China didn t fare any better. Ruling the Empire of Heaven with taloned fists. Most people don t worry too much about things like that. Most people have learned to farm again, and for the most part to get along with their neighbors. Community defense, an idea left behind when America became criss-crossed with roads and railways, became popular again, and the soldiers that citizens had feared and despised when they came back from the horrors of war were once again treated like brothers and sons.
Most people worry about eating, and working, and winter.
I lived much as I always have. What s in my pack I got for free. With what I can get for it I can eat for a year. I came around the corner of the goat-trail that I was on and looked down over what used to be State Highway 17, and saw the trees that were not trees, and dropped the burning cigarette out of my mouth and crushed it beneath my boot. In the narrow pass cut by the two lane road were crosses, maybe thirty of them, the corpses on them desiccated by the sun and the wind, many of them gone from the waist down.