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Last night, in the middle of the tornado warning alert and our phones and our alarm system screaming in unison that a tornado is imminent:

Gordon: Is that a tornado siren of a flash flood siren?

Me: Who knows?

Kid 2. Kid 2 knows. They used to just do sirens for the tornados, but now they added flash floods, and so the tone of the siren is different. Apparently, that was the flash flood siren.

We’d managed to catch Batty, our outside cat, and secured her in the laundry room. The trust is broken again, and she will have to get over it for the next 6 months, but she didn’t fly into the storm. The tornado and hail missed us, so hey, it’s a good day. So on brand for Central Texas though. Any other day – sunny, hot, blue sky. Memorial and 4th of July – massive thunderstorm every year.

Gordon is recovering from surgery. We had to take the original bandage off and sealed the incision sites with waterproof bandages so he could take a shower, and his incisions are dry, the right color, and seem to be healing well. He can raise his arm all the way up, but the shoulder is still tight. He’s been going to physical therapy and his post-op is next week. Hopefully they will clear him for swimming, because that really seemed to help.

Yesterday Grace Draven came over before the storm, and we hung out and talked shop. I’m so excited for the new novella she is working on. It’s a brand new world and it is so shiny.

In other news, we are engaged in a tower-defense military campaign called, “Protect the bird feeder.” We both really like watching birds from the office window, so we set up a birdfeeder. We get all kind of birds and it’s awesome. We also get squirrels and the deer, who wreck the birdfeeder. The deer are the worst, so we now installed some strategic garden fencing around the bird feeder in concentric circles so they can’t step over it.

The squirrels are a bigger problem. Protecting against them is impossible so instead we settled for the misdirection.

Look how cute he is at his picnic table.

The post If You Can’t Win, Bribe first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Today, the 27th of May, is my wedding anniversary. Today, the 27th of May, is the Guy Gavriel Kay book launch for Written on the Dark, which is being held at the Merrill collection of Speculative Fiction. I’d link, but it’s a ticketed event (tickets were free), that is entirely fully booked. I could have squeaked in as a bookstore employee, except, see above. Wedding anniversary. HOWEVER, today is also the release day for Heir of Light. Heir of Light should, as of today, be available for purchase at all ebook sellers, and also, bookstores. There’s a hardcover and trade paperback version of the book, and the interesting thing — to me, book geek — is that the hardcover has the half-title … Continue reading →

All serious runners know about snot rockets. At least in pre-pandemic times, they did.

But one particularly talented runner relishes snot rockets more than others.

When he turns up dead, the list of potential murderers runs longer than the list of medals he collected over the years.

But when an investigative journalist sees the true crime potential of the case, what she uncovers surprises even her. 

“The Demise of Snot Rocket“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Demise of Snot Rocket By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Let’s be honest: It was gross even before the pandemic shut everything down and made us aware of just how dirty the world—and our habits—were.

Runners, especially distance runners, didn’t have time to blow their noses, so they would press one nostril closed, and forcibly exhale whatever was in the other nostril, while moving on a trail. Sometimes that exhalation worked, and sometimes it didn’t. If it didn’t, the runner wiped his sleeve (and yeah, “his.” It was usually a guy) across his face.

Anything to prevent stopping. Anything to preclude carrying tissue or wipes, which you couldn’t dispose of anyway on a trail. Sometimes you could toss the tissue into an open garbage can on a run in a neighborhood or an urban area, but that meant carrying the wet slimy thing for blocks or more, and no one did that.

Instead, they sent snot flying out their noses, and hoped no one would see it.

This happened so often that it had a name: The Snot Rocket.

Fun, right?

Not possible while wearing a mask. And afterwards—who knows? No one is confessing now. If snot rockets have returned, no one will admit to it, when they all laughed about it before.

This story takes place before.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if it had happened after. Would Snot Rocket have changed? Would he have coped? Would he have become even more obnoxious?

We will never know.

****

To clarify a few things: Yes, I knew a guy named Snot Rocket. Not named by his parents. Named by all of us in the city who raced (reluctantly) at his side. A few of us tried to have him banned from local races, but we couldn’t for two reasons.

1. He was good. As in always finished in the top five good.

And…

2. Everyone did it. Even the people who lied and said they didn’t do it.

I did it on one particularly long trail run when I was in the woods in the rain by myself and my nose wasn’t having it. My choice was a leaf or a snot rocket and, dear readers, I chose the rocket. The leaf could’ve given me poison ivy or poison oak or bugs or something. The snot rocket itself was a one and done.

It did leave me feeling…curiously elated.

I’m a woman of a certain age, raised by an OCD mother in a time before anyone knew what that was. I follow (most of) the rules, and that includes not expelling snot into the wild. (It also includes not discussing snot, but I think we’re beyond that in this post-2020 world, right? We discuss fluids and filth all the time now. All. The. Damn. Time.)

All those years of running track in junior high (yes, I’m old enough not to call it middle school), high school, and college—thank you very much—before Title IX funding amounted to much of anything. I wasn’t good enough to go on to regional and national competitions, where you actually got a bit of money.

But, in the early days of running, I was good enough to compete in local races with the men, often as one of the few women. Early on, I was in the top ten, but age eventually moved me to the top twenty and then the top thirty, and finally I became Queen of my Age Group, always smoking the other women in my age range by a significant, noticeable amount.

I can’t tell you when Snot Rocket joined our merry band of local runners. One day he was there, and the next day (probably) we were all discussing how disgusting he was.

It wasn’t just that he expelled goobers loudly and with great enthusiasm, it was also that he seemed to have an endless supply of them. It got so none of us ever wanted to run near him. Either side was a danger zone, and in front of him, well, sometimes you didn’t know you were hit until you got home and peeled off your sweaty race shirt.

He’d probably be arrested now. Arrested and charged with assault.

Back in the day, we discussed it—those of us who had to share the road with him. Half of us thought he used it as a race strategy to keep path clear.

When I ran past him (and I didn’t do it as frequently as I would have liked; he was faster than me), I would make sure I was at least a yard away from him—off trail, on the sidewalk, wherever I could go and still be on the path for the race, so I wouldn’t get disqualified.

Social distancing before we ever heard the term.

Of course, that zigging and zagging added a tiny bit of distance to my run, which I resented, and so did everyone else who used that same strategy. Some of the men claimed they didn’t care. They claimed they would run past him, and not worry, because they were already sweat-covered and dirty.

But I saw them in real time: they’d pass as far from him as possible, and if they were ahead of him, they had to expend extra energy just to keep the distance.

No one wanted to get too close. And I think that extra energy cost some of Snot Rocket’s competitors the race. They didn’t have anything left in the tank when they got close to the finish line, and he would zoom right past them.

There was no proving it, of course.

But Snot Rocket’s personal habits and his consistent wins did not endear him to the local runners. Particularly when he would brag to anyone who could stomach listening about how great he really was.

He had—he said—thousands of finisher medals. Some in boxes, and the best ones—the “coolest” ones hanging from hooks on his walls.

He died, with three of those medals around his neck, and no other medal in the house.

But I get ahead of myself.

***

I’m an investigative journalist. Not the kind you’re thinking of—the old-fashioned Woodward and Bernstein model, supported by a sympathetic paper filled with heroic and compassionate leaders who really didn’t care about the bottom line (and yes, that was fiction, but it was a fiction we all bought). I did work for the Gray Lady once upon a time, until her D.C. rival poached me. I stayed there until I’d had enough of the insularity and constant political doublethink. Then came the rabid nightmarish shock that was the first few months of the Trump era.

My marriage of long-standing broke up over (among other things) politics—his were red, mine weren’t. So, I quit the day job and moved west, heading to yet another storied newspaper just in time for it to get sold and close.

I landed on my feet more or less, and became part of an online collective that partners with media outlets all over the world. We do the research and some of us also do the writing, and both organizations get the credit.

It pays less than I made in D.C., but the work is more flexible, and the cost of living here is lower.

I ran back east, so it was only natural to join running organizations here. I signed up for every race I possibly could and as a result met the other slightly obsessive runners in the community, some of whom were fast like Snot Rocket and some of whom were nice, like the bulk of the folks running the show.

I didn’t get involved with anyone—wasn’t that interested, really—but had a pretty fulfilling life. Research, writing, and running, plus living in a place where I didn’t have to talk politics 24/7, made life a lot more pleasant than it had ever been before.

I also had the freedom to set my own schedule, which actually allowed me to run as many races as I could find. I preferred 10K because it was just long enough to challenge me, but short enough to allow me to have the rest of the day to do something else if I so chose.

It also meant that I got to meet a lot of elite runners, because 10Ks were usually attached to the big races. We had only three Boston Qualifiers in this city, but that was three more than most places.

I’d run Boston half a dozen times, including the year of the bombing. But Boston lost its allure for me, partly because I was on the team that ended up reporting the bombing. I heard stories of loss and heartache, heroism and strength, and pretended for those few years that it hadn’t had an impact on me.

But after I moved, and qualified in my age group, I couldn’t bring myself to go. It wasn’t an east-west thing either, or the idea that I had to travel long distances. My stomach knotted and my mouth went dry even thinking about it.

Every year, the Boston Qualifiers were fraught. Runners shoved their way into separate starting corrals, yelled at volunteers, and sometimes tried to shoehorn their way into a pace group they hadn’t signed up for.

I tried to stay out of their way, but that year, the year Snot Rocket died, I failed at keeping my distance.

That particular race had a new director who was a bit clueless. The corrals snaked through an industrial park, doubling back on themselves. Unlike most large races, the corrals didn’t have makeshift barriers to keep runners from sliding into another grouping. The director apparently expected people to police themselves.

My corral for the 10K was across a narrow strip of parking lot away from the lead-off runners for the actual marathon. My corral was quiet. Most people in a 10K maybe cared about a personal best, but they really weren’t there for a make-it-or-break-it chance to run the race of their dreams.

Those in the marathon line were there to win, or to PR and get in the race of their dreams, particularly those in that first corral. Like so many big races of its type, this one offered hefty prize money for the finishers. The qualifiers went down by age group, but the actual runners—the ones who traveled from city to city collecting trophies and prizes—well, they needed to focus on their race rather than some kind of squabble about times and spots in line.

I was just trying to focus on my race when I noticed Snot Rocket was in the middle of the shoving match.

I started watching like a kid drawn to a school fight. I actually had a dog in the hunt or skin in the game or whatever cliché you wanted to drum up. Not because I wanted Snot Rocket to win, but because I was curious about what he was up to.

He was screaming at one of the runners, spraying visible spittle all over him, just from the force of his verbal outburst. The runner—a tall skinny White guy, who looked like he ran professionally—screamed back.

I couldn’t make out the words, but these guys were serious. They were furious at each other.

Snot Rocket shoved the other guy first, right into the crowd of elite runners. They paid attention for the first time, glaring at the two of them. One of the exceptionally tall and thin runners, a man who looked vaguely familiar, raised his hand, and waved it—not to get the attention of Snot Rocket and the other guy, but to get the attention of the volunteers.

One of the volunteers responded immediately, which told me that the vague familiarity I felt actually meant something. The runner really was one of the elites, and more than that, one of the people the race was honored to have in its lineup.

That volunteer disappeared into the crowd, and I couldn’t follow his yellow jersey to see where he went, because I’m not exceptionally tall or tall in any way, shape or form.

Snot Rocket and his squabbling buddy didn’t even seem to notice. The squabbling buddy shoved Snot Rocket. Snot Rocket tripped backwards, and probably would have fallen if he hadn’t been in such good physical shape.

No one tried to break them up. No one wanted to get involved. Or maybe, no one wanted to get injured just before a race.

Finally, a couple of people wearing yellow security jerseys waded into the crowd. One of them grabbed Snot Rocket by the arm. He shook them off, and turned toward them, utterly furious. I was finally able to see his face.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” he said loud enough for me to hear.

The security official said something in response, and reached toward Snot Rocket’s bib. Snot Rocket stepped backwards again, only this time he backed into another security official.

Two more security officials were talking with Snot Rocket’s opponent. The opponent shook them off and tried to move forward in the crowd, but the crowd closed around him. No one let him get to the front of the line.

Snot Rocket wasn’t watching any of that. He was arguing with security now, only softer, so I couldn’t hear.

“Never seen that before,” said the woman next to me. She was thin and slight and wore the race T-shirt with an additional tech shirt underneath. It promised to be cool for this run, but I never wore the extra shirt. I always got too hot at races.

“Me, either,” I said and turned away, so that I could see the rest of the fight. Only the fight was done now. Snot Rocket was being led down that strip of unmarked parking lot, walking between two security officials, his head down.

I couldn’t see Snot Rocket’s opponent anymore, but the crowd had closed back up, and they were all facing forward, going through their pre-race rituals while they waited for their corral’s starting gun.

“I wonder what that was all about,” the woman next to me said.

I could have told her about Snot Rocket, about how unpleasant he was and had always been. I could have engaged in polite speculation, since we had to wait another thirty minutes before we started moving—provided the 10K went off on time. That would depend on the full and half marathoners.

Technically, we started on a different block from the full and half folks, and went a completely different direction to stay out of their way. We’d join each other nine miles into their race—and then our group would veer off, and head toward the finish line via a different route again.

I didn’t expect to see Snot Rocket again, because he was a marathoner and, I thought, had just managed to get himself disqualified from the race.

But I did see him, just before I joined the marathoners at mile marker nine (the race used the marathon numbers, not numbers for the rest of us). He was loping like he always did, making it look easy. His hair flowed backwards, his arms were relaxed at his side, and he had a half-smile on his face.

He looked nothing like the man who had been shouting so loudly that spit came out of his mouth. He actually looked content.

I watched him run as the road I was on headed toward the road he was on, and I envied his perfect stride. I didn’t register anything else except a mild curiosity about how he managed to stay in the race after that egotistical display and why he was looking so content with himself.

I had been a bit unsettled from his fight; I would have expected him to be more than a bit unsettled. I would have expected him to be deeply disturbed, maybe running a bit too fast to get rid of the adrenaline from the fight itself.

And then I joined the crowd and didn’t think about him at all. I concentrated on finding my lane, where I could keep a steady pace and stay out of the way of the full and half marathoners who didn’t need some pokey 10K runner to screw up their PR.

That’s the thing about running. People are polite, generally. And if they have conflicts, they leave them off the course. This isn’t one of those confrontational sports like hockey or football. It’s something most people do for themselves, including the elites. Yeah, there’s money involved, but mostly, there’s bragging rights. And bragging rights mean even more.

And that was all the thought I gave him that morning. Maybe I didn’t even go that far. I enjoyed my race, got my finisher medal, noted that I had won my age group, and waited for the 10K medal ceremony, which was taking place long before any of the full marathoners even thought of crossing the finish line.

Then I went home, finished up an article on the impact of California fuel regulations (sometimes my job is not fun), and poured myself a glass of California chardonnay to celebrate a good day well lived.

The next day, the authorities found Snot Rocket dead. Strangled in the living room of his own house.

***

Of course, I didn’t find out for nearly a week. I didn’t know Snot Rocket’s real name; I never had the desire to ferret it out. So when people talked about Dave dying, I didn’t know that Dave—he of the very ordinary and forgettable name—was Snot Rocket.

I didn’t learn that until the running group met at our favorite park for our 7 a.m. weekend run, and we were greeted by an exhausted-looking detective.

He was sitting on a concrete picnic table—on the table itself, feet on the concrete bench. He clutched an extra-large to-go cup of coffee like a lifeline. He actually wore a suit, although it was cheap and baggy, as if he had lost weight due to a serious health condition. His hair was thin, and his face was thinner. The suit called attention to him—who wore a suit to a park at this time of the morning?

We all shot him nervous looks as we mingled and talked. And when zero hour arrived—7 a.m. on the nose—he stood up and ambled over to us.

I cringed. I always do when a non-runner stranger decides to talk with our group. That person usually wants to know what running is like or if we’re racing or how he can actually get into the daily habit without doing any of the work.

Only this guy flashed a badge, introduced himself as Detective Conners, and said he was looking into the death of Dave Pyron. Most of us glanced at each other in confusion, and probably would’ve told Conners that we didn’t know any Pyron, until Roscoe Carter raised his extremely thin eyebrows and said, “You mean Snot Rocket, right?”

We all whipped our heads toward him, and a few of us expressed incredulity that Snot Rocket was named Dave. Finally, Conners hauled out a photograph—fortunately one taken from Snot Rocket’s house, not the photo of him strangled—and we had to agree: yep, Dave and Snot Rocket were one.

None of us wanted to give up our morning run, so we invited Conners to join us, which he declined. Instead, he offered to interview us one by one as we returned. Apparently, he too thought this was a race, not a group venture. A few people normally would have sprinted out, but no one did this time, because no one wanted to be first to talk with the detective.

We left in a mass and returned in a mass. I hung back. I wanted to watch this guy work. My reporter’s instinct had flared up and I found myself wondering if there was a story here I could use.

Conners got to hear stories about snot going awry, about Snot Rocket’s interminable arrogance, and about his winning ways. Conners asked a few questions, mostly about Snot Rocket’s relationships, which most of us knew nothing about.

Roscoe said Snot Rocket (or rather, Dave. Roscoe called him Dave) had had two live-in girlfriends over the course of the past ten years. All of the relationships had ended badly (what a surprise). And when the last one cratered three years ago, Snot Rocket swore off relationships forever—and, according to Roscoe anyway, seemed to live up to that vow.

I had taken a seat on a nearby picnic table, nursing a Gatorade that I had brought with me, as I listened to the questions. I had learned the fine art of eavesdropping as a young reporter, and it had never failed me.

Some of the questions Conners asked were routine—Who are you? How well did you know the victim? When did you last see him?

But one question got a snort or a half-laugh from every single person he asked it to. Do you know anyone who disliked Dave?

The answers seemed planned, because they were the same, almost with the same wording: Everyone disliked Dave.

Everyone.

Which was how I would have answered the question, given a chance.

But Conners got halfway through the scrum of runners before looking at me.

“Learn anything from your eavesdropping?” he asked.

I knew better than to be surprised at the observation powers of investigators. Much as I complain about the politics in D.C., I met a lot of career folk who saw everything. Many of those people were inspectors general or worked in the various inspectors general offices. They didn’t miss a trick.

“The only thing I’ve learned today is Snot Rocket’s real name,” I said.

“Not a fan?” Conners asked, waving me over, so that I would sit near him, like all the other people he had interviewed had.

“No,” I said.

“So I don’t suppose you ever saw his house,” Conners said.

“I didn’t know he had a house until someone said he died in it,” I said.

Conners nodded. He wasn’t taking notes, but he had his iPhone on his knee. Even though the screen was dark, I would wager the thing was recording.

“What’s your interest in all of this?” he asked.

“Curious, I guess,” I said.

“Eavesdroppers are usually more than curious,” he said. “So, again, what’s your interest?”

“I’m not sure I have one,” I said.

“Not sure,” he repeated, as if he didn’t understand that. “How come?”

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I have credentials in my car if you want to see them.”

“When we’re done,” he said. “You doing a story on Dave?”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “But there might be something here. True crime is a big beat, and this has some interesting angles.”

“True crime,” he said, as if I had pissed all over his salad.

“I’m always looking for stories that will help our company continue its award-winning investigative journalism,” I said.

“This isn’t an award-winning scoop,” Conners said. “Just a squalid murder of an apparently unpleasant man.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it as award-winning,” I said. “We have to pay the bills. True crime can do that.”

“Even if you’re a suspect?” he asked.

I smiled at him, condescendingly. I had perfected that smile over decades, starting during my young, perky and cute decade. Then the smile let my interview subject know all those questions I had asked him—those hard-hitting ones?—they hadn’t come from my bosses; those questions had come from me.

Later, that smile got me through doors that would have been closed to anyone else. I had become old enough to seem like someone, and I had that kind of face—the kind that looked like it had once been famous but was no longer.

Now, I had aged into the strong mother figure and that condescending look shamed more than one person into cooperating with me, even though they never should have.

“I’m not a suspect,” I said.

“I’m the one who makes that determination,” he said, maybe a tad defensively.

“I’ve heard enough to know your timeline,” I said. “I was working—at the office—during that ten-hour window. I had been busy the day before and the day after, and once again, I never knew Snot Ro—I mean Dave—even had a house.”

Conners’ eyes narrowed. He didn’t like my tone. I didn’t really care.

“You know I’ll check, right?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

Conners took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if he were trying to control his annoyance. “So what can you tell me about your friend Dave?”

“First of all,” I said, “he wasn’t my friend Dave. Secondly, I can tell you the man was a pig.”

“To you?”

“To everyone,” I said. “You know the derivation of his nickname, right?”

“Actually, no,” Conners said.

Non-runners. They weren’t up on the slang. The nickname would have told him a lot had he been part of the community.

So I explained it all to him—the nickname, the behavior, the possible advantages it gave Snot Rocket in a race.

“Yet you let him join the group here,” Conners said.

“If he was a member of this group, it predates me,” I said. Then I had to give Conners my personal history. He got more and more tense as he heard my CV, particularly when I mentioned which papers I had worked for.

Yeah, he’d check on me, but he was also savvy enough to know I wouldn’t lie about that. Which meant I was a lot more impressive than I looked. And a lot more of a threat to his investigation. If I was going to write a story about it, I wasn’t just some hack threatening to make sure he handled the case right; I was going to write something that would be read.

“This group run was a recurring event in his computer calendar,” Conners said.

“Sounds like maybe he hadn’t updated the calendar in a while,” I said.

“Sounds like,” Conners said, as if he agreed with me. But his tone was distracted. He was watching the rest of the group, most of whom were fidgeting. We had all budgeted time for the run and maybe breakfast afterwards, but after that we wanted to get on with our day.

He looked back at me. “When was the last time you saw Dave?”

I wanted to be obnoxious and say I never saw Dave, I didn’t know a Dave, I would never socialize with a Dave, but I didn’t say any of that, because that was when I remembered the Boston Qualifier.

I got that image of Snot Rocket’s perfect form, the way he glided down the road, weaving his way in and out of the other runners as if he was gifted and they were mere mortals.

I would never see that again. And that, of all things, made me just a little bit sad.

“Well?” Conners asked.

“Last Sunday,” I said. And then I told him, not about seeing Snot Rocket run, but about that fight in the corral, and security dragging him off. And then I mentioned that Snot Rocket ended up running the race after all.

I finished with this. “No, I don’t know who he was fighting with. No, I don’t know what they were fighting about. I could tell they were really mad at each other, and their behavior was really out of bounds for any race I’d ever been part of. I have no idea what the security arrangements were at that race. I do know it had a new director, and that most people working the race were volunteers. I know they have records of everyone’s times, and a lot of photographs. In fact, all of these races are well documented because not only are there official shots, but participants take a lot of pictures as well.”

I stopped at that point, because I had nothing to add except speculation and while speculation was fun, it wasn’t really productive, not with a detective, except maybe to indict me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

He had a few more questions for me, none of which I considered relevant or important, and then he moved on to the remaining few. I listened to the questions, heard the same or similar answers, and started packing up to leave.

He never did ask anyone if they had been to Snot Rocket’s house or if they’d seen his medals or even if they had seen him be violent. It was as if the story I had told about the Sunday before hadn’t registered in Conners’ brain.

Or maybe he didn’t want to influence anyone.

I found it curious though, and I worried that he had mentally dismissed me because of my age, my gender, or maybe even my status as a reporter.

He never looked at me again, even as he wrapped up and headed to his car. I gathered my Gatorade bottle so I could toss it, and as I did, Roscoe joined me.

“What did you make of that?” he asked.

He knew some of my history, knew that I was a reporter, and probably surmised that I had some experience with the police that he didn’t have.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” I said, “except that they’re investigating.”

“He didn’t seem all that invested, though, did he?”

People who read and watch a lot of television expect police detectives to work on one case at a time. Instead, they work on dozens, and never give any case much time. Except the high-profile ones. That Conners spent this morning here, waiting for us, but didn’t seem all that interested told me that Snot Rocket’s murder was a weird death, but not significant enough for the brass to pay attention.

Conners would want to close the case to get his closure rate up, but that was all. It was going to be hard for anyone to care about Snot Rocket. He wasn’t the most charming of men alive, and there was no family that I knew of to clamor over solving his death.

“He spent a lot of time with us,” I said, not liking being in the position to defend Conners.

“Yeah.” Roscoe frowned. “I just get the sense this one is going to just slide into the unsolved pile.”

I nodded. “I suspect you’re right.”

***

I didn’t ask Roscoe why he cared. At that point, I wasn’t sure I did either. But as time went on, I found the murder niggling at me. The fight. The medals. The pointed message of the strangulation.

It wasn’t that I cared about Snot Rocket as much as I cared about something else: Someone had murdered a person I knew.

I’d met a lot of people connected to murders over the years, but only after the fact. I never knew the victim. I was never involved in the early stages. I only got involved later on, when the death became a story.

My reporter brain was noodling this one. We were always being admonished to take initiative, to look for something that might make the company money as well as something that would cost the company money.

All of us, the investigative reporters, were good at spending money so we could chase the best stories, the kind that won Pulitzers and Edward R. Murrow awards. But I noted that the reporters who stayed with the company weren’t just the award winners. Unemployed award winners were thick on the ground these days.

The company held onto the reporters who could do both—win awards and make money. I hadn’t had a moneymaker in a while.

I figured this story might do the trick.

***

I pitched it that Monday with the title “Death of a Weekend Warrior,” about a lonely guy with no social skills who spent all his time running and collecting medals, a guy who ended up dying horribly. I told my boss that this might be an Unsolved Mysteries kind of thing, and he reminded me that we were in early days. Maybe it would end up being a series.

In that conversation, I learned he was also flirting with a new podcast, one that would capitalize on the true crime podcasts that were getting turned into books and films and cultural conversations at the time.

My boss also pointed out, in that cold dispassionate way journalists had of discussing uncomfortable (and often unsaid) things, that Snot Rocket didn’t have any family to object to his portrayal. My boss reminded me to document, document, document, but he also told me that speculation was possible in this instance—and he said so in a way that encouraged it.

I wasn’t comfortable with that, at least not at the time, but apparently I can be persuaded. The deeper I got into the case, the more I found my way to the dark side.

***

I started, like I always do, with what the internet could tell me. Snot Rocket did not have a public-facing Facebook account. He didn’t seem to be on Twitter or Instagram or any other social media site that I could find. He did have several professional accounts with places like LinkedIn, but those looked corporate, as if his bosses had mandated them and he had to follow a template.

From them, I learned that he worked in some engineering field with a technical specialty that I didn’t really understand. The corporation he worked for spanned the globe, doing all kinds of building and other projects. On none of these sites was it clear what kind of work he did—whether it was building something or backup work or design. He didn’t seem to travel for the job, which made some kind of sense, because this city is big enough to have all sorts of engineering and construction work, enough to keep an entire flood of people busy for years.

I looked up his ex-girlfriends, but they didn’t have much of a social media presence either. The one who did keep her photographs current seemed to delete her past with regularity. If I wanted to track her relationship with Snot Rocket—or, um, Dave—I could do so, but that would require a lot of digging into the Wayback Machine Internet Archives or other places that kept track of the world as we once knew it.

I nearly gave up there. I mean, why write a story about a man that no one liked, a man who had filthy personal habits, and did his best to shove people away from him, a man who was murdered for his efforts?

And every time I got to that last bit, I realized that was why. Snot Rocket had pissed off a whole slew of people. This was rather like a game of Clue. Who hated him enough to finally off him—and in the most personal way possible?

I sat at my desk with a yellow legal pad after doing my preliminary search, and doodled what I did know, not just about Snot Rocket, but about the killer as well.

I knew that the killer knew Snot Rocket. The killer clearly hated Snot Rocket. The killer used Snot Rocket’s most treasured possessions (I assumed) to actually kill Snot Rocket. Then, the detective thought, the killer stole those possessions, except for the ones that had strangled the life out of Snot Rocket.

I also figured that the killer was tall—at least as tall as Snot Rocket. I couldn’t imagine someone short standing on a chair, with his (her?) hands clutching a ribbon around a medal and pulling that ribbon tight enough to strangle Snot Rocket. I figure that the killer had to be strong as well, because Snot Rocket—well, anyone, really—would have fought like hell to avoid being strangled like that.

Unless he was unconscious. Since I did not, at the moment anyway, have any access to Snot Rocket’s autopsy report, I did not know if he was drugged or unconscious when that medal (those medals?) got wrapped around his neck.

I would need that information eventually, but first, I was going to work on who Snot Rocket was.

I was about to give up on the internet side of Snot Rocket’s life when I realized I hadn’t even gone near the entire treasure trove of internet research that would give me everything there was to know about Snot Rocket. Not Dave the Engineer, but Snot Rocket, the runner.

As I had told Detective Conners, most of racing had gone online in the last 20 years. From race results to photographs to vanity selfies (with other people in the background), the internet held a virtual wealth of information about runners, racing, and more.

Hell, I’d been in Boston after the bombing, and between the video surveillance from stores and official cameras, and the cell phone photos and videos of the race, the authorities were able to track down the bombers in record time. I had contributed a handful of photos to the authorities at their request—after the suspects were caught, but as the prosecution was putting their case together.

Even though I was a reporter, I had been in the race, and had no trouble parting with what could have been key evidence, something I might not have been able to do had I actually been a reporter on the story.

I learned though. I learned the value of other people’s moments, the way that those moments captured one whole hell of a lot more than the photographer realized.

It took three full days of work, searching for races with Snot Rocket’s real name in them. Some of those races weren’t easily searchable—especially later races. Early on in the century, the internet was a lot cruder than it is now. If a race wanted to post results, they did so on a page on their website.

Sometime around 2010, those pages became private. You had to be part of the race or someone who knew how to get into those private pages to see them. Fortunately, I’d hacked a number of them, not because I was trying to get a story but, for one reason or another, my own listing in a race didn’t give me access to those pages. So I learned how to get access without waiting for one of the organizers to give me permission.

Now the race pages were on some dedicated site, one that you only learned if you actually paid for the race. Those would have been tough to find except that innovation had only come about in the last few years, and in the last few years, I had met Snot Rocket, and we were often in the same race together.

I worked from those backwards, developing a system: I looked up Snot Rocket—Dave—by name to find out where he finished. His finisher spot—almost always near the front—then provided his bib number. In the more recent races, I could search official photos by bib number, catching a glimpse of Snot Rocket throughout the race.

The later photos usually showed a man running alone. One of the photos actually caught him launching a snot rocket, and I marked it. I wanted Detective Conners to see it. There was no one else in the frame, though, so I doubt that particular loogie was heading toward anyone else.

Photos of these races showed him at the starting line, usually standing by himself, sometimes holding one of his ankles as he stretched. The photos at the end of the race showed him grabbing his medal from the volunteer handing them out—no graceful bow of the head so the medal could go around his neck, no smile. Just a gimme that now kinda yank.

Then Snot Rocket would walk away, usually out of the frame. Some photos at various races caught him on the way to the parking lot, medal clutched in his fist. A few showed him in the crowd. Often, it seemed, he went to the timer’s tent to see where he placed. If he was first, second or third, the spot that would give him an award, he would grab that early so that he could leave.

He almost never climbed on the podium—if, indeed, there was a podium. He always walked to his car, medals clutched in his hand as if he had stolen them.

He didn’t seem to get any joy out of collecting those medals. He had the same grim look of determination on his face that he had had at the start of the race, as if whatever prompted him to run hadn’t been satisfied by the simple act of completing the race.

The photos started to change four years back. He looked less Snot Rocket and more Dave. His hair was lighter, trimmer, and once in a while, he grinned as he crossed the finish line, pumping a fist or slapping someone else—a guy I didn’t recognize—on the back.

A closer look at some of the finisher photos showed Snot-Dave talking with people as he got a bottle of water out of the ice chest or waited to get on the finisher podium.

Eventually, I started to recognize the people around him. A dark-haired thin-faced woman, who was not wearing racing clothes, and another couple, both of whom seemed to be runners. They had bibs, usually wore the race’s T-shirt, and often wore compression pants. They talked and laughed with the thin-faced woman, who didn’t seem to smile all that much.

Indeed, her eyes had a wary, tired look, but I couldn’t see the source until I went farther back.

Farther back, she too wore racing clothes and an extra twenty to thirty pounds. That weight looked good on her. She smiled more, and that made her pretty. Often, she looked up at Snot—well, Dave. He looked more like a Dave here—with something like love and affection.

He usually had an arm around her, pulling her close. They would share water bottles, pose with their finisher medals, holding them up to the camera or mug with them on their foreheads or wrapped around their arms like matching bracelets.

Even farther back, there were the photos of young love, the meet-cute that every rom-com has, only here, the couple would have that awkward leaning into each other stance that people who were attracted but hadn’t yet committed to anything often had.

Before that—about ten years back—Dave ran with a group of young men, none of whom looked familiar. And before that, he would show up at races with a young woman (who had to be his age) who would stand at the sidelines, arms wrapped around herself, mouth a thin displeased line, as if she didn’t want to be anywhere near sweaty runners so damn early in the morning.

Roscoe had said Snot Rocket had two girlfriends. I wagered I had seen them both. Only one had been serious, and the other had been a flirtation, something that young people got into before they knew themselves well enough to know in the space of a conversation or two or three that the attractive person they were talking with wasn’t really right for them.

I made a list of all the people he seemed to socialize with, and if they had a bib number, I wrote those down too. Then I worked recent to less recent, trying to figure out who his associates were.

They weren’t as good at running as he was, that was for certain. They were recreational runners who usually ended up in the middle of the pack. Except for the final woman, the woman with the thin face, who lost twenty to thirty pounds. She did well in her age group, often placing first by a long distance.

Her name was Noelani Kahale, and, as her name suggested, she was originally from Hawaii. She had a huge social media presence, but it confused me. Her photographs were full of Dave. Noelani and Dave, running on the beach. Noelani and Dave, laughing before their sunrise run. Noelani and Dave, entwining their matching finisher’s medals at the end of races.

It wasn’t until I looked at the dates that I realized the posts I was seeing on all her platforms were five years old

There was nothing new.

Some people vanished because they closed or abandoned their online accounts. Others watched their lives to go hell and didn’t want to chronicle that.

I suspected something else though. Noelani had gone from a healthy tanned woman to a too-thin rail of a person who did not participate in runs.

I searched for her on the internet, and found the obituary almost right away.

Noelani Kahale, dead of lung cancer at 35. The obituary mentioned that she hadn’t been a smoker, and there was no obvious cause of the disease. It urged everyone to give to various cancer organizations and research foundations that were searching for causes of lung cancer in nonsmokers.

She had no children, and was not married. Her parents had brought her back to Oahu, and buried her there.

There was no mention of Dave or running or anything personal about her.

The friends had a big social media presence as well, and, it seemed, they had moved onto triathlons. They did not seem to participate in any of the local runs.

But I had found them, and I knew they might be helpful.

So I called, and left messages, asking for an interview, not mentioning Dave. Three of them never returned my call.

The fourth, the woman in the shot with Dave and Noelani and another friend, called, and set up a meet at a local coffee shop for the following day.

She assumed I was interested in her recent triathlon finish which was good enough to qualify for one of the bigger races in the fall. I let her hold that assumption. It was always easier to talk with people when they were unprepared, instead of prepared.

I also set up an appointment with Detective Conners—only I told him that I was officially covering the story, and that I would want whatever information he could give me. I would, I said, let him know what I had discovered as well.

He hadn’t sounded happy, but he hadn’t told me to stop investigating either. My sense that he was overwhelmed and not that interested in this case persisted, just in the ways that he addressed me or seemed to need reminding about the case itself.

I put my annoyance at him aside, and focused on the first interview. My subject, Jenna Wasserman, also had a large social media presence, with lots of friends and lots of activities. The man she had been with in those photos with Dave had vanished from her social media pages a few years back, so I assumed a breakup.

But I made notes, just in case.

I wrote those on paper, because I planned to use my phone to record the interview, just like I had done for more than a decade.

If she didn’t like that, I would record anyway, and call it all deep background.

***

The early morning meeting came after both of our runs. We were both rosy cheeked and bright-eyed, but we had both changed into business casual—khakis and somewhat dressy shirts.

She was on her way to the bank where she worked in the loan department, and I would go back home to make notes after the interview was over.

The coffee shop we met in was a wannabe Starbucks not far from my place. The baked goods were sinful and delicious, but the coffee was always watery and unimpressive. I liked the blueberry muffins, and had learned to order an iced tea with them.

Jenna ordered her standard coffee drink, took one sip, made a face, and set it aside. She said nothing about the quality, though, for which I gave her silent props.

She looked even more fit in person, and she had that glow that distance athletes often had, that sense of comfortable athleticism that gave her a grace with every single movement.

I asked if I could record, and told her I would take notes by hand as well. She had no problem with that. And because she was so cheerful and pleased about an interview, I did ask her about her athletic career—her recent success at triathlons, and the upcoming big race. I liked her enthusiasm.

I was sorry that I was going to have to squash it.

“I’m not just here about the triathlon,” I said to her. “I assume you heard about Dave Pyron.”

“No,” she said, with a slight frown. “What did he do now?”

Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

“He died three weeks ago,” I said. “I thought you would have heard.”

“Died?” Her frown grew. “No, I hadn’t heard. Why did you think I would?”

I decided to save the well, he was murdered. It was all over the news for a little later. Instead, I said, “Because I saw photos. I thought you were friends.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “We were never friends,” she said. “He was friends with my ex-boyfriend, Calvin.”

“You didn’t like him?” I asked.

“Calvin?” she said, deliberately misunderstanding me.

“Dave,” I said.

Her lips thinned. “I liked him a lot that first year. He took great care of Noelani.”

“When she was so ill,” I said, guessing.

Jenna nodded. “He did everything for her. He made sure she had everything she needed, he worked with home health care, he even paid for hospice when she lost her medical insurance.”

That was not the man I had expected. “But…?” I asked.

“Her parents,” Jenna said. “I blame them.”

“For what?” I asked.

“They did nothing.” There was anger in her voice, and her eyes flashed. “Nothing. They wouldn’t help financially, they didn’t come out for her surgeries, and when she was dying, they didn’t come to visit.”

I felt that tingle I both loved and hated, the journalist moment—the one that says, This is a great story, and I loved great stories. But I also knew that this was someone’s life we were discussing, and someone’s pain, and for that reason, the tingle irritated me.

“Then,” Jenna said, her voice getting louder, “they commandeered her body, and they could. Because she didn’t have a will or anything, and they were her next of kin.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

“They took her to Hawaii and buried her there, even though she wanted to be cremated. Dave told them—hell, we all told them she wanted to be cremated, but they didn’t listen. They didn’t even acknowledge Dave. He went out for the funeral only to find out that they didn’t even hold one. Just some ceremony at the grave site that she didn’t want.”

Jenna leaned back, and let out a small “whew,” then gave me a tiny smile.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m still mad about it all.”

She sipped the coffee and winced.

“I’ll wager Dave was too,” I said.

“He was livid. And not just at them. At everything.” She shook her head. “Everything was unpleasant with him. Everything. We would go to races, and he got viciously mean. Noelani had made him promise he would keep going. They were collecting medals from races all over, especially the ones you had to qualify for.”

“Like Boston,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, like Boston, which they did, and New York, which has some weird system that they couldn’t get through. And they were going to hit every Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon around the world, so now he was assigned to do that, and he just got angrier and angrier.” She wrapped her hands around that coffee cup, and then seemed to recall that she didn’t like it, and shoved the cup aside.

“So the medals were…?”

“Theirs,” Jenna said, threading her hands together on top of the table. “I kinda got the sense he resented it all, but he couldn’t get out of it.” She shrugged. “We all tried. We talked to him, and that didn’t do any good. It just made him madder. We suggested that he quit running for a while, and that really infuriated him. We suggested therapy—or I did—and jeez, I’ve never had anyone yell at me like that in my entire life. It was awful and scary, and for a minute, I actually thought he would hit me.”

That did not surprise me, given the level of anger I had seen at the Boston qualifier. It had seemed as if Snot Rocket had a deep well of anger that looked like it was infinite.

“That was the last time I saw him,” Jenna was saying. “I refused to go to runs if he was there, and that pretty much destroyed my relationship with Calvin.”

“He continued to go to the runs?” I asked.

“For a while,” she said. “Then he even gave up. I think I could’ve handled that, but he told me that I overreacted to Dave, that Dave wouldn’t hurt anyone, and I disagreed. I hate it when people tell you you’re overreacting and they weren’t even there.”

“He was nowhere around when Dave challenged you?” I asked.

“We were at a run, so Calvin was there, but he wasn’t right next to me. He couldn’t hear anything. And later, after we broke up, he called to apologize. I didn’t take the call but here…you can hear it for yourself.”

She took out her phone, opened it, and scrolled through the screen with her thumb. I didn’t say anything, not even to comment on the fact that she had saved a message from someone she ostensibly was no longer interested in.

“Here it is.” She set the phone between us, and clicked on a voicemail message.

Hey, Jenn, it’s me. I owe you a major apology. You said Dave was scary, and I told you that was an overreaction, but I was wrong. I should’ve listened to you. I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry.

Then there was some phone noise, as if he half-expected her to respond. And finally, he hung up.

“Did you call him back?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I learned long ago that guys like that think they’ve wised up, but they never do. He’d make the same mistake. He did make it a few times earlier, usually on smaller stuff. This was one that made me scared, and he dismissed it, and I decided that he wasn’t for me.”

I made some sympathetic noises, which were not fake. I was sympathetic, just not as interested in that part of her story.

“Would you mind giving me Calvin’s number?” I asked, just in case it was different from the one I had.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He moved out of state nearly a year ago. He wouldn’t know what happened to Dave any more than I do.”

“But Calvin can give me some background,” I said.

Her lips thinned. “I suppose. Just don’t tell him you got the number from me. I don’t want him to think I hung onto it or anything.”

I almost said, But you did hang onto it, and then I changed my mind. It was her business, and it had nothing to do with the story I was working on.

I thanked her, and ended the meeting. Then I got into my car and checked my notes on my laptop. The number I had for Calvin was the same one that Jenna had given me. He hadn’t answered before, and I doubted he would answer now. But I called and left another message.

Then I drove home. I had two hours before my meeting with Detective Conners. I needed some think time. Something about my meeting with Jenna bothered me.

I had just lugged my laptop and purse into the kitchen when my cell rang, with the ringtone I reserved for people I don’t know. I set everything on my already overcrowded table, and then found the phone inside my purse, barely managing to answer before the call went to voicemail.

“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “This is Calvin.”

I sank into a nearby chair. I hadn’t expected him to call. I thanked him for his call, then asked if I could record our conversation.

He paused for just a moment, then said, “Ah, what the hell.”

So I hit the record button and put the phone on speaker. He asked a few questions about Dave’s death, which I answered, and then he confirmed Jenna’s information, almost verbatim.

“So, here’s the weird thing,” Calvin said. “I don’t talk to him for years—I mean, we’re in separate towns, you know? Then he calls me out of the blue.”

Calvin was using present tense. Dave’s death hadn’t registered with him yet, even though he had known about it before he called.

“I’m all like green,” Calvin said. I wasn’t sure I understood him, and was about to say so, when he added, “I mean, I even work in the industry. We’re both engineers but on different sides of the environmental divide, if you get me.”

I finally did. I made an affirmative noise.

“So, he says, you always wanted me to get rid of the medals, melt them down. Can you give me the name of the company that does that? So I do.” Calvin sounded reflective. “I thought it was weird, you know. But I also figured he was finally moving on from Noelani. And maybe it was time, since he’d been so angry for so long.”

“Did you ask him about that?” I asked.

“Naw,” Calvin said. “We’re not that kind of friends, never really were. And besides, he hung up right after. It felt…I don’t know…abrupt, weird, off somehow.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“About a month ago,” Calvin said.

Not long before Snot Rocket died. That seemed odd.

“Can you give me the name of the company?” I asked.

“Yep,” Calvin said. “That’s the only reason I called. I was looking online at the stories about the murder and they mentioned that someone stole his medals. No one stole them. He’d gotten rid of them.”

“How do you know that for sure?” I asked.

“I got a friend who works there,” Calvin said. “I asked him to watch out for them.”

“Because you wanted to keep track of the medals?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t believe Dave would go through with it,” Calvin said. “But he did. It was one of the bigger hauls of medals that the company ever got.”

We talked a bit more, and then we ended the conversation. The medals weren’t stolen. They had been melted down. Snot Rocket was redesigning his life—whatever that meant.

I called Detective Connors and told him what I learned about the medals. He was already ahead of me on that. They’d found a receipt in Snot Rocket’s office for the medals, sent by the company shortly after they arrived.

“Still leaves us at square one, though,” Detective Conners said.

“Not really,” I said. “Let’s still meet in an hour. Bring me photos of the medals that strangled him.”

“They weren’t used to strangle him,” Conners said. “They were just hung around his neck.”

The way someone did when they finished a race.

“Bring them anyway,” I said. “I’ll bring my computer.”

“And what good will that do?” Conners asked.

“You’ll see,” I said.

***

We met at a different coffee shop, one he had chosen that wasn’t far from the precinct. The coffee shop was a lot more utilitarian. It clearly predated Starbucks. There was a menu for specialty coffees, but the menu itself seemed to discourage trying them. I got a bottle of water, which seemed safest, considering the filthy state of the yellow walls and linoleum floor.

I found one table that didn’t have crumbs, but I still wiped it off before I sat there. I put a napkin underneath my laptop. I’m not usually that fastidious, but some places just inspire extra precautions.

Conners came in, ordered “the usual,” and sat down across from me without picking up anything from the counter, clearly expecting someone to bring his order.

He slapped some pictures at me. They had been printed on a high-quality printer, showing the medals front and back. One medal was a finisher medal, the kind everyone got. The other was a third-place medal from the same race. And the third wasn’t from any race at all. It just looked like a race medal. Someone had engraved World’s Biggest Asshole on the back.

That detail hadn’t made the news, and I could see why.

I raised my gaze to Conners.

“We figure they’re all fake,” he said.

“They’re not,” I said. I recognized the first two. They were from a Boston qualifier nearly a year ago. I had the same finisher medal on my wall. I’d actually fingered the age group medals before the race, hoping I’d make my time, because those medals were pretty.

These weren’t medals you could find easily, and I knew, because I had researched it, that Snot Rocket hadn’t received any age group medals in that race at all—which was odd. He’d been placing well in other races at that point.

I looked up third place in all the male age groups first, just on a hunch, but I didn’t recognize anyone.

Then I stopped. “How did Dave die?” I asked. “I thought you said he was strangled with the medals.”

“That’s what the officers who answered the call thought. We let it stand, figuring we’d release cause of death when we had our suspect in hand.”

I nodded. “You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

“Blunt force trauma to the side of the head,” Conners said. “He fell or was pushed and banged his temple on a table. Whoever was there didn’t call for help—which might’ve actually saved him. Instead, they propped him up, put the medals around his neck, and left. He wasn’t found for three days.”

“You’re saying he was alive when that person left?” I asked.

Conners nodded. “Probably not conscious though. The ME thinks he lived another five, six hours or more.”

I couldn’t help myself. I shuddered.

“So,” I said, thinking about all that calculation I had done for strength and height, “it could’ve been a woman, then.”

“Hmmm,” Conners said non-committally. Which was a confirmation, in its own way.

I spun the laptop around and went through the podium photos, showing him the third-place finishers in all of the age groups. He stopped me after I had shown him the forty-to-forty-five age groupers.

“Can you email me the link to all of this?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and did it as we were sitting there. “You know who did it.”

“Maybe,” he said, slapped down a five for his non-existent “usual,” and left.

I studied the pictures. I didn’t recognize anyone. But I went through the names, and scanned social media, just because I was feeling a tad off. What I had thought I knew, I hadn’t known, and what I hadn’t known turned out to be important.

I found her in the thirty-five to thirty-nine age group. McKenna Granchester. She mentioned on several of her sites that she’d discovered someone new, that he was kinder than the other men she had known, and he was a runner.

And the real tell? She said she was helping him overcome a big loss. She tried to convince him to get rid of the past—to Marie Kondo it, in other words, get rid of all the clutter, stop hanging onto the loss, and move forward. He refused.

She wrote on Facebook: Some people just need to be pushed. He found the service that would recycle his stuff. I just mailed it all off one afternoon. He’d said he was going to do it; now he’s mad that I did. That’s weird, right?

People weighed in. They always did. And I didn’t care what they said.

I was just imagining the conversation. She’d gotten rid of his possessions, his memories of Noelani, the one thing Noelani had made him promise to continue.

He had a terrible temper, one that had scared Jenna, one that had upset the entire running group, and half the people who raced with him.

I couldn’t imagine what he would have done when he discovered that McKenna had sent his memories to be recycled.

The argument was for the cops to figure out, if they could. Had Snot Rocket pushed her first? Or just screamed in her face, like he had done with Jenna? Had McKenna pushed him away, which was what people seemed to do with him.

He probably tripped, fell sideways, and hit his head. And if she had called 911 right there, everything would’ve been all right.

But she had to put the medals on him—her medals, as a kind of fuck-you. And then she left him to die.

I got up, brought Conners’ five to the cash register, and left, feeling vaguely sick to my stomach.

I knew how to write this, once I got the information I needed from Conners, once she got arrested and the case started wending its way toward trial.

An angry man fell in love, lost the woman he loved, tried to rebuild but got angrier and angrier. Met another woman, thought maybe she was the one, and instead, she proved how very wrong he was.

He’d been trying to move forward—and that attempt failed.

***

Which is how I wrote the story. Without a mention of his nickname, although I did mention the snot rockets. I had interviews with a number of people, including the guy who pushed him at that last race. They’d gotten into a fight over starting position. Snot Rocket believed the guy had cheated and moved up several slots.

After I talked to him, I believed the guy had too.

That didn’t make Snot Rocket likeable. He had been an arrogant asshole, and he remained one. I empathized with a lot—the loss of medals, the loss of control—but not the way he responded.

And the anger, the anger was problematic.

I wrote the story. McKenna not only got arrested and immediately pled to manslaughter (from Murder 2), and she went away, and the story caused enough of a blip that I was able to keep my job through the next round of layoffs.

All of that, a month or two before the pandemic shut down everything, including racing. Everything except the media company I worked for. Suddenly, I had more to do than I had ever planned—none of it weird click-bait homicide stories.

With so much death in the U.S., no one really cared about strange little murders anymore. We were all trying to survive.

And yet…I find myself thinking about him. Snot Rocket. Not who he really was, but who he presented as at the races.

That filthy habit of his, the one that brought his nickname, has become something else in this post-COVID world. People are getting arrested for spitting on others.

And had races resumed, and had he not reformed, and had he been murdered then, think of all the people who would have had motive. He might have made them sick. He might have killed their loved ones.

And the way his grief had taken him, he might not have cared.

Not that it matters, because he died in the pre-COVID world. Along with his filthy habit.

The demise of the snot rocket came after the death of Snot Rocket. But not long after.

And neither, I must report, caused not a ripple in the world we find ourselves in. No one misses them. I get the sense that no one thinks of them, besides me.

We actually lived that way—with free-floating snot rockets and spittle and petty jealousies and shoving matches over medals. We lived that way, and saw nothing wrong with it.

In a world we no longer recognize as our own. In a land so far away it feels like another century.

I can’t say as I miss it.

But I think about it.

All the damn time.

 

___________________________________________

“The Demise of Snot Rocket“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Demise of Snot Rocket

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Collectibles, edited by Lawrence Block, Subterranean Press 2021
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Americanspirit/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

It is a holiday in US, so we are taking it easy and the installment is on the short side. Happy Memorial Day.

Something wet my hand. My eyes snapped open. Sometime between the waves of shivers and searing pain, my will had given out and I’d fallen asleep.

Bear lay next to me, licking the dry stalker blood off my hand. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw me stir, she sat up and panted.

My back ached, but the suffocating fatigue was gone. I felt strong again.

I flexed. No glitter. In her or in me. We had beaten the flowers.

For a few moments I just sat there, happy to be alive.

Bear danced from paw to paw, looking at my face as if expecting something.

“Are you thirsty?” I took off my helmet and poured some water into it from the canteen. She lapped it up.

The gashes on her shoulder and back had closed. I parted her fur to check. There was a narrow, pink scar, but even that was fading.

What was it Elena said about the stalkers? They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming.

I still had one stalker heart left. I focused on it, pushing as deep as my talent would let me go. The heart unfurled before me, not just glowing, but splitting into layers of different properties, each with its own color, as it had done when I panicked trying to diagnose Bear. It felt like the most natural thing now, as if my talent always worked this way.

I studied the layers. The toxicity was first, an electric blue. I used to see it as a simple glow. Occasionally I got swirls of color varying in saturation and vibrancy, which my brain somehow interpreted into data, but what I saw now was nothing like it.

My father used to collect topographic maps, detailed reliefs of mountain terrain in different parts of the world, with contour lines and color-coded heights: lighter color for the greater elevation, medium for the mid-lying areas, darker for the valleys. This was exactly like that, except I knew that the valleys were a healthy baseline, and the peaks indicated how much toxins affected a particular body system. Nervous and integumentary systems were barely influenced, the digestive and respiratory were moderately impacted, but the poison wreaked havoc on the endocrine, exocrine, muscular, and circulatory systems.

And I somehow knew that the integumentary system was comprised of skin, hair, nails, sweat, and oil glands. Yesterday I had no idea what that word stood for.

There was no point in puzzling over that. The more pressing issue was that the stalker hearts should’ve killed us. They didn’t. Why?

I focused on the next layer, the one glowing with pale pink under the blue. There was that unsettling feeling of falling through the glass floor again. Another relief, in red this time. It took me a moment to figure it out.

Regeneration.

I hadn’t seen it before, maybe because I was too focused on countering the poison. The stalkers were damn near indestructible. We’ve been targeting the glands in their neck, but given time, they would regenerate those. You had to deal enough damage to cause actual clinical death, otherwise no matter how badly they were wounded, they would bounce back. Good to know.

But the regeneration on its own couldn’t counter that shocking toxicity. More, that was not the way biology functioned. Eating cobra meat didn’t magically give you the ability to produce snake venom. Eating the stalker hearts should’ve just poisoned us, but instead both I and Bear healed our wounds and purged the poison.

On the other hand, regular biology couldn’t account for the emergence of the Talents, compound fractures healing in 7 hours, or a glowing gem passing through solid bone. We were in Arthur C. Clarke territory. Any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, and this was magic.

I sorted through my environment until I found some pollen traces and split that into layers as well. The toxicity was off the charts. I tried to look at the two of them together, the heart and the pollen, by superimposing one on to the other, but the picture was too complex. After a few seconds, both sets of layers collapsed, and I saw white again. This time I was blind for at least a minute. I had to be careful not to push myself too far.

The best I could figure out was that mixing the pollen and the stalker blood somehow negated their mutual harm while boosting the regenerative properties of the stalker’s heart.

It was a miracle that we survived. A roll of cosmic dice.

Once my vision returned, I flexed again. A quick scan of Bear and my body showed if not outright immunity, then a high resistance to both poisons. We could likely stroll through the flowers now, not that I would risk it unless we absolutely had to, and eating the stalker meat should be safe. At least in theory.

The memory of the horrible battery acid taste sliding down my throat made me shudder.

I checked my shoulder. The bite had knitted closed. The gashes on my legs from the claws had healed too. I had escaped death. Again. I couldn’t tell if it was the magical gem or my newly acquired regeneration. Possibly both.

Bear licked the hat clean and looked at me.

“More?”

I poured a bit more water out. She lapped it up.

My mouth was dry, too. I tipped the canteen and finished what was left. We would need to find a water source soon. Also, I was hungry. So very hungry. I’d taken my watch off because it broke, so I had no idea how much time had passed. I should’ve checked the bodies for a watch, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

 It felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. The stalker heart weighed about 2 pounds, and I had eaten a whole one just like it. I should’ve been full, but instead I was starving.  Water, food, exit. I needed to find all three.

There was something on the opposite wall. Some sort of shapes…

I picked up the hard hat and flicked the light on. 

Cave drawings, depicted in rust red and blue. A procession of some kind of beings, resembling raccoons or foxes, maybe? They were leading weird looking donkeys.

Danger.

A vision unfolded in my mind. A caravan of fluffy creatures departing, some being wrapped in rags begging on the street, and a feeling of alarm. Not deadly danger exactly but ruin. Financial ruin.

The vision faded.

“What do you think this is all about, Bear?”

The shepherd wagged her tail.

“Yes, I don’t know either.”

The woman who called me her daughter, the four-armed killers, and now the foxes, all distinct and morphologically different. Three separate species. Representatives of three civilizations? Or was it one complex society?

What the hell was on the other side of the breaches?

I had no answers and more pressing things to worry about. We had one canteen of water left, so we needed to get a move on. If we found a water source, I would need to wash up. My coveralls were drenched in stalker blood. My hair was bloody too and it stuck to my face and neck. I hooked the empty canteen back to the loop on my coveralls, put the hard hat back on my head, and nodded to my dog.

“Once more into the breach. Living the dream.”

Bear wagged her tail, and we started across the stone bridge.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

The stone bridge stretched in front of me. It was only twenty-seven yards long, but it felt like a mile. I shuffled across it, one foot in front of the other, my body weak and exhausted, and poor Bear heavy like an anchor in my arms. She was still breathing. I felt her every ragged breath. She was shivering and sometimes she would yelp, but she was still alive.

Almost there.

One step at a time. Almost made it.

Just a little further.

The little cave gaped in front of us. It was a nearly circular depression in the rock, about fifty feet across, its walls smooth, its floor empty.

I tried to set Bear down, but my legs gave out, and we both collapsed. I pulled myself upright and unhooked Bear’s leash from around my neck. Three stalker hearts tumbled to the ground. I had cut them out along the way, strung them onto the leash like fish, and then I put that grisly necklace around my neck. It was the only way I could carry it.

I chopped one heart into small pieces. My hands felt so heavy and clumsy. I scooped a handful of stalker stew meat and shoved it in my mouth.

It burned like battery acid.

I swallowed. Fire sliding down my throat. I chopped the meat smaller. The last thing I needed was to die choking on stalker’s heart.

The pieces of raw flesh landed in my stomach like rocks. My hands trembled.  I retched and forced it back down.

I’d managed to down one and a half hearts before the shivers came.  Cold clutched at me.  My teeth chattered, my knees shook, and I could not get warm. I slumped against the cave wall, shuddering. Bear trembled, turned, and crawled to me.

Tears wet my eyes. 

Bear slumped against me and rested her head on my thigh. I petted her. We shivered together. Time stretched, each moment sticky and viscous.

The shivers came in waves now. They washed over me, broke into stabbing pains, faded, and came again.

I had to stay awake. Something told me that to sleep was to die.

I shook Bear. She looked at me with her warm eyes.

I forced my quivering lips to move. “You have to stay awake.”

The shepherd looked at me.

“Stay with me. I’ll tell you a story. You were born into this new age. Your parents were probably born into it as well. You don’t know but it didn’t use to be like this. It used to be… nice.”

I stroked her fur with trembling fingers.

“I remember when the first gates opened. The government called them anomalies back then. One of them was right downtown. The military cordoned it off. Shut down half of the business district.

“At first, everyone was alarmed. There was news coverage, and theories, and the markets crashed. But the gate just sat there, not doing anything. Roger and I drove by to look at it. It was huge. This high-rise-sized, massive hole in the middle of the city, swirling with orange sparks, strange roots and branches twisting along its boundary, just out of reach. I remember feeling this overwhelming anxiety. Like looking at the tornado coming your way and not being able to do anything about it.

“I asked Roger if we should move. And he said, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ Roger was my husband and my best friend. Neither of us got along with our parents. I have no siblings, and he didn’t talk to his brother, so it was the two of us against the world. We discussed it on the way home. Our jobs were here. We’d just bought the house two years before. Tia was doing well in school. Roger’s company was twenty minutes from the site, and I was north of it, so if something happened, we’d have time to get out. We decided to stay.

“For two months the gate just sat there. People stopped talking about it, except to complain about the traffic. Then one day – it was a Monday. I don’t know why crap like this always happens on Mondays – one day, I had this long Zoom meeting with the San Diego office, trying to sort out the new advertising campaign. I kept hearing raised voices and then San Diego went offline.

“I came out of my office. Imagine the conference room crammed with terrified people, and they are all staring at the screen, glassy-eyed and completely quiet. There was a newscast on tv, and the journalist sounded so high-pitched, she was squeaking like a terrified mouse. The anomaly had burst and vomited a torrent of monsters into the city.  Downtown was a warzone. Bodies torn apart, cars upside down, and creatures that had popped straight out of a nightmare streaming across the screen…”

I remembered the burst of hot electric panic that shot through me. I knew in that moment that whatever plans we made and the future we thought was coming, had just died, smashed to pieces with a hammer of an existential threat.

“I stumbled away from the room and called Roger. He answered right away. He said, ’Pick up the kids and go home. Straight home, Ada, no stops. I’ll get there as soon as I can.’”

My eyes had grown hot. I swiped the tears off with the back of my forearm. My fingers were stained with stalker blood, and I didn’t want it in my eyes.

“These are angry tears. The fucked up thing is, I remember his voice, Bear. I remember how he sounded. Strong and sure. And I miss that. I miss that voice, I miss the old him, and he is a fucking shithead, and I will never let him back into our lives, but there it is.”

I swallowed and checked Bear. She looked at me. Still alive.

“I left the office. The streets were choked with cars. I’m on the corner of Grace and Broadway, right by that pancake place, and a cop is in the middle of the intersection, and this herd of people just tears out of nowhere and stampedes down Grace. The crowd runs past, and the cop is on the street on his back, not moving. I saw that man being trampled to death. Then a body falls on the street from above. I look up, and there are six legged things crawling on the building to my right and yanking people out of the windows, and up ahead, just past the IHOP, there is a high-rise apartment building. And it shakes, Bear, and then people start raining from it, jumping in desperation and just smashing onto the street. And I know it’s about to fall, so I jerk my wheel right, and tear down Grace Street in the direction the stampede had come from, because I have no place to go, and something tells me not to follow the crowd. It was hell on Earth, Bear. I don’t know to this day how I got out.

“I picked up Tia, made it to Noah’s daycare, grabbed him, and drove home on autopilot. At some point we passed Target, and it was on fire. We get to our house and huddle in the bedroom on the bed. The kids are scared, so I turn Netflix on and for some reason it is still streaming despite the world ending. We watch and wait.”

I sat in that bedroom and thought what life would be like if Roger died, and every time I imagined losing him, it felt like someone had cut my soul with a knife. Until today, those were the worst two hours of my life.

“Finally, I hear the code lock, and then Roger walks into the bedroom, wild eyed, disheveled, but alive.”

The relief had been indescribable.

“I hug him, but he doesn’t hug me back. He just stands there, stiff. I thought he was in shock. I make some frozen pizzas, we eat, and we stay with the kids watching Netflix.  Roger is distant. It’s like he’s gone into some inside place where nobody is welcome. At some point he leaves the bedroom. I wait until the kids fell asleep, check my phone for news, and then look for him.

“He is sitting on our front porch. He has a pack of cigarettes, and he is chain smoking, one after another. He quit when I was pregnant with Tia. Ten years later, that fucking pack still bothers me. I didn’t make him quit. He chose to do it. Either he had a secret pack – and who keeps a hidden pack of cigarettes for 6 years? – or he’s been smoking on the side and hiding it from me. Why?

“Anyway, I tell him what I saw on my phone.”

That conversation was branded into my memory. I could recite it word by word and in an instant I was right there, back on that porch, with the night encroaching onto the city and the blaze of orange in the distance, where Target was still burning hours later.

“They are saying that the anomalies are gates that lead to some other world or dimension. There are twelve gates in the US. Our outbreak is fifteen percent contained. They think they’ll have it under control in forty-eight hours.”

“Nothing is under control.” His voice was almost a snarl.

I reached out to take his hand.

He shifted away.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what you saw, but I’m so sorry.”

“I took 90 home,” he said. “The traffic stopped. Everything stopped. And then the things came. They went after the ones who got out of their cars first. Then they figured out that we were in the cars. I saw them rip a man apart right in front of me. They threw him on my car. His guts fell out of his body onto the glass. His intestines were sliding on the windshield, and he was still alive. I just sat there and watched him die.”

Roger stabbed the cigarette out on the step, crushing it.

“I sat there like that for three hours, waiting for them to find me. I didn’t know if you and the kids were dead or alive. I didn’t know if you made it home or if you were stuck like me. And the whole time I had this voice in the back of my head telling me that I needed to get the fuck out and take care of my wife and kids. I needed to nut up, get out of the car, and go find you.”

Oh my God. “You made it home. That’s all we wanted.”

He didn’t look like he heard a word I said.

“And then I thought, what if you were already dead? What if I never found you? And you know what I felt?”

I couldn’t tell if he wanted an answer. “No.”

He looked at me, and his eyes seemed feverish. “I felt relief.”

“What?”

“I felt relief. A burden lifted.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. Adaline, why would I lie about this now?”

I stared at him, stunned. What do I do with this? How do I fix it?

“The world is ending. This right here…” He held his hands out and circled the street. “This is done. It’s over. It’s over for all of us.”

“I think you’re still in shock.”

“Maybe. But I see things very clearly now. We are living on borrowed time. There will be more of these holes. They’re not just going to give up. We can’t beat them. I don’t know how much time we have left. Six months, a year, a week. Nobody knows.”

I’d gone strangely numb. A part of me knew he was talking and making words, but none of the sounds made any sense.

“I’m going to live whatever time I have left on my own terms. Doing what I want.”

He fell silent and looked at me. This was the part where I had to say something.

My voice came out wooden. I was so calm, and I had no idea why. “And what is it you want, Roger?”

“Not this.”

“Ah.”

“Not anymore.”

“Is there room for me and the kids in this new life on your terms?”

“No.”

The word lashed me.

“We’ve been together ten years. If you don’t want to be married, that’s fine, but you don’t get to just quit being a father. The kids have known you their entire lives. They won’t understand, Roger. They need you.  I need you.”

“It’s not about you or them. This is about me. I need something else.”

“Tia loves you. Noah adores you. That little boy can’t wait for you to come home. Every day he does a little dance when he sees your car in the driveway. You know what Tia told me while we were waiting for you? She said, ‘Don’t worry Mom, Dad will kill all the monsters.’”

Roger shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t kill any monsters. I didn’t save anyone. I just froze. And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life feeling like a coward.”

“So, you’re just going to abandon us? To whatever happens?”

A hint of something cold and vicious twisted his face. “I have a right to be happy. For however long I have left. I’m going to grab my happiness and hold on to it while I still can. This is done. We are done.”

“What am I supposed to tell the kids?”

“Whatever you want.”

He got up and went inside.

“And now you know how my marriage ended, Bear. I’ve had a decade to think about it.  I understand it better now. I was able to drive away from the slaughter. I escaped. He couldn’t. He just sat in that car stuck and waiting to die, and it must’ve occurred to him that he was doing that exact thing in his life. He must’ve realized something about himself that neither he nor I knew until that moment.”

I stroked Bear’s fur.   

“He’s down in Puerto Rico. He owns a boat and takes tourists out to the reefs to snorkel with manta rays. He is exactly where he wants to be. And until today, I was where I wanted to be. I manifested as a Talent three years after that first gate break. Yes, I got this job for benefits and pay, because I have bills and kids, but there are other ways to earn money. I do it because every time I find adamantite or aetherium, it makes us a little stronger. It gives us a better fighting chance to repel this invasion, and I will keep finding this shit until all the breaches are broken and all the gates are closed, so my children can have a safe, boring future.”

I realized that I was snarling and took a deep breath.

“I don’t blame Roger for the divorce. I blame him for being a shit father. I’ve tried, Bear. I’ve sent emails, I texted, I offered phone calls. He didn’t respond. The only communication from him was through the child support payments. That’s how I knew he was still alive.”

Another shudder twisted me.

“He works as little as possible, so he makes just enough to survive and maintain the boat. At first he was sending $200 a month, then $100 per month, then he stopped. I kept offering to send the kids to visit him or inviting him to visit us, and he cut that off. He said he didn’t want to see them. I finally had enough and had my lawyer email him an affidavit to relinquish his parental rights. I thought it would shock him into having a relationship with our kids. It came back as a scan in twenty-four hours, attached to a blank email, signed, notarized and witnessed by two people. He wanted to get rid of Tia and Noah that much.”

I gritted my teeth.

“I didn’t tell the kids, but I have the Death Folder on my desktop, with insurance, and the will, and all that crap. Tia knows about it, and that affidavit is in there.  Once my death is announced, they will learn that their father doesn’t want them. My children will think they don’t have anyone left in this world. People break promises all the time. Roger promised to love me. Melissa promised to be my friend. London promised to protect me.

“Promises must be kept, Bear. Especially to children. I promised Tia I wouldn’t die in this hellhole and I meant it. We are going to survive. We will get out of here if I have to crawl on my hands and knees all the way to that damn gate.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

 Here is a snippet from the story Rolling Tide of Darkness:

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UO5-16 Destroyed Hyperbridge Star System, Upsilon Sector

 

The first Necron-Xeno alliance convoy arrived in the destroyed star system with the usual explosion of expended energy as they exited hyperspace.

There were twelve ships in the convoy; they immediately sent out four cruisers to scout ahead of them. The rest of the task force then reoriented and set sail for the neighboring star system. It would take a few hours to cross to a point where they could jump into hyperspace once more.

Hazel Irons III was awake upon their arrival. The second generation clone was eager to get started. She knew there was a ticking clock; she needed to prove herself to her queen before an ansible transport arrived and the link to the alliance was established.

She also needed to set her hooks into the sector quickly. She was aware that their partners would no doubt be sending their own expedition. After all, they had been the ones to send the first two Preserver ships and find the partial hyperbridge to the virgin sector.

Her lips quivered in a smirk. Well, virgin to her queen for the moment. But like many virgins facing invasion, it would not be a virgin for much longer.

Soon the rather small and mostly unpopulated sector would be conquered and added to the collective. It would become a place for the alliance to grow more ships and fighters for the war to consume the galaxy. It would be a new unknown front against the Federation forces in the Tau sector.

All of that had to wait, however. She had a mission to perform. To do that, she had to push and exercise her limited initiative to dig her hooks into the sector as quickly as possible.

Once the Necron and AI navigators were ready, the ships jumped into hyperspace once more.

~///*\\\~

UR34DP-17 Empty Star System -Necron Cryptorium Preserver II

 

Cerberus, the Guardian of Tomorrow, stomped through the hidden base’s alabaster and black marble corridors to the command center.

He didn’t need to move in haste but did so because of the urge to do something, even if it was little.

“Report,” he barked, red eyes glowing with anger and purpose.

“Ship arrival detected,” a Necron voice whispered.

“Multiple ships detected,” another voice stated.

“Passive sensors are too far out to get a definitive identity,” the first voice whispered.

The knight paused and turned to the Caretaker as she gently laid a hand on his arm as if to brush past him. She glided into the room and then paused.

“Defense is my domain,” he warned.

“So be it. If we are in need of defense, you will of course be in command. But for the moment, we continue to hide.”

“Agreed,” the knight commander growled.

~///*\\\~

Hazel noted that there was no attempt to contact them upon arrival. That was irritating. She had been warned that the base was hidden. “Olly olly in free,” she whispered.

She saw the Necron ship captain turned to her.

She shrugged. “Worth a shot,” she joked. He did not react to her attempt at levity.

“Tough crowd,” she said as she looked around the room. “Have we established that there is no one else in the star system?”

“Confirmed,” a Necron sensor tech reported.

She looked to the captain. “May I suggest we transmit our IFF and any codes to get the Cryptorium to report its presence?” she asked mildly.

The Necron ship captain went over to his throne and tapped in a command. After a moment, a pulse could be seen echoing out from the flagship in a wave. A second pulse of information followed a moment later.

Attempting to make contact with the Cyptorium was important in the grand scheme of things, Hazel noted. The question was would they reveal their presence?

~///*\\\~

The Caretaker was on hand when the signals came in. The first identified the ships as from the alliance; the second was a command to contact the ships. That would of course reveal their location within the star system. “It has been confirmed. They are friendly and are aware of our presence,” she said with a look to the knight.

The rest of the council had been woken from their stasis slumbers and were present.

“Do you concur that they are not a threat.”

“They are not a threat … for now,” the knight ground out, clearly unhappy with anyone knowing of their location.

~///*\\\~

The ruling council was wary of the order to reveal themselves. Instead, they bounced a signal off of several rocks to hide their location.

The bounces delayed the conversation. It was ultimately in their favor; other than the order to reveal themselves, the newcomers did not have any other codes or a message from the Gravemind or Guiding Intelligence.

~///*\\\~

This post is all about audio.

Maggie Audio

This Kingdom is getting an audio release, and we are being asked about our input. We R Excite!

If you have a favorite narrator who is suitable to voice a 25 year old woman and does great male voices, lay your suggestions on us in the comment section. We are looking for a new to us narrator, so not someone who has voiced a lot of our work.

Inheritance Audio

The Inheritance Audio is in the works. We are right now looking at a split narration for Ada and Elias. This adds additional hoops for us. Because of the scheduling issues, the ebook and print copy of The Inheritance will likely come out a lot earlier than the audio. It’s hard to book narrators on shorty notice. But have no fear, the audio will be released.

AI Audio

On May 13th, The Guardian published an article regarding Audible use of Ai voices.

“We are bringing new audiobooks to life through our own fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology,” reads the announcement on Audible’s website. There are two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible’s AI technology.

Both options will allow publishers to choose from more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French and Italian to narrate their books. AI translation of audiobooks is expected to be available later in the year.

We will not be picking up that option. All of our narrators are human. This is why it takes so long for audio to come out sometimes.

Rogan POV audio

We are aware that Rogan POV didn’t make it into GA edition. No worries, we are working on it and hopefully you will be getting the extras with the next couple of releases.

The post Can Your Hear Me Now? first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

 Sitrep: Starting to ramp up on writing Shelby 10.

This snippet is from the story The Tour, a Federation story:

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Agnosta

 

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Nohar Yellow Tiger Rajestan was nervous but did his best to fight the jitters down. He’s been in stasis pods before; this would be no different.

He just didn’t like confined spaces. The pod was bad. But the coffin was a temporary evil; it meant he’d be asleep for the journey ahead.

He still wasn’t certain what possessed him to take on the journey. Orders obviously, though with his rank he could have gotten out of them had he wished. General Anhueser’s personal request and reminder that it could help him with his ongoing fear of travel too. His therapist Maddy had also been on that wagon.

He glanced at the nurse. She looked impatient.

“I’m going,” he muttered.

She indicated the pod.

“Okay, okay,” he muttered as he climbed in.

“It’s like taking a nap, sir.”

“I’m a warrant. Don’t call me sir.”

“Sorry, Warrant … ah, Chief Warrant Officer … um …”

“Chief is fine. Not that we’ll know each other long,” he growled. The nurse smiled and began to hook him up. A jack was attached to his implants to plug him in and monitor his vital signs. Additional sensors were attached for backup purposes.

“Can you leave the door open until I’m asleep?”

“That’s against protocol,” the nurse said with a frown. A doctor out of his range of view cleared his throat. She looked up. “… But I guess so, Chief.”

“I know; I sound like a kid,” the cat muttered, ears back. His fur was up. He knew he was anxious.

“Just try to relax, sir. The drugs can’t take hold until you relax,” the nurse said, voice dropping into a calming lilt.

He growled something but she kept moving. He could smell her since she was so close. Humans tended to like perfume and this one liked jasmine. It was a bit cloying, clogging his nostrils. He fought the urge to sneeze.

“Just close your eyes and picture a nice sunny day. Taking a nap in a hammock on a porch maybe …”

He let his eyes droop and then close.

“That’s good. Now, I’m attaching a Somnetic Delta Wave Inducer,” the nurse said. “It will help you fall asleep.”

Nohar grimaced but didn’t reject that. He had used the device a few times when anxiety had gotten the better of him and he’d needed to sleep. It was better and safer than drinking himself to sleep to avoid the nightmares. He felt the device being placed on his forehead. After a moment, there was a slight click sound and then he started to feel lethargic.

He heard the nurse say something in an approving voice and then nothing more.

---#---

Major General Pasha 101001 looked out the window as the shuttle continued to climb to orbit. As missions went, this one was better than most. It was also long overdue. He just wasn’t certain about it.

He had pitched the idea of an inspection tour to the Admiralty several years ago. He had thought it had been forgotten until a decision on high had come up. He’d been a bit wistful about seeing home again and had hinted about taking an assignment there or retiring. Apparently, that had made certain parties volunteer him for the mission.

His basic inspection tour had been bloated. The navy had provided one of their super fast couriers but they’d tagged their own IG inspector onto the mission. He’d been fine with that until the Marines had coughed up two of their own IG officers.

His staff had been pared down from seven to five including his AI Jack. One of his staff was First Lieutenant Angie Samara from the army AG office too, replacing his adjunct. That had been irritating. Not that he really needed someone to hold his bag.

Officers from Inspector General’s office from any branch of government were generally not well received. They were very much into nitpicking down to spot-checking the number of nuts and bolts in containers.

Pasha thought of his mission as showing the flag, going around and showing off to the public as well as the military personnel that the military did care about the individual bases and so on.

Of course before each arrival and supposed colonoscopy, the commanders of the AO would be busy scrambling to get everything neat and tidy. The rank and file might complain about such antics but it served a purpose. Well, correction, several purposes, Pasha thought. One was to put everyone on notice that they were checking in and cared about getting shit right. The second concept tied into the first; it was that if they were going to try something stupid, think twice, big brother was watching.

The third they all knew about already was for publicity and morale. The troops felt better when they knew that the bosses actually cared about them and their welfare. Listening to some of the troops and seeing them show off their skills was also important.

The senate Military Affairs Committee had gotten wind of the mission and sent their own representative from the senate IG office. He had yet to meet her.

He’d put his foot down at any additional people when he’d heard the mutterings about other government departments wanting to tag their own people in. The last thing he needed was a love boat with a couple dozen petty bureaucrats. Besides, the little courier could only handle eight passengers. Going with more people would have meant a bigger ship, which would have been slower and would have defeated the purpose of doing it fast.

Fast hell, he thought as the shuttle’s main engines cut off and they drifted to the station in orbit of the moon. He’d be lucky if the mission was completed in four years. He was expecting delays that would run them to five easy he mused darkly. He glanced over to his crew. They were all looking out the windows. He snorted to himself and then closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. Better to meditate than get drawn into some last-minute paperwork or some such nonsense.

---#---

 Sitrep: Some minor changes to the Bast cover. I'll get on that project probably tomorrow.

On to the snippet!

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Time Zone

Rita Geffen was having a normal day or thought she was. She came out of her building and put her ear buds in. She headed to her scooter to head to work but then stopped when she noticed everything was frozen.

She smiled, thinking it was some sort of flash prank. She’d heard about them played years ago. She thought of the people as mannequins or like a mime. But when she went over to touch a woman walking midstride, the woman didn’t react.

Even her dress was fluttering and the wind was blowing her hair. It remained out like that.

She looked around and saw a plane in the sky, just frozen in the air. Off to her right, she saw a distant helicopter. Again, just frozen. She spun in place and saw other things just frozen there. A flock of pigeons were nearby; one was pooping on someone. She could see the poop just hovering in the air.

“What the hell is going on?!?” she demanded loudly.

~~~~~~

Rashid Bashar had been working in the tunnels underground. His phone had no signal and of course no internet. When he came out to check on things, he found that the phone was still losing battery power faster than it should. It kept trying to find a signal. He had to put it on plane mode to keep it from draining the battery. He was confused about it until he looked around and saw the bustling market frozen in place.

“Allah …?” he asked in disbelief, eyes wide in surprise. It was near dusk and everything was just frozen. He didn’t understand. Nothing made sense.

~~~~~~

There was an eerie silence; it was so quiet it was scary. Like the calm before a storm, like when all of the insects went silent just before something happened. There was no sounds of birds, no insects, no machinery, no people talking, nothing at all. Darren Monroe realized how much you just tuned out all of the ambient noise until it was gone.

 “God, this is freaky,” he muttered.

He hadn’t understood what was going on. He still didn’t. It was 9 am and just … stuck. The sun didn’t move, the people didn’t, nothing did except him. He’d tried to take a nap and hoped it was just a bad dream, but when he opened his eyes, the world was still frozen. Even Max, his old buddy, was frozen in his dog bed licking his privates. The scene made him snort. Someone should make a sculpture of it or some such, he thought.

He pulled out a generator and plugged in an old radio from the back of his closet. But of course it didn’t work. He finally got a clue and tried his old CD collection. Those worked thankfully.

He didn’t have many; he’d inherited them from his uncle and just stuck them in a box because his mother had insisted that they’d be valuable some day. Now he was glad he’d kept them. The same for the DVDs.

Just hearing sound again helped him feel a little better. The situation was freaky, and he didn’t understand what the hell was going on but hearing the Top Gun album helped him somehow.

~~~~~~

Sergeant Ezra Falk of the Israeli army made his way through the apartment and saw everything and everyone just stuck in place, frozen in time. When he got outside, he looked around to see birds, planes, cars, people, all things that had once been in motion were just frozen still. Things that were falling were just stuck.

“Hello? Anyone in there?” Ezra asked as he waved a hand in front of the woman’s frozen face.

“Freaky, it’s like no one is breathing … and who the hell am I talking to again? You can’t hear me!” He turned around and looked to see everyone and everything just stuck in time.

“Does anyone know what the hell is going on?” he demanded.

There was just silence. No sounds of anything at all.

“This has got to be the weirdest damn dream I’ve ever had,” he muttered as he stormed back inside.

~~~~~~

Tammi Cabot started to make some headway on what was going on. It didn’t make sense but some rules were starting to become apparent to her.

Like that other people were frozen but if she got close to something, it began to move. The first time that happened it had startled her. She hadn’t expected it. But then it froze again.

She pictured a bubble around her, some sort of field that was allowing stuff to move.

She tried various ways to interact with stuff and then people. It didn’t work with the people though, at least not the same as the inert items. She wasn’t certain as to why.

One thing she did find was that once the item moved out of whatever bubble was around her it just stopped again.

She tried tracing a paper airplane she made, moving along with it. That was fun.

“Either this is a dream or God is nuts,” she muttered as she wandered around to see the sights and take pictures. She might as well make the best of the situation.

~~~~~~

Debbi Jordan was hysterical as she looked around at all the frozen people and things. She thought that she was dead. “I’m in hell? This is hell?”  she cried going through some hysterics until she began to hiccup. She finally hit the bottle and got drunk. She eventually passed out and never woke up again.

~~~~~~

Darren made a hell of a mess while eating a tub of ice cream and watching a DVD. He thought of a scene and snorted and then snickered. It reminded him so much of the first Home Alone movie. “Hey, I’m eating junk and watching smut, Someone better stop me!” he caroled loudly. As expected no one answered.

He started to get headache and thought it was eye strain. He shut off the DVD and got up to pee. As he walked down the hallway, he started to feel a little better.

In the bathroom, he peed and then hit the lever to flush the tank. Water actually went down but the tank didn’t refill. He played with the lever and then took the tank top off and fiddled with the innards, totally confused as to why it wasn’t filling.

He finally gave up after a moment and decided to deal with it later.

He opened the medicine cabinet and took an aspirin for the headache and then downed some water to wash it down and then went to eat.

~~~~~~

Lance Stewart made his way home and moaned when he saw his wife frozen. He studied her for a long moment and then gently touched her. The whole world was frozen; he didn’t know why. But he didn’t want to be alone.

~~~~~~

Tammi Cabot continued to record her video diary. She took tons of photos and video of people frozen in the air. She then dictated her thoughts, unsure why, or who would see it.

She spent a lot of time video recording strange stuff. It was amusing, and she started to look for the truly bazaar stuff.

~~~~~~

Darren went to sleep on his bed with his phone on his chest hoping it was all one bad dream. The alarm on the phone went off sometime later; He checked it hoping it was a call. He instead saw that it was a carbon monoxide detector. He was confused and rolled to the side feeling a bit disoriented.

It was still broad daylight outside. That confused him until he remembered the world being frozen. But that was a distant unimportant thing. He looked at the phone in his hand once more.

He’d set that app up at his mother’s nagging. He didn’t understand why it went off. His head hurt more and he was tired. He was very sleepy; however, it was a pain in the ass to sleep with it being broad daylight out.

He wasn’t going to go to sleep at all with his bladder full he realized. Well, it was time to do something about that he thought blearily.

He got up and coughed, and then he had to hold out a hand to steady himself to get down the hallway to the bathroom. Again, he noted that it was still daylight out. He held the phone in his free hand and wondered why he felt like he was hung over.

When he got to the bathroom, he looked out the window and saw that yes, everything was indeed still frozen still. He let out a long suffering sigh.

He unloaded his bladder again but this time he had nothing to flush tank when he hit the chrome lever. He grimaced in realization of that problem as the smell of his own urine wafted up to his nostrils. “Gonna have to plunge that or something,” he muttered as he got into the medicine cabinet and got another aspirin. He fumbled the bottle and lid but finally got one out. Of course several spilled on the counter, down the drain, and on the floor.

He didn’t care at the moment. He just wanted the pain to go away.

He popped the pill in and then took a swig of water from a bottle he kept on the counter. He used to have a cup for tap water but the damn ants had been all over it and groused him out. He leaned against the wall and wondered what the hell was wrong with him now.

~~~~~~

Before anything else: MAGIC TRIUMPHS is out from Graphic Audio today. Yay!

Gordon’s surgery went well. We got home safe yesterday and today he is in the home gym, working the shoulder as the doctor instructed. The doctor was pleased and saw no additional need to do anything beyond the expected scope of the surgery. Gordon was very put out yesterday because they did a nerve block and he couldn’t move the arm.

The first thing my husband did when I pulled into the garage is squint at the trashcans on the curb, left there since Monday was the trash day. I told him that I would take care of the trashcans, so I got out and headed for the recycling bin. I pulled it back behind the wall and here is my husband dragging the other trashcan back.

I made him coffee and bought yummy Krispy Creme doughnuts and got him a strawberry shake because his throat hurt. He did things like pick up the dog and pick up packages. Apparently, “a man has to do things” instead of sitting on the couch resting his arm in a sling like he is supposed to.

I stressed out a lot about the surgery. We came in at 7:00 am, as instructed, at 9:45 am they took him away, and I went into the waiting room, where the patients were represented by numbers on the screen. Each number had a color code that informed you what stage of the surgery the patient was at. It was supposed to be a short surgery. When I got there, his name had a green code meaning that he was in surgery. 10, 11, 11:30… Then I get a text. Surgery is starting. By 1:00 pm I was kind of a basket case and I bought some yarn I shouldn’t have bought in a moment of stress. I need to block Wendy’s Wonders.

Anyway, we are home and it’s back to the writing. And admin. So much admin.

I have a fun challenge for you. This is a rough sketch of an actual intersection in a major US city courtesy of Candice Slater. Some creative liberties were taken with the height of the building, but other than that, it is right out of Google Maps. It’s an interesting intersection, because there is a pancake restaurant in that red building on the left and an IHOP over there under the blue roof.

There are some clues in The Inheritance as the the general location. More clues will be give in the upcoming installment. The first person to recognize this intersection and name the cross street will get a character named after them in The Inheritance. The character maybe a hero or a villain. Comments on the blog only, please. Have fun!

Edit Mod R: Winners have found the answer, in approximately 15 seconds! Congratulations, JoAnne and Anton, sharing the prize! The Horde is unmatched, Interpol should either hire us or watch us, not sure hehe.

The post Name That Street first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

 Sitrep: So, Goodlifeguide is a bit saturated at the moment so no garuntees that we'll see the manuscript back before the upcoming holiday.

In other news, I noticed some blog posts complaining about my covers. So, I spent the week poking around at 8 of them. I tried a few before with mixed results. This time I took a piecemeal approach with many. Some are enhanced with AI some like Regeneration have no AI enhancements, I just shifted the point of view.

To be clear: Same book, just new cover.

 

I will be replacing the old covers with these in the coming days.

Crime scene investigator Pamela Kinney hears the bad guys outside her house and smells smoke, but only realizes the next morning the crime they committed—burning the flag that had covered her daughter’s casket.

Her police colleagues call it a small crime, but she disagrees. She must solve it, and she must solve it now.

Chosen as one of the best mystery stories of the year, “Patriotic Gestures” explores the fine lines that run through American culture, and sometimes through Americans themselves.

“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Patriotic Gestures By Kristine Kathryn Rusch  

Pamela Kinney heard the noise in her sleep—giggles, followed by the crunching of leaves. Later, she smelled smoke, faint and acrid, and realized that her neighbors were burning garbage in their fireplace again. She got up long enough to close the window and silently curse them; she hated it when they did illegal burning.

She forgot about it until the next morning. She stepped out her back door into the crisp fall morning, and found charred remains of her flag in the middle of her driveway. There’d been no wind during the night, fortunately, or all the evidence would have been gone.

Instead, there was a pile of burned fabric and a burn stain on the pavement. There were even footprints outlined in leaves.

She noted all of that with a professional’s detachment—she’d eyeballed more than a thousand crime scenes—before the fabric itself caught her attention. Then the pain was sudden and swift, right above her heart, echoing through the breastbone and down her back.

Anyone else would have thought she was having a heart attack. But she wasn’t, and she knew it. She’d had this feeling twice before, first when the officers came to her house and then when the chaplain handed her the folded flag which just a moment before had draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Pamela had clung to that flag like she’d seen so many other military mothers do, and she suspected she had looked as lost as they had. Then, when she stood, that pain ran through her, dropping her back to the chair.

Her sons took her arms, and when she mentioned the pain, they dragged her to the emergency room. She had been late for her own daughter’s wake, her chest sticky with adhesive from the cardiac machines and her hair smelling faintly of disinfectant.

And the feeling came back now, as she stared at the massacre before her. The flag, Jenny’s flag, had been ripped from the front door and burned in her driveway.

Pamela made herself breathe. Then she rubbed that spot above her left breast, felt the pain spread throughout her body, burning her eyes and forming a lump in the back of her throat. But she held the tears back. She wouldn’t give whoever had done this awful thing the satisfaction.

Finally she reached inside her purse for her cell, called Neil—she had trouble thinking of him as the sheriff after all the years she’d known him— and then she protected the scene until he arrived.

***

It only took him five minutes. Halleysburg was still a small town, no matter how many Portlanders sprawled into the community, willing to make the one and a half hour one-way daily commute to the city’s edge. Pamela had told the dispatch to make sure that Neil parked across the street so that any wind from his vehicle wouldn’t move the leaves.

And she had asked for a second scene-of-the-crime kit because she didn’t want to go inside and get hers. She didn’t want to risk losing the crime scene with a moment of inattention.

Neil pulled onto the street. His car was an unwieldy Olds with a souped up engine and a reinforced frame. It could take a lot of punishment, and often did.

As a result, the paint covering the car’s sides was fresh and clean, while the hood, roof and trunk looked like they were covered in dirt.

The sheriff was the same. Neil Karlyn was in his late fifties, balding, with a face that had seen too much sun. But his uniform was always new, always pristine, and never wrinkled. He’d been that way since college, a precise man with precise opinions about a difficult world.

He got out of the Olds and did not reach around back for a scene-of-the-crime kit. Annoyance threaded through her.

“Where’s my kit?” she asked.

“Pam,” he said gently, “it’s a low-level property crime. It’ll never go to trial and you know it.”

“It’s arson with malicious intent,” she snapped. “That’s a felony.”

He sighed and studied her for a moment. He clearly recognized her tone. She’d used it often enough on him when they were students at the University of Oregon. When they were lovers on different sides of the political fence, and constantly on the verge of splitting up.

When they finally did, it had taken years for them to settle into a friendship. But settle they did. They hardly even fought any more.

He went back to the car, opened the back seat and removed the kit she’d requested. She crossed her arms, waiting as he walked toward her. He stopped at the edge of the curb, holding the kit tight against his leg.

“Even if you somehow get the D.A. to agree that this is a cockamamie felony, you know that processing the scene yourself taints the evidence.”

“Why do you care so much?” she asked, hearing an edge in her voice that usually wasn’t there. The challenge, unspoken: It’s my daughter’s flag. It’s like murdering her all over again.

To his credit, Neil didn’t try to soothe her with a platitude.

“It’s the eighth flag this morning,” he said. “It’s not personal, Pam.”

Her chin jutted out. “It is to me.”

Neil looked down, his cheek moving. He was clenching his jaw, trying not to speak.

He didn’t have to.

She understood the irony of the statement. Somewhere in her pile of college paraphernalia was a badly framed newspaper clipping that had once been the front page of the Portland Oregonian. She’d framed the clipping so that a photo dominated, a photo of a much-younger Pamela with long hair and a tie-dye t-shirt, front and center in a group of students, holding an American flag by a stick, watching as it burned.

God, she could still remember how that felt, to hold a flag up so that the wind caught it. How fabric had its own acrid odor, and how frightened she’d been at the desecration, even though she’d been the one to light the flag on fire.

She had been protesting the Vietnam War. It was that photo and the resulting brouhaha it caused, both on campus and in the State of Oregon itself, that had led to the final break-up with Neil.

He couldn’t believe what she had done. Sometimes she couldn’t either. But she felt her country was worth fighting for. So had he. He joined up not two months later.

To his credit, Neil didn’t say anything about her own flag-burning as he handed her the kit. Instead he watched as she took photographs of the scene, scooped up the charred bits of fabric, and made a sketch of the footprint she found in the leaves.

She found another print in the yard, and that one she made a cast of. Then she dusted her front door for prints, trying not to cry as she did so.

“A flag is a flag is a flag,” she used to say.

Until it draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Until it became all she had left.

***

“I called the local VFW, Mom,” her son Stephen said over dinner that night. Stephen was her oldest and had been her support for thirty years, since the day his father walked out, never to return. “They’re bringing another flag.”

She stirred the mashed potatoes into the creamed corn on her plate. The meal had come from KFC: her sons had brought a bucket with her favorite sides, and told her not to argue with them about the fast food meal.

She wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t have much of an appetite.

They sat in the dining room, at the table that had once held four of them. Pamela had slid the fake rose centerpiece in front of Jenny’s place, so she wouldn’t have to think about her daughter.

It wasn’t working.

“Another flag isn’t the same, dumbass,” Travis said. At thirty, he was the youngest, unmarried, still finding himself, a phrase she had come to hate.

The hell of it was, Travis was right. It wasn’t the same. That flag these people had burned, that flag had comforted her. She had clung to it on the worst afternoon of her life, her fingers holding it tight, even at the emergency room, when the doctors wanted to pry it from her hands.

It had taken almost a week for her to let it go. Stephen had come over, Stephen and his pretty wife Elaine and their teenage daughters, Mandy and Liv. They’d brought KFC then, too, and talked about everything but the war.

Until it came time to take the flag away from Pamela.

Stephen had talked to her like she was a five-year-old who wanted to take her blankie to kindergarten. In the end, she’d handed the flag over. He’d been the one to find the old flagpole, the one she’d taken down when she bought the house, and he’d been the one to place the pole in the hanger outside the front door.

“The VFW says they replace flags all the time,” Stephen said to his brother.

“Because some idiot burned one?” Travis asked.

Pamela’s cheeks flushed.

“Because people lose them. Or moths eat them. Or sometimes, they get stolen,” Stephen said.

“But not burned,” Travis persisted.

Pamela swallowed. Travis didn’t remember the newspaper photo, but Stephen probably did. It had hung over the console stereo she had gotten when her mother died, and it had been a teacher—Neil’s first grade teacher? Pamela couldn’t remember—who had seen it at a party and asked if she really wanted her children to see that before they could understand what it meant.

“I don’t want another one,” Pamela said.

“Mom….” Stephen started in his most reasonable voice.

She shook her head. “It’s been a year. I need to move on.”

“You don’t move on from that kind of loss,” Travis said, and she wondered how he knew. He didn’t have children.

Then she looked at him, a large broad-shouldered man with tears in his eyes, and remembered that Jenny had been the one who walked him to school, who bathed him at night, who usually tucked him in. Jenny had done all that because Stephen at thirteen was already working to help his mom make ends meet, and Pamela was working two jobs herself, as well as attending community college to get her degree in forensic science and criminology. A pseudoscience degree, one of her almost-boyfriends had said. But it wasn’t. She used science every day. She needed science like she needed air.

Like she needed to find out who had destroyed her daughter’s flag.

“You don’t move on,” Pamela said.

Her boys watched her. Sometimes she could see the babies they had been in the lines of their mouths and the shape of their eyes. She still marveled at the way they had grown into men, large men who could carry her the way she used to carry them.

“But,” she added, “you don’t have to dwell on it, every moment of every day.”

And yet she was dwelling. She couldn’t stop. She never told her sons or anyone else, not even Neil who had become a closer friend in the year since Jenny had died. Neil, a widower now, a man who understood death the way that Pamela did. Neil, whose grandson had enlisted after 9/11 and had somehow made it back.

She was dwelling and there was only one way to stop. She had to use science to solve this. She couldn’t think about it emotionally. She had to think about it clinically.

She had her evidence and she needed even more.

The next morning, the local paper ran an article on the burnings, and listed the addresses in the police log section. So Pamela visited the other crime scenes with her kit and her camera, identifying herself as an employee of the State Crime Lab.

Since CSI debuted on television, that identification opened doors for her. She didn’t have to tell the other victims that she had been a victim too.

She took pictures of scorch marks on pavement and flag holders wrenched loose of their sockets. She removed flag bits from garbage cans, and studied footprints in the leaf-covered grass to see if they looked similar to the ones on her lawn.

And late that afternoon, as she stepped back to photograph yet another twisted flag holder beside a front door, she saw the glint of a camera hiding in a cobwebby corner of the door frame. The house was a starter, maybe 1200 square feet total. She wouldn’t have expected a camera here.

“Do you have a security system?” she asked the homeowner, a woman Travis’s age who looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her name was Becky something. Pamela hadn’t really heard her last name in the introduction.

“My husband put it up,” Becky said, her voice shaking a little. “I have no idea how it works.”

“When will he be back?” Pamela asked.

Becky shrugged. “When they cancel stop-loss, I guess.”

Pamela felt her breath slide out of her body. “He’s in Iraq?”

Becky nodded. “I put the flag up for him, you know? And I haven’t told him what happened to it. I’ve gotta find someone to fix the holder, and I have to get another flag.”

Pamela looked at the house more closely. It needed paint. The bushes in front were overgrown. There were cobwebs all over the windows, and dry rot on the sills. Obviously the couple had purchased it expecting someone to work on it.

Either the money wasn’t there, or the husband had planned to do the work himself.

“I can fix the holder,” Pamela said. “If you have a few tools.”

“My husband does,” Becky said. “I can show them to you.”

“I have a few things to finish, and then you can show me,” Pamela said.

She dusted for prints, and then, for comparison, took Becky’s and some off the husband’s comb, which hadn’t been touched since he left. Then Pamela went into his workroom, which also hadn’t been touched, and took a hammer, some screws, and a screwdriver.

It took only ten minutes to repair the flag holder. But in that time, she’d made a friend.

“How’d you learn how to do that?” Becky asked.

“Raised three kids alone,” Pamela said. “You realize there’s not much you can’t do, if you just try.”

Becky nodded.

Pamela glanced at the camera. Untended since the husband left. It was probably in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house.

“Can I see the security system?” she asked.

“It’s not really a system,” Becky said. “Just the cameras, and some motion sensors that’re supposed to alert us when someone’s on the property. But they clearly don’t work any more.”

“Let me see anyway,” Pamela said.

Becky took her past the workroom, into a small closet filled with electronics. The closet was warm from the heat the panels gave off. Lights still blinked.

Pamela stared at it all, then touched the rewind button on the digital recorder. On the television monitor, she watched an image of herself fixing the flag holder.

“It looks like the camera’s still working,” she said. “Mind if I rewind farther?”

“Go ahead.”

Backwards, she watched darkness turn to day. Saw Neil inspect the hanger. Saw Becky crying, then the tears evaporate into a stare of disbelief before she backed off the porch and away from the scene.

Back to the previous night. No porch light. Just images blurred in the darkness. Faces, not quite real, mostly turned away from the camera.

“Got a recordable DVD?” Pamela asked.

“Somewhere.” Becky vanished into the house. Pamela studied the system, hoping that she wouldn’t erase the information as she tried to record it.

She rewound again. Studied the faces, the half turned heads. She saw crew cuts and piercings and hoodies. Slouchy clothes worn by half the young people in Halleysburg.

Nothing to identify them. Nothing to separate them from everyone else in their age group.

Like her, her hair long, her jeans torn, as she stood front and center at the U of O, a burning flag before her.

She made herself study the machine, and figured out how to save the images to the disk’s hard drive so that they wouldn’t be erased. Then she inspected the buttons near the machine’s DVD slot.

“Here,” Becky said, thrusting a packet at her.

DVD-Rs, unopened, dust-covered. Pamela used a fingernail to break the seal, then pulled one out, and inserted it in the slot. She managed to record, but had no way to test. So she made a few more copies, feeling somewhat reassured that she could come back and try to download the images from the hard drive again.

“Will this catch them?” Becky asked while she watched the process.

“I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I hope so.”

“It’s just, they got so close, you know.” Becky’s voice shook. “I didn’t know anyone could get that close.”

It took Pamela a moment to understand what she meant. Becky meant that they had gotten close to the house. Close to her. The burning hadn’t just upset her, it had frightened her, and made her feel vulnerable.

Odd. All it had done to Pamela was make her angry.

“Just lock up at night,” Pamela said after a minute. “Locks deter ninety-percent of all thieves.”

“And the remaining ten percent?”

They get in, Pamela almost said, but thought the better of it.

“They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg,” she said. “Why would they? We all know each other here.”

Becky nodded, seemingly reassured. Or maybe she just wanted to abandon an uncomfortable topic.

Pamela certainly did. She wanted to play with the images, see what she could find.

She wanted a solid image of the culprits, one that she could bring to Neil.

Maybe then, he would stop complaining that this was a petty property crime. Maybe then he might understand how important this really was.

***

But it was her own words that replayed in her head later that night as she sat in front of her computer.

They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg…. We all know each other here.

She had lied to make Becky feel better, but the words hadn’t felt like a lie. Thieves really didn’t come here. There was no need. There was richer pickings in Portland or Salem or the nearby bedroom communities.

Besides, it was hard to commit a crime here without someone seeing you.

Except under cover of darkness.

Her home office was quiet. It overlooked the back yard, and she had never installed curtains on the window, preferring the view of the year-round flower garden she had planted. At the moment, her garden was full of browns and oranges, fall plants blooming despite the winter ahead. She had little lights beneath the plants, lights she usually kept off because they spiked her energy bill.

But she had them on now. She would probably have them on for some time to come.

Maybe Becky wasn’t the only one who felt vulnerable.

Pamela put one of the DVDs in her computer, and opened the images. They played, much to her relief, so she copied the images to her hard drive and removed the DVD.

Her computer at home wasn’t as good as her computer at work. But it would have to do.

She didn’t want to do any work on this case at the State Crime Lab if she could help it. The lab was so understaffed and so overworked that it usually took four months to get something tested. When she last checked, more than 600 cases were backlogged, some of them dating back more than nine months.

Those cases were bigger than hers. The backlogs were semen samples from possible rapists and blood droplets from the scene of a multiple murder case.

She couldn’t, in good conscience, bring something personal and private to the lab. She would work here as long as she could. Then if she couldn’t finish here, she might be able to convince herself that the time she took at the lab would go toward an arson case—a serious one, not a petty property crime, as Neil had called it.

Petty property crime.

Funny that they would be on opposite sides of this issue too.

Pamela went through the images frame by frame, looking for clear faces. Her computer didn’t have the face recognition software that one of the computers at the lab had, but she had installed a home version of image sharpening software. She used it to clean out the fuzz and to lighten the darkness, trying to find more than a chin or the corner of an ear.

Finally she got a small face just behind the flag, a serious white face with a frown—of disapproval? She couldn’t tell—and a bit of an elongated chin. Enough to see the wisp of a beard—a boy’s beard, more a wish of a beard than the real thing—and a tattooed hand coming up to catch the flag as the person almost blocking the camera yanked the pole out of the holder.

She blew up the image, softened it, fixed it, and then felt tears prick her eyes.

They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg.

No. They grew up here. And worked at the grocery store down the street to pay for their football uniforms at the underfunded high school. They collected coins in a can on Sunday afternoons for Boosters, and they smiled when they saw her and respectfully called her Mrs. Kinney and asked, with a little too much interest, how her granddaughters were doing.

“Jeremy Stallings,” she whispered. “What the hell were you thinking?”

And she hoped she knew.

***

Neil wouldn’t let her sit in while he questioned Jeremy Stallings. He was appalled she’d even asked.

“That sort of thing belongs on TV and you know it,” he’d said.

But she also knew he probably wouldn’t do much more than slap the boy on the wrist, so what would be the harm? She hadn’t made that argument, though.

Instead, she waited on the bench chair outside the sheriff’s office conference room, which doubled as an interview room on days like this, and watched the parade of parents and lawyers as they trooped past.

No one acknowledged her. No one so much as looked at her. Not Reg Stallings, whose brother had sold her the house, or his wife June, who had taken over the PTA just before Travis got out of high school. No one mentioned the friendly exchanges at the high school football games or the hellos at the diner behind the movie theater. It was easier to forget all that and pretend they weren’t neighbors than it was to acknowledge what was going on inside that room.

Then, finally, Jeremy came out. He was wearing his baggy pants with a Halo t-shirt hanging nearly to his knees. He wore that same frown he’d had as he took the flag off from Becky’s front door.

He glanced at Pamela, then looked away, a blush working its way up the spider tattoo on his neck into his crew cut.

His parents and the lawyers led him away, as Neil reminded all of them to be in court the following morning.

Neil waited until they went through the front doors before coming over to Pamela.

She stood, her knees creaky from sitting so long. “He confess?”

Neil nodded. “And gave me the names of his buddies.”

Pamela bit her lower lip. “Funny,” she said, “he didn’t strike me as the type to be a war protestor.”

Neil rubbed his hands on his pristine shirt. “Is that what you thought?”

“Of course,” Pamela said. “Every house he hit, we’re all military families.”

“Who happened to be flying flags, even at night.” There was a bit of judgment in Neil’s voice.

She knew what he was thinking. People who knew how to handle flags took them down at dusk. But she couldn’t bear to touch hers. She hadn’t asked Becky why hers remained up, but she would wager the reason was similar.

And it probably was for every other family Jeremy and his friends had targeted.

“That’s the important factor?” she asked. “Night?”

“And beer,” Neil said. “They lost a football game, went out and drank, and that fueled their anger. So they decided to act out.”

“By burning flags?” Her voice rose.

“A few weeks before, they knocked down mailboxes. I’m going to hate to charge them. There won’t be much left of the football team.”

“That’s all right,” Pamela said bitterly. “Petty property crimes shouldn’t take them off the roster long.”

“It’s going to be more than that,” Neil said. “They’re showing a destructive pattern. This one isn’t going to be fun.”

“For any of us,” Pamela said.

***

Her hands were shaking as she left. She had wanted the crime to mean something. The flag had meant something to her. It should have meant something to them too.

God, Mom, for an old hippie, you’re such a prude. Jenny’s voice, so close that Pamela actually looked around, expecting to see her daughter’s face.

“I’m not a prude,” she whispered, and then realized she was reliving an old argument between them.

Sure you are. Judgmental and dried up. I thought you protested so that people could do what they wanted.

Pamela sat in the car, her creaky knees no longer holding her.

No, I protested so that people wouldn’t have to die in another senseless war, she had said to her daughter on that May afternoon.

What year was that?

It had to be 1990, just before Jenny graduated from high school.

I’m not going to die in a stupid war, Jenny had said with such conviction that Pamela almost believed her. We don’t do wars any more. I’m going to get an education. That way, you don’t have to struggle to pay for Travis. I know how hard it’s been with Steve.

Jenny, taking care of things. Jenny, who wasn’t going to let her cash-strapped mother pay for her education. Jenny, being so sure of herself, so sure that the peace she’d known most of her life would continue.

To Jenny, going into the military to get a free education hadn’t been a gamble at all.

Things’ll change, honey, Pamela had said. They always do.

And by then I’ll be out. I’ll be educated, and moving on with my life.

Only Jenny hadn’t moved on. She’d liked the military. After the First Gulf War, she’d gone to officer training, one of the first women to do it.

I’m a feminist, Mom, just like you, she’d said when she told Pamela.

Pamela had smiled, keeping her response to herself. She hadn’t been that kind of feminist. She wouldn’t have stayed in the military. She wasn’t sure she believed in the military—not then.

And now? She wasn’t sure what she believed. All she knew was that she had become a military mother, one who cried when a flag was burned.

Not just a flag.

Jenny’s flag.

And that’s when Pamela knew.

She wanted the crime to mean something, so she would make sure that it did.

***

She brought her memories to court. Not just the scrapbooks she’d kept for Jenny, like she had for all three kids, but the pictures from her own past, including the badly framed front page of the Oregonian.

Five burly boys had destroyed Jenny’s flag. They stood in a row, their lawyers beside them, and pled to misdemeanors. Their parents sat on the blond bench seats in the 1970s courtroom. A reporter from the local paper took notes in the back. The judge listened to the pleadings.

Otherwise, the room was empty. No one cheered when the judge gave the boys six months of counseling. No one complained at the nine months of community service and even though a few of them winced when the judge announced the huge fines that they (and not their parents) had to pay, no one said a word.

Until Pamela asked if she could speak.

The judge—primed by Neil—let her.

Only she really didn’t speak. She showed them Jenny. From the baby pictures to the dress uniform. From the brave eleven-year-old walking her brother to school to the dust-covered woman who had smiled with some Iraqi children in Baghdad.

Then Pamela showed them her Oregonian cover.

“I thought you were protesting,” she said to the boys. “I thought you trying to let someone know that you don’t approve of what your country is doing.”

Her voice was shaking.

“I thought you were being patriotic.” She shook her head. “And instead you were just being stupid.”

To their credit, they watched her. They listened. She couldn’t tell if they understood. If they knew how her heart ached—not that sharp pain she’d felt when she found the flag, but just an ache for everything she’d lost.

Including the idealism of the girl in the picture. And the idealism of the girl she’d raised.

When she finished, she sat down. And she didn’t move as the judge gaveled the session closed. She didn’t look up as some of the boys tried to apologize. And she didn’t watch as their parents hustled them out of court.

Finally, Neil sat beside her. He picked up the framed Oregonian photograph in his big, scarred hands.

“Do you regret it?” he asked.

She touched the edge of the frame.

“No,” she said.

“Because it was a protest?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t articulate it. The anger, the rage, the fear she had felt then. Which had been nothing like the fear she had felt every day her daughter had been overseas.

The fear she felt now when she looked at Stephen’s daughters and wondered what they’d chose in this never-ending war.

“If I hadn’t burned that flag,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had Jenny.”

Because she might have married Neil. And even if they had made babies, none of those babies would have been Jenny or Stephen or Travis. There would have been other babies who would have grown into other people.

Neil wasn’t insulted. They had known each other too long for insults. Instead, he put his hand over hers. It felt warm and good and familiar. She put her head on his shoulder.

And they sat like that, until the court reconvened an hour later, for another crime, another upset family, and another broken heart.

___________________________________________

“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Patriotic Gestures

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published published in Scene of The Crime, edited by Dana Stabenow, Running Press, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Americanspirit/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Bonus points for correctly identifying the popular culture reference.

Drishya Chandran blinked her big brown eyes. On paper, she was twenty-one. To Elias, she looked about fifteen at most. 

It’s not that the kids are getting younger; it’s that I’m getting older.

“I’m sorry,” Drishya said. “I honestly didn’t see anything.”

They had commandeered the Elmwood Public Library and through the glass window of the conference room Elias could see the gate looming like a dark hungry mouth, bathed in the glow of the floodlights. No matter how many lives they threw into it, it would never be enough. It was past one in the morning, and he was out of coffee.

“Walk me through it one more time,” he said.

“The drill head jammed,” Drishya said. “I showed it to Melissa. She said to go get the new one from the cart in the tunnel. I went to get it. The next thing I know Wagner is running out of the tunnel, and Melissa is behind him, and her face doesn’t look right. I’m like okay, I guess we are doing that now, so I turned around and ran to the gate. I heard an explosion behind us, so I didn’t look back. I didn’t even know London made it until I was out.”

“Why was the cart in the tunnel and not at the site?” Elias asked.

“It didn’t fit. The site slopes to the stream and there wasn’t a lot of flat ground, so we could only get three of the four carts in.” Drishya counted off on her fingers. “Cart One had the generator, lights, and first aid, so it had to come in. Carts Two and Three were for the ore. Adamantite is heavy, so we didn’t want to carry it too far. Cart Four with the spare parts had to live outside.”

“So there was adamantite at the site?” He’d read Leo’s notes of Melissa’s interview, but it seemed almost unbelievable that so much adamantite could exist in one place.

“Oh yes. That’s how my drill broke. Chipped off a chunk this big.” Drishya held her hands out as if lifting an invisible basketball.

“Was the adamantite in plain view?”

The miner shook her head. “No. Buried, and half of it underwater. It took the DeBRA about 10 minutes to find it. She had to mark it with paint for us.”

Was this why they were attacked? Was something protecting the ore?

Drishya sighed. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Everyone is dead.”

“It is, and they are,” Elias confirmed.

“I knew we would get a big bonus when we found the gold, and then the DeBRA came up with adamantite. I was so excited. I thought I could finally put a deposit on the house. My mom isn’t doing so well. I’ve got to get us out of the apartment, and I’m the only one working.”

Gold? What gold? “I’m sorry your mother is in bad health, and that you had to go through this trauma. You may want to see Dr. Park. He has a room set up downstairs.”

“I’m okay. I didn’t see any of it,” Drishya said. “I’ve only been working for 6 months. I didn’t even know people that well…”

He’d seen this before. Some people grieved when faced with death, others got angry, and some tried to disconnect themselves from what happened.

“I understand,” he said. “Still, it might be a good idea. You’ve lost colleagues in a sudden traumatic way. Things like that can fester.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“So how much gold was there?”

“A lot. It was everywhere in the water, like rocks. We weren’t even drilling; we were pulling it out by hand. Nuggets the size of an apple. We ended up dumping like fifty pounds of it to make room for the adamantite, and we’d been only gathering it for about five minutes.”

“I see. I appreciate your help, Ms. Chandran. The guild is grateful for your assistance. Please get some rest.”

She got up and paused. “You are a lot less scary than I thought you would be.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Just so you know, Wagner told me not to talk to you.”

Elias raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He said that miners don’t go into the breaches with guildmasters. They go with escort captains. He said it was something to keep in mind.”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

She nodded and walked out.

Elias pulled up the interview notes on his tablet. Neither Melissa nor London said anything about the gold. Malcolm wouldn’t have seen the adamantite, but gold was an entirely different beast.

Was it just gold? Was that it? He’d been wracking his brain, trying to find the reason for the lapse in procedure, having this back and forth with Leo, wondering what he was missing, and all this time, the answer was depressingly simple. Well, no shit, Sherlock, here it is. Greed.

He had put so many regulations and checks in place, and somehow greed always won. He was so fucking tired. Things were much simpler in the breach. The enemy was in front, the support was behind, and he didn’t have to wade through the swamp of human failings. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room and into his armor. He had a powerful urge to slice something with his sword.

Leo appeared in the open doorway like a wraith manifesting, met his gaze, and stepped back.

“Come inside and shut the door,” Elias growled.

Leo came in and closed the door behind him.

“Sit.”

Leo sat.

“Why do baby miners think I’m scary?”

“Because you are, sir. Most people find a man who can cut a car in a half with a single strike and then throw the pieces at you frightening.”

“Hmm.”

“Also we offer the highest pay and the best benefits among the top tier guilds, and you are their boss who holds their livelihood in his gauntleted fingers…”

Elias raised his hand. “Did you know there was gold at the mining site?”

Leo’s eyes flashed with white. “I did not.”

“Apparently it was in the water. Nuggets the size of apples. Finally, I know something before you do.”

“Congratulations, sir.”

Elias let that go, pulled up the map of the site on his tablet, and pointed at the three tunnels, each carrying a current of water that merged into a single stream. “Gold washes downstream.”

“Malcolm left the tunnels open because he wanted to maximize the profit from the site.”  Leo’s face snapped into a hard flat mask. “He must’ve expected that once they cleared the site, they would gather more gold upstream.

“Remind me, how much did Malcolm make last year?”

“Seven million.”

“I want to know why gold got him so excited that he risked nineteen lives by leaving the tunnels unsecured.”

“Nineteen?” Leo frowned. “The mining crew, the escort, the DeBRA…”

“And the dog.”

“Oh.”

“Malcolm took a significant risk. That’s not just greed. That’s desperation. How are his finances?”

“Squeaky clean as of the last audit, which was two months ago. Credit score of 810, low debt to assets, less than 10K owed on credit cards. I’m following up on a couple of things. We should know more in a few hours. Do you want me to get Wagner in to talk to you?”

“He won’t tell me anything. Wagner is forty-nine years old. He was a coal miner before the gates appeared, and we are his third guild. He’s used to getting screwed over by his bosses.”

“So, he developed an adversarial relationship with us despite fair treatment,” Leo said.  “Seems counterintuitive.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of treatment he gets. He’s cooked. He doesn’t trust us, he will never trust us, and he will always resent us no matter how many benefits he gets.”

“That’s not even logical.”

“It isn’t. It’s an ingrained emotional response. Trust me, we won’t get anything out of him. I’d like you to reinterview Melissa instead. As you said, I’m scary, so she may do better with you. Don’t be confrontational. Be sympathetic and understanding. Make it us against the government: we need to tell the DDC something and we need her help to make them go away. Imply that her cooperation will be remembered and appreciated.”

Leo nodded. “Should I bring up the families?”

Elias shook his head. “Normally the foreman would be the last to get out, just before the escorts. She was at the head of the pack. Either she was incredibly lucky, or she abandoned her crew and ran for her life. Either way, there is guilt there. If you lean too hard on it, she might shut down. Go with ‘you were just doing your job, and we don’t blame you for surviving’ instead. Get her a coffee, get some cookies, interview her in a comfortable setting, and see if she thaws and starts talking. If she goes off on a tangent, let her. Don’t rush. You are her friend; you are there to listen.”

Leo nodded. “Will do.”

“Did Haze get the children?”

“Yes. They’ve just arrived at HQ. I still don’t think this is wise.”

Twenty-eight people died in the breach. Fourteen members of the assault crew, nine miners, four escorts, and Adaline Moore. Twelve of the deceased left behind minor children. Of all of them, only Adaline Moore’s kids had no immediate family to take care of them.

The media devoured any news related to the guilds and gates, and the death of a prominent DeBRA would set off fireworks. Once the news broke, Adaline’s children would become the center of a news cycle. They would be overwhelmed, used, wrung dry for the sake of the cheap emotional punch, and then abandoned to their grief. If they were lucky, the country would forget they existed. If they were unlucky, someone would take note of two vulnerable orphans with a million-dollar life insurance payout.

“I will not allow Adaline’s children to be fed to the media circus,” Elias said. “They are safer at the Guild HQ. DDC hasn’t made any notifications yet, but we both know it will get out. I don’t need some asshole showing up at their door, sticking a microphone into their faces, and asking how they feel about their mother dying. All Haze told them was that Adaline is missing in the breach. They will find out what happened from me, personally.”

He would take care of that in the morning.

“Adaline Moore would have made provisions,” Leo said.

“I’m sure she did. Until we know what they are, we will take care of it.”

“This will be seen as Cold Chaos controlling access to the children because we have something to hide. We are trying to minimize the media’s attention, but they love conspiracies. In an effort to keep the story small, we may end up making it bigger.”

“That’s fine. If they want to paint us as the villain of that story, let them. We will survive. We are the third largest guild in the country.”

Leo sighed quietly.

“I called Felicia,” Elias told him.

Felicia Terrell was a powerhouse attorney, and she specialized in guild-related litigation. He spoke to her two hours ago. She called him a marshmallow and promised to show up first thing in the morning. The children would be well protected from everyone, including Cold Chaos.

Elias leaned back. He was so over it. As soon as he hammered the assault team together, he would enter the gate. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room. There was no politics in the breach.

Leo was still sitting in the chair. Some other problem must’ve reared its ugly head.

“Lay it on me,” Elias said.

“We can’t find Jackson.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find him?”

“He was supposed to fly out of Tokyo twenty minutes ago. He didn’t make it to the plane, and he isn’t answering his phone. I’m on it.”

Jackson was arguably the best healer in the US. He didn’t drink, he didn’t do drugs, and his biggest vice was collecting expensive bonsai. The man did not go AWOL. Jackson was always where he was supposed to be. He was calm, competent, powerful, and respected wherever he went, because he did things like walk into other guilds’ gates and rescue their assault teams from disaster when asked. Nothing could happen to Jackson.

“Do whatever you have to do, but find him, Leo.”

The XO nodded. “I will.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This has not been the best year, and I feel that I’ve been under water for most of 2025. But this morning it occurred to me that I’ve never posted the cover for The Wild Road here, so first things first.   Cover art by Jody Lee. The Wild Road is the second book in the series; it follows Hunter’s Redoubt. I have been working on the third book, but ‘working’ means starting it over and over again. But this morning when I woke up, I had that flash of insight that meant I’d been starting from the wrong place. Again. All West novels do this. To be fair to me, much of April was taxes and house repairs and copy edits (Cast … Continue reading →

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things just isn’t the same

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things just doesn’t belong

Can you guess which one before we finish this song?

 Sitrep:

I sent MV8 off to Rea on Monday. She got it back to me yesterday, and I did the edits and then sent it off to Goodlifeguide for final formatting. There are... 5 stories? Two new original science fiction, 2 Federation stories, and 1 PRI story.

We'll see if I get it back before Memorial Day. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I've spent the past week running 8 of my old covers through SeaArt to enhance them. I am wrapping up the last one but I'm torn. I'm not sure if I should go with the enhanced original design or one of Bast.

I'll post the new covers in a later post.

Anyway, on to the snippet!

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Invasion

 

Yep, another alien invasion story. But this one has been kicking around for a while. I think it came up after seeing some of the invasion stories where humanity looses initially? Like Falling Skies and such. Of course, I have to put my own twist on things. :)

Glen Aurellius was out hunting but aware it wasn’t a good time for it. Most of the animals were active at dawn and dusk. But he had to hunt; he only had so much food on him. His backpack was filled with odds and ends to help him survive but was light on fresh food.

He really needed to stop for a while and try to smoke whatever he caught so it would last longer. Either that or trade the excess again or give it up rather than have another survivor try to rob him of it. It wasn’t worth the fight.

He heard some motion in the ferns up ahead and paused. He knelt slowly, feeling the ache in his knees from the motion, but he ignored it as he pulled his bow up and notched an arrow.

The animal that came out of the bush was a feral pig, maybe six months to a year old. It wasn’t very bright; it went for the pile of nuts and berries he’d left out as bait.

He lined up his hunting arrow and made certain he had a solid shot before he let loose. The arrow swished and hit the pig in the shoulder. It squealed in surprise and tried to run but stumbled.

He snapped another arrow up and shot the beast before it got too far. He wasn’t in the mood to chase it. That arrow hit the head though and had a point not a broad head. It didn’t have the power to penetrate the skull. It stuck out like one of those spears used to torment fighting bulls.

He didn’t think of that much as he pulled a third arrow and shot it. That caught the pig in the ass. It stumbled and then fell as its movements and the broad head arrow tore something vital within it. It finally fell gasping into the ferns and dirt.

Glen went over and used his bowie knife to slit the throat as the pig twitched. He didn’t want it to come back to life. He knew he was being stupid; you were supposed to wait until the kill was dead but he didn’t feel safe.

He watched the blood flow as he pulled his arrows and examined them. He flicked a bit of gore off one and frowned at the tip of the second arrow. The metal was okay but the arrow wood behind it had a slight crack. That’s what he got for using a point and not using composite arrows.

He shook his head and cleaned the tip on the bristle hide of the fallen beast. He was going to eat well tonight even though he wasn’t too fond of pork. Oh, bacon was fine, but ham was a bit greasy.

Still, food was food.

He put the arrows in the quiver and set it on top of his pack and the bow and then got to work. He pulled a camping rope out and tossed one end over the tree limb above. He knotted the other around a rear leg and then yanked it up. Once the pig was jacked up, he tied off the rope and gutted it.

He was working fast and dirty, there was no telling what was in the area. A bear, wolverine, big cat, or anything else. The smell of blood would attract other predators soon enough. The flies would get fierce too in the early summer heat.

He flicked a fly away and then began to portion the pig up. It was only eighty pounds or so, sixty with the offal unloaded. He left the head and some of the bones behind. He wrapped the rest in a piece of plastic and then tested it as he got up.

At forty-two he thought he could handle the pack and meat but it was not going to be a pleasant haul. He was going to need to find shelter soon as well as some firewood. Once he was somewhere dependable, he could break the meat down further.

Scavengers were welcome to the leftovers or ex-wives, whichever came first he thought in amusement.

He had been married and divorced twice. He’d been something of a JOAT, bouncing around with careers. He’d never really found his calling. His dreams of being in the military had died when he’d been injured in a football game. From there he’d moved on to a few other career paths. He had loved science fiction though, which was why he’d ended up on the west coast.

Now he was trying to make it back to the east coast to the old family farm, if it even existed. Picking his way on foot was a bitch though. There were no vehicles running; anyone stupid enough to get one going usually ended up as target practice for the bastards in orbit.

Involuntarily, he glanced to the sky. It was not quite noon; he had plenty of time to find shelter.

He heard a commotion ahead of him and instinctively paused and then turned. He wasn’t certain what it was but he didn’t want to encounter it with so much weight and his primary weapons locked down behind him. At the moment, he had his machete and knife available.

He walked around a big tree but then paused and slowly put his hands up at the sight of an alien Centaur standing there holding a rifle. A human in camo was standing next to him.

“Well, what do we have here?” the guy said. “I didn’t know we ordered take out, but I think we’ll take it to go,” the guy said.

Glen had a sinking heart. The sounds of something moving in the brush intensified. He turned his head slightly and saw another Centaur charge up and then stop. It snorted at him. It was holding a rifle in its arms casually.

“Um, hi, guys?” Glen said.

The other human snorted. “I believe lunch is served,” he said as he indicated that Glen should unload.

Glen sighed and hoped it was just a robbery.

~~~*~~~

The rollercoaster note is still in effect: this will be a scary ride, but it will arrive safely. Ada is not a pushover.

Something was wrong with Bear.

We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels. Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all. I was so worn down, I could barely move. My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.

Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.

Bear whined and fell.

Oh god.

I dropped on my knees by her. “What is it?”

The shepherd looked up at me, her eyes puzzled and trusting.

I flexed, focusing on her body, concentrating all of my power on her. What was it? Blood loss, infection…

The faint outline of Bear’s body glowed with pale green, which told me nothing. I had to push deeper. I focused my power into a thin scalpel and used it to slice through the surface glow.

It resisted.

I sliced harder.

Harder!

It  broke, splintering vertically into layers, and I punched through it. It was almost like falling through the floor to a lower level.

Bear’s body lit up with pale blue, the glow tracing her nerves, her blood vessels, and her organs. I had never before been able to do that, but that didn’t matter now.

Toxin. She was filled with it. I saw it, tiny flecks glowing brighter as they coursed through her like some deadly glitter. I had to find the origin of it. Was it from a stalker bite? No, the concentration of poison wasn’t dense there. Then what was it? Where was it the highest?

Her lungs. That fucking glitter saturated her lungs, slipping into her bloodstream with every breath. I had to go deeper. I pushed with my power. Before, it was like trying to slice through glass. Now it felt like punching through solid rock, and I hammered at it.

The top layer of the blue glow cracked, revealing a slightly different shade of blue underneath. I hit it again and again, locked onto the glitter with every drop of willpower I had.

The tiny specks expanded into spheres. What the hell was that?

I pounded on the glow, trying to enlarge it. The spheres came into greater focus. They weren’t uniformly round; they had four lobes clumped together and studded with spikes.

What are you? Where did you come from?

A flash of white cut my vision. I went blind. It lasted only a moment, but I knew I hit a wall. I wasn’t going any deeper. I would have to work at this level.

I blinked, trying to reacquire my vision.

My thighs were glowing with blue.

I jerked my hands up. Pale glitter swirling through my arms and fingers. This dust, this thing was inside me too, and I couldn’t identify it.

We were both infected, and it was killing us.

Panic drenched me in icy sweat. I wanted to rip a hole in my legs and just force the glitter out.

Bear whined softly like a puppy.

I was losing her. She trusted me, she followed me, and she fought with me, and now she was dying.

“You can’t die, Bear. Hold on. Please hold on for me.”

Bear licked my hand.

The urge to scream my head off gripped me. Wailing wouldn’t help. If only I could identify the poison.

Why couldn’t I identify it? Was it because it was inside us and it had become part of us? Or was I just not strong enough to differentiate it from our blood? It had started in the lungs, so we must have inhaled it.

I took a deep breath and exhaled on my hands.

There it was! A trace of the lethal glitter. I focused on it. The four-lobes spiked clumps, swirling, swirling… Something inside me connected, and I saw a faint image in my mind. The mauve flowers. We had been poisoned by their pollen.

I flexed harder, stabbing at the pollen with my talent. The tiny flecks opened up into a layered picture in my mind, and the top layer showed how toxic it was…

Oh god.

We were almost out of time. We needed an antidote. Now.

I strained, trying to access whatever power lay inside me, the same one that showed me the Grasping Hand and gave me the stalkers’ name. It didn’t answer.

Please. Please help me.

Nothing.

We would die right here, in this tunnel. I knew it, I could picture it, me wrapped around Bear, hugging her as we both grew cold…

No. There had to be an answer. We hadn’t come all this way to lay down and die. We did not kill and fight all these damn stalkers –

The stalkers. The stalkers went to the lake to drink. The flowers were all over the shore, but the stalkers had died because the lake dragon had torn them apart. The flowers didn’t poison them.

I jumped to my feet and ran to the nearest corpse. My talent reached out and grasped the body. There was pollen on the fur and on the muzzle and a faint smudge in the lungs, but none anywhere else. Not a trace in the blood. They were immune.

The poison had to be eliminated in the bloodstream. If it was purged in the liver or any other organ, there would’ve been traces of it in the blood vessels but there were none.

I flipped the stalker on its back, shaped my sword into a knife, and stabbed the corpse, slicing it from the neck to the groin. Bloody wet innards spilled out. I dug in the mush, pushing slippery tissue aside until I found the hard sack of the heart. I carved it out and pulled the bloody clump free.

Flex.

The heart glowed with blue. Toxic. It would poison us, too, but there was a slim chance we could make it. It was the difference of might-be-dead from the stalker heart or definitely-dead from the pollen. We didn’t have hours, we had minutes. The heart had to be the answer.

I put it on a flat rock and minced the tough muscle into near mush. I scooped a handful of the bloody mess and staggered over to Bear.

She was still breathing. There was still a chance.

I pried her jaws open and shoved a clump of the stalker mince into her throat. She gulped and gagged. I held her mouth closed.

“Swallow, please swallow…”

Bear gulped again. Yes. It went down.

“What a good girl. The best girl. One more time. Let’s get a little more in there.”

I forced two more handfuls into her and flexed. The concentration of pollen in her stomach dimmed. I had no idea if the immune agent in the stalker blood would spread or if it would be broken down by stomach acid. It didn’t matter. We were all out of choices.

Bear let out a soft, weak howl, almost a gasp. It must have hurt.

“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you if there was any other way.”

If I ate the heart now, there was no telling what it would do to me. I could pass out right here, and we would both become stalker dinner.

About twenty minutes ago we had walked by a narrow stone bridge that spanned a deep cavern. There had been a depression at the other end, a little cave within the cave. I’d thought it would be a good place to rest, because the stalkers could only come at us one by one, but I had wanted to get out of the tunnels. At the time, it seemed better to just keep moving. It seemed like forever ago, but it had just happened. We had to find a place to hide, and that was the closest safe spot I could think.

I should be able to find the bridge again. I just had to follow the trail of bodies and make it there before the poison got me.

I picked Bear up. She felt so heavy, impossibly heavy.

I spun around and trudged back the way we came.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 5 Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Gorgeous!!!

In reply to Skeeve.

Seems like the easiest way to hold a drucrafter captive would be to just take all their sigls. Barring some primal effects, they wouldn’t be able to actually use their essentia for anything then. (Assuming they didn’t do anything odd like imbed a sigl subcutaneously or swallow it.)

I have a weird feeling this week. It’s like I overlooked something or forgot some bill, and I keep checking to see what I missed and can’t find it. And it’s Thursday already. How? How?

Gordon’s surgery is next week. They will clean the scar tissue from his shoulder, and he will have to immediately go into physical therapy. If we miss an Inheritance installment, that’s probably why. Hopefully we will stay on track. I am going to try to get the next three posts lined up so Mod R can just click Publish and then do the hard work of moderating.

To people asking about craft projects: I haven’t been able to knit or crochet because the hands are not cooperating. Especially the wrist rotation with the hook is a no go. I haven’t been able to see a neurologist either. I can’t even get on the schedule. It is a bit frustrating. Okay, it’s very frustrating.

I need to get back to workouts. I chickened out this week because we are having a heat wave. It’s overcast today and it cooled off to 96, wooo! We were at 101F (38C) yesterday. It’s hot and humid. I think lifting weights was helping a little or maybe it’s my imagination.

Since I can’t knit or crochet, I’ve been trying to play a little bit of computer games, although I have to limit that, too. Both Planet Crafter and the Enshrouded are releasing updates: the Enshrouded one already came out, and the Planet Crafter is coming on 16 or 19th.

I have been playing the Humble expansion in Planet Crafter in preparation for the expansion. It’s a neat game where you are a convict dropped off on a barren rock of a planet, and the only way to escape is to terraform it into a garden planet.

Right now I’m breeding butterflies in different colors. The game is pretty, although Humble isn’t my favorite. I like a lot of water at my base locations, and the centrally located lake is more like a puddle.

My butterflies! My bees! Zeolite crystal mining site Cool Sinkhole. There is a cave behind the large waterfall.

The new update is supposed to let you terraform more moons in this alien solar system. I’m excite!

Finally, we have gotten a couple of puzzled comments – mostly from international readers – regarding the widespread use of dishwashers in US. About 75% of US households have them. They are convenient, and we are encouraged to purchase them because they use less water. A typical modern dishwasher will use 3-4 gallons for a load of dishes, while washing the same load by hand uses 15-27 gallons. It also saves energy, because most people wash their dishes in hot water and heating that water adds up. To that one commenter who wondered why an off-the-grid home in the Southwest would need one – their water is likely limited. They are trying to conserve their resources. A small dishwasher can ran off solar, and washing dishes is not optional.

To the person who is now vigorously typing how their handwashing never uses that much water: Having a dishwasher doesn’t make you lazy, not having one doesn’t make you a dirty planet polluter. It’s a convenient appliance. Some people have space for it, some don’t, and there is no reason to have a moral superiority battle over it.

I’m trying to figure out what to read next. LitRPG is my new military SF. I usually read outside of the genre I’m working on and I’m unlikely to ever write a strict LitRPG. I am sadly out of the Azarinth Healer. I have Bushido Online in my library for some reason. Maybe I will try that one next.

The post Life and Other Dishes first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.