You might think Boston would be inhospitable to a self-sufficient community, that the natural resources necessary for such a thing, solar power, wind, heating fuel and the like would be insufficient to provide for eight large buildings worth of people, but Conrad Blankenship has done just that.

The centerpiece of the complex is Conrad tower, 31 stories of living space, cafeterias, workspace and entertainment. Conrad Tower is the home of the residents who started the community with Mr. Blankenship, a consortium of MIT professors, captains of industry and Boston elites who keep the interests of the community constantly in their plans. The tower itself is a magnificent example of late pre-apocalypse Bostonian Architecture, having been recently completed and hardly settled before things began to go wrong in the world. Conrad Blankenship took control of the tower through defaults on the mortgage to his bank.

Originally planned as a low carbon footprint green building, generating much of its own power through solar panels and a battery of wind turbines on the roof, Blankenship had the vision to continue this foundation into a self-sustaining community. Since the building was nearly all glass, he built a ring of hydroponic farming and greenhouses on every floor, at harvest time providing nearly half the food of the community. He also created a large roost for chickens, providing eggs and protein for the resident’s nutrition and fertilizer for the crops. Rainwater is collected, filtered and recycled on site.

As I said, many of the eldest residents of this community are technologists. They are responsible for much of the success and additional resource generation of the community. The building overlooks Boston Harbor, once a busy hub of commerce and international shipping. The Harbor is now idle, but it generates power via wave machines designed on site.

More power is generated from additional solar panels found by scavenging parties sent out through the city. It is one of these scavenging parties that helped extricate me from the situation with Pickman. Neighborhoods are scouted for solar panels, which are removed and added to the buildings. I said before they had a fine architectural style, but it’s only if you look past the solar panels which have been put everywhere they can get a purchase. They said they even have a warehouse of solar calculators that have been collected for the tiny panels which are constantly being built into larger devices.

He was very proud of his claim that he was getting several percent more power for each technology the his community has developed that was in use at the time of the calamity. “We’re pushing the boundaries of what could have been. We’re going to do this right this time around. We’ll be cleaner and better, live up to the promise that we didn’t get the chance to.”

Blankenship obviously wants to expand.

Additional power is generated in the health clubs. Participating in an exercise program is compulsory for the well-being and energy needs of the community. Stationary bikes, rowing machines, and other pieces of equipment are connected via belts or chains to dynamos which generate power.

As I said, there are eight buildings currently in the Blankenship complex. Some of them are specially purposed, one is solely a factory tasked with recycling and manufacturing more usable power generators and resources for the community. I saw a new wave driven power generator nearly off the line, as well as glass furnaces and machinery for metal shaping. This is the only part of the complex that ever uses any kind of fossil fuel, I was told. This is mostly a legacy from when the building was an active facility on the harbor. Much of the machinery has been repurposed or relocated to here in order to complete the task of providing for his community.

None of the buildings in the complex were originally meant to go together. They all existed separately before Blankenship took control of them, and this presented quite a challenge for the engineers. Infrastructure had to be built between the buildings, up to a half-mile apart, using technologies that hadn’t been completely implemented before the end of life as we knew it. In order to make it a complex with a common community, infrastructure had to be shared.

The community is linked by a transportation system mostly reserved for the community leaders of various small vehicles from golf carts to a couple plug in hybrids they were lucky enough to find. They have a number of vehicles they run on biodiesel which is brewed on site from a variety of sources, and a few cars that are run on whatever petroleum resources they can come up with. One of the most fortified areas of the community is a field of petroleum tanks. It has been fortified by a wall of crushed cars and the beginnings of a all made of tree trunks, giving it the look of a post-industrial frontier fort. But trust me, don’t try anything funny in this area. They shoot first, and don’t bother to ask questions.

“The more resources are shared, the more the community will work together. If you must fight with our neighbors for basic needs, only conflict can come of it,” he explained to me in an interview. It was a philosophy of R. Buckminster Fuller, whom he’d studied deeply in his education. “We certainly saw this happen as resources became scarce during the calamity. There would certainly be more of us here on earth if some of the wars over resources hadn’t been fought.”

Blankenship is a dynamic and energetic figure, he led some of my tours personally, and the community reveres him as a capable leader, a teacher and a friend. He’s tall, handsome, and always well groomed, like a politician used to be.

The accommodations I saw in Blankenship Tower were luxurious even by pre-apocalypse standards. I later saw more typical accommodations, and these were adequate, clean and secure as things go.

Family life in the community is diverse and active. The children are in school most days of the year with few breaks to speak of. Conrad believes that only an educated community is prepared for progress and survival. He claims that the children have a master’s level education by the time they would have been in college. The task of teaching students falls on the adults of the community, most of whom held college degrees or higher, and this is one of the ways in which community members pay into the community. In time off from school children may go to the beach, though swimming is not allowed unless you are wearing a full hazard suit, as the PCB contamination of the harbor is still high, and traveling away from the community might not be safe.

The community provides three meals a day, strictly rationed. Much of the cuisine is vegetarian and raw, as the scientists feel that cooking reduces the nutrition of the food and uses too much energy for such a population of this one’s current size. Every little bit of energy and nutrition must be utilized, they explain. Nothing can be wasted. Alcohol and other intoxicants are strictly prohibited for residents.

There are medical facilities available that are impressive to say the least. Health care is provided by doctors and nurses in the community, who also share their knowledge in classes. Medication is largely on the edge of expiring, and so the treatment is slipping further and further into history. They are looking into creating their own drugs, but this is a technical skill in extremely short supply in the world at large. If somebody came to them with those skills, they’d accept that person willingly.

Once a week, there is a community meeting where the leaders describe progress in their technology and their resource building. The meetings are enthusiastic and practically a revival for the community residents. New members are introduced to the group, and strategies are mapped out for the coming quarter year. A primary focus of the community is acquiring pre-made technologies and and resources. During these meetings, the real business comes down to scavenging details.

For the residents, military training and service are compulsory. Security is a significant consideration for any community of this type, and trespassers can be assured they will meet heavy resistance. This training also pays off in defense for the scavenging teams. Blankenship gave me confident assurance that in nearly 150 scavenging missions the previous month, they had only lost four people to ambush and attack and most of those attackers had been summarily tracked down and dealt with.

If you’re looking for a community where you can enjoy significant benefits in exchange for hard work and service, this is the place to go.

If you would like to apply to join, the best way is to approach a scavenging party, but be sure to do it carefully. Bring a white flag and keep your hands where they can see them.

So I’ll pick up with Pickman. He didn’t say much as he led me away from the tunnel. Nothing more than “Stay away from them unless you want mushrooms. Not good people. Good mushrooms. But not good people.” or “Get behind me,” this latter phrase as he would sense some kind of danger, though none ever materialized that I could tell.

He led me back away from the harbor into the west side of Boston, and into a large industrial building. I know we passed Fenway Park on the way, but I’m not sure where we wound up. The building was huge. When he closed the door and locked it down his resolve softened.

The building had a few levels to it, and while it had an industrial purpose once, it now lay idle and strewn with refuse. He was a scavenger and a packrat. The refuse was piled in categories, so he was using it for something. One pile was books, from the looks of them, horror books. A lot of Stephen King. I counted three copies of Pet Cemetery alone, but there were more, Koontz, Lovecraft, Poe, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, Frankenstein, Dracula. All the stuff I read in high school before all of this happened. Good taste. Behind this pile was more, shelves, walls lined with books, separated by volume, ten or twenty of the same one, arranged by type as if the warehouse was a neurotic bookstore.

Looked like some spots in the walls had been patched and reinforced. Maybe that was what he was doing here. Didn’t get to dawdle long. He led me up to his office. It was up a couple flights of stairs, and looked like it had once been just drywall and windows, but now it was a steel cage, bars on the windows, with strategic ports in the diamond plate on the walls. Defensible. Not sure I wanted to go up. For fear I couldn’t get back out.

I asked if he could hold up for a minute while I caught my breath. He said he’d get me some water, and gave me the .45 just in case. In case of what?

The .45 gave me a sense of who he was. A .45 could shoot through the walls of his office, so he was telling me he trusts me. Easy for him to say. He wasn’t just almost eaten. He still had a hundred pounds on me and who know what kind of arsenal in that room. Plus, I knew I was valuable, and who knew what that meant.

He came back with a canteen and handed it to me, saying it was distilled and filtered. I smelled it and took a drink. It was clean and good.

His eyes wouldn’t land on anything for more than a second. He seemed almost wary.

I asked him what he does, and he came back with something completely unexpected. He said he’s a painter, but times being what they are, he doesn’t get a lot of time to paint anymore.

I asked to see his paintings and he led me up to the office. The room was larger than I thought it would be, and he’d kept the windows on the building unobstructed. Southern Exposure. The office had a bed and one wall taken up with a store of provisions, rice, flour, canned goods, supplies. He also had an arsenal in another wall, closet dedicated to ammunition. Bows and arrows hung from the ceiling. In the middle was a large table, covered with canvases, tubes of paint, rags, and the like.

He flipped the covers off of a canvas.

“Here,” he said, and then racked his rifle.

“Do you want this too?” I gave him the gun. I was at the point of believing he wouldn’t hurt me.

I looked around at the canvas, a hideous beast looked back, demonic and wild at once. It belonged on the cover of one of the books from the pile downstairs. He flipped the covering on another painting, and another. They were all the same.

It was then that I noticed something under a covering that wasn’t a painting or supplies. I tried to sneak a glance underneath it, but there was a commotion, and I only got a glimpse of dark gray fur. The door jumped open, and Pickman was grabbing his gun and shooting in an instant. I ducked for any amount of cover I could find, expecting bullets might ricochet in the steel cage. The table was fortified, and so I landed under there. From the floor I saw a feral cat, or what once had been a feral cat.

“Damned things. Demons keep attacking.”

Demons? I thought.

I stood up and looked at him in all seriousness. “Pickman, these are cats, not demons. You should be eating these when you kill them.”

He wouldn’t hear it, and this is when I figured Pickman out. He’d been a horror fan, a really ultimate fan, and confronted with the horror of the apocalypse, retreated into the worlds in his mind.

“You don’t know the people that live in Boston, they use magic, they summon demons, and send them after me. They’ll want you, but I can protect you.”

There’s things you never want to hear coming out of a psychotic’s mouth, and this is one of them, an indication of possessiveness that really just needs to be run away from.

I told him I was fine.

“No you’re not.”

I began to make my way towards the door, very slowly while I told him about my credentials and my assignment.

“I need to protect you. We must repopulate the world.”

That’s the other things you don’t want to hear. I made for the door, but he got in front of me.

“You’re not leaving.”

I kicked him in the knee, hard, but he hardly flinched. He picked me up and threw me across the room. I backed up, plotting my way around him, but he came at me fast, pushed me against the wall, and my shoulder broke a window. Glass cut my shoulder deep, and my head was bleeding too. I grabbed for anything I could and knocked him on the head. You’d think from movies and things a good blow to the head would knock him cold, but it doesn’t work that way. You have to hit people a few times. He caught my arm, and almost pinned me when the door opened and three people rushed in.

“Pickman!” they yelled.

He turned around.

“You can’t have her. She’s mine.”

This gave me the chance to break away. I kicked him in the small of the back and he dropped. I rushed over to the others, hoping they weren’t cannibals or psychotics. After today, the odds had to be in my favor.

They wound up talking him down from there. They “negotiated” my release with a copy of “I am Legend” and “The Cthulhu Mythos”, though I gather they were from the pile downstairs.

This is how I managed to come across my assignment. The people who rescued me were scavengers from Conrad Blankenship’s community. They stopped their scavenging and took me there.

They’ve been fixing me up. I got stitches in my arm and temple, and I’ve been recovering from the loss of blood under their hospitality.

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