After the Apocalypse

Janet ran...

...and the obscenities pouring from the man she had just left bleeding in the dirt faded away…

like the man himself. 

He was nothing. He was a threat that had been dealt with. 

Like she always dealt with threats. 

She had the hard skills, built up over years of practice. She could dominate most situations. Her force of will bent others to her path.

And if they didn’t bend, they got run over or shoved aside. 

KJ the Killer.

...and she ran. 

...

Hello my fellow survivors. How is the apocalypse treating you?

This is Chris your host. And a fine Saturday morning it is up here in New England. 

We had a storm fly through yesterday with wind and rain and snow. 

I was worried about our friend Tim who has been helping with the story ideas and editing. He’s been out on the Appalachian trail for 2 weeks.  He’s currently passing through the area near where Janet and the old man are struggling to survive the apocalypse in our story.

Imagine if a storm like this hit out in the Smoky Mountains while they’re out in the trail? I’ll have to see if we can work a storm into the story. 

When I was a teenager, I spent a week hiking in the Joyce Kilmer National Forest which is near there, a bit south.   It would have been this time of year.

I remember we did get an ice storms a couple days, but you just crawl into your tent and wait it out. I remember waking up an hitting the plastic tarp overhead and the ice shattering and sliding off. 

But we survived. I would have been 16 and just rolling out of wrestling season, so stupid but indestructible. 

…

Speaking of hiking adventures in the wilderness, my wife forced me to watch a movie called Into the Grizzly Maze from 2015, mostly because she likes to look at the actor James Marsden.  

I’ll be honest it was a silly movie about an angry Grizzly bear who likes to eat people. For some reason they talked some A-list talent into it. Billy Bob Thorton is underused as the bear hunter, think Quint from Jaws. 

Thomas Jane was one of the main characters, who is one of my favorite actors, you may know him as detective Joe Miller in The Expanse, which is one of the best hard space Scifi shows to come out recently. 

Or, for you Marvel fans, Thomas Jane was the original Punisher who went after John Travolta in 2004.

God knows how these actors got caught up in the hot mess that is ‘Grizzly Maze”. I suspect a paycheck was involved. 

…

Looking out my office window this morning, the forsythia is out and my cherry tree is about to bloom. 

What did you think of this week’s story? 

Janet is discovering or rediscovering her strength and how it can help her in the Apocalypse. 

…

I’ve been reading through a SciFi series called the Lost Fleet over the last year. I’m about to crack into the 8th and final book. It’s a Space Epic but I also realized last night that it parallels Xenophon’s Anabasis.  

Bear with me, here. Xenophon was a Greek mercenary with a force of 10,000 other Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC.

Note this is before Rome, and a70 years before Alexander the Great. 

Anyhow, they march deep into Babylon and Cyrus gets killed in battle. The opposing Persian commander invites the Greek leader and his staff to a banquet to talk things out and instead has them killed. 

This leaves the 10,000 Greek mercenaries deep in hostile territory with no leaders. So they elect Xenophon, who leads them out of Persia and back to Greece with a tactically brilliant retreat.

To make a long story short that is exactly the story line of this lost fleet series, except with spaceships.

I feel like I have to reach out to the author and ask him if that was his intent. I’d be curious to know if it was or if it was just an example of how universal human stories are. 

If you want to delve more deeply into any of this the links are in the show notes and on an accompanying post at my Patreon page. 

Survivors, we are about to crack 4,00 downloads, which is good, but we can do better! I need your help. I need you to like the show, post a review and, most importantly, tell 3 friends about it. Please share the show on social. 

I really want to start publishing weekly, but I can’t afford to unless I get more survivors to tune in. I’m just a guy doing what he loves, not a corporation, so I need your help.

If you enjoy the story help me keep it going by contributing $5, $10, $20 to the Patreon. 

It is Patreon.com/aftertheapocalypse all one word. 

Do it now. Let’s keep it going and until next time, keep surviving.

…