Happy Labor Day! I’m not spending working, unless you count working on a short story.
I also wrote a little something else yesterday, as part of my weekly free-writing group:
There was nothing to be done about it, Harold thought. If the snow didn’t let up, and judging by the sky it wasn’t going to, then he was going to be trapped here longer than just overnight. And there was barely enough firewood to see him through until morning. Over in the corner of the cabin there was a radio, shiny and almost brand new from the look of it, and a flare gun on a shelf in the pantry. But neither of those things were going to do him much of any good, he realized. He’d been halfway across the room to the radio when he remembered where he was.
But there was nothing he could do about that now. At least not until he got the recall.
There wasn’t a lot of food in the pantry, Harold noticed. He wondered, briefly, about whoever had lived here before him. There were no bodies, at least none that he’d found, and no sign of a struggle. Maybe they hadn’t been here when it happened, the worst of it. Maybe they’d headed to town for provisions, or been headed here from further south. The place looked lived in, but not recent. It couldn’t be recent. Whoever it’d been, they’d left behind of few tins of canned peaches, some beans, and that flare gun, but not a whole lot else. Whoever it’d been was long dead now.
Harold supposed it could be worse. This was supposed to be survivalist training, wasn’t it? This was supposed to get him ready for work in the field. He’d heard about agents-in-training thrown off into worse assignments than this, cadets who had barely survived before recall — and plenty who hadn’t. Holing up against a winter storm after the end of the world didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
He checked his readings. If the radio was going to give him nothing but static, he could at least be sure about the equipment he’d brought with him. It wasn’t much — couldn’t be, according to protocol — but at least the scanner’s blip-blip-blip was comforting, the steady green light that confirmed there was no more contagion. The plague that had killed everybody on Earth, at least, was gone.
So it’s a little cold, he thought. There’s probably some blankets, and you like peaches. Got to check their sell-by dates, check for dents, but it could be worse. You’ll be fine. Harold almost laughed. It wasn’t like he’d been time-jumped back into the Pleistocene or anything like that. He wasn’t going to end up on the roll of cadets who had been crushed or eaten by dinosaurs. There’d been this one guy, tried as a witch back in sixteen-something in Salem. They’d had a noose tight around his neck before the recall came. You could still see the marks. Harold was just here, up north in the Canadian backwoods, trapped by bad weather, the last man left alive on the planet. It wasn’t going to be fun, but it was going to be easy.
And that’s when there was a knock at the door.
Meanwhile, Saturday night I watched The Abyss, which was pretty much everything I expected it to be. I can’t say that I loved the movie, but I thought Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris were great together. (This scene in particular — spoiler warnings — was pretty damn terrific.) I do think the movie would have been a little better without the science-fictional elements, though, which seems like a weird thing to be saying. The aliens — again, um, spoilers — almost seem like an afterthought. The director’s cut apparently expands on that, though possibly not to the betterment of the film. I dunno, I enjoyed it.
Last night, I also re-watched Jacob’s Ladder, which I think was a little better the first time I saw it, if only because I didn’t know how it ended.
And that’s kind of been my long weekend, such as it is. Hard to believe it’s already September.
