It was not too long after the Colorado River had finally dried up that the new governor of Arizona, a six year-old boy named Mikey, had organized a militia to drive northeast into the Great Lakes region in order to finish, by force if necessary, the pipeline that would pump fresh water down to the desert two thousand miles away. Even though their home state had turned into nothing more than a cracked, forlorn, arid landscape littered with bones and empty plastic bottles, Mikey and his followers still clung to some innate belief that Phoenix was where they wanted to be, where they were meant to live, in fact, and something worth fighting for.
Due to the power grid being inoperable, it was a bit tricky for Mikey the governor to get messages out and coordinate logistics amongst his militia, who were mostly guys named Mike who wore mustaches and drove large pickup trucks. They could still get gas from a well that they had dug years ago that somehow had struck an underground deposit of oil which was refined into gasoline through unknown processes that occurred as it traveled up the pipe to the pump.
For their trip up north, however, Mikey had decreed that they would use the self-driving cars which they had removed from the abandoned Tesla factory. Governor Mikey had scrawled a message in his six year-old handwriting onto a white sheet which he attached to a flag pole at the sulfur springs, the only place for hundreds of miles where water still trickled out. Meet 4th of July to go north, the message said. Below that simple call to arms was a block of letters printed large, in red ink, that said “Brought to you by Amazon.”
Even though there was not much of a population left in the southwest, most of the residents having fled north once the climate catastrophe had entered its more critical stage, and despite the fact that there were no signs of commerce to speak of, hardly any electricity or gasoline, in fact, evidence of total societal collapse was everywhere, somehow, there were still Amazon delivery vehicles moving daily throughout the deserted boulevards of Phoenix and the surrounding suburban sprawl.
There must have been still some semblance of a population left there hidden away in remnants of homes that could somehow still be cooled to below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or, perhaps, there was no such population and Amazon just paid to keep the trucks running in order to project some potemkin-like image of security and sanity within an obviously broken and deadly situation. Only Governor Mikey knew the answers to those questions and he wasn’t talking. In fact, he really didn’t know how to talk all that well yet, his parents having died years earlier of heat stroke and his speech therapist having fled to Kamloops, BC.
Mikey was almost completely incomprehensible when he spoke and his chicken scratch handwriting proved very difficult to decipher, even when printed in big letters on a giant canvas waving in the wind above the trickling sulfurous water spring that lied within the former botanical gardens. That’s what his militia used as an identifying trademark, that only they possessed the ability to understand what Mikey was saying or writing. Maybe they could or perhaps they were just pretending. Either way, here they were, gathered together in a golden horde of broken-down self-driving vehicles heading east down Route 66. The whole trip was sponsored by Amazon, although the promised privations and cash payment had never materialized. By the time the group arrived in Minnesota, there were only a few militiamen left, the majority of the vehicles having caught fire and exploded on the way.
Mikey was among the survivors. He directed his small group of followers to their local contacts, a successionist millennial cult housed in a trailer park outside of Finlayson. They had no leader, as they were ironically democratic and inclusive, a cult without a messiah figure. They were enthralled by Mikey and his followers, having communicated with them via ham radio over the past year. Now, they stood outside the trailer staring at baby Mikey and his followers, all six of them. They expected a horde of thousands, or at least hundreds. But here was a ragtag handful of Arizona white-trash, descendants of Apache killers and insurance fraudsters, having survived for centuries in the southwest sun through swindling fellow citizens, sucking on chili dogs in the 7-11 parking lots at midnight, plotting their takeover.
Minnesota had also been impacted by the climate crisis, of course. The woodland forests had been transformed into an arid landscape of scrub brush and buckthorn. But, there was water. The cult members guided Governor Mikey and his militiamen to the banks of the St Louis River, still rumbling along with fresh, cold water. A flock of whooping cranes danced and dived overhead. Mikey turned to his right-hand man to ask him to set up the boring tool that would secure the pipeline to the river bottom, the pipeline they intended to stretch across the plains, across the mountains and beyond. The pipeline that would deliver water to the survivors back home. It was Mikey’s dream to see the megalopolis restored, with ornate fountains and golf courses everywhere, just like before.
Mikey’s right-hand man didn’t have the tool, so he turned to the man standing behind him, who, not having it either, turned to the man standing behind him and so on until the last man, a tall fellow with a yellow bandana tied around his neck, turned around and saw no one else there. Mikey stared at his crew in disbelief. The cult members hung their heads and turned to go home, while Mikey launched into a scolding tirade aimed at his incompetent men. No one understood a word he said, but the meaning was clear. They could turn and go back to Arizona empty-handed or else stay in Minnesota and blend into the local population until they were able to rise up and realize their plan and build the pipeline.
The other option was to cross the river over into Wisconsin where they were more likely to find followers, like-minded folks who would join their cause and become accomplices to the water theft, perhaps lured by the promise of a new Jerusalem in the desert, restored to grandeur and complete with marble fountains, flashing neon signs, golf courses and big hamburgers. They waded into the river, heading toward Wisconsin.
THE MOSSY BOG 