Tag: snippet

01/15/21 Snippet, ‘Desert’ (Working title).

Does this work as an introduction?

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Joe Grushnark-Baxter shook his head as the last gunman tumbled down the hill. Damned fool should have known when to leave well enough alone. Him and his friends.

He looked down, saw that the aforementioned damned fool was still kicking from the bullet in his head, and aimed down the barrel — and then stopped. Bullets weren’t cheap. Besides… Joe looked back over his shoulder and asked, “These all of the point-ears?”

One of the halflings now crowded up against the bars of their jail-cart snorted. There were five of them, all looking more than a little battered, but this one had a spectacular shiner. “And just why should I tell you, tusk-mouth?”

Joe thought about getting mad for a moment, before conceding it was a fair question. He stooped, shucked a hoop of keys off of one dead elf’s belt, and tossed the hoop at Shiner. The halfling might have only one eye working at the moment, but he still snapped it out of the air like a frog snagging a fly.

“Because I said please?” Joe said, taking pains to be polite.

Shiner had already somehow gotten the right key in the door lock. “I’m sorry to say you did not, good sir,” he said as the door popped open. That just left his and the other halflings’ neck chains, but Shiner was working on that as he talked. “Say please, I mean.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. Fine. These all of the point-ears, please?”

It was amazing, how fast short halfling fingers could move. “All in this slaver party, sure.” Shiner grinned at him. “There’s another five outriders, scouting out for trouble and more folks to grab. I figure they’ll be coming back hells for leather, now that they heard the shots.”

“Well, damn.” Joe had been reloading his revolvers and checking his rifle; they looked fine, but you always checked. “Shame they’re not four. I don’t care about their guns, or the mules. You want ‘em, take ‘em. But get somebody to put that poor bastard down there out of his misery.”

“Oh, I figure one of the boys is taking care of that,” Shiner said as there was a sudden, if brief, commotion at the bottom of the hill. “But you ain’t gonna ask us to stick around?”

“Nope,” Joe said. “Skedaddling’s smart, even if it’s on a mule. And if there’s five outriders here, then there’s probably a damn regiment or two of the point-ears real close by. They’re not gonna get any happier about what happened here.”

“Sure. So why ain’t you running? This an orc thing?”

“Nope.” Joe wished he had some tobacco to chew, so that he could spit it. “This all started when these sons of bitches shot my horse.”

01/11/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

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Syah went on, “I liked her, right from the start. Chook was good to people. The first day I came in, she spent the whole morning getting to know me. None of that corporate crap about favorite bands or shared commonalities, either. She wanted to know the way I liked to work, what things drove me nuts when other people did them, how to know when to distract me and when to leave me alone, things like that. By the end of the day it was like I had been there for months.”

“Yeah.” For a moment I was tempted to call him out on the ‘corporate crap’ part — Syah had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about the folks paying our salaries — but I decided to let it slide. “Chook was great at getting along with everybody. And she meant it, too; you can tell when somebody cares. Guess that’s why she went into net interfacing.” I swigged my own beer. “That, and how nosy she was.”

That got me a grimace from Syah. “That was a little weird, yeah. I didn’t think Chook meant anything by it, and I know you have to know everything to interface properly, but she lived the life, huh?”