Sudan: A Novel
Page 37
“Dan...don’t. OK? Just send me some money.” There was a pause. “And I’ve got to get in touch with the Putz...”
“The Putz?”
“He’s an old friend from college who’s a soft touch for electronic equipment. Hey, I don’t suppose you know where I could lay hands on an old metal Nikon. I... lost mine. And no way am I going to use one of those digital things.”
“You’re really staying, aren’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yeah, I’m staying.”
Silence. Dan thought of a dozen things he wanted to say, things that had come to him in the night when he woke up in a cold sweat with dreams of Ron’s screams fading to rags and tatters in his head. He wanted to tell Ron how proud he was of him, how proud their father would have been. He wanted to tell his brother he loved him.
“You be careful now...hear?”
“I hear.”
Ron drew in a deep breath. “I’m heading out. I hear the government in Khartoum is shifting attention to the western provinces.”
“Where?”
“A place called Darfur.”
Idris and Aleuth sat beside the dying embers of the cooking fire as it shot little red sparks into the night sky. Akin was asleep on her sleeping mat. Aleuth rose and stepped to the door of the tukul to look in on her. Just to check. The girl was sound asleep with Shema wrapped in her arms.
When Aleuth returned, Idris looked at her with a knowing half smile. He, too, constantly checked to see that Akin was there, that she was safe, that she really was home.
Aleuth sat down on a log in the flickering firelight, picked up a stick and pushed aimlessly at the coals. Finally, she forced herself to give voice to the thought that had been hiding just out of sight, like a puff adder in her mind.
“They could come back.”
Idris looked at his wife. He wasn’t surprised by her words, and he slowly nodded.
“Yes, they could come back.”
Now that the thought had been free, words spilled out after it in a torrent.
“They could come back anytime...tonight, tomorrow...and take her away again, steal her—steal both of them.” Aleuth’s voice had the beginning sharp edge of hysteria. “Idris, they could make Akin a slave again! They could take her and Shema away and beat them and starve them and...” Her husband didn’t tell her the fate Akin had so narrowly escaped; he didn’t have to.
“Idris!” This last was a frantic, desperate plea: “How can we protect our children?”
Idris stared into the glowing embers for a time before he lifted his head and looked into his wife’s eyes. When he spoke, his voice was quiet.
“We can’t.”
THE END
Click FREE DOWNLOAD
If you enjoyed this book, would you please consider writing a review of it on Amazon so other readers might enjoy it, too. Just a couple of sentences. That would mean a lot to me.
I’d also love to talk to you personally, "face to face," tell you a little something about each one of my other six novels. Just click the video links on the book-preview pages that follow.
Most important of all—THANK YOU for reading my book.
-- Ninie Hammon
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
(Click here.)
After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her; JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
(Click the links below to:)
Buy Black Sunshine
Sign up for email list
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about FIVE DAYS IN MAY.
(Click here.)
On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents, each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh, has lost his wife and his faith, and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, all four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the crossroads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
(Click the links below to:)
Buy Five Days in May
Sign up for email list
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Book Trailer
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about HOME GROWN.
(Click here.)
Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
(Click the links below to:)
Buy Home Grown
Sign up for email list
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Book Trailer
Author Ninie Hammon
talks brie
fly about
THE LAST SAFE PLACE.
(Click here.)
In the deepest, darkest midnight of her soul, Gabriella writes a horror story about demons, and then one of them crawls up out of the pages and confronts her face to face. A deranged, fanatical fan who believes he is The Beast of Babylon from her novel turns up at a book signing and then comes after her to claim her as his bride--and to sacrifice her son, Ty, as an blood offering to their unholy union.
Gabriella, Ty and Ty’s grandfather, Theo, the crusty old stand-up comic called Slap Yo Mama Carmichael, run for their lives, back to the only place in Gabriella’s life where she ever felt safe. But once there, she discovers that facing the demons from her past may be harder and more dangerous than facing the one who hunts her.
As Ty and Theo battle their own personal monsters, Gabriella begins to fall for a man who carries a guilt she can’t even begin to imagine.
The predator who stalks Gabriella and her family tracks them down and corners his prey as a full moon rides high in the night sky and lightning explodes on the mountaintop. Then all their lives and demons collide in a final, apocalyptic celebration of one man’s madness. Gabriella’s only hope lies in the unexplainable power of two-thousand-year-old tree. Is it strong enough to save them? Can a single, perfect bristlecone pine somehow determine the fate of them all?
(Click the links below to:)
Buy The Last Safe Place
Sign up for email list
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about
THE MEMORY CLOSET.
(Click here.)
Something happened to Anne Mitchell when she was 11 years old that was so horrible her mind erased the whole first decade of her life. Twenty-five years later, she has come home to a dried-up Texas prairie town to live with her crazy grandmother in the rambling old house where she grew up in a final desperate effort to remember.
Unless she remembers, Anne will never understand the meaning of the anguished confession her mother choked out as she lay dying. And Anne will remain forever a slave to what she calls the “Bogeyman”—strange images from her lost childhood that haunt her dreams, stalk her waking hours and leer at her from the shadows behind her reflection in mirrors, windowpanes and wine glasses.
Though Anne has finally summoned the courage to face her past, she really doesn’t understand how expensive remembering will be. The cost of her memories could very well be her sanity. She might very well have to pay for her childhood with her life.
(Click the links below to:)
Buy The Memory Closet
Sign up for email list
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Book Trailer
Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about
WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
(Click here.)
On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant, and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and two-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Piper Addington
… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.
Carter Addington
…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.
Maggie
…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.
But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…
… on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.
(Click the links below to:)
Sign up for email list
to be notified when When Butterflies Cry is available, to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
Read Chapter One
Ninie Hammon
Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.
Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.
Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewhere in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, Kentucky and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.
Ninie would love to connect with you on her website, niniehammon.com. You can also find there links to other social media where she can chat with you.
SUDAN
Copyright © 2010 Ninie Hammon
For full copyright information, click here.
All covers by DogEared Design.
Please turn the page for Amazon’s Before You Go feature. Thanks!