Harvest

I had been driving South-West with no clue as to where I was going or why I was going there. Being almost 9 months pregnant wasn't helping matters. Between the hormonal crying jags and frequent bathroom stops, I was starting to think I must have gone insane.

I found myself telling my life story to the little acrobat kicking my kidneys. It's a long drive from Akron, Ohio to the middle of nowhere New Mexico.

I tried to turn around and go back home to Ohio a dozen times, but every time I would like daze out and the next thing I knew, I had gotten turned around and was heading South-West again. Somewhere around Wichita, Kansas I completely quit trying to resist.

There wasn't really anything for me back in Ohio anyway, and there had to be hospitals wherever I ended up anyway, so why fight it? All I really had was myself and the little kidney kicker anyway. The jerk who I had once thought was the love of my life, suddenly got cold feet and ran off 3 months earlier.

No note, no goodbye. Not even an e-mail or text message, just poof! Vanished from off the face of the Earth, as far as I could tell. Jeff Smith if that was even his real name, I'm starting to have doubts. I woke up one morning and he was just gone. Didn't even take anything with him. Left his coat hanging on the hook and his cell phone on the kitchen table. As far as I can tell, he left barefoot in just the boxer shorts he wore to bed the night before.

I did the good wife thing and reported him missing, but if it weren't for the little kidney kicker, I'd swear Jeff Smith never existed. I went to the same office building where I had often dropped him off or picked him up from work, but no one there had ever heard of him. I should have known he was too good to be real.

Girls like me don't ever really get the happily ever after. Never knew who my Dad was. My Mom dropped me off at social services when I was 2 and never came back. Doesn't matter, I don't really remember her anyway. Grew up shuffled from one foster home to the next, until I started getting woman curves as the first creepy foster Dad called it. By the time I was 14, I had gotten tired of fighting the pervs off & just ran away and joined the ranks of other faceless and nameless street kids.

When I met Jeff, it was like winning the lottery. A really nice guy, with a job, an apartment and a car. I had only just turned 18 and was working fast food and staying in a cheap rent by the week room downtown. He started coming in everyday and flirting with me during what he claimed was his lunch breaks from work.

We got married 3 months later and I was already 2 months pregnant by then. Then he vanished from my life as quickly as he had appeared. I couldn't afford the rent after he was gone, so it's a good thing he left his car. I moved back into one of the crappy roach infested rooms downtown again and was planning on selling the car to cover rent until after the baby was born and I could find a job again.

Then 3 days ago I woke up with the urge to just get the hell out of Akron. Winter was blowing October into November, so it seemed like a good time to head South...and West. So I drove to the pawn shop figuring I could maybe get a hundred bucks or something for my engagement and wedding ring. I figured it was probably a fake diamond, but I was pretty sure it was real gold. Turned out the ring was real, the crabby man at the pawn shop gave me 2 thousand for it, more than enough to head somewhere warmer.

So, now...here I am in the middle of the dessert heading for some mountains. Oh yeah, did I forget to tell you, I picked up a couple of passengers along the way. Tara and Jayne, they're both pregnant as well and from what they've told me, they both had their own versions of a Jeff as well. They're also both alone like me, no family, no one to miss them if they just happen to vanish off the face of the Earth.

And that's what is going to happen. We all know it now as the caravan of cars, trucks and minivans rumbles through the dessert night. All of them are filled with pregnant women just like us, there must be a hundred cars. We can see the twinkling lights of the ship now, it's really pretty as it hovers there between us and the mountains. Maybe it won't be so bad. They are speaking in our minds now, telling us that we won't remember a thing, won't remember ever even being pregnant. That they will let us live and let us go after the harvest, but we know it's just another lie.

A Fairy Tale

We grew up believing that fairies were cute little mythical creatures with gossamer butterfly wings.

We knew there were tales that said they were mischievous, but basically harmless.

Who knew that fairies were real?

At first we all thought they were some weird bugs.

Warnings were broadcast on the evening news that they were a mutant type of locust, because they were destroying crops Worldwide.

But…we were all wrong about fairies.

Turn out the Druids had been keeping the fairies trapped in an alternate dimension for the last few millennia. The first fairies to break free were the little ones that ate plants…the ones that were only the size of a bug.

Not long after the evening news started talking of possible widespread famine due to swarms of what they called singing locust, because of the noise they made, the bigger ones started getting free.

We still weren’t to worried. Military forces Worldwide were joining forces & destroying them with flame throwers & strategic poisonous sprays. It seemed like it was working…of course, we still hadn’t realized yet that they were fairies.

The slaughter of millions of the small fairies, just made the bigger ones angry…that’s about the time the human sized ones started flying around. An old gnarled man named Sean MacCleary made International news as their human spokesman soon after.

MacCleary was the one who told us what they were and what they wanted.

Governments across the globe tried to negotiate peace treaties with them. Paranormal and esoteric experts tried to find a way to close the gates they had opened between dimensions. Nothing worked, they didn’t want peace…and the gates couldn’t be closed.

Humans waged war against them for awhile, but there was just too many of them…that’s when the really big ones showed up. Some as big as elephants, all hideous to look at.

For a few years, we fought them and tried to hide…but they started herding humans like cattle. The human sized ones took control. Earth belongs to the fairies now, we just work for them.

Female humans have a higher survival rate. They need our females to produce their favorite food.

All the old fairy tales were wrong. Fairies aren’t cute. No one knew the truth, no one warned us to guard the gates…No one told us that they eat human babies.

The Grey Rider (Prologue/pt.1)

He stood atop the peak of infinite despair as it had come to be known in ancient times. He was pale in face and mane save the red of fire upon his cheeks from the driven snow of the mountain winter. Alone he traveled most often as though a symbiotic manifestation of the earth as a being; he represented all that nature wanted him to, intended him to, needed him to; he was charged to protect her as a feeble and dying mothers only offspring. He vowed to stay true to this mission exponentially and under any distress.

For the last century or so he had been a lonely specter, looming as an apparition of the forgotten forest where no man had dared to walk for near an eon at least. He long since fled the thought and legends of man and was known now as a whisper of a story with no profound accuracy to attest his traits or character to keep his memory alive.

There was a time in which he was recognized as a Lord of all that lived. A time where his infamy was only superseded by his immortal powers of the Gods. A time where most creatures within the free lands had dared to even utter one of his names or aliases without a stutter in respect for his benevolence and power. Now he was a shadow of his former self, afraid to appear from a lack of confidence he himself had derived, simply from the loss of her. She was the one. The chosen one as he had presumed and no matter how hard he tried through training and defending; he still could not protect her from the darkness, from the unholy wraiths that deemed her a threat.

She was Juallia, a peasant child turned savior of the free, he built her up to his council, the kings, the queens and all the peoples known to such a pedestal that when she perished she gnarled the majority of his soul with her. This left the world hopeless and when the fall of man came his wisdom was proven to be flawed and useless. His own name and legend scarred he would retreat from all memory and become the phantasm he so desired, as he was unfortunately unable to die the forgotten forest seemed the perfect place to be in fact forgotten.

This was until his survey of life below called for his resurgence once again. Darkness came from the north and the peoples of world required his service and aid. They needed a leader to end the misery, a being of the Gods to eradicate the evil and extinguish the fires of doom and strife. He was their only hope in gaining freedom from eradication. His course was now set, his blade was sharpened, his wits regained, and with the arrival of his long lost friend and companion, the noble, winged steed Odinus; he was ready now to ride again.

*** Part One of "The Grey Rider" Series

No Quarter (Excerpt)

I wish I knew what was going on outside of this bathroom.

More importantly I’d like to figure out how the Hell these toilets keep flushing. The sinks don’t work at all but the toilets keep flushing. Where’s all the Goddamn water keep coming from? Probably better I don’t know and just be thankful they are; damn things are the only thing keeping us alive.

Lemme bring you up to speed. My names Damien Gordon, but I’ve been tellin’ everyone its just Barstow. Yup, the name’s Barstow. Thats the last place I remember being before all this happened. Nobody really believes its my name anyway, but i really don’t give a rat’s ass cause it ain’t none of their business.

When I say “them” I mean the three other fools I’m stuck here waiting on hand-and-foot for in this Godforsaken suburbian mall basement we call home.

There’s the two chicks from Santa Rosa; Kirsten and Anna, who wound up here en route to Hysteria looking for a cure for Anna’s stomach cancer or something. They stopped here to do some shopping on the way through Bakersfield but ended up in this shit-storm instead. Don’t really know why you’d need clothes in a damn cancer ward but whatever. The guy sleepin’ under the sink with a busted ass head is Patrick Kennedy. Or just Kennedy. I don’t believe his name any more than the bullshit one I’m giving, but what the Hell; name’s probably ain’t real important now anyways.

As for myself, I was on a damn-fool mission of a roadtrip with my two best friends for what was ’sposed to be the time of our young lives. One of these friends Ryan, died as we crashed in through the atrium and into an elevator shaft of this place trying to avoid the blast wave. The other, Desmond; went off with some chick the night before and i haven’t seen him since. He was most likely ate up by whatever nuke or comet hit us, and I'll never see his annoyingly smug ass again. At least it was more than likely painless.

There’s this emergency broadcast radio jam thats been playing pretty much since we got here. It claims that if we are hearing this to stay bunkered down for at least a month if possible. It mentions fallout, and insects, and some babble about a Speiwak Industries and then recycles, and plays again.

We decided to listen to it and have been down here now for 26 days, barely alive and drowning in boredom. But we’re almost ready to leave. We’ve got our things packed and ready to see what’s out there.

July 21st

The overwhelming silence that filled the lavatory was disturbing, but peaceful Damien thought. He filled the room with graceful plumes of foul smoke as he lit cigarette after cigarette; he was always a chain-smoker, but now his habit had become an obsession with lack of a better hobby. Either way it had pleased him a bit more knowing it bothered everyone else. “What the hell, everyone’s dead. Girls already got cancer, and ain’t much else to do.” He’d tell them. “Unless you wanna get frisky in the stalls?” He aimed at Kirsten.

She was not impressed. In fact she actually felt that he disgusted her. His broken English, his uncleanliness; even in this situation was repulsive, his attitude and disrespectful nature. His constant profanity, his incessant bitching and snoring. She decided she wanted him dead at times if it weren’t for the fact that he was actually working feverishly every day, busting ass to get them out of the bereavement the worthless tomb of a mall had brought upon them. He was someone that outside of this predicament, she would never had even glanced at in passing, not even giving him a friendly nod, lest he was a valet or server grabbing her coat. Regardless she also decided she would for now use him until something better came along. She needed to for her sister…for herself.

The Escape

The sound of running could be heard behind them. It was raining hard this night so that every fall of foot sounded like that of a cannonball ricocheting off the surface of some great lake. The forest they were in had no name; it had no need for one for no one had ever escaped its clutch to tell of it. When they were younger, and the sun still shone, neither of them could’ve conceived a place like this to have existed, or rather; events to have unfurled in the manner of which they would to have placed them in such a predicament. In actuality, most of the past was filled with a haze of ubiquitous, convoluted portions of memory. All they could remember now was years of hastily running from everything, just like today.

Earlier that day he had told her that it was all finally going to be okay for the first time in years, he told her they would be free to irrevocably start their lives. They both knew however it was a bold faced lie. One he told her a great many times with no avail. He told her these little white lies to give her some sort of peace of mind in a world that only provided a virulent state of harm; a world in need of devouring them whole.

He refused to allow this path to perdition to persist or allow anything to hurt her. He loved her on a magnitude unfathomable or describable to most. Not that there was anyone. His conviction to this rapture that was his love was maddening at times, but necessary for the both of them. It was the force that drove him to fight and keep her alive by any means possible.

Twelve years ago he picked her up from the streets of a city long destroyed, vigorously saving her from certain annihilation. Others came and went or were destroyed but they survived. The ones they were running from were called: The Ciphers.

The Ciphers had come to our obscure blue satellite two decades earlier with the promise of ushering human culture into a new era. They came bearing indescribable gifts and a working knowledge of every human language. They had been watching us. As they peered down upon us though they were planning, readying, equipping themselves to stage an extermination of biblical proportions we could have never foreseen. The global community as a whole quickly trusted the foreign species as they now promised mankind a true eternal and everlasting life.

All of these promises were proven to be mistruths of course; we just realized it entirely too late. They soon introduced a ‘purge of souls’ where we were to join them aboard their primary ship, the Dregg-Init, and become part of the ‘Calamity of the skies’ as it were. It was an illusion to mask the holocaust that would proceed.

It took nearly two thirds of the population to die till the people realized what was happening and tried to conjure a revolt; but it was too late. They were too powerful and advanced. Three years after, only a million if that were left to flee aimlessly in strife. If not for a few lone jarheads from Utah we would all be dead and they would have this place once and for all. Somehow they managed to destroy the majority of the massive Dregg-Init by means of a Hydrogen bomb hidden under a wheelchair of all places and pushed right into their lair. It goes without saying this was a suicide bomb of sorts.

There they were though. On this ever-collapsing shithole of a place called Earth. Narrowly evading death and uncertainty at every breath, and living daily without resolve. No wayward wanderer one could ever come across will ever tell a weary passer that they are safe, or have the upper hand, or merely that they are simply happy today.

Nothing but war stories; The men, the women, the children all have according war stories and none of them know how many Ciphers are out there. We are all dead is the general consensus. They will continue to hunt until the end of us or them.

Nobody cries…

The two of them had heard of a place a time back where some folks were building a resistance and an underground city they call New Babylon. It may be just a rumor of a myth but it is where they would now attempt to head; tip by tip. Their only mission now is to keep running for now, his personal oath was to keep her safe and alive. Especially now that there will be three of them soon.

REFLECTION

I used to be a scholar.

I used to be a brother.

I used to be a son.

I had a life once.

I had a purpose.

Did you ever do something on the premise that maybe; just maybe you could possibly make a difference?

Did you ever train for something or go to classes or get tutored in the hope that all you would be learning would someday change your future or make everyone’s future that much better?

Well I did all of those things. I spent years educating myself and exercising every order or discipline necessary for what I had thought would be my pre ordained destiny. Too bad I was wrong…Dead wrong.

To make things short for anyone who could possibly ever read this if anyone ever would, I will tell you that I have gone beyond the borders of all reality and human expansion in my quest out here alone amongst the stars. You see, I was part of a team of scientists basically catapulted into the depths of space; frozen in cryo-sleep.

The mission was simple. We were to be launched into deep space in the first worm-hole generating FTL ship ever conceived toward the Andromeda galaxy in hope to find other life or explore possible future planets to colonize. There were six of us in all; three male, three female and we all knew this was a one way trip. How could it not be? We were aiming to hit a mark 2.5 million light years away. We had spent the last two generations exploring the Milky Way without resolve. It was an unfortunate discovery to find that there was only one inhabitable planet within our entire galactic range. So we had to venture further.

When I woke I found that we had been traveling for just over 387 years at a rate 29 times the speed of light. The main cabin was hardly recognizable and covered in dust of some sort and I soon found out the true meaning of lonesome. All of the five other passengers aside from myself had not survived, and died in their chambers from aged wiring malfunctions. To make matters worse; the ship had jettisoned all five pods for economic purposes. I didn’t even get the chance to say my farewells to the departed.

It was five years, three months and two days ago now when I first came to life again, and you could not begin to realize the suffering I am dealing with. I am nowhere near an end in sight and have long since run out of activities to busy myself with. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I don’t dream or even move anymore. I am stuck here floating in the somber vestal void that is the universe; my universe, with only my reflection to keep me sane and in good company. A person I cannot even recognize. I don’t want to die like this; miserable and cold…but I am beginning to weigh my options. I see now that everything looks perfect from far away.

HOPE

My Name Is Hope14…
What a joke!
I was one of the last children created after the HSX virus struck Earth.
The Human Sterility Extermination virus was released into India in 2011 by a group of Eco-Terrorist in an attempt to lower the World’s population problems.

Originally the virus was only meant to lower sperm counts in men…but something went wrong…that’s usually what happens when humans play God…not that anyone believes in God anymore.
Instead of lowering sperm counts, the virus made infected men’s sperm toxic. Men throughout the world spread the virus through a mild airborne virus with flu like symptoms. By 2012 almost all males were infected world wide.

It took Doctors and Scientists until 2017 to even figure that out. At first it was women and gay men who were dying after being infected by toxic sperm that literally ate their insides out. Of course it took the so called experts 2 years to even connect that the women and gay men were actually dying from the same thing…and by then it was too late, the entire population of Earth was already infected.

All kinds of World wide chaos had already happened long before the Hopes were created. Wars were fought. People were quarantined. Vaccinations were tried and all failed.

Women rose up and took control of what was left of the World. Men were kept in isolation camps, then exterminated in hopes of starting a new virus free population with frozen uninfected sperm.

Before the Hopes were created, scientists had tried impregnating women with uninfected frozen sperm, only to find out that the women had been infected all along. The virus hadn’t made women sick, but had made them carriers.

That is why the Hopes were created. There were originally 25 Hopes and 25 numbered male babies. All created from uninfected frozen eggs and sperm. The males all developed the flu shortly after birth and were euthanized.

The Hopes were kept isolated from the general population. Raised in a sterile germ free environment. When we were little, we all stayed in a dorm like area. As we reached maturity we were separated and isolated even from each other.

Hopes 1 through 10 were impregnated with uninfected sperm at age 17. Only Hope3 and Hope 8 were able to carry to term. Both infants were born infected. The virus had continued to mutate and both infants died shortly after birth.

After that, all of the Hopes were tested and only Hope 17 and I were uninfected & not carriers. Instead of impregnating us, they created more lab babies like we had been, using our eggs.
The babies still died.

That was the end. Soon after they set us free. We had been humanities last hope. Most of us stayed together in an abandoned farmhouse here in Virginia, just a few miles from the CDC labs were we were created. 4 years ago Hope22, the last of the other Hopes, passed on. Hope22 was 76 years old.

As the last Hope, I decided to make one last visit to the labs and found out most of this information about us. I was just curious. The labs were long abandoned. I was hoping there would be people here, since I haven’t seen anyone else since Hope22 died, and it’s been at least 20 years since I saw anyone who wasn’t a Hope.

I guess I’m probably the only person left alive on Earth and I really wont be here much longer. I’m old and tired and sure don’t have the energy to walk back to the farm.

I saw a nice little house a few blocks from the lab here. I’ll set up house there where I can keep an eye on this place just in case someone comes.

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