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Like a great thriller? Then you’ll love this free excerpt from our brand new Thriller of the Week: From John Locke’s Mystery Thriller MAYBE (A Donovan Creed Novel) – 33 out 43 Rave Reviews and Just 99 Cents on Kindle!

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Maybe (a Donovan Creed Novel)

by John Locke

4.1 stars – 43 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:

When an angry, unemployed chemist unleashes a bio-terrorist attack against women and children, the president of the United States asks Donovan Creed to get involved. It’s just one more thing on Creed’s plate.

New York Times Best Selling Author John Locke was the 8th author in history to sell more than one million books on Amazon/Kindle. His books sold more than 1,720,000 copies in 2011.

Reader Comments
6-stars. Amazing read! I can’t believe I didn’t buy this on the day it came out (I used to check every week till November but then stopped). These are my favorite go-to books (I re-read books all the time). I hope there are >20 more in the series.
– Vidur Singhal, Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars
The master has done it again! I can hardly believe this guy how he changes a story and things happen you would never think of! he makes you laugh out loud sometimes! His wit and insight make you want more, more, more! After nine or ten books I’ve read John Locke has became my favorite author without a doubt! Check out all his books when you get a chance, you wont be regret it! Good going John! what your going to do next God only knows!
– Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

*  *  *

INTRODUCTION

Miles Gundy.

 

PEOPLE ARE SCREAMING.

Sunday, last week of May, Derby City Fair, Louisville, Kentucky. Food and people everywhere. Rock bands. Tents. Roaring rides, rumbling roller coasters.

…People are screaming.

Not from rock bands or rides.

People are screaming!

Women’s hands. Babies’ faces and children’s hands are suddenly…melting.

The Derby City Fair is under attack.

But from whom?

And how can the attack be isolated to babies’ faces and women and children’s hands?

Within minutes, hundreds of cell phones call 911. Hundreds more record the victims and post the videos on YouTube.

The system designed to work swiftly does so. 911 operators contact police, police call the FBI, the Feds call Homeland Security, and by the time Miles “Mayhem” Gundy pulls his late model Honda Accord onto 1-65 South, Homeland Security has Lou Kelly on the phone. Homeland patches the president into the call, along with several members of the Pentagon, who have assembled in the War Room at the White House.

“Where’s Darwin?” the president asks.

“We couldn’t find him,” a man says.

“Who’s Lou Kelly?”

“Associate Director, Sensory Resources.”

“Mr. Kelly,” the president says, “What’s happened to Darwin?”

“I have no idea, sir,” Lou says. “But I stand ready to help.”

“Good man. Mr. Kelly, you’re on the phone with Sherm Phillips, Secretary of Defense. Sherm, tell Mr. Kelly what you told me. We need to know what we’re up against.”

Sherm Phillips does, and Lou tells the president of the United States to hold while he calls Donovan Creed.

1.

Donovan Creed.

 

My daughter, Kimberly Creed, and I are visiting Callie Carpenter at her Las Vegas penthouse. I just told Callie that Kimberly’s on the team.

Callie looks amused.

“That seems funny to you?”

She looks at Kimberly. “Mildly so.”

I run a group of assassins for a branch of Homeland Security called Sensory Resources. Darwin’s my boss. Callie’s my top operative. We also do freelance hits for the mob.

Callie says, “When you called from the airport you said Lou Kelly killed Darwin.”

“That’s Lou’s story.”

“Seems unlikely,” Callie says.

“I agree. But why would he lie?”

“Well, he did try to kill you recently.”

“True,” I say.

Kimberly’s eyes grow wide. “I don’t understand. Why would Uncle Lou try to kill you or your boss?”

Lou isn’t related to us, but Kimberly’s term of endearment shows how close he’s become to our family. I don’t mind her calling him uncle, though like Callie said, he tried to kill me last year. That incident set our relationship back somewhat, but Lou’s a valuable asset, best in the world at what he does, and he’s gotten me out of some tight spots over the years. What I’m saying, when he’s not trying to kill me, I trust him with my life.

Sounds crazy, right? But that’s the type of business I’m in.

I give Kimberly the short answer. “Last year we conducted a sting operation. Large sums of money were involved, and Lou saw a chance to make billions if he could kill me. He couldn’t, but I gave him a second chance. To prove his loyalty, Uncle Lou killed Doc Howard, who he claims was my boss, Darwin. He said Darwin was trying to kill me.”

Callie says, “What part will Kimberly play on the team?”

“Believe it or not, she’s an accomplished assassin.”

Callie looks dubious.

“Remember Jimmy T?” I say.

“The one who guarded Kimberly last year?”

I nod. “He quit the business and became a professor at Viceroy College. His real name was Jonah Toth. Kimberly put him down in the men’s room.”

Callie arches an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”

Most people would ask why Kimberly killed Toth. Not Callie. She could care less why. That’s what makes her the world’s best assassin, aside from me.

“Including Toth, she’s got nine notches on her belt,” I say.

“You must be so proud,” Callie says, with more than a little sarcasm.

“From now on, we’ll call her Maybe. Maybe Taylor.”

“I like it,” Callie says.

Maybe says, “And I should call you Creed, like everyone else.”

“Good point. No sense in broadcasting the fact you’re my daughter.”

From the kitchen Gwen Peters yells, “You’re ignoring me again!”

Gwen is Callie’s current love interest. I dated her first, but Callie stole her from me. Kimberly—I mean, Maybe—has met Callie before, but this is her first exposure to Gwen.

“Every time that man enters our house you completely ignore me,” Gwen pouts.

Callie smiles and says, “That man.”

I smile and say, “Our house.”

Callie says, “That man is worse than our house.”

I agree.

“Hard to imagine how quickly I’ve sunk so far,” I say. “What’s she doing in there, anyway?”

“Burning cupcakes.”

“Seriously?”

“She’s the world’s worst cook.”

“Maybe I should tell her you said that.”

“Maybe I should tell her about Rachel.”

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I check the screen.

“It’s Lou,” I say.

Callie turns to Maybe and says, “Let’s go salvage the cupcakes.”

As they walk from den to kitchen, I say, “What’s up, Lou?”

“Donovan, I’ve got Homeland Security on the phone, several members of the Pentagon, and the president.”

“Hello, Mr. President,” I say.

A voice says, “This is Sherm Phillips, Secretary of Defense. The President’s monitoring the call, so I’ll cut to the chase. We’ve got word of a bio-terrorist attack at the Derby City Fair in Louisville, Kentucky.”

“How can I help?”

“Lou Kelly says you understand terrorists better than anyone in the country.”

“I won’t argue the point.”

“He says you understand how they think. We’re blind on this one, and need to know what’s happened.”

I get a whiff of burnt cupcakes from the kitchen, put my hand over the phone, and yell, “Are you frosting them?”

“We are,” Maybe says. “You want one?”

“Chocolate, if you have it,” I say.

Back on the phone I ask Sherm, “What do you know for certain about the attack?”

“No bombs detonated, but people’s hands and faces have been affected.”

“Affected how?”

“The flesh is falling off their bones.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“People’s hands, babies’ faces—appear to be melting.”

“How many victims?”

“Somewhere around twenty.”

My mind starts racing.

Babies?”

“That’s right.”

“Their entire face or just the lips and cheeks?”

There’s a pause. “Lips and cheeks. How’d you know?”

“You said people’s hands. Is it mostly women and children?”

“Yes.”

“When you say their flesh is falling off the bone. Which side of their hands is worse, the palms or the back of the hands?”

“Does it matter?”

“What do you think?”

“Hold on.”

Sherm clicks back on and says, “It’s worse on the palms.”

“Hand sanitizer,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“Ask if they have plastic hand sanitizing stations at the fair.”

“Why?”

“My first guess? This is an urban terrorist, acting alone. He’s putting a chemical agent in the public hand sanitizers. Some type of acid. Mom pushes the plunger, foam comes out, she rubs her palms together, then the top of her hands, then pumps some more and rubs it on her baby’s hands and cheeks. She can’t leave the toddlers out, so she pumps again and wipes their hands. For some reason the acid effect is delayed. But after a time, it starts burning holes in their hands and cheeks.”

I hear Sherm in the background. He’s on another line, asking if they have hand sanitizing stations at the fair.

Callie, Maybe, and Gwen enter the room. Gwen places a tray of cupcakes on the coffee table. Each lady has her own unique style of attack, but when Gwen licks her frosting the temperature in the room goes up five degrees.

A new voice comes on the line.

“Mr. Creed.”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

Callie arches her eyebrows.

“You asked if they had plastic hand sanitizing stations at the fair. Why plastic?”

“Plastic resists acid erosion.”

There’s another pause. Then the president says, “There are two stations on the midway, two in the exhibit buildings. All four have plastic reservoirs. I think you’ve done us a great service.”

“Thank you sir.”

He says, “It terrifies me to know there are people like you in the world.”

“Rest easy, Mr. President. I’m on your team.”

“That’s what frightens me.”

I say, “You understand this is just the beginning?”

“What do you mean?”

“You need to get the word out to all airports, public buildings, private businesses, anyone who uses plastic dispensers in bathrooms or work spaces. Especially Louisville, and the surrounding cities and towns.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not remotely.”

“You said it’s one man, acting alone.”

“That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

“We need to catch him.”

“Good luck with that.”

He pauses. “Could you catch such a man?”

“If he continues attacking? Yes. But it’ll take time.”

“How much time?”

“If he stays busy? Days or weeks.”

“Then catch him.”

“I’ll need the full cooperation and resources of government and law enforcement.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll need the highest possible clearance.”

“You’re joking.”

“Total access, Mr. President. Nothing less.”

He says, “I wouldn’t give a man like you access to a dog turd.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

The line goes dead.

Maybe says, “You were talking to the president just now?”

“Yes.”

“Of the United States?”

Gwen makes a face and says, “Bullshit. He was just trying to impress me. He’ll say or do anything to get in my pants.”

She looks at me and says, “It won’t work.”

Her tongue flicks at the frosting again and again, and I see she’s making little sculptures on her cupcake. Callie catches me staring.

“Down boy,” she says.

 

2.

LOU CALLS ME back.

“Good call on the hand sanitizer,” he says.

“Any deaths yet?”

“No. But they’re going to be permanently disfigured.”

“That bothers me.”

“Me too. Wait. Which part?”

“The acid should start burning mom’s hands immediately. But there’s a delayed reaction of what, ten, maybe fifteen minutes? Possibly longer?”

“You’re trying to guess how long it would take him to put acid in all four sanitizing stations?”

“I am. Ask the Louisville PD how far apart the stations are, from first to fourth.”

“Will do.”

“And ask the geeks how he managed to delay the effect.”

Lou’s geek squad possesses the finest computer minds and researchers on the planet. It’s one of the reasons I keep him on my personal payroll.

“I’ll run it by them,” he says. “Anything else?”

“I want to know every victim’s name. I want to see their before and after photos.”

“Even the babies?”

“Especially the babies.”

“This will help you find him, somehow?”

“No. But it’ll help me want to. And Lou?”

“Yeah?”

“When the scientists isolate the chemical agent, we need to learn who manufactures it, who distributes it, and how our urban terrorist got hold of it.”

“What type of person are we looking for?”

“A chemist.”

“Corporate?”

“Yes. Or a high school chemistry teacher, college professor, or grad student with a chemistry major.”

“That’s a pretty wide range.”

“First cut.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone with a chemistry background has survived the first cut. As Felix continues terrorizing people, we’ll narrow the possibilities accordingly.”

“Felix?”

“We need to call him something besides the urban terrorist.”

I hang up and tell Callie and Maybe about Felix and what he’s done.

“Sounds like a kid’s book,” Maybe says. “Felix at the Fair?”

Callie says, “I thought we were going to war against Darwin.”

“We are. If he’s alive.”

“Then what’s all this about finding Felix?”

“We’re a long way from finding Felix. But it’ll keep Lou busy while I try to figure out if Darwin’s still alive.

 

3.

Sam Case.

 

THE GOVERNMENT FACILITY at Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Virginia, includes an underground bunker called Area B, which is the size of a small city. Area B was built to withstand repeated strikes from nuclear weapons. More than 600,000 square feet in size, Area B contains a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreational facilities, self-contained power plants, and is equipped to broadcast TV and radio signals.

Area B is where Sam Case lives and works for the government, developing a synthetic cure for the Spanish Flu, a virus so deadly it decimated one-third of the earth’s population in 1918. The thing about the Spanish Flu, there’s no cure. First time around, it nearly wiped out the planet.

Next time it’ll be worse.

And there will be a next time.

Like many government employees, Sam’s in no hurry to solve the problem he’s been hired to solve. But Sam’s motivation isn’t about steady employment. It’s about self-preservation. Sam’s life is in jeopardy, and Mount Weather is the only place on earth his enemies can’t get to him.

What you want to know about Sam Case, he’s one of the world’s most brilliant people. More than a year ago he had a thriving business and a hot wife, Rachel. His business involved moving billions of dollars electronically from bank to bank, all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, effectively hiding it for the world’s most ruthless dictators and criminals. The modest fees he charged earned him millions of dollars, and life was good.

Enter Donovan Creed.

Creed also parked a sum of money with Sam, but unlike the others, he saw an opportunity to cash in. He broke into Sam’s house, lived secretly in his attic, and eventually breached Sam’s security and stole billions of dollars from Sam’s clients.

He also stole Sam’s wife, Rachel, who’s certifiably insane.

She’s also one of only two people in the world known to possess a gene that’s resistant to the Spanish Flu.

Rachel also lives in the underground bunker in Area B.

But not by choice.

Government scientists are holding her captive, harvesting her eggs, and hoping to create a generation of children who will inherit the gene. Until Sam or some other scientist can create a synthetic response to the Spanish Flu, Rachel must remain there.

Sam considers Donovan Creed his arch enemy. Such is his hatred for Creed, he’d give ten years of his life to make Creed suffer a day.

Sam measures his life in terms of victories he’s won over Creed.

His first was separating Creed and Rachel. He orchestrated Rachel’s capture, and manipulated scientists into letting him live and work in Area B so he could be near her. Sam’s sperm is being used to create the new children from Rachel’s eggs. Having sole access to Rachel, and being the man responsible for creating children with her, Sam hoped, over time, to win back his wife’s affection.

Not that he wants the bitch. He only wants to sleep with her. And only because it would be another way to punish Creed.

Pretty sad when the victory you hope to claim over your arch enemy involves sleeping with your own wife.

But Rachel has no interest in sleeping with Sam, so that part—that one small part—is another victory for Creed.

Worse, Creed doesn’t seem overly broken up over the fact his girlfriend is stuck in Area B for what could be years.

Sam’s second victory involves Creed’s daughter, Kimberly.

Sam’s been fucking her.

What makes it particularly sweet, he’s manipulating her into loving him.

And Creed, the deadliest assassin on earth, hasn’t a clue.

The man who made this revenge possible is another of Creed’s enemies, Doc Howard. For all practical purposes, Kimberly is Sam’s car, and Doc Howard gave him the keys to her ignition.

Doc Howard expects to be compensated.

For starters, he demanded that Sam locate the Bin Laden death photos. These, like many of the world’s most sensitive documents, are stored in the underground vault at Area B.

Sam has no idea what Doc Howard plans to do with the photos, but it’s best to stay on Doc’s good side. He’s a very dangerous and powerful man in his own right.

Sam used his hacking skills to locate and copy the digital files.

He’s looking at them now, with mild interest. When he’s finished looking, he encrypts the photos, and types a code to bypass computer security for twelve seconds while he forwards them to Doc Howard’s email account.

Doc gets some stupid photos, Sam gets Kimberly Creed.

He presses a button on his cell phone.

Kimberly answers, using her alias.

“Maybe Taylor.”

 

4.

Maybe Taylor (Kimberly Creed).

 

“HI MAYBE,” SAM says. “How’s tricks?”

“I can’t talk now,” she whispers. “I’m with my father.”

“In Vegas?”

She works her way out of the den, onto Callie’s balcony. “Okay, I can talk now. Yeah, I’m in Vegas.”

“I miss you,” Sam says.

Maybe smiles. “That’s ridiculous. It’s only been a day.”

“Seems like forever.”

She likes being the one with power in the relationship. It lets her be cool, lets her say things like, “Don’t fall in love, Sam.”

Which forces him to say, “Sorry. Too late.”

“Are you still planning to divorce your wife,” she says, “or was that something you said to get in my pants?”

“We’re definitely divorcing. The papers are being drawn up this week. She’s already agreed to sign them.”

“Don’t do it hoping to marry me,” she says.

“Why not?”

“We’re never going to be a couple.”

He changes the subject. “I’ve found a guy to do your boob job.”

She laughs. “I hope it’s a doctor and not just some guy.”

“Don’t worry. Your boobs will soon be in the hands of a highly-skilled surgeon.”

“Odd way to put it,” she says.

“It seems insane to pay another man to put his hands on your body. He should pay you for the privilege.”

“Hmm. Maybe I should charge you next time!”

“If that’s what you want, I’ll gladly pay.”

“Assuming there’s a next time,” she says, then smiles, noting his silence. Maybe loves being able to manipulate him for a change. For the past year he’s been a demanding, judgmental father figure. Now, after one night in the sack, she’s turned him into a lovesick puppy. Sam spent a year scrambling his voice, manipulating her over the telephone, and all that time he thought he was in charge. Now he’s met her, had sex, and his power has crashed and burned. He’s fallen head over heels for her, and she loves it.

He says, “There has to be a next time.”

Maybe can hardly contain her joy. In truth, she expected he’d probably never call after getting what he wanted. That’s happened more than once with boys in the past, so she assumed a grown man would be even more aloof.

Especially a married man like Sam.

But as it turns out, she has the power to make him happy or sad. It’s an amazing feeling, one she’s never experienced.

Sam says, “I have to have you again.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s the big deal?”

He sighs.

She loves it when he sighs. He’s frustrated, working hard to win her affection.

“You’re the best I ever had,” he says.

“The best what?”

“Lover.”

She smiles and says, “That can’t be true.”

“I’d take a lie detector test on it.”

“You’re older, wealthy, and married. This is all about you getting a little strange on the side. You probably fucked me, thinking of your wife.”

“That’s not true, Kimberly.”

“Wrong name, Sam.”

“Sorry.”

“You expect me to believe I’m the best you ever had?”

“Absolutely.”

“Have you forgotten my sexual issues? You had to inject my vagina with Botox to get it open. I felt nothing. It can’t have been a pleasant experience for you.”

“It’s not just the act, it’s the whole experience. It’s being with you, holding you, touching you. Helping you achieve sexual comfort. I know it sounds absurd, but I’ve never felt this way in my life. If you don’t like me calling it love, I’ll call it passion, though it’s love, passion, and a hundred other things combined. I’m not trying to push you, honey. But I have to have you. And yes, you’re the best I ever had.”

“The best what?”

“I already told you.”

“Say it again. Be vulgar.”

“The best fuck.”

“Say it again, with feeling.”

You’re the best fuck I ever had!

“Thanks, Sam.”

She feels something warm and exciting stirring within her…

And likes it.

“When can I see you again?” he says.

“I’m not sure. I’m working for him.”

“Who, your father?”

“Yes.”

“Have you told him about me?”

“He still thinks you’re a post-Rapture pet salesman.”

“Have you told him my real name?”

“He asked, but I refused. We’re still calling you Chuck.”

“If he demands to know my name, what will you say?”

“I’ll tell him to fuck off.”

“He’s your boss now,” Sam says.

“I freelance. I work for him, I work for you. If someone else comes along, who knows?”

“Prove it.”

“Prove what?”

“That you work for me.”

“How?”

“Kill him.”

“Who, my father?”

“Yes.”

She laughs. “I’d kill you before raising my voice at him.”

“I know. I was just kidding. But I think I’ve made my point. You obviously don’t work for me.”

“I’m not sure you understand what free-lance means, Sam. It means I get to accept a contract if I want it.”

“But if you work for me…”

“As I said, I work for both of you. But he comes first.”

Maybe smiles, knowing he’s pouting. Sam’s got it bad for her. It’d be so easy to take advantage of the situation.

She says, “Give me another way to prove my loyalty.”

“Kill someone for me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t care. As long as it’s someone your father knows.”

“He knows Doc Howard.”

Maybe notes the complete absence of sound on the other end of the line.

Finally, Sam says, “Did you say Doc Howard?”

“Yes.”

“You think you can kill him?”

“He’s already dead.”

What?”

“One of my father’s people killed him. I just heard about it. Apparently he was far more than a skilled surgeon. He was one of the most powerful people in government. My father called him Darwin. He was my father’s boss.”

More silence.

And still more.

Finally Sam says, “Kill someone else your father knows. I want details.”

Maybe removes the phone from her ear and stares at it a moment while frowning. Is he serious? She puts the phone back to her ear.

“You seem to have forgotten the financial component,” she says.

“It’s all about the money to you.”

“That’s right.”

“Pleasing me means nothing to you?”

“Don’t pout, Sam. It’s a turn off.”

He sighs again. Then says, “Fine. Pick out a victim. Someone your father knows. Tell me who it is, and the connection, and I’ll formulate a price.”

Creed, Callie, and Gwen are sitting in the den, talking. Maybe watches them through the sliding glass door, and allows her gaze to settle on Callie. Creed certainly knows Callie. But Callie’s as deadly as Creed. And anyway, she likes Callie. She’s beautiful, smart, and cool, everything Maybe wants to be. Callie’s not a candidate for killing. There’s still too much to learn from her.

Gwen, on the other hand…

She looks at Creed, looking at Gwen.

Maybe’s not jealous of Gwen, doesn’t mind Creed looking at women that way. She wants her father to be happy, and bedding sexy women seems to make him quite happy.

If he’s happy, she’s happy.

She’s also not jealous that Gwen’s prettier and sexier than she is, and has great hair and a better body.

What she doesn’t like about Gwen is her disrespect.

Callie and Creed deserve to be respected. They’re elite killers. Gwen’s a twenty-year-old widow and former stripper. She’s got no right to disrespect Callie or Creed.

And yet she disrespected both of them.

Earlier, in the kitchen, Gwen made a nasty remark about how Creed tricked her into having sex with him. Callie’s eyes narrowed, and Maybe could tell it was a sore subject, though Gwen hardly seemed to notice or care.

Gwen cheated on Callie with Creed.

On the phone, Sam says, “You still there?”

“Yeah. Wait a sec.”

Maybe watches Gwen working it for them, licking the frosting off her fingers and lips like a porn star might do.

She’s center stage, full of herself.

Thinks she’s hot shit.

It’s disgusting.

Maybe didn’t notice it before, but Gwen’s wearing a particularly revealing outfit. Creed noticed. He’s noticing it now.

You know who’s a better match for Callie? she thinks to herself.

Creed!

Callie’s prettier than Gwen, and tougher, and she and Creed are in the same business. They work together, respect each other. Callie’s sexy, but doesn’t throw it all over the place like Gwen. With Gwen out of the way, Creed and Callie might find happiness, despite Callie’s apparent preference for women.

Maybe imagines holding a gun on Gwen, forcing her to her hands and knees.

Bark like a dog! she’ll say, and Gwen will bark.

Louder, bitch! and Gwen will howl.

Kiss my feet! she’ll say, and sexy, hot-shit Gwen will kiss Maybe’s feet.

“I’ve got someone in mind,” Maybe says.

“Who?”

“Gwen Peters.”

“Never heard of her.”

Maybe stares at her phone again, in disbelief.

“Why would you know her?”

“I wouldn’t. Who is she?”

“My father’s girlfriend.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. I’m just surprised to hear he has a girlfriend.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Forget I said it. Are they currently dating?”

“My father had sex with her a couple of times.”

“When?”

“What do you care?”

“Humor me. I’m trying to come up with a price.”

“I don’t know the first time. Second time was a few days ago. She’s Callie’s girlfriend.”

Maybe notes a distinct pause on the other end of the line.

Then Sam says, “Who’s Callie?”

“She works on our team.”

“Callie’s an assassin?”

“Yup.”

“Your father fucked Callie’s girlfriend?”

“Yup.”

“I bet that caused problems.”

“I suppose.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know much about it. And anyway, what do you care?”

“How old is Gwen?”

“Twenty.”

“Just like you.”

“So?”

“Is she pretty?”

“I suppose.”

“Are you jealous of Gwen?”

“Of course not!”

“You’re okay with it? Her having sex with your father?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Oh, wait. I see. You think I want to fuck daddy. That’s ridiculous to the point you’re about to piss me off. That whole thing about how you made me call you Daddy last year? I told you before, it’s creepy as hell. And disgusting. You’re lucky I ever let you touch me, and I probably won’t, ever again.”

“Sorry. You’re right, of course. Still, you’d like to see Gwen suffer, wouldn’t you?”

Maybe can tell Sam’s trying to get in her head. She knows how to deal with him.

“Tell you what. I’ll pick someone else.”

No!

Maybe smiles.

Sam says, “I’ll pay you a hundred grand to terminate Gwen. But I want details.”

“She’s close to Callie and my father. You’ll have to provide the weapon. Something foolproof. If Callie finds out, I’m toast.”

Sam goes quiet a minute. Then says, “I’ve got something in mind. When can we meet?”

“You’ll come to Vegas?”

“I can be there tomorrow night.”

“Let me know when you get here.”

Continued….

Click on the title below to download the entire book and keep reading

Maybe (a Donovan Creed Novel)

by John Locke

Like a great thriller? Then you’ll love our brand new Thriller of the Week: From John Locke’s Mystery Thriller MAYBE (A Donovan Creed Novel) – 33 out 43 Rave Reviews and Just 99 Cents on Kindle!

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Maybe (a Donovan Creed Novel)

by John Locke
4.1 stars - 43 reviews
Supports Us with Commissions Earned
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here's the set-up:
When an angry, unemployed chemist unleashes a bio-terrorist attack against women and children, the president of the United States asks Donovan Creed to get involved. It's just one more thing on Creed's plate.
One Reviewer Notes:
This is another great read by John. In fact I'm going to say this is the best one yet. John uses all the characters from his other books. If you have not read his other books, explains who the character are. This book is fast moving and you will not be able to put down. Thank You John for another great read, and keep up the great work.
G. Nusbaum aka LotsaLocke, Amazon Reviewer
About the Author
New York Times best selling author John Locke is the international best-selling author of eleven books in three different genres. He is the 8th author in history to have sold one million eBooks on Kindle, and the first self-published author in history to have done so. Locke has had as many as four books in the top ten at the same time, including #1 and #2. His Donovan Creed thriller series has sold more than 1,200,000 downloads since January, 2011. New York Times best selling author John Locke is the international best-selling author of eleven books in three different genres. He is the 8th author in history to have sold one million eBooks on Kindle, and the first self-published author in history to have done so. Locke has had as many as four books in the top ten at the same time, including #1 and #2. His Donovan Creed thriller series has sold more than 1,200,000 downloads since January, 2011.
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Escape to Clare Harbor…a page turning series filled with strong heroes and heroines, unbreakable family ties, life-long friendships, second chances in life and love, new beginnings, and fresh starts even in the midst of a deadly storm that turns out to be far worse than they all first believed....
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Welcome to Caption, Wisconsin. Home of Neka Zook, blogger and unsuspecting dog-sitter. When the beloved daughter of a local mechanic goes missing, the father seeks out Neka Zook, a local retiree with an odd little blog. Why Neka? Because a dream told him she could help. Can a woman who claims to...
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'Til death do us part...When a mysterious stranger convinces Meadow Jenkins to escape her volatile marriage, she is determined to leave everything behind and build a better life for herself. Meadow fakes her own death to flee from the abuse of her husband in a soul-searching journey across the...
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Ravyn: Til Death Do Us Part
By: TL Fisher
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From the USA Today bestselling author of The Southern Pasta Shop Mysteries comes a new series that proves blood can be thicker than water...As a young single parent, Mackenzie Elizabeth Taylor has struggled to provide for her teenage daughter. She finally catches a break when she inherits half of...
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All Jen wanted was a tattoo apprenticeship.The only artist willing to take her on, Lilith Sharpe, owns Graphomancy, a tattoo parlor in the worst neighborhood of Conflict, Oregon. And there are drawbacks. A contract signed in blood (what?) states Jen will work for free (come again?). On the...
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A woman is found dead in a local businessman’s holiday let. Detectives uncover some shady dealings. But did he kill her?The charm of a West of Ireland holiday home is somewhat tarnished when a woman’s body is found in the property. There are few clues as to her identity. However, in her hand is...
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Willie Dumfries is the real deal, a Big, Bad Wolf who will stop at nothing to punish Sheriff Rufus Parteger. On a romantic night with her Army Special Forces boyfriend, Sam Hogan, Gabby unexpectedly finds the Parteger family car abandoned in a parking lot. The sheriff’s teenage daughter is later...
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“I now pronounce you husband and…”New York City, 1923The most talked-about wedding is quickly approaching, and PI Jax Diamond is on top of the world. The tuxedos are freshly pressed and hanging in their closets. His good friend is busy decorating the nightclub for a glorious reception, and the...
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DEA Agent Kurt Rawlings has made a lot of enemies in his successful career, sending hundreds of criminals to prison. But now he's the one in captivity, snatched in El Paso by assassins but taken and smuggled into Mexico by a cartel that wants him alive—for now. Hoping to survive and reunite with...
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Based on an actual military program. Men Who Stare At Goats was based on a real program, Trojan Warrior, which the author was part of. This book takes that to the next level. The Russians sink the submarine USS Thresher in 1963 using their classified psychic project, but something goes awry and all...
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Like a great thriller? Then you’ll love our brand new Thriller of the Week: From John Locke’s Mystery Thriller MAYBE (A Donovan Creed Novel) – 33 out 43 Rave Reviews and Just 99 Cents on Kindle!

Like a little romance? Or a lot? Then we think you’ll love this free excerpt from our Kindle Nation Daily Romance of the Week, Jackie Barbosa’s THE LESSON PLAN (LORDS OF LANCASHIRE) – 4.5 stars and just $1.96 on Kindle!

Over the weekend we announced that Jackie Barbosa’s THE LESSON PLAN (LORDS OF LANCASHIRE) was our new Romance of the Week and the sponsor of thousands of great bargains in the Romance category: over 200 free titles, over 600 quality 99-centers, and thousands more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!

Now we’re back to offer our weekly free Romance excerpt, and if you aren’t among those who have downloaded this one already, you’re in for a treat!

4.5 stars – 6 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:
Sometimes, love is the hardest lesson of all…

Despite her imminent debut, Miss Winifred Langston has no interest in trying on expensive ball gowns, learning intricate dance steps, or perfecting the one piece she can play on the pianoforte. Freddie would rather don a pair of breeches and go target shooting, fishing, or horseback riding—astride—than be anywhere near a ballroom or high tea. Rather than waste the last few days of her freedom on such pursuits, she invites her two closest friends to join her in one final caper.

When Conrad Pearce learns of Freddie’s plans, he decides it’s past time to teach his younger brother’s partner-in-crime a well-deserved lesson. But when he intercepts her, disguised as a highwayman, to demonstrate how dangerous and ill-advised her stunts are, he can’t resist the sensual beauty hidden beneath the maddening tomboy’s exterior. What began as one sort of lesson becomes quite another, as Conrad embarks on a comprehensive erotic tutorial of his surprisingly enthusiastic and adept student.

Now, he only has to convince the irrepressible Freddie to trade her breeches and madcap ways for the gowns and domesticity she despises.

 

Reader Comments

I loved this book. This was my first taste of Jackie Barbosa and I loved it. This book led me to quite a few more reads by this author and I was not disappointed, far from it. Freddie is a precocious tom-boy who likes her independence and Con is the older gentleman who wants to take it away. Into the story comes a sexy highwayman who doesn’t disguise himself very well, and a steamy night in an abandoned shack. This book puts out, but leaves you wanting more. In this case that’s a good thing.

D. Castro, Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars

A young heroine who is daring, irrepressible and beautiful. A British lord who is staid and responsible. They have secretly been eyeing each other for years. And now these perfect opposites are about to mate and set off fireworks. Perfect pacing for a novella, fun naughty sexual encounters…what more could one want to pass an hour or two? Highly recommended.

Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

Chapter One

Lancashire, September 1794

The Honorable Miss Winifred Langston had achieved, through a combination of blind luck and careful contrivance, the prodigious age of twenty-one without ever having suffered the indignity of a London Season. Her luck came in the form of a doting, distractible father who seemed not to notice that his only daughter had long since reached an age past which gallivanting about the countryside dressed as a boy could be considered an excusable, childish prank. The contrivance came in convincing her brothers that, should she have her debut, it would be their duty to chaperon her to endless Society events at which they would be every bit as much “on the market” as she. As every one of them still possessed a good many wild oats yet to be sown, they were more than happy to help persuade her father that Freddie’s debut could surely wait until next Season.

And the next. And the next.

But now, neither providence nor machination could forestall the inevitable. In a mere two weeks’ time, the Langstons would complete their prescribed year of mourning for that doting, distractible father, and the new viscount, Freddie’s brother Nash, had come to the stark realization that if he did not marry off his little sister, he would be stuck with her for the rest of his born days.

There was nothing to be done for it, of course. Nash had always been the most imperious of her three brothers, no doubt the result of being the heir, and Freddie knew he would not yield now that his decision was made. That did not mean, however, that she had any intention of being happy about it.

Dressed as usual in her twin brother’s outgrown breeches, shirt, and waistcoat, Freddie sat cross-legged beside the river that separated the Langston estate from the neighboring, much larger property belonging to the Earl of Ormondy, dangling her fishing line in the icy water as she bemoaned her predicament.

“I shall have to wear gowns all the time and dance and take tea. And be ladylike.” The last word came out on a groan.

Thomas Pearce, who happened to be not only Ormondy’s spare but Freddie’s friend since both were in leading strings, sat on her left. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “If it would help, I’d marry you, Fred old girl. We could just carry on like always, then.”

Freddie’s twin and perpetual partner-in-crime, Walter, emitted a peal of laughter from her right. “Are you mad, Tommy? You’re not even three-and-twenty. You can’t get married yet. Puts too much pressure on the rest of us chaps. Besides, you and Freddie as man and wife…?” He shuddered indelicately. “I’d rather contemplate the vicar and Miss Stanley engaging in intimacies than that.”

Thomas’s cheeks turned a hot shade of red, though whether at the thought of the elderly vicar and the stern headmistress of the girls’ school in a torrid embrace or of himself and Freddie as a married couple, she couldn’t be sure. Either one was rather alarming to contemplate.

“Well,” he said staunchly, “if that’s what it takes to keep your brother from forcing Freddie to marry some withered-up husk, I’m willing to make the sacrifice. Least you could do is support me.”

So, marrying her would be a sacrifice for him, would it? That was certainly flattering. Although strictly speaking, she felt much the same. If she were to imagine marrying a Pearce, it would most certainly not be Thomas.

No, it was Conrad Pearce, seven years Thomas’s senior and heir to their father’s earldom, who moved Freddie’s otherwise romantically disinclined heart, not to mention other considerably more unmentionable parts of her anatomy. Other young ladies might have waxed eloquent upon any number of his attributes. handsomeness—exceptional; his height—prodigious; the breadth of his shoulders—impressive; or the remarkable color of his thick-lashed eyes—silver and just as opaque as the real thing. But, though Freddie appreciated these qualities as much as any other female, these attributes were not the primary source of his appeal.

Quite simply, Conrad fascinated her by virtue of being everything she wasn’t—levelheaded, self-contained, urbane, reserved—and that air of perfect, impenetrable composure seemed both a careful façade and a deliberate challenge. Unsettle me, it dared her. Muss my never-out-of-place hair, put my impeccably knotted cravat askew, overset me with passion and recklessness. She found it impossible to believe he was as imperturbable, as detached, as he appeared. Beneath that cool, polished exterior, she believed there lurked a kindred soul, and she ached to set him free from his prison of decorous self-restraint.

Unfortunately, despite years of trying, she had absolutely no hard evidence to support her suspicion. Conrad was about as likely to part with his good sense and marry her as he was to fly to the moon and back. He knew her far too well for that.

In point of fact, everyone in Winmarleigh knew Winifred Langston was not marriage material, which was undoubtedly the reason Nash wanted to remove her to London. There he could foist her off upon unsuspecting gentlemen who might be kept from knowing, until too late, that the object of their affections could shoot the cherry off a cheroot at thirty paces whilst merrily puffing on one herself.

But certainly not if Freddie could prevent it.

She returned her attention to Thomas. “That’s quite all right,” she assured him, giving his arm a sympathetic pat. “No-one needs to make any sacrifices on my behalf. Nash can make me go to London, but he can’t make me marry anyone, and he certainly can’t make anyone want to marry me.”

Far from appearing relieved, however, Thomas looked even more morose. “If the men in London have eyes, you’ll have suitors by the dozen. Once you go, you won’t be back. You’ll see.”

Freddie stared at him. Was he suggesting she was…pretty? Because, truly, nothing could be more ludicrous. Not that she was ugly, of course; she didn’t think that. But she was boyish, sturdy, solid. Certainly nothing so frilly or feminine as pretty.

But now she couldn’t help seeing Thomas through slightly different eyes. Did he see something about her that she herself did not? Did he perhaps actually want to marry her? That was a considerably more unthinkable possibility than that he would consider doing so a sacrifice.

“Oh, don’t be maudlin,” Walter interjected. “She’ll be back come the end of the Season, right as rain, and we’ll all just pick up where we left off.”

Ah, that was more like it. Leave it to her sunny, never-malcontent brother to keep things in perspective. Of course, he would think that nothing would change, because as far as Walter was concerned, the world and everyone in it existed entirely to suit him, because, quite simply, most of the time, they did. He’d gone away to Eton and then Oxford and returned to find everyone and everything at Barrowcreek Park utterly unchanged, including himself. No doubt, he expected the same outcome from Freddie’s impending excursion to London.

But what if, against all odds, London did change her? What if, inconceivable as it sounded, she discovered she actually liked wearing gowns and dancing and taking tea? What if she wanted to marry and behave like a lady?

Most of all, what if this was her last chance to be the outrageous and irrepressible Freddie Langston? What if, a tiny, traitorous voice whispered, this was her last opportunity to get Conrad to notice her—really notice her—before she lost him for good?

She pulled her line abruptly from the water and got to her feet. “Well, if we’re going to pick up where we left off when I return, we ought to be doing something more interesting with these last few weeks than fishing.”

Walter gave her a sly glance. “What did you have in mind?”

Freddie grinned back at him. “A plan only a brother could love…”

Thomas was twitchy all throughout dinner. Oblivious as always, neither the earl nor countess seemed to notice their younger son’s disturbance, but Conrad found it impossible not to notice.

Thomas had dropped his fork. Twice. He spilt wine on his cravat and choked on a bite of pheasant. Most of all, he looked miserable, his eye sunken, his color ashen. And as always, it fell to Conrad to sort out whatever scrape his brother had got—or was about to get—himself into. No one else would do it, least of all Thomas himself.

So, after the earl excused himself from the men’s after-dinner port to sneak off to visit the mistress he kept in a tidy cottage in the village he thought no one knew of, least of all his wife and sons, Conrad seized the opportunity to ferret out the cause of his brother’s distress. “So, what are Walter and Winifred up to now?”

“Freddie,” Thomas correct reflexively, but not before a guilty expression crossed his face. “You know she hates to be called Winifred.”

“So they are up to something, then.”

But really, when were they not? The residents of Winmarleigh referred to the Langston twins not as Walter and Winifred, but as Salt and Pepper, for they seemed to have taken it upon themselves to provide all the spice to village life. Thomas, alas, was usually relegated to the role of butter, there to smooth things over after they’d gone badly wrong.

“I didn’t say that,” Thomas ground out irritably.

“You didn’t have to. So, what is it this time? Dressing up in sheets to haunt the girls’ school? Putting frogs in the baptismal font? Releasing a plague of locusts?” He was only half-kidding about the latter two.

Although if he were honest, Conrad would be forced to admit that Winifred Langston didn’t have to release either frogs or locusts to plague him. All she had to do was saunter by in a close-fitting pair of breeches, her heavy raven tresses escaping from beneath the cap she jammed on her head in a completely useless effort to camouflage her gender. As if any male with operational vision could mistake the owner of that slender waist and gloriously rounded arse for a boy. He certainly hadn’t been able to since the summer he’d returned from Cambridge to discover that the tomboyish urchin who’d played with his younger brother was no longer a leggy, boisterous child, but a leggy, boisterous young woman with a figure that would have been right at home in Miss May’s Pleasure Parlor.

Conrad shifted uncomfortably. If he was going to gather wool, he would prefer not to have it binding him in anatomically delicate locations.

His brother only proceeded to look more vexed. “This isn’t funny at all, Con.” He let out a slow, anguished sigh. “He’s taking her away. To London.”

Conrad raised an eyebrow. “Not much of a prank, that. I’d have thought Walter more cunning.”

“Not Walter, Nash—er, the viscount. He insists it’s time for Freddie to have her debut and…you know, get married.”

“About time,” Conrad muttered, ignoring the corkscrew of pain burrowing into his chest. It was only surprise that Nash was finally taking the girl in hand. “The sooner she’s married off, the sooner Winmarleigh will be safe from her antics.” Albeit considerably less entertaining.

Thomas’s mouth hardened into a frown. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

Conrad stared at his brother with a growing sense of disorientation. “Wait. You’re not saying you are…sweet on her?” Thomas looked away, but not before Conrad read the truth. “Bloody hell…you are.”

“Damn it, Con, you wouldn’t understand. She’s just…she’s Freddie, blast it all, and I don’t want to lose her.”

So Thomas wasn’t in love with her? Well, that made the gnawing discomfort of his own inexplicable attraction to the chit seem less lecherous, if only barely. What would his brother—not to mention her brothers—think if he knew how many times Conrad had stripped her bare in his mind and proceeded to have his lascivious way with her?

“What makes you think you will lose her? It’s only a Season. Plenty of ladies don’t find husbands in their first Seasons.” Or second or third. Especially not those who preferred to wear breeches, ride astride, bait their own hooks, and shoot targets from horseback. Likely, it was only Conrad who had a carnal fascination with that sort of female.

Thomas rolled his eyes. “You must be blind if you can’t see she’ll be the toast of London. I may not be sweet on her, as you put it, but I know a beautiful woman when I see one. Just because we grew up together does not mean I can’t see her clearly. Apparently, I’m the only one around here who can.”

This was hardly the time for Conrad to admit that his eyesight was perfectly functional when it came to Miss Langston.

“We all have to grow up some day, you know. Even you and Miss Langston. Although, I suppose, hoping that Walter Langston will join the two of you in achieving adulthood would be too much to hope for.”

“You’re making light. The three of us have been friends for our entire lives, but now that we’re grown up, one of us will be forced to move away, simply because she happens to be female. I hardly call that just or fair.”

Fair or not, it was the way of the world. What did Thomas think Conrad could do about it?

“Marry her yourself, then.”

No sooner had the words passed Conrad’s lips than he wished them back. God, the only thing that would be worse than living in the same town with Freddie Langston while not being able to touch her would be living in the same household with her. Just the thought of his brother in bed with her sent an icy shard of rage through his gut.

“I suggested that. She turned me down flat. Doesn’t think any of the London gents will want her, but I know better.”

“Maybe she’ll turn them all down flat, too.”

“I’m sure that’s what she thinks she’ll do. But you know Freddie. She’s too passionate by half, and she doesn’t do anything by mere doubles, or even triples. When she gets to London, she’ll throw herself into the balls and routs the way she throws herself into everything, and then she’ll fall headlong in love.” Thomas sighed. “And then she won’t be back.”

The icy shard that had penetrated Conrad’s gut when he thought of his brother with Freddie twisted sharply as he envisioned the scene Thomas painted so vividly for him. Because Thomas was undoubtedly right. That was exactly how it would be when Freddie Langston arrived in London. She would take it by storm, and it would never be the same again.

“So, she is going to let Nash take her to London without a fuss, then?”

Thomas chuckled. “Oh, hardly. In fact, I think she rather hopes to do something so outrageous, the news will make it all the way to London and Nash won’t be able to take her at all.”

And that was how, a few seconds later, Conrad discovered that the Honorable Miss Winifred Langston intended to visit Miss May’s Pleasure Palace just two nights hence. The reason in order to learn “what all the fuss is about.”

Conrad had a mind to show her. In the interest of not being called out for pistols at dawn by Nash Langston, however, he went upstairs and showed his hand instead.

Chapter Two

“You want me to kidnap your sister?” Conrad sputtered. He thumped his chest twice with his fist in an effort to coax the sherry he’d made the mistake of sipping at precisely the wrong moment down the proper pipe. He didn’t wish to expire before he ascertained whether Nash Langston still retained full possession of his wits or had instead been sent round the proverbial bend by the pressures of becoming the head of his notoriously wild family.

The aforementioned gentleman leaned forward eagerly in his chair and nodded, giving Conrad even greater reason to doubt his friend’s sanity. “Just so. She needs an object lesson in the dangers of her antics, and a good kidnapping by a highwayman is just the thing to do the trick.”

“But…why not simply forbid her from going to Miss May’s or, indeed, from going anywhere with Walter and Thomas until you leave for London?”

The young viscount rolled his eyes heavenward. “If you think forbidding my sister from doing anything is an effective means to prevent her from doing it, you don’t know her nearly as well as I would expect after almost twenty years of acquaintance. Obedience has never been Freddie’s forte.”

Whether obedience would be Freddie’s forte or not was somewhat difficult to say, since to Conrad’s knowledge, she had rarely in her life been ordered to do or not do anything. He’d often thought what she needed more than anything else was a solid spanking and a clear injunction to behave herself. Her father and brothers had been too indulgent by half, and Freddie, more than anyone else, was paying the price.

Notwithstanding, he didn’t think it wise to disagree with his friend’s assessment of the young lady’s character, particularly in light of the fact that he’d fancied himself delivering that spanking—and a bit more—one too many times for comfort. “Point taken, but don’t you think this…remedy…is rather extreme?”

“Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures. And you must admit, Freddie is never anything but extreme.”

Indeed she was, Conrad thought with a grim smile. Extremely lush. Extremely vibrant. Extremely beddable. Although Conrad doubted that was what her brother had in mind when he used the word.

“Surely you can find someone else to play the part of the highwayman,” he suggested hopefully. “One of the servants or tenants, perhaps?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Even if one of them could carry off the masquerade without shooting himself in the foot or falling off his horse, she would browbeat him to the truth inside of five minutes. They’re all more terrified of her than they are of me.” The young viscount shook his head ruefully. “Besides, there are few men I’d trust with my sister’s virtue. You probably haven’t noticed, being as you’ve rarely seen her in a proper dress, but when she allows herself to look like a lady, she’s really rather fetching.”

Conrad suppressed a groan. If Nash knew exactly how fetching Conrad already found his sister, he’d find himself called out for pistols at dawn.

Fortunately, his friend failed to notice his discomfort and continued blithely, “All you need do is keep her in an out-of-the-way place for the night. Blindfold her and tie her up, give her reason to worry what may become of her, until I ransom her back. After such an ordeal, I warrant she should be chastened into behaving in a more appropriate fashion.”

Blindfold her and tie her up? An image so frank and carnal that it shocked even Conrad flashed through his mind—Freddie Langston, naked and blindfolded, her wrists bound and secured above her head, her legs spread wide and tied to the bed frame, her glorious black hair fanned out around her like a thundercloud.

Heat suffused him, and he drained his sherry in one swift gulp.

Nash raised an eyebrow and gestured toward Conrad’s empty glass. “Would you care for another?”

And another and another. At least if this conversation continued on its present course.

While Nash poured them both more sherry at the sideboard, Conrad tried to regain his composure. He’d come to the Langston estate this afternoon intending only to inform his friend of his sister’s planned escapade so he could put a stop to it before the girl managed to ruin herself and her family so thoroughly neither could recover. The last thing he had anticipated was to be enlisted into a counter-escapade that was even dafter than the original.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Worse yet, he could see no means by which to escape his conscription. He could hardly admit that he was absolutely not to be trusted with Miss Winifred Langston’s virtue; that he had, in point of fact, been lusting after her for years. And not in the polite, proper way a gentleman desires a lady he hopes to marry, either, but in the coarse, vulgar way he wants a woman of loose morals.

“So, what do you say, Con?” Nash asked as he handed Conrad his refilled glass. “I’ll see to it they have to take the coach instead of going by horseback and warn the driver that there’ve been reports of a ruthless highwayman preying on the road between Winmarleigh and Garstang. He’ll pull over for you in a trice, and from there, you’ll be in and out with Freddie in no time.”

Wincing internally at the phrase in and out with Freddie, Conrad considered his options, conceded he had none, and accepted his fate. He nodded. “I’ll do it.”

Nash beamed. “Excellent.” He raised his goblet in salute. “To putting my troublesome little sister in her place.”

“Indeed,” Conrad murmured, meeting his friend’s toast despite the certainty that he and Nash had entirely different visions of where, exactly, that troublesome young lady’s place was.

Freddie grimaced as the carriage hit yet another rut in the road and her backside was once again separated from, and then forcibly reacquainted with, the thinly padded seat. Here, at least, was one good argument for skirts and petticoats; they offered one considerably more protection from the brutal beating of travel by coach than breeches. Even then, she was bound to be bloodied and bruised by the time she reached London, since it was highly unlikely that Nash would permit her to ride into Town on horseback.

“You haven’t changed your mind about this, have you, Fred?” Walter asked, apparently noting her sour expression. “We can always turn back, you know.”

In truth, she had begun to think better of this excursion within minutes of proposing it, but she wasn’t about to admit that to her twin, who thought it a marvelous lark to sneak his sister into a house of ill repute. The problem was, as tantalizing as the idea was in theory, it had quickly dawned on her that it was likely to be rather boring in practice. What, after all, was she going to do in a house of ill repute? Certainly not what men did when they went to one.

In for a penny, in for a pound, that was Freddie’s motto. She wasn’t going to back out now despite her misgivings.

“That’s not it. I’d just much rather be going on horseback than by coach.” She wrinkled her nose as they hit yet another bump, dislodging a cloud of dust from the faded curtains that covered the windows. “Don’t you think it’s odd that Hermes should have thrown a shoe on the very same day that Mercury got the colic?”

Like Freddie and Walter, Hermes and Mercury were twins, a pair of Arabian bays their father had purchased several years before his death with his son and daughter in mind. They were also, aside from Nash’s gray stallion—the grandiosely named Thor—the only riding mounts in the stable, which was why Walter, Thomas, and Freddie had been forced to take the coach this evening rather than traveling, as they normally did, on horseback.

Walter shrugged. “Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Hermes is forever throwing shoes and Mercury has a penchant for eating things that don’t agree with him.”

Both were true, but Freddie couldn’t shake the intuition that their mode of conveyance had been determined by contrivance rather than coincidence, although she could not fathom what anyone would gain by such machinations other than her annoyance. Perhaps that was enough for her older brother, however, who seemed of late to be wholly focused on being as irritating to her as possible, no doubt because he hoped she would decide to behave herself in London and get down to the business of selecting a husband if only as a means of escaping his needling.

She was forced to admit that he might be onto something. The idea of spending the rest of her days under his roof had become a less-than-attractive proposition over the past several months.

The carriage jolted to an abrupt halt, almost pitching her from the narrow seat and knocking her knees painfully into Thomas’s.

“What the devil?” Walter muttered. He rapped his knuckles against the roof. “I say, Potts,” he hollered to the driver, “what’s the trouble?”

No answer was forthcoming, but the reason for the sudden halt in their progress became clear when the door to the carriage jerked open just a few seconds later. The person doing the jerking was not the driver, Potts, but a masked man clothed entirely in black and holding a pistol of impressive size.

A highwayman.

Freddie’s brow furrowed. When had highwayman begun to prey on the stretch of road between Winmarleigh and Garstang? It wasn’t exactly Hounslow Heath in terms of either traffic or fat purses.

While she contemplated this anomaly, Thomas raised one hand in surrender and patted the coin pouch in the pocket of his coat with the other, raising a weak clank of metal. “We haven’t much coin with us this eve, but we’ll gladly give you every ha’penny if you will but permit us to be on our way.”

Walter gave Thomas an angry scowl, no doubt irritated by the latter’s hasty capitulation, but there really was no arguing with a pistol, and Walter knew it. He reached up under his coat to untie the strings of his own purse, but the highwayman cleared his throat and shook his head.

“I don’t want yer coin,” he growled in a broad Lancashire dialect. “What I want…” He stretched out a finger and pointed it straight at Freddie’s chest. “…is ’er.”

Chapter Three

Conrad steeled himself to hold both the pistol and his index finger steady. Although everything had gone swimmingly thus far, with the coachman just as intimidated as Nash had promised he would be, it could all go terribly wrong in a heartbeat. If he had to resort to actual violence to accomplish his goal, the masquerade would be over before it had really begun, since he was hardly about to shoot Walter or Freddie Langston, let alone his own brother.

Not that he could, even if he wanted to; as a precaution, he hadn’t loaded the pistol, which meant it would be useless if any of his victims actually resisted.

Naturally, it was his brother who resisted first. “You can’t have he—” Thomas began, then broke off, his eyebrows pulling together in a scowl as he fixed Conrad with a suspicious stare. “I say, how did you know he’s a she?”

Conrad’s blood chilled; he hadn’t intended to reveal that he was aware of Freddie’s gender. The word her had simply slipped out, no doubt because he was always aware of her femininity no matter how she was garbed. But now that he had let it out, he’d no choice but to go with it.

“Sure ye don’t think everyone hereabouts don’t know Viscount Langston ’as a sister what gallivants the countryside dressed like a boy?”

“So you know this is the Honorable Miss Winifred Langston?” Walter asked.

“Course I do,” Conrad responded, settling into his role with a bit more ease as the familiar accents of his tenants began to roll more comfortably off his tongue. “Why d’ye think I’m taking ’er for ransom? Wouldn’t do no good if she wasn’t Quality.”

“Well, you can’t have her,” Thomas declared stoutly, shifting his body so that, within the tight confines of the coach, his torso was positioned between Conrad’s useless pistol and Freddie. He folded his arms across his chest. “I won’t let you.”

“What do you mean, I?” Walter bristled. “She’s my sister. If anyone’s going to protect her virtue, it ought to be me.”

Conrad didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. Leave it to his brother and Walter Langston to argue over who should be shot first in a futile demonstration of heroism. The fact that neither of them could possibly know the pistol was unloaded made their idiocy all the more poignant. God help them if they were ever waylaid by an actual highwayman.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t be a pair of ninnyhammers,” Freddie huffed, clearly as exasperated with her companions’ bravado as Conrad was. “The man’s got a pistol, or did you think that was a cucumber?”

“But, Fred, you’ll be ruined,” Walter protested.

As if he had ever worried about his sister’s reputation before…

Over Thomas’s shoulder, Conrad saw Freddie wave her hand dismissively. “Nonsense. Nash will pay the ransom straightaway and then sweep the entire incident under the rug. No one but us will even know it happened.”

“And how do you know he means only to ransom you?” Thomas fixed a baleful eye on Conrad. “He could just as easily ravish you first and then ransom you, you know.”

“That’s a risk I shall just have to take, because I am certainly not going to allow him to put a bullet in one or both of you and then kidnap me anyway. Now,” she continued, giving Thomas a shove on the back, “do sit down and let me get out of the coach.”

Thomas pitched forward, catching himself just before bumping his head on the opposite side of the carriage.

“You can’t mean to go with him, Fred!” Walter grabbed her arm. “He might not just ravish you. He could kill you.” His tone was no longer blustering, but pleading.

Uneasiness slithered up Conrad’s throat as it dawned on him that Thomas and Walter weren’t just putting on a show; they were genuinely concerned for Freddie’s safety. And why shouldn’t they be? As far as they knew, Conrad really was a highwayman, and while highwaymen might have a certain romantic reputation among the lower classes, aristocrats rightly regarded them with a healthy dose of fear.

Why had neither he nor Nash spared a single thought when planning this escapade to the anguish they would be inflicting on their respective brothers? They had both been so intent on ensuring that Freddie would be suitably chastened by her experience that the potential effect on her companions simply hadn’t crossed their minds.

Come to think of it, the one person who seemed not the least bit troubled by the current turn of events was the one person who was supposed to be. Surely a well-bred young lady on the brink of being kidnapped by a brigand should be a trifle more…alarmed?

Instead, the lady in question was in the process of freeing her arm from her brother’s grasp with a businesslike composure entirely at odds with the gravity of the situation.

“He could kill me, but he won’t,” she said with such complete, calm assurance that Conrad knew at once she had figured out that this was all for show, although he didn’t think she’d yet recognized him. She’d simply concluded, correctly, that Nash had orchestrated the entire thing and that she was therefore in no real danger whatsoever.

For two heartbeats, Conrad considered pulling off his mask and confessing the whole scheme. And he might well have done it had Freddie not stretched out her hand—bare and slender and elegantly pale—toward him and said, “Do pretend to be a gentleman and help me down.”

He couldn’t have said whether it was her impudent suggestion that he feign being a gentleman or the tantalizing provocation of her naked hand so near his own, but some thread of control inside him snapped. Freddie Langston had always had the power to shake his composure, but as of this moment, she had torn his vaunted equanimity to shreds.

She was toying with them—him, Walter, Thomas, even the poor coachman. She knew what was afoot, and yet she kept it to herself, preferring to watch them all make fools of themselves. Conrad imagined she must be quite enjoying the show as they all danced to her merry little tune.

Which, in point of fact, was what she had done all her life. Every male in Winifred Langston’s life—from her father to her brothers to Conrad’s own brother—did as she wished, when she wished, for she had long ago mastered the art of making them believe that what she wanted was what they wanted. Well, no more. What he wanted was certainly not what she wanted, and it was well past time she learned that men were not playthings to be manipulated like marionettes on the strings of her whims.

Especially not this man.

He wrapped his black-gloved fingers around her slim wrist and pulled. Her chestnut-brown eyes widened as she tumbled out of the carriage and onto his waiting chest. She gasped at the same moment he released the air from his lungs on an involuntary oomph and their breath mingled, sweet and humid. Her parted pink lips hovered scant inches above his, and a flare of lust singed his veins as he registered how close he was to kissing her. All he would need to do was to slide his fingers around the base of her skull and draw her head down to his until their mouths met.

Except, of course, that this would require him to drop his pistol to free his hand, and that would not exactly lend itself to the completion of his task. Not to mention that he’d be kissing her in full view their brothers, both of whom stared balefully at him out the open door of the coach. Hardly the setting he had in mind.

Not that he had any sort of setting in mind for kissing her. He wasn’t supposed to be kissing her at all. Anywhere. At any time.

With a muttered oath and a renewed focus on his mission, Conrad tightened his grip on his captive’s wrist while continuing to point the pistol menacingly in Walter and Thomas’s direction. “The sooner ye ’urry back to Barrowcreek and deliver my ransom demand, the sooner this little lady’ll be free,” he told them, careful to continue disguising his voice behind accent. “If ye dally, I might forget to pretend to be a gentleman.”

Freddie stiffened at his mocking repetition of her words. Perhaps she sensed she had pushed her kidnapper rather further than was wise, even if she did believe it was all just a sham.

Walter crossed his arms over his chest. “How much do you want?”

Conrad quoted the sum he and Nash had agreed upon. “Two ’undred pounds. Not an ’a’penny less. I’ll meet ’im ’ere for the exchange at dawn. Tell ’him to come alone.”

Walter blanched. “Alone? You could kill him, take the money, and keep m’sister.”

“And even if you don’t, how are we to know you’ll return Freddie safe and, er…” Thomas cleared his throat, blushing furiously as he completed his thought, “…intact after an entire night with her?”

For the first time since he’d donned the scratchy black highwayman’s mask, Conrad was glad he was wearing it because he could feel his face go as hot and red as his brother’s. Freddie’s lithe yet lush frame so close to his was more than enough temptation. He could already imagine all too easily what he could accomplish in one night with her; he didn’t need any help, least of all from Thomas.

Forcing himself to remain in character despite the riot of lascivious images tumbling through his head, Conrad shrugged. “Ye’ll just have to trust me.”

“Trust a highwayman? How stupid do you think we are?”

Freddie twisted in Conrad’s grasp in order to glare at her brother. “Oh, for pity’s sake, if he meant me any harm, he’d have shot the both of you by now and got on with it. Just do as he asks. Please.

For several long seconds, Walter stared at his twin, and Conrad had the eerie sensation that the two of them were speaking without saying a word.

At last, Walter set his mouth in a grim line and nodded. “Very well, we’ll go.” He gestured to the driver, who had watched the entire ordeal in silence, to resume his seat and the man, obviously eager to escape the scene, hastened to do so.

When the coach finally rolled away in search of a wider stretch of road to execute a turnaround, Conrad closed his eyes with relief. The hard part was over. Now all he had to do was convince Freddie that he really was a dangerous highwayman and she wasn’t at all safe with him. Given his current state of frustrated arousal, that shouldn’t be much of a challenge. He bloody well felt dangerous.

With the golden-orange tinge of sunset fading into the blue glow of dusk, however, his first order of business was not to frighten her, but to get them both to the shelter of the abandoned woodcutter’s cottage they’d be occupying for the night. Conrad was debating the relative merits of dragging her there on foot or hoisting her over his shoulder and carrying her when she sighed gustily. He opened his eyes to find her smiling up at him, a thoroughly disconcerting and unexpected reaction given the circumstances.

“Good heavens, I thought they’d never leave,” she said.

Then, to his horrified delight, she snaked her free arm around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him. Soundly. Ardently. And to be quite honest, very, very badly. And he had never been more thoroughly aroused by a mere kiss in his life.

Bloody well dangerous was right.

Continued….

Click here to download the entire book: The Lesson Plan by Jackie Barbosa >>

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Alice in Deadland

by Mainak Dhar

Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled

Here’s the set-up:

The sensational Amazon.com bestseller. #1 Science Fiction and Horror bestseller. More than 50,000 copies sold in less than three months.

Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it’s legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.

Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.

What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.

A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland – a book called Alice in Wonderland.

If you enjoy Alice in Deadland, also check out Zombiestan by Mainak Dhar for another action packed thriller with a unique twist on the zombie genre and Vimana the Amazon.com sci-fi bestseller by Mainak Dhar.

Learn more about the world of Alice in Deadland and engage with the author and other readers at the new Alice in Deadland Facebook Group. Go to facebook.com/groups/345795412099089.

Reader Comments
I have read a lot of books based on the Zombie apocalypse and this is by far one of my favorites! You will easily fall in love with the story and the characters. This book not only brought a delightful twist on Zombies, but ties the “apocalypse” to events of today. Alice in Deadland is definitely worth taking a peek at!!
Kayla W., Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars

I love it when I find a book that I absolutely can’t put down, and this one definitely took the cake. Great twist on an old favorite. Certainly looking forward to more from this author.
Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

*  *  *

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the hill, and of having no Biters to shoot. Once or twice she peeped through her sniper rifle’s scope, but could see no targets. ‘What is the use of an ambush’, thought Alice, ‘without any Biters to shoot in the head?’

 

Alice was fifteen, and had been born just three months after The Rising. Her older sister and parents sometimes talked of how the world had been before. They talked of going to the movies, of watching TV, of taking long drives in the countryside, of school. Alice could relate to none of that. The only life she had known was one of hiding from the Biters. The only education that she knew to be useful consisted of three simple lessons – if a Biter bites you, you will become one of them; if a Biter bites someone you know, it doesn’t matter whether that person was your best friend, they were now a Biter and would rip your throat out in a heartbeat; and if you could take only one shot, aim for the head. Only the head. Nothing else would put a Biter down for good.

 

So here she was, lying on a small hillock, her rifle at her shoulder, waiting to pick off any stragglers who escaped the main force. The first few years of her life had been one of hiding, and of surviving from one day to another. But then the humans had begun to regroup and fight back, and the world had been engulfed in a never-ending war between the living and the undead. Alice’s parents were part of the main assault force that was now sweeping through a group of Biters that had been spotted near their settlement. She could hear the occasional pop of guns firing, but so far no Biters had come their way. Her sister was lying quietly, as always obedient and somber. Alice could not imagine just lying here, getting bored when the action was elsewhere, so she crawled away to the edge of the small hill they were on and peered through her scope, trying to get a glimpse of the action.

 

That’s when she saw him. The Biter was wearing pink bunny ears of all things. That in itself did not strike Alice as strange. When someone was bitten and joined the undead, they just continued to wear what they had been wearing when they were turned. Perhaps this one had been at a party when he had been bitten. The first Biter she had shot had been wearing a tattered Santa Claus suit. Unlike kids before The Rising, she had not needed her parents to gently break the news that Santa Claus was not real. What was truly peculiar about this Biter was that he was not meandering about mindlessly but seemed to be looking for something. The Biters were supposed to be mindless creatures, possessed of no intelligence other than an overpowering hunger to bite the living. She braced herself, centering the crosshairs of her scope on the Biter’s head. He was a good two hundred meters away and moving fast, so it was hardly going to be an easy shot.

 

That’s when the Biter with the bunny ears dropped straight into the ground.

 

Alice looked on, transfixed, and then without thinking of what she was getting into, ran towards the point where the Biter had seemingly been swallowed up by the ground. Her heart was pounding as she came closer. For months there had been rumors that the Biters had created huge, underground bases where they hid and from which they emerged to wreak havoc. There were stories of entire human armies being destroyed by Biters who suddenly materialized out from the ground and then disappeared. However, nobody had yet found such a base and these stories were largely dismissed as being little more than fanciful fairy tales. Had Alice managed to find such a base?

 

Her excitement got the better of her caution, and she ran on alone. She should have alerted her sister, she should have called for reinforcements, she should have done a lot of things. But at that moment, all she remembered was where the Biter had dropped into the ground and of what would happen if she had truly found an underground Biter base. She was an excellent shot, far better than most of the adults in the settlement, and she was fast. If there was one thing she had been told by all her teachers since she started training, it was that she was a born fighter. She could put a man twice her size on the mat in the wink of an eye, and she had shown her mettle in numerous skirmishes against the Biters. Yet, she was not allowed to lead raids far from the settlement. That had always grated, but with her father being one of the leaders of the settlement, she was unable to do anything to change that. He claimed that her excellent shooting and scouting skills were better used in defensive roles close to their settlement, and had promised her that when she was older he would reconsider, but she knew that was a nervous father speaking, not the leader of their settlement.

 

This could change all that.

 

Suddenly she felt the ground give way under her and she felt herself falling. She managed to hold onto her rifle, but found herself sliding down a smooth, steep and curving slope. There seemed to be no handholds or footholds for her to slow her descent or to try and climb back up. She looked up to see the hole through which light was streaming in disappear as the tunnel she was falling down curved and twisted.

 

Alice screamed as she continued falling in utter darkness.

 

***

It took Alice a few minutes to get her bearings, as she was totally disoriented in the dark and also winded by her fall. She saw that her fall had been broken by a thick cushioning of branches and leaves. She had heard whispers that the Biters were not the mindless drones that many adults dismissed them to be, but those accounts had been dismissed by most people as fanciful tales. She wondered if there was some truth to those rumors after all. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw a sliver of light to her right and crawled towards it. As she went deeper into the tunnel, while she still could not see much, the smell was unmistakable. The rotten stench that she knew came from only one possible source- the decayed bodies of the undead. Even though she had seen the aftermath of many a skirmish with the Biters, and was no stranger to the stench, she found herself gagging. As she came closer to the light, she saw that the tunnel opened into a small room that was lit by crudely fashioned torches hung on the walls.

 

She could hear some voices and as she peeped around the corner, she saw that the rabbit-eared Biter she had followed down was in animated conversation with two others. One of them was, or rather had been in life, perhaps a striking young woman. Now her skin was yellowing and decayed and hung in loose patches on her face. Her clothes were tattered and bloodied. The other Biter with her was a plump, short man who seemed to have the better part of his left side torn off, perhaps by a mine or a grenade. Alice had been around weapons for as long as she could remember, and while all humans now needed to be able to defend themselves, Alice had shown a special talent for fighting, perhaps one her mother did not always approve of. Her mother had wanted Alice to do as the other young people did and stand on guard duty close to the settlements, but Alice had always wanted to be in the forefront, to feel the thrill that came with it. Now, Alice thought, she had perhaps got more thrills than she had ever bargained for. She was trapped in an underground Biter base, with no apparent way out.

 

The Biters were talking in a mixture of growls and moans, but they seemed to be communicating with each other. Now that she got a closer look at the rabbit-eared Biter she had followed in, she realized that he had been in life not much older than her. Perhaps he had been on his way to a costume party when he had been bitten. As he turned his head, Alice saw what may have once been a smile now replaced by a feral grin that revealed bloodied teeth.

 

Alice’s heart stopped as Bunny Ears looked straight at her. For a second she hoped that he had not seen her, but he bared his teeth and emitted a screeching howl that sent a shiver up her spine. As all three Biters turned to look at her, she exploded into action.

 

Alice’s grasp of the alphabet may have been tenuous despite her mother’s many failed attempts to teach her the languages of yore. But after The Rising, Alice saw no use for them- there were no books to read, and no time to read them even if they had remained. But what Alice excelled in school at, and could do almost without conscious thought, was how to thumb the safety off her handgun and bring it up to a two handed hold within three seconds. The first shot took the fat Biter squarely in the forehead and he went down with an unceremonious flop. As the two others bore down on her in the slight loping, lumbering gait the Biters were known for, she fired again and again, the shots from her gun echoing in the underground cavern. She hit the female Biter at least twice in the chest and then knocked her flat with a head shot. Bunny Ears was now barely a few feet away when Alice’s handgun clicked empty. She cursed under her breath at her horrible aim, realizing just how much easier it was to shoot at targets in practice or snipe from hundreds of meters away compared to being so close to Biters out for her blood, and with her heart hammering so fast she could barely keep her hands straight, let alone aim.

 

Alice heard footsteps and howls behind her, and realized with a stab of panic that she was now well and truly trapped between Bunny Ears and others who may have come behind her down the hole.

 

She looked around frantically and saw a small opening in the wall to her right. She ran towards Bunny Ears, diving down at the last minute beneath his outstretched fingers that were crusted over with dried blood. Alice stood only about five feet tall, and was lean, but she had been top of her class in unarmed combat. She swept her legs under the Biter, coming up in one seamless motion as Bunny Ears fell down in a heap. She ran towards the hole in the wall and turned around to see at least four more Biters coming behind her.

 

Alice fumbled at her belt and took the lone flash bang grenade she had slung there. As she ran into the hole she pulled the pin and rolled it on the ground behind her, and then continued to run at full speed into the darkness of the hole. She heard the thump of the grenade a few seconds later, hoping that the intense flash of light it emitted would slow down her pursuers for a few seconds and buy her some time.

 

With that hope came a sobering thought. Time to do what? She was stuck deep inside what seemed to be a Biter base, and was running ever deeper into its recesses. She was well and truly trapped.

 

***

 

Alice ran till she was out of breath and stopped, going down on her knees, more tired and scared than she had ever been. The darkness and narrowness of the passage she was in did not help, as it made her feel disoriented and claustrophobic. At least she could no longer hear footsteps behind her. That did not surprise her. While the flash bang would not stop the Biters, she knew they hated very bright light, and it would certainly have slowed them down. Also, she was a very fit young girl who could outrun most of the people in their settlement, whereas the Biters pursuing her, while feared for their feral violence, moved with their characteristic stiff, loping gait, which meant she would be able to outrun them in any flat out race. The problem was that she was trapped in their base, and all they had to do was to tire her out.

 

When she thought she heard distant footsteps behind her, her fear gave her a second wind and she started running again, clutching her side, which had begun to hurt from the exertion. She ran into a wall, and fell back hard on her back, realizing that the tunnel turned ahead of her. As she looked past the turning, she saw what appeared to be a door framed by light coming from behind it. She ran towards it, and as she came closer, she was stunned to see a familiar figure drawn on the door. It was a seal showing an eagle framed by letters that were barely visible in the light coming from behind it. She started trying to read the letters and got past the U, N and I before she realized she did not need to tax her limited reading skills to understand what it showed. She had seen a similar seal in old papers her father kept locked away in a dusty box. Once he had told her something about him having worked in the United States Embassy in New Delhi before The Rising. She had understood little of what he had meant, though other kids around the settlement had told her that her father had been some sort of important man in the governments of the Old World. They had told her that she and her family had come from another land called America, which was why her blond hair and fair skin looked so different from her brown friends. But none of that mattered much to Alice, or to anyone else anymore. The old governments and countries were long gone. Now all people, irrespective of their old countries, religions or politics were bound together in but one overriding compact- the need to survive in the face of the Biter hordes. She had heard tales of how human nations had waged wars against each other, driven by the Gods they worshipped, or the desire to grab oil. Alice remembered laughing when her teacher at the makeshift school in the settlement had told her class about those days. She had thought her teacher was telling them some tall tales. What was it the old folks called them? The ones who had read the books before the undead rose and the world burned.

 

Yes, fairy tales.

 

When Alice heard footsteps behind her, she was snapped back to reality, and she struggled with the door in front of her, trying desperately to open it. She found a handle and pulled it with all her strength, and finally found the door budging. The door was made of heavy metal, and it sapped all her strength to open it enough for her to slip through. She looked back through the open door and heard the roars before she saw shadows appear in the tunnel. She pulled the door shut, hoping that what she had heard about Biters being stupid was right. That old joke about how many Biters it took to open a door.

 

She took a look around the room she was in and saw that it was lit by a single small kerosene lamp on the ceiling, and was filled with papers and files that crammed the shelves lining the walls. There was a small desk in a corner and when she walked to it, she saw some old newspapers on it. She had never seen a newspaper in her life, and was fascinated by the pictures and words she saw. She didn’t need to read the words to know what they showed. They were relics of the last days during The Rising and its aftermath. There were grainy pictures of the first appearances of the undead, which she imagined for those who had never seen before them must have been quite a sight. Then there were pictures of burnt and charred cities- the remains of the Great Fire that the human governments had unleashed on so many cities when it seemed like all was lost. That was the barren, bleak landscape that Alice had known as home- the wastelands outside New Delhi, where millions had died in the Biter outbreak and then millions more as governments tried to contain the outbreak by using nuclear weapons on the key outbreak centers. Man had proven to be the most jealous of lovers, preferring to destroy the Earth rather than give her up. But it had not been enough, and in the fires of that apocalypse was born a renewed struggle for survival between humans and the undead in the wasteland that was now known simply as the Deadland.

 

Alice had been so transfixed by what she saw that she had forgotten all about securing the other doors to the room, and she screamed in agony when she realized that there was another door, partially obscured by a chair, which was ajar. She heard footsteps behind it, and realized that what she was taken for escape was in fact nothing more than a death trap.

 

She took out her handgun from her belt and as she felt for the safety, remembered with dismay that in all the chaos she had forgotten to reload. As she saw shadows enter the door, she realized she had no time for that any more. She unslung the sniper rifle from her shoulders. As such close quarters, there was no hope of her putting it to much use as a long range weapon, but there were other ways to make it count.

 

As a child, Alice had forever been getting into scrapes, and her parents would never tire of telling her to back down once in a while, instead of wading into every fight. But once after she had shot two Biters during a night-time raid, her father had got quite drunk to celebrate and told her that he loved her spirit and that no matter what the odds, she should never give into fear. To be afraid in the face of the undead was to die, or worse, to become one of them.

 

As Alice remembered her father’s words, she felt her fear slip away. She knew that the Biters tried to bite and turn every human they found, but also that the humans who fought back the hardest sometimes enraged them so much that they ripped them apart, killing them instead of turning them into the undead.

 

Better dead than undead.

 

That had been the motto of the school where they had been taught survival and combat skills. Whereas little girls before The Rising may have been playing with their toys or watching TV, Alice had grown up playing with guns, explosives and learning the best way to destroy the undead. And she had been the best in her class.

 

She was now swinging the rifle in front of her like a staff, moving it around her fingers so it cut sharp circles through the air. Three Biters came in, and as the first reached for her, she cracked him across the forehead and leaned toward him, sweeping his legs under him as he went down. The next up was a squat woman wearing the tattered, bloody remains of a saree, and incongruously enough, a huge diamond solitaire earring on her left ear. The right ear was missing. Alice delivered a roundhouse kick that sent Ms. Solitaire stumbling back and then reversed the sniper rifle in her hand, firing a single shot that disintegrated the Biter’s head. The third Biter, a tall man with his jaw missing, was almost upon her when she hit him hard in the face with the butt of her rifle. Biters might feel no pain, but it unbalanced him enough for Alice to jump back a few steps and put another round into his chest. Only a head shot would put down a Biter for good, but a high powered sniper rifle bullet did impressive enough damage and slowed one down no matter where it hit. A gaping hole opened in the Biter’s chest as he slumped back. Alice knew he’d be at her throat soon enough so she tried to chamber another round in her rifle.

 

That was when she felt her right arm caught in a cold, clammy grip that was so strong she screamed and dropped her rifle. Bunny Ears was back and he was bringing his face back to bite her arm. Alice kicked him in the shin, but he did not even wince as he came closer to delivering the bite that would be the last thing Alice felt before she became one of them.

 

Alice did the last thing he perhaps expected. She head-butted him and as he staggered back and loosened his grip on her arm, she vaulted over the desk and stood with her back to the wall. There were now no less than six Biters gathered in front of her, and Alice suppressed the welling panic within as she unsheathed the curved hunting knife that was always by her side. Bunny Ears snarled and screamed in rage, a hellish concerto that was soon taken up by all the Biters in the room. Alice had heard of this ritual before. It meant the Biters were going to rip some human apart instead of trying to convert them. Alice reversed the knife in her right hand and stood with her legs slightly spread apart, just as she had mastered in countless hours of unarmed combat practice. Her teacher there had been some sort of elite commando in the armies of the old governments, and he had told her she was his best student. She slowed her breathing, focusing on the creatures in front of her, trying to block out her fear, trying to still her mind. As Bunny Ears stepped toward her, she gripped the knife handle tight and readied herself. Better dead than undead.

Continued….

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Alice in Deadland

by Mainak Dhar


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Alice in Deadland

by Mainak Dhar
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The sensational Amazon.com bestseller. #1 Science Fiction and Horror bestseller. More than 50,000 copies sold in less than three months.

Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it's legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.

Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.

What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.

A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland - a book called Alice in Wonderland.

If you enjoy Alice in Deadland, also check out Zombiestan by Mainak Dhar for another action packed thriller with a unique twist on the zombie genre and Vimana the Amazon.com sci-fi bestseller by Mainak Dhar.

Learn more about the world of Alice in Deadland and engage with the author and other readers at the new Alice in Deadland Facebook Group. Go to facebook.com/groups/345795412099089.

About the Author

Mainak Dhar is a cubicle dweller by day and writer by night. He is the author of eleven books including the Amazon.com science fiction bestseller Vimana. Learn more about him and his writing at mainakdhar.com.
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'Til death do us part...When a mysterious stranger convinces Meadow Jenkins to escape her volatile marriage, she is determined to leave everything behind and build a better life for herself. Meadow fakes her own death to flee from the abuse of her husband in a soul-searching journey across the...
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From the USA Today bestselling author of The Southern Pasta Shop Mysteries comes a new series that proves blood can be thicker than water...As a young single parent, Mackenzie Elizabeth Taylor has struggled to provide for her teenage daughter. She finally catches a break when she inherits half of...
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All Jen wanted was a tattoo apprenticeship.The only artist willing to take her on, Lilith Sharpe, owns Graphomancy, a tattoo parlor in the worst neighborhood of Conflict, Oregon. And there are drawbacks. A contract signed in blood (what?) states Jen will work for free (come again?). On the...
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A woman is found dead in a local businessman’s holiday let. Detectives uncover some shady dealings. But did he kill her?The charm of a West of Ireland holiday home is somewhat tarnished when a woman’s body is found in the property. There are few clues as to her identity. However, in her hand is...
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“I now pronounce you husband and…”New York City, 1923The most talked-about wedding is quickly approaching, and PI Jax Diamond is on top of the world. The tuxedos are freshly pressed and hanging in their closets. His good friend is busy decorating the nightclub for a glorious reception, and the...
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DEA Agent Kurt Rawlings has made a lot of enemies in his successful career, sending hundreds of criminals to prison. But now he's the one in captivity, snatched in El Paso by assassins but taken and smuggled into Mexico by a cartel that wants him alive—for now. Hoping to survive and reunite with...
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Based on an actual military program. Men Who Stare At Goats was based on a real program, Trojan Warrior, which the author was part of. This book takes that to the next level. The Russians sink the submarine USS Thresher in 1963 using their classified psychic project, but something goes awry and all...
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Like a great thriller? Then you’ll love our brand new Thriller of the Week: From Mainak Dhar’s Zombie Thriller ALICE IN DEADLAND – 178 out of 245 Rave Reviews, Just 99 Cents, or Currently FREE via Kindle Lending Library

Like a great thriller? Then you’ll love this free excerpt from our Kindle Nation Daily Thriller of the Week, by the author of #1 bestseller While the Savage Sleeps, Andrew E. Kaufman’s THE LION, THE LAMB, THE HUNTED – 31/32 Rave Reviews, Just $2.99 and Currently FREE for Amazon Prime Members via Kindle Lending Library

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From Andrew E. Kaufman, author of the #1 bestseller, While the Savage Sleeps…

SHE ONLY STEPPED OUTSIDE FOR A MINUTE…

But a minute was all it took to turn Jean Kingsley’s world upside down–a minute she’d regret for the rest of her life.

STEPPING INTO HER WORST NIGHTMARE…

Because when she returned, she found an open bedroom window and her three-year-old son, Nathan, gone. The boy would never be seen again.

A NIGHTMARE THAT ONLY BECAME WORSE.

A tip leads detectives to the killer, a repeat sex offender, and inside his apartment, a gruesome discovery. A slam-dunk trial sends him off to death row, then several years later, to the electric chair.

CASE CLOSED. JUSTICE SERVED…OR WAS IT?

Now, more than thirty years later, Patrick Bannister unwittingly stumbles across evidence among his dead mother’s belongings–it paints her as the killer and her brother, a wealthy and powerful senator, as the one pulling the strings.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO NATHAN KINGSLEY?

There’s a hole in the case a mile wide, and Patrick is determined to close it. But what he doesn’t know is that the closer he moves toward the truth, the more he’s putting his life on the line, that he’s become the hunted. Someone’s hiding a dark secret and will stop at nothing to keep it that way.

The clock is ticking, the walls are closing, and the stakes are getting higher as he races to find a killer–one who’s hot on his trail. One who’s out for his blood.

Reader Comments

I loved Andrew E. Kaufman’s book! An excellent, suspenseful story that I found difficult to put down. It is Andrew’s second novel, and he has another best-seller for sure with this one. I loved the first-person narrative and it worked so well with his protagonist reporter, Patrick Bannister. Andrew’s characterizations, dialogue, suspense, and intrigue will keep you turning the pages of his book to see where he takes you next. An enjoyable, great read. Andrew will again hit the best-seller lists with The Lion, The Lamb, The Hunted, as he did with While the Savage Sleeps.

-Linda Pendleton, Amazon, 5 Stars

Another great book from Andrew Kauffman. This book really captured my attention and my heart from page one. The story simply unwrapped itself perfectly for me and had me wanting for more right away. The main character Patrick was a true delight to get to know and I really cared about what was happening to him. The horrors that Patrick faced as a child were so realistic and not at all hard to imagine happening.

Although different from his first book, The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted is a great follow-up you shouldn’t pass up.

– Amazon Reviewer, 5 Stars

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

 

Chapter One

Black Lake cemetery was a study in contrasts. A velvety lawn, vibrant and lush, shrouded by people in dark attire with vacant expressions—all aimed toward the focal point, a slick mahogany casket perched over a shadowy hole.

I allowed my eyes to settle there for a moment, along with my thoughts, but nothing good came of it, just a grim and sobering realization.

There wasn’t enough dirt on this earth to bury that much evil.

I forced my attention away from my mother’s grave, fidgeted with my tie to loosen the knot. This place was hotter than the hinges of hell, an oppressive blanket of humidity and temperatures climbing to heights so ambitious that even my eyelids were sweating. Summertime in Georgia, just as I’d always remembered. I hadn’t been back in years. I hadn’t missed much. Listening to the preacher, I felt like I was attending a funeral for a stranger—and in a way, I was. Dedicated and loving? I must have missed that day.

I moved on to the crowd, recognized less than half of them. An outsider looking in—that’s all I was—surrounded by sharp glares and astonished whispers:What’s he doing here?

Welcome home.

So nobody expected me to show. I got that. Not sure I expected me to show. Don’t know why, but I felt compelled to do it. I suppose some part of me needed to close the door on her once and for all, to see she was really gone.

Cancer of the spine. Apparently she’d complained of back pain for months but never bothered seeing a doctor. Typically stubborn, and she paid the price for it. Diagnosis to death: less than three weeks. I arrived just in time to see her go.

It had been at least fifteen years since I’d last seen my mother. I found a mere shadow of the woman I remembered: thin, frail, and conscious only long enough to hiss her parting words at me. All three of them.

Fix your hair.”

That was it. That was her. With all the pain and suffering, her venom still managed to find its way to the surface one last time.

Then she drifted off. Never opened those joyless eyes again.

The crowd began to disperse. I turned from her coffin and began walking to my car. Then I heard a faint, familiar voice behind me. I glanced back and saw Uncle Warren doubling his steps to catch up. Too late to pretend I didn’t hear him.

Doing okay, Patrick?” he asked, sidling up beside me, his tone a strange hybrid of disingenuous and awkward concern.

I forced a polite smile, kept walking. “Fine. You?”

All right, I suppose.” He let out a long, labored sigh, as if the moment required it. “You know…it’s hard, all this.”

I half-smiled, half-nodded. Half believed him. And kept walking with my gaze on the pavement.

So,” he said. The sudden, bright tone in his voice startled me. “How’re things at the magazine?”

Great. You know…busy.”

A seemingly endless pause stretched between us, and then he said abruptly, “Your momma was a good woman.”

It sounded more like an argument than a fact. I gave no response. The comment didn’t deserve one. I also wondered when senators started using words like “momma.”

He continued, “You’re still coming by the house to take care of the paperwork? Right?”

I nodded tentatively. Apparently, he’d set up a trust account for me years ago. I didn’t need his money, didn’t want it, and I planned on telling him so. I just figured his sister’s gravesite wasn’t the place to do it.

And I hope you’ll stay in town for a bit,” he added.

Leaving tomorrow,” I replied, a little too quickly.

Then maybe you can come by the house, see if there’s anything you want. You know, sentimental items.”

That stopped me in my tracks. I stared at him for a long moment, then said, “You just don’t get it, Warren, do you?”

Get what?”

I looked away, shook my head.

He started to say something, stopped, then let out a quiet, exasperated sigh.

I reached for my car keys, fumbled with them, then felt his hand on my shoulder. I don’t know why, but something really bumps at my nerves when people do that, and Warren always did it a lot. It wasn’t the only reason I found him irritating, but it was one of them.

Patrick,” he said, with a stern and level stare. The hand stayed on my shoulder. “I’d really like for us to have some quality time together.”

I thumbed through my keys some more without looking at him, my discomfort swelling to colossal proportions.

You know,” he continued, his tone now bordering on preachy, “you could spare a little time for family.”

Then he paused and stared at me as if waiting for a response.

I gave none.

Instead, I got in my car, drove away.

***

I pulled up the winding drive that led to Warren’s mansion, a garish, white monstrosity on the edge of Lake Hathaway. Think modern-day Tara, surrounded by water and screaming “new money.” I’d spent a good part of my childhood here. My mother liked to drop me off under the pretense of having a weekend with Warren—male-bonding time, I guess—but really it was more a dumping ground than anything else, a way to get me out of her hair. Not that I minded. I came from a less-than-modest cookie-cutter bungalow, and Warren’s spread was like a trip to Disneyland. I swam, boated on the lake, and played on the twelve-plus acres. Warren was usually away on business, and it was like having the place all to myself along with a staff of ten waiting on my every need.

I walked into the living room, and swear to God, it was as if time stood still: every conversation killed, every head turned, and every eye trained on me. Awkward doesn’t come close to describing what I felt as I moved through the crowd, disapproval hovering over me like a menacing cloud. I pretended that I didn’t care, but inside I knew this was a big mistake.

What the hell was I thinking?

Actually, that was the problem; I hadn’t been.

Realizing it was too late to turn around, that I’d look even more foolish if I did, I got the hell out of there and headed toward the one place where I knew I could find refuge: the library.

I descended the steps, walked inside, and breathed in its distinctive scent, the one I loved: paper and binding glue, seasoned by time. The combination had a calming effect on me as a kid and was doing the same now. I felt my nerves untangle.

I loved it here, loved everything about it, the way it looked with the endless array of books stacked across all four walls, the feeling of running my fingers across the leather-bound spines. I’d often sit in the corner, sometimes for hours, lost in imaginary exploration. For me, reading was adventure, but most of all, reading was escape—escape from a life I never understood. Opening a book felt like taking a trip someplace else. Someplace better. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, the Hardy Boys—these were my friends. It didn’t matter that they weren’t real; they were there, always, whenever I needed them. And the best part: she couldn’t go with me.

I walked across the mirror-slick wood floors, then reached up to a shelf for Oliver Twist. Running my fingers over the words, I smiled and remembered.

Patrick?”

I swung around to find Tracy Gallagher grinning at me. The sight of her made my heart speed up, but I wasn’t sure if it was the hormones or the nerves—probably both. She was older now, but man, she still looked great.

I guess you could say Tracy was my first love; the only problem was she never knew it. She lived three houses down from me, and I would have moved heaven, earth, and everything in between to be with her. A classic case of unrequited love. We were good friends while we were young—that is, until adolescence set in. Then the social pecking order kicked into gear, and away she went, straight to the top with me falling somewhere near the bottom. I don’t think she ever meant it to be that way—just one of those things, I guess. We drifted apart, but I never forgot her.

It’s been a long time,” she said, walking to me. Her smile was warm. “How’ve you been?”

I’m well, Tracy.You?”

She moved past me, and for a split second, I caught her scent. Something linen mixed with something floral, and in that instant, it was high school all over again.

Gazing up at a shelf, she shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess. You know… husband, two kids, living out in the burbs. Never got out of this place. Smart move on your part that you did.”

Not like I had a choice, I thought as I put Oliver back on his shelf. “Doesn’t look like much’s changed around here.”

Nope,” she said through a restless sigh, “it never does.”

Hot and muggy with a chance of showers by afternoon?”

She grinned, still studying the rows of books. “You got it.” Then she turned to me. “So. A famous writer now. Pretty impressive.”

I shrugged. “Just a news magazine.”

Modest…you always were.”

Was I?”

About as unassuming as they came.”

I returned my gaze to the shelf, nodded.

I have to say, though, I was kind of surprised to see you came back.”

You and everyone else,” I said through a forced laugh. “I’m not exactly the town’s Favorite Son.”

She dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand. “Screw ‘em,”

Right,” I said, and grinned. “Screw ‘em.”

But you look good, Pat. You really do. I’m glad things got better for you after the…”

The overdose,” I said quickly, as if by doing so it might take away her discomfort.

Yeah.” She fell silent for a moment and pushed her hair behind one ear. It was a nervous habit she’d had since childhood. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

No. It’s okay. I’m fine with it. Really.”

She offered a thin smile.

Can I ask you something, though? Was I the only one who thought she was evil?”

An unsettled expression crossed Tracy’s face, and then she turned her head away, shaking it. “Everyone thought she was kind of crazy, I guess. The ones who wanted to see it.”

Did you?”

Want to see it?”

Did you know?”

She turned back toward me, but this time her expression was easy to read. “I should have done something that day, Patrick. I should have stayed and listened.”

That day. My stomach twisted into a knot. I struggled against my thoughts, pushed the words out slowly,“But you had no way of knowing…”

I knew,” she said, nodding, and then softer, “I knew. I was just…afraid.”

Afraid?”

Of the other kids. Of her. Of…everything, I guess. “ She looked down, hair behind the ear again. “I just left you there. Alone. It was all my fault.”

I lost Tracy’s voice and quite possibly my mind. The knot pulled tighter in my gut, and suddenly everything came rushing back to me. I was there again, living the nightmare. White light. White noise.

Patrick?”

I snapped back to the present, stared at her with what I knew was a dazed expression. The lump in my throat made it damned near impossible to speak, my voice coming out gritty and tight. “I’m fine.”

You sure?”

Yeah…look, I’d better go back upstairs.”

Patrick…”

Fine, really.” I attempted a smile, then pushed past her. Headed up the staircase, quickly, and straight for the bathroom.

I locked the door behind me. My back against the wall, eyes closed, I took in a long steadying breath. A thousand thoughts rushed through my head. A thousand memories.

Then I pulled the pad from my pocket, and with shaky hands, wrote the word vicious fifty times.

Chapter Two

In The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas wrote that houses have souls and faces like men, and their exteriors carry the imprint of their characters. To me, our house always looked dark and ominous, a shadowy projection of the horrors inside its silent, secretive walls. As a kid, I remember staring out through those dreary windows and wondering whether the world outside was as awful as the one within. Bad memories lived there. Horrible ones.

I decided to take Warren’s advice and go back anyway—not for sentiment, as he’d suggested, but to rid myself of those memories. I needed to go through the place, chase away my ghosts, and then walk out that front door one last time.

But going inwas another story.

I stood in the doorway and felt my nerves jangle with slow-burning apprehension. Bad vibes seemed to rock this place from its foundation. I stepped in, stopped, then looked around.

She’d done most of her dying here before moving on to Hospice, but as I walked in, I could still feel a sense of approaching death hanging heavy in the air. Stillness, but not the kind that lent itself to peace or tranquility—no, this was something different, a life waiting to end and a peculiar numbness that seemed to resonate throughout.

The kind that gnaws at your insides.

Warren had obviously hired a cleaning crew to wipe away the postmortem effects, everything in its place, not a speck of dirt anywhere. An oxygen tank covered in plastic stood in one corner; in another, an empty trash container sat on the counter. I gazed at the bed: neatly made. A sanitized version of hell, I thought, then moved on.

I peered into my former bedroom and shook my head. She’d wasted little time converting it into her sewing room once I’d left for college.

I put your things in the garage,” she’d said matter-of-factly at Thanksgiving break. “Take what you want. The rest goes to Goodwill.”

Great to see you, son.

Moving on to the living room, I gave it a quick scan and then a drawn-out sigh; nothing ever seemed to change here. Those tattered drapes. The outdated television. I thought about that damned music box, and a sharp pang of anger flickered, then fizzled. The thing meant more to her than I did.

As filthy-rich as my uncle was, I never understood why my mother insisted we live in such lower-middle class squalor. Was it to elicit sympathy? Because she never thought she deserved better? Warren offered repeatedly to get us out of here.

Camilla,” he’d plead, “let me help you. You don’t have to live this way.”

Don’t need any charity,” she’d say in her typically dismissive tone. “I can manage on my own.”

So we existed on a meager income, inside a two-bedroom box, and in a part of town that people kindly referred to as “undesirable.” Our threadbare, second-hand furniture had the smell of other people’s lives—ones I was sure had been much better than mine—and I wore clothes to school that had outlived their usefulness on someone else’s back before landing on mine.

You don’t need fancy new clothes,” she’d tell me in her singsong voice. “What you have is just fine.”

God, I hated that woman.

Warren did his best to help, gifting me with what she wouldn’t provide, but I always sensed it was more because he felt sorry for me than anything else. He never really succeeded in being the stand-in male figure in my life, seemed he always radiated more pity than love. I knew the difference—most kids do—so I grew up resenting his misplaced, half-hearted attempts.

And I resented even more that he could have put an end to my mother’s abuse, but didn’t. Instead, he chose to look the other way, always immersed in his political career, running here, running there to God-knows-where.

My real dad died when I was barely a year old, and I only knew three things about him. His name was Richard, he had a bad heart—which eventually killed him—and he worked in the textile business. As a kid, it took me a while to figure out what that actually meant. For the longest time I thought he remodeled bathrooms.

Oh, make that four things. He left my mother with the burden of raising me alone, as she reminded me constantly.

When I turned eighteen, I put as much distance between her and me as I could. Warren offered to foot the bill for college, and I ran with it, seeing it as my one-way ticket out of hell. I moved as far away as I could. Odd, though, how distance doesn’t always separate us from the bad memories and associations as much as we’d like. Even now that she was dead, her effects still lingered.

I opened the basement door and turned on the light—or tried. A naked yellow bulb dangling from the ceiling flickered a few times before going dark. I flipped the switch up and down, hoping to give it life, but with no luck: blown.

Found an old flashlight in the kitchen junk drawer, but true to form, she’d let the batteries die. It seemed as if nothing here was meant to survive.

The clock radio on the kitchen windowsill stole my attention, and I froze. Bad memories, everywhere. I couldn’t believe she still had the damned thing. I reached for it, pulled the batteries out, then slammed it into the sink. Felt a note of satisfaction hearing it crack.

Got the flashlight working and headed for the basement steps.

It looked as if nobody had been here in years. Old sewing equipment hugged one wall: an antiquated machine, three tailor’s dummies, and enough spools of thread to mend a small nation. Her sewing hobby never really got off the ground, despite all the supplies she’d picked up at garage sales. The floor was strewn with boxes covered in dust, cobwebs stretched between them, some labeled with marker, some not at all.

I pulled the lids up on a few but found nothing other than a whole lot of junk inside. Dozens of dusty, colored bottles in one; another was filled to the brim with packages of crackers, expiration date: October, 1983.

What on earth was she planning on doing with them?

Finding anything useful here was an exercise in futility. But then as I headed back toward the steps, the flashlight beam connected with an open box, and I could see an old book that looked vaguely familiar. I pulled it out. Gulliver’s Travels, one of my favorites. Curiosity got the best of me, so I examined the rest of the contents. More books from high school, a jumble of papers, and small objects that I couldn’t see clearly in the dim light. I tucked the box under my arm, then headed upstairs.

As I reached the top of the steps, Warren moved into the doorway. I jumped. He stood, staring at me.

Scared the hell out of me,” I said, feeling my heart thump a few beats ahead.

Find anything?” he asked, eyeing the box under my arm.

I felt an odd twinge of defensiveness. “Just some old books.”

He nodded slowly as if measuring my words. I broke eye contact by glancing down at the box I was holding, keeping my attention on it as I spoke. “Not much down there except a whole lot of clutter, really.”

Quite a pack rat, your mother was. She never liked to throw anything away. It drove me crazy when we were kids. I think she got it from our mother. She was like that too, you know.”

Small talk. I offered a dim smile.

You know,” he continued, staring off into the kitchen, his voice tempered with cautious diplomacy, “I was just thinking I could drive you to the airport if you’d like. Maybe get a bite to eat or something on the way.”

Appreciate it,” I said, glancing at my watch, “but I don’t have much time. My flight leaves in an hour-and-a-half, and I’ve got a rental car to return.”

He mouthed—but did not say—oh, while nodding, as if suddenly getting the point. “No worries, then,” he said, a little too brightly. “I just thought maybe—”

Some other time,” I answered back quickly, realizing I was squeezing the box tightly against my thigh. I caught myself eyeing the door, the one I wanted to walk out of for the last time, the one Warren was now blocking.

He stared at the floor and pursed his lips. I knew the move all too well—a mannerism he’d perfected throughout his political career, one he often used to give the impression he was thinking things over. “There’s this matter of the house,” he finally said. “I’m putting it up for sale. I’d like you to have the proceeds.”

I shook my head quickly. “That won’t be necessary, Warren, I—”

No, really,” he interrupted, “I’d like for you to have the money.”

No, really,” I said, feeling my anger swell. “I really don’t want it. Give the money to charity. It’ll be the one good deed that ever came out of her.”

He looked at the floor again, pushed out a heavy sigh.

You know, Patrick…” You know, Patrick always meant trouble coming.

I realize you and your mother didn’t always see eye to eye.”

Never,” I replied.

What?”

I said, never. We never did.”

But she was my sister, and she’s dead now,” he said, his tone climbing the ladder of edginess, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d try and show some respect for her when you’re around me.”

Respect?” That was it. I’d had enough. Enough of Warren, enough of her and this house, enough of everything. All I wanted now, was out. “You see, here’s the thing, Warren: you have to give respect to get it, and she never gave one ounce of it. Not one.”

But she was your mother.”

Barely,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.” I pushed past him and headed for the door.

Patrick!” he shouted. “Don’t leave this way. I don’t want bad feelings.”

You’re about thirty years too late for that, Warren.” As I jerked the door open, the box slipped from under my arm to the floor, and everything inside scattered. I got down on my hands and knees, started hastily shoving items back inside.

Warren hurried over. “Let me help you with that.”

I don’t need your help!” I said. “I don’t need it at all! You’ve done enough!”

He knelt beside me anyway, and we both grabbed for Gulliver’s Travels at the same time. I gritted my teeth and yanked the book away with force, startling him. He held my gaze for a moment in total silence.

I scrambled to my feet, stood, rubbing my wrist.

Are you hurt?” Warren asked.

A scratch. It’s nothing.”

Warren stood up, “Let me take a look.”

It’s fine.”

He reached for my hand. “Seriously, Patrick, let me—”

I pulled it away. “I said it’s fine. I’m not going to bleed to death. Okay?”

But you could…you know you could.”

It’s not that deep,” I said, turning toward the door, anxious to get out of this house and away from Warren.

Patrick!” he shouted to me, “Wait a minute!”

No, Warren.”

But…”

I said, no. It’s over.”

He started to say something else, but I didn’t hear it; I was already out the door. Walking away. Done.

Finally. Once and for all.

Inside the car, I immediately reached into my shirt pocket, then panicked. I’d left my pen and pad at the hotel.

Breathing heavily now, sweat crawling down the back of my neck, I began rifling through the glove compartment like a madman looking for a fix. Found an old map and a broken pencil, the point flattened. With shaky hands I scrawled fragile three times, barely readable, before the pencil tip broke off. I hurled it against the windshield as hard as I could, then felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

I closed my eyes and dropped my head onto the steering wheel, keeping it there for a long time.

If I never saw Black Lake again, it would be too soon.

Chapter Three

From my earliest memories, my mother’s moments of affection were as fleeting as they were inconsistent. Not many encouraging smiles or gentle touches, and the ones she gave often felt flat and shallow. She carried herself as if to discourage human contact, if not block it entirely. When I was young, I’d often grab for her hand as we walked, but she’d quickly pull it out of reach; the reaction seemed almost instinctual, like flinching from a blow or pulling a finger from a hot flame. Even as we moved through stores or crowded streets, I’d often find myself several feet behind, chasing after her, trying to keep up.

Once before bedtime in a half knee-jerk, half desperate bid for affection, I threw my arms around her; but I might as well have been reaching around a giant boulder, hard and cold. Her entire body grew stiff and unyielding, and she turned her head away.

Feeling rejected and confused, I pulled back and gazed at her.

I have a cold,” she said, rising and moving quickly toward the door, cool and detached. Then she turned off the light and left my room.

I don’t think I understood her rejection or its impact on me at the time. I thought all mothers kept their affection under lock and key. In my world, it was normal to want love and not get it, no different from wanting a toy in a store and being told we couldn’t afford it. My mother didn’t indulge in affection because emotionally, she was bankrupt.

But as I grew older and watched other kids and their parents, I began realizing my world was terribly out of whack. Of course, knowing this, I did what any kid would do: I blamed myself, often wondering what it was about me she found so appalling.

Then, one day I got my answer.

We were driving home from church. Something had gotten under her skin—as was often the case—and for most of the day, her mood veered between silent sulking one moment and angry ranting the next.

I hate it when you comb your hair like that,” she said with a snarl, alternating her glance between the road and me. “That part in the middle. God, Patrick!”

What’s wrong with it?” I asked, now studying my reflection in the side view mirror.

She gave a flip laugh that pushed my question into the category of preposterous. “You look like a horse’s ass, that’s what’s wrong with it.”

The comment stung, and tears filled my eyes. I know she saw them, but she didn’t appear the least bit concerned.

We drove on in silence for a while, the tears streaming down my face. And then I had to know. “Why don’t you love me?” I practically blurted the words out through my sobs.

What?”

Love me,” I said, “How come you can’t?”

She fell silent for a moment, keeping her attention on the road, then let out an exasperated sigh.

Because, Patrick … quite simply, you can be rather unlovable.”

Continued….

Click on the title below to download the entire book and keep reading

The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller

by Andrew E. Kaufman

Like thrillers? Then we think you’ll love this free excerpt from our Kindle Nation Daily Thriller of the Week by the author of FLOWERS FROM BERLIN, Noel Hynd’s REVENGE: MANHUNT IN PARIS! – Just $2.99 – or FREE via Kindle Lending Library


Just the other day we announced that Noel Hynd’s suspense-filled REVENGE: MANHUNT IN PARIS! was our new Thriller of the Week and the sponsor of thousands of great bargains in the thriller, mystery, and suspense categories: over 200 free titles, over 600 quality 99-centers, and thousands more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!

Now we’re back to offer our weekly free Thriller excerpt, and we’re happy to share the news that this terrific read is still just $2.99 for Kindle Nation readers during its TOTW reign, or FREE via Kindle Lending Library!

by Noel Hynd
4.6 stars – 8 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:

US Air Force Lt. Richard Silva’s hell on earth begins in the fall of 1970 when his plane is shot down over North Vietnam. Silva is captured and taken to a POW camp where he is turned over to a shadowy interrogator who specializes in the systematic torture of American prisoners. Miraculously, Silva survives and returns to the US.

He finds an America that is profoundly different from the country he left. But America isn’t the only thing that has changed. Silva’s mind has been horribly altered. For him there is only one way out: Find the man who tortured him. Find him and kill him. With only a few clues to his enemy’s true identity, Silva embarks on a manhunt.

Silva quickly penetrates a shadowy underworld of politicians, criminals and intelligence agents in New York, Washington and ultimately in Paris. In France, he further burrows into a nether world of professional killers, political extremists, cops and assassins. Along the way, he finds romance with a beautiful young artist and rediscovers his own humanity, all the while drawing closer to the man he must murder in order to redeem his own soul.

This is a 2011 revised version of a novel originally published under the title “REVENGE” to rave reviews in 1976.

Reviews

“A notch above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world….”

“Noel Hynd knows the ins and outs of Washington’s agencies both public and private.” Publishers Weekly

“A Tense Bloody trail to a grim climax!” – Liverpool Daily Post

“An Intricate spine chiller….Bloody good!” – NY Times

“Ingenious and fast paced without a wasted word.” – Chicago Tribune

“A Powerful Book!” – The Scotsman

“Entertaining and absorbing!” – Birmingham Evening Mail

“Invites Comparison with ‘The Day of The Jackel’ – Boston Herald

Reader Comments

“Just read ‘Revenge: Payback in Paris’. Terrific read and if you’re a fan of Robert Ludlum, Lee Child or Daniel Silva, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s very gripping, well researched with some interesting twists.It’s a classic ‘one guy on his own attempting to right a wrong’ kind of story, but it keeps you interested throughout and is hard to put down. You always want to know ‘what happens next?”
P. Schmideg, Amazon – 5 stars

“This is a very sharp thriller, written in the 1970’s when stories like The French Connection were before the public. I read this years ago and then updated to Kindle. Still a fine book, slam bang pacing and a fast exciting read”
Peter Wilhite, Amazon – 5 stars

“I just finished Revenge and I have discovered a new author. I can’t wait to read more of Noel Hynd’s books.”
Rita Marie, Amazon – 5 stars

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

Prologue

On October 14, 1970, the pilot, co-pilot and six crew members of a United States Air Force bomber buckled themselves into position in their aircraft. They reviewed their assigned mission in the undeclared war waged by the United States against the Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam. The bomber’s engines roared to life. Moments later, accompanied by a fighter escort, the jet was airborne.

 

The airplane thundered eastward above the Pacific Ocean where Americans have warred with Asians for the better part of a century. It flew in its proper formation northwards from Guam, its home base, towards its intended targets forty miles south of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.

 

Soviet ships, cruising in the international waters around Guam, spotted the formation of American aircraft. The ships radioed to their ideological allies. The peasants and militia­men in North Vietnam, rushing to their battle stations, knew when the sky above them would be heavy with enemy bombers.

 

The airplanes neared Hanoi at ten minutes past nine, Hanoi time. Ground anti-aircraft crews in the jungles and towns south of the North Vietnamese capital fired in well-disciplined patterns at the airborne invaders above them. Forty miles south of Hanoi, just above the hamlet of Den Bing, the giant bomber was racked with the hot exploding lead shot skyward from the defending guns below. The giant plane convulsed with the hit and began to lurch at an altitude of 45,000 feet. It became quickly and deathly appar­ent to the pilot and crew that their plane would crash within seconds.

 

Four of the eight-man crew were unable to eject. They died when the plane exploded in a thick forest. Major Ronald Mecili, the pilot and a veteran of forty-one pre­vious missions, parachuted into a watery rice field where he imme­diately disentangled himself from his parachute. A hundred meters away, Airman First Class Leonard Lewis, a black man from Memphis, landed within sight of Mecili. The men, seeing each other’s chutes, crawled and scrambled to­wards each other, keeping their heads and bodies low so as not to make an alluring target.

 

Captain William DeMeo landed bruised and battered but not seriously injured two miles away. Captain DeMeo was disengag­ing himself from his chute’s confining cords when Lieutenant Richard Silva, at twenty-two the youngest member of the mission, hit the ground.

 

Silva winced in pain as soon as his body, dropping sixteen feet per second, crashed into the branches of a tree. But he did not know the extent of the injury until he had slashed himself loose from the tree and cracked down on the flat rocks below.

 

The left side of his uniform was soaking with blood. His hip­bone and upper left leg had been splintered. The broken bones protruded through the torn flesh of his hip. He attempted to move. But the pain tormented him with an agonizing throbbing that made him wish he had ridden his aircraft to its fiery destruction miles away.

 

He gasped for life and tried a second time to move. When he knew he would be unable to stand, he attempted to crawl. He managed to pull himself along the ground with his hands, desperately seek­ing to reach a clump of bushes that might conceal him. Surely enemy soldiers would come looking for him. Richard was too obsessed with pain and fear to consider that the remains of his parachute, hanging splendidly from that tree, served as an excel­lent marker. The enemy would know just where to find him.

 

A dozen local soldiers came upon Richard less than two hours later. They beat him with heavy sticks. It wasn’t until they saw his leg that they knew he was already disabled. Richard thought he would be killed.

 

A local nurse was eventually called, and Richard was given ban­dages. Then two black-clad women made a splint out of a bamboo tree. His leg was placed in the splint, and they were beginning to carry off their captive when the sky was again rumbling with the roar of airplanes.

 

The loss of the bomber and its crew had set off a noisy rescue attempt. Richard’s leg, hip and groin were torturing him. His mouth was bone dry, and he pleaded for water. But because of the rescue planes above, his captors gagged him and temporarily abandoned him in a forest.

 

He lay there for five hours. He had no way of knowing that as he lay in agony under a tropical tree at the side of a dirt road, a U.S. air rescue team was pulling to safety two of the other three sur­vivors of the crash.

 

Major Ronald Mecili and Airman First Class Leonard Lewis were plucked from the jungle. Mecili had a broken arm. Lewis, wearing around his neck a figa given to him by his sister in Tennes­see, had escaped with nothing more than bad bruises and a few cuts. Lieutenant Richard Silva and Captain William DeMeo were, after an arduous five-hour search, declared missing in action.

 

Once the rescue planes had departed, Richard was taken from the forest by the soldiers and placed in an old Citroën truck that was a relic of the French campaigns of the 1950s. He was driven north on rocky rough roads. He was given enough water to pre­serve his sanity.

 

As the truck travelled through villages towards Hanoi, he was pelted by bottles, sticks and rocks. In three days, during which his wound remained untreated and his torment intensified, he was delivered to the Hoa Lo prison camp in Hanoi. Richard Silva was then asked to sign an admission of war crimes against the people of North Vietnam.

 

He refused.

 

Since prisoners were to be broken immediately if possible, Richard was beaten by guards and denied medical attention for several days. He was allowed a subsistence level of food and water and was not allowed to sleep for more than two hours at a time. His captors kept him isolated and continued to demand a confession. After ten days, delirious and beginning to come down with fever, Richard scribbled a few words onto a paper pushed in front of him.

 

“The United States,” he scribbled with a trembling feeble hand, “must end the killing.”

 

For his “confession,” Richard was permitted to see a doctor. His hip and leg were placed in old wooden braces, and he was given shots of antibiotics. He was then locked in a cell with a second prisoner. Richard thought he was hallucinating when he recognized Captain William DeMeo. But it was DeMeo. Alive and, considering the circumstances, unharmed.

 

Eventually the brace was removed. The wound, however, had not properly healed. The infected leg swelled relentlessly until Captain DeMeo, trying to keep his comrade alive, pierced the wound and tried to drain it.

 

Richard lay motionless by day and then shivered through the freezing nights at Hoa Lo, the camp that the prisoners-with the grim sense of humor that was critical to survival-had renamed the “Hanoi Hilton.” During those shivering nights, DeMeo and Silva slept together and shared a single torn linen sheet. It was DeMeo’s care as well as Richard’s own intense will to resist that kept him alive.

 

Richard gradually neared death over that winter of 1970, his body in endless agony. His strength ebbed. His wounds remained open and badly infected. Captain DeMeo frequently fashioned makeshift bandages from odd bits of cloth found around the prison. It was only his minimal medical attention that separated Richard from death by blood poisoning.

 

That following spring, in April of 1971, Richard’s pain began to subside. For no apparent reason he was taken to another cell where he was held alone. Then he was called before a lean, sad-eyed Vietnamese interrogator whom the prisoners nicknamed Grumpy, an understated and ironic comment on the man’s vicious disposition.

 

Grumpy spoke a smattering of cracked and in­comprehensible English, but his command of the language-or lack of it-did not prevent him from being understood.

 

Grumpy began by speaking politely to Richard. He told Richard that if Richard would cooperate, his name would be placed on the list of prisoners of war. Richard had parents and a sister back in Massachusetts. They had no idea, six months after his plane had crashed, whether Richard was dead or alive.

 

“What am I supposed to do?” Richard asked.

 

“We pick an American to tell facts about the war,” said Grumpy in fractured English.

 

“Tell facts about Vietnamese people struggle against Yankee imperialism.”

 

“Shove it,” muttered Richard.

 

“You must cooperate,” said Grumpy.

 

Richard, lowering his gaze to avoid the piercing eyes in that mean sunken face, muttered a further word that was barely audible to Grumpy.

 

“Never,” he said.

 

Grumpy boxed Richard on the skull. Then Grumpy summoned two assistants from the next room. Richard’s arms were held behind his back and iron manacles were placed on his wrists. There were screws on the manacles. The screws were tightened right down to the bone. Then a rope was looped around Richard’s arms and his arms were pulled tight. The procedure continued until Richard passed out. Then when he was revived, the process was repeated on his swollen ankles.

 

“You must surrender and sign a statement,” Grumpy insisted as he stood like a vulture above Richard’s tortured body.

 

“Never,” Richard panted again in agony. He repeated over and over in his mind the words to songs, hymns, or prayers. Anything he could think of. He was made to kneel for two days. He refused to break. He felt it his duty to resist.

 

Then on the following morning, Richard was first faced with the Imp.

 

Grumpy returned with a small man with an olive complexion and dark almost catlike gleaming eyes. He was European and spoke French with an odd accent. Some of the prisoners called him Jacques out of deference to the language that he spoke with the Vietnamese. Other prisoners called him the Imp, a name that was more appropriate for the fiendish excesses of the short dark man.

 

Others had even less flattering names. But although none of the prisoners knew the Imp’s precise name, identity, or origin, they knew what he was. A torture expert.

Richard was left alone in a cell with the Imp.

 

“No one cares you not talking,” said the Imp in readily under­standable English.

 

“I care,” muttered Richard.

 

“You are a prisoner,” said the Imp. “We can let you live or let you die.”

 

Richard remained silent. He began to think that this would be the final stage of his captivity. He was too stubborn to give in, too duty-bound not to resist. He would never allow himself, he thought, to be turned into a propaganda tool by his enemy half a world away from the peaceful beaches of Cape Cod where he had been raised.

 

“You will have to cooperate,” said the Imp. “It will be so much less painful for you. So much easier for everyone.”

 

“What do you want?” Richard muttered.

 

“You will sign and read a statement,” said the Imp. “Sign and read in front of film cameras.”

 

Richard looked up at the Imp. Then he spat into the Imp’s face.

 

The Imp pounded Richard across the head with a fist. Richard was made to kneel again on that torturously painful side that sup­ported the broken hip. As he crawled to a kneeling position, the Imp smashed him again across the face. Teeth were loosened. Blood ran down his cheeks. Richard thought he would be beaten to death. He wasn’t far wrong.

 

The Imp placed Richard’s hands in those manacles behind his back. The Imp tightened the screws until the flesh was broken and the screws stabbed through to the bone. Then a rope was strung between Richard’s wrists. The Imp, holding Richard down with a foot on his shoulder, pulled the rope upward until Richard would scream in agony, thinking the Imp was going to pull his arms right out of their sockets. Eventually the Imp kicked Richard over onto the floor again.

 

“Now you surrender?” asked the Imp.

 

“Never,” said Richard between loosened teeth. “Never.”

 

The Imp continued the torture through that day, enjoying it. The next day consisted of hourly sessions of the same. Then the Imp substituted a hot wire for the rope. Richard continued to resist, even though he was nearly senseless.

 

For the four days that followed, Richard was beaten with a wooden club every hour around the clock. He was not allowed to sleep. By this time his body was a red and white sea of welts, scars and cuts.

 

Then on the morning of the fifth day, Richard began to break. He agreed to do whatever the Imp wanted.

 

For two days he was left alone, and a doctor was even sent to see him. The visible bruises and scars on his face were attended to so that they would not be conspicuous for a camera. He began to think. He knew that he had agreed to surrender and do what was asked of him. But he had not done it yet. Richard began again to resist.

 

He refused to discuss a statement when the Imp brought him a pencil and paper. In a rage, the Imp kicked him in the face. Then the Imp ordered him transferred.

 

Richard was dragged by the leg to another cell, which consisted of concrete on three sides and iron bars on the fourth. He was beaten inside that cell for several more days. Then one morning the Imp told him he was being given a last chance.

 

Another American soldier was placed on his knees outside the iron bars of Richard’s cell. The soldier was handcuffed and bound at the ankles. He too had been beaten mercilessly.

 

Richard looked at the soldier. Had Richard been capable of tears at that point he would have shed them. He recognized William DeMeo as that other soldier. One of the guards was standing over DeMeo, holding a pistol to his head.

 

“You want to save your friend’s life?” asked the Imp.

 

Richard looked up with imploring eyes that were crazed with fear and pain.

 

“You write a statement,” said the Imp. “Now.”

 

DeMeo managed to raise his head and look at Richard from the other side of the bars. DeMeo shook his head slowly and resolutely at Richard, indicating that Richard should not cooperate.

 

Richard’s gaunt searching eyes stared at the man who had saved his life. Then he looked back up at the Imp. The Imp gave a signal to the guard. Richard heard a short cracking pop. Then another. DeMeo had been executed. His body slumped to the dirt, his head ripped obscenely open by two bullets. Richard stared at his friend’s body.

 

“We leave his body here,” said the Imp. “You look at it until you make statement.”

Richard felt his sanity escaping him. The Imp was winning. Richard began to curse himself for not talking. He began to wish he, too, would be executed. The Imp was right. No one cared he was resisting.

 

Beatings began again the next day. Then the Imp promised to bring another American soldier to the same spot where DeMeo had been executed.

 

“We shoot one man a day until you make statement,” said the Imp. The next morning when a battered young blond soldier was dragged into the same spot, Richard cracked. He said he had talk before a camera.

 

“You keep word this time,” said the Imp. “If not, we kill ten more soldiers.”

 

Richard then wrote a statement that he was eventually forced to read and sign before a camera. The sequence was then released by the North Vietnamese to the world press. In many places around the world it was carried on television. In Massachusetts, it was the first indication to those who knew Richard that he was still alive. The date was June 10, 1971.

 

Richard was kept in solitary confinement even after writing an obviously contrived confession, reading it and signing it. He was given better food, however, but his leg was still painful. And even though the specter of the executed William DeMeo haunted him incessantly and almost destroyed his own will to live, Richard finally brought himself to beg for what he really wanted.

 

A doctor.

 

In August of 1971, he was placed in a hospital near the prison. X-rays were taken of his leg. The doctors discussed amputation, but decided against it. The shattered hip-bone and battered upper leg then received its first real medical treatment by the North Vietnamese doctors. It was ten months after the wound was first inflicted.

 

As his leg healed over the course of months, Richard gradually regained the ability to walk. First he could struggle on two legs with a cane. Then as more time went by, he was able to walk with a limp. The doctors told him the limp would last. Perhaps forever. It would be his lasting punishment for bombing civilians, they suggested.

 

Able to reason rationally again, Richard became aware of a new room in the Hanoi Hilton prison camp known to the prisoners as Disneyland. It was in this room where certain prisoners were now placed in chains. They were unable to move their hands or feet for days at a time. It was in this room, Richard knew, that the Imp was con­tinuing his own brand of warfare.

 

The rumor around the prison asserted that the Imp had tortured to death a dozen men in Disneyland. The sudden absence of those soldiers after sessions with the Imp confirmed the rumors in a circumstantial way. All twelve names would remain forever missing in action.

 

Eventually Richard acquired a cellmate, an army lieutenant from Mount Vernon, New York. The man had been captured the preceding month, September of 1972. He was silent and in shock much of the time he was imprisoned. Richard struggled to help the man retain his sanity, just as DeMeo had struggled to help Richard. The lieutenant, a gaunt, intense young soldier named Howard McKiernan, talked sometimes coherently about the rumors that the war was almost over. There was an election com­ing in the United States. Surely, said McKiernan in one of his more lucid moments, the war would end before the election and the prisoners would be home by Christmas.

 

Yet there were certain prisoners who were not destined to go home.

 

On one October day, as rumors of the war’s conclusion buoyed the spirits of the POWs, the Imp attempted to break their will a final time.

 

The Imp singled out four men. They were placed in cells visible tothe others. Then, in what was to serve as an example, the fourwere subjected to wires, ropes, razor blades, shards of glass, flog­gings and starvation. Their anguished screams and groans were audible throughout the camp.

 

Then, after eight days, the four men were marched, pushed or dragged to the center of the camp. In full view of their com­patriots, each of the four men took a rifle bullet through the brain. All four times, at close range, the Imp pulled the trigger. The last of the four to have his brains blown out was Lieutenant Howard McKiernan.

 

Then, with a spirit of hopelessness again prevalent at the camp, the Imp disappeared. Slowly, a few new prisoners arrived. And gradually the talk of the war’s conclusion returned. The torture sessions lessened with the Imp gone. Then they stopped completely.

 

The men knew. Something political was happening. Less than six months later, the men were going home. For almost all of them the agony was finally over. But not for Richard Silva. Throughout his torture, throughout his imprisonment, and throughout those executions, one thought alone had been growing with maniacal obsession.

 

Richard would find the Imp. And kill him.

Part One

 

Chapter 1

 

For Richard, the freedom that followed his release from prison was tempered by his obsessive desire to begin his mission of revenge. There was much for which Richard held the Imp accountable.

There was the personal torture. There was the execution of William DeMeo. There were the sixteen other murdered soldiers. And there were two other related deaths. Those of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Silva. Richard’s parents.

 

In April of 1971 Raymond Silva, a carpenter who lived on Cape Cod, had died quietly and painlessly in his sleep. Richard’s father died an unhappy man. Richard’s name had never appeared on any prisoner of war list until July of 1971. Raymond Silva died thinking his only son was dead. Then four months later a woman with her mind on a grocery list failed to obey a stop sign at the access to Route Six in Massachusetts.

 

The woman hurtled through the stop sign with her Ford station wagon and sideswiped the car driven by Mrs. Raymond Silva, fifty-four, of Hyannis, recent widow and mother of a prisoner of war. Mrs. Silva was laid to rest beside her husband in a peaceful old cemetery in Provincetown, just yards away from some of the country’s first settlers. It fell to Richard’s only sister, Maureen, to inform her brother of the dual tragedy.

 

Richard learned of his parents’ deaths by long distance tele­phone upon returning to Collins Air Force base in March of 1973. The cheering children and the enthusiastic flag-waving adults who greeted the returning prisoners were hollow echoes to Richard. Richard knew that much of what he had loved as a child was gone. He did not want it to be. He would like to have seen his parents again for five more minutes.

 

It wasn’t fair. For this, too, the Imp would pay.

 

“I guess we just have to pick things up and continue as best we can,” Maureen said when she saw her brother for the first time. “What else can we do?”

 

Richard was silent. After his return, he was silent to many questions. Silent, but not unresponsive.

 

Richard came home again to Cape Cod, although coming home again was something that Rich­ard would never be able to do. Home was where his parents were. Yet the house he had grown up in had been sold. There was a stranger sleeping in the upstairs bedroom where his mother had once hung white curtains and where his father used to discuss the Red Sox with him. Richard went back once to see the house. He swore he would never do it again.

 

His sister, three years his junior, had married a man one year his senior, a bland, inoffensive, and likeable fellow who hadn’t served in the army for reasons about which Richard had never cared to ask. Maureen Silva, who was now Mrs. Frederick Downes, had prepared a room in her new home for her older brother to stay in “for as long as it takes to get resettled.” Whatever that meant.

 

Frederick Downes, who did something involving numbers in a Hyannis bank, had no objections to the brother-in-law he’d never met moving in indefinitely. Downes, faceless and boring, was a generous man, except with the bank’s money.

 

In the first days and weeks back in Massachusetts, Richard would borrow his sister’s car and drive to a deserted section of the Provincetown shore line. Then he would walk. Alone. And with the limp that was his lasting memento of the war, he would also think. He would determine elaborate schemes for tracking down the Imp.

 

As the days went by, fantasy turned to practicality. Richard would ponder ways in which he could identify and then find the Imp. Each time he devised a method, he would examine it a second time. With his methodical, calculating and obsessive mind, he would pick apart each plan until it became impractical.

 

One conclusion was clear. He would never find the Imp without help. Whose help? Anyone’s. What Richard needed was a place to begin.

 

“You’re quiet again,” said Maureen. She, her husband, and her brother sat in the living room of the modest grey-shingled Hyannis house in late April of 1973. On the television, Walter Cronkite explained the instruments to be used on an impending space mission.

 

Waste of money, Richard thought, looking at the screen. Then he turned to answer his sister. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. ‘That’s all.”

 

“You really shouldn’t dwell on what it was like over there,” she said, alluding to his imprisonment.

 

“I was thinking about the future. Just the future.”

 

“Oh,” she said. She turned her attention back to the television. Downes’ attention had never swerved from it. Richard reached beside him and picked up a newspaper. It was his habit to read everything he could find. He wanted to know what had happened in all the time he was gone. And he wanted to know why it had happened.

 

On the seventh page of the Boston Globe a drawing caught his eye. It was the type of line drawing that police artists sketch from descriptions given to them by the living victims, if any, of crimes. The drawing was the likeness of a man who was subsequently arrested for a series of thirteen rapes in the greater Boston area. Beside the drawing was the man’s actual photograph.

 

“Boston hasn’t changed a bit,” Richard noted wryly. “Still has the best sex crimes in the United States.”

 

But instead of dismissing the article as he might often have, Richard continued to read. The article was about a police artist named Kermit Kelly. Kelly, in the Boston police headquarters building on Berkeley Street, sketched six to ten faces per day, compiling them from descriptions given by witnesses or victims. Often the drawings proved valuable in solving crimes. Often they did not. But always, said the article, Kelly provided the police somewhere to begin.

 

Somewhere to begin. A drawing.

 

Richard read the one column on page seven and then turned on to page thirty-four where the article continued. He read that Kelly had once aspired to be a commercial artist, but had taken a job with the police force out of financial necessity in the early fifties. And although a new computerized device was imperiling the jobs of police artists like Kelly, there continued to be a need for officers who could transform a witness’s words into pictures.

 

Richard turned back to page seven. He looked at the drawing Kelly had made. He looked at the photograph of the arrested man.

 

The drawing made the man look heavier than he was. The eyes were narrower. But the nose approached perfection and the hair style was the same. In all, the likeness was remarkably accurate.

 

Richard folded down the paper and laid it alongside his chair.

 

“What are you reading?” his sister asked.

 

“Do me a favor,” he answered.

 

“What?” she replied.

 

“Lend me the car again tomorrow,” he said.

 

Downes turned and looked at Richard.

 

“Where are you going?” she asked.

 

“Boston.”

 

“Should I ask why?”

 

“I might have a job lined up,” he lied. “I don’t know yet. I have to go into Boston to see a few people.”

 

“Why didn’t you say so?” she asked.

 

“I’ll have someone else drive me to work,” Maureen said. “Take the car.”

Chapter 2

 

Richard drove from Hyannis to Boston in less than two hours. Upon arrival in Boston, he bought a city map. He found the location of the main police station on Berkeley Street, the building in which Sergeant Kelly could be found. It took another half hour to inch through the traffic to Berkeley Street. Then there was the matter of parking.

 

“A lousy place to park illegally,” muttered Richard to himself. Every empty parking place was flanked with either a yellow line on the curb, a driveway, a hydrant or a bus stop sign. Richard finally left the car in a metered space on Berkeley Street. He walked to the police headquarters. It was a quarter past twelve. Lunch for some.

 

In the main lobby of the police headquarters there was a uniformed officer in a glass booth. It was impossible to pass him without being seen. No doubt, Richard thought skeptically, the Black Panthers would announce themselves before calling on the commissioner.

 

The uniformed cop in the booth was already watching Richard from behind a plate of apparently bulletproof glass. Richard noted that the police in American cities, like infantrymen, had to secure themselves against guerrilla attacks.

 

“Can I help you, sir?” asked the cop, diverted from the cross­word puzzle he had been working on.

 

Richard had aged in prison. Before he was captured few people had called him, “Sir.”

 

“I’m looking for Sergeant Kermit Kelly,” said Richard.

 

“Do you have an appointment?”

 

“No,” said Richard. “But it’s important.”

 

The officer eyed him and then picked up a black telephone. He dialed three numbers.

 

“Name?” asked the cop.

 

“McKiernan,” said Richard, choosing a name to match the occasion. “Howard McKiernan.” The young prisoner from Mount Vernon, Richard’s final cellmate, would never know that his name had been borrowed.

 

The officer in the glass booth mumbled something to Kelly. Then he looked up.

 

“What’s it about?” the cop asked.

 

“Sorry,” said Richard. “I’m only talking to Sergeant Kelly.”

 

“He’s on his lunch hour,” said the cop. “Can you come back at one thirty?”

 

“No,” said Richard. His response caught the guard and Kelly, who was on the other end of the line, by surprise.

 

“He says he can’t come back,” said the guard. Richard compli­mented himself on a good show of strength. The guard continued to speak on the telephone to Kelly. Then he put down the phone and looked up at Richard.

 

“Go on back,” said the cop. “Room oh-five-seven, ground floor. Take the corridor down there,” he added with an indication of his hand. “Take it all the way to the back. Kelly will talk to you now.”

 

“Good,” said Richard. “Thanks.”

 

The guard made no reply.

 

Richard crossed the concrete lobby and passed through the door that led to the east-wing corridor. Richard followed the grey hallway on the other side of the door and passed several small rooms, all numbered. Some doors were open. Others were not.

Through a few of the open doors Richard saw cops in blue shirt­sleeves sitting in rooms littered with papers, files, and battered cardboard coffee cups. Other uniformed police bent over files or mug-shot books. Richard followed the descending numbers on the doors until he came to one marked 057.

 

At a desk cluttered with pens, pencils and a half-eaten sandwich, was a red-haired, red-faced Irishman with a scowl on his face. Kelly was reading a newspaper as Richard entered the room. Kelly’s eyes were glued angrily to the coverage of the Bruins loss to the New York Rangers.

 

“Yes?” asked Kelly looking up suddenly.

 

“I’m looking for Sergeant Kelly,” said Richard.

 

“No one here by that name,” replied Kelly. Richard looked at the name plate on the desk. “I’m Detective Sergeant Kelly,” muttered Kelly with a mouthful of his sandwich. He slammed his newspaper onto the side of his desk. “And I’m also on my lunch hour.”

 

“This may come as a surprise to you,” said Richard calmly, “but I don’t really give a crap whether you’re on your lunch hour or not.”

 

Kelly looked at Richard through squinting eyes. “What’s your problem, kid?” Kelly finally said. “My day was complete before you came in.”

 

“I want you to do something for me,” said Richard, speaking in the regional Massachusetts accent that they shared.

 

“What?” asked Kelly.

 

“Draw a picture.”

 

“What are you, smart-assed or something?” snapped the cop. “I sit here all day and draw pictures.”

 

“Then I came to the right place.”

 

“You think I haven’t got enough to do?” Kelly asked. A patrol­man looked into the room, saw Kelly was busy, and left again. Kelly was about to call after him. But Richard spoke first.

 

“If we cut the comedy,” Richard said soberly, “I’ll tell you who I want a picture of.”

 

Kelly turned his attention back to Richard. “Before you waste your breath, have you reported the crime yet?”

 

“It didn’t happen inBoston,” said Richard.

 

“What are you bothering me for if it didn’t happen in Boston?”

 

“I’m bothering you because I need your help.”

 

“I can’t do anything until I get your case referred to me by Precinct Command. Even if some bastard raped and killed your paraplegic grandmother ten minutes ago, I can’t listen to you till Precinct Command tells me about it first.”

 

“That may be so,” said Richard calmly, “but I’m not leaving until I tell you about it.”

 

Kelly looked harshly at Richard, then shook his head.

 

“I get all the nuts. What the hell’s your problem?”

 

“I’m twenty-five years old,” said Richard, “and I just spent the last two and a half years of my life in a North Vietnamese shit-hole called Hoa Lo. You know it by the name of the Hanoi Hilton. I was there since my jet crashed in 1972.”

 

Kelly’s eyes drew a bead on Richard. “Are you leveling?” asked Kelly.

 

Richard nodded.

 

“What did you say your name was?” asked Kelly.

 

“Howard McKiernan,” said Richard.

 

“Keep talking,” said Kelly. “I’m almost starting to like you.”

 

The hard Irish eyes were softening. And as Richard began to tell the veteran cop about the Imp, about imprisonment, about torture and about Captain William DeMeo, he was acutely aware that Kelly was listening.

 

Richard, sensing now a fully sympathetic audience, dwelt on how the manacles screwed into the wrists and ankles and how twelve Americans were assumed to have been tortured to death by the Imp.

 

“The little gook bastard,” Kelly finally muttered when the story was concluded.

 

“He wasn’t a gook,” said Richard flatly. “He was Caucasian.”

 

The cop wrinkled his face in a gesture of both distaste and con­fusion. “White?” he asked.

 

“Most Caucasians are,” said Richard. “White and probably French. Some sort of European Communist. He pulled rank over those slopes. They’d obviously imported him from somewhere else to break people. As soon as peace was in sight, he cleared out. I figured that out after I got back to the United States.”

 

Kelly was nodding. Richard knew he had hooked him.

 

“But you don’t know who he was?” asked Kelly. “A name? A definite country?”

 

“Nothing,” said Richard. “Not even a picture. That’s why I’m here.”

 

There was an uneasy silence as Kelly looked at the young man seated before him.

 

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “You want me to draw him.”

 

Richard nodded.

 

“What for?” Kelly snapped.

 

The words leaped out of his mouth. “I’m going after the guy,” said Richard.

 

“What do you mean by ‘go after?'” asked Kelly.

 

“What do you think it means?” said Richard. “I have a score to settle.”

 

“Are you sure you came back from that place with all your screws nice and tight?” asked Kelly.

 

“The Air Force psychiatrists thought so,” said Richard, “even if you don’t. Look, are you willing to draw a picture of the guy or not? There must be other men who-”

 

“Now hold it, just hold it,” snapped Kelly as he held up a beefy hand. “I’ll let you have your picture. You just have to tell me one thing.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Are you planning to kill the bastard?” Kelly managed a sympathetic smile as he waited for Richard to respond.

 

“You can think what you like,” answered Richard. “But I’ll settle my score with him outside the city limits of Boston. It won’t concern you at all.”

 

“You’re serious, aren’t you,” mused Kelly in softer tones. “You’re out to kill the punk.” Kelly paused thoughtfully. “How are you going to find him?” he asked.

 

“I’m starting in Washington,” said Richard. “If I have information and a picture, I might be able to find out who he is. From there I might be able to find out where he is.”

 

“Son of a bitch,” muttered Kelly in open admiration. “The bastard deserves what­ever he gets from you.”

 

Richard restrained a smile.

 

“Start telling me about him,” said Kelly. “What about the shape of his head? A point? Any horns?”

 

Kelly picked up his pad and a pencil. He listened to Richard and began to draw.

 

Continued….

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REVENGE: Manhunt In Paris!

by Noel Hynd