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agency down completely. They certainly didn’t need a massive NSA just to listen in on HAM operators conversing among the many small groups of survivors. Yeah, the government wanted to watch them closely, but a much smaller NSA could handle that easily.
    President Capinos was forced to lean over to reach the table, as his prodigious belly kept him too far back. He and his family were among the few Americans who had not missed a meal over the last year, or lost a child to the plague. He wasn’t president when the plague hit, had never held any office before, and had never ran for as much as mayor of a small town. Until the plague, he had never needed to hold office to yield power. Satisfied to stay out of the limelight and keep his anonymity, using his wealth to control government officials as tools for his own plans, he had never needed or wanted direct political power. Indirect power had been much safer and in many ways less trouble, since he didn’t have to waste time running for and holding office and keeping up a charade for the public. Not an ideologue, he didn’t give a damn if the country moved to the left or to the right. He found political debate boring and inconsequential. No matter what way the political winds blew, he could buy anything he wanted, from a county commissioner to a president. Who gave a damn if the person you kept in your back pocket belonged to this or that party?
    There had been many just like him, but then came the plague, changing everything. Wealth suddenly became almost meaningless in the post-plague world. When he saw others like him maneuvering to take political power directly by demanding special elections and then preparing to run for office, he knew he had no choice but to play the same game, but on the highest level, and he knew he had to win.
    He and those like him had made certain there was a presidential election right on schedule, even though 95% of the American population had been lost to the plague. They made it a matter of pride in Washington that not even the Civil War had delayed an American national election, and they swore the plague would not delay this one. Since there were so many vacancies in Congress created by the high mortality rate of the plague, many special elections had been held to replace them. The result was an entirely new U.S. Government, one that had no resemblance to the old one, in organization or values.
    During the elections, there had been little to no pretense of following the Constitution or rule of law. No one in Washington cared what the rest of the country outside of the Northeast thought. Very few outside of Washington even knew of the elections. The actual number of Americans who voted had been minuscule. Fewer voters decided who would be a congressman or senator than had voted for a local sheriff in normal times, and none of the voters actually lived in the state the congressmen and senators supposedly represented. It took only a quarter million votes (all from the Northeast only) to put Russell Capinos in the White House. By all reason, he should have been called President of the Northeastern States, not President of the United States. Nevertheless, once in power, he immediately decreed the already existing state of emergency permanent and removed what few constitutional protections the former government in Washington had left in place.
    Because of the plague’s tendency to kill the elderly at a higher rate than the young, the Supreme Court Capinos inherited had exactly two sitting justices. He had no trouble convincing the new Senate to fill every vacancy on the bench by the end of the first month. They were all handpicked men and women who had little to no respect for the idea of constitutionally limited governmental power. For the first time in Capinos’ life, he would be pulling the strings with his own hands, instead of paying others to pull the strings for him, and he worked every day to consolidate his power. Power became his new drug,