8 Short Stories

What time is it?

  He asked himself that question quite a lot since he came to be here. Here was a small cabin deep in the woods of the Oklahoma mountains. At least he thought it was Oklahoma. Many things just were not clear since… since… He shook his head. Must try not to dwell on the past, he chided himself.

  He went about his daily chore of checking his traps and snares to see if he had scored anything that could be dinner. Collecting water from the stream a mile away, this was for washing himself, his old clothes and, when boiled, for drinking.

  A very skinny rabbit was in one of his snares, but it would have to do. He would put it in a pot of water and let it slowly cook most of the day. After cleaning it of its fur coat of course and other parts he couldn’t bear to eat no matter how hungry he was. His daily survival chores were the only thing that kept his mind off of what had happened.

  He had to jerk himself back to the present several times a day but this was far fewer than when he had first found this place. It was raining and dark and it seemed like a perfect hiding place, he decided to stay after the sky cleared and sun came up. If they came for him here, he might just let them have their way.

  He remembered that his watch had been broken sometime during that storm as he fled for his very life. Running from shadow to shadow, from things that might well have been shadow themselves, the night was a blur. Could he have imagined the whole thing? Of course not, it was beyond question.

  His life had been average. It had been a comfortable middle class existence that had crumbled all around him and everyone else. It hadn’t been as sudden as all that, there were signs pointing to danger, warning those who heeded the call. Few did.

  How long ago had it been? Days had run into weeks and months. He did not have the answer, he was sure that there had been at least one winter. There was very little else he was sure of.

  He must still be in shock, in denial of what had happened. Yet he continued to try and push away the memories. He knew that he needed to examine them, understand them and to accept them before he was consumed by fear. He decided it must be bedtime, without a clock he was never sure, but it was dark.

  He had fled. He had run for his life. He had abandoned his family, his town and everything that was important to him and ran away. A coward? Yes, but one who is still alive, if only just. He tried to remember whether or not he stopped and looked back one last time or if he looked straight away as if looking back would turn him into a pillar of salt. He could not remember.

  He heard an owl hoot in the trees behind the cabin and wondered what time it was.

  The country never thought it could actually happen. The internet lunatics could not be right in the end could they? Back when there was an internet he had laughed and mocked them on those message boards every once in a long while. He never gave politics a thought and he couldn’t tell you who the Governor or President was.

  That was before there were foreign soldiers in total control of Washington DC.

  The President had been an “internationalist”, whatever that meant. He campaigned on better international cooperation and trust. He promised to hold out a hand of friendship and reconciliation to those who had called themselves our enemies.

  The President had invited the foreign troops. It was almost unbelievable. How could someone so naive become leader of the former free world? He had been elected because he promised to fix the economy and root out government corruption. In the end he had given all the plum administration jobs to friends and campaign contributors.

  He was just another politician. Back to real life for those who had thought things would be oh so different this time.

  He remembered a day when he was pushing his children in the swings at the park on a Saturday. It had been strangely empty and quiet. There weren’t any vehicles zipping by on the roads, even the birds were silent. Now he would have called it eerie.

  It was like the whole world knew some dreadful secret that he and his family didn’t as they sat in the empty park for their picnic. That was just his hindsight of course, at the time he had only noted how oddly quiet and abandoned the town seemed.

  Only when they arrived home and finally turned on the television did they know something had gone terribly and horribly wrong. The nation, maybe the world, was transfixed as the foreign troops slated for joint training maneuvers had taken the President and the Congress as their prisoners.

  While they had been having their tuna salad sandwiches under the giant elm tree soldiers from several nations had been pouring into the country from several sources. Our own military had been ordered to stand down; their Commander in Chief had not really been given much choice in giving those orders.

  Two days after it be