Category Archives: Chapter 3 – Road To Portland

There’s no getting around it, Billy thought, smart people really are different. He glanced at the passenger seat where Doogie was happily tapping his fingers on the dash in time to an obscure disco song and added an addendum; extremely … Continue reading →

The Analyst was having a bad day. He was out of Mountain Dew, the transmission on his SUV had crapped out, and the data… The data was completely vexing. “You seem nervous.” It was the Cigarette Smoking man, who is … Continue reading →

How would you know you’d hit rock bottom? This weighed upon Billy’s mind as he drove. He concluded one sign was grasping at straws. Delivering 10 pizzas to the middle of nowhere was grasping at straws. He wanted the money; … Continue reading →

Billy was itching to deliver a pizza.  You can’t make money just standing around. The phone rang and an order went up on the screen. Two small vegetarian pizzas for a few blocks away. Billy recognized the address. It was … Continue reading →

“Billy Loser” wasn’t Billy’s name but he temporarily matched the nickname. He was a pizza delivery boy and Uber driver. He’d recently dropped out of college, his Subaru needed new brake pads, his girlfriend had dumped him, and he hadn’t … Continue reading →

Bart was going to die. He’d spent autumn, when he should’ve been gorging on the bounty of nature (or stolen apples), petrified and covered with skunk bits. Without a store of fat, hibernation was just another word for starvation. Even … Continue reading →

Seven thousand feet above a nondescript homestead in the middle of nowhere a beautiful thing was happening. A minute particle of dust became the nucleus for a gossamer structure of ice crystals. This crystalline entity, almost achingly beautiful on its … Continue reading →

A thousand miles away the Analyst was watching a series of monitors. Drones were circling so high above the Curmudgeon’s forest that they might as well be satellites. Satellites were peering so intensely at the area they might as well … Continue reading →

The Curmudgeon had a choice to make. He stared at the crater and weighed his options. All of the squirrels were missing, an oak had exploded, and a bear was petrified. It was the government’s fault! Those bastards! He knew … Continue reading →