by Jeff Abugov
The sounds of cheering soldiers on the ground grew even louder. Peyton’s aide, the young Lieutenant, quietly approached his President to fulfill one of the earliest orders that he had been given.
“Your, uh, medicine, sir,” he said as he handed Peyton the small silver flask.
Peyton smiled as he took it from the boy and unscrewed the cap. He raised it to the room in toast, moved it to his lips, then paused. “After I win reelection,” he said as he screwed the top back on and placed it in his jacket pocket.
And on the far side of the room, Africa approached the slayer that she had always despised. “No matter what transpires forward, Laurel,” she began as the two other vampires lingered by her side, “I wish only to say to you, thank you.”
“On the contrary, Africa. It has been a privilege to watch your ascent. You will make a fine queen for your kind.”
“I shall endeavor to prove you right. Yet if it should come to pass that we must face each other in battle –”
“Let us hope that it does not.”
“Yes. Let us hope, my friend.”
Laurel smiled, honored, so proud of all that she had been able to accomplish.
And that was when her eyes met with Peyton’s. The President clasped his hands to his heart, extended them out to her in a gesture of love and friendship, and mouthed, “Thank you.”
She mimicked the gesture back to him, paying no heed to Plato who was now standing behind her, salivating as he stared upon her luscious slayer neck.
“No, Mr. President,” Laurel mouthed back. “Thank you.”
In a flash, Plato sprouted his fangs and lurched towards Laurel’s throat. But just as quickly, she thrust her left arm backward and up into the small vampire’s chest, stabbing him in the heart with the wooden stake that she had been quietly holding in her hand all along. Plato dropped dead to the ground.
“Truce over,” said the slayer.
The Queen leaned toward her new protégé and whispered, “We’d better go.”
And with that, Harve and Africa transformed to mist and flew out of the HQ, out of the hospital, and into the night.
EPILOGUE
It was very late that same night when Rog wheeled himself into the office. There was still much work to be done, bodies to be burned, bodies to be donated, bodies to be buried, and medals to be allotted. It would require an endless sea of paperwork for the Captain-with-the-scar and hence an endless sea for Rog himself—and the formerly homeless man couldn’t wait to get started.
He was surprised to see that the light in his Captain’s office was on, and even more surprised to hear a soft sobbing coming from behind the Captain’s partially open door. Rog’s heart went out to the man to whom he owed so much so he quietly wheeled himself to the edge of the door to see what was what.
The Captain-with-the-scar was standing alone in the center of the room. His human skin was peeled back as he tapped repeatedly on the keypad strapped to his lower forearm but to no avail—the quantum generators that powered it were gone forever. He cried softly over the billions of his kind who had needlessly perished, and for his friends and family that he had held so dear.
Rog wheeled himself out of the office and then back to his quarters.
He never said a word.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are so many people who so generously gave their time to help me with this book that I don’t quite know where to start. They were all invaluable. I suppose, since my made-up science is such a big part of the story, I will start there.
But first, I must point out that at any point in the process, if accuracy or fact conflicted with a compelling narrative, I always chose the narrative. In other words, despite my heartfelt gratitude to my many expert consultants in so many varied fields, I didn’t always listen to them. So if you’re their buddy or coworker and catch a mistake they should have caught, don’t give ’em a hard time. It was probably me.
It was my goal for my made-up science to be scientifically correct wherever it could be, and to sound correct wherever it couldn’t, which was most of the time. It was a bit intimidating to ask respected experts in their field, “Hey, I conjured this up out of whole cloth. Can you make sure I’m using the right words?” But the two Davids, as I call them, did so much more than that.
David Saltzberg, UCLA professor of physics, and David Jefferson, spacecraft navigation engineer, Jet Propulsions Laboratory (JPL), not only gave their time and expertise, but their warmth and humor. Working separately because they don’t know each other, they corrected me when I was factually wrong (I had forgotten about relativity at one point, oops), and they pushed me to go even further with the science fantasy whenever applicable. This book is better because of them both.
Regarding the military aspects of the story, my goal was to be one hundred percent accurate as to tactics, behavior and jargon—you know, other than the fact that my soldiers were fighting aliens, avoiding zombies, and allied with vampires. In this category, I lucked out too. Retired Army Major Leonard Gomberg and former Army Sergeant and Police Detective Julia Torres (the latter of whom also taught me how to properly swear in Spanish), approached the book from entirely different perspectives but each to the same positive end. Also working separately, addressing their comments was at times as easy as swapping one word for another; others, it seemed the whole story was about to collapse. But they never shied away from the long tactical discussions that followed, digging in till we came up with something militarily credible while remaining dramatically compelling. I thank them both.
Writing a screenplay in which a helicopter is about to crash into a brick wall or is ducking alien beams of white nothingness would require little more than the words I just used in this sentence, the rest being up to stunt coordinators and special effects teams. But a novel requires every detail spelled out and hence, an actual knowledge of the machine. I began this effort with no such knowledge, and have ended it with plenty. But pilot Laurie Pitman did far more than teach me words like “cyclic,” “collective” and “skids.” She targeted some of the stunts I had in my first draft as utterly impossible, commended other stunts that were improbable but cool, and even threw in a few tricks of her own. She also explained how helicopter pilots don’t care for the word “chopper;” a word that had been all over the early drafts. I deleted the offensive term from Johnny’s mouth and thoughts, but sometimes it just felt like what certain characters would say. Sorry Laurie. And thank you, Laurie.
I want to thank Dave Engdahl for teaching me about the city of Jacksonville, and Audrey Samz for her knowledge of Key West, neither of which I’ve been to but both of which seem beautiful. (The original plan was to have the main war in Miami but that didn’t make tactical sense from a military perspective.)
I want to thank my copy editor Amanda Pisani for her scrutiny, her tireless devotion, and her willingness to fight me on most everything; Patrick Gomez for the Latin; Keith Nolan for teaching me how to type with an Irish accent; and Josie Abugov for typing the one Chinese sentence into a Word Doc. (It means “they go to the park.”)
But my greatest thanks must go to the friends and family who read my pages along the way—some Part by Part, some chapter by chapter—sometimes even versions of the same chapter over and over as I neurotically asked them to weigh in on changes that I had made. Their encouragement kept me going, and their brutal honesty kept me honest. Only because they would sometimes say the pages were confusing, or stupid, or dull, hurting my feelings terribly, was I able to believe them when they said they loved it, giving me the inner security to move on. Without being able to quantify their invaluable help, I list them alphabetically. Thank you to Adam Abugov, Aria McKenna, Don Foster, Sandra Bettencourt and Will Kleist.
Lastly, I want to thank you, dear readers, for getting this far. I take that to mean that you
enjoyed this tale, and I hope you will like my next one even more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Abugov graduated from Concordia University Film School in Montreal where his two student films won national awards at the Canadian Student Film Festival. He began his professional career writing freelance for the NBC hit Cheers for which he eventually became a staff writer and then story editor. He served as executive story editor on The Golden Girls, then went on to write and produce such hit shows as Roseanne and Two and a Half Men. He served as executive producer of Roc and Grace Under Fire, and most recently of the animated series Fugget About It. He also wrote and directed the feature film The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, starring David Hyde Pierce and Carmen Electra. He has received a Golden Globe Award, a Peabody Award, and three People’s Choice Awards, as well as being nominated for a Humanitas Prize, a Canadian Screen Award, and a second Golden Globe.
After having achieved success writing and producing within the Hollywood system, doing as he’s told and playing nice, Jeff has at long last decided to let his imagination run rampant and do it his own way . . . and he’s having a blast!
He hopes you’re having as much fun reading his stories as he’s been having writing them.
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