Read Online The Last Tomorrow by Ryan David Jahn - Free Book Online

man, just shy of six feet tall, taps an Old Gold cigarette from its crushed packet, lights it, and walks to his Divco milk truck, all white but for the fenders painted light blue, and, on
the side of the truck, also in blue, the words,
    H.H. WHITE CREAMERY CO.
    In Business Since 1912.
    In business since the year this man, this milkman, Eugene Dahl, was born. In business for fourty years. In business since milk was delivered by horse and carriage.
    He steps into the truck and gets it started. He pumps the gas pedal to keep it running while the four-cylinder engine warms up. It takes a few minutes.
    While he waits for the engine to start running smoothly he smokes his cigarette and looks out the windshield at his quiet street.
    He spits a bit of tobacco off the end of his tongue.
    It’s hard to believe this is where life has brought him: to a finicky milk truck in front of his one-bedroom apartment just west of downtown Los Angeles. Once he thought he was going to be
something.
    Once he almost was.
    2
    After a childhood of squalor in rural Kentucky, living in a shack with a dirt floor about thirty miles outside of Elizabethtown, surviving only on the meat he and his father
could shoot – deer, wild turkey – Eugene made his way to New York to become a writer. He rented a room in Red Hook and got a job in construction. His skills were limited, but he could
swing a hammer. After work he’d go home, sit at the typewriter with a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, and bang out stories with titles like ‘Planet 17’ and
‘The Black Ooze Had a Name’. Sometimes they’d sell to Astounding Stories or Weird Tales and he’d get a check for twenty or fourty bucks.
    Usually they wouldn’t.
    Every once in a while he pretended to work on a novel.
    Then, in 1938, he got an idea for a comic book.
    He’d spent many a Sunday in his youth learning to draw by copying the funnies, and later by writing and drawing comics to hand out to his friends, so, though he was out of practice, he
thought he might have enough ability left in him to create on paper what existed as yet only in his mind.
    It turned out he was right.
    He spent hours writing and drawing after work. He checked out anatomy books from the library to help him, and books on architecture, and books on animal life. He almost always found an image
that could work as a reference when his abilities or his imagination failed him, as they often did. If he couldn’t find a reference, or if something was simply beyond him, he drew around the
problem.
    It took him months to finish, months hunched over his small table after long days of swinging a hammer in the sun. He worked with aching muscles. He worked with blood-blisters throbbing on his
fingers. He worked with gashes in the backs of his hands. Then one day he looked up and was finished. He had four seven-page stories written and drawn, and, as far as he was concerned, ready to be
printed up and put on newsstands.
    It was a superhero comic.
    His superhero was called Rabid, but Donald ‘Don’ Coyote was the name of the man behind the mask. He was a bookstore clerk who spent his days and nights lost in tales of adventure. He
lived with his mother, had a cat named Meow he fed every morning, had a crush on a girl at work he was afraid to ask out.
    The first story began with Don Coyote being bitten by a rabid dog as he walked home from work. Over the next several days he changed. His cat noticed the difference before he did and began
hissing at him when he walked by. Then his hearing improved. High-pitched sounds began to bother him. His teeth grew long and sharp. He began to crave raw beef, and eat it with his bare hands. His
muscles doubled in size.
    Then he went to work and learned that the girl he liked, Sue, had been mugged the night before. He asked where she’d been mugged and what the fellow looked like. That night he went
hunting. He found the man who stole Sue’s purse and recovered it. Then he