--- Osbie Z, cont'd ---

Back home, things were changing. In light of all that’d come and the more would come further, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Still, it was a fact that our lives were growing harder. I don’t know what else to call it but harder.

I wonder if you’d be interested to know this, and maybe you’ll find it silly – but back before any of all this started, we had certain preconceptions on the subject of the end. Don’t ask me why. What kind of morbid curiosity set us to dream of disaster as if it was a thing to be admired? But anyway we had, and at great length, and in some kind of hubris we had decided there were rules.

See, our way of living up to that point had become dependent on the magnificent force of electricity. It was in our houses and in our schools. Our cars used it in the radio, our doctors used it in their heart machines, and we even ran that lightning through our hair appliances. But even as important as it was, as ever-present and affordable, it was still new. Fire was different. Fire we’d known for ten thousand years; for so far back it was on the walls of the cave men. But electricity? For all our mastery and all our artifice, we had only known it a century.

What? Benjamin who now? Seventeen fifty what? Well, baby it’s not like I know the exact dates of things. Okay. Just – how about you just save it for your lessons, and you let me finish my story.

Alright, then. My point is, we had always assumed that it was our high technology that would be the first to go. Our widgets and screens and telephones. And computers? Oh those things would sizzle-pop and fry in the first ten minutes. And more, like I said, we put circuit-chips in everything. That’s including those self-same cars and planes which were breaking, by the way. So when we saw our trains and motors fail – and not only that but that the mortal end of their engineering was more likely with age and not less, that the ‘el cheapo’ whiz-bang versions lasted while the tried-and-true did not – it just seemed...

Backwards. It felt wrong.

In fact, by large degree the electrical was being advanced even faster than before. For example we couldn’t afford a new bicycle that year, but it cost us barely more than a song to buy a television. Our last one had been full of ray tubes and cathodes, as deep as a stride; this new one was no thicker than the width of my hand. My telephone was changing too. I used to have this little thing with a hinge, and the little numbers could only show on the screen in one color on account of the liquid crystal (which is I guess what they made them from). By that spring, my new mobile had a face in full riotous color. It connected to my electronic mail, and played little games like cards or checkers.

I mention this to contrast our progress to the state of my shoes. I was putting miles on my sneakers in a way I never had before, and my toes were already feeling the rough streets through the thinness of their soles. My friends and I were trying to preserve our friendship, crossing the distances which wheels had once made easy, in order to grasp at the comfort of each other’s company. But inevitably… we began to fall apart, our connections to each other real only in the magnetic waves we bounced across relay towers and into our lonely homes.

School was shut down. It was simply getting too hard to deliver our teachers to the building, and that left us kids wandering wild in the streets. Desperate to prevent their descent’s descent into going feral, our parents were scrambling for alternatives. The only one we’d come up with was to open up a local church for mixed lessons. But that didn’t even happen ’till fall.

Instead the border between me and adulthood was slipping faster than I was getting older – at a pace I wasn’t ready for. At first I simply took up the chore of making the trip to the grocers, while pretending to keep up my studies from home. Then later that year I’d take on a job, delivering food and things to older folks on behalf of a community organization: Gracious Madonna’s Community Cupboard.

All the while, the dragon rolled along the coast of South America. Make no mistake, everywhere it visited was ruined. Those were real cities it was destroying, and the folks living there; there had to have been millions of them. But... and I don’t want to make excuses, but they were all so far away, and we were so busy being angry at the doubling cost of morning coffee.

So, every night after the celebrity gossip segment, and the politicians blaming one another, and before the steamy serial adventures of single lady detectives, the enemy’s progress was charted in two minute segments. The Action News: Monster Tracker was getting strong viewer ratings, which was apparently important, and it gave us the ’vasion in dotted lines and colorful graphics. Then they would paint these big blobs on the map to stand in for the fleets of allied ships, and push them about in order to prove just how cleverly the naval forces of the civilized world would save us.

I was only dimly aware of the fact that we were no longer seeing live images or video from the conflict. Smarter folks that me were starting to stir a fuss, and I’m sure I could have found more on the net, but I wasn’t wise enough to see it as a sign we were losing. The first image I saw of Old Duke Fulminous wasn’t even a photo – it was a graffiti, a vandal wall-painting on an abandoned storefront. Though I was in the middle of my delivery route, with weary arms full of hot dinners, the image stopped me frozen, standing beneath golden coils looping through angry thundering cloud. His plumage was full, like some emperor of birds, and his five-finger claws were wrapped around thinly veiled metaphors (which I didn’t recognize, but I’m sure reflected the artist’s politics). Most arresting though, was it’s face: a half horse, half lion with cruel human eyes. It loomed – looking down on me with dispassion like it was coming only with the intent to deliver a punishment we deserved.

Early on, Leilung struck inland only rarely and for the largest cities, hugging the shore like he was drinking from the power of the Atlantic to fuel his warfare. Though we couldn’t’ve known it, he was leaving behind all the seeds of ’Vader pestilences in his wake: goblin muck, rabie pearls, go-shems, dryads, all of it. Later they’d be like a second tsunami, sprouting six months behind him.

That kind of talk (if it was happening) stayed hidden online in rumors; the public would rather focus on the big, heroic and upcoming promise of battle. People started learning the names of warships. Heck, I even remember one: the Zumwalt-class destroyer Lyndon B. Johnson. My dad bought the commemorative sweater. That confidence wouldn’t break ’till we met the dragon in earnest, which we did at the end of August as he turned the bend at Cape Branco. The Atlantic fleet was set like a bear-trap, lethal and atomic and in wait. By then, anything which ran on fossils had been phased out, as our best brainiacs had swapped it all out with hydra-ma-zines and electrorail guns and all sorts of things which I’m sure sounded impressive at the time. There were eleven countries (I think) that came with us in that coalition.

And we lost. I don’t have much more I can say about it, because the Battle of Recife was never broadcast. It was classified to high heaven and back. So, for better or worse, it’s possible we panicked a bit.