Excerpt from Normal Heroes

I have been deep in my editing, and even deeper in procrastination of my editing.  Thought you might like a post, so I found an excerpt for you.  It doesn't have any spoilers, just a little back story.  Enjoy.

-excerpt-

Soon, Alice was walking down the highway. She felt like herself, for the first time in days. Now, she was in her element. Alice double checked her rail-board systems and set her cover-all to its maximum cooling power. After a couple of miles, she came to a crossroads that had a security-cam. She waved to her public, smiled, and took a left.

A while later, she got to the train tracks that would take her west. After using her rail-board to check satellite surveillance, she found a shady spot to wait. When thirty minutes had passed, she heard the train screaming its warning at the road crossing. She counted the cars as they passed, an old habit she had picked up from her father. The train had two sleek electric engines, and four battery cars behind them. After that, she counted twenty-one passenger cars. Alice waved to the people inside. Then, came forty freight boxes, then fifteen flatbeds. When she saw the end of the train coming, she put the rail-board in running mode. It flashed a pattern of lights to indicate that it detected the train. She told it she was ready, and stepped back a few paces.

As the last car went by, the rail-board shot out its tether, that latched on to the underside of the car. Alice casually walked over and picked up the board, careful to avoid touching the tether as it spooled out at great speed. She set the board down on the right-hand iron rail, mounted it, and told it she was ready. The board smoothly accelerated, under its own power, until it matched speed with the train, and then began to catch up. Alice told the board to leave sixty feet of cable out. Alice used to ride twenty feet behind, but the danger of the train whipping projectiles at her was too high. Riding a long tether was more dangerous in high traffic areas, where road transports were waiting for trains to pass. When the board reached the proper distance, it shut down its drive and let the train pull it along. The spinning of the rail-board's wheels generated power reserves, so it could catch up to the next train Alice tethered.

It was a noisy, dirty, dangerous, and illegal way to travel. Alice loved it. She took a vid-feed of herself sitting on the board as its odometer passed one kilometer. She mailed the feed to the Iceland factory workers that had built her new board, and another copy she mailed to the millions of people that loved her. She laughed behind her mask and tried to take stills of wildflowers, flying past at eighty miles per hour. This beat the hell out of jumping on trains, as she had done in the past.

It all started with a bottle of gin. The bottle belonged to her father. It was mostly full. Alice was thirteen years old. She lost her mother five years before. A drug overdose. Everyone told her it was a heart attack, but she knew better.

The bottle of gin was sitting on the tiny kitchenette table in the FEMA trailer she shared with her father. The trailer, assigned to them after the great LA Quake, was cramped and dirty. It always smelled faintly of skunk. Outside the windows, dust flew in massive clouds over the north Kansas prairie.

Alice was crying. The tears turned to mud on her dust covered face. The neighbors had called the law on her father, again. They always did that. Alice loved her father. She did not care if he was drunk, or poor, or a bad role model. She heard her father snoring in the bedroom. It was two in the afternoon. The law told Alice they were coming back to get her. They were taking her away. Alice knew who called the law. It was that Bucky Johnson. He hated her dad, because Felicia Johnson was sweet on him. Alice's dad didn't care either way. He cared about gin. Alice cared about her dad. That's how it worked. Alice grabbed the bottle. A train slowly accelerated, some distance away. Alice rummaged in kitchen drawer and found an old cloth rag. Then she found some matches.

Alice picked up the bag she had packed. It contained all of her best stuff. It did not weigh much. She pulled the bag onto her shoulders and wiped at her muddy tears. She went out into the raging dust storm. The cloth she had over her face did not help much. She could taste the dust dripping down her throat from her sinuses. It tasted like hunger and failure. It reminder her fallen cities and her mother's cold flesh. She closed the trailer's door and wished that the lock still worked. She wanted her dad to be safe.

She could barely see in the blowing dust. Good, she thought. She made her way through the maze of FEMA trailers, until she found the one assigned to the Johnsons. She went around the back of it, away from the door. The Johnsons' poor, stupid dog was tied there, cowering in the dust. It didn't notice Alice as she stepped by. Near the hitch of the trailer, on the side away from the door, was a storage hatch. Alice lived in exactly the same model of trailer, so she knew. Alice also knew that these shitty FEMA trailers had shitty hardware that always broke. Alice opened the hatch. It had a rusty old tool box in it. She pulled out the tool box and looked inside. The only thing good she found, was a greasy box cutter with a new razor blade. She put it in her pocket. She knew stealing was against the law, but she had no use for the law. They were coming to take her away from dad.

Alice knew that right above the hatch, inside the trailer, was a bed. Just like in her shitty FEMA trailer. She opened the bottle of gin and took a sip. She hated the taste, but it reminded her of her dad. She took another sip and then stuffed the old rag down the neck as far as she could. She looked over at the poor stupid dog. Alice carefully put down the bottle. She used the box cutter to cut the thin rope that held the dog to the trailer. She kicked the dog. Just hard enough to make him run away. She picked up the bottle and turned it upside down. When the rag started to drip, she righted the bottle. Alice placed the bottle on its side, in the storage hatch. She got out her matches.

The third one she tried lit the rag. She calmly watched it flare. Soon the bottle broke from all the heat. Fire started spreading in the hatch. Time to go, she thought. Alice ran toward the sound of trains.

The security at the rail yard did not see her. Alice assumed they were hiding from the dust. She found a box car with an open door and climbed into it. She did not know where the train would go. Before the dust quit blowing, Alice was many miles away.

A year later she got her first rail-board. Around the same time she found out her father died in Kansas, frozen to death behind a convenience store. She was in Prague, working as a house painter, and sleeping in an abandoned building. She bought a tiny bottle of gin to help her remember him.

Alice never found out what happened to the Johnsons. Sometimes, she liked to think, they escaped the trailer fire. Sometimes, she liked to think, they didn't.