After the Apocalypse

A pandemic survival story

Season one, Episode Fourteen, “Run”

Janet ran...

...and the obscenities pouring from the man she had just left bleeding in the dirt faded away...

like the man himself.

He was nothing. He was a threat that had been dealt with.

Like she always dealt with threats.

She had the hard skills, built up over years of practice. She could dominate most situations. Her force of will bent others to her path.

And if they didn’t bend, they got run over or shoved aside.

KJ the Killer.

...and she ran.

...

Outro S1E14

Hello my fellow survivors. How is the apocalypse treating you?

This is Chris your host. And a fine Saturday morning it is up here in New England.

We had a storm fly through yesterday with wind and rain and snow.

I was worried about our friend Tim who has been helping with the story ideas and editing. He’s been out on the Appalachian trail for 2 weeks. He’s currently passing through the area near where Janet and the old man are struggling to survive the apocalypse in our story.

Imagine if a storm like this hit out in the Smoky Mountains while they’re out in the trail? I’ll have to see if we can work a storm into the story.

When I was a teenager, I spent a week hiking in the Joyce Kilmer National Forest which is near there, a bit south. It would have been this time of year.

I remember we did get an ice storms a couple days, but you just crawl into your tent and wait it out. I remember waking up an hitting the plastic tarp overhead and the ice shattering and sliding off.

But we survived. I would have been 16 and just rolling out of wrestling season, so stupid but indestructible.

...

Speaking of hiking adventures in the wilderness, my wife forced me to watch a movie called Into the Grizzly Maze from 2015, mostly because she likes to look at the actor James Marsden.

I’ll be honest it was a silly movie about an angry Grizzly bear who likes to eat people. For some reason they talked some A-list talent into it. Billy Bob Thorton is underused as the bear hunter, think Quint from Jaws.

Thomas Jane was one of the main characters, who is one of my favorite actors, you may know him as detective Joe Miller in The Expanse, which is one of the best hard space Scifi shows to come out recently.

Or, for you Marvel fans, Thomas Jane was the original Punisher who went after John Travolta in 2004.

God knows how these actors got caught up in the hot mess that is ‘Grizzly Maze”. I suspect a paycheck was involved.

...

Looking out my office window this morning, the forsythia is out and my cherry tree is about to bloom.

What did you think of this week’s story?

Janet is discovering or rediscovering her strength and how it can help her in the Apocalypse.

...

I’ve been reading through a SciFi series called the Lost Fleet over the last year. I’m about to crack into the 8th and final book. It’s a Space Epic but I also realized last night that it parallels Xenophon’s Anabasis.

Bear with me, here. Xenophon was a Greek mercenary with a force of 10,000 other Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC.

Note this is before Rome, and a70 years before Alexander the Great.

Anyhow, they march deep into Babylon and Cyrus gets killed in b...