Friday, July 30, 2010
Another Excerpt from The Last Guardian
The following short exceerpt is from The Last Guardian, available now from the publisher at www.mundania.com from my website at www.stephenlafevers.wcpauthor.com and from Amazon.com and many other places on the web and in bookstores.
The long nights and short autumn days in Fairbanks were giving way to the terrible ice fogs and arctic temperatures of winter. Many residents try to squeeze a final outdoor fling into their schedule that time of year because they’ll soon be forced indoors by the weather.
The city’s population had doubled due to the pipeline construction. “Outsiders” streamed in, hoping for fast bucks and high times. It was almost too much for the permanent residents. Most of them lived there because they disliked the crime and crush of urban America. Now it had followed them literally to the end of the earth.
Even Fairbanks University student Jane Potter had felt the pressure that September weekend and was determined to get as far away from people as she reasonably could. In her father’s plane, Jane flew a few hundred miles east to a place on the banks of the Yukon River called Eagle City. It was just what she needed.
Ninety years ago, Eagle City had been a thriving metropolis of 35,000 souls, living, dying, working, cheating, riding the boom of Klondike gold. There had been casinos, banks, bordellos, a cavalry post, even an immigration office to deal with Canadians coming to search for the yellow metal.
All that was gone now, except for the old immigration office, and the hundred or so folks who call the place home. Jane sat on an abandoned pile of wood that had been cut and neatly stacked nearly a century before. She gazed at the ruins of a once-lively cavalry post. A memorial at the stables proclaimed: “Half their horses died the first winter.”
Turning east, she saw row upon row of firewood stacked beside the pipe that had carried water to the fort. Along the way, the pipe passed through a series of small buildings. Each building contained a stove where wood fires kept the water from freezing before it got to the next building and so on until it reached the fort. The fort was in ruins, but the pipeline and wood remained nearly unchanged.
Jane got up and walked among the ghosts of men and times long gone, knowing that, like Eagle City, Fairbanks would not always be teeming with society’s greedy rejects. She wondered if someday only the oil pipeline and its pump stations would remain to show what had once been there.
It would soon be dark, she thought and zipped up her parka against the chill. She would have to leave soon if she were going to stop at Chicken on the way home. She had never been to Chicken, but had heard the story of the original settlers who wanted to name the place after the local birds, but couldn’t spell Ptarmigan. “Hell,” someone said. “Let’s just call it Chicken.”
Her spirits lifted, Jane turned and walked briskly toward the airfield that had once been a parade ground. It was only a few hundred feet to her father’s Supercub, but before she reached the aircraft, she quietly dissolved away.
The long nights and short autumn days in Fairbanks were giving way to the terrible ice fogs and arctic temperatures of winter. Many residents try to squeeze a final outdoor fling into their schedule that time of year because they’ll soon be forced indoors by the weather.
The city’s population had doubled due to the pipeline construction. “Outsiders” streamed in, hoping for fast bucks and high times. It was almost too much for the permanent residents. Most of them lived there because they disliked the crime and crush of urban America. Now it had followed them literally to the end of the earth.
Even Fairbanks University student Jane Potter had felt the pressure that September weekend and was determined to get as far away from people as she reasonably could. In her father’s plane, Jane flew a few hundred miles east to a place on the banks of the Yukon River called Eagle City. It was just what she needed.
Ninety years ago, Eagle City had been a thriving metropolis of 35,000 souls, living, dying, working, cheating, riding the boom of Klondike gold. There had been casinos, banks, bordellos, a cavalry post, even an immigration office to deal with Canadians coming to search for the yellow metal.
All that was gone now, except for the old immigration office, and the hundred or so folks who call the place home. Jane sat on an abandoned pile of wood that had been cut and neatly stacked nearly a century before. She gazed at the ruins of a once-lively cavalry post. A memorial at the stables proclaimed: “Half their horses died the first winter.”
Turning east, she saw row upon row of firewood stacked beside the pipe that had carried water to the fort. Along the way, the pipe passed through a series of small buildings. Each building contained a stove where wood fires kept the water from freezing before it got to the next building and so on until it reached the fort. The fort was in ruins, but the pipeline and wood remained nearly unchanged.
Jane got up and walked among the ghosts of men and times long gone, knowing that, like Eagle City, Fairbanks would not always be teeming with society’s greedy rejects. She wondered if someday only the oil pipeline and its pump stations would remain to show what had once been there.
It would soon be dark, she thought and zipped up her parka against the chill. She would have to leave soon if she were going to stop at Chicken on the way home. She had never been to Chicken, but had heard the story of the original settlers who wanted to name the place after the local birds, but couldn’t spell Ptarmigan. “Hell,” someone said. “Let’s just call it Chicken.”
Her spirits lifted, Jane turned and walked briskly toward the airfield that had once been a parade ground. It was only a few hundred feet to her father’s Supercub, but before she reached the aircraft, she quietly dissolved away.
# posted by Stephen LaFevers @ 12:59 AM 
