
# Perseverance (Short Stories)

Steve Stroble

_Perseverance (Short Stories)_ , copyright © 2017 Stroble Family Trust. All rights reserved.

Formatted by Polgarus Studio

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

This book is a work of fiction. All people, places, events, and situations are the product of the writer's imagination. Any resemblance of them to actual persons, living or dead, places, events, and situations is purely coincidental.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright c 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

### Table of Contents

What Smells?

Revenge of the Undead

Riding the Bullet

The Case of the Missing Sophomore

OFFAL's Last Stand

Why Do You Look So Strange? (All of a Sudden)

Porthole in the Fog

EMP Code Blue

Battling the Big CA in Sunny CA

Acknowledgments

**Bonus story from _And the Ravens Will Feed You and Other Stories_ **

Bonus - The Ravens Will Feed You

### What Smells?

Curbside garbage pickup happened every Wednesday for residents on South Pinedale Avenue in Banderville.

It was also the day Cara Husky had to babysit her little sister while their mother worked her shift as a nurse at Banderville Memorial Hospital. Cara was glad her mom last month had cut back to part time work hours. But that still meant two twelve-hour shifts, one during daytime on Wednesday and the other on Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays, when Dad had to assume the role of babysitter.

On this Wednesday morning, Cara wished summer vacation would hurry up and end so she could return to a routine of high school while an aunt or grandparent took over Wednesday babysitting of Hope.

Not that Cara minded watching Hope.

But she often wished three year olds came with a switch to shut off or at least power down what Cara called _an infinite supply of energy_. All this morning Hope had toddled around both floors of the dwelling. After she had reached into cabinets, drawers, and bookcases, the house appeared as if a flood had washed through its interior and removed items from their intended places and left them strewn about the floor after the waters had receded.

It had taken two snacks, three children's TV programs, and five stories before Cara could coax Hope into her room and sing her to sleep for a nap by humming lullabies. Her little sister tucked away in bed, Cara cleared a path from the bedroom she shared with Hope to the kitchen. There, a pile of dirty breakfast dishes and utensils waited.

"Ugh. Why does Dad have to always have his bacon fried to a crisp?" Cara wondered out loud as she rubbed a scouring pad on the bits of meat and fat that seemed to have melded onto a greasy cast iron skillet. Scrubbing it and the stainless steel pan in which half a dozen eggs had been fried in canola oil distracted Cara enough so she did not hear Hope awake and wander toward the front door of their split level home. Because of the summer heat, Cara had left the solid core wooden front door open, with only a screen door keeping out the flies looking for an opening to a supply of food and the buzzing mosquitos hungry and hunting for humans' fresh warm blood.

The screen door sat ajar enough for tiny hands to open it as Hope pushed on its aluminum frame.

Once outside, Hope lifted her arms toward the fluffy gray and white cumulus clouds hiding the sun. Then she walked across the lawn to her favorite ball and kicked and rolled it until it became wedged underneath a row of bushes dividing her front yard from a neighbor's. As she crawled under the green shrubs to retrieve her toy, Hope heard a familiar sound, one of her favorite ones, a gigantic green and white garbage truck bouncing and lurching toward the curb thirty feet from her. Its hissing air brakes widened her hazel eyes.

Every week it performed the same trick, its magical illusion amazing Hope without fail. Down toward Earth would descend a huge metallic claw to clutch the 60-gallon plastic container full of stinky trash, anything that could not be recycled into new plastic or metallic containers or paper products or converted into reusable mulch. Up, up, up, the claw always lifted the container, no matter how full or heavy, before upending it, shaking it, and making its contents somehow disappear.

Hope was certain of the before and after condition of the garbage can because more than once she had climbed onto an overturned bucket next to where it sat on days other than Wednesdays and peered down into it to survey its contents. Every Thursday, it sat either empty or contained only a trifling of trash, the only confirmation necessary to assure her the truck's performance yesterday had once again succeeded. Every other week, either the recyclables' bin or yard and garden waste bin would also be empty.

Sometimes the magic truck rushed its pickup and a plastic bin would fall on its side as it returned from its journey toward the sky back to planet Earth. Even from her bedroom window, Hope had seen it had been empty as it rested sideways on the sidewalk. Often, Hope had tried to convince her parents and siblings to watch the weekly magic show with her, but they had all ignored her pointing finger.

Only her eleven-year old brother pretended to care enough to share her excitement. In response to her pointing and shouts of _look, look, look_! he had lifted her into a freshly emptied can and given her a ride inside of it to the side of their house. Then Cara had screamed at him until Hope came to his defense by beginning to wail, her preferred tactic to distract her older brother and sister whenever they fought.

* * *

After washing the dishes, Cara flipped on the television set and found a movie she thought adequate for her sophisticated tastes, maybe one good enough for her to review on her reviewer page at Amazon's website.

Tired from a date the night before and not getting home until midnight, her father's imposed curfew, Cara drifted off to sleep. While Cara dreamed about what August and being a sophomore might bring her way, outside on the front lawn Hope watched her favorite Wednesday entertainment.

After squeezing the overflowing trash can, the iron claw hoisted it skyward. Three quarters of the way up the truck's side, the mechanism jammed. Hope's mouth opened as the truck's cursing operator exited his right side driver's seat. Because he held a tire iron and his face resembled her daddy's whenever he grasped such a tool, Hope scooted backward until her head touched the hedge.

The sanitary engineer climbed a ladder made of three-quarter inch thick rebar welded to the side of his truck until his face was level with the lid of the garbage bin. Then he banged on the metal chain that picked up and dumped the twenty-five to thirty dozen cans his truck lifted every shift.

"You better work now," he said as his feet touched the concrete and he shook the tire iron at the part of his trucks always requiring the most repairs. He climbed back into the truck's cab and pushed the control to activate the chain. When he heard the kind of groaning sound mechanical things make when their human operators expect the impossible, he leaped back onto the sidewalk and looked heavenward.

"Come on, God. Why do I always have to get stuck with the truck that is so messed up that it can't even finish a single shift?"

He rolled the bin containing yard waste underneath the one dangling above hm. Next, he grabbed a seven-foot long one-inch thick piece of oak from behind the driver's seat. Standing as close to the cans as possible, he thrust his long pointer to press a control in the cab to release the metal claw.

As the freed can dropped two feet toward the top of the plastic bin under it, the driver leapt next to them and squeezed the falling can in a bear hug as the one under it tottered from side to side. He stopped the lower can's movement by letting it bump against his hip until it stood motionless. Then he lowered the can he held to the ground.

His orange coveralls and face drenched with sweat, the driver walked to the rear of his truck and pulled a two-liter plastic bottle of root beer from his protective clothing's largest pocket. In between gulps, he dialed his cell phone. As he waved traffic around his vehicle and explained the breakdown to his dispatcher, Hope walked to the truck and touched the bottom rung of the ladder. It looked no longer than the ones she loved to climb at the playgrounds her family took her to visit.

Her leg and arm muscles were firm from the hours spent climbing monkey bars and ladders to their tallest slides. Soon, her feet rested on the next to last steel rung of the ladder. This allowed her to bend at the waist, her pelvis resting on the ladder's top step.

Hope was surprised by the stinky assortment of fresh garbage assaulting her eyes and nose because she had assumed the garbage she had so often seen tumble from the cans somehow disappeared. After all, her big brother had said the trucks ate the garbage to give them fuel to rumble around town and out to the dump, where they spit out anything that gave them indigestion and next went _potty_ if need be.

A sad looking doll, dumped from her next door neighbors' can, looked to be reaching up to Hope, so she stretched down to rescue it. Her motion propelled her into a somersault, landing her atop 138 houses' worth of weekly trash.

Having convinced his dispatcher by saying, "I can't pick up another can because the chain's jammed beyond me being able to fix it," the driver threw his empty soda bottle high into the air and yelled, "Three points, he wins the game," as it disappeared into the truck's storage compartment for trash. He whistled as he headed toward the dump to jettison his not quite full truck. Then, it would be back to the maintenance shop to pick up another truck to finish his route.

"Looks like a little bit of overtime," he sang. "OT for me, how sweet can that be?"

His song and the rumbling diesel engine next to him drowned out Hope's alternating wails and sobs, which had begun when the truck lurched forward into gear. She wondered if the truck had already decided which of the three scenarios detailed by her brother would happen to her: consumed along with the garbage all around her to power the monstrous truck, burped out by the truck at the dump, or worst of all, becoming part of what came out of the truck when it went potty.

* * *

Ten minutes later, the increased volume of the television as a commercial break played woke up Cara.

She stumbled to the bathroom. After splashing three cupped handfuls of cool water onto her face, she went to check on Hope. Seeing only a rumpled blanket where she had tucked Hope in, Cara began calling her name, starting with one call in a normal voice every ten seconds. After a search of her home's every room, Cara's voice rose in volume and her calm calls escalated from "Hope?...Hope?...Hope?..." to demanding shrieks of "Hope! Hope! Hope!"

During her second search of the house, Cara noticed the front screen door was ajar. She dashed through the front entryway using enough force to pull the top hinge of the screen door from its aluminum alloy frame. As Cara's feet touched the concrete steps leading from the front porch to the yard, scenarios flashed through her mind, all of them starring Hope as innocent victim because of a neglectful sibling: frightened and lost, kidnapped, run over by a car, molested, murdered. The images flashing through Cara's mind stoked the two emotions controlling her – fear and guilt.

After quick searches of front and back yards showed no sign of her little sister, Cara did what many of her age had grown up doing: she pulled out her phone from her jeans pocket and sent a tweet:

Help. My three year old sister Hope is lost. I think she is still in the neighborhood. Help me. And don't tell my mom or she'll kill me.

Her tweet landed on 117 phones. Within three minutes it had been forwarded to another 538 phones. Ten minutes later, the message sat in the memories of 2,639 phones. Fifty-six volunteers descended on the Husky's home. Their frantic knocks on doors within a two-block radius produced nothing, not even a report of a sighting of Hope.

Hearing the negative results, Matthew Hennessy took charge as GIC, Geek in Charge.

First, he posted on his Facebook page:

Missing: Hope Husky, age three. Last seen on the 1800 block of South Pinedale Avenue in Banderville. If you have any information, call....

Not sure whether his army of 1,351 Facebook friends, ninety-six percent of whom lived outside of Banderville, would prove adequate for the task, Matthew next posted on _What's Happening in Banderville?,_ a page where local residents chatted, complained, cursed, gossiped, and too often raged about politics, religion or life in general.

Matthew smiled as he watched the genesis of what he thought would be a case of one of his posts going viral. The first comments to it appeared on Facebook within seconds and did not cease until weeks later. Two minutes later, nineteen others had shared the post to their Facebook pages. The first comments were dramatic and short:

OMG. I hope u find her.

I started searching over here on the south side of town.

Have u found her yet?

Let me know if the searchers need any sandwiches.

On the way there with my dog Roscoe, best damn tracker in the state.

Have you called 911 yet?

The last comment sent Matthew to Cara to ask her the same question.

* * *

It had been a routine shift for LVN Tonya Husky, caring for patients suffering from pneumonia or the flu strain she thought never fully exited the older ones it invaded until they died. Patients of all ages, who had endured the uncertainties of surgery, had tested Tonya's patience since her shift began. At least the number born at Banderville Memorial Hospital today outnumbered those who had died in its wards – so far. She was returning to her ward after lunch in the cafeteria when her phone rang.

"This is Tonya."

"Hi, Tonya. I just heard the news. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Because I'm almost seven hours into my shift I'm not too good at recognizing voices right about now, Tonya thought. It would help quite a bit to tell me who you are. "Who is this?" she asked, in a voice she hoped carried enough irritation to keep this intrusion as short as possible.

"Racheal."

"Oh, hi Racheal. What do you want to help me out with?" She hoped her friend had heard how Tonya had been drafted to serve as chairwoman of her church's craft fair. As she listened to the answer, Tonya's expression went from bored to hysterical. "Oh, my God! My baby? I have to get home right away."

She dropped her cell phone and ignored its bounce and slide across the tile floor. Sprinting to the nurses' station, Tonya slowed to a trot as she passed it. "My daughter's missing. I have to get home right now."

The charge nurse for the ward stood and tried to utter a reassurance, but her words bounced off the door to the stairway as it slammed shut behind Tonya. She descended three flights of empty stairs in twenty-two seconds and bumped into staff and patients as she bolted across the first floor for the hospital's main entrance. Commuting to or from her worksite took fifteen minutes most days.

Tonya made this trip home in eight minutes.

* * *

Tonya Husky's body shook as she grabbed her oldest child and rocked her back and forth. Her voice trembled even more. "What happened? Where is Hope? Why didn't you..." She stopped when she saw Cara's eyes grow wide as her head bobbed about.

Cara's fears and worry for the last hour gave way to tears. "I'm sorry, Mom. I fell asleep just for a little while after Hope laid down to taker her nap. When I woke up..." Cara pointed at the house, the front yard, and then toward the back yard to try and communicate the extent of her hasty search. Unable to any longer take her mother's fingernails digging into her bare upper arms, Cara tried to wiggle free from her grasp. As Cara collapsed onto her knees, she dragged Tonya's vise-like grip downward until their faces were inches apart.

"No...no..." Tonya stammered, not sure which level of scolding her daughter deserved or if it could even penetrate what she considered the hardest head of their five-member family. A loud cough spun Tonya's head upward.

"Excuse me, Ma'am. I'm Officer Jorgenson. I need to ask you a few questions. Can we go inside and maybe you can have something cold to drink to help you calm back down. I know you're pretty upset because I chased you for the last five blocks here to your house and you didn't slow down even after I put on my lights and then my siren."

"Are you going to give me a ticket at a time like this?" Tonya let go of Cara and wobbled as she stood.

The officer sighed.

"No. You must be the mother of the one who the dispatcher radioed us about. I just need to help you find your missing daughter, okay?" The cop started to walk to the front porch. "Maybe you should come inside, too," he nodded at Cara after he saw a van from a local television station pull up to the curb. "It's getting a little bit crazy out here."

* * *

Fourteen blocks away, Art Pagan lifted the lid to what he _called the best compost bin known to man because it has wheels and didn't cost me a single cent._ The gasses created from grass clippings, weeds, leaves, coffee grounds, and kitchen scraps knocked him backward, as if one of his friends had landed a punch to his jaw after both had had too much alcohol.

"Woeee, Jethro!" He imitated Uncle Jed, his favorite character from the television situation comedy _The Beverley Hillbillies._ "That sure has got to be some right powerful mulch. It'll make Granny's garden turn into the Garden of Eden for sure. All that's left to do is give it one last shot in the arm."

Art popped open a twelve-ounce can of his favorite beer and poured the brew on top of the steaming, smelly mulch. "I read in one of them there organic gardening magazines that baptizing mulch with beer gets it to cooking big time. I love the smell of rotting vegetation in the morning!"

Art slammed the lid to one of the eighty-gallon heavy duty gray plastic refuse bins the city had provided to all its residents. Into it supposedly went _all yard waste, but no pet litter, meat or dairy products, disposable diapers, or other toxic materials_ , according to the instructions studied and adopted by the city's Environmental Protection Department.

Art checked the date he had painted onto the can's lid and smiled. "It's been cooking for four weeks now. Should be ready to spread around starting sometime next week." The sound of his phone ringing in his den sent Art inside.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Art. The radio just said they are really biting up at Lake Tuckahotha. Let's go."

Art's plans of applying his freshly brewed batch of compost around his eleven fruit trees evaporated, replaced by visions of large, plump bass being reeled into his friend's boat. "I'll pick you up in ten minutes. We'll take my camper and your boat. Let's stay through Saturday. By then, the lake will be crawling with boats and the fish will all be hiding."

"Quit jabbering and get on over here before our wives find out and try to talk us out of it like they always do."

* * *

An hour later, when a breeze blew past Art's compost bin and through an open window, his wife Nancy's nose twitched. She had agreed to tolerate his mulch making only if he had all of it out of the bin by tomorrow because she needed it in an empty condition so she could prune her rose bushes. But he had run off to go fishing instead.

"You snooze, you lose. You fish, you wish you hadn't instead of doing your chores," Nancy said as she wheeled the bin to the curb fifteen minutes before the truck picking up yard waste turned onto the Pagan's block.

Some of the smoldering batch of table scraps and yard waste had reached 172 degrees after sitting in full sun inside the closed container for twelve hours a day for weeks. It landed atop a pile of gasoline soaked newspapers, used to clean up a mess from a neighbor's garage and which then had been tossed into his yard waste bin because of his overflowing trash can. Forty minutes later, Art's steaming mulch ignited the newspapers as the truck holding them turned onto a bumpy, rutted dirt lane leading to the county dump.

Its driver had heard tales of garbage trucks catching on fire, the legends always taking place in a large metropolis, where anything and everything transferred from cans to the trucks, including dead bodies.

"Help! Help! My truck's on fire." She waved her arms as she fled the flames, which had spread downward to the branches, bushes, and weeds, until her truck's container looked more like a volcano than a _sanitary receptacle_ , the term a bureaucrat had coined.

* * *

The dump's superintendent's 911 phone call alerted six members of the nearest volunteer fire department, four of whom responded. By the time they arrived clinging to their fire engine, an ancient model handed down by the U.S. Forest Service, the fire had consumed all of the flammable material inside the truck's bed. A smoldering mixture of ashes and embers remained.

It took five minutes for the fire crew to drench the residue and another five trying to convince the driver to dump her load "right here on the dirt road so we can make sure it's completely out before we leave." After reminding the driver of how Smoky Bear always ordered campers to drown their campfires, stir what remained, and soak them again during the public service announcements starring him, the driver obeyed.

Satisfied after every drop of water from their 1,200 gallon tank had been applied to the gooey mess, firefighter Sondra Tighe coiled one of the hoses used to fight the blaze. The glint of the setting sun's rays reflecting off of something about 150 yards away turned Sondra's head.

Must be a piece of metal or glass, Sondra thought. A minute later, another reflection from the same direction seemed to now be a little closer.

And moving.

She ran to the truck and grabbed the binoculars donated with the truck. What appeared to be a dirty, crying child filled the instrument's field of vision.

"Angel, you my angel?" were the first words firefighter Sondra heard after sprinting to the tired, hungry Hope, whose silver colored hair clip had caught a descending sun's final light for the day.

### Revenge of the Undead

Selling four e-book copies of the first book in her dystopian series had unraveled Fran Prescott's world, which consisted of the high expectations she had placed on her venture. How could this happen? she asked herself over and over. She had followed every tidbit of advice gleaned from reading dozens of books and blogs by best-selling authors, expensive editors, and sought after literary agents.

Before its publication, her book had been critiqued by ten beta readers. After incorporating almost everyone of their suggestions into the manuscript, she sent it to an editor, whose suggestions required five months of rewriting. During this phase, a cover designer had produced what Fran thought a magnificent likeness of her book's two main characters.

Despite Fran's efforts, _Resurrection of the Undead_ sat at 2,168,035 on the Amazon charts for hardcover and paperback books and the e-book version hovered around 900,000.

Worse yet, no one had reviewed it.

When she posted her woes on a web page named Authors of Dystopian and Utopian Fiction, some of its readers replied by offering her names of those who had helped their books sell more copies. Fran wrote the eleven suggested names on a piece of paper and then cut the suggestions into individual strips. She dumped them into her favorite hat, closed her eyes and attached thumb and forefinger to the strip of paper she thought radiated good vibes, the kind of future her last fortune cookie had promised: W _onderful success will visit you shortly._

She read the name she had chosen aloud, "Tom Xavier."

Although 1,841 miles separated them, Fran was speaking to Tom two minutes later. Raised to give others the benefit of the doubt, she thought Tom's strange appearance to be the fault of a poor Skype connection. She wondered if her movements and changing expression looked as bizarre to him as his did to her.

After introductions, Tom took control. "So, which one of my packages are you interested in, Fran?"

"Packages?" Fran asked.

"Yeah. Do you need the bronze, silver, gold, mother of pearl, emerald, or platinum package to market your book?"

"Uh, actually, I just got your name and phone number as a recommendation from a group I belong to. I really don't know anything about what you offer."

Tom smiled.

"Well, I'm glad to hear I come so highly recommended. I believe in a soft sell approach. High pressure tactics don't work on me because they make me want to run for cover and hide from whoever is using them on me. Most readers are the same way. Give me your email address and I'll send you the link to my video on YouTube. If you're still interested after watching it, you can get back to me."

* * *

Fran watched the video three times before opting for the platinum package, which would promote her book with a _guaranteed_ _5,000 tweets and 20,000 emails to_ _avid readers_. It included a promise her book would hit at least the Top 10 on the best seller list for its genre on Amazon and get ten or more reviews.

After selling some of her jewelry at a pawnshop, Fran contacted Tom again. "I'd like to go with your platinum package," she said.

"Excellent choice," Tom said as his fingers tapped his computer's keyboard. "I'm sending you a form to fill out. As soon as I get that back and receive your payment to my Pay Pal account, your campaign will start up."

Fran paused. She had read dozens of times a sentence should never end with a preposition and writers who committed such a crime against the English language were not to be trusted. She wondered if book promoters who ended spoken sentences with prepositions could be trusted, either.

"Something wrong, Fran? Do we have a bad connection or do you just need some more time to think things over before we launch your new book's promo?"

Tom's questioning ended Fran's hesitation. "Uh, no," Fran said as she remembered how her book's ranking had dropped during the last five hours. "I'll fill it out right away and send you the money. Thank you."

"Thank you, Fran. I think you're going to really be pleasantly surprised by the end of our campaign. It is so important to constantly promote. Before you know it, _Resurrection of the Undead_ will be selling like hotcakes."

"Goodbye."

Fran's voice trembled as she recalled advice from a _How to Write a Best Seller_ book she had read: "Writers who use split infinitives in their stories are worse than amateurs. They are guilty of grave error, one that will at best cause educated readers to stop reading and at worst, write scathing reviews. The only sin worse is the use of clichés in your book."

While she filled out Tom's form, his split infinitive of _to constantly promote_ and cliché of her book _selling like hotcakes_ pulsed through Fran's mind over and over as she wondered if book marketers should likewise be held to the standards she and other excellent writers followed.

* * *

Once Fran's payment hit his account, Tom went to work.

News of _the best dystopian epic in years_ was tweeted to his 5,012 followers. Next, he sent an email of three paragraphs describing two of the book's main characters, one a zombie, the other his mother, a non-zombie, and the challenges they faced _in a world gone bad_. It reached the in boxes of 20,005 personal computers, smart phones, laptop computers, I-Pads, and other devices. Of the total emails sent, 6,815 landed in Spam folders, with seven percent of those being opened. Thousands of the emails languished in email accounts rarely or no longer used.

A little more than 9,000 of them were read by the recipients, at least in part. When the readers saw _the book_ _has been reduced to only 99 cents for the next 5 days_ , 771 of them read the book's blurb or a sample of _Resurrection of the Undead_ after clicking on a link to Amazon. Twenty-two of those bought the book, which pushed it to number thirty-seven for its genre on Amazon's ranking by the third day of the campaign.

On day four of the campaign, Tom became irritated, which caused him to start talking in a loud voice.

"What's wrong with these people? Don't they know that Fran needs results?" he asked his dog. He checked her book's latest ranking and slammed the mouse down on top of his computer's keyboard, which broke three of its keys. "Now it's dropped down to number forty-four!" Tom scrolled down to reviews for the book. He jumped from his chair when he saw a two star and a three star review. "At least it also got a couple of four star reviews."

Using pseudonyms, he wrote four short five star reviews of _Resurrection of the Undead_ by using his four Amazon accounts, which were spread among his smart phone, laptop computer, I-Pad, and personal computer. Each device connected to the web through a different web browser, because Tom thought such trickery would keep anyone from discovering one person had written the four reviews.

For his next review, he went next door.

His neighbor was delighted after answering her doorbell. "Come on in," Mrs. Johnson said as she held her front door open with one hand and pulled on Tom's arm with her other. Widowed eight months ago, she now craved contact, even if it involved an odd neighbor sixty-one years younger than she. "Would you like some tea?"

"You read my mind," Tom said. "While you're making it, could I please use your computer? I can't get mine to do what I need it to because of...because of its limitations." Surviving on half-lies, Tom thought this one fit his definition of a statement containing at least a bit of truth because he could not use any of his four devices to post another review of the book he was promoting.

"Could you please log on for me?" he asked.

"Certainly, as long as you close your eyes so you don't see my secret password. I change it every month because so much monkey business happens on computers nowadays." Mrs. Johnson tapped a combination of four numbers and eight letters, two of them upper case, to log onto the internet. "There are just too many people pretending to be someone they are not on the internet. I think they're called _frackers_."

Her preparations in the kitchen gave Tom time enough to log into Amazon by using a fifth pseudonym he reserved for Mrs. Johnson's computer. After posting his fifth five star review for _Resurrection of the Undead,_ Tom joined his host in the kitchen.

"I saw where we're supposed to get thunderstorms starting tomorrow night. Is it all right if I mow your lawns early tomorrow morning before the grass gets too wet to cut?"

Mrs. Johnson set the pot of tea and a plate of cookies on her kitchen table and sat opposite Tom. She wiped away the tears running down her cheeks by dabbing a cloth napkin to try and hide some of her pain.

"You're just like my Herman was. He was always checking the weather forecast so he could plan on when to water, when to cut the grass, when to..." She stopped remembering and blew her nose. "I don't know what I'd do if it weren't for nice folks like you that help me out so much."

As Tom bit into a cookie, he used his free hand to pat his favorite neighbor's folded hands. "No problem. Your husband taught me so much about how to make it in this life that I love doing anything that helps you to remember him."

* * *

After checking her book's status for the sixty-third time in four days, Fran grabbed her cell phone and punched its buttons to dial its most recently added phone number. The sound of a recording transformed her frown into a pout.

"Hurry up, hurry up." Fran yelled into her phone as Tom's recorded monotone irritated her. At last a shrill beep told her she could begin her message. "We have to talk. Just in case you have a phone without caller ID, this is Fran. Remember me, the one you made all those great promises to?"

Twenty minutes later, Fran's phone rang and its small screen identified the caller. "What's going on? You said I would get my money back if I don't get at least ten reviews and my book does not hit at least the top ten on that list at Amazon, right?" she asked as she paced in circles.

Two time zones away, Tom made faces at his phone, including sticking out his tongue, as he shouted at it in hands free mode. "Huh? The last time I checked, _Resurrection of the Undead_ was climbing up the charts big time. And it already had nine reviews."

Fran stabbed the air using a finger, on its end rested a pointed nail filed to inflict maximum damage on any would be mugger or rapist.

"Nine reviews? When I just checked a few hours ago it only had four reviews. I suppose because you're in a different time zone, what you see on your computer is different than what I do? Besides, you promised me ten reviews, remember? And what about those two stars and three stars reviews? What's that all about? I'm beginning to think that those replies to my posts on Facebook were right after all."

"What did you post?"

"I asked some groups I belong to how much they spend on marketing their books. Only one of those who replied said they spend at least $1,000."

Tom sat in his easy chair and patted his black lab's head, which soon rested on his lap.

"Which Facebook groups for writers do you belong to?" He listened carefully as Fran named twelve in quick succession. "Okay, here's what you need to do. Put posts on all those groups and ask them to go to the five star reviews for your book and then click that they are helpful."

"I got some five star reviews?"

"The last time that I checked, you had five of them."

"Really?"

"Would I lie to you? Are you on Goodreads?"

"Yes."

"Good. Also ask your Facebook people to put your book on their _to be read_ shelves at Goodreads."

"But what if they haven't bought my book yet?"

"That doesn't matter. Just them putting it on their _to be read_ shelves makes it look like they bought it, which will make other people buy it, which will move your book up in the rankings."

The warnings of those who had replied to her posts came back to Fran. Some had included _conned, lied to, taken for a ride,_ and other similar words to describe their experiences after hiring someone for marketing and promotion of their books.

"Wait just a minute, Mr. Smoothie. What about your guarantee that my book would hit the top ten for my genre?"

Tom tapped on his laptop until he found a page showing Fran's book now ranked at fifty-two. "Look, this is only day four of your promotion. We still have part of today left, and all of tomorrow, right?"

"Well, you better do what I paid you to do. Your contract guarantees that my book will have at least ten reviews and hit at least the top ten within 30 days or I get my money back, all $1,000 of it."

"No problem, Fran. I'm on the job for you."

"You better be. Goodbye."

Tom said _goodbye_ to a _call ended_ message on his phone's screen.

* * *

The next morning Tom started mowing Mrs. Johnson's grass at 7 a.m. He grunted as he pushed what he called a _one person power mower_. The blades of the reel mower moved in time to the music screaming into his head through ear buds attached to his battered Walkman.

No wonder Mr. Johnson croaked, Tom thought. Using this ancient push mower is enough to kill anyone.

When Tom finished, Mrs. Johnson met him at her unattached garage as he put the mower away. "I bet you're hungry," she said. "Come on in for some breakfast."

"Thanks, you either heard or read my stomach. It's been growling for over an hour."

As Mrs. Johnson stood at the stove making thick buckwheat pancakes and eggs sunny side up, Tom watched from a chair at her kitchen table. He moistened his throat by guzzling freshly squeezed orange juice and coughed. "I really hate to impose on you again like this, Mrs. Johnson."

"What is it now, son? You know I'm always here to help you out with anything you need. You're my neighbor."

"My credit card has been so maxed out for months that I had to finally cut it in half."

"Good for you. Do you need to borrow some money?"

"No, but if I give you $100, can I use your credit card to buy some books by one of my clients? I need to send them out right away and using a credit card is the fastest way possible. But since my credit card is history..."

She set a plate piled high with enough calories to keep Tom's hunger satisfied until dinner. "Is that all? Sure you can."

* * *

Using Mrs. Johnson's credit card gave the appearance someone, in this case a nice old lady, had been so impressed by _Resurrection of the Undead_ she was buying 100 copies of it to send to friends and relatives. In reality, Tom had sent them to 100 reviewers he had met via emails and phone calls during the last six years. The task took him long enough that Mrs. Johnson invited him to dinner.

"Thank you, but I'm still stuffed from your great breakfast," Tom said as he hugged her goodbye.

"Well, don't only come over just when you need my help or I need yours. You don't know how much it means that I don't have to pay someone to cut the grass and weed it and water it. You know, there's a special on The History Channel tonight that you might like. Come back over for supper and we can watch it."

"Thanks for the invitation. I'll be back if I can get all my work done before then."

To not be interrupted while he had mowed the grass and bought the 100 e-books, Tom had left his cell phone at home. It had one message, from seven hours ago.

"This is Fran again. In case you forgot, the campaign for my book just ended a few minutes ago. I've done everything that you told me to do and now it's slipped way down to number102 on the Amazon list. I've been talking to other authors and they all are telling me the same thing, that unless there's a miracle, my book won't hit the top ten within the next month because I can't do another reduced price special until after another ninety days are over. So that means you are going to need to send back my $1,000 by the third of next month. Just so you understand, there are no hard feelings on my part. But business is business. That's another thing those other authors told me, that writing is a business, especially when you self-publish like I do."

Tom ran to his bathroom and grabbed the sides its toilet and vomited most of his breakfast into it. He had hoped his recent purchases of _Resurrection of the Undead_ would push it into the top ten. When he again checked the book's ranking, it sat at number fifteen.

He cursed and shouted at his dog, the only creature Tom knew who absorbed and shared his troubles instead of fleeing or offering advice. "I knew I should have sent out those gift cards when the book was only ninety-nine cents. Now it's selling for $2.99 instead of just ninety-nine cents because the campaign is over!"

His frustrations somewhat vented, Tom composed an email to send to the 100 book reviewers he had sent copies of the book:

Hi, Tom here.

In the past, you have reviewed one or more of my clients' books and they really appreciate your honest feedback.

_Well, there's a new one that is in your inbox called_ Resurrection of the Undead _. That is, if you haven't already found it and started reading it. I'll keep this short so you can get back to your reviews. Please take a look at it and if you like it, please leave a review for it at Amazon._

_Just in case the book somehow accidentally went to your spam folder and then got deleted (if you're like me, you don't bother to browse your spam folder before dumping it), I'm sending you a gift certificate so you can buy a copy of_ Resurrection of the Undead _for $2.99._

So be sure to check your inboxes later on today.

Thank you and happy reading.

He used his email list named _Reviewers_ to send the message.

* * *

After handing Mrs. Johnson a check for $299, Tom spent the rest of the afternoon using her computer and credit card to send the electronic gift cards to the 100 reviewers he hoped would rescue him. The way this campaign had progressed, he worried that three-fourths of them would use the gift cards to buy a different book than _Resurrection of the Undead._

So what if the follow-up gift card is really just some kind of a bribe? Tom thought as he worked. Who cares if they just make up a review without even reading the book? Not me, not me, not.

His calculations left a dwindling hope of twenty-five other potential reviewers, who impressed by Tom's persistence, might buy copies of _Resurrection of the Undead_ with his gift card _._ As he worked, Tom silently prayed enough copies would be bought to land the book in the top ten for its genre, even if only for one hour.

Exhausted on account of the $398 now spent on _expenses_ out of the $1,000 he had received for this job, he stumbled home at 6 p.m. after begging off from Mrs. Johnson's second offer of supper followed by The History Channel special, a luxury he could not afford because he only received broadcast TV on his nineteen-inch set. When he entered the 640-square foot house he rented, his pet met him.

"Sorry I've been away all day, Buddy," Tom said as he patted the dog. Buddy barked and walked to the corner of the kitchen reserved for his food and water. Tom groaned when he saw both bowls were empty. "Man, I hope you didn't tear up the house again just because I forgot to feed you. Tell you what, once I get through with this dumb campaign, I'm going to line up some new book reviewers. The ones I got now must have marked my emails to go straight to their spam folders. Once I get some new reviewers, we can go camping for two or three days, okay?"

Buddy wagged his tail as he devoured his first meal of the day.

* * *

During the next two days, Tom's watch's alarm beeping every hour to remind him to check the ranking of Fran's book interrupted any extended sleep. When the book at last rose to number ten, he made a screen print of the page that contained a photo of _Resurrection of the Undead_ ' _s_ cover, Fran's name as author, and the most wonderful number Tom had ever seen next to them. Then he fell onto his couch and slept until Buddy woke him nine hours later by pawing at his master's chest because of hunger.

When a tenth review of the book appeared a week later, Tom made screen prints of all of its reviews. He put them in a folder labelled _Fran Prescott._ Then he steeled himself for the part of his job he hated most, follow up, which Tom believed to be _just fishing for repeat business_ , a process in which his half lies often expanded into full blown ones.

Fran answered after her phone rang two times. "Hello, Tom. Are you calling to say that you give up? When are you sending me back my $1,000?"

"But, Fran, your book hit number ten about a week ago."

"I don't believe you. I've been checking two or three times a day and it never got higher than number thirteen."

Tom opened her file and pulled out the screen print he had made. "Here it is. It hit number ten at 4:02 a.m. two Fridays ago. I can send you a copy of the screen print to prove it if you want."

"Never mind. The last time I checked, my book still only had nine reviews. You guaranteed me at least ten."

"But that's why I called. I checked just ten minutes ago and now there are ten reviews. Congratulations."

"Hold on while I take a look." A minute later she returned. "It's a one star review! It would have been better if I had gotten stuck with only nine reviews instead. Some promotion you stuck me with."

"Fran, if you're going to make it as a writer, you have to stay positive no matter what happens. Besides, you have five five-star reviews." None of which would have happened if I hadn't written them, Tom thought.

"But when potential readers see that one star review they won't buy my book or any of the others that I plan to write."

"Don't worry. After we hang up, get on Facebook and post on all those pages you belong to get people to click on the _No_ option where it asks if that one star review was helpful to them. That way, anyone who sees it will think a troll wrote it. Readers are really sophisticated these days, you know."

"And so are we writers. So far I've only made a couple hundred bucks on my book. That still leaves me almost $2,000 in the hole because of what I paid for you, an editor, proofreader, and cover designer. I'm not doing this author thing just as a hobby, you know. I'm in it to make a living, to make the best seller lists and have millions of books sold, okay? If I can't quit my day job, then what's the use?"

"Anyway, since this is just your first book in your series, how many more are you planning on writing? I bet that lots of those who are reading _Resurrection of the Undead_ are already anxious for more great stories from you. You know what I'm saying, right? I bet they can hardly wait for the next one to come on out."

"Four more books altogether. The next one is going to be called _Baptism of the Undead._ Then comes _Communion of the Undead_ followed by _Confessions of the Undead_. I'm going to wrap up the series with _Left Behind with the Undead._ "

"Whoa! Now you're talking, Fran. Tell you what, since you've been so easy to work with and now that you'll be a repeat customer, I'll give you a discount to market those four books for you. How does $900 per book sound? There's only one catch for you to snag such a great deal. You have to promise that you won't ever tell anyone about the discount because I can only give it to you for being such a great client."

"What, $900? I wouldn't pay you more than $200 a book if I ever used you again."

"Look, Fran, I really understand how it's a dog eat dog situation for all of you writers, especially these days for fiction writers. For every one fiction book that sells, there are about ten nonfiction books that do well. Five years ago I read that 15,000 different books are published every day worldwide. Because of all the indie self-published authors now, it's probably up to at least 20,000 different books a day getting published. I know it's hard for you writers. But believe me, it's even harder for us marketers of your books. Maybe you need to branch out. Did you publicize your book on Goodreads yet?"

"Of course I did."

"Okay, you're one step ahead of me then."

"Sorry, but I have to go. I have an incoming call. It's been interesting working with you, though. Believe me when I say that I've learned a lot." About what a crook and clown you are, Fran thought as she turned off her phone and threw it onto her blue leather couch.

When the call ended before Tom could say _goodbye_ , he sighed and turned to Buddy. "Well, that was another in a long series of one-time customers. What do they want from me, a pound of flesh?" Tom lifted his shirt and wiggled his belly after grasping it with both hands.

His dog cocked its head in the manner canines do when trying to understand humans, the strangest of all God's creatures, at least in Buddy's experience.

Tom walked to his computer and clicked on the icon labelled _Goodreads_. In the website's search bar, he typed _Resurrection of the Undead._ A second later an electronic image of the book's cover popped onto his screen. Below it, Tom read a synopsis of the book and a single five star rating and review. Tom laughed because he had expected at least three or four lesser ratings and reviews.

He laughed even harder when he read the name of who had left the glowing five star review, _Fran Prescott_.

### Riding the Bullet

"Hurry up, Mom, or we'll miss it."

Thirty-seven year old Melissa Towne broke into a trot as she struggled to catch up to her teenaged daughter. She regretted dressing her best for the trip in a cream colored pantsuit, gold plated necklace, mother of pearl earrings, and tight fitting brown loafers two sizes too small to hide what she considered her big feet. Each step became more painful.

"Stand in the doorway, Carly. I'm almost there."

Carly planted her feet against one half of the closing door and her backside against the other half. A mechanized voice rebuked her.

"Please clear the doorway, train is departing...please clear..."

The voice repeated the order seven times before mother and daughter ware aboard the L.A. Express, nonstop service from Stockton, California, originating in Sacramento. The pair walked through four passenger cars before they found two seats side by side. Carly continued to whine.

"Way to go, Mom. If you hadn't taken so long to get ready this morning, we would have gotten here in time to get upper deck seats. There's no good view sitting down here on the lower deck." She pointed at the triple paned window and then flopped into her seat. The two men seated facing them did not look promising either.

One looks like a dinosaur because he's so old, Carly thought, and the other one? Carly stood and pretended to straighten her blue jeans and green cotton blouse so she could get a peek at the passenger whose face hid behind a copy of that morning's _U.S. Business Report_. She leaned forward until her shiny black hair brushed one of the hands holding the newspaper.

When the paper folded, a man who appeared to be forty winked at her. "Aren't you getting a little too close before introducing yourself, Miss...?"

Carly blushed as she fell back into her seat. She stared out the window as the man who wore a charcoal gray suit turned his attention to her mother. "First time riding the bullet, ma'am? I'm Roger Huntsfield."

"Pleased to meet you Mr. Huntsfield. I'm Melissa Towne and this is my daughter Carly."

Roger's smile revealed so many teeth Carly thought him to be more shark than human. His friendly tone of voice convinced her that her mother had been targeted as a potential meal.

Roger nodded at the sleeping man next to him.

"I'd introduce you to this man but he's been asleep ever since I sat down." He shrugged and returned to his sweet talk, a pitch designed to hook up with the pretty woman who sat three feet away. Roger frowned when a porter pushing a cart stopped next to the four travelers.

"Your usual this morning, Mr. Huntsfield?"

"Yeah, the usual." He held a metal wrist chain up as the porter scanned it.

"Here you go, sweet dreams." The porter handed him a plastic vial an inch long.

Roger lifted it in a toast to his two new acquaintances.

"Doctor's orders. She says I don't get enough sleep." He unscrewed the vial's tiny cap and drank the clear liquid. When his head dropped forward, the porter pulled a disposable pillow from his cart, placed it behind Roger's head, and gently rested it against the neck support he pulled from the seat's top. Then the porter turned to Melissa and Carly.

"How about you ladies, would you like what he just took?"

"No thank you," Melissa said.

"Okay, enjoy your trip. We're scheduled to arrive in L.A. an hour and twenty minutes from now." As the porter stepped to the next row of seats, the train lurched forward.

The nameless passenger sitting next to the snoring Roger Huntsfield opened his eyes halfway before stretching his long, thin arms and legs and yawning. He stomped his boots on the carpeted floor to circulate more blood to his tingling feet. His frayed jeans and plaid flannel long sleeved shirt gave him the appearance of a retired lumberjack, Carly thought.

He yawned and rubbed his eyes and said, "About time. Let's get this show on the road."

* * *

By the time the train was rumbling past Modesto, proper introductions had been exchanged among the three passengers who would spend a little over an hour together as they traveled about 350 miles through the heartland of California, the Central Valley made famous by John Steinbeck's stories from the previous century.

Carly thought John Hender was boring. His voice resonated somewhere between a Midwest twang and some other strange dialect she had never heard. Most intriguing were some of the strange words he used. She wondered if maybe they betrayed his former profession and waited until her mom paused her conversation to open a package of toasted soy nuts.

"Excuse me, John, but may I ask you how old you are?"

Melissa gagged on a soy nut as she elbowed Carly and shook her head. The question brought forth the first smile displayed by John Hender to his seatmates.

"Old enough to be your grandfather, little girl." He studied Carly's bright hazel eyes. "Let me guess first. You're sixteen, right?"

"Fifteen." Carly said. "And my guess is you're about seventy, huh?"

John tipped his Sacramento Tigers baseball cap. "Thank you. Actually, I turn eighty-two next month."

Carly calculated where one so old might have been when. "You weren't in the Israel War were you?"

John turned his head and stared at the farmland rolling by the train. His hands became fists twice before he cleared his throat. "What if I was? Why do you need to know about any of that?"

Carly leaned forward. "We're studying that war and have to turn in something about it. If I could interview you about what you did then I wouldn't have to write an essay instead."

"Carly, it's not polite to get so personal with someone whom you just met." Melissa turned to the one she feared had been offended. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hender. My daughter should know better than to ask you such things."

John Hender's hands clenched a third time. His sigh sounded like some long dead spirit reluctantly being exorcised from his soul. "That's all right. It seems to help when I tell folks about it."

"All right." Carly punched the metallic wristband of her smart watch.

As its screen flickered on, she sat erect before lowering her voice an octave, a range she used when she hoped to persuade her listeners. She aimed the watch's screen at her face. "This is Carly Towne and I'm here today on the Stockton to L.A. Bullet Train. For my sophomore history class project, I'm interviewing someone who fought in the war during which a quarter of Israel's population died. Let me introduce you to Mr. John Hender. How are you doing, John?"

"Fine."

His hands became fists again until his story ended, of how a third of his battalion's troops were killed or wounded and the survivors wondered years afterward why they had been spared.

"We had laser weapons that we fired from rifles, tanks, and planes," John said. "But they had biological and chemical weapons." He wiped his nose with a ragged handkerchief. "You ever see someone die from those?"

"No," Carly said. "But I saw a movie about that horrible war and –"

John bent his neck backwards at a ninety degree angle and focused on the dirty ceiling above them. In a corner, a spider rested from spinning its web as it waited for any flies or mosquitos who had boarded the train in Sacramento or Stockton. John wondered if the passengers who sat above them in the train's upper deck were as naïve as the youngster plying him with questions.

"That smart watch of yours hooked into the internet?" he asked.

"Yeah. Why?" Carly asked.

"Look up the Israel War Memorial."

"I didn't know there was one," Melissa said.

John returned his head to a position so he could view the Townes. "It's there in Jerusalem. Maybe it will help your report get a better grade if you download photos of some of the troops from my battalion who died. Besides, they deserve some kind of memory, if nothing else, you know."

* * *

After completing her interview of John, Carly reverted to her normal routine of calling her friends on her smart watch. Her mother began a new conversation.

"So, what did you do after the war, Mr. Hender?"

"I helped build this rail line." He swept his hand back and forth and up and down over the center aisle. "How do you like riding the bullet?"

Melissa sighed. "The worst part is getting to the station on time, any of them. Our commuter bus from Livermore got stuck in traffic and we almost missed this train. We usually just take the milk run train that travels along the coast because it's so scenic. We catch that train out of San Jose."

"So why all the rush on this trip then?"

"My dad's sick. He got the flu and then pneumonia and my mom is afraid he won't make it. They live outside of San Diego."

John chuckled.

"What's so funny about what I just told you? My daddy's dying."

"I'm sorry. I was just thinking how it's going to take you longer to get from L.A. to San Diego than your trip from Stockton to L.A. will."

"I know. After spending over six trillion dollars on this bullet train line, you would think that they could also have built an express line between San Diego and L.A. with some of that money."

"You sound just like all the ones I worked with. All of us said what you're saying after we finished this line. Once you've done the same thing for long enough it's sort of hard to get used to doing anything else."

"How long did you work on the bullet line?"

"Oh, only about twelve years. There were some guys who milked another four, five, six, or even seven more years after it was built because of all the repairs that had to be made to it. I figured I'd had enough so I went ahead and worked on The Canadian Wall after that. Smartest thing Canada ever did, building that thing."

* * *

As it entered the tunnel underneath the Grapevine, the bullet train slowed to 210 mph. Melissa said God had created the sixty-mile wide stretch of mountains as a sign there should be two Californias: South California and North California, the highest ridges of the Grapevine serving as their border.

"Maybe the voters will finally approve it this time during the next election," John said after grabbing a back pack from the rack above him. "Looks like sleepyhead overdosed."

He pointed at their still snoring traveling companion, Roger Huntsfield, who grunted after the porter snapped a wakeup capsule under his quivering nostrils. Its vapors would rouse even the drunkest or most stoned passengers to the point they could safely exit the train.

The Townes and John Hender said their goodbyes at the passengers' platform for the next train departing for San Diego. Then he walked to the row of taxis sitting in front of L.A. Central Train Station. John chose a two-seater cab because such vehicles' fares were subsidized by the Federal Pollution Control Agency.

Besides, he did not want to share a cab with other passengers. None of the four, six, eight, or ten seat cabs could depart until every seat filled with humans or luggage. Any cab drivers leaving the station with even one empty seat could lose their license.

"Where to, sir?" The cab driver pressed a button to bring his cab's electric motor to life.

"How about Huntington Beach?"

"Sorry, but my cab's batteries are running low." The driver pointed at a flashing gauge on the dashboard. "If I drop you off at Venice Beach instead, then I can hit a recharging station nearby there while I eat lunch."

John shrugged. "You're the boss. Let's go."

"You down here for the Olympic Gladiator Games?" The driver pulled a ticket from his shirt pocket. "This is the last one I have for sale so it'll be pretty steep, say maybe $32,000?"

"That looks like a ticket that's only good for one day."

"Yeah, that's the only ones that us scalpers can buy up to resell on the black market. What do you say? Tell you what, I'll knock the price down to $20,000."

"No thanks."

* * *

John waded into the Pacific until its warm waves massaged his tired knees. Every few minutes, he dunked his head under the ocean's water for a few seconds because a friend who lived in the apartment next door to his had said, "The sea water has minerals that will make your scalp healthy enough to grow more hair. You got too many bald spots for any woman to want you. What's the matter? You don't want to die all alone do you?"

He followed his friend's prescription not because he believed it would produce thicker hair but to have something to joke about when he returned home.

Midday on a Thursday, the beach was being used by a couple thousand of swimmers, surfers, sun worshippers, and beachcombers either looking for valuables buried in the sand or food to eat left on the sand or in trashcans. John found a spot where the closest beachgoers around him sat or lay at least fifty feet away, enough of a comfort zone for him to relax. His daydream had turned into a dream manufactured by REM sleep when a whirring sound roused him.

"Mr. John Hender?"

"Huh?" He stared at the drone hovering two feet above him.

"You are to accompany me to the nearest memory center immediately, sir. Failure to do so will result in your arrest, possible detention, and potential incarceration. You will be liable for all court costs. Because all of California's prisons are currently filled to capacity, you will have to serve your sentence in a Mexican prison, should you be convicted of making the Islamophobic statements you are accused of and charged with."

Part of him wanted to pretend to cooperate before grabbing the drone and tearing it apart with his calloused hands. Such foolishness was a felony. And others who had attacked drones had lost fingers or hands, depending on the composition of the drones' blades, the carbon ones producing the worst amputations. And any ambulance summoned in such cases became triaged into the bottom of the electronic lists dispatching them, which had resulted in some of those injured by drones being _DOA, dead on arrival,_ when they pulled up to medical facilities.

Baring his soul to a teenaged girl to help her complete her homework in an easier fashion and soaking in Southern California's sun and waters had calmed John to the point he chose the option he always called, _the lesser of two evils_.

* * *

Dr. Thelma Ricketts ordered the computer to display her patient's medical history on the screen embedded in the wall next to his bed. She clucked her tongue.

"Memory Disorder...shoulder injuries requiring surgery...two hip and pelvis replacements...spleen and prostate gland removals..." She sat in the chair next to the bed. "Mr. Hender, it would be easier for me to tell you what is not wrong with you, because I've only read just the first page of your records. There are twenty more pages besides that one."

John smiled. "Well, doc, guess I'm just the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow all rolled into one, huh?"

Her silence and quizzical look told him this was not a doctor to be toyed with, one who had an agenda not as concerned about his well-being as her own. When her lips jutted outward and contorted into a pout, John sighed. He wanted to ask if he could leave now because his roundtrip ticket from Sacramento to L.A. stipulated he take the 6:01 p.m. Bullet Train that evening and it was nonrefundable. But the cold metallic horizontal bars anchoring him to his bed convinced him silence might be a better option.

Dr. Ricketts stood and removed her glasses and let the android nurse standing next to her disinfect them in the sterilization chamber built into her abdominal cavity. After putting them back on, she left the crowded ward without another word. Two agents, one uniformed and the other in plainclothes, met her in the hallway. The one in matching pants and blouse took charge.

"Dr. Ricketts, I'm Agent Gladstone and this is Agent Vickers of the Veterans Administration. He is here to ensure that John Hender's rights are maintained in an orderly and lawful fashion."

Agent Gladstone's fingers felt ice cold to Dr. Ricketts as they shook hands. She wiped the sweat transferred to her hand by Agent Vickers' palm onto her white large pocketed doctor's coat and made a mental note to disinfect her coat and hand once she had finished talking to those she considered interlopers. Because Agent Gladstone had not identified which agency she worked for, Dr. Ricketts knew it was in her best interest to cooperate. If she did not, she might lose her license to practice medicine as a doctor in California.

"So where do we go from here?" Dr. Ricketts asked. "I have a heavy patient load here at the memory center and others waiting back at my private practice who all require my attention."

Agent Gladstone smiled.

"We understand." She glanced at Agent Vickers until he nodded. Then she ordered a device as thin as a piece of paper to display, "Case 1988767265."

Dr. Ricketts watched two minutes of the interview Carly Towne had squeezed out of John Hender four hours earlier as they sped at 300 mph through what little remained of the once seemingly endless farmland of the Central Valley.

"It's worse than I thought," Dr. Ricketts said. "What course of treatment do you recommend?"

"Removal of all memories from age twenty-two and earlier," said Agent Gladstone. "Do you agree, Agent Vickers?"

"Yes. Current Veterans Administration protocols concur with your recommendation, which take into account Patient John Hender's rights."

Dr. Ricketts turned to the nurse android assigned to her. "Schedule patient John Hender for laser memory corrective surgery immediately."

#### Six Weeks Later

John Hender's neighbor clicked off his television. "You'd think that with 1,000 channels to pick from, that they'd have something good enough for us to watch."

"Whine, whine, whine, that's all you ever do," John said. His friend walked over to his visitor and studied John's hairline.

"Listen, if it weren't for you listening to me, you would've never gotten all that new hair to grow back in over your bald spots. Say, what's that scar doing there? I don't remember that ever being there before."

John ran his fingers over the synthetic skin and artificial hair recently grafted into his scalp. "That's where they went in to operate at the memory center when I was down in L.A."

"No kidding? My doctor has been saying that's just what I need. Does it work?"

### The Case of the Missing Sophomore

I hate the calls that come before or after business hours. Those always turn into the hardest cases. Besides that, it's so early I can't even focus my eyes to see if it's 5:17 or 6:17.

"Hello, this is Bobbi Heck, Private Investigator. I'm sorry that I missed your call, but if you –"

"Stop it, Ms. Heck, please. There is absolutely no time left for us to waste. I can tell real voices from recorded ones."

I fumble for my glasses. "Go ahead."

"My daughter has gone missing. You came very highly recommended."

"I see. When can you meet me at my office?"

"In twenty-five minutes."

"Okay. Good-bye."

You're in luck, lady, whoever you are, because it's Tuesday. Monday night through Thursday night I sleep at the office, which saves me a three, maybe four hour a day commute that saves me over $100 a week in gas which is important because I don't get enough good paying cases. Or maybe it's because I get too many of the wrong kind of cases, like missing people. Those are always the toughest ones to solve, you know, the ones that clients don't want to pay for _services rendered_.

* * *

The car of my potential client is big, black, recent model, and shiny. And it has a chauffeur who even opens the door for its owner. Having a third floor office lets me size up customers before I let them in through the front door.

"Ms. Heck, I spoke to you earlier."

"Yeah, I'm buzzing the door open for you. Come upstairs to Room 315. You like coffee?"

"Yes, yes please."

Her voice sounds shaky. I hope she's not too freaked out. Hysterical clients just make bad cases even worse. They almost always also try to be helpful, but just end up getting in the way.

This one looks to be about fifty. It's really hard to tell these days because there's so much plastic surgery and Botox and industrial strength makeup that can cover up and hide a lifetime of wrinkles and pain and sin. Boy, she could use something. It looks like she hasn't slept in days. Time to be professional.

"Please have a seat, Mrs....I didn't catch your name."

"I'm Raye Kruse."

And that ring and bracelet make you a candidate for a mugging, at least in this part of town. Wow, her hand is ice cold. And she acts like she doesn't want to let go of mine.

"Anything in your coffee?"

"No."

Great. I just read that psychos like their coffee black. I hope she's not mistaking a dead daughter who died years ago for the one she claims is missing.

"Here you go. Please forgive the Styrofoam cup, all my good china is –"

"Please cut out the small talk. My...my daughter..."

Oh great, now I made her cry. I hope she doesn't get too much snot on my handkerchief.

"I'm sorry. Here, use this."

"I'm sorry to get so emotional like this but it's not like her to do this sort of thing. We've always been close and..."

My hanky comes back beyond repair so I drop it in the wastebasket when she's not looking. "Tell me about your daughter."

"Her roommate reported Darcy missing three days ago."

"Did you file a missing persons' report with LAPD and the L.A. Sheriffs' Office yet?"

"No. Darcy is attending college back East in Boston."

"Okay. Is the Boston Police Department looking for her then?"

"They say they are. But I think they really aren't too concerned. I can tell by the way the detectives sound when I call them."

"Before I take on this case, I need to warn you that the first seventy-two hours are the most important in missing persons' cases. After that the odds of finding them alive go way down."

"She went missing Saturday night so tonight will make it seventy-two hours. Regardless, I want you to find her. I don't care how much it costs."

After I have her fill out my standard contract, she called someone to book the next nonstop flight from LAX to Boston for me. So I grabbed the suitcase I keep packed with two changes of clothes and hit the freeway. Just in case Darcy might be hanging out here in L.A. instead of Boston, I stopped to leave word with my best contact, Melvin.

As usual, his mechanic shop is wall to wall cars.

"Darcy Krause, twenty years old, parents live up in Beverly Hills. Got it. Leave a copy of her photo on my desk so I can ask around," Melvin said without looking up from the car he was turning a wrench on.

When my flight turned out to be first class, I knew Mrs. Krause meant business. First time I ever flew in the front seats of a plane, first time I ever ate fancy steak and lobster on a plane. This is turning out to be a case of firsts.

But is that a good or bad omen?

* * *

After landing at Logan International, I took a cab to the obvious place for all out of town private eyes such as me to check in, the Boston P.D. The detective assigned to the case looked less than happy after I introduced myself and the reason I was trespassing on his turf.

"Why can't these out of town people let us take care of it?" he asked. "Don't they trust us?"

"You know mothers, Detective Williams. They worry a lot. Any leads yet on Darcy's whereabouts?"

"No."

He shrugged and patted a pile of manila folders stacked so high that it looked ready to fall off of his messy desk. "These are the murder cases I'm working on right now. Those are the missing persons' cases." He pointed at a pile that looked neglected because it sat farther away, out of his immediate reach. "Guess which ones take priority? Or do you all do investigations by using a different way of prioritizing them out there in L.A.? My guess is she will turn up in a week or so."

"One last thing. Can I conceal and carry my weapon while I 'm here in Boston?"

"Only if you have a local permit. Want to fill out an app for one? Until you are approved, you are technically breaking the law. You want to leave your piece here until you're on the way back home?"

I handed him my protection, a .38 Special passed down to me from my dad.

"No thank you about applying for a permit. I don't plan on being here long enough to have to wait and wait for any bureaucracy to approve my right to protect myself."

"That's true enough. Here's my card just in case you dig up any leads on that college girl. All the local private dicks around town here extend that professional courtesy to us. You, know, you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours kind of arrangement."

He hands me his business card after writing his home phone number on it and saying, "You can call me any hour, day or night...even if it's just because you're lonely." When that doesn't get a blush or even half of a smile out of me, he becomes what he probably considers more _subtle_.

"You need someone to show you the best place around town for dinner tonight?"

His eyes narrow like a snake about to strike and his half open mouth has a wad of saliva drooling out of its corner. I don't think this guy is having a stroke; he's having something even more deadly, a MLC – Mid Life Crisis.

"Let me make a call first just so I can be sure your offer of dinner fits into everybody else's schedule. I hate it when people infringe on me so I don't ever want to do it to anyone else either." I pull his land line to my side of his desk and dial the home phone number he just handed me. The one who answers on the other end sounds world weary, like someone who life has dealt a wolf for a husband who has broken her heart more than once.

"Hello, Mrs. Williams? Hi, your husband just invited me to dinner at what he claims is the best place in Boston." She wants to know who I am.

"I'm a private eye from out of town. Your husband calls those in my profession private _dicks_. Sounds to me like he's still living in the 1960s and reading Mike Hammer novels or watching film noir movies from Hollywood's Golden Age. Anyway, I'm sure that when he said the _best place in town_ , he had to mean your home. Even hiding behind his desk, it looks like he's carrying around fifty, maybe sixty extra pounds because of your excellent home cooking."

Now she's thanking me for the compliment in a way that sounds like she never or rarely gets any.

"I'm sorry but I'll have to take a rain check on your husband's kind offer." Now she sounds like she's disappointed and confused at the same time.

"Yes. That's right. Just a minute, he's right here." I hand the phone to Detective Williams. His expression has gone from one of expectation and lust to one of hurt and anger. Instead of radiating lechery disguised as love, his eyes are now shooting daggers at me.

"I know I should have asked you first before inviting her, dear, but she was in such in a hurry to get to work on her case that I had to invite her as she was walking out the door," the shot down lover boy says, his lie almost believable. "Look, I have to go now. I'll talk to you later."

He hangs up.

"Why'd you have to go and do that? Don't you know...?" His words die quicker than the erection his dirty mind was probably giving him a few minutes ago when he thought he was reeling me in.

"Because the gold wedding ring on your left hand has stopped working, that's why."

He holds his hand in front of his face and inspects the ring as if it's a secret communication device issued by his P.D. "Huh?"

"It's supposed to remind you of whatever promises you made to Dorothy before, when, and since you got married. I just gave your ring a jump start is all. Your wife's voice sounded just like the women who hire me because they think their husbands or significant others are cheating on them. I did it for her, okay?"

* * *

I made one more phone call from Detective Williams' office, a fake one that hopefully completed his rapidly growing negative first impressions of me. After dialing the local number for the weather, I carried on a conversation with the recorded forecast that was calculated to make me look like I cared about the missing girl only slightly more than he did.

I told my imaginary girlfriend who I supposedly had not seen in years that I wouldn't be in Boston for long, maybe just a day and maybe we could take in a movie or something. That way Detective Williams might figure I'm not going to dig too deep and so am not worth telling any of his contacts about. You never know, but anyone who's cheating on his wife just might be cheating on the Boston P.D. also, by passing along info to the wrong kind of people, the kind who know more about what happened to Darcy Krause than me and the Boston P.D. put together.

Next stop was Darcy Krause's apartment. Her roommate was home but about as helpful as Detective Williams as she talked to me through an inch-wide crack of the open door.

"I already talked to the police. Go talk to them."

"I already did and they were less than helpful, sort of how you're acting with me now. What is everybody trying to hide anyway?"

"Okay. I think Darcy took a plane somewhere. Goodbye."

"Goodbye," I said to the door, which is now shut and being locked by turns on more than one deadbolt.

In the world of private investigation, many times it's more who you know instead of what you know that ultimately solves cases. That's because often someone you know knows what you need to know. At least that's what my dad always said. So I call a friend who works for TSA and give her the name of who I'm searching for and the most likely airport she might have flown out of on anyone of the last three days.

Twenty minutes later, she calls me back.

"Sorry, but I could not find any flights taken by a Darcy Krause flying out of Logan International during the last few days. There was a Darcy Krause who flew out of Spokane, Washington on Sunday though."

"Wrong Darcy, I'm afraid. Thanks anyway."

Such dead ends are bad, especially when technically I and my friend have both just broken the law by her passing on to me what her search of TSA's computers found. But since I don't fly too often and so don't get my tax dollars' worth by TSA screening me before I even get to the airport, I figure my friend's computer search is just my tax dollars at work more up close and personal than being scanned and patted down by some TSA agents as part of a slow moving line.

I return to Darcy's apartment and once again am greeted by being shown a one-inch wide view of its interior.

"Before you shut the door again, please listen to how much Darcy's mother is suffering because I still have no leads to tell her about." I play a voice mail out loud of Mrs. Krause sounding even more frantic than when I first met her. Doing that gets me inside the apartment.

I show her my P.I. license, which makes her teary, red rimmed eyes grow wide.

"You really are a private investigator. When you came by here before, I thought you were really a reporter looking for a story. If Darcy's mom is worried enough to hire you, then she really must be in trouble."

"So what makes you think Darcy flew out of Boston... uh sorry, I didn't catch your name?"

"I'm Callie Newby, the serious roommate, you know, the one who has to watch over and take care of the carefree, wild, and happy go lucky roommate. The first time Darcy disappeared for three days without telling me where she was going, I laid down the law that she had to at least call or text me within six hours of whenever I noticed she was gone. After that, she always did, except this time. That's why I reported her missing."

"Mind if I look around just a little bit?" She says _no_ so I search through Darcy's desk, two dressers, nightstand and closet and ask to use to use the bathroom. Then I point at her PC. "You happen to know Darcy's password?"

"No." Callie stared at her feet. "Once when I was looking over her shoulder when she was logging on, she got mad and slapped me. It was like she was always trying to hide something from me."

"You think we could go out to the airport and look for Darcy's car? You do know what it looks like?"

"Sure."

We stop off at the Boston P.D. so I can retrieve my .38. For some strange reason, Detective Williams gives me the cold shoulder and is happy that I'm leaving town so soon. But the bozo who's been tailing me ever since I left this building for the first time four hours ago follows us all the way out to the airport. I have Callie pull into the short term parking lot and park her car. Bozo parks a row away and keeps looking into his side view mirror to keep an eye on us.

So I walk over and introduce myself. "I'm guessing that you work for Detective Williams because you didn't show up until after I left his office."

"What's it to you?" the short, squinty eyed guy asks through the window of his beat up black Ford. The way his right upper arm is pushed away from his chest tells me whatever he's packing in the holster under that armpit is large, able to hold maybe three times as many bullets as my small revolver. He clutches the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white.

"Why are you bugging me? I never heard of that detective."

"Because I don't like creeps like you following me around, especially in a strange city. Tell me what you know about Darcy Krause's disappearance. If it's valuable enough..." I pull my billfold from my hip pocket and open it.

"Look, lady." He turns on the ignition. "No matter how much you might pay, anything I told you, like who I really work for, could get me killed, okay? I'm just down at the bottom of the ladder trying to survive by doing errands for people, okay? Take some friendly advice. Beat it out of town and don't ever look back this way again, okay?"

He slams the car into reverse and backs out so fast he almost runs over my foot. His tires squeal as he looks for the nearest exit. His car's license plates don't carry the telltale markings of a city police vehicle and I doubt the Boston P. D. is hard up enough to use undercover cars that old and dented. The guy is probably what he says, just a working stiff hired by some criminal element to tail me. But why would the underworld be so very interested in a nobody like Darcy Krause?

I almost feel sorry for the guy who has been following me. Nothing worse than being a tail that's been made by the one they're tailing. At least that's what Dad always said.

I'm liking this case less all the time.

* * *

It takes Callie and me twenty minutes to find Darcy's car and me another five to convince Callie to use the duplicate key she had made without its owner's knowledge. Inside the glove compartment is a phone.

"Aha!" I say in my best Sherlock Holmes imitation. "Why would she leave a phone in the car, Dr. Watson?"

"It's a spare one that she carried in the car just in case she left the apartment without her other phone."

I flip it open and there are a couple dozen messages, most of them from Mrs. Krause. One of the emails is more helpful, a notice from a credit card company of a payment to rent a car in Las Vegas last Saturday. But the email is addressed to credit card holder Helen Olds and not Darcy Krause.

"I knew she was leading some kind of double life but..." Dr. Watson says.

* * *

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

That phrase replays in my mind one too many times during the long flight to Las Vegas with a layover in Salt Lake City, the only route the airline offered in exchange for my first class return ticket to L.A. I fly coach, another downward omen about how this case is heading.

The young kid behind the counter where I think Darcy rented the car looks confused by my request so I repeat it. "Look, all I am asking is to take a quick look through the car that my friend rented to see if my earing fell off while we were driving around in it. She rented the car on Saturday. Her name is Helen Olds."

"This is pretty unusual. Please wait a minute. I have to check with my manager first before giving out any such information about our customers."

The manager proves more helpful and asks me to have a seat while the car is brought to the terminal so I can search it. All I really want to do is to physically see the car to verify where it really was checked back in. I don't trust what computer records claim or the ones reading them to me, especially when I have to make a request twice. Then I'll casually ask when Darcy AKA Helen Olds checked the car back in so I can come up with a better timeline on her whereabouts.

Instead of the car being brought to me, fifteen minutes later a plainclothes Las Vegas police officer is asking me to go downtown with him. He says the rental car was found abandoned.

Out in the desert.

* * *

It takes an hour of Q and A before the Las Vegas detective even acknowledges that my story is possible. Because he does not hit on me like Detective Williams did back in Boston, I decide to be nice to him.

"Here's Darcy Krause's hairbrush," I say as I hand him the plastic baggie holding it. "You might want to run the DNA off of one the hairs in it against any of the DNA evidence you might have found in that rental car. Bet you it matches Darcy Krause AKA Helen Olds."

The detective sighs, the kind you hear when someone realizes they are headed down a trail that always has ended up badly in the past.

"My guess is that the DNA on this hairbrush will eventually match the DNA from the corpse of a young female that is found a day, a week, a month, a year, or decades from now. You know what they say."

"Yeah, _what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas._ "

* * *

Back home in L.A., I find out that this case is creating problems for more people than just me.

My mechanic Melvin had put the word out around L.A. about the missing Darcy Krause. His contacts had in turn asked their contacts about her enough that Melvin got one response, but one that was even less friendly than the ones given to me in Boston.

"Some guy paid me a visit a couple of days after I spread the word around about your missing girl," Melvin said.

"Yeah?"

"He said it would be a shame if did not stop talking about her."

"Huh? What's he look like?"

"Some greasy well-dressed dude who looked like he was from the Mexican Mafia."

"But why would someone like –"

Melvin drops his socket wrench so hard that it comes apart.

"No offense, Bobbi, but you white people sure are dumb sometimes. They always hire someone from outside their organization to take care of people like me. You really want to happen to me what happened to Darcy?"

"You're saying it was a hit? I thought it might have been just a case of robbery or rape that escalated into murder."

"That's my guess. I figure she got involved with some really powerful person or the powerful family of someone and then for whatever reason, Darcy became a liability. Maybe she had some dirt on someone. Look what happened back in 2008 when that prostitute in Chicago said he had had sex and did drugs with one of the candidates for President that year. Bam, bam, bam, he was killed execution style."

Melvin points and fires his finger gun at me to drive home his story.

"Then another young man gets snuffed out the same way. Bam, bam, bam! Word on the street was the same candidate had sex with him too. Listen, I grew up in Chicago. My daddy ran a shoe shine shop in one of those fancy high rise buildings when I was little. He used to hear gangsters and politicians joking about how they raised the dead and had them vote for JFK. Nowadays, instead of any of those kinds of shenanigans, they are adding to the dead anyone who might derail a candidacy or business or whatever. People have become things that other people use up and then dispose of if need be. You've lived long enough to know at least that much."

"But what am I going to tell Mrs. Krause?"

"I don't care. Tell her what I just told you. Maybe the truth hurts but having you or me getting wasted because of your keeping on trying to solve her daughter's disappearance will definitely hurt one or both of us a whole lot more. I'm sorry but I don't want to end up dead just because she can't accept the fact her daughter is more than likely dead."

* * *

Letting down a client is one thing. Disappointing a desperate mother is worse, much worse.

"You're saying you won't pursue the case any further? What about working with that police detective from Las Vegas?"

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Krause. But now that my associate has been threatened, I have to end my involvement."

"You really believe in his theory then? That my daughter somehow got involved with someone who had her killed?"

"It's a possibility."

It ends with me recommending a P.I. I know in Las Vegas in case Mrs. Krause can't let this go and with her writing me a check for more than I expected or deserved. After she leaves, I close the manila folder labelled _Darcy Krause_ and put it into the file cabinet drawer labelled _Unsolved Cases._ Those are the cases that keep you awake at night, the ones you even try to solve in your dreams, like I've been doing ever since I found out Darcy had an alias, complete with credit card.

My dad says those are the kind of cases that kept him awake too.

* * *

_It's time to head to my second job_.

That's what Dora Jimenez always used to say. We worked in an office as clericals a long time ago. At five, I would go home to cook dinner or run five miles or drop into bed, as circumstances and my mood dictated. Not Dora. She was a grandmother and her daughter worked a swing shift so Dora would go home and take care of her three young grandchildren.

I never thought much about it. But now I do because my second job is every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

During the week, my father lives in an assisted care place up in Lancaster. So on Fridays I pick him up and haul him over to my nearby place for weekends. He says he likes "getting out of jail on parole," every time, his way of letting me know he would like to make his three-day weekends away from the care home into seven day a week ones.

When I tell him how I have to keep the business he started in 1958 going, he shrugs.

In his prime, Dad was the best P.I. in L.A., maybe even all of Southern California, depending on who you talk to. Nowadays, he watches a lot of reruns of _Perry Mason, Barnaby Jones, Peter Gunn, The Rockford Files, Richard Diamond, Mike Hammer, Charlie's Angels, Hawaiian Eye, The Thin Man, Mannix, Cannon, Honey West, 77 Sunset Strip_ , and any crime movies from the 1940s and 1950s that feature a P.I. in the cast.

His memory fades in and out like those radio stations you sometimes can pull in from out of state so Dad gets to solve some of the cases from scratch again, even though he's seen them a dozen times at least.

He also likes to talk shop.

"How did that missing college girl case turn out?" he asks during dinner.

"How do you know about it already? I hadn't started working it yet when I saw you last weekend."

"Melvin called me after some tough guy threatened him because he was helping you out on it."

"Oh. I should have guessed."

"Yeah. I told him to tell you to drop it quicker than a hot potato. You know, drop back ten and punt like they do in football games. If they're willing to whack a nobody like Melvin, then they would be more than willing to come after you too, you know. People think that organized crime is dead just because all of the old time bosses are dead or in jail or too old like me to do much of anything anymore. Ha! There's a whole new generation of young punks who took their places. Punks that are way more wacko and deadlier."

He pauses, his way of asking unanswered questions a second time.

"Don't worry. I dropped the case."

Like he's done ever since I was little, he reads the disappointment in my face and voice.

"How about if I contact Joe over there in Vegas for you? He worked the murders for the detective squad before he retired. If anyone can get some action going, he can. He knows every conman, tough guy, and hustler in that town and most of them still owe him favors. Besides, the last time I talked to him, he was bored silly. A dead end case like this is just what he needs."

I smile for the first time since meeting Mrs. Krause on Tuesday.

Even better, a month later I stop dreaming about her daughter Darcy when Dad tells me the Las Vegas P.D. found her remains in the desert outside of the city. Mrs. Krause was so thankful to be able to lay Darcy to rest in a fancy cemetery she even invited me to her daughter's funeral.

R.I.P., Darcy.

### OFFAL's Last Stand

"You should start callinf yourselves the Old Fart Fellows Always Lazy because that's what you are." After spending ten minutes trying to explain to these boneheads why their organization would cease to exist, Kara Headland's patience exited her. At first, she had feared her presentation would offend enough of OFFAL's members until she would be asked to leave.

But once she had renamed the Order of Friendly Fellows At Large, any restraint she was known for evaporated.

"I am here as the appointed representative of the OFFAL Women's Auxiliary League. If it weren't for us girls, your boys' club probably would have died off a long time ago. None of you even have learned to cook yet, even though some of you are in your eighties."

Barny Turlock stood. "Don't forget me, young lady," he said. "I turn ninety-one next month, you know."

"I'm sorry, Barny," Kara said. "No offense intended. My point is that whenever you guys cook here for one of the breakfasts, lunches, or dinners open to the public, the meat is either burnt to a crisp or dripping with blood because it's so rare."

"But I cook it that way because so many us are anemic," OFFAL's president, Mike Dunny, said. "If those of us with low iron counts don't eat meat real rare, we get really run down and turn into what you just called us a few minutes ago."

Seven other of the fraternal organization's members nodded or voiced their assent.

Fearing his style of grilling might be voted on and then banned from OFFAL's large kitchen and outdoor brick barbeque pits, Oscar Newton stood. "As vice president of OFFAL, I feel obligated to remind you that cooking meat and fish until they are well done has much more health benefits than eating it half raw and bloody. You don't want to get parasites, do you? And since hardly any slaughterhouses kill the animals like it says to in the Bible, what all of us end up buying and eating contains a whole lot of blood and uric acid."

"Uric acid?" Mike Dunny ended his question with a loud hoot.

"Yes, uric acid, President Dunny. When you kill animals the non-kosher way, they are terrified and their bodies shoot a lot of uric acid and other poisons into their meat. Then what gets sold at the store is full of liquids like blood and who knows what else. Some places even inject water and salt into the meat to make it weigh more. Like you just said, the shorter time that you cook it, the more blood it still has in it. Who in their right mind wants to pay for meat that's full of liquids, especially when it's selling for six to seventeen dollars a pound these days?"

Kara leaned forward at the podium until her lips contacted its skinny microphone and coughed. The sound echoed off the room's thin wood paneling and turned her audience's attention back toward her.

"Excuse me, but I feel a motion is now in order. That is, if you boys still use _Robert's Rules of Order_ to conduct your meetings like we gals do. Anyway, I suggest that a vote be taken on OFFAL's Women's Auxiliary League's five proposals. Remember, this just might be OFFAL's do or die moment, this might be your very last chance."

The club's president took charge. "I move that we vote on whether to accept the five proposals so graciously presented here tonight by the representative of our fantastic Women's Auxiliary League." Mike Dunny paused to catch his breath before continuing his motion. His motions were always detailed enough to indicate how his fellow members should vote.

"Mike, it sounds to me like you're asking Kara for a date after the meeting, the way you're buttering her up," Barny Turlock said. "Just wait until I tell your wife."

The oldest member's commentary caused most of those still awake to laugh so loud that it woke the two who had nodded off, which Barny noticed. "Now it looks like Ed and George finally woke up. I move that you repeat your motion, Mr. President, so they'll know what it is that they're voting on."

As Barny sat down, Ed stared at the floor, his face flushing a bright red.

George glared at Barny. "You keep making fun of me like you just did and you can walk home," George said.

Barny poked his cane at the friend who gave him rides to church, doctors, stores, everywhere he needed to go. "No wonder you have to take all of those medicines. Your blood pressure must have just gone from 140 over 100 to 200 over 130. You're the one who should walk home so you could lose some of that lard you've been hauling around for years and years." When George batted away the cane, it clanged into the metal folding chair in front of him.

"The meeting will please return to order," Kara Headland said. "As long as you drag your meetings on, I'm amazed you accomplish anything."

"Oh come off it, Kara. I was hoping you'd stay around long enough so I could talk to you afterwards about setting me up with a date with that little honey, Beth. Now that her husband Leroy has died and left us with one less member, I need to –"

"Sorry to interrupt you Barny, but Kara's right," said Mike. "I once again move that we accept the well thought out proposals submitted to us by the Women's Auxiliary of OFFAL."

"Do I hear a second?" Kara asked.

"I second the motion on the condition that we vote by secret ballot," Vice-president Oscar Newton said. "I don't like the way President Mike Dunny worded his motion. Both times he made it pretty clear how he's going to vote. It's obvious that he's trying to sway the membership for this vote."

Mike turned toward Oscar but before he could offer his rebuttal, Kara spoke. "I'll pass around this pad of paper. Please take a sheet of paper and write either yes or no on it."

* * *

The secret ballot produced a tie, ten in favor and ten opposed. Their votes ran mostly along party lines, with the traditionalist faction of OFFAL voting _no_ and the younger members voting _yes_. Three times as sexually active with their wives than the traditionalists were with theirs, the younger members feared their spouses might boycott their bedrooms if the proposals were not adopted.

Three of the traditionalists were widowers, two had never married, three suffered impotence because of medical conditions, and two had been so wearied by life they now could take or leave sex.

Only Kara Headland smiled as OFFAL's secretary and treasurer, who had tallied the votes, announced the tie.

President Mike Dunny frowned, calculating his chances for his re-election next month based on the results of his motion. His chief opponent, Vice-president Oscar Newton, had also placed great hope on the results because if Mike's motion lost, he was convinced he could replace him.

As OFFAL's top two executives worried about their futures, Kara once again spoke, this time from the back row of folding chairs, where she had moved during the voting. "If I recall correctly, OFFAL's by-laws state that in case of any tie vote, the Women's Auxiliary can select a representative to cast the deciding vote."

"Are you sure about that?" Oscar Newton asked.

"Only one way to find out," Mike Dunny said. "Mr. Secretary, fetch a copy of OFFAL's by-laws."

Secretary Nick Costello shuffled to the back room doubling as an office. He rummaged through a bookcase holding volumes of minutes dating back to November 2, 1946, when twelve men and their wives had founded OFFAL. After searching for four minutes, he found the last surviving copy of the club's by-laws, typed on an Underwood manual typewriter during the last millennium.

When Nick opened the faded cardboard cover, a crinkled yellow page tore. "I move that someone get these by-laws typed into a computer. I'm not turning any more pages until my motion is passed."

"I'll take care of it," Kara said. "Now, can you please turn to the section on voting?"

Nick mumbled to himself as he read the requested words. Finally, he stopped and raised his voice. "Yeah, it's just how Kara says."

"Well, since all of you will be able to tell how I voted even I write it down, I'll just say it out loud. I vote _yes_ on OFFAL adopting the Women's Auxiliary's set of recommendations. I can even include them in the by-laws when I type them into my PC at home, if you like."

* * *

Some of those who have endured church splits claim such events leave such bitter feelings that the wounded relationships often do not heal during the lifetimes of those who once worshipped together. Sometimes splits in secular organizations, even fraternal ones, can grow even nastier. The tiny cracks in OFFAL's cohesiveness widened and grew deeper after its Women's Auxiliary League's five proposals were written into OFFAL's by-laws.

The adoption of them provided ammunition for the two who now campaigned to become OFFAL's president for the next three years: incumbent Mike Dunny and challenger Oscar Newton. Dunny used his email list to remind all of the other members of _my past service for all of you_.

Oscar met with them in person, until one member remained, the only one not present when the Women's Auxiliary League's five proposals had been adopted, Paul Astor. Oscar had convinced himself Paul's vote would decide the election.

But getting him to even attend next Tuesday's meeting would prove difficult because for the last two years, Paul had only attended OFFAL's breakfasts, dinners, cookouts, dances, and the club's contingent in the annual July Fourth and Veterans' Day parades. Convincing him to allow a visit had taken Oscar three long conversations by phone.

* * *

Paul Astor's house appeared to be vacant when Oscar parked at its curb. No car sat in its driveway or furniture on the front porch. One half-dead flower grew in its eight flower beds. The front lawn alternated like an awful patchwork, spots of crab grass, Bermuda grass, and weeds surrounding bare dirt and looked as if it had not been watered in two weeks.

Boy, this place sure has gone downhill ever since Paul's wife died, Oscar thought as he kicked clods of dirt off of the sidewalk leading to the front door.

The whirring sound of a turning camera mounted under the garage's eaves spun Oscar's head toward the sound. When the camera continued to turn in time to his steps, Oscar shivered.

Oscar had listened to but not repeated the rumors around town: "Paul has gone off the deep end really bad ever since Mabel died," and "You know what they say, you're never the same after you lose a spouse, especially if it's the husband who has to bury his wife," and "His neighbors say he walks around his back yard talking to himself all the time."

Paul's being a fellow OFFAL member made this scene even more unbearable because the word _trust_ was part of their oath to define the club's internal relationships. Well, who can you really trust these days? Oscar thought. Before he could knock or ring the doorbell, the front door swung open and Paul yanked on his jacket to pull him inside the dark, musty smelling house.

"Hurry up, before they see you," Paul said as he slammed the metal door so hard that its frame shuddered. Using both hands, he locked the doorknob and turned the deadbolt at the same time.

"Before who sees me?" Oscar asked. Paul's incredulous expression made him wish he could retract the question.

Paul led his visitor to what had been Mabel's sewing room until she became too ill to enjoy it. Now it served as Paul's combination panic room and safe place, the only square footage of his home he was certain where a conversation could not be recorded by some shadowy government agency or secret society. To him, it did not matter if the eavesdroppers were publicly or privately funded because too often they shared common goals.

The room's interior stunned Oscar.

No exterior light or air could penetrate the room because Paul had placed 5/8-inch plywood sheets over the windows. On top of the plywood and the room's sheetrock were thin sheets of metal, which also covered the ceiling. Paul had deemed the three inch concrete slab underneath the beige carpet to be thick enough to forego the need to cover it with a metal covering.

Paul sat in a recliner and grinned as Oscar ran his fingers along a wall. "It's lead and thick enough to keep our conversations private. Sit down, Oscar. You make me nervous when you act like some building inspector from City Hall. Oh, that reminds me, since you're the only other one that's been in this room since I remodeled it, you can't tell anyone else about it, okay?"

"Okay."

Oscar sat in a folding metal chair bought at the last OFFAL rummage sale. Paul always told sellers at such rummage sales, _stop trying to rip off a fellow OFFAL member. Don't I deserve at least a 50% discount?_ After arriving home, he would tell any neighbor or passersby, "Get on over to OFFAL's rummage sale. The best part of it is that you don't have to pay any sales tax!" as he unloaded items he had bought.

"Look, I don't have all day, even if you do. You said you wanted to know who _they_ are, right?"

Desperate to lock up Paul's vote, Oscar nodded. "I guess so."

Paul's sky blue eyes narrowed as he stroked his long scraggly dull gray beard. "You ever hear of HAARP?"

Oscar thought Paul's depression since Mabel's death and his resulting isolation had caused him to sometimes drop articles such as _a_ before nouns. "Sure. They use them in orchestras. I think that even the angels play them up in heaven, right?"

When Paul shook his head the way a teacher does after giving up on a student into whom she has invested too many hours, Oscar rethought his answer. "Oh, you must mean a blues harp, don't you?" He stood and pretended to play an invisible harmonica by making grunting sounds he had heard Jack Bruce of Cream, Magic Dick of the J. Geils Band, and bluesmen Paul Butterfield and John Mayall produce decades ago.

"A thumpa bumpa, wah, wah, waaaah..." When Paul dropped his head into his hands, Oscar stopped his imitation. "I give up, what are you talking about?" Oscar asked as he sank back onto the cold chair.

"HAARP stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. The government uses a bunch of high power radio waves from a station up in Alaska to control the weather worldwide. They said they shut it down, but I know they lied as usual. They are the ones behind global warming."

"Oh."

Oscar had also heard rumors about Paul's escape into an alternative universe. For Paul, everything had been pre-arranged not by a sovereign Triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but by a multitude of conspiracies planned and carried out by human beings from dozens of nations. Their strength as a group did not depend on numbers of members because they all held positions of power and access to unlimited wealth to carry out their nefarious plots against Earth's billions of unwary occupants.

Oscar bit his bottom lip. Unsure of whether to show interest in HAARP or to try and steer the conversation back to his reason for enduring this visit, the upcoming election, he remained silent.

Paul studied his guest's hesitation. "I bet you're thinking, 'boy, Paul is just another nut case.' Well, let me ask you this then, who caused 9/11?"

"Whoever took over and flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thank God for those brave passengers who took down the fourth airliner into the ground in Pennsylvania. God only knows where it would have crashed if they hadn't fought against those terrorists."

Paul sighed.

"Don't you even know that no airplane engine parts were found at the Twin Towers, Pentagon, or that supposed crash site in Pennsylvania?"

"But..." Oscar retreated back into a role as uncertain pupil, still willing to try anything not to offend Paul.

"No ands, ifs, or buts about it. Technology exists so that they can create holograms, even of flying airplanes. That's what hit the Twin Towers, holograms of jets. The second that they appeared to hit those skyscrapers, they detonated the tons of explosives that they had planted on the floors where it looked like the jet airliners crashed. They did the same thing at the Pentagon. There are thousands of engineers and architects who have proven that the damage at the Pentagon was caused by a blast that traveled from the inside to the outside and that the only way that the Twin Towers could have collapsed is from explosives planted into them while they were being built. They planned that false flag event for decades."

"But then what happened to the airline passengers and crews on those four planes?"

"They forced them to land at secret bases like the one at Area 51, where they either executed all of the people immediately or fed them to the aliens that like to eat humans. That's why there are so many missing persons' cases, by the way. And the real reason Obama is letting all the illegal human aliens into this country is to soften us up for when they finally start letting the extraterrestrial aliens land all around the Earth and take over."

Oscar stared at his watch to try and hide his expression. "Actually, I'm really pushed for time," he said. "I have to be getting back to work."

"So the election for OFFAL's new officers is going to be close? That's the scuttlebutt that I've been hearing lately." Paul's wry smile told Oscar his host knew the reason for his first visit to Paul's home.

"Yeah. It could be another tie, just like when we voted on the Women's Auxiliary's proposals."

"I heard all about that already. Sorry I wasn't there to vote them down. Those proposals are going to spell the end of OFFAL. Mark my words. Every one of them is geared to bring in dumb young punks to take the place of all the old timers like you and me, the ones who've kept OFFAL going all these years. You know who was really behind those five proposals?"

"No.

"Our president, Mike Dunny, that's who."

"Mike?"

"That's right. From what I've found out, he's most likely a member of the Illuminati. If he gets re-elected again, he'll bring in a bunch of youngsters and get rid of us by re-working OFFAL's program to suit them. One by one, all of us older guys will quit OFFAL. Then once Mike gets all those new members to join the Illuminati, they'll take over our town, little by little." Paul pointed at the bookcase covering one of the room's walls. "I can lend you a book about how they operate if you want."

"So I can count on you to be at the meeting to keep Mike from being re-elected?"

"I'd like to but I need some money for gas to get there."

"How about if I pick you up instead?"

"We can't do that. If anyone sees us showing up or leaving in the same car, they'll figure out that I voted for you."

Oscar pulled his wallet from his rear pants pocket. "I guess you're right. You sure think of everything." He handed a $10 bill to Paul. "See you at the meeting."

* * *

The next day, Mike Dunny came to Paul Astor's house unannounced. At first, Paul did not answer the repeated rings of his doorbell. When he at last opened his front door, he stretched and pretended to yawn.

"I was having the sweetest dream about my dear departed Mabel until you interrupted it, Mike."

"I'm sorry, Paul. Can I come in for just a few minutes?"

"Sorry, but I need to make lunch and can't afford to feed anyone, especially uninvited guests who like to show up at mealtimes." Paul's crooked smile turned into a sneer. "Go ahead and get it over with. You're here to ask me to vote for you, right? Isn't this the first time you ever bothered to pay me a visit here? You must be getting desperate."

It took Mike ten seconds to recover from having his selfish motives laid bare, something he had thought only his wife capable of doing. He tried to fend off Paul's growing displeasure with a weak smile. "You read me like an open book, Paul. Yeah, I need your vote. But not just me. OFFAL needs it even more. Did you know that the average age of our members is now up to 65.3 years?"

"Oh? We're all getting that old?"

"Yeah, but if I'm re-elected, I'll bring in new members, lots of them. Just you wait and see."

"Well, I'd like to help you out but I have a slight problem."

Paul led him to the front of the garage and lifted its warped plywood door open and then pointed at the two flat tires on his Chevy Nova. "I already used up my roadside service for the year because my car is fifteen, almost sixteen years old. Marty over at the gas station says it'll cost me $30 to get those tires repaired. I have to have my car to get to the next meeting. And don't offer to give me a ride because that would look bad, like you were buying my vote in exchange for a free ride to the meeting. That sort of monkey business happens every election day, you know."

He led Mike back to his front porch and positioned himself and his guest in front of the lens of his security camera. Paul smiled as Mike handed him $40 because he did not have anything smaller than $20 bills in his wallet. They then shook hands, the perfect ending, Paul thought, for the recorded transaction that could be interpreted as _proof of President Mike Dunny bribing a voter before OFFAL's most important election ever_.

* * *

Most of OFFAL's members were surprised when Paul Astor appeared on election night because this was his first attendance at their weekly meetings in two years. But they greeted him as if he had been at last week's meeting.

The more calculating voters were shocked when the results of the election were read, especially those who had bet on its outcome.

"The final results for our next president are as follows: Mike Dunny, eleven votes and Oscar Newton, ten votes," OFFAL's secretary said. "I move that we adjourn to the bar to congratulate both Mike and Oscar on a hard fought campaign." He led the way to the stained oak bar that stretched along one wall. Only Paul and Oscar remained seated.

"What happened?" Oscar asked. His pleading eyes reminded Paul of the expressions on his children's and later, grandchildren's faces when he had forgotten promises made to them.

Paul stood.

"Don't worry. Like Yogi Berra always said, 'It ain't over until it's over.' Besides, the fat lady hasn't sung yet either, just like Yogi always liked to say when his Yankees were losing. And I'm taking her place tonight. Just sit back and watch."

Happy that he would not have to lug his surveillance system's playback unit in from his car and play the CD showing Mike Dunny handing him two $20 bills, evidence Paul was certain would be construed of as a bribe for his vote, he strode to the bar. If Mike had received twelve or more votes, Paul had planned to show OFFAL's members the tape because such a margin of victory would mean the conspiracy had spread too far, the equivalent a Stage Four cancer.

But the eleven votes cast for Mike allowed Paul's preferred option to unfold instead.

To get everyone's attention, Paul used a bar stool as a ladder, climbed atop the bar, and stomped his loafers until everyone had turned toward him. "I have an announcement to make. I'm retiring as of tonight."

"But you haven't worked a day since your wife died," Barny Turlock said. "Aren't you just a little bit late telling us?"

Paul waved his hands to silence the guffaws and laughter. "I meant my retirement from OFFAL."

His clarification stopped every movement. Some held glasses lifted halfway to their mouths. No one had ever retired from OFFAL. Sure, you could die while a member, which would earn you a large contingent of club members at your memorial service or funeral.

"I'm starting up a new fraternal organization called the Guys and Gals Society or GAGS for short. We aren't going to have a separate women's auxiliary. Our women will be at every meeting to draw in more members. I read on the internet that works better these days. You got to bait the hook and use pretty lures to hook members these days, you know."

Still angered by Mike Dunny's re-election, Barny raised his hands and looked heavenward. "Count me in, Paul. Where are you going to be meeting at?"

"We'll be using the V.F.W. hall. They said GAGS doesn't have to pay any rent for the first three months, until we get our feet on the ground and start collecting our monthly dues."

Paul climbed down from the bar to continue his pitch.

"Our meetings will start at six p.m. on Thursdays so all of you can get home early afterwards. First order of business will be election of officers. And bring your wives or girlfriends along so they can help us work up some sort of by-laws before we incorporate. And tell them to invite some of their lady friends."

### Why Do You Look So Strange? (All of a Sudden)

Nighttime is the worst time of all for me, because that's when I wake up and try to remember. You know, what day it is, why I'm here; but most of all why I can't remember my name no matter how hard I try. You would think I could at least remember yours because most of you look so strange all of the time that I spend hours trying to remember.

Luckily for me, I got one of those buttons that you push for situations like mine. If you wait long enough then someone shows up and explains things to you. Well, I pushed my button ten minutes ago. Maybe if I roll out of bed onto the floor and start yelling, they'll show up sooner?

Oh, I forgot. There are metal rails on the sides of my bed to keep me on the mattress and off the floor. Maybe I can just climb over them.

"Mr. Monroe, why are you trying to climb out of bed again?"

"So you'll come and rescue me...ah, what's your name? I can't see your name tag in the dark like this."

"I'm May, remember?"

"Of course I do, you think I'm a ninny or something?"

* * *

Only thing worse than trying to remember folks' names is trying to carry on an intelligent conversation with them. But what are you going to do? It's not like I have a whole list of people to choose from to eat with.

"Pass the butter, Arnold."

"Here."

The one with the butter addiction is Douglas. I must pass him the butter at least twenty times every day. Most meals it's just him and me at a table because everyone else says they're either afraid of us or can't understand what we like to talk about.

"I was trying to remember what you were saying about love and some cat, Douglas."

"Cat?

"You know, _c-a-t_."

"Leave it to you to want to talk about the cat instead of love."

"I can't help it. My mind doesn't work very good any more. But I know that yours does."

"Oh, all right. There's a cat who lives here with us named Radar. That's because she roams the halls looking for the one who needs her the most. I'm starting to think we should rename her to either Vulture or Buzzard."

"Why?"

"Because she always knows which one of us is closest to death. That's the beds she always jumps up onto and stays there until the poor person croaks. If the dying one is in a lot of pain, Radar even purrs to try to calm them down."

* * *

Breakfast was okay. We had eggs and sausage, those little links so small that they probably make 5,000 of them from just one big fat hog. It sure seems like someone said they would come visit me today. Who was it? Maybe their name is written down here somewhere.

Arnold Monroe shuffled to the desk on which he had glued, taped, or thumb tacked dozens of notes. As he searched through them, he read them aloud to try and prime his memory.

"My name is Arnold Monroe."

"I live in Worthington."

"I am seventy-three years old."

"My wife's name is Wilma."

"I stay at Pineview, a place for assisted living for old people like me."

"My kids' names are Ellen, Lance, and Vickie."

"I like to read."

"My name is Arnold."

"I worked as a plumber for thirty-nine years."

"Ralph is going to come visit me today."

Arnold grabbed the note about Ralph and spent another five minutes reading the rest of his notes, from left to right, from bottom to top. When none of the other notes detailed any other visitors, Arnold sat on his bed and smiled.

"Aha. So Ralph is coming to visit me. I wonder who Ralph is. Hey Tony, who's Ralph?"

The maintenance man who served as everything from janitor to electrician to plumber to heating and air conditioning technician, if the repairs were not too complicated, finished changing the burned out light bulb in Arnold's bathroom. "Only one Ralph around here; that has to be crazy Ralph for sure. You just relax, Arnold. Old Ralph should be here shortly."

* * *

Ralph Lincoln was having an off day. So far, only one nurse's aide had slapped his arm.

"Have you been swallowing your meds, Ralph?" the nurse's aide asked.

He raised his left arm and formed the Boy Scout salute. "Scout's honor, I swallow them, one and all."

"Well, I'm going to ask the head nurse to ask the doctor to up your dose. You are the...the..."

"Go ahead and spit it out before you choke on it, darling. I'm the horniest old goat you ever met. Let's elope so I can change my ways by settling down with you as far away from this joint as possible."

She blushed at the one old enough to be her grandfather. "Cut it out."

"I will if you'll smuggle me out of here as soon as your shift ends. I know a preacher who'll marry us in a hurry. He has a whole list of witnesses that he keeps on call twenty-four hours a day. Then we can honeymoon along the coast or maybe take us a cruise to the Bahamas. What do you say?"

She sighed as she left his room.

Ralph shrugged as he inspected himself in the mirror attached to his three-drawer dresser. His hair was brown, white, or missing, his jowls wiggled when he laughed, and wrinkles ran across his worn out looking face.

Who cares? Ralph thought. When you're hot, you're hot.

Of the ninety-two residents at Pineview, only Arnold received a daily visit from Ralph. Cajoling a nurse's aide to take him there was part of his routine.

"Hey, Felicia, how about taking me over to Arnold's room?" He yelled down the hall at the first one he spotted.

"Go by yourself. You need the exercise."

Ralph grumbled as he propelled his wheelchair down the long corridor of the U-shaped building. With his room at one tip of the _U_ and Arnold's at the other, his arms ached before he arrived.

"Hey, Arnold. What's cooking? Let's blow this joint for greener pastures, where the flocks of sheep are tended by the most beautiful shepherdesses on God's good green Earth. You can have Rachael if I can have one of her handmaidens."

"Uh, hello. Who are you?"

"Ralph, you dope. Remember how I wrote my name on one of your notes just like I always do?"

"No. Am I supposed to remember?"

Ralph parked his wheelchair next to the easy chair where Arnold sat. "Sometimes you make me want to slap you silly. I wonder if doing that would wake up the memory part of your brain."

* * *

Arnold's first six months at Pineview had been the hardest for hm. He would wander the halls looking for someone or something familiar. His doctor had kept trying different combinations of medicines at different dosages until one regimen sedated Arnold enough to keep him in one of three locations: his room, the dining room, or the recreation room.

When Ralph moved into Pineview, within a week its staff said he was _unique_.

He had no signs of Alzheimer's or any form of dementia. Instead, Ralph's body was deteriorating. Diabetes had caused poor circulation until extremities robbed of necessary nutrients and oxygen suffered gangrene. A week ago, his left foot and lower calf had been amputated, with more surgery scheduled if the gangrene did not respond to his medicines.

Ralph feared he would be reduced to a body without limbs, with pieces removed in increasing increments.

Unwilling to _sit on my butt until I die like some of the other ones around this joint_ , Ralph spent hours on Pineview's screened patio, weather permitting. Since coming to the facility, he had counted eight residents who had died. What upset him the most was an unwritten rule shared by staff and residents to not talk about anyone who had passed away. After six decades of breaking rules, Ralph thought the latest social convention placed upon him to be silly.

"Sure do miss old Dan," Ralph said.

"Who?" Arnold asked.

"Dan. You know, Daniel Carney." Ralph began his version of the song he sang four or five times a week to commemorate his former roommate.

Danny boy

When Irish girls are smiling

It's because you kissed them

One and all...

Arnold hummed along and clapped when the song ended.

"Let's go outside. No offense, but this room has what I heard one of the orderlies call, 'old people's smell.' We need some fresh air." He spun his wheelchair so its handles faced Arnold. "You drive so you can get some exercise."

Arnold enjoyed pushing his best friend to the courtyard's trellises with grapevines that provided shade and fruit each summertime. From a small garden patch came carrots, tomatoes, sweet peas, and herbs the residents tended. A tree towering as high as the roofs surrounding it bore fruit the home's kitchen staff transformed into apricot preserves.

"I remember the time when –"

"Shut up, you old fool." Ralph stomped his remaining foot on the red pavers. "You must have told me that story ten thousand times already."

Ralph's protest became lost in the announcement crackling over the home's P.A. system. "Good morning, everybody. Arts and crafts are beginning in the recreation room."

* * *

Ralph could not decide if the life he lived kept him sane or was slowly driving him crazy. Only one activity resulted in his perfect attendance, arts and crafts. But once his project was complete he would be too busy to attend any more sessions, he had decided.

"Almost finished with your..."

The volunteer, a middle aged lady who led the class three days a week, ran her hand over the metal mesh contraption. Blue, red, orange, turquoise, white, and yellow crystals filled one-third of its surface.

"It's a hat," Ralph said as he placed it on his head. "The crystals draw in astral power and send it along the metal mesh. I have the crystals positioned so that the power will fully saturate my brain. Want to try it on?"

"Maybe some other time." The volunteer turned to more mundane artwork of two elderly women applying watercolors to their numbered canvasses.

Before the class ended, Ralph donned his completed project and steered his wheelchair into the hall. Halfway to Arnold's room, he ran into Dr. Oglethorpe. Of all the medical practitioners who treated the residents at Pineview, Ralph like her the most. Not only pretty, she also seemed to care about her patients, a quality at times reminding Ralph of the one woman he had loved.

"Hey, Doc. How's Arnold doing? You talk to him yet today?" Ralph asked.

"He appears to be holding his own," Dr. Oglethorpe said.

"I need to ask you something." Ralph motioned for her to bend lower as he whispered. "I got this theory that our minds are like computers with a limited amount of space to store up all of our memories. Once it gets all filled up, our memories stop working like they used to. That's why people like Arnold can't remember a lot of things. You know, like names and what day it is."

Dr. Oglethorpe straightened her back and smiled. "I love your analogy, Ralph. Maybe I can use it in one of papers that I write for the medical journals. Do you want me to give you credit in it?"

Arnold smiled. No one had given him credit for anything worthwhile during his fifty-nine years, only for what had been labelled scandalous or bad. "No, that's okay. I just needed to verify it with you before my experiment can start up." He unlocked his chair's wheels.

"Experiment?"

Ralph tipped his strange hat and waved goodbye over his shoulder as Dr. Oglethorpe shielded her eyes from the reflection of the fluorescent lights off of the hat's crystals.

* * *

After a few adjustments, Ralph's memory sweeper fit Arnold's larger head. But the stress of stretching the hat caused two dozen of the crystals to pop out onto the floor. Ralph waited until Friday's arts and crafts session to make final repairs.

"Still working on your hat, Ralph?" The volunteer leader for the class asked.

Ralph continued to glue the crystals back into place. "Yeah, it just needs a few minor adjustments made to it. Want to try it on?"

"Maybe later. Excuse me, but it looks like Nancy and William are fighting over the bead materials again."

She walked toward the couple she thought were too stubborn to admit they loved each other. Hard to believe they've been married for fifty-two years, she thought as she pulled the quarreling couple's chairs farther apart.

Ralph chuckled. Two for two, he thought. Both times that I offered to let her try it on, she walked away. Think I'll call this my multi-purpose model because you can use it to get rid of people, too.

Ralph wheeled his chair over to the table with a hand held hair dryer some of the artisans used to speed the drying of their paintings so they could return to their rooms with them. Any paintings left in the recreation room tended to disappear.

"Can I borrow it for a minute, Kathleen?" Ralph asked.

"Sure." Kathleen stopped applying hot air to her self-portrait, which Ralph thought to be realistic, except for the missing wrinkles and white hair. "My, that is sure pretty," she said. "Is it a crown? I always thought you were descended from royalty."

"Yeah, it can serve as a crown if you want it to. How did you know that there was a queen something or other from Africa way back on my mom's side?"

"It must be because you inherited your ancestor's regal bearing, I guess."

For the next ten minutes, Ralph embellished the tales told to him by his grandmother while he was in grade school. He added enough action and intrigue to keep Kathleen's attention. Satisfied that every crystal, whether marble sized or as small as a split pea, was at last firmly reattached to the wire mesh, he tried on his crown. Because of its increased size, it now hid his thinning hair, eyebrows, and the top halves of his ears.

"What do you think?"

"It's ...it's just splendid. You look just like one of your ancestors who you told me about in your story."

Ralph winked. "Just call me King Ralph. Maybe if the word gets around about my new name, I can get some better service around here."

* * *

At first, Arnold did not want to wear the memory sweeper for longer than five seconds. But when Ralph promised to give him his desserts from supper _for the rest of my life_ , Arnold relented.

"Besides, they just make my diabetes get worse, even though they're sugar free," Ralph said. "But I still can't sit at your table in the dining room. The last time I tried to do that, I thought your pal Douglas was going to kill me because of the evil eye he was giving me."

"Okay, let me try it on again," Arnold said. "Are you sure it will make the ladies like me?"

"They'll be thinking you're a king. That's what Kathleen said when she saw me wearing it." Ralph positioned the hat in such a way so it would not become uncomfortable even if Arnold rolled onto his side. Then he unlocked the wheels on his chair and pushed off from the metal rail of his friend's bed. "Just don't take it off. I'll be back in the morning to check up on you. Pleasant dreams."

The only other ones who had promised to check on Arnold had been medical personnel. Enough of his memory remained that Arnold still associated people into groups so he concluded Ralph must also be a member of the medical profession, especially because of his thorough knowledge about the equipment now attached to his head.

"See you in the morning, Doctor...what's your name again?

Ralph wheeled back to the bed and patted Arnold's hand. "I'm Dr. Ralph."

Arnold reached over to his bed stand for the notepad and pen and wrote _Dr. Ralph is coming for a visit_ on the top slip of paper, and then told him, "Attach this to the top row of my notes over there on my desk."

Early the next morning, Arnold awoke when a wheelchair crashed into his bed. "What...what's going on?"

"It's me, Dr. Ralph, the brilliant inventor who invented your new hat to fix your memory."

"Who?"

"Dr. Ralph, you dork!"

"Oh. Hi, good to meet you."

* * *

Three days later, Felicia turned on the lights in Ralph's room. "Time to get up, sleepyhead. Breakfast starts in..." The nurses' aide shrieked when no response came through Ralph's dark blue lips. They rose upward in an immobile grin so angelic Felicia thought the smile had been affixed by a tattoo artist.

She reached her fingertips to his carotid artery and searched for a pulse, then changed her motion to grab her cellphone and summon the lone registered nurse working the graveyard shift. "It's Ralph Lincoln. I think he's dead."

* * *

Within fifteen minutes, two paramedics were rolling the motionless Ralph toward their ambulance parked at the home's front door. Pineview's residents remembered him with whispers, pointing fingers, and shaking heads.

"What's going on?" Arnold asked a cluster of three residents who had begun telling stories about the one they knew would not be coming back.

"Ralph Lincoln died in his sleep last night," one of them said.

"Who?" Arnold asked as he adjusted his crystal studded hat.

### Porthole in the Fog

Rain or shine, in summertime heat or winter's cold and damp, whether she felt like it or not, Beth Gist ran two miles a day, every day.

And always the same route.

After exiting the front door of the half of a duplex she rented, her rhythmic footsteps took her past a church, two blocks of houses, followed by a nursery patrolled by nine stray cats adopted by its kind owner, crumbling fast food joint, and then a small strip mall of massage parlor, laundromat, Thai restaurant, nail salon, donut shop, and one of the eleven Lowville shops known for delicious foot-long sandwiches.

On the corner sat Beth's only real obstacle to keeping her heart rate beating at least 150 times a minute during her workout, a stoplight.

After she ran across the street, a larger strip mall offered her some welcome lighting and an overhang wide enough above her to give a 105-yard long shelter where she ran laps if any rain proved too drenching.

It contained a coffee bistro competing against the Starbucks across the street, two beauty shops, liquor store, _Nothing More Than a Buck_ store, ice cream parlor, pizzeria, bank, Chinese food restaurant, and place to receive and wire money or "get your tax return early" or "a payday loan" at interest rates high enough to make Shylock blush. A grocery store converted into a fitness center anchored the mid-sized mall.

Next, she ran past four blocks of houses and then a grade school before doing an about face and retracing her steps to return home.

Until five months ago, Beth had started her run at 6 a.m.

But after one sleepless night, she misread her clock radio and left her house at 5 a.m. When she discovered there were only about one-fifth as many vehicles on the road an hour earlier, she adjusted her start time to 5 a.m. for two reasons: fewer nauseating fumes from passing cars to breath in and less chance of being hit by sleepy or distracted drivers in a hurry to get to work.

Other than the stray cats who had made the nursery their home, Beth saw few other regulars during her daily runs. Overweight patrons hungry for an easy breakfast succumbed to the delicious smells wafting from the donut shop. Across the street, others walked into the fitness center to burn off instead of consume calories.

Four of those delivering copies of the _Lowville News_ sometimes appeared along Beth's route, depending on when the newspaper's printing press had completed its run. Beth admired two of them and despised the other two.

She smiled when she saw either of the teenaged girls. One of them pedaled her one speed bike while holding a large canvas bag slung over her shoulders from which she tossed papers. The other also seemed wise to Beth, because she was always accompanied by a large dog. Exercising a pet who in turn provides protection, smart girl, Beth had thought the first time she waved _good morning_ to her.

And the two other newspaper deliverers? Typical men, Beth had concluded.

One sped down streets in an older model truck, tossing papers through an open passenger window. The other would park his running car at the curb, get out, and drop papers next to the front doors of the residences on his route. To show her displeasure, Beth always stopped her run, bent at her waist and coughed violently if either vehicle came within 100 feet of her.

"They are both gross polluters," Beth had told her co-workers, who displayed lesser signs of dismay as they pretended to share her concern. In her lexicon, _gross polluters_ applied to any who drove when alternate forms of transportation could be used instead. "Besides, the amount they spend on gas and wear and tear on their cars probably is as much or more than they make delivering those papers," she had told those who seemed unimpressed by her observations.

Beth also shook her head and often clucked about _those who pay money to go to a gym to stay in shape._

Most obnoxious of all were the cats Beth encountered during her daily runs. Always too stealthy, even the friendly ones who trotted toward Beth, sometimes meowing and seeking attention.

This morning's run presented a challenge common to many Lowville winter days, fog. Not the misty kind that allowed Beth to see anyone or anything from half a block away, but fog so thick it clung to Beth's waterproof white parka before condensing into liquid until it ran down its folds onto her $160 white running shoes.

It grew thicker with each step.

She tried to maintain her normal pace while this fog compressed her, an unnatural pressure reminding Beth of a CAT Scan probing her body a year earlier. Beth thought it dense enough to make the sound of her footsteps echo off of the whitish gray blanket clinging to her.

What seemed to be a far off, tiny opening through the damp mist reduced her jog to a walk. Beth's head jerked backward as the fissure grew from the roundness of a silver dollar to almost a foot in diameter, maintaining its circular shape as if it were computer generated.

Her heart increased its beats despite the slowed pace. Her muscular frame shivered from a coldness not from the winter weather, but one radiating from her soul outward.

By the time she stood inches from the opening, it reminded Beth of the porthole she had gazed through during a cruise to the Bahamas five years ago, her last extended vacation. Instead of blue sky, sea gulls, and calming ocean waves, this porthole gave her a view of a dark fogless landscape partly illuminated by ancient streetlights. Every other fog Beth had known during her thirty-four years had tapered off gradually at its edges.

Somehow this one had bunched into a solid wall through which she could see nothing unless she used its porthole, the only opening between what now seemed to be two intersecting worlds.

Standing at an intersection, Beth turned her head and saw cars parked in front of houses lit by an occasional porch light. A song moved her back a step. Then its melodic words pulled her back to the porthole to see its source, a small figure on the other side of the street moving from her left to her right.

The lyrics sounded familiar, inviting her to join in the singing:

Where are you going my little one?

My little one?

I'm going to the woods to have some fun

Have some fun

What will you do there my little one?

My little one?

We'll find a place to hide

A place to hide...

As the child's body merged into the blackness caused by two consecutive burned out streetlights, the song died.

* * *

It's not uncommon for police officers to think they have seen everything possible in a job taking care of an often ungrateful, too often hostile public. And then a call unlike any yet experienced arrives.

"Unit twelve, missing child reported near intersection of Elm and Oak streets by pedestrian."

"On my way."

Officer Jordan Huxly's body tensed as he pushed the accelerator of his black police cruiser to a speed hovering somewhere between safe and dangerous because the first few hours of a missing person report are always the most crucial, ones too often dictating life or death. With the fog allowing him at best a quarter block clear view, he searched for taillights of vehicles ahead.

Twice for Huxly, missing children calls had ended badly because of a child never found and a dead body opening up a murder case. He prayed this one would not.

At the intersection of Elm and Oak, he stopped his car and looked for whoever had called his dispatcher.

"Over here, follow me."

Beth Gist's sudden appearance in his car's headlights and her frantic voice ratcheted up the cop's tenseness. He parked where Beth paced back and forth.

"He disappeared right here," she said as her hand swept downward.

"Who?"

"I don't know. He looked about five or six years old."

"You live on this block?" Officer Huxly's flashlight beam penetrated the dark patch underneath the two burned out streetlights.

"No. I live north of here about a half mile."

At first, he thought Beth Gist to be either mistaken or hung over from too much alcohol or whatever drug, legal or illegal, she used. Her tale of a porthole in the dense fog giving her a view of a fogless street down which a strange child wandered into oblivion seemed to him, well, just too weird. Beth's increasing anxiety enhanced the eerie atmosphere.

When the summoned officer refused to knock on the door of the house nearest the patch of black caused by the burned out streetlights, she did. A yawing man who looked about seventy answered his front door in a mood to match his frayed robe.

"What do you want this hour of the day?" He took a step toward Beth and stopped when he saw Officer Huxly move into the faint glow of the porch light.

"She says she saw a child about five or six years old vanish in front of your house about twenty minutes ago," the cop said. "Do you have a child or grandchild about that age living here? Maybe he wandered off and then came back home while you were asleep."

"No such person lives here. Besides, what would a little kid be doing outside this time of night?"

"No, I know what I saw," Beth said. "He was walking past your house but disappeared right in front of it." She pointed to where darkness had seemed to swallow up the singing child.

"Were you driving by?" the homeowner asked.

"No. I was out running and stopped at the intersection over there." Beth pointed at the spot where the opening in the fog had dragged her into a mystery she no longer wanted to endure.

The homeowner shook his head. "I don't see how that's possible. The fog's so thick you can't even see halfway to that corner."

"But the fog was cleared out all along this street when I saw the child. I could even see down as far as the cemetery at St. Joseph's."

The homeowner cocked his head and looked toward the graveyard. "That's another five blocks from here. There's no way that you could have seen that far, lady. Not in this fog."

"But..."

He stepped backward into his home. "Well, I'll leave it up to you two to figure all this nonsense out. I'm going back to bed. Maybe you saw a ghost out for a stroll and it was heading back home to the cemetery."

His cackle continued as his front door shut.

* * *

Beth's mood alternated from anger to frustration to confusion as she answered routine voice mails and emails from customers at the bank where she worked. Next, she smiled and nodded at other customers seated across from her desk asking about loans. A small girl sat on her mother's lap minutes before Beth's lunch break.

Bored, the child began to sing:

Where are you going my little one?

My little one?

I'm going to the woods to have some fun

Beth dropped the pen she was using to fill out a loan document. "Where did you learn that song?"

The girl of about ten shrugged. "I had a dream last night. Someone named Tommy taught it to me."

Beth's hand trembled as goose pimples grew on her arms. "Tommy? Who's that? Do you know him?"

"No, I just met him in my dream for the first time. I really liked him."

* * *

Only on rare occasions did Beth take lunch with a co-worker. Desperate to share her unwanted experience, she managed to convince a bank teller to join her.

"I tell you, it's just too much to be a coincidence, Terry," Beth said in between stabbing her Caesar salad with a fork. "I've never experienced anything like this before."

"It's called synchronicity," Terry said. "You know, when too many similar things connect together one after the other, to just be coincidences. My mom says it's divine providence. Either way, that's why the little boy you saw while you were running and the girl at your office this morning both sang the same song. And only hours apart, too. Gee, I wish stuff like that would happen to me. Maybe I should start running when it's still dark outside like you do?"

Terry continued to educate her about such matters until Beth's mind began spinning as she tried to understand. At the end of their workday, Terry stopped by Beth's desk and winked.

"Be sure to check your email when you get home," Terry said. "I gifted you a book that might explain it way better than I can. You looked sort of confused at lunch."

Beth stayed up to 1 a.m. reading _How to Use Life's Everyday Events to Conquer Your Innermost Fears of the Future._

* * *

When Beth called the Lowville Police Department the next morning, she learned that no missing children had been reported. When no new portholes materialized in the fog during her morning runs during the next three weeks, she tried to put the incident out of her mind. Then dreams featuring her and the strange singing boy invaded her once peaceful sleep.

At last, she sought help from one who had become as much a confessor as healer for her.

"I don't know why those dreams won't stop," Beth said to her primary care doctor. "It's like I'm supposed to do something...but I don't know what...I think."

Her doctor shrugged as she put down her stethoscope and unwrapped a blood pressure cuff from Beth's biceps. "There's nothing that I can find wrong with you physically. You are probably the fittest patient that I have." She pinched Beth's upper arm. "You only have twelve percent body fat, which is low for a woman."

"So I'm crazy then? Those were the kind of looks both the cop and man who lived in the house near where the boy disappeared gave me. Now, I think you're saying the same thing."

"If I were you, I'd see a psychiatrist or psychologist to work this thing out. You're a double A type personality. Maybe you need to cycle back your lifestyle a little. Do you want me to write you a referral?"

* * *

Dr. Rudolph Sanger (PhD) had always been a good listener, which had helped his hundreds of patients to unload their burdens, no matter how twisted, during his thirty-two years as a psychologist. After hearing Beth Gist's tale, he rubbed his black and white goatee and turned his intense gray eyes toward the ceiling until he found one of his pets, a spider he used to treat those suffering from a morbid fear of the eight-legged creatures.

Beth thought his words were more stream of consciousness than diagnosis.

"I think that you are dealing with either an illusion caused by the fog, darkness, and shadows that you saw that morning or a hallucination caused by an overly tired mind or possibly a combination of both. You are pretty young to be a senior loan officer." Dr. Sanger looked up from the ten-page questionnaire he required every patient to fill out. "And exercising seven days a week? That's too much, no matter how young you are."

"Illusion or hallucination? So you think I'm wacked out too?"

"No, I didn't say that. Our minds can play tricks on us sometimes if we don't get enough rest. For example, truck drivers see what they call _the black dog_ if they drive too many miles without adequate sleep. Now I am going to write a treatment plan for you. Follow it to the letter."

"Okay."

As Beth walked to her car, she wondered what kind of punishment Dr. Sanger had prescribed. After sliding behind the steering wheel, she unfolded the slip of paper and did not scream until she finished reading:

  1. No more than six days a week of exercise.
  2. Take at least a one week vacation ASAP, away from your normal day to day routine.
  3. If you still need to talk about your experience with the strange boy you saw in the fog, make another appointment to see me again.

* * *

"Well that's my story, Mom." Beth set down her mother's freshly baked half eaten chocolate chip, walnut, coconut cookie. "Am I crazy?"

Her mother's face paled. Then she bowed her head to try and hide her tears.

"What's wrong, Mom? I knew I shouldn't have laid all my problems on you."

Mrs. Gist shook her head as she patted her moist cheeks using her apron. "No. It's just that I'd forgotten how he liked to sing that song about finding a place to hide and have fun."

"Who, Mom? Who?"

"Little Tommy Garlington. He was your playmate when you were a little girl."

* * *

After dredging every memory of Tommy Garlington from her mother, Beth went to the _Lowville News_ for more details. At first, the old woman behind the counter ignored Beth. But when Beth asked about researching a long ago story, the wrinkled lady laughed.

"Oh, news from that far back is buried in our morgue, dear. We haven't bothered to put it on our computers yet and probably never will because we don't get very many of your kind snooping around about news from so many years ago."

This clerk's false sincerity and monotone drone belong in a funeral home, Beth thought. She's the type who probably gets along better with the dead than the living most days of the week.

She led Beth past the paper's silent printing presses to a small musty room smelling of aging paper, ink, and mostly forgotten memories stored in large binders protecting copies of the _News_ published from 1912 to 1987. Everything from 1988 to present was stored on digital ink, the guide reminded Beth.

"What month do you require?" asked the old lady, whose smile had become a frown.

"Do you at least have a subject file on computer for the older papers?" Beth asked. "You know, so I can narrow down my search?"

The frown grew until it resembled a grotesque mask. "I suppose you think I have enough free time for such a task as that? What month and year do you need?"

"Ah, 1984 and the month was..." Because Beth's mother had only provided the year of Tommy Garlington's disappearance, Beth paused.

"I don't have any more time for this. The 1980s are stacked over there." Beth's helper stepped toward the door. "And don't forget to turn the lights out. Advertising is still way down for the paper. That's why I now have to do three jobs instead of just the one I used to."

Beth calculated the event she and Tommy had been part of must have occurred during Lowville's warmer months, which ran from mid-March to mid-October most years. She flipped through edition after edition of the papers, scanning only their front pages. Forty minutes later, her heart beat faster as she read aloud the headline of the June 27, 1984 front page story: _Little Boy Missing, Girl Found_."

Reading the story raised another batch of goose bumps on her arms:

Police and volunteers using search and rescue dogs continued to search yesterday for a boy, aged five, who authorities think wandered into the wilderness area by the Patch River. Lowville resident Tommy Garlington was last seen by his mother, who joined the searchers at the wilderness area.

"I noticed he wasn't in the back yard around 4:30 yesterday," said Joan Garlington, Tommy's mother. "I'm just glad that Beth Gist was found unharmed."

Beth Gist, age three, had been playing with Tommy, according to Ms. Garlington, when both of them apparently slipped through a loose board in the fence behind the Garlington home, which borders the wilderness area.

So far, the Gist girl has been unable to provide any clues as to what became of Tommy. When found, she only spoke of a big cat, said Police Officer...

By the time Beth finished the story, she was sobbing as she wondered if she had been the first one to escape from the safety of the back yard, causing Tommy to follow after her.

* * *

No more information could be mined from the newspaper's staff. Everyone involved in the story about Tommy and Beth, its reporter and editor and publisher, no longer worked at the _Lowville News._

"It's the way of the newspaper business," the one who had introduced Beth to the paper's morgue said. "They either leave for better jobs or drink themselves to death. If it weren't for me, this paper wouldn't even still be in existence."

"Thank you," Beth said as she backed out the front door.

After another long talk with her mother, Beth at last decided to obey Dr. Sanger's prescription.

It took her three hours of searching the internet before finding what she thought would be worthwhile enough for her first vacation in nineteen months. The Skyview Lodge and Adventure Trails' site promised much:

Escape the city and daily pressures of your everyday life. Return to nature by enjoying our campground or taking one of our adventure treks into pristine wilderness guided by a descendant of Choctaw Native Americans. See creatures of the forest in their native habitat and view vistas that will enthrall you. Be sure to bring a camera to capture the adventure of a lifetime.

Its customers' testimonials sounded genuine and mostly positive, so Beth booked a complete package.

* * *

After flying into Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Beth rented a car. As she drove northeast, the terrain changed quickly, from sandy desert growing cactus to high desert to forests and the climate from one of the hottest on Earth to a more temperate one where pines and firs thrived. The trees grew taller and thicker until Beth pulled off the road into a clearing a mile after seeing a sign that read: _Elevation 4900 feet_.

Somehow, the lodge looked smaller than the one pictured online. One of its owner's faces showed none of the peace and joy and oneness with nature his business's website had guaranteed.

"Hope no one died," Beth said as she propped her backpack and sleeping bag by the knotty pine counter acting as a barrier for the sad looking man. "You look like I feel."

"Don't mind him. He's always Mr. Doom and Gloom."

Beth stared at the one she thought the lodge's website had described as descended from Choctaws because of her dark black hair and high cheekbones. Eyes changing from blue to green to brown, depending on the light, betrayed a mixed lineage. She would prove to be so different from Beth's customers, who always wanted a piece of her.

"Hi, I'm Grace. Oscar the Grouch over there is my husband Jack."

"I'm Beth Gist. Hope you got my reservation."

Jack growled as he tapped his computer's keyboard and stared at its screen. "Well, at least you made it. The rest of those bums cancelled their reservations on me."

* * *

The next morning Grace knocked on Beth's door at 5 a.m. After a breakfast of deer steak, eggs, pancakes, and grits, they set out on a trail from the lodge. It wound snakelike, with every mile walked gaining them at least 100 feet in elevation. Beth's daily runs allowed her to keep pace for the first four miles. By mile five, her lungs burned from air not as rich in oxygen as Lowville's.

Her gasps slowed her guide.

"Ordinarily, both Jack and I go on the treks, which usually include at least three guests. But since the others didn't show up, it's just you and me." Grace adjusted her large pack, which carried a tent, food, cooking utensils, change of clothes, and sleeping bag tied to its bottom. It weighed forty-six pounds, Beth's pack half that. "So you get the special one on one adventure, just you and me." Grace glanced at the pale blue sky. "Someone up there must be watching over you."

They set up camp after a twelve-mile hike.

Grace spent the day telling tales of growing up in Alabama, near remnants of her tribe, to which she was one-fourth related. Beth's preoccupied gaze faded slowly. It took until the last campfire of the night for enough of a bond to form for Beth to reciprocate by speaking of her forgotten incident as a three year old, resurrected by a porthole in the fog.

"Sorry that I haven't talked very much. But the only real reason I guess I'm here is to try and forget what happened." Beth laughed. "Now I know that I'm crazy. I'm trying to forget something I can't even remember because I was so young when it happened."

Grace stared at the dying flames and embers. "Sometimes the past can eat at your soul like a cancer and kill you emotionally and mentally."

The next morning she offered to help Beth bury her dead by asking if she could return with her to Lowville.

"Besides, I could use a vacation from Oscar the Grouch."

* * *

"So, none of Tommy's family still lives here in Lowville anymore?" Grace asked.

"No. They moved away shortly after he went missing," Beth said as she gazed at the former home of her long lost playmate.

"Okay. You two couldn't have wandered too far after you crawled through this fence. You both were still pretty small." Grace ran her hand along the five foot tall cedar planks and turned to the small forest of oaks, redwoods, pines, and elms that shaded the wilderness area on the south side of the Patch River. "I need to work alone. I'll call you if I find anything."

Grace walked slowly to the nearest dirt path as Beth returned home. Up to this point, Grace's best clue for answers had come from the _Lowville News_ ' article about Tommy and Beth's misadventure.

All Beth had told her rescuers was something about a big cat, Grace remembered.

I bet she saw a mountain lion, Grace thought. Since it happened during June, most cougars would have still been higher up in the foothills or mountains. They would not follow the deer down here to the flatlands until late July or August after the creeks and streams ran dry higher up. Unless...unless a mother cat had made her den down here somewhere in the wilderness area.

A vision of a hungry female cougar searching for prey formed in Grace's mind. Without food, her milk would dry up. Without milk flowing daily through her teats, her cubs would starve to death.

Any prey would do.

It could fly, crawl, walk and run on four legs or two, whether long or short, as long as she could outrun it. Such is the law of the jungle...and the forest. And such is a mother's love for her young.

Grace's thoughts ended with a vision of a mountain lion carrying a bloodied, no longer breathing Tommy Garlington in her mouth as a terrified Beth watched, already slipping into shock and pushing the memory deep into her subconscious.

* * *

Not until the third day of her search did Grace find a possible den two miles upstream from the wilderness area.

A small outcropping of granite near the banks of the Patch River had an opening through which only the upper half of Grace's body could intrude. Using a flashlight borrowed from Beth, she searched the lair inch by inch until it reflected off a whitish oval looking object half buried in the dust. Part of the flashlight's beam penetrated an opening too perfectly rounded to have been formed by decomposition.

Grace pulled free from what she believed had served as a mountain lion's lair and become a makeshift tomb for Tommy Garlington. She uttered a prayer of thanks to her Maker.

Then she dialed 911.

* * *

The funeral for Tommy Garlington required a tiny casket because only a few bones were recovered with his skull from the long ago abandoned rocky den. Although Grace could not attend the service, Beth gave her new friend all the credit for finding the remains when she spoke to Tommy's parents and siblings after the final song, _Let the Children Come to Me_. Their closure became complete after Beth told them she now remembered how Tommy had pushed her away as the cougar sprang toward them.

Life then returned to a routine for Beth Gist, a new and unexpected one.

Now she ran six days a week instead of seven and had already booked another stay at the Skyview Lodge for next summer. She also stopped competing against her co-workers and judging those who used cars to deliver newspapers.

The next heavy fog came to Lowville at the end of November. This time, a doorway seemed to open in it at the intersection where Beth had peered through a porthole a year earlier. Part of her wanted to detour her morning run into the safety of more fog, the thicker the better.

Instead, she stopped running and stepped through the opening.

Once again, no fog floated above the street that dead ended at St. Joseph's cemetery. A shaft of moonlight penetrated the mist, lighting the grave of Tommy and a few of those surrounding his. As the opening in the mist closed and reopened, the moonlight shone as a lighthouse might on the patch of gravesites, Beth thought she heard a voice in her soul say, "Thank you."

"Thank you, Tommy," Beth said.

She cried all the way home.

### EMP Code Blue

Years later, partial credit would be given to astronomer Ursula Petrovich for discovering the Mother of all solar activity. But other better known scientists would capture the bulk of the credit and ensuing prestige and awards because of their peer support network that excluded lesser knowns such as Ursula.

When she first noticed how Venus was reacting to the solar storm almost upon it, Ursula cursed.

If only the storm had hit Mercury first, she thought. That would have given us more time to prepare, if need be.

But Mercury's current position in its solar orbit had sheltered it from the storm ripping through the solar system toward outer space.

Part of Ursula wanted to call her Godly grandmother and ask her to pray for their planet. Another part longed to speak to her mentor. She dared not contact either one until after Alexander had helped her determine the storm's magnitude and trajectory.

Her subordinate could at times be so mercurial Ursula had told their coworkers he proved her theory that men had monthly cycles affecting their moods to a greater degree than those women experienced. One day he could be gentle as a lamb, the next, like a porcupine embedding its quills into anyone who ventured too close to him. She found him on an extended break, playing a computer game he had developed.

"Alexander, I need your help right away."

"What is it this time?" he asked without looking up at her.

"I've detected readings that Venus is being hit by a solar storm. All the other astronomers are probably still so busy monitoring the two black holes merging together that they haven't even noticed the solar storm yet. I ... I mean _we_ need to know whether the storm's trajectory will bring it in contact with Earth."

"Again? I've performed that task for you how many times already during the last seventeen years? Is it 200 or 300 times by now? Besides, I am off work in five minutes."

"You fool!" Ursula aimed for the back of his chair but part of her palm connected against Alexander's back.

"Okay, okay, don't get so angry. But you will have to convince my wife that I need to stay here late because it is my daughter's birthday tomorrow. I need to go home and get some sleep before I make preparations for it."

He punched a button on his cellphone and handed it to his supervisor.

* * *

It took a promise of _I will bring your daughter a birthday present if you let Alexander stay a few minutes late tonight to help me with an urgent matter_ before his wife relented to Ursula Petrovich's request. A half hour later, Alexander handed a computer printout to Ursula as he walked past her.

"I put in all of the variables that you supplied. Good night," he said before a door slammed behind him.

Her eyes scanned down the document and stopped at the field titled _ETI_ (Estimated Time of Impact). It read: _6 hours, 4 minutes_.

She dropped the document during her sprint to the observatory's one phone using a land line to the Kremlin. The tired sounding voice answering Ursula's frantic call seemed to be controlled by an even more tired mind, guaranteeing a slow transmittal of her message up the chain of command until it reached someone possessing enough knowledge to understand its implications.

Ursula ended her call and collapsed onto a seat's edge, which left her sprawled on the tile floor when the wheeled chair scooted out from under her slender body. An image of her mentor shaking his head flashed into her brain as she stood. A call to his cellphone gave an option of leaving a message. She broke protocol and sent the retired professor who had guided her to a PhD in astrophysics an email detailing her discovery.

Then she prayed.

"Oh God, please have him wake up and turn on his computer."

* * *

Hacker Jackie Yee did not believe in prayer, only his overrated perception of himself. While honing his illicit skills, the accompanying rumors of his stealth and theft or corruption of electronic data from any computer located anywhere in the world had elevated him to legend. Tired of great fame and little money, he sought out security. What better place than working for government, he had thought.

So he had joined China's army of hackers.

Jackie loved working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift six days a week because then his office became almost empty of other humans and their never-ending distractions.

Jackie saw Ursula Petrovich's email before anyone else. His quick mind deduced such a communication from a Russian observatory to a well-known astronomer might yield at least one tidbit of useful information. After downloading it into a program to render the email's Russian into Chinese characters, he smiled as he read the rapid translation:

Professor:

Have data to indicate that Earth will be hit by major solar storm. Point of impact will range from approximately 80 degrees west longitude to 100 degrees east longitude. I fear my data will not reach someone high up enough in time before impact. Please call me as soon as you read this. Maybe you know someone to contact?

Ursula

Competitive since his years as a toddler, Jackie now set a goal to beat his American counterparts by relaying the email to his country's leadership before the American government's hackers could to theirs.

* * *

NASA administrator Libby Neff first became aware of a potential disaster when she read a message on her Twitter account warning _Judgment Day has arrived._ She half walked and half ran to the part of the Houston, Texas, complex monitoring solar activity and found most of its cubicles empty due to the holiday.

"Anything new on that solar storm?" she asked at the first occupied cubicle she found.

"Which one?" a bored looking technician asked. "There's been a whole lot of activity coming off the sun lately."

"The biggest one."

"It's still banging along."

"Any chance it will hit Earth?"

The technician tapped on his computer's keyboard. "Looks like it might possibly graze Earth just a little bit. Our computer model shows that most of that storm is going to miss us. You can stop huffing and puffing now. You sound like you ran over here."

She hurried back to her office and called a Russian colleague and spoke first when someone answered. "Hello, Ursula?"

"Is that you, Libby? How are things there in America?"

"What do you know about the solar storm created by that huge CME about four or five days ago?"

"I could lose my job if I tell you anything. You have to speak with my boss for any such data. But I can tell you this much."

"What?"

"Regardless of what he says, you have been warned."

"But..." Libby's systolic blood pressure increased another thirteen points as she searched for the phone number she had scribbled down a year ago.

An hour and ten minutes later, after Ursula Petrovich's boss had received permission from the Kremlin to talk to NASA, Libby Neff believed she had enough information to justify making a call to the White House.

* * *

But the President was not at home on Pennsylvania Avenue. To celebrate the holiday, he had retreated to Camp David for a barbeque with some of those who had helped him to capture the highest office in America. When a Secret Service agent intruded and whispered into his ear, he frowned.

"Mr. President, your chief of staff just called and said you need to meet with the military Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon," the agent said. "Your helicopter is ready for you to return to D.C."

The President excused himself without explanation, leaving guests to speculate on his uncharacteristic exit because other hasty departures had always included a joke or complaint. Halfway to the helicopter, he called his chief of staff.

"Thank God it's you," the one the President had nicknamed _my right hand woman_ said.

"What's this all about, Judy?" the President asked.

"NASA says we're going to get hit by a mega solar storm caused by a coronal mass ejection."

"Then have them call a press conference. That should take care of it."

"But the Joint Chiefs of Staff say they have to meet with you about this right away at the Pentagon."

"Tell them to meet me at the White House instead. Then call the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA and tell them to get to the White House right away. I'll meet with them after I'm through listening to all those generals and admirals. Don't they ever take a day off?"

Thirty-eight minutes later, the President strode into a large White House briefing room and counted his Joint Chiefs of Staff. "All present and accounted for. So why are all of you so upset about this activity from the sun? Where exactly is it supposed to hit the Earth anyway? I hope it destroys Russia. That would be nice."

The five men and two women who advised him on military matters did not respond, except for the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, who tried to stifle nervous laughter beneath his crooked smile.

"Well?"

An Air Force general stood and aimed his laser pointer at a digital map of the Earth covering an entire wall.

"From approximately here," he said as he traced a red line from the map's North Pole down the line marked 80 degrees west longitude to the South Pole. Now embedded onto the digital display, the red line added by his laser pointer blinked. "To here."

He drew a second line between the poles along the 100 degrees east longitude line. The second red line also continued to blink after he shut off his laser pointer. "As you can see, most of the area exposed to the impact is out over the Pacific Ocean. The ETA of the impact is about two and a half hours from now. Please understand that these estimates are all just a SWAG."

"SWAG?"

"Scientific Wild Ass Guess."

The President stared at the map. "But that's also almost all of the United States except for a section of the East Coast. Just how much damage will the solar storm do to us?"

"Unfortunately, we can't measure it until it passes over one of our monitoring satellites. Since the solar storm is traveling over four million miles an hour, the Earth will be hit by the storm before we can even measure it," the general said as he sat down.

"But why are of you so worried then? Isn't this something that NASA can monitor and take care of instead of you?"

The chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rose and walked to the map.

"We are concerned because the Chinese have a satellite that is orbiting around Earth in a way that carries it over the San Francisco Bay Area and then somewhat south of us here in D.C." Her moving finger cut the portion of the map representing America into northern and southern halves.

"We cannot be certain but it may contain a nuclear device. If they explode it while it's over the center of our nation, the electrical magnetic impulses released could render most or maybe even our entire electrical grid and computer networks inoperable for God only knows how long." She stabbed north central Kansas on the map. "That is ground zero. We are all in agreement that it should be shot down with one of our missiles immediately. During the last few hours, the Chinese lowered this satellite's orbit from 250 to 232 miles above Earth. They are obviously up to something. We think they might have lowered the orbit to time their detonation of the nuke with the solar storm hitting us."

"I see." the President's thoughts drifted back to the barbeque and deal making he was missing.

The Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to say more, much more. Struggling, she kept her anxieties internal.

We wouldn't be here sweating bullets if one of your predecessors hadn't handed China our missile and satellite technology in exchange for secret campaign contributions, she thought. Their missiles used to blow up on the launch pad or crash shortly after takeoff before he gave away our secrets to them.

As if in response, the President stood and turned to his _fixer of all problems, great and small._ "Tell the Secretary of Defense to get over here right away. The rest of you are dismissed except for you." He pointed at the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, General Rangel.

Rangel had become the only member of the military the President had developed a tiny measure of fondness for after he decided to adopt him as _my little brother_. "How many troops are there in the Guard?"

"A little over 400,000, if you include both Army National Guard and Air National Guard together."

"Thank you." He marched from the large briefing room to a smaller, more intimate one he reserved for making final decisions and found two chatting men waiting for him. "Where is the head of the F.B.I.?"

"She's out of town, but is on her way back to Washington right now," the head of the NSA said. "I hope she gets here in time."

"What do you mean by that?"

"If her plane is up in the air when the solar storm hits, it could fry the computer systems on the jet she's on and shut down its engines," the head of the CIA said. "It could crash. Our intel that we picked up is that the Chinese and Russians are grounding all their planes and telling those in the air to divert and land as soon as they can must mean that this storm just might be big enough to affect planes of all sizes when it hits Earth's magnetic field."

"Okay." The President pointed at the head of the NSA. "You contact the FAA and tell them to do the same thing to all of our planes after you have briefed me."

The head of the NSA stared at his watch and thought, every second counts. Let me go do it now. Please.

Instead, for the next ten minutes the President grilled him for details of how the 325 million or so Americans under his care were behaving. "How many people know about this solar storm and how are they taking the news?"

The chief of the NSA gulped, shook his head, and blinked all at once. "It's off the charts. The last time I checked, the posts about it had gone viral. The tweets were in the tens of millions and posts on the internet in the millions already."

"Well, at least that's a whole lot less than I expected. Maybe this won't turn out so badly after all."

"But," he paused as he connected his smart phone to one of the NSA's mainframe computers. "The numbers are now up to almost 100 million tweets and posts about the solar storm on the internet are up to almost forty million."

"And the media are all over the story. The more hysterical reporters are advising people to head for shelter," the CIA chief said.

"So what are people doing?"

"There are runs on stores, especially grocery stores and gun shops for ammunition, most likely. And the lines at gas stations are as long as five blocks. Many of the stations have already run out of gas. We can't tell for sure if people are fleeing the cities because this is the start of a long four-day holiday weekend and the traffic is bound to be heavy anyway."

"Four days? Today is Thursday. Are you telling me that employers are giving their employees Friday off, too? That means that even more people will be traveling than if it was just a three-day weekend."

"Not very many of the employers are giving them an extra day off. But a lot of people either call in sick or take one vacation day whenever a holiday falls on a Thursday."

"If the storm does end up knocking out our electrical grid, how will people take it?"

The NSA chief sighed. "It will be panic in the streets, especially in the places where people have to rely on air conditioning to survive during summertime. Communications for law enforcement and emergency responders like firefighters and ambulance drivers could become almost nonexistent."

The President smiled. "We don't have to worry too much because General Rangel from the Joint Chiefs just informed me that we have more than 400,000 National Guard troops available to handle any contingency. If I have to, I'll just declare martial law nationwide. This just might be the perfect time to put some fear into those damn right-wingers."

"Uh..." the NSA chief hesitated. "About 80,000 of those Guard troops are deployed overseas right now."

"That still leaves us with around 320,000 of them at our disposal. That should be more than enough."

The last half of their conversation focused on where best to deploy the Army National Guard and Air National Guard forces across the nation. Then the President dismissed him.

"First, work with my Secretary of Defense to mobilize all those Guard troops. Judy is getting ahold of him. You know where her office is down the hallway, right? Second, contact the FAA to ground our planes like the Russians and Chinese already have."

"Yes Sir, right away." In his haste, the head of the NSA stumbled as he hurried from the dimly lit room.

Now the President sat alone next to the one who had proven to be his favorite appointment, his CIA chief.

"Look, China has altered the altitude of that satellite five or six times ever since they launched it," the CIA chief said. "It's no big deal that they did it again today. Maybe they think they can better monitor the solar storm from its new altitude."

"You're right."

"We sure as hell don't want to blow it out of the sky like those military boys and girls want you to do. All they ever seem to want to do is start World War III."

* * *

Little brothers can be such a big pain, especially if you have to babysit one, fifteen year old Sofia Orca thought. It's even worse because I'm trapped inside this plane and every seat is taken so I can't even move away from Casey.

Younger than his sister, Casey had fidgeted and talked for hours, fueled by his snacks of candy bars washed down by a caffeinated soft drink brought aboard for the long flight. At first merely annoyed, Sofia now wanted to scream.

"No more drinks with caffeine for him, please." Sofia's pleading voice and eyes brought a nod and smile and understanding from the flight attendant dispensing sodas, fruit juice, iced and hot tea, coffee, and alcohol from her metal cart.

Casey frowned at the orange juice handed to him by his sister. "How come I can't drink another soda instead?" he asked. "Can't I have one without any caffeine since you always think that it makes me really hyper?"

"Because the sugar in it would make you hyper too."

"I wish we were up in first class with Mom and Dad. That's where they serve all the cool expensive stuff."

"They only got to sit there because all of the other seats were overbooked, silly. Besides, they deserve a break from...from us." Sofia turned up her nose, struck by her sudden magnanimous substitution of _us_ for her intended _you._

The jetliner's intercom system cackled to life.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain. We have just received word that we have to return to Honolulu. We are sorry for any inconvenience this might cause any of you."

The announcement brought about a chorus of groans and a few curses. Only one passenger sounded happy.

"All right!" Casey shouted. "Maybe we'll get to stay in Hawaii a few more days. I read that the airlines have to give you a free hotel room when this sort of thing happens, unless it's because of the weather." He glanced out the window, his view changing as the airliner began a wide 180 degree turn. "It's beautiful outside so it can't be because of the weather."

* * *

Grandparents on both sides of his family had filled the President of the People's Republic of China with a sense of destiny; one he believed now was at last coming to fruition. For decades, he had desired to strike back at Japan on behalf of the tens of millions of Chinese killed by invading Japanese troops during World War II. Now it appeared he must settle for a secondary target, America. Attacking that target was what the Central Military Commission's members had argued in favor of for the last hour.

"So the newest projection of the Russians is that the solar storm will hit most of China and the eastern parts of India and Russia?" The President asked the official in constant contact with hacker Jackie Yee.

"Yes. Unfortunately, that also means it will only strike the western third of America instead of almost all of it, which was the original projection."

"I see. And if we do go ahead and explode our satellite at the exact moment the storm hits Earth's magnetic field, where will it be in its orbit, according to the new calculations?"

"About eight hundred miles west from San Francisco, out above the Pacific Ocean. The electrical magnetic impulses created by our atomic bomb concealed in that satellite will only travel about this far inland," said the general who had argued the longest and loudest to convince China's leader. The general rubbed his sweaty palm over the portion of the paper map showing the border between Utah and Colorado.

"Are you certain that the solar EMP will provide us with enough cover to get away with what the generals want to do?" The President turned to the astrophysicist he most trusted.

"Yes."

The President stood. "When is the moment of the detonation to be then?"

"Nine minutes from now," the astrophysicist answered.

He turned to the generals. "Proceed with your plan. Excuse me, I have to now return a call from the President of the United States."

The American President five minutes later uttered an impatient greeting to the Chinese President before saying, "I'm afraid my translator is still stuck in traffic and not here yet. We will have to rely entirely on your translator."

His tone of voice sounds bewildered, the Chinese President thought as he waited for a translation of his words from English into his native tongue before responding.

"That is no problem. The translator sitting next to me is the best one we have."

"Good. I've been calling to ask why you grounded all of China's planes, even your military ones. Is it because of that solar storm that was supposed to hit Earth about an hour ago? Do you think it will really be strong enough to damage the electrical and computer systems on your planes?"

"Yes, we are very concerned that the EMPs produced by the storm will be strong enough to do severe damage. That reminds me. We are likely to need your help to recover after the solar storm hits my country. Do you think you will be able to help us?"

"I'm sure that can be arranged. Oh, I also need to know why you lowered the altitude of one of your satellites. As usual, those damn crybabies are going to demand answers from me when Congress goes back into session."

"First, let me say how grateful my nation is to your country for giving us access to your satellite and missile technology. Unfortunately, there are still a few problems that we are experiencing. As you know, that satellite is used to gather data for our planned colony on the Moon and after that, further space exploration. But the telescope does not always focus correctly, which requires us to sometimes alter the satellite's orbit. Perhaps your administration could be so kind to help us fix this problem?"

"I'll call NASA and –"

The sudden end to his words told the Chinese President that whichever communications satellite had been beaming their call halfway around the world was now inoperable because of the long awaited storm, a potential disaster foretold by his scientific advisors since he had taken office. Less than a nanosecond before the storm struck Earth's magnetic field, China's atomic weapon had detonated hundreds of miles above Earth.

The Chinese President wondered how effective his country's contingency plan to protect its electrical and computer infrastructure from the EMPs now bombarding Earth would be.

* * *

Neither captain nor crew was happy about their fishing expedition. With their hold only a third full of fish and two day's journey away from their home port in Hawaii, any expectations of a large payout were fading. When the captain could not fix his boat's sonar unit, he summoned his first mate.

"I still can't get it to work. Tell the men that we have to head back. But keep the nets out to see if we might get lucky and snag some more catch on our way in."

After issuing the order, the first mate spotted the descending aircraft as he returned to the wheelhouse."Captain, you were in the Navy, right?"

"Yeah, for twenty-six years. Why?"

"I just saw what looks like a plane heading toward the islands pretty low in the sky seeing how we're so far from them."

The captain grabbed his binoculars and stepped from his wheelhouse to the rolling deck. "It's only at about 4,000 to 5,000 feet." He yelled and told the other five members of his crew to quiet down.

When only the slaps of swells creating groans from the wooden boat still sounded, the captain cocked his head toward the sky and listened. "Do any of you hear any sounds coming off that jet's engines?"

His crew answered by shaking heads.

"It's going to ditch in the ocean without power. Pull all of those nets back on board."

The five deck hands scrambled to obey.

"Give this tub everything's she's got," the captain ordered his first mate, who gunned the boat's three diesel engines. "And follow that plane until it hits the water." He stepped back onto the deck. "The rest of you start throwing anything heavy overboard that will slow us down."

* * *

Six months later, the United Nations' ambassadors assembled in New York for an emergency session. The bureaucrat overseeing the committee tasked with tallying the effects of the solar storm on Earth's nations waited until every delegate sat and grew silent.

"Thank you for being here even though travel conditions are still extremely difficult because of the damage to the airlines caused by last year's major solar event," she said, her words translated into dozens of languages and then transmitted to the earphones of the ambassadors and their staffs.

"According to our initial assessments, the most severe damage occurred to the western part of the United States. Japan experienced a lesser amount of damage. There was even less damage to China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia. Our preliminary estimates of casualties are in the hundreds of thousands due to: crashes when cars, trucks, buses, and airplanes had their engines stop working, power and computer failures at hospitals, nursing homes, and other such facilities, lack of air conditioning and later on, heat, for millions of residences, and from riots due to water and food shortages and other lawlessness. Dozens of satellites were rendered inoperable, including one that exploded. Our scientific team has yet to conclude why it did."

Her nonstop presentation, featuring videos and slideshow and repeated calls for action, ended an hour later.

China's ambassador rose to respond.

"The continued accusations made by some American and Japanese politicians are not only with no basis in fact, they are preposterous. If China had wanted to detonate an atomic device to create EMPs to destroy the United States' electrical grid, would we not have detonated it over the center of America to do just that? As everyone now knows, our satellite instead exploded hundreds of miles away from the West Coast of America, out over the Pacific Ocean. As has already been said earlier, only a very small section of the U.S. was affected. In fact, China's eastern coastal cities were just as severely damaged. With all due respect, the damage to our country is much greater than what was detailed in the presentation we just heard."

The ambassador's right eyebrow twitched, a nervous habit whenever he lied.

"But what about all of the radioactive fallout that has been detected since your satellite exploded?" Japan's ambassador asked.

"Our satellite was powered by enough nuclear fuel so that it could perform its numerous daily tasks and experiments for many, many decades. It had to have a very large amount of nuclear fuel or else the satellite's orbit would have decayed and its remnants might have landed on some of your nations as it burned up during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The solar storm somehow caused the nuclear power plant on that very large and extremely complicated satellite to explode. It will cost us billions of dollars to replace it. Accidents happen, even in outer space. And don't forget about all of the radioactive material released from your nuclear power plant into the atmosphere and oceans after the earthquake and tsunami in your country of Japan not that many years ago. Please remember that this solar storm was even more powerful and devastating than those two events combined that struck your land. In the meantime, my country's leaders have asked me to appeal to the international community to come to the aid of our nation. We are in desperate need of –"

Eight hundred and sixty-one miles to the south, nine year old Casey Orca used a remote control to end his television connection to the United Nations' meeting. His sister Sofia glanced up from her e-book about zombies hunting for survivors of multiple apocalypses.

"I wish we were still over there on vacation in Hawaii," Casey said.

"Why, just so you could hang out with those guys from the fishing boat who rescued us? I can't wait until things finally get back to normal in California so we can go back home again."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. Things here at Grandma's house are way too boring."

### Battling the Big CA in Sunny CA

"You need to get those checked out."

That's what my wife had said about the three ugly growths on my back. I could only see parts of them by trying to turn my head 180 degrees and staring at their reflection in the bathroom mirror.

"I can't tell. I need to refer you to a dermatologist," my primary care doctor said three weeks later.

Six months later, the dermatologist's waiting room seemed to have originated in the imaginations of O Henry and Rod Serling. It was crammed full of patients sitting under signs warning: _The average waiting time may be about 1 hour._ Part of the room was devoted to skin care products and a licensed person to administer them. All of us who sat and waited were treated to commercial free songs from the 1960s beamed from a satellite.

A Buddhist monk in orange robe was having problems with the karma being handed him by the receptionist. "The doctor can't see you today until you pay your co-pay for your last visit," she told him.

The monk's face contorted into an expression similar to David Carradine's look of bewilderment every time his master had called him _grasshopper_ on the television show _Kung Fu._

At the other end of the waiting room, a woman wearing a black robe and headdress revealing only her hands and face clutched a girl about two years old. Every breath the child attempted was labored: coughs, wheezes, and rattles sounding like lungs swimming in fluid. I wondered if this dermatologist did charity work and saw some patients suffering from ailments other than those related to the human body's largest organ, our skin.

An older couple, the man talking and joking loud enough to fill the waiting room with his voice, entered. He flirted with the receptionist until she said, "We need to build a separate waiting room just for you to wait in when you come in here."

When they sat next to me, he spoke of how his adult children had told him to get a strange looking growth on the top of his foot checked out. He did and it was cancer. He has returned for a checkup after his surgery to remove the deadly invader.

As I entered a back room to be examined, my life flashed before my eyes as three back to back songs transported me to when I was fifteen and invincible, 1967. Aretha Franklin sang about how her man made her feel natural. Next, Frank Sinatra intoned about going from the bottom of the heap to the top, from beggar to king. The chorus echoed "that's life..." over and over.

Hearing about life made me reflect on mine, especially when the third song began, one by those lords of the dark side, The Doors, a quartet more at home with death than life.

Instead of one of their chart topping singles, such as _Light My Fire, Love Me Two Times,_ or _L.A.Woman,_ hits from when songs were sold as 45 rpm vinyl disks, a B-side and lesser heard song pulsed from the speakers into my ears. _The Crystal Ship,_ a fantasy tale condensed into three minutes, promised thrills and girls by the thousands as I sat alone in the treatment room.

As if cued by the music, my dermatologist appeared and donned a pair of goggles to magnify his eyesight and give him the appearance of an X-man as he scanned my body.

"We need to cut those out today. Is that okay?"

Huh? You tell me, Doc, I thought. I mumbled my consent, faking the kind of _who cares_ attitude that Jim Morrison of the Doors and Frank Sinatra had anointed me with during the last two songs. "Sure, why not?"

So the evil looking skin was cut out and sent to a lab in a larger city, and from there forwarded to a lab in San Francisco for further analysis. At the next appointment my dermatologist said, "Pre-melanoma," before taking out surrounding tissue from one of the three still healing areas. Because melanoma had killed my wife's uncle, the doctor said all my children needed their skin to be examined by "a dermatologist, not a general practitioner."

They did and are fine.

After six decades of swimming and often not wearing a shirt while working, the sun has inflicted severe damage on my skin, so the doctor wants me to return every three months for life. As a reminder of my mortality, similar scenes play out in our neighborhood.

One neighbor, a retired carpenter, plays golf and walks our streets daily for exercise but appears to be losing weight from his muscular body. Over time, he tells us of the cancer spreading through his internal organs. "The doctor says that if I do chemo, I might live an extra six months to a year."

He begins the treatments.

Another neighbor has been getting treated for prostate cancer, then skin cancer. I am surprised by his skin cancer because he is Hispanic, his skin a deep brown from years of working outdoors in the construction industry. Until then, I had believed only whites could be afflicted by melanoma. His doctors cut out lymph nodes and start chemotherapy and prescribe drugs still in their test stages as time wears on. But he fades away and dies first in his early sixties.

A few months later, our other neighbor passes away in his mid-seventies, still walking and golfing to the end.

Memories surface.

The most vivid one is from forty-one years ago, while working as an orderly in a convalescent home. One resident resembles a scarecrow missing most of its straw stuffing because the man is skinny and frail and wasted. He doesn't respond to anyone who enters his private room. I ask the nurse what is wrong.

"He has _CA_." She whispers the abbreviation, as if saying _cancer_ aloud will aggravate the curse inflicted on his body and make him die sooner.

Next come memories of those who claimed, "God healed me. My cancer's completely gone." I had rejoiced with them, but most of them died within months or at most two decades later from cancer.

"It was a lack of faith on their part," some say.

"Maybe they had some secret sin that they refused to repent of," a few say.

Relief is ministered when most say, "It was their time to go and be with the Lord forever."

For three decades, I visited a health food store owned by an older couple, and ground peanut butter from fresh peanuts, bought twenty-five pound bags of oats, and drank a _natural, organic, corn syrup free_ soft drink, or sometimes purchased herbs, vitamins, and minerals from its shelves. Then I bumped into one of the health food store's owners at a drug store across the street. He's picking up five prescriptions from its pharmacy and explains, "When you get to be my wife's and my age, you need more and more medicine."

His words prove true as I age.

After being diagnosed with melanoma, I am told about a natural healer "who has healed two dozen people from Stage-4 cancer" with his regimen of herbs, vitamins, and minerals and who knows what else. A few years later, his number of supposed cured patients from the ravages of Stage-4 cancer has risen to three dozen. I am tempted to ask him for names and phone numbers or email addresses of three or four of them to ask if the non-licensed practitioner or a licensed medical doctor had diagnosed their cancer as Stage-4 and if a medical doctor had declared their cancers to be in remission.

But the healer dies at age sixty-two before I can make the request.

* * *

My regimen becomes having growths cut out or frozen off by application of liquid nitrogen during routine visits to my dermatologist.

Months become years and then a mole on my lower abdomen grows in size and turns from light brown to dark brown to gray to black to jet black. By the time of the next appointment, the usual question pounded in my mind: _Is it melanoma_?

This time no music played in the waiting room. The dermatologist did not like the looks of my now black mole because he sliced off the top of it for a biopsy and said, "Make an appointment to come back in one week."

* * *

"It's cancer," the dermatologist said a week later. Instead of cutting out the rest of the mole and surrounding tissue as he had in the past, he makes an appointment with a surgeon "so he can check out the inside of you."

In the car on the way home I punch buttons to bring the radio to life.

The English band Yes sings about an _Owner of a Lonely Heart_ and berating the sufferer for never thinking of the future. I don't like thinking of possible futures, such as ending up like my two neighbors who battled cancer for the full fifteen rounds before losing on TKOs, technical knockouts leaving behind widows, children, and grandchildren.

I change the station.

On the next station, Stephen Stills is singing about leaving his troubles behind by sailing to the South Pacific, where he finds the _Southern Cross_ , a formation of stars blinking in the nighttime skies _._ For him, it's a matter of the truth one is trying to escape being small in comparison to a future day. Two for two, at least in my world when comparing the two songs to the way life is unfolding for me.

I punch the other four buttons but decide to give none of the singers of songs or talkers a chance to blindside me again. So I shut off the radio and concentrate on which of the five gears to shift into as the car rolls homeward.

Is the glass half empty or half full? At least the doctor thought the lymph nodes in my groin were okay after he examined them. Inches from the cancer, they are quite vulnerable, according to the little I know.

* * *

When the surgeon you are referred to wants to refers you to somewhere else, the situation starts to go from irritating to scary. I protest.

"But my dermatologist cut out or burned off all the other growths."

"They weren't like this one."

"Don't you get referrals from dermatologists for cases like mine?"

"I only see about one a year that is like yours is."

"You can't cut it out today?"

"It's too big. You need to go to a cancer center where they will put dye into you to see if the cancer has spread to other parts of your body." As he rises and opens the door to the exam room, I follow him and spout more reasons why he should operate instead, today.

But his assessment that my case requires treatment he and the hospital he's associated with cannot provide torpedoes my protests. He refers me back to my dermatologist with a note saying I should go to a cancer center two hours away when there is no traffic and at least three hours travel time when there is.

So I ask my wife to pray that the doctor's group who handles our referrals to specialists will send me to one of the cancer centers located in two much closer metropolitan areas.

* * *

Bringing up prayer moves the discussion into a spiritual realm, a battleground for most couples, including us. Not only am I from Pluto and she from Mercury, I was raised Catholic and she Baptist.

She likes Jews for Jesus. The Messianic Jews who spoke to my spirit were the pair of musicians who as songwriter and producer released albums as a group named Lamb, and Art Katz, a prophet given to the body of Christ for over half a century before he went home to his eternal reward.

My wife likes books by C.S. Lewis and Sarah Young. I like J.R.R. Tolkien's and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's fiction and nonfiction. She favors the sacred music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart while I prefer the songs of Johnny Cash, Allison Krause, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, and Kris Kristofferson, at least when their lyrics turn toward the Lord and His kingdom. He and His realm have become more of a focus since cancer manifested itself on my skin like mushrooms sprouting after a springtime rain.

Now the main contention becomes her being a card carrying member of the _God Is in Control_ wing of twenty-first century Christianity because the Bible says in Romans chapter 8: _and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him..._.

Unwilling to endure or even acknowledge all such reassurances about God's sovereignty over cancer, especially the one seeking to kill me, I preach a sermon to her to retaliate.

"I know you're big on always saying, 'God is in control,' but that's like telling someone that there is gravity or E equals MC squared or the sun came up today and will also set later on. None of that matters, okay? God created the universe. When I was five years old, I used to think about God having no beginning or end. So, yeah, God is in control because He created everything, including you and me. Remember that Bible teacher who said that people's keys did not fit his locks, in other words, that their solutions did not fit his problems? Well, I'm like him, okay?"

My wife says nothing.

Her silence makes me reflect. "Okay, maybe what you're saying is like the shotgun doses of penicillin we used to give patients when we were medics in the Army. We injected hundreds of thousands of units of penicillin by using the biggest needles possible to knock out whatever ailed them. Maybe you're shooting spiritual penicillin into my soul. Next, you'll be telling me that my soul has cancer too, I bet."

The day after visiting the surgeon, a letter arrives from my doctors' group informing me that I've been approved to visit him. "Better late than never," I grumble as I read it. Only two words jump off of the paper.

_Melanoma, malignant_.

Huh?

My dermatologist and the surgeon he referred me to both called it cancer. Over the last three years I've done enough research to know the different types of skin cancer, some more dangerous than others, with the worst being malignant melanoma. Up until now, I had thought I had some low grade form of melanoma. So, for the first time I type _malignant melanoma_ into our computer's search engine.

Clicking the first link causes our McAfee filter to throw up an electronic box on the computer monitor warning, _Whoa! Are you sure you want to go there?_ Having infected our laptop and personal computers with viruses, Trojan horses, and who knows what else hackers are capable of, I decide the first site is hazardous, maybe even capable of inflicting misinformation into people's minds while damaging their computers.

I limit my perusal to sites approved by the McAfee filter and that sound reputable, such as the Mayo Clinic, Web MD, LIVESTRONG, and a couple of national cancer organizations.

They all say pretty much the same thing about melanoma: if it's treated early enough, there can be success; if too late, the cancer spreads, often first to lymph nodes and then various internal organs like the liver, brain, intestines, lungs... The research shuts me down into reflective mode.

I remember some whose battles against the ravages of cancer I had heard about first or secondhand. One was a coworker serving in the Air Force Reserve when called to active duty during the Gulf War. Shortly afterwards, she came down with cancer and the aggressive treatments made her hair fall out and she wore a wig to hide her baldness before dying in her late thirties.

Another co-worker I ran into after he had retired. He had lost a lot of weight and said, "It's because of my cancer."

He died a couple of years later.

The most ironic case had been a neurosurgeon who inserted a shunt into our son's brain shortly after he was born to drain excess spinal fluid and saved his life. A decade later, the neurosurgeon's obituary said he had died of brain cancer.

But the most haunting images are those whom I've never met in person: folks on Facebook writing about their cancer experiences and the little children on the commercials about St. Jude's Hospital, all of them bald. Eleven days after my dermatologist said, "It's cancer," I know I'm not as brave as the ones in the St. Jude's Hospital commercials.

Nor as patient.

_Why_ is now the first or only word for my questions.

Those questions fog my mind as I plod along on my two-mile walk, performed between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. to avoid the sun's rays and to breathe in a minimal amount of fumes from the vehicles filling the streets later on. Even minimal exposure to sun over an extended period can be harmful, according to some websites and my dermatologist. And all of them agree on factors contributing to melanoma.

Whites are more susceptible to melanoma and having fair skin, light colored hair or eyes are also factors. _Ding, ding, ding_ ... I hit the jackpot on all of those, three lemons lined up in a row.

What did that Bible teacher say? _If you get lemons, make lemonade._

Unprotected exposure to sunlight is also bad. I think back to rarely wearing a coat or sweater because of the warm Southern California sun for three years as a child, followed by four years in Alabama and then two years in the Philippines. For all of my sixty-two years, my shirt was off outside whenever possible, whether working, swimming or just lying in the sun _soaking up the rays_. Forty-four of the most recent years have been in a climate that has about 270 days a year of sunlight and days as long as fifteen hours in the summertime, when the living can become less than easy if one is not careful about protecting skin.

They don't call it sunny California for no reason. The soil and sun here allow just about anything to be raised: apples, beets, cattle (dairy and beef) dates, eggplant, fish, goats, honey, iceberg lettuce, jicama, kale, lemons, mangos, nectarines, onions, pears, quince, rice, squash, turkeys, un-genetically modified herbs, Valencia oranges, watermelon, X-mas trees, yams, and zucchini. Everything from _A_ to _Z_ and then some.

And cancer cells.

Further research reveals diet cannot cure cancer or keep it from returning if it goes into remission. However, eating foods high in antioxidants is good strategy to strengthen one's immune system. So I begin doing what my wife has done for decades: eat more vegetables and fruits and less junk food, especially sugar. To start days, I drink three large cups of hot mocha containing heaping tablespoons of cocoa and coffee because they contain vital antioxidants.

* * *

_You have to walk the walk, not just talk about it_.

That was another saying I started to hear in the 1960s and heard repeated in various forms every decade since from family, friends, teachers, neighbors, pastors, Bible teachers, evangelists, co-workers, acquaintances, even strangers. Growing desperation goads my wife and me to visit a widow who walked the walk of melanoma stalking a loved one. What she tells us about her journey alongside her dying husband is hard.

But it's enough to sober me up for more research.

I had guessed maybe one of five Americans get cancer. Now I know it is one of three women and one out of two men. All the actuarial tables used by life and health insurance companies now make sense as I recall a phenomenon I first began to notice twenty years ago at worship services. For every male senior citizen sitting in the pews, there were about four women the same age.

* * *

Are consultations supposed to be ominous? I always thought such drama should be reserved for when the surgeon comes out of the operating room to the family and friends of the patient and shakes his or her head and maybe says, "I'm sorry but..." At least that's how it played out in the movies and on TV.

My surgeon has been operating for decades and is accompanied by an intern apprenticing for the trade. After a long series of questions and examinations of parts of my body where I guess it is most likely any traveling cancer cells could have taken up residence, game day is discussed. A radioactive dye will be shot into the melanoma's site to determine any nearby lymph glands where it might have spread. Other tests such as a chest X-ray are ordered.

* * *

In at the hospital's admissions unit at 7 a.m. Last memory in the operating room is a clock reading 10:17 a.m. Wake up in the recovery room at 12:03 p.m. Talk to the nurses as if they are old friends because of the anesthetic's side effects making me feel high.

We will arrive back home by 1:20 p.m.

Surgery in America is thorough, using more checks and balances and internal controls than I ever saw during twelve years working as an accountant and auditor.

My designated driver talked to the surgeon after my surgery before he leaves to operate on a patient's breasts (my wife had spent time watching updates for ongoing and upcoming surgeries on the digital board in the waiting room). After effects of the anesthetic leaves me dizzy if I sit or lie down, but if I stand up, the dizziness stops.

"The dizziness goes down to my feet when I stand," I tell the uniformed medical assistant who pushes my wheelchair to our car. She gives me the same strange look the two nurses in the recovery room displayed after telling them of my remedy for such after effects.

* * *

Sometime during childhood, I decided listening to the song, reading the book, or watching the movie or TV show exempted me from any of the melodrama, good or bad, life might bring my way. While the physically injected radioactive dye had a half-life of six hours, those stories tended to attach themselves to my mind, will, and emotions, sometimes for decades, maybe even for a lifetime.

In high school, after the required reading of _Death Be Not Proud,_ a father's account of his young son's drawn out death by brain tumor, I told God, "You think I can just die peacefully in my sleep instead, Lord?" Memories of watching TV's _Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, M.D.,_ and _Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman_ increased my request, especially after many viewings of one of the show's weekly opening sequence of a hand drawing corresponding symbols on a blackboard as a voice intoned, "Man, woman, life, death, eternity."

* * *

"Whatever happens in the natural happens in the spiritual realm," a friend who reminded me of Frodo the Hobbit used to tell me over and over in the 1970s. This is now proving too true forty plus years later.

Two days ago, the surgeon cut out physical cancer from my body. Today, an omnipotent, holy, Triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cut out some cancer from my soul. As usual, my wife served as the operating room nurse as my anger and pain flooded over her during my analysis of "everything that's wrong with this picture," which included my cancer in particular and the world in general. As usual, she cauterized the wounds and went about the daily demands that never cease for her.

When God's grace is manifested in a tangible way, it's hard to deny and foolish to reject it.

* * *

"When all else fails, go see Granny," was one of the first sayings my wife learned as a child. She repeated it when I told her my latest in a long series of battle plans to defeat the big CA in sunny CA.

Exhausted and grasping, I made _when all else fails, go see Granny_ my mantra as I drove to her home.

Once Granny's farm had been forty acres of apples, walnuts, and almonds. Now her inheritance has dwindled to a quarter acre having a 950 square foot farm house, well, and fourteen ancient trees producing enough for her to harvest and can to survive and a valley oak tree tall and wide enough to shade her entire dwelling during merciless late summer afternoons.

I parked at the end of her dirt driveway nearest the wide, two-lane paved street snaking through the 171 houses standing where the orchards she had helped plant once stood. She sat while shelling sugar peas on her front porch and tossed me one. Even raw, the flavor of peas and their pod satisfied my longing for anything resembling the sweetness of sugar. I ate twenty more of them as we talked.

"You got woman troubles, don't you boy?" she asked.

I gagged on a half chewed pod. "Who you told you that, Granny?"

"Your face. My dad wore that same look whenever he and Mom argued. So did my brothers, uncles, cousins, friends..."

"Well, you know what they say, 'you can't live with them and you can't...'" I paused, hoping she would follow my lead.

"...live without them. Yeah, same was true of me and my Clyde." She pointed at the five foot wide base of the oak tree. "That's why I put his ashes under that tree, so they could at least help it to grow taller and provide me some shade to remind me of him."

She took her peas into the largest room of her home, the kitchen, and returned to the porch holding a quart-sized glass jar filled with a foul smelling dark brown liquid and handed it to me.

"Drink this," Granny said.

"What is it?"

"A remedy for your nerves. Word around town is that you're falling apart. That's the worst thing that can happen to a body when you've got the cancer. Word is that your neighbors have heard you yelling at your poor wife night and day."

My stomach knotted as I became like a deer frozen on asphalt, hypnotized by the light and love of an old woman instead of an oncoming vehicle's headlights.

She sat back down in her wooden rocking chair and began a swaying motion to match the cadence of her words. "I'm real sorry that I don't have a cure for your cancer. But at least God in His heaven has seen to it that knowledge of ways to treat the cancer's side effects such as your bad case of nerves has been handed down for generations of my family. Now it's time to pass it down to your family." She gave me a recipe for the herbal brew. "Give this to your wife when you get home. Tell her I'll come by with the ingredients to make it just as soon as the herbs have dried enough to use."

* * *

After finishing my third jar of her herb tea, brewed from plants from her garden growing in place of grass in Granny's front yard, I spent a half hour telling her the history of my disease. She seemed content to nod once in a while.

"Well, time for me go home." I stood until her gesture sent me back onto her worn easy chair, used by dozens, maybe hundreds of her guests.

"Time for a come to Jesus meeting, boy. No sense in wasting any more of your time."

My mouth went dry and palms got clammy. What Granny had told me during our last such meeting two years ago had felt like a sword cutting my inner being into compartments until Jesus rearranged them into some sort of wholeness.

"You know, my folks brought us out here in 1930 after a God fearing Indian who lived near our Arkansas farm told us that the drought that had just started was going to be fearsome and last for years and years. I was only four when we got this far following the crops so we could pick them. Aunt Bess always said it was a miracle the way the good Lord took us from being crop pickers to share croppers to us owning this piece of land. Daddy died first in 1942. We were still too poor to afford one of those fancy funerals so we buried him at night. Uncle Nathaniel planted that oak tree over there on top of Daddy's grave as his tombstone and we told folks that Daddy had been on a trip back to Texas when he took ill and died to keep the law from coming around asking questions and digging up his plywood coffin and moving it to some pauper's cemetery."

"Nobody ever found out?"

Granny laughed. "World War II had started and all the posters everywhere said, 'Loose lips sink ships,' so even us kids kept our mouths shut when Uncle Nathaniel told us that burying Daddy where we did was part of the war effort so it had to stay a secret."

"Then where's your mom buried?"

"By the time she passed away in 1965 there were too many nearby nosy neighbors to bury her body by the oak tree so us kids had her cremated and stuck her ashes down next to Daddy's coffin."

Sweat began to pour down my armpits. "Uh, are you asking that I see to it that your ashes get put there too when the time comes? That is, if I outlive you?"

"Would you mind too much? You're so slow about things that I sort of doubt you will ever finish this life before I get to."

"Okay."

"You know, this valley we live in can grow anything. We even supply food for other countries all around the world but with this long drought we have going on, it's turning into another Dust Bowl. Might not be too long before folks that depend on us for food are going hungry or even starving to death but that's what happens when we hate the way God wants us to live and pass laws that go against the Bible to justify it."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. "Besides all that, do you have any idea how many thousands of acres they're taking away to build that bullet train that is going to run hundreds of miles dead center through some of the best farmland in the whole world or all of the crops they are using for biofuel instead of food? You know how many folks are moving out of this Central Valley because there's not enough water anymore?"

"No."

"No matter. The important thing is that whatever time the good Lord has left for you, spend as much as you can praying that us Christians will repent because the Bible says we are the ones who have to humble ourselves and pray and turn from our wicked ways. If we don't..." Granny stood and reached for her front screen door. "Ever since I heard about you getting cancer, I've been praying for you every day. Funny thing, though. When I asked the Lord what I should tell you about your disease, it sure seemed like that verse that says, 'pray without ceasing,' popped into my soul."

I walked backwards off the porch toward my car. "So what you're saying is that I should start praying all the time that God will heal me, right?"

Granny's head drooped as she sighed.

"Boy, you are about as dense as those folks that Jesus walked the Earth with 2,000 years ago were. Stop worrying about nothing but yourself all the time. God wants you to start praying for the billions of people who don't know Him. If you get tired of praying that, then start praying for all your brothers and sisters getting their heads cut off or raped or shot to death in the Middle East and Africa."

For the first time in four years, I stopped worrying about my cancer.

### Acknowledgments

Thank you for reading these stories.

Thank you to my alpha reader for the last forty-one years, Jean Stroble. After all that time, she was overdue for a promotion; so now she is also my editor.

Thank you to James, GoOnWrite.com, for the cover.

Thank you to Polgarus Studio for their formatting.

Any errors that remain are mine.

If you enjoy short stories, a sample of some free ones is available for you to read at my blog: <https://shortstorystop.wordpress.com/>

## Bonus story from _And the Ravens Will Feed You and Other Stories_
### The Ravens Will Feed You

The smell was always the worst reminder.

For days, the charred flesh that stuck to the idols caused Zebulun to walk as far from the temple as possible. But if the wind shifted, the odor found his nose. He thought of how the infants' agonizing screams lasted less than a minute as the fire consumed them.

But the odors from the sacrifices to Baal lingered long after their pain ceased.

Expressing how human sacrifice infuriated him would be foolish. Any willing to listen might just pretend to agree. Then they could report his rebellion. Being posted to a dangerous location might result. Or if the queen caught wind of his beliefs, she could get that eunuch of a husband of hers to order a worse fate for Zebulun.

So the soldier kept his faith in the Lord God hidden from others. But his silence offered little peace. Instead it fanned his turmoil.

Ritual? Ha! It's as if they think they are sacrificing a lamb or heifer. It's the murder of helpless children, their days cut short by parents too ignorant or too frightened to care as their sons and daughters die.

"Zebulun. Wake up."

"What? I'm not asleep. I...I am meditating."

"On what? I know better. Your eyes were open but you were standing as still as a rock does."

"Isn't that what a guard is supposed to do?"

"Bah. Show at least a little movement so I don't have to climb up to the top of this wall to check on you again."

"Yes, Captain."

The weary guard walked the length of the wall, turned and repeated his movements.

This will keep the city safe? Israel is not plagued by enemies from without but from within. Why did King Ahab have to marry Jezebel?

Pale moonlight revealed a figure, seventy yards away, approaching the city's main gate. Zebulun scanned the hilltops.

Nothing.

Then he squinted at the space to either side of the slow moving shape. Nothing. A spy perhaps? From Judah? More likely from one of the heathen nations that surround Israel.

The sentry laughed at his thoughts. Israel was as pagan as any other nation, nearby or far away.

"You, there. Why do you approach Samaria at this time of night?"

Silence.

"Answer me."

Silence.

The figure stretched out and became another one of the sleeping humans and animals waiting outside of the gate until it would open in the morning. The fire blazing near him revealed what his lips did not. He wore some kind of hairy animal skin and hair and beard that gave him a wild kind of look.

_He is probably just another apostate who has come to worship the false gods of Queen Jezebel._ Zebulun resumed his pacing of the wall. _I think the Lord God has abandoned Israel. We are doomed._

* * *

"Zebulun, I'm here to relieve you."

"Good." He handed the spear he had carried for ten hours to his replacement.

"Long night for you?"

He yawned. "They are all long. Guard duty is probably the worst part of being a soldier."

"And I always thought that killing and being killed in battle was."

The sleepy soldier descended the flight of stone steps to the courtyard. After taking a single step toward his barracks, he felt a presence float by him. Although the man had not touched Zebulun, something about the stranger roused the soldier's instincts.

Whoever it was wore no sword or knife. As his long wooden staff hit the stone pavement it seemed to send forth an urgency, that he was on some sort of mission. Dust and sweat clung to his bare arms and legs, his face and thick beard.

Looks like he has come from a long journey, Zebulun thought as he followed him. Then his sleep deprived mind remembered the silent one who had descended from the dark hills.

"It's you," Zebulun said. "I'm the sentry from last night who called down to you from the wall, remember?"

When no response came, Zebulun ran to the man's side. "No need to be unfriendly. Are you silent because you do not speak Hebrew?"

His reply was a small grunt, as if that was all this bothersome conversation needed to end it. Zebulun wondered if that was the way this man's tribe communicated with outsiders.

His father was a merchant; his mother had grown up as a shepherdess tending her family's flocks. But neither of them had ever grunted except when lifting something heavy. Nor had they spoken of strange people who used such noises to communicate. Maybe Hebrew was a foreign tongue for this stranger?

Because his parents had taught him that the Lord God expected Israelites to treat others fairly, even aliens who dwelt among them, Zebulun continued his friendliness. "My name is Zebulun. What is yours?"

His pace did not slow down as the man turned his head. "Elijah."

"And where are you from, Elijah?"

"Is that the palace over there?"

"Yes."

Elijah doubled the length and pace of his stride. He ignored all whom he passed. As Elijah's foot touched the bottom step to the palace, Zebulun ran after him. Tired from a night of serving as a sentry, he could not catch up to stop the foolish actions.

"Wait!" Zebulun cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted after him. "You cannot enter the palace unannounced. Wait for me and..."

Because Elijah was near the top of the steps and showed no intent of slowing his pace, Zebulun stopped calling after him. His mouth fell open when the guards at the entrance to the palace did not stop Elijah. They continued to stare straight ahead as if they did not see him pass. Zebulun summoned the last of his strength and ran up the steps. When he neared the entrance to the throne room, he heard the stranger's voice.

Zebulun leaned against a pillar as the words echoed off of the marble and granite walls.

"As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word."

Zebulun tensed and waited for Elijah's scream as a spear or sword or perhaps both would end his lack of obedience to protocol. Instead, he watched him stride by. Once again, Zebulun jogged to keep up with him.

"You are a prophet of the one true God. My prayers have been answered."

Zebulun's panting forced air down his dry throat. The warm atmosphere burned his lungs, leaving him unable to speak and keep pace with the prophet he had thought he would not live long enough to see. When they reached the gate, Zebulun tried once again to learn about the one he had first glimpsed seven hours earlier.

"Please, Elijah. I know you are a prophet. Tell me where you are going?"

Elijah stopped. He smiled as his hand patted Zebulun's shoulder.

"To where the ravens will feed me."

* * *

If days seem long because of living in a decadent society whose corruption has invited God's judgment, the sleepless nights grow even longer. Abandoning the God of Abraham, David, and Elijah for gods fashioned from stone and wood had not been merely foolish, Zebulun thought.

It was suicidal.

More than two years had passed since Elijah's ultimatum to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. For Zebulun, they had been blessed because he had been promoted from guarding the walls to guarding the palace and cursed because that meant instead of hearing the continuing screams of the children offered in fire to Baal, he had now to endure the rants and tantrums of Queen Jezebel, the source of Israel's human sacrifices.

"I told my father it was a mistake to ally himself with Israel by making me marry you."

King Ahab recoiled from the words of his queen.

"You act as if what I say to you is some sort of secret. But all Israel knows that the great King Ahab is little better than a eunuch. Has there ever been a kingdom as powerless, as impotent as yours?"

On and on the harangue continued.

"Phoenicia, ruled by my father King Ethbaal, is superior to Israel in every way. Phoenicians rule the seas, Israelites cower in the desert. My people are great merchants, bringing goods and treasure from distant lands; your people are nothing but a lazy bunch of shepherds and farmers. Don't bother telling me again about what you claim was Israel's golden age, when David united the twelve tribes of Israel into such a great nation that when the Queen of Sheeba paid David's son Solomon a visit, she was breathless. I have yet to be breathless since leaving my home in Phoenicia..."

Noticing her husband's downcast gaze, Queen Jezebel paused. She stopped pacing in front of his throne and laid her head on his lap.

"Forgive me, my king. It is not you to blame for Israel's suffering. It is Elijah who is to blame. Let me consult my prophets. They will know what you must do."

Zebulun walked to a hallway next to the throne room and stared at the royal city through a latticed window. What breeze filtered through the window was hot. As Zebulun silently prayed for his nation, the words of Elijah from long ago pulsed in his mind:

"As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word."

If only the king would lead his people in repentance, then surely the Lord God would have Elijah speak again, this time a blessing. Zebulun wished he were in a position to voice that thought to King Ahab. If dew and rain did not return soon, how many would die?

When he heard Queen Jezebel return to the throne room, Zebulun scurried to the gold trimmed door that led to it. He lingered outside the door as he pretended to inspect the two guards stationed there. One guard nodded his head at the pretender as the other grinned. The queen's voice was now gentle.

"My prophets have agreed with me. They said that he should be brought here to the palace. If Elijah does not cooperate, then he can face the same punishment that was given to those other prophets like him."

Zebulun shuddered as he hurried down the long corridor to the room assigned to him as commander of the day time guards. He remembered how Queen Jezebel had ordered that dozens of prophets who remained loyal to the Lord God be executed. After he had shut the door to his tiny chamber, he fell on his knees and cried out quietly to his God to spare Elijah from the wicked queen who ruled Israel more than her husband.

A knock on his door ended his prayer.

"The queen wants to see you."

"Why, Obadiah?"

"The one who told me to find you did not say what she wants. Keep your head and maintain your bearing or you may lose your life."

Zebulun straightened his robe. The 197 steps to the throne room became the longest walk of his career of serving the royal couple. Endless nights of guard duty now seemed welcome. Obadiah whispered as they walked side by side.

"You know where my loyalties lie?"

"I have heard rumors that you worship the Lord God."

"Good. Believe them but do not repeat them."

Having Obadiah at his side steadied Zebulun's gait as they appeared before Jezebel's throne and bowed.

"You are Zebulun?" The queen pointed at the one she acknowledged only out of desperation.

"Yes, my Queen."

"I've been told that you spoke with Elijah when he came here two years ago to speak his lies."

He gulped. Already he felt the steel of a guard's sword severing his head at the queen's command. But if his death kept others from dying, so be it.

"Only once as he departed from Samaria." His voice quivered.

"Then you must tell everything you know to the king and Obadiah to help them find Elijah."

"Yes, my Queen." Zebulun took a step backward and bumped into Obadiah. He turned to beg forgiveness for his clumsiness. When he turned around to bow again, Jezebel was gone, having slipped into the room hidden by the crimson curtains near her throne.

"Come." Obadiah grabbed Zebulun's arm and led him toward the guardroom. "The sooner I am away from Samaria, the better."

As he changed, Obadiah had Zebulun retell all he knew. Obadiah sighed when he learned of Elijah's destination.

"Where the ravens will feed him? But that could be anywhere."

"I know. But when I asked Elijah where he was going that was all he would tell me. Then he smiled and walked out the gate toward the wilderness. I have not seen him since."

"At least you had enough sense not to lie to the queen. If she suspected that you had she would have told King Ahab you were a conspirator against his throne with Elijah and you would be dead by now. She knows how to use the king's fears to get what she wants. It sickens me to even be near them."

"As chief servant in the palace, then you must be sick most of your waking hours. Is it really true that you hid some of the Lord's prophets when Queen Jezebel began to have them killed?"

Obadiah bowed his head. "If I had not done that then Elijah alone would be left from among the Lord's prophets here in Israel." He fastened a belt around his waist. "Sometimes I think that soldiers such as you face less danger than true prophets of the Lord. And while Israelites face famine, the queen continues to feed her false prophets at her table."

An hour later, King Ahab stumbled to the stable and met Obadiah. They led a small contingent of soldiers into the wilderness. Those who followed muttered about serving in an army whose real leader wore gowns and sat in the palace as her husband obeyed her commands.

The search party had not travelled far before Ahab raised his arm and reined his horse to a stop. "You soldiers return to Samaria." He watched as they trudged back toward the city that now appeared as large as his fist.

"What do you require now, my king?" Obadiah asked.

"Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals." King Ahab turned his horse westward and urged it into a trot.

_At least he's joining in this foolish quest. No grass can survive this long without rain._ Obadiah turned eastward. He preferred walking to the sore rump that riding horses inflicted.

As the miles passed, he relaxed. The kind of peace that only solitude in the midst of God's creation can bring flooded his soul. I am beginning to like this, he thought. I bet the king likes his search just as much because it gives him time away from Queen Jezebel.

An approaching figure startled him. When he was certain, Obadiah fell on his knees and bowed until his forehead touched sand and rocks.

"Is it really you, my lord Elijah?"

"Yes. Go tell your master, 'Elijah is here.'"

"What have I done wrong, that you are handing your servant over to Ahab to be put to death? As surely as the Lord your God lives, there is not a nation or kingdom where my master has not sent someone to look for you. And whenever a nation or kingdom claimed you were not there, he made them swear they could not find you. But now you tell me to go to my master and say, 'Elijah is here.' I don't know where the Spirit of the Lord may carry you when I leave you. If I go and tell Ahab and he doesn't find you, he will kill me. Yet I your servant have worshiped the Lord since my youth. Haven't you heard, my lord, what I did while Jezebel was killing the prophets of the Lord? I hid a hundred of the Lord's prophets in two caves, fifty in each, and supplied them with food and water. And now you tell me to go to master and say, 'Elijah is here.' He will kill me!"

"As the Lord Almighty lives, whom I serve, I will surely present myself to Ahab today."

* * *

The meeting between prophet and king was better than Obadiah expected. Ahab tried to make up with bluster what he lacked in courage as he projected his sins onto the one he hated.

"Is that you, you troubler of Israel?" Ahab did not dismount from his exhausted horse as he used it as if it were a throne.

"I have not made trouble for Israel," Elijah replied. "But you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the Lord's commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table."

* * *

Zebulun stared from the top of the palace steps as his fellow Israelites filed into the temple of Baal.

All the people do is copulate with the temple prostitutes. What is wrong with you? Is not your husband good enough for you? Is not your wife good enough for you? How much do you pay the temple prostitutes for your idolatry? What you call worship is nothing but lust.

He thought of those who dwelt in small villages and had Asherah poles set into hillsides where they could worship the goddess of their desires. For years he had considered fleeing Israel for Judah and the rule of its king, Asa, who had cleansed Judah of temple prostitutes and idols. True, he had not removed the high places on hills where idolatrous Judeans still gathered, but he was known for a heart "fully committed to the Lord."

Asa's son Jehosophat now ruled Judah and had followed his father's ways. So it was still tempting for all in Israel who had not bowed in worship to Asherah or Baal to flee to Judah.

But for Zebulun to do so would mean desertion from Israel's army.

Nothing worse than a deserter, no matter how noble his excuse, Zebulun thought. Besides, what would there be for him in Judah if its army would not have him because of his running away?

Such reverie is most often banished when reality interrupts, such as the return from a long journey of the one whose shared secrets made him a most trusted friend. For Zebulun, that friend was the bravest in all of Israel, except for Elijah.

"Obadiah! How did your search go? The soldiers who returned said that you and King Ahab searched for pasture."

"Never mind that." Obadiah strode past him. "Elijah found me."

"Elijah? After all this time?"

"Yes. And when I brought Ahab to meet him do you know what the king called God's prophet?"

"No."

"The troubler of Israel."

As Obadiah entered the room reserved for him to bathe, Zebulun sat on a bench outside of it. He spoke through the open door. "What happened?"

"Elijah has challenged the prophets of Jezebel to meet him at Mount Carmel."

"How many of her prophets?"

"All of them. The hundreds who eat at Jezebel's table."

"But there are almost 1,000 of them."

"Samson slew 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, remember?"

"Yes."

One by one, Zebulun recalled the tales about the Judges of Israel told to him by his mother: Deborah, Gideon, Samson, and others called forth by God when no king ruled over Israel. He remembered how the Lord God raised up judge after judge to deliver faithless Israel and their mighty deeds to defeat the enemies who surrounded the twelve tribes grown into a mighty nation in which "everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Then his mind wandered down Israel's long list of kings, beginning with Saul, then David, next Solomon, followed by the split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, each one with a monarch, most of whom had prostrated themselves to the gods of the nations instead of the one true God who created the heavens and earth. If only...

"Follow me." Obadiah seemed a new man in a fresh robe and days of filth of the desert removed from his body. "Ahab said he is going to send word through the entire nation to assemble Jezebel's prophets at Mount Carmel." He lowered his voice to ensure only Zebulun heard it. "The day we have prayed so long for is upon us."

Obadiah did not speak again until they reached the stable. His intense stare caused sweat to form on Zebulun's brow. "Do you swear by the Lord God of Israel to help me?"

"To do what? I am just a lowly soldier. You are chief servant for the palace. There is nothing..." Zebulun's excuse wavered. He admired Obadiah but feared what he might request.

"First you must swear an oath."

"I swear by the Lord God Israel to help you."

"Good. I have hidden 100 of the Lord's prophets in two caves and supply them with food and water. If Queen Jezebel ever finds this out, you know she will have me executed. You are to continue to care for the Lord's prophets if I am found out and killed."

Zebulun gulped and wished he had known what he had agreed to before he swore his vow. "That many? I thought maybe you had hidden a dozen at most." He wondered how one so close to the throne could be so bold and not be found out. "But what has Elijah been doing all of this time? Where has he been hiding?"

"When he met me in the wilderness, he told me that after he prophesied of the drought, he hid east of the Jordan River in the Kerith Ravine."

"No wonder no one has been able to find him."

"He said that ravens brought meat and bread to him to eat. He stayed there long enough that one of my old purple robes that made its way to him from the prophets wore out. Surely you have heard about what happened after the brook dried up and he left the ravine."

"No."

"That is another reason I must introduce you to the prophets who I have been hiding in the caves. They are the ones who tell me what Elijah does not. The Lord commanded Elijah to go to Zarephath. A widow there fed him. When the widow's son died, Elijah prayed to the Lord and the boy rose from the dead."

"Yes. I remember a story about a boy rising from the dead but..."

"But what?"

Zebulun bowed his head. "I did not believe it. I thought it was just a tale dreamed up by our desperate people who live in a land that has had no rain for more than two years now."

"No matter. I will ride to the north and you to the south to summon the people. The king is sending out other messengers throughout Israel as well to gather all of the people to Mount Carmel."

* * *

Zebulun had never been to Mount Carmel. But its raw beauty would have to be enjoyed another day, he thought. When he arrived there, thousands of Israelites who had answered King Ahab's summons covered its slopes to see the prophet who had announced God's judgment challenge the hundreds of prophets who had led them to worship idols and sacrifice their infants in fire.

"How long will you waver between two opinions?" Elijah asked as he stood near a long unused, broken down altar of stones that once had held sacrifices to the Lord. "If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him."

Zebulun wanted to shout his loyalty to the God of Israel but fear replaced zeal as none of the thousands who surrounded Elijah answered his ultimatum.

Elijah stared at the sea of bowed heads. Only a few returned his gaze with anxious expressions. When he turned to the contingent of hundreds of Jezebel's prophets, Elijah was greeted with sneers and the hatred that radiated from their inner beings. Sacrificing infants to Baal was routine, just part of their duties. Killing Elijah would be joyful. How their queen would reward them.

"I am the only one of the Lord's prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. Get two bulls for us. Let them choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The god who answers by fire – he is God."

Relieved that so little was expected of them, the people obeyed.

A small group from the crowd led two bulls up the mount. The pair sensed their fates and let their hooves plod mechanically toward Elijah. He laid a hand on each of their heads and whispered how they were more courageous than any of those assembled. Then he turned to those whose knives and swords had been sharpened to murder him.

"Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god but do not light the fire."

Four prophets of Baal held one of the bulls while a fifth slit its throat. All of them shivered with excitement as the red blood gushed to the ground. Before the dying animal had drawn its last breath, a dozen other prophets hacked and sawed with swords until dozens of pieces of raw meat lay piled on the altar of stones they had built. Their chants were hypnotic.

"O Baal, answer us!"

Some of them chanted in their native Phoenician tongue. Others used the language of the Israelites. Never waste an opportunity to proselytize these backward Israelites, Queen Jezebel had told them many times as they ate at her table.

Their frantic pleas were repeated hundreds of times as the morning sun moved westward over the assembly. By noon the frenzied prophets began to dance around their altar and the sacrifice covered with flies.

"Shout louder!" Elijah's mocking increased into what they considered blasphemy against Baal. "Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened."

The oldest of the prophets grabbed a sword and slashed his legs and arms until blood ran from his self-inflicted wounds. His fellow prophets followed his lead, using swords and spears to mutilate their flesh. Soon, the dirt on which they danced turned from brown to red, then to a sticky mud. Their cries to Baal reached a din. Then it slowly subsided.

By the time of the evening sacrifice, many of them lay gasping for breath around the altar. Even the youngest of them no longer danced but sat dazed, wondering why Baal had not answered their long hours of worship. Hot sunlight had baked their spilled blood into a clay like substance that continued to draw swarms of flies. Those watching the spectacle backed away from the stench of the prophets' sweat and the bull's decaying meat.

The gathered crowd murmured as Elijah built an altar of twelve stones. Then he scraped a trench around its base. After arranging the wood on top of the altar, he placed the pieces of the second slaughtered bull onto the wood. He turned to the people.

"Fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and wood."

After the first soaking of the altar, he repeated his order twice more until the drenched pieces of meat and wood shed the excess water and filled the trench around the altar. Elijah lifted his eyes and arms to heaven and prayed.

"O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again."

A child first saw the fire falling from the cloudless sky. She pointed as it ignited the bull, wood, stones, and evaporated the water in the trench. Dropping onto their faces, the people began to chant a long unused refrain.

"The Lord, he is God! The Lord he is God!"

Zebulun fell to his knees and joined in chanting the cry as King Ahab turned and shook his head before gazing again at the ashes, the only reminder of the altar, wood, and bull. Part of him wanted to join his subjects in repentance. But another part feared Queen Jezebel more than the Lord God the people cried out to.

"The Lord, he is God! The Lord he is God!"

The king's contingent watched mutely as Elijah had the people lead the exhausted prophets of Baal to the valley below Mount Carmel. There he slaughtered them with one of the same swords used during their bloodletting hours earlier.

King Ahab fretted to those nearest his chariot.

"What will I tell Jezebel? She said that her prophets would silence Elijah forever today. When they don't return to her..."

He waited, hoping that Elijah would also attack him so that at least he could return to the palace with news of "the troubler of Israel's" death. Only his horses listened to his grumbling. A half hour passed before Elijah's servant ran up to the king.

"My master Elijah said for you to hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you."

"Rain?" Ahab rolled his eyes. "Because of your master no rain has fallen for years. He is to blame for all of our nation's troubles."

"Look, Sire." An advisor pointed at the clouds rolling eastward from the Mediterranean Sea.

Ahab shrugged. "Let us go down to Jezreel then. Perhaps if it does rain it will take longer for me to return to the queen?" He studied the darkening sky that had blotted out the sun's rays.

As Zebulun rode behind the king, rain driven by winds from the nearby sea pelted him. He slowed his horse to a trot as the horses pulling Ahab snorted their fears. Another from the king's contingent yelled at Zebulun.

"Look who approaches us. I don't believe it."

Zebulun spun around atop his mount and saw Elijah's legs moving with a rhythm he had seen displayed by rowers of boats on the Sea of Kinnereth.

Up, down, up, down.

It seemed as if his feet did not touch the trail, even as it turned slick from the raindrops that bounced upward from it. As Elijah pulled alongside of his horse, Zebulun shouted at the one sent to turn Israel from its sinful ways.

"The Lord, he is God! The Lord, he is God!" Zebulun's voice thundered above the howling wind.

Elijah nodded and quickened his pace. Zebulun urged his horse to a gallop but relented as his mount neighed its reluctance to try and overtake the sprinting human. He shielded his eyes and caught sight of the prophet passing the king's chariot. Goose flesh rose on Zebulun's arms as the hairs at the nape of his neck tingled.

It took them hours to travel the twenty-five miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel.

Elijah was waiting for them there.

* * *

"Dead? What do you mean, they are dead?" Queen Jezebel stared at her husband.

Never had she heard such nonsense, not even from a fool like him. "How could you let that animal Elijah slay my prophets? When my father hears about this, he won't send any new prophets to me. It's all your fault! Bring me a messenger. Bring me that soldier who talked to Elijah when he first came to the palace."

"Zebulun?" Ahab sighed. Better for her to spew her venom on others instead of me, he thought.

Five minutes later, Zebulun entered the throne room and bowed.

Uncertain why he had been summoned, Zebulun stared at the space between king and queen. He thought an invisible wall separated them. Only a shared hatred united king and queen.

"Because of what he did to my prophets, you are to find Elijah and tell him, "May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.' Go and tell him."

Zebulun bowed again and walked at his fastest pace to the stables. After choosing the best rested horse, he urged it to a gallop through Samaria's front gate.

* * *

For the first time, Zebulun saw an emotion he thought Elijah incapable of, fear. After hearing the message about Jezebel's threats, the prophet said nothing. But within a minute, Elijah and his servant had taken the road south toward Judah.

As he returned to Samaria, Zebulun tried to reason why his hero had fled in what seemed to him a panic.

Perhaps the Lord has called him to now prophesy to Judah. Perhaps...he is no different than I am. Judah is where I would go if I were not a soldier in the army of Israel. At least their king is not wicked like Ahab and Jezebel. Yes, Elijah will be safe as long as he remains there.

* * *

Weeks passed as Zebulun performed his unofficial duties; ones that he believed glorified his God. When not overseeing the guards at the palace, he made trips to one of the caves where Obadiah had hidden the prophets who continued to learn the ways of the Lord and hoped to someday emulate Elijah.

Zebulun always brought them food. In return, the prophets told him what they knew. They said that Elijah had travelled deep into the wilderness and hidden in a cave on Mount Horeb, where he was confronted by the Lord God. Told that there were 7,000 left in Israel who had not bowed their knees to or kissed images of Baal, Elijah had anointed his successor.

"He's a farmer named Elisha," the most disappointed prophet said. "We were certain that the Lord would choose one of us to take Elijah's place. All of us sense that Elijah's time on Earth is coming to an end. Elisha will take his place."

Soon, invading armies from surrounding kingdoms replaced drought as most in Israel returned to wavering between serving Baal or the Lord God. Zebulun marched with the army of Israel to face Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, and the thirty-two kings who had joined him as allies. When Zebulun saw the enemy's much larger army, he wished he had written a last letter to his parents. Greatly outnumbered, Israel's army was doomed, he thought. Any letter written now would not have one left alive to deliver it.

But somehow Israel won the battle, which left the enemy alliance broken as their kings retreated to their kingdoms. The following spring the Aramean army returned. This time, 100,000 of its soldiers fell in battle. Those two victories must surely convince King Ahab of the Lord God's merciful deliverance of Israel, Zebulun thought.

Instead, the evil increased.

When the king lusted for a vineyard of a subject, he offered its owner a better vineyard or a more than fair amount of money for it. But the owner refused to give up the inheritance passed down for generations in his family. Tired of Ahab's moping about the palace, Jezebel conceived and carried out a plot to falsely accuse Naboth of blasphemy and treason.

She smiled at the news of the innocent Naboth's death and told Ahab to take possession of what he had envied. As Ahab walked through the vineyard he planned to convert into a vegetable garden, a familiar voice startled him.

"This is what the Lord says: Have you not murdered a man and seized his property? In the place where dogs licked up Naboth's blood, dogs will lick up your blood," Elijah said.

Ahab clenched his fists.

"So you have found me, my enemy!"

"Dogs will devour Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel. Dogs will eat those belonging to Ahab who die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country."

Ahab returned to his palace with his robes torn and donned sackcloth and acted more humbly than anyone who served him could remember. Zebulun and all who saw his repentance wondered if it would last.

* * *

For three years battles had ceased between Israel and Aram. But prior defeats and losses of territory from his kingdom ate away at King Ahab's soul. First, he complained to his officials.

"Don't you know that Ramoth Gilead belongs to us and yet we are doing nothing to retake it from the king of Aram?"

Unwilling to face the Arameans alone, he waited until he could seek an alliance with King Jehosophat of neighboring Judah. Surely, having one who feared God as an ally would bring victory, Ahab thought. Jezebel had sighed to signal her agreement.

When Jehosophat paid Ahab a visit, Ahab used wiles learned from his wife to negotiate with the one he considered useful.

After the expected formalities that royalty bestow on one another, Ahab turned to Jehosophat. "Will you go with me to fight against Ramoth Gilead?"

"I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses," Jehosophat said.

Ahab stroked his beard. Convincing the King of Judah had proven much easier than he had thought. He had expected him to ask for some kind of payment.

"First seek the counsel of the Lord." King Jehosophat added his sole condition.

For every ounce of wickedness that Ahab possessed, King Jehosophat carried godliness in his being. That quality ensured wisdom, which had borne cautiousness, especially when dealing with idolaters.

Upset by the unexpected delay, Ahab somehow held his temper. "As you wish."

The hastily assembled tense prophets numbered about 400 and filled the courtyard. They relaxed when they saw that Elijah was not present, only the king of Israel and king of Judah sat on thrones above them. The prophets murmured their speculations to one another.

"Shall I go to war against Ramoth Gilead, or shall I refrain?" Ahab asked them.

The boldest of the prophets answered as one. "Go, for the Lord will give it into the king's hand."

Jehosophat studied the hundreds who stood before him. "Is there not a prophet of the Lord here whom we can inquire of?"

Many of the prophets grumbled their displeasure that a mere king would reject their prophecies.

_At least he did not ask me to find that troubler Elijah._ Ahab shifted on his throne. "There is still one man through whom we can inquire of the Lord, but I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad. He is Micaiah son of Imlah."

"The king should not say that," Jehosophat said.

The lengthening delay now troubled Ahab. He turned to a trusted aide. "Bring Micaiah son of Imlah here at once."

Because the assembled throng could not fit inside the palace, the kings sat on thrones near the main gate into Samaria as they waited. Unwilling to concede defeat, the prophets continued to prophesy.

"This is what the Lord says: 'With these you will gore the Arameans until they are destroyed.'" The boldest one had made iron horns and hopped about with them decorating his head.

His cohorts joined in. "Attack Ramoth Gilead and be victorious, for the Lord will give it into the king's hand."

As the messenger sent to find Micaiah brought the prophet to the chanting throng, he warned him. "Look, as one man the other prophets are predicting success for the king. Let your word agree with theirs, and speak favorably."

"As surely as the Lord lives, I can tell him only what the Lord tells me," Micaiah answered.

The messenger gulped as he worked his way through the crowd whose prophesying had reached its peak. He signaled an official who stood by the thrones. Informed of the arrival of the prophet he hated, Ahab raised his hand to silence the hundreds of prophets who shouted that his success had been preordained by the Lord. He scowled at the one whose words he despised.

"Micaiah, shall we go to war against Ramoth Gilead, or shall I refrain?"

"Attack and be victorious, for the Lord will give it into the king's hand."

A murmur of affirmation buzzed through the other prophets.

"How many times must I make you swear to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?" Ahab stood.

Those closest to Micaiah shrunk back from him, unwilling to stand near the object of their king's wrath.

Micaiah's body stiffened. "I saw all Israel scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd, and the Lord said, 'These people have no master. Let each one go home in peace.'"

Ahab sank onto his throne and his hands clenched the sides of his throne as he turned to Jehosophat. "Didn't I tell you that he never prophesies anything good about me, but only bad?" But Jehosophat ignored him and leaned forward as Micaiah spoke again.

"Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. And the Lord said, 'Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?' One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord and said, 'I will entice him.'

'By what means?' the Lord asked. "I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,' he said.

"'You will succeed in enticing him,' said the Lord. 'Go and do it.'

"So now the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The Lord has decreed disaster for you."

The one who had danced with iron horns threw them to the ground. Clouds of dust rose off of his sandals as he stomped to Micaiah. His wrath surpassed Ahab's. "Which way did the spirit from the Lord go when he went from me to speak to you?"

"You will find out on the day you go to hide in an inner room," Micaiah said.

Enraged by the prophecy, King Ahab shouted a command that would send Micaiah to prison. Unsatisfied with that degree of punishment, he ended the command with "...give him nothing but bread and water until I return safely."

"If you ever return safely, the Lord has not spoken through me. Mark my words, all you people!"

Two soldiers led Micaiah away.

* * *

Marching into battle with the army of Judah as an ally now seemed inadequate to King Ahab as they and his army approached Ramoth Gilead. Ahab pulled Jehosophat aside.

"I will enter the battle in disguise, but you wear your royal robes."

King Jehosophat tilted his head in response. He considered reminding Ahab of Micaiah's prophecy of doom and death but remained silent.

While Jehosophat rode into battle still wearing his colorful robes, Ahab's disguise transformed him into what appeared to be a soldier of little importance. Armor added to his protection.

When the battle began, Jehosophat's royal garb almost brought him death while Ahab's cowardice seemed to ensure his survival. Then an Aramean launched an arrow from his bow that slid through the narrow gaps between the sections of Ahab's protective armor. During his last day on Earth, he watched the battle he had instigated as his blood flowed through the disguise onto his chariot.

His death at sunset panicked his army.

Their cry, "Every man to his town; everyone to his land!" announced King Ahab's passing as the panicked troops retreated.

Ahab's final ride to Samaria began and ended as a corpse. As servants washed his blood from the royal chariot, dogs lapped up the gore, to fulfill what Elijah had prophesied years before.

* * *

Ahab's son Ahaziah succeeded him as king of Israel. Most royalty are remembered by descriptions, some long, others short. This one would immortalize Ahaziah as a monarch who: "walked in the ways of his father and mother...He served and worshipped Baal and provoked the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger just as his father had done."

After years of faithful service to human royalty and God, Zebulun was promoted to captain in Israel's army. At times, the added responsibilities caused him to wonder why he had longed for such a promotion. He groaned because of King Ahaziah's idolatry.

But when Ahaziah injured himself from a fall, Zebulun's hopes revived. Maybe now he will at last repent, Zebulun thought. Instead, the king sent messengers to inquire of Baal-Zebub, his most trusted god.

Sent by God, Elijah intercepted the messengers and sent them back to the royal palace with a prophecy.

"Why have you come back?" Ahaziah knew they could not have made the roundtrip to the prophets of Baal-Zebub in so little time.

"A man came to meet us. And he said to us, 'Go back to the king who sent you and tell him, "This is what the Lord says: Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending men to consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron? Therefore you will not leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die!'"

The messengers' description of who had cut their journey short angered their sovereign.

"That was Elijah the Tishbite." Ahaziah shook his fist. "Summon me a captain of the army."

Zebulun had to run to catch his fellow captain when he saw him riding to the city's gate. "Where are you going with so many men? Have enemy scouts crossed our borders?"

The one who had mentored Zebulun into his rank as captain reined his horse to a stop.

"Ahaziah has ordered us find Elijah..."

His friend's anxiety troubled Zebulun. "I will pray for you."

"Do you think Elijah will cooperate?"

Zebulun's gaze fell from the captain's face to his horse's midsection before resting on his own sandals. "I don't know. He remains a mystery to me. I know he is a prophet of the Lord but..."

"We must go. The Queen Mother is meddling in all of this as usual."

Fifty soldiers on foot followed their captain through Samaria's main gate. Zebulun climbed the stairs to the top of the walls that surrounded the city and watched as they headed to the location where Elijah had met the messengers. The wilderness seemed to swallow them.

After enough time had passed for their return but the watchman on the wall reported no sighting of their approach, a second captain and his fifty men rode through the gate. This time, Zebulun did not halt the contingent.

Zebulun did not sleep well that night or the next. Summoned the following morning to the palace, he knew silence would best serve him. When he was fifteen feet from their thrones, he bowed before King Ahaziah and Queen Mother Jezebel.

"What is wrong with you soldiers?" Ahaziah fiddled with the royal scepter. "How many of you does it take to bring one man to my palace?"

Unwilling to betray his fellow soldiers in any way, Zebulun stared at the multi-colored tapestry that hung behind the two thrones.

"Surely, he will succeed," Jezebel said. "I remember this one. He is the soldier who talked to Elijah when he first came to Samaria."

Ahaziah smiled. "Is that so? No more delays. Captain, take your fifty men and return to me with Elijah."

* * *

As they drew closer to the hill Elijah sat on, the soldiers who marched behind Zebulun began to murmur and point at the vultures that flew above them. Their captain halted his company and dismounted.

"Stay here. I will talk to Elijah alone. You may rest."

The fifty men plopped their rumps on stones or bare earth and drank water from the animal skins strapped around their shoulders. All of their heads faced the direction their commander walked.

The two horses that Zebulun had seen the captains leave Samaria on met him when he was a hundred yards from the base of the hill. One of them nuzzled him. The other whinnied and shook her head at Zebulun and then the prophet who watched the meeting.

When the wind shifted, Zebulun smelled what he thought was the remains of a campfire that either the prophet or soldiers had used to ward off the coolness of the desert nights. Fifty yards from the base of the hill he spotted what appeared to be fused metal. Closer inspection revealed fragments of armor, swords and spear tips joined together into random objects that seemed to mock him. The bits of charred flesh that surrounded him explained the birds that continued to circle overhead. Were they descending or was it his imagination? He recalled watching the fire of the Lord consume Elijah's sacrifice and altar on Mount Carmel.

Trembling, he fell onto his knees at the bottom of the hill.

"Man of God, please have respect for my life and the lives of these fifty men, your servants. See, fire has fallen from heaven and consumed the first two captains and all their men. But now have respect for my life!" Zebulun's mouth went dry as Elijah arose. Shadows of the circling buzzards danced around Zebulun and made his trembling rattle his armor.

Elijah cocked his head as if he waited for an inner voice to speak. On the way back to Samaria, the prophet told Zebulun why he and his fifty men had been spared.

"You should be glad of what the angel of the Lord told me as I sat on the hill back there."

"What did the angel tell..." Zebulun gulped, unable to finish his question.

"Go down with him; do not be afraid of him."

* * *

The prophet's message for the injured king was as severe as those for his father had been.

"This is what the Lord says." Elijah's stare unnerved Ahaziah. No wonder Mother hates him, he thought. "Is it because there is no God in Israel for you to consult that you have sent messengers to consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron? Because you have done this you will never leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die!"

His task complete, Elijah left the palace.

For days, Zebulun watched the second king he had served waste away. He began to wonder how many of them he would outlive before his own time to die came. Now he was certain that Elijah's prophecy about Queen Mother Jezebel's death would stalk her until it came to pass.

After being introduced by Obadiah to the company of the prophets that he had hidden during Jezebel's reign of terror, Zebulun had befriended one of their number, a young man named Abel. He never tired of hearing of Elijah's exploits because Abel and his family recalled them with a fervor born of genuine admiration that required no additions to the tales. Whenever his duties took him within ten miles of Abel's childhood home, Zebulun made excuses to his commanding officer.

"I think I should check the conditions at Shiloh, Commander."

"Very well, Zebulun. Report to me as soon as you return from there."

Zebulun smiled when he found Abel was visiting his parents at their home in Shiloh. Better to hear about Elijah through a witness instead of secondhand from his parents, Zebulun thought. As Abel's mother prepared a simple meal of bread for their guest, his father poured wine for the three men. The first cup of the dark sweet purple liquid refreshed Zebulun. The second loosened his tongue. The alcohol unleashed what he dared not say elsewhere.

"King Joram has proven himself to be just as wicked as his father Ahab and brother Ahaziah were when they ruled Israel. As long as Jezebel remains alive..."

Abel's father raised his left hand. "Not so loud, Zebulun. There are many still loyal to her and Joram. What you say could be taken as treason, you know."

"I know, I know." Zebulun lowered his voice. "Forgive me for possibly endangering all of you." He turned from father to son. "What has become of Elijah? Some say he has disappeared."

Abel smiled. "The Lord has taken him."

"What? He died?"

"No. I was with the company of prophets at Jericho when Elijah and his servant Elisha went to the Jordan River. We watched as Elijah struck the river with his cloak. The flowing waters dried up where he had struck it and they walked to the other side on dry ground."

"I wish I had been there." Zebulun recalled seeing Elijah on Mount Carmel and years later on a hill that became the final resting place for 102 of his fellow soldiers.

"Wait until you hear what took place next." Abel's father smiled at his son.

"A chariot and horses that were made of fire came down from heaven and took Elijah away."

"Maybe they took him out to the wilderness?"

"No, that is what we thought also. But we searched for Elijah for three days and found no trace of him anywhere. He is gone."

Zebulun bowed his head and sighed. "Then Israel has lost its greatest prophet."

Abel and his father looked at each other and smiled.

"Before the chariot took Elijah away, Elisha asked for and now carries a double portion of the spirit that Elijah did," Abel said. "Now Israel will see even more mighty works of the Lord God."

"But will Israel heed them?" Zebulun asked.
