Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Davin likes going downtown to South County Interactive’s office in Great Barrington, even though he still more or less hears the quotation marks he puts around downtown. Boston has a downtown, Cambridge and other sizable towns and cities have downtowns, but the term downtown doesn’t feel like the right fit for Great Barrington.

He steps out of his old Kia, or really it’s more like he pulls himself up and out with grunts since the car’s not roomy and it’s low to the ground, and he’s less spry than he’d like. And the door handles have a tendency to pull right off, the exterior ones. He’s had to replace handles four times already. He hates the car, hates driving, hates the whole stupid idea of it, but then he’s not in Cambridge anymore.

What was I thinking? he asks himself, and not for the first time, but still, it’s a beautiful day, and the morning rain is gone and the day now hot enough, if perhaps too hot, but clear and sunny. He’s found a parking spot right on Main Street, not three doors down from the building entrance of the SCI office. Parking can sometimes be a problem during high season when the town is crowded with visitors, but it isn’t high season, even if the temperature and humidity feel that way.

He growls a howyadoin’ at a passerby, one of the many regulars he sees around and maybe has met, but he’s not sure. He then spots Deidre, the new house sharer-to-be, coming up the sidewalk, and he offers a half wave. The young woman has a nice smile.

He’s offered to help her move some of her belongings in early, after she told him her car is in the repair shop. He was coming downtown anyway, he’d told her, and she lived nearby, and was off work at the right time to meet up at the SCI office.

He knows Deidre works full-time at the crystal and tarot shop downtown and part-time at a restaurant as a server. He also knows from what she told him previously, that she thinks of herself as a writer—albeit, unpublished, she’d readily confessed. She’d told him she writes poems, or something akin to that anyway, as she had put it.

He hadn’t any response to that declaration. Deidre is young and may or may not yet know things take time, but it isn’t his role to tell her. She’ll figure things out.

As she steps close, Davin says, “Hey roomie,” and immediately feels stupid, so he adds, “Sorry. That was weird.”

Deirdre says, “Well, we are, right?” but Davin can see she feels a bit embarrassed, or maybe just shy.

Davin grabs the door and points upward. “Second floor. Shouldn’t take me long.”

Deidre steps through and starts up the stairs.

SCI is up the stairway, which is cool and dim with the sun already around the building, leaving the east-facing street entrance door in shadow. The SCI office door is open, and he steps in, but Deidre doesn’t follow. Instead, she takes a seat on a chair in the hall near the office door. He hears Alicia on the phone in her back office, so he goes to the banquet folding table that’s been set up in the front room as a work surface.

He sets his laptop down and logs into his Google account to look at the news. His Google News AI feed is well shaped and has some balance in sources so he can at least argue he’s avoiding bubblizing. Of late he’s been fine-tuning to see how good the local filters can get, although he more and more finds he’s in something of a feedback loop with a lot of SCI hits showing up.

He seems to always be upgrading his ad block extension. He’s noticed searches still increasingly slant toward results that clearly have some commercial benefit for Google, including the ever- plentiful Ads and Sponsored results that crowd out the actual search hits he’s pursuing. And despite his use of ad blocking, it seems like half of the links he clicks on go to pages that must be whitelisted to see the content he wants. So far, he’s managed to keep Alicia from making SCI demand whitelisting, and the analytics back up his argument that people mostly like to see local ads.

Or at least don’t hate them, he considers, thinking of his constant frustration with the state of the Web these days where everything is about monetizing and barely any attention paid to the initial promise of the Internet to make information discoverable and available to all. He mostly doesn’t like to think about the ever-expanding commercialization of digital content. The potential of more positive cultural benefits from developments like hypertext and wide accessibility to content had been a driving force early in his career, and he had moved away from book publishing to explore the emerging world of electronic publishing.

He’d finally canceled his several Facebook pages right after Harris and the Democrats had failed to keep Don the Absurd from regaining the White House.

He puts such an unpleasant thought away and starts reviewing the news.

The fires out west are at the top of his Google News, the sort of news items that are present nearly year-round these days with the enduring drought supplying fire conditions across much of the West. But parts of the Amazon are on fire too, and vast areas of Siberia are once again ablaze, already surpassing that region’s previous high mark of more than 50 million square miles burnt back in 2020, the now second-worst recorded.

Ah, 2020, the year that keeps on giving, he says to himself when he sees the year referenced in the story he’s skimming through. Neither Gwen nor Davin had anyone close to them die from Covid, but that year had been difficult in many ways, and he knows he’s still recovering economically.

Never mind recovering mentally, he notes silently, but he knows better than to dwell too much on that annus horribilis.

That year Siberia had burned an area bigger than the size of Greece.

And 2021 wasn’t really any better and the floods in Pakistan in 2022 had covered a third of that country’s land and a dozen monster storms had wreaked havoc in many places. He had been fascinated by the satellite images.

These days the smoke particulates from the fires out west sometimes make their way to the east to provide haze and spectacularly reddened sunsets, but the smoke also has become a significant public health issue, and he well remembers last year’s warnings and advisories when a western weather system helped the smoke travel far. Those few days of mask wearing had produced a Covid memory for many people. So far though, this year the air quality this far east has not been compromised.

The year is young, he reminds himself.

He calls out to Deidre through the office entrance door. “Come on in. Make yourself comfortable.” But then he realizes she’s sitting on the same kind of chair he has to offer within, and then he realizes the chair near the door is the same type of chair because it comes from the office, it being the exact chair he had taken from the front office space and placed near the door the last time he was here when he’d gone out into the corridor to give Alicia some privacy as she talked. As best he’d been able to make out, she was talking with some financial advisor or another.

It’s not a fancy office, but he approves because it means Alicia is putting her resources back into SCI and not fancy furnishings or palatial suites.

Deidre comes in carrying the chair. He nods to a small pressed-wood table where two more matched folding chairs are nestled, and Deidre sets her chair close by the others and sits back down.

“Fancy office, huh?” Davin quips and Deidre is polite enough to smile.

He points toward Alicia’s office door, which is half open.

“She’ll finish up and I won’t be long.”

“No problem,” Deidre says.

“Which restaurant do you work at?” he asks her.

“Farm Table,” she answers. “The one toward the north end of Main Street.”

Davin knows it, likes the place, and is sure he must have eaten there more than once or twice, but he’s not one for dining out, especially if he’s alone.

Deidre tells him her evening shift is a Monday and everybody knows that to be the slowest night of any week, but she’ll do better during the high season when a Monday night can be busy and the tips not bad, and she may get more shifts too.

High season, Davin thinks, keeping his sarcastic reaction to himself, but then he realizes these days he often unironically uses this exact phrase.

She’s a good-looking young gal, Davin can see, with a nice head of black hair that curls to frame a symmetrical face, frank dark eyes and full dark lips, and skin that carries a hint of hard-to-determine ethnicity, but her age makes him feel like she is alien. She is younger than his youngest.

But she seems levelheaded. She’ll be living on the second floor, at the opposite end of the house, in a room with its own deck and outside entrance and about as far away from his second-floor office as is possible, the big library room separating the two spaces. Levelheaded, responsible, quiet, that’s what he thinks she will be.

Hopefully.

He’s got a security deposit from her, plus first and last month’s rents, already, something of a victory in comparison to Chaplin’s status. Maybe he’s getting better at this boarding thing.

Who the hell knows, he tells himself. Luck, more than anything.

He wants to ask her if she has a boyfriend but can’t figure out how to do so without it seeming weird, and besides, the rental agreement limits overnight guests, so he’ll just have to wait and deal with that problem should it arise.

“It doesn’t matter,” he asks, “but why are you leaving your apartment?” She hadn’t talked about her current rental, but then they’d talked about a lot of things when she’d been by the house to see the room, and there was his rambling on about the house and the lease, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t been forthcoming.

“Well, my landlord informed me and my roommate we had to be out by the end of the month,” she tells him.

It’s only a few days from the end of the month, he notes.

“Wow,” he says.

Deidre nods. “Yeah,” she says, “we got word nearly halfway to the end of the month, that’s when we were given this notice.”

That seems to be everything he’ll learn about it because she has stopped.

But after a moment, as Davin is about to get back to his news, she tells him she and her roommate were plenty annoyed by the notice, but in a way, it hadn’t really surprised her because it was just another instance of what has been happening to a lot of people she knows.

“Just one more homeowner changing the use of apartment for short-term rentals. He wanted us out early so he could fix up the place, which I’ll tell you, seems kind of like a Herculean task, the poor shape of the house outside and in,” she says, shrugging, and then she looks up at Davin, blushing. “I mean, I don’t have anything against Airbnb, and I love your house, I love that there’s a lot of space, a lot of yard….”

Davin smiles and waves away any concern she might have. “No problem,” he tells her. “Anyone who uses the term Herculean is good in my book.”

She smiles.

“The short-term rental situation is a problem,” he then adds. “I hear you. It’s just that these days with costs all up sometimes it’s an important piece of, the, uh, Berkshire Shuffle, right? That term still used?” Berkshire Shuffle was a colloquial phrase for the amalgam of part-time and second or third jobs a lot of people in the Berkshires were forced to pursue in order to make ends meet.

She smiles, then grins. “Oh yeah,” she says.

“The house is big,” Davin continues, “and it makes sense that more people use it, so house shares helps cover costs too, not”— and he is for a moment flustered—not that there’s any danger of losing the house or anything, but there is still some work I’d like to do with the property.”

Deidre nods.

Davin turns back to his laptop. Climate change is one of his alert filters, and greenhouse gases a selected subtopic, so he’s looking at a story in The Washington Post that has been following various NGOs’ efforts on the carbon tax bill that’s been mutating in the halls of Congress, although stillborn might be the better description, considering the state of Congress. Still, the mid-terms are coming up and there’s a lot of speculation about one or the other side of Congress slipping back under Democratic control.

Davin’s not a Democratic, but he sure hopes this happens. Trump’s first two years this second time around have been even more chaotic than before, with his loyalist appointees commuting by clown car.

All news, including climate change news, has been hard for him to follow since the 2024 elections.

As if to prove his point, there’s a story in his feed that seems atypically sensational—a murder of a fossil fuel divestiture activist, a VP at Carbon’s End, a spin-off or new division of ClimateProgress.Org, or at least he’s pretty sure ClimateProgress.Org spawned it. He has an old colleague who switched over to climate technology and who may have had some connection to ClimateProgress.Org, although Davin knows that sometimes he doesn’t listen too closely when his friend gets going on the subject of his work.

He more certainly knows he’s got to do more work on the news filters because too many off-focus climate change–related news items are getting into the hit results, and he’s been spending too much time reviewing all of them, even if it’s just a fast skimming. The new AI feature is supposed to help by learning from the items he reads and rejects, and by judging duration of the read too, and by noting click-throughs, among many other factors, but as with a lot of other software and apps, he resents all the time it takes to purportedly save himself time and become more efficient.

Artificial, yes, he tells himself, intelligent, not so much.

Thefeed filter is natural language processing based, which Davin thinks heunderstands.

This AI needs a talking to, a joke he makes on a regular basis.

He clicks on the Response button for this murder story, and chooses Ignore, so the AI doesn’t get the wrong idea. He goes back to the results list, and a few topic headings down in the feed there’s a story about agricultural markets affected by the ongoing western droughts, and he thinks to suggest to Alicia that she be on the lookout for someone who can report on local agriculture since there’s been an increase in active farms in the region, but then again, it’s not his ambition to take the farm beat, which just might happen if he starts suggesting this sort of coverage.

He checks his email and notices he has new ones, and since he’s been actively advertising the second house share and is still thinking of taking in a third house share, he’s curious to see the newest responses. He’ll hold off on the third house share for a while though, because his son Jimmy is getting out of Chicago mainly because the city is in what looks to be a prolonged heat wave, one of those crazy one- thousand-year weather patterns that happen more and more. He assumes Jimmy won’t likely stay long, liking being on his own, but his son may be running out of money after getting laid off.

Davin will play it by ear on the third house share, considering the odd economic times, and Jimmy could well be around for some time. Family first, he thinks, even if the divorce has confused that guiding principle. Gwen’s new place in Lenox is small, so there’s no real option other than to have Jimmy stay with him.

Davin is glad about that.

He sees there are two new responses about the house share, but the first, from some guy named Willy, has little to offer, including the lack of a last name or any answer to either of the two questions Davin posted in the listing, which has him wondering, yet again, if people even read these days. On the other hand, the second inquiry is more interesting, with the email in good form and the content on target. He’ll reply to this one, letting the person know the offer’s been filled but that he’s happy to keep her on file if something comes up.

Davin sighs, and then stretches in the chair, his arms thrown widely, and slowly.

Alicia is still on the phone, trying to sell more ads to an event venue, if Davin’s eavesdropping skills are on point. All he is really listening for, however, is for Alicia to end the call, so they can get on with the business at hand, which is the attempt by Alicia to talk Davin into taking on an editorial role.

He’s tempted for the income, considering the consulting he’s doing for SCI these days is mainly tweaks of feed structures for the platform, mainly because the platform has matured. There’s the ad sales–related bonus payout, which, while growing, is still modest and his share will only likely grow modestly, accordingly.

And the Airbnb, he reminds himself, annoyed this is not now an active listing, waiting on repairs. He hadn’t and won’t make an insurance claim on the damage, as much as he can use the money for the renovation, but he doesn’t want to flag flood damage with the home insurance. A big increase in home insurance for some policy holders, mainly concentrated on Florida and California, has made national news any number of times, but the insurance companies are more and more on the lookout for flood danger everywhere, and he knows of several people right here in Housatonic who have houses close to the river now paying in big bucks these days.

The last time he looked at the water damage, he had seen some of the damage had gone into the apartment’s small bedroom’s back wall where it shared a common wall with the bathroom. The contractor Davin hopes to settle on keeps getting delayed in his start, and this could very well become a bigger project with some mold remediation. It’s this sort of thing, the unexpected cost, that can make him wonder just why exactly he bought out Gwen’s share of the house instead of them just selling the damn thing.

Money does seem always short, and thus Davin Caine, Cub Reporter, he muses, knowing he’ll let Alicia talk him into taking an editorial role, although he remains concerned there won’t be much of any income from it.

He turns back to his Google News feed, looking to see how the Red Sox’s early season struggles are going, but then Alicia steps out of her office, so he swivels in his office chair and points at her. “Alicia Soares, SCI Publisher”—he points to Deidre— “Deidre.” And then he stops still. “Uh,” he says, feeling embarrassed.

“Deidre Gustavson,” Deidre says as she stands up, her hand out. “I’m the new roommate.” She nods toward Davin.

“House sharer, he likes that term,” Alicia says, but she still has Deidre’s hand in hers and is looking at her, and for a weirdly long time, Davin can’t help thinking.

The post Chapter 11: Ink-A-Dink-A-Doo first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Cyn doesn’t answer calls on her phone, doesn’t make calls, because the phone, battery pulled, is somewhere at the bottom of the side pocket of her leather tote bag with its cross- body strap, serving as combination briefcase and purse. The draft agreement documents for this morning’s meeting are still stuffed inside, but now the bag itself is crammed back into her backpack. She suspects holding on to the phone is a good idea, considering it has texts she never sent and received texts from Joe after she knew he was dead.

The last one, Where R U?

Fuck you, she says, thinking of the sheriff, or whoever shot Joe, and who would have killed her too if she’d ridden to the meeting in Joe’s rental.

Or…if I had screamed, or made any noise, or had walked along the road, or…

But she’s trying to stop these thoughts.

Or hadn’t stopped right at the mile marker, she can’t help thinking.

She is suddenly not sure if she’s talking out loud. She looks around and the nearest passenger is several seats ahead, apparently oblivious to any sound she may be making, lost, apparently, in the small screen built in the back of the seat in front—CNN, she thinks, a clip she recognizes as the fires, either the Northwest, or Colorado, or Yellowstone.

She turns her face up toward her own fuzzy screen and sees the caption identify the clip from Yellowstone.

Or killed if I wasn’t crazy, Cyn says to herself.

She thinks this, but not harshly, but softly. She is thinking about those days and months and years that followed the shooting of her father, right in front of her. Her two younger brothers were in their bedroom, their habit of retreat whenever their father grew in rage, their shutting the door on the ugliness always sure to result. She had called 911 that day, worried for them all, desperate for their mother who had plenty of scrapes and bruises and black eyes, the broken hand that one time, the other time when he wrenched her mother’s arm back, putting her arm in a sling for weeks afterward. She had grown hyperalert to the grimaces that would flit and flash across her mother’s face as she did simple things like laying down a casserole on the table or folding clothes.

She had been in therapy for almost five years after the shooting, although the last three were less frequent and mainly to check if she was disassociating again, retreating into the comfort of the separate self to abandon her day-to-day stresses that were normal enough ones for any kid, but not for her, not then.

With therapy across the remaining years of her childhood, she had come to realize she had done her best to help her mom, done her best to help and comfort, and she had learned, through practice, through the months and years of going to sessions, that she wasn’t at fault.

She had been strong, she had been a help. That’s what they all had told her.

Some help, she scoffs, a shadow of a snort that makes her again look up and around at the nearby seats—the bus mostly empty, thank god, which makes her snort again, a short burst of air pushed through her nostrils like a horse.

She works to quiet herself.

Who are you? Where are you? How do you feel?

The old habits of self-observation taught to her long ago, and here the habits are back, right on time, the deep breathing she tries, the self-forgiveness she has to re-practice, the recognition of her sense of guilt about Joe’s death, and recognition, too, that she hadn’t been at fault. These efforts mix with the horror of the shooting, the shock, her often tenuous hold on herself.

Cyn knows what makes sense, would make sense, and that is to go to the police when she’s far enough away. Las Vegas, where she’s heading, would be fine, but she’s still too shaken, too shaky, and she needs to give herself more time. More time to rest, time to practice being in her own self, time to resist the still strong tug of dissociative escape that had shaped her time after her father’s death.

And now, yay, reset, she tells herself, anger flaring.

Fuck me, she tells herself, but she attempts to tease out the tenderness too that she’s trying to give herself and is glad for it.

She is heading to Las Vegas, and it occurs to her there may be fire regions the route will bring them through, and so she waits until the cable story comes back around, but she almost misses it, snapping her attention back just in time to get an impression of the graphic of the major fires in the west.

Clear skies, baby, she says to herself, a giddiness rising, then vanishing as quickly, and she wishes she had some Xanax or Ativan.

The fires at these scales have been an annual occurrence for the last five years, maybe more. There was the bad year before Covid, and the Covid years were even worse, the skies over Portland and Seattle and San Francisco dull orange sometimes, just images from news stories until she was living in San Francisco after joining Carbon’s End. Even in her short time there she’d seen her share of smoke-choked air. The fire season this year had started ever earlier and was thought likely to run longer. If she remembers right, the count is already closing in on ten million acres.

You’d think we’d run out of trees, she tells herself, although she knows full well there’s plenty more to burn in the sixth year of significant drought.

She has one of the new hoods, although this is back in San Francisco, in her bureau, one of those HEPA filter hoods, with a clear visor. The thing looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but a month earlier the winds moved the smoke toward the city from the Putnam Creek fire and the Atlas fire complex east of Napa. The smoke had plumed over the city for three days before the wind changed, and she had been plenty glad for the hood rig even if it all flashbacked to the coronavirus mask days.

She’s been an activist in some shape or form since her high school days, a climate change person, a person committing herself to the change needed, a long-term foot soldier, a veteran, is how she thinks of it. The Carbon’s End job was perfect, the divestiture effort exactly the sort of work she’d been aiming for, her years of volunteering and low wage work in the trenches finally paying off.

Well, not paying, at least all that well, she thinks, noting the pay was good only relative to the sort of hand-to-mouth existence she’d long gotten used to. The actual salary was a big deal, even if not all that big a salary, as she discovered when she couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, at least one that didn’t include passels of roommates. Not even the tiny studio she lives in, thanks to Roger, the executive director at Carbon’s End, who had owned a bunch of rentals around town. He had used these properties mostly for short-term rentals, at least until the new ordinances went into effect against Airbnb and its kind, but he’s kept one of the apartments, the one near the office. This studio apartment he included as part of Cyn’s remuneration, although she’d had to share it at times when out-of-town staff or contractors came to the headquarters.

When this happened, she usually stayed at her colleague Ellen’s place, and the two of them would BART in from Richmond together.

Joe had been by the studio apartment, after hours, a couple of times. He was charming, she was horny, lonely, but she had kept things frosty.

Until I didn’t, she corrects herself.

And then Cyn again realizes with a start, he’s dead, a surprise in the form of a periodic mantra.

She starts her exercises again, but after a few minutes she’s back to thinking about the texts on her phone, the texts she’d never sent, with their story of an affair, and these make her again feel guilty and alone. She cannot help thinking about it, about Joe, images still come and go like flickering shadows, and she despairs, she wants to wail, to shout, to tear this bus apart, throw the pieces, kick down the hills they’re passing through, pull the sky down and swallow it.

Of course, she had thought about sleeping with Joe, and Joe had talked about his wife, the new baby, the lack of sex, the exhaustion and routine that buried his days, and about everything he missed—the fun.

Of course, I would never sleep with my boss, she tells herself., and then out loud, “Never would,” she hears herself say, low, a whisper, and the sound of it outside of herself shocks her.

On this bus, she knows that she had been sleeping with Joe, and she wonders if they’d been followed, spied on, but the odd texts don’t suggest this one way or another.

And they hadn’t known she’d set off in her own rental.

Cyn is suddenly ravenous for news. She needs to know what’s being said about him, the story must be breaking, but it’s not going to be on CNN, for sure.

She scrolls through the channels, there are an even dozen, but neither of the other two news channels is Environmental Network News, which she figures is the only one likely to carry anything about Joe being dead, that, and maybe, local stations in San Bernardino, if there are still such things.

Or in San Francisco, she thinks, it will be a local story, there.

She won’t put her phone back together to check, of that she’s sure, and so she tries to decide whether to take a nap or watch reruns of Friends—the sort of old syndication programming one can expect on crap TV.

Crap TV, a great name, she thinks, but her effort at escape evaporates, and she’s up in the aisle, swaying gently as she pulls herself up to her neighbor several seat rows forward.

“Um,” she says, and the man, probably near fifty, slowly turns his face away from, yes, Friends, as if it has a precious pull on him.

He just looks at her, his eyebrows raised high, doing his talking for him.

He looks like a goddamn cowboy, she realizes, and then she sees a Stetson on the seat next to him.

He pulls one earbud free.

“Um,” she repeats. “Do you have a phone or tablet I could borrow, mine’s broken and I need to look something up,” she tells him.

He looks at her, his eyes surrounded by deep tan and wrinkles. She can smell his hair lotion, or maybe cologne.

He turns away and Cyn thinks she’s been dismissed, but he’s reaching for a small duffle bag stuffed into the footwell of the Stetson’s seat.

“Here you go, little missy,” he says, handing her a mini- tablet, and his grin reveals three missing teeth from his left upper canine back to a gold-capped molar.

The post Chapter 10: The Wheels on the Bus Go Round first appeared on David Guenette.

As I will say to anyone, my attention to this question is understandable, considering that I’m writing the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, a series I describe as “literary climate fiction.” The series includes the third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, published this past spring, and the last book, Farm to Me, has a publication date of Spring 2027, if the good lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise. For the curious, there’s a guest blog post on ClimateCultures—not to mention many posts on my website—describing the series.

The aim of the series is to tell the story of people living with climate change—not with the crisis as the sole focus of their lives, but rather as an everyday part of their world. This positioning mimics what we—that is, Americans—experience and so the story is one with which readers can identify. My hope is that readers come to consider a wider spectrum of issues of climate change within their own lived experiences and thus are more likely to consider and act on climate progress.

The series falls within the category of speculative fiction, especially considering the four books take place in the same locale over a period of twenty-plus years, with the first, Kill Well, occurring in 2026. Dear Josephine, the second title, takes place in 2029. Over Brooklyn Hills is set in 2035 and the final book, Farm to Me, is in 2047. The series runs from the present to nearly 2050. We can expect progress to be made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions along with the continuing consequences from climate change already in play. While plot points can span the world and extreme weather consequences show up here, there, and everywhere, the main characters of the series are grounded in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with the worst consequences from climate change mostly seen at a remove, just like today, when reports of flooding disasters or heatwaves killing thousands is mediated through news and social media. The characters’ lives remain largely focused on the more quotidian concerns of life that may be or at least seem unconnected with climate change.

In other words, I’m speculating what our lives with climate change look like today and how this changes over time as we better understand how climate change affects us, including the growing cost to our personal economics.

Fiction is Speculation

“Speculative fiction, leaning into the dystopic, how else to write about climate change?” writes Brit Griffin in a recent guest post on ClimateCultures. She’s the author of The Wintermen, a three-book series that started in 2014. The series portrays a Canadian North in a guerrilla conflict as society breaks down under the pressure of climate change. Griffin has a new book out titled The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien, and her post is titled “The Call of the Gothic: Storytelling During Climate Catastrophe,” outlining her shift toward gothic writing. She says:

But then, between the first book and the last (released during Covid), the still-yet-unimaginable became too plausible, too ordinary in its believability. At that point, for me, the dystopic frame lost something of its power as a narrative device. Took on a sort of tepid register.

…

And there was a peculiar listlessness emerging, all the alarms and harbingers crowded out, the once looming, sky-darkening grims becoming more of a ho hum. All that urgency and momentum gone, simply dissipated. This wasn’t dystopia, it was the day in, day out… the time for speculation seemed to have passed.

Griffin describes her latest novel as a Gothic tale:

I considered what I was seeing, what I was understanding, about current climate catastrophe. Odd the disconnect, because as familiar as it had become it was anything but normal. Fantastical floodings washing away bridges and mountainsides and cows and chickens. Fires like giants, towering infernos burning and burrowing and still smouldering even through the cold of winters. It put me in the mind of monsters, of supernatural beings, of large dark forces wailing and tearing their way across the landscape, driven by the diabolical disinterest of the tech bros and the fossil fuel magnates. I was beginning to see Gothic.

Fiction is speculation across any and every genre of the species, but what Griffin is talking about is her shift to speculating about climate change at a remove through the conventions of the Gothic genre. Gone is the “near-future” of Wintermen and her new work welcomes the 19^th century of the boom and bust of silver mining in various northern parts of Canada’s Provinces. I can’t adequately speak to the quality of Griffin’s new novel, although the sample I read of Wintermen, the first book in the series, shows she’s a solid writer, and the sample from her latest work is easy and enjoyable reading.

But is a Gothic novel that takes place over a hundred and fifty years ago fiction about climate? Since climate is part of every life and story, one could say yes, but what about climate change? There’s always allegory, of course, when writing about one subject is actually telling a story about something else. The Gothic genre mixes mystery, psychological tension, and terror. Coming out of the Romantic movement of the 18^th century, it is often described as a reaction against the order and rationality of the Enlightenment, even if the style takes its name from medieval Gothic buildings like castles, abbeys, and ruins that made up many scenes and settings. The Gothic genre is not my cup of tea, but I’ve got nothing against the genre and like any genre, whether a particular work is any good is up to the writer’s success or failure.

What I’m interested in is what distinguishes climate fiction from other types of fiction.

Climate Fiction: Premise or Subject of the Story?

I sometimes wonder if I have a John the Baptist complex, since my effort to understand what sets climate fiction apart from other categories of fiction seems one hell of a lot like crying in the wilderness for all the effect it engenders. I’ve tried to get discussions going, even to the point of my being willing to pick fights, although, raised as I was to be polite, I’m not inclined to fisticuffs. Nevertheless, responses have been crickets, although, on the other hand, there’s been a total absence of beheading.

I’ve written many posts on my website and on Substack on the subject of what distinguishes climate fiction from other forms of fiction. I’ve reached out to Fiction Climate Writers’ League, corresponded with writers and publishers, cited—and reviewed—books and discussed authors as examples of climate fiction or fiction that only claims to be climate fiction. I’ve made my case on ClimateCultures, where Mark Goldthorpe introduced my long essay “Telling Stories About Climate Change” this way:

In this original piece, novelist and essayist David Guenette suggests that, too often, “climate fiction” fails to bridge the planetary-scale climate crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges: more stories we can identify with may relieve suppressive social silence on climate change.

So why does Griffin shift to Gothic? She quotes Ann Radcliffe as “one of the greatest authors of romantic gothic literature,” saying that terror “expands the soul” and thus, in the hope of Griffin, allows the reader to “process the weird, the unfathomable; they assist us in exploring upheaval and community breakdown. Hopefully Radcliffe is right, and stories can help to awaken and move us to act.” This attribute of Gothic novels may be as Griffin states, but the weird and unfathomable of climate change realities are at best at a remove. Perhaps the book is a response to climate change, but it isn’t climate fiction, unless the definition of “climate fiction” is so broad as to be meaningless.

Grist Magazine (“25 Years on the Climate Beat”) has a climate fiction initiative called Imagine 2200, where Tory Stephens, Climate Fiction Creative Manager, collects and publishes short stories and periodically sends them out via a signup email. Grist has also published a couple of anthologies drawn from such published stories. As the name of the initiative suggests, the stories tend toward more far-future settings, although there are some that reflect near-future scenarios (“Sandbag Squidward” is a notable recent example).

The most recent Imagine 2200 short story, published October 15, 2026, is “The Re-Rememberings of Bee Bishop,” by AriDy Nox. It is a solid, captivating story. The story is also situated 400 years in the future, when humans have undergone ReUnification, something that involves genetic manipulation that incorporates Earth aspects into the human genome, reflecting a radical shift in human culture that better aligns humans with the world.

I typically question such premises as climate fiction, but I’m more inclined to accept “The Re-Rememberings of Bee Bishop” as climate fiction in that the story represents the aftermath of human culture’s efforts to correct what humans are doing to the climate, even while raising the question of our tendency to revert to the view of humans as separate from and superior to the Earth. Still, I’m less sure how this story and many of the others in Imagine 2200 help bring readers to an understanding of where we are today and how we might try to get to where we need to be as best we can, but I’m sure the argument would be that a story that helps shift peoples’ perspective on their relationship with the Earth can only help. My concern, though, is that we’re in a time of necessary and specific action that includes political choices in support of climate progress legislation, right along with a better understanding of the options those of us in economic positions to act, and so undertake any and all of the household electrification actions now available to us. I’m all for mankind improving itself to form a healthier relationship with the environment, but there are actions needed today that could ameliorate the worst climate change consequences tomorrow. Failing to do so means the world becomes more inhospitable. Reducing carbon emissions can’t wait for the next stage of human culture’s evolution. People are dying today because of climate change, and more will die tomorrow.

Climate Fiction as Call to Action, Including Understanding Climate Change

As I argue in my ClimateCultures essay, there are now many thousands of novels that describe themselves or are otherwise provided the mantle of “climate fiction.” Add to that the poems about climate change, or short stories, paintings, drawings, prints, songs, and videos, and the question arises: Are any of these creative expressions helping in any significant way to shift the course of the Anthropocene away from dire climate consequences?

Unfortunately, the vast number of “climate fiction” stories use global warming and climate change as a story premise. Climate change’s potential for a flooded world, desert wasteland, burning forests, life-denying temperatures, or terrible storms often contributes to an action-adventure or survivalist tale, often without much concern about accuracy of the climate science or much discussion of how such terrible worlds could be avoided. Worse yet, many of these apocalyptic tales breeze past the human and ecological costs the premise demands, skipping directly to some form of “guy-gets-gun-and-girl” story or something otherwise not about climate change and what it does to us or what we might do about it.

Many other novels and short stories use the premise of climate change to present magical realism, evolved humans in distant futures, aliens, or fantasy. Can a story of a person who can speak to mushrooms help people address the climate crisis today? Depends on the story, I guess. You can judge one instance for yourself by reading “The Case of the Missing Lake,” by Colby Devitt, published in the Grist Imagine 2200 program on November 6, 2025; the subtitle is “Lake Ballona goes missing, and only the mushrooms can help.” To be fair to Grist’s climate fiction initiative, their aim is to “celebrate stories that invite us to imagine the future we want—futures in which climate solutions flourish and we all thrive.”

There are other approaches to climate fiction, including as a sub-category of science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future, which I consider the gold standard of climate fiction, insists that he’s a science fiction writer. The problem I have with a lot of what gets called climate fiction is that many such novels deal with serious problems of today and tomorrow in unserious ways, but The Ministry for the Future is informative, well-written, entertaining, and regards climate change very seriously.

There are literary fiction novels that manage to address climate change as more than a dystopian premise. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is one great example, where characters are deeply developed to support the human story, but climate change is integrated into the story, with readers likely to come away with a clearer sense of urgency and—hopefully—agency. The only kind of magic there is in such books is the magic of portraying human lives vividly. Climate change is confidently and reasonably represented within the characters’ experiences.

Thrutopia, Another Name for Climate Fiction

As I put it in my ClimateCultures essay, climate fiction is fiction that carries useful knowledge of the issue of climate change in the hope that readers will be more conscious of the circumstances of climate change and more thoughtful and engaged toward solutions to ameliorate it. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called “Thrutopia,” although I’ve recently come across “Protopian,” too. Whatever your term of choice, the basic idea here is a story where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions—or fail to get to solutions—whether societal or personal.

Like all new categories, Thrutopia tends to broaden—like the current application of “climate fiction”—toward uselessness. For some authors, Thrutopia can simply mean a rejection of climate apocalypse stories. For me, I use the old Downeaster joke “You can’t get there from here” and apply this challenge to climate fiction, where paying attention to what we know about climate change and its causes and how we might indeed make our way toward climate progress and the trials therein are the relevant subjects. Note that I’m not arguing that climate fiction, in this definition, must be about successful solutions for climate change amelioration, but only that climate change is the pervasive subject of the story, not simply the premise or starting point that is too often ignored thereafter.

“Thrutopia” seems a growth industry on Substack these days. Here’s a (no doubt) partial list, and like the entries on most such Substack lists, some are brand new with not much to show and some have been active for some time, and some haven’t been active for a while:

1. Kate Evans
2. Bewilded Boomer
3. Welcome to Thrutopia
4. THRU
5. Bending The Arc (A Thrutopia Magazine)
6. Manda Scott
7. Secret Poetry Appreciators
8. Cypress Knees

A number of the above Substacks include serialized fiction, such as Kate Evan. Climate Fiction Writers League carries posts about Thrutopia writings. Sandy’s Substack offers Sandy W. Lawrence’s views on climate change science and policy, but also references his “trilogy of climate fiction—or cli-fi—novels explores disaster without descending into apocalypse, offering a thread of optimism rather than despair. Set in present-day Washington, D.C., the stories unfold in a world teetering on the edge of…”

There is also the category of “Solarpunk” that has a big crossover with Thrutopia. Examples from Substack include:

1. The Solarpunk Times
2. Solarpunk Words
3. London School of Solarpunk
4. SolarPunk Stories
5. The Aspiring Solarpunk

What I’ve found—although this view is hardly based on a comprehensive study—is that much of Thrutopia and Solarpunk also falls into fantasy and far-futurism. There are interesting things to learn and enjoyable stories to read, but without the near- and mid-term future focus on climate crisis solutions, these stories miss my definition of climate fiction.

Climate Fiction is the Story of Our Fight Against Climate Change

The fact is that our window is tight for putting into place solutions toward lessening the already unavoidable scourge of climate change, because if we don’t quickly reduce the damaging effects of high greenhouse gas emissions, we’re looking at living in a radically different world. The good news is that we have economically viable clean energy and electrification now, but that, of course, doesn’t mean we’ll manifest the electrotech revolution fast enough to make a big difference. We can do it, but will we?

Of course, some people already are living in that climate-distressed world, and while many of us who live in a developed country have social safety nets and the wealth to cushion bad effects, the death toll tied to this summer’s European heatwave is 50,000, and there’s the ever-increasing property damage for those more bothered by material loss than human lives destroyed.

Right now, the battle is to reduce the amount of suffering.

There’s value to writing about this radically different world, of course, especially if its effects on people—characters, in the case of fiction—are a main focus. As my own series progresses, the consequences of climate change are felt even in places like interior southern New England, even if these effects show up most often through higher everyday costs. In the final book of the series, Farm to Me, set in 2047, basic aspects of the economy of the Northeast are changing, including the resurrection of agriculture here as once productive agricultural areas in the States and other countries we import fresh food from suffer adverse chronic conditions such as drought and aquifer exhaustion. New England resumes its old business of farming to supply the cities and local areas; a plot line involving extortion to consolidate the growing food distribution business adds tension. Among the new characters is an ex-arbitrage professional who has lost his city life to AI and now has (literally) bought the farm in New Marlborough, hoping to thrive amidst the carbon-sequestration credits of his certified regenerative farm. The main through character, Davin, now 82, has his granddaughter visiting (or hiding) in his Housatonic House on the Hill as civil society feels the anger of the young responding to the darker future the previous generations have gifted them, and the crackdown underway threatens to birth greater civil unrest. I haven’t yet specified the carbon PPM in 2047, nor the rise in global average temperature, nor with precision the state of various tipping points. Studying is ongoing. I guess I’m still working out our level of success in our fight against climate change.

Still, rest assured. Climate change is very much a subject of the series, even if the novels are enjoyable to read.

That’s climate fiction, right?

The post Is It Climate Fiction? first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

It’s almost evening before Larsen gets back to his Anaheim hotel room and positively evening by the time he finishes showering, letting the dirt and dust wash way.

He looks at his reddened palms and notes the start of two small blisters.

Getting soft, the thought comes to mind.

He steps into his business suit, adjusting his tie in front of the bedroom’s big mirror, and he decides to shop for another set of casual clothes tomorrow. He’s already packed his dirty clothes and the shoes he’d been wearing into the plastic bag supplied by the hotel for laundry. He’ll throw these out, and he’ll dump the field operations burner in the trash too, some place right, next time he goes out.

There’s no reason to keep this field operations phone because the only person he calls on it won’t be answering any phone ever again. He removes the SIM and twists it until it’s torn, and then he cracks the phone by leaning it at an angle against a baseboard and hitting it with a fast kick of his foot.

He is wearing his dress shoes. He is wearing the suit he would have worn on the trade floor today, or for any other sessions he will say he attended, not that there’s any chance anyone would ever ask, but good cover means thorough cover, so he’ll head down to the bar where he’ll likely find some other conference attendees and chat them up about what they thought of one or another of the afternoon sessions.

First, though, he’s got other business to take care of, so he sits at his hotel room’s small desk and opens up his laptop and signs onto a VPN redirect service. He accesses his email persona account and contacts his man at the law firm to ask for an update from his morning’s request to get some private agencies on to Cynthia Wainwright’s trail, a request that had included a backgrounder on Cynthia Wainwright he had been sure to run through a metadata stripper before he headed out past Barstow.

He keeps his email’s tone calm, although he’s annoyed there isn’t an update already waiting for him in the email box of his untraceable persona.

He needs to exercise caution in his relationship with the clerk since the relationship is young, and he doesn’t want to spook him.

Spook him, Larsen scoffs. Or spoof him.

Larsen is in fact spoofing him, in that the email persona is fictitious but by all appearances a real person’s account, and as far as Larsen is concerned this serves his interest in this guy Madaki not knowing anything about him. Only a systems analyst could dig deep enough to find that his emails aren’t actually going through the firm’s email server.

The first email he sent this morning had contained a malware insertion that will alert him if a security review is done because any decent review will show the law firm’s network is compromised. This insertion routine carries timestamps well past his previous consult work, and the insert routine is a new one beyond the protection he had recommended, not that the network admin likely has implemented all his recommendations yet. He wants to roll his eyes, but such sloppiness in the system administration works in his favor. No one will seek any connection between his recent security audit and the intrusion, and all and any efforts to find out who created his fictious email persona will be unsuccessful. Covering one’s tracks takes redundancies, although he thinks that any of these routines ever being discovered remains a negligible probability. His false identity email asks Madaki for a locate update on Cynthia Wainwright.

This shouldn’t have to be asked, but the law firm contact is one of the junior clerks, an immigrant who loves cloak-and-dagger bullshit.

He also loves the anonymous cash drops, Larsen considers, and as far as Larsen is concerned, that is a comforting state of affairs, although that cash has already ended, even if the guy is clueless the spigot is closed now. The persona who Madaki thinks he works for is itself just one step away from disappearing completely. Unfortunately, the clerk is not a natural at this sort of work, and the guy’s earlier reply to a query from Larsen is as good an example as any of the guy’s lack of experience, because what he now gets back from the clerk is almost unintelligible, and this annoys him, but at least he has learned there are three investigation services engaged.

He is going to flag another service for Madaki, and he’ll tell the clerk it’s another BOLO agency hire but will ask him to use the codename Birddog. He explains in his email that this other service the clerk could be hearing from will use the codename because it’s from a guy he knows, a person doing him a favor, but the guy can’t be named because of a noncompete situation, and the guy is a bit paranoid about doing this favor for him, worried it could end up biting him on the ass. Larsen adds that this person will get paid directly by him, not Madaki, for services rendered.

Larsen needs to keep Madaki in the dark about the purpose of the contractor he intends to hire, but Madaki will need to share location information for the target, assuming one or another of the legitimate investigation services succeeds.

So don’t mention him to the other services, please, Larsen adds, along with instructions to keep Birddog in the loop on any results from the other services. Don’t care how many agencies on board, but your email doesn’t include progress. Anything on the locate yet? Anything on official sources? Larsen finishes with in his reply to Madaki.

He looks at his watch. He’s got to get down to the bar while the getting’s good.

Update in real time, he ends up adding, but then erases that and writes out more clearly what he wants. Keep me informed of every and any updates on the location effort, including monitoring of official sources, news items.

Larsen knows his own access to law enforcement wires is minimal, but he’s been hoping the legitimate agencies hired will have connections, maybe even to the national network used for interstate law enforcement requests. He’s already set up a bot search on one of the California nets and a couple of others, but he doesn’t know if or when there will be any public-facing information.

Of course, he already knows she never showed up for the meeting, his gaining this confirmation from a call he’d made to the investment group posing as a Carbon’s End staffer.

Another reason to dump that burner.

He knows the Craigson target never showed, of course, having got his face shot off by that idiot.

He spends a few minutes checking his alerts but sees there is as yet not all that much in the news, despite his leaking ploys. He knows law enforcement is already looking into the shooting, but how fast and how effective these entities will be is an important consideration. He’s second-guessing his leaking the phone texts angle, nervous about how well these might survive scrutiny, but he wants to keep the lovers’ murder/suicide premise upfront of the developing new stories. He doesn’t really expect anyone to check to see if the texts are external insertions, and he’s already seeing some mention of the embezzlement angle he’s engineered in the few news reports out already, which impresses him given he only put this into action this morning. Unfortunately, his crypto balance is now dangerously low, having forked over a good chunk to one of his subcontractors to another dark web service, but at least it is one that’s been reliable in the past, and he can’t complain about the fast turnaround. With any luck, the leaks being orchestrated will keep pressure on the target.

With any luck, Jesus, he scoffs. The possibility that the young woman still hasn’t yet contacted the law has become the centerpiece of his Hail Mary hopes. His play now is to beat the law enforcement agencies to her because things will get very messy very quickly if he can’t bring resolution, and Rocky won’t like that. There’s little or no chance of trace-back, but Rocky doesn’t like fuckups. Larsen has to find out where the hell she is as soon as possible and get this mess taken care of.

The bar and the conference chatter will have to wait a bit more. He’s still got to get online and secure a contractor for this extreme prejudice action.

That contractor needs to know where to find her, of course.

Go Birddog, go.

The post Chapter 9: Go Birddog, Go first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Cyn is on Interstate 15, heading north, putting distance between her and what’s happened, still not quite believing anything is real. That includes the night before, after getting to Ironwood, the nice resort hotel she’d found for her and Joe after they’d flown the small intercity turbo into Barstow-Daggett Airport, gotten the two rentals, and then driven up to Ironwood to get ready for the next day’s meeting.

And each other, Cyn thinks, and for a moment the excitement of her affair with Joe stutters into her thoughts, but then the terror sweeps back. It’s as if there are multiple worlds, one as unreal as another, one striking against the other, strobing back and forth.

Joe is dead, Cyn thinks, but doing so means she must fight the part of her that keeps such thoughts distant. She shakes her head, fighting to keep what has happened in mind. She understands that she needs to figure it out, so she can know what she should do.

That meeting had been set for the morning, was to be at the executive’s house in Newport Springs, the one next to a golf course she had discovered was owned by the person with whom they would be meeting, as she had learned during a conversation with one of the man’s assistants as she finalized the meeting details. She can remember that particular exchange with such detail, this recollection overlaying the image of Joe in his car, overlaying the sheriff cursing at the blood splatter on his face.

She shakes her head yet again, and this yet again fails to push the images from her mind.

She wonders what the sheriff, or deputy, or whoever it was, what he thought he would do once he caught up with her at the golf course clubhouse where she and Joe were to meet the investor group to sign the divestment deal.

She imagines the sheriff walking into the meeting covered with Joe’s blood, what the reaction would be, and she feels herself on the verge of hysteria again, on the edge of crazy bursting, and she comes back just in time to step hard on the brakes, falling back from nearly rear-ending a Greyhound bus.

She tries to settle herself. She’s trying to figure out what the murders could have been, and why. Where it happened seems more than a coincidence, of that she feels sure.

The divestiture deal is the only thing that makes any sense.

They had occasionally run into pushback with other deals, but would someone actually kill? By the time a company or institution was ready to make the change, it was seen as a good thing, good PR anyway.

She’s convinced the two of them in the same car had been expected, and she wonders what the man had thought, and how long it had taken Joe to figure out something was screwy, wasn’t right.

A sob escapes her, her hands pushing at sudden tears as she pictures Joe then. Was he scared? Did he know? she wonders, her heart feeling like it’s tearing.

Why would anyone bother killing him?

Cyn tries to puzzle out an answer. But she can’t think of anything that makes any sense, and she’s puzzling over an explanation as another thundering wave of dread blossoms, and her sense of being pursued dominates once again, and then she thinks about the GPS, or whatever the fuck it is! that she now half-remembers rental cars might have, some sort of LoJack tracking, and she understands, clearly and entirely, she needs to not use the car, she needs to dump it and catch the bus, she needs to strip her phone. She’s behind the bus, following it, her flush of panic growing, her armpits tingling with new sweat pinpricks, a single course of perspiration rolling down her left side beneath her blouse.

She cranks the air-conditioning. She keeps her eye on the bus. She concentrates on breathing and keeping a steady distance between her and the bus.

She reaches into her bag for her phone with her right hand, hauls it out, and fieldstrips it to pop the battery, both hands at work on top of the steering wheel, eyes back and forth from the phone to the road, up and down, until the battery fumbles out.

In her mind she sees the phone tossed out, the battery too, bouncing along the pavement behind her speeding car, but that’s a clip from a movie, maybe from dozens of movies. No, she tells herself, placing the phone, disassembled, on the passenger seat.

She concentrates on the bus ahead.

This calms her, but then she’s thinking about her affair with Joe and feels a rush of embarrassment and shame as it dawns on her everyone will know she’d been fucking him, a married man, her boss. She tries to convince herself this is hardly important, this is irrelevant in comparison to Joe being killed, but she’s grown viciously angry with herself, falling into a discomforting cascade of mortification.

But there’s a species of surprise too.

She knows that she sometimes had worked very hard in past moments to examine how she would end up doing this sort of thing, her history with older men, the pull this has had for her.

Dr. Becker, for example, she tells herself, feeling anew that incident’s humiliation, the resignation of her advisor during her second year in college, and she repeats her old argument that it hadn’t been her.

Not exactly, she thinks, but her carelessness, she knows, had helped bring their relationship to light.

Well, if sucking him off in his office, letting him eat me, is a relationship, she thinks, seeing again the cramped small office thick with paperbacks on shelves and stacks of papers and his laptop and that afghan-covered recliner that had the tendency to push back up as his weight settled on the footrest, his chest counter-tilting the lighter mass of her arching back, her arms squeezing the armrests. She remembers laughing when that would happen. She remembers his smell, how the recliner worked well upright when she went down on him. She remembers the sense of comfort she’d felt in his excitement toward her. She remembers her sense of control.

Billy, he had told her to call him, something that seemed more incongruous a thing than his penis in her mouth.

What had she been thinking, she wonders, but this is a question she hasn’t been asking herself for too long, not since transferring to Ohio State after that semester. She had managed to get back into therapy there, a woman therapist who had helped her a lot.

Well, apparently not enough, Cyn thinks.

She’s been sleeping with her boss.

Had been, she thinks with a shudder.

It wasn’t a big deal, or so she had told herself when it started. She’d been horny, alone in a new city, and Joe was charming in his funny way, his excuses for dropping by, his inappropriate texts, the way he could bring his full attention to her or act strictly professionally, depending, and it had all seemed to her simple fun.

Cyn doesn’t want to be thinking about this, but fun isn’t it exactly, she knows, and she knows she let it all overwhelm her—the new job, and a big opportunity finally, and an all-new city, and her own expectations enormous, but tenuous too.

She had fallen into her old trap of looking for safety, comfort, and the sense of self as someone deserving attention.

Inappropriate, she now sees.

Demanding attention, she thinks.

She had been anxious, stressed, and vulnerable too, not to Joe’s predation but to that thing with which she had long struggled, that need she had assumed had been dealt with years before. She was wrong, and it makes her angry and self-hating, but she knows she needs to stop these feelings.

“Fuck!” she screams in the car, wanting to tear the steering wheel off, both hands’ knuckles popping white in her anguish.

She knows negativity is just another part of the trap, even as she can still feel how much she still wants the relief of his attention.

She tries to stay focused on the back of the bus.

Some people are going to blame Joe, she realizes, and she feels this will be wrong.

Of course, he could have resisted, she tells herself.

But if not Joe, there would be someone else, this is what she’s thinking, and that Joe was hardly like that, not a predator, and the friendly attention, the playful flirting, and then the divestiture trips. The affair started on the second trip, and some part of her feels fondly of him, but the feelings are more complex, anchored in an emptiness that is existential, anchored in an old wound.

And then the guilt pours into her, shame exploding, and she wants to squeeze shut her eyes, but she needs to follow the bus, but she keeps picking away at these thoughts, now thinking back to high school, another of her troubled times when she had been caught fucking her neighbor, the adult son living with his mother, the man older by a decade. Cyn can’t think of any reason why it should have happened, and there had been talk of charges against the man, and her mother and stepdad were furious, hearts broken, bewildered.

The shrink she’d been sent back to had talked about daddy issues, not that he ever used that term, but he had spoken of her hunger for protection or safety, and he had worked with her to come up with ways to think about these impulses. He had shown her a way of coping with her feelings and had offered her exercises that were flashbacks to those first sessions after she’d seen her own father shot dead.

She doesn’t like to think about those days, about the way she could be, and the panic and the racing fear that would overwhelm her, and the guilt too, the same guilt that threatens to engulf her now, guilt that Joe is dead, guilt that she had slipped back to old and unhealthy choices for her life.

Fucking a married man, Cyn faults herself.

You are an asshole, she tells herself.

She squints through her tears, eyes still affixed on the back of the bus.

She tries to undertake those steps she’d learned to self-calm, to center, to breathe, even as she fights through tumbling images from this morning and from her past and the confusion of spiking impulses toward self-annihilation.

She breathes and begins to calm herself.

And after a mile or two more, she wonders if the bus will ever stop. She wonders if she’ll be following it over some great distance, long enough for the car to be tracked, her getting pulled over, and some part of her realizes if she gets far enough, then she should go to the police, tell them what happened, but her bowels flair with an animal anxiety that keeps her thinking only of the bus, getting on the bus or getting caught—the only two choices.

She glances at the digital clock above her car’s radio, and her rational self sees that less than an hour and a half has passed since the mile marker.

Mile marker, she thinks, anger flaring in her realization she’s using this as code for Joe’s death.

Joe’s murder.

She is feeling more than halfway crazy.

She glances forward and sees signs for Mojave National Preserve, Hollow Hills Wilderness Area, and Highway 127, and a town or city called Baker. She sees the bus signaling and dropping into the off ramp, and she bursts into new sobs, pushing at the sudden tears with one hand while she turns the wheel to follow the bus that takes the sharp left at the end of the ramp onto the road under the Interstate. Cyn follows the bus onto Death Valley Highway/Route 127 and pulls into the 76 Gas Station and Country Store parking lot where the bus has stopped, and she is out of the car, big backpack in hand, wiping at her tears, her face drying into the hot desert sun.

Fifteen minutes later, from her seat on the nearly empty bus as it swings out of the parking lot, she sees across another parking lot a sign reading, “The World’s Tallest Thermometer,” and behind a big restaurant building, the top of the same said thermometer, tall, shining, and glaring red.

The post Chapter 8: On the Roll and On the Run first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Davin sits at his desk in his office, the big room on the second floor he had made by opening up the common wall of two smaller rooms, and his desk fills an outside corner with Gwen’s own desk running perpendicularly to his along the front face of the house, except that the desk isn’t hers anymore. He has metastasized the space, and this veneered door blank sitting on top of two-drawer filing cabinets now holds his old monochrome laser printer and what seems like ever-growing piles of papers, periodicals, and folders.

He likes the office, with its generous amount of work surface and the nice light from the south- and west-facing windows.

He really likes the office, except, of course, when his feeling about this space is less than positive, and, at the moment, matching his dour mood. Gwen had mostly only used her laptop, and later, mostly just her phone, and was less and less at her desk. The office doesn’t trigger her absence particularly, at least not nearly as much as their bed—his bed, now—and the empty side on which he still doesn’t sleep.

He’s in the middle of reviewing South County Interactive ad reports, cross-referencing the ad-to-sale ratios and checking subtotals to be sure his first real payout is what Alicia figures. He has learned the hard way over the years it’s always best to double check, as much as he has to push himself to take the time to do it.

With age comes wisdom, he thinks, even while wondering if it’s especially true.

Part of him keeps thinking about swapping the old recliner in the back corner of the office for a smaller armchair in the living room, which would then make room for an extra side table, but he recognizes the delay tactic. He has come to know his frequent thoughts about changing, adding to, and otherwise manipulating the space and structure around him are a kind of daydreaming in which he engages, a kind of reverie, and there’s comfort he draws from such thoughts, but he suspects there’s something unseemly, unhealthy, in such thoughts too.

Mental masturbation through redecoration.

Christ, he tells himself at this thought. He’s not feeling particularly depressed, but he knows he’s not always the first to notice.

He glances out the window behind the left corner of his desk, then stands to better look out. It’s a nice sunny day, a bit warm for the time of year, and unusually humid. The adolescent leaves of the second-growth northern cherry trees are bouncing in the breeze, and he thinks it’s another good day for some garden work. But he’s looking over the South County Interactive ad revenue reports for the last couple of months, checking them against the amount on the first check he’d just received from Alicia.

He has no real confidence he’ll ever make much money with this work, especially relative to the long hours he’s already put into the project, and especially considering he’ll likely not leverage this work into other similar work. After all, he’d been intentionally winding down his professional efforts, when, before the South County Interactive assignment, he’d been working mostly as a freelance analyst, researching electronic publishing business processes and technologies for a boutique consulting firm. He had produced white papers, webinars, case studies, and reports, and on occasion, had been hired out for some hands-on project consulting.

More than I wanted to do, he thinks.

Less than I should have done, he considers.

He had worked for this small consulting company before his exodus from the city, and for a while he had mixed the Housatonic house renovation work with more such professional work, but that work had grown less frequent. All for the best, he had thought at the time. After all, he had made the move to Berkshire County to build a studio and concentrate on his art, and the disappointment he’s felt in his last few professional projects seemed just another sign to stay the course, confirmation his interest in such professional work was over and done with.

And who could have possibly known it’s hard to make money making art? he jokes for the hundredth or thousandth time.

And yet here he is, working with South County Interactive. Somehow though, this work feels different, and he would have to guess it has something to do with it being local and something that could contribute to the community whereas the bulk of his previous work involved large corporations and publishing segments that held little personal interest for him. He had long ago also noticed the better a job might pay seemed to correlate with his not liking the assignment, so he’s pretty sure he’ll be liking the SCI work for quite a while.

And Alicia has been talking to him about writing pieces for SCI, which, he admits, makes him feel good, at least if he ignores a species of dread when imagining he’s back in the writing business.

He starts pacing around his office. When he draws back near the window he can see the retaining wall structure that holds back the cut of the driveway and thinks yet again about the unexpected cost of making the back property accessible. The cost was largely caused by the steep slope the house was long ago built into, and the driveway problem turned out to be a $40,000 solution to get drivable access to the upper yard, but the parking area up top is an essential requirement for the first-floor apartment rentable to Airbnb guests, and now, for the two paying additions to the household.

Well, one, so far, he reminds himself, wondering yet again if Chaplin will work out in the long run. Chaplin, the first of the house sharers, is a young twenty-four years of age but seems an okay fellow, even though cash availability seems tight, which has Davin wondering if he should talk to him about some sort of regular property work schedule since the kid seems pretty competent, according to the construction work references he’d given.

But the main thing he notes as he looks at the retaining wall and the part of the driveway he can see from his office window is, I’m a fucking idiot. Considering how much had been spent on the property to date, this is not an infrequent refrain.

And then he’s back at his desk and retakes his chair, getting back to the reports from South County Interactive. “Fuck you, I’m not an idiot,” he says out loud as he brings up an Excel spreadsheet with the latest tracking of ad buys.

The numbers look stronger and stronger the more he looks at them.

Davin knows businesses that advertise with SCI like to see if the money they’re spending on their ads has demonstrable and positive results. The design of the backend operation of the SCI content management system he’d spec’ed has expanded tracking routines, so he can easily illustrate ad spending successes. If all goes as planned, South County Interactive should be selling more ads to current and new clients alike, which will mean he’ll get a bigger percentage for new or expanded business the online publication pulls in.

And with the Airbnb, once the season starts, there’s more income, although he hasn’t yet selected a contractor for the repair of water damage in the apartment, so the season won’t start all that soon for him this year. But having finally agreed on another boarder—Well, house share, as he always corrects himself—then maybe, just maybe, the ends will meet.

He gets back to work, building a presentation of the data that will interpret the results of the report. This kind of presentation has its challenges, but the data looks good, especially if no one thinks to challenge one or two key assumptions.

Like the assumption that $10,000 should be plenty to improve access to this property, he hears himself think, before telling himself to focus.

He clicks on a PowerPoint template and pulls it over to the second monitor in front of him.

And somewhere behind his sudden sigh he wonders when he’s ever going to get back to the studio.

The post Chapter 7: I’m an Artist! I’m a Content Management Analyst! I’m an Idiot first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Larry Larsen sits in a hotel room that could easily be in one of any number of such hotels, and he takes a moment to double check which one he’s in, happy it’s indeed a Hampton Inn as he had thought.

He runs memory checks like this all the time.

Still, he likes that these rooms pretty much look all the same.

What he isn’t liking is having to tell Rocky the assignment has gone sideways.

The boss is going to be furious, is the first thought that comes to mind after Larsen has finished talking to the freelancer on the arranged burner phone.

A complete and utter fuckup, is his second thought, furious with the freelancer who had fucked up badly.

Larsen decides he has to speak again with the freelancer out in Barstow—Well, somewhere the fuck around there, out on Route 247 or parts thereof, he corrects himself—and he’s using the burner for this specific purpose. He’s calling from Anaheim, there ostensibly and provenly at a conference, not that he’ll get to any sessions today, but instead is scrambling like an idiot trying to run herd on his hired talent for this assignment. His so-called talent can’t seem to get anything right.

Talent, he thinks, all but rolling his eyes. The guy is proving to be a big-ass problem. The situation may be fucked beyond repair, and that will not make the boss happy.

Larsen is operating out of Anaheim because this provides good coverage. He is close enough to act under emergency situations, but far enough not to be a possible involvement trigger if it ever comes to an investigation.

He knows a burner makes for some protection too, but he’ll use the second burner when he’s in Barstow trying to un-fuck the situation. It’s perhaps paranoid, but cell tower pings can bite you on the ass, so he’ll leave the current one here.

He knows it should never come to an investigation, not one that goes anywhere anyway, but meeting the objective of this operation looks less and less like a win. But perhaps not all is lost. He’s got some contingencies he’s mulling. It shouldn’t have come to contingencies if his talent had half a brain, but it looks like this is too much to hope for despite the care and thought he’d taken vetting this guy and then mapping out the play.

He admits to himself he should have listened to that little nagging doubt in the back of his mind when he’d decided to go with a complicated play, but it had seemed a solid plan.

Set up as local law, pull over the targets before the meeting, shoot them, at least one close up, the phone texts telegraphing murder-suicide from a lovers’ quarrel.

He had even taken the trouble to discuss abort points with the talent.

What talent? he mentally scoffs, but then, really, this is his own screwup since he hired the guy, judged him competent, or competent enough anyway, and from a talent agency that had previously proved reliable. The freelancer should have simply let the target go on his way the very instance he discovered the young woman wasn’t with him. But instead, the target had gotten suspicious while made to wait, at least that’s what he assumes from the freelancer saying that he’d only been trying to keep control of the situation while he waited for the other target. Control of the situation turning into shooting the man in the head.

By accident, of course, the freelancer tried to make clear repeatedly.

But there is his own judgment to second-guess too. He’d thought he’d taken the guy’s measure during their one video call, all with the necessary precautions of using the VPN and the encryption, and the guy had struck him as smart, attentive.

That’s why I get the big bucks, after all.

But what he’s going to get this time around is a lot of shit for what happened, and he’s not enthusiastic about what he’s doing to try to fix things.

But sometimes you got to wing it.

Of course, winging it was exactly what the idiot had done.

Larsen makes the call.

The guy’s poor decision is why Larsen is now yelling at the man.

“So, if target one was not with target two, why didn’t you just walk?” he asks the man on the other end of the call.

Why didn’t you think that the plan was already off the rails, you fucking idiot, is what he’s thinking.

He interrupts the man on the other end of the phone. “—no, I sent that slip text because you asked me to, not that I’m not sorry I did, considering.” The other man is saying something more, but Larsen cuts him off.

“No, goddamnit! The whole idea was to wait to see if she showed up, and see if it was clear, and then proceed with the original action.”

He shuts his eyes. He mightily regrets the follow-up texts he’d inserted in the hope the woman would show up. He’s usually good with improvising, but his most recent example of improvisation is not so good.

Should have aborted, you asshole, he thinks, but holds off saying it, not entirely sure if his anger is directed only at the freelancer. He really wants a cigarette, but he’s not going to have this conversation huddling outside with other smokers where he could be overheard. That would be poor operational hygiene.

God forbid I smoke in the room.

He finds it funny that he worries about violating the hotel rules, considering all he does, including the present operation to kill a couple of greenies inconveniencing his boss’s clients. Probably billions of dollars’ worth of inconvenience.

“Yeah, I heard you that she never showed up, and I’m sorry as shit that I ever considered trying to finesse the texts to get her there,” he says.

He is indeed sorry. His gut had screamed Abort! but he himself had overthought the situation, probably because he’d picked up from the boss a species of delight in the undertaking, back when the operation was assigned, although he might have simply read that wrong.

“Yeah, the gun just went off,” he replies, but adds silently, You fucking moron, although he is now clearly directing this judgment as much to himself as to the idiot in the field. If this had been called off instead of waiting to see if the girl would show up, then the freelancer wouldn’t have killed the man, no harm, no foul.

“Yeah, sure the target tried to grab the gun, uh huh,” he replies tonelessly.

If you weren’t in the guy’s face, asshole, in the first fucking place! he keeps from screaming out loud.

Larsen can hear the wind over the phone. The freelancer is on the move, driving, but the guy’s not thinking, and for some reason Larsen simply can’t imagine, the guy is on his way toward the meeting location.

In a stolen law enforcement vehicle, he reminds himself. Fuck.

“Obviously,” Larsen says, “you’re not going to the meeting.” He is speaking calmly, even if he’s shouting in his thoughts, Idiot!

He tells the freelancer talent he needs him to ditch the vehicle and gives him the coordinates he had determined in his earlier planning would be a good place to do so.

“Let me see if we can pull a delicious donut out of this pile of shit,” he tells the man on the phone, instructing him to keep the same extraction coordinates, about a two-hour hike from the vehicle ditch point.

Always a bad sign when I find myself using my father’s old expressions, he thinks. He half remembers his old man telling him it was some translation from a Norwegian saying.

It will take Larsen a little more than two hours to get out to the extraction coordinates, but he’s got no choice.

He tells the freelancer they can still find the girl after he picks him up. He tells the freelancer they can surveil the girl and see if they might wrap this up without further trouble. It doesn’t matter, Larsen tells him, if her suicide is in the original car or not. The murder doesn’t have to be followed immediately by the suicide, Larsen tells the man.

Larsen knows this is a stupid longshot. She’s at the meeting, according to the freelancer, and Larsen had immediately confirmed the text she’d sent claiming that, using his cell-server-installed shadow program. Craigson sure isn’t there at the meeting, being dead, so she’ll think something is wrong and the cops will be called, and so, over and out.

But he needs to get the freelancer thinking they can still pull this off. He texts the man with a confirmation of plan, telling him to lie low at the extraction point and wait for a rendezvous.

If law enforcement finds Craigson sooner rather than later, then even being out that way gets tricky.

Best not overthink any further, is what he’s decided. He has the hotel room for another two days, a day past when the security conference ends. He can get to Barstow and back, two hours each way, plus whatever other time needed.

The operation, he thinks, is now only cleanup, so he’ll have to buy a shovel.

Rocky is going to be unhappy.

Larsen’s interactions with the boss are minimal, and on this side of his work for Rocky the interactions are always carried out through encrypted channels. The rare face-to-face meetings are only for the public side of the relationship when he sometimes serves as a digital security consultant for the boss’s business management consultancy, but even then, he almost always meets with others in the company.

Sometimes his two roles cross over. A recent job involved installing a backdoor on a  server while doing a security audit as part of the process his boss undertakes for client corporations, something to do with business efficiency and management improvement. That job was at a law firm, and he can guess that firm handles many of his boss’s big clients.

They’ve got a clerk there on board just in case, not that the clerk actually knows Larsen since he always works asymmetrically with such assets, and they’ve never met.

Thinking about this isn’t getting anything done, he decides, trying not to scold himself.

He’s not succeeding.

The boss won’t be happy he’ll head to the Barstow environs, but there’s no other option at this point, he’s sure. The operation has badly screwed the pooch, and cleaning up the occasional pile of shit is also part of his job.

Not causing shit for Rocky is the point of my job, he reminds himself. The freelancer had looked good, and had been vouched for, but no references, of course, by the nature of the work being unattributed, but then you don’t go shopping for killers in the Sunday paper classifieds. And using the same freelancers too often carries its own risks, so he had decided to try again one of the other services because that was best practice, but he had ended up with this idiot.

He’s willing to admit the plan may have been a bit too complicated with too many moving parts, although the targets taking separate vehicles to their meeting was unexpected.

Unexpected! he thinks.

Fuck, he thinks.

Has he perhaps loved the application of planted phone texts a bit too much, he is finding himself wondering. One of his newer tech tools he’d been too eager to try.

I do love my fucking tech, he admits to himself.

He knows he has to get out there for the rendezvous, but before he goes, he takes a minute to write up a job submission for some BOLO locate services just in case he needs them.

I sure as hell hope not, he tells himself, but he knows he’ll need to find the young woman if there’s any chance to come up with something he can figure to fix the fuckup.

He also puts together a job request that will go through a heavily encrypted TOR routine to access one of the kill services he’s used before with never a problem. Now he wishes he’d started there.

Fuck.

The post Chapter 6: The Good Boss/Angry Boss Game first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Cyn walks back to her car, her steps and stride growing faster until she’s almost running. She slows, focusing on the instances of her earlier shoe prints, where sufficient wind-sifted sand has collected to catch an impression. She fiercely concentrates on retracing her steps back toward her rental.

She remembers nothing else about returning to the car. She’s surprised to find herself underway and her quick glance at her phone thrown onto the passenger seat shows she’s been driving only for a few minutes. Her rearview glance see nothing of the curve or the cut-faced looming rock, just the road she’s advancing along receding like a movie run backward. She feels nauseous again, but she keeps that in check with a sudden fury about backtracking the way she’d come, upset and angry she has to take the risk.

Everything’s a danger, she feels. She’s driving back toward the resort, thinking she’ll go straight past and make the Interstate instead, but a white vehicle is driving east on 247, covering ground like a bullet toward her. She fights to stay in her lane, to keep heading west and north, fights not to give in to her impulse to drive the car away, off road, into the scrub, away, away.

The pickup passes.

The driver, seen in a glimpse, is an old lady with tight gray curls fluttering in the air of the truck’s open window above a logo for Lucerne Valley Pecans. The woman lazily lifts a hand off the steering wheel as she passes, a greeting to another lonesome vehicle.

Shaking, she releases a breath as she watches the truck recede in her side mirror. Then she sets her eyes and thoughts to where she should be heading.

It’s not easy. She struggles to maintain her awareness of the road, still beset by cascades of tumbling thoughts and feelings of dread, and her flashing memories and formless old feelings and anxieties. She’s surprised. She had developed the belief, or habitually assumed, anyway, that her past and all the trouble that had followed on was long ago resolved. She hasn’t thought of her father for years.

Dead father.

Driving, she figures she owes her life to her father.

“Probably,” she says out loud in her rental car, trying to figure out where she needs to go, but still on the desert highway, trying not to press the accelerator to the floor, which is what her animal self seems intent on doing.

It occurs to her that the Chevy Bolt isn’t exactly a speed demon.

She tries to remember Barstow, which is up ahead. There’s the intersection of the county highway she’s on where she thinks it meets Interstate 15, just south before she hits the town.

The miles pass in a mix of dread, panic, and elation, the mix like a buzzing cloud that envelops her.

If I hadn’t stopped right at Mile Marker 27, I’d be dead.

If I had gone with Joe in one car, I’d be dead.

And some other part of her understands that if she hadn’t had the childhood trauma, she might have reacted differently. She almost never thinks about it, what happened when she was young, the force of habit of years now, but she certainly knows that seeing her father get shot right in front of her when she was eight qualified as childhood trauma.

She sniffs. No shit.

Her father shot by the police responding to the domestic violence call, one of those things she would never really get over, despite the therapy, the childhood PTSD work, her own history of dysfunction, the dissociative problems, and all the efforts to sort her out.

The relapse in her mid-teens, the trouble at school.

Acting out.

She had always thought that phrase was funny.

Hilarious.

Nothing feels remotely amusing.

Cyn is trying to figure out what she should do.

Part of her understands she should go to the authorities, but she knows she can’t, and part of her tells herself to just wait until she’s far enough away, far enough from that sheriff or deputy or whatever he was, far enough away from his colleagues even. She can’t know who to trust locally.

But what she really keeps telling herself is to go away, get away. She considers if Barstow is far enough away, but nowhere feels far enough away, not in any way. She only has the briefest flashes of such thoughts, though, because despite her effort, a darkness keeps coming over her, a cloudbank of blankness, a smothering static from which she only sporadically rouses herself before the absolute sense of annihilation propagates glimpses of her old living room, of the spike of bright that is her father’s white t-shirt disappearing with dark blood eating the light.

Cyn starts, seeing that the car has slowed, her foot has receded from the accelerator at some point beyond her recollection, the car barely rolling, already at the gravel edge. The crunch of the tires on gravel is the first real sensation to come through. She shakes her head, looks backward in a glance, and pulls back onto the road, toward speed.

Jesus, she tells herself.

She knows she has to get a grip on what was, is, happening, and as she makes the effort, she finds herself wondering if her childhood trauma is why she’s alive. Wouldn’t normal people have shouted or stepped out?

I’d be dead.

Thanks, Dad, Cyn suddenly thinks, and she starts giggling even as she knows she’s having another inappropriate reaction. She knows she has to settle herself and so is breathing deeply, slowly. She needs to go over what’s happened.

She had pulled over right at Mile Marker 27, that little green and white sign, the sort that’s everywhere but is almost always unnoticed. The text said mile marker 27, and she had pulled over, figuring he’d show up.

She’d been surprised Joe’s car wasn’t there, but somehow—well, the weird text? she tells herself now—knew that something was off, something had felt odd.

And then she had noticed the bounce of lights, the flashing subtle strange colors bouncing off the sun-lit rock on the other side of the road up at the far curve and she had known, somehow, had understood something was wrong, very wrong.

And then she had looked around the rock edge.

She sees it again in a flash that feels like she’s there again, there, seeing the man leaning into Joe’s car.

She tries to force her focus on the road she’s driving down.

A policeman, the sheriff, whatever and whoever that person is, had killed Joe.

The county highway has no other traffic, but she keeps drifting faster.

Whoa Nelly, she says to herself, and in this moment she is aware of the strangeness of it, she’s in a cowboy movie, rocketing through the desert.

“Whoa Nelly, indeed,” she says to the car, willing her foot back off the accelerator pedal.

She’s still in a stretch of the highway that looks the same as all the rest, same shallow rises of scrub, but she’s put dozens of miles between her and Joe and the sheriff, deputy.

Dead Joe.

She hadn’t screamed when the gun fired, which was good, of course, but then, she’d never been much of a screamer. She hadn’t run out, asking, What the fuck! but that’s because she already knew what just happened, and even still processing, she had already been ducking down.

And then time behind the giant rock formation had stretched, and she was in two places, flickering in and out of each.

It had finally occurred to her, moments or minutes later, that the man was sticking around. She heard him talking, muffled by distance and the mass of rock.

This had confused her, until it occurred to her he was sticking around for her to show up, she had suddenly been sure of it. Her body had gone still and cold with that knowledge.

And then she had received the text asking her where she was.

Imwaiting.

Her moment of brilliance had come, a moment of clarity among her bouts of confusion, panic, and flashes out of time.

She had taken up her phone and texted back.

Straining, she thought she could hear a text notification tone up the road, and he had muttered and sworn into the phone he was using, and she had chanced a peek and saw him pull out another phone.

“No,” he shouted into the first phone. “A new text from her.” “No shit, she sent it,” he had said, and then, “She was supposed to be in the fucking car!”

“Fuck!” he had yelled before saying, “Okay, okay,” and then he was gone, driving, flashing off to where she had hoped to send him.

And now here she is, speeding down the county highway in the other direction, past dust and dirt and rocks and scrub brown and black with the morning’s shrinking shadows, everything stretching along her sight, a corridor, a strobing tunnel of light and shadows in the morning sun.

And now here she is, speeding down the highway, wondering where she needs to go.

The post Chapter 5: Whoa Nelly first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

According to Alicia Soares, when Davin first talked to her about providing consulting services regarding an online newspaper, the unusual problem with getting local news in the Berkshires wasn’t that there were no local papers, but rather, there were far too many.

Her argument, some three-plus years before, was that too many papers meant they not only cannibalized each other’s potential ad revenue but also offered different target audiences, so there wasn’t one place to go to for a full pitch and perspective on the local goings on. Davin has been an intermittent subscriber to the digital edition of the one “big” paper, The Berkshire Eagle, a daily that tried to handle all of Berkshire County from North Adams and Williamstown on the northern border all the way to Great Barrington and Sheffield to the south, but which acted like only Pittsfield, the main metropolis and county seat stuck pretty much dead center of the county, generated news. The Eagle only rarely carried news of the far reaches of Berkshire County, which is one reason why he’s currently a nonsubscriber. Another reason is because even the Pittsfield news is typically overwhelmed by the rash of AP stories that populate this daily, and he still reads The New York Times for national and international news. The Eagle is also chronically rumored to be on its way out, changing ownership several times in the past decade.

He’s sitting at his desk, letting himself reminisce about South County Interactive and how he got himself involved. He’s letting his mind wander mainly because there’s a work order and project definition he’s supposed to be putting together for his subcontractor who does the API and software coding tweaks on the SCI platform. The current requirement involves changes to the metrics engine, so there’s likely to be fussy PHP backend integration with the SQL database he’s argued needs updating.

Be careful what you wish for, he reproaches himself. He knows he has something of a knack for pushing for improvements on any project he gets involved with, just like he knows he also has the unfortunate knack for underestimating the time he’ll be required to spend pursuing any such improvements.

He thinks of his present situation as a good case in point. At least SCI is a pretty good service, he feels, and his strategy of the self-erecting site means this online service delivers a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in South County.

In his early years in Housatonic, if he wanted to know about Great Barrington or Lenox or Stockbridge, Lee, or Sheffield, or any of these towns’ select board or planning board meetings, or traffic problems, or if he desired a thorough bead on obituaries, real estate transactions, district court cases, and school sports, the old south county weekly, The Berkshire Record, was his best bet but hardly all that helpful considering its light content listings. Even the news—except for the local school sports—was hit-or-miss, not that SCI itself doesn’t have a long way to go in comprehensive news reporting.

And Alicia keeps hinting I should write a lot of it.

But before SCI, the publication that was the place to see what was going on around town for dining or entertainment or tag sales or cars for sale, was the free shopper, Shoppers’ Guide, but it comes, of course, with a complete and intentional absence of any news reporting. There were also several periodicals focused on art and culture, ranging from the local to the wider region that included northwest Connecticut, upper Hudson Valley, and even southern Vermont. There were magazines covering health, yoga, and metaphysics, and one with a slant toward women’s issues, and others yet that covered real estate or home interior design, and of course, the stream of glossy and pulp realty porn publications. There was even a commerce weekly covering Berkshire businesses, and he finds this publication to be okay, just not that widely read, including by him. And then there were a bunch of online efforts from both the print publications and some digital standalones, all rather different one from the other, and most now a matter of historical interest because they all pretty much shared the characteristic thinness endemic to such efforts, and thus little income generation potential and therefore little in the way of actual content staff or longevity.

He brings up the bookmarked tabs he’s been referencing in his effort to more clearly understand the issues of using PHP with SQL, but it’s another nice day, and he really wants to be in the garden or in the studio.

He sighs.

No such luck, he tells himself.

Davin had made his original pitch to Alicia when she’d been—for what proved a very brief tenure—the editorial side of The Berkshire Record. It hadn’t amounted to anything, despite her interest and her telling him she had great hopes for the Record, including the online component she was trying to push the publisher to fund. She didn’t need to be convinced of the opportunity in the marketplace for publishing something that carried online news more people would want to read and therefore generate more ad revenue. She’d been quite positive in her attitude and knew it would take time and investment to pull off the Record remake. Her optimism was largely based on the new publisher’s oft-stated commitment to back her, and the publisher was putting up real money for building a bigger reporting staff.

He’d gotten excited about the prospect for The Berkshire Record online work back then, but he didn’t get any go-ahead for writing any specifications, and then Covid hit, and his occasional email reminders to Alicia got replies that took more and more time and increasingly cryptic responses, and then none, and then he learned about the Record being sold.

He knows he’d been half-relieved, thinking he’d be able to finish a series of pieces in the studio and restart his conversations with two different area galleries about scheduling shows. Not that either were then open, but the Covid shutdown couldn’t last all that long, he’d assumed.

Gwen had been kept on salary, but money was tight, and he doesn’t like to think about his income during this period. There had been a report or white paper here or there, but he’s sure that time of low billings hadn’t helped the marriage.

But, hey, I’m working now, he tells himself, shuffling through his notes.

Davin looks at the sites he’s pulled up on his monitor and groans. It seems like he needs to catch up on the details of any and all new developments in the technical process of what he’s trying to update, and he knows he’s never been all that adept at application program interfaces.

He’s interested enough in the SCI work, and he remains impressed Alicia hadn’t let a little thing like losing her editorial position put too much of a damper on her goals. They’d reconnected well over a year ago now, a date easy enough for him to keep track of, coming shortly after the legal end of his marriage and the stint of self-imposed isolation he had fallen into afterward.

Alicia had called him and restarted their discussions. She’d made it clear she felt she’d had to do something because the way her career was going was a problem. Not a problem financially though, she’d pointed out, talking about Walter, her husband, who worked as a trader and was good at it, even better than good. No, money hadn’t ever been a problem, and there always seemed to be more than enough money, mostly from his family. The house in Sheffield had been bought outright and the renovations expensive, but fully paid off, and there was the life insurance payout too after her husband died.

He’d been on game and could see her interest in his expertise, but the conversation turned stranger yet, their having adjourned the meeting to one of the small restaurants in town. Sitting at the bar with her, he’d been surprised to learn the husband had died in a car crash, and Alicia talked about having to figure out the financial situation in detail. That had come with a few surprises too, including her discovery that her late husband had bought the girlfriend Alicia had had no idea he had a place of her own, except the Manhattan co-op was still in Walter’s name. There wasn’t any question of his girlfriend getting the co-op anyway, considering she died along with Walter in the crash, Alicia had noted, seemingly matter-of-fact.

The estate was worth almost five million, all told, she mentioned, which had surprised him, not because of the sum, but because of her openness about her financial resources. She did make it clear that much of it was in the real estate, but with liquid assets too, especially after selling off the co-op.

He had certainly paid attention.

She seemed intent on telling her story, which was that the move to the Berkshires had been her choice because of The Berkshire Record job offer and because her husband had gone independent, a day trader, and could live anywhere. The job offer had been compelling, but she had told him she wasn’t entirely surprised that in the months of increasing ad revenues the publisher took a buyout offer, and the new owner looked at the editorial costs and decided to trim staff, starting with Alicia. She talked about how she had wanted to be a newspaper person going all the way back to high school, and she had never considered any other major than journalism and had spent the first few years post-college on the staff of a mid-market newspaper. After that, she had found work as a freelancer because she’d gotten married and they were moving a lot as Walter jumped from one opportunity to another as he worked his way through better and better investment companies.

It had been a strange afternoon, and Davin still wonders how much that may have been due to their finishing off a second round of martinis as she talked. He had considered going for a third round but found himself noticing she was quite attractive, in her forties, probably, but in good shape, and with the short, cropped brown-blond hair that seemed right for a successful and fit woman of the world.

He had abandoned the idea of another drink, half-amused and half-confused by his turn of attention. But he’d felt there was grief still forAlicia, but mixed with anger, and maybe some feelings of relief too. But she still doesn’tstrikehimasdwellingonfeelingsalltoomuch.

Instead, she dwells on the business as best he can tell.

The two of them have never again had any conversation like that.

The bet with her online newspaper seems likely to pay off, he thinks, although he’s sure Alicia still keeps her fingers crossed. And the competition has been withering away, and the pandemic certainly hadn’t helped those publications. Most of the print efforts have collapsed due to a combination of pulp price hikes, ever- increasing energy costs, and the die-off of those customers who still retain the habit of reading print, a demographic increasingly small and increasingly economically irrelevant.

Still, that could be one big challenge, and Davin fears the demographics of Berkshire County aren’t particularly encouraging for an online newspaper. Out of all Massachusetts counties, Berkshire remains at the top of the list for average age, leading the state in older population, and it’s been getting worse that way for a long time. Not that there’s any mystery about this trend, he knows, considering the county also remains the most economically depressed, which means most of those young people who could seek work elsewhere did seek work elsewhere.

But then, there are the second-home owners and the tourists, and there’s also the newly-resurrected passenger train services from New York and Boston. House sale prices are among the lowest in the state and more and more people taking notice of this for some time, even if mostly out-of-towners, as the house prices seem quite high enough to most long-time residents. Prices went even higher during Covid with city-folk buying up property in their escape from cities as work-at-home practices took hold across many businesses.

Many of these city-folk stayed.

Berkshire County is close to New York—but not too close—which means a lot of affluent city people seek vacation homes, or at least vacations, among the green and relatively cool hills of the county. It’s beyond dispute that Berkshire County is beautiful with its rolling lands, small farms, river valleys, and worn, gentle mountains, and a good number of big state parks and forests help keep it that way. The Berkshires is also home to cultural institutions of surprising quality, the poster child being Tanglewood, summer home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and still going strong, but there’s plenty of art, theatre, summer camps, luxury health spas, yoga retreats, and outdoor hiking, biking, and camping activities as other big draws. When such folk are here, they want to know what there is to do, where to eat, where to spend money.

He tells himself to get to work, and for the next few minutes actually makes a dent in the project definition, but he realizes that he needs to confirm the likely scale of API work. Before he goes back to his open tabs, he checks his email.

He still has at least one room to let, so he checks frequently to look at inquiries. There were two in his mailbox earlier this morning, both getting the form response of polite “No Thanks.” There are now three new ones, and it takes him just a couple of minutes to reject two of them, but the third is well-written and answers the questions he’s asked of the applicants, an action far rarer than he would ever have supposed.

The woman, probably young, he guesses, works a full-time job and is a part-time server at one of his favorite restaurants, Farm Table.

Deidre is an unusual name these days, he thinks.

He wonders if she’s served him, but he knows the chances are slim since he eats out infrequently.

Employed, can pay rent, works at least some evenings, so less intrusive maybe, he wonders.

He replies with a request to speak on the phone, providing several time windows.

He’s been amazed at the number of responses, although he’s not entirely surprised since housing is tight in the area. What does shock him is how poorly so many people present themselves in their queries. There have been a few exceptions, including Chaplin, his first house share, but he is worried if Chaplin will work out, especially since the safety deposit payment remains partly unpaid. But Chaplin likes the idea of substituting in-kind work, both with garden and carpentry labor, and he’s already made up the shortfall. Davin’s already growing concerned he’ll end up paying Chaplin, considering all the projects there are to do.

And now a restaurant worker with a day job could work out, and the extra rent income will certainly help him. She seems more financially steady than Chaplin, and there should be plenty of additional restaurant shifts come high season.

In the high season, Davin knows, New Yorkers rent cars by the thousands to make the quite pleasant ride to the Berkshires—pleasant, at least, once that ride gets out of Metro New York. Increasingly, tourists and second homeowners are taking the reestablished passenger service that connects with the Metro North commuter rails out of Grand Central Station, then transferring at Southeast Junction, passing through upper northwest Connecticut to run into Massachusetts with stations through Sheffield, Great Barrington, and Lee, all the way to Pittsfield where other new connections will eventually head farther northward to North Adams and into Vermont. The Berkshires draw visitors from Metro Boston too via the straight shot west down the Mass Pike and the east/west rail that’s been reestablished through Pittsfield. The Berkshires also sees its share of overseas travelers and west- coasters, and even with the economy down and energy prices back up, the Berkshires is a lovely and easy place to go for a lot of people, and people with money, at that. That had been Alicia’s argument, at any rate, and nearly a year into the venture, the online publication is making money. Not all that much money yet but heading in the right direction, and this makes Davin happy because she’s had to start paying out some of the revenue to him. He had contracted out as content management consultant, and he’d put together the RFP and vendor options for the South County Interactive platform, and he’d vetted the various proposals for her until they had a plan in place, but he’d deferred part of his payment until certain revenue marks were hit.

After last month’s tally, the revenue has reached the first trigger amount.

Davin pulls a copy of the latest revenue report from a pile of papers on the surface of Gwen’s old desk, and he finds himself wondering if the day may come when Alicia finds herself a bit envious of the way Davin made his deal.

And then he looks out his window and sees the light will fade soon, and he groans.

Time to figure out the PHP SQL parameters.

The post Chapter 4: Local Papers, Plural Rural first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Cyn remains behind the rock of the massive cut-through, the rock that blocks her view of the road farther up and the vehicles off the shoulder.

She keeps getting lost in the echoes of what she’s seen, and she’s trying to fight against the ever-rising static in her mind.

She forces herself to understand she isn’t eight years old, she isn’t slumped against the far wall of that childhood living room, but she keeps finding herself thinking of the odd shape of her father bleeding, her father slipped down on the hall floor, and of the police lights and the ambulance lights strobing through the windows and the still-open front door—of the cops crowding the living room, stepping in and out of the front door, her mother keening.

She can’t remember what came next. She has never had a memory of this, but someone had surely come and taken her away.

She’s trying to stir herself. She thinks about creeping back to her car down the county highway beyond the curve, but the idea that the man—policeman, or sheriff, or deputy—might see her freezes that idea with panic.

The man who killed Joe.

She knows the occupant in the car isn’t Joe anymore but something else now. The blood and other matter sprayed against the rear windshield makes that clear enough. Sweat creeps over her, and she’s having trouble breathing.

She’s wishing with a growing roar that she never saw Joe’s car, or the other one, the white one with flashing lights, or the uniformed man, stark images along with what seems a thousand other high-contrast concurrent impressions, including her sense of the man’s surprise and anger at the blood.

Cyn sits up, her back now no longer pressed against the massive and looming rock, her eyes no longer shut against the morning sun. The rock behind her is already warming, the sun already hot, and in the next moment she closes her eyes again and almost surrenders to sleep, but she fights this feeling because she knows on the other side of the massive rock is the shoulder of Route 247, the small county highway in the middle of the desert where Joe is dead.

She’s getting lost in furtive waves of half-thought notions and cascading grasps for explanations that pulse in and out of her feelings, and then she knows with a wave of certainty that if she hadn’t taken her own rental and had instead gone with Joe, she would be dead too.

Her body feels cold, even against the growing hot face of the sun-bright rock.

She pulls in the dry air of the scrub desert in a long stuttering breath, and it’s as if she’s in an odd well of gravity, a mix of bright light and shadow of past and present, and she’s trying to bring herself back.

She’s trying to form an idea about what to do.

She’s trying not to think of Joe alone in the car, or of the blood on the back glass, part bright and part dark in early morning sun and shadow. Her eyes are squeezed shut but she sees it all, the bright flashing cop lights ghost coloring the rock cut on the opposing side of the curve of the road, the cop lights coloring the man as he leaned into Joe’s car, and the moment too that burst red against the car’s rear glass.

But now she finds herself getting up, and with animal caution she peers back around toward the two vehicles, peeking past the huge cut rock, looking up at Joe’s rental and the policeman standing, except the man isn’t a policeman, the uniform is nothing like a city cop, but a sheriff, or a deputy, and the man is walking back to the white patrol SUV that has a circle of gold on the door and lettering and a central image she can’t make out, but the lettering reads San Bernardino County. She slides back around, back down, sitting on the ground, certain of her danger and her need to remain unseen, quiet.

Her eyes shut.

She sees her father smile at her above his blooming blood.

Dad, she thinks.

Her eyes fly open and she looks around, sees the scrub extending forever, without end, the scruff of dusty brown plants and the dirt, sand, the curved-back giant rocks and every small pebble, a bird, tiny, high up, a lone cloud, a contrail even higher.

Get a fucking grip, she tells herself.

And she whispers, “Okay, okay, okay,” over and over. She’s fighting for control of her panicked and jumping thoughts.

In her linen jacket pocket is her phone. It’s vibrating, muffled.

Fuck! she silently screams and even that feels out loud, and her heart leaps up into her throat. Even this seems too loud, her blood beating noisier than the vibrating phone she tries to bury with her body.

Her phone goes silent.

Her phone chirps of text notification.

She listens, new panic rising, but she hears nothing but the hint of the man speaking into his phone, those several dozens of feet up beyond the rock, and she rises shakily and chances another glance.

Deputy, sheriff? she wonders, seeing him back to his vehicle, his lower torso hidden behind that vehicle’s front end, his phone up to his ear. He’s half turned away from her.

Cyn slips back.

She pulls the phone out and sees she’s just received a text from Joe.

Hey, where r u? Imwaiting

She wonders at it vacantly, and then she hears the man say something, but she can’t make it out exactly, but she catches some of what he’s saying, he seems to be talking loudly enough on his phone, but her hearing is off, her ears still overflowing with surging runs of pounding blood.

And then she knows with a moment of clarity those earlier texts this morning weren’t from Joe but somehow from the man.

She knows what she must do.

She texts, thumbs moving with strange calm, At meeting.

She adds, Thought you were going early. Where R U?

She hears a distant ringtone play and peeks around the rock edge in time to see the man pulling out a different phone. The first phone is still held up to his ear, he’s still talking, and then the man goes still as he looks at this second phone.

Cyn pulls back and sits against the hard rock, concentrating on what she can hear. Her eyes pop open when the man starts cursing, his fury carrying past the massive rock still between them. Then a car door slams shut and the vehicle starts off away, kicking up enough gravel for Cyn to hear it ping off Joe’s car.

Cyn remains sitting, a brief staticky relief rushing over her.

And then she’s back, brought back by her body needing something.

I need to shit, she tells herself, surprised.

She’s up, she feels the pressure, but her whole body is also about as clamped up as possible. She’s moving with quick clumsy steps, stumbling on the tiny rocks underfoot, her steps giddy with reprieve.

She’s trying to quiet herself.

She’s suddenly powerfully thirsty.

She realizes the sun is hot.

She can feel the sweat blossoming beneath her arms already going dry. She thinks about the bottles of water back in her car, back down the road a bit, around the curve, and this makes her think about Joe’s car on the other side of the rock, half-leaning off the shoulder.

Joe is dead, she tells herself, one part of her, but this is met with a silence from a hot and fearful depth that’s swallowing what she’s just again admitted.

Her body, her abdomen seems to be twisting, a pulsing twist back and forth. Her body feels like it’s loosening gravity, she’s starting to float, a wail rising up inside her in preverbal sounds.

A quieter part of her tries to take stock.

She knows her car is parked, pulled over on the shoulder some way behind her, and still half-crouched she can see through some scrub just a glimpse of the car, back at the start of the slow long curve that’s kept the car out of sight from the roadside ahead.

Weeds, but dry, crinkly—she thinks, fixating on the scrub and landscape she doesn’t know. Not in Kansas anymore, she tells herself. Fuck you, she tells herself.

Her bowels cramp. She moves to hold herself against a midsized rock, clumsily pulls down her panties, her left hand now holding up her skirt, her right hand steadying against the slope of the rock she’s squatting next to.

Her right hand, her left hand, arms trembling. Cyn is trembling.

Breathe, she tells herself, trying for a calm voice within, and then she tries this voice out loud.

“Breathe,” she says, but this isn’t a calm voice, it’s shaky and hoarse and a whisper.

And then she’s throwing herself forward, both arms out, her hands planting as widely as possible, but some drops of vomit splash on them. She can feel it even as she heaves, spitting, but when she looks, she sees only one or two drops on one sleeve of the dress jacket, the off-white one, the fashion brand she cares less than nothing about except that Joe bought it for her, a welcome gift when she’d started the new job.

Before we started fucking.

“Shit,” she says. So that I look right for the meetings, she tells herself. She’s standing up.

I guess I had to puke, she tells herself, some strange calmness in this thought.

She stands up, tugging at her underwear as her skirt flops down.

She glances down her front, smoothing the fabric.

Who wears a dress jacket to the desert? she finds herself asking, or maybe it’s just another random thought, these seem to be coming and going—all sorts of things.

So that’s what a continental breakfast looks like, she thinks, looking at the ground darkening brown with the wet vomit.

She’s feeling calmer.

She stands up and concentrates on pulling the skirt straight.

She looks around, glances back down at her throw up, and she pictures the impressive breakfast spread put out by the out-of-the-way desert resort, coming in the afternoon before the meeting this morning.

This image makes her laugh, but it’s a strangled sob that comes out.

She’s having furious on-and-off conversations with herself for what seems like hours, days.

Her dress jacket’s pockets are tight, and it’s a struggle to get the phone back out. She feels like she can’t do it, her arm an independent clumsy creature, and then the phone is in front of her, a surprise.

It hasn’t been very long at all.

She sees she’s been here only a few minutes.

I thought I had to shit but I really had to puke, she finds herself repeating as she moves away from her vomit and sets herself back down gingerly, settling down like an ancient woman, like a dying person might. She slowly leans back, but her eyes fly open.

She doesn’t like what she sees when she shuts her eyes. The blood, the man with Joe, the pop that keeps repeating in her mind like a bad spot on a scratched-up CD, the clipped pinging sound of it all, a loud and running rip.

She’s got to go.

She’s trying to piece together everything, and the pieces are trying to fit. After a moment, she says out loud, “Number one, my phone.” She picks it up from where she’d laid it on the dirt beside her.

She’d gotten those messages on her phone, those messages.

That’s important, she thinks.

She reads the most recent message.

“Number two,” Cyn says in a whisper. “Dead.”

She knows this. She sure as hell isn’t going to go out to the road, to Joe’s car, to check.

Because he is dead, she thinks. And dead men can’t send texts.

She picks up her phone again and scrolls through the texts.

Com on don’t be mad, is the first one, supposedly from this morning, less than thirty minutes back.

My life is done U ruined it, she had replied, although she hadn’t texted this, except this was now on her phone as Sent. But she had been too puzzled by the Mile 27 meet-up text, the only one she’d really seen while driving.

She hadn’t replied to any of the texts.

She had not really read them until now, not really. She’d been in a rush, the new printouts done, and she was in her rental heading out to meet Joe and the investor executive.

She knows Joe was excited for the big meeting, had left earlier. Up and at ’em, he’d actually said through the door of her room, his knock knocking her awake.

He’d sounded excited through the adjoining door. He was already yelling through the door about some changes they’d have to make with the contracts.

She’d known he was excited, the meeting likely to be a big win for them, a first for getting this kind of investment group to pledge fossil fuel divestment, turning away a big pipeline project for one thing. The changes to the contracts she saw as she’d made the changes, were more specific language about the pipeline.

She’d been glad for the trip, a chance to be with Joe without the eyes that might be watching, without worry his wife might drop by the office with the kids, and she’d been giddy with the idea of relaxing away from the signs and hints she always had to watch. But she also had been excited about the trip because she was going to Joshua Tree after she was done at the meeting.

On her own. It had been too long since she’d done that sort of thing.

Cyn sees all her plans, the time with Joe, the camping, the time alone, the hiking, all emerging and fading, just parts of her distractions and drifting thoughts.

But she’s trying to settle herself, gather herself.

Joe had texted about Mile Marker 27. He certainly wasn’t likely to pull over and text her weird messages. Maybe an On your way? query, possibly. Maybe Don’t forget the new printouts, although that too was unlike him. He knew she was competent.

It certainly wasn’t like him to text to ask if she’d taken his pistol, which she sees as she scrolls the text thread upward.

Why did u take gun?

Which he doesn’t even have one, she tells herself, but a wave of what’s happened washes over her again, her underarms prickling a new wave of sweat, and she swallows hard against the hint of nausea.

Which he didn’t have, she corrects herself.

Never had had, as far as she knows, not when he was alive, not when dead. She tries to push the new wave of panic back down.

She knows she hadn’t written the next text either. Need to tell you something, a reply from her phone that she reads as part of the text thread, the time of the text recorded as two hours ago, but she’d had her phone with her as she finished up with the contracts.

And Joe’s reply, coming much more recently, wasn’t Joe, not like him, not the way he talked, or texted.

Meet me at mile marker 27. I’ll wait hurry.

She had already been underway, had stopped as soon as she came to the mile marker, puzzled Joe wasn’t yet there. She had pulled over and gotten out to stretch her legs and look at the view.

She looks at the phone’s time and sees the message was sent less than twenty minutes ago. Not even.

Joe was alive, she realizes.

She holds her phone loose in her hand and a flushing panic rises up again, sweeping over her entire body. Despite her efforts not to, she wonders about Joe’s last minutes. What had he thought, what had he been feeling?

She’s got to go.

Cyn gets up and begins moving back toward her car. She stays off the road to keep behind the rock mass that had hidden her original approach. She starts retracing her shortcut that cuts the curve of the road.

She won’t look back.

In her mind she fiercely keeps the mass of rock as the only thing behind her.

The post Chapter 3: Mile Marker 27 first appeared on David Guenette.