by Maxey, Phil
CONTENTS
Title page
Copyright
Disclaimer
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thank you
ENCOUNTER
Cascade Prequel Book 1
by
Phil Maxey
Copyright © 2018 by Philip Maxey
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Printing, 2018.
www.philmaxeyauthor.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
Location: El castillo olvidado, Southern Spain.
Date: February 11th.
Adonia Calvo stepped out onto the veranda of her second-floor apartment with a basket full of wet clothes. The sandy, tiled floor felt warm on her feet, which surprised her. She had grown up in the small southern Spanish town of ‘El castillo olvidado,’ and this was a time for jackets and full-length pants, not T-shirts and shorts.
Still, she shrugged and started to lay her son’s garments on the wires which stretched across the small space from one white, plastered wall to another.
As she laid out the shirts and pants, she felt her back. Eight hours per day, five days a week, seated in the back office of ‘Constructores de castillos,’ a local construction company, doing their accounts, was, after a decade, taking its toll on her spine.
She flicked her long, rich, coffee-colored hair back over her shoulder and pushed her hand back into the wicker basket to pull the last few pieces of damp clothing out when something caught her eye in the distance. Beyond the sand-colored eleventh-century castle, which sat majestically on the tallest of the three hills that surrounded the town, was a shadow.
She continued placing the clothes while watching the smudge on the horizon. When the final piece was on the clothesline, she stepped forward, near to the small outside wall and leaned on the railings which ran across its top, all the time trying to make sense of what the mismatched area of sky could be.
There were no other towns in that direction. No factories or highways to produce a cloud such as the one she was looking at, and pollution was unheard of in this part of Spain.
She wondered if someone had started a fire out there. Unfortunately, this was not uncommon in the area, but usually, the fire starters waited until summer had taken a foothold and the fields and hills were shades of orange and yellow.
The shape was now darker and denser.
She squinted, which allowed her to see that it was also wavering slightly.
A car horn in the narrow street behind her building jolted her back to her surroundings. She also could faintly hear the sound of shouts but couldn’t ascertain from which direction they were coming.
The hairs on the back of her neck stiffened, but she couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at. Walking backwards, while still looking at the distant hills, she moved inside then to the living room, from where she took the old pair of her father's binoculars from the shelf in the alcove. Blowing the dust from them, she opened the latch and walked back outside. She slid the eyepieces from their leather container, pulled the lens caps off, and held them up to her face.
At first, there was only a blur, but she quickly rotated the central dial, bringing the old fort into sharp focus.
Two cars, a small white compact and a truck, came roaring over the hill next to the castle’s entrance, each one kicking up a plume of dust.
The car skidded on a sharp bend. Adonia sucked in a breath, but the driver recovered and continued down the slope towards the town.
She almost had forgotten the reason for her wanting to extend her vision and slid her view slightly upwards and to the right. At first, she wasn’t any more certain of what she was seeing than without the binoculars. A large mass of something was a few miles off, beyond the hill.
Birds?
Every resident of the town knew that their location was contained within a migration route for birds from Africa into Europe, and she had become quite well versed in the species that moved overhead during this time of year, but she had never seen a flock quite like the one she was looking at.
She moved the lens lower again, to try and see where the panicked vehicles had gotten to, but they had already fallen below the line of the buildings in front of her. More vehicle horns rang out in the streets.
Something was wrong.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone and tapped the most recent number.
“Come on,” she said to herself in Spanish.
An elderly woman answered.
“Mamá.”
“Yes?”
She lifted the binoculars back to her eyes, trying to fix the view on the strange flock once more. “Is Jeraldo with you?”
“Yes. He is trying on a new pair of Bambas, why?”
Adonia went to reply then stopped when the circular view of the world steadied, and a wave of fright rippled across her.
“Are you there?” said her mother.
“Yes, I’m here. Where are you?”
“You know where we are, we’re—”
“Leave! Come back, now!”
Adonia’s eyes remained fixed on the pulsating black mass which swept across the battlements of the ancient building, just two miles away. Even from this distance, she could see pieces of masonry falling to the ground. This was no ordinary flock. She was starting to doubt it even was birds.
“Mamá! Bring Jeraldo back now!”
CHAPTER TWO
Location: Highway 405 LA, USA.
Date: May 11th.
Grant Collins hit the brakes just in time to stop his sedan from rear-ending a similar silver version of his car. His was an O8 model where ‘hands-free’ was not an option.
“Yeah, I hear you. I have until the end of the weekend to send you the latest manuscript,” he said, with one hand on the wheel and the other balancing the cell phone on his shoulder.
Grant eased down on the gas. The traffic on the Californian freeway was starting to move again.
“Yes, yes. I know that. Xavier! I heard you the first twenty times. You’ll have it. I’m already twenty K into it and it’s…” He nodded. “Yes, of course, the protagonist is the same… yes, but…”
Grant’s agent blurted some more warnings about missing the publisher's deadlines and then hung up.
“Yeah, screw you too.”
He dropped his phone down on the passenger's seat and looked at the modern wagon train of traffic ahead
and swore again. He was already fifteen minutes late for his son’s tenth birthday party.
His ex-wife’s voice rolled through his mind.
‘Don’t you do it to him again, Grant!’
A year ago to the day he was stuck in a forgotten airport in the Midwest which was buried under ten feet of snow, and not going anywhere soon. Even the cell coverage was spotty, and the only communication he managed to get to Ben, was ‘happy birthday buddy, sorry I’m not there!’ He swore to himself there and then that he would never miss another of his son’s birthdays.
He looked at the line of traffic which headed off into a haze of gasoline fumes and thought about his son’s expression; looking at the front door each time it opened and his father wasn’t the one that came through it.
Screw this.
Staying on the 405 wasn’t an option.
As the traffic moved again, he looked to his left, trying to make sense of the group of emergency vehicles that were parked at odd angles around a man shouting and waving into the nearby apartment block’s gardens. A woman and child stood nearby, one clutching the other. The woman looked terrified. No doubt some kind of carjacking. He wondered if he should stop and help out, then quickly dismissed the idea. His days of playing hero ended when he left the LAPD due to an injury.
Unusual for a carjacking to happen on the freeway, though.
His mind started to run through the various scenarios that could have led to such an event when out the corner of his eye he caught the sign for the next exit.
He sighed.
Wrong lane.
Pulling on the steering wheel, he drove out to the right, instantly slamming on his brakes when a guy on a bicycle almost slammed into him.
The man swore, giving him the middle finger, while neatly weaving around the front of the car.
A cyclist on the freeway?
Two strange occurrences in as many minutes. It was going to be one of ‘those’ days.
He pulled out onto the exit making sure there was nothing else coming along the outer lane and drove down the slope. A small heap of fur and broken bones sat at the curb, and he swayed the sedan to the left slightly to avoid it, then stopped at a junction.
It was a bright spring day in south LA. As the light remained stubbornly on red, his mind drifted back to an arrest he made on the opposite corner. Tourists kept getting mugged. His partner thought it was probably the tweakers who inhabited the basement of the nearby apartment block, but the attacks always happened during the midafternoon, when the individuals that had an addiction to meth were usually sleeping. Even though it wasn’t his usual crime to cover, he spent some of his free time sitting in a vacant office opposite the corner for three days straight when, finally, just as his ex-wife's coffee was about to become undrinkable, he saw a youth in a hoodie preparing to jump on an equally young man who had just stepped off a bus.
A quick call on the radio and the uniformed officers on that particular shift emerged from a nearby building and grabbed the guy up. The perpetrator's apartment was a chaotic mess of keepsakes and other people’s memories, most of which were returned to their former owners. Not a bust that made any headlines, but one that gave a lot of people pieces of their lives back. He smiled nodding to himself. He still missed his time with the Hollywood police department.
The light changed, and he tore off across the junction, heading north towards the heights.
A tinny jingle emanated from his phone. He grabbed it, doing his previous balancing act again.
“I’m ten minutes out… yes… I know… I’m sorry, but you know how the 405… yup… Just don’t do the cake thing until I’m there.”
Iona, his ex-wife, hung up.
His sedan raced past two-story apartments, then back onto larger roads and more traffic.
“What the hell…”
Even for LA, the abundance of vehicles on the roads seemed unusual. All the residents knew to avoid the freeways, but you could usually count on the smaller roads to be relatively clear during the week.
Two men were arguing beside their trucks on his right side. His column of traffic moved past them. The bed of one of the pickups was laden with small pieces of furniture, trays of bottled water, and freezer boxes. A woman and a child sat patiently in the cabin. The young girl trying to comfort a small brown dog which barked incessantly.
Arriving at the next junction, rather than moving across it into another wall of vehicles, he turned to the right, and then took the next left into a suburban road.
Gray apartment blocks passed by as he gained speed, moving forever north. The road he was on became a hill, surrounded by small oil-drilling rigs, which repeatedly bowed to him.
He looked at his phone. The ten minutes he said he would be had already come and gone. Skidding slightly he turned onto Rodeo Road, picking up speed and changing lanes.
He swung the sedan into a narrow street, bordered by single-story pastel-colored homes. These plots were wider and neater than what he had previously passed by. A man was piling suitcases into the back of his car, while his wife shouted at him from the front of their home.
He recognized every inch of every lawn, tree, and sidewalk. Twenty years covering the Hollywood district of LA as a detective will give you that. He also knew that normally he was only a few minutes from his former home, but then today the traffic was especially bad.
Keeping to as many two-lane residential streets as possible, he cut his way through the Art District, then Beverlywood. The houses here were expansive. Two- and three-story homes that often featured on the local TV networks, bounded by mature trees that towered just as high.
He pulled into the street as he had done a thousand times before when he actually lived there. He could already see a number of cars parked outside the Spanish Colonial Revival house which now belonged to Iona.
He skidded to a stop, turned off the ignition, got out, and walked a few feet before swearing, turning around, and grabbing Ben’s present from the back seat. He went to walk away for the second time but stopped when he caught his reflection in the darkened side windows of his car. His graying, dark brown hair was a little too long and laid across his forehead. With one action of his hand, he swept it back across his head and tried to make his dark blue shirt look a little less like he had grabbed it from the laundry basket.
His last thought before the children started screaming was that he looked every one of his forty-two years.
Grant pivoted away from his car and reached to his side for his service gun. Despite not finding it there, he ran forward trying to understand where the screeches were coming from.
Back garden.
These were not the screams of children playing, this was something else. Not bothering for the front door, he ran to the right side of the garage and pushed open the gate to the side alley.
A blur flashed past his face, leaving behind a burning sensation on his cheek.
He charged through the second gate, through branches, and into a young boy who was holding his bloody arm.
Grant went to hold the boy but he slipped from his grasp and ran past him. He went to follow him, but the shouts, yells, and screams brought his attention back to the large, lush garden.
Across the manicured lawn, chairs and brightly wrapped boxes lay scattered, along with a table beneath which two more children were hiding. Other children were cowering amongst the nearby bushes, while a man staggered around, swiping at the air. Even with his back to him, he recognized the balding head of Iona’s husband, Travis.
Grant ran forward, trying to see if any of the sheltering children were Ben and trying to understand what had everyone so freaked out, when he saw it.
A spiked shape that sounded like a flying buzzsaw dived down at Travis. A thin red line appeared on the back of his neck. He howled in pain and swiped the tennis racket through the air, completely missing the creature.
Grant looked at the glass doors to the house. Iona, Ben, as well as other adults and children looked back. A
wave of relief ran through him.
He looked back into the air, immediately spotting the thing circling overhead. As a cop, he was used to quickly assessing a situation, and knowing what the best course of action was, but he hadn’t come up against a psychotic flying insect before. He briefly looked at the children who were still knelt amongst the leaves and branches at the edge of the lawn and calculated if he could get them back to the house, but it was obvious if the thing wanted to attack them he wouldn’t be able to stop it.
Instead, he looked to his left, where three tables each had their own umbrella to protect from the sun. He grabbed the closest, pulling it and its pole from the center of the table, then pushed on the inside, inverting it and ran down the steps onto the lawn.
“What is that thing?” he said to Travis.
Travis turned around, clearly out of breath. “I don’t know, it just came outta no—”
The buzzing noise filled the air once again.
“Here it comes!” shouted Travis, pulling his arm back with the racket in his grasp.
The thing dropped upon them in a fraction of a second. Quicker than any insect Grant had ever seen, but he was ready for it and swept the open umbrella through the air. A thud hit the inside of the canvas and he drove it and the umbrella into the ground, dropping to his knees and collapsing the thin metal structs on top of it to keep it trapped.
“Hit it!” he shouted to Travis.
Iona’s husband needed no second invitation and he repeatedly brought the racket head down upon the quivering lump.
After the sixth impact, the thing underneath was not moving, and the only sound Grant could hear was whimpers from children and his own heartbeat.
He and Travis looked at each other.
“It’s got to be dead,” said Travis.
Grant looked up into the air. “That was the only one, right?”
Travis nodded. “That we saw, yeah…”