WASTED
WORLD
EPISODE 1
Geoff North
Copyright © 2020 by Geoff North
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Live Again (Out of Time Book 1)
Last Contact (Out of Time Book 2)
Lost Playground (Out of Time Book 3)
All Inclusive (Out of Time Book 4)
Ambition (The Long Haul Book 1)
Retribution (The Long Haul Book 2)
Annihilation (The Long Haul Book 3)
Thaw (CRYERS Book 1)
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Twisted Tales (Volume 1)
Twisted Tales (Volume 2)
Twisted Tales (Volume 3)
Chapter 1
The world was minutes away from having its ass kicked. The planet’s most successful and dangerous species was set to eradicate everything, and they were helpless to do anything about it. When ten to twenty thousand nuclear weapons are primed to use on any given day for more than half a century, it’s only a matter of when it will happen, and which crazy fucker presses the first button.
Jacob Heez hadn’t grown up during the Cold War. He was still a dozen or so years from being born around the time Reagan was demanding Gorbachev to tear down The Wall, and the Soviet Union was collapsing like a house of cards. Jake remembered the stories his father had told him of how it had been when he was a little boy growing up into a young man during the late seventies and early eighties. He told Jake of the recurring dreams, of bombs dropping in the wheat fields, and the billowing mushroom clouds that rose into the grey skies of his teenage nightmares. Dwayne Heez would wake in a cold sweat and cry, terrified that one of those times he wouldn’t wake up—that the nightmare would have become a waking reality. Jake’s father told him these stories because he believed those days were long gone, and he wanted to instill in his son a sense of what the world was like in its most frightening times.
But Jake’s old man had gotten it wrong. He forgot to account for the fact that history had a tendency to repeat itself. The Cold War blew back in with a vengeance. It was no longer simply cold; it was frozen, and there was no chance of a thaw. Jake’s twenty-first century Cold War era had become an Ice Age of old paranoia and new mistrust. There were fresh players—North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and India to name just a dangerous few. Some of these countries had gone to war, and there had been limited nuclear exchanges between the more radical governments. The world had managed to hold on. People continued going to work and going to war. Their relentless pursuit of over-populating the globe and killing their neighbors continued.
Jake was a farmer, like his father before him. He wasn’t all that involved with the world around him. He was more concerned about the five thousand acres of that world he owned. But his father had taught him to keep an eye on current events. Those old talks of how things were had stuck with Jake. He watched the news, and though there was little new about it, he remained aware.
Earlier that morning, Jake had listened to the news on the television while he ate his breakfast and prepared for ten or twelve hours of back-breaking fence repair. Most of it went unheard. It was the same thing day in and night out. People thousands of miles away were threatening to obliterate each other, and after listening to that same bullshit his entire adult life, Jake had developed a way to block most of it out, as he was certain almost everyone else did.
Perhaps that’s the problem, he thought, as another six-foot long pole was pounded into the ground with his sledgehammer. Maybe we have to stop blocking so much out and start doing something about it. He removed his work gloves and wiped the sweat away from his forehead with one of them.
What kind of lesson am I teaching Nicholas by ignoring the problem? He looked north, in the direction of the Heez farm house over three miles away, where his five-year old son was undoubtedly now out of bed and running about in. Mandy would be awake now as well, chasing after him and trying to settle him down long enough to eat a bowl of cereal. He would be asking where his dad was, of course. Mandy would be explaining that Daddy has work to do, and that if he was a good boy, he would see him again in a few short hours for lunch.
Jake grinned, imagining the exchange. He inhaled the crisp morning air deeply and looked up at the sky. One word kept coming back to him from the news. Imminent. It had been plastered in big red letters on the bottom of the television screen. The media loved using words like that: Devastating. Looming. Tragic. Desperate… Imminent. The more frightening the headline, the more apt viewers were to sit up and take notice. They scared the shit out of people and kept their ratings up. The smile dropped as his thoughts darkened once again. What kind of world have we brought him into? All was blue and clear above but looks were deceiving. It was a dangerous, scary world to raise a kid in. It’s what his father had told Jake’s mother years before, and what Dwayne’s father had likely thought decades earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Same worries, same shit, from one generation to the next. There had never been a good time to raise a kid into this world, and there never would be.
Jake replaced another worn post with a new one and put his tools in the back of his pickup. He jumped into the cab and headed south
