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Stories from the Verse
Re Verse All
Chapter 112: Beam 98
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Hastings 220
They found housing before they found food, so Beam moved them into the common room of one apartment block and proceeded to order diner-style bacon cheeseburgers along with a huge fixings bar of lettuce, tomato, raw and fried onion, peppers, mushrooms, catsup, mayo, mustard, relish, and a couple other things. Each of the sandwiches was accompanied by French fries and coleslaw, and this time he ordered a couple hundred cans of assorted sodas. He ordered a couple bottles of beer each for himself, Sophia, and Bron. He knew his wife preferred wine, but it was easier just to get the six-pack.
He wished he’d ordered more beer, even though he drank one of Sophie’s, but he knew that it would be a mistake to drink as much as he wanted under the circumstances. Instead he ordered breakfast for ten hours away, assorted egg sandwiches with hash browns again and the same beverage choices as last time. He then went to bed.
In the morning he managed to grab a sandwich and coffee, and noticed that Bron and Sophie avoided the coffee. Bron had at least three of the potatoes. Once everyone was fed and settled, they headed back to the ramp.
It was less than half way up, but more than a quarter, by the white-haired man’s estimation, that they ran into trouble. It didn’t take Beam long to figure out what happened: that mining mole they saw being repaired had gone off course, come through the wall just below floor level of the ramp, carved a trench with a six-foot opening at the top but shaped like a ten-foot pipe below, then went out the far wall into a space above the hall, where it fell to its mechanical death. Maybe or maybe not sad for the haywire machine, but there was no obvious way to get one hundred people, plus or minus a few, across such a gap. He stared at it for a moment, and then noticed that Bron was standing next to him, also staring.
“Bron,” he said, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Bron nodded. “We’re going to have to build a bridge.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with five other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #395: Character Obstacles. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
