ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE TALE

Show versus Tell --

Alex Cavanaugh mentioned he sometimes struggled with this.  His novels do not show it though. 

However, here is the TELL version of the tale of my prior post to help him and my other friends a bit.

TELL:

I am Elu, Apache diyi. And only I am left to tell the tale of Man, for I exist only in mirrors.

If the White man had merely been content to destroy himself, I would be glad.

But it is the White Man's way to destroy all he touches -- even his entire world.

Where to begin?

Do I begin with the madman who tainted ice cream he gave for free to the children on the streets of Detroit?

The poisoned dessert that turned those children into the walking dead?

No. Instead I will begin with the seven year old Victor Standish.

Abandoned by his mother, the Angel of Death, he sat in a swing in a Detroit playground, misunderstanding completely why she had left him.

As Death, she was Allwheres, Alltimes at once. She could no longer take him with her lest she destroy his sanity.

Being Death's son, Victor unknowingly drew the undead children to him. Showing the largeness of heart that would one day be his undoing, he saved the white girl beside him.

His mother's touch was already removing most of the memories of his wanderings. But though he could not place the face or form of his centaur teacher, Chiron, Victor remembered his teachings:

When surrounded by enemies, seize your sword, thrust up your shield, and find the high ground.

And this Victor did, taking the white girl, Becky, with him, though taunting and herding her.

He found his sword, a fallen baseball bat. He picked up his shield, a discarded garbage can lid.

In the towering child's slide and swing bars, Victor found his high ground. He found his first teacher in free running, the black boy, LeRoy. He found his rage against his deserting mother. He channeled it to fend off the undead horde.

But they were too many.

His rage exploded. Tapping into the power of his mother's blood, Victor screamed for the undead to die. And since he was his mother's son, they did just that.

Above Victor, safe from his death-scream, Becky lowered her slingshot, looking at Victor in wonder.

LeRoy pushed the three unmoving, undead children from the top of the slide. The small white girl in glasses began to shiver from shock.

The enemy was defeated ... for the moment.

Standing a layer of life from Victor, his mother, Death, cried black tears. Her son had proven he could survive without her.

She decided to cast him only on the deadliest streets. Then, though he would never again be by her side, he would always be in her heart and in her sight.

Still, there were other undead children than the ones killed in the playground.

The children's nightmare was not over.

And the End of Man had begun.
***

{Scroll down for the SHOW passage}:

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR AMAZON SALES RANKING

THE LAST DAY!

RITES OF PASSAGE AT #10!
http://www.amazon.com/RITES-OF-PASSAGE-ebook/dp/B004XQVPYM

See poor dead Rachel on the cover?

Make her ghost smile by writing just a two sentence review. Eric keeps threatening to write: "This book didn't suck. Read it, and I bet you agree with me!"

1.) ONE NEW POSITIVE REVIEW

can be the one thing that encourages a potential reader into buying. And one new sale can make the Amazon Sales Ranking go up considerably.

And many buyers want to buy what everyone else is buying.

2.) THE FIRST SHALL BE LAST:

Amazon sales rank is generated by a proprietary algorithm. The more copies a book sells on Amazon, relative to other books, the higher the rank---

or, the lower the number. So, a rank of 10 is higher than a rank of 257,090.

3.) ENOUGH ABOUT ME. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ME?

Link to the Amazon page for your book in the signature line of the emails you send. Then, everyone who receives email from you will be exposed to your book. The chances are that at least some of them will click on the links.

No, I don't do this ... I have so little free time with my job as a rare blood courier that sadly I send very few emails. But many of you do send many emails. Make them count.

4.) REMEMBER PANDORA AND THAT CURIOUS CAT?

"Search Inside the Book" is an important property to put in place for your book. It allows customers to actually browse through parts of the book. They'll be more likely to buy a book that they've been able to flip through.

5.) A PATH TO HIGHER SALES THAT MAY MAKE YOU FEEL UNEASY:

Write Listmania Lists that include your book. These are lists of books that fall under a particular topic and include links to the Amazon page for each of them. Write lists for as many categories as your book could reasonably fall under.

6.) LIST FOR FREE:

It may translate into higher sales AFTER the free period stops. If your book is priced at 99 cents, others may take note of higher sales rankings and take a gamble on your book.

7.) DON'T INDULGE IN AMERICAN IDOLism:

Amazon Sales Ranking is a popularity contest wherein your book's sales are compared to the thousands of sales of its neighbors.

Statistics say you will have to keep your day job. Or in my weary case, my day AND night job!

Write because you love it. If you touch one heart, then you have succeeded.

8.) Enough about me ...

I cannot know if I have touched that one heart unless you post a review. Please do so for RITE OF PASSAGE. It is a lonely dark road for most of us as we struggle in self-publishing. One sale, one supportive review can light the dark and warm a lonely heart.

Do it, not just for me, but for others toiling in the shadows of meager sales.

Have a lovely weekend. Me? I will be driving lonely rural roads all weekend and into the week. Darn that storm! :-) Roland

C Is for CONTEST!

What would a new month be here at my blog without a contest?

The prize?

A Michael Whelan autographed lithograph (say that fast 3 times!)

When 7 reviews are written on THE RIVAL

http://www.amazon.com/RIVAL-chapter-LEGEND-STANDISH-ebook/dp/B007JOUJ60

I will draw from those 7 names and WHAM! That lucky person gets that Michael Whelan autographed lithograph! How cool is that?
***

A review of THE RIVAL by Candy Lynn Fite

"Sometimes a book comes along that strikes me as rare, a gem, if you will. The Rival: The Legend of Victor Standish is one of those books.

#1 gem:

A fast-paced, urban fantasy filled with historical figures, ingeniously woven throughout. And, take a gander at the fabulous cover...don't you want to know who she is??? Not to give anything away, but readers won't be disappointed. In fact, as the main character time travels to 1834 New Orleans,

had hundreds of moments where I found myself smirking (and giggling) at Victor Standish, and the way he handles himself when in the most precarious situations. Prepare to face many creepy supernaturals, and by creepy, I mean way beyond sparkly monsters.

Speaking of Victor, the #2 gem of the novel,

one cannot help but adore him! A literary legend, hell yeah. His dry, witty humor will crack the face of the stoniest of souls. Victor and I have a special bond, as he helped me through a tough surgery last month by telling me the most ridiculous jokes. He will remain in my mind for years to come. If he'd allow me, I'd adopt him. His unworldly love for his classy, Victorian ghoulfriend, Alice, brought me to tears more than once.

"I wasn't an orphan anymore. In her arms, I was home." ~Victor Standish, The Rival.

And, as for Victor's authentic character, well, that brings me to the #3 gem, the author.

Many applause go out to Roland Yeomans, the amazing author of The Rival. His creation of Victor Standish is a superlative example of authentic characterization. Roland achieves the ultimate with his writing, he types, allowing Victor to tell his story. Thank you, Roland, for sharing your literary worlds with your readers.

If you're up to an action-packed jaunt with amazing characters, and a protagonist to root for, you must check out, The Rival: The Legend of Victor Standish.
***
I am humbled by this review. Thanks, Candy. You made a weary blood courier's battered evening truly great! Roland
***

EARLY PRAISE for THE RIVAL

http://www.amazon.com/THE-RIVAL-chapter-STANDISH-ebook/dp/B007JOUJ60/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1331660710&sr=1-2-fkmr0

Early praise for the urban/historical fantasy, THE RIVAL:

“If you love Sherrilyn Kenyon's Nick Gaultier, you'll be enamored with Victor Standish! Victor has a dry sense of humor that comes from not taking the trials of life seriously no matter how extreme the circumstances.

And I love that attitude whether in real life or make believe. I love his acid comebacks and how much he loves Alice Wentworth, his Victorian ghoul girlfriend. The prologue alone with hints of Homer and his opus, The Odyssey, will keep you glued.” – Braine of TALKSUPE.COM

“Holy action! THE RIVAL dives right into the adventure straight off the bat and doesn’t stop ‘til the finish.

Great voice, fun humor laced throughout, combined with lovely emotion. Wonderful themes presented and tied up nicely at the end. Roland Yeomans is definitely an author to watch!” — Morgan Shamy

“The story launches into action nearly from the moment the cover is opened, all the way to the last page.

Rich in the metaphors, similes and witticisms recognizable as Roland Yeoman's own unique author voice, young Victor Standish battles his way through a world plagued by monsters both undead and living, mystical, alien and ancient beyond memory.

Using every skill he possesses from a sharp wit to a katana, ball bearings to acupuncture, martial arts to magic to a clever ménage a trios,

no enemy but one can withstand Victor's assault on the past as he moves through time and space to prevent a Revenant war. That one? Himself.

One missed shuffle of the deck of time could result in a butterfly effect that will destroy more than one plane of existence.” - Donna Hole

THE RIVAL is a stand-alone Victor Standish urban fantasy.

Victor Standish. Some call him the young Indiana Jones of New Orleans. Others call him the teen Ulysses of the French Quarter. The undead and worse spit his name as if it were a curse. Their cornered victims breathe the name as if it were a prayer.

Victor says, “I’m no hero, certainly no saint. I’m just me.”

Alice Wentworth, the Victorian ghoul of his heart, raises an eyebrow. “Sometimes that is entirely too much.” She hugs his arm, nearly as hungry for his flesh as for his heart, “Sometimes it is just right.”

Discover Victor’s childhood odyssey of zombies and betrayal in Detroit that forged him into the legend he is. Watch Alice and Victor travel to the New Orleans of 1834 to save the Crescent City of the present.

Victor’s challenges are unique:

To keep the younger version of his father, Samuel McCord, from meeting the eerie Empress of the Jade Mask lest Victor never be born. To keep the young Edgar Allan Poe from sweeping Alice off her feet and into the poet’s arms.

The undead Abigail Adams, the revenant Empress Theodora, the all too alive President Andrew Jackson, and the voodoo demigods, Legba and Erzulie provide near-impossible odds.

Victor laughs, “Impossible just gives birth to legends.”

And so it does in THE RIVAL.

Read this stand-alone chapter in the ongoing LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH.
***

LUCKY SEVENS_THE RIVAL

The lovely Jo Schaffer

has tagged me for LUCKY SEVENS

http://jostorm.blogspot.com/2012/03/lucky-sevens.html

The rules are as follows:
1. Go to page 77 of your current MS
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines - sentences or paragraphs - and post them as they're written. No cheating
4. Tag 7 authors
5. Let them know

I gratefully accept tags, but I know many of my friends do not like them. I don't know who among them do not, so I do not tag. If any of you visiting want to play, great!

Alice insisted I use her latest book, so here are the those seven paragraphs (not sentences). Hey, you know how Victor loves words:

Legba, was still here. Happy with me he wasn’t. It was almost a tradition with me when arriving anywhere.

“What be wrong wid you, boy?” he huffed in his Jamaican accent.

Alice giggled, “Do you wish the list alphabetically or in order of importance?”

Legba pointed a long scraggly finger at the wiggling tentacle on the grass busily growing an Old One at the end of it. Sfumato! I never knew that could happen. Stephen King should publish a handbook or something on the by-laws of creepy-crawlies.

“You be killing all of dis city, girl!” Legba shouted.

Alice quickly pointed my way. “Me not him.”

“That’s right. Throw me under the wheels of the bus, Alice.”
***
Many of you have asked me about the word "Sfumato" with which Victor swears. Though a ghoul, Alice Wentworth was raised in the early Victorian Age and is made uncomfortable with Victor's normal "colorful metaphors" as she puts it.

Victor loves her with all his heart so he tries to use the word "Sfumato" that sounds like what he wants to say! Having spent literally years in public libraries for their safety, he is undestandably well read.

He knows Sfumato is one of the four major painting modes of the Renaissance.

The most prominent practitioner of sfumato was Leonardo da Vinci,

and his famous painting of the Mona Lisa exhibits the technique (especially in the shading around the eyes).

Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane."

To Victor, Leonardo's description of Sfumato dove-tails exactly with what he feels about "proper" and "improper" when he wants to swear!
***
I have waited for this movie since I first read the books with the Leauge of Five as a young boy

PERFECTION IS WHERE YOU FIND IT_Friday's Romantic Challenge

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

The leader of the vampires shoved me onto the porch leading to the entrance of The Bourbon Orleans and laughed, “Poet, your dream is about to become nightmare.”

I saw Alice shiver. She was looking at the four entrance columns , towering above us. Her face seemed to glow it was so pale. Her nose suddenly wrinkled like a rabbit’s.

“V-Victor, those columns ….”

“Yes?”

“They are painted with … human blood.”

The leader laughed low, “Makes you hungry, little ghoul?”

Alice began to shiver worse. The blood moon struck fire from the silver edging to her black Gothic Lolita dress. Sfumato! I glanced down at the moon doing the same to my white Mark Twain-style suit.

I sighed, angry at myself. You know, one day I would die, not because of what I didn’t know, but of what I had forgotten.

Like I had forgotten our clothes had been bathed in the Waterfalls of Eden, not once, but four times … with us in them. Such a thing was fatal the first time, much less four. But our love for each other had pulled us through.

I smiled like I was feeling that love as never before … which I was.

I reached out and squeezed her hand still smiling. “We are not of the night nor of darkness but of love.”

My suit and her dress flared like suns. The vampires screamed shrill yet husky. Reeling away from us, they burst into foul-smelling two-legged bonfires. They didn’t make three steps. They collapsed to go up like dry driftwood.

I brought Alice’s hand to my lips and softly kissed it, surprised that for the first time in our love that it was warm.

“People think they know who we are, Alice. They are wrong.”

She smiled with trembling lips. “Wrong.”

Alice embraced me, kissing me hungry, loving, and with the passion that I knew would never die. I shivered. We had kissed before but never had her lips been warm. Never. I ruined our kiss by smiling.

She pulled back. “You smile?”

“Your lips.”

She swallowed. “What about them?”

“They’re warm.”

“Warm? Your love has made them w-warm?”

“Our love, Alice.”

She mewed like a lost kitten having found home, rushing into my arms, renewing our kiss with even more passion.

Her hand reached around my neck, pulling me into it. She needn’t have bothered. I was doing just fine on my own. I pulled her body into mine, not roughly, but with all the tenderness in my heart.

I wasn’t an orphan anymore. In her arms, I was home.

I heard screams from behind the windows all along the balcony. Alice and I stepped back, looking up in shock.

Vampire bonfires flared behind each and every window where those leeches had been watching us being led to our supposed slow deaths.

They fell to the wooden floors. I made a face. It was certainly going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.
***

ZOMBIES DON'T PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS

THE RIVAL doesn't come out until summer 2012.

Many of my new friends wondered about the "playground" incident mentioned yesterday.

Here is the version found in THE RIVAL that contains surprises even for my old friends :

My real memories begin when I was seven. And where I started was where I almost ended. I know I wanted to end right then.

Why?

Mother ended when I was seven.

Leastways, me being with her ended. Though I can’t remember it clearly, I know she and I travelled the world together before then. Always together.

Never again.

I can never see her face clear that last day. No matter how hard I try. Her whole body is vague even. All I see clear are her winter-gray eyes. Wet with tears. Then, becoming granite cold.

“I must leave you, Victor.”

“W-What?”

“Hush! I have taught you better than to lose control like this. Though I take his face from your mind, remember Chiron’s lessons.”

“Don’t leave me, Mother!”

“It is done. My nature is what it is. You must survive as best you can. Beware. My taking time to leave you here has spawned foul creatures in Detroit. And they are hungry. I must leave before even worse happens.”

Cold lips press down upon my forehead. “I-I love you, Victor.”

Then, she simply vanished. One heartbeat there. The next gone.

My mind told my eyes they were wrong. People just didn’t disappear like that. My blinking eyes screamed the obvious : I was alone.

My mind refused to believe. The heart dying inside me believed my eyes. Mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

The world slowly grew into focus. A chill Autumn air made me shiver. At least, I told myself it was the cold winds that were doing it.

My nose wrinkled. Exhaust fumes. Grass. Yelling kids. A playground.

Mother had dumped me at a playground. That was just so … so mean.

Cold, distant. Mother had always been that. Still, I always felt loved somehow. My face closed like a fist. You didn’t dump someone you loved like an unwanted kitten at a playground.

I stepped back from the thought. My feet followed. The chains of a swing brushed my shoulders. I sank down into it hard, my legs not wanting to support me anymore. Like Mother didn’t want me anymore.

I grabbed the chains and squeezed with all my might. Why? Why didn’t she love me anymore?

To my right whined a girl’s voice, “I don’t like you.”

I blinked my eyes to focus my mind. I turned. A girl was in the swing next to me.

A year younger than me, she had long, wavy black hair. Her eyes were the color of the wine-dark sea. The same sea that Triton had surged out of, blowing death from his spiral horn.

I shook my head.

Where had that thought come from? I caught a fleeting image of a wrinkled face, sad eyes milked over in blindness. Homer.

His name was Homer. And he always found a way to make me laugh. I went cold inside. Ulysses. He always called me ‘Ulysses.’

The girl cleared her throat. “I said I don’t like you.”

“Take a number,” I muttered.

“I said I don’t like you!”

“I didn’t hear you that time, and I’m not going to hear you the next.”

She pointed over my shoulder. “And I don’t like them either!”

I smiled as cold as my heart felt. “Must be my kind of people.”

I turned in the swing. “Or not.”

The dead-eyed children swayed on lead feet our way, their faces rotting, their dress clothes torn and dirty, their nails broken from having clawed their way out of their coffins and up through the dirt of their graves.

Was this what Mother meant? Were they the reason she had to leave me so quickly? I swallowed hard remembering her words. Had she somehow made these corpses into zombies just by being here?

No. That couldn’t be. She was just Mother.

“Zombies!,” I muttered. “Fricking kid zombies. Oh, why the hell not?”

The girl covered her mouth, “Oh, you said a naughty!”

“On my best day, Sunshine, I’m PG-13.”

Mother’s slate-hard eyes flashed before mine. “And this is not my best day.”

“My name’s not Sunshine! It’s Becky.”

I jerked my thumb to the jaw-snapping, hungry kid zombies moving our way much too fast. “It’ll be ‘Kibble ‘N Brains’ if you don’t get the lead out.”

What had Chiron told me? When surrounded by enemies, get a sword, a shield, and the high ground.

Becky pulled out a wooden slingshot. “I’ll stop them!”

“Lots of luck with that, Nibbles.”

“My name is Becky!”

We were almost surrounded. I ran to a fallen baseball bat. Two zombies were making sure that the boy whose blood was all over it, wouldn’t miss it.

I darted in between them, nervous laughter bubbling from my lips. I tumbled through their grasping arms, snatching up the bat.

“My life is like a loaded gun,” I panted.

One lunged at me.

I beaned him with all my might, and his rotting head burst. I laughed, “I hope your name was Homer. ‘Cause I always wanted to hit a homer.”

To my far left, Becky screamed, “Fall down! WHY WON’T YOU FALL DOWN?”

I ran over, grabbed her by the pony-tail and snapped, “Cause the fun never stops with zombies!”

“Stop!,” cried Becky. “You’re messing up my pigtail.”

I spotted a slide/jungle-gym. All right! High ground.

I grunted, “Those zombies will mess up more than your ….”

A kid zombie with a half-eaten face lurched through the garbage cans lining the playground, knocking them over. A garbage can lid rolled to my feet.

My shield!

I snatched it up and smacked the zombie in the face with it. “Watch out! Low bridge.”

I thumped Becky on the butt to get her moving faster to the slide/jungle-gym.

“Hey, that’s my butt!”

I jerked my head to the shambling, but all-too-fast kid zombies. “It’ll be theirs if you don’t get a move on!”

We made it to the slide at the same time that a black kid took a mop handle and used it as a pole vault to get to the top of the metal tree-house at the top of the slide.

“Whoa!,” I gasped. “Way to go, LeRoy.”

He looked down at me. “Ya gotta learn free runnin’ if you gonna make it on these streets, bro. How did you know my name anyway?”

I got uneasy. “Lucky guess.”

But it hadn’t been. I had just known it. Like I had known Chrion’s lessons but couldn’t remember his face.

I smacked Becky up the slide with the garbage lid. The ladder was too slow as a couple of screaming kids found out the hard way. We ducked aside a girl with glasses. I shield-blocked the brick she aimed at me.

“Save it for the dead heads,” I barked, scooting by her.

The slide/jungle-gym was a big son of a gun. I skipped down the steps from the tree house to the walkway where six kid zombies scrambled towards us moaning, “Brains, brains, brains.”

I winked at Becky who was taking aim at them with her ball bearing loaded sling shot.
“They can’t mean you. It’s gotta be me they’re after.”

Becky let go with her sling shot, sending a ball bearing into the only eye of a grasping girl zombie. “Ha, ha. Very not funny!”

LeRoy pushed a boy zombie off the top of the tree-house with his mop handle. “Damn! They just too many of ‘em!”

It hit me then.

Mother hadn’t abandoned me.

She had left me here to be killed.

She … she wanted me … dead. She didn’t want me anymore. She didn’t love me. Had she ever loved me? Hot tears filled my eyes.

“Wrong!,” I yelled. “There aren’t enough!”

I leapt onto the walkway, swinging with bat and shield, knocking the grasping kid-zombies every which way.

Zombies scuttled like cockroaches out of Hell along the top of the rungs of the jungle-gym. They dropped down on the walkway. I swung at them with all my hurt, all my anger.

Brains, bits of skull, and rotted flesh flew in chucks as I danced about, smacking them with all the rage I felt at Mother for just dumping me … for not loving me anymore.

Glasses sobbed, “I-I’m outta bricks. They’re going to eat us.”

They kept coming. I kept blocking and smashing.

Becky went for more ball bearings but came up empty. A giggling girl-zombie knocked LeRoy down. He screamed.

{Tune in this summer for the rest.}
***
What could be the theme for Victor's friendship with Becky & Glasses :

THE LAST NEWSCAST

Ever wonder what happened to Becky, Glasses, and LeRoy from Victor's zombie run-in at that playround in Detroit?

You'll find out in THE RIVAL.

{Due to be published this summer!}

But here is the bit called "THE LAST NEWSCAST."

{Detroit has become the city of the undead except for four very frightened children -- one of them a murderer and worse.}

“You can find everything you need at Sears,” I whispered with a smile, remembering what Mother had once told me.

“Aren’t you finished yet?,” whispered Becky.

Over the past month we had learned to whisper whenever we talked. It had been a pretty lousy thirty days.

Especially for Becky and Glasses. Both had lost their parents long ago. Becky lived with an older sister, Glasses with a maiden aunt. Both sister and aunt died in that playground.

I made a finishing twist of the screwdriver and nodded, “All finished.”

I handed her the tinkered leg of a walker I had worked on for nearly an hour. “Your Zip gun.”

Becky took it with a frown. “Gee, it’s heavy!”

“Should be. It fires ball bearings.”

LeRoy cocked his sullen head. “How it do that?”

“It uses compressed air to shoot ball bearings. I took a couple of things Leonardo di Vinci taught me ….”

All three of them looked at me as if I were Forest Gump, and I hurriedly added, “ … in a dream.”

Glasses smiled timidly, “What was the dream, Victor?”

“Ah, Mother and I visited him when he was a real old man. She told him it was time to go.”

“Go where?,” Becky frowned.

I shrugged. “Somewhere he really didn’t want to go from the way he looked. Mother left me with him, saying she’d postpone his going as long as he taught me needful things.”

Both Becky and Glasses made me uncomfortable by getting closer than they needed to be.

LeRoy huffed, “And did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Show you those needful things, fool!”

“Yeah, he did. It was a pretty fun month. He was a neat teacher. Then ….”

“Then, what?” whispered Glasses.

“Then, Mother came back. But Leo took it better than I expected. He ruffled my hair and told me I had made his last month one of the best.”

Becky got even closer. I couldn’t understand it. In a month she seemed to have grown older by a full year at least. I had a sinking feeling my scream on the playground had something to do with it.

She whispered, “What happened next?”

I grew uneasy and muttered, “The dream ends there.”

LeRoy grunted, “Dreams always do.”

He sneered at my red wagon by the Sears hardware check out. “What else you got in there?”

I reached down and pulled out the mini-crossbow I had jury-rigged for Glasses and handed it to her. “Lighter than bricks.”

She took it gingerly. “Ha. Ha.”

I smiled thin. “I used pulleys and chains in ways Archimedes showed me.”

LeRoy sneered uglier. “In another dream, right?”

I nodded. “In another dream.”

Becky made a librarian face. “How many of those silly dreams do you have?”

“Don’t know. I just seem to remember ‘em when I need them.”

I sniffed at the faint traces of familiar perfume and pulled at the cuffs of my work gloves, uncomfortable at the memories they stirred. LeRoy smiled like a shark. He shook his head.

“What? You don’t want those lily white hands to get dirty?”

“Cut. I don’t want them cut. Remember how fast Shamblers get when they smell fresh blood?”

That shut him up. He looked concerned all around the empty store. He gnawed his upper lip.

“This places spooks me. It so empty. It should be full of Shamblers as you call them.”

Glasses shook her own head. “It’s as if somebody cleared them out before we got here.”

Becky laughed bitter. “Maybe it was Victor’s Mother.”

I might have laughed with her if I weren’t smelling her strange perfume in the air.

To change the subject, I pulled out two back packs. One marked G and the other B. I handed them to the girls.

“It has bolts and ball bearings in them. First Aid kits, magnesium flares, matches, Zippo’s, lighter fluid …..”

“Why both matches and Zippo’s?,” growled LeRoy.

Glasses’ eyes lit up. “Oh, I know! You skirt a Shambler with the lighter fluid, light up the pack of matches with the Zippo, and throw it on the zombie!”

For once LeRoy nodded in appreciation of one of my ideas. "Barbequed Shambler! I like that."

I figured he was smiling because it was spoken out loud by Glasses. If Becky had done it, he would have done hand-stands.

He suddenly frowned, “Hey, where’s my back pack?”

“With that free running of yours, you don’t need to be loaded down with a pack.”

I bent down and pulled out my gag gift. “Here’s a new mop though .. to replace the one you broke over that Shambler's head in the playground.”

As the girls giggled, he snapped, “You know where you can stick that.”

“Where do we go from here?,” asked Becky.

I grinned, “The mattress department.”

LeRoy huffed, “I ain’t sleeping in this death trap.”

“We’re gonna sit while the girls snooze for a couple of hours.”

Becky clasped both hands together. “Oh, LeRoy, could we? To sleep on a real bed again ….”

He relented. “Oh, all right. But not for no two hours. Maybe thirty minutes. Those Shamblers may be gone now, but they be coming back.”

Becky and Glasses literally skipped on the way to the Mattress Department. Sears had three beds as models. The girls picked the biggest to snuggle up in together.

LeRoy made me antsy the way he looked at Becky in the bed. I unfurled long sheets of bubble wrap all around their bed.

LeRoy muttered, “The Shamblers get that close, getting warned won’t do no good.”

But the bubble wrap seemed to ease the girls in the way that I hoped it would. LeRoy glared at me, seeing it. Let him. We were never going to be Prom dates anyway.

They snuggled in their new Sears jeans and blouses and sighed. I sighed, too, as I noticed they kept their sneakers on. It was a new world with new rules.

I had already set up two Lazy Boys by the beds before I led us here. With the TV in front of it. LeRoy arched an eyebrow.

“Where the popcorn to go with the movie?”

“No movie. Only a DVD recording marked THE LAST NEWCAST.”

LeRoy made a face. “I can hardly wait.”

3.
The newswoman looked like she had seen better days. Her fancy hair-do was all frazzled. Her business suit looked like it had been slept in for days.

The camera was even off-center as if not wanting to get too close a look at her. Her first words explained the camera.

“T-Ted, the camera man is … dead. I … shot him myself.”

She peered into the camera as if begging its owner’s forgiveness.

“You asked me to, Ted. I – I didn’t want to. God, you know I didn’t want to. B-But you said women were the stronger sex.”

(“Yeah, right,” muttered LeRoy. I shushed him.)

She sniffed once, picked up a stack of rumpled news copy, and laughed bitterly.

“I don’t feel stronger. I feel … that’s just it. I don’t feel. It’s like my heart and mind are both wrapped in cotton.”

I heard the pounding and grunting from behind the camera at the same time she did.

She went stiff, dropping the papers in a messy sprawl on the desk in front of her.
“I don’t have long. But if I’m going to die, I’m going to die a newswoman.”

The pounding on the unseen door got louder. The grunting was worse somehow, and the poor lady echoed my thoughts.

“It’s that damn hungry, incessant grunting. It’s more than hunger. Sexual almost. Damn.”

She looked back into the camera, now seeing, not Ted, but the audience. “Ted set this up to repeat over and over again. So if you’re watching this, I’m not really here.”

She looked off into the shadows and murmured, “I haven’t been here for a long time now.”

She snapped out of it with the increased pounding and grunting behind the camera. Splintering wood was added to the mix. She tried to wet her mouth, her dry tongue.

“Anyone close to you gets bit, you kill them. In hours, minutes even, they become ….”

The grunting grew obscene somehow, and she looked towards it then back to the camera.

“… one of them. Shoot them. But not in the body.”

She smacked her forehead. “There! If you don’t have a gun, a bat, a lead pipe. Fire. Burn them! But save yourself. They are already dead.”

She looked down at the floor by the camera and whimpered, “Already dead.”

The door sounded ready to go, and she pulled out a revolver.

“Don’t bury them. Kill them. But don’t burn the bodies! God, don’t burn the bodies.”

“Ted and I were there when the National Guard started burning the bodies. The smoke. God, the smoke. It infected everyone by the fires who breathed it. They changed so fast.”

She closed her eyes tight as the grunting got louder, the splintering wood more shrill. “Those changed didn’t shamble.”

(LeRoy looked at me with the speaking of the word. His face was ash gray, his eyes wide.)

“They were like rabid dogs. They ran so fast, their open mouths foaming. T-That’s when Ted got bit. I think I might have gotten a whiff of that damn smoke myself. I – I don’t feel human anymore.”

It sounded like the door was about to go.

“No, I feel like a little girl back in church, knowing I’m going to get a spanking when I get home.”

She stroked the revolver as if it were a cat and began to sing “O Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” in a little girl’s voice :

“H-Here I raise my Ebenezer ….”

She put the gun’s barrel under her chin.

“H-Hither by Thy help I’m come,
And I hope by T-Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive a-at ho-home.”

She pulled the trigger.

I jumped in my chair. The door to the newsroom finally tore off its hinges right then. The camera was knocked down. We saw a flurry of shambling feet. Then, there was a click.

The newswoman was back looking at us again. “T-Ted, the camera man is … dead. I … shot him myself.”

The clip was repeating itself. I was shaking. LeRoy husked out , “Shit.”

I managed to say, “What you said.”

LeRoy frowned, “Hey, the grunting didn’t come so soon, did it?”

I quick turned off the TV with the remote. The grunting kept on. LeRoy suddenly looked like an albino.

“They found us!”

We popped out of the Lazy Boys. I turned to the far end of the third floor. There. At the escalator.

The Shamblers were tumbling to the floor as their feet no longer remembered how to step off an escalator. They hadn’t seen us yet. They had only smelled us.

LeRoy started for Becky. I was closer. I whispered shrill.

“Cover Glasses’ mouth when you wake her.”

“Why the hell for?”

“Don’t you remember? They always wake up screaming.”
***

***
Alice & Victor's love theme :

NEW DREAM AWAKENING

This is but a preliminary cover done by the incomparable Leonora Roy

for the new Victor Standish novel, THE RIVAL,

whose rough draft is just now awakening across my keyboard.

Victor Standish discovers to his dismay that the key to saving the future of New Orleans lies in its past.

The year 1834 to be exact.

The year he barely survived when DayStar threw Victor and Alice back there the first time.

{In the last chapters of UNDER A VOODOO MOON :
http://www.amazon.com/LEGEND-VICTOR-STANDISH-VOODOO-ebook/dp/B0064CKPJ4/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_2 }

Now, he and Alice are back. Undead enemies they first met in 2005 are meeting the star-crossed lovers for the first time :

Abigail Adams, Empress Theodora, and the dreaded DayStar, he whom many believe is Lucifer himself.

And two startling new enemies join their ranks :

President Andrew Jackson, recklessly pursuing plans to allow his revenant wife, Rachel, to turn him into one of the living dead so as to be with his beloved forever.

Meilori Shinseen, (that's right - the namesake of the haunted French Quarter jazz club)

18 years before she is destined to meet Captain Samuel McCord aboard the cursed Demeter.

Their allies only make things worse :

SERGEANT Samuel McCord

and the recently dismissed cadet from West Point,

the dashing Edgar Allan Poe, who falls in love with the surprised Alice,

calling her his Annabel Lee (which is the title of the last completed poem by the artist).

How will Victor keep this younger version of his mentor from meeting Meilori before she becomes the kind of woman McCord can love?

And just as maddening, how can he keep Alice from succumbing to the charm, gallantry, and poetry of Poe?

As Alice tries to unsuccessfully calm Victor’s unfounded fears, one of her own appears :

a warm-blooded, living girl from Victor’s past, flashing long lashes and legs at the teen who is her whole world.

What is an undead ghoul to do against such competition?

And how did an orphan girl born in the Detroit of the late 20th Century end up in the New Orleans of 1834?

Some mysterious Entity is playing with both Victor and Alice.

Suddenly, the dangers of 2005 don’t appear quite so deadly to the star-crossed pair.

(LOOK FOR IT SUMMER OF 2012!)
***