Hello and welcome to meters pod episode 14. I'm your host D
Mitas. Our story for this episode comes to us from Chris
Capps. Chris Capps is a cognitive point of reference
living in the American Midwest. His work the cathedral appeared
in massacre magazine, and he's been posting short stories to
his blog and editing for hatchlings writers group online.
He has a few books on Amazon including the homespun horror
novel, our war with Malini, fac, and the Evan the waste series of
post apocalyptic pulp books. Without further ado, here's our
story
that sun never set on Pine falls by Chris Capps.
Matthew Wilcox is the one that made the bomb stop exploding.
And no one knew where it came from or who dropped it. We
didn't even really know what the payload was, whether it was a
full Makaton or 10 or splinter from a cluster bomb. All we knew
when everyone and pong balls woke up at 336 and 15 seconds is
that it was hanging in the sky, just outside the city limits.
And then the man named Matt Wilcox had made it stop. Just
ever had started to go off. Everyone, every woman, every
child knew that name. It happened at 336 and 15 seconds
and the town meeting happened a little less than an hour later.
I say it that way for a reason. The town meeting happened it
wasn't called. People woke up, got out of their homes and just
started walking towards town hall to talk about it. There was
a thick orange glow in the sky just bright enough to trip the
sensors and the automatic street lamps and make baby bird start
crying from the nest for early worms. Some denied with a new
denied knowing it claimed it was just the morning sun. And they
ignored that the lot was coming from up north over by where the
airfield was. A lot of the older folks who lived through the Cold
War figure that's probably what the target was lots of silos on
the ground by the airfield. And pine Falls was just bullet holes
with from an automat. The mayor got on the phone called up
Kalafatis where the Onassis dairy plant was to see how they
were doing. The phones just whistled like electric wind
through an old house. He said it down and chewed his cheek for a
while and then assembled a team to head out into the world and
check on 16 men we never heard from again. Their truck just
stopped on the highway as soon as they reached the exit the
town. Six people working in the farm and fresh saw it they just
stopped moving like their truck had turned into a Polaroid. The
first real question asked when the strange meeting at town hall
started wasn't about what had just happened. It wasn't about
the phones and it certainly wasn't about the truck no one
knew had already been sent. First question when the room
finally got quiet was from Jessica, who was sitting at the
head of the band Falls City Council. No one had asked her to
go up but Jessica was known for her initiative and though young
people the town tended listen when she spoke. Jessica had a
good heart the camera you could just tell by listening. It was
an odd questions he asked why did we all know it was Matt
Wilcox it stopped it and nobody really had an answer. Matt
wasn't much of a man to speak of. He worked down to the auto
shop but he didn't know much about cars so he was low on the
totem pole. He was married to a woman the same 40 years named
Janet. Janet MC Hagen's Wilcox was a nice woman hard to hear
and had no patience for drinkers. She took the stage
next and Jessica letter. I woke up same as everyone else. And I
knew Matt had done it. Somehow I knew she Paul's shaking her head
and pantomime and how her hand had reached over to where her
husband had been in bed. He wasn't there though. I don't
know where he went. He's up on the hill. Jerry Bivins kid said
Jerry Jr. was 17 sitting in the town hall with his girl Tawny
they didn't say much else. Most folks were able to deduce which
hill they meant The old quarry lip where the high school kids
like to go, if you understand what I mean. Half the town went
up there, then to that man on the Hill drunk, stopping that
spark from swallowing us all. He had half a bottle of paint
thinner whiskey in his hand and a receipt from the SIR gas a lot
where he had made the purchase a few days prior, he was sitting
on a stump with red eyes staring as hard as he could into the
burn in face of frozen nuclear holocaust with pice naked down
his trouser legs. Janet ordinarily would have started
dealing then, finding out that Matt was drinking out in the
world without telling her that she wasn't mad. Then she just
sort of looked at him with a patient kind of love and then up
at what he was looking at. He was rocking a little and talking
the words to an old Hank Williams song.
car headlights were pulling around him, spilling on his back
and then to the side as they parked behind him and whole
families got out to look up at the sky. It took the better part
of an hour to talk him down off that hill. Someone brought him
blanket and others asked him a lot of questions. Eventually, he
agreed to stop staring at the thing in the sky. He explained
later that he had thought the thing would start moving again
if he blinked too much or looked away. But he had been wrong. And
after everyone got him a fresh set of clothes and enough coffee
to sober up a little. He said that he had the biggest headache
of his life. And everyone let him sleep. hours past many
hours, the sun never rose, more groups were assembling, thinking
about leaving town and going out into the world to see if
explanations can be found there. The television channels or
showed a single frozen image on every channel, constant streams
of the same tone of sound. The internet didn't work. Phones,
reception was fine all over. But no information came in or went
out. The rest of the world at least his pond Falls was
concerned had simply stopped and mid stroke. And so they could
see the world wasn't offering them anything in the way of
answers. Without facts the town's people shared words. At
the end of the day, the mayor's office got a wind of a second
group, Robbie hicker and his boys had set out to leave town
on foot with raffles in hand for anyone who tried to stop them.
They were found in a field like scarecrows standing still with
their guns. I stayed like that. For them. Time had stopped. No
one went near them. Matthew got a lot of visits that week. Work
resumed in the farms. But that first month we mostly stuck to
the fields well inside the perimeter of town. No one knew
for sure how far existence went, how far you could go without
getting stuck. After that first month, the grass kept growing
and we use that to indicate where we could and couldn't go.
Signs went up around the edge of town. Don't go in the short
grass. Hard to say why the grass kept growing. But Marge over the
flower shop notice that all her sunflowers reporting to the big
orange thing in the sky like it was the sun. There was no day or
not just that no orange rain in whatever light we could get
down. And the plants loved it. And sound Dr. Mackel from the
university guests that Tom hadn't stopped exactly as best
as he could tell. There was still some kind of transfer of
energy happening just at a rate so slow enough that the nuclear
explosion was not harmful more like a sunrise. When we ask what
mount a call is something like this, he shrugged angry. I don't
know Judith, why don't you get a PhD in thermal engineering and
tell me the boys in the town started up hobbyists digging
arrows in the sky. After about a month most of the birds have
disappeared. Well, they didn't disappear. There's a big black
Halo ring around the perimeter of town. funerals for men who
stopped in the field never happened. Dalton Fuller, a
greasy spoon line cook who was the first one to ask to be taken
down after his heart attack. With pong balls cut off in the
hospital wasn't looking good. He asked to be taken to the park
the edge of town and that's where we pushed his wheelchair
down the hill until it stopped and the short grass him with his
arms up like he was riding a roller coaster. Dalton fuller
never died where we see it. A year past lack that laugh in the
town was simple, but in its own way, we were still living
through the end of the world just not one we had pictured. We
had to live on our own, make what we needed. Matt stop work
in the auto mechanic shop after it closed and he started working
in the soil and his property and grow food for him and Janet
Wilcox never had any kids. Never the time for it. Gear started
slipping past us and bit by bit the old world faded from memory.
Whenever exactly forgot about it, but after a few years, it
came up a lot less in conversation. Matt Wilcox got
older, old enough that his eyes started turning yellow and his
doctor told the rest of us his liver was showing signs of
giving up.
He'd been drinking the whole time quietly by himself. He
never bothered anyone. So we never really noticed. And so the
second meeting in the history upon Falls was called to discuss
Matt Dennett didn't go to that one. Matt Stein, Mayor Jessica
said, older now. Doctor says it could be next month or a year
from now. Now ordinarily, I wouldn't consider it our
business but there's that fire in the sky and I'd like to just
talk to you and see what we all have to say about it. What's
gonna happen when he dies? Someone said, and did matter who
anybody could have said. We were all thinking it. He doesn't have
to die. Another said. The dine relax statues. Immortal at the
edge of town, where they stood in the fields called mid stride
as they backed away, wave and inward. There was a circle of
mall around us all dressed in their Sunday finest. No one ever
had to die. Believe it and Matt go off and find that hill while
everyone else in town figured out what to do with him. He sat
there yellow eyed staring at the sun. What half a bottle of fine
Scotch in his hand. When the sheriff found him the first
thing he did was feel the drunk snack for a pulse. Matt Wilcox
was dead by the sun, our new old son never said never grew and
swallow us up and just stood burnin over us with a cool
forever morning. Maybe someday Tom will start again. But I
don't know. And I don't know what will happen when it does. I
know the bomb will finish where to started all those years ago.
And whoever tries to find out what happened upon falls will
find a crater same as you'd expect. I'd say they find more
bodies than usual buried in the cemetery. But no one's visited
in years. And without new deaths, there's no need for
headstones. I'd still get a kick out of some politician somewhere
talking to America mourn in our town publicly say in every life
in our town was snuffed out in an instant. Maybe he's right. Or
maybe our towel just go on forever in this doomed footprint
the story reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone
called a little peace and quiet. I recommend you check it out if
you get the chance. If you'd like to make a donation to help
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Sprite. You can check out more of their work at odd sprite.com.
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unless otherwise stated. Have a good one, folks. We'll see you
next time.