Corn, Cows, and the Apocalypse (Part 1) (24 page)

-
Interogatous Interruptous-

             
“Let go.”  I hissed as Devin pulled me onto my seat by my lassoed wrist.

             
“Are you trying to get yourself hurt?  August has made it perfectly clear that he is bad news.  Why won’t you listen to her?”

             
“I know and I agree with her, but I need to know more.”

             
“What more is there to know?”  He let go of my wrist. 

             
“Adrian is bad, is not a complete statement for me.  Why is he bad?  What does he want?  Is he the mayor’s lackey?  Or is the mayor his?  I need more information, Devin.”

             
“You’re not getting it that way.”  He clenched his jaw tightly and narrowed his eyes daring me to defy him. 

             
It took me a moment to realize what my flirtation must have looked like from his perspective.  I couldn’t expect him to understand what I myself didn’t understand.  I just needed to touch Adrian again.  I needed to read him just as I had the old murdering rapist.  I needed to see how black his heart was.  At the same time I was trying to keep him on my good side in case he was as evil as I suspected.  I didn’t need my enemies knowing that they were my enemies. 

-I Need A Hero-

             
By the second round, I was having trouble staying in my seat.  It could have been from any number of things:  The electric energy in the crowd as they cheered for their favorite competitor.  The nervous prideful energy I felt watching my mentor battle grim after grim.  Or perhaps it was just the fact that in place of cheerleaders, the mayor had secured strippers to dance for the box seats. 

             
Unfortunately, I knew it was none of the above.  Something was wrong.  The instincts, that everyone insisted I use, were alight like a forest fire, but I couldn’t translate them.  It was all fine and dandy to have a woman’s intuition, but a hell of a lot of good it did with the brain of a nit wit behind it. 

             
I must have looked antsy, because Devin put his hand on my knee and gave me an enquiring look.  I leaned over to speak over the cheering crowd.  “I don’t like this.”  I said trying to articulate the only thing I was sure of. 

             
“I hope not.  I’m still holding out hope you’ll give in someday.”  He winked at me and squeezed my knee before returning his attentions to his girly dancers.  It took until then for me to realize he thought I was referring to them. 

             
I looked to Haden for some counsel, but she was in the middle of an interview with two very attractive male reporters.

             
I glanced between dancing girls to catch a glimpse of Garrett.  He was taking the brunt of eight grim at once.  I wasn’t entirely sure why they were bombarding him so much when there were six other competitors available.  August was trying to get to him to help, but one of her three grim was particularly dexterous and was managing to avoid all of her strikes.  The other two were keeping her wary, but they weren’t attacking. 

             
I could feel myself rise as I watched the scene, but I still couldn’t see the danger.  August could win this tournament with one hand tied behind her back.  Why did I want to run to aid her so bad?  What was wrong?  What was I missing?

             
I felt a tingle on the back of my neck as if someone was watching me.  I glanced at Adrian Dorn, but he wasn’t watching me.  He was watching August.  He looked upward to the ceiling and nodded at someone. 

             
I looked up and saw the gunmen prepared to save the day as the mayor had instructed them.  They looked ready and willing to shoot any grim that got out of line.  Aside from them, there were two new additions, but they weren’t gunmen.  They handled the spotlights. 

             
My instincts as primal as they were, were screaming at me.  I stopped questioning them and let them take over even before I understood what I needed to do. 

             
My hands gripped the railing beside me and I flipped over it.  My shoes skidded down the cement wall, easing the sting on my feet when I landed on the concrete below.  I could hear Devin above asking me what the hell I was doing, but I was already in motion again.  Slow motion, though I knew I was pushing harder than I’ve ever pushed before. 

             
Fucking legs move.  I’m too stupid to do this damn job.  Please God no!  Not AGAIN! 

             
Despite the violation of rules, the crowd was loving my impromptu rush onto the field and they cheered all the louder.  Had I had the forethought to simply warn August, she still wouldn’t have heard it. 

             
The grim spotted me right away and swarmed.  I had no weapons.  The first one I just barreled through with the momentum of my run.  The second one grabbed me and I twisted his arm flipping him over to his back and wrenching away.  The third’s face shattered before me when my fist went at him full force.  I didn’t even feel the three fingers I broke in the process.

             
Garrett saw me coming through, but he couldn’t get away from his grim.  They were on him heavy because they knew he would help August if she got in trouble.  It was all a distraction.  Haden’s interviews, Devin’s girly dancers, it was all to keep them from noticing August was in trouble. 

             
Adrian hadn’t anticipated me.  He didn’t know I was still a threat to his plan.  The lights above weaved in and out of the battle and settled on August.  The blinding light forced her to back away from her agile opponent—back right into her lingering herders. 

             
“No!”  I screamed coming up fast.  I didn’t know if I was fast enough. 

             
The shivs were clear glass.  They were concealed so well, I don’t imagine the handlers would have even suspected they were there, even if they were looking right at them.  The attack would go unnoticed by the gunmen above.  Two well-placed stab wounds would be enough to kill August.  It would go down as a tragic accident, and the mayor would ruefully promise to do a better job to safe guard his future contestants.  All the while he would demand that we continue with the tournaments to rid our state of every last wicked grim.

             
Why did they want them exterminated so badly?

             
I pushed as hard as I could.  One infuriating step at a time.

             
Move fucking legs!  MOVE!

             
I could see it playing out yards, feet, and inches from reach.  I realized that I was right all along.  My greatest fear was about to come to life and there was nothing I could do to stop it.  I was going to fail, just as I thought I would.

             
August recovered from the glaring light and sensed more than saw the danger.  She spun cutting off the hand of one of her grim attackers.  The other was a hair from eviscerating her while her defenses were occupied. 

             
He lunged.  I leapt.  The glass shard scraped her stomach as he tumbled over with me on top of him.  We were immediately tangled in a wrestling stalemate.  He wanted to gouge my eyes out, and I just wanted to get off him and check on August.

             
I looked back.  August’s eyes and mouth were wide with surprise.  Her weapon hung impotently at her side.  The crowd almost immediately hushed in reverence of the moment.  I heard the screams, but still didn’t see. 

             
Haden and Devin were running toward us.  Garrett was frantically trying to fend off his last grim.  August’s third grim appeared from his ducked position behind her.  He eyed me with a growl and grinned.  His teeth should have been sharpened to fine points, and dripping blood, but they weren’t.  He was just the body of somebody I never knew. 

             
August fell to her hands and knees bleeding from the cut across her belly and the wound, the glass shiv now protruding from her back, had made. 

-
Sixteen Seconds-

             
At some point, the gunfire started and every last grim was dispatched with the precision of military discipline, including the one under me.  I scrambled to August’s side searching for something to do.  Even as I searched, she shook her head at me. 

             
“August,” my eyes looked onto hers stinging with the knowledge that we didn’t have much time.  “I’m sorry.”

             
She shushed me.  “You have to take care of them.”  She whispered. 

             
“I will.  I promise.”

             
“You have to take my place.”

             
“I could never replace you.”  My eyes welled over with tears.

             
“You have to lead them, promise me.”  She looked over me insistently. 

             
“I promise.  August, please, don’t leave me.  I can’t do this without you.”

             
“You are so much more than you know.  You have to believe that.”

             
I didn’t, but I nodded. 

             
Haden and Devin arrived falling next to August.  They went through the same motions I just had, searching for something to do, but quickly realizing there was nothing.  There was just enough time for them to grip her hands and match her gaze before her eyes turned vacant and her head lolled back. 

             
A set of stifled whimpered and stuttered sniffles were all that we could manage to do at the moment.  It was Garrett who offered a solemn howl of agony.  He was standing behind me.  I hadn’t even known he was there.  I wanted to leap up to console him, but when his emotional roil was over he offered me a scorching heart breaking glare. 

             
When I looked back at my beloved August, Haden and Devin looked at me with a less scathing expression, but none the less, I could see the disappointment in their eyes. 

             
This was what my training was about.  I was supposed to be there to save her and I wasn’t.  I had failed her.  I had failed my team.  I had failed myself.  And yet somehow through all that, I had to find a way to keep my promise to August and take her place.

Sneak Pee
k

Cow Tipping After the
apocalypse

              I would like to say I offered him a lady-like derisive slap, but my intent was not to discipline him for his errant behavior.  My intent was to hurt him the way his supposed death hurt me.  Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I had missed him.  Seeing him reminded me that I should have mourned him, but didn’t because I was selfishly engrossed in trying to keep my team from abandoning me.

             
My fist grazed his cheekbone in a solid backhand.  It wasn’t enough to give him a black eye, but it would make it hurt to chew for a while.  He cradled his face and stared back at me in shock.  I wanted to hit him again, and I even stepped forward to do so, but Garrett and Devin pulled me back. 

             
Priest and I were locked in a silent battle.  My eyes were starting to water, and his were returning to their former expression of sympathy.  I sniffled trying to decide if I was crying for him, for August, or for everyone who hated me right now.

             
I broke down and sobbed.  I didn’t care if I was supposed to be a strong leader.  I just wanted people to stop leaving me.  I let my body go slack and I was prepared to drop to the ground and freeze my face to the snow with my tears, but Devin hoisted me up into his arms. 

             
There was a short discussion, before Devin slipped into the back of the SUV with me still cradled on his lap.  I felt ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop crying and I didn’t foresee a future that I would be able to stop. 

THANK YOU!

I hope you have enjoyed the book and will continue on to book 2:

Cow Tipping After the Apocalypse.

Please leave a review.
  Your opinion not only influences other potential readers, but it helps me know what you like, or dislike about my books, so I can continue to entertain you.

If you are interested in more of my work, please look up “The Warden: Successors” on kindle.  An urban fantasy series about a top-secret prison that contains supernatural beings.

Here’s
an excerpt:

The Warden: 
Successors

              The guards gruffly tossed Cori and Ethan into the darkened house.  The door slammed behind them and a something clicked from the outside.  Cori immediately checked the door, but she already knew the answer. 

             
Locked.

             
She combed the walls for a light switch.  After turning off the porch light, she found the main switch.  To her left lamps in the living room illuminated the home.  The conjoined living room, dining room, and kitchen had the style of an American log cabin.  The living room had a huge fireplace, a plush tan couch and two brown leather chairs surrounding a glass coffee table.  Taxidermy animals adorned the fireplace, and the illuminating wood lamps rested on slate end tables that flanked the couch. 

             
To her right the dining room table sat to one side of the kitchen island.  The table and chairs were hand carved from logs and varnished with a glossy red mahogany stain.  The wrought iron faux candle chandelier was centered above the table. 

             
The kitchen counters made an L against the wall squaring off with the L shaped island.  The stainless steel industrial sized fridge/freezer opposed the end of the island, while the apron sink on the long counter offered easy back and forth work with the stove inset into the island.  The short leg of the island served as a breakfast bar seating that overlooked the kitchen. 

             
Cori wasn’t sure what she expected to see when the lights turned on, but a bachelor pad straight from a design magazine wasn’t what she had in mind.  After a moment of looking over the room she rushed over to the fireplace to get a fire going.

             
Ethan started scavenging the cupboards and fridge for food.  She wasn’t surprised by that, he look emaciated.  She wondered how long he had been in captivity.  She wondered how many of his bruises were inflicted prior to his abduction. 

             
Thankfully the logs in the fireplace were the fake ones you just light directly with a match.  She hadn’t been around a fireplace for a number of years, and even then, fire was never her strong suit. 

             
A wave of heat billowed out of the fireplace.  She closed her eyes and let the orange flame and deep heat take away whatever thoughts and concerns were rolling around her mind.  Of which there were many. 

             
Eventually, the smell of food drew her back into reality.  She looked behind her and saw Ethan kneeling over the coffee table devouring cold chicken off the bone, ice cream, and chips without regard to any appropriate palate order.  At one point, he dipped his chicken into the ice cream.  She smiled and sat back against one of the chairs to watch him. 

             
He paused with stuffed cheeks and looked at her.  “Do you want some?”

             
She shook her head despite being extremely hungry.  She got the impression he would have held back eating so much if he knew he needed to share.  Given his condition, she didn’t want to interrupt.  She had been on more calorie restrictive diets than the last two weeks.   

             
After a few minutes of staring at the fire, Ethan let out a cavernous burp and sat back against the couch.  “I’m so stuffed.”  He looked back at her and shoved his plate over to her.  “There’s a chicken leg there I haven’t touched.”

             
Satisfied that he was indeed done, she leaned over and took the untouched chicken.  It tasted like heaven—cold, chewy, glad to be alive, heaven.  After she finished the chicken leg, she felt her hunger spike, rejecting the meager leg as a meal.  “Any ice cream left?”

             
“Yeah,” he shoved over the carton.  “You want a new spoon?”

             
“No, I’ve had worse than cooties.”  She gave him a half smile. 

             
Ethan moved to toast his body by the fire.  He rotated himself like a pig on a spit.  Cori eventually gave in and grabbed the chips off the coffee table.  She was hungrier than she thought.  “I’m surprised he doesn’t have a big screen T.V. sitting above that mantle instead of taxidermy trophies.”  She said between bites.

             
“He wouldn’t get reception out here would he?”  Ethan asked.

             
“Maybe with satellite,” she pointed out.

             
“We should check the rest of the house.”  Ethan suggested nodding to the hall leading to the open staircase.

             
She looked back at the other half of the house and decided that it was a good idea.

             
They searched the remaining rooms down the hall on the lower floor.  They found a master bedroom with bland beige walls and simple furnishings, a pristine bathroom, a laundry room, and a study with ample books.  None of the rooms contained a television or anything resembling modern electronics. 

             
“Well, he has books.”  Ethan said fanning his finger over the books lining the wall in the study.  “If we read past the boring descriptions of inanimate objects, it might be like watching a sitcom.”  He said as he pulled out a dusty, red, leatherback book with yellowing pages, and a spine that cracked when you opened it.  “None of these books look like they have been touched in a century.  I doubt he reads all that much.  “What do you make of this guy?” 

             
Cori searched through the study desk for anything that might clue her in on what she had gotten herself into.  “I don’t make anything of him.  I don’t plan to get to know him well enough to make anything of him.”  The only thing of interest was the red phone on the desk.  It looked like an old rotary phone, but the rotary part was missing.  “Honestly, I just pegged him for a creepy boy molesting old man.”

             
“I’m not a boy.”  Ethan objected with a slightly deeper voice than he had previously been using.  “I’m seventeen.”

             
“Young enough to attract a man though.”  She didn’t think for a second that Danato was a child molester, but she couldn’t help but push his buttons. 

             
“Shut-up,” Ethan whined.

             
“I’m sorry, you’re right.  I’m sure he won’t molest you.  He’ll just train you to be a proper love slave.  Within a few years he’ll have you believing you want it.”  She smiled deviously as his face flushed.  

             
“Maybe he will molest you!”

             
Cori couldn’t help but think of the last two weeks in captivity.  She wondered how long it would take to clean off the stink of Yvette’s rotgut lackeys.  She couldn’t claim to have been broken by the encounters, but only because she had already stonewalled every emotion she had about the experience.  “At my age they call it rape, sweetie.  It sounds
sexier
that way.”  Cori shook her head as if the images were only an etch-a-sketch in her brain. 

             
Just shake it off. 

             
“Anyway, I doubt it.”  She sat down in the black leather desk chair and pulled it up to the desk.  Despite the look of it, the chair was rather uncomfortable.  It tipped forward too much, making her feel like she was constantly falling out of it.  “He was trying to get rid of me.  The only reason I’m here is to clean his damn toilets.  Which are spotless, if you saw,” she added.  “Easy job for me,” she propped her feet on the desk.  “I wonder what
jobs
he’ll have you do?”  She grinned. 

Ethan glowered at her. 

              “If I were you, I’d go search that bedroom of his.  If he’s hiding anything weird, you might as well find out now.  Not that it will prevent anything, but it’s better than being surprised.”

             
Ethan placed the book back on the shelf and left the room.  Cori dropped her grin, picked up the phone, and checked for a dial tone.  Nothing.  She tapped the release. 

“Hello.”  A gruff voice spoke on the other side.

“Hello?”  Cori stared at the phone like it had grown wings.

“Girl,
is that you?”  Danato’s voice asked on the other end.  He sounded out of breath.

             
“How…”  She started.

             
“The phone goes directly to my office.  There’s no outside line here.”

             
“This is insane.  There is no reason to be this cut off from civilization.”

             
“
Yes
, there is.”  He said without offering further explanation.  “Did you really have anyone to call?”

             
After short deliberation, she hung up on him.  It was true that she had no one to call, but that wasn’t something she wished to be reminded of.   

             
The phone rang, or rather, hummed at her.  She took in a deep breath and answered it.  “What?” 

             
“Look, I assume you are both making yourselves at home, but don’t spend the whole night exploring.  Get some sleep.”

             
“Whatever?”  She said tossing her head back.  She was sick of being ordered around.  She had had enough of that the last two weeks.

             
“Listen missy, the doors and windows are locked for your protection; don’t try to break out just for the sake of flaunting your resistance to this situation.  You are safer in that house than anywhere else in this facility.”

             
“Don’t call me missy.  It makes me sound like a cheerleader.”

             
“You certainly are not that,” he mumbled, “but until you tell me your name, I will call you
Missy
.”

             
“You never asked my name.”

             
“Ethan did.  You didn’t seem to think we would need it, so Missy it is.”

             
Cori retorted with another hang up, or rather a slam down.  Ethan rushed back in the room.  “Were you talking to him?”

             
“Yes.”  She said.

             
“What did he say?”  He asked anxiously

             
“He said he wants you to wait in his bed naked until he gets back.”

             
“Knock it off!”  Ethan shook his head.  “You must really need a distraction.”  He mumbled.

             
“What?”

             
“Nothing,” he left the room.

             
“I heard you.”  She said following him.  Ethan headed upstairs and she followed.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”  She asked.