Speeches and stories by Ken Peters cut from
HG World presents: "The Googies"
1. Ken explains where his understanding of The Googies comes from and why they frighten him.
It's something you
carry with you. You can only process so
much of it at any one time, so your brain starts to process things
differently. But you end up walking
around with this big rock in your gut; all your fears and grief get stuck there
and you wish to god you could just pass it like a kidney stone. It never goes away, keeps you up at night,
slows you down...and it grows. Most
folks can't manage it for long; they don't find ways to shrink the stone as it
were. Most folks let it drag 'em down.
They either keep it cool so long they just break down... or just give up and take
a slow dance with an eater. Some get
cold and lose their faith or even their humanity rather than put up with that
kind of pain.
How do you shrink the
stone?
When I was little,
this was probably the middle-1970s...prehistory to you...I knew who the googies
were for real. I didn't have a dad. I had a series of grown-up pals who showed
up in my life for a few weeks or months at a time, pretended to be interested in
me and then disappeared when mom got crazy or tired of them hanging
around. Sometimes mom got loud on the
phone with the thing she said was my real dad.
She made him out to be some horrible thing that I should be afraid
of. I thought all moms were that loud,
that angry. One day some people from the
county came to visit and mom stopped yelling.
Oh, she was so sweet that day. And for the next month. When I acted up, she told me that I needed to
stay quiet or they'd come back. They'd
come back for me and take me to a dark place and I'd never see her again. I didn't go to school very often, but after
the county people showed up, I was put on the bus every morning, either by my
mom or someone from the school district.
I hated it. One day my teacher read
us some poetry by Shel Silverstein. The googies are coming, she told us in a
spooky voice. The googies are coming, the old people say, to find little children and
take them away.
That was all I needed
to hear. I was so scared I never really got the point of the poem...never made
it to the last few lines without freaking out over two plump, sad-looking goons
with big glasses and wet lips and a sour old lady who looked like 50 pounds of
sand pounded into a 20 pound tweed sack.
They were sour, sinister beasts wearing suits made of people skin. None of them looked comfortable. One even had a lazy eye that she kept on me
while scolding my mom in a completely different direction.
(Ken's origin changed as the story was edited, so this explanation was cut from an early draft.)
2. A digression about his troubled youth and why he grew up introverted and hostile.
I don't like being a
guest of authorities. I ran away from a
babysitter when I was nine. While mom was working one of her crap jobs, she
parked me with some 20-something welfare mom with three other kids, including
her own. At first it was fun - except
for the menthol cigarette stink and the two hungry cats that thought my
sneakers were mice - but then her boyfriend started spending time there. He came "back" from somewhere
terrible so I thought it made sense that he and my sitter would love up on each
other and disappear for short times upstairs while I played video games. After a week, though, the guy wouldn't even
talk to me, deal with any of the kids, and spent the entire day every day
drinking, eating and hogging the video games.
He and the sitter had a kid together and the boyfriend was about as
useful and reliable. The two had a lot
in common. Both would scream until fed, whine until comforted, and they hated
competition for attention. The only
differences I saw were that the boyfriend could master a game controller and
use the bathroom. One time I tried to
play one of his little fighting games, you'd think I tried to steal his
car. He raised a hand to me and I...
well, I punched him in the stomach.
While he was getting over the shock, I bolted from the house. I'd seen what happened when he raised a hand
to my sitter. It wasn't pretty. My sitter was too busy eating or talking on
the phone to notice I left and an hour past before she asked he boyfriend what
happened to me. They called my mom. Mom had to leave work and track me down. When
she found me hiding in the closet at home I thought I was in trouble because I
messed up that big baby's stupid game.
Mom, for all her
little faults, saw through it all and took me out of that house. She couldn't afford it any more anyway since
leaving her shift cost her the job, but mom hated juggling plates and tables
for a bunch of blue collar grab-asses.
She said that if it didn't kill ya, it made you stronger for the next
job.
A few months later,
mom got some bad news that made her very sad.
We never really had a lot of happy-fun-time, but this was different than
the usual stress of bounced checks, overdrawn accounts and bill collectors at
the door. Turns out the video game
champion couldn't concentrate with his little boy crying right beside him and
his little blob of pixels couldn't delete the other blob of pixels or whatever
it was that kept his demons occupied. So
enraged was this man-child that he beat his own son with the game controller,
then throttled the life out of him.
(Another version of Ken' origin that didn't survive. It was a much more loving home than future iterations...)
3. Ken's darkest origin story.
When I was younger, I used to tell people I left home at an early age. That was usually enough to cover my rough
edges, particularly around suburbanites whose idea of having it rough was
losing cable or electricity for more than a few hours after a bad storm. If I did get close to someone like that it
was after a few weeks on the job. After
spending time in their home fixing their things and doing their work, some
folks seem to think it's permission to pry into my life.
I helped build an addition to some couple's house once and by the second
week they asked me where I went to school.
"I was home schooled" was my usual reply until one lady shined
to me so fast you might have thought I said Jesus himself taught me. She was a home-schooler, too and had a lot of
questions. After wiggling my way through
that encounter I liked to resort to 'here and there' or 'I moved around a
lot'. Interestingly enough, I never
realized that when they asked me that question, they were really asking where I
went to college.
HA! My university was a series of
courses in how to get money from a deadbeat without getting stabbed or how to
evict poor, single mothers from an apartment and still be able to stand looking
at yourself in the mirror. I came from
a very dark place, which I guess is what prepared me for when the entire world
went that way.
Anyway, I was in a particularly black mood over a couple who had more money
than brains and less understanding of the world outside their little controlled
cul de sac. As someone they brought on
from a county rehabilitation project, they decided to treat me like some
wounded animal. Between laying concrete
for their patio and assembling exterior walls for their extra bedroom, they
wanted to know all about me.
By the way, I was the "rehabilitation" that program referred
to. Because my early release was
contingent upon satisfying these homeowners, I played along and told them I was
home schooled and spent time in foster care, managed to get through primary
school without being crushed by my classmates or the system and then the
pink-polo-shirt-wearing muther fugger asked me "So, Ken: what was your
first crime?"
Just because I make polite conversation and tolerate your simple-minded
banter about how the world should be and how crappy people got it below
you...it don't make us friends.
Something about that question pissed me off, so I decided I would tell
Pink Polo the truth.
"I shot my older brother in the face with a nine millimeter
pistol. He was seven. I was three."
The horrified look on Mrs. Pink Polo convinced me to stop right there. I felt the need to put back some of the soft
and fuzzy stuff that protected such people.
After all, I wanted my points from the assignment and my pay, both of
which would disappear if they decided I was too crazy to finish the job.
"It was an accident, they say.
Mom kept a gun in every room of the ratty little apartment we lived in
after my dad...or something pretending to be him...just left us. I found a pistol in the living room behind
the radiator. It was loaded and
chambered and I somehow managed to trip the safety. My big brother was in the living room with
me. I don't remember what happened and
nobody else was around to tell me. They
tell me mom was asleep in bed at the time.
I remember a loud bang, a cloud of smoke and something hard and hot hit
me in the face; the kick on the gun knocked me out cold. I woke up in the ambulance. My brother Benny died a week later.
They say it wasn't a crime. But it
was the catalyst. I never saw mom
again. I have vague memories which I'm
sure are embellished with a few pictures I have of her...the ones I persuaded
myself not to burn in a drunken pity party.
(This represents where Ken comes from: A mix of guilt and rage; a brilliant mind and a good soul tortured by grief and loss. I think perhaps he was happy when the rest of the world came around to how he saw things. Listeners ask how Old Ken can be so thoughtful and worldly after everything he's seen and done. I modeled his behavior on older veterans who were able to come to terms with a "normal" life of grand kids and peaceful evenings and the opportunity they earned to just sit and read a book or listen to music again. Ken knows how lucky he was to survive.)
4. Ken's experience dying once...
The body drifts to sleep, but the mind remains awake. Five senses die but my thoughts are of
falling into blackness, freed of my body.
I should be terrified. This is
how it ends, after all. No beating
heart. No sensation of cool air in my
nose and chest. I cannot raw it. Those
impulses are gone. My universe is so
much greater without the impediments of flesh.
Without the chemistry of emotion I become pure thought. I expected to feel trapped inside the
confines of my brain, to feel weighted by my useless mass. Instead, I am free. This sensation is one of elation.
I believed that my body would go numb as though I were going under
anesthesia, counting backward from one hundred I would not even be aware how
fast I faded. The truth was sunset,
fading of everything in a slow, graceful wave, followed by a sunrise of new
perception. The light of the world is
bright, but not so bright as my new sun
All I've written before feels so foreign, so confused
and devoid of reason.
5. Ken's tips for surviving on the run...
Eaters migrated to warmer climes in the winter. Things were bad in Dixie year round. But in the late fall, the herds were clear of
the northern part of the country leaving the lurkers and the slumps to deal
with more often than the stray wandering loners and small packs. The first year it was easy to find a place to
stay in the small towns and cities. You
picked a row house in a crappy neighborhood so you knew the windows and doors
were extra strong, did some recon and some good ole fashioned burglary from the
second or third floor...boom.
Shelter. I learned to keep quiet
and check everywhere inside a house even if it looked abandoned. There were places with fire doors and bars
over the windows, but they weren't boarded or fortified after the fact. Those places were usually clean...and by that
I mean nobody likely died inside hiding in the attic or basement. But you had to check, even the
cupboards.
One time I was rolling through Maryland and stopped in a small ranch house
locked up from the inside. I snuck in
through the garage and went to sleep. I
woke up to something tugging on my boot.
It was...well, it was a kid...about six... skin and bones with the
yellow eyes of an eater. From the smear
he left across the floor, I figured out he came from a cupboard under the sink
in the kitchen. It must have taken him
hours to get out and across the house to where I was sleeping. I put it down with a table lamp and tossed
the body out into the yard. The rot
would mask the scent of my being there.
Moral of the story, kid: You search everywhere. Twice.
But once you had a place in an empty neighborhood, you could manage for a
short while, set up subtle security measures around the place in case the
living or dead try to pay a visit, and then – y’know - recharge the ole
batteries. This one house I stayed in
near Gettysburg had a full wardrobe of winter clothes and a closet full of
blankets, even a bathroom closet stacked with old, but useful medicines. It was a treasure box. The place was a converted commercial property
with high windows and heavy, reinforced doors.
From the evidence a single mom with two kids lived there. The clothes were her ex's. Fit nice.
Kept me warm. I slept hard.
You're gonna sweat and piss and shirt and most people deal with blood, so
it's only a matter of time before all that human stink attracts a crowd and you
gotta move on. I lasted longer in that
place near Gettysburg than most and had time to scout for spare gas and a Ford
Bronco locked up in a secure garage nearby.
I was ready to go before I ate some spoiled food and ended up with a bad
fever for a day or two. Fevers bring out
the dead quicker'n shit, so I had to cut my recovery short and …[edited]
6. Ken spends some time in Pennsylvania's capital city...
There were two months in the first spring of the eater uprisings when
things weren't so bad. This was before I
made it to Hagerstown, Maryland and took a job driving The Popcorn
Express. I found myself following the
back roads through the Appalachians heading southwest. I found myself in scenic Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania. I had one set of clothes
and a really under-stocked go-bag strapped to my back. Word along the refugee trails was that
Harrisburg was the place to go to get the hell away from what many predicted
would be a million-eater herd pouring out of the city come summer.
Harrisburg was a capital city and a hub of evacuations for the
northeast. If you look at the old maps,
you'll see that Harrisburg is like the center point between important places
with Interstates crossing through town in every direction. I was there because I had outdated
information about flights leaving from the airport.
When things started falling apart in Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, and all
those little farm towns in between, Harrisburg bravely loaded all the lawmakers
and their lawyers and staff into helicopters and flew away. Then the city was opened up to refugees. The locals got out first, clearing mid-town
for the military. Then outsiders were
let in. The highways would only take you
so far before checkpoints stopped all traffic into town. You took anything you could carry into the
check point and left the rest for looters.
Past the check points, everything was military. From there, you got
processed and put on a bus to the airport or tossed in a row home or hotel room
for the time being until you got booked on a flight out. Where you would be going? You didn't know until you got there in most
cases. Rumor had it that the more letters
you had behind your last name the faster you and your family got off the ground
and out of town.
When I got there, the soldiers at the checkpoints and refugees were long
gone, but the medians and embankments around them looked like auto scrap
yards. By the time I reached the airport
just down river in Middletown the only planes on the ground were stripped for
parts or burned out metal tubes. The
Air National Guard unit stationed there took everything but the paint on the
hanger walls.
In downtown, it's easy to confuse the old stone government buildings for
mausoleums. A lot of them were sealed up
and full of eaters... thousands of 'em.
It was common practice to bait eaters with what the army called
"Swifts" and "Dodgers" - who would get a mob of eaters all
excited by the scent of "dodgers" who would run up the street in
between stragglers and form them up into a herd. The Dodgers would lead them to a building and
hide as the Swifts drew them deeper into the building, filling up rooms on
every level, all the way up to the roof before getting lifted away by a waiting
chopper or zip-lining to safety like in an action movie. The buildings were
boarded up or welded shut from the outside. Many were burned. As burning or razing buildings became too
dangerous or time consuming, they were just left as is - sealed tombs for the
undead.
I'm not saying that just boxing up a thousand eaters inside an office
building was the brightest tactic in the world, but one of the side effects of
this mass entombment was a relatively eater-free zone in the city. The smell of the dead masked the smell of
living meat. The few eaters left had
been cleared out by the few living stragglers left in town. These were tin pot warlords and survivalist weirdies keeping watch over neighborhoods form inside row homes or apartment
buildings. They wouldn't think twice
about squeezing off a warning shot or five if you wandered too close to their
kingdoms. They had enough time to strip
out all the resources they could hoard.
a few of them were kind enough to leave 2-way radios in plain view so
they could tell you directly to feck off of their streets.
But for the most part, Harrisburg west of Cameron Street, north of Derry up
to Division was a ghost town. I was able
to get some essential supplies and spend a few calm hours sitting on the river
bank, watching the mile-wide Susquehanna River ferry bodies down toward the
Chesapeake Bay. At sunrise, with the
sun peeking up over the Capitol dome and smoke rising up over the hills to the
west, it was like a view from a bank of the River Styx.
My ride of choice in those days was a local news van. I found it parked off in a corner of an empty
parking garage. I preferred it because
it had space and was lower profile than a camper. It wasn’t a sat-truck with the big dish on
top, but it had a little control room and recording booth inside. This made it warm and quiet and
bullet-proof. When I found it, the tank
was full and the engine recently tuned.
Aside from the dead guy in the driver’s seat with a chewed up arm and a
lap full of blood from the canal blasted through his chiseled chin up into his
brain, it was pristine. I even found a nice house just outside of town in an
area used to house soldiers running the relocation mission, an updated row home
with 10-foot hardwood fencing all the way around and a detached garage off the
main road. I don’t remember how I found
it. I was looking for stuff to scrounge
near a truck repair shop and a supply depot when there she was. Three stories, well stocked with canned
goods, a gassed up genny, enough water for six months, operational plumbing,
beer…the end of the world’s version of a mansion.
7. Life before the uprising wasn't luxurious, but it was "normal"...
A year into the end of the world, everyone I knew started talking about
adapting to the New Normal. It was our way of saying goodbye to the old world. We all talked about the streetlights and
public water fountains, silent-flush toilets and 24/7 conveniences that would
never come back. Oh such-n-such was a
pretty town once, before the army bombed the crap out of it. If the Baltimore Orioles had made it to the
2011 season, their line up would have taken them to the pennant.
You know what was "normal" for me? Normal was starting my day at 5:15 when the forklift
across the street started moving empty water cooler bottles from a trailer
truck to the washing facility next door.
Normal was the rumble of fully-loaded eighteen wheelers rolling by my
apartment on 21st street because they'd turned 20th street by the loading docks
into a tire-chewing minefield of potholes, ruts and sinkholes. Normal was starting my day with a luke-warm
shower and cold pizza from the night before.
My apartment opened onto an alleyway, the front door right in front of a
sewer cover. On cold days, the steam
rising through the holes in the cover would frost up my first-floor
window. On summer days, I'd open the
door to go to work and walk into a wall of stink so bad that to this day I
never walk through a door anywhere without taking a breath and holding it.
Normal was a walk up 21st street to the corner market, talking with Rashni
over a hot cup of coffee. She was the owner’s daughter and every time he saw us
together he'd ask if I wanted to marry her and take her away from a life
chained to a cash register. Pretty girl,
Rashni was and her bashful smile told me that dinner and a movie wasn't out of
the question, but in those days, I didn't think my life was much of a step up
for anybody, so I kept our relationship strictly coffee. Normal was that rare night off when I could
get home by 5pm with some take-out, throw my boots into the corner and prop my
dogs up on the edge of the couch. I
didn't have to have cable or nothin', I could crack the front window and listen
to my neighbor Monique perform the latest scene in her one-woman show outside
her apartment. She must've had the worst
cellphone reception because I could hear her all the way upstairs on the
toilet. Normal was Police lights outside
my apartment building every night sometime between sunset and midnight, twice
on Saturdays. Normal was gunshots in the
complex once a week. Most times it was
just bangers blowing off steam by throwing some nine-mills into the air. Other times, it was bloody stuff for the
evening news and the morning paper.
Normal was a hug from my old landlady when I told her I fixed the leak
under my sink myself or replaced this or that without asking her idiot son to
come muck it up. For that, she kept my
rent low and swapped out my crappy ice box with a new fridge she picked up at a
Sherriff’s Sale.
Career-wise, I was as high on the corporate ladder as I could go,
really. I was born for the field and not
the office. I had my CDL license, certs
to run most construction equipment on tires or treads, knew all the roach coach
operators in midtown by name, and a lot of good cash money coming in – under
the table, but all legit work. Normal
was not so bad.
Then normal changed. I should've had
a clue when work started drying up. I
started taking government contracts, infrastructure projects with tight
deadlines and impossible standards. As
things around the world started to fall apart, I was getting jobs that sounded
more like Smokey and the Bandit runs than typical hauls. Safety regs just vanished one day. If I could
get from Baltimore to upstate New York and back on a freight swap, I’d get paid
well.
(Originally, Ken's story was a biography that lasted an entire episode. I wanted to show how he came to be the man you'd read later. Down the line I thought it was better if the listener didn't know what he would do in any given situation based on his erratic and pointedly selfish behavior. I didn't want to give clues of heroism in his back story.)
8. A rough version of Ken's first run-in with the Eaters.
To me, there's little difference between the eaters and the lost souls you
saw in the later part of the big depression.
You had parks, prisons, hospitals, shopping malls, every forgotten alley
was full of people that most of the world tried to ignore. They were dirty and tired, sick and
invisible. The only difference was that
the dead were not crushed under the weight of their own circumstance; they
weren't ashamed or programmed to feel like they needed to hide from those who
didn't want to see them. That's where
the world went wrong. The PAIN epidemic
spread fast through the tent towns and in the underground communities hiding in
the cities.
The first time I saw an eater was on the job site. We had about fifty guys clearing a lot
downtown for someone who was gonna build a Starchucks or a McBurger joint. Before you can go in and start knocking out
the rot and breaking stuff, the law says you gotta make sure there aren’t
people hangin’ around that might get hurt. Me and some goon named Clyde were
doing a walkthrough to make sure there were no squatters or homeless folks
inside the run-down, four-level townhouse.
Back then we went in with the usual jumpsuit, gloves, crowbar and brass
knuckles because squatters, druggies, even rat familes get testy when you try
to move them along.
Clyde went to the third floor bedroom and found one guy crouched down and
chowing on a pasty, white leg that had been attached to a body resting on top
of a pile of blankets. Clyde saw it
before it caught his scent and put the crowbar through its skull. Then he slipped on the big pool of gore and landed
on top of his crow bar. In a move you couldn’t choreograph, he wound up landing
in such a way that the prying end went through his right eye into his
brain.
That's the moment I remember seeing as I reached the top of the stairs. He never saw the woman in rags stand up from
her spot in front of the closet door. She had a knife stuck in her chest and
about a dozen other holes thereabouts.
She went right for Clyde's body.
She dove for him like he was the first meal she’d seen in weeks and I
managed a pretty impressive golf swing that connected just before she reached
his bleeding face. I wish I could tell
you that was thinking heroically in a time of crisis, but I didn’t care what it
was coming at me – it needed to fall down before me.
Her skull was soft. I never got a
look at its face before I pulverized it.
After I turned Clyde over and decided he was definitely a dead man, I
yelled out the window that we had a man down, two scabs and a Bio-Hazard emergency
in the house. Inside, I was working out a good excuse for two dead bodies and
thinking the severed, chewed leg was good enough to keep me out of jail –
especially if the CSI guys saw the missing bits of it inside the one dead
dude. This was unusual, but not a unique
experience. Barney was yelling something up at me so I leaned my head out the
window to repeat what I’d just said.
Barney the foreman - otherwise known as the fat guy who stayed outside with
the truck while the rest of us actually worked - went for his cell phone to
call it in. That's when I heard movement
on the old wood floors behind me. I
think, if not for the fact that Clyde's body was between the front window and
the bedroom door, the three eaters who appeared would have got to me before I
heard them. They fell on Clyde and tore
him apart. I started screaming at them
and they kept tearing and chewing and digging their bare-boned hand into the
hole they punched into his stomach.
Unbeknownst to me, about a dozen of the guys waiting outside with hammers
and pry bars and other implements of destruction heard that Clyde was hurt and
decided to come in and help me. In the
melee that ensued, the gang uncovered a nest of about a dozen eaters. All of them were dispatched, but not before
two of them were killed and five others getting infected.
Cops came out like an armored brigade. The house was surrounded and they
thought it was a riot. The infected men
got put in ambulances and taken to two different hospitals. Most of the men on
the scene were put into plastic cuffs and processed downtown. Me? I heard the sirens and quickly walked off
the job down the back stairs and made a bead for this little place I know where
you can shower the blood off your body and launder it out of your clothes
without question. It’s the kind of place that specializes in good times and
happy endings, if you understand me. I
wasn’t scared, but I looked into the sunken, yellow eyes of an eater, looked at
something that could not possibly be alive and I understood them. They were not evil, but they were hungry…like
the big men I stood with in the rain looking for work. They were not things to reason with or
intimidate with a single punch to the face.
You could only destroy them or keep out of their way.
With that knowledge I understood that the sirens didn’t mean rescue. The men with wounds would never make it out
of the hospital. Best case, the hospital
knew what it was doing and would keep them isolated or put them down. Worst case, they wouldn’t know what they had
on the table until it bit them. The cops
would have to call the feds, the CDC and Homeland Security. I wasn’t going to a relocation center. I
wasn’t gonna get Superdome’d. So I left
my buddies and pals to their own wits and hoped they had the same sense as me. If I’d stayed, I would probably be stuck at
that HG World up north or in that one in Dover, Delaware that got overrun by
eaters.
We’re all so used to the phenomenon now, but even at that moment I thought
I was just dealing with someone on drugs, someone who mixed their “X” with PCP
or shot mescaline directly into their brains or something that would make them do what they did. People going crazy
on bath salts and clawing off their own faces – or someone else’s – that was
always on the news. With the world in the economic shitter, the R&D
sections of many drug cartels were hard providing different ways for people to
punch out of this world as hard and as long as possible for little money.
In sum, Ken won't shut up if you let him roll... :)
