I’ll be adding two chapters a week right here, or you can snag an ebook from the links at the bottom of this chapter if you don’t want to wait.

In this chapter, we get to see some seriously weird photos, among other things…

A Sudden Outbreak of Magic

Chapter Four

Jeroan’s stomach did a quick flip-flop as he peered down at the camera in Polly’s muck-covered hand. The screen had been cracked almost exactly in half, which made the image captured on it all distorted and full of squiggly green lines. But he could still make out his own goofy grinning face on one side of the picture as he bent down next to the old guy.

On the other side of the cracked screen was a nightmare image of the old guy—his eyes obscured by blue light like smoke, yellow snot in his mustache and beard, and his mouth half-open, as if he was in the process of saying the first of his weird words.

“Holy crap,” Jeroan whispered. His stomach did some more flipping and flopping. He could barely drag his gaze away from that smoky light in the image, where the guy’s eyes should’ve been. He didn’t remember Polly taking that picture.

“Glad you only got one shot,” he muttered, itching to turn off the camera, or maybe just throw it against the alley wall. “I look like an idiot in that one.”

“Dude,” Polly said. “I took at least three pictures of you two best friends forever. Stupid camera just didn’t get ‘em. But it should be enough to show the guys. They don’t need to know we didn’t get any money off him. We’ll just say he was broke already, and…”

As Polly planned their triumphant return to the gang-that-wasn’t-really-a-gang, Jeroan slipped the camera from Polly’s hands and started fiddling with it. He glanced at Kelley, tempted to ask her for a little help. She always read the manuals and taught herself how to work gadgets like this. Who had time to read how-to books? But he knew better than to ask for an assist—he’d never hear the end of it.

Kelley moved in closer, and they both looked down at the image of the old man’s face. Jeroan’s head felt suddenly warm, despite the cold air in the alley.

Blue smoke instead of eyes. Mouth frozen in the middle of speaking. Shiny bits of snot in his beard. And Jeroan smiling away next to him.

“Who is this guy?” Jeroan muttered as he pressed Zoom on the camera.

He felt a warm wind puff onto him like a breath of air, and then the camera flashed and made a clicking sound, as if it had decided to take a picture all on its own. Jeroan sucked in a quick breath. Dots of sweat broke out on his forehead.

“Jeroan,” Kelley whispered. “What did you do?”

Kelley pointed at the camera, where a new image now filled the cracked screen. And it wasn’t of the alley floor, where the camera had been aimed when it flashed and clicked.

The picture was definitely not downtown Dubuque. The only light in the shot was from the full moon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Next to the crack in the screen, a young man—a boy, really—in a dark blue robe stood on top of a set of huge stacked rocks with his arms in the air.

More rocks, some of them big as cars, stood all around him, like giant dominoes waiting to be tipped over.

What looked like bright blue light poured out of the boy’s hands, aimed at a figure on the other half of the screen. The second person was mostly hidden in the shadows, but Jeroan could just make out a white face, covered in weird green lines from the broken camera.

“Hey, I didn’t take that picture,” Polly said, moving in and reaching for the camera. “Lemme see that—”

“No, wait!” Jeroan said.

But Polly was faster than him. She snagged the camera and hit the Zoom button once, then hit it a couple more times.

No flash-click this time.

Jeroan leaned in closer and saw the image of the boy grow bigger and bigger, until his face came into focus. His zoomed-in face was now split in half by the broken screen, but Jeroan could clearly see the agony in his expression. Agony, as well as anger. Like the times Kelley had made him so mad she wanted to scream at her.

And there was something… familiar about that face. Jeroan stared a few seconds more, and then he had it.

“Add a beard,” Jeroan muttered, “and about a hundred years, and this could be that old guy as a kid. They have the same eyes. Maybe this is his great-grandpa or something.”

Polly grunted in response as she clicked more buttons on the camera, moving the image around, zooming in and out, her bony fingers working fast.

“And I think I see other people in the picture,” she was saying. “One guy in the shadows and—oh snap. Lookit this. Two people are on the ground, all laid out.”

“They’re at Stonehenge,” Kelley said. “That has to be where they are.”

Polly passed the tiny, bent camera back to Jeroan. She stepped back, eyes wide and face pale. Kelley leaned in closer to the camera.

“What is this, J?” Polly said. “Those people look like they’re dead. This is all messed up.”

“Your camera just got busted, that’s all,” Kelley said, acting all confident, but Jeroan saw her chewing her lip. “And it’s distorting some old pictures, or something.”

Jeroan squinted again at the grainy image of two people slumped against a rock, one of them big and dark-skinned, the other one light-skinned and petite. Both of them had what looked like wisps of green smoke rising from their robes.

“Yeah, right,” he said, determined to not let this weird him out. “Watch this.”

His hands shook as he hit the Next button. Nothing. No more pictures.

“Maybe,” he said in a soft voice, focusing all his attention on the camera. I can figure this out, he told himself. I know I can. It’s just like one of those impossible algebra problems at school. “Maybe you have to…”

“Jeroan,” Kelley began, but he barely heard her. He was sweating like a madman now, as if all that concentrating was heating him up from the inside out.

“J?” Polly said, reaching for his shoulder.

Jeroan shrugged them both off and shook his head. I got this, he wanted to say, but another tiny puff of heat hit him again. It came from the little, banged-up camera. The camera had the answers, he knew it.

“How’d he get here?” he whispered.

The camera gave off another flash of light, followed by a clicking sound.

“No way,” Polly whispered, staring at the camera. “No frickin’ way.”

A new image now appeared on the broken viewscreen in his hands—the same boy in blue robes, dangling high in the air, upside-down.

The boy was covered in greenish light this time, and he was hanging somehow above a bridge. In the background, orange flames and gray smoke filled the night sky of a burning city.

“Oh man, oh man,” Jeroan said with a laugh that came out of nowhere. He zoomed in on the picture, stifling another panicky giggle. “Look at this!”

Kelley and Polly pushed in close to look at the battered, but still shiny, golden pocket watch in the boy’s hand. Its hands were set at nine minutes to nine.

“No way!” Polly said again. “You know who had a watch like that, don’t you?”

Jeroan didn’t say anything. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the dirty sleeve of his coat, and then groaned at the smell.

Impossible, he thought. It can’t be.

Jeroan looked back at the camera. The city behind the upside-down boy was strangely familiar, like a page from an old history book. He could just make out the words Bateham’s Mill on the side of a burning building in the distance, under the boy’s head. He was tempted to whip out his eGadget and do some googling, but then he remembered he no longer had it anymore.

“Let me try it,” Polly said, and before Jeroan could try and stop her, she plucked the camera from his hands.

“Wait,” Jeroan mumbled. “Be careful…”

Jeroan felt another burst of heat, this time coming from Polly’s skinny frame.

“Where is that old fart right now?” Polly said to the camera. Then the other girl flinched as the camera flashed and clicked again.

“Whoa, dudes,” Polly said, tottering a bit and nearly running into Jeroan. “That felt really weird.”

He put a hand on Polly’s arm to keep her from toppling over, and once more, all three of them looked at the camera’s screen.

“Whoa is right,” Kelley said.

She pointed at the new image of a fast food restaurant, with a certain elderly fellow sitting at a table with a tray stacked high with food. The old man had a huge roast beef sandwich halfway to his mouth and a dazed, happy look on his hairy face.

“That’s Harvey’s,” Jeroan said, “just up the road.”

“Looks like our money is being well-spent,” Polly said. “That thieving old fart.”

As Polly stepped away from Jeroan, she slipped on some garbage. She caught herself before she fell, letting lose a couple choice swear words.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

She’d left the camera with Jeroan, and he was still staring at the picture when Kelley elbowed him in the side.

“You guys aren’t going to go there now, are you?”

“Oh yeah, we are, dude,” Polly said, now ten feet away and heading out of the alley fast. “Nobody robs us.”

“Wait a minute—” Kelley began.

Jeroan already had the phone in his jeans pocket and knew what Polly was going to do when he gave Kelley a tiny push to get her out of his way.

“Sis,” he said, “this is your turn to back off. We’re just gonna have a little talk with the guy. A little… discussion. You know. Wait up, Pol,” he called.

He gave Kelley one last look, daring her to say something, and then he jogged off after Polly. The Beast could find her own way home.

* * * * * *

To Jeroan’s surprise and annoyance, Kelley decided to tag along with him and Polly on their way to Harvey’s. It figured, he thought. She was too nosy to not come along to see what he and Polly would do. Jeroan actually wasn’t all that sure what Polly’s plan was. He hadn’t ever seen her so worked up before.

They made it Harvey’s in less than ten minutes with Polly in the lead. With the thick, salty smell of fries and roast beef in the air, the three of them turned a corner. Two police cars sat in front of the restaurant, lights spinning, next to an ambulance from Mercy Hospital.

Nobody said a word as they crept into the alcove of a dark storefront on the same side of the road as Harvey’s. As they peeked out at the restaurant three doors up, Jeroan felt a sudden pang of guilt.

Had the old guy attacked someone else? he wondered. I should’ve done something to prevent that, somehow.

Before Jeroan or Polly could say a word, two paramedics wheeled a gurney loaded with a person wrapped in a blanket into the back of the ambulance. Polly didn’t have to point out the wild gray-and-white beard poking out of the blanket, or the floppy red hat covering most of the man’s face.

That’s him, Jeroan thought, and then movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. About fifty yards away, on the other side of the street, a banged-up brown van with tinted windows rolled to a stop next to a pile of snow at the curb. A puff of gray exhaust dribbled up out of the muffler of the idling van.

Kelley elbowed Jeroan and whispered his name, but he just shrugged her off without taking his eyes off the van.

I don’t like the look of that van, Jeroan thought. They showed up here a bit too conveniently, with their dark windows and all that.

The Harvey’s door slammed open again, interrupting his dark thoughts. He watched the paramedics leading a very unsteady—and very skinny—kid in a brown Harvey’s shirt and cap. He looked Chinese or Japanese. Kelley elbowed him again, as if to say, Look! Someone else in this town who’s not white! What were the odds?

They loaded the kid, who was maybe a year or two older than Jeroan and Kelley, into the back of the ambulance as well, and then slammed the doors shut. Within seconds the ambulance sped off, flashers spinning and siren blaring.

“Uh oh,” Jeroan said.

He’d almost forgotten about the two cop cars still parked in front of Harvey’s. He pulled Kelley deeper into the alcove, shushing her along the way. Polly was already there ahead of them, crouching in the shadows.

Jeroan peeked out and saw a cop step out of the restaurant, a big red-faced guy with gray hair and a mustache. He looked like he was laughing at something said by the other cop, a tall, thin woman with her hat pulled low over her eyes. They stopped next to the first car, and the male cop reached in and flicked off his flashers.

“So what was that skinny kid talking about before he blacked out on us?” he said, brushing crumbs off the front of his uniform shirt.

The female cop flipped open her notebook as if it was part of her right hand and read from it. “The name was Jiang Wu. Nametag read ‘Jimbo.’ Employee’s exact words were: ‘The blood is weak. But the gears never fail to turn.’ Extra emphasis on the never. Sir.”

Jimbo held his breath, feeling a sudden urge to sneeze. Something was tingling in his head from what the cop had said. Blood and gears?

“Too many video games, I think,” the male cop said, stifling a burp with his fist. He’d apparently had lunch inside while the paramedics were working. “Or maybe too much MSG from his parent’s restaurant, huh?”

“Sir,” the female cop said. “Please. You said you were going to work on not being offensive like that.”

“Oh yeah,” the male cop said as he climbed into his car and belched again. “Forgot about that. See you at the station, Beyers.”

All three teenagers made themselves as small as they could inside the alcove of the closed store until both cop cars were gone.

Jeroan was shaking his head and looking at Polly. “Beyers and Gregson. Those two pains-in-the-butt. Maybe the old guy’ll zap them, too. It’d serve ‘em right.”

“You know the cops in town by name?” Kelley asked him. She sounded both disgusted and amazed, all at the same time. “Already?”

“What can I say? I don’t waste time, sis.”

When Jeroan looked out of their alcove again, the street was empty. The brown van with the dark windows had moved away as well, though he hadn’t seen it go. Just a moving van, he figured, probably dropping off stuff at one of the stores. Can’t get all paranoid after what happened this morning.

“Where to now?” Polly said, emerging from their hiding spot at last and digging inside her coat. “Want to ask the magic eight-ball camera?”

“No thanks,” Jeroan said quickly. He looked up and down the street, formulating a plan. The grin on his face made his sister cringe.

“Jeroan…” she began.

“Mercy Hospital isn’t far, is it?” he said, still grinning.

“Nope,” Polly said. “But I got one place I need to stop first. For some backup.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Kelley said, gathering up her bag of books and her square box once more. She was looking at Jeroan as if she didn’t know who he was, and it unsettled for a moment. Just a moment.

“You’re going to go harass that old guy again,” Kelley said. It wasn’t a question.

“You don’t have to come along, you know,” Jeroan said softly.

“‘Cause you two have been doing just great on your own,” Kelley shot back. “Why don’t you just give it a rest for today?”

“Why don’t you just quit hassling us today?” Jeroan said. “Always messing in our business.”

“Jeroan, the guy’s like a hundred years old, and you wanna—”

Jeroan took a sudden step closer to Kelley, ready to wade into another fight, but then his stomach gave a long rumble. He remembered how hungry he was, but…

“What?” Kelley said, watching him,

Time to pull out the charm instead of the strong-arm. Jeroan turned what he thought of as his “award-winning smile” on his sister, full-force.

“Hey, Kelley. Can you spot me twenty bucks? That old guy took my wallet, and I really need to get something to eat before I keel over.”

Kelley was reaching into her coat pocket she froze, just for a second, as if she’d just remembered something herself. She pulled her hand out of her pocket, fast.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m broke, too. Guess you guys are on your own.”

Jeroan just shook his head, feeling his charm dry up, only to be replace by the familiar, ready-to-fight feeling he had whenever he had to deal with his sister.

“Thanks,” he said. “Glad you got my back, little sister. Thanks a ton. Come on, Polly, let’s go.”

Without waiting for Kelley’s reply, Jeroan turned away from Kelley and started off with Polly toward downtown again, with the cold wind at their backs. He couldn’t stop thinking about that feeling he had up at the top of the alley, pinned to the wall by nothing other than some weird energy, and how he’d almost whimpered at the sight of the old man walking away.

That was me hitting bottom, he thought. Even before we landed in that nasty dumpster. The old man needs to pay for that. One way or the other.

He didn’t want to look back behind him to check on his sister, but he did anyway. But the sidewalk in front of Harvey’s was empty except for gray blobs of dirty snow. Kelley the Beast was nowhere to be seen.

Can’t wait for the serialization? Here’s how to get a copy now:

• Buy a PDF directly from UnWrecked Press
  
• Digital versions available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThruFantasy.
• Trade paperback available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

If you enjoyed what you read, feel free to make a donation via PayPal:

I’ll be adding two chapters a week right here, or you can snag an ebook from the links at the bottom of this chapter if you don’t want to wait.

In this chapter, Kelley takes another brief detour and gets the story from her brother, who’s just sort of… hanging around as the chapter begins…

A Sudden Outbreak of Magic

Chapter Three

If her arms hadn’t been loaded down with a bag of books and her new dragon in a box, and if the wind hadn’t been so fierce, Kelley would have pulled the little book from inside her coat and got busy reading it on her way home.

Instead, she had to make do with walking as fast as she could on the snow-lined sidewalk without dropping any of her loot from Ms. Haze’s store.

She backtracked past the big court house with all its gray statues guarding its roof and headed down a side street. She hoped Jeroan and his sidekick hadn’t decided to come back this way while she was in the store talking about fake research papers and snitching books from Ms. Haze.

A half dozen steps later, Kelley heard a voice calling out. A mad one, but also a familiar one. She stopped and cocked an ear toward the sound. Once more she heard what had to be Jeroan’s voice, yelling for help.

And he wasn’t alone.

“Great,” she muttered, hustling toward the alley from earlier that morning. “I should’ve known they’d go back there.”

Both Jeroan and his punk buddy were now yelling, their voices all high-pitched and hoarse, which made Kelley almost break into a run to get there. A half block from the alley, though, she slowed, suddenly tentative. She wondered if that old guy had some other homeless old friends who’d come to his rescue.

She pulled out her eGadget, hit the Mute button, and saw the red light of the GPS locator blinking fast. That was Jeroan all right. Just great.

Tiptoeing closer, Kelley’s sense of discomfort grew as she listened to the shrill voice of Jeroan’s buddy. The guy’s voice must not have changed yet, because as much as she hated that expression, he really was screaming like a girl.

When she finally made it to the entrance to the alley, she peeked around the edge and looked inside the shadowy alley. Except for garbage bags and a dozen dumpsters lining the brick walls of the dead-end alley, the place was empty.

“What the—” she began, but she was interrupted by her brother and his buddy, yelling. Their voices came from about twenty feet above her.

“Jeroan?” she called, and then looked up.

Her brother and his buddy were dangling halfway up the slimy bricks of the building next to the alley, their shoes easily twenty feet above a very full and very smelly dumpster.

“Kelley! Get us down! Now!”

“Yeah!” added Jeroan’s squeaky-voiced buddy.

“Um,” Kelley asked, immediately annoyed at being yelled at by her brother. But then the sight of Jeroan and his buddy kicking and struggling two stories up was so ridiculous, so unbelievable, that she couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing. “No problem. Just give me a second. I don’t seem to have a ladder here in my coat pocket.”

“Kelley…” Jeroan began. “Quit mucking around.”

Kelley did her best to pull herself together. Not even an hour ago, she’d been hauling butt to get away from these two. She took another look at Jeroan’s squeaky-voiced friend with the long dishwater-blonde hair poking out from under the hood of his red windbreaker, and her brain made a sudden connection. Jeroan’s gangster wannabe friend was a she, not a he.

The realization made her start laughing all over again.

“Kelley!” Jeroan yelled. He kicked the wall behind him so hard, he lost one of his shoes. It plopped into the bags of garbage below him.

“So,” Kelley said at last, wiping tears from her eyes. “How did you guys—you two—get up there? And what’s holding you up there?”

“Nothing,” Jeroan snapped.

“That old dude,” his friend squeaked at the same time.

“Really?” Kelley said, glancing around the alley again. She felt a faint tinge of disappointment that the old man was gone. There was something about him, and the way he’d looked at her this morning. Like he was trying to tell her something. Weird blue light and all.

“Just get us down!” Jeroan yelled.

“I don’t know how I’m—” Kelley began, but she stopped when she saw Jeroan and his buddy start to slide down the alley wall. Before she could say another word, the two of them dropped into the dumpster feet-first, yelling every inch of the way.

* * * * * *

 A minute later, Kelley felt like she was looking down at a pair of half-drowned rats that had flopped down on the cold ground in front of the alley dumpster. Smelly rats, covered in garbage and slime.

She didn’t want to think about the nastiness covering her own hands from helping to pull Jeroan and his lost shoe and his skinny white girlfriend out from the burst garbage bags and other mess inside the dumpster.

She also didn’t want to think about the look on Jeroan’s face as he fell—he’d been looking down, right at her, and his expression went from scared to betrayed, as if she’d let him down for not managing to get them down safely from the wall, or not protecting him from the helpless old man who was now gone from this alley.

“What the heck happened here?” Kelley asked before Jeroan could get up off the ground and storm out of the alley. She reminded herself to breathe through her mouth to avoid the stink of rotting food and the variety of other, indefinable smells.

Jeroan glanced over at his friend for a second, and then began talking, in his usual fast way.

“Look. It was the old guy’s own fault that he was still here, sitting on his butt, when we came back here. It was almost like he was asking to get jumped. The old fart should’ve had the sense to get out of here before we got back from chasing you.”

“Chasing me unsuccessfully,” Kelley added. “I so blew you away, Jeroan.”

“We just wanted to talk to him,” Jeroan’s friend chimed in.

“I’m not talking to you right now,” Kelley said to her, her voice strangely calm. “I’m having a discussion here with my little brother.” She gave Jeroan her best disgusted look. “Plus, we haven’t even been properly introduced.”

“Oh, my bad,” Jeroan said. “Kelley, this is Polly. Polly, this is Kelley. My sister.”

“Didn’t wear your running shoes this morning, did you, Polly?”

“You just got a good head start,” Polly countered.

Kelley gave a laugh, but a short one. She didn’t want to be all buddy-buddy with some white girl trying to get street cred with the new black kids from the big city.

“Go on,” Kelley said. “Finish your story already. Tell me why you just wanted to talk to some poor homeless guy.”

“It was like a dare, really, from the guys.”

“This was part of an initiation?” Kelley blurted out. She fought the urge to grab her brother by the front of his stained jacket and shake him. “For a gang? You haven’t learned a thing, have you?”

“They’re not really a gang,” the girl named Polly muttered.

“It’s not what you think,” Jeroan said, holding his hands up like he was surrendering. “This is nothing like Chicago. I mean, come on,” he said with a quick smile aimed at his little girlfriend, “there’s only one gang here in Dubuque, for crying out loud. And Pol’s right—they’re not really a gang. They’re more like, like… a club!”

“Some club,” Kelley said. She glared at her brother’s big brown eyes and his nervous smile and tried not to feel like she was looking into a mirror.

She purposely avoided looking at his girlfriend, though she was pretty sure she remembered the white girl from the halls at school. Polly was usually trailing the older kids, looking like the scraggly tail to the older kids’ kites.

“So you want to hang out with a bunch of kids,” Kelley began before Jeroan could get going again. She hated the way she was sounding like Mom, using her logic and all. “A bunch of kids who think it’s a good time to jump helpless old men?”

“Dude,” Polly said. “That is one old fart who ain’t helpless. How d’you think—”

Jeroan cut her off. “Can I just finish here? I’d really like to get home and change my clothes already. And it’s cold here in this nasty alley.”

“Go on, then,” Kelley said.

“We were supposed to go up to a stranger and get him to give us some money, and bring back some sort of evidence to show everyone else. That way they could see we had the guts to do it.”

“Nice,” Kelley said. This really was like Chicago all over again.

“So Polly was going to take a picture with her new camera, but before we could do anything,” Jeroan stopped and looked around the alley, as if watching out for the old bum coming back to finish him off. “Something crazy happened.”

“Tell her ’bout the words, J,” Polly said, eyes wide next to Jeroan. “And that freaky light in his eyes.”

Words? Kelley thought, keeping her own mouth closed tight. She touched the book in her coat pocket and thought about strange words filling her head from earlier, right after that old man had looked at her. Weird, foreign, almost nonsensical words.

“Oh yeah,” Jeroan said. “Before he, um, exploded, the old guy started to seriously freak out, mumbling this crazy stuff I could barely hear. This weird blue light was in his eyes. He just looked at us, back and forth, back and forth, and each time he turned to look at me, that blue light was brighter, until it hurt to look at.”

“It was frickin’ crazy,” Polly muttered.

Jeroan gave her a perturbed look at being interrupted and continued.

“Then he looked right at me with his hair standing straight up and his beard sticking out all over, and he said ‘Mo.’”

“‘Mo’?” Kelley felt another sudden urge to laugh out loud.

“Yep. Then he said more. ‘Moammar and Yishi. Their names were Moammar and Yishi.’ Then he said these words I’d never heard before. I can’t even repeat ‘em.”

“Sounded like he was coughin’ up a hairball,” Polly said.

Kelley caught Jeroan as he shuddered.

“He says those words, in I-don’t-know-what language, and bam. Next thing I know, I’m hanging up above the dumpsters with Polly. Then he says a couple more weird words, cleans out our pockets, and picks up his red hat and his bag and just walks away. Like it was no biggie.”

“Walked away with all my money, my crappy phone, and my brother’s knife,” Polly said, wiping her nose angrily with a dirty hand. Her squinty little eyes were looking all around the alley, as if trying to spot some hint of her lost stuff. “He’s gonna kill me for that.”

While Polly talked, Jeroan had been watching Kelley closely. Kelley knew that look. She wasn’t getting the whole story here, and he wanted to see how much of it she was buying.

“And that’s how you found us, little sister,” he said when Polly was done complaining.

Kelly looked at the bag of books sitting on the cold, wet alley floor next to her, with the square brown box on top of the bag. She took a deep breath, wincing at the sour and rotten smells infiltrating her nose, and got ready to start picking holes in Jeroan’s story.

“Hold on,” Polly said. She scuttled of on her hands and knees across the wet alley floor and nearly dove headfirst into a pile of garbage. She let out a sharp chuckle. “I knew it!”

Kelley gave Jeroan a wide-eyed look of disapproval that he promptly ignored.

“What?” Jeroan called out. “You find something?”

Polly backed out of the little tunnel of garbage she’d created and jumped to her feet with a triumphant smile. Her red windbreaker was three sizes too big for her, probably a hand-me-down from the brother with the knife. She looked tiny inside it.

In her gloveless, blue-tinged hand, she held up what looked like a bent piece of metal not much bigger—or thicker—than a credit card.

“He didn’t get everything, dude,” Polly announced. “My camera!”

“That’s yours?” Kelley said, getting to her feet and stepping closer to the smaller girl to get a better look. “That’s a three-hundred-dollar camera. How did you happen to come into possession of that?”

Polly acted like she didn’t hear Kelley’s question. She was already fiddling with the camera, trying to get a picture to come up in its cracked display.

“I knew I saw this thing go flying when he zapped us that first time. And I never saw it go into that old fart’s bag.”

“It’s toast,” Jeroan said. “I heard it go crunch under the old guy’s crappy boots. Plus I don’t think Marky will want to see our pictures now, since we didn’t finish the job. We were supposed to roll him, not the other way around. Let’s just get outta here.”

He took a few steps toward the street, as if hoping Kelley and Polly would take the hint and follow him.

“Holy crap,” Polly muttered. Jeroan stopped, his back turned to them, and cocked his head in their direction.

“Oh man,” Kelley said before she even got a look at the camera’s tiny screen. “Do I really want to see this?”

“Oh yeah,” Polly said without looking up. “You really do.”

Can’t wait for the serialization? Here’s how to get a copy now:

• Buy a PDF directly from UnWrecked Press
  
• Digital versions available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThruFantasy.
• Trade paperback available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

If you enjoyed what you read, feel free to make a donation via PayPal:

I’ll be adding two chapters a week right here, or you can snag an ebook from the links at the bottom of this chapter if you don’t want to wait.

In this chapter, our buddy Jeroan puts the J in Juvenile Delinquency…

A Sudden Outbreak of Magic

Chapter Two

She’s doing it to me all over again, Jeroan Strickland thought as he turned back into the alley and out of the cold wind. I can’t do anything here without the Beastly One sticking in her nose to muck it all up.

What made him so crazy was that Kelley really didn’t need to spy on him for Mom and Dad. The three of them—the parentals and him—had an agreement. They were cool with him “Finding his own way” (Dad’s term) and “Thinking asymmetrically” (Mom’s phrase). Plus they were too busy at their new law office to worry much about Jeroan. They probably figured moving to this crappy little town would be enough keep him out of trouble. This town, and Kelley the Beast.

But while his little sister could do no wrong and always did everything people asked of her, Jeroan had perfected a way of making life interesting that the Beast could never understand. You couldn’t sit still and follow the rules, he knew, and expect to do anything great.

And Jeroan had plans. Big plans. So big they changed on a pretty much daily basis.

Today’s plan was to make an impression on Polly’s buddy Marky and the other players in Dubuque, Iowa. He was determined to show them what he was made of. Polly, who had latched onto Jeroan on the first day of school, had volunteered to come along today and help him get in good with Marky. It had been her idea to go downtown this morning, after they cut class once again.

Then Kelley the Beast had butted in, and they’d had no choice but to chase her off. Jeroan thought about what they would’ve done to her if they’d caught her on the slick, snow-lined streets of this scrawny little city. Maybe threaten her with death or dismemberment. Maybe dangle her over the icy Mississippi from atop the railroad bridge a few blocks away. Or maybe twist her—

Jeroan inhaled the stink of garbage and came back to reality. He had to set his plans of getting revenge on Kelley on hold, yet again.

Doesn’t matter, he told himself. She got away, and we’ve got work to do here in this nasty alley.

With his Chicago Bears sweatshirt all pitted out with sweat under his coat from running, he stood once more over the old wino with the Santa Claus beard.

“Back off,” he muttered to Polly next to him. “Let me take care of this.”

Polly, her face still red from all their running, nodded and started digging in her coat pocket. As usual, she was dressed up like a guy, and unless you knew there was a skinny white girl underneath that baggy Bulls windbreaker, you could fall for it too.

Polly gave Jeroan a quick little grin as she pulled out her stolen camera, but he could see the excitement and fear in her eyes. He was scared too, but he knew how to cover it up with attitude. You didn’t let the guys in Chicago know you were afraid.

Shivering from the cold, Jeroan tried not to think about the weird light he thought he’d seen coming from this guy’s eyes right before Kelley mucked up their morning plans. He swore that light had been bright blue. Must’ve been the sun reflecting off a car’s hood or something. And the way the old man’s hair had turned into a pin-cushion while the Beast was yelling down the alley at them had been sort of… freaky.

But it was the old guy’s own fault that he was still here, sitting on his butt in the cold, stinky alley. It was almost like he was asking to get jumped. The old fart should’ve had the sense to get out of here before Jeroan and Polly came back from chasing his nosy sister.

And Kelley the Beast, Jeroan thought, was never gonna let me forget the fact that she outran us this morning.

“Jeroan,” Polly whispered. “Come on. I got the camera ready.”

Jeroan ignored her and focused his gaze on the old man.

“Here we are again,” he said to the smelly old guy sitting on the ground. “Looks like you didn’t get too far, ol’ man. That’s a good thing. For us, at least.”

“Yeah,” Polly added in her scratchy voice. Jerome winced. “You ain’t got no one to save you now. No nosy sisters with fancy cell phones here.”

Before Polly could say anything more, Jeroan grabbed the old man’s satchel from his side and started unzipping it. Not to be outdone, Polly jumped in and stuck a hand inside the old man’s raggedy brown coat. She pulled out an old pocket watch the size of her fist. Jeroan was digging through the satchel when the old man started screaming hoarsely, grabbing for the watch Polly had taken from him.

The guy was actually trying to get to his feet, he was so crazy for the watch, when Polly elbowed him in the stomach, hard. He dropped to the hard alley floor once more, the wind knocked out of him. Jeroan nearly dropped the satchel.

“Cut it out, Pol!” he spat. “You’ll kill the old fart.”

“Just setting up my photo, J,” she said, giving him a slightly crazed grin. “Now get down there next to him. I’m having to do all the hard work today, you slacker.”

Jeroan stopped digging through the meaningless, worthless items in the old man’s satchel—some change, about twenty mismatched socks, a couple beat-up paperback books, and a dozen sticky pop cans. Nothing valuable. He hunkered down next to the spluttering old man, breathing through his mouth from the mixed smells of body odor and garbage.

“Hurry up,” he muttered to Polly, who was balancing the old man’s watch in one hand and aiming the tiny blue camera in her other. “Take it already, then I’ll take one—”

Jeroan never got to finish his sentence. He heard a grunt, and then something solid smacked into his chest and sent him flying backwards.

The old fart hit me, he realized as he rolled back to his feet, five feet from the man still sitting on the ground. And he hit me hard.

It took everything in Jeroan’s willpower not to run from the alley right away. His chest was still tingling from where the old fart had caught him with an elbow.

No, Jeroan thought. No running. Polly’s still here, and she still thinks the sun rises and sets on me. I can’t let her down. Not yet, at least.

Meanwhile, the old guy on the ground was starting to seriously freak out. Mumbling words that Jeroan could barely hear, much less understand, the old man with the stringy beard and wild white hair had his eyes clamped shut. He shook his head from side to side. His spindly arms were raised out to the sides, as if he were pulling himself to his feet on invisible strings. Once he was standing, slightly hunched over, the man pointed his hands—one at Polly, one at Jeroan—and opened his eyes.

The weird blue light was back in his eyes. Jeroan groaned.

For what felt like an hour, the old man looked from Polly to Jeroan, back and forth, and each time he turned back to Jeroan, the blue light had grown brighter, bathing the alley with an unnatural brightness that Jeroan could almost feel, tickling his skin.

Then the man’s gaze came to rest on Jeroan. His glowing blue eyes grew focused. His lips, almost hidden under his dirty white and gray beard, stopped moving. His nose wiggled, then his ears, and then the man’s long, wild hair lifted straight out from his head as if he’d been jolted with a huge blast of static electricity.

“Mo,” the man said in a thick, low voice, as if he were talking only to himself, and Jeroan and Polly just happened to be close enough to eavesdrop. He coughed and grimaced and tried again.

“Moammar and Yishi,” the old man said in the blue-lit alley. “Their names were Moammar and Yishi.”

Jeroan felt a sudden urge to stop harassing this man and help him instead. There was something about the look in the guy’s eyes, underneath all that weird light and staticky air. He thought he recognized the desperately determined look on the man’s face. It was a look Jeroan saw in the mirror most mornings, though lately he’d been feeling more desperate than determined.

But before Jeroan could shake his frozen limbs into action, the man inhaled a raspy breath and spoke three strange words:

“Dohol Elem Kazqu.”

Crackling energy shot out from both of his bony index fingers and covered Polly and Jeroan. The man moved his hands up, with the flowing blue light still pouring out his fingers, and Jeroan felt his feet leave the ground. He was too shocked to scream. Polly was in the same predicament, her mouth a wide O of disbelief as she flew through the air, lifted by the line of blue energy toward Jeroan. As the old man below them put his hands together, they both hit the slimy bricks of the far alley wall with a dull thump and dangled there, fifteen feet above an overflowing dumpster.

Jeroan grabbed Polly’s hand as they dangled there, unable to even squeak out a single word. He could only watch as the flow of weird energy stopped from the man’s pointing fingers.

We’re dead, he thought. He skin felt hot and ticklish, as if hundreds of ants were crawling on him, and his heart was beating triple time.

But the man wasn’t looking at them anymore. It was as if he’d forgotten about them already. He tottered over to get his satchel up off the alley floor, and the effort nearly made the old guy fall over.

Jeroan hissed when the old guy stepped on Polly’s camera, then kicked it out of his way. She must’ve dropped it when he flung her into the air. Marky and the guys needed photographic evidence from this morning, or they’d never let Jeroan hang with them. And this old fart had messed it all up.

At the sound of Jeroan’s hissing, the old man stopped and looked up at them again. He cocked his head, as if he was remembering something, like when was the last time he’d washed his clothes or taken a bath, and then he made a cutting gesture with his left hand.

Jeroan felt his throat tighten up. We really are dead now, he thought.

“Oskam,” the old man said, breaking the silence of the alleyway.

A parade of pocket change, dollar bills, wallets, keys, a shiny black eGadget, a battered hot-pink flip phone, and a knife marched out of their pockets and dropped obediently into his muddy satchel. The last item to float across the alley was a scratched, gold-plated pocket watch, its hands frozen at nine minutes to nine. The old man grabbed the watch with his free hand, as if feeling a need to protect the ancient timepiece from any further damage or misdoing.

“Hey!” Polly cried out in her false-tough voice. Jeroan was impressed that she even able to talk. “You can’t rob us, man! We gonna be gangsters, so—”

Jeroan grabbed her by the coat sleeve, finding his own voice at last.

“Quiet, Pol. He ain’t from here. Look at him.”

With his white hair and beard still standing straight out in a dirty halo, the old man gazed up at the two kids through the cloud of unnatural blue light that had gathered around his face. His coat hung off his shoulders and down almost to his knees, like a ragged wizard’s cloak. He smelled like burnt toast and body odor.

Polly shut her mouth tight.

Jeroan could only watch as the man picked up a surprisingly clean red hunting hat from behind a garbage can and plopped it onto his head, covering his static-filled hair. With his bulging, jingling satchel on his shoulder and his pocket watch tight in his hand, the old man turned and began strolling out of the alley.

Jeroan and Polly remained suspended above the alley floor. They looked at each other and both began yelling at the old man before he disappeared and left them hanging there forever.

At the exit from the alley, the old man—who was no longer hunched over—paused, looked back, and smiled. Looking at that smile, Jeroan felt all of his confidence drop away from him and splat into the dumpster below him like a big bag of garbage. He nearly let out a whimper of relief when the old guy started walking away from them again.

This, he decided as he dangled above the rotting mess in the dumpster below him, was not at all how I’d planned to spend my morning. And it’s all the Beast’s fault.

He couldn’t wait to find her again, somewhere in this godforsaken city, and have a little discussion with her.

Just as soon as they got down from up here.

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I’ll be adding two chapters a week right here, or you can snag an ebook from the links at the bottom of this chapter if you don’t want to wait.

ASOoM is a novel for all ages about magic, growing up, and finding your place within those two very different realms.

And let’s not forget that a sequel, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, is in the works and should be done in early 2012.

The story continues today with the Chapter One!

A Sudden Outbreak of Magic

Chapter One

Black girl on the streets. Better keep an eye on her, if you can.

Kelley Strickland felt like everyone in Dubuque was watching her today, thinking suspicious thoughts. Shivering inside her heavy winter jacket, she walked past yet another mound of gray snow piled on a street corner in this cold and dull place, in search of her trouble-making brother.

Her family had only been living in this whitebread city on the Mississippi for three and a half months, and Kelley wanted to move back to their real home—Chicago—badly. She used to be happy there, with her friends and all their favorite places to go in the city. But of course Jeroan had messed all that up with his loser friends and their little stunts.

And now he was starting that garbage again here. Already.

Which explained why Kelley found herself out on the streets on a freezing Tuesday morning in November instead of sitting next to the dripping radiator in Mr. Mottet’s Freshman Language Arts class.

Earlier that morning, she’d peeked—just for a second—at Jeroan’s laptop in his empty bedroom. Just long enough to read an email from one of his new buddies about cutting classes. The last straw. Kelley bundled up, left home, and started to track him down before he embarrassed her again and ruined her chances of ever making friends here.

As if I care about having friends here, she thought. Though she had to admit that she had a bit of revenge tied up in her plan today. Jeroan deserved to get punished for all his little schemes and lies. He never got caught. But if Kelley so much as looked at someone cross-eyed, Dad grounded her.

She shuffled past the clock tower on her left and got hit by another cold blast of wind. An old gray pickup truck rattled past, reeking of manure, and the driver lifted a hand, waving at someone. Kelley looked around, breathing from her mouth to avoid the stink, and realized that Farmer Joe had been waving at her.

That’s the whole problem, she decided, adjusting her lucky black cap against the cold. The people here were just too nice. They said “Hi” to you on the street, for crying out loud. Complete strangers. If you did that in Chicago in her old neighborhood, someone would smack you in the face. You definitely didn’t want to draw attention to yourself back there.

She looked up and down the quiet street with its brick buildings and icy parking lots full of pickups and SUVs and rusted-out compacts. Across the street sat the office for the local news station, its glass windows almost hidden behind a big monster of a satellite dish. She could almost feel the radio waves—or whatever they were—humming through the air around that rusty old dish at KWWL headquarters.

Flecks of snow swirled in the air, and she fought the urge to sneak back home, crank up the heat, and go back to bed. She hadn’t found any other signs of Jeroan all morning.

What Kelley really wanted to do was track him with the sweet phone Mom and Dad had bought her the day before they started their new school here. One of the few benefits of having lawyers for parents—they usually had money for stuff like that. Even if the parentals didn’t have time to even hang around long enough to see her and Jeroan open their gifts.

As usual, Kelley had made a point of reading the skimpy manual cover to cover before she ever turned it on. Then she went online and read all the websites and wikis and blogs she could for the eGadget. She liked knowing all the secret features, including all the good hacks. Just in case.

But Jeroan must’ve been too far away to get a reading from the tiny little GPS locater Kelley had convinced Mom to secretly sew into the lining of his coat. She’d hacked her phone to be able to find him, but she must’ve missed a step or two—the GPS wasn’t working right.

So she had to search the old-fashioned way, without any of her best tech tools. Just walking around downtown and looking for clues and hoping to catch a break. Kelley hated the old-fashioned way.

She hiked down another block of Main Street, her breath puffing out in front of her as she hurried past a busy coffee shop and a brewpub just opening for the day. Her phone gave off a soft beep, and then, after a few more seconds, beeped again.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” she whispered to herself as she slid closer to the brick wall of the store on her right. Jeroan had moved into range.

Three blocks ahead of her, on the other side of the road and moving away from her, walked a pair of boys. One black and one white—Jeroan and his buddy.

The beeping continued, each one a tiny bit faster. She pulled out her phone and hit the Mute button. Pressing a few more buttons, she keyed up the video camera tool. Gotta love the eGadget’s gadgets, baby.

She aimed the phone in front of her, squinting at the small image taking shape in the camera’s rectangular viewscreen, and waited to hit Record (she only had so much battery and disk space on her smart phone, so she couldn’t be wasteful).

She fiddled with the touchscreen on the phone to get a better angle on Jeroan and his buddy as she followed them down a side street. They were heading toward the railroad tracks and the big, brown river beyond that.

Black girl with a camera, Kelley imagined the small-town Iowans whispering to each other. Watch her closely! She’s surely up to no good.

* * * * * *

A little over fourteen years ago, Jeroan Jeffrey Johnson Strickland was born five minutes before Kelley, and he’d never let her forget it. He loved reminding her that she was his younger sister. Kelley had a pretty good idea of what had really happened: he’d pushed her out of the way so he could come out first and grab all the attention.

Well, look at my “big” brother now, she thought. Cutting class and wandering the dead streets of Dubuque with some skinny white kid in a baggy Chicago Bulls windbreaker. She’d been following them for almost eight blocks, and as she watched from across the street, the two of them headed down an alley.

Holding her breath, Kelley tiptoed behind an old brown Chevy Blazer. If she held her phone just right, she could track what they were doing without leaving her cover.

“You little hellions,” she said. On the screen of her phone, she watched Jeroan and his buddy creep up on a bearded old man sprawled out in the middle of the alley.

She felt a weird pang in her chest looking at the guy all dressed in ragged layers of clothes, with his white hair and beard standing up at crazy angles. The old guy didn’t have a clue that he was about to have visitors—he looked like he’d either just woken up or was about to pass out. His floppy red hat sat next to him on the ground, forgotten.

Kelley hit the Record button on her phone at last.

Jeroan and his skinny buddy were less than ten feet from the old man, stalking him like first-time hunters approaching a deer. Or gangster-wannabes approaching their first initiation victim.

And unless Kelley did something, fast, the Jeroan Delinquent Show would all start again.

She sucked in an icy breath, about to scream at them to stop. But for a few seconds her mind locked up, and she couldn’t think of any words to shout at them. Panicked, she looked at the helpless old guy and almost started shouting some crazy nonsense words at Jeroan, she felt so mad.

My brain’s backfiring on me. I gotta pull it together.

“Back off!” she managed to yell at last.

Jeroan jumped and stepped back, and his buddy had to actually lift his bony white hand off the old man’s shoulder.

And then the old man on the alley floor turned.

And looked right at Kelley.

The alley suddenly filled with light, as if a spotlight had been snapped on. At the same time, something surged through Kelley’s hand, and she almost dropped her precious eGadget. The weird light in the alley came from the man’s eyes.

But that’s crazy, she thought, blinking fast to clear her own vision. It was just the sun. Had to be the sun. And my imagination.

She gripped her phone tight and yelled again, “Back off, Jeroan!”

“Kelley!” her brother roared as he saw her at last. “Get out of here, idiot!”

Kelley wasn’t looking at Jeroan, though. She couldn’t ignore it now—the eyes of the old man next to her brother really were lit up like a pair of blue beacons. Their light ignited his bushy white eyebrows and static-straightened hair, which stood out straight from his head like pins in a pincushion.

As she met the man’s gaze, unable to look away, Kelley felt a warm trickle of sweat creep from under her cap, roll down her forehead, and slip down her cheek.

In that instant, she had an odd pair of thoughts, back-to-back.

The first was: This old guy doesn’t need me to rescue him here.

The second was: I may have spared Jeroan and his buddy some trouble by interrupting just now.

At last the old man blinked, and the weird blue light winked out.

Shadows fell over the alley and its three occupants. Kelley let out the breath she’d been holding and heard the echo of strange words somewhere in her head, like far-off music spilling out of someone’s car window two blocks away. Words she’d never heard before.

And then she had to stop recording and run, because her brother and his new pal were charging after her, leaving behind the old man in the alley. She tucked her phone inside her coat, spun on her heel, and sprinted hard up the street. If she had any breath to spare in her lungs, she would’ve been laughing like crazy.

* * * * * *

After ten minutes of hard sprinting, Kelley knew she needed someplace quiet and out of the way if she was going to stay safe. A store or restaurant she could go into and tell some sob story about the mean boys chasing her, and then maybe call a cab—if this city even had cabs—to whisk her back home safely.

So far, though, all the buildings on this side of the street were either empty or still “Coming Soon!” according to their signs. Kelley looked back, just for a second, and saw that Jeroan and his buddy were less than half a block behind her, cussing and yelling her name. Jeroan’s buddy already lagged ten feet behind him, fading fast.

Kelley laughed out loud as she put on a burst of speed and flew past the huge gold-domed Court House, dodging patches of black ice on the sidewalk. Jeroan could really sprint, but she could always take him in the long distances. She just had to make it a few more blocks, and she’d be in the clear.

Her good spirits disappeared, though, two blocks later, when she saw a police cruiser hum past one street up, close to the tall clock tower she’d passed earlier. She saw red brake lights. Her old Chicago instincts kicked in, and she pivoted hard and sprinted down a narrow one-way street.

As soon as she’d run a dozen steps down this street, Kelley looked to her left and saw a tiny shop with an “Open” sign in its small front window. Like magic.

She skidded to a stop and gazed up, still breathing hard. A faded wooden sign above the windowless door announced “Haze Books and Gifts” in bright blue letters. Above to the name, a winged white horse reared up next to a grinning green dragon.

Panting for breath, Kelley pushed against the heavy wooden door and entered the shop.

A tiny bell above her let out a sharp, tinkling sound that nearly made Kelley yell out in surprise. Not even daring to breathe, with her heartbeat like a series of gunshots in her ears, she stood with her back against the closed door until she heard her brother thunder past, followed five seconds later by his stumbling buddy. She gave them another ten seconds before exhaling.

Just like old times. She peeled off her lucky cap and shook out her hair. Jeroan and I will have to sort it all out tonight, back home. After he cools off. I just hope he doesn’t try to bother any more bums today to try and impress his new friend.

With that thought in her head and the tangy smell of incense filling her nose, Kelley took a cautious look around the shop.

Luckily, the store contained no people, not even a shopkeeper, but it was filled with just about everything else. Covering the walls from floor to ceiling, black bookcases overflowed with paperback, hardcover, and leather-bound books. More books were stacked on top of and around the cases as well.

In front of Kelley stood two dozen long, wooden tables, each with a different arrangement of related artifacts.

A smile crept across her face as she gazed at the neatly arranged rows of crystal balls, pewter figurines, jeweled necklaces and bracelets, wildly colored magazines and newspapers, bottled spices, and all sorts of musical instruments. There was even a table full of windup toys, which came in the shape of knights, wizards, dragons, trolls, and other fantasy creatures and monsters.

The windup toys caught her eye, and she moved toward that table in the center of the shop. The store seemed much bigger from the inside, and she felt like it expanded with each step she took. Now that her pulse had returned to normal, she crept forward, stuffing her cap into her coat pocket. She’d covered half the length of the store before she realized she was tiptoeing.

Relax. It’s just a store. Maybe the first really worth-a-crap store I’ve come across in this city. She rubbed her cold nose. Even if they do burn too much incense here.

When Kelley took a step closer to the table full of windup toys, the table exploded.

Every single one of the windup toys burst into motion—wizards waggled their tiny staffs, knights raised their shields, warrior women swung their swords, centaurs reared up and kicked their hooves, and countless other mythical beasts clattered and danced noisily on the table. Kelley fought the urge to dive under the table full of herbs and incense sticks next to her.

But instead of running off once more this morning, she stepped closer to the chaos unwinding on the table. She reached out for a clattering green and blue dragon half a foot tall, its curving gray wings beating the air madly as it hovered a few feet above the table.

Kelley stepped back, afraid to exhale.

With a graceful movement, the dragon flew toward her. Without thinking, Kelley held out her hand, and he dropped onto her palm. As soon as its cold metal talons touched her, the crazy orchestra of windup toys stopped clattering.

“Hey, little fella,” Kelley whispered to the wound-down dragon in the sudden silence, her voice cracking. She couldn’t stop grinning. “You’re the best thing I’ve seen all winter. Even if you and your friends nearly did give me a heart attack.”

Letting out a shaky breath, she admired the intricate scales carved into the dragon’s muscular back. He was surprisingly heavy, because he was made of metal instead of plastic like she’d expected. What toys were made of metal these days? Totally old-school.

She was tempted to turn the metal key in his back, just below his wings, to wind him up again, but decided against it.

“May I help you?” asked a voice from directly behind her.

Kelley jumped again and let go of the dragon. The little beast’s gears clattered back into action, and he circled around Kelley’s head twice before landing obediently next to her dripping boots. Kelley turned toward the voice with her face burning hot.

A petite white woman with black, gray-streaked hair stood looking up at Kelley from next to a table piled high with masks of all shape and color.

“I am sorry, miss,” the woman said. Her eyes were the light blue color of the summer sky, and Kelley saw a hint of laughter in her mouth. “I did not intend to frighten you.”

She didn’t seem all that sorry for scaring me.

“Um, hi,” Kelley said. “Sorry for messing with your dragon. And all your other toys.” She looked down at the metal dragon on the floor, his front paws and left wing still twitching. “Is he broken?”

“I am sure Alexander is all right,” the woman murmured, with the hint of an accent that Kelley couldn’t recognize. “I am Ms. Haze. Welcome to my shop.”

She held out a hand, and Kelley shook it. The woman’s fingers were like ice, though the shop was warm and she wore a thick purple shawl over a woolen gray sweater.

“What can I help you with today, Miss…”

“Strickland, but just call me Kelley.”

Kelley fiddled with the cap in her pocket with one hand and tried to pat down her wild hair with the other, stalling for time. She felt like she needed an alibi, since this was a school day, after all.

“Well. I have a report due for this class at school—today’s an in-service day—and I needed to pick up some…” She glanced around at the walls and gave the woman her most convincing grin. “Books.”

Ms. Haze nodded and said nothing, watching almost expectantly, with that smidgen of a smile still on her face.

In for a penny, Mom always said, in for a pound. Whatever that meant.

“So anyway,” Kelley continued, “I’ve covered pretty much everything our library had to offer, and I was hoping you’d have something more.”

“And your topic is?”

“Oh.” Kelley’s mind raced for a moment until she remembered the strange blue light in that old man’s eyes just a few minutes ago, back in the alley. She shuddered as she remembered how weird and almost dizzy that light had made her feel. And then she thought about how she’d found the store, just like that. Like snapping your fingers. Just like…

“Magic,” Kelley said, and then swallowed. “My research paper, I mean. It’s about, um, magic.”

“Ah,” Ms. Haze said, leaning closer. Her smile grew wider. “Of course.”

Kelley felt like she should say something more as the older woman gazed at her without blinking. She fought the urge to scratch her nose again as the smell of incense tickled her nose. Then Ms. Haze stepped back and made small humming sounds while she gazed around the shop. Kelley exhaled.

“Let us try something over here, Kelley, in section sixteen. Follow me.”

Without waiting for her, the little woman marched off toward a tall set of bookcases on the far wall, plucked five books from five different locations, and plopped them into Kelley’s arms.

“You could try these for a start. I do not think your school library will have these in its collection. Now, let me check a price for one of your books. One moment.”

Stepping away quickly, the petite woman disappeared behind a velvet curtain near the back of the store. Kelley hadn’t even noticed that curtain earlier.

She set the books on a rickety brown chair and picked up the first one on the pile. It was a fat leather book with a sunburst etched into the cover, and it was called An Unabridged Yet Concise History of the Mystical World, by Dr. Sarah van Prattshaw Reese. Yawn. Kelley preferred reading stuff like this on her eGadget, so she could skim faster and jump around more when she got bored.

That reminded her—she set down the big book of magic and checked her phone to see where Jeroan was. He’d gone out of GPS range again, apparently. He was probably walking by that big KWWL satellite dish again. No beeping or blinking.

Good news for me, Kelley thought, but not so good for the bums of Dubuque.

After her eGadget was back in her jeans pocket again, she unzipped her coat and looked around the store one more time. She felt relaxed here, like she could stay here all day long, finding new amazing stuff on every overflowing shelf and table, with no pain-in-the-butt brother around to muck things up. If Ms. Haze would let her.

A small white book in a black bookcase next to her caught Kelley’s eye. She reached up and pulled it out.

The book was warm to the touch. Its cover was blank, with an elaborate, dark blue symbol printed on the spine, nothing more. The symbol looked like a fancy “Q” fused with a “Z,” with about a hundred squiggles and curlicues. It almost looked like the planet Saturn, but with more rings and doodads orbiting it.

Kelley cracked opened the book, which wasn’t much bigger than her hand, and flipped to the first page. The first page inside the book announced the title as Words of Magic.

Footsteps sounded behind the curtain, and Kelley felt her shoulders hunch instinctively. She closed the book again and ran her thumb across the fancy symbol on the spine of the book. Her thumb tingled, just for a second, when it ran over the squiggly icon.

Words of Magic. Right.

Without another thought, Kelley stuffed the little white book into the inner pocket of her coat.

“Here it is, Kelley,” Ms. Haze called out faintly from the other room. She slipped through the curtain with a ledger in her hand. She set it down behind a glass countertop. She now wore tiny half-moon glasses perched precariously on her nose, and she began punching numbers into a brown metal cash register that was almost as big as she was.

“I will sell you all five books for ninety-three dollars. What do you think?”

Kelley winced at the price but handed the older woman her shiny new credit card, courtesy of her Mom and Dad. She hoped the guilt she was feeling about snatching the book wasn’t showing on her face.

“I hope these help you with your, ah, report, Kelley,” Ms. Haze said with a smile, running the card through an old, rickety card reader. “May I get you anything else?”

Kelley swallowed and looked around the shop, taking in all the fantastic trinkets and the endless array of books. She forgot her guilty conscience for a moment when her eyes fell on the dragon once more. She walked over to him and picked him up from the floor.

“I’d love to buy him, too,” she said, handing the dragon back to Ms. Haze at the counter. “He’d go great in my bedroom. But I really shouldn’t spend any more…”

Ms. Haze took the dragon from her and placed him in a small, square box. She pushed the box across the counter. “He is yours.”

“What? But I—”

“Take Alexander. There is no charge. I know you will appreciate him. And he will take care of you as well.” She gave Kelley a wink so fast that Kelley thought she’d imagined it. “And I know you still believe.”

“Thank you,” Kelley whispered as she gathered up the bag of books and the box. She walked out of the warmth of Haze Books and Gifts and into the cold with her arms loaded down. She was feeling uncomfortable and guilty, but she was also filled with a giddy feeling that she hadn’t felt since she was a kid.

The title of her stolen book echoed through her brain as she stood in the tiny alcove of the store entrance.

Words of Magic. Magic!

Kelley took a few steps forward, and the harsh wind hit her like a fist. She winced, half-expecting Jeroan and his buddy to be out there waiting for her. But the streets in this section of the city were quiet and deserted, and the small book was warm against her chest, making her forget the November cold.

Black girl with a stolen book, Kelley thought, smiling, eager to get home and start reading. Someone call the authorities, fast!

Can’t wait for the rest of the serialization? Here’s how to get a copy now:

• Buy a PDF directly from UnWrecked Press
  
• Digital versions available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThruFantasy.
• Trade paperback available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

If you enjoyed what you read, feel free to make a donation via PayPal:

Kelley and her twin brother Jeroan just moved to Dubuque, Iowa. Their parents uprooted them from their home in Chicago after learning that Jeroan had gotten mixed up with a gang. As the only black girl in her grade, Kelley is not pleased about the move.

One cold morning in November, after trying (unsuccessfully) to keep Jeroan out of trouble again, she gets “infected” by magic after reading aloud from a small leatherbound book she finds.

She also blows up the family home at the same time.

Soon Kelley and Jeroan must face up to a power-hungry, centuries-old Sorcerer who wants to rid the world of what he calls “renegade” magic-users. Only Kelley’s new way of using magic will save their new city and their magically infected friends, though she may lose her brother in the process.

A novel for all ages about magic, growing up, and finding your place within those two very different realms.

I’ll be serializing A Sudden Outbreak of Magic right here on my site, one to two chapters a week, or you can snag an ebook from the links below if you don’t want to wait. We start today with the Prologue!

(And hey, a sequel, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, is in the works and will be done in early 2012!)

• Buy a PDF directly from UnWrecked Press
  
• Digital versions available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThruFantasy.
• Trade paperback available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

A Sudden Outbreak of Magic

Prologue

Excerpted from Words of Magic, page 1533:

On that fateful day in October of 1871, the daylight in downtown Chicago was waning, the wind off the lake was at my back, and I, Jonathan Archibald Masterson Brightwell, was on the run again.

From inside my dirty wool vest, I could feel the flutter of tiny gears in the pocket watch against my chest. The time between each tick of my prized watch felt a tiny bit longer than the last.

Time. I’d spent more time running in my life than I had not running. For over three centuries—though I looked no older than fifteen years of age to most people. I tried to look older, and thicker, by wearing dark suits two sizes too large for me, like the blue suit I wore on this warm fall evening. But I was fooling no one. I was just a skinny, ignorant boy, in over my head once more.

I hurried past dusty wooden storefronts and around gaslight poles, inhaling the nose-tickling smells of horses, perfume, and manure. The other walkers around me wore their Sunday best, and many of them gave me a smile or a tip of the hat.

If only you knew my history, I thought. You’d keep your distance and not smile.

Still hurrying down the street, I dipped my right hand into my satchel and pulled a hooded, dark blue robe that seemed far too big to fit in the small satchel.

“Finally,” I whispered as I pulled on the robe. I kept the hood down, for now. After touching the round disc of my watch—still ticking!—under my robe, safe inside my vest, I felt a reassuring wave of confidence. I hadn’t worn this robe in a long time.

And tonight I would need it.

Though I’d slept most of the day in a barn in my wet clothes, buried under two feet of hay, I still hadn’t had time to recover from my misadventures last night. That was when the five burly men in long black coats had cornered me by the lakeshore. Somehow the followers of the Druid had found me, again.

I’d only been in the city a few months, working in the city’s south side, helping the always-coughing people turned away from the hospitals. I’d tried to be careful, saving those I could, comforting those I couldn’t, using my Words sparingly.

At least I got in a good shot at O’Shea, I thought. Before I dove deep into the waters of Lake Michigan, I’d blasted a hole clean through O’Shea’s brown bowler.

When I crossed over quiet LaSalle Street, three blocks from the bridge and the horse and wagon I’d rented with the last of my money, I pulled up short. I could smell smoke drifting up from the south.

“Wind’s picked up,” I muttered, and then bit down hard on my bottom lip. I’d been talking to myself too much lately, like a doddering old fool.

I passed the water pumping station and saw the metal arches of a bridge rising above the low warehouses and stockyards around it. The clank of the pumping station’s massive machinery filled the air as it drew water for the people of the city in an unending battle against time and need.

I know the feeling, I wanted to tell the water pumping equipment. The constant, thankless struggle is tiring, isn’t it?

When a harsh voice answered me, I realized I’d spoken out loud again.

“If ye are so tired, Johnny-cakes,” the voice drawled with a thick Irish accent, “p’rhaps I could innarest ye in a wee nap?”

Blocking my way onto the Randolph Street Bridge stood a red-haired man, stout and imposing at nearly six feet tall. His black overcoat dragged on the ground, picking up dust with each step he took. The other walkers scattered at the sight of the big man and the crackling tool in his hand.

“Whatever it is you have to offer me, Seamus O’Shea, must be either stolen or bad for my health. Thank you, but no thank you.”

“Call me Amsterdam,” O’Shea spat. “‘At’s me code name, boy. You shouldn’a found out me real name! Th’ boss’ll kill me!”

I had a Word prepared, but I hated wasting it on one such as O’Shea. Because if O’Shea was here, that meant Michael would be here as well.

“Where’s your hat, Seamus?”

The Irishman answered by lifting the long black object in his hand. The two tips of the arcane metal tool ended in wicked metal prongs. When he clicked the triggers next to the rubber handles, the prongs sparked with a sickly green light.

I pulled the hood of my robe over my head and—hoping that Yishi’s charms still retained their powers—I began walking toward O’Shea. As I drew within two feet of the bigger man, my pocket watch clattered louder and faster, and its metal grew hot against my chest.

I inhaled, saw the lines of power swirl and dance through the air around me, and then channeled them into my watch. Heart fluttering and then pounding, I let the energy swirl through the clockwork gears of my watch with a rush of heat and a clattering of metal. At last, I exhaled with a Word from deep inside my chest: “Gholt.”

A burst of blue light flashed from the watch hidden inside my worn robe and covered O’Shea like a blast of lightning. O’Shea froze, his big hands still squeezing the triggers to his crackling tool.

“You come at me with Pincers?” I gasped at O’Shea, lowering my hood. My hands and the rest of my body became visible again. The Irishman stared at me with eyes filled with surprise, shock, and a growing flicker of fear. The rest of his body remained motionless.

I wanted to crack O’Shea between the eyes with his own Pincers, but I reminded myself that he was just a follower. I could have ended up just like him.

So I turned instead and ran onto the bridge, smoke filling my lungs. Most nights the bridge was filled with coaches and walkers, and the air would echo with the ring of hooves, wheels, boots, and shoes on the battered wood. But not tonight.

I looked to the south and got my first glimpse of the fire. Flames licked at wooden structures of the Gas Works and Bateham’s Mills, and the fire was spreading to either side of the river.

“The wind,” I said. “The wind will make this worse.”

My nightmare memories of the battlefields from the brutal War Between the States less than a decade ago forced their way into my mind. I’d worn both the blue and the gray during those dark times, slipping behind either army’s lines so I could heal the wounded and try to save the dying. When I was caught—as I always was—I simply escaped with a Word or two, switched sides, and started all over again.

I could hear the fire wagon sirens now, mixed with screams. Each tick of my watch was a hammer blow against my chest, strong enough to take away my breath.

Pausing in the lane reserved for stagecoaches and horses, I realized that Michael and his henchmen had started the fires. He knew that I would want to help fight the fires. Once again, I was trapped in the middle, with no good option to take.

In front of me, a slender man in a dark suit and top hat stepped onto the bridge.

“Michael,” I called. “It’s been a long time.”

I hid my shaking hands with the sleeves of my robe and approached the man.

“Johnny,” he said, doffing his hat sarcastically at me. His receding hair was thinner than it had been the last time I’d seen him, before the war. Thick blonde sideburns framed his face down to his chin. “Hello again, my good friend.”

I glanced behind me. On the other end of the bridge, O’Shea and two other henchmen brandished black Pincers crackling with green energy, keeping people from using the bridge.

Meanwhile, the dry city was going up like kindling.

“All for me?” I said. “You’d burn Chicago just to find me? Not very subtle.”

Michael chuckled as he walked closer. “We will simply make up some excuse, as we always do—some old fool dropped his cigarette, or a cow kicked over a lantern. And my people—our people—will remain as invisible as ever.”

As Michael spoke, I exhaled and let my eyes cross slightly so I could again see the lines of magic that were constantly twirling in the air around me. Once I saw them, I was able to pull them down and snare them in the inner workings of the watch held snug in my vest. The gears suddenly began moving wildly, like a caged beast, as power flowed through the cogs of the watch, gathering the familiar blue energy of my clockwork magic.

I pulled my glowing, sizzling pocket watch free of my vest, aimed it at Michael, and screamed three Words. A globe of blue fire as big as my head shot out of my gold-plated watch, headed right for Michael.

But my former teacher only laughed and created a wall of green-tinted energy in front of himself with one simple Word. My ball of blue magic bounced harmlessly off Michael’s green shield, though the force of the impact made him lose his top hat and stagger back three steps.

For the first time all night, I saw Michael’s face tighten. As far as I could tell, the man used no watch or other clockwork device to channel and manipulate the wild energies of magic. Instead, I watched him wave at O’Shea to come closer.

That explained it. To conserve his own energy, Michael wanted to use the Irishman’s blood—instead of his own—to channel the magic before using it on me. Once again I felt a tinge of pity for O’Shea. He was Michael’s tool, no more important than a freshly wound watch.

“You know,” Michael said, “you really must give up your little windup toys, Johnny, and embrace the true magic taught to us by the Druid. The magic of the blood—” He gave a smile and a nod in O’Shea’s direction “—preferably someone else’s instead of your own—is much more powerful, much more efficient. And what happens if you lose your precious watch?”

I clamped my jaws closed, determined not to give Michael the pleasure of seeing my fatigue and fear. Not after what he’d done to Moammar and Yishi.

I touched the golden watch, its metal hot inside my thick vest. Michael just shook his head and smiled.

“Jonathan. It will be quick, just like it was at Stonehenge. Come closer.”

You come closer, I thought, my hands beckoning the other man. You get into position, you traitor. Murderer.

“It has been entertaining, has it not, my good, good friend?” A handful of blonde hairs now dusted the shoulders of Michael’s dark jacket. “All of the changes in this time, the new advances in science and engineering? Eighteen hundred and seventy-one—how can it be such a year, already? So much progress and so much violence, all in such a short period of time. The Gatling gun, now that was fun, eh?”

Before I could respond, a sudden explosion made the bridge under me sway.

“Ah.” Michael glanced at the orange glow of the fires to the south of us. “That would be the pumping station. Right on schedule.”

When Michael turned back to me, I was waiting for him. I held both of my hands up, all ten fingers aimed at him. My pocket watch was ticking so fast against my chest that all I could feel and hear was one solid tick, blurred together like a bell that never stopped ringing.

“Noloquorstdi!”

Blue-white light erupted out of my watch. The light broke apart and shot into Michael like a thousand tiny darts. He created a shield again, but half of the darts slipped through his barrier. Michael took a step back, almost stumbled.

“I’ve wanted to do that,” I spat, “for twenty years. Ever since Stonehenge.”

As Michael fought to stand, I looked down. My watch had stopped ticking.

That did it. I panicked and started running for the edge of the bridge. My vision was so blurred by heat, smoke, and exhaustion that I could scarcely see. The Words always came at a price, and they may just have cost me my watch, if not my life.

Curling lines of power and magnetism rushed around me as Michael reached out to magic for one more attack. He didn’t even trying to force it through O’Shea. Instead, he took all the energy into himself, into his own blood this time.

Inhaling smoke and gagging from the stink of burning buildings, I leapt off the bridge. My eyes burned at my failure to stop this conflagration. But at the height of my leap, a burst of dazzling green light from my former teacher hit me in the chest.

My watch-making tools inside my coat caught the blast. Tiny screwdrivers, calipers, wrenches, and gears exploded into the night air like metallic rain.

My final vision on that day was of my old friend and mentor Michael Azure, standing upside-down in my inverted vision, his arms raised triumphantly in front of the burning city. The image was etched onto my eyes as I hung for a helpless moment in the hot air.

And then I dropped like a stone into the river, and I knew nothing more, for many, many years to come.

And that ends the prologue! If you enjoyed what you read, feel free to make a donation via PayPal:

UnWrecked Press presents: something new, maybe?

Whoa. Just realized that tomorrow is the first Friday in over a year that I won’t be running a short story here on my site. I ran 52 stories here in 2011, never missed a Friday for my  Fiction Friday series from UnWrecked Press.

I can’t say I miss all the effort of putting up a blog post, finding cover art, designing the cover, writing a short description of the story, and then making the story into a 99-cent ebook. But it was a good learning experience, and all my old stories are now officially ebooks.

And I am glad to be done.

But…

With tomorrow being Friday the 13th, and that big gaping hole in my blog/journal… I just have to do something new.

But what? Hmmm….

Stay tuned, friends. Stay tuned.

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Finder.” You can read the entire story, below, for free.

And… that’s it! The start of a new year, and the end to all my stories. I’m all caught up and ebooked! Check out all the ebooks at my Stories page.

Though something tells me that I’m not done writing about Bim and Hanky J, from the story below…

Finder

Wedged into the unforgiving passenger seat of a twelve-year-old Ford Escort, I took a deep breath and shoved more food into my mouth.

My old friend Hanky J sat perched in the driver’s seat, waiting on me without watching me. We were down south, ten miles north of Arkansas City. Both of us cold and miserable in the rain, parked in front of a wide expanse of brown, slow-moving Mississippi.

I hadn’t even realized he’d stopped the car. I’d been too busy working my way through an economy-sized bag of Cheetos, chewing slowly, savoring each morsel. I was shoving handfuls of food into my gob, trying to get a line on our missing person.

She was still alive, fortunately. Though I feared that my connection to her—the image of a tiny, dark room without windows, and the weight of a jagged rock clenched tight in one hand—had grown weaker. That I was losing the taste of her.

Now Hanky J was shaking his head, giving me that look.

“What?” I said around my mouthful of cheese-flavored snacks. These were the crunchy kind, too, not the nasty puffs. Definitely beat some of the other shit I’d eaten in the name of duty. “I’m workin’ on it. Don’t stare.”

Henry Johnson, aka Hanky J (his self-made nickname, which I always though broke some sort of rule, somewhere), was a private investigator. His specialty in the past few years had been tracking down identity thieves online, but now and then he liked to branch out, especially when it came to missing persons.

Hank was also my best friend since first grade, the only kid at our school who’d been on the receiving end of more shit than a goofball like me from bullies like Darren, due to the fact that he was the smallest, not to mention darkest-skinned, kid in our grade.

I don’t know what possessed his parents to move to tiny Faison, Iowa, thirty years ago, but I owed them.

Hanky J did a pretty good job of hiding his disgust at being  associated with me right at that moment, with my flab as well as my crumbs spilling over the car seat and onto the console, my bag of nuclear orange junk food growing more and more empty.

He never said anything about it. I’m sure he just loved the fact that he had to fondle my left love handle each time he shifted his Escort into gear.

“This is my m.o.,” I began, though I knew I didn’t have to explain anything to him. “I can’t help—”

“Look. I’m freezing, and this rain is making me crazy.” Hanky crinkled up his nose and cracked his window an inch. “And you’ve got more b.o. more than m.o.”

“Screw you,” I laughed, but just for a few seconds. This job was getting to Hanky J. He usually never commented on my lack of showering and my overeating when we were on a case. I think it was the water. He hated being close to so much water. It was too much like the time he lost Alisa.

“She’s close,” I said after swallowing my most recent mouthful. I really could’ve used a 20-ounce Diet Coke about now. “And she was definitely here the night she got taken. Memory’s strongest from that night. They stopped by here, for something.”

Hank rubbed the point of his carefully manicured beard and sighed loud enough to drown out the rain for a few seconds.

“Bastard probably wanted to show her where she’d end up if she didn’t cooperate. This part of the river’s deep, and that spillway over there would’ve freaked her out.”

Hank pointed a tiny brown finger at the rocks lining the riverbed not ten feet from his Escort’s front bumper. Brown water gushed from a culvert ten feet wide set in those rocks, a horizontal waterfall churning into the river.

Just looking at it made my belly recoil and clench, recoil and clench, sensations I’d grown used to in the past two decades.

With a sigh, in spite of the ache in my full stomach, I shoved another handful of orange crunches into my mouth. Hanky J had to look away.

As I chewed, I closed my eyes, forgot about my employer/best friend next to me, and blocked out the shudder of running water and the patter of rain on the car roof.

I focused only on the food rolling around on my tongue like so much starchy debris, trying to reconnect with our lost girl.

Her favorite snack had been Cheetos. Just my luck; I was a sweets guy, not a salty guy. Get lost, gag reflex. Get lost.

* * * * *

You’d be surprised at how difficult it can be to find out a complete stranger’s favorite food. Especially if that person has just gone missing.

Hanky J and I were used to weird situations, though.

He could usually dredge up some good hints using his computer skills. I was sure a lot of the software he used was illegal in most states, but that didn’t stop him. If that didn’t work, he’d impersonate a cop and make a phone call or two to the missing person’s friends. Sometimes I’d figure it out on my own, guessing at foods, looking for that connection one bite at a time.

The trick, of course, was learning this information without becoming kidnapping suspects in the process.

I remembered my first find, over twenty years and about two hundred pounds ago. Darren, our hometown’s bully, had lost his dog, and he employed me under duress: “Find Buddy or start picking up teeth off the sidewalk.”

The looks I got for asking what kind of food Buddy liked to eat, all those years ago, were priceless. A pretty innocent question, to get a better feel for the dog.

Looking at the half-empty can of Alpo that Darren brought me from their fridge, covered in Saran Wrap, I felt a pang of empathy for the other kid, even if he had enjoyed knuckling my skull for most of the fifth grade. I don’t think Darren had been able to throw away that last bit of Buddy’s memory from their fridge.

At the same time, something went “thunk” inside my head, my Eureka moment, which occurred as I was sniffing a can of weeks-old dog food.

“Can I please have a spoon?” I asked.

* * * * *

Her name was April. April Mae Honeycutt, to be exact. A name all over the Net and on every news channel in the past few days. She would turn sixteen next week. Security footage from the mall in Greenville had uncovered just two fuzzy images of a man, first walking up to April, then standing right next to her, hands on hips, looking down at her. A tuft of gray hair under his navy blue baseball cap under the harsh mall fluorescents.

That had been two and a half days ago. No other evidence had come to light, according to Hanky J’s contact in the Little Rock police department.

All of that was common knowledge, though, easily googled. I pushed away the tiny flinching fear inside of me that said, “This is it. You lost it, Bim. You’re nobody again. Just another loser living alone, two blocks away from your parents in a cheap rented house.”

“Bim,” Hanky J said from next to me, though he may as well have been fifty miles away. “Bim…”

With her favorite food now digesting inside in my sizable gut, so close to where she’d been recently, the images and memories and thoughts related to April’s disappearance now came faster, like bad dreams coming on the heels of too much pepperoni-and-sausage-and-onion pizza the night before.

I sighed. It had been years since I’d had good pizza.

“Last night,” I muttered. Take that, insecurities.

“Here,” I said, my own voice sounding miles away as I went back.

Dark. Dark out here under the half-moon, the night cold and too cloudy for many stars.

The river pulled at her sore eyes through the tinted windshield like a giant magnet.

She held her bound hands in front of her—metal handcuffs—when he pushed her out of his black SUV and onto the rocks.

Legs wobbly, as if she’d been walking all day, or standing without a break, and she tumbled, hit her shin on a rock. He’d taken her shoes, probably as a precaution against running, and her socks were already wet and muddy.

Strong hands gripped her, long fingernails biting into her upper arms.

All she could think about was food. Cheetos. Hungry.

He’d already let go of her arms. He never touched unless he had to. At least so far.

“We all end up here,” he’d said in her ear, standing behind her. Voice low and angry, hint of a southern accent that had never fully faded. “Thrown in once our usefulness is up, washed downriver out into the gulf, then out into the ocean to rot.”

April was too weak to run from him and his low, unsteady voice, and the knowledge both haunted and infuriated her.

* * * * *

I swallowed and nearly choked, and the desperate, hopeless night was replaced by gray noon light and my own coughing. Then my gut gave a lurch.

“Oh man,” I said, eyes watering. I grabbed for the door handle.

As I lost all the junk food I’d ingested in the past half-hour onto the gravel, I felt April—just April, never April Mae—slipping from my head for a second. I nearly panicked. We were too close for me to lose it now, or for the connection to just disappear because I couldn’t stay focused. Or worse.

I’d only lost the connection four times in all these years. Those missing folks hadn’t survived long enough for me to find them.

But by the time I’d finished spitting into the rain, I still had my connection to the lost girl. I dropped back into the car with a shaky groan. The Cheetos were strong, and her will to live was even stronger.

“I don’t know how you do that,” Hanky J said as he started the Escort. His right hand bumped me in the side as he put his car in reverse. “But I’m glad for it. Which way?”

I stuffed three sticks of gum in my mouth. A black SUV. A man dressed in gray. A voice tinged with madness, spouting off nonsense about water.

“Where’s the closest lake?” I said, feeling the gum dislodge the last bits of junk food from my teeth. With them came the image of a lake, a pier, and a two-story white house behind it. April had gotten a good look at the place, thank God, before he’d taken her inside.

We all end up here, he’d said to her, facing the water.

“So,” I said as Hank elbowed me again with an apologetic wince as he put the car into first gear, “at what point should we engage the local authorities?”

“Not just yet,” Hank said. “Just point me in the direction of where he’s got her. I gotta talk to this guy first. I have to know.”

I stifled a burp and tossed the empty Cheetos bag into the back.

Hank, I thought. Alisa’s safe now. Stop chasing her.

“Fine. We’ll have to stop at the first convenience store we come across, though. I’m outta fuel.”

* * * * *

Some people were cut out to be regular nine-to-fivers. They got along with others, played nice for their bosses, got raises and lived normal lives. But when you catch weird vibes whenever you share a person’s favorite food, even if they aren’t lost, it can make for very awkward social moments.

Like at my first job, at the factory in town during my first attempt at college, when we had chocolate cake for Miss Doris’ forty-year anniversary at the plant. And I learned of her hot senior-citizen lust for the new priest down at the Catholic church. Ruined chocolate cake for me, for forever.

So I started working hard on focusing my strange skills, tuning out all the static, eating only the kind of foods I figured people didn’t like: collard greens, liver and onions, Brussels sprouts, unflavored and unsalted potato chips, mac and cheese with just a tiny bit of the cheese mix added.

Either weird flavors or not enough to keep that food from being beloved by any one person. Problem was, even when I wasn’t focusing on finding anything or anyone, I just kept eating.

I ended up moving back in with my parents at the age of twenty after dropping out of school at the U of Iowa, with my prospects dimming until all I could see on the horizon were more shifts at the factory and long days of clock-watching.

So I guess you could say that running into Henry—”Call me Hanky J, Bim!”—at the grocery store that day had been my salvation.

We’d lost touch, and something in him was different. He smiled less, for one. I’d learn later that it was the bad stuff with his girlfriend Alisa that had added about ten years to him. He told me later that when they’d found her, alone and half-crazy after a week in a shack next to a smelly river, she’d only asked for Hank.

They’d never found her kidnapper, and she’d never gotten a good look at him. That had haunted both of them, and eventually killed their relationship five years later.

There in the grocery store, Hank told me how he’d gotten his two-year degree in criminal justice at the local community college. He said he’d been looking for me, ironically. He wanted to know how I’d always been able to find stuff, especially people. He never said anything about Alisa, but he didn’t need to.

Pretty soon Hanky J was hooking me up with work, getting me out of my parents’ house and building up what little self-esteem I had after dropping out of school, while he got to build his private eye reputation with my finds.

His favorite food was deep-dish sausage and mushroom pizza. Another awesome taste, off my list forever.

* * * * *

The rain finally let up the moment I spotted the white house on the lake, the place three thousand square feet, easy. The trip here had been surprisingly quick, as I chomped Cheetos and ticked off more and more of the landmarks from April’s own journey here.

The budding trees and narrow two-lane roads and the fancy stone entrance to this lakefront neighborhood looked a bit different in the post-rain sunlight, compared to the way they had appeared in the tinted glass of the SUV’s windows. At least he hadn’t covered her eyes on the way here.

Maybe the guy wasn’t as unhinged as his voice had sounded in my head. He seemed more desperate than crazy.

Speaking of unhinged—we were coming up on the part of the job that always made me question my partner’s sanity.

Hank drove his Escort right up to the closed garage door. The houses in this neighborhood five miles outside of town sat on two-acre lots surrounding a lake that must’ve been a quarter-mile wide. Lots of privacy out here, no streetlights. No cars in any of the driveway. I was starting to get itchy and nervous.

It was now Hanky J’s turn to take over. I got to sit back and watch, still munching Cheetos and tracking April’s thoughts. She was in that room again, still handcuffed, still thinking about how hungry she was. Hungry, and angry.

Hank liked the face-to-face approach with the kidnappers we caught. Said he wanted to look them in the eye, try to get them to explain why they did what they did. I’d tried to convince him to get the local cops involved at least, but he refused.

He reminded me of the gun he always kept tucked inside his little black jacket. I knew how fast he was, though that never made me feel any better.

April’s thoughts shot into high gear when she heard Hanky J’s knock. I wished my skills worked two ways, so I could send her a reassuring message, tell her to stay low.

But all I could do was feel her sting of surprise at the knock, followed by a rush of other emotions—fear, panic, and maybe even a strange kind of excitement at the sound of her kidnapper’s footsteps outside her locked room, growing louder.

Her stream of thoughts took a strange turn then. I kept feeling a rock, clenched tight in the darkness. Hank knocked on the door a second time, standing casually and acting all relaxed in his dark jeans and maroon sweater-vest.

I wanted to roll down the window and get him to come down off that front porch. But I couldn’t explain why, not for sure. More Cheetos were needed.

And then, with another handful of chips halfway to my mouth, it hit me. April didn’t want to be rescued.

That’s all I could figure. She had her own escape plan figured out, and here we were, hosing up that plan. She was thinking of the forest at the end of the road, where her kidnapper—a burly man in his mid-forties, gray hair in need of a good cutting, stubble and wire-rimmed glasses on his face—had taken her earlier.

They’d walked for an hour, then he gagged her and set her loose. Toying with her, chasing her. He eventually caught her, peeled off her ruined tennis shoes, and took her to the river. Showed her the churning water of the spillway as a warning.

Before he picked her up after she fell and barked her shin, she’d grabbed a rock just a bit smaller than her palm. A rock with a nice serrated edge to it.

Still nobody had answered Hanky’s knocks. The man was busy unlocking the door to April’s room. She could just barely hear his panicked mutterings.

The guy was cracking under the pressure, saying something like, “Can’t take it. Too much—”

April’s thoughts went black and still as the key turned in the door to her cell. Nearly choking on my current mouthful of Cheetos, I put a shoulder to the car door and opened it.

“Get in there!” I yelled at Hanky J, spraying the driveway with orange meteorites. At the same time, I keyed in 9-1-1 on my cell. Hanky J would just have to deal with that.

The kidnapper had the door to the windowless room unlocked, and all I could see was the rock in April’s hand. Then a sliver of light that grew wider as the man pushed open the door. Rock and darkness. And the darkness was disappearing, until it was just the rock.

Hanky J had the front door jimmied and was running inside, while I was moving too, at last. I panted my slow way up to the porch, rain pelting me as the storm clouds broke. I just hoped we weren’t too late.

I paused at the front door to catch my breath and swallow back a gutful of bile.

We were too late, but not for April.

Down the hall, a man in a gray sweatshirt lay crumpled on his side, his broken eyeglasses two feet from his bloodstained head. A puddle of red grew around him on his hardwood floor.

April had gone for the temple instead of the throat. Probably a good choice. Dude wasn’t moving, barely breathing.

Above him stood a teenaged girl, barefoot and bedraggled, smiling madly down at him with the rock in her hand, poised for another blow.

But then Hanky J was there, his small, strong fingers on her wrist, talking low and fast, pulling her away from her kidnapper lying at their feet.

I’ll never forget, in the seconds before I lost my connection to April Mae Honeycutt—”Just call me April, damn it!”—the way she looked at me. I felt her fear of me flash through her like the sharp spikes of pain I always felt after making a connection.

She’d thought I was working with her kidnapper and not her rescuer. That I was coming to back him up, not Hanky J. She’d thought I was a bad guy.

And then, right before her connection with me broke as she allowed herself to accept that she was no longer lost, but found, I felt her comprehension as Hank explained who I was. Her understanding was followed by a reflexive kick of disgust.

With the sound of sirens growing in the distance, I wiped my mouth and dropped out of April’s head forever. My stomach, brimming with her favorite snack, lurched as if I’d been punched.

This time I wasn’t sure if it was the girl’s revulsion or just my usual reaction to my gift that was making me so violently nauseous.

As Hanky J led April—still clutching her rock—past me to the front porch, I looked around for a bathroom, a sink, a garbage can. Anything to catch all I’d eaten on this case.

I’d like to say that I found something suitable for the event, but I can’t. I guess the kidnapper was in no position to argue with the mess I’d made on the nice hardwoods of his front hallway.

* * * * *

Hank wasn’t pleased with me for calling in the local authorities, but he handled them easily enough. He just insisted that the media tell the world that April was found via an anonymous tip. He didn’t want any of the attention, and he knew I really didn’t want it.

Before the locals arrived, Hanky J did get a chance to check out the kidnapper’s computers while April and I sat waiting awkwardly on the wide front porch. Thanks to his regular work with identity thieves, Hanky was just as fast with a computer as he was with picking a lock and disarming angry teenaged girls with rocks.

Hanky’s time on the computer helped placate him after not being able to interrogate the kidnapper, much less even look the guy in the face, thanks to April and her rock.

Turns out the man had made plans to sell April to a sex slave ring being operated out of Long Island, so he could get out of the debt he’d been in since he got laid off his job two years ago. I figured stuff like that only happened in other countries, not here. Showed what I knew.

After the cops came and whisked away April and her badly wounded kidnapper, I kept thinking about what April had thought when she saw me come charging into the house, my long hair and beard all slicked down with rain, belly hanging out of my Hawaiian shirt, mud on my flip-flops.

Panting for breath, just from running from the car to the front door.

Me, a bad guy. Me, someone who every day ate the crappy food that nobody else loved, bland food or food with an off taste to it, just so I could get by without picking up someone else’s thoughts or feelings. Me, a guy who had helped find almost five dozen missing people in the past twenty years.

There was something else I needed to find. A couple things, actually. If a young girl like April could find the steel in her to take out a man twice her side with just a rock, I could muster up the willpower to get my own shit together, before all this food I was eating killed me.

I couldn’t blame these extra two hundred pounds all on my job, either. It was me, something inside of me, that always felt hungry, never satisfied.

Along with my willpower, I’d need to find my good walking shoes, too.

I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be anywhere near as easy as finding Buddy the lost dog.

The End

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Finders, Keepers.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

Here’s a story about brothers and what it means to truly disappear…

Finders, Keepers

As far as Mark Rasmussen was concerned, the only really good things about living in Newport that summer were the buried glass balls on the beach and the slumgullion chowder at Maggie’s Place.

If all went well, he’d add playing football to that list, but two-a-day practices didn’t start for another two months, and school the week after that. He had a lot to accomplish before then.

He was going to jog three miles a day, lift weights like a madman, maybe make some friends. And most importantly, help his big brother Dennis find more of the tiny glass globes buried up and down the ragged, rocky coastline that formed the western border of their new town.

“No way am I bothering with these hicks,” Dennis had confided in him on their drive out in the U-Haul. Dennis was going to be a senior this year, and as always, he got the preferential treatment from Mom and Dad by getting to drive the second moving truck. “Less than a year here, and I’m back home at Portland State, sucka.”

“And where’s that leave me?” Mark blurted out as he swayed back and forth, the smells of burnt oil and dust stuck in his nose.

Dennis hit the brakes as they passed out of the cool shade of eighty-foot pines into blinding sunlight on their way west through the Coastal Mountain Range. The two-lane road disappeared on them for a few crazy seconds in the unexpected flash of brightness.

He flicked his light brown hair off the tops of his prized pair of sunglasses and tried to act cool, but Mark saw how tightly he was gripping the truck’s steering wheel.

“Shit outta luck at the coast, buttmonkey,” Dennis answered at last. “Sorry.”

The sun went behind a wad of gray clouds, the truck bounced and swayed down the road, and Mark’s ears popped. By the time they made it down from the mountains, a dull, persistent rain had started, and neither of them had said another word.

* * * * *

The next few weeks were busy with unpacking and wandering around town. The dull roar and wind of semis and pickups running up and down narrow Highway 101, just inches away from the sidewalk where Mark jogged. It reminded him, in a somehow comforting way of the downtown buses and the train back in Portland. Sickly sweet exhaust burned in his mouth, down his throat, and all the way to his lungs, but he never let up.

At home, Dennis was quiet and mopy, but not quite as bitter as that day in the U-Haul.

Mark thought by mid-June that things were going to be all right with his abnormally grumpy older brother.

Until the day at the beach when Dennis took a swing at him.

While Mom and Dad were at their new jobs, Mark and Dennis scuffed along in the water-packed gray sand close to the churning waves, sometimes climbing onto and hopping from one set of humpback-sized rocks to another. They watched the beach fill up with tourists—mostly elderly and families with little kids—the farther south they walked.

Mark kicked off his old pair of running shoes, and soon his wet toes started to go numb.

Dennis wanted to argue that day. Droning on like the low thump and slap of the tide next to them, he grumbled about whose fault it was that Mom and Dad had lost their house back in Portland.

Foreclosed—such a weird word. Mark said it wasn’t anybody’s fault, just the stupid economy. Dennis said it was due to Dad’s slack work ethic at the software company. When Mark tried to retort, Dennis’s response was to aim a punch at the back of Mark’s head.

That one swing was all Dennis got.

Dennis was taller by two inches, but Mark had been filling out in the past year, losing his baby fat at last. And he’d been lifting weights every other day, prepping for the football season.

Mark grabbed Dennis’s punching arm as it came at his skull and yanked it over his left shoulder, curling his body into a C without thinking. Dennis went up and over him, feet kicking out and a surprised shout bursting from his mouth. He landed on his back on the wet sand. Air went out of his lungs like a cough.

Mark didn’t even know what had happened for a good five seconds.

After hitting the ground, Dennis stayed down instead of coming back for more.

“Asshole,” Dennis coughed, wiping sand from his mouth. “Got lucky with that one, lard-butt.”

“Whatever,” Mark said.

His head was spinning at what he’d done. Cold water lapped in onto his already frozen feet, but he barely noticed. He felt like the lowly kicker who got called in with no time left on the clock to boot a forty-five-yard field goal to win the game.

He just took down his big, seventeen-year-old brother! Everything’s gonna change now. No more getting pushed around. No more shit about being too little to go and do what Dennis got to go and do.

People in shorts and long sleeved shirts walked past on the wide beach, peeling away from the incoming tide to give both Rasmussen boys a wide berth. It was a cool midsummer day, barely sixty, with the wind coming in off the water like a bludgeon. And Dennis was still down on one knee in the softer sand away from the water line. He was gazing at the gray sand flecked with tide-smoothed black rocks under him, looking like a too-tall toddler fiddling with his first sand castle.

I’ll wait ’til he gets up, Mark thought as he looked away. And we’ll both act like nothing happened.

Around them, the beach stretched a good hundred yards from surf to cliff, where smaller, older homes perched like painted cardboard boxes, with newer, bigger houses of more sturdy material awkwardly mixed in. Below the houses were the logs.

Ever since Mark had been a kid visiting the coast from the city, he’d always thought the fallen and burnt trees spread out all over the dunes had looked like dead giants. Soldiers of some ancient battle, cut down before their time.

He used to love hiding in them as a kid, so good that ten-year-old Dennis refused to play hide-and-seek with six-year-old Mark anymore. One trip, Mark had hidden himself so well under a fallen log that not even Mom and Dad could find him. He’d sunk into the sand enough to require six adult men to come lift off the log enough for his skinny legs to wriggle free.

Below him, Dennis still hadn’t gotten up.

Panicking for an instant, mouth suddenly dry, Mark took a step closer. Was he hurt? Or just trying to fake me out and get me to walk right into a sucker punch?

He was about to say something when he saw the purple globe in Dennis’s hand.

Dennis held it like a fallen baby bird, and it wasn’t much bigger than an orange. Maybe a plum.

As the globe caught the weak sunlight, it set off tiny shimmering reflections inside it that made the ball almost seem to be in motion. It looked like a painted globe representing some world other than Earth, or maybe even a large purple eye that never blinked.

Dennis’s own blue eyes glittered with genuine excitement as he picked wet, clinging sand off the little ball with a gentleness that Mark hadn’t seen much of in the past few months.

“What is it?” Mark whispered as the tide shushed in around him to flood his bare feet again.

“I tell you what it is, dumb-ass,” Dennis whispered, dragging his gaze from the palm-sized globe and giving Mark a goofy, manic smile. “It’s fucking magic, baby. Let’s go find some more.”

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Comfort and Joy.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This story was first published in The Raleigh News & Observer’s Sunday Reader, December 2002.

Comfort and Joy

Two things, and two things only, kept Lew Zimmerman from quitting his job at the toy factory.  The first was driving Marty Thier to and from work.

The second thing that kept Lew from quitting was his desire to get under Marty’s skin during their fifteen-minute trip through their sleepy hometown before and after work.  So far, after over two years of riding together, Lew hadn’t even come close to denting Marty’s round, peaceful exterior.

On a cold mid-December morning at half past six, Lew pulled up in front of Marty’s parents’ house with a warm box of a dozen donuts resting next to him.  He looked through his mostly-frosted-over windshield at the peaceful midwestern streets around him, grinned, and pressed the horn of his ancient Malibu.  When Marty appeared in the doorway, Lew cranked up a heavy-metal version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on his car stereo to accompany Marty on his way down the sidewalk.

Good morning neighbors, Lew thought, grinning madly.  I bring you hard-rock tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

Marty dropped into the passenger seat and clicked off the radio without a word.  Lew knew Marty hated the start of the work week, especially in the winter, so there had been donuts waiting every Monday for over a hundred weeks.  The box would lie empty on the floor of the Malibu by the time they rolled up to Plastico Toys.

“How’s the wife and kids,” Marty mumbled at last, pushing long black hair off his forehead as his breath turned to smoke in the cold Malibu.  It wasn’t really a question; it was just talk, a simple way to pass the time on the way to work.  Neither man had a serious girlfriend, much less a wife and kids.  Lew considered himself ahead of Marty, having recently found an old house north of town to rent.  In a few weeks, by the new year at the latest, he’d move out of his parents’ place at last.

Lew took a deep, icy breath.“Baby’s sick, junior’s got the runs, Momma ain’t talking to me, and the dog’s got a funny look in his eyes.”

Marty pushed the hair out of his eyes and inched up the corners of his mouth.  Not bad, Lew thought.  Usually Marty’s face was a mask of indifference all morning.

After rolling through a stop sign and making two more turns, they were there at the entrance to Plastico Toys.  Lew gunned the oversized engine of his Malibu, hating the sight of the faded blue building with the big “P” painted on its side.

Whistling tunelessly to try to raise his spirits, Lew huddled inside his winter jacket and followed Marty into the high-ceilinged factory.  Gray snow surrounded them in piles, like forgotten, unwashed laundry.

Once inside the factory, Lew pulled up short.  He felt like his ears had popped.  He paused for a second, and then strode through the double doors leading to the assembly lines.  At the time clock area, people in jeans and sweatshirts and workboots stood talking lowly, casting glances at the time clock.  As Marty approached it ticked to seven o’clock with an audible click.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Riverrun Alley.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This story was first published at MarsDust, July 2003. Watch for cameos from creatures and people from some of my other stories and novels!

Riverrun Alley

In the ramshackle slum of Riverrun Alley, just east of the City of All-Worlds, winter started early and stayed longer than an uninvited guest, and Tockle the otherworlder was beginning to doubt he’d ever see spring.  Perched on the edge of his sleeping mat, he tried to remember a day in his new world without bitter cold and searing wind.  But the tall blue being from Quantock was cursed with a painfully short memory, and he couldn’t remember what he had eaten last night, much less what life had been like before he entered the Portal that led to Subaridon.

Unfolding his body with a crackling like dead branches breaking, Tockle stepped outside of his hut and checked a wrinkled sheet of well-used paper with his day’s tasks scribbled on them.  He’d barely finished reading his first chore when one of the two Hagarupk brothers living in the shack next door ran into him.

“Tock!”  Grex shouted.  “What is doing today?”

“I have work to do on the Old Walls,” Tockle said.  He shivered and pulled his hood tight over his bald head. “Then I’m meeting a friend at Andros’ Bar.  If you help me, we can finish early.”  He gave Grex a weary smile, noticing the way the hairy boy was shaking—either hunger or withdrawal from the drugs he and his brother indulged in.  “And lunch will be my treat.”

“Deal,” Grex said, slapping Tock on the back harder than was needed.

With snow falling around them, Tockle and Grex walked south through the twisting paths of Riverrun Alley, waving and nodding to the other slum dwellers they passed.  South of the Zither River and east of the locked and guarded City walls, the Alley was a mish-mash of shacks, boxes, and lean-tos huddled together for warmth.  Dirt paths trickled and shifted around the parasitic growths of discarded wood and synthetic brown boards.  The only constants were the boundaries of the river and the City walls, and the lights of Andros’ Bar on the northern riverbank.

With snow falling around them, they arrived at Tockle’s work site after nearly a dozen references to his scribbled directions.  For two weeks’ worth of food, Tockle had agreed to break pieces of the Old Walls into gravel and haul the gravel the River.  He picked up a rock and began smashing.  There was always work to do, food money to be earned.

“Max has seller at West Gate,” Grex began, watching Tockle work.  “Seller put stuff under wagon, Max and buddies hit driver.  I grab Blur when driver not looking.  Funny stuff, huh?”

“I guess,” Tockle said.  Through the falling snow, he looked over at Grex’s furry smile and had to laugh from his front-mouth.  His side-mouths were inhaling deeply, helping him draw strength from the thin air as he laughed.  The heat from his exertions had chased away the cold and most of the bad feelings that had been haunting him since the start of winter.

Tockle knew the boys –- Max in particular -– were addicted to the pulse-tripping temptation of Blur, sold in the cheap southern taverns far from Andros’ Bar but close to the City walls.  Tockle could imagine the havoc the drug was wreaking on the boys’ bodies, making them move four to five times faster than their normal speed, their hearts racing as Blur kicked their nervous systems into overdrive.

“Why do you do it?” he asked Grex. “Take Blur, that is.  Isn’t there something better you could be doing?  Working, maybe, or helping the Guard?”

“Help King’s Guard?” Barking laughter, Grex almost fell off the chunk of ruined wall where he sat.  “Good joke, Tock.  King’s Guard help get Grex killed.”

Tockle slammed the big rock he held in his hands down onto another section of wall, disintegrating it.  The gravity of Quantock had been almost five times that of Subaridon.  “I’m not joking.  Keep using that stuff and it’ll kill you.”

Grex was silent and unmoving for a long moment, nearly the longest Tockle had seen him that way since they’d met that past summer.

“Why use the Blur?  To forget,” Grex said at last.  “To forget we never fight for Hagurupk back home.  To forget we stuck here, forever.  That why we Blur, Tockle.  To forget.”

Tockle stopped in mid-swing.  He felt a cold wind blow from the north, rushing down at them from the Herders’ Hills beyond the slum.  Looking up, he saw that the sun was at the top of the sky.

I am supposed to meet someone for lunch, Tockle thought suddenly, fumbling in his vest pocket for his paper.  Fertig.  Of course.

“Come,” he said.  “Lunch time.”

On their walk back through the Alley to the tavern at the northern edge of Riverrun Alley, as the cold came back to fill his bones with ice, Tockle could still hear Grex’s voice, clear in Tockle’s unreliable memory: That why we Blur.  To forget.

* * * * *

In the gray noon light, Tockle and Grex approached a ramshackle building lit from inside by lights of many colors, as if it contained fires of blue, green, orange, and red at every corner.  Dangling from the off-kilter front door was a sign reading “Andros’ Bar.”  Below the careful block letters of the tavern’s name were messages scratched in three different languages.  All three said “All beings welcome.  No credit.”

“Fertig!” Tock said, knocking his fist on the black wood of the bar in front of a tiny, squid-like being.  The glistening, three-foot-tall creature was perched on a box balanced on a bar stool.  “It’s good to see you again, my friend.  You remember Grex, of the Hagurupk?”

A ringlet of eyes turned to Tockle, and then looked Grex up and down.  Three of the creature’s six tentacles waved in Tockle’s direction, and then the creature picked up a shot glass of water and poured it over its oblong head.  Fertig the Squibble was in a mood.

“Ten minutes late,” Fertig squeaked, “and you bring this brute.  Last time I saw him, he and his brother were harassing the local traders and avoiding any sort of paying work.”

“Fertig,” Grex said with a growl.  “I growed up, huh?”

“Growed out is more like it, from the size of your gut.”

“Okay boys,” Tockle said, waving at Andros’ shadow behind the bar.  “Enough bickering.  Lunch is on me today.  And so are drinks, if you’re so inclined.”

“Gents,” a deep voice said.  A blue shadow outlined in glinting white light stood waiting on the other side of the bar.

“Drinks for my friends, Andros,” Tockle said, squinting to see the wraith-like tavern owner properly.  “I’d like to get three bowls of your best stew as well, along with a loaf of your grainiest bread.  And some extra water for the Squibble, if you please.”  Fertig and Grex ordered their drinks, and Andros slipped away.

Tockle turned to Fertig.  “So.  What’s news?”

Fertig did his best to shrug his non-existent shoulders, his tentacles rippling.  “The river might freeze solid if the cold keeps up.  Wouldn’t be good -– you heard about the wild dogs at this time of year?  They’re hungrier than us, and twice as mean as any Hagurupk.”

Grex waved him off and drank the ale Andros had silently placed in front of him.

“And it’s been snowing all week,” Tockle said.  The feeling of dread mixed with sadness from earlier that morning had returned.  “I don’t know how people can survive winters here.”

“Not much choice,” Fertig said, and Grex nodded for the first time in agreement.  “Though there’s always the celebration us Squibbles have in the River to look forward to, so long as it doesn’t freeze up on us.  Only five more days.”

“Celebration?”

Fertig dumped another shot glass of water over his head.  It soaked into his skin before it could reach the box or the barstool below him.  “Yeah.  We all get together to celebrate the shortest day of the year.  At mid-winter.  We get drunk, make wild Squibble love, and wrap our tentacles ‘round each other until the sun comes up again.”  He gave a squeaky laugh.  “Come on, Ol’ Blue.  Don’t you pay attention to the other races ‘round here?”

“I’ve been living in the City,” Tockle said, knowing how hollow his explanation must sound to his friends.  “Plus my memory’s not…”

“Not hardly there, yeah, I know,” Fertig said.  “Buy me another drink, will ya, Ol’ Blue?”

Tockle snapped four sets of fingers.  Ignoring the Squibble’s suggestion, he grinned at Grex and turned back to his small, tentacled friend.  “So tell me, Fertig.  How does this celebration work?”

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “What the Land Takes.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This is a story about loss and faith, and the lengths a person will go to save his land…

What the Land Takes

“I was three when the power takeoff assassinated my older brother. Like a hit man for the thirsty ground, the machine snagged my brother’s coat sleeve and ripped his eleven-year-old body from the ground. He spun like a top until all I could see was his blood in the air, forming a wall.”

This was one of the first stories my former neighbor told me, five weeks into the growing season a half-dozen years back.

“I sat on the ground not five feet away, unable to breathe. The blood of my big brother Jimmy—the boy I adored, even if he acted like my enemy half of the time, and called me dumbshit names like Froggy—his blood hung there in front of me, ripped from his skin by the spinning machine. The steaming wall of his blood hung there next to the idling tractor for what felt like an hour.

“Then the hot blood flew through the air and splashed onto me, burning me. I never screamed once, not even when Daddy came out of the barn and found me sitting there in the black dirt, all of three years old, holding a rectangle of wet fabric, all that was left of Jimmy’s heavy winter coat.”

My cans of beer went fast that night, the thirtieth anniversary of his big brother Jimmy’s death, but not as fast as my neighbor’s mugs of whiskey. We toasted his death, and my neighbor cursed his murderer, a killer without a face or a voice.

* * * * *

My neighbor used to live on the northern side of the corn and soybean fields, in a big white clapboard house on a farm that hadn’t seen a plow since the turn of the new century. Even while he was still living there, his fields were in the process of being reclaimed by rabid ditchweed, his house and barns floating on a sea of wild grass and rye, all his livestock long dead.

My neighbor was once a farmer, but when I knew him he was just a drinker and a talker. In that order. What he drank was cheap whiskey from the bottom shelf at the Pack ‘N’ Save in town, and what he talked about was how the land takes. How it takes and takes.

“It takes”—he’d explain in his low, slow voice—”our blood, especially that of our innocent children. And in return it gives us healthy crops, fat livestock, and peaceful towns free of crime. Simple lives, stained every few years with loss.”

Here he’d pause and take a long pull on his chipped mug full of Kessler’s. He exhaled a breath like diesel exhaust before he continued.

“People from other towns in other states probably wonder about the number of car wrecks, the farming accidents, the suicides in barns, but I’ll bet they never friggin’ ask about ‘em. It’s the land: it takes them away from us, and good working folk that we are, we absorb the pain and put it way deep inside us and harness the loss as best we can so we can continue. On the surface you could never tell that the piled-up years of devastation and heartache has hurt us so deeply.

“Greedy, the land took everything from me. You know this.”

And I would nod and drink my beer, brought over from my place in my dad’s slowly disintegrating Styrofoam cooler. I could stuff a twelve-pack in there along with a tray of ice cubes, and when it was empty, I’d sling it wet on my shoulder and walk home and try to sleep in my stale bachelor’s farmhouse, with its rooms full of old, unused furniture.

I was just a single guy who knew my neighbor needed a friendly ear, and I had two to spare. I’d be back over the next night, after the milking and the feeding and spraying and all the other endless chores of my day were done.

Then, almost two years ago, at the start of a rainy spring, things started getting weird. About once a week, my neighbor would leave late at night, after one of our talks had gotten him riled up. Most nights I’d be too pissed to do anything about it, and so I’d just let him go. But in what would turn out to be my neighbor’s last month here, I started following him.

I followed him across an eight-mile grid of ruler-straight gravel roads until we ended up at the sportsman’s fishing pond out in the countryside. He’d brought his canoe in the bed of his old, rattle-down truck, and a dozen sticks of dynamite.

Still reeling from all my beer, I watched him load the canoe with his sticks of dynamite and drag it to the edge of the twelve-acre pond. In minutes he was stretched out on his back in the middle of the water, as if his canoe had become a portable, lidless coffin. The moon was full enough to light him up in the water, but not bright enough to show me hunkered down behind the pussy willows at the edge of the pond.

I sat back and waited and watched everything in my vision dance. I listened to the whispers of the land bounce off the water surrounding me. I didn’t dare look away my neighbor, though I ached to fall back and stare instead at the stars as slowly marched past me. Heartless mosquitoes flew into my ears and eyes in a series of buzzing bombing runs.

While I just heard whispers on the wind and the splash and gurgle of the water, I imagined my neighbor hearing voices. He’d told me about the times he heard the land talking. Maybe it was, and I was just too damn ignorant to understand the language.

I closed my eyes, just for a second, and the suck of mud and splash of pond water and hiss of wind converged:

“Who… is next?”

Like a voice—hundreds of voices?—coming from under the pond, the clotted voices dripped into my ears like dew.

“Who will… sacrifice?”

I pressed my lips together, tempted badly to answer the land. But that way led to madness. I was just drunk, imagining shit.

“Who?”

I wanted to tell that voice that some of us escaped, people like my older sister, who moved to a city to the east after college. We lost most of our best people that way, leaving the town with the under-educated, the workers, the drinkers, the oblivious ones who don’t look for the connections in events the way I do. I missed her, but she was mostly dead to me anyway—too far away, never visiting. Coming back hurt too much, she always said, back when we used to talk.

“No,” my neighbor said at last, before I could speak. Just one little word, repeated. “No.”

At some point I’d ended up flat on my back, holding my breath. The land spoke again to my neighbor its mud-choked voice:

“Move. Go elsewhere, dry little man…” The grass crackled and hissed. “We don’t need you here.”

But the land didn’t understand, I thought. We’ve sunk our roots here. This was our home. We just want to live here and continue on like our ancestors. To survive.

As if following the land’s orders, I heard my neighbor splashing around in the canoe. I looked up and saw him paddling back toward the muddy of the pond shore. I rolled to my feet and stagger-ran back to my car before he saw me there.

He’s letting us down, I thought, the wind pouring in through my open windows as I downshifted on a gravelly straightaway. He didn’t rise to the land’s challenge. We were all betrayed.

* * * * *

“I knew my neighbor Marty for over thirty years before he shot himself in the face in his hay loft. Good guy, worked hard, loved to play cards, follow college football, and drink whiskey sours. We went to Catholic elementary school together, watching a few more nuns retire as we advanced each grade until they were all gone by the time we moved on to the public middle school and then high school, where we both squeaked by with diplomas.

“His eleven-year-old son found him in the barn. I could never forgive Marty for that.

“Like most others, Marty’s farm had been faltering in the past few years. I’d been living on my family’s land all my life, but I’d had to give up farming two years ago myself. I guess my brother’s blood only went so far in the uneven calculations of the greedy land.

“Far as I knew, Marty had never lost anyone in his life, so he and his family were due for some bloodletting. I hate to say it, but my theory fit his profile: when his bachelor brother took over the farm the next year, the corn shot up and the next month the cows gave out more milk than they had all summer. You couldn’t walk ten feet into his wheat fields without getting lost.

“After that, I took to sleeping in my truck most nights, preferring the quiet and the chill of the outdoors to the echoes and numbness in my empty house. The voices weren’t so loud out there. At least, not at first.”

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Takedown.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This is the second of my sports-related stories, both of which harken back to my teaching days in the midwest. Ah, the old days…!

Takedown

Far as I was concerned, the whole tournament was a foregone conclusion.

At five minutes past eight, in a mostly deserted gym, I swatted the rear end of my one hundred and twelve pounder and pushed him into the circle. My head throbbed, my mouth was dry, and the day stretched out ahead of me like a long drive across the plains. I fell into the cold metal folding chair next to the bright red mat as the referee dropped his hand to start the match.

“Stay low,” I said, saving my voice for later in the tournament.

An icy winter draft carried the antiseptic odor of mat cleaner around the gym, mixed with the warm smell of fresh doughnuts and hot coffee from the concession stand. Ignoring the match in front of me, where my wrestler was down by two already, I searched the bleachers for Sarah.

She had to be here. Sarah never missed any of her brother Mark’s matches. But all I saw were the dull faces of Pender farmers and their families sitting next to their sons—my team—watching the match, shouting encouragement.

No Sarah. I needed to find her and straighten things out from last weekend.

Before I knew it, Urbanec, my one-twelve wrestler, was down six to nothing going into the third period. He was a pretty good wrestler, had a good shot of making it through districts to state, but I was the only person in his life who ever pushed him. After the buzzer sounded, I slapped my fist into my hand and caught his eye, then pointed at the floor.

In the middle of the mat, Urbanec got down on his hands and knees, and his opponent placed one hand on Urbanec’s elbow and curled the other around his midsection.

The final period began with another buzz, sending a fresh wave of pain through my temples. I shouldn’t have gone out drinking last night with Johnson, the new English teacher at school. But he was the only other teacher my age here, and what else was there to do in Pender on a Friday night?

“Let’s go now,” I said to Urbanec, without really looking at him.

Sarah really should’ve been here by now. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flurry of skinny white legs, followed by the thump of bodies hitting the mat. Urbanec was on his back, struggling like a caught fish.

I jumped up, knocking the folding chair over with a loud clang.

“Bridge your neck!” I said in a loud voice, trying not to yell. I always lost my voice at these tournaments. Blood rushed and pounded in my head as I stepped toward the circle, where Urbanec was thrashing around on his back, lifting first one shoulder, then the other, kicking and grunting.

“Move, Urbanec! Don’t just—”

The referee slapped the mat once, hard.

From one corner of the gym, weak applause drifted over. Urbanec rolled to his feet, and the referee raised his opponent’s hand. Urbanec walked off the mat, angling away from me, his head down and his eyes blinking fast. Bud, my assistant, handed him his warm-up and patted him on the back with a pudgy hand.

I took a deep breath and stepped close to the skinny little sophomore, ignoring Bud.

“Don’t cry. He caught you. You’ve got to keep your weight back, and fight like crazy when you’re on the bottom. And bridge when you’re on your back. I told you that a million times.” I looked up and glimpsed light blond hair in the stands. “It’s okay,” I said, squeezing his bony shoulder. “Get ‘em next time.”

Stepping around the mats, warm-up clothes, medical kits, and jump ropes that littered the gym floor, I headed toward my team’s campsite in the west bleachers. Unfamiliar faces from other schools glanced at me for half a second, then looked away when they didn’t recognize me.

In our corner of the stands, four of my wrestlers leaned back onto duffel bags and pillows, half-asleep again now that the match was over. Oberg and Hentges were talking to their parents, and Mr. Hentges rubbed his son’s head and laughed his loud, braying laugh that drew rude looks from the other school’s team camped next to us. My headache intensified.

All alone, Mark sat listening to his headphones. Underneath his red warm-up hood, his face was pale and colorless from starving himself all week to make weight, which he did—barely—this morning at the seven a.m. weigh-ins. He held a bunched-up Subway wrapper in his hand that I could tell he didn’t want me to see.

His mother sat behind him, alone, and she looked away when she saw me. Sarah wasn’t there, but I knew I’d seen her. Instead of sitting down, I crossed the gym again, dodging other coaches and athletes and parents, and made my way to the concession stand. I’d kill anyone who got in the way of my cup of coffee this morning.

“Andy,” a voice said from behind me. “I really don’t want to argue with you today. I just came to watch Mark wrestle.”

“Sure. No problem.” I turned, and my headache vanished when I saw here.

Sarah wore a red Pendragons sweatshirt, the dragon mascot looking less menacing over the soft curves of her chest. A clip at the top of her head held up her light blonde hair. She wasn’t smiling, but she still looked good. I loosened my tie and waited for her to say something more.

She folded her program in half, then folded it in half again. “Come on,” she began. “I meant what I said last weekend. I just need some time for myself and school.”

“Don’t give me that tired shit again,” I said, my voice gravelly and low. She pulled her body back the tiniest bit when I swore, glancing behind her quickly. “If you don’t want to see me, tell me why. Don’t give me excuses.”

Sarah watched me with her head turned slightly while I talked, as if trying to gauge how upset I was. In the gym, a coach yelled instructions to his wrestler in a desperate voice, sounding like a frantic mother.

She dropped her eyes and turned toward the gym doors. “Let’s talk later. I need to get back and watch Mark wrestle.” She stopped and looked at me again. “And anyway, aren’t you supposed to be in there coaching your team?”

“Fuck the team,” I said, knowing she would wince. Sometimes I had the need to get the last word, whether the conversation was over or not. Her blue eyes became narrow and guarded. “Bud can handle them. You and I need to clear this up right now.”

Sarah walked off before I could finish. Her long legs carried her back into the gym, leaving me alone again. The coach continued yelling inside the gym, and I hoped someone was listening to the poor guy. I licked my dry lips and glanced at the two teenage boys who had arrived to work at the concession stand. They were watching Sarah leave, small smiles on their faces.

I slapped a dollar on the counter and squinted at them when they jumped.

“A large coffee, please.” My eyes felt dry and sore. The first boy, wearing faded jeans and his school’s football jersey, filled a Styrofoam cup from a big thermos.

“Don’t grow up, you guys,” I said. “Stay young, and stay out of trouble.”

Grinning uncomfortably, the boys didn’t say anything back.

I grabbed my coffee, listening to the desperate coach’s voice in the gym fall when a sharp whistle blew.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

Nothing beats the December cold like a trip to the North Carolina coast for some wreck-diving, ghost pirates, and a spark-flying romance.

For the entire month, you can buy the ebook version of Heart’s Revenge for just $.99 from the following distributors:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• DriveThruFantasy
• Smashwords

You can also get the trade paperback version for just $10.95 from Amazon and CreateSpace.

So why should you take a chance on Heart’s Revenge?

The book pulls together three of my favorite themes, plus one new theme that I wanted to experiment with. The first theme is that of a normal person thrust into a strange, possibly supernatural situation — that would be Ella, a Maritime Studies professor headed to Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina, in search of a shipwreck and the mysteries it may hold. The second is an exotic locale — tiny Ocracoke Island. The third is a mystery — not just about this shipwreck, but the lost souls from the ship from centuries earlier.

The new theme for this book was that of (deep breath) romance. Ella and her divemaster, Mitch, immediately butt heads as soon as they meet. But there’s that strange, unexplainable attaction…

I have to admit, that part was a lot of fun to write.

Finally, just like November’s Novel Launch book, this novel has ghosts. Not just any ghosts, either. We’re talking about some pirate ghosts, including the ghost of one of the most infamous buccaneers of all time.

And he’s missing his head…

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “Home Court Advantage.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

Parts of this story are based on actual events, but I’m not saying which parts. Enjoy!

Home Court Advantage

The zebra shirt was too big for me, stretched out by the previous wearer’s wide back and sagging belly. I tucked in the shirt past my underwear and hung the whistle around my neck, the impression of someone else’s teeth still denting the rubber that covered the metal of the whistle. Almost time for the big game.

McNeil, the school principal and my boss, had grabbed me after lunch, talking with the fast, loud voice he used with disruptive students.

“Listen,” he’d said. “Neither of my refs can make it tonight. Would you do it for us, Johnson?” He had started walking away as soon as my head had begun to nod. As the only first-year teacher at Bancroft Public School, I didn’t have much choice but to agree.

“By the way,” he’d yelled, already halfway down the hall, “we’re playing ‘Bago.”

I stepped out into the gym wishing I could’ve had time to get my knee brace from my apartment. A cold breeze blew in from the side door, drying the light sweat that had broken out on my arms. Two junior high kids from Bancroft tossed around a wadded-up ball of used making tape on the home side, the ball getting away from them and bouncing down the length of the empty wooden bleachers.

On the other half of the gym, the Winnebago side was already full. Little brown-skinned kids ran around the edge of the worn, uneven court, while stocky dark-haired men and women sat knee to knee and hip to hip, talking loudly and punctuating their conversations with laughter. At the top of the bleachers, squinting at their grandsons warming up on our worn wooden floor, old Native American women and men leaned against the wall.

I nodded at Mr. Davidson, our business teacher and the clock operator for the game.

“Look who’s wearing the stripes! Welcome to the big time, Steve.” He laughed with a coughing, grating sound, and then his voice lowered a couple of notches. “You’d better not miss anything out there, rookie. Both sides might scalp you if you flub a call or don’t —”

A cheer from the visitors’ side drowned out Davidson’s final words of wisdom as one of the Winnebago players barely missed a dunk during a lay-up drill.

A deep, laughing voice yelled, “Way to go, Weaselhead!”

I wondered if that last bit was an insult or the kid’s last name. It was all still fairly new to me.

I grabbed the game ball from behind the scorer’s table and carried it to the center of the court. McNeil stood there, arms folded, wearing the stripes as well. He must not have had any luck recruiting any of the other teachers.

Either that, or he wanted to be in charge of this game. The two towns of Bancroft and Winnebago were only fifteen miles apart in eastern Nebraska, and I’d heard that the rivalry had grown more intense over the past years. I remembered the wide-eyed stories my students told me in study halls about the flagrant drug use in the reservation schools, and how someone from Bancroft got jumped after a football game at Winnebago.

Talk like that was all I had to go on here: second-hand stories and stereotypes passed on from one generation to the other. I should have been a substitute teacher in Omaha.

“We about ready to go?” I asked, slouching a bit as I looked down at him. McNeil nodded, not smiling as he shifted his weight from foot to foot, his dark eyes scanning the visitors’ side. He was five inches shorter than me and squat and muscular, like a fullback. Discipline wasn’t a problem here in our little Nebraska school.

I turned to watch the six members of the Winnebago varsity shoot lay-ups. They wore plain yellow windbreakers with their school name on the back, and all of them had their black hair pulled back into ponytails.

Waiting in line to attack the basket, standing still, they didn’t look like much of a team. But once they sprang into motion, they moved fluidly and gracefully, guiding the ball with ease across the floor and through the net. I’d never seen anyone move like these six kids did, at least not up close. I suddenly thought of war paint and buffalo hunts, and I brushed the stereotyped visions away like mosquitoes.

Hurrying to beat the final buzzer before tip-off, the band launched into a shaky, rushed version of “Jingle Bell Rock.”

I winced at the sour notes. Today had been the last day of school before Christmas break. If it weren’t for this game, I’d be visiting my old hometown many miles to the east with my parents and the rest of my family, not risking my knee here on our school’s warped hardwood.

Davidson hit the horn when the song ended, and both teams jogged to the sidelines. After an even more rushed “Star Spangled Banner” by the twenty-odd members of the school band, the Bancroft players tore off their breakaway pants and blue pullover tops and kicked them under the bleachers. I swiveled my head and watched the Winnebago starters carefully unzipped their windbreakers and placed them in a neat pile on the bench.

The starters formed a circle at midcourt and waited for the tip-off, glancing from ball to opponent and back. I wiped a track of sweat that had suddenly popped up on my forehead and caught an odor of sweat and deodorant from the circled athletes.

For a second all the players tensed, then McNeil tossed the ball into the air. Joel from Bancroft batted it to Matt, who leaned into number eleven from Winnebago and tried to take him one-on-one.

Eleven bumped Matt with his body, but not enough to earn a foul; I wanted to let them play. Matt shot and missed, and Winnebago rebounded. McNeil and I trailed the ten boys to the opposite end of the court.

By the end of the first eight minutes, Bancroft led eighteen to fifteen. There was more banging around and pushing close to the basket than I could handle, and I ended up calling two fouls on the home team, two on the visitors. Eleven had both of Winnebago’s fouls.

My knee was holding up, but I was getting winded from all the whistling and running. McNeil hadn’t called any fouls, and he glared at me every time he heard my whistle.

The home side was half full when Warren, the Bancroft coach, called time-out. He was working the Bancroft crowd, trying to pull some noise from the hometown factory workers and farmers just now coming in after a long day of work. Most of the men leaned back against the bleachers behind them as if they were at home in front of the television, silent but watchful.

The Winnebago side never relented with their cheering and clapping. The drafty old gym was getting warm.

Inbounding after the time-out, Matt threw a baseball pass upcourt to Travis, who stood waiting at the three-point line. Just as Travis shot, fifty-three swung his arm up in desperation, but instead of hitting the ball, the palm of his hand landed on Travis’s nose.

I ran over, whistling like a madman. Fifty-three stared at Travis’s bloodied nose without moving, his mouth partly open.

I almost wrenched my knee pulling Matt away from the taller Winnebago player. For a second I thought about calling a technical foul on fifty-three, but it looked like the big guy had just lost control of his long arms.

McNeil thought otherwise. As I bent over Travis, motioning for the manager to bring some towels and water over, McNeil formed a T with his thick hands.

“Technical foul on five-three,” he yelled, glaring at the tall Winnebago player.

The Winnebago side blew up. Their angry voices reminded me of the crowds at some of my college games a few years go, in places twenty times bigger than this crackerbox gym.

A huge Native American, his black hair braided down his back, walked onto the court, yelling “What?” over and over. He towered over McNeil. Someone behind him threw a bag of popcorn onto the court. He looked ready to take a swing at McNeil.

Without even pausing, McNeil strode up to the big man and gave Winnebago another technical.

“Stay off the court or this game is over!” his voice boomed over the mayhem of voices, and the crowd quieted down. McNeil had a reputation among the three reservation schools in the area, ever since a legendary bar brawl just outside the reservation when he was my age. Someone in the brawl had ended up in the hospital with a concussion and a detached retina.

I was supposed to be intimidated, like all the other teachers were.

Kicking popcorn out of his way, McNeil turned his back on the visiting crowd and marched Matt to the foul line to shoot the free throws from the two technicals.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.

Also, before I forget, I’ve updated my UnWrecked Press online store to allow you to buy PDFs of my novels, the comic I wrote with artist Niki Smith, and more, directly from me. Go on over and give it a try. (Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to put these bundles online as PDFs, so you’ll need to use your other favorite online ebook store for those!)

Here’s my latest (and last) bundle o’ digital stories:

Contemporary Fantasy Five-Pack: Includes “Skidmark and Mudbeam,” “Finders, Keepers,” “Family, New and Old,” “Finder,” and “Another Way of Disappearing.” Save two dollars off the “cover price” of buying each story individually!

Also, you can read a couple stories in the bundle before they get their own individual ebook. Because that’s how I roll.

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

Halloween Six-Pack: Includes “Black Angels,” “One Night in Rosecroft,” “Disillusionist,” “Painting Haiti,” “Never, Incorporated,” and “A Tale of Two Shits.” Save all sorts of money instead of buying each story individually!

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

Science Fiction Five-Pack: Includes “Working the Game,” “The Death Sentence,” “Unplugged,” “Remainders,” and “The Deck.” Save two dollars off the “cover price!”

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

High Fantasy Four-Pack: Includes “An Outrider’s Tale,” “Heart and Map, Ink and Blade,” “The City of All-Worlds,” and “Meet the Madfeet.” Save a dollar off the “cover price” of buying each story individually!

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

Dark Fantasy Five-Pack: Includes “Gunning for the Buddha,” “Natural Order,” “Visions of Suburban Bliss,” “Coal Ash and Sparrows,” and “Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies.” Save two dollars off the “cover price” of buying each story individually!

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

What Was Left Standing: Four Stories: Four interconnected stories about rough lives, tough choices, and bittersweet loves. Includes “Peterson & Son Automotives,” “Waiting for Joey,” “After the Storm,” and “What Was Left Standing.”

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.

Triplets: Brief Tales of the Future, Futility, and Family: Three short-shorts about a pair of futures that we hope will never be, and a past that’s shrouded in failed memories and exaggerated bravado. Includes “Zeppelin Women,” “Snakebite and the Sea,” and “Origins.”

• eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Barnes & Noble.