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Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: KDP
ISBN-10: 1311840656
Pages: 18
Copyright: Feb 28, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781311840653
Life sucks for Stubby Peraldrak, but that changes when he discovers a chunk of rock that grants him strange powers – powers that could save, or destroy, the world. But Stubby dreams small, and he just wants to impress the hot chick down the hall and get in her pants – if she doesn’t kill him first.
Life sucks for Stubby Peraldrak, but that changes when he discovers a chunk of rock that grants him strange powers – powers that could save, or destroy, the world. But Stubby dreams small, and he just wants to impress the hot chick down the hall and get in her pants – if she doesn’t kill him first. She thinks he’s spying on her because he’s a traitor, working for the enemy, but will she really like him better if he convinces her he’s just a harmless perv?
Excerpt
The wind sent ripples through the grass in the graveyard, tickling the tombstones, but I paid little notice – until the grass rebelled, standing bolt upright, refusing to obey the still-blustering breeze a moment longer. The graveyard had been abandoned a long time ago and the grass was untended and unruly, but that didn’t explain its odd behavior.
I stopped my bike and stared through the rusted wrought-iron bars of the fence, my eyes zeroing in on one patch of grass, about six feet across, which suddenly began to move again, but in a strange and disturbing way – flattening itself to the ground, then springing up and twirling in a circle, then jerking from side to side, then flattening again, repeating the motions over and over – completely at odds with the becalmed sea of grass around it.
A graveyard is spooky enough at night without the grass acting screwy, and I wanted to get the hell out of there, but I had to figure out what was going on or it would bother me all night.
Some freakish whirlwind? Could be. But I’d ridden by the 16th Street Cemetery plenty of times on windy nights and never saw the grass act like that. Maybe the Jermies were testing some new weather weapon. But I saw no black-hulled aircraft hovering overhead, no mysterious sedans on side streets with tinted windows and oddly shaped headlights.
So what the hell was making the grass go nuts? It wasn’t natural.
I sure as hell didn’t want to go inside the graveyard to investigate, so I just sat there on my bike outside the gate, hoping things would return to normal so I could tell myself it was just a meteorological fluke or a trick of the moonlight or my overactive imagination. But ten minutes later nothing had changed and I’d had enough. Time to move on.
But the wind had other ideas. It blew the cemetery gate open and gave me a shove in the back at the same time – which didn’t make sense because how could the wind be blowing in two opposite directions at once?
Maybe it was the ghosts of the dead, beckoning me to come in and hear their tales of woe. Or some other kind of spirit, who needed something else. Either way, they might be pissed if I ignored them. So I got off my bike and walked through the gate and headed for the back of the cemetery, to the patch of gesticulating, schizoid grass.
As I drew near, the patch flattened to the ground again, and this time it didn’t rise. I cupped my ear, listening for ghostly whispers rising from the graves. I heard nothing. But I saw something, lying in the middle of the flattened patch of grass, something white, glowing in the moonlight.
I stepped forward, leaned down and grabbed it, straightened up.
It was a chunk of tombstone. A broken-off bit about the size of a brick, with a star etched into one side.
A lot of tombstones in the 16th Street Cemetery got knocked down and broken up, years ago when the Marque VII tanks rolled through that part of town as the Jermies were mopping up and taking over. Owerd said the tanks never actually entered the graveyard, and it was Jermie kids who knocked down the tombstones – and only the ones with stars on them. I like the tank story better. But one thing’s undisputed: Once the tombstones were knocked down, the Jermies hauled them off in a dump truck and ground them up and used them in the new highway on the other side of town. But the Jermies must’ve missed this chunk, hidden in the tall grass.
As I knelt there, cradling the chunk of stone in my hands, I imagined I was an archaeologist, decked out in khakis and a pith helmet, and I’d just discovered some ancient ruin in the heart of the steaming jungles of central America or someplace, and I was about to insert the stone into a niche in a wall covered with strange hieroglyphics, and the stone would trip some hidden mechanism and open a secret door to a subterranean chamber full of crystal skulls, or a stairway leading down to the lost kingdom of Atlantis in the center of the earth. Or whatever.
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