The Last Reich: The Killing Kind - Book 1: Ch. 1

1.

Clod and Hess moved through a biting sand storm and Fiend had his fingers in both of them. The sun was bearing down hard through the swirling sands and their twins shadows stretched out forever. The world was bathed in a reddish glow like they were walking into an inferno. Clod had been outfitted in a thin black overcoat, a black pillbox hat with a wide, sagging brim, black everything. Fiend had the idea that Clod should be Black Death moving across the sands and the impression was good. Clod’s face had become a mass of shadows and the rest of his skin wasn’t exposed. His black coat licked and fluttered against the heated sands and again and again, the wind roared like an invisible beast. All that black would have killed a man not propped up by magic the way Clod had been. A nature man’s brains would have boiled in that heat, wearing all that black, but Clod didn’t even sweat. Hess hadn’t been as fortunate or more fortunate, depending on how one considered the situation. Hess was washed in sweat and he’d taken his over shirt off and put it on his head to shield himself from the evil sun. He panted like a dog and wiped sweat from his eyes. Fiend had loosened his hold on Hess after he took Clod and Hess thought he might owe Clod a debt for warranting such attention. Fiend had held Hess tight enough to crush his bones, his figurative bones in any case. Fiend had made him bulletproof in a sense and Hess hadn’t missed having such a gift. He could feel it. Not the bullets, but the bulletproofing. There’s a reason why everything alive had soft parts. Things that could slow or stop bullets were also dry things. Fiend made his body into something solid. His body was all one raw nerve. Breeze hurt and walking was hell, but Fiend pushed him, made him keep going.

Fiend was doing it to Clod now, holding him tight and even still, Hess had seen moments when Clod was something more than the blank slate for Fiend’s will or the Black Death for Fiend’s enemies. Hess would see Clod fighting like hell and when Hess saw those moments, he would advice Clod to stop it. Fiend would always win and Fiend loved the struggle. Fiend was a cruel child pulling the wings off a fly or cutting the tail off a dog.

The two of them were approaching a town much like Appleton, but Appleton after an absolute plague had strike. There were dead bodies littering curved, wooden porches and the wide main road. Their necks and bellies were slashed open, but their wounds only bled sand. Their flesh was dry paper plastered around warped skulls. There was no smell. It was too hot for stink to last for long. The stink had evaporated away along with the people’s last breaths. There was a man hung up on a hook. His mouth was opened in a silent scream. His legs were gone and all the rest of him was stick thin and mummified. There was a boy in the middle of the road. His stomach was agape and his arms and legs were stretched out around him. His mouth had been partially ripped away, his jaw had been torn off, but again, there was no blood or smell. The pair had moved passed the boy without a second thought. Clod and Hess had come to this open air graveyard to stir up some dead men, the ones that had killed the rest of them. Fiend had set them to retain the services of vampires.

Fiend had pointed out the town and set Hess and Clod off to find it. Hess had found the exact building, a too-dry single-story tavern with windows painted with pitch. Slashed and faded sheets stained with old, old blood had been tacked up on the porch roof and they fluttered about in the strong winds, licking to the left and back to the right. The sheets spread out in the battering winds and Hess and Clod stepped through them. Batwing doors stood before a black as absolute as very deep, polluted waters. There were things shifting in the darkness, things that didn’t sleep and were always hungry. These things had grown excited at the sight of the pair, not realizing that neither of the men would be on the menu. Hess held back for a moment, staring unsure at the darkness. Clod threw the batwing doors open and Hess followed. Hess had found his nerve as the darkness spilled over him and stepped ahead of Clod.

The bar room was washed in shadows and mots of dusts. Old tables and chairs laid smashed apart across the floor, but some were intact and cleaned. Empty beer steins stood abandoned atop those tables. There was a sagging bar perched up on a sawhorse on one end and a pile of limestone bricks on the other. Behind the sagging bar, there was a smashed and splintered mirror smeared with brown, rusted streaks. People had died in here, but the bodies had been cleared away. On either side of the bar, there were doorways were the doors had been broken down or simply removed. There was a man sitting at the bar, throwing back a shot of blood. It might have been rich, ember whiskey, but Hess knew it was blood. It slithered tacky out of the glass and the man on the bar stool smiled around the glass rim. His lips were red as he turned and looked upon the two men. He had black eyes and white skin like porcelain. The man had no pores and no facial hair. He had thin black hair shaven on the sides and slicked smooth on the top. Around his neck, he had the boy’s jawbone tied to a piece of thin rawhide. It had been picked clean of meat and the teeth were gone from the U-shaped bone. He nodded tiredly as if he really did throw back some whiskey. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar top and the jawbone slid, cockeyed, on his bare white chest. 

Others came from the shadows, melting out from nowhere and all of them were smiling. All of them had paper white skin and black eyes like ink wells. There were ten in total, not counting the original man at the bar. Hess nodded at the newcomers as if they were all friends. The newcomers smiled back at him. Hess knew he had to give the impression of authority. He had Clod with him and they really only needed one of them. Hess pulled up a chair and sat across from the man sitting at the bar, pulling a cigarette and a match out from his pants pocket. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke across the space between him and the man on the bar stool. Clod remained standing, blank-faced and still.

“I’ve traveled a long way and I would ask for a drink, but I don’t think you have my poison.” Hess said, looking over to the man at the bar. The newcomers gave a round of laughter at his minor joke.

“Yes. I doubt that very much. You’ve come a long way. More the pity. You’ve come this far to die.” The newcomers laughed at this as well. The man had a delicate, deliberate voice, not feminine, but something like a fragile piece of machinery. Something that would break if forced or hurried.

“Now, I doubt that very much. Move on me if you like. You’ll be swatting your own out and my friend and I will be burdened with finding another clan.”

“Swatting out?” The man asked, a smile curling his lips.

“Oh, yeah. My friend is like the Grim Reaper, himself. He need only wave his hand and all y’all will die a second death, a permanent one. That would be a shame, in any case.”

“How so?”

“Because your kind and the man we represent could help one another nicely. The man we represent is looking for an army. You see what I’m aiming at.”

“Not exactly.” He gestured for him to continue.

“We’re here asking for your service and the man we represent, he could help you along as well. Definitely, there would be blood. Definitely, there would be slaughter. Possibly, the sun might be extinguished. Never be burned by the daylight again.”

“That sounds nice, but that isn’t what I’ve misunderstood. I misunderstood why you would think you could leave here alive. We don’t care about your master’s ambitions. We’ll kill you and then kill him for his presumption.” He snapped his fingers and the newcomers came around with their mouths yawning with fangs. The man at the bar laughed and Hess laughed as well. Clod stepped forward with his blank face.

One.

Clod was behind a black haired woman, his arm hooked around her neck. He put his hand on the side of her head and then he twisted her head off her shoulders.

Two.

Clod elbowed a large man in the face, driving his head back. He launched forward, leading with his foot and landing his heel in the center of another man’s chest. The man went down and Clod kept with him. The man’s chest caved in like a tin can. 

Three.

The large man that had caught the elbow now caught a foot into his knee. The kneecap shattered and the hinging joint bent in the other direction. As the large man fell, screaming in pain, Clod stepped forward and ripped his head off.

Four.

Clod gripped an arm that had thrown a jab and it came off almost instantly. Clod swung the arm across the face of a blonde woman. She corkscrewed down to the ground. Clod discarded the arm and bashed the one-armed jabber until his skull became concave.

Five.

The blonde woman got up and charged. Clod caught her by the neck and drove his free hand into her belly, just below her rib cage. He gripped the rib cage and pulled. Her inner works spilled out onto the bar room floor.

Six.

A skinny man threw two jabs and Clod dodged them. Clod drove his palm into the skinny man’s face. Once, twice, three times and then four. The skinny man had died the third time.

Seven.

Clod swept the legs out from a flabby woman and then he brought his heel down, smashing her skull.

Eight.

Clod ripped the throat out of a man with gray hair.

Nine.

Clod caved in the skull of a girl that might have been fourteen when she was turned.

Ten.

Clod picked up a blonde man by the throat and drove him through the bar top. He crashed to the ground, groaning.

“That’s enough.” Hess said and then he looked to the man at the bar who had somehow turned paler faced.

“I only need one of you. I think that fellow is well enough.” Hess said, pointing to the blonde man resting in the ruined bar top.

“You wouldn’t have fared so well, were we not in our dry season.” The man at the ruined bar said through a frown. He said it, but he didn’t sound like he exactly believed it. Hess gave the man a soft chuckle and a dry-lipped smile.

“And if ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts, I’d still be looking for blow-jobs. The situation is, you die or you come with us.” Hess said, stretching his legs out and putting his hands in his lap. A long silence rested among the dust mots and the shadows. The blonde woman, with her chest partially pulled out, whined softly and the flabby woman, with her skull crushed in, made sickly spasms, but neither of them could penetrate that long silence.

“ We are not hounds, not attack dogs. We are vampire. We are the darkness.” He said softly, mostly to himself. His eyes had gone dull and his face grew almost translucent.

“Clod. Rip his dick off and put it in his mouth.” Hess said. The man on the stool fell off his stool and clattered to the ruined bar top. He kicked and squirmed away, putting his hands up in defense.

“I will go. I shall come.” The man cried as Clod towered over him.

“Then, I think we have an understanding.” Hess said through a smile. Clod stopped, staring down at the snow white man with the child’s jaw on his chest.

“On to new business. We’re in a bar. What the hell happened to all the liquor?” Hess asked, giving the question serious importance. 

No Magic For Luke Peters: Ch. 2

Chapter Two: Blood on a Baseball Bat

Bobby Bland had a tumor in his brain. It was a tiny, pink knot pressing up against his brain stem. He didn’t know he had one, even though he suffered from terrible migraines. Bobby and Luke had one thing in common. Neither one of them spoke much to their old men. While Luke didn’t quite trust his father’s emotional stability, Bobby feared his father, although he’d never confess to such. Bobby trusted completely that his father was mentally and emotionally unstable and he often played with the lovely thought that his gray-haired, chain-smoking papa wasn’t going to be around forever. His father would die and Bobby would dance a merry jig on the old man’s grave. If asked, Bobby would never admit that he wanted to kill his father, but anyone who could have watched Bobby and his father would have thought it a foregone conclusion.

Bobby’s old man gave him a closed fisted blow to the ribs for slamming the bathroom door and the first thing Bobby did at school was pay that violence forward. It wouldn’t be difficult to make the connection that Bobby wished the squealing, busted nosed freshman under his fist was actually his father. Bobby probably wouldn’t have made it to college. Not because he was stupid, to the contrary, he was actually quite intelligent. Bobby wouldn’t have made it to college, partially because of the tumor growing in his skull and partially because boys like Bobby became men like Bobby’s father. If Bobby got past the tumor growing in his head, he’d probably beat  his father bloody one night. He’d be arrested and arrested again. Men like Bobby’s father had a strange duality. They felt powerless, so they charged about like wrecking balls, showing their power.

Bobby’s father struck Bobby because he couldn’t strike his boss and Bobby hit those weaker than him because he couldn’t punch his father. Although he wouldn’t admit it to himself or anyone else that he wanted to kill his father, he would get his wish. While Luke Peter’s sleep became less fitful and his heart rate slowed, the dark man visited Bobby Bland in his room. The dark man didn’t allow himself to be seen, however. The dark man was a whisper in Bobby’s ear while he sat in a desk chair in his small, cluttered room holding frozen peas to the side of his jaw. His father had backhanded Bobby for showing up an hour late for curfew. Bobby had wanted to hit him back. He had gone so far as to close his fist tight, cracking his knuckles in the process. He didn’t, though. His father stepped away to go collapse into his easy chair and Bobby fished the peas out of the freezer.

As smart as Bobby was, he couldn’t think his way around a lesson he had learned early on. Everything leads back to pain. Talking back led back to pain. Running away led back to pain. Allowing bruises to show, so that busy-body teachers go around asking questions, that definitely led back to pain. His father was mostly good about giving him body blows, bruises he could hide with shirts. Striking him in the face had been a mistake on the old man’s part because the frozen peas could only do so much. Still, Bobby nursed his tender jaw. Little beads of water licked along the length of his cheek where tiny, pale blonde patches of stumble had begun to creep their way to the surface. He hadn’t realized that he had completely tuned out the music from his iPod. Had his father walked in at that moment, he might have accused Bobby of being stoned. Bobby’s eyes were glazed over and a cold sweat worked its way though his short, dark blonde hair and down his temples.

Bobby. Bobby. Bobby. The dark man whispered. While Bobby’s eyes were glazed over, his mind was working like an over-clocked engine. Bobby saw such things. He saw a dark, swaying forest with large purple leafs laced with thin, red veins and dipping with clouded rain water. There were things in the darkness with large red eyes and yawning mouths full of needle-sharp fangs. Their eyes were glaring up to Bobby, narrowed and cold.

These are my children. They are the eaters, the killers, the takers. They are the darkness burning into your world, Bobby. They wish to claim you, Bobby. Come and see. Come and see. Come and see. The dark man whispered. The frozen peas spilled from Bobby’s fingers and bounced off his desktop, settling on the carpeted floor. His fingers tingled and shook as his eyes flickered into life like little blue light bulbs. He had been holding his breath while the dark man whispered to him. He hadn’t known exactly why, but he thought that the dark man might have a poisonous quality to him like breathing in Mustard gas. The wind came back to him in coughing bursts. Bobby pounded his chest while his eyes stole to a scuffed, metal baseball bat leaning up against the corner amongst a clutter of dirty laundry.

Come and see, Bobby. The dark man whispered and Bobby knew that the baseball bat was his key to come and see. There were flashes of blood bursting across Bobby’s mind as he stepped across his bedroom. The bat had a smooth rubber grip and it felt nature in Bobby’s hand. It had a solid heft to it and Bobby rested it against his shoulder, moving out from his bedroom and down the long, narrow hallway leading to the living room lit by flickering television. Bobby moved slowly  and as silent as a whisper. 

Come and see, Bobby. Bobby’s old man was leaning back in his easy chair with a six pack of beer between his legs. There had been a two-can deduction from the pack and there was another pack of empties resting at the easy chair’s side. Bobby’s father lifted one of the beers to his lips, took a long swallow and then replaced the can between his legs.

Come and see, Bobby. Bobby was behind him, the television’s glow splaying up against his face and glinting off the metal of the baseball bat. His father was watching a re-broadcast of an old boxing match. Bobby hadn’t recognized either fighter. One of the men had strikes of gray hair running through his black and a thin layer of fat on across his chest. The other man was younger, a blond man in his twenties. Bobby’s father picked up his beer and brought it to his lips, drew on it and brought it back between his legs. Bobby drew a hollow breath and his father heard it, craning his head around to see his pale faced, broad shouldered son with a metal baseball bat resting against his shoulder like he might have been waiting to go to baseball practice. Bobby’s father must have been that person viewing their father/son relationship because he just set his face in a wary grimace and put his beer. Bobby saw in his father’s eyes that his father had expected this day to come, eventually.

Come and see, Bobby. Bobby and his father communicated more with that one bitter than they had ever in all of Bobby’s life. Why would he raise a hand to someone who might come for him in the future? When you thought like Bobby’s father and when you thought the way Bobby would ultimately think, it made perfect sense. Bobby and his father were like the scorpion in that parable about the frog by the river. Bobby’s father struck Bobby because that was his nature, he was that kind of man. Never mind if his nature sent him drowning along with the son he stung so often. The baseball bat descended and Bobby’s father died silently.

Later on, with his father’s hulking body wrapped in an old, hand-stitched quilt and then stuffed into a hall closet, Bobby sat in his father’s easy chair, sipping on one of his father’s beers  while the television flickered a blue-gray glow across his face. The beer had been tepid and biting on his tongue, but Bobby hadn’t minded. It slowed his mind down enough for him to understand everything that was happening. It was important that he understood, because he would be alone for the most part. The dark man did not want his hands to be seen in these doings. His eyes were dull and glossy as the dark man showed him such things. The dark man whispered in Bobby’s ear. The dark man told him about Luke, who Bobby had a vague foreknowledge of, and he told Bobby about the bothersome old man who he would have to kill first. The dark man had promised him he would see and Bobby had.

No Magic For Luke Peters: Ch. 1

Chapter One: The Dark Man, The Old Man And A Boot

Luke Peter slept fitfully in his bed because a dark man stood atop a telephone pole while a cold wind blew. He had a corncob pipe clamped between his teeth and blue smoke made a halo around his head. The dark man’s yellow eyes narrowed while he stood atop his tall perch, his mind working away at the boy’s heart. A dog bayed anxiously on the street below and the dark man hissed between his teeth. Luke’s long limbs tangled in his bed sheets and comforter while his heart throbbed into an irregular beat. The dark man meant to kill the boy. He meant to stop Luke’s heart and sometime in the morning or possibly in the afternoon, he’d be found, bathed in sweat and ice cold. The medical examiner would scratch ‘Congestive Heart Failure’ even though Luke was a sixteen year old in the prime of life. He’d be buried in the suit he had once worn to his mother’s funeral while his father fought back tears. The dark man nearly would have done it if it wasn’t for a worn, rawhide laced, cracked leather boot. The old boot sailed, end over end, and nearly struck the dark man in the thigh. That had been enough to cause the dark man to recalculate his murder attempt. He was an unknown element. He was the shadow lurking at the fringes of his prey’s mind. The fact that someone knew of him and knew enough to try and stop him from conducting his errands was distressing. The dark man dispelled like smoke from a snuffed out candle. Luke’s heart rate slowed in his chest and his sleep became less fitful.

Having your heart clenched and compressed by a psychic hand isn’t good for your health, even if it doesn’t kill you. Luke’s body understood this fact even if Luke, himself, did not. The golden sunlight spilling in past his drawn curtains was like daggers driven into his eyes. He slapped his hands up to his face to block out the light and the sudden movement caused his stomach to protest. He could taste acrid bile seeping at the back of his throat. He swallowed it back and found himself swallowing it again and again. His eyes were watering from the pain of the light, but also because his sinuses were flared up, making him want to breathe out his mouth. This confluence of events was leading to one of two logical conclusions: either he vomited up last night’s Pizza Hut on the carpet in his bedroom or he navigated his way to the bathroom and upchucked there. Rolling on his side and letting loose onto his carpet seemed reasonable, but Luke figured that he wouldn’t think so after the deed was done.

He picked his body up like a very old man might get out of bed and he found that his legs had become mutinous overnight. They tingled and ached and he found that they were ignoring half the commands he gave them. The action of gingerly lifting himself up from his mattress had turned his stomach into a roiling sea and it was crashing up his throat. He couldn’t waste time on getting his legs under some semblance of control. He made his way, on his hands and knees, to the small, dingy bathroom at the end of the hall. Luke and his father hadn’t lived in a mansion by any means, but Luke might have sworn that he had traversed the entire length of Buckingham Palace on his way to the bathroom.

Inside the bathroom, Luke purged in big, heaping gasps and it had actually made him feel better. His brow was sweaty, pasting his brown hair  to his forehead and his eyes had a watery film.

“No more. No more.” Luke whispered into the small bathroom. There was a small, high-hung window filtering in cool blue sunlight. Luke frowned and cooled his feverish face against the cool porcelain toilet and there, he glimpsed up toward the sink and spied his mother’s ceramic figurines. Neither him nor his father had the heart to box up any of her things. They remained untouched, collecting dust and grime. There was the smiling, little farm boy with a frayed straw hat cocked back behind his ears and a water-stain and soap scum halo blossoming beneath him. There was a one-legged gnome with a sagging belly, a pointed, red hat and an open wheel barrel where his mother had put her wedding and engagement rings when she washed her hands. She had been buried with those rings on her fingers. He closed his eyes, but the memories had slipped through, regardless. It was torture thinking about it, but the sight of his mother in her coffin reefed with a bouquet of red and white roses was like an sore on the inside of his mouth. He couldn’t stop tonguing at it. Suddenly, Luke didn’t want to be in the bathroom.

He forced his legs to obey him, forced them to take his weight and then wobbled out of the bathroom. His legs managed to buck his will while on the stairs, but he was able to seat himself before his knee could belt on their own. Downstairs in the kitchen, the tap was running and there was the clatter of dishes. Luke could smell dark-brewed coffee mixed with the smell of a fried egg with minced onions. His stomach churned faintly at the smell, but he had no want for the bathroom. He just clapped his hand against his stomach and massaged it softly.

“Easy. Easy.” He whispered to it, sounding a little like a horse trainer without meaning to.

At this point, in a normal father/son relationship, Luke would ask his father to stay home from school and his father would give Luke a suspicious stare, put a hand to Luke’s forehead and then consent to him staying home. In a normal father/son relationship, there might even be a promise from the father to check on Luke. Luke and his father didn’t have that kind of relationship. It wasn’t that Luke disliked father, he actually loved his father, he just didn’t trust him. What Luke didn’t realized and probably might have if he ever made it into a college psychology course, is that his situation with his father was so textbook that first year Psychology students might refer to Luke by name. In that psychology class, Luke would learn about a term called Deflection.

Of course, he wasn’t angry with his father. That wouldn’t make sense. His father had no way of stopping the cancer cells from spreading through his mother’s body. His father was mortal. True, seeing a parent’s fallibility can be a scary thing for a child, but Luke understood that his father wasn’t Superman. He had caught his father sobbing at the kitchen table while gripping a ceramic bird that Luke’s mother had painted. Luke had cried, silently in his room and it hadn’t occurred to him that his father might cry, as well. Luke understood that it’d be unfair to be angry with his father for being human, but seeing his father cry with his hands around his mother’s blue and white ceramic sparrow had knocked something loose in Luke. He loved his father, but he was waiting for his father to fail. He thought of his father as being a cement dam with giant fissures running through the foundation. Luke was sure of it. His father could break at any moment. He would not put pressure on such a crumbling structure and if that meant that he and his father had become strangers in the same house, then so be it.

Instead of speaking with his father, he kept silent in the darkened stairwell lined with four year old photographs of his mother and waited for his father to leave for work. The rattling tap cut off and there were the sounds of movement towards the back door, leading out toward the driveway. Luke heard the creak of his father’s heavy boots on the wooden back steps. When he heard his father’s old Chevy putter into life, he began rubbing feeling into his legs. Luke hardly ever skipped school and never abused the system that allowed him to do it. When his homeroom teacher listed him under absent, an automated phone call was sent to his house around noon. The answering machine picked it up, but Luke’s father had never really grasped how the answering machine worked. Messages normally remained on the machine for days, to be erased at Luke’s leisure. His father typically got home a few hours after Luke, so there was no reason for Luke’s father to ever be suspicious of his quiet son being up in his bedroom.

Once his legs had awoken, he started for his bedroom but there was a repeated clanging, someone bashing the side of a metal trashcan. Clang. Chink. Clang. Chink. There was the heavy ring of the trashcan and then a smaller sound of glass bottles resettling at the bottom. Someone was right outside the house, just a little ways away from the cracked blacktop driveway and the creaking wooden steps. Luke’s first thought was the neighbor boy, Jimmy. Jimmy, a three-foot tall, snot-nosed  sadist with dreams of pro-boarding, had declared war on Luke after Luke drove over his skateboard during a driving lesson. Jimmy’s war mainly consisted the occasional egging, leaving graffiti on the side of their house and generally being disruptive. Luke wouldn’t have put it pass the punk to be playing a drum solo on their trashcans. He liked the idea of scaring the little brat, but his stomach hadn’t settled enough for him to charge out, screaming his head off like an ax-wielding psychopath. The next logical solution was turning the garden hose on him. It wasn’t exactly cold enough for him to get pneumonia, but a guy could hope.

Outside, he turned the rusted spigot and bent the green garden hose, cutting the flow of water so as to release the current at the perfect moment. He crept around the house, dragging the hose behind him. He’d left from the front door, snaked around the side, through the crabby, dehydrated lawn and picked up the hose. Clang. Chink. Clang. Chink. The sound rang through the cool, morning air. The trashcans were on the other side of the wooden fence with rotten knotholes dotted through the ancient Gofer wood. Clang. Chink. Clang. Chink. Luke stole across the length of the driveway, getting to the wooden fence as fast as his tender stomach would allow. His plan was to sling the garden hose over the unpainted, picket fence, letting loose the cold water laced with its reddish rust and drenching Jimmy while Luke laughed. That had been the plan and if it was Jimmy, the neighborhood terrorist, it would have worked. Instead, the hose was suddenly snatched from Luke’s hands and Luke was snatched up by the collar. The water from the garden hose sprayed out onto the cracked blacktop of the driveway. A shaggy German Shepherd went to the flow and lapped at the current while Luke stared eye to eye with an old man with old, gray eyes the dusty color of abandoned iron. His face was lined with hundreds of thousands of little grooves and pockmarks. In the old man’s hand, there was a polished wooden cane stained a deep crimson color.

 

“You’ll have to wake up a lot earlier than that to catch me with my pants around my ankles, Pecker-wood. Still, it’s a fair try for such a green child.” He said and his voice was cold and dark. It was gravelly like a machine fallen into ill-repair.

Luke gripped the old man and attempted to free himself from his surprisingly strong grasp. The old man gave a wary sneer and then released Luke, shoving him away in the process. Luke’s foot hooked behind the other and he fell backward onto his behind. The jostling piqued his stomach’s ire, but his pride was the only thing severely injured. The old man stepped forward, looking down at Luke and the dog had moved to the old man’s side, water dripping from his muzzle.

“Up now, boy. Ain’t much time before they come, trying to kill you again.”

New Novel - No Magic For Luke Peters

Hey, All.

I'm officially announcing my newest novel, No Magic for Luke Peters. This is a Young Adult/ Urban Fantasy novel about Luke Peters, a teenager tasked to beat back the darkness. Unfortunate for him, there's NO MAGIC FOR LUKE PETERS.

It's still early for this novel, but I'm really excited about the story and wanted to let people know. It's got violence and sarcasm and werewolves and people hitting other people with frying pans. It's going to be awesome. I'm going to be posting a couple chapters for this months content. Hopefully, this kick ass story will make up for last  month where hardly anything was posted. Nothing worth reading I suppose. I'm also going to post a couple chapters of The Last Reich: The Killing Kind. Lastly, I'm hating the way the header image looks, so look forward to new look there.

Bye.

The Warner House

A stiff wind blew down the Warner House. The house had been an old, shaggy things that swayed with the movements of the day, so no one was all that surpirised that it had fell. The parents had warned their little ones away from playing in the Warner House and mostly the children listened. There was a legend surrounding the house. Murders, the old standby.

The legend was that Mia Warner would lure children into her home and snake their guts from their bellies to make strings for her guitar and she'd sknned the children to make leather for her shoes. Mia was the crazy, old cannibal witch on the top of the hill and not many children dared to venture into her crumbling home. Like most legends, this had a nuggest of truth mixed in with all the lies and fables. There was an old woman named Mia Warner who did live in the Warner house. The Warner house was once a plush estate sprawling for miles and miles, employing hundreds of people to tend the land and serve the Warner family. Tragedy struck the family and continued to strike the family. The father, Louis Warner, had been a wild gambler and died indebted to many people. Much of the land was sold to pay off the father's debt. That hadn't been the end of it. Louis had willed the remainder of the land to his two sons; Eli and Thomas. Neither were very intelligent, but Eli's stupidity was mixed with a temper. Eli shot his brother, dead and hid the body in a deep well. The rotting, festering body ended up poisoning the well sometime afterward, ironically killing Eli. Before Eli died, he had a daughter, Mia. Mia was saved from the poisoning by the fact that Eli had never acknowledged Mia as his biological daughter. Mia's mother was a whore. Although there were many receipts and many witnesses, Eli  passionately denied fathering the child of a whore or ever going to a whore in the first place. Mia had his blue-gray eyes and his curvy black hair. She even had Eli's tempor. The one thing that helped Eli's case was that Mia wasn't stupid like her father.

Mia had ambition. Her and her mother had stopped to watch a man play his guitar and it was then that she decided that she'd own her own guitar and play like the man had. Most children would have made such a mission for themselves and forgot about it before the day was done. Mia hadn't and she had her hands on her very own guitar, paid for with her very own money, before the year was done. She taught herself how to play it and she played it well. People came from far distances to watch Mia play. They cheered and cooed and best of all, they paid.   

2012-23-03: My Thoughts On Today

I'm writing this at 9:08am on Friday. Pale, yellow sunlight is washing through my translucent curtains. The morning is a quiet one. All the cars have gone; no puttering to be heard. All the people are away; no chatter to be heard. There's a mild wind flickering the shade and the fan is whirring dully in the corner. I'm sweating slightly, although it's only 63 degrees. My body is acclaimated to the winter still. It's been a weird winter, cold but never too cold. It rained more than it snowed and I prefer the rain, myself. My father once commented that he liked the snow because it purified the world. I think of the snow on the sides of the road, scummy and black. It doesn't seem all that pure to me. I like the rain for the same reason my father likes the snow. I like smell after a good, hard rain. I like the drama of rain when it's good and hard. Thunder. Thunder. Lightening cracking across the sky as the rain puttered and sprayed.

When I take the family dog out, I wonder how he sees the world beyond our front door. Victor, our dog, is very much an indoor dog and we have suspicions that he's afraid of the dark. He definitely hates the rain and is miserable in the snow. I wonder if he makes the connection that they are all the same world or is he surprised, thinking that our front door is somehow magical. Were a human to open the door, snow. Open it again, rain. Again, bright sunlight. Yet again, bleak darkness. You can see him tense up and slow when he realizes that he'd been led into the dark world. I wonder if he wished we would finally let him check out a dead squirrel world, a bouncing tennis ball world, a too-slow cat world. I would if I could, Vic-vic.

I've purchased Zoo City by Lauren Beukes listening to Horns By Joe Hill. All my thought on today.

Matthew H. Jones
March 23, 2012 Lowell, Ma

Brief Brief on a New Novel: The Last Reich - The Killing Kind

There's no news in regards to the original Last Reich novel, but I've begun querying agents about it.
As for the next book, I've put down 1500 words of the very first chapter. I feel as though I need to follow through with this series. I want to know exactly how it ends and I won't until I write. I don't have control over the outcome.

I think story telling is a lot like braiding a multicolored squid's tenticles. As you work from the body to the tips of the tenticles, the squid's tenticles are thrashing about. You have a vague idea that it should look a braid when you're through, but you'll have no idea about the color pattern or the quality. I'm going to finish the chapter later on today. Clod and Hess going into a dead town to find vampires.