Warday

I entered the salvage business in 1989. I’ve been a salvor for four years now. Mostly we work the New York Reclamation District, Southern Division. But I’ve also got permits for the District of Columbia and an iron permit for freelance railroad work in the Northeast Corridor. I have twelve guys and about six pieces of equipment, including a heavy-duty wire puller that strips copper wire out of conduit, a couple of rivet poppers, a wrecking ball, and one hell of a good set of torches.

My lifedose has put me on the triage, which means I’m unbeatable, so I don’t give too much of a damn about counts. I work hard, and when I can, I have all the fun that money can buy. Life’s too short for anything else. I’ve got about eight-percent body coverage squamous, mostly face and neck. No pain. I’d like to wangle a trip to England. There’s a doctor there who might be able to get me a number, but he wants a thousand in gold. A thousand! So I take black-market radiums at a buck a pop. But I better not talk on that.

You want to know what we do? Simple. We work the salvage area for anything marketable. That’s what we do. Our P-and-L puts us high, but that’s mostly because of depreciation on the Demon, which is our main cutting tool. It gets a lot of work. Mostly we’re in for cutting out steel and copper from skyscrapers. We participated in the One Chase Manhattan Plaza demo for gold, though.

Now that was a hell of a demo. Salvors are still talking about it.

We were new. a small company. In those days we didn’t have the kind of equipment we’ve got now. I mean, I started up by just saying to myself. I want to make some of that goddamn salvage money. I was an assistant product manager for Triton Systems before the war. We marketed video games, can you believe it? That was a very big business. Multimillions. Even in new dollars we’d be grossing a hell of a lot. It was, like, I think thirty million in 1986.

Big.

So I was out on my ass after the war. Triton’s bank accounts had been erased by EMP. Then the stock market dissolved and all the Triton stock just ceased to exist. No different from everybody else. Except our inventory was destroyed. EMP burned every chip we owned, and ruined our fabrication equipment.

By ’89 I was stealing food. Trouble was, so was everybody else.

There was a point when I would have sold my sister for two minutes alone with a loaf of Wonder Bread. Here we were, living in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Darien and there’s the five-year Connecticut moratorium on mortgages declared, so we got no mortgage to worry about. You know what it was like. People were starving all around us. I remember, I went into a supermarket with a shotgun. Big deal. Everybody else had a gun too. Bread is eight dollars a loaf and I have, like, a dollar. I would have given away my house for that Wonder Bread, plus sold my sister.

When that hot dust drifted down into the wheat and corn belts.

America learned what it was to goddamn not eat.

I figured we’re all going to die anyway, so I’ll just say the hell with rads and the hell with everything and go into salvage.

Now, of course, it’s a different story. We got a waiting list to enter the Salvor’s Association. We’ve been regulated by the Army.

But back when I started, people were scared of salvage work.

They still thought in terms of prewar life expectancies. People still thought they ought to feel young at forty.

Sally—that was my wife—she made my first rad suit. Sewed it herself out of an old swimming-pool cover. We used bonded lead epoxy in it that I made myself. I got the lead out of car batteries, just like everybody else. Stole ’em. I don’t mind admitting it. I hurt people to get the lead for that suit, and I’m sorry. But most of ’em didn’t last the winter anyway. I mean, we starved half to death and then the flu came, just when we were weakest. Darien probably lost half its people. Sally died in the spring of ’89. Just so weak, anything would have taken her. We had noodle soup that winter, from the Connecticut Allocation when it got started up in January. I remember, Christmas of ’88 we were living on soup made out of dandelion roots and salt and Fritos. We were just a little hungry.

I went down into New York on the second salvor call in ’89. I remember they had this big pier on the Hudson, Jersey side. All covered with plastic. About six government types. EPA, they said.

They got us to fill out forms and wear dose cards. They checked our suits by putting a geiger counter in ’em, closing ’em up, then sticking ’em out on the end of the pier. If you could hear the counter, you stayed at home.

They gave a geiger to one of every twenty men. Those counters were worth their weight back then, so half the men just took off. I mean, what’s the use of cutting steel and stuff all day that’s probably gonna be condemned hot anyway, when you can take a geiger counter worth maybe five hundred in gold on the black market and just walk away with it?