by Chris Sapp
“Hey!” Izabel tried to say. But her voice was gone, replaced by a harsh croak. The figure closest to her responded by raising it’s cybernetic arm and pointing it at her. No! Not pointing. Aiming. There was a barrel on the end of the arm, not a finger. By the time Izabel realized this, it was too late. A cloud of dark green gas fumed out of the barrel and engulfed Izabel. For the second time in less than an hour she was blind and choking. But the sensations didn’t last long because the gas was rendering her unconscious. She fell the floor and the last thing she saw before she passed out was two pairs of red lenses peering at her through a fog of green.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
APPENDIX
SLADE ENTERPRISES
MAGNUS SLADE, Interim Druglord of Slade Enterprises (male centaur)
- his home planet, CENTROPOLIS
- His wife and lead chemist, KARIAH SLADE
- BLAIR HAWKINS, Kariah’s assistant (male centaur)
- VI, lead enforcer (female vampyr)
- PETRO and FLYNN; his bodyguards
- ROE DRISKELL; bounty hunter indebted to Magnus (male Fenixborn)
- His morphagens:
CENTAURS, half-man/half-horse
BLACKTAILS, Merfolk with black scales, hair, and eyes
BLOODHOWLS, werewolves, brown fur and red eyes; strongest of their kind
ELVES, tall, slender, pointed ears, and vertical pupils
FAERIES, 6-8 inches tall, sparkling wings
FENIXTAILS, cigarettes that give users red feathers and healing capabilities
SHADOWPAWS, werewolf, black fur and yellow eyes
- His Dealers:
JARL, Tres Luna dealer (male bloodhowl)
APRYL, San Andreas dealer (female faery)
VALDEZ INDUSTRIES
PACO VALDEZ, druglord of Valdez Industries and a member of the Morphagen Order (male minotaur)
- His home planet, FAHRENHEIT
- His chemist, RICKARD MARKHAM (male chromey)
- His heirs;
SILVIO VADLEZ, eldest son and in a coma after serious accident (male minotaur)
AUGUSTO VALDEZ, Chief Administrator of the Crucible (male minotaur)
- NARI AND MAYA ANDREWS, twin sisters and Augusto's girlfriends (female elves)
- KYM; Silvio’s full-time nurse (female G-head)
- DEON; Crucible stuntman (male minotaur)
- RIKON; Crucible stuntman (male Ogre)
- CASH; Crucible stuntman (male Quicksilver)
- His morphagens:
EMERALD ENFORCERS, Merfolk with emerald scales, hair, and eyes
GOLDEN GUARDIANS, Merfolk with golden scales, hair, and eyes
MINOTAURS, half-man/half-bull, fur is black or brown, eyes are blue, red, green, or yellow.
OGRES, 9ft tall, large tusk, skin is brown, black, or green
QUICKSILVERS, werewolf with silver fur and green eyes; fastest of their kind
SYRENS OF SERENITY, Merfolk with red scales, hair, and eyes; their singing can be enchanting or deadly
- His dealers:
KING GARSON CURRY, Aquila dealer (male Emerald Enforcer)
JORI, San Andreas dealer (male elf)
OTHER PEOPLE FAMOUS + NOT
ATTILA GRAVES, champion brawler (male Giant)
DAEDALUS SHAW; The Czar and head of Morphagen Order (male draconis)
ELIJAH DEFOE; assassin (male Chromey)
JEDREK; Arktikus storage employee (male Frostfang; exiled)
LARKIN GRUNDY; bounty hunter (male G-head)
PHAELAN LENNOX; vocalist of The Phaes (male elf)
- His bastard daughter, IZABEL RAMSEY (female elf)
PHAEDRA WHITE, band member of The Phaes (female elf)
- PRINCE CONLAN, son of King Garson Curry (male Emerald Enforcer)
- SHARDAE MCCREADY; owner of The Pearl Casino (female Syren of Serenity)
ZANE EMPIRE
DURGA ZANE, Druglord of the Zane Empire and a member of the Morphagen Order.
- Her home planet, TERRA GIGAS
- Her morphagens:
CHROMEYS, kevlar lotion that makes the user nearly indestructible
FROSTFANGS, werewolf with white fur and blue eyes
GIANTS, 20-25ft tall, incredible strength
KAMELEONS, allows user to imitate anyone they touch
VAMPYRS, fair skin, enlarged incisors, highly sensitive to sunlight
ZERO G, chewing tobacco that gives users blue skin and allows them to defy gravity
- Her dealers:
FISKE, Morphagen Depot dealer (male Kameleon)
RAGNAR, Terra Gigas dealer and Durga’s brother (male Giant)
PLANETS
AQUILA, Merfolk home world, ninety percent water
ARKTIKUS, frozen tundra, Frostfang home world
CENTROPOLIS, centaur home world: tropical climate
FAHRENHEIT, minotaur home world, desert climate
NOS482, vampyr home world, nights last twice as long as days
ORATHAS, elf home world, arid climate
SAN ANDREAS, city planet
TERRA GIGAS, Giant home world, slave trade capitol of the galaxy
TRES LUNA, werewolf home world
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dependent Days (which will be referred to as DD from here on out) has been my labor of love since somewhere around 2004 maybe even earlier. So let’s just say 10 years and call it a day. I know…I know that’s a really long time. Yes, I have a family. Yes, I work 40hrs a week. I know…none of these are excuses and I won’t use them as such because I’ve cranked out plenty of material while I was hiding from DD. Phil McClimon, a terrific writer and a wonderful friend, once accused me of “liking the idea of DD more than actually writing it.” I’m sure this led to a vehement denial from me…but in a way he was right. I wasn’t afraid of writing DD, I loved it. But I was afraid of screwing it up. I’d had this idea in my head for so many years that I was afraid that the final product would be lacking in some way. Or that it wouldn’t live up to the expectations I had built up in my mind and therefore fail to find an audience. Because as much as writers like entertaining ourselves, we like entertaining others more. But eventually I realized that my beloved story would always fail to find an audience if it remained unpublished. Duh!
At its earliest stage, even before it was titled Dependent Days, this story was about a girl named Isabelle (note the spelling variation) who wanted revenge on a nasty Druglord named Third Degree. Now, I remember comparing the story I wanted to tell to the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill and realizing that they were similar. Too similar because at the time my story was still set on Earth and took place in modern day. So, the only thing that made it different from Kill Bill was the drug aspect. That wasn’t enough and somehow…my mind did that writer thing it does and…everyday ordinary drugs turned into morphagens. By doing that, I opened up a can of worms so big that I still haven’t finished eating them.
Anyway, now that I had something unique and a cool title to boot, I set out to write the story. It was a fiction manuscript. Now that my drugs had turned into morphagens, Third Degree became a fire elemental that had survived an overdose. He was covered from head to toe in scar tissue. Izabel was a water elemental, Third Degree’s polar opposite. Yes, I had elementals in the early stages. I also had Cyborgs. But Phil could never buy the idea of a drug giving the user power to control the elements. Or how a pill could turn flesh into robotics. Eventually, I realized he was right and I learned to live without elementals. Third Degree eventually became a draconis named Daedalus Shaw and I settled for a distance cousin of cyborgs and called them the Bionic Brood.
I know much more about story and structure now than I did then and to make matters worse, I wrote that manuscript without an outline. That’s probably why it was never completed. But there are a lot of things that survived that first attempt. Izabel and Roe were in that first version. In fact, Izabel saved Roe’s life after she found him dying in an alley. Magnus and Kariah existed back then too, but their su
rname was Stark and Magnus had a brother named Emryk. Augusto and his Crucible were there too and so was Wren…all though what happened to her was very different. There was even a young less confident version of Prince Conlan.
Eventually, I abandoned the manuscript and moved onto something else and by the time I came back to DD, I was writing screenplays. I ended up writing two different DD scripts. Primo Escobar made his first appearance in one of these scripts. Yes, he was a Shadowpaw and yes Roe was tracking him. Shardae and Durga Zane appeared for the first time at this point. One of these screenplays had the Crucible or Gauntlet as it was called then. One of them did not. The story got put on the back burner as Phil and I started writing more screenplays together. But then in 2012, having grown frustrated with trying to break into Hollywood, Phil decided he was going to write an ebook and publish it on Amazon. Seeing the wisdom in this decision, I decided that I would attempt a second DD manuscript. You’ve just read a polished version of that second attempt and I hope you were as pleased with it as I am. I know it ended on a cliffhanger. Don’t you hate that? But don’t worry, that isn’t where the story ends and I promise, I won’t take as long to tell you the rest.
A Sample Chapter from Bay City Chronicles: Johnny Lonesome
By Chris Sapp & Philip A. McClimon
Available Now on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GK6CQ14
The Badass Victim
Erin Covington sprinted down a cracked sidewalk in a bad neighborhood. Her breath came in gasps and the stitch in her side threatened to double her over. She hadn’t run this hard since high school track, but she couldn’t stop now, they were still behind her. Her pursuers’ footfalls mixed with their laughter as a dozen more store fronts whizzed by her. The lights were off and the doors were locked. The sun had set and the “Day People” had gone home and pulled their shades. Like a shift change, the “Night People” came out to do their dirty work.
Her knapsack, echoing the rhythm of her stride, bounced painfully off her lower back, the strap digging into the soft flesh of her neck.
She approached the intersection of Gregory and Fifth. It was empty. No friendly neighborhood police on this side of town. Even the homeless found someplace else to be. It was just her and the three street rats.
She made a hard left on “Gregory” and lost one of her flip-flops. Running in flip-flops was difficult. Running with only one was nearly impossible and her gait took on a lopsided spasm of desperation. Each step drove jagged pieces of gravel into the bottom of her bare heel, but she didn’t feel it.
Another intersection, and this time she took a right for no reason whatsoever. She missed the yellow traffic sign that read, “No Through Access”, barely visible under graffiti tags.
“NO!” she yelled in equal parts anger and fear, her mind not willing to process the sad fact that she ran headlong down a dead-end alley.
“YES!” yelled one of the rats, as they slowed their roll into the alley.
Erin spun around, holding her knapsack in front of her like a shield. Smiling and laughing, the three street rats closed in on her. Erin used up the last of the physical space left to her, the brick wall signaling the end of the line with unmovable certainty. The three stopped inches from her, their faces revealing the anticipation of a much greater treasure soon to be plundered than any they might have taken from a now forgotten Honda Civic.
“Please,” she pleaded, “I didn’t see anything.”
“You’re ‘bout to,” said the street rat with a huge gap between his front teeth.
He ripped her bag out of her hands with one smooth motion. After a quick glance inside, Gap Tooth tossed the bag in a high arc over his shoulder. It bounced off the wall and landed hard, drawing pad and pencils spilling out across the pavement.
The second street rat stepped forward. His long greasy hair hung down, hiding part of his face, but none of his intent. In a last ditch effort, Erin took a swing at him. Her creative talents did not extend however to the art of war. The street rat caught her wrist, his long fingernails digging into her skin. With his free hand, he ripped the front of her dress open. Erin’s screams echoed off the alley walls and out into the merciless night.
The walking arsenal that was Johnny Lonesome, stood at the corner of “Gregory” and “Madison”, staring down at a single pink flip-flop. Wiping the remnants of puke off his face, he bent over and picked it up. As he did, a woman’s terrified scream erupted out of a nearby alley. With a roll of his eyes and a deep sigh, Lonesome answered the call.
He reached the alley and found exactly what he expected to. Three rapists and one victim. Rape was the main course, but her death was surely the dessert. Lonesome took in the scene. If someone were to ask, and he were in a mood to answer, he would have said that the real victim here was him. As evidence for the defense, he would have pointed to his watch, a watch that clearly displayed “2:29”. It would have been pointed out that, that was A.M not P.M. Only those with bad habits and ill intent were out this late, “Night People” not “Day People.” This girl was clearly ”Day People.” Had that not been enough to make his case, he would have directed the attention of his questioner to the girl herself. Her dress was two sizes too small and when she bent over, anybody within a hundred feet could see everything her mother gave her. Poor… innocent… girl? My ass.
Half an hour ago, Lonesome, the real victim here, was sound asleep on his futon in his small warehouse apartment, when a flash of pain in the center of his forehead woke him. The pain was never alone. It was always accompanied by a vision. This time, the vision was of a girl,
… running for her life!
Intense stomach cramps followed the image. Lonesome, holding his stomach, stumbled out of bed and into his bathroom. He didn’t bother turning on his light, he’d done this enough times, he knew the layout by heart. Dropping to his knees in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, he hurled into the waiting bowl. The chunky vomit impacted the water with an angry splash.
This was his call, and it always rang him off the hook. An urge, to be somewhere, to employ his particular set of skills with extreme prejudice. It was an old routine, a routine that repeated without variation every time. Johnny Lonesome was well practiced, able to dress to the nines in death dealing accoutrements, all while puking his guts out. Driving posed its own unique challenges. Most people pull over on the side of the road when they get the urge to throw-up. Not Johnny Lonesome. It provided no relief. Behind the wheel of his black ’67 Camaro, with his stomach knotted so tight that just moving an inch sent spikes of pain radiating through his digestive tract, he couldn’t pull over on the side of the road. Lonesome couldn’t stop because his fever of 103, and his aches, and the endless vomiting wouldn’t stop until he physically traveled to the place that flashed in his mind.
No doubt about it, he was the real victim here. That’s what he would have said, had anybody asked. But nobody asked.
Popping a piece of bubble gum into his mouth, Lonesome stepped into the alley and prepared to go to work.
Erin had been forced on to her back while Gap Tooth and Greasy Hair held her legs apart. The trio’s leader occupied the space between them.
“Open wide, bitch,” he said, slowly unzipping his fly.
She struggled, yelled, and screamed, all to no avail.
Her screams were cut short by the calm interrogatory of Johnny Lonesome.
“Excuse me, Miss?”
All three street rats spun around in surprise. Even Erin strained her neck to get a better view. She saw a tall man with short wavy brown hair emerge out of the darkness behind her three attackers. He was dressed in all black and he had… weapons. Lots of weapons. They were strapped to his person in every way possible. He looked like he’d jumped right off the pages of a comic book. And he was smiling. It wasn’t sleazy or sadistic. It was confident.
“Excuse me, miss, is this your’s?” asked Lonesome, holding up her errant flip-flop.
“Uh… yes,” she said.
“I thought so,” he said, as he slid the flip-flop into place on her raised foot.
“Looks like you dropped your bag too.” For just a moment, Erin forgot that she had almost been raped. Lonesome’s movements were unhurried, his voice calm and strangely soothing.
“Go grab her bag, will you?” Lonesome asked Gap Tooth as if he was talking to a friend or co-worker. Gap Tooth didn’t move. He was frozen. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He looked from Erin, to Lonesome, to his buddies.
“Who is this guy?” Gap Tooth asked of no one in particular. His question seemed to release Lead Rat out of his daze.
“Yeah, who the hell are you, man?” demanded Lead Rat as he raised his hands to shove their uninvited guest. Lonesome’s previously unhurried manner belied his martial abilities. Before the leader knew what was happening, Lonesome seized Lead Rat’s wrists, pulling him close.