THE STICKS

By Jeffrey L. Zucker

"The Sticks" continues as book two of The New Moon Trilogy. In this saga, a pilot named Captain Baker is driven by his desire to solve a riddle. Living in the enclosed arcology of New Moon City, Baker is one of the few people able to travel outside during his missions to the remaining city-states. Outside, in The Sticks, there was only desolation: the result of the Great Calamity caused by the explosion of the Yellowstone caldera.
As a child, Baker was taught to keep his word and developed a strong moral compass passed down through his family. His brother, Art, has died unexpectedly, and has left a manuscript behind. His final words were; "Look for me." When Baker hears about an experiment to test near-death experiences, he realizes he has a unique opportunity to fulfill his brother's request.
The financiers of the experiment hope to use Baker's out-of-body experiences to spy on their competition. Some are dependent on the experiment for their own advancement, and are determined to terminate it, if its success appears doubtful. A few even toy with the idea of leaving Baker for dead.
Captain Baker finds an adventure he was not prepared for in The Sticks, and his quest is answered in the most unexpected way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667896106

Book preview

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THE STICKS: Book 2 of The New Moon Trilogy

Copyright © 2023 Jeffrey L. Zucker. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-66789-609-0 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-66789-610-6 (eBook)

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.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,

events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination

or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Sticks first came out at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Figuring people would enjoy something to read whilst sequestered at home, I issued one chapter daily on my website: jeffreylzucker.com . After receiving high praise for the online version of the book, I wrote the prequel, The Arcs, which was published first. This long awaited, newly edited version of The Sticks is much the same as the original, with a few added twists.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have patiently borne with me while I worked endlessly on The Sticks, including Michelle McFadden, Marian Powell, Mary Ann Clark, Scott McMullen and my wife, Jean Wilcox. I would be remiss in not mentioning my mother-­in-law, Doris Kettler, who, in her 97th year, edited the entire book.

Enjoy!

Jeff Zucker

This book is dedicated to the

memory of my brother,

Rick.

This story is a work of fiction.

All characters, with the exception of

historically known individuals,

are completely fictitious.

Prologue

Part One The First Time

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two The Second Time

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part Three The Third Time

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part Four The Fourth Time

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part Five The Last Time

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Prologue

Yes, it has occurred to me. I may be wrong. Many before me have devoted their life’s work to it. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Yet, no one has ever brought back incontrovertible proof. Oh sure, there are those who say they know the answer, they’ve had the experience. They know the truth. And yet … it remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time.

What if? What if there was a way there and back? Would we then know the answer? Then, would people believe? Would we finally be able to become one? Not a squabbling band of primitives, but one fully united people?

I think about these things a lot. I have dreams. Visions. I do! Call me a mad man. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps, I’m just another one of the hundreds of thousands.

But … perhaps I’m not.

Journal entry

September 21, 2098

Art Baker

Part One

The First Time

"Do not despair once you have entered the path,

for the Creator assures us of success if the direction of

our aspirations is correct." —TALMUD, PSACHIM

A quote found in the journal of Art Baker

Chapter 1

Black ooze.

It bubbled up from the ground, hissing and stinking. It emerged along the gray pathways and in the gravel pits. Sending its stench up into the filthy air, it was ever present and everywhere.

A thin spiral of dust briefly touched down, swirling and twisting. And then another. Caught up in their suction were twigs and dirt, embers and ashes. Going nowhere. Landing after the whirlwinds had completed their dances, to be picked up another time.

Heat. Heat so intense the entire landscape wavered.

Trees stood leafless, their charred, withered branches reaching upwards, begging … pleading. Upwards, to the putrid yellow sky. The distant cumulus spat lightning, and sheets of virga fell. But no rain would ever reach this place.

Nothing was living there.

Nothing was alive.

Nothing.

Chapter 2

Rain.

There’s a certain smell to it. Especially in the desert. The odor of earth and sky. You can sense its dampness before it is upon you. Taste it. The Greeks had a name for it. Petrichor. The blood of the gods, fallen from the heavens.

He longed to experience that divine scent. But he knew he never would. Nobody would. It was impossible. No one would ever go outside again without a hazmat suit.

Outside.

Into The Sticks.

Staring out his window into the growing twilight, he could see clouds stretching to the horizon as always, the underbelly of a great, gray sea. As the darkness grew, so did his image in the glass. He knew what it showed. A hard, chiseled face. A few premature wrinkles. Flecks of silver in his short brown hair, cut in a military style. His body, still toned and muscular, was clothed in a crisp, blue uniform bearing a name-tag above the breast pocket. Although backwards in the reflection, he knew what it said: Baker. Silver bars on his shoulders identified him as an Air Force Captain, wings on his lapel indicated he was a pilot. The shadows under his hazel eyes bespoke his condition.

Tired.

He stood on the seventeenth floor of an immense building, an entire metropolis. Shaped like a huge, arcing sand dune, the city was three miles from tip to tip, and fifty-seven stories tall at the highest point in the center. Its back was turned to the punishing westerly winds like a man with his collar pulled up against the weather. From the sky, the metropolis looked like a crescent. Hence its name: New Moon City. It rose from a barren desert once called Ash Meadows. Meadows was now a vestigial word. Ashes were plentiful. But as for meadows, there were none.

Toward the end, it hadn’t merely been the demons possessing the leaders of the world to cause the undoing of the planet, nor the following holocaust. It was the planet herself. She expunged much of the human species, like a fever rids the body of a virus.

Long before Captain Baker was born, the changing planetary weather patterns had begun. Places previously hospitable to human life became too hot, or too cold. Not enough water. Too much water. Mass migrations ensued.

Although forewarned, people were still surprised by the rising tides and the withering winds. Local conflicts over scarce resources became regional conflicts, eventually spilling over international borders. As the polar icecaps melted, their great weight was redistributed and the equilibrium of the earth shifted. Monster earthquakes shook the planet. Fissures opened where none had previously existed. Sleeping volcanoes awoke. And then, the true extinction began.

When the Yellowstone caldera exploded, a massive fireball ascended into the sky. The shock waves of the blast destroyed everything within a hundred miles in a brief instant. Ash in unimaginable quantities spewed into the atmosphere, encircling the globe. War followed, sparked by the calamity of Yellowstone. And then … winter. Decades of winter.

And finally, the fever broke.

Glaciers gradually crept back down from their mountain retreats. Oceans receded. Torrents of rain washed wind-blown ashes from the charred remains of trees, their branches standing as petrified testaments to the vanished vegetation.

Although most of civilization had crumbled, some outposts had managed to ride out the storm. The surviving enclaves had been prepared to exist completely on their own, either by intention or sheer luck. New Moon City was one of the very few to withstand the disaster.

New Moon had been built in western Nevada where a mammoth underground reservoir of Pleistocene water once bubbled up from the ground in a crystal-clear hot spring. During the early years of the twenty-first century, the government had repurposed the property, turning it from a wildlife refuge into a national security site. The ancient aquifer now provided steam heat in the winter, electric generation all year long, and a virtually inexhaustible supply of fresh water. The city was completely self-sustaining, its totally enclosed environment secure from the ravages of weather as well as the dangers of war.

Those who could afford it, those who were needed, those who were lucky or sneaky, found refuge in the sheltering citadels before the undoing of habitable earth came about. The others perished. They perished in great numbers through war, through pestilence, through starvation, and greed. The unfortunate ones numbered in the billions. The remainder of humanity hunkered down in their fortress cities. No one dared to go outside again. The air and the ground were still poisonous. But, inside the sealed confines of the enclosed cities, one could still survive.

The remnants of civilization were linked by a fragile filament of flight paths. With resources scarce, and air travel dangerous, flights between cities were limited. Captain Baker, a member of an elite cadre of pilots, was one of the few people able to witness the world from the sky.

As he looked out the window of his apartment, a spark jumped between the clouds, suddenly illuminating the putty colored hills beyond. There were no living plants outside, nor any life at all. Only toxic air, poisoned land, and blackened trees, their withered limbs silhouetted against the sodden sky. And yet, the city stood intact, its crescent shape stretching out like the wings of an earth-bound phoenix.

The storm furiously battered against the thick glass, a thousand icy fingers scrabbling to get in. The captain watched it buffeting the building below him, yet he knew he would remain safe and dry. Not a drop of moisture would ever penetrate the confines of the hermetically sealed city.

In his hand, he held a drink. A manhattan, complete with amarena cherry. He swirled it, took a sip and wryly grinned to himself as he thought about how he had obtained the dark red fruit, quite a rare commodity. It was good to have connections.

On the coffee table next to him lay a tattered manuscript, its pages crumpled and dog-eared. He had read it many times, he knew its every page. As he turned away from the window, he ran his left hand slowly over the cover of the document, like a person caressing a lover’s skin.

Maybe tomorrow it would be sunny. Maybe the clouds would part.

Highly unlikely.

He did know one thing for certain, though.

Tomorrow, he would die.

Chapter 3

In the morning, he ran.

Running helped Baker relax. It was both his exercise and his transportation. As he ran, he simultaneously emptied his mind and filled it. He filled it with the sights and sounds around him. He filled it with thoughts about his past life. He filled it with his fears about the future. And he emptied it.

With running.

He had chosen his pre-dawn route partly because it was the most rigorous. It ramped up to the fifty-seventh floor and then descended back down. It was also the longest way to get to his destination. He was in no hurry.

New Moon City curved in a gentle, three-mile arc. As Baker ran up the sloping skyway, the interior of the city opened to the feeble morning light. Below him, he could see the lower levels of the metropolis and the vast atrium extending throughout its entire length. Fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables proliferated on every level, like the hanging gardens of Babylon, turned out-side-in. The abundance of plant life made the air rich with oxygen, which he gratefully inhaled as he ran. Underneath the main atrium, he knew more vegetables grew in enormous hydroponic gardens. Artificial lighting enabled crops such as broccoli, cabbage and beans to grow around the clock, supplying a never-ending bounty of fresh vegetables to the grocers.

On level five, the horizontal light rail was not yet crowded. As the main public transport of New Moon, it would soon be thronged with school children, workers and shoppers. A waterway flowed parallel to it, separating the tram from a broad walkway, where sleepy cafe workers wiped off tables in anticipation of the morning rush. A few avid fishermen practiced their skills by the banks of the stream, doing so more for sport than sustenance, since the largest fish were harvested in mass quantities at the end of the artificial river.

He often wondered what life had been like when the city was new, over sixty-five years ago. There was no doubt New Moon had regressed since then, but at least they had survived, which was more than could be said for ninety-five percent of humanity. Many of the things taken for granted in those days had disappeared. Automobiles were obsolete. Televisions and cell phones had ceased to exist because nobody had the resources to manufacture or repair them anymore. People had returned to writing letters and reading books, which was probably not all that bad. They still had art and acoustic music. Dance. Theater.

Simple electronics could be cobbled together, but the more sophisticated equipment was very expensive, putting it out of reach of most consumers. Various parts of the aircraft he flew were cannibalized from older models to keep them operational.

As he ran higher, Baker crossed bridges and ramps interweaving throughout the atrium in a lacy filigree, connecting the two converging arcs of the city at multiple levels. A few early risers passed him on bicycles and pedicabs as he made his ascent to the top, while he similarly passed slower runners and pedestrians. He had emerged from the residential area, run through the commercial zone, and entered the heart of the metropolis. There, the interior widened out to create a huge public plaza, bounded by the performing arts center and the municipal complex on one side, and the university, with its large sports arena on the other. Grand staircases marked the large civic space, and elevators whisked their passengers vertically to their destinations.

The religious center of New Moon City stood next to the sports arena. A multi-denominational facility, it was officially known as The House of Worship. On significant holidays, its growing congregation overflowed into the adjacent stadium. However, for most occasions, the modest-sized chapel sufficed for such things as baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

Baker had attended more than his fair share of funerals at The House of Worship. When he was fourteen years old, thousands of lives had been snuffed out during the Great Infection. One of the dangers of living in a totally enclosed environment was that any disease, if not quickly and effectively dealt with, could run rampant. The Great Infection had started with a mold growth. By the time it was finally scrubbed from the ductwork, it had laid waste to ten percent of the population of New Moon City. His parents were counted among the unfortunate.

One particular funeral though, three years ago, had been different. When his younger brother, Art, succumbed to cancer, his funeral marked not only the conclusion of Baker’s only sibling’s life, but an ending for Baker as well. Art had been Baker’s only surviving relative. Once his brother passed on, he was alone.

Baker painfully recalled when the minister of The House of Worship approached him in an alcove after the funeral, wearing the obligatory look of solemnity and compassion on his face. Baker never had much interest in religion, so his attitude was skeptical at best. Bemused as well, on occasion. But not on this day.

I’m so sorry for your loss, Captain Baker. Arthur was a fine and … interesting man.

Baker joined hands with the minister as they paused for a moment of silence. Reverend Hardesty was a narrow man, all angles and elbows, with a bobbing Adam’s apple, and a few sparse remnants of hair clinging to the top of his head. His hands felt like clammy pieces of pork as he slid them on to Baker’s palms. He exuded the opposite of warmth. But here he was, attempting to provide comfort to Baker.

Thank you Reverend Hardesty. I will miss being able to talk with him. Baker had felt a close bond to his brother, although they had grown apart in recent years. Art. Nobody ever called him Arthur. Nobody who really knew him. Just … Art. In the absence of their parents, Baker had been more than just a big brother to Art. He had always looked after him, had taken care of him since they were children. It was just the way he was wired. He felt it was his duty, his responsibility. His promise.

He irrationally blamed himself for his brother’s death. He felt he had betrayed a sacred trust. He was disappointed in himself, although there was nothing he could have done to save Art. In many ways though, Baker felt he had also been a disappointment to his younger brother, while he was still alive.

You are always so violent, Art had said, even at the slightest things. He would critically comment about minuscule habits, comparing Baker’s heavy footsteps to his own gliding way of walking. Or the fact that Baker ate his food quickly, and talked with his mouth full instead of chewing slowly and contemplating every bite. You should be more mindful. But Baker wasn’t mindful. He liked a good stiff drink every now and then. He chased women. He enjoyed flying airplanes, which was why he’d joined the Air Force, something Art never condoned. He was different than Art.

Art had led a simple life of study and contemplation. He was always questing, exploring. A person with tremendous curiosity. Contrary to Baker’s inclinations, Art had delved deeply into religious studies. He adopted religions faster than a spinster acquired cats. One year he was a Sufi, the next he was a Jew. Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Jain. He wanted to know them all. He followed different dietary restrictions with each new faith. Meat … no meat. Fasting … not fasting. But he was not a follower of fads. He was a seeker of wisdom.

Baker even looked quite different than his younger brother. It was said Art looked a lot like their grandmother, Aliyah Estrella. Delicate build, small stature, and very curly hair. Baker, by contrast, was much larger than Art. He was more squarely built, and had arrow-straight, dark-brown hair. One feature they did