LCD Chapter 1:

I woke up on Christmas morning. Not that I knew it was Christmas morning. Shit I didn’t even know it was morning. I had a headache, a dull one, far back like it had been there a while and I had gotten use to it. I woke up in smelt of dust and urine and it was cold, not freezing cold but cold enough to be a discomfort. My left eye was bandaged. I thought, Great that was my good eye hope its still works, what did I get up to last night?  If this room was in a hospital I would have to be somewhere in a third world country. It looked like how I would imagine a jail cell in Bangladesh or an Iranian bomb shelter would. The room was dark and dank the only light in it coming from a small high window. The strange thing was that the light had a eerie green glow to it, the same shade of green they used in Scooby Doo cartoons, to set the scary undertones when a ghost was about to show up. There was a door on the far side of the room…If you could call it the far side of the closet. The room was small and in this ghost light it looked like the inside, of a rather chilly, microwave. I was scared, I wouldn’t use the word scared, Worried. Lying on a gurney in this urine smelling, closet sized, Ghost light Microwave, I was waiting for a apparition to show up. The door creaked open and the expression on the face of my ghost was as if she had seen one, as the color of her face drained the greener her expression got.


The biggest meteor storm in recorded history: Not only was it well televised, corporately sponsored and supported by the Vatican and every other religion, but the event had a PR team assembled from only the very top shelf of the militaries Media and Public Relations division. Yes, diversionary tactics at its finest. After the third world war had gone astray, slipping from the grasp of the planets number one superpower, the public who were, ever so slightly, pissed off, needed to be duped. A Spectacle was needed, an attention whore of an event, and as if sent from above, the meteors arrived from deep space.   


Merry Christmas to me! And what a precious gift, the gift of life after you should have been dead or at least a vegetable. Claire was shocked, shocked and beautiful, shocked, beautiful and easily embarrassed I discover after telling her how beautiful I found her to be. I was a charming guy, or at least I thought I was. This was how I discovered just how much trouble I had found myself in.


3 months after they had been spotted the meteors had finally made their approach towards earth; hundreds of thousands of small meteors would streak the sky as they burned up in earth’s atmosphere. Dubbed: The greatest spectacle ever seen, a once in a lifetime opportunity, a great story to tell your grandchildren. Assured and reassured again, by the greatest mind in the scientific world to be a breathtaking, totally safe, perfectly normal, cosmic event. Not since the Stone Age had so many people spent the night outside in the wilderness staring at the sky. Irony does not sneak up at you it falls from the heavens.       


If you had to sum up your personality traits the process would be easy, Funny, energetic, romantic, hardworking, loyal, trustworthy, partial to red heads… basically a list of qualities you see in yourself or wish you saw in yourself…witty, charismatic, strong, righteous, honest …an relatively easy question to answer, a little harder if you trying to be honest about it… ill tempered, needy, greedy, jealous, unsympathetic, petty…boy I wish I could answer it honestly, I wish I could answer it at all.

Trying to remember if you are funny or charming kinda puts your life in a new perspective. I tried sitting up in my bedlike cot-gurney, a feat I managed, I say feat because I was so out of breath by the time I achieved this, I almost slumped back down out of sheer exertion. My muscles burned, no ached. What the hell was wrong with me? It felt like a truck had run over me, twice.

And the list of unanswerable questions started. How was I feeling? Great question. Bad, Really, really uneasily bad. My name? Damned if I know…Thirsty? Very! Where I was? Baghdad prison cell…I was definitely funny, thank goodness at least I had not lost my sense of humor, but as for any memory of what, where and who, I was a blank slate.

So how long have I been out? Claire says since she volunteered here, and well before that, almost 19 months to be exactish… apparently all record were lost and the only information the make shift hospital had of me was a collected in one folder, my entire known life in a 4 page folder, most of which was primarily dosages of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medication. No name, No date of birth, no family, no anything…Blank slate.


The first glass storms appeared after the entire eastern seaboards nuclear power stations went up. Not that they were in fact Glass storms as such, rather microscopic crystal shards, the most devastating of the effect that followed the apocalypse. But to the first few who survived the crystals fallout, glass storms seemed an apt title. Giant billows of green dust, tearing skin from flesh, sandblasting windows, and shredding lungs as people drowned in their own blood. And as the sun set on the first day those that survived the Fall Out were stranded.


The first nights of my new life were pleasant, sleeping for the first time I can remember from fatigue, not coma induced vegetable mode. Then the glass-storms hit and sleeping was out of the question. If you ever imagined (and try to follow) someone taking rather coarse sandpaper to your brain, enthusiastically, then that would describe the onset of my episodes as I have chosen to call them. Episodes: because lying in the corner of a room crying like a little girl and wishing for a rather large gun to alleviate the pain, sounds not so manly. Painkillers helped, but at the dosages needed I tended to drool occasionally.


Run and hide. It seemed that that had become the survivors’ motto, staying ahead of the jade dessert, which was creeping its way across the country spreading slowly and shredding everything in its path. The dessert devoured it way from the eastern seaboard to the west, luckily after the first reactors blew the government took the others offline saving millions of lives for the time being. But the dust and the aftereffects took more souls each day. The other continents were hit just as badly, if not worse. The continent that was least damaged was Africa. Being third world was finally good for something.


It took me a couple of months and a whole lot of phisio attention to get me out of my little microwave, the details of which would surely bore most. In short I spent allot of time falling and getting picked up by Claire. Lots of little personal achievements, wiggling my toes, sitting upright, feeding myself, walking (hobbling seems more appropriate), picking my own nose, removing my colostomy bag (my personal favorite). With Claire by my side I made a almost full recovery. But the episodes and the sleepless night raged on.

Recovery had come but not the answers I so desperately needed. Now I had the fortitude to find them.