by Patin, Eddie
“Here’s the stairwell!” the point man said. The group stopped. Harvey followed in the back, his pistol at low ready. He’d keep up with them, of course, but he was also doing his best to keep an eye out for any enemy combatants following his new little squad.
He heard one of the officers pat another on the shoulder, then, heard the point man open the door. With the shuffling sound of gear and boots, he heard the first man go into the stairwell, then the whole group surged forward as the second man went in.
“Clear!” one of them said from inside, his voice echoing in the tall space.
“Let’s go!” another said, and they started their way up to the main floor, cutting each corner with Harvey trying to keep up in the dark with just a Glock.
“What’s happening?” Harvey asked, his voice echoing in the stairwell.
“It’s the end of the fucking world!” one of the officers responded.
“Shut the fuck up!” another said. “Talk later! Let’s get upstairs first!”
Everyone clustered next to the door to the main level, then quieted down as the point man put his hand on the handle.
Suddenly, Harvey was aware of rapid movement down below them, and he raised his gun to the darkness just as a shrieking cry erupted at the base of the stairs! The two nearest cops swung their rifles around, their weapon lights sweeping strong flood beams across the black air, and the brilliance lit up a man—a creature—charging up the stairs at Harvey and the rear of the group. Its eyes were black holes with blazing blue centers, and its mouth was stretched open, long teeth like jagged fangs glistening in the light, its face slick with bright red blood...
“Fuck!!” someone yelled, and the two rifles erupted into four fiery and deafening shots. Harvey winced as the rifles barked near him, their reports painfully loud in the enclosed space, and watched the creature’s head explode in the wash of the bright gun lights. He caught a glimpse of elongated arms with long, clawed fingers flailing as it fell back into the darkness.
“Let’s go!” the point man shouted, opening the door.
Harvey’s head throbbed, and his ears hurt with a splitting pain. In the darkness, he saw flashing, dancing bursts of light, appearing and reappearing everywhere he looked. Clutching the pistol, he followed as the officers piled out into the side entrance area of the station—a large, open hallway that led out to the west side of the building. The desk next to the entrance was abandoned, and the glass doors leading outside were shattered. All of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling were off.
As Harvey could see by the light of day again, in awe of what was before him, he didn’t even notice the faces of the other officers with him. He forgot about the fact that more monsters might be sprinting up the stairs behind them. Taking slow steps to the broken doors to outside, Harvey marveled at the sky.
Glass crunched under his feet.
The sky … was red.
Ahead of him, on the other side of the concrete wall outside the doors, was the massive convention center parking garage, and beyond that, he could see the Wynn, the Encore, and the Palazzo buildings of the Strip.
But the sky was red, and the Las Vegas Strip was burning…
Want to know what happens next??
Continue to Season 1, Episode 2!
“Merge” – Season 1, Episode 2 (Book 2)
Portals all over Earth unleash hell, and worlds MERGE...
After the disaster underground in the Geneva UEA research lab with Portal Zero, random gateways to other worlds and dimensions have been popping up throughout the world, each thundering into existence with a powerful Electromagnetic pulse (an EMP), destroying electronics and power grids all over the planet...
Six Americans and their families, scattered throughout the country, have been thrown into chaos. And not only are they trying to survive the already devastating effects of the EMP's, they're also starting to encounter horrific creatures from much darker realms than here. And what will happen when areas of Earth shift around--when alien worlds slither into our own, and some characters' homes slide into ... somewhere else?
"Merge" is Episode TWO of Season ONE of the "Time of Doors" (Book 2)
Read it today!
Click HERE to find Book 2
P.S. – In case you haven’t read Episode TWO yet...
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About Eddie Patin
Author, entrepreneur, and adventurer, Eddie Patin was born in south Louisiana, and has lived the majority of his life in Colorado, USA.
A business owner and consultant during the day, Eddie spends his free time building a career as an author, an artist, and a musician. Outside of his writing, he has business experience in marketing, SEO, creating companies, ad and graphic design, and copy writing under his consulting business. He’s passionate about his music, the pursuit of martial excellence in firearms, combat arts, and medieval weaponry, and is a big fan of Capitalism and the Free Market.
Eddie Patin’s favorite fiction authors are Ayn Rand and Stephen King, and his favorite genres to write in are dark fiction, grim sci-fi, and horror. He is also an author of a variety of non-fiction topics, and likes to write children’s books designed to promote strong values.
You can find Eddie Patin’s titles organized under fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books, based on slightly different pen names:
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More Books from Eddie Patin
The “Time of Doors” Series
Portal Zero – “Time of Doors” Season 1, Episode 1
Merge – “Time of Doors” Season 1, Episode 2
Other Fiction Books
In Darkness of the Mountain’s Night – Werewolf Horror
Out of Paradise – Medieval Zombie Horror
Hijacked on Naos 5 – Science Fiction
Reclaiming the Maze – Fantasy Story about a Minotaur
Curb Painting – Little Books of Extra Cash Volume 1
Declutter Magic – Edited and Published by Eddie J Patin
Declutter Magic 2 – Edited and Published by Eddie J Patin
(Being Updated—Coming Soon)
MORE COMING SOON!!
Keep up with my Website for New Titles (Click Here!)
Enjoy this Excerpt from…
In Darkness of the Mountain’s Night
A Werewolf Tale
About the Book
"Great story! Really interesting twist, and a very realistic feel of being away from civilization on a frigid mountain."
"I love the atmosphere in this short story! It's a breath of (cold) fresh air getting back to the dark and scary aspects of werewolves in this time of teeny-bopper monster romance! Home run."
R Elmore - Firearms blogger and enthusiast
During an extraordinarily cold week of Elk season, high
in the mountains, amidst weekend warriors bedecked in blaze orange and corrupt rangers looking for revenue, Brett and Jon find that there are more beasts than Elk in the high mountains, and more types of game than those listed on the books...
Enjoy this dark short story from Eddie Patin about a monster deep in the wilderness of the highland country, and the havoc it wreaks on hunting season.
"I felt like I was really hunting elk, up until the monster changed everything..."
ONE
There was a body lying face down in the glade.
As I stumbled forward, my bare feet slick with mud and plunging through the icy water of the marsh, I could see the hunter’s shoulder raised in the air in a hunch, the bones beneath his body curled tight in death and his legs sprawled in the mushy sod. Through the bleak grass, grey in the crisp air of early November, the blaze orange of his vest was a burning flame in a dreary landscape.
The ball of my left foot slipped between two strange clumps of the uneven ground, and slipped into the cold water again. I was down on a knee before I caught my balance, reeling from side to side to keep from falling headlong into the papery blades of grass.
No bugs. Too cold for bugs.
What in the hell was going on? What was I doing here?
My skin was numb. I thought for a moment that my knee was a little shredded on the spongy ground, a field of tall grass built on mud and water, sticks, stones, lichen.
Yes. Cut it up a little, but it was too cold to bleed. Yet.
I was naked! Why in the hell was I naked?
My skin felt thick, and I wrapped my hands around my arms and tried to warm up.
A little voice in the back of my mind told me that hypothermia can have some pretty disorienting effects on the mind—I could become forgetful. Delusional. That must be what was going on, because I didn’t remember a damned thing as to how I got here, in the middle of this glade, a dead man up ahead…
The silence of the mountains pressed in on me, the morning too cold for birds, the mist in the air holding the expanse of blue skies outside of my little bubble of existence, nothing to be seen above the stratosphere except around Mt. Everson, where the clouds parted and followed the distant mountain up into the haze.
A man lay on his stomach before me, distorted over an arm bent up under him.
I reached up to touch my cheeks, convinced that the feel of my fingers on my frozen, rubbery skin might bring me back to reality. The hair of my beard bristled and felt like it was not my own.
Walking forward to the body as best I could on the marsh, I stared, held my breath, and waited for a sign that this man was anything but a lump of lifeless matter dressed in camouflage and hunter’s orange.
Crouching down, feeling the grass prick the backs of my thighs, I reached out with a hand that wasn’t mine.
I touched the vest. The man’s side. He seemed real enough. His orange hat was thrown off into the grass before him. The back of his head was full of thin, grey hair, matted in random directions by wearing a hat and going without a shower for the last several days.
This was a real man. I wasn’t imagining. His body was real, under my frozen and tight fingers.
And my fingers were caked with a dark grime.
I pulled my hand back and looked at my fingernails. Black under the normally white and clean edges. Filthier than they’d ever been in my life—like I’d been scratching the residue off of an old car’s oil pan.
Where the hell have I been?
The air ripped through my lungs like a torrent of ice water. A breeze flowing through the valley from the mountain tore at my skin and made me shake like I didn’t know I could.
So cold up here. So cold up here when naked.
I reached out with my grimy hand and grasped the man’s shoulder. As I expected, he was stiff. Frozen. With little effort (I was surprised at how easy it was in my state), I pulled at the corpse and turned him over.
As if in a dream, the lifeless face, shattered and torn, stared back at me with clouded eyes. He was a man of around sixty—that is, not really an old man, but not quite middle aged, either. But his jaw had been torn off, his throat ripped out, and his face lacerated and hanging in cold, leathery flaps. The grass pulled and ripped apart when I turned him over, clinging to frozen chunks and droplets of blood, bright and colorful like red Kool-Aid.
And somehow I noticed his ghastly visage with no more interest or shock than if I were observing the pattern in the bark of a fallen log.
The man’s arm was twisted into a curl in front of his chest, stuck fast by Rigor mortis and the chill of high altitude, but quivered in place as I turned him all the way to his back, the sling of his rifle wrapped around the locked elbow.
With a strength that I wouldn’t have expected in my frozen, dull body, I pulled his hand away from his chest and straightened the arm with a few pops. His rifle was an old, Swiss battle rifle. I unwrapped the sling from the dead, stiff arm, and placed the gun aside.
With fumbling fingers, I unzipped the man’s vest.
TWO
“So,” the kid said, “are you guys hunting tomorrow?”
“You bet,” Jon said, shooting a glance my way. I could tell the tone—that processed friendly-but-not-really-friendly tone that told us he was fishing for suckers that would let him fill his quota and earn him some fees for the county.
My hands were as close to the fire as I could manage without burning them. As cold as it was, the fire didn’t give off much warmth in a campsite with little shelter from the open sky. I could hear a truck passing on the road a ways off while I saw the kid’s wheels turning as he looked us over.
“Would you guys mind showing me your permits?”
I wanted to decline, since I didn’t actually need to prove myself until I was actually hunting, but these guys had a lot of wiggle room to be real assholes if they wanted to be. There was no reason to piss this kid off—he’d be up here all week.
Jon reached to his back pocket as I pulled open the Velcro pouch on my chest with a muffled rip. The kid watched me first. Producing a folded-up sandwich bag, I smoothed out the plastic with cold fingers, opened the seal, and handed over the perforated blue card.
The kid took my card and scrutinized it, his neutral face flickering in the fire.
“Brett?” His eyes flashed up to mine. “Cross?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You caught a Bull tag, huh? That’s cool.”
“Yep.”
He paused for a moment, then, “Do you have your ID?”
Jon, who had been holding his hunting license in readiness, lowered his hand to his side and sat back down in his folding chair. His curly, dark hair sprouted from around his fleece cap like black feathers. His pale eyes flashed me the same look he gave me some times at work when ‘one of those kind’ of customers heads our way.
I looked over the kid’s face and wondered if he was going to be a hard-ass. He was young, and he seemed friendly, but that was only how he seemed. Could be hard to tell with these guys. They make the rules to make sure everything stays in balance, but they end up pursuing the rules more to make an income off of the hunters than anything else. At least, that’s the way I’d always thought.
“No,” I said.
His blonde eyebrows raised. “You don’t have your ID?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t have my wallet. I don’t need it.”
The kid paused. His eyebrows lowered. Then he handed my hunting license back to me. “Okay,” he said, then turned and inspected Jon’s card, proffered immediately when the ranger’s attention settled on my friend.
Jon had been going on and on about the rangers earlier today, after we got into another conversation about the over-abundance of rules and regulations. He recited the rules and our rights, and how we didn’t have to show the rangers anything until we were on the hunt, or until we were carrying the elk back to camp and back to the world from which we came.
Now, he complied without a wink of o
bjection or resentment, but I could understand. It was best to keep the rangers off of our backs. Especially now, in the beginning. If we gave them any lip, they could hound us the whole rest of the trip, inspecting this and that. The King’s inspectors could probably go for quite the power trip if they landed on any hunters that didn’t go along with the typical routine.
I replaced my card in its plastic bag, folded it, and put it back into the nylon pocket of my shell jacket.
After checking our tags, the ranger muttered some form of ‘have a good one’ that I didn’t even notice, then was gone quite abruptly, jumping back into his Bronco to make his way to the next potential money-bags.
“Fuckin rangers,” Jon said.
Reaching down, he pulled up a bottle of Whiskey. With a twist, the metal seal crackled and broke open, and Jon reached down again, producing a plastic cup for each of us. The bright moonlight twinkled in the glass and spoke of good experiences out in the wild.
The nights were long with the temperature falling far below zero and our sleeping bags barely keeping us comfortable enough to sleep. I slept the strange sleep of being numb and dreamless, waking occasionally to zip the bag back up over my head.
The first morning was black, but with Jon’s GPS and our headlamps, we made our way to the hides we had chosen the afternoon before. As I lay in the field, my bag off to the side and my shoulder propped up on a fallen tree, I listened to the silent darkness and held my rifle trained on the tree-line across the field.