Wastelander

by Dave Gehrke

When Citizen Jeremiah Beltz is sold as a slave to the primitive Wastelanders the Tribunal knew they were sending the incorrigible to a certain death. The chances of a Citizen surviving the unrelenting sun, the harsh winds, hordes of bandits, and rampant disease, much less the Wastelanders’ primitive lifestyle, were miniscule. The Wastelanders rode horses, fought each other with swords, knew little about sanitation or medicine and lived in tents out on the miles and miles of barren waste land that surrounded the City. How the poor uneducated bastards managed to exist at all was a mystery to those who lived in City # 14.

No question; the incorrigible Beltz would be dead in a few months. But so what? Selling him as a slave saved the City the trouble of executing him and dumping his body into the compost grinder. So the Tribunes traded him to the Wastelanders for a prime beef. A win-win if there ever was one.

The Wastelander is a story of two cultures striving to survive in a world forever changed and a man torn from one culture and thrust unwillingly into the other. Jeremiah Beltz, an intelligent but quick-tempered mid-twenties water engineer chaffing under the rigid structure of the more “civilized” City culture, is sold as a slave to the “primitive” Wastelander culture and quickly learns there is more to these supposedly uneducated people than any Citizen would ever believe. The Wastelanders’ constant refrain: things are often not what the seem. And as Beltz slowly discovers, the refrain is true about the men he meets, the woman he falls in love with and himself as well.

308 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 11, 2022

About the author

I grew up "reading" comic books in my uncle’s toy and hobby store. I hadn't started school yet so I just stared at the pictures and tried to figure out what the words might meant. I think the first word I learned might have been “Pow!”. “The” came next. And from there I slipped my way into literacy. My uncle, when he grew tired of me being in the way of paying customers, started sending me home with a comic, purportedly so my parents could read them to me. Fortunately both my parents were prodigious readers themselves and soon had me reading to them.

I gained two skills from those early days; how to manipulate my uncle into sending me home with new reading material and how to read at an early age.

Reading itself opened up a whole new world for me; a world of knowledge, fascination, entertainment and imagination. And that world lay just across the alley from our home at the Dyckman Free Library. The comic books were soon replaced by works of fiction and my vocabulary grew accordingly. By the time I reached the second grade my uncle had christened me “Professor” and before I reached the eighth grade I’d proven to Mrs. Dombrowski, the librarian, that had I was ready to graduate from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and move into the adult fiction section.

By high school my standard explanation to any teacher wondering how I happened to know something esoteric or arcane was “I read that somewhere.” Which usually also brought a groan from my fellow classmates.

Writing, it seems to me, is the next step up in the reading chain. And when I discovered I could wow both my classmates and my instructors with my completed writing assignments, I decided at sixteen that I would someday become a writer of books.

That was before life got in the way; college (I’ve earned three degrees), marriage, kids, various business pursuits, teaching, coaching, school administration and half a dozen hobbies. But I never lost the desire to become a novelist. So I studied people (future characters); their mannerisms, how they spoke, the way they conversed, what motivated them, how they reacted in various situations, how they expressed their hopes and their dreams, the way one wrinkled her nose when she laughed, the way another tended to begin the answer to any question with “basically”.
And I gathered reams of notes; character descriptions, possible storylines, potential plots, locations, time periods, etc. And I continued to read, sometimes for entertainment and sometimes to study the different techniques used by my favorite authors in crafting their books.

Then, when my kids were off having kids of their own and I retired to my own semi-isolated place in the countryside, I focused on what I felt had always been my "true" calling; writing.

Life, as they say, goes full circle. It's just that some circles have larger diameters.