Category: Books

This is the last day that I randomly just write whatever. Well, until the next time I’m away from my main files. Everything I wrote today is something I can use in the book, though.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate fighting people who want to kill me? I don’t mean just not worrying if I can’t take a punch. I mean flat-out, no-fooling, want to put me in the dirt. It’s always scary, and kind of insulting. It’s not like I woke up that morning planning to do it to them.

It’s weird how easier the obsidian knives made it here, though. The two guys carrying them felt like shadows, smudgy blobs that didn’t want to do anything on their own, except put muscle behind the knives’ urge to slice through my precious hide. That always makes it easier, when you gotta do what you gotta do.

The poor bastards fought like blobs, too, with the kind of clumsy-looking slashes that looked easy enough to counter until you realized they weren’t gonna stop, and were too numb to feint , or get scared. And what their knives hit as we danced around the room, they curdled. That’s the only word for it. Anywhere that got scored by one looked discolored or slimed, with a mildewed stink that grew as we moved. This was definitely big-E Evil going on.

I still didn’t like smashing my knuckle-duster into the first cultist’s elbow. Some of it was the reek of old, baked-in evil coming off the guy, and some of it was the way his scream was cut off halfway, like the pain wasn’t worth indulging. But a lot of it was how the elbow felt as it fell apart. I don’t care what they tell you about berserkers or terminators, friend. When the joint don’t work, you can’t gut that out.

And so it begins. This is going to jump around ferociously, by the way: I have whole sections that go [write this later]. Well… it’s later.

Earl knew his stuff; and what he didn’t know, his wife had picked up for him. Between the two of them, and their apparently endless supply of kids, we had the coach unpacked and hidden away in no time. And I mean unpacked, and I definitely mean us. I didn’t wait for somebody to help with my bags, and neither did David and Patricia. I even grabbed Lucas’s for him, since he had gravitated towards helping get the horses back all the way down to just a little crazy.

His frown got bigger and bigger as we all worked, especially when Lucas noticed how we were all just a little frantic about it. “Y’all were looking in the wrong places,” he murmured to me as we pushed the coach the rest of the way into the barn. “The broomers landed twenty minutes ago, but you kept looking up, instead of south.”

“And what does that tell you, Lucas?”“That I was looking in the wrong place. You gotta take it seriously when the locals do something you don’t expect, Tom. They always know the area better than you. That’s why they’re the locals.”