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Amazon
Double Dragon Publishing
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing
ISBN-10: 15540453044
Type: Fiction
Pages: 433
Copyright: January 5, 2008
ISBN-13: 9781554045303
Sally and Anne Mae Harris, the deeply loved wife and daughter of successful L.A. cartoonist Mica Harris, wake after a devastating auto collision to find themselves in a strange and dangerous limbo. On a trip to Copenhagen a year after the accident, Mica believes he is hallucinating when he sees the two of them, seemingly still alive. What’s more, for the briefest of moments before they are whisked away, he is convinced they recognize him, too…
And now Mica is convinced he is seeing strange, devil-like creatures that no one else can see. He alone knows they exist.
And now, they know he knows…
And they’re coming for him…
Can his wife and daughter, immobilized in another dimension, find a way to save him? Can the single powerful force of human love conquer a race of relentless aliens intent on terra-forming earth into a noxious planet like their own? And, impossible as it seems, can Sally, Anne Mae and Mica be reunited again, if only for the briefest of moments, by the love that inspires them to confront impossible odds?
Available as an ebook (all popular formats) Also available as an audio book, as a trade paperback, and as a Kindle book.
Excerpt
Prologue
Limboland
Sally Jensen-Harris woke to her own bitter tears. She had been weeping for what seemed like an endless time, and for what she knew was good reason; after all, everything she loved had been taken from her. Her sense of loss was total and complete. She had fallen down a black hole of despair, a place from which there would be no hope or salvation. But it was more than just a sense of loss, for whatever she had become-all that remained of the living, breathing person she had once been-was here now with her. It was disorienting because there didn’t seem to be any difference between inside and outside. There was just the blackness, the loss, and nothing else.
She could sense the frightening, palpable nothing, the ether in which she floated. Reaching out made no sense because she knew there would be nothing there. All around her was blackness, void, empty. She wasn’t cold or warm; she was only aware that her own physical reality had disappeared, along with that of her entire known world. All that remained was the pain of her loss.
After a time, in the same way she was aware of the hopelessness of her situation, Sally also became aware that her daughter Anne Mae was nearby. She couldn’t see or feel her; she simply was aware of the familiar loving and needful presence of Anne Mae in the way of all mothers that goes light-years beyond anything of logic.
Before this nothing-time, everything had been different. Once Sally had been a self-contained person and a scrappy fighter, tough and independent ever since she’d been a little girl. She hadn’t been afraid, even as she remembered the last real things from her life-the burnt rubber smell, the squeal of tires, one brief flash of chrome teeth in the headlights, and last, her daughter’s long, trailing scream into nothingness. But even in her despair, she knew this sense of no-being wasn’t right; it had an almost alien strangeness. She hadn’t expected to wake up at all, much less to find herself lost in this nothing world of no light or life or sensation.
Perhaps there was a personal angel who guides each of us on our path. Sally couldn’t be sure, but from that first moment when she woke in the dark void and resolved to control her weeping, she was somehow aware that things had gone very wrong, although at that time she had no idea how off course she had drifted…actually, been herded.
And yet even then her pervading sense of gloom couldn’t overcome a faint flicker of curiosity. This new place could not by any stretch of the imagination be the logical extension of the terrible accident that had happened to her and Anne Mae. Heaven? Hell? She was well acquainted with the classic Christian beliefs, thanks to years of indoctrination by the nuns of St. Bonavita boarding school, an isolated and difficult high school calculated to garner a certain number of applicants into the sisterhood itself. Their seed had fallen on the rocks of doubt, and the system of eternal rewards and punishments hadn’t taken with Sally; but if it did really exist, she was sure hell was nothing like this. Could she be in purgatory, that place in high Christian belief where sinners were sent to wait out the time until their souls were cleansed by fire? She doubted it. Where were the flames, the purging?
With nothing but an endless string of moments on hand, she pursued this line of logic a little further. There were those Christians who believed purgatory was simply a place of waiting; if so, actual flames might not be necessary. She dismissed the thought with a fearful little attempt at a laugh.
Sally tried to look back realistically at their lives and who they had been. She and her husband Mica had enjoyed their talents and their great love; but on the greater scale of things, they were fairly ordinary people living normal lives without any real exception. They had both come from broken families, but that had only encouraged a tighter bond between them. And their daughter Anne Mae had been well-adjusted and caring. Sally would readily admit that maybe she herself had committed bushel baskets full of garden-variety sins in the old sense of sin, guilt and the attendant penance, but Anne Mae was barely ten, and her daughter would never end up in a place like this.
Sally forced herself to believe she wasn’t going to wallow in endless self-pity. But as she fought hard to push down the overwhelming sense of loss for everything she had left behind, she was aware of a new feeling, a growing dread for what might lie in store for her and Anne Mae. Too easily her mind could become a pinwheel of frightened thoughts. Where are we? she asked herself. And who did this to us?
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