The entire audiobook version of INFINITY is now available as one mega-download. Just $3.75! Over 5 and a half hours of entertainment!
http://wordsushi.com/store/#ecwid:category=2200907&mode=product&product=9560498

THANK YOU! Even though the book is a free download tomorrow, enough people paid for a copy of INFINITY today to pop it onto the Kindle best seller list for “Occult Horror”.

Gotta love those small victories!

UPDATE: 11:04 pm. INFINITY jumped to #89. This will most likely be the last chart movement before it becomes a free download at midnight.

“Diary of a Madman” is a story about a serial killer who is manipulated by a mysterious stranger. Thematically, it is a story about the loss of identity and the loss of self. Throughout the entire book, which is told in first person, we never even learn the name of our protagonist (which is intentional).

Some of you know that the Shadow Falls books, “Badlands” and “Angel of Death” are tales about a man who discovers that he is in fact, the embodiment of “Death.” If you have either read “Angel of Death” or heard the audio book version, you are probably already familiar with how it directly relates to the ending of “Diary of a Madman.”

Diary/Badlands/Angel of Death make up the heart of what I refer to as The Angel of Death Chronicles (AODC).

Yes, INFINITY is a book that is riddled with AODC references and Easter eggs. No, you do not have to have previously read any of the AODC books to understand what INFINITY is all about. That being said, let me peel back another layer…

Think of the concept of “demons.” What does it mean to you? Who are demons? How do they manipulate people? What is their purpose? What do they want? More importantly, where do they come from? Those voices inside of your head compelling you to do bad things. Are they part of your consciousness? Or did they originate from somewhere else, infecting you and your mind like some kind of parasite?

INFINITY exists in a world where all of those questions are answered. The AODC books exist in a world where all those questions are asked.

In “Badlands” Galan Altos (an anagram for “a lost angel”) is a killer who is haunted by his past and is tormented by the ghosts that follow him. At the end of the book he comes to a startling realization about his true identity. In “Angel of Death” we fast-forward 150 years in time to find that Galen’s consciousness is being manipulated from one life to the next in order to send him down a darkened path of no return. He is a being with no control over his existence. In “Angel of Death” he finally becomes aware of this lack of control and fights to alter the destiny that has been chosen for him by his father. Standing in Galen’s way is his brother, also chosen to assume the mantle of “Death”–with the two brothers fighting to see who will ultimately become Death. Whereas Galen is a being that will only kill for a reason, his brother is a cold-hearted murderer happy to see the streets run red with blood… (and yes, there is a strong Cain and Abel reference in the Shadow Falls books that I blogged about here).

Consider then our titular character from “Diary of a Madman” and how he is manipulated by a stranger named Eddy into choosing other killers as his victims. who is Eddy? Could Eddy in fact, be a demon?

Now, the true relationship between INFINITY and the AODC books can only be revealed once you have read INFINITY and INFINITY Rising, the direct sequel that picks up right where infinity leaves off. all of these books make up a very layered overall universe. The INFINITY books are just the top-most layer of it all.

I will tell you this much. There are things referenced in the infinity books that take place in the as-yet-to-be-written “Diary of a Madman” sequel that have to do with Ian’s past before he became part of this demon-hunting cult known as the Church of Infinity. Also, some of you may recognize passages from “Badlands” that are in a book Ian reads called “Exit the Valley” penned by “Thomas Holt” — the same name used by the Preacher who burns down his own church with his entire congregation inside (as revealed in Badlands). The story behind how Thomas Holt wrote “Exit the Valley” is a part of the Shadow Falls canon that hasn’t been told yet.

So yes, it’s complicated… some may say convoluted, but these three different universes and how they all are essentially concentric circles of one another has been something I’ve been working on for nearly a decade. It’s only now that I’m able to reveal how these puzzle pieces all fit together.

For 24 hours starting at 12:01 PST on 2/15, CLICK HERE to snag a FREE copy of INFINITY, my brand new supernatural thriller about a demon hunter who becomes the hunted when an unstoppable assassin from Hell comes to earth on a mission to kill.

INFINITY is the biggest and most badass novel I’ve ever written. It took me three years to complete and I even enlisted the help of an editor who has worked with Stephen King and Isaac Asimov to really make one incredibly cool, pulse-pounding thriller.

Normally, INFINITY will be priced at a very affordable $2.99, but with Amazon’s help, Glenneyre Press is giving it away for one day so I can put this book in YOUR HANDS because I know once you read it, you’re going to love it and want to tell your friends about it. That’s how confident I am that this book, the characters, the writing and all the mythology about demons will rock your world.

I want you to to read INFINITY and I want you to talk about it. If you support my craft, grab a free download and if you like the book, buy a copy for a friend and talk about it online.

But you only have one day to get INFINITY for free! Go grab it!

ABOUT INFINITY:
Earth is Heaven for Demons…

According to the prophet Ranajee, demons live among us in human form. They exploit man’s vulnerability to place everyday people in a condition of suffering that exists right here on Earth. As more demons enter our world, this condition will never end until all of humankind is enslaved.

Ranajee, however is the pen name of a mysterious and seemingly ageless leader of a cult of demon hunters known as the Church of Infinity. It is their chosen task to eradicate, with extreme prejudice, those who endeavor each day to hasten the end of mankind.

And when Ranajee gets his hands on a powerful artifact that could allow him to breach the borders of Hell, an unstoppable demon assassin is sent to wipe out all the members of the Church of Infinity once and for all.

Now one last surviving demon hunter must escape from prison and go on the run. With the help of a conspiracy-theorist punker named Rachel, he goes on a search to track down this artifact in order to trade it for his life and save the human world from certain doom.

A demon hunter becomes the hunted when an unstoppable assassin from Hell comes to Earth on a mission to kill…

The INFINITY ebook will drop in ONE WEEK on Feb. 15th! I know a lot of you out there who follow my fiction first found me through audiobooks and I wanted to do something special for all y’all… so I recorded a FULL audiobook version of both INFINITY books.

I’m even giving you a free preview of Part 1 (of 5) a full 53 minutes of what I think is the best novel I’ve ever written.

Click here to download PART 1 of INFINITY for FREE 

GET INFINITY Parts 2 & 3 – now available in the Wordsushi Store! Over 2 hours long!

Earth is Heaven for Demons…

According to the prophet Ranajee, demons live among us in human form. They exploit man’s vulnerability to place everyday people in a condition of suffering that exists right here on Earth.  As more demons enter our world, this condition will never end until all of humankind is enslaved.

Ranajee, however is the pen name of a mysterious and seemingly ageless leader of a cult of demon hunters known as the Church of Infinity. It is their chosen task to eradicate, with extreme prejudice, those who endeavor each day to hasten the end of mankind.

And when Ranajee gets his hands on a powerful artifact that could allow him to breach the borders of Hell, an unstoppable demon assassin is sent to wipe out all the members of the Church of Infinity once and for all.

Now one last surviving demon hunter must escape from prison and go on the run. With the help of a conspiracy-theorist punker named Rachel, he goes on a search to track down this artifact in order to trade it for his life and save the human world from certain doom.

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!

However, one of the things that went extremely right this year was my own efforts to build up my book sales. Around March, I discovered the ebook revolution had come knocking on my door. Sales of the one ebook I had released in 2008, “Where’s My F*cking Latte“, had been growing from a seedling into a mighty oak and were now exploding. I realized immediately that the growing ebook revolution would be huge for indie guys like me. My buddy Blake Morgan really instilled a mission into my head when he told me that the best way to sell back catalog was to release more material.

So that’s what I did. I polished up and released seven older novels as ebooks, several of which had only been available as serialized podcasts. I wrote lots and lots of brand new material and released three more non-fiction books and a book of short stories. All four of my non-fiction books hit the Kindle bestseller lists in their respective categories. Latte and the Bin Laden book have become fixtures at the top of theirs.

And yes, all of my books sell copies and those sales keep growing as the market continues to go vertical.

So far for 2012 I have a brand new urban fantasy series comprised of three novellas. I also have another Rev. MYN book, the sequel to “Go Forth and Kick Some Ass,” coming out. Both projects are written and finished. I’m also starting development on another big non-fiction book that I’d like to have out before summer.

And as I was drafting a battle plan of what I’d like to accomplish as an author in 2012, I had a thought. I’d love to find a great writing assignment. I am very fortunate to spend as much time as I do working on all of my own books, but in the spirit of spicing it up a bit I was thinking it would be really awesome  to get hired to write for someone else’s project…to step into some other character’s world and put my talents to work adding my own spin to their adventures.

The dream: to write a big action story as part of a massive franchise like Bond, Halo or something similar. My novel, “Number One with a Bullet” was very much a Bourne-meets-Bond type of story. I know I could knock something like this out of the park.

I don’t really know anybody to approach with this so I thought I’d just throw it out there, screaming into the sky with the hope that somehow, someway it finds the right ears. If you have an action franchise that needs an author, let’s talk. I’ll send you samples of some of my best pulse-pounding work and we’ll go from there.

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!

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!

Mobile is the future of media. What the rest of us already knew is finally becoming evident to the stuffy windbags who are desperately trying to find some kind of relevance in today’s media landscape.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog and on my Facebook page, I’m always looking for ways to try and connect with readers who might dig my writing. That’s why I’ve decided to serialize my thriller novel THE DOOMSDAY CLUB for free over at Wattpad. 

THE DOOMSDAY CLUB is a fast-paced suspense-filled thriller about four college friends who inadvertently kill someone and then end up having to invent a phony terrorist group in order to try and cover up the crime.

I put Chapter One up and will add Chapter Two once we hit 250 reads.

Click here to read THE DOOMSDAY CLUB over at WATTPAD for FREE

Because Wattpad is a mobile-driven community, it also has free apps for all the most popular mobile platforms.

I have this big, brand new urban fantasy novel that I’ve written (for now let’s just call it by a codename: “Fallen 8″). It’s about a cult of demon hunters. I wanted to really polish it up so I hired (at great expense) an outside editor who has worked with Stephen King, Kevin J. Anderson and Isaac Asimov. I think we’ve been able to polish this manuscript into something really amazing. It’s extremely cinematic, full of non-stop action and has some incredible thematic elements. It could be the best thing I’ve ever written.

In short, if you’ve enjoyed any of my previous work, including “Shadow Falls”, “Number One with a Bullet”, “Diary of a Madman”, you’re gonna flip over this book.

And so the question becomes: How best to get this book out there to you? All of the fiction I’ve released in eBook form had been, at one point, podcast for free. This book doesn’t have an audience… yet.

So, I’m contemplating a couple of ideas. Basically, they are all variations of a similar theme: divide this one big book into two books and then give you the first book for free.

Giving you the first book for free is a risk I’m willing to assume. I could give you the free book in a couple of different ways. I can break it up into 16 serialized podcast episodes, I can release it on Smashwords as a free eBook download. I can post the serialized chapters here on Wordsushi.

That all seems easy. The question is what to do after week 16, after getting you hooked on this crack-like storyline.

Here are my ideas:

• A) Put out the 2nd book, in its entirety, as an ebook for sale. Most likely, it would be packaged together with the first book so you’d get both books for an affordable price  ($2.99 to $4.99) and would include bonus material from book 1 not included in the podcast/free versions.
• B) Use the sale of the ebook as a mini Kickstarter-like campaign to raise money to produce a free serialized podcast of the second book. Give it a reasonable goal (maybe selling 2,500 copies) If you liked the first book enough, I’d hope you spend $3-$5 to help fund it, even if you’re not an ebook reader kind of person.
• C) Actually do a Kickstarter campaign and try to raise $4K or so. Give away some nice freebies to those who donate. Maybe even use it to find creation of a physical print copy of both books together (something of course that would be made free to those who donated a certain pre-determined amount to the Kickstarter campaign).

Basically, if I do this, I’d probably do some kind of combination of the above.

Thoughts?

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

“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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SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS

Read the Shadow Falls: Badlands PROLOGUE and CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

Eternity passing through his mind, the Stranger stared at the pathway to his obvious freedom before finally reaching toward it. What had appeared before his eyes was no illusion, for, while he’d been sleeping, someone had unlocked his cell.

He rose from his bunk, the ebbing fear still in his subconscious from a dream he could not remember now, though whatever it had been had left behind a dark and sticky residue of uneasiness in his mind. His foot moved closer, shuffling across the wooden floor and that’s when it hit him, a flash of white tearing through his mind like lightning.

The flash had taken him back, accompanied by the sharp crack of rifle fire and the cordite fresh in his nostrils. In the wavering heat of midday, ahead marches an infantry advancing toward them across the plain, bayonet at the ready. Behind him the rapid cannonade of artillery roars defiantly, strafing the enemy front line, hurtling shattered bodies into the air.

He turns to the soldier next to him, yet another face from his past, another ghost from a time buried in his mind, a green recruit picked up just three weeks previous while his regiment had been on the march. The rookie’s face pale, stricken with fear, unlike the face of the other soldier he’d seen in his mind the day before, a face of a predator eyeing its prey.

The Stranger remembered both men quite well, diametric opposites of one another. The recruit with his shock of red hair and crooked mouth had expelled a certain sense of panic from the first second the Stranger had laid eyes on him. This moment in time, now unearthed from the shifting sands of his memory, was no different.

From the recruit’s throat comes the breathlessly spilled words of the 23rd Psalm.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me lay down in green pastures…”

His neck stretched so far, the muscles coiled so tightly, that each vein is clearly visible through the skin. Which is exactly where the lead ball fired from a Mexican rifle strikes him, just below the chin, felling him with no remorse. The green recruit’s body hits the ground bringing with it another flash in the Stranger’s mind, one that brings him back to his place in his cell standing halfway from the bunk to the door.

Just a random visitation to one of the many horrors stored inside the crumbling vault of his mind, the Stranger reckoned. One of those buried away under so many nights of alcohol-fueled anesthesia that somehow burrowed to the surface time and again.

The Stranger shook off the memory as if it were rain on his sleeve and stepped toward the cell door to see if that also was some kind of figment of his weary mind. As he swung the door open, listening to the iron hinges creak, one other thing became very apparent to him and it made him freeze.

There was not a single sound coming from outside.

Even in a small town such as Sagebrush, there were horses and foot traffic, buckboards and wagons transversing the main thoroughfare with reasonable frequency. There were children laughing and raised voices of the drunkards stumbling out of one of the town’s saloons.

But not today.

Today there was only the stillness inside the Sheriff’s office. With every step across the wooden floor came a creak that seemed deafening by contrast. Reaching out, the Stranger opened the door and stepped outside, taking large droughts of hot, fresh Texas air into his body. And as he filled his lungs his eyes caught on the fact his ears hadn’t lied to him. Save for the very slight breeze, he was completely alone on the street outside the jail. Nary a horse, nor man, woman, child or dog were in sight or sound. Not even the shambling sonance of the one saloon in town lucky enough to have a piano drifted through the air. The loudest thing the Stranger could hear was his own breathing which became more rapid as the anxiety of silence closed around him.

Run, he thought. You’re out. Escape before anybody sees you.

Standing in the dirt behind the town jail was the wooden skeleton of the gallows he’d been sentenced to hang from on this very morning.

Run! His mind yelled at him.

“Hello!” his voice called out.

Stupid, his mind yelled again. You’ll regret that as you dangle from the rope.

“Hello!” he called out again, more urgently.

And as no answer came, he felt the knot of panic squeeze tighter in his chest. Finally, he began to walk down the thoroughfare, his steps feeling tentative given his lack of a weapon for protection.

Protection from what? His mind asked.

Deep inside there was a sense of what that answer may be but the Stranger shut it out of his mind. A figment caused by too much time in the stir. He stepped past the edge of the jail toward the livery when he saw them.

Feet.

Bare and still the dirty feet lay toes down in the dust, ending in a pair of brown-panted legs. Where those legs went were beyond the Stranger’s vision, obscured by the back of the building.

The Stranger ran toward them, his heart pounding, suspecting full well what he’d find. Two years wearing the uniform of light infantry had given him the opportunity to see many a pair of unmoving feet laying in the dirt, upon battlefields carved into the scarred earth. Hardly ever did any of those feet move again, more often than not, left to the maggots and vultures that would soon follow.

Even before turning the corner the buzzing filled his ears. Flies had descended upon what was left of the man, lighting upon the tacky surface of his blood-soaked back. What was left of his clothes had been shredded as if…

…attacked, thought the Stranger.

He turned and ran. Heading toward the Saloon everyone just called “The Gulch”. It was Sheriff Overton’s favorite watering hole and the most likely place to find the rotund drunkard. With each step the Stranger scratched into the dirt, it became apparent the Gulch was inexplicably silent.

The smell caught his nostrils before he even pushed past the saloon doors into the dank building. His first step allowing him to catch the gaze of a man draped across a nearby table—on his back, arms spread and dangling off the edges. Blood dripping from the mouth of the corpse, running down its chin, falling into a sticky puddle on the floor.

From one end to the other, the Gulch was strewn with bodies. Some obviously felled where they had stood. Others, given the scarlet trail left behind them, had been dragged to their final spot on the floor.

The Stranger turned away, squeezing his eyes shut as his mind flashed back to a Mexican afternoon. He had stumbled upon a similar massacre, unparalleled in its brutality until now. The scene in his memory populated by young faces—boys, girls…

Oh no. Immediately his thoughts rushed to the sound of a bell. One he’d heard every day he’d been in that jail, tolling once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

When he turned upon his heel toward the door, his eyes fell upon the body of Cherokee Sue sprawled, head down, across the wooden staircase. Her eyes glassy. Her throat laid open from ear to ear, the wound still glistening in the dust-filled rays of sunlight reaching in through the Gulch’s front door. With her body upended, her dress had fallen open, revealing, in death, the modesty she had withheld from the Stranger in life.

As fast as his feet could carry him, the Stranger ran toward the schoolhouse, along the way spotting the dead left behind by whatever had caused this. Heart pounding, he pushed himself though every fiber in his body told him to turn and run the other way—that what he would find would not be pleasant.

Turning the corner past the bell post, his feet caught upon something—a dog lying dead, its face covered in foam, legs splayed unnaturally in separate directions. The Stranger’s hands were skinned from the dirt but he didn’t wane. Back to his feet he sprang, ignoring the stitch in his knee from his awkward fall. With a trembling hand, he pushed open the schoolhouse door.

To find it empty.

Of course, he thought. It must have happened at night. Momentarily, a sense of relief washed over him for he had expected to find the young bodies of Sagebrush’s children torn and shredded, given to the same horrible end as Cherokee Sue and the rest of the dead back at the Gulch.

At night when all the children were tucked safely in their beds…

His throat dried to dust. Not a child’s cry or plaintive wail could be heard. And as the Stranger went from house to house, building to building, he found them—faces, bodies shredded, most rendered unrecognizable by any human standard. The horror that had visited under the cover of darkness had come with teeth bared. Its hunger not discriminating from young or old, helpless or innocent.

In the afternoon he found Overton, face down in the livery, sometime after the flies had. The Sheriff was sprawled naked across a girl who looked no older than a teenager. Without a second thought, the Stranger took the Sheriff’s gun, lifting it carefully from its holster while turning away from the slashes dug into Overton’s back.

It was the girl’s eyes that stared at him as he stood in the doorway and turned back one last time. The stunned look on her young face, searching for an answer that would never come.

The Stranger had been looking for a horse or any realistic way out of town and had found nothing. Though his mind refused to wrap itself around what he was seeing, it was apparent by the scarcity of slaughtered foal that whatever indeed had come in the night wasn’t particularly interested in anything equine. Whatever had come did not use bulk as the sole measuring stick for choosing its victims.

Perhaps all the horses were stolen, the Stranger thought, which led him to the more reasonable idea it had been men—bandits—who had done this. In his experience, there was no question men were certainly capable of such bloodshed and brutality.

But then why had I been saved? He wondered yet again. He had certainly not met all of the people of Sagebrush but all those he had, and plenty he hadn’t, had been among the victims. He searched for anybody. Any sign of life but located only corpses. As he stood in the alley between the general store and the town’s hotel, with only empty windows looking down upon him like vacant eyes, even Kentuck, the rail-thin deputy had been found, or at least most of him had.

Even though he had been beaten by the deputy, the Stranger sat and wept for Kentuck, a sheer chill clutching his spine once the finality had hit him.

And as the Stranger stumbled back to the street, he fell to his knees in the dirt, squeezing his eyes shut as his fists balled in the dust. His breath hitching, he could not make a sound, finally arching back his head and letting out a scream enshrouded in a torment beyond reason. He felt as if his jaw would rip from his face as his mouth stretched open further to let out his anguish for in the entire town of Sagebrush, he was the only one left alive.

Perhaps they left you so there’d be someone to take the blame, he thought.

Immediately his mind raced from one long-forgotten face to another. Enemies from the past, those causing him to live a life of running and hiding like an animal, traveling only under the cover of night. One of them had finally caught up with him, he was certain.

Which was even more reason to get out of Sagebrush as soon as possible.

Even more so than you being surrounded by nothing but dead folks? His mind asked.

The Stranger looked over his shoulder toward the west. The sun had hours ago reached its zenith in the sky and was headed toward the horizon. He had four to five hours of daylight left at best. Without a mount, covering the kind of distance away from here that would make him comfortable in that little time would be a problem. Having no horse meant limited supplies and with oceans of sand and scrub between here and everywhere else he began to think his prospects were looking very slim.

The air around him began to noticeably stink of death and it weighed heavy upon his mind, crushing his sanity.

“Better than staying here,” he said to himself, making the decision to leave Sagebrush as quickly as possible.

Frantically, he searched again for a horse and as he turned the corner past a house on the edge of town, he heard it. Tied to a pole was an aged grey and brown burro, its back sagging to a deep curvature. Upon the creature’s face sat the most fixed and blank stare he’d ever seen on an animal. A stare he remembered his father had a name for.

Dumb.

Careful were the steps he took toward the animal who didn’t even seem to notice his approach. Burros were slow but many a time ornery in the Stranger’s experience. As he came up to the beast and ran his hand along its neck, the burro startled and turned its lumbering head toward him slowly. It was at that point the Stranger realized the burro had not heard him approach.

“Great, you’re deaf.” He spoke and the burro didn’t react to his voice. Considering the condition of the scarred animal, the Stranger wasn’t sure if its disability was a product of age or years of abuse. He’d once seen a man take a red-hot poker to the ears of a mule that, after becoming deaf, didn’t startle too easily anymore.

The burro stared impassively at the ground as the Stranger untied him. At first the curmudgeonly animal didn’t want to move but after a few sharp tugs on its rope, it clomped off, following its new master away from its old home, one which it would never return to again.

By mid-afternoon the flies had descended on Sagebrush in thick, ungodly high-pitched buzzing black-winged clouds. Upon the ground and in the air the scavengers were approaching. As he exited the general store, carrying an armful of canned goods, he noticed three vultures on the ground standing in a circle, squawking loudly as if trying to decide where to feast first.

To the burro, the Stranger affixed an old saddlebag, its ends hanging low to the ground given that said bag had been designed for a stout horse and not an old, sagging creature like the one he’d been stuck with. On one side he loaded the satchels with jerky, coffee and as much food as he dared burden the animal with. On the other he packed as much ammo as he could find—two horns loaded with black powder, a small box of bullets and a can of chamber grease. Behind the counter he’d found a pair of brand new Colt Dragoons in their original holsters, the kind meant to be strapped around a horse’s neck. In the service the Dragoons had been called “Horse Pistols” for this reason. Given the size of his burro, the holster belt hung slack. It would have to do. Lastly, the Stranger strapped four canteens of water over the burro’s already overloaded back. He then placed a mostly new hat upon his head to protect him from the beating sun.

It was getting late and the itch was great to put miles between him and this town full of nothing but the dead. He pulled on the burro’s lead but the animal continued to stare at the ground.

“C’mon, damn you stupid thing. Let’s go!” He growled and in the stillness of the air his voice boomed. A chilling thought ran through the Stranger’s mind. If whatever had committed the atrocities he’d witnessed today was still out there, he’d do best to leave quietly.

He pulled on the rope but the stubborn burro wouldn’t move.

“Now!” The Stranger hissed and when the burro refused to budge, he balled his fist and struck the beast right between the eyes, drawing back his hand from the pain he felt after connecting with the thick bone of the burro’s skull.

No matter. The burro would not move. Angrily, the Stranger shook the beast to no avail, falling exasperated to his knees, catching his breath in angry sobs. Frustrated, he struck out at the dirt on the ground with his hand.

To the scorching summer sky his eyes went. It was not his intention to fight the animal to the precipice of nightfall. Letting out a long sigh, he got to his feet and unstrapped one of the saddlebags, reaching in to find a piece of jerky, which he held out under the nose of the obstinate beast.

The burro first licked, then took the entire piece of jerky into its mouth, chewing in loud wet bites that sounded like a butter churn.

“C’mon,” the Stranger said leading the burro down the thoroughfare of the dead town last known as Sagebrush.

As night began to fall, the Stranger became worried. He looked over his shoulder across the dry plain, back in the direction of the town he’d left only hours previous. It had long ago vanished in the haze of sun beating down upon the ground, swallowed up in the rippled heat. He pushed himself and the burro, whom he’d taken to calling “Blue” due to the unchanging glum look on its face, to go further at the cost of another piece of jerky. They continued racing the setting sun until reaching the slight crest of a shallow ravine—a river run dry, chased away by the brutal Texas summer. It was here in this dry shoal the Stranger decided to stop for the night.

He built a small campfire using scrubwood and shared a meal of more jerky with the burro. Briefly he thought of tying Blue up to prevent him from escaping but given the nature of the beast, and its sheer stupidity, escape seemed very unlikely. Instead, Blue stood just outside the rim of firelight, closed its ancient eyes and fell asleep on its feet.

As the fire dimmed and the Stranger laid back to rest he stared up at the stars—a pitch-black field illuminated with millions of glowing pinpricks in space. He was a free man, but again he was on the run. This time not only from the enemies of his past, but from something he couldn’t understand—a fear. One so gripping that his heart shook in his chest like thunder. And though every fiber in his body was worn to exhaustion, he could not bring himself to shut his eyes for he was truly afraid of what lay behind the closed doors of sleep.

Finally, his will to fight it any longer gave in to his body’s desperate need for rest. His slumber came quickly, pulling him downward into the full depths of unconsciousness.

The respite was brief though, as the Stranger shot bolt upright, eyes open. But this time it was not the hammerstrike of nightmare that had awoken him but something that even asleep, his ears had caught.

Slowly, he turned his head blindly to listen again. And that’s when he heard it.

The dried snap of desert brush under someone’s boot—a footstep coming toward him in the darkness.

*****

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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.

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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.

*****

If you enjoyed the Prologue to Shadow Falls: Badlands. Please visit one of my sponsor links!

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That Night by BLACK LAB

Badlands: Prologue – Part 1

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Thanks to BLACK LAB for the SFB theme song THAT NIGHT from their new album PASSION LEAVES A TRACE.

Badlands: Prologue – Part 2

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Badlands: Chapter One

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As has been the case since his arrest weeks ago, The Stranger is mistreated and abused by the town locals who view his hanging as the perfect cure for boredom in this little dusty town just north of the Rio Grande. As night falls, The Stranger's fight to stay awake is futile and this time he's visited by a different nightmare. Though the setting is similar, the inside of a burning church, the people are different. And this time he is confronted by an imposing figure who calls him by the name of "Brother Thomas" and mockingly implores him to "do something". The Stranger wakes in his cell in a cold sweat and that's when he realizes that someone has left his jail cell unlocked and the door open.

Badlands: Chapter Two

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This Night by BLACK LAB

Badlands: Chapter Three

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Badlands: Chapter Four

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Badlands: Chapter Five

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Badlands: Chapter Six

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Badlands: Chapter Seven

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And so we begin Part 2…

Badlands: Chapter Eight

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Nine

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Ten

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Eleven

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Twelve

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Badlands: Chapter Thirteen

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Fourteen

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Fifteen

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REDEMPTION by KEVIN REEVES & IAN BAIRD

Badlands: Chapter Sixteen

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Badlands: Chapter Seventeen

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Badlands: Chapter Eighteen

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Badlands: Chapter Nineteen

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty One

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty Two

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty Three

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty Four

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Badlands: Chapter Twenty Five

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