Chapter 8

****Author's Note****

Hey everyone! We passed 50 followers, isn't that awesome? It's Tuesday at the moment, and this chapter will be released on Friday, but at this moment we're at 63 followers which is mind blowing! I didn't expect the fiction to grow so quickly, but I'm really happy to see folks enjoying the story. It just makes me even more excited to write.

I also would like to give a shoutout to Tiuri, Tharsult, KASmith, and bnaz for the consistent edit suggestions and fantastic feedback via comments they leave on almost every chapter. I really enjoy interacting with everyone in the comments, and it helps me grow as a writer. Thank ya'll! It means a lot to me that you take to time to help out and hang out with us!

Lastly, if you haven't checked it out already, this is the story I've been reading in my spare time.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/59370/an-endlings-decision

****End Author's Note****

Chapter 8

It felt good to finally have a game plan put together. While Drew felt a bit bad about asking Amber to talk to his mom about the fire and brimstone that was going to be coming their way, he wasn't going to be sitting on his ass. In reality, Amber was just better at talking to his mom about tough stuff. Why? She had the patience that Drew lacked. She could handle having the same question asked four different ways without snapping, at least for a while. Drew was well aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and decided to work on the areas where he'd be able to provide the most benefit.

Marriage was all about partnership and support. He felt extremely lucky to be married to someone as amazing as his wife. While they didn't agree on everything, they did on everything that was important. Over time they had learned to rely on each other to compliment their weaknesses. Math, numbers, making lists, and problem solving? That was his forte. Amber was better when it came to repetition, patience, and keeping Drew out of trouble... mostly.

With Spock in tow, the caster of the house began the long list of crap that needed to get done. The very first thing was sending text messages to Mark and Miranda, hoping one of them would see it. He kept it short and simple, but also tried to impress upon the direness of the situation.

'Emergency! 10/10. Need ya'll both here ASAP. Phone is on loud, reach out to Amber if you need to. Get here ASAP, it's serious.' the message read.

All he could do was wait and hopefully they'd see it. It's not like he could call them, but if he hadn't heard back from them in a couple hours he'd ask Amber to give them a call. It wasn't like he could with the voice change. It was about 8:30am, so they might be stuck in traffic on their commute to work. Maybe they'd check their phones during that timeframe.

By the time Drew was on the phone with the third credit card company he received a reply from Mark.

'K. On our way soon.'

'Cool, let me know an ETA when you have one.'

Too busy to take time to think about that upcoming situation, Drew focused on his other tasks. Amber had woken up his mom and they were in her tv room talking, while he and Spock were in the small office room that served dual functions of both entertainment and business purposes. As it turned out, Spock was the type of person to be easily amused as he enjoyed spinning in circles while sitting in Amber's computer chair.

The hours passed as numbers were crunched, lists were made, and many google searches yielded results. Spock had finally grown tired of chair spinning and had started to teach himself how to use a computer. Turns out a System made human that was a tutorial guide had a fairly good grasp on using menus and searches as he ended up on wikipedia.

Drew had finished his work and decided to check facebook before he needed to check in with Amber and his mom. No new notifications, he scrolled through his feed. Old acquaintances getting married, pictures of people playing with their kids, cat videos. Until he finally saw something that made him pause.

A post written by a local woman. She owned a small café in the nearest town to his home. If you could even call it a town. With a population of less than 500 people most folks knew each other, hell most folks had each other on facebook. Drew didn't, but he had the café owner on his friends list. She made a mean burger, and her curly fries were to die for. That and she always posted if she was going to randomly close for the night to watch her grandkid's sports games.

"What are you looking at Drew Wright?" Spock inquired as he rolled the chair closer to Drew's computer.

"Evil."

"Evil? I confess, the notions of good and evil are new to me. The wikipedia articles were very interesting though."

"It's human evil Spock. This is a social media website where people can stay in touch with..."

"I read the article on it."

"Of course you have. Anyways, the post is from a local lady that owns a small business down the road about ten miles from here. She's talking about how angry she is regarding bullshit happening in the town."

"What makes this... bullshit evil?"

"A retired man from the next town over purchased some old run down buildings that have been abandoned for fifty years. He wanted to do something to help the community and disadvantaged people with his life savings. He was in the process of renovating the buildings to turn them into a Christian community center and shelter. That's when the town came in and fucked everything up."

Spock stayed silent.

"Basically the folks who run the town are one denomination of a religion called Christianity. The man who purchased the property is part of a different denomination. Both denominations believe in basically the same things, but with only minor differences. To put it bluntly, one family runs the whole town, and they didn't like that someone that didn't belong to their specific brand of religion was opening up shop."

"What is this community center, and why wouldn't they like it?" Spock asked.

"That's the thing. A community center is an open place for any local to come in at almost any time. He planned to have board games people could play, free books they could read, and several areas for entertainment in case the locals wanted to host get togethers for free. The shelter portion would be different. He'd allow folks who lost their homes due to financial reasons or fire, etc to have a roof over their heads. A place to stay while they figured things out so they wouldn't be on the street."

"I do not understand. Why would the town leaders not like that? Aren't those good things?"

"It's because he belongs to a different branch of the religion. That's it. That's the whole reason."

"Their branch doesn't hold the same beliefs the man's does?"

"No, they do. One hundred percent. In fact, helping others is a major tenant of every branch of that religion."

"Drew Wright, I'm confused. If they share the same belief in that, then why does it matter?"

"Bingo! It doesn't matter. They made it matter because they're giant assholes that believe anyone other than them is wrong. It has nothing to do with beliefs and values, and everything to do with this man being different than them. They are more than willing to screw the town over to get rid of the man. That's the point. This post is going into detail about how the city allowed the properties to be purchased, knowing ahead of time what their new purpose would be."

Spock stayed silent as he listened to Drew.

"After the buildings were purchased, they condemned them, saying they were unfit for human occupation. The man then decided he would fix every issue due to the building's age. But each time the building inspector came, they'd find more things wrong, and he had no choice but to fix those as well. This kept occurring for several months and other locals started to suspect something fishy was going on. The man was working day and night to fix the buildings with his own money, and by himself. The post says that while he was out buying more supplies today the town had the buildings demolished, along with all the contents within as the man was 'living' in said condemned buildings."

"So the locals believe the building inspector was influenced by the town leaders, and due to the strange occurrences, locals were starting to pose difficult questions for the leadership. Thus the ...town decided to demolish the buildings?"

"In a nutshell? Yes. The post is talking about what happened after that, which just happened a few minutes ago it seems. When the man came back and saw the buildings in ruins and attempted to salvage his supplies and tools, they weren't there. The locals pitched in and are helping him pick through the rubble, but none of his things remain. The city clerk then came by and dropped off a written notice of a lean against the properties to pay for the demolition."

"This lean, what is it exactly?" Spock asked

"Basically the man cannot sell the property or do anything with it until the town is paid the amount of the lean. Which, according to this post is over three times what demolition should have run."

"His tools and supplies are missing, no one is able to find them, and the town is now charging him in extreme excess of the demolition to... prevent him from rebuilding?"

"Yeah, that's what it seems like. Plus all his equipment is just gone? He had generators, solar panels, power tools. The whole kit. Stuff that big and expensive just doesn't up and disappear. Those utter bastards stole them from him, or found somewhere to dispose of all his stuff. They actively prevented something beneficial for the community from opening, something that's only purpose would be helping people. They destroyed that man's dream for retirement of helping people, hell with that lean they'll probably end up taking all his money left for savings. All that guy wanted was to help people."

Drew was livid. Pissed, no, infuriated. This saga had been going on for months, and he'd been following it like every other local. The world was an absolutely horrid place for many people, but one guy wanted to make a difference, and he'd gotten screwed because he was a different flavor of Christian. It was disgusting. The worst part? Drew knew there would be no justice for that man. Every board member of the city, the mayor, and even the clerk were all part of the same family. What would complaining do? Nothing.

It wasn't like the guy could even sue. Even without the apocalypse coming, no lawyer would touch this case. There'd be no money in it for them. No money to make from a little town with less than five hundred people. He had no doubt one or two of them might lose their positions in two years when elections came up. But it was all a moot point now.

"Drew Wright, I believe I'm experiencing what would be known as anger. My body feels tight, closed up, I feel like I have too much energy, but all I seem to focus on is what those people did. I don't like this feeling, it's much worse than confusion."

"That sounds like anger. I'm extremely angry myself. Hopefully when The System comes the monsters kill the fuck out of those 'leaders'."

"Why do the locals not fight them? If people feel the same way as we do, why don't they do something about it?"

"Law and order. Society has laws in place, laws that prevent fighting and killing. I've met that man a couple times, he's bound by his faith, he's likely to take this lying down. But some of the locals? They'd definitely beat the shit out of those people, or even kill them without those laws."

"I see. The System's descent is only days away though. I have my doubts whether those rules and laws remain an effective means of restraint for long."

"I agree Spock, I definitely agree. When everything stops working, the power goes out, and monsters roam the streets... the only law that will matter is survival and strength. As much as I'd like to do something about those people, we have our own concerns at the moment. My family and friends come first."

The two men sat in silence for some time. Drew using the breathing techniques he learned previously to help control anxiety attacks, while Spock seemed to be deep in thought. While the anger slowly started to fade, the resentment over that man's treatment, and the corruption of the leadership remained deeply ingrained in Drew's heart. By the time Drew finally felt more at ease and in control of his emotions Amber had walked in the office.

"It's done. I think." she sighed

"You mean the talk with my mom? How did she handle it?"

"With fifty million questions all phrased slightly different ways while I wanted to pull my hair out in clumps."

"Sooooo the way every talk goes with her then?" Drew chuckled.

"Yeah, but worse. I'm seriously starting to think it's early dementia or something dear. It's like her brain just can't process the information given to her without multiple repetitions, and even then I'm not certain whether she understood. I'm pretty concerned."

"Excuse me Mrs. Wright, but I read about this dementia on the wikipedia. When The System comes, natural illnesses like that will no longer be an issue. There's a good chance her brain will heal as well. Even if she doesn't use a token, her cognitive functions should remain the same as any other baseline human."

"Really!? Are you for real? That's a miracle! That's going to help so many people!"

"It will Boo Bear. It's a bit of good news despite the many people that will end up dying. Do you think she'll be okay seeing me?"

"I... don't know. I'm pretty sure I heard her lighting up a joint and turning on the tv when I left the room. I'd give it some time just to be on the safe side."

Drew burst out laughing. Amber had a slight smirk on her face as well. It was a rather recent devolpment, but his mom had started smoking pot. She'd been so against it when he was growing up, but now it was legal and she tried it out for the pain in her right hip. Now she was lighting up at least twice a day and watching her shows. Who was he to judge? If it helped her then he didn't give a shit. Hell she deserved to relax.

"Of course she's getting high as a kite right now! That's too funny, oh man. World's totally ending and what does my mom do? Light up a joint."

Spock seemed confused, but at least he wasn't still angry. The Wright couple just chuckled for a while.

"So, quick question. Besides looking like that famous actor, do I still look relatively human to you Boo?

"Uh, yeah? You told me about you being some kind of elf, human, vampire hybrid or something... but you look totally human to me."

"Great. We need to head to town and start grabbing shit. It's probably going to take several trips. I also called a well driller company and they'll be here tomorrow to install four manual pump wells. I figured we'd likely need more than one or two. I ordered some rain recycling equipment so we can always have a source of relatively clean water. Then I called that pond guy's number from the business card we picked up last week. I'm going to have a large pond put in the day after tomorrow, and I'm going to have him stock it with fish. Good to have some supplemental food sources. I got some other shit done, but we can talk on our way into town."

"Okay, let me throw on some real clothes if we're going into town. Have you heard from Mark or Miranda?"

"Yeah, they texted me an hour or so ago and said they were heading up. I'll probably have an ETA from them soon."

"Good, I'm glad they saw the message. I guess I'll need to have 'the talk' with them also. But you'll definitely need to do your magic show routine. We should grab some lunch when we're out. I want to treat Spock to some barbecue." Amber said.

"So what you're really saying is that you want barbecue, but it would be rude to leave poor Spock out of the fun?"

She leaned over to kiss her husband.

"You know me so well dear! I'll go get dressed!"

Drew chuckled.