NANOWRIMO – Winner!

ding ding ding…
I crossed the 50,000 word line today, but I have a little bit more write to finish the story, which I’ll do tonight or tomorrow. The online shopping juggernaut is in full effect and I’ve got to get to work filling orders and helping out. Enjoy another excerpt of the madness:

When Little Cecil graduated from college, Big Cecil bought him a plane ticket and a Eurail pass so he could travel around Europe, just as Big Cecil had done. Little Cecil returned to the United States in the spring of 1999, which was a time when Big Cecil had entombed himself in his apartment, never venturing out as he had a dread fear of the Y2K bug. Little Cecil hadn’t heard about his father’s paranoia and expected him at the airport. After waiting for several hours on the curb, he called his grandmother.

By this time in her life, the only way she made it through the day was to drink a one and a half liter bottle of chablis after lunch. This left her in a semi-functional state until the next morning, but she always believed she was capable of anything in her inebriated state. Little Cecil’s call came at 9:00 PM, while Darlene was watching television and trying to stay awake.
“Hello Cecil darling,” she said.

“Can you come pick me up at the airport?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, your father won’t leave his apartment,” she said.

“Why?” Little Cecil asked.

“The bug!”

“His car? He doesn’t drive that thing.” he asked, knowing that his father hadn’t driven it years.

“No, the bug! The Y2K bug!”, she yelled.

Little Cecil told her where he was waiting and she got into her car to pick him up. She only made it to the intersection above the freeway when she nodded off and went careening down the hill through two red lights. When she crossed Eastlake Avenue she t-boned the truck that Sheila’s mother was driving, killing her instantly. Darlene was still barely alive when the paramedics arrived, but died on the way to the hospital.

Carrie Jackson was on her way to pick up her husband and her daughter who were too drunk to walk after spending the day at the Eastlake Zoo, a tavern only five blocks from the accident. They were celebrating Sheila’s twenty first birthday with a beer bender, leaving the family feeling guilty about Carrie’s death to this day. In the settlement with Horatio Willis, the mortgage on their crab boat was paid off with a fair amount of money left over. Still nothing compared to having Carrie alive.

The police eventually broke down the door of the Willis mansion as Horatio was deaf by this time and couldn’t hear the phone ringing. When they woke the old man up, he wrote down the phone number for his son Cecil, who was finally persuaded to leave his apartment with assurance that all the computers in the world had at least eight months of functionality remaining. Little Cecil took the bus home from the airport and came home to an empty house with the front door hanging of its hinges and no sign of his grandparents. He went up to the turret room of the mansion and watched for someone to come home.