The Farside of Never -Book 1- Daphne -1- Colorado Springs (Patreon)

All I wanted was a job.

I answered an ad on one of the online job boards. It was practically a new experience for me and made me feel like I was a real part of the 21st century.

"Adventurous young people needed for exciting jobs building a new country. Agricultural, petrochemical and medical training are pluses. Write or email Sahel Major Industry..." followed by an address in Egypt and a Canadian email address.

Adventurous fit me well enough, I'm most always ready for a new experience. Never say never, as my grandfather used to say.

I figured it meant a trip to Africa; wasn't the new country of South Sudan in the Sahel? And didn't they need exactly those specialties, farming, oil and medicine? I'd grown up on a farm in Eastern Oregon, gotten medic training in the Army, and served several tours as a roustabout and spare medic on oil platforms around the world. I knew I'd be perfect for the job -- if only forty-one could be considered young.

I sent off an email query and got back an electronic questionnaire which I duly filled out and returned within a day. Ain't technology marvelous?

I didn't exactly lie on the form but I hadn't mentioned being refused re-enlistment out of the Army with a General Discharge instead of an Honorable. Something to do with missing drug supplies. If I had told the truth, I could have stayed in but some other people would have gone to jail. They didn't have enough evidence to charge me, let alone convict because I really had had nothing to do with it. So I kept my mouth shut, something it turns out I'm good at.

I also didn't mention that I was fired from my last oil platform job for smuggling whiskey aboard, strictly forbidden by the Muslim owners of the rig. The funny thing about that was that it wasn't for me so much as for some of my Arab buddies for whom getting caught with alcoholic beverages would have meant prison and a fine instead of just being fired. My contract required the company to pay my way back to the states, and so I'd come home.

Not that Los Angeles was home, exactly, but like a few other times, there was a woman involved. After that relationship fell apart, and don't they all, I found myself down to a few bucks in a credit union account and a yen to get back to work. The ad from SMI wasn't the only one I answered but they were the first to reply.

Nothing wrong with my farm experience but of course I'd been a kid then and I never took ag-science or business courses. My one year of college had been wasted, almost literally; I'd spent one-third playing football and two-thirds of it discovering beer and marijuana. I could have stayed in with help from the coaching staff, but then my parents had died and I had no desire to go back to either school or the farm. Which led directly to five years in the Army after selling the farm to some neighbors for almost nothing.

When I flunked out of military life, too, I wandered down to Louisiana, following a girl with the cutest accent, another dead-end romance. With my size and physical aptitude, I naturally ended up working in oil fields for a decade which had led to oil platforms in the Gulf and off Brazil and eventually to Iraq and then Bahrain.

And now, perhaps, to Africa. I had a vague idea that the terrain of South Sudan might be a lot like the Oregon desert I grew up in. Hotter though, and with real lions instead of cougars.

Four days after sending in the questionnaire, I was called into an office in Santa Monica for an interview in which lots of personal questions got asked.

The woman asking them said her name was Laurel and she had another cute accent which she identified as Lancaster, England. I listened attentively and answered as best I could. I told her to call me Larry but she insisted on Mr. Howe and I knew I had no chance for another romance, dead-end or otherwise.

At the end of the interview, without being told if I had passed, I got handed an envelope with airline tickets for Colorado Springs and two days after that I sat in a waiting room in a small industrial park near the Springs airport with four other hopefuls, all of them younger than me by more than a decade.

"Wonder how many openings they have?" said the tall boy in the end chair. Boy? He was probably in his late twenties which meant he'd been in diapers when I started high school, so boy he was. Good thing he wasn't black and a mindreader but up until then, I'd never met a genuine mindreader. Lots of blacks, American, French, African and East Indian but no mindreaders.

"No one has ever mentioned a number," said the only woman candidate. "I'm Felice," she added.

"Doug," said the tall young man who had spoken first.

The Hispanic-looking gent next to Felice was Paul and the last of us five, a pale guy with less hair than me, gave his name as Gordon.

"Larry," I said, matching the others for laconic utterance. All of the men "had a size on them," as my grandfather might have said. I was probably the heaviest and Doug the tallest but even Paul was over six feet and built like a wrestler.

"Maybe they have enough openings for all of us?" suggested Felice hopefully. The dark-haired woman looked dainty among us men, though she was several inches above average height and had some muscle. Cute muscle. I'd been back in the States long enough to take the sharpest edges off the yearning for female companionship, but a man can always dream.

"I think they do have plenty of openings," I ventured when no one had said anything for a time. Everyone looked at me and I wished I had said nothing.

"Why?" asked Paul.

"I looked before I got on the plane, they still had the advertisement up on the job market website. Plus, they invited me to come here, and I'm not really young," I smiled. "I remember when phones still had cords."

They grinned and nodded, taking my point seriously despite the joke.

Five minutes later, we were all invited to come through a door and each of us shown to a small cubicle and told to take off all our clothes and put on one of those silly backless paper gowns for a medical exam. At least, I assumed the others got the same instructions I did.

"Just routine, really," said the burly fellow whose nametag read Jerry. I'd seen only one other person in the building, another large individual in the same dungaree work uniform Jerry wore, but hadn't been close enough to get a name. Not that it mattered, I never saw either of them again after that day.

I got undressed and put my clothes in the plastic drawer provided and put on the paper gown. Seeing people, especially officers and senior sergeants dressed like this had sometimes been amusing back in my Medical Corps days. It was usually a prelude to some undignified procedure or another or at least hours of waiting around with an uncomfortable draft up the backside. Not for me, I was one of the medics, but for my victims, uh, patients.

I wondered if this were necessary, it had to be a pretty thorough exam to need people nearly naked. Maybe it was some kind of psych testing. Or just a slightly cruel joke on the applicants. I'd done that myself, putting one sergeant major into the paper gown for almost an hour before telling him his non-existent tests had been cancelled. Why do I always end up getting punished for things I haven't done instead of for being the actual lowdown sneaky son-of-a-bitch I really am?

I felt ready to believe anything along that line but I really needed a job. Being idle for very long always made me antsy. So I sat quietly on the plastic chair, wondering where the examining table I expected to see might be. There was a sink with a small mirror and I amused myself by giving me an oral exam. Actually, I just stood in front of the mirror and yawned several times.

I had to admit that I was kind of a funny-looking guy. Long lantern jaw, black hair cut too short to comb and receding in two places, pale eyes set in a bunch of wrinkles. I'd shaved off my mustache when it turned out to have too much gray in it to be plucking and my upper lip looked two shades paler than the rest of my face. When I smiled, if you looked careful, you could see that I was missing the four back teeth in my upper left jaw, courtesy of a wayward crane hook.

I had a face that women were willing to get to know but did not seem willing to wake up with for the rest of their lives. Me, I was stuck with it, I thought, and it served me well enough since it didn't actually frighten people.

Eventually, Jerry came for me and led me down a short hallway to what looked vaguely like an x-ray room. I couldn't imagine what else the odd-looking device hanging from ceiling rails in the center of the room could be, but it didn't look like any x-ray machine I'd ever seen. Jerry had me lean against a frame with my back against a cold, black glass plate so it had to be an x-ray, I figured.

"Hold still," Jerry ordered, leaving the room.

I heard the hum of capacitors charging, the whine of coils being stepped-up and the thutter of fans keeping it all cool. I didn't expect to see anything, least of all a flash of intense light that convinced me for a moment that I had been killed in some freak accident.

No such luck though 'cause I was falling, falling through the space where the frame I'd been leaning on had been. The world tilted crazily around me and I tried to yell but lost consciousness before I could utter a sound.