About this title: This is it. The end of the world as we know it. Stuff hits the fan. No rule of law. Timelines are converging rapidly, but why? Is it CERN, Mandela Effect or Planet X? What is real and what is not? In a brutal landscape with very few survivors, here is one man who has turned his back on a world that has disowned him, and yet the world will not let him simply walk away. Rating: HIGH controversy.
(An excerpt.)
It was a time of Devils. Oh, it wasn’t so apparent at first, at least to those people who weren’t paying attention. Those people always went to their meaningless little jobs to collect their meaningless little paychecks, to pay their meaningless little bills. They always did their job! They always paid their bills! They always did what they were told! If… If only once those people had pulled their heads out of their ass, then maybe all of this wouldn’t have happened the way it did!
“Calm down.” Charles said, mostly because he’d taken to saying things out loud. That was because there was no one around to talk to. Not anymore.
He was in his studio apartment. The two windows had their curtains drawn. The only door was shut. Charles had to do it this way because it had become so bright outside it was becoming impossible to see, even with sunglasses. He stood before his sink, with his hands on the faux marble counter top. His eyes stared at his reflection in the large mirror mounted to the wall. Charles scanned the silicone at the base of the glass. He made a mental note that he would have to replace that decaying glue one day, although he had no idea of when he could do it. Maybe there was no usable glue left anywhere in the world.
“My name is Charles Foster.” He said at his mirror image. Ever since people started to forget things, even important things, he’d made it a habit to remind himself of who he was. “I was born in June of 1980. I am a Gemini. I am not a Taurus like the assholes at NASA kept trying to tell me. They can’t change history. NASA can’t change history!”
Charles caught himself before he really went on a tantrum. There was a time when people thought him a very patient man. That was before things changed. Everything had changed, however, and now Charles argued even with himself.
He started talking again. “I, uh, I am thirty-six years old. I was married for almost thirteen years in my old reality. I had four kids.” He paused there for a few seconds, because it was hard for him to face up to what had happened to his life. “In my old reality, I divorced my wife three years ago. In this new fucking place, I got divorced six years ago. My youngest son was never born here.”
A long moment passed, before Charles could push away the memory of his kids. His ex-wife had taken them to another fucking state. All the way to fucking Utah!
“I live in San Diego, California.” Charles went on. “I was… I worked in retail for a long time, before shit turned sour. After that, I took whatever job I could get. I was a taxi dispatcher at the airport. That was my last job. Before that I worked at the Marriot. I did odd jobs there, like directing traffic in the parking lot and telling people where the special events were. Mostly… Mostly I helped set up the tables and seating at special events. In a pinch I helped take luggage up to the guest rooms, but the regular bellmen didn’t like that very much because I got some of their tips.” He sighed. “Man, I miss the fucking free lunches at the hotel.”
The Marriot employed a staff of a couple hundred people, including a small host of full-time cooks. They didn’t have a big variety in the dishes they served to their fellow employees, but at least it was free. If you were careful about what you put on your plate, it could even be healthy. Charles remembered the salads he’d prepare with cheese crumbs, raisins and sunflower seeds, and the sides of steamed vegetables including carrots, corn and peas. Of course, occasionally he would stuff his mouth with fried chicken, hamburgers or pizza, like the fat-asses he worked with did. All of those fat-asses were probably dead now, he figured.
“Goddamn, I miss those free lunches.” Charles reminisced.
Because he didn’t earn that much money, and because the state was taking away so much in Child Support, he sometimes went to work a little early or left a little late. That was so he could eat twice instead of once, like he was supposed to.
He wasn’t the only one doing this. The maids did this all the time until their supervisors would catch them. They’d get fired, only to be replaced by new maids a day or two later. A lot of people were desperate to keep their jobs, Charles recalled. They would do anything if they feared they might get dismissed. Anything.
Not Charles. He didn’t give a shit if he got fired or not. He simply stopped caring about his life after the divorce, after his ex-wife had taken his kids up to Utah. That bitch had spread her legs for the first guy to wink at her. This bothered Charles a lot at first, because who knew what kind of man his ex was bringing into her new place, where his kids were living. That didn’t bother him too much anymore because he couldn’t do anything about it.
What did irk him was that she’d gone up to Utah with four of his kids, but after the reality shift he only had three kids left. His youngest son had vanished, and so had the memory of him in the minds of everyone else. Even the pictures in his picture album were gone, replaced by different shots he’d never taken. Charles was the only person who still remembered the little boy. Inside his little apartment, he still had the toy cars, the coloring books and the crayons his son had once played with. Those weren’t gone, but his son’s pictures were. It didn’t make sense.
“Think about something else.” Charles told his reflection, letting go another long sigh. “I, uh, I didn’t get fired like the stupid maids. I could have, but I didn’t. One of the supers came in one day for a soft drink. He’d seen me in the lunchroom earlier, and he saw me in there a second time after work. The reason he didn’t bitch at me was because I did my job right. None of the other assholes did their job. They were always on their phones or slacking off, or stealing hotel supplies when nobody was looking.”
This sobered him up a little more. “I was one of the idiots who did their jobs. But you know what? I used my brain! I didn’t sit in the lunchroom and soak up the garbage the TV news was shoving down our throats! I ate my food and I got the hell out of there! Let those other morons fall for the mainstream bullshit news, but not me!”
Charles wasn’t good at a lot of things, but he was good at doing simple tasks better than others, without having a boss looking over his shoulder all the time. If Charles was a super, undoubtedly he could do a better job than his boss, because his boss was a piece of shit with hair on top. That’s right, Charles could have done better than the man in charge of him. Hell, his boss couldn’t even interview new people who came in looking for jobs. Charles knew how to fucking interview! Other things he knew how to do were to connect the dots, to keep things organized and to keep things running smoothly. Those were the reasons he was still alive!
“I’m still alive.” He comprehended. “I’m still alive, when everybody else is dead.”
Books By Raymond Towers 