Shards

By Darrel Bird

Craig Martin travels a dangerous land that demands survival of the fittest. He meets Lou Benton who is a tough woman, and together they set out to go west, hoping for a better life. He knows of a valley on the Colorado river if they can reach it. But that is thirteen hundred miles into the unknown.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Darrel Bird
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310272028

Darrel Bird

Darrel Bird has written and published 47 short stories. He attended Bakersfield college, and is an avid motorcyclist.

Book preview

Shards

by Darrel Bird

Copyright January 2014 by Darrel Bird

Smashwords Edition

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Part 1

Snow fell down the neck of Craig Martin's coat as he crawled under the limbs of a cedar with low-hanging branches on the edge of a field. His hands shook as he scraped dead cedar needles from the base of the tree and then searched in his coat for his flint and steel.

He had to take off his gloves to handle the flint and steel, and by the time he got smoke, his hands were cold and scraped from striking the flint against the steel, but a little flame eventually smoked into life, and he scraped up more cedar needles.

He put his hands inside his coat as chills invaded his body again. Again, he was sick, and he knew he was in a great deal of trouble if he didn’t have shelter and food. He would die off, as so many had around him. He took his binoculars and raised them to stare across the snowy field at the farm house. The binoculars shook in his hands, but taking as deep breaths as his tortured lungs would allow, he was able to still the binoculars enough to study the house, barn, and shed for movement.

He had about three hours to carefully watch the buildings for life, and then he would have to make a move regardless. He began to break off the stubs of dead branches off the bole of the tree and toss them onto the fire; afterwards, he leaned against the cleaned-off part of the tree and began again to watch the farm house. He knew he may have to kill someone again today. His fevered mind went back to the better days, when a man did not have to kill for food, shelter, or clothing.

In the better days, the electricity went off without rhyme or reason. Physics had just quit working, and no one had a clue as to why. There just wasn't any spark any more. The cars stopped working; even the batteries went dead. He had been sitting in their apartment in the Boston neighborhood watching old reruns of Bugs Bunny with his six-year-old daughter when everything stopped. It was his day to watch her while his wife, Lisa, worked. Bugs Bunny was right in the middle of Yaaa, what's up...?

His daughter had said, Fix the TV, daddy; it’s not playing. He had gotten up to go to the fuse box when he glanced out the window to see the neighbors trickling out of their houses to look up and down the street. Instead of going to the breaker box, he had walked to the front door and out of the house to see what people were looking at. There was not a car running, and the street light on the corner was out. He walked over to Mr. Bernstein to stand beside him and ask, What’s happened, Mr. Bernstein?

I don’t know, son; everything just quit, and even the phone doesn’t work. It's probably the government taking a crap on Boston. Them sum-bitches are always messing with stuff.

Look at that dickhead Louie Manovitch kicking his Mercedes. None of the cars will run; he probably stole it anyway.

Why won’t the cars run?

How the hell would I know, kid? I ain’t owned one in ten years; maybe God turned everything off thinking we’d had enough fun for one lifetime. Then again, I suspect the idiots with their brand new super-collider have gone wrong. They keep trying to make black holes and stuff they don’t know anything about."

Doors slammed on cars as people got out of them and raised the hoods, as if they could fix modern cars anyway. Joey down at the mechanic shop had sworn if they got any more complicated he was out of the business.

People walked back inside their houses and apartments, then walked back out again to look up at the