This year I am working on a story called Bob vs. The Alien Slug Monsters. Instead of an outline I have a basic list of plot points I want to cover between meeting Bob and sending him off to fight the king of the slugs. There is more of a cast of characters than an actual outline, so we will see how the story develops. And with that intro we continue with Bob Versus the Alien Slug Monsters…
Day 18: It wasn’t something he wanted to explain, but luckily, no one asked.
It wasn’t something he wanted to explain, but luckily, no one asked. The talk was a bit more subdued as they moved forward. Their course was now angled slightly away from town, heading out across the deeper end of the lost subdivision. While the retirement community, Golden Meadows, was located closer to town, the streets here were not leading directly to it.
‘Which is why when Gene picks up Enid he drives back across the bridge and to the community.’ On the other side of the bridge there was a street that would take them almost directly to the street with the community.
‘We were never really meant to connect with anything,’ Bob thought as he navigated. Their subdivision, when it was built, appeared to want to visit the connecting town as little as possible. They had their own grocery located in the middle of the subdivision along with shopping centers that catered to the area and those who didn’t want to go into down or to the main shopping district on the other side of town.
Bob found that bit of history a little amusing. Centerville was not a large city. Heavy traffic meant a delay of five to ten minutes maximum and only occurred generally if you were near a group of office buildings letting out for the end of the day or a church at the end of a service. There was one spot where three churches emptied out into the same small street at the same time each Sunday. They all chipped in to pay an off duty police officer to direct traffic for an hour each week.
Still unless you attended one of those churches then you knew to avoid East Harrison starting at eleven and running until a little after noon. If you did attend those churches, you knew what you were in for when you left and just followed the directions of the nice officer standing in the middle of the road.
This neighborhood, originally named Morningside because it was on the eastern edge of town, seemed to simply want to pretend the rest of Centerville didn’t exist. ‘The stores here were nice,’ Bob thought.
He had moved in well before the dismantling took place and remembered the streets well. Jarrods, the grocery where he shopped was once on his right. It was one of the first buildings to go and he was certain the larger chains envisioned its demise as a victory. While the entrance into what was the parking lot were still in place, and how Bob remembered them, the parking lot as well as the store were gone now. As one of the first places to be taken down, it was one of the first places to be taken over.
Bob glanced over, marveling at the number of trees that had grown up since the removal. He blinked as he saw movement in those trees. Bob slowed and then stopped the car, to get a better look.
“What’s going on,” Enid asked. There was a slight quaver of fear in her voice. Bob hated the thought of being responsible for putting it there.
“I thought I saw something moving in the trees,’ Bob said.
Ten til Midnight 