69 INCHES AND RISING

by Rebecca Steinbeck

  --------------------

  69 INCHES AND RISING

  REBECCA STEINBECK

  --------------------

  Copyright ©2013 Rebecca Steinbeck

  Published worldwide by Burning Hearts Books.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by copyright law.

  www.facebook.com/RebeccaSteinbeckAuthor

  --------------------

  To you, my wonderful reader.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The man in black loaded the gun, aimed it at the woman across the road, and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit her in the chest and blood flowed from the wound. She staggered across the front porch as the heat from the bullet tore shreds from her soul. She fell to her hands and knees and looked at the man who had shot her. He was smiling. The heat from the bullet was ferocious now, burning her inside like she was on fire. Tears rolled down the sides of her face and the man in black smiled some more. Her dress was soaked in blood and she crawled to the top step. She hoped to get someone’s attention, praying to God they could help her. But she didn’t get it and even if she did they couldn’t help her because the bullet had done the damage the man in black hoped it would, and it made him happy to see that.

  Her body was close to giving up now and the tears flowed hard and fast. She looked around, not for help anymore but for comfort, because she had accepted in her heart that by then it was too late. She looked around because she wanted the last thing she saw before she died to be the thing that had given her the most happiness - her home town that kept chugg-chugg-chugging along during the day and its sordid little secrets to itself at night. And as she looked around, she prayed the thing that gave her just as much happiness as her home town would be happy and safe in the arms of the daughter of the man who killed her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jonathon looked at the words on the screen. It wasn’t how a romance novel should begin, he thought, but then again he was used to writing horror, and his own love story had begun in a river of blood so why shouldn’t someone else’s? He continued typing, one word following the other, and each word playing its part in the creation of a new world that would soon be filled with the same love as his. But first there would be something else. First there would be fear, for without fear there would be no appreciation of the love that followed. He typed as fast as the story unfolded in his mind, albeit with two fingers for he never took a lesson in how to type with ten. He was a literary superstar after all, and superstars could do whatever they wanted, and what he wanted to do was write, not take dictation. He was an author, not a secretary. And he was a man in love whose heart was driving the story he was writing down a path he had never been down before. The story he was writing was not about scaring the shit out of people as many of his other stories were. It was about making them feel. He wanted his readers to know he had found love and he was sharing it with them the best way he knew how. Through his words.

  Serena watched him from his office door while she hugged a warm cup of tea. He was wearing a set of headphones through which pumped heavy metal music. He had it so loud she could hear it even through his headphones and he was tapping his feet to the thunderous beat while his fingers punched the keys on the board in front of him. Sexy. Successful. And able to do two things at once. She had hit the jackpot.

  Jonathon tap-tap-tapped away. The pictures in his mind were transferring easily to the computer screen as they always did, and its one of the things that made his work so popular with the masses, but not so much with the literary snobs who thought that anything less than a Man Booker Award winning manuscript wasn’t worth wiping their butts with. But Jonathon Steel wrote for the man in the street, and he didn’t care one bit what the man in his ivory tower thought about it.

  He saw from the corner of his eye his cell phone light up with an incoming call. He kept tap-tap-tapping away, wanting only to write what needed to be wrote. The call could wait.

  Serena watched as the call rung out. She knew he wouldn’t answer it and didn’t press the fact it might be important. This was Jonathon Steel, world-famous and best-selling author and he was writing what his publisher had already paid him a princely sum for. If he didn’t want to answer his phone, he didn’t have to. She turned and walked back to the lounge where she picked out a movie to watch. Thy Kingdom Come, based on the novel by Jonathon Steel. She slipped the disk into the DVD player and curled up on the couch. The movie began, and she smiled because she knew in her heart how much she loved him and she knew in her head just how big the jackpot she had hit was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The man in black went back inside the house and closed the door. He looked out the window at the woman across the road that he had shot in the chest. Her body was laying dead on the front porch of her house. He was holding the rifle he had used to shoot her and his hands were sweaty as they gripped it. He turned to his wife who was sitting in the corner of the lounge. She was wearing a piece of tape across her mouth and a length of rope was wrapped tight around her wrists. She looked at her husband through bloodshot eyes, her heart disintegrating more and more with each passing moment, each one taking her further away from the man she loved, the one who fathered both her children, and closer to the one who would put the end of a rifle in her mouth and blow her away.

  He came toward her, creeping and crawling, raising gooseflesh on her skin. He stopped in front of her and touched the end of the rifle to her chin. He lifted up her face and looked deep into her eyes. “All you had to do was love me. That’s all. But you couldn’t even do that. You didn’t even know how.” He sniffed a nostril full of snot into the back of his nose and he looked at her with a great deal more scorn than he had ever shown before. “And then I find me a woman who wants to love me and now I can’t even have that. To Hell with you.” His heart was angry and his soul was on fire. He pushed the end of the rifle into the flesh of her throat and wrapped his finger around the trigger. He was ready to kill. Again.

  There came a knock on the door. It was the police and they were responding to reports of a gunshot.

  “Hello,” one of them said. “Anyone home?”

  The man in black pushed the end of the rifle harder into his wife’s flesh. He was angry, ready to blow her away. Ready to be blown away. There came another knock. The sweat was dripping from his brow and running down his nose. It fell from the tip to the ground at his feet and a little puddle began to form. The police knocked again. The man with a rifle in his hand watched as every happy moment he had shared with each of the two women flashed before his eyes and for a moment he almost couldn’t do it. Moments don’t last forever though, and unless you are able to carry your thoughts from one moment to the next they are surely left behind, just as this one was. Goodbye my darling, and may God have mercy on your soul. He had killed a woman that loved him to scare a woman that didn’t and he pulled the trigger again. The bullet sped along the barrel and cut like a steaming hot knife into his wife’s throat and out the back of it. Her body slumped against the chair and the man stepped back. On the other side of the door the two officers looked at each other and drew their guns. One of them kicked his foot against the door and with a ferocious crack like that of the mightiest of whips the door broke down and the officers pointed their guns at a murderer. “Drop it!!” one of them said. The man who had just shot his wife and whose blood splattered the wall behind her dead body thought of all that had been and all that would surely come, and decided that he had got his revenge and that any more life to be lived would be better lived after death.
He turned to face the officers and his finger stroked the trigger of his rifle like a hundred dollar hooker stroking a man’s cock. He aimed the rifle at one of the officers and pulled the trigger. The officer pulled his as well and the two bullets passed each other at such high speed they hardly had time to say hello. The bullet fired by the man in black whizzed passed the officer’s ear so close that it burned the hair sticking out of it. It rocketed into the wall behind the officers and a cloud of smoke puffed out of the wall and into the air. The bullet fired by the police officer smiled sweetly as it hit the man in black in the chest. It burned a hole in his flesh then cracked a rib on its way into his heart. The man in black froze for a moment as the bullet peeled away layer after layer of muscle to reveal the man’s soul and it shattered it into a thousand bloody pieces. The man dropped the rifle and fell to his knees. The white light at the end of the tunnel he was promised by a church when he gave up his dark ways was nowhere to be seen. Instead he found himself coming face to face with the demons he thought in a very good moment were gone forever but they weren’t. They had only hidden themselves like children hiding from their parents and now, after much time had passed and in a feeding frenzy the great white sharks of the world’s deepest oceans would be proud of, it was time to come out and play.

  The room turned dark and slowly the darkness turned a deep blood red. The cries of a thousand dead men and a thousand deadly demons rang about his head and the demons leaped out of the darkness and feasted on him. He wanted them to stop but they never would because this was Hell and this was where he was destined to be and here he was. He had played his cards and lost. Now he belonged to the Devil.

  The floor beneath him gave way and fire rose toward him. His heart was full of fear, and the dreams he had dreamed began dying a painful death in the flames that reached for him like the bony fingers of dead men that were reaching for one last chance at life. He heard a voice from within the thick black smoke that swirled above him and he looked up, knowing in what was left of his heart that the Grim Reaper was about to swing his scythe through the putrid air and take his head all the way off. He hoped the voice belonged to God.

  “I give myself to you, O Lord,” the man in black said. Tears had sprung from the corners of his eyes and were burning the flesh on his cheeks as they rolled down the sides of his face.

  A ball of fire exploded from the thick black smoke. It engulfed the man in black and he screamed as the flames tore at his flesh and into his soul. He struggled as best he could against the fury of the fire and the razor sharp teeth of the demons, but he was weak and the fire was strong and the demons were too. Soon the fire won and the demons cut there way back through the Earth’s crust to the depths of Hell. They were carrying the soul of the man in black which was a trophy happily accepted by the Devil himself as a reward for winning the game the man in black had dared to play.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jonathon ended the chapter and pushed back his chair. He stretched his arms and yawned. It had been a long evening and he had written well over three thousand words of the story inspired by his love for Serena, though started as usual dripped in blood. It would blossom soon enough into a full blown love story just like his own and he believed the time was right to write it. All of his stories so far had been based on what he knew and what he knew was all he knew, and all he knew was poured into every single story and all he knew was horror and that’s why he wrote it. That’s why every word of every story ripped at the heart of the worlds he created for his characters to move around in. Sometimes those characters lived and sometimes they died. Sometimes they loved and sometimes that love was torn away from them. Sometimes they were happy but they always ended up alone, sad, and quite often dead. Jonathon’s art had always imitated his life and that’s why the stories he had written were as bloody and bad as they were, and it’s why he knew the story on the screen in front of him would blossom soon enough into a full blown love story. He removed his headphones and the sounds of a battle being fought on the television screen in the lounge bounced around his office and leaped gracefully into his ears, filling his head with beautiful thoughts of the time he spent on the movie set as a creative advisor to the first-time director whose job it was to bring Thy Kingdom Come to life.

  He switched off the computer and climbed to his feet. He pushed the chair under the big oak desk once owned by Hemingway and for which he had paid a small fortune and switched off the light. He looked back over his shoulder from the doorway at where he was as both a man and a writer and smiled. Not only was he pleased but he was proud too of what he had achieved as both. So was his mother and so was Serena.

  He went down the hallway and into the lounge. There, sitting on the armchair with her legs tucked beneath her bottom and her head laid gently against a cushion, was Serena. Her eyes were closed and there was a hint of a smile. He went to her and kneeled in front of her. He ran the tips of his fingers under the hem of her nightgown and up her lower leg to her knee. He circled her knee several times and did so with a grin that if seen would make the other person think that all his Christmases had come at once, which of course they had, many times over.

  Serena stirred. She parted her legs ever so slightly but enough to give Jonathon room to move which he did. He slid his finger toward Serena’s pussy and she moaned. He knew she was awake enough to know what was going on, but realized too that she was not that much awake that it couldn’t pass itself off as a beautiful dream, and dreams can leave us feeling much more wonderful than life itself because in dreams we can be anything we want. It’s even better when that dream becomes a dream come true. And for Jonathon, it had done just that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A tsunami of blood swept over the horizon and it swallowed the souls of the men and women who had hedged their bets with the Devil and lost, among them Jonathon’s father. The tsunami swelled to over a thousand feet high with the life energy of the damned and their cries tore at the heart of the angel whose job it was to save them. Tears rolled down the sides of the angel’s face as the men and women disappeared one after the other into the putrid depths of blackness, never to be seen or heard of again. Death for the dead, and no way back.

  Her heart broken, the angel took flight towards the Earth’s surface, approaching it at a ferocious speed. Something caught its eye. Over there. Behind the smouldering sack of meat that was once a beautiful horse but one that had been burnt to death by a man who had lost one too many bets on it, and who had taken his frustration out on the horse in a fit of drunken rage, pouring a bottle of alcohol over it then setting fire to it.

  The angel stopped flying and approached what had caught its eye with great caution and care. It was a woman, middle-aged with greying hair and a heart stripped bare. She was sobbing like a baby and one with plenty of time and nowhere to go. The angel looked back over her shoulder at the tsunami that surged forward, searching for more souls to gorge itself on. “You may have got the many,” the angel said in defiance of the wall of death approaching the middle-aged woman with greying hair, “but I’ll be damned if you’ll get them all.” She reached down and grabbed the woman under the arms and lifted her up to the top of a high mountain where she was safe from the tsunami. The woman looked around at the dark clouds from which was springing forth thunder and lightning and balls of fire that spewed toward the ground. One crashed not so far away from where she was and her body shook with fear, and the realization she was dead hit her, and hard. She looked up at the angel that had saved her from the tsunami. She reached her hand out to touch her but the angel stepped back. She knew this woman. It had been a long time since she had seen her but she knew her. Then it hit her. She stepped back further and her heart sank. She looked up at the dark clouds, peering through them to the light that shone on the other side. “You gave me a job to do and I failed you,” she said. “Please let me help this woman come to you so she might live forever and so I might have redeemed myself in your eyes.” The angel waited for a sign that her words had n
ot fallen on deaf ears. And still she waited.

  A hand wrapped itself around the angel’s leg. It was the woman she had saved. The angel turned to her. “I beg of you,” the woman said. “Please help me get back to my home. I want to go home.”

  How does an angel tell a dead woman there was no home; that she was dead and there was no coming back? She did what she knew. She kneeled before the woman and wrapped her arms and then her wings around her in the hope she would feel some comfort. She drew the woman to her breast and the woman cried. The angel looked up at the dark clouds that crashed and banged with thunder and lightning and wondered why she had not heard from the God who sent her into the depths of Hell in the hope His children might be saved from the Devil’s thirst for human blood. “Please hear me,” she said, before turning back to the woman at her breast and whose heart would be safe behind the beauty and strength of an angel’s wings.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jonathon lifted Serena off the lounge and she draped her arms around his shoulders. He carried her upstairs to the master bedroom and laid her on the bed that was once his but now it was theirs. He lay next to her and pressed his lips to hers. Electricity ran through her veins, pushing the blood around her body faster and faster until it found its home and that home was her heart, and it beat only for the man in her arms. He sat her up and pulled the nightgown over her head and above her raised arms then threw it to the ground. She laid her naked body back on the bed and he undressed himself, releasing his hardened cock from the prison that was a pair of designer jeans and a hundred dollar pair of briefs. He lay between her legs and tickled the edge of her pussy with the tip of his tongue. She let out a girlish giggle for her pussy was sensitive and his tongue was like a magic wand he would wave at it, and it would moisten at the magician’s command and the magician would receive a standing ovation from the crowd he had entertained.