After the Gulch

Thinking about it, I was rather unfair to the denizens of Galt's Gulch, the richest 400 people in America. After all, they have 50% of the assets of America, they can certainly afford to bring with them all the materials and farm tools they would need in order to make a nice home for themselves in Galt's Gulch. A few of them even have theoretical knowledge of how to use these, and a few of them -- in the technology industry, mostly -- have even used a few small hand tools themselves, though not recently. For example, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has actually used a screwdriver. Granted, he was only 18 months old at the time, but at least he knows what a screwdriver is, unlike Cindy Walton.

Still, the end result will be starvation and death for the denizens of Galt's Gulch. Even with all the farm tools in the world, if you've never farmed before the likelihood of managing to grow a crop is pretty slim. And the 400 have no practical skills in how to repair farm equipment, not to mention that they can't even fuel their tractors and bulldozers without paying money to the hated peasants outside the Gulch, which they have foresaken doing because the peasants are just leaches and dimwits beside their obvious brilliance. So it might take six months, or a year, or two years, but eventually the last denizen of Galt's Gulch shall perish from hunger, likely after gnawing the last shreds of meat off the raw carcass of the next-to-the-last denizen of Galt's Gulch (raw carcass because, again, the 400 richest people in America may have a *theoretical* notion of how to light a fire and cook meat over it, but the number of said richest people who've actually done so is not likely to be very high).

So anyhow, enough of Galt's Gulch. So what happens to the rest of the world once the denizens of Galt's Gulch go into hiding in their hidden valley? Well..

At your local Wal-Mart, the trucks come in with merchandise as usual, and the workers unload them and stack them on the shelves as usual. The store managers walk their stores as usual and approve hiring of workers and accept resignations of workers and the store's computers send the day's sales to Walmart Bentonville every day, and the computers at Walmart Bentonville issue orders to their suppliers every day. The supplier relations specialists in Bentonville keep contacting their equivalents at their suppliers to negotiate pricing and availability as contracts expire. At suppliers, the product managers continue developing new products and getting approval from the VP of Marketing to put them into production, and selling these products to Wal-Mart.

Then one day, it's time for the monthly board of directors' meeting, and neither Jim Walton nor Robson Walton show up. The CEO asks, "Has anybody seen Jim or Rob?" Nobody has. "Oh well, we don't need them for a quorum, let's get the reports from our operating units and make any decisions we need to make." And they do.

Ten months later, it's time for the annual shareholder's meeting, where the board of directors has to be re-elected by the shareholders and... err... the biggest shareholders, every single one of the Walton family, are missing. Neither hide nor hair has been seen of them for almost a year now. The board shrugs, and renominates themselves as well as two more people to take the board positions of the two Waltons who are no longer around.

At some point someone asks, "Sayyyy.... nobody's seen the 400 richest people in America recently. Is something going on? Have they been kidnapped or something?" The FBI goes to the homes of the top five people on the Forbes 400 list, and manage to badge their way past the guards and ascertain that the guards have not seen their employer in over a year and that their employer's business manager continues signing their paychecks as usual. Said business manager says she hasn't seen her employer either but assumes said employer is at one of their other homes. The FBI gets a court order to search the home under reasonable suspicion that a murder or kidnapping may have taken place, and find clues to where the Galt-goers have gone. They go to Galt Gulch and find all 400 corpses plus the corpses of their spouses and heirs, many horribly mangled due to cannibalism. The world is agoggle about how horrible it was that the 400 went to such extremes to remove themselves from the presence of their "inferiors" yet came to such a terrible end. And then...

... the world goes on, as it's been going on for the past year without these "masters of the universe". The 400 took their spouses and heirs to Galt's Gulch with them and there were no survivors and they left no wills, so the ownership of the properties and corporate shares that they owned devolves to the unclaimed property division of the states the 400 resided in, which then auctions them off and has plenty to pay off their state's entire debt plus any deficits caused by recessions. New owners take over and let the employees continue running the companies, as has been true for the past year that the owners were nowhere around. In the end, all that happens is that the 400 proved just how little they contributed to the economy, which didn't even notice they were missing until the FBI found the gory evidence of a Donner Party Event in Galt's Gulch.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Missive from Galt Gulch

"There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers.

So the top 400 richest people on the planet decide they're sick of dealing with the little people, and retire to Galt Gulch.

Day one: Four hundred people wander around Galt Gulch. "Where's my mansion?" Christy Walton asks. "I think we're supposed to build our own shelters," Larry Ellison replies. "I'll just hire some Mexicans to build me a new mansion," Charles Kotch says. Bill Gates mutters, "Do you see any Mexicans here?" Jim Walton says, "Just go to the nearest Wal-Mart and shout 'La Migra!' at the top of your voice, and stand outside. You'll see plenty of Mexicans to hire." "There's no Wal-Marts here," David Kotch says in an irritated voice. Alice Walton looks shocked, and says "What do you mean there's no Wal-Mart here? There's Wal-Marts like, everywhere!"

Warren Buffet sighs. "We have rocks and we have trees. All we have to do is pile up rocks into walls, and cut down the trees to use the wood to make roofs." "But I might break my nails!" Christy Walton screeches, a look of horror on her face. Michael Bloomberg interjects, "First things first. I'm hungry. What's for dinner?" Larry Page wanders by, a confused look on his face. "Just go onto Google Maps and look for nearby takeout restaurants and order something," he says. "Dolt!" snaps Sergey Brin, "We don't have computers here, and there are no restaurants, this is Galt Gulch, not Galt Silicon Valley!" Sheldon Adelson says, "I have a candy bar. I'll bet you this candy bar that nobody knows how to cook in this gulch." George Soros snarks, "I'll take that bet, because my fellow rich people are dolts, morons, and idiots, helpless without their serfs to do their every bidding." Michael Dell irritably says "That's mean, George. Anyhow, the answer is clear. I'll just use my credit card to buy that candy bar from Sheldon, and sell it on the Internet." "Monkeys! Monkeys! I see monkeys!" Steve Balmer shouts, and Paul Allen looks around, "hey, maybe we could eat those for dinner." Jeff Bezos says "Sure, just order a barbecue grill and a cigarette lighter from Amazon.com and we'll have barbecue monkey for dinner." Ann Chambers asks, "has anybody seen my nurse? I feel a fainting spell coming on." John Paulson snaps, "We don't need those little people. We are the masters of the universe. We own everything." "That's okay," Donald Bren says. "I'll just hire some contractors to bulldoze all this and put up a McMansion tract housing plot." Abigail Johnson helpfully says, "I think if we provide a mortgage-backed security for that application, we can obtain a significantly higher profit." Phil Knight says "so do you know how to drive a bulldozer, Donald?" and Donald looks at Phil with a look of horror that says "what, me, get my hands dirty?" Carl Icahn then says "let's do a leveraged buyout of bulldozer drivers." Ron Perelman yells, "Does anybody here know how to drive a bulldozer?" Silence follows.

As darkness falls, the 400 denizens of Galt Gulch huddle, hungry and cold, under the marginal shelter of the sparse trees populating the gulch. But they do not huddle in silence. As they huddle, they talk excitedly about new kinds of CDO's, leveraged buyouts, Internet search algorithms, optimal investment strategies, and the advantages of computerized inventory control. Over the next few days, the denizens of Galt Gulch slowly fade away, until in the end there are only 400 corpses, doomed by their inability to, like, actually do anything for themselves, as vs loot things from other people.

The End.

The above is, alas, a work of fiction. Oh well.

-- Badtux the "Too Bad" Penguin

The zombie apocalypse

Last night I had a zombie apocalypse nightmare, albeit more of a Robert Heinlein style "slug" zombie than a traditional zombie. That is, these zombies were caused by a brain-eating parasite that resembled a mouse-sized slug and drilled into your brain, not by some sort of virus that was spread by biting.

The first we see of the zombies is the hero and heroine are in a hotel conference room and suddenly black oozy mouse-sized things burst in through the doors, along with shambling zombies. The hero pulls out a pistol and shoots a path through the zombies to the emergency exit, with the heroine covering his back with another pistol and rushing out behind him.

From that point on, things got a little less cohesive. You see slugs oozing toward them as they run to their cars in the parking lot. The hero and heroine spend a few lines trying to figure out what's happening and what they're going to do, but spot the slugs and jump into their respective cars just in time for the slugs to start slapping against the windows, and they drive off in different directions.

The heroine is in a *very* crowded Mini Cooper pulling one of those small "mini-car" teardrop trailers. Apparently she's been on the road for a long time. She drives a ways, finds a secluded spot, pulls off, and sleeps an hour or so. After that she heads to the rural area where she grew up, thinking perhaps there's more of a chance they're not infected yet, especially since everybody is well armed out there. She pulls into the driveway of the property she owns, and notices a dead body hanging out the door and leaves in a hurry. Rather than taking the main road, she takes a back road that leads to one of her relatives' homes. She passes a Sheriff's car sprawled across half the road, red lights still blinking, windshield smashed in, she can't tell where the deputy is, so she just speeds past. Finally she arrives at her relative's house, and the relative lets her in. The relative then tells her that a slug is eating into his brain, and she has only a minute or two to grab his deer rifle and blow his head off before the slug takes over and tries to kill her. She does that, and the spattered slug writhes a bit then dies.

She stocks up quickly on more guns and ammo, as well as filling her car from fuel cans, and heads toward the nearest city. She isn't breaking any laws but a patrol car comes up behind her with its bubble lights flashing. Remembering the Sheriff's Department car and the possibility that these might be zombies like her cousin that she had to kill, she keeps going until there is a second patrol car coming towards her with bubbles flashing. At that point she figures zombies don't coordinate well enough for that and pulls over.

So of course they pull her out of the car and roust her and she tries to explain what she has seen, including the slug in her cousin's brain (though in her version of the story the cousin pulled the trigger himself to commit suicide). They don't believe her.

And then I woke up.

What do penguins dream when penguins dream? Well, now you know. Nope, no idea how this story ends :).

-- Badtux the Nightmare Penguin

The case of the missing body

The prisoners in the cells behind the police sergeant were sleeping the sleep of the unjust when the message came in at 5AM: a crypt had been looted and both the body and the loot were missing. Grumpily the sergeant sent out a call to the detective on duty, dispatched a couple of patrol officers to secure the area, and then returned to his sword-n-sandals fantasy novel.

Detective Morelli wasn't fond of 5 AM but he was even less fond of body thieves. As he approached the scene of the crime on the narrow path that led to the crypt he noted a bunch of people in white robes on their knees praying, he had to step over a couple of them because they were packed around the crypt. The two patrol officers at the crypt looked distinctly uncomfortable and had their riot batons at ready.

Morelli identified the senior officer and asked, "What's the situation, Officer Berlusconi? Who are these people?"

"Some sort of cult, sir. They keep demanding to go into the crypt. I told them that everything got stolen out of there and there's nothing to see, but they won't go away."

"Huh." Morelli ducked his head into the crypt and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. Indeed, there was nothing but some random bones lying around in various cubbies. He turned around to the white-robed cultists and yelled, "Hey, yo! Who's the leader of you bunch?"

A guy with a long black beard wearing one of those Jewish beanies tentatively stood up and said "I guess I am, now."

"What's your name, citizen?"

"Peter Shamir, sir."

"Well, Peter, come on up, you're going to get a tour of this crypt, then you're going to go to your bunch there and tell'em what you saw, then you're going to all clear out, see?"

Peter just glared, then said "It depends on what I see."

"Well, hope you see what you need to see then, because otherwise we're calling in the Army to move you lot away at spearpoint."

"The Army?" Peter spit. "They're the morons who executed our Holy Leader."

"Well come up here and see, then."

Peter tentatively stepped over a few of his fellow cultists and joined Morelli at the entrance to the crypt. "So who was your Holy Leader, and why did the Army execute him?"

"He was Joshua Eshkol, and the morons thought he was leading a rebellion against the government. But he wasn't! He was a wise and holy man who had no inclination to get involved in politics, he even told them that!"

"Well, do you see your Joshua around here?"

Peter looked around in the gloom, eyes adjusting to the low light level. "He's.... he's not here? But where...." then Peter's eyes got as big as saucers. "He is risen! He is risen!" He ran out to his fellow cultists. "He is risen!" White robed men and women jumped up and started dancing around in circles, shouting "He is risen!" Morelli rolled his eyes. The cultists ran away down the track, still occasionally shouting "He is risen!"

Morelli shook his head. "Religious nutcases. Heavens save us all from them. So, officers, what happened here?"

"Well, sir, we got word yesterday evening that somebody might be stealing the body out of this crypt, so we sent Officer Craxi down here to keep an eye on things. But he musta fell asleep. He claims he didn't, but then he would, wouldn't he?"

"Yeah. Or somebody knocked him over the head, I can't see someone sleeping through looting a whole fuckin' crypt. How's his head feel?"

"Uhm, he did complain he had a hellacious headache, sir. But then he had a whole jug of wine with him. To keep warm, he said. So that might be it."

"Drunk outta his skull, no wonder he didn't wake up. Well fuck. I guess I can't blame him for wanting some liquid entertainment. Watching a fucking crypt has to be the most boring fuck-ass job ever. So who owns this crypt?"

"Joseph Sharett, the miller."

"Guess I'll head on down there then," Morelli said.

Morelli walked down the path to the cemetary, then took a taxi to Sharett's mill. He walked in and badged the secretary behind the desk. "I need to talk to Joseph Sharett."

"Yes sir." The secretary led Morelli through the lobby door, and to a large office behind. A large Jewish man with a long black beard wearing one of those Jewish beanies was behind the desk, looking at some papers with Hebrew writing on them.

"Sir, the police are here to talk to you."

"Thank you Yitzhak, you are dismissed," the man said.

Morelli badged the man. "I'm Detective Morelli. You're Joseph Sharett?"

"Yes, Detective, I am. I'm a busy man, what is this about?"

"Do you own a crypt in Holy Mount Cemetery where a common criminal named Joshua Eshkol was laid to rest a couple of days ago?"

Sharett slapped his papers down. "Oh yeah, that asshole. Have you seen those fucking cultists of his? Have you? A guy shows up, says that a holy man got killed and asked if they could use one of the niches in my family crypt 'cause else they were going to have to dump him in a pauper's pit. Crap, I'm not a bad guy, I said okay. But have you seen those fuckers? I went up there to check on things and there were all these assholes in white robes all over the fucking place, and they'd took over the whole fucking crypt, they'd even shoved my mother's bones over into a corner to make room for shit they were piling around all over the goddamned place, perfumes and fine cloths and stuff. I tell ya, it was enough to make a man go into a rage and tell those assholes to get their fucking holy man and all that shit out of my crypt by the end of the week, or else. So what, those assholes complained that I was mean to them or something?"

Morelli examined the man with a neutral expression on his face. "So you want that body and all that swag out of your crypt?"

"Oh fuck yeah. If it ain't outta there by the end of the week, I'm going to send some of my security guys up there to clean it all out and dump everything at the front door of that Peter dude who seems to be their second in command."

"Well, somebody already cleaned out the body and all that swag. Nothing left but your family bones up there."

"Really? Well whoever did that ought to get a fucking medal. Cultists. Bah. I shoulda never let them put their holy asshole in there in the first place."

"You wouldn't know anything about who could have done this, do you?"

"You ain't accusin' me of doing' it, are you? 'Cause if it was me, I done told you what I woulda done. It's my crypt, I woulda just dumped everything outside of that Peter's house and stationed a couple of security guards at the entrance to the crypt to keep them from bringing their holy asshole back. You want to know who might have had an incentive to, like, disappear that body? Check with the Army, they weren't too damned happy to have all these cultists gathered in one spot venerating a common criminal."

"Any idea who I should check with?"

"I think a Lieutenant Zanardelli was in charge, he's over at the Governor's Palace post."

"Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Sharett. I notice that your business seems unusually large and thriving for a mill, and that's one expensive desk you're sitting behind. Must be a lot of profit in grinding wheat nowdays."

"I'm an honest businessman, detective. Now are you done?"

Morelli tipped his hat. "I believe so. Assuming you've told me the truth." Then he turned and left.

Morelli took a taxi to the Governor's palace, and went around to the side where the Army detachment was posted. He badged the trooper at the gate. "Detective Morelli here, to see Lieutenant Zanardelli."

"Does he know you're coming?"

"He knows someone from the police department is coming, I'm pretty sure, but not my name."

"Yeah? Let me check." The man looked down at a register in front of him, looked back up. "Nope, no police department dude listed here."

Morelli sighed. "Look, we're on the same side here, we're both trying to keep order in a sea of assholes. I can go up to the Governor's office and get an order and shit, but that's just plain asshattery. Just call Lieutenant Zanardelli and let's get our business over with."

The trooper considered, his monobrow squinching up a bit. "Okay, sounds fair enough." He turned around and spoke into an intercom, "A police detective is here to talk to Lieutenant Zanardelli." A couple of minutes later, Lieutenant Zanardelli showed up, flicking imaginary dust off the sleeves of his spotless uniform.

Morelli badged him. "Good morning, Lieutenant. I'm Detective Morelli from the Metropolitan Police. Just a routine enquiry about a missing body. Do you recall Joshua Eshkol?"

"Oh, him. That cult of his is plain creepy. The Feds were monitoring them and decided it was time to pull him in and put him on trial for fomenting revolt, the Army got called in because these nutcases were gathered in a large compound and it was decided that an overwhelming show of force was needed to keep them from resisting his arrest. He was guilty, of course, so we executed him two days ago. What's this about a missing body?"

"Well, sir, it appears someone disappeared his body from the tomb, after a couple days where those cultists were congregating around there. Somebody suggested that the Army might have gotten tired of those cultists congregating and decided to put an end to it by removing the body to some deep pit somewhere that it'll never be found."

"Interesting," Lt. Zanardelli said. "I'd say you have no need to know, but in this case, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. The Army has no interest in these cultists, we didn't find any weapons in their compound so from our perspective they're a non-issue. You might want to check with the Feds though. They seem to have a bee up their ass about these cultists."

" Do you know who I should talk to with the Feds?"

"I'd say check with Agent Zoli, he was the one who called in the Army for manpower."

"Thank you for your cooperation, Lt. Zanardelli. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this before those cultist assholes can make a big fuss out of it."

"Yeah, well, good luck with that." Lt. Zanardelli turned and went back inside, still flicking invisible dust off of his immaculate uniform.

Manelli walked around the other side of the governor's palace and descended into a basement hallway. Halfway down the hallway was the Fed's door. He walked in and badged the secretary. "Detective Morelli to see Agent Zoli."

"And what is this about, may I ask?"

"Some cultist assholes. Agent Zoli will know who I'm talking about."

The secretary looked down at her desk, then back up. "You're in luck, Agent Zoli is in. Let me get him."

She talked into an intercom, and Agent Zoli entered the lobby shortly afterword, looking splendid in his dark suit and footwear. Morelli badged him, "I'm Detective Morelli, you're Agent Zoli?"

"I am. And what is this about?"

"We have a missing body. Some common criminal named Joshua Eshkol."

The agent laughed. "Oh yeah, him. His body isn't missing, his family has it."

"Ah. And how, exactly, did they accomplish this?"

"Well, when he was executed of course we notified the next of kin, his parents. They came down to retrieve the body, but those cultists had already snatched it and put it in that crypt. They were irate, of course, but what were they going to do, wade through a bunch of cultists to take their son's body away? Not hardly!"

"So how did they do it?"

"Oh, I sent a couple of agents with them last night to fetch the body and crate it up for shipping. The cultists seem to go home at dusk, there wasn't anybody out there except some cop passed out snoring near the entrance. We didn't bother waking him up, he smelled like a winery."

"Thank you, Agent. Can you give me the names of his parents, just so I can verify this information with them and close my file?"

"Sure, why not. I know how that goes, your superiors will get on you if you don't dot all your i's and cross all your t's." The agent pulled a pad and a pen out of his pocket, and scribbled a couple of names on it and the address where they lived, then tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to Detective Morelli. "Just don't expect much from them. Those cultists had them pretty freaked out. I doubt they'll even verify that they have the body, for fear that the cultists will start hanging around trying to sniff out where they've put the body."

Morelli shrugged. "Maybe so, but you know how it goes."

"Sure. Good luck, Detective."

Morelli nodded, and headed out.

The address on the pad was out of town, but Morelli bet that the body wasn't out of town yet. He started checking out shippers who might handle freighting a large crate. After the fifth shipper, he found the one.

"Oh yeah, them," the shipper said, looking at the names on the piece of paper. "Yeah, they were in here, with a body to ship."

"Is the crate still here?"

"Yeah, the freight to Galilee had already left by the time they got in, it'll be on tomorrow's freight."

"I'd like to verify its contents, then."

"Sure, why the fuck not."

The shipper took Morelli back into the warehouse to where some crates were sitting on a loading dock. He picked up a prybar and pried open one, and stood aside to let Morelli look inside. Morelli looked inside and yep, there was some Jew down there, with the hooked nose and dark curly hair and long black beard, dressed in one of those white cultist robes. The mystery of the missing swag was solved too, it was packed all around the body, the parents apparently having decided that they needed the swag more than the cultists.

"Thanks," Morelli said. "Now I can close my case."

Morelli headed back to his office, wrote it up, and closed the case. A few months later his boss came in. He'd heard that the cultists were making a nuisance of themselves claiming their Holy One had risen from the dead and walked around for a while. Morelli just shook his head. Cultists. Given how many cults were around in these times, he didn't figure that this one would last long. Rising from the dead, who was dumb enough to believe stupid crap like that? Morelli handed the file to his boss, and that was that. Until the day he died, he didn't think about it again, because really, with all the cults around saying all this silly crap, who cared about one particularly silly one? "Rise from the dead", indeed. If you'd asked him, Morelli woulda snorted. Those bones were well and interred in the family crypt of the guy's parents. But nobody ever asked him, because it just never was important enough, not until long after Morelli died and was himself interred.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Craziest movie villain *evah*

My fertile imagination created a nightmare last night. We have the stereotypical horror movie teens standing around in the surf, and suddenly one turns around and says, "Where's Bobby? Wasn't he standing right behind us?" And swiftly everybody starts bounding out of the surf, thinking "SHARK!" and heading up a nearby bluff. When they make it up the bluff, a girl screams "Where's Joe?!" and yes, *another* one has disappeared.

So the teens flee, and huddle, and we do a scene shift and we finally get our first glimpse of the killer. He's kind of humming and talking to himself, "bumble bee, bumble boh, fresh meat fresh meat dum dum doh" and bounces on-camera, bounding up the slope. His narrow lips are working, showing his fine teeth underneath, and he has a long neck and four hooved feet (splashed with blood) and a wooly brown coat and is... a llama.

Yes, a llama. As in, wooly South American pack animal. My imagination created a freakin' killer llama! A more unlikely movie villain I cannot imagine, other than perhaps killer bunnies :).

So anyhow, our intrepid band of heros builds a tree house to get away from whatever is picking them off one by one. In one scene we see the llama bumbling along, and a cute blond thing sees it and says "ooh, you're cute!" and goes over to pet it or some shit, and the llama sticks its hoof through her chest and before we can see blood spurting we cut to the look of horror on her face as she dies a movie death (hey, it's a late-night TV movie nightmare from the early 70's, okay?).

While the treehouse is still being built, the hero is out investigating the ruins of an old cabin that was on the edge of the bluff. He lies down on one of the few boards left of the front porch to watch the ocean and glances to the side and sees... cats. Yes, common house cats, tabbies, mackerels, black-and-white, just a random assortment of cats, sitting on shelves created by old crates. He's baffled because they're not sitting in the sun, and waves his hand toward one of them, an orange tabby, "hey, kitty kitty!" The cat sort of dodges his hand, then points down with its paw. Something makes him roll off the board into the crawl space under the porch just as the llama's hoof comes down on where his head would have been. At which point he pulls out the .45 ACP he had strapped to his hip and starts blasting away, and the llama runs off, apparently unhurt.

And then I woke up. So we'll never know how this bad horror movie ended, heh.

-- Badtux the Horror Penguin

In the woods

I jump over a log and scramble down a slope, and find a space where I can see through the trees to the stage below, and there you are, sitting in the forest duff watching the show beside your father. You are sixteen or seventeen years old, with ivory skin and wispy blond hair tied back in a bun. You are wearing a white dress with lace fringe, and a tan jacket with white pseudo-fur collar and cuffs to deal with the cold, and soft tan suede leather boots that look very comfortable. The fragility of your jaw, the fine bones of your face, fascinate me as do your thin wrists and the fragile bones of your hands. You are like a porcelain figurine, settled on the forest floor.

Then the musician on stage says to the audience, stand up! And you stand. The musician says jump. And you jump. The seat of your white lace dress is covered with dirt and leaves but you do not seem to notice. Your knees are thin and fragile looking under the dirty lace, but beneath them swell your calves, the calves of an athlete, participating eagerly in jumping. And I recall that porcelain can cover steel, as with porcelain-covered steel bathtubs or a roasting pan. Then I know.

You will go home, and change from your ruined dress to fresh clothing. Only the best. Your mother and father are determined that you shall not fail, that you will be the best at everything you do, and they will give you only the best to make sure there is no reason for failure. You throw yourself into it eagerly, basking in the approval of your parents. You are not built like a natural athlete but they enrolled you in soccer and so you do everything possible to excel and you do. You study late at night to make straight A's in school and if you are sometimes dizzy with exhaustion you do not show it because that is simply not done. You are Going Somewhere. But where? You don't know. You don't care, yet. You care only that your parents adore you and shower you with approval for performing.

One day you will graduate from college, a good college, and then what? The good jobs are being outsourced now, outsourced to China, outsourced to India. Perhaps graduating from a top college after several summer internships with major companies will land you a full time job. Then you will be on track to rise in the corporate hierarchy. Until one day you look around and look at your life and realize it has been one long pointless attempt to earn from the world the same approval that you once got from your parents. Then what?

Or you do not find that job, and, humiliated, move back in with your parents. You spend hours crying in your room as your disappointed parents flutter about outside urging you to go look for a job, clean yourself up, get a haircut, lose some weight, get some exercise. Then one day you go to the park just to leave the house and there is music playing, and you stop, and you listen. You listen. For the first time, you truly listen.

All stories should have a happy ending. But I do not know which ending, of the two above, is the happy one.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Dancing barefoot in the park

You were standing near the rail at the edge of the pit, your braided hair brown under the sun, wearing bare feet and a pair of cargo pants and a white t-shirt that bared your arms to the sun. You were in your early twenties, young, full of life, full of energy, dancing to the music feeling free. Your happy face, cheeks sunburned, alternated staring at the stage and closed eyes like an orgasm of music had overwhelmed you. As you danced to the music your braids jumped up and down as if alive. And you were free. For a time.

And afterwards... ah yes, afterwards. You went back to the small flat that you share with four other people, eyes glowing with excitement, saying "Did you hear what I just heard?" to your roomies, then all of you draw straws to figure out who will sleep where tonight, who gets the bed, who gets the couch, who gets to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor. You draw the short straw so you shove some anarchist screeds to the side to make a clear space, and sleep a sleep of contentment. Then tomorrow, you will go to work at the organic coffee house where you make minimum wage but, the owner says, it's all he can do because of the Seattle competition driving his prices down so far, and worry about what will be for supper because you ate the last of the food yesterday and you don't get paid until next Friday. You try to figure out who owes you, or whether there is a food bank that is giving out free food, or maybe you can scrape enough coins from behind the sofa to buy a few packages of ramen noodles. But you are free, you say to yourself. You're not a bought-and-sold slave to corporate America, you say to yourself. You are free.

And for a few hours, you were.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

The Bottomlands

I had a dream last night, a dream of childhood, a dream of the home where I grew up. I have this dream from time to time when things are looking risky in my life, when my job is precarious or I am uncertain what direction to go. It is not a dream that is pleasant, though. It is the Bottomlands trying to drag me back.

There is a foreign land just on the other side, on the other side of the tracks, the other side of the freeway, a land where dreams go to die and hope never rose, a land of trailer parks and rusty cars and dirty children playing in puddles of mud with broken toys. It is a land where the norms of behavior and dress that apply in America are unknown, a foreign land where nothing works the same, where the clan is the standard of life, "who's your people?" the first question you're asked. People can be kind there, or harsh, people are people, but life is harsh in general, with the only comforts of a life spent eking out a miserable living in a series of dead-end menial jobs (both legal and illegal) being mind-numbing drugs and television (pretty much the same in the end). These are the Bottomlands, where those from outside venture only reluctantly, and leave as swiftly as they can.

But as uncomfortable as it is for outsiders to venture into the forbidding realms of the Bottomlands, so it is for the denizen of the Bottomlands who quests outward, who finds a way past the barriers both social and physical put around the Bottomlands into the foreign land outside, who puts on some of the outer vestiges of the foreign land he finds himself and pretends to be just another person living the American dream. For this person, life is always precarious. What if he says the wrong thing, behaves the wrong way, somehow lets it be known that he does not, in fact, belong in this strange land he finds himself in? So he makes sure only a few trusted people can ever get close enough to notice the cracks in the facade, and hopes that the tightrope he walks never breaks and that he never wobbles and falls. Because there are no nets when you come from the Bottomlands. There is only the fall, and the Bottomlands pulling you in once again.

When times get rough, or uncertain, or something is disturbing me, I have that dream, that dream of childhood. And then it crashes in once again, that ugly realization that I try not to remember: the Bottomlands are jealous that I escaped. All it takes is one, only one mistake... and the Bottomlands are waiting there for me.

-- Badtux the Pensive Penguin

Writing update...

Okay, I finally figured out who did it -- who killed who, and who the killer is at the end of the story. Or rather, one of the characters just accidentally told me who killed the first victim by being *far* too interested in how to kill someone. The second and third victims fall out of the murder of the first victim even though their killers are different people altogether. So now I just need to sit down and finish writing the damned thing...

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Goldilocks and the Three Computers

Goldilocks was bored. She'd scored a lot of loot recently and was looking for a bit of a break, so she booked a flight to the Bahamas. While looking for a computer to carry on an airline for doing regular email and Internet access and post the occasional photo to the Internet she broke into this little apartment in San Jose. And what, then, did she see but three computers, all in a row? So she tried the one on the left, and it was too big. She tried the one on the right, and it was too small. And she tried the Acer Aspire One 10" laptop in the middle, and it was just right.

Then the owner of the apartment came home, shot her dead with his .357 Magnum, and everybody lived happily ever after. Except for Goldilocks the Burglar, of course. She did make a beautiful corpse though... -- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Dull day

Went shopping at Costco and REI to spend my credit card money (the "cashback" bonus their respective affiliated credit cards pay), ended up 49 cents out of pocket. Then I spent a long time re-arranging the following song for my own fingerings and vocal range. It's a more complex song than is usual for TVZ, five chords rather than the usual three chords and the truth, but still a beautiful song.

Now I'm heading off to actually write down some of the new chapters of In the Deserts of the Heart that I've been writing in my head for the past few weeks...

-- Badtux the Boring Penguin

Monday morning fiction blogging

I had a problem with my plot. Before I left for my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the person who I *thought* was the bad guy, turned out to *not* be the bad guy. So I had to write in a new bad guy if I wanted my plot to work. Sorry if that seems a bit Manichean, that's just how the mystery / thriller genre works, there's basically one plot that you slot different scenarios and characters into, the secret is in how creative you are at tweaks to that plot and tangling sub-plots around that one plot and how interesting of characters you can drop into the plot. If the character who was slotted into one place in the plot suddenly decides he doesn't like it there, you just have to figure out something to do with him and put some other character into that slot. In my case, the guy I thought was the bad guy turns out to be a victim of a frame-up. Except it's not quite that simple. Heh.

So anyhow, I was puzzling it over for the past two weeks, and think I finally have the solution. I also came up with some additional plot points / scenes to write into the text. So I spent a couple of hours writing tonight to put some of that in, and have another weeks' worth of patch-ups to do before I'm ready to push on into the meat of things with the actual murder. The murder is happening later than I'd like it to happen (generally you want it within the first few chapters, that's how the genre works), but there's a helluva lot of pipe to lay here, and mysteries within mysteries to lay pipe around. All the friggin' foreshadowing I'm doing will simply have to substitute. I mean, I'm up to 24,000 words (typical novel length is around 100K words nowdays), and I'm still laying pipe. And once I have a dead body to play with, there's still a *lot* of plot to go. Oh well, big books are preferred nowdays because if someone is paying $8 for a paperback novel, they darn well want their money's worth. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Writing Penguin

Lies within lies

Suddenly I don't know who killed who in the novel In the Deserts of the Heart. Nobody is what they seem to be. The bad guy might be pure evil, or he might be someone who loves his daughter very much and is crazy with worry about her. The victim might be a mother trying to protect her daughter from evil, or may be a crazy woman whose delusions are dangerous to her daughter. We don't even know our main protagonist's real name, and actually never will, and further on in the novel we get two different back-stories on her, both of which check out upon further checking but which are mutually incompatible and thus one of them is a well-set-up lie. About the only person who is exactly what she appears to be is the sheriff's favorite dispatcher and ex-Marine, Marlena. As our mystery woman comments, "you're like the desert. Nothing is hidden. Everything is there in front of you, the bones of the land out in plain view."

Whether I can pull this off... who knows. I'm just curious to see what happens next. Like I said, I had sketched out a general idea and plot and ending, but the characters seem to be wanting more morally ambiguous roles for themselves (i.e. in the last scene that I just wrote, our main character and "good guy" slaps a woman and says "You seem to be operating under the delusion that I'm a nice person. I'm not. Get in the car.") That's going to affect the plot, but I'm not sure how yet.

-- Badtux the Writer Penguin

A dream, a death

Quiet. Then in the rubble something moves. A finger touches a trigger, then lightly moves away to rest alongside the trigger guard.

Frank complains to his wife Betty about the high price of their mortgage payment. "We should have never gotten that adjustable-rate mortgage." "Yes dear."

Boot-clad feet slowly feel their way through the street. Eyes look around, looking for the glimpse, the flicker of movement, that means death is near.

"Bobby! Bring in your bicycle!" "Okay, Mom." "Right now, young man!" "I said okay! Jeez!"

A detached arm lies in the street, a bloated bloated reddish color. Raw meat spills out of the end once attached to a shoulder like sausage out of a sausage skin. Flies buzz around it and maggots wriggle. The smell of rotted meat, like hamburger meat left to rot for days in a trash can, fills the air.

Betty places the platter with steamed broccoli onto the table. "Not broccoli again!"

A movement. Without a word, multiple rifles open up on its source. Boots scramble to the side as the men disperse and give covering fire to the two men who charge directly at the place the movement happened.

"Man, I don't know what's happening at the office," Frank says. "They're not giving raises to, like, anybody. I hope the last round of funding didn't fall through."

A toe pushes a small face. "Another kid," says the man. He swings his rifle back up, eyes searching for movement, and moves away with his squad. Behind him, the flies are already finding their next meal on the exposed intestines of a young girl, perhaps five years old, whose torn body in a small pink dress lies half-buried by rubble.

"What's on the television tonight, hon?" "A new episode of Survivor!" "Great! Let's see who gets kicked off the island today."

And the flies buzz.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

A Christmas story

That morning, Jesus got up after noon. He always got up after noon, ever since he'd quit going to school when he never showed up at middle school after graduating elementary school. One of his teachers had told him he had a gift for math, but school was lame. Anyhow, Jesus shared a bed with his brother, but his brother was already up and gone.

Jesus went looking for breakfast. He found a box of corn flakes in the pantry. There were no clean bowls so he rinsed one out and poured corn flakes into it. Then he looked for milk in the refrigerator. There was none. He shrugged and ate the corn flakes dry.

Jesus went looking for his momma and found her passed out in her bed, a bottle of whiskey clutched to her like a lover. Jesus found his granma in the living room, watching a telenovela. Nobody else was home. Jesus went into the bathroom and washed his hair in the sink. Jesus was proud of his hair, it was long and black and straight and shiny and set off his honey-colored skin well. He loved looking at his last school picture, which his granma had mounted on the wall. He did not recognize the wistful look on that face though.

Jesus was bored. He found his .38 and his bicycle and headed out to do a drive-by of the Lamers. It was only fare, the Lamers did drive-bys of his gang too. Afterward he played a game of high stakes hide-and-seek with several Lamers as his heart raced with an adrenalin high. Eventually the Lamers gave up and Jesus pedaled home.

Some of the gang were playing basketball and Jesus joined them, long black hair swirling as he dodged and juked. He was short for his age, and skinny, but he could move with the basketball as if it were part of him and had a good eye for the basket too. They played basketball until it got dark, then Jesus went home, where spaghetti and meatballs out of a can was waiting.

Afterward Jesus went out to the streetcorner to sell the merchandise. Black tar. Cheap, nasty, not even as sexy as crank nowdays, but Jesus's family had connections back in Mexico and Jesus was only twelve so could not be charged as an adult if arrested. Business was slow. People weren't buying, for some reason. Finally Jesus figured out why when one of the customers said, "Merry Christmas!". Jesus replied, "Ho ho ho!" as he realized that hey, it was his birthday.

So Jesus went home and found his momma and said, "Hey, today's my birthday! I'm thirteen years old!" And his momma said, "Wow, big boy. Lemme give you a present." His momma got up and went to a cabinet that was too tall for him to get into, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and gave it to him. "Here you go."

Jesus took the bottle of whiskey to the bed he shared with his brother and drank a long hard slug out of it. It tasted funny, like medicine. But then it made him feel warm inside, and peaceful. Jesus drank and drank and drank, until finally he fell asleep, bottle of whiskey clutched to him like a lover. It was Christmas in the 3rd Ward of Houston. It was Jesus's birthday. Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas.

They say a boy by the name of Jesus was born on Christmas Day over two thousand years ago, died, rose from the dead, and went away. But only after he said he'd be back again.

What if Jesus was born again, two thousand years later, to a family in a bad neighborhood of Houston? What if he was raised the way that kids are raised in those neighborhoods, treated the way those kids are treated? What hellfire and damnation would await us all when he grew to adulthood -- and who, amongst us, would not deserve it?

-- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin

In the Deserts Of The Heart - Chapter 2 Part 2

Chapter 2 Part 1
Note - production was delayed because I wasn't satisfied with a plot twist and ended up dumping a couple of chapters worth of material and re-writing. Sometimes a story just won't give you a murder within the first few chapters as is a convention of the murder mystery genre and it doesn't do you any good to try to force it. Oh well.

Fifty miles away, Ray Olsted was looking at a printout from the California Death Register.

"Clarrise Foster, you're in a lot of trouble," he said to himself, looking at the piece of paper. Marlena knocked on the door and he told her to come in. Almost didn't even notice her. He was getting old. Seemed only yesterday he'd been riding a trail bike up the mule paths to remote mines that nobody had seen for a hundred years, thinking nothing of falling down. Now his joints ached, and his skin was thin and cut easily, and if he fell down bones broke. Old. Beat the alternative, but when a fine sturdy woman like Marlena didn't even bring the little soldier to attention, much less make it salute...

Marlena told Ray about Jerry's call.

"I'm heading out there," he told her. He grabbed his hat, pulled his gunbelt on, and headed out the door.

Marlena watched him leave, and frowned. She went back to dispatch to check on where the other deputies were. There were only four deputies on duty to cover the whole county at the moment, daytimes were quiet time, it was the evening when the bars opened that things got rowdy. She thought about it, then dispatched a deputy to be close to the action in case the Sheriff needed backup. She thought about it a little more, and called CHP dispatch to see if there were any CHP officers in the area. There was one on CA 190. She asked if he could possibly be shuffled down to CA 178 for a few hours, just as a favor, in case her sheriff needed backup. Please? She sweet-talked the dispatcher for a few minutes, until finally she wheedled him into doing it. And all it took was a date. Heck, given her social life lately, it wasn't as if she were giving up anything. Her life nowdays seemed to be nothing but work, fixing her old Jeep CJ, and repairing her old shack to keep it from coming down around her head. Eating a restaurant meal with someone of the male persuasion was going to be a nice change.

One of these days she figured she was going to be out there on patrol too. If she could just get that community college diploma. The GI bill wasn't what it used to be, but six years in the Marines still qualified her for a little bit of money... but the whole reason she'd joined the Marines was because she hated school. For a miner's daughter who'd spent most of her childhood outdoors school had been horrible, all inside and everything. Somehow she'd always managed to miss the cutoff date for applying at the community college. Until she did that, she wasn't going anywhere.

She leaned back to her chair and sighed. She was stuck inside anyhow. She might as well apply.

There were no applications or paperwork sitting around for her to file or start processing, so she grabbed the tawdry romance that she'd been reading off the shelf, and went to the next page, frowning intently. She was a bit farsighted, and reading always made her head hurt, and it was a stupid book. But there was nothing else to do in this place during the daytime when she was waiting for something to happen. So she slogged on, lips barely moving, as she read about the ridiculous exploits of some drama queen and the knight in shining armor who was rescuing her. Marlena snorted. If it'd been her, she would have just blown away the bad guy with her .357 the first time she met him and been done with it. But that would have made the book, like, only five pages long, so...

She wondered what Sheriff Olsted would do when he found out "Clarrise"'s real name. Marlena had known it for a few weeks, of course. As well as a certain other thing that she was sure the Sheriff would be surprised by.

Men. Marlena laughed to herself. They were so full of themselves. They didn't even think to ask a woman about things. Marlena turned a page, and frowned again, and shook her head at the stupidity of it all.

In the Deserts of The Heart - Chapter 2, Part 1

Chapter 2
---------

It had been ten years since Jerry Rawlings had prevailed over the Bureau of Land Management and they'd issued the deed for the Wishing Well Mine and Mill Site. It had been fifteen years of legal wrangling before then, over the fact that his granddad had patented the mining claim decades before yet the BLM refused to admit it and indeed had ordered him out of his home. A pair of BLM rangers had come out to his home to burn it down as "abandoned property", that being a time when BLM rangers were regularly spotted burning down backwoods cabins as "public nuisances". That had been shortly after the cell phone tower went up Roger's Peak, and luckily Jerry was line-of-sight. He'd called the judge, the judge had immediately written out a court order, and while the BLM rangers were stomping around outside threatening him, the Sheriff and two of his deputies came by and served the court order on them ordering them to cease and desist or be jailed immediately for contempt of court. It took the two BLM rangers a while of talking to their superior, but they finally left. Two years later, the BLM had finally issued the deed.

Since that time, Jerry had fixed the place up pretty nice. While he had a 30kw propane-powered generator out back, he rarely had to fire it up, thanks to a row of solar panels on his roof. The BLM had cut his water line, claiming he had no water rights to the Wishing Hole Spring, but all he had to do to foil them was drill down 40 feet to the granite shelf that the water from the spring ran along and suck the water out from there. He had a windmill pumping the water back up to a water tower on the hill above his house, and a backup electric pump that he ran once a month just to make sure it worked. It was a damn sight more complicated than a simple pipe to Wishing Hole Spring, but given that the BLM rangers kept coming in and vandalizing his pipe every time he fixed it, well...

His wife had run to Ridgecrest with the grandbabies to do some shopping and he was there by himself when someone smashed into his locked gate with a sound like a small explosion. Jerry grabbed his 30-30 and ran out onto his front porch. Some durnfool was driving a big Chevrolet pickup truck way too fast up the canyon towards his house. Jerry pondered a second, then decided anybody willing to smash through a locked gate was up to no good, and moved out to where he could get a down-the-throat shot at the front tire. Easy now... squeeze... yeah!

The truck veered wildly, almost flipping before it came to a stop sideways in the canyon. A wild-haired man jumped out and looked around wildly, then spotted Jerry sighting down on him with the rifle and jumped back in. The man started the truck back up, turned it around, and drove out the way he'd come, flat tire and all.

Jerry just stood there for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the truck's engine fade away around the bend of the canyon. It stopped for a few minutes. Changing the tire, Jerry figured. Then it started up again, and faded out.

Now that was interesting, Jerry thought. He walked back up to the house, and fished the bag phone out and gave a call to the Sheriff's office. "Is Ray in?" he asked Marlena, the red-headed dispatcher who was seriously hot in a curvy sort of way but way too young for Jerry, something that had crept up on him. How had he gotten old so fast, anyhow?

"Ray's holed up in his office," Marlena said. "Is that you, Jerry? I don't think he has time for fishing. He has a pretty blond thing to worry about."

"Oh yeah. The new woman up Copper King Canyon. I think she said her name was Clair, something like that? I went up there and introduced myself a few months back. Friendly enough li'l filly, but a bit distant. Got that whole thousand yard stare thing going, y'know?"

"Clarissa, I think. Anyhow, she's had someone poking around, and wants one of our deputies to come out and see if he can figure out who it is and what they want."

"Is that so? I was just wanting to talk to Ray about my own visitor. He smashed through my front gate and was driving hell-bent for my house. He mighta accidentally picked up a flat from some lead poisoning, if you get my drift, and decided to leave. Wonder if that has anything to do with Clarrisa's problem?"

"You ain't shootin' trespassers again, are you?"

"Well, sorta," Jerry said, embarrassed. There'd been a big stink when some of them Sierra Club types had cut the lock off his gate and traipsed right on in, and he'd fired a warning shot in their direction. One of them had gotten irate and huffily stormed at Jerry, and Jerry had promptly put a bullet through the man's shoulder. The man had survived. Filed a complaint with the Sheriff's office, of course. Jerry just told the Sheriff, "I'm sixty-five years old, he was a twenty-somethin' youngster with muscles threatening to beat me up for tellin' him to get off my land, I defended myself, ain't a jury in this county that would convict me." Which was true. Everybody knew Jerry, and knew if he shot someone, that someone needed shootin'. But still, it was a lot of fuss, especially the lawsuit.

"Is this guy going to be filing a complaint?"

"Over a spare tire? After he destroyed my gate? I doubt it. Anybody who would smash a pickup truck through a locked gate ain't got no good in mind."

"Well, maybe your visitor has something to do with Clarrisa's problem. I'll tell Ray."

"'Preciate it." He hung up the phone, and went back inside and turned off the television. Satellite TV was ruinin' folks, he figured. When he was younger, the only entertainment was what you made for yourself with the piano or banjo or harmonica. Nowdays...

He strapped on his big .45 automatic and headed out the side door to the workshop. He seemed to recall having some chain there. Ah. Yes. A twenty-footer. He dug around until he found a spare lock that would fit through its links, declared it good enough, and found some yellow marker ribbon. He tossed it all into the back of his old Jeep Wagoneer 4x4, and drove down to his gate to see what had happened.

The gate was a bit dented, but he'd welded it up of some pretty hefty pipe, and it was still pretty much intact. The lock on the chain, on the other hand, had disintegrated. The chain itself still looked fine. Jerry got the other lock out of the Wagoneer, chained the gate back up, then stopped to think a bit. What if this fellow met his wife and grandchildren on the road, coming back from Ridgecrest?

He headed back up to the house and tried to raise his wife on the CB radio. A 20 foot mast got his signal out pretty far, but she either was out of range or otherwise occupied. It was the otherwise occupied thing that bothered him.

Jerry sighed, collected his wife's .38 and his grandchildren's .22 rifles, went back out to the Wagoneer, and headed back out, locking the gate behind him as he left. He figured he was going to go wait where the road hit pavement to make sure that the crazy man wasn't going to bushwhack her. And if the crazy man tried to bushwhack him instead...

Well, that was why the .45 ACP was on his hip, after all.

In the Deserts of The Heart - Obligatory notes

This is fiction, and it's currently being written. It's only up to 13,000 words at the moment (or roughly 1/10th of the way to the 100k words that make a nice-sized novel nowdays), but is going smoothly and I know how it ends (note: not a happy ending). I'm mostly posting it here to keep me focused on cranking out prose. Some notes:

1. Don't think that you know any of the geographic locations that I talk about. I deliberately fictionalized some of the geography in order to protect the privacy of real people who live in the real locations. You'll notice me occasionally talk about real locations that seem to give you a geographic bearing, such as Roger's Peak, or real towns, such as Ridgecrest or Independence, but the actual geography I present is not the real one. While it roughly occupies the same territory as Inyo County, it isn't.

2. Everybody is fictional, of course. The real Inyo County Sheriff's Department bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional un-named sheriff's department in the novel. That said, some of the background events, such as BLM rangers spotted burning down miners' cabins as "public nuisances" or cutting off the water supply to mining camps that they want to see go away, actually happened, and the tension between the locals and the various Federal agencies actually exist, to the point where the NPS has closed some roads and Inyo County has come right in and re-opened those roads by grading right over the "Road Closed" signs to create a nice smooth road again. Add in the LADWP (LA Department of Water and Power) which maintains a water monopoly in the Owens Valley and uses that as a weapon to punish the locals whenever they get uppity, and you have a nice little stew of tensions going.

3. Don't assume that any character is a character from my first two novels. I haven't made that decision yet. Besides, the second novel didn't go so well, I don't have the skill to do it right yet and pretty much abandoned it in place even though I know what happens and how it ends. Let's just say that if you thought the first one was dark, the second one was virtually infrared on the color scale, and while the second one might tie in to this one, it might not, either. I intend to be deliberately vague on that.

In the Deserts of The Heart - Chapter 1, Part 2

From time to time Ray went to a bar. It was down a back road, where the tourists never went. He would go to the bar and drink beer and think about his daughter that he hadn't seen for ten years, think about all the things he'd seen over the years, all the people who he'd grown up with and all who were gone, and he'd listen. You learned a lot, listening. Folks talked in bars, and in a county with as few people as his, the grapevine worked fast.

He noticed the woman when he came in. Women did come to this bar. Hard-scrabble women, woman miners who'd gathered their share of scars, weathered women who drank as hard as the men and were almost as ornery. This woman wasn't like them. She was a small woman, blond, dressed in khaki pants and a dusty t-shirt with sweat stains under its armpits, sturdily built with her arms showing sleek muscle but she was too small and quiet to be one of the lady miners who sometimes swept in like a force of nature. This woman didn't talk loud or curse or join in any conversations. She simply sat there, and drank, and stared at nothing at all.

Ray had seen stares like that before. Plenty of young men and women from the county entered the military, the only real job left to young people other than catering to tourists now that the mines were worked out and the factories gone overseas. Some of them didn't come back. And some came back... changed. He wondered where she'd seen combat, which one of her comrades had died. But all his attempts to talk to her had always gotten nothing more than one-word answers, at best.

He'd asked around, and she was set up on an old mining stake up Copper Canyon. There was nothing back there. You needed a Jeep just to get there. But no one was quite sure what she was doing back there. Some folks had noticed that the mine seemed to be being worked again. But that didn't make any sense, because the copper ore left in that mine was so low grade that it wasn't worth carrying off to be milled, even if the woman re-built the road so that trucks could make it to the mine again.

He sat down beside her.

"Another," the woman said to the bartender, pointing to her glass. The bartender came around and filled up her glass out of a can of lemon-lime soda.

"Drinking the hard stuff I see," Ray commented.

The woman turned and stared at him. "Some of us don't want to forget," she said quietly.

Ray blinked, surprised. This was more words than she'd said the entire last time he'd tried talking to her. "Way I see it, if God hadn't wanted us to forget from time to time, He wouldn't have invented beer," Ray said.

"There is no God," the woman said, and turned back to her lemon-lime, and stared deep into its depths.

"Bleak philosophy," Ray observed.

"Reality usually is."

Ray ordered his beer from the bartender, thinking about that. "So why bother coming here?" he asked.

The woman stared at her lemon-lime for a few minutes. Ray waited. He was in no hurry. The bartender brought his beer, and Ray slurped the foam off the top. The place was a dive, but the beer was good. The owner was some yuppie from San Francisco who'd cashed out, dropped out, and decided to open a beer pub somewhere. Nobody quite knew how he ended up here though. But when he'd bought the dive, he'd installed his beer making gear in the back, and now... it was good beer. The best beer in the county, certainly. Not that this was saying much, when the only other beer in the county was Milwaukee horse piss.

"Weakness," the woman said. "I listen."

"Listening isn't weakness," Ray pointed out. "Listening is the only way to learn."

"I shouldn't need it. It's dangerous."

Ray perked up. "Dangerous?"

"Needing anything. If you need, they can hurt you."

"They?"

The woman waved her hand, looked disgusted, and took a sip from her drink.

There were a number of reasons why a woman might want to live alone in the desert. Ray had been out here all his life, and the usual stories blurred together after a while. Abusive boyfriends, abusive spouses, horrible abuses in the past that the woman was trying to forget, or just plain post-traumatic stress disorder where they wanted a quiet life that wouldn't set off an incident. Ray had read her as a combat veteran. The thousand yard stare and all that. But "they?" Perhaps domestic violence?

Ray tried again. "Anyone in particular that the Sheriff's department ought to notice poking around looking for your place?"

The woman shook her head. "All dead, or in prison."

"Sounds like a story you have there."

"Yeah," the woman said. That was all she said. She sipped her drink, then stared into it again. She had, apparently, said all she was going to say. Ray knew better than to press a desert rat further once a desert rat was ready to be alone again, even if said desert rat was a tiny blond woman staring into a lemon-lime rather than a whiskey. The desert was full of stories. Some of them, unfortunately, would never be told.

A few minutes later, the woman looked at him again. "You're the Sheriff?"

"That I am," Ray admitted.

"There's someone poking around outside my place. Just watching from the rocks."

"Want a deputy to come out there and check it out?"

The woman considered. "I don't know. I never got a good look. Just a glimpse. Don't think he or she means me any harm. At least, they could have shot me in the back a couple times and didn't. But skulking around like that doesn't sound good."

"Old boyfriend?"

The woman snorted. "Not bloody well likely. They'd be more prone to throwing themselves at my feet and begging me to come back to the city."

Ray smiled. "Sounds like you broke a lot of hearts in your day. So what happened? How'd you end up out here?"

The woman smiled back, and hopped off her bar stool. "You're cute when you do that cop thing," she said, and reached up and touched his cheek. "Just send someone over tomorrow, okay?" She stared up at his eyes for a few seconds that seemed like minutes, still smiling, then turned away and walked out of the bar.

Ray stared at the door for a minute or so. His heart was thumping.

"She's too young for you," the bartender said.

"Yeah." Ray turned back to his beer.

"Awe shit. She stiffed me again." The bartender stared forlornly at the near-empty glass of lemon-lime soda sitting on the counter.

"You want me to go arrest her or something?"

The bartender considered for a few seconds. "Naw. I'll just add it to her tab, and remember not to serve her next time until she pays up."

"She probably just forgot."

"I don't think she forgets," the bartender said. "Maybe that's the problem. Too much remembering. Clutters the mind."

"I wonder what she's remembering?"

"I don't think I want to know," the bartender said. "Damned shame, whatever it is. Purty thing like that, too."

"Yeah, a damned shame," Ray agreed. He decided he'd been amiss in not finding out more about his new taxpayer. He had her application for a concealed carry permit on file, he'd pretty much rubber-stamped it once the FBI check came back clean because a little lady like that needed some heat for protection, but that was all he knew about her. There was something strange about this whole affair, not the least the notion that someone was poking around her place. He wondered if that was so, or if she was simply imagining things, having flashbacks. Either way, he decided, he was going to run a couple of checks on her when he got back to the office in the morning, then run out there to see about her mystery guest.

That resolved, he drank his beer, and listened, and thought about a daughter he hadn't seen in ten years, and people he'd known, and people gone. And about a small blond woman who had smiled at him and touched him, touched him in more ways than one, and he wasn't quite sure what to think about that.

In the Deserts of The Heart - Chapter 1, Part 1

In the Deserts of the Heart
E.L. Green

Chapter 1

There was somebody out there.

The woman was a small woman, compact, sturdy in the way of someone who had been an athlete when young and worked hard with her body when older. She was wearing khaki pants and a white cotton work shirt and a sun hat and carrying a shovel where she had been trying to clear her grey water drain line to get her sink flowing again. The desert sun beat down upon her, but the air was dry, and her brow was crusted with salt, rather than sweat, as she took a sip from her water bottle and considered. There was nothing to tell her that someone was out there. Just a feeling. A glimpse out of the corner of her eye. That was all. But she had learned, over the years, to trust such feelings, even though they were no longer life or death.

The woman's browe furrowed under her sun hat. She put the water bottle back into her pocket and unhurriedly carried her shovel to the shed at the back of her shack, feeling the weight of the .357 revolver strapped to her hip. She did not think she would need it this day, though. Whoever was out there, watching her, seemed in no hurry.

Then she walked into her shack and sat in the chair near the wood stove and did what she did most days, had done for longer than she wished to recall. She sat, and she remembered, and never glanced towards the framed photos of dead people that occupied the northmost wall.

---

Ray Olsted hadn't intended to go into law enforcement. His nickname when young had been "Wild Ray". Everybody assumed he would be a criminal of some sort. Then one evening while driving an old lady miner up to her claims, they went through the gate that protected their canyon from intruders, turned into a neighbor's driveway to visit, and were met by a frantic-looking young man pointing a .22 rifle at them. "How did you get in here?" the young man demanded. "With the key," Ray replied sensibly. "We're going up to Miss Polly's claims. But it looks like you don't want company, so we'll just move along." So he backed up, and as he backed up, looking out his back window, his backup lights fell upon the dead body where a pool of blood was still forming.

Rather than turning up the canyon to take Miss Polly to her claims, he went back down the canyon. He drove to the nearest telephone, thirty miles away, and called the Sheriff's office. A deputy showed up half an hour after that, driving a battered Impala.

Ray explained the situation, and the deputy called it in on his radio. Then he scratched his head and thought.

"Are you armed?" the deputy asked.

"No sir," Ray replied, because for someone nick-named "Wild Ray", carrying a weapon was a recipe for disaster and he might be wild but he wasn't crazy. But Miss Polly, who was all of 78 years of age that year, replied "I am", and pulled a snub-nose revolver out of her purse.

"Well, we better make sure the guy doesn't go anywhere," the deputy said. "It'll be a while before anybody gets down here from Bishop."

"You won't get up the canyon in that," Ray said, nodding at the Impala. He pointed the deputy at the other door of his Bronco. "Jump in."

"I'm coming too," Miss Polly added. "You might need the firepower." She daintily placed her revolver back into her purse. The deputy pointedly looked away. In these parts, deputies didn't see a lot of things that big city cops would see. Taking in a 78 year old woman for an illegal concealed weapon wasn't happening. So the deputy went and called in where he was going, and got into the Bronco, and they all headed back up-canyon.

When they got back up, the young man met them with the rifle again, and the deputy shouted "Police. Put the rifle down." The young man threw it down and put his hands up, and while Miss Polly held her revolver on the young man, the deputy cuffed him and brought him to the Bronco and stuffed him into the back seat."

"My, this was exciting," Miss Polly said, as Wild Ray pondered this use of his prized Bronco's back seat.

"Yep," Ray said, and looked at the deputy. "How does someone become a deputy?" he asked.

The deputy replied. And thirty years later, after more work than he liked to think about, Ray Olsted somehow had ended up Sheriff, not quite believing it. For someone who had once been "Wild Ray", it was an unexpected destination, but it suited him fine.

The young man, who had murdered the caretaker of Davidson Camp over money then smashed the caretaker's head in when his rifle jammed, was in prison now, and would be for the rest of his life. Davidson Camp was a ruin, all the Davidsons gone away to the big city to work for money and never coming back. Miss Polly had been dead for ten years now, having survived to the ripe old age of 98, sprightly up until her last year when finally she'd lost her edge and faded away. It'd been thirty years, and the years hadn't been too kind to the lean young man who'd encountered a murderer at Davidson Camp, he had a couple of scars now where he hadn't ducked fast enough in a bar fight or a gun fight, and his belly was bigger than he liked to think about. He'd had a wife, lost a wife, had a daughter, a daughter he hadn't seen for ten years now as she led a life somewhere else in the town his wife had moved to when she divorced him. But that was life. That was life. He was alive, he wasn't in jail, all in all he couldn't complain.