Sam Foster was an ordinary guy with a beautiful wife, a nice house with its own fishing hole, a good job. Then things went awry as his favorite fishing spot turned out to be one of the many points where the fabric between Universes is thin enough that people can pass through.
At first he could shrug off the effect of the jumps -- haven't you, many times? But one day he came home to see his wife swinging from the rafters of their home obviously put there by his own hand and his world fell apart.
Hounded by the police, Sam builds an apparatus to make a desperate jump between worlds to a place where only the swords from his days as a champion fencer and his wits stand between him and a bloody death. On this new world, Sam battles dinosaurs and sharks large enough to swallow a boat whole while becoming embroiled in the political struggles between the gods of the Multiverse.
Note well: This book is a final draft in the process of being proofread prior to it being distributed with an ISBN. It is complete and fully readable, but may change in small ways before its final release.
If you buy now, do so aware that you may find erorrs in the tpying that are not yet corrected, a few places where sentences don't flow perfectly (although there should be very few as the book has been substantially worked over already) and that the title and cover art are still subject to change. On the other hand, this final draft edition could one day be a collector's item, and I doubt that any errors exist that are so obtrusive that they'd interfere with one's pleasure reading the book. Just FYI -- rgb
Excerpt
I think it was a great white (or rather its prehistoric version, a megalodon -- I don't think great whites ever got that big). Definitely not a whale shark or any other plankton eater. God only knows what it ate (Chorus: Anything it wanted!) Full grown whales, an occasional giant squid, and perhaps, if I didn't get there in time, an appetizer called Graber who could pass down its gullet unchewed like Jonah into the body of the whale.
Don't get me wrong. It was four times the length and twice the width of the twenty foot boat I was in. The boat would fit lengthwise down that gullet. If I hadn't needed Graber to help me pull, I would have been heading shorewards at a healthy clip, instead of following the wind and current over rocks and reefs that I didn't know like the back of my hand, but Graber did. As soon as I collected him I had real plans for setting some world records in crew.
A hundred yards out, it turned and circled lazily back towards Graber, which was a real shame, since I was almost there. I could see its enormous, ugly face, a hundred, sixty, forty feet away. And I was only ten feet from him myself. In another twenty seconds I would have him out of the water. Unfortunately, it looked like in ten seconds Graber would be contemplating the belly of the beast -- from the inside -- or I'd literally be putting my hand in its mouth to try to pull him in. Probably arm, upper torso, and all. I proceeded to panic, which (as usual) turned off my conscious mind.
Then my sneaky, self--destructive subconscious took over, and I did a stupid thing. I mean it. I am a coward, deep down inside, and even the allosaurus was a picnic in my own mind compared to this. You see, I kind of like reptiles, snakes and such. Even a ten ton lizard who took a wrong turn back in the Jurassic can be a bundle of laughs. But I have a genuine phobia about sharks, and have had it ever since I read the opening chapter of "Jaws" in a drugstore some years ago.
So to this day, I do not understand why I picked up one of those damn harpoons and threw it twenty feet into its snout even as it started to open its mouth and roll sideways. The harpoon was damn sharp and lanced in right next to one of those funny little holes on the side of its sofa-sized nose, holes that on this shark were big enough to put a fist into.
The water behind Graber exploded into a boiling cauldron of foam and fins as the shark simply vanished. Graber damn near vanished, too. He was sucked back about twenty feet by the whirlpool, but then began to swim again like mad towards the boat. I moved to the end of the boat to help him in over the gunwale.
Suddenly the water seemed very far away. I looked behind me and...
Now I swear that this is true, and not just cribbed from Moby Dick. The entire boat was neatly clenched in the biggest pair of jaws that I have ever seen. One could make a handsaw out of each separate serrated tooth. The jaws were attached to a head the size of a one--car garage. The head was attached to an endless length of body that was surging up out of the sea. I felt like Ahab on an elevator. Or was it Starbuck.
Several surreal images, like flash-frozen photos, are still with me. The dead fish eyes, watching me. The harpoon stuck like a toothpick out of the snout. The teeth. The teeth. Oh, God, the teeth. The teeth that crushed the boat very much like a crisp taco shell, with me the filling squirting out before they closed, snapping together a few inches from my heels as the head slowly lowered us to the waves again.
Suddenly I was floating next to a four foot piece of the stern, where I had stood a moment before. Pieces of boat were strewn about. Not too many. I remember an insane thought about chickens and pebbles. Does a shark even have a craw? Could it digest seawater-soaked wood? A couple of the harpoons were floating nearby so I grabbed them for support. I saw Graber quietly making for a piece of the mast flung fifty feet or so away. The churning foam settled, and the water grew absolutely quiet.
I held perfectly still, remembering that ultrasensitive lateral line. Nobody home, Jack. You got me in the last bite, mixed in with all those fish from the hold (the leftovers from which were still floating all around and hopefully covering my scent).
It surfaced, gently, like a submarine, rising with its head just in front of me, almost close enough to touch as it nosed into the piece of the stern, perhaps checking to see it I was there or if it was edible. Who knows what a stupid, oversized fish thinks?
Who knows what I think when I am insane with fear? I did my second stupid thing. A red mist had drifted across my eyes when I sat there, twenty feet above the water, and looked death right in its
basketball--sized eye. So I didn't do this. The other me, the dangerous one (the stupid one, in this case) did it. I (he) drove one of the harpoons into that damned, dead, eye.
When I say ``drove' I may have exaggerated, indulged in a bit of poetic license. Have you ever tried throwing something while floating in the water supported in part by the thing one is throwing? More accurately, I heaved myself up on the harpoon on my left side and sort of slung the harpoon that was in my right hand at the eye. Since the range was about eight feet, I was lucky to actually nick it as the harpoon went in surprisingly deep.
This time it surged forward and up on its way down. When the water stopped boiling around me the second time and I floated the five feet or so back to the surface, the stern of the boat was gone, but I still had the last harpoon. Graber was slowly drifting further away. For a long moment nothing happened.
Then Graber, who had been very quiet, began kicking and thrashing. I looked behind me and saw the fins angled off, twenty feet away. Graber was acting crazy. Then I understood. He was trying to attract its attention, hoping to get eaten in my place (I guess) and hoping that it would leave after that.
Screw that. You can't stop someone from going crazy in times of great stress and actually trying to get eaten by a god-damned shark the size of Rhode Island, but you can try to prevent it. The shark turned towards Graber and its body swung like a blimp up beneath me. I caught its backfin with one arm as it swept slowly by and was lifted up clear
out of the water. I suddenly found myself sitting on the broad back of the shark, whose rough skin gave surprisingly good footing.
So I stood up with the last harpoon, and literally jumped into the air to drive it with all my weight deep, deep into the broad back just in front of the fin, pushing the wooden shaft in after the head and twisting it like a scythe with my weight as the shark surged in response. I vaguely remembered reading or hearing someone say that sharks are unusually ticklish there. Maybe they are.
The last thing I remember was flying through the air for an impossibly long time, with a huge greyish white body twisting above and beside me. The water was very hard, then very deep and very cold. My consciousness fled...
Strange bones found on a storm-swept Florida beach take a couple into the sub-Atlantic base of a secret government lab. Transgenic global preparation is threatening to erupt in the devil's triangle with supernatural forces.
Michael, just Michael, simply wanted to live life his own way. He had no intention of becoming a revolutionary. Yet destiny calls even the uncertain and the arrogant to duties beyond themselves. Hidden agendas, false friends, and his own confusion le
Michael, just Michael, simply wanted to live life his own way. He had no intention of becoming a revolutionary. Yet destiny calls even the uncertain and the arrogant to duties beyond themselves. Hidden agendas, false friends, and his own confusion le
