Unearthing the Flint Hills: Prologue
Ghost of a Man
This is my story, the story of my adventures in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, a story that might have ended before it even began. It’s ironic that, after surviving four years unscathed in Iraq, I was wounded in a firefight next to the dormitory trash dumpster of Lawler College. But I survived that skirmish.
And after four weeks of recovery and rehab, I returned to campus. The cast was off my leg and I was in pursuit of a story, the type of story that could only come from the quirky confines of this little-known liberal arts institution in the middle of the Flint Hills.
I didn’t survive the next skirmish. Had I known my pursuit would result in me lying dead on the floor of Thaddeus York’s house, I might have stayed in Kansas City.
As it turns out, death wasn’t as bad as I thought. The blackness, the nothingness, was substantially unlike anything I had ever experienced. This state of being lasted an instant or an eternity. I couldn’t say.
I was seamlessly existing within the absolute blackness and at the same time a host of alternative realities. Drawing on my religious training, this triggered one specific thought percolating in my head… no that wasn’t quite right, given that I didn’t actually have a head. Rather, it triggered a thought percolating within my incorporeal essence.
I was a ghost. Or perhaps I was a spirit that had been reincarnated a number of different times in a number of different realities. No longer tethered to my Vince Cowan body, I was free to go anywhere I wanted—in an instant.
And dead or not, I had a story to pursue—unearthing the mystery of the hidden treasure buried somewhere in the Flint Hills hamlet of Bettis, Kansas. Along the way, I might just unearth the mystery of Thaddeus York, as well.
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