Tagged: photos
Early Epilogue
Dear Planet Earth,
Like I guessed, it was General Talpa and his resistance fighters who attacked the transport truck outside of the slave labor camp. Mr. Ozawa, the homie spy, ran back to the mole men with his tail between his legs, which let Talpa’s crew rescue Rachel, Randall, and Mrs. Bing. (Mrs. Bing is apparently in an even worse state than before right now.)
They planned a 200% more organized assault than we did, scouting the area and getting the tanks in position. When they finally attacked, the mole people and their homeless underlings had practically no time to get together a defense. We rolled out together with few casualties about an hour later.
We’re all in pretty high spirits — happy to be reunited with lost friends, invigorated that all hope is not lost, and planning our next attack on our clearly vulnerable invaders.
The Pit
Dear Planet Earth,
I finally finished my debriefing with General Talpa and the other nerds who saved my life. They gave me a lot of new info to think over, but for now, I just want to finish uploading all the pictures I took from the battle.
Here’s a good one I got just as we were pulling away in the transport trucks full of former slaves and (hopefully) new allies. You can see the mole people’s drill peeking up from out of the top of the labor camp.
I didn’t get any decent pictures of the fighting actually inside the camp itself. Just try to imagine the sarlaac pit from Tatooine on fire, screaming, but a hundred times more frightening.
The Talk
Dear Planet Earth,
He’s been coming to my cell for the past couple mornings. My father. My dad. I don’t know what to call him. He didn’t stick around long enough when I was a kid for me to give him one of those common labels. I don’t even know his first name. Maybe I’ll ask him next time — if I don’t try to punch him in the face.
He told me that they worked on recruiting him even before I was born. The homies — he chuckled over my new nickname for them. He said that they told him about the coming invasion, of the mole people, the true inheritors of the upper crust. He chuckled when he used the word “mole people,” too. To him and his fellow homeless minions, they were and always will be the “Inheritors.”
They ruled over all levels of the Earth for thousands of years until we homo sapiens revolted and drove them underground. This was eventually seen as a truce by the Inheritors. They could tolerate our dominion over the inferior crust so long as we maintained peace and the fragile ecosystem affecting all of the layers. But humans screwed it up. We destroyed our planet beyond repair and the Inheritors saw invasion as their only option to protect the Earth.
He said he’d understand if I couldn’t forgive him for abandoning me and Mom. He said he tried to save us from the same fate as the others, using his considerable pull to keep us away from the fighting before it began.
I sat silent for much of this, turning this new information over and over in my mind, seething. He left me a book to read — the same one that convinced him to leave us all those years ago.
I should have punched him in the face.
The Bet
Dear Planet Earth,
They came to my cell today. The homies (trademark pending) marched in dragging a bloody Mr. Ozawa by the shoulders. I said his name, trying to mask any sense of shock or relief I felt. My elderly Japanese friend gave a small grunt as he fell to the floor and attempted to roll on his side.
I took careful note of my jailers. There were three of them, all middle-aged, if not older. They wore the same dirty, unassuming clothing you’d see any homeless person wearing on the street. They smelled almost as badly as myself (though I may be biased). The biggest of them had a large, gruesome scab on the left side of his face. He took a couple steps toward me and smiled.
“We have a little bet going on here,” he said. “We’re trying to find out if Carl here is completely full of shit or just partly full of shit.”
He stepped on Mr. Ozawa’s hand as I contemplated how Japanese the name “Carl” really is. He winced in pain and the big homie continued.
“According to him, you people saw him making off with your weapons and fellow upworlders, and that’s what made him flee in a ‘dignified’ manner.” He put more weight on Mr. Ozawa’s hand, who gave another short shriek. “Then you ambushed him outside our camp here, effectively destroying the truck and it’s primitive supplies.”
I interpreted all of this as quickly and clearly as I could. I sat agape as the entire room of enemies awaited my next response.
“He. . . He kidnapped them?”
Mr. Ozawa started to cough out plea after plea, alleging his unshakable devotion to “the cause,” decrying the “unscrupulous lies” of upworlders like me — all in perfect English.
The big homie smiled wide enough to reveal his many brown and missing teeth. He turned to his companions and said, “Looks like you owe me a Coke.”
He took out a large pistol covered with thin pipes and promptly blew off Carl Ozawa’s traitorous head.
In the Beginning
Dear Planet Earth,
The horror and confusion from that first day seems like a lifetime ago. It’s only been a week, but I still feel like an old man remembering the days we searched throughout the city for our presumably kidnapped comrades, defiantly holding on to hope and a “leave no man behind” mentality.
“Rachel!”
We shouted their names from a Jeep we stole. We used to use the word “stole” back then.
“Randall!”
Malls, gas stations, restaurants. We raided any place we thought had the slightest chance of having our friends; all the while, foraging, storing for the upcoming fruitless manhunt we all knew (but never admitted) was coming.
“Margaret!”
Apparently, Mrs. Bing’s first name was Margaret. It echoed along the empty streets of Los Angeles as the uncaring sun baked us from above.
“Mr. Ozawa!”
Finally, a clue. A tire track from our transport truck — fresh and southbound, if Lieutenant Halston’s tracking skills could be believed. And back in the beginning, we were willing to believe anything that could bury away an ugly truth.
New Real America
Dear Planet Earth,
Two cars, six rest stops, and nineteen stale cinnamon rolls later, we’ve made it Los Angeles. I’m charging up my electronics in the least disgusting Starbucks on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — it’s hard to tell if the mole men made this place such a rotting hellscape or if this is what LA always looked like.
I’ve only been to California twice for vacation, and even then my mom made sure to keep us only around the San Diego area. Still, there’s a charm to this place, a feeling in the air that we’re experiencing the real heart of America’s past, present, and future. It’s the same feeling I’d get sometimes walking the Strip back in Vegas.
This soulless neon cesspit, I’d think to myself in a drunken stupor. This is life.
But that was all a different life — in a different world. Homework, money, sexual frustration. My problems today involve constipation and an elderly woman going through a complete mental breakdown.
Mrs. Bing started wailing uncontrollably somewhere past Barstow. She begged us to stop driving, to let her go and meet back up with her daughter. So, we’ve stopped. We’ll try to find some other survivors, stock up on supplies, and hope to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Mrs. Bing gets her shit together before we’re ambushed yet again.
Maria later whispered to me that her daughter was one of the many we lost at Apple Valley.
Down
Dear Planet Earth,
I don’t have much time. We’re moving out again. Here’s a picture to explain it all — the last image we saw before everything came crumbling down around us. Literally.
The Drill Snake
Dear Planet Earth,
We just pulled into some library, licking our wounds from the latest mole people attack that left seventeen dead and five injured. Few of us are speaking out loud, and even less are making eye contact with each other. No one knows when the next strike might come, which friends might die.
I got a chance to upload this photo from the unlikely battlefield.
General Talpa was quick to bar any civilians from seeing what exactly was in the giant hole left by, what I’m now calling, “The Drill Snake.” Anything glowing that much implies some serious monster making powers, and the couple CDC guys we have with us, who swiftly got into Ghostbusters mode, didn’t help allay any of those fears.
If only I knew where to find a good book. . .
Holy
Dear Planet Earth,
We were attacked. Four miles out of Gary Goldberg’s Discount Cars, I heard the first explosion.
“Holy fuck. . . ,” someone whispered.
I jumped out of my seat and ran to the back of the truck to see the flaming remains of the other transport. A thousand thoughts flew through my head in those first few seconds. I wondered if the people on board felt anything, if my friends were on that truck, if we were next.
We made a sharp turn and the soldiers around me started arming themselves, pushing me back towards my seat and the other civilians.
“Get back!” they yelled.
They moved their rifles over the dusty scene, some moving more frantically than others. I heard someone begin to wail behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the action before me.
“Where are they? Where are the motherfuckers?”
BOOM!
A fireball appeared on the right side. The troops began shooting wildly as the truck seemed to balance on the left side wheels. The driver swerved, and the truck rolled over. I hit my head on a crate, and when I got my bearings, I could see the soldiers piling out of the truck, shooting at something beyond my vision.
I followed them. I had to follow them. I could hear screaming in the background, someone calling my name. My head was throbbing with pain, a pulsing, high-pitched dial tone. A part of me knew that the truck was on its side now. That I could be consumed with swift flames and not feel anything as my seventeen year existence came to a climactic end. That nothing I did ever mattered.
I emerged from the truck into a new desert, filled with other overturned transports and countless, puny human soldiers firing their harmless weapons into a hulking monstrosity of steel. It was a 20 foot tall snake with barbarous edges and an enormous drill on the front. And when it decided it had enough of our bullets and curses, it burrowed down into the sand, leaving nothing but a giant, gaping hole.
El Barto Was Here
Dear Planet Earth,
The rumor is Talpa’s back from his super secret mission and we’ll be heading out tomorrow onto Fort Some-Dead-War-Hero’s-Name. It can’t come soon enough, if you ask me. Things just got a lot more tense here since someone spray painted a bunch of cars with the message “DIE MOLE MEN” over and over.
With only a handful of kids among us, all eyes are on the angsty teen who disrespects old women and consistently asks to help kill mole men.
Of course, it wasn’t me. My respect for punctuation is too deep to forget a comma after “DIE,” though I won’t try to plead my case to my compatriots. The majority of survivors from invasions of mole people, and I include myself in this, like to hold on to the last vestiges of common decency they have afforded to them, silently berating those who have slipped into the tempting trap of organized anarchy — despite how washable said spray paint is or how much they may agree with the spirit of said message.
I’m getting enough dirty looks to know that I probably won’t be allowed to drive one of the minivans tomorrow.
