Aftershock

FBR chapter 7 scene 6 is below the previous post

2009-01-15T09:49:00.000-08:00

I have made changed this morning to the end of scene five where Jeseka died and Jasper went after Ben. After those changes there is a complete scene 6 with Ben and Darlene on their way to Coos Bay.
Scroll down two posts to read it - I just added it to the scene 5 post below.

Alan goes to work!

2009-01-14T16:00:00.000-08:00

Ok chickies, in response to demands for a more fluid and readable FBR, I've created a link over to the right for chapt 1-7 of FBR in acrobate pdf format - just click on the link and you'll get the whole thing from chapter one. I put it together this afternoon out of all the places I've written chapters and I don't THINK there are any omissions or duplications but it certainly remains a rough draft.
I am not going back now from to the end of book one to fix anything, as I would like to continue on with the story through it's conclusion about chapter 15.

Tomorrow I start working at the big tent RV show and for 10 days I'll be selling tv junk to people who should kill their TVS instead of purposefully showing up for further brainwashing. I'm doing this for the value of the durable assets (an ounce and 1/2 of gold), yes for the cash, because somehow Paulson and Bernake have missed sending me a Fed helicopter full cash. Yes it is wage slavery, yes it is prostitution of the soul, but it's only 10 days. Whew.

Enjoy the longer FBR over to the right - characters are about to misbehave - coming up in the next scene so you want to stay tuned. I won't be able to talk by Saturday night - there will be over 10,000 people walking through the big tent, but I still might be able to write.

Alan, taking one for greed.

FBR, chapter 7, scene 5 and 6

2009-01-13T09:25:00.000-08:00

I have made a few important changes to the end of scene five below and added scene six. I had fun with this one.

FBR, chapter 7, scene 5 and 6

Jasper reached the fire and Bones settled down but wouldn't leave her side. She looked down at the dog, Bones looked at her and immediately laid down flat and only his eyes darted about.
Bea reached the campsite and grabbed Jasper. “What are you doing, what are thinking, are you alright?” all in a rush. Without waiting for a reply, “do you know they have the flu, did you think before you exposed yourself, you know better, jesus fucking mary and joseph what the fuck is in your head?”

Jasper let her mother wind down, Mark was a little way off uphill, rocking back and forth on his feet, unsure of what to do. Jason was still staring at Bones, who lay perfectly still which he had never seen since he met the dog. Jeseka stopped coughing long enough to watch the awkward exchange while Roxanne stood slightly behind her and watched Mark.

Jasper wondered as she often did around her little tribe what the big deal was. Bones rolled his eyes up at her and she silently told him to be still. All these people worry about things that make no difference and then put themselves at risk all the time paying no attention to where they are, what the trail holds for them. She understood now that they lived in huge noise in their heads, hardly hearing the world around them, hardly aware of the world. But the boy was different. He watched the dog and then watched her.

“I'm Jason,” he said, holding out his hand to her.

Jasper could here Bea grown as Jasper reached out and touched his hand on the back, then pulled him toward her, so that they were about a foot apart. She bent down and brought his hand to her mouth and licked the back of it.

Jason was too startled to pull away. Then Jasper stepped in and licked the side of his face. She stepped back and said, “I'm called Jasper. You're very hungry.”

Mark watched this play out. Jasper had just licked the boy's face, any hope that she wasn't exposed was pretty much gone now. Bea was there with them. Oh fuck what would he say to Ben about this? Fuck, thought Mark, I'm never going to see Ben again. In one day our tribe is decimated. Jeez no wonder Ben wanted to stay hidden, and they had until his friend, his contribution to the group, Darlene, turned them all in.

Jasper caught Mark's eye and motioned him down. Every instinct about this mess made Mark want to flee. This is why he used to work in the woods when the world was right, before it was all messed up like now. Too many people, too many obligations.

Suddenly the tension in him drained and his mind was quiet. Jasper was there watching him, inside, he could feel it. He stepped forward and walked to the group, which felt pretty anticlimactic. Sure thought Mark to himself, until I'm sick and puking blood.”

“They're hungry Mark. Ok if I go get them something?”

“Do you realize that we are exposed now Jasper. We can die from this.”

Jasper smiled at him, “no silly, you smell fine.”

God it was hard to talk to her sometimes. “Sure get them something. Might as well have full bellies while we wait to see what happens.”

Jasper leaned over both of the women and took a deep breath through her nose. “I'll be back.”

Bones whined as Jasper left, looked up and then was quiet. As soon as she was out of sight Bones was up smelling the new comers and trying to get a small piece of the rabbit Bea shared among the hungry group.

“I'm sorry Mark,” said Bea, sitting on a fallen log, “I couldn't abandon her. We had no choice in the long run, we are going to be exposed no matter what.”

“I got it. Just I was hopping somehow that Ben really would get back or Darlene with the vaccine and . . .” then he fell quiet.

“Ben and Darlene won't be coming back Mark, you know that. We can't keep wishing things were true or not and live in a future that might be. Ben sacrificed himself for us, for me,” her voice choked a bit and she wiped at her eyes. “Anyway, it's done now.”

“No, it's just begun now,” said Mark. With that they were drawn into the conversations around the fire, getting to know the young boy and the two women.

Ben got more wood and added it to the fire. Jeseka was hot to the touch, but complained of being cold. Roxanne tried to comfort her, the effects of the marijuana were gone now in the face of Jeseka's moment by moment collapse into the flu. Bea brought water from the creek at the bottom of the hill and used it to keep a moist cloth bathing Jeseka.

Bones was the first to freeze and then run off into the woods. Jasper entered the clearing with Bones bouncing at her feet and at the two nutria that swung from her hand. Her spear was tucked through her loose leather belt, and her other hand had bracken ferns formed into a loose basket, filled with moss and greenery.

An hour later everyone was well fed, and Jasper had made a soup from the stomachs of the two animals and was spooning it into Jeseka who hardly responded now, her breathing labored. Occasionally she coughed and there as a trace of blood at the corner of her mouth.

Mark looked on trying to hide his dismay at the speed of this disease. He looked around wondering who was next. He remembered Ben saying the mortality rate was more than half. Jasper watched his face. Bea and Roxanne were tending Jeseka full time now, and were paying scant attention to Mark.

“She'll be quick to go Mark, she smells like she is leaving.”

“What?” not sure that he had heard right.

“She won't keep us long, she is going back into all of this now, she is dying.”

Jason looked up. “Don't say that, she's going to get better. You'll jinx her if you talk like that.”

Jasper looked at him and said you don't have it, you are already fixed.
“What do you mean by that,” his voice rising.

“You already had it, and you are fine.”

Jason looked at Mark. “What is she talking about?”

Mark shrugged, “she knows things, she had stuff happen to her, and, I can't explain it. But usually she is right.”

“Are you a witch?” said Jason, staring at Jasper, pretty sure there was some sort of cruel joke going on while his new friend Jeseka was apparently dying just a few feet away.

Jasper looked at him without replying.

“Can you tell if Roxanne will get it?

“No I can't tell for her yet.”

“Shit.”

“Yea,” said Mark, “I'm afraid for all of us now, especially Bea? I don't think Ben would forgive me if anything happened to her and the baby.”

“She is fine, you too. I fixed you and Ben and Darlene and Bea.”

Mark shook his head like he hadn't heard right. “What?”

“None of us will get the flu, I gave us the vaccine.”

“What are you talking about Jasper. Darlene might bring the vaccine with her back, and somehow I don't it, besides we've been exposed now and Ben said the vaccine had to be given before exposure.”

“Yes, and that is why I put it on all of you.”

Oh god, thought Mark to himself, she thinks her salves for the cuts and poison oak sores was the same as the vaccine for the flu. No point in telling her different, we'll get it or not.

“Not.” said Jasper's clear voice.

“Look honey, it doesn't work that way,” said Mark, sharply to Jasper who was looking away.

“Who are you talking to,” asked Jason, looking around.

“Jasper.”

“She didn't say anything.”

Jasper looked over at him. “I put the vaccine in the salve with the other healing items. It was the exact right smell that was in the shoulders of all three of the soldiers. I took it from one of them.”
Mark froze finally understanding the teeth marks on the last of the three men. Jasper had chewed off the vaccination site, held it in her mouth, oh jesus fucking christ, he thought.

“Your funny.” said Jasper. Mark didn't bother looking up, this time he knew that no one spoke. Bea watched this exchange and realized something big had just happened, but her hands were busy cleaning the blood that now dribbled down Jeseka's chin with every breath.

They talked late through the afternoon, holding a living wake while Jeseka slid down. She died that early in the night and they buried her under a magnificent cedar near the edge of the clearing.. Even Bones felt the mood, staying still at Jason's feet. Roxanne wept until Bea made a tea for all of them from the ferns and mushrooms that Jasper had brought back. Jasper poured and then watched as they each fell into a soft gentle sleep. Roxanne was the last, and finally she too let go, giving into the effects of the narcotic tea. Jasper watched and waited. She covered them as best she could to keep them warm. She sniffed and there was no rain coming tonight.

Jasper had not understood completely why Ben had left with Darlene. Oh, she was a normal bright girl besides this other part of her that was growing, but sometimes she didn't pay attention too well to the adult talk. Now she understood that Ben thought he would get them killed and was exchanging his freedom, maybe his life for the vaccine. Shit she thought, she should have paid attention. She had inoculated him too.

With that, she cleaned her knife and tucked it firmly in her belt, checked her spear, and as the moon rose over the ridge above them, bathing the hill in a soft gray light, she caught Bones' eye in the moonlight. She made sure he understood that nothing were to get close to these people tonight. With that, she ran up the hillside with fast, effortless strides. headed towards the clearing where they have left Ben and Darlene early that morning. Both were easy to track, but Darlene was ripe, so Jasper wouldn't have to look for sign, she would smell her the entire way.

Far from this hill, the cub, a cub no more, lay quiet, waiting, his mother was moving. She was going hunting, and sometimes now she took him with her. She wasn't hunting, but she was going and this time the young male would come. The girl was moving in the night.

End of Scene 5

FBR chapter 7, Scene 6
Location: on the trail to Coos Bay out of the mountains.

Ben stirred, trying not to wake Darlene. They had covered only ten miles on this first day, but it was a rugged ten miles as they slowly followed the creeks up to and over hill after hill, but by late afternoon they were descending towards the coast. The air smelled different, and the trees were more uniformly Doug Fir.

Ben wasn't terrified of what Patricia had waiting for him. He had put that away when he made the decision to make the trade. What kept him tossing was the sure knowledge that Patricia was unlikely to keep her side of the deal. She had force at hand that she could use against him. What he couldn't judge was how much of this was personal for her. She had never met him so he hoped that this was just to make sure that no one knew about the fuel storage depot. But how could she be sure he hadn't confided to someone?

Darlene rustled as she turned in the thick needle bed they had made in the debris shelter under the large fir. They built it just big enough for two, and had more than a foot of needles below them. And the sides of the shelter was only a foot above their heads when they were burrowed in. It was getting second nature to all of them to build these shelters quickly. It was actually a little too warm, and that was part of Ben's inability to get to sleep solidly.

Ben thought that Patricia would have known from her conversations with Darlene by cell phone that Ben had not told anyone about the fuel depot. That might keep the rest of them safe. If they all knew she would have to kill them all. Ben knew there was a very real possibility that she would kill them all anyway.
He sighed and turned over again, trying to quiet his mind. But it wasn't just his mind that was restless. Ben had formed a connection with Bea, but with the rape and her pregnancy Ben had no physical relationship at all. Nor had Mark for that matter, and his body could smell Darlene laying close by.

Darlene bothered him because she acted naively, gullible, but he was well aware that she was not really guilty of anything. She was not a shrewd woman, she was just a woman. Despite Ben taunting Mark about Darlene's overt sexuality, the low cut waitress uniform with the breasts spilling out, despite he intellectual revulsion towards such women, he kept thinking about her lying so close. After the long hike they had washed up quickly in a nearby stream and Darlene had rinsed out her underwear and hung her bra and panties over the tree limbs, near to their small fire to dry for the morning. Ben was well aware that she had only one of Mark's shirts half buttoned laying next to him.

It was no time to think that way, Ben knew that, they were both probably going to be dead in two days, though Darlene probably had confidence in her deal with Patricia. Ben could hear her even breathing in the close confines of the shelter.

Go to sleep Ben, he said to himself silently, aware that he was erect and hard. Go to sleep. Just as he settled in and drifted off, Darlene's had reached in and lightly stroked his cock.

“Jesus,” said Ben, jerking upright, ramming his head into the roof of the shelter. Fir needle dust and debris fell into his eyes and nose. Sneezing he said, “What are you doing.”

“You need my help, I need something too or we'll never get any rest.”

“Stop it.”

There was just enough light from the dying fire, that Ben could she Darlene sit up as much as possible. She pulled Mark's shirt over her head, and tossed the shirt to the front of the shelter.

Ben could see the outline of her nipples, standing hard on her large breasts. Darlene rolled toward him and said, “You haven't had a woman for month's Ben, and I haven't had anyone for since before the world went crazy. Make love to me.”

“Goddamn it Darlene, your the reason we're in this mess. What in the world makes you think I would have anything to do with you let alone have sex? Put your shirt on and go to sleep.” Ben struggled to sound authoritative, but felt his voice betraying him even as he spoke.

Darlene said only, we'll if you won't make love to me, you can still fuck me, right?” her voice a throaty laugh in the night as she rolled over presenting her gifts to Ben.
Ben was drifting in a deep sleep dream, it was before the flu back when his girlfriend Ann-Brooke was his lover. There were so many things she didn't do, he had to be careful what he suggested, what he asked for. But in his dream she did them all.

Sunlight snapped him awake a moment later. Darlene was sound asleep, Ben was naked and cold. He was angry with himself, and got out to get the fire going. They needed to get on the trail if they were to make the miles they needed to make today. Surprisingly he felt great. Clapping his hands together he plucked his clothes from where they had aired last night and brought them nearer the fire to warm a bit before he dressed.

It was a rare mountain morning, with the sun promising a spring that was not far away and the sounds of the woods changing from the night to day. He guessed it was almost nine, through more wood on the fire and held his pants up to the fire, first one side then the other.

He was in that position when he felt the something sharp and cold reach through his legs and touch his balls. He jumped high and just missed landing in the fire, stumbling, he dropped his pants.

“Fuck Darlene, don't do that!” he shouted, turning.

Jasper smiled, but her eyes were not.

End scene 6 chapter 7

FBR, chapter 7, scene 4

2009-01-11T16:14:00.000-08:00

Scene four is now complete- Tuesday morning - the end of the scene is important if you read the incomplete scene yesterday. - alan

FBR, chapter 7, scene 4, complete now

Jeseka doubled up, coughing again, so hard this time that Roxanne reached over and pounded her back. “Jeez honey, this stuff's not that good. What's a matter, do you have a tickle?

Jeseka brought her head up, red faced, “No, I just feel terrible.”

Roxanne was sitting along side Jeseka on the log, and Jason was opposite, watching with some concern how fast Jeseka was getting bad. Jason had noticed her sweating as they walked along, on a slight uphill grade. Usually Roxanne was out in front setting the pace for her mother and for Jason. Jason had joined up with the Rainbow pair of mother and daughter almost a week before when they were all stranded trying to move south on Route 101 near Neskowin on the Oregon Coast. I-5 had been closed for a month, but up until now it was possible to hitch rides on 101. Three days ago they had run into their first road block, local cops, not the Feds denying everyone movement on the road unless they paid a toll. Their hitch that time paid, but said no more at the second stop in Lincoln City and raised a fuss. Jeseka warned him but he said he had a goddamn right to use the road as much as anyone, and seeing as he was driving a converted Volkswagen Van, it was a pretty short discussion that ended up with the driver being hauled away.

Jason and the Rainbow mom and daughter slipped into the crowd and walked away. They couldn't go south because of local roadblocks so they headed east into the coast range, after stealing a good atlas at the local library. Jason went because his family was already dead. His whole family had come down with the flu, but Jason awoke after several days enough to drink and eat and in a week more he was feeling normal. He buried his parents and his sister in the back yard, then began going south towards Los Angeles where his favorite uncle lived. He tried to reach them by phone, but the phone system was in the “all circuits are busy state almost all the time.

Roxane felt Jeseka's forehead. “You're burning up honey. We need to find some house and get you to bed.”

“I'll be fine, it's just the weed was irritating, I'll be fine in a few minutes. Just make some tea or something, please mom?”

Jason had become friends with the golden retriever that belonged to someone somewhere and somehow Roxanne had ended up taking him along. Jason called him Bones because he was skinny and fluid and his joints stuck out all over. Jeseka said his name was Dead which Jason didn't think was funny.

Roxanne had the tea going and Jeseka had curled up by the fire to nap for a few minutes when Bones started pacing and watching the trail they had just come in on. Jason wasn't sure what to do if they had company, they didn't have any food except for a few potatoes in Roxanne's leather bag, and the only protection they had was Bones who would certainly lick someone to death or drown them in drool. Ben could not imagine Bones actually biting someone. This was the second time Bones had gone on alert in the short time they had been there.

“Quiet down Bones, if we've got company better welcome them,'' said Roxanne.

At that moment Mark and Bea walked down the trail and stopped short of the fire by about fifty yards.
“Hi folks,” said Mark. “I'm Mark, and this is my friend Bea.”

Roxanne looked them over. “I'm Roxy and this is Jeseka and Jason. The bouncing mutt is called Bones. You want to come on down and share the fire? We would be happy to hear what you have seen, because we have been seeing some very uncool happenings.”

Mark shifted uncomfortably. “Well there's no good way to ask or tell, but have you been exposed to the flu?”

Jason walked closer to Jeseka. “Yes we have. I've had it and got better, and we have been seeing people for days who are coughing and then, well, giving up.”

“Then we're going to have to take a pass on sharing your fire. Bea here is pregnant and we haven't been exposed.”

Mark talked for a minute more and then he and Bea turned to retrace their steps up the trail. Mark took a few strides and then turned and said, “Say have you seen a young girl, a little younger than Jason come by?”

Mark held his breath afraid that Jasper had already exposed herself, shit then what?”

“No said Roxanne rubbing Jeseka's neck. No one else has come up here at all. You're the first people we've seen in the hills since we left Lincoln City.”

“Wait,” cried Roxanne, “you wouldn't have any food you could spare do you? We haven't eaten for a bit, and, oh I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked. We know, not many well fed people right now.”

“We've can spare a little - Rabbit from yesterday OK?”

“That would be great. Strange, my daughter and I used to be vegetarians, but that's not even a thought anymore, we're just hungry all the time.”

Mark kept his distance while Bea pulled some meat wrapped in an old plastic grocery bag. She laid it on a clean tuft of grass and turned to walk back up the trail.

Bones sprung up and raced towards the meat, Roxanne cried “No Bones. Stop.”

Bones veered away and bounded towards the edge of the brush, his tail wagging. Jasper stepped into the clearing and laughed as Bones bounced off or her, around her, unable to stay still. Bones took off towards the fire and Jasper followed.

“Stop Jasper,” yelled Mark from a hundred yards up the trail. “No, Jasper, stop, they have the flu,” he yelled. It was too late Jasper was at the fire.

“Oh fuck!” said Mark

Bea had reversed and was headed towards Jasper too,

“Bea, you can't, she's exposed.”

Bea waved her middle finger back and Mark and continued down the hill towards her daughter, fully aware of the death sentence she might be passing on herself.

End of scene 4

FBR chapter 7, scene 1 through scene 3

2009-01-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

I've added the second and third small scenes to the bottm of this scene - so there is new reading today - Saturday.

FBR, chapter 7, scene 1,2, and 3.

“He'll be alright,” said Mark, speaking to himself as well as Bea.

Bea walked a pace behind Mark and to the left. Looking down, concentrating on the steep climb into the Rogue Wilderness. Both Mark and Bea carried large packs with enough supplies for a few days.

“No he won't,” said Bea softly.

That morning, the morning, in Bea's mind, they had left Darlene and Ben behind at last night's camp and taken the truck deeper into the BLM land, and then almost to one of the trail heads on the northern flank of the Rogue Wilderness area. They found a over grown logging cut and backed the truck uphill under the larger firs at the edge of a clear cut. They used the dry brown brush to build a blind in front of the truck. It was the best they could do.

Mark caught the slightest whiff of smoke. Jasper had left the truck with them but was paralleling them, Mark hoped, collecting mushrooms and rose hips. Jasper had been quiet on the ride in, not depressed, maybe sad, thought Mark. The past months since her transformation he had learned not to be concerned when she was in the woods alone. But smoke meant people. People and Jasper, well that was of some concern. He wished he could call her back.

“You smell that?”

“Yea, just now.”

“Could it be a forest fire?”

“Not in March, maybe a lightning strike, but that would just smolder.”

“What do we do? Jasper's out there.”

“If it's a campfire, we need to see who is up here, but we can't let them see us. I think we'll just continue up this cut and see. The breeze is towards us, coming from the west. Lets go slow. Maybe Jasper will come back when she smells it.”

Jasper watched the three people eating and laughing around the fire. They were taking hits off a joint they were sharing. Jasper knew all about that from her mom's occasional smoke days. The smell of frying Spam filled her nostrils. She could almost taste the salt. She knew Ben would not want her to come near these people. She felt a pang of sadness for Ben. She should have gone with him and she should have removed the Darlene problem when she had the chance. She could still run back and kill her. No, Ben and Mark would be upset. Mark especially acted unusual around Darlene Jasper noted. Angry, protective, and distant, all at the same time.

Jasper knew she should trot up the mountain to the road and tell Mark and Bea about this. Mark said they needed to be out of sight for three or four days, then Ben would contact them. He didn't seem to be very sure about that. But Jasper couldn't pull herself away from the laughter, the salt, and most of all the dog.

A young golden retriever, his whole body wagging his tail was dancing around the three of them, crouching with his head between his paws and then leaping up to jam his nose to the knees and crotches of the three people.

Jasper could see that two of the people were young, just like the dog. As a matter of fact they sort of all acted like the dog, happy, which was something Jasper hadn't felt from others in a long time. There was one young girl, older than herself, maybe eighteen, and the other female on closer inspection was a older woman, maybe in her thirties. They both had messy matted hair, and knitted rainbow colored caps, long colorful dresses, 'jeez, how do your run in those?” she thought.

The third person around the fire was a boy, well, a young man actually. He was not wearing the hippie clothes that the women were, but was in jeans and a plaid shirt. He looked like the loggers kids she had met when her mom landed them in Myrtle Creek, a life time ago, but really only last year.

Jasper sighed and melted into the forest, and as she did, the retriever looked up, alert. He began barking a warning to group, but the two women were sort of out of it. The boy looked into the deep brush where Jasper had been. He said, “shh Sadie, no bears today,” more hopeful than sure.

End of scene 1, chapter 7

Patricia gently slid her Blackberry closed. It was a time of complete chaos in the federal government. Resources on the ground were drying up. She could no longer reliable move assets in the field. Last year she could have put her finger on the map, zoomed in, pointed at a person and have them eliminated before the hour was up. Well, stop exaggerating, she thought to herself. One day anyway.
Now nothing could be done quickly or reliably. The staggering bureaucracy of the federal government was grinding slow and slower as revenues declined, taxes went unpaid, the Federal reserve board printed more and more cash to cover short falls, but that cash never seemed to reach the payroll departments. Each office of every branch had become defensive, focused on survival in their own world of dwindling money, and they had never played well together before, now it is was almost impossible.
Of course Patricia loved this, in chaos was opportunity to advance. Homeland security was a well defended kingdom within the government, and while she couldn't get any help outside of it, inside of it she could act without much oversight.
She played with the Blackberry in her hand, thinking about the latest chess piece to move. Satellite recog had just gotten around to forwarding the intel that Global Security had gone ops mode yesterday. They videos forwarded to her were very telling, including several of a truck leaving the active area heading west. Patricia smiled. Arthur my love, what would daddy think of you now, what would he say? Patricia looked up at her father's picture and thought about the standard she sought to achieve, his standard.
The Blackberry chirped, she looked down to see the number she had assigned to Darlene displayed.

“P.”

“Is that you Patricia? This is Darlene.”

“No names, again I have to tell you, no names.”

“I have him.”

“You have who?”
“Ben.”

“No names.”

“Fuck, I'm sorry, I'm nervous, ah, I have who you want.”

“I think you're being a bit coy. Don't you think I know what is going on?”

“What do you mean, he's with me, we'll meet you.”

Patricia hesitated. Could it be true, could Arthur have missed again?

“What about the others?” Patricia asked.

“Ah,” Darlene hesitated, “they're gone.”

Patricia was silent for moment, then spoke. “Ok, where are you, what is the closest town?”

“We're hiking towards Coos Bay, B.. ah, him and I.”

“Where are the others going?

“I don't know, B... ah, he talked to them alone and they went off in the truck.”

“You're his captive?”

“No, well, not like that, no, I mean I hit him and tied him up so your people could get him, so I could help you, you know, like you said. Anyway he got away before your people got to the shelter, that spooky girl Jasper is always around she helped him.

Patricia sighed, pointless to mention the name problem, pointless because it just wasn't going to matter soon in any case. “Why is he coming with you then?”

“I made him see that he was a big danger to the others, I convinced him to turn himself in, for you Dar. .. oh yea.”

Patricia was aware that Darlene's story was a mix of fabrication, self aggrandizement, yet there was an element of truth to it too. “Is he there with you?”

“Yes.”

“Put him on.”

End scene 2

Chapter 7 Scene 3

Ben flipped Darlene's phone closed and put it back in his pocket. He and Darlene were on a hillside facing the coast of Oregon, some thirty rugged miles away. They would be meeting Patricia on the third day in the evening at coordinates he had given her while on the phone. She reluctantly agreed to the exchange of Ben for the vaccine while actually never using the word. What she said is that she could protect them, the other three and the unborn baby too, but that Ben needed to talk to her as soon as he could. She didn't argue much, which frustrated Ben. His only bargaining chip was himself, and once he handing himself to her, there was no incentive for Patricia to keep her word.

Eventually they agreed that Ben and Darlene would come to Coos Bay, Darlene would meet Patricia, get the vaccine and return to Ben. Only once the vaccine was on hidden, and Mark called with the location would Ben return to Patrica. Patricia agreed to that and that scared Ben more than anything. Ben would have no reason to come back after getting the vaccine, Patricia should have insisted on a simultaneous swap. She didn't. Why not?

“We better get moving, if we're going to cover fifteen miles a day for the next two days.”Ben was in excellent shape from his line walking job and from the last months of foraging and living close to the mountains. Darlene had slimmed down too, and the fact that her cigarettes ran out early on helped her find new strength and endurance.

Darlene felt like a great weight had been lifted from her. Everything was out in the open now. Patricia would be happy and everything would get straightened out with Ben, and if even if he thought she wanted to kill him, he would understand once he met her that she was a rare woman in government, a woman who cared and would keep her word. Too bad Bea and Jasper and Mark were so mad at her. Damn, wouldn't they have done the same thing?

She hoisted her back while Ben studied the map.

“We have two long hard climbs so we'll try to get as far as we can by late afternoon. We'll have to build a quick shelter for the night, our second day will be the long one.”

“Don't worry Ben, I'm sure you'll get this all straightened out with her, I'm sure it's just a big mess.”

Ben shook his head at the way Darlene could overlook everything that had happened since the night they blew up his trailer. Ben was well aware that this was likely a one way trip. He was sick to his stomach to go, but sicker to have Bea, Jasper or Mark killed while he was the hunted one.

“Yea, I'm sure you're right, lets get going.”

“I'm right behind you honey,” said Darlene, her mood buoyant with the happy thought that she would get to see her son in his new surroundings.

End chapter 7 scene 3.

FBR chapter 6, scene 10

2009-01-06T07:53:00.000-08:00

Complete to end of chapter six now.

FBR, chapter 6, scene 10, chapter six is done..

FBR, chapter 6, scene 10.

“We should dump the truck,” said Mark, hands gripping the wheel as they bounced through dips and potholes on the logging road.

“We can't carry everything. We would be extremely slow.” said Ben, riding against the door. Bea was crammed between the shifter and Ben. Jasper was in the bed of the truck watching Darlene who was bound and gagged on the floor of the truck, rolled up in a blanket to stop her from hurting herself. Jasper watched the back up the road, looking for pursuit. Every few moments she looked at Darlene who's eyes glared back at her. Whenever the three up front we busy, Jasper would place her spear at Darlene's throat, and silently mouth, “your dead.”

“They can track the truck from the heat of the engine. I'm surprised we haven't been stopped yet.”

Ben was thoughtful for a moment. “You're right Mark, they could and they should have. So where are they? They should have had these roads covered and they should have come at us with air, not foot soldiers. The question is, who are they?”

“What are you talking about? There that bitch Patricia's bunch, Homeland Security, isn't it?” asked Bea.

“All this has been bothering me right from the beginning. Why did they try to kill me, what for, I'm nobody. Why didn't they come back and get me when Global had me? Why did Global leave when other helicopters showed up. Who were the men Jasper saw when Jasper had her run in with the gang person at the stream? From the beginning there has not been a concerted effort to find me, or the rest of you.”

Bea watched Ben for a minute, “So what is going on Ben, have you figured anything out?”

“Mark, can you work up to a ridge top, maybe near one of the park and hike spots along the wilderness area?” They were headed west towards the ocean, driving deeper into the Coast Range mountains that bordered the ocean in Oregon. “We need to get face to face on all of this.”

Four hours later, dusk was beginning to fall, the truck was out of sight under a large fir, hopefully from satellite as well as anyone else that might venture this way.

Bea stirred the new fir, adding dry dead branches from the ones that fell under the old firs. She had positioned the fire near the base of a thicket of hazelnut and blackberry bramble so that the slight prevailing wind took the smoke through the brambles, breaking it up. Bea felt the chill up here, they were higher than their normal camp and though there was no snow, the ground was sodden and the air near freezing as the darkness approached.

She had placed three large stones in the center of the small area she had cleared and built the fire over them, so as it burned hotter she was able to put a covered pot over the three rocks and get water from the nearby spring up to boiling.

Darlene sat on a tarp at the base of a large fir, her hands tied behind her back, duct tape across her mouth. She glared at Bea. Bea's feelings were mixed. She knew Darlene so well, but apparently not at all. Bea had cleaned the blood from Ben's head and she was clear that Darlene was responsible for that and that was as far as she needed to think about that. She was surprised a bit that she was so protective of Ben, but she guessed that was not so odd in these circumstances.
Mark and Ben completed a quick shelter of branches and debris, it would provide some warmth for the night. Using one of the lower fir branches they had created an A frame of branches on each side – open at one end, the end towards the fire. Then they had used a tarp and loaded it will fir needles, moss and small fir branches. They dumped this over the branches making up the sides of the A frame, then filled the ground inside with ten inches or more of the same material, making an insulating bed. The closed end of the A frame got the same treatment. The tarp went over the structure and was weighted down with rocks. It was wide enough to have all five of them sleep parallel for the one night with some degree of comfort. Once the sun was down there would be no fire as the heat signature to satellites would be too obvious.

“We can't carry her around like that.”

“I'm open to suggestions?” said Ben.

Mark looked at Darlene's face, tear were tracking down over the duct tape. Got up and helped her up, and cut the rope that tied her hands behind her. He held the face with one hand and tried to ease the duct tape off. Darlene pushed him away and ripped the tape off, and began cursing immediately.

“You've got not right to tie me up, you fucking assholes, I'll kill you all if my son is harmed!” she shouted, but clamped her mouth shut as Jasper pressed a knife against her ribs from the rear, leaned over and purred - “hush,” digging the point through her coat and blouse and nicking the skin about her ribs.

“Sit by the fire.” said Mark to Darlene. “you need to tell us why, then we'll know what to do I guess.” Ben watched Mark and wondered what Mark would do or could do. Ben knew they couldn't carry her along as a captive. Hell, he didn't even know where to go now, Darlene was a small problem compared to the larger problems facing all of them.

Darlene looked from face to face, glaring. “Why should we die because Homeland Security is after Ben? I mean, what the fuck did you do Ben, and why didn't you mention that you were being hunted when you and Mark dragged me up here?”

“Whoa,” said Mark. You asked to come, you specifically asked me to help you convince Ben to take you along. There was no dragging. Fuck,” said Mark, kicking at the dirt with his heal.

“You stupid bitch, you nearly got us all killed. Stop worrying about how you got here and tell us what you did, who the fuck are you? Why did you hit Ben and tie him up?” spate Bea. She rose from the ground looming over Darlene. “You dumb fuck, you almost got my daughter killed too!”

Bea's hand shot out and cuffed Darlene across the face knocking her back onto her ass. Bea lept at the lady, but Ben pushed himself between the two women. Darlene sprang to her feet and started clawing at Ben, trying to get at Bea. Mark stood and forcibly put Darlene back on the ground.

“Don't make me tie you up again.”

“But that bitch hit me, that's OK I suppose.”

“I don't think you're in a position right now to worry about that. You have bigger problems,” said Mark.
Ben got Bea pushed down, hugging her tightly as she sobbed into his shoulder. Jasper remained squatting opposite all this action, smiling, unconcerned. Returned the pot of water to the three stone fire after everyone was seated. What fun, she thought.

Ben put his head down. Can this get any worse he thought. “Darlene, what is your connection to the men who came today?

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Ok, why did you hit me and tie me up?”

Darlene looked away, then back towards the fire, then her eyes flicked up and the left and she began to speak. “I figured if they got you they would leave the rest of us alone.”

“But you told someone where we were didn't you?”

“No, how would I, that's stupid, I just wanted to stay alive. What the fuck are they after you for anyway?”

“We'll talk about that in a minute but you didn't talk to anyone?”

“How could I?”

“By phone.”

“You have all the phones, I don't have a phone, what are you talking about?” asked Darlene, beginning to look down at the ground now, then right and left.

Jasper watched Darlene's eyes darting, lying, making them all unsafe. She had become other. Jasper could smell the difference and looked at Mark to see what he wanted her to do. She held the knife lightly in her hand, ready.

Ben shook his head gently, mostly because his head throbbed from clubbing, but mostly because he could think of only one thing to do. He watched as Jasper too and knew that the situation was explosive, even if Darlene was oblivious to it.

“Darlene's right I'm afraid. They are after me, not all of you. We have been in isolation for over three months and there is still no vaccination program for the public. We can't stay isolated forever. The men that attacked Mark and Jasper had recent inoculations, so perhaps a vaccine is close, or maybe it is not. Perhaps it will be available to all, but as far as we have heard on the shortwave, there are no trials at all in the general public, so what do we do?

“We need to wait,” said Bea. “It will come, in time, the vaccinations will come. We just need to move and hide out and wait and listen.”

“What about your baby?” asked Mark. “Are you willing to deliver a child with only us for your medical team? No, Ben's right, we need to take our chances with the infection. Some of us will make it. Anyway, I hope some of us do. It is better that what is happening here today,” he said looking at Darlene.
“Thanks Mark,” said Ben, “But I don't think those odds are good enough. We need to get the vaccine that the military has. We have to trade for it and get us all inoculated. It think the Feds have it and I think they are delaying, on purpose.”

“Why would they delay?” asked Bea. “Besides if they do have it we would be the last ones they would give it to.”

Ben shifted, looking at each of them in turn. “Maybe we can trade for it.”

“Trade what?” asked Mark.

“Me.”

“What? Are you nuts!” shouted Bea.

“Look, we don't know why they want me or even who. It isn't really the military, it's Homeland Security and their goons. But I don't think those soldiers were accidentally here, and I think they had inoculations for H5N1. The only thing we have that they want is me. They are gong to keep coming until we are all dead.” Ben was silent watching each of them absorb the information.

“But we need you here,” said Bea, her wiping her at her eyes, angry.

“Come on Bea, there is no other way. We can't hide forever, eventually that evil bitch will find a way to kill me, and you too. But if we give her me, if she is convinced only I know what she suspects I must know, then perhaps after inoculation, Mark and Jasper can get all of you out of southern Oregon, away from second thoughts by Global and Homeland Security.”

“That's a lot of fucking ifs?” said Mark.

“Then I'm open to suggestions from any of you, including you Darlene.”

“You can't trade with these people, how the fuck would you get near them without them killing you on sight?” asked Bea.

“Darlene can,” said Ben softly.

“I told you I don't know what you're talking about. But your damn right that you are the problem and the sooner you are away from us the better off we'll be,” said Darlene.

“You mean your son?” said Mark.

“You shut the fuck up! I told you never to mention him,” snapped Darlene.

“You lost that right when you tried to sacrifice Ben for your safety.”

“It wasn't for my safety, it was for . . .,” she stumbled to a stop. “Anyway I wouldn't know how to contact them.”

Ben felt in his coat pocket and brought out Darlene's phone, flipped it open and hit the recent calls button. “Why don't you try that one,” he said, pointing to the last call. The date and time stamp were clearly from this morning.

Jasper looked at Mark's face and that was good enough, she rocked forward on the balls of her feet and uncoiled over the fire bowling Darlene over. As they landed Jasper was on her back, her teeth locked on Darlene's neck. Her left arm brought the knife around beneath Darlene's ample breast and brought the razor sharp point to bear.

“No, we need her,” shouted Ben.

Jasper's hand vibrated and the knife began to release a thin stream of blood through Darlene's clothes.

“Stop,” said Mark lowly. Jasper growled into Darlene's throat and in an instant rolled away from her. Darlene spun and vomited onto the grass in great wracking heaves.

No one went to help her. Ben held up the phone. “Darlene will make the deal but we have to do it well away from here, where there are witnesses. Darlene and I will leave at first light for the coast. You three disappear into the wilderness area along the Rogue river.”

Darlene had recovered enough to roll over, the vomit staining the front of her blouse. “What the fuck makes you think I'll help you? They'll kill me son if I help you, you can all fucking die for all I care, especially that fucking animal,” she said pointing at Jasper who now sat tense next to Mark. He was trying gently to get the knife away from her. Jasper hissed. Mark withdrew his hand.

“Whatever your deal with Patricia Darlene, she is going to reward you if you are the one to deliver me to her, right? All we are asking in return is for three doses of flu vaccine for Mark, Bea and Jasper. Surely she'll pay that insignificant cost seeing how much effort she has spent to kill me so far.”

Darlene thought about it. It might be a great advantage for her to help Patricia this way. She didn't want to seem to eager but it was a good idea. “Why only three doses, why not five?” she asked.

“Oh I'm sure you'll get yours from Patricia,” said Ben. “For me, I doubt she feels I will live long enough to need it. We'll leave first thing in the morning Darlene.”

“Jasper,” said Ben.

Jasper looked at him. “Mark and I need to work out some details. Come over here.”

Jasper approached Ben warily.

Ben held out his hand. She didn't take it. He left his and outstretched and slowly her arm rose and she put her knife in his hand.

“Do you promise me not to kill Darlene?”

“Ever?”

“Today”

“For today. OK.”

Ben held her hand for a moment longer. There was more he wanted to say. She stared at him, and Ben felt a jolt through his arm, and he snapped up his head to catch her eyes. They froze like that for the briefest of moments, then it was gone. Jasper turned away from Darlene, from Ben, from her mother, and walked off into the forest.

Mark and Ben moved off to talk, leaving Bea and Darlene by the fire. Bea settled back, digesting the death sentence that Ben had just passed on himself.
“You better watch Jasper, Bea. She's changing into something bad.”

“I can't believe you're talking at all. You could have gotten us all killed. Why did you do it?”

Darlene was quiet for a few moments. My son is paralyzed. A quad, he had a terrible fall. I couldn't afford the payments. I tried and tried. I worked two and three jobs. But it wasn't too long before this woman showed up saying that my work was important, you know, Mark has mentioned it, I worked with many of the Earth Firsters and the like. She wanted information, just who was up to what and for that they would keep my son in the best of facilities, getting therapy, and education, building him a new life. “

“Shit I never gave them very much that couldn't have got out of the papers. But then this Ben thing started, Patricia called and said I better be able to help her. Mark showed up at the diner and you know the rest.”

Bea wanted to hate, did hate, but didn't, Darlene for putting someone who, who was what to her, she thought. Bea tried to figure out if she was in love with Ben. There was too much going on with the rape, the pregnancy and now this, to know.

“I understand what you did and why Darlene. But I don't condone it. I don't know what we're all suppose to do, but I do know that man saved my life and the life of my daughter and now he is giving himself up to save us all, including you. So while I'm calm Darlene, I just want to say that while I understand what you did, if and when Patricia kills Ben, then there will not be a day when I am not hunting you and I will kill you. You understand?”

Darlene was shook by Bea's low even voice, but rose in anger and said, “Look it, you may find that a lot harder than you think. I'm doing right by my boy and if that is some sort of sin and you are judgment come, well so be it. But you might want to consider that I have been out of the nest a while myself and may not be so easy to kill.” Darlene crossed her arms and glared at Bea.

Bea shook her head. “Don't forget Jasper.”

Darlene blanched, pivoted on her heal and went to get her pack ready to leave in the morning. It might be horrible to be exposed, her hard decisions put on display and judged. Well let them, she thought. Soon I'll be able to see my boy again, and it is all worth that. She began thinking of how best to approach Patricia with this deal.

End of Chapter 6

FBR chapter 6, Scene 9

2009-01-02T06:40:00.001-08:00

FBR, Chapter 6, Scene 9, short scene

“Nothing, no trace. I want to drive back up here in an hour and not be able to find this,” said Arthur quietly. The Global Security soldier saluted, spun on his heel and began barking orders to the small group of men.

Six men clustered under one fir, squatting, drinking coffee and talking. Arthur approached them, his face rigid.

“What am I paying you for? You can't even gather up two men, two women and a girl?

The men, their ghilly suits stowed were dressed in Goblet black jackets over body armor. Their weapons were stacked and they were warming themselves around a small hot fire. The senior man had been with Arthur for over four years, ever since leaving the Navy. He looked up, and said, we were smoke, we were invisible yet we were found. JJ was killed.

Arthur had already seen the body. JJ had been stabbed from the rear, right through the body armor. Body armor was good against small arms fire but useless against hot rifles and even with armor plates added for slashing protection it was open to being penetrated from the rear.
“So what if you were found, why aren't they here on the ground in front of me?”

“No one was here when we got to the shelter. Why didn't you have men covering all the exits from this mountain?” asked one of the men, risking Arthur's wrath.

Arthur stared at the man for a moment, ready to snap his head off, but of course he was right. That had been his call. The more men he put into the operation, the more men he brought to Oregon, the greater chance that Patricia would learn about his operation. He was moving around her as she had moved outside of the Global force when she sent the three men in earlier. She was hiding something from Arthur, and from her own department. She was way off the reservation on this one and this level of risk, her actions without warrant, meant that big money was involved, or even more than money. Everyone in the government was looking for a safe haven and a safe future.

Arthur was aware that the United States was even now not recognizable as the country it had been last year. The federal bureaucracy fed off the work and money of the people it controlled, and the flu had destroyed that flow of money into the coffers of the Treasury. No money, the Feds print more fake money, and for a while every one pretended they were still being paid. Yet every person was looking for an edge that would do two things. Get them and their families vaccinated, and find a store of value, not dollars, that they could use to secure their own future. Having a private army was a very good thing for Arthur, but he needed resources to feed, expand, and equip his men.

FBR chapter 6, Scenes 7 and 8

2009-01-02T06:25:00.000-08:00

Foreign Body Reaction, chapter 6, Scenes 7 and 8

"Right up the hill towards us?" asked Ben incredulously.

Jasper shook her head yes. "And trucks are coming behind them."

Ben glanced at Mark for confirmation. "I didn't hear them, but you better believe her. I think they know exactly where we are."

Ben glanced around the shelter. They had all made so many changes, adding to the comforts of their little world, no time. They were coming right here, not just the ridge line in general, but right here. 'Like they know where we are,' thought Ben, 'exactly where.'

"We have no choice," said Ben loudly. "We can't fight trained soldiers with a few military surplus weapons."

"Why don't we just fade out of here and then fade back in when they are gone?" asked Mark. Other faces registered similar thoughts. The idea of leaving the shelter before summer had come was horrible. They all remembered what it was like those first few days of arriving here.

"This is different, this is like a tentacle of a larger beast. Even if we cut it off, or as you suggest just fade away in front of it, the beast still knows our location. How many times can we keep fading away? No, I'd hope to wait a few more weeks but we can't stay here, we will fade away to the west and move towards the coast range."

With that Ben turned and began stuffing critical equipment into his back pack. No body moved for a moment, then Mark and Jasper began quickly pulling stuff from the walls, rolling up furs and blankets made from twisted rabbit furs.

"Wait a minute," shouted Darlene, "wait just a minute. Why are we leaving, we don't even know what they want. This is stupid, lets just go talk to them."

Mark spoke before Ben got a chance. "Darlene, no one wants to leave our shelter, but those men moving up the hill are in camo gear and you don't come to say high but working up a hill with weapons and ghilly suits."

"They're not after me, or you Mark. They don't know anything about us. Bea, they don't want you, they just want Ben and that girl. Why should we run from the very people that can help us?"

Bea's quiet voice came from away from the group, "How do you know who they are after Darlene?"

Everyone hesitated and looked towards Darlene. She flushed, fearing she had said too much. "If they are the same people as with that lady who attacked Ben, then only Jasper was targeted. Not us."

"Oh you don't count what they did to me in the van as 'targeting? Rape doesn't count?" asked Bea moving closer to Darlene.

Darlene sputtered backing away, "Yea, well sure, but that was just to get at Jasper, I mean Mark and I aren't part of this, not really."

"Then why don't you just go meet them and see?" asked Bea.

"That's enough!" said Ben. "We don't have time for this now. Everyone shut up, get your stuff, and move move move. We've practiced this, no do it. We'll sort all this out later when we are safe."
Darlene swiveled from person to person, backs turned toward her, she desperately wanted to get out of here and go back home. Patrica would see she was taken care of and she could visit her son. 'I want my old life back' screamed Darlene silently to herself. She could just walk out, she could just leave them, but that isn't what she promised her friend was it. She had to get them to leave Ben behind. Patricia wanted Ben. That was the important thing.

"Everyone take the west trail to road at the base of the ridge on the west side. Mark will meet us there with the truck. Everyone straggle out, stay under the trees, if they are using heat sensing satellite imagery they can't see you under wet trees. Everyone take a different way down. If you don't see Mark in fifteen minutes meet at the bridge. Jasper, go keep an eye on our visitors, if the trucks are still coming I need two clicks on the transceiver."

He tossed one of the precious transceivers to her and she hesitated watching Mark dragging two heavy packs out to the truck.

"He'll be fine Jasper, he has the truck, no go!"

Jasper hesitated, threw her small pack to Mark, picked up her spear and a fur cloak and ran through the shelter door into the gray drizzle.

Mark was gone, and Bea was the first one out and down the trail.

"Darlene, go now, but don't follow exactly. Take any path down the west side and then turn north at the bottom of the hill. Mark will pick you up. Go no further than the bridge and then get off the road if you haven't seen him. Go."

Darlene hesitated, and pushed past Ben back into the shelter. "Wait," she shouted, we need these phones, and quickly swept all the phones into her leather bag. She crouched down and couldn't get the chargers disconnected from the power strip.

"Help me Ben," They're stuck."

Ben reached past her, muttering, "how can a plug be stuck, just pull the damn thing. . ."

He bent low and never hear the wood stool that crashed into the back of his head. He grunted, his dark hair rapidly coloring with the welling blood, slid to the floor and was still.

Darlene felt for Ben's pulse, then used a bit of rope to tie Ben's hands behind his back. There Patricia would have him and most of their problems would be solved. Darlene took off following Bea. following Bea. Patricia wanted the girl too, Darlene had to stay with the larger group, that is what Patricia would want.

Scene 8
The trucks had stopped a few hundred yards on the opposite side of the ridge from the men that were working up towards the shelter. Jasper could smell the hot metal. The trucks were east of the men and the men were only a hundred yards or less form the logging cut that lay below their shelter. Jasper was north of the men, slightly above them on the hill side, invisible to them.

When Mark started the truck, there had been movement on the hillside. The men were incredibly difficult to see, Jasper was tracking them more peripherally than by looking directly at them. At one time, all seven of the gopher men rose, and it appeared to Jasper that the ground rose with them, Their black body armor and revealed beneath the ghilly suit capes of torn dyed fabric that made them nearly invisible here in the coast range mountains. Browns and greens and blacks and white mixed and changed as they moved so much so that it was hard to follow them if their backs were toward her.
"I want one of those, " thought Jasper, and made a slight sound in her throat.

She backed up and ran through the woods paralleling the men and then well in front of them skirting from the north around to the west side of the shelter she would intersect the others headed for the rendezvous with Mark and the truck.

She could see the trail that Bea and Darlene had left, and set off after them. Jasper was halfway down the hill when she saw Mark's truck pull up near the bottom of the drainage. Bea and Darlene darted to the truck, flung the passenger door open and got in. Mark waited, letting the truck idle. Jasper could see that they were all looking back up the hill for her and Ben to arrive.

She turned on the ball of her foot and sprinted effortlessly up the hill to shelter. She paused at the south west edge of the rock face, and laid flat against the hill. The seven soldiers were only ten to fifteen yard away and she couldn't work around to the front without being seen, and the rock rear wall prevented her from getting into the shelter from the rear.

Jasper jumped up and ran due south from the shelter yelling "Wait for me, wait up!" She forced herself not to look back at the men, not to notice them but just ran yelling, "Don't leave me, wait!."

She could almost feel the bullets that would stitch up her back, but they never came. She made the end of the clearing and took the most obvious deer trail, sobbing and crying, "Wait." She cleared a fallen fir in a single bound and dropped to all fours and scurried east through the brush. She could here men coming, she hoped all of them, for Ben's sake. 'Where had he gone?"

Three men passed the log made their way south along the trail. Slowly Jasper made her way to the east side of the shelter and worked around to the warm south side. The door was open. Jasper could here movement inside, things were being tossed about and she could here the squawk of a radio being keyed. In the distance she hurt diesel engines cranking to life.

"Shit she thought and began to back up, totally focused on the shelter. A hand snaked around her mouth, clamping it shut. Jasper could taste blood on the hand and opened her mouth to bite down hard when she tasted Ben. She slumped against him and the settled to the ground. He whispered in her ear.
Quiet little one, lets get out of here.

Ben let go of Jasper and turned to head down the ridge line to the west. Jasper could see blood matting Ben's hair in the back. He had taken only two strides when there was a ominous sharp snick and click of the bolt being pulled back on an automatic rife.

"Just stay still right there. Get on your knees now!"
Ben glanced back at the man approaching, he was alone. "Where was Jasper."

The man shouted, "did I say you could look at me?" Then he sighed like he was really disappointed in Ben, and Ben was going to make him shoot him. Quickly been dropped to his knees and put his face in the dirt. He hoped Jasper had gotten away and would get the others and leave. In a way, he thought, Darlene was right, they were probably better off without him. Patricia was probably behind this and as long as Ben was alive he would be a liability to them.
He took several deep breaths and waited for the man to either kill him, kick him or what.

Nothing. He slowly turned his head to see Jasper pulling her spear from the soldier's back, carefully through the ghilly cape. She quickly rolled the man over until the camo suit was free and motioned to Ben to come. Ben had no time to think about what he had just seen, he grabbed the man's weapon and an extra clip that he could see on his belt and followed Jasper a few feet until she disappeared.

Damn it Jasper he thought, just go to the truck. He was afraid to shout to attract attention of the other soldiers, so he had no choice but to make his way down the west side of the ridge. He lept to the rear of the truck and as his foot touched Jasper clambered over the stake bed side and crouched by him. Slowly, and quietly as possible Mark drove out to the west.

FBR chapter 6, scenes 5 and 6

2008-12-28T09:41:00.001-08:00

FBR Scene 5

She carefully placed her feet through the wet fiddle neck ferns, making sure of her balance before reaching for the mushrooms. Even though fall was the normal time for mushroom hunting, there had been a few warm rains, and Darlene had found enough mushrooms over the last few days to provide a welcome relief to all their diets.She was off the ridge, across the stream and almost a mile west of the rock shelter, home,” she thought. She had just walked up the ridge line of this hill to near the summit. She listened carefully. Ben had done a good job of making them all scared of being found by anyone. She heard nothing human, and Jasper was busy with Mark this morning running the trap line east of the camp.

She had been too frightened to do this before, but she just had to know. Jasper was like fog in the woods, you never knew where she was, but she had watched her leave this morning with Mark and had followed them for a few minutes to make sure they headed out. She had told Ben and Bea that she was going mushroom hunting to clear her head.

She fished beneath her waterproof poncho to a leather bag that all of them carried, Bea called them possibility bags. It was rabbit skin of course, big enough to hold greens,camus bulbs, and plastic bags balled up at the bottom for less clean items like pitch wood or crayfish. A soft strap of twisted rabbit hide looped over her opposite shoulder to comfortably keep the bag in place.

Darlene burrowed down and found it. Her heart gave a guilty beat, as she felt the smooth cold plastic of her cell phone. She had stolen it from the shelf where Ben kept all the phones fully charged. No one was to use any of them, and they were left off with their batteries separate when they weren't physically on the charger. Ben had told them that the phone's GPS locater chips worked anytime the phone was on, whether you called anyone or not, and that there were some who said the Feds could actually turn on the phone and poll the GPS chip anytime that the battery was in it.

She had snatched the phone and buried it in the bottom of the bag as soon as Bea and Ben went outside to work on projects. Hopefully no one would be paying attention and notice that one of the three phones was missing.

“Yes.”

“It's Darlene.”

There was silence on the other end.
“Patricia?”

“No names you dumb bitch.”

“Sorry,” Darlene rushed to apologize.

“I had given up on you. You have been a very bad girl. More, you have been a very bad mother. Don't you care about your son?”

“Don't you hurt my son, I couldn't call, not until now, he has all the phones, I had to steal it, I had to wait, this was the first,” her voice caught in a hiccup, her words crashing out.

“Wow, I didn't hurt your son, now did I? But we had an agreement didn't we?

Darlene was silent, listening. She was disparate to find out if her son was OK, was being cared for.

“Didn't we.”

“Yes.”

“What did you agree to do?”

Darlene hesitated, and then spoke plaintive, soft. “To call you every week.”

“What did I agree to do?”

“To keep Jimmy at the group home.”

“Have you kept your agreement?”

“I couldn't, I just told you, we are like, like prisoners here. Ben controls everything, I'm taking a big chance right now . . .”

Patricia interrupted, “So you didn't keep your agreement and decided your son was not as important as your comfort. So you got your son turned over to adult care, but they didn't pick him up because they are, well, not responding. So you decided that the group home should turn him out onto the street in the winter. You're one hell of a mother.”

“You turned him out on the street?” Darlene wailed, “but you promised, I called you, I told you where we were. How could you do that,” she screamed at the phone, her voice echoing off the far hillside.

“I didn't do it. You did. Your decision, my hands were tied by our agreement. What could I do, I can't save everyone. Do you understand what is going on in the world you idiot? I certainly can't save some broken boy, not with good, whole people dying, right and left? You did this, only you Darlene, you turned your son out to die on the street.”

Darlene sobbed, mucus ran down her face.

“But not everyone is a liar and some of us treat our “friends” better than they deserve.”

“What?” muttered Darlene, lost in the image of her son freezing to death in a wheelchair, alone.

“I'm saying I went the extra mile for you Darlene. I saved your son, I got him back into another facility, a government facility. I saved your son Darlene.” Patricia's voice grew tender and soft. “I did it for you Darlene because I know you try, you do try. You work hard. It is that fucking Ben who hurt you, who almost killed your son. I saved him, I saved your son because I'm your friend Darlene.”

“yes, yes you are, oh thank you so much Patricia. Oh thank you, oh my god, when I think of Jimmy on the street, oh god.”

“Calm down, relax, friends take care of each other. Now you have to do better about calling me, and there is so much to catch up on. Do you have time for a friend? Can you help me now?”

Ten minutes later Patricia hung up the phone. She had simply hoped Ben and his group could simply have died from the flu. Hell, she thought, she had even sent in a team to make sure they were infected. She had the team vaccinated but they carried enough of the virus in capsules in their mouths to infect at least the women, while they raped them. She didn't want Global involved in this any longer. Arthur had become much too interested in this little side project of hers; she could feel him nosing about out there, trying to find the value.

She tapped the table top. Ben was a loose end and he needed to be tied off. Her conversation with that twit Darlene had been quite informative. Idly she brought up the screen of test subjects that were used during the first three months. The vaccine had been rushed to completion, and in the beginning she knew that palative measures had be researched too. Anything to give certain people more time to wait for the final vaccine. That wait had been crucial and successful, thanks to the many volunteers who had given their lives in the early trials. It had been worth it, the vaccine was nearly ninety percent effective if administered directly into the blood stream before exposure to the live virus. Vaccine production was in priority mode at every facility that could produce it, here, Europe, Asia, Australia. The right people had breathed a tremendous sigh of relief and sat back to watch a new world unfold. With half the population, oil, coal, all resources would go farther, global warming would be slowed, and good patriotic Americans could get to work on forging a new world that was disciplined, strong, and pure.

Patricia hit the page down a few times and saw Jimmy's name. Gee, he hadn't even made it through the first trial. He had died only 48 hours after she had in placed him in the program. Well, he was weak, just like his mother, she thought, but he had performed a useful service.

“As will Darlene,” she spoke out loud to her empty office.

Darlene slipped into the shelter, her basket filled with morels. She quickly replaced the phone on the shelf, carefully detaching the battery and got back to work, her face flushed, immensely relieved that her son was getting the best of care. Patricia had done so much for her, she had been a fool to go with Mark, he wasn't really interested in her anyway.

-------------------------------------------

FBR chapter 6, scene 6
Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill
Chapter 6 Scene 5.

The floor of the forest moved. There it did it again. “Wow,” thought Jasper. She let her vision go wide, feeling, seeing, smelling and hearing the entire slope before her. In seeing it all, it was easy to see the small changes making their way up the slope towards the berry and alder bramble where Mark had left her a few minutes before. The movements were that of large gophers but without the hills and holes. Just swellings that rustled and ever so slightly moved. There were seven people sized gophers moving up the hill. They were really obvious once you knew how to look.

Jasper melted back through the blackberries, without disburbing a single cane. She stayed low until she was over the crown of the road cut above her, then set off after Mark. She stopped every few hundred yards to crawl to the edge of the road and check the mountain side below her. She didn't find any other big gophers except those seven that were moving slowly up the ridge towards home.

Jasper was looking for deer or elk, which with her help Mark had come to prefer as their main meat source. They had thinned out the rabbits and Mark had finally become comfortable with Jasper getting in close to the larger game and spearing it, quickly and quietly.

It was the first week of March and Jasper toyed with her small spear, twirling like a baton as she ambled down the road. She took no pains to hide herself here as the crows were taunting what they believed was an owl hiding in a tree, which required a lot of crows because they had nothing good to say about owls, and of vice versa too. However, they made excellent lookouts and had already dismissed Jasper as not worthy of interrupting their deadly serious task of owl harassment, all the more funny to Jasper as they were yelling at a small dead fall of leaves and twigs stuck in near the tree top. There was no owl there, but Jasper knew how crows were, it really didn't matter, for if nothing else it was good practice. Jasper liked crows because they had loud opinions, good eye sight and great hearing. If any human approached, long before she would hear them, the crows would be delighted to tell the entire forest about it. Yep, you could always count on crows.

Mark was squatted checking for tracks, vehicle tracks, when Jasper appeared next to him.

“Christ!” said Mark. “I told you to watch the hillside until I got back.” He calmed himself down. Since Jasper's “transformation” as he thought of it, he was no longer the peerless woodsman. Now, when Jasper was in the forest he felt like he had a flashing neon sign on him.

One day he had made every effort to loose her, ending up completely hidden in a leaf and bramble blind. He didn't like to brag, at least to others, but he couldn't think of anyone, military or otherwise who should have been able to find him. Besides, Jasper had no clue that he was trying to hide from her. He just wanted to see if he could do it. While he had slowly been studying, with no motion of his head, the small area in front of the blind, he had become aware of her head right next to his, trying to see what Mark was looking at. He hadn't heard her, hadn't seen her. She just materialized as far as Mark was concerned.

Jasper found almost everything funny, at least when she was in the woods with him, but she seemed anxious now.
“There are seven people working up the hillside towards home. They are wearing some sort of complete camouflage and they are moving very slowly. I didn't see weapons, and their camoflage is really good.”

“Shit, Ben needs to know this right now. I hope everyone is at the shelter.”

“When I left, everyone but Darlene was close by.”

“Where was Darlene?”

“I don't know, collecting mushrooms I think. After I tell Ben about the men, should I go get her?”

Mark gathered his gear and said show me where you saw the men, then tell Ben and go get Darlene. I don't know what Ben is going to want to do about this, but if your description is acurate, then I think we are looking at soldiers in ghilly suits, and they will be armed. Christ I don't know what we're going to do now.”

“Do you want me to stop them?” said Jasper as they set off up the deer trail, cutting directly back to the shelter.

Mark put his arm around her shoulder and said, “ No, no honey, these men are more than a match for you. Think of them as a hunting machine. If they are military we need to stay away from them.”

Jasper looked at Mark, “Why are then coming here?”

Mark shook his head. “I don't know but I bet it is somehow tied up with that woman you saw the day, ah the day.” He hesitated, he hadn't talked much about that day with anyone, he wasn't sure what Jasper saw or remembered. “Anyway, I'm sure we'll find out.”

As Mark set off directly up hill Jasper lagged a bit behind, listening. The crows were diverted from the owl practice, they were cawing at something larger and noisier than the men gophers. She jogged after Mark wondering how not to scare him with the news. Trucks are coming too.

FBR chapter 6, scene 3

2008-12-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill
Chapter 6 Scene 3.
Foreign Body Reaction, Chapter 6, scene 3

“You sure they were military?”

“Yes, some sort anyway. They didn't have strips or dog tags so I think they were off the reservation so to speak.” Mark rocked back on his heals and watched Ben.

Quietly so the others wouldn't hear Ben said, “I don't think there is going to be a vaccine soon. We haven't heard of anyone actually getting it.” He grew quiet and rested his head across his hands which were folded over his knees. He rocked slightly starting into the hot embers of the fire at the far end of the rock face shelter.

Mark waited, watching Ben.

“How did Jasper react to the killings?”

Mark shifted uncomfortably. He did like talking about Jasper. “She seemed fine, like it was normal and had to be done.” He hesitated.

“What?”

“I don't know, you really need to be asking her. She seemed, I don't know, ah, almost at peace even when she killed the man in front of me. It was oddly comforting, like she was protecting me, us. Fuck, I don't know, she's pretty incredible.”

“What she is is a very stressed fourteen year old girl who will soon be fifteen, who growls when she eats meat and kills without stress. That sound normal, healthy or incredible to you?”

Mark glanced down to the other end of the shelter where Bea and Darlene were making tea and Jasper sat still, cross legged on a elk hide. She seemed to be lost in thought.
“Are any of us normal, healthy or whole now?”

Ben stirred the coals around with a stick. February was still cold and damp and the fire was a luxury they had grown to cherish. “We are getting stuck here Mark. We are going to be discovered and possibly infected, maybe worse if today is any indication.”

“You said we can't have contact until we have the vaccine.”

“I don't think it is coming for us. I've been thinking. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but perhaps with the financial meltdown, the depression, the country is accidentally better off with a fifty percent population reduction.”

“Jesus Ben, are you saying you think this was virus was made on purpose? That's foil head shit!”

“I think regardless of how it came to be, the end result is really good for the people in power. The infrastructure of roads, rail, remaining coal, food, all of it is left intact, while the load on all these things is greatly reduced. We have a longer technological future if there are fewer people.”

Mark rarely got upset, but Ben was touching on some thoughts that had been bothering him too. The flu was enormously deadly, the shortwave reports putting the numbers as high as seventy percent dead among blacks and Asians, and at least fifty percent mortality among North Americans on average.

“If they, the people like the Feds and Homeland security and all of them, if they had a vaccine wouldn't they use it on themselves?” asked Mark.

“Yes they would, if they knew it was safe, and if they were exposed they would use it even untested,” said Ben. “I've been thinking about that. Did those men today have any special marks on them?”

“What kind of marks? I told you there were no dog tags that we could find.”

“I think it would be a permanent mark, a tattoo of some sort,” said Ben quietly. “If I was inoculating soldiers, I would be careful to make sure I could tell who had been vaccinated and who had not. Until all the people important to the feds were vaccinated it would be important to recognize people who were still possibly contagious, lets call that the “wild” state. I would mark them somehow like the polio vaccine used to leave a permanent welt. If not a tattoo which would be too slow, I would mark them someplace visible.

“Did you see anything like that?”

“We didn't look, we dumped them in a steep ravine about 2 miles away from the hill top, east, opposite from here, but we didn't strip them or anything,” said Mark.

“I would make the vaccination indicator visible, hands probably or face. We need to know.”

Mark prepared to protest but thought where Ben was heading. “You think there is a vaccine and they are withholding it,” hissed Mark.

“I don't know but we need to know that. If these men were deserters perhaps they will share a common scar or tattoo or something visible. You need to go back and check.”

“So what if you're right, what does that change.”

“If there is no vaccine coming for us, we will need to move and avoid others for a very long time, but even then, sometime we will be exposed. Some of us will die. If we stay here, well, we will still get exposed eventually and we will not have the protection of any group. Bea's baby will be here in six months. Darlene is increasingly nervous. We can't stay here for ever and we don't have a vaccine. You tell me, what do we do Mark?”

Both men grew silent as Jasper approached with some food she had prepared. Darlene did most of the cooking but sometimes Jasper helped and prepared things like mushrooms, roots, bark teas. She smiled as she came over with a bark plate with small flat crackers made from Camus bulbs, a starchy root. A small stone cup with honey in it and a whittled stick for spreading the honey shared the plate. She set it down gently withdrew.

“I'll go look at first light said Mark, but I'll walk. I don't want to draw and more attention than necessary with the truck. I'll be back before the sun is full up.”

Ben just nodded, spreading the honey on the little flat bread pieces. He popped one in his mouth and thought about how this would be the moment he would think back to when thinking about being warm, safe and surprisingly well fed.

Mark was about to speak when Jasper returned with a boiled cloth and a small cut off plastic soda bottle, filled with what looked like pulverized liver or clay or something.

Both men had scratches, hell they all had scratches and poison oak blisters from the coast range brambles. It was part of living with in the woods. Since Jasper's transformation, as Mark thought of it, she was good at making salves that reduced irritation of poison oak and dried the blisters up quickly. She seemed to have a connection with the forest now. Mark was hard pressed to see how she was insane or stressed. She looked at peace.

Both men shed their coats and shirts in front of the fire and she washed the scratches and blisters gently with warm water, Darlene came over and helped.

“God that smells,” said Darlene. “What do you have in it this time Jasper? Looks like meat or something.”

Jasper laughed, “it is just what they need to stay healthy.” Jasper dipped a finger in the stone bowl and touched her tongue and reached out to touch some to Darlene's mouth.”

“No you don't,” said Darlene leaning away, “it smells awful.”

“But a good awful said Jasper licking her lips.”

Both men shrugged and Jasper slowly worked the salve into their scratches and blisters, working the mixture in deep.

Finished with them she turned to Darlene who fled back towards the other end of the shelter.
Jasper laughed, a sweet sound. “I'll have to do her scratches when she's asleep.”

Ben and Mark put their clothes back on and turned again to the fire. “Now she's turning into Florence Nightingale?”

Mark shrugged. Nothing Jasper did now would surprise him after today on the mountain.

Scene 4.

His breath clouded the cold wet air of the mountain. The ravine had been steep and it took Mark a long time to get down and through all the brambles and debris at the bottom. Jasper and he had picked the spot to dump the bodies to make sure it they would not be easily found. He had found all three where they had crashed through to lay brokenly across the logs and boulders that formed the bottom of the season stream.

The bodies were stiff from the cold or rigor mortis, whichever, Mark had difficulty trying to get their clothes off. He gave up and used his knife and removed their military jackets and camo underwear in strips.

“Fuck,” said Mark, recoiling from the third body. It was the one Jasper had nearly decapitated. The head hung slack, barely attached and it rolled around grotesquely as he worked to remove the clothes.

He had found no marks on the hands of the men, and their faces were pretty beat up from the fall through the brush. However he found nothing similar on each of the men. He and Jasper had stripped the boots and other critical gear from the bodies before tossing them, but they had left the clothing, fearing it would tie them to the dead men.

He laid the three bodies next to each other and began an closer inspection. He found that animals had already been at the men, the gutting of the one man having been a feast for many of the the scavengers. Ben saw coyote and raccoon tracks among others.
He found the first one Jasper's would be rapist. High on his right arm was a perfect pink raised welt like the kind made by air injectors. Mark remembered his own welts when working for the Forest Service as a contractor. Malaria had been making a come back in some parts of Oregon as the weather had warmed in the last three years, and the Forest Service inoculated everyone with air gun driven vaccinations. That was the welt.

Fuck, he thought. Quickly he checked the right arms of the other two, one had the welt, and on the last one some animal had bitten off the top for deltoid and the place were the vaccination would have been was gone. Mark rechecked the marks on the other two men, they were very recent, within days probably given the swelling and the welt.

Mark finished the inspection and turned them men face up, and then he saw it. There was a small set of three blue dots, a tattoo, fresh on just under where the dog tags would have hung over the sternum. Mark quickly checked the corpse that had been partially eaten and found the same tattoo.

“I think you are right, there is a vaccine,” said Mark aloud to the three dead men. The light was getting stronger now as the sun was lighting the top of the hill. Time to get gone thought Mark. He glanced on last time at the teeth marks on the arm of the third corpse and shook his head.

I'm BACcccck!

2008-12-26T18:28:00.000-08:00

I used to fall down when I rode enduros on in Massachusetts. My motocycle weighed 250 lbs and an enduro is where you try to go real fast in the woods so keep an average of 24 mph for the entire course - usually 50 - 100 miles. For me that meant going as fast and as hard as I could all the time. So of course occasionally I would drop the motorcycle in a down hill over camber trailer corner and slide into the woods on my ass at 60 mph - the motorcyle laying on its side in front of me crashing the smaller trees out of the way while my foot would keep me from catching up with the bike.
Because of all the protective gear I wore, it look dramatic and it was incredibly dangerous, but it was like - just waiting for every thing to slow down when it happened - it takes a long time to slide to a stop.
We are in a downhill off camber financial crash. Your bike is on the ground in front of you and the world is sliding under our collective asses. It is odd to watch that happen, but the thing to remember is that nothing bad happens as long as you keep your food on the bike - keep it away from you.
If that is too cryptic, it is only because I have lived through that many times, but this, this loss of 1/2 of your retirement, my retirement, the loss of jobs, and all of that is a long slide. You have to decide if you want - what to do in that slide.
I suggest you stop worrying about what people believe around you It is a slide, it is exciting, it is a rush, it is terrifying, it is exhilerating, but still you are on your ass and the slide is downhill. This will be a long slide. Focus on what you can do to better your position. Anything you can get that can be converted to hard assets or useful tools, do it. Don't pay attention to the news - its a huge mess and a smorgasboard of attempts to manipulate you into shopping and debt in a useless attempt to save capitalism.
Sorry, you already crashed that bike, you need to concentrate only on improving you situation wherever you can. They want to give you some sort of stimulus - great, grab it, convert it, store it. If you are offerred some future Obama CCC program job, sign up - take everything offerred but attach to NONE of it. It is all part of what the crash feels like from the forest floor when your butt is traveling 60 mph through the woods.
There is real danger that you can die from this, but all in all, it is better than living in an insane asylum with everyone pretending that all is well. We well into it folks and there is much much more sliding to do, this is just the beginning.
Find something fun to do while you wait, the new future is coming, you don't have to rush it.
A guilty truth for me - crashing and surviving - was as much fun as finishing without incident. This time, these years will be the time of our lives, enjoy the slide, at least it is real.
mcchicken back again - the story begins again with chapter six scene 3 tomorrow.
Merry fucking Christmas and a slip sliding new year. Repeat after me - I am not my job, I am not my job.

It's all about the garden

2008-06-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

The collapse is underway, and there has been little more to add about that. Fuel prices reflecting export land model (ELM) has the rear of the bell curve collapsing faster than Hubbert could ever have expected. It's good to be aware of global warming but perhaps we would all be better served by trying to figure out a way to do without fuel, oil and cars at all. If we could do that, we would have some insulation, personally, from the complete transportation collapse that is on our door step.

I have been busy pursuing all those processes that might give me maximum flexibility in the uncertain, but certainly lesser energy future. A big part of that is providing that which will be not provided in our future - food and energy. So spring for me has been spent converting a field and old garden space into food production. My hope is to be able to feed the vegetable/starches part of the diet for two humans at least, working up to 8 humans eventually on 1/2 acre of land. I can see that 4000 sq ft may be a reasonable garden for feeding 4 people in Oregon's wet and then dry climate, but personally the doing of it is very labor intensive, time intensive and just plain wears me out.

The earth is a she. Why do I think that? Because I feel her when I till and plant and encourage the baby plants. I feel her like you feel a lover, like you feel your mother but never know it until she dies, and then only by her absence. I miss my mother. I miss that embracing acceptance, the durable love. Oddly I feel an attachment to the dirt I work and to the plants she gives me.

Gardening is too soft word for the process of raising food to eat to live. Gardening is Mr. Rogers in a tweed sweater encouraging a young cabbage to grow through kind words. Gardening is for modern man or woman. Gardening is about one tomato a year, a sprig of parsley. That was gardening before. It is not the food production of now and of the future. Gardening was about accent, now it is about substance. It was optional, now becoming mandatory.

That was my mindset anyway when I covered a thirty foot by forty foot area of semi abandoned but somewhat mowed flat soil and clay with cardboard and plastic last year. I could see future food feeding me and seven others. It was all math and size and production and a long to do list leading up to it. As most of you know, I came back early to Oregon this year to get into "production.

I felt a cold resistance to removing the card board and plastic. There are two garden plots and one area of fruit trees. I dug in the new trees, the soil was wet and heavy, the water table high, everything asleep, almost dead in heavy clay. I felt nothing but alone and wet and cold. I had to hand spade the small garden, and my back was so sore every day as I dug and hoed, slamming the hoe down into the unyeilding black wet muck. I planted onion bulbs, and soon peas and beets there. My back was sore every day.

The last month and one half has been a maelstrom of fence building, making a green house out of casa blanca, planting apple trees, blueberries, building new compost piles, tilling, digging, hoeing, planting. Recently I have been surprised to find that I seem to have entered into a contract. I planted she reluctantly gives me her babies, she yeilds. I understand that, the reluctance to bring forth, the offering of baby plants, waiting to see if I will water, weed and care for them. She questions my durability, my commitment to take and use the bounty that she provides. It is one thing to plant, another to reap.

Like most people, my life is buying food, or fast food and that's it. Now as the garden rows are visible and promising, I think of the ways in which I can meld that productive plenty to a lifestyle that is 8 feet wide and 22 feet long. But that is the nature of all enterprises. The contract is always drawn between parties that have yet to yeild, yet to perform and each must then rise.

The earth is rising, shit, burgening actually, and my new contract is to use that, to use the food, and to increase the fertility, to make the food that best that it can be to eat (the right nutrients and trace minerals), and most of all, to complete the many cycles of growth and decay. To do that I must constantly set aside what is easiest and work on that which is present in front of me.
For her part, the earth soothes my mind as I hoe, and bubbles delight up through me when I find new plants pushing up. Potatoes tight grimaced an a darker green than possible to the frightening visage of slasher movie zucchini come to pillage. Carrots are diffident in their small barely commited feather wisp, next to beans who are the only ones who can talk to the zucchini at all.
The corn masquerades as grass, nothing special it says to surrounding weeds, but holding coiled inside the code to tower over them all, and shade them to death. Only the beans and the zucchini are unimpressed. Floppy topped onions all hilled up, droopy leaved beets craving viagra, and radishes, already entering their final days, tall and proud and providing.
These all are the world under her control and my performance, sore back or not. The fecund earth is the real thing, our jobs and twitches and automatic responses, cream, no sugar, no jacket, no straw, these are the meaningless noise of "civilization."
I say all this to let you know that when your desparately trying to grow food there are rewards that might be unexpected, and connection that while unexpected is deep and good in unexpected ways.

It was the contract that has been drawn, an agreement that has grown up. Like an ugly dog who persists, I have been let in again, and now she has expectations of me. Who? The she that I have woken.

Rhizome

2008-04-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

FBR is delayed because I'm traveling back to Oregon, actually in Oregon right now in Cave Junction. Once I land and get the garden fencing project underway I'll have more FBR.
I'm posting today because I was reading Archdruid and in the comments saw a brief discussion of Jeff Vail, who posts sometimes on The Oil Drum blog. He has a concept of independent family or groups who are self sufficient for their necessities, but interconnected via fairs and festivals for trade. He has five essays that are worth a look. See what you think. When you hit his home page click on Rhizome on the right navigation bar. I've aimed you at his homepage so you can get an idea of biases before delving into the essays. I think there is something there to really think about.

FBR chapter 6 scene 2

2008-04-01T10:24:00.001-07:00

Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 6 Scene 2

“Ouch, damn,” Mark cursed as he caught the inside of his forearm on the frame of the solar panel. He looked at the scratch, watching the blood begin to peak up through the abrasion.

The muscles of his right arm were burning from holding the Makita up so long. The panels were much more difficult to remove than he had expected. Getting all four of the 120 watt Kyocera solar panels off and loaded into the truck was taking much longer than he had planned.

The solar panels were rectangles about four feet long and a little less than that wide. Each was held by two screws on each side of the steel frame. The screws were anti tamper, theft resistant, stainless steel. They could be screwed in, were designed with a ramp that made it impossible to unscrew them.

That had not been a surprise, Mark had spotted that on his first exploration of the abandoned microwave site. He was drilling every single screw out, using his Mikita cordless. He had gone through two batteries so far, throwing the exhausted ones down off the roof of the microwave shack. Jasper had the battery charger plugged into an old inverter in the truck bed, and was recharging them as Mark worked.

'That poor truck battery!” thought Mark. But he knew their dying truck battery problem was nearly solved. The microwave tower site was remote enough that it had been designed with deep cycle battery bank to backup the grid supplied power. They were large batteries, six volts each, that required all of Mark's strength to lift into the back of the truck. They and the solar panels were crucial to keeping their little tribes small level of technology alive. Mark still hated doing this, this stealing, not from the social consciousness perspective, but only because it was taking too long, and it was making noise. He just knew that you could hear the Makita miles away from the hill top.

He disregarded his burning arm and got back to work.

“Should I go inside and see what else we could use?” asked Jasper from below.

“No, this is bad enough, the longer we are here the more likely we are to have company. We need to get out of here quick.”

“It would just take me a moment.”

“No. The more we do here, the more traces of us we leave, and the greater the danger of us being followed. No, the panels are enough.”

Jasper looked at him on the roof of the small hut, reaching up the pole, arms extended, holding the Makita as it drilled down to free yet another screw head.

Jasper was delighted by the cool drizzle that had enveloped the mountain top. It cut visibility and sound, which was a good idea while they stole the panels and batteries, but it also reduced what she could hear.

“I'm going to check around for a minute,” she called up to Mark, and with that,Jasper melted back through the cut steel woven wire fence into the forest that fringed the hill top.

Mark got the third panel released and carefully lifted it from the frame. He reached under the panel and used side cutters from his tool belt to clip the wires that exited out of the weather proof box. He was careful to save as much as the copper wire as he could. They would need that to wire later when they put the panels into service.

Mark looked at the remaining panel as he climbed down and swapped out the Mikita battery for another more charged one. He rubbed his shoulder and realized that he no longer worried too much about Jasper when she disappeared into the forest. She seemed natural and at peace when she moved between the boundaries of the two worlds, the one of the forest and the one of the tribe.

Jasper moved through the wet brush and debris and into the second growth fir that sheathed the lower mountain. She moved in a spiral down, checking the logging trails and skid roads, seeing how they rent through the top soil, exposing the red orange flesh of the mountain. It had been many years since the mountain was logged, and the second growth fir was a full young forest, but those orange scars still ran rust colored blood in the February rain. She saw the rabbit tracks, coyotes scat with it's telltale hair, owl droppings but no signs of tires or feet, other than their own.

Mark exhaled in relief as the last screw head snapped off. He just needed to get them loaded and start the truck and get out of here.

A click, a ratching snick, broke the silence.

Mark froze and turned slowly to see three men standing just outside the fence, next to the truck, grinning up at him.

“We'll help you load those panels for you, wouldn't want you to drop 'em with all the hard work you did in stealin 'em.”

"Thats OK, but thanks, I'm done and just leaving."

The three men were dressed in camouflage hunting gear, and all had machine pistols over their shoulders. The one doing the talking had a revolver pointed at Mark, casually almost, comfortable with the gun. Mark knew the man was comfortable with the weapon.

Fuck! he thought to himself, Jasper? Where is she? Shit.

“Sorry partner, we're going to have to take those panels and confiscate your truck. Hope you don't mind?” asked the one with the revolver. “See we all were thinking the same thing I guess. Great minds think alike right? But we had couldn't figure out a way to get them panels off of there without breakin' em. You coming along with good tools, well damn, that was plain fortuitous, wasn't it boys."

The other two men had moved out in an arc around Mark's position on the roof, each with their right hands resting on the machine pistols, still slung from their shoulders. Mark could see that they weren't to concerned with resistance from him, but still, they stood with their feet slightly apart, weight on the balls of their feet, ready to move a foot in any direction as they would bring their guns up. Ex-military, Mark bet. Trained. Fuck!.

The leader, the talker, leaned back against the truck as Mark handed the panels down, lit a cigarette and exhaled into the damp morning air.

He pointed to one of the two men. “Break that door open and lets see what we got.”

There was no mistaking it, thought Mark, these are trained soldiers. National Guard, Army, didn't matter Mark thought, the question now was how Ben and the others and Jasper would survive without the truck and all the equipment in it. It was their lifeline. But Mark understood of course, that they would find tools and panels, maybe, but they could only do that if they stayed alive. That was first. The only important thing now was to get them out of here before Jasper came back. That and stay alive himself if possible.

Mark was thinking calmly but he was sweating and his pulse was racing. He didn't fight the fear, just greeted it as an old friend. Fear always made him faster, and he doubted that these men could keep up with him in the woods if he could only get to outside the fence.

Mark heard the crash of the door as it gave up under a hard kick. The man was directly beneath him. The leader was still outside the fence leaning against the truck, but an easy shot from there would kill Mark as well as a closer shot. It wasn't more that fifteen yards away. The man who had taken the panels was carrying them now one at a time to the fence and pushing them through the hole.

Third soldier came out of the microwave hut and shook his head towards the leader.

He stood from the truck and holstered his weapon. Mark moved to the edge of the roof to get down, the slick corrugated metal made it hard to stay balanced.

“No, you just stay up there. You know I can't leave you to yap about seeing us right?”

Mark's head swiveled to the edge of the roof closer to the fence on the north side of the little compound.

“You won't make that jump. Besides, I can hit you running, or jumping or hell, even flying, as easy as just standing there. But maybe we can make a deal?

“What sort of deal?” answered Mark cautiously.

“Well,” drawled the man, “you weren't getting all this stuff just for you, right?”

Mark didn't answer.

“So I'm thinking you've been collecting stuff for a group of your people hiding up here in the mountains. Hell, its getting kind of crowded up here ain't it?” and he laughed.

“So why don't you bring us back to your place and we can join up. Me and the boys don't got the virus, and I'm guessing your group don't either, right? We can make a better team you see, we got the guns and the systems, you got food, maybe women?" he said unable to keep the learing tone from his voice.

Mark realized the man would take what he wanted if he found the others. Probably kill everyone, or worse, just kill Ben and him and take the women.

“Mark, I'm back!” shouted Jasper as she looping up the logging road, swinging her arms, laughing and bright, completely oblivious to the situation unfolding before her. Even stranger, she had stripped off her work clothes down to the leather short skirt she had sewed as her underwear and had only a small rabbit fur bra she had sewed tied around her breasts.

All three of the men spun at the sound of her voice, their hands on their weapons.

“Oh, jeez”, she said as she finally noticed the men. They all started towards her.

“Run Jasper, run!” screamed Mark.

Jasper screamed and ran off the road onto a deer trail, screaming the whole way. Mark jumped down between the north fence and the wall of the shed as bullets from the third man sprayed the roof where he had been standing moments before.

The leader and the other man were in hot and hard pursuit of the fleeing girl. They wasted no time racing behind her down the deer trail.

Mark cautiously peered around the corner of the building. The man who had shot at him was edging backwards towards the trail, but unwilling to leave the truck and Mark. He was pissed. He knew he wasn't going to get his share, again. His frustration and indecision kept his focus split and when he turned back to look at the trail again, hoping the other men would drag the girl back here for all of them to share, Mark rushed him.

He spun back, feeling the rush of Mark's attack, the machine pistol already sputtering, spraying, the dirt stitched as it worked up in an arc towards Mark. Mark slammed into the man before the arc could complete and bowled him over. Both men hit the ground hard with Mark grasping the man's right wrist, trying to keep the machine pistol away.

The man was well trained and broke Mark's hold on his arm slowly pushed the machine pistol up against Marks left side. Mark scramble to pull himself away, but inexorably the pistol moved and the man's finger tightened on the trigger.

In the woods the chase lasted only a few moments. They had cornered her easily. Jasper was pressed against a large black oak, spread with her arms clutching at the bark behind her, tears running down her face, chest heaving. The men advanced.

The leader motioned the other to hold back and he advanced slowly towards Jasper.

“Now, now little girl. You needn't cry. We're not going to hurt you. We just haven't seen many girls up here ya know and we wanted to look at you. We won't hurt you. Your safe now.”

Jasper sobbed louder, her eyes dialated with fear.

Quickly he stepped right into her space and kicked her feet out wider, so she couldn't take off on him. He grinned, reached out, and ripped off her fur top.

“My my, aren't these little titties sure pretty. Hey Roy, look here.”

Jasper slapped at his face with her left hand.

“Now now, we're just going to have a little fun, no reason to be hitting. What's your name?” he asked as he laid his weapon on the ground and began unbuckling his pants.”

Jasper didn't respond, but she stopped shaking, and she smiled tentatively at the man, and whispered something.

The leader leaned in, happy that she was going to make this easy. He sighed a long drawn out sigh and they fell to the ground together, her legs laid open under him.

Roy smiled, both embarassed and excited. He was hard as a rock and waited for his turn. The sound of gun fire echoed down the mountain. He turned and his last thought was that this was turning out to be a really good day with unexpected benefits.

A burning cramp, a deep pain, started at his right kidney and arced through him in a burst of pain, it hurt so bad and hard and fast it was like lightning and then, just nothing. He collapsed to the ground, his diaphragm and heart released from any further toil.

Jasper set off at a dead run. The knife dripping, she reached the clearing in just a few moments. She could see Mark rolling on the ground with the last soldier. The soldier was trying to bring his pistol around into Mark's side.

She slid through the fence like water through a hole, and flew to the man's back. She snapped his head back, and her blade, still not dry, but razor sharp severed the ligaments and arteries of his neck, from left to right, the arterial blood spraying out to paint Mark's face and clothing. She pulled back hard and felt the weakened vertebra part. For a moment she thought of taking his head off completely, because, well, he had almost hurt Mark. She growled and let the almost severed head remain on the body.

Mark felt the man tense as his head was snapped back, and the man's warm spray over him.

Jasper rolled the man off of Mark and smiled at him. Mark stared at her, blood spattered and half naked. Her skin glowed and she smiled at him with concern.

“Sorry they got in. They were already up the trail towards you before I found them. They were very quiet, I'm sorry I wasn't quicker. You alright? Are you hurt?”

Mark shook his head in disbelief. "I think I'm OK, but I want to wash this blood off. Where are the other men?"

"They won't hurt anyone now."

“Go get your clothes. Lets collect their weapons and ammunition and anything we can use. We'll take them with us in the back of the truck and throw them down a ravine. We have to make sure they were alone before we get to the rendezvous with Ben's group.

Mark didn't want her to see how shocked he was. Almost being shot was one thing, but Jasper, well, he didn't know what to think, except one this one thing.

Good thing she is on our side.

Site metamorphisis in contemplation

2008-03-22T07:03:00.001-07:00

Hey chickies, its time for a change.

I believe, I think, I feel that I have lost many readers and friends with this blog as I have continued to prod and showcase the insanity that is leading us to an inevitable change in our world. I used write, "our uncertain future." I don't think that anything is uncertain now, but we do seem to sit at a Chinese restaurant with the menu of collapse and change from column A through column Z providing a plethora of choices.

Why did I begin this blog? Hubris? Because I think I'm so smart? Probably some of that, hell probably a lot of that. But my initial reason was to wake people up, hoping that each person who woke up to the problems ahead would bring their friends along and we would have pockets of people who were not going to be shocked back hard on their collective ass when Walmart was empty and interstate trucking was irregular, and the party was over, the party of free energy.

More important to me, I wanted to force, yes force, each reluctant, in-denial person into seeing what I see for a moment. Getting it, getting what? Getting that they and their fore bearers have created this horrible mess, that we, each of right now continue to destroy our beautiful planet, plunder resources, pollute what we don't eat or destroy, and over populate out of control until two hundreds species ;er day disappear.

After the WWII, in some towns around the holocaust camps, the allied soldiers made the local towns people - who were also "unaware," and in denial, come and tour the camps. That is what I have tried to make each of you do in your mind, to hold your head and not allow you to turn from it until you would finally scream, yea, we did it, and it is our nature and we will continue to do it until we eat it all and shit it out. I simply wanted you, or those who could, to break from denial, to witness what we have wrought. Since we cannot stop, it is our nature, at least we can shed a tear for what we might have been, here on earth.

To whatever degree I did or didn't accomplish those two goals, I am done with it. Those of you might read this, know what I think and know what I think each of us should do. To those who castigate me for having the arrogance to think I know what they should do, I apologize. For the friends that don't come around, OK, I understand, hell, it's all I talk about and it's depressing, hunh? Wait to you see what comes.

To my family I am sorry that I'm not living inside the bubble with all of you and I do get that you miss me being "normal."

So after the next FBR installment I'll start rearranging things. I'll put all the links to the old blog material on the aftershock site, and I'll put the better links on the right of the blog there too. then I will evaporate the blog, and I'll begin the development of the main www.heirloomseedsource.com. Possibly more people will be interested in how to choose heirloom seeds for their area than in the philosphy of collapse. I'll probably put bunny pictures up somewhere. Certainly in our future the knowledge of gardening without hybrid seeds is going to be more valuable than my observations of the collapse we're in now. Hell, even mainstream media is getting around to mentioning little bits, here and there, once in a while, but always near a column on how the economy and energy supplies and everything is going to improve in 200X.

I wish all of you well, and we all have many sources more eloquent than me to dip into what is happening behind the scenes. I personally have a pretty great life right now, as I'm somewhat more insulated against the changes that come than many. I know to many I have sounded like chicken little saying the sky is falling and from that some of you have deduced that I am a gloomy Gus. Actually I'm happy and laugh and nap and love the sun and walk and see flowers. I love my friends and I enjoy coffee in the morning and the sun on the Dome Rock mountains in Q.

Getting out of the bubble is coming alive and having real conversations and actually listening to people. Why bother? Because I want to remember. We are in freefall right now.I want a mental snapshot of how wonderful individuals often are.

I will miss the release I got from writing out my frustrations here, but it is time for me to concentrate on my own more gentle transition to tomorrow . I am looking forward to a wonderful summer of a big garden, fishing, and continuing talks and emails with friends who are also preparing in their ways for the huge change that is upon us.

Vios con Dios whatever your beliefs.

Margin Calls, pink sky and Gary arrived in Q

2008-03-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

HI chickies,
I freaked when I saw how low gold and silver had dropped. That shows how perfectly self centered I am. A drop in Gold and Silver might indicate an increasing value in the dollar which would be good for everyone in slowing the rise of import prices. But my little bit of money and future are tied up in gold in silver, so I often have a divided, conflicted response to gold going down. Seeking comfort I read through the various posts of my links and saw that Archdruid has a post on just this topic, margin calls. This link goes to the top of his blog, thus is good only for a few days. It is an excellent easy read.

Gary arrived in Q late yesterday afternoon, tired, but all look pretty relaxed and happy to be out of the cold. How cold? We tried to start a fire with his cardboard from his cabinet in the fifth wheel. The paper and cardboard were not damp, but they had been frozen in the closet until they drove south three days ago. Erika tried to light the paper for about five minutes. I went and got a single piece of Q paper, and it burst into flame. That's how cold, even cardboard won't unfreeze.

I moved over to the 14 day free area and choose a flat spot for the work that Gary needs to do - putting his solar panels back up on the roof. Perhaps, if I'm not too lazy, and I'm very lazy after the packing La Casa Blanca and moving over here, I might get off my ass and take some pictures.

FBR, Chapter Six, scene 1

2008-03-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 6 Scene 1

“I guess since we're murderers I shouldn't complain about you turning Jasper into a thief,” said Bea, stretching her cramped legs out of her. They were taking a ten minute break on the hike. Darlene, Bea, and Ben had been hiking up and down a southeast ridge for most of the morning, carrying heavy almost forty pounds each in the packs.

“Bad to the bone, and a danger to all children, I guess,” said Ben, smiling and sitting down in front of Bea. Bea wore a long loose dress that each of the three women had come to adopt in the last three months. All the them tended to count time from the first flu case in Grants Pass.

“The truck battery's about shot. We need the shortwave and CB radios and scanner or we wouldn't know what is happening. You know that.”

“So you have to send Jasper with Mark to steal solar panels?”

Ben began working a bit precious aloe and oil into Bea's calves.

“God, not so hard, oh, that's good.” said Bea and finally, “Nice.” as Ben's hands worked.

“They'll be back soon I would think.”

“Why does he always take Jasper on these salvage trips?”

Ben thought about it a moment. “I think it is really her who takes him. Do you think she gives him a choice?”

Bea thought about it for a moment. In the three months since Jasper had come back with Mark, awake and alive and back to her old self, well no, thought Bea, she's not like her old self. Her old self was a spoiled teenager. The divorce had been hard for her, but she soon learned to play dad against mom to get what she wanted. That had been Jasper. The girl who came back with Mark that day Bea thought of, in private moments, as new Jasper.

Jasper had eaten ravenously, going through their dwindling stores of freeze dried Mountain House meals, then had fallen into a deep sleep that lasted until the following morning. Mark had sat by the fire and told them what he saw. He didn't try to make sense of it, he just told it in order. Everyone had questions, but Mark didn't have the answers, and he was not a man to supply them to ease the discomfort of others.

When Jasper awoke she spent more time with Bea, which might not seem strange, Bea thought, unless you had a fourteen year old girl, in which case you were probably aware that mom is “not cool“ at that age. In the three months they remained at the overhang shelter, she and Jasper had become mother and daughter again. They created new clothing for Jasper, and slowly Jasper's wardrobe changed to incorporate the hides that Mark tanned from the trap line that fed them throughout the winter months.

The entire three months would have been considered idyllic by most people, except at night they learned step by step what happens to an inter connected country that is slashed apart at every arterial road flu closures, military police, vigilantes and the ever increasing piles of unburied dead.

Mark and Ben took turns listening with an ear bud, and both took time in the truck during the day to listen to the CB. The CB radio provided little as they were far from I-5 but occasionally one of the linear amped rigs was powerful enough and they could hear single sided conversations for a while. The information was bleak.

The H5N1 virus burned out of control up and down the I-5 interstate corridor and across the nation. The ruined economy that had staggered zombie like after the financial collapse of 2008, had been dealt a deadly punch to trade. Roads went unrepaired, trucks did not flow like blood through the arteries of commerce, and anything that was available came by barter and trade locally, if the people dare meet each other face to face. Hunger drove them out, and they had to search and trade and barter for food, fuel, wood for heat. The flu road silently with them and it killed over two thirds of those who showed symptoms.

Some people had resistance to it, and never got sick, others got sick and got better. And a small few got it, never got sick, but continually spread the virus wherever they traveled.

The small band of five had grown together as tribe through the winter. Without Mark they would have starved. He worked harder than any of them to keep them fed and safe. His were the skills required now, and even though he worked, listened to the radio and took part in discussions about their future, he remained somewhat aloof, except to Jasper.

When Jasper wasn't with Bea working on a project she was shadowing Mark, and any time Mark went to check the trap line, Jasper was with him. When Mark looked for signs of others close to them, Jasper was right behind. At first he sent her back. He needed to concentrate, and moving through the woods like a shadow was not a game. He was armed and he didn't want to accidentally shoot her. He explained that to her.

He tried being stern, talking to Bea who just shrugged, and to Ben. Whether Ben liked it or not, he was the defacto leader of the of the small band.

Ben talked to Jasper.

Jasper stood five foot four now, at age fourteen, she had black hair that when combed out cascaded down the middle of her back past her shoulder blades. She had almond eyes with a hint of Mongol blood from some Indian forebearer. Her face was alive, and she had a new sensitivity that was unnerving. That was coupled with a warm sense of no personal space and a tendency to laugh and giggle at unreasonable worry and concern. Ben didn't make much headway with explaining why she couldn't go with Mark. She liked Ben, he really tried to make everything work out and make sense. He explained well and got excited when he talked. She enjoyed that now.

One day Mark was following a noise he hoped would be a deer in the brush ahead. He never used the pistols or rifles because of the noise. They remained undiscovered and he wished that to continue. He dispatched small game caught in the traps with a small oak club, and he carried a hickory bow that he had made years before. He made arrows from dried rose branches, straighted over the fire and broadheads from scrap metal. Fletching was provided by a coyote killed wild turkey.

The wind veered and Mark's scent drifted into the alder thicket below him. The doe was up and running, and Mark took careful aim. The arrow fell struck some limb or twig in flight and went low it seemed, but three bounds later she crashed to the forest floor, still.

Mark was pleased and drew his sheath knife to begin the butchering. He arrived at the deer as Jasper stood and wiped her knife on a handful of big leave maple leaves, and slide it back into her sheath. She handed Mark his arrow and bent to watch him dress the carcass.

“I missed.”

“Close though.”

“You killed her?”

“We needed her, and I'm hungry for something besides raccoon and rabbits.”

“Mark looked at the girl, “how . . .?”

“I knew where she would go, I heard both of you. I just sat down and waited.”

Mark grumbled, “I made no noise.”

Jasper laughed, but I can hear you anyway silly, then her face got that far away look that Mark had seen before. She placed her hand on the deer's still chest. She sighed and the wind stirred the leaves around them slightly.

Mark felt something move between all three of them, the girl, the deer, him and even the forest. He never told her not to come again.

They had returned that day, Jasper carrying part of the deer carcass wrapped in hide. Blood and fluid stained her legs as she walked, dripping from the meat. Bea watched amazed.

Jasper had been nearly a vegetarian before the, uh, attack, but now she happily munched any kind of meat, and she seemed hungry all the time. She ate rabbit thighs, chunks of raccoon, wild turkey, and fish.

Mark had mentioned once that Bea should listen closely as Jasper chewed. He swore she made a noise in her throat, sort of a growl. Bea had slapped him and just laughed. Mark was serious, but shut up. It was just good to see Jasper getting whole again, more than whole in a way she never was before. Her body was filling out. She seemed poised and thought so many things were funny. Yet she remained a fourteen year old girl woman, mercurial, changing moods, sometimes noisy and repetitive until you just couldn't stand it and then other times, in the middle of that she would become perfectly quiet, stand stock still and listen. At least Bea thought she was listening.

That had been a hard time for all of them. The destruction the flu caused, the deaths, and then the destruction people caused as the grip of civilization seemed to fall away from some of them like ill fitting clothes. Personally it had been hard for each of them not to be in contact with friends and loved ones. Ben said they couldn't turn on the cell phones because the cell phones contained chips that allowed others to know where they were. That was hard.

It was a great relief for Bea in January when Jasper started her period. Bea had been holding her breath in a way, she didn't want Jasper to have to hold onto that memory of the rapes, be defined by it, and to have to love a baby that constantly reminded Jasper of that time. So Bea was struck numb when she herself missed her period.

The thought of being three months pregnant shocked Bea back to the present and the warm, sensual touch of Ben's hands on her legs. She spread her legs a bit to give Ben greater access to her sore muscles. She was only three months pregnant by her back was sore already. Ben flushed. Bea laughed.

Ben was obviously attracted to her and had actually started getting pretty close until Bea had told Darlene that she was pregnant, or thought she was. Everyone knew it in short order, and Ben had withdrawn a bit more.

He listened every night to the nightmare that was modern America, and he was determined that they would not be infected or eaten by the monster that so many groups had become. But it seemed to cost him, there was no release from the horror for him, no comfort.

Bea had felt a connection to him the moment that he had touched her wound there in the mini van on that horrible day. They had been lucky. None of their group ever showed a sign of the flu. Ben was completely determined that it would stay that way.

Bea did mourn her brother Barry and was saddened that they had to bury him in hurriedly in an unmarked grave. Jasper told her mother that she knew just where Barry was and if Bea wanted Jasper could take her there. Bea no longer asked how Jasper knew, but she knew there would come a time that they would go there and she would get a chance to say goodbye to her brother in peace. Someday Bea had said, when it is safe again.

Bea only wished Ben could forgive himself for his decisions that day of the attack. Bea looked down to see if she was showing yet. Nope, not yet. After three months she needed to unwind too, and she sort of thought she could help Ben out at the same time. This massage was a good start. His hands were burning on her thighs.

“Anyway, Mark found a microwave repeater that is on top of Big Dutchman Butte,” said Ben. “There is no sign of power or life, and Mark and Jasper have been checking the trails and roads for several days. There are four good seventy five watt panels there.”

“We only have the short wave and the CB radio, why do we need it now, especially since we're on the move now?”

“We need power for the CB radios, recharging the phones if we ever use them again, and because they are valuable as trade items for other things we might need.”

“You mean we're going to actually talk to other people in person?” said Bea, betraying her excitement.

“Can't keep'em down on the farm once they've seen the city, huh?”

“Shut up, you know what I mean.”

“Anyway, The tower is not working and we might as well have them as someone else. I thought it was worth the risk slight risk.”

“Your decision boss, anything happens to Jasper, I'll kill you in your sleep, she smiled as she said it.”

“I'm not the boss, we've had this discussion before, but regarding Jasper, deal, kill me in my sleep if necessary.”

“A rose by any other name still stinks,” said Bea getting up to get rose hip tea ready for Mark and Jasper's return. During the winter, their primary drinks had been dried dandelion root and dried rosehip tea sweetened with honey. Both were excellent sources of vitamin C, and in short supply in their other foods.

Ben grumbled to himself, but he had to admit it. He ended up making a lot of the decisions. First because Bea and Jasper had been in shock for a long time after the abduction and attack, and then because they had all fallen into comfortable rhythm beneath the rock overhang on Chipmunk Ridge. Over three months, without really meaning to put much work into it, they had naturally turned it into a little tribe.

Odd thought Bea, that is how she thought of all of them, a group of five pilgrims. Every night they listened to the shortwave, the little Kaiko radio. It used little energy and was easily recharged from Mark's truck battery.

Three months had passed since Jasper's return. It was late February and in the Siskiyou mountains of Southwest Oregon the group of three women and two men continued their isolation. Spring was beginning to erupt, though early for even this warmer section of Oregon.

Ben stood up and Darlene returned from the woods, Bea said, me next and took off into the woods to relieve herself, then all there were on the way again, working by compass across the folded hills to meet Mark and Jasper. From there they would ride to their new home for the night. Game had become scarce as the months passed, and Ben was increasingly concerned about the black SUV that mark had mentioned on Jasper's return. From the description Ben was sure that it was Patricia. How and why she was there, he had no clue, and if that close, why was she waiting?

With the first hint of spring, Ben had made the case for moving towards the coast and they had agreed. There there would be more food choice and at least more distance from the flu horror of the I-5 corridor.

Titans clash, burrow in little chickies!

2008-03-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

This Monday will be a memorable one in the history books. Yesterday Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank on Wall Street failed. In order not to make it look like it went bankrupt, our government and the Feds brokered a deal for JP Morgan to buy what was left of Bear Stearns for $2/share. Friday Bear Stearns was worth $53/share when a bail out was conceived. It didn't work, so the gutted it and gave the problem the JP Morgan.

This set off a firestorm in the Asian markets while I slept - though I watched like a rube at the carnival watching the wolf boy eat the fat lady - until late last night. The Asian markets decline 4 to five percent, gold jumped to 1030/ounce, oil to 111/gal. When the US markets opened today is seen as the most dangerous day imaginable. Earnings reports on the other banks are do, and they are expected to be terrible. The market is in free fall, the dollar has fallen yet again to record lows against the Euro and everything else, including the Yen. Asian banks this morning ceased trading with Lehman Brothers, another investment bank, but the smallest, and it may flush down the toilet today. This does not make investors happy, so like the Asians they try to pull their value out of those that will die, and that kills the banks.

Example, a report this morning that Citi bank is borrowing at 10 percent and loaning at 6 percent. That ain't going to work long.

So chickies, our financial future is tumbling through space right now. It will affect what you can buy, and how much it will cost. It will force factories to close and jobs to be lost. Any retailers selling non essentials will continue to be unable to get credit to make inventory purchases and the real estate market is just beginning to go over the edge.

Rarely do we live in a time where we can actually see the collapse of a worldwide financial system. Of course market people won't use the word collapse, they will say that the market is resetting itself. Indeed it is. Many of us will be reset right along with it.

So, as I've said before, forget the giants, watch only to avoid being stepped on as much as possible, get your plants started and get your chicks and bunnies while you can. A pig and some goats are good too if you have the room. Everything you needed to get from China via Ebay and Walmart - better do it now - with the dollar in freefall - DOWN - all imports will be going up. Cars, tools, everything in fact, because in case you didn't notice in the last 20 years, we don't make much here anymore, except noise, and there is a lot of noise being made this morning.

Other matters, the next two scenes of the new chapter 6 will be up later today. Guess who is pregnant? Stay tuned.

Jerked McChicken

Dancing with Giantz

2008-03-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

Gold at $1005 ounce and oil at $110/barrel. Unbelievable just two years ago, the press takes note but doesn't every show us the play, only the details.

Imagine you snuck into the theater on the cheap, are hidden in the alcove of one of the exits, and you can't see the screen but you can hear it sometimes. Sometimes you can see boot laces and fancy shoes walk by just outside, under the curtain. You report faithfully on the shoes, pumps, boots and sandals, and your readers know just what people are wearing at the movie but they don't have a clue as to what the theater is for, or what the movie is about.

That is where we are, each and every one of us, because all media reports are similar to our shoe reports above. True, but in being true to the detail and not the message, false. As to why the media would lie, because they are handmaidens to big business who owns both them, the appearance of government, and essentially the dance floor of our entire lives.

I've been somewhat peevish the last two days. The weather has been unsettled, I'm unsettled and the world of finance is under enough pressure to form diamonds where all the forces meet. I'm not going to write about shoes today, I'm going to talk about the theater and the real actors of capitalism, the giants and their dance.

Oil and gold are at record levels. From that we would think that the dollar must be falling – and if we check against other currencies, yep, it was at world record lows against other major currencies on Friday. So if I was the media, I could write, and would write if you paid me to, that gold rose on the dollar's fall. Yes it did. BUT WHY? They never fucking say WHY?

We are left to believe that it is because the housing market and the credit market is collapsing on some sort of shit that was done to give loans to poor people (those useless fuckers) who took those loans and now the deadbeats aren't paying. So the dollar is worth less and gold, measured in dollars goes up. We are always left with a simple answer by the capitalist machine of state and media. But of course we are not told enough to know what is happening.

Why, because you might react and cause more loss to the wealthy. So the sound bites end with gold and oil rise on the dollars fall do to inflationary pressure. Implicit in such partial truths – like the brown shoes under the curtain have brown laces generally – true but fucking irrelevant – so is the price of oil and gold to what you are doing right now.

We are dancing with giants. This is what really is on the screen folks. If you don't control the distribution of billions of dollars I'm NOT talking about you. I'm talking about the BOYZ.

Giants are the executive branch of every country that trades on the market. It is the Federal Reserve Board, it is the IMF, it is the big boyz behind the curtains one level ABOVE the governments, it is that 2 percent of the population that we do not see.

Gold and oil are rising in price because many of the boyz need to shift huge amounts of money out of failing investments and put them some place safer. This is necessary so that after the financial collapse they will have assets to shift back, buying again (in their theory) all the land, control structures, and methods of production with their preserved wealth. Friday the move to safe asset place was gold and oil. That is why gold and oil continue to rise – the big boyz are moving assets, liquidating especially real estate, and converting the money to oil future and gold bullion.

Gold is of no particular interest to them. They're not gold bugs – Oil is of no particular interest to them. Financial collapse that is ongoing is making the dollar less valuable every day, so they can't turn their money in to cash and store it in big shoe boxes. If they did, after the collapse which is a long drawn out thing, when they opened the shoe box they would find a much less valuable dollar, possibly near worthless.

If they left it in the real estate under the Trump Plaza, the new market value might mean they have lost 4/5 of what they have. No that wouldn't do.

Wealthy live by taking a percentage of what you do. Their wealth must continually be invested to make more. If they stood still eventually, well hell, eventually they would become, us, me. The work you perform, they get a cut of. Why do you think you have a job, because you're cute? You have it because you do something that allows one of the boyz somewhere UP THERE, to make more money than if you didn't have your job. That is why you work for them. In a time of economic recession, stagflation, and real collapse, the jobs collapse too. That is not good for them. They don't like this mess any more than you, but unlike you, they are willing and able to do something about it. So they are shuffling their giant feet on the dance floor, and moving huge amounts of wealth in and out of gold, oil seeking to reduce how much they will loss, where you, you will loose most of everything in this collapse.

I've heard it mentioned with horror that there are those who think there are parts of our government who are PLANNING the death of billions of people on the planet – fucking INSANE. True of course, google End Game. That's terrible right?

Well, not so much as it first seems. We are at a reset game point on this small beautiful planet Smarter and more normal and conservative thinkers and professors than I, not wackos, foil heads and white supremacists, agree that the carrying capacity of our little world topped out at 1 billion at the time of the civil war (1864). Since then we have been using coal, then oil and natural gas to feed people, and you know what we do when there is enough food, we fuck and make more of us. We we could and we did, if not you and I our parents certainly, and here we sit cheek to jowl on our little planet. All 6.8 billion of us.

Simple math. Oil and gas grew the extra food that created the more people. Less oil and gas equal less food. Less food equals LESS PEOPLE. How many can the earth support without using natural gas and oil? Woow boy. Well, we've kind of fucked up the topsoil and such and we've over farmed and under cared, so an axiom of this OVERSHOOT thing, that's the thing we're in right now, overshoot, is that when you stop destroying the top soil and cutting everything down, you're not back where you where started – you're actually quite a bit worse. So lets say less than one billion for the whole planet, and if we are sweet and sing all together and using humanure composting, and all of us play nice, in a century maybe we can support a billion and a bit again.

You counted how many we got now? Oh yea, 6.8 billion. So to those people who think that governments think tanks are not and have not been studying how to get from 6.8 to 1 billion, you are dumb as a rock or a perfect sheeple. Lets take a moment to all be shocked. You mean the population is going to have to FALL. Yep, it has to fall by 5.8 billion, not 4.5 billion. That's a lot of people. Hell it's a lot of compost. So if you lived in a democracy that you actually participated in, wouldn't you hope that someone was looking at this, making a plan, at least making sure your name wasn't on the list?

So be sure that government has plans if bird flu (when bird flu) hits, and most of those plans are about keeping people docile world wide while they die. I suspect that will not go well because we're becoming a bit unhinged (personally speaking of course). Oh, and reducing the birth rate wouldn't help as we right now could run to 10 billion just by restricting each person to only one replacement person. What's the math there, you're thinking. Well each person who has a baby doesn't have the decency, given our overshoot, of quietly and immedately dying. Shit some people continue to live on and become grand parents. That's how you end up with 10 billion, if every single person today said I can only have one replacement of me. But of course with the oil past the ½ point on the dip stick, we can't even continue to do 6.8 billion, let alone 10. So we actually are going to have living people die, not of old age. You figure it out. Flu, war, starvation, nuclear war, border wars, immigration wars. Is this a fun dance or what?

So with gold on the rise, all real estate plunging, banks not loaning to you or others, everyone calling up to see if you can pay them now or early or soonest, and food rising like gold and oil every time you go to the grocery store (what about raisin bran – four dollars for the little box in Q – what the fuck is that? -well it's wheat of course, we aren't growing as much wheat because we're growing more corn – why's that – for your car – for ethanol you dipstick). Don't go there, fuck Africa and those poor countries, yea were not exporting corn, yea they're starving, so what, didn't you just say there are too many of us. Besides, listen to the rumble of my Humvee, ain't she sweet?

So here you are, you can see today's movie on the screen – rich boyz moving assets preparing for the financial collapse and their re -entry into a new a more glorious control of power in the future.

What should you do. Well, watch out for the their feet on the dance floor, we are so tiny, I am so tiny I'm an insignificant and they will close that factory repossess and salvage the home right from under your feet, in order to put themselves in a safer position that all the rest of us. That's a given.

So what you should do, if you're still reading and not in the bathroom retching, or back to watching dances with the stars:

Buy as much gold as you can get. Not jewelery, coins bars, bullion, gold with no added value. Store it IN HAND not on deposit somewhere.

Buy as much silver in ounces as you can for when the dollar is being devalued and a new dollar 100 to 1 being printed and mandated, you won't be holding old dollars. Silver is small and can purchase things, normal things like tools. Gold is so valuable that it is difficult to get change. OK the Raisin Bran is $56 and the apple is $12 and all you have is an ounce of gold which by that time is $2000. Hard to make change.

You should not worry about anything the media says anymore and any politician that you don't personally control. Just turn off the shit, you'll know when hard times are here. Simple. If the power goes off for a while and the grocery store don't have no Bud at any price, and if Walmart's looking a little thin, then yep, that's an actual American Calamity, and don't worry, it's not an American problem it is a world problem. Watch out for them big feet then, they be a' flyin, you be a'dyin. None of these people are good dancers and you are very very tiny (speaking of myself of course).

You should either get rid of all debt or maximize your debt and max out every credit line in order to put cash into your hand to buy gold and silver and stash it. Then file bankruptcy when everything is foreclosed. It won't make a bit of difference by then. The only thing that will count is land you can control, gold and silver.

If you have stocks and bonds and a 401K try to shift them to gold funds – Fidelity has one for instance, and if you can't do that, go for the energy companies. While this dinosaur is dying energy is going to be a priority for everyone, and it won't take too many brown outs and grid failures to get the boyz to pour newly created cash into the energy markets. We'll drill EVERYWHERE, will support solar and wind and tidal, though they won't make much of a difference right now – too late baby!. Invest in anything we're going to run out of.

Energy,

Fresh water,

Food.

Buy freezers and solar panels and T-105 batteries and buy a junk yard, not one all stripped but a nice fresh one full of trucks and new cars. Buy a tow truck, get a four wheel drive. Get guns and ammunition and booze. Those are the new real assets.

If you don't have money, invest your energy into your own personal solar and wind and hydro, invest into food in growing your own, fuck if you own it, just plant and harvest until they start shooting at you.

Water, get close to running water. Get close to good shallow wells, did your own.

If you can grow enough, trap, fish and hunt, have water to drink and create enough energy to keep your minimal level of personal civilization alive (lights, communications) then you will do all right.

All above simplified. Take care of yourself now, break all the rules and forget everything the last four generations told you – they lived on the rising tide of free energy, you live on the ebb tide, their homespun philosophy and wisdom is a useless anchor that will drown you (mixing metaphors – sorry). Shrug off what dad and mom would think, shrug off what it means to be a good guy, a generous guy, and see to you and yours, and stay way fucking light on your feet, because the dance floor has professional dancerz who will stomp you flat during then next 6 months.

Business does not represent you, your congressman does not represent you and your parents have the wrong tools for new alien world. If you want to survive this, or if you want your children and grand children to survive this you must change, now.

And hold your close people tight, for you can't be everywhere, can't foresee everything, and no one will remain untouched. Balance is being restored, things are likely going to fall on your head.

Club Orlov

2008-03-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

Many of you stalwart loyal chicklets will recognize Dmitri Orlov's name from numerous posts in the past. However, I've just placed his blog on the right hand navigation bar, replacing Ran Prieur who had died and gone into politics; pretty much the same thing. However, to ease the transition, here is a quote from a recent Club Orlov blog entry:

"All of this playing at politics is completely unnecessary. Democracy is for those capable of self-governance. Americans are not interested in governing themselves, but in watching television, and the political spectacle does not make for particularly compelling television viewing. To make it more interesting, I would like to propose a process of political reform which I call "Two-Step to Empire." Step 1: McCain chooses Cheney as his running mate and, come November, Diebold comes up with some numbers to show that they have won; Step 2: Cheney renames "Office of the Vice President" to "Office of the Emperor" while McCain gratefully fades from view, his mission completed." - read more here.

FBR, Chapter Five concludes Scene 5 & 6

2008-03-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 5

Ben swam up towards conciousness. Darlene's SKS beat a staccato rhythm against his head. Louder and louder and louder until he jerked awake.

“You all right there?” asked Mark. “Your head was sort of bouncing of the window. Sorry about this road.”

Ben realized the wack, wack, wack was not the SKS but this head striking the driver side glass in time with the pot holes in the old logging road.

“Still the dreams?”

“Every time I close my eyes,” replied Ben. “Where are we?”

“Almost back to the camp.”

It was three days since the slaughter, as Ben thought of it. Odd, he thought, it felt like one second ago, and ten years ago at the same time. A lot had happened in three days.

Mark turned left onto a needle carpeted road. The weather was damp again, and Mark didn't want to leave tracks, but it was becoming more difficult. Each time they used the road to get in to the basin, the path became more obvious.”

“Well this is the last load, right?” asked Ben.

“I'm going back one more time, but I'll go on foot.”

The barely discernible path wound around and over a rock face and they began a descent along the edge of second growth on the north and much older timber on the right. They were skirting the edge of the wilderness area, about twenty five miles from the campground that none of them would ever forget.

Ben saw Bea step out from the trees, nearly invisible in a loose dark sweatshirt with a hood. She glanced at Ben and Mark and walked up and over the rocky path. She had cedar limb with her and dusted the road as she walked. Ben noticed that the scabs along her temple where falling off now and her long black hair was hidden beneath the sweatshirt.

The truck rumbled to stop in front of a southeast facing rock overhang. Mark looked in amazement at how much had been down in the six hours they had been gone. The overhang was not deep enough to call a cave, but it had provided shelter that first night. That horrible first night, thought Mark, as he looked at Ben.

Ben was lost somewhere in thought or memory. Mark didn't understand that, but he did know that most people had trouble with doing things and sometimes even more trouble with letting those necessary things be right. Ben had still got them out of there, but it wasn't the Ben he had known before. Well hell, he thought, neither was Darlene.

Despite the sorrow, grief that everyone had been moving through and under for the last three days Mark did notice the work on the front of the overhang. On the first night they had simply thrown sleeping bags on the slope leading up to the rear of the overhang. It was damp there but drier than further out. The southwest facing exposure had kept the light rain off of them and they had fallen into the bags and slept.

Now, with three days work there was debris from the clear cut completely obscuring the overhang, the slope had been flattened to the back, creating a thirty foot long shallow cave of about ten feet. Fir trees grew tight to the southern end of the overhang and below a fire pit had been built of rock, and as long as they kept the fire hot, there was little smoke and what there was was dispersed in the branches of the trees.

Good idea on the fire Ben.”

Darlene had removed the rear tarp of the truck and was picking through the last load from the, the, killing park. That was how she thought of it.

“You could do one more load, there are still things you didn't bring,” she said without rancor.

Ben came around and put a hand on her shoulder, you flinched away from him. He shrugged and stepped away from her. She had not looked straight at him since the killings.

“No, we can't go back. It's too dangerous.”

“No one is looking for us, not here!” she snapped.

“I'm sorry Darlene, I'm sorry for what we had to do.”

“Well I'm sorry too, and I'm god damned sorry that we didn't kill them all.”

Mark turned and embraced the older woman. “I tried honey, I tried. I only found the one man in the woods, and didn't know until later that there was another. It's my fault, not Ben's.”

Darlene leaned into Mark accepting the warmth and then leaned back, her face wet with the light cold rain and tears. She reached back and slapped Mark hard across the face.

“Yes, your fault, my fault, Ben's fault and all I see is that little girl and that man raping her, and I can only hear the sound of the gun shuddering against my shoulder and the bits and pieces of the men flying off,” she said her voice starting to rise. Mark reached out and pulled her close. She sobbed against his chest.

“There was nothing else to do Darlene.” said Ben. “I was mad at Mark for deciding for all of us on his own, but I've been thinking about that for the last three days. Each of us would have made the same decision eventually. But we would have been too late to save Bea and Jasper. Once we saw them kill Benny and start raping Jasper, what else could we do? We didn't have a choice.”

Darlene couldn't face Ben. He had put that gun in her hand and that sound in her head.

“But we had a choice of that to do then. We should have called the cops, not run up here.” There, she said she thought. It was was Bea thought too.

“If there were any cops to call, or do you mean the soldiers? Do you think they would have come up and told, OK, justified shooting, go about your business? And what about the fucking flu Darlene, you'd kill us all to give the responsibility of what we had to do to some father figure, the “authorities.” Ben's voice was angry now.

“What the fuck would you have done, condemned us all to death? I'm sorry Darlene but we didn't abduct Benny, his sister Bea or her child. We don't “party” with them, didn't rape Jasper, we didn't rape Bea, and we didn't kill Benny.”

Darlene gasped. “How did you know that Bea was raped too?”

“She told me!” he shouted back at her.

At that moment Bea walked up past the truck. She looked at all of them, one after another. She stood, her five foot seven in frame solid, her feet planted at shoulder width, he weight centered on the balls of her feet.

“Yes Darlene, Mark, I was raped too. Before we got to the camp, and they made my brother watch. Then they started groping Jasper. I begged them to leave her alone, that I would do anything they wanted. They just kept drinking and the fat one, the leader said he guessed that they would do whatever the fuck they wanted with us, and yes I would do everything and when the boys were done with me, I could watch them fuck my daughter.

“Jesus Christ you assholes. Are you feeling sorry for those fuckers. Have you looked at Jasper? You look in her eyes. Nobody's fucking home. Here you are deciding some philosophical bullshit and how awful you feel about what you did. Fuck you all. I just wished you had killed every one of them. But you should be thanking Mark Darlene and thanking Ben, because I do. I have my daughter, I have my life, and if I have my way, I'll find and kill that last one too. because he raped us both in the van. I will find him and I will gut him.

Bea's face was on fire. She had perfect white teeth in a tanned strong face. Ben watched her explode and realized that however tortured he was by killing a person, it was not an exercise in civilization. It was survival, and it was good that they killed them and it was good that Bea was alive. She had a strong face that affected Ben deeply. He imagined that Helen of Troy had that sort of face. He simply stared at her, as did Mark and Darlene.

Darlene stepped forward and reached for Bea, “I'm so sorry honey, I didn't think.”

Bea stepped back and slapped her hand away.

“I appreciate you cleaning me up, and how tender you've been with Jasper, but so help me Darlene, I hear you making these men any more upset about what they had to do, what you had to do, I'll slap you until you finally get through that big hair, cheap waitress act of yours that this isn't the world of a week ago any more. If my daughter is going to survive I can't, we can't, afford to have you second guessing decisions that keep us alive.

“Fuck, none of us know if what will happen, but I'm god damned glad that Mark killed that fucker, and if I hadn't been so fucked up afterwards I would have cut his balls off and stuck them in his mouth for the cops to find.”

Darlene stepped back, “I'm sorry, sorry.” At that moment all three of them suddenly saw Jasper standing off to the side of Bea, between the shelter and Bea.

The turned to her, she had pulled her clothes off again and was standing naked in the rain, her eyes vacant.

Both women turned away from the men and clustered around the young girl, sheparding her back towards the shelter.

“Let's go get you cleaned up honey,” said Darlene with her arm around her shoulder, and Bea held her and let the girl who walked lifelessly between them.

“You think she'll come back?” asked Mark.

“I don't know, but this is a problem when and if we have to move again. I hope so, but then I can't imagine.”

It had taken the big truck three trips for Mark and Ben to clean up the campground. Mark and Ben and driven the van, two trucks, with the motorcycles loaded in back, and the quad runners further up the road to another campground. The quad runners had turned out to be the best vehicles for moving the bodies. They siphoned the gas out of the motorcycles and most of the gas from the quad runners and had filled Mark's truck tank and a few cans. They took the food, ammunition and weapons.

The hardest part was using Benny body. Ben was insistent that there be no connection between Benny's van and the gang. They took the van much farther almost five miles, to steep bank, and poured a gallon of gas over Benny's body, put him at the wheel and pushed the minivan over the side down to the edge of the creek below. The van crashed but did not catch fire until Mark climbed down and lit it by hand. The fireball was enormous in the early evening and they left the area quickly in the truck.

They loaded all the supplies, tents, food and cooking utensils they had cached at the campground and left some of the weapons scattered among the dead men. They hoped that with the flu, the military and all the problems out in the larger world, that the scene might be passed off as a bunch of drunk assholes who finally shot the hell out of themselves. Ben doubted it, but it did put some confusion into the mess and helped to separate Benny's group from the outlaw group.

Mark had let them off of the the camping road, along the Rogue river for about twenty miles, and then up a gated private timber section to where current overhang camp.

Ben had been impressed with how simple it was to get through the locked and chained gates. They swung out, painted bright yellow. The posts were ten inch pipes set in concrete and the pivoting arm that actually blocked the road was four in steel The padlocks where hidden up in side the pipe so that you couldn't get a bold cutter up there. Mark had simply cut the heavy chain with a four foot bolt cutter and replace one of the links with a repair link. He had a collection of rusted repair links that you could slide open and closed that matched most of the gate chains they saw.

Ben new that these replanted sections saw the owners or management companies once per year if that, and with all the flu, there wasn't going to be thinning, or logging going on right now. The gates kept drunks out. They had gone through two of the gates and the overhang was back on BLM property from what they could understand from the maps.

“So what if those guy's had the flu?” Mark had asked on one of the trips.

“I guess we'll know in a week, if any of us get sick. Seems that Darlene recognized the fat leader from the diner. She hadn't seen him in a while so maybe his group hadn't been into town since the first flu showed up in Grant's Pass.”

“I hope you're right, it would just be too much for Bea if Jasper also got the flu from that pig.”

Darlene and Bea had cleaned up Jasper and redressed her. Ben had seen the bruises on her breasts, neck and thighs when she was standing in the rain. The vision competed with his dreams of the actually killing. It didn't make it all right, but it made it bearable. At least Ben thought, he could put it aside while they got rested, fed, and out of the rain for a few days. Then they would have to decide what to do.

Ben also realized that Bea's outburst had pleased him in some deep way. Maybe they would be OK and maybe Jasper would come around in a few days.

Two weeks later, well into December they got snow. Darlene was standing outside of the shelter watching the flakes drift down, smoking.
“You think they're still after us?”

Mark had just come back checking traps along the creek that ran below them. It was a small seasonal stream, probably dried up in the winter. Mark had set a line of Conibear kill traps along the stream to take rabbits and beaver if they were here. He also had set a perimeter circle of larger conibear 300 traps in a circle around the camp about three hundred yards out. He had two rabbits hung from his belt and had stopped to share the new snow with Darlene.

“Won't last long.”

“Still pretty.”

Later that afternoon Mark and Ben called a meeting, and got everyone dressed and out to walk a perimeter line around the camp.

In the past two weeks Jasper's bruises had faded and she had stopped wetting herself. But her eyes remained focused on something far away. She didn't talk, except sometimes she shouted at night in dreams.

Two days after they were settled in the shelter, she had disappeared and it had taken Mark about forty five minutes to track her. She was walking through the woods avoiding the poison oak and black berries but still when Mark looked in her eyes, there was just nobody home.

After that, Bea and Darlene had taken to tying Jasper to themselves with a ten foot cord when they went out. She would follow along passively and Bea thought she was happier for it, though no one else could see any difference. To Mark, it seemed that Jasper was farther away from reality every day.

Mark had want to put larger traps that he had in the truck around the perimeter, but Ben had vetoed the idea. There was a chance of people who worked in the woods stumbling into the traps, and Ben wasn't willing to use maiming as a warning. Mark made the point that they where only five people.

“Do you think that guy made it out?”

“I'm sure he did, but I'm not sure he would tell anyone,” said Ben. “I mean how would he explain what they were doing. No, I think he's running like a rabbit, far away from here.”

“I hope you're right.”

The day after the snow, Bea was the first to wake. They had put dry fir on the fire last night and it had heated the rock wall providing pleasant warmth throughout the night. That coupled with the sleeping bag and exhaustion of getting used to a new and physical life style, had provided the deep and recuperative sleep.

Bea thought that it was probably the sleep more than anything that had allowed them to heal and recover. She was not sure about herself though. The rape was back there in her mind, over there, and she was not sure she could go near it. She only hoped that she and Jasper weren't pregnant. Jasper had just started her periods this year, a late bloomer in her class.

Bea's heart sank as she looked over at Jasper's bag and it was empty. The string laid cut between their two bags.

“Jasper's gone she screamed,” waking the others.

Foreign Body Reaction

Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 6

“Wait,” shouted Ben at Mark, “I'll come too.”

Mark hesitated and shook his head no. “We don't know how long she has been gone. You're needed here.” He nodded towards Bea who was getting dressed frantically.

Ben hesitated and was interrupted by another scream from Bea. “She's got my knife!”

“What knife?” asked Ben.

“I took it from the man who, who . . I took it, it's a long hunting knife. I've been keeping it tucked under the sleeping bags. It's gone.”

Mark pulled on a down vest, and took the binoculars hanging from the shelf they had built near the fire pit. He took the SKS rife too and checked the magazine. Ben had cleaned it and reloaded it. Mark threw it over his shoulder and left. The snow was mostly gone and packed down by their own foot traffic. Mark went out about fifty yards and cut a semi circle around the camp. He crossed Jasper's tracks headed east just south of the granite outcrop that formed their home. He began to follow her tracks at a jog, thankful that she wasn't barefoot at least.

Mark was not the only one following Jasper. For days mother and baby had been watching this one who hung back when the humans were out. The weak one. The noise and too many others had disturbed game and while she and her cub were in no distress, they were hungry.

She had left the cub hidden to wait for her, and had worked along the creek bed, smelling the traps the humans had left, her nose curling in contempt and revulsion at the smell of the steel.

Now she padded along behind the girl, letting her stay ahead for a while. It was not time yet.

Jasper reached the top of a hill at sunrise. She had no idea how long she had been walking, indeed if she was aware at all, it was just that the sun came over the hill to the east and bathed her in light. Her limbic old brain reacted to the light and warmth by turning toward it. The snow had stopped, and the air was clear. She had come out of the older fir forest behind her into a burn area. She could see all the way down to the stream below and up the other side of the valley to the exposed red-orange earth of the mountain, all the way to a road. Her eyes were not focused, not really seeing, but something in her struggled and smelled the water down below. She was cold, the sun warm, and that she did feel.

She began to shake and run down the hill. The light glowed in the mist rising from the soil around her. All around her plants and seedlings were erupting from the earth. Despite it being winter in southwest Oregon, the ground seemed alive and growing, and she could somehow feel that too. She could feel the hillside's energy suffuse through her.

Deep in that place that she had been driven during the attack, fear rose as a wall in her and pushed her down like a choking hand, but the sun fought through that and like a song's beat she could feel herself become aware to the terror that was those men in that horrible van, hurting her and watching her mother. She slid away from the pain. She needed to stop it, stop that pain.

There was something else pushing at her inside too, there in that place of self loathing and disgust, something foreign but familier. But the push was not like that man's penis cutting into her, killing her, this was clean, and strong and had claws to fight back. She felt it, and it surged within her. But her pain and loathing were too great and she retreated down again.

She stopped near the stream her chest heaving from the run down the mountain. She gulped at the air. Pain washed through her. She couldn't bear it, it was unthinkable what they had done and no one would every want her, she was disgusted with herself, and, no, stop, stop. She had to get it out. The long hard knife appeared in her hand, the blade glinting in the morning sun. She offered the insides of her arm to the morning sky.

Again the other push, clear strength, the acceptance of the world as is came from outside, all around. It was warm and she could feel her claws dig into dirt below the forest floor. She saw herself from above. She could see her arms raised in supplication to sun, to be let free of this pain that ate her like a malignant cancer. To be free of this man, these men, who had raped her and hurt her and scared her away, so deep and far away that the world was the surface of the ocean to Jasper. Too far above her head to ever reach. She and this other saw her put the knife along side her arm and bend the sharp blade against her skin.

She began to slice, and she could feel it and then she felt her claws push the soil, and she stopped to wonder at the power that pulsed through her thighs and the fear of that man, the other men, their hands hurting her where she should be loved but instead it hurt, hurt, hurt.

Her awareness burst forth and struggled to reach the sun. Power coursed through her and she could see through four eyes, and felt the heart of the mountain lion, and she could see the man who stood across the stream, laughing at her. Her voice found itself and she screamed in terror, anger, defiance, for he was one of the ones that forced his hand up beneath her and broke her and hurt her and now, he stood there laughing.

He looked over his shoulder up to the road on the other side of the creek.at the black SUV parked there. Beside it stood a woman and man.The woman nodded yes to the man. The woman saw the knife in the girls hand, cutting down the length of her arm, tiny rivulets of blood had begun to flow and the woman above saw that. He licked her lips and felt a moistening, her breath caught.

“So you little cunt, you came back for a little more? I knew you would, you little girls always want more don't you.” His beard glistened with spittle and he rubbed his crotch lewdly with one hand, the other holding some sort of weapon.

“First things first you little bitch.”

He raised the weapon and she could see herself through the cougar's eyes, she could see him and she brought the knife away from her arm. A voice roared in her head, close, “Down baby, down now.”

Mark crested the hill above, his lungs bursting. For the last hundred yards cougar's tracks lay on top of Jasper's. The mountain lion was hunting the girl. He unslung the weapon as he ran. He saw a tawny blur of motion behind the girl. He dropped to his knee and sighted down the rifle. Too far, but he had to try, he waited until the cat gathered for her leap at the girl's back and he pulled the trigger.

NOTHING, fuck nothing, the safety is on. Shit, too late thought Mark.

Jasper dropped. The man found not a young girl who he had raped before him but the springing form of an in prime female mountain lion rocketing toward him. He could see the yellow of her eyes and he had just enough time for urine to drench the front of his pants before the big cat struck him full in the chest. He bowled over as she spun around to take his head in her jaws, crush it.

But the big cat stopped, she stood still and watched the man. He couldn't believe she didn't simply snap his neck. He stumbled backwards into and across the stream to where the girl laid. Perhaps, oh yes, thank you God of fucking little girls, perhaps he would still give that fucking Patrica woman what she wanted. And what she wanted was that sweet little girl lying on the ground behind him.

As the cat waited and watched Mark pounded down the hill trying to get close enough to do what? Certainly the man and the cat were both dangerous, he had heard Jasper scream when she saw him. Mark was stunned and confused by what was happening below him.

Mark skidded to a halt. He laid the rifle barrel across a burned stump and sighted on the man advancing on Jasper. He clicked the safety off and put his face along the stock. It felt warm and he knew that he would kill this man, and that the bullet would not miss. He felt the rightness of it and he began to squeeze the trigger.

Suddenly Jasper stood. Mark cursed. She was directly in the line of fire. He released the trigger. He was back on his feet running down the hill.

Jasper was calm. Her fear that had consumed her and buried her under its weight was like a fire around her, her pain became a screaming wall of sound surrounded her then concentrated to single point of fury. She moved closer to the man, one of the men, one of the many men. The cougars eyes found her and the pain, the sound, the fury formed into a liquid thing and flowed into her hand.

The man spun around and foundthat Jasper was no longer on the ground. She was right there, inches away, her eyes opaque and focused on the past. She brought her left hand up and blocked the gun out and away. She stepped tight to the man, as to embrace him, as a mother would embrace her son. She pushed the knife into him just above his pubic bone and gutted him straight up to the ribs. The ball of fury, the terror, flowed out her arm into the man's guts. She angled the knife up and sliced through the heart, right where the lion told her.

Jasper stood back and the man looked down in amazement as his intestines spilled, steaming, to the ground. He looked up and began to sink, his knees buckling. He had reached his knees when a wicked sound of crushing bone cut the morning air. The mother cougar effortlessly twisted until a rifle shot snap of the vertebrae echoed in the cool morning mist and bright sunshine.

Mark raised the rifle, but Jasper turned and smiled at him, caught his eye, shaking her head, no. Mark looked back to the cougar, but she and the man where gone. Only a bloody track that led toward the stream remained.

High above on the logging road, Patricia sagged against the side of the SUV, her slacks soaked through.

“Oh my god, Arthur, did you see that?”

Arthur looked at Patricia, watching her faced flushed in excitement and opened the drivers side door and slid in. He knew he needed her to find Ben, but she was a seriously fucked up woman, he thought as he started the SUV. In a few moments there was nothing left in the burn area except a young girl smiling in the sun. They climbed back up the hill, Mark glancing nervously behind every few steps. He couldn't believe the change in her.

Jasper was aware of every twig that crunched under foot, the smells of the soil and the blue of the sky. A gentle roaring moan filled her mind and she looked to see if Mark heard it. No, he was focused somewhere else right now, but she would see for him and the others now. She came in close to Mark's side and reached out for his hand.

Thinking she sought comfort he looked down and gently took her hand. A warmth suffused through him, a feeling of enormous resilience. timeless patience. He simply stared down at her wondering what he had just witnessed.

Jasper laughed and felt the lion, fill her belly. She was hungry too!

“Let's go Mark, let's run" she shouted. Mark heard her beautiful young voice for the first time and marveled. The sun was bright but this morning, at least this morning thought Mark of the dark weeks that had passed, at least this morning, something was done, something had changed, and it was good.

Can't look away

2008-03-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

Morning free chickens everywhere. FBR will be up by 10am today which is now your time if you're on the west coast, same as me here in AZ! Kunstler was rambling about a bit on an old topic this morning, still worth the read, and the piece that struck me was this succinct paragraph, and I quote:

"The US faces a pretty stark choice right now: it can let the losers take their losses -- both the big institutions who created and traded in fraudulent securities, and all the "little guys" who borrowed too much money trying to get rich quick, or trying live like the millionaires they see on TV. We can let them go down, and suffer the consequences of their bad choices (and maybe prosecute some of the culpable bankers and corporate executives), OR, in an effort to let these losers off the hook we can wreck the whole machinery of capital by making our medium-of-exchange worthless." -Kunstler, his blog today - click on Clusterfuck on the right.

The medium of exchange that is becoming worthless is the dollar. I myself am going to try to stop watching the price of gold in dollars which is confusing because not only is gold increasing in value, the dollar is losing value, so a rise in gold prices can mean either that gold is actually going up or that the dollar is becoming less valuable - for example perhaps the feds are going to reduce the prime rate by another .75 this week (wait for it) which causes all dollars to become less valuable (including the ones in your wallet and purse right now), and thus gold will appear to go up, when in fact in other currencies it might be the same. Perhaps we should forget about the dollar (and I suggest you do, and if you're holding dollars, don't look now, but they are shrinking in your hand every day), and watch the price of oil and gold only in Yuan, Loonies, and Euros. Each of them have their own movements but are less volatile than our free fall dollar at the moment. In fact the one you should be watching is oil, as gold really is stable unto itself. That is so hard for many people to understand. There is not much gold in the world, and there is only a little found and refined each year. It is durable but jewelery siphons some off to be hidden away and in thus gold maintains it's scarcity at about the same value. It is all the currencies that change and the increase in the number of dollars it takes to buy gold is a direct indication of loss of value of the dollar, not an increase in the value of gold.

That is not true for oil however. It is rising against all currencies because it has peaked and there ain't no more being made (at least not at any rate that would make a difference - though you could stop back in 120 million years and check). The rise of oil is real. Gold is just a safe place to store your work and asset energy while you wait to see what happens. No, you can't eat gold, but it is scare, and universally understood, two of the requirements of a medium of exchange. The dollar is not scarce, is not understood, except that you have to take dollars for oil purchases world wide, or we will huff and puff and put our military on your doorstep. Reserve currency status goes to the biggest prick. So money is actually a poor choice for money.

Lest you think I have any real knowledge of the markets and finance and money, please disabuse yourself of that notion. I'm not a real scientist, just another incredulous face pressed against the glass of change, unable to look away. An example, gold plunged $20 this morning, but for no reason that I can see, and when the Fed lowers the interest rate this week, it should go up to new unexplored heights. Will it? I don't know, but I know this, if you're holding a bunch of dollars in hand, in cash, it is time to exchange them for things of durable value, gold, silver, booze (good stuff - not Ripple), ammunition (especially shotgun shells), guns, handguns, tools, solar panels (if you got the space), and of course, OPEN POLLINATED seed.

But my not knowing what the fuck is going on does not give me comfort, nor should it, you. The insanity of wealth based on nothing but agreement -no value supports our printed currency except the belief of one retarded banjo player in Appalachia, who luckily can't be found because he's out back with the pigs. Heaven forbid he awake to the illusion and start the cascade of the dollar collapse and subsequent worldwide economic collapse. That is why he is kept in the dark - just like you and I.

I'm writing the end of chapter five of Foreign Body Reaction this morning, and if I can write it as I feel it -I think it is pretty good! Watch for it after 10am. That will complete chapter 5 and I'll have the pdf of one through five up later today or tomorrow.

What's to do?

2008-03-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

Thought I would let you know what I'm doing, lest you think the warm slothful weather of Q has got me sipping diet pepsi with my feet up. Well some of that of course.

I've been trading email messages with Gary - see the Daily Pill link to the right. He is headed down this way to get out of the winter and then to Oregon. We have totally different lives, different generations even, and different obligations.

Gary is hurrying to get a garden in on a piece of property in Oregon. His overriding concern is to start literally digging in, growing his own food and thus to put "insulation" between the rising costs of food and his family and their plans.

I have been busy converting what little cash I have in the bank, about $4000 into more durable assets. My goal is to keep light on my feet and get plants started right here in my Airstream for when I arrive back in Eugene. I will be putting in a large garden for the same reasons as Gary. First, it is a no lose situation. Even if the larger garden I plan for this year produced NOTHING I would have the advantage of having make that mistake while still having a small income and the ability to purchase food. If the garden does produce passably well, then I eat well, can a lot, and have lower food costs, as well as a more healthy food supply, for a fraction of store bought food.

Gary has made the point to me, and he and I will talk more about this when we are sitting together around a fire rather than in email, that everyone in the US pays something to stand where they are currently. Rent, own, squat, camp, boondock, one way or another someone is paying for the land under your feet, and thus indirectly you are too. Boondocking which is my overwhelming preference - parking for free, places severe limitations on how much I can impact that plot of land. On BLM land for example, you can stay 14 days in theory, but in reality much longer. But if you put in a garden, well, move along little doggie.

As you go up in costs you go up in ability to do something with the land, like have chickens or grow food. But until you actually own the property - which is not ownership because there are controls (zoning) on what you can do with it - then you have the right to more permanent changes and advantages. Shops with tools, solar power in a big way, wells, storage for salvaged material, root cellars and solar friendly earth structures to live in. All of these require you to own the property outright or with a mortgage.

Gary feels that he can save so much by producing most of his own food, that he can thus afford a mortgage to buy the property. The head butting we do over this is that I think the property values have JUST STARTED to collapse. I'm not in a hurry to buy high and support a mortgage on property that is continually worth less than the mortgage.

So that is where I am, what I'm doing, converting assets - cash to silver or gold, guns and ammunition, stored food. I'm also enjoying the summer sun, reading things that bend my mind in many directions, and generally enjoying this respite before a greater storm is upon us.

What are you doing?

FBR, Chapter Five, Scenes 3 and 4.

2008-03-02T09:58:00.000-08:00

Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 3.

“Five.”

“Five?”

Darlene leaned against the side of the truck and watched Mark. Ben stood near her, close enough to speak quietly.
“I called seven people. I felt like an idiot,” said Darlene. "Only five are coming, and I'm not really sure they meant it. They all thought I was nuts."

Ben understood. There hadn't been time to prepare for this. People needed time to digest, time to discuss.
“This is something we should have been discussing for a years before the flu hit. You did what you could,” said Ben.

“Just like you with your friend Jacob, right?”

Ben looked down, his foot scrubbing the dirt. “No, I've been having these discussions and what to do if scenarios for years with Jacob. I just couldn't convince him that something as innocuous sounding as bird flu was a big enough problem. He needs the comforts of normalcy, the city life, at least once in a while.”

“You mean Emily, right?”

“I'm not so sure it is Emily that is the problem, she's just convenient.”

Both watched Mark laying flat on a warm rock, scanning a valley below. They were thirty miles north of Grants Pass and west into the mountains. The Hellsgate area. They had stripped Darlene's Subaru and loaded the tents and supplies into the bed of Mark's truck. They were three hundred feet above the GPS coordinates that Ben had supplied for Darlene's friends. It was an hour past the time they had agreed on. No one had showed yet. Mark was watching the only road in and out of the valley below. They were on a road that had several campgrounds, but the road had been nearly abandoned when fuel prices climbed and campers had become rare.

The weather had surprised them all when it dawned unseasonably warm this morning. The gray late November winter seemed to have given way to an sun once again. If Ben could have forgotten what was going on up and down the west coast it would just been a pleasant day in the woods with friends.

Ben and Mark had unloaded supplies down below, enough for four or five days for three people. Whoever showed now, now that flu was in Grants Pass was assumed to be infected. Ben planned on keeping them comfortable and at a distance for longer than the incubation period. He had read that symptoms, coughing, sneezing, and scratchy eyes were demonstrated usually in forty eight to seventy two hours. If her friends showed no symptoms after four days they were probably alright. Ben would have preferred longer but they needed to get moved back away, deeper into the wilderness, farther from I-5. Though he hadn't discussed it yet with Mark, Ben's plan was to move towards the coast along the Rogue river.

They spent the next two hours taking turns watching the valley below and listening. Mark left several times and hiked down to check intersections for tracks. They ate, listened, watched and waited.

Darlene was slumped against one of the truck tires, her head leaning against her knees.

“We have to go,” said Ben.

Darlene shook her head slightly in agreement. "Not a one."

"Sorry," said Ben.

Ben offered his hand and she drew herself up and dusted her seat off. Mark came over the edge of the hilltop and shook his head negatively. Carefully they all checked to make sure they left nothing behind, no trace. Mark dusted out their footprints with an hazelnut branch.

They were loading up when Mark paused and looked at Ben. He listened and they could hear the distant crunch of gravel, followed by the sound of off two stroke and four stroke engines.

All three of them dropped to their knees and crawled out on the rock ledge, lay down and watched the scene below them.

Two four wheel drive trucks, one with a canopy, and two motorcycles pulled off the road below. They were only a few yards from where Mark had piled the camping equipment for the hoped for rendezvous. Two quad runners, both bright green slid to a stop behind the van.

“This will do,” followed by something unintelligible and then drunken laughter. Two of the men dismounted the bike and went to the back of the van. They pulled the hatch up. A man got out of one of the full sized pick ups and came around behind the van. The rear of the van was facing the rock promontory where Ben, Darlene and Mark lay, but the deep shadows inside the van didn't allow Ben to see inside.

Mark held up a finger to Ben and then handed him the binoculars. Ben took a minute to focus and could see two rolls of something in the back, one of them was squirming. The man from the truck was huge. He towered over others and his stomach hung over a thick leather belt. He had a biker's beard, and a bald head. The other doors of the second truck opened and several men got out holding machine pistols. Ben watched them spread out throughout the clearing.

The first lump from the van was pulled out and dumped to the ground. The fat man gestured at the two boys to unroll what was now clearly a dirty throw rug. They laughed and pulled the end up and a body rolled out and collapsed on the ground. Even from this far away, Ben could see blood on the man's head.

One of the group with the machine pistols shouted and pointed at Mark's cache. The tableau froze, and everyone moved over to inspect their discovery.

Darlene tapped Ben and gestured to be given the binoculars. Ben passed them to her. Ben had chosen this spot carefully and on the off chance there was sun today, he knew it would be from behind them.

Darlene focused and both Ben and Mark started at her quick intake of breath.

“Shit, oh my god, that's Benny on the ground. Oh fuck, he was one of my calls,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“How many people where coming with him?”

“Three. I mean, three total. He has a sister that is staying with him and her daughter too. “

Mark tapped Ben again and pulled him towards him. Ben shook his head no, furiously. Darlene could see Mark's hands beseeching him, palms turned up.

“No.” Ben hissed.

Down on at the clearing, Benny was trying to get to his knees. He wiped futilely at his eyes and got to his knees. He struggled to stand using the rear bumper of the van and he leaned in, half collapsing trying to pull the second bundle out. He tore at duct tape that held the rug closed and managed to rip only a bit before the fat man had returned.

Benny's head slapped back as the giant's hand grabbed the hair on the nape of his neck and dragged him backwards. Benny fell to his knees and the man slapped him to the ground.

“Who stuff is that, asshole! Who were you meeting out here?”

Benny tried to see what he was talking about but the big man simply pushed him down to the ground with one foot on his chest. With his other hand he unrolled the second rug. The child rolled out limp. There was no sound. She wore only ripped panties, and the bruises on her white slim body were visible from the hill.

Darlene bit her lip and stifled a scream. “It's Jasper, the daughter. Oh my god, is she dead?” said Darlene her voice rising.

Ben shushed her, reaching over to silence her. When Ben turned back, Mark was gone. “Fuck!” said Ben in a whisper. Darlene looked and saw that Mark had left. She grabbed Ben.

“You can't let him do this alone.” Her hand dug into Ben's arm.

“Down below the sudden wailing of the young girl, rolled up the hill.”

“Look who's awake boys,” shouted the fat man.

“I told you a private party was what we needed.” The two boys left the pile they had been tearing apart and the two of the four men from the second truck we returning, their weapons ready but relaxed.

When Ben and Mark had decided on this rendezvous point for anyone of Darlene's people, they had chosen an area near Tin Can Campground opposite the to Galice very near the Rogue River. They were a rise south of the campground, looking down on it. Ben figured that if anyone who came could be comfortably quarantined in the campground for five days to see if any of them developed the flu. From here they would be able to go west in an arc that followed the Rogue River or south and loop back to Route 199 past Cave Junction and to California. Darlene's tale of soldiers on 199 gave the nod to running west.

Darlene rolled closer to Ben and repeated.
“You can't let Mark do down there alone!” she hissed.

“He shouldn't have gone down there at all,” snapped Ben, trying to keep his voice down.

“They'll kill him, we need him.”

“There will be many of these groups, many people will die, and I'm sorry that you know these people, but if they are infected, Mark is not only jeopardizing himself, but us too. They could be infected, they could kill him, or worse he will kill some of them. What will that do, these men will hunt us. Did you see the automatic weapons?

“Fuck Darlene, what we should do is get the truck out of here as quietly as possible while they're involved down there.

Darlene just stared at him. “But that isn't what we're going to do, is it?”

“Fuck!” said Ben. “We haven't even started to get out of this mess and already we're breaking every rule of common sense.”

“You know what we have to do then, if we start this you know what we have to do?”

“I know we have to get that girl, Jasper I think her name is, away from those men. That is all I know. If you where a parent you would no that too.”

“If Mark does that, they will track us. They have vastly superior automatic weapons and more than that. They are not the kind of people that would think that this was anything but fun. They have already slipped over to a different way of living. Have you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The men below in the campground are a certain type. A certain percentage of all populations are always controlled not by an internal belief in right and wrong, but rather by the rules of the civilization they are surrounded by. In prison there are rules, in cities cops and peer pressure control them. But in times of civil collapse, they loose their restraint, it freedom to destroy, take, stay drunk and drugged and to do whatever they want. For many of these people, that is terrorizing others, especially those they perceive a part of that world that controlled them.”

As Ben talked he had moved back from the edge of the rock ledge and to the truck parked in the shadows. He rummaged in the back of the flat bed, and found his Cache tube. Darlene followed, listening and watching.

“So if we are to join Mark in saving this girl, we may or may not live. But Mark decided that for us when he reacted as a 'normal' man in a normal world; last weeks world. And here I am, reacting the same way to my friend, who we need, and who is now part of our close people, our tribe for the next six months.

“Do you understand what we have to do now?”

Darlene opened her mouth to snap back at him, the obvious answer. But her breath caught in her chest. She had followed Ben's line of reasoning. She stared at Ben and realized what he meant. If they managed to save the girl and her uncle, They would be pursued. They could not afford or survive that pursuit.

Ben unrolled the Mexican blanket that cradled two long guns. Both were military surplus and thus quite inexpensive. Unlike sporting rifles they were heavy, ugly, and rugged. He handed her the Yugoslavian SKS that had been modified to accept AK47 clips. He slapped a 40 round banana clip into the bottom of the rifle. It had no scope, and was not really accurate above 150 yards even in skilled hands. Ben choose the other long gun, a 1944 Mosin Nagant that had a scope on a very ugly mount. It was long and accurate out to 400 yards with the scope.

Darlene accepted the lighter SKS with the clip. Ben put 5 stripper clips of Russian ammunition in his pockets and said.
“Ready.”

Darlene looked at him and said, “I don't know if I can do this?”

“Then stay here.”

“I can't.”

“You know what we have to do?”

“Kill them all.”

“Yes. Everyone.”

Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 4

"Have you fired a rifle like that before?"

"I've never even seen one of these. Doesn't look like the 30-30 lever I used for deer hunting," she said looking down at the rifle."

It is not full automatic, you get one bullet per pull of the trigger. The sights are pretty accurate. Just line up the front in the middle of the posts in the back, all even height, and whatever is out there about from here to the van down there will get hit. Even if you miss, the noise will keep them pinned down. I want you to work your way back down this road to that bar of gravel above the creek."

He brought her around and they crawled to the edge. "See it down to your right?" Ben asked.

"Yes," Darlene said softly. "I don't know if I can do this Ben.

"Then stay here. I can't help Mark if you're taken prisoner too, or killed. If you go down there you must do what we must do, or we leave here right now, they finish raping the girl, kill the man, kill the girl and probably kill Mark too somewhere in there. But we will be alive. I would guess it is what Mark knew we should do."

"I'm not leaving him and that poor girl to those animals," she hissed.

"Then use that anger or get the fuck out of the way."

Darlene,s face was red, her carefully coiffured hair was hanging in dirty strands. She said nothing, but got in a crouch and began working down the road, keeping out of sight.

Ben returned his attention to the scene below and the long Mosin. He used the primitive distance measurement and saw that the men at the cache were about 200 archins away. This measurement is an 18th century measurement of the pace of a Russian soldier. Ben had fired the Mosin long enough to get use to the strange distances. He knew an archin was about 28 inches.

The men who were clustered around the girl at the back of the van were a little closer. No one in that camp was watching anything but the girl, including the men who had been on the periphery with the automatic weapons, possibly machine pistols.

Ben folded his sweatshirt that he had picked up at the truck into a neat bundle and tried to do everything as he had always done at the range. He was pretty good out to 150 yards with the Mosin, but the men who where were still standing around the supply cache were a bit farther away than that. Ben laid out the ammunition clips to his left, and rested the birch wood stock of the long rifle over the folded sweatshirt. He laid perfectly flat on the still warm rock at a twenty degree angle to the gun and tried to remember the Finnish method of slapping the bolt open and closed without moving the rifle from his shoulder.

He brought the stock up to his cheek and tucked the rifle firmly against his shoulder. The Mosin slapped hard when it fired and it was very loud. He used the scope to search the campground for any sign of Mark. Then trying not to feel anything he began to assess danger and risk as he looked at each man. He could see the fat pig rutting at the teenager spread on the floor of the van, and the other men cheering him on, waiting their turn. Two men were in the van but he couldn't see them beyond the leader. His finger curled around the trigger of them Mosin and the lit reticule of the scope centered on the back of the fat man's head. The scope was only four power but he could see the sweat dripping down to the seemingly lifeless girl.

Ben took his eye away from the scope and searched again for Mark. He could see nothing which didn't surprise him. He looked to his right and saw Darlene was in position, the SKS held awkwardly in front of her, but pointing at the men around the van, but she was looking at him. He held one finger up, pausing her.

The four men with the machine pistols had been drawn into the on going rape, and now were all focused on it. Ben brought the crosshair off the fat man and shot the first man with the machine pistol through the ear. Without waiting to see him fall, he slapped the bolt open and closed chambering the second round. The men below were just turning to react and he shot the second one low in the neck, the blood spurting on the his fellow watchers. The third round took the third man with the machine pistol in the stomach as he was raising the gun, looking for the source of the fire. The fourth man had dove to the ground and rolled under the van, bringing his weapon out before him. The fat man backed up off of the girl and there was a snapping, buzzing sound. He swatted at his temple as if stung and yelled at his men to get to cover. He took one more step and was stung again. This time he sighed and crumpled to the ground.

Ben chambered the fourth round as the men scattered below. Suddenly the sound of the SKS began a low snap, drumming bullet after bullet towards the men nearest the cache. The men all hit the dirt seeking cover and Ben shot one after another as they lay down. He dared not shoot at the two men who were now under the van as the girl remained unconscious on the floor of the van and the two men deeper inside were out of sight.

Dirt exploded close to Ben's face followed by a sharp crack a millisecond later. Dirt and rock stung his face. He flinched back from the edge of the ledge. He rolled backwards and to the right grabbing only one five round clip from where he laid them. He reloaded his rifle, safely back from danger and rolled back into position.

He saw two of the men farthest behind cache drop their guns and run into the woods bordering the campground. Another ran for a motorcycle, and was frantically kick starting it when he began to shudder in time with the rhythmic pounding of the SKS below him. Darlene was simply shooting one round after another, every second, another bullet and she had found the range. The SKS was chewing him up. The man fell over slowly to the left and the motorcycle tank was ruptured in turn. The sweat smell of gas filled the clearing.

Suddenly the teenager slid out of the van and dropped limply to the ground near the fat man. She looked at him, noting the two small holes at his temples. There was hardly any blood. The men who where behind her in the van pushed another rolled carpet to the door in front of them and brought handguns to bear, using the carpet as a cover and a gun rest. Ben almost shoot right through the carpet but then remembered Darlene's comment that there were three people. Ben felt a cold heaviness come over him. He knew with certainity that he could not keep this up even a minute longer.

He felt a wave of nausea swept over him. He swallowed hard, and without further hesitation shot both of the men laying in the van through their lower backs. Having paralyzed them, he worked up each of their spines with one more shot each. The bolt slammed back, open on an empty chamber and Ben pushed the rifle away from him. He couldn't see now, the chips must of have cut him. He wiped his eyes, no blood. He face was running sweat and tears. He was effectively blind. He rolled to the side and retched again and again until there was nothing left in him.

The steady wack wack wack of the SKS finally stopped. There was an odd stillness to the forest. The moment was broken by scream from the forest that was cut off abruptly. Ben couldn't look back below, but he forced himself to his knees and began to stumble down the road toward Darlene. He realized that he had left his gun, but felt the familiar gouge of the pistol in his belt. He made it to Darlene. There was no blood around her. But she sat dazed behind the SKS semi auto rifle. Ben reached to pull her to her feet. She recoiled from him without a word. Her carefully applied makeup was running down her face.

Ben hesitated and then continued down to the clearing. He made his way towards the van when suddenly the right sleeve of his jacket fluttered and he felt stung. He realized he was currently deaf from the Mosin's report but he couldn't remember hearing it as he shot. The plucking at his clothing occurred again and he saw the man under the van taking carefully aim with the machine pistol, spraying a creeping line of exploding dirt geysers toward him. The gun snapped from the man's hands, and he had only a moment to register surprise as a hand with a heavy hunting knife reached around in front of him from under the van and cut his throat.

Mark rolled out of the truck, a 10-22 Ruger carbine over his shoulder, so small it appeared like a child's toy, a K-bar knife in his left hand. He walked among the men, not looking at Ben, but kicking their weapons away from them. Ben heard a gurgle and looked up to see Mark reach down and sever another man's throat.

Darlene pushed by Ben. She squatted and pulled the girl by the arm out of the tangle of bodies at the open end of the van and ten feet further before she cradled the limp form of the teenager to her. Ben slowly made his way to the last rug. He was afraid of what he might find, afraid that he might have shot through the rug. He cut the duct tape and the limp form of a woman in a halter top, shorts, bare feet and long black hair rolled out on the floor of the van. The long black hair was stuck to the right side of her head with caked blood. Not a bullet wound, she had been hit. Ben left her for a moment, and looked for water. The truck had several cases of water bottles in the back. Ben took several of them to Darlene, then cracked one open and poured it over the bloody temple of the woman. Her eyes flickered open for a moment, saw Ben, then closed again.

Ben lowered her head and kicked the bodies away from man he had first seen come out of the back of the van, the brother of the woman he thought. The man was still, limp, on forest floor. Ben turned him over to find a round neat hole where his right eye should have been. Ben felt nauseous again, swallowed hard and turned to the fat man. He rolled the leader over. A chromed forty five automatic lay beneath him. It had been fired, and looking again at the dead man, the size of the wound could only have been made by the forty five.

Ben pulled the brother gently away from the van and covered him with one of the rugs. The woman in the van was stirring now, getting up, calling, "Jasper," hoarsely.

A hand clamped firmly on Ben's shoulder. Ben spun and realized it was Mark. He raised his hand to strike Mark, and Mark stood still and waited for it. Ben's hand fluttered down. With that Ben collapsed. Mark stepped forward and caught Ben as he fell. He slid him over to Darlene and laid him down next to her and the girl. Darlene looked up, her eyes filled with tears.

Way of Going

2008-02-29T07:26:00.000-08:00

In the horse world, horses have one value judgment placed upon them that is quite important. It is how they move, a certain confidence or lack of it, an attitude, a strut. That is part of the horse's way of going. Each of us has a way of going too. Whether we are dragged into the future, unware of the future, or living permanently in denial, it becomes our way of going.

Your way of going, my way of going, affects what we take in for information and our decision to do anything with information. I read a great line on a blog today regarding the information available to us. "If you don't read the paper, your uninformed, if you do read the paper, you're mis-informed." We don't want to appear naive and foolish to our friends and co workers, so it is only natural to accept the common belief system. The common belief system was a product of education and advertisement that benefited the very few and only worked while there was an ocean of energy to support it. Now we are deep past the point of equilibrium. The common belief system, the fear of looking foolish is exactly what will keep you frozen in place as every resource is removed from your grasp. Common beliefs were always wrong, never did benefit you very much, but now, now if you don't put down the self programming tools, common belief will decrease your chance to survive.

Even mainstream media, eyes wide open in perpetual surprise, are reporting the economic collapse of the dollar, the energy problem (peak oil), and climate change which trumps all the rest. So friends are now paying attention a little, slipping out of denial here and there for a moment. But their way of going is usually cynical distrust in change, denial of change, and a continuation to always do things like they have done before because it "works out in the end." Of course the arcs of change in our history have been several generations long, so that is generally a good way of going.

BUT, this time we are at the end of many arcs. We are at the end of capitalisms market driven use of the free energy of the earth (oil/natural gas). Market capitalism requires always more cheap energy, cheap labor, and infinite resources. Even those most in denial must admit, that two out of three of those are no longer possible. So at the end of an arc of seeming stability, there is great change. At first it only affects others. Others loose their homes, others get so deep in credit card debt that they can no longer maintain their current way of going. They collapse, but so far it is a small percentage of others. Not you, not I. So as good sheeple we will wait for the good times to come back, the markets to correct, the government to help, and we watch elections, TV and we stay distracted and misinformed.

We are in a tremendously fast time of change. Like an arrow through the heart, the beast still runs on not understanding that it is already dead. That is modern life, dead on it's running feet. The result is that those in complete denial will not adapt and they will rise, fall, survive, die, prosper or not, not by planning and work, but by pure accident. I think there is a way of going that will mitigate the collapse for you. My way of going is my reaction to my understanding of what is happening today.

A. I will seek every advantage in future income, keeping all doors open. Let energy, goods, information, and materials flow in. I open my filters wide, listen to the foil heads, the hippies, the scientists, the thinkers, and stop listening to MEDIA.

B. Cut off every outflow of energy, money, effort, materials, work that does not directly lead to increasing your survivability, joy, and fun.

It is pretty simple. Ed Foster once compared it to a bucket. You have things pouring in the top - money, materials, learning, fun, doing, creation of things, and in the bottom of the bucket there are holes and all those good things pour out. A: above is about increasing the fill of YOUR bucket and B: is decreasing the size of the holes in YOUR bucket.

Some practical examples in my life. I live in a small Airstream trailer that not only is better for the use of resources for the earth, but costs me very little to live. Between Quartzsite and Elmira I spend less than 180/month for my right to stand on a piece of the USA. I buy wheat, rice and years of dry and freeze dried foods, and store them in the trailer. That decreases my food outgo as well as gives me a "spring" against times of food interruption (coming).

I don't watch TV at all, though friends send me bit torrent downloads and sometimes I buy a DVD. I use the internet to teach myself anything that I need to know, even down to having a flat on my truck that wouldn't come off, and I found a site on how to get a stuck wheel off after the nuts were off. I make use of the salvage around me to build tools. Whenever I buy I seek to buy cheaper or not at all. I hike, I calm down, I look at rocks and understand the wonder of being out in the desert. Coyotes move like smoke in front of me in the morning, a real experience that stays with me throughout the day. I'm closer every day to being part of it, instead of a spectator.

Slowly I have learned that most of what I bought in the past was lost, or junk or was of no interest to me in a very short time. I have also learned the hard fact that often personal relationships that worked under the old system, but that used enormous personal energy were the worst holes in the bucket. A bad personal relationship can knock the bottom right out of your bucket. I had this years ago. It was the hardest time and change in my life.

The good consumer American way of going, common to most US citizens does not work for the coming collapse. Don't you feel we just have to buy something to fix this mess? Just have to buy something - the programming we are bombarded with makes us WANT to BUY SOMETHING - so when you have to buy something, buy quality tools and immediately make something important to you. Art supplies, welding equipment, anything that helps you reduce the size of another hole in your bucket. For instance, buy a grain grinder and start buying wheat in 50lb bags. You get to buy two things but you reduce the size of one of your bucket's holes.

The message of media is so subtle that it transforms itself to make us think that if we by a hybrid vehicle and replace all the light bulbs in our house with fluorescents that we a buying a better future. Bullshit. Don't worry about your bulbs, and your hybrid will help neither you nor the planet. Focus on NOT buying anything. If the light bulb works, use it until the electric grid shuts down and browns out. Instead of buying a light bulb, if you must buy, buy solar panels, inverters and batteries and get yourself off the grid completely.

The simplest thing is to start a garden. Seeds are small and not expensive. Get open pollinated so that you can save the seed for the following years. Get a garden going soon and get your compost piles going NOW. There is NO downside to growing your own food. I guarantee that anything you grow will taste better than store bought, and it all has the hidden value of making you healthy, filling your time with satisfying effort (it really feels good to my soul, my heart, and calms me to be in the garden). While you're gardening you are NOT frozen in front of the tube with a beer in your hand. The programming of Empire only works if you put yourself in front of it.

OK the biggest way to change is to reduce your outflow, and most people have the biggest holes in their buckets when it comes to debt. Debt is necessary for Empire and if you stop being in debt, stop buying, then you will kill our economy. If enough people do that is exactly what will happen. However if you personally don't get rid of debt then Empire will continue to control the most basic needs, i.e., where you live, what you can eat, drink, and smoke, and how long each day you will be in bondage to the system. Debt will allow them to own your property, evict you, and put you to work to pay back what you owe, and you will remain, or die, in harness. Very dramatic right, well here's a simpler less dramatic exhortation, follows:

Stop paying any attention to Empire. Do NOT participate except when it benefits you. It is a staggering dying beast and you need to be preparing you and your children for what we are transitioning into - collapsing, an ever fragmenting loose association of feudal and fascists states. Salvage will be the job, and food production the over riding concern (thanks Gary!).

Don't buy anything new. Haunt the Goodwill and St. Vinnies. Easier to buy now than sew later. Do without and go for a walk instead. Grow food, learn to walk, walk, walk. Get your fat ass in shape, get your fat kids in shape. How? Walk, walk, walk. You'll feel better, you'll cut off some of the bullshit that rains down on you every moment. From ads to Oprah, all of Empire programs you for conformity. Forget about conformity. Don't even wear the same color socks. It is immaterial. What comes requires you to be light on your feet, flexible, adaptable.

One last thought on debt. If you're so deeply in debt that every debt stick leans against another, and all assets are up for grabs if you file bankruptcy, then drive your debt higher, right to the max. With that money buy gold, silver, guns, ammunition, good liquor, even a retirement plan that would survive bankruptcy (if you are close to retirement), then walk away from all of it. In a year none of this will matter, but it will matter whether you have gold and silver to buy things, and if you have guns, good booze to trade. Conibear traps will be worth more than your current "assets" of fiber board and plastic. Make sure your transportation is worth less than a few thousand dollars but spend some of that debt to make it reliable - but low book value.
Do not put your assets where others control them. Between a treasury note or gold in cache buried in the back yard, choose the cache. Cache weapons and ammunition and gold and silver. Knowing that it is happening in a place -that people are preparing, always gives fascists and future "big men" feudal systems pause.

Don't argue with the other sheeple. They are completely, terminally, invested their debt, their previous decisions and will assume that the "good life is coming back." It just needs a little tweaking. It isn't going to and you know it, you can feel it but can't stand it. You must have the courage be excited about change, to hum through this taking care of you and yours. Don't pay attention to the big picture except to benefit your gold, silver, guns, booze, tools and transportation. Put your nose down and trust your gut.

So if you're deep in debt, break the programming hold. Embrace your debt, expand it, manipulate the system as it has used you. Stop listening to the societal programming that you are bad if you are poor, you are bad if you're in debt (I think you're stupid, but not bad), good if you give everything away and volunteer. Instead, move your debt around so that you end up with cash in hand to buy any asset that you can easily trade (that which will be desired) in an economic collapse. It should be something you can store without it loosing value. Don't store bags of salad for example, but red wine and hard liquor, yes. Cigarettes, less good but still valuable trade items in the short run. Any addictive substance will have maximum value. Booze, drugs, prescription drugs, if they have reasonable storage life. In then end for most collapses in the previous ages always seems to come back to gold, silver, weapons, booze, and good hand tools. You can't go wrong with those.

It will be a wild ride for the rest of my life. It will be a wild ride for you too. In there, in change, is a chance for each of us to build a personally more sane and satisfying life. Reconnect with your close people. It's time.

Late note: Here's a link that Rick directed me to. It is a great example of what does count. Behind the ads and the headlines the internet does allow real information to get through. This one is about food, and it's a critical read. The link will only work for a few days, I'm sure.