Explosive Dreams

by Hadena James

  “Hi,” Brent smiled. Faster than he could blink, Brent’s fingers were wrapped around Nick’s throat. He gagged and struggled to breath.

  Not good, Nicky. Do something to defend yourself.

  Nick grabbed at the head of the Tallahassee Terror, digging his finger into the man’s eye. Brent grunted at him.

  “Enough,” a smaller man with dark hair and a crooked nose said. Brent instantly let go.

  “I was just warming him up,” Brent moved. The Marshals had been moving in. They still stood closely, watching.

  “Today is not your day to die, Nick. Not your day at all. It’s coming, but my sister has been through enough these past couple of months. The fan club won’t bother you again. When you die, I want you to be looking into my eyes, not theirs.”

  “Why?” Nick asked. “It’s part of her job.”

  “Oh, I really don’t mind her being shot, strangled or fighting for her life. I don’t even care that she had to have skin grafts. She’s a big girl, quite capable of taking care of herself and healing her physical wounds. What rubs me wrong, is that the hospital made a mistake. They told her that Reece had died as a result of your bombs. I know my sister and I know that ate at her like a painful, parasitic infection that she couldn’t cure. My sister doesn’t care for many people, to have one die, however briefly, was more agony than the burns and the skin grafts. But you’ll wait. I’m expecting a more important visitor. Another killer succeeded where you failed and a member of her team, Michael Giovanni was buried a few days ago. Until that killer’s dead, you get a reprieve. Now, if she finds and kills him, you’ll die much faster. If he ends up in here, you’ll have to wait until I get out of confinement for killing him before your death comes. But it is coming,” Eric Clachan stood up. Nick heaved for the second time that day and began to pray the sniper was never found.

  Renown

  He sat in his recliner, looking through his scrapbook. For five years, no one had taken notice of his work. No one had cared that he was a good shot. No one had cared that he had claimed over twenty victims. Finding the mass murderer had helped. Finding the US Marshals Serial Crimes Tracking Unit and the FBI’s Violent Crimes Unit had been very helpful. Having them together had been fortuitous, killing one of each had put him on the map.

  He had finally gotten their attention. He lit a cigarette. It was almost time for Halloween. May seemed very far away. The start of the fair season would bring him renown this time. Someone would finally be paying attention to him.

  He could wait.

  Epilogue

  The Bubonic Plague outbreak in California had disappeared as quickly as it had come. There were lots of dead squirrels, a few other dead animals, and four humans that had lived through it. The potential epidemic had quietly been swept away, but it still held a spot in my mind. I scanned the news regularly for it.

  Halloween had brought trick-or-treaters. The children of law enforcement officers had rang my doorbell well into the night. One of the advantages of living in a gated community like ours. Nyleena had dressed up as a witch and come over to hand out candy. She was a good witch, of course. Trevor had found me a pirate’s costume and I had donned it all night without a single complaint. She and I had taken turns handing out candy. We had ooh’ed and ahh’ed over the costumes of both the children and the parents, who had gotten into the spirit. A dozen or more parties had been in full swing. One had gotten slightly out of control, but it seemed silly to call the cops when the party belonged to the head of the SCTU.

  Nyleena and I had both been invited to the party. We had both decided handing out candy and watching cheesy horror movies sounded better. We’d had a Vincent Price marathon and then topped it off by watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

  The first week of November, I had been cleared to go back to work. The same was not true of Lucas or the SCTU. We were short two men without Lucas. Also, we’d lost two Marshals in less than a year. While Lucas and I had been recovering, Gabriel and Xavier had been working with the VCU. However, even the VCU was very slow at the moment. Not because crime was dropping, but because the powers that be thought we weren’t being given enough down time. As far as they could tell, the only time off any of us had taken in the past year had been for recovery from physical injury, unless it had been forced on us.

  This was entirely possible. I knew I hadn’t taken a vacation day and couldn’t remember anyone else taking one either. We were never sick or never sick enough to not work. They were trying to implement a new rule, work a case and be off for a number of days in correlation to how long the case had lasted and how bad it had been. I wondered who would be in charge of judging the severity of each case.

  Trevor had taken it upon himself to fix Thanksgiving in a week. My family had been invited as had Gabriel’s and Xavier’s. More importantly, Alice had been invited. I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to seeing her again, but I wasn’t dreading it like I did most social encounters.

  Today, I was alone, in my house, enjoying reruns of Waiting For God. A bone-chilling cold had settled over Missouri and we’d already had a few snows. It was uncommon for heavy snow to fall in November, but it wasn’t unheard of. The seventeen inches that covered the ground outside gave me an excuse to stay indoors. I got up and made a cup of hot chocolate, added marshmallows and went back to the couch.

  “Ace!” Gabriel opened my door.

  “Here,” I answered, turning around on the couch. He had someone new with him. I cocked my head to the side and stared at the stranger.

  “This here is John Bryant,” Gabriel brought the stranger further into the room.

  “Um, ok,” I frowned at Gabriel.

  “John is our newest team member, we’ll be going back to work in December. He’s moving in this week.”

  “In the snow,” I said.

  “In the snow,” Gabriel confirmed.

  “Poor guy,” I turned back to the TV and paused my show. I didn’t want to miss a joke I’d heard at least a hundred times because I was talking to the newest team member.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you Marshal Cain, I’ve read a lot about you,” John extended his hand.

  “I don’t actually touch people I don’t know,” I said. “I’m rude and stand-offish when you first meet me. If we survive together for a few weeks, it’ll get better. If we survive a psychopath together, I’ll warm a little faster.”

  “I heard you were hard to get to know,” John said.

  “Talking to Lucas I see.”

  “Yes, you were the last one for me to meet,” John had the grace to look sheepish.

  “Well, then,” I stood up. “Do you guys want hot chocolate or coffee?”

  “Sure,” Gabriel made his way into my kitchen and started coffee. I stood there looking for something to do other than get to know the new team member.

  “I like books, fishing, and anything with chocolate in it,” John told me.

  “I like history and work,” I answered. “I’m a very boring person.”

  “Ace can literally bore people to sleep,” Gabriel shouted from the kitchen. “Her brain is like an encyclopedia of everything dark that has ever happened in the world, especially if humans did it to other humans. She’s also my point man. Lucas may bust down the doors, but Ace goes in first. She can subdue a bad guy like no one else. Half the time, they see her and surrender.”

  “The other half?” John asked.

  “She kicks their ass until they do,” Gabriel handed John a mug. I kept coffee for other people, I didn’t drink it myself. “Before John came to work for us, he was working for the Secret Service in Treasury as a computer tech.”

  “And you moved here?” I asked, the first interesting thing all day to be said.

  “It sounded like a nice change,” John answered.

  “What really made you move?” I pressed.

  “My daughter was kidnapped three years ago. She was found beaten, raped and murdered a week later in a ditch. SCTU caught the guy that did
it. So I applied. Sorry to come in under these circumstances.”

  “Life expectancy isn’t real high for a member of the SCTU,” I tried to wave the comment away. “Two or three years is the best we can hope for. Xavier and Lucas are both going on four years, but they’re the exception, not the rule.”

  “And they’ve definitely gotten their fair share of scars to show for it,” Gabriel sounded a touch distant. “We have lots of rules, none of them pertain to the handling of killers. The primary one is that we watch out for each other, in the field and at home. Ace has a stalker or two. She also has a fan club in The Fortress. The new president is Brent Timmons, The Tallahassee Terror. He killed the old one and took over after meeting her. They have supervised club meetings where they follow her cases and do scrapbooking. The Marshals allow it because it serves a purpose, we have the ability to better understand those we’ve caught as well as those we track. Their meetings have actually led to different ways of thinking and helping on unrelated cases because they think like killers. Lucas gets transcripts of them and goes over them for important information. Malachi Blake is dangerous, but technically still a good guy, so don’t kill him, but don’t let your guard down completely when he’s around. If we and VCU are both home, you’ll see him often. He lives a block down, but hangs out here. Don’t sneak up on Ace or Lucas, they’ll kill you without realizing it. Sneaking up on Xavier is also not a good idea, but he’ll just maim. We all have designated jobs within the unit. Stick to your job and you’ll do just fine. Screw up and things will not go as well.”

  “Got it,” John said.

  “Also,” I looked at him. “I’m a sociopath. My fan club isn’t the only place where we have people that think like killers. We’re all damaged goods, accept that and respect the boundaries. We won’t pry too hard into your life, if you don’t pry too hard into ours. What I did earlier is actually a no-no among us. But it gives you an example of the reason behind it. It’s uncomfortable and most of us don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t a great feeling,” John admitted.

  “No, no it wasn’t and some of us have more secrets than others. You’ll learn them slowly. Are you good with a gun?”

  “Proficient,” John said.

  “Get better,” I told him. “Also, learn to use a knife if you don’t already know. Sometimes it is the only weapon available.”

  “I can fight,” John told me.

  “So can Gabriel and Lucas and Xavier.” I answered. “Now ask them who would win a fight.”

  “Who would win a fight?” John asked.

  “Ace,” Gabriel’s answer was immediate. “And it has nothing to do with her being a girl. You’re going to encounter some seriously bad killers who are so far gone they don’t feel any pain. Psychopath 101: they don’t feel pain the way a regular person does. They won’t go into shock from pain or be stopped by it. If you shoot them and don’t hit something vital, they just keep coming. And if you see Ace struggling to take someone down, you can bet your ass he’s a true psychopath. Offer help, sometimes she takes it, sometimes she doesn’t. It depends on the situation.”

  “Why do you do that?” John asked.

  “I’m a sociopath, it’s like half the perks, half the side effects. My pain tolerance is about fifteen times that of a normal person. I can’t feel guilt, empathy or sympathy, so if I kill one, I’m not going to lose sleep over it at night. Most of the team will. I don’t fight like a girl and I don’t fight fair.”

  “Which is why sometimes it is just better to stay out of her way,” Gabriel said. “You’ll learn the signs.”

  Coming Soon!

  Hunting the Spell: Book One of the Hidden Demons Trilogy – August 2014

  Callie Strachan was living the life of any Elder, until a nuclear bomb explodes on The Island. The wall containing her aunt and Ankhimet melts from the blast. Jasmine casts a spell that puts just about everyone on The Island asleep and Ankhimet escapes in to the world of humans. Now, Callie, her sister Rain, and her cousin, Ginger are on a quest to find the key to wake the Elders and recapture Ankhimet.

  Cannibal Dreams (#5 in the Dreams & Reality Series) – November 2014

  The SCTU has dealt with cannibals before, but nothing prepares them for what they find when they begin chasing this monster. Teen boys are going missing in a small rural parish in Louisiana, but the first real glimpse of horror comes when a couple of children find a foot in a ditch that reveals human bite marks. All the skills of the SCTU will be tested as they try to stop more boys from being eaten, alive.

  Also by Hadena James

  The Dreams & Reality Series

  Tortured Dreams (Book 1)

  Elysium Dreams (Book 2)

  Mercurial Dreams (Book 3)

  The Brenna Strachan Series (Urban Fantasy)

  Dark Cotillion (Book 1)

  Dark Illumination (Book 2)

  Dark Resurrections (Book 3)

  Dark Legacies (Book 4)

  The Dysfunctional Chronicles

  The Dysfunctional Affair (Book 1)

  The Dysfunctional Valentine (Book 2)

  The Dysfunctional Honeymoon (Book 3)

  The Dysfunctional Proposal (Book 4)

  Short Story Collection

  Tales to Read Before the End of the World

  About The Author

  I’ve been writing for over two decades and before that, I was creating my own bedtime stories to tell myself. I penned my first short story at the ripe old age of 8. It was a fable about how the raccoon got its eye-mask and was roughly three pages of handwritten, 8 year old scrawl. My mother still has it and occasionally, I still dig it out and admire it.

  When I got my first computer, I took all my handwritten stories and typed them in. Afterwards, I tossed the originals. In my early twenties, I had a bit of a writer’s meltdown and deleted everything. So, with the exception of the story about the raccoon, I actually have none of my writings from before I was 23. Which is sad, because I had a half dozen other novels and well over two hundred short stories. It has all been offered up to the computer and writing gods as a sacrifice and show of humility or some such nonsense that makes me feel less like an idiot about it.

  I have been offered contracts with publishing houses in the past and always turned them down. Now that I have experimented with being an Indie Author, I really like it and I’m really glad I turned them down. However, if you had asked me this in the early years of 2000, I would have told you that I was an idiot (and it was a huge contributing factor to my deleting all my work).

  When I’m not writing, I play in a steel-tip dart league and enjoy going to dart tournaments. I enjoy renaissance festivals and sanitized pirates who sing sea shanties. My appetite for reading is ferocious and I consume two to three books a week as well as writing my own. Aside from introducing me to darts, my SO has introduced me to camping, which I, surprisingly, enjoy. We can often be found in the summer at Mark Twain Lake in Missouri, where his parents own a campground.

  I am a native of Columbia, Missouri, which I will probably call home for the rest of my life, but I love to travel. Day trips, week trips, vacations on other continents, wherever the path takes me is where I want to be and I’m hoping to be able to travel more in the future.

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