Given that almost every state has some sort of stay-at-home order in place, and a lot of you are dying for stuff to read, I’m posting an excerpt from BIG SKY FALLING that reflects how it feels to be cooped up.
For reference, the characters in my book at this point hadn’t left their survival retreat in eight months.
“So, you up for it?” Manny asked Eric while he contemplated his next move on the ornate wooden chessboard.
“Winning this game? Absolutely,” Eric said and moved his black queen’s rook halfway up the right side of the board. He looked out the sunroom’s tall glass panes at the gray and rainy spring morning—March was coming to an end. “As for leading the first patrol when the snow melts, yeah, I’m up for that, too. I’ll let you know who I wanna take with me, and then we’ll rehearse.”
Manny snickered as he examined his dwindling options for moves. “After a long and cold winter trapped indoors, you’ll be fighting off volunteers with a whip and a chair—that is, until they learn that the catch is that they’ll be led by your stupid ass.” He moved a tan pawn one space forward. “We’ll start simple and make contact with our immediate neighbors to see if they’re still alive. Sorry to say you’ll probably be talking to corpses, hermano.”
Eric took a sip of his increasingly precious coffee. “Don’t care—we’ve been cooped up here for seven months, and I’m going stir crazy. And this is a big house! Can you imagine how people holing up in small homes are dealing with this? If they didn’t think to stock up on games, books, and other diversions, it would be like living in the waiting room of a doctor’s office and its thirty-year-old magazines, multiplied by a million.” Eric picked up his remaining knight and jumped it near his rook.
“I don’t wanna imagine that,” Manny said. “You don’t truly appreciate freedom of movement—the right to hop in your car for no reason and take a drive or grab a burger—until you’re deprived of it.”
Stay safe and stay sane, kids – I’ll try to post more. I’ve been 18 hours a day, nonstop as I juggle working from home with educating my children.