Ben Neo does dirty work for Tommy Murphy. Take care of this guy, fix that problem. The kind of fixes that carry lengthy jail sentences. On the side he picks up strays and teaches them the tricks of his trade. Nikki Moore and Ed Reiser are his latest trainees. Carlos Sanchez works for Jefferson Prescott, the largest illegal drug smuggler in the Americas. Jefferson has put him in charge of the biggest drug deal he has ever done, but Carlos has a few bad habits, including Lita, Jefferson’s daughter. Daryl Jones and Danny Gaynor were hired by Carlos to deliver the drugs, but curiosity got the best of them. They took a look at what they were transporting and decided they should negotiate a better deal, and just maybe they should keep a little for themselves. Jimmy West handles the less savory work for Tommy Murphy. Wet work. When things go really bad Jimmy is Tommy’s go to guy. He knows Jimmy will do whatever it takes to get to the answers he needs, including murder. David Cross is stuck in the slow lane. Nowhere job, nowhere life, until one early morning when millions of dollars in drugs and cash fall into his lap. When Tommy Murphy and Jefferson Prescott send their hired killers to find the missing drugs and cash. David goes on the run with a beautiful young woman and the chase begins… A fast action packed page turner.
This preview is licensed to the Sam Wolfe recommended podcasts blog and nowhere else. If you want someone to read this kindly point them to this blog to do so. Thank you for appreciating the hard work of this writer.
This material is owned by George Dell and may not be copied or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the author or his Assignee.
DEAD BAD
~
“Oh yeah, it’s a match,” Don said. He showed Sammy the two thumbprints.
“But I thought we wouldn’t know until Monday afternoon at the earliest?” Sammy said.
“Technically, officially we won’t. I just suspected it was the kid. He did time so I pulled his card. The prints match, but I’m not a qualified expert, so we have to wait officially until they give us the word on Monday,” Don said.
“So we still can’t do anything this weekend?” Sammy said.
“Might give us a little leverage,” Don said. He walked across the garage and returned the fingerprint to a tech.
“Got our guy?” the tech asked.
“A strong possibility,” Don said. “Very strong. I’d like you to keep that between us… Chain of custody… Don’t wanna fuck with that shit,” Don said.
“Hell no,” the tech said. “That would be my ass.” He walked away and then came back. “Same print on the trunk lid too… Glad it helped… It did help, right?” he asked.
“It did,” Don said in a low voice. “And thanks.”
“So now we know why he needed the keys, to check the trunk,” Sammy said.
Don nodded… “Want to go rattle his cage a little?” he asked.
“I do. And I’m wondering why our witness didn’t see him do it?” Sammy said.
“Easy,” Don said. “The car was out of sight at the back of the trailer.”
“Probably,” Sammy agreed. “But, I want to hear her say that. What was her name anyway, Ali… Amy… Something like that.”
“April,” Don supplied before Sammy could look it up in his notebook. “Yeah, April like the month. Why does someone name their daughter something like that? Or Brandy, or Misty, you just know every guy in school is gonna be banging her,” Don said.
“Banging the shit right out of her,” Sammy agreed. They both laughed.
“Let’s go,” Don said. They headed out of the garage into the late afternoon sunlight. It was fall and even with the strong sunlight there wasn’t a lot of warmth in the air.
“I fucking hate fall,” Sammy said.
“And winter soon,” Don said. He unlocked the car: Leaned across to unlock the passenger side; started the car and pulled out of the lot.
~
They drove over to the West side of the city. April followed as David searched for an abandoned piece of property. The problem wasn’t finding one, the problem was finding one that wasn’t already being used by drug dealers or that had a place to pull behind it. He found one by an abandoned apartment house on a side street and pulled behind it. April pulled in behind him.
“This makes the trailer park looked like high class,” she said.
“We better hurry before we attract a crowd,” David said. They transferred everything to the Jeep in just a few minutes, and then David used a screwdriver to take the plates off the truck. He emptied the glove box and behind the seat, then used a hammer to smash one corner out of the windshield and a pair of pliers along with a screwdriver to remove the VIN plate.
He had no doubt the truck would be gone ten minutes after they were gone, but once it did turn up, if it ever did, it would be hard to trace without the VIN plate. There were other areas, motor, frame, but usually no tow yard was going to go through the trouble of checking. They’d tow it in and store it in the yard and eventually auction it off. Even then it would probably go for parts so there would be no need to find the VIN and run it through DMV.
Most likely one of the several pair of eye’s watching them would steal it and keep it for themselves. He left the key in the switch. As they were leaving three guys were walking down the block toward the house. Or at least it seemed that way to David. They stopped and flipped off the Jeep as they rode by them, then they ran down to the house. Before they had turned off the block David saw the nose of the truck poke out of the driveway.
“Better get us away quicker, April. Make a few fast turns. Those guys might chase us with our own truck,” David said.
April took the next left then a right and another quick left and they popped out on Genesee Street. David looked, but he didn’t see his truck anywhere.
“Looks good,” he managed before something hit them from behind. He nearly broke his neck getting turned around only to see it was his own truck with the three guys driving.
“Can you drive this hard?” David asked. “If not we’re going to have to find a way to switch.”
April dropped the drive letter into low and floored the Jeep. She shot around a line of traffic swerving out into the oncoming lanes, then skidded into a hard left and shot down a side street. Instead of slowing she kept the Commander floored and ran the next several blocks flat out. Checking in mirrors as she left the truck behind.
She slowed just enough to make a slight curve and then sped up again. She locked up the brakes halfway down the block to make a fast right. She drove hard for the next three blocks, and then made a left. The truck was nowhere in sight, but she made another fast right before she slowed down.
She cursed under her breath. It was a dead end street, mostly abandoned properties. She got the truck turned around and headed back. Halfway down the block David’s truck shot across the mouth of the street, and she could hear the tires scream as the driver locked up the brakes. She made the next intersection and headed back the way they had come.
She floored the truck again and blew by a half dozen two way stop sign intersections that bisected the street they were traveling on. She finally locked up the brakes again and slid the Jeep into a left and they were coming up on Genesee Street once more.
April skirted a small line of cars waiting at the red light and slid out into the street, tires smoking.
She punched the gas hard and got the Jeep two streets down before she turned again and shot up two blocks and then made a right onto a side street.
“Christ,” David said as she flew by a stopped dump truck and he heard something scrape down the entire passenger side of the Jeep. “You’re gonna get us killed!”
“Those guys are gonna get us killed,” she said as behind her the pickup truck swung out around the dump truck and then sideswiped a car parked nearby before the driver got it straightened out again.
They were driving into one of the more run down areas and she made a quick left and then another quick left trying to lose them on the narrow short streets. David reached forward and pulled one of the flat black 9 MM guns from the glove box, flipped off the safety and laid it on the seat top. He looked at April who snatched it up and dropped it into her lap.
David took a second gun out and got it ready.
“Fuck,” April said. “Dead end! Dead end again!“
“Fuck it, get it turned around,” David yelled.
April floored it, jumped the curb and tore up the front yard of the house before turning around. She came back down onto the street, slammed the gearshift into park and jumped out of the truck.
“What the fuck are you doing?” David Screamed. He jumped out of the truck. He could hear his own truck, engine screaming as it came. April stopped and then raised the pistol. David stared at her incredulously for second and then lifted his own gun.
The truck came screaming down the other street, saw them and locked up their brakes. April opened up, and David fell in with her. The driver got the truck turned toward them, floored it and then the windshield blew apart.
One of the guys on the passenger side leaned out with a pistol and opened up on them, but he was shooting wild. David was surprised at his own calm as he turned, took careful aim and then fired at the side of the truck. The pistol fell from the guy’s hand and then both of them had to jump out of the way to miss the truck as it roared by them and cannoned down the street.
The truck continued a half block before it jumped the curb and plowed into a house. April and David were up and scrambling for the Jeep even as flames begin to shoot up from the house and the wreckage of the truck.
David ran for the truck only to find a young guy sprinting for the Jeep.… He saw David and April and let his pistol drop to the ground.
Don’t… Don’t… Don’t shoot me,” the kid yelled. He stood a frightened look in his eyes as blood dripped down one side of his face. His breath came in ragged gasps.
David ignored him, jumped into the truck just behind April and slammed the door.
April gunned the engine and ran hard for about ten blocks, then slowed, working her way to the outskirts of the city on the back streets, finally pulling into a huge mall parking lot and parking in the first spot she found.
“That was fucking crazy,” David said. He was still breathing hard.
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When the world falls apart after an extinction event. The few who are left look to their governments for help.
But the Governments are done. The Police are done. The Military are done. The few remaining in power can do nothing except release a top-secret virus that may help.
In the end the release of the virus SS-V2765 did not help the living. Instead it helped the dead and changed the entire survival rate for the living. They now not only had the other living to worry about…
But when the dead began to rise all the power shifted…
The Human Race began to fall and the Zombie Race began to rise…
Wound up in the E.R. the other evening/morning with my wife who was not feeling well; wow, what an eye opener that was.
Got there the previous afternoon at around 4:00 PM or so. It was semi busy, looked about the same as it did twenty years ago, the last time I was in an E.R. waiting anyway; but within just a few moments I realized how different it was.
The first thing I noticed was Homeless People in the ER. Lounging, stealing pens and talking nurses and security staff into crackers, sodas, ice water, socks. I was amazed at how things were. Who knew? Well, apparently the hospital is because one of the homeless people was a handful for several hours. He got a staff member to give him a glass of ice and then went over to an abandoned half bottle of soda and poured over the ice and drank it. The man across from him said something to him and he made several colorful remarks back including “It ain’t your f*ckin’ soda so shut the f*ck up. I reminded myself to keep my f*ckin’ mouth shut, which I did, but when I turned back to my wife, she was glancing past me to the left trying to get me to look, so I did.
Nothing special a young girl all curled up in a single seat, she was that small with pink toenails sticking out, which is what I thought she was referring to. I shook my head, I didn’t get it, so she cut her eyes again and I looked back, this time sliding past the pink toenails to a large expanse of bare ass sticking out of those skin-tight see-through- yoga pants she had on that a lot of women seem to wear, that has somehow slid off her hips and down to the middle of her ass. A full moon.
I almost laughed and then had to remind myself that I had looked with permission, but I had better not look again. I think I said something like ‘Urk” I didn’t know what else to say.
About then homeless man one starting wandering around the E.R. talking to himself. Things like: “Lass week I’s in Buffalo shootin’ H. Been out since Saturday.” Then he looks at you like he might just cut you for your pocket change.
Cut my eyes away, overshot and wound up looking at that wide expanse of ass again. Jeezz, I said to myself, out loud.
“What are you looking at that woman’s ass again for?” My wife asked. “Wasn’t I lied,” and nodded at the mumbling homeless man who had luckily migrated to the general area of behind the woman’s ass.
My wife left off, satisfied but why is there something like that in an E.R. anyway?
Things chilled out for eleven seconds and then the girl must have felt a breeze on her ass and tugged up her yoga pants. I swear withing a very few seconds they were back down so far, I was sure there was going to be a serious breach of panties at any moment. And, the thing is, those yoga pants are so thin you can see everything through them, panties, EVERYTHING. I felt like switching places with my wife, having her run interference. But, no, this was my problem and so I forced my eyes back to wandering around the ER.
Homeless man 1 got a nurse to give him a Sprite and some snacks. He was happy for a moment, and that was when homeless man two showed up. He asked to see a patient that did not exists. When the security guard told him there was no such patient he said “Oh, Okay,” and wandered away to a small corner of the waiting room that held a few chairs and disappeared from the security guard. Suddenly security guard 2 shows up, is informed by security guard 1 that there may be a problem, and heads over to the area homeless man 2 disappeared in.
We could hear a brief argument: Yes, we, the whole damn room was bored, waiting to be seen and since the wide expanse of ass had once again been covered there was nothing else to do, then the two of them came out of the corner with homeless man 2 protesting that he had simply forgot to sign in. The security guard walks him to the sign-in table right next my wife and I and hands him the paper to fill out. The homeless man stood for a few moments, fumbled with the pen, stole two of the pens and then headed down the hallway the went back into the ER proper.
“HEY!” Yelled the security guard from the desk, “you can’t go down there! But down there he went and so the security guard chased him down and he came back reluctantly. And, just as the security guard sat down the homeless guy starts scream and jumping up and down and shaking his fists in front of the desk and trying to eyeball all of us with the stank eye at the same time. “I Want a Psych Review! I WANT A F*CKIN’ PSYCH REVIEW RIGHT NOW!!!
That puckered me up. I have seen crazy before, and I don’t like it. Especially when I have a wife right next to me and in between me and sir crazy. So, I edged forward. Old I may be, but I weigh 270 and if he comes to close to my wife, he’s going to lay down hard.
He didn’t. A second later he bolted down the hallway again this time pursued by a skinny security guard who apparently had bigger kahunas that the other fat security guard. We didn’t see him again for a while, so I assume he got his wish for a psych eval.
I believe it was about four hours later when my wife was finally called back to see the actual doctor; after a cat scan, blood work and an exam by a PA and a nurse. This was around midnight.
Within seconds of her leaving the semi naked woman next to me began to cry. Uh uh, I told myself. Your wife will kill you. And so, I sat there like the sane old bastard I am and let her cry. I felt bad, but the older you get you either get smarted or you find yourself the star of an episode of Snapped where wifey buried you in the back yard garden, and they only discovered you because the cat partially disinterred you while crapping on you.
Two hours after that, with more homeless man 1 con jobs on the nurses, and more expanses wide expanses of bare ass the nurse came and got me to take me back there. I admit it, I thanked God profusely.
It was after shift change the next day before we were seen by the doctor. And as we sat back there for hours waiting Homeless man 1 got sent to Pysch Eval too, where we overheard homeless man 2 already was. He ran in there as soon as the door to the mental health unit was opened. We finally ended the whole fiasco after 14 plus hours, no sleep, wifey finally got a shot that gave her some relief. 14 hours for a shot to help settle down a migraine. Crazy, and finding out that drug addicts and homeless people have, at least from what we saw, and the fact that the hospital staff catered to them as though they were used to giving them pens, paper, notebooks, sodas, crackers and more to settle them down, have pretty much tried to settle the problems they have in their lives by crashing in on the hospital E.R and mental Health units.
I left some things out because you wouldn’t believe it and I don’t want to exploit people as it was a real event. But next time you need to make an E.R. visit you might want to switch that to an urgent care, I understand those places are marginally worse for the care part, but substantially stricter for the crazies. Of course, I might add that Urgent Care had at least one doctor on, and the ER, 20 times larger also had only one doctor one…
This week: It seems like last to this, the week flew by, and I had so much to do that I really couldn’t stop to think about it.
Microwave ovens and presets on microwave ovens:
I like microwave ovens. They have made our lives better; I truly believe that. How else can you get a hot cup of coffee from yesterday’s leftover coffee in just about 120 seconds? Not that I do that. I mean drink yesterday’s left-over coffee… Okay… I do.
Here’s the thing though, it’s coffee! That’s my only argument. It should be enough though. I mean it’s like sacred, isn’t it? If I were living in a cave and discovered the coffee bean and bought it to my fellow cave dwellers, they would probably build a shrine for me and worship me… Paint pictures of Coffee beans on the cave walls instead of hands, horses and signs for water. History would have been changed! Well, would have been changed had that happened.
So, no. I won’t throw out coffee. I guess that is a shocking admission but it’s true.
Once, I can’t remember the movie, some western, the character threw the dregs of then coffee in his cup on the fire. The other guys around the fire looked at him like he was crazy… Crazy! And, he must have been. I was just a kid at the time, and I thought he was crazy! After that the other cowboys ostracized him. And he wasn’t asked along for the next roundup. That’s how serious a thing coffee was for cowboys back in the day. So. I don’t throw away coffee. Which brings me back to microwaves. Don’t you wish your mind worked the way mine does? See how I came right back to where I wanted to be? Okay. I don’t even know how my mind works; I just thank God that it does. So, Microwaves…
I like the idea of a Microwave, but I do have some issues with them. First, you cannot make popcorn consistently. In fact, I went to make popcorn the other day and the bag said, “Do not use the Popcorn Setting on your Microwave.” Huh. Then why have the setting there? Isn’t that the whole idea? Ease of use? Push one button? Well, we’ll get to that in a minuet. The bag went on to give precise microwave instructions. If you have this many “Watts” use this amount of time. This many, that amount of time. I had a headache when I finished reading it. Finally, I put the popcorn back into the cupboard and got some chips instead and sank into a deep depression over the whole technology thing. How can you eat microwavable popcorn if the button settings are wrong, and you have to spend three hours figuring out wattage? You can’t just get out a pan and some butter, tear open the bag and do it that way, can you?
Well, as I sat eating my chips that I didn’t want I thought about that. There are a lot of buttons on a microwave. For instance, there is a beverage button on mine. It doesn’t work for beverages though. It leaves them too cold or too hot. But what if you accidentally pushed the popcorn button? And you then found out the popcorn button worked for beverages? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, it does. I tried. But the beverage button will not work for Popcorn. What a mess that was. But, in the end, I did go back out there, rip a popcorn bag open, and put it in a pan with some butter. Guess what? That did work.
As for the coffee on the popcorn setting it did come out pretty good, but I have an aversion to using a button marked Popcorn for coffee. But I wonder. If the popcorn companies don’t want you to use it, why do the microwave companies still make a popcorn button? Hmmm. And if the beverage button doesn’t work for beverages, what the Hell good is it anyway? And, if coffee is the most nuked beverage, why not a Coffee button? And stay with me here, if the Popcorn button isn’t used anyway, why not re-label it Coffee? Then I wouldn’t have to feel so bad about using the popcorn button for my coffee. Hey, I’m going to get one of those little label makers and make a coffee sticker and put it right over the Popcorn label. That will solve my problems for now. Feel free to just copy the picture above, print it out, and paste it on your own Microwave! No need to say thanks.
That only leaves the power button on mine. But that is kind of cool. You can press it, set the time amount, and watch the little turntable go around and around….
Have a good week…
Check out The Zombie Plagues:
The Zombie Plagues: Book One
by Geo Dell
ONE
Watertown
Tuesday Morning:
Project Bluechip
Major Richard Weston
He read the report twice and then carefully set it back on his desk. Johns or Kohlson: One of the two had stolen samples of SS-V2765. It was not a question. No one else had the access, no one else the proximity or knowledge of where it was stored. Two of the viruses, one each of the REX agents were missing. Enough to infect several million people and that was just the initial infection. From there the infected would go on to infect even more, where it stopped was anyone’s guess.
Knowing it was one of the two did not solve the problem of how for him though: There should have been no way to get it out. Every area of the facility was under surveillance. There had to be more than just one of the two involved.
From Complex C they were stripped down, showered: Out of the showers naked and into a locker room where they could retrieve their own personal clothing they had stripped out of that morning: Dressed, frisked, metal wanded and then allowed into the elevators that would take them six stories to the surface. This theft was not something either of them could have committed alone.
“Alice.” He picked up the report from his desk. “I have a problem… A problem that requires your… Expertise. Two fold… First; all the guard and camera operators for C Complex are to be relieved of duty. You will personally interrogate them and find out which of them took a payoff to look the other way… Our boys, Johns and Kohlson… Both or one smuggled out the virus.” He paused… “It hardly matters in the scheme of things, it changes nothing, but it is the principle of the thing.” He tossed her the report. “Read it… Quartermaster’s office… Handle that too?” Alice nodded before she bent and looked over the thick report. “Second thing is the virus agent, and the REX agents are out there somewhere.” Alice raised her head from the report. “Find it and bring it back?” Alice nodded once more before her head dipped low again; eyes devouring the report. Weston leaned back in his chair, the cigar that was a near permanent fixture in his mouth, rolling from side to side as he closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “It goes without saying… They’re all expendable,” he added as an afterthought.
“Sir,” Alice said before she returned to reading.
Ecuador
Jefferson Prescott’s Estate
Wednesday Morning
Andrea Zurita had been alive for the second time for more than three days. The men who had left her body had done so carefully: Senor Prescott would be very angry to find them on his land. Transgressions had been met with violence in the past, the bodies dumped into the ocean.
Andrea Ivanna Zurita had taken I’ll three days before in the small village near to Prescott’s property. She worked for Prescott, someone allowed on and off the property with ease. She had taken ill at work suddenly, no one knew the why of it and her family was poor: A doctor, other than the local clinic, was out of the question. So, she had been sent home to rest, but she had never made it to the local free clinic: She had lapsed into a coma a few hours later and while her family had still been reeling, she had died. No rhyme, no reason.
Andrea Zurita was a young woman, there seemed no reason for her sudden illness and death, but there were things that should be done and so the local Mirukus, shaman had come. A few words, prayers, the shaman was a transplanted Haitian. They understood most of what he said, but not everything. He had left and they had prepared her for burial. She was washed and dressed in a plain white cotton dress. The second day came, and the family came to call, leaving their wishes where she lay in her grandmother’s home. The third day came, and the burial was coming. Cousins, men who worked in a neighboring village, were on the way to open the grave. That was when Andrea had sat up and vomited blood.
Her eyes had rolled back into her head. Her body shaken, but her chest did not rise. She had spoken no words, but she had tried to rise several times before one of the arriving cousins, crossing himself, had bound her with rope, hand and foot. They had sent for the Mirukus again.
The old Haitian had come quickly, taken one look at Andrea and then spoken cryptically, quickly. “Return her to the man that has cast this spell on her. He has bound her to him in life and that has followed her into death. Return her for she is yours no longer.”
The Mirukus believed the white man, Prescott, had attempted to control the river spirit Pullujmu, to take control of the beautiful young woman for his own devices, but she had slipped over into death and was now controlled only by those who controlled the dead. He had left fearfully, quickly and had refused to come back for any reason. With nothing left to do for her they had taken her and left her bound body on the long drive that lead to the Prescott house. The white man may have her, but he would not have what he expected to have.
Jefferson Prescott.
Jefferson watched as the men carefully skirted the body of the young woman in the back of the patrol truck. They had picked her up and, not knowing what else to do, they had bought her to him.
Her eyes rolled in her head, but occasionally they would stop and focus, seeming to stare through him. Blood seeped from her open mouth, staining the front of what looked to be a burial garb of some sort. She was, at first, unrecognizable to him until one of the men told him she was his own worker, Andrea Ivanna Zurita: Kitchen help, among other things, she had been here for more than a year. To Jefferson’s Catholic upbringing she seemed possessed, and he kept his distance as he watched her, perhaps as superstitious as the local shaman had been.
He had eventually made the phone call to the Policía Nacional del Ecuador and left the matter in their hands. He had seen stranger than this in his time in Ecuador and had no doubt he would see it again. He sent one of his men into the small village with a thousand dollars in U.S. Currency, Ecuador had no currency of its own, for her family. A thousand dollars would go a long way for a poor family living in an equally poor village.
His phone had chimed, and he had excused himself to answer it. He was needed back in Manhattan; Ben Neo had found the answers he required. He pushed the problem of Andrea Zurita from his mind and concentrated on plans to leave that evening and return to Manhattan.
The Policía Nacional del Ecuador had come some hours later, taken her off his hands without question, as though they saw this sort of thing every day and he had never heard another thing about it or given it another thought. He had taken his private helicopter back to the United States later in the day as though nothing of any significance had occurred.
Manhattan
Wednesday evening
“You have a beautiful view, Mr. Prescott,” Ben Neo said. He stood on the balcony of the top floor of Prescott’s building which was his home in Manhattan and where his wife and two daughters lived full-time.
“I am rarely here,” Prescott said. “But I do enjoy the view when I am. My wife and daughters seem to like it too. My eldest daughter, Lita, seems to enjoy it more than my wife Esmeralda or my youngest Mia.” His eyes slid to Carlos who met them with his own. “But we’re working on that, aren’t we?” His comments seemed directed a Carlos. Carlos nodded. Not sure what he should say or do. “We are,” Prescott said. He sipped at his drink. “Are we all set for tomorrow?” he asked Carlos?
“We are,” Carlos said. “We’ll drive back to Rochester later tonight.”
“You own a home there?” He turned to Neo.
“Yes. Everything is there; we’ll take it from there to the meet in Watertown. Carlos will go with that, I’ll pick up the cash and then meet your guys there,” Neo said.
Prescott nodded. “It seems like Tommy, and I should just dispense with all the drama and just deliver the stuff directly to each other,” he said. He laughed, “But that would put both of you out of a job. And there are so many things I can’t handle as well or don’t have the time or inclination to handle, as well as you two.”
He was interrupted by Carlos’ cell phone ringing. Carlos’ dark face flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” he said, obviously not about to answer it. He fumbled it out of his pocket ready to shut it off.
“No, no,” Prescott said. “We were done. Take your call. It is all right, Carlos. Take it out here on the balcony. Benjamin and I will give you a little privacy… Won’t we, Ben?” he asked.
Ben nodded and they both stepped through into the living room and pulled the sliding glass door shut.
“Hello,” Carlos said, obviously upset. He listened. “I cannot believe you called me here,” he said. His voice was high and panicked. “Are you crazy? Did you know he was here with me? Right here with me? He is in the living room separated by a few pieces of glass. You are crazy. Crazy,” he took a couple of deep breaths while she spoke. “No… That is even crazier! While he is right here? Meet you with him in the house? Are you trying to get me killed…? No? It seems as though you are… It does… No… How…? How will he not know?” He listened for a few minutes glancing nervously through the glass, but Neo and Prescott stood with their backs to him over by the bar.
“Lita,” he said at last, “I will meet you… Nothing else… I have to leave later on…”
She continued to talk.
~
Ben stood silently drinking his drink. The two voices came clearly through the small scanner behind the bar. They listened to the conversation between Lita and Carlos.
“Did you know, Ben that they were simply radio signals, and they can be picked up easily?” Prescott asked.
“Yes… I did… Although I did not realize it could be done this easily,” Neo said.
“Cheap frequency scanner. I only need to know the frequency.” He sighed. “I’m sorry you are a witness to this embarrassment. I treated him like a son… She is my daughter. He has obviously corrupted her… Take him down through the basement, leave that way… Bring me back what I requested, Ben. I would almost do it myself; right now, but I will not bring murder into my home… Call me?” he asked.
Neo nodded. It was obvious that the conversation was over. Prescott reached behind the bar and flicked off the scanner. He pulled his phone from his pocket and punched in a number.
“Yes… Bring Mr. Neo’s car to the basement elevator… Thank you.” He hung up just as Carlos came back in through the sliding glass doors, rubbing his arms.
“A little cool, eh?” Prescott asked.
“A little,” Carlos answered. “About the phone call,” he started.
Prescott held up his hand. “Not necessary. Besides, we have had a change in plans. Ben here, along with you, will drive back now. A little earlier than we planned, but apparently Mr. Neo needs to take care of something for Tommy this evening… So… You, see?” He shook Neo’s hand. “Your car is waiting at the basement entrance.” He looked to Carlos, but his face was a mask: Unreadable. Carlos said goodbye and followed Neo to the elevator.
On the road
The idiot lights came on: Ben’s Ford bucked twice and then died. Carlos looked over from where he had been watching the lights of Manhattan slip away. They were in an abandoned industrial area on their way across the city.
“Not good,” Carlos said. “Especially here.”
“Hopefully it’s not a big deal,” Neo said. “And who would be stupid enough to mess with us?” he asked. He laughed and Carlos joined in. “I think it’s a loose wire. It happened once before,” Neo said. He coasted the car to a stop and shifted into park. He reached down, pulled the release handle and the hood popped up.
“With all the money you make. You should buy a better car,” Carlos said.
Neo nodded… “Too cheap, I guess. Will you pop that glove box and see if there’s a flashlight in there? Should be.”
Carlos searched briefly and pulled out the flashlight, held it to his chin and turned it on. He laughed. “Makes me look like a dead guy,” Carlos said and laughed again.
Neo nodded. “Come and hold it for me and we’ll get this baby fixed and be on our way.”
They both climbed out and walked to the front of the car. Neo popped the second hood latch and pulled the prop rod into the air. “Back here,” Neo said. He pointed to a block of wires and one loose red wire that had pulled free. “I knew it,” he said. “Hang on, let me get the tape. Fix it a little better this time,” Neo said. He ducked back into the car and Carlos stood holding the flashlight and thinking to himself; wishing he could have met Lita, but glad that he had not, if Prescott ever found out he would be a dead man. He felt the car shift as Neo got back out and came around to stand beside him.
“Hey?” Neo said in a soft voice.
Carlos looked over at him.
“It’s not personal. I would have done her too,” Neo said. His hand came up fast and he shot Carlos twice between the eyes before he could say anything. Carlos dropped straight down: Folding up as he went. Neo shot his hand out and snatched the flashlight out of the air before it hit the ground. He bent down and checked the pulse at the side of Carlos’ neck to make sure, but Carlos was gone. The silenced 22 was perfect. Not enough velocity to exit the back of his head, just enough to kill him dead. He walked around to the back of the car.
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The house is the house we grew up in. We played tackle football on that road.
Baseball in that gravel lot in the picture above, which is directly across from our house.
The little white building pictured above? That was Major’s Market. If you had a quarter, you could get a sixteen-ounce Coke, or Pepsi if you prefer, or DR Pepper as I preferred. You could also get a large candy bar, and a handful of penny candy. All for that quarter. We used to love to walk down to Major’s Market and spend our money.
We used to get up on the roof of that red building, which is a lumber storage barn, with a neighbor’s ladder to get our baseballs a few times a week. There would usually be three or four along with someone’s kickball, football, or basketball. The tackle football was a sometime thing. The thing being it never lasted long before someone got pissed and got in a fight. It hurts to be tackled on pavement. But once we walked about a mile to play football on the lawn of a church, and when we got there a funeral started and the minister told us we’d have to leave. So, we just played in the street. You didn’t have to worry about traffic, yes, all the families’ owned cars, but most of the dads were never around, so the cars weren’t around much either. You could play for a good two hours and never have a car come along. And if one did? Well, I hate to say it, but we weren’t so quick to get out of the street. After all it was our street, our neighborhood, go drive somewhere else. And, as I mentioned, it wasn’t likely to be anyone from the street.
The blank area that looks like an old driveway full of bushes, is where the railroad tracks ran behind the lumber company. It doesn’t look like much now, but that was our private park back there. There were four tracks, three of them almost dead, one that ran from north into the city. The whole area was overgrown, and I think every kid on the block had a fort back there somewhere. Also, the trains used to stop there to pick up lumber, and or drop lumber off. So, there were huge concrete loading docks that we could survey our kingdoms from.
Most of us boys used to go camping every weekend. That area in back of the lumber company was a great place to leave our bikes. It was our neighborhood, and kids for blocks around knew it. Nobody who wasn’t from the neighborhood went in there, so your bike was safe for the weekend. Leave the bikes, jump up on the rails and start walking north, balancing on the rail, toward Black River (Where I now Live).
When we hit the small village of Huntingtonville (Above today: The old railway tracks have been converted to a trail walk that goes out of Watertown all the way to the village of Black River) we could fish, swim in the Black or both. There was a dam that many of us balanced across the top of to make our way to a small island in the middle of the river. It was an abandoned island. And we explored every inch of it at one time or another.
We would find a place to camp out. Either a farmer’s field, or somewhere in the miles of forest that surrounded the Black, and even a long stretch of land that followed the riverbank. Flat but isolated. It had once been a railroad bed, abandoned for years.
Sunday afternoon we were back on the tracks, balancing our way back to Olive Street, pick up our bikes (That way we didn’t have to go home) and head for Thompson Park. Walk those bikes up two miles of hill, hit the top, turn around and ride like the wind down off the park hill. If you hit the lights right, or dared to run them, you could coast all the way to the public square in Watertown. After all it was Sunday, everybody else was at church. We would end up at the First Baptist Church on the Public Square (A new England town square). I knew my sister was inside. I of course was a rebel and so I went to Catholic church sometimes with dad. Given a preference I’d rather go camping though. But that is the same sister that got me to love God by giving me a cassette tape (Jesus Christ Superstar).
Then I had an accident and met God. Then two years on the street, addiction, alcoholism, running away from life, family, God. But life eventually got me back to that connection I had lost. The house looks a little different. The neighborhood a little rougher, if that is even possible. Somebody turned the little market into an apartment. And the city ripped up all the tracks that we used as our own private path to the entire world. But even if the pictures are different from what I remember, I still feel that love for those days when I look at them, Dell.
Books I have written using my hometown as a backdrop (Renamed to Glennville NY)
Happy Friday! I could have said End of the Week, but I didn’t., so I should get an A for effort.
Low thirties here in New York. That feels good after the deep freeze we’ve been in. All of the snow is melting fast. Even, so I know winter is coming back, even my cat reminds me; he is growing in that thick coat. He owns me, of course, I should not have said my cat, I am his human, and he never lets me forget it. He refuses to stay inside; he has made it his goal in his nine lives to get to know every female cat in the village. I think he believes it is his duty to do it. After year three of ruling the village, I never see any other male cats in the village except my Houdini. He has had his share of battles, one ear missing and the other chewed up; even so he refuses to retire and lay on the couch.
I saw a YouTube show I watch today, and the person said spring is right around the corner. What? Didn’t we just take the hard swing into winter a few weeks ago? Shut up! Don’t jinx us, because I can tell you that up here spring is months away.
Anyway, Houdini: Sometimes three or four days will go by before he shows up at 1:00 AM demanding to be fed, so I decided to work on a treat system to get him to come back a little sooner: Meat, he loves meat, and he doesn’t care what kind it is as long as it didn’t come out of the cat food can. So now every time he shows up, I put down dry food and cat food, and he looks from me to the refrigerator as if to ask, ‘Where is the meat?’. Although he isn’t choosy, chicken is favorite. So, now every time he shows up, he ignores the dry food, the Purina wet cat filets, all he cares about is the chicken (He has no clue what I’m feeding him, usually Oscar Meyer lunch meat cut into tiny strips, he thinks it’s all Chicken, even when it is Chicken.). When I do make chicken, I make an extra breast portion for him and serve it to him over a few nights. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, I think he had more Turkey that I did.
Check out my America the Dead books below and enjoy this beautiful mid-winter break from the weather, Dell…
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LEGAL
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons places, situations or events is purely coincidental.
Route 81 rest-stop
Watertown New York
April 20th
1:00 am
A black truck pulled into the rest stop and two men climbed out; walking toward the rest rooms that sat in from the road. Concrete bunker looking buildings that had been built back in the early seventies. They had been closed for several years now. In fact the Open soon sign was bolted to the front of the building; rust streaked the sign surface. It seemed like some sort of joke to Mike Bliss who used the rest stop as a place to do light duty drug deals. Nothing big, but still that depended on your idea of big. Certainly nothing over a few thousand dollars. That was his break off point. Any higher than that, he often joked, you would have to talk to someone in Columbia… Or maybe Mexico, he told himself now as he sat waiting in his Lexus, but it seemed that since Rich Dean had got himself dead the deals just seemed to be getting larger and larger. And who knew how much longer that might last. He watched the two men make a bee line for the old rest rooms.
“Idiots,” he muttered to himself. He pushed the button, waited for the window to come down, leaned out the window and yelled. “What are you, stupid? They’re closed.” He motioned with one hand. “You can’t read the fuckin’ sign or what?”
Both men stopped and looked from him to the sign.
“Yeah, closed. You can read right? Closed. That’s what it says. Been closed for years. Go on into Watertown; buy a fuckin’ burger or something. Only way you’re getting a bathroom at this time of the morning.” He had lowered his voice for the last as he pulled his head back into the car and turned the heater up a notch. The electric motor whined as the window climbed in its track. He looked down at his wrist for the time, 1:02 A.M., where the fuck was this dude. He was late, granted a few minutes, but late was late.
A sharp rap on the glass startled him. He had been about to dig out his own supply, a little pick-me-up. He looked up to see the guys from the truck standing outside his window. “Oh… Fucking lovely,” he muttered. He pushed the button and the window lowered into the door, the motor whining loudly, the cold air blew in.
“And what can I do for you two gentlemen,” He asked in his best smart-ass voice.
The one in back stepped forward into the light. Military type, Mike told himself. Older, maybe a noncom. A little gray at the edges of his buzz cut. With the military base so close there were soldiers everywhere, after all Watertown was a military town. It was why he was in the business he was in. It was also why he succeeded at it.
“Did you call me stupid,” The man asked in a polite tone.
“Who, me? No. I didn’t call you stupid, I asked, what are you, stupid? Different thing. The fuckin’ place is closed… Just doing my good deed for the day… Helping you, really, so you don’t waste no time,” Mike told him.
“Really?” The man asked.
Mike chuckled. “Yeah really, tough guy. Really. Now, I did my good deed, why don’t you get the fuck out of here ’cause you wore out your welcome.” He opened his coat slightly so they could see the chrome 9 mm that sat in its holster.
“Really,” the first guy repeated.
“Okay, who are you guys, frick and frack? A couple of fucking wannabees? Well I am the real deal, don’t make me stick this gun in your fuckin’ face,” Mike told them. He didn’t like being a dick, but sometimes you had to be.
“You know what my mother always said about guns?” The second guy asked.
“Well, since I don’t know your mama it’s hard to say,” Mike told him. He didn’t like the way these two were acting. They weren’t cops, he knew all the locals. If it had been someone, he had to worry about he would have handled this completely differently. These guys were nobodies. At least nobodies to him, and that made them nobodies to Watertown. If he had to put a bullet in… His thoughts broke off abruptly as the barrel of what looked like a .45 was jammed into his nose. It came from nowhere. He sucked in a deep breath. He could taste blood in his mouth where the gun had smashed his upper lip against his teeth.
“She said don’t threaten to pull a gun, never. Just pull it.”
“Mama had a point,” Mike allowed. His voice was nasally due to the gun that was jammed hallway up to his brain. “Smart lady.”
“Very,” the man allowed. “Kind of a hard ass to grow up with, but she taught me well.” He looked down at Mike. “So, listen, this is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna drive out of here right the fuck now. And that’s going to stop me from pulling this trigger. Lucky day for you, I think. Like getting a Get Out of Jail Free card, right.”
“This is my business spot… You don’t understand,” Mike told them. “I… I’m waiting for someone.”
“Not tonight, Michael.”
“Yeah, but you don’t.” He stopped. “How do you know my name?” he asked. There was more than a nasal quality to his voice, now there was real fear. Maybe they were Feds. Maybe.
“Yeah, we know you. And we know you use this spot as a place to do your business. And I’m saying we couldn’t care less, but right now you gotta go, and I’m not going to tell you the deal again. You can leave or stay, but you ain’t gonna like staying,” The guy told him.
“Listen… This is my town… If you guys are Feds you can’t do shit like this… This is my town. You guys are just…”
The guy pulled the trigger and Mike jumped. He fell to the right, across the front seat. Both men stepped away from the car, eyes scanning the lonely rest stop from end to end, but there was no one anywhere. The silence returned with a ringing in their ears from the blast as it had echoed back out of the closed car interior. The shooter worked his jaw for a moment, swallowing until his ears popped. He lifted his wrist to his mouth. “Guess you saw that,” he said quietly.
“Got a cleaner crew on the way up. You’ll pass them in the elevators. The boss is waiting on you guys.“ The voice came through the implant in his inner ear. No one heard what was said except him.
He nodded for the cameras that were picking him up. “In case you didn’t hear it, someone is supposed to meet him here so your cleaner crew could have company.”
“Got that too… We’ll handle it.” He nodded once more, and then walked off toward the rest rooms as the other man followed.
Once in back of the unit they used a key in the old, rusted handset. It only looked old and rusty, it was actually an interface for a state-of-the-art digital system that would read his body chemistry, heat, and more. The key had dozens of micro pulse sensor implants that made sure the user was human, transmitted heartbeat, body chemistry, it could even tell male from female and match chemical profiles to known examples in its database. Above and to the sides of them several scanners mapped their bodies to those same known profiles. Bone composition, old fractures, density and more. All unique in every man or women. The shooter removed the key and slipped it into his pocket. A few seconds later a deep whining of machinery reached their ears, the door shuddered in its frame, and then slipped down into a pocket below the doorway.
A second later they stepped into the gutted restroom. Stainless steel doors took up most of the room; the elevator to the base below. They waited for the cleaner crew to come up, then took the elevator back down into the depths.
~
The Bluechip facility stretched for more than five miles underground. Most of that was not finished space, most of that was connector tunnels, and storage space bored from the rock. The facility itself was about three thousand feet under the city of Watertown in a section of old caves that had been enlarged, concrete lined and reinforced. The rest area was one of several entrances that led into the complex. An old farm on the other side of Watertown, an abandoned factory in the industrial park west of the city and a few other places, including direct connections from secure buildings on the nearby base.
John Pauls and Sammy Black had Alpha clearance. Both were ex-military, but most likely military clearance was no longer a real matter of concern this late in the game, Sammy thought as they made their way down the wide hallway. The word coming down from those in the know was that in the next twenty-four hours the human race would come very close to ceasing to exist at all. No confirmation from anyone official, but regular programming was off air, the news stations were tracking a meteor that may or may not hit the Earth. The best opinions said it didn’t matter if it hit or not, it would be a close enough pass that there would be massive damage. Maybe the human race would be facing extinction. The government was strangely silent on the subject. And that had made him worry even more. The pass was estimated to be right over the tip of south America. So maybe formalities like Alpha clearance weren’t all that important any longer. If only Mike Bliss had given that some thought before he had pissed him off.
The halls were silent, nearly empty. Gloss white panels eight feet high framed it. It had always reminded Black of a maze with its twists and turns. Here and there doors hung open. Empty now. Always closed any other time he had been down here. So it had come this far too, Black thought. He stopped at a door that looked like any other door and a split second later the door rose into the ceiling and Major Weston waved them in.
Alice, he had never learned her last name, sat at her desk, her eyes on them as they walked past her. One hand rested on the butt of a matte black .45 caliber pistol in a webbed shoulder holster that was far from Army issue, and Sammy had no doubt she would shoot them both before they could even react. Alice was etched into one of those name pins that the Army seemed to like so well, but oddly, just Alice, no last name, rank or anything else. She wore no uniform, just a black coverall. The kind with the elastic ankle and wrist cuffs. No insignia there either. He had noticed that months before. Her eyes remained flat and expressionless as they passed her desk.
“Alice,” Sammy said politely. She said nothing at all, but she never did.
“Sit down, boys,” Major Weston told them. He spoke around the cigar in his mouth: Dead, but they always were, and there was never the smell of tobacco in the office. They took the two chairs that fronted the desk.
The Major was looking over a large monitor on the opposite wall that showed the north American continent. This map showed small areas of red, including the northern section where they were. The rest of the map was covered with green. “Where we are, and where we need to be,“ he said as he pushed a button on his desk. The monitor went blank. He turned to face the two.
“So here is where we are. You know, as does most of the world, that we are expecting a near miss from DX2379R later on tonight.” He held their eyes.
John shrugged. “I’ve been doing a little job, must have missed that. It’s not gonna take us out is it?”
“Saw that on the news a few days back. Guess we dodged a bad one,” Sammy said.
“Right… Right,” Weston said quietly. “But that cover was nothing but bullshit.”
“It’s going to hit us?” John asked.
“Maybe… The fact is that we don’t know. One group says this, another group says that, but it doesn’t matter because it will probably kill us off anyway. Direct hit, near miss, it is going to tip over an already bad situation with the Yellowstone Caldera.” He raised his eyes, “Familiar with that?”
“Yellowstone Park?” Sammy said.
John nodded in agreement.
Weston laughed. “Put simply, yes. Yellowstone has always been an anomaly to us. Back in 1930 the Army did an exploratory survey of that area. What we came up with was that there was a section of the Rocky Mountains missing. Looked at from the top of Mount Washburn it was easy for the team to see that the largest crater of an extinct volcano known to exist lay before them.”
“I guess that’s about what I thought,” Sammy agreed.
“Yeah. We all think that. Except it is not true at all because the Yellowstone caldera is not extinct, it is active. Active and about to pop. There have been several warnings, but we took the recording stations offline quite some time ago, so there has been no mention of it in the news. Budget cuts,” he shrugged. “So everyone is focused on this meteor that may or may not hit us and instead this volcanic event is going to blow up and when that happens the rest won’t matter at all.” He clicked the button on his desk and the monitor came to life. “All the red areas are spots where the surface pressure has increased. There was, at one time, many active volcanoes on the north American continent.” He clicked a button and the map changed to a view of the European continent with many of the same red shaded areas.
“All over the Earth… Higher pressures. Up until a few days ago the brainiacs were still arguing over whether this could even happen.” He laughed. “It is happening and they are arguing over whether it can happen. Well, we had our little debates and then we realized that history shows clearly that this has happened before. Several times. Call it the Earth’s way of cleansing itself.”
“But it’s not an absolute, right?” Sammy asked.
“Don’t start sounding like the scientists.” He reached below his desk and came up with six small silver cartridges. Each had a red button mounted on the top with a protective cap over the button itself. He clicked a button on his desk, and a picture of destruction appeared on the screens. It was obviously an aerial shot, looking down at a chain of islands. Smoke hung over the chain, reaching as high as the plane itself. As the plane dropped lower, rivers of red appeared. “That picture is an hour old. That is… Was, the Hawaiian chain.”
Sammy twisted further to the side, staring at the monitor. “How can that be… I mean everyone would know about it.” He turned back to Weston.
Weston nodded. “And that would be true except the satellites are out because of the asteroid. Shut down to avoid damage. That is the official word.” He clicked the button on his desk and the monitor went dead once more. “I started this out saying that none of it matters and that is true. The Yellowstone caldera is going to erupt sometime in the next few days. Not a maybe, not an educated guess: If the satellites were up, you would know that the park is closed. It has already started. We have had a few small quakes, but the big stuff is on the way. He rolled the cartridges across the desktop; Sammy and John caught them.
“Super volcanoes… Earthquakes that modern civilization has never seen… The last super eruption was responsible for killing off the human population some seventy-four thousand years ago. Reduced it to a few thousand. And that is not the biggest one we have evidence of.” He lifted his palms and spread them open, sighing as he did. “So, it is a double whammy. If we survive the meteor the volcanoes get us, or the earthquakes because of them, or we’ll die from injuries. And I think those of us who die outright will be lucky. The rest of us will have a hard time of it… Staying alive with nothing… We will probably all starve to death.” He paused in the silence.
“Those cartridges are a compound developed right here in this complex for the armed forces. Project Super Soldier. SS for short. That kept people from looking too deep, they assumed it was something to do with the Nazi youth movement here and abroad. We let that misconception hold.” He waited a second for his words to sink in. “SS is designed to prolong life past the normal point of termination. It allows a soldier to survive longer without food and more importantly without water. Does something to the cells of the host, I don’t pretend to know what. What I do know is that the people above me made the decision to release this…” He picked up a mug of coffee from the desk and sipped deeply. His eyes were red road maps, Sammy noticed now. Like he hadn’t slept in a few days.
“So this is it for us. I guess you realize that you probably won’t get paid for this. No money is going to show up in your account. I will run it through before I pull the plug, but I truly believe the machinery will be dead by the time payday rolls around. So this is something I’m asking you to do.” He pointed to the cartridges that both men were looking over. Sammy held his as though it might bite him.
“Those babies are really all we have to hope with. Most people will die outright. They will never make it past the quakes, eruptions, and the resulting ash clouds and gases. Up here we should be okay as far as gases go, eruptions, but there are fault lines that crisscross this area. This whole facility is bored from limestone caverns. Probably won’t make it through the quakes, although it is a good eighty miles from the closest line,” he shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. My point is there should be a good chance for survivors here.”
“So we do what with these? Can they harm us?” John asked.
“Harm you, kill you? No, but you will be infected the minute you push that button. It will protect you the same as anyone else. There is enough in a single cartridge to infect about five hundred million people,” Weston said quietly.
“Whoa,” Sammy whistled. “Why infect… Why not inoculate? And why six cartridges… Three Billion people?”
“Minimum, three billion. That is before those infected pass it along themselves: After a while it won’t matter. As to the question of infected, this is a designer virus. You catch it just like the flu. We infected whole platoons by releasing it in the air over them. Eighty-Nine-point seven percent infection rate, but that doesn’t really matter because it infects people close to you and those people will infect you… Sneezing, waste, sex, water, food, it gets into and on everything. And once it is in you, either orally or via bloodstream you will be infected. The human body has nothing to fight it, no reason to be alarmed or believe it’s anything more than a virus. And that same response will help to carry it to every area of the body as your own defenses manufacture white blood cells to fight it. So you may as well say a one hundred percent infection rate.” He paused and rubbed at his temples.
“Be glad they decided on this. They have some others that will kill everybody in the world in a matter of days.” Weston nodded at the raised eyebrows that greeted his remarks. “I don’t doubt that the merits of which way to go were hotly debated,” he finished gravely.
“The virus is designed to live within the host, but it can live outside of the host. It can stay alive in a dead body for days, even if the body is frozen. In fact that just freezes the virus too, once the body is thawed it will infect any living person that comes along. So those,” he pointed to the silver cartridges, “are overkill. Same stuff is being released across the globe. Great Briton… Germany… Australia… West coast just a few hours ago. Manhattan has already been done, all the East Coast in fact. I want the two of you to head out from here. One vial here, then one of you head west, the other south. Go for the bigger cities… Water supplies… Reservoirs… Release it in the air or water, it doesn’t matter. There are men heading out from the south, the west coast. The Air Force will be dispersing the same stuff via cargo planes tomorrow or the next day… As long as they can fly, if we can even make it that long, and that isn’t looking really good right now…” He rose from the desk. “I’ll see you out.” He turned to Alice. “Alice… Pack us up.” Alice nodded as Sammy and John got to their feet, but her hand remained on the butt of the pistol. Rubber grips, Sammy noticed as he passed her.
“Alice,” he said.
“Um hmm,” Alice murmured.
Sammy nearly stopped in his tracks but managed to hide his surprise as he passed by into the hallway. The Major fished two sets of keys from his pocket. “Parked in the back lot. A couple of plain Jane Dodge four-bys. Drive ’em like you stole ’em. Leave ’em where you finish up. Hell, keep ’em if you want ’em. Nobody is going to care.”
The three stood in the hallway for a few seconds longer. Sammy’s eyes locked with the Major’s own, and he nodded. The major walked back into his office, and the door rose from its pocket behind him. Quiet, except the slight buzzing from the fluorescent lights.
John shrugged as his eyes met Sammy’s, waiting.
Sammy sighed. “You heard the man… West or south?”
“Flip for it?” John asked. His mouth seemed overly dry and he licked his lips nervously.
Sammy pulled a quarter from his pocket and flipped it into the air. “Call it, Johnny.”
“Tails,” John said just before the quarter hit the carpet.
Sammy bent forward. “Tails it is. You got it, Johnny.”
John looked down at the carpet. “West, I guess.” John said.
Sammy nodded, looked down once more at the quarter and then both men turned and walked away toward the elevator that would take them back to the surface.
Watertown Center New York
Shop and Save Convenience store:
Haley Mae
1:30 AM
“Last one,” Neil said.
Neil was a detective for the sheriffs’ department. It was closing in on 2:00 AM and he and his partner Don had just come back from six hours of sleep to get a jump on the day. Yesterday one of the checkout girls had disappeared between the Shop And Save, a small mini mart on the western outskirts of the city, and home. Earlier this morning she had turned up dead in a ditch just a quarter mile from the front door. The techs were still processing the scene, but it was looking personal. Stabbed to death, multiple wounds, no defense wounds, at least none that he or Don had been able to see, and fully clothed. Her purse had been found nearby, wallet and cash inside. No ID, but her store ID had still been clipped to her shirt. They would know more in a few days once the coroner did her magic. It all pointed to someone she knew, and they had no known boyfriend. The trailer park where she lived had turned up nothing, they had questioned some people at the convenience store, but some had been off shift, so here they were back at the store questioning the other employees.
They had commandeered the night manager’s office which was barely larger than a broom closet, but at least it was a place to sit with enough space left over to call in the workers and ask their questions. Free coffee via the same night manager, who had still not gone home, was taking a little of the six hours of sleep sting off, but to Neil free coffee in a convenience store was like a whore offering a free shot of penicillin to the first twenty-five customers.
“Who’s next?” Don asked.
The last half hour they had been interviewing the people who worked the same shifts as Amber Kneeland.
“Haley Mae,” Neil said.
Don looked up and stopped writing in his little notebook. “How do you,” spell her name, he had meant to ask Neil, but she was right in front of him.
“EM. A. E,” she said with a smile.
“Vietnamese?” Don asked. She was obviously mixed race, African American and Asian, he questioned himself.
“Japanese,” she told him.
“Nice name,” Neil said, “Haley.”
Beautiful girl, Don thought. “Did you know Amber Kneeland? Sometimes works this shift?” he asked.
“Not really,” she answered. “I mean, I met her, but only in passing… I just started here myself.”
She really is beautiful, Don thought. “You wouldn’t know if she had a boyfriend… Other friends?” he asked.
Haley shook her head. “Sorry,” she said… “What has she done?”
“Nothing,” Neil supplied.
“She went missing last night,” Don said. “Turned up dead this morning.”
Haley shook her head. “Oh my God. That’s horrible. She was such a nice girl… Quiet.”
Neil nodded his head. “So maybe you did know her a little better than you thought?”
“I just started here a few weeks back, and like I said, I don’t really know her… But it might be a girlfriend not a boyfriend.”
Don looked at her. “You wouldn’t know who?”
“No. It’s just a rumor. Someone said it to me… I don’t even remember who… But I’ve never seen her with a guy, and I have seen her with other girls… Maybe also the way she looked at me a few times…”
“Go out with her?” Don asked.
“No… Never… I…”
“Don’t swing that way?” Don added.
Haley frowned slightly before she answered. “I work. I don’t swing any way. But if I did she wasn’t my type. She never asked me out, I never asked her out.”
“Didn’t mean to offend you,” Don said. He shrugged. “She’s dead.”
“She would probably do the same for you,” Neil said.
Haley nodded. “That really is all I know. I hope you find who did it though. She seemed like a nice girl,” Haley said.
“You don’t seem the type for this… Bagging groceries at 2:00 am,” Don said, changing the subject. “You aren’t local or I’d know you… This city really is small despite the base.”
Haley smiled. “Came here a year back with a boyfriend, Army. He left, forgot all about me, I guess. I had this idea of modeling… Tough to get a foot in a door though.”
“Wow, if he left you behind he must be a fucking idiot… Any good?” Neil asked.
Haley laughed.
“Excuse mister smooth there,” Don told her. Neil feigned a hurt look and Haley laughed again. “He meant, have you done anything? I know somebody… Might be interested.”
Haley arched her eyebrows. “I can model. I did a You Jeans ad back in Georgia a few years ago. I just need to prove it to the right person.”
“Escorting? Maybe dancing. It’s strictly escorting or dancing, no funny stuff. Dance clubs… Clothing modeling,” Neil said.
“Probably start out escorting… Dance a little… Then if he likes you he’ll put you into the modeling end of things. He owns a lot of shit… Several car dealerships across the state… Some of the biggest dance clubs, clothing outlets, those bargain places, but still, modeling is modeling, right? Not the big name stuff, but it is a foot in the door,” Don added.
“I can do that,” she said slowly.
Neil passed her a white business card with his own name scrawled across the back. “Tell him I sent you… That’s my name on the back.”
“Jimmy Vincioni,” Haley asked.
“Just V… Jimmy V, good guy,” Neil said.
Haley nodded and tucked the card into her front jean pocket. “I’ll call him… Thanks. Look…” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I’m pretty sure she had a girlfriend here… I just don’t know who,” Haley added quietly.
Don finished writing in his notebook, nodded once he met her eyes and then shook the hand she offered. She walked away.
“Beautiful,” Neil said.
“Absolutely,” Don agreed. “You ain’t getting none of that though.”
“Yeah? But if Jimmy V hires her? It’ll be the next best thing.”
Don shook his head, but smiled. His eyes rose and watched as Haley walked away. “Guess I’ll have to have a few drinks at the club if that happens.”
Joel sat at the bar and watched football on one of the big screen TV’s Mort had put in. It was a slow game, he was tired, and his mind kept turning to other things. He couldn’t concentrate. Part of the allure of the Rusty Nail was the quiet. After a 12 hour shift at the mill with the constant noise from the huge machinery, the quiet had been nice. But that had all changed once the bar had become popular with the nearby base. He needed to go home. The crowd in the bar was starting to build and the noise was giving him the beginnings of a headache. He caught Mort’s eye and went back to his thoughts as he waited.
The Rusty Nail had always been a locals only bar up until a few years back when the economy had taken a nose dive. The nail was wedged up a side street off Factory square. Not exactly easy to find, and that had hurt business too as the old people left and the new people came in.
Mort, Mortimer to anybody that felt like being tossed out on their ass, had nearly lost the small bar and the building above it to the bank. The building above it had six small apartments that Mort had purposely left empty when he had bought the building fresh out of the service thirty years back. Who wanted to deal with tenants, he had said then. But times changed, and so he had sold his house, moved himself into one of the apartments, and then sold the bank on remortgaging the whole building as well as renovating the other five apartments. The bank had come up with a loan that took all of that into account and added a second income source from the apartments that could pay the monthly mortgage and put a good chunk of change into his pocket too.
He had signed on the x, taken their money, renovated the building, moved in the tenants and then taken a hard look at the Rusty Nail. He had decided to completely gut the bar and do it over. He had dumped far too much into the renovations though, including being closed for nearly a full month, and then opened it to find that the economy had taken an even deeper nose dive during those nearly thirty days. The third month into the new mortgage and he had found that he was maybe in a bad spot already.
Joel remembered now that he had sat right at the end of the bar when Mort had talked it over with some others, Moon Calloway, Johnny Barnes, Jim Tibbets, Joel had been welcome to include his two cents which he had declined to do.
“Well, what you do is put the word out to those cab drivers. Believe me, I’ve seen it. They will have them soldiers down here in no time, even if you are off the beaten path,” Jim had said. Jim was a school bus driver for the north side district and less than a year away from a fatal car accident on the interstate. Jeff Brown, who had been a local football star, was doing ten years up at Clinton Correctional for hitting Jim’s car head on drunk and killing him. But that night Jim had still been alive and had wanted to be a part of the New Rusty Nail that Mort had in mind. Something a little more modern. Modern bought the soldiers, but more importantly it also bought women.
“I’m not paying a cab driver to bring me G.I.’s,” Mort had said. “And I know your game. You’re just hoping to get laid out of it.”
They had all laughed at that, except Jim who had turned red. But after a few seconds he had laughed too, and the conversation had plodded forward the way bar conversations do.
“Well, you ain’t got to pay them exactly, give them a couple beers,” Moon threw in.
“Jesus Christ,” Mort exclaimed. “That’s why you boys ain’t in business. You think the beer is free.”
“I know it ain’t free, Mort,” Jim said. “But it don’t cost you that much. You get it wholesale.”
“Wholesale? I drive right out to that wholesale club and buy it by the case most of the time just like everybody else. Cheaper than them beer guys, except draft, of course. That ain’t free. You got to pay the yearly club fee. You got to pay them taxes to the feds. You got a lot you got to pay for. Some fuck crushes your can you’re fucked for that nickle. Jesus… wholesale my ass. It ain’t no bargain.”
“Yeah? … Let’s see,” Moon starting writing in the air with his finger. You get it for let’s say six bucks a case, I know that cause that’s what I pay out there too. So six bucks divided by 24 is,” he drew in the air for a few moments, erased it, and then started over. “How the fuck do you do that, Joey… The six goes into the twenty-four? Or times the twenty-four?” Moon asked.
“Uh, it’s a quarter a can,” I had supplied.
The argument had raged on from there. Once Moon found out he was paying a buck fifty for a can of beer that only cost a quarter he was pissed off.
In the end Mort had talked to a couple of cab drivers. Free draft beer one night a week if they bought soldiers by all week long and told as many others as possible about the place. Within two weeks Joel hadn’t recognized the place when he had come by after shift to have a couple of beers. The soldiers drank a lot of beer, the bank mortgage got paid, and life was fine. Except for the fights, Joel thought, but you can’t load young guys up on alcohol and not expect trouble. Especially when those young men were just waiting on the word to go and maybe die in another battle that remained undeclared as a war. High stress levels meant heavy duty unloading. The M.P.’s got to know the place as well as the soldiers did.
“Joel, you ready?” Mort asked now.
Joel smiled. “I was thinking back…” He had to shout to be heard. Tomorrow his voice would be hoarse. “This place was empty! … Yeah…One more then I gotta go,” Joel agreed.
Mort leaned closer. “Gov’ment tit. I know it, but screw it. It’s all the Gov’ment tit. Road and Bridge projects. Job centers. One way or the other it comes out the same. Even them subsidies so the paper mills can still run. It’s all the Gov’ment tit, ain’t it, Joel?”
“Its is,” Joel shouted. He nodded. It was. This town would have dried up years ago without it. Mort left and then came back a few moments later with a fresh beer.
“Vacation?” Mort yelled.
Joel nodded. “Two weeks of silence,” He shook his head at the irony and Mort’s laughing agreement was drowned out by the noise.
“If I don’t see you, have a good one,” Mort said leaning close.
Joel nodded. “I will.” He raised his glass and then tossed off half of it. A few moments later he was outside on the relatively quiet sidewalk punching numbers into his phone, calling for a cab. The night was cold, but the cold sobered him up. It seemed nearly capable of washing away the smoke and noise from inside the bar. He stood in the shadows beside the door waiting for the phone to ring on the other end. The door bumped open and Johnny Barnes stepped out.
“You ain’t calling for a cab, are you?” Johnny asked when he spotted him.
Joel laughed and ended the still ringing call. “Not if I can get a free ride from you.” Joel told him.
“Yeah, you were always a cheap prick,” Johnny agreed. “Hey, I heard you’re heading into the southern tier tomorrow?”
“Two weeks,” Joel agreed as he levered the door handle on Johnny’s truck and climbed inside. His breath came in clouds of steam. “Get some heat in here, Johnny.”
“Coming,” Johnny agreed. “Man, I wish I was you.”
“Me too,” Joel agreed.
Johnny laughed. “Asshole, but seriously, man. Have a good time. You gonna hunt?”
“Nothing in season… Maybe snare some rabbits. Not gonna be a lot this time of year.” Joel said.
“Maybe deer,” Johnny offered. He dropped the truck in drive just as the heat began to come from the vents.
“Probably, but they’ll be out of season. Rabbit, and I got freeze dried stuff. Trucks packed, which is why I didn’t drive it down here.”
The truck drove slowly through the darkening streets as the street lights began to pop on around the small city: The two men laughing and exchanging small talk.
The Joseph Short Story During the war years in the early 20 th century, Joseph Short, a wealthy clothing mill owner, began a new division producing trousers for the United States Military. At the same time his own business was reduced by half, due to a cotton blight and rations having been cut even further as cotton was appropriated by the government for the war effort. Short had invested the sum of $58.000 in his mill and was stretched to the financial limit. The contracts for trousers were filled and payments were forthcoming from the military, but there were massive delays in funding, and once issuing the contracts the prices had been slashed by a senate sub-committee, and so what was expected to eventually be paid, although a small fortune, would probably not cover much more than the bank notes and employee wages.. Still, it was thought a patriotic effort that Short endorsed as did many other mill owners, and so he pressed onward. Still, the problem vexed Short. How was he to
America the Dead is now available at Barnes & Noble When a catastrophic natural disaster looms on the near horizon, the government releases an airborne virus designed to make the human race tougher, better able to survive. It was developed for soldiers to make them better able to fight, go longer without food and water, and increase their strength. In its virus host it bonds itself to our own cells and helps them to regenerate at an advanced rate, so that even if you die you can rise again. In non-combat field tests the soldiers become aware of this, they called the phenomenon Overclocking and looked at it in a positive light. How could you look negatively at being able to live forever? A quick shot of the antidote after the heart had begun to beat again and the virus seemed to slip into remission, leaving a healed body that would come out of the virus induced coma in a few days once again its own. But the virus does something the governments didn’t consider, it never stops w
I am in the middle of home construction, writing BillyJingo , and a half dozen other projects. I spent yesterday doing yard work, cutting tree limbs and trees, clearing out an old garden, and in the midst of that the delivery truck showed up with all of the building materials I ordered and, of course, I was here alone when it showed up. The delivery guy uses a lift to take the stuff off the truck bed, a tractor trailer flatbed actually, and sets it on the ground. So, there it was, a pile of Sheetrock, studs, and other building materials sitting in my driveway. I had been in the middle of cutting down a tree, so I went back to that. A kind of, ‘Finish one thing before you start the next thing approach.’ And of course I was hoping someone might show up to help. The Tree: If you have ever cut down a tree you have maybe been where I was yesterday. In the ground, stretching up into the sky, the tree didn’t look so big, tall, formidable. First, a short explanation about wh
I am doing the after birthday regretting prayer, ie I ate too much, drank too much and I’m still really old and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. And the beer didn’t soften the fact that Father Time took another bite out of me.
Doing my blog today and loving the fact that it stopped raining earlier when the weather forecast came in and they are calling for snow tomorrow. Wow. It is crazy this year. Let it snow. I have plants to go out, but I have not transplanted them, and some of them are not even up yet because of how crazy the weather has been.
Marijuana is legal here in my state. I can’t stand it, never could, when I tried it as a kid it always made me sick, so I stuck to the Colt 45 and the Boones’ Farm Apple Wine or Strawberry Hill. Yes, as a kid. I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies. Love and Peace and Rock and Roll, which you may not be aware used to be sexual description at one time, not a music description. No wonder our parents hated it.
In any case drinking by eleven or so and running the streets by thirteen. Fourteen nearly killed me, literally and also found me living on the streets at a very young age for the next two years. Sixteen saw me in the Navy.
In any case, so, I grow marijuana for someone I love who uses it to deal with pain, life, be able to eat even sometimes. If you thought, it was all hype that Marijuana helped with pain and made it possible for some folks in pain nearly all of the time to live a better life, I can tell you it is true. It works. I would love to post it here but for some crazy reason it isn’t allowed. I am thinking of doing it on my own site but of course that would most likely get me labeled adult only and kill most of my traffic. All that for something that actually works. Go figure.
So, instead I’ll leave you with another installment of my America the Dead series of books. Episode 3 below, enjoy, Dell…
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AMERICA the DEAD: EPISODE THREE
~
March 2nd
New York: Watertown
Joel and Haley
Morning
Joel Morrison awoke to the sounds of birds whistling in the early morning pre-dawn. Birds, he thought, usually the sounds from the mills drowned them out.
He had made it home around 6:00 PM the previous evening. He was working the midnight to eight shift and had stopped into the Rusty Nail after work to have a few drinks with some other guys from the paper mill.
He had wanted to leave before the bar began to fill up. The Rusty Nail had gotten more than a bit rowdy as of late. Two years before, one of Joel’s good friends, Moon Calloway, had been killed in the bar. That had seemed to turn the tide. After that point the bar had become much worse, a proving ground of sorts for the young GI’s from the base. Joel often wondered why he even bothered to hang around there at all. Last night it had seemed as though the rowdy element was showing up even earlier than it usually did, when Johnny Barnes had offered the ride Joel had accepted.
The house on Linden Street wasn’t much, but it was paid for, and Joel knew a lot of guys at the mill who either rented or were damn close to losing their homes to the bank. Times were tough in the old U-S-of-A, and at least he had the place free and clear.
He had practically fallen into bed once he had gotten home. He hadn’t realized how tired he was.
He’d been working all the short shifts he could get, along with his normal evening shifts, saving the money after he’d paid off the house, and today would be the start of his first real vacation in over twelve years.
Joel had grown up in the small city of Watertown and had never left. It suited him, he liked to think. Where else could you see the seasons change so vividly or take a quiet stroll through the woods anytime you felt, he often wondered. The Adirondacks were close by. The southern tier, where he hoped to be in just a few hours, he reminded himself, stretched away for miles. Forever wild lands, Lake Ontario, wetlands. And if he wanted the big city, it was just seventy miles away down route eighty-one.
This is going to be one great vacation, he thought, as he got out of bed. Despite the damn birds.
The vacation he had planned was a three-week camp out in the State Forest Preserve that started only twenty miles to the east. The preserve was nestled up to the military reservation and stretched from there all the way into Central New York. Joel had no idea exactly where he would camp. He had decided to just hike until he found a spot that suited him.
As he headed for the bathroom, he noticed that the clock on the dresser was off. Not blinking, but off, and he could vaguely recall dreaming of waking during the night to some loud noise.
It had seemed at first, when he had awakened within the dream, as though the entire house had been shaking. He had passed from that dream into another, but the noise and the shaking had seemed to accompany him into that dream as well. It had to have been the strangest dream he could ever recall having.
At first, he had been in his bedroom; the walls shaking around him, and the next thing he knew he had been standing on a stone pathway that overlooked a wide and deep valley that stretched away for miles before it hooked to the right and disappeared. Its forward path blocked by even higher mountains, with others lifting even higher behind that. He turned to follow the ridge lines back to where he was and the scene had shifted to the bedroom once more. He had found himself sitting up in bed, breathing hard, frightened, the room silent, wondering if this was just more of the dream or an actual waking. As he began trying to figure it out, waiting for his head to clear, he had found himself sitting on a bar stool in the Rusty Nail, Moon Calloway beside him holding down the other stool.
He tried speaking to Moon, but he either couldn’t hear him, or he pretended not to. In his dream he had still known Moon was dead, so it made sense to him that he could not speak to him. He turned to Mort to order a beer and Moon had suddenly spoken.
“It was right here, Joel… Right here. Bad place to die… Used sawdust on the floor… Soaks up the beer… The blood…. You know….”
He tried to turn as soon as he heard the voice, but by the time he turned the scene had shifted again. Instantly the bar was gone, and he found himself standing at the edge of what he took to be a lake at first. The water stretched away as far as he could see. There was a tang of salt on the air; red earth crumbled away as the waves came in, taking more land with it. He could remember the salt smell from a trip to Florida as a kid with his grandparents. The smell of the sea.
“This is the place,” Moon said from beside him.
He turned expecting Moon to be gone, but he was standing a few feet away staring out over the water. He turned and looked at Joel. “You see it?” Moon asked.
“Yeah,” Joel managed. The word was barely audible, lost in the sounds of the sea as it worked to take the red dirt away. “Where,” Joel asked. “Where is it? What place is it?” He turned when Moon didn’t answer, but Moon was gone. He blinked and he was back in his bedroom, in bed in his own house on Linden Street, talking to a priest that was sitting on the edge of the bed. He remembered telling the priest that he just wanted to go back to sleep. That had apparently satisfied the priest, as he had shaken his head and seemed to float away.
Joel shook his head, recalling the dream as he entered the bathroom. He picked up his toothbrush from the small plastic cup that held it, squinted into the mirror, and turned on the cold-water tap.
Nothing happened. No rattle of the old pipes in the wall. Nothing.
“What the hell,” Joel said aloud, “frigging water out too?” He dropped the brush back into the cup and headed into the kitchen to start the coffee.
“Shit,” he said as he entered the kitchen and remembered the power was off, and that there was no water with which to make the coffee. “Now what?” He walked back into the bedroom and tugged on the pair of jeans and shirt he had worn the day before; he walked through the house to the front door, shoving his feet into his sneakers as he went, and opened it to retrieve the paper that he knew would be there. The ends of the untied laces clicked and bounced against the old hardwood floors as he walked. At least he could read the paper, maybe even find out what the hell was going on.
The sun was just beginning to climb into the sky as the door swung open. He bent down.
“No damn paper either?” he muttered as he stood back up and began to search the lawn.
His eyes rose from the lawn and fell on the Hubert house across the Street.
Something seemed oddly out of place, and he puzzled over it for a few seconds before his mind told him what it was. The entire house was leaning to one side. That wasn’t all though, the street in between dipped and rose in places, and the lawn over there had large patches of brown dirt. The snow that had been everywhere the night before was nearly gone. His eyes had skipped over it, lending an illusion of straight lines until he had looked closely. His eyes rose to the Hubert house once more and he realized what else was wrong, the lot looked too big: He could see more of the Hubert house because the houses on either side were gone. No trace. Jumbled dirt and clumps of grass filled those lots. A leaning Oak that had been in front of the Schuyler house for two hundred years: Uprooted and on the verge of toppling onto the fresh soil.
As he left his doorway and started across the street to get a better look, his eyes took in the devastation that had changed most of the street overnight.
Broken cobbles from the old streets poked through the pavement in places, and the broken pipes below street level bought him the sound of running water somewhere deep below. The reality of it hit him and he stopped and turned to look back at his own house. His mouth fell open wide as he stared. The entire house was leaning from foundation to roof, the gutters had detached and snaked down to meet the ground. Almost seeming as though they were holding the house upright. Small sparrows where pecking through the debris that had fallen from the gutters and singing in the warming morning air. Joel’s mouth snapped shut as he stumbled back into the street and sat down hard.
“What the hell is this?” he asked aloud to the street.
“What the hell is going on?”
Joel believed in the tangible. If it could be touched it must be real, and so believing, he reached down to feel one of the cracks beside him in the road. The road tipped, tilted, had separated, and the other surface had dropped lower. His fingers came away with small chunks of asphalt.
“Feels real,” he declared aloud, as he stared at the road. He pulled at it and a small piece of the asphalt he held snapped off into his hand. He bought it up to his face to examine it closely; threw it back to the ground and got up from the street.
He looked slowly off in both directions down the length of Linden Street. As far as he could see in either direction the roads or houses were similar. In fact, he thought, the street doesn’t even look like a street anymore. It was still a street because he thought of it as a street. His street. There was now more gravel, dirt and broken asphalt chunks than there was actual street. And in several places, it was gone completely. No sign. Wide spots that were wholly devastated.
Joel closed his eyes and then reopened them. It was all still there. Nothing had changed. He stood and stared for a few minutes longer before he started to walk off down the street in the direction of the downtown area, three blocks to the south.
He looked over the houses he passed. Most were partly, and some were completely destroyed. He felt as though he were in a bad dream. He knew he wasn’t though, as he had closed his eyes to blink away the sights several times to no avail. He had also pinched his left cheek until his eye had begun to water. No good. It was still there. He had done acid once, but only once, back in the seventies, and he had heard about flashbacks, and this could maybe be one, and he had been drinking pretty damn heavily yesterday, and…
He spotted a young woman sitting on the curb three houses down and walked up to her. She tilted her tear streaked and puffy face up to him as he approached.
“Is this a dream?” he asked when he stopped.
“No, it’s no dream,” she replied as she slowly shook her head.
“Where have you been since last night? Didn’t you hear the noise? Didn’t you feel it?”
Joel recalled the noise that had awakened him during the night. The noise he had thought was only an extension of the strange dream.
“Well, I thought it was a dream, you know, but I did hear a storm, or something, but I didn’t think it was a big deal… you know, they can get loud sometimes, but… What happened?”
“Yellowstone blew up,” she said simply. “Didn’t you see the TV?”
Joel shook his head.
“Well,” the young woman continued, “anyhow that’s what happened. They cut in to the TV last night; I was watching… you know, and they cut in and said that the Yellowstone caldera was going to fracture because of how close the meteor came. I came outside to see, and, well there was nothing to see at first, and then the ground started shaking, so I ran to get back inside. But the whole bottom floor of the building was gone.” She shrugged.
The young woman broke into fresh tears and buried her face back into her hands.
Joel sat down beside her and put his arm around her in an attempt to comfort her.
“Is your husband here?”
“Not married,” she said, “There was a guy… A few years back. He’s stationed somewhere in the Middle East,” she finished, as she looked at Joel.
“Sorry,” Joel said, “how long have you been out here?”
“I called this cop that had given me his card… He said the police would come so I came back out to wait, but they never showed up, so I just sat here. I didn’t know where else to go or what to do! I’ve been here ever since, just watching the street crack.”
Joel looked around at the street.
“It happened all at once?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, also staring at the street. “One second it was still whole, the next it wasn’t. But it’s still going on. Every little while a crack will just appear and then another section will tilt or drop a little. Sometimes there’s no noise, other times it’s this horrible groaning sound… Like it’s alive or something.”
“Is your power on?” Joel asked changing the subject.
“No,” she replied, “went off right after the ground started shaking.”
“Mine’s off too,” Joel replied.
“The power lines fell while I was out here, arcing all over the place. Scared the shit out of me too, and then they just quit… Went dead,” she said.
“Listen… I’m going to walk downtown… see if the police department is open or see maybe if everyone is there somewhere. You’re the only person I’ve seen so far… do you want to come with me?”
“Sure,” she said, as she stood and brushed at her jeans, “no use sticking around here I guess, is there?”
“I don’t think so,” Joel said. “I think… you know that everyone else is probably downtown. Getting organized or something,” his eyes betrayed the worry he felt. He hoped that everyone was downtown as he had said, but he wasn’t convinced himself. We have to find someone though, he thought, don’t we?
He stood up and they both walked off down the street toward downtown Watertown.
“Joel,“ he told her. Talking to you for an hour and didn’t even know your name.”
She laughed, halfhearted, but it instantly lifted the mood. “More like fifteen minutes if that… Haley.” She told him.
They exchanged small talk as they walked, and it seemed to help quell the fear they both felt.
They wondered about the rising temperature as they walked.
“I wonder if it’s some sort of fallout from the earthquakes. Can it be radiation, Joel?” Haley questioned.
“Maybe. I flunked science, so I really don’t know. I don’t think so though. I mean, if it was, wouldn’t we be sick? I think ash is a possibility, maybe if they triggered volcanoes? Makes me wish I had paid attention in science class, or physics, history, one of those.” Joel said.
She laughed again, this time a little more fully. “No,” she replied. “I don’t think so either… I mean the earth shook… like an earthquake. I didn’t know we could get an earthquake up here.”
“Oh yeah… Lived here all of my life. It’s more than possible, happens all the time… You from here?”
“No… Syracuse, before that Texas.”
“Ah, the big city… Well up here we don’t have a hell of a lot to do so they teach us about fault lines, earthquakes. We have a huge fault line that bisects this entire region and continues on south to the Gulf.”
“All the way to the Gulf?” Haley asked. She patted his arm. “Big city my ass,” She laughed. “You should see Houston you want to see big city, buster.”
Joel laughed and nodded. “Seen Houston once… I mean, a long time ago. And then only the Greyhound station downtown.”
She stopped. “Get out, really?”
“Really.” Joel told her. “Very bad place too,” he seemed apologetic.
“Yeah.” her eyes had suddenly gone sad. “Very.” She started her feet moving again. She had come close to telling him just how well she knew that area of Houston and had nearly bitten her tongue to stop the words. Emotional situations… You never knew the things that would just jump right out of your mouth, she thought. Leaving you all kinds of vulnerable too.
They talked back and forth as they continued down the street. When they reached Fourth Street they turned and walked the short block to Main, turned left this time, and headed into the downtown area.
March 2nd
Joel and Haley
They both stopped short as they topped the small hill at the crest of Main Street and stared down at the downtown area on the other side of the river.
It appeared to be more of a war zone than a city. The buildings that were still standing leaned crazily to the left or right, and only the tallest seemed to have been, as yet, untouched. Haley wondered aloud at that.
“The taller ones are not that old. Built with federal monies. Earthquake proof…. To an extent: When I was a kid the tallest building was the Baptist church tower.” He pointed to a gray stone spire that reached into the air.
There was a small crowd of people milling around in the center of what had been the Public Square.
“It looks bad to me” Joel said softly. He pointed. “City police building?” He met her eyes with his own. “Gone… There should be thousands of people down there…”
Haley shook her head. “Ought to go down.” She looked up to see what he thought about it.
Tiny people walked aimlessly around the square or stood, seemingly transfixed, by the huge gray spire of rock that capped the State Street end of the square. The sight of the people broke the spell. Joel nodded once and they began the walk down the hill.
They stopped and looked over the bridge that crossed the Black River. It seemed fine, almost untouched. It was so strange a sight that Joel laughed.
“What?” Haley asked.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you? Everything destroyed and the bridge sitting here untouched?” He looked from side to side before he stepped out on the steel decking and began to walk. As they neared the other side, they could see that there was a crack that ran from side to side and the road dropped down more than a foot. They leapt easily down.
“That makes me feel better. It just seemed too weird that it had no damage at all.”
Haley nodded and they continued to walk into the downtown area.
The walked up a small rise that had once been the bank of the river just a few hundred years ago, before the dams, mills, and reservoir projects had changed the water flow, Joel thought. The Public Square spread out before them.
“At least there are other people,” Haley said aloud. “Last night when I was sitting there all alone, I was wondering whether there were.” She breathed a sigh of relief which was echoed by Joel.
When they reached the first people at the bottom of the hill, they could tell that many of them were in shock. An older woman wandered by completely naked. Blood ran down one calf from an ugly looking wound, and she was covered with dirt and grime. When Joel attempted to talk to her, she tried to hit him with a baseball bat she had been holding at her side.
“Leave me alone, you bastard,” she screamed into his face. And then she had run off towards one of the still standing buildings.
Joel was shaken by the experience and jumped when Haley touched his arm.
“…think,” he caught as he turned around to face her.
“Wha-What?”
“I was saying, I don’t think she knew what she was doing,” Haley repeated. “Hey? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he answered, in a small voice.
He was still a little shook up when an older man began to approach them, and he found himself wishing he would turn and head in the other direction. He didn’t even recognize him until he was nearly upon them.
“Glenn,” he asked, “is that you?”
Joel had worked for Glenn driving truck at the gravel pit two summers before, when things had slowed down at the mill. Glenn Dove owned the gravel pit, and most considered him a hard guy to work for.
Joel had liked him though. He seemed to be honest; always paid on time, and he always bought Joel a beer when he ran into him. He was forever trying to talk Joel into leaving the mill and going to work for him full-time. Today he seemed old and tired. Joel supposed he didn’t look much better.
“How are you, Joel,” Glenn asked, “some vacation, huh?”
Joel had run into Glenn just the week before down at the Rusty Nail, and had told him he’d be leaving, but he hadn’t given the vacation a second thought since he’d gotten out of bed this morning.
It seemed odd to think of it now. Wonder what the rest of the world woke up to this morning? He thought. It had only been a short time since he had awakened this morning, but it felt like years had gone by.
“I guess my vacation got canceled,” he said, trying a grin on his face. “Hell looks like a lot of vacations got canceled,” he continued, as the grin slipped from his face. “Did you see any of this happen, Glenn?”
“No,” he replied solemnly. “I was out at the pit, and I didn’t come into town until this morning. But I saw plenty out there, thank you just the same.”
“As bad as this?” Joel asked, waving his hands at the damage that surrounded them.
Glenn paused and looked around at the destruction.
“Pretty damn bad,” Glenn said, as he shook his head in agreement. “I was moving the trucks down to the loading area, down the bottom there, and the ground started to shake, and the shaking threw me right out of the cab. I jumped down and got the hell out of that pit in a quick hurry, let me tell you. Good damn thing I did too, as about ten minutes after I did the bottom just cracked open and she started to fill. Spent the night in the woods and when I walked out this morning the water was up the top of the pit. Never seen nothing like it.” He paused and looked around the small-town square. “So, I came down here, but I’ve been over to city hall, nobody’s there. The police department, you know,” he gestured helplessly with his hands.
“Gone,” Joel agreed.
“Seen you coming across here and figured to see what you might know,” Glenn finished, nodding.
Joel shook his head. “You can ask Haley,” he said pointing to the young woman beside him, “she saw it on the television last night.”
Glenn looked expectantly towards her.
“Well… not like I know it all, but I was watching the TV last night, and they said…”
Joel turned to stare out at the people who stood nearby in small groups, as Haley spoke to Glenn.
“Shit don’t that figure,” Glenn exclaimed, when she finished, “So another politician lied to us. All last week they said that meteor would be no problem. Yesterday morning there was some yak attributed to the web about Yellowstone being closed down and already in a bad way and they denied that too,” He swore under his breath. “Figures. Seen any sign of the Guard around, or the Army?”
“We just got down here ourselves,” Joel answered, “but I expect they’ll be here soon, don’t you?”
“That’s right!” Haley exclaimed, “They should be coming, shouldn’t they? I mean, we’re alive, hell of a lot of people are alive, they’ve got to come, right?”
“Maybe,” Glenn said slowly, looking from one to the other, “but it seems as though they should have been here already, doesn’t it? I mean, if they were coming, it ain’t that far to the base… Eight miles? I mean, well, hell, it ain’t a long way for them to come.”
Joel nodded his head. “Well, if they aren’t here by noon… Anybody got a watch?”
Haley nodded and held up one hand so he could see the slim silver dial on her wrist, 9:32 he noted.
“Well, if they ain’t here by noon, I vote we go look for them.”
“Sounds good to me,” Glenn said, as Haley nodded her head in agreement.
They spent the morning wandering between the few remaining buildings and talking to the small groups of people that had formed around the huge church spire in the middle of what was left of the city’s downtown.
Haley found several other people with similar tales of the destruction they had witnessed the through the night. A few had slightly different takes on what had happened. One woman was convinced the end times had come and spent most of an hour trying to convince Haley to repent of her sins and join her. She had been polite and firm as she told her thanks, but no thanks. She had also stuck closer to Joel after that. Joel was disheveled. He probably hadn’t realized he’d forgotten to even comb his hair when he had walked out of his house this morning and witnessed all the destruction. His eyes were a little wild looking. People tended to shy away from him when they saw him.
She sat at the bus stop bench overlooking the square and wondered what had happened to some of the people. Joel sat quietly beside her, lost in his own thoughts.
One woman had stopped by the bench and tried to convince them that flying saucers were to blame, and she actually had several people convinced of it. They formed a small protective group around their leader. Haley supposed that with the way things were this morning, that it wasn’t as far-fetched as it may have been just yesterday. She listened cautiously, courteously, and they both breathed a sigh of relief when she became distracted by a small after shock and then moved on, her group hovering protectively.
“Jesus please us,” Joel said.
“Amen,” Haley agreed.
They had discovered earlier that though none of their cell phones worked some phone lines were still working. Well, sort of, Haley amended as she thought about it now. You could call out, but all you got was static or a busy signal. There was a bank of old style pay phones in the Arcade Mall. Joel had tried for over twenty minutes, calling every emergency number in the telephone book. He had finally given up about ten minutes ago and had ambled back over to sit beside her on the bench.
“You still want to go out to the base?” he asked now.
“No.” she replied, as she released a deep sigh. “I really don’t see a reason for it… I mean, if they were there, and everything was up and running, they would be here by now. So, I just don’t see a reason for it. We were fooling ourselves to think that they would come. Let’s face it, they’re probably at least in as bad shape as we are.”
Joel, who had been feeling the same, nodded agreement.
“So, what do we do then?”
“I don’t know, Joel. I don’t know what we can do.”
The conversation ended, and they once again sat staring out over the square, neither knowing what to say.
Glenn wandered back over from a small group of people he had been talking with and sat down next to them.
“What did you find out?” Joel asked.
“Well,” Glenn began, “mainly a lot of strange stuff. For instance, you know Lilly Roberts over there?” he pointed at a tall woman, standing with the group he had just left.
Joel and Haley both nodded.
“I know of her,” Joel said, “she ran that little diner out on River Road, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” Haley confirmed, “I worked out there last summer, part-time.”
“Well,” Glenn continued, “she said she was at home with her husband and, well… You guys know him?”
They both nodded their heads to indicate that they did, and Haley said, “Kind of hard not to know him, or at least to know of him.”
Earl Roberts, Lilly’s husband, had established his own church three years before. The local paper had published numerous stories about him, and the church itself. He had obtained his license through a mail order ministry, and the church was based on the book of revelations; specifically on the principal that the planet Earth was in the last years. Jesus was on his way back, and not the easy-going Jesus of the New Testament, a darker, angry Jesus.
“He’s the guy who had the church out in Fort Drum, right?” Joel asked.
“The same wacko,” Glenn said. “Well, anyway, they were at home last night, having an argument about that church of his; she says they were awful close to divorcing over it. So, they’re arguing and she’s telling him how she doesn’t feel as she knows him anymore, and bang the first quake hits… She says there were three, at least three,” Glenn said and paused.
“Maybe five,” Haley said… “At least I felt five.”
Glenn nodded. “Better number. That’s what I felt, but I didn’t correct her. … So, he just turns away from her and stares at the front door for a few moments and then leaves. She’s chasing him down the street, but he’s making for the river fast… Snapped.”
“There’s plenty more here that have slipped over the edge,” Haley said.
Glenn nodded. “Well, he did just that. Slipped over the edge. Walked right to the river and starts talking like there’s somebody there. She said at first, she thought maybe he had just gone clean over the edge, you know? A second later he just jumped in. Nothing she could do the water was high, churning. Bad … She never saw him come back up again.”
“Sometimes Happens,” Joel said as Haley nodded her head.
“I’ve heard of that too,” she said.
“Well, there’s a couple of others who swear the same sort of thing happened to people they knew. A few others are talking about end times.” Glenn paused and looked out over the lake wringing his hands restlessly in his lap.
“I don’t know,” Glenn continued. “I guess it makes about as much sense to them as anything else.”
“You mean they think it is the end times? That it was real?” Haley asked.
Glenn shook his head. “I ain’t saying I believe it at all,” he replied. “I’m simply telling you we’re going to have to be really goddamn careful who we deal with.” He arched his eyebrows. “Strange winds blowing.”
“Seen it while we sat here. I can’t believe something like this can throw someone that far off. But we’ve heard a few similar things this morning.” Joel said.
“And that was strange stuff while we weren’t seeking it out… Just sitting here minding our own business.” Haley added.
“Well,” Glenn began, “let’s say that this is the beginning of the end of the world. I ain’t saying it is, but for the sake of argument let’s say it is.”
“All right,” Haley replied, “let’s say it is.”
“Well, so let’s say it’s the end of the world. What does that really mean?”
“I can’t say I follow you.” Joel replied calmly. “I think it’s self-explanatory, right?”
“That’s about how I feel about it too,” Haley said when Joel had finished speaking.
“You went too deep,” Glenn said, as she finished speaking. He laughed lightly. “I meant, what is the end of the Earth? It’s obviously not the end of the Earth right now or we wouldn’t be here. What it really means to these people, I think.” He raised his hands to gesture at the people milling around everywhere. “Is the end of their way of life. They can’t call a cab. Take the train into New York and see a play, fly to the Bahamas for vacation. That is their end. They can’t see anything past that, and so when that ceases to exist it is the end of everything for them. They snap… Jump in the river… Sit down in the road and wait for God… Or Moses, or Muhammad to show up. The mother ship… I don’t know.” He sighed, leaned forward, cupped his face in his hands and looked out at the devastation. He straightened up, rubbed at the small of his back with both hands. “It’s too soon in my life to be the end of anything. I need some more time. And, anyway, when something ends something else begins.”
Joel was surprised into laughter. “The Mother Ship?”
“Hey, I talked to that lady earlier… She’s pretty much doing just that,” Haley said.
“I don’t know what I believe myself. It’s a question that I never felt a need to answer. I mean, I’ve had a few Bible-thumpers come knocking on my door from time to time. I ain’t mean about it, I just listen politely is all, and when they ask me if I want to be saved, or get to their point, I just pass. I just always figured to each his own, you know? I mean they ain’t hurting me,” Glenn continued, “and if they want to go around knocking on doors, hell, let ’em do it.”
“I just don’t answer the door anymore,” Haley said.
“Me either,” Joel added, and continued. “I kind of got into the habit of looking through the peephole lately anyway, on account of the crime being what it is, and if it’s a Jehovah, or some other Bible people, I just don’t answer the door.”
They all three shook their heads in agreement.
“I’ve done that too,” Glenn said and then went back to his original argument. “But suppose it is their end? Then what?”
“Well,” Joel started, “I suppose that you could have a lot of people just waiting for God… Or maybe even the mother ship. Right?”
Haley just sat quietly, listening to the conversation, as it went back and forth.
“So, you would, but,” Glenn continued, “what if there really is a God and a Devil? How does that change things? What if the people that believed in God were taken up?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Joel said, “I guess probably it was the first thing that jumped into my head this morning. It seems pretty far-fetched to me. I mean… Would God have a need to be this dramatic? And doesn’t God just do things and then, I don’t know, after ten thousand years or so the people fall in line and things are okay again?”
“Yes… God is not known to be really easy on his believers.,” Glenn agreed.
Joel continued. “Take Joanne Hamilton over there for instance,” he said as he waved his hand at a group of people. “I worked with her husband down at the mill, and he’s one of the meanest bastards I ever knew. Everybody knows he used to beat the shit out of her, and there was that business a few years back where he got himself caught with a young girl out on Jefferson Road, parked to the side there where the kids hang out. That kind of blows their theory, doesn’t it? I mean if there was ever a meaner son-of-a-bitch I don’t know him, and I can’t see what good side there could be to him, do you?”
Glenn seemed to think a second before he shook his head. “I don’t see anything good about him either,” he stated flatly. “I knew him myself, and I couldn’t stand him, but hear me out a second, Joel.”
Joel nodded his head, and Haley leaned closer to Glenn to listen.
“I think those people are dead as dead. Swallowed up by the Earth, drowned in the rivers. They’re gone and that’s that. But what about these others? All I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter to us whether we don’t think that’s what happened, it only matters that they think that’s what happened.”
“Then I guess they try to bring us into their psychosis,” Joel said. He looked around at the crowd.
“But that doesn’t make it so,” Haley said.
Glenn Laughed wryly. “I wasn’t looking for truth,” he said softly, “I’m just trying to make sure I live… Both of you too. We have got to be careful with some of these. I have been in war, seen how easy it is for people to turn into primitives just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I say, we need to think about leaving here. It’s only going to get worse.”
Joel turned from looking over the crowd and nodded. “Makes sense. You have a long way of getting to the point, Glenn, but logical… Thought out.”
“I spent a whole six months in college before I had to leave to help my mother run the gravel pit after my dad died,” Glenn continued. “This makes me wish I’d spent a little longer. Maybe I’d know more about it. Whatever it is though, it’s natural. Something that just happens. I don’t want to get tangled up in someone’s ideal.” He paused and then began to speak once again, changing the subject slightly.
“The other thing that’s been bothering me is something we can all agree on.”
“What’s that,” Joel asked.
Haley answered the question for him.
“I think I know,” she said, “it’s the Earthquakes. I mean if we really were hit by that meteor, shouldn’t we all be dead by now? What I mean is, when I was outside last night, I didn’t see any fall out, but I did feel the earth shaking, it felt like an earthquake too, a big one, but that couldn’t have been the Yellowstone one, that’s, what, a few thousand miles away anyway, we wouldn’t have felt it like that, would we? And still have aftershocks?”
She stopped and drew a deep breath inward and then continued.
“The television said that the meteor was sighted inbound, and I could have sworn that, for just a few seconds, there seemed to be a huge glow from the west in the sky. I remember thinking it was where it landed, but when I looked again it was gone. If it was though, why are we still alive?”
“That wasn’t my exact concern,” Glenn said, “but it runs along the same lines. I felt the shaking too, and it felt more like a heavy thud the first couple of times I felt it, something close… Not far away.”
“…I’ll tell you what though, I was talking to Jasper Morrison, he fishes Lake Ontario for a living, you know, and he was just docking when it started. He had a pretty good view from there, out across the lake, I mean, and he said he could clearly see a white streak running across the western edge of the sky. He said he was expecting to see a mushroom cloud or something, but the sky glowed for a split-second or two, then the glow just disappeared. But a man’s line of sight is only about 3 miles or so, after that the curve of the Earth drops off. So, you are looking at something fairly close, or further away but high up in the air.”
“He also felt the ground shaking after the hit,” Glenn continued. “But that’s not hard to explain. You may not know this, but there is a fault line that runs all across the Great Lakes basin. Ontario included. The fault line runs all the way across the continent to the gulf coast. Could be that the impact did trigger some sort of earthquake. My point though, is that if that meteor did hit in the west, close enough for Jasper to see, we should be dead.”
“Joel was telling me about the fault,” Haley said.
“What else did he say?” Joel asked.
Haley nodded her head slightly as if to voice the question herself.
“Well, like I said, he had just brought the boat into the dock and tied it off. That ain’t a little boat, I’ve seen it, forty-five-footer, and the water where he ties it off is damn deep too. Well,” he continued. “He tied it off, and he’s standing there, and the waves are starting to really build so he hot foots it off the dock. Just as he gets off the whole damn thing just sinks. It took his boat and a couple others with it too. That ain’t the end though. As he’s standing there, this is the weird part, the lake just drops about five feet, real fast. He knows that lake, and it could be, if that fault line opened up, it could have dropped. If so, I’ll bet we have one hell of a new river running from here down to the Gulf a Mexico, or at least one hell of a lot of damage.”
“Jesus,” Joel whistled softly.
“I don’t know… Food for thought though,” Glenn concluded and leaned back into the bench.
Joel recalled the dream of the night before and quickly related it to Haley and Glenn. When he finished, Glenn turned to Haley.
“Did you see anything? Maybe dream about anything?”
“No,” she replied, “nothing at all, except for what I told you. But I was up all night after it happened.”
“I haven’t had any myself,” Glenn said quietly, “Of course; I was awake all night too in the woods.”
All three sat back into the bench and stared out over the square, lost in thought.
“So, what does it all mean?” Joel asked to no one in particular, as he continued to stare at the lake.
“I wish the hell I knew,” Haley said, as she turned her gaze away from the Square and back to the two men on the bench beside her.
Besides a few guys from the mill that he would have an occasional drink with, or maybe shoot a game of pool with, Joel was a loner, and he had never married. It was not something he had chosen to be, it was just the way the world was. You really couldn’t trust people, he thought, you could never really know what they were like. It was a thing that had bothered him for as long as he could remember.
He had known men who seemed to be perfect fathers and husbands, but when they were at the bar, and the kids were home with the wife, they were completely different. It was something he had always hated, and something he had constantly fought with whenever he had noticed the same sort of inconsistencies in himself. It was a battle though that he had always won and would continue to fight. It was one of the main things that had decided him against religion when he was a kid, that and his father.
His father had been a strict Catholic and had fought with Joel’s mother to get her to agree to let him take Joel to attend the local Catholic Church. Joel had hated it. His father, who was normally drunken, or at least drinking, would sit calmly through mass with all his other drinking buddies every Sunday, then when he got home it was, “Bring me a fucking cold one, woman.”
He had actually been glad when his father had died, he had never said it aloud, but he had been. He had only wished he had died a lot sooner so that his mother could have had more than the one year she had lived past him, to enjoy life. He pulled his mind reluctantly back to the conversation, when he heard Glenn speak his name.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking.”
“That’s okay,” Glenn smiled, “we all are.”
Glenn continued. “What I think is that the world has changed… That simple. We just need to get on with this different life. I know that’s over simplistic, but it beats staying around here waiting for the mother ship to show up. What I was wondering is what you’re going to do. Hell, what all of us are going to do now?” He paused as most of the silent crowd that had gravitated to them turned their eyes towards him.
“Maybe it’s time to sacrifice an animal… Pray,” an older woman in the crowd said.
Glenn continued when no one else answered. “I don’t think, or maybe I’m just not convinced,” he offered the woman who had just been speaking a small smile, and then continued, “That praying, or a sacrifice, will do us much good. Maybe what we should be doing is trying to figure out what we should be doing. Catch my drift? We can’t just stay here and wait for someone to come, it ain’t going to happen, and I think we can all agree on that.” He looked around at the faces that surrounded him and stopped at Joel’s.
Joel nodded.
“Did any of you notice the temperature?” Glenn asked.
Several people looked expectantly to one corner of the Public Square, where the Watertown Trust Bank had sat with its digital clock, which alternately flashed the time and temperature. They turned quickly back when they realized it was no longer there.
Many of them had noticed the difference in temperature though. Northern New York, even in the summer months, rarely reached the high seventies, low eighties, on the hottest days. The surrounding air was much hotter and humid.
They looked back at Glenn.
“Haley and I noticed it this morning,” Joel said.
“I picked this up when I went in Samson’s Five and Dime earlier,” Glenn said, holding up a small plastic thermometer. The red line on the thermometer hovered just short of one hundred degrees.
As he looked at the thermometer, Joel recalled how warm it had seemed this morning. When he had first opened the front door, he had felt it, but then forgotten it as he had gazed out into the street. As he looked around now, he noticed that several people in the small crowd were sweating profusely. In fact, he realized, he was sweating a great deal himself.
“Anyway, my point is this,” Glenn said as he began to speak again, “there may be something to that earthquake theory some of you have been kicking around. It could be that the fault line may have been triggered,” Glenn was saying. “If it was, we really ought to be thinking about finding a safer place to be. I remember reading about that fault line, and it seems to me the book I read, said that if the fault were somehow triggered, it could, and probably would, crack the entire Great Lakes Basin. That means that Ontario, along with all the other lakes in the chain, probably would drop. At least a small amount at first, but after they recover from the initial drop, they’re probably going to rise… They’re probably going to rise, a lot. I don’t know what most of you know about this city, but I’ll tell you what I know. Got it from the same book,” he paused. “…It’s built on pretty low ground. Now… that river,” he said indicating the bridge that spanned the Black River on the opposite side of the Public Square, “has surely been rising.”
With that the discussion went back to where they should go, and what they should do once they got there.
“You’re right,” Joel said at last, “We do need to make some decisions,” he paused for a moment and then continued. “When was the last time anyone here ate? I know that sounds a little stupid at a time like this, but if we’re going anywhere, we should also think about food, and in this heat dehydration could become a factor as well, couldn’t it, Glenn?” he finished, looking toward him.
“I should have thought of that myself,” Glenn said, “how many of us are there?”
Haley quickly counted heads and replied. “Twenty-seven, Glenn.”
Glenn nodded his head. “Okay… Let’s do this. We do have to eat, so let’s head up Maple Street to Jacobs Superette, get something to eat, and finish this discussion there.”
Everyone agreed, and the small group left the public square and walked the three blocks to Jacob’s Superette in a light rain that had begun to fall.
Jacob’s Superette
Joel, Haley, Glenn and several others were standing by the rear doors that led to the stockroom in Jacob’s Superette.
They had been discussing where they should go. A few others from the small group, were there with them.
Joel looked around at them as the conversation went back and forth. They seemed solid enough. Terry Jacobs who had worked for Glenn, Amber Johnson who was married to a GI from the base who was now stationed overseas, and Scott Vincent, a carpenter working on one of the many housing developments in the area. There were others but many of those others that had followed them to Jacobs Superette did not really seem to be doing anything other than following. The ones that had gathered at the back of the store seemed to be on the same page, leaving Watertown.
Ed Weston and Dave Jackson had joined the small group earlier. Ed had worked for Glenn at the gravel pit for over ten years. He was tall with dirty-blonde hair and a slim muscular build, and Joel liked him. He’d grown up right here in Watertown on Fig Street, down by Jackson’s Lumber. A piss poor family, but Ed himself was a damn good man. He seemed a little rattled today, but weren’t they all? He was a hard worker and would be an asset to the group if he chose to come along.
Glenn and Haley both knew Dave. He owned one of the local lumber mills: A small family mill. He had also driven truck for Glenn once or twice when things were slow. Joel had never met him, but he had seen him around: Watertown was a small city. Neither of the men had voiced their opinions but had been standing quietly as the other three had talked. Dave was younger than Ed, but just as tall, and his dark black hair was tied in a small ponytail that hung down his back.
The conversation at the market never really got going. The crowd that followed had spread out into the store, taking what they wanted to eat and then split up into smaller groups, discussing their own plans. A few had congregated near the beer coolers. That discussion was sometimes heated, and more than once Joel had caught some nasty looks directed at them from that crowd.
“I guess not everyone is on the same page,” Joel said now.
“It was a good idea,” Glenn said. “You can’t make people see a good idea. Look at cigarettes. People knew for years what they were doing to them, and they still smoked. Some of these people haven’t hit the wall yet. They still believe the system will save them.”
“Yeah, except there is no system,” Scott said.
Glenn nodded.
“Listen,” Joel started. He paused until they were all looking at him, not sure if he really wanted to proceed. “Might sound stupid,” he said after a few moments of silence.
“I don’t think anything would sound stupid right now… We’re trying to figure this out,” Haley said.
Joel frowned. “Okay.” He frowned deeply, and then nodded decisively. “So, it’s this. I was leaving this morning for the Southern Tier. I’m thinking, the truck is all packed, what are we,” he paused and counted heads, “Eight? I have enough food packed to keep us all fed for a few days… We could head out to the Tug Hill Plateau. Close by. We could pick up some stuff here to take with us too…” He paused again, but no one spoke. “I say let’s get another truck or two and get away from the city for a few days. Maybe the Tug Hill Plateau wouldn’t be a bad place to be right now. Let things calm down, especially the hot heads.” He paused, his face grim. “We can come back in a few days… Maybe the Guard will be here by then, maybe not, but it would give us a few days to think this out, if it… Well, if it really is as bad as it seems to be…” He looked from face to face as he stopped speaking.
“Smart,” Scott said.
“Probably for the best,” Glenn agreed. He had all been listening to the nearby conversations, some loud and argumentative, and the beer cooler was emptying quickly: That certainly wasn’t going to help the problem.
“Yeah… These guys seem bent on getting drunk and figuring it all out,” Amber said.
“I’ve seen that sort of thinking before,” Haley agreed. “I vote go.”
“I’m on that,” Scott agreed.
Dave Jackson and Ed Weston agreed.
“I make that all eight?” Joel asked.
“Only, let’s get some trucks and get what we need here before we go. This place is going to get picked over fast,” Haley said.
“Who do you want to go with you?” Joel asked.
“I’m open,” Haley replied.
“I’ll go,” Amber said.
“Me too,” Scott added.
“That’s enough… I guess we’ll get stuff ready here… Wait on you,” Joel said. He held Haley’s eyes until she nodded. A second later she and the others left and the rest of them began to put together some bags of supplies.
This short story became the new novel just released by W. G. Sweet!
… Ethan lives in Harlem with his wife Janelle. The city gets out of control fast as an apocalypse hits the world.
Harlem is burning; what is not burning is gang controlled. What is not gang controlled is abandoned. The people are on their own. The cops disappeared, same with fire fighters. The Fires are unchecked.
Across the river parts of New Jersey are also burning. Ethen and his wife pick up bits and pieces of newscasts but none of it seems to make sense to them.
Things become clearer over the next few nights. Something, or somethings are prowling the streets at night, preying even on the gangs. At first, there is no clear answer and Ethan is convinced it is gang on gang violence, but little by little, it becomes clear that the dead are the problem. …
