A HUNTING PARTY ATTACKED.
A LONE SURVIVOR RESCUED.
Turning her back on the traditions of her family and community, Rueda Cole forges a new path with the desert wanderer who saved her life. The way is fraught with danger, but the unexplainable drives them onward, even to the ends of the earth.
Together they will journey into the unknown.
Together they will bring the world into a new era.
Together, they will become the stuff of legends.
REMAINS SERIES PART I
Twenty years ago, Cargo Flu swept the world.
The City lives on as the shadow of a metropolis, planned and managed with rigidly enforced rules and regulations, but growing again, even thriving, using intensive salvage—machinery, spare parts, even wire and gasoline harvested from the wreckage. City life is pleasant, not so very different from life before. So long as you stay in line.
Miles outside the City, in the wild areas, refugees from the early chaos settled into a small community, living off the land, farming and ranching. They are modestly successful. But it’s a hard life, agriculture done the ancient way, without mechanical power. And it’s precarious, imperiled each day by a crippling injury, a life-threatening infection, a crop-destroying blight, or the frailty of advancing age.
Now there are people anticipating war, clever people who think it might be useful, and who don’t want to come in second. Salvage is beginning to run out. And the great equalizer, Cargo Flu, is still out there, lurking in forgotten debris.
REMAINS SERIES PART II
The world is gone.
But there are the remains of it.
Brother Tom is a charismatic idealist, who once suffered an excruciating crisis of faith in the ultimate good, but who found a new truth and returned to Andersonville to preach it. Now, each week, a small but growing number of people climb Service Hill and listen to his predawn sermons, drawn by their promise and simple message.
The town around Service Hill has lived off the land for twenty years, stubborn survivors of Cargo Flu. They lack everything, even running water, yet two young people are reinventing electric power, bringing a new optimism to people who thought they would not live to see it again.
And Brother Tom’s faith is endangering their lives.
Inevitably, the new faith finds its way into the nearby City, challenging no authority, yet salvaging lost souls who haunt crumbling areas long ago abandoned to the old plague. But a convert is learning secrets he can not live with, and is asking what is the meaning of faith if its believers must suppress the truth for it.
He does not accept the silence. And he does not expect to live to learn the answer.
These seven short stories mark the beginning of The Creepy Story Time Project . The stories span the experimental to the existential – from criminals to crones, ghosts to devils, magic to murder. This is what comes of lies, loneliness, and darkness.
Welcome to the void. Here, hold my hand. Let’s stare into it together.
He was ugly.
Short, fat, cross-eyed; balding with a fringe of unkempt, oily hair; loud and obstreperous. Endowed with a strong sense of his own interest and a defiant sense of honor, he hated aristocracy and loved the underdog. When the Southern secession first broke out, he raised Massachusetts regiments for the Union, got himself appointed their commander, and led them to secure the nation’s capital before many in the North even realized the danger.
He ruled the captured city of New Orleans with an iron fist and a price on his head, stamped out yellow fever with relentless (and unwelcome) sanitation and harsh quarantines, and prevented outright starvation among the city’s poor, while occasionally despoiling its secessionist rich. As a politically-appointed general, his stunning success in capturing and pacifying Baltimore, then shutting down Maryland’s secession, masked his practical inexperience in battlefield operations. As well, a fondness for the lives of his men probably undermined the untutored military judgment he possessed.
He campaigned to legislate a ten-hour workday in his home state at a time when fourteen was the norm, and gleefully represented Lowell mill-girls in court against their blue-blooded employers. As a criminal defense lawyer, he became a sensation. As a politician, he reveled in his enemies as much as he treasured his friends.
His funeral procession, long after he had faded from public life, was reported to have been a mile-and-a-half long.
This unruly force of nature, flamboyant, unapologetic, forgotten by history, was called by the name Benjamin Franklin Butler.
Doubt and confusion since the election of 2024 were certainly a part of the incoming administration’s grand strategy, but in many ways they signify nothing new. Long-running neglect piled atop fractures built from the beginning into the American State have been weakening the structure for many years. Like the rotting of an old, rusted highway bridge, sudden fissures and misalignments in our national institutions, accompanied by ever louder creaking and groaning from the body politic, are not just the signs of a changing political season. They are a warning that the structure is declining past the point where a little new paint, or even some shoring up here and there, will secure its future.
This book is a small collection of brief articles cutting through some of the smoke.
Much more needs to be done.
