A Small Gray Dot

I would’ve left all of the firearms because I had enough guns, and didn’t need any more at the time, but I needed extra cash so, except for the 9mm, which I kept, the rest I sold and used some of the money to pay a doctor to look at my nose. Unfortunately, it was several days before I went and he said I should’ve come sooner, so because of that, my nose would always have a crook in it. It wasn’t bad. The doctor said a little plastic surgery would fix it right up if I wanted to go that route. That type of surgery was getting to be iffy, and the break caused no impairment to my breathing so I never bothered. Besides, I had better things to do with my money.

Roy Winston called later. Seemed Abe Harlow had another reason for hiding out in that isolated area and I’d accidentally helped catch a fugitive.

His deputies went out to the site, found Harlow, and took him to a hospital where he was treated and released, and then they arrested and held him for extradition to York, South Carolina because the check they ran on him came up with an assault warrant. Not on his wife but on a different female. The man was a cowardly asshole who undoubtedly got his jollies terrorizing and beating women.

Since I didn’t especially enjoy fighting or getting my nose broken – or shooting someone – I got careful of how I told my clients that the husband/wife/lover or whoever they’d sent me to find didn’t want to come back. That incident taught me to always take a couple of the guys I sometimes hired for legwork, to accompany me if a client wanted to meet in an isolated area.

I never had another such incident. As for Harlow, unfortunately, I did see his ugly ass again but that was much later.

Chapter Fourteen

TWO YEARS AFTER THE DAY THE WORLD changed forever, folk had begun to relax and quit trying to hide if a sudden heavy fog came up, though, if that shit ever happened again I believe everyone knew there was no way to hide from it. But, you couldn’t blame anyone for being paranoid.

On the other hand, the technologies that folk hoped would return hadn’t done so, either. In fact, some things that functioned right after the Event, no longer did or if so, not in the way in which they had before. Folk chalked this up as being part of the aftereffects, though the physicists were still trying to figure it out without much luck. There were also a number of odd leftovers from that day.

One such leftover was in the form of patches of weird growths that appeared not long after the Event – trees, shrubbery, and undergrowth – forming unpleasant blighted sites. It was unknown where they came from or why they appeared in any particular place, but studying them was impossible. For instance, there were five blighted sites in the city, and early on, after a couple of complaints, the authorities sent a crew into one to begin clearing it. They never came out. Whoever was in charge of such things was smart enough not to send anybody in to look for the lost crew.

Someone got the brilliant idea to only go to the edge and begin clearing from the outside. This didn’t work because when the crew showed back up the next day to continue, they found that what they cut down the day before lay moldering on the ground and the vegetation had regrown. Trying to snip off a few pieces of greenery for study didn’t work either, as the cuttings blackened and disintegrated leaving nothing to be tested.

Several places from around the world reported having removed a patch in its entirety only to find that it reappeared overnight. Most such patches weren’t large and there wasn’t that many of them. Generally, the places that had them only had one or two but Charlotte with its five, had more than anywhere else. They didn’t obstruct anything important so avoiding them wasn’t difficult. It was merely something else to which everyone had to adjust. The city posted warning signs.

Trade and the transportation of goods went into a tailspin at first but after the initial chaos, it resumed – with those companies and countries that were still more or less functional. Due to the new limits of the internet, many online businesses eventually shut down.

On the mainland, more trucks were in use since trains didn’t work. Ships, always the major transporters of goods still worked. They became the only way to transport overseas since there was no more air service but they were a lot slower than before because as another of the after effects of the Event, ship engines were no longer as efficient and there were occasions where they completely stalled before getting passengers or goods to the destination. People who could fix them and keep them running were in high demand and sails and oars made a comeback as more than a sport or hobby since the fear was that ship engines would eventually quit completely, as had television, cellphones, and other technologies.