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The days are longer, the calendar's filling up, and I want to feel as good as this beautiful summer weather. That's why I've been loving Groons. It's one daily pack of gummies that covers my greens, vitamins, minerals and even has 6 grams of prebiotic fiber so I don't need to juggle a complicated wellness routine on top of everything else. They taste amazing. They're easy to toss in my bag on the go, plus they're vegan, gluten free, and HSA FSA eligible for reimbursement. Save up to 52% off with code Podcast at Grunds co pod that's Code Podcastruns co When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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Greetings and hello Killianaire listeners. It's me, Anna, writer and director and Puddle I have melted. It's too hot in this booth. The big finale stream for Find Us Alive takes place on Friday, August 7th at 4pm MST on our YouTube channel, Hodgepodge Audio. The whole cast will be there listening to the series finale together with you, the chat, and afterward we will have time for discussion, questions and more. Naturally, this is a pretty enormous accomplishment for us and we would love to have as many of you there as possible. That's Friday, August 7th at 4pm Mountain Standard Time on the Hodgepodge Audio YouTube channel. We hope to see you there. Also, we have some new patrons to shout out for this episode, so a special thanks to Russell, Jadeloverofgoodtea, Navi and Fishmaster86. Thank you for supporting us and making it possible to make brand new shows. I appreciate each and every one of you. If you'd like to hear your name at the start of an episode or get ad free downloads, merch and more, visit our patreon@patreon.com hodgepodgeaudio thank you so much for your support and please enjoy the episode. Say Buddy, what takes 50 years to get up to the top floor and 30 seconds to get down? This horror podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Warnings are included in the show notes. Listener discretion is advised. Furthermore, this audio Drama is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental. Hey, buddy, who is the most liquid Christmas man on the street? The worst thing about the long, hot dry season was the air and the way it stole the moisture from soil and skin. Lincoln wetted his rag mask again, wringing out every precious drop of water he could before tying the fabric over his nose and mouth, adjusting it until it reached both peak protection and peak discomfort. His breath smelled awful. He would need to chew another stick later to scrub his teeth clean, but breathing through only his nose made him lightheaded. Mom said he had to wear the mask because it would buy him a few years before cancer got him, but dad said the difference wasn't by much, and Taylor refused to wear one at all because none of their generation would live past 40 if all the animals kept getting skinnier. The best part of the dry season was sun washing, and that was almost worth it. Most months their wash water was conserved for laundry that the villagers actually wore. The washing was done by the Gomez family. The soap was made by the goodman's second daughter. Lincoln was glad he didn't do the washing. Their hands always looked so dry and cracked. In the autumn, before it got too cold to move the metal around, the collectors would comb the dump for anything useful, and there was always plenty of fabric, old shirts and blankets and curtains. Lincoln would help sort through everything they brought back, piling up everything that could be reworked, separating the salvageable from the rotten. This part he hated because it smelled awful and left a nasty film of grime on his hands. They gathered up all the usable fabric and waited until the deep freeze hit, then spent all winter laying them out in the snow to freeze off the mold and pests. And then when the weather got warm, they boiled it all in a big pot and caught the steam in a still to be condensed and stored again. All of it would hang dry in the early summer sun, waiting for Lincoln to unpin each piece and hold the stained material to his face to breathe in the smell of smoke and sunshine. He spent the following months sitting in a heap of clean fabric, picking at strands until he could unravel them inch by inch, winding the strings around a stick until he had a fat skein of old thread ready to be woven into something new, spinning the dead world into the living one. Best of all, by the biggest stroke of luck in the universe, he hadn't been assigned to help dig the well. Lincoln could think of maybe a thousand other duties he would rather have than sweating in a hole in the ground. Not that it wasn't important work. If the villagers found groundwater, maybe they wouldn't be so dehydrated all the time. So he sat, unclipped his safety pin from the waistband of his pants, and got to work. Picking apart an old stained T shirt, he luxuriated in the shade where the air was cooler and tried very hard to forget about the group of strangers currently meeting with the village leaders and all the ways that could go terribly, violently wrong. Paul K. Marshall's bunker was nothing like what the contractors had promised, which was unfortunate because all the contractors were dead. There would be no renovations, no changes of scenery. He felt trapped, and not just because this was the first time he had ever stayed in one place for so long. When Paul was young, the Montessori school his family owned traveled to a different country for three months of the year, usually January until April, to escape the dismal cold of their home city. After the holidays, they typically went to one of his father's estates, which remained exciting during his earlier childhood years when he couldn't remember which sets of toys were at each house every time, it was like seeing a new load of presents. This global travel gave him a perspective only afforded to those with family money, knowledge of the world outside his bubble. He ate prime Wagyu beef in Dubai, raced yachts in the Caribbean, tasted wines in Italy, took a camel safari in India. Paul prided himself in his worldliness. It was something that those untraveled could never understand. He saw the world as it was, whole and unfiltered. It was certainly something his fraternity brothers didn't understand. It seemed like every year fewer students came from reputable families, instead coasting in on shiny new tech money or worse, academic scholarships. Paul found it unfathomably difficult to talk to them. Ignorant and inexperienced as they were, they had no ambition. They all lacked his hunger. Paul worked so much harder than his peers. While his classmates were off wasting their time at parties or part time jobs, Paul was studying or clocking volunteer hours at his father's company, networking his way up the ladder without collecting a single cent outside of his stock portfolio. He ran himself ragged, chatting with executives and mixers, accompanying key players to horse races he didn't even want to attend, and coordinating his house staff's comings and goings. But the grueling labor of college paid off when his father named him co chair not long after he received his mba. A decade or two, grinding away in his corner office and on the driving range and in the cocktail bars. And it was finally his turn. What he had been waiting for his entire life, his father's retirement and his assumption of the throne. Martial energy thrived under his direction. They expanded globally, forcing pipelines through every state, drilling in every national park, spilling over the northern and southern borders. Paul Marshall was a real nose to the grindstone worker. Spending as much as 30 hours a week in his office. He earned every last multi million dollar bonus. It was his company now, his profits, his fossil fuel empire. And he deserved every penny. After all, it would be nowhere without him. The research was a problem, however. As the decades dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to find climate scientists willing to finesse the data of their internally conducted impact studies. Eventually, they started using doctors of other stripes. Any white man with Dr. In front of his name would do, because nobody really read the studies except for socially inept academics and hopelessly broke environmental activists. And Marshall Inc. Owned just about every local news station in the country. So disseminating their own message wasn't too difficult. Paul Marshall had his people focus on the weather over the climate. Painting scientists as greedy shut ins who only wanted grant money to fritter away on useless experiments. His company fed the world lie after lie, ignoring the conclusions of their own research that the mercury really was rising. It got much more difficult when things began to collapse. The truth was, Paul Marshall didn't really understand how it all happened. Something about the collapse of the dollar water riots that started in India, then spread like California wildfires. Floods, droughts, frosts so deep and early that they killed miles and miles of crops. The death of nearly every living thing in the ocean. The disappearance of insects. From his perspective, it was only a series of headlines. Just the same monotonous roar of the third world's constant suffering. Until he realized it wasn't the third world anymore. It was every world. It was his world. The one outside the windows of all his vacation homes. And it was inching rapidly closer as the have nots began to leave their squalid nests in search of food. Food they didn't earn. Fortunately for Paul Marshall, he knew this was coming eventually. He knew it for years, which is why in the decades approaching the collapse, he pushed his profits even higher, Funneling his excess into building a shelter that would persist even if the world above didn't. He had his people build it under a beautiful green patch of forest he owned outside the city. The only other structure in the area was a gargantuan warehouse leased to an e commerce company. He collected rent from the warehouse and he defended the property against those who would waste it on houses or apartment buildings, protecting the true wealth that lay underneath. Not oil, ironically, an even more valuable reserve. A small aquifer, untapped, soaked through with clean, fresh water. His people built his bunker with this aquifer in mind. His scientists constructed an elaborate hydroponic garden that would provide food. For decades, Paul had filled the space with books, DVDs, years upon years of off grid entertainment. Weapons, of course, but those were more within the wheelhouse of his security personnel. He was still the leader, the commander. Even when the world fell, he would be the one paying. A personal chef, a personal farmer, a personal physician, a personal army. Then, in a few decades time, once the lesser people had wiped each other out in their squabbles, he and his brethren would return to the surface to reclaim the world in their image. The one thing he did manage to overlook was that after everything went to shit, the guards stopped caring about money. The underground garden was never meant to feed a large group, only himself and his wife. Really, it was economical. His staff could use the hard cash he gave them to barter on the surface. Surely the coins and papers would be invaluable up there. He was wrong. The trading party came back empty handed, stomachs growling. After a few weeks, the tension reached a fever pitch. There had been some kind of argument in the lab, a disagreement between the guards and the scientists. Gunshots, shouting, racing footsteps. The lights flickered and died. Paul Marshall hid himself and his wife in the panic room for days. And when he came out, flashlight in hand, his staff was gone. So was the stored food and most of the hydroponic equipment. There were no bodies, no spent shells. And to make matters worse, the interior door wouldn't budge. Paul Marshall, in his early 70s and soft from a life of being driven between golf holes, could not get the door open. The latch was intact, the mechanisms were functioning, but the exit stayed stubbornly closed. Had they sabotaged him? Blocked the hatch? Screaming would be of no help. How many people were even left out there? Not enough, surely. At the very least, he had water. The pump was the only thing in the bunker that still worked. It was a simple machine, an ancient one, made of parts that moved with the fuel of human effort. The water the pump pulled forth was cold and pure. And Paul Marshall took comfort in the fact that it was all his. That above the ground, the straggling remains of humanity would die scrabbling at the dry earth. All because they didn't have the mind to think ahead and plan accordingly. If he died it would not be of thirst, but it might just be of hunger. Paul Marshall was not alone in his man made cave. His wife came with him, and their treasonous staff had not bothered to take her when they abandoned ship sagging old Matilda Marshall. Paul had married her the respectable way, in their late 20s. She was a wife, a mother in the making, something he needed to complete the perfect picture of his life. She bore him four children and outsourced their upbringing to a fleet of nurses and nannies and tutors. She kept her appearance taut and refined and stood with him at benefits and functions, at least until menopause caught up with her. And then she really let herself go. Fortunately for them both, there were plenty of other women and girls at Paul Marshall's disposal. Women and girls he hadn't signed a prenup with, who could serve their purpose and be sent away just as quickly. Women and girls who didn't have a place among the society of surviving elite. He brought Matilda with him, just as his adult children had brought their own spouses to their own bunkers. It was the respectable thing to do. But now he regretted it. Every day, or at least every timeless period in the dark, all he had was her voice, begging, arguing, bargaining, hounding him for a solution. She knew he didn't have one. She was doing it on purpose. She was poking at his masculinity, reminding him of his failure to protect her. Paul grew resentful. The only silver lining of the situation was that in this impenetrable darkness he didn't have to bear with the reminders that he was yoked to an old sow. He didn't have to look at her wrinkled face or her coarse, graying hair or her drooping breasts. He didn't have to be reminded that his half of humanity was inextricably tied to the lesser half, the half that withered midway through their lifespans and spent the rest of their years as bitter, ugly old matrons. But maybe the dark hid another gift. He was not alone. He was trapped in this labyrinth with a warm, living creature, A creature full of meat and marrow, an animal like any other, with shoulders and ribs and flanks and haunches. Soon her weakening voice made his mouth water. Soon he began feeling her body when she embraced him, searching for the fleshy parts, evaluating how much was left. Paul Marshall knew he shouldn't wait long. He had to act before true starvation set in and she wasted to nothing but bone and sinew. He never liked gristle as she struggled underneath him, his fingers sinking into her fleshy neck. He reminded himself that if his wife were in her right mind, she would have wanted this. She was a good woman. She would have wanted him to live. It was romantic in its way. In death as in life, she dedicated her body to prolonging his legacy. Now, as her meat sustained him through the end of the world, they would never part, and history would praise her for making the ultimate sacrifice for the love of her husband. She stopped moving, and Paul Marshall got to work without bothering to check for a pulse. Paul Marshall was a smart man. He couldn't have managed his father's company if he hadn't been. His staff had looted everything that could conceivably be used as a weapon or a tool. This meant there were no knives. This meant he had to use his teeth. Her thin, aging skin tore like tissue paper under his overgrown fingernails, blood oozing warm and slick where he clawed open her shoulder. The shoulder was a good cut, was it not? He couldn't tear at the meat well enough with his fingers alone, so he joined her on the floor, crouching on hands and knees to sink his teeth into her muscle. It was different than steak, naturally, different than the bled, tenderized flesh of a farmed animal. Each bite was fresh, juicy, and hard won, every stubborn morsel ripped from the bone. Paul Marshall gnawed through meat and tendon, wet mouthfuls sliding down his throat. The meat groaned weakly, but he ignored the noise. It would die back soon enough. After enough blood leaked out, time lost its meaning. Paul Marshall was once again a rich man, fatted with meat and skin, hydrated on water that in another life he may have bottled in glass for a premium. His kill lasted a long time. He picked at the outer flesh until he found bone, then adventured into the congealed swamp of the abdomen, sucking down lengths of intestine and slurping up bits of organs that crumbled wetly in his mouth from the impending rot. The bones he tore from their sinews, cracking them open to suck out the cold marrow. The eyes he missed overestimating their shelf life, and the bugs got them first. Determined not to lose anything else, he ripped the skull from the spine and crushed it against the ground like splitting a coconut against a rock. The brain inside was victim to the insects, too, partially, but Marshall categorized it as a win, shoveling cold, wriggling gray matter into his stinking maw. He didn't wash the floor. It always seemed to taste of sweet copper. No matter how long he spent dragging his tongue over the sticky concrete, it sustained him even after he sucked the bones clean even after he chewed the flavor out of handfuls of hair. The blood on the ground never disappeared and never dried. It remained a delicious tackiness under his bare feet, always ready to be mouthed at until his stomach no longer complained. Paul Marshall didn't notice, or perhaps didn't mind, that his body was producing no waste. Even after eating nearly 200 pounds of flesh and viscera, he was clean, pure. The bunker only smelled of blood. It was the water, he was convinced that pure crystalline water from the iron pump. He was a brilliant man. He deserved this water like he deserved his wife's meat, like he deserved to dredge up the blood of the earth and consume it until survival on the surface meant starvation and, and heatstroke and scraping through every day. If those peons didn't have the foresight to build their own bunkers, their own black cloaks of solitude, that was their choice. Their stupidity, their lack of hunger. He sealed his lips around the nozzle of the pump and levered the handle. The water was all his. All of it would be his. He would suck the aquifer dry before any of the poor beasts above could deny him what he owned. The gush of liquid that issued from the pipe was not water. Paul Marshall could not see the black fluid that flowed from the spigot. It didn't have the cool thinness, the grounding tastelessness of water. It was thick, acrid, alien. It didn't matter if Paul Marshall could see or not. He had never seen the fields in person. His liquid assets in existed to him as only numbers on paper, a series of notices brought to him by people who had never set foot on an offshore rig. No, Paul Marshall had never seen oil with his own eyes. He never would. But he would taste it. Paul Marshall sucked down his second gallon. The oil, the priceless, invaluable oil, surged back up his esophagus, his stomach long full to bursting. The stuff dribbled out of his nose, escaping through his sinuses as he choked and coughed to get it all down. Paul Marshall felt his face burning, mucous membranes dissolving to expose the raw inner flesh. His stomach was bloated and straining, bile pushing into his lower intestines by the sheer force of the deluge, his abdomen searing with the heat of unlit, oh, unprocessed fuel. His stomach sprang a hole, and another and another. He could feel the rips, hear the muffled tearing noises inside his own body, resonating straight up to his skull through his ribs and spine. He could even hear it over the rush of oil from the pump over the wet, gasping, sucking noise of his mouth. At the spigot. His stomach pulled apart in sudden climb. Clean snaps like an undersized shirt popping its buttons. Black gold flooded every bit of space in his body, spilling between his organs, seeping into the fibers of his muscle, soaking into the brittle structure of his aging bones. All of it his and no one else's. Nobody could take it from him now. He was the wealthiest man in the world. Lincoln spent the rest of the day in an anxious haze. He tried to focus on his work, but all the while he manufactured reasons to be in earshot of the negotiations. The chatter suggested the talks between the villagers and strangers were going well, but that might just mean that nobody had pulled a weapon. This had happened a couple times. Lincoln's village had turned a few groups away when they didn't seem trustworthy. Fights rarely broke out because Lincoln's village was pretty large and fairly well armed. Other times they had taken in smaller groups, especially ones with young children. More mouths to feed, yes, but also more hands to work. But this group seemed different. They were more organized than travelers who simply happened upon the warehouse community. They called themselves Scouts. Said they used to be an army, back when there were armies. It made Lincoln nervous. He wondered what the rest of their clan looked like, if they would be friendly. If they wouldn't, what they might have to give, what they might look to take. The biggest problem was water. Nobody had enough. Lincoln's village scraped by, but every summer they lost people to heatstroke. He could imagine what it was like for even less established groups. The newcomers didn't have enough. Water was the only thing they were looking for. Their stores had run dry. Their reservoir had turned to thick, unusable sludge. They would die if they didn't find some. It was during these negotiations that another boy, one around Lincoln's age, ran into the warehouse, covered in mud and hollering. They hit water. He cried. He didn't think about the group of scouts. Nobody could shut him up quickly enough. They hit water. The diggers hit groundwater. They had found an aquifer. The leader and the scouts talked in hushed tones. Lincoln broke strand after strand of string, he was so nervous. The warehouse buzzed with activity. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the intruders and their possible wicked motives. Because there was a well to be finished. Bricks had to be laid along the sides. A winch had to be crafted to haul up a bucket. Water untouched by the poison on the surface. Water enough for everyone. Yes, everyone. The leaders announced that their village would soon be much larger. They would have a lot of help finishing the new well and filtering its life giving bounty. Their new alliance would see to that. Several more families, several more children. If they were willing to help, they would be welcome. The age of man was over, but humanity was as it had always been, laughing and crying and struggling against the forces of existence. It was only smaller now than it had been years ago. Once again, just as millennia before, the only wealth was a full belly, a warm shelter, and the companionship of others. Say Buddy, who's the most liquid businessman on the street? Killionare episode two is written, produced and narrated by Anna McGuire. Original music by Jackson McMurray script editing by Sarah Schell. Visit hodgepodgeaudio.com for merch, transcripts, information and more Great audio fiction. If you like this show and want to support us, visit our patreon@patreon.com hodgepodgeaudio thank you for listening.
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