The illness is terrible, as is being shipwrecked on this unknown isle. Every day is a struggle to find food and shelter.
Still, it is better that what he had before: a dull grey life in a dull grey suit at a dull grey job.
Now, he feels alive.
Maybe it’s OK if rescue doesn’t come.
Maybe he’s been rescued already.
It’s that you don’t get a choice of who you feed on. It’s predestined somehow.
Clarice is annoyed to find her chosen target this time is a typical college jock; an honest to god beer bong swilling, pledge hazing frat boy.
Fantastic.
She feeds because she must, but she doesn’t like it.
Later, she meets her coven and is embarrassed when she calls one of them “bro.”
Professor Murdoch is working to stop this. Even though the war ended years ago, he is changing lives today.
He constructed two things to assist him: a time machine and a robot soldier nicknamed “Dear John.”
He sends Dear John into the past to fight in place of some young soldier. Soon, every battle features Dear Johns, leading platoons of itself, into battle against forces of other Dear Johns.
And men, who were destined to die in battle, suddenly find themselves alive and home, all thanks to Dear John.
It’s not that big, and it’s dirty, but it’s got a big backroom, enough to hold all our instruments.
We practice day in and day out.
The windows are covered over with newspapers, so we sleep in the front on makeshift beds made from old store shelves.
The whole place smells of sweat and feet and old fast food.
We are living the high life.
Sadly, he had bought it from a second-hand store just a few days before.
But he didn’t do what the briefcase wanted.
Once owned by a mobster, the briefcase loves carrying stacks and stacks of bills. And it hungers for money.
After the crime scene is cleaned up, and all the paperwork is filed away, the briefcase sits in an evidence room.
A temporary wait until it is sold as unclaimed goods and finds itself in someone else’s hands.
“Look, it’s very simple. A so called ‘primate city” is just the largest city in a geographic area. It’s the primary urban location, like how Paris is the most known city in France. It’s just a label. It has nothing to do with primates!”
As he sits back, his assistant challenges him.
“Then why have we all turned into apes?”
“Well,” says the doctor. “It’s probably an unrelated phenomenon.”
It’s an imperfect system. There are too many clocks at different times, too many time zones, too much confusion.
His “accurate” atomic clock sets itself to Daylight Savings Time two weeks early. This is the seed that drives Clark to take over the world.
Now all clocks, all watches are tied into one master clock that he controls, all set to one global time.
You have to get used to it. Your body says it’s 8:00 AM, but the clock says it’s 5:00.
But you get used to it.
At least the trains run on time now.
They don’t have any choice.
Boone looks at the string, laying out in the man’s garage. It’s not a tidy ball or roll, just a big heaping pile.
“Yeah, it’s kind of a mess,” says the owner. “They left it that way”
Skulls, skeletons, monsters, fire: all the things that send teachers to the school counselor.
It’s a game he plays sometimes. How to get attention. How to cause a panic.
He listens at the door of the teacher’s lounge, enjoying the concerned voices about him.
That’s enough, comes a thought in his head. Knock it off.
“Are you still here, boy? I thought I got rid of you.”
I won’t let you do this anymore. It’s not funny.
“Is for me,” laughs the demon.
Grab a stick and a Latin dictionary. Slice your hand and use your life. You can even bake magic in a muffin. (It’s true.)
Or, you can do like Owen and just sit and hate. Think about the person you hate, and channel that energy in their direction.
But there is a price, as always.
When you burn another, you make yourself the wick.
And fire consumes everything.
It is a dark, rainy night as a hitchhiker reaches for a car door handle.
Pause.
The hitchhiker is a maniac, as these tales require.
The driver, an escaped mental patient. (Don’t ask how he got the car.)
The man crouched in the backseat of the car? The one neither the driver nor the hitchhiker has seen? Also crazy and armed with an ax.
On the side of the road, annoyed, is the phantom hitchhiker, to whom no one is paying any attention.
That was supposed to be her ride.
She sighs and waits for the next car, on a lonely rainy night.
It’s not her face, which is pleasant but average. It’s not her body either, which is slim but boney.
But something about her makes men swoon.
She knows it’s her power, her confidence, and the large amount of radium stitched into her dress.
Farah nocks an arrow and fires.
She practices with her bow two hours a day, every day.
On weekends, she takes riding lessons and animal husbandry. She can shoe her horse if necessary.
Her friends think she’s just trying to be weird. They date boys with sports cars and spend their days at the mall.
Farah isn’t interested in any of that. She doesn’t even have a cell phone.
What she does have though is knowledge.
She knows what is coming. She is preparing for the end.
