The Unpocalypse Series - Volume 1

Willem - A Ride into the Country

He clattered down the road leaving a trail of smoke and dust. The sound of the velocipede's engine, or what the trendy types were beginning to call a motorcycle, was an assault on the serene countryside. Willem, now in his late twenties, had the look of an insane man straddling the machine as it rattled and chugged and threatened to fall apart at every bump in the road. He looked insane mostly because he didn't care how he looked.

In his few years back from the war, he had no regard for what others thought of him. He hid from his family and from anyone who knew him. He dressed only for his own strange sense of practicality. He wore the same greasy trousers and shirt almost every day and his riding gear consisted of a leather fire captain's helmet to protect his head, and a leather coat which flapped behind him. A pair of goggles covered his eyes and his long, unkempt beard parted at the chin in the oncoming breeze and wrapped around both sides of his face as he rode along. He wore huge, preposterous gloves that must have been meant for working a forge or shoveling kol into a furnace, because they flared out and reached almost to his elbows. The total effect made him look like a deranged and dirty, young wizard.

The four years he'd spent in the military, most in the front lines of the Jinni War, had rendered him in many ways unfit to live in his old home. He felt at times a tempest of emotions, and at others had a complete absence of human feeling. He couldn't relate to or speak meaningfully with anyone he'd known prior to the war. Instead, he'd spent his time alone, reading, tinkering, learning, and experimenting with self-medication. He'd fully invested himself in learning how to build velocipedes. It was a distraction at first, but quickly became an obsession.

He listened to the strokes and timing of the engine as he sped farther into the open countryside. It was a new build. The first ever kerosene engine he'd tried. It was only marginally faster than the steam velocipedes he'd built in the past, but damn, at this moment, in the sun and the wind and the lonely road, it was good enough, he thought.

He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the small bottle there, pulled the cork out with his teeth and spit it into the wind. He then chugged the remaining cocaine syrup and threw the bottle off into the tall grass along the road.

The warm glow poured over him, combined with the smell of the prairie grass, the wild flowers, the distant forests. It set his spirit right. These rides were practically religious. He took them almost every day, and there was always a point when he was at least ten or more miles out of town, when life became... tolerable.

When he'd first come back from Jinn, he'd tried whiskey to take off the edge, but it made him feel dull, tired, and unable to work on his machines and caused him to crash on several of his rides. In the war, he had a commander that issued cocaine syrup for "endurance" for long and rigorous missions. He had formed a bit of an attachment to it over time, and discovered that once back in his hometown, that children's tooth ache syrup had cocaine in it these days, and consumed in large amounts, had the same effect.

Today would be a long ride, he decided, with something like a smile. He had a full tank of kerosene, and two more bottles of the syrup in his saddle bag. As an afterthought, he pulled a small pouch out of another pocket and fumbled with the drawstring one-handed, while trying not to crash. He dumped some dried leaves into his mouth and stashed the pouch away again, grabbing the handlebars with both hands just in time. A big dip in the dirt road almost dumped him and his sputtering machine over. He chewed and sucked at the sour leaves, a new discovery, that he had been experimenting with. The natives of this land had thought it was a magical plant. He wasn't sure if it was magical, but he definitely had bright flashes in the edges of his vision after a few minutes.