Fair warning:  Most of this is probably going to change to some extent, but I didn’t want to waste my first scribblings on Ken, because I like the character.  So here’s a little previously-written bit of the story to do with Ken. 

 Â *****

Kenneth Chambers wasn’t happy. No, he was
content, and for him that was better than happy. Happy people were
always headed for a fall, and then they hit bottom. Ken had already hit
bottom and knew what it looked like. It wasn’t as bad as people made
out, but it wasn’t comfortable. So Ken had climbed up a little and
levelled out where he felt comfortable. He didn’t care what anyone else
 thought.

It was rent day, and Ken had the money plus a little
extra. He’d gotten paid for two repair jobs today, a lawnmower and an
old air conditioner. If you knew what you were doing with a compressor
and could still get your hands on some freon gas, you could make some
money fixing air conditioners. That and the sale of a couple of dime
bags of his herbal sideline had provided enough money for the rent and
a supper of real food. In Ken’s view, “real food” was anything that you
got from a diner or restaurant; then came “food”, which was generally
microwaved, and finally the vast majority of his diet: granola, cereal,
chips, donuts, etc., under the heading “something to eat”. But tonight
it would be real food, after he’d settled the rent with Jimmy Ruger.
The rent was always Ken’s first priority and the only thing he accepted
as a requirement or responsibility. After all, a man’s home is only his
castle until he gets kicked out, which was also why Ken was careful to
keep his sideline out of Jimmy’s sight. Jimmy might have a suspicion,
but if Ken got stupid enough to make it obvious, then he would deserve
to get kicked out.

This man’s castle was approximately the size
of a two car garage, but half again as long. Ken lived in the same
mini-warehouse where he worked. That was the one thing Jimmy didn’t
give him shit about, because he saw it as getting a night watchman for
free. Ken got up, picked up the faded beach chair he’d been sitting in
and stepped through the open garage door into the first of two rooms,
his workshop, where he kept whatever small engines or appliances he was
working on. The other was a living area, furnished with a black leather
sofa bed and armchair (you could get furniture that looked like new if
you went around early enough. It was amazing what some people threw
away.) The battered refrigerator in the corner with the portable
television on top, however, argued that you can’t get everything for
nothing. Ken’s choice of coffee table, an old wooden cable spool three
feet wide replied that some people don’t want everything. Contrasting
with the decor, however, Ken’s habits were quite neat and he maintained
some hygeinic standards. He wasn’t sure whether Jimmy knew that he had
plumbed the old cracked sink next to the fridge. Of course Ken had a
key to the bathroom at the end of his building, which was also equipped
with a small shower. Ken wasn’t surprised by this, he figured either
this was Jimmy’s way of avoiding installing emergency eyewash stations,
or he may have had some idea of putting a meter on it and charging.

Ken
stepped through the doorway in the divider into his apartment and
washed up at the sink. His face was well-hidden under his unruly black
hair and full beard (not quite so black anymore), revealing only a
perfectly triangular nose, two surprisingly lively brown eyes and
perhaps a few extra lines. He looked in the mirror of the medicine
chest above the sink and thought perhaps he looked like a little like a
young Jerry Garcia. Yeah, that wouldn’t be too bad. Again, he didn’t
care what anyone else thought. He gave a few half-hearted tugs at his
hair and beard with his comb, replaced it in his pocket, and left to go
see Jimmy Ruger, Grade A asshole.

Ken didn’t dislike Jimmy, not
at all. He figured that the word asshole, like stupid, sometimes wasn’t
an insult, it just denoted a fact of life. So while some people were
stupid, Jimmy was an asshole. Ken supposed that the biggest symptom of
this was that Jimmy liked to give people shit for no reason. He didn’t
think he’d seen Jimmy actually mad about anything more than four times
in the five years he’d been living there. No, Jimmy was at his happiest
when giving people shit, and today was no exception. “You’re just in
fucking time, you. One more day and I coulda told you to go find a
carboard box. So how are ya anyway?”

“I’m fine, and you oughta
stop advertising your competitors like that,” Ken growled amiably.
“Here’s your rent. So how’s it going?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine,
business is good. Or it will be when that dickweed in B-12 gets out,
that fucker’s costing me a fortune in electricity. And everything
magically fucking breaks in his bay, ain’t nothing his fault. I gotta
justify this shit to the old man, and… whoa, d’you feel that?”

Of
course Ken had felt it. A tremor in the ground, not much, but enough to
make him grab the counter to steady himself. There’d been a few of
those tremors in the past month, and lots of speculation. “So you
figure we’re gonna get an earthquake or something?”

“Nah, they
said in the paper it was something that happens every 10,000 years or
something. Here.” Jimmy reached under the counter and held out the
paper, topping it with a scribbled receipt, “I’m done with it.”

“Thanks,
see ya later.” Ken stepped through the door and looked back. “Hey, you
might wanna take a look around, make sure all that shakin’ didn’t break
anything.” He grinned. It got the desired reaction.

“Don’t you
fuckin‘ jinx me like that, you prick! Of all the f—” The closing door
cut off Jimmy’s rant. Always leave ‘em cheerful.

Ken stepped
back out into the warm afternoon, sparing a glance for the gigantic
entrance sign for Ruger Warehouse and Storage Facilities, and strolled
back to his warehouse. Ruger Warehouse of course didn’t mean Jimmy. The
complex belonged to his old man, Sol Ruger, who was enjoying a healthy
retirement on the profits. He paid Jimmy well enough for managing the
place and doing all the work, but Ken gathered from the way Jimmy
talked that old Sol wasn’t likely to give him a share of the profits in
this lifetime, so Jimmy just had to keep totin‘ that bale as an
employee until he got his inheritance. Well, Ken supposed, it wasn’t
such a mystery how Jimmy got to be the way he was.

Ken tucked the paper under his arm and set out down the street. If he was quick, he could grab dinner at the diner.

 Â *******

 Ken was going to visit Matilda this
evening, though it wasn’t a rendevous he wanted anyone else to know
about. He made his way across the railroad tracks in his jeans and
combat boots, and quickly ducked into the Oregon woods. Ken had other
affairs, Maybelle and Marylou for example, but Matilda was his pride
and joy. He picked his way between the thick trees until he found the
mark he was looking for — a spot of yellow paint on bark. He stepped
to the foot of the tree and after a brief glance upward began to climb.
A few minutes later, he reached the dead bole of the tree, with a
smaller rich green trunk growing out of it. “There you are,
sweetheart,” he drawled. “I see you’ve been waitin’ on me.” Matilda,
being Ken’s best-producing female marijuana plant, didn’t answer.

After
making his cheerful collection of bud and leaf from Matilda, Ken was
climbing back down when he felt the tree lurch. He grasped at the trunk
of the tree and clung there for a moment catching his breath while the
tremor faded. California was supposed to be earthquake country, not
Oregon. He quickly finished the climb down and made his way back over
the railroad tracks. As he began to climb the hill on the other side,
however, another lurch and a sound like artillery fire shook him. The
unbearable roar was something he felt as much as heard. As he sprawled
at the base of the hill, clapping his hands over his ears, he saw the
ground a hundred yards down the tracks erupt in a line of peaks about
twenty feet high, like a small mountain range forming. The tracks broke
with a metallic twang like a giant’s guitar string, the ends forming a
ramp pointed skyward.

He turned at a new sound, startled again
as he saw a train approaching, its normally thunderous airhorn barely
audible above the roar of the earthquake, which was subsiding. The two
locomotives in the front and two cars had already jumped the tracks
during the quake (or tremor, whatever it was it was big) and sparks
flew from the wheels as they chewed ties and gravel and skewed slowly
to the left, away from him, but anywhere near those tracks was too
close. The train was traveling at least 60 miles per hour, Ken
reckoned, and the squealing brakes were a hopeless gesture. He had a
few seconds to scramble as far as he could away from the tracks, and in
doing so he missed seeing the actual death of the juggernaut.

The
derailed locomotives and cars left the tracks completely before
reaching the newly formed ski jump of jagged iron and slid down the
embankment, but the next car vaulted skyward on the twisted rails. The
change in momentum was enough to snap the coupling with the derailed
cars, which rolled as they plunged into the woods, exploding trees into
splinters as they struck. Almost half of the remaining train was
launched into the air before the weight of tons of railroad cars slowed
its velocity. It crashed to earth with a scream of tortured metal, cars
separating and sliding, a gigantic broken snake lying dead in steel
pieces. The last half of the train crumpled at the impact, cars
smashing sideways into each other too quickly to make a separate sound,
instead producing a continuous roar. As Ken stopped and turned, the
ruptured fuel tanks of one of the huge diesel locomotives joined the
cacophony, belching a ball of orange fire to join the champagne sunset.
He sat stunned for a moment as shards of metal, glass and plastic
rained down. But when his gaze swept across the Amtrak logo on one of
the crumpled cars, Ken saw that this wasn’t merely a scene of
destruction, it was a scene of carnage. The train had been carrying
 passengers.

His ears ringing, he made his way back down to the
tracks toward the crash, avoiding the small fires and debris that
littered the ground. As he picked his way around an entire wheel
assembly that had been thrown from one of the cars, he smelled fumes
and a moment later saw flames erupt from a shattered carriage that had
been carrying some passengers‘ cars, the vehicles now spilled across
the wreckage like toys. The fire quickly spread to the other cars
crushed against it. Ken took this as a sign. Not only could he not
help, but if he was going to survive himself he’d better be quick about
getting out of there. He climbed back up the slope away from the
wreckage, and from the top he saw how far the first fire from the
locomotive had spread. Shit. His plants were toast. He still had a male
plant a few miles up the road, but it wasn’t the same. Not only was he
personally going to be missing his plants for a long time, but business
was going to be slow too. But Ken did have his priorities. If he
couldn’t save those people, at least he could get to a phone and call
 911.

He was about to turn away and start down the other side of
the hill when he saw the first strange thing. With a tearing sound, a
bright light ripped through the air behind the wreck and broadened into
a hole through which he could see light. Then a foot came through it.
That was the second strange thing. When the rest of the body started to
come through, the body of some animal with a bird’s head, Ken decided
he’d had enough strange things for one day, plus one train wreck. He
started hurrying down the other side of the hill. But just as he
reached the bottom, the final strange thing happened — it spoke.
“S-s-s-t-t-o-o-o-p!” it croaked. And “S-s-s-s-s-s-top! S-s-s-top!” He
paused long enough to glance over his shoulder. He was wrong. The thing
didn’t have a bird’s head, it had two. Ken ran.

By the
time he had crossed the vacant tree-covered lots between the hill and
his warehouse, he had almost convinced himself that he had seen a
hallucination as a result of the traumatic shock he’d received from the
train wreck. It couldn’t be drug-induced, he told himself, after all he
hadn’t smoked any laced doobie — not recently at least. He could be
sure of his product, that was one reason he was his own supplier. Or
had been. He thought sadly of his lost crop. Goddamn people. No matter
where you go, they always have to go interfering and fuck everything
up. OK, so they didn’t ask for a train wreck. But why did they have to
pick that spot? His spot. He ducked through the hole in the chainlink
fence and found himself back in Ruger’s Warehouses and Long Term
Storage, “accessible” 24 hours. His first stop had better be Jimmy
Ruger’s office, where if the asshole was in he could use the phone to
dial 911. Not that he had any intention of telling them who he was, and
Jimmy better not either. He had enough people messing with his life
without getting the goddamn cops involved, especially with his
sideline. And he sure as fuck wasn’t going to tell them any stories
about two-headed birds in gorilla suits. That would definitely earn him
a free coupon to go get measured for a jacket with long sleeves. No, it
was just the shock that made him see something, a trick of the light.
Tricks of light don’t talk. Yeah, and two-headed birds don’t wear
gorilla suits, he told himself. Now which one do you really want to
 believe?

Jimmy the asshole was in, when Ken ran up and looked
through the office window. “Chambers. What the fuck do you want? I’m
about to go home, so if it’s—”

“No, it’s nothing wrong with the warehouse. There’s a train wreck over the hill. Gimme your phone.”

“Holy shit! Here!” as Jimmy pushed an ancient, grimy touchtone across the desk. “Anybody hurt?”

“I
think they’re gonna find ‘em all dead. Shit, there’s fires everywhere
and everything. It looks like Jeffrey Dahmer’s fuckin‘ barbecue out
there.” Dialing.

“Aw man, how can you say sick shit like that?” Jimmy might be an asshole, but he was an asshole with a weak stomach. Ringing.

“I’ve seen worse.” Yeah, about two minutes later. That was worse. Shut up.

From the phone: “911, What is the nature of your emergency?”

After doing his civic duty, Ken decided to call it a day.

Stepping
past an outboard motor on a bench and over an old broken air
conditioner, he made his way through his place of business. Well, it
did him all right. He made enough for beer and some food, if you count
snack food. The one downside to harvesting your own pot is the
munchies. Ken was on first name terms with the entire Munchies family,
since he’d been using more and more of his own product lately, and
whether or not he had a taste for junk food, the fact remained that it
was still cheaper than what he called “real food”. Real food at the
very least had to be microwaved.

He took a glass and a bottle
down from the small cabinet (a medicine cabinet, appropriately enough)
above his bed, and walked with them back to the door, swirling the
bottle gently to see how much was left. Then he got a folding chair and
opened the door again. It was starting to get dark, but the warehouse
complex was well lit. If he sat as he often did in the cooling evening
breeze, he would probably hear the sound of the firetrucks rushing to
the crash site and perhaps see a helicopter circling with a spotlight.
Instead, as he turned around to adjust his chair, he saw something else.

If
someone had asked Kenneth Chambers the last thing on this earth he
wanted to see the day before, he would have answered his ex-wife. But
today something new topped the list, followed closely by train wrecks.
What Ken saw was a bright white rip of lightning past the divider to
his bedroom, which broadened into a bright hole.

Finishing
his burger while rolling east through Utah on Interstate 84, Ken
Chambers was making good time. He’d been on the road for eleven hours,
including two stops for gas, and he was starting to feel almost normal,
almost cool with it. He’d need some sleep soon, though he wasn’t sure
he’d be able to when he did finally pull over somewhere. He couldn’t
afford a motel, not if he was going to have enough gas to get to
Denver. Even the convenience store burger cost twice what it should
(four times, if it was made out of what it tasted like.) When you were
on the run, money was crucial. But am I on the run? he wondered. Well,
the situation certainly looked like that. He certainly couldn’t afford
to be pulled over by a cop in Jimmy Ruger’s van. Yessir, ossifer, he
would say to some imaginary policeman, I know Mr Ruger very well. He
would want me to borrow his van even if he didn’t exactly say so.
What’s that? Yessir, I know he’s missing, that’s why I couldn’t ask…
but you see there were these two-headed birds in gorilla suits… That
was where the explanation kept breaking down.

Eleven hours
ago, another one of the things (Ken didn’t want to think of them as
aliens, that was too crazy, he didn’t want to think of them at all) had
stepped through a hole in thin air into his bedroom.