Click here to order your copy of THE MVP or any of the other GFL books! Don’t delay, the sooner you order, the lower number you get!

Set in a lethal American professional football league seven centuries in the future, THE MVP puts huge humans on the field with five alien races to make a game that is faster, stronger and deadlier than anything we know today. The fourth book in the Galactic Football League series, THE MVP follows on THE ROOKIE, THE STARTER and THE ALL-PRO. 

Star quarterback Quentin Barnes has spent three seasons putting together a hard-hitting, hard-fighting team that combines all-stars, rejects, young players and seasoned veterans from all five sentient races. He has fought against racism and bound his team together through shared sacrifice, blood, tragedy and victory. But this season Quentin faces the biggest challenge yet — the deadly threat of the Prawatt race, which has captured him and the rest of his Ionath Krakens teammates. Quentin and his friends must overcome impossible odds to escape this deadly and unknown race. 

The GFL series is described as “STAR WARS” meets “THE BLINDSIDE” meets “THE GODFATHER.” Join the Krakens as they fight to take the title and achieve immortality.

Yes, you read that right. INFINITY follows DIARY OF A MADMAN, but in the same way that DIARY OF A MADMAN follows ANGEL OF DEATH…

INFINITY takes place in a distant-but-not-too-distant future from the events of DOM… And it alludes to specific events that take place in between the end of DOM and the beginning of INFINITY.

And although it hasn’t been written yet, I’ve been planning out a direct sequel to DOM that picks up moments after DOM ends (and moments after ANGEL OF DEATH ends)… It will go into filling the timeline before INFINITY begins… but I have no concrete date for when DOM2 will come out.

And if you want an advance peek at INFINITY (let’s just say with some blazing action) I’ve placed a small preview of the beginning of INFINITY in the paperback version of DIARY OF A MADMAN.

The 2012 drop date for INFINITY has yet to be determined… I want to finish recording the audiobook version first… so stay tuned for details to come!

YOU ASKED FOR IT, you got it! The most requested MYN back catalog release to get the dead tree book treatment, DIARY OF A MADMAN, is now available for order in trade paperback!

Turns out I had a free afternoon after finishing the TRANSISTOR RODEO SOUNDTRACK ALBUM so I decided to take a couple of hours and put together a paperback version and get it uploaded to Amazon’s Createspace for some good ol’ fashioned book-binding…

It’ll be up in the regular Amazon store in a few days, but right now you can order a copy from the DIARY OF A MADMAN Amazon CreateSpace page for just $9.99. 

This was all pretty last minute stuff and I put the pedal to the metal in order to get it out so that you could order one for the Holidays, if you so desire.

And yes, I will be offering signed copies for sale, but not until after the 1st of the year because, believe it or not, I still haven’t gotten my copies of the book yet, LOL…

Oh, and just to sweeten the pot, I included a SPECIAL EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW of my upcoming action-thriller series INFINITY in the back of DIARY OF A MADMAN. 

So pick up your copy now… CLICK HERE TO ORDER and be the first to read the first few pages of INFINITY!

Watch the trailer for DIARY OF A MADMAN!

TRANSISTOR RODEO ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK ALBUM – Featuring 16 tracks and OVER 2 HOURS OF MUSIC! All original underscore written and produced by yours truly… pop your earbuds in while you read and let this pulse-pounding electronic and percussion score bring the story alive.

Only $2.99. CLICK HERE

Some of you may remember the Transistor Rodeo audiobook podcast that I originally did a couple of years back and how I had decided to try something nobody had done before–write a complete musical underscore for the entire book, wall-to-wall… It was a lot of work but I think it really added something to this already incredible story. Now that TRANSISTOR RODEO is out for Kindle, Nook, iBooks and in Paperback, I thought it would be cool to go back and remaster a whole bunch of those original music score tracks and release them so you can experience the book in a whole new way…

Here, check out some of the tracks!

Because it’s much easier to catch little things in a manuscript that need to be changed when you hear yourself read it aloud, I decided that it really wouldn’t require much more effort to just turn on my VO rig and just “perform” my upcoming urban fantasy series INFINITY.

Now, that being said… I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with the audio version of INFINITY. I’m still contemplating several different scenarios. I think the likelihood of it being released as a free podcast is slim. Right now, I’m leaning toward releasing it as a paid downloadable audiobook, probably right around the same time that the ebook comes out… maybe even sooner. I’m also thinking that the ebook versions will include a few extra scenes not in the audiobook version… just to make it more interesting… but we’ll see.  Maybe, I’ll release a couple of chapters for free just as a teaser…

First, let me get through the material and see how I feel about it. So far, it’s sounding really good though…

INFINITY will arrive in 2012… stay tuned for more details coming soon!

As a successful and growing indie publisher and author, I see the rapidly-growing market for 99 cent Kindle and Nook ebooks exploding by leaps and bounds because there are lots of avid readers out there who love great content, but hate big publisher prices. That’s why I warmly welcome you to check out some of my 99 cent ebook offerings. And remember, you don’t actually need a Kindle or Nook to read my ebooks!

THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN: How the Mission to Hunt Down a Terrorist Mastermind was Accomplished
An Amazon bestseller! Read how we got Bin Laden. Part detective story, part tech thriller and part Bruckheimer action. The true story is amazing.
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK / iBOOKS

PACIFIC COAST HELLWAY PRESENTS: PISSED OFF-Is Better Than Being Pissed On…
“Imagine Howard Stern dropping acid with Trey Parker and Jon Stewart…”
—PLAYBOY MAGAZINE’s praise for Pacific Coast Hellway and Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff…
If you like rants, you’re in for a treat as I take on the topics that make my blood boil, including: Child Beauty Pageants, Competitive Eating, Autoerotic Asphyxiation and more!
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK / iBOOKS

GO FORTH AND KICK SOME ASS: Be the Hero of Your Own Life Story
“Life is tough and this book reminds you of that, but it also reminds you that YOU are tougher than anything life can throw at you. Mark has taken years of experience and boiled it down to an inspiring, humorous and dead on serious look at what you need to do to be successful in life. It isn’t as difficult as you might believe.”
- C.C. CHAPMAN – New Media trailblazer and bestselling author of “Content Rules”
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK /  iBOOKS 

KILLING MY BOSS
DELIGHTFULLY TWISTED. LIKE HITCHCOCK MEETS WES CRAVEN.
You hate your horrible boss. You’re not alone. And for good reason. Your boss is a complete jerk and everybody knows it. If you have ever imagined what it would be like to send your horrible boss to his or her early demise, KILLING MY BOSS is the “Youdunit” book you’ve been waiting for.
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK / iBOOKS 

SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS
What lays behind destiny’s door? Is it damnation or salvation… one ex-soldier haunted by apocalyptic nightmares will journey to find out the truth… If you love horror, check out the first novel in the Shadow Falls series.
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK / iBOOKS 

THE ART OF SURFACING
“A deft financial thriller. Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff writes like a man who’s been plundering and pillaging Wall Street for years!”
-STEPHEN POLLAN, bestselling author (Die Broke, Fire Your Boss)
“Great characters, clever writing. This books rocks!”
-PHILLIP RHEE, action movie producer, director, star (Best of the Best)
Get it for KINDLE / NOOK /  

Raf, who has been a big supporter of my work for years posted this photo on Facebook right afte he received his brand new copy of  Transistor Rodeo in paperback. I had to snag it because it really, really made my day. How awesome is this?

Thanks Raf! You totally rock, buddy!

Also, the only way to order SIGNED COPIES of TRANSISTOR RODEO is to join my mailing list… so please, hit this link and sign up.

It’ll be on Amazon’s site in a few days and of course you can order it without the discount code and pay the full $9.99 retail price at my Amazon/Createspace eStore link: https://www.createspace.com/3700954

…to get onto your eBook reader!

KILLING MY BOSS, the anthology of twisted tales I co-wrote with the fiercely-talented Colin F. Barnes is now only 99 CENTS for a limited time over at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

If you’ve ever had a boss you’ve really hated, you’ll love KILLING MY BOSS–highly entertaining stories of revenge on the worst bosses you can imagine.

Pick up your copy of KILLING MY BOSS for your Kindle or Nook today.

Some of you already know I design most of my own book covers. This one, for the upcoming release of SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH, I think, came out exactly right. I just finished the last few details with the manuscript including thanking all of you who helped me shape the original draft of the story when it was a serialized audio podcast. I gotta say, I’m really proud of the way this book came out and paired with BADLANDS, it really makes one amazing epic tale.

Enough procrastinating… I’m gonna finish formatting the book and get it submitted for Kindle, Nook and iBooks. Keep an eye out for it!

In anticipation of the upcoming release of SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH, I’ve decided to make SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS a free download at Apple’s iBookstore. Just moments ago on Google+, Sean J. O’Neil told me Badlands was one of his favorite things I’ve ever done. Badlands’ sequel, Angel of Death will be available soon, perhaps even as soon as next week, but for now get your read on and check out this dark horror thriller for FREE on iBooks.

Shane Lees is a super-talented artist and really cool guy I’ve known for a while. When he’s not off scaring small children, he’s at work with a pencil, creating some really haunting artwork. You may have seen his drawing of Galen Altos right here on this site. I love the composition on this one, how the somewhat innocuous diagonal lines on the tie (the universal uniform accessory  of downtrodden cogs in the machine everywhere) just lead you back to the violence. Superb work, Shane! I think this so cool.

I’m very proud to announce the release of KILLING MY BOSS, a collection of really wicked stories about well… trout fishing… no, about, uh… sending one’s horrible bosses to their early and much-deserved demise. I wrote KILLING  MY BOSS with Colin F. Barnes, a very talented writer from the U.K. A country that seems to have possibly invented the horrible boss, whereas I’d like to think that here in America, we perfected it.

But that’s neither here, nor there. Geographic boundaries aside, we want you to read these Hitchcock-esque tales of murder and revenge. And, you can even imagine that one of the asshole bosses is your boss, and… well, let your imagination do the rest. That’s why we call it a real “Youdunit” book… get it, “Youdunnit”… okay, whatever… just buy the book and enjoy the hell out of these extremely entertaining, and quite twisted stories.

C’mon, the book’s worth it just for Guy Burdick’s inspired cover art alone….

AVAILABLE now from AMAZON (for the Kindle), BARNES AND NOBLE (for the Nook) and coming soon to the iBOOKS BOOKSTORE.

Not only do we thrill in watching Dexter dispatch people with such brutality, we root for him to get away with what he’s done. Our loyalty to his well-being goes far enough for us to care that he doesn’t get caught, even though, beyond any reasonable doubt, we have just witnessed him commit cold-blooded murder.

When it comes to entertainment, why do we love serial killers so much?

The philosopher Heidegger once wrote that when we are aware of death, it transforms us from “existing” to “being.”

Who then is more aware of death than the one who deals it? The one who stares into the eyes of his victims as the light goes out behind them forever. The one who sees us in our most vulnerable and revealing moment as we know that what comes next is the end.

In the most unspeakable of circumstances, with no way to escape, do we beg for our lives or do we go down cursing and spitting? The serial killer knows better than anyone else about what it is that you are made of inside… and not just by removing your entrails.

Serial killers illustrate the power of God. They choose whether you live or you die. Even more accurately, they choose how you die. A serial killer feels he or she is superior and above everyone else. They know the way things should be, despite a world that defies their expectations of existence. When I wrote my serial killer novel, DIARY OF A MADMAN, my intention was to capture the mindset of a cold-blooded, calculating killer who is compelled to murder others because he believes his crusade will make the world a better place.

Ever notice that one hand that believing in yourself being good or just is pride, but on the other hand, believing others aren’t as good as you is a psychosis? A serial killer’s evil is just a factor of perspective and spin.

Leatherface, bad. Dexter, good.

Leatherface is a soulless monster who thirsts for the blood of those who enter his territory. In this regard, he is no different from the great white shark in “Jaws.”

In our eyes, Dexter’s heinous crimes are justified. He is the disinfectant that wipes these scummy people off the face of the earth and away from innocents like us. Because of Dexter, our spouses, children and friends come home safely tonight instead of being tortured to death or buried alive in a shallow grave by a remorseless psychopath. We root for the bad guy who kills other bad guys because we fear that the justice system will fail us.

What about Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs?” Not all of his victims were those who have fallen through the cracks of justice. Some were just unlucky enough to pique his desire to kill. Still, we root for Hannibal to succeed in his desire to be free to live his life the way he chooses.

In our eyes, serial killers are cool because they use stealth and cunning to gain an advantage. They are clever and interesting. They use urban camouflage and social engineering to blend in and get close. We associate with fictional serial killers because we often walk that tightrope wire over the abyss of our own sanity. At one point or another, we have contemplated what it would be like to gravely harm or murder someone who has trespassed against us, someone who has caused us a great deal of pain.

Maybe it’s your boss. Maybe it’s that idiot neighbor who purposefully lets his dog shit on your lawn when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s someone of considerable influence whose demise would benefit you or possibly even help shape the kind of world you hope to live in some day.

We have all wished death upon someone in a manner that suggests we would seriously like to see them not only suffer, but be made aware exactly why they are suffering, and in those last agonizing moments of their miserable lives, know that vengeance has been done because they chose the wrong path.

Though nearly all of us will never fall prey to the darkness that compels one to kill, we cannot get enough of the serial killer in modern fiction. But serial killers in real life aren’t superheroes, they’re murderers. And most importantly of all.

They’re just like you and me.

*****

Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff is the bestselling author of “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.” He is currently developing a sequel to his acclaimed serial killer novel “Diary of a Madman.” His latest book on mayhem and murder, “Killing My Boss” will be available in July.

The MYN App for Android smartphones or Android tablets is finally here! Last year, when the MYN iPhone app came out a number of people asked me about a version for Android. Well, it took some time but your requests have finally been answered. What’s cool is it has new social media features built in to let you post stuff from inside the app to Facebook and Twitter as well as the ability to email a link without leaving the app itself. The Android MYN app runs on Android 2.1 or later and is available at the Android Marketplace.

So stop asking what other than Angry Birds you can do with your Android smartphone… get the MYN App for Android today!

DIARY OF A MADMAN
by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

CHAPTER 1

Dear Diary,

Today, I woke up at 7 a.m., stretched for 20 minutes and made myself an egg white and spinach omelet with two pieces of wheat toast and the last of the margarine. Watched the news on KTLA for fifteen minutes. Caught a story about a possible teachers’ strike. Afterwards, I took a shower and got dressed (white buttoned-down JC Penney shirt, tan Dockers pants). Grabbed my gym bag and went into the office to pick up some new brochures. Told my supervisor I had a sales call in Torrance, but instead drove three hours to Bakersfield and murdered a man named Phil Testaleone.

Phil’s house was located in a tract of small and inelegant homes built in the 1950s. Two bedrooms, one bath, twelve hundred square feet, including one-car garage, all perched atop less than a quarter acre of land. Original brick exterior. Twenty-year-old aluminum windows (why people don’t replace those awful things is beyond me?). Roof that appears to have last been shingled more than a decade ago. Chain-link fence in the front. Old picket fence in need of a coat of paint on the south side belonging to the neighbors. Slightly bent screen door (lock already broken). Schlage doorknob lock with two deadbolts on the front and two on the back door leading out into the yard behind the house.

Grass was freshly cut, possibly yesterday (I love that smell). A rusted and forgotten swing set idles near the fence (made back when they used to build them out of steel, and not plastic) right next to a dirty and spider-infested pile of firewood. It was almost 2 p.m. when I got there. I circled the block and saw nobody, which was exactly what I was expecting since in the weeks I had been casing Phil’s house nothing in this neighborhood had changed. A few doors down, the one house on the street for sale still had the same sign on the lawn. (And someone please tell me why the hell do realty whores think they need to put their mug shot on everything? Sheesh!).

Three blocks away, I parked on the street with several other cars near the Von’s market on Henderson. In the back seat I took the grey meter reader’s coverall out of my gym bag and put it on. (It’s a bit looser after I dropped those five pounds). The surgical gloves, I slipped into my pocket.

Because there was no need, I didn’t bother appearing to be checking meters until I was on Phil’s block, and with the hat pulled down on my head and these fake eyeglasses, I was nobody. I once read somewhere that the whole idea when they designed these uniforms was to make the wearer invisible. (I should have thought of getting one of these outfits sooner, but what can you do? Live and learn.)

At Phil’s house, I made it into his backyard by hopping over the gate when nobody was looking.

One scary moment, I caught my leg on the top of the fence and slightly ripped the coverall. Quickly checked the fence for fibers and my leg to see if I was bleeding. Luckily no on both, but decided I should seriously consider dropping another five pounds.

With no one home and both neighbors at work, it took me less than a minute to pry one of the flimsy aluminum windows with a screwdriver. As I got it open, I thought of the combined four deadbolts on both doors and had to stifle a small laugh.

I pulled myself into the second bedroom and, once inside, tried to take in the aroma of Phil’s house but was denied the home’s natural scent by way of a Glade plug-in air freshener trying to convince me summer lilacs smell like something from Dow Chemical.

I’m almost convinced people are so accustomed to what’s fake that they prefer it to the real thing. I mean, when the fuck have you ever had grape soda that actually tasted like grapes?

In the hallway, I could catch the hint of bleach in the air and followed it to a pair of accordion doors hiding an old washer/dryer pair. Inside the washer was a load of whites. Hanes underpants and T-shirts, socks. Probably all new, as of two Christmases ago.

The dryer was empty.

Very little in the fridge except for tomato juice, eggs, bread, mayonnaise, mustard, deli-cut lunchmeat (ham and beef tongue) and Swiss cheese. In the cupboards, I found mostly soup and one bottle of imitation maple syrup. There was hardly any doubt in my mind Phil has lived alone here ever since his mother passed away a year and a half ago. Throughout the house, I counted three photos of her. One faded black and white snapshot of a young woman with wavy hair wearing the uniform of a WAC from the Second World War, reminds me of an old postcard.

At some point, I realized I’d been staring at the WAC photo for fifteen minutes. Honestly, it started to give me the creeps, so I pushed it off the wall. After that, I went into the garage to hunt around.

Phil came home right on time, a little past six. I had been waiting just behind the door and when he closed it while flipping through his mail, I grabbed him from behind. I clamped my right hand over his mouth very tightly and used my left to hit him in the neck with the stun gun. He reacted quickly, quicker than I thought, trying to elbow me. Everybody gets one good shot thanks to the adrenaline. Thankfully he didn’t get the lucky shot.

His elbow to my ribs didn’t hurt at all and as I kicked his legs out from under him and brought him to the floor I could feel the fight go right out of his body. I waited for the stun gun to recharge and hit Phil again, holding it to his skin until he passed out.

I originally had thought I would drag him to the kitchen but after some thought I finally decided on the small dining area.

Phil awoke a half hour later, and as expected, tried to scream through the duct tape covering his mouth. I had wrapped it three times around his head to make sure there was no chance—better safe than sorry. He was secured to a chair at the head of the table, wrists and ankles taped to the thick armrests and legs. They really don’t make furniture like that anymore.

I kept the light low and the shades drawn, nothing out of the ordinary. I even put the TV on in the living room. (It’s the small details that matter. Remembering them reminds me I’m in control.)

When Phil came to, his eyes went so wide I nearly had to laugh. He looked like one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons when Elmer Fudd sits on a thumbtack or something. I could see that he was scared, even though he tried to pull it together quickly.

But once he saw what I had taken from his garage, he broke down. He had to have known what was going to happen next.

Truth was, I hadn’t expected to find a cordless drill, but I did come across an old plug-in Craftsman that was heavier than a brick along with a nicely coiled twenty-five-foot orange extension cord. The drill bits found in the box nearby were old and needed sharpening, but I was pretty certain they’d be good enough to go through skin, muscle and bone.

Hovering over Phil, I held up the drill and gunned it once for effect. I watched him begin rocking back and forth in the heavy chair, struggling to break free out of instinct. Had he been thinking, he would have realized it was a completely fruitless effort.

Where does the saying “fruitless” come from? Archaic from when folks used to go out foraging to survive and the resulting feeling of coming back empty-handed? I can’t understand it. Why not take a crossbow with you? You’re bound to find something to eat if you look hard enough.

I let Phil rock back and forth a bit because I could finally smell the acrid scent of sweat coming off him. Eventually, I pushed him backward, tipping him over until he and the chair slammed on the floor half on and half off the Persian rug. I’d bet anything that was a real Persian too, not some made-in-Mexico knockoff.

I leaned down and pushed the point of the bit against Phil’s shoulder and the moment I hit the trigger his body jolted as if struck by lightning. I put my other hand on his chest to hold him in place and drilled until I hit bone. I was feeling good so I drilled a second hole before moving to the other shoulder. Then I decided the holes weren’t big enough so I went back to the garage. There, hanging on an old pegboard, was a thick, half-inch masonry bit I’d missed before, still wrapped in the blister pack it had been sealed in sometime during the 1970s.

When I’d gotten back to Phil’s dining room, he had managed to roll over onto his side in a lame effort to get to the door. I kicked him back over and told him I was going to punish him for his disobedience, and I used the masonry bit on his hip, actually feeling it snap once I punched through the thick bone.

The other thing I’d brought back with me from the garage was a nice old-fashioned claw hammer. I actually had to hold each of his knees down with one hand while I went to work on them with the other. (Five whacks to shatter the left one. Seven for the right.) It had always been my feeling that if you break the knees first, it makes it easier to do the feet without too much of a fight.

I took Phil’s shoes off (Florsheim, nice!) but left his socks on (one black, one blue—colorblind, Phil? Maybe?) before using the claw end of the hammer on his feet. Within two or three swings, I’d lacerated them, tearing flesh away with each successive blow. I’d even managed to splatter myself in the process so it was probably a good thing I had on an old apron I found in the kitchen.

Phil squeezed his eyes shut from the pain and it annoyed me so I went through the drawers in the kitchen and found a pair of orange-handled scissors. I put my knee into Phil’s chest as I pulled his eyelids up and cut them away. There. The last thing I wanted was to have all this hard work of mine go unappreciated.

I took the scissors in my hand and used one of the points to stab right through Phil’s cheek into his mouth where it made a slight popping sound. I kept stabbing his cheek until I’d punched a hole big enough to see his tongue then I began stabbing that as well until it looked like a lump of bloody hamburger. I hadn’t been planning on doing that. I love it when I improvise.

Phil had weakened immensely from the blood loss, so I decided to think about wrapping things up a bit. I went into his bedroom to get the items I’d found earlier.

When I showed them to Phil, he began crying and it occurred to me that he hadn’t even shed a tear until this very moment. I told him what I like about older gardening shears is that they’re made from cold-forged steel. Steel made in the U.S., and not this imported Chinese garbage.

“But I guess you know that by now, huh Phil?” I told him.

When I showed him the cigar box I had found hidden high on a shelf in his closet, he tried to turn away. I opened the lid to reveal all of the tiny severed fingers. Most of them shriveled and blackened with age. One, maybe half the size of my own fingers, looked fairly fresh, maybe a month old.

I held the tiny finger up to him. There was a hint of pink polish on a chipped nail and I thought of a news story I’d seen weeks ago about an eight year-old girl who’d vanished from a playground as her mother’s attention was focused on a cell phone. I’d seen the posters with the girl’s face as far away as L.A.

Jody Sue Montgomery.

They never found her, and right now I was pretty certain I was holding up her ring finger. One that would never see an engagement or wedding ring because of Phil Testaleone, a forty-seven-year-old pedophile who, as the cigar box would testify, apparently loved to collect trophies.

I put the small and delicate finger back into the box and closed the lid. I picked up the claw hammer and used the head to smash into the duct tape covering his mouth, bringing it down hard as I heard his teeth shatter underneath. I believe I said something to him, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what. It’ll probably come back to me later.

At some point, I must have turned the hammer around to the claw end because when I looked down, Phil’s face had caved in on one side. Quickly, I stopped because I wanted to make sure he was positively identified.

So then I picked up the drill and used the masonry bit on his abdomen and chest, trying to remember where all of the major organs were located. After several tries, I found his heart and sometime during the second hole I’d put in it, it must have given out.

I slipped out of Phil’s shirt (and the pair of his shoes I’d squeezed into). In the kitchen sink, I used a lighter to completely melt the surgical gloves I’d been wearing before dropping them down the disposal. I took off my coveralls and put on the dark sweatpants and shirt in my gym bag and left out the back door sometime after 1 a.m. The street was dark and quiet and I walked to my car and drove home. All the way back, I fought the urge to stop and pick up a pack of cigarettes.

*****

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Diary of a Madman (Kindle)

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What listeners are saying on iTunes about DIARY OF A MADMAN

Wonderfully Delicious – A Window Into the Darkness.

The author/narrator truly captures the deviancy of a serial killer’s mind, heart and soul. The author paints an authentic profile of a killer. It appears the author has done a commendable job on his research. As a professor of child psychology, with a strong interest in violent behavior disorders, I enjoyed peering inside the mind (while fictional) of a serial killer. Thank you, Mark.

-JamesPh.D.

…His precise knowledge of human physiology lends an almost Tom-Clancy-like second-by-second suspense to the actual description of this murderous efficiency, which is very very chiling (Nemcoff must have some medical traiing)… this book was an unexpected guilty pleasure, and I found myself checking my earbuds to make sure no one was overhearing his wickedly delicious narrative.

-stacy_a_lbc

I have to say the first chapter threw me for a loop. The detail of the murders and the language were a bit unsettling. After the second chapter… I have become addicted to the book. The description, from the point of view of a killer, is definitely colorful, insightful and entertaining. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a beautifully written thriller.

-BOLESE

WOW! Truly twisted and unavoidably addicting.

-Fergibaby

“Reads like a bullet train. I couldn’t put it down!” - BERT LOVITT, Director of the feature film PRINCE JACK

“Nemcoff’s stories cut to the chase — blistering action meets brutal reality on the way to over-the-top, big-budget finishes.” – NYT Bestselling author, SCOTT SIGLER

THE DOOMSDAY CLUB
by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

CHAPTER 1

Hale doesn’t really seem to notice your life has headlonged into a massive clusterfuck of sorts. Not that you ever really expect him to but in your sometimes incredibly naive way of thinking, you’ve been hoping he’ll mention that you haven’t showered, shaved, gone outside in days, or eaten much more than Cheetos from the rusted-out, hunk of junk vending machine down the hall. For Christ’s sake, the least he could do is mention the haircut you’d given yourself. Though, you suppose if it was your roommate turning into a dirty, reeking, Cheeto-eating poster boy for mental patient hairstyles, you’d probably do your best to say nothing either. Truly, the funniest thing about this is that if he would just crack open one of his Psych textbooks long enough, he might even recognize this as a complete cry for help on your part.

It’s around the fourth or fifth day that he finally says something about it.

“I used to call her Mitten because she smothered you and gave you absolutely no distinctive form,” he tells you.

You glare daggers into his soul as he shakes his head.

“Thank you, drive through,” you answer.

At this point Hale picks up the framed photo on your desk, the one you’ve been unable to look away from since falling into this funk—a snap of Jackie and you in better times, and frisbees it through the open window.

You yelp as if he had carved out your spleen with a wooden spoon, knowing if you weren’t feeling so damned helpless you might sock him in the eye. Instead, you sit and stare at the empty space the photo of the woman you once loved had, until just now, occupied. To Hale’s credit, at least he doesn’t remind you that this is the second time this month you’ve been kicked to the curb.

Last year, Coach Riggs moved you from the outfield to starting shortstop. A lot of your teammates had hopes for getting to the bigs after graduation but you knew you’d never have the chops to go to the show so you were just happy not to ride pine. As a complete surprise to no one, you had a very lackluster season. You didn’t quite suck but you didn’t really shine either—except once.

In your inimitable way you blamed your sorry-ass excuse of a decent on-base percentage on the lack of a good bat. Everybody thought it was a steaming load, but in your gut you truly believed it. Jackie had gotten so sick of hearing about it that right before the third to last game of the season she bought you a brand new aluminum Louisville Slugger and damn if it didn’t look like something King Arthur could have pulled from a stone to slay a dragon with. On the spot, you dubbed it Excalibur. Jackie threw her arms around you, kissed you and said the words that put the ping back into your swing:

“Get thee a hit and thou mayest bed a lusty wench this evening.”

You went three for four that afternoon, including the triple that scored the game-winning run. You even homered in each of the last two games of the season. That damn bat made all the difference in your swing and your confidence and you treated it like some sort of holy relic by mounting it on a rack on the wall above your bed. This year, though, your mind is elsewhere and you field like someone punched a hole in your glove. At the plate you can’t see the ball to save your life. When Coach Riggs pulls you aside to say he’s making room for someone else on the roster until you get your head on straight, you pack your stuff and leave without saying a single word.

***

You’re anxious as Hale leaves to get your picture from the street, thinking some wino in this crappy neighborhood has already run off with it. When Hale comes back twenty minutes later, having replaced the shattered frame with something cheap from the corner market, you snatch it from him with both hands. Your heart still sinks. Jackie a.k.a. “Mitten” had been your steady girl for most of the last twenty-six months, two weeks and three days and the fact that she’d ejected you from her life with all of the fanfare usually reserved for tossing a cigarette butt from a car window was not exactly a state secret around here anymore. Nor was the fact that she had done so because you had become one unbearably morose son of a bitch.

Made you wonder how come you were always the last to know. Never before it happens but boy if a moment of horrifying enlightenment didn’t strike you between the eyes just as the words were about to spill out of her mouth. You have this crazy theory. You think your balls know and they crawl right up into your belly. They do a duck and cover and all of sudden you sense them pushing up against your gut and you know that it’s all turned into a big nine-ways-to-Sunday pooch-screw. It just beat the hell out of you how they got to be so damn smart in the first place.

And that’s when Hale sighs, reaches into his dresser drawer and does what he thinks would be best. He packs a very, very large bong hit for the two of you.

“A friend with weed…” he offers.

“Is a friend indeed,” you shoot back. Hale grins at you and today more than ever with that poker-straight hair of his he has that Messiah look that some dudes just have. Jesus with a joint, that is. You often think your little saying is kind of stupid but you do it because it’s one of those things that started four years ago and sort of stuck because tradition in a college dorm is saving twenty cases of empties so you can build a beer-can pyramid in the back of your room.

***

“Dude, you want more of this?” Hale passes the joint to you. “I think I’ve had more hits than the Rolling Stones.”

You smoke for a good hour during which time you’re joined by Nikko Desic—this real smart, round-shouldered, kind of pimply kid with an underdeveloped face that looks like it could have used more womb time, and your buddy Fuckin’ Dan, a skinny guy who can barely put three syllables together without dropping the F-bomb like some kind of redneck Enola Gay. These are your best friends. In private, Hale often half-jokes about someday publishing a paper declaring Dan’s profane condition as some sort of speech impediment or something. Right now you could care less.

At this moment, the only thing you know is that for the first time in almost a week you feel nearly human again. Somewhere just north of shit-fire awful and south of fine. You’re in metamorphosis from homeless-looking, manic depressive dipshit into giggly, smiley, stoned guy and you feel your pain melt away.

To everyone’s annoyance, you start to find every goddamned thing funny. You laugh like hell at the monster zit on Nikko’s forehead, at a dirty cartoon titled Bi-curious George that Hale shows you, at your self-inflicted hair wound and more than anything else, you laugh at the bright orange Cheeto stains that look like they’ll need to be sandblasted off your fingers. Suddenly you’re engrossed, knowing there’s no way whatever makes those damn things that godawful color could be anything other than exceedingly detrimental to your health. Your mind races to thoughts of wearing gloves to the dinner table when you go home so the Units don’t ask why your hands sport a lovely shade of dayglow toxic-shock monkey piss. Maybe, you think, if it comes down to that you’ll buy a pair of oven mitts so you can give your stepdad the finger whenever you feel like it, which incidentally is getting to be quite a lot when you’re home.

In a way, you know the city is doing this to you. You’re a suburban boy with soft hands. Maybe I don’t belong here, you wonder. And as you feel a kind of bubbling euphoric moment of clarity, you stop laughing because of the wave of paranoia that hits you like a sucker punch.

Ten minutes ago you had gotten up to take a leak and when you came back, you were in such a rush to toke up, you forgot to put the towel back under the crack in the door to keep the smoke from leaking out into the hall. This year you couldn’t even smoke cigs in this building, let alone doobage, and Hale was very adamant about the whole towel deal. Last year you watched as he got busted more times than James Brown at a wife-beating convention. So many times, in fact, the school threatened to boot his ass out entirely. His father, the ex-stuntman turned porn producer, a stocky fucker who went by the nickname “Bullet”, got so pissed that he left the set of Anal Fisted Bitches With Badges 3 to come here and give Hale an earful that you could hear from your old room on the other side of the floor. The old man told him, in no uncertain terms, that if Hale got himself punted from yet another school he’d get his ass beaten Brooklyn style, whatever the hell that meant. So, like any good boy Hale swore he’d straighten up and fly right and that he’d stop smoking pot, a promise he kept for nearly six whole hours after his dad got in the Seven-series and pedaled his deluded old self back to his house in Topanga Canyon and the twenty-year old trophy wife with giant pillowy tits.

This year, Hale lives with you. You get along well but you feel fairly certain it’s because you’re here on scholarship and he wants his dad to think he’s stopped hanging out with his burner friends. His parents buy into it — hook, line and stinker. They love you. You’re on the cusp of making something of your life. Little do they know your grades are sinking, your habit is getting as bad as his lately and the two of you account for most of the narf smoked on this floor. You just have the common sense to confine most of your shaking and baking to that little park on Mulholland where you and Jackie used to go sit and watch the lights of Hollywood twinkle like a tray of jewels after a good backseat romp.

And as you toke it up with your pals in your room with what is probably half the floor getting ripped on the second hand smoke leaking out from the crack under the door, you look around and see nobody else has noticed the missing towel. You tell yourself if you can just put the damn thing back where it belongs, it’s no harm, no foul, no big damn deal. You reach down into your crotch to check, and to your relief the boys are where they belong. Rock on, brother. Rock on.

As soon as Hale hits off the bong, you reach over to grab the towel and immediately see the thin shaft of light from underneath the door broken by the tree-trunk shadows of a large pair of combat boots on the other side. And even before the heavy knock on the door comes you know exactly that it’s the last person on this whole spinning rock that you want to see right now.

Richard “Bo” Boyd, the Resident Assistant on your floor, is without a single iota of doubt, the epitome of low-voltage social reject Marine ROTC attracts on this campus. About guys like Bo, Hale has a theory he’s dubbed the teenie weenie syndrome. Men with little dicks grow up over-aggressively trying to measure up against other males. Pity is that even though women can see right through this gross overcompensation, they get drawn to this type of mate because of how easily they can control him by letting him believe he’s just as big as anyone else. The often overlooked and sad part of the whole damn thing is that if the woman remains unsatisfied sexually, she may decide to hunt down an extracurricular larger organ. Thus threatening her mate’s newly found status of manhood and he in turn vents his aggressions on her. Deep down, you often think if Hale would ever get around to actually writing his thesis it would be about reducing domestic violence by making men less angry at their own dicks.

The school year didn’t start with Bo or else you would have transferred to the newly co-ed girls’ college down the street. In the Fall, when you moved in to find Becky Aldredge as the R.A.—kind of cute, kind of a chub-chub and a little bit granola around the edges—you all figured you had it made in the shade. You figured a little fiirting with the Beckster would ensure never getting busted for squat.

Well, if you had known that any right-minded man trying to wink at a feminist lesbian was apt to get his dick kicked in the dirt, you would have nixed the idea from the get go. Turned out the Beckster thought the four of you were goofing on her and got her panties all knotted in a bunch. Next thing you know, Hale was getting busted regularly and the simple easygoing life you’d worked so hard to attain had gone the way of the hot comb.

Two weeks before Christmas break and you were on the prowl at this Theta Delt party in Westwood and lo and behold, there was Becky’s girlfriend hanging out looking like she was hoping someone would go and talk her up. Now, unlike the Beckster, this chick was borderline hot—nice frame and a slow gap-toothed smile on the marginal side of sexy. Nothing to break your arm writing home about but in the general all-around, not too shabby and there wasn’t a straight man in attendance who hadn’t done much worse at one time or another. You figured all the drunken frat jerks would be crawling all over her, right? Well, all the Theta Delts knew she batted the other side of the plate and everyone there was trying their best to score at least one last party lay before break. So, as a result, the Beckster’s girl was flying solo.

You pooled your cash and came up with close to a hundred bucks and Nikko tossed it to one of his buds from the basketball team to go over and start flirting with her. Hale whipped out a camera phone and after an hour of googly eyes and a few more jello shots you became the proud owners of a snapshot of Becky’s honey pie jamming her tongue down the throat of one of the biggest black dudes you’d ever seen in your life.

You end up in such a rush to get back to your room to e-mail it to the Wicked Bitch of the West Dorm that you actually miss the best part of the whole damn evening. It turned out that Nikko’s buddy, Wallace, took Becky’s girlfriend back to the jock dorm and gave her the time until the wee hours of the morning.

Becky found the picture in her e-mail the next day and went positively apeshit. They broke up, Beckster swallowed a handful of OxyContin, and after a long night of puking her guts out in the infirmary she went back home to Idaho and to the best of anyone’s knowledge. No one had seen hide nor hairy leg of her since. “It just goes to show you,” Hale had said as her taxi pulled away. “Pussy makes you crazy no matter who you are.”

As the pounding on your door continues, Dan whispers, “Oh shit, it’s Major fuckin’ Dick!” and Hale bursts out giggling, blowing a mouthful of smoke right in your face. The laughter is completely contagious because Nikko and Dan can’t help giggling like drunken ten-year old girls. Not you though. What you get is a major case of the jumpies that old Bo is going to hand you some noise about your orange-stained fingers or your shitty homemade haircut. You realize then, pot does some very weird stuff to you sometimes.

“I said, open this goddammed door right now! I’m going to write up the whole bunch of you misfit motherfuckers!”

Hearing the chuckling through the door was pissing Bo off even more because he starts barking it now, just like the way they teach when you’re up to your ass in a river full of piranhas and God-knows-what and you have to give an order to all the other automatons in the platoon. In a whisper, Hale dares somebody to ask through the door if Semper Fi comes from ancient Latin for I am a fucking robot.

But you’re still gaping at the shadows of Bo’s shoes under the crack in the door when Hale calls your name, waking you out of your paranoid trance. You are completely sober again. That sinking feeling of depression has come back like a bad check.

“Scott, open the door,” Hale says again.

You look over at him while Nikko just shrugs his shoulders back in a calm way that makes you think if you were to take his pulse right then and there it would barely break sixty.

Yours on the other hand beats like a dance club kick drum and you start to feel it in your temples. You reach over and turn the knob and the door slams open, crashing against the wall and startling all of you. Bo stands there for a second, puts his hands on his hips and does his best General Patton tight-ass walk into the room.

And this is the point where Hale unfortunately decides to show off his finely honed sarcasm.

“Can I help you?” he asks, doing his best impression of someone who never gave a shit about anything even remotely authoritarian.

Bo squints at him the way you’d look at a dog turd stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Then, making absolutely sure that he has eye contact with all of you, he blurts: “You little rat-fucks are big-time busted.”

Busted.

The word hangs in the air like a stale odor and you can tell Bo is enjoying this far too much and you absolutely begin to hate his stupid jarhead guts for it. Right then, you get this feeling deep down inside that nothing good can possibly come out of all of this.

Your balls know.

Duck and cover.

“Now, I don’t know what kind of bullshit Little Miss Muffdive let you jerks get away with but let me be the first to inform you that it won’t be tolerated any longer. You little dopers make me sick. I’m not about to let this go down on my watch, especially by little stoner faggots like you!”

He works his way up to a cadence and you suddenly become aware of the need to go pee again. Major Dick looks at you with those crazy eyes of his and you feel your boys decide to go hibernate for the winter.

“Congratulations,” he growls at you. “It looks like you’ll end up with this whole room to yourself after they kick your loser roommate out of school.”

You steal a glance at Hale but he just keeps his poker face.

“That is, if they let you keep your scholarship.” Bo knows he has your full and undivided attention.

“Tell you what. I’m even going to confiscate your stash so you little drug addicts won’t be lighting up until after they boot all of your asses out,” he adds, and that becomes enough to loosen up Nikko’s tongue.

“Hey man, you can’t do that!”

“Shut your suck, fucknut. Maybe you haven’t noticed it from your little drug-induced haze over there but there isn’t a soul on this floor right now but you scumbags and me. That means I could throw all of you down the fucking elevator shaft and say it was a weirdo tragic accident or some little stoner faggot suicide pact. Since I’m in a good mood, I’m just going to take your precious little dope down to the can myself and before I flush it, I’m going to drop my pants and take a great big crap all over it.”

You all flinch as Bo’s fleshy paw shoots out to grab your weed off the desk behind Nikko’s head.

“Just what I thought, just a bunch of little pussy-boys,” he says, crunching the rolled up baggie in his fist like Custer taking a Cherokee scalp.

As he turns on his heels and walks out, your hope that he makes it halfway to Neptune before anyone says anything gets shattered by Dan.

“Fuckin’ dick,” he mutters underneath his breath.

As Bo stops in his tracks, you swallow hard. “What did you say?” Bo barks as he snaps around on his heels.

Silence.

Bo stands there, milking it to the point of sheer agony.

“What’d you say, fuckstain?” Bo’s nostrils flare and it flashes into your head that he has at least three inches and no less than sixty pounds over any of you. Wiping up a room full of pot-smoking smartasses is probably stepping into wet dream territory for him.

Dan stands up, and you want to punch him in the mouth for getting you all in way deeper shit than you were in already.

He looks Bo square in the eye. “I was fuckin’ wondering. If your parents got a divorce, would they still be considered cousins?”

You expect instant Hiroshima, but what Bo does scares you even more. He snorts, takes one step into your room and shuts the door behind him. Without a word he makes it very clear how this is going to be a very private ass-kicking for all of you.

“It’s about to get busier than a pair of jumper cables at a Puerto Rican wedding in here.” Bo grunts, puts his hand on Nikko’s face and shoves him into your dresser, knocking over the newly re-framed picture of you and Jackie taken at the beach last summer. Helplessly, you watch as Jackie and you hit the floor and as the glass breaks, you suddenly want so badly to be on that beach with her, drinking margaritas and making love in the chest high water instead of facing the ugly prospect of a mouth full of broken chiclets.

You don’t know how long you space out but when you turn around, Bo has Dan in a choke hold. Dan’s face starts to turn purple and Hale tries to pry Bo’s thick arms away with one hand while pushing his face back with the other. When you see Bo grinning like the Cheshire Cat after a blowjob, something inside you finally rages like a furnace.

“Do something!” Hale turns to you. The sudden blast of adrenaline feels like heroin jacking through your veins. A dry lump the size of Mexico fills your throat.

“Fucking do something!” Hale screams again and in one flash you know how to make it all go away. You know how to take control of the situation, make the yelling subside and bring back the calming sense of silence you now miss so much.

Your eyes dart to the relic mounted over your bed. Without a sound you feel the world stop turning as your fingers wrap around its handle.

You take a breath. You close your eyes.

And in one split-second you swing Excalibur again and change all of your lives forever.

*****

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BADLANDS
by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

PROLOGUE

It was the year of the Lord sixteen hundred and ninety-two, on the ninth of August, when the brig Majestyk docked in the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, having made the crossing from Portsmouth, England just over a fortnight past due. Those who had made the journey had learned the hard way that coming to the new world would be more difficult than anyone could imagine. The crossing had been marked with hard work, spoilt food, and seas which had nary a want for human passing.

All passing except death.

Of the fifty-one men, women and, children making the voyage, only forty-three would leave the boat—the other eight had their bodies committed to the sea once the mortal coil had left behind nothing but their husks.

Two had been brothers—elderly gentlemen of great wealth who had attempted the trip, neglecting the protests of friends and loved ones who warned both that they were too frail for such an undertaking. After the younger brother’s passing during the initial month at sea, the second, older brother fell violently ill. Some supposed it was out of grief for his fallen sibling. He never recovered, lasting only a scant few days before himself succumbing to the Christian Lord’s call home. It was during this time that young master Miles Lawton, age ten—on board the Majestyk with his parents, his older brother, Thomas, and baby sister, Alyson—realized there was only one thing he feared above dying.

While his mother, Corrine, volunteered to bring water below to the moribund elderly man, it was Miles who followed her into the hold where the man lay breathing his last. Back in Portsmouth, Corrine Lawton had been a nurse before her children were born. Aside from the Majestyk’s captain, whose idea of treating an open wound included a sharp rub of gunpowder, Corinne Lawton was the only qualified caregiver on board. Though in this case, as with most life-threatening afflictions while crossing the open ocean for weeks at a time, treatment consisted of little more than offering comfort, blankets, and muted prayer.

The other deaths—a mix of men and women, and a girl of three years—deaths had not been so simple to explain.

Before disembarking from the Majestyk, Miles’s father, William Lawton, donned his familiar frock, silk cap, and kid gloves, while his mother and sister both wore dresses they had carefully kept in storage during the voyage. They ventured from the lower harbor into the town of Duxbury to seek a hot meal on land. As the children sat for their supper, they all bowed their heads in silent prayer—for on the morrow, they and the other travelers of the Majestyk would head north towards the land they were to settle. To the promise of new lives!

In the dark that night, as Miles and Thomas shared a bed in the inn above the city’s finest tavern, the elder brother recounted the screaming death of the old man on the ship. It was enough to cause Miles a sleepless night of gazing at the ceiling through the dark; he could not even relish a bed that did not pitch from side to side all night long.

The proceeding week was as difficult as any of the worst days at sea. From Duxbury, fourteen covered wagons filled with supplies and passengers ventured away from civilization into territories yet uncharted by European man. It was William Lawton who had led this group, for he had negotiated the land purchase based upon a map brought back to England by some trappers who had made their own fortune in this new world. The parcel they were headed toward had not yet been settled by anyone and, given its location near a lake and what had been described to him as “virgin soil fertile ‘nough to grow trees into the heavens,” there could not be a better spot to begin a town based upon freedom from the religious persecution they had suffered back home.

Or so they believed.

That night, Thomas came to Miles as the young boy was gathering twigs and sticks for kindling. Thomas had something he wanted to tell, but the younger brother had been so excited that he ejaculated a secret of his own.

According to Miles, the local guide—who passed his days on his horse riding ahead of the party and his nights by himself sleeping near a campfire with his rifle close at hand—had a deformity. It was Miles who once recoiled from the guide’s stare—for the man had one eye, which normally was hidden under a leather patch, but at this moment the hole was in plain sight. In the eyeball’s stead was an empty socket, the flesh around it was gnarled and scarred. Miles quickly turned away, too frightened to even speak. It was two full days before he could even muster the courage to mention it to his brother.

“Mayhap it was an Indian that done it?” was Thomas’s reply. It then became Thomas’s sole mission to himself see this injury. The next day, during a brief respite for the sake of the horses, Thomas saw the guide nearby drinking from a canteen. Desiring a clandestine look, he carefully approached from the supposed blind side, but the guide lowered his canteen and turned away. Thomas once again approached slowly, taking but one step before the guide turned toward him—his patch lowered over the eye in question—and stared singularly back at Thomas.

“Best keep near the wagons, boy,” barked the guide. “There are things in these woods that ye might not want to meet face to face.” The guide released a harsh laugh, one that Thomas did not find amusing at all. He decided seeing the guide’s deformity was not worth being close to that man anymore than needed.

On the second week of the trip, the party stopped for a night in a verdant valley. Two of the men, ardent hunters, were able to catch and slaughter deer for a stew. It was this evening that William and another pair of men went to the guide during which a heated argument broke out. It was Corrine who kept her children back, far enough away as to not be able to clearly hear what was being said—but not before Miles was able to understand the gist of his father’s concern.

The guide had taken them away from their intended route, and far away from their destination. And though he told no one, William Lawton was going to dragoon the guide to return the group to where they needed to go regardless of what he had to do to make that happen.

The voices of the men rose higher as tempers flared. William Lawton was accusing the guide of misdirecting the party; according to his map, they were several days off course.

“Ye don’t know these lands,” intoned the guide. Such was his rationale for the detour: something for which the men had no patience. Their journey, which had been prolonged at nearly every juncture, would not be delayed any further. The path on which the guide was taking them went suspiciously around a wooded valley instead of through it—a valley that, as far as anyone could figure, would provide easy crossing, fair shelter, and abundant natural resources and game.

As the guide lowered his voice to a hush, he again explained what William Lawton refused to believe.

This was not land one wanted to cross—not at any time, day or night. True, it was a valley abundant with lush green, but his years of trapping and hunting these parts taught him to stay clear of the areas that the Indians themselves avoided. As he explained, these were people of the earth; they communed with its spirits and lived in concert with the animals that roamed the land. If an Indian refused to go somewhere because he or she believed it to be bad ground, it was best to do the same. The guide did not know why these natives circumvented this valley; he did not need an explanation.

But William Lawton did. He insisted they be taken through the valley. Summer was nearly over and there were still many preparations that would have to be made before the chill set in: houses to be built; larders to be filled with game. Time was not a luxury they could afford to waste anymore. Again, the guide refused.

“I ain’t gon’ do it,” he said.

In the morning, the party woke to find the guide gone. William Lawton was forced to tell the others the man, “obviously a charlatan,” had absconded in the dead of night. By the guide’s normal campfire was the satchel containing the silver pieces which Lawton himself had paid him back in Duxbury.

“We shall continue on our own,” William told the others. He’d reasoned the map he’d carried since England proved accurate so far, thus there was no reason to believe their destination did not lay just on the other side of the valley.

That morning they descended below the rim. William told the others he thought the “guide the fool.” Another man was convinced the supposedly one-eyed guide had been a drunkard, though no one recalled ever seeing him take a single drop of spirits. That first day they made a fair amount of distance from their previous night’s camp. Come evening, as the wagon train came to a halt, two of the men who had spotted ruffed grouse a few meters back separated from the group with their guns to hunt for supper. One kissed his wife and promised her fresh fowl for dinner.

By nightfall, neither of the two men had returned.

Their families grew concerned as the hours passed.  Several others volunteered to go searching for the missing pair.

“No,” William told them. “A night with no moon was not one to go on a search party. We can’t afford to have more go lost.”

He reassured the others the hunters had just gotten misdirected. With the sun missing from the sky, it would be difficult to see into what you were heading. Lawton said he knew these men—they were smart enough to stay in one place until sunrise, when they would be able to find their way back to camp where a good ribbing by all awaited.

The disappearance of these two men was the talk, albeit hushed, of the entire camp. It was Corrine who forbade her boys to speak of it at all, which is precisely why Thomas quietly turned to Miles in the night as the two boys pretended to sleep.

“I never told you what I saw back on the ship.” His voice trembled as he whispered into Miles’s ear. “But I must because, though I try to remember, it is like this memory seeks to evaporate from my brain like morning dew drops. If I don’t tell you, I fear I may forget entirely.”

Several nights after the elder of the two old men died on board the Majestyk, Thomas had awoken in the middle of the night with an urgent need to relieve himself. From his berth he crawled out and carefully felt a path toward the gangway to the upper deck. It was not uncommon the men on ship to urinate overboard, although always taking care to be both on the leeward side away from the wind and out of view of female folk. Thomas relished this as being the only good thing about life aboard a ship: the ability to pee freely into the sea. As Thomas settled at the stern rail, hidden behind several casks of fresh water, he froze in mid-act. Several yards away was his father, pushing a young woman over the starboard side rail. The woman appeared relenting—not even protesting—and fell like a lifeless doll into the darkness of the water below. Struck with fear, Thomas crouched behind the large barrel and watched as his father looked around and descended back below deck, wiping his hands on his coat, as if dirty.

Thomas’s voice hitched. His body was shaking. With both hands he clutched Miles’s arm, digging his nails into his brother’s skin. “I think father killed her.”

Miles froze as if dumbstruck, and then began battering Thomas with blows from his tiny fists.

“Take that back!”

Thomas grabbed the younger boy’s wrists. “Hush!” he hissed quickly.

“You lie.”

“Why would I lie? Have I ever lied to you?”

It was a question Miles had only one response to: “No.” His brother had always been truthful with him. Not once had he ever told even a fib to Miles. His brother had always been a very serious boy, a fact not lost on anyone in the family. Now, with something as grave as two men missing, their families worried—everyone had become serious. And with the deaths of several passengers aboard the Majestyk, this was not the time to think Thomas had softened his ways.

“How do you know it was father?” Miles asked, growing more scared. “It could have been one of the ruffian sailors who pushed that woman overboard.”

Thomas shook his head. Everyone on board was quite familiar with the attire of the ship’s crew: loose duck trousers, checked shirts and tarpaulin hats. Their father, with his frock coat, would have borne a completely different silhouette than your average jack-tar.

“For what reason would he have to cause her harm?” Miles asked, his voice raising too much, causing Thomas to react as if struck.

“Boys!” A voice growled. It was their father. “Get to sleep.” William had been only a few feet away, cradling a gun in the crook of his arm, much like the guide used to. He waited until Thomas had lain back down and closed his eyes before turning away. A closer look would have revealed Thomas’ body trembling in fear, wondering just how much his father had heard.

By daybreak the two missing men had not yet returned to camp; thus William organized a search party consisting of himself and three other men. Taking four of their best horses, they set out back through the valley in the direction the others had vanished. William promised they would find the missing men.

They didn’t have to look very long.

Less than a league from camp, they came across the first man. He initially appeared to be standing in a hole up to his chest, slumped over onto the dirt, fast asleep. It wasn’t until the search party got closer that one of the men on horseback realized there had been no hole. The missing man, a young carpenter who had come over to the new world with his young wife, had been severed in twain, his body shredded at mid-chest. Trailing behind what was left of the man’s body were viscera and blood—a dreadful quantity of blood.

“Looks as if he was dragged,” one of the men posited. Indeed it did, and all eyes followed the line of ground-soaked blood toward the bramble where it disappeared.

“We must look for the other man—” William cut himself off in mid sentence. A crackling sound had come from the thicket. It was a sound a hunter would never mistake for anything else than what it was: a footstep.

Quickly, the men of the search party dismounted. William drew a musket pistol from his belt and put a finger to his lips. An older man to his left cocked his head to the side and sniffed the air. It was even in the breeze—something bad, coming from the bramble ahead. At his feet, William could see the line blood would lead them to whatever was hiding in the thicket. With a slight movement of his hand, William gestured for them to proceed quietly. As he stepped closer he could hear it—growling, feral, and unafraid. The gun, which had been loaded and primed back at camp, came up to his shoulder as William thumbed back the hammer.

The older man to his left nodded. He would flush whatever it was out of hiding. “Yah! Yah!” he yelled, waving his arms.

From the bramble it came, baring teeth, the throaty growl blaring from its mouth making no mistake of its intention. The older man recoiled but it was no use. The beast’s bloodshot eyes locked upon its prey as it launched from its rear haunches into the air.

Time stood still with the blast—the shot from the musket found its mark in the skull of the beast and it dropped like a stone onto the dirt, its shattered head lolling backwards.

The older man turned, his face ashen. “Good Lord!” His hands shook furiously as he turned, stumbled against a tree, and purged his breakfast onto the ground.

One of the other men approached the prone lump of black fur on the ground. The great beast was no bigger than a large dog.

“Don’t touch it!” William commanded. He approached slowly and poked it with the barrel of his musket.

“Nice shot, William,” the young man said to him.

The fourth man in the party looked at the dead beast. “What is it?”

“Wolf,” William said. “We must have surprised it.”

“William!” The older man was calling to them. The others rushed to the sound of his voice. He pointed. In a pile next to his sickness was unmistakable: “It’s— it’s a leg.”

It was obvious to all—the leg belonged to the dead man they had found on the path. Upon further inspection, it was also obvious the wolf had been chewing on what was left of it. Talk turned to the one man still missing. The consensus was that wolves may have gotten the first man, but that left the question of what had happened to the second. Even the horses were gone without sign.

“I am no expert,” the older man said, pointing to the upper half of the dead man’s torso still on the path, “but I have never heard of wolves doing that.”

They knew back at camp that the mood would be somber. It was agreed by the men of the search party that William would inform the wife of the halved man, but not of their suspicions of how he had died. “Best not to alarm the women and children,” he said. The others knew he was right. The second man, William would say, was still missing and he hoped all would pray for his safe return. He knew different though: the second man was not coming back either and the longer they stayed, the more chance there was that whatever was out there might decide to visit again.

That night, Miles slept poorly, thinking of the dead man in the woods covered in darkness. At one point, the exhaustion overcame him and his eyes finally closed, only to be jarred out of slumber by the feeling of something hovering over him.

Breathless, he opened his eyes, his heart pounding. Before he could make a sound, a hand clamped over his mouth. Leaning over him was his father, who brought his mouth to Miles’s ear and whispered:

“Listen to every word I tell you and don’t make a sound, or you will perish tonight like the others.”

Miles was so struck with fear that he couldn’t even blink; he just stared into the night.

The boy nodded as his father continued to whisper. What he said seemed impossible—but this was his father speaking. Miles glanced over toward his brother, but Thomas was fast asleep. As far as he could tell, his mother and baby sister, Alyson, were inside the wagon as usual and in perfect slumber. There was nobody watching them. Miles considered what Thomas had told him—the story of his father tossing the woman overboard. He refused to believe it at the time but the things his father was now telling him—well, they amounted to murder.

His own father: a killer.

“Please, Miles, you must trust me,” William said. “There are lives in great peril. You must get dressed now. I will explain more as we walk.”

Miles wanted to scream—to warn the others. His father had become—at what point he wasn’t sure—a complete and raving lunatic, subject to the influence of the moon. It was his father’s hand on his shoulder, the hand of a disciplinarian, which prevented him from doing so. If he screamed he was sure his father would kill him as well. In the dark, he slipped on his clothes, hoping, praying that his brother would wake up and see him—but Thomas lay still.

“We must go. Hurry!” his father whispered.

And under the cloak of night, with only the sounds of the valley and woods around them, Miles and William Lawton crept off into the darkness. At the edge of camp, Miles turned to look back at his brother. It would be the last time he would see Thomas as he remembered him.

Miles decided that once in the woods he would flee from his father under the cover of night; but as they ventured further down the trail, he became aware of sounds coming from the surrounding woods and brush. Scurrying. Breathing. Footsteps lighting just outside the illumination of his father’s torch. The journey the past couple of weeks and sleeping outside had rendered his ears accustomed to the noises of the outdoors, especially those after sundown—crickets; owls; the occasional bump in the night—but this was different. With every step the noises grew louder, a cacophony of movement unseen, until the sound grew so great Miles thought he would surely go mad.

In the darkness ahead, Miles would see small glints of light appearing briefly, then disappearing.

Nothing but fireflies, he thought. But part of him knew better. The glints in the darkness always appeared in horizontal pairs.

They were eyes.

Eyes staring back at him.

Watching him.

Sizing him up from ahead in the dark.

Run! his brain commanded him, finally breaking through to consciousness. He pulled away from his father, about to flee when the old man’s hand wrapped around the back of his neck—his father’s rough skin feeling hot as a flame against his soft, bare flesh.

“Do not pull away from me,” his father hissed. “You do not want what is beyond this path.”

Miles’s eyes fell upon the pistol secured in his father’s belt. William then took his hand off the boy’s neck and put it back on the butt of the gun, as if ready to draw.

Miles fell back into step; he dared not disobey. If there was a chance to escape the clutches of his murderous father, this was not it—especially not with the gun at his old man’s side. He would wait and when the time came he would run as if being chased by lightning.

They walked down the path for what seemed like ages until coming to another clearing. Up ahead in the rim of dim light from his father’s torch, Miles could see something on the ground. It looked like—

A hand. A disembodied hand.

“Do not look,” his father said, though it was impossible. Given the choice of looking around at the eyeballs glinting in the darkness or ahead on the path, Miles decided on the latter.

As they got closer, Miles gasped.

William attempted to shield him but there was no keeping the boy from seeing the man torn in half—the same man William himself had found earlier. William clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.

“Do not scream,” he whispered. “If you must look, do not scream.”

The man, whom Miles had remembered from the months they had all spent on the Majestyk in close quarters, did not resemble a human being anymore—for his body had been mostly stripped of skin and flesh. From the man’s face came the grimace of bone and teeth.

“Carrion,” William said. “For animals,” preempting Miles’s obvious question. “By the morrow there will hardly be anything left of him.”

“D-d-d-did we come to bury him?” Miles blurted out.

“No,” his father said, and from the inside of his frock coat drew a dagger.

Miles’s breath caught in his throat. He saw the blade and froze, expecting the next moment to be his last.

He’s going to kill me, Miles thought. But instead of turning the blade on his son, William crouched next to the dead man and cut a small lock of hair from what was left on his head.

“Hold this and follow me,” William commanded, handing Miles the torch. Carefully, he followed his father to the bramble a few feet away—and that’s where he saw it.

Another man, naked, curled up on the ground and, judging from the fact that half his head was missing, very dead.

“Animals didn’t do this,” Miles whispered.

“No,” William responded, crouching down next to the body of the naked man. “I did.”

A chill ran down Miles’s spine.

“This man attacked us earlier,” William said. “I had no choice.”

Miles looked down.

“He was one of us.”

“Was. Not any longer. He had turned. I’m positive he killed the other man.”

“I— I— I don’t believe you.” Miles was stunned. That he’d just said this to his father shocked even himself.

“Please, Miles. I don’t expect you to understand quite yet.” His father cut a lock from the body of the naked man as well. “Bring the torch over here.”

Miles did as told. He dared not disobey as long as his father still had his pistol.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim firelight, William paced a circle twice, drawing it in the dirt with his dagger the second time through. From there he drew several lines crossing and connecting. Miles had seen this before back home, but was always told by his mother he was too young to know of such things.

“It’s a pentagram,” William said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Back home we were persecuted for our beliefs. Shunned, ridiculed, even murdered. This is why we came to the new world, Miles. To find a better place where we are free to practice our religion as we see fit.”

William positioned Miles in the middle of the pentagram.

“Be still,” he told the boy. “And watch.”

His father began by circling the pentagram.

“Some dare call us Pagans. Heretics. Worshippers of Darkness. Let them. From whence we came, it is the self-proclaimed duty of the self-righteous to judge us based upon the fact that our beliefs do not accord with theirs. We have chosen the master we wish to worship and it is He who has delivered us to this place—a place of our destiny. But it is obvious that before we are to claim that which is ours, we will be tested first. Tested by the obstacles others choose to put in our path to challenge our faith. Tested by people who dare stand in our way. Like that one-eyed hoodlum who wanted to hold us up for more money and tried to scare us with tales of spooks and spirits. It was I, however, who had the last laugh on him. He will not be extorting monies from gullible travelers anymore. I made sure of that.”

Miles swallowed hard. He thought of the woman going overboard. He thought of the man lying dead with half his skull blown off, brains for offal.

“For years, I have had visions of this place. Visions of what we will find here and, before my very eyes, these visions have been true. Every last one of them.”

A sound started in William’s throat, beginning first as a low whisper then turning into a low growl—the chant coming from his mouth melting into words and phrases in a language Miles had never heard before. A language so guttural and primitive, yet at the same time mentally hypnotizing. William’s arms drew back and forth in a way reminiscent of the conductor of a small orchestra Miles had seen back in Portsmouth. Back then the conductor had been summoning music from the musicians; here his father was summoning, but what was anybody’s guess.

As the chanting grew louder and more intense, Miles looked up and saw that in place of his father’s eyes were now shocks of white. Miles couldn’t scream; he couldn’t even move. It felt as if bands of iron had wrapped around his body. The terror inside him was swelling to the point where he felt as if his sanity were being torn asunder from his body.

William reached out and grabbed Miles’s wrist with one hand, raising the dagger in the other. With one quick stroke he sliced clean across the boy’s palm. Then, clutching it inside his own, balled both hands into a fist and squeezed. Miles felt as if the bones in his hand would shatter—his hand being crushed inside his father’s hand—but instead blood poured out onto the ground as if he were letting a calf. The blood, which pooled at Miles’ feet, quickly disappeared into the ground as if being sucked down by a vampiric earth. And as quickly as it started, William dropped Miles’ hand and it was over. The invisible bands holding Miles in place were gone and the youth, drained physically from the ritual, fell to the ground at his father’s feet.

“You are ready,” William said, catching his own breath, “to do that which needs to be done.”

In silence, they waited for sunrise to come. William mouthed some kind of unholy prayer to himself.  Miles had become too scared to even move, feeling as if something were sitting next to him, but anytime he’d look, there was nothing. It was a presence he could feel—but not see. To Miles, it was something oddly comforting; he no longer knew whom his father was, though this presence next to him felt familiar. At some point during the night exhaustion overwhelmed Miles and sleep enveloped him.

It was his father who shook him awake.

“Time to go,” William said. He didn’t even wait for Miles to get up before starting off down the path back towards camp.

Miles started to his feet, his limbs stiff from inactivity. He glanced down at his hands, looking for the deep cut his father had put there but it was nowhere to be seen. His eyes darted from one hand to the other. Nothing. So certain he had been of the gash, his father squeezing his closed fist like…

“Miles, please hurry!” his father called out. Miles tried to remember what had indeed happened last night—but his memory seemed foggy. He vaguely recalled what Thomas had said about how the things he’d seen on the boat evaporating from his mind like morning dew. Miles turned back to the spot where they camped—and that’s when he saw it. In the woods, through the bramble and thicket, were eyes. Hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, staring back at him from hiding.

And those eyes seemed hungry.

“It isn’t possible,” Miles whispered to himself; but when he turned back the stares were still there. Watching him.

Miles picked up the pace of his feet until he had caught up with his father, grasping William’s hand for comfort.

As they approached camp, Miles could see the clearing up ahead through the trees. The wagons were still circled in the same way to which Miles was accustomed. He wanted to run toward them—to his mother, brother, and baby sister.

“Wait,” his father said. “One thing I must tell you before we go back.”

Miles waited in anticipation. The evening had been long enough; he just wanted to be back at camp.

“You could say part of my vision for this new land and our future was drawn in blood.”

Miles’s heart beat faster; he didn’t like where this was heading.

“We live in a time of great peril,” William continued. “War; pestilence; greed. We are at the verge of a great reckoning. Just because we walk on this ground now does not mean we always shall—I have foreseen this with mine own mind’s eye. The evil of man—persecution; genocide—has pushed this world to the brink of Armageddon. It is, undeniably, upon us.”

Miles began shaking. His father had long ago abandoned the pulpit in the church of which he’d been a pastor. Miles had been three years old at the time and had barely a recollection of it—though at night, in secret, Thomas would talk about it on occasion. William explained he had “lost his faith,” claiming he had seen the “truth” about his beliefs. Miles was beginning to think his father’s visions were this “truth.” He was aware of the strange rituals he would sometimes hear his mother and father secretly performing late in the evening, but chose to believe they were just things he was too young to understand. He thought of the secret moans and sounds coming nightly from his parents’ room that he would often cover his ears not to hear.

“I did this for us, Miles,” his father said. “I brought us here to be with Him, to serve at His right hand when the day of reckoning arrives—for this is the place from where He will emerge to reclaim the throne He was denied.”

Miles closed his eyes. In his mind was an image from an old church primer from years ago, a book that had been long banished from their house. The image, a horned beast trapped in a pit of flame, seemed to burn itself into Miles’s mind.

“I brought Him the sacrifice he wanted, Miles. I brought it to Him all the way out here.”

His father turned his head and gestured toward the clearing—toward the camp.

Pulling away from his father, Miles bolted down the path.

“Miles, come back here!” William shouted. “You’re not going to like what you find there.”

Miles ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet pumping against the hard dirt. His lungs burned but he kept running, finally breaking free into the clearing.

His heart felt like it was going to explode but he kept moving toward the wagons.

“Thomas!” he called out, gasping for breath. “Thomas! Mother!”

It was then that he saw the bodies.

Two of them laid on the ground, their limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. Miles approached, slowly, his whole body shaking. Some thing had dismembered the man and woman on the ground, their bodies apparently thrown to the ground as if they were playthings. Her clothing had been ripped apart, her skirt mercilessly dragged up over her face. The man next to her did not even have a face to speak of—for the flesh had been torn off, his exposed jaw hanging open in a never-ending silent scream.

Miles turned. “Thomas!” he yelled. “Mother!”

No sound greeted him in return. He turned past the first wagon and looked inside. The flies had begun to already light on the dead woman, landing on the bloody gash along her neck. In her arms she clutched a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Miles remembered—this was the woman who had given birth in Portsmouth just two months before they boarded the Majestyk.

Miles ran to the next wagon. Dripping from between the wooden slats of the undercarriage was blood.  He need not look inside to know what had happened. He took two steps and found another man, laying face down, his legs severed above the knee, exposing denuded bone. Miles knew without question: those legs had been chewed off.

And then behind him he heard a sound.

He spun to find three coyotes gnawing the flesh of another dead body just under the next wagon. The scavengers were oblivious to Miles as he approached, but when one of the coyotes looked up, exposing its victim, is when Miles saw it.

Thomas’s face.

Or, more accurately, what was left of it.

“No!” Miles screamed. “No!” He ran toward the coyotes shrieking and waving his arms like a wild man to shoo them away. The beasts scattered, disappearing into the woods at full stride. Miles fell to his knees next to his dead brother.

“Thomas! Thomas!” He grabbed his brother’s limp arm, his shirt torn and soaked with blood. At the end was a gnarled stump where Thomas’s hand had been chewed away.

The tears exploded from Miles as he clutched Thomas’s body to his, crying into the sky, sobbing to the point of silence—just deep, hitching breaths.

“I’m sorry, Miles. Here is the sacrifice we must make,” William’s voice came from behind him. Miles squeezed his eyes shut and held his brother’s lifeless body closer.

“Miles.”

William reached out to him but Miles pulled away, leaping to his feet, dropping Thomas’s body.

“Please, boy.”

Miles backed away from his father’s reach. He bumped into a wagon. Behind him, he heard a thud and a hand fell upon his shoulder. His head shot around to find the outstretched arm of his mother, her visage barely recognizable with her lower jaw torn away, the rest of her face frozen in a grimace of agony. Still clutched to his mother’s breast was baby Alyson, a cry bursting from her tiny lungs.

“She’s alive,” Miles said, relief washing over him. “She’s alive.” He reached for her but his father grabbed him from behind and spun him around.

“Please understand, Miles.”

“You did this!” Miles sobbed. “You killed them all!”

“No. It was not my hand.”

“But you knew. You brought us here to be slaughtered!”

Baby Alyson’s cries cut through the air. Miles wanted to grab her and run but his father’s hands clutched his shoulders.

Miles could hear someone else sobbing from an adjacent wagon—a girl’s cry, but he could not place whom.

“There are others still alive; we must help them,” Miles pleaded.

“In this world we are the persecuted, in the next we will be one with His power. His time is coming, Miles. And when that day is upon us, it will change everything. We will rule by His side.”

“Whose side?”

“The Coyote.”

William stepped back from Miles. “I have known for a very long time of our family’s legacy and have tried to deny it, even trying to find refuge in God. But the truth cannot be hidden any longer. What God created is not worthy. Their time has passed. It’s time for the darkness to return to this world.”

William raised the gun. Miles wanted to run, but couldn’t.

“Close your eyes, Miles.”

“No.”

“Then keep them open.”

His father thumbed back the hammer on the pistol.

Miles’s voice trembled. “Y-y-you’re the Coyote.”

“No, my boy,” William said, a serene smile crossing his face. And that’s when Miles could feel the pain in his hand. He looked down at the gash his father had sliced with his dagger, which had split open once again and began to bleed. And as the blood poured from the wound Miles could see a light inside, growing from a point into a glowing ball. The vision came to Miles, endless images flashing by his eyes as if time were rocketing past him while he was standing still. There was flame and smoke. An earth scorched. The sky opening. A battle of darkness and light.

“I’m not the Coyote,” William said as he pressed the barrel to his own temple. “You are. And you will be victorious.”

And with a steady hand, he pulled the trigger.

PART I

Spirits of the Dead

by Edgar Allan Poe

Thy soul shall find itself alone

‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude

Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again

In death around thee, and their will

Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,

And the stars shall not look down

From their high thrones in the Heaven,

With light like hope to mortals given,

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,

Now are visions ne’er to vanish;

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,

And the mist upon the hill

Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,

Is a symbol and a token.

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

CHAPTER 1

June 22, 1850

It was easy to watch them burn. To watch their bodies roast as the flames first licked, then consumed them whole.

He stood his ground as man and woman, adult and child perished in the fire, dying in unspeakable agony. From his vantage point, the Stranger could see and smell everything. Those who had not succumbed to the thick, acrid smoke begged for help, for a mercy that would not be forthcoming, their cries muffled only by death itself. He wasn’t sure if some screamed willfully or because their lungs sought to release the pressure caused by the super-heated air; they were expanding, inevitably to burst. These victims drowned in their own blood, which simmered in their bodies.

His feet were unmoving, no matter how hard he tried. Night after night he could not escape this macabre nightmare as those around him, trapped in the charnel house of his mind, pounded on the locked doors of the church that was to become their tomb. Even on the rare morrow that he would awake not drowning in night sweats, he could still feel the presence of the horrific vision in his mind, seared into his brain as if branded with a red-hot iron.

The sun had barely risen, though the Texas heat was already unbearable. At least inside his cell, the Stranger was directly in the shadow of the gallows being erected for his hanging the following day. Truth was the Stranger wasn’t sleeping, but had taken to closing his eyes and pretending he was. During the moments he was noticed to be awake, he was subjected to non-stop barrages of verbal and physical harassment by the jail’s proprietor, who used the Stanger’s sentencing to justify his cruelty—insisting that the prisoner deserved no better. After all, he was to be the town’s guest of honor in what would serve to be the only real entertainment in weeks.

To a certain extent, the Stranger didn’t believe he deserved any better than the promised hanging, either. His had been a life of unrepentant sin fueled by anger, jealousy, greed, and every extreme of emotion felt by a man with no direction or boundaries. He had stolen, murdered, robbed, raped, and taken the Lord’s name in vain—sometimes all while even in service of his own country. He often used spirits to self-medicate and flee the world around him—although this liquid escape only lubricated the wheels that perpetuated his path of destruction.

His past—what he could slowly remember of it—had been soaked in the blood of the innocent and not-so innocent alike. After two sobering weeks in a stifling cell, barred from whiskey as the heat soaked up the remaining drops left in him, his past quickly filled up with regret.

Regret of a life wasted; of loves never found; of promises left unfulfilled.

But even the regret, he reckoned, would be temporary, given his date with the gallows in less than twenty-four hours.

With a creak, the Stranger could hear the front door of the sheriff’s office open. Someone was coming in. He kept his eyes shut and his back to the cell door, hoping that continuing to feign sleep would keep whomever it was from bothering him during what few hours he had left. Along with the sound of boots on the rotted wooden floor came misplaced giggles, which were unmistakably female.

“Thar h’is,” spoke the bug-eyed, rail-thin deputy, the one who the Stranger discovered everyone called “Kentuck” for no better reason than that’s where he’d claimed his kin had migrated from. Along with Kentuck was a nearly toothless whore who, though only in her twenties, looked two decades older from the years on her back and a five year habit involving laudanum.

“Git up!” Kentuck yelled through the bars. When the Stranger didn’t move, Kentuck sucked a wad of tobacco-stained saliva into his cheek and spit onto the Stranger’s vulnerable back. “I says, ‘Git up!’” he repeated.

His incarceration here in Sagebrush, Texas, this small border town just north of the Rio Grande, had been marked with similar and regular abuse. The night he had been arrested, Kentuck and the sheriff, a stocky and cantankerous man named Overton, beat the Stranger into unconsciousness in this very cell while the Stranger’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. The charge had been stealing a horse—of which he was definitely guilty—and killing the man who owned the now stolen horse. The latter was a debatable charge at best, since the Stranger claimed he’d just been firing a warning shot, and the “hapless geezer in question had impeded the passage of said bullet with his foolhardy head.”

After the Stranger had been caught, instead of calling in a marshal or a judge, Sheriff Overton deemed the situation one that was to be handled without the “meddlin’ of outsiders,” as he liked to put it. Besides, he reckoned, given the chance, a proper hanging would be a spectacle that would be good for morale, especially if the condemned danced that agonizing mid-air jig for several minutes at the end of a rope that he enjoyed so much instead of dying quickly from a neck snap. That would be right entertaining, it would, he thought, and would go a long ways to help him get reelected sheriff come fall.

“Git t’yer feet!” Kentuck yelled at the Stranger. He repeated it, and with his mouth wet with chaw it came out more like “Gitcherfeet!”

The Stranger obliged, if only to prevent provoking the young into any shows of bravado in front of his female guest. The Stranger also had one other reason to stand: to get a glance of what may be the last woman he would ever see up close. Not that Cherokee Sue—as the locals called her on account of her mixed blood—was any real specimen of beauty. There’d been a tale the Stranger overheard shortly after his arrest about Cherokee Sue giving birth to a child to which no less than a half-dozen men claimed paternity. What the Stranger wanted to know—and had the sense to keep to himself—was how many men in town had denied being the father? The child had passed in its third day and, given the conditions of the town and the prospects of its upbringing by Cherokee Sue, this was likely a merciful fate.

“He don’t look orn’ry,” Cherokee Sue hooted. She spat onto the wooden floor between her and the cage.

“He ain’t,” Kentuck hooted in return, almost in one syllable.

“Not after we got through w’him,” he finished. Kentuck made it crystal clear that he was proud of the beating he’d put on the restrained man.

“You wanna see one las’ cunny before ya die?” Cherokee Sue was grinning, already raising her dress above her knees. “I’ll show it t’ya.”

She took a step forward, standing right in front of the cell. As the hem of her filthy dress rose to her dirty and blood-stained thigh, the Stranger leaned closer, enough to smell the booze and grime soaked into her body. One lesson he’d learned early on was you had to take whatever little you could get, no matter what it was.

Just as the tattered hem of Cherokee Sue’s dress came just above mid-thigh, she leaned back and spat right into the Stranger’s face, cackling her toothless laugh at him as the liquid trickled from his eye to his mouth.

“D’ya see that?” she laughed at Kentuck. “He was so mezm’rized, I coulda walked up and put a blade in his eye.” She dropped her dress back down to cover herself, flattening the front with one hand, as if restoring an air of respectability to her appearance.

“Can’t wait t’see you dance,” the whore cackled again as she and Kentuck left arm in arm. “Bett’r make it a good one.”

The Stranger sat back down on the bunk when something caught his eye as the door closed: the face of a man, one he hadn’t seen since…

It was burned in his mind. An August day, 1847, three years prior. A battlefield shrouded in smoke. It was the last day the Stranger had worn that uniform, one decidedly not too different from the one worn by the man whose face he just imagined.

Another ghost from the past come to torment me in my final hours, the Stranger thought to himself.

It was obvious that what little time he had left on this earth would certainly not be spent in peace.

He stared at the door for what seemed to be hours, waiting for it to open once more; to see if that face, one no less chilling than that of Beelzebub himself, was still there waiting for him. The door remained closed. The jail there in Sagebrush was no hub of activity, especially given Sheriff Overton’s proclivity of holing up daily in one of the town’s three saloons.

At midday, Overton finally entered carrying a yellowed plate topped with a grayish stew and a hardened biscuit, which he wordlessly gave to the Stranger. No sooner had Overton sat at his desk before a bearded man unknown to the Stranger walked into the jail. He was nattily attired in a black suit, contrasting sharply with the skin of his face, which had the color and look of an apples’ fleshy interior.

“Stand up,” Overton told the Stranger before opening the cell door. Putting down his plate of rotten food, the Stranger obliged—but as the bearded gentleman in the black suit proceeded to remove a measuring string from his pocket, it became clear the purpose he served here.

“Just about six feet tall,” the hangman said, reading the markings of his string dangled from the crown of the Stranger’s head to his feet. He examined the Stranger up close, eyeing the prisoner’s build. He grabbed the Stranger’s shoulders and squeezed.

“Solid, I’d say about two hundred pounds, give or take.” The bearded hangman made some notes on a small pad of paper.

The Stranger thought the number sounded low and would have argued the point if he’d known his actual weight. What he did know was that if the Hangman’s eyeball calculation was too light and the rope too short, he’d drop from the gallows floor and bounce up and down like a yo-yo, indeed slowly strangling to death.

“Coffin?” the hangman asked. “For an extra five bucks?”

Overton shook his head without taking a moment’s hesitation. “I say we leave ‘im strung up for the birds as a warnin’ to any others comin’ into my town fixin’ to be horse thieves and murd’rers.”

Great,  the Stranger thought. Overton was sparing no effort to make an example of him. Of all the towns to steal a horse, he had to pick this one.

The hangman charged Overton a dollar for the rope, which the Sheriff gladly paid, given it was an investment toward his re-election. When the hangman’s grim business was over, he left with a touch of his hat brim in Overton’s direction—but barely a glance toward the Stranger, the man whose body he just examined. As the Stranger sat back on his bunk, feeling a rancid stew churn in his belly, he stared out at the dry Texas sky through the bars of his window; it had been a sky he’d carelessly stared into many times as a free man. Today he cherished every last moment of daylight he could see, marveling the shades of blue he’d never taken the time to notice before.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the Stranger could hear the unmistakable sounds of nightly revelry drifting down the street from the town’s saloons. He figured he was the topic of conversation while Overton was in there buying drinks, slapping backs, and reminding everyone to show up bright and early to get a good view of the gallows.

The Stranger even imagined Kentuck would be cashing in Cherokee Sue’s toothless gratitude that night for her chance to spit in the face of a murderer.

If they only knew, the Stranger mused. If they only knew.

Inasmuch as he fought it—not wanting to cede one precious moment of consciousness—the Stranger fell asleep, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion. His eyes closed, bringing with them a fractured sense of peace.

On his wooden slat bunk he tossed and turned once more, his bothered sleep tormented again by spirits of darkness that had returned with a concussive thump in the night. Of all the nightmares that had come in the last few years that leeched into his subconscious mind, this one was different.

“Brother Thomas, please do something!” the woman shrieked at him, her eyes boring into his as the firelight danced across her frail features. Her mouth had curled in agonizing panic. The Stranger recoiled from her hands, pawing at his coat. The sounds—screams for mercy, screams of unbridled fear—rose around him as they pounded against the locked door and the fire licked greedily at their heels.

There was no mistaking the crucifix on the wall, even as fire reclaimed it as ash. This was a church all right, but not the burning house of God from his previous nightmares. That one—a recollection of a memory seared into his mind—he had seen with his own eyes. This new vision, a similarly twisted tableau, was somehow keenly different: all about him was the agonizing helplessness embedded in the thick smoke of charred flesh and bone. Though as he himself became helplessly paralyzed with panic—his mind exploding to find his own escape from this flaming incarceration—he spun to find the face of a man whose grinning mouth stretched below blackened eyes, reminiscent of a abysmal well.

“Yes, Brother Thomas,” this grin laughed at him. “Please do something!” The bellow coming from this mouth chilled the Stranger to the bone while the flames rose all around them to consume them back into the earth.

As the sun broke through the bars of the cell and fell upon his face, the Stranger stirred, then awoke.

Damnit, he thought. It was morning and he began cursing himself for his lost night—what he figured would be his last. Any moment he expected Overton and that rat-faced sidekick deputy, Kentuck, to come in, cuff his hands, and lead him to the gallows. The Stranger sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his eyes shut as he tried to remember any kind of prayer from his past. When they came for him, he would neither beg nor cry; he would take every last step with whatever dignity he had left.

Minutes passed, then what seemed like hours. His stomach grumbled from hunger. Finally the Stranger got to his feet and peered out the window of his cell. The gallows were still in plain view, a brand new ten-strand hemp noose awaiting his neck.

But there was nobody there.

No men. No women and children perched upon buckboards awaiting the spectacle of his slow execution.

And that’s when he noticed it:

The door to his cell was unlocked and slightly ajar.

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“For fiction that reads like a bloody summer blockbuster and makes you move in your chair like a first-person shooter, look no father than Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff.” - NYT Bestselling Author SCOTT SIGLER

NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET
by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

CHAPTER 1

EXT. FRENCH ALPS VILLAGE – MORNING

Frost, the thin layer forming on the road crunches beneath the wheels of Rodrigo as he pedals his bike, the huff of his breath trailing in the frigid morning air. Muscular legs pumping furiously, sinews burning like fire. He leans hard to the left as he veers onto another street in the village without losing a single beat. Each lungful of air feels like icy needles stabbing from the inside, but it doesn’t slow him one bit. His body is a well-conditioned machine, built up to endure any type of physicality needed to get the job done.

Behind, the Alps rise in all their majesty. Glorious peaks cloaked in snow reaching up into an immaculate azure sky. It truly is a sight to behold. In fact, a wonder. But to Rodrigo, his mind cares only about one single thing—killing the man he knows is right now coming down the mountain on his daily visit into town from a chalet inside a walled compound.

Quiet is the street. So much so he can hear the snow falling as he stops at the edge of a park to chain his bike to a fence by the side of the road. Carefully, Rodrigo opens the leather satchel strapped to the handlebars. Inside, sitting nestled against a five-pound hunk of solid-steel plate is a block of Semtex. With nimble fingers, Rodrigo rubs a hardened spot on the plastic explosive until it becomes malleable and then carefully presses a blasting cap into its surface. He then walks away and waits. As expected, he doesn’t have to wait long.

He hears the music first, not the engine. The yellow Land Rover is pristine–all of the serious hardware: roll guards, bulletproof glass, twelve-speaker, 400 watt stereo with subwoofer. The car pounds like an Ibiza nightclub as it barrels down the street.

Rodrigo bends his wrist slightly and checks his watch. Without even realizing, he mutters in his native Portuguese, “Good little boy. Right on time.”

Inside the Land Rover is a man with long hair. As is his custom, he drives like a banshee and wears shades to hide the emotionless dark eyes beneath. Seated next to him is the blonde from the night before, her face in his lap, bobbing up and down on his stiffening cock. He grabs a handful of her golden mane and pushes her head down further. Choosing a new song from the changer in the trunk, he cranks the stereo even louder. It’s a dance mix by the band Spray, blasting so loud that each beat shakes the entire car with near-seismic force. Picking this song is the last conscious decision the driver will ever make.

A block away, Rodrigo reaches into his jacket and removes a small wireless remote no larger than a pack of cigarettes. With his thumb, and no compunction for what he is about to do, he presses the one button on top. Inside the satchel left strapped to the bike, a laser motion detector becomes active. A razor-thin beam of red light streams across the street to a reflector he had placed against the side of a trashcan the day before. The beam is practically invisible, even against the powdery snow falling from the sky.

Behind the wheel of the Land Rover, the driver thinks of his next job, his impending orgasm and how he’s going to get rid of the girl. He suspects nothing, even as the front of his car cuts neatly through the laser’s beam triggering the charge placed inside the satchel. The Semtex explodes, launching the five-pound steel plate toward the car at subsonic speed, Ka-whammo, obliterating the Land Rover in the blink of an eye.

All that remains is a smoking shell of steel and two charred figures burning in the middle of the street, melting all the snow in a three-foot circumference around it. The driver’s head lolls backwards, his hair and skin melted to the bone. A slight sound lights from his mouth that is nothing more than the escaping steam from the boiling mess inside of his skull.

“One step closer,” Rodrigo whispers, grinning to himself as horrified onlookers stream from quiet apartments and stores to gawk at the fiery wreck. Most are wordless, though one old woman begins to wail uncontrollably, having only ever seen this kind of thing before during a war long since forgotten.

Rodrigo turns and slips away from the crowd, unnoticed.

Mostly unnoticed.

He takes only a few steps before spotting the glint of light from an open window in the distance. A reflection of the sun off glass. Instantly in the cold, wintery air, his mouth turns dry as dust.

Just over a half mile away, inside an empty building, a German man with cropped platinum blond hair sights a Steyr Tactical .308 sniper rifle through a scope. He is Soeren Anton. Today, after nearly a month of tracking, he has found his man. Through the scope he watches Rodrigo’s panicked face. He can even make out the words falling breathlessly from Rodrigo’s trembling lips.

“Merda…” Shit.

Quick as a breath, Rodrigo turns and makes a run for it. After half a block, he starts to believe he has a chance to make it out of there alive.

He is wrong.

Soeren follows Rodrigo through the scope. He eases up on the Steyr’s trigger. He pulls back. It’s too easy. With a deep breath fresh in his lungs, Soeren closes his eyes and turns his head away. He keeps his target in his mind’s eye. Not yet, not yet…

Calmly, his finger nestles the trigger, finally pulling it, firing the kill shot.

The bullet races, covering the half-mile in a split-second, passing between unsuspecting onlookers before ripping through Rodrigo’s back and chest with a white puff of smoke. He falls to the ground, already dead, his blood staining the pure white snow a dark crimson.

EXT. MOROCCAN MARKETPLACE – DAY

A continent away, a beautiful red-haired woman takes her morning stroll. White Dolce & Gabbana linen suit, calfskin shoes by Prada, non-prescription glasses by Helmut Lang. Everything about her walk is sexy. Each step rocks her hips back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm. Her pink tongue moistens a perfect pair of red lips. She passes a grey-haired man who takes one look and wonders to himself what her pussy would feel like.

He has a better chance of stopping time.

Meet Jayden. She has been an assassin for nearly a decade. Those who know of her or her work say only cigarettes have killed more people.

What she doesn’t see is Kadar, the dark-skinned man in the scarlet kaftan following twenty yards behind her. Marking her every movement. Biding his time in the crowded marketplace.

Kadar’s mind, foolishly, is on the prize. In his head, he is already spending the money. He is already buying the yacht.

At a market stall, something catches Jayden’s eye. She senses being shadowed, but does her best not to let on. Instead, she picks up a worthless trinket. She holds it up to the stall’s rotund proprietor.

“C’est combien?” How much?

Without even looking up from his coffee, the proprietor brusquely shoots back, “Twenty.”

“Ten,” comes the response. Yet another game has commenced.

Kadar, sensing he will lose his chance by waiting another second, secretly withdraws a long dagger from his sleeve. Because of his experience in matters such as this, his movements and intentions are imperceptible to the untrained eye.

Jayden sees the dagger reflected in the worthless trinket. She sees the dark-skinned man closing the distance between them. Perhaps the trinket isn’t so worthless after all. She will come back for it when this is over. Without continuing to haggle with the proprietor, she turns and walks away. Her steps become faster. Even in heels, she moves like a cat, weaving through the gauntlet of people in the marketplace–people who have no idea that they are brushing elbows with two of the world’s deadliest killers. Jayden’s senses are so heightened in the heat of the moment that she doesn’t need to look to know her pursuer has gained on her.

The moment she gets to the end of the road, she turns left onto another street and pins her back against the aged and pitted brick wall of a small bank. This is where she will make her stand. Live or die. It’s the way the game is played and the only way it can be.

Kadar, the dark-skinned man, turns onto the same street, dagger ready to strike. He rounds the corner and finds…

Nothing.

His breath chuffs in surprise. Suddenly, he hears a footstep behind him. He turns…

…to find Jayden.

Before he can move, she blows a handful of powder from her fist into Kadar’s face. His airway closes on the inside like a vice, burning hotter than an open flame. His first instinct, though, is not to reach for his own throat, but to strike at his killer with his dagger, a blade that has tasted the flesh of more victims than one could count. But the knife drops from Kadar’s hands as his nervous system begins a final shutdown. His knees buckle. As he dies seconds later, Jayden leans him against the wall. To a passerby, he may appear to be drunk, or praying. To a coroner, he will appear to have died of a sudden massive heart attack.

Neither is Jayden’s problem. She is one step closer to the money, but no closer to figuring out how to collect it without ending up like the others.

EXT. MEDITERRANEAN SEA – SUNSET

The sun hangs low, seemingly willing to disappear into the water. On a clear day like this, it burns bright orange, looming large on the horizon. While the great ball of light slips further away, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter glides above the water toward a hundred-and-sixty-foot luxury yacht named “Double Platinum”. Within moments, the helicopter lands on the massive cruiser’s fantail. Right on time.

As the rotors whine down, a muscular Russian man dressed in a black cotton turtleneck and Brioni suit, keeps his head low as he approaches the bird. Meet Mr. Vosler. He opens the side door of the helicopter to greet the arrivals.

“Hello, ladies.” Vosler lends a hand, first to one thin and pretty blonde and then another. If it weren’t for the fact that one has long hair and the other short, they could be identical.

Possibly models, Vosler thinks to himself. Possibly underage.

Both are tipsy and giggling and one of the blondes hands him a mostly empty bottle of Cristal.

“Show them to our finest guest quarters,” comes a voice.

Stepping out of the bird behind the two girls is the one and only J.C. Richelieu. His white linen suit is crisp and his collar hangs open. It’s a look he’s nearly famous for, having appeared in similar garb in several magazines, including Business Week, the cover of Spin and a special pre-Grammy issue of Rolling Stone. Richelieu steps onto the deck of his forty-million-dollar yacht. In the last five of his fifty-two years on this Earth, he has never once stopped to watch a single sunset. Today is no exception.

“I have the conference call waiting,” Vosler tells him out of earshot of the two models.

INT. RICHELIEU’S OFFICE – MOMENTS LATER

Below deck, Richelieu slips into a very large black leather Manos wingback chair as Vosler brings him a whiskey rocks, small splash. The surroundings of this humongous below-deck lair are entirely made of glass, steel and chrome. It is very much befitting the C.E.O. of Grantium Entertainment.

With a tap of his computer keyboard, a bank of several video monitors lowers from the ceiling. Each one tagged with the location its feed originates from. The faces staring back at him from around the globe wait for Richelieu to begin. He will run this high-tech teleconference, working it like a Vegas pit boss.

“Week number three of our contest, and the players are starting to light up the board. What a week it was, my friends.”

On another screen by his left hand: numbered pictures of Land Rover Man (Number Five), Rodrigo (Number Ten), Kadar (Number Eight) sit alongside a photo of another man (Number Three). Each photo marked with the word “Deceased” in red letters over their faces. The numbers, randomly assigned, are not a reflection of their ranking.

Picking these killers was easy for Richelieu. He is a man who likes hits and knows how to use them to his advantage. Music hits. Coke hits. Even the kind of hits used to compel some and make others vanish. All have served him well in building his empire. Selecting ten top assassins is a task as natural to him as naming the ten biggest-selling albums of all time or the ten top vintages of Bordeaux.

Richelieu continues. “Three less players in our little game. Four down. Six to go.”

With a stroke of his keyboard, another screen shows pictures of six other killers, presumably still alive, including Soeren (Number Seven) and Jayden (Number Nine). “Now… who cares to make it interesting?”

No answer.

Richelieu sips his drink. It’s not fear of him that stops the others from speaking up. Rather it’s the gambler’s instinct of waiting until your opponent makes a move that brings the silence.

“Come on people, this isn’t Miami Beach bingo. Ante up!” Richelieu barks, setting his whiskey rocks down with a hard clink on the glass top of his massive desk.

Finally, the man on the monitor marked Copenhagen speaks up first.

“A hundred that Number Nine is the next to die.”

Richelieu taps a couple of keys on his computer. A photo of Jayden comes up on a screen. “Boo-Ya! One hundred on Number Nine to get picked off. Who wants it?”

From a monitor marked Paris: “Another hundred that Number Seven does it.”

“Double it and you’re on,” chimes a man from Cape Town.

Richelieu grins as he turns to Copenhagen. “That’s four-hundred grand to you, my friend.”

“Done,” responds Copenhagen, without a quiver of doubt.

“Now, who else wants a piece of the five-hundred burning a hole in my pocket?” Richelieu asks his captive audience.

From the monitor marked New York, a millionaire with a marked accent addresses the group. “Pardon me if I sound like I just stepped off the short bus, but this is my first time betting in your little contest and I’m still not sure if I quite understand how this here game of yours works.”

Richelieu reaches into a desktop humidor and pulls out a Cohiba. “I’m sorry your late father didn’t explain it better before his passing. The rules are simple. World’s ten best pitted against one another. The last one standing wins the kewpie doll.”

The man from New York blinks once, then twice, as if thinking. “A hundred million dollars is one hell of a kewpie doll.”

“Which makes it all the more interesting when we bet on the action each week.”

“And which one of youse controls this hundred million dollars?”

Richelieu snips the end off his cigar. He doesn’t even look up. “An offshore shell corporation, the board of which is comprised of the seven men, including myself, that you are talking to at this moment. The money is held in escrow by a law firm in Singapore to be paid upon our instructions.”

“And nobody in this group interferes?”

“Well, that wouldn’t be sporting now, would it?” Richelieu grins. With a sterling silver butane torch, he lights the Cohiba while turning it gently in his other hand.

The gentleman from Moscow speaks up. “Speaking of sporting, when are we gonna hear from Four? Not even one kill or even proof that he is still alive.”

With a tap of his finger, the monitor with Jayden’s photo changes to show a picture of a handsome man with piercing eyes. He is tagged as Number Four.

Copenhagen questions. “Yes, who is this mystery man? I’m starting to think he doesn’t even exist.”

“What do we know about him?” asks Paris.

“His real name is Johnny Dane.” Richelieu takes a puff on his cigar and savors it. “Orphaned at age six, Dane was raised on a cattle ranch in Arizona by an uncle. Early acceptance to Annapolis and then ran into some disciplinary issues, but nonetheless graduated at the top of his class. Recruited into the Seals where he did one tour of duty. Someone there must have noticed something, because after that, he was drafted by his government into their new covert wet ops program.”

Richelieu touches the monitor again. Appearing onscreen are several digitized newspaper clippings. A Colombian general lies dead from a gunshot wound to the head. A large Czech mobster face up in a Prague steam bath, a white towel around his robust middle and an open gash across his throat. Dead eyes staring upward, never having registered the silent murderer who took his life.

“Four years later, Johnny Dane went freelance, racking up seventeen documented kills. All top-echelon targets,” Richelieu continued. In his other hand he rolls the Cohiba, feeling the fine leaf against his fingers. A Cuban cigar is a masterpiece unto itself. This he appreciates—the aroma, the taste—knowing someone in another country slaved to make these things for his pleasure.

On the monitors, the other millionaires nod. An approving murmur drifts among the party as Richelieu continues. “Word has it he can sneak in and out of a hot zone like a ghost. That’s why he gets no less than a million dollars for each job. As it stands, gentlemen, I still have Dane as my odds-on favorite to win this contest.”

The man from New York pipes in, his skepticism as apparent as his Brooklyn manners. “Nice story, Richelieu. But is it true?”

Richelieu looks directly into New York’s eyes. “Oh, I assure you, it’s all true. Before his vanishing act, Johnny Dane was the single best assassin alive.”

From London, this is met with some doubt. “Yes, but for all we know, this Johnny Dane could bloody well already be dead.”

Taking a sip of his drink, Richelieu puts down his Cohiba. With his fingertip he reaches over and touches the picture of Johnny Dane on the screen. “Perhaps…” he says, hiding his eyes from the camera trained on him. “Or maybe our boy’s just playing hard to get.”

FADE TO:

EXT. GRAND CAYMAN ISLAND – BEACH – DAY

A picture-perfect blue sky, golden sands. If God had a beach house, it would be right here at the foot of an ocean as clear as blown glass. From the surf emerges a man in a pair of dark blue board shorts. Mid-30s, handsome, the tan on his taut frame masking a few small scars on his body. Meet Johnny Dane, his dark hair tousled and several inches longer than his last known photo. On his face, a week’s worth of beard salted slightly with grey whiskers. In his right hand, he carries a snorkel and mask. In his left, a small metal cage holding several perfect red lobsters. Before he’s even fully out of the water, three native boys run up to him. Their voices ring like music.

“Johnny! Johnny!” Their beaming faces eagerly eyeball the cage in Dane’s hand.

“Two hours and that’s all you catch?” The first boy chimes playfully.

Dane grins. “Well… if you don’t want them…”

He pulls the cage away from the boy’s outstretched hands. The bluff works like a ten-dollar rabbit’s foot and the once-big grins on their young mugs momentarily falter. A wry smile crosses Dane’s face like a tide as he hands the cage to the tallest of the three youngsters. “Just leave me two,” Dane says.

The boys turn to the surf. Stepping towards them from the water is an olive-skinned beauty. Meet Ava. Her red bikini leaves little to the imagination. A body to die for with curves only a Formula 1 driver could survive. The tall boy turns back to Dane and raises an eyebrow.

INT. GRAND CAYMAN – SMALL HOUSE – MAGIC HOUR

A breeze blows. Thin curtains billow in the bedroom of Johnny Dane. He arches his back. Eyes closed. His body ripped and tanned, falls in concert with Ava below him. As he enters her, we see her face. It’s breathtaking with features that would make Da Vinci cry. Their mouths find each other in an embrace of complete intimacy. No wonder nobody’s heard from this guy.

CHAPTER 2

INT. GRAND CAYMAN – DANE’S HOUSE – LATER

Dane and Ava lay naked under the sheets. She rests her head upon his chest as he kisses the top of her hair. Delicately, she runs her fingers along the inside of his outstretched arm.

“It’s only two hours until my birthday and you still haven’t told me what we’re going to do,” she purrs into his ear.

Dane squeezes his eyes shut. Holy shit. He forgot.

“It’s a… it’s a surprise,” he quickly mumbles.

“It’s also our anniversary.”

Dane isn’t used to being caught unsuspecting in the crosshairs like this. “It is?” he asks. His voice sounding less like a question than he’d like.

“Six months since you swept a simple cocktail waitress off her feet.”

“Maybe it’s true what they say?”

“What who say?”

He grins. “You know… time flies when you’re overcome with lust.”

Playfully, she hits him with a pillow.

“So what do you want for your birthday?” he asks.

“No fair. I can’t tell you.”

“Give me a hint.”

“How about….” she begins, “…your last name?”

If Dane has even one moment of hesitation, it doesn’t show. He rolls out of bed and drops to one knee, right there on the floor. Naked as the day he was born.

As he opens his mouth, she puts a finger to his lips. The tip of one red fingernail traces along his mouth. Her eyes drop. “Not here, silly.”

Before he can protest, she gets out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her and slips into the bathroom adjoining the bedroom, turning back momentarily.

“First a shower. Then, you can propose over dinner.”

She disappears behind a closing door and the shower begins to run. Dane flops down on the bed, his smile showing a happiness he’s never known before. This girl definitely has his number.

“Ava, will you marry me?” he asks softly, nearly a whisper. The life of an assassin seems a million miles away.

But that’s all before he hears a slight noise—someone entering quietly through the small house’s front door. Dane’s smile vanishes.

Quickly, he slides into a pair of jeans at the foot of the bed. He looks at the closed bathroom door, the shower still running, and then at the open window a few feet away.

INT. DANE’S LIVING ROOM  – MOMENTS LATER

A dark-suited man creeps quietly towards the bedroom, his hands empty. As he crosses through a shaft of light coming through a window, it’s apparent the intruder is a Rastafarian with his dreads pulled back.

Meet the man known in the game as Number Six.

His last kill, the first in the game, was the contestant known as Number Three.

FLASH CUT TO:

INT. BELIZE – WAREHOUSE – NIGHT (FLASHBACK)

The man in the black rubber butcher’s apron is covered in blood. Meet Hugo, the guy you send when you want your killing to make a very strong impression. Even with the heavy black rubber gloves on, Hugo manages to light another cigarette from the embers of his current one and dumps the old butt into an already loaded ashtray. He picks up the chainsaw from the floor and goes back to his worktable. There lay the limbless torso of a local police commissioner’s wife, the still-shocked expression on her face from the moment she bled out while having her legs severed in front of her eyes.

Hugo fires up the saw, this time he wants the head. Her blood, still fresh, sprays brightly across the floor as the power tool does its job, tearing through sinew and bone in less than three seconds. Lifting her up by her mane of bleached blond hair, Hugo examines it closely. Her features are still quite attractive for a middle-aged woman.

Too much plastic surgery, he thinks to himself. The massive amounts of Botox she’s obviously had should keep the head looking fresh until it reaches its destination. Carefully, he places it, face up, in the plastic-lined box, tapes it shut and places it on the table with the other packages going to her husband.

Hugo wipes his sweating brow with the back of his sleeve. The air in the warehouse is still and humid. He walks across the floor to the barn door fifty feet away. With a bit of effort, he pushes it open, then closes his eyes and takes in the fresh breeze blowing from outside.

Almost done, he thinks. After tonight comes a long-deserved vacation. But it will be very much a working vacation at that. In his jacket is a plane ticket for Auckland, where he will begin his hunt for Derek Poole, his first planned kill in the contest in which he’s been invited as a participant. He contemplates all the money and how it would mean never having to kill for hire again. In his mind he replays the fantasy, a nice ranch in Mexico where he could troll at night for border crossers–poor, desolate wretches nobody would miss. He would abduct them, take them back to his “special room” and do with them as he wished to his heart’s content.

Halfway back to his worktable, Hugo senses something. He turns and sees the silhouette of the man standing in the doorway. His bushy dreadlocks casting a wide shadow at the top of his head.

Hugo’s heart jolts, sending a burst of adrenaline through his system. Dashing for his worktable, he tries to pick up his pistol but the thick rubber gloves don’t let him get a grip and the gun falls clumsily to the floor. Quickly, he reaches down to pick up the chainsaw and when he looks back toward the door, the dreadlocked man is nowhere to be found.

“Fuck,” Hugo whispers. He keeps low, peering around the left side of the table.

Nothing. Nobody.

He then peers around the right side of the table.

Only to be greeted by the torso of the commissioner’s wife falling on top of him. Hugo presses the saw’s trigger, the chain cutting into the meat of her shoulder but the dreadlocked man is too strong and uses the weight of the torso to knock Hugo backwards onto the floor.

With a thud, Hugo hits hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and the chainsaw from his hand. Stars fill his head but he looks up just in time to see the Jamaican killer standing over him, a boot on the back of the commissioner’s wife to hold them both down.

The Jamaican grins at Hugo with a mouth full of platinum teeth. With a flick of his wrist, a small pistol drops from his sleeve into his hand. Still smiling, he pushes his dreadlocks from in front of his eyes, points the gun at Hugo’s face and pulls the trigger.

FLASH CUT TO:

INT. DANE’S LIVING ROOM  – BACK TO SCENE

The Rasta killer moves like a wraith, slowly approaching the bedroom door. His body flows like water. He doesn’t even breathe.

His hand wraps around the knob, enveloping it, turning it slow enough to keep his movement silent. One second passes, then another. He turns until he can turn no further. He takes a slight inhale. In a moment, he’s going to burst into the room. In a moment, he’s going to pull the trigger on Johnny Dane…

Number Six pushes into the bedroom and finds it…

Empty.

Hearing the shower, Six’s eyes flick toward the bathroom door. He takes a step. Suddenly the bedroom door swings shut behind him.

Revealing Dane.

Number Six knows he’s caught. He doesn’t move. Puts his arms up.

Dane looks at Six’s hands, both empty. No weapon. “Who are you?”

“Hey mon, I’m just here to talk.”

“You ever hear of using the phone?”

Six turns, slowly, and sees that Dane is unarmed. He smiles, showing off several platinum teeth.

Shwick! Just as the small silencer-equipped pistol shoots up his sleeve and into his palm.

“Nothing personal,” he says to Dane. It’s true. Business is business.

Before he can finish, Dane jump kicks Six in the chest. For his trouble, Six gets two broken ribs and a trip to the night table. Airborne, he comes down hard. Bam!

Six is back on his feet, gun still in hand. Dane is on him like a flash, kicking up a shirt lying on the floor, twisting it into a lasso that he wraps around Six’s arm.

Except now… SHWICK! Another gun materializes in Six’s free hand, a bead drawn on Dane.

“Johnny, you gonna be the sweetest slap of my whole career.”

Just then, the bathroom door swings open.

Ava steps out, dripping wet, wearing only a silk bathrobe. “Wha—?”

Startled, Six turns the gun toward her. He pulls the trigger. Blam!

But Dane knocks Six’s arm up. The bullet missing Ava’s head by an inch. Her scream fills the room.

In the blink of an eye, Dane grabs Six’s hand and turns the piece on its owner—KaBlam—and shoots the Rastafarian killer through the neck. The warm spray of Six’s blood jets across the wall behind them. Dane drops the gunman to the floor and notices his assailant is still breathing, barely.

“You’re dead and you don’t even know it, Dane.” Six’s words come out as a hiss. He expires, blood pouring from his open mouth onto the front of his dark suit.

Dane turns. Ava’s seen too much. She runs from the bedroom as fast as her feet can carry her.

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Diary of a Madman for the Kindle and Diary of a Madman for the Nook are available starting today!

DIARY OF A MADMAN is a splatterpunk symphony of hardcore violence and sex wrapped in a tight-as-nails noir narrative about loss of self. Told in a casual first person style, DIARY OF A MADMAN details one man’s fixation with infamous serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Harv “The Hammer” Carignan, The Genessee River Killer and Andrew Cunanan and his obsession with catching the serial murderer known as the “Interstate Slasher”. During the day, he hides behind his bland persona as a salesman but outside of the office politics he is very serious about his “hobby”. However, as he kills more victims his world begins to unravel around him and what he finds on his murder and sex-fueled journey will shock you right to the very last page.

Before you begin a narrative project such as a novel or short story you should really know what it is you’re going to write. Sure, it’s easy to have a great idea for a scene or a conversation that sparks the genesis for that great tale you want to tell but the trap a lot of writers fall into is not being able to answer the question of “What Happens Next?”

Writing any kind of narrative, especially a novel is often a test of will and endurance. Nobody wants to start and fail so I believe you give yourself the best chance to succeed in your quest if you know as much about your Five W’s before diving in.

THE FIVE W’s

Who, what, when, where and most importantly… Why?

WHO

Who is your protagonist?

Who does your protagonist care about most?

Who is this story about?

Who stands in their way?

Who do they meet while trying to overcome the obstacles in their path?

Who holds the answers to the questions?

Who does not want the truth revealed?

Who benefits from any good or bad deeds?

Who benefits from any actions?

Who will win in the end?

WHAT

What does your protagonist’s normal life look like?

What do they normally do?

What is their normal routine?

What are they afraid of?

What are their faults?

What happens that permanently alters the trajectory of your protagonist’s life? What do they plan to do about it?

What is holding them back?

What makes them decide to take on a life-altering journey?

What is the first thing they do on this journey?

What will they do the first time misfortune strikes?

What is the antagonist capable of?

What will they discover that will change everything their journey was all about? What is the worst thing that could happen?

What will cause your protagonist to face their worst fear?

What will they do to overcome this worst-case scenario?

What does success entail?

What will they do when they reach their goal?

What will happen if they fail?

What will they do if they ultimately succeed/fail?

What does it all ultimately mean?

WHEN

When does your protagonist’s normal life take place?

When does the inciting incident happen to forever alter this normal life?

When does your protagonist decide to take action?

When do they leave on their journey?

When do they have their first encounter outside of their comfort zone?

When do things get difficult enough that your protagonist really questions their journey?

When does the event happen that alters everything this journey was about?

When is the worst time that the worst-case scenario could happen?

When does your protagonist feel that things couldn’t be any worse?

When does your protagonist spring into action to ultimately reach their goal?

WHERE

Where does your protagonist call home?

Where are the boundaries of your protagonist’s comfort zone?

Where physically, emotionally or spiritually does your protagonist have to go to leave on their journey?

Where will that journey take them?

Where do they most fear to go?

Where could the worst possible thing that could happen, happen?

Where will your protagonist make his or her final stand?

WHY

Why does your protagonist have to leave their comfort zone and undertake this journey?

Why can’t they go it alone?

Why should the reader care about the protagonist’s journey?

Why does the worst-case scenario happen?

Why does your protagonist have to succeed?

Why will it take every resource at his or her disposal?

Why is it important that he or she succeeds or fails in the end?

I may have missed a few… please feel to post any of the other Five W’s you think are important in the comments!

WHAT IS SHADOW FALLS ALL ABOUT? – LISTEN NOW!

Let me tell you of a story about two brothers
Sons of the immortal demonic impulse known as Death
For centuries, groomed to succeed their father
One brother, the Wolf, is the judge of souls
The other, known as the Coyote, thirsts for the blood of the innocent and not so innocent alike
Time and again, across countless lifetimes, the brothers have battled

This is their story.

Go ahead, say that the SHADOW FALLS series, the first installment of the ANGEL OF DEATH CHRONICLES sounds loosely-based upon the story of Cain and Abel. I won’t tell you you’re wrong.

In BADLANDS, a killer wakes up on the day of his hanging to find his jail cell door open and everyone in town has been slaughtered. After fleeing in search of the meanings inside his constant nightmares, he discovers he has lived many lifetimes and though all of them he has been pursued by evil spirits, including that of his brother who allow Galen to realize he is actually, in fact, “Death”.

In ANGEL OF DEATH, Galen wakes in another life in a motel room covered in blood, laying next to a mutilated corpse. He is “rescued” by his sister who tells Galen they have to “break the cycle” that continues to catapult them through countless lifetimes full of misery and bloodshed.  But it is Galen’s brother who discovers he enjoys killing too much to make it stop. In the final confrontation, Galen is forced to kill his own brother (mirror to Badlands)… he loses consciousness and wakes up back in the jail cell, this time the door is closed. He goes to his hanging to atone for his sins but wakes up again, this time as a serial killer who has been in pursuit of another, more grisly killer, the Freeway Slasher… who of course, is… well, I’ll let you guess who he is.

A man discovers he is the embodiment of DEATH and then as the events of his past come to light he comes to believe he can alter his destiny. Shadow Falls is an allegory about THE HIGH COST OF REPEATING THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST.

Plus, updates on the TV series, the animated feature, etc… things are moving forward!

I went to email the Angel of Death draft-in-progress to myself and saw the file size came out to 666K… is this a sign of things to come?

Previously on Angel of Death: After getting Nena and Galen to a safehouse way outside of the city, The Freak goes back to retrieve the artifact, the petrified eyeball, he inadvertently left behind in their rush to escape attack. Meanwhile, Galen’s insistence to know the truth brings Nena to reveal two important details of Galen’s previous existence. The eyeball in question used to be his and a book given to her by a man named Mathers inexplicably details the events of their past lives from 150 years ago–a book titled BADLANDS.

LISTEN TO ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE SIX!

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Previously on Angel of Death: Galen Altos wakes in a tenement apartment where he meets his long lost sister, Nena. Someone who he hadn’t seen for over 150 years or possibly several lifetimes. Their reunion is interrupted however by gunfire coming from a mysterious man named Darvos who has come looking for… something… but what he instead finds in Nena’s vacant apartment is a relic, a petrified eyeball. However, it is a discovery that makes Darvos break out in a devilish grin.

LISTEN TO ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE FIVE!

Tell me what you think. Leave a comment.

Episode Five commentary is available as a separate podcast download. Click here.

New to Shadow Falls? You don’t have to have listened to Season One or Badlands to enjoy ANGEL OF DEATH.

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SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS

PART I

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD by Edgar Allen Poe

Thy soul shall find itself alone

‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy:

Be silent in that solitude

Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again

In death around thee, and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still

The night—tho’ clear—shall frown—

And the stars shall not look down,

From their high thrones in the heaven,

With light like hope to mortals given—

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish—

Now are visions ne’er to vanish—

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more—like dewdrop from the grass

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—

And the mist upon the hill

Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken

Is a symbol and a token—

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

CHAPTER 1

June 22, 1850

It was easy to watch them burn. To watch their bodies roast as the flames first licked, then consumed them whole.

He stood his ground as man and woman, adult and child perished in the fire, dying in unspeakable agony. From his vantage point, the Stranger could see and smell everything. Those who had not been felled by the thick, acrid smoke begged for help, for a mercy that would not be forthcoming, their cries only muffled by death itself. Those that died screaming as their lungs exploded from expansion caused by the super-heated air lay drowned in their own blood, which simmered inside their bodies.

His feet were unmoving, no matter how hard he tried. Night after night he could not escape this nightmare as those around him, trapped in the charnel house of his mind, pounded on the locked doors of the church that was to become their tomb. Even on the rare morrow that he would awake not entrenched in night sweats, he could still feel the presence of the horrific vision in his mind, seared into his brain as if branded with a red-hot iron.

The sun had barely risen though the Texas heat was already unbearable. At least inside the cell where the Stranger slept, directly in the shadow of the gallows that were being built for his hanging the following day. Truth was the Stranger wasn’t sleeping but had taken to keeping his eyes closed and pretending he was. During the moments he was noticed to be awake, he was subjected to non-stop barrages of verbal and physical harassment by the jail’s proprietor who felt the Stranger deserved no better. After all, he was to be the town’s guest of honor in what would serve to be the only real entertainment in weeks.

To a certain extent, the Stranger didn’t believe he deserved any better than what he was being promised. His had been a life of unrepentant sin fueled by anger, jealousy, greed and every range of emotion felt by a man with no direction or boundaries. He had stolen, murdered, robbed, raped and taken the lord’s name in vain—sometimes all while even in service of his own country. Mostly though, while under the influence of alcohol, the self-medicating lubricant that had greased many a wheel set in motion toward his own path of destruction.

His past, what he could remember of it, had been soaked in blood of the innocent and not so innocent in return, and now that the last two weeks being cooped up in this stifling cell without a drop of whiskey to drink had dried him out, his past was now becoming one full of regret.

Regret of a life wasted. Of loves never found. Of promises left unfulfilled.

But even the regret, he reckoned, would be temporary given his date with the gallows in less than 24 hours.

With a creak, the Stranger could hear the front door of the sheriff’s office open. Someone was coming in. He kept his eyes shut and his back to the cell door hoping that continuing to feign sleep would keep whomever it was from bothering him during what few hours he had left. Along with the sound of boots on the rotted wooden floor came giggles that were unmistakably female.

“Thar h’is,” spoke the bug-eyed rail-thin deputy, the one the Stranger had discovered everyone called Kentuck for no better reason than that’s where he’d claimed his kin had migrated from. Along with Kentuck was a nearly toothless whore who, though only in her twenties, looked two decades older from the years on her back and a half decade-long habit involving laudanum.

“Git up!” Kentuck yelled through the bars. When the Stranger didn’t move, Kentuck sucked a wad of tobacco-stained saliva into his cheek and spit onto the Stranger’s back. “I says git up!” he repeated.

His incarceration here in Sagebrush, Texas, this small border town just north of the Rio Grande, had been marked with similar such abuse after abuse. The night he had been arrested, it was Kentuck along with the Sheriff himself, a stocky and cantankerous man named Overton who had beaten the Stranger into unconsciousness in this very cell while the Stranger’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. The charge had been stealing a horse, of which he had definitely been guilty, and also of killing the man whose horse it had been. The latter a debatable charge at best since the Stranger claimed he’d just been firing a warning shot and the hapless geezer in question had impeded the passage of said bullet with his foolhardy head.

After the Stranger had been caught, instead of calling in a Marshall or a judge, Sheriff Overton deemed the situation one that was to be handled without the “meddlin’ of outsiders,” as he liked to put it. Besides, he reckoned, given the chance, a proper hanging would be a spectacle that would be good for morale, especially if the condemned danced an agonizing mid-air jig for several minutes at the end of a rope instead of dying quick from a neck snap. That would be right entertaining, it would, he thought, and would go a long ways to help him get reelected as Sheriff come Fall.

“Git to yer feet!” Kentuck yelled to the Stranger. He repeated it and with his mouth wet with chaw it came out more as “Gitcherfeet”.

The Stranger obliged, if only to prevent the young deputy from getting any ideas regarding shows of bravado in front of his female guest. The Stranger also had one other reason to stand—to get a glance at what may be the last woman he would ever see up close. Not that Cherokee Sue, as the locals called her because of her mixed blood, was any real specimen of beauty. There’d been a tale the Stranger had overheard shortly after his arrest about Cherokee Sue having given birth to a child to which no less than a half-dozen men claimed paternity. What the Stranger wanted to know, and had the sense to keep to himself, was how many men in town had denied being the father? The child had passed in its third day, and given the conditions of the town and the prospects of its upbringing by Cherokee Sue, it was perhaps a merciful thing at best.

“He don’t look ornery,” Cherokee Sue hooted. She spat onto the wooden floor between her and the cage.

“He ain’t,” hooted Kentuck. Though it came out in one syllable like “Y’aint.”

“Not after we got through w’him,” he finished. Kentuck had made it real clear he’d been proud of the beating he’d put on the restrained man.

“You wanna see one las’ cunny before ya die?” Cherokee Sue was grinning, already raising her dress above her knees. “I’ll show it t’ya.”

She took a step forward, standing right in front of the cell. As the hem of her filthy dress rose to her dirty and blood-stained thigh, the Stranger leaned closer, enough to smell the booze and grime on her body. One lesson he’d learned early on was you had to take whatever little you could get, no matter what it was.

And as the tattered hem of Cherokee Sue’s dress came just above mid-thigh, she leaned back and spat right into the Stranger’s face, cackling her toothless laugh at him.

“Ja see that?” she hooted to Kentuck. “He t’was so mesmerized, I coulda walked up and put a blade in his eye.” She dropped her dress back down to cover herself, flattening the front with one hand as if there was something proper about her attire that needed attention.

“Can’t wait to see you dance,” the whore cackled again as she and Kentuck left arm in arm. “Better make it a good one.”

The Stranger sat back down on the bunk but something caught his eye as the door closed—the face of a man, one he hadn’t seen since…

His thoughts trailed off. Where he’d last seen that face burned in his mind. An August day, 1847, three years previous. A battlefield shrouded in smoke. It was the last day the Stranger had worn that uniform, one not too decidedly different from the one worn by the man whose visage he had just imagined having seen.

Another ghost from the past come to torment me in my final hours, the Stranger thought to himself.

It was obvious what little time he had left on this Earth would certainly not be spent in peace.

He stared at the door for what seemed to be hours, waiting for it to open yet again. To see if that face, one no less chilling than that of Beezelbub himself was still there waiting for him. The door remained closed as the jail in the town of Sagebrush was no hub of activity, especially given Sheriff Overton’s proclivity of holing up daily in one of the town’s three saloons.

At midday, Overton finally entered carrying a yellowed plate topped with a grayish stew and a hardened biscuit, which he wordlessly gave to the Stranger. No sooner had Overton sat at his rolltop desk when in through the front door of the jail came a bearded man the Stranger had not seen before. He was nattily attired in a black suit, contrasting sharply with the skin of his face, which had the color and look of the fleshy inside of an apple.

“Stand up,” Overton told the Stranger before opening the cell door. Putting down his plate of rotten food, the Stranger obliged and as the bearded gentleman in the black suit proceeded to remove a measuring string from his pocket, it became clear the purpose he served here.

“Just about six feet tall,” the hangman said, reading the markings of his string from the Stranger’s feet to the crown of his head. The hangman examined the Stranger up close, eyeing the man’s build. He grabbed the Stranger’s shoulders and squeezed.

“Solid, I’d say about two hundred pounds, give or take.” The bearded Hangman made some notes on a small pad of paper.

The Stranger thought the number sounded low and would have argued the point if he’d known his actual weight. What he did know was if the Hangman’s eyeball calculation was light and the rope too short, he’d drop from the gallows floor and bounce up and down like a yo-yo, indeed slowly strangling to death.

“Coffin?” the Hangman asked. “For an extra five bucks?”

Overton shook his head without taking a moment to even think about it. “I say we leave him strung up for the birds as a warning to any other would-be horse thieves and murderers that come through these here parts.”

Great, the Stranger thought. Overton was sparing no effort to make an example of him. Of all the towns to steal a horse, he had to pick this one.

The Hangman charged Overton a dollar for the rope he’d brought which the Sheriff gladly paid given the thought it would be an investment toward his re-election. When the Hangman’s grim business was over, he left with a touch of his hat brim in Overton’s direction but barely a glance toward the Stranger. As the Stranger sat back on his bunk, feeling the rancid stew churn in his belly, he stared out at the dry Texas sky visible to him through the bars of his window. It had been a sky he’d carelessly stared into many a time as a free man. Today he cherished every last moment of daylight he could see, marveling in the shades of blue he’d never taken the time to notice before.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the Stranger could hear the unmistakable sounds of nightly revelry drifting down the street from the town’s saloons. No doubt, he thought, he’d be the topic of conversation for sure and Overton would be in there buying drinks, slapping backs and reminding everyone to show up bright and early to get a good view in front of the gallows.

The Stranger even imagined Kentuck would be cashing in Cherokee Sue’s toothless gratitude that night for the chance to spit in the face of an actual murderer.

If they only knew, the Stranger mused. If they only knew.

Inasmuch as he fought it, not wanting to cede one precious moment of consciousness, the Stranger fell asleep, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion he’d felt. His eyes closed, bringing with them a fractured sense of peace.

On his wooden slat bunk he tossed and turned for again, his bothered sleep tormented by spirits of darkness had returned with a grinding thump in the night. Of all the nightmares that had come the last few years, leeching into his subconscious mind, this was different.

“Brother Thomas, please do something!” the woman shrieked at him, her eyes boring into his own as the firelight danced across her frail features. Her mouth had been curled in agonizing panic. The Stranger recoiled from her hands, pawing at his coat. The sounds, screams for mercy, screams of unbridled fear rose around them as they pounded against a locked door and fire licked greedily at their heels.

There was no mistaking the crucifix on the wall, even as fire reclaimed it to ash. This was a church all right, but not the burning house of God from his previous nightmares. That one, a recollection of a memory seared into his mind, he had seen with his own eyes. This new vision, a similar tableau twisted, was somehow keenly different. All about him was the agonizing helplessness embedded in the thick smoke of charred flesh and bone. Though as he became overcome with his own panic, his mind exploding to find his own escape from this flaming incarceration, he spun to find before him the grinning face of a man with eyes blackened in appearance like a bottomless well.

“Yes Brother Thomas,” the face of evil laughed at him. “Please do something!” The bellow coming from his mouth chilling the Stranger to the bone as the fire rose all around them to consume them back into the earth.

As the sun broke through the bars of the cell, falling upon the Stranger’s face, he stirred, then awoke.

“Dammit,” he thought. It was morning. He began cursing himself for his lost night. What he’d figured would be his last. In moments he expected Overton and that rat-faced boy sidekick deputy, Kentuck, to come in, cuff his hands and lead him to the gallows. The Stranger sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his eyes shut as he tried to remember any kind of prayer from his past. When they came for him he would not beg, nor would he cry. He would take every step to his death with whatever dignity he had left.

But minutes passed, then what seemed like hours. His stomach grumbled from hunger and finally the Stranger got to his feet and peered out the window of his cell. The gallows were still in plain view, a brand new ten-strand hemp noose awaiting his neck.

But there was nobody there.

No men. No women and children perched upon buckboards awaiting the spectacle of his slow execution.

And that’s when he noticed it.

The door to his cell was unlocked and slightly ajar.

*****

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Welcome to the Wordsushi.com FREE SUMMER READING program. Because I love entertaining y’all, I’ve decided to post the text of SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS online in serialized form because what could be better than to escape into a horror thriller for your summer reading fun.

Best of all, you don’t have to be at the beach. You can do your summer reading at work! Just don’t let the boss catch you.

Unless my schedule gets in the way, I will post new chapters on Mondays and Thursdays. To subscribe, you’ll need the full Wordsushi feed (not just the audiobook feed) – Get the full Wordsushi feed by clicking HERE.

In short, and not to give too much away, SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS is about an ex-soldier who wakes up in his jail cell on the day of his hanging to find everyone dead around him. What he discovers will take him on a journey to find out exactly who he really is. The prologue, takes place about 150 years before the events of Badlands. Let’s just call it an important teaser, if you will.

If you like the prologue to SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS, (or find any typos!) please leave a comment or two.But without further adieu, let your summer reading commence!

SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS

PROLOGUE

It was the year of the Lord, sixteen hundred and ninety-two on the ninth of August, on which the brig Majestyk docked in the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, having made the crossing from Portsmouth just over a fortnight past due. Those who had made the journey had learned the hard way how coming to the New World would be more difficult than anyone could imagine. The crossing had been marked with hard work, plain food, and seas which at times had nary a want for them to pass.

It had also been marked with death.

Of the 51 men, women and children making the voyage, only 43 would leave the boat, the other eight having had their bodies committed to the sea once the mortal coil had left behind nothing but the husks of their former selves.

Two had been brothers—elderly gentlemen of great wealth who had attempted the trip despite the protests of friends and loved ones back home who warned both that they were too frail for such an undertaking. After the first brother’s passing during their initial month at sea, the second, older brother fell violently ill. Some supposed it was out of grief for his sibling. He never recovered, lasting only a scant few days before himself succumbing to natural causes. It was during this time that young master Miles Lawton, age ten, on board the Majestyk with his parents, his older brother Thomas and baby sister, Alyson, realized there was only one thing he feared more than dying.

While his mother Corrine volunteered to bring water below to the moribund elderly man, it was Miles who followed her into the hold where the man lay breathing his last. Back in Portsmouth, Corrine Lawton had been a nurse for a period of time before her children were born. Aside from the Majestyk’s Captain, whose idea of treating an open wound included a sharp rub of gunpowder, Corinne Lawton was the only qualified caregiver on board. Though in this case, as in most life-threatening conditions while crossing open ocean for weeks at a time, treatment consisted of little more than offering comfort, blankets, and muted prayer.

The other five men and women, and one child—a girl no more than three years old—their deaths had not been so simple to explain but as Miles would later learn, they were no less mysterious.

Before disembarking from the Majestyk, Miles’ father, William Lawton, donned his familiar frock-coat, silk cap, and kid gloves while his mother and sister both wore dresses they had carefully kept in storage during the entire voyage. They ventured from the lower harbor into the town of Duxbury where a hot meal on land awaited. As the children sat for their supper, they all bowed their heads in silent prayer for on the morrow they and the other travellers of the Majestyk would head North towards the land they were to settle. To the promise of new lives.

In the dark that night, as Miles and Thomas shared a bed in the inn above the city’s finest tavern, it was the older of the two brothers who recounted the screaming death of the old man on the ship. It was enough to cause Miles a sleepless night of gazing at the ceiling in the dark instead of enjoying finally being in a bed that did not pitch from side to side all night long.

The next week was as difficult as any of the worst days at sea. From Duxbury, fourteen covered wagons filled with supplies and people ventured away from civilization into territories as yet uncharted by Western man. It was William Lawton who had led this group, for he had negotiated the land purchase based upon a map brought back to England by some trappers who had made their own fortune in the New Country. The parcel they were headed toward had not been settled by anyone and, given its location near a lake and what had been described to him as “virgin soil fertile enough to grow trees a thousand feet high”, there could not be a better spot to begin a town based upon freedom from the religious persecution they had suffered back home.

Or so they believed.

That night, Thomas came to Miles as the young boy was gathering twigs and sticks to be used as kindling. Thomas had something he wanted to tell, but the younger brother had been too excited that he blurted out a secret of his own.

According to Miles, the local guide who spent his days on his horse riding ahead of the party, and his nights by himself sleeping near a campfire with a rifle close at hand, had a deformity. It was Miles who recoiled once from the guide’s stare, for the man had one eye, which normally was hidden under a leather patch, but for this moment was in plain sight. In the place where Miles had expected to see an eyeball was an empty socket, the flesh around it was gnarled and scarred. Miles quickly turned away, too frightened to even speak. It was two full days before he could even muster the courage to mention it to his brother.

“Mayhap it was an Indian that done it?” was Thomas’ reply. It then became Thomas’ sole mission to himself see this injury. The next day, during a brief respite for the sake of the horses, Thomas saw the guide nearby drinking from a canteen. Carefully, he approached from the side desiring a clandestine look, but the guide lowered his canteen and turned away. Thomas approached slowly, taking one step before the guide turned toward him, his patch lowered over the eye in question, and stared back at Thomas.

“Best keep near the wagons, boy,” barked the guide. ”There are things in these woods that you might not want to meet face to face.” The guide let out a harsh laugh, one that Thomas didn’t find amusing at all. He decided seeing the guide’s deformity wasn’t worth being close to that man anymore.

On the second week of the trip, the party stopped for the night in a green valley. Two of the men, ardent hunters, were able to catch and slaughter deer for a stew. It was this evening that William and two other men went to the guide and soon after a heated argument broke out. It was Corrine who kept her children back, far enough away as to not be able to clearly hear what was being said, but not before Miles was able to understand the gist of his father’s concern.

The guide had taken them away from their intended route; a long ways away from their destination. And though he told no one, William Lawton was going to compel the guide to take them to where they needed to go no matter what he had to do to the man to make it happen.

The voices of the men rose higher as tempers flared. It was true. William Lawton was accusing the guide of misdirecting the party. According to his own map, they were several days off course.

“Ye do not know these lands,” intoned the guide. He tried to explain his rationale for the detour but the men of the party wanted nothing of it. Their journey, which had been delayed at nearly every juncture, would not be delayed any further. The path on which the guide was taking them mysteriously went around a wooded valley instead of through it. A valley which, as far as anyone could figure, would provide easy crossing, fair shelter, and abundant natural resources and game.

As the guide lowered his voice to a hush he explained again the words William Lawton refused to believe.

This was not land one wanted to cross, not at any time during the day or night. True, it was a valley abundant with lush green but his years of trapping and hunting these parts taught him to avoid the areas that the Indians themselves avoided. These were people of the Earth. They communed with its spirits and lived in concert with the animals who roamed the land. If an Indian refused to go somewhere because he or she believed it to be bad ground, it was best to do the same.     But William Lawton insisted they be taken through the valley. Summer was nearly over and there were still many preparations that would have to be made before winter set in. Houses to be built, larders to be filled with game. Time was not a luxury they could afford to waste anymore. Again, the guide refused.

“I shan’t do it,” he said.

In the morning, the party woke to find the guide gone and William Lawton was forced to tell the others the man, obviously a charlatan, had lit off in the dead of night. By the guide’s normal campfire was the satchel containing the silver pieces which Lawton himself had paid the man back in Duxbury.

“We shall continue on our own,” William told the others. The map he’d carried all the way from England proved accurate so far so there was reason to believe their destination did not lay just on the other side of the valley.

That morning they descended below the rim. William told the others he thought the guide a fool. Another man was convinced the one-eyed guide had been a drunkard though no one ever recalled seeing him take a single drop of whiskey or wine. That first day they made a fair amount of distance from their previous night’s camp. Come evening, as the wagon train came to a halt, two of the men who had spotted ruffed grouse a few miles back turned on horseback with guns. One of the men kissed his wife and promised her fresh fowl for dinner.

By nightfall, neither of the two men had returned.

Their families grew concerned as the hours passed.  Several others volunteered to go searching for the two lost men.

“No,” William told them. A night with no moon was not one to go on a search party. “We can’t afford to have more men go lost.”

He reassured the others the two men had just gotten misdirected. With the sun down from the sky, it would be difficult to know which way you were headed. Lawton said he knew these men. They were smart enough to stay in one place until sunrise when they would be able to find their way back to camp where a good ribbing by all awaited.

The disappearance of the two men was the talk of the entire camp though kept in hushed tones. It was Corrine who forbade her boys to speak of it at all, which is why Thomas quietly turned to Miles in the night as the two boys pretended to be sleeping.

“I never told you what I saw back on the ship,” his voice trembled as he whispered into Miles’ ear. “But I must because though I try to remember, it is like this memory wants to evaporate from my brain like morning dew drops. If I don’t tell you, I fear I may forget entirely.”

Several nights after the eldest of the two old men died on board the Majestyk, Thomas had awoken in the middle of the night with an urgent need to relieve himself. From his berth he crawled out and carefully felt a path toward the gangway to the upper deck. It was not uncommon for any of the men on ship to urinate overboard, always taking care to be both on the leeward side away from the wind and out of view of female folk. Thomas relished this as being the only good thing about life aboard a ship, the ability to pee freely into the sea As Thomas settled at the stern rail, hidden behind several casks of fresh water, about to do his business, he froze. Several yards away was his father, pushing a young woman over the starboard side rail. The woman appeared not to protest or even move and fell like a lifeless doll into the darkness of the water below. Struck with fear, Thomas crouched behind the large barrel and watched as his father looked around and descended back below deck, wiping his hands on his coat as if dirty.

Thomas’ voice hitched. His body was shaking. With both hands he clutched Miles’ arm, digging his nails into his brother’s skin. “I think father killed her.”

Miles froze as if dumbstruck, then began battering Thomas with blows from his tiny fists.

“Take that back!”

Thomas grabbed the younger boy’s wrists. “Shhhhhh,” he hissed quickly.

“You lie.”

“Why would I lie?“Have I ever lied to you?”

It was a question Miles had only one response to: No. His brother had always been truthful with him. Not once had he ever told a fib to Miles. His brother had always been a very serious boy, a fact not lost on anyone in the family. And now, with something as grave as two men missing, their families worried. And with the deaths of several passengers aboard the Majestyk, this was not the time to think Thomas had changed his ways.

“How do you know it was father?” Miles asked, growing scared. “It could have been one of the sailors who pushed that woman overboard.”

Thomas shook his head. Everyone on board was quite familiar with the attire of the ship’s crew: loose duck trousers, checked shirts and tarpaulin hats. Their father, with his frock coat, would have borne a completely different silhouette than your average jack tar sailor.

“For what reason would he have to cause them harm?” Miles asked, his voice raising too much, causing Thomas to react as if struck.

“Boys!” A voice growled. It was their father. “Get to sleep.” William had been only a few feet away, cradling a gun in the crook of his arm. He waited until Thomas had lain back down and closed his eyes before turning away. A closer look would have revealed Thomas’ body trembling in fear, wondering just how much his father had heard after all.

By daybreak the two missing men had not yet returned to camp and William organized a search party consisting of himself and three other men. Taking four of their best horses, they set out back through the valley in the direction the others had vanished. William promised they would find the missing men.

They didn’t have to look very long.

No more than a mile from camp, they came across the first man. Initially, he appeared to be standing in a hole up to his chest, slumped over onto the dirt, fast asleep. It wasn’t until the search party got closer that one of the men on horseback realized there had been no hole. The missing man, a young carpenter who had come over to the New World with his young wife, had been literally cut in half, his body shredded at mid-chest. Trailing behind what was left of the man’s upper half were entrails and blood. Quite a lot of blood.

“Looks as if he was dragged.” One of the men pointed. It indeed did and all eyes followed the line of ground-soaked blood toward the bramble where it disappeared.

“We must look for the other man—” William cut himself off in mid sentence. A crackling sound had come from the thicket. It was a sound a hunter would never mistake for anything else: a footstep.

Quickly, the men of the search party dismounted. William drew a musket pistol from his belt and put a finger to his lips. An older man to his left cocked his head to the side and sniffed the air. It was there in the breeze something bad, coming from the bramble ahead. At his feet, William could see the trail of the dead man’s blood was going to lead them to whatever was hiding in the thicket. With a slight movement of his hand, William gestured for them to proceed quietly. As he stepped closer he could hear it, a growling, feral and unafraid. The gun, which had been loaded and primed back at camp, came up to his shoulder as William thumbed back the hammer.

The older man to his left nodded. He would flush whatever it was out of hiding. “Yah! Yah!” he yelled, waving his arms.

From the bramble it came, baring teeth, the throaty growl blaring from its mouth making no mistake of its intention. The older man recoiled but it was no use. The beast’s bloodshot eyes locked upon its prey as it launched from its rear haunches into the air.

Blam! The shot from the musket found its mark in the skull of the beast and it dropped like a stone onto the dirt, its shattered head lolling backwards.

The older man turned, his face ashen. “Good Lord!” His hands shook furiously, then he turned, stumbled against a tree and threw up his breakfast onto the ground.

One of the other men approached the prone lump of black fur on the ground. The great beast was no bigger than a large dog.

“Don’t touch it!” William commanded him. He approached slowly and poked it with the barrel of his musket.

“Nice shot, William,” the young man said to him.

The fourth man in the party looked at the dead beast. “What is it?”

“Wolf,” William said. “We must have surprised it.”

“William!” The older man was calling to them. The others rushed to the sound of his voice. He pointed. In a pile next to his sick on the ground, was what was unmistakable. “It’s… it’s a leg.”

It was obvious to all the leg belonged to the dead man they had found on the path. Upon further inspection, it was also obvious the wolf had been chewing on what was left of it. Talk turned to the one man still missing. The consensus was that wolves may have gotten the first man but it left the question of what had happened to the second man and even the horses since there appeared no sign of either.

“I am no expert,” the older man said, pointing to the upper half of the dead man’s torso still on the path. “But I have never heard of wolves doing that.”

They knew back at camp the mood was somber. It was agreed by the men of the search party that William would inform the wife of the man they had found of his demise but not of their suspicions of how he had died. “‘Tis best not to alarm the women and children,” he said. The others knew he was right. The second man, William would say, was still missing and he hoped the others would pray for his safe return. He knew different though. The second man was not coming back either and the longer they stayed, the more chance there was that whatever was out there might decide to come calling again. That night, Miles slept poorly, thinking of the dead man in the woods somewhere in the darkness. At one point the exhaustion overcame him and his eyes finally closed, only to be jarred out of slumber by the feeling of something hovering over him.

Breathless, he opened his eyes… his heart pounding. Before he could make a sound, a hand clamped over his mouth. Leaning over him was his father. William Lawton brought his mouth to Miles’ ear and whispered:

“Listen to every word I tell you and don’t make a sound or you will perish tonight like the others.”

Miles was so struck with fear that he couldn’t even blink.

The boy nodded as his father continued to whisper to him. What was being said seemed impossible but this was his father speaking. Miles glanced over toward his brother but Thomas was fast asleep. As far as he could tell his mother and baby sister Alyson were inside the wagon as usual in perfect slumber. There was nobody watching them. Miles considered what Thomas had told him, the story of his father tossing the woman overboard back on the boat. He refused to believe it at the time but the things his father was now telling him, well, they amounted to murder.

His own father, a killer.

“Please, Miles, you must trust me,” William said. “There are lives in great peril. You must get dressed now. I will explain more as we walk.”

Miles wanted to scream. To warn the others. His father had become, at what point he wasn’t sure, a complete and raving lunatic. It was his father’s hand on his shoulder, the hand of a disciplinarian, that prevented him from doing so. If he screamed he was sure his father would kill him as well. In the dark, he slipped on his clothes, hoping, praying that his brother would wake up and see him but Thomas lay still.

“We must go. Hurry!” his father whispered.

And under the cloak of night, with only the sounds of the valley and woods around them, Miles and William Lawton crept off into the darkness. At the edge of camp, Miles turned to look back at his brother. It would be the last time he would see Thomas as he remembered him.

Miles decided that once in the woods he would flee from his father under the cover of darkness but as they ventured further down the trail he became aware of sounds coming from the woods and brush around them. Noises. Scurrying. Breathing. Footsteps padding just outside of the arc of firelight from the torch his father carried. The journey the past couple of weeks, sleeping outside, had rendered his ears accustomed to the noises of the great outdoors, especially those after sundown—crickets, owls, the occasional bump in the night—but this was different. With every step the noises grew louder, a symphony of movement unseen, until the sound grew so great Miles thought he would surely go mad.

In the darkness ahead, Miles would see small glints of light appearing briefly, then disappearing.

‘Tis nothing but fireflies, he thought. But part of him knew better. The glints in the darkness always appeared in horizontal pairs.

They were eyes.

Eyes staring back at him. Watching him. Sizing him up from somewhere in the dark.

Run! his brain commanded him, finally breaking through to his conscious mind. He pulled away from his father, about to bolt when the old man’s hand wrapped around the back of his neck, his father’s rough skin feeling hot as a flame against his soft, bare flesh.

“Do not pull away from me,” his father hissed. “You do not want truck of what is beyond this path.”

Miles’ eyes fell upon the pistol stuck through his father’s belt. William took his hand off the boy’s neck and put it back on the butt of the gun, as if ready to draw.

Miles fell back into step. He dared not disobey. If there was a chance to escape the clutches of his father, this was not it. Especially not with the gun at his old man’s side. He would wait and when the time came he would run as if being chased by lightning.

They walked down the path for what seemed like ages until coming to another clearing. Up ahead in the rim of dim light from his father’s torch, Miles could see something. It looked like…

A hand.

“Do not look,” his father said. It was impossible. Given the choice of looking out at the eyeballs glinting in the darkness or ahead on the path, Miles decided on the latter.

As they got closer, Miles gasped.

William attempted to shield him but there was no keeping the boy from seeing the man torn in half. The same man he himself had found earlier. William clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.

“Do not scream,” he whispered. “If you must look, do not scream.”

The man, who Miles had remembered from the months they had all spent in close quarters together, did not resemble a human being anymore for his body had been mostly stripped of skin and flesh. From the man’s face came the grimace of bone and teeth.

“Animals,” William said, preempting Miles’ obvious question. “By the morrow there will hardly be anything left of him.”

“D-d-d-did we come to bury him?” Miles blurted out.

“No,” his father said and from the inside of his frock coat he drew a dagger.

Miles’ breath caught in his throat. He saw the blade and froze, expecting the next moment to be his last.

He’s going to kill me, Miles thought but instead of turning the blade on him, William crouched next to the dead man and cut a small lock of hair from what was left on his head.

“Hold this and follow me,” William said, handing Miles the torch. Carefully, he followed his father to the bramble a few feet away and that’s where he saw it.

Another man, naked, curled up on the ground and judging from the fact that half his head was missing, very dead.

“Animals didn’t do this,” Miles whispered.

“No,” William responded, crouching down next to the body of the naked man. “I did.”

A chill ran down Miles’ spine.

“This man attacked us earlier,” William said. “I had no choice.”

Miles looked down.

“He was one of us.”

“Was. Not any longer. He had turned. I’m positive he killed the other man.”

“I… I… I don’t believe you.” Miles was stunned. That he’d just said this to his father shocked even himself.

“Please, Miles. I don’t expect you to understand quite yet.” His father cut a lock from the body of the naked man as well. “Bring the torch over here.”

Miles did as told. He dared not disobey as long as his father still had that pistol.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim arc of light, William paced a circle once, then drew it in the dirt with his dagger the second time through. From there he drew several lines, crossing and connecting. Miles had seen this before, back home, but was always told by his mother he was too young to know of such things.

“It’s a pentagram,” William said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Back home we were persecuted for our beliefs. Shunned, ridiculed, even murdered. This is why we came to the New World, Miles. To find a better place where we are free to practice our religion as we see fit.”

William positioned Miles in the middle of the pentagram.

“Be still,” he told the boy. “And watch.”

His father began by circling the pentagram.

“Some dare call us Pagans. Heretics. Worshippers of Darkness. Let them. From whence we came, it is the self-proclaimed duty of the self-righteous to judge us based upon the fact that our beliefs do not match theirs. We have chosen the master we wish to worship and it is He who has delivered us to this place. A place of our destiny but it is obvious that before we are to claim that which is ours, we will be tested first. Tested by the obstacles others choose to put in our path to challenge our faith. Tested by people who dare stand in our way. Like that one-eyed hoodlum who wanted to hold us up for more money and tried to scare us with tales of spooks and spirits. It was I, however, who had the last laugh on him. He will not be extorting monies from gullible travelers anymore. I made sure of that.”

Miles swallowed hard. He thought of the woman going overboard. He thought of the man lying dead with half his skull blown off.

“For years,  I have had visions of this place. Visions of what we will find here and before my very eyes, these visions have been true. Every last one of them.”

A sound started in William’s throat starting first as a low whisper then turning into a low growl—the chant coming from his mouth melting into words and phrases in a language Miles had never heard before. A language so guttural and primitive, yet at the same time hypnotic. William’s arms drew back and forth in a way that reminded Miles of the conductor of a small orchestra he had seen back in Portsmouth. Back then the conductor had been summoning music from the musicians, here his father was summoning, but what was anybody’s guess.

As the chanting grew louder and more intense, Miles looked up and saw that in place of his father’s eyes were now shocks of white. Miles couldn’t scream, he couldn’t move. It felt as if bands of iron had wrapped around his body. The terror inside him swelling to the point where he felt as if his sanity were being torn asunder from his very body.

William reached out and grabbed Miles’ wrist with one hand, raising the dagger in the other. With one quick stroke he sliced clean across the boy’s palm. Then, clutching it inside his own hand, balled them both into a fist and squeezed. Miles felt as if the bones in his hand would shatter, being crushed inside his father’s hand but instead blood poured out onto the ground as if he were juicing an orange. The blood, which pooled at Miles’ feet, quickly disappeared into the ground as if being sucked down like water into a drain. And as quickly as it started, William dropped Miles’ hand and it was over. The invisible bands holding Miles in place were gone and the boy, drained physically from the ritual, fell to the ground at his father’s feet.

“You are ready,” William said, catching his own breath. “To do that which needs to be done.”

In silence, they waited for sunrise to come. William mouthing some kind of unholy prayer to himself.  Miles had become too scared to even move, feeling as if something were sitting next to him, but anytime he’d look, there was nothing. It was a presence he could feel but not see. To Miles, there was something oddly comforting because he did not know anymore who his father was, though this presence next to him felt oddly familiar. At some point during the night exhaustion overwhelmed Miles and sleep enveloped him.

It was his father who shook him awake.

“Time to go,” William said. He didn’t even wait for Miles to get up before starting off down the path back towards camp.

Miles bolted to his feet, his limbs stiff from the way he had been sitting. He glanced down at his hands, looking for the deep cut his father had put there with his dagger but it was nowhere to be seen. His eyes darted from one hand to the other. Nothing. So certain he had been of the gash, his father squeezing his closed fist like…

“Miles, please hurry!” his father called out. Miles tried to remember what had indeed happened last night but the memory seemed foggy. He vaguely recalled what Thomas had said about how the things he’d seen on the boat evaporating from his mind like morning dew. Miles turned back to look at the spot where they had been and that’s when he saw it. In the woods, through the bramble and thicket, were eyes.

Hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, staring back at him from hiding. And those eyes seemed…

Hungry.

“It isn’t possible,” Miles whispered to himself but when he turned back the eyes were still there. Watching him.

Miles picked up the pace of his feet until he had caught up with his father, grasping William’s hand for comfort.

As they approached camp, Miles could see the clearing up ahead through the trees. The wagons were still circled in the same way they had always made camp. Miles wanted to run toward them, to his mother, brother, and baby sister.

“Wait,” his father said. “One thing I must tell you before we go back.”

Miles waited in anticipation. The evening had been long enough; he just wanted to be back at camp.

“You could say part of my vision for this new land and our future was drawn in blood.”

His heart beat faster. Miles didn’t like the sound of this.

“We live in a time of great peril,” William began. “War, pestilence, greed. We are at the verge of a great reckoning. Just because we walk on this ground now, does not mean we always shall for I have foreseen this with mine own mind’s eye. The evil of man, persecution, genocide, has pushed this world to the brink of Armageddon. The end of days will soon be upon us.”

Miles began shaking. His father had long ago abandoned the pulpit of the church in which he’d been a pastor. Miles had been three years old at the time and had barely a recollection of it, though at night, in secret, Thomas would talk about it on occasion. Their father had “lost his faith”, claiming he had seen the truth about his beliefs. Miles was beginning to think these visions he was just learning about consisted of what his father claimed to be “the truth”. He had become aware of the strange rituals he would sometimes secretly hear his mother and father performing late in the evening but chose to believe they were just things he was too young to understand. He thought of the secret moans and sounds coming from his parents’ room at night that he would often cover his ears not to hear.

“I did this for us, Miles,” his father said. “I brought us here to be with Him. To serve at His right hand when the day of reckoning arrives for this is the place from where He will emerge to reclaim the throne He was denied.”

Miles closed his eyes. In his mind was an image from an old church primer of his youth, a book that had been long banished from their house. The image, a horned beast trapped in a pit of flame, seemed to burn itself into Miles’ mind.

“I brought Him the sacrifice he wanted, Miles. I brought it to Him all the way here.”

His father turned his head and gestured toward the clearing. Toward the camp.

Pulling away from his father, Miles bolted down the path.

“Miles, come back here!” William shouted. “You’re not going to like what you find there.”

Miles ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet pumping against the hard dirt. His lungs burned but he kept running, finally breaking free into the clearing.

His heart felt like it was going to explode but he kept moving toward the wagons.

“Thomas!” he called out, gasping for breath. “Thomas! Mother!”

It was then that he saw the bodies.

Two of them on the ground, their limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. Miles approached, slowly, his whole body shaken. The man and woman on the ground had been torn apart by something, their bodies seemingly thrown to the ground as if they were nothing but rag dolls. Her clothing had been ripped apart, her skirt mercilessly dragged up over her face. The man next to her had no face to speak of, for the flesh had been torn off of it, His skeletal jaw hanging open in a never-ending silent scream.

Miles turned. “Thomas!” he yelled. “Mother!”

No sound greeted him in return. He turned past the first wagon and looked inside. The flies had begun to light already on the dead woman, landing on the bloody gash alongside her neck. In her arms she clutched what appeared to be a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Miles remembered these two as the woman who had given birth in their hometown just two months before they boarded the Majestyk.

Miles ran to the next wagon. He did not have to look inside to know what had happened. Dripping from between the wooden slats of the undercarriage was blood. He took two steps and found another man, laying face down, his legs severed above the knee exposing denuded bone. Miles knew without question, those legs had been chewed off.

And then behind him he heard a sound.

He spun to find the three coyotes gnawing the flesh of another dead body on the ground just under the next wagon. The scavengers were oblivious to Miles as he approached and when one of the coyotes looked up, exposing its victim, that’s when Miles saw it.

Thomas’ face.

Or, more accurately, what was left of it.

“No!” Miles screamed. “Noooo!” He ran toward the coyotes shrieking and waving his arms like a wild man to shoo them away. The beasts looked up and scattered, disappearing into the woods at full gallop. Miles fell to his knees next to his dead brother.

“Thomas! Thomas!” He grabbed his brother’s limp arm, his shirt torn and soaked with blood. At the end was a gnarled stump where Thomas’ hand had been chewed away.

The tears exploded from Miles as he clutched Thomas’s body to his, crying into the sky, sobbing hard to the point where he was no longer making any sounds, just deep hitching breaths.

“I’m sorry, Miles. ‘Tis the sacrifice we must make.” William’s voice came from behind him. Miles squeezed his eyes shut and held his brother’s lifeless body closer.

“Miles.”

William reached out to him but Miles pulled away, leaping to his feet, dropping Thomas’ body.

“Please, boy.”

Miles backed away from his father’s reach. He bumped into a wagon. Behind him, he heard a thud and a hand fell upon his shoulder. His head shot around to find the outstretched arm of his mother, barely recognizable with her lower jaw having been torn away, the rest of her face frozen in a grimace of agony. Still clutched to his mother’s breast was baby Alyson, a cry bursting from her tiny lungs.

“She’s alive,” Miles said, relief washing over him. “She’s alive.” He reached for her but his father grabbed him from behind and spun him around.

“Please understand, Miles.”

“You did this!” Miles sobbed. “You killed them all!”

“No. It was not my hand.”

“But you knew. You brought us here to be slaughtered!”

Baby Alyson’s cries cut through the air. Miles wanted to grab her and run but his father’s hands clutched his shoulders.

Miles could hear someone else sobbing from an adjacent wagon. A girl’s voice. Most likely the twelve-year-old daughter of fellow travelers whom Miles had barely spoken to during the entire journey.

“There are others still alive, we must help them,” Miles pleaded.

William reached down to the pistol by his side, drawing it from his belt.

“In this world we are the persecuted, in the next we will be one with His power. His time is coming, Miles. And when that day is upon us, it will change everything. We will rule by His side.”

“Whose side?”

“The Coyote.”

William stepped back from Miles. “I have known for a very long time of our family’s legacy and have tried to deny it, even trying to find refuge in God. But the truth cannot be hidden any longer. What God created is not worthy. Their time has passed. It’s time for the darkness to return to this world.”

William raised the gun. Miles wanted to run, but couldn’t.

“Close your eyes, Miles.”

“No.”

“Then keep them open.”

His father thumbed back the hammer on the pistol.

Miles’ voice trembled. “Y-y-you’re the Coyote.”

“No, my boy,” William said, a serene smile crossing his face. And that’s when Miles could feel the pain in his hand. He looked down and the gash his father had sliced with his dagger split open once again and began to bleed. And as the blood poured from the wound Miles could see a light inside, growing from a point into a glowing ball. The vision came to Miles, endless images flashing by his eyes as if time were rocketing past him while he was standing still. There was flame and smoke. An Earth scorched. The sky opening. A battle of darkness and light.

“I’m not the Coyote,” William said as he pressed the barrel to his own temple. “You are. And you will be victorious.”

And with a steady hand, he pulled the trigger.

*****

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PREVIOUSLY ON ANGEL OF DEATH: Galen Altos hears a disturbing message whispered to him in the moments before death. But as the Stranger is awoken by a phone call, this time in a motel room next to the mutilated and very dead body of a naked woman, he has no recollection of how he got there or even who he is. But now the police are beating at the door and with only one way out, the Stranger sees something he hadn’t noticed before. A purse presumably belonging to the corpse he woke up with.

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LISTEN TO THE ANGEL OF DEATH EPISODE 2 COMMENTARY

You wanted to know about cinnamon, I’ll tell you about cinnamon. Plus I’ll ramble on about what’s going on so far in Angel of Death, read some of your emails, Facebook messages and comments and I’ll tell you how the Angel of Death opening and closing theme music came to be… Hint, it’s from my previous life. Yes, it’s rambly. Yes, it’s long. Let me know what you think! Comment below.

Black Lab – THIS NIGHT - from the album “Passion Leaves a Trace”

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@astralaudio on Twitter asked me if I had an audio promo for Angel of Death. Embarrassingly, I didn’t at the time but I put together one for him and anyone else who’d be willing to play it on their podcast. If you can and will, feel free to download the mp3 or aiff file.

Of course, I’d be happy to reciprocate. If there’s a promo of yours I can tack onto the commentary episodes, shoot it my way for sure.

SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH PROMO (mp3)

SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH PROMO (aiff)

Oh, and Angel of Death Episode 2 is coming tomorrow…

Shadow Falls returns with a nightmarish tale of gripping horror. In the final brief moments before death, something is whispered into Galen Altos’ ear. However, what happens afterward will only propel him toward a final date with what lay behind destiny’s door.

LISTEN TO ANGEL OF DEATH-EPISODE ONE

Tell me what you think. Leave a comment.

Episode One commentary is available as a separate podcast download. Click here.

New to Shadow Falls? You don’t have to have listened to Season One or Badlands to enjoy ANGEL OF DEATH.

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LISTEN TO THE ANGEL OF DEATH EPISODE 1 COMMENTARY

Welcome to the first SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH episode commentary. I know its early in the game but I try to give you a bit more background into what you should expect plus I talk about the 699 day delay in launching a SF3 and answer your questions about PCH and my health among other things. LOL. Mostly, though it’s time to just shake the rust off and have some fun again.

And as I talk about here in this half hour gabfest, you don’t need to have heard Shadow Falls: Season One or Badlands to follow the action here in Angel of Death.

As mentioned in this commentary, a song you should own if only to get a better understanding of one of the dramatic themes in ANGEL OF DEATH.

Kevin Gilbert – SHADOW SELF from the album “Thud”

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As I originally mentioned a couple of posts ago, I’m going to create two different feeds for the show. One with just the episodes and another with just the commentary. I’ll make links to both available next week when I make the launch date announcement so you can subscribe early to make sure you get the first episode of Shadow Falls 3 the moment it comes out.

I’m excited about this. So far with the Shadow Falls Season One audio drama and Shadow Falls: Badlands, I’ve only been able to expose just the barest hint of where this story is going. In Shadow Falls 3, we’re going to really learn the truth about our characters and I think it’s gonna blow your mind.

Stay tuned….

Consider this to be a test drive of the new website. I put this story out on the old Wordsushi site and as an audio file on an episode of PCH last year. I’ve decided to re-release it for those of you who may have missed it the first time.

Let’s just preface this by saying THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

However, some of you have now wondered “What will become of Michael Vick now that he’s out of federal prison?” A lot of you have expressed anger. A lot of you have said he deserves a second chance.

Some of you think he has no place in professional football, a place where he potentially serves as a role model for impressionable youth.

Perhaps the only important issue is whether or not, by virtue of his current and future actions, he can serve as a role model of change.

I REPEAT, THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. MICHAEL VICK PAID HIS DEBT TO SOCIETY. IN NO WAY DO I CONDONE OR SUGGEST THAT ANY HARM SHOULD COME TO HIM.

Click here to hear an audio version of Judgement Day for Michael Vick

That being said, I present:

Transistor Rodeo: Prologue

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 1

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 2

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 3

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 4

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 5

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 6

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 7

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 8

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 9

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 10

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 11

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 12

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 13

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 14

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 15

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 16

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 17

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 18

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 19

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Held captive by Archie Arhtursen, Cal is told of the scientist’s scheme. Arthursen has used the robot’s unexptected malfunction to prove the capabilities of the scuttled military software program to elude capture. Arthursen cuts a shotgun wedding deal with Cal. He’ll signal the robots to come in from behind the curtain and Cal will take credit and receive 50 million dollars for his trouble. Money that may very well come from unscrupluous sources who end up as the highest bidder. It all doesn’t sit well with Cal, who manages his escape, just as Arthursen finds himself locked out of the robots network by the very robots themselves.

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hetransistorrodeo.com – leave a comment

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 20

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 21

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 22

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Transistor Rodeo: Chapter 23

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