Caleb Martin
October 18, 2012
Period 4
"US vs. China: Who Will Win?" proclaimed today's headline of the Washington Post. The headline had many of the residents of Longview, Texas worried. While it was no secret that this " Second Cold War" between the United States and China over oil was no secret, it seemed to be escalating out of control. Each side had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other which caused a new era in civil defense to emerge. Fallout shelters were retrofitted across the nation and Longview even had its own medium-sized shelter underneath the Good Shepard Medical Center near downtown. Whenever a bit of news concerning possible military or nuclear conflict appeared the Walmarts in town would always run out of supplies. People took everything and I mean everything from that wretched store even if it had no real survival uses. I saw a guy in there taking large set of basketballs for God's sake. Eventually after four miserable months of tension , the U.S. and China could not settle their differences and ended up scorching the Earth with thermonuclear fire. I, working at the Good Shepard Medical Center as a family practice doctor took refuge with 4683 (as our later census data revealed) co-workers, schoolchildren, accountants and a variety of other downtown patrons in the hospital's shelter. We lived (kind of) in the shelter for 14 terrible years. Another year, another thousand people added. The shelters maximum designed capacity was a mere 5,000 people but now it had swelled to eighteen going on nineteen thousand. People were being put in places that were never considered as suitable living spaces. Ten families are somehow living in the sewage outflow tunnel. Along with space, food became a definite issue. The overpopulated shelter had now resorted to eating the rats and roaches that scurried along the wall as a food source to feed its giant population. Then we finally decided to leave, to think that what remained of Longview had to be better than the shelter filled everyone with a sense of optimism, but it was not that easy. The city was untouched by the bombs so most of the building's decay was a result of nature not man. Unrecognizable mutant creatures prowled the streets and pockets of raiders and survivalist existed. Neither would go down without a fight. People saw the mutants as a great food source yet were hesitant to eat them due to the fact that we knew very little about their physiology. A few people died from eating some unknown diseased mutant caterpillars but the remaining former doctors (such as myself) from Good Shepard dissected several of the new creatures. Most were found to be safe to eat particularly the two-headed cow known as Brahmin. They made some great burgers. The gangs were a real pain though, they banded together in order to fight us. The "war" lasted several months before we finally won. Any surviving gang members either assimilated (adding another 1,567 people to our population ) or were summarily executed. For years the some-what rebuilt city of Longview thrived as it is situated along Interstate 20. It became a trading town in which our top notch Brahmin were sold to travelling merchants for supplies that we needed. As time went on Longview got bigger and a bit richer and life went on. One day new visitors appeared. They called themselves the " Texas Rangers" and were a group of approximately sixty- thousand based around Dallas (or what is left of it).They were the source of most of traders who had practically dumped their money into the city. It was a mutual relationship Longview gave Dallas Brahmin for food and in return Dallas dumped its money into Longview. After five profitable years of this, the Texas Ranger Congress of Dallas annexed Longview to create its 13th state of Longview. The town's population exploded afterwards as people from all over the "Texas Union '', as they called it, wanted to strike it rich in Longview and the small towns that sprang up around it as Brahmin ranchers. Land and water was never much of a problem with the ranchers but manpower was. The ranchers had a critical deficiency in workers which hindered their profits which the State of Longview would collect as taxes. The state needed a solution so they created one in a way. They set up what they called the State of Longview Department of Labor and Industry in the old Texas State Bank and Trust building. However the department had no real solution because they had no way of obtaining a mass of cheap workers only the occasional few. They needed a desperate solution. Luckily, they found one.
