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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Evacuation

Those few of us who were left waited out the Peat Rain, and when the fall had slowed, gathered our most precious belongings, what food and drink we had left, and gathered at the Arco Station on the hill to refuel before driving north into the desert and then east into the mountains. I looked around at the mall, and was amazed by how quickly some the buildings had collapsed into ruin. It was almost like the sturdier the building had been, the quicker it had fallen. I couldn't really make out a pattern for that. My own home had been fully intact, While any with flat roofs or multiple stories had begun to decay around mine.

While waiting my turn to fuel up Little Red, I was absently shoveling the peat aside as I'd seen a depression in the nearly smooth layer we'd all driven over to get to the parking lot on the hill. The pit was about the size of a large tool box and as I shovelled the last of the peat from it, I came to a thick canvas covering that was already being damaged by the spongy alien material. That told us that the pit had been covered up in the first or second Peat Rain.

The garage owner was one of the survivors and he came over to help pull up the canvas covering. There were tools there, blow torches, wrenches, socket drivers, Even a few different tire irons and small jacks. He explained that these were all damaged in some fashion, so had been put in a storage bin as spares. After some negotiations, he allowed the cache to be parted out amongst the survivor's vehicles. We were very cautious taking the tools out of the pit. The garage owner and a couple of other mechanics went over each tool and made sure they were safe before handing them out. Eventually we had about thirty vehicles and several dozen five gallon and one gallon cans filled up and loaded into the various vehicles. We set out down the hill and up onto the freeway, driving at a cautious speed to allow the larger more fully loaded vehicles to keep up. I didn't know what to expect, as everything on our radios was filled with digital noise.

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