JohnHartness.com

This is a preview of my first novel, The Chosen. You can buy your copy here.

I sensed him before I saw him. I always do. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, playing a little blackjack when I felt his presence over my right shoulder.

“Hi Lucky.”

“Big A.”

I hate that. He always has to go there right away. And he’s supposed to be subtle. Ass.

“Been here long?”

“A while. Playing a little cards. You?”

“Well, you know me, Big A, I’ve got a place here. I love this town. Everything about it just calls to me.”

“Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere.”

I finally glanced over and gave him the satisfaction of a look. A new look for him this time around – red riding leathers, no helmet of course, black boots, black hair tied back in a ponytail and sunglasses. The sunglasses were kind of a given, I suppose.

“Nice outfit. You look like one of the cavemen in that insurance commercial.”

“Thanks. You, as always, look well put-together.”

I’ve never been sure how to take his compliments, and I wasn’t in Las Vegas to think, so I just went for face value.
“Thanks.”

For once he didn’t press the issue and stopped talking. So we sat there playing blackjack for a while. Me playing green chips, him moving quickly from green to black to purple all the way up to the yellow $1,000 chips in a couple of short hours. He lost just enough hands to keep from getting thrown out, but not quite enough to keep the eye in the sky from getting suspicious.

“A, looks like we’ve got company.”

“You got a mouse in your pocket? I’m not the one that’s been sitting here counting cards for three hours.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one who took twenty grand in chips out of my safety deposit box this morning. Chips, I might add, that came from a casino that was exploded a couple decades ago.”

I hate that he always has more information than he rightfully should. I suppose, to give him his due, that he does have people literally everywhere in this town. But it’s still annoying. I’ll grant that visiting a box that hasn’t been touched in 25 years might raise an eyebrow or two, but I’m still blaming the attention of the lummox in the off-the-rack suit on my unwanted companion’s unabashed card-counting. Either way, the brutes in suits might have had a few questions for me that I wasn’t fully prepared to answer at exactly that moment, so I looked at my old pal Lucky.

“Keys?”

“Might I suggest California? I hear Sacremento’s nice this time of year. My bike’s out front. You’ll know which one. You owe me one.”

“We’re not even. This doesn’t even come close. Nowhere near to close.”

“You really know how to wound a guy, Big A.”

“Bite me.” With that, I grabbed Lucky’s keys from the table, tossed a green chip to the dealer and headed for the cage. I spotted another security lummox between me and the cage, so I decided on discretion as the better part of valor, tossed a couple grand in chips into the air and used the resulting pandemonium to make my less-than-subtle way to the exit. As I glanced back towards the table where I had left Lucky, I noticed that he and the two guards were having a beer and yukking it up like long-lost frat brothers. Which for all I knew, they might have been.

He was right, I knew which bike was his right away. It was big, loud ostentatious black thing with flames painted on the gas tank. Subtle. I swear, the thing looked hungry. I put the key in the ignition (apple key chain? Really?) and headed off down the highway, turning immediately to the East as I recalled Lucky’s nod toward California.

Okay, so looking back on it, maybe opening a 25-year-old lock box wasn’t exactly the most under the radar move I could have made. I know that people take out safety deposit boxes in this town all the time. But not all of them pay the rent on those boxes with automatic debits from numbered accounts. And I just had the bad luck to run into the same security guard that rented me the box the first time, on his first day of the job 25 years ago. Little bugger had a good memory, that’s for sure. And I guess I hadn’t changed much since then. Ok, make that not at all. So it might have been my fault we got spied after all. But I’m still blaming Lucky. After all, he’s been taking the blame for things for a couple millennia now, so what’s one more little incident?
Maybe I should back up a little. My name is Adam. No, I don’t have a last name. Yes, that Adam. No really, you can feel for the rib if you like. But it’s better if you don’t. I’m ticklish.

I rode a few hours east until I got just outside of Flagstaff, and pulled over to watch the sunset and think. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Lucky, or Lucypher if we wanted to be particularly precise about it, to show up unannounced, but this time I hadn’t seen him in years. I wondered what he wanted. He always wants something, and he usually gets it. And it’s usually not good either to be the one who gives it to him or to be between him and his goals. It’s better to sit on the sidelines and watch the carnage, hoping not to get too much splatter on your shoes.

That’s what I’ve done for years – watch. I’ve watched people grow from just a couple to billions of huddled masses, yearning for something or another. I’ve watched people kill each other over pennies in the street and I’ve watched people give their last breath to help a stranger. And through it all, ever since the Garden, Lucky has been a constant. Always around, always goading something into action. I never know why or what he wants, I just watch.

But this little interaction was different. This was the first time in millennia that Lucky had been goading me. He wanted me to do something, and whatever it was, I didn’t want to do it. The last time I did anything he wanted it didn’t turn out so well for me, so I’ve tried to steer clear of his maneuvering since then. So I sat, and the sun set, and I watched the shadows lengthen and the desert turn from a superheated wasteland to a patchwork canvas of light and rolling shadows. I like sunsets, they carry the memory of the day before and the promise of the day to come.

Eve always preferred sunrises. She said they were more anticipatory, like a held breath before the day explodes like a sneeze all over the world.

Yeah, Eve’s real too. It all is, except for the bit about Lucky being a serpent. That was a little bit of poetic license on Mo’s part, but he was always creeped out by snakes and I think the whole serpent thing was just a little underhanded way of making sure people overall didn’t like snakes any more than he did. Really, Lucky was our friend, and was in the Garden with us from the very beginning. Several of the archangels used to come visit in the Garden: Gabriel, Airel, Jophiel and Metatron were there the most, but after we left the Garden we saw more of Azrael than we really wanted to.

So yeah, Lucky was around the Garden. And we really did all live there with all the beasts in perfect harmony and everybody lived forever and nobody died and it was all sweetness and light. But that can’t sustain. It’s not a natural state of being, and Dad understood that. And he gave Lucky the hardest job, because Lucky was his favored child, and he knew that Lucky would do it without question, no matter what it would cost him in the long run.

So Lucky gave Eve the apple, and she shared it with me, and we ate it, and got kicked out of the Garden, and headed off to the land of Nod and all that stuff you’ve read about since you were a tadpole. And it almost killed Lucky, not just to be banished from Dad’s side forever, but to have to trick Eve and me, who were his best friends, into doing something that would make our lives pretty awful for a very long time. After a long time and more than a few beers, I managed to forgive Lucky and we reached an understanding of sorts, but Eve never let it go. Leaving the Garden broke something inside her that never healed, even after all these years.

Oh, I guess by now you’ve figured out that we’re immortal. Gaining knowledge of good and evil didn’t do anything to change the whole living forever thing we started off with, even though we didn’t pass that on completely to our children. They lived a good long time, don’t get me wrong. And I watched more than one century turn with my kids, but eventually they grew old and died. And I watched more and more centuries turn without them. And no matter what my buddy Clive Lewis wrote about all men being “sons of Adam,” it didn’t change the fact that my direct sons and daughters were gone.

So I sat on a little hill just west of Flagstaff watching the sun go down and trying to figure out what Lucky was looking for. What did he want me to do? He had suggested California, so of course I headed East, but is that what he wanted me to do in the first place? Lucky was the original trickster, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to double- or even triple-think me into going exactly where he wanted me to go.

As I sat there pondering, the first star of the night came winking into view in the east, and I could feel my answer. East. I had to go East, and I had to find Eve. This was gonna get ugly.

For the rest of the story, buy the book here.