The Midnight Stand (The Elysia Saga Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

think I
took him out for the day to show him how to catch lizards. We’re fine.”
    Lee studied Harley over again, rubbing the
stubble on his chin.  “Alright, go grab yourself a soda from the fridge kid and
have a seat.”
    Ancil nudged Harley over to the kitchen where
Ruth Delany was speaking with another woman. Ruth smiled at Harley and showed
him over to the refrigerator, handing him a Coca-Cola.
    There were a few others in the house, all about
the same age. They nodded at Ancil as he entered.
    “This is all who came?” Ancil said to Lee as
they moved into the living room. An air conditioner rattled in one of the
windows. It was powered by a generator on the side of the house. The whole
house was powered by generators. It was off the grid.
    Lee took out a self-rolled cigarette and lit it.
“What do you expect? No one wants get involved. No one wants to get their hands
dirty.”
    “This isn’t enough. They’ve got thousands of
signatures already, political backing, who knows how many judges in their
pocket.”
    “Don’t you think I know that?” Lee shot back. “We
have no means of communication. We can’t get the word out. They’ve got people
checking the mail and the phone lines. We can only pass word through the church
and that’s not yielding too many prospects right now.”
    “What about the libraries?” Ancil asked.
    Lee snorted a laugh at Ancil and took a long
drag off his cigarette. “Nobody’s at the library anymore. They’re dead.”
    Ancil surveyed the room: only two other couples
were at the meeting. That made eight people, and that was if you counted
Harley. Barely enough to have a baseball team let alone a militia.
    “Let’s just get started then,” Ancil said.
    Ruth went over to the couch and Harley sat next
to her, his can of coke in his hands.
    Ancil continued, “Okay everyone, thank you for
coming over today and for the Delany’s for hosting this get together. I just
want to-“
    “What are we doing here, Jacobs?” Earl Henderson
called out. He was there with his wife Theresa. Earl was a farmer who owned
twenty acres of land that he was currently struggling to keep up with since the
government subsidy program was abolished. He would end up losing the farm
within the year.
    “We’re here to talk about what I believe is a
concern for everyone in this room,” Ancil said. “You’re all aware of it, we’ve
been seeing it every day for a long time now and it’s only going to get worse.
I’m talking about the Ellis project.”
    “You mean the Elysia project”, Lee broke in.  “I
heard that’s what they’re calling it now. Sounds like some foreign bullshit to
me.”
    “What’s to talk about?” Earl said. “They got the
support of the local authorities. I see them knocking down houses and building
the tracks for that damn thing already.”
    “Yeah, so do I. Just the other day I saw em`
knock down Eddie Fletcher’s place, the one over by the river,” Allen Keyes
said. “That place was in his family for eighty years and they just took it
right out from under him. Eminent domain or some non-sense.”
    Allen was a mechanic whose business was hanging
on by a thread. He couldn’t keep up with the new electric cars that rarely
broke down. The younger kids didn’t want to buy gas cars anymore and his
clientele was dying out along with his business. “What’s preventing them from
doing it to anyone of us?” he said.
    “That’s why we wanted you here today, to figure
out a way to stop them,” Ancil said.
    “There’s no stopping them. It’s just a matter of
time,” Earl said. He sat back on the couch with his arms folded and his legs
spread out in front of him.
    “So you’d rather just do nothing and count off
the days till they come for your home? Or your kids. And you know it’s going to
happen,” Ancil said to him. Earl didn’t have a response to that. He just sat
there quiet, his eyes focused on the floor.
    “They feed off the young. They manipulate