Kevin Wade Johnson
Some of the best bits: @2019 Kevin Wade Johnson Call me vile. Call me a villain. But I wasn't willing to be a victim. * * * I scuffed at the ground, kicking a dead leaf into the river. It swirled away, caught in the current. I wondered where it was going. I sighed. What I needed to do was stop wondering, and decide where I was going. "You're on your own, leaf," I murmured, but thinking more of myself. * * * I had to look out for her the way she had for me. One-way loyalty means exploitation. * * * Fists clenched, I was seething when we walked off. All the shots in my pistol wouldn't fight off more than half a barracks' worth of invaders on this base. I was powerless to stop this…base treatment. I followed her across the seemingly endless planks, into the seemingly endless rain, chill drops running down roofs and buildings like seemingly endless tears. Or maybe the most vital fluid, of some cold-blooded, cold-hearted creature. * * * We kept walking, coming after about twenty minutes to a fence. Black wrought-iron, ten feet high, with sharp points at the top, I thought, in the uncertain lantern light. Patches of rust showed where upkeep was down. * * * Ice in the air around me, on the artificial stone and asphalt around and under me, slowly forming on me. Around me. On me. In me. Ice freezing all around. Droplets of water, water mist, energy ebbing away. Droplets touching cold concrete curbs, icy asphalt, warmth lost and gone. Particles of mist, molecules of water, no longer floating or flowing, freezing in place, locked in, rigid, never to move until heat one day returned. If it returned. * * * Warmth is so easy to take for granted, until you don't have any. * * * Hints of red and rose washed the darkness in the east, brightening the overcast sky into reddish gold. Silhouetted against that sky in the distance stood a giant, four-legged creature, something like a horned mastodon crossed with a camel, only bigger. And something was riding it, brandishing a rifle or spe
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