E.A.R.T.H.

By R.L Mortenson

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477120002

R.L Mortenson

TO FOllow

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by R.L Mortenson.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012909641

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4771-1999-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4771-1998-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4771-2000-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

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CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER ONE

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE on our planet have, for most of a century, been ingesting an ingredient in their food and water that is virtually undetectable by any standards used by any laboratory in any of our so-called elite and sophisticated societies. This ingredient is so concentrated that just one drop can contaminate more than five hundred gallons of water and cannot be filtered out, boiled away, or be detected by any type of chemical once it has been put into the water and food supply of cities and nations around the world.

When it has been introduced into the human body, it combines with other chemicals that are already present in the body at a molecular level, which then transmit a signal to the brain to begin eating larger quantities of food and to store it as fat, which has produced generations of obesity in most of the affluent countries of our world. This is only part of a planned assault on our world.

To explain the significance of the preceding paragraphs I have to go back several months when another writer, a good friend of mine, asked me to fill in for him on an assignment about some strange happenings at a factory that produces a great variety of food additives.

My name is Steve Lessing, and I’m a reporter and writer. Over the phone, he briefed me on what I should be looking for and on what questions I should ask. As it turned out, I did more looking and no asking, but a lot of wondering about what it was that I saw and why.

It was a Monday when he called me at home in Reno. He was hacking, sneezing, and coughing so much over the phone as he explained what I should do that I urged him to go see a doctor. He said he was OK and to just shut up and listen, so I did. I was to take a cab to a motel a few blocks away from his apartment, check in, and get the envelope he left at the desk. In it would be the keys to his car and directions to the factory where the tour was. The car would be parked in the lot behind the motel. We’d take the tour and come back to his place; then we would talk things over about what I had seen and heard.

Fred Johnson and I had been friends for over twenty years and have collaborated on a lot of writing projects. Many times I had gone out and just watched and then reported back to him. We would then write up a story on whatever it was. He said that everything had already been arranged for my flight from Reno to Memphis, and I was to take a jet the next morning, so I would arrive within plenty of time to get to this factory and take the tour on Wednesday.

He said not to call him when I got in, as he was going straight to bed and sleep off the cold that he’d gotten. Of course I did call when I got in and just got his answering service saying he was not available. So the next morning, Wednesday, I was up early and on the road heading for the factory, which was a two-hour drive from Memphis, south along the river, and I arrived just after nine in the morning. The parking lot was pretty full, and by the time I walked into the lobby, a tour group was being herded through a doorway by an attendant, who informed me that I was late and to get my name tag from the sign-in book and join the group.

I saw my friend’s name and address had already been entered, and a sticker with his name on it had been made out. Well, I thought, I’ll just be him for the day. So I put on his name sticker and joined the group.

As tour groups go, this one was OK, with lots of facts and figures about the factory and what they produced, but it was still boring. So I tuned out the tour guide and began looking around at the glassed-in tunnel-like elevated walkway that had doors, which slid open and close as the tour moved from one section to another. One thing I noticed as we passed through various sections of the factory was the fact that all workers wore rubber gloves and had face masks on and that they never looked up at the tour group. All these things made this tour quite different from any I had ever been on before.

As soon as the group walked into what the tour guide said was the churning room where the products were stirred around in huge vats, I felt something was wrong.

The lights on the work floor were flickering and dimming out when halfway down the line of vats, an electrical panel blew open with a shower of sparks, and an alarm went off. All of the workers on the floor began walking toward the center of the building as the tour group pressed up against the inside railing and peered through the glass to see what was happening. That’s when someone yelled, Fire! Then all hell broke loose on the walkway as the tour group surged back toward the open door behind me.

I was pushed hard up against the railing, and to keep my balance, I reached out to steady myself against the glass enclosing the walkway, and that gave me an electrical shock that knocked me flat on my butt.

As I’m sitting there on the walkway, I feel the overpressure in my ears and look up in time to see the doors close and the lights go out on the walkway. Glancing down on the work floor, I saw two people with hazardous materials suits walking up to the electrical panel, which by then had stopped sparking, and gave it a quick shot of foam from an extinguisher and reset all the switches. They then walked back and under where I was still sitting. They had pulled off the hoods of their hazmat suits, and both of them had short white hair and skin that looked odd in the dim light.

They reappeared with their hoods back on, pushing a cart that held what looked like a water-pumping apparatus with a nozzle, which they hooked up to the first of the vats and then pumped the handle twice very slowly.

Still sitting in the darkened shadows of the walkway, I watched as they went down the line of vats hooking up the nozzle and pumping the handle slowly, putting something into each vat and wiping off each nozzle with a cloth and putting it in a hazard bag for disposal.

Slowly they came back up the line, and at each spot where they had attached a nozzle, they checked the floor with a beam of blue light that flashed at the second vat, and immediately, they swabbed the floor and then tightened the cap on the valve where they had attached the nozzle. The swab they used on the floor went into the hazard bag, and then they used the blue light again. This time, there was no flash, so they checked the last vat and passed out of sight under where I sat.

I waited a few moments for them to reappear, and when they didn’t, I glanced at the vats into which they had added a liquid that to them was a hazardous substance that required the wearing of full hazmat suits and the intense cleanup and disposal of the rags into plastic bags clearly marked with the hazardous substance warning logo. It made me wonder just what was going on at this place where food additives were made and shipped all over the world.

Slowly I got up and made my way back along the glass-enclosed walkway and realized that the place was empty. All the workers had left when the so-called fire was yelled, and that made me think about another thing that I noticed before I went down on my butt, holding my hand where it had been zapped by the glass. Those workers had just casually walked out; only the tour group had left in a panic to escape the fire. To them it was just another drill.

Leaving the lobby, I stripped off the stick-on name tag and found that my friend’s car was the only one left in the parking lot; everyone had sure left in a hurry. After buckling up, I looked out the right side window and saw the same two guys walking down a path that led to a small bungalow sitting on a knoll above the river, and in the driveway leading to the house was a big black SUV with a couple of guys looking my way.

The two guys on the path joined up with the two by the SUV, and they all start walking slowly toward me when a loud rapping on my side window startled the hell out of me. Glancing out to my left, I see another of the same type of person looking in at me and waving an almost-gray finger in a circular motion for me to roll down my window.

Before the window is even halfway down, he tells me to start the car and get out of the parking lot. Looking back at the four advancing toward me, I comply and get the hell out of there. Once on the main road, I watch through my rearview mirror as they close up the main gate and think, What are the odds of seeing five people all the same height, all the same complexion, all dressed the same, all working at the same place? Plus what those two guys did earlier, this has got to be the screwiest setup I’ve ever run across.

I had driven several miles when I realized that I had turned south instead of north, and since it was still early afternoon and I saw a sign advertising a small country store, I decided to stop there and maybe have a little bit of lunch before turning around and heading back north to Memphis.

After turning down a side road toward the river, I came to a few buildings, one of which was the old country store and an old pier with a couple of skiffs tied to it. After parking the car and walking inside, I saw this was really an old setup with all the goods stacked on shelves and stored in bins along with fishing gear on one side and hunting gear on the other. And right in the middle of all this was one of the biggest potbellied stoves I’ve ever seen, with old captain chairs circled around it, a few of them occupied by some old-timers swapping tall tales.

As I looked at this scene, I began to think that what I had been through that morning was just a momentary figment of my imagination. I kind of leaned back against the counter and took a few deep breaths to clear my mind and noticed that one of the old guys was rummaging around a pile of old magazines, finally coming up with one that I recognized. It was a fishing magazine that I had done an article for a couple of years ago.

In that article, I told the story of my catching the largest fish I’ve ever seen and how that fish and I fought right down to our last bit of strength and then I let him go. The old guy showed my picture to all of them sitting there and then asked the question that so many others have asked before, Why didn’t you just haul him in?

Well, I said, the fish had fought me to a standstill and did not deserve to be hung out on a wall. Besides, I had all those pictures to prove that I bested him. Of course, I added, if he had yanked me into the river, you would have seen me floundering around and spitting out water because I tell it like it is with no glorifying hoopla just to make me look good.

They all laughed at that and invited me to sit down, and we had a great time spinning yarns about fishing and hunting around the local area, and I mentioned that the river appears to be pretty good as there was a shoreline below the bluff. Everyone went quiet. They looked at each other, and one of the guys said that everyone there, at one time or another, had been chased out of that section of the river by the private patrol boat employed by the owners of the factory.

The local sheriff had come around and told everyone that for a mile on each side of the pier was private property and they could not fish there. And then they told me this story about a guy who went in broad daylight and started fishing right under the bluff. They saw his boat and some of his equipment overturned and scattered out on a sandbar just below the store the next day and never saw him again. The sheriff couldn’t find anything when he went to look at the shoreline.

As the old-timers spun out different tales about how good the fishing and hunting had been before the factory was put in, I finally told them about my weird tour that morning, and they mostly nodded their heads in agreement as it just added another tale to tell around the potbellied stove. About this time, one of the guys knocked the ashes out of his pipe and mentioned that it was getting late, and he got up and left, as did the others when they saw that the shadows were getting longer.

The storekeeper had sat down but had not said anything during all of the storytelling, but now he turned to me and said, I would like to tell you a true story about the factory. Let me close up. I have some pictures and other things to show you. So after closing and locking the door and turning the Open sign over to Closed, he motioned for me to follow him down a short hallway into an office, where we sat down next to an old beat-up rolltop desk, where he unlocked a drawer crammed full of files. Selecting one of them, he laid it out for me to look at.

What he told me was both shocking and spellbinding and had me on the edge of my seat, wanting to know more. He showed me a land grant that his great-grandfather had received for the land that the factory was built on. He told me that his great-grandfather had built the cottage before the turn of the century and that his grandfather had it rebuilt when he returned from the First World War, and it was where he and his sister had been born.

His mother and father, along with all of the family, had been buried in the family cemetery on top of the bluff overlooking the river, but because of one mistake, he no longer owned the land and would not be buried with his kinfolk.

His younger sister had just graduated from high school in 1937. She was not satisfied with living on the family farm, which was quite large, extending a mile on each side of the cottage up and down the river and for several miles inland and was quite fertile. She wanted to get out and see the bright lights and have some fun, meet new people, and enjoy herself. So after a few quarrels with Mom and Dad, she packed a bag and headed for New