It’s that time of year again! NaNoWriMo has begun! Some of you followed me a couple years ago on a failed journey through literary abandon. This year I’m going to finish the damn novel. One of the things I have learned about writing for NaNo is that the material won’t be good. I think Earnest Hemingway said it best: “The first draft of anything is shit.” If I can remember that and trust myself to write poorly, then I will have something to edit in December and beyond. If I can pull it off, I will finally have a novel, and that means I can work towards fulfilling my dream of being published. But that means I have to be willing to write poorly. We’ll see how that works out.
I missed the starting gun of the Midnight Write-in, but still managed to make it. B and I got there two hours late to find the back room of the IHOP absolutely packed. In fact, we were barely able to squeeze in at a corner table. It was both inspiring and humbling to see such a turn out. It’s nice to know that so many other people are trying to accomplish the same thing I am, but at the same time it reminds me that I’m a little fish in a giant pond. We wrote for about three hours, with a little eating and socializing in between writing spurts. Around 5:00 AM we decided to start packing up to head home.
When I finally woke up Bridget and I had something to eat and watched an Episode of Weeds. We then worked together to turn our dining room area into a writing space to use for NaNo so that both our computers can be in the same room. I’m hoping that the opportunity to write together, at the same time and at the same table will keep us both motivated. I’m also hoping it will be a good bonding experience for us to help us grow closer as we both struggle towards the same goal. Love through writing. What a novel concept. (Hey look! A PUN!)
As I wrap up my writing for day one I sit at 2,293 words. I’m over the daily minimum but far below my goal. I can’t be too mad, though. Moving the computer from upstairs to the downstairs dining room took a lot more time than I thought it would, since we wanted to make it as unobtrusive as possible. Still, I feel like I have a lot of ground to make up. When one of my friends is over 5K and I barely broke 2K, I feel like I’m slacking. But then, am I more worried about word count or writing a good story?
The beginning pretty much sucks and feels slow. I decided to try to write this story as the Hero’s Journey as defined by Campbell. It’s hard, and it seems that the only way to really do that is to allow for a slightly dragged out start. When I go back to edit I will probably fix that.
Anyway, if you’re on this site you probably want to read some of what I have written. Here’s the text from day one:
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As we flew over the city I couldn’t help but wonder how a pacifist who had never so much as held a gun could end up in a helicopter with a SWAT officer, a retired Marine Corps Drill Instructor and a redneck survivalist with seriously bad hygiene and a tendency to give women’s names to all his guns.
The reality of our situation had never really hit me before, but as I looked down at the body littered landscape it all began to sink in. The brutality of the weeks since the final portion of the wall had been erected had seemed like a fantasy, some kind of exaggeration stirred up by what was left of the sensationalist media and the new breed pundits. But here, face to face with the truth, I had to admit that things might really be as bad as they seemed. The casual chatter of my companions wasn’t making things any easier. They had the look of people who had seen all this before, and worse they didn’t seem fazed by it at all. Through all the noise, I caught the tail end of a dead baby joke.
What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
I.
I hate waking up to a ringing phone, especially on a Saturday. It used to mean some debt collector was going to try to scare you into giving up more of your money. Fortunately, debt ceased to be an issue a few years ago. Unfortunately, the sort of things that people might call about made me wish for a collection call. I reached over to pick up the phone, but managed only to knock it off the nightstand onto the floor. I mumbled some profanity or other and leaned over the edge of the bed to pick up the receiver.
“What?” was about all I could manage to mumble.
“Will? You got a minute?”
“Yeah, one. Then I hang up the phone. What do you want?” I didn’t like talking to Eric on a good day, and today was shaping up to be beyond bad. He stammered out a poor excuse for pleasantries, but when I mentioned that he had less than thirty seconds to get to the point the game suddenly changed. My eyes were on the clock as he rattled off something about a transmission that had come in the night before. The last thing I heard was needless flattery about my being the only person he could trust. I hung up before his nose could get any browner.
There was no way to get back to sleep after such an unfortunate rude awakening. I forced myself to sit up, though I admit it was more of a mostly upright position with a definite list to the right. My mouth tasted like the beer I’d nearly drowned myself with the night before mixed with day old nachos. I was torn between brushing my teeth or taking a shower. Finally I decided to brush my teeth in the shower. Somehow the change in routine briefly tricked me into believing the day was going to be different.
Nothing was different. I got cleaned up, ate a bowl of stale puffed wheat and drank a glass of warm orange juice. When the phone rang again I ignored it. Then came the question of whether to venture outside or stay cooped up in my shithole apartment for another day. The coop certainly seemed like the better option until the knock on my door.
To no great surprise I found Eric standing outside my apartment door. Somehow he managed to make his ragged khakis and faded blue polo look like business wear. It was just something about him, some aura he put out that fooled you into trusting him as a professional. He invited himself in and took a seat in my recliner. I pretended not to notice the manila envelope he was so blatantly trying to showcase. I went into the kitchen and poured him a cup of cold coffee. He wouldn’t drink it, he never did. Even after the grids went down and we had to start preserving generator power he somehow expected hot coffee.
“I’m telling you, this is important. We got a call in last night and nobody can make heads or tails of it. We’ve got the Germans, the French and the wetbacks, but what we don’t have is you.” He stood up and walked to the kitchen counter, still holding the envelope and looking like he expected me to rip it out of his hands. That was a thing that would not happen.
“I’m a teacher.”
I could tell he wasn’t satisfied with my response, but I didn’t care. He picked up a fork and dug into a plate of eggs that was sitting in front of him. I knew this part of the game. He was playing on familiarity in the hopes that it would ease my nerves and help make me more pliable to the manipulation. “Not bad, but a little undercooked.” At least that’s what I thought he said through the mouthful of food.
“Those eggs have been sitting there since Tuesday.”
He coughed the eggs out onto the plate. “Shit. Don’t you ever clean up around here?”
“Why bother?”
“The call came from Wyatt. Well, a mile or so south of Midlothian, Texas. Like I said, nobody can make-“
“The answer is no. Sorry, I mean ‘hell no.’ What made you think telling me that would convince me to help? Of all the dumb ideas, that’s….”
‘Will. Maybe she’s alive.”
“Get the hell out.”
II.
I had been pirating power for a few weeks, using it to charge my iPod. I could live with cold coffee, stale cereal, warm orange juice and eggs that were just a little off. I could handle cooking with sterno or just not cooking. I could not, however, stand silence. After the visit from Eric I had decided to console myself with a little visit from Enrique Iglesias. Hero was the order of the day. While not my favorite song, it reminded me of Penny. I wanted that. I wanted to feel sad. I needed to hurt. I needed to know that there was something in me that could still hurt.
I could see her when I closed my eyes. I could smell the lavender scent of her shampoo, the same stuff I would work into her long black hair when we showered. I missed her touch, the feel of her baby soft skin as I hugged her close. There’s no limit to what I would give to hear her voice, to feel her breath against my ear as she whispered that she loved me. If there was a chance that she was alive and still anywhere near Wyatt…
I opened my eyes and looked at the kitchen counter. Eric had left the envelope sitting by the plate of bad eggs. I slid out of the recliner and edged to the counter, eyes on the envelope like it was the bait in some kind of trap. I held my hand over the envelope for something between a second and an eternity before forcing myself to pick it up. It was even harder to open it.
“Fuck you.” I crumpled the envelope and threw it into the trash.
III.
It hadn’t rained in days. Lord knows we needed it, too. Boiling water wasn’t cutting it, not with the detrituts seeping into our water supply. The clean-up crews had hauled all the bodies away and burned them, but some filth lingered. Just the idea of what might be in the water made it hard to drink, even after it was run through a purifier. Sometimes the only way to get the water down was to know it had just come from the sky.
I heard the pattering on my window. I didn’t bother to look outside to see if it was raining. I just put my shoes on and went outside. I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, really. I just wanted to feel the rain on my face, to pretend it could wash away a life of unfulfilled promises and drown the ghost of failure that still haunted me. Really, I just wanted to feel something other than longing. Unfortunately, all I got was a replay of a lingering memory of Penny standing in the rain with her drenched hair clinging to her face, looking at me with sad eyes. She said the rain was God crying because I was leaving her.
IV
I don’t know why I detoured to the school. Classes were out of session and I wasn’t going to be paid extra for working during the break. Maybe the fact that there was always hot coffee had something to do with it. Or maybe it was access to the wire that I was wanting. Either way I had both, as well as a nice view of the growing storm outside my office window. The storm was going to play havoc on the wire, so whatever I was going to do had to be done quickly. It would take a good week to get things back up and running once service died, and I wasn’t sure I would remember what I was looking for at that point.
I pulled up the record of transmissions from the islands. Islands were small settlements that had survived the epidemic and were operating under mostly normal conditions. Most of the messages from the islands were requests for medicine or food, which volunteers would fly in once a week. Air drops stopped for a week when the last section of the wall was being wrapped up, and transmissions from the island poured in like a flood. The people on the islands didn’t like what the wall represented, they didn’t like the feeling that they were being abandoned, left to die in a sea of death. Even after we reestablished the drops they didn’t forget that we were on one side and they were on the other. Nobody could forget how we lost some of the islands during that week, either to illness or to breaches that could have been prevented if we had just been there. To this day nobody can explain why we didn’t just evacuate them and bring them over the wall.
I flipped through some of the older transmissions, reviewing the requests for medicine and food, the same requests that always rolled in. I think I was trying to justify ignoring Eric’s request by convincing myself that whatever had come in was the same as all the rest. A cry for help that equated to little more than calling out for delivery. I think I wanted to believe that whatever Eric had brought to me was mundane and of no consequence. I sure as hell didn’t want to admit that I was afraid I was incapable of helping.
As I scanned through the inboxes on our server I noticed that the number of islands sending requests steadily decreased every couple of weeks. It started with the settlements furthest west, but over time islands closer and closer to the wall went silent. We all knew what was happening, but actually seeing the transmissions taper off made the problem real to me. I read the last request from Blanchard, a simple order for bottled water, boxed noodles and whatever canned meat could be spared. The transmission was two months old. Something was unsettling me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I moved from my chair to the big wall map. It took some searching, but I found Blanchard on the map, just west of Shreveport, Louisiana. I ran my finger along the red line for Highway 20 until I found Midlothian, a small city in Texas. Blanchard was 203 miles east of Midlothian, and Midlothian was five miles east of Wyatt. I nearly knocked my coffee cup over as I scrambled back to the desk. It took a good twenty minutes to find what I was looking for, but eventually I came across the most recent transmission from Wyatt, an evac request that was four months old. That meant Wyatt had gone dark four months ago. If Wyatt had fallen, what the hell did Eric have in that envelope?
The rumble of thunder had grown louder while I was lost in my reading. The pattering of rain against the window was heavier and shook the window. With a sigh I downed the last of my lukewarm coffee and shut down the wire. With nothing else to do I flipped off the light, leaned back in the office chair and waited out the storm.
V.
The storm went on for hours. I have no idea how long into it I fell asleep, or how long Eric had been sitting in the room with me while I slept. When I woke up he was looking out the window. I was tempted to pretend that I was still asleep, but that seemed counter-productive.
“Are you going to help?” There’s something to be said for letting someone wake up before throwing that kind of shit at them. Whatever it is, Eric never heard it. I sighed and mumbled something about hearing him out, then reached for my cup. I noticed a wrinkled manila envelope under the cup. The bastard had gone into my apartment and fished the damn thing out of the trash. I pushed the cup aside and picked up the envelope.
“How are we hearing from Wyatt?” The question went unanswered as I opened the envelope. Eric shifted like he wanted to answer me, but something kept him from doing so. I pulled the papers out of the envelope and looked them over. “What the hell is this?”
