Grit & Shadows Boxed Set
Page 26
And while some of the history in Jack’s research is true, much of it is not. As far as I know, there are no such artifacts as the ones I’ve invented here. Blending fact and fiction so that you can’t tell them apart is half the fun!
All that brings back valuable gems my feeble, crusty brain had lost. And there’s more of me in this story. Obviously, I had the wanderlust pretty badly. And I used to be really into Taoism, or at least my own interpretation of it, and would like to be again someday. Though, who’s got time for philosophy these days? I barely found time to reread this story in fourteen years.
But maybe it’s a blessing that I waited so long. The wide gap that has swallowed up my memories, then, can be bridged by rediscovering this novel and the story beneath it.
And if you’ve read this far, I hope you’re getting a little something from it, too!
Thanks for reading.
J. D. Brink
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Turn the page for a sneak preview of your next favorite book from J. D. Brink!
Sneak Preview: Hungry Gods
Colorful spandex, dark humor, and the zombie apocalypse. Hungry Gods is the flagship novel of an entire universe of superheroes for grown-ups.
Can rookie superhero Spitball stave off the zombie apocalypse?
The country’s premier superhero team is missing. So when a mutant monstrosity goes on the rampage, it’s Spitball to the rescue! He’s a third-string hero today, determined to be first-string tomorrow.
And the Army may be giving him just the chance he needs. Spitball has been invited to undertake a secret mission into America’s heartland. What he’s about to discover, however, is not a chance at stardom but a horror movie come to life...
Hungry Gods is a fast-paced adventure of costumed superheroes, government conspiracy theories, and flesh-eating zombies. It’s kick-in-the-spandex fun and excitement with Spider-Man’s sense of humor, Watchmen’s grit, and The Walking Dead’s appetite.
Grab it before it grabs you!
HUNGRY GODS: A Quick Glimpse
The light inside the black, bleak firehouse bay kicked on and the slow, metallic clicking of chains through pulleys broke the eerie silence. The faster zombies outside noticed right away and by the time the door was two feet off the ground, there were several knobby, scraped up knees waiting on the other side of it.
Seconds later, waist high, the number doubled.
They all stood patiently, perhaps their death-numbed brains not realizing yet what this moving wall meant, but all eager to find out.
Like dumbstruck game show contestants, Spitball thought. What’s behind door number one, Chuck?
He’d hit the door control button and half a second later was hanging out the passenger-side window of the fire engine, literally riding shotgun. None of the waiting zombies were quite smart enough to duck under the door until it rose to the eye-level of the shortest in the crowd. By then there were about a dozen of them out there, and that first one to poke its moldered head under the door—crooked mouth slobbering and wide, blank eyes probing for dinner—got the first taste from Spitball’s 12-gauge.
BOOM.
The blast disintegrated that zombie’s head and threw what remained into the next hungry contestant behind it. It also nearly tore Spitball’s arm out of the socket and almost pulled him right out of the window onto the concrete deck. He banged his knees against the interior of the door, yanking himself back inside.
“Kicks like a mule,” he shouted, “but now I know.”
Silk Spider cranked the key and the powerful engine awoke like a grizzly.
The crowd of hungry dead started pouring in, but the door wasn’t yet open enough to drive through. The fire engine rumbled in place beneath him as Spitball pumped out round after round, faster than the zombies could move but not so fast that the mechanism would jam on him. He burst a few heads like grey, rotten melons, but firing awkwardly sideways and half through an open window meant his aim wasn’t always so lucky.
He laid a few zombies low and lost a full second realizing the gun was empty.
Those maimed but still with their heads began to scramble back to their feet as he reloaded six more rounds.
“Damn, Hollywood got it right. Shoot ‘em in the brain.” He was talking too fast for her to understand, and too quick to stop himself. “Well, George Romero got it right. Everyone else was just copying him. Ever see the original Night of the Living Dead?”
He blew a fat zombie’s head off its shoulders.
“The black and white one? That’s the creepiest one.”
BOOM, dead housewife in an apron.
The zombies were swarming over the front of the vehicle now, and more were coming from outside.
“I just hope this zombie classic doesn’t end with me coming out of the house when it’s finally over and getting a bullet put in my brainpan.”
BOOM.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying,” Spider shouted over the engine, “but I’m done waiting on this slow-ass door.”
She ground the stick into gear and stomped hard on the gas pedal. Five walking dead disappeared underneath the huge truck, making for a bumpy ride, and several more were deflected off as she drove straight into the gathering crowd. A foot of the heavy garage door banged against the cab and windshield and smashed apart, then the whole segmented sheet metal came crashing down onto the tail end of the truck and whatever dumbstruck dead were still standing in the doorway. Spitball pulled himself into his seat and braced himself for a rough ride.
A zombie in a nightgown, one in overalls, another naked, and two more in baseball uniforms all banged hard and were rolled under as Spider jerked the wheel left, hopped the curb, and plowed over a stop sign.
“In retrospect,” she said over the noise, “there was probably a more subtle way to go about this.”
“What’s the rest of this plan?” Spitball asked as they mowed down another walking corpse.
“Not quite sure,” she admitted. “We may have to improvise.”
It took less than two minutes to reach the church and as the fire truck jumped the curb into the parking lot, a crowd of parishioners came to greet them.
“Saves us some time and effort,” Spider mumbled.
Some of the dead had been standing around, while others had been pounding against the oaken double-doors, probably drawn to the same painful noises inside. Spider rolled the wheel back and forth, weaving a course that maximized the zombie casualties. It reminded Spitball of the driving course his dad had made for him, the object then being not to take out the cones. Spider ran down as many as she could, showing no sign of slowing despite coming up fast on the stone façade of the building. Spitball jerked forward in his seat as breaks squealed, bones snapped, and bodies were dragged against asphalt. The ladder truck ground to a halt just inches from the church wall.
“Everybody out,” Spide
r said, grabbing her weapons.
He was on top of the cab in no time. She came out with the katana across her back and M4 in hand.
They both surveyed the mess behind them and Spitball’s stomach complained about it. Broken bodies were still clawing their way toward them, corpses with snapped spines and legs twisted backwards, dragging themselves along the blacktop between parking lot spotlights. One zombie had climbed back to its feet and was shuffling toward them as fast as it could with its right arm pinned behind its head, the shoulder blade no longer hidden beneath the skin and no longer on its back. One shot from Spider’s rifle put the thing down for good.
“Now what?” Spitball asked, a little more panicky than he’d have liked.
Spider swung her rifle around and fired two rounds into the large window above them. Mary, Joseph, and the Baby Jesus all fell away in shards of colored glass.
“You can make that climb, can’t you?”
It didn’t look far, but it still felt out of reach. He looked down.
In the narrow gap between the front of the truck and the wall was a zombie with half a face, trying to claw its way out from under the truck and right up to them. If Spitball somehow missed the jump and fell, that thing would be happily waiting for him.
By the time he looked up, she was already balancing in the glass-toothed window sill with the rifle slung over her shoulder. She sprayed down a few strands of safety webbing to steady him; his nerves more than his body, probably. He crouched down, ready to jump, and came back out of it.
“I’m not going to cut myself on that jagged glass, am I?”
“Just get your ass up here, hero.”
Spitball made a rather unathletic leap with the shotgun in both hands, slapping it over the window lip and then smashing into the outer wall with the rest of his body. His wrists were now carrying most of his weight and were pinned right where broken glass could have been while the rest of him pressed limply against the stone.
Like a girl, he told himself, thinking of how his buddies would have described the pathetic attempt in fifth grade gym class.
Then the girl present helped him up.
Silk Spider wasn’t what most would call super-strong, but she could probably take down your average pro wrestler with ease. She pulled him up by the fine safety strands she’d cast while he climbed as best he could with his feet on the outer wall stones. The whole event seemed slowed down to him, which may have meant he was actually moving superfast, or that he was simply scared as hell. The whole time, he swore he felt the dirty nails of that zombie under the truck scratching at his boot soles and trying to drag him down.
As soon as was he was up on the shattered window sill, Spider spun him around by the shoulders and pushed him backward off the other side.
He gasped in panic before realizing that the puppet strings were guiding him down. The twenty-foot drop was slowed, but it still hurt his feet when he landed. Inside the church it was almost pitch black, street lamp light from outside barely filtering in through the stained windows. They glowed faintly of red and purple, but none of that light reached the floor. The glow did lend highlights to the pew tops, though, row after row of them, and to a few other features around the room, not yet identifiable.
Silk Spider rappelled down like a pro using web lines and landed next to him with the rattle of a geared-up soldier. She snapped her rifle around and into a firing position.
Spitball jumped to imitate her, aiming his shotgun into the darkness with shaky hands.
I talked her into this, he thought, and here we are back to being the rookie and the badass again.
“Is that what I think it is?” she whispered harshly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see.”
“I thought you had—”
Crack. She fired a round into the pews.
Crack-crack-crack. A burst of three more.
The muzzle flash lit the immediate area like a strobe light. In the first flash he saw nothing. The next three lit up a balding zombie with black, peripheral hair flared out like centipede legs. As it recoiled and fell from the series of shots, Spitball noticed its black tunic and white collar.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Exactly,” she replied. Then: “Stay down, preacher-man.” Three more shots.
“Turn your damn goggles on so you can see—Oh shit!”
Spider shoved Spitball to the side and opened fire toward the front of the open chamber. His hip banged into a pew and he nearly fell over as he fumbled with the shotgun and his goggles at the same time.
Cranking around the lenses lit the room in shades of night vision green. Now he could see the dead man coming at them, a figure in black Miracle Mesh made to look like a tuxedo T-shirt, his face even whiter than the others with little circles painted on his cheeks, teeth exposed through missing lips, and a wild hunger in his cold, dead eyes. The zombie took a bullet each to the chest, neck, and head before finally going down.
“Dollman,” she breathed, pointing toward the front of the church.
There was a crowd of black-clad zombies on the chancel, dog piled against the far wall by the altar. One pulled itself away from whatever they were doing to respond to the gunshots. He snarled in their direction, leapt off the chancel platform, and landed in a low crouch. When he stood back up, there were two of him.
A green-tinted blink later, three identical Dollmen zombies came charging.
Hungry Gods, book one of the Identity Crisis series. Available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats.
The Many Worlds of J. D. Brink
Discover these and more tales of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror.
IDENTITY CRISIS UNIVERSE
Superhero fiction for adults
Identity Crisis series
Hungry Gods
Deus Ex Machina
Secret Origins series
Masks
Secret Identities
Identity Crisis 2029 series
Invasion
Stand-Alone Shorts
Silk Spider: Behind the Eight-Ball
Dreams of Flying
Medicine Man
Puppet Theatre
Tuesday Afternoon Mayhem
THE THUNDERSTRIKE SAGA
Epic quests of fantasy
The Prince of Luster and Decay
Tarnish
The Siren of Songwind Wood
ENDLESS DARK UNIVERSE
Galaxy-spanning science fiction
Cold Stars series
The Thorne Legacy
The Scythe of Kronos
Stand-Alone Shorts
Frozen Heart
GRIT AND SHADOWS
Noir, mystery, and horror
The Grit & Shadows Collection
A Long Walk Down a Dark Alley
Kiss of the Maiden
One-Eyed Jacks
Stand-Alone Short Stories
Eating in the Underworld
The Prince and the Darkness
Moondance
Snake Eyes
Unfeeling
Lonely
Mime
THE ALL-SEEING EYE
Nothing hides from the All-Seeing Eye
Green-Eyed Monster
Platypus
NON-FICTION
Top Secret Codewords for Indie Writers
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About the Author
J. D. Brink was not a private detective in the 1940s, but he’d liked to have been.
Instead he was born in the 1970s, was a kid at the best time ever to be a kid (the ‘80s), and went to college in the ‘90s. Since then he’s become a sailor, spy, nurse, and officer in the U.S. Navy, as well as a gravedigger, insurance adjuster, and school teacher.
Today (Halloween, 2019) he and his family have returned to his native Ohio, where there aren’t enough cheating husbands, missing persons, practicing witches, or hard-boiled mysteries to keep him
occupied.
His fictional adventures take place in the Identity Crisis superhero universe, Endless Dark sci-fi universe, and Thunderstrike Saga fantasy realm, to name a few.
Contact the author and join The Conspiracy for freebies, updates, secrets, and more by way of these cybernetic whisper modes:
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jdbrink@brinkschaostheory.com
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