Bad Stuff

By James J Seydel, Jr

Harley watched as the coffee shop began to melt. He should have been surprised like normal folks, but he wasn’t. He didn’t even know where to rank it on the list of things he thought of as the bad stuff. Ever since that Gwoop-Thing arrived from God-knows-where, the little central Pennsylvania town of Colton seemed to be auditioning for a place in the weirdness hall of fame. Formerly mild-mannered people had become vicious. Colton’s citizens were beginning to panic after a few really bizarre and unexplainable deaths and turned to each other for comfort. Harley wasn’t panicked and had no need for comforting words...or any words, for that matter. He that he was equal to whatever task the entity brought his way. He believed that his life to this point had only been practice for his meeting with the Gwoop and he was ready. Bring it on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James J Seydel, Jr
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465702449

James J Seydel, Jr

I live with my wife, Cheryl, in Montgomery County, PA. Cheryl was a cheerleader in high school and never quite got over it. Her rah,rah attitude keeps me going on those days when the keyboard doesn't seem very friendly. I am very lucky. Back in 1992 I sat down at an Apple IIe computer and started playing around with the barest thread of a story. Every now and then I would put down a few thoughts until in 2011 it just needed to be finished. The result is Bad Stuff and I thank you for reading it. My email: [e-mail]

Book preview

From the driveway off of Old Snyder Road, the old house looked like just that….a normal-looking old house. From Arlene’s point of reference under the decrepit old kitchen table in the normal-looking old house, it was a whole different story. Her view was of dust, cobwebs, old worn floorboards of pine and the shadows of things and times long gone, but normal? That was a word that somehow sneaked into the room when no one was looking. It didn’t belong and hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.

Fear has the ability to distort vision better than any funhouse mirror. It makes shadows in a darkened room into the monsters of our nightmares and bends our best logic into the clubs that beat us down.

Today, Arlene’s fear was real, courtesy of the thing waiting for her on the front porch. She couldn’t know it wanted to see her lying broken in a corner of this old place, bones broken, staring at the ceiling with big doll-like sightless eyes, forgotten and alone. She did know it planned to cause her great harm but didn’t need to know the details which might be even worse than what she could imagine. She shuddered and tried to move her arms enough in this cramped space to hug herself for comfort. It didn’t work.

She was struck by the absolute silence. It’s a warm summer night, she thought. There should be sounds. Where are the crickets? There are always crickets, right? Those damnable, ever-present, pain-in-the-ass crickets must have given in to a threat their little cricket brains just could not handle. They’re probably sitting out there as scared as I am waiting to see what happens next. I wonder how they even know that something's wrong. And how about the other little creatures of the night. Where the hell are they? There should be the rustling of leaves and other ground stuff as the critters make their rounds, looking for morsels of food and maybe hooking up to make other critters while they try, like me, to just stay alive. She supposed, for the moment, they were in the cricket camp, silent, still, waiting. Also, no air moved and it dawned on her that it had been still for quite awhile. She had never seen it this still, doubted it had ever been this still. She wondered how the night had been put on hold, but really didn’t want to know.

Her silent questions were met only by the roaring of her own heartbeat in her ears. Even Mr. Thing Waiting On The Porch was quiet and its silence greatly amplified the already deep-throated silence of the night.

This day had started out like any normal-run-of-the-mill summer day in Colton. As usual, the sun had come up. As usual, a Bermuda high was pumping hot humid air into this little, central Pennsylvania town. As usual, the people went about their business with wet armpits and an eye on the western sky for the first sign of any cooling weather system. On this particular summer day there would be no sign. The heat and its accompanying grouchiness were here to stay. Kids headed for the pool thought it was just great. Likewise the guys who owned the pools and waterparks and anyone else who stood even a remote chance of cashing in on the string of hot days. Everyone else just mopped at their sweat and tried not to start World War III just because they were uncomfortable. But, what the hell, that’s what summer’s all about, right?

Toward the end of days like this, if there wasn’t a thunderstorm, the sun slowly sank through the thick moist air like a giant tangerine, its mellow light subdued so you could look right at it without squinting. Pictures taken during this time were usually filled with warm, soft tones and outside the camera the light gave a peaceful aura to the evening.

There would be no peace out at the normal-looking house on the old Snyder Road this night. Traffic would not be the reason for the lack of peace. That was all over on the new Snyder Road nowadays. Only once in a while would anyone come down this old road now, and they were usually confused by two roads with the same name. Imagine that. No, there would be no peaceful evening out at the normal-looking house because there was something evil on the beat-up old porch waiting for a meal, or perhaps just to play, or maybe both.

As Arlene passed the minutes until whatever, a board in the floor creaked, startling her. She jumped, banging her head on the table. It was an old wooden thing that looked like it wouldn’t stand up to the weight of a decent meal, but looked like Fort Knox in her panicked flight into the house. Now it rattled loudly when she hit it and the thing outside reacted to the sound with a very small, startled thump on the wall and a sigh that almost sounded like a child yawning. It certainly didn’t sound like a killer. Arlene, she thought, it’s dangerous to think like that. Thinking maybe it wasn’t a killer scared her even more. There were worse things than dying. That thought brought even more fear and it was a chilling sensation such as she had never known. It didn’t freeze her heart, though. It was beating so fast the blood literally screamed through her ears. Her palms were slippery with sweat and little tremors of fear teased their way around her body, poking here and there until they found the pathways to her brain. They found the little switch and dumped a flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. She was more than prepared to fight or flee, but could do neither.

Being scared made the adrenaline flow, and her body’s response to the adrenaline increased the level of fear, and the cycle was repeating itself in ever increasing intensity. Most people would be concerned when their heart beat so fast, but they would only be guessing about just what danger all this anxiety really posed. Arlene Simon, a practicing psychologist knew only too well what was happening and what could happen if this mess wasn’t brought to conclusion, and rather quickly. She was sure she was going down the road to a stroke or heart attack and was disgusted by not being in control. Sure, she was disgusted by the coppery taste of terror in her mouth and by the thought she might be eyeball to eyeball with her own death, but it was not being in control which really pushed all of her buttons. She was, after all, a woman and very much needed to be in control. Who else, she reasoned, would get things done in this world if the women weren’t in the driver’s seat? While not a feminist in the strict sense of the word, Arlene was a successful independent female in a man’s world and she was really, really proud of that.

She valued her ability to function in a man’s world, but saw it as a natural thing, not a protest or statement of anything extraordinary. In her mind, the human condition was analogous to a giant brain with the women being the rational, logical, ‘let’s get it done’ left side. The men were the right side of the brain, the dreamers with a collective short attention span unless sex was the goal. She pictured guys still living in caves, dressing in animal skins picked up at some prehistoric Goodwill box were it not for the woman’s touch.

One thought led to another and she would take off down a new path exploring ideas that led to other ideas. And so it went as she mentally skipped around avoiding her current situation until she took it full circle and plopped back to now.

The now she found herself in wasn’t exactly what she’d have chosen for this night but it was what it was and she, as usual, would make the best of it. As idealistic as her ideas of men, women, survival and life were, she was pragmatic enough to wish for a man or two with the tools of war to appear and save her feminist butt.

Dear Lord, she said, please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the speed to run like a crazy son-of-a-bitch if I can find a way out of this spot. Oh wow, she thought. Nice way to talk to the Lord.

When she was growing up in St. Francis parish, where the nuns wore wedding rings to symbolize their marriage to Christ, such a prayer would have probably caused the very church where she was baptized to shake like a bowl of jelly. Not only that, but some of those holy women would surely have arranged for a couple of big guys with nets to pack Arlene off to a nice little room with cute padded walls decorated with painted-on crucifixes because the real thing could be used to harm yourself.

Father Walsh wouldn’t have minded though. Joe Walsh was cool. He was human. Not at all what most people of the era thought of when they pictured a priest. No, Arlene thought, Father Joe wouldn’t have minded a bit. In fact, he’d probably have been amused. Boy, I wish he was still around.

But she was still under the table in her present ‘now’ and acutely aware that the next move was hers. She began to take stock of her situation by imagining what she would be thinking if she were the creature. It’s probably getting impatient the way we do when our meal takes too long to arrive in a restaurant. We can retaliate with the size of the tip. What’s it going to do? This is not helping you, babe, she thought. Let’s get on with it. Am I stalling with these little mind games? Yep, I am. Maybe I could hold up a mirror and scare the living hell out of it. Come on, Arlene, let’s get serious.

Through the maze of thoughts crashing around in her head, a shadow of a sound teased at her. It grew like the pre-dawn light announcing a virgin day until she heard it for what it was…a siren. She drank in the beautiful noise and breathed a little sigh of relief. Maybe they would get to her before she became an unwilling dinner for her little friend waiting impatiently on the other side of the wall trying to figure the tip. She thought of this thing attacking and chewing the lower arm and hand of Bill Winton the other night and a shudder ran down her spine like a demented ferret on roller blades.

Bill was still alive and she was thankful for that, but he hasn’t spoken a coherent word since just after the attack. He just babbles like an idiot and, while Bill had a problem with booze, he was certainly no idiot. There has been no reliable account as to what really happened at his place, but it didn’t take a Werner Von Braun to figure out that it wasn’t at all good. She had heard about the police responding to a call of a man screaming and creating a disturbance fully expecting to find Bill in one of his frequent drunken rages. What they found was ol’ Bill kneeling in a pool of his own blood and vomit staring at the spot where his hand used to be. He was rocking back and forth like a holy-roller in prayerful ecstasy and didn’t even seem to notice the cop walking cautiously toward him. The young patrolman eased himself down to Bill’s level, trying to ignore the mess on the ground. He didn’t like to see a lot of blood and he certainly didn’t like to see vomit in any amount. He was fighting to save his dinner.

Bill, he managed to force out around the rising lump in his throat, What the hell’s going on?

Bill looked up at Officer Jonathan Robertshaw through the haze of alcohol and tears. He sucked in a shuddering breath which had started out to be a sob and said, Jonny, this really pisses me off.

It was to be the last thing he said that anyone could understand. They knew what had happened so they understood that they couldn’t understand.

To Arlene, the big news at the moment wasn’t Bill Winton but the sirens slicing off chunks of the heavy night air and making them into little packages of hope. The sound was getting louder. It was as sweet as any symphony and just as she began to feel a little like breathing again, the noise peaked and began to recede. She realized she had just heard a prime example of the Doppler effect, which, in ordinary everyday language meant: The bastards went right on by.

The night quickly closed around the spot where the sound had been and Arlene imagined she could see her last bit of hope running barefoot through the meadow getting smaller, fading away to the nothingness of despair.

Until this point, it hadn’t occurred to her the sirens might be announcing a whole different emergency than her own. Hell, nobody thinks like that, she reasoned. You have a fire and hear the fire whistle, you know its for you. Right? Yeah, right. This time they just drove by with no more concern than a tumbleweed. Of course they couldn’t be concerned about a problem they didn’t know about, but that didn’t make her feel any better. She couldn’t believe it and yet she knew what she’d heard. Okay, here we are, back to square one, she thought.

Doppler, she said to the night and the hairball-in-waiting, what a great Scrabble word, amazing herself that the thought of Scrabble popped up in what could be her final moments on the planet. Sweet Jesus, she thought, I should be thinking survival not Scrabble. Have I gone ‘round the bend’, as they say? Do people who’ve gone ‘round the bend’ ever ask themselves if that’s what happened? No, it’s all a giant defense mechanism. That’s really cute if you think about it. My mind’s trying to protect me from knowing what’s going to happen to my body. Neat system in some cases, but right now I need my body to do some protecting so I have something to carry my mind in.

Two

No one had actually seen this thing that had taken Bill’s hand and now bedeviled Arlene, but everybody had an opinion. After all, opinions were free. Some thought it was just some lunatic going about its lunatic business, without rhyme or reason.

There were those who thought it was a tad suspicious the thing happened to show up near a research facility that was involved in genetic research. And others thought maybe it was a crazed scientist who had used himself as a guinea pig in an experiment gone wrong. Others didn’t have a guess and didn’t really care. They just had something new and different to gossip about. What really was known about the reason for the mayhem could be recited in a very few words, but to no one’s surprise, Harley Matthewson had a theory.

Harley always had a theory. He had theories about everything you ever wanted to know and then some. According to some of Colton’s more vocal citizens, Harley could be a royal pain in the ass, even though he did know a lot of ‘stuff’.

Mister Matthewson was a career student of the world who had never been more than three hundred miles from his birthplace of Colton, PA. He spent a lot of time in his life along the Susquehanna River with his nose stuck in books and could speak of distant lands and travel problems until you thought you were actually listening to a seasoned world traveler. He especially liked to regale the boys at the bar with stories about any place that featured bare-breasted women. When he got wound up to tell of those places, his eyes got brighter, color sneaked into his cheeks and his voice took on a kind of narrative quality, like Walter Cronkite. After the story, when everyone went back to whatever they had been doing, Harley was just plain old nosy Harley.

On the local level, where women wore clothing that covered all the good stuff, Harley’s theory entailed a mixture of science fiction, religion, old wives tales and just plain, all-American bullshit. He tried to tell anybody and everybody what his idea was, and nobody would listen, and he was suddenly without a friendly ear and that couldn’t be a good thing, could it? Harley didn’t think so.

His slender, barely six-foot frame parked on his regular stool at Ollie’s Bar and Grille, he was something to see had anyone chosen to look. A generous amount of gray hair was covered by an old fishing hat pulled down over the forehead, (even though he never fished) Marlboro Lights 100 dangling from his mouth, (nobody was going to tell Harley Matthewson what was and wasn’t good for him) and the ever-present beer in his hand, he was, indeed, a sight. He jumped every time the door opened and a potential listener popped in. But the only thing people wanted to talk about these days was the mess in Washington, and even though a local monster could take center stage for awhile, it couldn’t push that action out of conversation for very long.

Harley correctly guessed the people felt more comfortable talking about something in another strata of society two or three levels removed from their everyday world. Only the cops, ambulance squad members and the close friends or families of the victims were able to devote a significant number of brain cells to actually dealing with the terror they felt. All the rest felt just a bit cozier if they kept it on the back burner.

Harley talked almost non-stop about the scandal, and regulars at the bar didn’t have to worry about seeing it on CNN. Harley had it covered. He was the master of ceremonies, a clownish vision of facts, figures and rumors. You just knew talking to him was going to bring you up to date. You just knew his information was good. And….you just knew you couldn’t escape with just the facts. You’d have to sit through the famous ‘Harley analysis.’ It was like watching the State of the Union speech, then being forced to endure the network talking heads telling you that you’re too dumb to know what the President just said, but they would enlighten you.

Spilling a mug of beer that he hoisted in the general direction of his mouth, he said, with foam dripping off his chin like a demonic Santa, I told ya when we sent some of them scumbags to Congress there was gonna be trouble. Now maybe you’ll listen to Ol’ Harley.

When he held center-stage and people were listening, Harley got a warm-fuzzy better than the first kick of nicotine in the morning. Most of the listeners liked to hear him talk tough about politics and he, being the quintessential show-off, didn’t disappoint them.

This Harley Matthewson was a complicated man. Even though he was very often the star of the show, Harley held most of the barflies in contempt. He felt they all should have better things to do than warm the plastic cover on a bar stool. Of course, he was also sitting in this bar. But that was different. That was Harley. He’d tell you he was here to study the nature of the bar-beast, ‘for something he was working on.’ He was ‘working on something’ for as long as anyone could remember, and his buddy Mitch often said, It must be one helluva big job to have eaten up all these years. Maybe someday we’ll all get a chance to see this epic work and share in ‘ol Harley’s spotlight. He always ended with a kind of sardonic chuckle which annoyed the hell out of Harley. But Harley showed up everywhere, battered hat perched atop his fifty-nine years of experience, Marlboro Lite 100’s in his shirt pocket and the darting eyes of a scholar or a busybody. Which of them he was depended on your point of view. Accidents, funerals, parties, auctions, the county fair. He was always studying. He checked on the highway demons that he said were responsible for causing the accidents. He also said he could hardly bear to witness the suffering of his fellow man when misfortune reared its ugly head, but the man could relate how much blood was on the ground, the street, and the inside of the car when old Wally LaCombe collected a big elm tree on Conestoga Road last fall.

Wally was driving that old Ford Taurus a bit faster than he was supposed to on his way to the bar having just stomped out of his house in a rage. His wife, Irma, insisted he attend the church wedding of that old bitch Cassandra Marlowe. He said he wasn’t going to a church to participate or to observe her wedding or anything else. In fact he wasn’t ever going into a church again. Right Wally. How about a funeral for yourself?

Irma, though in genuinely grief-stricken, couldn’t help but think the old bastard not only got himself killed but also lost the argument. Wally had, indeed, found his way into a church. Harley too, was at the funeral, in the front row, as a matter of fact. He said his attendance was to witness and revel in the indomitable spirit of man when faced with the grim reaper. After Wally’s graveside ceremony it was his opinion, loudly announced after more than a few beers, that he’d seen some people there who were not friends of Mr. LaCombe and anybody who went to a funeral of someone they didn’t know was a ghoul.

It was sort of an amazing thing to hear from a man who hasn’t missed one in years. Of course, he went because ‘he was working on something.’ Harley, having just surveyed the faces of the bar crowd, turned from them, fell silent and receded into what the regulars called his ‘sock thing’. Whenever he revved up the serious thought processes, he’d sit with one foot on the bar-rail with the other crossed, right ankle on the left knee and fidget with the top of his sock. Harley watchers knew the ‘sock thing’ would lead to the ‘well, I’ll tell ya thing’ and it was not at all uncommon for some of them to suddenly realize there were other things they had to do……right now.

Three

Arlene heard a soft sigh through the window and wondered if she was out-waiting the thing. Would it actually go away after awhile if it sensed the victim was unwilling? She didn’t really believe that and didn’t think it was good to be thinking like that and decided to bring this thing to a conclusion very shortly. She felt as though she’d been in this darkness for hours and ‘Darkness’, she found, was not at all related to the amount of available light, but rather a condition of the soul. It was maybe even a place far from here where the only thing of consequence is self. Will I die? Will I live? Will it matter, and to whom? She didn’t want to come this close to seeing her real self and began to compute her situation in terms of assets and liabilities. Even as the soundless envelope of the night closed in she tried to be analytical. On the plus side there was very little. However, on the debit side of the ledger, she found a shopper’s paradise if you happened to be in the market for pain and misery. She was alone. There was an unknown on the other side of the wall and the probability was extremely high that this unknown was going to try valiantly to put an end to her days as a viable life force.

Jeez, almighty, why am I using terms like life force? The bastard wants to kill me. It wants to mangle my body and enjoy the sight, smell and taste of my spilled blood. About the only thing that helps is I don’t believe it’s human and I’m only concerned with death, not anything sexual. She found some solace in thinking that her body would not be host to an enraged sex maniac, but began to shake in fear and anger and stuff she felt but, for all her professional training, could not recognize.

Rustling on the porch. A soft, scraping sound that seemed to indicate movement but remained in the same place. She heard a soft sound from what she thought must be its throat. It was a noise that was familiar yet alien. Now what the hell is that, she thought. It was a mournful sound which reminded her of the cultists sitting in a circle, chanting. It wasn’t a word but it had meaning. It wasn’t threatening by itself, but under the circumstances, it implied impatience to get on with whatever was about to take place. The noise was now accompanied by a shadowy kind of rhythmic vibration that she felt rather than heard. She sensed a kind of macabre dance was commencing and she desperately didn’t feel like dancing.

The throat sound and the vibrations increased in volume and intensity and the curtain was slowly going up on a play that had an unscripted third act. The walls began to pulse in time with music unheard by anyone or anything other than the maestro on the porch. The thing somehow was making a clapping sound in a beat that had both form and structure.

Powerful and savage feelings were being generated and Arlene, in spite of her fear, could sense a certain beauty in what was about to happen. The scene was acquiring a symmetry which may have been ungodly, but which gave rise to an energy feeding upon itself like a speech by Adolf Hitler, evil but mesmerizing.

The moment was broken by the sound of window glass shattering and scattering inward all over the form of the hunched-up Arlene. Show-Time, she yelled, in a voice falsely sounding brave and vibrant. She stood and faced the window frame which had tenaciously refused to part with all of its glass. Little sparkly pointed bits of the window remained and would twinkle in the morning sunshine. Arlene didn’t care. The creature was scurrying along the porch, only a shadow, as it prepared to take her. It went all the way to the front door at the far end of the enclosure and finding it could not get in, turned and charged her position at the window.

She glimpsed an alien-looking form no more than five feet tall with a deformed head that seemed much too large for its body. The legs were like those of a chimpanzee and she judged, in those few seconds that if the legs were straight, it would maybe be a bit taller than she. His arms, (typically, she thought of it as ‘he’) were flailing about in what seemed like an effort to maintain balance and she’d not gotten a good look at the eyes, but she saw them now. Boy, did she see the eyes. If asked later, to describe this monster, she would remember nothing but the eyes. They were gigantic. They glowed like the eyes of a cat but not like the eyes of a cat. They weren’t yellow, but a sickly shade of green and they seemed to pulse like a flashlight that was about due for new batteries. Standing there, wasting precious seconds, she was grossed-out by its saliva that was sometimes a stream, sometimes a spray. It came out copiously from its ugly head and its waiting place on the porch looked like it did after a heavy rain had dripped through the rotting roof.

The input from her eyes, frightening as it was, didn’t compare with the ungodly stench assaulting her nose. It was a very strong, very nasty, very, very disgusting odor. A smell to end all smells made her shake with nausea. It seemed as though all the evil that ever was tried to sneak up her nose. She turned and started to run through the house and was surprised to be suddenly outside, no longer a prisoner of either the creature or her own inability to act, though she did not remember going through a doorway. The warm night closed in around her and she ran. Pleading with her God for help, she ran as though she could actually see a finish line in what was probably her last race.

Out the gravel driveway toward the road was where her legs were carrying her when she heard the shuffling of the creature behind her. She chanced a look over her shoulder and was shocked to see it moving at a speed that just couldn’t be, considering its obvious physical limitations. It didn’t look like it could run very well and, in fact, it didn’t appear to be moving very well except where it counted, distance versus time. Man, that son-of-a-bitch is quick, she thought. He’s gaining and doing it quickly. Soon, very soon, it would be within grabbing distance and there was still a lot of driveway between her and the road. She didn’t know what she was going to do once the road was reached, but it didn’t seem to matter. Her pumping legs and rapid movement were reasons for her to feel like she was doing something for herself.

As it got closer, she could hear the labored breathing and all that did was make her more acutely aware of her own heaving, burning chest, and Arlene wondered if she had what it would take to get out of this mess in one piece. She was never a very athletic person but felt she could go with the best of them for very short periods of time and she was hoping the thing chasing her wasn’t one of the best of them.

Just as it appeared she was going to lose the race, a car turned into the driveway splashing them with a halogen glare more beautiful than a sunset. The bad thing with the funky green eyes angled off the drive into the trees and was very quiet.

The welcomed car nosed into the driveway and slid to a stop, throwing gravel from all four wheels about twenty yards from her. From inside the car she could hear a man’s voice yelling, For crying out loud, Mandy, get off my ass. We’ll go back and get the old drunk. Now shut the hell up.

As the words were still dying in Arlene’s ears, the car backed out of the narrow drive and, with a shriek of burning rubber, vanished, leaving her to share this heavy, awful night with the monster.

She had yelled to the driver but her words acted as if they saw the futility of their mission and just gave up, falling quietly to the gravel, leaving her alone and unsettled by the absolute quiet.

No noise was in the air. Night-sounds were happening all over the darkened part of the planet except right here in the very narrow focus of her very own private world. This world was a very dark place, populated with something set on her destruction and the somethings that were a part of her everyday, carry-around package nestled in a part of her mind that never saw the light of day. She had heard someone say that we all have our little red wagons to pull around. Tonight, she was pulling a caravan.

The very next thing she heard was the opening bell for the final round of her life. A sound not unlike a growl started low in the throat of the thing and seemed to grow in intensity as it approached. Here we go again with the Doppler effect, she thought as the weight of the creature fell on her, dragging her to the ground and knocking the wind from her lungs. She would never get it back.

The monster or creature or goblin or whatever it would finally be called was all over her, ripping her open in a series of vicious slashes that left almost none of her looking like the pretty woman she had been.

Four

Harley stirred, uncrossed his legs, lit a cigarette and looking into the face of Lefty Daniels, said, Well I’ll tell ya, Lefty, the Gwoop that took old Bill’s hand off is one mean son-of-a-bitch and I think I know what it is.

Did you just say Gwoop?

Not like that I didn’t. Pay attention, will ya? It doesn’t rhyme with goop. The oo’s are silent like book or whoopee and you’re just busting my balls. You heard me the first time. Now can I get on with it?

By all means, please straighten us all out.

Antoine (Lefty) Daniels knew he was in for a story that could go on for hours if he let it and wondered why he didn’t go fishing as he had told his wife, instead of popping into Ollie’s. Well he was here now and would just play it by ear, (if he had any ear left after Harley opened up.)

Harley adjusted his hat, took a long pull on his beer and pulled a lungful of cigarette smoke into his already polluted chest. He really made a concerted effort to have everything just right when he did what he did best, and what he did best was talk. His eyes even got deeper, somehow, as he transformed from the everyday Harley to Harley the Magnificent, Speaker of Things You Need to Know.

He looked like a wise old owl surveying the forest. The trees in Harley’s forest looked into their beer foam and prepared to appear attentive to the ‘professor’. For as much as they thought they really didn’t want to listen, it was better than anything else they had to do and, once in a great while, the man really had something to say.

One by one they turned to face him and when he was sure the moment was just right, he began. You guys are a pain in the ass. I’m not a stupid man. I know by the looks on those faces you really don’t want to listen to me, but I also know that you’re afraid not to because maybe somebody will learn something. Yer worse than a bunch of old lady busybodies. Remember, I was the one who told you, back in ’93, that Iraq wouldn’t last more than 4 or 5 days once the ground fight started and some of you bastards laughed at me. Well I’ll tell ya, they went down in 100 hours and that, my skeptical friends, is 4 days and 4 hours. Maybe this time you’ll hold back the snickers and learn something.

I think what we’re dealing with here is one of those once-in-a-lifetime freaky things scientists keep on the back burners of the mind but don’t really believe could happen. Okay, you got doctors manipulating genes, experimenting with radioactivity, looking desperately for a cure for disease. They know the proper protocols for testing but they’re impatient. They all seem to have some kind of need to get into print. What would happen, say, if a group of these guys trying to make a name for themselves and get their work in a recognized paper, was fooling around with an engineered gene which was subjected to some new radioactive tool and maybe combined with a virus like influenza, or HIV. We all, well maybe some of us know, that viruses are mean little critters, HIV wipes out the immune system. Who knows what would happen if it was manipulated in some bizarre way? I think some yo-yo with a degree played God and engineered this problem for us. As usual, the poor, uninformed everyday common men who get out there everyday and make this country work will be called on to straighten out their mess. Ain’t that always the way?

From the end of the bar, Mitch Caldori looked around the room and was annoyed to see his buddies nodding in agreement. It rattled the hell out of him to think they believed the guys in the labs could be responsible for all the misery being visited