Genesis Earth

Genesis
Earth: Armageddon

Genesis
Earth is a trilogy of books that document the plight of the peoples
of the Earth as she faces a mighty battle of superpowers rarely
glimpsed by mankind. #God #Chistian #Mythology #ChristianFictionm
#Readers #BookLovers

https://books2read.com/b/bzBG1E

Genesis
Earth: Gods and Devils

The
small group is traveling trying to find others, trying to find the
scope of the damage and the survivors… #God #Chistian #Mythology
#ChristianFictionm #Readers #BookLovers
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Genesis
Earth; the Roads out of Eden

He
was sure now, that he had somehow become trapped in this dead body.
Which was bad but was not that bad. It meant that he could maybe
exact a small amount of revenge… #God #Chistian #Mythology
#ChristianFictionm #Readers #BookLovers
https://books2read.com/b/b6GEz0

A free Sample from book one!

Genesis Earth: Armageddon

By George Dell

Original Material Copyright © 1976
– 1984 – 2009 – 2012 by Dell Sweet

This book is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away

 to other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an

 additional copy for each recipient. Thank
you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any
names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the
author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s
places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

This novel is Copyright © 1976 –
1984 – 2009 – 2014 by Dell Sweet Publishing. No part of this book may
be reproduced by any means, electronic, print, scanner or any other
means and, or distributed without the authors permission.

Permission is granted to use short
sections of text in reviews or critiques in standard or electronic
print.

Genesis
Earth: Armageddon

FOREWORD

First, let me
caution you on the length of this foreword, it is long. I apologize,
but I follow the thought to where it goes, and this one went quite
some way. Feel free to skip past it, it contains nothing that is
absolutely germane to the story that follows. If, on the other hand,
you are like me and you like to know the why of things, read on…

I recently published a story in a magazine and had a conversation with the editor about writing and
how it works for me. I said that what I do is take a mental outline
of what I want and go from there. I usually commit those same ideas
to paper. I don’t usually publish short stories in magazines, but the
process was interesting and made me put some real thought into the
interview answers.

It’s pretty
simple to have an idea, or a storyline. We all get them, but that
doesn’t write the story. You
have to do that, and the first thing that you
have
to do is believe in what you are writing. If you don’t believe in it
no one else will because you will not be able to convince them it is
real or viable. For instance, if you want to write a zombie story,
but you have no faith that you can, you more than likely won’t ever
write the story because no matter what you do
write,
you will not feel it, believe in it, and so you will continue to
reject it until you hit upon something you do believe in; or give up
entirely.

I don’t know how you write, but the
writer friends that I have talked to have all been in that place
where the words stopped, or the phrasing wont come. The thing is, it
doesn’t matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because you are
allowing yourself to get caught up in all the trivial things of your
proposed story, so much so that you have frozen your creativity. You
have no story because you are not allowing yourself to write it. You
have dammed up that stream. Stopped the flow of information. What you
need to do is just write, and there are a few reasons for that.

First: Write it because writing
moves you past that initial word on paper place. Just write. It
doesn’t matter if it’s misspelled, it doesn’t matter if the
punctuation isn’t right, it doesn’t even matter if you have no idea
where you are going with the story, even if it seems that it is not
adhering to your outline. Just write it. Let it flow. You can fix all
of the other stuff later. And you wrote the idea down, so if this
story coming to you is not the story you wanted, write it anyway.
It’s a gift. Take it. Write the other story some other day.

Second: Write it because the words
will disappear if you don’t get them down on paper. I have heard many
writers say, “I had better write this stuff in my head down on
paper before I lose it.” or “I had this story in my head, I
should have written it down, I didn’t and now it’s gone.” I have
never heard a writer say, “I guess I’ll write this story down that
I have stored in my head from two days ago.” They don’t say that
because it is gone, so write it down.

Yes a story
idea can get in your head and be there for months. Drive you crazy.
But that is the idea
for a story, not the story itself. The idea without
direction,
and that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about sitting
on the couch watching TV, or driving to work in your car, and
suddenly an idea hits you and goes past that and starts to formulate
into a story, and you know that it is is ready to be written out…

So here is this guy and one day the
world as he knows it ends. The Earth stops being predictable, if it
ever really was. The buildings, houses, and roads buckle and are
consumed by the Earth in places. Earthquakes hit and destroy nearly
everything he knows. And just like that his life is completely
changed forever. I wonder what he would do?

It took me several tries and forty
years to write that story out. Most of that was because I left for
the streets at fourteen and spent the next two years living there.
From there I went into the service. From there I became married, and
then life took over. But the need to write that story never stopped.
I wrote three books about it that no one ever saw, and then I lost
those books for almost 30 years.

The note above was written in 2009,
me rethinking the earlier books I had lost. It made me write it out
again, and it became another book. As I followed that need to write
that story out of me it turned into dozens of composition notebooks
full of other manuscripts, short stories, plays, lyrics, millions of
words that I finally realized I could write out of me.

You see writing is not about anyone,
but you. Sure, the popular authors will say things like “I wrote
this one for the fans.” And in some ways that is true, but in all
the ways that matter it isn’t true at all. You wrote it because it
was in you and it needed to be out of you so you opened up that
doorway between your mind and your form of expression and you wrote
it out of you. Gave it a life. Set it free. It doesn’t matter if ten
thousand people hate it. If one likes it? That will make it all
worthwhile. So it was for no one except you. It was because it was
there and it was time for it to be birthed and you birthed it. The
fans just gave you the ability to have an audience to read it.

This story is the original
unpublished version of Earth’s Survivors. Not the story that became a
series about the rise of the dead. There is not one Zombie in this
story. This is a story about people struggling to survive.

When I was in
the process of publishing this book, it was the first thing I had
published in more than thirty years, someone said, “You know,
publishing has changed. This is a good book but it probably will
never sell a single copy because it doesn’t have zombies or vampires
or werewolves in it.” That bugged me. I slipped back into that
anxiety mode most writers find themselves in when they first
publish… The
editors are cutting out this and that, changing this scene, deleting
this character, it isn’t what I wrote any longer… That
sort of stuff.

I should have known better because I
had already published years before and gone through all of that, and
never published again because I hated the process so much. I saw this
new self publishing as an opportunity to publish something my way:
The way I wrote it.

All well and good, but the thing is
that some editors, friends, people in your circle really do know
better than you do. So I yanked this book, went back, wrote zombies
into the plot line: Had a blast doing it, and then published it.

It took off, and I hated it. I felt
like I had succumbed to the temptation to go for the cash, lost faith
in myself that I had a written a good book that could have made it
without zombies/vampires/werewolves and sold out. Don’t get me wrong,
I enjoyed writing a zombie series, but this series of books was not
written as a zombie vehicle. It was written as a series about people
picking up the pieces of their world and starting over. It was my
need to get this story out of me that made me finish this original
story when there was no market for it. When Earth’s Survivors was a
going series with the un-dead center stage.

Does that mean you will like it?
Maybe. If you like good characters and a good storyline you may. It’s
up to you. I wrote it because it was in me and it needed to be out of
me. I wrote it because it was what was given to me to write by
whatever Gods are up there passing out stories, all those years ago.
Here it is, and I will continue with this series publishing all the
books that were written for it, and then never published. Yes, even
if it is just for myself…

Geo

One

June 15th

At
a large gravel pit on the outskirts of Glennville, New York, Gary
Jones carefully maneuvered the wide mouth of the loader bucket over
the dump box of the truck, and pulled back on the lever closest to
him to release the load. Ain’t this something, he thought as he
slowly topped off the dump box, barely 10 AM and we’ve already sent
out twenty-seven truckloads of gravel to the base.

Six men out sick, and another forty
truckloads to deliver before five tonight. What in hell are they
doing with all this gravel? He wondered. It was a question he had
asked many times before, and still had not gotten an answer to. Uncle
Sam paid well though, and on time to boot, so he guessed he probably
shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He signaled the driver, and
he pulled away with a whoosh of air as he released the brakes.
Another dump truck lumbered up to take his place, and he pushed the
questions out of his mind as he began filling the box.

– 2 –

Far
below the small city of Glennville New York, Richard Pierce sat
working before an elaborate computer terminal. He had just initiated
the program that managed the small nuclear power plant hidden deep
below him in the rock. A small handset beside the computer station
chimed, and he picked it up and listened. He did not speak at first,
but as he listened a smile spread across his face. “Very good,”
he said happily, when the caller was finished, “keep me
advised.” He set the small handset back into its cradle and
turned his attention back to the screen in front of him. The plant
had powered up just as it was supposed to, no problems whatsoever,
and that made Richard Pierce extremely happy. Two more days tops, he
thought, and then maybe I’ll get out of this dump.

He supposed he should feel honored
that he was even here. It was after all one of the biggest projects
in the country, albeit top secret, but he could not help the way he
felt. He was close to a mile underground, totally cut off from
everything and everyone, and he hated it. If he had a choice, which
he had not, he would never have come at all. But he had written the
software that handled the power plant, as well as several other
sections of the underground city, and that made it his baby. There
were a couple of small bugs, mainly due to the fact that no one had
been allowed to know what the entire program was supposed to do. The
way the rewrites were going however, it looked as though he would not
be stuck here anywhere near as long as he had originally thought, and
that was something to think about. He had begun to feel that he would
never leave this rock-bound prison and wouldn’t that be a real
bitch.

• 3 –

In
Seattle Washington, Harvey Pearlson sat at his wide mahogany desk and
talked quietly into the phone.

The extravagantly appointed office
was located on the top floor of one of Seattle’s most highly regarded
newspapers. Pearlson had worked his way up from the bottom, after
starting as a carrier in 1955, sixteen floors below.

“No,” Pearlson said
quietly, “I don’t want to know. I just thought that maybe it
could be handled in some other way.” He listened for a few
minutes nodding his head as he did.

“Yes, yes I see, but?” He
rubbed his eyes as he listened. “No, I don’t,” he said
emphatically, “I happen to like him a great deal, and if you
give me the time…” The voice on the other end of the line cut
him off, and he once again listened quietly.

“I see,” he said, once the
voice had finished speaking. “No, I do understand. I won’t. Do
you think I’m that stupid? Give me a little credit here, will you.
You wouldn’t even be aware of it if I hadn’t called you in the first
place, for Christ’s sake.” He listened for a few seconds longer,
then hung up the phone.

There was no reasoning with Weekes,
he told himself, and he was going to do what he was going to do. For
Frank’s sake, he wished he had never called him at all. Too late now
though, he told himself, far too late. After all, he had done his
best to swing Frank away from the story, but Frank Morgan was not a
man who could be easily swayed, and he told himself, unless he
wanted to find himself in the same circumstances, he had better just
shut up and let it go. He reached over and thumbed the intercom
button.

“Cindy?”

“Yes Sir?”

“I’m going to be out the rest
of the day, Cindy, and if Frank Morgan comes looking for me before he
leaves, you don’t know where I am, correct?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Anything important comes up
you can reach me on my mobile, Cindy.”

“Yes Sir, Mister Pearlson.”

Harvey Pearlson picked up his
briefcase and left the office. Whatever Weekes had in mind, he wanted
nothing to do with it, and he didn’t want to be available for any
sort of questions that might arise either. It was unfortunate enough
that he had started the whole ball rolling; he had no intention of
sticking around to see where it ended up stopping. No, he told
himself, the lake was the best place to be. The only place to be, and
he intended to stay there until the whole thing blew over just as he
had been told to.

He took his private elevator down to
the garage area, walked across to his Lincoln, and drove out of the
parking garage, turning right on Beechwood. He passed a hooker
standing at the corner of the building and thought just how badly
Beechwood Avenue had gotten as of late. He would have to speak to the
security people when he got back from the lake. Putting up with the
hookers that had taken over the avenue at night was one thing, but
broad daylight? Standing right in front of the frigging building? No,
something would have to be done, and if the security people couldn’t
take care of it, maybe he’d speak to Weekes. After all, he owed him
one now, didn’t he? He pushed the thought away, signaled, and pulled
out onto the loop. In an hour he’d be at the lake, and then he could
forget about the whole mess, for today at least. He eased the car up
to sixty and leaned back into the leather upholstery to enjoy the
drive.

~4~

Ira
Pratt stared at the squared board lost in thought. If he moved to the
right, he would surely lose two checkers. Maybe, he thought, as many
as four. Moving to the left would not help either. There was actually
only one semi-safe move to make, and that was straight ahead. But
even that move could put a hurtin’ on his few remaining checkers, he
thought. Nothing to do for it though, but move it, and see what
happened.

He stared into the thoughtful eyes
of the older man across the table, trying to read them. No good, he
was a master at hiding his thoughts. His face was calm and carefully
composed, not so much as a smile played at the corners of his mouth.

Ira gave in and decisively moved one
checker forward and then leaned back into his chair, waiting to see
what the older man would do.

“Well, I see you have left me
little choice, Ira,” the older man said. He picked up one of his
own checkers and carefully slid it forward as he finished speaking.

“That was what I was hoping
you’d do,” Ira said grinning as he jumped two of the older man’s
checkers.

“No doubt about it, Ira, you’re
just too good for me,” the older man replied. He smiled widely,
and pleasantly, and then changed the subject. “How about we take
a short break, Ira, maybe go for a walk. You must get tired of
beating me all the time?”

“Well,” Ira replied, “I
kind ‘a get the idea you let me beat you sometimes, but sure, I
wouldn’t mind a break at all.”

“I would never let you beat me,
Ira. It is a good thing we don’t play poker though. I might gamble
the entire kingdom away trying to beat you,” the older man
replied laughing. “Besides I have my reasons for wanting to take
a break right now. I see it like this, if you and I take a break,
maybe once we return your concentration will not be so keen, and then
maybe I will win one of these games for a change.” He rose from
the small table as he finished speaking. “Ready, Ira?”

“Yep.”

Ira closed his eyes. He could have
kept them open, and a few times he had, but the trip was unnerving
enough without adding the visual aspects to it. Not that there was
anything to see except darkness for the split second they would be
traveling, he thought. Still…

He opened his eyes. They had
actually only been shut for less than a second, but in that space of
time they had traveled a considerable distance, or at least seemed to
have. The small table that had been before him was gone, replaced by
a lush green valley. A calm blue river flowed across the valley floor
far below. He followed it with his eyes as it wound away in the
distance.

“It’s beautiful,” Ira
exclaimed, “but will it still be…?” He let the question
trail away.

“Yes, it will, as will several
others, Ira. But it need not be this place, there are so many to
choose from,” the older man informed him. “Come.”

Ira blinked, and when he opened his
eyes they were standing in a high mountain meadow. Wildflowers covered the meadow, and a large, summer-fat herd of deer grazed
peacefully among them. A large buck raised its heavily antlered head
and stared at the two men, but perceiving no threat went back to
grazing the field.

“This is also beautiful,”
Ira said quietly.

“It only matters where, Ira.
There are so many. There were even more, and there will be again.”

“I’ll have to tell Cora about
this place, and the other,” Ira replied, still watching the deer
graze.

“You should, Ira. In fact,
there will be many things to tell her. Things she will need to know,
Ira.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. The time is short.”

“I was afraid of that,”
Ira said slowly.

“There is no reason to be
afraid, Ira.”

“I know that. I guess I mean
afraid, as in I wish it didn’t have to happen.”

“I knew what you meant, Ira,
but it is necessary. As much as I would wish that it was not, it is.”

Ira nodded his head slowly. “I
know.”

The two men stood in silence for
several minutes, watching the deer in the field. It seemed so
peaceful to Ira, a good place to be, a good place to live, and that
made it harder to accept that most of it would soon be gone. The
older man spoke, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

“Would you like to look at some
others, Ira?”

“I believe I would at that. I
think I’d like to look at as much as I kin before it’s gone, I guess.
Does that sound wrong?”

“No, Ira, it does not, I too
wish to look… Ready?”

Ira nodded but did not close his
eyes. Darkness enveloped him, and a sense of speed. The absence of
light was complete; he could only sense the presence of the older man
beside him as the traveled through the dark void.

– 5 –

April 11th, 1952

Ira
Pratt drove the old tractor carefully down the side of the slippery
hill. It had been raining for close to three days, and it didn’t look
as though it was going to let up right quick, he thought.

The rain was causing all sorts of
problems, and not just for him, he knew, but for the cows as well.
The biggest problem was the creek, and the only way the creek wasn’t
going to be a problem was to unplug the thing.

He sat on the tractor as it slipped
and slid its way down the hill through the gray sheets of rain. Ira
let out a sigh of relief once it reached the bottom. For a second
there, he had been sure both he and the old tractor would end up in
the creek, but God was smiling on him today.

He slipped the worn gearbox into neutral and sat looking at the rush of muddy-brown water. The creek
was a good four feet above the point of flooding, and he wasn’t sure
it was a smart move to try to put the tractor in that. The tractor
was sure footed, but so was a goat, and he’d seen more than one goat
end up on its ass. But there wasn’t anything else for it. If he
didn’t move the trees that were clogging the creek, and flooding it
out and over the banks, then he might as well just sit back and watch
a couple more cows drown.

Ira knew cows, pretty much anyhow,
and everyone that he and Cora owned were just as stupid as any other
cow he’d ever seen. The cows didn’t understand flooding, they didn’t
understand how the water could weaken the banks, and so the big
dummies just walked on down to the creek, just like any other day,
and got swept away when the bank crumbled under their weight. Three
days of rain and four dead cows, and though cows were stupid, they
weren’t cheap.

Ira sat in the pouring rain and
stared at the creek. Normally, the creek was no more than eighteen
inches deep at the most. Course normal wasn’t what it was today, he
thought, and wishin’ it wouldn’t make it so. It was his own damn
fault, he reminded himself. Two of the trees that were clogging it
had been there last summer, and hadn’t he promised Cora he’d take ’em
out before fall? He had, but he hadn’t, and so here he was in the
pouring rain fixin’ to half kill himself to get ’em out.

Looked like the best way, Ira
thought, might be to try and snag the biggest one right from the
bank. He squinted as he shielded his eyes to peer through the rain.
One thing was for sure, sittin’ on the tractor and thinkin’ about it,
wasn’t gonna get it. Reluctantly, Ira climbed down off the tractor
and edged closer to the bank. The rain was coming down hard, but the
section he stood upon seemed solid enough. “Probably what the
cows thought,” he muttered as he moved closer.

He walked back to the tractor,
unwound a long section of chain from behind the seat, and walked back
to the creek. The top of the bigger tree was sticking a good three
feet over the bank, and he was glad that it was. He could see that
the water was rising faster, and moving along quicker, and he had no
wish to get any closer to it than he had to. Quickly, but carefully,
he wound the chain around the tree and pegged the links with an old
bolt to hold them. Looks good, and solid as well, he thought as he
slipped the other end of the chain over the bucket. He genuinely
didn’t want to try and turn the tractor around. In fact, he thought,
as muddy as the ground was, he’d be damn lucky just to get it back up
and away from the creek when he finished.

He gave an experimental tug at the
chain, and then climbed back up on the tractor. Carefully, without
grinding the gears any more than he surely had to, shifted into
reverse. He played the clutch out slowly and brought up the slack in
the chain.

“Well God?” He asked,
looking skyward, “You keepin’ a watch down here? I could sure
use a hand about now, Lord. Amen,” Ira finished.

He let the clutch out a little
further, playing the gas pedal as he did, and let the tractor go to
work. The oversized tires spun, caught, and the tractor began to
slowly back up the steep bank, pulling the tree out of the muddy
water as it did. Ira released the breath he had been holding, and
just as he did the chain snapped in two. Ira barely had time to
register what had happened, when the old tractor flipped, crushing
him beneath it.

TWO

For
Franklin W. Morgan, just Frank to his friends, June 15Th, had been a
particularly hard day.

As he sat at the small, scarred,
wooden table at Mikes Pub on Sixth Avenue, nursing a shot of gin, his
thoughts turned inward, mulling over the same problem he had been
mentally chewing for the last several weeks. It always came back, no
matter how far away he pushed it. It slipped right back to the front
and began to hammer away at him. But today was much worse. It had
seemed endless as it dragged on, and he had been able to concentrate
on next to nothing. He had avoided the office, and Pearlson, no sense
compounding things when he was so close to the truth by chancing a
confrontation with Pearlson.

Pearlson was… Pearlson
was, a piece of shit, he
thought. However, at the moment it wasn’t just Pearlson that had him
so keyed up and anxious, it was leaving, and, he supposed, that was
just as it should be.

The thing that had made it difficult
to get through was the pressure and anxiety he always felt when he
was on the trail of a promising story. That and the stress associated
with the story.

It was not so much the stress his
job placed on him; he had always dealt with that quite well. He knew
what it was, and what it had been for several weeks now. All of those late-night calls to his sources in New York. No sleep, virtually
working around the clock; sifting through the information this source
or another provided; sorting out the truth from imagination, and
getting to the facts, or as close as he could get to them. That,
coupled with the fact that he had been the only one, save Jimmy, who
believed it, and now Jimmy was apparently missing so he could add the
disappearance of a good friend to the growing list of worries that
kept him up at night. This was turning into a three-ring circus damn
fast, and he didn’t like. He didn’t like it at all.

He was sure now, or as sure as
anyone could be. But who the hell would believe him? Not his editor,
that was for sure. He would not soon forget the day two weeks ago,
when he had approached the subject with him either. It had been
partly his own fault, Frank realized. He had not been as prepared as
he should have been. He had also possessed no hard facts, he reminded
himself, and he had speculated far too heavily for Pearlson’s taste.
Even so, he was just as convinced as he had been then. No. More so
now, he amended.

Two additional weeks of digging into
it, with Jimmy’s help, had produced a wealth of information, and it
was no longer just conjecture as the old man Pearlson had said, but a
steadily growing stack of cold hard facts.

Pearlson had still laughed and told
him he should try writing fiction for a living. But there had been
something else lurking just behind that laugh, hadn’t there? Perhaps
a hint of nervousness maybe?

Pearlson had also suggested that
just maybe Frank needed a vacation, and things being the way they
were Frank had taken him up on the last suggestion.

Screw him, Frank thought as he sat
at the table and drained the last of his drink… Just screw him.

That was what had made his days so
long and his nights so sleepless, he reasoned. Churning around in his
head was all of that knowledge… Along with fear, fear of what that
knowledge may mean.

But did he actually know anything?
He asked himself, and could he actually prove what he did know? Yes,
Dammit… And just as suddenly, probably
not. He couldn’t prove
all of it yet, at least not entirely, he admitted.

Not for much longer though, he told
himself, the proof part of it was about to change. He had made plans
to go to New York. Directly to the source, so to speak, and find out
just exactly what was going on. No conjecture, no guessing, no
screwing around at all. If Pearlson wanted facts, Frank would get
them one way or the other, he had decided. And the suggestion to take
a vacation couldn’t have been a better cover for him to go under, he
reasoned.

No, he decided, it wouldn’t be much
longer at all. Two weeks in upstate New York and he would know for
sure. Frank saw no way that Pearlson could kill the story then. Not
faced with cold hard facts.

But Pearlson could be an idiot, what
if he still rejected the truth even after the facts were presented,
he asked himself. Well, if he did, Frank reasoned, that would open up
a whole new set of problems. Maybe Pearlson was involved somehow…
Maybe not, but the whole thing had smelled of a cover up from the
start, and if Pearlson cut the story loose, if he still placed no
faith in it, then there had to be a reason, and maybe… And
maybe shit!
If it turned out that way, then maybe it would be time to move on.

He rose slowly from his chair and
fighting his way through the crowded table area, made his way to the
bar.

“Another Gin, Mike,” he
said, once he had gotten the old man’s attention. “On second
thought hold the ice, just straight up.” He stared miserably at
the juke box in the corner that blared incessantly, and silently
urged it to fall silent as he waited for the drink. His thoughts,
still clouded, turned back to the problem he was constantly turning
over in his mind, when a glance at his wristwatch reminded him of how
late it actually was.

He turned his attention back to the
bartender. “Shit! Mike, I’ve got to go see the kid’s and I am
already late,” he threw a twenty on the bar, “that should
cover the tab.”

“What about this?” Mike
asked, holding up the shot glass.

“You drink it, Mike, I truly am
late. I’ve gotta go,” Frank replied as he started to turn
towards the front door.

“Hey?” Mike called in a
questioning manner. Frank turned back to the bar.

“Get some sleep, Frank,”
Mike said, “your eyes look like two piss holes in the snow.”

“Yes, Mother,” Frank
joked, “I will.”

Frank smiled to himself. They always
played this game and had been at it for the twenty years that Frank
had been coming into Mike’s. Mike seemed to think it was his duty to
mother him, even more so since Jane had died.

“See you in a couple of weeks
or so, Mike,” Frank called as he stepped out the door. He
glanced at his watch once again as he did. I’ll never make it, he
thought, no way.

He resigned himself to the fact that
he would more than likely be late, and not for the first time this
week. He had already been late three times, picking up Patty and Tim
from the sitter.

Cora Pratt, the sitter, could pitch
a real fit when she wanted to, he thought. “Well, I’ll deal with
her when I get there,” he mumbled to himself. Besides, he
thought, tonight I don’t have to pick them up, just say good-bye for
two weeks.

The heat assaulted him as he stepped
out of the air-conditioned comfort of the bar, and he winced.

Twenty-seven years of living in
Seattle had not changed a thing for him. He felt about the city as he
always had. It was too hot in the summer, what there was of it, and
too damn cold and windy in the winter, and it wasn’t home. He still
thought about it as a place he was only visiting. He never had gotten
used to it, and, he knew, he never would.

Frank worked the handle upward
slowly, pulling the driver side door of the company car open
carefully. He had to as this one stuck if you were forceful, and then
he would end up crawling over the damn passenger seat to reach the
driver’s side. It seemed to him that he had once had this car when
it was new. It was hard to tell though as it was a pool car, and the
younger generation of reporters in the press pool beat the hell out
of all the cars.

“Too many hot-rod kid’s driving
the piss out of them,” he said aloud as he keyed the motor and
pulled the Plymouth Voyager out into the traffic. He headed out of
the city, towards the suburbs and Cora Pratt.

~

When he reached the turnoff, from
Route 5, Frank slowed the car and swung into Cora’s driveway. 

The old farm had been in the Pratt
family for five generations. Ira Pratt, Cora’s long dead husband, had
steadfastly refused to sell any of the land that made up the small
farm, and after he had died Cora had adopted the same attitude. So, in
the midst of suburbia, the old farmhouse sat on its own eighty-acre plot. It was sort of funny to Frank as you could drive a short way in
either direction and you would still be in the Wildflower
subdivision, part of which was still a respected suburb of Seattle.

The subdivision had simply been
built around the property when Ira Pratt had refused to sell. Consequently, the farm had become a boundary line of sorts. West
Wildflower was the poorer and run down section, whereas the eastern
section was well kept and quiet. In the middle sat the farm and Cora
Pratt.

Cora was a formidable woman, who, as
far as Frank could tell, took no shit at all from either side.

When the “uppity bastards,”
as Cora called them, on the east side had sent a letter demanding
that she cut down on the fertilizer her hired man used on the corn
field, she had called in John, the hired man, and told him to use
just a little more instead. They had of course “Taken her to the
court’s,” as she had put it, but to no avail. The court had
upheld her Commercial Farm Zoning, and the judge had told the “Smart
ass lawyer,” as Cora had called him that worked for the East
Side Coalition, not to bother him with anymore groundless lawsuits or
he’d personally report him to the Bar Association.

Likewise, when some of the,
“Shiftless no-accounts,” from the west side had tried to
steal some of her chickens, she had “filled their britches with
buckshot.”

Frank knew all this was true because
Cora had told him. She didn’t want to “Mince no words” as
she had put it, “lay it all out on the table,” she had
said. “Just in case you get to hearing things and think I’m a
bit funny, I ain’t… I just protect what’s mine.”

That had been her little speech, on
the day six years ago, when she had first begun taking care of Patty
and Tim, and Frank had to admit, to her credit, she seemed to be
just what she said she was, and no one could have taken better care
of his children in his opinion.

Cora waved from the front porch
swing as Frank stopped the car and walked towards the white framed
house. The scent of Lilacs in bloom came to him on the light breeze
from the porch front, where the bushes marched away in both
directions, rail high.

“Thought you weren’t coming
to say good-bye to your kids,” she quipped.

“Sorry,” Frank replied, “I
got bogged down in traffic.”

More like a couple of shots of gin,
she thought but didn’t say.

“Yep, that traffic can surely
be a bother in the summer, that’s for sure,” she said aloud. Tim
and Patty
leaped down from the old porch and raced across the lawn. Frank went
to his knees and caught them in his arms.

THREE

Frank Morgan flipped the map back
onto the passenger seat of the small red Toyota Prius and glanced at
his watch. 

He had figured the trip from
Syracuse to Fort Drum would take about an hour and a quarter. He
hadn’t, however, counted on the traffic. The whole day can’t be
great, he thought. The trip into Syracuse International had gone
well. One short connection in route and other than that the whole
trip had been uneventful. But now he had to deal with this. Something
up ahead was slowing the traffic down, and he was pretty sure he knew
what the problem was. Still, if he lost much more time, it would
probably be close to dark when he arrived in Fort Drum, and the
possibility of arriving after dark, and trying to find the house
didn’t appeal to him. 

Frank eased the Prius out into the
passing lane, and slowly coaxed the car up to speed again. He had
been right; the problem was the same as it had been coming off the
thruway from the airport to get on route 81. Army convoys, and if you
didn’t get around them quickly, you could spend forever in the left-hand lane. He had learned that lesson the hard way coming off the
thruway. Not only couldn’t he get around them, at first, but when he did, he couldn’t get back in for the exit to Route 81 north. He had
ended up heading south instead and had wasted twenty minutes getting
turned around and back to the northern exit.

What the hell kind of military base
needs that many trucks, he had wondered. It was a question that
actually didn’t need to be answered, but he answered it anyway. The
base doesn’t, the caves do. They may unload at the base, but I bet
they just drop the load and ship it into the city at night, he told
himself. 

He stared out the window of the car,
and looked over the traffic as he passed it. Jeeps dump trucks,
Hummers, and tractor-trailer combos carrying who knows what. All of
them heading to northern New York, he knew. He also knew that the
airfield, at the base outside of Glennville, had been quite busy as
well, the convoys of trucks weren’t their only supply source.

Frank reached towards the dashboard
and fished a cigarette out of the pack that rested there, lighting it
just as he passed the last olive-green truck on his right. He tossed
the lighter into the plastic console, and it landed with a hollow
plastic bong. At the same time, he pulled back into the right-hand lane, and leaned back into the seat as he took a long pull on the
cigarette.

From what he had been able to
determine from the map, and what he already knew from his
investigation, the military base was about twenty miles north from
Fort Drum. Don was right, it didn’t seem as though any of the trucks
would be passing through Fort Drum on their way to the base.
Glennville was only about nine miles away from the base though, and
that was where the loads would end up. Not in the city actually, he
reminded himself, but under the city, and he hadn’t found that little
piece of information on the map. The map said exactly nothing about
the caves.

When he had first started to
seriously investigate the base, he had gotten the first hint of the
caves from one of his informers. The informer was an ex-private
turned junky, who had been stationed at the base when the project had
started. The rest he had gotten from the articles he carefully culled
from the Glennville Daily Press, and Jimmy, an old friend who worked
at a Syracuse paper. Some things could be hidden, but there was
always a clue if you knew where to look. 

The first article he had read, had
seemed harmless enough, but coupled with the information he’d already
had, it had been intriguing. The United States Army had purchased
some abandoned property from the city to use as a storage depot. The
story had gone on to say that the land was close to the train depot,
and the base would benefit from the purchase as they would no longer
need to truck shipments from the base to the depot every time, they
used the rail yards. The ex-private had tipped him off about the
caves, which also happened to be located on the same piece of
property.

Even then, it still hadn’t made a
whole lot of sense to Frank. What would they save? They would still
have to ship whatever came in there, to the base. Wouldn’t they? 

In other articles, most of which had
been written years before in the Glennville paper, he had learned
what the property actually consisted of, and at first it had seemed
like an unlikely purchase. It hadn’t been all that hard to dig up the
old articles, especially with the help of his friend in Syracuse.
Although Glennville had its own local paper, the Times Reporter in
Syracuse, which was only seventy miles away, often reported on the
events that took place there. 

It had been an easy matter of
looking through the archived data files, pulling the stories that
pertained, and with the help of an internet connection, the reporter
friend sent the stories to Frank in Washington via e-mail. He had
learned most of what he knew about the actual property from those
stories, some of which dated from the early thirties.

The property was located on the riverbank in the heart of the down-town section of Glennville. It
consisted of a stretch of road that began in the center of the city,
and then extended out of the city along an old set of railroad tracks. An old defunct coal company and some run down out buildings
were also included. Perhaps the most important of all, an abandoned
series of caves that ran under the city. The city had bricked up the
caves better than sixty years before, in response to the community. 

In June of 1935, a large group of
school children, along with two adults who supposedly were well
acquainted with the caves and their various twists and turns had set
out on a field trip to explore them. They had never returned. A
subsequent search had turned up no trace of them at all. Three weeks
later the city had sent a Public Works crew to brick up the entrance,
and it had been closed since. 

When the Army had bought the property, it was considered unsafe and had pretty much been allowed
to go to seed. The road leading out of it had likewise been closed
off some years before, and the area had become a hangout for young
kids and vagrants. On any given night the police ended up being
called to the area several times, and the city had debated for years
about what they should do with the property.

When the Army had offered to
purchase the property, the City Council had considered it a Godsend,
and had been more than happy to sign over the deed and accept the
check they offered. It had seemed to be the end of it. Frank had read
later articles, however, that seemed to indirectly touch on the
property. There was an increase in traffic after the sale, and an
unusual amount of security that surrounded the site. 

The local paper had downplayed it
to normal, or as close to normal as they could. Glennville had always
been a military town, and so most of the complaints of increased
traffic, were actually seen in a good light. Increased activity at
the property might eventually mean more jobs, and in a depressed
economy, which depended heavily on the nearby base, anything the Army
did was always reported in a positive light. As far as the local
paper was concerned, there was nothing negative to report. 

So the real clues had come from the
Syracuse paper. Franks’ friend, Jimmy Patrick, kept in touch, and had
contacted Frank whenever he came across anything that was related to
the smaller northern city. Syracuse itself had had tremendous
problems, initially, with the traffic. 

When Frank had called Jimmy, he had
only wanted to know what he knew about the place. But after Jimmy had
told him about the traffic problem, he had asked him to keep in
touch, and he had. He had also filled him in on everything else he
knew about Glennville. As he drove along, Frank mentally ticked off
what he knew about the northern New York City.

The Black River split the city in
two, and there were four bridges that spanned it. Three of the four
also spanned the property that the military had purchased, and those
three bridges were new. When they had been replaced, the road that
ran to the old, abandoned coal mine had been blocked off and
abandoned. Ironically, or maybe not, Frank thought, the Army Corps of
Engineers had done all of the work. 

The result was a small, discarded piece of property, with its own road leading in and out, in the heart
of the city. It was bound on the south side by the Black River and
the north by a sixty-foot rock ledge that rose just behind the old
historic downtown district. That was, besides the caves, what Frank
knew about the city itself. Jimmy had seemed to have caught Frank’s
enthusiasm for the mystery and had also sent him other articles he
found as well. 

Some of them, although at first
glance seemingly innocent, were quite revealing about what was
actually going on in Glennville.

The first one Jimmy had dug up and
sent him, was from the Public Notices section of the Syracuse paper.

“I thought it was kind of
strange,” Jimmy had said, “that they didn’t print the
notice in the Glennville paper.” 

Frank had read the long notice
carefully. It boiled down to a statement of facts concerning the
property in Glennville, and the Governments intended use of it.

The whole notice hadn’t made a lot
of sense. It seemed to be saying that they intended to invoke the
privilege to the mineral rights that had been deeded to them along
with the property. It also stated that the Army Corps of Engineers
had decided that the closed caves would need to be reopened for a
feasibility study, to determine whether or not they could be used as
a storage facility. It had been the first direct mention of the caves
at all. 

The notice went on to say that since
this would involve transportation of, as well as disposition of,
excess material from within the caves, the Corps had asked for, and
via the printing of the notice, been given permission to begin the
process without the necessary permits. They were also granted
permission to transport radioactive materials to and from the site,
the notice stated, and had likewise been granted a waiver of the
Clean Water Discharge Act, to allow undisclosed drainage into the
Black River. 

Subsequent notices and articles had
detailed contract awards for “unspecified” electrical and
plumbing work, along with contracts for per-piece orders of drywall
and lumber. Another notice Frank had read, contained contract awards
for concrete and asphalt, to a Texas corporation. The amounts were
unspecified, and were listed as needed for road repair, and sub-wall
replacement. Jimmy had thought some of it was unusual, and probably
even illegal, and although Frank had agreed, there was not much that
either of them could do without further proof. 

Jimmy had also told Frank that the
Army had been building up the area for some time and that from what
he’d been able to determine, they had begun work on the caves even
before they had completed the purchase of the land.

They both suspected that the notices
were only a cover for some larger project the Army was carrying out,
and the radioactive permits bothered him a great deal. Jimmy had
promised to stay in touch, and he had, up until last week. 

Frank had tried to contact him at
work several times but to no avail, and the messages he left were not
returned. He had tried calling Jimmy at home and his cell as well and had only been rewarded with his voicemail. That had seemed
strange to Frank also. Jimmy was a damn good reporter who knew the
value of answering his phone whenever it rang. At work, at home, in
the middle of the night, it made no difference. Jimmy always answered
the phone. Jimmy wasn’t answering and now instead of four rings
before voicemail, the phone was directing to voicemail after the
first ring.

He had even tried contacting Jimmy’s
editor, but he had refused to talk to him. He hadn’t given up though and had tried to call just this morning before he left Washington.
His call was put through, but all he had gotten was a steady busy
signal at his home, and when he had called his work number, a business-like secretary at the paper informed Frank, in a
matter-of-fact tone of voice, that Jimmy had left just the day before
on an assignment. When he had asked her where he had gone to, her
voice had gone even more business-like, and she had told him the
paper did not give out that sort of information. Just when Frank had
been about to try a different, more tactful approach to find out
what was going on, she had hung up on him. The whole thing, the
caves, and Jimmy’s disappearance weighed heavily upon him.

Frank inhaled deeply from the
cigarette, and then tossed it out the open window. 

That was why he was here. None of it
figured. The base itself had hundreds of acres of land, so why did
they need more? Why the caves? And what the hell had happened to
Jimmy? …

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