[If you need to catch up with the #10 stupid thing I survived growing up in Texas, you can click here.] As a teenager, like any red-blooded teenager, I did my best to push my limits. Of course, at the time I didn’t think I had limits. One of the compromises my parents deemed satisfactory during the summer months was that I could stay out late as long as it didn’t interfere with me getting up at 5:30am for a long day’s work of manual labor on the ranch.
Most of you probably already see where this one is going.
It’s the summer of 1992. Depeche Mode’s Violator has been rocking my Walkman for almost two years, and I’m still trying to negotiate my own Policy of Truth with my Personal Jesus. I’m enjoying the peak of my teenage freedom having earned my driver’s license and yet to sail off to college. I’m not a popular kid. I’m by choice an outsider—part jock, part nerd, and part punk/grunge (while punk is transitioning to grunge and the Dead Milkmen are enjoying commercial success).
On any given Wednesday night my friends and I enjoy strolling through the twenty-four hour Walmart in Benbrook in order to annoy the guy at the gun counter or solicit rambling responses from nutty guys in their thirties by asking which has more recoil, the ‘91 Gen 2 Glock 19 or the classic S&W model 360. (Yes, in the early nineties you could buy a handgun at Walmart at 1am with nothing more than a [fake] driver’s license.)
After such an evening of rollicking entertainment, it was common for me to return home well after midnight. My regular home coming routine involved switching off the headlights at the base of the driveway, shutting off the engine to coast into the carport, and entering my bedroom through the window that I left open a crack before leaving. Mostly this was just to muddy the evidence in case something came up in the court of parental law later on.
Several weeks of this type of behavior begins to take its toll on the quality of my daytime performance as a ranch hand. And yet, so far, I’m pulling it off. I’m making out like a bandit. I’m doing it my way (wink wink).
Then I find myself caught off guard by the slow part of the summer. Shipping day is long past. We’ve worked all the cattle. No bull has busted through the fence to harass the heifers. No windmill needs a new check valve. I painted the pipe coral last summer. But there is always work to be done. My dad decides it’s a good day to ride the fence line and spray mesquite trees attempting to grow up through the wires.
We load the poison mix into a fifty-gallon drum and attach it to the back of the tractor. Of course my dad opts to drive while I’m assigned to ride in the bucket with the spray nozzle. Easy peasy. All I gotta do is pay enough attention to spray mesquites and locust trees as we pass by them. Land of imagination here I come.
Except after three hours of bouncing along the fire guard path plowed on our side of the fence line, it’s dreamland that beckons me home. My dad must have spaced out because its several minutes before he yells at me for missing a tree. When he stops the tractor, I nearly fall out of the bucket. I’m still a bit dazed and confused by the time he reaches me. He raises a brow, shakes his head, and returns to the driver’s seat of the tractor. “Fall asleep again, I’m dumping you out.”
That evening I made the decision to go to bed early.
At the Desk This Week
Fun stuff this week. I crashed a plane full of innocent people into the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean! Yay! But never fear, not all of them will die. I’m planning on having some Norwegian fishing boats chug to the rescue…so they can be attacked by a bunch of evil telekinetic henchmen and most likely killed. [shrugs] It’s a rough life to be a character in any of my stories. But hey, survival is always a possibility. If I haven’t written it yet, I can’t be totally sure of how it will all play out. (I just have to stay awake at the keyboard.)
Twitch and Die! Empty but Living, Scene 1-4
[Click here for an introduction by Jim Buckner]
[Start with the introduction to the series.]
“Looks empty, doesn’t it?” Chloe sidled up against Chancho and fished beneath his serape for his arm.
Her hands were cold, but the touch sparked his resolve. “Si, vacie pero viviendo.”
“Hmmm?” She raised her eyes.
“Empty but living.” He gestured toward the homes of New York Hill behind them. “Not like these.”
Thurber stretched out below them. It was a wood and mud version of a modern city. Power lines stretched from side to side, crisscrossing the major intersections. The homes each claimed their own assigned space, giving way to the neighboring homes with grace. It had none of the calamitous collisions between meandering shotgun shacks, or tent towns sprouting like mushrooms after a rain, typical of boomtowns. None of the disorderly derricks littering every open space like pyres of matchsticks.
Thurber had once been a proud community given to a singular purpose. But its fidelity had been lost—exchanged for a more basic one. Buildings had been burned. Barriers of debris and shattered shells of automobiles clogged roadways. Power poles had toppled. Smoke billowed from mine shafts that harbored smoldering coal seams. Thurber had gone to war from within and without. And war was always ultimately about survival.
After a long pause, Chloe nodded. “I think I know what you mean, about the hill. It’s too clean. There’s not even a story of the people left behind.”
Chancho pointed with his chin. “I’m afraid the story is down there.”
Angelo stooped to pick something up on his way to join them. “It looks like somebody left a piece of the story up a here after all.” He held a shiny casing out to Chancho without taking his eyes off the ground. “There are more over here.”
All three of them lowered their gaze. Soon they’d gathered a few dozen casings, all in various stages of weathering. Countless others dotted the face of the overlook in each direction.
Chancho shook his head. “Only one reason for shooting so many times from one spot.”
“Target practice. Son of a bitch.” Angelo scattered the casings in disgust. “Vezzoni has been thinning de ranks.”
“So people are still living in Thurber,” Chloe gasped.
“People trained not to show themselves during the day, especially not with strangers standing on the bluff.” Chancho turned and headed for the donkeys.
“One question.” Angelo grabbed his arm. “Are those people infected? Or no?”
“Mi amigo, show us the way past the fence. Then if you’re still interested, we will look for the answer together.”
Thirty minutes later, the three of them left the cover of brush and crept toward the least formidable section of Thurber’s perimeter fence—three strands of barbed wire strung across the top of a decaying picket fence. An old cemetery, there long before the large-scale mining operation, perched on a bluff northeast of town. Cemetery Hill.
During more recent years, the graveyard had spilled gradually and in spurts down a gentle slope that faced away from town. Rather than replace the older fence, they’d strung barbed wire across the top. And due to the sacred nature of the plot, the long standing hardwoods had been left unmolested.
Under gray skies and massive branches creaking in the breeze, Chancho momentarily felt the peace of the dead. The final blessing granted to those who’d run the race. Though he didn’t always have the strength, he worried less about his own termination than that of those around him—friend, foe, stranger alike. It’s not time yet to rest.
He and Chloe wove their way through the headstones. They followed Angelo’s lead as he granted disproportionate respect to certain graves. Suddenly he stopped.
“¿Amigo?” Chancho whispered, hesitant to disturb the spirits.
Angelo nodded at the ground. “My brother and I, we did not bother with such things. But…”
Chancho looked down. The simple brick paver at their feet, one of dozens, had been engraved with the name, ‘Serge Marcon.’ The brick next to it was missing. Nothing but a dirt hole remained. Chancho looked up at Angelo, who’d froze in mid-sentence. “¿Amigo?”
“That, there,” Angelo pointed. “The last time I came through I did see it with my own eyes.”
Chancho waited for him to finish.
“There used to be a brick for Phebe, right beside Serge. Somebody took it.”
“Or broke it.” Chloe picked up two hand-sized chunks of brick at the base of a nearby tree. One clearly had a ‘Ph’ engraved on it.
“Who…” Angelo fidgeted and wrung his cap in his hands. After scanning their surroundings he turned to go. “Cemeteries are for de dead.”
As they crested the bluff, they gained sight of Thurber proper up close and personal. Chancho wondered how far the borders of the cemetery had spread, and if it was for only the dead any longer.
The papers spilled from McCutchen’s fingers. Shuddering, he lurched to his side and collapsed. The echo of gunfire rang out across Gordon valley as his head struck the ground. The shot had come from so far away, he’d had time to guess who’d finally caught up with him between the pinch of the lead and the resounding crack that rousted the buzzards with the signal of fresh meat.
A low cloud of dust from his body striking the packed dirt dissipated in the breeze. Spinning like a top, inches before his eyes, his wedding band glinted and swiveled in slow motion. His falling body had crushed the wooden box that had kept every ghost and secret of Doc’s family—the family that had for a time been his own. Elizabeth.
A page of Doc’s letters, written to the wife he’d lost years before the death of his daughter, Elizabeth, fluttered into view. Abandoned by the breeze, the letter settled to the earth and slipped beneath the spinning ring. The slowing pulse of the ring’s slap against the paper finished as the last wave of echoing gunfire rolled past him. Then there was silence. McCutchen closed his eyes. I’m coming.
The twin smokestacks of the five-acre brick kilns dominated the view to the southeast. But nothing billowed from their tops. Instead, smoke seeped out of cracks in the earth’s surface around the edge of the brickyard and further toward Mine #4. Underground coal seams released steady trails of thin, black smoke like breath rising from a sleeping dragon.
The explosive secrets lurking beneath the ground and behind the shadows, just out of sight, slithered up Chancho’s leg, over his chest and around his throat. The unseen of Thurber, Texas, choked him gently. Worse than among the tombstones, he feared to speak.
Squatting, Angelo pointed at the largest building directly in front of them. “That is the mercantile. Over there is de opera house.” He tugged on Chancho’s leg until he and Chloe squatted beside him. “And de smokestacks of course. Use them as landmarks if you get lost.” He pointed west across an expanse of mud- and ash-covered homes. “We are heading there, if we are to find de Marcon place.”
“Chancho?” Chloe leaned close to his ear. “What is it? You see something?”
Chancho shook his head. “It’s everything I don’t see.”
“The lights last night could have been coal fires,” She prodded him.
Angelo grinned. “Or demons that only come out at night. Come, my friends.” He clambered down the crumbling rock slope of Cemetery Hill. “I want to see what has become of Vezzoni’s town.”
Chloe followed next, Chancho in the rear. After a short scramble they reached a tiny creek and wooded area at the base of the bluff. “Vezzoni’s personal home.” Angelo pointed at a large two-story house guarded by a half dozen naked elms. Many of the windows had been broken. A torn curtain guttered in an opening on the second floor. “I will kill ‘em.”
The protection provided by the barren scrub and briar gave way to the stark exposure of one of Thurber’s dirt roads. The culvert running beneath it had clogged with brambles and debris. Backing up against the dam, the water foamed and stank. The smell was the same as the stone house and the abandoned bungalow on New York Hill. Chancho wiped his nose on his serape.
“This way.” Angelo scuttled across the street and into the ditch on the other side. Chloe followed. Chancho had progressed half-way when something caught his eye. He stopped and straightened slowly. Nothing but browns and grays met the eye—mud and ash everywhere. But he swore he’d seen color, a bright flash of red, too bright for rust.
“Chancho,” Chloe whispered hoarsely. “Chancho.”
He shook his head from side to side. He scanned the darkened windows and the piles of debris along the road. Eventually he looked at his feet. He felt what he was looking at before he understood it. And the feeling was heartache.
Despite the constant cloud cover, it hadn’t rained or snowed in days. Only ash from the fires had fallen. In the layers of ash were tracks. Along the very middle of the road ran a busy footpath—bare feet and boot treads, all of them smaller than his own. Never did a single track tarry from the path.
The world shrank around him until only the immediate mattered. Chancho hailed the others with a nod. When they didn’t answer he turned his head in their direction. Through a window pane in the house beyond them something disappeared behind a film of dust and glare. “Trust me, amigos.” He nodded again. “Slowly.”
Chloe climbed from the ditch and joined Chancho. She saw what he’d seen. Angelo followed.
“I think there are both living and dead in the cemetery,” Chancho said.
Chloe nodded. “The living are following a set of rules in order to stay that way.”
“Rule number one appears to be stay out of the shadows.” Chancho stepped aside, giving Angelo the lead.
“So a Sunday stroll it is. And here I left my parasol at home.” Angelo grinned at Chloe.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “I prefer a good wide-brimmed hat. Now on with ya.” She slapped his buttock.
“One of the boys, eh?” Angelo set a steady pace, sticking to the path others had recently trod.
Again Chancho brought up the rear, processing everything he saw as a stranger visiting a foreign land. Vast extremes had melted Thurber down and poured it into a strange new mold. The result appeared to be completely new cultural rules and standards—a new balance they risked tipping. Chancho did not need to see the locals to know them. They were now as he had been when a child—orphaned.
The foot path veered around an abandoned auto, the passenger compartment piled full of garbage. Chancho paused where the refuse spilled from an open door. On second glance, the majority of the contents were fresh goods taken off the mercantile shelves—foodstuffs still in their wrappers. Warm clothing with tags. The tracks increased in the area, coming and going. He cocked his head. The mercantile sat on the corner, less than a block away. Why remove its items to leave them here?
A gust of wind tugged at his sombrero. It kicked up a dust devil and pelting him with gravel and ash. Quickening his step, he caught up with Chloe and Angelo as they turned the corner. They headed west now instead of south. Chancho risked a final glance toward the mercantile auto. Nothing. Then an ash-covered house with a mud-colored picket fence blocked it from sight.
He was certain he’d seen something bright red, but his alien eyes were preventing him from seeing it again. A clatter echoed from behind them—a clank followed by a trickling of metallic debris. Chancho lurched back around the corner. A few yards from the auto a fifty-gallon drum lay on its side. It had rolled gently into an overturned wagon, causing a trickle of rusted machine parts to spill into the ash.
Angelo and Chloe pulled up behind him, breathing heavy.
Chancho looked them in the eyes. “We are outsiders here. For the moment, still a curiosity. Eventually curiosity becomes annoyance.” Angelo lead out, this time at a quicker clip.
As an orphan Chancho had felt a stranger to the world outside the orphanage. When he’d run away to join the revolución, Ah Puch had shown him how to navigate a world he’d always seen from the outside. Anglo culture had been made bearable by the fact that Chancho had shared it with close friends. They’d been outcasts and then outlaws together. As a state representative and folk hero, he’d once again learned to navigate a larger world.
This time he’d gone from large to small, broad to narrow. Here were the rules of the outlaw and the orphan, the outcast and unwanted. Thurber had become a wasteland where breaking the rules would most certainly come at a great cost. But unlike before, when Chancho had been among the outcasts, this time he had no idea what the rules were. He had no one to teach him.
Worse yet, Chancho feared Thurber’s smallest residents would be safer within the fence than without. He himself had only survived outside the orphanage with divine intervention. And Chancho struggled to see God in such a place as the present-day Thurber.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read Twitch and Die!, Season Four of the Lost DMB Files. I’ll be publishing FREE daily scenes from the Lost DMB Files until…I die…or something terrible happens. Seriously, I’ve got over 400 scenes written so far, and I’ll be writing more until the story reaches its natural ending. You are totally welcome to read the entire story for FREE! If at any point you decide you would rather finish the story in ebook or print format, just click the buttons below and you can do that as well. If you enjoy reading the serial releases, BUT you would also like to support me as a writer (my kids need wine!) please subscribe to my premium content for bonus scenes, exclusives, and insider access to my process. And of course, I’d be grateful if you would share this post with any of your reader friends who you think would enjoy the Lost DMB Files. Happy reading!