Ever Onward Read Free

old man a head start!”
    Josh Williams, making sure his son
couldn’t see, shot Bob the finger.
    Both men smiled.
    Jessie called down from above. “You
guys coming or what? I’m getting hungry!”
    “You’re always hungry!”, Josh
replied. “Have a Granola Bar!”
    Jessie’s face hung over the boulder
thirty feet above them. His long blond hair covered all but his
smile. “I finished those off back at the lean-to.”
    Josh shrugged at Bob and started up
the open rock. “Better get going before he eats my supper as well
as yours.”
    Bob sighed and adjusted his shoulder
straps. “Let him. At least these bloody packs will be
lighter!”
    They made camp soon after on a flat
outcropping just under a mile above sea level and just over nine
miles from the nearest road. After a meal of noodles and Josh’s
wife’s spaghetti sauce, washed down with tea and hot chocolate,
they watched the sun set in all its fiery splendor, then turned in.
Bob was dead to the world as soon as his head hit the non-existent
pillow. Jessie gave his dad a hug and crawled into his sleeping
bag, eager for the morrow’s climb. By candle light, Josh smoked his
pipe, wrote in his log and thought of his wife. Soon he too sought
his bed.
    As he lay in his sleeping bag watching
the stars appear in the heavens, Josh wondered what Bob would say
if he knew he was sleeping on what the locals called The Spine of
God. All three hikers were totally unaware of the catastrophe that
had taken place at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada some twenty four
hours earlier. Josh turned on his side. Thoughts of tomorrow’s long
climb up Mount Marcy filled his mind. Hoping the weather would
hold, he drifted off to sleep, while over half a continent away,
silent, swift, death raced towards him.

 
    Chapter 3 : THE DARK
STRANGER
    China Lake Naval Weapons
Center
    California. June
22
    Private Jocco Wellington let the jeep
role to a stop, hardly noticing the quiet crunch as the front wheel
passed over yet another half empty uniform. Jocco was confused.
Everyone was dead, and that bothered him. Not the fact that they
were dead exactly, but the fact that he had no fucking idea how
they came to be that way!
    Since waking up in the barracks and
finding all the bunks filled with what looked like crumbling ashes,
he had searched half the base and found nothing but bodies.
Hundreds of bodies, or rather, half bodies; each with that gray
papery shit spilling out of them.
    Lighting a cigarette, he squinted up
at the sun. Nearly noon. He got out and walked over to General
Bremen’s office. Bremen was a real hard-ass, but he’d know what the
fuck was going on. But if General Bremen knew, he wasn’t telling.
All Jocco found in the office was a shirt-full of more gray papery
crap with four gold stars on the collar.
    Then the phone rang and Jocco nearly
browned his shorts. Fumbling with the receiver, he held it away
from his sweating body as though it were a deadly snake.
    “General?!”, the voice on the line
yelled. “General, is that you?! Thank Christ you’re
alive!”
    Jocco remained silent, his conniving
brain racing. All his life he had lived by his wits. Pimping,
running drugs, always playing it close to the edge, always just one
step away from the Boys in Blue. But, like the fat lady said: ‘All
good things must come to an end!’ Sold out by a little prick who
sought to take his place, the D.A. had made Jocco an offer he
couldn’t refuse: join the army or do a seven year stretch in the
can. Jocco had no great desire to serve Old Glory, yet neither did
he much relish the thought of having his asshole reamed out by some
killer retard named Bubba.
    And now this! Life was just one big
fuck-up from the word go!
    “General? Are you there ?” the
voice on the line squeaked. “SPEAK TO MEEEEE!”
    This last had been screamed, snapping
Jocco back to the present. “I’m here”, he said. “Who’s
this?”
    “Oh, Sweet Jesus !”, the voice
wined. “I thought everyone was