by john | Apr 14, 2013 | Fiction, Writing
There’s a new Bubba story coming! Finished the draft, just gotta knock out the typos, tighten it up a little, and give it a cover. Oughta have it ready for y’all later this week. Here’s the opener –
Love Hurts
A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story
By John G. Hartness
The last thing I saw was the handle of my Grandpappy’s sword sticking out of my belly, covered in blood that was supposed to still be inside me. The last thing I heard was my brother’s voice, speaking to me for the first time in about fifteen years, mocking me as he twisted the blade. The last thing I thought was how much family reunions suck.
The next thing I knew I was laying in a hospital bed with more tubes and wires stuck to me than Wolverine in that crappy X-Men prequel. I stared up at the ceiling for a minute, wiggling fingers and toes and other parts that would wiggle before I turned my head to the side. Agent Amy was asleep in the chair by my bed, a strand of blonde hair creeping loose from her ponytail to brush across one cheek. I reached out to brush it back into place, but was really surprised to find that somebody had tied hundred-pound weights to my hands. Or at least that’s what it felt like, because I couldn’t move either mitt.
Amy must have heard or sensed something, because her eyes snapped open and she reached for the call button on my bed.
“Can I help you?” Came the tinny voice from the little speaker thingy that doubled as a speaker for the TV and a walkie-talkie to the nurses’ station.
“He’s awake. You should probably come untie him now.” Amy replied. I heard what she was saying, but didn’t quite get what she was saying until Amy looked back to me.
“Good morning, sleepyhead. The nurses kept the keys to your restraints, and I didn’t think it was worth fighting over while you were still asleep.”
“Where am I?” I don’t really have a problem with cliches, as long as they’re valid. And this one was. I had no friggin’ clue where I was.
“Atlanta. I had you flown here after Jason skewered you.”
“Like a damn shishkabob. Little bastard ran me through like poop through a goose.”
“That’s attractive, Bubba.” A new voice came from the door, and I looked up to see my best friend, wingman and technological guru Skeeter standing in the doorway, striking a pose. He woulda looked more heroic standing there all backlit and shit if he was bigger, or maybe armed. As it was, his skinny ass was the best-looking thing I’d seen in weeks. Except for Agent Amy, but she’s a chick, which gives her a default boost in the good-looking department. Anyway, Skeeter stepped into the room and flipped on the lights as a cute Asian nurse pushed past him.
“Mr. . . .”
“Bubba.” I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “Just Bubba will do fine, sweet-cheeks. Now, you wanna let me loose from all these cuffs and tubes and wires and shit? I gotta go rip my brother’s head off and crap down his neck.”
I didn’t know Asian people could get that pale, but she turned white as a sheet. I think she was afraid I was gonna kill Jason right there in the hospital. Which I reckon I woulda if I’da thought for a second that he was in the hospital.
She glanced over at Agent Amy, who gave her a nod. I reckon it was supposed to reassure the little thing that I didn’t want to kill her. It must have worked, since she set to unfastening me from the bed. “Mr. Bubba, you can’t rip anyone’s head off for a while. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’re going to be in much shape to be ripping open a bag of Doritos anytime soon. You suffered serious internal injuries, and if it were not for the work of a lot of very fine surgeons and your friends here rushing you here in a —“
“Black government helicopter that none of us knows anything about.” Skeeter said with a grin. He was sitting in a straight chair by the window, grinning like a possum that had just crossed the freeway. He’d been full of conspiracy theories since we were in middle school, so finding out that the government really did have black helicopters was the best Christmas present he could have ever imagined.
“Yes, that.” Nurse Whatsherface finished. “My name is Lucy, and I’m your daytime nurse. Ethel is the charge nurse and your technician is Alex. Dr. Watson will be by later to talk with you about your injuries and how long you can expect to stay here.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Serious about what?” Lucy had that look on her face that said she knew exactly what I was asking about but didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of just answering the question.
“My doctor is named Watson?”
“Yes, sir. Dr. Watson is one of our most competent surgeons, with experience in a wide range of internal injuries. And your injuries were apparently quite extensive.”
“Yeah, that’s what happens when your kid brother shoves a sword through your guts. Extensive injuries.”
She looked back down at her charts, doing a good job of not asking any of the obvious questions. “Yes, well, my sibling rivalries were slightly less violent. Now Agent Hall, Mr. Jones, would you please step out of the room for a few minutes while I check the dressing on his wounds?”
They left, and Nurse Lucy did a thoroughly professional job of checking my wounds, redressing the hole in my back and my front, and making sure that nothing got kinked up in my catheter line. And if you ever need to feel like the least sexually interesting human being in the world, let a nurse slap a huge bandage across your naked belly while you’re pissing into a catheter bag.
“How long?” I asked, more to take my mind off what she wasn’t doing than anything else.
“How long what?” She replied, not bothering to look up from the task at hand.
“How long was I out?”
“You were in surgery for about eleven hours, then there were some issues with getting you stabilized, so it says here that they went back in to patch up a couple of other small bleeders and then you were out for about three days.”
“So it’s been four days since that little son of a bitch gutted me?”
“Yes. If you don’t mind my asking, why haven’t the authorities been involved? You came in here on a government helicopter and you’ve said repeatedly that you know who stabbed you. So why aren’t there any police around?”
I looked up at her and tried to remember the days before I knew that the things that go bump in the night are real and that the monster under your bed was usually a boggart, not a figment. Those days were way too long ago, I couldn’t drag up that innocence anymore. I gave her my best lopsided grin. “Nurse Lucy, I’d love to tell you, but it was a government training exercise, and I can’t say anything more.”
“But you said —“
“I’m pretty sure you misheard me. Didn’t you?” I smiled a little, which is usually enough to scare normal people. It worked. The little woman turned pale again, and went back to work without any other questions.
by john | Dec 20, 2012 | Fiction, Writing
In the spirit of giving, I’m putting this up for free until after Christmas. It will also be released as an ebook for $.99 if you’d rather not read on the computer screen. This takes place soon after the events of Final Countdown.
Unholy Night
“Did I mention how much I hate Christmas carols?” I hissed into the Bluetooth earpiece. The little old lady in front of me turned around and glared at me, breaking off right in the middle of “Good King Wenceslas.”
“Did I mention I don’t give a flying rat’s ass?” Came the gravelly voice in my ear.
“Don’t swear at me, you bedridden behemoth, I’m out here doing your job while you’re the one laying on your back watching porn and eating Cheetos, while I’m the one out here freezing my chestnuts off listening to some fat white heifer invent new lyrics to ‘O Come all Ye Faithful!’” I might have gotten a little louder than I had hoped for in that last bit, because this time the aforementioned fat white heifer turned around and gave me the evil eye.
“Skeeter, shut your pie hole.” Bubba’s voice crackled over the airwaves. “I’m laid up here with tubes comin’ out of places I didn’t even know were places on account of my shithead brother sticking three feet of samurai sword through my guts, so you gotta suck it up and sing!” There was a squawk of static, a squeal and a hum as Bubba hung up on me.
It wasn’t really unexpected, his bad mood. He had almost died at the hands of his psychotic kid brother, and right after killing his father for the second time, to boot. That kind of thing would leave anybody feeling a little under the weather, and Bubba wasn’t the type to enjoy lying around a hospital bed for very long. As a matter of fact, his enjoyment ended about the time he realized that they wouldn’t give him unlimited morphine and that all the nurses wore underpants.
Then we got the call about something terrorizing Christmas carolers all around the Atlanta suburbs. There was a group in Athens that went out a couple of weeks before Christmas, and they came back struck dumb with their hair bleached white from fright. The next weekend in Lilburn half a dozen senior citizens from the Methodist church went out to spread a little holiday cheer, but only three came back. One of them blew his brains out with a shotgun the next morning, and the other two, a married couple in their seventies, took a bottle of Grandpa’s epilepsy pills and never woke up. Uncle Father Joe got the call from the Methodist preacher and went up to take a look at things, strictly on the D.L., since the Methodists don’t really admit to believing in any of the shit that we shoot on a regular basis.
Well, technically the stuff that Bubba shoots on a regular basis. I don’t usually shoot things, unless it’s on an Xbox. But with Bubba laid up in a hospital bed and Agent Amy called back to Washington to answer a bunch of unpleasant questions about werewolves and Bubba’s family, I was the only one without a priest’s collar that we had to send out in the field. And while Uncle Father Joe was more than willing to get his hands dirty, the couple of weeks right before Christmas were pretty busy for him, what with all the feeding the poor and Midnight Mass stuff going on.
So I ended up dispatched to Atlanta, wandering through Buckhead with a bunch of white people singing off-key Christmas carols and standing out like a banana in a smokehouse. We’d been walking up and down the sidewalks in the richest neighborhood in Georgia for three hours, and I was about ready to shoot the next person who suggested “O Holy Night.”
Then I heard the scream. And all hell broke loose.
It sounded like the noise a cat makes when you run over its back legs with a lawnmower. You don’t want to know how I know what that sounds like. The noise was coming from the glary little old lady, who was now staring down at the sidewalk and screaming fit to bust a hearing aid. I pushed my way to the front of the pack to see what she was hollering about, and almost tripped over the body of the head caroler. He was a fat white guy (they were all white guys, blowing my idea of blending in right out of the water), and he was deader than Vanilla Ice’s music career. His tongue was lolled out of his face, and it hung down over his three or four chins like a big pink slug. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and his hair had bleached completely white.
I knelt beside him and felt around his throat for a pulse. I found nothing, no matter how many chins I dug through. I pressed a finger to the Bluetooth and clicked open my comm line. “Bubba, you there? We got another one.”
“Put on your glasses, Skeeter. I can’t see shit here without ‘em.”
I pulled on the pair of bulky glasses and plugged them into the Bluetooth. The world went away, replaced by glowing green and red globs as my vision switched into the infrared spectrum.
“That’s better. Look around so I can see if there’s anything warm or cold around you.” Bubba said in my ear.
“It’s the eighteenth of December, dumbass. Everything around me is cold.” I whispered, scanning the surroundings for heat sources. The carolers bloomed orange and red in my goggles, but everything else was a uniform green or blue. I glanced back at the dead guy, but couldn’t tell him from the sidewalk.
“Something’s screwy here, Bubba. This guy looks cold.”
“I thought you said everything was cold.” Bubba replied.
“Everything is cold, asshole, but he just dropped dead in the middle of ‘Joy to the World,’ so he should be a lot warmer than the ground. But he’s not. What causes that?”
“I got no idea, Skeeter. And why were y’all singing Three Dog Night songs?”
“Not that ‘Joy to the World,’ you idiot. The other one. But anyhow, what sucks all the life out of somebody fast enough to make the body go ice-cold in seconds?” I asked. I kept my head on a swivel, but nothing looked out of place. I took the goggles off. The carolers were crying, and several of them had phones pressed to their ears.
“I need a distraction, Bubba. The cops are on the way and I’d rather not be the one gay black man hovering over the body of a dead cracker in Georgia.”
“I think Atlanta’s got a black mayor, Skeeter. It’s been a long time since they lynched anybody down there.”
“Well I’d rather they not get a hankering to bring tradition back right now, so would you please send a fake dispatch call reporting a bomb at Lenox Mall so I can get the hell out of here?” I heard him typing, then heard tires squeal and the siren rapidly start to head away from me.
I leaned over the body and took another look at the dead guy. A little old woman leaned over next to me and tsk-tsked at the corpse. “Such a shame,” she murmured, shaking her head.
“Were you friends with him?” I asked.
“Couldn’t stand the S.O.B., bless his heart.” She said without looking at me. There was no malice in her voice, just that old-money Southern disdain that can’t be taught, but comes naturally to bitchy old women who sip moonshine out of ornate flasks and look down on anyone who’s never served on the board of deacons of the local Baptist church.
“Why didn’t you like him?” I asked carefully. I didn’t look at her either. I figured everything would go more smoothly if neither of us noticed that she was talking to a black man in public. Much less a gay black man. Not to mention standing over a dead white guy’s body talking to a gay black man. In public.
“He was an asshole, but he couldn’t help it. Bless his heart, his mama died when he wasn’t nothing but a little feller and his daddy didn’t have no more sense than God gave a goose. But he had a lovely tenor, so we let him come a’caroling with us every year.”
“Oh shut the hell up, Bernice.” The new voice came from another old white woman, this one with lavender hair instead of snow-white like the first one. That was the only way I could tell them apart. White people all look alike, you know.
I turned to the new old woman. “Ma’am?”
“Ignore my bitchy sister.” The new woman said. “She’s been pissed off at Franklin ever since he ditched her for the substitute mail carrier over in Roswell. He was the heart and soul of this choir. Now we don’t have a tenor. We might as well go back to the home now.” The new sister seemed genuinely upset at the fact that someone had died not ten minutes ago, or at least upset that she was going to have to stop the caroling for the night.
“Well, maybe it’s all for the best.” The first old woman, who I now knew to be Bernice, said. She was working at that “old wise woman” tone, but she was trying a little too hard and still sounded bitchy.
“What do you mean?” I asked the question she was dying for somebody to ask. I hated to give her the satisfaction, but I needed to find out all I could about the dead guy if I was going to find out what killed him. And maybe stop it from killing anyone else before Christmas.
“Well, he was pretty depressed after getting booted out of the Singing Christmas Tree, and he’d been talking about suicide. Maybe he just willed himself to die.”
“Bernice, you are the biggest bitch in the free world.” Her sister said.
“Mary Alice Everhart, you shut your filthy mouth.” Bernice said, putting on an affronted look so fast I knew she had it in her back pocket for emergencies. Some old women carried Kleenex, Bernice carried offended looks.
“I will not shut up, Bernice. Jacob was just fine about not directing the Singing Christmas Tree this year, especially when the director they hired gave him a solo. He wasn’t depressed, he wasn’t upset, he was happy. You just can’t stand to think about anybody being happy without your approval, that’s what your problem is.”
Bernice stared at her sister with her mouth hanging open for a long moment, then snapped it shut and turned away with a hmmmph. I took a couple picture of the dead guy with the camera in my glasses, then turned and started walking up the sidewalk.
“Hey, where you going? We got to talk to the police!” Mary Alice yelled after me.
I just waved at her over my shoulder and called out “Can’t stay. Too many parking tickets at The Vortex.” I kept walking, retracing our route until I got back to my Mini parked at the Methodist church. I got into the car and flipped down the sun visor. I pressed a little button and a blue LED lit up, signaling that I had a good sync with my glasses. The glasses transmitted all the photos I’d taken of the body to the car’s computer and to my servers back home, as well as to Bubba’s iPad. I scrolled through the pictures on the touchscreen in the car, but I got nothing new out of them.
“Bubba, you see anything good in those pictures?” I spoke to the air, but the Bluetooth link was still active.
“Nah, nothing. You didn’t even get a good downblouse of the GILF with the purple hair.”
“You’re terrifying and a little disgusting, Bubba.”
“Thanks. But there’s nothing here to see. There’s no reason that dude should be dead. I mean, he was old, but that don’t mean nothing. There’s lots of old farts still running around out there.”
“I bow once again to the breadth and depth of your uselessness. I am continually amazed.”
“Thanks.”
“Sarcasm is lost on you, isn’t it, Bubba.”
“Yep.”
“Are you near a computer?”
“Yeah, Skeeter, I’m near a computer. They’ve got about seventeen of the damn things hooked up and monitoring every drop of anything that goes into me or comes out of me. And I got this iPad you gave me, too.”
“Well hop on the internet and see what you can come up with on Singing Christmas Trees in Georgia.”
“I don’t need the internet for that one. Let’s start with – they suck, there’s a lot of gay-ass music, and they suck. What more do you need to know?”
“I need to know if there was a Singing Christmas Tree in each of the towns where we’ve had deaths.” I sat back in the car and listened to the tap-tap of the detachable keyboard I’d given Bubba along with his iPad. Something about an ex-defensive lineman’s hands and a touchscreen seemed like a bad idea to me.
More seconds than I thought it could ever take to Google “Singing Christmas Tree” passed, and then finally Bubba’s voice came back on the line.
“I got it!” He sounded like a kid at Christmas.
“It took that long?” I asked.
“No, I had the information in like ten seconds, but I kept you waiting forever because I figured that’s what I was supposed to do. Since I never get anything useful out of you until about fifteen seconds after somebody’s started shooting at me, I thought dragging things out was part of my new job description.”
“I hate you sometimes, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, but what would you do for fun without me?” I could hear the big dumb bastard grinning and couldn’t help but smile myself.
“What do we know?” I asked.
“There was a Singing Christmas Tree production within two nights of every murder, including the one tonight. The Lilburn Singing Christmas Tree was last night, and it’s scheduled to be in Atlanta next weekend. That finishes out the tour.”
“Do you have anything on the director?”
“The what?” I smacked myself in the forehead, then did it again as I heard Bubba chuckle over the Bluetooth.
“I know what a director is, Skeeter. Remember, I took that theatre appreciation class in college.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know you actually went to the class.”
“Twice, but it was enough to know what a director is. The director of the tour is Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV, and he looks like a real piece of work. I just sent the link to your car.”
“Thanks.” I clicked off and swung the touchscreen over. When we fixed my car after Bubba’s dad trashed it, I installed a jazzed-up Mac and a movable touchscreen that I could operate from either the driver’s or passenger seat. I will admit to playing Angry Birds Star Wars edition while stuck in traffic, but only a couple of times.
I clicked on the link that Bubba sent and delved into the world of Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV, affectionately called A.G. by those closest to him. A.G. had been a world-class choir director at one point, but the advent of Auto tune and the success of the TV show Glee drove up the budgets on his productions past any reasonable point and he was relegated to directing community theatre Singing Christmas Trees to make ends meet. He had a modicum of success until his wife suffered a tragic accident while decorating the set for their Christmas Eve production last year. Apparently she lost her footing while putting the finishing touches on the top level of the tree and the imported Bolivian scaffolding toppled to the stage from a height of thirty feet or so. Mrs. Morehouse tried to break her fall by hanging from the Star of Bethlehem, but the rigging failed and she came crashing through the roof of the nativity scene, impaling herself and the Betsy Wetsy doll they were using for the Baby Jesus on the fallen star. From that point on, “Away in a Manger” was removed from the set list of any production A.G. was involved with.
I typed a few other commands into the computer, and a map of Georgia flashed onto the screen. A blue line with yellow dots sprang to life showing the performance towns and dates of A.G.’s tour, then I overlaid a red line with green dots to show the string of mysterious deaths. The blinking circles on the screen told the story – A.G. had been in every town with a strange death within 24 hours of the incident. Looked like I needed to go see a man about a tenor.
Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV lived in an architectural cliché. I pulled my Mini up to the front of the single most Gothic building I’d ever seen on American soil. The place was huge, with a grey stone facade looming over the surrounding suburban homes. The house stood at least four stories high, a stark contrast to the plain ranch homes that surrounded it. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why someone hadn’t just hung a neon sign out by the mailbox that said “Evil Genius Inside.” There were even gargoyles, of all ridiculous things!
“I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I had Bertha.” I muttered into my Bluetooth.
“Skeeter, Bertha is a fifty caliber hand cannon that weighs more than your head. There is no way on God’s green earth that I am letting you carry her into battle with the forces of evil. There’s no guarantee that either one of you would make it back in good working order.” Bubba’s voice growled in my ear.
“Yeah, and I just bet I know which one you’re more worried about.” I grumbled back.
“Skeeter, you are my best friend in the whole world, but Bertha is my gun. And the bond between a man and his firearm is something sacred. Do not pretend to understand that bond, and do not presume to supplant it.” His voice had a reverent tone to it, like he was discussing something holy. I let it drop, having a pretty good idea who Bubba would shed more tears over, me or Bertha. I took out my Ruger P95 from the glove box, checked that there was a round in the chamber, and slid it into a holster at the small of my back. I strapped a Judge revolver in an ankle holster around my right ankle, and slid a butterfly knife into my back pocket.
“Where did you get all that hardware? And what the hell do you think you’re going to do with that knife? Anybody gets close enough to your skinny ass to cut with a knife, they’ve already killed you.” Bubba said.
“Ain’t you the one always saying a fella can’t ever too well-armed or too well-hung?”
“Well, I reckon now you got one out of two, little buddy.” Bubba shot back. I pressed the mute button on my earpiece and got out of the car. I climbed the twenty-seven steps to the eighteen-foot oak front doors and grabbed the knocker, which of course looked like Marley’s face from A Christmas Carol. I expected the damn thing to talk to me when I grabbed the ring, but it kept mercifully silent. The door did swing open without being touched, which did nothing at all for my blood pressure, but I didn’t scream and manfully strode into the foyer.
Okay, maybe I yelped a little and jumped back about eight feet, then slunk in through the open door like Gollum following Frodo, but I went in. And my jaw dropped at what I found in there.
Instead of the stereotypical gloomy, cobweb-laden grand entryway I was expecting, I walked into something out of a friggin’ Martha Stewart Christmas special. There were as many lights blazing in that house as in some whole trailer parks I’d visited, unless you count bug zappers as lights, which I don’t. They don’t give off enough illumination, especially after they’ve been frying June bugs for a few hours. But anyway, this place was lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.
And that’s not even to talk about the non-proverbial Christmas tree that was standing in front of me, stretching all the way up until the star brushed the top of what had to be an eighteen-foot ceiling. And every decoration on there was top-notch. I saw stuff from Tiffany, the Disney store, and Sarabella, and you know none of that stuff comes cheap. But right in the middle, just a little bit below eye level on me, was what looked like a homemade ornament. It was just a plain white ball, and in black Sharpie someone had written “A&N,” with “1995” under it. Nothing else, just a white ball with a pair of letters and a year on it, but it was the only personal touch on a tree that was otherwise yanked straight out of a magazine.
I pushed the button on my earpiece. “Hey Bubba, you got a location on this Morehouse feller yet? I’m thinking there’s more to this than meets the eye.”
“Heh heh, like a Transformer?” My redneck sidekick chuckled in my ear.
“No jackass, like the inside of this place doesn’t match the outside. I don’t know what’s going on, but something doesn’t feel right.”
“Doesn’t feel right like the bad guy’s standing behind you and about to whack you on the head not right, or doesn’t feel right like your underwear’s bunching up and you’re starting to chafe not right?” The sad part is I knew exactly what he meant.
“More like the bad guy’s standing behind me -“ A blinding pain shot through my head, and I staggered forward into a huge pile of presents. As the empty cardboard boxes collapsed under me, all I could think was “Shit.”
I woke up tied to a chair staring across a big room with a vaulted ceiling. At the far end of the room, must have been fifty or sixty feet away, was a skinny little dude in a tuxedo. And for me to call somebody skinny, he was downright emaciated. He was standing on a little box behind a podium waving one of those little sticks a conductor uses. He had an old-style boom box on the floor next to him, and there were a bunch of glowing forms floating in front of him.
He noticed I was awake almost instantly, probably because I groaned and started cussing as soon as I woke up. “Ah, Mr. Skeeter, I presume? Or at least I assume that’s a name, because it’s what the rather profane man on the other end of this device was yelling after I rendered you unconscious.” My captor held up the shattered pieces of my Bluetooth headset. Good thing he didn’t know about the video link built into my glasses. Unlike Bubba’s, my glasses are prescription and I’m blind as a bat without them. If he’d smashed my glasses, I wouldn’t have had any chance to ever get out of there.
Not that I had a whole lot of chance as it was. I was tied tight to the chair with zip ties, those plastic ties that you get at Home Depot for bundling wires together behind your computer desk. Well, I was trussed up with those things like a Christmas turkey, and I didn’t get the feeling that this guy was breaking out the cranberry sauce anytime soon.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Bubba always seemed to have good luck when he got the bad guy to do the whole evil exposition thing, so I decided to try it.
It worked. Maybe Bubba’s right and every bad guy has a “monologue” button that’s just waiting to be flipped. “I am Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV, but you may call me The Maestro.” He paused there for dramatic effect, but when no organ chords hit, he went on.
“I am building the finest choir in the world, and I have need of many voices.” He gestured out over the glowing shapes in front of him, and they broke out in song. Not like “America, the Beautiful” song, but more like a low keening, kind of an aaaaahhhh-ah-ahhhh-aaaaaaah kind of song. It was creepy. A.G. waved his hand again, and the choir stopped.
“I have harnessed the power of the Afterlife to bring these loveliest of voices together, and tonight we will bring back to me the greatest soprano I have ever heard, the truest, purest, more beautiful voice I have ever listened to-“
“Edith Piaf?” I asked.
“No, you idiot. I shall resurrect a truly spectacular voice, the kind of voice that generations will weep to, the one, the only-“
“Billie Holiday?”
“No! Shut up, you fool! I am bringing back to the stage my dearest, sweetest songbird, my-“
“Barbra Streisand?” I guessed again.
“She’s not even dead, moron.”
“I know, but I’m a gay man. You say female singer, my DNA screams ‘Babs!’ I can’t help it, I was born this way. Ask GaGa.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The very confused little bad guy had completely lost his train of thought now.
“Which part, the gay thing or the Babs thing? I would think a choir director of all clichés might understand about being gay.”
“I’m not gay!”
“Don’t lie to me, I saw your Christmas tree. No straight man owns that much vintage lace garland.” I watched his face turn about eighteen shades of purple and knew I’d hit a nerve. It was tough growing up skinny, short and gay in the south. But it would have been just as hard growing up skinny, short, a music nerd and straight. Because at least when everybody assumed I was gay, they were right. This poor bastard had to put up with all the teasing and got none of the inherent fashion sense. I knew he was really straight the second I laid eyes on him. It’s all in the shoes. His were 100% off-the-shelf Wal-Mart. Total straight boy. But he was getting wound up, which either meant he was going to kill me, in which case this had been a terrible idea, or he was going to do something stupid and give me a chance to break free, in which case I was a genius.
He pulled a pistol from his pocket, sliding the meter pretty solidly toward the “terrible idea” end of the spectrum, and pressed it to my forehead. “You are a fool!”
“No argument there.” I might have squeaked a little when I said it, but I maintained control of my bladder, which is a good thing. It’s hard to intimidate bad guys when you smell like pee. I looked past the scrawny dork pressing a gun to my head and took a good look at the shapes that were milling about. One of them looked familiar and when it turned to face me, I knew why – it was the old fart from the caroling group. Yeah, the one I hadn’t managed to save.
“Say that again.” A.G. relaxed the pressure of the gun barrel against my head a little.
“Say what?” I squeaked again. I couldn’t help it. My voice has always gone up when I get scared, and I’ve spent a lot of my life scared.
“That! Do that again! Hit the high C!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, jerkoff!” I said, but really I squeaked about half of it.
“That’s perfect!” The nutbar shouted, and whirled to the choir. “He’s got the note! Now all I have to do is capture it, and she’ll be returned to me!” He was really excited about something all of a sudden. I didn’t know or care until he whirled back to me with a grin on his face and a weird contraption in his hand. It looked kinda like a crystal ball, only covered in facets, like a D20, but more like a D100,000. There was a light glowing from within the crystal, a flickering, dancing light. I watched it flutter, and jump, and felt my eyes starting to close –
And then the asshole had to start talking and snap me out of it. “She’ll come back to me. All I need is the perfect soprano-“
“What are you talking about, fool? I might be a little light in my loafers, but I ain’t no soprano. Not the Tony kind or the singin’ kind.” I said, turning my eyes firmly away from the crystal. I could almost hear it murmuring to me, and I didn’t want it pulling any Frodo and the Ring crap on me, so I refused to look at the thing again.
“My Nicole will come back to me once I get the perfect choir assembled. All I need is a soprano, but all those old bitches caroling were altos and mezzos. But your little falsetto is perfect, so all I have to do is harvest it and -“
“Harvest?” I squeaked, then cringed at the pleased look on his face. I was going to have to get a more manly voice.
“Your soul, of course. I need to harvest your soul to add your voice to the choir.” He gestured over his shoulder and I followed his movement with my eyes. Unfortunately, he also brought the damn crystal up and snared me again. How does Bubba always get out of this crap? Oh yeah, he shoots everything. Well that wasn’t going to work, since I was tied to the chair, and I couldn’t talk my way out of the mess for a couple of reasons. One – my captor was batshit crazy, and two – my captor was batshit crazy. I felt myself slipping again, losing hold on myself, tried to close my eyes but it didn’t help, and then the world started to go dark, my vision tunneled in until there was nothing but the dancing light, the flickering, ghostly light, and then –
BAM!
A.G. screamed, the crystal exploded, and I flipped over backward in my chair. The cheap kitchen chair shattered beneath me and I wriggled free. Okay, really I just rolled over and said “ow” a lot until my vision cleared, then looked around for the source of the noise. Agent Amy stood in the doorway, her pistol drawn and aimed at A.G.
“I’d really rather not shoot you, Mr. Morehouse, so please put your hands up.” She said calmly.
“You already shot me, you meddling bitch!” That marked the first time I’d ever heard anyone use the word “meddling” outside a Scooby-Doo episode.
“Yeah, but that was the wrist. This one will go in your head. Now put your hands up.” Amy replied.
A.G. didn’t raise his hands. Instead, he turned around to the ghost choir and screamed “GET THEM!” Pointing at me and Amy, of course.
The choir didn’t move.
A.G. repeated the command, flourish and all.
Nothing.
“Um, hate to be the one to break it to you, A.G., but they don’t seem to be wanting to do too much getting of us.” I pointed out, getting to my feet and trying to get the last pieces of chair off my wrists. Those zip ties were on there good.
A.G. let out a scream and ran at my. I raised a chair-tethered arm and conked him on the forehead with the piece of wood I couldn’t quite rid myself of, and he went down like a sack of uncooked spaghetti. Trust me, the image works, he looked nothing like a sack of potatoes, and a lot more like a handful of raw spaghetti. He sprawled on the floor, then curled up in a little ball, weeping.
Agent Amy came over to stand next to me. “Nice shot, Skeeter. You laid him out. And made him cry.”
“I don’t think that’s me. I think that’s something else.” I said.
“She’s gone. Forever.” A.G. wailed. I knelt down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah, she’s gone, A.G. It’s awful, and it was too soon, but she’s gone. And even if you’d managed to build your choir, she wouldn’t have been back. Not like you knew her.”
“I just wanted to hear her voice again. One more time. Christmas was her favorite holiday.” He curled up and started to cry again.
I got up and walked over to the boom box. The ghostly choir was still there, just floating. “What are y’all still doing here?” I asked.
They said what ghosts usually say, which is nothing.
I looked at the boom box, and the CD in the top was homemade. Written on it in Sharpie was “Atlanta, SCT, 2009.” I pushed the play button, and a beautiful melody of strings came forth. The choir turned to the cd player, and a host of ethereal voices picked up on “Silent Night.” A.G. stopped wailing long enough to listen, and it was a good thing, because they really did have lovely voices, if a little breathy.
“Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Sleep in heavenly peace.”
When the ghosts started to sing the second verse, a soft white light filled the room and a new voice joined in. It was a woman’s voice, the most beautiful soprano I’d ever heard, and in her voice I heard all the happiness of Christmas growing up. I heard the laughter of me and Bubba when he got his first shotgun. I heard the laughing arguments about religion and eating fish on Friday between my Dad and Uncle Father Joe. And I heard my mom, singing “O Come All Ye Faithful” as she basted a turkey, a voice I hadn’t heard in years that still brought tears to my eyes. I looked over at Agent Amy, and saw tears streaming down her face and knew that she heard it too. A.G. stood up, and with a dignity far beyond the insanity he showed just minutes before, stepped up to the podium and picked up his baton.
Silent night holy night
Shepherds quake at the sight,
Glories stream from heaven afar,
Heavenly hosts sing alleluia;
Christ the Savior, is born
Christ the Savior, is born.
Silent night holy night
Son of God, love’s pure light
Radiant beams from thy holy face,
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
When the last notes died away, a glowing shape separated itself from the choir and drifted over to A.G. It wrapped the crazy little conductor in its light for a long moment, then flared so bright we had to look away. When the spots cleared from my vision, A.G. was lying at the base of his podium, eyes closed, with a peaceful smile on his face.
I walked over to his body, felt for a pulse, and found exactly the nothing I expected to find. “Well, he got to hear her one last time.”
“Don’t know if he’s going where she is, after everything he did.” Amy replied.
“That’s not our department. Uncle Joe’s in the afterlife business. We just deal with ‘em while they’re here. And he’s pretty dealt with.” I said.
“I agree. Time to get the hell out of here and get some eggnog.” Amy turned and headed for the door.
“Right behind you. But, uh . . . Amy?” I asked.
She stopped and turned around. “Yeah, Skeeter?”
“Could you cut me loose from these chair pieces? It’s awful hard to walk dragging half a kitchen chair behind me.”
She laughed, and we headed out into the winter night.
by john | Sep 13, 2012 | Fiction
Here’s a piece of something new I’m working on. It will probably be a novelette or novella, somewhere in the 20-30,000 word ballpark. Hope you enjoy it.
Dagger’s Breath
Remarin’s feet slid on the slick cobblestones as he rounded the corner, threatening to send him sprawling into the street and under the wheels of a cartload of whiskey barrels. Scrambling madly and bowling over a rotund matron loaded down with laundry, the young thief regained his footing and dashed off down a dark alley. He ducked into a darkened doorway as four mailed, spear-toting guards barreled down the street. Remarin sagged with relief , but kept to the shadows as he crept slowly to the mouth of the alley.
Remarin peered back the way he’d run, ducking back into the shadows as two more heavyset guards came into view at more a trot than a sprint. They clattered past, chainmail and breastplates shattering the stillness of the night with their cacophonous rattle. Remarin stayed frozen until they were long past, then exited the alley and walked casually back the way he’d come.
That was close, Remoron. The voice in his head was dry as burnt toast, and Remarin glanced down at his belt. The black hilt of a dagger hung there, a small ruby set into the pommel. In the heart of the ruby a small light flickered, as if there was a flame dancing within the gem.
“Trand, you’re back. I thought I left you in the belly of the first guard.” Remarin whispered, long practice allowing him to converse with the dagger with the barest hint of lips moving.
I’m not that easy to get rid of. We’re stuck with each other until you’re dead or I’m released from this stupid curse.
“Or I smelt you down into earrings for that good-looking tavern wench from two towns back. What was her name again?” The dagger didn’t answer. Grateful for the silence, Remarin turned a corner off the main merchant’s thoroughfare and headed toward the poorer section of Landfall. Here one could find a pub with a room to let, a man in an alley with goods of undisclosed provenance, or a good street brawl if that’s what one was looking for. Remarin was in search of none of that. He found what he was looking for just a few short blocks from the merchant’s district, in a nondescript building nestled between a bustling pub and a shuttered laundry. He knocked twice on the door, waited for three breaths, then knocked twice more.
The door opened and a wizened man of maybe five feet in height stepped back to allow the thief entrance. “Welcome back, Remarin. I trust you have my goods?”
“I have the jewel, Salvar. I assume you have my money?”
“I have everything you’re entitled to, thief. Hand over my gem and I’ll fetch your payment.” Something in the little man’s tone rung false with Remarin, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the gem flash brighter than normal in the dagger’s hilt.
“Not to be suspicious, Salvar, but let’s see the payment first.” Remarin stepped slowly back until he could feel the door against his back heel. He couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, and that alarmed him even further. At this time of night, the tavern next door should be raucous, full of the sounds of drunken fighting and off-key warbling from the horrible bard they kept chained up by the fireplace. But tonight, nothing. Not a scrape of a chair, not a single slurred bellow for more ale, not even the twang of an out of tune lute.
Something’s amiss here. The voice in his head now sounded worried, as though the dagger actually cared what happened to Remarin.
“Really? And here I thought the tingling along my spine just a draft.” Remarin whispered.
Salvar, for his part, was playing the role of affronted shopkeeper to the hilt. “Why, Remarin, I’m amazed at your lack of trust! How many times have we done business? How many times have I moved merchandise of questionable ownership for you? And how many times have I given you fair market value for goods that I couldn’t move for weeks, even months? And now you choose to mistrust me? I may as well turn my back on you so you can pull the dagger out and stab me through the heart again!”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Salvar. It’s that I don’t trust anyone. A trusting thief very quickly ends up as a dead thief, and I have no interest in becoming a dead thief. Now where’s the money?”
The corrupt little pawnbroker fidgeted for a long moment before reaching behind the counter. His hand came up with a dagger, and Salvar let out a yell “He’s running!”
Remarin whirled around and shot the bolt of the door. He grabbed the heavy wooden plank that leaned beside the door and set it into the two iron holders, securing the front entrance for a few moments at least. He turned back to Salvar and drew his own dagger. “You know you can’t best me in a knife fight, Salvar, why even try?”
“Because I’m being paid very handsomely to deliver your dead body to the gates of a particular mansion tomorrow morning, and if I don’t kill you, I don’t get paid.” Salvar said, waving his dagger around in an almost-convincing display of knife work.
“I admire a man who sticks to his principles, Salvar. Even if those principles are killing me. For that, I’ll let you die quickly.” Remarin changed his grip and flicked the dagger across the room. The ruby-hilted blade tumbled end over end to bury itself in the hollow of Salvar’s throat. “Sometimes it’s very useful having an enchanted weapon around.”
Are you claiming that there are times that it is not useful to have me around? Trand’s voice echoed in Remarin’s mind and he crossed the room to pull the dagger out of Salvar and wipe the dagger on the dying man’s tunic.
“Yeah, Trand. Like when you’re talking. I could definitely live without talking to my weapons.”
You’re just mad that I’ve got a bigger vocabulary than you do. And there are two of them behind the door.
“I knew that.” Remarin grumbled, pulling open the door that led to Salvar’s storeroom. A pair of surprised mercenaries stood there, hands on sword hilts and shields at their sides. Remarin drew his rapier and ran the first one through the throat in one fluid motion. The second charged the slight thief, knocking him over and adding to his growing collection of bruises. Remarin grabbed the man’s ankle and dragged him to the floor before he could reach the front door and open it for his reinforcements, then clambered up the man’s back and slit his throat with a spare dagger he drew from his boot.
“Is that all of them?” Remarin gasped. Trand remained silent. “Trand, are there any more of them?” Nothing. Remarin sighed. “Fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t know there were two of them in the storeroom, I could only hear one. You saved my ass. Again. Are you happy now?”
No, but if you let me stab something else I might be able to recover from your appalling lack of faith in me. There are four outside, but no more in the building.
“Then I’ve got enough time to loot the place and sneak out the back way.” Remarin replied. He wiped his dagger down, slid it home in his boot, sheathed his rapier and commenced to pilfering any valuables the mercenaries might have had on their persons. He gathered up a couple of necklaces, three good rings and one jeweled earring, understanding that most mercenaries kept their savings in jewelry since it was easily portable.
Salvar’s body proved as worthless as the man’s loyalty, yielding nothing worth stealing, but Remarin knew where the pawnbroker stored his gems and gold. The thief moved soundlessly up the stairs to Salvar’s bedroom and flung open the door. He stepped quickly to the center of the room, flipped back the corner of the rug and pried up the false floor at the edge of the bed. He’d cased Salvar’s home and shop many years ago when they first began to do business, just in case something like this ever happened. “Better safe than sorry, I always say.”
No you don’t. You always say something remarkably stupid like “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Well you could end up dead or trapped inside a magical dagger for a thousand years, that’s what could happen!
“Shut up, Trand.” Remarin said, filling his purse with jewels and what coins he had room for. He barely felt the air shift above him, but dove for the floor in time to avoid the brass candlestick swinging at his head. The startled burglar flipped onto his back and got his arms up in time to block the return strike before his brains got smeared all over the floor. The blow had little force behind it, and Remarin easily disarmed his attacker and sprang to his feet. He drew back a fist to continue the fight, but hesitated when he saw the dirty face of a young boy staring up at him.
“What in the Seven Hells is this?”
That is a child, Remoron.
“I hate you. You know that, right?” Remarin hissed.
He turned his attention back to the child that had almost bashed his brains out. “Who are you? What are you doing here? And why did you attack me?”
“I’m Kit,” the child answered, his jaw set and his fists tight at his sides. “Salvar had me tied up here, dunno why. And I attacked you because that’s what you do to thieves. You bash ‘em.”
“Well let’s have a little less bashing and a little more talking.” Remarin looked the boy up and down. His close-cropped blonde hair was dirty, and longer than was the fashion, and his clothes were little more than rags, but there was intelligence shining in those blue eyes, and a ferocity that Remarin found . . . well, amusing if he were to admit it to himself.
“Nothing to talk about. Salvar’s dead. There are men beating down the front door to kill you and I think they’ll probably do that or worse to me. Can we run away now?” Remarin revised the boy’s age upwards at his words, then heard the loud crash of a door splintering downstairs.
“Yes, I think running away now is a grand idea. Do you have good boots?”
“No, just these scrappers.” Kit pointed to his feet, which were wrapped in layers of rags that provided warmth, but no traction.
“Toss ‘em. We’re taking the High Road, and you’ll fall to your death in those. Barefoot is better than bad shoes up there. Now come on.” Remarin flung open the window and looked out into the street. So far their little adventure hadn’t attracted any outside attention. More likely, Salvar had paid off anyone he thought would scream for the watch, so as long as the fighting stayed in the house no one was going to say anything. He stepped out onto the narrow ledge and stretched for the eaves. His fingers found the slimmest purchase, and he pulled himself up onto the roof. He lay flat on his stomach, reaching down for the boy.
“Kit, can you grab my hand?” Remarin whispered.
“I . . . I think so.” The boy’s voice quavered. Remarin didn’t blame him. If he slipped, the boy would fall to a hopefully quick and definitely painful death on the cobblestones below. The boy stood on tiptoes on the ledge, then on one foot as he strained to grab the thief’s dangling hands, then their fingers locked and Remarin pulled the boy to safety.
“You’re heavier than you look.” Remarin panted as they lay on the roof.
“You’re just weaker than you thought.” Kit replied. The boy scrambled to his feet and said “Which way?”
Remarin rolled to a crouch beside Kit and pointed off to the east. “That way. We’ll follow this line of buildings all the way to the docks, then hop over a couple of alleys and into the attic of a man I know.”
“You mean a thief.” Kit said. Remarin looked at the boy, startled by the accusation in his eyes.
“Not everyone I know is a thief. This man happens to be a shade, I’ll have you know.” Remarin started off across the rooftops, walking toe to heel to keep his steps silent.
“What’s a shade?” Kit asked, matching his steps to the larger man’s.
Remarin sped up to get ahead of the boy, hoping to hide his flush. “A shade is someone who buys stolen goods from thieves.”
“Oh, but he’s not a thief, oh no, mustn’t think that.”
“Shut up, Kitten.”
“It’s Kit. Don’t call me Kitten.”
“If you’re going to follow me around like a puppy, I should call you Spot.”
“Well what am I supposed to call you? Mr. Thief seems a little silly.” Remarin held up a hand and they slowed their march across the rooftops as they crossed a house that the thief knew belonged to a light sleeper with a crossbow and a willingness to punch holes in his own roof in an attempt to skewer “squirrels.”
“Call me Remarin, Prince of the High Road.” He tried for a grandiose bow, but almost lost his balance on the pitched roof and had to frantically windmill his arms to regain his balance.
Call him Remoron, King of the Jackasses.
The boy’s eyes flew wide and he whirled around, looking for the unseen speaker. “Who said that? Where are you?”
“Wait — you heard that?” Remarin put out a hand to steady the boy, whose balance had grown precarious as he looked for the source of the voice in his head.
“Of course I heard it. Someone making fun of your name. But where is he? I don’t see anyone.”
“He’s my dagger.” Remarin said simply. Kit gaped at him, the stared at the dagger, with its softly glowing red hilt.
“Your dagger?”
“Yeah, his name is Trand. He’s trapped in the dagger for a thousand years because he managed to irritate a powerful wizard.”
I irritated him? I seem to recall there being two of us in the wizard’s tower that night.
“Yes, but I’m not the one trapped inside a knife for an eon.” Remarin replied.
Only because I got caught.
“Proving that I am the Prince of the High Road.” Remarin said, bowing. This time without the balance troubles. “But that doesn’t explain how you heard Trand talking. Who are you?”
“I told you. I’m Kit. I’m nobody special. And aren’t we still on the roof that you were worried about?” Remarin’s eyes widened as he heard a commotion from below.
“Dammit! Run!” The thief and boy sprinted across the slate roof, sending loose tiles to skitter down the rooftop and shatter in the courtyard below. A crossbow bolt erupted through the roof just in front of Kit, causing the boy to skid to a halt and look around wildly.
Remarin dashed back a few steps and grabbed the boy’s arm. “Don’t stop! He needs time to reload. Better to be somewhere else when he does.” The pair reached the end of the row of connected homes and Remarin hung a hard left, pulling Kit after him. No longer running across the relatively level ridgebeams, now the thief and the boy bounded up and down the pitched sides of roofs and leapt from building to building. Remarin looked back once and was relieved to see the terror in the boy’s face had faded to exultation as he reveled in the night’s chase.
This is the best part of the job, he thought. The night air, the freedom, the cash . . .
The people climbing up on the roof ahead of you with swords that want to chop you into kibble. . . Trand’s dry voice snapped Remarin back to the task at hand, and he looked ahead at the pair of guards trying to find their footing in their heavy, hobnailed boots. The chain mail restricting their movement was bad enough, but they didn’t stand a chance of catching anyone with those silly boots on.
Remarin reached into a pocket on his pants and pulled out a string of firecrackers, lighting one and flinging the string at the guards. The small explosives popped to life, blinding the guards and startling them with the pops and bangs. The first guard caught the string in one hand, then threw it back over his shoulder as a pair of firecrackers went off in his hand. He grabbed his injured hand, lost his footing and tumbled over the edge, Remarin never looked back to see what happened to him, just assumed from the resounding crash from the street below that it didn’t end well. The second guard fared a little better, keeping his feet until the firecrackers stopped exploding in his face. By the time the smoke cleared and he could focus on anything other than not falling off the roof, Remarin and Kit were out of sight.
by john | Apr 25, 2012 | Fiction, Writing
This time, Bubba hunts La Chupacabra! Here’s a little preview of the new Bubba story, on sale this weekend!
It was the middle of the night, and I was crouched in a damp, smelly field waiting for something the happen. This wrapped a lot of my least favorite things all up in a nice little ball of suck for me to gnaw on. I hate waiting. I’m a man of action, as they say. I like to do stuff, not wait around to do stuff. Now I’ll admit that some of the stuff I do sucks, like chasing down zombies, or werewolves, or fighting witches or ghouls or vampires or pretty much anything else that goes bump in the night. But it’s a damn sight more entertaining than sitting around waiting for something to show up for me to kill. Especially when I don’t know what I’m waiting on. Waiting to me just seems like a great big waste of my precious drinkin’ time.
I hate being wet, too. I’m a big dude — six-five and a good bit past three hundred pounds. And every damn inch is covered with hair. I got a ponytail that hit me halfway down my back, a beard that reaches almost down to my chest, and a pretty good suit of man-fur everywhere else. I ain’t one of these billboard pretty boys that’s got nowhere for a tick to hide on their cute little manscaped six-pack abs. I got a whole great big fuzzy pony keg of a belly, and that all makes it pretty uncomfortable when I’m rolling around in the cold damp grass. And it takes forever and about three big towels to dry off. I tell you, it’s just irritating.
And as much as I am a bonafide country boy, I’m not a big fan of the smells of nature, if you know what I mean. And this field was full of some impressively natural smells. I much prefer the kind of smells that come from a bottle. Like the sweet, soothing smell of Jack Daniels. Or the glorious lavender-scented cloud of stripper perfume. I once heard a fella say “they call it Destiny, but it smells like shame.” I disagree. It smells like the hopes and dreams of desperate men and women smart enough to take advantage of them. I love strippers, they have an uncomplicated view of life. You give them money, they show you boobies. I have a similarly uncomplicated view of life — monsters need to be killed, I kill ‘em.
And that’s why I was stuck in a damp, smelly field in the middle of the night miles away from the scent of whiskey or the sight of a boob. I had a monster to kill, and as long as the critter was playing shy, I was stuck out there freezing my ass off and bitching to Skeeter over the Bluetooth. Skeeter’s my backup, my technical liaison, my navigator and my best friend. He’d appointed himself my best friend since the day I kept Jason Skoonfield from running his underpants up the flagpole in middle school. I probably wouldn’t have stopped Jason from having a little bit of innocent fun, but since Skeeter was still wearing his underpants I thought that was a little over the line. So me and Skeeter struck up an unusual alliance. I kept him from getting killed for being the only black kid in our school, not to mention the only gay kid and the smartest kid in three counties, and he made sure I passed algebra and got out of high school. Even the principal thought it was a fair trade. He was pretty tired of replacing all the desks that couldn’t hold me, and he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork if Skeeter ended up dead. So he didn’t ask about my grades, and I didn’t tell.
“Skeeter, you remember when Jason Skoonfield was gone run your drawers up the flagpole in tenth grade?” I asked the air.
Skeeter’s disembodied voice came back in my ear. “It was one of the most traumatic experiences in a traumatic youth, Bubba. Of course I remember it. It may have been the pinnacle of my humiliation in that vile institution they called a school. Why do you bring that up now?”
“You know I get all philosophical-like when I’m stuck out here smelling cowpies and staring up and the stars. You ever wonder where we’d be if I hadn’t stopped Skoon and his buddies?”
Skeeter’s voice got very quiet. “I do, Bubba. Sometimes I do, but I try not to think about that too much. And you shouldn’t either, we’ve got a job to do.”
I knew where he was going, and it wasn’t a road I wanted to go down right then. Or ever, for that matter. I looked down at the glowing face of the child’s Mickey Mouse watch and thought back to happier days. Then I gave myself a shake and answered Skeeter. “Yeah, but what the hell is the job, Skeeter? I’m freezing off my danglies out here and ain’t heard nothing all night.”
“You know the monster’s been feeding every third night, and this is the only herd that hasn’t been attacked this month. So if there really is a chupacabra somewhere around here, this is the best spot to find it.”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty damn good spot to get a frostbit sack, too.” I grumbled. “You got it easy, sitting there in your nice warm little command center. Remember, I was on a lake just a few days ago in flip-flops and no shirt, and supposed to be there for another four days. Instead, I’m fully dressed in long pants, a leather jacket and a sweater and I’m still freezing my ass off!”
I heard a sharp intake of breath as Skeeter started to reply, but I cut him off with a hiss. “Shut up, I think I hear something.” There was a rustling sound coming from the fenceline a few feet away. I crept over in the direction of the sound and suddenly realized that the source of the sound was a cow. I got to within three feet of the beast before I could make out its shape in the moonless night, then I scrambled backwards as quickly as I could as the cow unleashed the most terribly stench I’d ever experienced right in my face.
“Skeeter you sonofabith a cow just farted on me!” I screeched into the earpiece, trying to get away from the cloud of methane that was wrapped around my head. I heard Skeeter laughing uncontrollably in my ear as I worked hard not to vomit.
“You know I’m gonna kill you when I get out of here, right?”
“I don’t make the assignments, Bubba, I just send you the emails.” He sounded dangerously close to hyperventilating, and I was dangerously close to walking off the job when I heard the scream.
If you’ve never heard a goat scream, you should do everything in your power to keep it that way. It’s a sound like nothing on earth, kinda like a mix of a human scream with a deeper tone than any human can make, and it can carry for miles. It chilled me to the bone, and put my butt in gear. I started running for the sound, drawing Bertha, my fifty-caliber Desert Eagle as I went after the monster. When I got there, I stopped dead in my tracks at the scene in front of me.
This was not what I had come here to hunt.
by john | Jan 19, 2012 | Fiction, Writing
Here’s the beginnings of a new short story series I’m toying with – let me know what you think.
I was freezing. My feet were numb and the only thing keeping my hands from going the same way were the chemical handwarmers I had tucked inside my mittens. My breath would have been billowing steam around me if not for the black balaclava I had wrapped around my head. Only my eyes were exposed, and even those were starting to freeze shut. The steady drizzle had long since made my black ski coat into a sodden, heavy mass of cold pinning me to the rooftop where I’d setup my surveillance. Finally the light in the bedroom I’d been watching for the past three hours clicked off, and the foyer lights on the house clicked on. A few seconds later, my target stepped out the front door, and it was showtime.
I set down the binoculars I’d been watching through and blinked a couple of times to clear the ice off my eyelashes. Cursing my thick dark eyelashes for not the first time in my life, I settled my cheek alongside the stock of my Remington 700 SPS tactical rifle and slipped my hands out of my mittens. I took careful aim as the target kissed his mistress, closed the door and turned to go down the steps to the Lexus sedan parked half a block away in a feeble attempt at discretion. He stopped, checked his watch, and looked up and down the sidewalk before taking his first step. I exhaled as he lifted his foot, and squeezed the trigger. The .223 Remington round spat out of the barrel, dropping slightly due to wind and the drizzle, and struck the target solidly just above his right eye. His head snapped back and his feet went out from under him, dropping him solidly on his butt on the porch. I slid to the edge of the roof and zoomed in on his corpse with my Canon T3i digital SLR camera. The 75-300mm zoom lens made it a snap to focus on his face from fifty yards away, and I took several pictures as he lay there in the porch light. The small round left a neat hole in his forehead, with no exit wound to leave a mess on his girlfriend’s door.
Evidence collected, I broke down the rifle into the soft-sided guitar case I used to carry my rifles, and put the camera into the extra space. I slung the whole mess onto my back and started for the stairs. I had just pulled the heavy door shut behind me when my cell buzzed in my pocket. “Crap,” I muttered as I pulled a mitten off with my teeth and dug around in my sopping jeans for my phone. I swiped a thumb across the screen and peered down at the text glowing up at me.
“Where u at, gurl?” My best friend Tina asked in her pseudo-streetwise lingo, even though she lives in Back Bay with her mom and stepdad. He’s some kind of neurologist or psychologist or some doctor that messes around in your head. Her mom’s pretty with big boobs. That’s her job, and she works hard at it. Pilates, yoga, tennis, manicures, pedicures, massages – if it tightens, stretches or tones, Tina’s mom is all over it. Tina kinda hates her mom, she thinks she’s a gold-digger. She’s right, but it’s not really that bad.
“Just getting off work, u?” I texted back. Tina thought I worked at a used bookstore in Jamaica Plain. Since she never read anything in her life that wasn’t in Cliff Notes format, that kept her from asking too many questions about my work. Which was a good thing, since bookstore clerks are seldom called upon to shoot state senators in the head from fifty yards away.
“Home. Bored. Duh. Wanna come over?” The last thing I wanted to do was go over to Tina’s and watch another chick flick movie while her mom drank red wine until she passed out. I was cold, wet and still had homework. But there was one thing I had to check on first.
“Where’s Jason?” Jason was Tina’s older brother. He was eighteen and on the swim team. He had dark, curly hair and pale blue eyes that made his tanned skin look even darker. In a word, yum.
“I wouldn’t have bothered asking if he wasn’t home. Now get yr ass over here! LOL”
“Be there soon.”
I slid my phone back in my jeans and continued down the stairs. At the third floor I pushed through the door and into the hallway, pausing long enough to remove the duct tape I’d used to hold the door open when I went up to the roof earlier. I passed under the security camera, wire dangling from where I’d cut the wire a week before and made my way down the hall to my apartment. There was nothing in there except an air mattress, a duffel bag, a backpack bulging with my schoolbooks and a roll of toilet paper. I quickly stripped off all my wet clothes and draped them over the moderately functional radiator. I dug a pair of panties, bra, towel and washcloth out of the duffel and stepped into the bathroom. I grabbed a travel size soap and shampoo from my bag and set them on the edge of the bathtub, then set a Walther P22 pistol on the back of the toilet. I had a 22Sparrow suppressor screwed onto the barrel of the Walther, so if anyone disturbed my shower there shouldn’t be any more noise than a loud handclap. I wasn’t expecting visitors, but it’s always better to be safe than dead.
I stood under the hot spray for a long time, washing the smell of gunfire out of my hair and the chill out of my bones. I personally thought that the tangy, slightly salty smoky smell of firearms was a little sexy, but I doubted Tina’s brother would think so. He’d probably think I burned dinner or something. I got out of the shower, dried off and padded into the apartment in my underwear. My clothes were still soaked, so I dug around in my duffel for the spare jeans, Harvard sweatshirt and socks I had with me. I finished dressing, pulled on tennis shoes and a light raincoat, and grabbed my camera out of the guitar bag. All my wet clothes went into the duffel, the backpack onto my shoulders, and the guitar case in one hand. I grabbed the duffel with the other hand and did a quick idiot check of the room before I left.
“Idiot, indeed.” I muttered at myself as I went back into the bathroom, grabbed my Walther and slipped it into the guitar case. The shampoo container and soap wrapper went into the duffel, and out the door I went. I left the door open a crack behind me, figuring it wouldn’t take long for one of the junkies on the floor to take me up on my unspoken offer of a place to crash. I still had three months paid up on the place, somebody might as well use it.
The street was awash with red and blue lights when I stepped out the front door, just another little redheaded girl in a city full of Irish. I stepped up to a cop working the yellow tape and asked “What happened?” in my best innocent little girl voice.
He looked down at me and smiled a little. “You shouldn’t see stuff like this kid, head on home.”
“Okay.” I said, and turned to walk away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a big man in a suit eyeballing the crowd suspiciously. A detective, wondering if the killer had revisited the scene to check on the investigation. Yup, I had. And they had no idea. They just saw another skinny, clean and maybe cute someday little girl going home from a guitar lesson.
I walked a couple of blocks over, then tossed the duffel into an alley where I knew a homeless family with a daughter about my size had taken up residence. I’d cased the neighborhood well before I decided on my attack strategy. I knew every person that lived in a four-block radius of my strike zone, and knew that the cops in this neighborhood only had a 35% close rate on homicides. The precinct where the target lived, make that had lived, reported a 77% close rate on murders. Didn’t take a math whiz to figure out which neighborhood was better to shoot someone in. Of course, I am a math whiz. Come to think of it, I’m pretty bright in general. I’m Cindy Slaughter, teenage assassin. Pleased to meet you, too.
by john | Nov 24, 2011 | Fiction, Vampires, Writing
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! Here’s a little something I tossed together for your enjoyment!
Turkey Day Debacle
By John G. Hartness
I knew I was in trouble when I stepped into the grocery store. I looked over at Abby and said, in all sincerity “Remind what people eat on Thanksgiving again?”
“Well, turkey for starters” was the snotty reply from my shopping partner, a twenty-two year old newly turned vampire with a body to die for (if I wasn’t already dead) and an attitude to slit your wrists over.
“I remember the turkey, smartass. What else?”
“Jeez, Jimmy, how long have you been dead again? There’s stuffing, ham, cranberry juice, rice, gravy, biscuits, casseroles, desserts, Oh my God, the desserts! I’d almost forgotten the desserts!” She was leaning on the shopping cart writhing an a not-unpleasant way that was probably a lot more distracting to the live patrons of the store than it was to me.
“Stop that, you’re scaring the mortals.” I shouldered her aside and took the cart, heading towards the back of the store and the first mission – turkey.
“I was not!” Abby protested, but fell into step beside me. “Are you sure we can’t eat? Not even just a little pumpkin pie?”
“It’s not a good idea.” I remembered my first meal after turning, how everything tasted like sawdust and then upset my delicate digestive system for days. Even though our new place had multiple bathrooms, I didn’t wish that kind of suffering on anyone, dead or alive.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen? I’m already dead, after all!” So I told her, in extreme graphic detail, the worst that could happen. She turned even paler than normal, then shifted to a lovely shade of green before running into the restroom at the back of the store.
I parked the cart at the meat department and walked down the aisle looking at the different flavors of pre-cooked turkeys available for purchase. Cajun turkeys, smoked turkeys, spiced turkeys and Honeybaked Ham turkeys. The last one confused me a little. I wasn’t sure if it was a ham-flavored turkey, a turkey-flavored ham, or just a normal turkey-flavored turkey made by Honeybaked Ham people. Regardless I picked up the smallest turkey-style turkey that I could find. After all, only three of our six-person dinner party could actually eat food, so it’s not like Greg and I would be making a lot of turkey and O-Negative sandwiches.
By the time I’d picked up the cranberry sauce, Abby was back beside me, glaring at me every now and then for making her go barf. I was just pleased to share the misery. We picked out the rest of the supplies for our feast in relative silence, then I stopped dead in the middle of the dairy department.
“What now?” Abby asked, giving me a petulant look that she had perfected in her life as an adorable college coed. That life had come crashing to an end a few months ago at the hands of a visiting vampire, and now Abby was as (un)dead as I was. Her last confrontation with her maker didn’t turn out so well for the older vamp, so I kept the volatile young woman at arm’s length when she started tossing around nasty looks.
“Do you know if the stove works?”
“Yes. I checked it before we left tonight.”
“Do we have any pots and pans?”
“God, you’re really bad at this, aren’t you?”
“Cut me a little slack, Abby, I’ve been dead almost as long as I was alive, and I wasn’t exactly the most responsible person even when I was still human.” She must have seen something in my face, because she let that one slide. I’m not usually an angsty vampire, but sometimes, holidays in particular, it kinda sucks being dead and having abandoned most of the people that knew you when you were alive. That’s why this dinner was so important – there would be more people there than just me & Greg for the first time in a bunch of years. Sabrina Law, my almost-on-my-luckiest-day girlfriend and police detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and Father Mike Maloney, our best childhood friend, were joining Greg, Abby and I for dinner. We’d invited Bobby, our blood vendor from the morgue, but he was spending time with his family, all of whom were alive and unlikely to look upon him as an appetizer.
Abby nodded silently and took over cart-pushing duties while I fretted over the last few things on the list. Did I want to make fresh cranberry sauce or canned? After a brief but heated debate with Abby, I settled on canned. There’s just something a little charming about the gelatinous mass of cranberry sauce jiggling on a plate, still sporting the indentions from the side of the can. We finished up the last remnants of the shopping and headed to the front of the store. It was pretty close to deserted, there not being many people loading up on canned goods and milk at four AM the night before Thanksgiving. But when you’re the living dead you have certain restrictions on your movement that humans don’t have, and you end up becoming familiar with all sorts of places at all sorts of atypical times.
Even for the middle of the night, the front of the store was sparsely manned. I only saw one cashier working, no bagboys, and one pudgy twenty-something assistant manager leaning on the Customer Service counter. He had his phone in his hands and sported the studious look of a man very intent on an epic Angry Birds session. I walked over to the cashier and started unloading the cart onto the conveyor belt. I looked over the items and glanced back at Abby.
“I don’t think Hershey bars were on the list.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. These are not the candy bars you are looking for.”
“I’m not looking for any candy bars, and yet here they are. And don’t try to Jedi mind trick me. You know you can’t eat those, right?” She pouted a little, and I heard a little hmph from the cashier.
I looked at her and caught her giving me the kind of look that female grad students give to clueless frat boys right before they launch into a lecture on feminism. I raised my hand to her before she could start and jerked a thumb back at Abby. “Lactose intolerant. If she eats milk chocolate she farts like a basset hound. It’s amazing. Last time she ate a bowl of ice cream she blow out three windows in the kitchen.”
Abby threw a can of peas at my head, but I heard them moving through the air and caught them before I got a concussion. I put the last of our groceries on the belt and asked for plastic bags, pulling out a wad of cash that my dinner entree had been carrying around. I mentioned that on this holiday I was particularly thankful for muggers with lots of cash and not too much crystal meth in their bloodstream. Meth does nasty things to vampire teeth, too, so I was glad the thug I’d had for dinner was pretty straight-edge.
I saw the cashier’s eyes go wide a second before I heard the shotgun go off, so I had just enough time to reach over the counter and knock her to the ground when the gun went off. I ducked between the aisles and reached into my boot for my Ruger LCP. Which I immediately remembered was sitting on my bedside table, because what could happen, it’s a ten-minute trip to the grocery store in the middle of the night. I’m sometimes not the sharpest fang in the jaw, okay?
“Are you packing?” I hissed back at Abby.
“No, I didn’t think I’d need a gun in the produce section. You?”
“No, I picked today to give up on my general pessimism towards the human race.”
“Great timing.”
“Yeah, right. Can you check on the cashier? I kinda knocked her down a little.”
“A little?” Came a third, and indignant, voice. “You shoved me into the middle of next week. You’re strong for a skinny little dork!” I looked around and saw the cashier’s head poking out of the end of the aisle.
“Thanks, I think.” I replied dryly. “You wanna get back under cover before or after you get shot?” Her head snapped back behind the conveyer belt, and I glanced back at Abby. “Keep her alive.” I whispered, then I stood up.
The sound of shell racking into the chamber of a twelve-gauge shotgun is unmistakable, and that’s the first thing I heard when I stood up. Much to my chagrin, the sound was much closer than I had expected. Therefore, so was the gun. I looked over about ten feet from the end of my aisle and there stood our robber du jour. He looked pretty comfortable with the shotgun, but didn’t look like he’d robbed many grocery stores. He looked more like he’d been out hunting for his Thanksgiving turkey the old-fashioned way and decided to knock over a Piggly Wiggly on the way home.
“Hey.” I said, holding my hands out where he could see I was unarmed.
“Hey.” He said back, pointing the shotgun at my head. I knew from recent experience that a well-placed load of buckshot could in fact kill a vampire, because it can blow a head clean off a body, thus counting for decapitation. So I didn’t want to do anything that would end up with me dead. Um, deader. Or really dead. You get the idea.
“Can I help you with something?” I started moving slowly towards him, trying to keep my body between his line of sight and where Abby was hiding, and hopefully coming up with a better plan than the one I was currently exercising.
“Get me the money from the cash register! And the safe!” He ended each sentence with a jab in my general direction of the shotgun. I made my way to the register and looked for a NO SALE button. No luck.
“How do I open this thing?” I whispered to the cashier, who was curled up behind my knees.
“You need a manager’s keys.” I looked around, but the fat manager kid was nowhere to be seen.
“We’ve got a little problem there,” I said to the man with the gun. “You see, it takes a manager’s keys to open the register, and I’m not a manager. In fact, I don’t even work here.” I chuckled a little, giving the whole thing my best we’ll laugh at this later vibe, but he didn’t laugh along with me.
He aimed the shotgun straight at me and gave me a cold look. “Then you better find a manager real fast, or I’m going to spread pieces of you all over the front of this store.” Bingo. As soon as he made eye contact, I locked gazes with him and started pouring mojo into him.
I looked at him confidently and said “You do not want to hurt anyone. Put the gun down and lie down on your stomach.”
He looked at me like I was crazy and replied “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but if I don’t get some money in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to shoot you in the face.” Crap. Either my mojo was on the fritz, or Greg’s latest theory was right – that mojo didn’t work when the subject was under a big load of adrenaline. Or he was one of the rare people my mojo just didn’t work on, like Sabrina. But the adrenaline thing made more sense.
I held up my hands and started toward him, slowly. “Okay, but the last place I saw the manager was over at Customer Service. He’s probably run halfway to Charleston by now, but if he dropped his keys, they’ll be back there.”
He waved the shotgun towards the counter. “Go get ‘em.”
I never took my eyes off him as I made my way to the counter, trying to keep the counter and Abby in my peripheral vision the whole time. It worked like most things in my life, which is to say not at all, because I tripped over a buggy and went ass over teakettle about eight feet from the Customer Service desk. I went down in a gangly tangle of spiky hair, black jeans and polished chrome, making enough noise to raise the dead. If I wasn’t already risen.
Abby, being the smarter of our duo, took the diversion as an opportunity and sprang up from her hiding spot in the checkout aisle and chucked a can of cranberry sauce at Shotgun Guy’s head. He turned back to her just in time to get a shot off before the can caught him right between the eyes and sent him reeling to the floor. Abby jumped for the sky and the shotgun blast passed harmlessly under her. Well, harmless to her. A bunch of magazines about Demi and Ashton’s divorce and the Dancing with the Stars finale got blown to shreds, and her box of Hershey bars was pretty well destroyed.
I untangled myself from the shopping cart and walked over to the prone robber. I kicked the shotgun away from him and searched him for any sign of another weapon. Seeing her was clear, I tied his hand behind his back with his own shoelaces and mojo’d the manager kid into thinking the cashier had taken him down with no help from anyone. Abby bespelled her into thinking the same thing, and then erased our transaction from the register. I blew the surveillance tapes to bits with the shotgun, loaded the groceries into the buggy, and headed towards the car.
“Abby, did we just steal our Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked as I put the last bag in the trunk.
“Well, you can look at it two ways. One, you were going to pay for it with stolen money in the first place. Or two, it was our just reward for a good deed. But yeah, if you wanna be honest about it, we did.”
“I think your moral compass points north less often than mine does.”
“Says the soulless undead creature of the night with the priest best friend and a cop girlfriend. You’re a CW show waiting to happen, so don’t give me any crap, pal.” I slid behind the wheel and drove us home in silence, deciding that sometimes discretion really is the better part of valor.
*****
The next night about eight, after everyone laughed their way through the story of our shopping trip and Greg hacked the NFL network to get the game, we all settled in for dinner. Greg, Abby and I had glasses full of nice, thick blood, while Mike and Sabrina had plates loaded down with the grub we’d all spent much of the early evening preparing. It had been a good night, nobody new was dead, Sabrina had brought her cousin Stephen and his husband Alex to the party, and I stood to propose a toast.
“Tonight, I’m thankful for all of you. For old friends and new, you guys are the reason I get up every night to do what I do. You all make my world a better place, and I thank you for it.” A chorus of “hear, hear” and “you’re such a dork” rose from my friends, and I sat down to drink while they enjoyed dinner.
Sabrina suddenly grabbed her jaw and yelped. “Ow!” She spit something hard out into her plate, and Abby and I shared a look as a stray piece of birdshot plinked off of Sabrina’s plate. Then we all just looked at each other and laughed.