by R E Kearney
ENDLESS FIRE
Limos Lives
By
R E Kearney
Also by R E Kearney
Future Furies
Aethon Arises
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
This book is the intellectual property of the author and as such cannot be reproduced in whole or in part in any medium without the express written permission of the author.
Copyright © 2019 R E Kearney
To Barb, my loving wife, best friend and the Editor in Chief.
Without her encouragement and assistance I could not
and would not have written this story.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks and my sincere appreciation to Tim Flanagan and his associates at Novel Design Studio www.noveldesignstudio.com for their cover design, social media production and all of their other assistance coordinating the publication of this book.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
DUST DEVILS
LAND LOST
ROAD TRIP
LYMON
SQUALOR
SEINE SANE
CHIP CHILDREN
L’ILE-DE-FRANCE
LIMOS
SUDDENLY SUICIDAL
HEAD GAMES
GOING BANANAS
IMAGINE THAT
IN THE ZONE
MIND MATTERS
PATERNITY PAINS
MEMORY LOSS
CONFESSIONS
PURVEYANCE
FORT MORGHAN
THE OATH
NATURALS
CRAGI
RELE
GUARDIANS
KERSY
BE HAPPY
SEWER RATS
WEWATTA WALK
HOMEBODY
HARDLY HEARING
GETTING RELIGION
UNWELCOMED
EAR SHOT
BEAUTE
SEED VAULT
BOIG
PARTNERSHIPS
KAKISTOCRACY
FINDING FAMILY
NO DISHONOR
About the Author
DUST DEVILS
“Can you commit suicide if you have no life left?” Rube wonders as he climbs the ladder steps.
Stiff rope bristles stab into his throat as he drags the noose around his neck. He slides his makeshift slip knot snug against the base of his skull. With three tugs, he frees most of his scraggly, scruffy beard from the rope’s grip. Carefully, he plucks free his whiskers ensnared in the noose and watches them sail away in the wind.
Reaching down, he pats his pistol and holster on his hip. It has been his only companion and best friend since his father died. His father gave him the replica 1873 single action army Colt for his sixteenth birthday. Tugging on his holster belt, he centers the belt’s buckle below his belly button. He screws his grimy, sweat encrusted cap onto his shoulder length, tangled and filthy hair.
“Must be the handsome, masculine man for the flies and vultures.” Rube sneers, as he smooths his beard. He chuckles at his sad reality. How he appears now will not matter soon. Chances are almost zero that anybody will find his body swinging from this tree before the vultures and maggots strip his bones clean.
Two vulture shadows dance on the ground around him. The big, hungry birds are circling - watching and waiting. Soon he will descend from man to carrion. Meat to eat. Feasting on the dead is the only way to survive out here.
He glances skyward to guarantee his aged, worn, lariat is strung tight around the limb above him. He tugs hard on his old, rodeo-days rope, just as he did years ago when lassoing calves in rodeo competitions. Above him, the dead cottonwood tree’s limb creaks, but does not bend. He considers that reassuring.
For his final earthly act, Rube examines his desert dry, heat baked land one last time. Standing atop this ladder on the highest spot in the area, he is able to survey much of the farm his father gave him after his father gave it to him. Dead. Lifeless.
This cottonwood tree that his father planted to honor him on the day he was born has withered and died, succumbing to the relentless sun and heat. When his father died, he planted him about three feet to the left of his tree. It is in respect to his father that Rube has chosen to die here, too.
“Am I a coward to kill myself papa or should I keep trying?” Rube poses his question to his dead father’s dead tree.
As if in answer, a swirling funnel of stinging sand and straw spins past him. He watches it tear across sun charred clumps of dead wheat stalks ripping them from the ground, shredding and hurling them skyward. For too many years, the only thing Rube has been able to raise on his family’s farm are these dust devils.
Whirling, twisting eruptions of hope-killing dust dance across parched plains. The inferno heat and eternal winds have sucked the life out of his land and the life out of him. The dust devil dives and dips and disappears, dumping debris on the bitter end of Rube’s farm, inches away from a tall, wind-breaking fence.
“Forgive me father…,” Rube whispers into the howling wind. Silently, he bows his head for a moment. Then he jerks upward stabbing an angry, shaking finger straight ahead, shouting, “…but, damn and destroy that corporate farm for it has killed me.”
Sucking in a deep breath, his final breath, Rube closes his eyes. It is time to end his time. He slams his right foot backward knocking the small step ladder supporting him crashing to the ground. He drops. The rope tightens around his neck. He chokes. He cannot breathe. He is strangling.
Pain! Too much pain! Dying hurts too much! Kicking his feet and swinging wildly, he grabs the rope above his head and yanks himself up.
Snap!
“Aw, crap!” Rube plunges, smashing his back into the toppled ladder’s legs. Six feet of rough, stiff, dry-rotted rope drops onto his face.
Crack!
Rube jerks his eyes to the sky, just as the tree limb breaks loose. Bam! It plunges, crushing his left ankle. Screaming in pain, he pounds his fists into the dry dust. Wind whips the grit into his eyes and up his nose.
Coughing and choking, he angrily hollers into the whirling wind, “Aaaah! I’m such a miserable failure. I can’t even kill myself.”
Groaning and bleeding, Rube wrestles free of the step ladder’s legs. Exasperated, he loosens and yanks the noose off his neck. The rope snares his beard whiskers tearing them from his chin and throat. Blood oozes from his rope ripped throat. His back throbs. Beneath the heavy branch, his trapped, snapped ankle aches.
He begins to rise, but then retreats. Frustrated with himself and his life, he slumps back onto the ground defeated. As he lies in the dust, scowling skyward into the burning sun, Rube’s pain, shame and mortification at failing to hang himself, slowly transforms into a revelation. An epiphany!
“I didn’t die for a reason!” he exclaims into the wind. “There must be a plan for me. Something important for me to do. That’s why I didn’t die. It’s a message. I’ve been saved to destroy these corporate thieves.”
With powdery dirt blinding him, he twists and turns and struggles until he finally sits up. He brushes his face. His vision is blurry, but he can see. He hates what he sees. It mocks him. One hundred yards ahead of him, behind a twelve-foot high, solar-electrified, security fence and wind barrier, a sea of thin yellowing stems of ripening, speed-breeding, genetically-modified Kernza ripples in the breeze.
Rube watches the corporate farm’s fleet of agriculture aerorobots flitter inches above the Kernza and just below the protective overhead of far-red-spectrum, speed-breeding, LE
D lights. Occasionally, a stream of liquid is injected into the Kernza roots from one of the agribots. The agribot flies a little farther before injecting again.
When construction crews from the Society Preserving Endangered Agriculture began building the Chinese owned corporate farm, Rube spent hours watching and interrogating them. He learned that hyper-spectral sensors on the drones are able to detect minute differences in the plants’ health and needs. The SPEA technicians demonstrated to him that by constantly reading the condition of each square inch of Kernza, the agribots inject enriched water or enzymes called phytases or microbiomes just where they are needed when they are needed in the amount they are needed without waste.
Rube’s sweat is the only water he can provide his plants. He cannot irrigate. His wells suck polluted saltwater out of the depleted Ogallala Aquifer. On the corporate farm, SPEA technicians installed water structures that extract gallons of fresh water from thin, dry air.
Rube’s seeds die baked inside his concrete-hard, sterile ground. No life-giving life - no microbial communities live in his active-carbon depleted soil. His overuse of fertilizers and pesticides combined with high heat and drought killed them. And without microbes, his soil is not fertile and his seeds do not sprout. SPEA’s genetically-modified, fast-maturing, perennial Kernza produces four crops a year through the sweltering heat and drought in biologically-engineered, microbe-restored soil.
Rube despises those agribots, but he loathes that corporate farm more. His scorn is born of jealousy and embarrassment. He was born to a farmer, who was born to a farmer, who was born to the farmer who settled this land. Farming like his father and his father’s father is all he ever desired to do and all he knows how to do. He never wanted to learn anything else, so he never bothered to learn anything.
With a bitter taste of humiliation, Rube remembers applying then begging to work on their futuristic farm. The SPEA technicians just smiled and shook their heads. “You have no skills. You have no education. Your time is past. You’re not needed. This farming operation is all autonomous and cyber. No humans. It is a no-man land.”
He is mortified because they were correct. His time is past. Drones and robots succeed while he fails. They grow while he dies.
“I will destroy you!” Rube shouts at the busy, buzzing agribots, “I’ve been saved to obliterate you! You demons of the devil!”
Yanking his Colt from its holster, he angrily fires at the flying agribots. He shoots wildly and quickly empties his revolver. Nothing is hit. No damage is done. This is not his first attempt to shoot down the agribots and, as before, he only succeeds in wasting some of his few, remaining bullets. Shaking his head in resignation, he slowly holsters his pistol.
Cursing under his breath, he collapses into a heaving heap of his dust.
LAND LOST
“Why are you laughing, Nóngmín? What is so funny?”
“Come over here Chǎng. Come watch that crazy cowboy living west of speed-breeding cereal plant K117.” Young, global-quantum-internet, Chinese technician, Nóngmín, motions for his team member to join him at his bank of security images.
“Why? What is he doing now? Is he shooting at our speed-breeding lamps and agribots again? I don’t understand why he wastes his bullets. He never hits anything.” Chǎng ambles away from her monitoring station to join Nóngmín.
“Of course, Chǎng, he is always shooting at our agribots. That’s what American cowboys do. They shoot at things…everything. But, I think he tried to kill himself before that.”
“By shooting?”
“No, by hanging. I think. Watch this security MPEG . He is such a sad flop…a true Shǎzi.”
As if watching a comedy show, the two security monitors snicker and snort as they review Rube’s futile, sad, suicide attempt.
“Access the database, Nóngmín. Is this the farm land that Nóngyè Corporation just annexed? I think he is the farmer that lost it. Had it…what do they call it in the US…uh…reclaimed.”
“Yes, the US territories authority reclaimed it some years ago. Just forgot about it until SPEA claimed it as abandoned property. In three days, it will be added to K117.”
Nóngmín and Chǎng return to observing live security surveillance of Rube.
“Why is he still lying on the ground? Is he hurt?” Chǎng slides closer to better see the visuals. “Can you enlarge the image?”
Waving his hand across the control sensors, Nóngmín amplifies the visuals. He focuses on Rube’s face. He is obviously in intense pain.
“Should we dispatch a medical relief drone?” He asks, stepping toward another grouping of control sensors.
“No. You know we aren’t allowed to interfere. It’s against our corporate charter.”
“But, what if he dies?”
“Then he dies. Isn’t that what he wanted anyway? So he dies. He should be happy.” Chǎng leans toward the visuals to study Rube more closely. “Besides, he is a nobody. He’s not one of ours and our corporate charter says we’re not allowed to interfere.”
“So, we just watch him lie there and die?”
“Yes, we watch him lie there. Deciding to die or not to die is up to him.”
ROAD TRIP
With streams of sweat streaking across his dust caked face and burning his eyes, Rube gives up on death. Just too unpleasant. From the dirt, he rises. He strains to raise the broken tree limb and free his shattered left ankle. After several attempts, he finally succeeds. But, the effort drains him.
Breathing heavily while leaning on the step ladder, he heaves his two hundred and sixty-two pounds into a half-standing, half-kneeling stance. His sweat soaked clothes cling to every mound and crease composing his five foot eight inch roundness. As he begins his excruciating, half-mile trudge toward his trailer, he wonders how long he can survive in this sun before heat and thirst kills him. Not very long, he calculates, so he hobbles forward faster.
Rube finds no relief inside his oven-hot, airless trailer. His ancient air-conditioner expired five months before this mid-December heat wave hit. He cannot afford to replace it. But, since a tornado wiped out his area’s main electrical powerline four months ago, a broken air-conditioner is not his only problem. Rube has had no working refrigerator or stove since September, as well.
Nobody residing in these wastedlands of the Desert Plains is capable of repairing the powerline, and outsiders are reluctant to venture near. Wise, Climate refugees migrating north out of the scalding South Morasses stay clear, traveling in designated safe strips either east or west of the Desert Plains. Criminals choose to die in prison rather than attempt an escape into these wastedlands. The Desert Plains are a population desert.
Rube lives in the nowhere far from anywhere. Hugging the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and stretching from Canada to Mexico is a three hundred mile wide crescent of drought-dried, hard-packed dirt designated the Desert Plains or as he calls it, the deserted plains. During the period of Dissolution, when the United States disintegrated into the loose, bickering Mid-North America confederation of twelve Metrostates, eight independent Sovereign States, the forty-two states of the Federation of United States and nineteen FUS administrated territories, the Desert Plains fell into a void. Nobody claims them. Nobody funds them. Everybody ignores them.
Any person who could, escaped to a Metrostate or Sovereign State years ago leaving Rube alone and lonely. Shirley, the woman he met through an online dating service only for Rurals, stayed less than six months before running away to civilization. She moved in, drained him of his money and credit, and then disappeared in the middle of the night more than twenty years ago.
Drinking excessively at the time, he was so drunk that he did not realize she was gone for two days. Dumping the trash, after she had gone, he discovered her discarded pregnancy test stick. Her test was positive. She was pregnant. He had always wanted children – a son, especially. He yearned for family. Broke and broken, he never recovered.
Out her
e, you are alone and on your own. Abandoned, forsaken and forgotten is the only way to describe Rube’s zone of the Desert Plains. He doubts that anyone is aware that he lives or exists anymore. You do not die here, you vaporize.
To escape his trailer’s stifling heat, Rube hurriedly grabs his personal communication device, all of his remaining ammunition and the keys for his antique truck off his table. Leaning on his hunting rifle for support, he hobbles outside. Waving his outdated PCD above his head, he searches, but finds no signal. He has no battery power, either. But then, he knows nobody would travel out this far or dispatch an ambulance drone to fly this far to help him, even if he could signal someone.
For medical help, Rube must drive the one hundred and fifty-three miles to the Lymon outpost where he believes a small synchronous-interactive medical clinic operates. It is the only medical facility outside of the Denver Metrostate. He hopes his cranky, old pick-up can travel that far. Otherwise, there is just no help to be had. Except for the scant possibility of one or two fellow, failed farmers, it is deserted between here and Lymon.
Climbing into his elevated, four-by-four truck has never been easy. Today, with his injured ankle, it is especially challenging. First, he unbuckles and shoves his pistol and holster inside. Hopping on his right foot, he lifts his rifle into the truck and pushes it onto the passenger side floor. With his left hand on the door’s armrest and his right hand on his seat, Rube attempts to hop and lift himself into his seat. He fails, falling backward and banging the back of his head into the side of the truck. Two attempts and two head bangings later, he finally boosts himself onto the edge of the seat.
“I’m too old, lame and fat for this nonsense.” He chokes breathlessly to his truck after he pulls himself onto the driver’s seat.
When his truck coughs and rattles to life, Rube breathes a sigh of relief. But, his worries return quickly when he realizes that his truck’s fuel may not last as far as the only remaining petroleum depot, which is also in Lymon. At least, five years or so ago, he heard that Lymon still had an internal combustion engine support facility. Too few people inhabit his zone to support any closer depots. In fact, he may have the only ICE vehicle for two hundred miles. Anyway, petroleum deliveries into his area ended when the last fuel transport to enter was hijacked and the driver murdered eleven years ago.