As more refugees checked in and told their stories it was evident that the essentials of civilization were fast disappearing beyond the vastness of Camp Galaxy.  Mona interviewed the new guests and recorded their tales with all the gory details just like she once recorded the proceedings at Area 71.  Yet, it was clear to her that recording facts and trials of survival were one thing, but the realities of the ongoing events could be, and probably would be quite different from the stories of the interviewees.  Perhaps due to their relief at finding themselves safe and welcomed in a place chockfull of sophisticated gear, most spoke optimistically of their odysseys, even minimizing the hardships and terrors of their trips.  It was as if they knew the storms would ebb, the skies would clear and the phones would resume their chirping in a world cured of its present madness.

     Mona wasn't so sure.  They reminded her of an old song her grandfather was fond of, a tune proclaiming that with a Colt 45 and a four-wheel drive, a man could survive in the country.  When money got tight in the family home, the old man would say "don't worry, Honey, we might have to eat a lot of porcupine, but we will make it."  Even then Mona wasn't so sure.  She pretty much knew how many porcupines could be in the neighboring woods, how many deer, how many squirrels even, and how many days there was in an ordinary winter.  The arithmetic was not encouraging.

     A gifted student, Mona had scored a scholarship at a military academy.  First in her class, she entered service with great expectations.  She would quickly rise through the ranks, she thought.   Unfortunately, soldiers did not walk into fights anymore, they did it from their easy chairs in air-conditioned trailers in the Nevada desert, controlling the drones that were doing the military's dirty work and going home at the end of their shift.  There was no 'real' war going on and without combat experience Mona's promotions would be few and far in between.  However, cute enough for good optics and unusually at ease with the mountains of shenanigans that cluttered the in-boxes of senior officers, she became the perfect aide-de-camp to aging warriors with a slipping grasp of the algorithms and other headaches of the electronic age.  A glorified secretary to the martial elites, Mona obtained the associated level of security clearance and promotions, but her applications to the War College courses she was lusting after were routinely nixed by her superiors:  "Oh Mona, we just can't let you go..."

     She soldiered on with marathon running and martial arts classes.  Dalliances with suitable men withered over expectations of matrimony and child rearing.  She tried women, but Mona's shoulders were wide enough to carry the world, it seemed, while she only wanted to lose herself in loving arms.  No suitable partner ever understood the contradiction.

     I'll scratch all of this from my bucket list, she thought.  But then, what to do?  Well, there are always books to read, e-books from everywhere, in translation when needed.  Probably pretty interesting stuff at the War College library when you have a suitable security clearance.  Now this was a glorious idea.  Mona was reading, soon taking notes. An archivist was born.

     Still, it wasn't until she checked in at Camp Galaxy that she finally came into her true vocation. Adding another sheet to the growing stacks of papers recording the doings within and without the premises one day, she realized that possibly no future historian would have been as close to the events' consequences as she was and perhaps no one could possibly comment and interpret those events in real time, so to speak.  Right then, she started on the first sheet of another stack of paper.  Mona's Journal was born.

     Another alumnus of Area 71, a former security consultant, turned up on foot, armed, exhausted and nearly starving.  Mona had much appreciated his plain speaking at meetings where he presented his work and she was eager to hear his assessment of the national situation.  It was bleak.  He shared a tale darker than most.

     For a change of pace, just before the cataclysm, the contractor had gone to work for a financier who had, as he put it, "more money than sense."  The man was planning an escape to his private retreat, a Pacific Island, but first they had to fly to his other private retreat on the coast of Maine to retrieve some artworks and other million-dollar knickknacks.  Their plane touched the ground just ahead of an ice storm of unprecedented violence that would paralyze the area for days, leaving plenty of time for small talk with the estate's staff while sharing coffee and news.  A groundskeeper told about a call from his daughter, a cashier in a local convenience store.

     "Dad," she said, "guess what we first ran out of."

     He had the answer, "Why honey, it was beer!"

     "No sir, Dad, it was donuts."  That cracked up everyone.

     "God help this country when it runs out of donuts," said the groundskeeper.  He wasn't so lighthearted the next day with another story from the convenience store. The distributors delivery trucks could not get that far on the icy roads and most supermarkets in the northern part of the state had nothing but empty shelves.  A local trucker who moved logs and woodchips out of the forest year around made a deal with a distributor and headed downstate with his woodchips trailer secured to its Western Star horse, chains on all eighteen wheels.  He made it and was coming back loaded when approaching home in the dark of the night he came to a barrier.  A detour sign put him on twenty miles of a beat-up rural road through forested land.  It was slow going, but not a challenge and he did not know someone had moved the barrier and the detour sign behind him and that another similar set up was at the northern end of the stretch he was on.  Somewhere around halfway he saw bright lights and a truck jackknifed across the road with a couple of pick-ups in attendance, red emergency flashers blinking away.

         He was found in the morning manacled to his bunk.  The thieves had taken all of his load except the bundles of paper towels, too bulky perhaps, and the beverage stacks, too heavy to carry.  They had kept the Western Star humming for heat, but someone had put a hammer to the VHF, just in case.

     "They had baklavas on, I couldn't say who they were," he said to the police, but he confided to his wife that he recognized one of the pickups, it belonged to a state cop.  The very same day, the Western Star and its log trailer headed to the home of the trucker's father in New Hampshire, the wife and kids following in the family SUV packed with all they could take.  At their house the chips trailer remained with the paper towels.  The soft drinks and the beer disappeared that night.

     Around the coffees at the estate kitchen table, no one laughed, or hazarded a comment.  The former security contractor was thinking of his times in the Middle East's rebellious days, sitting around in a group of 'friendlies' and wondering which one might just put a knife through his ribs for 'justice', a few fifty-dollar bills, or a case of beer.  After a while he got up and said he had to talk to the boss.

     The rest was verbatim in Mona's journal.

     "I told him we had to get out of there.  When cops start stealing food, they will take his, not his staff's.  He was worried about his Monet, his Matisse.  We wrapped that in blankets in a cardboard box.  He was in tears, moaning about his 'treasures of western civilization'.  I said there would be no such thing as western civilization in a week.  The maid didn't want to go, she had family nearby.  We left her with the million-dollar knickknacks and headed for the motel where the pilots were staying.  I was driving with my head out the side window, weaving around downed trees, running over live wires hanging from sparking messes on the poles.  Good thing his estate toy was a decades-old Hummer, a relic, but good as new.  At the motel the pilots were in their socks, they didn't want to go.  They said they were forbidden, we had no flight plan, the tower was closed.  Then, ice could build up on the plane and take us down, blablabla...  I said I would pilot the darn thing myself.  I lied, I said I knew how.  They put on shoes and coats and we drove to the airfield where we had to tow the plane with the hummer far enough out of the hangar to fire it up and take off on the first runway we came to.  We were gassed up for L.A., but strong headwinds put us down in Dallas.  There, we couldn't buy jet fuel at any price.  I said we had to find a ride, head to Mexico.  He wouldn't do it.  They will steal my paintings on the road, he said.  I said no one gives a shit about paintings when you can't buy fuel in Dallas, Texas.  He thanked me and offered me a check.  That's allright, I said, I couldn't cash it where I am going.   He gave me his gun and a box of bullets and I left him sitting in his plane with his cardboard box.  I have never seen a sadder man in all of my life.  I found rides, walked the last hundred miles in six days.  And here I am."

     Mona thanked him and asked what he thought he would do at Camp Galaxy.  Nothing stressful, he hoped.  Cleaning and chores perhaps.  He was tired, he said.  Mona thought of his gun, the box of bullets that didn't seem to bulge in his jacket anymore and the rides he said he found.  Fatigue wasn't his burden, it was the weariness of killing.

Next: FISH DOG