Dead South
Mama Jones' Land. May 5th, 2037
You don't usually get to see a catastrophe coming. That's one of the hallmarks of a true disaster. It behaves like lighting: it strikes fast, in a flash that hits without warning, and you don't hear the thundering boom until after it has already left you burnt and your home in cinders. Only then do you get the chance to sit and think about what happened. A real catastrophe is a punch to the gut. Swift, undeserved, brutal.
The Olive Plague was of that kind. At first, at least. When it rolled across the earth like a tsunami, birthed out of some lab or by some cruel twisting of nature, and whole lives and cities and cultures were swept away underneath it. The human race went into shock. This was a pandemic so infectious that when you opened your eyes in the morning, you could never be sure if your face had grown olive boils while you slept, however careful you might've tried to be in the days before. But it didn't just kill you. If it had, the end of civilization as we knew it might have been mercifully quick. Nobody can truly hate the bullet that enters your brain and ends your life before you've even had the time to realize you've been shot.
But those touched by the Olive Plague died slow deaths. They lived on for months after symptoms began. They moaned, they suffered, they begged. So humanity had time to understand what was happening to us. There were long weeks where we could let it sink in: the end of our kind, our way of life- the end of the mark our race got to leave on this little blue marble. The only difference between catastrophe and tragedy is time.
These are the kinds of thoughts that Mama Jones has.
When she's sitting on the porch of her old plantation home late in the morning like this, drinking her sweet tea out of a glass jar, her mind can go off on all sorts of philosophical musings. It's the kind of thinking she would've scoffed at once. Jones was raised on a farm, a woman of the soil. She went to college, her daddy was rich, and he left most of that wealth to her- being an only child had upsides- but she didn't often let her mind fly up into the clouds like this. Thinking about humanity and fate. What silliness. The End will do that to you.
And, well, it's better than thinking about the Mounted Skulls.
They're coming. The Jonesgroup doesn't have long to prepare. A couple of weeks, maybe. There were a few men from the Mounted Skulls in Bluffton just yesterday. They were up on Maple Ridge Crest, talking to the Neighbors, asking for information about what the Jonesgroup has been up to. Or so the two Neighbors who've come down to the Jones land today have been saying. They've come in a pair, an thirty-something blonde woman and an old gray-haired man on horseback. When did the Neighbors get horses, Mama Jones wonders? They have everything these days.
They're also swearing that they didn't tell the Mounted Skulls anything, that they just sent the raiders on their way without a word of useful information, but Mama Jones has her doubts. It would be just like the Neighbors to play on both sides of the fence. So to speak.
She sips her tea. She thinks some more. These Neighbors, that's their problem- they're too sly to be trusted for long. The Dixie are no help, either; Mama Jones never wanted to join up with them, and they don't help folks who aren't their own. The Rangers might come to their aid. If someone could get word to them. But, in the end? It'll be up to the people of the Jonesgroup to save themselves. In her heart she knows that. They all do. Down to the last soul.
She looks out at the land that, in her own mind, she still owns- the woods, the little footprint of clearing around it. These stragglers and drifters she's taken in over the long years have gradually been trying to build this land into something better. By the end of the month, will it all have burned?
