Average Joe

By Peter Sargent

Twenty years after he last saw her, Hal encounters his high school crush stumbling down a frozen stretch or rural Indiana highway. Disoriented and wearing nothing but a t-shirt in falling snow, Jenny is headed toward the 50/50... a massive scientific experiment buried deep beneath the Great Plains. Hal holds vigil over her in the hospital, but his motives soon turn darker. Jenny lays unconscious and Hal digs into her past. He discovers that she was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that would change the broken world in which they live. Once a promising young engineer, Hal now finds himself unemployed, disillusioned and mentally unstable. He once coveted an unobtainable woman. Now he covets her life's work, an achievement that is no less out of Hal's reach. He considers stealing Jenny's discovery and claiming it as his own, bringing upon himself destructive forces that he never before imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Sargent
• Release date: Jul 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311501400

Peter Sargent

Peter Sargent's ancestors were lamplighters, steam train engineers, architects, firemen and preachers. He has a sense for the timbre and color of urban life and industry, coupled with a taste for philosophy and its questions of human destiny. With a classical training in mathematics, Peter spends most his career writing radar processing software. His fiction, mostly of the speculative variety, is the passion of his nights and weekends. A native of Greater Boston, Peter still resides in Massachusetts with his family. If you like his work, then you might consider liking him personally. Visit Peter Sargent's author page on Facebook and get notifications of upcoming work! https://www.facebook.com/petersargentscifi http://petergsargent.blogspot.com/

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Average Joe

You would’ve been my last choice, but I hope that you’ll live up to the occasion.

Mr. Noyes used to be Hal’s eleventh grade English teacher, but on that night in the hospital he was a broken codger in a charcoal suit. Hal had found his daughter, Jenny Noyes, wandering in a snow storm and now she was comatose in the hospital bed. Mr. N used to make Hal shrink. Noyes had once received probation on charges of assault on a minor (which never went to court) and the kids used to say he kept a shotgun and a sledgehammer in the back of his jack shit LTD wagon. At first Hal shirked telling the man the whole story about how his daughter ended up here, but these days he wasn’t so timid.

Hal glanced at Jenny, as if she could help him tell this part of the story.

He said, I didn’t know it was her when she called me. It’s been a while.

She was disoriented. said Mr. N, She pulled you out of a deck of cards.

I drove up 37 out of Bloomington, toward the hole. There’s no light in the fields and I nearly ran her over. Hal glanced out the window, where snowflakes darted in and out of orange orbs under the street lamps. She wore only a tee shirt and shorts. I saw her legs glowing in my headlights and I slammed the brakes. She was holding a big envelope as if she expected someone to steal it. I don’t think she even noticed the cold.

Hal omitted the part about how the trip to the hospital left him with an empty gas tank and not a buck to fill it. And that wasn’t as bad as the migraines pummeling his head because he hadn’t had a smoke in two days. He’d have to let them impound his car. Then he’d take a bus and bum a smoke off someone. The last thing he was