Prologue
Nothing was like it used to be. My father used to tell me what the country was like before the Collapse, and sometimes it doesn’t seem all that different. The Northeast Regional Sovereignty isn’t as big as America used to be, but it stretches from the Great Lakes to the Adirondacks, dips down into the Ohio Valley. Big enough, I guess, and it runs. More or less. Dad never did like the way Howard’s temporary restoration government somehow became permanent – “God damn aristocracy” he used to say – but he went to work, raised a family, did what he was supposed to do and his ashes are scattered up in the old State Lands where he used to hunt and nobody goes any more.
Not like it used to be.
I suppose I could have run the blockades and got across the Mississippi to live in the Central Zone, but the CZ is a bigger shithole than the Sovereignty, least from what I can tell. It’s too hot for my tastes down in the Confederacy, plus I’d have to get through the Wastelands below Wilkes-Barre and past the old capital. They say D.C. still glows at night from the anarchist backpack nukes. The whole Deep South never appealed to me much anyhow, and the Gold Coast...a played out pyrite mine. Dad said their overboard progressive tendencies got them what they deserved and he referred to it as “That chaotic clusterfuck on the other side of the Rockies.”
So I went to school right here in the Metro area, did my hitch in the Reserves defending the border along the Wastes keeping the ragtag, the bandits and berserkers at bay, and stayed in the M after I mustered out. I worked, paid my taxes, even voted a few times casting my ballot against the aristocracy, kind of in memory of my father, but it didn’t do any good. Things stayed the same, not like they used to be. When I got tired of working in the grocery store and took up private investigation I didn’t bother getting a Sovereignty license, just worked under the table. Didn’t bother paying taxes on my income, either. All the social benefits and financial security programs had been bled dry and recast as unaffordable Third Estate entitlements when I was a kid, so what for? I sometimes wonder if I’m as disillusioned as my dad became, or if he came to not care as much as I don’t care now. Sometimes I wish I could ask him. If I could I’d also ask him what he ever heard about Isle Royale. I’d only heard to stay away from it and to turn in anyone from there that I might encounter. I don’t think most people knew anything at all about the witches. I know I didn’t until that night in Jack’s Place.
