Spreading the Mail

This is my best (fairly hurried) recollection of a short story I wrote some years ago as a fictional follow-up to the Kevin Costner film, The Postman. It has a few inspirations, but I thought it would be fun to convert into a fairly linear Twine experience as opposed to a parser. I want the audience along for the ride with the Postman, not as the Postman.

This story is an alternate ending to The Postman. It takes place a year or two after the primary events of the film minus the giant timeskip at the end to show off the statue.

There were a bunch of low tech isolated communities all living quarantined from each other for decades, right? No modern medicine, limited hygiene? Keep that in mind, travelers.

A seasoned, yet young Postman heads out to make contact with a new town. The furthest out they've gone so far.

He bids goodbye to the border town in the early morning, checking with the guards one more time the best way to the next town on his aging, largely obsolete map. Nearly half a day's ride due north. He sets off at a brisk pace.

The travel is safe and uneventful, boring even and the Postman makes good time. 

As he arrives, he is startled by the sudden appearance of the town walls. Typically he heard a community before he saw it. 

As he got closer, he saw something more alarming.

No one is on the wall. 

No one answers the gate or his calls.

It's quiet.

He finds another way in over the wall, and bodies everywhere. Covered in sores, blood hemorrhaging from every orifice, fingertips, nose and ears blackened.

Men, women, children, all dead.

He wanders through the quiet town, carefully walking around the bodies.

Finally he hears something.

Ch, shump. Ch, shump... ch, shump.

He approaches the sound warily, reaching for his weapon.

As he rounds the corner, he sees a thin, emaciated man with a shovel, digging a hole in what appears to be a community garden.

Next to him is a wheelbarrow with three figures wrapped in sheets. One his height and two much shorter.

The man pauses for breath, leaning on the shovel, his breath wheezing thinly out of him.

The shovel handle glistens in blood and pus from the broken and popped sores on his hands.

The Postman shifts their weight, and the man turns toward him at the sound, weaving slightly.

His face is covered in boils and his yellowed eyes and nose are bleeding.

The very tip of his nose appears to be turning black.

The man pulled his pistol and trained it on the stunned, young Postman, frozen in shock, but then he doubled over in a coughing fit before crumpling to the ground.

"I have to... I have to finish. I can't leave them for the birds. I don't care what happens to me, but please help me bury them."

Looking at the emanciated form, the Postman silently stepped forward and picked up the bloodied shovel and began digging.

He finishes digging the grave and lowers the shrouded forms into the hole, the adult first, clearly a woman, and two children of indeterminate sex.

After gently settling the last body down, he turned to speak with the man.

He was dead.

He had quietly died while the Postman dug, finally able to let go as the other man had taken his final burden from him.

The Postman put him with his family.

And filled the grave.

He then searched the rest of the town, but found no one left alive.

Clothes still flapped in the breeze on clotheslines, and flies buzzed around tables set for dinner.

He thought he might have heard a dog whining plaintively in the distance, but the sound fails to repeat.

Seeing nothing left to do, the Postman scaled the walls and returned to his horse, returning the undeliverable mail for Scottsdale to his carrying pouch.

He then pulled out his map, found Scottsdale, and crossed it out with a small but firm X.

He then climbed back on his horse and set off back the way he came.

As he approached the town he had left early that morning, he stopped at a creek a quarter mile from town and again pulled out the mail for Scottsdale.

There was a letter he had in mind, one he saw when collecting decades old undelivered mail from before the war.

Shuffling through them, he found it. Faded with age, it was now the lightest and faintest of pinks.

A delicate feminine script flowed across the front.

The letter was sealed with a lipstick kiss and the Postman swore still, all these many decades later, smelled ever so faintly of perfume.

He hesitated briefly, and then tore it open and pulled out the letter.

"Get your weekend special at Vicki's Massage Parlour! $50/half hour or $85/hour!

Bring this letter in for more discounts! Vicki's gals will take care of..."

The Postman stared at it for a very long time.

He was only 19 this last spring, and, in his defense, he had never seen an advertisement of any kind before, let alone a Massage Parlour.

He didn't really understand what he was looking at. But he did know what it wasn't. It wasn't a letter, a message, a show of empathy and caring from one human to another.

The name came back to him. The Post Master had mentioned it in passing when he last was through. The term struck him strange and almost sacrilegious... Junk Mail.

How could mail be junk?

Now he knew.

He felt cold and scared and, for the first time in his travels, truly alone.

He slid the message back into its envelope and pondered briefly.

He then pulled out the entire Scottsdale bundle, a ratty mix of brittle multicolored paper and considered it carefully.

...and then tossed the whole thing into the creek.

He turned his horse around and rode away towards the the town seen in the background with woodsmoke drifting up to the heavens and the distant din of human voices beckoning him home.

...

The camera slowlu pans down as the Postman rides away, down, down, toward the creek, where the yarn tying the bundle together had given way and circus of letters of all shapes and sizes and colors from all over the country and even the world danced upon the creek downstream.

As the camera slowly fades away, we hear the Postman, some ways away now, cough and clear his throat.

And then he coughs again... and again. His coughing lingers a full 10 to 15 seconds into the credits and the final musical number before finally fading away.

Fin.

Someone pointed out that many may not have seen The Postman, nor read the book by David Brin. So, here's a rundown of the premise:

In 2013, an unnamed nomad wanders the scattered communities of the Utah flatlands, trading performances of long-forgotten Shakespearean plays for food and water. During his travels, the nomad takes refuge in a long-deceased postman's mail vehicle, wearing the uniform to stay warm.

With the postman's uniform and mail bag, he arrives in the nearby settlement of Pineview with a new racket in mind. He approaches the gate claiming to be from the newly-restored U.S. government. He convinces Pineview's leader, Sheriff Briscoe, to let him in by showing a letter addressed to elderly villager Irene March. The postman inspires a teenager named Ford Lincoln Mercury, who asks to be sworn in as a member of the postal service and even helps him set up a post office for the town. When the postman leaves for the town of Benning, he carries a pile of mail left at the post office door by the townspeople.

During a raid of Pineview, General Bethlehem, the leader of the Holnists, a neo-feudalist militia, learns of the postman's tales of a restored government in Minneapolis and becomes afraid of losing power if word spreads. The Holnists are the de facto authority in the area, collecting tribute and recruits from local towns. He has the post office burned to the ground, and kills and abducts members of the town. He raids surrounding towns looking for the postman. When he finds him, the postman surrenders, but resident of Pineview saves him from execution, and the two escape into the surrounding mountains. The two ride out the winter in an abandoned cabin in complete isolation.

Many long cold months later, when spring arrives, they leave and run into a girl, who claims to be a postal carrier. She reveals that Mercury has kept the postal service alive by recruiting other carriers and building more post offices. They have established communications with other settlements, creating a quasi-society and inadvertently spreading hope.

Bethlehem continues to hunt and capture postal carriers, all of whom are executed and displayed publicly. Feeling responsible, the postman orders the service to disband and writes a letter to the militia revealing his original fraud. However, Bethlehem learns to his dismay that the postman's example has spread farther than he could have anticipated when his men capture a carrier from distant California, and he redoubles his efforts to find the postman. The postman, closely followed by young carriers travel to Bridge City. When Bethlehem's scouts catch up, the mayor helps the postman escape on a cable car and urges him to find others willing to resist Bethlehem.

In a recitation of King Henry V's speech prior to the siege of Harfleur, the postman rallies himself and his followers to war. The mounted carriers and Holnists meet across a field. Not wanting any more carnage, the postman instead challenges Bethlehem to a personal hand-to-hand duel, with their troops as witnesses. The postman wins the fight but spares Bethlehem's life to maintain morale. Bethlehem tries to shoot the postman in the back with his revolver, but is shot dead by his own second-in-command, Col. Getty. Getty then surrenders, and the rest of the Holnists follow his lead.

Time jump to thirty years later, the postman's grown daughter Hope, accompanied by other public figures and servicemen (including postal workers), speaks at a ceremony unveiling a bronze statue by territorial waters in St. Rose, Oregon in tribute to her father, who has recently died (1973–2043). Her speech, along with the fact that all the attendees are wearing modern clothing and using technology, reveal that the postman and his mail carriers' actions have helped rebuild the United States.

The film bombed hard at the box office and certainly has some cringe worthy moments and subplots, but it is sincerely one of my favorite premises. There's a really cool story trying to peak out at the seams.