The Postman by David Brin

been a strong-willed man to have persuaded his local emergency committee to offer such a trade. Hoarding, however illogical and uncooperative, was a major contributor to the collapse. It astonished Gordon that there still had been people with this much good sense during the first two years of the Chaos.
    He rubbed his eyes. Reading wasn’t easy by the light of a pair of homemade candles. But he found it difficult getting to sleep on the soft mattress, and damn if he’d sleep on the floor after so long dreaming of such a bed, in just such a room!
    He had been a little sick, earlier. All that food and homebrewedale had almost taken him over the line from delirious happiness to utter misery. Somehow, he had teetered along the boundary for several hours of blurrily remembered celebration before at last stumbling into the room they had prepared for him.
    There had been a
toothbrush
waiting on his nightstand, and an iron tub filled with hot water.
    And soap! In the bath his stomach had settled, and a warm, clean glow spread over his skin.
    Gordon smiled when he saw that his postman’s uniform had been cleaned and pressed. It lay on a nearby chair; the rips and tears he had crudely patched were now neatly sewn.
    He could not fault the people of this tiny hamlet for neglecting his one remaining longing … something he had gone without too long to even think about. Enough. This was almost Paradise.
    As he lay in a sated haze between a pair of elderly but clean sheets, waiting leisurely for sleep to come, he read a piece of correspondence between two long-dead men.
    The Mayor of Gilchrist went on:
    We are having extreme difficulty with local gangs of “Survivalists.” Fortunately, these infestations of egotists are mostly too paranoid to band together. They’re as much trouble to each other as to us, I suppose. Still, they are becoming a real problem.
    Our deputy is regularly fired on by well armed men in army surplus camouflage clothing. No doubt the idiots think he’s a “Russian Lackey” or some such nonsense.
    They have taken to hunting game on a massive scale, killing everything in the forest and doing a typically rotten job of butchering and preserving the meat. Our own hunters come back disgusted over the waste, often having been shot at without provocation.
    I know it’s a lot to ask, but when you can sparea platoon from relocation riot duty, could you send them up here to help us root out these self-centered, hoarding, romantic scoundrels from their little filtered armories? Maybe a unit or two of the US Army will convince them that we won the war, and have to cooperate with each other from now on.…
    He put the letter down.
    So it had been that way here, too. The clichéd “last straw” had been this plague of “survivalists”—particularly those following the high priest of violent anarchy, Nathan Holn.
    One of Gordon’s duties in the militia had been to help weed out some of those small gangs of city-bred cutthroats and gun nuts. The number of fortified caves and cabins his unit had found—in the prairie and on little lake islands—had been staggering … all set up in a rash of paranoia in the difficult decades before the war.
    The irony of it was that we had things turned around! The depression was over. People were at work again and cooperating. Except for a few crazies, it looked like a renaissance was coming, for America and for the world
.
    But we forgot just how much harm a few crazies could do, in America and in the world
.
    Of course when the collapse did come, the solitary survivalists’ precious little fortresses did not stay theirs for long. Most of the tiny bastions changed hands a dozen or more times in the first months—they were such tempting targets. The battles had raged all over the plains until every solar collector was shattered, every windmill wrecked, and every cache of valuable medicines scattered in the never-ending search for heavy dope.
    Only the ranches and villages,