Jeff Posey's Blog, page 11

“Let’s Hurry,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

“There’s a lot I don’t understand,” said Annie, looking at Serles. She met him just moments ago when the whole force of Reagan Newcastle turned upon them like a guided missile, but she couldn’t wait.

“I don’t understand it all, either,” said Serles. He pulled two wide cases from the back of his truck and walked with them like heavy suitcases while men and women unloaded a long trailer. They sent everything down the evacuation tubes, but Serles walked out toward the open desert.

“Where are you going?” Annie asked.

“There isn’t time,” he said, turning his head back to throw his voice to her without turning around.

She ran after him. “Wait.”

He stopped. “Go back, Annie. Go down the evac tube.”

“No.”

“They’ll be here any minute. I’ve got to get these set up.” He hoisted his suitcases.

“I’ll help you.”

“I can do it alone. There’s no reason to risk you, so go back.”

“No.”

He glared at her. She’d only just met him and he looked at her as if he might slap her if he had a hand available.

“Fine,” he said. “Get yourself killed. Your father will like that.”

“My father’s dead.” She knew the moment she said it that Serles didn’t know. His shoulders sagged. “I thought you knew.”

“I knew he disappeared. I knew they were hunting for you.” He shook his head, then began hurrying toward the desert floor.

She followed him.

“Who did it?” Serles asked.

“The one called Zoop.”

Serles nodded. He sat down one of the cases. “There’s a cable in there,” he said. “We need to connect to this other one across the valley.”

Annie knelt and snapped two buckles that freed the housing and exposed a coil of cable atop a box with switches. “What is this?”

“Resonance impulse device. If they’ve used any of our nanocarbon structures, this will vaporize them.”

“How close do they have to get?”

Serles pressed his lips together ad scowled. “We don’t know exactly. It’s still kind of in the testing stage.”

“So it might not work.”

“No. It might not work. That’s why I’d rather you go down the evac tubes.“

“They killed my mother, too,” Annie said, hefting the coil of cable of her shoulder.

For the first time, Serles looked at her in what felt like compassion. Or understanding. Maybe sorrow. In the distance, the beat of helicopter blades pounded up the valley.

“Let’s hurry,” he said.

She held his gaze a moment, the world crystal clear, even magnified. “Yes. hurry.”

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock. Serles is the ancestor of the character by the same name in The Pump Jack Potion.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Stealing the Perfect Bluestone,” Anasazi Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Welcome to another historical AnasaziStories flash fiction by Jeff Posey.

Astani looked up when Buffalo Boy tapped a stone on the low unfinished wall outside his mother’s house. He stood and walked out into the sunlight.

“They’re moving it at the next full moon,” Buffalo Boy said.

Astani nodded. That meant they had about ten days. “Details?” he asked.

Buffalo Boy worked in the Fat Man’s establishment keeping the girls alive, and he heard things.

“Like usual. They don’t want to arouse suspicion.” He laughed.

“You sure?”

“Hey, I don’t know anything for sure. Neither do you.”

“So, what, ten burden bearers? Six warriors?”

Buffalo Boy laughed. “Yeah, and they won’t even know which one has it. Or what it’s worth.”

“But we do.” Astani didn’t like the way Buffalo Boy smirked and swaggered, but that’s how he always acted. So he said nothing about it. He knew it bothered him now only because of the stone. Bluestone, perfectly in the shape of the brilliant Day Star that faded after a full moon cycle years ago. Unworked by human hands, craftsmanship of the gods. The ancient cultures to the south would give anything for such a stone. The albino woman who now ruled the canyon with soft hands did not deserve such a gift. So instead, Astani would take it. Flee to the south with Buffalo Boy. They would live like High Priests.

“Will the warriors be elites?” Astani asked.

“Oh, of course, Led by that Choovio himself. They think everyone is afraid of him.”

“Aren’t you?” Choovio was a big man, a proven warrior, his face like stone.

“An arrow will pierce even his skin,” said Buffalo Boy. “We’ll take him down first.”

“And the others?”

“If we pick the right place, they won’t know what hit them.”

“So what’s the right place?”

Buffalo Boy paced in front of Astani, strutting. “That’s where my special gift comes in.” He pointed at his head. “They’ll be wary in the hills at the cut. They’ll all be looking up thinking at any minute they’ll be attacked.”

“It’s a good place,” Astani said, imagining rolling boulders onto them.

“But out on the plains after they’ve walked for two days, they’ll almost be sleeping on their feet. That’s where we’ll hit them.”

“Are you crazy? They’ll see us long before they get to us.” He shook his head and turned to walk away. He wouldn’t do it with Buffalo Boy if he thought something as stupid as this would work.

“Wait, Astani,” Buffalo Boy said, stepping in front of him. “You choose to forget the badger dens.”

Astani stopped and a faint grin pulled at the corners of his mouth. Yes, he remembered. Years ago as boys, they challenged each other to a footrace across the flatlands and Buffalo Boy had fallen into an old abandoned badger den. When Astani tried to help him, he fell into another old chamber. It took them hours to overcome their shock and fear of being trapped to work their way out. Of course. They could hide in those, watch the road, and jump out at the last moment.

Astani nodded. “It might work.”

Buffalo Boy stuck out his chest. “Of course it will. We will kill Choovio first. Then the other warriors. And the burden-bearers will be nothing. Then we’ll be rich. We’ll be gods.”

Astani kept nodding. “Yes,” he said, “gods.”

 

Choovio and the albino woman are a major characters from the historical Anasazi novel Less Than Nothing .

“Not Much Longer,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Reagan Newcastle stood looking out the boardroom window to the streets twenty-five stories below. He could see seven Annie’s from there, the nearest painted on the glass of a derelict office tower across the street. Dressed in her trademark tiny blue vest, tight red shorts, and white knee boots, the image of Annie leaned against a life-sized bottle of vodka and looked at Newcastle with the same expression he remembered from the night he tried to bed her. He’d been so shocked that she went along, his erection failed him, and she never gave him another chance.

On the street below, slow-rolling sun cabs mingled with ultra-light hydrogen cars and a few grimy gasoline models from before the First Outage. Newcastle loved old cars, especially the gleaming black Hummer that muscled its way to the curb at his building. A 1999 model, he knew, almost fifty-five years old. Two men emerged who looked like human Hummers, pushed back the perpetual throng of street people, and soon the white head of Peter emerged, chairman of the board of 2G Inc. In a few moments, he would burst into the room and fill it with the intense charisma that propelled him to become pastor of the three largest churches in Texas, and then to merge the thirty-three largest mega-churches in the Southern States, and then created 2G to own and operate them.

From the popular pulpit of gNet video, Peter preached 2G as being “To God,” and in private to senior secular business owners who disliked governmental meddling, he christened it “Second Government.” His theory involved outsourcing government to 2G, hence achieving a slow-burn takeover. Upon success, he would call it the First Government of New America. Newcastle knew all about it.

Already, 2G had contracts to provide police, fire protection, and water to Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Shreveport, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Peter cut workers’ pay to a flat ten dollars a day and fired everyone who complained, with the public warning that “Only the fittest survive, and unfit whiners don’t fit into 2G.” He created the most profitable company in the South, behind Annie’s Liquor Emporium. The girl in the painting across the street. And the only woman he ever loved.

“Reagan,” Peter said as he entered the room behind his two bulldog guards. They swept the room and back out in a ballet of practiced movement, and backed out, noiselessly closing the heavy oak double doors. Peter stretched his hands at Reagan and they did an awkward four-handed shake, Peter’s trademark when he hadn’t seen you in a while.

“How was your drive from Dallas?” Reagan asked, though he suspected Peter’s response. It rarely varied.

“Getting worse.” Peter walked to the picture window and looked out. A head shorter than Newcastle, the older man radiated energy. “Unfit people everywhere. After the Second Outage, I thought more would go to God, but they bred like locusts.” He raised his white eyebrows a couple of times. “But not for much longer.”

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Annie Q&A: The Second Outage,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

At age ninety-two, Annie Roth Serles held a final series of interviews with Jesse Theodore, her biographer. This is a transcript of the recorded interview segment, edited for clarity, that took place in Miss Annie’s home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in February 2114. The noted location is the sun room, which Miss Annie called her garden.

Question: So what caused the famous Second Outage?

Answer: I forget how young you are. You weren’t even born until, what, a decade after?

Q: Fifteen years.

A: I guess you’re lucky. That, and what came after triggered the end of many nations, and almost this one. But that’s not what you asked. You want to know who to blame for the Second Outage.

Q: Right. The first one, back in thirty-seven, was sunspots.

A: Coronal mass ejection, actually.

Q: Yes, and the second one lasted twice as long but had no natural cause.

A: I suppose that’s true, if you don’t consider human activity natural, and it sure seems to go irrational a lot. Okay, so after the First Outage, the United States, led by the first Democratic majority in both house and the executive office for the first time since, I don’t know, Clinton, maybe. Anyway, they nationalized the electrical grid and all its generators. Though it can’t be said the Republicans didn’t have a hand in it. All the utility companies and suppliers really leaned on a Republican bailout like Bush did for his banker buddies just before the first black president took office. So more than outright nationalization, it was a forced buyout at double or triple true asset costs. Biggest financial buyout in history, I think. Trillions in debt, financed by, like everything else, the Chinese, instead of taxes.

Q: So that meant all the generation and transmission stations, and all the power lines and poles to hold them up and such, suddenly all that was owned and managed by the federal government.

A: Exactly. And it was impressive at first. They restored power to Washington, D.C., in three weeks, before they could even start the political process again. My father loved it. “Socrates was right,” he liked to say. A benevolent dictator is probably the best and fairest way to run a complex society. The problem lies in ensuring the benevolent and balanced part. That takes wisdom, and humans dislike being dictated to by the merely wise. Unless they’re rich or famous, of course.

Q: So the Democratic president, Jennifer Palin, whose aunt was the Republican governor from Alaska and ran as vice president to follow the Bush administration.

A: That’s right.

Q: So President Palin ran the country like a benevolent dictator to bring us out of the First Outage.

A: Exactly.

Q: So how did that lead to the Second Outage.

A: Therein lies the enduring story of humankind, I think. Palin spent huge sums of money, especially pointed because the world’s financial exchanges crashed along with the power grid. But she made power restoration the number-one priority with the directives that would have been genius had they been carried out. One: Get power back on. Two: Make it run more efficiently. And three: Make it work without burning fossil carbon.

Q: If they’d done that last item, you think the Second Outage would not have happened?

A: Yes. Well, maybe. It’s complex. If they’d made the transition to zero carbon, then at least it would have required a very distributed electrical system, rather than a centralized one, which is far more susceptible to failure by mismanagement and attack.

Q: So what exactly caused the Second Outage.

A: Greed more than terrorism. The America First party blossomed during that time, between outages, and with its bunker, old-style mentality. If people wanted to buy solar panels for their roves, they said, let them. But don’t do it for them. Don’t make them. And they wanted to stimulate business growth at all costs, plus update the military, strengthen our border fences, and build massive public-private water projects to stop flooding in the East and to bring Canadian water to the Southwest. A disastrous set of programs in the long run. But people voted them in. So I guess that’s what they wanted. To crash and burn.

Q: So it’s the voters’ fault that the Second Outage happened?

A: In a democracy, everything that happens is the fault of the voting majority, isn’t it? By definition? So the electrical grid, just barely in the “get it working” part of President Palin’s plan, stopped being a national priority. After all, it worked. Barely. Dozens of coal-fired electricity plants were hastily build. Enormous ones, and not particularly efficient. Not at all. Worse than back in the twentieth century. And they stopped stockpiling spare parts. And because unemployment was so high, the industry squeezed worker pay to the minimum—some electrical workers earned only ten dollars a day. Can you believe that? When some CEOs made more than a billion a year. Anyway, they tried to unionize, and it failed the first few times, then it finally took root. Even the government started firing unionized workers, harking back to President Ronald Reagan. He apparently fired a bunch of unionized federal aviation employees. So, the inevitable happened.

Q: Strike.

A: Yes, and a really bloody fight it was. Just as the Chinese started calling their loans to the U.S. Treasury, selling t-notes instead of buying for the first time in living memory, which led to the worst financial crisis in history. Twice as deep as the Great Depression.

Q: And that’s when it happened. The ghost of Osama bin Laden.

A: Perfect timing, it was. In martial arts, you find your center balance and relax into it while you watch and wait. When your opponent is vulnerable, you attack with everything you’ve got.

Q: How many coordinated attacks that day? Forty-seven?

A: That’s the official number in government reports. There’s good reason to suspect most of the other of hundreds of failures were caused by lower-level attacks as well. Most carried out by angry workers on strike.

Q: So, what, several hundred?

A: About a hundred, maybe. The rest fell like dominoes.

Q: And no benevolent dictator emerged after that.

A: No. The U.S. almost came apart at the wheels. The old South threatened to secede, and that’s when Reagan Newcastle and 2G Inc. rose to a kind of religious-based power. The remaining eastern and western sections battled over funding for water projects. And the southwest literally dried up and blew away.

Q: Do you think the terrorists won?

A: For a while, they did, that’s for sure. Those planes flying into the twin towers in New York turned us into an angry, but afraid, country, and that made us more like our enemy than like ourselves. Armed retribution can reverberate across generations.

Q: But Reagan Newcastle almost rallied everyone against the terrorists, of which he labeled you a leader.

A: That’s right. They key word you said is “almost.” That’s how close I came to not being here today.

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Irony Like Cold Honey,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

The Director waited for Annie and her two-man motorcycle gang in his office, thinking about how to handle her. He knew how badly Reagan Newcastle wanted her, and it put his colony, his little piece of paradise hidden in the desert, at risk. Even if he did nothing, when Newcastle found out, there would be a high price to pay.

On the other hand, Serles would want Annie, too. The Director knew the connection. He used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory with Serles. The long, mostly boring, time spent in the lab made them talk about things such as what triggered them to go into science. The Director learned about Tucker Roth, Serles’s high school science teacher, who had a daughter who ran the most lucrative private enterprise in the South. There were more billboards with Annie in provocatively sexy clothes and poses than for any other business. Everybody knew Annie.

It came down to a simple calculation, really, the Director decided. Who is most likely to survive and thrive in the long run? Newcastle or Serles?

The Director broke with Serles for what might be called religious reasons. Serles became an uncompromising atheist, going so far as to write a blog widely circulated asserting that the work of scientists who were not atheists could not be trusted by rational minds.

That pretty much split the Los Alamos camp cleanly into two groups of almost equal size: atheists and those who couldn’t bring themselves to make such a strong declaration. Few were outright Christians or even committed theists. But all had a ticklish feeling that something had to be out there in a godlike way. When the Scientologists collapsed, a couple of their former board members approached the Director and they created a New Age Unitarian-style commune, nearly half the adult population holding PhDs, many former researchers from Los Alamos, almost wholly funded by the Gerald Oliver Dodge Foundation. The GOD Foundation. The irony dripped like cold honey.

Serles did the same down in Chaco Canyon with the atheist scientists and engineers, but the two groups kept in touch, mostly through back channels. The Director hadn’t spoken directly with Serles since before the Second Outage. But when the Director wanted more Serles Sheets, they got them without fuss or hesitation. They shared other technology as well, and the Director knew a dozen or so of his scientists had daily contact with Serles’s people. Just two years ago they completed laying a hidden fiber optic line to Serles’s Chaco facility.

Serles would find out about Annie in a matter of hours.

It would take Newcastle a little longer.

The Director suspected a few Newcastle sympathizers lived among them, but they kept quiet, especially now that Texas seemed on the verge of a civil war that had a strong hint of social cleansing. Most scientists had a natural repulsion to that, except for a small group of statisticians who claimed the only way to save the planet was by a mass human die-off, whether planned or unplanned, deemed by God or merely chance. He imagined Newcastle and Serles having that argument. It would be quite entertaining.

A knock on the door announced his assistant. “Doctor,” she said, “they’re here.”

He nodded. “Show her in.”

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock. Serles is the ancestor of the character by the same name in the short story, The Pump Jack Potion. Gerald Oliver Dodge is featured in the novel, The G.O.D. Journal.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Three Shocking Dots,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Annie looked at the proofs for her next advertising campaign for Annie’s Liquor Emporium. An art element in the lower right puzzled her. It looked like a stylized ellipsis between two parentheses: (…). She’d marked it for deletion, but there it remained.

She called the designer and complained.

“Your father insists it be there,” said the woman. “And your mother before him. That’s been on every ad and billboard you’ve done since the beginning.”

How had she missed that? “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Annie took the proof to her father, who sat on the floor in his office with an empty duffel bag and supplies arranged around him: socks, toiletries, a stack of cash.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting ready,” her father answered.

“For what?”

He looked at her as if she should know. “The great disruption. We’ve talked about that. You know, the…” he whispered “…escape plan?”

Annie frowned. Why would they want to escape? Annie’s Liquor made millions every year. They were the third-largest employer in the South. Escape from what? To what? But she didn’t want to get into that now. She held out the proof sheet to her father, who studied it.

“Looks good,” he said, handing it back.

“Look what I deleted. There on the bottom right.”

Her father nodded. “That has to be there.”

“Why?”

“Because it just….” Her father made a face of distaste. “Hell, I don’t know. Your mother insists. It means something to her. I’ve always just let her have it. You should do.”

“I’ll go ask her, then.”

Her father shrugged and handed the proof back to her.

Lydia Roth sat up in bed looking at her e-magazine reader. She had a towel twisted into a peaked turban on her head, scars from the bad side of her face ending at the scalp line.

“Mother,” Annie said.

“That blouse would look better with pearls,” said her mother, looking at the necklace Annie wore, chunks of jet with one striking orange tiger’s eye.

“Mother, what is this?” She handed her the proof sheet on old-fashioned paper. Annie liked paper. Her mother preferred electronic everything.

“Oh. That’s something you can’t take off. It’s in the contract with the agency. They don’t put it in, they don’t get paid.” She offered the paper back. Annie didn’t take it.

“Why? What is it?””

Her mother sighed. “You always were excitable. Look at your fingers, dear. You know the ones I’m talking about.”

Annie held her left hand palm-up. The first three fingers had small but clear black dots tattooed to the tip ends.

“Hold it right. Like Miss Elby showed you.”

Annie sighed like a pre-teen and held her hand out like a greeting or salute, her thumb holding the pinkie into her palm, three fingers held for the viewer to see three dots in a row.

Her mother raised the proof page and pointed at the art element Annie wanted to remove. She raised her eyebrows, a nonverbal “Get it?”

Annie frowned and shook her head. She didn’t.

Her mother tapped her forefinger on the symbol. “Three dots,” she said, “as in a parenthetical missing comment.”

Annie tossed up her hands. “What does that mean?”

“It’s an ellipsis, dearest. Look it up. the deep root word is leipein, to leave something of value behind. That’s what we must do. You’ll know when it’s time.” Her mother held her three fingers, dots on each, toward Annie’s eyes, her eyes peering down her hand like sighting a weapon.

Annie refused to salute her back. It seemed too stupid. But she stopped fighting and the art element remained. She began seeing the symbol everywhere, on everything related to their business.

That night it came to her. She’d leave something behind all right. A shocking ad campaign that would make enormous piles of money. Annie grinned, imagining what she could do with three dots. She imagined an outfit of dots that covered only three places, and those just barely. She would give them an ellipsis they would never forget.

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock. Elby is featured in The G.O.D. Journal.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Beautiful, Brilliant, and Clueless,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Theo stepped up from the basement safe house into the warm January night air. Another winter without a freeze, looked like.

He let his eyes adjust and saw a hulking dark shadow under a tree.

“Arch?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“Over here,” Arch said. Theo had the wrong dark shadow. Archibald was on the other side of the tree. Theo walked to him.

“Everything good?” he asked.

“So far. You?”

“I guess.”

“Problem?”

“That damn girl,” said Theo. “Brilliant. Beautiful. And clueless. She’s got no idea what’s going on in the world.”

Archibald shifted in the darkness and sighed through his nose. “She finding out pretty good, though, seem like.”

“Well, her daddy was leading some kind of rebellion among scientists and engineers and such, and she didn’t even know. What the hell kind of upbringing is that?”

“My daddy got beat by people with sheets on they heads. I didn’t know until he gone five year.”

“Well, hell,” said Theo. He couldn’t possibly hope Arch would understand the problems he saw with Annie. But Arch certainly knew things even Theo would never truly understand. “Something’s happening out there, that’s all I’m saying. Can’t stay like this. How long has the likes of us been saying that? And she could step up and do something about it, but she doesn’t look the least bit up to it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“She in shock.”

“I know that,” he snapped. Felt bad for treating Arch this way. “I don’t mean to fight with you. But dammit. They ruin my Centipede Section, kill my buddies, wipe out your whole neighborhood, and kill nearly all your family and friends, all on a trumped-up charge against Annie that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I hear they say she dead. They kill her after she shoot Reagan Newcastle in the arm.”

“That’s right. So see how perfect it is? How embarrassed they’d be if Annie turned out to still be alive? And that she really is leading an uprising? They’d shake in their boots. And people like you and me would fight back with everything we’ve got.”

“Maybe,” said Archibald. “But maybe that give them more reason to keep killing folks they don’t like.”

“They don’t need any reason to do that. They need a reason to stop. To be scared. To know we’re not going to take it anymore.”

“What we going to fight with, Mr. Theo? They got guns and flying machines. We got rocks and sticks. Like when white men first fight black men in Africa. We ain’t got not chance.”

“There’s got to be something we can do. We can’t outrun them. Even if we could, who would we have to leave behind? How many wouldn’t be able to keep up?”

The night air stirred and the smell of fungus-laced dry-rotted wood wafted past them.

“So what you think she ought to do, then? She already try a shot at Newcastle, and blow him up too. What else she can do?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m just frustrated, I guess. And antsy. They’re going to find us here. I feel it.”

“We slow ’em down for you.”

“I know. I know you will. But I sure would rather take the fight to them. Wouldn’t you?”

Archibald laughed, deep and slow. “Naw. They kill us all, sure. Best thing’s to keep ’em guessing. Surprise ’em time to time. Miss Annie ain’t gonna quit. You see her on that push bar on the train. You know what she got in her. She gonna be all right.”

“I hope so. Maybe you’re right. Poor girl doesn’t hardly trust anybody. Doesn’t even think about getting help. Stubborn as a donkey.”

“She don’t need to think about help. Just need to do what she do, and they be all kind of people like me stand up for her. You see.”

Theo sighed. Maybe Arch was right. Patience never had been something Theo practiced much. “Well,” he said, “I just hope she hurries up and figures her own head out. This places gives me the willies.”

“Ain’t no place safe. This probably ain’t so bad.”

“I guess. Just keep a good watch.”

“Now you the one don’t trust nobody.”

Theo grinned and chuckled. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m worse than she is.”

“It gonna be alright, Mr. Theo. You go get some sleep. Tomorrow bring what it bring, ain’t no worryin’ gonna change it a bit.”

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock. Theo is the son of Sean O’Brien from the novel Anasazi Runner and a significant character in Ellipsis.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

“Ku Klux Coffee,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Peter began his day as usual, with one glass of water and twenty minutes kneeling on a tray of gravel. His scabbed knees bled, but the suffering focused his mind while he prayed.

When he stood, shaky, he bandaged his knees and had his first precious cup of coffee. Only the most wealthy and influential men could acquire coffee, brought from Central America on sailing ships. The low-grade coffee made its way to Texas by donkey train. He hoarded the good stuff. With every sip he thanked God and begged forgiveness for his weakness.

This morning, the first since the governor of Texas appointed Reagan Newcastle Peace Commissioner, Peter sucked down his daily twelve cups of coffee without noticing it as much as usual. He and Newcastle used the excuse of that harlot Annie’s escape to start a quick war against heathen rebels. Mostly poor people, homeless burdens on an already grossly overburdened society. Being rid of them would vastly improve the quality of life for those who remained—which would further the work of God without measure.

Nevertheless, it saddened him to prematurely end the suffering of so many before they experienced the genuine enlightenment and comfort of bearing witness to the miracle of Christ as proven by the thriving churches he and his peers had built over the last decade across the old American South. Negroes and Hispanics, he believed, were agents of the Devil, incapable of receiving the true blessings of Christ. Their lot was to work for and serve those who could receive and understand those blessings. He had that revelation early in life, shortly after that Hispanic man murdered his young wife. The only woman he ever truly loved. The grief of that led him to a life devoted to the church.

To this day, every time he thought of the death of his wife, he longed for a cigarette. But he vowed never again, and he wouldn’t.

Instead, he spent a caffeinated twenty minutes speed-reading his favorite passages from the Bible that reinforced his faith in their mission. Usually, that is. Today, he had the unpleasant and wholly secular task of calming the jittery Texas governor and his elected thieves, too many of them Hispanic and black. How and why this country allowed men and even women of such inferior qualities to serve in public office both saddened and enraged him.

He’d been a thirty-year-old preacher in Longview, Texas, when the voters of the nation committed the unspeakable sin of electing a black man to the highest office in the land. That spurred him into tireless action, and through the inevitable disasters that followed the Obama administration, he and others built a network of megachurches fed by deep, scalding rejection of the democratic process.

He never mentioned it aloud except among the most trusted and secure confidantes, but the invisible arms of the Ku Klux Klan elevated Peter and eleven other like-minded pastors into what became, ultimately, a de facto second government. They were particularly helped by the hand of God with each of the major power outages, which weakened government and strengthened subcontractors beyond even the wildest fantasies of Ronald Reagan. A government grounded in and guided by men bestowed in wisdom by God and not by the increasingly ignorant and Godless masses. That’s what Peter wanted to create and leave as his legacy.

Soon, perhaps in a matter of weeks or even days, he would accomplish his greatest gift to God—the rise of Reagan Newcastle to the governorship of Texas. Newcastle certainly had the gifts to carry out the assignment. And from Texas, the Christian Second Government would rise to flow across the land, especially the Old South, and save the nation from utter ruin.

Newcastle’s only weakness lay with his infatuation with the harlot Annie. That’s why Peter had secretly countermanded Newcastle’s orders to Zoop. Newcastle wanted her brought in alive. For the sake of their mission, Peter ordered Zoop to kill her and to bring proof of her death. That should help Newcastle get his mind straight.

“Praise Jesus,” he muttered with a shiver. “I’m already out of coffee.”

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.

Before Anasazi: New Info on Basketmakers in Colorado

Precursors to the Anasazi, the Basktmakers are grudgingly revealing their history through archaeology. The more learned about the Basketmakers, the more we can speculate what kind of influence it took (such as ultra-violent fringe warriors from the Toltec/Mayan cultures to the south) to radically change them into what we know as the Anasazi.

From a recent article:

Radiocarbon dates from corn indicate [Basketmakers] inhabited the Animas Valley [of southwestern Colorado] as early as 700 B.C. – 500 years earlier than previously thought.

And they lived here 100 years longer than previously believed, through about 500 A.D., which is about the same time as the end of the Roman Empire.

After 500 A.D., there seemed to have been a migration out of La Plata County, although two radiocarbon dates from Darkmold suggest that at least a few people were still around in 670 A.D.

via The Durango Herald 09/02/2012 | ‘Darkmold’ dig reshapes our understanding of Basketmakers.

They had more time and the same resources as the Anasazi, yet Basketmakers did not leave a similar legacy of stone buildings and cannibalism. Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

“War Against the Deficits,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

Reagan Newcastle had a few moments alone after his meeting with Peter and his board of directors. What a crazy last few days! He knew things were about to erupt, and he and Peter planned for it, set it up well, reacted perfectly to the gifts of the situation at hand.

Yet instead of feeling victorious, he felt tired and lonely. “It’s just beginning,” he said aloud to no one.

In his heart, he knew Annie would not willingly accept him. He had somehow known that from the moment he met her. But even now, even after she shot to kill him and missed, even after she blew up the penthouse office, he grieved for the loss of her and wanted her back.

The throbbing pain in his shoulder where Annie’s bullet passed through reminded him of the ache in his heart. If only she didn’t fight it. If only she would join him, if he could somehow bring her around. in months or years, he felt certain she would come to love him. She must. Life is inconceivable without that.

Instead, she fought back with an intensity that surprised and secretly pleased Newcastle. What a woman! If she only redirected her brains and skill and beauty to work for the inevitable Kingdom of God on earth, she could help him attain ten times what he could do without her. Why couldn’t she see that? Why didn’t God make her see it?

So he and Peter used her rebellion to escalate the war on poverty and ignorance and sloth that added up to people Newcastle called Deficits. The Deficits brought the state and the nation to its knees. And Peter and the other Twelve declared that it earned the well-deserved wrath of God.

He stood and paced, careful to keep his arm pinned to his shoulder to prevent his wound from opening. “Where are you know?” he whispered. Still alive? Wishing you could take it all back and join me? “Have you suffered enough?”

Annie, contemptuous though she was of the guiding path of Jesus, had a will as strong as Newcastle’s. But she also had a cold heart, at least as cold as Newcastle’s. She sold liquor to the down-and-out with no qualms. She destroyed the souls of the godless one slow drink at a time. In a way, she did God’s work without acknowledging it. “You’re no different than me,” he said. “I just have a faster way.”

When Annie resisted her opportunity to join him, he and Peter saw their chance and convinced the governor of a larger rebellion that didn’t even truly exist. Peter convinced him to appoint Newcastle as a citizen war general to put down the rebels. The governor bought it, and sold it to the president. Newcastle had as much political coverage as money and favors could buy him. It couldn’t be better.

They planned to set up Annie as the false leader of the rebellion, but then she began to behave as if she really did lead a growing rabble. Shooting Newcastle and blowing up the penthouse cinched their argument, and their war against the Deficits suddenly became easy. Because of Annie.

“You’ve blood on your hands now, Annie,” he said. “Some mine, I’ll give you that. But I forgive you. Even if no one else will.”

He shook his head to clear it, force his thoughts to change. Zoop was on Annie’s trail. With instructions to bring her back alive, even though Newcastle had staged her death and publicly declared the head of the rebellion cut off. A mistake, perhaps, since she kept escaping Zoop’s grasp. It would strengthen any incipient rebellion to know she still lived. But Zoop could be counted on. Annie’s window for redemption closed quickly. He didn’t know how long he could keep it open for her.

“Forget about her,” he instructed himself. It’s time to cleanse the open sore the state of Texas had become, the whole South—the entire nation, even the world. To have a chance at a clean, Deficit-free future required a dirty, unpleasant present. People must die so that others may live, like Christ showed the world. And Peter and the Twelve had appointed Newcastle to be the man who oversaw that cleansing. He had no blood on his hands. Peter and the Twelve shouldered that burden. Newcastle merely carried out orders.

A knock on the door and his new secretary looked in. “Governor on line one, sir.”

He nodded, but didn’t rush to pick up the phone. In a matter of days, if all went well, the governor would become as irrelevant as Annie.

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.