A child is born and With His First Breath death ends. (originally titled Rachel's Song)
A lot of people believe the world is going to end on December 21, 2012, but what if the only thing to end is Death?
Dougie lives the first 17 years of his life as any other normal child in the new world, he goes to school, plays with his buddies, wonders at his neighbor, Mr. Wilken's antics as the old man tries and tries unsuccessfully to kill himself in a world where death is impossible. It isn't until his older brother, Tim, comes home that Dougie finds out who he really is and with that knowledge the whole family's life changes drastically.
Reverend Ray Mosea wants nothing more in life than to control the last person born on earth because he knows that person is Death born into the world, and whomever controls Death controls the world.
(With His First Breath is currently sold as an EBook in major bookstores, or at Smashwords.com in all formats.)
Excerpt
Whitefields, Michigan
The day before was a nightmare from which Charlie Wilkens couldn’t awake, a nightmare in which his whole life spun downward into an endless empty pit. How, he asked himself, could God be so cruel? For six months he watched his beloved Doris wither away in monstrous pain while the demon cancer devoured her from the inside out. Then the doctors told them that the demon was finally under control, the cancer was in remission and her pain ended. In a week they were going to let her come home. One week would have been today, Doris should be walking in the door to live out her remaining years at his side, but instead he buried her yesterday. Her heart, weakened from all the treatments, lost the battle that the chemotherapy had won. It just wasn’t fair.
“What am I supposed to do now?” He asked an uncaring God. “What am I supposed to do now?” He had no one who cared, his only child, Allison, lived in
California or maybe it was Colorado, or was it Montana, he couldn’t remember because it’d been so long since he’d heard from her; she probably didn’t even know her mother was dead. He didn’t have any friends to amount to a tinker’s damn; the members of the church didn’t count because they’d been more Doris’ friends. Doris had been his life, without her he was just a lonely old man waiting to die.
Too hell with that, he thought. Why should I hang around being miserable when I can end it right now and be with Doris? I hate this town, hate the do-gooders, hate that stupid sparrow chirping endlessly outside our bedroom window, and most of all I hate this depressing old house without you Doris. I know you’d be tellin’ me it’s a sin, but Baby I ain’t been without you in sixty years and I’m too set in my ways to get along without you.
Twenty minutes later Charlie had written a note addressed to: “Whoever has to clean up this mess, sorry. Charlie Wilkens”. He found the old handgun he bought many years ago and sat looking at the picture of Doris while he gathered his courage.
“OK old man quit stallin’. Doris,” he said looking upward, “Doris honey I’m coming, wait for me”. With that he put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and without hesitating pulled the trigger.
The sound was deafening, much louder than he expected, but then he didn’t expect to be lying there in a puddle of his own brain matter wondering if his hearing would return. He lay there several minutes waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel all those clowns on TV were always talking about. He looked around the room, seeing cracks in the ceiling he never noticed before. He prayed that Doris would come and get him because the reality of what he done was beginning to congeal all around him and he never did have a very strong stomach.
Several more minutes before the ringing in his ears disappeared and he sat up, “Ah shit! I can’t even kill myself right!” He thought that somehow the bullet must have missed the important stuff and the bloody gore on the floor and wall was just something unimportant that covered the brain. Now he was going to have to do it again. Without a second thought Charlie put the gun back in his mouth, this time tilting it upward as much as possible and pulled the trigger again. If he’d felt the back of what used to be his head Charlie could have saved himself the discomfort of not being able to hear again for several minutes because even a grief stricken, crazy old man could tell by the size of the hole in the back of his skull, that the first bullet would have been sufficient if this had been the same world it’d been minutes earlier.
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