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We discuss my new book, The Reborn, along with all the strange things that make me tick.

Here it is. 

A Pretty Mouth is one of those books I had heard a lot about well before I ever decided to purchase it. Molly Tanzer has an obvious talent for the weird and eldritch, and the praise that preceded her and her book was not to disappoint. APM is not exactly what I expected, however. It is not a novel, but rather a sort of connected short story collection, centering around a central novella, all focused on the family history of the house Calipash, told in reverse chronological order. If that sounds confusing, it can be. But if you stick with it, everything becomes clear and you will find yourself with a powerful desire to reread the book from the beginning, lest you not know what you’ve missed.

A definite recommendation for anyone who likes there horror on the weird and Lovecraftian side.

4 stars

At least, for the Lovecraft eZine kickstarter. Look, I rarely ask you to spend money–except on my books, and seriously, why aren’t you buying more?–but this is a truly awesome project that I am supporting. The world is in desperate need of quality Lovecraftian films. Desperate. And what’s more, if we raise the money we need to make them, I’ll get to kill somebody in a new Lovecraftian short story. Did I mention I’ll also be writing a new Lovecraftian short story? That’s sorta my thing. Anyway, you only have a couple more days to give what you can to make this project a reality. If you don’t, the madness of the unknown and unknowable will surely descend upon you! Or something.

Support the project.

It’s awesome.

Great guest blog below from Carl Alves, the author of Reconquest: Mother Earth, a great sci-fi novel I reviewed recently. Check it out, and then buy his book.

I like to describe my novel Reconquest: Mother Earth as a combination of the movies Independence Day, Red Dawn, and Gladiator.  Admittedly, that’s a strange combination.  In this post, I discuss how these three movies relate to my novel.

Independence Day

I remember when Independence Day came out, the trailers and promotion for the movie were tremendous.  The buildup of the movie was so great that instead of releasing the movie on July 3, 1996, they released it a day earlier, which coincided with when the movie starts.  The buzz was huge, and the movie became one of the all-time biggest blockbusters.

It’s not the deepest, most thoughtful movie ever made, and you had to suspend your disbelief in many places, but it was a lot of fun.  I enjoyed the portrayal of human spirit that the movie displayed, when against all odds, in an impossible situation, the humans used intelligence and ingenuity against a far more powerful enemy.

Those are elements that I adopt in my novel Reconquest: Mother Earth.  In my novel, I incorporate a very different kind of large scale invasion that the movie uses, but that is a small part of the novel.  The much larger part of the novel is the response by former Navy SEAL Mitch Grace, who wakes up from a coma five years after the initial invasion.  He personifies that same never-say-die attitude that even though the humans are badly overmatched, they can still find a way to defeat the alien conquerors.  Mitch must do so in a planet conquered by the aliens, where humans are used as slaves in mine, but much like in Independence Day, he will not stop fighting the aliens as long as he is still breathing.

Red Dawn

I was in the fourth grade when Red Dawn came out in theaters.  As a kid, this was an amazingly cool concept for a movie, and I was psyched to see it.  I didn’t get to watch too many movies in the theater when I was a kid, so it was a few years later by the time I finally watched it.  Despite some of the silliness in the movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Admittedly, the execution in this movie didn’t always work.  There are many aspects of it that aren’t particularly believable, and there were many testosterone filled scenes in the movie, but as long as you don’t delve too deep, it’s a fun and enjoyable film.  It fit the attitude of the time well, but it doesn’t particularly hold up many years later.

My novel, Reconquest: Mother Earth, shares some elements with Red Dawn.  In my novel, aliens take the place of the Soviets, and they have now overrun the planet.  Mitch Grace is devastated to find that most the world’s population has been decimated, and humans have been thrust into slavery in mines working for the aliens.  He can’t accept this and gathers followers to start his own guerilla war against the aliens.  They have vastly superior technology and weaponry and he must go into hiding, but much of that never say die feeling is captured in the novel.

Gladiator

Gladiator is simply put one of the best movies I have ever seen.  It is epic in scope, the story of Roman general Maximus Meridius, played by Russell Crowe.  Maximus is loyal to the emperor, but is thrust into slavery when Commodus, expertly played by Juaquin Pheonix in one of the greatest acting roles I have ever witnessed, kills his father and seizes the throne.  Through his incomparable skills as a warrior, Maximus becomes a renowned gladiator with one thing on his mind – vengeance.

When I first came up with the concept of my novel Reconquest: Mother Earth, before I even started writing it, I had an image in my head of my main protagonist, former Navy SEAL Mitch Grace, in an arena battling it out with aliens.  I didn’t know how I was going to incorporate this into my book, but one thing was certain, somehow, someway it was going to be part of it.

In my novel, Mitch Grace, during his guerilla campaign, is captured and enslaved much like Maximus.  He becomes an intergalactic warrior, even taking the moniker of “The Gladiator”.  He becomes an intergalactic sensation, a human that can kill aliens in single combat.  Much like Maximus, he is single-minded in his focus, which is to reconquer the planet.

Latest review of Harry Shannon’s Biters and my The Reborn is in, this time from Horror Drive-in, one of the best sites for horror reviews on the web. To spoil it for you, they really liked both books. Check out the review here, and go buy Biters/Reborn here.

If you know me, you know that I love all things Lovecraftian, and you know that I am particularly fond of the Lovecraft eZine. Well they are currently in the planning stages of their most amazing project yet. It’s called Whispers from the Shadows. The Zine is taking three of their best stories–none of mine sadly–and turning them into short films. And they are doing it the right way. Doug Jones of Pan’s Labyrinth  and the beautiful Katie Parker of Absentia and Oculus are staring. All we have to do now is raise the money to get it done. And that’s where you come in.

Here’s the Kickstarter campaign with lots of amazing awards for various levels of support. At one time, you could pay $125 and I would make you the star of one of my stories. Unfortunately, that’s sold out. But I want to write that story for whoever was crazy enough to pay that much for the honor. That means we need to raise $18000. We are already more than a quarter of a way there. Help us get the rest of the way.

Sign up for my email list! I promise not to spam you, and I’ll never give away your information. This is only for BIG announcements like new book releases or Pulitzer prizes won. That sort of thing. Click here to sign up.

Reviews are starting to come in on The Reborn and its companion novel Biters not only from fans, but also from some of the most respected names in the horror genre. This Horror After Dark review is my favorite yet. Check it out, and I’ll be providing more reviews as they come out.

Imagine my amazement then when Brett J Talley’s The Reborn raised that bar set by Biters and then pole-vaulted right over it. Without doubt the best piece of fiction (of any genre) I’ve read this year, The Reborn takes a spin on eugenics and links it with a war that destroys much of the world…

Fans of apocalyptic, action-based fiction should do themselves a favour and thrust this one right to the top of their TBR pile.

 

4 Double Crosses for Biters and 5 Life Ending Spikers for The Reborn, averaging out to be a 4.5 star read.

 

So today’s the day–The Reborn, my third novel, has been officially released. I want to thank everyone who was involved, everyone who offered encouragement and advice, and everyone who took a chance on me and this book, most prominently Christopher Payne, my publisher. I also want to thank Harry Shannon for letting me join him and his book, Biters, for this Double Down offer. And now I turn it over to you. If you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll review it. If you haven’t, I hope you will buy it. And above all else, I hope you enjoy it.

“You know, when we were kids,” Dominic said as he and Marcus climbed into his SUV, “I thought we’d have flying cars by now. I thought we’d have all kinds of things.”

“Maybe we would have,” Marcus said, “if it hadn’t been for the war. It seemed like everything just stopped then.”

“You’re right. The war changed everything.”

Marcus nodded his head in agreement even though Dominic was wrong, and Marcus knew it. Everything had changed before the war came.

It had started with a man named Franklin Dodd Evans. Evans was a murderer, at least according to the state of Alabama. To others, he was a symbol, an example of an innocent man condemned to die.

The evidence against Evans was less than spectacular. He had known the victim, one Dale Kimbrough, and the two had had a falling out shortly before Kimbrough found himself on the wrong end of a 9 mm.

The gun was never located, but Evans was known to have purchased such a weapon at some point in his past, and his own piece was missing. Evans claimed it had been stolen some months before the murder. No one had seen Evans and Kimbrough together that night, and while Evans had no alibi beyond being alone in his trailer, there wasn’t any evidence to show that he had left his home, either. It was a meager case for the prosecution, and Evans would have probably been acquitted were it not for a single strand of hair found at the crime scene.

But even that was suspect. The hair’s DNA had already begun to degrade by the time the police found it. Kimbrough was killed in July. What the intense heat of an Alabama sun began, the rain from an equally intense Alabama thunderstorm had helped to complete. All that was left was one strand of Ohno STR—junk DNA that was thought to serve no real purpose and that no one outside of a handful of scientists had even heard of at the time. Yet that was all that was needed. According to the experts who testified at Evans’s trial, Ohno STR was perfectly unique—it was as tied to an individual as his fingerprint, if not more so. In these experts’ professional opinions, Evans was unquestionably the killer.

The jury agreed. Evans was convicted and sentenced to die. Yet he never stopped proclaiming that they’d got the wrong guy, and in the years that followed groups like The Innocence Project and Amnesty International rallied to Evans’s defense, claiming that the DNA evidence was flawed. The courts were not sympathetic, and on May 15, 2002, Evans became the last man to sit in the Yellow Mama, Alabama’s colorfully named electric chair. The initial jolt of electricity—which lasted in excess of thirty seconds—didn’t kill him. The second only served to set him on fire. The third, however, did the trick. Evans was dead, and Kimbrough’s death, vindicated.

That’s how everybody remembered it, at least until the summer of 2020, the summer of the San Francisco Sandman. He was a killer of the most gruesome kind. Hunted with a knife, carving up his victims—always women—in increasingly sadistic ways. But it was one peculiar thing he did that earned him his nom d’morte; he liked to sew the eyelids of his victims shut with a needle and thread so that they might appear, were it not for the missing organs or split-open stomachs, only to be sleeping. Thus a legendary serial killer was born.

They caught the Sandman more than a year after his killing spree began. He was a bit of a prodigy as serial killers go, a seventeen-year-old drifter named Owen Danielson. Danielson denied guilt, claiming that he was an innocent man whom the desperate authorities were intent on framing. But his DNA was found on thread that had sealed the eyes of the Sandman’s last victim, and it was an open-and-shut prosecution for the district attorney’s office. The case likely would have lived on only in the imagination of Hollywood movie producers and horror writers were it not for an overeager intern with Amnesty International who ran a check on the Ohno STR from the Danielson case and made a startling discovery—it was a perfect match for the DNA recovered in the Evans trial. When independent scientists reviewed the intern’s findings, they were shocked to find she was correct.

The result was something akin to judicial chaos. There was no question that Owen Danielson had nothing to do with the Kimbrough murder; he wasn’t even born when Evans went to the chair. The conclusion seemed to be that DNA testing, at least using Ohno STR, was fundamentally flawed. And that was a problem.

Across the country, hundreds of convictions rested almost entirely on Ohno STR evidence. The use of DNA in criminal prosecutions, whether derived from Ohno STR or not, was suspended until more research could be conducted. And in a move that surprised no one, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that all convictions involving Ohno STR were to be vacated, with the accused to be retried or released. Almost universally, cash-strapped districts elected not to bother with new trials and hundreds of men and women—convicted of everything from robbery to rape to first-degree murder—were released from prison. The Innocence Project declared it the greatest day for the criminal justice system since the passage of the Eighth Amendment.

And that’s when the crime wave started.

*  *  *

Dominic pulled off of 9^th Street and onto New York Avenue heading northeast. The area had enjoyed a brief renaissance during the war, but since then it had been largely abandoned, just row upon row of empty warehouses. Dominic passed beyond them to a nearly deserted area, down a broken drive past ancient “No Trespassing” signs and a series of squat brick domes, to a warehouse behind which he parked the car.

“The old United Brick Corporation,” Dominic said. “There was a time when you would never go to a place like this. Drugs, gangs, crime. Back then, there was enough business that a cop wouldn’t have had to worry about losing his job. Now it’s just empty. Going to waste.”

Dominic hopped out. “Come on,” he said before slamming the door. “This is it. I know it doesn’t look like much.”

The two men walked up to a side door that was innocuous other than the card scanner beside it. “We like to keep a low profile.” Dominic slid a card through the reader and there was a soft click. “Nobody much comes up here anymore, and no one really even knows about the organization, so the security is pretty much for show, even if it is thorough.”

A buzzer sounded somewhere inside, and Dominic pulled the door open. The warehouse didn’t look all that different on the inside. The two men strode across the open, abandoned factory floor to an old freight elevator. Dominic slid his card down another reader—“Nothing more annoying than leaving this thing at home”—and they waited as the elevator car rose from the depths.

When the doors opened, it took Marcus’s breath away. The interior was spotless—sheer metal walls reflected every particle of light. The two men stepped inside, and the doors closed behind them. There were no buttons to push. The car began moving down on its own for what seemed to Marcus like a suspiciously long time.

The doors opened to a small room. A man in a uniform was seated at a desk. He looked up at Dominic and nodded. Dominic jerked a finger at Marcus.

“He’s with me.”

The guard nodded again, and Marcus noted for future digestion that the guard’s right hand remained underneath his desk, no doubt grasping the handle of a firearm of some sort. A double door opened, and Marcus followed Dominic into an open floor space that was not unlike that of the precinct. Men and women sat at cubicles, typing away at computers. There was an air of efficiency about the place, exactly as one would expect from a policing outfit. The only difference was the huge digital map of North America covering the far wall. Red lights blinked off and on across the continent, with a concentration around the DC area. The depiction of the West Coast made him shudder. It was completely blank, as dead and devoid of life as the actual piece of earth it represented.

He remembered in the old days, when he was young, that people had worried “the Big One” would come, and that California and the rest of the West Coast would simply slide into the sea. In the end, it wasn’t nature that turned heaven to hell.

It was man.

*  *  *

The United States had long enjoyed steadily declining crime rates, which is one reason the winter of 2022 was so harsh for everyone. The Supreme Court had opened the doors of America’s prisons, ostensibly to see innocent men and women go free. By the time the wave of robberies, rapes, and murders had subsided, many of those who had received a reprieve found themselves back in jail. Baffled experts in criminology and forensic psychology wondered what had happened. Were these men turned into violent criminals by their time in prison? Or had the DNA evidence—flawed though it might have been—somehow led to the right person being convicted of the right crime?

It was the Kensington Paper that changed everything, the Kensington Paper that ushered in a new era for mankind, the Kensington Paper that shook to their very foundations religion, politics, government, and philosophy. For it was the Kensington Paper that first hypothesized the existence of the Reborn.

It wasn’t a paper at all, in fact. It was Erin Kensington’s doctoral thesis. And she had been thorough. She had gone back into thirty years of records and collected Ohno STR results from every capital murder case that resulted in a conviction in every jurisdiction. What she found confirmed a hypothesis she had held in secret but did not dare to utter aloud.

The DNA sequence in Ohno STR recurred in many of the cases, and it always reappeared after the convicted was executed or died in prison; none of the subjects shared Ohno STR with another killer alive at the time. In an even more disturbing development, killers who shared the same DNA sequence also tended to share the same MO.

Kensington ended her dissertation in as provocative a way as possible, writing, “For millennia, mankind has searched for confirmation that there is something beyond this life, for proof that we will live again. Many believers look for a god in the sky. But God is not there. He is in our DNA, and so is our soul. And we can—and will—live again.”

Of course, Kensington’s findings were immediately and resoundingly rejected by the scientific community. But her thesis sparked a wave of research. Kensington followed up her study of convicted murderers with rapists, and once again, the same pattern emerged.

Soon, independent analysis began to confirm Kensington’s theory. The August 2023 issue of Time magazine featured the Buddhist wheel of rebirth with the headline, “Reincarnation: Scientific Fact.”

Reaction was as swift as it was diverse. Parts of the Middle East erupted in violent protests, with conservative Islamic clerics declaring that any notion of reincarnation was Bid‘ah—an evil innovation. They further declared that anyone who professed a belief in reincarnation to be a kafir worthy of death.

The Catholic Church was less extreme, expressing both skepticism and its intent to study the matter further, while noting that there was not necessarily an inconsistency between reincarnation and Christian tradition. At the same time, Buddhism experienced an explosion of growth in the United States that it hadn’t seen since its celebrity-spawned renaissance of the 1980s. Meanwhile, governments around the world began to study what this development meant for criminal courts and preserving law and order.

The implications of Kensington’s research went well beyond the world of criminal justice and religious belief. Tin-pot despots and authoritarian dictators around the globe had always claimed some loose birthright that gave them an air of legitimacy. Now they began to support those assertions with “scientific” evidence. North Korea was a leading innovator in this area, with Kim Jung Un declaring himself to bear the same genetic marker as Sejong the Great, having supposedly recovered a strand of DNA from a relic of the great king housed in a museum in Pyongyang. Before long, a new wave of grave robbing and black market archeology had developed, with the world’s rich and powerful paying enormous sums for proof that the blood of great men and women flowed through their veins.

And in Luoyang, a large industrial backwater in the middle of China, a man born with a blood clot in his right hand had begun to gather a legion of followers—the poor, the workers, the disaffected underclass of communist Chinese society.

They called him father, but his name was Khan.

*  *  *

“I’ve read your file, and I like what I see.”

Dominic had led Marcus Ryder into an interior office—one that by its location and decoration was obviously reserved for whoever was in charge of this operation—where he was met by a black man with a face that bespoke command. They say you can read some peoples’ faces like a map, that the canyons and valleys that cut across their brow and down the corner of their eyes and along the edge of their mouth can tell the story of their lives. Ryder had read this particular story before. This man had served in the war, and he had seen hard things.

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Marcus.

“We don’t make many hires,” he said, “and when you sign on here, we expect a lifetime commitment.”

It wasn’t that Marcus was unwilling to take such a plunge—this job would be a blessing, one he couldn’t turn down, no matter what the requirements—but the man’s words still surprised him. He didn’t do a good job of hiding it either, and the man across from him, whose name he’d given as Commander John Porter, held up his hand.

“That may sound extreme, I know. But what we do here, we do in secret. And once you know that secret, you keep it forever, and we keep you. So I will certainly understand if you want to back out now. Do you need a day or two? We want to make this as easy as possible for you.”

Marcus supposed he should take some time, that he should at least pretend to think it over. But he had already decided he would do whatever they wanted, so he simply nodded.

“Are you sure, son? You don’t even know what you are getting into.”

“And I assume you aren’t going to tell me unless I agree to it? This is a sight unseen deal, right?”

Porter stared back at him.

“Then I’m in. The best friend you ever find is in a foxhole, and nothing builds loyalty like desperation. There’s not a whole lot left for me to do out there, so I guess I’m in if you’ll have me.”

Porter dropped Marcus’s file on the table and looked up at Dominic. He nodded.

“Then you’re in,” Porter said, never looking away from the other man. “Dominic will train you. Come on.” He stood. “It’s time you learned what we do here.”

###

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The call had come in a little after 2 P.M. A DNA sniffer near an open-air market had scored a hit, and dispatch had assigned two teams to the case. The profile was Clear, which meant this was a runner. Two teams was surely one too many, but Dominic Miles preferred overkill. He found that a sense of inevitability made the target more docile.

They almost never fought back. They’d tell themselves later that they were paralyzed by fear, but he always thought it was simple calculation. As long as there’s a chance, most people will fight. Once that chance hits zero? Then it’s over. They just lay down and die.

The agents arrived in two cars, both marked like ordinary police cruisers: “To Protect and Serve.” Dominic set a perimeter, assigning one agent to the front of the building and one in the back. He was in no hurry. The report indicated that the girl they were looking for was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. She couldn’t run, but he figured she would try and hide. That meant she was somewhere inside this building, a five-story brick structure that had been abandoned since after the war. It was an old apartment complex, so searching it would be easy. They’d find her. It was only a matter of time.

And they had found her all right, but then the bitch had killed Sadosky. Dominic had never been particularly close with him, so it was nice, for once, to see one of them show a little spine. He’d killed her for her trouble, of course, but that was procedure. Now he had to clean this mess up and find a replacement.

He guessed the department would be doing some hiring.

*  *  *

Marcus knew it was bad news when he found the handwritten note on his desk. “Come see me,” it said. It was signed simply, “Cap.” The captain never had liked to deliver bad news over email.

The men and women in the office had learned to dread the day a handwritten note showed up on one of their desks. It was happening more and more, it seemed. There wasn’t much call for policemen these days.

Marcus had felt it coming when he arrived at work. The guys had been on edge, tense, and the looks they gave him were filled with a strange mixture of sadness and relief that only now made sense. Even Haidet, normally a man who seldom shut up—particularly around Marcus, to whom he showed a special fondness—gave him only a nod before turning away. So the note was not surprising, though it was very disappointing.

Still, it could have been worse. Marcus didn’t have a wife or kids at home. No mortgage to pay, nothing like that. But he had had dreams of something bigger, something better, long ago before the war. But all that seemed far away now. And if nothing else, he did have at least one mouth to feed—his own.

“No use wasting time,” he murmured to himself. When he looked up, the other men and women in the precinct all suddenly became busy with other things. They had been watching him. Imagining how he must feel. They sympathized with him, but were glad it had happened to someone other than themselves.

This time, at least.

He knocked on Cap’s door and didn’t wait for the obligatory “come in” before he entered. The captain looked up. He didn’t smile, didn’t give Marcus a hearty handshake before delivering the blow. It was one thing that Marcus had always liked about Cap. He wasn’t the kind of guy that would bullshit you. He wasn’t the kind that would hug you close before stabbing you in the back. He gave it to you straight, and Marcus respected that.

“I’d ask you to sit,” Cap said, “but I think you know why you’re here.”

“I’ll sit anyway, if it’s all the same to you.”

The captain nodded a couple times and then gestured to the chair across from his desk.

“I don’t know, Captain,” Marcus said. “I kinda always thought we’d close this place down, turn out the lights together.”

Captain Neal McKindrickson laughed and then settled into a mournful smile. “Me too. Me too. I wish that was the case, but you know how things work these days. You’ve been here the longest ’cept me. That means you’ve got the highest salary. Wasn’t going to insult you by asking you to take a pay cut.”

“I’m glad. I might have been tempted to accept it.”

“At half what we pay you now, and who knows how long it would last. There’s not a lot of future in this business.”

“I think I’ll take a drink, if you don’t mind.”

The captain reached down and removed a bottle of scotch from the lower drawer in his desk—prewar—where Marcus knew he kept it. They’d shared more than one round together in the lazy afternoons when most of the guys had already knocked off for the day. He pulled the cork clear and poured two healthy glasses, three fingers each. He dropped one in front of Marcus and held his own in the air.

“To a future with no crime.”

Marcus grinned. “I’ll drink to that.”

“So where do you go now?”

“Well,” Marcus said, swirling what was left of the brown liquid around the glass, trying to see if he could reach the rim without it spilling over. “Can’t say I’d given it much thought until about thirty minutes ago.”

“You had to know this was coming.”

“Knowing it and accepting it are two different things. Besides, jobs—good jobs at least—are hard to come by these days.” One dark drip achieved escape velocity and slid down the side of the glass. Marcus caught it with his tongue before it could get away.

“Well if you need a place to stay . . .”

Marcus cut him off with a laugh and downed his drink, slamming the empty glass on the desk. “Cap, the day I show up at your door and ask to sleep on the couch, start the suicide watch ’cause you’ll know I got nothing left.”

Captain McKindrickson rose and offered his hand. “Understood.”

Marcus didn’t hesitate to take it. The captain was, after all, a good man. A good man in a job that was becoming more difficult every day, but for reasons no one could have fathomed decades earlier.

“If you need me, I’ll be at the bar.”

Thirty minutes later he had made good on that promise. He was one of only two customers in the Alehouse Rock at 10:30 in the morning. The bartender didn’t ask Marcus any questions. He just filled his glass and let him go. An hour and four drinks later, it was only Marcus remaining, the other patron having departed for greener pastures. Marcus didn’t notice when the fellow left and didn’t care, nor did he notice when the door opened and another fellow walked in. It was only when he sat down next to Marcus—and ordered water—that he took notice. The man looked at him and smiled, holding up the glass.

“On duty,” he said.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be in a bar.”

The man chuckled. “Depends on the job, I suppose.”

“And what job brings you here?”

“Looking for a man actually, one that I was told would be here.”

“Is that so? How’s that working out for you?”

“Depends. You are Marcus Ryder, correct? The same Marcus Ryder who served with the 15th in Siberia during the war?”

Marcus finished his beer and called for another. For the first time he really looked at the person next to him. He was stout, but not big. Heavy, but not fat. Cut muscle, and lean too. Marcus didn’t know if he was military, cop, or some combination of both. But whatever he did, he was Special Forces. Of that much, Marcus felt certain.

He had known dozens of guys who looked like him, served with hundreds of them in the war. But there was something else about this man, something that marked him as one not to be trifled with. It was the eyes. There was a coldness in them, like the wind blowing across the tundra. This man cared about something, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that most people cared about. He wasn’t like most people. That worried Marcus. Men like this one were meant to be feared.

“I feel special, you knowing so much about me, and I so little about you,” Marcus said, coolly.

After a period of time that could only be called uncomfortable, the other man said, “You were at Luoyang, weren’t you? When they finally broke through to the Golden Hall of the Khan, you were the man who killed him, weren’t you?”

Now it was Marcus’s turn to feel cold, to feel the ice breaking underneath him. “That’s classified.”

The man burst out laughing, cackling so hard the bartender on the other side of the room jumped, his obsession with the replay on the television of a particular football game interrupted.

“I like you already.” He held out a hand, and Marcus took it. “I’m Dominic, Dominic Miles. I’ve been looking for you.”

“How did you find me?” Marcus asked, choosing that over the perhaps more appropriate, “Why?”

“Your captain said you would be here. Or your old captain at least. I hear you’ve had a rough day.”

“You might say that.”

“Well I’m here to make you a proposition. Police work is a noble profession. Or it was, back before the war. It’s not surprising that you would choose it, after your training, all you’ve been through, all you’ve learned. I was there too, man. They train you to kill. They teach you to like it. They give you every skill you need to sow death. And then when the war ends they send you back into the world with a pat on the back and a ‘good luck, soldier.’ They expect you just to go back to the way things were. And when they ask you on an employment application what you’re good at, what your particular talents are, ‘killing men’ and ‘making things go boom’ are not usually high on the list of preferred credentials. Am I right?”

Marcus simply nodded. He was right. He guessed being a cop was a “noble profession” as Dominic put it, but it was also the only job he could get. He didn’t know how to do anything else.

“But here’s the thing, Marcus, it’s not like the old days. We don’t investigate crime anymore. We stop it before it happens. The war didn’t end, my friend. The battlefield simply changed. Guys like you, guys like McKindrickson, a dying breed. But I’m here to tell ya, it doesn’t have to be that way, not for you. I know what you did during the war. I know it was you that took out Khan, ended it all, stopped the fighting in its tracks. You ever think how many lives you saved with that one bullet? And then they told you that you couldn’t talk about it, right? They gave you a medal you couldn’t keep for a story you couldn’t tell. They didn’t want it to be about one man. They wanted it to be about all of us, in it together. After so many dead, I guess we needed that. We all killed Khan. We all pulled the trigger. We all fired the shot. But people remember what you did, the people that matter. And right now, they are finally ready to give you the reward you deserve.”

“And what reward is that?”

“A new beginning.” Dominic pulled a shield from his pocket, a badge. There was an eagle in the background, wings spread, talons out ready to strike. And crossed in front of it, two objects. One a staff, a shepherd’s crook. The other a sword, long and sharp. “I am employed by an organization that you have probably never heard of, a small enforcement division under the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t have a designation, at least not officially. Most people just call us the Shepherds.”

“The Shepherds? Why do they call you that?”

“Because, Mr. Ryder, someone has to keep the wolves at bay.”

###

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For Annie, Brent, Caitlin, Elizabeth, Erin, Jeff, Joe, Kate, Krista, Kurt, Megan, Mike, Nick, Pam, Rob & Steve—thanks for trusting me enough to let me kill you.

It is the late summer of 2050, seventeen years after the end of the Great War, and twenty-five years after A-Day.

Chapter I

Amanda Baker couldn’t run anymore. A few months earlier? Maybe. But not now. Perhaps there’s no such thing as being a little pregnant, but Amanda was heavy with child, as Sister Doris might have said.

And because she couldn’t run, she hid. Locked herself in an interior room of an abandoned building somewhere north of the Heights that smelled of dried urine and dead rats, and there she waited.

Her grandmother had told her that when a storm is coming, you take shelter. You go inside, you lock yourself away, you stay down and you hide. Then you hope the monster doesn’t find you. Now the monster was coming for Amanda Baker, and she didn’t think hiding would do much good. Not anymore.

For nine months she had hid, since she’d let her boyfriend take her to that hospital. She should have been smarter. Never take a chance unless you know how it’s going to turn out. That’s what she had always said. That was what she had lived by. She could have gone to one of the clinics in Southeast. She knew where they were. She knew girls who had been to them. They’d take care of everything. They’d run the tests, tell you right where you stood, and if your baby was Clear, that’s when you went to the hospital. And if it wasn’t? If it was Marked or, God forbid, Reborn? Then you made a choice.

Amanda didn’t have that chance now; nor did she have a choice. She had gone to the General Hospital, just like Paul had wanted. When the tests came back, she saw it in the nurse’s eyes. She knew. That’s when she’d started running. But she hadn’t gone far; DC was the only city she knew.

Yet she ran anyway, away from her boyfriend who would have made her do it, would have made her “do the right thing,” just like he always did. She’d stayed with a family that clung to the old ways, a Catholic couple who had been friends with her parents. They’d put her up, and there she’d tried to figure out what to do and where to go.

For nearly nine months, it had worked out. She had done it. She had kept her head low. But it was foolish to think she could hide forever. The General Hospital had her records. They knew who she was. One of the closed-circuit cameras was sure to make her face, or she would trigger one of the DNA sniffers all over Washington. She was bound to make a mistake.

And today, it had happened. She wasn’t sure what she did, what mistake she had made. All she knew for certain was that when she heard the sirens, they were for her. If you look over your shoulder long enough, her grandmother had once said, eventually you see someone looking back.

So she ran as far as she could, as far as her swollen belly would let her go. And then she had crawled into this corner, trying to make herself as small as possible. Trying to save a life. Not her own, but her child’s.

She jumped at a crash from below her, jarred out of her thoughts. The heavy tramp of booted footsteps followed. Then more explosions of noise as other doors were kicked in. She backed herself against the wall, tried to sink into it, tried to dissolve away where no one could find her. The cry of splintered wood and shattering frames flowed like rolling waves, closer and then farther away, as whoever was below searched every room, looking for her.

Then it wasn’t below anymore.

She heard the crash as the door at the end of the hall was kicked in, and then the boom of every bootfall coming nearer. Another door burst at its seams, and then another, and another, each one louder than the last, pounding in her brain like a gunshot, so close she could feel it in her bones.

A shadow passed in front of the bathroom door. For a moment it lingered. She sat perfectly still, but she knew that whatever hope had been was lost, her prayers amounting to nothing but wasted breath and wasted words. Then the world caved in around her as flying pieces of wood struck her face and stuck in her hair. When she opened her eyes, two men loomed before her.

They were dressed in black—combat fatigues, heavy black boots laced high, black masks and goggles, as if they were hunting the most dangerous thing in the world instead of her. In their hands they held guns. She stared down the muzzle of one of those rifles and wondered if death was coming.

“Check her,” one of them said. She couldn’t even be sure which it was. One man slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled out a DNA scanner. She tried to will her body not to betray her, but it was no use.

“It’s her,” the man said, slipping the scanner back in his belt. “She’s Clear, but it’s definitely her.”

“Miss Amanda Baker,” the other figure, the leader she guessed, said as he pulled out a card and started to read. “It is my duty under the Rostov Protocol of 26 U.S.C. section 5001 to inform you that you are carrying a Class 1 undesirable which we are required to terminate.” He turned to his partner and nodded.

Amanda’s eyes darted from one to the other. “No, no, no,” she mumbled. “Please no.” Her words went unheard and unheeded.

“Carry on, Sergeant.”

The man who had held the scanner unholstered what could only be a gun, though of a kind she had never seen before. She tried to crawl away even as he took aim. It was no use. The man pulled the trigger.

There was no explosion, no deafening bang; only a high-pitched whistle and a flash of blue light. There wasn’t even pain. But she felt it anyway, as the pulse of energy entered her abdomen. She felt it as something died inside of her, something that was part of her and yet separate all at once. Then she wished she had died, too.

The man in charge lowered his rifle. “You’ll need to go to the hospital tomorrow for extraction. No charges will be filed against you for running, though if you speak about this incident, you will be arrested. I want you to know that it is very unlikely anything like this will happen again. Reoccurrence is almost unheard of. But should it, I suggest you go directly to the authorities and have it dealt with. You can’t run.

“Sergeant Sadosky here will give you a card. When you go to the hospital tomorrow, present it to the Attending and he’ll take care of everything. Understood?”

He didn’t wait for her to respond, gesturing for his companion to finish up so they could leave. Amanda heard his words, but she was no longer listening. She saw the sergeant reholster his weapon and remove a card from his front shirt pocket. He took two steps forward and knelt down, reaching out to hand it to her. And that was the moment she had been waiting for.

She pulled the blade she had hidden from underneath her. Before the man could react, she had sliced open the back of his thigh, exactly as she had been taught. The man screamed as he fell to the ground and rolled wildly, blood pouring out of him in great spurts, painting the floor. Amanda wasn’t thinking very clearly, and she couldn’t focus on much, but one thing she knew was that this man, the one who had killed her baby, would be dead within minutes. To her surprise, the other man started to laugh.

“Well done, Miss Baker. Well done.”

He took aim with his rifle. She didn’t have time to decide whether she should be happy or sad before he pulled the trigger, adding Amanda’s brains to the pool of blood that now spread slowly beneath the quivering body that lay beside her.

 ###

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I’ll be posting a chapter of The Reborn every week for the next three weeks until the official release date of Friday, April 11. Hope you enjoy.

So if you are a fan of Lovecraft or of weird fiction and you haven’t been over to the Lovecraft eZine, then you are seriously missing out. It’s the best run, most informative horror site on the web, and if you took the “horror” part out of the last clause, it might still be true. Here are five novels I’ve leanred about on that site that I’ll be reading and reviewing next.

1. The Whisperer in Dissonance by Ian Welke. Described by the eZine as “a scary, disturbing novel that reads like a cross between H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick,” I’m not sure how I could not read this book.
2. Displaced Person by Lee Harding. The eZine claims this is “one of the best Lovecraftian books you’ll ever read.” That’s enough for me. (if anyone knows where I can get a copy for less than $500, let me know)
3. Reanimators by Pete Rawlik. I already own this book, and I know Pete, so it’s about time I read it. Helps that it’s gotten fantastic reviews.
4. A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzier. I’m not sure if it’s the cover or the title or the praise it has received, but I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while.
5. The Amulet by William Meikle. A hard-boiled PI and a Lovecraftian mystery. What more do you need?

I have been woefully negligent on my concert updates as of late, so consider this a refresher. Back in October and November, I attended a couple fantastic concerts at the venerable 9:30 Club, and I would highly recommend that folks who are fans of good music (i.e., not what you hear on the Top 40 Radio) should check out these artists when they come to your town. First, Noah & the Whale.

This band–which derives its name from the rare Biblical pun–hails from jolly old England, gov’ner. And like many of their countrymen before them, they have a talent for lyrical composition. Their songs tend to tell a story, a style of music-making that I have always preferred.  They are a band that’s a lot of fun, and you should check them out. 

A couple weeks later, it was The Head and the Heart. Now, I gotta say, THTH is pretty much my favorite contemporary band active today. Their first album–self-titled–was, simply put, a masterpiece. Every song, from beginning to end, is brilliant. And it actually holds up as an album–you don’t get the feeling that ten random songs were just thrown together. Their second album, “Let’s Be Still,” is also very good and worth a listen. If they come to your town, go. I promise you’ll become a fan. 

I meant to post this yesterday, but I’ve been too busy commenting on the end of True Detective. The Reborn drops April 11, so I hope you are all getting excited. Just to encourage you to pick it up even more, I’ll be sharing the first three chapters over the next few weeks, so look out for that.