The sale of this book without its cover….well, is, sort of, impossible since it really doesn’t have a cover but let us go through the legal spray out anyways. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Hands up to you who have books like this in your collection? Now that I put my hand down we can continue with the credits and copyright and legal and stuff that people just don’t ever pay attention to unless it is pumping their own horn.
An Original Publication of System* Publishing, a Tin Universe book published by System*Publishing, a division of System*Productions, Melbourne, Florida. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead or living dead, is entirely and very much so in the coincidental.
Written and Edited by Brian C. Williams
Cover Digital Work by 74 Images
Photography by Stainless Photography
Author Photo by Nancy Collins
Beta Reader Melinda George- Harold
Tin Universe #16
A First Shot Fired, Part One
This Earth on which these stories take place is much like our own but there are differences.
In a few noticeable ways there are differences that make it alternate, now of like our own.
Different in the sort of ways alligators are different from one another and crocodiles are not.
Different in the ways ants are different from one another but elephants are not.
It’s a crazy world out there. It is alternate reality acreage, other universe land, and we all just need to learn to chill and enjoy the ride. And this applies to the one telling the stories more than anyone else.
BREAKING NEWS: Riot breaks out over cookies in Kent, refresh website for updates…
BREAKING NEWS: Colin Ryan states a possible run for office during interview in Chrono Magazine…
BREAKING NEWS: Celebrity dumbass names baby East South Downing…
“There will come a time when we just wakeup and there is no more governments because the new Deities have struck down these false Divinities.” Tom Raapack, author of The Devil Made of Sand: The End Of Man’s Age Begins
Sometimes the skies don’t clear and sometimes they don’t have to for you to feel the warmth of light on your face.
Some people think it’s an indignity to acknowledge how gray the world is but if you don’t look at the gray and black then the sunshine will never cross your vision.
Chris didn’t grow up in Billings, Montana. He didn’t grow up with the Montana sky warming his skin.
He was born and for the early part of his life raised in San Francisco; though when he was born his name wasn’t Chris Friday but Chis Lugar. His mother and father had changed their identities after being part of a group called The Rain Fall Balcony.
During the 1960’s the anti-government group The Rain Fall Balcony were bombing military locations all over Montana. Their name had started to make waves nationally, becoming a symbol of confrontation; so they needed to be brought down hard.
The U.S. government tracked them down. It took six months but they finally found, cornered, and killed all but two who escaped death or capture because who knows with the government and those two were Chris parents.
People will say that Destiny doesn’t control us but it sure can shove us down a path.
Growing up in San Francisco was a pretty ordinary life for Chris.
Well, ordinary for San Francisco.
He was immersed in reading, debating things from an early age, and told to speak his mind. Conveyed to never just see one side of any issue. That was something his mother and father hammered into him as being a very important factor to growing up to be the best person he could be.
In San Francisco he had friends from many walks of life. As his parents said, “We wish you to have friends from many backgrounds of how their families came to this country.”
And that’s a pretty white way of stating a liberal goal but no matter how he came across his view of America, his view of America has never been one of closing off things but about how opening up doors, windows, and opportunities are what has put strength into America and shutting down prospects does nothing but generate weaknesses.
When his family moved from California to Florida after his dad retired as a cop, yeah a cop, when he was 18 he decided college in the Sunshine State wasn’t for him and instead applied at every large and small school Billings had.
Chris didn’t choose the largest city in Montana by a random pick with a throw of a dart or anything like that. He knew his family was originally from there and because of reasons they never told him they hated everything about the place.
Things didn’t go as planned though with his life in Billings and late at night he wondered if he should have taken the easier route and taken the job his father had lined up for him on an oil rig off the coast of Florida.
There was something in his father setting that up for him. The pushing him towards that job. They understood his choices, they taught him to make his own paths in life, but this just felt like them trying everything they could to move him away from Montana as a choice.
When parents try to push their kids in one direction the natural reaction is to push back the very way their parents don’t want them to go.
Billings avoided most of the economic downturn that had run shitting over the rest of the country like a stampede of rich fucks but decay reaches everything and everywhere because it’s a part of life and so this is a lesson the Magic City will find out.
And no this city isn’t a hub for supernatural stuff.
Though every city has its spiritual side.
It’s just a stupid city nickname.
Unless I get an idea why it isn’t just another stupid city nickname.
This one time railroad town was trying to shine a very bright light but to the cancers of the world, they saw that light as a beacon, a taunt in their faces.
When we are not just maneuvered off our path but picked up and thrown as far as an object can possible go to where we can’t see our path anymore and maybe it doesn’t even exist so we have to dig around in the mess we have made to find a new path, even if we have to create a new path with insanity and digging the path with our hands scooped like shovels it’s a situation of screaming at the shadows and trying to punch the embers of early morning lights.
That paragraph made no sense what so ever.
And I thought this issue was going good so far without a lot of my disorientated insanity.
Chris came up with his plan almost a year ago when he found himself really sick with the flu. Everyone else who caught it had fought through it with doctor visits, drug regiments, and bed rest but he didn’t have insurance for a doctor’s visit, contact for obtaining any drugs that might help, and time for rest as the little work he was finding as an artist was keeping him at the drawing board because even though he was a very good artist, he was also really, really slow.
The idea that would turn into a plan was triggered when someone online, just a random blogger he followed, said it just baffled her that so many people were so silent about the stuff going on in the world today.
A citizenry which is blindly angry or silenced is a war won for any government. Governments or the powerful in general use many tools to silence the masses. They false create political correctness to make it where humor between human differences and the weaknesses of powerful groups like corporations and religious or
ganizations are protected.
They also use economic situations to force peoples focus to shift from what is going on with the workings of their so called leaders because they are living lives of day to day survival.
They put swords and words in hands and direct the people against each other and only smile at any blood spilt because neither side fighting and dying is their side.
The rich, the government are pen masters looking down at the dog fight below them.
An opinion you don’t agree with is one thing, a majority of silence and stupidity for the sake of your view is insane and deadly to the future life of any group of people or individual for that matter.
And all of that just means we are fucked if we aren’t