Collected: Volume 4: Collections, #4

By M. K. Dreysen

From the river, through the office, away across the starry universe, shadows stretch out to grab and to bind. To hide away, and to devour.

Herein you'll find eight short stories and tales by M. K. Dreysen. Read and explore the darkness and the light, and discover the worries and the monsters that linger between the poles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. K. Dreysen
• Release date: Aug 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393805472

Book preview

Collected, Volume 4

Collected Short Stories and Tales

By M. K. Dreysen

All Stories Copyright © 2020 M. K. Dreysen

Cover Image By Enrique Mesequer of Pixabay

Graphic Design Via Gimp by M. K. Dreysen and Aimward Drift Publications

Published By Aimward Drift Publications. Visit aimwarddrift.blogspot.com for news, updates, and upcoming stories.

Dedication

Family, friends, readers, always. And especially the readers of the blog who've kept up with me. Thank you all.

Down To The River

More bayou than river, sluggish and barely moving under sunrise. She'd be running if she could.

But the night was long. She left her energy somewhere behind her, to be picked up by the bloodhounds along with her scent. The more tired she's become, the louder their calls and howls. They're feeding on her energy, the dribbles of it she leaves behind.

The whips don't crack. They don't need to. Not yet. The dogs do not need to be pushed to their jobs. Yet.

The woman falls to her knees on the bluff over the water. It's high, it'll never flood on this river bank.

It's twenty years gone since the end of the war. Not that the men on horseback admit to it. They know only what their fathers told them, about money and power that they used to have.

Now, they only have the money. And it doesn't matter that the abolitionists, the true believers, have been replaced by the carpetbaggers, who can be bought off. They shouldn't need to pay for their privileges.

The army's busy these days chasing Indians. They don't have the energy to watch over every sharecropper. And the sheriffs don't care as much as they might.

She didn't remember slavery, either. She was a baby when Lincoln fell in the theater.

She thought it was safe to tell him no. It would have been, five years ago.

But that big story, the biggest story, has turns and twists yet to go. She told him no, and when he came for her again, he found an empty shack.

He made up a story. He had to, even his friends who played at wearing the sheets and calling themselves wizards wouldn't stir out just to chase a sharecropping woman across the country. She stole silver, he said.

It wasn't much of a story. But it was enough to get the gang together, and call out the dogs.

The night that followed was a nightmare and a dream. To the dogs, and the man who controlled them, this was what they were made for.

Everyone else on horseback found themselves slapping at mosquitoes and horseflies and wondering what the damned point was.

She just walked, and ran where she could, held the night close, the nightmare closer. She didn't have time to connect it to anything.

She stood over the bluff, sun behind her. The river was as far from home as she'd ever been. Dumb luck, if she'd had a little more time she'd have come out on the ferry, just a little farther south, and the old man with his mule who pulled the ferry back and forth across the river.

The old man who was her father.

A dog came out behind her, big puppy bloodhound, young and fast. She heard him snuffle and whine in surprise. You don't know what to do when I quit running. The others were behind, maybe another couple minutes.

She didn't wait. When the rest of the pack of dogs came up to the bluff, it was to watch her body float downriver.

The bluff was high enough. Her only regret, the last thing she worried about before she stepped off, was that her father would be the one to find her body.

Many years later, the woman's great-great-grandnephew stepped along that riverbank.

Drake LeDrummond was learning to appreciate why baby engineers get paid the big bucks, compared to their new-minted college graduate peers.

He'd done the thing right. Take advantage of A&M being right down the road, offering a scholarship so he didn't need to take out any loans. Do a postgraduate year at UT with a professor in the chemical engineering department who was working on automated systems.

And who had a few connections here and there.

Take a baby engineer's gig at an environmental consulting group. Put in a few years and he'd be a P.E. and on his own recognizance.

Assuming he could make it through the boss's trials. Drake, my young friend, if you are fortunate, you are about to put yourself through more hell than you can imagine. You're going to take on responsibility, that will never be rewarded by acknowledgment of your genius. You're going to find yourself exposed to lawsuits for a hundred little things, and you'll need to navigate the rapids with dexterity and grace. Most important, first last and always, you are going to be building things that, if you screw it up, have the potential to kill millions of people.

In other words, Drake, first you need to shut up and learn how the people who do the real work do their jobs.

Which is why he was climbing along a riverbank at three in the morning, looking for a trunk-line and the valve that would open it. Muddy boots engineering, he muttered. This is what you wanted to do.

He repeated that to himself, often. Especially when he heard some of the comments that came in from the pipefitters and welders that were building the plant.

His boss wasn't buying his blithe comments. Drake, I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night. You're a young black engineer working in one of the most lily white industries in the south. Don't b.s. me.

They don't know enough to bother me.

But they know more practical engineering than you do. That's the hell of it. If you need anything, let me know. But if I have to step in and yell at anybody...

Drake didn't have to finish the sentence. He'd never been in the army, or played football, or even had a beer at a fraternity.

But he knew what a bunch of guys would do to the fish who ratted them out to the boss.

How do I know when it crosses the line? he asked.

I wish I could tell you. Just remember, they might be ignorant, pigheaded, and stupid enough to make you want to drag up and run off the job. But don't wrap yourself up in that feeling of superiority. It's more dangerous than anything they can do to you.

Which is how Drake ended up being the one searching the riverbank for the valve.

The other guys were all working, the hard deadline on the turnaround looming over them. Shutdowns are a fact of life in a plant, but every one of them costs money. Graveyards, overtime.

The crews love turnarounds, except for the part where they're working twelve hours a night and can't stop for a beer on the way home.

The helpers and their fitters were all wrapped up in the jobs of the moment. There were occasional points where the engineer minding the job needed to do something to show the guys that he was a regular joe.

One of the feed lines to the unit ran along the river bank, jumped the river, went through about half a mile of red clay, then surfaced in the middle of the unit. In between shutdown and now, when they were getting ready to wrap up the turnaround and turn the unit back over to the operators, spring floods had pulled a couple yards of sand from the river bank down onto the valve.

No problem, that's what backhoes are for. Assuming he found the valve and marked its location properly. No one wanted to find out what the feedline would