{"id":479,"date":"2009-10-13T07:36:28","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T12:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=479"},"modified":"2018-10-30T20:05:47","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T00:05:47","slug":"finzel-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Finzel, Part two"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Part One is right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

——-<\/p>\n

This story ends in November, the tenth year of the community.\u00a0 Almost three years since anyone had come up I-68, or ventured east to look for supplies in the abandoned cities.\u00a0 US 40 was returning to nature, also abandoned.\u00a0 Parker\u2019s people had begun to believe themselves to be alone.<\/p>\n

The nights were dark and cold.\u00a0 Autumn giving way to an early winter, which everyone dreaded.\u00a0 On guard duty at the Hen House sign, bundled in jackets and blankets, sipping the last of the coffee, now cold, and dreaming of the end of the shift, sat Ken Eaton and Chris Shingleton.\u00a0 One had been a wage slave at the Comcast call center in DC, the other had been a PG County cop.\u00a0 Two souls rescued by Parker.\u00a0 Two people who, a decade ago, had never set foot in the woods.\u00a0 Now they peered into the cold night for any sign of trouble.\u00a0 What had become the most tedious job of all.<\/p>\n

The shift dragged mercilessly into the early AM, and Ken kept them both awake with trivia, songs, inane conversation that drove Chris up the wall.\u00a0 The blind on the overpass was abandoned.\u00a0 No need for an early warning system when any sign of their existence was obscured by the wildness growing beside \u2013 and onto and through \u2013 the road.\u00a0 Anyone traveling the interstate would probably be on foot, anyway.\u00a0 Or mounted.\u00a0 The mechanized Gates and McGavin team were most likely unique, eccentric adventurers given license to pursue their technology by a prospering community.\u00a0 Parker\u2019s people could afford to indulge.\u00a0 But they knew they were lucky.<\/p>\n

Chris had argued to reduce the jeep duty to just one person, or do away with it entirely.\u00a0 Years without seeing a soul\u2026 Gates and McGavin fanning out across the countryside looking for plunder also returned each time with the depressing \u2013 or uplifting, for some \u2013 news that they had seen no one, nor signs of anyone\u2019s passing.\u00a0 From the firetower, the nights were always dark.\u00a0 No lights, no fires, no glow on the horizon.<\/p>\n

Parker insisted on the guard duty. Always be prepared.\u00a0 She was a regular boy scout.\u00a0 Chris told Eaton that he was taking a piss, and he pushed open the jeep\u2019s door with a vicious, grinding crunch and jumped down onto the loam of the forest floor, trudging through the leaves to the big Sycamore that had started to crowd what remained of the rutted dirt road leading back to the community.\u00a0 Here was beautiful silence.\u00a0 The sharp, earthen smell of autumn in the mountains filled him with childhood memories of Halloween, and holidays, and playing in leaf piles.\u00a0 Trudging in the dark to school, and returning to play in the late afternoon as the trees shed their last and the November sky stared down coldly blue-white.<\/p>\n

He leaned against the tree, lit up a joint and inhaled deeply.\u00a0 So much for autumn smells.\u00a0 Time to come down from the chattering tension in the rotten cab of the dead jeep.\u00a0 He closed his eyes and listened to the forest sounds.\u00a0 The rustling of leaves as animals small and large moved about, the scrape of trees as a breeze he couldn\u2019t feel playfully tugged at the upper branches.\u00a0 When he opened his eyes again and looked up, the moon hid behind clouds, and the increasingly skeletal trees waved against the dim glow.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t process the alien sound until a few dull seconds later.\u00a0 A train whistle.\u00a0 He blinked and shook his head, stubbed out the joint on the bark of the Sycamore, and cocked his ear towards the night.\u00a0 A hallucination?\u00a0 Good, wild mountain weed?\u00a0 Over-fatigued and half crazed by fucking Eaton\u2019s mindless blather?<\/p>\n

There, again, a train whistle.\u00a0 Ricocheting through the cold air from somewhere along the B&O tracks that ran through the dense forest into Pennsylvania.\u00a0 The tracks were miles to the east, but the cold air played games with the sound and he could swear some phantom train was about to come hurtling through the trees.<\/p>\n

That cold night air is something.\u00a0 He could also clearly hear Eaton, about 100 yards back in the jeep, say: \u201cHoly mother of fuck\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The whistle woke up Parker\u2019s people.\u00a0 Everett Macchiarella was reading a Braille book in the firetower.\u00a0 Endless hours of boring guard duty, and he taught himself Braille.\u00a0 Talk about useless skills.\u00a0 But what was a joke became the perfect way to pass the time, as he was forced to sit in the dark during the night shift to protect his position from imaginary attackers.\u00a0 He heard the whistle and briefly saw the headlamp on the locomotive pass through the distant trees.\u00a0 A flickering phantasm that he saw before the whistle, and it spooked the shit out of him.\u00a0 The whistle wasn\u2019t much help, either.\u00a0 He stood up and shouted to no one, he fought two urges \u2013 to run to the window and plaster his face against the glass and to run scared down the winding stairs and back up Tower Lane to the community.\u00a0 He felt suddenly alone and exposed.\u00a0 Alone in the tower, illuminated by the moon, almost half a mile from help.\u00a0 He felt suddenly aware of the dark forest surrounding the tower, and of that half a mile hike back to the others.\u00a0 Some watchman instinct made him turn to the west, looking over to and up the Interstate to where the Hen House sign and his fellow guards were.\u00a0 Of course, he could see nothing.\u00a0 But countless fearful images began filtering through his mind.<\/p>\n

In the community itself \u2013 a gathering of huts and small houses grouped around an old farmhouse \u2013 everyone was asleep.\u00a0 A hard day of work done and another one soon to come.\u00a0\u00a0 It took the whistle two blows to rouse the lighter sleepers, one of whom was Parker.<\/p>\n

She sat up as if from a fever dream, shuddered as the old world came rushing back, and threw the covers aside.\u00a0 Her farmhouse \u2013 her palace \u2013 was cold.\u00a0 The fireplace showing no more than dim, smoldering coals.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t notice anything, though, as she rushed to her window and looked out at the night.\u00a0 Stupid reaction.\u00a0 She grimaced, then began throwing on clothes, coats, boots.\u00a0 She wrapped a scarf around her head and ran downstairs and outside, where others had already begun to form in the makeshift communal square outside the old homestead.\u00a0 They were all staring east, past the little hill with their graveyard and into the woods as if their eyes could penetrate the gloom and reach across the miles and bear down focus on the train tracks.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrain,\u201d Thais Schain muttered needlessly.\u00a0 She was 20, pretty.\u00a0 A child of The Fall.\u00a0 The ten year old waif following Parker as she led her people up the Interstate and to safety.\u00a0 Now she was a woman, and occasional consort when Parker\u2019s defenses wavered.<\/p>\n

Parker glanced at her, put a hand on her shoulder, then strode up the hill towards the graveyard as if she could get a better view.\u00a0 She looked at the stones of her people, and she knew it was all over.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do we do?\u201d Murray Walter asked from somewhere behind her.<\/p>\n

Parker turned sideways, not looking at anyone, and issued her orders.\u00a0 \u201cGet to the jeep and the firetower.\u00a0 Tell the guards to stay put, but get a full report.\u00a0 And find Gates and McGavin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muttering, assigning tasks, and then shadows ran out in three different directions.\u00a0 Parker strode back to the farmhouse, followed by her people, and, after closing the shutters on the library windows, lit up several oil lamps.\u00a0 They all stood watching each other, her people, bundled in utilitarian clothes, long haired, some unshaven for years, sleep still in their eyes.\u00a0 Hope and dreaming beginning to shine behind that sleep.\u00a0 A train whistle meant real civilization.\u00a0 It meant machines, fuel, manpower, trade, currency, resources.<\/p>\n

Parker sat down heavily in her tattered easy chair.\u00a0 Could she protect these people from themselves?\u00a0 From their wistful decade-gone memories?\u00a0 Her gut told her that, at best, Pandora\u2019s Box was about to be opened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Part One is right here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[126,129],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-finzel","tag-series"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":794,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}