Bowie V. Ibarra's Blog
September 29, 2018
March 9, 2018
BLOOD: The sequal to 'Codename: La Lechuza' - REVELATION OF THE BLOOD QUEEN TEASER
THE SEQUEL TO THE 2017 BEST SELLING SUPERNATURAL ACTION/ADVENTURE STORY ARRIVES IN MARCH
By
Bowie V. Ibarra
By
Bowie V. Ibarra
January 20, 2018
BLOOD - Preview Travis Adkins 'Mists of the Dead'
TRAVIS ADKINS TAKES FANTASY FICTION TO ANOTHER LEVEL IN HIS LATEST TITLEbyBowie V. Ibarra
Travis Adkins has never had issues with lack of imagination. Or articulation. Travis brings all of his best writing qualities in an amazing and enjoyable Dungeons and Dragons-style adventure title that is one part fantasy, one part zombie horror, one part comedy, and one part bawdy erotic title. Read this excerpt from 'Mists of the Dead' and see for yourself. Then, pick up a copy HERE.
Copyright 2017 Henchman Press, Travis Adkins. All rights reserved.
In the following excerpt, Warrel the Bard, Kogliastro the Wizard, and Beatrix the Cleric have been spirited from their world into a bizzare new world through a mysterious mist. As they try to understand the realities of their new world, rivals from their world appear and bring trouble. That's when the real trouble from the mystery of the mist begins to reveal itself.
= = = = = = = =
Ahead, Kogliastro stopped walking and stood still in the midst of his light. Warrel’s own steps stuttered to a stop, and then Beatrix’s.
As Warrel waited for the wizard to turn around, with warranted exasperation, and give them a good scolding, he began formulating in his head the response he would provide. He would say he and the cleric weren’t arguing, only politely disagreeing. Then he would apologize. But he had a feeling Beatrix would not suffer chastisement as readily as he did.
Please turn her into a frog, he thought.
With movement as slow and graceful as a dancer’s pirouette, the blue mass of robe framing Kogliastro swiveled around to face them. He brought up his hand, heavy sleeve sagging, and beckoned with a bony finger for Warrel and Beatrix to come forward. They did.
“Get behind me,” he said.
Warrel exchanged glances with Beatrix, and they moved to opposite sides behind Kogliastro.
Warrel watched the wizard, but said nothing. He looked where the wizard was looking, back the way they had traveled, at the mists sieging the circumference of the magical light, obscuring the land from view. It was quiet out there with no one talking—quiet as a grave. Warrel figured it probably wasn’t healthy to be immersed in such deadening silence, when all you could hear was your own blood rushing in your ears.
“Danger?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kogliastro said.
Beatrix twitched. Her eyes shut in palliative meditation, and opened again in resolve. “The un-dead?” she asked.
Kogliastro’s hood shook side to side. “I sense no un-dead in my divinations, only a void,” he said. “But I know they are only part of it; the void is greater than they. The emptiness in this world is vast, the nothing greater than the something, the not-beings greater than the is-beings.”
“What?”
“Beings can be, and nothings can noth,” Kogliastro said.
“But what danger approaches?” Warrel asked.
“A subterfuge,” Kogliastro said.
“The illusory magic?”
“No. The presence of illusory magic is still a distance away. What approaches us now is the camouflage shadowing us since we arrived here.”
If you weren’t so obtuse I could better follow what was going on, Warrel wanted to say.
The mists betrayed nothing. If there was some kind of code lurking in their swirls and undulations, Warrel couldn’t see it. There was no breeze stirring them yet still they danced, a reaction without an original action, objects in motion staying in motion. He swept his torch across his unprotected side, hoping it might ward off anything lurking on the other side of the light.
“My powers have failed in this world from the start,” Beatrix uttered through downcast lips. “I have been unable to sense any of the threats until they were already upon us. Either my goddess cannot reach me to lend me her strength, or this world itself is an evil all-pervasive.”
Both, undoubtedly, Warrel thought. And a cleric who cannot turn the un-dead is not a cleric at all; worth less than half a fighter, if that. Perhaps the un-dead in this world are like the dead in our world—quite immune to any and all manner of buncombe. But what am I worth? It’s not as if I can beguile them with song, now is it?
“Bah!” Warrel said. “Show yourself, unless thou art craven!”
“Whatcha in sucha hurry ta lose ya head for?” a voice returned.
Warrel braced himself. He knew that voice.
Flames from two approaching torches ruptured the mists, causing a rift in their omnipresence. Currents wafted aside like ghosts fleeing an enchanter.
Two men in leather armor marched to a stop just inside the perimeter of Kogliastro’s light.
“You leave a trail a blind man could follow,” the one with the face full of tattooed teardrops said.
Warrel gritted his teeth. “Thou hast been nothing short of coccydynian, Irvane Jillian,” he said.
Irvane smiled. Beside him, his drooling brother Cale flashed a snarl.
“Who are these men?” Beatrix asked.
“Well, well, well—what’s this?” Irvane said, gawking at the cleric. “You traded in your dwarf for a blessed little goose.”
“So you are a rapscallious knave; that’s all I need to know,” Beatrix said, folding her arms and drumming her mace against her hip.
“A bad trade,” Irvane said. “Me’n Suds actually fretted quite a bit, worryin’ ourselves over how best to deal with Gumgen. Stayed up all night we did, drawin’ big plans. Don’t matter none now, does it?”
“You do not get to say his name,” Warrel said.
“Up and died, did he?”
“Fuck yourself,” Warrel said.
Irvane focused on Beatrix again. “I’m sorry, m’lady,” he said. “We’s got no quarrel with the Whites, but my mama always told me no witnesses, so we’re gonna have ta dirtnap ya. It’ll be quick.” He cast his eyes at Warrel. “You won’t be quick though, poet-boy. And when I’m done with ya, I’m gonna profane yer fuckin’ remains.”
“Have your wits escaped you?” Warrel said. “Has that gaudy codpiece concealing your microphallus blinded you to the situation in which we find ourselves?”
“That insult’ll be your last,” Irvane said. “Ain’t no Swearen around to protect ya, and no witnesses’ll be testifying to him on your behalf in regards to what’s gonna transpire here.”
“Yes, here,” Warrel said. “Have you looked around? Have you any clue where we are?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Irvane said. “I feel strong here. This place fuckin’ speaksto me. Me’n Suds might even set up house.”
“So strong here,” his brother Suds-Cale mumbled.
“Oh, shut it, thou warthog-faced buffoon,” Warrel said.
“Can I kill him now?” Suds-Cale asked.
“Make your move,” Warrel said. “The wizard will incinerate you.”
“The wizard ain’t doin’ shit,” Irvane said, grinning big.
And he certainly wasn’t, when Warrel glanced over to check on him. Kogliastro was doing nothing.
“Kogliastro,” Warrel said. “Hey. Hey. Kogster. Pops!”
Worry flashed in Beatrix’s eyes.
“He’ll do whatever we tell him to, ‘cause he can’t do no other,” Irvane said. “He’s nothing but an old man in a robe, and he’ll give us that nice magic cloak he’s got if’n we ask him to.” He snuck his free hand behind his back and it returned with a large glasslike orb cupped in his palm. Irvane displayed it proudly.
So, that’s it, Warrel realized. That’s the coward’s cunning Gumgen spoke of; Irvane’s answer to the wizard’s magic—he has himself a Globe of Invulnerability, purchased or stolen or looted from an enchanter. Now he and his brother are immune to magic, immune to scrying, immune to divination.
“A dirty trick,” Warrel said.
“History’s wrote with dirty tricks,” Irvane replied.
“Written,” Warrel said. What else did Gumgen warn me? Oh— “He might throw daggers before closing in with swords,” he added from the side of his mouth.
Beatrix nodded. She shifted into a sideface posture, mace primed.
Warrel caught something from the corners of his eyes—the flutter of Kogliastro’s beard, and heard something like a growl issue from beneath the wizard’s hood.
Kogliastro lifted his arm and showed his palm to the Jillian brothers. “Enough,” he said tiredly. “I have heard enough. It is obvious you will not be swayed from your ill-intentions by parley. You force me to reveal where the true balance of power lies.”
Kogliastro turned his hand over, palm-up, mirroring Irvane’s pose. Then, with a suddenness and ferocity that caused the tendons in his forearm to ripple, and a simultaneous intonation of the word, “Erbek,” the wizard’s fingers slammed shut into a quaking fist.
In Irvane’s hand, the Globe of Invulnerability shattered in a wonderful implosion, filling the bowl-shape of his palm with his own blood. He gawked dumbfounded at the empty air above his hand where the globe had been, outwardly unaware of the many more bleeding cuts up his forearm made by the bursting shards of glass.
Warrel’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped, face beaming. Beside him, Beatrix tried to conceal her own shocked amusement by covering her mouth with her fingers. Kogliastro merely lowered his hand and allowed it to resume holding his staff.
“Ha! Ha-ha!” Warrel laughed. “Oh thy loathsome Irvane, I truly hope—for the sake of the last vestiges of your pitiful pride—that wasn’t the full depth of your cunning! Ha! This is Kogliastro, man!—not some vagrant street magician! Did you think he’s never come up against a Globe of Invulnerability before?! Ha! Oh, thou hast really cuckol’ed the kobold!”
“A thousand cocks on you, bard!” Irvane roared.
“What do we do now?” Suds-Cale asked.
“We kill them,” Irvane snarled. “And prop ’em up with poles in their nethers.”
The two brothers cast their torches aside and drew the bastard swords from the scabbards on their backs.
Irvane was fast—so fast that even with Gumgen’s forewarning Warrel wouldn’t have been able to evade those three twinkling daggers whistling towards him. He was spared only because a barrier had materialized between his party and the cutthroats. The daggers ricocheted sharply off the barrier with three succinct tings—ting-ting-ting—like the tolls of a tiny bell. Warrel recognized the barrier—a vertical, two-dimensional abjuration twelve feet wide by twelve feet tall, transparent and shimmering like a thin coat of water. It was the same magic he’d seen encompassing Eralynn’s Teahouse to keep out nosy plebeians when Kogliastro was inside.
Irvane and Suds-Cale shifted their weight forward to charge the barrier, but were suddenly thrust backward in such a way Warrel assumed Kogliastro had cast another spell. But that something was terribly amiss here was all that Warrel could really identify. There was soon too much chaos to fully consider each occurrence in turn; one horror immediately followed another.
Irvane and Suds-Cale were still just inside the perimeter of Kogliastro’s light, but their bodies were arched backwards, their heads submerged in the obscuring mists.
Both brothers were screaming.
Warrel cringed.
Irvane tugged forward, trying to get himself back in the false safety of the wizard’s light. He pulled mightily against whatever was keeping his head in the mists and he momentarily succeeded, just long enough to reveal to Warrel and Kogliastro and Beatrix the bloody teardrops filling in the tattoos on his cheeks, and a slimy putrescent hand that poured over his forehead from behind with its index and little finger sunk deep into the sockets of Irvane’s eyes in a sinister grapple.
Suds-Cale’s screaming ceased the instant Warrel heard the cracking crunch of his skull breaking, which was followed by the wet, slurpy sound of his brain being pulled from the cavity, and then the gnashings of teeth.
“Gramercy!” Irvane cried. “Gramercy!”
His bastard sword lay discarded on the dry grasses. Both of his hands worked at the arm that tried to yank him into the mists by its secure grip in his eye sockets. His face was replete with bloody tears.
Kogliastro extended his hand and pointed at Irvane. The chant he then intoned from deep in his throat bore all the evidence of a magically-transformed larynx. An underlying resonance of rumbling swept over everything. The spell was aimed at Irvane, but the tangential effects were enormous. Warrel and Beatrix were seized and held stiff as trees, limbs shuddering.
Warrel tried flailing but could not. He tried shouting, but could not. Beside him, Beatrix managed a windless groan. He understood what was happening even through his panic: Kogliastro usurped their voices.
Less than a second had passed but it felt much longer. It was the first time Warrel was truly terrified of Kogliastro. He had heard stories, passed off as hearsay, about unutterable arcana, and realized now with much embarrassment and humility how stupid he had been; he knew he was traveling with a master wizard, but didn’t truly grasp how real and harrowing were the unfathomable magics he’d been warned of—magics that bent reality to the wizard’s whims and gave him total control of the destinies of others. There was no way of explaining it, or comprehending it, other than saying Kogliastro had penetrated the immutable matrix of the universe and come back with the scariest magic ever recorded.
This enchantment stopped an enemy’s heart by mere postulate.
It was too much power for anyone to possess. It was godlike.
An entire barbarian hill tribe was blowing their war-trumpets in Warrel’s ears. Over the resonance were countless chanting harmonics—“Beel”—“Kray”—“Ide”—“Urd”—the arcana carrying absolute authority; demanding, commanding.
Kogliastro used the power to grant Irvane’s plea for mercy, but the mists corrupted the magic as Beatrix had warned. Irvane’s heart did not stop beating; it exploded from his chest instead, ribcage bursting wide open, spattering the magic barrier with dollops of pulpy blood.
The rumbling ceased. Warrel felt himself back in control of his body.
“Simplespells, wizard!” Beatrix shouted. “Damn it!—we’re lucky to speak again!”
From the left flank, a rotted, raggedy humanoid rushed at the cleric, arms outstretched and flailing like some pestilence-stricken madman racing to arrive first at the panacea. She staggered the creature with a straight kick to its chest, then attacked, spinning in a whirl of white tunic, channeling all of her impetus at the apex of her mace and connecting with the creature’s mouth, bashing it wide open and sending teeth spraying like tiny hailstones. The creature went flat and she pounced to finish it off, crushing one side of its skull with an arcing downward strike, and then ambidextrously swapping the mace to her opposite hand so she could crush the other side of the skull. It seemed a crucial lesson she had been first among them to learn: always double-strike the undead.
Another undead humanoid emerged from the mists and made a run for her, but Kogliastro thrust out a robed arm and abjurated a second barrier perpendicular to the first. The undead smacked into it and recoiled with a broken nose.
Warrel encountered his own undead, a putrescent smaller humanoid bounding from stunted leg to stunted leg, coming closer. He identified it as having been a gnome, though now it was barely held together by its rotting muscles and tautly-stretched ligaments.
He waved his torch and his prediction was confirmed: the undead gnome retreated from the fire. It hopped side to side beyond the reach of the flame, trying to find a weakness in Warrel’s guard.
Kogliastro put up a third barrier, this one in front of Warrel, and then a fourth connecting all the barriers together, and then topped it with a ceiling, completing the magical box.
More undead emerged from the mists and into the wizard’s light. In the time it took Warrel to cast his eyes around full circle, score upon score of undead had come out of the mists and gathered on all sides of the magical barrier.
We are as the trolls caged in the menagerie, Warrel realized grimly. Except it’s quite the other way around, now, isn’t it? The ones craving flesh are on the outside looking in.
By the hundreds they came, heeding some demon trumpeter’s call; forgotten souls from the tempest tossed, human and elf, dwarf and gnome, halfling and orc; anointed in malodorous cadaverine leachate trickling dark and dirty from ruptured skin and nostrils, in stages of decay as diverse as the mob’s members; the pauper in patchwork clothing, bloated with noxious gases; the orc impaled by a bardiche, feet made of cold and sticky clay; a physician ill-served by the plague mask even still perched upon his countenance, breached seams dripping maggots; the knight in corroded and sundered armor, sundry rivets mislaid; the dames in brocade dresses with lips of lurid blue; the marbled appearance of the courtesan in a golden girdle; men of nobility in frayed doublets with lacy ruffled collars; a peculiar humanoid uncatalogued by cryptozoology with a feature full of outreached tentacles, beak like a squid gaping with hunger, garbed in a cracked chitinous cuirass; the kingsman donned in a surcoat bearing the sigil of a kingdom nonexistent; the elf aristocrat decorated in a cloak of darkleaf—thou are not exempt from this fate; none are. Why need I further pore—this corner holds at least a score, and yonder twice as many more. The dead who know nothing: who is the fool?—who is the wise man?—who is the beggar?—the emperor?
Livers and intestines were the first to rot after death, Warrel knew, leaving nothing to digest the nutrients these undead sought. The brains they devoured were given over to total nothingness—wasted into an eternal oblivion. On Erda, the world he knew, life must needs eat life. But on this broken, misty world, life was given unto non-life.
What a grisly joke has been played upon us all, he thought.
Their approach was noiseless—trancelike—not a single breath or sound escaped the dusty abyss of their mouths. The impossibility of their very existence aside, they should not have had the capacity for such coordinated movement. Even well-drilled armies of living men sometimes had a stumble or two when they marched in formation, but not these undead; they did not bump against each other or cross feet. Somehow they were functioning cohesively—without even communicating. And now they were at all four sides of the barrier, trying to get in.
“Kogliastro,” Warrel uttered bleakly. “Is there anything that can be done?”
The wizard answered by plunging his staff into the ground, stabilizing its lifeguarding light, and evoking a magic missile in his palm. He loosed the missile through the shimmering barrier at the nearest undead, magic slapping its face with a wet poof. The head recoiled; clear damage had been done.
Kogliastro evoked another magic missile, and another, launching them at the same undead. Its head recoiled from each blow, each blasting away a chunk of its skull. Two more missiles followed and obliterated the skull entirely.
The wizard flowed in a magnificent arcane dance, loosing magic missiles into the air and through the barrier. They came at first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, the pinkish-orange projectiles racing like tadpoles at the innumerable targets before them. Surely the mists overhead obscured a display greater than any performance of fireworks ever recorded on Erda—perhaps a show even grander than the celebrated ceremony at the Garden of Light in Solux, when millions of hatchling torchflies swarmed the shores during the night of the long solstice, brightening the sky as full as day.
The missiles plunged inerrant on their course, poof-poof-poof, destroying skulls, orange tracers recalibrating to strike the next target, brains and bone fragments popping out in showery eruptions, mostly headless corpses dropping clumsily to the ground, twisted and entwined in macabre poses, a tangle of arms and legs, limbs interlocking in some perverse, necrotic orgy of mortflesh.
Hesitantly hopeful, Warrel watched on as minutes passed and piles of undead littered the field. Not a single sliver of weed was visible through the rotting mass.
He is doing it, he thought. Truly the wizard is as a god.
Except the stream of magic missiles had now begun to sputter, like the dwindling momentum at the end of some divine orgasm. Warrel threw his gaze over to Kogliastro and observed a blue robe with gold piping soaked through with sweat, the lower half stumbling, losing coordination.
“He is exhausting himself,” Beatrix said.
She dashed to be at his side, but before she could reach him to support him upright, the wizard crumpled in a ripple of deflated robe, one final magic missile shooting from his palm and weakly slapping some undead’s face in a gesture most impotent.
Kogliastro lay on the ground. His hood had fallen back in his collapse and the man underneath revealed to Warrel and Beatrix with absoluteness. This was a man deep in senescence, a grandfather several generations grand, a sweaty balded pate above two cataract-infused eyes, twitching as if in momentary senility. Amidst the white beard a mouth appeared, laboring to propel oxygen through its shallow passage and refill the strained lungs powering the decrepit carbon engine.
Beatrix knelt at his side and supported his head.
He is but a cluster of cloth draped upon a frame of bundled twigs, Warrel thought.
Kogliastro’s pupils rolled in Warrel’s direction. They studied Warrel for a time, and then the wizard said, shakily, “I see you looking at me through the pitying eyes of youth—the ignorant eyes gazing upon something they think will never happen to them. Know this, Warrel: One day you too will be a young man looking out upon the world from the lenses of an old body, and none who look upon you will see the man you still believe you are.”
Outside the magical cube, there was no indication the number of undead had been at all reduced. A new wave of zombies scaled and conquered the mountains of unmoving corpses, and the vanguard was pressed to the barrier and gawking like spoiled children at the window of a chocolatier’s storefront.
Beatrix sluggishly turned away from the sight of them and lowered her head, gulping. “How long will your barrier hold, Kogliastro?” she asked.
“I… cannot know for certain,” he replied.
Beatrix nodded soberly. She cast her eyes around the interior of the cube before finding and focusing on the bit of handle jutting from Warrel’s boot, the handle belonging to the Pixie Prick.
“I would like to make use of your blade, Warrel,” she said. “May I borrow it?”
Shaking his head in answer to her question was a frustrating distraction. Warrel was deep in thought, mulling over an idea with a projected outcome that was surely too hopeful to happen in any kind of real actuality. But if the wizard’s magic missiles had been able to pass through the barrier from this side, perhaps anything could.
“Face the inevitable,” Beatrix said. “Be not a coward who dies a thousand deaths. Lend me your blade and I will demonstrate courage.”
“No,” Warrel said.
“Warrel!”
“No!” he said. “Cleric, postpone thy martyrdom and humor the possibility, however remote, that the lunamoth doctrine suckled from the teats of your goddess serves only to propagandize dying as a trivial, minor inconvenience. I do not share your conviction that life is but a meaningless flicker against the backdrop of some grand immortality; I see life in its full, limitless potential. So, please, be still a moment and let me conclude my thoughts.”
“Ugh—you dare advise me,” she scowled. “Such a ubiquitous trend—the male pontificating the female what she should or shouldn’t do with full agency over her own body.”
“Oh, drop the dogmas!” Warrel snapped. “I’m not trying to claim dominion over you—I’m only asking that you not pass your ghost beyond the veil before we’ve exhausted our options.”
“What options?” she asked doubtfully.
“I might have something,” he said.
“And if you do not?”
“Then my blade is yours to plunge into your breast—or whatever the ritual is your goddess demands.”
“Fine. Do what you will—but be quick about it,” she said. “If I suffer tortuous death at the hands of the un-dead, your name will be the last curse uttered from my lips.”
“Yes, yes, fine,” he said. I’ve been cursed plenty before. He focused his attention on the sweaty old man in the skins of robe on the ground like a collapsed monument. “Kogliastro, are you still with us?”
“Yes,” the wizard said.
“Clarify for me: will anything go through the barrier from this side?”
“Yes,” Kogliastro said. “Attacks from within may pass.”
“Do they need be magical in nature?”
“No,” Kogliastro said.
“You’re quite sure?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure.”
“And nothing can pass through from the other side?”
“Nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing?”
“Correct. Unless I authorize it.”
“And you’ve authorized nothing to pass?”
“Correct.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“So nothing at all can pass from the other side?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you very, very sure?”
“Yes, Warrel, he’s sure!” Beatrix said.
Warrel put up his hand. “Okay, okay,” he said.
He turned to face the nearest wall. Zombies pressed up against the other side, front to back, shoulder to shoulder, showing their teeth. Their ranks could go on infinitely.
Warrel shuddered. I must make room.
He extended his torch at the barrier, expecting some kind of resistance despite what the wizard told him, but there was none. The flame passed through, as did the solid of the torch itself. An anomalous force tugged at it from the other side, but he understood it was actually the barrier prohibiting any particles from reentering once they had already passed through.
The undead shuffled backwards one step at a time as the flame drew near. Warrel released the torch and it fell to the dirt on the other side, rolling a short distance on the slight incline and singeing scattered blades of grass as it trundled over them. After everything settled and all movement had ceased, there was roughly four feet of space between the vanguard of undead and the barrier.
That will do, Warrel figured.
He reached a hand behind his back to untie the lashings securing the crossbow to his knapsack. Once accomplished, he displayed the crossbow to Kogliastro and Beatrix.
“This is The Albatross,” he said. “The heighth of gnomish ingenuity. This,” he bounced it in his hands, “is equal to almost the entirety of my life savings. I—”
“Get on with it,” Beatrix said.
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there,” Warrel said.
He spun again to face the undead. With a nervous exhale, he released the ammunition casing from the crossbow’s stock, and verified with a quick glance that six Bolts of Massive Explosion were lined up inside. They phosphoresced with an ominous green iridescence, sheening to glowing tips, a luster lusting only for carnage, wholesale.
And so you shall have it.
He settled the stock against his shoulder and lifted the crossbow at a rotting elf in the forefront. Its pointed ears were browned and withered at the edges and the cartilage of its nose was disintegrated, exposing a festering nasal cavity. Warrel sighted center-mass, the crosshairs targeting a magnified view of the elf’s chest, showing with gratuitous detail the slimy curls of intestine peeking out through multiple ruptures.
Warrel cocked the foregrip with a staunch jerk back then forward, the crossbow releasing a hiss of air in synchronization with the forward motion, drawing back the mithral bowstring. A Bolt of Massive Explosion was conveyed by some mechanism inside and positioned in the flight groove.
Warrel tapped his finger on the tickler guard. It was all that stopped him now.
“Hold on to your butts,” he said.
He pulled the trigger. His eyes were able to witness only a single image of the bolt, a brief instant of the distortion of space by a zooming body captured in his memory as a wraithlike umbilical cord linking the crossbow to its target.
And then all the fires from all the furnaces of all the hells opened wide their abyssal jaws and expelled apocalypse on the dark and misty lands. All was fire—the undead were fire, the soil was fire, the air was fire—burning greenish-red and engulfing even the mists—the mists that succumbed even after losing form and sprinkling droplets of evacuees that were immediately boiled and annihilated.
Warrel winced and shrank back, shielding his eyes with his forearm. The ground trembled below his feet. He squinted at Kogliastro and Beatrix, at their bodies bathed in a wash of neon light, and dreadfully wondered if this might not have been what the wizard had in mind when he said nothing could pass. Warrel counted one, two, three seconds. But inside the magic cube, even at the nucleus of the explosion, the tall grasses were still green and thriving and he felt no trace of heat from the inferno without.
The raging fire was too wide-ranging to make any assessment of its true proportions. For all Warrel knew, it could have conquered this broken world entirely. And once he admitted this to himself, he recognized the terrified expression frozen upon Beatrix’s countenance. It meant to say, the gnomes have it within them to destroy the world—gods help us all.
A minute passed, at least, before there was any change in intensity. The flames receded and the mists in the sky were replaced with roiling black smoke. The fire divided, died off, separated into small tongues lapping away at meager remnants of corpses like pennants of fallen soldiers rippling in the wind after a battle. The field was black, scorched and smoldering. There was no undead left standing anywhere in sight—which was quite far, for the fire had sent the mists into full retreat and provided Warrel his widest vista since he first set foot in this gloomy world.
Beatrix sprang to her feet and investigated the carnage around her. When Warrel espied glimpses of her face, he felt he could almost read her mind: Her oaths forbade her from encouraging, approving, or permitting such wanton destruction, but she was so relieved to be alive that she praised the wanton destruction for saving her, and then all the feelings of guilt came flooding in, and surely at this point she was a mess of amalgamated emotional dissonance. It explained her withdrawn silence.
Inexorably, new undead appeared at the horizons in the form of misshapen silhouettes, weaving around the numerous small fires still burning, drawn to the occupants inside the magic barrier.
“They will keep coming,” Kogliastro said, wincing as he sat up. “And I must dissolve the barrier soon—I cannot recuperate with this lingering magic taxing my power. How much ammunition do you carry?”
“I have five bolts left,” Warrel replied.
“Of the same variety as the one you loosed?”
“Yes.”
“Good, good—fantastic,” Kogliastro said, with burgeoning enthusiasm. He pointed at the way they had been travelling. “We must continue seeking the source of the illusory magic. There is an intelligence behind it. If we locate it, we may find safety.”
Somehow I doubt that, Warrel thought.
“Clear a route with your weapon, as far as you can,” Kogliastro said. “Thenceforth we can flee before more un-dead close in on us.”
No other options were coming to mind, so Warrel set about the task. Beatrix blinked away from eye contact and said not a word as he slipped past her to the barrier opposite. He felt her fingers brush his wrist, probably carrying the intent to halt him but not with enough real conviction to make it manifest. She turned her head lugubriously in his wake, as if it were demanded by creed that she witness the chaos her silence sanctioned.
She sighed, barely audibly, “How can my fall be happening so fast?”
Warrel aimed at the farthest spot he could see in the blackness, where the mists were converging, and fired a second Bolt of Massive Explosion.
This time he could behold the detonation in all its glory. The initial burst was a spherical eruption of flaming spikes that looked like the form of some giant enraged quillrat, then a growing column of greenish-red flame shooting into the sky and billowing off like a mushroom. The all-consuming wave of fire came next.
He did not wait the full minute or more for the fire to dissipate. He cocked the foregrip again, lifted his aim to a higher trajectory, and pulled the trigger. He wasn’t sure what kind of range The Albatross was capable of, but he figured it must be great.
Another mountain of fire erupted behind the first. Warrel aimed higher and fired again, then aimed higher and fired again, repeating until the last bolt was expended. He agonized upon each explosion, wondering how much each shot was costing him monetarily. He decided he oughtn’t analyze it too thoroughly; after all, any man who watched his fortune slipping away would feel the same paroxysms of grief.
“Good, good,” Kogliastro said. He attempted to stand, but couldn’t get further than one knee. He wobbled, on the verge of toppling over.
Beatrix caught him. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she said. “We are in no immediate danger. Dissolve your barrier. Let your strength return.”
“No time,” Kogliastro said. “We must flee now.”
“Then we shall carry you,” Beatrix said, purchasing Warrel’s compliance with the austerity of her gaze.
They took opposite sides of the wizard and draped his arms across their shoulders, raising him gently to his feet. To Warrel it seemed less like a human body he and the cleric shared between them and more akin to some hollow construct of papier-mâché they were charged with delivering undamaged to some far-off exhibition. He feared at any moment he would harken the sound of a breaking bone.
Beatrix pulled Kogliastro’s staff out of the ground and slipped it into his hand. He adjusted it in his grasp to extend the light before them.
“Be swift,” he said. “Now, forward, as the fires die.”
The barriers dissolved with a flicker. Hot air blew at them like the ambient heat of a summer sun baking the concrete of a city street, along with the marinade of smells such a street would carry. The pungent stench of crispy, cremated corpses burned in Warrel’s nostrils as if he had snorted the entire stale contents of an old pepper grinder.
They ran, gaining speed as they coordinated strides. Their bootsteps sunk deep in the sweeping black bed of powdery cinders, ashes stirring like dead leaves in a poofy gust of autumnal breath, fiery red coals snowing at their trail.
The craters at the detonation points served as beacons through which they waded in and out, and at the third crater Warrel burst into hysterical laughter.
Beatrix confusedly glanced over at him, then returned her eyes forward. “What could you possibly find so funny?” she asked.
“Oh—” Warrel said with a grimace, “Only that I laid The Albatross down and forgot to take it up again. I ask you: how much must I give?—how much must this land take?”
“Good grief,” Beatrix said. “You know we can’t go back.”
“I know,” he panted. “Just imagine all the other treasures that might be lost out here in the mists.”
“I am imagining living—not treasure,” she coolly replied.
Her breathing was regulated despite the exertion of running, in contrast to Warrel’s increased huffing and puffing. He had worked hard to keep up his cardio and thought the natural endurance of half-elves quite unfair.
“Yes, living,” he said. “Aren’t you glad you stuck around? I bet you’d have felt awful silly killing yourself before I managed to get us out of there.”
“Yes, Warrel,” she said. “I’m sure I would have felt very silly.”
“And considering you’d likely have returned as un-dead.”
“What?” she said sharply, looking past Kogliastro to throw a quick glare in Warrel’s direction. “What does that mean?”
“Just a hypothesis I have,” Warrel said. “If you die with your brain intact, your body belongs to the mists. I think.”
Beatrix scoffed. “And you were going to give utterance to your hypothesis when?”
“When and if the need arose, I suppose.”
She growled. “Argh! You flighty bastard!”
“I’m not flighty,” Warrel said.
She nodded a thought to herself, with conviction, unable to hide the sneer of her lips. “I’d have gone for your brain first,” she said, “though I’m sure it would’ve provided me little satisfaction.”
“Oh, truly thou art rife with zingers,” Warrel replied.
“You impertinent flake,” she hissed. “By the gods, it’s as if I have direct audience with the uncrowned king of imbeciles.”
“Enough!” Kogliastro burst. “Both of you, enough!”
Warrel was not frightened so much at the wizard’s anger as he was by the mists closing in at their sides. They appeared rageful, swooping in swiftly and violently, wanting nothing less than outright revenge for the casualties they suffered by fire.
The scorched land gradually gave way to unscathed pastures. The mists tried to smite at the wizard’s light, sending wispy assassins to encircle the bright bulb at the end of his staff. The luminosity dimmed under their efforts, but did not extinguish.
And though Warrel did not turn his head long enough to investigate fully, he was almost certain putrefied hands and arms were reaching at them from the mists.
He almost cried aloud, We aren’t going to make it!
They passed through an opening in a low stone wall, the first architecture Warrel had seen since leaving the abandoned town. The grass began to reveal interspersed flagstones that clapped loudly under their bootfalls, leading somewhere, certainly.
—Hopefully.
“Stop,” Kogliastro said. “We are there.” He unwound his arms from the cradle of their shoulders and leaned forward heavily on his staff.
Directly before them was debris where a large manor once stood, evidenced by the ruins of pillars, walls, and supports suggesting the shape of the original structure. There was no telling what its final fate had been, whether fire, storm, or pillaging. Strangely, however, the mists did not invade the area. They seemed unable, being stopped and turned away at the tentative borders.
“There is nothing here,” Warrel said, breathing hard.
“Yes there is,” Kogliastro said. “We see an illusion—a false projection of reality. Behind the illusion the structure still exists, intact and mostly undamaged.”
“It does?” Warrel asked. “There’s a… house here?”
He stepped ahead and flattened his palms against one of the pillars, but his skin did not quite make full contact, as if there were some invisible surface area he was not allowed to see. He knew there was something there; he could feel a finished surface on his fingertips, like polished wood or a painted exterior. He walked sideways, following the imperceptible vertical plane with slaps of his palms, feeling the solidness even where his eyes were sure there was nothing.
“There must be a way in or someone wouldn’t be bothering to hide it,” he said. “A door—there must be a door.”
His brushed against the jambs of a doorframe and felt for its outline. The doorway was large—he could tell that straight away—something imposing and impressive for moneyed gentry to flaunt at passersby. He laid hand on the doorknob, but it only rattled in his grasp. He floated a hand upwards and found a hinged knocker, a cold metal cast of some indefinite form.
“Hello! Is there anybody there?!” he called out, rapping.
Only stillness answered him, though every word fell echoing through the shadowiness of the house, the air shaken by his call.
Warrel stood perplexed. He called again, “Is there anybody there?!”
But never the least stir made the listeners.
“Open says me!” he shouted. He fumbled down at the knob and probed for a keyhole while one hand slipped into his jacket for his howler quill. “I may be able to pick the lock.”
“No,” Kogliastro said. “Stand back. I am not strong enough yet to dispel the illusion, but I may be able to… just stand back.”
Warrel backed away uncertainly, glancing over his shoulders for any sign the undead had caught up.
Kogliastro lifted a shaky hand and said, “Repulverie.”
A large rectangular shape burst thunderously in the false emptiness and yellow light gushed forth from the nothing. Kogliastro had repelled the door from its frame, Warrel gathered, and he was now seeing the interior the illusion had concealed. It was well lit, and there were no mists inside—that was good enough for him.
Kogliastro collapsed to his knees. Beatrix collected him under his arms and hoisted him up. She assisted him to the doorway as he hobbled weakly on crouched legs.
And Warrel was suddenly off his own, plummeting forward, his nose barely missing a flagstone. He cried, “Oomph!” as he ate a mouthful of dirt.
He was dragged backwards, back to the mists, his shirt bunching up in a roll against his chest, a firm pressure around his ankle like a terminal anchor. And he was too tired, too fatigued—and he knew it—to struggle against his assailant.
The undead leaped, and Warrel heard the whistle of air through its gaping mouth, and soon the teeth would be clenched on his scalp, and he braced himself for the surge of pain.
There was an unexpected sound, though, a loud thunk, following an altogether different whistle of air. Warrel saw the blurred crystalline club swinging in a pendulum arc, and felt the impact in the atmosphere when the undead’s face was crushed into its scalp.
A hand gripped the collar of his jacket and he felt himself dragged once again, this time forward, turned clumsily half-over with his knapsack holding him at an angle. The coarse dirt abruptly changed to smooth hardwood flooring, and the hand released him.
He lifted his head. There was Kogliastro on his hands and knees in the blankets of his robe, and he thrust a hand back and said, “Etrun.” The rectangle shape, now recognizable as a paneled door, flew back into its frame as if drawn by gravity. Kogliastro then fell flat on the floor, exhaling an exhausted sigh.
Warrel propped himself on an elbow, and breathing hard, trying to syncopate the beating of his heart, gazed up at the pale apparition who had delivered him from skeletal clutches.
“Yours is the aura of a corrupter,” Beatrix said. “But I postponed your death all the same. Like for like.”
Warrel nodded. He had the urge to shamelessly and effusively kiss her boots, but settled for patting them instead. The doeskin was soft yet unyielding to his touch.
“You have my undying gratitude,” he said. “Pardon the pun.”
= = = = =
Pick up the rest of the adventure today in paperback and Kindle HERE!
Travis Adkins has never had issues with lack of imagination. Or articulation. Travis brings all of his best writing qualities in an amazing and enjoyable Dungeons and Dragons-style adventure title that is one part fantasy, one part zombie horror, one part comedy, and one part bawdy erotic title. Read this excerpt from 'Mists of the Dead' and see for yourself. Then, pick up a copy HERE.
Copyright 2017 Henchman Press, Travis Adkins. All rights reserved.
In the following excerpt, Warrel the Bard, Kogliastro the Wizard, and Beatrix the Cleric have been spirited from their world into a bizzare new world through a mysterious mist. As they try to understand the realities of their new world, rivals from their world appear and bring trouble. That's when the real trouble from the mystery of the mist begins to reveal itself.
= = = = = = = =
Ahead, Kogliastro stopped walking and stood still in the midst of his light. Warrel’s own steps stuttered to a stop, and then Beatrix’s.
As Warrel waited for the wizard to turn around, with warranted exasperation, and give them a good scolding, he began formulating in his head the response he would provide. He would say he and the cleric weren’t arguing, only politely disagreeing. Then he would apologize. But he had a feeling Beatrix would not suffer chastisement as readily as he did.
Please turn her into a frog, he thought.
With movement as slow and graceful as a dancer’s pirouette, the blue mass of robe framing Kogliastro swiveled around to face them. He brought up his hand, heavy sleeve sagging, and beckoned with a bony finger for Warrel and Beatrix to come forward. They did.
“Get behind me,” he said.
Warrel exchanged glances with Beatrix, and they moved to opposite sides behind Kogliastro.
Warrel watched the wizard, but said nothing. He looked where the wizard was looking, back the way they had traveled, at the mists sieging the circumference of the magical light, obscuring the land from view. It was quiet out there with no one talking—quiet as a grave. Warrel figured it probably wasn’t healthy to be immersed in such deadening silence, when all you could hear was your own blood rushing in your ears.
“Danger?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kogliastro said.
Beatrix twitched. Her eyes shut in palliative meditation, and opened again in resolve. “The un-dead?” she asked.
Kogliastro’s hood shook side to side. “I sense no un-dead in my divinations, only a void,” he said. “But I know they are only part of it; the void is greater than they. The emptiness in this world is vast, the nothing greater than the something, the not-beings greater than the is-beings.”
“What?”
“Beings can be, and nothings can noth,” Kogliastro said.
“But what danger approaches?” Warrel asked.
“A subterfuge,” Kogliastro said.
“The illusory magic?”
“No. The presence of illusory magic is still a distance away. What approaches us now is the camouflage shadowing us since we arrived here.”
If you weren’t so obtuse I could better follow what was going on, Warrel wanted to say.
The mists betrayed nothing. If there was some kind of code lurking in their swirls and undulations, Warrel couldn’t see it. There was no breeze stirring them yet still they danced, a reaction without an original action, objects in motion staying in motion. He swept his torch across his unprotected side, hoping it might ward off anything lurking on the other side of the light.
“My powers have failed in this world from the start,” Beatrix uttered through downcast lips. “I have been unable to sense any of the threats until they were already upon us. Either my goddess cannot reach me to lend me her strength, or this world itself is an evil all-pervasive.”
Both, undoubtedly, Warrel thought. And a cleric who cannot turn the un-dead is not a cleric at all; worth less than half a fighter, if that. Perhaps the un-dead in this world are like the dead in our world—quite immune to any and all manner of buncombe. But what am I worth? It’s not as if I can beguile them with song, now is it?
“Bah!” Warrel said. “Show yourself, unless thou art craven!”
“Whatcha in sucha hurry ta lose ya head for?” a voice returned.
Warrel braced himself. He knew that voice.
Flames from two approaching torches ruptured the mists, causing a rift in their omnipresence. Currents wafted aside like ghosts fleeing an enchanter.
Two men in leather armor marched to a stop just inside the perimeter of Kogliastro’s light.
“You leave a trail a blind man could follow,” the one with the face full of tattooed teardrops said.
Warrel gritted his teeth. “Thou hast been nothing short of coccydynian, Irvane Jillian,” he said.
Irvane smiled. Beside him, his drooling brother Cale flashed a snarl.
“Who are these men?” Beatrix asked.
“Well, well, well—what’s this?” Irvane said, gawking at the cleric. “You traded in your dwarf for a blessed little goose.”
“So you are a rapscallious knave; that’s all I need to know,” Beatrix said, folding her arms and drumming her mace against her hip.
“A bad trade,” Irvane said. “Me’n Suds actually fretted quite a bit, worryin’ ourselves over how best to deal with Gumgen. Stayed up all night we did, drawin’ big plans. Don’t matter none now, does it?”
“You do not get to say his name,” Warrel said.
“Up and died, did he?”
“Fuck yourself,” Warrel said.
Irvane focused on Beatrix again. “I’m sorry, m’lady,” he said. “We’s got no quarrel with the Whites, but my mama always told me no witnesses, so we’re gonna have ta dirtnap ya. It’ll be quick.” He cast his eyes at Warrel. “You won’t be quick though, poet-boy. And when I’m done with ya, I’m gonna profane yer fuckin’ remains.”
“Have your wits escaped you?” Warrel said. “Has that gaudy codpiece concealing your microphallus blinded you to the situation in which we find ourselves?”“That insult’ll be your last,” Irvane said. “Ain’t no Swearen around to protect ya, and no witnesses’ll be testifying to him on your behalf in regards to what’s gonna transpire here.”
“Yes, here,” Warrel said. “Have you looked around? Have you any clue where we are?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Irvane said. “I feel strong here. This place fuckin’ speaksto me. Me’n Suds might even set up house.”
“So strong here,” his brother Suds-Cale mumbled.
“Oh, shut it, thou warthog-faced buffoon,” Warrel said.
“Can I kill him now?” Suds-Cale asked.
“Make your move,” Warrel said. “The wizard will incinerate you.”
“The wizard ain’t doin’ shit,” Irvane said, grinning big.
And he certainly wasn’t, when Warrel glanced over to check on him. Kogliastro was doing nothing.
“Kogliastro,” Warrel said. “Hey. Hey. Kogster. Pops!”
Worry flashed in Beatrix’s eyes.
“He’ll do whatever we tell him to, ‘cause he can’t do no other,” Irvane said. “He’s nothing but an old man in a robe, and he’ll give us that nice magic cloak he’s got if’n we ask him to.” He snuck his free hand behind his back and it returned with a large glasslike orb cupped in his palm. Irvane displayed it proudly.
So, that’s it, Warrel realized. That’s the coward’s cunning Gumgen spoke of; Irvane’s answer to the wizard’s magic—he has himself a Globe of Invulnerability, purchased or stolen or looted from an enchanter. Now he and his brother are immune to magic, immune to scrying, immune to divination.
“A dirty trick,” Warrel said.
“History’s wrote with dirty tricks,” Irvane replied.
“Written,” Warrel said. What else did Gumgen warn me? Oh— “He might throw daggers before closing in with swords,” he added from the side of his mouth.
Beatrix nodded. She shifted into a sideface posture, mace primed.
Warrel caught something from the corners of his eyes—the flutter of Kogliastro’s beard, and heard something like a growl issue from beneath the wizard’s hood.
Kogliastro lifted his arm and showed his palm to the Jillian brothers. “Enough,” he said tiredly. “I have heard enough. It is obvious you will not be swayed from your ill-intentions by parley. You force me to reveal where the true balance of power lies.”
Kogliastro turned his hand over, palm-up, mirroring Irvane’s pose. Then, with a suddenness and ferocity that caused the tendons in his forearm to ripple, and a simultaneous intonation of the word, “Erbek,” the wizard’s fingers slammed shut into a quaking fist.
In Irvane’s hand, the Globe of Invulnerability shattered in a wonderful implosion, filling the bowl-shape of his palm with his own blood. He gawked dumbfounded at the empty air above his hand where the globe had been, outwardly unaware of the many more bleeding cuts up his forearm made by the bursting shards of glass.
Warrel’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped, face beaming. Beside him, Beatrix tried to conceal her own shocked amusement by covering her mouth with her fingers. Kogliastro merely lowered his hand and allowed it to resume holding his staff.
“Ha! Ha-ha!” Warrel laughed. “Oh thy loathsome Irvane, I truly hope—for the sake of the last vestiges of your pitiful pride—that wasn’t the full depth of your cunning! Ha! This is Kogliastro, man!—not some vagrant street magician! Did you think he’s never come up against a Globe of Invulnerability before?! Ha! Oh, thou hast really cuckol’ed the kobold!”
“A thousand cocks on you, bard!” Irvane roared.
“What do we do now?” Suds-Cale asked.
“We kill them,” Irvane snarled. “And prop ’em up with poles in their nethers.”
The two brothers cast their torches aside and drew the bastard swords from the scabbards on their backs.
Irvane was fast—so fast that even with Gumgen’s forewarning Warrel wouldn’t have been able to evade those three twinkling daggers whistling towards him. He was spared only because a barrier had materialized between his party and the cutthroats. The daggers ricocheted sharply off the barrier with three succinct tings—ting-ting-ting—like the tolls of a tiny bell. Warrel recognized the barrier—a vertical, two-dimensional abjuration twelve feet wide by twelve feet tall, transparent and shimmering like a thin coat of water. It was the same magic he’d seen encompassing Eralynn’s Teahouse to keep out nosy plebeians when Kogliastro was inside.
Irvane and Suds-Cale shifted their weight forward to charge the barrier, but were suddenly thrust backward in such a way Warrel assumed Kogliastro had cast another spell. But that something was terribly amiss here was all that Warrel could really identify. There was soon too much chaos to fully consider each occurrence in turn; one horror immediately followed another.
Irvane and Suds-Cale were still just inside the perimeter of Kogliastro’s light, but their bodies were arched backwards, their heads submerged in the obscuring mists.
Both brothers were screaming.
Warrel cringed.
Irvane tugged forward, trying to get himself back in the false safety of the wizard’s light. He pulled mightily against whatever was keeping his head in the mists and he momentarily succeeded, just long enough to reveal to Warrel and Kogliastro and Beatrix the bloody teardrops filling in the tattoos on his cheeks, and a slimy putrescent hand that poured over his forehead from behind with its index and little finger sunk deep into the sockets of Irvane’s eyes in a sinister grapple.
Suds-Cale’s screaming ceased the instant Warrel heard the cracking crunch of his skull breaking, which was followed by the wet, slurpy sound of his brain being pulled from the cavity, and then the gnashings of teeth.
“Gramercy!” Irvane cried. “Gramercy!”
His bastard sword lay discarded on the dry grasses. Both of his hands worked at the arm that tried to yank him into the mists by its secure grip in his eye sockets. His face was replete with bloody tears.
Kogliastro extended his hand and pointed at Irvane. The chant he then intoned from deep in his throat bore all the evidence of a magically-transformed larynx. An underlying resonance of rumbling swept over everything. The spell was aimed at Irvane, but the tangential effects were enormous. Warrel and Beatrix were seized and held stiff as trees, limbs shuddering.
Warrel tried flailing but could not. He tried shouting, but could not. Beside him, Beatrix managed a windless groan. He understood what was happening even through his panic: Kogliastro usurped their voices.
Less than a second had passed but it felt much longer. It was the first time Warrel was truly terrified of Kogliastro. He had heard stories, passed off as hearsay, about unutterable arcana, and realized now with much embarrassment and humility how stupid he had been; he knew he was traveling with a master wizard, but didn’t truly grasp how real and harrowing were the unfathomable magics he’d been warned of—magics that bent reality to the wizard’s whims and gave him total control of the destinies of others. There was no way of explaining it, or comprehending it, other than saying Kogliastro had penetrated the immutable matrix of the universe and come back with the scariest magic ever recorded.
This enchantment stopped an enemy’s heart by mere postulate.
It was too much power for anyone to possess. It was godlike.
An entire barbarian hill tribe was blowing their war-trumpets in Warrel’s ears. Over the resonance were countless chanting harmonics—“Beel”—“Kray”—“Ide”—“Urd”—the arcana carrying absolute authority; demanding, commanding.
Kogliastro used the power to grant Irvane’s plea for mercy, but the mists corrupted the magic as Beatrix had warned. Irvane’s heart did not stop beating; it exploded from his chest instead, ribcage bursting wide open, spattering the magic barrier with dollops of pulpy blood.
The rumbling ceased. Warrel felt himself back in control of his body.
“Simplespells, wizard!” Beatrix shouted. “Damn it!—we’re lucky to speak again!”
From the left flank, a rotted, raggedy humanoid rushed at the cleric, arms outstretched and flailing like some pestilence-stricken madman racing to arrive first at the panacea. She staggered the creature with a straight kick to its chest, then attacked, spinning in a whirl of white tunic, channeling all of her impetus at the apex of her mace and connecting with the creature’s mouth, bashing it wide open and sending teeth spraying like tiny hailstones. The creature went flat and she pounced to finish it off, crushing one side of its skull with an arcing downward strike, and then ambidextrously swapping the mace to her opposite hand so she could crush the other side of the skull. It seemed a crucial lesson she had been first among them to learn: always double-strike the undead.
Another undead humanoid emerged from the mists and made a run for her, but Kogliastro thrust out a robed arm and abjurated a second barrier perpendicular to the first. The undead smacked into it and recoiled with a broken nose.
Warrel encountered his own undead, a putrescent smaller humanoid bounding from stunted leg to stunted leg, coming closer. He identified it as having been a gnome, though now it was barely held together by its rotting muscles and tautly-stretched ligaments.
He waved his torch and his prediction was confirmed: the undead gnome retreated from the fire. It hopped side to side beyond the reach of the flame, trying to find a weakness in Warrel’s guard.
Kogliastro put up a third barrier, this one in front of Warrel, and then a fourth connecting all the barriers together, and then topped it with a ceiling, completing the magical box.
More undead emerged from the mists and into the wizard’s light. In the time it took Warrel to cast his eyes around full circle, score upon score of undead had come out of the mists and gathered on all sides of the magical barrier.
We are as the trolls caged in the menagerie, Warrel realized grimly. Except it’s quite the other way around, now, isn’t it? The ones craving flesh are on the outside looking in.
By the hundreds they came, heeding some demon trumpeter’s call; forgotten souls from the tempest tossed, human and elf, dwarf and gnome, halfling and orc; anointed in malodorous cadaverine leachate trickling dark and dirty from ruptured skin and nostrils, in stages of decay as diverse as the mob’s members; the pauper in patchwork clothing, bloated with noxious gases; the orc impaled by a bardiche, feet made of cold and sticky clay; a physician ill-served by the plague mask even still perched upon his countenance, breached seams dripping maggots; the knight in corroded and sundered armor, sundry rivets mislaid; the dames in brocade dresses with lips of lurid blue; the marbled appearance of the courtesan in a golden girdle; men of nobility in frayed doublets with lacy ruffled collars; a peculiar humanoid uncatalogued by cryptozoology with a feature full of outreached tentacles, beak like a squid gaping with hunger, garbed in a cracked chitinous cuirass; the kingsman donned in a surcoat bearing the sigil of a kingdom nonexistent; the elf aristocrat decorated in a cloak of darkleaf—thou are not exempt from this fate; none are. Why need I further pore—this corner holds at least a score, and yonder twice as many more. The dead who know nothing: who is the fool?—who is the wise man?—who is the beggar?—the emperor?
Livers and intestines were the first to rot after death, Warrel knew, leaving nothing to digest the nutrients these undead sought. The brains they devoured were given over to total nothingness—wasted into an eternal oblivion. On Erda, the world he knew, life must needs eat life. But on this broken, misty world, life was given unto non-life.
What a grisly joke has been played upon us all, he thought.
Their approach was noiseless—trancelike—not a single breath or sound escaped the dusty abyss of their mouths. The impossibility of their very existence aside, they should not have had the capacity for such coordinated movement. Even well-drilled armies of living men sometimes had a stumble or two when they marched in formation, but not these undead; they did not bump against each other or cross feet. Somehow they were functioning cohesively—without even communicating. And now they were at all four sides of the barrier, trying to get in.
“Kogliastro,” Warrel uttered bleakly. “Is there anything that can be done?”
The wizard answered by plunging his staff into the ground, stabilizing its lifeguarding light, and evoking a magic missile in his palm. He loosed the missile through the shimmering barrier at the nearest undead, magic slapping its face with a wet poof. The head recoiled; clear damage had been done.
Kogliastro evoked another magic missile, and another, launching them at the same undead. Its head recoiled from each blow, each blasting away a chunk of its skull. Two more missiles followed and obliterated the skull entirely.
The wizard flowed in a magnificent arcane dance, loosing magic missiles into the air and through the barrier. They came at first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, the pinkish-orange projectiles racing like tadpoles at the innumerable targets before them. Surely the mists overhead obscured a display greater than any performance of fireworks ever recorded on Erda—perhaps a show even grander than the celebrated ceremony at the Garden of Light in Solux, when millions of hatchling torchflies swarmed the shores during the night of the long solstice, brightening the sky as full as day.The missiles plunged inerrant on their course, poof-poof-poof, destroying skulls, orange tracers recalibrating to strike the next target, brains and bone fragments popping out in showery eruptions, mostly headless corpses dropping clumsily to the ground, twisted and entwined in macabre poses, a tangle of arms and legs, limbs interlocking in some perverse, necrotic orgy of mortflesh.
Hesitantly hopeful, Warrel watched on as minutes passed and piles of undead littered the field. Not a single sliver of weed was visible through the rotting mass.
He is doing it, he thought. Truly the wizard is as a god.
Except the stream of magic missiles had now begun to sputter, like the dwindling momentum at the end of some divine orgasm. Warrel threw his gaze over to Kogliastro and observed a blue robe with gold piping soaked through with sweat, the lower half stumbling, losing coordination.
“He is exhausting himself,” Beatrix said.
She dashed to be at his side, but before she could reach him to support him upright, the wizard crumpled in a ripple of deflated robe, one final magic missile shooting from his palm and weakly slapping some undead’s face in a gesture most impotent.
Kogliastro lay on the ground. His hood had fallen back in his collapse and the man underneath revealed to Warrel and Beatrix with absoluteness. This was a man deep in senescence, a grandfather several generations grand, a sweaty balded pate above two cataract-infused eyes, twitching as if in momentary senility. Amidst the white beard a mouth appeared, laboring to propel oxygen through its shallow passage and refill the strained lungs powering the decrepit carbon engine.
Beatrix knelt at his side and supported his head.
He is but a cluster of cloth draped upon a frame of bundled twigs, Warrel thought.
Kogliastro’s pupils rolled in Warrel’s direction. They studied Warrel for a time, and then the wizard said, shakily, “I see you looking at me through the pitying eyes of youth—the ignorant eyes gazing upon something they think will never happen to them. Know this, Warrel: One day you too will be a young man looking out upon the world from the lenses of an old body, and none who look upon you will see the man you still believe you are.”
Outside the magical cube, there was no indication the number of undead had been at all reduced. A new wave of zombies scaled and conquered the mountains of unmoving corpses, and the vanguard was pressed to the barrier and gawking like spoiled children at the window of a chocolatier’s storefront.
Beatrix sluggishly turned away from the sight of them and lowered her head, gulping. “How long will your barrier hold, Kogliastro?” she asked.
“I… cannot know for certain,” he replied.
Beatrix nodded soberly. She cast her eyes around the interior of the cube before finding and focusing on the bit of handle jutting from Warrel’s boot, the handle belonging to the Pixie Prick.
“I would like to make use of your blade, Warrel,” she said. “May I borrow it?”
Shaking his head in answer to her question was a frustrating distraction. Warrel was deep in thought, mulling over an idea with a projected outcome that was surely too hopeful to happen in any kind of real actuality. But if the wizard’s magic missiles had been able to pass through the barrier from this side, perhaps anything could.
“Face the inevitable,” Beatrix said. “Be not a coward who dies a thousand deaths. Lend me your blade and I will demonstrate courage.”
“No,” Warrel said.
“Warrel!”
“No!” he said. “Cleric, postpone thy martyrdom and humor the possibility, however remote, that the lunamoth doctrine suckled from the teats of your goddess serves only to propagandize dying as a trivial, minor inconvenience. I do not share your conviction that life is but a meaningless flicker against the backdrop of some grand immortality; I see life in its full, limitless potential. So, please, be still a moment and let me conclude my thoughts.”
“Ugh—you dare advise me,” she scowled. “Such a ubiquitous trend—the male pontificating the female what she should or shouldn’t do with full agency over her own body.”
“Oh, drop the dogmas!” Warrel snapped. “I’m not trying to claim dominion over you—I’m only asking that you not pass your ghost beyond the veil before we’ve exhausted our options.”
“What options?” she asked doubtfully.
“I might have something,” he said.
“And if you do not?”
“Then my blade is yours to plunge into your breast—or whatever the ritual is your goddess demands.”
“Fine. Do what you will—but be quick about it,” she said. “If I suffer tortuous death at the hands of the un-dead, your name will be the last curse uttered from my lips.”
“Yes, yes, fine,” he said. I’ve been cursed plenty before. He focused his attention on the sweaty old man in the skins of robe on the ground like a collapsed monument. “Kogliastro, are you still with us?”
“Yes,” the wizard said.
“Clarify for me: will anything go through the barrier from this side?”
“Yes,” Kogliastro said. “Attacks from within may pass.”
“Do they need be magical in nature?”
“No,” Kogliastro said.
“You’re quite sure?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure.”
“And nothing can pass through from the other side?”
“Nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing?”
“Correct. Unless I authorize it.”
“And you’ve authorized nothing to pass?”
“Correct.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“So nothing at all can pass from the other side?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you very, very sure?”
“Yes, Warrel, he’s sure!” Beatrix said.
Warrel put up his hand. “Okay, okay,” he said.
He turned to face the nearest wall. Zombies pressed up against the other side, front to back, shoulder to shoulder, showing their teeth. Their ranks could go on infinitely.
Warrel shuddered. I must make room.
He extended his torch at the barrier, expecting some kind of resistance despite what the wizard told him, but there was none. The flame passed through, as did the solid of the torch itself. An anomalous force tugged at it from the other side, but he understood it was actually the barrier prohibiting any particles from reentering once they had already passed through.
The undead shuffled backwards one step at a time as the flame drew near. Warrel released the torch and it fell to the dirt on the other side, rolling a short distance on the slight incline and singeing scattered blades of grass as it trundled over them. After everything settled and all movement had ceased, there was roughly four feet of space between the vanguard of undead and the barrier.
That will do, Warrel figured.
He reached a hand behind his back to untie the lashings securing the crossbow to his knapsack. Once accomplished, he displayed the crossbow to Kogliastro and Beatrix.
“This is The Albatross,” he said. “The heighth of gnomish ingenuity. This,” he bounced it in his hands, “is equal to almost the entirety of my life savings. I—”
“Get on with it,” Beatrix said.
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there,” Warrel said.
He spun again to face the undead. With a nervous exhale, he released the ammunition casing from the crossbow’s stock, and verified with a quick glance that six Bolts of Massive Explosion were lined up inside. They phosphoresced with an ominous green iridescence, sheening to glowing tips, a luster lusting only for carnage, wholesale.
And so you shall have it.
He settled the stock against his shoulder and lifted the crossbow at a rotting elf in the forefront. Its pointed ears were browned and withered at the edges and the cartilage of its nose was disintegrated, exposing a festering nasal cavity. Warrel sighted center-mass, the crosshairs targeting a magnified view of the elf’s chest, showing with gratuitous detail the slimy curls of intestine peeking out through multiple ruptures.
Warrel cocked the foregrip with a staunch jerk back then forward, the crossbow releasing a hiss of air in synchronization with the forward motion, drawing back the mithral bowstring. A Bolt of Massive Explosion was conveyed by some mechanism inside and positioned in the flight groove.
Warrel tapped his finger on the tickler guard. It was all that stopped him now.
“Hold on to your butts,” he said.
He pulled the trigger. His eyes were able to witness only a single image of the bolt, a brief instant of the distortion of space by a zooming body captured in his memory as a wraithlike umbilical cord linking the crossbow to its target.
And then all the fires from all the furnaces of all the hells opened wide their abyssal jaws and expelled apocalypse on the dark and misty lands. All was fire—the undead were fire, the soil was fire, the air was fire—burning greenish-red and engulfing even the mists—the mists that succumbed even after losing form and sprinkling droplets of evacuees that were immediately boiled and annihilated.
Warrel winced and shrank back, shielding his eyes with his forearm. The ground trembled below his feet. He squinted at Kogliastro and Beatrix, at their bodies bathed in a wash of neon light, and dreadfully wondered if this might not have been what the wizard had in mind when he said nothing could pass. Warrel counted one, two, three seconds. But inside the magic cube, even at the nucleus of the explosion, the tall grasses were still green and thriving and he felt no trace of heat from the inferno without.
The raging fire was too wide-ranging to make any assessment of its true proportions. For all Warrel knew, it could have conquered this broken world entirely. And once he admitted this to himself, he recognized the terrified expression frozen upon Beatrix’s countenance. It meant to say, the gnomes have it within them to destroy the world—gods help us all.
A minute passed, at least, before there was any change in intensity. The flames receded and the mists in the sky were replaced with roiling black smoke. The fire divided, died off, separated into small tongues lapping away at meager remnants of corpses like pennants of fallen soldiers rippling in the wind after a battle. The field was black, scorched and smoldering. There was no undead left standing anywhere in sight—which was quite far, for the fire had sent the mists into full retreat and provided Warrel his widest vista since he first set foot in this gloomy world.
Beatrix sprang to her feet and investigated the carnage around her. When Warrel espied glimpses of her face, he felt he could almost read her mind: Her oaths forbade her from encouraging, approving, or permitting such wanton destruction, but she was so relieved to be alive that she praised the wanton destruction for saving her, and then all the feelings of guilt came flooding in, and surely at this point she was a mess of amalgamated emotional dissonance. It explained her withdrawn silence.
Inexorably, new undead appeared at the horizons in the form of misshapen silhouettes, weaving around the numerous small fires still burning, drawn to the occupants inside the magic barrier.
“They will keep coming,” Kogliastro said, wincing as he sat up. “And I must dissolve the barrier soon—I cannot recuperate with this lingering magic taxing my power. How much ammunition do you carry?”
“I have five bolts left,” Warrel replied.
“Of the same variety as the one you loosed?”
“Yes.”
“Good, good—fantastic,” Kogliastro said, with burgeoning enthusiasm. He pointed at the way they had been travelling. “We must continue seeking the source of the illusory magic. There is an intelligence behind it. If we locate it, we may find safety.”
Somehow I doubt that, Warrel thought.
“Clear a route with your weapon, as far as you can,” Kogliastro said. “Thenceforth we can flee before more un-dead close in on us.”
No other options were coming to mind, so Warrel set about the task. Beatrix blinked away from eye contact and said not a word as he slipped past her to the barrier opposite. He felt her fingers brush his wrist, probably carrying the intent to halt him but not with enough real conviction to make it manifest. She turned her head lugubriously in his wake, as if it were demanded by creed that she witness the chaos her silence sanctioned.
She sighed, barely audibly, “How can my fall be happening so fast?”
Warrel aimed at the farthest spot he could see in the blackness, where the mists were converging, and fired a second Bolt of Massive Explosion.
This time he could behold the detonation in all its glory. The initial burst was a spherical eruption of flaming spikes that looked like the form of some giant enraged quillrat, then a growing column of greenish-red flame shooting into the sky and billowing off like a mushroom. The all-consuming wave of fire came next.
He did not wait the full minute or more for the fire to dissipate. He cocked the foregrip again, lifted his aim to a higher trajectory, and pulled the trigger. He wasn’t sure what kind of range The Albatross was capable of, but he figured it must be great.
Another mountain of fire erupted behind the first. Warrel aimed higher and fired again, then aimed higher and fired again, repeating until the last bolt was expended. He agonized upon each explosion, wondering how much each shot was costing him monetarily. He decided he oughtn’t analyze it too thoroughly; after all, any man who watched his fortune slipping away would feel the same paroxysms of grief.
“Good, good,” Kogliastro said. He attempted to stand, but couldn’t get further than one knee. He wobbled, on the verge of toppling over.
Beatrix caught him. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she said. “We are in no immediate danger. Dissolve your barrier. Let your strength return.”
“No time,” Kogliastro said. “We must flee now.”
“Then we shall carry you,” Beatrix said, purchasing Warrel’s compliance with the austerity of her gaze.
They took opposite sides of the wizard and draped his arms across their shoulders, raising him gently to his feet. To Warrel it seemed less like a human body he and the cleric shared between them and more akin to some hollow construct of papier-mâché they were charged with delivering undamaged to some far-off exhibition. He feared at any moment he would harken the sound of a breaking bone.
Beatrix pulled Kogliastro’s staff out of the ground and slipped it into his hand. He adjusted it in his grasp to extend the light before them.
“Be swift,” he said. “Now, forward, as the fires die.”
The barriers dissolved with a flicker. Hot air blew at them like the ambient heat of a summer sun baking the concrete of a city street, along with the marinade of smells such a street would carry. The pungent stench of crispy, cremated corpses burned in Warrel’s nostrils as if he had snorted the entire stale contents of an old pepper grinder.
They ran, gaining speed as they coordinated strides. Their bootsteps sunk deep in the sweeping black bed of powdery cinders, ashes stirring like dead leaves in a poofy gust of autumnal breath, fiery red coals snowing at their trail.
The craters at the detonation points served as beacons through which they waded in and out, and at the third crater Warrel burst into hysterical laughter.
Beatrix confusedly glanced over at him, then returned her eyes forward. “What could you possibly find so funny?” she asked.
“Oh—” Warrel said with a grimace, “Only that I laid The Albatross down and forgot to take it up again. I ask you: how much must I give?—how much must this land take?”
“Good grief,” Beatrix said. “You know we can’t go back.”
“I know,” he panted. “Just imagine all the other treasures that might be lost out here in the mists.”
“I am imagining living—not treasure,” she coolly replied.
Her breathing was regulated despite the exertion of running, in contrast to Warrel’s increased huffing and puffing. He had worked hard to keep up his cardio and thought the natural endurance of half-elves quite unfair.
“Yes, living,” he said. “Aren’t you glad you stuck around? I bet you’d have felt awful silly killing yourself before I managed to get us out of there.”
“Yes, Warrel,” she said. “I’m sure I would have felt very silly.”
“And considering you’d likely have returned as un-dead.”
“What?” she said sharply, looking past Kogliastro to throw a quick glare in Warrel’s direction. “What does that mean?”
“Just a hypothesis I have,” Warrel said. “If you die with your brain intact, your body belongs to the mists. I think.”
Beatrix scoffed. “And you were going to give utterance to your hypothesis when?”
“When and if the need arose, I suppose.”
She growled. “Argh! You flighty bastard!”
“I’m not flighty,” Warrel said.
She nodded a thought to herself, with conviction, unable to hide the sneer of her lips. “I’d have gone for your brain first,” she said, “though I’m sure it would’ve provided me little satisfaction.”
“Oh, truly thou art rife with zingers,” Warrel replied.
“You impertinent flake,” she hissed. “By the gods, it’s as if I have direct audience with the uncrowned king of imbeciles.”
“Enough!” Kogliastro burst. “Both of you, enough!”
Warrel was not frightened so much at the wizard’s anger as he was by the mists closing in at their sides. They appeared rageful, swooping in swiftly and violently, wanting nothing less than outright revenge for the casualties they suffered by fire.
The scorched land gradually gave way to unscathed pastures. The mists tried to smite at the wizard’s light, sending wispy assassins to encircle the bright bulb at the end of his staff. The luminosity dimmed under their efforts, but did not extinguish.
And though Warrel did not turn his head long enough to investigate fully, he was almost certain putrefied hands and arms were reaching at them from the mists.
He almost cried aloud, We aren’t going to make it!
They passed through an opening in a low stone wall, the first architecture Warrel had seen since leaving the abandoned town. The grass began to reveal interspersed flagstones that clapped loudly under their bootfalls, leading somewhere, certainly.
—Hopefully.
“Stop,” Kogliastro said. “We are there.” He unwound his arms from the cradle of their shoulders and leaned forward heavily on his staff.
Directly before them was debris where a large manor once stood, evidenced by the ruins of pillars, walls, and supports suggesting the shape of the original structure. There was no telling what its final fate had been, whether fire, storm, or pillaging. Strangely, however, the mists did not invade the area. They seemed unable, being stopped and turned away at the tentative borders.
“There is nothing here,” Warrel said, breathing hard.
“Yes there is,” Kogliastro said. “We see an illusion—a false projection of reality. Behind the illusion the structure still exists, intact and mostly undamaged.”
“It does?” Warrel asked. “There’s a… house here?”
He stepped ahead and flattened his palms against one of the pillars, but his skin did not quite make full contact, as if there were some invisible surface area he was not allowed to see. He knew there was something there; he could feel a finished surface on his fingertips, like polished wood or a painted exterior. He walked sideways, following the imperceptible vertical plane with slaps of his palms, feeling the solidness even where his eyes were sure there was nothing.
“There must be a way in or someone wouldn’t be bothering to hide it,” he said. “A door—there must be a door.”
His brushed against the jambs of a doorframe and felt for its outline. The doorway was large—he could tell that straight away—something imposing and impressive for moneyed gentry to flaunt at passersby. He laid hand on the doorknob, but it only rattled in his grasp. He floated a hand upwards and found a hinged knocker, a cold metal cast of some indefinite form.
“Hello! Is there anybody there?!” he called out, rapping.
Only stillness answered him, though every word fell echoing through the shadowiness of the house, the air shaken by his call.
Warrel stood perplexed. He called again, “Is there anybody there?!”
But never the least stir made the listeners.
“Open says me!” he shouted. He fumbled down at the knob and probed for a keyhole while one hand slipped into his jacket for his howler quill. “I may be able to pick the lock.”
“No,” Kogliastro said. “Stand back. I am not strong enough yet to dispel the illusion, but I may be able to… just stand back.”
Warrel backed away uncertainly, glancing over his shoulders for any sign the undead had caught up.
Kogliastro lifted a shaky hand and said, “Repulverie.”
A large rectangular shape burst thunderously in the false emptiness and yellow light gushed forth from the nothing. Kogliastro had repelled the door from its frame, Warrel gathered, and he was now seeing the interior the illusion had concealed. It was well lit, and there were no mists inside—that was good enough for him.
Kogliastro collapsed to his knees. Beatrix collected him under his arms and hoisted him up. She assisted him to the doorway as he hobbled weakly on crouched legs.
And Warrel was suddenly off his own, plummeting forward, his nose barely missing a flagstone. He cried, “Oomph!” as he ate a mouthful of dirt.
He was dragged backwards, back to the mists, his shirt bunching up in a roll against his chest, a firm pressure around his ankle like a terminal anchor. And he was too tired, too fatigued—and he knew it—to struggle against his assailant.
The undead leaped, and Warrel heard the whistle of air through its gaping mouth, and soon the teeth would be clenched on his scalp, and he braced himself for the surge of pain.
There was an unexpected sound, though, a loud thunk, following an altogether different whistle of air. Warrel saw the blurred crystalline club swinging in a pendulum arc, and felt the impact in the atmosphere when the undead’s face was crushed into its scalp.
A hand gripped the collar of his jacket and he felt himself dragged once again, this time forward, turned clumsily half-over with his knapsack holding him at an angle. The coarse dirt abruptly changed to smooth hardwood flooring, and the hand released him.
He lifted his head. There was Kogliastro on his hands and knees in the blankets of his robe, and he thrust a hand back and said, “Etrun.” The rectangle shape, now recognizable as a paneled door, flew back into its frame as if drawn by gravity. Kogliastro then fell flat on the floor, exhaling an exhausted sigh.
Warrel propped himself on an elbow, and breathing hard, trying to syncopate the beating of his heart, gazed up at the pale apparition who had delivered him from skeletal clutches.
“Yours is the aura of a corrupter,” Beatrix said. “But I postponed your death all the same. Like for like.”
Warrel nodded. He had the urge to shamelessly and effusively kiss her boots, but settled for patting them instead. The doeskin was soft yet unyielding to his touch.
“You have my undying gratitude,” he said. “Pardon the pun.”
= = = = =
Pick up the rest of the adventure today in paperback and Kindle HERE!
January 10, 2018
FIGHTS: Preview - La Lechuza: Revelation of the Blood Queen
New adventure pits
La Lechuza vs. Vampires in the Border Patrol
First ZBFbooks.com title of 2018 pits the hard fighting, hard loving Paula Belle Luna, Codename: La Lechuza, against the forces of darkness! Vampires have infiltrated the Border Patrol, and its up to Paula to stop them.In the following excerpt, Paula has discovered the menace and wants to confirm if the malevolent beings are capturing illegal immigrants and holding them prisoner for their precious blood. She gets a ride to the Border Patrol facility just outside of San Uvalde by her arms provider, Reverend Farkas.This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2016, 2017, 2018 Bowie V. Ibarra and ZombieBloodFights.com. All Rights Reserved.
CHAPTER 11LATE NIGHT INFILTRATION
“Are you going to tell me anything, Paula?”
“Didn’t Jesus say, ‘Silence is Golden’, padre?”
“That wasn’t Jesus.”
Paula had to reach out to Rev. Farkas if she was going to undertake her reconnoiter on the Border Patrol. Making sure the kids were taken care of at the house, she had picked up most of her gear. There was enough supplies for her recon, but she needed one last important element.
A ride.
“Why couldn’t you take your own car?” said Rev. Farkas, shifting the steering wheel to avoid a pothole on the road.
“Because everyone knows my car. Besides, your company and blessing are needed.” She gripped her hands together, tilted her head, and fluttered her eyes in an insincere gesture.
“You always have my blessing, Paula,” said Rev. Farkas patiently. He couldn’t help but huff and shake his head with a grin as he turned onto a road just outside of town near the Purple Sage. “But I’m not going with you.”
“I’m just doing recon,” said Paula. “And I just need you to pick me up in an hour… right here.”
Paula could see the Border Patrol building in the distance and called for Rev. Farkas to stop.
“Alright. Simonize our watches to one hour,” said Paula, prepping her timer on her teched-out googles.
“Synchronize?” said Rev. Farkas, prepping his watch.
“Whatever,” said Paula. “On one. In 3, 2, 1.”
Farkas and Paula started their timer together and Paula slung her gear pouch, storing a rope and a grappling hook as well as a few other supplies, across her shoulder. But before she stepped out, she looked to Farkas.
“How about that blessing, padre?”
Smiling and making the sign of the cross over Paula, Rev. Farkas gave Paula her blessing. “Lord, bless and protect your daughter and servant, and bring her back to me in an hour. Amen.”
Their eyes locked. A moment.
“Amen,” said Paula, stepping into the night and running into the brush a few hundred yards from the facility.
Without her original outfit, Paula had to improvise. She had picked a pair of black spandex leggings with a thin green stripe running down the side of her legs to her green Addidas wrestling high tops. Her throwing knives were strapped around her right thigh. Her Bowie knife hung from her right hip. The spandex top she was wearing matched her leggings, complete with green trim on the shoulders that ran down to her wrists. Green trim also laced the material around her generous cleavage. And if you looked hard enough, you could see a soft belly behind the black spandex. The lenses of her high-tech goggles were yellow and her hands were covered with loaded SAP gloves.
Jogging through the brush, she crouched down and snapped a pic of the facility using her goggles. Then, using the device’s projector app that produced two screens in front of her, she opened the screen and dialed up the coordinates of her location. It was projected in one of the screens, then copied and pasted to a satellite imagery app.
Even though she had resigned from the clandestine organization she once worked for**, the tech and apps still worked for her. And Rev. Farkas, along with Sister Joyce, made sure to secure the apps and have access to any upgrades without ever losing info.
As the satellite photo was being downloaded, Paula was studying a blueprint of the main building taken from the San Uvalde municipality database on the other open window. She twisted and turned her hand in front of her face, manipulating the size of the image with the projector app.
That’s when a text alert blinked above the open windows.
It was Mickey.
What R U wearing?
“Dammit, Mickey,” whispered Paula as she checked out the now-available satellite image. “Some other time, man.”
The image was in great resolution, and showed not only the main office building, but the location of the warehouse, hidden in the trees and brush a few hundred yards behind the main office. The same office from the vision. Upon closer examination, Paula noticed a non-paved road to the warehouse was hidden in the trees. Though a few vehicles were parked around the hidden building, there was no evidence of guard towers or people in general. No security walking around. Curiously, there were no windows on the upper level of the warehouse. So there was no question the main target to investigate was the warehouse.
So, staying in the shadows, Paula crept through the trees and brush to the warehouse.
As she made her way, a deep sense of dread began to fill her heart with fear. She stopped, cloaked in darkness and looked around. She felt like a pair of eyes, or more, were looking at her.
She turned on her infrared vision.
Nothing.
Night vision.
Nothing.
FLIR.
Nothing.
“Enough with the fear, Paula,” she whispered, returning the goggles to normal vision.
Fighting through the fear, Paula emerged from the brush, still in the cover of darkness, near the building. She clicked on the ‘Camera Freeze’ app on her goggles screen that freeze-framed security camera transmissions. She then had the goggles perform an electronic assessment of alarms and locks. While she let the apps do their work, she checked out the building exterior.
Similar to the main office, this big warehouse had no windows with the exception of one large window on the third floor. Paula assumed there was a matching one on the opposite side. The building was made of cinder blocks and had two large metal doors at the front, big enough to drive a large vehicle through. She switched to X-Ray vision app and immediately noticed she could not penetrate the walls with the app.
“Hmm.”
The electronic assessment of the alarms returned, and she optioned to have them turned off. But the locks to the main door were not electrical.
Taking another look at the aerial shots, Paula noticed large vents and skylights on the top of the building. That was a new option.
“Glad I brought you,” said Paula, pulling out a rope and hook from the bag. Finding a good edge that looked strong enough to allow the hook to grip on the flat roof, Paula spun the hook and rope before getting enough momentum to throw it up. The hook caught hold of an edge, and after a quick test, Paula climbed the wall.
pouch after tying it up again. She scoped out the rooftop and could see the skylights she had viewed in the satellite images.
“Let’s take a peekski,” she whispered, walking to a skylight. The rocks that were spread across the tar roof crunched under her boot. She looked around her, sensing she was being watched.
Scream.
Looking down into the warehouse, the lights were off. All she could see was the soft glow of computer monitors stuck on a screen saver and other electrical devices near the floor.
“I need light,” she whispered, activating the night vision of her goggles. Clicking it on, she peered through the skylight.
Help.
Her eyes grew wide as the night vision app brought to light what was hidden.
Help me.
Below, in the large warehouse, were rows upon rows of white tables. Lying on the tables, strapped down and set with multiple intravenous devices, were humans. Apparently, they were dressed in the clothes they had been caught in and set on the tables. Very clear streams of blood were passing through the IVs. A mask was set over their nosed and mouths in which Paula assumed was the gas that kept them under and, perhaps, oxygen to keep them alive.
But the most fascinating aspect was how the tables were arranged on multiple conveyer belts. The belts ran diagonally in a cycle. The setup reminded Paula of the old mills that cycled through with buckets scooping water into the mill, spinning it. Even though this machine was not working now, Paula assumed that’s how it ran.
They must cycle through every day and harvest the blood, she thought. Fed intravenously. Diabolical.
“It’s quite a setup, wouldn’t you agree?”
The voice startled Paula, who immediately turned and shined the light from her goggles on the source of the voice behind her. The source of the comment held up her hand to the bright light. Paula could see the woman’s lips, laced in red lipstick, curve into a smile. She knew exactly who it was. Bolts of fear shot through her body.
“Why, Deborah Robins. Taking a midnight stroll on a rooftop tonight?” said Paula, trying to stay calm.
“You could say that,” she said. She could feel Paula’s fear.
Ms. Robins was wearing a Border Patrol uniform. Her top was unbuttoned. Paula hated how the bitch showed off her rack. The wind caught her jet black hair and ruffled her straight bangs. “Just doing my job.”
“Security, right?”
“Right,” she replied, walking to Paula. “You’re coming with me.”
“How about ‘no’, dear,” said Paula, unsheathing three throwing knives from her thigh strap and jetting them toward Agent Robins. They whistled through the air and struck true. One struck Ms. Robins’ throat. The second, in the chest, right between her two large breasts. Third, her stomach. They set in Ms. Robin’s body in a line. Blood sputtered from the points of entry, soiling her top.
Agent Robins gurgled in pain, removing the knives and staggering. “You cunt,” she whispered.
Paula pulled out the hook and rope again and untied it, ready to go over the side again. “I’m the boss here, bitch. Don’t fuck with me.” Some confidence was returning.
Ms. Robins’ gurgles turned to laughter. Her throat sizzled and healed before Paula’s eyes. Steam rose from the other wounds as they also healed.
“No,” said Ms. Robins, dashing to Paula at an unearthly speed. “I am the boss!”
Not expecting the move and the speed, and with no time to respond, Ms. Robins shoved Paula into the air. Taking flight, out of control, Paula was sent over the edge of the building. Having just scaled the wall, she knew exactly what was below her.
Paula’s body was on a crash course for the hard stones and dirt on the ground below.
** see ‘Codename: La Lechusa’
= == === ==== === == =What happens next? Buy it now on Kindle before the paperback is released now HERE!
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August 4, 2017
FIGHTS: PREVIEW - 'El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde'
A Sneak peek at the lucha cinema inspired storybyBowie V. Ibarra
On September 1st, the debut of ZBFbooks.com's latest action title hits the stands. El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde. Inspired by the lucha cinema movies of El Santo and Blue Demon, the story finds El Aire, a legendary Mexican luchador, fighting to save a city from an Aztec Death cult.
Here's the synopsis:
El Aire is a legendary Mexican luchador. With a combination of high-flying acrobatics and scientific technical prowess on the mat, El Aire is one of the premiere wrestlers in the world. When he’s not competing in a lucha libre event, he’s working to protect his community as an independent crime fighter.
His ally, PJ Homeslice, brings El Aire news of a small time crime. But a deeper investigation proves the crime to be bigger than initially considered. Museums across Texas, including in San Uvalde, have had thefts involving the relics of Mictlantecutli, an ancient Aztec God who was said to have powers over the living and the dead. El Aire and PJ discover that the crimes coincide with wrestling events promoted by one of El Aire’s old rivals, the rich Copetes Hernandez.
As El Aire and PJ investigate, they learn of a cult whose followers believe in the second coming of Mictlantecutli. And the two friends discover that the recent archeological investigation not only reignited the cult, but holds much darker revelations: The Mummies of San Uvalde!
Is Copetes responsible for the thefts? Are the mummies rising from the grave with supernatural powers? Can El Aire recover the relics? It’s a lucha cinema-inspired adventure that will culminate in a devastating Lumberjack Match in the Temple of Mictlantecutli…TO THE DEATH!
Action, intrigue, and lucha excitement await as El Aire takes on The Mummies of San Uvalde.
And now, here's your chance to read the first two chapters of the exciting lucha-themed adventure, El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde!
EL AIRE vs THE MUMMIES OF SAN UVALDEBYBOWIE V. IBARRA
COPYRIGHT 2015 BOWIE IBARRA, ZBFBOOKS.COM3rd draft 4/29/15
DEDICATED TO EL SANTO AND BLUE DEMON.To The Masked Gringo and the Ethiopian Hemmorhoid.To PAUL BISHOP and FightCard Books for recognizing how great lucha libre is.
PROLOGUE The Dallas Museum of History had held many a special exhibit in its long lifetime. The exhibits were always of the highest quality and prestige. It was this commitment to excellence that attracted folks from all over the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and the rest of the state. But no other display of rare treasure had reached the heights of attention than its latest exhibit held for the facility. The Lost Treasures of the Mictlantecuhtli Legend was wildly popular. It was, perhaps, even more popular than the curators had anticipated. The exhibition garnered worldwide attention as one of the hottest and most valuable ancient treasures on display across Texas. Because of this fact, the display of ancient relics needed the most capable, the quickest, and the most effective security team money could buy to protect it. And it needed a leader to put the museum on lockdown when the time was right. Protect the treasure. Defend the history. Someone who would not let anything, man our mouse, get past his steely gaze and competent watch.That man was Waldo Lipschitz.Waldo Lipschitz. Substitute teacher for fourteen years. Mall security team for twenty. Dallas Museum of History for fifteen. As a lifetime member of the private security firm, Security Force, Waldo was a legend among his peers. His resumé was sterling. Now pushing 70, and a month away from retirement (a retirement he could have taken a year before), Waldo Lipschitz was put in charge of the security team to protect one of the world’s greatest treasures.“Good night, folks,” he said, waving at the final museum patrons as they walked out the door. Before Waldo could lock the door, the museum curator approached him.“Waldo, thank you so much for your assistance this evening.”“It’s what I do, ma’am.”“I’m a little late. There’s a museum after-party in Deep Ellum tonight. This exhibit is the best we’ve had in ages,” said the curator, putting on her coat. She walked to Waldo and gave him a sweet hug, as if she were his daughter, or granddaughter. “And I’m glad you’re in charge protecting it.”“It’s what I do, ma’am,” Waldo said again.“We’ll see you in the morning,” she said, dashing out into the wet Dallas night.
“Be safe,” he called out as she dashed out into the rain. Lighting flashed in the sky before he closed the door. As he was locking it, the thunder rolled. It’s deep reverberation muffled only slightly by the closed door. In the distance, a car alarm went off as the skybound rumble of thunder resonated through the building.“I’m sure glad I am not out in that mess,” he said, walking back to the front desk. It was his post, set up with an adequate surveillance system. Seven TVs were set up, in color, but a little fuzzy. Six were scrolling through rooms throughout the museum. One monitor was dedicated to the main exhibit, the Mictlantecuhtli showcase.
He picked up his CB from his desk. “This is Lipschitz calling to 1st Team. Everybody accounted for?”“Roger,” came the reply from the first team captain. He was an obese man with immense confidence. “Both our roving teammates have started their beat.”Lipschitz looked at his monitor and confirmed the movement of 1st Team on the first floor.“2ndTeam. Report.”“2nd Team here. We are go. Over.”His eyes found the monitor and confirmed the statement. The second floor was being patrolled by two members of 2nd Team.The museum was on lock, thanks to Waldo Lipschitz.“Well, then,” he muttered to himself, picking up his smart phone. “Let’s upgrade my village.” He tapped on the screen of his smart phone, touching the ‘Bash of Clans’ application icon. The name of the creative team, F-5, sprung up in bold white letters on the black screen before the illustrated ‘Bash of Clans’ loading screen appeared.Waldo would never have learned about the game had he not watched his granddaughter, Julia, playing it on her phone. The family had come over to visit one day, and little 10 year-old Julia’s face was staring into her device. In an effort to reach out to her, Waldo sat beside her and asked her what she was doing.“I’m playing ‘Bash of Clans’,” she said. Then, she gave a brief description of the gameplay before showing him how to play. After her demonstration, she asked, “Would you like to try, Pawpaw?” Her smile always warmed his heart.“Sure,” he had replied. Taking the phone into his hand, she helped guide him into the gameplay, and he quickly caught on.“Hey, you’re pretty good at this, Pawpaw,” she said.“Well, you taught me well, my dear.”She smiled big, before giving her Pawpaw a big hug.“Bring it on, clans,” he muttered, smiling, as his clan set-up was displayed on his screen. A light began to flash on his monitor hub. It was a signal for movement in one of the exhibits. A silent alarm. “What?” he muttered, tapping on his phone briefly to capture some of the digital coins he had accumulated before putting it down and observing the monitor. He adjusted his glasses from the middle of his nose up against his face with his index finger. “What the?” he whispered, shaking his head before looking back at the screen. He could not believe what he was seeing. The four mummies in the Michlantlecutli exhibit were moving. “What the?” he whispered again. This time, he lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He tried to rationalize the situation. In his mind, he was tired and hadn’t had a lot of rest this particular week. Perhaps he was hallucinating. Looking again with clear eyes, he realized his eyes were not deceiving him. The mummies were rising and actually seemed to be getting bigger. Waldo could not confirm that fast enough because the monitor suddenly went snowy. Then black and white bars bounced up and down the screen before turning grey. Then, the screen flipped completely black. Tapping on the screen was not the most mechanical or practical way to get the monitor working again. But Waldo did it anyway. On the third tap, a small stream of electricity snapped at his finger. He withdrew it quickly, flapping it near his face. He gulped. Looking at his finger, a tiny black dot indicated the burn the bolt left on his finger. Picking up his CB, he called to Team 2 on the second floor. “Team 2 leader. Do you read me? Over.” “We read you. Over.” “There is someone…” he didn’t want to say what he saw without confirmation. “There is movement in the new exhibit. I need your team to check it out. Over.” “We’re on it,” they replied. Waldo’s eyes were glued to the monitor as Team 2 left their post to go check the report. The team passed through one hallway to the next, floating through different monitors in the surveillance hub like specters walking through walls. As the team approached the exhibit room, Waldo reached for his CB. “Team 2. Do you read me?” They stopped before advancing into the room to answer the CB. “We read you.” “Listen, before you go in. I have to let you know I think… I think the mummies are alive.” He could see on the screen the Team 2 leader shaking and smacking his CB. “You’re breaking up, sir. I … hear… do you… over…” Waldo looked at the screen. From the shadows emerged the mummies. Team 2 was oblivious to their slow advance. “Team 2! Team 2! Behind you!” yelled Waldo into the CB. “We can’t… you… breaking up…” “Team 2!” shouted Waldo before the video screen began to flip, become distorted, then turned into a snowy field of scrambling white, gray, and black. “Team 2? Team 2,” said Waldo. There was no response. Reality was setting in. Fear sunk its talons into Waldo’s heart. There was a big problem poured on his plate, and he knew he had to do something. He also knew he didn’t want to. He wanted to run. “I’ve got to do something,” he said. “Team 1 leader. Do you read me?” “Waldo. We heard the whole conversation. We just heard some screams from the second floor. Phil just left. Joanne and I remain here, awaiting orders.” That’s when Phil ran by their desk, screaming in fear. “Phil has just run by our desk,” said Team 1 leader. “I see that,” said Waldo, watching Phil run through the monitors before running past his very desk and out the front door. “Phil is gone,” said Waldo, trembling. Things were quickly spiraling out of h
is control. He had to do something. More than anything, his reputation was at stake. “I need you to go to the Mictlantecuhtli exhibit. Team 2 is in trouble. Something is up there and they need to be stopped. “We’re on our…” “Team 1, do you read me?”
“…need…” It was the same thing that happened before. The mummies were closing in. “Team 1, get out of there now! They’re near you! The mummies! They’re near!” No reply. Waldo looked at the screen that showed Team 1. No only had their screen gone snowy, but so had all the other monitors. “Good God,” said Waldo, turning to run. But standing in front of him, looming over him like a statue was one of the mummies. It pulsed with a strange energy. A light glow, an aura, dimly illuminated the ancient preserved corpse. “Please,” whispered Waldo, raising his hands in submission. The mummy raised its arm into the air and struck Waldo in the neck. A knockout nerve strike. At the ancient exhibit, a mummy arrived by the featured Mictlantecuhtli relic, secured behind safety glass. Its glowing mummified fist punched the barrier, shattering the glass before removing it from the display. The energy of the mystery power at work had disabled the alarm system, allowing the relics to be removed with no one to stop it.
CHAPTER 1 – LUCHA LIBRE!
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your main event of the evening, scheduled for a ‘Best of Three’ contest. A competitor wins a round by pinfall or submission.” “Oh, man, I can’t wait!” PJ Homeslice stood and clapped in anxious anticipation for the match featuring his cohort and good friend, the masked Mexican lucha libre legend, El Aire. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the crowd began clapping and cheering for the match they’d all been waiting for. The San Uvalde Civic Center was warm with the excited agitation of the hundreds of fans in attendance. “In the blue corner to my left, weighing in at 86 kilos, fighting out of Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, Cangrejo Azul!” A chorus of boos resounded around the arena as Cangrejo Azul shouted malditos back at the audience booing him. He was clad in a baby blue and white-trimmed singlet and white boots, and his mask held the same scheme with the image of a stylized crab on the forehead of the mask. Along the side of one white boot read ‘Cangrejo’. On the other boot, ‘Azul’. He pointed and shouted at one old lady in the front row. A triple-A battery hit him in the back, and he ran to the opposite side of the ring to threaten the folks where he thought the projectile had come from. There was one exception to the jeering fans, however. And much to PJ’s dismay, the guy was sitting right next to him. “Yay!” the dude shouted, jumping up and down. He was a teen, but the light complexion of his face was not marked with pimples, but a sea of freckles. He was making Cangrejo’s crab claw gesture with his hands as he hopped around in joy. He glanced at PJ, smirking. “And in the red corner,” said the announcer, pausing. The crowd’s response began to change from a symphony of taunts to a cacophony of cheers. “Weighing in at 86 kilos, from Villa Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico, he is The King of the Skies, El Aire!” The crowd began to chant, “Aire! Aire! Aire!” as the caped lucha legend mounted a turnbuckle and waved at the crowd. His spandex pants were decorated with the colors of the Mexican flag: Red, White, and Green. The eagle with the snake in its beak standing on a cactus was near the top portion of his spandex pants near the lower part of his back. His mask was red, white, and green, with the emblem of the ancient country on his forehead. El Aire removed his cape with a flourish, handing it to a ring attendant. Then, he launched himself from the turnbuckle into a backflip, landing on his feet before gracefully rolling backwards and popping back to his feet. The crowd cheered with joy. Except the guy standing by PJ. “Boo!” the guy shouted, giving El Aire two thumbs down and shaking them in the air. “El Aire’s overrated, and so is his workrate,” he said toward PJ. “Boo!” “Your mom’s overrated,” shouted PJ, flipping the guy off. His skinny pale finger wiggled in the air, and his freckled face grimaced under his brown hair and brown eyes. “And so is her workrate.” The announcer stepped out of the ring and the bell rang, starting the first fall match. The two luchadors circled each other before tying up. El Aire swiftly gained the upper hand with a tight arm drag, sending Cangrejo Azul flying across the ring. Cangrejo got to his feet swiftly and grappled with El Aire again. And again, El Aire sent Cangrejo to the canvas with an arm drag. “Why do you like Cangrejo Azul so much?” asked PJ. “Because El Aire’s overrated!” shouted the fan of Cangrejo. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about, stupid,” said PJ. Cangrejo Azul sprung to his feet again and dashed to El Aire, only to be greeted with a drop toe-hold. Cangrejo Azul fell face first on the mat, grabbing his nose, stunned. It gave El Aire the opportunity to slide over Cangrejo’s body and grab a side headlock on the mat. He locked it in and cranked it. “See?” said PJ. “That’s scientific wrestling right there.” The other dude just sneered. “There’s lots of match left out there, buddy boy.” Cangrejo Azul, stuck in the headlock, managed to work himself and El Aire back to their feet. He then broke El Aire’s headlock by forcefully shoving him off of his slick neck and into the ropes. El Aire bounced back and was met with a punch to the mouth, knocking him flat on his back. The ref immediately jumped in, chastising Cangrejo Azul. “Yay!” cried out the Cangrejo Azul fan. “Hey!” yelled PJ. “Get in there, ref! Closed fist! That’s illegal!” Cangrejo Azul began to kick at the prone body of El Aire, stomping and punching the lucha hero. He turned to the fans and mocked them, receiving an immediate response of negativity and anger. He smiled, then laughed, making a rude gesture to the crowd before turning back to El Aire, who was slowly rising. Cangrejo Azul caught El Aire with a kick to the solar plexus, keeling El Aire over before scooping El Aire up into the air and slamming his body to the mat. Standing by his head, Cangrejo Azul jumped into the air, delivering a legdrop across the neck and face of El Aire. The rudo covered El Aire, hooking a leg, only to have El Aire kick out at two. He harrumphed, standing back up.
Cangrejo Azul picked up El Aire and twisted El Aire’s body with his, punishing El Aire with an abdominal stretch. El Aire cried out in pain. Cangrejo Azul punched El Aire’s ribcage as the fans began to clap for El Aire. After a few more moments in the hold, Cangrejo Azul punched El Aire right in the mouth, flooring the luchador yet again. “Again!” shouted the guy. PJ took a deep breath. The punches had struck El Aire in just the right spot, dazing the luchador and giving Cangrejo Azul the opportunity to start punishing him. He picked El Aire off the mat and flung him to the ropes. El Aire bounced off the barriers toward Cangrejo Azul, who had already started to run at El Aire, ready to deliver a clothesline. But El Aire ducked under the strike, bounding to the ring ropes. Cangrejo Azul turned around to see El Aire taking flight. Careening horizontally towards Cangrejo Azul, El Aire struck his rival with a flying headbutt, connecting square across Cangrejo Azul’s chest. The blow sent Cangrejo Azul to his back. Not only did the aerial move take the starch out of Cangrejo Azul, but the fall flat on his back knocked the air out of him. El Aire adeptly took the cover, hooking a leg with both arms and positioning all his weight over Cangrejo Azul’s chest, pinning his shoulders to the mat. Cangrejo Azul struggled to break the pinfall to no avail, and the ref counted three, awarding the first fall to El Aire. “There you go, stupid,” shouted PJ. “First fall goes to El Aire.” “He’s still got to get one more,” said the dude as the luchadors prepared to vie for the second fall. After a few moments of awkward silence between the rival fans, the bell rang again and the two Mexican luchadors tied up. Cangrejo Azul cinched on a headlock on El Aire, tightening the hold around El Aire’s head. He turned his back on the referee and promptly punched El Aire in the mouth several times. The referee tried to get a better view of what was happening, but was met by a grumpy Cangrejo Azul, who sustained the headlock and whined, “What are you looking at?” “Ref! He punched him!” shouted PJ. “No, he didn’t!” shouted the dude. The referee chided Cangrejo Azul, who ignored the official and dashed across the ring with El Aire still in the headlock. Cangrejo Azul jumped into the air before landing on the mat, smashing El Aire’s head and face into the canvas with the bulldog maneuver. “Pin him!” shouted the fan. PJ was nervous. But the ref only got to two when El Aire kicked out. “Yes!” shouted PJ. His heart beat in his chest with nervous excitement. The punishment on El Aire continued as Cangrejo Azul stomped on El Aire’s lower back. PJ cringed as Cangrejo Azul picked El Aire up and shot him into the ropes. On the rebound, Cangrejo Azul caught his rival in his arms and spun El Aire in the air before dropping the tecnico, back first, over his knee with the tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. El Aire shouted in pain as Cangrejo Azul held his rival over his knee, holding El Aire’s legs down while pushing down on his head by the jaw. The stress position coupled with the pain from the backbreaker was very unpleasant. “El Aire’s going to quit,” taunted the guy. “No, he’s not,” replied PJ before shouting, “C’mon, Aire!” Cangrejo Azul released the hold by delivering a Mongolian Chop to El Aire’s solar plexus before tossing him to the mat. That’s when Cangrejo Azul turned to the jeering crowd and taunted them with his crab claw hand gesture. The crowd began to boo loudly. But not the guy by PJ. “Yay!” he shouted, making the crab-claw hand gesture. PJ just shook his head. Cangrejo Azul picked up El Aire by his mask. El Aire tried to respond with punches to Cangrejo Azul’s stomach to no avail. Cangrejo Azul kneed El Aire in his belly and whipped El Aire into the ropes. Cangrejo Azul ducked his head in preparation to back body drop El Aire. But instead, El Aire leapfrogged Cangrejo Azul, hurdling his foe and dashing to the ropes. Wondering what just happened, Cangrejo Azul stood up and turned around. El Aire had already rebounded off the ropes and had taken flight, smacking Cangrejo Azul in the head with a flying forearm strike. Cangrejo Azul fell to the mat, where El Aire went for a pinfall. PJ shouted, “Yes!” But it wasn’t enough for three. The crowd was shouting encouragement for El Aire as he slowly rose to his feet, holding his back. “He’s going to get him,” shouted PJ. The other guy just smirked. El Aire picked up Cangrejo Azul and shot his rival into the ropes. As Cangrejo Azul hit the ropes, moments from rebounding, El Aire jumped into the air, prepping to catch Cangrejo Azul with a huracanrana, a type of flying headscissors hold that flings a foe headfirst to the canvas. It was the experience of Cangrejo Azul that countered the throw by simply stopping his forward motion, hooking his arms around the top rope to stop his rebound. Already floating in space, El Aire had no one to catch in his risky flying hold. So gravity took the wheel, dropping El Aire flat on his already-injured back. “Yes!” shouted the guy, jumping up and down. They both knew what was next. Cangrejo Azul reached for El Aire’s legs as El Aire groaned on the mat, holding the back of his head, stunned. Cangrejo laced El Aire’s legs at the ankles and stuck both legs under one arm by the ankles. He then walked over El Aire’s body, putting the lucha legend on his belly. With the leg lace secured under his arm, Cangrejo Azul sat down on El Aire’s lower back. He leaned back, putting an immense amount of pressure on El Aire’s lower back. “Yes!” shouted the guy. “The Blue Crab Hold! The Blue Crab Hold!” PJ still stood with his hands on the back of his head as El Aire surrendered to the hold, tapping out vigorously on the mat.
“Yes!” shouted the dude again. “Cangrejo’s got this now.” He then pointed at PJ and laughed. Groaning, PJ shook his head again. As Cangrejo broke his signature hold, letting El Aire loose, El Aire rolled right out of the ring to the floor. He grumbled, positioned on one knee, rubbing his back. This is bad news, thought PJ. Bad news. Cangrejo Azul had been taunting the crowd when he noticed El Aire’s injured state on the ground. Climbing out of the ring, he took the boots to El Aire, stomping on his back. Fans threw paper cups at Cangrejo Azul. One was full, and it splashed across his chest. “You don’t like that?” he shouted at the crowd. “I do,” said the guy by PJ. “Then you’ll hate this,” he shouted, lifting up his elbow and dropping it on El Aire’s lower back. El Aire groaned in pain as Cangrejo Azul climbed into the ring. He charged at the ref, grabbing him by the shirt, shouting, “Ring the bell! Start the match now!” “No!” shouted PJ. The ref nodded and signaled for the bell. The bell rang and El Aire was still on the floor. “One,” shouted the ref over the ring ropes by El Aire. “Get up!” shouted PJ. “Two!” “Get up!” “Three!” “C’mon, El Aire. Get up!” “Four!” “Stay down,” cried the dude, with a smile. “Five!” El Aire began to pick himself up. “Six!” “Yes! C’mon, El Aire!” “Seven.” El Aire had lifted himself to his knees, holding on to the apron. “Eight!” El Aire picked himself up, climbed to the apron, and rolled in by the nine count. “Yes!” Thank you, God,” groaned PJ. El Aire hadn’t had a chance to get to his feet when he was met with boots to his back by Cangrejo Azul. “He’s done,” said the guy. “No, he’s not,” said PJ. For the next few minutes, Cangrejo Azul abused El Aire, punishing his lower back with kicks, stomps, and throws. PJ was cringing with every strike, lock, or toss. Several times, Cangrejo Azul secured a lock on El Aire’s body, only to have the Mexican great he was beating down break the hold by grabbing the ropes. Lifting El Aire off the mat, Cangrejo Azul launched El Aire to the ropes. On the rebound, Cangrejo Azul caught El Aire in a tilt-a-whirl sidewalk slam, planting El Aire into the mat. PJ could hear El Aire groan as Cangrejo Azul went for a pinfall. El Aire kicked out. Slapping his hands in anger, Cangrejo Azul then grabbed El Aire and lifted him off the mat and flung him to the ropes again. He caught El Aire on the rebound, but this time, El Aire was ready. Flying into the tilt-a-whirl again, El Aire changed his momentum just enough to secure one of Cangrejo Azul’s arms. Still flying, he used his momentum to fling Cangrejo Azul to the mat. “Yes!” shouted PJ. Quickly getting to his feet, Cangrejo Azul dashed straight at El Aire, who was ready for the aggression. This time, El Aire used Cangrejo Azul’s motion to flip him to the mat with a Japanese arm drag. Realizing the momentum change, Cangrejo Azul swiftly rolled out of the ring. He waved off El Aire, walking around the ring. “Get back in there, you big chicken!” shouted PJ. “You shut your stupid mouth, gringo!” Cangrejo replied, pointing a finger at PJ. “You shut yours, stupid,” said PJ, pointing one back. “Oh, you got me there,” said Cangrejo Azul, getting in PJ’s face. “That comeback did kind of suck,” mumbled PJ, moving away from the luchador. That’s when he noticed El Aire had got to his feet and had bounced off the opposite ropes, running toward them from the ring. “Whoa!” shouted PJ, moving out of the way. “Look out!” shouted the guy, pointing at the ring. “What?” said Cangrejo Azul, turning back towards the ring. There was nothing he could do at that point. El Aire had already taken flight, diving headlong at Cangrejo Azul. Cangrejo Azul tried to block the tope suicida to no avail. El Aire crashed head first into Cangrejo Azul’s chest, knocking him into the abandoned chairs. El Aire had struck Cangrejo Azul with a powerful blow. But now, on the floor, he began to clutch his back again. “Get up, El Aire!” shouted PJ as the ref started the count again. “One.” “C’mon, El Aire. Get up!” “Two.” Cangrejo Azul was recovering slowly. “Three.” El Aire remained on the floor. “Four.” Cangrejo Azul had recovered faster than El Aire and slowly moved to the luchador. “Five.” Cangrejo Azul reached El Aire and picked him up by the mask. El Aire still clutched at his back. “Six.” “No!” shouted PJ. “Yes!” shouted the guy. The two were crying out because Cangrejo Azul had scooped up El Aire and body-slammed him on the arena floor. “Seven.” “No!” “Yes! Yes!” Cangrejo Azul made a rude gesture with his chin and hand at the crowd before rolling into the ring at the eight count. “Get up, El Aire!” “He’s not getting up,” said the guy, laughing. “Nine.” El Aire tried to pick himself up, but he only got as far as the ring apron, clutching his back as the ref counted ten. “Aw, man,” said PJ as the bell rang, ending the third fall and securing the win for Cangrejo Azul. “That was a cheap win and you know it,” he said, glaring at the guy. “A win’s a win, man,” said the guy, pointing and laughing at PJ. PJ rose from his seat and worked his way to the aisle as the announcer said, “Here is the winner of the third fall via countout, Cangrejo Azul!” “Bye-bye, chump,” said the guy as PJ walked off toward the entrance to the dressing rooms. The arena booed Cangrejo Azul, who was soaking it up, making his crab hand gesture as he returned to the dressing room. El Aire had already worked his way halfway up the aisle as PJ reached the dressing room entrance. El Aire acknowledged fans and saw PJ. He nodded at him, knowing PJ had work for him. PJ returned the nod. After a few moments of greeting fans, El Aire approached PJ. “You going to be alright, amigo?” asked PJ. “I’ll be fine,” El Aire replied. “What do you got for me?” “Something good.”
El Aire nodded, still rubbing his back. “Great. Meet me at the Montana Bar in an hour. We’ll talk there.” “Roger that,” said PJ. “Excuse me,” said a woman’s voice behind PJ. Both of them turned to see who it was. Their eyes gave away their excitement. “Good evening,” said the woman. “My name is Elvira Mata.” She offered her hand. El Aire took it and kissed it. The sweetest floral fragrance graced his senses, a much needed contrast to the sweat and grime of the wrestling contest, a literal breath of fresh air compared to the brawny aroma and rancid smell of sweaty knee pads of the competitors. El Aire grinned at Elvira, taking in her figure. Her little black dress was low cut with a diving neckline that fell just below her breasts. Her black high heels had suggestions of glitter, and El Aire suspected she was wearing thigh-highs and garters. She smiled back devilishly, saying, “I’d like to personally invite you to the San Uvalde Museum grand opening of a special exhibit tomorrow.” “I heard about that,” said El Aire. “The recently discovered San Uvalde mummies will be on display. Is that right?” “Correct,” she said. Her voice was laced with a honey El Aire greatly appreciated. “I’m one of the sponsors. We would be honored with your presence.”
“Thank you,” said El Aire. “I’ll be there.” With a smile and a wink, the woman walked away. PJ stood, hypnotized, watching her glide away. “Wake up, hermano,” said El Aire. “But I’m dreaming,” said PJ.
“No, you weren’t,” said El Aire. “Go meet me at The Montana Bar. I’ll see you there.”
========What will PJ tell El Aire at the Montana Bar? Find out by picking up your copy of 'El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde' today HERE in Paperback or Kindle.
Click on the book cover to go straight to the order page on Amazon.com.
BOWIE V. IBARRA is a prolific writer who makes his home in San Antonio, Texas. He is the progenitor of the 'Tex-Mexploitation' genre whose books include such first wave zombie horror classics as the 'Down the Road' saga. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com and pick up a book today!
On September 1st, the debut of ZBFbooks.com's latest action title hits the stands. El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde. Inspired by the lucha cinema movies of El Santo and Blue Demon, the story finds El Aire, a legendary Mexican luchador, fighting to save a city from an Aztec Death cult.
Here's the synopsis:
El Aire is a legendary Mexican luchador. With a combination of high-flying acrobatics and scientific technical prowess on the mat, El Aire is one of the premiere wrestlers in the world. When he’s not competing in a lucha libre event, he’s working to protect his community as an independent crime fighter.
His ally, PJ Homeslice, brings El Aire news of a small time crime. But a deeper investigation proves the crime to be bigger than initially considered. Museums across Texas, including in San Uvalde, have had thefts involving the relics of Mictlantecutli, an ancient Aztec God who was said to have powers over the living and the dead. El Aire and PJ discover that the crimes coincide with wrestling events promoted by one of El Aire’s old rivals, the rich Copetes Hernandez.
As El Aire and PJ investigate, they learn of a cult whose followers believe in the second coming of Mictlantecutli. And the two friends discover that the recent archeological investigation not only reignited the cult, but holds much darker revelations: The Mummies of San Uvalde!
Is Copetes responsible for the thefts? Are the mummies rising from the grave with supernatural powers? Can El Aire recover the relics? It’s a lucha cinema-inspired adventure that will culminate in a devastating Lumberjack Match in the Temple of Mictlantecutli…TO THE DEATH!
Action, intrigue, and lucha excitement await as El Aire takes on The Mummies of San Uvalde.
And now, here's your chance to read the first two chapters of the exciting lucha-themed adventure, El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde!
EL AIRE vs THE MUMMIES OF SAN UVALDEBYBOWIE V. IBARRA
COPYRIGHT 2015 BOWIE IBARRA, ZBFBOOKS.COM3rd draft 4/29/15
DEDICATED TO EL SANTO AND BLUE DEMON.To The Masked Gringo and the Ethiopian Hemmorhoid.To PAUL BISHOP and FightCard Books for recognizing how great lucha libre is.
PROLOGUE The Dallas Museum of History had held many a special exhibit in its long lifetime. The exhibits were always of the highest quality and prestige. It was this commitment to excellence that attracted folks from all over the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and the rest of the state. But no other display of rare treasure had reached the heights of attention than its latest exhibit held for the facility. The Lost Treasures of the Mictlantecuhtli Legend was wildly popular. It was, perhaps, even more popular than the curators had anticipated. The exhibition garnered worldwide attention as one of the hottest and most valuable ancient treasures on display across Texas. Because of this fact, the display of ancient relics needed the most capable, the quickest, and the most effective security team money could buy to protect it. And it needed a leader to put the museum on lockdown when the time was right. Protect the treasure. Defend the history. Someone who would not let anything, man our mouse, get past his steely gaze and competent watch.That man was Waldo Lipschitz.Waldo Lipschitz. Substitute teacher for fourteen years. Mall security team for twenty. Dallas Museum of History for fifteen. As a lifetime member of the private security firm, Security Force, Waldo was a legend among his peers. His resumé was sterling. Now pushing 70, and a month away from retirement (a retirement he could have taken a year before), Waldo Lipschitz was put in charge of the security team to protect one of the world’s greatest treasures.“Good night, folks,” he said, waving at the final museum patrons as they walked out the door. Before Waldo could lock the door, the museum curator approached him.“Waldo, thank you so much for your assistance this evening.”“It’s what I do, ma’am.”“I’m a little late. There’s a museum after-party in Deep Ellum tonight. This exhibit is the best we’ve had in ages,” said the curator, putting on her coat. She walked to Waldo and gave him a sweet hug, as if she were his daughter, or granddaughter. “And I’m glad you’re in charge protecting it.”“It’s what I do, ma’am,” Waldo said again.“We’ll see you in the morning,” she said, dashing out into the wet Dallas night.
“Be safe,” he called out as she dashed out into the rain. Lighting flashed in the sky before he closed the door. As he was locking it, the thunder rolled. It’s deep reverberation muffled only slightly by the closed door. In the distance, a car alarm went off as the skybound rumble of thunder resonated through the building.“I’m sure glad I am not out in that mess,” he said, walking back to the front desk. It was his post, set up with an adequate surveillance system. Seven TVs were set up, in color, but a little fuzzy. Six were scrolling through rooms throughout the museum. One monitor was dedicated to the main exhibit, the Mictlantecuhtli showcase.He picked up his CB from his desk. “This is Lipschitz calling to 1st Team. Everybody accounted for?”“Roger,” came the reply from the first team captain. He was an obese man with immense confidence. “Both our roving teammates have started their beat.”Lipschitz looked at his monitor and confirmed the movement of 1st Team on the first floor.“2ndTeam. Report.”“2nd Team here. We are go. Over.”His eyes found the monitor and confirmed the statement. The second floor was being patrolled by two members of 2nd Team.The museum was on lock, thanks to Waldo Lipschitz.“Well, then,” he muttered to himself, picking up his smart phone. “Let’s upgrade my village.” He tapped on the screen of his smart phone, touching the ‘Bash of Clans’ application icon. The name of the creative team, F-5, sprung up in bold white letters on the black screen before the illustrated ‘Bash of Clans’ loading screen appeared.Waldo would never have learned about the game had he not watched his granddaughter, Julia, playing it on her phone. The family had come over to visit one day, and little 10 year-old Julia’s face was staring into her device. In an effort to reach out to her, Waldo sat beside her and asked her what she was doing.“I’m playing ‘Bash of Clans’,” she said. Then, she gave a brief description of the gameplay before showing him how to play. After her demonstration, she asked, “Would you like to try, Pawpaw?” Her smile always warmed his heart.“Sure,” he had replied. Taking the phone into his hand, she helped guide him into the gameplay, and he quickly caught on.“Hey, you’re pretty good at this, Pawpaw,” she said.“Well, you taught me well, my dear.”She smiled big, before giving her Pawpaw a big hug.“Bring it on, clans,” he muttered, smiling, as his clan set-up was displayed on his screen. A light began to flash on his monitor hub. It was a signal for movement in one of the exhibits. A silent alarm. “What?” he muttered, tapping on his phone briefly to capture some of the digital coins he had accumulated before putting it down and observing the monitor. He adjusted his glasses from the middle of his nose up against his face with his index finger. “What the?” he whispered, shaking his head before looking back at the screen. He could not believe what he was seeing. The four mummies in the Michlantlecutli exhibit were moving. “What the?” he whispered again. This time, he lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He tried to rationalize the situation. In his mind, he was tired and hadn’t had a lot of rest this particular week. Perhaps he was hallucinating. Looking again with clear eyes, he realized his eyes were not deceiving him. The mummies were rising and actually seemed to be getting bigger. Waldo could not confirm that fast enough because the monitor suddenly went snowy. Then black and white bars bounced up and down the screen before turning grey. Then, the screen flipped completely black. Tapping on the screen was not the most mechanical or practical way to get the monitor working again. But Waldo did it anyway. On the third tap, a small stream of electricity snapped at his finger. He withdrew it quickly, flapping it near his face. He gulped. Looking at his finger, a tiny black dot indicated the burn the bolt left on his finger. Picking up his CB, he called to Team 2 on the second floor. “Team 2 leader. Do you read me? Over.” “We read you. Over.” “There is someone…” he didn’t want to say what he saw without confirmation. “There is movement in the new exhibit. I need your team to check it out. Over.” “We’re on it,” they replied. Waldo’s eyes were glued to the monitor as Team 2 left their post to go check the report. The team passed through one hallway to the next, floating through different monitors in the surveillance hub like specters walking through walls. As the team approached the exhibit room, Waldo reached for his CB. “Team 2. Do you read me?” They stopped before advancing into the room to answer the CB. “We read you.” “Listen, before you go in. I have to let you know I think… I think the mummies are alive.” He could see on the screen the Team 2 leader shaking and smacking his CB. “You’re breaking up, sir. I … hear… do you… over…” Waldo looked at the screen. From the shadows emerged the mummies. Team 2 was oblivious to their slow advance. “Team 2! Team 2! Behind you!” yelled Waldo into the CB. “We can’t… you… breaking up…” “Team 2!” shouted Waldo before the video screen began to flip, become distorted, then turned into a snowy field of scrambling white, gray, and black. “Team 2? Team 2,” said Waldo. There was no response. Reality was setting in. Fear sunk its talons into Waldo’s heart. There was a big problem poured on his plate, and he knew he had to do something. He also knew he didn’t want to. He wanted to run. “I’ve got to do something,” he said. “Team 1 leader. Do you read me?” “Waldo. We heard the whole conversation. We just heard some screams from the second floor. Phil just left. Joanne and I remain here, awaiting orders.” That’s when Phil ran by their desk, screaming in fear. “Phil has just run by our desk,” said Team 1 leader. “I see that,” said Waldo, watching Phil run through the monitors before running past his very desk and out the front door. “Phil is gone,” said Waldo, trembling. Things were quickly spiraling out of h
is control. He had to do something. More than anything, his reputation was at stake. “I need you to go to the Mictlantecuhtli exhibit. Team 2 is in trouble. Something is up there and they need to be stopped. “We’re on our…” “Team 1, do you read me?”
“…need…” It was the same thing that happened before. The mummies were closing in. “Team 1, get out of there now! They’re near you! The mummies! They’re near!” No reply. Waldo looked at the screen that showed Team 1. No only had their screen gone snowy, but so had all the other monitors. “Good God,” said Waldo, turning to run. But standing in front of him, looming over him like a statue was one of the mummies. It pulsed with a strange energy. A light glow, an aura, dimly illuminated the ancient preserved corpse. “Please,” whispered Waldo, raising his hands in submission. The mummy raised its arm into the air and struck Waldo in the neck. A knockout nerve strike. At the ancient exhibit, a mummy arrived by the featured Mictlantecuhtli relic, secured behind safety glass. Its glowing mummified fist punched the barrier, shattering the glass before removing it from the display. The energy of the mystery power at work had disabled the alarm system, allowing the relics to be removed with no one to stop it.
CHAPTER 1 – LUCHA LIBRE!
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your main event of the evening, scheduled for a ‘Best of Three’ contest. A competitor wins a round by pinfall or submission.” “Oh, man, I can’t wait!” PJ Homeslice stood and clapped in anxious anticipation for the match featuring his cohort and good friend, the masked Mexican lucha libre legend, El Aire. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the crowd began clapping and cheering for the match they’d all been waiting for. The San Uvalde Civic Center was warm with the excited agitation of the hundreds of fans in attendance. “In the blue corner to my left, weighing in at 86 kilos, fighting out of Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, Cangrejo Azul!” A chorus of boos resounded around the arena as Cangrejo Azul shouted malditos back at the audience booing him. He was clad in a baby blue and white-trimmed singlet and white boots, and his mask held the same scheme with the image of a stylized crab on the forehead of the mask. Along the side of one white boot read ‘Cangrejo’. On the other boot, ‘Azul’. He pointed and shouted at one old lady in the front row. A triple-A battery hit him in the back, and he ran to the opposite side of the ring to threaten the folks where he thought the projectile had come from. There was one exception to the jeering fans, however. And much to PJ’s dismay, the guy was sitting right next to him. “Yay!” the dude shouted, jumping up and down. He was a teen, but the light complexion of his face was not marked with pimples, but a sea of freckles. He was making Cangrejo’s crab claw gesture with his hands as he hopped around in joy. He glanced at PJ, smirking. “And in the red corner,” said the announcer, pausing. The crowd’s response began to change from a symphony of taunts to a cacophony of cheers. “Weighing in at 86 kilos, from Villa Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico, he is The King of the Skies, El Aire!” The crowd began to chant, “Aire! Aire! Aire!” as the caped lucha legend mounted a turnbuckle and waved at the crowd. His spandex pants were decorated with the colors of the Mexican flag: Red, White, and Green. The eagle with the snake in its beak standing on a cactus was near the top portion of his spandex pants near the lower part of his back. His mask was red, white, and green, with the emblem of the ancient country on his forehead. El Aire removed his cape with a flourish, handing it to a ring attendant. Then, he launched himself from the turnbuckle into a backflip, landing on his feet before gracefully rolling backwards and popping back to his feet. The crowd cheered with joy. Except the guy standing by PJ. “Boo!” the guy shouted, giving El Aire two thumbs down and shaking them in the air. “El Aire’s overrated, and so is his workrate,” he said toward PJ. “Boo!” “Your mom’s overrated,” shouted PJ, flipping the guy off. His skinny pale finger wiggled in the air, and his freckled face grimaced under his brown hair and brown eyes. “And so is her workrate.” The announcer stepped out of the ring and the bell rang, starting the first fall match. The two luchadors circled each other before tying up. El Aire swiftly gained the upper hand with a tight arm drag, sending Cangrejo Azul flying across the ring. Cangrejo got to his feet swiftly and grappled with El Aire again. And again, El Aire sent Cangrejo to the canvas with an arm drag. “Why do you like Cangrejo Azul so much?” asked PJ. “Because El Aire’s overrated!” shouted the fan of Cangrejo. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about, stupid,” said PJ. Cangrejo Azul sprung to his feet again and dashed to El Aire, only to be greeted with a drop toe-hold. Cangrejo Azul fell face first on the mat, grabbing his nose, stunned. It gave El Aire the opportunity to slide over Cangrejo’s body and grab a side headlock on the mat. He locked it in and cranked it. “See?” said PJ. “That’s scientific wrestling right there.” The other dude just sneered. “There’s lots of match left out there, buddy boy.” Cangrejo Azul, stuck in the headlock, managed to work himself and El Aire back to their feet. He then broke El Aire’s headlock by forcefully shoving him off of his slick neck and into the ropes. El Aire bounced back and was met with a punch to the mouth, knocking him flat on his back. The ref immediately jumped in, chastising Cangrejo Azul. “Yay!” cried out the Cangrejo Azul fan. “Hey!” yelled PJ. “Get in there, ref! Closed fist! That’s illegal!” Cangrejo Azul began to kick at the prone body of El Aire, stomping and punching the lucha hero. He turned to the fans and mocked them, receiving an immediate response of negativity and anger. He smiled, then laughed, making a rude gesture to the crowd before turning back to El Aire, who was slowly rising. Cangrejo Azul caught El Aire with a kick to the solar plexus, keeling El Aire over before scooping El Aire up into the air and slamming his body to the mat. Standing by his head, Cangrejo Azul jumped into the air, delivering a legdrop across the neck and face of El Aire. The rudo covered El Aire, hooking a leg, only to have El Aire kick out at two. He harrumphed, standing back up.
Cangrejo Azul picked up El Aire and twisted El Aire’s body with his, punishing El Aire with an abdominal stretch. El Aire cried out in pain. Cangrejo Azul punched El Aire’s ribcage as the fans began to clap for El Aire. After a few more moments in the hold, Cangrejo Azul punched El Aire right in the mouth, flooring the luchador yet again. “Again!” shouted the guy. PJ took a deep breath. The punches had struck El Aire in just the right spot, dazing the luchador and giving Cangrejo Azul the opportunity to start punishing him. He picked El Aire off the mat and flung him to the ropes. El Aire bounced off the barriers toward Cangrejo Azul, who had already started to run at El Aire, ready to deliver a clothesline. But El Aire ducked under the strike, bounding to the ring ropes. Cangrejo Azul turned around to see El Aire taking flight. Careening horizontally towards Cangrejo Azul, El Aire struck his rival with a flying headbutt, connecting square across Cangrejo Azul’s chest. The blow sent Cangrejo Azul to his back. Not only did the aerial move take the starch out of Cangrejo Azul, but the fall flat on his back knocked the air out of him. El Aire adeptly took the cover, hooking a leg with both arms and positioning all his weight over Cangrejo Azul’s chest, pinning his shoulders to the mat. Cangrejo Azul struggled to break the pinfall to no avail, and the ref counted three, awarding the first fall to El Aire. “There you go, stupid,” shouted PJ. “First fall goes to El Aire.” “He’s still got to get one more,” said the dude as the luchadors prepared to vie for the second fall. After a few moments of awkward silence between the rival fans, the bell rang again and the two Mexican luchadors tied up. Cangrejo Azul cinched on a headlock on El Aire, tightening the hold around El Aire’s head. He turned his back on the referee and promptly punched El Aire in the mouth several times. The referee tried to get a better view of what was happening, but was met by a grumpy Cangrejo Azul, who sustained the headlock and whined, “What are you looking at?” “Ref! He punched him!” shouted PJ. “No, he didn’t!” shouted the dude. The referee chided Cangrejo Azul, who ignored the official and dashed across the ring with El Aire still in the headlock. Cangrejo Azul jumped into the air before landing on the mat, smashing El Aire’s head and face into the canvas with the bulldog maneuver. “Pin him!” shouted the fan. PJ was nervous. But the ref only got to two when El Aire kicked out. “Yes!” shouted PJ. His heart beat in his chest with nervous excitement. The punishment on El Aire continued as Cangrejo Azul stomped on El Aire’s lower back. PJ cringed as Cangrejo Azul picked El Aire up and shot him into the ropes. On the rebound, Cangrejo Azul caught his rival in his arms and spun El Aire in the air before dropping the tecnico, back first, over his knee with the tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. El Aire shouted in pain as Cangrejo Azul held his rival over his knee, holding El Aire’s legs down while pushing down on his head by the jaw. The stress position coupled with the pain from the backbreaker was very unpleasant. “El Aire’s going to quit,” taunted the guy. “No, he’s not,” replied PJ before shouting, “C’mon, Aire!” Cangrejo Azul released the hold by delivering a Mongolian Chop to El Aire’s solar plexus before tossing him to the mat. That’s when Cangrejo Azul turned to the jeering crowd and taunted them with his crab claw hand gesture. The crowd began to boo loudly. But not the guy by PJ. “Yay!” he shouted, making the crab-claw hand gesture. PJ just shook his head. Cangrejo Azul picked up El Aire by his mask. El Aire tried to respond with punches to Cangrejo Azul’s stomach to no avail. Cangrejo Azul kneed El Aire in his belly and whipped El Aire into the ropes. Cangrejo Azul ducked his head in preparation to back body drop El Aire. But instead, El Aire leapfrogged Cangrejo Azul, hurdling his foe and dashing to the ropes. Wondering what just happened, Cangrejo Azul stood up and turned around. El Aire had already rebounded off the ropes and had taken flight, smacking Cangrejo Azul in the head with a flying forearm strike. Cangrejo Azul fell to the mat, where El Aire went for a pinfall. PJ shouted, “Yes!” But it wasn’t enough for three. The crowd was shouting encouragement for El Aire as he slowly rose to his feet, holding his back. “He’s going to get him,” shouted PJ. The other guy just smirked. El Aire picked up Cangrejo Azul and shot his rival into the ropes. As Cangrejo Azul hit the ropes, moments from rebounding, El Aire jumped into the air, prepping to catch Cangrejo Azul with a huracanrana, a type of flying headscissors hold that flings a foe headfirst to the canvas. It was the experience of Cangrejo Azul that countered the throw by simply stopping his forward motion, hooking his arms around the top rope to stop his rebound. Already floating in space, El Aire had no one to catch in his risky flying hold. So gravity took the wheel, dropping El Aire flat on his already-injured back. “Yes!” shouted the guy, jumping up and down. They both knew what was next. Cangrejo Azul reached for El Aire’s legs as El Aire groaned on the mat, holding the back of his head, stunned. Cangrejo laced El Aire’s legs at the ankles and stuck both legs under one arm by the ankles. He then walked over El Aire’s body, putting the lucha legend on his belly. With the leg lace secured under his arm, Cangrejo Azul sat down on El Aire’s lower back. He leaned back, putting an immense amount of pressure on El Aire’s lower back. “Yes!” shouted the guy. “The Blue Crab Hold! The Blue Crab Hold!” PJ still stood with his hands on the back of his head as El Aire surrendered to the hold, tapping out vigorously on the mat.
“Yes!” shouted the dude again. “Cangrejo’s got this now.” He then pointed at PJ and laughed. Groaning, PJ shook his head again. As Cangrejo broke his signature hold, letting El Aire loose, El Aire rolled right out of the ring to the floor. He grumbled, positioned on one knee, rubbing his back. This is bad news, thought PJ. Bad news. Cangrejo Azul had been taunting the crowd when he noticed El Aire’s injured state on the ground. Climbing out of the ring, he took the boots to El Aire, stomping on his back. Fans threw paper cups at Cangrejo Azul. One was full, and it splashed across his chest. “You don’t like that?” he shouted at the crowd. “I do,” said the guy by PJ. “Then you’ll hate this,” he shouted, lifting up his elbow and dropping it on El Aire’s lower back. El Aire groaned in pain as Cangrejo Azul climbed into the ring. He charged at the ref, grabbing him by the shirt, shouting, “Ring the bell! Start the match now!” “No!” shouted PJ. The ref nodded and signaled for the bell. The bell rang and El Aire was still on the floor. “One,” shouted the ref over the ring ropes by El Aire. “Get up!” shouted PJ. “Two!” “Get up!” “Three!” “C’mon, El Aire. Get up!” “Four!” “Stay down,” cried the dude, with a smile. “Five!” El Aire began to pick himself up. “Six!” “Yes! C’mon, El Aire!” “Seven.” El Aire had lifted himself to his knees, holding on to the apron. “Eight!” El Aire picked himself up, climbed to the apron, and rolled in by the nine count. “Yes!” Thank you, God,” groaned PJ. El Aire hadn’t had a chance to get to his feet when he was met with boots to his back by Cangrejo Azul. “He’s done,” said the guy. “No, he’s not,” said PJ. For the next few minutes, Cangrejo Azul abused El Aire, punishing his lower back with kicks, stomps, and throws. PJ was cringing with every strike, lock, or toss. Several times, Cangrejo Azul secured a lock on El Aire’s body, only to have the Mexican great he was beating down break the hold by grabbing the ropes. Lifting El Aire off the mat, Cangrejo Azul launched El Aire to the ropes. On the rebound, Cangrejo Azul caught El Aire in a tilt-a-whirl sidewalk slam, planting El Aire into the mat. PJ could hear El Aire groan as Cangrejo Azul went for a pinfall. El Aire kicked out. Slapping his hands in anger, Cangrejo Azul then grabbed El Aire and lifted him off the mat and flung him to the ropes again. He caught El Aire on the rebound, but this time, El Aire was ready. Flying into the tilt-a-whirl again, El Aire changed his momentum just enough to secure one of Cangrejo Azul’s arms. Still flying, he used his momentum to fling Cangrejo Azul to the mat. “Yes!” shouted PJ. Quickly getting to his feet, Cangrejo Azul dashed straight at El Aire, who was ready for the aggression. This time, El Aire used Cangrejo Azul’s motion to flip him to the mat with a Japanese arm drag. Realizing the momentum change, Cangrejo Azul swiftly rolled out of the ring. He waved off El Aire, walking around the ring. “Get back in there, you big chicken!” shouted PJ. “You shut your stupid mouth, gringo!” Cangrejo replied, pointing a finger at PJ. “You shut yours, stupid,” said PJ, pointing one back. “Oh, you got me there,” said Cangrejo Azul, getting in PJ’s face. “That comeback did kind of suck,” mumbled PJ, moving away from the luchador. That’s when he noticed El Aire had got to his feet and had bounced off the opposite ropes, running toward them from the ring. “Whoa!” shouted PJ, moving out of the way. “Look out!” shouted the guy, pointing at the ring. “What?” said Cangrejo Azul, turning back towards the ring. There was nothing he could do at that point. El Aire had already taken flight, diving headlong at Cangrejo Azul. Cangrejo Azul tried to block the tope suicida to no avail. El Aire crashed head first into Cangrejo Azul’s chest, knocking him into the abandoned chairs. El Aire had struck Cangrejo Azul with a powerful blow. But now, on the floor, he began to clutch his back again. “Get up, El Aire!” shouted PJ as the ref started the count again. “One.” “C’mon, El Aire. Get up!” “Two.” Cangrejo Azul was recovering slowly. “Three.” El Aire remained on the floor. “Four.” Cangrejo Azul had recovered faster than El Aire and slowly moved to the luchador. “Five.” Cangrejo Azul reached El Aire and picked him up by the mask. El Aire still clutched at his back. “Six.” “No!” shouted PJ. “Yes!” shouted the guy. The two were crying out because Cangrejo Azul had scooped up El Aire and body-slammed him on the arena floor. “Seven.” “No!” “Yes! Yes!” Cangrejo Azul made a rude gesture with his chin and hand at the crowd before rolling into the ring at the eight count. “Get up, El Aire!” “He’s not getting up,” said the guy, laughing. “Nine.” El Aire tried to pick himself up, but he only got as far as the ring apron, clutching his back as the ref counted ten. “Aw, man,” said PJ as the bell rang, ending the third fall and securing the win for Cangrejo Azul. “That was a cheap win and you know it,” he said, glaring at the guy. “A win’s a win, man,” said the guy, pointing and laughing at PJ. PJ rose from his seat and worked his way to the aisle as the announcer said, “Here is the winner of the third fall via countout, Cangrejo Azul!” “Bye-bye, chump,” said the guy as PJ walked off toward the entrance to the dressing rooms. The arena booed Cangrejo Azul, who was soaking it up, making his crab hand gesture as he returned to the dressing room. El Aire had already worked his way halfway up the aisle as PJ reached the dressing room entrance. El Aire acknowledged fans and saw PJ. He nodded at him, knowing PJ had work for him. PJ returned the nod. After a few moments of greeting fans, El Aire approached PJ. “You going to be alright, amigo?” asked PJ. “I’ll be fine,” El Aire replied. “What do you got for me?” “Something good.”
El Aire nodded, still rubbing his back. “Great. Meet me at the Montana Bar in an hour. We’ll talk there.” “Roger that,” said PJ. “Excuse me,” said a woman’s voice behind PJ. Both of them turned to see who it was. Their eyes gave away their excitement. “Good evening,” said the woman. “My name is Elvira Mata.” She offered her hand. El Aire took it and kissed it. The sweetest floral fragrance graced his senses, a much needed contrast to the sweat and grime of the wrestling contest, a literal breath of fresh air compared to the brawny aroma and rancid smell of sweaty knee pads of the competitors. El Aire grinned at Elvira, taking in her figure. Her little black dress was low cut with a diving neckline that fell just below her breasts. Her black high heels had suggestions of glitter, and El Aire suspected she was wearing thigh-highs and garters. She smiled back devilishly, saying, “I’d like to personally invite you to the San Uvalde Museum grand opening of a special exhibit tomorrow.” “I heard about that,” said El Aire. “The recently discovered San Uvalde mummies will be on display. Is that right?” “Correct,” she said. Her voice was laced with a honey El Aire greatly appreciated. “I’m one of the sponsors. We would be honored with your presence.”“Thank you,” said El Aire. “I’ll be there.” With a smile and a wink, the woman walked away. PJ stood, hypnotized, watching her glide away. “Wake up, hermano,” said El Aire. “But I’m dreaming,” said PJ.
“No, you weren’t,” said El Aire. “Go meet me at The Montana Bar. I’ll see you there.”
========What will PJ tell El Aire at the Montana Bar? Find out by picking up your copy of 'El Aire vs. The Mummies of San Uvalde' today HERE in Paperback or Kindle.
Click on the book cover to go straight to the order page on Amazon.com.
BOWIE V. IBARRA is a prolific writer who makes his home in San Antonio, Texas. He is the progenitor of the 'Tex-Mexploitation' genre whose books include such first wave zombie horror classics as the 'Down the Road' saga. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com and pick up a book today!
February 1, 2017
FIGHTS: Brantwijn Serra Rides in the Weird West
ZBFBOOKS.COM HAD A CHANCE TO SHOOT THE BREEZE WITHA WEIRD WESTERNER
ZBFbooks.com - Where are you writing out of?
Brantwijn Serra - I'm writing out of sunny SoCali, which is not the most ideal place for a pluviophile like me, but it has it's charms.
ZBF - How did you find the Weird West?
B - In college a friend introduced me to a pen-and-paper roleplaying game called Deadlands, and I got sucked in really hard. I've loved Weird West ever since.
ZBF - Any favorites or inspirations?
B - Well, as you might guess from my answer above, I adore the story behind Deadlands and it's "sequel", Hell on Earth. But other favorites include High Plains Drifter and the Dark Tower series.
ZBF - Tell us about your book.
B - My book "The Pact" is the first in a 7-8 book series. A lot of story is inspired by the Deadlands games my college friends and I, though I incorporated Norse mythology and paranormal folklore into the tale as well. It's the story of a frontier bounty hunter with the magic of the paranormal world at her fingertips, and her mission to track down a man who wronged her years ago. To be sure she has the ultimate edge in her battle, she's struck a deal with a supernatural spirit, swearing herself to host it's presence in her own body in exchange for its power.
ZBF - Where can readers find your book?
B - It's always nice if folks purchase the book direct from the publisher's site HERE because it really, really helps small presses stay alive. My publisher for The Pact is Champagne Book Group. But if readers must go through Amazon, they can also find it there (http://relinks.me/B01M27C3CX). It's also available on Barnes and Noble, for Nook users.
ZBF - How can readers follow your work?
B - Folks can follow me on Facebook and Twitter, as well as G+, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr. I'm Brantwijn pretty much wherever you go...
ZBF - What are we drinking if we ever hang out?
B - I'm not much of a drinker but I do love me a good Angry Orchard.
BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
ZBFbooks.com - Where are you writing out of?Brantwijn Serra - I'm writing out of sunny SoCali, which is not the most ideal place for a pluviophile like me, but it has it's charms.
ZBF - How did you find the Weird West?
B - In college a friend introduced me to a pen-and-paper roleplaying game called Deadlands, and I got sucked in really hard. I've loved Weird West ever since.
ZBF - Any favorites or inspirations?
B - Well, as you might guess from my answer above, I adore the story behind Deadlands and it's "sequel", Hell on Earth. But other favorites include High Plains Drifter and the Dark Tower series.
ZBF - Tell us about your book.
B - My book "The Pact" is the first in a 7-8 book series. A lot of story is inspired by the Deadlands games my college friends and I, though I incorporated Norse mythology and paranormal folklore into the tale as well. It's the story of a frontier bounty hunter with the magic of the paranormal world at her fingertips, and her mission to track down a man who wronged her years ago. To be sure she has the ultimate edge in her battle, she's struck a deal with a supernatural spirit, swearing herself to host it's presence in her own body in exchange for its power.
ZBF - Where can readers find your book?
B - It's always nice if folks purchase the book direct from the publisher's site HERE because it really, really helps small presses stay alive. My publisher for The Pact is Champagne Book Group. But if readers must go through Amazon, they can also find it there (http://relinks.me/B01M27C3CX). It's also available on Barnes and Noble, for Nook users.
ZBF - How can readers follow your work?
B - Folks can follow me on Facebook and Twitter, as well as G+, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr. I'm Brantwijn pretty much wherever you go...
ZBF - What are we drinking if we ever hang out?
B - I'm not much of a drinker but I do love me a good Angry Orchard.
BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
January 21, 2017
FIGHTS - The Weird Westerner: THE REAL #WEIRDWEST: Mailbox Baseball in the Weird...
Here's a reblog of a great Weird West Article from Frank Fronash. Check it out.
The Weird Westerner: THE REAL WEIRD WEST: Mailbox Baseball in the Weird...: I believe in aliens like I believe in spooks. I mean, we have to have a soul, look at us! The things we get up to and damn few ...
The Weird Westerner: THE REAL WEIRD WEST: Mailbox Baseball in the Weird...: I believe in aliens like I believe in spooks. I mean, we have to have a soul, look at us! The things we get up to and damn few ...
January 15, 2017
FIGHTS: The Weird West with Dominic Stabile
A STRONG VOICE IN THE WEIRD WEST GENRE SITS DOWN WITH ZBFBOOKS.COM
ZBFbooks.com - What part of the world are you writing out of?
Dominic Stabile - I’m currently living in a small Maine town called Penobscot. I’m from South Carolina, so most of my fiction takes place in the South East.
ZBF - What got you into the weird west genre?
DS - Joe Lansdale’s Jebediah Mercer stories. I had been writing for about a year when I read “Dead Man’s Road” in a Lansdale issue of Weird Tales. I had never read anything like it. Most of the Horror I had read up to that point would build suspense, reveal the horror, and then end with the character either dying or going mad. I was expecting the same from Dead Man’s Road. But what blew me away was that after the horror was revealed, and the hero, Jebediah, narrowly escaped death, the story kept going. He went after the creature, and the story ended in a climactic battle. It was a refreshing break from the norm, but it also crippled my own writing for years, because nothing I did could stand up to it.
ZBF - Do you have any favorite weird west stories?
DS - Well, “Dead Man’s Road,” for sure, as well as the rest of Lansdale’s Mercer stories. A novella of Lansdale’s called “On the far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.” The films Seraphim Falls, Bone Tomahawk, Blood Moon, and others I’m sure I missed.
ZBF - Tell us about your title.
DS - The synopsis for Full Moon in the West goes: Juan “Tezcat” Medina is about to take the law into his own hands. Having lost his wife and daughter to a gang of outlaws, he strikes a deal with a local witch. She can resurrect his family. All he has to do is kill the six outlaws before dawn and bring their souls back to her. But there's something different about this gang of outlaws, something Tezcat isn't aware of until it's too late, and he's forced into a showdown with evil.
I originally wrote this for an anthology, but never submitted it. The story grew and took a path that didn’t fit with the anthology’s guidelines. By the time I was done, I had a story that was too long to submit to magazines and too short to submit to book publishers. I came across Grinning Skull Press’s Grave Marker Series, which focuses on publishing ebooks of stories in this range. They accepted it, slapped an amazing cover by Jeffrey Kosh on it, and that’s that.
ZBF - Man, that sounds like an excellent story. Where can people get your title?
DS - Full Moon in the West can be purchased for Kindle HERE.
ZBF - How can readers keep in touch with your progress?
DS - I write movie/book reviews at dominicstabile.com. I’m also active on facebook, Instagram , and twitter . I’ll be giving updates on my progress through the third book in my Scifi/Noir series from Mirror Matter Press (Stone Work is available on Amazon, Stone Wall and Stone Factory pending), as well as my progress on my Horror/Magical Realism novel, The Youth Room.
7. Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink?
Oh yes. Maker’s, neat.====
BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
ZBFbooks.com - What part of the world are you writing out of?Dominic Stabile - I’m currently living in a small Maine town called Penobscot. I’m from South Carolina, so most of my fiction takes place in the South East.
ZBF - What got you into the weird west genre?
DS - Joe Lansdale’s Jebediah Mercer stories. I had been writing for about a year when I read “Dead Man’s Road” in a Lansdale issue of Weird Tales. I had never read anything like it. Most of the Horror I had read up to that point would build suspense, reveal the horror, and then end with the character either dying or going mad. I was expecting the same from Dead Man’s Road. But what blew me away was that after the horror was revealed, and the hero, Jebediah, narrowly escaped death, the story kept going. He went after the creature, and the story ended in a climactic battle. It was a refreshing break from the norm, but it also crippled my own writing for years, because nothing I did could stand up to it.
ZBF - Do you have any favorite weird west stories?
DS - Well, “Dead Man’s Road,” for sure, as well as the rest of Lansdale’s Mercer stories. A novella of Lansdale’s called “On the far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.” The films Seraphim Falls, Bone Tomahawk, Blood Moon, and others I’m sure I missed.
ZBF - Tell us about your title.
DS - The synopsis for Full Moon in the West goes: Juan “Tezcat” Medina is about to take the law into his own hands. Having lost his wife and daughter to a gang of outlaws, he strikes a deal with a local witch. She can resurrect his family. All he has to do is kill the six outlaws before dawn and bring their souls back to her. But there's something different about this gang of outlaws, something Tezcat isn't aware of until it's too late, and he's forced into a showdown with evil.I originally wrote this for an anthology, but never submitted it. The story grew and took a path that didn’t fit with the anthology’s guidelines. By the time I was done, I had a story that was too long to submit to magazines and too short to submit to book publishers. I came across Grinning Skull Press’s Grave Marker Series, which focuses on publishing ebooks of stories in this range. They accepted it, slapped an amazing cover by Jeffrey Kosh on it, and that’s that.
ZBF - Man, that sounds like an excellent story. Where can people get your title?
DS - Full Moon in the West can be purchased for Kindle HERE.
ZBF - How can readers keep in touch with your progress?
DS - I write movie/book reviews at dominicstabile.com. I’m also active on facebook, Instagram , and twitter . I’ll be giving updates on my progress through the third book in my Scifi/Noir series from Mirror Matter Press (Stone Work is available on Amazon, Stone Wall and Stone Factory pending), as well as my progress on my Horror/Magical Realism novel, The Youth Room.
7. Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink?
Oh yes. Maker’s, neat.====
BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
FIGHTS: Alana Melos slings her brand of erotic Weird West
DELILAH DEVILSHOT IS DANGEROUS AND DELIGHTFUL
BY Bowie Ibarra
ZBFbooks.com - So Alana, where do you write your erotic weird westerns?Alana Melos - South Dakota. Not the middle of nowhere, but next to it.
ZBF - How did you get into the Weird West?
AM - Deadlands the game, but I've always sort of like the weird aspect of many genres. It was sort of eye opening to see the old west portrayed in such a cool way!
ZBF - Any favorite weird west storties?
AM - Right now, my favorite is probably Cthulhu Armageddon. Although it's not "technically" weird west, it's a dystopian horror, but it's got that weird west feel to it with the lone gunman hunting down his prey.
ZBF - Tell us about your Weird West title.
AM - My particular series for the Weird West is Delilah Devilshot, which is Weird West erotica. Her family is gunned down and she makes a pact with a devil for revenge. Although it's got a lot of steamy sections in it (it IS erotica!), it's really heavy on plot, action, and characterization as well. I can't write a story, even a sexy one, without heavy plot!
ZBF - I can dig it! Where can folks find your works?
AM - All of my works are available on Amazon HERE, though for this month I am doing a giveaway of The Devil and Delilah at Instafreebie HERE. ZBF - How can folks keep up with your work?
AM - Sign up for my mailing list! (see above giveaway at Instafreebie) I'm also pretty active on
ZBF - And if we're ever in a bar talking erotic fiction, what are we drinking?
AM - White Russians.
:D The dude abides.====
BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
January 14, 2017
FIGHTS: ZBFbooks Interviews #WeirdWestern Author David J. West
DAVID J. WEST BRINGS SOME GREAT TITLES TO THE WEIRD WEST WORLDby Bowie V. Ibarra
ZBFbooks.com - What part of the world are you writing out of?
David J. West - I was born in Utah, grew up in Montana, moved to Utah got married, back to Montana, got divorced, got remarried and moved to LA and then as luck would have it we are back in Utah. So I'm pretty familiar with the American west as I have traveled all over it. I enjoy traveling and seeing the sights wherever I'm at.
ZBF- What got you into the weird west genre? DJW - I've always been into history and mythology and the old west is part of both those worlds. Writing the weird western is just the natural progression for me of blending two things I am fascinated with. Maybe fascinated isn't strong enough. Two things I absolutely love.
ZBF - Do you have any favorite weird west stories? DJW - I'm a HUGE fan of Robert E. Howard and really dig his weird west horror stories Valley of the Lost and The Horror from the Mound and even those that are fantasy that are on the edge of frontier weird west stories like the Conan's tales of Red Nails and Beyond the Black River. I really liked Louis L'amour's Haunted Mesa and for more current authors I dig Joel Jenkins Lone Crow stories, R.S. Belchers Six-Gun Tarot, there are a lot more too numerous to list.
ZBF - Tell us about your title.DJW - Scavengers is about what people will become when they are driven to the edge. I place a lotta bad dudes in an inhospitable desert wasteland (that I am intimately familiar with from numerous wild camping trips) and get to play around. It is based on some real dangerous people = Porter Rockwell and some real yet rumored lost gold stories in the area. I love using that local stuff as a background.ZBF - Where can people get your title? DJW - For right now, Scavengers and others like Cold Slither are only on Amazon HERE, but I will be making them available in more venues by summertime. That includes audiobooks. ZBF - How can readers keep in touch with your progress? DJW - There is my newsletter - https://t.co/Q2cP5JefXtTwitter - https://twitter.com/David_JWestMy blog/website - http://www.kingdavidjwest.com/and I shouldn't be too hard to find on facebook either.ZBF - Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink? DJW - Hahahaha! No, I am in Utah. I'm a sucker for anything with vanilla in it though.======BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
ZBFbooks.com - What part of the world are you writing out of?
David J. West - I was born in Utah, grew up in Montana, moved to Utah got married, back to Montana, got divorced, got remarried and moved to LA and then as luck would have it we are back in Utah. So I'm pretty familiar with the American west as I have traveled all over it. I enjoy traveling and seeing the sights wherever I'm at.
ZBF- What got you into the weird west genre? DJW - I've always been into history and mythology and the old west is part of both those worlds. Writing the weird western is just the natural progression for me of blending two things I am fascinated with. Maybe fascinated isn't strong enough. Two things I absolutely love.
ZBF - Do you have any favorite weird west stories? DJW - I'm a HUGE fan of Robert E. Howard and really dig his weird west horror stories Valley of the Lost and The Horror from the Mound and even those that are fantasy that are on the edge of frontier weird west stories like the Conan's tales of Red Nails and Beyond the Black River. I really liked Louis L'amour's Haunted Mesa and for more current authors I dig Joel Jenkins Lone Crow stories, R.S. Belchers Six-Gun Tarot, there are a lot more too numerous to list.
ZBF - Tell us about your title.DJW - Scavengers is about what people will become when they are driven to the edge. I place a lotta bad dudes in an inhospitable desert wasteland (that I am intimately familiar with from numerous wild camping trips) and get to play around. It is based on some real dangerous people = Porter Rockwell and some real yet rumored lost gold stories in the area. I love using that local stuff as a background.ZBF - Where can people get your title? DJW - For right now, Scavengers and others like Cold Slither are only on Amazon HERE, but I will be making them available in more venues by summertime. That includes audiobooks. ZBF - How can readers keep in touch with your progress? DJW - There is my newsletter - https://t.co/Q2cP5JefXtTwitter - https://twitter.com/David_JWestMy blog/website - http://www.kingdavidjwest.com/and I shouldn't be too hard to find on facebook either.ZBF - Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink? DJW - Hahahaha! No, I am in Utah. I'm a sucker for anything with vanilla in it though.======BOWIE V. IBARRA is the author of the Weird West title 'The Cruel Fate of Dr. Brewster McGill', available in paperback and Kindle format. Network with Bowie at his official website, ZBFbooks.com.
