In another life,
his name would’ve been Horace Szalinksi, son of Hank and Linda Szalinksi. He
would’ve grown up happy and well-fed on the dairy farm his great-grandparents
had built in Plainview, Nebraska, and he would’ve been surrounded by love and
tenderness. He would’ve played football or wrestled—perhaps even making it into
the professional leagues. He would’ve worked hard and taken a young, sweet
wife. In time, he would’ve inherited the family farm, then passed it on to his
own children.
Just another man
in a sane, reasonable world.
But Horace’s life
had been neither sane nor reasonable. Fate, that fickle force of nature, had
intervened in the form of an insidious Corporation: PRO-T-EN Industries.
Even at its
long-forgotten inception as a weapons manufacturer, PRO-T-EN Industries had set
out to take over what had once been known as the “military-industrial complex,”
and all of America along with it. Government contract after government contract
led this Corporate monstrosity to begin spreading its evil roots into
everything: pharmaceuticals, real estate, stocks and bonds. Soon, PRO-T-EN
minions began to infiltrate every major company on earth, each staking their
own claim from within.
Sensing what lay
on the blighted horizon, other Corporations panicked, merging into
conglomerates; desperate to consolidate and preserve their power. One by one, the
politicians sold what remained of their souls and broke their oaths to serve
God and country; no longer wealthy elites masquerading as public
representatives, but employees with their precious livelihoods—not to
mention their very lives—hanging in the balance.
Honest,
hardworking, independent people—like the Szalinskis—held their ground as their
neighbors fled the dying small towns for the economic shelter of the big
cities. Then they’d taken up shotguns and pitchforks and machetes for defense
when the first true scavengers came. Bloodthirsty men, clad in leather and
chains, riding two- and four-wheeled combustible engine machines. They’d had no
regard for human life, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Out of
necessity, the survivors of each state banded together, forming their own
tightknit communities outside of the guarded perimeters of the mighty Civilian
Centers.
As for little
Horace, his parents had done their best, living as their forebears had
intended: free, and self-reliant. But on one torrid afternoon in August of 2067,
fate again intervened. Roaring engines—hybrids, this time—from out of the
shimmering horizon. Invaders from God-knew-where; craving food and sex and
violence. And they’d found all three in a small group of wastelanders living in
what remained of a desolate apartment complex in Pierce, Nebraska.
In the ensuing
carnage, Linda Szalinski had hidden three-year-old Horace in a closet with the
intent to come back once the invaders had left. But both she and Hank had been
cut down without mercy, leaving Horace all alone to fend for himself in this
cruel world.
Hours later, by
then both scared and hungry, Horace began to scream and pound on the closet
door. His hysterics had caught the attention of someone else who’d hidden;
someone Horace never remembered. That forgotten figure rescued Horace from the
closet and took him far away from that apartment complex, ever further from his
hometown of Plainview, and sold him for food into a slave labor camp the first
chance he got. There, the sadistic camp warden had renamed Horace as “Skreth”
for the strange, rasping noises he used to make every so often.
And so his life
had begun anew.
As Skreth had
grown into boyhood, he’d been forced to chop wood, to haul buckets of water, to
gather and sharpen sticks. And later, he’d learned to hunt and butcher his own
food. To forage. To fight tooth and nail each and every torturous day of his
existence.
And as he grew
into a monster of a man, both in body and spirit, Skreth had learned utter disdain
for each and every Corporation in The United Sectors of America.
* * *
Hungry for more? Have you read Captain Rourke's call to return from his Extended Consensual Absence?
NO?!
Read it here: Captain Rourke's Vacation Is Cut Short! (Excerpt)
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