Sci-fi
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
it felt like April slovenly patches of snow sprawl about the property here and there. But they were in full melt. Water ran from them in streams down the gravel driveway, and the icicles hanging off the barn dripped a mad rhythm. The air had a sharp taste like new life, and Seth's breath no longer came in hot blasts of steam. He was crouched on the upper floor of the barn, peering out through the hay hatchet, the three intruders in the door yard below. They stood in a semi circle, sitting on their motorcycles, keeping furtive watch in the farmhouse and the crop fields. They had guns only a week ago. They would never have made it up the driveway. On motorcycles. The snow had been knee high, but a sudden spike in temperature had melted the worst of it away. The quick change was what his father had always called the thaw in mildly ominous tones. The fresh weather had put him in the mind of riding his bike or helping his father with the planting before school. He knew the sequence well. First, the potatoes than the barley than the corn sugar beets in the small plot behind the House year in, year out, for as long as Seth could remember, for as long as he had been alive as his father had been alive, that was the way of things on the Walker Farm. The corn never did well. It wasn't suited to Montana soil or to Montana Weather. Corn belonged in flatter places with longer summers, but sets. Father had always tried. The sad and emasculated stocks that struggle out of the furrows never seem to dishearten him in the slightest. A farm isn't a farm without corn, William Walker had proclaimed, and that had been that beyond the trees. At the bottom of the Walker driveway, a man and a woman watched the house. Both of them are quite tall. The man was narrow and rangy, with hard veins popping out of his forearms. The woman was solid and strong, planted on powerful thighs like enormous chicken drumsticks. A large woman, but not a fat one. The man was watching the upper floor of the farmhouse where moments before a dim light had winked out. It had been to faint for electricity and two solid for fire. Flashlight, he thought and grunted something Ah, the woman said she had been staring at his back and lost inside herself, which wasn't the same as being lost in thought. When she blanked out, which happened a lot these days, she seldom thought anything at all. She just floated along on a tranquil sea, staring off at nothing until someone said something or shook her or hit her. I said, Smart kids, the man said. They got all the window sheeted over to keep the light in so you can't tell anyone's home. We wouldn't even known about them if you hadn't spotted the boy. Oh, the woman said, a blush rose in her face of the faint praise. And she added, Oh, farms in good shape to the man continued, cocking his head in the direction of the neat barn. In the carefully shuttered windows. Crop fields were all overgrown to ****, but they kept up the place pretty good. How many houses did we pass? With the roof caving in? And after only 67 months, six months? His jaw tightened in the darkness, and he said, since everything started, the dead walking and the whole world ending, etcetera, six months right