Event Survivors

By Ron Mueller

Event Survivors
Waking up in the cave didn’t surprise him. How bad he felt did. The hangover was intense. The cave had always been his retreat. When he was younger it was always a place to get solitude and when in High School it was a place to come to sober up if he had been drinking. He touched his face and realized he was bleeding. He couldn’t remember driving up the mountain to get back home. Driving up in his condition was really a stupid thing to have done. He should have known better. Lucus sat on the ground wondering what had happened. His head pounded, he ached all over and it was pouring rain.
“Well let’s get to the house and get cleaned up,” he thought as he stood and slowly walked out to the front of the cave. The pain in his ribs was intense. Whatever fight he had been in, he must have received the worst of it.
He stopped short. He had never seen rain like this. It was pouring. There was a solid sheet of water falling from the sky. It was not just raining but solid things were falling from the sky. All he could see was a solid sheet of water beyond the cave entrance. He found an old towel and held it out in the rain to wet it. He began to clean himself up. The rain water seemed brackish, more like saltwater then rain. Big things kept falling from the sky.
“What in the world,” flashed through his mind? Then it hit him.
“Did the event everyone was talking about really happen?” was his next thought.
He sat at the cave entrance wondering how long it could rain so hard. He knew he could make it to the house with his eyes closed because he had done it when as a kid he had decided he wanted to know how it felt to be blind. He closed his eyes and walked out into the rain. The rain was so dense it was actually hard to breath. Lucus stumbled down toward the house and thought he had counted his steps wrong because he did not find the edge of the porch as he had anticipated. He tried looking but he couldn’t see a thing. The rain was too dense. He slowly worked his way forward until he hit solid rock. He was lost. The only rock was behind the house. He could not see his hand on the surface of the rock. He felt first to the left and then to the right. As his arm extended to its limit, he felt the edge of cut stone. He moved over to his right until he could feel the door handle. A shiver went through his body. He knew he had his hand on the door to the cool room located in back of the house. He slowly lifted the handle and opened the door. Lucus stepped in and got out of the rain. He closed the door and stood in the dark. He was shivering, not so much from being wet but with the realization that the home he had grown up in was missing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Around the World Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Feb 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452417042

Ron Mueller

About the Author Ronald E. Mueller [e-mail] Ron grew up in what is now Flint River State Park in Southeast Iowa. The 170-year-old house Ron lived in is built into a hillside. It faces a 125-foot-high cliff towering over the little Flint River. The house and the land talked to him about; the passing of time, the struggle to conquer the land, the struggles people faced and the wonder of nature. He climbed the cliffs, crawled into the caves, dove from the swimming rock, collected clams from the bottom of the pond, gigged and skinned frogs for their legs. He trapped muskrats for fur, hunted raccoon in the dead of night, and with only a stick hunted rabbits in the dead of winter. His young life was outdoors, and nature tested him. He walked to a one room stone schoolhouse uphill both ways. A stern but warm-hearted teacher, Mrs. Henry was instrumental in shaping his character as she shepherded him from the fourth to the eighth grade. A Montessori before its time. It was a great way to grow up. His experiences inter-twined with snippets of fantasy lend themselves to the adventures he leads the reader through.