Tag Archives: serialized fiction

Serialized Fiction: Our eBook Experiment

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Do you like to be left hanging?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved cliffhangers. My fascination began with a TV show called Cliffhangers, which ran for less than a season in the 70′s. The show featured three stories every week, one about a vampire, a mystery, and an Indiana Jones sorta adventure. Every segment left the hero hanging and questions lingering with a…

“to be continued…”

I hated having to wait a WHOOOOOOLE week. Yet, as each new episode drew closer, I grew more excited and eager to see what would happen next. And when it comes to serialized stories, it’s always about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Years later, I loved and hated other shows in a similar way — LOST, X-Files, Carnivale, The Wire, Deadwood, The Walking Dead, Battlestar Gallactica, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and too many more to name without coming off like a guy who never gets off the couch.

Though these shows span different genres, they have a few things in common.

They all have great stories, they all have storylines which stretch across seasons, and they all have flawed but memorable characters. And, of course, they always leave you wondering what happens next?

SERIALIZED BOOKS

While serialization has been around for ages, it wasn’t until Stephen King did it with The Green Mile in the 90′s, that I discovered it.

King managed to do what the best TV shows did – he kept me hanging from book to book, always wanting more.

It was the most awesome reading experience I ever had!

While I’d always dreamed of creating a serialized TV show, King showed me that I could do the same thing with books.

However, that seemed like a faraway dream as you have to be a pretty big name in order for a publisher to take a chance on a serial.

When I met Sean Platt, we decided to try serializing a story I’d been sitting on forever, Available Darkness. While it was a great experiment, our workload was too much at the time to give it its due. And though we had a nice response, most people asked the same question – when will it be available in book form?

Most people, I find, don’t enjoy reading on a website. Neither do I.

And to be honest, though we were serializing Available Darkness, it wasn’t a true serial. It was a book we were putting out in serialized format. A strong distinction, in my opinion.

You can serialize any book, I suppose. But I prefer a book which was meant to be serialized, designed from the outset as such, so it can be enjoyed as both a part and part of a whole. You know, like TV shows.

While we both wanted to do a serialized series, self-publishing print editions seemed too costly to deliver cheaply to readers. And delivering a cheap, but awesome read, is what we wanted to do, even if we weren’t yet sure how.

AND THEN KINDLE HAPPENED…

While Apple revolutionized the music industry, Amazon changed the way books will be sold. Forever.

Readers began adapting to the idea of eBooks, and were buying eBooks in record numbers, outpacing the sales of print books at Amazon.

Authors like John Locke, J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and a ton of names that will someday be household, found success on their own terms with eBooks. They didn’t have to go through publisher gateways to find readers. They didn’t have to worry about a publisher thinking their work was good enough to publish. They only had to worry whether readers would read their stuff.

And the readers have spoken with their wallets and purses.

Indie authors are celebrating the wall coming down because it gives them a much better chance of getting their books into the hands of readers. But there’s another advantage to this new age of eBooks. Publishers (including indie authors) can now experiment with different and more creative ways to deliver stories.

Two years ago, there weren’t too many publishers that would serialize a book if it wasn’t written by Stephen King or someone with a proven track record. It’s too risky an investment. But with eBooks, the risk is greatly minimized.

Sean and I saw our window to doing what we’ve wanted to do since we started writing together… create a serialized book series.

AND YESTERDAY’S GONE WAS BORN

Serialization is hardly a new idea, it’s been around for hundreds of years. But serialized eBooks is something I surprisingly don’t see too many writers doing.

We considered how some of our existing book ideas could work in the format, but decided against that. We didn’t just want to serialize an existing book, or even a book we are in the process of writing. If we were going to do it, we’d do it right.

Our series would be designed from the outset as a serialized book, paced just like TV episodes, with rising tension and killer cliffhanger endings.

We came up with the concept of Yesterday’s Gone, and then we each came up with our own characters independent of one another and said, “Okay, see what you can do with this premise and let’s see where it goes.”

Then we traded our chapters and began to flesh out the first “episode,” storylines, and then the full “season,” developing Yesterday’s Gone as writers would develop a running TV series. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing!

We released the first episode in August, and followed up with Episode 2 in September. Reaction has been great. Readers have emailed us to tell us they love the concept and the books, and also that they hate us for making them wait to find out what happens next.

But, just like me, they admit, they love having something to look forward to in the next episode.

I love email like that!

TWEAKING THE EXPERIMENT

While we originally planned to release new episodes every month, Sean convinced me that a month is too long. Voracious readers can get through our 100 page books in a day or two. Making them wait a full month is just too long.

For one, there’s many storylines to follow. Expecting readers to remember everything a month later is a bit much. And given that I, the co-author, can’t remember every little thing that happens from episode to episode a month after I wrote it, I can’t expect readers to.

So we decided to shake things up a bit — release all six episodes of Season One all at once – right now, along with the full season in one convenient and low-priced download.

Season One came out last week and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news with you.

We’ll be releasing Season Two in January, with episodes released on a weekly schedule, which seems a better fit for the serialized model. While there will still be a few months between seasons, I think the story flows a lot better in weekly installments.

If you like post-apocalyptic stories like The Stand, shows like LOST, or serialized fiction in general, I’d love for you to check out Yesterday’s Gone. You can buy Episode One right now for .99 and see if you like it, or just dive in and buy the full Season One for just $4.99.

We’re also posting the first episode online at SerializedFiction.com starting here, where we’re also posting some behind-the-scenes marketing stuff, our trailers, Yesterday’s Gone-related news, and more in-depth discussion about the story and our experiment.

You can click on the video to watch a larger, HD version at Youtube.

Available Darkness: Chapter 38

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Available Darkness Book Cover(Serial and Milk: Available Darkness is a serialized horror thriller co-written by David Wright and Sean Platt. A new chapter appears here each Friday. If you missed previous chapters, you can read them here.)
October 2, 1999
St. Augustine, Florida

Hope lay in bed, mentally tracing her fingers over John’s angular jaw, across his chin, and then over his soft lips as his breath rose, fell, and whispered between them.

The soft blue light of predawn made her feel ridiculous for her mini-breakdown hours earlier.

The painting, which she’d started without any thoughts of what it was or where it would eventually go, had taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It was a non-commissioned piece and not something she planned to show at her friend Sergei’s gallery. She initially thought the new direction was some unrealized artistic desire bubbling up and pushing her to explore her boundaries.

However, as the painting progressed, she began to sense another power at work. Night after night, she was continuously pulled from her sleep, unable to rest until she returned to the canvas, adding bits and pieces of images, compelled to lay them across the canvas as though she were obsessively divining the will of the Gods.

She’d never felt so out of control and without direction, save for the first painting she’d ever professionally shown, Dusk Wanderlust. The one which drew John into Sergei’s art gallery when it first opened in the historic district of St. Augustine nearly two years ago. Just as that painting seemed to draw her and John together as one, this painting seemed more ominous, though she wasn’t quite sure why, as though it would rip them back to two.

The angel didn’t originally start out looking like John. He originally appeared a rather generic, golden-haired heavenly being. Prior to that morning, there was also another person in the painting—the broken body of a red haired woman, her body draped in black. A dark tattoo of a shooting star stained the pale flesh along the nape of her neck.
Hope wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was positive the angel had just killed the woman.

Then, last night, she was roused from her sleep with a sudden, burning desire to return to the canvas and scrub it with changes. Without realizing where her mind was moving her hands, she’d endowed the angel with her lover’s face.

Two hours later, sweat matting the hair on her forehead, she dropped her brush and lost the first of her tears. Shaking, she knelt down and picked it back up, then quickly began to paint over the dead woman’s body in violent strokes of indigo and violet.

Horror was bubbling to the surface of their lives. Hope could feel it burning beneath her skin and in every pore of her body. Well, at least, in the inky shadows of the night.

In the bright light of morning, under the down covers of a warm, soft bed, that fear seemed as out of place as a grandfather clock in the corner of a nightclub. John had talked her down from the ledge last night, helping her examine why she was so upset. She didn’t tell him about the woman in the painting because some part of her felt it had something to do with infidelity and she didn’t want to appear insecure. If there was one thing Hope knew about John without any doubt whatsoever, it was that he was a faithful man.

During his examination of the painting, John told her, with a satisfied smile, that she’d never been so happy for such a long period of time. That realization, in the face of the looming two year milestone of their dating, was bringing some nested fear to the surface and manifesting itself in the form of this unsettling painting.

“The fear will go away,” he’d said, squeezing her shoulder blades beneath his large, strong hands. He turned her around, then pulled her into his embrace, absorbing her tears as they soaked the thick cotton of his nightshirt. “You deserve to be happy.”

While other men in her life had analyzed her only to determine that there was something wrong with her and that it was her fault she was miserable because she must be afraid of happiness, or some such psychobabble, John didn’t search for what was wrong.

He simply told her what was right—them and their love.

And he was right. She deserved to be happy. She just needed to get past the fears.

Even though they’d been together for two years—her longest relationship by at least 14 months—they had never settled into the mundane routine which seemed to poison the wells of so many other relationships around her. She sometimes wondered why this man seemed so different than all the others?

She was far too cynical to believe in things like fate or soul mates. But the inner romantic in her, the one who existed at her core despite all the bad experiences life had seen fit to throw her way, secretly believed that John was the closest thing to a soul mate she would ever know.

They were different in many ways, but their differences seemed to work in harmony. While she was anxious, frenetic and prone to emotional flights and dives, he was calm, laid back and perhaps the most evenly tempered person she’d ever known. However, they also had many things in common, including a love for reading, art, and equally at home discussing philosophy or why there would never be a show on TV better than the X-Files.

John was also the first person who ever took such a deep curiosity in knowing everything about her—from what she was like as a child (a clumsy, scrawny introvert), to the consistency of her dreams (incredibly rare), to her deepest fears (being unable to conceive a child), to what inspired each and every one of her paintings. At times, John appeared like a scholar with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the subject of her, no matter how uninteresting she sometimes felt.

Perhaps the biggest reason their love was so intense, even after all this time, was that to her, John was still something of a mystery.

He worked as a cook at an upscale Italian restaurant just a short walk from Sergei’s gallery, and didn’t talk much about his life before moving to Florida, which he said was rather ordinary. With any other man, she would suspect such reticence to be indicative of an unseemly past filled with debauchery and selfish deeds.

John was different, though.

He grew up in more than 20 foster homes after his parents died, drifting from state to state, never really establishing roots in any of them. He spent his time working and reading and sometimes composing music on piano, though he never played for another soul. He had no friends, family or meaningful relationships. John was, in some ways, a blank slate, a guy who seemed to have been waiting for some spark to bring him to life. Hope was that spark, he confessed during one of their few discussions of his past.

Despite his claims to the ordinary, there were times, such as this, when she lay next to him in bed watching him sleep, that she felt there was far more to John than she might ever know. There was a deeper John somewhere inside, a John who had yet to look her in the eye. She suspected that perhaps he had suffered some great hurt which made him the way he was, so remote and distant to everyone other than her.

She moved a bit closer to him in bed, wanting to touch him, but not wake him.

John’s eyes opened and his left eyebrow arched.

“Are you watching me sleep?” he asked, a smile breaking through the surface of his tired face. It wasn’t the first time she’d been busted.

She slid towards him under the sheets, her hand sliding under his shirt and finding his warm chest as her leg wrapped around his groin. She felt his cock stiffen immediately. She smiled.

“Well, good morning,” she said as she climbed on top of him and reached down to slide him into her.

“Wow,” John said, still smiling, “it is a good morning.”

Suddenly, the sound of their doorbell shattered the intimacy of the moment.

“What the hell?” Hope said, climbing off of John and cycling through the possible selections in her mind—who could possibly be showing up on her doorstep at this hour?

John threw on some jeans and then flew downstairs.

He peered through the front door’s peep hole and glanced back at Hope, who stood at the foot of the stairs with the phone in her hand—just in case she needed to call the cops.

She didn’t need to, though. They were standing at her doorstep.

“It’s the cops,” John whispered, a confused look on his face.

He flicked on the porch light and opened the door. Hope, suddenly by his side, wrapped both her arms around his right one.

“Hi, I’m Detective Avery,” said the tall, hawk-nosed, dark-haired cop with raccoon circles under his eyes. “This is Detective Johnson,” he said, gesturing toward his partner, a thin black man with salt and pepper hair and a receding hair line.

“We’re wondering if either of you have seen this woman?”

Avery held out a photo. Hope’s throat closed and her stomach nearly fell through the floorboards. Staring back at her was a glossy image of a red haired woman, a shooting star tattoo leaving a trail of ink across the nape of her neck.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Available Darkness: Chapter 35

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Available Darkness Book Cover(Serial and Milk: Available Darkness is a serialized horror thriller co-written by David Wright and Sean Platt. A new chapter appears here each Friday. If you missed previous chapters, you can read them here.)

John and Larry both reached out in a blind attempt to stop the slaughter.

Abigail’s fingers were ten tiny pythons around Lydia’s paling skin. Both bodies shivered and shook, Lydia tangled in death’s inescapable clutches while Abigail feasted on her fleeting life.

John and Larry were dead in their tracks, impotent witnesses to the destruction playing out before them. The child, so sweet just hours before, had been transformed, by them, into a killing machine.

John was frozen. His heart shattered as he stood in the shadow of the sentence he had condemned Abigail to endure. Yes, he had saved her life, but at what cost?

Larry fell back. He wanted to scream, but his mouth filled with vomit instead, which spewed in a fountain, burning bile through his esophagus and onto the cold cement floor of the warehouse. Suddenly, something in Larry snapped. Rage, anger, hate, he wasn’t sure, but it stormed toward the surface and splashed ice water on his inaction. He raised his pistol, aimed directly at the back of Abigail’s head, and marched forward.

John glanced up just in time. He instinctively reached out, and for the second time that night, delivered a blast of energy from his palm, sending Larry to a crumpled heap on the cement. The gun skidded backward across the floor and John descended on Larry in less than a breath. Unlike last time, John wasn’t weakened by the blast he had sent. However, the blast also didn’t do as much damage to Larry, who was on all fours, scrambling away from John and towards the gun that had slid across the floor.

“Stop!” John barked.

Larry turned and glared upward, his face flushed with anger.

John stared down, silent. Unflinching. His message was clear: do not fuck with Abigail.

Larry looked past John and toward Abigail, who hunched over Lydia’s ashen body. The electricity had nearly finished its course through her body and her body was rocking slowly as she murmured something Larry could not make out.

Something in Larry shifted.

Yes, he was still horrified and saddened that Lydia, one of the only women he was ever close to having loved though he’d never uttered the words or even admitted the fact to himself until this very moment––was dead. Yet there were other emotions churning the sick stew in his guts and brain, a blended broth of awe and curiosity. This was the first such transformation he’d ever witnessed. Though he’d known of a few instances where people had become feeders, they were rare, the stuff of whispered legend.

A thousand questions throbbed through his mind. He’d been obsessed with the arcane knowledge of Other World ever since he’d first seen one of the aliens, more than two decades prior.

John watched Larry’s face transform, his flesh fading from raspberry to blush, and finally to its normal doughy hue. He could sense Larry’s heart rate slowing, could even hear the man’s heartbeat, he noted with interest. He glanced over to the gun, which lay a good 10 feet behind Larry.

“We have a problem here?” John asked.

Larry shook his head. His eyes passed John, darting to something behind him. John did a 180 and found Abigail standing, facing them.

John braced for what was to come, for her to break down and cry or scream out in anger at what they’d done to her. His mind scrambled over the possibilities. What he would say to comfort her, to explain what had happened, or at least to say he was sorry. However, she wasn’t crying. She wore a marble slab of emotion.

After a long stretch of silence, her vacant expression changed slightly.

“What happened?” she asked, in barely a whisper.

______________________________

“What are you looking for?” Bob said, repeating the question that had rendered Jack speechless.

While Jack would normally flare up at anyone (no matter how high their ranking) who had the temerity to ask him such a thing, or dared to spy on him, he needed to tread carefully. Something big was happening, and for the first time in his professional career, he was at a disadvantage because he had no idea what was in play.

Jack figured honesty was the best policy since he had no idea how much they knew. “I’m remembering things, Bob. Things that don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

The other side of the line was silent.

Shit, I said too much.

Then, after a long silence, Bob responded. “Let it go, Jack.”

Jack wanted to do anything but let it go. He wanted to jump through the phone and demand for Bob to tell him everything. Right now!

“Listen, Jack, I get that you have more questions than answers right now and that it’s frustrating. However, I need your head in the game. We have a killer to catch. The man who, I might remind you just in case you’ve forgotten killed your wife.”

“I haven’t forgotten a thing,” Jack said, pissed that Bob would play that card. He was also somewhat pleased. If Bob was getting desperate enough to try such a cheap tactic, it meant one thing, Jack was closing in on something that they, whoever they were, didn’t want him to know.

“We’ll help you make sense of things, soon, Jack, I promise. But right now, I need to know you’re not going to be sidetracked. I need to know you’re not going to botch this up.”

Jack measured Bob’s words. If he responded too quickly, Bob wouldn’t buy the change of heart. Moreover, he’d likely lock down Jack’s ability to get any information at all, if he’d not already done so. Jack pulled a sigh from the depths of his belly and unscrewed the bottle of whiskey he kept on his nightstand. He took a deep swig and sighed a second time, half enjoying the show he was putting on for Bob.

“I’m just so tired,” Jack said, broadcasting utter exhaustion, “I just want to close this case and put an end to the nightmare.”

“I know,” Bob said, his voice soothing.

“You know, I haven’t cried since the funeral,” Jack said, in a moment of spontaneous honesty, surprising himself with his confession.

Bob was now the quiet one.

Jack continued, “My head hasn’t been right in a while, Bob. I’m not eating or sleeping. It’s no wonder I’m having such fucked up dreams. I just want to catch this guy, Bob, nail him to the fucking wall so my wife can finally rest in peace.”

“Do you need some time off?”

“No, Bob. Just let me get this monster and then we can deal with whatever else we need to deal with.”

“If you ever need anything, Jack, anything at all,” Bob said, “just ask.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, taking another sip, “Right now, I’m just gonna get some sleep so I can hit this tomorrow with fresh eyes.”

They hung up. Jack turned out his light and stared at the computer, wondering how else they might be monitoring him. He glanced at his window, the curtains closed, as they always were. He then rolled off the bed, dropped softly to the carpet, crawled toward the wall, and slowly pulled the bottom corner of the curtain aside just enough to steal a glimpse. There, about half a block down, he saw a van nearly swallowed by darkness.

“Well, hello there,” Jack whispered to his watcher.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Available Darkness: Chapter 34

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Available Darkness Book Cover(Serial and Milk: Available Darkness is a serialized horror thriller co-written by David Wright and Sean Platt. A new chapter appears here each Friday. If you missed previous chapters, you can read them here.)

Jack kneaded his temples and stared at the screen. On a safari for clues to his foggy past, he’d accessed a database in the bureau computer, wound his way through a series of gateways, and finally located his full file. While he’d pieced together many puzzles via public and classified records during his years with the agency—lives collected neatly in folders filled with facts, photos and crime scene reports—it was another thing altogether, attempting to quilt the fragments of his own scattered existence.

Facts stared back at Baldwin; things remembered and forgotten, both seeming as ancient as he was feeling. He saw nothing which indicated that his parents, William and Elizabeth Winslow, died in a violent crime. Their deaths were listed as a car accident, just as he recalled. Driving home one rainy night, their car lost control on a slick road and wrapped around a light post.

Death on impact. Survived by one son, Jack. No mention of another.

Shortly following the accident, Jack was adopted by Ed and Myriam Baldwin. Ed was an agent with the FBI, leaving a career’s worth of footsteps for Jack to eventually follow. According to the gospel which Jack had never thought to question, Ed and Myriam were a freshly married couple, unable to conceive. Ed had been on his way home from work when he arrived at the scene of the accident, Jack’s parents hugging the lamppost, twisted inside a couple tons of metal. After a long talk with Myriam, they decided to adopt Jack. They got their child and saved the world from one more orphan.

Jack sighed and put his elbows on the desk. He’d already searched for records of his birth parents, but turned up nothing. Not too surprising. If they died in a car accident, they shouldn’t have been in the database unless they had been flagged for some reason, or were victims of a crime the bureau was investigating.

Another few seconds in front of the screen and the corners of Jack’s mouth suddenly twitched. He leaned forward and let his fingers dance across the keyboard. He typed John Winslow in the search box, and then ENTER.

Four names, three of them with no relation to him; the fourth, a huge question mark.

When Jack clicked on the fourth name, he received a message window. ACCESS DENIED, the red letters said. PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED, the green ones agreed. Below the lines, a message showed his IP address and mentioned that his search and failure to meet clearance had been noted. Great.

What the hell is going on? Why would John Winslow, possibly his brother, be a secret FBI file?

Jack continued to stare at the monitor, the corners of his mouth curled in frustration. He had no memories of a brother, yet something in the name tickled the deep recesses of his brain.

Could he have completely forgotten having a brother? He’d known of people forgetting things and blocking things out after traumatic events. Hell, he could understand wanting to forget your parents’ murders and burning the reels of the mind movie. But this, if it were true, went well beyond forgetting. There was a paper trail noting his parents’ death in a car accident, implicating lie as truth. That meant conspiracy.

But why?

Why cover up a murder? Why cover up the existence of a brother? Could the government really have rinsed his memories, not only of murder but of a younger brother as well?

A week ago he would’ve thought it was impossible or at least downright lunacy. But it had been a long week, even without the dream. The dream! Jack shuddered at the involuntary image of his father’s burned heap of a body; a sack of ashy flesh no different from those which had littered the last few of his days; no different than his wife, Julia’s.

Something brought Jack to life, out of his drugged fog, like an animal perking to a strange and sudden scent.

The monster in his dream had claimed to be his brother, Jacob.

Two brothers, one nightmare.

Jack entered the name Jacob Winslow.

ACCESS DENIED, PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Jack thought of the killer he was tracking. The killer, who finally had a name, thanks to Bob’s information—John Sullivan. He entered the name and held his breath.

ACCESS DENIED, PROPER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

What the hell?

Jack’s mind was crackling, connections slowly clicking into place. Something inside him shuddered. What if the killer, John, was also his brother? It didn’t make sense, of course. According to Bob, the killer wasn’t from this planet. The killer also seemed younger, though Bob said he was in fact, much older.

The boy in the dream was distinctly younger than Jack.

Yet when Jack thought of the damage Jacob had done to his father’s body, and the damage this John Sullivan was doing to others right now, the connections, as crazy as they seemed, almost arranged themselves with an impossible sort of certainty. If both brothers were real and both some sort of otherworldly feeders, then …

What in the hell does that make me?

Jack leaned back in his chair and pondered the question. His cell phone rang. His boss, Bob.

“Hello?” Jack said, feigning grogginess so Bob would think he was still asleep rather than launching an investigation into some half-cocked tapestry of deception, based on a dream, more likely inspired by his drugs than actual memories.

“What are you looking for, Jack?” Bob said.

Jack’s heart started pounding. They’re monitoring me? Why? He swallowed, “What do you mean, Bob?”

“Don’t make me drag it out of you, Jack. Why are you accessing department databases and dredging up ancient history? What is it you’re trying to find?”

Jack, normally quick with a lie, was frozen.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Be sure to check out the Author’s Notes in the comments section following each chapter. Also, please tweet this post and help spread the word about Available Darkness and nurture online fiction.

Available Darkness: Chapter 33

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Available Darkness Book Cover(Serial and Milk: Available Darkness is a serialized horror thriller co-written by David Wright and Sean Platt. A new chapter appears here each Friday. If you missed previous chapters, you can read them here.)

Larry swung the black van into the chop shop. The unassuming warehouse sat in the middle of a dozen others, nearly invisible, in a broken row in a rundown neighborhood just two miles south of their next port of call.

Lydia was waiting outside, alone as he’d requested. Most hours, she’d have a crew of at least six to help ensure her safety, but their amorous past was a solid promise of safety. She raised the bay door and Larry pulled inside, parking beside the white Ford Econoline she’d readied for him. The van was modified inside, with a spacious cargo area sealed off from the front to prevent any light from seeping inside. Larry would transfer John and Abigail, and then be on his way. Lydia would take care of the black van and all its tracking systems.

Larry hopped from the van. Lydia pulled the bay door down and turned to him, her infectious smile lighting the room, “Hey, stranger.”

He laughed. “Not by choice. You still seeing Tony?”

“Hell no, he’s back with his little bitch Jessi.” Lydia sidled towards Larry, then leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. “You asking for any particular reason?”

Larry grinned. It had been a while since he’d been laid. Even longer since he’d been with a kinky little minx like Lydia. He felt the usual stir, and then ignored the wish that was turning to a want which time wouldn’t allow. Lydia’s eyes danced; hands in her pocket, head sideways, a lock of chestnut curls teasing the nape of her neck. Larry swallowed.

“No reason, just wanted to make sure the hairs on my neck weren’t rising because of an asshole behind me.”

Lydia laughed. “Nope, just you and me … and whoever you have in the van.”

“Thanks for this,” Larry said, reaching into his pocket for an envelope of cash which found her fingers in a whisper, with the fluidity of a man used to greasing palms and paying for those items or services which were unavailable on the open market.

“Nothing but a thing,” Lydia said, peering over Larry’s shoulder at the black van. “So, what are we about to unwrap?”

“I need to get these people to safety,” Larry said as he led her to the side door. He slid it open. Inside, an especially large looking John with a still sleeping Abigail like a rag doll in the nook of his body.

“Oh shit!” Lydia’s eyes widened. She took an involuntary step back from the van.

“So you get the news in this city too, huh?” Larry made a weak attempt at humor. It didn’t work.

“Dude, what the hell are you into? I’m not into helping a kidnapping, no way.” Lydia took another step back, this one on purpose.

Larry had seconds to calm her. Lydia’s blood was always hot and it didn’t take much to roll it to a boil. She may have run a chop shop with a regular clientele of thugs, thieves, and organized crime, many which had blood on their hands, but kidnapping, or any crime involving a child, was something she wasn’t willing to take part in.

He spoke calmly.

“Come on, you know me better than that. Don‘t believe any of that shit you saw on TV. There are some people after her, bad people. We’re protecting her.”

John crawled from the van and nodded to Lydia.

“What about him?” she said, “I saw what he did on TV. What the hell is he?”

“You trust me?” Larry asked, his voice climbing an octave like a guy in a fight with his girlfriend.

Lydia looked past John and at Abigail, who was starting to stir. “You okay, sweetie?”

Abigail looked up at Lydia. The child’s eyes were cloudy and distant. Larry could only imagine the accusations barreling through Lydia’s mind. They drugged this girl!

Larry had always been able to count on Lydia in a pinch, but they hadn’t spoken in more than half a year, since the “Tony situation” came out of nowhere and took over everything. Who knew where her loyalties lay now?

Larry eyed her up and down, while her attention was on the child. He was certain she was packing heat; something small like a snub nosed Ruger, probably in the small of her back. Lydia might not have run with the lowest of the low, but she was, like Larry, always prepared for any eventuality. He didn’t want to get into a gunfight, so he’d have to act quickly to disarm her the moment before she reached for her piece.

“Where are we?” Abigail asked, her syllables slurring through the slosh of a thick tongue and vacant expression.

Something looked off about the girl, Larry thought. Same doll, different batteries.

“You okay, honey?” Lydia asked, edging towards her.

John leaned over, blocking access to Abigail, and growled. “Don’t touch her!”

Lydia drew back, and before Larry could make a move, she had a gun in hand, a Ruger, indeed, Larry noted, and aimed it at John. Oh fuck, Larry thought, this is gonna get ugly.

“What the hell is going on here?” Lydia asked, gun trained on John, but eyes on Larry; wide, wild, and dilating in a fear that was full yet unflinching.

“Put the gun away,” Larry said, his voice a glassy calm, “You saw what this guy did to those people, right? He may not be human, BUT, he’s not the bad guy here. And this girl here, Abigail, isn’t human either. These government fucks are after them both. They want to capture them, experiment on them and God knows what else. All that shit on TV is a giant spin by the media machine, Lydia. You have to believe me.”

Something in Lydia’s eyes softened and Larry could see she was starting to buy what he was selling. He might have even believed they would get out of the entire mess unscathed if Abigail hadn’t started to scream at that moment, her body convulsing in a wicked rhythm of spasms, eyes rolling into the top of her head. A low predatory snarl started to spill from her throat.

“What the fuck?” Lydia said, gun back on John.

John’s face turned gray as he turned to Larry, “What’s happening?”

Abigail echoed the question in broken gasps, her fingernails digging into John’s arm. “Wh… what’s hap…pening to me?”

Abigail’s back arched upward, her body a circus freak of twisted contortions as anguished cries erupted from her lungs.

Tears poured down Lydia’s face, “What’s happening?”

She put the gun back behind her back and moved towards Abigail, reaching out to help somehow. Neither Larry nor John were able to stop her before Abigail’s flailing hand seized Lydia’s forearm and locked.

And the feeding began.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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