.” She said.
Dolly sent him and Tiki to the pool to get some water, such as it was, and they walked away. A few minutes later, there was a scream. We ran toward the sound. Tiki was sitting on the ground, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, and he was pointing at a tree.
Hanging upside down by his feet with his stomach slit open and his entrails lying on the ground in front of him was the hillbilly Santa.
“It seems as though my feeling was correct.” Said Dolly. “They’re here, and we may very well be fucked.”
😱