Dread. Despair. Desperation. Disappointment. These are the only emotions Pete is familiar with. With no friends, no job, and no prospects for the future, Pete sets out west in search for a new beginning as a forest firefighter. It doesn't take long for Pete to learn that life out in the wilderness of Montana is tough, tougher than anything he's ever experienced. The only thing keeping Pete alive is the sympathy of an old local fireman named Paul, who's seen too many people fail to bear seeing another fall by the wayside.
As soon as life begins to look up for Pete, the cracks start to form as Paul uncovers a conspiracy involving the mining companies who effectively run their town. Before he has time to consider the consequences, Pete is diving head first into the conspiracy alongside Paul. What they uncover may have the country shaken to its very core.
Set Me Alight is my first self-published work. It started out as a story about a friend of mine who was bumming around from place to place, moving from one crap job to the other to put off entering the real world. Eventually he made it out west in the Rockies. I started joking around with him that he needs to pull his life together and become a hardened forest fire fighter. I then wrote a quick outline of a b-action movie starring my friend as a Snake Plissken wannabe uncovering some government conspiracy. It following him around with his wolf companion, causing mischief with anarchy groups, and then ending with a showdown with the President on top of the Freedom Tower in New York City.
Fast forward a few months, I'm visiting family and friends over the holidays, bored out of my mind, and I stumble upon the outline I had written. I decided to retool it, make it a little less bonkers, and what I ended up with was Set Me Alight.
The story can be found on Amazon and Smashwords. Please see the links below:
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K53Y0IA
Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/435259
Barnes and Noble:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/set-me-alight-bill-leviathan/1119460016?ean=2940045926539
Below, find an excerpt from the first chapter of Set Me Alight
Prologue
It's so God damned cold in here. Not much else you can expect when there's only a thin layer of tarp and pizza boxes shielding you from the cold Pennsylvania winter air. There's not much I can do to occupy my time. My weary body aching for a good night's sleep, but the cold is keeping me up in a borderline delirious state. No one else to keep me company is this drafty little home I have. No one except "Authentic Tony", staring at me with his fat little face, mocking me with his stupid little grin and that warm, fulfilling pizza floating right next to his head. Authentic Tony lives in a dream of never ending pizza and eternal smugness, something I can never hope to achieve during my futile existence. I keep telling myself I'm going to turn that box around, but who else would I be able to direct my hate and anguish towards then? Myself? I already spend my whole day doing that. I don't need to spend my nights doing it as well. Tony can stay for now, his haunting glare watching over me as I drift into an intermittent sleep.
Day time hardly brings any relief. If I stand directly in the sun, I can warm up a little bit, praying that a gust of wind doesn't pass by, piercing through these tattered rags I call clothes. It’s the only relief I get during these winter months, a little bit of feeling returning to my arms and legs as I bask in the sun. Most of the day is just a dreary reminder of what life has become for us ‘workers’ or ‘commoners’ or whatever you want to call us. Wake up, walk out of my tent, shamble around our little village seeing what I can scavenge for warmth or sustenance. Every now and then I get lucky, a half-eaten apple or moldy bread crust. Most days, the best I get is discovering one of my neighbors won't be waking up any more, providing me a few more tattered layers to wrap myself with.
After I stop hating myself just enough to motivate myself to move out of bed, I make my way out of our village in a search for work. There's not much to be found around here. The only people who seem to be paying are cleanup crews. Spend the whole day picking up other people's shit. Going into the gated communities to remove their trash, heading to the nearest factory to pick up their dumped waste, and sometimes carrying off the half frozen bodies from the benches downtown. Stand around in a group of a hundred guys, wait for a pickup truck to pull up, and hope I'm one of the lucky three people picked for the job. It's a good day if even a quarter of the group gets selected to work. Most of the time it’s closer to 10%. The good days always seem to come after particularly cold nights.
I missed out on work once again. Another wasted day. Without the work, it’s doubtful I'll get anything to eat. Nothing substantial any ways. What to do to take mind off the crippling hunger pangs? Sitting around the little fire in the center of the village is always a good way to pass the time. There's going to be some old geezer telling stories of what it was like before the crisis, or some young kid detailing their dreams of making it big one day and how they'll still remember us little guys. Those are always the best. The delusions of breaking free from this circle of poverty, a delusion only a teenager who spends too much of their spare time standing outside the windows of television shops could have. At the least, I'll hear a story from some poor woman who witnessed their entire family waste away before them just last week. It’s nice to be reminded there's someone out there worse off than you. It's the little tragedies of everyone else's lives that get me through my day.
Before I could make it to the village center, I see my neighbor Jon heading towards me. It seems like its every day he's cooked up some sort of scheme to get us out of this village. All of them half-cooked ideas and concepts his 8th grade education level can't even begin to comprehend. My favorite has always been to somehow extract the grease from all the discarded pizza boxes and carry out containers, and then sell it to the government as an alternate fuel source. The food in those containers was 90% artificial grease to begin with, and it hardly provides sufficient fuel for our poor bodies. How was it ever going to power something useful?
"Hey Pete, how's it going?"
"Same as always Jon. I'm cold, I'm tired, I'm hungry, and there's no end in sight. At least I still have my sunny disposition."
"Jesus Pete, first thing in the morning and you're already rattling off about how shit humanity's existence is. Shut the fuck up already. I've only just saw you and I'm already tired of your God damned cynicism. I've got something important to talk to you about."
"Yeah? What is it this time? We going to try your plan of breaking into rich neighborhoods to siphon off gas to sell it to other neighborhoods? You still haven't quite figured out how to get past those high fences or armed guards."
"I've already warned you Pete, quit it with the tired cynical shit. Winter's almost over man. I heard on the radio they're predicting a dry spring and summer out in the west. You know what that means?"
"I don't have the slightest idea what that could mean Jon."
"Summer forest fires, and lots of them. They need people to fight those fires, Pete. Desperate, dumb kids who have nothing else going for them. And they pay a lot Pete, a lot. Work for three months out of the year, and then faff about for the rest."
"That's just great Jon. The only problem, is we live on the east coast, not the west. There's no fires here. There's about 2,000 miles between us and the fires."
"Good thing we have a few months to travel those 2,000 miles to get to those fires."
"Ok, and how are we going to train to fight fires on this trip? They may be looking for 'dumb and desperate' kids, but it’s not exactly an easy job. We're going to get ourselves killed awfully quick if we don't know what the hell we're doing."
"You know Old Jim from the other side of the village? He was a volunteer firefighter in Philly before the crisis. I've already run this by him, and he's coming. He said he would help 'train' us as best he can along the way."
"Alright, alright. When are you two planning on leaving for this little adventure?"
"Tomorrow. We haven't told anyone else, so if you're interested, show up tomorrow at the train yard. We'll be trying to hitch a ride from there."
"If I decide to go, I better not end up standing in the train yard alone with my dick in my hand, you hear?"
"Don't worry Pete, Old Jim and I are 100% committed. See you tomorrow."
"Don't be so sure I'll be there Jon."
I don't think I slept at all that night, wracking my brain over what to do tomorrow morning. Was Jon being serious? Does he think we stand a chance out there in the west? It’s a long ride out there, and we have no provisions to speak of. Though what exactly am I hanging onto here? My little starring contests with Authentic Tony? Maybe we can find a train heading down south, warm our bones a little before the inevitable, us starving to death while tucked away in the back of some train car. A train yard worker will find us, our bodies frozen stiff and huddled together in a desperate attempt for warmth. They’ll pry our frozen bodies apart with crow bars, and then dump us on the side of the rails for the summer vultures to get us. The warmer cities are over run with us 'workers' this time of the year. Where exactly would we be heading? The "West" is a pretty big area. Texas? California? Those places already have too many mouths to feed, they may not give us the warmest of welcomes. Though it’s not like we won't have time to decide where we're heading along the way. It's going to take a lot of train hopping to get there. Lots of opportunities to get caught by some train yard guards. I've lived in Pennsylvania my whole life, never really had much of an opportunity to travel. I had a car when I was sixteen. Wasn't long before I had to sell it for scrap to buy some food. I've been able to pick up some national news over the radio or on the screens in the television shops, it doesn't seem like they're living any different throughout the rest of the country. I shouldn't be that much of an outsider. We've all had the same experiences for the past decade. Hunger, shame, and a complete loss of your dignity. That's what unifies the common man, a cold emptiness that permeates through all of us. Or maybe not. That could just be the ever cynical east coast attitude radiating through me. Maybe they really our just happy out there. ‘West coast is the best coast’, right? We may not make it all the way to the coast though. Might not make it past the Rockies, or somewhere in the Great Plains. There's a lot of fires out there, no reason to keep going. We'd just be another couple of outsider Okies in an already overcrowded California. I'm not getting anywhere with these thoughts, maybe catching the dawn sunlight on my face will bring about some sort of revelation. A little vitamin D should help clear up my thoughts, or at least make me less likely to kill myself.
Well, its dawn now. What am I going to do? There isn't much packing for me to do if I go. A blanket, maybe a couple of plastic bags to wrap around my feet to keep them dry. I don't own much more than the clothes on my back. Shit. There's no better reminder of what little mark you're leaving on the world then preparing to move. Nothing, I have literally nothing to claim to my name. If I leave here, no one will notice. Just a small empty spot for another down-on-his-luck bum to set up their tent in. I can only hope they have a happier existence here than I ever did.
Ok, that's it. I've made up my mind, I'm going to the God damned train yard to meet up with Jon and Old Jim. I've got my blanket, my tarp, and a few plastic bags that aren't too riddled with holes. Bob next door never returned to his tent last night. Looks like he left behind a pair of shoes. The soles are only half attached, but they'll do. Size 10. My lucky day, only two sizes too small. Almost enough space where I can pretend to wiggle my toes. Life’s looking up already.
It's quite a hike to the train yard. An hour and a half walk. I left early, so it should be 8 or 9 in the morning by the time I get there. Jon never said what time to meet him, just to be there. Fuck, what if he's already gone? I robbed Bob for nothing. How long should I wait there? 15 minutes, an hour, two hours, five hours, till dusk? It's not like I have plans or anything for today, but at least I would be able to stew in my own self-pity in the comfort of my own home.
Thank God, Jon and Jim are here. Old Jim's a lot older than I anticipated. Grey haired and hunched over a cane. Guess his name isn't ironic. I already have a feeling that he's going to be a liability on our way out. His dentures will probably fall out while catching a moving train, and I'll be forced to spoon feed him his meals. That, or he's just going to keel over and die before he does anything useful for us. I’m sick and tired of people dying off before I can fully exploit them.
"Pete! Glad to see you've made it." Jon yelled out.
"Might as well rot away out west if I'm just going to rot away here."
"You always bring the best attitude." Jon said.
"So, Jon, have you and Jim decided on where we're going? Or are we just seeing where the trains take us?"
"We're going to Montana", Old Jim replied.
As soon as life begins to look up for Pete, the cracks start to form as Paul uncovers a conspiracy involving the mining companies who effectively run their town. Before he has time to consider the consequences, Pete is diving head first into the conspiracy alongside Paul. What they uncover may have the country shaken to its very core.
Set Me Alight is my first self-published work. It started out as a story about a friend of mine who was bumming around from place to place, moving from one crap job to the other to put off entering the real world. Eventually he made it out west in the Rockies. I started joking around with him that he needs to pull his life together and become a hardened forest fire fighter. I then wrote a quick outline of a b-action movie starring my friend as a Snake Plissken wannabe uncovering some government conspiracy. It following him around with his wolf companion, causing mischief with anarchy groups, and then ending with a showdown with the President on top of the Freedom Tower in New York City.
Fast forward a few months, I'm visiting family and friends over the holidays, bored out of my mind, and I stumble upon the outline I had written. I decided to retool it, make it a little less bonkers, and what I ended up with was Set Me Alight.
The story can be found on Amazon and Smashwords. Please see the links below:
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K53Y0IA
Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/435259
Barnes and Noble:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/set-me-alight-bill-leviathan/1119460016?ean=2940045926539
Below, find an excerpt from the first chapter of Set Me Alight
Prologue
It's so God damned cold in here. Not much else you can expect when there's only a thin layer of tarp and pizza boxes shielding you from the cold Pennsylvania winter air. There's not much I can do to occupy my time. My weary body aching for a good night's sleep, but the cold is keeping me up in a borderline delirious state. No one else to keep me company is this drafty little home I have. No one except "Authentic Tony", staring at me with his fat little face, mocking me with his stupid little grin and that warm, fulfilling pizza floating right next to his head. Authentic Tony lives in a dream of never ending pizza and eternal smugness, something I can never hope to achieve during my futile existence. I keep telling myself I'm going to turn that box around, but who else would I be able to direct my hate and anguish towards then? Myself? I already spend my whole day doing that. I don't need to spend my nights doing it as well. Tony can stay for now, his haunting glare watching over me as I drift into an intermittent sleep.
Day time hardly brings any relief. If I stand directly in the sun, I can warm up a little bit, praying that a gust of wind doesn't pass by, piercing through these tattered rags I call clothes. It’s the only relief I get during these winter months, a little bit of feeling returning to my arms and legs as I bask in the sun. Most of the day is just a dreary reminder of what life has become for us ‘workers’ or ‘commoners’ or whatever you want to call us. Wake up, walk out of my tent, shamble around our little village seeing what I can scavenge for warmth or sustenance. Every now and then I get lucky, a half-eaten apple or moldy bread crust. Most days, the best I get is discovering one of my neighbors won't be waking up any more, providing me a few more tattered layers to wrap myself with.
After I stop hating myself just enough to motivate myself to move out of bed, I make my way out of our village in a search for work. There's not much to be found around here. The only people who seem to be paying are cleanup crews. Spend the whole day picking up other people's shit. Going into the gated communities to remove their trash, heading to the nearest factory to pick up their dumped waste, and sometimes carrying off the half frozen bodies from the benches downtown. Stand around in a group of a hundred guys, wait for a pickup truck to pull up, and hope I'm one of the lucky three people picked for the job. It's a good day if even a quarter of the group gets selected to work. Most of the time it’s closer to 10%. The good days always seem to come after particularly cold nights.
I missed out on work once again. Another wasted day. Without the work, it’s doubtful I'll get anything to eat. Nothing substantial any ways. What to do to take mind off the crippling hunger pangs? Sitting around the little fire in the center of the village is always a good way to pass the time. There's going to be some old geezer telling stories of what it was like before the crisis, or some young kid detailing their dreams of making it big one day and how they'll still remember us little guys. Those are always the best. The delusions of breaking free from this circle of poverty, a delusion only a teenager who spends too much of their spare time standing outside the windows of television shops could have. At the least, I'll hear a story from some poor woman who witnessed their entire family waste away before them just last week. It’s nice to be reminded there's someone out there worse off than you. It's the little tragedies of everyone else's lives that get me through my day.
Before I could make it to the village center, I see my neighbor Jon heading towards me. It seems like its every day he's cooked up some sort of scheme to get us out of this village. All of them half-cooked ideas and concepts his 8th grade education level can't even begin to comprehend. My favorite has always been to somehow extract the grease from all the discarded pizza boxes and carry out containers, and then sell it to the government as an alternate fuel source. The food in those containers was 90% artificial grease to begin with, and it hardly provides sufficient fuel for our poor bodies. How was it ever going to power something useful?
"Hey Pete, how's it going?"
"Same as always Jon. I'm cold, I'm tired, I'm hungry, and there's no end in sight. At least I still have my sunny disposition."
"Jesus Pete, first thing in the morning and you're already rattling off about how shit humanity's existence is. Shut the fuck up already. I've only just saw you and I'm already tired of your God damned cynicism. I've got something important to talk to you about."
"Yeah? What is it this time? We going to try your plan of breaking into rich neighborhoods to siphon off gas to sell it to other neighborhoods? You still haven't quite figured out how to get past those high fences or armed guards."
"I've already warned you Pete, quit it with the tired cynical shit. Winter's almost over man. I heard on the radio they're predicting a dry spring and summer out in the west. You know what that means?"
"I don't have the slightest idea what that could mean Jon."
"Summer forest fires, and lots of them. They need people to fight those fires, Pete. Desperate, dumb kids who have nothing else going for them. And they pay a lot Pete, a lot. Work for three months out of the year, and then faff about for the rest."
"That's just great Jon. The only problem, is we live on the east coast, not the west. There's no fires here. There's about 2,000 miles between us and the fires."
"Good thing we have a few months to travel those 2,000 miles to get to those fires."
"Ok, and how are we going to train to fight fires on this trip? They may be looking for 'dumb and desperate' kids, but it’s not exactly an easy job. We're going to get ourselves killed awfully quick if we don't know what the hell we're doing."
"You know Old Jim from the other side of the village? He was a volunteer firefighter in Philly before the crisis. I've already run this by him, and he's coming. He said he would help 'train' us as best he can along the way."
"Alright, alright. When are you two planning on leaving for this little adventure?"
"Tomorrow. We haven't told anyone else, so if you're interested, show up tomorrow at the train yard. We'll be trying to hitch a ride from there."
"If I decide to go, I better not end up standing in the train yard alone with my dick in my hand, you hear?"
"Don't worry Pete, Old Jim and I are 100% committed. See you tomorrow."
"Don't be so sure I'll be there Jon."
I don't think I slept at all that night, wracking my brain over what to do tomorrow morning. Was Jon being serious? Does he think we stand a chance out there in the west? It’s a long ride out there, and we have no provisions to speak of. Though what exactly am I hanging onto here? My little starring contests with Authentic Tony? Maybe we can find a train heading down south, warm our bones a little before the inevitable, us starving to death while tucked away in the back of some train car. A train yard worker will find us, our bodies frozen stiff and huddled together in a desperate attempt for warmth. They’ll pry our frozen bodies apart with crow bars, and then dump us on the side of the rails for the summer vultures to get us. The warmer cities are over run with us 'workers' this time of the year. Where exactly would we be heading? The "West" is a pretty big area. Texas? California? Those places already have too many mouths to feed, they may not give us the warmest of welcomes. Though it’s not like we won't have time to decide where we're heading along the way. It's going to take a lot of train hopping to get there. Lots of opportunities to get caught by some train yard guards. I've lived in Pennsylvania my whole life, never really had much of an opportunity to travel. I had a car when I was sixteen. Wasn't long before I had to sell it for scrap to buy some food. I've been able to pick up some national news over the radio or on the screens in the television shops, it doesn't seem like they're living any different throughout the rest of the country. I shouldn't be that much of an outsider. We've all had the same experiences for the past decade. Hunger, shame, and a complete loss of your dignity. That's what unifies the common man, a cold emptiness that permeates through all of us. Or maybe not. That could just be the ever cynical east coast attitude radiating through me. Maybe they really our just happy out there. ‘West coast is the best coast’, right? We may not make it all the way to the coast though. Might not make it past the Rockies, or somewhere in the Great Plains. There's a lot of fires out there, no reason to keep going. We'd just be another couple of outsider Okies in an already overcrowded California. I'm not getting anywhere with these thoughts, maybe catching the dawn sunlight on my face will bring about some sort of revelation. A little vitamin D should help clear up my thoughts, or at least make me less likely to kill myself.
Well, its dawn now. What am I going to do? There isn't much packing for me to do if I go. A blanket, maybe a couple of plastic bags to wrap around my feet to keep them dry. I don't own much more than the clothes on my back. Shit. There's no better reminder of what little mark you're leaving on the world then preparing to move. Nothing, I have literally nothing to claim to my name. If I leave here, no one will notice. Just a small empty spot for another down-on-his-luck bum to set up their tent in. I can only hope they have a happier existence here than I ever did.
Ok, that's it. I've made up my mind, I'm going to the God damned train yard to meet up with Jon and Old Jim. I've got my blanket, my tarp, and a few plastic bags that aren't too riddled with holes. Bob next door never returned to his tent last night. Looks like he left behind a pair of shoes. The soles are only half attached, but they'll do. Size 10. My lucky day, only two sizes too small. Almost enough space where I can pretend to wiggle my toes. Life’s looking up already.
It's quite a hike to the train yard. An hour and a half walk. I left early, so it should be 8 or 9 in the morning by the time I get there. Jon never said what time to meet him, just to be there. Fuck, what if he's already gone? I robbed Bob for nothing. How long should I wait there? 15 minutes, an hour, two hours, five hours, till dusk? It's not like I have plans or anything for today, but at least I would be able to stew in my own self-pity in the comfort of my own home.
Thank God, Jon and Jim are here. Old Jim's a lot older than I anticipated. Grey haired and hunched over a cane. Guess his name isn't ironic. I already have a feeling that he's going to be a liability on our way out. His dentures will probably fall out while catching a moving train, and I'll be forced to spoon feed him his meals. That, or he's just going to keel over and die before he does anything useful for us. I’m sick and tired of people dying off before I can fully exploit them.
"Pete! Glad to see you've made it." Jon yelled out.
"Might as well rot away out west if I'm just going to rot away here."
"You always bring the best attitude." Jon said.
"So, Jon, have you and Jim decided on where we're going? Or are we just seeing where the trains take us?"
"We're going to Montana", Old Jim replied.