Infecting the Flint Hills: Prologue
My Story Begins
It’s curious that I call this my Flint Hills story. I never knew the Flint Hills existed until I arrived in the quaint town of Bettis in search of my half-brother, Dwight. Of course, at that point in my life I knew that my biological father, Daddeus, whom others knew as Thaddeus York, was a professor at Lawler College in the middle of nowhere, U.S.A. He might have even mentioned that Bettis and Lawler were located in the Flint Hills during his occasional visits to Oregon. If so, it never registered.
Whether or not I knew of its existence, I was drawn to the area, inexplicably leaving my husband and children in search of the brother I barely knew. Although I hadn’t met Dwight until a few weeks earlier, the fact that my mother had another child was not surprising given her profession.
I was raised in a brothel. I didn’t exactly grasp the nature of my situation until my mother died. To me, it was a nice house in Burbank, California with Gwen and several attractive women, my mother included, who were very popular with men. They weren’t degenerate prostitutes—as my grandparents claimed—they were just family, the only family I knew.
I didn’t meet Daddeus until I was 12. He entered my life, coming to my rescue shortly after my mother died, when my grandparents filed for legal custody of a pre-teen ‘living in depraved conditions and exposed to all manner of sordid activities.’ Perhaps… if they had been normal grandparents, living in a quiet suburb, with two small dogs, weathered concrete trolls in the garden, and bowls of hard candy on the kitchen counter, then things might have been different. But they were religious zealots prone toward notions of white supremacy living in a commune in Idaho with dozens of like-minded folks. I’m inclined to contend they offered an even more depraved and sordid environment.
Gwen brought Daddeus into the fold when the zealots descended on Burbank. Apparently he was as ignorant of my existence as I of his. Although discovering a 12-year daughter was quite the surprise, he did everything he could to help. Even though DNA tests confirmed Daddeus was my biological father, such did not sway the courts. I was sentenced to spend the remainder of my adolescence living in religious, bigoted purgatory.
Thanks to Gwen and Daddeus, I escaped to Portland, Oregon, trained as a nurse, met my future husband Jerry, and forged a pleasant, boring, suburban life with my precious daughter and two adorable sons.
Then Dwight showed up.
I literally bumped into him while Christmas shopping at the mall. He was incredibly charming and personable. Whether it was familial or something else, we had an instant connection. And given my own ‘accidental’ birth, I had no reason to question that my mother had done the same once before.
However, when he left Portland shortly after Christmas in search of a woman named Gina, I was compelled to follow for reasons I didn’t fathom at the time. I never expected that my trip to the Flint Hills, my Flint Hills story, would involve the fate of the multiverse.
However, the question of when my Flints Hills story actually began is a complicated one.
In retrospect, a solid case could be made that it began several months before I arrived in the Flints Hills, before I was barely aware such a place existed.
As a nurse, my odd working hours and haphazard sleeping patterns were seldom conducive to natural circadian rhythms. Dreams, at least those I recalled, were seldom if ever part of my life.
That, however, changed in the months leading up to my Flint Hills journey. The dreams were lucid and they were strange, revealing lives I never lived and people I never met. Of course, I failed to make the connection at the time, but afterwards, once my Flint Hills story was underway, those dreams, those visions, offered a reasonable claim to the beginning of my Flint Hills story.
For the sake of this exposition, let me start the story on a brisk January morning when I pulled the rented Ford Taurus into the angled parking space in front of the Bettis Police Department housed in a nondescript, decades-old building.
