SODIUM Trilogy Part One

by Stephen Arseneault

  Frank’s firm had been heavily involved in large mergers and acquisitions, and his bonuses that year alone had topped ten million dollars. I was eager for Renee to finish school and get started at Frank’s firm. Every time I blinked, I had big dollar signs in my eyes.

  The remaining college years went by fast. Renee finished with a master’s degree in only four years. I, in the meantime, had managed to finish only my first two years of coursework. So, I did what any sensible, bought-and-paid-for man would do: I asked Renee to marry me.

  We were wed on her twenty-second birthday, which was fine by me, as it meant one less date I had to worry about forgetting in the future; thinking of others was not one of my stronger traits. I had not once cheated on Renee, but it wasn’t for a lack of invitations. I was, after all, a handsome young man, and I certainly had the appearance of big money.

  Aside from all the obvious benefits, I really loved that girl, and she knew it. I may have been an entitled, egotistical schmuck… but at least I was a loyal schmuck.

  As a wedding gift, Frank bought us a really nice first-palace on the other side of Detroit from where my parents lived. The place had a stone wall with wrought-iron spikes on top that went all the way around the five acres of property. An automatic gate let you into a circular drive that fronted the brick-and-ivy Colonial-style home with four large columns.

  It really was a spectacular place. It had a five-car garage, an indoor lap pool, and a large, heated outdoor pool surrounded by marble pavers, benches, statues, and pillars. It was a fantastic place for entertaining, and with Eunice’s guiding hand, we had a number of extravagant affairs there. To top it off, we had a permanent house staff of three.

  We spent seven happy years in that home before our big move to Florida. As time went on, I saw less and less of my parents, as they no longer were a good fit for my lifestyle. My father was always uncomfortable when he came to the house, and that, in turn, made me uncomfortable. My mother was a chain-smoker, and since Renee didn’t allow smoking in our home, my mom was somewhat put off by having to go outside. She really liked Renee, but she just had to have her cigarettes.

  I spent most of my spare time at the country club, playing tennis and golf and hanging out with my society crew. My younger brother, Rex, had left Detroit just after high school and moved to somewhere in California. He had become a troublemaker in his teen years—repeatedly suspended from school, having minor brushes with the law, and constantly getting drunk or high with his friends.

  I tried once to talk some sense into him, but he wasn’t interested. And who was I to say anything to him while I was still milking off Renee and her father? I know we both broke our parents’ hearts. Neither one of us had turned out anything like what I know they had hoped for; I had turned into the rich elitist snob and my brother a lazy California doper.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  Just before our Florida move, my mother passed away from a stroke, probably from hardened arteries from all those years of smoking. Four months after she passed, my father went, too. I think his death was from a broken heart. He was lost without my mother. He just sat in the house all day staring out the front window toward the porch where he and my mother had spent many an evening relaxing after the day’s toils.

  I believe it was their passing that planted the idea of a move away from Detroit in my head. I was feeling guilty about not having been the son I thought they had envisioned, and that guilt gnawed at my soul. I thought about it constantly. With my self-centered attitude, I began to believe my life would somehow be better, or that the guilty feeling would at least be reduced, if I could get far, far away from Detroit.

  So, I convinced Renee we needed a winter place in Florida where we could escape the unforgiving cold of Detroit. We found a small ranch on the east side of a large Central Florida lake. It offered warm winters, stunning sunsets, and space from neighbors and traffic congestion, and, of course, it was a long way from Detroit.

  We first stayed on the ranch for a week over Christmas with Frank and Eunice. It was sunny and seventy degrees most of the week we were there. A pleasant breeze blew through the row of palms that fronted the lake in the backyard. Frank really enjoyed the warmth and outdoors part of it, but Eunice was not impressed. I believe her only consolation was that it gave her something to go home and bicker about with her snobby friends.

  I fell in love with the place and decided I wanted to visit it as often as possible. Renee had been moving up nicely in the firm, and a second home was an easily afforded luxury item for us. She insisted on buying it outright for me as she had been amassing quite the pile of wealth from her successes at work. I was given free rein to make any additions or updates to the home, and since I wasn’t working, I was all too happy to have some goals.

  I had the place practically rebuilt from the ground up and added a pool with a guesthouse, a spa, and a boat dock. The floors, windows, kitchen, and bathrooms were updated, along with a porch built with a nice screened sitting area that had a great view of the lake. I also had a large six-car garage built so I would have plenty of room for my eventual plethora of toys.

  My final addition was a Florida hurricane bunker attached to a boathouse. I had read stories of the aftermaths of hurricanes where looters ran wild and you could be without power for weeks on end. Though there had certainly been cases like that, it was not the norm. But I had the money to burn and no desire to rough it if I didn’t have to, so I had the nearly self-sustaining bunker added along a canal back to a natural spring.

  Even though I had not finished my degree in electronics, I decided to make the hurricane bunker my electronics shop. I could tinker away at any project that caught my fancy. Having such a large bankroll behind me allowed me to stock the bunker with a multitude of high-end electronic equipment; many a small business would have been envious.

  I spent most of eight months getting the Florida house in order, which left me with flying home to Detroit on the weekends at first, and then every other weekend by the eighth month. I had a nice boat, a pair of four-wheelers, and various other toys to now play with.

  But I wasn’t happy without my Renee there to share in my spending joy. It was time to convince her to take a leave of absence from the firm and move to Florida. We would work on that family she had always wanted. She was hesitant at first, but with a little coaxing, she warmed to the idea.

  It would mean putting her career on hold, but with her own accumulated wealth, and still having Frank’s deep pockets behind her, it was easy for me to convince her it was the right move. For three years we tried and tried to get pregnant, but the doctors said I didn’t have very good swimmers.

  I lashed out at Renee for any little trivial issue. I had convinced myself I should somehow be blaming her for my condition even though it was from the lack of potency and my own self-centered thinking. Well, needless to say, my selfish behavior and her desire to go back to work drove a big wedge between us.

  It essentially ended when I told her to go back to Daddy and her career and I hoped she would be happy with her money. The gravy train I had been on for so long suddenly came to a complete stop. Renee left the following morning to go home to Detroit.

  Sometimes you know your reactions are wrong, but for some reason, you just can’t control your emotions enough to do the right thing. My pigheaded brain had driven the only woman I loved from my arms over something that was nobody’s fault. I loved Renee, but I was so embarrassed over my condition and the things I had said that I let almost a full year slip by without so much as a phone call.

  The following spring, I got the divorce papers in the mail. The terms were quite generous considering the fact I had brought absolutely no value to the marriage. She gave me the Florida house and all its furnishings and toys and two hundred fifty thousand in cash. I took the deal without even thinking about it. I was furious she wanted a divorce, and at the same time, I was deeply hurt. From that day on, I regretted not trying to patch things up.

&
nbsp; After burning through most of the settlement the first year, I knew my spoiled life was heading for some big changes. With my two years of schooling and virtually no work experience whatsoever, I found myself lucky at thirty-two years of age to find the electronics tech apprenticeship job at a local custom doorbell factory.

  It was a low-wage assembly job, but with no mortgage and with all my toys already paid for, I found it was just enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table. Since the main technology of a doorbell was electronics and given the fact I had a shop full of equipment, it was just the sort of job I needed. The owners were kind enough to pay for my continued schooling, and in return I gave them a solid performer.

  What seemed like fifteen minutes then turned into fifteen years at the factory. As a consequence of my lower income, most of the toys I had acquired had slowly been sold off as maintenance was due. Without Renee around to impress with my antics, there was no joy in owning them anyway.

  Over the years at the factory, I worked my way up to floor manager. I had also learned a good lesson in humility and became quite humble in my dealings with others. I liked to think that my parents probably would have gained back some of the respect for me they had most assuredly lost.

  The pay was low, and the hours were somewhat long and boring, but the owners had treated me well. I oversaw a staff of about twenty workers, twelve of whom spoke no English whatsoever. So, after eight hours on the clock, I was all too happy to head home for a beer and a fishing pole.

  I had also put on sixty pounds, with much of it going around my gut. My curly hair was often unkempt, and I was sporting a scruffy beard. I had numerous photo albums of Renee and myself, and when I occasionally looked through them, I sometimes wondered if anyone would recognize me if I ever made it back up to Detroit. I was not the dashing young hunk I had once been.

  On the personal front, I had the occasional date, and they were all nice ladies, but I was still in love with Renee, and those feelings always came to the surface. It had gotten to the point that I no longer sought the company of another woman, as it always ended badly with hurt feelings.

  I ended up spending countless hours milling about in my shop. It looked like I was destined to die as the fat bachelor with few friends and nothing better to do than toy around with his geeky experiments, sometimes bringing my doorbell solenoid work home with me just to tinker with.

  As a side hobby, I made an attempt to build a small robot. My prototype could roll around on its treads and had an arm with a claw and a video feed I could watch from a PC monitor. It was fully controlled by a remote joystick as I didn’t have the computer savvy to make it autonomous in any meaningful way. I wanted to find a partner for that, but never took the time.

  The claw mechanism was quite powerful and sported my own lightweight solenoid design, using some of what I was able to discover from the crazy old man's object with Pete, years earlier. It had been well over twenty years since Pete's death, and with not much else to do with my life, I had resurrected the coil for my tinkering projects.

  I had also used my coil design to make a coil gun. I had the mathematical equations worked out and had other thoughts for improvements, but that only took me so far. I needed a precise, computer-controlled timing mechanism to actually make it more than a toy. I thought my improvements to the old man's coil would be a big plus, but as I couldn’t get much further without the proper help, it joined the many other electronics projects waiting in the wings to someday be completed.

  My life had become as empty and event-less as any life could be.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  As I write this, more than four years have passed since they first arrived. My memories about that day could not be clearer if it had happened yesterday. That day, a truly unexpected life was thrust upon me and the others who managed to survive, and I'm sometimes in wonder at how lucky I was, even though I did not feel so at the time...

  I liked my twelve acres of land, my home, and my dock and canal. The block boathouse and solid bunker sat at one end of the canal, with the lake on the other a good 150 feet away. The natural spring boiled up right under the boathouse; it did an excellent job of keeping the canal flushed out and clean.

  Numerous large oaks made a dense canopy over the bunker, boathouse, and canal, and years of underbrush growth, accompanied by my neglect of the maintenance, had left the boathouse and bunker all but invisible from the house… and from the air; the flat concrete roof sported several years of leaf buildup.

  My property was bordered on one side by a modest-sized cattle ranch and by a large orange grove on the other, and at the time, the nearest neighbor was several hundred yards away. It was definitely a peaceful place, which had unfortunately left me with plenty of quiet time to pine over Renee. I would often just sit out in a rocker on the screened porch with a beer in my hand as I daydreamed of my younger days.

  My new adventure began on a Wednesday... hump day. A long day at work at the factory had just ended, and I was headed home. The ringing in my ears brought on a need for relaxation, and my brand of relaxation was a cold brew and a bit of bass fishing.

  Sunset had always been my best bet for bass-action, and that evening would be no different. After arriving home and fetching a cold one, I walked out onto the dock with my tackle box and pole.

  I can only guess the large oaks and the flow of the spring made the area by my dock one sweet fishing hole. I had so many notches on my dock rail for the bass I’d caught that I gave up marking them after the first year; I was doing considerable damage to the railing. I was already on bass number three that evening when I saw the first bright flashes to the northwest... toward Orlando.

  My first thoughts were that a good thunderstorm was brewing. But those thoughts soon turned to ones of skepticism because the flashes were too distant and too large for a thundercloud. I continued to dwell on the flashes in the back of my mind as I cast my line.

  Ten minutes after the flashes, the rumbles began. I had been to many a space shuttle launch in my days in Central Florida, and the rumbles seemed eerily similar to the rumble the shuttle boosters made from about ten miles out. This day they came from the direction of the flashes, rolling across the water and shaking the ground and the dock; it was as if a train was going by.

  I then saw some type of a black craft moving at breakneck speed just above the treetops on the horizon. I thought it odd to be going that fast that near to the ground. There were no military training areas nearby, and you certainly wouldn’t do any type of training or stunt flying this close to a populated area. And it didn’t look like any aircraft I had ever seen. As I continued to cast, an uneasy feeling brewed in my gut.

  My jaw then dropped as I watched a distant airliner suddenly fracture into a thousand pieces and cascade toward the ground as another of those black craft flew past it. As I stood in stunned silence, my mind told me something really bad was happening. Chill bumps sprang up on my arms and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  Soon afterward, the sonic booms began. One being so loud it hurt my ears. And yet, I just stood there with my jaw dropped, looking out at the skies.

  Most people are not trained to react to such unusual situations, and as a result they just stand there gawking at whatever is going on. Only one out of ten of us naturally leap into immediate action when a crisis occurs. That is why soldiers, policemen, and firemen have to go through such intense training. They need to know what they are doing in an emergency, or they risk others’ lives as well as their own. It's that heavy training that breaks the freeze and pushes them into immediate action.

  You like to think you are that one out of ten, but chances are pretty high you aren't, and as it turned out, I was one of the other nine.

  After a minute or so of confusion and disbelief, I turned and started to run for the house. I was next greeted with a bright flash overhead, followed by a dark, shadowy blob. I instinctively covered my ears just as a monstrous boom followed and knock
ed me from my feet. Had I not been covering my ears, my eardrums surely would have burst. As it was, I was dazed. When I got to my feet, I first ran in the wrong direction. It took several seconds for the fog in my head to clear and for me to turn again back toward the house.

  The kitchen door was only about a hundred feet away, but the run seemed like it took an eternity. I bolted into the house. The power was already out and the windows had exploded inward from the concussion of the last boom. Glass shards were everywhere.

  I headed straight for my gun cabinet and started pulling out my small stockpile of weaponry and ammo. My next thought was to get my wheelbarrow and roll as much as I could out to the bunker. I didn’t know how much time I had, but I was determined to make the best use of it.

  In the bunker, I had a small diesel generator, several months of dry foods, and other emergency supplies, all stashed for a hurricane. Anything extra I could carry was taken from the house with haste. The hurricane bunker quickly became my fortress.

  The bunker was a decent size—about eight hundred square feet. It was constructed of steel-reinforced concrete, including the roof, and it had two steel doors and no windows. I had built some piping into the roof and had it rigged so I could run the cool sixty-eight-degree water from the spring throughout as sort of an AC unit during the summer. With the water running through the pipes, it rarely reached eighty degrees, even on the hottest of summer days.

  The humidity was another issue, though, so I had a small window-type AC unit that worked mostly as a dehumidifier. The AC unit was built into the steel door that opened into the boat launch.

  I had several racks of solar panels I had bought at a bankruptcy auction installed in the yard. I had them wired to a battery pack salvaged from a scrapped hybrid vehicle. It had cost a pretty penny at the time, but having read all those stories of lost power for a week or two during a hurricane, I was happy I had spent the money. On that day, it became an invaluable expenditure.