An Elegant Solution

A Substack Zone Story

Nov 24, 2024

The Twilight Zone redefined storytelling, drawing audiences into the unimaginable. Now, 66 years later, top writers, artists, and musicians are stepping into its eerie glow with a fresh twist. Ready to see where they’ll take you?

“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the [Substack] Zone.” -Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone

Before he opened his eyes, the first thing Jeffrey Potter noticed was the musk of rain-washed dirt, peppered by the harsh scent of electrical sparks and ozone.

Lightning. There had been lightning.

Jeffrey opened his eyes and blinked in the blinding New Mexico sunshine that glared through the windows of his Ford Mustang. He sat up, rubbing his head, and took stock of his limbs.

All accounted for. His hair too, not even singed.

Jeffrey rolled down his window and craned his neck to look out at the sky.

An expanse of blue, vibrant as the ocean, without a single cloud pockmarking its surface.

Strange.

That storm had been so fierce, with a raging cavalry of rolling dark clouds that surged over the distant mountains, lightning forking like spiderwebs across the blackened sky. There had been no place to stop on the flat, lonely stretch of highway, nowhere to shelter.

Lightning had stabbed down from the sky, had struck the edge of the western mountains, not far from the road where his shiny new car sped, trying without hope to outrun the storm. Another strike, and not fifty feet from him, a gnarled sagebrush burst into flame.

Then a flash –

He must have been unconscious long enough for the storm to move on. A concerning thought, but all’s well that end’s well. Here he was, unharmed, the storm long gone and the sky peaceful once again.

But his car.

The lightning must have struck his car, his beautiful car. Throwing open the door, Jeffrey scrambled out to the road and circled his Mustang, his eyes searching out scorch marks or blown tires.

Somehow, the car didn’t have a scratch on it. He had veered off the road, but the Mustang bore no sign of wear and tear except for a thin layer of splattered red dust.

At least that was one good thing. His car was still intact, and he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Carol when he made his way back home next week. Not that she’d care, anyway, so long as she could spend his paycheck how she wanted.

Jeffrey climbed back into his car and started it up, listening to the engine. It purred like a kitten, smooth as could be.

Oh, but he’d tracked dusty dirt into the car. That wouldn’t do. He’d clean that out as soon as he got to the next service station. Amazing how quickly the desert sucked up rainwater. Looking at the cloudless sky and the dirt dry as crushed bones, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes he never would have believed that a raging storm had just rolled through the valley.

Jeffrey Potter is a man of numbers, predictability, margins; a man whose profession it is to know what people want, or to make them want what he has to sell. But what Mr. Potter is about to discover will shake him to the very core and take him to a place from which there is no escape: The Substack Zone.

For miles not a single car or human being passed Jeffrey. He sped along Route 66 and fiddled with his radio, searching for a station. When the storm had rolled in, Roy Orbison’s voice had been crackling over the speakers, singing about lonely people. But Jeffrey couldn’t get anything now, only the whispery static of dead air.

A low, thrumming drone caught Jeffrey’s ears, and he swiveled his gaze around the valley. A plane, perhaps? He’d heard rumors that the government tested new aircraft out here in the desert, where the military could fly all sorts of classified inventions with fewer curious eyes about, so there was less chance of spies reporting it to the Soviets.

Jeffrey turned his eyes back to the road, and there, just feet away, directly in front of him, was a figure. With a gasp, Jeffrey slammed on the brakes, squealing across the flat, straight asphalt.

The figure stumbled to the side of the road and fell as Jeffrey’s car skidded to a stop, leaving a trail of blackened rubber behind it. The droning grew louder, throbbing against Jeffrey’s eardrums.

Heaving in a quick breath, Jeffrey threw the door open and stuck one leg out, biting words lighting on his tongue. But as he set foot on the sun-warmed road, a shadow fell over him, and the droning reached a fever pitch. Jeffrey stopped, half in and half out of his car, his face slack with shock at the black behemoth of a helicopter hovering over him and the ragged man on the road.

The man, his clothes worn and faded, scrambled to his feet, and for one desperate moment his eyes caught Jeffrey’s.

His gaze shot northwest along the highway, and his face turned suddenly fierce.

Then he darted for the sagebrush-dotted valley.

Jeffrey didn’t even hear the gun over the roar of the helicopter. A small spray of red shot from the man’s head, and he dropped like a doll to the dry, rust-colored dirt.

The helicopter swung out further into the valley and lowered itself toward the ground. Figures wearing black clothes and black helmets and carrying heavy black rifles scurried down a ladder and swarmed like ants around the fallen man.

Jeffrey climbed back into his car, put it into gear, and started driving northwest again. He needed to follow the ribbon of highway to the nearest service station. It had been a while since he’d used the bathroom.

His knuckles were chalky against the steering wheel, and his whole body shook. One mile down the road, Jeffrey pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and vomited onto the dusty ground.

Half a mile from the service station, there was a roadside billboard. But it was strange. Not vinyl or painted plywood, but almost like a giant color television. Frenetic, saturated, overwhelming, images moving so fast he could hardly keep his eyes on the road. He’d have to take that idea back to the company. Certainly out of their budget for now, but if they started planning for it, they could look into offering a premium package of televised roadside ads. Amazing, like something out of The Jetsons. But apparently that’s what New Mexico advertising companies were doing now.

The image changed, flashed, flitted from an advertisement for some kind of new soda pop to an alert.

WARNING: ARMED AND DANGEROUS. DO NOT APPROACH. IF SEEN, CONTACT LAW ENFORCEMENT IMMEDIATELY

Above the flashing message were photos: A green-eyed woman and a child, a boy with matching green eyes and uncut hair curling around his ears.

Jeffrey shifted in his seat and glanced around the flat desert, empty but for himself and the lone service station ahead.

He shook his head. Unfortunate for that kid, whoever he was. Police might as well put him in jail now, since he’d end up there eventually, with a mother like that. Whatever she’d done.

Jeffrey didn’t much care for kids. Noisy, messy, unpredictable. Altogether more trouble than they were worth until their brains finished making all those connections that turned them into functional, responsible adults. He had to admit, though, that they were good for business. Convince parents that their kids would be in danger of sickness or stupidity or diaper rash unless they bought whatever it was his client was trying to sell, and he had a gold mine on his hands.

The bone-rattling, droning hum sounded in his ears again and vibrated his car, and in moments the black helicopter surged above him, gliding fast and sharp as a gargantuan hummingbird. Zigzagging back and forth over the desert as though searching, it slowly faded into the distance.

At last Jeffrey pulled into the parking lot of the service station, a run-down building of faded adobe. Jeffrey drove up to one of the gas pumps and climbed out to pay inside. He still had more than a half-tank of gas, but better safe than sorry in a godforsaken place like this.

Inside the brightly-lit store, a bleary-eyed man sat behind the counter.

“Hey, fella,” Jeffrey said, deepening his voice and pulling out his wallet. “Two fifty on pump number 3.”

“We don’t take cash.”

“What do you mean you don’t take cash? Everybody takes cash.”

The man made an odd noise that was somewhere between a scoff and a grunt.

“You only take those charge cards or something?” Jeffrey said. “That’s a downright foolish idea for a business.”

“Look, mister, just pay out there like everybody else.”

Even if he could figure out how to work this ridiculous self-paying machine, the pump didn’t fit in his gas tank. What kind of gas station had custom pumps? Stupid idea. No wonder this place was such a dump. Couldn’t do any decent business, making its customers jump through bizarre hoops just to get a tank of gas.

He still had a bit more than half a tank. Enough to get him to the next service station, most likely. A more normal service station.

Jeffrey settled into his car and looked toward the back of the building, beyond which lay sagebrush and the dusty mountain foothills. Maybe the guy was pulling his leg. There had to be something around back, a normal gas pump. No business could be this backward.

Starting up his car, Jeffrey backed away from the pump and slowly circled to the back of the building. The asphalt was cracked and jagged in places, with small dunes of windswept dirt encroaching from the desert as though mustering forces to swallow the invasive service station. Butted against the back wall was a huge, squat dumpster overflowing with bags.

No gas pumps.

Ridiculous. What was wrong with this place? Jeffrey started to reverse his car, then paused.

Something was moving in the dumpster.

Jeffrey inched his car forward. A racoon or something, probably. Did New Mexico have racoons? He could let the guy inside know that some critter was rooting through the trash, not that the guy would care.

Then a shape, bigger than a racoon, much bigger than a racoon, raised itself out of the bags, climbed over the side, and slid to the sandy asphalt. Its back was to Jeffrey, and it clutched an armful of packages wrapped in cellophane.

The faint jolt of shock faded, and Jeffrey shook his head. Just some tramp looking for food.

Jeffrey opened his car door and stepped out, ready to holler at the bum to beat it, when another shape, a smaller one, popped its head above the bags in the dumpster. The words fizzled to nothingness on Jeffrey’s tongue, and he stared as the little boy, the curly-haired little boy from the flashing neon billboard, shimmied down into the tramp’s arms.

Putting the little boy on the ground, the tramp turned, and wide, startled green eyes latched onto Jeffrey.

ARMED AND DANGEROUS

DO NOT APPROACH

Jeffrey fell back a step, his mouth dry and his thoughts fritzing.

CONTACT LAW ENFORCEMENT

A phone – he needed a phone. The building, inside.

Stumbling away from his car, Jeffrey bolted for the front of the service station, then stopped. His car. What was he thinking? He’d left it there, doors open, engine running.

He whirled around, already in motion back toward his beautiful Pagoda Green 1964 Ford Mustang, when sunshine glinted on the dented cylinder of an old lead pipe, and the world went black in a sharp surge of pain.

She held the gun between them like an ultimatum as the mile markers ticked away south and the sun sank lower over the western mountains. Jeffrey’s eyes darted back and forth between the long, flat road, the woman with her gun, and the dial on his fuel tank that dipped closer and closer to empty.

What would she do when the gas ran out? Shoot him and leave him in the dirt?

The few service stations they’d passed all had those same strange pumps out front, the ones that didn’t fit his car. What was the matter with this place? Maybe it was a New Mexico thing.

He could grab the gun, maybe. He could dive across the seat and snatch it from her hand. He had to be almost twice her size.

But even as the thought crossed his mind, Jeffrey knew his arms wouldn’t obey him. He froze in emergencies. He was useless when fear addled his brain. A woman and a child in a car, and here he was, afraid to move.

His head ached, and his temple throbbed. He’d wiped away the trickle of blood, but that bruise would be there to stay for a good long while. Thoughts gnawed at Jeffrey’s mind, and finally he let one drop into the silence. “Why didn’t you leave me there at the service station?”

The woman crossed her arms, keeping the gun pointed at him. “Buying time.”

Looking past the woman, Jeffrey glanced at the sun that touched the uppermost ridge of the mountains. It would be getting dark soon.

Maybe she wanted to cross the border, escape into Mexico with the kid. He’d heard of people doing that before in parental kidnappings, like this one seemed to be. But his car, on what was left of this tank of gas, wouldn’t get her that far.

“You know,” Jeffrey said, his tongue catching on his dry lips and teeth, “if you just give him back, you’ll do some time, but it won’t be forever. It wouldn’t be the rest of your life.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The kid. If you surrender and give him back –”

The woman’s face tightened, and she took a sharp breath. She turned her eyes back to the long, straight road ahead.

Quiet fell over the car again, and Jeffrey’s stomach turned. So she wouldn’t be surrendering.

The little boy’s voice drifted from the back. “I made a face on the window.”

Jeffrey glanced in the rearview mirror to find that the boy had breathed a cloudy spot onto the window and pressed his face into the condensation, leaving an imprint of a smooshed nose and mouth.

Reflexive words – Knock it off, kid, this ain’t your car – sprang to Jeffrey’s mind, but he caught them before they escaped his mouth. Couldn’t upset the mother.

“You know if there are any service stations around here with normal gas pumps?” Jeffrey said. “Those other ones don’t fit my tank, and we’re running low.”

“Gas pumps?”

Jeffrey’s patience, thin and fragile as dental floss, frayed. “Yes, lady, gas pumps.”

“There are charging stations. But not gas pumps.”

“What do you mean no gas pumps?”

“How have you been driving this antique without having it converted to electric?”

“What are you talking about? This car’s brand new.” Jeffrey’s head pounded, and his breaths came fast. This was wrong. It was all wrong.

“This car doesn’t have a tracker, does it?” the woman said. Her green eyes stabbed into Jeffrey, her voice flickering with intensity. “I thought, with a car this old, it might not have a tracker.”

“A tracker? Why would my car have a tracker? Who’s chasing you, the CIA?”

“The CIA?”

“What is wrong with you?” Jeffrey’s voice rose to a near shriek, and the little boy shrank back, wedging himself between the seat and the door.

His knuckles whitening on the steering wheel, Jeffrey gasped, noisy breaths going in and out. He was dreaming. This must be a dream. He’d wake up, and he’d be fine and his car would be fine and he’d get to his motel and sleep and then wake up and drive right back to Carol. Or he was dead, and this was Hell –

“What year is it?” he snapped.

“What are you talking about?”

“Just tell me what year it is.”

The woman’s ferocity turned to a bewildered frown. “267.”

“What?” Jeffrey’s breath caught in his throat. How did breathing work? How did he breathe in and out every day like it was the easiest thing in the world? “What do you mean 267? That’s not even a year.”

Shifting in her seat, the woman angled herself toward Jeffrey. She held the gun loosely in her lap, not even pointing it directly at him anymore. “You think if I just give up and turn myself in, that I’ll get a little slap on the wrist and Danny will go on with his life and be well rid of me.”

It wasn’t a question, and Jeffrey didn’t respond. He stared at the road, tried to remember how to breath, and imagined, wished, yearned that he was anywhere but here.

“I’m going to show you something. You won’t remember it; you’ll think it’s crazy. But it’s true. The memory centers of your brain were inhibited until you left this place.” Reaching into her pocket, the woman pulled out a crinkling piece of paper and pushed it at Jeffrey. “They don’t tell us anything. People need to know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Memory centers. What kinda nonsense –” He glanced at it, looked back at the road. But the paper drew his eyes back to it as if by gravity, and he slowed the car.

What on earth? –

“One minute,” the woman said. “I’ll give you one minute to read it, and then we’re getting back on the road.”

It was a folded pamphlet, amateurish in its design, like the papers the Bible thumpers handed out on street corners or stuck under people’s windshield wipers. Jeffrey could give this woman, or whichever of her mentally unstable friends had created this, a tip or two about design. The print was too small, too cramped. The illustrations weren’t centered on the page –

The illustrations. Jeffrey’s gaze hovered over the first image, confusion welling up in an angry bubble in his mind. Cylinders, filled with fluid. In the first, a jumble of tiny limbs, an overlarge head – a baby. In the second, a curly-haired child, eyes closed. Then an adult, naked as a newborn baby, climbing out of the cylinder and its sticky fluid, stepping toward a severe-eyed man in a white lab coat.

“What is this?” Jeffrey’s voice rushed out in a hoarse whisper.

The cylinders – what was going on here? This woman was insane. She must be. Part of some dangerous free-thinking, free-loving cult, making bombs out of toaster ovens and all that nonsense. Or maybe she was a Soviet agent, spreading lies and twisted propaganda.

“Read it,” she said. “That’s why I made these, so people can know.”

His eyes wouldn’t work, wouldn’t process the words on the page. Jeffrey shoved the paper back toward the woman, his lungs aching with each rapid breath.

“You’re not going to read it?”

“No.” He pressed on the gas, and the car sped back onto the highway.

The woman folded the paper carefully along its creases but didn’t return it to her pocket. Her eyes bored like lasers into his face.

“Look, lady, I don’t know what kind of messed up, drug-smoking group you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in, but I –”

“You saw the pamphlet. What do you think those pictures mean?”

“That you’re a nutjob,” Jeffrey said, before remembering who held the gun.

In the distance, Jeffrey glimpsed a black vehicle moving toward them down the desert road. He cast a frantic glance at the woman to see if she’d noticed, but her eyes were fixed on him.

“You’ve never seen a child before, have you?” she said.

“What are you talking about? Of course I’ve –”

“You want to know why? Do you know what happens to unauthorized children?”

The black car raced closer. Sweating, Jeffrey slipped one shaking hand off the wheel and reached for the crank to lower the window. He spun it as quickly as he could, his fingers clumsy and wet.

“What are you doing?” The woman raised the gun again. Her voice threaded with panic, she turned to the boy. “Danny, get down on the floor. Now.”

Jeffrey flung his hand out the window, waving a wild, frantic arc with his arm as the black car neared them.

“Roll the window up,” the woman shrieked, aiming the gun at Jeffrey’s head. “Stop! Roll it up now, or I’ll shoot.”

Shoot the driver, and I won’t be the only one who dies, Jeffrey wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn’t work.

The woman ducked her head down, crouching below the dashboard, and the black car blew past them, its tinted windows black in the glare of evening sun.

267. Year 267. The strange pumps that didn’t have gas, didn’t fit his car. The enormous television billboard. The behemoth of a helicopter, huge and black and quick as a hummingbird –

No. No, this was crazy. He was Jeffrey Potter from St. Louis. He worked for McMann Advertising Firm. He was going to stay at a motel, maybe meet up with that secretary in Albuquerque, and Carol wouldn’t know or care.

In the rearview mirror, Jeffrey watched the black car slow, then make a smooth U-turn on the quiet highway. Following them, it pulled closer.

It did look different. Not the black-and-white cars of the St. Louis officers who waited by the side of the road to catch speedsters. The car behind him was powerful, a steam train to Jeffrey’s four-legged mustang.

That man on the side of the road, the one whose life had ended in a spray of blood, he hadn’t had a gun. He hadn’t done anything to make himself a threat. All he’d done was run.

The year 267 –

This was ridiculous. He was Jeffrey Potter, and it was 1964. Kennedy was dead, Johnson was president. He was Jeffrey Potter.

“Mama?” The little boy’s voice was small behind Jeffrey.

The woman yanked off her coat, reached to the backseat, and laid it over her son on the floor. “Don’t move, Danny. Don’t make any noise, no matter what.” She turned her furious, green-eyed stare back up to Jeffrey. “If they catch us, we all die. They will kill us, all of us. Do you understand me?”

That fierceness in her eyes. Carol had had eyes like that, once. That first night he saw her, she had smoked a cigarette, danced to music his parents never would have allowed. From across the room, there had been a shining thread drawing them together in a strange, unpredictable gravity. But that was years ago, now. She’d changed. Or had he?

The black car suddenly flashed red and blue, riding up behind Jeffrey’s bumper.

Sliding back into her seat, the woman raked her fingers through her hair and wound it into a quick braid. She slipped the gun beneath her seat and tugged at her dress, a prettier pattern than Jeffrey would have expected from her potato sack of a coat.

Jeffrey eased his Mustang onto the dusty shoulder of the highway.

The black car pulled up behind him, and a bulky, black-helmeted man extricated himself from the vehicle. He advanced toward Jeffrey, toward the green-eyed woman and the boy hiding beneath Jeffrey’s seat, and his footfalls kicked up tiny whirlwinds of dust.

“Why did you do that?” The gun sat on the floor between the woman’s feet. She clasped her hands together in her lap, and her sharp green eyes hovered over Jeffrey’s face not with ferocity now, but with confusion. “I didn’t think you believed me.”

Jeffrey licked his desert-dry lips and glanced into the rear-view mirror. The officer, or whatever he was, had turned around and was continuing north up the highway, apparently placated by the woman’s smile and Jeffrey’s nonchalant insistence that they were a couple going on a trip, that he’d only stuck his hand out the window to enjoy the New Mexico air. But there was a tingling in Jeffery’s spine, the instinctive twitching of a rabbit spotted by a hawk.

The officer had studied the woman’s face for just a few seconds too long. But he hadn’t even tried to look in the back seat, where Danny had huddled halfway-under Jeffrey’s seat and covered by his mother’s coat.

Danny’s bright green eyes, identical to his mother’s, caught Jeffrey’s in the mirror, and for a few moments Jeffrey couldn’t look away. He seemed an ordinary kid, nothing particularly special. If this woman wasn’t as insane as she seemed, if she was telling the truth, the impossible truth, then what reason could a squadron of black-clad soldiers have for going after a little boy?

“Tell me who you are,” Jeffrey said. He despised his voice, the way it squeaked and shook when he was terrified. “That nutjob paper you have shows people growing in test tubes or something.”

The woman took a deep breath, interlocked her fingers, and stretched her arms until her knuckles popped. Then, settling back in her seat, she turned her fierce gaze back to Jeffrey. “I used to be a geneticist.”

Jeffrey raised his eyebrows, his gaze flicking over her worn paisley dress and her dirt-crusted boots.

“Neurological overlays, that was my specialty,” she said. “I used neurological profiles of individuals selected for their exemplary, positive childhood experiences and well-adjusted social-emotional functioning in adulthood, and I programmed those neurological connections into the brains of developing humans.” She looked up with a sad, biting smile. “I’m part of the reason we have almost no crime, today. Careful genetic selection, along with my work, and now we have a society full of obedient, content workers. Little worker bees.”

“That’s not possible.” Jeffrey whispered, but his stubborn disbelief wavered.

The woman leaned slightly toward Jeffrey. “You know people who’ve disappeared, don’t you? You’ve heard rumors that they were dangerous? Do you want to know the real reason they vanished? A defective neurological overlay. If anyone consistently behaves in a way that seems contrary to their programming, then the overlay is deemed ineffective, and the they’re declared a danger to society.”

“But,” Jeffrey said, his words catching on his dry tongue. So she thought it was the year 267, thought that he was part of her world. So what - she was loony. She was loony. “That picture –”

She turned to smile at Danny, who was busy tugging a loose thread from his shirt, then looked back at Jeffrey. “The reigning theory for the last who-knows-how-long has been that eliminating adverse childhood experiences is the key to solving crime. So if society could protect children from these experiences, could simulate a healthy, happy childhood, then that child would someday have a healthy, happy, financially productive adult life. Once scientists discovered a formula for creating synthetic amniotic fluid, everything fell into place. Keep humans in their little cocoons until they reach adulthood, give them the social-emotional neurological profile of someone with an idyllic childhood, then let them out and train them to do whatever it is that society needs from them. Eventually scientists created a growth hormone that could speed up the development process. So whereas once it took nearly two decades to grow an adult human, now the whole process, from embryo to maturity, can be completed in a matter of months. You may, in reality, be only a few years old. The memory centers of the brain are suppressed until training is complete –”

Jeffrey scoffed. “But then where did he come from?” He pointed at Danny. This lady was off her rocker. He never should have convinced that cop to leave. “Here you are claiming your society has no kids, when there’s one sitting right there in the back seat.”

“They botched my procedure.”

“What procedure?”

“Sterilization. It’s supposed to be standard practice for everyone. But…” She shrugged. “Human error is one of life’s only certainties.”

“They botched it – how do you know they botched it?”

The woman lowered her chin and raised her eyebrows as though speaking to a very dim child. “Because I got pregnant.”

“Oh.” Jeffrey looked at his knuckles.

“It was too much for my happy-little-worker-bee neurological overlay. I was in shock for a while, horribly confused. I plotted and planned and saved. Then I bolted. I’d heard rumors of secret communities tucked away in quiet places, and, by some miracle, I found one of them.”

The sun, half-concealed behind the mountain ridge, cast an orange glow on the desert, transforming it to a vast alien landscape. Jeffrey stared straight ahead, his mind garbled. “What did you do?”

“I raised Danny. The slow, messy, unpredictable way.” She turned again to Danny, whose sleepy head bobbed and drooped against the window. Reaching back, she tugged her coat over him and tucked it around his legs. With a sigh, she shifted to face forward again. “But, two days ago, they found us, our commune. Only three of us made it out alive.” She bit her lip, her mouth tightening. “Now just two.”

Jeffrey’s beautiful little Ford Mustang sputtered. It coughed. His panicked eyes flew to the fuel gauge.

Empty.

The car pushed and chugged, softer and softer until it fizzled into silence and stillness, and stopped just as the last hint of sun dipped below the sharp-ridged western mountains.

“No,” the woman whispered.

At the edge of Jeffrey’s awareness, he caught a faint, droning hum.

Danny jerked awake in the backseat. He looked around, blinking into the twilight. “Mama, how far?” His small voice quivered, but he raised his chin. “We can walk. I can do it.”

The woman stared at the road, her eyes glazed.

Jeffrey turned to her. “It’s still about fifty miles to the border. Straight that way. You can reach it in a few days if you make good time.”

“The mountains,” the woman said, her voice mechanical. “We can hide in the mountains. It will take longer, but the terrain is harder for them to search.”

The droning grew louder. Behind them, far to the north, a black dot appeared in the sky.

“Go,” Jeffrey said. “Take your food and head for the mountains now.”

The woman threw open the door of the car, and Danny scrambled out after her.

“You can come with us,” she said, ducking her head down to the door.

“I need to get home,” Jeffrey said. To Carol.

He needed to get home to Carol. Somehow.

For the flash of a moment as his words hung in the air, the spark in the woman’s sharp green eyes dimmed.

“Go on.” Jeffrey pointed to the mountains. “Go, now.”

Danny held out his hand to Jeffrey. His shoulders stood straight, a little boy trying so hard to be a man. Jeffrey reached down and shook his hand.

With one long look back, the stubborn ferocity of her green eyes reignited, and the woman and her son scurried into the dirt and sagebrush, making for the towering mountains.

Jeffrey walked around to the back of his beautiful Pagoda Green Ford Mustang and leaned against the trunk.

He could buy them time. Not much, but maybe just enough. Maybe. There was no way to know.

He’d bring Carol to see New Mexico, someday. She’d see the fierce sunlight and the bold red dirt, and she’d love it, he knew she would. Somehow, he couldn’t pin down exactly when, he’d stopped noticing that ferocity, that flickering vibrance she’d always carried like a hidden candle. He’d become so focused on accounts and copy and margins and predictability that he’d let go of the shining, unpredictable thread and its strange gravity.

He’d find it again, that thread. He’d pick it back up, and he’d see the devastating, beautiful New Mexico light in Carol’s eyes, someday.

The metal of his car was warm beneath Jeffrey’s skin, and the clean, dry scent of windswept desert swirled around him as he watched the pinprick of black grow larger and larger in the purple light of the setting sun.

If we were to stumble into a world made in our image, would we feel at home? Or would it be a prison, one in which our flaws and shortcomings and misunderstandings follow through to their logical conclusion? Our world is not tame, nor is it always good. But the little seeds of stubborn human wildness always find a way to rebel against false absolutes, both in and out of the Substack Zone.