A hot spark of vengeance flared like a magnesium torch in Desmond’s solar plexus. He came up on his knees and slid his hand into his pocket, withdrew the fountain pen with rain-slicked fingers, and folded it tight in his palm. He cocked his arm back, got his feet under him and lunged forward, bringing his fist down like a hammer, plunging the silver nib into the side of the old man’s neck at an angle to avoid the spinal vertebrae and increase his chances of hitting the carotid artery. The pen speared through flesh with shockingly little resistance, and he felt his fist connect with the man’s neck in a flash, the force of the blow knocking the aged body sideways.
Desmond leaned forward and whispered, “Mightier than the sword, motherfucker.”
At first there was no blood: the barrel of the fountain pen plugged the hole. The samurai lurched forward and let out a guttural howl that morphed into a cry of rage. Tendons sprang into taut ropes along the man’s neck as his right hand shot out and seized the sword hilt.
Desmond pivoted on one knee, swept Lucas up in his arms, and tossed the boy over Drelick’s body, sending him crashing into the corn. Lucas shrieked in midair, landed roughly, and rolled. Desmond yelled, “Run, Lucas! Run!”
Lucas looked back in horror, must have seen the old man staggering forward with the pen poking out of his neck, but Desmond guessed it was the hideous sounds the man was making more than the sight of him that spurred Lucas to flee.
Desmond staggered backward over Drelick’s body. He almost tripped but then used the momentum of what could have become a sideways tumble to launch himself into the wider path that the younger swordsman had been trying to cut his way out of. The old man’s eyes were losing vitality, losing even the bright spark of rage, and his breath now made a labored whistling like a cheap wooden flute. He looked as if he wanted to say something to Desmond before cutting him down but could no longer make his voice work.
The samurai raised the blade. Desmond’s trembling hands had found the holster on Drelick’s left calf, and he scrambled to work the gun free. Too slow. It was snapped in. His fingers, dumb and numb, cold and clumsy, were going to cost him his life, cost Lucas another parent after all.
Then a mechanical beating sound that had previously been absorbed and attenuated by the corn suddenly rose to deafening volume, and the angle of the falling rain shifted. The stalks were blown flat, and Desmond hit the ground with them. The helicopter thundered overhead, bullets whistling along the trajectory of the raindrops. It was gone as fast as it had come, and the old samurai fell back into the corn stalks beside his apprentice, his sword still clenched in his dying hand.
Desmond turned and ran, screaming Lucas’s name over the wind and the rain and the receding roar of the chopper, now circling to land.
NINE YEARS LATER
Epilogue
Lucas wakes to the smell of bacon and eggs. It prompts him to roll out of bed a little earlier than he otherwise would. At thirteen, he isn’t an early riser, and a brisk jog to the bus is a regular part of his day, but today is his birthday, and the smell of his father’s cooking arouses anticipation in his belly that affects him like caffeine. Maybe Kirsten will remember his birthday, too, and shoot him a card on his phone. He wonders if she’ll sign it with the L-word.
Twenty minutes later he is showered, dressed, and lumbering down the stairs in his sneakers, jeans, and t-shirt; the device on his hip is already hitting the third song on his playlist. He takes the hardwood stairs two at a time, past his Mom’s framed photos on the mustard-colored walls that always look more yellow in the morning when the light floods in through the high cathedral windows. When he reaches the landing, he glances through the sliding glass doors out of habit. The deck chair where his father usually spends his mornings this time of year, banging out the daily word quota on his laptop, is vacant today.
In the kitchen he finds his old man in chef mode, complete with ridiculous apron. Lucas taps the pause button, pulls the headphones down around his neck and leans on the marble-topped island where cracked eggshells lay scattered on a folded paper towel. In the dining room, a cluster of blue and white helium balloons strain toward the ceiling on strings tied to the back of a chair.
“Smells good,” Lucas says.
His dad lifts a pot lid from a steaming plate of eggs and bacon and passes it to him. “Toast already popped, but you might want to warm it up.”
“Thanks,” Lucas says, taking his plate to the table and sitting down beside a rectangular package, clumsily wrapped in colorful paper. Whatever it is, it looks too big to be the video game he asked for. He shakes some salt onto his eggs and begins shoveling them in, eyeing the package with disappointment and deciding it must be a shirt.
“No mad dash for the bus today?” his dad asks, sitting across from him with his own plate. “I figured I’d drive you to school, anyway. Give you time to eat a proper breakfast for a change.”
“My nose woke up before the rest of me. This’s good,” he says around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
His dad smiles in that goofy way of his, like he always does when watching Lucas enjoy something. “You can open your present, you know. You don’t have to wait.”
Lucas takes another bite, then sets the fork down, picks up the box, and gives it a slow shake. It is heavier than he expected. He tears the paper off and opens the box to find a hardcover book nestled in a bed of tissue paper. Gold letters stamped on the spine read:
ORPHEUS
DESMOND CARMICHAEL
“Wow, one of your books. You pull it off the shelf this morning and wrap it before I woke up?”
“Have you ever seen this one on our shelves?”
Lucas turns it over and looks at the spine again. He shrugs his shoulders.
“Don’t worry, I have something else for you later, when we have cake with Nana.”
“If you want me to read one of your books, you can send it to my handheld, you know. Easier to carry around.”
“This one was never published. And it’s not a fantasy, like the others.”
“No? Isn’t the name from one of the myths?”
“That’s right. Who was Orpheus?”
“Um…a musician who visited Hades to rescue his dead wife?” Lucas hears the lightness evaporating from his voice as the sense of this recited trivia sinks in.
Desmond nods. “This book is sort of a memoir, and it’s about your mother.”
Lucas lays the book down on top of the shredded paper in a way that reminds him of his dad placing a dead bird in a shoebox last summer after it hit one of the tall windows. Now there are butterfly stickers on those windows.
“The year after she died, around the time when the bad men came back, I was writing a book with that title, and it was a fantasy—a hero’s quest with a dragon and a maiden and everything. A real piece of crap, but I was trying to write her into it, trying to save her in my imagination because I couldn’t save her in real life.” He sighs and takes off his glasses. Lucas has noticed that sometimes his dad takes them off not to see something nearby better but to remove a layer of separation between his eyes and those of the person he’s talking to.
“She took a lot of photos, you know,” he says with a vague wave of his hand at the walls around them. “And you can think of this book as my photos of her, and of us, from a time you were too young to remember.” Desmond looks down at the glossy tabletop, picks up a napkin and wipes a teardrop from the surface. After a deep breath, his voice grows stronger. “I’ve waited until now to share it with you because it’s honest. It shows my faults and hers. Which isn’t to say that it’s not biased—of course it is, in the way that anyone’s memory would be. But if there are places where it seems like fantasy, remember that it’s not. That’s just love, as best I can recall and describe it. As true as I can tell it.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Desmond rolls the napkin into a ball in his fist, and nods. “Happy birthday, son,” he says. He smiles his weary smile, and gazes beyond the butterfly stickers at the sky.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I’d like to thank my wife Jen for supporting my writing in countless ways. She was the first reader of this book, and her enthusiasm for it gave me the confidence to see it through. Considering what I did to her fictional counterpart, I think that’s true love. Thanks also to my crack team of beta readers for improving the story with insightful critiques: Jeff Aach, Chuck Killorin, Jeff Miller, Jill Sweeney-Bosa, and again, Jen Salt. You guys rock.
Brian and Cathy Cuffe, Esq. were very helpful in answering my questions about the legal details of guardianship cases in Massachusetts. Any errors or liberties in that area fall squarely on me. I’m also indebted to Howard and Diana Salt for being the kind of in-laws who make life better in every way. Domo arigato to Sensei Alex Markauskas, Sensei John Dore, and Jamey Proctor. Anything I got right about Iaido is thanks to them, and any misrepresentations are my own. Thanks to Christopher C. Payne, Dr. Michael R. Collings, and everyone at JournalStone for working hard to make good books, and to Jeff Miller for another amazing cover.
Credit where it’s due goes to a couple of non-fiction books that were instrumental in my research: Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston, and Flyboys by James Bradley. The former breathes life into a chapter of American history that we are in danger of forgetting, and the latter depicts the horrors of the war in the Pacific with a depth and complexity that my novel can only hint at.
Douglas Wynne is the author of the rock n roll horror novel The Devil of Echo Lake, which was a first place winner of JournalStone's 2012 Horror Fiction contest.
He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and spends most of his time hanging out with a pack of dogs when he isn’t writing, playing guitar, or swinging a sword. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter and at www.dougwynne.com
Rena Mason proves she is a rising new voice in horror.“ —JG Faherty, author of The Burning Time, Cemetery Club, Carnival of Fear, and the Bram Stoker Award® nominated Ghosts of Coronado Bay.
William (Billy) Burke and William Hare were two real-life, beer-swilling, fist-fighting lowlifes who managed to stumble their way into infamy in Edinburgh, Scotland in the late 1820s. Step by step, they graduated from the unemployment line to petty thievery, to grave robbing, and then on to cold bloody murder – ultimately becoming Britain’s first documented serial killers.
What history doesn’t know about, or consider, is the possibility that Burke and Hare may not have been acting on their own; and the blame for those heinous crimes might not entirely be theirs. Two mysterious strangers have arrived in the city–an old sculptor and a stunningly beautiful actress–both of which use their money and influence to manipulate the young Irishmen into searching for an ancient artifact rumored to have the awesome power of Heaven and Hell combined.
Seized by the vicious killings of Jack the Ripper, Victorian London’s, East End is on the brink of ruin. Elizabeth Covington, desperate and failing to follow in her beloved father’s footsteps, risks practicing medicine in the dangerous and neglected Whitechapel District to improve her studies. News of a second brutal murder spreads. Elizabeth crosses paths with a man she believes is the villain, triggering a personal downward spiral taking her to a depth of evil she never knew existed. Only she knows the truth that drives the madness of a murderer.
Steel Breeze Page 25