From the desk of Soren Ragnvald, Editor In Chief

The incidents in Fresh Kills New York are frightening, and I am grateful to the survivors of the incidents there for the safety of our reporter, Lori Kim, while at the same time, I express my sincerest condolences to the survivors for their fallen. I am going to send Lori to a safer expedition while I attempt to negotiate a resolution with Conrad Blankenship. I’m certain something can be arranged. There is no need for these kinds of actions in our world. We all need to rebuild. Lori, I’ll send you someplace as safe as I can make it for your next assignments.

We are able to receive word from AJ Green of what had been the Coast Guard, but unfortunately, I have no network in that part of the world. The Caribbean and Haiti did not have enough of a market to justify an entry to cover it. At the time of the trouble, Nordlander Telecommunications had only a small foothold in New England. We are receiving his broadcasts via satellite, but have no boats or resources in place for rescue. We will monitor the situation and look to provide resources as we can.

Ithius Sinclair continues to find stories in the Bay area in California. This area in particular has fallen on desperate times. Food and resources are scarce, and the competition for survival has divided the survivors into clans. The area is one of the most anarchic, violent and dangerous I have current reports on, and there are many rumors of cannibalism. Large wildfires still burn unchecked in the hills, while other places are flooded with glacial melt. Still, there are patches of survivors clinging on and rebuilding, and order has some hope of returning to the area.

In the Phoenix area, Michaela Blackhorse is just coming on-line. The area struggles for water, and the populations from Central America and Mexico heading to more hospitable climates to the north can lead to significant clashes. At the same time, there is a new strain of West Nile Virus that is finding a foothold in the area that appears to be exceptionally strong and has new dangerous symptoms. There is little ability to develop medicines or vaccines anywhere, and so this could spread to the rest of the continent if it isn’t contained there soon.

The End of the World Times continues to provide coverage of survival niches in our post-apocalypse world. Our reporters are independent agents who work on your donations. Please help us support their coverage.

35 miles the hell away from Fresh Kills NY – I don’t know where I am, but I’ve lost Blankenship’s thugs. Yeah, Blankenship again. Ran into them this morning, just before the explosion. Yeah, it’s been a great day.

Where do I start? We were very close to the miners. The line of people carrying garbage out looked like ants digging an anthill. They were so close. I left to take a break, have a piss off to the side when I was jumped by three men. I recognized one of the attackers as one of Blankenship’s top security guys, right away, his introduction wasn’t necessary. Can I just say it isn’t nice to jump a girl who’s pissing? I had my pants almost up when they grabbed me, so my hands were down, and my pants slid down as they dragged me. I made noise, but I didn’t think anybody had heard me. They knew their area, dragged me away from the paths most people take back to the community.

He had me in a bear hug, and was dragging me, kicking and struggling, away. The guy holding me was good. He kept out of the range of my head’s movement, so a head butt wasn’t going to work. Kicking was mostly out, everything I did with my legs dropped my pants lower. Only way to go was to break the grip. I feigned a few moves, then slipped myself a few inches lower through the grip, dug my nails into a pressure point in his hands and pulled as hard as I could.

He dropped me, and I managed to get a hand down to pull up my pants. it isn’t decent of them to attack me in such a state, but I knew I wasn’t going to a moment to buckle. I held them with my hand and made a break for it through the widest gap I could get through. As I ran, one took a step in with his leg. Big mistake. Left himself open. Gave a good sharp kick to his knee, and I’m pretty sure I broke it. Steel toes. Can’t beat them when you need to take out a knee.

That gave me a step away, and while that was nice, two or three were much nicer. I put on all the speed I could before I felt an arm grab my elbow. I rolled my shoulder and mostly broke free. I pulled hard, released his last grip on my sleeve, and ran hard, buttoning my pants as I went.

And then I was practically back to the dig site. I heard gunfire behind me. Fuckers were shooting. I can’t dodge bullets, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying. I made my run much more erratic, hoping I’d be able to get away. Good thing about guns is they’re usually effective. Bad thing about guns is their report is unmistakable and loud. The sound attracted attention from above, and when Adam Powell saw it was me running from a few men, he started running for me.

It probably saved his life.

There was a series of explosions up at the site. A fireball shot into the air which knocked down Adam and the few others who were coming my way. I could feel the blast of heat from where I was. The funny thing about being chased by a guy with a gun is explosions don’t necessarily scare you off. I ran for Adam, safety in numbers, and I saw others who had been up top running away, any way they could to reach safety.

Garbage was flying through the air, flaming papers and melting plastics raining down. And now that I’m writing this, I remember the graffiti “1,000 Years to Rain”. had to be connected, but I’m not going back there to investigate.

When Blankenship’s people saw the explosion, they turned and ran. We found shelter until the debris landed and then rushed up to the site. The place was obliterated. You could see the explosion started from deep in the mine, as the whole main tunnel had collapsed. There had been a secondary round of explosions near the mouth of the tunnel. this was the source of the debris. We rushed to help the injured, me constantly keeping an eye over my shoulder. There were burns, open wounds, it was a war zone.

I did what I could for hours, but my safety was still questionable. I stuck close to Adam, pulling people away from the site, treating them. There wasn’t nearly the first aid supplies we needed to treat everyone. People from the neighborhood began pouring in with what supplies they could, and the reinforcements began treating the wounds.

I worked into the evening last night, and there were several turns at guarding me over the night.

I can only give you a little bit of what this means. The men in the mine are dead, as are a lot of people in the tunnel. I don’t have a death toll of any accuracy, but I’ve heard estimates from 50 to 120. There are near as many wounded. Adam wasn’t sure if they would be able to continue the mining, if the project would go on there. Much of their equipment was destroyed. For a while he thought he was going to travel with me, and I would have welcomed him. In the end, he escorted me ten miles away before he stopped me, got off the back of my cycle and began walking back. He couldn’t leave his community like that, but he felt I was safely far away.

So that’s it. I don’t know what all of this means, who caused the explosion, or why, but I have to get away from there right now for my own safety.

Outside Fresh Kills, NY – They say they’ll let me back up to the site tomorrow, my symptoms of toxicity are almost out of my system. I feel fine, but their project doctors have more experience on this than I do. The housing we are in used to be a suburb of moderate affluence, and every worker at least has a house for themselves. There is no shortage of housing these days. I’m living with one of the camp doctors, in a spare bedroom.

His brother is up at the site every day, and he is preparing for the return of the miners. After this long without food, their systems will need to be brought back up to a normal metabolic rate slowly using specialized easily digested foods. He’s prepared a good deal of these foods, finely ground grains that essentially look like mush. He says it is almost how you’d bring a newborn infant up to adult foods, but it can be done more quickly than the year it would take for an infant.

This community feels like a place of deja vu of life before. There are so many people here, it actually feels like a community, like there should be a park district and a little league, ice cream parlors and pizza joints. There aren’t many places like this left in the world. Most people moved into the cities for the companionship, or, if they were up to the survival challenges, stayed in the countryside, living off the land by hunting and farming.  A group of people actually living and working together.

The community is right now a restless place to stay. The comings and going from the site are round the clock, and all members of the community are contributing. There are a small number of female miners, but all the wives and women of the community are capable of the physical demands of subsistence living. They have gone into a high activity mode since the collapse, pushing to produce more support resources. They pump and carry more fresh water from the groundwater wells, carry it to the site, gather and harvest more food, haul more waste away from the excavations, their backs are as broken as the men who have been down in the shaft for over a week now.

For the most part, they ignore the thought that hangs over everybody’s heads, that the men trapped in the mine will never make it out again. The several that I’ve talked to all deny the possibility, say they will not allow the thought into their heads.

“We’ll get them out,” is what they say to themselves, between themselves, and they believe it.

It is frustrating to me to be trapped here. Still, I’ve heard some strange rumblings at night near my room, but cannot place them. There’s a lot of unknown  people coming through. Most of the people in the community think they are a blessing, some think they are only here to find a place where survival is provided. I understand the need to belong to something these days, and they say they will attempt to provide if the new comers stay, but that contingency is after they find the trapped miners. I hope all of these people have good intentions. Found more graffiti today in three places, all saying the same thing, “1,000 years to rain.” Don’t know what it means, and neither does anybody else. People who would leave graffiti in a time like this are bad news, if you ask me.