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 27: Bob thought about it as he walked.
Bob thought about it as he walked. Their houses weren’t visible from the bridge. The bridge was how they got over the river. “Taking out the bridge means people couldn’t cross.” The embankment was too steep to cross easily. “And the road looks like it goes into forest.”
Bob often felt like he was driving into the forest and on the few occasions he had people come over, they too remarked that they hadn’t known there were houses there and that it felt like forest to them.
‘And if people who live in Centerville think of it as forest, someone who didn’t know the area would certainly think so.”
Bob blinked and realized he just thought of someone invading Centerville. He shook his head. “Who would do that?” He asked. Centerville was not a strategic point. They had no valuable resources. They had a couple of call centers and a few insurance headquarters. ‘And they mostly store paperwork not process claims.’
Centerville was thus named because it was in the center of the state, but it wasn’t the capitol and all major things happened on the outer edges of the state. That’s where the cities were, the major industries and factories. When they were younger Bob and his friends used to joke that they were simply a dot on the map marking the center of nowhere.
“Who would invade nowhere?” he asked himself. He shook his head. “There has to be another explanation.”
As he walked Bob turned over several possibilities. They ranged from a military exercise gone horribly wrong to their rival town of Garnetville, 45 miles down the road, pulling some sort of prank that went horribly wrong. Bob thought of the crater in the road.
‘Garnetville would have to have some sort of military weapons for that,’ he thought. As far as he knew, they did not. Despite the name, Garnetville was named after a man named Garnet. They did not have a mine. Their claim to fame was a paper mill.
‘I don’t think paper mills have high explosives.’
Bob ran out of options as to who would be destroying roads and thought about the roads. ‘In and out of town.’ Bob sighed. He might not know who was doing this but the pattern of destruction or at least what he could see of it, seemed to indicate that Centerville was being cut off for some reason.
‘And where have all the people gone?’ He remembered when a tornado struck a few years back. Things were quiet for a very short time after, but then they got really loud and busy. He thought Centerville looked like an ant hill that got kicked over. Once the shock of the tornado passed, people got busy clearing and rebuilding.
‘Maybe we are still in the shock phase,’ he thought.
Still, it seemed strange that no one was moving, no one was wandering around trying to figure out what was going on. Bob rounded the bend in the road and saw the entrance to the Golden Meadows parking lot even though the building was still hidden.
Ten til Midnight 