August 20, 2025
Dreamer’s Worlds – Dell Sweet Dreamers-10

Dreamer’s Worlds – Dell Sweet

wendellsweet7 August 15, 2025

Check out this free read of Dreamer’s Worlds and then scroll to the bottom to check out the book links…

ONE

In The Moonlight:

Joe Miller

“Easy… Easy, Boy.” I lowered my hand to the dog’s head and patted affectionately, trying to calm him. He whined low in his throat and looked around at the darkness that closed in on us.

We were in a garage, that much I could tell. Just a nondescript, average run-of-the-mill garage.

The dog lived here. Not the garage specifically. Specifically he lived with, or was owned by, the people that lived on the ground floor of the nearby house. I knew that was true because I lived on the top floor of that same house, even though I had only ever set foot there once or twice, and then only in dreams. I still knew the place. It looked the same. Familiar. The dog, Bear, slept in the garage.

The dog squirmed under my calming hand, whined once again, and then darted out of the garage toward the lower floor of the house. Maybe the first floor. Maybe the basement if he had or could find a way into it. Either way, he was safe now. A kind of exit stage left. Still, I waited a few long minutes to see if he might return, when he didn’t I turned my attention back to the grocery cart I had just pushed for the last few miles to reach the garage.

It wasn’t mine. Well, technically it wasn’t mine, but everything in this world was mine if you came right down to it. I had entered what looked to be an abandoned house and found the cart, already loaded, sitting in an attached garage just off the ground floor apartment. I remember thinking… “So… This is how it begins…

It always begins some way and I suppose that sometimes the ends justify the means, and here was the end… I mean to say that I took the cart, loaded as it was, no more thought involved, pushed it out of the garage at a run and went blindly down the rain-slicked dirt road in front of me.

There was one bad part when I nearly got stuck, but I saw the problem from a long way off, put on a burst of speed and made it through the mud hole and out the other side. It was only a matter of minutes later that I had come in sight of the house and knew what the deal was. I had been contemplating the cart and it’s contents, feeling ears of corn through the side of a large sack, about to check some other stuff, when the dog had appeared.

When the dog came, memories came with him: The house; The people that owned the dog… Returning from work… or? I don’t know. Work or something else. Daily? Was it before things got bad? If so it had to be work: There was nothing else but work before. So work, or something like work… Coming home… The people downstairs… The family upstairs that I knew so intimately, but had never actually seen… Other memories… Leaving to go and get the cart… Knowing it would be there somehow… Getting there… Looping back to here and the present time…

The dog didn’t come back. I stood, the moonlight washing over me: This was critical, all that I had to do was stay there. There meaning upstairs. Stay there. I would be home. I was home. All I had to do was stay. But it never worked out that way. Even as I was thinking about climbing those stairs, checking on the kids, climbing quietly into bed beside my wife, something else was pulling at me, and as I looked around, the big van was parked in the driveway. Almost talking to me. Had it been there a few moments before? A few seconds ago? Surely not. I’d just pushed that cart up that driveway. There had been nothing in it… And that was… Today…? Tonight…? Just a short time ago…? Sure it was.

I let my eyes move around the garage, sweeping over the cart and its load of bundles and packages… Junk too… I hadn’t seen that before… Computer parts? … Maybe… Food and machines. That was ironic. But my mind was not satisfied. The van was there and if the van was there… … I felt in my pockets… … Keys… … And absolutely those keys hadn’t been there a few seconds ago. I could feel their scratchy press against my thigh. Irritating yet comforting… My eyes turned up to the van.

The van was the way out. It could be anyway, if I could simply stay with it… But there was no time to think. Certainly no time to be thinking like that.

More memories came. Memories of always taking the van; always, and… And I couldn’t make the rest of that ghost of a memory come, whatever it was, it was lost to me. … The city… Being lost in the city… Something…. It wouldn’t come, but, well I couldn’t stay here could I?

I glanced towards the house again, expecting the dog to come back… No dog… He had played his part and… And… I looked up at the full, bloated moon. When had I left the garage? I was standing next to the van… Looking in through the drivers window. The keys out of my pocket and into my hand. I could feel their cold, metal weight… Dawn was not far away, if I was going… That was it. The thought just echoed in my head… If I was going I better get going? … If I was going I better get to it? … I better throw away the keys and go in the house? … I better… But I stopped those thoughts. I knew where I better lead to, it lead to, ‘The time is short!’ Once dawn moves in you’ll be stuck! Whatever I had to do in the city with the van had to be done now: Before dawn, or not at all. There was no time to think about it… There never was… I looked down and sucked in a sharp breath.

I let the breath out slowly as my hand fitted the key into the ignition. When had I opened the door? ‘For that matter,’ my mind started, but I shut the door on those thoughts as the van roared to life. I dropped the lever into reverse and for some reason I looked up at the top floor of the house as I did. The lights popped on… A shadow moved behind the curtains of one window… ‘Better go if you’re going,’ my mind whispered. ‘You could stay,’ another voice inside my head countered. ‘Just walk up those stairs…’ the curtain moved in that upstairs window and I quickly turned my eyes aside… I couldn’t see that…. I always turned away: Always…

The van bounced and then lurched out into the street. Gears clashing, transmission whining. The tires chirped as I braked too hard and then slammed the gear shift into drive. The outline of the city glowed in soft yellow light before me. The moonlight bathed the road behind me bright and familiar. After all, how many times had I driven this road? … I sighed, slipped my foot off the brake pedal and let it fall heavily onto the gas. The tires chirped once more as I moved off down the road, snapping the headlights on as an afterthought. Behind me, in the back of the van, the dog whined. I lowered one hand and his head slipped underneath that hand.

“Easy… Easy, Boy,” I said.

In The Moonlight:

Laura Kast

“Easy… Easy, girl, I wont hurt you.” I lowered my hand slowly to let the dog get my scent as I approached the van… Boy, my mind corrected… Boy, Laura…

“Boy,” I said aloud and laughed. But the dog looked like he knew what I had said, cocking his head from one side to the other. His upper lip curled away from his teeth, but he was no longer snarling or growling deep in his chest. “Easy, Boy. Easy, Boy… It’s me, Laura… Easy.” I reached down and he allowed me to rest one hand on his head. I ruffled the thick fur there.

This was new. Did the dog know me? Did I know the dog? I thought about it and realized that at the very least I knew the dog. That didn’t mean the dog knew me. And the dog was definitely not letting anyone near the van. Guarding it. He seemed to consider me on a deeper level, his eyes locked with mine. When had I looked back at him? I couldn’t answer the question. With the dog looking at me like that the question didn’t seen important at all. Wasn’t, important at all, I corrected myself… The dog corrected…?

“You do know me… Don’t you? …Bear?” The dog, who was not a dog, cocked his head to one side and seemed to smile at me. … “Your name is, Bear? … Good, Boy… You’re… Joe’s dog… Bear. Good boy, Bear… Is he here… In the van?” I eased closer as I talked.

Bear watched me, but no longer growled at all. Even the stiff posture he had assumed had changed. His tail dropped and moved slightly. It may have been the beginning of a wag. He whined low in his throat. His eyes reflecting green iridescence in the blue of the moon light. He whined again and then came closer to me, easing his head back under my hand so carefully it seemed as though it had always been there. I rubbed his head once more and then my hand slipped under his jaw, scratching, my head lowered at the same time. Bear whined again and then licked my face.

Laura, you take too many chances, I told myself. Too many. But my hand continued to rub Bear’s head and scratch under his jaw, allowing my racing heart to slow. Catching my breath. Wondering what came next. I was new to this. I had never been this far before. I didn’t know what came next.

“You get in the van,” Joe said from the open window above me.

A small, sharp scream slipped from my throat before I could stop it; sounding like someone was strangling me as I tried to suppress it.

“Jesus… Jesus, Joe… Jesus!”… I managed to get myself back under control after a few seconds. I sucked air back into my lungs. Bear whined and looked up at me. My heart slammed against my rib cage.

“No… Not, Jesus. Thank God it’s not that time,” he said.

I met his eyes, but there was no smile in them. “You scared me,” I said defensively, still breathing hard, chest heaving, heart slamming against my ribs.

“No shit. You think I wasn’t scared too? You’re not supposed to be here … You never have been.” He finished quietly after starting in a loud, strained whisper. His eyes remained on mine. The wind picked up moving the limbs in a huge Elm that stood nearby. Its winter-dead limbs clicking and clacking as they came together. The heavy branches groaning and creaking as the wind momentarily gusted.

The wind continued to build for a few more seconds. Our eyes still locked on one another. Then the wind died down with an audible sigh and I shuddered involuntarily and shifted my eyes away.

“I know… I know,” I started. I moved my eyes back to his, but he just stared at me.

“I do know,” I started again. “I’m not even sure how… How I got here,” I finished quietly.

Bear pushed past me, tail wagging, and jumped up into the van as Joe opened the door.

“That’s how it happens,” he said every bit as quietly as I had started. His eyes that had wandered up to the night darkened sky were back on my own now. Staring at me out of the open door. Bear’s head popped up, looking at me from between the seats.

“Well,” Joe asked?

“What,” I asked? I cocked my head in an unconscious imitation of the way Bear was looking at me.

“Shouldn’t you get in,” he asked? … “Or don’t you want to?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? Here I was, where I was not supposed to be, where I was not invited to be, where I had never been before and it was time to make the choice.

Bear cocked his head once more as if he were also waiting to hear my answer. The dog that was not a dog at all… a… wolf? Maybe… Maybe more than that too… His green eyes asked the question.

“I get in the Van,” I said quietly.

Joe looked away and then turned quickly back. “Yeah. Yeah. You get in the van and we… We go… It’s nearly dawn… There isn’t much time and we have to get as far as we can before the sun comes up.”

He stretched one hand across the seat, held out to me and I could hear the engine running… When had he started it? … I couldn’t remember. My tongue poked out and licked at my dry lips. Bear seemed to grin. No. Not just a wolf either… One side of his upper lip curled over his teeth.

I found my feet stepping up into the passenger area and I followed…

In The Moonlight:

On The Road With Bear

Joe

I rolled to a stop at the intersection. The city was ahead, the house behind, I had never turned left or right so I had no idea what might be in those directions. Were those two roads, one to the left, one to the right, winding away into the distance, just conceptions? One of those photo realistic things that made you look twice, maybe even more? I looked again.

The roads were night dark, the moon playing hide and seek, gliding in and out of the heavy black clouds. The falling rain distorted both the near road and the distant road. How long had it been raining, I wondered, once the rain finally registered. Big, fat drops formed and rolled off down the slope of the windshield. I reached for the wiper switch but found nothing.

I took my eyes from the windshield and looked, supposing I had put my hand in the wrong place, but I had not. There was simply nothing but a gray, formless mass that slightly resembled the lower half of a dashboard. I blinked and when I opened my eyes once more the wiper switch was there. Exactly where it had not been. Exactly where it should be.

Tired I thought.

Bullshit was my second thought.

I blinked again, but the wiper switch remained. I flicked it on half suspecting that it wouldn’t work. That the wipers, if there were any real wipers, would remain frozen to the glass, refuse to move, but they swept up and pushed the beaded drops of rain from the glass nearly silently. Bear whined and pushed his nose under my hand.

“Alright, Buddy,” I told him. I stroked his head and then looked back out at the road. Left, right, straight, I asked myself.

There was a mystery to the city. Sometimes it went bad for me and sometimes it simply frustrated me.

… Running down the clock… One thing was sure, I had never come back out of the city in the many times that I had driven down into it.

… Left, right, straight, I asked myself again.

I pulled a small wire bound notebook and a pen from my shirt pocket and thumbed it open. Pages and pages of notes on the many times I had gone, but none of them amounted to anything except four entries:

The first entry, page twenty-Six, an address, 52715 Randolph Circle. I had never found Randolph Circle in all of my trips, let alone 52715. I had no memory of ever being there. Of any trip to the city when I may have gone there. I did not remember marking the address into the book. Nothing. A total blank.

The second entry, page twenty-five, read; Be careful of Locust street. Big bold letters. And I remembered being there. I had barely got away with my life.

The third entry, page twenty-seven said; ‘West End Docks.’

I knew that place. I remembered being there, the first time and several other times. But the details weren’t there. I couldn’t see them. Why had I been there? I couldn’t see it. Put my finger on it. There was a long, low building that fronted the docks. A house across the street. An old run down neighborhood. A low, curving concrete wall where I had sat and watched people come and go several times. And more. The feeling that I had been there other times that I could not yet remember. I say yet because I had the feeling that I would remember it. But page twenty-six? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a ghost of a memory.

A map would be useful, but there were no maps. It had taken a dozen times or more before I could count on the wire bound note book being in my pocket. Bigger things, like the van, had taken even longer. Before that I had had to walk or steal a car and that was always risky. But there was hope for a map. Someday, just not this day. At least I didn’t think so.

A quick check of the glove box and the engine cover storage area proved that to be true. Nothing useful. And why was it so much useless stuff was there? A spare pen cap… A broken transistor radio, the van had a radio of its own… Sometimes anyway, but there were no stations on the dial, or at least not yet there weren’t. That was another maybe, but it was there, so what good was a broken transistor radio?

Two paperclips. An insurance card, made out to me… For what? A fuzzy life saver, it looked like lime, my least favorite flavor. A flashlight with no batteries, and a dog biscuit. That was new. There had never been a dog biscuit before. Bear whined and gave a little woof in his throat.

I laughed, “It’s yours, Buddy.” He took it gently from my hand. The dry scrape of the Windshield wipers dragged my attention to the windshield. No rain. No rain on the road either. I reached down and flicked off the wipers. At least the switch was still there.

Straight, my mind finally decided. Better the evil that you know. Left and right could wait for another night. I eased off the brake as Bear jumped up onto the passenger seat, rested his paws on the dashboard and watched the countryside pass us by as we made our way into the city.

The fourth entry was on page fifty-eight. A series of numbers. 2757326901. All strung together, followed by a name Laura K. Whole first name, initial only for the last: Like I knew her maybe? I didn’t though. I must have at the time I wrote the number down, but I didn’t now. Who was Laura? Were the numbers a telephone number? Code talk? It bothered me that I had written the entry and yet had no recollection of doing it. Same as Page twenty-six.

I passed the City Limits sign as I wondered. Regular street lights. No traffic. Sometimes there was traffic, sometimes there wasn’t.

The rain began to fall all at once. One second no rain, the next everything was drenched as though it had rained forever: Always; would never stop. I fumbled for the windshield wiper switch once more, but by the time I turned it back on the windshield was clear. No more rain. The road looked as though it had never seen rain, as if it had never been there at all.

I glanced at the speedometer and then lowered my speed. I didn’t need to attract attention. There were cops here and they had no problem putting me in jail. It didn’t seem to matter to them that I was no more real to them than they were to me, off to jail they took me. And before that was all said and done I spent ten days in that jail. Eating Bologna sandwiches, smelling that moldy-pissy jail smell and trying to convince my court appointed lawyer that neither of us were really there. Jail was no good. I had no intention of going back there. I looked once more at the speedometer, backed off a little more, and then passed the sign announcing the city limits.

The city was early morning dead. It wasn’t dawn. If it were I would not have been there, but dawn was close. There was a glow above the city skyline. Faint… Pink… Growing as I sat idling at the intersection waiting for the light to change.

I noticed the rain was falling once more and I had either never turned on the wipers the last time it had rained, or I had turned them off after it had rained. I reached down to flip the switch on and that was when I heard the sound of a heavy engine screaming. Gears clashing. Bear voiced a warning just as my eyes cleared the dashboard and tried to make sense of the scene before them.

There wasn’t much time to absorb it. A garbage truck just feet away from the driver’s door and closing fast. Sirens screaming. Red and blue lights pulsing. Chasing the garbage truck, I wondered? That was nearly the only thought I had time for.

Bear barked again. My eyes focused on the truck only inches away from me, and slowly rose to the driver. A woman… Laura? … Her eyes focused on my own for the split second before the Garbage truck hit the van’s driver door full blast.

Pain exploded inside of me. Faintly, far away, I heard Bear howl in either anger or pain. Then that sound, all sound, was quickly cut off, replaced with a low snapping sound that quickly turned into a heavy crackling sound. The smell of Ozone filled my nose, but something else quickly began to replace that smell. Gasoline. Gasoline and something else… Diesel? And then, with a low wham, the heat came. I struggled to free myself, but it was no use. I had time for one more quick thought … Laura … Laura … Why …? And then the explosion came and the pain flared, then ended almost as fast as it had come and I found myself flying through the blackness of the void… Flying…. Falling… Panic building… Lungs trying to pull a breath… Voice trying to scream… Nothing coming out… Then sight returning in a rush… The street racing up to meet me… The remains of the Van and the Garbage truck burning far below me…. Red and blue lights pulsing… Cars parked aslant in the street where they had skidded to a stop… Cops behind open doors… Crouched to fire… Their guns pointing… Rain falling… The pavement coming closer… So close I could see the individual pebbles of the surface embedded in the asphalt mix…

The impact came with no pain. The remaining air crushed from my lungs… I tried once more to scream, but it was no use… I hit hard, bounced, came down once more and my eyes flew open wide as I impacted the second time…

Gray half-light… The buzzing of the alarm clock… My own sheets tangled around me… Damp with sweat. The red numerals on the clock read 6:47 A.M. I sucked air greedily, like I had never been among the living at all. Never known how to breath. Just returned from the dead. I released my breath in a long, shaky shudder, found myself half sitting up in the bed and fell back to the mattress urging my racing heart to slow… Calming myself… Morning had come.

I reached over, shut off the alarm clock and silence descended on the room. I could hear my heart beating in that silence. Rapidly slamming against the inside of my ribs. Hard. Heavy. Loose and wet. Hear my labored breathing. I lay still for a few minutes watching more color seep into the sky, then got up and made my way to the shower…

Get the books below…

Dreamer’s Worlds: The Dreamer’s Worlds

Laura and Joe are dreamers. When they close their eyes they dream travel through space and time, to other worlds with little more than a thought… #Mythology #Fantasy #Readers #DreamTravel #Kindle

Dreamer’s Worlds: Sparrow Spirit

Book 2 of 2: Dreamer’s Worlds: As Joe and Laura fall deeper into the Dreamer’s Worlds they search to learn more about the legend of Sparrow Spirit… #Mythology #Fantasy #Readers #DreamTravel #Kindle

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Wastelands 8 Eight Front

Wastelands 8

wendellsweet7 August 14, 2025

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below. #3DModel k #dellsweet #directx #Donk

#3DModels #3DCarModels #dellsweet

This is wastelands 08. Wastelands cars are built from junked cars, trucks, junkyard scraps. They are welded up, powerful engines installed that are converted to methane and they are used to move people, supplies ort both throughout the wastelands outposts.

This one is a tube built with a V10. A truck frame has been mated to the body and the 4-wheel drive mechanicals have been added from yet another wreck. This is a fast ride that is used as a fighter and to protect convoys or supply vehicles.

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. #3DCarModel #directx #dellsweet

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below. #lopoly #landscape #3ddesign #3droad #3DLand #dellsweet

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Wastelands 6 Six Perspective 3

Wastelands 6

wendellsweet7 August 14, 2025

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. #3DCarModel #directx #dellsweet

#3dmodels #directx #dellsweet #fbx #lopoly #3dcarmodel

Wastelands 6. This is a tube-built vehicle. Fast. V10 methane powered. Room for a driver, passenger and a gunner and a large cargo or just supplies. This was built from pipe and welded up, skins from old V.Ws were used to cover the front clip. The result was stuffed with a methane powered V10 and fitted with a 4 wheel drive drivetrain and lifted. Large tires finished it out and it was set out on missions in the Wastelands. This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below and converted versions in 3DS, FBX and OBJ.

See this model in a video game: https://youtu.be/6hE-W6Vq8M0

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

The Road to Chickasaw fotor-ai-2024100510839

The Road to Chickasaw

wendellsweet7 August 14, 2025

Check out this free chapter read of The Road to Chickasaw and then scroll down for the link to get the book…

The road to Chickasaw

Copyright 2024 W. G. Sweet all rights reserved.

Cover Art © Copyright 2024 W. G. Sweet

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

LEGAL

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic, print, scanner or any other means and, or distributed without the author’s permission. Permission is granted to use short sections of text in reviews or critiques in standard or electronic print.

The road to Chickasaw

PROLOGUE

Somewhere in the World

Overclocking: SS-V2765

“Stay down next to the friggin’ bank, Hunter!” Beeker yelled. Beeker could see that Hunter probably wouldn’t be hanging around for much longer. He didn’t have the wits that Simpson had had. And a fire fight was no fuckin’ place to have to baby sit. Why was it that he always ended up with all the ass-holes any way? They had been pinned down in this particular position a sandy beachhead for four days. Sand and water in front of them, mountain and jungle behind them. They were on the other side of a river, and if the man upstairs the man that pulled all the friggin’ strings, Beeker liked to think, didn’t do something damn soon they might not see five.

The fire was just as heavy as it had been on the first day. Non-stop. Round after round of machine gun fire, and mortar rounds that came so fast it was hard to tell when one ended, and another began. Hunter crawled over, eating some dirt as he came. But at least he had crawled. The numb son-of-a-bitch had walked the first few times; like he was out on a goddamn Sunday stroll.

“Sergeant Beeker?” he whisper yelled over the sound of the gunfire. “Shouldn’t we maybe take the shit now, sir?”

“Hey, fuck you, if I say we lay low, we lay low. We take it like we’re supposed to, no deviations on my watch. Now, shut up and crawl your white-ass back over to your position, mister, NOW!”

The shit was V2765. The thing was, Hunter had already had it at least once, the rest of them hadn’t and never would. But Hunter had come with the vial clearly marked as a booster shot… He didn’t need that yet.

Hunter went, he didn’t have to be told twice. Beeker was one mean bastard, and he had absolutely no desire to mess with him. Even so this whole situation didn’t set well in his mind, and that was mainly due to the fact that it didn’t make any sense. And how in hell could it? he asked himself. There was no answer, because there could be no answer at all. Fifteen days ago he had been safe and sound in… In… It wouldn’t come. Someplace. He had been someplace, not here, and he had been… Whatever he had been, or where ever he had been it wouldn’t come. He could almost remember, like it was right there, just beyond memories…

He could remember waking up here with Beeker, Philips, and Ronson. In the middle of… Of… Where am I? He didn’t know that either, and they weren’t disposed to tell him. Other than waking up in the middle of this fire-fight, he couldn’t remember jack-shit. He made the outside perimeter, and curled up into a near ball as he pressed himself into the dirt embankment.

Jungle all around… Not the Middle East then… Where he had been… Had he been in the Middle East? Fighting… Fighting the… He couldn’t make the information come to him, but it seemed as though it was just barely out of reach like all the rest…

Bluechip… Volunteer? For? Thoughts floating around in his head… They had given him a shot… Some sort of booster? Yes, booster… Booster shot… For, what? He asked himself, but he had no idea.

“About fucking time,” Beeker yelled above the roar of gunfire… …They had been pinned down for the last several hours, with heavy fire. It had finally fallen off somewhat, and it was time to make a move: Beeker was no fool, he had every intention of getting his men the hell out, including that test case they had laid on him…

He’d already lost four good men on this mission. He couldn’t see losing any more. He looked across the short, smoky distance, directly into Ronson’s eyes, and signaled left, away from the sand, towards the jungle that pressed in from behind them. A quick sideways flick of his own eyes told him that Hunter and Phillips had caught it too. Beeker signaled Ronson out first, then Phillips, and then Hunter. It was a slow go; belly crawl for the first few hundred yards. The bullets continued to whine above them, but they all made it one piece. Two hundred yards in they were able to stand. The jungle finally offering some protection. Beeker led the way quickly yet carefully, through the lush greenery. The others fell in behind him silently. Two miles further through the dense jungle, and they finally lost the distant sounds of gunfire, and the jungle fell nearly silent. They fell silent themselves, moving as quietly as they could from tree to tree: Aware of the noises that surrounded them. A short while later when the gunfire had completely fallen off, the jungle seemed to come back to life. Bird calls, and the ever present monkey chatter. That was a good sign to Beeker, if the jungle was full of soldiers, the birds sure as fuck wouldn’t be singing. They pushed on through the night, and morning found them in a small village with a main trail running through the middle of it. They walked quietly through the village end to end… Burned out… Empty… A good place to rest-up.

“Oh, man,” Ronson complained. “Fuckin’ cra-zee,” Beeker agreed wearily. He was leaned back against the side of a burned out hut, smoking a cigarette he’d pulled from inside his jacket.

Hunter didn’t have the slightest idea where they were, let alone what they were talking about. Beeker had led them through the jungle and at first light they had come upon this village. They had crept in warily, ready for whatever lay before them. There had been no need, it was empty; a couple of dozen scattered bodies busy gathering flies: Burned out huts. The design wasn’t familiar to him. He had thought Beeker would move on. He hadn’t. They were still here. But where here was, and how Beeker had found it, eluded Hunter.

“Sure as fuck did thought we was done,” Phillips agreed.

“Yeah, well, we made it this far,” Ronson said. He grinned, and then the grin turned into a full fledged smile, and he began to laugh. Phillips joined him, and a second later, when Hunter was sure Beeker was going to open his mouth to tell them all to shut the fuck up, he started laughing too. “Oh… It’s good, look-at-him,” Ronson said, holding his side, and pointing at Hunter, “he don’t have a friggin’ clue.” That seemed to drive all of them into hysteria, Hunter saw. Including Beeker, who was usually hard-nosed and moody. He was doubled over too. Holding his sides. Tears squirting from his eyes.

“That true?” Beeker asked at last, once he had managed to get the laughter somewhat under control. “That your friggin’ problem is it, Hunter, you don’t have a clue?” he stopped laughing abruptly, and within seconds Ronson and Philips chuckled to a stop. “Do you have the slightest idea where your ass is?” Beeker asked seriously.

“No… Well, a jungle, I guess,” Hunter answered.

“No… Well, it could be a jungle, I guess,” Ronson mimicked in a high falsetto.

“Is it?” Hunter ventured in a near whisper.

“Look…” Beeker waited for silence. “Take a break, it’s going to get worse. Why don’t you have a smoke and kick back… Enjoy the break?”

“Well, the thing is that I don’t smoke, bad for the lungs. I’m pretty careful about my health.”

“Really?” Beeker asked politely. He chuckled briefly, lit another of his own smokes, and then spoke softly. “I would like your complete attention, Hunter, do I have it?”

“Yeah, sure…”

He cut him off, his voice a roar. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a fuckin’ war goin’ on, you pansy mother-fucker. A fuckin’ war, Hunter, you understand that, you ain’t gonna live much fuckin’ longer anyway. Get with the program mister, now!”

Hunter’s eyes bugged out, but as Beeker finished he forced himself to speak. “I know that… I can see that… It don’t mean I have to die though, not necessarily.”

“Man, Beek, don’t waste your time, he hopeless, same old shit, like Simpson. Like all those friggin guys before Simpson,” Ronson said.

Beeker drew a deep breath, winked at Ronson, and then spoke. “Yes it does,” Beeker said calmly. “It does because you ain’t a regular. You ain’t been here long enough, and you don’t mean a fiddler’s fuck to anybody. And that sucks, but that’s life, Hunter,” he paused and looked over at Ronson. “How long was the last one, fourteen days, am I right?”

“As rain,” Ronson replied coolly.

“And where are we now?” Beeker asked.

“Seventeen?” Phillips asked.

“Uh uh,” Ronson corrected, “eighteen, man, remember? Simpson bought it eighteen days ago, and this ass-hole came into play. Replacement, supposedly.”

“Right!” Beeker said. “It is eighteen, and that’s why nobody gives a fuck about you, Hunter. Eighteen’s too far, you’ll be done at twenty, it never goes past that, and I’ll bet bullets to bodies you’ll buy the farm long before we’re done with eighteen, see?”

“No,” Hunter said slowly, “I don’t see.” Seventeen? Eighteen? What the hell was that all about? he wondered.

Ronson chuckled. “I think he’s confused, again, Beek.”

“I think he was fuckin’ born confused,” Phillips added.

“Seventeen? Eighteen?” Hunter asked aloud. He didn’t get it, not completely anyway.

“Have a cigarette,” Beeker told him.

“I told you, I don’t…”

“Yeah, right, fuck that noise, there’s a pack inside your jacket… Check it… See if I’m right.”

Hunter fumbled with the jacket snaps, and finally pulled the jacket open. A half pack of smokes resided in the inside pocket. A silver Zippo tucked in beside them. He looked up with amazement.

“So?” Beeker asked, smiling widely.

“One of you guys stuck them there, while I was sleeping, has to be,” Hunter said.

“And when was that?”

Hunter thought about it. He Looked over at Beeker. Beeker just smiled.

“Don’t you get it yet, Hunter? Don’t you feel like an extra in a play.”

“Bluechip? Volunteer for SS-V2765? … Wow, they must have zonked your brain, man…

“Look, it was hard for Simpson too. He was with us for twenty days, and you know, I liked that sucker. He was all right for a white dude. All you guys show up… Combat ready… Except you’re all fucked up in the head… No idea what to expect or even where you are… It aint supposed to be that way, so we always have to lay it out… You are one of them, Super Soldier, we call it over-clocked… You’re gonna get dead, and you know what? Then you’re coming back… Don’t ask me what the fuck is in that shit they give you, all I know is you’ll get dead and then you’ll come back from it and they’ll ship you out… That booster shot? It ain’t exactly a booster shot. I don’t know what exactly it is, but once you’re gone I know this, it’ll bring you back.”

“Yeah, back… In the beginning some didn’t come back, it don’t matter though, ‘cause they come and got them too… But the last several months they, all of you, come back… Dead and then you’re not… And then they’re here and you’re gone and then in a few days some other dick-wad shows up in a supply drop…”

“What? A supply drop?” Hunter asked.

“Oh yeah… Supply drop… Wrapped up like a… Like a douche, man..”

“Uh uh, Beek, man, that line was really Revved up like a Duece,” Ronson said.

“Okay, bad analogy… I hate that fuckin’ song anyways… Always did, but you guys come wrapped up, like a package, man. We unwrap you and you’re alive… We leave you be for awhile and next thing you know you’re sitting up… Walkin’ and talkin’.”

“Yeah, boy… Fuckin’ freaky shit,” Phillips said. “Mucho freaky!”

Hunter swallowed hard, lit up one of the smokes from his jacket, and leaned back against the side of the hut. The silence held.

“So,” Beeker finished quietly, “you gotta deal with it man… You just got too… It won’t be long…”

Stateside: Project Bluechip

Complex C: Patient Ward

Test Subject: Clayton Hunter

Compound SS-V2765

Gabe Kohlson moved away from the monitors. “Heart rate is dropping, don’t you think…” He stopped as the monitor began to chime softly; before he could get fully turned around the chiming turned into a strident alarm that rose and fell. “Dammit,” Kohlson said as he finished his turn.

“What is it,” David Johns wheeled his chair across the short space of the control room. His outstretched hands caught him at the counter top and slowed him at Kohlson’s monitor.

“Flat lined,” Kohlson said as he pushed a button on the wall to confirm what the doctors’ one level up already knew. Clayton Hunter was dead.

“I see it,” Doctor Ed Adams replied over the ceiling speakers. The staff called him Doctor Christmas for his long white beard and oversize belly. “Bertie and I are on the way.”

“Lot of good that will do,” Johns muttered.

Kohlson turned to him. “Go on in… Do CPR if you want… They don’t pay me enough to do it. I don’t know what that shit is. Look at the way the Doc suits up. Clayton Hunter will be in rigor before anyone gets in there at all.”

“No argument,” Johns said. He wheeled back to his own monitor, called up an incident sheet and began to type.

“Me too,” Kohlson agreed. “Preserve the video, med and monitor data.” He punched a few buttons on his console and an interface for the medical equipment came up. He saved the last 48 hours of data, and then began to fill out his own incident report. These reports might never be seen by more than one person, maybe two if you counted the person that wrote it, Kohlson thought, but it would always be there. Classified: Top secret for the next hundred years or so, and he wondered about that too. Would it even be released after a long period? He doubted it. The shit they were doing here was bad. Shit you didn’t ever want the American public to know about. He had made his delivery a few weeks before. Whatever this shit was, bad people had not only come to know about it, but had come to have a need for what it did. It didn’t matter to him, not really. There were rumors, a few things he had seen while monitoring test subjects. Nothing he considered concrete. Maybe it extended life, that was  the strongest rumor. From what he had seen though, as far as test subjects, it did its fair share of ending life pretty effectively too. And here was another one to add to the growing number of failures… If that’s what they were.

This incident report, along with the one Johns was doing, would probably get buried deep under some program listing that no one would ever suspect to look into. Or maybe it would get burned right along with Clayton Hunter’s body. He glanced up at the clock and then went back to typing.

“Uh… Call it 4:32 PM?” He asked.

“Works for me,” Johns agreed. “I got 94 for the body,” Johns said.

“Yeah… Yeah, me too. That’s a fast drop, but we both got the same thing. 94 it is… No heart, no respiratory, dead as dog shit.”

“Dog shit,” Johns agreed. They both fell silent as they typed. A few moments later the doors to the observation room chimed, the air purifiers kicked on with a high pitched whine, and they could both feel the air as it dragged past them and into the air ducts. The entire volume would be replaced and the room depressurized and then re-pressurized before the doors would open. And that would only happen after the air was tested and retested. A good twenty minutes away before anyone would step foot into the room with Clayton Hunter.

Complex C, Autopsy Room

Ed Adams and Roberta Summers had dissected Clayton Hunter’s body methodically. The autopsy had been painstaking. It had to be, it was recorded in detail and some General somewhere, hell maybe even the president, would be looking that video over in the next few days. Maybe even watching live now, Ed Adams thought. They had that capability. There was nothing to see. He had suffered a major heart attack. The heart had a defect. No history. One of those things that just came along and fucked up your two billion dollar research project all at once.

“Coronary Thrombosis,” He spoke in a measured voice. “Appears to be after the fact. The artery looks to be mildly occluded… The myocardial infarction appears to be caused from a congenital defect… Specifically an Atrial Septal Defect… Bertie?”

“I concur. Easily overlooked. The lack of sustenance put a higher demand on the subject’s heart, the defect became a major player at that point… Bad luck for us.”

“Uh, bad luck for Clayton Hunter,” Ed Adams added.

“Of course, bad luck for the subject, Clayton Hunter. I simply meant bad luck for a research volunteer to be defective in such a way that in effect it would compromise a project of this magnitude so badly.” She turned her eyes up to one of the cameras she knew to be there. “This in no way paints a true picture of V2765. We should proceed, unsatisfying as these circumstances might be, we should proceed with subjects 1120F and 1119X… Same compound.” She turned back to the corpse on the table. “You want me to do the brain biopsy,” She asked Ed.

Ed frowned as he made eye contact with her. They had decided, at least he had thought they had decided, not to mention brain biopsies. Three times now he had discussed the importance of not focusing on the changes that V2765 made to the brain. Anything that altered the brain could alter financing, funding, lab time. Even the government didn’t like changes to brain matter.

“Are you thinking there could have been an embolism?” He asked.

“Well I,” she sputtered away for a second before Ed rescued her.

“I think all we would see is evidence of the embolism that occurred near the heart. We could search out areas of the body and most likely find more than one occurrence of embolism. Well thought, Bertie, but I believe we will take a look at the brain later in the week. Right now I want to focus on the enzymes, proteins, blood work and readying the other two for a conclusion of this trial.”

“Yes. I agree entirely, Doctor Adams.”

“You have your samples?”

“Yes of course, Doctor… Rex?”

Ed frowned hard and shrugged his shoulders in the direction of the thick glass. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “None in here. That was stupid, Bertie.“

“What was that,” Kohlson asked Johns in the control room.

“What?” Johns asked.

“That… Whisper, I guess,” Kohlson said.

“Oh… That. You know those two got it bad for each other. Probably making little remarks you don’t want to hear. Besides which, you make a report on that and we all have to deal with it: Them, sure, but us too because the bosses will be pissed off about it. Best to let that shit slide: If the boss wants to know, he will. He looks at all of this shit in depth.”

Kohlson looked about to say more when Doctor Christmas began talking once more in the autopsy room.

“Let’s close him up,” Ed Adams said. He stepped on a switch set into the floor, paused, and then spoke again. “Lower the air temperature in here. We intend to keep him a few hours while we attend to other parts of the autopsy… No one in here for any reason.”

Out in the control room Johns keyed his mic. button. “Will do… How low, Doc.?”

“I guess about 34 Fahrenheit will do… Just to slow it all down for a while.”

“Done,” Johns agreed. He adjusted a temperature graphic on a nearby monitor via his mouse.

Kohlson leaned over across the short distance. “So we got to look at that shit for a while? Great.”

“They’re going to sew him up, so it won’t be so bad.”

“Yeah… That’s like, I got a mild case of flu. It’s still going to suck, because every time I look anywhere I’m going to feel compelled to look at it.”

“Yeah. Me too. It’s there. Draws you to it. Like the Bunny on the Playboy Cover. You look at the rest of the magazine, but you know you’re going to end up looking at her. She’s the reason you bought the magazine after all.”

Kohlson nodded and smiled. “And I’d rather look at Miss January than a dead guy with big stitches across his belly and over his chest, sewing him back up again. That is some ugly shit.”

Johns laughed. “But you look anyway… Human nature. Why do you think people slow down and look at accidents?”

“Because we’re morbid mother-fuckers,” Kohlson agreed.

“Well, that too, but it is that fascination with death we have. Look,” He pointed at the monitor. Do you think Clayton Hunter knew he’d be laying on a steel slab this afternoon, dick hanging out, with Doctor Christmas shoving his guts back in and stitching him up with his nursey assisting?” They both laughed and turned away.

“She ain’t half…”

A scream cut off the conversation and both men turned quickly back to the monitor.

Clayton Hunter was sitting up on the steel table. Arms drooping at his side. Mouth yawning. Doctor Christmas had backed away until he had met the wall behind him. Nurse Bertie was nowhere to be seen.

“What the fuck… What the fuck. Get a camera on the floor… Maybe she fainted,” Kohlson said.

“Got it,” Johns agreed. He stabbed at the keys on his keyboard and a view of the table at an angle appeared. Nurse Bertie’s leg could be seen, angled away from the table, skirt hiked high. The camera paused briefly and then the view began to shift as Johns manipulated the camera angle. Her face came into view. Mouth open, blood seeping from one corner.

“Doctor,” Kohlson called over the speaker system. Outside the airlocks had clicked on and the air was cycling. Good, he thought, in twenty minutes the Calvary would be here. “Doctor Adams?”

The doctor finally took his eyes off Clayton Hunter and turned toward one of the cameras. On the table Clayton Hunter leaned forward and tumbled off the edge of the table. At the same instant the air purifier quit cycling and three armed men in gas masks stepped into the airlock.

“Jesus,” Johns sputtered into his headset microphone, “You guys can’t do that shit. That air has to be worked?” Three more men stepped through the lock and the door to the autopsy room opened as well as the door to the control room. A split second later the rifles in their hands began to roar. The sound was louder than Kohlson expected in the enclosed space. He clasped his hands over his ears, but it did little good. The soldiers, he saw, were wearing ear protection of some sort. Noise canceling headgear. The remaining three soldiers had stepped into the control room, he saw as he looked back up from the floor. They had their rifles leveled at them, the others were still firing within the confines of the small autopsy room. A small gray cloud was creeping along the floor and rolling slowly into the control room. The stench of gunpowder was strong in the enclosed space. The air purifiers were off. Kohlson knew there was another control room outside this one that controlled this space, and possibly another outside of that space that controlled that space: Built in redundant protection; it was clear that they were in a very bad place.

Kohlson saw Clayton Hunter lurch to his feet and stumble into the soldiers who were firing at point blank range in the tight confines. A series of bullets finally tore across his chest and then into his head and he fell from view. A second later the firing dropped off and then stopped completely.

Johns was listening to the sound of his own heart hammering for a space of seconds before he figured out it was his own. The smell of gunpowder was nauseating, and he suddenly lunged forward and vomited on his shoes. As he was lifting his head he saw that the soldiers were retreating back through the airlocks and into the outer spaces of the compound.

“Jesus,” Kohlson managed before he also bent forward and vomited. They heard the air filtering kick back on as both of them rolled away from the puddles of vomit and quickly disappearing low, gray vapor from the gunfire. The doors into the autopsy room suddenly banged shut and then their own door whispered closed as well: Once again they were isolated in their small space.

They both sat silent for a moment, and then Kohlson left and returned from the small bathroom with a mop and bucket from the utility closet there. He left again and returned with a bottle of disinfectant and sprayed down the vomit and the balance of the small room.

“That won’t do shit,” Johns said solemnly. “We’re infected. Whatever they infected that guy Hunter with, we got it now.

Kohlson ignored him, waited the ten minutes for the disinfectant to work and then cleaned up the mess. Neither spoke while he returned the equipment to the small closet and then came back and sat down.

“You heard me, right?”

“I heard you,” Kohlson admitted. “I just don’t give a fuck… It’s too fresh… I can’t believe it right now.” He looked up at the clock. “Mother fucker… I was off duty in twenty minutes… Twenty goddamn minutes!” He spun and looked at Johns, but Johns was looking up at the monitors that were still on in the autopsy room. The smoke was being drawn out by the air exchange, and the horror of the room was slowly coming into focus.

Doctor Adams lay sprawled in one corner, a line of bullet holes stitched across his back. The back portion of his skull was missing, jagged bone and gray-black hair clumped wildly around the fractured bone. Johns gagged and looked away.

“Jesus… They killed everybody,” Kohlson said as he continued to watch. Nurse Bertie lay where she had fallen. Only her legs visible in the shot they could see. Clayton Hunter lay against the end of the stainless slab, his head a shapeless mass. The stitches across his chest and stomach bulging. Kohlson finally turned away too.

“They’re coming back for us.” Johns said.

Kohlson spun to the door.

“Not now, stupid ass, but you can’t think we get to live after that. They contaminated our air. We’re dead. No way are we not dead.”

Kohlson said nothing.

~

It was six hours before the soldiers came. They had finally taken a better look at the room, Johns moving the camera around as Kohlson watched.

“Dave… Tell me I’m wrong, but that fucker came back to life, right?” He was unsure even as he said it.

Johns shrugged. “I think what happened is they missed something… We missed something. Maybe a lead came off, you know… And the lead came off and so he seemed dead and he wasn’t dead at all, not really, he was still alive… Just that lead was off.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean… I mean the alternative is that he came back to life… You don’t think that do you? I mean, do you? ‘Cause that’s fucking crazy, Gabe. Crazy.”

“No. No, I can see what you mean. I can see where that could be… But I’ve heard rumors…”

“Same as we all have,” Johns agreed. “But come on, that’s…”

The air lock cycled on and six soldiers stepped into the hall like space that was actually just an airlock between the control room, the autopsy room, the former patient ward and the outside world. Johns tensed, waiting for the door to their space to cycle on, but it didn’t.

The soldiers were dressed head to toe in army drab-green plastic coveralls. Respirators, big units, sat on their backs and a full face shield and breathing apparatus covered their faces, somehow joined into the coveralls. Tape was wound around the elastic cuffs of the legs and the plastic boot covers that joined there. Flexible olive-green gloves covered their hands, also taped where they slipped under the plastic coveralls. They never looked their way at all, just waited for the air lock to cycle and then stepped into the autopsy room. A second later the monitors went dead in the control room.

“Fuck,” David Johns said. “That is not good at all.”

Kohlson got up and left the room. A minute later he was back with two diet colas. He handed one to David Johns and then sat back down. Johns glanced down at the cola. The top was open already. He looked at Kohlson and Kohlson stared back unblinking. They kept the supply of the virus compounds they were testing in there, but the med supplies cabinet was also in that closet. They had talked it over once. They had decided that… He pushed it away and focused on the low whisper of the air exchange

“You think they will outright kill us,” Kohlson asked after a few long minutes of silence.

“Gabe… I think they will, Gabe.” Johns said after a hesitation. He tried to stop himself, but he glanced down at the cola in his hand. It was half full. White powder floated on the surface. Clumped and drifting like tiny icebergs across a cola sea. “Probably… No. They’re listening in right now, I’m sure. Listening to see where our minds are at: As soon as those flunkies in there are finished with that job they’ll be in here to finish up the clean up.” He swallowed hard.

“Yeah. I guess that’s how I see it too,” Kohlson agreed. He raised his can and tapped the side. “Been good knowing you, Dave.”

Johns stared him down for a few moments and then sighed. “Yeah, same here.” He raised the can in a salute and then downed it. Kohlson followed suit. Silence descended on the control room…

Get the book…

The end has come for the Earth. The forces of nature have aligned, echoing the cataclysms of the past, and a devastating event looms, one that will leave only a fraction of humanity.

#Apocalyptic #Dystopian #Horror #readers

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Alabama Island Alabama-Pad

Alabama Island

wendellsweet7 August 13, 2025

A free chapter read of Alabama Island from author Dell Sweet…

ONE

Glennville New York

Off Factory Square: Joel Morrison

5:00 PM

Joel sat at the bar and watched football on one of the big screen TV’s Mort had put in. It was a slow game he was tired and his mind kept turning to other things. He couldn’t concentrate. Part of the allure of the Rusty Nail was the quiet. After a 12 hour shift at the mill with the constant noise from the huge machinery the quiet had been nice. But that had all changed once the bar had become popular with the nearby base. He needed to go home. The crowd in the bar was starting to build and the noise was giving him the beginnings of a headache. He caught Mort’s eye and went back to his thoughts as he waited.

The Rusty Nail had always been a locals only bar up until a few years back when the economy had taken a nose dive. The nail was wedged up a side street off Factory square. Not exactly easy to find and that had hurt business too as the old people left and the new people came in.

Mort; Mortimer to anybody that felt like being tossed out on their ass had nearly lost the small bar and the building above it to the bank. The building above it had six small apartments that Mort had purposely left empty when he had bought the building fresh out of the service thirty years back. Who wanted to deal with tenants he had said then. But times changed and so he had sold his house moved himself into one of the apartments and then sold the bank on remortgaging the whole building as well as renovating the other five apartments. The bank had come up with a loan that took all of that into account and added a second income source from the apartments that could pay the monthly mortgage and put a good chunk of change into his pocket too.

He had signed on the x taken their money renovated the building moved in the tenants and then taken a hard look at the Rusty Nail. He had decided to completely gut the bar and do it over. He had dumped far too much into the renovations though including being closed for nearly a full month and then opened it to find that the economy had taken an even deeper nose dive during those nearly thirty days. The third month into the new mortgage and he had found that he was maybe in a bad spot already.

Joel remembered now that he had sat right at the end of the bar when Mort had talked it over with some others, Moon Calloway, Johnny Barnes, Jim Tibbets; Joel had been welcome to include his two cents which he had declined to do.

“Well what you do is put the word out to those cab drivers. Believe me I’ve seen it. They will have them soldiers down here in no time even if you are off the beaten path” Jim had said. Jim was a school bus driver for the north side district and less than a year away from a fatal car accident on the interstate. Jeff Brown who had been a local football star was doing ten years up at Clinton Correctional for hitting Jim’s car head on drunk and killing him. But that night Jim had still been alive and had wanted to be a part of the New Rusty Nail that Mort had in mind. Something a little more modern. Modern bought the soldiers, but more importantly it also bought women.

“I’m not paying a cab driver to bring me G.I.’s” Mort had said. “And I know your game. You’re just hoping to get laid out of it.”

They had all laughed at that except Jim who had turned red. But after a few seconds he had laughed too and the conversation had plodded forward the way bar conversations do.

“Well you ain’t got to pay them exactly; give them a couple beers” Moon threw in.

“Jesus Christ” Mort exclaimed. “That’s why you boys ain’t in business. You think the beer is free.”

“I know it ain’t free Mort” Jim said. “But it don’t cost you that much. You get it wholesale.”

“Wholesale? I drive right out to that wholesale club and buy it by the case most of the time just like everybody else. Cheaper than them beer guys except draft of course. That ain’t free. You got to pay the yearly club fee. You got to pay them taxes to the feds. You got a lot you got to pay for. Some fuck crushes your can you’re fucked for that nickel. Jesus… wholesale my ass. It ain’t no bargain.”

“Yeah? … Let’s see” Moon starting writing in the air with his finger. You get it for let’s say six bucks a case I know that cause that’s what I pay out there too. So six bucks divided by 24 is” he drew in the air for a few moments erased it and then started over. “How the fuck do you do that Joey… The six goes into the twenty-four? Or times the twenty-four?” Moon asked.

“Uh it’s a quarter a can” I had supplied.

The argument had raged on from there. Once Moon found out he was paying a buck fifty for a can of beer that only cost a quarter he was pissed off.

In the end Mort had talked to a couple of cab drivers. Free draft beer one night a week if they bought soldiers by all week long and told as many others as possible about the place. Within two weeks Joel hadn’t recognized the place when he had come by after shift to have a couple of beers. The soldiers drank a lot of beer the bank mortgage got paid and life was fine. Except for the fights Joel thought, but you can’t load young guys up on alcohol and not expect trouble. Especially when those young men were just waiting on the word to go and maybe die in another battle that remained undeclared as a war. High stress levels meant heavy duty unloading. The M.P.’s got to know the place as well as the soldiers did.

“Joel you ready?” Mort asked now.

Joel smiled. “I was thinking back…” He had to shout to be heard. Tomorrow his voice would be hoarse. “This place was empty! … Yeah… One more then I gotta go” Joel agreed.

Mort leaned closer. “Gov’ment tit. I know it, but screw it. It’s all the Gov’ment tit. Road and Bridge projects. Job centers. One way or the other it comes out the same. Even them subsidies so the paper mills can still run. It’s all the Gov’ment tit ain’t it Joel?”

“It is” Joel shouted. He nodded. It was. This town would have dried up years ago without it. Mort left and then came back a few moments later with a fresh beer.

“Vacation?” Mort yelled.

Joel nodded. “Two weeks of silence” He shook his head at the irony and Mort’s laughing agreement was drowned out by the noise.

“If I don’t see you have a good one” Mort said leaning close.

Joel nodded. “I will.” He raised his glass and then tossed off half of it. A few moments later he was outside on the relatively quiet sidewalk punching numbers into his phone calling for a cab. The night was cold, but the cold sobered him up. It seemed nearly capable of washing away the smoke and noise from inside the bar. He stood in the shadows beside the door waiting for the phone to ring on the other end. The door bumped open and Johnny Barnes stepped out.

“You ain’t calling for a cab are you?” Johnny asked when he spotted him.

Joel laughed and ended the still ringing call. “Not if I can get a free ride from you.” Joel told him.

“Yeah you were always a cheap prick” Johnny agreed. “Hey I heard you’re heading into the southern tier tomorrow?”

“Two weeks” Joel agreed as he levered the door handle on Johnny’s truck and climbed inside. His breath came in clouds of steam. “Get some heat in here Johnny.”

“Coming” Johnny agreed. “Man I wish I was you.”

“Me too” Joel agreed.

Johnny laughed. “Asshole, but seriously man. Have a good time. You gonna hunt?”

“Nothing in season… Maybe snare some rabbits. Not gonna be a lot this time of year.” Joel said.

“Maybe deer” Johnny offered. He dropped the truck in drive just as the heat began to come from the vents.

“Probably, but they’ll be out of season. Rabbit and I got freeze dried stuff. Trucks packed which is why I didn’t drive it down here.”

The truck drove slowly through the darkening streets as the street lights began to pop on around the small city: The two men laughing and exchanging small talk.

Public Square

Pearl (Pearly) Bloodworth

6:20 PM

The streets were clogged with snow, but the sidewalks were impassable so she had no choice, but to walk in the street.

She made her way carefully slipping and sliding as she went. It was just before 6:30 P.M. and she might make it to work on time if she could make the next two blocks without incident.

She had been working at the downtown mission for the last several months: The night shift for the last two months. The mission night shift was an easy shift. Everything was closed down. Those who had made the curfew were locked in for the night. Occasionally there would be a little trouble between residents, but that was rare. Glennville was small; as a consequence the homeless population was small. And trouble when it came was usually settled long before her shift. Her shift amounted to catching up on paperwork dispensing an aspirin or two and being there if there was an emergency of any kind. At 4:00 A.M. The kitchen staff would be there to start their day. Shortly after that the rest of the day-shift would be in. At 6:00 A.M. The mission doors would open and the homeless would take to the streets. She would have an hour of quiet at the end of her shift sitting and listening to the bustle from the kitchen as they cleaned up after breakfast and began to prepare for lunch.

She heard the approaching vehicle as she was stepping around a mound of melting snow and ice. It was late and there had been no traffic on this side street when she had stepped into the street at the cross walk three blocks down. The alternative was the foot deep snow and ice thrown onto the sidewalk from the plows. She would never get through that and make it to the mission on time.

The Mission was on upper Franklin Street a short walk in a straight line or even if you had to walk around the square and start up as she usually did, but tonight the square was packed with traffic and so she had chosen the shortcut instead. Unfortunately it was not well lit: A four block wasteland of parking lots and alleyways.

She had almost turned completely around to make sure the car had seen her when the horn blared and startled her. A second later she finished the turn hand clasped to her throat and watched as the car skidded to a stop and three men piled out of the back seat slipping and sliding in the slush laughing.

“What’s up, bitch” one asked as he found his feet and stood staring her down. The laughter died away.

“Nice ass” another said as he moved toward her.

She turned to the second man the one who had just spoken as she shrugged her purse from her shoulder caught the bottom of it in one hand and slipped her other hand inside. The third man really just a boy looked frightened as his eyes slipped from his two companions and then flitted to her. The driver leaned out the window

“What the fuck! Get the bitch!” He was looking over the roof-line sitting on the windowsill of the driver’s door a smirk on his too-white face.

“Yeah… How about a ride, baby” the nearest one said. The other had finally found his feet stopped slipping and was skidding his feet across the slush heading in her direction. She pulled her hand from her pocket and aimed the mace canister at them. They both skidded to a stop.

The closer one the one that had made the remark about her ass cocked his head sideways shrugged his shoulders and then pulled a gun from his waist band. “Yeah… Kind of changes the whole situation don’t it?” He asked.

“Roux! Don’t shoot the bitch. She’s no good to us dead!” This from the man-boy leaning out the window of the car.

The boy Roux turned to the driver and nodded. He looked back at Pearl. His gun was aimed at the ground close to her feet. She had only a split second to decide. He was less than five feet away; the gun rising from the ground when she pushed the trigger and watched the stream leap at him. His face went from a sarcastic smirk to alarm just before the stream of mace hit his nose and splattered across his face and into his eyes. A second later he was screaming. She had just turned to aim at the second guy when the world turned upside down.

She found herself tumbling sideways. Somewhere close by a roar began and rose in pitch as the ground below her feet began to jump and shake. She found her knees after she fell and skidded across the roadway as she tried to hold herself, but the shaking was just too hard. She collapsed back to the roadway and the relative softness of the slush and snow her body jumping and shaking as she seemed almost to bounce across the short expanse and into the snow bank on the opposite side of the road.

The roar went on for what seemed like minutes as she tried to catch her breath and steady herself at the same time. Both seemed impossible to do, but almost as soon as she had the thought the trembling of the earth became less and a split second after that the roaring stopped. There was no silence. The sound of breaking glass tumbling brick blaring horns and screams in the dark night replaced the roar. Sounds that had probably been there she decided she had just been unable to hear them.

Pearl made her feet and stared back down the street where the car had been. The car was still there the nose tilted upward the back seemingly buried in the street itself. She blinked, but nothing changed. She noted the broken asphalt and churned up dirt and realized the car had broken through the street. There was no sign of the men including the driver that had been hanging halfway out of the window.

She drew a breath another and suddenly the noise and smells of the world rushed back in completely. The screams became louder. Horns blared. The ground trembled under her feet as if restless. She could smell sewage on the air. Broken lines below the pavement her mind reasoned. She swayed on her feet as the earth trembled once more lurching as it did. She waited, but the tremble was not repeated. She sucked in another deep breath and then began to walk slipping on the broken pavement and slush as she did.

Franklin Street appeared untouched as she lurched from the side street slipping over the broken pavement and retching from the overpowering smell of sewer gas. She collapsed to the icy pavement skidding on her knees and was surprise to hear herself crying as she struggled to get back on her feet.

She nearly made it to her feet before the next tremor hit this one much harder than the last one. She bounced sideways knees slamming into the ground crying out as they did, but unaware of her own cries. Just as the trembling stopped she made her feet again and stood hand clasped to her knees to steady herself breathing hard holding herself rigidly wondering what was coming next. When the shaking stopped and silence flooded in she was shocked.

She finally opened her eyes she had no idea when she had closed them; straightened from the bent posture she had found herself in quieted her sobbing and looked around.

Forty feet away the gray stone of the mission that had risen just past the sidewalk was no more: Churned earth had replaced it. The sidewalk was still intact as though some weird sort of urban renewal had occurred there in a matter of seconds. Her eyes swept the street and now they took in the sections where the sidewalk was missing. The entire side of the street was gone for blocks. What was in evidence was an old house several hundred feet away perched on the edge of a ravine: Beyond that houses and streets continued. She was on the opposite side of complete destruction and there appeared no way to reach that side.

She turned and looked back at the side street she had come from. Churned earth; tilted pavement the car was now gone. Farther down the short hillside that had appeared the public square seemed completely destroyed. Water had formed in the middle of the square and ran away to the north; probably toward the Black river Pearl thought. To the west everything appeared to be intact; to the east Franklin Street stretched away untouched toward the park in the distance. Close by someone began to scream; calling for help. She took a few more calming breaths and then began to walk toward the screams: The west; angling toward the opposite end of the square.

The screams cut off all at once and a second after that the sound of a motor straining came to her; cycling up and then dropping. She paused in the middle of the road listening wondering where the sound came from. As she stood something ran into her eye stinging clouding her vision; she reached one hand up and swiped at it and the back of her hand came back stained with a smear of blood.

She stared at it for a second. The ground seemed to lurch shift suddenly and she reached her hands to her knees to brace herself once more; expecting the shaking to start again, but her hands slipped past her knees and she found herself falling her legs buckling under her. The ground seemed to rise to meet her and she found herself staring down the length of the roadway; her face flush with the asphalt. The coldness of the ice and slush felt good against her skin: As if she were overheated; ice wrapped inside of a dishrag at the base of her neck on a hot day. She blinked blinked again and then her world went dark.

She floated or seemed to; thinking of London. A hot day. She was a child again: Standing in the second floor window and looking down at the street far below. The dishrag dripped, but it felt so good against her skin. The memory seemed to float away. She was rushing headlong through a never ending stream of memories. All suddenly real again. Urgent; flying by so fast, but sharp in every detail.

Pearl had grown up on a council estate in London: When her mother had died she had come to the United States only to find herself in the Maywood projects on the north side of Glennville. From one pit to another. Just different names she liked to tell herself. Up until a few weeks ago she had still made the trip back and forth every day, but she had found a place; a small walk-up not far from the mission on the other side of the public square. It seemed extravagant to have her own space, but living in the downtown area suited her.

She seemed to be in both places at once. Back in her childhood staring at the street below the window; yet hovering over her body looking down at herself where she lay sprawled on the winter street. She wondered briefly which was real, but nearly as soon as she had the thought she found herself struggling to rise to her knees from the cold roadway; her eyes slitted head throbbing.

In front of her a shadowed figure had appeared staggering through the ice and snow angling toward her. She blinked blinked again and her eyes found their focus. The man from the car suddenly back from wherever he had been. One hand clutched his side where a bright red flood of blood seeped sluggishly over his clasping fingers. Her eyes swept down to his other hand which was rising to meet her. A gun was clasped there. Probably her mind told her the same gun he had been going to shoot her with before. The gun swept upward as if by magic. She blinked and realized then that the sound of the motor straining was louder. Closer. Almost roaring in its intensity. The gun was rising, but her eyes swiveled away and watched as a truck from the nearby base skidded to a stop blocking the road from side to side no more than ten feet from her. She blinked and the doors were opening; men yelling rushing toward her.

Bright light flashed before her eyes and a deafening roar accompanied it. An explosion; loud everything in the world. A second explosion came and then a third and she realized the explosions were gunshots. She felt herself falling even as she made the discovery. The pavement once again rising to meet her. Her eyes closed; she never felt the ground as she collapsed onto it falling back into the dark.

She was back standing in the window looking out over the street. The heat was oppressive, but the ice wrapped in the rag was mothers’ wonderful cure. She tried to raise it to her neck once more; to feel the coldness of it, but her arm would not come. She tried harder and the window suddenly slipped away. A man was bent toward her face. A helmet strap buckled under his chin. Her hands were somehow held at her side. The motor screamed loudly as this world once more leapt into her head. She was on the floor of the truck; vibrations pulsing through her body as the truck sped along… In the back of the truck her mind corrected as her eyes focused momentarily. Other men squatted nearby including one who was partially over her holding her arms as the other man was tapping the bubbles from a syringe with one gloved finger. The man’s face angled down toward her and he aimed something in a silver canister into her face from his other hand. The hand opened and the canister fell to the ground.

“Itzawight” his voice said in a far away drone. “Awightzzz.” She felt the prick of the needle the light dimmed; his voice spat static: The light dimmed a little further and then she found herself falling back into the darkness.

Glennville New York

Project Bluechip

11:00 P.M.

The first quake had been minor; the last few had not. The big one was coming and Major Richard Weston didn’t need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched one hand to his head. The fingertips came away bloody. He would have to get his head wound taken care of, but the big thing was that he had made it through the complex above and down into the facility before it had been locked down.

He laughed to himself before it was supposed to have been locked down. It had not been locked down at all. He had had to lock it down once he had made his way in or else it would still be open to the world.

He had spent the last several years here commanding the base. He had spent the last two weeks working up to this event from his subterranean command post several levels above. All wreckage now. He had sent operatives out from there to do what they could, but it had all been a stop gap operation. The United States; hell every government in the known world was finished.

The public had known that there was a meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. The spin doctors had assured the public it would miss by several thousands of miles. Paid off the best scientists in some cases, but in other cases they had found that even the scientists were willing to look past facts if their own personal spin put a better story in the mix. A survivable story. They had spun their own stories without prodding.

The truth was that the meteor might miss it might hit it might come close; a near miss, but it wouldn’t matter because a natural chain of events was taking place that would make a meteor impact look like small change.

The big deal; the bigger than a meteor deal was the earthquakes that had already started and would probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. And it had been predicted several times over by more than one group and hushed up quickly when it was uncovered. The governments had known. The conspiracy theorists had known. The public should have known, but they were too caught up in world events that seemed to be dragging them ever closer to a third world war to pay attention to a few voices crying in the wilderness. The public was happier watching television series about conspiracies rather than looking at the day to day truths about real conspiracies. The fact was that this was a natural course of events. It had happened before and it would happen again in some distant future.

So in the end it had not mattered. In the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The reality Major Weston liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You couldn’t dispute fact. You could spin it and that was the way of the old world; spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: Bare facts.

The bare facts were that the Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare facts were that the earth quakes had begun and although they were not so bad here in northern New York in other areas of the country; in foreign countries third world countries the bare facts of what was occurring were devastating: Millions dead and millions more would die before it was over. And this was nothing new. The government had evidence that this same event had happened many times in Earth’s history. This was nothing new at all not even new to the human race. A similar event had killed off most of the human race some seventy-five thousand years before.

There was an answer; help a solution, but Richard Weston was unsure how well their solution would work. He had put it in motion anyway. Teams were even now deploying the SS-V2765 compound. It was; like everything else a stop gap measure and probably too little too late. It was also flawed, but he pushed that knowledge away in his mind.

While most of America had tracked the meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living rooms and had been side tracked by all the trouble with the former Soviet Union he had kept track of the real event that had even then been building beneath the Yellowstone caldera. And the end had come quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power grids failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet down. The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all. And the gravitational pull from the large mass had simply accelerated an already bad situation.

Dams burst. River flows reversed. Waters rising or dropping in many places. Huge tidal waves. Fires out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava flowing from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not wiped out, but her back was broken.

In the small city of Glennville that had rested above Bluechip near the shore of the former lake Ontario; the river waters had begun to rise: Bluechip several levels below the city in the limestone cave structures that honeycombed the entire area had survived mostly intact, but unless sealed it would surely succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the last military groups had splashed through the tunnels and into the underground facility they had been walking through better than two feet of cold and muddy river-water. The pressure from the water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels below the city and that damage had been helped along by after-shocks.

When the last group of five men had reached the air shaft carrying the inert form of a woman between them they had immediately pitched in with a group Weston had sent to brick the passageway off. The remaining bricks and concrete blocks were stacked and cemented into place in the four foot thick wall they had started. The materials; along with sandbags initially used to hold back the rising waters had been taken from huge stockpiles within the city and from the stalled trucks within the wide tunnel that had once fed traffic into the base. There was no way in and no way out of the city: With one small exception.

The exception was that air ducting. The ducts led away from the city to a small mountain-peak about a mile away. There the ducts merged together inside a huge natural rock tunnel that had been part of the original network of caves and passage ways. That tunnel culminated deep within the mountain at an air treatment facility. There were also several access points where the ducting came close to the surface via tunnels and passageways that ran though the huge complex of caves and it would be possible to walk through one of the many air shafts to the tunnel; break through the ducting follow it to the treatment facility or outside to the surface and freedom. It would be difficult, but it would be possible. The end of the trip would bring them to the surface; from there they could go anywhere.

Glennville New York

Project Bluechip

Pearl

She came awake with a start. In her dreaming she had been leaning leaning holding the window sill and staring down at the street below. The heat the cold dishrag freezing her tiny fingers. She had leaned back shifted hands placed the rag against the base of her neck once more leaned forward and braced herself against the window frame and her fingers; slicked and unfeeling from the ice had slipped. She had plunged suddenly forward falling faster panicked and she had awakened as she had slammed into the surface of the bed; a scream right on the edge of her tongue waiting to leap.

“Here.” A woman’s voice. A soft hand at the base of her neck holding her; easing her back down to the bed. “It’s okay now.” She held Pearl’s head up and bought a water glass to her lips. Cold; ice cubes clinked together in the glass: She took the straw between her lips and drank deeply. She collapsed back against the bed.

“Where?” She managed at last. “Where is this place?” The ceiling was florescent lights in a panel ceiling. Dropped ceiling her mind supplied. An Americanism.

“Blue” the woman told her as Pearl’s eyes focused on her.  She was short slim dressed in fatigues a pistol in a holster at her side.

“Blue?” Pearl sounded as doubtful as she felt. She must have misheard. “Drum?” She asked. It was the closest military base.

“Blue” the young woman shook her head. “The new base… Blue.” She smiled, but it was a tired smile. “You remember anything at all?”

Pearl shook her head, but then spoke. “A car… A boy with a gun… An earthquake?”

“English?” The woman asked.

Pearl nodded. “Was it then? An earthquake?”

“More than one” The young woman sighed. “It’s bad up there. You’re lucky they found you Jeffers and the others. Lucky.”

Pearl nodded and then moved her legs and nearly fainted. She looked down both were bandaged. She recalled the gun. “Shot?” She asked.

“No… No just scraped up; banged up maybe” The woman told her.

“Badly scraped up?” Pearl asked.

“No… A few cuts, but they are swollen. A day or two and you’ll be fine.”

Pearl didn’t hear the rest as she sagged back against the bed and fell away back into the dream once more…

Glennville

Franklin Street

Roux

The roadway was tilted crazily; the snow was gone. Cold persisted, but it didn’t bother him in the slightest. A small silver canister lay just a few feet away. Inhaler his mind supplied. Maybe his other self agreed, but something inside him didn’t seem to want to agree. He ignored the canister and the line of thought for the briefest of seconds and it was gone completely. Slipped away from him to where ever thought ended up.

He had been lying half in half out of the gutter for the last several hours that he knew of. He had no idea how long before that. Days? Weeks? Weeks seemed wrong. Days he decided. He turned his attention back to the roadway before him. Was it a roadway? When he thought roadway he thought highway; something like that. From what he could see this was more like a city street.

It had never occurred to him in the passing hours to move his head, but the thought of it being a street in a city had caused him to move his head slightly so he could look around to be sure. Slightly, but enough to know he could move it. And he had moved it enough to know it was a city street. And if he could move it that much…

His face came away from the asphalt with a wet sucking noise and he nearly stopped. Expecting pain to come. Expecting the sky to fall. Expecting something, but nothing happened. The sucking sound stopped when his face finally pulled free and he pushed off with his hands and found himself in a sitting position. He flexed his jaw it worked; tended to click when he moved it quickly, but perhaps it was just residual of… Of?

He didn’t know what it might be residual of. There was something he had had in mind when the thought had popped into his head, but he couldn’t get it back now. His mind seemed slow. Not slow as in stupid though. He considered. It was slow like a computer he had once owned. The damn thing took forever to boot. That was what this felt like. A slow boot. He laughed at the thought, but all that came from his throat was a low buzzing sound that frightened him back into silence. He nearly laid back down on the cold road right then, but caught himself. Whatever this was it seemed real. Not a dream and if he could just get his mind to work right he could probably roll with it. Roll right with it. Whatever that might mean. He lost himself for a time again. Sitting at the side of the road starring into the dim gray afternoon sunlight.

He heard the noise before he saw the little boy. The noise was more persistent: Crying weeping something like that. Something he understood had known did know… He wasn’t sure. His head came around and he watched the little boy walking along the opposite side of the road; his face was dirty tear streaked one arm swollen infection he knew he understood infection. He had seen it somewhere. Infection was… Bad he decided.

The hand was mangled. It looked chewed a finger missing maybe an accident with a dog his mind supplied. Accidents with dogs happened. He watched the little boy stumble along. The arm a grotesque parody of a real arm swinging freely from its shoulder socket. Their eyes met a moment later, but it was already too late for the little boy. Roux had used his hands to prop his knees so he could stand. A second of standing had told him he could walk and a single limping step had told him he could walk well enough. It had probably been the standing his mind supplied now. His feet scraping on the loose gravel at the side of the street. His one ruined leg dragging slightly

He held the boys eyes with his own. Large frightened transfixed by the odd glow in his own eyes. He had closed the gap quickly limp or no: Long before the boy had ever thought to call out. A second of standing and looking down into those large sad eyes and he had reached forward quickly and pulled the boy into the air with both hands wrapped around his neck cutting off his startled squawk. A second later and he had dashed him onto the street surface and fallen once more to the asphalt himself. He pulled the still warm body to him…

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Joel has lived and worked his whole life in the small town of Glennville, but his life is about to change forever. He’s got his truck packed for an off-grid adventure he’s planed for his vacation. Fortunate for him, because when he awakens to leave for that trip, everything has changed permanently…  Haley is in Glennville because her husband was stationed at the nearby base. In a few hours her life is also going to change forever. She will find herself taken from her everyday boredom, living in a small town where no-one knows her, and she knows no-one. In a few hours. A short rest, she will step outside her life to a changed world, and no idea who she can trust or count on… Two people thrown together via circumstances. As they begin their journey they draw others to them, as the trek across what used to be the greatest country in the world looking for life, or a place to begin again… #ApocalypticFiction #Dystopian #EndTimes #EndoftheWorld #DellSwet #Readers #AudioBook

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Private Investigations: The John Rourke Private Detective series a-private-detective-middle-aged-standing-looking-unsh

Private Investigations: The John Rourke Private Detective series

wendellsweet7 August 12, 2025

A free read from book one:

Private Investigations 1: A John Rourke Private Detective Story

by W. W. Watson © Copyright 2022

Cover Art © Copyright 2022 W. W.. Watson

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

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Dedication

For Joan, my wife, the only dame who ever truly understood the shadows I walked in. This ain’t a love story, not in the conventional sense. There weren’t any moonlit strolls or whispered promises. Hell, most nights, I barely saw you, tucked away in that cramped apartment, the city’s symphony of sirens and shouts a lullaby to our uneasy peace. Our marriage was a deal, a contract hammered out between two bruised souls in a world that chewed up and spat out the soft and sentimental. You knew the game, the rules, the price. You saw the grime under my fingernails, the hollowness behind my eyes, the weight of every case clinging to me like a cheap suit. And still, you stuck around. You knew I wasn’t the knight in shining armor, more like a rusted tin can rattling down a back alley. But you saw something in the wreckage, something worth salvaging, even if it was just the stubborn ember of a flickering heart. This one’s for you, Joan. For the quiet strength you showed, for the unspoken understanding that passed between us in the dead of night, for enduring the man I am, not the man I wish I could be. For enduring the long silences, the averted gazes, the crumpled pay stubs that spoke volumes more than any words could ever say. For holding onto hope when I’d buried mine under layers of cynicism and cheap bourbon. This is a story of shadows, yes, but it’s also a story of the quiet loyalty that can bloom even in the darkest corners. A testament to the enduring power of a bond forged not in romance, but in the shared understanding of a life lived on the edge, where the lines between right and wrong blurred, and the only certainty was the next case, the next drink, the next uncertain dawn. It’s a small offering, this book, a poor substitute for the quiet life you deserved, a life free from the stench of smoke and the stain of violence. But it’s all I have to give, for you, the one woman who ever gave a damn about the crumpled, cynical, hard-boiled egg that is Jack Rourke. This one’s for you. And for the quiet strength you showed, the unspoken understanding, the enduring loyalty, even when there was nothing left to salvage but the embers of a flickering heart.

Chapter 1: The Stakeout Begins

The chipped paint on my beat-up Ford Falcon was flaking like old skin. The smell of stale coffee clung to the interior like a cheap perfume, a constant, bitter reminder of the long hours ahead. Across the street, Paul Fields’ two-story colonial loomed, a picture of suburban perfection, a stark contrast to the cramped discomfort of my temporary office. The relentless hum of traffic on Hemlock Drive was a dull, throbbing ache in my skull, a soundtrack to this tedious ballet of surveillance. My gut churned, not from the coffee, but from the gnawing feeling that I was hemorrhaging money, bleeding my retainer dry on this seemingly pointless stakeout.


Another hour ticked by, the sun inching its way across the sky, dragging the day along like a lead weight. This wasn’t the kind of case that got the adrenaline pumping. No shadowy figures, no whispered secrets in smoky bars, just a comfortable suburban home and a husband who seemed, at least from my vantage point, annoyingly ordinary. Melinda, the wife’s friend who’d hired me, had hinted at something more, something darker lurking beneath the surface of Paul’s apparently mundane life. But so far, all I had to show for five hundred bucks was a sore ass and the lingering taste of cheap coffee.


My gaze drifted to the house. Paul Fields, a man I’d pegged as a mid-level accountant based on the muted grey suit and the slightly receding hairline, was pacing the living room, a nervous energy vibrating off him like a faulty appliance. He kept checking the locks on the doors and windows, a ritualistic act that made my cynicism prickle. It wasn’t paranoia, not exactly; it was more like a compulsive twitch, a nervous habit amplified by whatever was eating at him. Was it guilt? Fear? Or simply the product of a mind overwhelmed by the mundane pressures of suburban existence? My years in this business had taught me that the most ordinary people often held the most extraordinary secrets.


I pulled out my notebook, the cheap paper rustling like dry leaves. I scribbled down a few notes, mostly observations about his movements – the way he nervously adjusted his tie, the slight tremor in his hand as he lit a cigarette, the way he kept glancing at the neighbor’s house as if expecting something, or someone. These weren’t the clues that made headlines, the kind that sold newspapers or landed you on TV. These were the tiny cracks in the façade, the almost imperceptible shifts in behavior that whispered of something amiss. But to the untrained eye, they were just… nothing. In my business, nothing was everything.


My thoughts drifted to Joan, my wife. Marriage, I’d decided long ago, was a complicated equation with too many variables. It was a series of compromises, small betrayals, and occasional moments of fragile intimacy that were often overshadowed by the petty squabbles and simmering resentments. It was a lot like this stakeout, actually: long stretches of tedious waiting, punctuated by brief bursts of activity, and the nagging feeling that it was all ultimately pointless. The money helped, of course. It paid the bills, kept a roof over our heads, even allowed for the occasional bottle of decent scotch. But the money couldn’t buy back the lost time, the quiet evenings that had been sacrificed at the altar of my cynical profession.


The hourly rate gnawed at me. Melinda had paid a hefty retainer upfront, but I was acutely aware of the ticking clock. Every hour spent here was an hour I could have been pursuing a more lucrative case. The guilt was a familiar companion, a shadow that followed me from one job to the next. It was a strange paradox of my profession: the quicker the case, the more guilty I felt, the more I worried about shortchanging my client, and the less I earned. It was a vicious cycle of doubt and self-recrimination, a never-ending loop playing on repeat in the back of my mind.


A memory flickered – Melinda’s face, pale and drawn, her eyes shadowed with worry. She’d met me in the dimly lit back room of a bar downtown, a place that smelled of stale beer and desperation. She’d spoken in hushed tones, her words carefully chosen, veiled in euphemisms. She’d never explicitly accused Paul of infidelity, but the suspicion hung heavy in the air, thick and cloying like the cigarette smoke that drifted around us. She’d spoken of unexplained absences, late nights, and a sudden shift in Paul’s behaviour, an unsettling change in a marriage that had previously been, at least on the surface, stable.


Hours bled into one another, the monotony punctuated only by the occasional car driving past, the rhythmic chirp of crickets from the nearby park, and the rhythmic tapping of my fingers against the steering wheel. Then, a break in the routine. A yellow taxi pulled up to the house next door, a nondescript dwelling with peeling paint and overgrown ivy. A woman emerged, her face obscured by the shadows, but her figure undeniably elegant in a way that contrasted sharply with the slightly shabby surroundings. She walked with purpose, a confident stride that betrayed no hint of hesitation, directly towards Paul Fields’ home.


My gut tightened. This wasn’t in the script. This wasn’t part of the expected narrative. This was a twist, a deviation from the predictable trajectory of a simple infidelity case. The woman disappeared inside Paul’s house, and the image of her silhouette against the lit window pane burned into my retinas. This wasn’t just about a straying husband anymore; this was something else entirely. Something more complicated, more dangerous. The feeling of dread wasn’t the familiar pang of anxiety associated with a looming deadline, but the sharper, colder fear of venturing into unknown territory. This stakeout, it seemed, was about to get a lot more interesting. And a lot more expensive for Melinda. And potentially, for me. The night was young, and the city held its breath.

The afternoon sun beat down on the Falcon’s dashboard, turning the interior into a small, sweltering oven. The smell of stale coffee had been joined by a new, unwelcome aroma: the faint, metallic tang of sweat. My shirt clung to my back, damp and uncomfortable. Paul Fields remained inside, his movements a blur behind the drawn curtains, but the overall impression was one of restless energy, a caged animal pacing its confines. He’d gone through the lock-checking ritual at least five times in the last hour, each repetition more frantic than the last. It wasn’t a subtle thing, this anxiety; it was practically radiating from the house, a palpable energy that even I, hardened veteran of countless stakeouts, couldn’t ignore.


I reached for my thermos, the lukewarm coffee a bitter disappointment. It did little to soothe the growing unease that was beginning to coil in my stomach, a knot of apprehension tightening with every passing minute. This wasn’t just a case of a possibly cheating husband; it had taken on a darker, more sinister edge. The obsessive checking of locks and windows wasn’t the behavior of a man hiding an affair; it was the behavior of a man hiding something far more significant. Something he was desperately, almost desperately afraid of losing.


My notebook lay open on my lap, filled with meticulous observations: the brand of cigarettes he smoked (Chesterfield, king size), the precise time he lit each one, the way he ground the butt into the ashtray with an almost aggressive force. These weren’t the glamorous details that made for a sensational story; they were the mundane breadcrumbs, the almost imperceptible clues that only someone with my experience could decipher, could weave into a narrative that held any real significance. But for now, they remained just that: breadcrumbs.


The hours stretched, each one a slow, agonizing crawl. The cityscape around me began to blur, the incessant drone of traffic merging into a single, hypnotic hum. My attention wavered, drifting from the house to my own life, the internal dialogue a familiar companion. Joan would be at home now, probably working on her latest watercolor painting, the gentle strokes of her brush a stark contrast to the harsh reality of my existence. I often wondered if she felt the same sense of unease, that same gnawing feeling of something being wrong, even when things seemed perfectly normal on the surface. Maybe she did; maybe that’s what kept us together, that shared unease, that unspoken awareness that beneath the surface of our seemingly stable marriage lay a chasm of unspoken words and quiet resentments.


I caught myself staring at the neighbor’s house again – the one the woman had emerged from. It was unremarkable, a typical suburban dwelling, slightly run-down and unkempt. Yet, it held a certain morbid fascination. It felt…significant. Like a piece of a puzzle I hadn’t yet found, a missing fragment in a picture I was slowly, painfully putting together. The woman had been striking, elegant in her simplicity, with a certain air of determination about her. She had entered Paul’s house without a second glance, her movements purposeful, even resolute. There was an understanding between them, a silent agreement that I couldn’t quite grasp. What was the nature of this interaction? Was she an accomplice, a confidante, or something more sinister?


The sun began its slow descent, casting long shadows across the street. The air cooled, the oppressive heat of the afternoon giving way to a cooler, more ominous evening chill. Paul Fields was less agitated now, but a subtle tension remained, a nervous stillness that was almost more unsettling than his earlier frenetic energy. He sat by the window, a drink in his hand, staring out into the gathering dusk. What was he looking for? Who was he expecting?


I checked my watch. The retainer was almost exhausted. Melinda’s initial payment, generous as it was, was quickly dwindling. The guilt gnawed at me again, the familiar pang of professional anxiety. I was spending more time on this case than I’d initially anticipated, and the hourly rate was a constant reminder of the dwindling financial returns. Was I overstepping my professional boundaries, letting my curiosity, my personal fascination with the case, cloud my judgment? I’d always prided myself on my objectivity, my detachment; but this case…this case was different.


A sudden noise broke through my thoughts – a low, rhythmic tapping against the glass of the window. I jerked my head up, my heart hammering against my ribs. It was coming from Paul Fields’ house, a slow, deliberate tapping, repetitive and insistent. My hand instinctively went to my pistol, a familiar weight offering a semblance of comfort, a grim reassurance in the growing darkness.


The tapping ceased. Paul Fields had disappeared from the window. Silence descended, heavy and oppressive, thick with an unspoken tension. The only sound was the distant hum of city traffic, and the faint, incessant chirping of crickets. The seemingly insignificant details I’d meticulously recorded in my notebook – the nervous tie adjustment, the tremor in his hand, the aggressive way he extinguished his cigarettes – these seemingly inconsequential observations took on a new, more profound significance. They were no longer just details; they were pieces of a puzzle, fragments of a story slowly, painfully unfolding before me, a story that promised to be far more complex, far more dangerous, than I’d initially imagined.


The night was settling in, and with it, a sense of foreboding that ran deeper than any simple case of infidelity. This was about secrets, lies, and a fear so profound it permeated every corner of Paul Fields’ carefully constructed suburban existence. The stakeout was far from over. In fact, I had a feeling it was just beginning. The truth, I suspected, lay buried deep, waiting to be unearthed, and my gut told me the cost of discovering it would be far greater than I’d ever anticipated. The woman’s visit had shifted everything, changing the stakes of the game. My job had moved beyond the simple pursuit of a cheating spouse; it had transformed into something far more complex, something that touched on the very fabric of human deception and its potentially lethal consequences.

The rhythmic tick-tock of the Falcon’s clock mocked the stillness of the evening. Each second felt stretched, an eternity of waiting. My mind, however, was far from the stakeout, adrift in the turbulent waters of my own marriage. Joan. The name itself felt like a worn coin, smooth from years of handling, its initial shine dulled by the relentless friction of daily life. We’d been together for fifteen years, a lifetime in some ways, a blink in others. The honeymoon phase had long since faded, replaced by a comfortable, if somewhat predictable, routine. We shared a life, a house, a bank account, but did we really share a soul? Was there still a spark, or was the flame reduced to a flickering ember, barely clinging to life?


The question gnawed at me, a persistent ache mirroring the dull throbbing in my temples. Marriage, I’d come to realize, was a constant negotiation, a delicate balancing act between individual desires and shared responsibilities. It was a dance of compromises, of unspoken expectations and carefully constructed compromises. Sometimes it felt more like a business deal than a partnership forged in love and passion. The paperwork – the joint accounts, the insurance policies, the mortgage payments – felt strangely analogous to the meticulous notes I kept on Paul Fields, each entry a careful accounting of actions, reactions, a meticulous record of a decaying trust.


Melinda, Paul’s wife’s friend, had paid handsomely upfront; a generous retainer, enough to keep me comfortably occupied for a week, even two. But the thought of the hourly rate – that constant, nagging reminder of the money I was burning – prickled my conscience. There was an insidious guilt that always followed a swiftly resolved case; a feeling of having cheated the system, of not earning my keep. This wasn’t a lavish life, detective work. It was more about steady income, keeping the wolves from the door, enough to keep Joan and I afloat. Yet, that constant pressure to justify my expenditure, to always be productive, mirrored the pressure in my marriage, where every moment seemed judged and accounted for.


Were we, Joan and I, simply two people going through the motions, enacting the rituals of marriage without the substance of genuine connection? Did the quiet silences between us represent a void, or simply the comfortable silence of two people who’d learned to live in harmony, even without passion? It was a question I’d avoided for too long, burying it beneath the layers of routine and responsibility. The work had become a convenient distraction, a shield against the introspective exploration of my own life.


The thought of Paul Fields’ situation – a man seemingly trapped in a web of his own making – stirred a painful resonance. Was his desperate need to secure his house an external manifestation of the same anxieties that gnawed at me? A fear of losing something precious, something irreplaceable? Or was it something darker? Something far more sinister than a simple midlife crisis or a clandestine affair? The more I observed him, the less certain I became of the original briefing. Infidelity seemed almost too simplistic, an inadequate explanation for the level of paranoia and anxiety I had witnessed.


The darkness deepened, swallowing the last vestiges of the day. The city lights twinkled, a distant, cold constellation in the vast expanse of night. My eyes remained fixed on Paul Fields’ house. The silence was broken only by the occasional rustle of leaves and the distant murmur of traffic. Yet, the stillness was deceptive. Beneath the surface, a current of tension flowed, a palpable sense of unease that tightened its grip with every passing moment.


I considered Joan again. Her world was a study in contrasts to mine. The vibrant colors of her paintings, the meticulous detail of her brushstrokes, the quiet satisfaction she derived from creating something beautiful; these represented a life that was completely separate from my gritty world of shadows and suspicion. We were two ships passing in the night, each sailing on a different sea. And yet, somehow, inexplicably, we’d found ourselves docked together, sharing a harbor, a home. But was it enough? Was this fleeting contentment what our lives were to become, or did a future of potential storms still await us?


My thoughts returned to Melinda’s initial payment, the generous upfront sum. It was enough to sustain us for several weeks, but the nagging feeling of not truly

earning it persisted. The hourly rate, a constant, insidious reminder of my own professional limitations. The case, initially expected to be straightforward, had become something else entirely, something that stretched the boundaries of my professional competence. The initial impression of a typical marital discord had morphed into something far more complex and unsettling, a mystery that wrapped around me, pulling me in like a relentless tide.


Was this my problem, the one I felt increasingly drawn to resolve? I often felt more satisfaction in the conclusion of a case, and not necessarily its financial rewards. The financial rewards were only relevant to the continuation of this lifestyle I was beginning to question. I knew, deep down, that there was something more to this than the potential for monetary gain. The thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of unraveling the complexities of human behavior, the dangerous dance between truth and deception; these were the aspects that truly captivated me. They were the reasons why I chose this path, why I continued to walk this lonely road, amidst the darkness and the shadows.


But the darkness was getting to me. It was creeping in, threatening to engulf me entirely, to swallow me whole. The night pressed down, heavy and suffocating. My initial feelings of guilt over a quickly resolved case had given way to a different kind of guilt, the gnawing sense of responsibility that came from recognizing the gravity of the situation. This wasn’t just about infidelity; this was about something far more profound, something that touched upon the very essence of human nature, the secrets we keep, the lies we tell, and the terrifying consequences of our actions.


The tension remained palpable, hanging heavy in the air like a shroud. The silence stretched, agonizing, unbroken. I watched, waiting, for the next clue, the next piece of the puzzle. The cost of the stakeout was going up exponentially, not just financially, but emotionally. What started as a simple, even mundane, job had evolved into something far more complex, a mystery that promised to be both exhilarating and potentially dangerous, a game with high stakes. And the game, it seemed, was just beginning. The shadows deepened, and with them, the unsettling feeling that I was venturing into territory that was far beyond my initial expectations. The line between professional curiosity and personal obsession was becoming increasingly blurred, and I had no idea where that would ultimately lead.

The memory flickered, a hazy snapshot in the stark contrast between the sterile brightness of my office and the shadowy suburban street where I now sat. Melinda. Her face, etched with a mixture of apprehension and determination, swam back to me. She’d arrived late that afternoon, a figure shrouded in a heavy winter coat, her breath misting in the cold air of my waiting room. The dim lighting of my office seemed to amplify her nervousness, highlighting the tremor in her hands as she clutched a worn leather purse. She’d been introduced through a mutual acquaintance, a lawyer I’d worked with on a few prior cases. Her initial reluctance to divulge details, the carefully chosen words, the veiled allusions – they’d hinted at something far more complicated than a simple case of marital infidelity.


“It’s… it’s about Paul,” she’d begun, her voice barely a whisper, as if afraid the very air might carry her secret. “My best friend’s husband. Sarah… she suspects something. Something’s not right. She’s too afraid to… to confront him herself.”


There was a hesitant pause, a brief silence broken only by the rhythmic tick of the clock on my desk. It was a sound oddly familiar to the one I was now listening to, the rhythmic ticking that filled the night here on my stakeout. The similarities between the two settings were unsettling, the echoes of that initial consultation creating a weird sense of déja vu.


“It’s not just… you know… another affair,” she continued, her voice gaining a slight measure of resolve. “It’s… different. More… dangerous.”


The word “dangerous” hung in the air, heavy with unspoken implications. She refused to elaborate further, merely offering a series of vague pronouncements; unusual late-night meetings, strange phone calls, and a pervasive sense of unease that permeated their otherwise seemingly stable life. She hadn’t spoken of specifics, only impressions, vague feelings, hinting at a darkness that lay just beneath the surface of their comfortable suburban existence. The fear in her eyes, however, had been palpable. It was a fear that transcended mere infidelity, a fear that spoke of something far more sinister, something that went beyond the usual marital squabbles and clandestine encounters.


She’d paid handsomely, a significant advance that far exceeded the typical retainer for a simple infidelity investigation. The money had felt… heavy, as if burdened with the weight of her anxieties, her unspoken fears. The generous payment had raised my suspicions, fueling my intuition that this was no ordinary case. It suggested there was more at stake than just catching Paul with another woman, that the truth was buried far deeper, far more elusive than a quick snapshot of infidelity.


I’d tried to draw her out, to coax more information from her, but she’d remained tightly wound, her lips sealed as if bound by an invisible oath. She spoke in coded messages, her words carefully chosen to conceal more than they revealed, her eyes constantly darting around the room as if expecting to be overheard. The overall impression was one of extreme urgency, a sense of impending doom that she couldn’t quite articulate, but that resonated powerfully with me.


The contrast between that dimly lit office, heavy with unspoken anxieties and the hushed quiet of the night outside Paul Fields’ house was stark, yet somehow fitting. Here, in the darkness, surrounded by the slumbering suburbia, I felt a similar weight of anticipation. The silence, which I’d initially found tedious, now held a different, more compelling meaning. It was a silence pregnant with secrets, a silence that vibrated with the unspoken tensions of the lives I was observing.


My eyes remained fixed on Paul’s house. The rhythmic ticking of my watch—a different watch, but the rhythm was the same, a constant companion—accompanied the sound of the crickets chirping in the nearby woods. Paul remained inside, a shadowy figure hidden behind the drawn curtains. His movements, even those few I could see, were restless, anxious. He kept pacing, checking the locks on the doors, peering out the windows as if expecting an intruder. It all fit with Melinda’s description, a feeling of being watched, of being under siege, not necessarily by a person, but by an unseen force. An unseen force that, in my growing suspicion, might be far more powerful and dangerous than just the threat of a love affair gone wrong. Perhaps Melinda herself was in danger. Perhaps Paul was, too. The initial case—infidelity—was losing its significance, becoming secondary to something else entirely. Something more complex, and infinitely more disturbing…

Check out the series below:

Private Investigations: The John Rourke Private Detective series

Private Investigations 1: A John Rourke detective Story (Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories) Kindle Edition Book 1 of 3: Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories by W. W. Watson (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

John Rourke is a private detective with contacts and a license to practice from New York to Arizona. He has the resources he needs across the country to find the information he needs to crack the toughest cases. Ex-cops, ex-Cons, snitches, stoolies, drug addicts, criminals, drug dealers and any kind of scum of the earth you can imagine or care to name. He knows the seedy side of life and to some people that makes him indispensable…

Book one:

The chipped paint on my beat-up Ford Falcon was flaking like old skin. The smell of stale coffee clung to the interior like a cheap perfume, a constant, bitter reminder of the long hours ahead. Across the street, Paul Fields’ two-story colonial loomed, a picture of suburban perfection, a stark contrast to the cramped discomfort of my temporary office. The relentless hum of traffic on Hemlock Drive was a dull, throbbing ache in my skull, a soundtrack to this tedious ballet of surveillance. My gut churned, not from the coffee, but from the gnawing feeling that I was hemorrhaging money, bleeding my retainer dry on this seemingly pointless stakeout…

#BookWorm #Readers #KindleUnlimited #WWWatson #Crime #Noir #Mystery #PrivateEye

Private Investigations 2: A John Rourke detective Story (Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories) Kindle Edition Book 2 of 3: Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories by W. W. Watson(Author)Format: Kindle Edition J
Book 2 of 3: Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories
John Rourke is a private detective with contacts and a license to practice from New York to Arizona. He has the resources he needs across the country to find the information he needs to crack the toughest cases. Ex-cops, ex-Cons, snitches, stoolies, drug addicts, criminals, drug dealers and any kind of scum of the earth you can imagine or care to name. He knows the seedy side of life and to some people that makes him indispensable…

Book two:


My apartment, usually a sanctuary of quiet solitude, became a temporary forensic lab. The dining table transformed into a command center, littered with maps, photographs, financial records, and transcripts of intercepted phone calls. The air hung heavy with the scent of stale coffee and the lingering aroma of cheap takeout containers. Days bled into nights as I painstakingly organized the evidence, meticulously documenting every detail, creating a comprehensive narrative that would stand up to the scrutiny of the legal system… #BookWorm #Readers #KindleUnlimited #WWWatson #Crime #Noir #Mystery #PrivateEye

Private Investigations 3: A John Rourke detective Story (Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories) Kindle Edition Book 3 of 3: Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories by W. W. Watson(Author)Format: Kindle Edition J
Book 3 of 3: Private Investigations: John Rourke Private Detective Stories

John Rourke is a private detective with contacts and a license to practice from New York to Arizona. He has the resources he needs across the country to find the information he needs to crack the toughest cases. Ex-cops, ex-Cons, snitches, stoolies, drug addicts, criminals, drug dealers and any kind of scum of the earth you can imagine or care to name. He knows the seedy side of life and to some people that makes him indispensable…

Book three:

The silence was broken by the distant screech of a hawk, its cry sharp and piercing against the vast silence of the desert. It was a lonely sound, a perfect metaphor for the state of my own soul. I was tired, bone-deep tired. Sleep was a luxury I couldn’t afford, nightmares a constant companion. The faces of the victims, the ones I’d found along Rieser’s trail, haunted my dreams. Each one a testament to the brutal efficiency of a man who knew how to erase his tracks… #BookWorm #Readers #KindleUnlimited #WWWatson #Crime #Noir #Mystery #PrivateEye

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Notes from the Edge fotor-ai-20240830232225

Notes from the Edge

wendellsweet7 August 11, 2025

Posted by Dell 01/18/2014

It’s Sunday again. It seems as though it arrived here way too fast, like I could have used a few extra days, maybe a nine day week… Will whoever is in charge of that take care of it? Thanks…

This week I thought I would treat you to a little preview of a character you may not have met, if you have not purchased and read the first books. She doesn’t come on the scene until the second book, but she is a major character from there on. Meet Donita…

This Book Two Preview is Copyright Wendell Sweet 2014 all rights are reserved. It may not be reproduced by any means except short references for review or critique.

~ In the Dark ~

The cow turned her head towards the woods, nervous. Her large eyes reflecting silver glints from the moonlight.

The smell of death and corruption was nothing new, and that was the smell that came to her now. But there was something wrong with it. Something not right with this smell. Something different. Her calf nuzzled her and began to nurse. The smell of humans came to her along with smoke and mumbled snatches of conversation and she stopped thinking about the dead smell. Turned away from the woods and stared at the firelight across the fields.

~In the Trees~

The eyes watched her and the other cows from the cover of the trees. The hunger was terrible, all consuming, and it came in crashing waves. The impulse to feed seemed to be the only coherent thought she had. It was hard to think around, hard to think past.

A few weeks ago she had been… Been? But it did no good, she could not force the memory to come. A name came, Donita… she had been Donita, she knew that, but that was all she knew. And a name was not everything she had been. She had been something else… Something more, but she could not get to whatever it was though. Something that did not wander through the woods. Something that was not driven by all consuming passions that she could not understand.

She turned her eyes up at the moon. It pulled at her. Something in it spoke directly to something inside her. Something deep. Something she believed had always been there but there had never been a need to address because it lived under the surface. Out of her line of thought. Below her emotions… Now it didn’t. Now it ruled everything. It was all she could do not to rush from the trees and find the smell that tempted her and consume it. Eat it completely. Leave nothing at all. Oh to do it… To do it…

Her eyes snapped back from the moon and a low whine escaped her throat. The calf, sated, had wandered away from her mother. Behind her the boy made a strangled noise in his throat. She turned, gnashed her teeth and growled. The thin, skeletal boy fell back, hungry but frightened. She could feel his fear. It fed her, tempted her to taste him, but he was no food for her. She knew that much. It was a sort of instinct… Drive… Something inside of her. The boy was not her food. The boy was not her sustenance. He was one of her own. Corrupted. And corrupted flesh could not feed and sustain itself on corrupted flesh. Fresh flesh was needed, live flesh. Fresh Human flesh, she corrected.

The boy trembled and grinned sickly, his one good eye rolling in his head. The other eye was a ruined mass of gray pulp sagging from the socket. A great flap of skin below that socket had curled and dried, hanging from the cheek. He felt at it now, carefully, with his shrunken fingers. She hissed at him and his hands fell away. She turned her attention back to the wandering calf that was nosing ever closer to the edge of the trees.

She desired human flesh. She needed it, but it didn’t absolutely have to be that way. Two nights ago it had been a rabbit, the night before that she and the boy had shared a rat. The night before that they had come upon the old woman. She thought about the old woman as the calf wandered ever closer to the line of trees. The old woman had been good…

~The old woman in the ditch~

They had come across the old woman at near morning. Near morning was the best she could do. Time was not a real concern to her anymore. She understood near morning because the sickness, the sickness that began to send the searing pain through her body, had started. The boy had already been whining low in his throat for an hour. In pain. It was like that whenever the night began to end. When the morning was on the way. Soon to be.

She remembered sunlight. Her old self had needed sunlight just as she now needed darkness. Absence of light. That had been Donita too, but a different Donita.

They had been crossing the rock filled ditch to get to an old house on the other side. The basement of the house was what she had in mind. Quiet, private, darkness. She had been scrambling down the steep, sandy side when the smell had slipped up her nose and froze her brain.

That is the way she thought of it. Frozen. Everything… Every thing besides that smell of flesh was frozen out. The boys whining, the coming dawn, the constant hunger in her belly, the moon silvery and bright so far up in the night sky. Nothing got by that desire, urge, drive. It consumed her, and it had then. It had started with her brain and then had spread out into her body. Her legs had stopped moving and she had nearly tumbled all the way to the bottom of the rock strewn ditch before she had caught herself, her head already twisted in the direction of the smell. Her ears pricked, her tongue lick licking at her peeled, dead lips.

She could smell the old woman. Knew that she was an old woman. It was in the smell. Somehow it was in the smell. And her flesh. And her fear… The boy had slammed into her then, still whining and nearly knocked her to the ground.

She had come up from that near fall in a crouch and the boy had slammed into her once more, so she had grabbed him to steady him. He had thought she meant to kill him and had pulled away but a second later he had caught the scent and they had both gone tearing down the ditch.

~The Old Woman~

The old woman had heard them coming. She had begun to whine herself, replacing the boys whining which had turned to a low growl. The panic built in her as she heard them coming. Her heart pounded, leapt, slammed against her ribs bringing pain with it. The pain rebounded and shot down into her broken leg. The leg that she had broken the day before trying to scramble down into this ditch to reach the house across what was left of the highway so she would have a safe place to stay. The pain slammed into her leg and she cried aloud involuntarily. A split second later the female slammed into her.

She had been on her belly. The pain was less that way. When the female hit her she drove her over onto her back. A second after that she was ripping at her flesh, biting, feeding and she could not fight her she was too strong, too….. Animal strong. And then the boy hit her hard, pouncing on her chest, driving the air from her lungs, and before she could even react, catch her breath back, he was biting at her throat.

She felt the pulse of blood as he bit into her jugular and it sprayed across his face. She felt it go. Felt her consciousness drop by half. Her eyelids flutter, flutter, flutter and then close completely. And the biting was far away and then it was gone…

~The Feasting~

The boy had her throat, but Donita had been biting her way into her chest. She had felt her heart beating and she had been gnawing against her ribs when she felt it stop. They had both calmed then, loosening the grips they had had on her, and settling down to feed.

She glanced now at the calf that was less than three feet from them. It’s huge moon eyes staring curiously at them. The calf did not know death. Had not seen it, she thought. It knew it’s mothers tit, the sweet grass of the spring field, the warmth of the sun and nothing else. It edged a little closer.

She had killed the old woman. She had had no use for her at all. They had eaten so much of her flesh that she was useless to them. Couldn’t sit up all the way, the boy had taken one arm off at the shoulder and carried it away like a prize.

Donita had eaten so much that she had vomited, but that had only forced her back to feeding until she was once again filled. She had looked around the ditch and spied the rock. The old woman had come back already and she was trying to raise herself from the ground. Trying to raise herself and walk once more. She had picked the rock up from the ditch. A big rock, but she was powerful, and she had smashed the old woman’s skull in as she had tried to bite at her.

She turned again to the calf. The calf was not what she wanted, but the calf would have to do for now. She let her hand fall upon the boys thigh and they both sprang at the calf.

The calf did not have the time to react, it didn’t even bawl. One second it was standing the next it was on it’s side, Donita’s teeth clamped tightly across it’s throat. A second after that it was sliding across the dew wet grass and into the woods, one wild eye rolling and reflecting the silver of the waning moon…

Get the book…

Earth’s Survivors: Rising From The Ashes

The end has come for most of the world’s population. Small groups of survivors are picking up the pieces… Learning to live again…

When the sun began to peek over the top of the ridge on the opposite shore of the Black River, everyone filed out to the two remaining trucks. It had been decided that Mike and Jan would stay behind while the others went in search of the stolen truck. They switched on and tested two sets of F.M. radios.

#Dystopian #ApocalypticFiction #Horror #Readers #BookLovers #KU #KindleUnlimited

Have a great weekend and I’ll be back next week…

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Wastelands 18 Waste-18-04

Wastelands 18

wendellsweet7 August 8, 2025

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. #3DCarModel #directx #dellsweet

#3dmodels #directx #dellsweet #fbx #lopoly #3dcarmodel

Wastelands 18. This is my ride if I were in the Wastelands. A junk yard patched up Ford Mustang. Dual methane tanks on the back. Room for me and my dog, just like Max… The result was stuffed with a methane powered V10 and fitted with a 4 wheel drive drivetrain and lifted. Large tires finished it out and it was set out on missions in the Wastelands. This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below and converted versions in 3DS, FBX and OBJ.

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Wastelands 17 WL-17-01

Wastelands 17

wendellsweet7 August 8, 2025

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. #3DCarModel #directx #dellsweet

#3dmodels #directx #dellsweet #fbx #lopoly #3dcarmodel

Wastelands 17. This is a short framed ex-Bronco built from junkyard parts and used for recon and fast deliveries through the wastelands. This was built from pipe and welded up, a skin from an old Ford Bronco was used to cover the tube-frame. The result was stuffed with a methane powered V10 and fitted with a 4 wheel drive drivetrain and lifted. Large tires finished it out and it was set out on missions in the Wastelands. This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below and converted versions in 3DS, FBX and OBJ.

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

Wastelands 16 WL-16-02

Wastelands 16

wendellsweet7 August 8, 2025

This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. #3DCarModel #directx #dellsweet

#3dmodels #directx #dellsweet #fbx #lopoly #3dcarmodel

Wastelands 16. This is a tube-built Military vehicle. Fast. V10 methane powered. Room for a driver, passenger and a gunner and a large cargo or just supplies. This was built from pipe and welded up, a skin from an old Pickup was used to cover the front. The result was stuffed with a methane powered V10 and fitted with a 4 wheel drive drivetrain and lifted. Large tires finished it out and it was set out on missions in the Wastelands. This model is designed and rendered in Direct X. The ZIP file also includes the maps and graphics as shown in the images below and converted versions in 3DS, FBX and OBJ.

Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com

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