The Water "Games"?

What had been the middle of America was a desert reaching from the Texas panhandle into Saskatchewan. Once the Ogallah aquifer was pumped dry in mid-century, cities and people disappeared. The incessant winds and dust storms  and heat turned skies a dirty orange by day. No stars shown at night.

With the ice caps gone and Greenland vanished, the oceans buried every city on the coasts. Potter's hometown of Spotsylvania was under water, and the Shenandoah valley was a shallow sea because there was no drainage, with the Atlantic lapping at the eastern base of the Blue Ridge. Houston was gone, and the skyscrapers of Dallas-Fort Worth were empty shells on a lifeless beach.

Oklahoma City was a village, its "river walk" filled with sand, its rivers dry, its energy companies vanished. The last earthquake had been more than a 9 on some forgotten scale, and collapsed the city's newest building, an energy company skyscraper. Potter thought it ironic that Tulsa fared no better, its statue of a senator who once called climate change a hoax presiding over vacant, dusty streets and empty oil storage tanks.

Most of the survivors of the famine and disease were like Potter, living in mountains like the Cascades and Alaska and Rockies and Ozarks and Appalachians and Poconos where they could still get groundwater  and altitudes cut the heat. That's where what remained of governments existed, where  power was measured in the amount of water controlled.

The Water "Games"

He was so old he could remember when there were five Great Lakes.

Today, there was only a ten-mile wide stagnant scum-filled pool where Lake Huron had been. Only old timers like himself remembered lakes. M. "Spot" Potter knew that water was no game. At age 89, he could remember when they're had been rain and trees, paper, printing presses, and a United States.

Now he lived in a tarp-covered shack on a deforested ridge in what had been southeast Oklahoma, which used to remind him of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, where he'd been  born. His folks named him Marion Spotsylvania Potter after their home town, and he detested both names. Early in his newspaper career he'd chosen to use the first initial and shortened the middle to Spot. He thought it made him sound more sophisticated. Sure, he'd had to weather the cracks about being named for a dog, but his reputation for getting scoops on breaking news made most people think it was a nickname for covering 'spot" news.  But that was back when there had been news, like the stories he broke on Oklahoma's water wars in the early part of the century.

Those were a mere drip in the bucket compared to what happened after "It" happened, with no rain, 10- month "summers," and retreating coastlines.

To be continued