The Last Chronicles of Pete Mersill

by David Millican

The Last Chronicle of Pete Mersill

  By

  Pete

  First Published - [November 16th, 2016]

  Fantastic Creatures: Fellowship of Fantasy

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N8SZJET/

  This edition published [July 10th, 2017] by [David Millican]

  [address of publishing house]

  www.davidmillicanauthor.com

  ASIN: B073V9G3GH

  Copyright © [David Millican] [July 10th, 2017]

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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  Insert witty, engaging opening line here. I don’t know who these people are that have time to sit around thinking up great opening lines, but I ain’t one of them. There’s a Fetch waiting to kill me. They’ve tried to before but I know this one won’t go so well for me. My defiance has finally caught up with me.

  The Fetches mostly did away humanity’s will to resist in the first month of their rule. I missed that month. Most of it I spent blackout drunk behind the Liquors & Country Ham Store off of I-65 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I’d run out of gas about a mile up the interstate and was called home by the twin beacons of Waffle Houses to either side of the exit. But it was the Liquors & Country Ham Store that told me I had found my final resting place.

  Six days and nineteen hours before that I had blown brain matter all over the face of my twelve year-old daughter as I shot the wrong man. On live television no less. Yeah, I’m that kind of screw-up.

  Oh, get off your high horses you hoity-toity, poor excuses for cattle. You sat there and did nothing while our world was being taken over. You have no room to judge me. Yeah, so I blew the brains out of an innocent man but at least I took action. At least I’m still taking action. What are you doing? Letting them tighten your leashes and suckle your life energy from you? Just be glad I didn’t kill your Fetch.

  For those of you who are uninitiated, which is who this journal is for, to kill a Fetch you must first kill the human it feeds from. Fetches gain their power and sustain their existence by leeching power from their humans. That means when I slit a Fetch’s throat, it just takes life energy from its human to sustain it. In return the human suffers the pain of the wound without the actual cut. Eventually with enough cuts the human expires and the Fetch dies.

  Die isn’t quite the right word. They move on to their next plane of existence, the next world, or whatever they call it. Though they don’t move on so much anymore. At least not since Nicole gave magic to hers. Nicole is such an ordinary name to bring down the reign of humanity on Earth, but then again, so is Pete. I’m Pete, if you didn’t bother to read the cover page. And if you didn’t, then give the journal to the person sitting next to you because the job of saving the earth isn’t for idiots.

  I’m sorry, that was harsh. Maybe the cover page got torn off and you have no idea what I’m talking about. My name is Pete Mersill and I am fifty-five…ish. Time has less meaning in this new world. Twenty years ago, on live TV, as I said before, I shot the President of the United States through the temple as he shook hands with my daughter. I liked the guy, had no beef with him. I voted for him. But I thought he was the human behind the Fetch trying to take over the world.

  I’m getting ahead of myself some. Most of you, by you I mean the uninitiated, don’t even know what a Fetch is beyond some Irish mythical creature. You don’t know that it’s the name of the things you see creeping around your bedroom at night. Or that they’re the things you catch a glimpse of out of the corner of your eye but disappear when you turn to look at them. There are those that are visible to everyone, you just didn’t know they were Fetches. Those who’ve chosen to stay rather than move onto their next world. You call them Overlords.

  The world has no idea what the Overlords are but the prevailing theory at the moment is they’re aliens. Which, by the loosest definition of the word, is true. They’re not from here. Fetches, and other creatures like them, are from a different…plane, dimension, existence? I don’t know the right word. It is a place laid on top of our world. No, that’s not right. They exist in the same place and at the same time just in slightly different, frequencies? That doesn’t explain it either but you can ask a mystic or a physicist about that, I’m neither. I’m a brute from Wyoming that smashes things first and then asks questions later. See the above assassination of the President for further clarification.

  And while we’re on the point of clarification, as to the events and conversations recorded in this journal, they are accurate to the best of my ability. Though my abilities are pretty accurate. A side effect of killing my Fetch, and other Fetches to a lesser degree, is the ability to see parts of my history like YouTube videos. I don’t know if I’m looking at my memories or the actual events in time, but I can recall almost everything that has ever happened to me with perfect clarity. Just a piece of advice for when it happens to you: don’t watch your birth.

  Twenty years ago I had a horrible job as the night manager for a grocery chain. I had the laziest crew, a manager that didn’t care, and a job that sucked the joy out of my life and marriage. My daughter, Marissa, was the only good thing in my life so I worked hard to provide for her.

  Every night I straightened, faced, cleaned, and organized that giant store almost by myself. As time went by I got better at the job. They had said the job was impossible but I was finishing with one or even two hours left to go. Yet, something ate at me, didn’t sit right in my stomach. My crew would thank me for doing jobs I hadn’t done, ask me about tasks I hadn’t assigned them, and my food would disappear even though I was the only one with a key to the office where it was kept.

  I began review tapes from the nights under the guise of trying to catch a late night shoplifter. The Loss Prevention people thought I was crazy, but at the time so did I. For three nights I saw nothing on the tapes. On the fourth, I saw myself walk into the freezer at the same time I was wiping down the check stands. I was literally in two places at once.

  “Are these tapes synced up?”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t they be?” Jones, the tall LP guy said.

  “Because I’m right there and right there,” I pointed at the two different screens, “at the same time.”

  “No, you’re right there.” They pointed at the freezer.

  “And right there.” I tapped the image of myself on the screen, except I knew it wasn’t me because I hadn’t done that last night. Maybe they had reused old tapes and there was bleed through or something.

  But that explanation went out the window. “There’s nothing on that screen,” Jones said.

  I stared in shock as his gaze circled around the screen, never once landing on the image of me wiping down the conveyor belts. It was like a little kid trying to avoid looking at his mom when she was trying to get him to look her in the eyes. If I hadn’t been ready to soak my trousers I would have found it funny. As it was, I could feel the breath of a fourth person on my neck. There were only three people in the small room.

  I turned to look but there was no one behind
me. Through the open door I saw a flash of red slip around the corner. I elbowed the short LP guy out of the way, I never remember his name, and looked down the long hallway. It was empty. The fluorescent lights glaring off of the cream tiles left no shadows. The door leading back to the floor was fifty yards away. Five seconds at Olympic speeds. Two seconds was all it had taken me to get around the corner. The swinging door hung silent and still.

  Back in the room, ignoring the shocked looks, I demanded they pull up the last few minutes of the camera placed just outside this room. And there I was again, running out of the room followed by me chasing me hot on my heels. Still to this day it makes my head hurt. Of course the LP guys saw nothing and the few other coworkers I grabbed from the breakroom were equally baffled by my behavior and agitation.

  James, the manager, stepped in and sent me home telling me to take the next few nights off and get some good sleep. I told him to stop acting like he cared about the store and go back to his games. Probably shouldn’t have done that in front of everyone, but I didn’t care at the moment. Someone… something had breathed on the back of my neck. I still felt the moisture of the hot breath.

  I was in a daze as I walked out the doors into the light snow that was supposed to turn heavy by