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“Do you think there are vampires?” Hint, Working on a vampire story now. Should be out in a few years. Not that it will take me that long to write it but I'm also working on several other books and it's about the forth one in the cue.
Something that I did with this story when I introduced you to Lonnie, and I have mentioned this before, Lonnie is a character in another story, the next book, who you meet. In the next book you will meet several characters who are in a future story. Since it's hard to introduce a vampire, especially this one into this story I just had to raise the idea about the possibility. But I will say yes Virginia there is a vampire.
“Food, you know what I miss? Bacon. And popcorn, popcorn with beer.”
“Yogurt.”
“Ice Cream.”
“That cheesecake they use to make at that bakery on Main Street.”
“B-B-Q.” I said with my stomach growling.
“The best of all, a peanut buster parfait layered in fudge and caramel and
topped with real marshmallow cream topping.”
Food, food, fooood! When your hungry you can think of little else, and when you have food but not the kind you want you dream of those foods. I was in the Navy during Desert Shield/Desert Storm stuck on
La Maddalena in Italy. Believe me it wasn't a hardship compared
to the guys over in the heart of the war but it wasn't a piece of cake either.
The
locals for the most part hated us and I can't really blame them. At the time the command said no women on the base because of an incident they wouldn't talk about. La Madd was about eight miles round and had 52 bars of which I have been thrown out of 51 of them in the year and a half that I drank during my three year stay there.
There were only local restaurants on the island, no chains, no corporate eateries like McDonald's or Taco Bell. You either cooked your own (hard to do when your working 16 hours days) or ate in town at one of the many cafes that served Italian food. Don't get me wrong it was food but we would have killed for a Taco Bell. The closest we had was the ships food
and one cafe that served chili cheese fries. The closest McDonald's was in Rome, that's a story for another blog.
The conversation above I have had a variation of a dozen times with dozens of people all because we wanted the familiar and didn't have it. I know of thousands of people on diets who have the same conversation. It's a great generic conversation.
The P-38 The John Wayne. I think my father gave me one of those when I was six. He told me he had it in the war. I didn't even know what war but it came from him so it was cool. He gave me that and a pocket knife about an inch long. I still have both of them today but the P-38 I carried on my key chain for years. That little hooked blade on it cut more holes in my jeans pockets than anything else in the world and I have I don't know how many scars on my thigh from being stabbed by that thing as I fell down or had a bike crash or did something stupid.
A younger generation would have no idea how to use this thing but from hundreds of camping trips I can tell you it has gotten me into stubborn cans of food and opened bottles and all manner of things and it's no bigger than a quarter. As I said in the story thousands of GI's carried these things and it served them well. So when your traveling light and need to open a can or bottle or unscrew something it's a great tool to have and I'm glad I gave it to our hero's.
Gaunt. I mention the above things because I had been waiting for a long time to get to this point in the story. From the time I really started writing it I knew I was headed for this moment and I was loving it. I know it sounds strange that I would relish getting my characters to a point of starvation but it's true. I had been reading a lot of survival stuff and how not eating right would make you basically waste away.
Then came that tv show "Naked and Afraid"; if you haven't seen it just watch one episode, just one, and it supported what I had in my mind. In the show your dropped off in the wilds somewhere and you have to trek to a base camp area naked with one item. You have to stay there for 21 days and then trek five miles to the extraction point. In that 21 days the contestants have to find their own food wherever they can and they always loose a lot of weight. Usually they catch some disease like dysentery and have to be rescued by the camera crew.
Our hero's have been scrounging for food for over two months. They are starving, they have gone from a little overweight to lean. For them the next step is gaunt and they are just starting the edge of that. What food they do have they must ration for God only knows how long and they are just realizing that their to-do list is a mile long and they might not have the strength to even make a dent in it before they can start surviving.
Imagine you have been living day to day and once you come up with a plan to live more than day to day, to live week to week and build to month to month or year to year. You have hope, remember they just left the library with new archery skills, they both can now hunt, their chances are doubled. But they see themselves in a reflection and know they are weak, know they may have come up with this plan too late to do them any good. It's only December and winter doesn't let up till March. They have at least three more months to go through before spring and they realize they many not have three more months in them.
What would you do faced with that possibility? You know what they did.
Cigars, I love cigars. I think this stems from my family. I had a great uncle Henry and an uncle Andy who both smoked cigars and I loved them both. God only know what kind of influence they had on my life outside of the cigars but they both smoked cigars and growing up I wanted to smoke them too. I did in the Navy because in Italy we could buy Cubans in the tobacco shops. Cubans are as good as people make them out to be buy the way. Today I don't smoke more than two or three a year simply because I can't afford them. I'm not talking those Swisher Sweet our boy was smoking but a good cheap $5 cigar. I just can't burn that kind of cash. My neighbor however does smoke Swisher Sweet Peach & Strawberry & Chocolate I think. That's why I decided to reward our boy with the cigars because I like cigars and in honor of my neighbor our boy got Swisher Sweets.
