Excerpt from Chapter 12 Casket
Liners—What are they For?
Carter Banks (main character)
and Harley Maxwell (Carter’s best friend from childhood) following by GPS the
abductors of Carter’s daughter and granddaughter, have taken a sidetrip into Nebraska
The road soon appeared, but would
have been easy to miss. Carter turned onto it.
“Just keep going, Carter. When we
get there you’ll know.
They soon entered a large meadow
clearing, where appeared stack upon stack of…, “What on earth are those?”
“Casket liners,” Harley said,
Thousands of’em. Maybe hundreds of thousands”
“Liners? Hell, they’re bigger than
the caskets themselves.”
“That’s right. You, me, and two or
three other good-sized people could crawl into just one.”
Carter pulled to within fifty feet
of a stack and stopped. Nearby a man got up and stared at them, “What the hell?
I didn’t even see him. What is he? A guard, maybe?”
“Not likely.” Harley opened a
compartment down below the dash, easily accessible by either the driver or
passenger, and pulled out what appeared to be a semi-automatic pistol, “Colt
.45, my friend.” He also retrieved a loaded magazine, inserted it into the
handle, and pulled back the slide, cocking it, then put it on half-cock safety.
He then slipped it behind him, between his back and his trousers.
Just like they do it in the
movies.
“Leave it running,” Harley said,
“We’ll both get out and talk to him. He might know something.”
They both got out, and left their
doors open.
“Howdy!” Harley called out.
The man didn’t answer. The stare on
his face appeared to harden, and maybe get a little wild.
“We’ll approach a little closer,”
Harley said.
They took a few more slow steps.
“Who the fuck are you?” The man
doubled his fists and raised, slightly, his left one.
“We’re nobody.”
“Yeah, ‘nobody’—fuckin’
right! Then what the fuck you want here?”
The man’s eyes had much white
showing, and—my god! His hair was short and black and looked like a
photo from a deep past, and a short little black moustache mainly just under
his nose that reminded Carter of, of—he refused to even think the name!
“They’re gonna try to mark us!” the
man shouted.
“Who’s ‘they?’” Harley
asked.
They were within about twenty feet.
“That’s close enough,” Harley said
in a low voice.
“The ones in charge,” the man said,
a little quieter.
“And who’s that?”
“You know!—the shadow fucking government!
Or the goddamned Illuminati—whoever the fuck they are!”
“So you don’t really know?”
“I know all goddamned right—I was
with’em—I was one of’em, for Chris-sake!”
“Are they close by?”
“Hell, they’re everywhere!”
“But the group you were with,” Harley
persisted, “Where are they? How close?”
As they stood there an odor began,
“Jesus!” Carter’s hand flew to his nose, an automatic movement.
“You don’t like that smell, do ya,
ya crazy fucker—it’s gangrene! I’m probably gonna die soon. The mutherfuckers
shot me when I was escaping. Hit my leg. It’s a wonder I got away at all.”
“We should help him,” Carter said.
“Start backtracking to the pickup,”
Harley said, “You keep driving.”
“What…?”
“Do it!”
They carefully walked backwards.
Carter’s skin began crawling. He didn’t know how close they were and he didn’t
want to turn around and look—
“Run!”
Then he did turn around and
ran, but just before he stopped seeing the man he saw that the man had started
toward them, limping but appearing quite able to move quickly. He reached the
driver’s side, jumped in and closed the door, thanking God they had left it
running.
Harley had moved a little more
slowly while keeping his eyes on the man. Finally at the door he pulled his gun
and pointed it at the man, then fired into the ground between the man’s feet.
The man stopped, “Mutherfuckers!
The hell with ya—we’re all gonna die anyway! The Mayans was wrong, but the
Illuminati ain’t!”
“Let’s go!” Harley said as he
climbed in, “Go to his left, about two hundred feet, then make a big U-turn and
haul our asses out’a here and back to the interstate, and don’t let no grass
grow under us!”
Carter did as instructed, and as he
began the U-turn, through peripheral vision, almost like an impossible dream,
he saw them: Railroad tracks. He tried to dismiss what he saw, the man’s
startling resemblance, the casket liners, as the presence of both things sent
his mind reeling to nightmarish movies and old news reels from World War II
Nazi concentration camps.
He didn’t think the Nazis had
bothered with casket liners, but the horrible analogy was there. What are
they for? Why the railroad? God help us!
Thanks for reading
Author’s notes
(Digital
downloads $0.99-$3.99; paperbacks $10.00-$29.95)
In my fiction I do
not try to create super-heroes, but rather bring alive common and regular
people who try to find love, survive, and react to circumstances as best they
can, and, usually, try to do the right thing. The books are more than one
genre, from war to sex and violence to romance to humor to horror to
fantasy to science fiction to adventure, I write in
third-person with viewpoints by men, women, and children.
Contact
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