Town Hall

After everything checked out plow wise, Leslie headed north. Between his near death experience due to the malfunction of his former plow and the strangeness of the whole message from space thing, he had decided to cut loose a little bit. He was rather self contained in his daily needs, food and shelter were covered pretty easily. He had a small piece of property with a yurt on it that he called home, and most of his daily food intake was provided by a food printer that worked relatively well, but there were things that the printer wasn’t allowed to print that he had to get from town. Namely, drugs.

Leslie considered himself a bit of a psychedelic redneck. Most days, he would start his morning with a microdose of psilocybin. To most people that knew him, it would seem wildly out of character, but for him it was a medical thing. He was prone to bouts of crippling depression. The question of whether this was a chemical imbalance or a reaction to the general state of the world was up for debate, but practically speaking it made little difference. He had been trying to mitigate this his entire adult life. With actual medical care orders of magnitude beyond his means, he had resorted to what he considered to be a pretty reasonable course of action.

He chose not to grow mushrooms himself. They were difficult to cultivate, and he saw it as his civic duty to participate in the local economy every once in a while. Also, having pounds of mushrooms at his house would not be ideal because they were technically illegal and he was kind of a boyscout for the most part. Nobody really gave a shit about the legality of something like that, but if he could avoid being put in prison for something stupid, he would.

His destination was a little taco shop a couple of towns north. This business had insinuated itself into the local culture and filled the same role as a town hall or a grange for a certain class of people. This class being the working one. If you needed a contractor, an electrician, a plumber, a landscaper, or anyone that knew how to do practical physical stuff, this was the place to go.

He rarely ate there, though the food was excellent. Cilantro tasted like soap to him and he was in the genetic subclass of humans that were destined not to like Mexican food. When he did order food there, he would make it clear that he didn’t care for cilantro, but they pretty much always blew it at some point in the chain of custody of his tacos. Somebody would inevitably notice that there was no cilantro on a set of tacos and muscle memory would take over. Soapy green leaves would fall like an autumn of dawn flavored dipspit.

This taco shop was roughly a half an hour drive north out of Kingston. Between Kingston and the rest of the northern hemisphere lay a geological feature called the Gulf. This was a piece of country that had a bit of a chip on its shoulder. To the odd passer through, it looked to be an extremely narrow valley with almost vertical walls. To somebody who drove through it on a regular basis, it was a capricious stretch of road that was not to be trifled with. It had its own microclimate. The Gulf was always about twenty degrees colder than the rest of the surrounding country. If it was a pleasant spring day everywhere else, it could be a Siberian hellscape in the Gulf.

It was full of blind corners. To keep you on your toes, you could come around one of these corners to see a three hundred year old maple laying in the right of way, a rockslide/avalanche/mudslide, any number of deer, a drunk driver on the wrong side of the road, bears, lynx, beavers, just to name a few that he had seen in the last year or so. What you truly didn’t want to see, and honestly you probably won’t until it’s too late, was a two and a half thousand pound moose.

They tended to come out around dusk and dawn and were the exact same color as nothing. Their matte brown coat had a property that made it stubbornly resistant to headlights. The only real clue to their presence is the lack of clues, they are a void in the forest. If you get extremely lucky, you will see the shine of their eyes, which is a faint eigengrau that is barely perceptible to the observer. These tend to be up where animal eyes usually aren’t so they typically look like something that is hanging out in a tree. Leslie had never hit one but he knew of a couple people who had.

One fellow, whose name was lost to history of course, had a slick little convertible sports car and thought it would be nice to take it through the Gulf at something approaching the speed of sound. The nature of the Gulf makes the blind corners almost irresistible to motoring enthusiasts. Coming around one of these siren corners, he noticed that there was something roughly the size of a house in the road. This was a moose. Having a small and nimble car, he did some quick calculations and decided to try to drive between its legs, there being roughly the width of a car between them. The moose, startled, began to head for greener pastures. This caused the moose to take a lower stance than it previously had, and the car shaped hole that this gentleman was pretty confident he could drive through, changed its shape. The top of the windshield clipped the moose’s belly and disemboweled it on the spot. The guts, taking some cues from that Newton guy, filled the convertible soaking the man and his upholstery in roughly a hundred gallons of blood, intestine, a kidney or two, and half digested moose shit.

So, needless to say, Leslie tended to take it a bit slow through the Gulf. As he poked his way north at a reasonable speed, frequently having to look out his side windows to have an approximation of his forward progress, he turned on his radio. For the most part, the radio was full of unlistenable garbage, historically this had been the case since radio’s inception. Instead of the airwaves being filled with bubblegum pop or vapid country tunes, the airwaves were occupied with digital static. With society being increasingly data hungry, the bit of the electromagnetic spectrum usually dedicated to radio broadcasts had been whittled into smaller and smaller sections, and the content replaced with a buzzing tinny din that only machines listened to.

There were hold outs though. There was a pirate radio station that acted as town crier and broadcast useful, vetted local information. If there was a weather event coming down the pipe, or a community event, Vermont Pirate Radio would let you know. It did not broadcast on a specific frequency, but jumped from channel to channel on a predictable basis, a la Heady Lamar. It would briefly interrupt the pervasive radio noise and broadcast a snippet of audio and a little piece of data that told the radio what channel to catch it on next. The radio, following these breadcrumbs, did its best to piece together a coherent radio show. The result was pretty decent, but there was always a bit of a background hiss and the occasional explosive burst of a digital buzzsaw.

VPR was in the middle of a call-in show concerned with local goings on. In the roughly five minutes that he listened to it before he shut it off, he heard the phrase Ghost Ship about thirty times. This did nothing for his steadily increasing baseline of flying dutchman related anxiety.

The taco shop he was headed for occupied a small portion of what the locals refused to refer to as a strip mall. They would call it a plaza or even a shopping center, but never something as suburban as a strip mall, but that’s exactly what it was. As he pulled in, he couldn’t help but notice that there was something that these same locals would probably call a kerfuffle or a commotion in progress. They wouldn’t call it a riot, but that’s what it was.