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Diana After Dark – Chapter 10 ‘I call him D’

Gonna keep this real short and sweet today, I woke up feeling like amy schumer fell on me. It must just be a mix of pushing myself really hard with the weight lifting and maybe too much staring at screens or not drinking enough. But I don’t see how it could not be not drinking enough because I literally drank three whole litres of green tea yesterday, don’t ask me how I know that but I did.

So yeah I feel like the inside of amy schumer’s toilet bowl today. Maybe not that bad, maybe the rim of of her biddy. Which is worse, I don’t know. Too shitty feeling for jokes, I just want to retire to the dark with my protein shake and silence.

But I bring updates, I was supposed to be writing but I had no idea what, got talking to another south african lovecraft fan recently and I really should get back to writing that but I felt a real urgency to keep the Diana train rolling because I think she has a real shot.

So instead of writing lovecraftian stuff I decided to do the pitch doc and query letter drafts for Diana After Dark. A lot more effort went into this and I’m pretty pleased with it and the blurb I think is probably the best I’ve ever done. You be the judge, I’ll leave it below for your viewing pleasure.

That’s pretty much it, I went over the editing Chrissy did up to now and I’ll wait for her to get enough done so I can make a complete pitch and then start sending it out to agents, see if I can’t get this thing off the ground. Although I think even if this book doesn’t get me attention from an agent I might just do another one and try to get that picked up as a series because I have some really good ideas for a second and third and even a fourth instalment.

That’s about it, 

See you…

Diana Harrison is the girl next door but be thankful she doesn’t live next door to you.

 Under her shy pretty girl exterior lives something a lot darker.

 

On the surface Diana is a happy go lucky senior at university high California. smart, funny and will laugh at all your bad jokes. She has a strapping boyfriend and a terrific grade point average. she seemed to have everything going for her. But her bold future is tested by a dark fascination with serial killers that borders on obsession.

Although some might find that strange and may not want to invite to their house party or to the prom she manages to keep her desires a secret.

However, when a real killer moves to town her inner and outer worlds begin to collide. A series of strange dreams and some haphazard internet snooping has landed Ditzy Diana in between the sights of the real thing and now she has no choice but to ‘come and see’…

 

~

Cutting out a lot of walking through bland bleached white halls. Not too dissimilar from the inside of a hospital complete with the smell of death and cleaning products. Here I was waiting in an ‘interview room’. It was sort of a bland egg shelled colour and it smelled vaguely of crayons.

It was just a square room that could have been an empty storage closet but for the table and chairs. There was no long two way mirror, just a camera, I was sure was on. But they would see nothing of interest, no tell or wink or talking to myself. I was without guilt of any kind, incapable of feeling it in fact and as far as I knew actually innocent of any crime larger than an overdue library book. My fantasies aside I was a pretty solid citizen, on paper. That was as far as I knew. Two or probably thirty minutes from now a detective could walk in here with a video of me robbing a jewellery store wearing the barmaids head as a hat.

I’m sure I’d look quite surprised, then again maybe not. I had dwelled on the possibility that the dark back seat driver might have been taking me around for a spin in the wee hours of the night. Slipping his driving gloves on and sidling over into the front seat while I was away with the faeries. But it seemed fanciful even for me. Although it would explain why I feel so rundown recently, I could just be getting my period.

I was about to delve deeper into another dark daydream when the seal on the door behind me was broken. I turned awkwardly to watch detective Cartwell saunter in looking down at a bland manila folder as if I hadn’t been waiting at least an hour at this point. Sipping a hot cup of coffee probably one of many. Our tax dollars at work.

There was something I liked about this place though. There was something beautifully impersonal about everything I saw. Men and women in and out of uniform shuffling about in a trance pretending they belonged, all separated out in little cubicles and cubies. The smell of justice a dank bitter smell like burnt coffee and cigarette butts. People brought together working towards something that could never truly be but was worth their time anyway. Like a maid constantly making a bed for others to sleep in only to have to make it again the next day. Making order from so much chaos, what a daunting task, I liked it.

He looked up at me like he didn’t expect me to be in here causing deep creases to form on his smooth chocolatey forehead. He then proceeded to slap the folder on the table as if it had pictures of the Kennedy assassination from an until now unseen new angle. My money was on Jackie this time around. Maybe it was the butler with the candle stick.

He took a sip of his coffee, waiting to say something, this whole thing I guess was to soften me up, let me stew, all protocol I was sure.

I could have said something, that was sort of the point of me being here. But I felt it impertinent to be the first one to talk in this situation, surely that would break some sort of criminal code. At least let the cop ask a question before you spill the beans entirely.

So I sat, adjusted myself in my seat a little bit and looked at him as he continued to look down and sip his coffee. I cleared my throat quietly, readying myself.

“Do you know why you’re here” He asked some, I was assuming, very guilty looking coffee granules at the bottom of his cup.

“Err” Eloquent as always. “Something to do with the heads in the lockers?” I asked myself, the words tiptoeing out playfully. The heads seemed like a distant memory now, a memento from a special day I never got to keep, I didn’t even keep the ball. Maybe I could still get it out of the trash.

He made a face at his coffee like he got all the way to the bottom only to discover the body of a fly in a set of tiny Bermuda shorts.

He looked up at me with half lidded eyes and made a sucking noise with his teeth before setting the empty cup down. The sound of the empty cup touching down on the table echoing went right through me. We had so much in common.

He then readjusted himself in his seat and made a sighing noise like he was about to open some grand grimoire of Diana’s mistakes past and present. A catalogue of all my thought crimes recorded for all to see. Probably even had my tween fascination with Justin Bieber and Edward from twilight in there too. That would have been truly incriminating. Especially if he found my adolescent fan fic shipping the two. My mind was wondering trying to distract from the dark hissing noise. A black punctured tire whispering to me in that mock reflection of my own inner voice.

A quiet siren ripping through the dark foggy depths of the ghost town called Diana.

He opened the file and split his lips as he looked at me, flipping a Photostat copy of a picture over in my direction.

In it; a blurry night still from a security camera, the vague outline of a hummer pulling out into the night.

“That picture was taken from a gas station security camera of a car fleeing the scene of the latest Headsman murder.” I don’t know what was more shocking, the picture or the fact not even the police could decide on a definitive name for him, Head-hunter, headsman, pick one.

I looked up at him and gave him my best teenage ‘so what’ face. Trying both not to look completely blindsided and also trying not to open my eyes wide enough for him to see that there was nothing behind them. Too much emotion, and too little would both be mistakes, what a tight rope I walk, how I envied Manson. He’d just make a funny face and say something vaguely intelligible.

“I- err” Great work Diana, you’ve got him eating out of the palm of your hand.

“Now what would be the chances that you would be the one to find those heads.” He sat back in his chair laying out some figurative diorama of events with his hands on the table separating us. “And only a day later photographed leaving the scene of another murder in your boyfriends car- and that is your boyfriends car isn’t it?” The question was mute, devoid of any inclination of doubt. He slid a few more pictures across the desk, these ones were less blurry. Different angles of the car even a nice shot from the front, my ghostly white face projecting through the tinted glass windshield. So alien looking, that whole night slid past me, I didn’t remember any of the drive back, just got filed away, burnt in a fire. He could show me cell phone footage of me drinking someone’s blood and flying away on a broomstick next and I would have shrugged. My heart was pounding now, jumping up and down. I could feel something rising, but it was slow and pleasant like the steady beat of Wagner through paper thin apartment walls.

Termites crawling through drywall, making a steady humming sound of tiny feet.

“You want me to believe this is a coincidence?”

That would be helpful. But neither of us were that dumb. I started to feel small and put upon like I was sitting in the principal’s office and I was about to be ambushed by my parents. Who would inevitably take the side of law and order and all things good and abandon poor Desecrated Diana.

I didn’t say anything, they can’t give you the electric chair if all you do is nod and drool. Was there a precedent for that?

“That’s you on those tapes.” He said it defiantly almost as a question. But there was something in his voice and the way he pointed and moved his head. Pointing at an imaginary VCR that made me think he didn’t really want to believe it. He didn’t want evil to be this cute. Something about that really troubled him.

I shrunk a little more away from him into my own little world.

He readjusted and sighed making some exaggerated face wiping gesture with both hands. As if he’d been the one waiting in here all this time to be accused of multiple murder that you probably didn’t actually do. “Look-

I don’t think a teenage girl is capable of all- that.” He said now with an air of divine leniency, a saint ready to let the sinner have a quick and merciful death instead of a long awkward one sitting atop a dull pike lathered in goose fat. “But I think you know something, I think it could even be someone at your school- your boyfriend maybe?” He nodded at me he was fishing now, the fight he had a moment ago, the hot spark of discovery was gone. He must have thought I would throw up or burst into tears when I saw the photos, not stare blankly at them hiding the rising tide of- something.

An air of almost perfectly crafted indifference. “I was just-“ Yes? “My boyfriend was taking me for a driving lesson” Weak Diana, that is terrible.

“At two O’clock in the morning, through central city?” He scoffed.

Oh Jesus, I was better off as the strong silent type, I should have asked for a lawyer, no that would have made me look ten times guiltier, don’t you watch TV?

Just as the silence between us had elongated to an incredibly unpleasant cacophony. The door opened again with the sound of Tupperware popping and the head of a tiny red-haired woman poked around it.

“Cartwell, captain Hughes wants to see you in his office”.

“I’m in the middle of an interrogation”

I thought this was the ‘interview room’ that’s false advertising!

“He says it can’t wait” The woman said.

He got up without saying another word, just a gasp or another sigh and a quick searching glance in my eyes, he’d find nothing and that’s what scared me the most. An odd expression crossed his face like he’d suddenly realised he’d been talking to a Burmese python this entire time. And I was just waiting for him to lie down and stop wriggling so I could unhinge my jaw and fit him footways into my mouth.

“Excuse me for a minute” He said before awkwardly angling himself around the desk, almost like he was trying to jump over it.

“Err” I said.

I waited for another ten or twenty minutes, trying not to look up at the camera or blurt out anything incriminating. Now that I thought about it I couldn’t even muster a confession. All the events leading up to this point were so disjointed. Despite actually being there, I doubted I could relay it in any particular order that made any sense. Not without needing to talk to a priest first.

I sighed, saddened by the fact even if he did rake me over the coals for hours and break me I wouldn’t even make enough sense to muster an insanity defence. Despite the fact I technically didn’t do anything but I had nothing really to bargain with either, no names to give no hard evidence. It crossed my mind to throw them Wendy like some sad tired over made up life preserver. Then remembering I still didn’t have any of that evidence they loved so much. It would just be a pathetic witch hunt spurred by a false confession based on ‘women’s intuition’.

Just as I was starting to feel sorry for myself and think of ways I could maybe accessorize or dye my hair in a toilet to go with an orange jump suit. Cartwell came bounding in looking a little flustered. He looked stolid, hiding a streak of glacial anger, like he’d received a swirly for good behaviour and was now looking to take it out on someone small and cute.

He stood aside from the door and made a flat dull donkey-like face. “You’re free to go”

“Err, whu-?” Kill me now.

“Word from on high is you’re a state case, I can’t touch you” He said it like I was covered in bugs or something to that effect.

A shard of glass came off my back and I felt a distinct shiver, what did that mean? Was I supposed to know? Was it the FBI? I just did a little harmless amateur hacking I swear, it’s not like I back doored the pentagon.

He cocked his head to the side motioning to the door and I got up awkwardly picking my heart up off the floor. Bundling out of the opening brushing past him as he held it open.

Something like a restrained growl coming from inside. A hushed pained yelping from a wounded dog was there something sharing space inside the good detective? Probably not, not everyone is a nutty serial killer Diana, get over yourself already.

I breezed down the hall finding some air in my lungs and some blood in my legs, it felt like I hadn’t used them in hours. I walked up and down feeling a little lost. I remember there being a bunch of surfer dudes busted for partying too hard. Trying to start the party all over again in the hallway cuffed to a bench. They were gone and the hallway was empty and samey looking, a graveyard quietus holding me in place.

An alien noise erupted from my purse and I jumped like an idiot in a slasher movie, it’s just your phone Diana.

I closed my eyes smoothing out my shirt and taking a deep calming yoga breath putting the phone to my ear.

“Diana?” The rugged voice said.

“You called me” I answered.

“You see you do need me after al.l” Brodsky croaked, a hoarse hissing laughter eking out like the sound of two planks rubbing together.

“You got me out of there?”

“What, don’t want to know how some OC detective who couldn’t find his ass with two hands and a Sherpa got his mitts on that footage. And only a few days after the incident in question?” He cleared his throat, it needed a lot of clearing “Warrants have to be issued subpoenas given out, it can take weeks. How would he even know to look at that stretch of road or that gas station in particular? He’d have to look at the security footage of a five block radius of the house. And why would he even bother for some low life gangbanger?”

“So it was you, you’ve been shadowing me?”

“Not me personally, I don’t get around so good anymore. I can help you or I can bury you under so much red tape you’ll wish you were dead. Do we understand each other?”

“You brought me here”

“I brought you here and with one phone call I can keep you here for as long as I want.”

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want and I think I know what you want.”

“I’m working on it” I said.

“Good”.

A few days of inaction passed, school, home, sleep. That process continued on for a short time until the weekend got the better of me. I realised procrastination was getting me nowhere and prom was getting ever closer. So now, as fortunes would have it Dumb Dawdling Diana found herself snugly entombed in the cool dank dark of the fairly roomy trunk of a Lincoln town car. Black as far as I can remember, terrible for this heat.

Maybe I should have been more alarmed but I was too busy listening for the turn and feeling the speed bumps to think about my immediate future. Muffled voices of inane pleasantries exchanged, you’re regular ‘How do you do’s’ and all that, ‘isn’t the weather lovely, what a nice day for a vivisection’. And then a mechanical noise of a gate rising, engine biting and rising and nosing through the gate.

I waited for a moment for them to clear the checkpoint. It was a five mile zone in this neighbourhood so I opened the trunk and stepped out quick and low and braced into a walk as casual as Larry, whomever Larry was. ‘Yeah I live here, just an average girl walking her- nothing.’ Shit should have brought a leash or something, maybe a clip board and stick on tie to look official, life a teenage garden inspector.

Oh you thought? Dashing dark lit Diana trapped in a trunk by some dastardly dude? Nay, I mean no, not yet anyway. Not if I had anything to say about it.

It was just the slickest way I could think of breaking into a gated community unannounced.

I’m getting ahead of myself, what am I doing? I asked myself as I started to feel like I was walking aimlessly as my eyes adjusted to blaring mid-morning L.A sun. Forgot my sunglasses, who does that? Oh how I pity you, ditzy deadly Diana.

I felt pressed, moulded, pushed along by hands seen and unseen and possibly one cold claw. A little field trip was of vital import.

Wendy Vargas, my dear old pal and for all intents and purposes; blood sister, lived in a nice little three bed three bath Condo in the Anaheim hills. About a thirty minute drive from school in a gated community known as ‘Viewpointe north’. Very glitzy, I must say.

It was a Saturday, of course it was, you wouldn’t expect a solid citizen, model pupil like me to skip class to do what exactly? A drop of home invasion, some measured manslaughter perhaps? I could be so lucky.

I picked this day for two reasons, school being the latter. The former was that today I knew exactly where Wendy was going to be because I was meant to be there with her. Today was supposed to be early prep work for the senior prom which was only a couple of days away, now I thought about it. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

Just benign things like hanging up streamers and sticking up posters, she had the whole committee helping I’m sure she wouldn’t miss me. I already called in sick ahead of time and subsequently turned off my phone. Promising her I would be buried under a mound of sheets and clothes sweating out some summer cold. Hoping to be rid of it before the ‘really like seriously important dance’. If I had had a conscience this is the moment it would popping up like that little Microsoft paper clip; “It looks like you’re trying to break into your best friend’s house to look for evidence implicating her in a murder”.

Of course lacking any of those oh so human draw backs I walked the streets without a care. Almost considering whistling a happy tune as I strolled the carefully pruned lawns and shrubberies of the block looking for her house in particular.

It was a very nice neighbourhood, reserved only for state senators, criminal attorneys and, I guess one ex-sandwich shop magnate.

I had been to her house before of course, being best buds and all. I could probably make some excuse with the gate keeper guard guy, say I forgot my iPod or whatever at her house. ‘Oh please mister guard could I go get it?’ Batting an eyelid or even two. But then there’s the problem of signing in and out. There’d be a record of my coming and going and although I didn’t plan on leaving any evidence there was a good chance she’d be told that I was here. And that was something I was willing to climb into the trunk of strangers car to avoid. In case you were wondering how I knew where the car was heading, they all have these stickers on them. Sort of a sign of status but helps easily identify peoples cars at a distance. So then the guards can decide when walking up whether to put on the fake shit eating grin. ‘Good morning Mr rich asshole’ or the stern Pitbull scowl ‘fuck off Mr nobody guy, no one’s buying bibles today!’.

Even their mail must have been sorted through that booth. I wandered if they filtered their internet too, maybe they warmed their toilets seats before they sat down. Who was I kidding? Of course they had heated toilet seats, goes without saying.

Actually now that I thinking about it, it had been a while since I’d visited her, maybe as far back as middle school play dates. But even then I think that was just an excuse for my ‘Aunt’ to see how rich people lived. Larp as one for an afternoon while Wendy showed me her collection of ethnic Barbie’s from around the world. Even then I found that tiresome and I could only dream of sticking all the heads of her Barbie’s on the gate surrounding Casa de Barbie’s dream villa. Complete with a real working hot tub and sauna.

In all honesty she didn’t really interest me back then, we’d stayed in contact, this was all before the ‘unpleasantness’ that befell her father. After that quite coincidentally we reconnected in high school. No one really interested me if I was being ‘really’ honest, not any further than I wondered what their insides looked like. Even then I felt like a shaved fox walking the cramped halls of a battery farm chicken coop licking my lips and asking only ‘when?’

The answer to that question always a shrill and chilling ‘Soon’.

Always soon, never now.

I had of course tried to get the area up on google so I could ‘walk the streets’ so to speak but even my digital footprint was denied access. I guess google wasn’t even good enough to set foot on these hallowed grounds, how privileged I felt even breathing their air. It was sort of heady and crisp, maybe they had it pumped in from aspen. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The houses of course were all perfectly breath taking. Smooth and gorgeous like they’d all been cut from one piece of stone, just giant liveable sculptures, little Mount Rushmore’s. Each distinctly wonderful and in keeping with the high end aesthetic. Without falling into the trap of being carbon copies of the other, wouldn’t dream of it.

Sprawling but perfectly modest two story buildings with beautiful well-kept lawns on all sides. Without any fences or gates surrounding them. Why bother when all the riff raff are kept out by armed guards and probably dogs, lots of angry dogs.

Finally after a couple of minutes of half purposeful walking. That’s half ‘I belong here’ confident, a little arm swing, fleet of foot, ‘I have somewhere to be, don’t stand in my way’ and half ‘shit, I’m lost’, have you seen fluffy? Is this my house or? Have you been drinking in the morning again?’ I came across a house I was sure I recognised.

It was a large two story condo, a sandy almost salmon pink colour, something like lime sandstone maybe I dunno, I’m not an architect. High school kid remember.

A huge almost church window on the front of the second floor and a giant white garage door below it. Tastefully dusted with trees and shrubs with some spikey looking desert plants put in for good measure. Gave it an overall atmosphere of look but don’t touch, sadly I could not comply.

The front door was for some odd design choice not actually at the front but sort of tucked at an odd angle almost in the house’s elbow. With raised partition of walls on one side and the full structure of the house on the other. Which was decidedly to my advantage as it would hide my advance around the house. To anyone given to an idle glance it would just look like a little rich white girl walking to her front door and then disappearing into the splendour she so rightfully deserved.

I know what you’re thinking; ’really you’re going to break into a probably nearing five hundred thousand dollar house in the middle of the day. Guarded by a team of armed ex-army and moonlighting cops? Yes, yes I was. I was that stupid, that desperate.

Really, honestly, you think I wouldn’t think of a way round this? Ok yeah you’d be right. I was just hoping something would come to me in the time it took for me to walk up the drive and open the unlocked door. Holy crap, you have to be kidding me?

0

GS2 Chapter 12 ‘Liquid Swords’

Feeling kinda bleh today so gonna keep this short and bitter, just like me. Or how I like my coffee, I dunno, fuck it, you want wit go find some edgy mommy blogger.

I don’t really have any updates since my last blog, the problems of having them like a day apart, oh I did finish the first proofread of Gage so that is available to read in full raw on inkitt of which there is a link to below.

Gage

That’s pretty much it, just waiting on my now two editors to finish the work, but it looks like my new editor is about to lap my old editor, I really hate emailing people, or talking to people or texting people or looking at people *sigh*. Which is why I never leave the house although I now have the excuse that all the roads are snowed dead.

Now Gage is proofread, I think I’ll go back and finish that Lovecraft story I was writing and finish the plan for the sequel to the newly minted Deedee after Dark.

See you…

~

An aggravated swizel chair noise, the sound of expensive leather creasing under toned tightened butt cheeks. The sound of a zen garden water fountain and those clicky clacky things that go on your desk to help relieve stress, somehow.

 

A large flat screen tv on the wall showed aerial footage of a police station swarming with thousands of furries, distant fires burning.

 

“Woah woah, pause this, what the fuck am I look at here?”

 

“Sir that’s a live feed”.

 

Dan furrowed his brow looking up like a confused dog at his secretary Ms Palmer. A long straight women with angular features and uncommonly large breasts and dark hair. Hired for her angular intellect and the fact she resembled a living anime character. Complete with a set of frameless glasses and her dark hair tied up in a bun with those Asian pin things in them. A beauty mark like a full stop underneath a plump bottom limp lightly glazed with peach lipgloss.

 

“Huh?” He said narrowing his eyes.

 

“Erm, it can’t be paused.” She leaned forward, squeezing her breasts against a tablet she was hugging extenuating her words like she was talking to an idiot. “It’s happening right now sir.”

 

“… I know that!” He threw himself back into his high backed office chair sulking a little, wrinkling his expensive suit. “Get that bastard Evergreen on the phone now”. He said seething, his eyes half open.

 

His secretary unsheathed her tablet from her bosom almost popping her own bra off or breaking her back and started tapping away at it.

 

“On line one sir” She said calmly.

 

He leant forward and took a blue tooth headset off his desk and put it on his ear, just breathing into it.

 

On the other end Evergreen was in his darkened command centre in one of the hollowed out oil trucks lit only by the light of the monitors inside.

 

“What’s he saying?” Murray whispered.

 

“He isn’t saying anything” Evergreen said holding the phone away and covering it with his hand. He put the phone back to his ear and said “Sir-“.

 

“What the cowfucking Christ is going on?”

 

“Sir I-“

 

-“I turn away for two minutes to get a shiatzu and a happy ending from a thai sheboy. And when I come back the town I planned to dump a bucket of zombies on like a kid with one of those bucket water door pranks. You know the ones” He paused trying to decipher where that joke was supposed to land or if he even intended it as a joke. “This town not only already coincidentally has a zombie outbreak. But they’re all specifically furfags lead by a spoonbending liberachi lookalike. And on top of that there’s some fucking yahoo running around like John Wayne before the game’s even started. “ He paused to take in a breath

 

“Sir”

 

“And yes I saw the dykes with the giant tranny, they were pretty funny actually.” He had a think, lost his train of thought and came back. “Someone is fucking with us.”

 

“I think so” Evergreen said flatly.

 

“Hmm”

 

“KGB wolf, CIA jackal, take your pick, on the other hand it could be ‘personal’.”

 

“Personal? But everyone loves me” Dan said with no hint of credulity, not even a trace. Zero credulity found. He laughed “Ok then, I know what has to be done” He said grinning so Evergreen could feel it through the phoneline.

 

A drawn out silence.

 

“Your orders sir?”

 

“Everything”

 

“Come again sir?”

 

“EVVVVERRRREEEERRRYTHINGGGGG!!!” He screamed down the headset, veins popping out of his neck, spit flying over his tasteful desk. “I WANT THAT TOWN WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH! SEND EVERY FUCKING THING WE’VE GOT! EVERYTHING THAT CRAWLS AND FLIES AND KILLS AND MAKE THAT TOWN A MEMORY!”

 

“Sir” His secretary chimed in soothingly. “Is it wise to cut the game short like this, what about the investors and the custome-“

 

“Fuck them.” He said turning to her bottling his rage into hands that looked like scare quotes emphasising his words. “I could give two shits about the fucking losers who pay to watch this shit. Who knows they might even like it, give them something new to fap to. Fuck some are probably furfags themselves.”

 

“Right sir, but the thumbs up on the stream are actually favourable. This much engagement at this early stage is unprecedented.”

 

His tone got loud but curt but he wasn’t shouting now, just talking out loud. “I learned from my dear old dad; ‘When someone tries to fuck you. You fuck them back twice as hard with their tears as fucking lube’, do you understand?”

 

“Yes sir”

 

“Send them, everything in the back catalogue. That little shitberg won’t know what hit him. This’ll be rapped up by tomorrow night. We sweep and clear, sterilize the town and we’re out without a trace with all the tactical data we need on the new prototypes.”

 

“You hear all that” Ms Palmer said touching her own ear piece.

 

“I heard him.” Evergreen said standing as rigid as an elm tree in the van looking straight. Murray was looking up at him not sure if he should talk. He ended the call and put his cellphone back in his top breast pocket and said to Murray “Do it.”

 

–

 

“Is he gone?”

 

“I think so, It’s gone quiet.”

 

“Too quiet.

 

“What the hell was that shit about, you think he was a terrorist or something”.

 

“Or a really pissed off postal worker.”

 

Two cops hiding in the dark of the police stations morgue crouched under an examination table. The cold feeling of all that chrome stainless steel surrounding them. Whispering like kids in boarding school in the cool darkness.

 

“Shhh what’s that noise?”

 

There was a muffled scratching noise.

 

“Shhhit he’s coming back, what d’we do?”

 

“I’m ready for the asshole this time.” He said as he sparked a lighter in the darkness making little pockets of light revealing them. Little coughs of light in the thick dark. A hissing release of gas then the woofing noise of steady flame.

 

“Where the hell dya get that Mal?”

 

“I swiped it from the evidence locker in all the confusion”

 

“Did you lock the door after?”

 

“Who the fuck cares Steve? My main priority right now is keeping my brain on the inside of my skull”. Mal said in a harsh biting spitting whisper. The flame of the flamethrower revealed him as a barrel chested Mexican with a mustache. His friend a slim balding man in uniform.

 

“Where we’d even get that from?”

 

“Weed farmers had it in case they needed to destroy evidence, fields of it.”

 

“Shhhh” Steve said as he readied his glock, lifting a torch to the side of it. “It’s coming from the win-“

 

A gutwrenching crash of glass and steel as some misshapen fuzzy form fell into the room. Carcrashing the silence of the dead in the morgue.

 

“What the fuck is that?” Mal said. Suddenly hesitant to use the flamethrower in such a small space having never fired it before. He hesitated looking at his partner. “Fucking shoot it already!”.

 

Steve swallowed and readied the glock in both hands letting the torch drop and roll to the feet of whatever it was. The careening beam of light revealing a giant cuddly bear with a ominous smile.

 

“What the fuck” Steve mouthed.

 

Mal looked at Steve and shouted “Fucking shoot it!”

 

He gathered himself aiming the gun carefully shaking. He popped off two shots into it’s fuzzy chest, a puff of smoke, a flash of light and some flying fur but the bear didn’t go down. It lurched forward and glomed onto Mal. The sounds of muffled jaws snapping under the costume, a dull whistling moan.

 

“Get offa me!” Mal said as he pushed back at it with one hand, the other on the flame thrower.

 

“What is that thing?”

 

“Fucking toast” Mal said as he readied the thrower. He hesitated a little like he wanted to cover his eyes as if he was about fire up a nuclear reactor. He fired it one solid burst engulfing the bear in the cloud of concentrated flames. The cool stainless steel lit up like rome, hot and cold, a warm light filling the tight sterile room.

 

The bear went up like a coach in a meth lab fire. The flames changing colour as they reacted to all the dyes and the artificial fibres. It started melting into a pile of indistinguishable rainbow mush.

 

“You got it” Steve said.

 

“Yeah I did” He smiled triumphant turning to his friend, his nose wrinkling up at the smell the thing was giving off. “Smells like burnt dolls hair and baby shit”.

 

Suddenly a white hot pain gripped his leg, quickly turning cool and numbing. “Ah, fucking tore a muscle or something, ah it burns!” He looked down and saw a multi-coloured molten paw gripping clawlike to his ankle.

 

He cried out like a rabbit caught in a bear trap as he was yanked off his feet by fear and revulsion. The pain now working its way to his brain, the smell of his own flesh cooking.

 

“Jesus!” Steve cried out popping off the small cap gun glock. The gun hopping in his hand like a hot potato covered in dish soap. The bullets getting lost in a nightmarish rainbow molten flaming goo making sad little sploshing sounds.

 

It climbed up Mal spreading it’s multi-coloured self all over him like rainbow napalm, burning and melting. His skin peeling away and falling off his bones as the toxic mess engulfed him. The smell growing stronger and more toxic burning the hair from both their noses. It got to his head, it’s hot clawlike fingers cutting through his flesh and skull like a hot knife through warm soft clay. Giving just a little resistance before collapsing in on itself. His brains and eye juice leaking out like warm jelly. Searing and bubbling and burning as they made contact with the white hot claws. Eyes popping out and boiling in the multi-coloured goo. He gave out an animalistic shrill scream of a semi-conscious dying thing crying out for something more painless. Instead of this searing slow mind tearing pain.

 

Steve shivered, shrinking into the darkest corner pulling the trigger of the now empty Glock. Clicking in the dark as the thing that swallowed what was left of his comrade started to rise. Flaming and melting, pieces falling off of it. The flame seeming perpetual. It lumbered towards him. Taking two steps before anticlimactically falling into a lifeless burning pile on the morgue floor.

 

Steve panted as the flames still raged. A relieved sigh leaving his lips he started to trace with his hands the corner of the room and walls. He started to back out towards the door quickly and quietly. The monster had kicked his torch back and he felt it rolling by his foot, he picked it up and walked backwards stopping as he backed into a coatrack.

 

“Oh shit, what is this, the coroner has a furcoat?” He said as he clicked on the torch, revealing crowd of silent giant plushies standing in the dark. “Oh no”.

 

–

 

A slim hand with green painted nails snaked around a crack in a door. Some quiet fumbling and then the click of a light switch.

Halogen lights lit up like rectangular lightsabers crisscrossing a grey concrete ceiling. Sandwiched by a grey concrete floor.

 

“This is it” Sunday said as her feet tapped on the concrete floor, echoing in the large open room. The smell of motor oil and wet paint. The garage was pretty much empty, a couple of trashed shells of cruisers and something interesting under a tarp in the centre. Her breath was a little short and she had a slick sheen of sweat on her face from throwing up earlier.

 

“Just like I said, follow the signs” BJ said as he followed her into the room.

 

“Let’s get the fuck out of here” Jimmy sulked his way in, his big knife hanging by his side.

 

TJ strode in like a Japanese general with his new sword at his side. Feeling ten feet taller, riding a crashing tsunami of raw power. He held it by his side blade up because he had no belt.

 

“Oooh” Sunday cooed as she knew tarps meant good shit, or total shit. She semi-skipped over towards the tarp flinging it off like she was pulling a table clothe off. Not really giving a shit if the plates were still there when she was done. A thick cloud of dust kicked up and swallowed her.

 

She was coughing loud, the others kept their distance. The dust settled revealing a large all terrain vehicle. Looked like decommissioned military. Low to the ground and angular with thick pierce proof tyres and reinforced windows, black. She hopped up onto the cab to look into the window calling back “Keys in the ignition”. With a big cliche’ smile on her face.

 

“Cool” TJ said.

 

Sunday was still coughing uncontrollably, but happily. She peeled away to look at it, trying to talk but getting cut off by another cough and then another. The coughing rolling into something akin to corpsing. It wouldn’t stop, she just kept coughing, her throat looked red and all the veins rose up on it. She started to sweat more, her mouth and nose started to leak a strange coloured substance. Her eyes rolling back into her head as she slumped to her knees. Her head hung down like a broken puppet, her arms lying at her side with their strings cut. Micro seizures locking her body up and down and releasing her. And then again, twitching like she was losing control of her body. Her bat hit the flaw and took a bite out of the concrete.

 

TJ rushed to her side almost dropping his new toy. His heart doing backflips, his stomach fighting to get to his throat. His ass tight as a drum full of coal that wanted to be diamonds.

 

“Sunday” He cried out. Hearing her name out loud was strange, addressing her, calling her by her name, were they friends? Was this anything close to a relationship, a woman he’d known for a grand total of three and a half days collectively. Officially the longest relationship he’d had with a 3D woman that wasn’t his mother.

 

Her body seemed to jossle back and forth. Waves of pain radiating up and down, making her sway rthythmically. Shivering like she was possessed.

 

“Please be ok” He whispered. “I can’t do this without you”. Tears welling up in his eyes he smiled at her, the sound of his sword jangling at his side.

 

“What the fuck is wrong with her?” Jimmy said with a little credulity in his voice as if she was faking.

 

Her head turned to meet TJ’s with a mechanic shift of ball bearings. Her face seemed flat and frozen, all the veins raised like a plate of red spaghetti. She tried to move her jaw but it seemed disconnected and loose.

 

“She is infected, the creepy hobo was right after all” BJ said softly.

 

Her mouth opened and a hushed hissing sound like air escaping a tire came out. Her mouth started to move with a great effort as if it was on some elaborate timer. The signal from her brain taking time to reach where it needed to be.

 

She grabbed his arm pulling him close and whispered

 

 “Kill….. me.”

0

TOTCB Chapter 15 ‘Half a Person’

Ok back again for that stuff, I do.

So on the plus side being banned on facebook for another thirty days does do away with a lot of the distractions I suffer which coupled with the intense tiredness associated with getting back into weightlifting is nothing too dissimilar from a literal handicap haha. Just half awake scrolling and scrolling forever haha.

It’s better that I do something vaguely productive despite feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck everyday. I went pretty heavy when I started up again, went straight to the eighty pound bar bell for the chest press which I don’t regret, if anyone hasn’t tried weight lifting or any good excercise, it really is like a drug. My drugs of choice are chocolate, coffee and excercise and I’m trying to cut back on the coffee.

Updates, updates, get down to business, get things right in my head. Still don’t have the finished edited copy of this which is infuriating and I’ve emailed and emailed and emailed and it’s getting me absolutely nowhere.

Also I realised I fucked up with the editing of Diana after Dark, because I did some story tweaks changing one of the characters so they’d be more integral to the story in later manifestations but I sent the old version so I had a minor freakout about that but hopefully it’s all fixed, Chrissy, my new editor seemed to take it in stride and it really put my mind at ease. But really what a fucking rookie mistake, changing it and forgetting to label it correctly, fuck me I feel dumb.

Anyway it’s going forward and recently it’s been a slog with all the weightlifting death feelings but I’ve working my way through the plans for the sequel to Diana after Dark and it’s going really well. I’m really liking the direction it’s taking. Also I decided to change Diana’s name to ‘Deedee’ for the title, so her name will still be Diana Harrison, Deedee will like be a nickname. I just think it’s cuter, its less heavy and librarianish and I think it makes for a snappier sound. Also the references to Dexter’s lab amuse me haha.

That’s about all. Just gonna spend the rest of the day editing.

See you…

TOTCB

~

On the drive home the ‘kid’ was relatively quiet, just staring out the window. Something in him seemed lighter, the weight was gone. Porter followed the highway back towards Selma and into Valhalla. As they reached the entrance he started to talk again.

 

“So you’re a detective?”

 

“Most of the time”.

 

“How do you get that work?”

 

“I got my license in a cereal box.”

 

He smiled and said “Cereal stopped giving away prizes long ago, I think”. Nulidad went back to staring out the window, or maybe just looking at his own reflection in the glass.

 

There was some activity in the sky, a black helicopter flew overhead. “I’ve got to let you out here, you know the way?”

 

“I know the way”

 

Porter stopped outside the childs play area in Valhalla park and the kid started walking. Porter did a u-turn and watched the kid disappear around the corner.

 

–

 

The next day he was all over the news, videos of his arrest outside of his home. The boy now a man was bundled out of a white car, held with his wrists cuffed behind his back by FBI in brown suits. He smiled at the camera, his hair turning an orange colour due to the bleaching and lights of the cameras.

 

The story was ‘master imposter fools his way into america, pretending to be a missing child. Fooling the fbi and even the boys parents’. They described him as a predator preying on the most vulnerable. Feeding off their hopes and fears to gain their confidence.

 

“It’s almost unheard of, a foreigner pretending to be a missing child fooling the boys own mother. It’s hard to even imagine it.” The news anchor said, ruffling his neat grey hair and deeply creased face. His voice ringing with faux concern and moral outrage.

 

Angela refused to be on camera. A tearful Peggy on her way to the sheriff’s office was stopped by reporters and cried “Where’s the real Johnny?”

 

Porter was sitting at the bar eating beer nuts and watching it all fall apart on the flatscreen above the bar. Patrick craned his neck with his hands on hips and every mouth was open watching. Patrick looked at Porter and Porter said nothing.

 

The phone rang in the back and Patrick slapped his bar clothe down and went to go get it. Only to come back a few seconds later. “Its for you, some FBI woman wants to talk to you about ears or some such nonsense.”

 

Porter went around the back feeling a little smug but keeping it off his face and out of his voice. “Hello”

 

“Porter Carraway, this is Special Agent-“

 

“-Nancy Jaeger, yeah I remember, can we get to the point?”

 

“Which is what?”

 

“Say it”

 

“What, you were right?”

 

“Not in so many words”

 

“We have him, but it’s not over and I think you know that better than anyone.”

 

“…” Porter started counting his teeth with his tongue.

 

“He’s been talking, a lot, about the real Johnny. What he thinks happened to him, he’s implicated the kids parents and someone named ‘Jack’. We’re having trouble tracking him down for an interview”

 

“Did you question his mother?”

 

“We did, she passed a polygraph twice?”

 

“And the third time?”

 

Nancy exhaled into the receiver and smiled “She failed, on every question. The needle almost jumped off the table.”

 

“Uh huh, what happened after that?”

 

“She didn’t take it well, the poligrapher confronted her and she stormed out the room screaming.”

 

“So you’ve got nothing.”

 

“Less than nothing. Poligraphs are a cheap parlor trick to convince juries but they’re not solid evidence.”

 

“Ok, now get to the part where I do you a favour”

 

“He’s saying a lot, too much. He’s claiming to have information on several missing person’s cases. And he’s already been caught using his phone calls to impersonate other missing children. He’s a compulsive liar and fraud, there’s not a jury on earth that would take anything he said seriously”.

 

“But you believe him? About the boy.”

 

“I have my suspicions, but I’m too caught up in all this to shift focus on finding the real Johnny to do anything about it. If I try to shift focus onto the parents now without any evidence they’ll give the case to someone else. I have to be nailing Nulidad to the wall or the case falls apart.”

 

Porter breathed in deep and thought about it.

 

“Do you understand?”

 

“Yeah” Porter said as he hung up the phone and then picked it up again and started dialing.

 

–

 

Porter parked outside their old house on Swallow street. It was a bright Texas morning. He set off after breakfast and sat for a moment thinking and getting hot in the cab with the air conditioner off. The house looked the same as last time, the only difference was there was a black Jeep pickup outside.

 

After a moment of hesitation he opened the door and stepped out shutting the door hard. He walked up the driveway to that small white garage door. Crossing the round the stone footpath onto the porch and he rang the doorbell like last time.

 

Like last time the drapes were pulled and he couldn’t see inside.

 

He waited, there was some rummaging happening behind the door. Before long a figure appeared through the white lattice window in the door.

 

“What d’ya want?”

 

“We spoke on the phone.”

 

“Oh yeah.” He said letting the sound of the door unbolting be a full stop. Then the clinking of the chain being taken off. A large man around six feet, well built with a gut of a long distance truck driver sood in the doorway. He had a rough short beard and a shaved head but otherwise a friendly face and an affable demeanor. “Hey hows it going?” He put his hand out to shake and Porter took it. “Sorry about that, we get a lot of salesmen around here, you know what I mean, please come in.” The large man let go of Porter’s hand stepped to the side to invite him in. He was wearing a generic white tee and sweat pants.

 

“Darrol was it?”

 

Porter entered a small living room from the front door. A black coach pushed up against the wall. Through an alcove in the same wall he saw the dining room with a ceiling fan spinning. A screen doors lead onto the back yard.

 

The large man then sped up past him and lead him into the dining room furnished in a sandy wood. There was a table and some cabinets with books and dvds and a small tv poking out of one of the gaps in the dresser.

 

“Darren” The man corrected. “how did you get my number again?”

 

“Your realtor was real chatty, I just had some questions to ask you”.

 

“About that case right? I saw it on the news about the missing boy. He used to live here? Had reporters buzzing around here wanting to look around but I really don’t know anything, how could I?”

 

“You said something about a black tarp on the phone”

 

Darren opened the screen door and walked out into his yard and Porter followed him. The yard was relatively small slightly overgrown but otherwise well kept. Bushes and trees lining the outer edges and a fence running all the way around.

 

“When we first got my dog Bernie, he would always dig in the back corner”. Darren pointed off to the right back corner of his yard. Where the back fence met an overgrown bush that leaned over into his yard was choking a small maple tree. “over by that tree there, and one day I was mowing, and I sort of went under the bush a little. And I started picking up some of this plastic like tarp, got all clogged in the blades of the mower.”

 

He looked over at Porter to make sure he was hanging on his every word and he was.

 

“And I stop the mower and I find where it’s coming from and it’s this black plastic coming out of the ground.” Darren gestured with his hands like the dead were reaching out of the ground. He turned to Porter and he was nodding. “So I tried to pull it out from under the bush” Darren mimed the action of pulling the plastic out of the ground. “But as I kept trying to pull it, it just kept coming off in my hands, I couldn’t get a grip on it.” He sucked his gums and put his hands on his hips. “So I got fed up of that and I just covered it up and never paid it any mind until last night when we were talking on the phone.”

 

Porter inhaled some fresh cool air and rocked his head back and forth looking at the overgrown bush. “That bush has been there a while, you didn’t plant that?”

 

“No sir, that was here when we moved in.”

 

“Your wife home?”

 

“No she’s at work, she works at the hospital, she’s a nurse practitioner, she wont be back til about six maybe later.”

 

“Darren?”

 

“Yep?”

 

“You got a shovel?”

 

–

 

They migrated to the bottom of the yard. Darren did in fact have a shovel but he didn’t want some stranger digging up his lawn so the compromise was a trowl. Instead of clipping back the hedges. Darren would hold it up while Porter probed the ground with the trowel.

 

“Yeah it was right about there, I think, it was a good couple years ago when I found it.”

 

Porter knelt down, he’d tossed his jacket over the side of the fence and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He started gently prodding the earth with the trowl kneading it like dry dough. Only after a minute of this did he feel any resistance and he could hear a crinkling sound. He started to pry and dust the dirt off just enough not to irritate Darren too much.

 

He managed to get a good chuck levered out with the trowl. From what he could see under the bush, there was something taking in some light. A dull plastic tarp nevertheless caught some of the light and was throwing it back.

 

Darren watched with a morbid curiosity. He struggled the keep the bush out of the way like wrestling an octopus. Porter looked up at him, on his knees in the dirt. He made a sucking sound and looked to Darren for some tacit permission.

 

Darren was getting tired and he nodded furiously out of his own sudden desire to know more. Porter started to dig a little more. Gently removing a few more layers of dirt until more of the tarp was exposed and he could see a seam and more.

 

It seemed cliché and dreamlike, predictable, so predictable it was almost laughably. It was stupid really, like an episode of murder she wrote, but there it was lying on the ground.

 

A bone.

 

“What is that? A bone? Is it like a dog bone?” Darren said nervously praying that he was right.

 

Porter pryed the tarp open revealing more of the bone, it was long and white and discoloured. “I’m no expert”.

 

“But can you make a guess? I mean come on man, did my dog put that there or what?”

 

“I can make a lot of guesses, none of them any good. But I can be sure your dog didn’t wrap it up in a tarp before he buried it.”

 

He moved it with the trowl to get a better look at it, catch more light.

 

“It’s human aint it?”

 

“Seems that way” Porter sighed “Ah I dunno” he said as he rolled back onto his heels and dusted himself off.

 

“So what does it mean? Is that the kid, was he here all along? Oh jesus help me!”

 

Porter sighed, something prickly crawling up his back and was breathing down his neck.

 

“No, I don’t think so”

 

“Wait what d’ya mean, who else could it be? You don’t think it’s the kid’s?”

 

“It looks like a femur, a leg bone.”

 

“Yeah so?”

 

“It’s too long to be a kid’s”.

 

“Oh jesus, then who?”

 

Porter sighed and gritted his teeth with his lips tightly pursed.

 

“I have no idea.”

 

“Well what the hell do I do with it? I should go to the police?” He said like he didn’t really want to.

 

“Sit on it for now, you don’t want the cops digging up your lawn with a back hoe over what could just be a dead dog”.

 

–

 

Porter stopped at a gas station the first chance he got to use the phone.

 

He lit a cigarette leaning out of the booth listening to it ring.

 

It clicked on, a tense woman’s voice answered.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Jaeger, it’s Porter. I had a visit with the guy who moved into their old house.”

 

“And? Did you find anything?”

 

“There was nothing in the house but we found something in the garden, buried under a black tarp.”

 

“Oh jesus you found him?”

 

“Not so sure, can’t guarantee it’s even human, just bones but from what I can tell it looks too developed to be a kid”

 

“I told you, my hands are tied right now. I can’t touch whatever it is you’re doing and I can’t send forensics to some guys house on your say so.”

 

“So what can you do?” There was a challenge in his voice.

 

“He called me, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day but your friend said you were out and you don’t carry a cellphone.”

 

“He-who?”

 

“Jack.”

 

“And what did Mr ‘Long-chain-on’ have to say for himself?”

 

“I asked if he’d come in for questioning and he refused. Apparently he didn’t believe from the start that Nulidad was his brother. But didn’t want to say anything to upset his mother.”

 

“And?”

 

“And then nothing”.

 

“Do you know where?” Porter sighed.

 

Nancy sighed and there was a sound like someone rubbing their temples. The clicking of plastic as the phone was moved between hands.

 

“I looked into his records and there’s an address of a rehab clinic he spent some time at. It’s possible they might know where he stays, it’s on Calebra, West San Antonio.”

 

Porter paused and took a breath.

 

“So I go there and I find out where this guy hangs out and then what?”

 

“If you find him. Call it in as an anonymous tip related to drug offenses and we’ll have him picked up and questioned, that’s all”.

 

“First, tell me”

 

“Tell you what?”

 

“What you think”

 

“You wanna know what I think? I think they know where their son is”. She paused and put her hand over the receiver for a second. She came back on with a rustling sound as she took her hand away. “I don’t believe a mother could not know her only son for a stranger, not in a million years.”

 

Porter let out a breath and then sucked on his gums before saying “I’ll let you know” and hanging up.

0

Diana After Dark Chapter Seven ‘Darkness on the Doorstep’

Good day once again fine people, some normalcy returning to my page thank Jeb and all his guacamole. 
Ok so here’s the next chapter of Diana After Dark, still playing with the title in my head. (Before you even think it, hell yes I am going to do a last jedi review as soon as I get a decent pirated copy because I’m paying to let Mickey Mouse shit in my mouth.)

Again ignoring the inkitt bullshit, that page is just a waste of time full of teenagers who stick crayons up their nose and middle age women touching themselves to werewolf homosex haha.

I saw the benefit of reviews at one point but it’s sort of incestuous how the reviews there work and it’s really just a load of nonsense and frankly I’m sick of reading the same fantasy story about some girl using her magical cooch to find the hidden whatever before she finds out she don’t need no man. I mean there are only so many stories you can read like that before you want to start huffing hot lead.

So I’m just gonna post full chapters on here and when I want reviews I’ll reach out to people on facebook for unbiased takes on it.

Still coming down from new years and it is a harsh steep decline. So many emotions kicked up it’s like all my other functions have shut down trying to process them all. Feeling like I’m in a rut again my writing has slowed down, still trying to finish Gage, kinda feel like the legs have been kicked out of my motivation but on a brighter note I randomly stumbled onto a new editor who seems to be really good and prompt and cheap.

I was just spamming that three book deal thing (which is having it’s last day tomorrow)  and I just spotted her ad out of the corner of my eye and messaged her and she got back to me with a quote, so it’s gonna be full steam ahead with Diana After Dark editing and then it’s just trying to get it out there to agents and make my fortune like the dickens character at heart that I am.

So have a good one, check out that three book deal in my last blog post and fuck inkitt haha.

See you…
Diana After Dark Chapter 7 ‘Darkness on the Doorstep’

 

Hot, sticky, red.

 

It’s blood isn’t it?

 

Blood?

 

All over the floor.

 

It smells, I don’t like it.

 

Why is it here?

 

All over the carpet.

 

Where am I?

 

Why did you do that?

 

A big puddle.

 

Blood all over the floor, spreading and getting thicker like a dark red plastic spreading and dripping and coating everywhere. A child’s room, bunk beds, bright colours. Where is this place?

 

Something rising from the blood, the sea of thick hot red plastic. A head coated in it like it was hot molten wax and then another and another bobbing up like croutons in a rich tomato soup.

 

My vision is a tiny cone surrounded by blackness, small hands, a child’s hands reach for the heads, turning them over one by one. I recognise their faces but can’t place them. Buried somewhere, a tinkling, a mocking laugh and a slamming of a heavy door and they’re gone.

 

A feeling of loss, of loss of loss. Losing something that never existed, something you never had taken before you even knew it was there.

 

The little hand reaches for mine and it tells me to come and play and I want to. I want to so badly, but I can’t.

 

I wake up again, a cold sweat, it’s dark. I maybe got two hours sleep on Paul’s couch.

 

We could have used the bed of course but I couldn’t drag him much further than the living room. He is a big boy.

 

And once I’d got him down I wanted to stay with him and make sure he was ok. Some motherly instinct kicking in Diana? Channelling a little Florence Nightingale perhaps? Hardly, a good mask needs a touch up now and then like anything else. But soon enough after lying down next to him the sandman had snuck up and wrapped the ten pound fishing cord of sleep around my neck and I was his. I’d fallen asleep right next to him. But now I was awake again in the wee hours of the morning and he was gone.

 

It wasn’t as dramatic as I thought it was. He came in after a minute or two with a glass of water and sat back down on the couch like he didn’t even notice I was there.

 

He cleared his throat and took in a big deep breath and then proceeded to take sips from his water and yawn.

 

“Oh you’re up” He said. “I was just getting some water.”

 

“I can see that”

 

“Here” He said as he handed me the glass. I took a big gulp from it. I suddenly felt utterly bottomless and wanted to down the entire glass before handing it back to him.

 

It felt like we’d never talk about it and that’s kind of how I wanted it. Pretend like it never happened. Just let it slip off the cuff, a very interesting dream soon forgotten.

 

“What happened back there?” he said rather ineloquently breaking my fantasy of a night lost. Murderous pirate ships passing in the night.

 

“You don’t remember” I stalled.

 

“No, I remember drinking a little and then, I dunno, I guess someone jumped me and everything went black and I woke up here and my gun was gone.” He sighed like he was talking about a botched boy scouts camping trip “My dad is gonna kill me”.

 

“Doesn’t he have lots of guns, I’m sure he won’t notice one missing” I added Diana deft subject dodger.

 

“You don’t know my dad” He scratched the back of his neck “I’ll have to tell him it was stolen.”

 

“Yeah you can’t tell him you lost it in a fight in a drug dealers house” Shut up Diana.

 

He laughed. Phew.

 

We gave up on sleep after that and had a quick shower. I had to change back into my previous set of clothes. Which was a little disgusting for dainty deleterious Diana but I couldn’t exactly skip school the day after another massacre. I suppose the whole finding body parts at school thing could have bought me a little credit. I dunno.

 

I stood in front of my locker again staring at the space left by the volleyball. I breathed and sighed, taking in all the smells of the pretty people passing me. Their talking all mixing together into an interminable cacophony. The occasional chortle and hushed whisper. Did I hear my name?

 

I closed my locker and as if by magic, a poof of smoke and the wicked witch of Orange County appeared.

 

Wendy engulfed me with the most over-exaggerated but nevertheless fake hover hug I had ever received. Her arms and chest barely touched me. But her movements were so verbose I thought she was going to poke my eye out with one of her fake tits or impale on a hoop earring.

 

“Omg are you ok?” She stopped for a brief second to look at me. “I’ve been trying to call you all weekend”.

 

Well we both knew that was an exaggeration but it was the kind you could overlook. The kind of happy shit people fling carelessly.

 

“I’m ok, I just-“

 

“Oh my god, I’m so glad you’re alright”

 

“I forgot the fliers, sorry” I cocked my head to the side, doing an attempt at an ‘aww shucks’ face.

 

“Fuck the fliers, you could have been killed.” She shivered and looked around the hall “He was here, he walked this hall, he could have done whatever he wanted and he chose our lockers. Also I picked up the fliers myself yesterday”.

 

I scanned her face and there was something there, but I couldn’t tell if it was genuine fear or excitement. The goose pimples were a nice touch. I knew without knowing what she was capable of but right now she looked like a cartoon a little Latin mini mouse rubbing her bare golden arms. Afraid of the big bad wolf.

Maybe I was wrong about her, after all I wasn’t that sure, and my big brain hadn’t proven much use as of late. It was sort of a romantic notion I’d conjured up about her. Spiced up her little half Cuban buns.

 

“I think we’re gonna be ok, if he wanted to kill us he probably would have done it already.” I looked into her face as it froze in an awkward expression, so I summoned up more comforting platitudes. Like pulling a drawstring in grief councillor Barbie. “It was probably just a coincidence he chose our lockers.”

 

“Well it’s over now, the cops have a suspect and he’ll have left the state by now if he know what’s good for him”.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You haven’t seen?” She went into her purse and pulled out a smartphone in a hello kitty case and started tapping away at it and then turned it over so I could see her screen. On it a blurred out picture of the bodies on the couch. The picture was really good this time, and I could swear it might have been taken at the same time. I could have been passed out on the floor just out of frame. “There was another murder last night, it’s some kind of gang bullshit, this psycho dealer kills four of his own guys and then bolts.”

 

“But how do they know it’s connected?”

 

“That’s the fucked up thing” She said as she opened her purse again to put her phone back at the bottom. “They found a head from the previous victim right on the motherfuckers coffee table.” Kitchen table/breakfast bar but reporters, you know, can’t get anything right.

 

That’s why the bar maids head was there. What a neat package. A picture was starting to form. A nice little picture framing Antoine as the Head-hunter. It seemed like quite a promotion, small time pusher to the serial killer hall of fame. I had ruled him out from the running as I assumed it was nigh impossible to tape and plastic wrap yourself to a bed. Offering yourself up as a meal to young velociraptor. But who knows, maybe that was just what he was into. It didn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibilities.

 

But I doubt he’d paint himself into such a corner as this, but maybe I’d over-estimated him. Maybe I’d over-estimated them all.

 

So what was the plan? If I killed Antoine would I have been next? Would Antoine have disappeared forever sealed as an open shut case? And because I didn’t kill him what then?

 

Was this part of his plan?

 

The word ‘kill’ set my teeth on edge, throwing it around so nonchalant in my head. I had my chance and I wasted it. I could feel now more than ever. It was this annoying buzz in my ear before, a single moth hitting a lightbulb in some deep dark cellar and now.

 

Now it was like fire ants screaming in my veins, crawling under my skin, the whispering a cacophony of good ideas.

 

It was almost unbearable, it took every social grace I had stored up over the years not to scream and pull my hair out.

 

It was whispering so loud now, right inside my ear. I felt hot. I could feel my mask melting, chipping, falling away. I was becoming some base creature. What was I supposed to do now? Go to the library for some montage on how to prevent lycanthropy? Maybe pick up some garlic and wolfs bane and make a smoothie with some kale.

 

I’d come so close, it could taste blood, smell it, it wanted nothing more to be fed, to cut, to take and I held back. I denied it and it was hungrier than ever. But something about denying it felt good too, delayed gratification. ‘Delayed’, was it really delayed, implying it was coming, it was inevitable.

 

I was roused by an obnoxious clicking sound.

 

“Hello girlfriend, are you home?” Wendy snapped her fingers again trying to get my attention.

 

“Oh sorry” Shit, I completely blanked, glazed over, I really am slipping. “I was just-“

 

“Happens to me all the time” A mysterious voice emerged behind Wendy, had he been there the whole time?

 

“Oh yeah Di” Wendy smiled and kissed the high chin of the man in the letterman jacket towering over her tiny self. “You’ve met my new bae right?”

 

“Yeah sure” Brahma, Bradie, bromide, brontide? “You sit behind me in biology or something right” Complete guess.

 

“Chemistry”

 

Close enough.

 

He was tall and well built, definitely a line-backer.

 

“Brodie just became the school’s new quarterback”

 

Close enough.

 

“I don’t like to brag” He said smiling, looking down at Wendy, crinkling his highbrow. He had a boyish face with kind of a button nose and a floppy haircut like he was in a nineties boyband. His entire person seemed like it was picked out of a saved by the bell episode.

 

“You better be bragging about me mister” Wendy said standing on her tiptoes for an actual kiss. Excuse me while I purge my stomach contents.

 

“I heard about what happened to you” Brodie said taking his soppy wet lips off Wendy’s sticky glossed Botox pillows. “That really sucks, I hope they catch the guy”

 

“Nothing happened to me” I said “Still got my head, see?” Did I really just point at my head?

 

“Right” He laughed like a big dumb idiot and then soured his face like he just barely got the joke. So this is how she liked them, big and dumb and pretty. He was good looking but something about his face soured on me. Too familiar, it felt like a face I’d seen everywhere and seeing it now locking face with Wendy did make me feel oddly queasy. Like walking in on my aunt getting ploughed by her reiki healer part time life guard part time boyfriend, Darren.

 

“Oh yeah where’s Paul at?” Wendy took her head out of the clouds “I haven’t seen him today”.

 

“Oh we’re just giving each other some space today I guess” I laughed.

 

“Something up?”

 

“No, we just, kinda had a fight, I guess, sorta”. Technically true, the best kind of true.

 

Truthfully, Paul had got a little closer to my inner sanctum, my dark fortress of solitude than I’d have liked. The dream whatever it meant was a message. And I just needed a little distance so we could better compartmentalise what happened. Pack it away in neat little boxes and pretend it never happened. I knew he was good at that. He was unpredictable last night but I had no reason to believe I couldn’t trust him to keep it secret. After all he had much more to lose than I did.

 

“Wow” Wendy said wide eyed “You two had a fight, that must be the sign of the apocalypse”

 

“I’m sure you guys will work it out” Brodie adding his pointless platitude with a dull dough eyed smile. Oh Brodie, what white teeth you have.

 

“Thanks”.

 

The rest of the day was one humid slog of nothing really that remarkable. Paul and I managed to avoid each other for most of the day, exchanging only one awkward glance in the lunch hall.

 

I was struck by a sad soggy urge just to get home and lay face down on my trash heap of a bed and just sleep until the sun came up again.

 

I walked home, it was pretty early. The serial killer was on the run, don’t you know. It was safe to walk the streets yet again fair citizens.

 

I couldn’t exactly use that excuse again on my aunt to come pick me up. Considering we hadn’t spoken since the other day and she probably already thought I was dead in a ditch somewhere. Maybe she was surrounded by FBI right now crying and trying to sell them dreamcatchers or aligning their chakras or something.

 

Yes, I did that to punish her, yes it was petty and but hey what did you expect? I’m a little monster after all.

 

I don’t know what I expected honestly.

 

Would she be happy to see me, would she be mad? Did I care? I’d take whatever meek tongue lashing she could muster out of her mousey give peace a chance voice box and then be sent to my room, exactly where I wanted to be. So it would turn out either way.

 

Of course I was planning to do the human thing, which was? I don’t know, apologise I guess. Or was that the Canadian thing? What was the teenage thing to do? Just storm in and start yelling and shifting the blame, nothing says good defence like a crazy offence. I could just completely blindside her with crazy accusations long enough to get to my room and lock the door with no supper.

 

That could work, she did kind of sick a crazy bond villain on me. Or did she? I dunno, I felt like I was getting a lot of things wrong lately. My usually big brain under a bushel had been leading me astray or worse it was outright lying to me. I was overthinking everything, getting paranoid and crazy… er.

 

Maybe I could go teary afternoon special and just burst out into a fit of crocodile tears, tell her the whole sick sad story. Nah that never works.

 

The walk went quite quickly thinking of things to practice saying, or maybe I’d just storm into my room and not come out ever again. Learn to photosynthesise, nah I’d need to open the blinds for that. The sun was just over the hill working its way down. It was still pretty bright, walking past all the matchbox houses. Hybrid cars puttering passed me at ten miles an hour.

 

I turned into my block and felt an intoxication of a coming night wind. The smell of the palms and the little quaffed bushes surrounding the houses. A primal rushing wind forcing its way into my lungs. I almost felt like skipping the rest of the way home.

 

But there was something incredibly tantalizing about resisting about holding off. Delayed gratification, as I said. It was something I’d honed over the years. There was no other way, unless I wanted to spend the rest of my adolescence looking at people through plexi-glass. Doing my best teen Hannibal Lector impression.

 

I walked as casually as I could as the sun was slowly going down, ripping broad swaths of red and orange along the sky.

 

The neighbours two houses over were having some sort of semi-noisy party. I say semi-noisy because it wasn’t loud house music or drunken shouting. Just refined loud excited talking knives and forks scraping. The barbecue sizzling on their quant veranda over their garage.

 

“Hey Di, how’s your aunt?”

 

“She’s-err fine” I said.

 

“Give her my best” Gary from next door said as he went back to flipping burgers and smiling at nothing in particular. He was a nice guy, kind of forgettable, one of those software engineers who grew a beard because he had no chin and wore only plaid. His wife was kind of a bitch though.

 

“Will do, have a good evening Mr Harvey” I said with a smile in my voice which he didn’t see. Politeness and cleanliness, next to godliness. I hopped up my driveway and to the front door about to knock remembering I had a key. Knocking would only give her enough time to think up a line and a face to sling it from. I was feeling righteous indignation. Her plan was probably the same as mine, come out guns blazing. Quickest draw would win, just bowl over the other, like women do. Making themselves completely impenetrable to logical arguments and explanations. Then resorting to waterworks when the other party wouldn’t just roll their belly up in the air for the final attack.

 

I jangled my keys out of my purse quickly finding the right one, oh so proud of myself. I can’t kill a helpless gangbanger taped to a bed but I can find my keys super quick. I slipped my key into the door and was slightly deflated to watch the door shrink away from my prodding. It swung loose from the jam.

 

Ditzy aunt stereotype forgot to lock the door again, what a cliché’. This was the sort of neighbourhood you could leave your door unlocked in but my aunt wasn’t the sort of neighbour to do it. In fact she’d been double bolting the doors again since the murders started.

 

Eh, it’s probably nothing. Maybe she’s out canvassing for me, stapling my picture to phone poles and in her haste just forgot to lock the doors. I’d call and she’d discover me home safe and sound and once I paid her back for the printing cost of the fliers, everything would be copasetic.

 

I closed the door behind me making a disconcerting clicking noise and instantly the air was heavier. A wry whisper, a hiss from the deep dark, a warning from the dark driver. The hair on my neck shot up. I held my breath and just listened. Nothing. Silence.

 

I breathed slow and quiet and got low and contemplative.

 

I could feel it, was it him? Had he come for me? I failed him. I didn’t play his game, didn’t dance to his tune and now he was coming for me and my aunts head.

 

Oh fuck.

 

He probably put it in the fridge waiting for me to stumble in and scream and then the bag goes over my head and the darkness comes. And then leaves and is replaced with bright light. Not god but a masonry light and a camera and a sharp blade and then snicker snack goes the Jabberwock. And then it’s nothing but cold concrete and darkness and then maybe flames and damnation if you’re into that.

 

This was it, I was making jokes but this was it, I knew it. Here in my home, there was nothing keeping him out, he got in before just to watch. To prod me, mock me for being unable to see the obvious truth. Which was?

 

I could run and I could scream, I could call Gary in here with his spatula and he could maybe slow him down for as long as it took for his head to hit the ground. The cops, the man in the wheelchair, could they protect me, could they save me from myself?

 

I had to try.

 

I made my way into the kitchen, it was dark, all the lights in the house were off.

 

I crabbed low, moving towards the phone in the kitchen. I know I should use my mobile but it makes a lot of noise and lights up like a Christmas tree and I couldn’t risk it. I needed the dark and the quiet low murmur of the party outside.

 

I squatted under the phone and released it from the cradle, slow and quiet and started tapping 911. Shit what was I gonna say? “Please send police my imaginary friend thinks there’s a serial killer in my house because it’s scared of the dark”.

 

Well it didn’t matter anyway, phone line was cut. Of course it was, that was dumb.

 

I slid Ruez’ iPhone out of my pocket and unlocked it and started swiping through his really cluttered layout to find his dialler. I starting tapping 911.

 

Just as I hit the last 1 the phone rang with a loud DMX song and I froze.

 

I answered like a fucking idiot.

 

“H-hello?”

 

“Come into the living room Diana” A hushed voice said.

0

Gage Chapter One: Tupelo

And here it is, the insanity that is a steampunk western sci-fi alternative history about a dude that gets a railway spike lodged in his brain. It’s still rough as all fuck, I’ve been struggling recently with writing and my day job, I’ve just been exhausted or too scattered to do anything more productive than pick my nose and eat potatoes. So I’ve sort of just been muddling along trying to get the right amount of sleep and the right amount of food to function and sustain this odd balance of my work and personal life where I’m perpetually tired from work but also broke because I spent all my money already on airfare and a rented apartment in barbados for a week.
But I mean how can I complain, things are looking up for me in a lot of ways, got stuff to look forward to and people that love me or at the very least don’t want me dead. That’s something.
So I’m really struggling to get back into the groove of things and I probably won’t get fully back on track until sometime in January when I get back from my third trip there, must be something in the water haha. Until then don’t expect to hear too much from me because I’ll be working or generally trying not to swallow my own tongue while I play elite dangerous.
I put up the full chapter which is not something I usually do but honestly, right now I’m just like fuck inkitt, inkitt is dogshit haha. It looked nicer and there was the chance it might publish one of my books but all it puts out is slocky romance or porn books for middle age women to get moist over or even worse those fucking horrible tween novels that won’t go away written by the middle aged women who fap to the porn books haha. So now they’ve changed their review policy I just don’t really see a need to go back, I dunno, I might go back later but for now why not just keep it in house and I can shill for reviews later.
See you…
~ 
 
The following are scraps of news articles and the personal diary of one Alexander Ford a known associate and collaborator with the man known previously before the great war as Phineas Gage.
 
 
~

June 4th 1849
 
 
 
I remember I was working as a mopboy at the time in McClusky’s bar. It was in the middle of a nowhere. A border town called Tupelo. This was when I first met the man who would later be recorded in the news apparatus as a terrorist and a madman.
 
 
 
It was a fairly average late afternoon in a relatively sleepy little town all things considered. We’d heard talk of revolts and crime and violence from the rebels and real action and adventure in these parts. Mostly stories spun from wonder of the unknown. But it was rarely reported anywhere but the radial transmissions and the tubescopes placed throughout the town. But most of the time they were just playing music or displaying some kind of sports activity, or some event in the capitals. Usually award ceremonies where Cyclon dignitaries gave other Cyclon dignitaries awards for peace or love or some such thing.
 
 
 
It was before I was born that they actually came, supposedly they’d been amongst us for a long time moving around not having a home to call their own. According to the tubescope we weren’t very nice to them, hating and fearing them just because they were different so they say. And then there was a time when we, being humans, decided we wanted to kill them all. The history books didn’t really say why, but it was reckoned that we were just ruled by evil men.
 
 
 
Well after that people felt so sorry for them, using our technology and theirs we built them a home in the stars. My people felt so guilty we took them in with open arms and if we didn’t we wouldn’t even have radials or tubescopes or the sportsballs we have and we’ve lived in peace ever since then. Or so I had come to believe in my young mind at the time.
 
 
 
I’d never once questioned the way the world was, my world was what the tubescope told me it was. With it’s bright coloured and smiling faces and awards and sportsballs and dreams of a better tomorrow, love and peace. I couldn’t even conjure the words in my head to even contemplate the lingering feeling of unease until that day.
 
 
 
It was unusually hot and I remember it vividly as I write it now, despite it being almost twenty years ago. As I sit on my bunk writing this now going on possibly the last mission I will ever fly about to drop the bombs that’ll end this damn war and free my people forever. I still remember that feeling in my chest when he told his story and the look in his eye as he spoke, the look he gave me.
 
 
 
Nothing much had happened that day, just the usual morning drinkers drowning their various sorrows. There were some miners who were working up on a quarry on the ridge mining gold for shielding shuttles and circuitry. McClusky the barman was scratching his bald head and craning his neck to watch the recaps from the latest sportsball game. I remember there was a lot of controversy recently as the sportsball league had lost it’s last human player. An act was passed to allow Kaftas to play after that it was all downhill, the aliens being physically superior in everyway the human players just couldn’t compete with that and they became tokens in their own game, there only for the fans.
 
 
 
But eventually they were gotten rid of entirely and after some slight protest from the fans it went on as usual. Any hold outs were ususally shut up by someone calling them speciesest or a bigot and reminded about the constitution and meritocracy. That the aliens should replace the humans if they do a better job. They had no real argument against that, only that it was their game despite most of the owners of the teams being aliens themselves we clung to it with some ancestral memory of it being ours.
 
 
 
I was never interested in sports being a skinny lad of around fourteen. As I said it was a boring day which made the appearance of a stranger all the more memorable.
 
 
 
He was a stout scholarly looking gentlemen with a bowler hat and an expensive looking suit, a city man no doubt accompanied by two anthropoid non-humans cloaked in human garb. These were not the same stock as the ruling Cyclon but a mutt-like hybrid of human and alien, not quite human but not quite alien, the stock of which made up the majority of the sportsball teams now. Although some had speculated that they weren’t from this world at all. They were much larger than humans with darker thicker skin like that of a rhino or elephant but had a vaguely simian appearance equating somewhat to a human face but far less expressive and desirest of empathy or any such human emotions. And although the face was ape like it had an elongated quality akin to a dog’s snout. The aliens commonly used them as security or bodyguards and they made up a great deal of the cities new police force. As they could take orders without question and follow them through with fearful brutality and they were moreover entirely expendable. Another could be plucked out of circulation within a day as they were so easily bred and they aged faster than humans so as these hulking monsters could in fact have the same number of years as I had then. In fact it was probably preferable for them to have the minds of children, not as to say the adults were much smarter. They were definitely stronger and faster with heightened senses of smell and sight. They could tear a human apart if ordered to do so but their intelligence and resolve was somewhat lacking in respect to a humans but I imagine now that was precisely the point, making them more pliable to the mind control the Cyclon used.
 
 
 
In their native tongues, they were known as Kaftas but we colloquially called them ‘Luggers’ or ‘Lugs’ as they were most commonly used in these parts for manual labour. But in recent times it had become impolite or not politically correct or speciesist to use these terms.
 
 
 
They wore human clothes but that just furthermore outlined the inhuman nature of their aspect. Seeming almost a parody of humanity as they stood so huge and hunched. Monsters wearing the clothes of men, their faces ridged and apelike as they gaped their mouths thoughtlessly.
 
 
 
The man leading them was a jovial looking sort, with a fat neck and small greasy looking mustache which was pruned and neat and leapt about his face as he spoke like a tick.
 
 
 
I couldn’t rightly hear what he was saying but he smiled and tipped his hat as McClusky looked at his huge bodyguards and got a squirrelly look about him like he wanted to crawl under a giant mouse trap.
 
 
 
McClusky didn’t say much but I could see his throat swallowing and his head nodding furiously as he was listening waiting to give up his own mother. As soon as he was prompted he pointed a fat sweaty finger at a darkened table in the corner hidden as it was behind a shaft of light from the window.
 
 
 
The stranger smiled and tipped his hat before tossing him a gold coin McClusky fumbled and stared at intently as the strange city folk passed under the shaft of light and sat down at the table in the corner.
 
 
 
The bar was small with few hiding spots, so how I’d failed to notice the other stranger was just due to my own uncurious nature at the time or quite simply because at that time the stranger did not want to be noticed.
 
 
 
The inside was dark as a rule, as most of the people in the bar were just trying to get out of the sun or sleeping off the drunk they had from the night before. Or just old timers with no better place to be.
 
 
 
But I remember even Mr Rickers the pianist hit a bum note as he saw the new faces, he sat on his stool at the piano tucked under the stairs. Madame Gertrude the old whore that worked upstairs stood in the middle of the stairs balancing on the banister watching them go with a wrinkled suspicious gaze and then shot me a school teacher sneer as she noticed me watching her. Mary Sue, I suppose she was a waitress although Madame Gertrude wanted to train her up as a whore but from what I heard she wasn’t much good at it stood open mouth gawping holding up a tray of nothing.
 
 
 
The human of the group sat down at the table in the corner with a smile in the back of his head, taking off his bowler hat and placing it on the table. Without saying a word he took out an ornate pipe and lit it taking big bellowing puffs from it as his non-human compatriots stood off to his side looking out the slats in the window standing as if they were children waiting for their mothers to be done browsing in a hat shop.
 
 
 
He cleared his throat and I edged a little closer to hear what he was saying.
 
 
 
“Is your name Phineas Gage?” The strange fat man said.
 
 
 
Noticing only the slightest movement, so slight it could have been imaginary, the figure he was talking to suddenly became visible. Siting still as he was in the shade, it was as if my eyes adjusted at that minute and I suddenly had that unusual face burned into my memory. To say he was grotesque would have been an exaggeration but under the hideous scar on his face was the face of a handsome man in his late twenties with a strong jaw and dark black hair cut neatly.
 
 
 
But his face, my god his face was a monstrous mess, as if he was half demon and how I did not notice him instantly upon his appearance has been blotted out from my memory. As how I could ever forget that face seems impossible. For if it were not the face of such as I know now, a monumental figure, I would think it the face of the devil himself.
 
 
 
And that’s how I felt at that moment, and a few after as I stood frozen thinking I was half in a dream as I looked upon his waxen features. Half his face looked like it had been chewed by Cerberus himself, his left eye closed, blinded and gone although he wore no patch. Which made his appearance all the more horrifying as half his face was handsome and strong and the other looked like that of a mangled corpse.
 
 
 
I might have pissed myself right then and there if I hadn’t just come back come back from writing my name in the dust outside.
 
 
 
The stranger with the horrific face looked up from his meal which consisted of a steak and some mashed potatoes and a glass of milk, with his one good eye. His jaw was locked and strong and he took up the glass of milk with one hand, his other out of sight and unmoving as if he had no use of it and he took a long gulping drink of it like it was a magic elixir and then hit the glass down hard and licked his lips of the white liquid gasping and sighing.
 
 
 
The fat man in the chair still smiling trying to look as casual and powerful as possible. Trying not to cross his legs and look anymore than a plucked peacock.
 
 
 
“I ask again sir” he said in a city accent. “Is your name Phineas Gage”
 
 
 
“What of it?” The stranger said. He looked at them stonily as he took the fork that rested on his plate and scooped up mouthful of mash potatoes and forced it into his misshapen mouth with his good hand. Then following it up by picking up the steak he evidently couldn’t cut with his good hand and taking animalistic bites from it. The fact it was larvae steak and not beef as cows had gone instinct from over farming a decade prior made it an especially grotesque sight as the thing was essentially a giant maggot. He ripped at it and it burst with a vile grey green liquid dripping down his chin. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his good hand while his other arm was rigid and seemingly useless.
 
 
 
I wondered if he hadn’t been in some kind train accident or mine collapse which had left his body mangled. I let my eyes adjust and get a better look at him and at first he had seemed of an average size as I compared him to the gargantuan monstrous nature of the Lugs accompanying the relatively dimunuitive stranger. But now maybe just from my memory, he seemed too a giant of a man, with broad mountainous shoulders and thick long arms like a gorilla with hands that were calloused and looked as if they’d worked everyday from birth. Hard back breaking soul crushing work, from tit to shovel to pickaxe to grave. He wore a thick brown woollen coat and a dirty dusty white shirt underneath.
 
 
 
“There a bounty on my head?” The man I now know as Gage said in an uncaring way as he continued to eat in this strange savage way not looking at these city folk.
 
 
 
“Quite a sizeable one” The man tutted. He crossed his legs finally as he was accustomed moving onto the next stage of his persona. “But I’m not a bounty hunter Mr Gage, I am a medical doctor of a new field entirely, a psychiatrist sent from the city, I’m not here to hurt you, I’d just like to study you.” He said it deflating, as if it was a magic tune everyone was supposed to dance to. “Doctor Herbert Westwood at your service” He said reaching out a pudgy hand only to hold it there for a few awkward moments. Getting heavier with every second to eventually drop it with a hurt twitching of his little neat mustache.
 
 
 
Gage snorted and spat out a piece of grubby sinew and continued to eat.
 
 
 
“I’ve heard about your case and I’ve been given permission to take you in under my care, in return all your past crimes will be forgiven.”
 
 
 
“Crimes, what would they be?”
 
 
 
“Murder”
 
 
 
Gage twisted his hideous face and looked up with his one good sharp eye and said “And what if I tell you to take your alien mutts outside and fuck eachother?” He spat, his voice slaked in a cool simmering rage as he chewed.
 
 
 
“Well then I’d have no choice but to…” His voice trailed off as he clicked his fingers and the misshapen creatures poorly cloaked in human clothes lumbered forward like animals. Such a stark viciousness emitting an ape like cry to battle bulging through their clothes with grotesque muscles and sharp canine teeth bared, their backs raised in a threatening gesture like a dog or a wolf.
 
 
 
The whole bar froze instinctually like rabbits hearing the roar of a lion. The women let out tiny squeaks of fear their bodies locked tight and their eyes unshakeably focused on these creaures suddenly shedding their human façade and revealing themselves as the monsters they undoubtedly were. I too froze unable to look away from some far flung cave man instinct passed down, staring and waiting.
 
 
 
I was just a boy and I knew if it was inclined, these beasts could devour me and everyone here if allowed to do so.
 
 
 
“Ah ah” The man tutted. The beasts heeled breathing deeply and heavily their huge grotesque frames rising and falling as they seethed with a vicious vulgarity. A vile steam coming out of their nostrils.
 
 
 
“We kill dreg nuh?” One of the beasts asked without turning his dog like head.
 
 
 
“No, they want him alive.” The man straightened his mustache, his eyes making two sharp points on his round face and he said. “They’ll want to make an example of him.”
 
 
 
Gage continued eating and didn’t even look at the man anymore. He hadn’t moved a muscle since it all started except to eat. He didn’t even look at the Luggers, like they weren’t there.
 
 
 
“I’ll give you one last chance to come peacefully, it won’t end well for you any other way.” The man was sincere now, but a condescending sincerity that got a piercing icey look from Gage with his one good eye.
 
 
 
The man knew exactly what that meant and he slowly stood putting his hat back on his head, his pipe still in his mouth.
 
 
 
He sighed and said “You’re a sick man Mr Gage, I can help you.” He looked at Gage but his face hadn’t changed, he sighed again and said “Very well Mr. Gage, have it your way. Luntz, Kurbt schnell! The fat man clicked his fingers again and stepped back as the fiends fell on all fours and circled left and right from Gage’s table in what little space they had. Seemingly weaving or attempting to strike from different angles
 
 
 
The entire bar was still frozen, unable to look away as the creatures surveyed their prey. Gage looked up with his one good eye and followed them as they sized him up. Their clawed feet on all fours making a sharp clacking scratching sound on the wooden floor. The first creature sniffed and made a growling sound in his throat and said “This one not so-“ The things head suddenly exploded with a cacophonous booming noise that sounded like god clearing his throat. The shards of it’s brain and bone matter pulping against the base of the stairs spattering slightly on the Madame’s slippers, although she managed to stifle a scream. The second reacting instantly throwing the table aside and pouncing on Gage snapping at the air. It’s powerful jaws trying to bite at his face but the thing was held there by Gage’s good arm as the thing slobbered all over him. Then a another booming cracking noise shook the entire place. I could hear the glass on the bar shake and could almost feel my bones shudder at the terrible noise and the sight of the things back erupt in bone and innard debris all over the tossed table with the remnants of Gage’s dinner on the floor.
 
 
 
I managed to keep my breakfast down, although the smell alone was hard to bear. I had thought when they came in it was strong, but now, in their current state they smelled even worse.
 
 
 
Gage finally stood and I could hardly believe my eyes, he must have been seven or eight feet tall as I remember it now. It could be just that I was so small but thinking back he was a freakishly large man with hands the size of a horses head. It could also have been that he picked a table that was in the corner beside the stairs where the roof was a little lower. But at the time I was lacking the education the rebellion had given me, otherwise the sight of him would have conjured images of Zeus and Atlas towering over man.
 
 
 
There was a muted hissing wimpering noise and I could see that the second creature was still alive spilling it’s innards on the dirty wooden floor I had yet to sweep.
 
 
 
Gage towered over it now, tucking something under his good arm he reached down grabbing with both hands the top and bottom of the lugs jaws and with a quick powerful jarring motion snapped them apart. I remember the women in the bar letting out another little squeaking noise as he put the other creature out of it’s misery, the sound of it’s whimpering hissing ending almost instantaneously.
 
 
 
That was the point that my breakfast made a return journey on the bar floor and down the side of the counter, ham and eggs.
 
 
 
Then the sound of small pieces of metal hitting the wooden floor and rolling, rolling through the blood and brain and bile.
 
 
 
The fat man nervously loaded small bullets into a travelling revolver his pipe nervously bobbing in his mouth as he bit down on it. His fat swollen fingers dropping the occasional bullet as he frantically tried to load the gun a bullet at a time. His face red and hot and wet.
 
 
 
Gage rose again to his full height and the man tried to smile cockily relying on the small gun in his hand, a streak of doubt crossing his nerve struck mind, would that gun even kill such a man or just make him angrier.
 
 
 
Gage took the thing he had tucked under his arm back into his left hand and let it hang by his side and I could see it clearly as a big custom hog leg made for his giant mits. It was shocking to me having only at that time seen guns in picture as they had been banned for civilian use.
 
 
 
*note to the reader – a Hog leg in the old era was what was used to refer to a fire arm that was sawed off at both ends and fired a sort of shot dispersal projectile which proved very effective as a close range weapon.
 
 
 
Westwood saw the gun hanging at his side and his mustache twitched into something resembling a nervous smile.
 
 
 
“A sawn off shotgun” He smirked. “I do believe you’re out of rounds my goodfriend.” A certain air of shakey confidence was returning now as his mustache bounced off his fat cheeks and his fat fingers danced and drummed happily on the pearl handle of the small revolver in his hand. “Now why don’t we just come along quietly-“
 
 
 
“Count again” Gage said as he raised the gun and pointed the lead chucker in Westwood’s general direction at which point he and I and McClusky all could see quite clearly it in fact had three barrels.
 
*Note to the reader weapons such as the shotgun commonly only had two barrels although some had three or even four but were for specialised use.
 
“Three?” Westwood’s smile fell off his face like dung from a donkey’s ass and he went white and waxy losing all tension, allowing his pipe to fall from his wet lips and onto the dirty floor.
 
 
 
Gage’s face stayed hard and evil and gestured with the huge gun and in an instant Westwood had dropped his gun as if it was hot coal or a venomous snake.
 
 
 
Gage walked slowly back to his seat which lay on its side keeping the gun partially raised although he didn’t have to. Westwood knew as well as anyone a man like him used a gun only to spare his bare hands.
 
 
 
He lifted the table and chair back on it’s legs and dusted the seat of his chair off and sat placing the gun in his lap and sat silently waiting.
 
 
 
Westwood stood silently, forgetting to breath in intervals, holding his breathing and swelling and swallowing and gasping like some snuffling pig looking at a man in a butchers apron.
 
 
 
Gage nodded at him and he took his seat back up and slowly Westwood did the same. Then there was a moment where an eternity of silence passed before someone spoke and of course it was Westwood.
 
 
 
“How did you know I was coming?”
 
 
 
“Didn’t.”
 
 
 
“But the gun, you always eat with it on your lap?”
 
 
 
Gage nodded slightly.
 
 
 
“And what if there’d been four of us, what then, what would you have done?”
 
 
 
“Reloaded.”
 
 
 
“I see” Westwood had put his white face in his hand and was shaking uncontrollably and searching for his pipe forgetting that he dropped it looking down the barrel of the gun. Coming up empty he found a the courage of the damned and sputtered “Dammit, what is it now?”
 
 
 
“You wanted to know.”
 
 
 
“Know what?”
 
 
 
“How I got this face”.
3

TOTCB Chapter 13 ‘Red Right Hand’

Heyo,

Back again with another chapter, got some interest in this actually, had a few literary agents ask for the completed manuscript but I’m still waiting on my editor to reply to my fucking emails haha!

But it’s a good feeling, it feels like with every step I take it’s a step further and although I didn’t really hold much stock in this book well not as much as I do with Diana in the Dark, it’s nice to know I’m getting closer to my goal. That this wasn’t all in vain and one day I’ll be where I want to be and it will have meant something.

Despite all that’s happened along the way, I can’t say I’d change a thing, happiness and misery only waiting over the horizon.

Still feel a little in a rut recently, victory or the chance of victory has defeated me for a time and I’ve been trying to write a lovecraftian story this last week but it’s proving trickier to manage my time with so many distractions. But I’m steadfast and I’ve been reingesting a steady diet of Lovecraft and bloodborne to try and get in the right frame of mind.
Don’t get your hopes up though, it’s not really meant to be scary, I’m writing something that’s a little like a Lovecraftian superhero origin story hence the title ‘Loverman’. It’s basically call of cthulhu meets the crow.

It should be a lot of fun once I get to the knitty gritty of it.

Anyway, back to the day to day grind.

See you…

Red Right Hand

–

Johnny was being held in Bexar county sheriff’s department in the centre of town. Con and Nancy were watching him through two way glass as he sat in an interrogation room. They were waiting for someone to brief them on what happened.

Johnny looked nervous, lost. Like he was searching for something, lost in his own head and he didn’t know where to start. He was pale with white bandages over portions of his face.

A sheriff’s deputy breezed in with a report in his hand, he was a short man with a beer gut and greying beard.

“Are you the fbi people?” He said without a hint of irony, chewing some kind of blue gum that made his breath smell like popcorn.

“That’s us” Con said, standing with hands in his pockets.

Nancy was still watching the kid, transfixed, her arms folded.

“Well I’ve got the report here signed by his mother. We’ve got her in a separate room waiting for the warrant to come through on the blood samples. But we should have that soon. We already have the boy’s DNA, fingerprint, palm print, photophraghed, the whole shebang”

“That’s great, forward it to our office and we’ll put it through our database and send it on over to Interpol.” Con said without removing his hands from his pockets, furrowing his all too handsome brow.

“Interpol, wow, this is some serious stuff huh?” The man smiled and swapped glances with Con and the back of Nancy’s head. He almost bowed and started to take the gum out which he now realised he’d been chewing loud. “Oh sorry, trying to quit smoking. I can leave the incident report here for you take a look at or I can give you the hightlights.”

“Highlights are good” Con said forcing a smile.

“Well alright then” The man said as he straightened up. “Well this is all from his mother and the boy doesn’t contest it. The subject, that is the young man, found what we’ve determined to be a flare gun. His mother said was out in the garage, she doesn’t have any idea how it got there. Possibly bought by her husband and put in storage”. He looked up for minute to check they were still there and he went on. “The subject took said flare gun and discharged it into the refrigerator, accidentally.” He said that last part looking at Con.

Nancy sneered as she kept looking through the glass. “What about his face?”

“He did that himself, the mother says it was an accident too. Boys will be boys and all that and she doesn’t want to press charges. After we’ve executed the search warrants we have no cause to hold them any longer”

“Is that everything?” Con said.

“Pretty much, I’ll leave you folks to it. We’ll keep you informed on the state of the warrant and forward any samples to your office.”

“Thanks deputy?”

“Kline, good to meet you folks, I heard you were from out of town, I hope its treating you well, you two have a good one ok.” The deputy closed the door behind him and left them alone in the cold darkened room. Watching Johnny squirm.

Nancy seemed to quiver from a draft as the door closed. She’d been standing with her arms folded facing the glass. Now she started to rub her arms as an almost nervous reaction. Con could tell something was wrong, he walked a few steps closer.

“You ok?”

“Mmm”

“What is it?”

“Just a feeling” Her mind was somewhere else.

“A feeling?”

“Like someone’s moonwalking on my grave” She was looking at her reflection in the glass now.

“The kid’s got you spooked?”

“It’s not just the kid, it’s the whole family, and the kid. I knew there was something off about him the minute I saw him.”

“Selection bias at it’s finest, you’re just remembering it that way to make sense of how you feel now”. He smiled knowing that would rile her in the right way.

She scowled at him and chupsed.

“There’s something wrong, it’s like he doesn’t exist. Like everything he does is out of time, out of rhythm. I can look at someone usually and see what they’re gonna do, or what they’re thinking. When I look at him it’s like static, cold white static.”

“What about the family”.

“They’re hiding something, but everytime I think I know what it is it just falls away. It’s not just that I feel like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back. It’s like we’re not moving at all or even if we find out what happened we’ll never quite know the whole truth.”

“That’s always how it is, only an idiot convinces themselves they ever have the whole truth of anything.” He was getting maudlin for a change. As soon as he said it he got that cold feeling like it was contagious.

“But it’s like even they don’t know the whole truth, like they’ve hidden it even from themselves, every one of them.”

“It shouldn’t take too long to have the test’s analysed, and once we send them on to Interpol we can put this to bed.” Part of him wanted to pat her shoulder but he knew how that would go so he kept his hands in pockets.

–

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Possibly the most savage review I’ve ever done. Paragon By Benjamin Peck

Piggy back rides?

Sorry what? I just read that and it just caught me off guard, why are people giving each other piggy back rides at the hospital? You’ve said ‘Crows peak’ twice now and I don’t know if you mean widows peak, I have no idea what a crows peak is, there are crows feet and there are widows peaks I had no idea there was such a thing called a crows peak.
Ok I just had to get that out, so first impressions are kind of cringeworthy, the names. It’s like trying to be a serious gritty story, stepping away from comic books but you still have all these cheesy comic books names, ‘Slayt’ ,’Zeke Blackwell’, ‘Glacier city’. It just took me out of it, it made me aware I was reading a story as opposed to being in an actual world.
I think it would have been better to just set it in a real world town because it seems a little pointless to create a fictional city but do little to no world building around it. You might as well just set it in new york and then people know what new york is like.

The fight scenes are ok, they’re not too self-indulgent but they’re not really jaw dropping either. I was about to drop this down for plot because there didn’t really seem to be one but then you have the thread of the cops taking people to that tower, so you have a nice hook to get people to want to read further to see what they’re doing to them at the tower.

Now honestly I hate the way Zeke is immune to the nullifiers, it’s just too tropey, ‘the main character is immune to the thing that’s holding everyone back’. It’s just been done to death and it completely drained all tension away from that scene with the cops. There was this great tension you’d created because here was this guy facing down people who could permanently wreck his powers and he does it anyway but no two seconds later he’s immune and all the tension is gone.
I like the premise of the nullifiers, I like the idea of superheroes being sort of second class citizens but it’s also been done. I mean this entire plot line is ripped almost entirely from the marvel civil war and to some extent incredibles and I just cant say this competes with those.
The writing is a little sloppy, there’s so much telling when you should be showing, just block paragraphs of exposition dumps, it’s tedious to read and it really weighs down the story. If you can’t deliver your exposition in an interesting way that isn’t just directly telling the reader, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.
The prologue seemed kind of pointless to be honest. I don’t see why it was relevant to see that his father dies (also really tropey) right at the start and not just have him mention it later or come up in a flashback or a dream. Why is it so relevant that it has to be right at the start?
Honestly the whole thing is too wet, it feels like it was written by a thirteen year old. This is an edgy teens idea of gritty realism. The mohawk and tribal tattoos on the main character just had me cringing so hard, 3edgy5me dude haha.
Don’t get me wrong, if a thirteen year old wrote this I would think he was talented as fuck. There’s a lot of potential here it’s just weighed down with some bad storytelling, some place holder cardboard cut out characters and tired tropes. I’m not saying it’s bad or shitting on it to be mean, it has a lot of potential its just not there yet.

*Update*

Ok this review might have been a little too savage haha. This guy was so butthurt he left me the saltiest three line review for DDD just taking some lame jabs at it that make no sense haha. Like he mocks it for her saying shit like ‘Leet’ hacker. Like he doesn’t get the joke, she’s using it ironically, she’s making fun of herself, it’s self-deprecating humour. But evidently if this guy knew what irony was or had a sense of humour he wouldn’t be this butthurt haha.
Just saying I went out of my way to tear him down and the usual shit like ‘you didn’t read enough of my story man’. Dude I don’t need to get through a whole shit sandwich to know what it tastes like. And why would I randomly want to tear down someone’s story on inkitt a place where reviews don’t even really matter. Like if this was on amazon it would be a completely different thing but inkitt is just a place to basically beta your work. But most of the time it’s just fucking pussies licking eachother’s assholes and just wanted the same in return so when someone like me comes along with the real honest biting criticism they need to hear they need a safe space haha.
Because that’s all I did, I just told the truth, I didn’t go out of my way to attack this guy. I just gave him the full unvarnished truth he needed to hear, one man to another but this little bitch couldn’t take it I guess and that’s really the death nail for a writer, if you can’t take the savage criticism you’re done honestly. If getting one not even really bad review, just critical review sends you into this much of a hissy fit how do you think you’re gonna take that long slog of rejection when you actually are looking to get it published.
Why the fuck do you think so many people self publish? Because they’re terrified of rejection. Just to chime in with a sexist note haha, it’s probably why more men in history are writers because men are more used to rejection than women.
Anyway I could have spent hours arguing with this dipshit for fun but I decided just to side step it, arguing on the internet is just too fucking time consuming and utterly pointless.

If you wanna check it out the drama for yourself, head on over to inkitt with the link provided.

Paragon

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TOTCB Chapter 6 ‘Red Shoes’

Ergh, ever have one of those days where your head just feels packed with sand and you haven’t even been drinking and coffee makes it worse haha?

Don’t really have much to blather about today really, GS2 trucking along, my publishing deal is working out ok. I was checking out my publisher and he’s a right wing christian so I was like ‘phew’ I can’t afford to have another enemy at this point haha. It’s not that I hate left wing people, it’s just I’m abrasive as fuck and I love to troll and trigger people and leftwing people just don’t go in for that. So if I was constantly offending him that would be a problem.

The ideas for the Dexter continuations/spinoff are firing on all cylinders, I was in the shower just writing on my rainfall showerhead haha. It’s really spinning together in my head, it’s falling in to place and it’s almost a problem because I’m like a dog trying to chase two cars now haha. Like I’m balls deep into GS2 right now but now I’m looking over to this like ‘Mmm’, mainly because it’s like that sort of fun but with the serious edge to it like LCYE. It’s not a dumb zombie novel but could be just as fun as one to write.

Some people are reading this and going like ‘why aren’t you writing it down?’. My process isn’t really like that, if I wrote down what was in my head right now it would just be a mess. It’s like giving birth to a baby, you can’t rush it, it needs to be a solid fully realised mass before it can born or it wont be whole. I need to hammer it out and forge the idea before I can start shaping it into something real.

I mentioned before I didn’t really get that much positive feedback from The one who came back, and honestly that’s bad from something that could be standalone, or it could be a loose series. Porter Caraway is a character I want to keep. But I’ve worked out a deal with my original editor Nat to do a chapter by chapter edit on the cheap and I’ll probably just give it out as a free novel through my mailing list because I owe you people more free shit and it’s not a bad novel, it’s just not my best I guess. It was rushed over nano, but it still has something. So there’s that.

Check out the unedited excerpt below and you can always read the whole raw thing on inkitt with the link below.

See you…

Red Shoes

–

Peggy thought if thy gave him a normal routine, he’d snap back eventually and become the kid they knew. So for a few days he got up he had breakfast, he had lunch and dinner, he watched movies, he went for a drive. A steady diet of normalcy, easing him out of his shell.

She had Brandon take him for a drive to a storage locker close to their old place. It was a large concrete block of a place, filled inside with red sliding shutters packed in tight. Like some kind of maze.

They found their locker. Brandon opened the padlock on the big red sliding shutter with a key from his jeans pocket.

“We locked up most of your stuff here when we moved. Momma didn’t have the heart to take it back, it was too hard for her, you know.” Brandon forced a smile and lead Johnny into the musty storage locker.

It wasn’t that full, it was a smaller box locker about six by six. There was a mattress on it’s side with a large brown stain in the middle, probably from damp in the locker.

Boxes, lots of boxes, some of them looked a little soggy.

“Hey why don’t we split up and see what we can find?” Brandon said smiling, like it was a game.

“Ok” Johnny said.

He smiled like a big brother. Johnny seemed like he was getting more comfortable talking to people. It was reassuring to hear his voice louder even if it was in a different accent. Brandon put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder. He breathed in and patted him on the back and ruffled his hair a little knocking off his baseball cap. Johnny was still wearing his dark glasses inside so there was more work to be done but there was some progress. Some light at the end of the tunnel.

Johnny opened a box that said ‘Johnny’s stuff’ on it.

“We kept everything the cops didn’t take, you know, for evidence”.

Johnny went through the box that was mostly pictures and little toys. Army men and gun shaped things, nothing really stood out except one picture.

It was a picture of Johnny before he disappeared. He was standing under a tree with a man who’s head was cut off by the top of the picture. Even though he couldn’t see his face he knew he hadn’t met this person yet. He couldn’t remember him from any of the other pictures he’d been shown.

He looked at himself in the picture and the expression was odd. He looked sick or sad or scared, and was fingering a strange necklace or pendant hanging around his neck.

Brandon stuck his chin over Johnny’s shoulder as he put a box of moth balls down.

“Oh that’s your older brother Jack” He got a little closer and pointed directly at the necklace. “He bought you that weird necklace thing you’d never take off. You were always into that aliens and ghosts and voodoo crap as a kid, dungeons and dragons, you know.” He paused and cocked his head for a moment as if he was struggling to fill the silence “I mean what kid isn’t? Some of the neighbours thought you were abducted by aliens” He laughed.

Brandon got a little sad as she took the picture off of him. “This was taken a couple of days before you went missing.” He gave it back to him and Johnny studied it.

Johnny took a closer look at the necklace in the picture. It was some kind of bird. Maybe an owl, standing on top of a circle with a five pointed star in it like it was the hood ornament of a car.

“Oh that’s right. You’ll probably meet Jack later today at the barbecue.” Brandon hiked up a box on his hip and turned around “It was supposed to be a surprise, Peggy’s idea. I got you out of the house for a bit and we have a little welcome home barbecue. Get you re-acquanited with some of the family.” He walked towards the entrance. “Come on, help me to the car with some of this stuff and we’ll see how it’s going.”

Johnny nodded. He put the picture back in the box and closed it up then picked it up and walked to the entrance of the locker. Brandon slid the door closed.

–

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TOTCB – Chapter 5 ‘Stranger than kindness’

Bonjourno, mi amigos. Probably butchering that, how many languages was that? I dunno, fuck I’m so talented, all that multi-lingual stuff haha. Yes I’m joking, no I’m not that narcissistic, pretty close though.

Ok so what’s new?
Not much, just being doing the day job thing as of late, picked up an addiction to Gwent (Google it). May get fired for playing it at work, well that would solve that problem wouldn’t it haha.

I got some writing done after a snaffoo with some of my software. But it’s all hunky dory now and I’m away, and honestly, I’m having too much fucking fun writing this book, honestly, wtf? Why is it this fun to write this much nonsense. It’s like writing it is reading it for the first time because I have like the outline and the characters but I don’t really know how it’ll take shape other than that. I don’t know how the characters are going to interact, or what they’re going to say or how they’ll act, what they’ll do or how they’ll do it.
It’s all flowing out of me like a stream of consciousness, like I type it and there it is. Like it’s not even coming from me and its fun. I’m really enjoying how it’s taking shape, it’s like a puzzle slotting into place and the nature of the book itself is fun. It’s almost like a portmanteau movie with all these different characters, different worlds colliding.

Yeah so that’s it, just really enjoying it, can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet but fuck it, better than writing some miserable crap that makes me want to hang myself haha.

Remember if you want a free review copy of the first book, hit me up on twitter or facebook and if you’re on my mailing list you get a free ebook just for joining.

Peace out people.

Oh yeah also here’s a chapter of my last book that everyone seems to hate haha fucking nano, yes I am blaming you haha.

Stranger than kindness

~

On the plane Johnny seemed nervous and Peggy could tell, but she couldn’t think of any reason why he would be. To her this was the end, this was what she wanted, he was home.

She turned to him as the plane slowed to a crawl, putting her hand on his and she said “Are you ready to go home Johnny?”

Johnny didn’t react at first, as if hearing his own name was so foreign to him. He could hardly believe where he was, what he chose, there was no going back now.

He smiled and nodded.

They got off the plane and there reporters with cameras waiting for him asking him questions he didn’t answer. They just pushed past them into the arrivals lounge and they didn’t follow them.

She held his hand, he was shy and she suddenly felt a shard of ice hit her heart and she thought what it might be.

She turned to him and looked at him and he looked away.

“Johnny, are you afraid Momma’s not gonna love you anymore or something?”

He didn’t say anything, he mouthed something and furrowed his brow.

“You don’t need to worry, you’re home now. We’ve missed you, we’ve all missed you, but it’s going to be ok now, I promise”

She lead him out of the arrivals area and through passport control and to get their luggage. He didn’t have much but that one backpack and the clothes on his back.

What if there was something wrong with him? What if he’d never get better, what if the Johnny she knew was gone, never to return.

She shook off those feelings and lead him out to the parking lot.

Still he was nervous, he couldn’t stop moving. Bouncing around almost, going to the bathroom a lot and watching people and watching Peggy. He was always watching her for some reason. Trying to pick up cues from her. Like he’d forgotten how to be him and somehow watching her would help him remember who he was.

Who he was dependent on her expectation at this point.

Peggy’s husband Brandon with his camcorder. Their son Carl and daughter Sarah. Johnny and Peggy’s mother Angela had all loaded up in Carl’s Lincoln to go get Johnny and his sister.

They waited at the end of a long tiled windowless hallway. It was white with white rails along the side, slightly bluing tiles stuck on the walls. Brandon started filming as he saw people passing them by. Lots of people, young, old, fat, skinny, men and women but none of them were Peggy and Johnny.

More and more people passed, more people than seemed possible. With each passing it seemed less and less likely that they would come out. For a moment it seemed like a bad dream, they’d lost one child and sent another to find him only to lose that one too. The big bad world just swallowed them up. With each passing stranger their hearts sank.

Until finally Peggy emerged carrying her one duffel bag, she looked warn out but happy. Her hair was a messy, probably from sleeping on it. She wore a t-shirt and jeans, her face looked content like she’d just been around the world and seen all seven wonders in one shot. She saw her family waiting their huddled together. Anxious, excited, a little fear there, fear of the unknown.

They were the only ones left, the last off the plane.

~

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