Wait. He’d done some research for a time-travel story he’d written that involved going back to the Civil War. This stuff was just like what soldiers ate back then—hardtack. Keep the crackers dry and they lasted forever. The soldiers use to soak them in water to soften them up and make them more edible. Hardtack was also what they fed prisoners back then.
Was that what this place, this town, this city was—a prison? But if so, where were the prisoners?
None of this made any sense.
He put the big questions aside. He’d figure them out later. Right now he had to master his immediate environment.
Even though he wasn’t hungry, which was odd because his usual routine was to graze all day, he knew he needed sustenance. He put a few crackers in a bowl and covered them with some of the stale water. While they were soaking, he figured he’d check out the apartment above again, the one that had been his in another time and place.
Going up, he marveled once more at the graffiti-free stairwell. Back in the apartment bedroom, the floor near the corner remained perfectly intact.
He wandered back to the front room. What was he going to do? How did he get back to his own reality?
He’d seen an elevator door down the hall. He checked and found it working. He hit the button marked L and the car headed down. A button below L was marked B but wouldn’t light. It had a keyhole next to it so maybe it needed to be unlocked before it worked.
The elevator let him out in some sort of lobby. Small. A couple of easy chairs and an empty reception counter. He spotted a door to a lighted office behind it but found it deserted. Filing cabinets and a desk sporting an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter, but no human. He checked the filing cabinets—empty.
His gaze wandered to the mechanical typewriter. Not even electric—totally manual. He pulled open a drawer in the desk and found a thick ring of keys, which probably opened every apartment. Another drawer contained a stack of typing paper. He stared at the paper a long time.
Well, why the hell not? He hadn’t written a single word all day and missing his Daily Duty was adding to his jumpiness.
Well, “Daily Duty” was what he called it in public. In private he called it “the Disease,” because that was what it was. P. Frank Winslow couldn’t not write. When he wasn’t actually putting words on the screen, he was thinking about the words he was going to put on the screen next time he sat down. He’d mentioned it to a doctor once who called it a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Always thinking about writing was the obsessive part; his inability to stay away from the keyboard was the compulsive component. The doc said OCD was treatable.
But Frankie couldn’t afford treatment. Oh, he could afford the pills, but treating the OCD might very well drop his word count. Many times he found he couldn’t stop and he’d go past the 2,000-word target—often enough to bring his annual word count to somewhere in the neighborhood of a million.
A million words sounded like a lot, and it was, and he divided them up between his pseudonyms—thrillers under his own name, horror-SF as Phillip F. Winter, and paranormal romance as Phyllis Winstead. But after his agent and the taxman took their cuts, and he helped pay for his mother’s assisted living back in Pennsy, all he could afford in the city was that crummy walk-up on Avenue D that now he missed so much. Yeah, he could have shared a place with someone, or found nicer digs in the outer boroughs, but both of those choices were anathema. P. Frank Winslow lived and worked alone, and NYC was the only place to do it.
He prided himself on having no illusions and no literary aspirations. Not these days, anyway. Starting out, he’d planned to make a big splash in the literary world, but decided to hone his writing chops in genre fiction first. He found it came naturally, and he made money at it, so he kept writing the stuff. It got to the point where he couldn’t afford to take off the extended time he’d need to write that big serious novel—the bills arriving every month wouldn’t want to hear about it.
He doubted now that he’d ever really had the capacity to explain the human condition. Hell, how could he explain something that had always baffled him? So instead he’d settled on simply trying to make the reader turn the page. He figured he was destined from the start to write pulp, and so he accepted his fate. His target became the gut, not the intellect. He was pressing readers’ buttons to trigger visceral responses, and he was good at it. If readers felt like they’d been on an emotional rollercoaster after finishing one of his novels, cool: job well done.
And as for the old Where do you get your ideas? question, he had a simple answer: dreams. His subconscious had a seemingly endless reserve of stories it told him while he slept, which he transcribed into novels while awake.
He needed to write and realized he could write about all this, adapt what had been happening to him. Make a sci-fi story out of it. Trapped in a deserted prison city in an alternate universe.
Yeah.
Just a few pages…just to take the edge off…
But he had to figure out how to use this damn typewriter first.
BARBARA
Well, Ellie had been right. The sunlight shining through those white globes created a spectacular display.
The globes had rolled out of the passage at a steady pace and I dutifully stacked them one by one against the window until all the panes were covered. They must have numbered about a hundred by then.
I spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly from room to room. I knew I should eat to keep up strength
