Filling in the Cracks

Book  4

By

Thomas W. Larson

Part of The Event Series

@ Copyright   March, 2016

All rights reserved

Acknowledgement

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped in the creation of this work.  It has been a rewarding and challenging effort.  First of all, a thank you to Marianne Stefanov and Ariana Patterson for being involved in the project.   Also, Beth Burke, a big thank you for the help in proof reading and keeping me from going too far astray in the story.  You all were so much help.

This is the disclaimer:

Aka the fine print

Although a number of locations in this story are real, the people involved in the story are all fictitious and do not really exist except in my mind, and now maybe yours.  Any similarity to a person living or dead is strictly coincidence.

Preface

Almost four years ago I set out on an adventure of the imagination that took me to places that I have seen before as well as places I have not.  In that time I have created persons, places and things that are now part of me.  It has been a wonderful and rewarding experience.

In the end, when The Event Trilogy was completed and published I still felt that there were some parts and pieces missing.  This work was designed to fill in those pieces and perhaps bridge some of those gaps.

Enjoy,

Tom

Unexpected Visit

It was an awesome day; I spent much of it out on the Harley Road King Classic. It is a 2008, but still, an old friend, a means of freedom and a time to think. I had done the southern route of my drive stopping at the Flanders Fish House for an order of fried clams, not as good as the ones from the Summer Shack at the Mohegan Sun, but they probably were about $400.00 cheaper because I didn’t drop a bunch of money into the $5.00 slot machines.  On the way home I overshot it a little and rolled into the parking lot of the Starbucks on Pleasant Valley Road. I had a hankering to sit and enjoy an iced green tea with lemonade, vente.

I settled down at a table outside the shop, it was warm and sunny and this was their quiet time of the afternoon so there were only a few people coming in and out of the shop.  As I sipped the cooling drink I sat thinking about the ride, the fresh mowed fields of the farms, the smell of the pines from the forests, and pungent odor of the road kill that I had passed along the way. I wondered if there was a muse waiting in those sights and smells.  I had finished the books of my trilogy, and now I needed a new writing project.

I drifted deeper and deeper into my own little world, really rather oblivious to the surroundings other than to notice and chuckle at the cars trying to exit the parking lot by means of using the wrong way of the one way entrance road.

“Tom, you’re Tom Larson, the writer.”

I was jarred back to reality by someone saying my name; it was an Asian woman, pretty, about 35 years.  I knew her, but I did not know how or from where. She was small, the naval BDUs she wore struck me as odd, but they matched the military air about her.

“Hi, ah, I, I’m sorry…..” I sputtered; my mind drew a blank as to a name.

“Asuna,” she replied.

I stood up, “I’m sorry; I should have… sit down, please.” I saw she already had a Frappuccino of some type.

“Thank you,” she said as she joined me.

I was still at a loss.  As I said, there was something familiar about her, even alluring.  I guess I have always had a thing for Asian girls, women, a waifu kind of thing.  And if I had ever had the chance back in my younger days this was the kind of woman I would have found as perfect.

“Tom, they sent me to talk with you.”

“They?” I asked, this was kind of getting weird.

“The others, you haven’t finished, you haven’t completed the world, our world yet, there are things out there that aren’t done, you owe us,” She replied.

“I’m sorry, I am kind of at a loss here, I owe? I haven’t finished?  What do you mean?”

Just then the door to the Starbucks opened and banged my chair without even an apology. I shifted, looking at the door to see who had come through the door and jostled me.  When I turned back I was alone at the table.  I stood and scanned the parking lot, there was no ‘Asuna’, just me, and a large woman in black yoga pants.  She was the one who burst through the door and now was climbing into her silver BMW.

I sat, no, more like flopped back into my chair.  I looked at my watch; it was later than I thought by about 30 minutes.  Had I fallen asleep? Had Asuna…..shit…she was the woman, the one from the Event, the story I wrote.  What did she mean, I owed them.

I did not sleep well that night, images, stories and ideas that had come to mind while writing my trilogy came back.  Asuna, she, and the others are still here, in my mind and there are still adventures and details to share.

Uncle Elgin

It was another day out on the Harley, the weather was great, warm, but not hot.  The skies were sunny and the roads were open and not very busy.  In the course of the ride I thought about the dream from the other day where I had apparently fallen asleep at the tables outside Starbucks.  I thought about the Asian girl, Asuna, a character from my books who had visited me.  I wondered…

As I rode, it got to be a little after one o’clock and there were pangs of hunger reminding me I had a light breakfast. I found myself on Route 10 in Southington, my old hometown.  I decided that while I was close I would stop at this little restaurant called Saints.  It was named after the old owner, Bob St. something or another.

I rolled up. It was a little after the lunch rush, it was kind of quiet with only a couple of construction workers seated at the lunch counter. I overheard snatches of their conversation as I walked by, something about how the union and the company were screwing them and that their new contract negotiations were not going well.

I took a booth near the back of the dining area and pulled out the menu.  I looked at it but I already knew I would be having my usual, two hotdogs, one with chili, mustard and onions, and the other with mustard, relish and onion.  But even so, while I waited for the waitress I stared blankly at menu.

He slid into the booth opposite me and settled in with grunts and groans, an older man, balding with a light comb-over. He was dressed in shabby plaid shorts and a Patriots T-shirt.  He was thick through the neck and middle with that old man’s body, the spindly legs, and arms.  I would guess he was in his mid-70s.

“Hi Tom, glad you could make it,” he said.

I don’t know how, but I knew, “Elgin, good to see you.”

“Yeah, it has been a while, you buying?”

“Sure,” I answered just as the waitress walked up.

“I will have 2 hotdogs, one with mustard, relish and onion, the other with chili, onions and mustard and a club soda with lemon or lime and my friend will have the scallops.” I told her.

She looked at me funny, I was not sure why.

“So I understand that you ran into a mutual friend of ours recently.”  Elgin said, with a smile, “I am glad she caught up with you.”

“Well, it was kind of a surprise, and I am still not sure what it was all about, but it was good to see her, and now, you,” I replied, but I am not sure it was that good, it was weird, I will go with that.

“So do you have some questions for me?  Do you want to know what parts you missed?” he asked.

Just then the waitress arrived and put my dogs in front of me, and the scallops on the other side of the table.  It was odd, she never looked at Elgin, just set the plate down, and asked me if there would be anything else.

I sat quiet for a minute or two staring at the plate of seafood and fries.  Then finally I asked, “You’re not real are you, you’re an imaginary character from my story, right?”

He laughed, “Well, what is real, what’s imaginary, and can they co-exist? Philosophy is not my forte.  But as far as you are concerned, I am real, heck; you ordered me scallops didn’t you.”

“I, well,” I stammered.

“Look, I’ll make this easy for you.  I have some more of the story for you, and it fills some of the gaps that you left open.  I mean at the time you wrote it the gaps were fine, but for me and the some of the other characters; we need a little closure too.  We can’t deal with just the meteor hit the planet and everybody died.  Some of us had parts that you did not put on the stage.”

I stared at him for a minute, and then said, “Okay, I guess you’re right, but what did I miss?”

“That’s better. Okay, for me, or about me, not so much, but there are a few things.  I mean aren’t you curious about what happened from the time your group escaped Otis until when they came back to try to save us?”

Actually, I have never thought much about that, in the original timeline of the story it was not all that important, but there may be some readers who want to know.

“Okay, I think you may have a point there.  But before that, why didn’t you go with Tom’s group, with your family?” I asked.

He looked at me for a moment, and then simply said “The Otis people were my family. Since I bought the place in the 80’s it was where I lived, who I saw and interacted day to day. Yeah, the group, Tom, Teckla, Nick were family by blood, but the Otis family, well there was a different bond there.  Otis was my home. The house that was where I lived, had lived for 30 years; I was not going to just walk away from it.”

I thought about this for a minute, and then asked, “But you didn’t try to get them to stay, in fact you told them to get away, why?”

He laughed, “Well, it is what I will call the Williams factor.  I knew the group, the blood family well enough to know that they would not fit at Otis. They were not going to be good little sheep and I knew that it would be a bad situation in the end with Nate and Barry.”

“What do you mean?”

Elgin looked around a second then stared straight at me. “See, Nate demanded absolute loyalty, his way or the highway.  I could step around it because I was a known entity, but newcomers had to be able to fit in.  I knew Tom wouldn’t, and Teckla, she would not go for it either.”

I just nodded my head, I understood, after all I had given life to those characters.  His assessment was really pretty much right on target.  Tom & Teckla would not have fit well.  Nick, he probably could have but a definite not on the other two.

“That all makes sense I guess, but in the end it did not turn out so well,” I offered.

He looked down at his scallops, still untouched and then back up at me.  “No, it didn’t.  I expected more from Barry and Nate, I thought they were good for our group, the Otis people, but in the end they were not what we thought.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“A lot of it I found out later, when we were nearing the end.  But let me back up a little.  I will fill you in on what happened after they, the family, left, and where it all ended up.” He said.

He went on to detail about what had gone on.  He told me that at first, in the first spring, the place, Otis, became a nice little Utopian society.  They were able to raid some supermarkets and warehouses so that food was plentiful.  All of those who could had to make what they called ‘home gardens’ that grew things like beans, corn, and other fruits and vegetables.  The food was stored away and was distributed in a fair and reasonable manner.  Everyone got a share of the food, and everyone did a share of the work needed to keep the place going.

Of course, there were some who did less physical work because they were administering what was needed in the community.  I mean they kept up appearances, made it look like they were just part of the group. People like Nate, Barry, and a few others and to a lesser degree, he, Elgin all kind of slacked, he admitted.

It made kind of sense I thought.

Elgin went on that over that first summer the numbers at the camp and the lake area grew.  They went from a couple hundred to a couple thousand, and in doing so the space and the food began to get a little thin.  Foraging for food became a bigger and bigger issue as the teams that were searching for the food had to go further and further out into the region.

The demands on space became a problem also because there were those, and he admitted to being one of them, who did not like the idea of having his property overrun with squatters.  By autumn it was bad.  The woods around the lake had become a huge tent city.  And as the tent city expanded, the area became less and less defensible.

Barry came up with the idea that it would be best if the ‘powers to be’ put together almost a kind of zoning thing.  They created a grid, or community design that would put the ‘high value’ people in the safer areas.

“I’m sorry,” I had to stop him here, “What do you mean by high value?”

“Ah, those were the people who had skills, like medical people, or military people, those with knowledge that could help the community,” he said.

“And there were low value folks?”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “The old, the weak, those that the assignment committee felt were a drag on the community, the ‘expendables’ was what we called them.”

I let this sink in.  I can sort of understand the concept.  At the end of the world we would want to save the best and the brightest.  It has been the theme of a lot of sci-fi movies and books.  I just never considered that it would really come to that.  But then, in writing this story I had also expected more from the government and the military.

Elgin picked back up telling me that it was where the problem with the ‘changers’ started (*Changers were the term that the Otis people used for the re-animated), but then said he was getting ahead of himself because before that happened, the changers, there was other stuff that happened.

Over time, a core group had developed, an elite little collection of the chosen, Nate, Barry, the Major (Bob Johnson), and a few, maybe thirty people who had it a little better than the rest.  The good food, the wine, and the comfortable houses were theirs.  They were across the lake from Elgin, on the north end, near the causeway.  Although he was ashamed now to admit it, but yeah, he was one of them.

Orwell’s Pigs, I thought to myself.

As the supplies ran lower and lower there were some fires in the outer camps, the low value areas and people died when the camps were burned. The people who survived were turned out, really chased away from Otis.  Nate was good at making them look like a big hazard and for the greater good he was able to get the rest of the community to turn against them.  Those poor folks had to really leave or face some nasty….they would be killed, it was that simple.

I sensed that there was a true touch of remorse.

Elgin said that as time rolled on the scavenging teams began to suffer more attacks and casualties.  In some cases teams never returned, in other incidents 20 people would go out and only 5 or 10 would return.  But when they came back, they were always checked for bites or marks.  Those who were bitten, or in any way damaged were removed from the community.

“What do you mean removed?” I asked.

He looked at me for a moment; I knew what he meant but I needed to hear it. He said the bitten were moved to a special area, a hospice, or so we told everyone, but in the end, they were killed.  At first we would give them a shot, a kind or lethal injection, but as the meds ran out, Sal, a guy named Sal, a short Italian looking guy, an ex-marine, would come up behind them while they were sitting in the exam chair and smash their skull with a piece of rebar.  Elgin said he never saw it happen, but heard about it.  It was merciful, and for the most part it was just one hit.

“One of the mistakes we made was we were too slow getting to Westover and some of the police stations.  We never got enough guns or ammunition,” he told me.

He explained that although they had tried, they waited too long and others had cleaned out those places.  They had some guns but not enough to arm more than 100 people and most of the weapons they had were small handguns or hunting rifles.  They never came up with the military grade stuff that could have made a difference.

There was some training given by ‘Basher Sal’ on to how to defend oneself with a piece of pipe, or rebar, or in Elgin’s case an old antique sword that he had. Elgin also said that he had an old police 38, and a box of bullets, but in the end it was mostly the sword that he used on the hill.

“So bit by bit the community went sour?” I asked.

“Yeah, we had too many people, too little room, and not enough in supplies. It was just a ticking time bomb,” he replied.

“So what happened? What was that first bad thing?” I asked.

He looked at me hard, and then said “It was all bad”.  He explained that as time passed it began with a horde of the changers that had followed a scavenging crew back from the Springfield area.  The crew knew they were there, following them and tried to out run them, but it didn’t work.  The changers hit the outer ring of the camp in a low value area and from there it was on.  The horde grew, and spread.  Elgin said he took charge of a bunch of people and tried to defend and hold the part of the area.  He looked for support and help from Nate and Barry and their strike team, but they had run out, abandoned them.  They had seen the handwriting on the wall and left the community.  By that time the lake community was pretty much surrounded and locked in.  The only way for survival at that point was to try to beat down the horde.  A group tried to build an outpost at the hill on the little peninsula.

“We held, for a while, we called for help, tried to get Nate and his people to come back, they never answered.  My nephew Tom and a bunch of people came and helped us. They flew in with a chopper and stopped the advance.  It looked like we were going to be okay, but …..” He stopped talking for a moment, then, “A couple of the group had been bitten in the battle, or a couple of changers got through, or something, and it was over.  I held on the best I could but in the end, I had the illness, I could feel it, it was hopeless.  In the end, I used the 38.”

I stared at him for a minute.

“Thank you, I needed to tell you that, I needed the closure,” he said.

Just then the waitress came over, I had finished my hotdogs. I turned and looked at her.

“Would you like your check?” she asked.

“Yes, please.”

“How about a box for the scallop dinner?” she asked.

I turned back to look at Uncle Elgin, there was only an untouched plate of seafood there, he was gone, or was he ever even there.

“Ah, no, just the check.”

Bob

Every once in a while I take the time to run out to a local BBQ joint for lunch.  There is a couple in our area, Little Mark’s which is good, and then there is Bear’s Smokehouse.  But Bear’s is takeout only and a little more expensive but so good, definitely worth the trip and the extra money.

Today, I decided that I would pick up some beef ribs at Bear’s, with a side of mac & cheese and slaw, the perfect lunch, and since  my monthly royalties check from The Event Trilogy had come in, it was a good day to splurge.  After picking up the order I drove down toward the Connecticut River to the area where, in the first book, we made the pick-up of Anne’s parents.

It was quiet, and shady and just a nice day as I settled in at a little picnic table overlooking the water. I could hear the buzz of the powerboats out on the river while I dug into the mac & cheese.

Did I mention that I am a compartmental eater?  Yeah, it is what I do, eat all of one thing first, then on to the next, and so on. Today it would be the mac & cheese, then the ribs and finally the slaw.  The cornbread that came with the meal would be donated to nature; there were a couple of ducks close by the landing so that would go to them.

As I sat, I thought I heard someone approaching; I took a quick look over my shoulder but saw no one. I loaded up the plastic fork with some more mac & cheese.

“I always like the pork ribs over the beef” a voice behind me said causing me to jump a little.  There was a man, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt.  He was I would say in his mid to late 30s, and he was lean, gaunt actually.  I thought the flannel was a little much for this time of year.

“Whoa, where did you come from?  I didn’t hear you drive up” I replied.

His response kind of creeped me out, “I learned to get around kind of quiet like.  You do that to survive.”

“Ah”

“Yeah, we started eating the beef ribs, and brisket and all the rest of the parts of the cattle that were out on the range around town, but over time that source dried up.  There were only about 20 animals.  From there we switched to the pigs, we found them easier to house in the barns and keep track of.”

I was kind of at a loss for what to say, I mean a stranger walks up to you and starts telling you things, unsolicited information, it does kind of make it hard to know where to go with the conversation.

“Oh, I am sorry, please continue with your lunch, I have mine here,” and he set a Styrofoam container across the table from me.  He opened it and there was a scrawny ear of corn, and a partial rack of ribs, definitely too small for beef and smelled like a savory pork rib, but they could have been lamb too I guess.  I never thought about grilling lamb ribs.

We ate in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “By the way, I am Robert, Robert Johnstone, but you can call me Bob.”

“Okay, Bob, I am Tom,” I answered, I figured a serial killer would not likely introduce himself to me, after all, he had his chance to take me out sight unseen long before this point.  But I was kind of wishing I had my Smith 9mm with me.

“Are you a local?  I mean from the area.”  I asked.

“No, I am from out west, great plains area.” He replied.

“I love it out there, well, actually the western end of Kansas and heading into Colorado.  It has always been one of those magic places.  When I would drive cross country I would see the Rocky’s through the trees and think, ‘I am home’, even though I never lived there.”

“Well Tom, I am guessing that you were never there in the winter time.  It gets cold, wicked bone biting cold.”  His expression changed as if he was looking at a different place and time, filled with sorrow and pain.  “We made it through the fall, and most of the winter, with the food we had.  There were about 40 of us.  But the food ran scarce……”

I sat and stared at him.

“The cattle were gone, the pigs, the canned goods, we were eating things you can’t imagine just to feel like we had food in our bellies.  We made soup, broth really from anything we could find, dogs, cats, bark, anything.”

I did not know what to say.

“We even tried to cook up one or two of those creatures, the humans that had changed; it was not something we could eat.”

It was starting to sink in. He was talking about a part of what the apocalypse would have been like for some.

“When Francine died we did something that we thought was terrible, but Tom, have you ever been so hungry, have you ever seen your kids, your wife so weak and cold……No, you won’t have.”

I knew where this was going.

“We ate her, I had to eat my own mother……” he sat silent, and yet there were no tears, there was almost a defiance in his voice. “It was her last gift to me, to us. She had given me life in the beginning, and gave me, us a little more when she left us.”

I thought about what he was saying, I tried to think what it would be like, and although I like to think I would never revert to cannibalism it was something that could happen, and in the long term of human survival, has, and probably will again.

“After that it was easy.  She bought us some time.  And once we crossed that line, we, a few of us ….. well….. At first most of the town’s people thought it was odd that we were getting fatter and thought we were just not sharing our food stash.  But then they realized what we, my family, were doing.  We tried to explain it to them, but they drove us out, they made us go away.”

It fell into place now, Bob, cannibalism, the west end of the Great Plains.

“Bob, you were from Limon, weren’t you,” I asked.

“Yes, but then we were forced out, we had to move to Kit Carson, my wife, my kids, and few others who did not want to starve.”

“And you hunted the soldiers,” I said, feeling now a little queasy.

“We did what we needed to survive.”

I was stunned and silent for a moment.

“Did you ever hear that humans taste like pork?  It is true, and with the proper sauce or seasonings it is quite good.”

“I”

“Even some of your characters in the book ate human flesh, and they liked it, well, until they put two and two together.”

I looked down at the Styrofoam container before him, and I knew, I didn’t want to, but I knew, and in my mind wondered ‘who’.

I heard the car driving up, tires crunching on the gravel, I turned to look. It was a pickup towing a boat.  When I turned back, he, Bob was gone.  There was not sign he was ever there.

He was gone, and so was my appetite.

Cats

I often run up to the local second hand stores, particularly the ones that sell books looking to find what I consider classics or must re-read works from various authors.  As some of my friends and readers know I do tend to lean toward the futuristic novels written years ago.  Huxley, Orwell, and Asimov all painted the future in a bleak way and it is interesting to read those works to see how close they were to hitting where we are at now. Orwell’s 1984 got the year wrong, but we are certainly heading that way.  Animal Farm, I see it as very much on target or applicable to the modern world we live in. On one such run to Savers’ I recently picked up an Orwell novel entitled ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ and am looking forward to reading it.

It is a warm Tuesday afternoon here at the condo, and thank God, school is out.  I live next to a school for behavioral issue kids who spend a great deal of time venting their frustration and excess energy on the swing set that is about 75 feet from my back deck.  In a way it reminds me of Huxley’s Brave New World in which the children are left to run rampant with the idea that it will make them better citizens, but at the same time it fails to prepare them for the real world.  It is as if they are conditioning the future fast food workers with anger issues and no discipline.  They are making gammas, mindless drones.

Anyway, with lemonade in hand, I settled into my swing chair that hangs from the top of my deck area.  I love the chair because it is comfortable, but also because it pisses the condo association off.  And they can’t do a thing about it.

Quiet, it is quiet, the sun, the warmth, and the cat in my lap, the cat in my lap? I no longer have any cats. After Moo died, and Basement Cat had to be put down I could not bring myself to getting another one.  Yet there she was, black, purring, staring at me.  Next to the chair, hissing at the black cat was a tortie….It was Moo and Basement, doing what they each did best.

I looked at them both, and thought about them and how hard it had been to say goodbye to them.  And yet, they knew it was their time, and that I had been good to them.  I had included them in my story, but their part was brief in the story, but for them it must have seemed long.

As Moo snored in my lap, Basement laid down next to the chair.  We were together again.  I am not sure how but I saw what happened with them after I let them out of the condo to be free, try to go for it on their own.  It was not easy for them at first, they had been indoor cats for years, but they knew, they were hard wired for survival.

The part that kind of surprised me was that they stayed together.  Basement had always just hissed at Moo, and Moo would finally get pissed off and chase her away.  But out there, on their own, they stayed close and soon worked together to catch birds, and mice and small animals.  It never dawned on me that house cats would, could be social hunters.  I mean we see it in lions, but house cats?

There were some scary times too, with coyotes, foxes, wild dogs, fisher cats, and even raccoons that worked against them and even tried to hunt them.  On one occasion Basement was trapped in a corner with a medium sized mongrel looking to finish her off for a meal.  Moo came out of nowhere and quickly and aggressively changed the dogs mind and menu.

There were other similar incidents in which they worked together, saved each other and kept on.  But in the end, Moo, who was old, had no more to give, she went to sleep one night and then Basement was alone.

The garbage truck rumbled by and woke me.  I was alone.  I sat and thought about my furry friends, and was kind of sad.  I shifted in the chair to get at my lemonade and saw the two mice lying at the side of my chair.  I knew, they were gifts, I smiled through the tears.

Sodium and Sulfides

It was a rainy afternoon, not good for the motorcycle so I ended up taking a drive down to Foxwoods Casino.  I won a little and was driving back lost in thought, and I am not even sure what the thought was.  But I suddenly realized that I should have eaten at the casino, used my points to pay for lunch.  Oh well.

I noticed a little diner off the side of the road as I rounded a turn on Route 85, ironically named, the Route 85 Diner.  I love diner food and they do generally have the best meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It is a favorite of mine.  It might be worth the stop.

As I rolled into the gravel parking lot there were three cars in the lot.  The diner itself was one of those kind of art deco metal sided rail car looking things.  The corners of the building were rounded, and the tinwork was still quite shiny.  The neon ‘Open’ sign blinked on and off invitingly.

I climbed the few stairs and walked into the place.  It was not very big, but had eight booths as well as the long lunch counter with about 15 of those little round stools that reminded me of vinyl covered mushrooms.  I settled onto the stool at the west end of the eatery.  I figured that there was no sense in taking a booth.

The waitress, a rough looking older woman came over.  It was sort of a stereo typed flashback to a couple of album covers.  She had dark grey streaked hair tucked into a hairnet, a kind of yellow pointed head band and a yellow uniform dress on, with a dingy white apron.   She was a little chubby and the uniform was tight.  She had a name tag, ‘Flo’, perfect, it made me smile.

“So what will it be there guy?”

I had looked at the menu and on page three was the answer, the meatloaf, mashed and corn.  I pointed to it, and asked for the gravy on the side.  She smiled; it was a kind of weird, toothy smile.

“Good choice, it is one of my favorites”, then she turned and shouted to the cook through a sort of window into the kitchen.  “Sam, one grey mush with the usual, put the mud in a cup!”

Ah, diner talk, I remembered it from years ago, we used to play at it when I was cooking at HOJO’s.  Adam and Eve on a raft, wreck’em, side of piggies, yeah, I just smiled.

“And what to drink?” she asked.

“Oh, how about a coke?”

“Is RC Cola okay?” she countered.

“Sure, anything but Pepsi.”

She served up my soda and then headed to the kitchen area.  There was another waitress at the other end of the counter filling salt and pepper shakers.  She wore the same hairnet and uniform, maybe not quite so chubby and a little on the short side.

A couple minutes later a little bell rang and I saw my lunch sitting in the window.  She walked down and brought it over, setting it down in front of me.  It looked and smelled great.  I did notice that there were some peppers in the two ample slices of meat, but that was okay.  I am not a peppers fan, but these were not over- powering.

I think I have mentioned before that I am a compartment eater.  So I started with the mashed potatoes.  I poured a little of the gravy on them and sampled.  They were the real deal, not the powdered mix from the can, awesome.  I wasn’t sure if it was homemade because so often the canned stuff they use is kind of tasteless.  This was good.

“Excuse me sir, could you pass the salt?” said a voice that was next to me.  I had not even noticed anyone sit down next to me or heard him order.

I pushed the salt over toward the voice without really looking up.  The hand, the green, scaly hand that reached for it had three fingers, and sort of little suction cups at the end of them.  I turned quickly to look at the, ah….guy next to me.

He, it was a gecko, a giant gecko, about 4 feet high, or would it be 4 feet long?  I am not sure.

Seeing the surprise on my face he made this sort of hiccupping noise.

“Hi Tom, bet you never expected to hear from me again.” He said.

I starred, then sputtered, “Krezz?”

Again, a hiccupping, “Close, actually I am KHriz”

“I, ah, no, I….” I was kind of speechless.

“So I know there were a couple of fuzzy points that you might need to clear up.  So I figured I would help with them.

“I, ah,” I stammered.

“So let us start with the easy one.  What happened to the Sky Crystal after I sent the clones to Earth?”

“Ah yes, I thought about that and well, I figured there were several options, but I never really needed to address it in the books,” I told him.

“Yes, and in doing so you left us in what you would call limbo,” he replied.

“I’m sorry, I never considered that,”

“Not a big deal, but what were the options?” He asked.

I had turned away for a second to look to see if the waitress was seeing what I was.  She saw me looking at her and walked down.  I turned back to KHriz and as the waitress arrived I looked back at her.  She was a gecko too.

“Wait, you’re, you’re HYlon.” I gasped.

“Correct,” she hiccupped.

How was this happening, but then considering the other visits I have had, it made sense.  I think my mind may be going.  But right now, it seemed real.  I loaded a fork full of meatloaf in my mouth thinking that if it was a dream I was having I would not taste the meat, but it tasted, it tasted wonderful.

I sat for a moment and could feel the stare of these two.

“Okay, Okay, I came up with three options for you and the Sky Crystal.” I said.

“Yes?” said KHriz.

“The first was that you simply stayed in your orbit, watching and observing the new world order.”

“That might work, I would have maybe considered doing that,” he said.

“Or?” asked HYlon.

“Well, the second option was that you found that the ship no longer had power and after evacuating the clones to Earth you spiraled into the sun and were all killed.” I said.

HYlon looked at me as KHriz spoke, “And I got the feeling that that was what you hinted at in the third book.” Ironically there was matter of factness to his voice, no anger or venom in his voice.

“Yes, well, I did not want to slam that door so I had a third option and if I needed to go with one, it would have been, that yes, you began to spiral in to the sun.  But for whatever reason, I guess impending doom was a great motivator, you somehow figured out a means to get the engines back up and working and were able to go home.”

They looked at each other, then at me.  Both broke out into hiccups.  Finally KHriz said. “I like it.  Home it is, I, we will accept and believe in the third option.”

I smiled at them, then caught a glimpse of the dinner plate in front of KHriz.  It was corned beef hash, and as I looked at it, KHriz was pouring salt on it, and I mean pouring, not just sprinkling.

“KHriz, I, may I ask a question?”

“Most certainly,” he replied

“That whole canned food, college diet, basically crap food, what was that all about?”

The two broke into hiccups, and finally it was HYlon who replied.  “Do you remember what Tom and Asuna had to eat early on when they got on the ship?”

I thought for a moment then remembered, “Yes, it was mushed up bugs.”  I quickly looked down at my plate.

HYlon hiccupped, and then said, “No, the meatloaf is the real deal. The QUalz ate bugs and bug larvae and mushrooms.  But what happened was during one of our visits we sampled some of your food preservation methods.  It involved the use of salt, actually, the use of sodium.”

I looked confused.

“We crave certain chemicals and salt, sodium is one of them.  It is like candy to us.  But it is also necessary for our metabolism.”

I still did not get it.

“Have you ever looked at the contents of a can of Spam, or Beef-a-Roni, or really almost any other canned or prepared food?” KHriz interjected.

I thought for a moment, then the light went on, high levels of sodium, salt, MSG.

“Okay, that explains the why, but not the how.”   I said.

“Oh, well early on we stuck with salt pork, brined meats or beef jerky.  But during visits in the period of your WWII we discovered the idea of canned foods, particularly Spam.  Did you know that was said to be what saved the Soviet Union in that war?” KHriz told me.

I just stared at him.

“We read the labels and as time went on your country, the USA and other countries mandated content labeling it made it easier and easier for us.”

“I see,” and as I looked at his plate with the corned beef hash and added salt, I got it.  “So you would make special trips to get this stuff, alien midnight grocery runs?”

“Oh, we did not have to even do it at midnight, we were able to do it during the day, remember, you gave us the holo-projectors to make our appearances seem human,” hiccupped KHriz.

“So I did,” I said with a big smile, “But what about the Boone’s Farm and bad wines?”

“Oh, that was the other chemical in the equations.  For us another necessary element was sulfides.  You see lots of it in cheap wine.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “So it was not the food itself but the chemical content in them that you crave.”

“Bango” exclaimed KHriz.

“It is Bingo KHriz, the term is Bingo,” said HYlon between hiccups.

“Yes, Bingo,” replied KHriz, “and the forms of the chemicals in your canned and brined food were a great deal more palatable than the mushroom larvae meals that we ate most of the time.”

At that moment there was a bell, a jingle at the door of the diner.  It was there to alert the waitress of a new customer.  I turned to see who was coming in.  It looked like a truck driver.  I turned back to HYlon and KHriz, but they were gone, disappeared.

I smiled to myself, this has happened before, and I am thinking will be occurring again.

I heard the waitress from the other end of the counter greet the trucker in disheveled work clothes, “Hey Jack, how is it going today?”

The pudgy truck driver just replied “I am so happy I could just shit.”

I left the tab and a few extra dollars at the counter and walked out of the diner.  I wondered who would be next to visit me.

Shrooms

It was a HHH, hazy, hot and humid day and one that I had no desire or intentions of going very far out of the house. I had spent the morning writing my blog entry for the day and then moved on to cleaning; a little laundry, mopping floors and the rest of the usual stuff.

As I worked my way down my to-do list, yeah, I am pretty anal about such things, but as we age it becomes easy to forget what I have to do.  I think we all have those moments where we walk into a room to grab some object or take care of some simple chore and 45 minutes later three other things are accomplished but the original goal had been undone.

So anyway, dusting was done and now it was water the plants time.  They were a little dry and as I watered into the Peace Lily from my Mom’s funeral all those years ago, I noticed that that there was a bunch of yellow balls in the soil around one of the other plants.

When I looked at them closer, mushrooms, they were mushrooms. I had never seen that happen before.  I figured I would look them up in one of my Audubon books and see if I could identify them when I finished the watering.

As I futzed along, I thought about it.  Why were there mushrooms in a plant that had never had them before?

The phone rang and when I saw that it was from Washington DC, I figured that it was another auto-dial “Hillary call” telling me that Donald Trump had raised millions and if I wanted a special supporter button I could help her urgent need to raise money.  I didn’t pick it up.

I poured another coffee and sat down checking my Face Book page, sending out a couple of funny meme and then recalled that I had been watering my plants.

As I got to the cactus done, can’t really water them too much, I turned to the Wandering Jew.  That was the one that had the mushrooms.  The more I thought about it the more I figured it might not be a bad idea to put it out on the back deck.  I just had this little voice telling me that the spores might be bad for me.

So I did, and of course in the doing I bumped it and one of the little yellow balls poofed.  There was a little tiny cloud of yellow dust.  Oh well, at least it was outside.

Back in the house, back to the coffee and Face Book.  Oh, first I need to check my on line banking, I do that every day, make sure that my account is not hacked or I am going to bounce any checks.  I see that my royalty check from my first three books has hit my account, looks like a Subway 6 Inch is on the table for lunch today.  And while I am at it I should check my e-mail.  There is all the usual stuff, drug/med saving from Canada, a few recipes, some travel ideas, but nothing of real importance.

The memes have all been sent out with care and now it is time to settle in and do some writing for the day.  I have a list of topics that I want to cover for the ‘Book 4’ but as I stare at the screen, I saw something on the edge of my sight.  I am not sure, it is just something popping in and out of the edge of my view.

Then across the screen marches a little kind of cartoon character, it looked like something out of Fantasia.  It, a, wow, a mushroom, with eyes, and a mouth, and an attitude.  It is standing in the middle of the screen, with hands on his hip, glaring at me.

“We wanted more time!” he told me.

I stared, and at least in my mind, I answered him. “Time?”

“Yes, time, you talked about us, a little, you mentioned us, but we never got the credit you should have given us. You talked about Spam, and crappy canned foods, and cheapo wines, but left us hangin’,” spouted the fungus.

“I, ah, well, you weren’t that important,” I replied.

I tried to get up, to shake loose from this hallucination, but it was a no go.  The recliner, where I do my writing had somehow absorbed me, wrapped its arms around my lower body.  I was unable to get up.  But then, really, I was so comfortable, so relaxed.

“Important, we weren’t important, Mikey, do you hear this dope?”

Suddenly there was a second mushroom on the screen, a little fatter, and kind of dopey looking.

“Yeah, boss, I heards him.  He makes me feel unwanted, I think I’z was important.”

“Of course, you were Mikey, we all were,” said the first mushroom.

Wait, I am sitting in my living room, writing and have two mushrooms who look like they are from a Disney cartoon talking to me.  This is normal how?

“Okay, Mr. Author Man, let me explain the thing to you, sees we was important, we was part of the story, and we was what keep the little lizard guys going….. for years.”

I am not sure if I said it, or thought it, but “Yes, but what is it that made you important?”

“Mikey, do you hears this guy?  I just told him we feed the lizard guys, what’d you call them, the QUalz? And then in the later part of the book were a food source for the survivors in the friggin’ Archive, and finally we feeds the clones…….Hey, Hey, Mikey, send in the clones…..Oh, I crack myself up……and was there any thanks, any respect, any mushroom recipes from Nick or what was his name…..Stumpy?   No, just…….we ate mushrooms and friggin’ bugs.”

By this point I was reduced to a drooling lump. I just stared at the screen, the colors, the whir of the fan in the computer.  Have you ever tasted a color?

“Hey, Hey, stay wit me here, don’t you be getting all weirded out on me.  I am just sayin’ you should do something about us mushrooms in the book, this book, maybe a recipe or two, or maybe how in the cold of one of the winters we kept them people alive.”

Luncheon meat, I think that is how I would be best able to describe my tongue, a big chunk of spam, or bologna.  It wouldn’t really work, I couldn’t talk back to this image on the screen.  The best I could do was weakly nod my head.

“Good, Good, I think you are gettin it.” said the first mushroom.

“Yeah, Yeah, that’s it.  He’s gettin it.” said Mikey.

Then the screen began to blur, and swirl, colors, spinning colors, I couldn’t look away, and then I was just looking into eternity, into the essence, the void, the blackness, the………..

It was dark outside, it was night, I have no idea what time.  I feel a little fuzzy, thirsty, a little hungry, real hungry, kind of like a hangover, but not so painful.  I sat and thought for a bit.  Mushrooms, yes they did play a part in the The Event.  They play a part in life on the planet, an important part.

I picked up the phone, 860-647-5329 and dialed………ring, ring……

The voice on the other end, “Hello, CJ’s”

“Yeah, I would like to order a small pizza, with Hamburg and make it double mushrooms.  The name is Larson!”

(Note: the mushrooms never visited again, the little yellow balls in the plant were gone, I am not sure if the birds, or squirrels raided them while I was ‘out’. But they were gone.)

Little Kingdoms

I have never been a fan of on-line gaming, but every once an again I would try it.  When I do the on-lines it was usually poker, Texas Hold’em.  I mean I don’t count Word with Friends or Trivia Crack, they are different.  I am talking like Warcraft, or Strike Force or whatever.  But every once and again, yeah I will jump in.

It was a Tuesday, a snowy Tuesday, and I had planned in advance by laying in my supply of bread and milk, and maybe a few bags of chips and some ice cream, coconut, my new favorite flavor.  Have you ever had it with fudge sauce, it is sinfully delicious.  But alas, I digress.

I chose a game called “Little Kingdoms’.  It is one of those typical strategy games based on a post-apocalyptic world that involve starting with a small area and building it up.  You add forts and outposts while gathering materials with the goal of building your little kingdom into a larger one by means of coalition, negotiation, or combat.  So it is not necessarily always just a shoot’em up or hacking with swords.

The one interesting aspect of the game is that you have your choice of where you want to start, or what sort of terrain your kingdom begins in.  All of the terrain is based on a continent that gives eventual access to the other potential kingdoms.

There are the options of what kingdom you might begin with, Forest People, Mountain People, Horse People, Swamp People, Lake / Shore / Ocean People, Farm People or Nomads.  By their title you get the idea of where they are located and perhaps their strengths and weaknesses.

For my first venture I opted for the Forest People.  It seemed to fit best to what I know, being from the Northeastern part of the country.  The other thing was I decided that the best way for me to start out was to play in ‘solo’ mode.  It left me the option of not joining an in-progress game where I might end up as mere cannon fodder or an easy target to an established kingdom.  The AI in the game kept the other kingdoms at a pace with the growth rate of mine.

So I began with my little band, a family or clan of 25 people, and built and bred, expanding the kingdom.  Each clan has basic knowledge, and weapons, like spears, knives, as well as simple necessities like pots, pans, clothing appropriate to your territorial climate.  As time moves on you are able to find and adapt modern things like guns, radios, transportation, and most importantly, knowledge.

So I happily built and added to my clan.  I stopped at noon to make a sandwich, and as I reached for ingredients, smiled thinking of little lizard guys, I was having a Spam sandwich.

By 2 pm the snow still swirled outside and the wind was howling.  I had grown my clan to 100 people by opening the clan up to ‘stragglers’, roaming people who wandered by and our children who were being born.  My clan, the ‘Thomerian Tribe’ was doing well.  We were not bothered by anyone, and had a thriving agriculture going.  The fields were full with wheat and corn, the cattle herds and sheep were growing fat and we were well stocked for winter.

It was by accident that the old cave was discovered and ‘unlocked’ to me. Some of the children were playing in a rock ridge area a little north of our village.  It was closer to the hovels and wall because the village had expanded over time to come closer to the ridge, and although they were told not to play there, well, kids will be kids.

I call it a cave but it was more a man-made underground structure.  It had things called books in a language that was strange.  Remember that although I am literate, the game puts that little twist in there that requires someone to break the code of the language; then we can have access to the knowledge contained in those tomes.

The long story short is that the Forest People, my clan, who broke the code and received a lot of knowledge about making things. The big key was that it explained how to get further beyond barriers in the underground structure.  It also gave background information of the other Little Kingdoms that might be out there.

One of the things that was in that deeper part of the cave was a magic pool, it was flat, and dark, and still.  It was clear that it was not a drinking pool, but had some strange quality about it.  The Learned One of the tribe studied the writings, the books that were there.  She figured out what it was.  She called it a ‘seeing pool’, but was not clear on how to use it. She spent time, hours working on trying to understand it, to make it work.  Her character was running on a background program loop and would cause a pop-up to periodically hit the screen with a question or to require an action like, ‘Touch Water?’ or ‘Talk to Water’.

It was the Mountain People that were first contacted; actually, more it was they who contacted us.  The video screen of my computer changed to a scene in which I watched the learned Sim character, Pindar, that was her name, sitting by the pool. There was a light, a small glow at first, which grew, and soon the pool was a turquoise blue and there was sound, voice actually, asking for those who might hear to answer.  Pindar was at first reluctant to do so, but finally, timidly, offered a simple “Hello”.

A chatter of excitement flowed out of the turquoise pool, question of who is this, where are you, are you friend foe, all of which were overwhelming to Pindar.

“Tom, aren’t you curious?” a voice came out of the computer, it was different from the turquoise pool, the pool was still with this voice, but when it spoke to Pindar there were ripples.

At first I did not think about it much.

“Don’t we get to find out what happened to Cheyenne Mountain after your characters left?” continued the voice.

It was an authoritative voice, a commanding male voice, one used to being in charge by the sounds of it.

I sat for a moment, “But I am in a game, you can’t talk with me, only the Sims.”

“Really?  I think you need to reconsider that for a moment.  You left us high and dry so to speak, your characters left, there were hints of what might have happened, what our friends at Fort Knox were up to, but then, it all just went away” the voice pointed out.

“I didn’t think it was important to the story, I mean really, were the readers that interested in what happened?” I replied, wait, I am talking to a computer, a screen, a voice.

“For some, maybe, but more important, you created a world, and people, and characters. Like Asuna told you, there is a responsibility to them, to us.  We can’t be just left here in limbo, forgotten in time, in nowhere land.”

As I stared at the screen, I thought about what he, wait, who is he?

“Hey, who are you?” I asked.

A kind of sigh, then, “It is General Osgood, remember him, or did you have to go back to find out who I was in the books.”

I chuckled, busted, that was what I had done while we were talking.  “Yeah, you got me!” I replied.

He laughed, and said to someone, “Okay Welles, you win again, I have to stop betting with you.”

A second voice, I am guessing it was Welles, General Welles, “So what happened to us and what about that asshat De Soto from Fort Knox?”

“Yeah, what did happen to me, the asshat as you called me?” a third voice chuckled; it had to be De Soto.

“Okay, I never really got too carried away with the actual putting fingers to keyboard on that but what I saw going down was this.” I mumbled.

I told them that after we delivered the medication that was supposed to save the world, and it didn’t, but before the Carrington Event took place, your locations, your facilities, had a little contest to see who would be the new high command.

General De Soto, beside his efforts to take out non-American shipping, he had the idea of rolling his troops cross country and going for a full assault on Cheyenne.  The down side of that was fuel, bridges and time were not his friends.  Unlike Cheyenne he had no long range equipment; best he and his men could muster were 40 Chinook helicopters with some support Apaches.  The attack was a failure, he were out-gunned; it was doomed from the start.

“Welles’ infantry held you at bay, and then Osgood sent half dozen Tomahawks, the nuclear kind, to Knox, game, set, match, Cheyenne,” I told the computer screen.

“Damn” said De Soto.

“Well, there were a few of your men who survived the blasts, mostly down deep in the gold vaults, but their end was even uglier, the troops who still had some of their body left changed, and came to get them.  You were one of the last to go General De Soto.”  I told him

“Crap, and those yahoos at Cheyenne got an easy pass, lived long and prospered.” He muttered.

“Yeah, well, not really, they did okay, but the problem was that without computers, and trucks and such due to the Carrington EM burst they were kind of stuck.  Some tried to move out and make it above ground.  The others stayed hunkered down in the mountain.  Welles, it was your troops who tried it outside.  Over time the group died off, although your men and women lasted about 25 years before the last one passed.” I explained.  “Mostly natural causes, a little bit of disease, some accidents and occasional zombie but no replacements, that was the problem, there were no new people, no babies.”

“I see” said Welles, “Sad, but I guess there was no other way for it to turn out.”

“No, not in the long term, but it does leave an option open to do a series of books based on your groups,” I offered.

“And I am guessing that those of us who stayed in the mountain pretty much met the same fate as Welles and his people,” said General Osgood.

“Pretty much, I wish I could candy coat it for you, General, but that is the Reader’s Digest version.”  I said.

“Well, thank you, now we have closure,” said Osgood.

“Yes, we do” added Welles.

“Yeah well I would have kicked your sorry asses in the real world!” laughed De Soto.

I started to say something but there was a beep, my computer was re-booting, I looked at the clock, it was flashing. There must have been a storm related outage.  I looked at my watch; it was 3:42 and getting dark.  The snow was still falling, heavily.  I realized I had some time missing from my day.

Unneeded Jealousy

I’m starting to find that I can expect a visit from book characters at any moment.  I‘ve come to realize that in the creation of a universe of my own design I have invited them to step out and talk with me.  Some of the conversations have been happy, some kind of sad, and others, well, others are just plain out there.

I was talking on line with a friend of mine the other night and the topic of relationships came up.  The topic was was whether there could be a platonic relationship between a single person and a married one.  And we pretty much agreed that it was possible once the issue of the sexual tension was put to bed……oops, perhaps the wrong way to phrase that.  But you know what I mean; there is no sex, no friends with benefits thing going on.

I have found that those relationships, whatever you call them, are very fulfilling, they allow for conversation and sharing of ideas, thoughts, emotions that are not encumbered by trying to find the delicate balance of saying the right thing.  There is no hurt or fear of vulnerability in those connections.

We did our usual signing off and I lay down with my latest dystrophic read before. I am currently about halfway through Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. After a while I turned off the light and rolled over, Ning, the new kitten was sleeping near me

It was dark, and actually kind of cold, which was surprising for August.  I felt the bed move, actually the mattress.  At first, I thought it was the kitten, she does move around some at night, but no, Ning was still purring, snoring actually oblivious to the movement.

I rolled over and there was a figure, a woman, sitting on the side of my bed.

“Ah, excuse me, who are you?” I said, a little shocked.

But the figure just sat there for a few moments.  Finally, she turned toward me, a woman, in her thirties, kind of attractive, dark hair, and sad brown eyes.  “You killed me!” she said, quietly, but there was no hate or anger in her voice, just the flat statement.

I sat straight up, wait, it is dark, night, how can I see her?

“You didn’t kill me exactly, Mike killed me, and Avalon, and Ken, and Steven” She said softly.

“I don’t understand,” I said, I was confused.

“You made us a little blurb in the book and with so much else going on just made us a little something to add to the page count, but you did kill us, all.”

I sat and thought for a minute, Ken, Steven, wait, they were the people in that little camp in the woods, the tracks in the snow.

“I remember, Mike lost it thinking that…”

“That Ken and I were too close and that we were lovers” she said.  “But he didn’t understand. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”

I stared at her, she was all in white long underwear, her skin was pale and as she turned toward me the side of her head, the one that had been away from me was matted, thick with dried blood.  The white quilted long underwear top she had on was brownish red where the blood had dripped.

“We were happy together, Mike and me, we had a great life, and Avalon, she was my heart string and the apple of her dad’s eye.  Then, he changed.  I am not sure what happened to him, but it began after he lost his company.” She told me.

She explained that Mike ran a little machine shop made some parts for a gun manufacturer in North Haven.  At first the sales were great because of the political climate, fears of gun control. He was able to expand his business, but then Sandy Hook happened. And in the aftermath the State, that ‘Asshole Malloy’ drove the guns manufacturers out.  It caused Mike’s company to fold.  In the end she said they lost everything, the company, and their savings.  They had to put Avalon back in public school.  They were just hanging on.

She told me that Mike began to drink again, he had quit for a lot of years, but the situation drove him back to the bottle.  He became crazy, paranoid, depressed.  And then, the meteor, the walking dead, they had escaped and at first Mike had a purpose again, he quit the bottle, and his focus was to survive, to be able to protect and keep his family, me, and Avalon alive and safe.  It worked for a while, we foraged, and we were doing okay.  Continuing on she said that one day, in late September they met Ken and Steven on the road.

“Like us they were lost souls just looking to hang on.  We joined up thinking that we would, could work together and in time maybe find some other people. At first it was fine, everything was fine.  But after a little while Mike started to get …..different, he was increasingly agitated.  I did see it, now that I think about it but there was no reason, we were eating, and living, and had a good thing going.  Avalon, she and the boy, Steven seemed to hit it off, and that was good.  Ken was a nice guy, not my type but a nice guy.  He was bright and funny and knew a lot about hunting, and survival.  We would talk about things, things that I could never discuss with Mike, but there was nothing going on.  I was with Mike.”

Winter was closing in and she said the plans as to make a run to the south, warmer climate.  But that early storm arrived and kind of slowed them down.  They grabbed some winter stuff, heavy sleeping bags and tents and things from the Cabela’s up in Pittsfield after that snow.

“We were fine, we had all we needed, we were gonna make it!” she began to sob.  “Then, Mike…..”

I sat in silence; letting the emotions run out of her a little.  I probably should have tried to put my arm around her, give her a hug, but somehow, that just did not seem right.

As the sobs subsided she continued.  “While we were picking thing up at Cabela’s Ken and I got separated from the group.  We ended up in the winter wear section and picked up some thermal underwear and wool socks.  When we got back and found them, Mike was furious, at first I just thought it was because we got lost.  But later, when we got back to camp he started, yelling, accusing, saying things like Ken and I were fucking around.  We weren’t I swore to him that we weren’t, and it was the truth. But it didn’t seem to help.”

I listened; I had never gone into this much detail about them in the book.  I had just kind of glossed over it.

“He went to bed early that night, he was angry.  But in the morning it was strange, he was quiet, calm, he almost seemed happy. It was like he had listened to what I had told him and believed me. It was actually a wonderful day, the old Mike, the Mike I loved and married had come back,” she continued, “I was glad.”

Then, she got quiet for a couple of minutes,

“We went to bed that night, like usual,” and she broke down, crying. “I woke up when I heard the bang, the gunshot. He, he….had killed Avalon, and was standing over me.  In the dim light I could see he was crying.  All he said was ‘I’m sorry’ as he put the muzzle of the gun to my head and pulled the trigger.”

I awoke, sweating, my heart was pounding, the dream or maybe better to call it the nightmare had been so real.  Ning was lying next to me, gentle snoring those little kitty snores, but I was awake.

I stumbled to the kitchen, I knew I was not going back to sleep. It was time for a coffee, and to think about what had just happened.

Killer Unknown

It has always been difficult for me to sleep the first night in a new or strange place, and I will say that the Coffee House was certainly new and strange.  It was a little rustic cabin on a coffee plantation in which we, my girlfriend and her daughter were staying on a recent trip to Central America.  The plantation itself seemed a little less than I had expected, and really it was more of a small house with three or four rooms, not the grand hacienda that I had expected.

At the plantation there was no large porch for sitting with a cup of home grown brew.  It was a little house tucked at the end of a small dirt road. A pair of bedraggled mutts lay on the concrete slab that projected itself outside the walls of the house.  And although they did bark as we walked up to the main house, but then quickly settled back down to continue their siesta.

The rustic cabin, well, that was even less than the plantation, two rooms and a little toilet closet, one an enclosed ‘master bedroom’ the other sleeping area was an alcove with a bed off of an open area which served as a kitchen, and living room.  Seating was sparse, a table, and some chairs on the kitchen end, a couple of benches in the living room side, beyond that, nada.

We did not bring anything to cook so we visited a market in the town in Santa Elena.  We picked up some things to eat but by the time I got back I was feeling a little feverish, perhaps I was not so careful about the water I had been avoiding.  The end result was that I was in bed, shivering and trying to sleep by 8:00 PM.

I say trying to sleep because the wind in the mountains had picked up and had brought rain with it, a heavy rain that resounded like pennies falling on the corrugated tin roof.  Clearly sleep was not going to be easy.

I finally fell into a fitful sleep after a while.  But I felt someone watching me.  I could almost make out the sound of breathing over the rain rat-tat-tatted on the roof.  It was pitch black.

“You wouldn’t have caught me you know” said a voice in the dark.

I sat straight up, “Who is it, who’s there?”

At first I thought maybe I dreamed it, that it was just nightmare, but then, “Oh, just me, one of the friends you killed off in your story,” replied the voice.

I was able to figure out it was in the corner, away from the door, but I had no idea who it was.  I guess one of the downsides to writing a story is that you really don’t know what someone sounds like if they were to speak.  I mean I could figure out some of them, Gillie with his Georgia accent, or Asuna, with that touch of Japanese, maybe Sgt Brown, but this one, I had no clue.

“Without sounding mean or anything, I killed off a lot of folks in the story’” I replied, I was really at a loss for where to go with this and it was maybe the wrong thing to say.

A chuckle, and then “Fair enough, I was kind of a minor character, but I could have had so much fun in Camp Romanica, I would have had you all twitching like nervous cats,” replied the voice trailing off.

We sat silent for a few minutes, I know he was from Romanica, so that helped a little, minor character, Billy, maybe, or one of the surviving bikers?  No, they were all women except for Billy.

“No guesses? Then let’s play a little game,” suggested the voice.  “If you can guess who I am, I will not do what I am here to do.”

“Here to do?”

“Of course, you didn’t think I would just go away without some payback did you?”

“And if I refuse the game?” I asked.

“Oh, that is not an option, you get 10 questions, and if it works for you, I go away, if not……well, then it’s on you,” the voice said coldly.

I sat and thought for a minute, wait, this can’t be happening, I was asleep, I am in Costa Rica, I am a writer, and one of my characters is haunting me.  I have to be dreaming, I will just have to wait it out and then I will wake up.

“No, you are not going to get away with it that easily! You don’t get to wake up from a dream and just walk away, this is real, this is payback,” said the voice.  “If you think you can wait it out, we’ll just set a timer.  I know, that rooster that will crow during the night, if you haven’t guessed by the time he does I get to play my game.”

I thought about it, and it is a character, it can’t hurt anyone, it is just a character.

“You can’t,” and I stopped a I felt the sting of something shape rack my arm.

“Oh contraire Motherfucker, I can hurt you, or if you like I can go visit your girlfriend and her daughter in the other room,” said the voice, now more menacing than before.

I felt my arm, it was wet, and warm, but the cut did not seem too deep, “Okay, okay, I will play, just leave them out of this.”

“Ah, that is better. So go ahead with your first question,” the voice said, with a touch of entertainment in the tone.

“Okay, well, let’s start here, was it by one of us, the campers that you were killed?”

“No!”  A terse answer, or maybe just short.

“So if it wasn’t one of us, it must have been a Zom.” I said thinking out loud.

“Ah, ah, now that is almost cheating, is that a question?  Are you looking for me to say that I was killed by one of the dead?  That would be question #2, so be careful.” He said, almost mocking, or like an arrogant teacher.

“No, not asking, just talking, thinking out loud” I replied.

“Okay, just remember the rules.”

I thought for a minute, then offered a name, “Armand?  Were you Armand?  The one who crashed his plane after your relationship with Grace went south?”

“Ah, now that is a little better, wrong, but you are at least playing the game.  Good.  So now let me ask you, why Armand?” queried the voice.

“Well, it was the first name I thought of, and well, it seemed like he might have had a back story to share, with losing Grace and all,” was my answer.

“Fair enough, but why would he cut you?  No, he was too pathetic in the end for that.”

I sat and digested what he had just said for a few minutes.

“Hey, don’t forget the rooster my friend, times passing.”

Thinking to myself, ‘Okay I know you are a male character, and I know that you are a vicious one, or may have been.  And I know or believe that you’re not a major player, so you are not like Barkley, or Gillie, or McManus, but then they lived.  Okay, let me think?’  …. “What about the Paul character?” I offered.

“Who? Who was Paul?”

“I will take that as a no then, Paul was a member of the biker gang. He was one of the snipers that killed Laura and Maggie.  He was disgruntled, and kind of a coward, but he did attack us.” I replied.

“Okay, yes, no is the answer on that one,” said the voice sounding almost a little confused.

I had learned something in that question, whoever was with me here was not one of the bikers, it is something, small, but something.  So the question then was which group was he with, the Stanwix bunch, Brother Gabriel, perhaps ….Mike, he would have, could have…….”Are you Mike, the guy in the tent that killed his wife and daughter?” I asked.

“Not bad, wrong, but not bad, Mike could have been a contender, but see, he was just a one trick pony, and he was led by his jealousy, and his depression, it was a sort of sad release for him, no real pleasure in it, the killings,” replied the voice.

Well, this helps a little it gives me the idea that this individual was a killer, and one who enjoyed it, a sadistic player.  How can I narrow the field down?  “Well, let me try this, were you ever at Fort Stanwix?”

“Ah, another good question, and although I knew some of the people who died up there, ah……that is a no to question #5, halfway to the end.”

Okay, so he was part of our group, that helps, I have time, I can do this.  Wait, this is too obvious but I said it anyway, “Brother Gabriel?”

“Hahahahaha, he is a good choice, a sick dog for sure with some very nasty ways of killing, but again, too much of a sledge hammer, no, I was more subtle.” The voice answered, I could almost hear glee in his voice.

Think Tom, think, who, who was hidden, who would have been a likely candidate, someone who was sneaky, under the radar, RADAR, “Okay, how about our spy from Fort Knox, Lt. Mills?”

“Again, a good choice, he had the skills, and the mindset of a killer, kind of like that Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now, but it was his job, not his passion.  Come on now, you are running out of time, and questions, that was #7, think passion, pleasure, watching the pain.  You know who I am!” The voice taunted me.

I looked at the glowing dial of my watch, it was just about 2 a.m. and I knew that meant at any time the rooster could start his ritual.  Think, there are clues here, you aren’t seeing them, but there they are there.  Finally I said, “I am going to burn a question here, but have you lied to me about any of the things I have asked you?”

“Nope, all true, I may have a fault or two, like being a psychopath but I am an honest killer.”

Okay, let me think about what I have, a male, who lived in Romanica, was killed, but not by a Zom or anyone in camp.  He knew people from Fort Stanwix, but was never there.  He was or seemed intelligent, articulate, and focused on the pleasure of the kill.  It was not much to go on; I needed that one piece of information, but what piece.

“Yah know, maybe I lie a little, I am thinking that after I finish you off I may go next door and play with the girls a little.  Mom will be quick and easy, but the daughter, Adrianne, now that would be fun, it would be slow, and so rewarding.” The voice sounded menacing.

Bingo! That was the piece.  I knew who it was, now the game was mine, I have the edge, and I can make him squirm.

“What happened to honor, I thought you said you were an evil person, but that you were an honorable evil person.” I said.

“I am, but a man has needs, and this game is getting boring, you are playing well, but it is not so fun, you’re too emotionless.  Better to watch the fear in their eyes, to hear them whimper, and sob, and listen to them beg.”

Emotionless? Oh, how wrong he is, I am plenty fearful, not only for me. I feared for but those on the other side of the door.  I knew who he was, I just didn’t know if I could trust him at his word.  But then I built him, I made him who he was, how did I make him, that is the question.  And I realized, I never addressed that issue.  Shit.

“Getting late, time to get those last questions in there Tommy Boy,” The voice taunted.

“Oh, I know, I know, and I am almost there, to the solution.  I know that the character, your character, was one who was good to your word, and if you said you would kill them, he would.  But I also know that if you say you will not kill, you won’t. You play by the rules, you’re evil, but a tidy organized by the book evil.” I said aloud.

“Ah, so who am I?”

“Question #9 first……do you know Delaney?”

Silence

“Do you know Delaney?”

Silence

“DO YOU KNOW…”

“YES!, I know that bitch, and if it had not been for her I would have lived, I would have been able to work your camp, Margo, Chelsea, Taylor, Heather, and Michelle, I had a supply to last me a year, a year of pleasure or passion!”

“John, why did you come visit me, to try to terrorize me?”

He was calm now, and chuckled, “I guess I wanted to just fill that little bit of me that I felt was missing.  You made me a pedophile teacher who killed a pain in the ass student without knowing the real me, the dark side, my blood lust. Over the years I killed 23 people, mostly young women, and a couple of Nancy boys.  It was what I did; it was my passion, my pleasure, my addiction.  Being a teacher, and kind of a student’s favorite, it worked well for me.  Alyssa, well, she was going to be my next victim but then all the undead thing started and she got away.  She and Delaney skipped out.  I kind of thought that Delany had me figured out, but she never got the chance to turn me in.  She was a smart girl, smart enough to stay out of my reaches.”

With a deep sigh, almost regret the voice continued, “You never knew that, but needed to.  You also needed to complete me, give me a redeeming quality, you did, I play by the rules.  Thank you.”

There was silence, the rain had stopped, and then the cock crowed as I stared at the ceiling.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

Chelsea

I was thinking about the various characters that lived, and died in my story.  I truly think that the saddest was Anne, or at least that was the one that affected me the most.  But there were others, the Stanwix crew, Nick, for that matter, Frank and Ethan were ones that I only brushed on the actual death and not necessarily what brought them to the place they were. Most of them really did not have nor need that detailed back story, but Chelsea, that was a slow, sad decline that none really saw coming.

So Chelsea, she was young, cute, blond, a kind of cheerleader type if you know what the stereo-type is.  She was perky of spirit as well as breasts which made her popular with the biker gang who had kidnapped her, and used her.  It had to be a hard life for that period of time before she was brought into the group.  And when she was brought in and she became comfortable it became evident that she was also one of those kinds of people who was not complete, she believed she needed someone in her life to make her ‘whole’.

Ethan was the guy; he was the one who filled that need for her.  And although she was needy, and he was a little bit of an over-reactor seeing terrors at every turn and behind every tree, they worked.  They made each other whole.

When Ethan died, it was terrible, first in the way it happened, with the explosion, but also in what it did to Chelsea.  It stripped her of a part of her life, she was suddenly cut lose and left to float in a sea of emotions, most of them negative.  As much as she needed someone, the hurt and pain of Ethan’s loss put up a wall which we really didn’t see at first.  I mean she had the same perkiness most of the time, with the twinges of sadness that would seem natural for someone who lost their love.

In time, she seemed to be back to normal, hanging with the youngers, doing things with them.  But she never connected back up with anyone, or so it seemed.  She mostly hung out with Taylor, and they seemed to have a solid friendship.  But there was more, there was a part was not seen or known about.  Overtime Chelsea saw Taylor as more than a friend, she was the missing piece, the part that would make her happy and feel whole again.

Over time Chelsea moved closer and closer to Taylor, there were touches, brushes, hints that she shared with Taylor, and Tay never really understood, it was just normal girl stuff in her mind.  Taylor saw it as just that girls, women tend to be a little more touchy feely and less homophobic than guys.

As the weeks moved on, the contact, closeness and opportunities become more and more intense.  And at some point, Taylor began to get what was going on.  At first it intrigued her, the thought of being with a woman.

There were others who saw what was happening, but really, no one cared, it was not a big deal in the new world order.  The clan, the campers weren’t caught up in the old traditions and taboos.  It was a different world.  The two of them would sit close at fire pit.  They would sometime even hold hands.

“Yeah, I knew where I wanted it to go, where I was trying to take it. And at first it was kind of good, falling in love is always good. We were both alone, and we helped each other get through things, we talked, and sometimes cuddled.  But it was not ……. We were on different levels.”  A soft female voice said in my head.

“Yes, we were, and I didn’t mean to lead you on, I thought…” said another, less soft, yet apologetic.

“No, I know, I pushed, and we had a thing, a magical thing, for a little while, but I needed more, I needed that intimacy, that contact,” and with a chuckle, “sex.”

“I tried, but I couldn’t, it wasn’t you, it was ‘it’, I felt weird, I mean, that night, it felt good, it was wonderful, but I couldn’t shake the guilt, I couldn’t….I’m sorry, I tried.”

“I understand, and as much as I hoped and tried to stop I couldn’t help myself.”

Okay, let me just stop here for a minute, yes, I am a little bit of a pervert and I listened to them, Chelsea, and Taylor talking in my head. But I also visualized ‘that’ night, the two of them alone, and with what started as an innocent kiss good night between the two that lead to touching, feeling and nakedness.  Two young soft female bodies, writhing on the bed as the full moon peered through the window, the soft moans of passion, and the promises of forever between the two in the heat of the moment.

And when morning came, they were different, Chelsea, elated at the events of the evening before, the spark and fire that had flared.  But Taylor, quiet, somber, guilt-ridden.  It was those feelings that took over and drove them apart.

Taylor avoided Chelsea the best she could, working with Teckla, while Chelsea tried to orchestra another liaison, a night of passion.  Teckla saw and understood what was going on, and did what she could to help shield Taylor.

In the end, Chelsea realized what was happening, and the why.  It started her on a path she could not escape this time, and as the days and weeks passed she sank deeper and deeper into herself and a depression.

When the big attack came, and it was all hands for survival. She saw her out, she saw one who would stay with her to the end and melted into his arms, he loved her to death.

I am not sure any of the campers expected what happened.  Taylor suffered a lot as a result of the guilt that she felt for not helping her friend, but she realized also that there was nothing that could have been done for her.  She had to just keep moving forward, and surviving.

The Pittsburgh

I had taken a run down to the Mohegan Sun Casino to drop some coins into the slots at the high stakes section.  I don’t want you to think that I am a high end gamer, I usually only play about $400.00 through the machine.  If my trilogy had sold well it might be a different situation but my monthly royalty check is only good for a $5.00 foot long at Subway.  But I do have this particular Double Triple Stars machine that has been good to me over the last year or so.  Hopefully today will be a good day.

Mohegan is located about 10 miles north of the Navy Submarine Base in Groton.  It is home of not only the base, which I visited in my book but also General Dynamics, the ship building facility that has constructed many of our boats.  And because of the proximity of the casino to the base, when boats come in for refit, the crews often use the casino as a place to visit and relax.

So while I was sitting at my favorite machine, dropping my $5 coins into it, a Navy Guy sat down at the machine next to me.  He was an officer, but I really don’t know the meaning of all the gold braid and bands on the arms.  But he did have a number of them so I know he was not some ensign or LT JG.

“Any luck today?” he asked.

I always kind of get funny about having people sit down next to me at a machine, I feel like they are trying to drain my luck.  Yeah, I know it is a gambler thing, all imagined, all just superstition, but we are creatures of habit no matter how bizarre the habit.

“No, so far not good, a few small hits but that is about all.” I replied, and actually, this guy did not seem so bad to talk to.  I have had people next to me slamming the machine and doing weird rituals like sweeping their hand across the glass as the reels spin.  No, this guy just dropped in his coin, pulled the lever and waited.

I had settled into my routine drop the coins, pull the lever, pivot the seat and wait for the reels to stop.  If I hit, I counted what I won and kept track.  When I reached the number of coins still in the machine and it matched what I had won, I stop.

“I see a lot of you navy guys in here this weekend; I am guessing a ship or two has come in.” I said.

“Boats, we call them boats, and yes, there are two of us in port right now,” he replied.

“ah, boats”

“Yes, the Ohio is in and us, the Pittsburgh” he offered.

“Really, my Grandfather was on the Pittsburgh, back in the 1920s, but it was cruiser back then.  He was part of the marine guard detail.”

“Yeah, the P has had quite a history, from back then to now, he told me.

I had not thought about it but this officer had a southern accent.  Why is it that so many military types have southern accents?

“I wonder how that history will end, with the boat, the Pittsburgh” I said out loud, actually more a thought out loud because in my books the Pittsburgh was part of it and we never really knew what happened to it.

“Well, it is funny that you should ask.  I have my thoughts on that,” he said with a chuckle.

I expected that he would say that it was a peaceful decommissioning at the end of a 20 or 30 year stint.

“Yea, after the Carrington Effect it all went downhill.”

“Wait, what?  Carrington? I…”

“Well, you created the scenario, you set us it up,” said the officer. As he turned toward me on his stool.  I saw his name tag, ‘KATZUNG’.  My jaw dropped.

He went on to tell me that after they had dropped Tom and Asuna off at their base they had returned to sea.  In the course of it they initially had a pretty calm and quiet time of it.  They made an occasional contact with some ships out on the high seas.  Some were immediately sunk because they were overrun with undead, others were helped, in some cases towed to port. They also did their best to distribute the cure for the illness that plagued humanity.

“We did what we were supposed to, thought it was right but that sterility thing was kind of a kick in the teeth,” he said, there was a touch of bitterness in his voice. “But hey, They, Tom and his people didn’t know, can’t blame them.”

He told me about the power struggle between Fort Knox and Cheyenne Mountain and how they had been stuck in the middle of it.  Technically they were under the control or command of DeSoto at Fort Knox but when they found out about the shit he was trying to pull with the biological weapons stored at the Archive they went over to the command at Cheyenne. They tried as hard as they could to stay neutral, and in the end did not use any of their weapons against Knox when the shit hit the fan.

“We pretty much minded our own business, worked the shipping lanes, and did what we could to help those who needed us.” He had a sort of proud grin on his face.

“Hi Cap,” a new voice piped in, and I turned to see another officer, with a southern accent standing behind me.

“Commander, I see you made it.”  Katzung smiled at his friend.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it.  You think he will like the end result?” replied the new joiner.

Miss it? I thought, what does he mean?

“I was just getting to that part, Tom, this is Commander Gaines, my XO on the Pittsburgh”

“Hi, glad to meet you,” I mumbled.

“Well, in a way we already know each other, but it is a pleasure for me to meet you in person,” smiled Gaines.

As I think back on it now, we never shook hands or even had any physical contact, that seemed odd, Anyway……

“So there we were out doing submarine stuff and saving those we could when the Carrington Event took place.  I have to wonder if we had been on the surface if it would have made a difference, we would have lost everything anyway and just ended up floating around, no NAV systems, no computer ability, no chance to do anything but just float on the ocean currents until we ran out of water, and food,” explained Katzung.

Gaines jumped in, “But it didn’t go that way, and in the end, it was probably better.  When the EM burst occurred we were underwater, probably about 300 feet and everything shut down.  No way to move, no way to escape, even our escape gear we had was of no use.”

“The chief engineer tried to rig manual overrides, and get us closer to the surface but it didn’t work.  In the end, the biggest concern was the reactor.  It was still running, we couldn’t shut it down,” said Katzung.

“So you still had engine power,” I said.

“Well, see no, that was the problem, the computer systems all down and the reactors cooking away with no cooling system there was nowhere for the energy they were creating to go. I mean the chief did his best, we tried everything we could think of but we were faced with a core that was getting hotter and hotter, and the coolant was building up pressure.  It was just a matter of time before things started to fail.”  Gaines told me.

“It was decided that we would just wait it out the best we could, but we knew what the end result was going to be, it was just the when would it happen we didn’t know.

The first collapse was a steam cooling line in the engine room.  When it burst, there were, well, the chief and some of his guys were trying to seal some smaller leaks.  I guess it was quick for them, but for that first few seconds, super-heated steam,” Katzung’s voice was soft, there was a sadness.

Gaines picked up the story, “The upside, if there could be one was that broken line released the pressure, it bought some time, but in the end, we were going to get colder and colder in the boat, and the oxygen would run out. We were dead men, we knew it, and what do you do.”

I sat, stunned, I had not thought this part of the story through, was I bad for subjecting these characters to this?  I had not noticed it before but now there was a group of people, sailors, standing in the area.  Clearly they were dead, some with a peaceful look as they slipped away from their own hand or from asphyxiation while others showed burns, or bloated from drowning.

I turned back to Katzung, I started to say I was sorry but he stopped me.  “No, you’re good man, you made us, you gave us life, a mission and in a way, immorality, and we are here to thank you, all of us.”

I looked around, and they were nodding in agreement and mumbling thanks.

Gaines piped in “In the end we knew the core was going to melt through the containment and the outer hull, when it did or was eminent there would be an alarm.”

I sat, thinking about that, sitting, waiting for your end, and then the alarm, the ding, ding, ding….

“Congratulations sir that is a nice hit.  Triple, Triple, Double, that is good for $25,000.  Do you want me to take out taxes?”  The slot attendant was standing there having put the Jackpot winner ‘feather’ into the coin slot.

“Huh, ah, yeah,” I looked around, I was alone, no sailors, no Gaines or Katzung, just me and the slot attendant.

I sat waiting the attendant to return, I thought about what I had just….. dreamt?  It would be a quiet ride home, even with the full pocket.

Linc and Teckla

Years ago I used to listen to Andy Rooney on the radio.  He would generally start his bit with a comment about “Did you ever think about…….. Well I did” and roll into his topic of the day.  I have found that as things have progressed after writing the trilogy I found myself having moments, sometimes when I was driving or at the Notch taking a walk, I would have thoughts about the story and find myself saying exactly that. So did you ever think about what happened to Linc and Teckla?  Well, I did and I have a few comments and thoughts that I would like to share with you.

Both of those characters had lost the loves of their lives to tragic events.  Lincoln, or Linc had married his high school sweet heart and they had spent years together, had their children and had escaped the zombie holocaust to help build a little niche for themselves with his brother and his family.  Then when they believed things were going well he lost his wife and kids to the group under the control of Nate and the Otis runaways.  It was not an easy loss; she was raped and killed in front of him.  He had been left for dead.

Teckla, well she had been with Frank for years, they were peas and carrots, meshed well together and had this connection that just seemed to work well.  I will not say that they completed each other, but they did complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  He was kind of impulsive, she thought things through, he was good with machines, she was good with home stuff, she was a leader, and he was a follower.

Each in their own way suffered with the losses, but each also kept moving forward.  It was their way of dealing with the empty spaces in the heart that were created.  Linc dove back into the farm and kept it going while Teckla worked with the horses at the stables near Romanica.  And in the end I think that it was the loneliness and the land that brought them together.

When everyone moved to the Archive the horse farm had to be abandoned, it was too far away from the new home. At first the horses were kept on the grassy area around the Archive, but it was quickly decided that they would be better off at the oxbow, where Linc’s farm was.  There was already other livestock there so it seemed a good idea.  When that happened Teckla and Taylor would take turns visiting the farm to take care of the horses. But as time went on Taylor seemed to find other tasks to take care of at the archive and Teckla would spend more and more days there.

Besides helping with the horses and soon the livestock she also helped in the clean-up of the farmhouse.  She added a woman’s touch with curtains, and decorating.  She would help Linc gather crops and firewood.  With time she was there every day, and then it was every night too.

“Well, that is a Reader’s Digest version of the story,” came a female voice from the back seat.

“And it was a little more interesting than you made it sound, I mean the getting together part,” said a strong sounding male voice beside me.

I looked to my right, but there was no one there.  I checked the mirror and the back seat was empty.  But I heard the voices, I was sure of it.

“Tek, you want to tell him about it?” said the male voice.

“I guess” was the reply.

After a moment or two of silence the female voice, I figured out it was Teckla began, “have you ever been really, really happy, and in love with someone.  Actually, I think you probably were because of the way you told the story Ann and the Tom character. You portrayed it as just a beautiful bond.”

I thought about it for a minute, about my life and yes, there were those moments and periods of time.  Although I kind of messed them up and they went away.  But this is not about me here.

“And have you ever had those bonds ripped away, not like you were just thinking, where you fell apart over time, or lost interest.  I am talking about having that person torn from you, in death?” Teckla asked.

“Well, I, in person, no, but in the book….” I answered, was I talking to myself or them?

“Right, you did good with the Ann part, perhaps a little over the top, but not too bad.  And you really did a nice job with Edwin and Arcelia, but you never felt it, not really,” Linc interjected.

I drove on, in silence and thought about it.

“So in our case we each had a wonderful relationship with our other half.  We fit together, enjoyed each other and had that bond, it was not perfect, we fought, and struggled, but the key was we wanted it to work.  We made it work, that was where we succeeded while so many fail,” explained Linc.

“Now imagine that point, that event where the bond is torn apart, right in front of you, imagine the pain, the sudden emptiness.  You talked about it with Ann, but did you feel it?  Did you really see the blackness of it all?” Teckla asked.

“No, I mean, I kind of felt some of it, as I was writing it, Hey, I even cried at parts, but not for long.”

“So until you have it happen, you don’t know what it is like.  And when you are in that blackness you find it hard to even move or even breathe, yet you have to.  You have to take that one step, small as it may be and then another.  I was lucky, I had Matt and Mark to help me keep going.  I buried myself in doing things, tasks, mindless tasks and it helped.” Teckla told me.

“My situation was a little more difficult,” said Linc, “I had no one, and everything, my family, my kids, my wife, all gone, and their deaths were played out in front of me.”

I listened, I remember what I wrote about those deaths, it was for the story, I never considered what it would have really been like.

“In my case I was able to focus on keeping the dream, the farm alive, at first for their memory, and then over time for my own sanity and finally, for Tek.”  And even though I could not see him I felt there was a smile in that voice with love shining through.

I turned left onto Main Street and started toward the Big Y.  I was thinking about these two, and what they were sharing.

“So, what happened, how did you two…..” I asked

There was a chuckle from both, and after a couple moments Linc said, “I don’t really know, it just happened.”

“Oh come on you, it was more than that,” piped in Teckla.

“Okay, well you tell the story then,” replied Linc.

Teckla started, “Well, we had the whole thing with the farm animals and the resurrection of the oxbow farm.  See, Linc was working hard at it.  And he was doing well, we still had the horses up at the archive, but you told that part of it already. And you told about moving them down to the farm.  While Taylor and I would take turns taking care of them I found that Lincoln and I would spend time together, I would help him in the fields, and we would talk, just talk, about nothing, and about everything.”

“It was like a ray of sun coming through the clouds, from the darkness and the focus on the farm and the loss of my wife, there was a something positive in all the darkness.  It felt good, and I felt guilty,” added Linc.

“I felt that guilt too, Frank had……and then I realized that I couldn’t bring him back and then it was okay to move forward, to live and love again.”

There was a minute or so of silence then Linc spoke up, “Janet came to me in a dream, she had the kids with her.  She was smiling, and happy.  She looked at me and saw my sadness and got this stern look, ‘Lincoln, you need to stop, we are fine, we are okay, but you’re not.  Heal yourself,’ she told me. ‘What do you mean? I asked’.  ‘You know, be what you once were, I give you my blessing to be happy’ was all she said.  I was confused by it.”

I had not realized it until then, I had never given a name to Lincoln’s wife.  I started to apologize for it but he cut me off.

“Its okay, don’t worry about the name thing, it was not that important, and now, she has a name.” said Linc.

“As time went on Taylor spent more time up at the archive she had hooked up with Gillie and they wanted to spend time together so that left me to go to the farm more often.  I think it was a hot day in September that we were working in the fields or herding some animals, no wait, we were putting some hay in the barn and Linc tool off his shirt.  I had seen him do it before, and well it never had any impact.  But that day, for a 45 year old guy, I saw him as … well, it was just a case of ‘wow’,”

I could sense the smile on Linc face, and the slight flushing of Teckla.

“We had dinner that night and had settled into the living room of the farmhouse. We often did that, had a coffee, read, talked about life, or the farm.  But that night it was different.” Linc offered.

“Yeah, you dragged out a bottle of that homemade dandelion wine and we built a fire in the fireplace,” said Teckla.

“Guilty, as charged, I am not sure why but we ended up laying on a blanket on the floor in front of the fire, it had been cool that night and actually the fire felt good and as it the fire was dying, we got gigglier.  I think it started with just a touch, then I took her hand and held it.  I, we were kids again, teenagers in love, or maybe lust.” He fell silent.

“Pretty much, the flood gates opened and the void was suddenly filled…. Oh, that sounded bad, what I mean was the emptiness, ah, crap…..we ……” as Teckla spoke I could sense the red of embarrassment.

“We did it, and we became united in more ways than one, okay!” Linc spurted out.  We all kind of laughed at that.

“And that is how we connected, became whole again.” Teckla proudly exclaimed.

“And we stayed together to the end.  We lived and loved each and every minute of it, good times and bad.  Sort of a happy ending,’ added Linc.

“Sort of?” I asked.

“In the end, the cancer, many of us ended up with it, our best guess was that the old world, technology had left its mark on us.  We both had it, and as it got too painful, we ……” said Linc, a sadness to his voice.

“We had made a pact, we decided that night in September that we would stay together and die together.  And we did, we kept that pact, it was a gentle end though, not like some of the other.  A gentle passing, together, in each other’s arms.” Added Teckla, but there was a sound of success or victory, kind of a pride in what they had done. “I love you Linc!”

“I love you too Tek.”

As I rolled into the parking lot of the Highland Park Market I stopped and sat for moment thinking about what I had just heard, or experienced.  I envied them; they had something very special, something that many of us never find.

Lucy

I have always enjoyed a nice walk out at Bolton Notch.  There is an old rail line that ran from Manchester to Willimantic that has been turned into a bike and walking path.  Even on the warmest of days it would remain comfortable for a stroll because of the tree canopy that covered the trail.  The other thing interesting about this place was that often while walking along listening to the playlist on my iPhone I would have an inspired thought for my story, the Event Trilogy.

I still enjoy heading out there, especially now at this time of year when the leaves are turning colors.  There are not a lot of oaks in the area, but rather it is birch and maple trees. The colors are brilliant, reds, golds, yellows all blending together.  Add to it a foggy morning and it is just a mystical place begging for adventure, or inspiration.

Today was not such a day; it was warm, and sunny but perfect for walking.  I chose the path to the left today and began down the trail.  In the early part of the walk there is a deep cut in the rock that had been blasted all those years ago for the railroad.  And as I walked along I was listening to a podcast.  It was an old radio play called ‘Dimension X’.  This one had to do with the arrival of aliens to Earth and the result of the meeting.  It was not a good ending for humanity.

As I walked along, it was quiet on the trail, I mean there were birds, and an occasional squirrel and I had a couple of cyclists pass me by, but no walkers.  To my right on the trail was the drop off to the brook below that fed into to the pond at Valley Falls.  On my left was the man made cliff that was blasted away back in the railroad heyday.

As I came to the gazebo, an old stop off point for the steam engine trains to refill their water supplies. I could see two women with a little white fluffy dog walking toward me on the trail.  As they got closer and closer, I saw them stop.  They were pointing at me, and seem disturbed.  I took my head phones off and when I did one shouted, “Hey, you can’t have your dog running loose, he is supposed to have a collar!”

A dog? I thought, I have cats, no dogs as I turned to look behind me.  It was not a large one, kind of greyish, shepardy looking.  It had been following me apparently.  It sat down about 10 feet from me, tail wagging.

I turned to the women and said loudly, “This is not my dog, I’m sorry; I don’t know what to do.”

Clearly they were agitated.

“Well, it might try to eat Spanky!” one shouted back as the other got onto her cell phone to call someone.

“Look, I think it is friendly, and maybe lost, let me try to get it over so you can get by.” I offered and turned back toward the the dog.  I am not sure how I knew, but I did, there was something about this animal that was okay, it wasn’t a danger.

I moved over to the little clearing to the left, and called gently to the canine.  She, I figured out it was a she, got up and walked over to me.  She sat down next to me, I guess you call it ‘heeled’.

I waved to the women and signaled them to pass by, and slowly, hugging the far side of the path the passed by.  The dog just sat and watched without so much as a twitch.

After they left I spoke to the furry canine next to me.  “So wild beast, why are you following me? Were you going to grab Spanky right out from under their noses?”

The eye, those golden eyes stared at me and although she did not speak, I could understand, in the look and with a voice in my head. “You are of the clan, you are one of us.  You have always been one of us, a coyote.”

“Whoa!” I said aloud. And yet, I sensed this was true, kart race name Coyote, nickname Coyote, the idea of the changeling or the joker, all related to that animal.

“I, we liked the story, all of us in the animal realm.  You brought us back to where we once were, on an equal plane to the humans.  We worked together with you.  Margo and the Momma, Lance with the horses, the Raven and Matt, there were connections as there once was,” the Coyote spoke to my mind.

I shook my head up and down.  “I thought it was important, have always felt a connection to nature and the spirits of animals, wait make that other creatures, animals sound kind of arrogant.”

“And that is why humans and animals no longer have the bond that you found in the story.   It was and is that arrogance that blocks the bond, humans placed themselves above us, but even beyond that they placed themselves above the Earth.  Men think that they can take what they want, that they are entitled, and that they are gods.  They are not.”

“I know,” it was the only thing I could say.

“There are those, like you who see it, and you do work at trying to restore the balance, but there are too few, and in so many ways you are powerless to stop the tide,” added the voice in my mind.

I sat in silence, I thought, and remembered some of the blog posts I had created on this very subject.  Humans, I thought of Futurama and Professor Farnsworth with his quote; “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore!”

“Tom, it is okay, the Earth will survive, it will continue and life will continue.  There is a great die off happening and it will leave few untouched. Man is among those who will be touched and touched quite hard.  But those, like you, those who join with nature will remain, and start over.  It will be like in the book, it ended, but it didn’t end.”

I was kind of sad in thinking about where humankind was going, the damage we have done, and are still doing.  As I sat, the Coyote curled up and put her head on my lap.  I gently stroked her head.

We sat like that for a while, then she perked up, “They are coming!”

“Who?” I asked.

“Those women called the animal police, they are coming” said the voice in my head.

“What should we do?  I mean I can claim you, but I don’t trust them” I said; look down at the head in my lap.

“It is fine, I have delivered Lucy’s message to you and I can return to the woods, I will be safe, for now.”

I smiled, how I loved that character.

In the distance I could hear, then see the EPA truck coming up the path.  The coyote sat up, gave me a doggy kiss and ran into the woods.  She was free, and safe.

When the EPA truck got to me the officers got out and asked me about my ‘dog’. I told them that it must have been a stray and that a gentleman had come down the path shortly after the women had left and took it away.  They seemed annoyed that they had to have made the trip.  We talked for a bit and really, they were not bad guys, they did what they could for nature, but it was the laws, man’s attempts to save the world that interfere more than help.

After they left I just sat and thought about what had just happened and the message that I had been given.  I started back up the trail and looked, checked to the woods to each side to see if the coyote was there.  I think I caught a glimpse a couple of times, but maybe not.

I felt good, at peace, I am Coyote clan.

Krezz

There are a number of meteor showers, eclipses or passing comets that just beg to be watched.  Unfortunately, where I live there are not a lot of good viewing sites due to city lights and dust.  But that being said I have found over the years that when there is something extraordinary I could take a ride for about 2 ½ hours to either the Berkshires or out to Cape Cod and find a place to set up a cooler, a chair, my old 35 mm camera on a tripod for a long exposure and then just sit and watch.

The Persied meteor shower this year was one of those events.  It was claimed that it was going to be the most prolific display in decades in part because the moon was in the new stage of its cycle.

So I drove out to a place that I had remembered from my youth when the family stayed at the cape for the summer.  There was a little spot off of Scorton Creek that would meet the needs perfectl. The area was more and more built up despite the rumors of a building moratorium. My plan was to get squared away with my hotel, have a nice fried everything platter (*Captain’s Plate, or Seafood Platter) and get to the site for about 10 pm.

I rolled up to the creek at a little after 10, unloaded the car and set up my little observation post in the sand and was settled in by 10:30.  It was quiet, well sort of, there was the gentle sound of the waves rolling in but the tide was out and the waves were not all that big.

As I looked at the sky I thought about things, old things like the summers that were spent here in Sandwich.  I thought of the old flames that had burned bright, then cooled, Deb, Jo-Anne, Susan and a few others of the era. I tried to keep in touch with them after the summer was over to perhaps meeting them the next year. It was one of the interesting things about vacation weeks, so often the weeks were locked in the same cycle from year to year and the same folks were usually there each year.

I wondered what life might have been like had the distance not been so great or if I had been a different person back in the day. I remembered beach fires, and playing football on the sandbar.  It was a happy time, carefree youth, and escape from the routine of college and high school.

As I sat in thought I heard footsteps crunching in the sand.  I had seen a few other people set up like me with coolers and chairs so I did not think much of it.

“May we join you?” a voice asked.

“Sure, suit yourselves,” was my reply.

After a few minutes they, it was a male voice who had spoken, were settled in. Being so dark I could not make out features so I was not sure who had joined me, but I guessed it was a couple based on the whispers.

We sat quiet for a while, just the waves, I think they might be getting bigger because they seemed a little louder, but then it might have been the tide coming in.

“Did you ever wonder?” he asked.

“About what?”

“Well, what happened to them?”

I was a little confused, “What happened to who.” Or should it be whom.

“Whom, it should be whom, but them, the little green men.”

I turned to look at the speaker, it was dark but now I could see a little, one’s eyes do adjust, and saw that it was not the form of a human.  It was ……. they were……. All I could think of was a large version of the Geico gecko.

I waited for a minute and then said, “But I thought you knew.  I had a visit from KHriz, and HYlon, I told them that they were able to fix the engines and escape orbit, they were going home.”

“Ah, yes, and RRqil and I know that part, but what we wanted you to tell us was about our lives, what happened to us.” There was no anger in that voice, but then the QUalz were not an outwardly emotional species

“So you are Krezz.” I said.

A hiccupping sound followed, and after a bit it subsided, “I’m sorry, yes I am.  And RRqil and I are curious, what happened to us.  We bonded, but we never really found out how we fared in the end.”

I sat for a moment, stared into space, as a meteor streaked across the sky, and then I said, “You were important to the story while Tom and Asuna were on the ship and after, but in the books your characters sort of….well, you were on the ship and the ship was gone.”

A female voice joined in, “But we raised the young’ens, the clones. I think we did a good job, we prepared them to bring life back to your planet.”

“It was the least we could do after we failed you.  I was to blame, I was to fix it.” exclaimed the male, Krezz with both pride and sorrow in his voice

“Yes, you di fix it, and I think that part was told in the story.” I replied.

“True dat……is that how you would say it?” Krezz, the male said.

I smiled, “Close enough, you know what happened in the books so I am guessing what you really want to know is what happened to you both after the ship escaped and headed back home.”

“Yes please,” said the female.

I was at a loss and really had never thought about it, they did their part for the story and I left them hanging.  I had done that to other characters, left them incomplete or forgotten.

“I’m sorry, I guess in a way I abandoned you both, in fact all of the QUalzians.” I said, “I didn’t think about that when I did it.”

“It is okay,” said Krezz, “But can you get us to our end now?”

“Yes, I can do that for you.   I t may not be in print, but I will give you a sort of peace.” I replied.

I went on to tell them about how they were able to escape the eminent crashing into the sun by getting the engines fixed and restarted.  I told them that it was Krezz who had actually been the one responsible by leading the science and engineering crews that to the fix that saved them.

Once out of trouble it took them years to get back to their home, and in those years, generation upon generation of QUalz were hatched and went to sleep.  About a thousand or twelve hundred years into the trek back home KHriz and HYlon went to sleep.  And it was time for a new leader, a new top QUalz.

“Because of your saving the ship and all those on board you were made the new captain of the ship, the Sky Crystal,” I said.

At first the pair was silent, and then some hiccups, and finally a new funny sound, it was like ort sneezing, repeated sneezing.

“We are sorry, you have overcome us with emotion, forgive our tears, what is your term, crying, it is of joy.” said Krezz.

“Well, your ascension to command, it seemed the natural thing to do, although you were not the captain when the Sky Crystal finally made it home to QUalz. But it was your hatchlings or line of hatchlings that finally completed the journey.”

“What do you mean?” asked RRqil.

“The trip took almost eighteen thousand years, and you both lived to be in the five thousands.  It was your hatchling, TAsun and his hatchling KRqil that finally brought your ship home. KRqil was the first female to ever hold that position of captain,” I told them.

Again, hiccups and sneezes.

“You have honored us; you have made us very happy.  We like this ending for us.  You are a kind human, in ways like the Tom we knew. Perhaps you could tell the tale of TAsun and KRqil in one of your future writings.”

I was at a loss but managed to mutter a thank you.  Perhaps it would be a good story, perhaps an epic.

It was the gulls that woke me, screaming close by as the waves now were crashing in.  The tide had turned and was on its way back out.  I rubbed my eyes, and remembered the visit.  I looked at the sand around my chair, I had been alone.

The Shower

There were two places that many of ideas for my story would pop into my head.  The first was while I would be out walking at Bolton Notch.  I have mentioned that to you earlier on in this book.  While I would be walking my mind would be unfocused and things would just bubble up.  Seeds for a third of the stories came to mind as I walked along.  I am not sure which ones they were specifically but they popped up.

The other place was in the shower. I think of that now because I am in the shower.  I remember ideas would just kind of wash over me as I applied the soap, shampoo or shaved with warm water running down my back and….

“Shit would just came to yo mind?’ said a female voice laughingly.

I looked and there leaning against the sink was a black woman in military pants, military t-shirt, and short hair.  At first I was, well uncomfortable about my being naked.  Then I pushed it aside, this was a visitor, one of my book characters.

“Sergeant Brown,” I said.

“Yup, dat right Tom, and I got some questions for you.  See, I was elected to haunt you by a few of us from the Archive.  The ones dat you brought back from Cheyenne and Fort Knox,” she replied.

“Okay, I will try to answer them for you.” I told her, I guess I am getting used to this.

“Wait, is dat a warm shower or a cold shower?” she asked.

“Warm, why?”

“Damn, you know how long it been since I had a warm shower?  Imma join you?” she said as she pulled the t-shirt over her head.  Her breasts were kind of on the large size, but firm, firm enough that she did not wear a bra.  As she proceeded to strip down, she showed, displayed a body that was tight and muscled.  But then all the characters in the books except for Grace were pretty much free of extra body fat.

The glass door to the shower slid open and she stepped in.  As the warm water hit her there was an ‘AHHHH’ that escaped her lips.

I looked at her and said, “I am done, I can get out of your way.”

“No, is okay, we needs to talk and shit.  Can you hand me the soap?” came the reply.

I passed her the plastic bottle of Irish Spring.  As I looked at her I realized that she was not an unattractive woman.  I had kind of talked about her in the story but never really thought about her in an aesthetic sense.

“You checkin’ out my ass?” she said, then laughed, it was a kind of deep and delightful laugh.

“I, ah, well sort of, I never, in the book really got into what you looked like,” I replied.

“True dat, and now, you finished the painting, and I think you kind of like it,’ she said looking down at, well, let us just leave it at that and say that guys are guys.

“Ah, so er, what was it that you wanted to ask about, or tell me about the story,” I nervously tried to change the subject.

“Oh, Dat, well we were wondering what happened to us, was der special stuff dat happened?  I mean Gillie and Taylor did hook up, you killed off Mills, what an asshole he was.  McManus, he kind of became a father figure for Molly, but what about me.  What happened to me?”

I stood, thinking for a few minutes, what did I do with Sergeant Brown, Washa, her name was Washa.  And the answer was really not much.  I mean she had her role in the story, she was the information specialist regarding the Archive, but I never really followed up on that character.

“Washa, I’m sorry, but I never…..” I began.

“I know, and well, I guess I am here to ask you, if, maybe you could?”

“Complete your life?”

“Yeah, tell me what happened to me in the end.”  We were facing each other now, naked, in the shower, maybe it was just the water from the shower, or maybe tears, and then there was a sob. “I want to know.”

I put my arms around her, and hugged her, the warm wet body drew close.  “Yes, I can do that.”

But I knew that the options were very limited.  Most everyone was bonded with someone else and it wouldn’t be possible to bring in a new player.  Really there were only two options.  The first was that she just lived with the group, alone, helping out with Akiri and Augustus, kind of a babysitter / nanny for them.  The other was that somehow she and McManus would pair and be Molly’s parents or protectors.

“Well, I have a couple ideas on that, but let’s get out of the shower and we can sit and talk about it.”

“Sounds good” she replied.

I was relieved because I was thinking lustful thoughts, as Washa had already noticed. And with the hug and contact the level arose a little further.

We dried off and went into the bedroom, it was right off of the master bath. She went into my closet and borrowed a white button down collar shirt.  I slipped on a pair of boxers and we sat on the bed.  I laid back on the bed and she laid next to me.

“Well?” she said.

I thought to myself, I wish she would button that shirt up a little. Then snapped out of my thoughts, “Oh, yeah, what happened to you, well, let me ask you a couple of questions and then we can go from there.”

“Okay, shoot away.”

“Did you want to remain alone to the end of time? Or would you like a companion?”

“Gimme a companion”

“Alright, to start, ah, which side of the plate do you swing from?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Ah, do you go for men, or women?”

She smiled and placed her hand on the boxers.

I cleared my throat, “Okay.”

I sat for a minute or two and collected my thoughts then finally I began ‘the Tale of Washa at the End of Time’.  It was probably clichéd, and over simple but it would work.  As I began the tale she snuggled closer like a little girl hearing a bedtime story from her dad.

I told her that as time went on there were many pair bonds that developed in the group.  At one point she and Lance become very close and despite the 10 year age difference she had found him very ‘interesting’.  On a couple of occasions she tried to subtly initiate something.  But he did not seem to get it.  She even tried a little less subtly, tried by putting his hands on her breasts and laying a big old wet kiss on him.  But he was lost in Delaney and was a pretty straight-up guy, so well, he didn’t go for it.

She was torn by the rejection and yet respected him for his commitment to Delaney.  She briefly toyed with the idea that if Delaney was removed from the picture, perhaps an ‘accident’ then things could be different.  But like him, she had her morals too.

It was about a month after Tom was found at the bottom on the cliff that McManus had come to her.  It seems that Molly was entering an area that was outside his knowledge, girl, actually woman stuff and he needed help.  So Washa helped him and in doing so saw a side of McManus that few saw.  Bit by bit they spent more and more time together.  But it was Molly who really pushed it over the edge.

Molly had gotten sick, a flu or something and was running a fever.  Doc Barkley had checked her out and knew it was just a minor thing.  But both McManus and Washa were worried and watching over her.  Molly lived in the same room as McManus.  One night Molly in her fever referred to Washa as Momma.  And that was the start.  Then later that same night she begged ‘Momma’ to stay.

The room was small and Washa and McManus shared his bunk while Molly slept.

“Washa, are you ever lonely?” asked McManus.

“Wait, can you give him a name, I want a name for him,” said Washa excitedly.

“Ah name, ah, okay, well, how about Stanley?” I offered

“Stanley, are you shitting me, I want something dope.”

“Dope, well, how about Shane?”

“Shane……Shane, yeah, I like it.”

So as they were there on the cot, Shane asked, “Do you ever get lonely?”

“Yeah, not alone, that is different, but I do get lonely” she replied.

“Yeah, me too, I mean I have Molly to look out for, but ……..”

“There are moments in every relationship that for lack of a better term starts the fire.  That night, that moment they, Washa and Shane had found an ember and together they nursed it, fed it and very soon the flame burst out bright and warm.”

“I likes it!” squealed Washa.

I smiled and felt good.

“But wait, did we live happily ever after?” she asked.

“Yes, yes you did.”

“Good, and now I don’ts even want to know how we died as long as we were happy until the end.” She said.

“You both were” I added.

She scrunched over close to me and she kissed me on the cheek and said, “Thank you”, then settle back in with her head on my shoulder.

When I awoke a little later she was gone, the white shirt still hung in the closet.

Acorns

I was out walking the notch today, Bolton Notch, it was a crisp autumn afternoon and the sun was sending its rays through the leaves, the fall leaves as they turned colors.  It was kind of fun because about half of the maple leaves have already fallen and little the path.  I felt like a kid as I kicked through them.

Off to my right I saw a squirrel as it scurried thought the leaves stopping once and again to grab an acorn.  There were also oaks in the forest.  And as I watch him, I guess it was a ‘him’, I thought about the little nuts that he picked up to nibble on, or hide away.

As I walked, I heard another set of footfalls moving behind me and catching me.  I did not think much of it at first, I just moved to the side of the trail to let the walker pass.

“One of the things that has happened since the end of society as we knew it is that we no longer had the standard grocery stores or places to just go and pick up a few things for dinner.  It was a case of scavenging and living off of what we could find out on the road (literally) or the canned good that we came upon.” It was Nick, alive, robust and doing well.  He was exactly as I had pictured him in the book, my heights and although we were only a year apart in age he seemed older.  I think it was the grey ponytail that looked so odd with top of his head that was bald.

I felt good about it, his visit, I always hated killing his character off in the story, but it was needed.

“So why did you take on the cooking duties?” I asked

“Well, it just seemed to fit me; after all, I was always the one who had the innovative cooking ideas for the holidays, and special picnics.” he chuckled.

He went on to say that for whatever reason he had taken the task of feeding our group, that we all had things we were good at.  He said that he saw this as a task he liked.  It was challenging to feed the 20 people each day using the goods we have found, grown, or killed.

He told me that he had wanted to help anyone who found our camp, if things went wrong that he had put together a little recipe book that could keep them alive and help take some pretty bad sounding combinations of ingredients and make them presentable. He said he set the portions for 4-6 servings because it is easy to expand the quantities to feed, 10 or 20 by doubling (and doubling again) the ingredients.

“One of the things that we have to remember is that we are or had been used to the nice civilized foods like beef, and pork and chicken.” He told me. “Now we are looking at deer, possum, and even skunk, almost any form of protein that we could come upon or gather.  Some of these concoctions may seem unappealing, but in starvation mode, they will get you through the thin, sorry, bad pun time.”

He continued on that most of all, for survival, one shouldn’t be afraid to try some things, but to trust your nose and your feelings; there is some stuff out there that is bad (spoiled) or down right poisonous.  For that he had raided the local bookstore for some field guide type books.

As we crunched along, we talked about some of the meals that he was able to put together, the way he creatively put together a wedding spread, a buffet, the holiday picnics and meals using what we had found in store and in the forest. He admitted that the store found foods were easy, although he did have to work on stretching the mixes a little.  We tended to use less of certain things, canned meats for example.

“Remember when your dad used to tell you about how your grandparents would have a Sunday dinner for 6 and use a single can of Spam as the meat source.  It was more potatoes, rice and vegetables back then,” he reminded me.

“Yeah that is true, I remember, and ironically I could down a can of Spam myself sometimes,” I replied with a sheepish grin.

We walked along in silence for a little bit.  A squirrel with an acorn ran across the path ahead of us.

“That for example became an important part of our meals,” he said pointing at the squirrel.

“What, what?  I know we eat them once in a while, but I don’t remember the squirrel being written in the dinners that much, it was mostly rabbits that Margo and Delany brought back for us.”

“No, not the squirrel, I was talking about the acorns.” He replied.

“Ah, yeah, I remember that, it is funny I never thought of them as food, people food, and then I was doing a little research for the book and found out different.  In fact, there were a lot of food out there that we could eat.  But we have become too civilized to exploit it.”

“Well, you gave me the chance to explore that, and I still want you to put that cookbook together that you have talked about.  I think it could be fun to research, but more, when it happens, you, and those who have read it will be better prepared.”

“Nick?  What do you mean when it happens?”  I asked.

He looked over at me and just smiled.

I found the thought troubling but try as I might I could not get any more out of him. After a few more attempts I gave up and we walked along, it was almost time for me to turn around, I could see the bench that told me I had walked half the route.  I usually did an hour, 3o minutes out, 30 minutes back.

As we started back he asked me why I had killed Lauren off, his wife so easily.  I explained that I was always bothered by that.  It was really the first one of our group that I killed off.  And even though it was not a ‘real’ person each and every character becomes part of a family, part of my world and removing them from the story was hard, some harder than others.

“I can understand, I think one of the hardest for you had to be Anne,” he said

“Yeah, that was.  But each character had their part to play in the story and their demise, death was important.”

“I was glad you let Grace and I go together so that we did not have to suffer the loss of each other,”

“Yeah,” was all I could say, this topic was actually kind of unpleasant.

“And I loved the change of Sword Master, having Lance release me from the inevitable and stepping up, that was kind of cool!”

I grunted, remembering how hard it was to write that segment.

We walked on in silence for a few minutes, I was deep in thought about the deaths, and killings, was it necessary?  I knew they were, but still, did I overdo it?

Ding, Ding, a bicycle bell rang behind me and there was a shout of “On your right”.  I moved to the left, and the cyclist passed by.  I knew that Nick was gone, he had said his piece, made his peace and was on his way.

“I will make that cookbook, I promise, I will do my part for whatever is to come. I said aloud as I crunched through the leaves.

A squirrel raced across the path, acorn in its mouth.

Revisited

Coffee?  Why do I smell coffee brewing?  I mean I when I was still working I used to set up my Keurig to have the coffee ready when I would get up in the morning, but I have been retired for over 6 years.  Wait, not just coffee, but bacon too…..WTF.

I checked the alarm clock 5:24.  This is way too early to get up, but I have to know what is going on, why am I smelling this, breakfast?  I threw on a robe and stumbled toward the kitchen.   As a walked in the lights were on, the smells were wonderful and there was Asuna!

“Good morning, it’s about time sleepy head,” She smiled.

I grunted and stood, staring in a state of surprise.

“So, I think a coffee will get you going,” as she walked over handing me a coffee, black, in my favorite mug.  “Come, sit down, let’s eat and talk.”

As I sat, she placed a plate of eggs, over easy, bacon and rye toast in front of me.  Then she sat down on the other side of the table, she also had a coffee and a plate of eggs, her eggs were scrambled.

I sipped the coffee and stared at her, my waifu, the 2D girl I created.  Wait, I guess I should explain ‘waifu’.  A waifu is a sort of imaginary girlfriend, generally created by a teenaged Japanese male.  It is a character in the art form of manga or anime. But the waifu, unlike just an imaginary friend is held in high respect, not just a fantasy girl that you would have sex fantasies over. No, she is much more than that. In the case of Asuna, I created her for the book character, but there is a personal connection with her. Yeah, I guess I am kind of a teenage male at heart.

As I stared at her, finally she blushed a little and said, “What?”

“Why are you here?”

“Ah, oh that, well, I, we have been following the new book, kind of a silly name, Book 4, but the content is good so far,  We like where you are going, but you are not doing so well on the deadlines.  I thought you wanted to be done by September, then October, now you are talking November.  What is going on?”

I looked at her, it was almost like having a breakfast conversation with your wife, and “I think that September date was a little over optimistic.  October, well there was a lot of days working at my part time flagging gig out at the race track.  I still think I can make November, but…..”

“But what?” she said, giving me an intense stare.

I kind of mumbled, “writer’s block.”

“Are you kidding me?  She burst laughing.  “You have written a trilogy, 1500 pages, and another 100 in this book and you’re whining about writer’s block?”

I stared down at my coffee, I felt stupid.

She stopped laughing and stared at me, then said, “I’m sorry, but you’ve done a great job, and are almost there, you almost have this done.”

“I know, but I, I have done the easy ones.” I stammered.

She smiled at me, and said simply “you know where you are going, but let me share some thoughts, some of us have been talking.  There were, are a couple of characters that need to be worked on,”

“Like who?”

“Well, you could start with Jimmy, the kid in the mine, or Gary before he was Brother Gabriel, and what about Michelle’s story.  You know there are things, stories out there that you can and need to do.”

I stared at her, she was a beautiful woman, and I know why Tom loved her.  Or was that I created her, my waifu, I am not sure.

I awoke a second time to Ning head butting me, she was hungry, but this time, it was not coffee I smelled, but cat poop.  I walked out to the kitchen, it was dark, cold and empty.  I turned on the Keurig, and went into my writing area and turned on my computer.  Once again she has stepped up, my muse came through for me.  I can do this.

But first, vanilla hazelnut or Jamaica me crazy, which coffee to have.  Then to the keyboard, I have a course again.

A Visit to DMV

It is no fun.  I am here because DMV messed up on my VIN# on the Harley and now I have to correct it to sell it.  I hate this place, it is always such a waste of time.  You come in, get a number and sit, and wait, and sit some more.  The people waiting are loud, and annoying.  I drew my number, D 74, and then look at the monitors, the good news is that the D series is in the 40s, the bad news is that there are also the A, B, and C series and their gaps are even bigger which means that the numbers, the lines, are long and with typical state run efficiency, slow moving. I thought I was being smart. I decided to use the Enfield office rather than Wethersfield thinking the lines would be shorter.  They may have been, but the ones here were pretty long.

I don’t know why, boredom perhaps, but I began to watch one of the lines and the DMV clerk.  I guess him to be in his 40s, tall and thin with a dour look that was magnified with his squinty eyes and old style black glasses.

I am sure that he didn’t know it but he put on a display that unfortunately strengthened the stereotype of DMV workers everywhere.  He was rude, condescending, and abrasive.  He hated his job, you could tell. Of course, my kinder gentler thinking made me think that he was just having a bad day.  But in my heart and mind, no it was not the case.

I looked up, ah, we have hit D-50, and the line was moving.  Then a thought hit me, what if I get that guy, what if he is my ‘DMV Savior’.  Then, a ray of hope, he was being replaced, a new worker, this could be good, maybe.

I had watched enough and settled in to the book I was reading on my iPad.  It was a book on writing.  I figure that if I am doing this writing thing I should probably work to be good at it.

I felt my chair move as the seat next to me was taken.  The person plopped into the chair with a heavy sigh.  As he sat there I could hear his heavy breathing. There was a bit of a wheezing to it.

“I hated these people, all of them, every last one,” he muttered, I think out loud, to himself.  “I needed to make them learn, to heed the words, to heed me.”

That caught my attention and I turned to look at him.  I caught my breath for a second.  It was the worker, the DMV guy. He did not have his glasses and without them he seemed to look younger, almost baby faced.  He was just staring at the lines, at his work station, talking to himself.

He ranted on, “When the plague came, I was blessed and I made them bow down to me or they paid.”

I watched him for a minute, the spittle coming from his mouth as he ranted.  I looked down at my iPad, and then back at him.  But he was different now, well, dressed different.  He was in a robe, a purple robe.  He seemed to be sitting straighter, taller now, before he was a hunched beaten man.  Now, there was an air about it, a swagger.  As he turned toward me his eyes, there was a fire in his eyes.

“May I help you my son?” he asked.

“No, no, I am good.  I was, I could not help but overhear you talking a minute ago and you spoke of a plague.”

“Yes, there was be a plaque, a meteor fell and I became a savior of all these low life scum.  It was I who raised an army of my selected few and brought peace and a new order to the world, for a while.”

If I had not seen this guy in his original DMV form I would have just dismissed him as a nut case but there was something else going on here.

“D-52” came an announcement on the PA system.  I looked up and then back at the robe guy.  He was back to being the DMV guy, wheezing away, and twitching.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

The voice was different, not the authoritarian voice of the purple robe, it was the abrasive tone of the worker.

“Yes, and why do you care?  No one cares, ‘just give me number plate and get a move at it, I ain’t got all day.  No, I don’t have an insurance card!’ all day long.” He sputtered.

Okay, guess it is more than just a bad day today I thought to myself.

“You ever wonder how I got to where I did in your story. I guess I can tell you, this was kind of the start.”  The voice, and the speaker was purple robe man.  “I put up with it for years, 23 years, 4 months and 12 days.  I was less than two years from retirement, and then I could be free of them, the state, the union, the governor and most of all the people that walked through the door each day.”

“Ah Huh,” what else could I say.

“And then you gave me an out, you freed me, you gave us the plague.”

“I, what?”

“You made me, you killed me, nice touch by the way, the little angel thing.  I liked that.” He said.  “But you never really told the story of how Gary Tuttle, DMV clerk 1st Class, got to be Brother Gabriel, the Pure.” He said, staring at me with an intensity that was almost scary.

“No, I didn’t, I never thought much about that aspect of it.”

“Well, let me run the course for you then.” He almost shouted, he was in preacher voice now, a fire and brimstone mode.

He began with how he had been working the day that the meteor fell.  It had at first only been a passing news story about breaking glass and lots of noise over Russia.  A day or two the die off started and when it got to the US the DMV told its employees to take a few days off, made them furlough days, which had already been agreed to in their last contract.  But he said he saw more to this, God came to him, told him and instructed him.

“God spoke to you?” I asked.

“Yes, he did, he told me what was going to happen, that the people would die, and comeback.  He told me in a dream.  And he told me what my part in the future would be.”

“I see,” I was a little surprised by this.

He went on and told how he began by moving, by heading out toward the Berkshires.  He somehow knew that the cities, Hartford, Springfield, the close ones would be burned.

“It was God’s will that they be smitten with fire, the sinners, the lechers and lepers, all burned.  I was to move on, to build God’s army, and find the Promised Land the place where his will and works could start over.”

I listened as he detailed his further movements.  He moved through the Springfield area and on to Route 20.  It was in Westfield that he met his first couple of recruits.  Armand and Grace, they were lost, walking together, fretting, afraid.  He spoke with them.

“Brother, sister, be not afraid, the Lord will watch over you, and be with you.  I am his representative, his redeemer, I am Gabriel.”

And they followed him, his energy seemed to bind them.  As they moved on Route 20, more and more joined him.

“My number was thirty and nine as we neared Hinsdale.  Along the way we had some that were not with the Lord, our God and had to be left behind, given to the sinful so that the rest of us could move on,” he told me.

He went on to say that there was one, Brandon, an almost likeable guy, but he had a sin, a sin that I, I mean God could not accept.  He was one who would lay down with other men. We were near Becket when we ran into a group of sinful.  We tried to get through them, but in the end there were many and even though we ran the best we could they were catching us.  It was Brandon who was sacrificed to them, he was not God material. I smashed his leg with my staff, it crippled him and made him scream.  The sinful fell on him, and we were able to get away.

“If you knew he was not going to fit in why didn’t you just kick him out?” I asked.

“For just the reason I used him for.  He was expendable,” was his answer.

As I looked at the smug smile on his face I thought, it sounds like Nate and Barry.  I wonder how many other leaders had done the same, kept people who really were not going to cut it, and then, sacrificed them.  It was cruel in a way, make them feel part of something when all along you had different ideas, they were a Plan B when the shit hit the fan.

We sat quiet for a minute or two, I almost felt like Brother Gabriel was reliving the moment. Then he snapped back.

“So where was I?  Oh yes, almost to Hinsdale.”

He said that as they reached the town there were a number of people that were already there, and a couple of the town fathers were still running the place.  They loved the idea of some more people because they had supplies, but there were not that many of the townsfolk to keep things going.  Then the army showed up.  That Colonel, he suddenly was going to be in charge and it was his way or no way.

Gabriel went on that the ‘townies’ were kind of okay with it.  But he had some other ideas.  He said he saw the military as a ‘Roman’ army, Caesar’s occupation of his Holy Land.  They were going to persecute him and his people.  He had to stop them, they were not men of his God.

As I listened I realized that although he turned into a monster over time he was a believer in his cause, his God.

“But you killed people, you tortured and killed people!” I said.

“No, no, I didn’t, we didn’t, we struck down the unworthy, we removed the unbelievers, the tools of the Devil.  That was our task, the Lord, My God gave us that task, and the resolve to do it,” was his reply.

I sat for a moment and thought about this on two levels.  As a writer it was good, it added to the story and really made for some good drama.  But I also thought about it from the humanitarian side and that was kind of troubling.  But then, when you are at the end of the world, I guess you have to play hardball.

“The path of the Lord is not an easy one and we heap vengeance on those who do not follow his ways.”

“But you killed innocent people! You locked them in rail cars and they died!”  I was a little louder than I thought and I had a couple people nearby look at me.

“Innocent people?  No, they did not accept me, or the Lord God.  To do that was a mortal sin, so they received their judgement and just punishments.”

Clearly this person, this monster was unhinged.  As I sat I thought about how it was right to kill him off.

“Yes, you made me a martyr for my cause, for my God.  For that I thank you.  I would have killed the Tom character, if the girl, the little angel had not gotten me first.  And really, in the end, I think I would have over time sent all my group to the railcars.  I saw after my death how they turned on me.  The Lord God would have found them to be false followers and their fate would have been sealed.”

I wished he would go away, he was making me nervous, making my skin crawl. Although it may have been unwise I closed my eyes.

“Number 74, Number 74, D-74, you’re up at station 3.”

I opened my eyes with a start and a snort. I was up, and it was my turn.  I walked toward station 3, and……..Gary Tuttle, the sour faced scarecrow.  I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, I knew it would not go well.  One has to love DMV.

Doc Barkley

As I came out of the gentle grip of the anesthesia, I felt pretty good.  It wasn’t the stuff they used to use that left you with a good buzz, this was more just a relaxed tranquility.  I also did not feel really any discomfort where whatever incisions were made to remove my gall bladder were supposed to be.  That was a good thing because that meant that they were able to do the procedure laparoscopically and did not have to split me stem to sternum.

As I lay back just enjoying the moment, I thought about how quiet it was in the recovery room and chuckled.  I remembered having colonoscopies and the calliope of escaping gas from my fellow patients.  Yeah, me too, it was dueling farts.

The screen that surrounded my bed drew back and a doctor walked in.  I know it wasn’t the surgeon, which was Doctor Raymond, this was someone else.  A tall square shouldered gentleman with gray hair.  He looked familiar, but then when I was a copper I visited the ER many times, so I could have remembered him from there.

“So how did it go?” he asked as he peered at my chart, “Any pain?”

“Nope, I am good, comfortably numb if you will,” quoting a little Pink Floyd.

“Excellent, and I understand that all went well with the surgery, so that is good,” he said with a smile.

I closed my eyes, tired, I was kind of tired.

“Did you ever wonder why so many of the people at the Archive died of cancer?” A voice drifted into my semi sleepy state.

My eyes flew open, the doctor, I looked at his name badge but without my glasses I could not quite make it out.

“You did think about that as you wrote, didn’t you?” he said.

“I, ah, er……no, I don’t think so,” my head was buzzing, I think it was the meds.

“Why not?” came his reply.

“I never considered it important.  We were all gonna die at some point, and it was an easy out I guess.  I mean some of the characters were addressed, and left the story with ways other than the big C.”

“True, and there was a point where you started down the cancer road with the whole radiation thing, the power plant leaks and all.  By the way that was nicely done in getting that resolved.  But you forgot a factor that would have made a difference.”

“I did?” I mumbled, still comfortably numb but now fighting to stay awake and alert.

The Doctor, the voice explained that there were two factors, actually three involved.  The radiation leaks from the power plants played a part, which explained why Matt and Tanya were able to survive cancer free when they went west.

But also there was the Carrington Event.  When that occurred it stripped away some of the ozone layer that protected us from radiation.  It was not a lot of damage, in the end probably no more than out aerosol usage in the 70s. But that Carrington thing was only the frosting on the cake.

The cake was the human activity part of it that took place when the military, or government or whomever implemented the plan to nuke the cities. It had been long discussed or theorized what the impact of 100 nukes would do to the atmosphere.  And there were a lot more than 100 set off.  It not only put a lot of crap in the air which caused some global cooling but also cause decay to the ozone layer.

“You’re not real!” I said.

“Well, I am and I am not.  I am a real character, Major Barkley, but I am a fictional character and here to visit you, to help you clear up some of the open spots in your stories.”

I grunted.

“That radiation thing bothered some of your readers and some of the other characters.  And in the end, it was key to the death of a few, Tom being the most prevalent one,” he added.

I lay there for a moment letting it seep in, then I tried to sit up a little, and although I had not been opened up a lot for the surgery it was uncomfortable.

“I see,”  I mumbled, then asked, “were you happy with the way you and ah…..”

“Charlene, I was Charlene,” I had not noticed the nurse who had joined us behind the curtain.

“Were you both happy with how it ended for you?” I asked.

He chuckled, “You never went into a lot of detail on that, we just kind of blended in with the rest of the slow decline of the group at the archive.  But we were both good with that.  We had a nice life together, and in the end, slipped away, peacefully.”

“Good, good,” I closed my eyes for a second or two, a long blink.

I heard the curtain slide back a little and a new voice joined us, no joined me.  There was the recovery room nurse,

“So how are you doing?” she asked as she began taking my blood pressure.

I knew better than to ask if she had seen the pair who had just visited me.  I have been here before.

As she did her thing, Doctor Raymond, my surgeon came in.  He told me that I was doing well and that the operation was a success.

“I think you will be fine with pain by tomorrow but I am going to give you a few extra pills for it just in case,” he told me.

I thanked him as he turned to leave, then he turned back around toward me.  “Who was Doc Barkley?” he asked.

“Why?  Why do you ask that?”

“Well, as you were going under for the operation you said ‘Doc Barkley says not to fuck this up.”  Raymond replied.

I smiled, “Oh, a friend, just a friend.”  These characters, these creations of mine are with me, always.

A Guilty Pleasure

I will admit it, I am a glutton.  I have this guilty pleasure a couple of times a month where I go ‘troughin’, a trip to the Hometown Buffet.  Yeah, I know, sneeze guards, and the food is not certainly in gourmet class, but it is tasty, sodium and fat filled.  And I like the selection, the meatloaf and pot roast are my favorite.

I usually go just after the lunch hour because then I get my senior discount and I always enjoy the visits because along with the food there is generally entertainment with the meal in watching my fellow diners.

Today there was a herd of buses at the restaurant.  It is the midway stop for the run from Boston to New York and those motor coaches are usually filled with Asians.  Today the place was packed and the chatter was lively, although not in English.  But the line to pay was not long and I was able to find a booth in a far corner.

As I settled in with my plate of assorted salads, I noticed that the usual senior crowd was not there.  I think they have figured out the bus routine and will show up a little later.

As I sat lost in thought while playing with my iPad, someone walked up to the table.  I didn’t look up from my ‘Words with Friend’s game at first, I figured it was one of the waitresses.

“Hi, I am sorry to bother you,” she said, “but there are no seats left, with all the bus people, would you mind if…..”

I looked up, wow, skin tight jeans and white T-shirt.

“ah, no, please, sit down.”

“Thank you,”

She slid onto the seat across from me.  I am not going to go into the guy thoughts I had as I checked her out other than to say I worked my way up from the table. But it was her face, and her eyes that caught me.  She was pretty, a kind of country western looking girl with a cute smile, slightly crooked nose and brown eyes.  I always like brown eyes with blond hair, long blond hair.

It was those eyes, they were striking, and yet there was a touch of sadness behind them.  She seemed like she had seen stuff, sorrow, pain, and it was sitting there, in her eyes.

“I’m Tom,” sounds dorky but what else do you say.  I mean I could have said something witty, or stupid like ‘do you come here often’ but decided to just let witty drop.

“I know,” she said with a faint smile, “You write.”

I looked at her, was she real or was I ……

“I am Michelle, Stumpy’s friend, girl-friend.”

I stared.

“I just wanted to pop in and give you a little more insight it me.  You painted it me, but you didn’t paint me all the way, the before The Event.” She said as she looked down at her plate.  It was her salad course too.

“I, ah, what can I say.  Your character had some good action, but in the end….’

“No, it’s okay, I liked what you did, Mark, Stumpy and I got a good deal and I was happier with him than I had ever been in my life, my so called life.” She smiled at me as she spoke.  “I was a pretty tragic character until then.”

She started to unwind the ball of yard that had been her life telling me how at an early age her single mom had raised her.  It was not a good childhood with a string of ‘Dads’ coming through the little apartment they had in East Hartford.  Her mom was basically what one would have called a ‘crack whore’.  But she did protect Michelle from it, ‘whoredom’, the best she could.

Michelle told me that basically she was on her own from like age 13 on, she lived in the apartment, but she was the mother taking care of Angie, her real mom.  It had been terrible, the drunken nights with Angie puking away while Michelle held back her hair.  Holding her as Angie cried about the terrible life she had after beatings by the drunk guys she would bring home, or would move in after their stays in prison.

“It made me strong, I loved my mother, but hated where she was, what she had become,” Michelle whispered, choking back a sob.  “She died when I was 17, her liver, it was gone, it was terrible to watch, to live through, but she finally had peace.”

Michelle looked up at me, I could see the sorrow in those eyes and now I began to understand what that sorrow was.

She told me that after Angie died it was hard, she had no one, she stayed with friends, or slept in hallways or any shelter she could find.  Somehow she became friends with Kelsey, a girl who worked at the local Hooters in Manchester.  Kelsey was a good person, and had also lived a struggle too, the hell that Michelle was going through.  She helped Michelle, got her cleaned up, showered and such.

“I never took drugs or drank to escape, I saw what it did to my mom.  I promised her when she was lying there in the hospital, near the end that I wouldn’t do it,” then she chuckled, “I did get hooked on Manga.  I would spend time in the library or the bookstores just reading those silly Japanese graphics novels. I wanted to be one of those characters so badly.”

She went on and told me that Kelsey got her a job at Hooters and it went well.  She was not rich, but she did pretty well.  She and Kelsey roomed together and it was good, all good.

“Kels got a man, he was a good guy and he took her away from all that and suddenly I was alone, again.  But it was okay, I had the apartment, it was a little tight money wise, but I was almost making it, the rent and the guys at the restaurant made sure I had enough to eat,” she said, staring off into space.

She said that over time her love of Manga, and waifu and cosplay led her to a place that at first she was happy about, but over time led to some sorrow.

She told me that it began when one of the customers at Hooters suggested that with her looks and body she would make a great dancer, exotic dance.  At first she said that it embarrassed her and made her feel uncomfortable.  But then she thought more about it, and somehow decided that maybe she could do it if she made herself one of the many manga characters that she found so strong and appealing.

So one night, she ended up going to one of the strip clubs, an amateur audition night dressed in a cosplay outfit to give it a try.  It was a small club, with only one girl dancing at a time.

“I was scared shitless and almost backed out, but then, I stepped on stage.  I had a typical kind of Sailor Moon, school girl outfit on and had done my hair to match the look, little puffy buns on the side.”

She sat for a minute, still staring off into space.

“I became that character, I was not Michelle anymore, I was someone else, something else, and it was okay.”

I just listened, and yea, I visualized in my mind.

“When I got back to my apartment that night, I found that I had made almost as much money dancing as I had working at the restaurant for a week.”  She looked at me and smiled, but it was a sad smile.

She said that over the next few years she danced a couple or three nights a week.  It was fun at first but then it got different.  The guys were all the same, wanted her, propositioned her, tried to do things to her, and she came to hate it.  But the money, it was hard to walk away from the money.

She went on saying that she had worked her way up to the top club in the area. She was at “The Blue” three nights a week and making $1000 to $1500 a week.  It was not all straight stage dancing, there were some private dances for like stag parties and lap dances involved, but she did not do ‘tricks’ even though the owners wanted her to.

There was one of the guys, the manager, Tony, who was always after her.  He had the hots for her wicked but she was able to fend him off.   He was a biker guy, fat, bearded, disgusting looking and he would hit on her, but never took it to the next level, never tried to force it. And really, he was a nice guy under that hair and fat.

When the meteor hit she said that things changed.  As the world began to fold up Tony and his crew, the other bikers, saw the situation and decided it was a good idea to get out of Dodge.  So one night, a couple of days before the army blew up the cities they all took off toward the Berkshires.  The original plan was to get to upstate NY, which was where Tony was originally from, farm country.

“It was all going well but then Fury, he was like the number two guy in the club, he and Tony had a falling out.  Tony saw the handwriting on the wall and he actually helped me get away, he and I took a ride one day and ended up near Hinsdale.  He stopped and told me to run, to go and hide in the city. That was where I ended up in the group that was run by Brother Gabriel.”

I knew the rest, which was what I wrote about, how Fury and the biker gang played, attacked Hinsdale and came for Tom and his people at Romanica.  How she was rescued from the Hummer and met Mark.

“Mark, oh, he was wonderful, so wonderful, I never met someone like him before.  He was kind, and patient.” She said, smiling, but this time there was no sorrow in those eyes, it was happiness.

“We spent time together, and it was ….. I remember the first time, it was one of those moments, I think we both felt it was time but he was so shy about it.  I was the one who forced the issue.” She was blushing as she spoke. “I felt like one of my manga heroes who found true love, and we had.  It was wonderful, Thank you.”

I stared at her, I had done nothing, I did not really talk all that much about the romance of these two characters in the stories, and yet, she filled this in, not me.  How can this be?  It is almost as if the characters are taking on real lives of their own, they are alive.

“I need to get some carrot cake it is almost as good as the ones that Mark used to make.” She said as she slid out of the booth and walked toward the dessert bar.

“Great jeans!” I thought.

She never returned to the table.

Molly

A beautiful fall day, the sun was out, it was kind of warm for mid-October.  I felt the need to get out with the camera and do some photos of the Notch, all aglow with the colors, the golds, yellows and reds on the maples and birches along the path.

When I actually got there it was a little brisk, but not bad.  I had a specific area that I wanted to visit.  It is a slight downhill in the bike path where there is a slow gentle curve that should be just perfect for the photos I wanted to take.

I started down the path to the right and as I neared the tunnel that ran under the interstate I saw the graffiti on the concrete walls.  It was they typical stuff, I love ….insert male or female name, 9/11 conspiracy stuff and a couple of gang related messages declaring boundaries. I just strolled by them, it was cool in the tunnel and the sooner I could get out and back into the sun the better.  But one, there was one bit of spray paint that really caught my eye and I stopped to stare at it.  It was a ‘bio-hazard symbol painted in red.  I stared at it thinking about the concrete wall in the archive that hid a danger, something that General DeSoto desperately wanted.

“Is doggy here Mister Tom?” said a small female voice just behind me.

I jumped, I hadn’t heard anyone come up on me.

“I’m sorry Mister Tom,” came the voice as I turned around.

It was a girl, a young women, she was about 18 I think, but small, fragile, with blond hair. I knew after some of the other visits I have had who it was.

“Molly?”  I said.

She smiled, a wide grin, happy that I recognized her.

“Yes, Hi,” she said almost shyly. “Is Lucy with you? I know she was here the other day.”

“No, no she isn’t,” I answered.

Molly, wow, now that was a character that I had used in the trilogy that really did not get as much development as I would have, could have written about.  I think the idea of her special power, the seeing things came through, and her almost childlike qualities.  But there was never any explanation of her. she was kind of an enigma.

“It is okay, I will visit with her later.  She is close by.”

“Molly, I…” I began

“You needed me in the story, which is why you made me.  I was a sort of bridge, a character that moved the story along,” she said, but the voice, it was different, it was that of a mature, normal woman of the age or even older than the form that was standing before me.

“I did, you’re right. But then I never filled you in, I only drew the outline and never filled in the colors.”

Again the mature voice, “and how would you have done that.  There really wasn’t all that much to fill in.  I was a special ED kid with the sight.”

“Yeah, but how did you get through the initial onslaught, the early days?” I asked…I had not really thought about it before.

It was the child voice again. “Oh, silly, that was easy, I just saw stuff coming and knew where to be safe. Daphne and Maria took care of me, and I kept them safe too.”

“But you all were captured, all held hostage.”

She laughed, a delightful little girl laugh, “But I knew Tom and Asuna were coming to save us.”

“I see,” I muttered more to myself than out loud.

“And in the end I knew we would be safe and happy. And, and I would have a doggy!”  She smiled.

I stared at her.  Amazing…she was amazing.  As complex a character she might have been, she was actually pretty plain and simple.

“So do you have any questions for me?”  It was the mature voice, the woman’s voice.

I stood for a second and thought.  “Yeah, I do.  Did your life go well, was it a good life?”

She smiled kindly, again in the adult voice, “Yes it was all that I ever wanted.  Even for be a retard, it was good.”

The use of the term ‘retard’ caught me off guard.

The little girl was back, “Mommy and Daddy were wonderful to me.  After we moved to the archive I finally got some.  I never had a mommy or daddy before that, I was put in a hospital and no one ever came back for me.”  There was a moment of sadness in her eyes and then they brightened.  “But Mommy Washa and Papa Shane were so good to me, and each other.”

“But I never put that in the book!”

“It is in the one you are writing now, we know, we see, we watch over your shoulder.  And Asuna sends one of us from time to time to help you with the story.”  It was woman voice.

“I ah, yeah, I guess you would see that.” I replied.

“So I know the other question that you have,” and this was weird, the sentence began in the woman voice and change to Molly voice.

“Oh?”

“Yep, you want to know what was behind the wall,” she giggled.

“I, ah, yeah, I had some ideas but never decided.”

“Okay, well what were the ideas and I will tell you if you’re right.”

“So we are going to play a kind of 20 questions?”  I asked

“Yeah” she shouted with glee.

“My first thought when I wrote the book and the way it pointed was that there was a kind of gas or illness behind the wall.  Was that it? I asked.

“NOPE, wrong, you’re cold, ice cold!”

“Okay, then my thought was that there was bomb or something like that back there.”

“Oh, you are still cold…..” she was wiggling with excitement as she answered.

“Well, you did say that there was death behind the wall and that we should not open it up.” I told her.

“Yes, I did say that, and it was true.”

“Well, I am at a loss, was it not human?” I asked her.

“You’re getting a little warmer” she said.

“Okay, was it one of the little alien guys, the QUalz?”

“Still kind of warm, but colder.”

“Some piece of UFO stuff, Area 51, a space ship.” I asked, I was getting frustrated.

“You mean like one of the little pod ships that KHriz or the clones used?”

“Yes, yes, one of those.”  I thought I had her.

“Nope, good try, but nope.”

“Damn! oops, sorry.”

“Give up?”

“Uh, yeah, I can’t think of nothing else.”

“Oh, you got it! I knew you would!” she shouted with peals of laughter.

“Wait, what, I got it, but I said I had no other guesses.”

“No silly, you said you could think of nothing else.”

“Yeah, but I……wait, you mean there was nothing back there?” I asked, sounding a little confused.

“It was nothing, there was nothing back there, and it was just a wall put up at the end of the tunnel.” She said with smile.

“But you said there was death beyond the wall.”

“I did, there were spidees…..I am scared of big hairy spidees and they kill things.” She proclaimed with a shiver.

I stared at her, incredulously, “Spidees……really, that was it?” I broke out laughing and after a minute or so.  “So I am going for a walk, want to join me?”

“Yes, but doggy will be here soon I will run with her when she gets here.”

We turned and started walking toward the east end of the tunnel and when we had gone a quarter mile or so beyond the opening I saw Lucy, standing a short way ahead in the middle of the bike path.  We stopped.

“Doggy!” she squealed and ran toward the coyote.

When she reached her she give her a hug and then the pair raced off down the path away from me. She turned and waved at me. I knew I would see her again.

I stood for a few minutes thinking about what had just happened.  I hate to say it, but I really like these visits.  Asuna is sending them to me?

In a way, they scare me, am I okay?  The night dreams are okay, or nodding out during the day to have them, but these daydreams……….

Slugs and Drugs

As I was driving along listening to the Sirius Radio, the song “Something in the Air’ by Thunderclap Newman came on.  It made me think that with the contentious elections between two inept and unqualified candidates on the horizon and rapidly closing in the potential for violence and even revolution is definitely in the air.

I think that it is a motivator for me to make a trip to a local gun shop to stock up on ammunition. I am beginning to believe that I will see a variation of The Event, which it will not be a meteor or a virus that brings about the end of society, and maybe it will just happen by our own hand.

As I drove on I thought about that.  It is scary, what would I do if the ‘revolution’ or ‘civil war’ did erupt.  As I did, another song from my youth came on the radio, ‘Monster’ by Steppenwolf.  A musical perspective from the tumultuous 70s that has meaning today, perhaps even more than ever with current events.

I think that the Trilogy could certainly be a guideline, get out of the area, find someplace isolated, and keep one’s head down would be the order of the day.

“Bullets, that would the coin of the realm,” a raspy voice said from the back seat. “Bullets, medicine, and gold’

I looked in the mirror, a toothless old man was there, unshaven, with his dingy white shirt was partially burned and as wrinkled as the lines on his face, a face that was half covered with third degree burns.

“You’re on target with the bullets, those will be important, as many as you can get.  They will be important in the early days and over time, you can trade them, or use them for protection. The medications, those will be important too.  But don’t trade those off too quickly.  Think of it this way, ‘slugs for drugs’ not the other way around if you can help it.”

“I am guessing you’re Burt.” I offered.

“Yeah, that is me.  Oh and I am not pissed that you killed me off, it was kind of cool actually, the way that you did it and all.  And you, well, the book Tom didn’t get the chance to screw my wife.”  He said with a kind of funny laugh that broke into a coughing jag.

I just listened, no one had screwed Mary Lou, and no one was going to, his alcoholic rantings were just wrong.

“Mind if I have a cigarette?” he asked.

“No, I am okay with it,” I figured he was not real, so the smoke, if I saw it would not even smell.

“So Burt, you think slugs and drugs are the way to go?”  I asked.

“Yep, and the other thing that you should look at is gold, jewelry, watches, but not the cheap ass Timex or Casio ones, nope, you want the good ones, like your Rolex.” He replied.

“I remember you suggested that early on in the trilogy.”

“Damned straight, but you pussies wouldn’t go for it.” he blustered.

“Well, in the end……”

“Bullshit, you were lucky in the trilogy, in the next event, when this country goes to war you will need it, it ain’t gonna be all slugs and drugs! There will be a need to trade, to buy things with gold and shit. That will be what you use.”

I thought about this for a minute or two, someone, one of the other characters had talked about something bad in the future too, about something that would happen.  Was it from within the story, or was it a warning from, shit, I think I am getting too wrapped up in this world I created.

“I remember now, yes, you did speak of that jewelry thing to the group, about how there was no moral issue with removing valuables from the dead. Do you really think that the jewelry will make a difference?” I asked him as I glanced in the mirror.

“In the world you created, no, it wouldn’t have had much impact because there were not enough people.  But in the future, in a land in revolution, yeah, it will,” was his reply as he took a drag from his cigarette.

I thought about this a little, and he is probably right.  Even in the case of a civil war there would still be production, there would still be things made, including drugs and bullets.  So yeah, valuables, gold, silver, gems would be of value.  Credit cards, or paper money would be pretty much useless.

“Burt, can I ask you something, you were in the Viet Nam war.  Did you ever” I started.

“Do you mean did I take things from the dead?  Yeah, I did, see when we came upon or made a kill, NVA, Charlie, we searched them.”

He went on to say that most of the time they had shit, a photo, or something in their pocket that had no value.  We were looking for maps, or intel.  He told me how he hated touching, searching the dead.  Some fresh ones weren’t bad, but the ones around for a while, it was not good.

“The ones a day or two old, all smelly and puffy.  I remember one that was so bloated it blew up on me.  I got covered with guts and shit.”

I let that sink in and remembered a couple of dead body calls I had been on.  I knew what he was talking about.

“What about money?  Rings?” I asked.

“Nah, a few did, but not me, most of us had this superstitious belief about a dead man’s money.  It was bad luck, it was cursed.”

“Then why did you suggest it in the story?” I asked.

“Easy, I figured we were all dead anyway, so why not.”

“Okay, so let me ask you this, if you had survived would you have, you know, ah, scavenged the dead?” I asked.

“Probably, if they were fresh, yeah.”

“Why?”

He took a big drag of his cigarette, “Because we were all gonna die and it seemed a good idea, just in case.”

I thought about it, I guess it was new ethical territory for them, so it did kind of make sense.

“Okay, I see you are almost at gun shop, so I am going get back to the others.  Mary Lou says ‘Hi’.”

I looked in the mirror, he was gone, if he had ever been there.  Funny, I can almost smell a faint odor, smoke, cigarette smoke.

The RV,  The Trip Begins

I have often considered another drive cross country, to check out some of the National Parks that I have missed.  I have hit most of the big ones, Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, but some of the smaller ones I have missed.

I remember the last time when I did the southern route from home to Santa Monica, California.  I always told everyone that I just decided to make a coffee run.  But really it was more about visiting or driving Route 66, the mother road. Another item on my bucket list check off as done.

That was a good trip. It gave me time to think, to settle my soul and just reconnect with the inner me.  With all the visits from characters from the trilogy I think this could be a chance to finally put them to bed so to speak, to move beyond the story and start thinking about the new writing project.

I actually did a little blurb when I got back on ‘How to Plan a Cross Country Trip’ for Wiki-How.  It has since been modified and improved by some other folks, but I am proud that 120,000 reads have taken place with a 4+ star rating.  If only my trilogy could be as successful.

Anyway, I-90 is the longest Interstate in the country, it runs from Boston to Seattle along the upper part of the country.  I think that it would be a good choice to drive since I have covered the southern routes, I-10, I-40 or at least parts of them.

The other aspect of it is that initially I-90 was part of the story when Tom and crew headed west to distribute the medication that the QUalz created. It was also the way that Matt and Tanya continued west for a while and eventually ended up in Canada.  But I will not deviate that much from the route.  I-90 it will be.

In the last trip I drove the KIA, actually the SUV that I did talk about in the Trilogy for the trip.  It was comfortable and I enjoyed it with stops along the way at various hotels, motels and casinos.  I actually had only one bad night, a rundown dump of a room in a HOJO in the Kansas City area.  The rest were fine.  But this time I am thinking that rather than rack the miles up on the new car I would rent one of those RVs, a small one, the Cruise America ones or something like that with the gaudy images of the country all over them.  It might not be the most cost effective way to go, but it would give me a chance to stay at some cool camping places in the national parks.

I remember on one of my trips out west I stayed at a campground in the area of Zion National Park.  It was different because you slept in a teepee, on the ground with a pad and a sleeping bag.  I spent three nights and it was one of those experiences that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

The first night it was about mid-night when the coyotes came running by yipping and yelping as they chased a deer.  I am not sure if they caught it because about 2:30 they were back by again doing the same song.

Then the second night, it was a balmy 37 degrees, which was not too bad with the sleeping bag, but that middle of the night pee call was not exactly swell.  Teepees do not have bathrooms or toilets and it was about a 100 yards in the dark to the outhouse.  Although, the sky with no ambient light left the stars bright and beautiful and worth the walk.

And finally, there was the last night, it was not so cold but there was this cricket.  I swear it had to be the size of a small house cat based solely on the noise it made.  But then, part of that may have been the acoustics of the teepee itself.

So, like I said this time I take an RV which I rented from a place in Windsor Locks, just off of I-91. Luckily, because it was getting late in the season, early September, I was able to work a deal in which I would drive it out to Seattle and drop it off there and then I fly back.

The Camper was not very large, enough for sleeping two, with a little stove, refrigerator and a potty.  But there’s no one to ride with me so it is just Ning (my cat) and I going to make the trip. I could hardly leave her home and I had gotten her accustomed to riding in the car long ago.

I have stocked with groceries, and packed assorted clothing and necessities and was ready to go.  I left the condo on September 17th, thinking that by about the 30th at the latest I would be in Seattle although I had no specific dates or places I had to be so it could be earlier, or later, I‘m not really concerned.

Ning settled into the passenger seat and almost immediately fell asleep as I drove north on I-91 and took the left onto I-90.  I know, technically I am cutting off about 70 miles from the trip, Boston to Springfield, but its close enough for government work.

My plan was to travel about 300 miles a day and doing so would get me to Seattle in 8 days.  But I had made provision to spend a little extra time in a few places along the way, Devil’s Tower was one of them.

Captain’s log, Day 1, September 18th 2016  Yeah, I guess my writing style from the books is taking over.

We left this morning at about 9 am, stopped for a Dunkin Donut coffee and a toasted everything bagel.  I was able to avoid the morning commuter mess on I-91 in Springfield, Mass and hit the Mass Pike by 10.  First Officer Ning was sleeping in the passenger seat.

The plan is to get through Albany today and continue west until about 5 PM.  There are no specific stops that need to be made at this point, the early part of this trip is more about covering ground than sightseeing.

As the day progressed, I considered making a stop at Fort Plain, just to see if it had changed, but then, I knew it hadn’t, it was the same in the real world as it has been for years, so no need.

But I did decide that it would be interesting to make a stop at Fort Stanwix.  That had been a place that was important to the story and the only idea of what it might be really like was based upon my Internet research and not a real time visit.

We reached the site at about 4:30 and I had a little time to wander around the fort.  It was really nothing extraordinary, a colonial fort made of earth and stone. And yet, I could imagine, vividly the events that had occurred in my story.  I could see what Matt had seen with the guy being staked out for the zombies.  I could hear the pop of the gunshot and …… screaming about being shot in the balls.  And I felt the anguish when Keith was found all busted up.

When I returned to the RV, I sat for a bit, just thinking about what took place there, in the story.  Ning was sprawled on the dashboard just soaking up the sun.  As I sat, there was a tap on the window.  A woman, a park ranger was there. I rolled down the window.

“Hey, not for nothing, but it is off season, if you want to you can park here overnight,” she said.

“Oh, okay, thank you.”

I sat and thought about it for a minute, part of me said it was as good a place as any to stay, and it was getting late.  But then a little ding went off in the back of my head.  A warning that I may have a ‘visitor’ or two overnight, this place could be haunted by my characters.  I had faced them before so I really was not frightened of them.  And the insights had been good, so I decided I would stay.

I crawled into my sleeping alcove about 9:30, Ning was asleep by my head.

Captain’s Log: Day 2, Sept 19th 2016

Ning was softly pawing at my face, her ‘I want breakfast’ announcement.  I looked at my watch, 7:42.  I stretched and found that I was refreshed, but also kind of disappointed, I had a dreamless night with no visits.  I thought it strange, I mean consider that I was in one of the real places that I had written about I would have thought that, well, anyway.  Breakfast time, mixed grill for Ning, and pumpkin spice Cheerios for me.

We were on the road by 8:30.  I did not get a shower this morning, but that is okay.  The goal for today was a little place in Erie, PA, a campground called Presque Isle State Park.  It is a little peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie.

I probably could have traveled a little further than Erie, but there was something, some reason why.  That part of the trip, well the countryside is pretty boring, the industrial east, and the rust / coal belt.  But it was about the 300 mile limit, although I am finding that over 300 miles in some parts of the trip are going to be necessary.

As I drove along, I listened to the radio.  Fortunately it was a satellite radio so it was not necessary to tune and re-tune to find stations I wanted to listen to.  For this leg it was music from the 60s and 70s mostly.

As the tractor trailers rumbled by, I stayed in the right lane.  The 6 cylinder of the RV was not up to trying to run with the big dawgs.  But that was cool, I had no were to be and plenty of time to get there.

Wow, Judy Collins, I thought as I listened to the radio, Send in the Clowns.  As I listened, the words, they shifted and the voice, I remember that voice, it was one I had heard recently, in my computer, General Welles.  And the clowns were now drones.  ‘Send in the drones, people are dying here, send in the drones, too late, they’re already here’.

I saw one, on the shoulder, to the right, sitting on the side of the road, that metallic master of murder. (Sorry, got into the M’s for a moment there.)

As I looked in the mirror, I realized it was a traffic control box. I laughed, Ning looked at me funny.  I am still way too into my little universe, but that is in part why I am making the trip, closure, if I can.

Then there was a ping on the back of the RV, I checked the mirror, I could still see the traffic control box, but I shouldn’t.

“They are single minded when they lock on to you.  They don’t give up said a voice from behind me.”

I have turned and saw them, a couple, in navy police BDUs sitting at the little dinette table with steaming cups of coffee in front of them. The woman was smiling at me, the male was looking toward the back of the RV.

“Langley, I knew you would show up, and that lunk head with you has to be LJ,” I said as I checked my mirrors.

It is funny, there is a cop thing in which we rarely used first names, it was always the last name or initials or our call sign.  I was always referred to as David 5 or Larson, sometimes, Fucking Larson, though not for sexual activities but in the context of ‘Son of a bitch, its Fucking Larson’.

“Well Tom, we had to stop by, have a cup of coffee and just fill you in on a few things.  I mean you covered most of it in the story, the trip to Burlington, how you found us, nice job there, and then our escape from the Hunters to get to your camp,” she said.

LJ piped in with a chuckle, “I think we’re clear the killer traffic box.”

“Okay, well then why are you here if I covered the bases?”  I was a little confused.

“We wanted to make sure that you realized why we headed to Burlington, why we left our post, Manchester.  It wasn’t that we abandoned anyone, We’d have stuck it out, but…..” LJ said without the usual arrogance that matched his SWAT guy persona.

“The place, the town was going nuts, there was nothing that we, the PD, or FD or anyone could do.  The projects, Squire and Spruce Street erupted, first with just vandalism, and then the reanimated bodies. We tried, but you know, the town had tens of thousands of people and only about 25 of us who chose to try to stop the insanity,” explained Langley.

“Yeah, most of the crew abandoned us, went home to their families, or just never came into work. I guess I can’t blame them.” LJ said, there was a bitterness in his voice.

“It was a no win situation you know, you had no chance of winning, or stopping it,” I said, again looking in the mirror.

“We know, we knew, the Chief, fucking coward, blew his brains out in his office, we heard the shot and when we found him he had a paper in front of him. It told about the military and their plan to nuke the cities,” LJ said, “I guess really, what else was he going to do?”

Langley was shaking her head in agreement, “We knew it was over, and we had to go, and do it quick.  We tried to get a group of people, the ones that were there with us and head out.  We figured that north was the way to go.”

“We loaded up the Peacekeeper, and the Bearcat with what weapons and supplies we could.  Figured they would be good, like little tanks.  Then we took the SUV type cruisers.  We had a handle on the highway conditions so we drove the back roads to avoid the military, and the cities,” added LJ.

“So that was how you escaped?” I asked.

LJ then went on to say that once they got north of the Mass Pike they worked their way over to 91 and just headed north til I-89 and then headed until they were about 30 miles southeast of Burlington.  They settled in there for a few months, in a little town called Bolton, kind of ironic because it was the same name as our next town over in Manchester.

“So in essence you did the same thing as Tom’s group, found a place to hole up until things calmed down.”  I asked.

“Yes, we did not get as fancy as that group at first, but in early June we moved toward Burlington and got set up there proper.  And it was all go, for a while.” LJ told me. “Tom and some of the Peru folks came and visited us, and we knew we had friends if we needed them.

“Then we found the Hunter, and well, you know the rest, death, running and trying to get away, down to Peru,” added Langley.

“And that was it?”

“Yep, you pretty much covered the rest,” LJ mumbled.

I had the need to hit the next rest stop, actually needed to hit one for a while, the morning coffee and two bottles of water were ready to come out.

“Guys, I need to stop at this restroom, sorry” I said as I pulled off the Interstate.

“Yeah, that is fine,” one of them told me, I am not sure which.

I raced, sprinted to the men’s room and took care of business.  When I returned to the RV, there was a little girl point to Ning who was now sprawled out on the dashboard enjoy the sun.

As I climbed back into the RV, I knew they would be gone, that my visitors had left, if they were ever even there.   I started the engine, and was back on the highway thinking about the visit and what it must have been like in their situation, one that I might have been in if this was all real. Would I have done what they did, or would I have bolted earlier.  I’m not sure I have an answer.

The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, other than getting cut off a couple times by idiots driving with cell phones in their ears it was pretty calm.  A stop for lunch at a Wendy’s at the rest stop and then on to Presque Isle.

We got there about 4 in the afternoon and got checked in.  As we rolled toward our campsite for the night on the east side of the peninsula. The place was wonderful, the leaves were at the height of their colors, reds, oranges and golds.  Being a Wednesday the campsites were mostly empty, a few other retirees with their campers were parked fairly close by, but not that close.

I built a little fire in the grills that they had set up and made dinner.  I had stopped at a little grocery store on the way to the park and had picked up a pork chop and some potato salad.  I left the door to the RV open and Ning poked her head out and then came outside briefly until a blue jay started to squawk at her, then she scampered back into the safety of the van.

I did a little cleaning inside the RV after dinner, took care of the dishes and made a pot of coffee, probably not a good idea for this late in the day, but it seemed to be the right thing to do.  Then I stay outside.

We were parked close enough so that the water was in view and as the sun went down and the moon rose over the water, beautiful, peaceful.  There was a little chill in the air so I went in and got a fleece to put in.

As I sat, I thought about my friends, yeah I will call them that, from the story.  I wondered which other visitors I would get, and actually which ones I would like to have pop by for a few and chat with me.

I know that Matt and Tanya will visit, but the little voice in my head says they will not be by until I get to Devil’s Tower.  I may see Asuna again, or maybe not.  Who would I like to talk to?

It got to be about 10 pm and the chill in the air was now downright cold as the wind picked up off the water.  Time to call it a night.

Captain’s Log; Day 3  Sept 20th 2016

There were no visitors overnight, just Ning and I, and she stayed kind of close with the chill in the air.  I dreamed, but as is usually the case the dreams left me as quickly as the sleep left my eyes.

I made some coffee and wandered down to the community shower room.  It was warm water, not hot water, but getting the smell of a couple days off me was the real important part.

It was a Cheerios kind of breakfast and then we were on the road.  Back to I-90.  As we drove along with Lake Erie to our right in the early part of the day I remembered an old National Geographic about the pollution in that lake and to this day I can’t eat catfish because of the pictures of the cancer fill sample fish that they pulled from the water.

The goal for today was Michigan City in Indiana, it was a little further than I would normally planned to travel by about 90 miles, but I really was not enjoying this area of the country.  There is something, I don’t know, I guess just not right in my mind.

As I drove by the Cleveland Airport I thought briefly about the adventures of the group as they headed west with the vaccine that the QUalz had made for them and the poor woman who had tried to elude the Hunters.  I figured that she might be one to come share her story with me, but no, no visitors on the road today.

We caught some rain about noon time and it made the driving a little bit less pleasant, particularly with the semi rigs ripping down the roadway at many more miles per hour than would seem safe.

We stopped at a little rest plaza along the way for lunch. I ran into the Subway for a 6 inch meatball, and grabbed a little container of milk for Ning, to soften her crunchy cat food.  As I paid for the food I chuckled, it was about what my monthly royalty check was from book sales. Writing a book that people read makes you a successful author, but not necessarily a rich one.

We were back on the road by about 1:00.  The weather did not improve that afternoon and we reach Michigan City in Indiana at about 4:30.

The Indiana Dunes Campground on the shore of Lake Michigan was pretty empty and although still kind of colorful.  A blanket of pine needles covered the ground.  It is funny what things you notice some times.

Ning came out and ran around the outside of the RV while I used the little grill to cook up some corn on the cob and a couple of burgers I had picked up at a Kroger Supermarket.  But then a squirrel began to chatter at her and she decided that the big scary gray thing might be dangerous and scurried back into the camper.

The sky was still clouded over and just as I took the food off the grill the rains came. It was a pretty good downpour and although not as bad as the ‘guesthouse’ in Costa Rica, it was pretty noisy.

I read until about 10, a little George Orwell, ‘Keeping the Aspidistra Flying’.  He was not a warm fuzzy writer, but I love the way he crafted his stories.  Then it was bed time.

Captain’s Log: Day 4, Sept 21st, 2016

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Apparently Ning decided to do a little First Officer reporting thanks to my leaving the laptop on and opened.  No dreams last night, no visitor, in fact, I did not even hear the rain as I quickly fell asleep.

The morning was cool, and still cloudy, but the rain had stopped.  Breakfast was a couple of eggs, toast and coffee.  I am thinking that as the trip continues I will find that the overall cost of renting the RV will be close to what I would have spent if I had driven my car and stayed at hotels, eating at restaurants along the way.

The goal for today was La Crosse, Wisconsin.  It was about 350 miles and pretty much a straight forward drive.  We took our time in hitting the road, we usually do that to avoid the morning rush hour traffic.  I hate the Interstates in rush hour.

The GPS cheerfully chirped directions as we rolled along the highway.  First Officer Ning was snoozing between my neck and the head rest.  She is a very small cat compared to Basement or Little Moo, 7 pounds as of the last Vet visit.  And after our lunch stop she took up other resting areas in the van.

Ah, lunch, I decided that for a change I would spring for a little turnpike food.  And that may have not been the best of ideas, I had to make a number of rest stops that afternoon…..if you know what I mean.

“Kind of gives you an idea of what they were going through at Stanwix,” chuckled a voice in the passenger’s seat.  I looked over, it was a soldier, a black corporal.  “Tyrone, Corporal Tyrone Tyresse Alexander, but then you never put that part in.  I was just ‘Tyrone’ when I tried to do the girl, Margo.”

“So you were the one who killed the folks in Stanwix, and turned them against the Romanica people.”

“Yea, dat’s right.  I had a score to settle, it was about respect.  Those peeps, Keith’s peeps shoulda killed us.  They dissed us, pushed us out, left us to suffer and die.  They shoulda killed us off right away at the Fort.  We din’t want no mercy. their mercy was really cruelness.”

“But you were alive, you could have gone on, moved on, it made no sense,’ I told him.

“No, it didn’t, we, us guys wit Womack, we was in charge, we had it good, they took it away from us, the bitch killed Womack, we had to settle the score.”

I nodded, sort of a half understanding.

“What, you don’t think we did right? You lead us there, you played it that way, but you never splained why we did what we did.”

I turned and looked at him, “You’re right, I didn’t explain it well.”

“So, I just did, now we’re good.”

“Yes, you did,” I answered.

“Now, your girl Margo, she took care of business, dat bitch be serious. Even down she fought hard.  And that cat of hers, Momma, now she knew what to do wit me!”  Tyrone said with a smile, “not personal wit her, savin’ her cub, she earned my respect, they boff did.”

I thought about what he just said, and it did make some sense.  He died well, he may not have been the most honorable character, but his death was justified.

I turned to look at him, but he was gone.  Ning was crawling back into the front seat where Corporal Alexander, Tyrone had just been sitting.  And I was think, next rest stop would be a good place to stop.

We got into Mitchell at about 3:45, I was pretty well ‘cleaned out’ and since we had some time to spare we had, I had a chance to go through the Corn Palace.  It is an interesting place.  I have visited it about 8 or 9 years ago on one of my western trips.  The entire outside of the building is decorated each year with corn husks and ears with a different theme each year.  This year being an election year was politically driven, elephants and asses, elephants and asses.

From the palace I headed to the Lake Mitchell campground.  It was not much of a campsite, small, and empty.  I had three other RVs and a couple of tenters sharing the space with me.  There were about 80 empty spaces.

I stayed off on my own, and although I drank lots of water I was still not quite up to eating.

Early night for me, 9ish, hoping I feel completely back to normal in the morning.

Captain’s Log: Day 5, Sept 22nd 2016

On the road again early this morning.  Okay, 8:30 is not all that early, but I had Ning gently pawing at my face a little after 7:00am. She was thinking that this would motivate me to get her a little breakfast, and she was right.

Once again there was no visitors last night.  There were dreams, and for a change I had a little memory of them.  They had to do with past live regressions.  I was remembering where I was in the past, in other lifetimes.

I really couldn’t recall the specifics, only that I was somewhere different.  But as I sat having my bowl of Cheerios I thought about it. There might be a muse, a storyline for a new book.  I would need a new project when I got back.

Anyway, I finished up my coffee and rinsed the cereal bowl and after a shower at the community bathroom it was time to hit the road.  As I climbed into the driver seat and started the RV I looked right and staring at me was Asuna.

“You’re not gonna leave us yet you know.  We are good with the idea of a new series, but not until you get home and have finished us, answered our questions or filled in the colors of the sketches you have penciled.”

I smiled at her, I wished she was real.  “I know, but it is getting close, we are getting close.”

She laughed, “You’re just like him, but then, I guess you are him.”

“Tom?”

“Yes, but then, that should not surprise either of us.”

Again she laughed, “Tell you what, I am going to let you have the rest of the day, I am not going to push anyone else on you today.  But I didn’t want you to just end our story and start a new one.  You can play in the story, the new one today, but you have some coloring to do yet.”

As I pulled on the highway I checked for oncoming traffic and when I merged onto the Interstate I glanced to my right, she was gone.  Ning crawled into the passenger seat and curled up.

My mind snapped back, focusing on driving and for what was ahead.  The goal was to reach Gillette, WY.  It was a longer trip than usual, because along the way I want to visit the Devil’s Tower National Monument.  I had been there years ago on one of my trips out west.

I felt that visiting the monolith would be significant because that was where the third book (The Archive and Beyond) really ended, and the rebirth of humankind took root.  My guess was that I would meet the clones, the next generation of human existence somehow despite Asuna’s ‘hall pass’.

The day on the road was pretty quiet actually, not much more than the endless stream of tractor trailers on the grey ribbon of roadway.  They say that everything is flat in Kansas, but I will attest to the idea that it pretty much the same in South Dakota.  It was monotonous, which led to the mind drifting, and then to thoughts of first the Event Trilogy and then off to the new writing project.

So what would happen if I worked on a story that was in a way like the visits I, Tom and Asuna made to the various rooms of the Earthers who were taken onto the QUalz ship, little glimpses of past lives, who I was, what it was like in that era and what people I might have connected with in that past.

Oh, I thought, I could put a romance twist to it, a lover throughout time, bonding between souls.  This could be awesome.

I am not sure why but I thought I heard a voice, the sound of someone clearing their throat, a kind of a female ‘ahem’.

“Asuna, okay, not now, I get it,” I sad aloud.

I saw that I was coming into Sturgis, the home of the big MC rally each year.  It was late in the season, so the place was pretty empty.  And while I am here I should pick up an obligatory T-shirt.

I have over the years collected them from various places I have visited. The most valued of the collections was the Harley shirt from Reykjavik Iceland from my visit there. But Sturgis, that could be up high on the list.  I wandered into the Sturgis Harley Shop and picked out a standard black long sleeve.  The back had the picture of Black Hills and a biker riding along a twisting road.

Sturgis is an interesting place, really, except it is built for tourism.  It is a sort of mecca for riders, with motorcycle shops and saloons,   One Eyed Jacks, Loud American, The Knuckle Saloon all based around the Main Street / Junction Ave area which come August each year is the heart of the rally district.

I wandered around a little, but there was not much going on this time of the year.  It was getting to be almost noon time and I considered having lunch there, but then thought further and decided I would do the 40 or so minute drive out to Deadwood.  I know that they had a couple casinos there, so a burger and bucks seemed be beckoning me.

Ning sleepily raised her head as I opened the RV door and piled in.  We drive on up Alt Rt 14 into the Black Hills and on to Deadwood.  It was a drizzly kind of day, and there was not much traffic on the route.  Moving up the main drag there were options, Saloon 10, Mustang Sally’s but in the end, how do you pass up Hickok’s Saloon and Gaming.

As I walked through the door I felt I should have had my six gun on my hip and with spurs jingle jangling. Yes, it was very rustic, and part of that was to capture the image of that old mining town and the wild and wooly days gone by. But it was fun.  The bar, that magnificent bar, dark, polished wood, pine, pine I think.  The ceiling was high, vaulted I think is the term, with hanging chandlers that had elk horns worked into the design. The walls had some old photos of the days gone by, although they could have been recreations and over in a far corner were about a dozen slot machines.

The place itself was pretty empty, rainy days in September are not prime tourist season, especially mid-week so I had pick of the tables, again, dark pine, kind of chewed up and distressed.  The waitress, and older woman kind of stocky came over.

“Howdy, would you like something to drink?” she asked as she gave me a menu.

I looked at her name tag, ‘Lilly’, I had to wonder if that was her real name or if it was just for effect.

“Yes, Lilly, let me have a club soda, with lemon or lime.”

“You got it,” she said as she walked away.

I looked over the menu and decided on the Hickok burger.  Basically a bacon cheese burger with fries.

Lilly returned and set the seltzer in front of me.  “What can I get you?” she asked.

“Let me have the Hickok burger, medium rare.” I told her.

“Regular, curly or sweet potato fries?”

“Oh, ah, regular, thanks”

“You got it,” she said as she turned and walked toward the bar.  I hadn’t noticed before that it was just her and I in the place.

I know I had a couple of minutes so I got up and walked to the slot machines, a good old Red White and Blue dollar machine.  I put my hundred dollar bill in the slot and began to play, three credits a pull.  I played my typical gamble’s routine.  Press the single coin button three times, pull the lever of the one armed bandit, twist in my chair and see what I won.

Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, look, bar, double bar, nothing.

Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, look, Red 7, nothing, Red 7.

Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, look, nothing, nothing, nothing….$3.

Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, look, not happening, I was nearing the end of my hundred.

Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, Blue 7, White 7, White 7…..$240.  I guess lunch was paid for I thought to myself.

The gentle tap on my shoulder almost made me jump out of my skin.  It was Lilly, “Your burger is ready, Oh, nice hit,” she said with a smile.

“Oh, thanks,” I smiled.  My heart rate was almost back to normal.

I cashed out of the machine, it was the paper receipt, I did always like to hear the clunking of the coins, but winnings are winnings.

I returned to my table and had my burger, a little more medium than rare, but tasty.

I paid the tab and headed back to the RV, I was tempted to press my luck but decided that I would talk away a winner, I’ll leave the big jackpot for another play or another day.

It is funny about slot players, and I guess gamblers in general, we are superstitious, or kind of routine oriented.  We have our casino clothing items, lucky shirt, belt, ring, or shoes that we have had worn when we won and have assigned it as status of good luck charm.  And of course, we have our good luck charm, lucky blue pig key chain, or lucky feather that is attached to our player’s club card.

For many of us there is also the routine like I pointed out above; Dink, Dink, Dink, pull, twist, then look.  Others will run their hand across the glass wiping away the bad luck, or some who slam the max play button while muttering prayers, incantations or curses.

Oh, and did I mention lucky machines?  We all have our favorites, Red White and Blue, Blazing 7’s, Triple Stars, each of us have that one or two machines that we love, and generally know where every one of that type of machine is in our ‘home’ casino.

Sorry, got on a little roll there about the casinos and gambling.

So as I drove out of Deadwood I was a little surprised, I thought the situation, one other person in the restaurant, would have been the perfect opportunity for a ‘visit’, but nope, nothing. But then Asuna did promise.

I drove back to I-90 and then into Gillette, SD where I turned right and headed up toward Devil’s Tower.  I got there about 3:30 and took some time to stop and watch a couple of climbers, little white dots on the side of the basalt monolith.  I got queasy just thinking about being up there on the rock face.  I could not even imagine trying that.

I drove over to the east side of the tower and there I checked into my campground for the evening.  It was the Bear Lodge KOA.  It had a little motor lodge attached to it.  I would spend the night here, under the stars of the western sky, free of the dust and ambient light of the east coast.  It was mostly empty, like the other sites I had visited, a couple of campers in tents and another RV, a big one, that was it.

I had a little dinner, some pork chops that I had picked up on the way in.  I smiled as I thought to myself that maybe I should have opted of Spam.

Ning wasted no time on her cat food.  She was funny tonight, almost seemed nervous.  She quickly ate, looking around more than usual and then took up a place in the corner of the bed alcove.  That was not typical for her.

It was dark by about 8:00 and I sat outside just staring at the tower, I remembered it from ‘Close Encounters’, it was where the aliens arrived.  It was beautiful at night, the stars, the arm of the Milky Way gave it an outline.  It was a little chilly so I ran into the van and grabbed a blanket.  I sat by the little campfire that I built in the fire pit and just breathed in the slight smell of the wood smoke and stared at the flames.

Captain’s Log: Day 6, Sept 23nd 2016

I remembered sitting down at the fire pit last night and spending some time staring at the flames.  As I sat lost in thought a couple of the other campers from one of the tents nearby came over, more like hobbled over.

“Well there young feller, you look a little lonely tonight and that is a pretty nice fire you got going.  Mind if us old folks join you?” asked the old guy.

I looked up from my camp chair, “sure, sit, it is a wonderful night. I’ll go grab a couple of chairs.”

They were a pair to be sure, weathered, wrinkled, old he had long hair in a pony-tail and beard. He reminded me of an old 60’s hippy.  She, well she was close to his age, a kind of Woodstock generation by the a few braids in her hair and the Native American / western movie attire.

But to my surprise they didn’t even hesitate but sat on the ground on the other side of the fire.  I was shocked considering they each had canes or walking stick that from what I could see had been nicely carved with little animal figures and decorated with feathers and pieces of fur.

There was a silence, just the gentle wind in an apple tree nearby, and an occasion howl, or call of an animal or bird.

After a few minutes, “So where are you folks from?”

The old man smiled, “Now, we are from here. But once, the East Coast.”

Hmmmm, I thought, yup, hippies from Woodstock.

The woman smiled, “Not what you think, young man, we have our story, your story.”

I stared at her for a moment, she was black, dark skinned, and wrinkled yet her eyes, the window to the soul, shined, there was something about the eyes.

“I am Turtle, this is Raven,” she said as she pointed to the male next to her.

Oh crap, how did I not see this, they’re, visitors, characters, from the story.

I smiled, and nodded, “Matt, Tanya, welcome, I am honored.  I have expected you, and this place makes sense for our visit.”

“Thank you Tom, we are happy to finally meet you in person.” Matt/Raven said as he pulled a bottle from the inside pocket of his fringed leather jacket. “A toast to this meeting.”

“You know I gave up the demon rum long ago.”

“Yes, but this is not that kind of spirit, so have no fear. Just an herbal tea,” he said.

I went into the van and got three small cups, red Solo cups, which Matt/Raven partially filled and as we sat by the fire nursed them.  It was a fruity nutty berry flavor, just a little tart.

“So, now, let me ask, because I never really wrote about it. What happened to you two?” I asked.

They looked at each other and smiled, “well, a lot and nothing really.” Matt/Raven replied.

“I am not sure I understand, a lot and nothing?

Tanya/Turtle began and told me that in the early days after they left the group they headed west, they were sort of guided that way, something had told them that was where they should go. She said that they knew they had a task, although initially they didn’t know what it was, other than to survive.

“We had skills, from when we were at Romanica and in the transition to the Archive, although we spent only a few nights there before we moved on, to visit Helen at the college. But then you wrote about that, and about our return to the Archive, and then our heading west at the end of September.  And that was where the story ended for us,” Tanya told me.

“So I guess what we need to add is the what happened next,” added Matt.

I thought about that, and wondered, what did happen next.  And as I did I felt light, kind of floaty light.  The fire pit took on a little different glow, more pink than yellow, and the smoke, it smelled different, sweeter, stronger, yet it didn’t bite the nostrils.

I looked at Matt / Raven and Tanya / Turtle.  Behind them were now animals, and birds.  A hawk sat on a tree that was behind them, it was joined by other birds.  A coyote (Lucy?) walked up and sat next to Matt, a mountain lion (Momma?) sat next to Tanya.  There were other animals that also joined in the circle, bear, elk, turkey, they all gathered and just sat.

Matt and Tanya changed, they became…….a raven and a turtle.

The voices, Matt, Tanya, and others flooded into my head, and yet, even though it was a rush of noise I was understanding and hearing each one individually, telling me about their quest, their powers and what they brought to Matt / Raven and Tanya / Turtle to be passed on to the new ones, the clones, the reborn humanity.

Those voices spoke of the learning, the reconnection with the Earth, the sky, the plants and animals.  Each had their message, turkey talked of sacrifice, bear and otter of gender, even little mouse had a part and spoke of awareness of what was around.  Squirrel gathered, Grouse danced, horse talked of power, gentle power. The voices spoke of the learning, the reconnection with the Earth, the sky, the plants and animals.

As I stared at the Raven and Turtle, Matt and Tanya had completely morphed.  They spoke as one, “We are Father Sky, and Earth Mother, you knew who we were, and now see what we have become.  How we moved from the people of the cave, the Archive and on to our trek to Bear Lodge, our home, the home of the new stewards of the Earth.

As I listened the voices became quieter, and drifted to a soft gentle buzz.  The fringe of darkness gently closed in, and light disappeared.

I awoke this morning as the sun climbed over the horizon.  I was in the camp chair, a red solo cup in hand.  I was alone.  What is above is what I recall of last night, I wanted to get it down before I had it slip from my mind.

Over coffee and Cheerios I considered staying one more night at Bear Lodge, but I knew that I had received all that I was going to receive.  I had known that I would visit with Matt and Tanya, but what had occurred was not what I had expected.

As I cleaned the camp site I saw them, the foot, paw and hoof prints on the other side of the fire pit. And as I looked at them I though how ironic that it would be a fire pit that the visit would come.

It was a quiet ride this morning, I did not even turn on the satellite radio, I was lost in thought about last night’s visit, my head full of what had been shared.  Ning was behind my neck as I drive.

I was getting into the mountain regions of western Wyoming and Montana. My original plane was to stop in the area of Butte.  But I just felt like driving today, instead of the 300 miles or so I usually drive I ended up with about 7 hours behind the wheel and ended for the night in a town called Deer Lodge in Montana.  The name caught and intrigued me.  I could have gone a little further down the road, but Deer Lodge seemed to call to me.

Deer is thought to be the ‘gentle’ totem.  Perhaps that was why it beckoned me.  I arrived at about 5:00 pm and found a little pull off in the town into the Grant-Kohrs Ranch Historic Site.  There was a parking lot that allowed overnight stays.  I would have stayed on the south side of town but the prison farm that was there made me a little nervous.

The ranch site parking lot was still close enough to the Main Street area so a short walk brought me to a little restaurant, Yak Yak’s, a kind of diner at the intersection of Main and California.  The place was kind of busy for a Thursday night, I guess, not being a regular.

I opted for the meatloaf, I don’t know, I have never gone wrong with diner meatloaf, mashed and corn.  And on this occasion I was not disappointed.

As I thought I still considered what had taken place lasting night, the visit.  The fill in for what happened to Matt and Tanya.  The bond that they grow with the Sky and the Earth and how when the time came were there to share it with those who come later, the clones.

The dish boy stopped in front of me as he was emptying the bus pans behind the counter.  The clack of the dishes as he loaded them into his cart snapped me out of my thoughts and back to reality.

“You know we all died, right?” he said.

My head snapped up and I looked at him.  He was an older guy, grey streaks in his hair, lanky, in a dingy white t-shirt. His face was pock-marked from a bout with acne years earlier.  I guessed him in his 40s.

“Yeah, we held on in the town, Prince George, up there in Canada, eh.”

The dish washer did not seem the brightest of people, and this may sound arrogant and I do not mean it to be, but if you are a dishwasher in your 40s, well perhaps life has not been so kind to you.

“Prince George?” I asked.

“Yes, where Matt and Tanya spread the poison to us.” Said a distinguished looking older gentleman who had sat down on the counter seat next to me.

“I, ah”

“Doctor Smedley, I was in Prince George, and I guess it was as much my fault as it was theirs.  I thought the pills were okay, but then so did they.  Just turned out to be not the case.”

“I, ah”

“No, it was okay, it wasn’t really the pills that killed us, right Jimmy?” said the gentleman.

“Nope, it wasn’t, we did fine,” replied the dishwasher.

“See, the pills made it so we couldn’t have kids, but then the only ones that might have been able to reproduce was Anne, Anne Landry and a couple of the younger girls, Renee and Belle.  It would not have been enough to keep us going, Prince George was a ghost town, and we all knew it.”

I saw a twinge in Jimmy, he liked one of those girls, I wondered if he ever had the chance to settle in with one of them.

Jimmy was looking down toward the bus pan, “I buried them, one by one I put them in the ground, I had to.  I was the last one.  Dylan, Mr. Dylan was first, then the Doctor Smedley and Ralph, and Nigel and Anne, and Belle.  Renee and I held on the longest, but it wasn’t that long.  It was the flu I think, the flu that got us.”

The Doctor picked up the story, “Yes, we had a flu, and it was what killed us, we had nothing to stop it, we all had it and in the mine we were too close.  Maybe if it hit in the summer or spring when we were outside, but it was winter, and colder than it had ever been.”

Jimmy was in tears, “Renee, she was last, she was…. I thought she was gonna make it.  She seemed to be getting better, she seemed,” and he broke into sobs.

“It is okay Jimmy, you did right by her.” Said the doctor.

“So the town, that little mining town just died?” I actually felt a twinge of guilt.  It is strange, but these people, these fictional characters mean something to me, they are part of me, and even though they are made up, I am connected to them.

“Hey, Tom, it is alright, no need to feel bad, you gave us something we did not have, you gave us life, even if it is just on a few pages in a book” Smedley said with a smile.

“Yeah, a book not too many people have read,” I replied with a weak smile.

“True, but still we lived.” Smedley laughed.

“Yeah,”

I looked off to the windows to the left of me, then as I turned back Kim was standing there, she was my waitress.  “So some dessert tonight?” she asked.

Jimmy, and Doctor Smedley were gone.

“No, I am trying to quit, but thanks.  Just my check.”

I paid my bill and walked back onto Main Street.  As I walked back toward the RV and Ning I was a little melancholy about the visit I just had. No more writing tonight.

Captain’s Log: Day 7, Sept 24th 2016

It was a fitful night sleep, dreams, hauntings that I can’t remember other than they were apocalyptic.

Bacon and eggs at Yak Yak’s this morning, with no visitors, a different busboy, a real busboy. The restaurant was busy and noise

On the road by 9:00, back on I-90.  Goal today is Medical Lake in Washington.  It is only a 4 ½ hour drive, but there are some places I want to stop to take pictures. I am in the mountains now, and I feel at home. As I passed though Montana, near Missoula,  I crossed the highest point on I-90, but there is something about the Idaho area, the mountains seem higher, and more, I don’t know, mountain-y?

There comes a point in a trip or vacation where you kind of say, I have had enough. Tonight will be my last overnight out here, tomorrow I will be in Seattle and tomorrow night winging my way back home.  I am ready, I have had enough.

I am getting cranky, I can see it in my writing.  I think even Ning senses it, she slept in the back of the van rather than behind my neck or on the passenger seat.

The little campground at Medical Lake was night, quiet as most of them have been on the trip.  The down side is that it is not that far south of Fairchild AFB.  It is a refuel station that puts up KC135s for refueling missions and as a result all day big 4 engine planes are coming and going, it is not a quiet place.

Finished up the open foods that I could for dinner tonight, some pasta and sauce, a slightly stale French bread, some butter.  I will donated the remainder to a food shelter tomorrow on my way to Seattle.

It is going to be a long day tomorrow, so I am calling it quits and going to bed early, 9:00.

Captain’s Log: Day 8, Sept 25th 2016

I am not sure why, but the night before I fly somewhere I never seem to sleep that well.  I think I get my mind in a dither because I am afraid that I will miss my flight, which is really kind of silly since I always leave myself plenty of time.

So I was off from Medical Lake early today, about 7:30 which will get me to Seattle by noon.  That will work out well because my flight back home didn’t leave until 3:50.  It left me plenty of time to pack up some of the extra things, clothing, books, items that I collected on the way and then ship them home via UPS.  It is cheaper to do it that way than to try to bring it on the place as luggage.  That way I only have a back pack with books, my laptop and a small carry-on to hold Ning.

Once that taken care of and dropped off at the UPS location it was on to the RV drop off.   On the way I saw a homeless man, I think he was a vet.  He was standing at a corner with a hand lettered cardboard sign “Hungry Vet, Help Please”.  What a shame the way Vets are treated, left to this life with all the resources available that could and should be available to him.  Resources that are generously given to those who are ‘refugees’ or have sneaked into the country rather than those who have served it.

I handed the guy the bag of canned goods that I had left over from the trip, some soup, cans of beans and Beef-a-Roni and of course, Spam. I handed him a twenty also.  I am guessing that the $20 will end up in the till of a package store somewhere, exchanged for a bottle of cheap vodka.  But if it gives him a moment of warmth or peace, who am I to judge.

The next stop was the RV return garage. That actually went pretty well, I had pre-paid for the rental so other than a few small incidental fees I was done.  I made certain that I took pictures of the van as I returned it so that I could compare them to the ones I took when I left Connecticut if the company pitched a bitch about some alleged damage.  There was no damage.

The staff there was kind enough to give me a ride to the Southwest Terminal. They had lined up another rental to drive it to LA via the coast highway and were going to pick the family up at the airport.

I was checked in and ready to go by 2:00, and sitting at gate B-13 waiting.  I had almost two hours to wait.  But I was good with that and so was Ning, she was sleeping in the carry-on, although she would periodically stretch and poke her head out of the zippered slot.

As I sat I stared out the window thinking about the trip, the things and the dreams, visits that I had.

“That was nice what you did for that Vet,” a female voice said from behind me.

I did not turn around, but answered with a thanks.

“Have you ever considered that the homeless, the true homeless, the tent city homeless would have actually survived very well in your books?”

I turned to look at the woman behind me, she reeked, and was in dirty shabby clothing, a bird’s nest of hair disheveled on her head.

“No, I didn’t but it makes sense.”

She nodded, “I was doing very well in Cleveland, near the airport.   We had avoided the undead and the robots for a long time.  A few of us had our little protected place. It was not perfect but we learned how to keep our heads down and were doing okay.”

I knew now who this was, the woman that Tom and the crew saw at the airport in Cleveland, the one that been chased by the Hunter, the hunter that Margo killed.  But the woman had run into a small horde and had not made it.

“We homeless, we worked together, we always did.  We were closer to living on the edge, finding food, and shelter than the city folk.  We were used to it, we lived it,” she said, staring at me.

I considered what she said and remembered by days in the police department and how those tent city people did work together, they shared, and survived.  The rule was basically share, work together or get the fuck out.

“So what happened to you? I asked, “Ah, I’m sorry, I never named you.”

She laughed, “Yeah, we are generally thought of as just nameless wanderers.  I am Alice, Thank you, I now truly exist.” There was a tear in her eyes.

One never thinks about that as we walk by the can collectors, the shelter rats in their ragged clothes.  Many of us divert out eyes and try to make them not seen.  I felt a little ashamed because I have done that.

I smiled at Alice, “I am glad, it is a pleasure to meet you Alice, I’m Tom.”

I realized that just that little acknowledgement meant so much to her, and means so much to them.  She smiled back, brushing the tears from her dirty face and tried to straighten her hair a little.

She told me that her group had fucked up, sort of.  They had a little group and were doing fine, it was a hard life scavenging and avoiding the undead and the robots. We were managing until this woman, Marcy showed up with a couple of kids.

“We should have turned her away, she was not one of us, but the kids, poor kids, 5 and 7, and how could we do that.”

The kids, so often it is about the kids, we humans will risk so much for children, anyone’s children, I thought.

She said that the woman with the kids had been from a suburb and how she lasted as long as she did was a miracle. She didn’t understand the code, she became a liability, stupid, and in the end did shit that cause the undead to fall upon the camp.  Alice said she was the only one to get away.  And she made it to the airport and was safe for a while until the robot, the Hunter, locked onto her.  When the robot was killed she thought she might make it, but then, the undead….

“I didn’t make it.”

We sat in silence.  I thought about what she had told me, it made me wonder if the real deal happened, an apocalypse, how well the ‘homeless’ would thrive or would have the least difficult adjusting to the new world.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, a gate attendant, “Sir, your plane is boarding now.”

I looked around, no Alice, but then it did not surprise me.

I boarded the plane and once we were airborne brought the carry-on with Ning down and she cuddled up in my lap as we flew back home.

No ‘visitors’ on the flight, but there were a couple of flight attendants who hovered in the area to see and pet Ning.  She was a queen on the flight and even invited to visit the flight deck today in the arms of the lead attendant.  Not many cats get their little ‘wings’.

Home Again

I am not sure what it is but there is that point in any trip where you just want to get home to your own little bed, your own little bathroom, your own little world.  I reached that point about 4 days ago, and now I am home.  Thank God, or should I say Sky Father and Earth Mother.

Anyway, I’m unpacked, and have uploaded my journal, the Captain’s Log from the trip. I am almost caught up on my e-mails and Facebook stuff and I’m pretty much settled back in.  A trip to Stew Leonard’s this morning for some food and I am set.

I received an e-mail from CCSU, my alma mater, they have a program in which authors / writers from the school are invited to do a little talk to promote their works as well as share something about their craft.  I am scheduled for a 30 minute show next week.

I miss the voices, the visits, the coloring in some sketches and filled in some gaps in the final product.  It is strange how this universe or world that I have created has infused itself into my life.

A casino trip tonight, I have free tickets to a concert, ‘The 1975’.  And I am sure that while I am there I will see if my luck has changed.  The music was awesome, the slot machines, not so much. I will have to find a new lucky shirt.

Funny, no visits on the drive down, and no one at the machine next to me.  I wonder if they are gone, if Asuna has sent them all to share and now we are done.

I stopped at Carlos’ Pastry Shop near the Winter Casino for a cannoli, and then sat I watched people going by.  There is an escalator leading to the casino right there and as people walked by I would ‘see’ what I thought was some of my characters, Lance, Del, Tay, Linc, and others.   I mean a physical manifestation, not the character, but kind of a caricature of what I imagined them to be.  Does that make sense?

Over the next few days there were still no visits, and I hate to admit it, but I miss them, the surprise of having some of the characters come to haunt me.

I spent some time Tuesday night preparing and making some notes and picking out selections for tomorrow’s presentation at the college.

It felt weird, walking into the bookstore, standing in front of the cameras, behind the podium.  I was nervous, but I have spoken in front of people before.

So I told my story, the history of how I had toyed with the idea for years, telling friends that when I retired I would write romance novels.  But I never really figured I would.  Then three years into retirement thought about it again.

I explained that one night I was doing a Netflix and popcorn night and watched a Korean movie about a writer.  It was a mystery film, kind of horror/ghosty kind of thing.  It was the catalyst that told me that I had to sit down each day and just work on it, write.

But I still had not found my muse, my inspiration, my storyline until in February of 2013 a meteor blew up over Russia.  It was there that the idea, the muse arrived and work really began.  It went from what was supposed to be a 200-250 page stand-alone fiction to a 1500 page trilogy, a universe.

I shared some of my thoughts on writing, that I did it for myself, it was my story, my voice.  And in the beginning writing was tough, yet as the page numbers grew it became easier, and the writing skills got better.  Party of that improvement was a result of taking a non-credit writing course at my local community college and then out of that come a small writer’s group, three of us sharing our work and helping each other alone the way.

Finally, I gave a little reading for them, and although not the best out loud reader I was able to share some of my work with them.

I began reading, “As we rolled into Fort Plain I expected to see the same little farm town that I remembered as a kid, there were still the same old brick buildings, and shops.  There was still the ‘Fort Plain Diner’ at the corner of Main Street and Flower, I remembered having breakfast there with Gramp and Mark.  They had the best hash browns I had ever tasted, but there would be no breakfast stop today,

But the town it was a mess, well part of it was, broken store fronts, and trash strewn about.  As we turned onto the main drag there was a stretch of about 100 feet that was clean and clear of the debris.  In the middle of the sidewalks was a sign board “Real Estate Office Open”, in front of a store front.

We pulled up in front and stopped.  As we did, a short fiftyish woman, kind of chubby, walked out of the office.  She was neatly dressed in a black skirt and green blazer with a kind of badge on the breast pocket and a hair style from the 60s that matched the outfit.  She had a yellow scarf around her neck and a cup of coffee in her hand.

“Hi! Welcome to Fort Plain”, she said in a kind of whiny high pitched voice.

We walked toward her, kind of shocked that she was there, this was just weird.

“Hi” answered Tanya, “we were just passing through and we have not met many people in our travels.”

“Yeah, yeah, been kind of slow at the office for a while, would you like a coffee?  I can’t offer any milk, but I have some powdered creamer if you like.”

We looked at each other, then at her, “Sure.  That would be nice.”

We walked into the office with her, it was meticulous. She poured us each of coffee in Linda Harris Real Estate mugs that matched the blazer color and logo.  It was actually not bad coffee.

“Here, here, sit down, what brings you to town?  Are you looking for somewhere to move to?  It’s quiet here” said Linda.

“Well, no we are not looking, although the place looks interesting.  We are pilgrims on a trip to Rome, which is what the Lord has directed us to do.”

“Ah, I see, yeah, the Amish, the ones that survived all made a beeline for Lancaster area in Pennsylvania, a long trip in horse buggies and scooters.”

“We saw a few of the scooters dumped on the side of the road, did some of the locals not get away?

She looked down and shook her head, “No, a lot of them didn’t make it, when it all started they believed, well, the bishop wouldn’t allow them to hurt the re-awakened, he felt it was God giving the sick ones a second chance.  But then, they realized it was the Devil’s work and they did better about it. But by then, so many, so many had died, and come back.”

“Did they burn their barns?  Why would they do that?” Tanya asked.

“Oh, no, that was me, and my son, we did that.”

“Why?”

“Oh, well, see, we found that the best way to stop the groups of re-awakened was to lead them into the barns, lock them in and then set fire to the barns.  It worked well; the hay burned, and cleaned up the mess nicely.”

“Where is your son?  Is he at home?”

“No, no, he was in the last barn that I burned.”  It was so matter of fact and cold, it sent a chill down my spine.

“I’m sorry, it must of have been terrible.” Tanya said slowly.

“Well, yes, but it was okay, I did not want him to turn, to re-awaken.”

“He was bitten then?”

“Oh no, he was fine, but it was just a matter of time before the re-awakened would get us, and I did not want to see him suffer.” She said with a motherly smile.  “He was a good boy, kind of slow, you know, so well, it was better that way. I just locked him in the barn with the re-awakened before I set it on fire.”

I am sure that Tanya had the same sick feeling in the stomach that I had.  I wanted to puke.  This woman meant well, I think, but what she did, my God!  Lord, forgive her.  Both Tanya and I set our coffees down.”

I finished the reading and looked up, in the back row was Linda Evans, green blazer, yellow scarf sitting there, smiling at me, giving me an enthusiastic thumps up.  Next to her was a form of a human, but terribly burned, her son?  He also was smiling, I think, or it may just have been the way the burn flesh made it appear.

I was a little shaken, that was not what I expected.  I looked away from them quickly and when I turned back they were gone. I recovered quickly.

I answered a couple of questions from the audience, about how long it took to write, or where I would find ideas.  The big thing I tried to convey to them that we all have a story or a painting, or song within us, it is getting it on paper, or canvas or musical score that is the challenge.

The ride home was uneventful but my mind was wrapped up in the visit by my ‘ghosts’ and the presentation. I hope I did not sound like too much of a dope.

As it turned out I did okay, a couple of days later I saw the write up in the Central Newspaper, it was positive.  I am a writer and until I saw that article I had a hard time believing it.  So now I guess it is time to move on to the next book, the one I was thinking about, the Past Life stories.

Tom’s Visits

I had promised myself repeatedly that I would take some time this summer to ride up to the area in which many of the stories in my trilogy took place.  I wanted to visit Peru, Camp Romanica and some of the surrounding towns like Hinsdale and Dalton.  I needed to see what they were really like in comparison to what I had made them in the story.

But before long it was October, I had made my trip out west.  I would do it now, with the foliage chance. I decided to jump on the Harley and run up past Springfield and out towards Northampton, the Hadley area.  There was just too much temptation to visit the College Library Archive that had once been a Cold War nuclear command post before the towns in western Massachusetts.

I found it easily and as I rode up and when I arrived I was not impressed.  I had expectations of a Cheyenne Mountain facility, like in the Stargate SG-1 TV series.   I also hoped to get a chance to visit inside and walk around a bit, but that was not going to happen today.  I had picked a Monday for the trip and unfortunately during summer break the facility was closed on Mondays, Wednesdays and the weekends.  It kind of made sense actually, with school out, there would not be much demand.

I was a little bummed out about it but I wasn’t going to let the day go to waste.  I hopped back on the bike and rode down Military Road and circled around to head up the west road to the site where that B-24 crashed during the WWII era.  I had been there before with a couple of my fellow retired ‘copper’ friends and remembered it vaguely.

The road up to it was a narrow tree lined snake of asphalt, twisting and turning as you gained elevation.  At the top there wasn’t much, just a small granite marker, kind of a 6 foot obelisk with a brass plate in the wooded area with a few picnic tables. The plaque had the names of the six members of the flight crew.   I was kind of surprised that there were no officer’s names on the monument; it had all been NCO’s and other enlisted men.  But then, I guess for the purposes of the day that was okay.  On the plaque was also a little blurb of what happened, how they were flying into Westover AFB about 20 miles to the east trying to clear the mountain.  The weather had been bad, with low clouds and rain. It was not much that they had missed getting home by, no, which is not right, because they did not miss the mountain, well, you know what I mean.

I walked absentmindedly toward the northwest edge of the mountain, to the ledge, okay, near the ledge; I am really not good with heights and would not get too close to the edge.  The spot gave a majestic view of the Connecticut Valley, the river winding its way through, surrounded in the green cornfields and lush trees of the summer woodland forests.

I settled into the bench and wondered what was it like being in that airplane and having that sudden realization that you had messed up, badly.  It was warm, the chirping of the birds, and the occasional gentle roar of the airliner heading into Bradley Airport not far to the south.  It was a nice day.  I never heard the stranger walking up on me until he spoke.

“So, are you going to tell me?”

I turned with a start, a little shocked, but there I was, well, sort of me.  It was the ‘Tom’ character that I had created.  He looked like me, but younger, and certainly thinner.  There was a sorrow in his eyes that was telling of the adventures that he had been through and yet, a metal, a fiber, a strength that was there that may have bent, but never broke.

I stared at him for a moment, not sure what to say, or do. Then, “I am not sure of the question,” I replied.

“Ah, well, you created me, so in a way we are of the same mind, so think for a moment, what would you want to know?” he replied.

I did sit and think, and having the entire story in my mind at first I did not get it, but then “I never told how you died.”

“Yep, pretty much, you had me die, and I am cool with that, for the story, but never got into the particulars, I just was found at the bottom of the cliff, that cliff,” he said nodding toward the ledge close by.

“Well, it was a hard thing to write, I mean you were a major character, like Margo, and Asuna,” I answered.

He smiled at me, and nodded gently, “Yes, they were great characters.”

We sat quiet for a moment or two, and then he said, “So in the end, I was sick, it was needed for the story, it did tie things up nicely, but the manner, the way I died was a little weak.”

“Do you really think so?  I kind of liked the idea of leaving it open ended.  It gave the reader a chance to deal with the death in a way they could feel comfortable,” I replied.

“Okay, that is great for the reader, but you do owe a little something to me, the dead guy, and for that matter, you, the writer.”

I stared at him for a moment; he had joined me on the bench.  In a way I guess he is right.  I remembered working on this part of the tale and trying to decide how would the ‘Tom’ character leave the story,

“I had a little trouble with that part, would he, you, die peacefully in your sleep, or painfully with the ravages of the cancer in your body. I felt the first though merciful was kind of lame, and the second was really cruel and not good for the story.  I had considered the idea that he would put a gun to his head but that was just too messy and I think uncharacteristic of you, your character.  So I left it open.  I guess that in a way the story, that part of the story was a cop out by having you walk softly into the sunset and just be found later.”

He nodded, and then asked, “So if you were ‘Tom’, and really you are, how would it have gone?”

I sat for a few minutes, I had visited this place before, this end, I did not want to be here again, but I owed this character, my creation the answer.  And really, I also owed myself the answer.  I have avoided it, but it was time to put the period on the paragraph.

I stared out over the valley, the clouds floating carefree in the blue sky, and then finally.  “I really had difficulty with that, and I guess I never really wanted to say.  And for what it is worth I was leaning toward was that the pain, the exhaustion, the cancer was finally getting to you and while you had a good day health wise so I decided that it was a good day to die.”

“But you didn’t want it too obvious,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so.  I mean, being found at the bottom of the cliff was certainly suggestive, but it was not an absolute, it left that chance that you just fell as possible.”

“But we, you and I know better.”

“Yeah, it is funny, in the end; we all have a lot of control over how we meet our death.  I mean, sure there is the sudden event, the car crash, the strange or medical event that we have no control over, a burst aneurysm or illness.  And even in those cases there is some control, not smoking, poor diet, speeding.  But they’re a little different, I am talking about the cases where we reach a point in our life that presents us with a choice.  At age 90, or 95, living, no hanging on in a nursing home, having someone feed you oatmeal with no one, no family left, that is one of those points where you might give up.”

He looked at me.  “I can understand that, yes there are those times.”

“Well, I saw the Tom character, you, nearing a point like that where the future was so dark that there was little choice.  Do you hang on for the final few weeks or a month and become something that you loath, waiting to die, reaching a point where you have no control over yourself, making others do for you, feed you, bath you, change your diapers or do you cut it short and go with dignity.”

“And you chose dignity for me,” he said.

“Yes, basically, you sat here at this very spot for a while, and thought, remembered, cried.  And then you walked west and into the air.”

We were quiet for a few minutes, then finally, “Thank you, it was a good way to die, I soared for a bit, then it was black,” he said.

He got up and walked toward the ledge and when he reached the edge there was Asana, waiting for him.  She smiled at me, and I could read her lips as she said thank you.  Then she turned, took his hand and they just walked.  But this time Tom did not fall, they just kept going straight and level fading into the clouds.

I sat a little longer, deep in thought.  Then I got up, walked back to the parking lot and got on the bike, it was late afternoon and I headed for home.  It was a nice ride, but my head was full and buzzing, so many thoughts about what had just happened.   But most of all I wondered about my own eventual end.