Season one, Episode Fourteen, “Run”

04/17/21 • 20 min

1 Listener

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...

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.

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.

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.

...

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

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

Previous Episode

Season one, Episode Thirteen, “The Dig”

After the Apocalypse

A pandemic survival story

Season one, Episode Thirteen, “The Dig”

The old man kept a slow but steady pace down the gravel road. It was getting on in the day and he needed to start thinking about shelter for the night.

Bill, the dog trotted about 10 yards ahead as the vanguard.

A small dust cloud rose behind them marking their progress.

The old man thought about that.

...

Hello my survivor friends,

How is the apocalypse treating you? Happy Easter! I figure rabbits will probably survive the apocalypse, right? Cockroaches and rabbits.

There’s a zombie online multiplayer game I play called Dead Frontier, yes, I’m all in on the apocalypse, and for the easter event you get to kill zombie bunnies.

Reminds me of Monty Python – “It’s just a Bunny Rabbit!” – You kids who don’t know what I’m talking about go stream Monty Python and the Holy Grail and you can thank me later.

Did you like today’s cliff-hanger? Maybe it was more of a pit-hanger.

Good news we at about 3500 downloads. We have new listeners in Minsk Belarus, Dhaka Bangladesh and Portoviejo Ecuador. All places I’ve yet to visit. I have been at Mahabalipuram on the Bay of Bengal, but that’s another story.

Send me an email if you are listening form one of these far-flung places. Love to get your feedback.

[email protected]

I need a favor from all you great people, whether Belarusian, Bangladeshi or Ecuadorian. Go into whatever podcast app you’re using and leave a review. Just a quick note. That’s what drives the algorithms. And we all love algorithms.

If you’re feeling super motivated tell a few friends. If we, you and I and Dmytri from Belarus can grow this tribe I can accelerate to weekly episodes and I’d really like to do that.

If you are just beside yourself with enthusiasm you can throw some Belarusian rubles, some Bangladeshi taka or some Ecuadorian dollars – because, yeah, Ecuador switched their currency to the US dollar – and you can do that at my Patreon page patreon.com/aftertheapocalypse.

I listened to a couple interesting SciFi stories recently. I like these short SciFi stories because they have that one really interesting idea that makes you say ‘Huh’.

One is a story called Things by Peter Clark - Have you ever seen a movie called The Thing? It was released in 1982 starring Kurt Russell (no relation) and directed by John Carpenter, based on a book by John Campbell from 1938.

Now you might be thinking, ‘gee all of those names sound familiar’ and you’d be right. John Carpenter the prolific director who brought you the Halloween moves, as well as some other B-movie SciFi classics like Escape from New York, also with Kurt Russell in 1981, just a year before The Thing, and one of my personal favorites, They Live with professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.

And of course John Campbell, who wrote the original story, was one of those giants of the golden age of Science Fiction, both as a writer and the editor of Analog.

I know, I know, I keep doing this to you, but trust me all of these factors come together to make The Thing<...

Next Episode

Season one, Episode Fifteen, “Not-So-Innocent”

After the Apocalypse

A pandemic survival story

Season one, Episode Fifteen, “Not-So-Innocent”

A sharp wind evaporated the sweat from Janet’s arms. She felt a chill, like a passing ghost. Her heart settled from a hard drumbeat in her chest to a low rhythmic thump as she walked, recovering from her run.

She felt cleaner now.

Refreshed.

The familiar ache of bone and muscle comforted her.

She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and looked ahead at the vehicle in the road.

What was going on with this overheated camper van?

It was an older, boxy model. The hood was propped open, and she could smell the metal of the overheated radiator.

Janet could hear snippets of argument as she cautiously approached.

It was hard to get all of it. The wind was gusting, creating white noise that washed out the voices, making them fade in and out like a bad phone connection.

She approached the van on the opposite side from where the people were arguing. Better to stay unnoticed. Was this even something that she wanted to get involved with?

...

Episode Commentary

Season One, Episode Fifteen – “Not so Innocent”

Hello and welcome back my survivor friends. How are we all doing? How’s the apocalypse treating you?

What did you think of the episode? Frankly I struggled writing this one and my editing team helped A LOT! Thank you Duane! If anyone wants to help with writing or editing please feel free to reach out.

I didn’t want to just have action. The action turns into “he-said-she-said” type motion-without-meaning after a while. And that get’s boring.

There are no stakes. Not snakes, stakes. You always have to ask and answer that question: what are the stakes here?

On the flip side you don’t want to bulk up with too much exposition and emotions – because that gets boring too.

The key is to marry the exposition and stakes with the action. Have what the characters do and say make your points for you.

Language is a powerful thing. Story telling is a basic, human, powerful thing.

So – long story short (pun absolutely intended) I had to wrestle with that in this episode.

I wanted to make sure that we were understanding the motivation of the characters and moving the broader narrative forward and even exploring some deeper themes.

And, as it turns out, this is a common theme in apocalyptic literature – how does your current pre-apocalypse skill set translate into a post-apocalyptic world? It’s not just preppers and backwoodsmen who will do well. It’s also the resilient, the fast, the smart and those willing to lead.

And to show this we take individuals out of the real world and drop them int the apocalypse – in our case Janet the type-A lawyer and the old man, a disgraced doctor turned ultra-runner.

That’s the theme that I’m trying to play with. And that’s what makes science fiction so much fun. Because you can create these mashups and play with them. What would a pre-school teacher do in an alien invasion? What would the ballet-teacher do in an alternate universe? I don’t know but you could write that story.

One of my favorite versions of this is when Rod Serling dropped a book loving bank teller into the apocalypse in episode 8 of the original Twighlight Zone titled “Time Enough at Last”. First aired in 1959 and based on a story by Lynn Venable.

In this episode Henry Bemis played by Burgess Meredith,. loves books yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. (You know Burgess Meredith as the original Penguin in the Batman TV series and as Rocky’s crusty old coach Mickey in the Rocky movies.)

The episode follows Bemis through a post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the difference between solitude and loneliness. In the end he breaks his glasses so he can’t read the books even though he’s the last one alive.

This was one of the most popular episodes of the original Twilight zone.

Anyhow, that’s an example of how you can make an episode compelling without much action at all.

...

Congratulations to all of you my surviving friends in the apocalypse. We are over 5,000 downloads strong now. Let’s push it to a million! Tell some friends, keep it moving. Post the link to the show...