Expanded – Erin Penn's Second Base

Flash: Taxing Dreams Part 3: Lifetime Travel Limit

September 13, 2026September 13, 2026 Erin Penn Leave a comment

“Alright, it is time to get this done,” Georgia stalked through the house to where the dining room table and their laptop.

Frank looked up from his crossword, peering at her over his readers. “Hmm?”

“It is two days after we got back from our fiftieth anniversary last year which should cover that quarter day and a little extra if they stop counting the excess travel surcharge from the month the vacation stops, which they most likely do. Anything to screw over the little man.” She pulled out her phone and wallet from her purse and booted up the computer. While waiting, she continued to mutter. “February is one of the four discounted months according to the IITD website. January, February, May, and October. We are going to damn well see our grandchildren. Surcharge this and kiss my ass, travel agent.”

“Ah.” Her husband nodded and returned to his puzzle.

The room grew quiet with the angry clicking, until the muttering restarted. “Right, you want my citizen verification again, can’t just use the password and a passcode like a normal website. I got you covered. Send me a text.” Georgia switched to her phone when the ding came in. From her wallet she pulled out her citizen identification card and took a picture using the app linked through the text. “There you go, now to get this done.”

After three minutes of computers and A.I.s talking to each other, verifying Georgia Andrews’ identity, while she huffed, muttered, and rearranged things in the bill-paying work area, a screen blinked at the Intra and Interstate Travel Division website, red reflecting on the sixty-nine-year-olds face.

Stunned, she stopped moving long enough for her husband to look up again. Just in time for her to screech, “What do you mean I’ve exceeding the Lifetime Travel Limit?!?”

Frank sighed and set aside his crossword booklet, leveraging out of his recliner to join his wife at the table. Sure enough, blinking on the website, “Lifetime Travel Limit exceeded, no further Interstate Travel Vouchers allowed.”

“Interesting.”

“This has got to be wrong.” Her brown eyes met his, terror and sorrow tumbling through them. “Right?”

“Scoot over and let me look.” Frank took over the laptop seat with its special cushion to help with her replaced hips. It felt good against his arthritis.

She moved into the seat he vacated.

After passing over her purse and wallet, phone and ID, so she would put everything back where they belonged before forgetting, Frank opened up a second window and search on Lifetime Travel Limit. Passed in 2034 and implemented in January 2036, so it had only been active for twenty-four days, the Balanced and Fair Travel Law included a Lifetime Limit on Travel to twenty-five thousand miles, just a little more that once around the globe to free up resources for everyone to have a chance to travel. Military are forgiven for station assignments, and in occupations where travel is considered common and necessary like trucking, travel is counted at a tenth normal rate.

Frank narrowed his eyes behind his readers. Military spouses and children were not covered under the law as exempt from mileage related to changing stations. He grunted and returned to the first screen to click on his wife’s profile.

Sure enough. His twelve different deployments impacted her because she followed him to Germany, Australia, and Korea, as well as stations in Texas (twice), Alaska, the Carolinas, and California (four times). It had been a crazy six years with her packing up house with two small children and moving as many as four times a year following him around the globe. The government recreated that in their file of her movements accurately. Also listed were the two childhood moves she had with her parents, and the four they had for his job before they finally settled in Alabama in their late fifties. Those moves had been submitted as part of the process of applying for citizen identification back in 2030. Last year’s trip to Florida for their anniversary, and two other trips made since the IITD had been added to Homeland Security appeared at the top of the list, since it was in reverse date order with a cumulative total.

Just the move to Australia and back would have pushed her over the edge since it was halfway around the world. As it was, her mileage total pushed triple the Lifetime Limit. Both Danny and Marge would not be far behind. Luckily, Margaret was a homebody like him, but Danny took after Georgia. The only thing saving everyone’s sanity with the new citizen identification requirements was both their children being born on American soil, Texas during basic training for Margaret and California three weeks after moving back from Korea for Danny. Some of his buddies reported their kiddos being sent back to the countries of their birth. It wasn’t bad for the Germany and Australian babies, but those born in Korea had it rough establishing themselves in a new country where they didn’t even speak the language nearly forty years after being born there.

He returned to the search results to read more about the Lifetime Limit. No grandfather clauses, literally. The Government Unified Records combined all moves, change of driver’s licenses, military services, governmental positions, medical records, jobs verified under social security payments counted as moves. Frank flipped back as he remember something he had saw which had confused him and grunted upon seeing her temporary Amazon job worked during the Christmas 2020 season being recorded as a move to Seattle Washington; he supposed they would fight that, but it wouldn’t change anything.

Back to the research, he searched for anything to help them.

For a population that moves over eleven times in their lives (they were overachievers), plus were part of a generation “wastefully” encouraged to travel, … blah, blah, blah – commute average about a quarter million miles, another quarter million miles for errands like groceries, and the final quarter million miles for entertainment purposes. Most peopled traveled over three quarter of a million miles in their lifetime.

The cap is now twenty-five thousand. Though errands and commute dozen count, unless you were in situation like when he had been stationed in South Carolina and Georgia had moved in with her brother in North Carolina, only ten miles from the base. A whole lot of people in cities which straddled borders were screwed. Or had long commutes like most of the Eastern seaboard…ah, blue states. Moving on. He knew better than let his thoughts linger on topics like that.

Interesting. only interstate travel counted as that fell under federal control. Intrastate commerce and travel fell under state rights. They could still apply for county travel vouchers, only state crossing vouchers and plane travel would be denied.

Frank grunted. His father still lived in Texas, and he wanted to bury the old man when the time came.

“What does that mean?” Georgia asked. “What is happening?”

“We can still see Margaret.” Frank opened another window to the IITD website and pulled out his phone to run an ID check.

“I want to see Danny and his kids. Even that witch, Eva, would be welcome. Plus my brother.”

“I’m checking.” Frank clicked a picture of his ID. “And Eva is fine. Just because her job made them move is no reason to malign her.”

“We will agree to disagree there. Why couldn’t they have stayed here in Alabama? They had perfectly good jobs in Montgomery.” Georgia crossed her arms and sat upright like she had a stick up her ass.

“Because her new job paid three times as much, and he found a job that let him stay home with the children while they were in elementary school.” Frank repeated the long-time argument distractedly as his portfolio opened on the government website.

Same travel and moves, most not counted since ninety percent of them happened while he had been in the military. The moves afterwards put him at nearly five thousand miles. He scrolled down. They hadn’t downloaded his trucker years from when he first got out of the military; the company was thirty-years defunct and the files likely shredded or demagnetized. And his four moves as a kid following his father’s military service were missing because he had forgotten to include them during the citizenship paperwork. That would come back and bite him if they figured it out. He was easily passed the Lifetime Limit too; the Miller administration just didn’t know it yet.

“There is no way for me to umbrella you in by my applying for the vouchers.” Frank frowned. “Vouchers are now done individually starting this year, including for intrastate travel.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, you cannot go out of state, except for medical emergency transferred from one of the three State Hospitals to an out-of-state location which will be processed by medical staff. At least according to this website. I’ll need to do more research, but right now, it looks like the Alabama state line is our limit.”

Georgia turned her big brown eyes on him. “Why?”

Frank thought of a dozen reasons his officers explained to him from when he checked travel vouchers in various parts of the world and shrugged. None of them were exactly flag-waving freedom justifications. “Don’t know.” He stared at the screen and considered various responses he would like to apply to the present situation.

A mistake. They were deep, deep into a mistake.

He had been released from his enlistment oath to America when he mustered out, not that the Constitution was still a thing, and each day he debated how to fix something he helped create. The world he was leaving his children was not a better one, but would the responses he could organize make them safer?

He didn’t know.

But as his wife fell on his shoulder crying, yet again, tears of frustration, fear, and hopelessness, he knew he was a step closer to hitting his lifetime limit on this bullshit.

(words 1,671; first published 9/13/2026)

Two attempts / Taxing Dreams Series

Taxing Dreams Version 1 (8/23/2026)
Taxing Dreams Version 2 (9/6/2026)
Taxing Dreams Part 3: Lifetime Travel Limit (9/13/2026)

Flash: Taxing Dreams Version 2

September 6, 2026September 13, 2026 Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

After cracking his neck to release the tension, Tom left his pretend cubicle, the walls were just under four and a half feet tall based on some metric unit or other, anyone could look over them, and made his way through the maze to the waiting area. Jennifer handed him the next number with the bar code to scan once he was back at his desk.

“Number 37,” he projected, his tone government-drone-dead. He remembered when he loved his job, helping people have adventures of a lifetime. He was a travel agent, damn it. People should travel, see the world, explore, meet, cross-pollinate. When did it all go so bad?

An older couple stood, both white-haired, and shuffled through the twenty or so people sitting in the plastic chairs.

“Number 37,” he repeated when they finally reached him. They nodded, a little numb from the, he looked at the small printoff in his hand for the time stamp and then looked at the digital clock on the wall, two-hour forty-minute wait. “Follow me.”

Tom made his way back and slipped through the narrow space on one side of his desk to get behind it. As they sat down in another set of molded seats, he scanned the bar code to call up the information the front desk had entered. More accurately, the couple had filled out online, then refilled out when they arrived, then scanned by the AI reader, and compared to what had been entered before with the differences flagged for his review, and everything else that got tagged in when their citizen identifications had been scanned at the front desk.

Ex-military for the husband; both a bonus and a detriment for whatever type of travel they were shooting for. Ten different stations during his six years. Two children – very socially responsible of them. Each of their children had the recently mandated two children, the grandchildren in their early teens. Ah, they wanted to visit them for the winter holidays, that is a reasonable travel, but holiday travel did come at a premium pricing…one was local and the other out-of-state. He winced when he saw the couple’s ages. Sixty-eight and seventy-two.

Forcing a smile on his face, he turned to the couple. “How can I help you today?”

“You can help us by approving our travel vouchers.” The woman pushed the generic paperwork some websites provided to “aid” in making travel arrangements.

“Well, first I need to find out a little more about the travel.” The smile didn’t waver. “Mrs. Andrews, where, when, and why do you want to leave Lauderdale County?”

“We already filled out all of that, four times since the computer timed-out during a rolling brownout.” She shoved the papers closer to him. “Just stamp these and we will be on our way.”

Tom looked back to the screen and touched a few keys on the virtual keyboard. “Ah, I see, you want to travel from Tuesday November 20^th until Friday December 28^th to visit family in Huntsville and in Stillwater, Oklahoma, with a small side trip to Jackson, Tennessee.”

“Yes, to visit my brother,” Mrs. Andres confirmed.

“That would be a total of five state border crossings.”

“I know that.” She tapped the pile in front of her. “That is why there are five travel vouchers here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, you might not be aware of the recent changes implemented. While the climate change travel tax is for crossing state borders, the non-renewable resource tax is charged by county crossings and you will need travel vouchers for each county you will be passing through.”

The man frowned at that. “When did that happen?”

“Two years ago now. I see your last travel was by plane in…January, so the county travel vouchers would have been unnecessary.”

They already traveled this year. It is going to be a nightmare.

“The law passed as part of the Terrorist and Immigration Control Bill in 2029 and parts have been gradually rolled out ever since. The county travel vouchers are the last measure to be implemented and it is still being worked on; Alabama hasn’t been enforcing it for people traveling locally, but, really, every time you have visited your daughter in Huntsville you should have been applying to cross through Limestone and go into Madison.”

Mr. Andrews grunted.

“Are you kidding me?” his wife exploded beside him. “Go through this every time we go see Margaret?”

“If your vehicle was an electric, then no, but with the gasoline personal transport you say you will be using, then yes. The tax stamps on the county travel vouchers underwrite the oil and petroleum companies maintain their infrastructure.”

“I told you we should have gotten the Honda instead of the truck.” Margaret snapped at her husband. She turned back to Tom. “But with the subsidies to Buy America, the tariffs for the lithium battery, and all that, the truck had been half the price at the time.” She huffed. “Fine, so what’s the damage to get the stamps?”

“Well, I need to create a map of your travel and get a list of all the counties you will be crossing.”

“Yes, yes, I understand.”

“And do you also understand that each state crossing comes with a charge.”

“Of course, we’ve traveled before.” Mrs. Andrews resettled in her chair. “They lumped it all together for our trip to Disney to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.”

“Very good. If you could pull out your phones and download the travel app.” Tom pointed out the QR code to scan at the edge of his desk, “I’ll show the most likely route based on the information you have provided.”

The woman pulled out her phone and scanned it in, flipping through the pages of accepting the app and spoke a few words to finalize the transaction. Once the confirmation popped up on his screen, Tom transferred the route and dates to her phone based on what they had entered on the website.

“This looks right.” The woman passed her phone to her husband. “Frank, double-check this please.”

He scrolled through the travel and itinerary and passed it back with a nod.

“Very good, now I will start the general recording.” Tom activated the video and audio recording for his office. “Thomas Ducan, certified and licensed Travel Agent located at the Florence Alabama Federal Office for the Intra and Interstate Travel Division of Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agency within the United State Department of Homeland Security. I am with Mr. Franklin Andrews and Mrs. Georgia Andrews who are applying for Winter Holiday travel by personal vehicle. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, you understand this meeting will be recorded.”

“We do.” Georgia said, and Frank nodded, frowning.

“Sir, we need you to confirm verbally.”

“Yes, I understand,” the man said, his frown deepening.

“Very good. Now, the travel being applied for is during the Winter Holiday season and for entertainment purposes, so surge pricing applies and no company is underwriting the travel. The vehicle is gasoline therefore both the non-renewable resource tax applies when crossing counties and climate change mitigation tax applies when crossing state borders. Mr. Andrews is seventy-two, so the senior surcharge applies. Mrs. Andrews is sixty-eight, so the senior surcharge applies. These surcharges stack.”

“The what now?” Georgia interrupted Tom’s recitation.

“There is a five percent surcharge on all travel voucher crossings for people over sixty-two or who are disabled. As you are receiving welfare substitutes, travel for entertainment purposes is considered a luxury so various luxury surcharges apply.”

“Social security is not welfare,” growled Frank. “I damn well paid into it since I was fourteen and got my first job. I still remember the FICA hit shocking me.”

“Many people feel that way, but the Congress specifically defined all types of welfare in the Even Better Big Beautiful Bill in 2028, and I have to work within the law.”

“So we have to pay 5% over surge pricing for both of us?” Pink tinged Georgia’s cheeks.

“Yes. Shall I continue?”

She waved her hand regally. “Please do, asshole boot-licker.”

Tom clicked out of curiosity over to their voting record, and internally shrugged, not surprised by the verbal abuse with those choices. You get the laws you get by who you elect. Two more swipes returned him back to the charges.

“As this is your second trip across state lines this year, there is an excess travel surcharge.”

Frank’s nostrils flared. “How much?”

“Only twenty percent. It increases by fifty percent for every additional trip.” Tom looked up from his screen. It was off-script and his supervisor could ding him, especially since this was on the record, but he couldn’t not give the warning. He was a travel agent. “The excess travel surcharge is based on being less than 365 and a quarter days since your last trip. The excess travel surcharge continues to stack, and the date of the counting restarts from the date of the trip. So if you decide to take a summer trip next year, you will still be within the 365-day window of this trip and the excess travel surcharge will be seventy percent.”

“Are they trying to keep us locked up in our homes?” The pink tinge was completely red and racing up and down Georgia’s neck.

Yes, yes they are. They don’t want citizens comparing notes. They don’t want people creating networks in case they need to run. And they love old people becoming bored and inactive as they die faster, getting them off welfare faster. And, most especially, isolation makes compliance easier. But Tom wouldn’t say anything like that aloud, especially to party loyalists.

“I almost forgot to mention the luxury surcharge for entertainment travel, but the five percent veteran discount applies to that, so only another seventeen percent. The total for all the crossing taxes and the surcharge as applied is being transferred to your screen…now.” Tom heard the ding on the travel app.

The words that followed from the old lady proved her status at the upper edge of the Gen-X generation, eventually it ended with “Hell, no.”

“Very good.” Tom responded without raising his voice. “If you would click the ‘no’ option on the app, rejecting the travel, we can move on to see if other options would be better.”

Georgia struggled to stand. “I just want to visit the grandbabies while I can, you motherfucker. How dare you!”

Standing more quickly than his wife, Frank grabbed his wife’s arm before she did something everyone in the cubicle would regret. “Do we get a refund of the application?”

“No, the application fee is non-refundable as indicated on the website.” Tom remain seated. “Let me just close out the recording, and I can escort you out.”

“No, you can just stay there, you worthless piece of trash.” Georgia huffed out of the cubicle toward the door, her husband following in her wake.

Security had a walkway above to observe and a sniper ready for people on both the intra-interstate travel side and the Department of Motor Vehicle side of the building. Escorting customers out had been removed from the metrics, but filing out the paperwork was still required if Tom wanted kept this shit job in an economy with 20% unemployment. “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews have withdrawn their travel request.” He time-stamped the file and moved to save it. With it, he watched the appropriate flags get generated for various agencies monitor the couple for traveling illegally during the holidays. Only three, since they were party loyalists.

People who continued to buck the system, got an addition four, including one to generate a visit by ICE within a week to investigate the less politically savvy, searching the house for packed bags and the like.

After throwing the Andrews number into the trashcan, Tom took a deep breath, rotated his neck, exhaled, then stood. He edged around his desk and went to the waiting area.

(words 1,987; first published 9/6/2026)

Two attempts / Taxing Dreams Series

Flash: Monster at the Church

July 5, 2026September 21, 2026 Erin Penn 1 Comment

Photo by Roger Starnes Sr on Unsplash

Haze hung over the broken black bones of the building, a noxious smell of wood and paint and gasoline. Tim dropped his bike beside the standing white sign declaring what the Sunday sermon would have been for the Second Baptist Church of Sneads Ferry tomorrow and approached where the congregation members sorted through the debris. Several shot dark, distrustful looks his way.

His light skin stood in direct contrast to most of theirs. The few white members were well known to the majority, having married in and been part of the church community for years. Those faces had streaks of soot.

Anger bubbled in his stomach, churning the breakfast he had eaten after working the morning window at his fast food job. Today, he had a split shift with morning and evening, giving him four hours to discover what Mr. Henderson had meant last night at the club. He had been right, the news covered it. It had cycled several times on the big television set up in the restaurant. Although the youth minister had been wrong about what the top story of the day would be. Judge Everett dying of a heart attack knocked this down to second place. White death always beats Black disaster. Even it if is a singular ninety-year old natural death.

“Timmy, what are you doing here?” Kiara asked. “You are going to get into trouble.”

He looked down at her, getting angrier at the shortness of her curls framing her face, realizing for the first time how much taller than her he was. His hurdler legs kept growing and he was basically all arms and legs at age seventeen. “I decided I don’t care anymore. How can I help?”

Her small laugh hurt his soul. “Got a dumpster on speed dial?”

“Actually…” Vinny had assigned Tim to deal with the vendors as part of his training to become a shift manager. “Let me see.” He pulled his phone from his shoulder bag.

A confused look crossed over Kiara’s face as he talked to someone in a broken mix of high school Spanish and English. Two adults closed on them. One looked like an older version of Kiara, only with full braids and beads clacking as she walked. The other a middle-age man with a belly but wide shoulders and taller than Tim, black and white sprinkled his tight curls.

Tim pulled the phone away from his mouth to ask, “He is willing to deliver and pick it back up for half price, if the dumpster can be picked up tomorrow by four p.m. so he can get it to his customer on Monday. He can get it here within an hour.”

“How much?” Kiara’s mother asked.

Tim recited the price he had been quoted. “Someone official will need to sign the contract when he drops it off.”

The man nodded down at the woman. “We can cover the cost if the church can’t,” he rumbled.

“Do it,” she told Tim before turning back to the man. “Nat, let the pastor know and get an area cleared.”

Nat wiped a soot streak on the side of the woman’s face, then kissed the cleaned area before walking off.

When Tim finished the call, giving the address for the delivery, he dropped the phone back into his bag.

“So, this is your White boy,” the woman said to Kiara.

“Mom,” Kiara rolled her eyes. “He isn’t my White boy.”

“You saved him, you got a responsibility.” The woman stated firmly before extending her hand out to Tim. “Beca Dixon.”

“Tim Boyd.” He shook her hand, then waved at the shell which should have been filled with music and laughter tomorrow. “Sorry about this.”

“Did you do it?” Beca asked point blank, her voice hard.

“No, but I know who did.”

“Going to report them to the police?”

He hemmed and hawed a moment. “That would not be effective.”

“Then why are you here?” Kiara shot at him like an accusation.

“To be as effective as I can.”

“Well, you can—” Kiara stopped midword, when her mother put a hand on her shoulder.

“He is still a child, like you, and he is sticking his neck way out just being here.”

Kiara black eyes flicked from her mother to Tim and back to her mother. “Fine.”

“What can I do to help?” Tim asked again.

“Once we got the dumpster,” Beca nodded to the people moving their cars, some of them driving off, likely to get demolition tools, “we will need help loading it up quick.”

“Would the youth group from First Baptist be helpful?”

“Do you think you can get them here?” Beca cocked her head, sending beads clicking.

“In a heartbeat.” He started pawing through his bag to dig out his phone again which was not exactly where it had just dumped it randomly. “Most of us listened to our Sunday School lessons.” Holding his phone triumphally, he paused, “Speaking of lessons, um, Kiara, I…”

“Spit it out,” the teenager snapped.

“That thing, you did, um, I might have done…something…like it last night.”

Kiara blinked twice, then studied his face. “Really?” She drew out the word, half-way between disbelieving and consideration.

Beca snapped her fingers to get their attention. “This can wait.” She pointed to where Nat was walking back with a younger, slimmer man who wore a shroud of authority even while in soot-covered overalls and wearing large muddy gloves and boots. “That isn’t something which should be discussed on these grounds, but we will discuss it as soon as possible. In the meantime, start calling your youth group and see who can came by today.”

(words 944; first published 7/5/2026)

Ordinary Monsters series

One) Monsters in the closet (5/10/2026)
Two) Monsters in the school (5/24/2026)
Three) Monsters in the Restaurant (6/28/2026)
Four) Monsters at the Church (7/5/2026)
Five) Monster in the Club (TBD)

Flash: Monsters in the School

May 24, 2026September 21, 2026 Erin Penn Leave a comment

State Sign

(Writer’s Group prompt of use an actual place for inspiration. Please note that no evidence of POW deaths is related in the records to the Hofmann forest. Liberty was taken for this story. Any relation to people living or dead is co-incidental. This is a work of fiction.)

Arriving at the Sneads Ferry High School, just off of Dixon, Kiara sat on one of the concrete benches outside to put on her sneakers before heading inside for college testing. Within moments the shadows of the long, covered walk between the drop-off line and the entrance were eclipsed by bodies. She looked up to discover Mandy in front of her with her boyfriend Chuck at her shoulder. With them were Tim and Granger.

“S’up?” she asked, setting her sneakers aside. Kiara glanced at the high school entrance to see who the school had hired for the special Saturday duty. Ken Baumgardner stood guard at the door; the white police officer made eye contact with her, then lowered his hat and leaned in the doorway in a way which blocked the camera lines. No help there. Standing, leaving her book bag and her sneakers on the bench, the seventeen-year-old Black girl backed onto the grass.

“What are you doing here?” Mandy asked, “School’s closed.”

“ACTs.” Kiara responded, looking around for any other aid. She had walked all the way over from High Ridge, leaving way early to make sure she didn’t miss the testing since both her parents were working this weekend. “I’m going to take the ACTs.” The way early seemed to be too early. No one else was being dropped off yet.

“You don’t be needing that.” Mandy said.

Kiara chuckled, hoping to break the hateful pall they were emitting. She had grown up with most of them, except Granger whose dad worked at the nearby base. Heck, her father and Mandy’s mom shared a last name, as black and white families often did in North Carolina, when one family owned the other at one point and neither family were of a mind to move away from where they had set down their roots. Making eye contact with each, she said, “Sure will, if I am going to get into a good college.” Only Timmy broke eye contact. The others stared with anger.

Chuck spat on the concrete walk, leaving a tobacco stain. The coach wouldn’t be happy to learn he was pinching. “Stealing scholarships from white folk with your DEI reversal dis-crime-ination.”

“Yeah.” Granger added. “Like your brother.” He and Tim started circling opposite sides around the bench. Kiara took a step back for each slow step forward they took.

Only J-J had gone onto college, her other two brothers had gone into the trades. He had gotten a full ride, but that had been a sports, not academic scholarship. Like everyone in her family, Kiara hid her smarts, keeping to the middle of the grades as best she could.

“Well, I am not trying to get a scholarship. Just have to take this to apply to Appalachian State U. Honest.” She held up her hands toward them.

“Girls don’t need to go to college.” Mandy put her arm through Chuck’s and leaned on his shoulder. “Just get yourself a man. No need to take a seat away from guys.”

With Mandy tying up Chuck, the explosive running back for the Bulldogs, Kiara took off running across the grassy lawn in front of the school, the beads in her hair clacking behind her. If she could get to the treeline leading into the Hofmann Forest which the school backed against, all she would need to do is hide there until other kids started unloading.

Chuck was a short speed runner and Tim did hurdles for track. Granger, though, was a long-distant runner and Kiara had already walked three miles to get to school. He yanked her down by her hair just inside the trees, sending beads flying, and punched her once, straddling her and raising his fist to hit her again, pausing a second as his social programming kicked in against hitting a girl.

“Do it,” panted Mandy as she caught up. “Teach this bitch not to steal from her betters.”

He pounded her three more punches, before standing and kicking her once in the stomach with his boots. “Don’t make me run again.” Cuts ran red where his new class ring had broken her skin.

The mist, not yet burned off in the June morning under the trees, cooled lungs as Kiara coughed blood, spitting leaves and loam inhaled as she sucked oxygen back into her body.

The mist thickened, and Kiara felt a different anger from the soil dugged into her knees and elbows. Shorts and a t-shirt offered little protection from being tackled to the ground. She panicked momentarily. She shouldn’t feel that anger, that connection to the soil. Not outside the coven circle.

Her beads!

“Nigger, taking what belongs to us.” Mandy kicked Kiara in the hands wrapped around her middle to protect her abused stomach. “Black trash.” She kicked Kiara again.

The ground groaned low.

Hofmann whispered in Kiara’s ears. Slaves who died cutting lumber in the forest, who bled harvesting the tobacco fields clear to build the school. But they were old, old voices, faded with time. Stronger were the German and Italian voices of the POWs held on US soil during World War Two.

North Carolinian business men knew what to do with free labor no one would come looking for. Thousands of interned soldiers found their way into the farms and lumber mills, filling slots left by the freeing of slaves eighty years before their capture in North African campaigns. The south does like taking free labor from Africa, no matter the skin color.

Her blood, blessed by the Loa under full and new moons since her mother had introduced her to the secrets, fell to angry soil, feeding it without the beads to contain her powers.

“Run.” Kiara whispered.

“What’s that, Black girl?” Mandy kicked her hard enough to roll Kiara onto her back. “Run? Don’t worry. You won’t need to run ever again.” She kicked her another time, rolling Kiara face down into the dirt.

“Mandy…” Tim said.

“Scared Timmy?” Mandy teased. “It’s time to take out this trash. Just another Black girl disappearing one summer afternoon. Didn’t you see the news? North Carolina has half of the missing black girls in the nation this year. No one will notice one more.”

Granger pounded his hands together. Kiara’s blood transferring from his right ring to his left palm. “Now we are talking. Wait ‘til I tell my dad I got my first kill.”

“Hold on.” Tim backed into a tree. “This is wrong.” He locked eyes with Chuck, the leader of the group, who shrugged like “what are you going to do? teenagers do shenanigans.”

Then the star running back snapped open a knife he always carried. “You can help, or you can be a pussy. But you are going to stay quiet.”

Tim nodded his head rapidly, the golden rays cutting through the branches of the ill-fated forest zig-zagging across his face. Mist rivaling low clouds swirled at his feet.

The forest woke. Indian battleground, slave land, a secret pit grave where Axis soldiers had been tossed responded to the necromancer blood soaking the loam.

Tim, fighting it every step of the way, swallowed when his eyes crawled back to meet Kiara’s brown eyes with just a touch of green, so like Mandy’s.

While the others had been concentrating on Timmy, Kiara had raised onto her battered hands and knees. Her cut face turned up, dripping blood, and she mouthed to him, “Run.”

Inside his brain, the word echoed in a thousand languages. American Southern, Lumbee, Seventeenth Century English, Hattian, German – Run. Run away. Don’t look back. Run.

His eyes dilated. His color blanched to ghost white.

Ghost hands lifted her to standing.

Tim ran.

The three others of the mob swung back to look at her.

Seeing their victim standing, Mandy rushed forward to push her back down. Granger closed on one side and Chuck on the other, playing his knife back and forth. “Time to die,” he said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Kiara said in a voice not her own.

Skeletal remains burst through the ground, clacking and clicking into place, slurping from the mud, thudding dropping dirt to the ground, vegetation burned the nostrils with scents of mold and moss from the freshly churned soil.

Behind Tim, running as though his life depended on it, the screams started, like teenage high-jinks to startle people at Halloween…or people being torn apart.

Kiara rested against a tree. “Danke,” she thanked the German officer who had been supervising when some timber fell the wrong direction. Struggling with her one year of high school German, after checking he wasn’t bilingual in French or English, he asked that he pulled the bones into the pit with his group so they wouldn’t stand out if someone came looking for new bones in the ground. Scratching through her memory, past her pain, she wiped her face for blood, then applied the sacrifice to the tree, asking the appropriate Loa to heal the area of all evidence, restoring the ground to health. Stumbling out, she found an Italian zombie carrying her beads. The boy had to have been only sixteen when he had died.

He spoke, or at least understood, English.

“You are very kind to have collected these for me.” Kiara bruised lips split as she talked, giving the boy strength and clarity as more of her blood leaked out of her skin. Never in her life has she spilled this much blood uncontrolled by bowl or goblet. “I hate to ask more of you, but if you could, see that those three spirits are sent on their way. I don’t want them hanging around here. The forest has dealt with enough.”

He nodded and shrugged, indicating he would try, but couldn’t promise anything. The other spirits were more vengeful than he, and both Chuck and Mandy descended from people in Oslow county who cracked whips against those who were not allowed to fight back. The spirit-infused body reached out a hand to cup her check and passed back much of the energy it had absorbed. Cuts sealed, raised bruised stopped swelling, the rib rasping with every breath disappeared from the list of offenses her body was keeping track of.

The spirit disappeared, soil falling off of her and him and merging back into the sport fields around the High School, leaving her clothes wrinkled but clean. She limbed slowly back to the school where streams of students talked, walking into the school for testing. Beside her shoes and bags stood Tim, rocking from foot-to-foot, the whites of his eyes getting rounder the closer she got.

Kiara sat down on the bench, wincing as she bent over, to put on the sneakers so she could go indoors. The beads dug into her hip as she changed feet. The noisiness of the world faded without her feet connected to the ground, but she didn’t have time or energy to return the beads to her hair and still have any chance with passing the ACTs.

Tim stayed frozen like a prey before a predator.

Standing, Kiara shouldered her bag. “You are going to stay quiet,” she said softly.

He nodded.

“Say it.” She lifted a finger to the middle of his forehead.

“Not a word, ever. I swear.”

“Are you here for the testing too?”

“Nah, we just wanted to mess with some of the ni—” he stopped himself mid-word.

She dropped her finger to his lips. “Do better.”

He nodded again.

(words 1,916; first published 5/25/2026)

Ordinary Monsters series

One) Monsters in the closet (5/10/2026)
Two) Monsters in the school (5/24/2026)
Three) Monsters in the Restaurant (6/28/2026)
Four) Monsters at the Church (7/5/2026)
Five) Monster in the Club (TBD)

Flash – Laying Easter Eggs Part 4: Monkeys Start Hunting for Eggs

March 29, 2026March 29, 2026 Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

“Epsilon Eridani, with Ran right in the life zone as recorded from Earth and the huge AEgir keeping it company.” Navigator Mia Young greeted her captain as Isabella Baker came in carrying her favorite stimulant in one hand and a tablet in the other. “We dropped out of relativistic drive thirty minutes ago within two A.U.s of our goal and have sent confirmation via gravity-wave back to Earth per standard procedure. Expected response, thanks to the buoys we dropped on the way here, will be three hours, specifically eleven hundred sixteen at the earliest, if no one bothers to get a response from the brass. Our six days travel out equaled to eleven Earth years.”

“I have command,” the captain said.

“Aye ma’am. You have command.” Mia tapped the panel in front of her, moving her work over to her normal station, and followed it to the seat there, leaving the bridge command chair empty for Baker.

“Everyone, I know it is early, but drop me a report.” Isabella put her precious near-coffee, because god-forbid uncontrolled stimulants be used on a “not-really military” space-going vessel, into the secured holder in case they lost control of the artificial gravity, again. The shakedown cruise was over a hundred years ago according to Earth’s calendar, but it was less than seven months ago according to her vivid memory. The quick trip back from Alpha Centauri, after letting the colonists there know they were not as alone as they had thought when they had escaped the World War Three their ancestors policies had created before the bastards had bugged out, had been much more exciting than the two-day inaugural trip to Sol’s closest neighboring star.

She dropped the tablet into the arm of her command chair to recharge and download the incoming reports.

***

Three hours later the ping acknowledgement came back from Earth. Always reassuring that the planet hadn’t destroyed itself while they were gone. She wasn’t sure if they and their sister ship, the Enterprise and Shuguang (a Mandurian word meaning Dawn or First Light) respectively, returning back to Earth in their very peculiar leapfrog through time kept the world governments stable or they had become a forgotten curiosity until they reappeared like a Flying Dutchman out of the mists of history. She expected it would take at least another hour before they got any official response from someone whose job wasn’t to watch a little workstation for a communication that came in every two to three years.

In the meantime, it was time to jog the elbow of Lieutenant Loong. Past time. Isabella stood, as she tried to do every hour, and toured the bridge, offering words of encouragement, snapping people awake from mid-morning slumps, and bringing a certain junior officer to heel. Quietly, no louder than any of the other communications she had offered to the others, she asked, “When should I expect Planetary’s first report, Ms. Loong?”

The American-born Chinese national practically jumped out of her skin. “Ma’am.”

Isabella waited, smiling gently, grateful once again the powers-that-be decided that humanity would send non-warships to explore the universe and staff them solely with women, and a shit-load of sperm in case they had to limp back with a failed relativistic drive trading a “three-year” deployment into a multi-generational trip. With the bonus of less air, less food, and less space needed for women. And less dominant battles for her command structure, though she still needed to regularly rein in Commander Julie Carter from engineering.

Prodding Loong Yang was unusual. “The report I asked for when I first stepped on the bridge this morning.”

“Oh, that report.”

“Yes, that report.”

“Um, well, I had some unusual findings.”

“To be expected. We are in a completely new planetary system. Only six planets.”

Loong pressed her lips together, before saying quietly. “That’s not it.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t think. Well, I do think, anyway Ran” her voice dropped to a near whisper and she switched to Mandurian, something Isabella had to learn on top of her fluency in Spanish and her functional German in case she got transferred to First Light, “is not natural.”

“Please repeat.” While Isabella had learned Mandurian, she hadn’t been immersed in it as yet.

The Lieutenant returned to English but kept her voice very low. “Ran is too much like Earth; it isn’t natural. Look.” She showed Isabella her screen where a blue-green planet turned. The only thing missing in the picture was the Moon for scale.

Fluffy clouds streaked across the atmosphere. Green and brown land masses floated by in the three-hour time lapse since the Enterprise had first aimed its scopes at the planet located in the life zone. Another set of scopes was aimed at the gas giant, another at the speedy rock near the orange star. A single camera was aimed at the three other, more boring planets of the system. A hurricane swirled across the girth of Ran between the two snowcapped poles during the first hour of the recording before the planet rotated it out of sight. The only thing missing was electric lights in the dark areas of the planet.

“Gravity?”

“Based on the bounce, within .03 of Earth, but on the lighter side.”

“Diameter.”

“2% more than Earth, but the density of the core looks slightly less than Earth, hence the gravity being lighter.”

“Day.”

“The spin is slightly faster than Earth, bringing the day within three seconds of our normal. And before you ask, same planetary tilt so same seasons.”

“Atmosphere.”

“Nitrogen-Oxygen mix within human range, though higher Oxygen than is presently found on Earth.”

“I want that full report an hour ago. Failing that, put together everything you have checked and get it to me as soon as you can.”

Captain Baker then order the ship to forget the slow pass through the system gathering information to send back to Earth and to get to the orbit of the second planet pronto. Two hours later, once the basic navigation was figured out to avoid AEgir and the small asteroid belt, Isabella retired to eat and parse the ongoing reports about Ran.

As much as she wanted to have all cameras pointed at Ran, she had instead ordered a full navigation analysis of the system. She wanted to know if there were visitors other than them, she wanted to know how to bug out, and she wanted to know if anything else was weird. She also gave Loong three Ensigns to get everything they could from their little suite of information. They had nineteen days to get to orbit without their relativistic drive online.

First, after getting today’s near-chicken made from fish meat and the dreams of the cook, Isabella reviewed the bullshit “thank you for your service and adding to mankind’s (oh, dear, we are back to that gendered word again, I guess it was time for it to swing back around) knowledge base” from the brass, now entitled “The United Americas.” In particular this missive was written by the “President for Life” and co-signed by the Director-General of the “American Space Exploration and Military Department” which it seemed she now fell under. The language was Spanish.

Finishing the pretend meat and the pretend gladhanding at the same time, Isabella moved to review the reports, to discover one of pings into her queue was another letter from back on Earth. This one from the European and African Union; a third ping hit while she opened that one came in from the Hauo Dynasty. Nice to know who the players are back home. The Hauo Dynasty had been two decades into solidifying the Asian union, actually successfully bringing both Japan and Australia under their umbrella last time the Enterprise passed through Earth. Looks like they finished cementing themselves into power if they managed to get information out of the United Americas within two hours of it hitting the planet and turning something around.

After reading both letters, she verified her communication officer had pinged acknowledgment back on all three and then she ordered all reports to be locked down. No outgoing information at all back to Earth. Fortunately with over a hundred years passing on Earth since they had lifted out of the gravity well to board the Enterprise, none of her crew had an urgent need to write home.

Finally cleared of all other duties, she poured over the reports about the Earth-like planet circling a star ten light years from home.

***

“Thank you, Lieutenant Loong for your presentation.” The captain watched as the junior officer scurried back to her chair behind her commanding officer, a Russian scientist who kept mostly to herself, an enigma to both the people who served under her and Isabella. With this discovery, she couldn’t let that phoned-in leadership continue. Baker stood and went the center of the room, looking around at her command staff and their support.

“We have been in orbit a month now. Thank you to Brooks and Price for creating the reports about AEgir and Zips to send back home. Now, we need to decide what to send back to Earth about Ran. Plants and animals seem to match Earth’s Pilocene period, somewhere between just two and five million years ago. I want to authorize a shuttle to verify, taking samples of plants, animals, and soil.” Baker gritted her teeth into a grim smile. “I want a damn core, as deep as we can make one. Commander Carter, I sent you my requirements two days ago. Think you can print something by the end of the week?”

“More like fourteen days if it is going to stand up to that sort of dig.”

“You got seven.” She looked around the table, making eye contact. “This is too much of a trap. Nearest solitary K-star to our planet having a planet in the life zone a 99.9 however many nines following percentage match to our homeworld. That isn’t right. We have seen what life looks like developed on other planets, and this isn’t it. Toss in the clear modifications of comets and to the Oorts cloud Navigation has found, someone made this. And since it is so much like our Earth, they made it for us. Why?”

“A gift?” suggested a ranking supporting the wall.

“It would take thousands of years if not millions, with technology we don’t understand. We barely can keep Earth habitable, forget about Terra-forming another world to be within a fraction of our gravity. To build a planet up for that would take slamming comet after asteroid after meteor into a world. Why would anyone leave something like this for us?”

“I wonder if they did this elsewhere. What is the next closest yellow or orange star to Earth that isn’t a flare star?” Lieutenant Brooks asked.

“I would try Tau Ceti. At just under 12 light years, that would be my pick to explore.” Ensign Price suggested. “With Groombridge being a nice runner-up at 16 light years.”

“Let me guess, none of these are close to each other.” Isabella stated.

“Opposite sides of Sol.”

“We don’t have time.”

***

“Between three hundred and five hundred thousand years, someone has been working on this.” Isabella placed her tablet on the desk.

Lieutenant Loong looked over at Lieutenant Brooks. Commander Stepanova, the director of the science division, had sent them alone. Seems she had kept a secret stash of vodka and was making her way through it.

Loong, more familiar with Captain Baker’s moods as a bridge officer, confirmed, “Oort cloud record shows modifications starting about 500,000 years ago with it stopping about 100,000 years after that. The planet record shows plant life like ferns, starting a “fossilized,” if you can even call it that, record about 220,000 years ago. That shows an accelerated change of forced evolution for about 80,000 years before that stops abruptly.”

“Metallic debris has been found within the ocean, in one area it looks like a space station about the size of the Enterprise. Several other land and ocean locations show smaller ships, all from about one-four-zero thousand. We looked for other evidence in space but found none. Whatever was fought, was fought here and gravity cleaned up the evidence.” Brooks shifted her papers around. “We have found three weak signals on the inner edge of the Oorts cloud. Scope magnification shows nothing.”

“That is a long trip out on sublight engines.” The captain rubbed her face. She looked over to her second-in-command. “Musa, I’m going to drop most of the Science department on planet. Volunteers will be impregnated. Half will volunteer for the procedure.”

“Clear ma’am.”

“That includes you. You are grounding with the rest. We are also dropping three-quarters of the seed and equipment in the cargo for colonization. Just in case. You will get a grav-repeater too. You will be on your own either for…” Baker’s eyes grew hazy as she did the calculations “…two months, or, and I hate to admit this is highly likely, I am going to do a quick run out to investigate those two star systems Price suggested, quick run for us being about a month or so, for you it will be more like forty years. See if you can get Shuguang in the mix. Last I heard, they were heading out to Ross.”

“Ma’am, I don’t speak Mandarin.”

“Learn. You get Loong. We need them here, not part of Earth, until we understand what is happening here and at home. Crank down the reports to a minimum. Say we crashed or some sort of shit.”

***

Seeing her sister ship in orbit around Ran reassured Captain Baker as she dropped out of realitivistic. She knew intellectually First Light had picked up one of the Tortoises Notes while they assisted the Ran colony for the last two decades. Between their efforts, and her own ship’s admittedly brief time thanks to relativistic speeds, they had deciphered the Tortoise comments as well as the Bird, Scorpion, and the Crocabilly additions. But talking in a careful code while keeping Earth and Alpha Centuri and the science station now at Barnard’s Star out of the loop had been a challenge. Most of the success wasn’t their own sneakiness but the United Americas attacking the Hauo Dynasty when their God-Emperor died, which brought the EAU into the conflict and ignited the fourth world war.

Would it be a good or bad time after twenty years – a generation of bad blood, to let Earth know they had three viable worlds ready for colonization and using the Notes they could finish off three additional ones which hadn’t been processed with the Crocabillies ruthless efficiency within a “short” ten thousand years into three more Edens?

Would it be a good or bad time to let the fractured Earth governments know there had been two intergalactic civilizations before humans made space flight? That we might have nine neighbors waiting or already reaching for the stars who may be as lovely as the Tortoises and Birds or as dangerous as the Competitors or the Threads.

Could she trust other humans not to wipe out the Potential threats? Could she trust the other Potentials not to be a threat?

She rubbed her belly, considering. Her pregnancy was just beginning to show after their five months of travel, something she had started just before dropping off the reproductive suite for the colony. About twenty percent of her crew opted to reproduce as well, just in case, which made the months of investigating Tau Ceti a nightmare of morning sickness for everyone.

What come next would need to be put to a vote, but her preference was let Earth, now a hundred fifty years ahead or behind her depending on how you looked at things, stew in its special crazy. She had a future to prepare for.

(words 2,642; first published 3/29/2026)

Laying Easter Eggs Series