The discharge process was as cold and impersonal as the metal frame of his hospital bed. A clerk with tired eyes slid a manila envelope across the counter without looking at him.
Inside was his final mustering-out pay—a little over six hundred dollars in crisp bills—his official discharge papers stamped MEDICAL, and a prescription for painkillers he had no intention of filling. They handed him a pair of polished aluminum crutches, the cold metal a new kind of shackle.
"Good luck, son," the clerk mumbled, already turning to the next file.
Son. He was nineteen, but he felt a century old. Duke tucked the envelope inside his army-issue jacket, settled the crutches under his arms, and turned his back on the VA hospital. The doors hissed shut behind him, sealing away the world of antiseptic and routine.
He was planing of changing the crutches for a cane like the guy from House when he could finally put his foot on the ground.
The world outside was an assault. After the muted, controlled environment of the ward, Los Angeles in late February was overwhelmingly loud, bright, and real. The sun, free from the filtering hospital windows, was a brilliant, unforgiving white. A city bus roared past, belching exhaust that smelled of hot asphalt and gasoline.
The sound of traffic was a constant, grinding roar, punctuated by the sharp bleat of horns and the occasional shout. He stood on the sidewalk, swaying slightly, his senses reeling. 'Man even in this era traffict is a b*tch'
His first destination was already preplaned, a pawn shop he had seen during his walks around.
He crutched his way down the bustling street, the tap-thump, tap-thump a clumsy rhythm against the city's hustle. He found what he was looking for tucked between a liquor store and a laundromat: the pawn shop.
The window was a chaotic mosaic of lost treasures and desperate pledges—saxophones, cameras, jewelry, and power tools all jostling for space behind the grimy glass.
The bell above the door jangled his entrance. The air inside was thick with the smell of old wood and dust. An old man with a glass eye and a welcoming smile looked up from behind a counter cluttered with what seemed like radio parts.
"Can i help you sir?" the man asked, his voice like gravel.
Duke's eyes scanned the shop. And there it was, on a lower shelf, sitting between a trumpet and a stack of old albums: a typewriter.
It was a Royal Quiet DeLuxe, housed in a heavy, dark-gray case with worn corners that spoke of use, not abuse. It looked solid, dependable.
"That one." Duke said, pointing with a crutch. "Could you show me that?"
The man grunted, retrieved it, and set it on the counter with a solid thump. Duke opened the case. The keys were round, black, and slightly yellowed with age. The platen was clean, without cracks but with several scratches. He ran a finger over the cold metal of the frame.
"Does it work?"
"Everything in here works," the old man said, affronted. "Twenty-five dollars. Includes a fresh ribbon and two boxes of paper."
It was a fortune, the economy hasnt still gotten down nor is the Dollar weak right now.
Duke hesitated a little, '$1.25 per hour is the current minimum wage... isnt this kind of expensive. And like what the hell is a ribbon' He though.
The man noticing his hesitation and looking at his crutches said directly. "Make it 20$ and its yours"
He pulled the envelope from his jacket, counted out the bills, and slid them across the counter. The transaction felt more significant than receiving his discharge papers.
He got the ribbon which looked like 2 short rolls of film connected and two boxes of paper.
The case had a sturdy handle. He grabbed it and carried it, the weight a comforting anchor, and navigated back out onto the street, his crutches now accompanied by the rhythmic bump of the typewriter case against the crutches.
He found a room for rent in a two-story stucco building in Echo Park. The neighborhood had a worn-around-the-edges charm, a mix of struggling artists, blue-collar workers, and old-timers who've seen it all.
His apartment was a single room at the back of the building on the ground floor, with a cracked linoleum floor, a lumpy bed in one corner, a sink and a hot plate in the other, and a bathroom down the hall he'd have to share, that was the bad part.
A single, large window looked out onto a patchy courtyard with a palm tree.
"Forty a month," the landlord, a weary-looking woman in a housecoat, had said. He handed her eighty for the first and last month's rent.
He felt a little happy in regards to how cheap this rent was, of course Echo Park right now is unlike how it is in the future.
He remembered Echo Park in 2025 being a very gentrified place, of course it was also very safe.
Right now its... well kind of a poor neighborhood.
The first thing he did, before even unpacking his meager bag of clothes, was to set the typewriter on a small, rickety table placed squarely in front of the window. He opened the case. The machine seemed to hum with potential, a silent engine waiting for a spark.
A few days later, after he'd settled in, he saw a sign in the window of a warehouse a few blocks away: NIGHT WATCHMAN WANTED. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.
It was perfect. The job was mind-numbing—punching a clock at various stations throughout a silent, cavernous space filled with cardboard boxes—but it paid cash at the end of each week and, more importantly, it gave him hours of uninterrupted solitude to think while making some money.
With a small, steady income and his savings, he allowed himself a few luxuries. He bought a cheap transistor radio from a Pawn Shop.
He spent an afternoon crutching around Echo Park, buying a stack of magazines from a corner newsstand: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Analog, and a few men's adventure pulps with garish covers depicting soldiers battling monstrous beasts.
That first night in his apartment, with the city sounds drifting in through the open window, he decided to finally give it his first try.
He turned on the radio. The warm, crackling sound of The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" filled the small room.
He sat at the typewriter, a fresh sheet of paper rolled into the platen. The blank white page was a void more intimidating than any battlefield.
He focused as he though, blocking out the music, the distant siren, the faint smell of fried food from a nearby cafe.
He searched for an opening scene, something visceral, immediate, and perfectly etched in his memories. After a while, He finally decided:
A small, utilitarian corridor. The shudder of laser fire from clones going around. The desperate, masked faces of the rebel soldiers. He decided not to include R2D2 now C-3PO on it.
His fingers found the keys. He began to type, not as a screenwriter, but as a novelist, translating the visual language of cinema into the best writing he could muster.
"The last of the rebel troopers died not to blaster fire, but to the sudden, suffocating silence that fell as the smoke cleared. Through the hazy, red-lit corridor, a figure emerged, a blacker shape cut from the shadows themselves. It was not a man but a monument to terror, its breath a mechanized rattle that drowned out the final, choked gasps of the dying. The polished black durasteel of its helmet offered no face, no mercy, only a reflection of the carnage it had wrought. As it stepped over the scattered bodies, the long, black cloak flowing around it like a shroud, the only sound was the heavy, deliberate clank of its boots on the deck plating—the slow, inevitable heartbeat of death itself."
The words flowed. He described the capture of the ship, the stormtroopers breaching the airlock, the cold efficiency of Darth Vader's entrance. He didn't stop for nearly twenty minutes, the clack-clack-clack of the Royal a steady, percussive beat beneath the radio's music. When he finally stopped, his right leg was beginning to throb with a little ache.
He pulled the page from the typewriter. He read what he had written. It was more than good; it seemed to him at the very least publishable. The prose was tight, the pacing relentless, the imagery vivid.
He now wanted a plan.
He needed to put star wars on hold, he wanted to not publish it on a pulp magazine but as a novel.
He opened one of the pulp magazines, Weird Tales. The stories were short, visceral, and heavy on atmosphere. They paid by the word, and they were a way to get his name—or a name—into print, to generate quick cash, and to at least hone his craft a little.
He pulled out a fresh notepad and wrote a heading at the top: ADAPTATIONS.
He needed material that would fit the pulps. Short, punchy, terrifying concepts. He thought of the future books he remembered, the ones by Stephen King. He couldn't write full, character-rich novels yet; they were too long, too complex for the short-form market that he was going for right now. But he could use the core idea to write a pulp version.
He began to write down ideas on his notebook.
'Salem's Lot: A vampire story.
A reporter returns to his hometown to find the people he knew are changing, becoming pale, nocturnal, and hungry. Focus on the initial discoveries, the mounting dread, the first confrontations.
The Shining:
Isolate the central monster. A malevolent hotel. A struggling writer takes a job as the winter caretaker, his sanity already frayed. The hotel preys on his son.
It:
A thing that feeds on fear and takes the shape of its prey's worst nightmares. A series of child disappearances in a small town, all connected to a malevolent clown that only the children can see.
Or well his favorite King story, Cujo:
A good dog, a friendly St. Bernard, bitten by a rabid bat. A mother and her small son trapped in a broken-down Pinto on a deserted farm road. Unrelenting, single-location suspense.
He looked over his list. These weren't the nuanced, epic novels one would think a reborn person would write but these needed to be raw stories stripped down to their bloody bones and packaged for the hungry readers of the pulps.
This was how he would begin.
He selected his first target: the story that would become Cujo. It was simple, brutal, and didn't require extensive world-building. Just a woman, a child, a car, and a monster.
He loaded a fresh sheet of paper into the Royal. The radio was playing "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel, its melancholic folk sound, a kind of strange counterpoint to the darkness taking shape in the apges.
His fingers poised over the keys. He took a breath, the musty air of the apartment filling his lungs. This was it. No more planning. No more waiting.
He typed the title, the words stark and black against the white page:
Cujo.
The clack-clack-clack started again, a steady, determined rhythm that lasted long into the Los Angeles night.