Not much to update this week. Some further revamping of our Feral story/plot line. The changes are looking good. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, here’s part two of Hungry Harry. If you missed the first instalment, you can check it out here and be sure to subscribe and/or share the love so others can enjoy it as well!
Hungry Harry: Part 2
By Mike Connell
New Hope, 2015
He’d zoned out for a bit, he realized. His cigarette ash was long. Drooping. The next drag would be the end of it. Any movement shattering its fragile imperfection. So he just sat there, staring at it. Burning slowly away.
Habit won out and he brought the cigarette to his mouth, sucking back to finish it off, the ash instantly falling across the legs of his favorite brown overalls. He held the smoke in briefly, before expelling it with a deep sigh and flicking the butt out the window.
He reached over and turned the music up. Way up.
The air smells sweet, the air smells sick
He never smiles, his mouth merely twists
The breath in my lungs feels clinging and thick
But I know his name, he's called Mr. D...
It was a busy week. The inside of his van was proof of it.
Dried blood. A maggot here and there. Feces. Actual shit. The worst. It didn’t always happen. The shit. It all depended on the condition of the passenger. Or, at least, what condition they were in when it happened.
And one of these days, he's gonna set you free
Human skulls is hanging right around his neck
The palms of my hands is clammy and wet...
But still, he liked his job. Jobs.
Not many people know that just about anyone can transport dead bodies in the state of Pennsylvania. Private contractors with no special permits or licenses. Chimeran or otherwise.
Harry was a body transporter. A member of a little-known, but growing Uber-like service that required little more than a driver’s license, a vehicle...
Lord, I was dancing, dancing, dancing so free...
Dancing, dancing, dancing so free
Dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me
Dancing with Mr. D...
And a willingness to get up close and personal with the newly dead.
None of which was a problem for Harry. He loved his job, and he was good at it.
His mum’s clairvoyance must have been in high gear when she picked this place. She couldn’t have landed a better place to settle down with this vocation in mind.
Harry likened New Hope to that town, Lakeside, in Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods.
He had never read much, in terms of scope. What he had read, he had devoured, and this was one of the books he couldn’t get enough of.
Anyway, New Hope. Lakeside. A seemingly safe, impenetrable place. Nothing bad ever happened there. On the surface.
In Lakeside’s defense, the residents were in thrall to the town’s benefactor. In exchange for generations of… protection, the mysterious character would take his yearly due payment, as he saw it. A child sacrifice, which would inevitably be written off as a runaway. The town never suspected.
That was Harry’s fictionalized characterization of New Hope. The residents seemed to cling to what the town’s name implied… it was a good place. Really. And don’t let anyone tell you different.
No matter that hitchikers coming through would often be waylaid, or the homeless and indigent were there one day, and gone the next. The people in New Hope just seemed to look past it.
So, despite its rural charm and, of course, its name, New Hope had become one of the unluckiest places to visit in America. The townsfolk would never admit to it, but over the past couple of years, the town had recorded the highest number of accidental deaths than any other city, town, borough, or—for that matter—state.
So, it wasn’t really clairvoyance, was it, he asked himself. What is it they—the shrinks—call it? A self-fulfilling prophecy?
Ya, well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Either way, for Harry, business was booming.
Harry wasn’t just a body transporter. He was also a certified crematorium technician. It probably doesn’t require a lot of explaining, but tying both of these jobs together made sense. The driving was at-your-service. You got the call, you went to pick up.
With Mr. D, with Mr. D
Cremation was on more of a schedule, but one tied to the timing of the drop-offs. He had to bring most of the bodies to the crematorium anyway. Eventually. Win-win. Right? Well, except for his, um, passengers, that is.
How does one become a crematorium technician, you might ask? Or a body transporter?
Well, before Harry could tell that story, he would have to tell this one: There weren’t too many Chimerans in the death business. He had checked. Well, there were few people, period – powers or not – who were in the business.
Normally, being Chimeran opened up doors of employment opportunity, from what Harry had heard and seen. But for him and his mum, those doors had usually been shut hard and fast.
His mum’s abilities hadn't been reliable enough to make her an ongoing asset, and his… his were just too weird.
When he was registered by the ICA, they classified him as a pyrolytic. Kind of like matter absorption. He could eat just about anything. Rocks. Wood. Metal. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything cool with it. It powered his body to a degree. Not in any super-powered way. Sometimes, depending on what he ate, he got a bigger burst. But generally it was a longer burn. Efficiency. If he ate, say, some coal, his body could break it down and use that energy for weeks.
For all intents and purposes, his digestive system was like a plasma gasifier. He could put anything into his gullet, consume it and his body could live off the resulting power conversion. It did the same with regular food, too, just like everyone else. But there’s a reason the major utility players don’t use the four (are there five now? Harry could never remember) food groups to produce energy. Sure, a balanced diet does a body right, but Harry’s Chimeran physiology required some more… robust fuel sources.
One might think there would be a number of opportunities for someone with those abilities, but Chimeran or not, people still have to like you, and be okay working around you, to give you a job.
So the death business would do just fine.
Here endeth part two. Stay tuned for part three next week!