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.

Fresh Kills, NY – The men continue to pump air into the chamber. There have been several strategies employed in the rescue, but each has met with unforeseen issues. They tried to clear waste from the top, but the time this would consume is too great to hope for any of the men trapped to survive. They have also tried clearing the shaft leading in, but cave-ins continue to happen. After the garbage hit the landfill, the plastic bags tended to rupture, making the piles essentially fluid. It’s like quicksand, the more you move out, the more falls in. Tunneling underneath the surface leads to collapses, and so they are going to try to drill a shaft down. The machinery they have might have been capable of this were a mine, but its weight makes it unsteady on the landfill base. They also have limited diesel fuel to run it. I was thinking about calling Blankenship Towers for a donation, but I guess that bridge is burned. Can anybody supply a recipe for biodiesel? It would seem like we’d have enough raw materials to cook some up. I’d do anything to help if it could get me away from the smell.

There doesn’t seem to be any one person in charge, but several leaders are emerging from the men here. The situation looks more and more dire, but the men and their families refuse to give up hope.

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Filed June 21, 2012

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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