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Authors: Kaje Harper
The Rebuilding Year (36 page)
“I’m not trying to be funny. I heard something.”
“Like what?”
“Like…something scraping, no…dragging along the sidewalk.”
I shook my head and started walking again.
Fraser caught me up in a few steps. “I’m serious!”
“No, you’re not.”
“Wait.” He hooked a hand around my arm, halting me. “Listen.”
Once again I listened. Once again there was nothing to hear but the whine of the power lines and the wind shaking the trees lining the street.
I made a sound of impatience. “
Not funny
, Fraser.”
“I’m not being funny!”
“You’re right about that.” But then I heard it too. A sound like a bag of wet cement being dragged along the sidewalk.
“Hear that?” Fraser exclaimed. “You hear that, right?”
I nodded.
We both stared through the tunnel of trees. The shadows wavered across the sidewalk. Moonlight and shadows…
The shuffling sound was moving toward us.
Fraser murmured, “What the hell.”
I shook my head, wanting him to be quiet. My eyes strained to see through the gloom.
“There.” I pointed at the pale form shambling toward us. “What the…”
“Hell,” finished Fraser, and launched himself at the thing.
At the mummy thing.
Okay. At the mummy. The glowing-red-eyed, bandage-trailing mummy that was apparently following us down the quiet residential streets of Walsh, Wyoming.
As Fraser pounded down the sidewalk toward it, the mummy turned and sprinted away with un-mummy-like sprightliness. I raced after Fraser.
“Fraser!”
He gave no indication he heard, barreling along ahead of me like a TV cop in pursuit of a felon.
Where the hell were they going? What did Fraser plan on doing if he caught the thing?
The mummy cut through the trees, darted across a neatly trimmed lawn, flew down a driveway and scrambled up and over a wooden fence. I’ll be damned if Fraser didn’t fly right after him.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted after him.
Once again, if Fraser heard me, he gave no sign. He disappeared over the fence. I reached the gate a few seconds later, totally out of breath. I tried it. It swung open and I went through. I was in a backyard. An ordinary backyard with a large Doughboy pool and a lot of trampled flowerbeds.
From the other side of the brick wall at the back of the yard I could hear crashing sounds. I added my footprints to the flowerbeds and heaved myself up, scrambling over the wall as lights in the house behind me went on.
The lights were already on in the house next door. House lights and backyard lights blazed brightly, illuminating the bulky white form disappearing over yet another wall—and the soles of Fraser’s Converses diving after in close pursuit.
I swore and raced after them. The back door to the house slammed open. A voice bellowed, “You kids get the hell out of here before I call the cops!”
Imagine trying to explain this to the cops?
He was still yelling as I cleared the next fence.
I found myself in an alley. Weeds grew through what remained of the cracked pavement. Opposite me was a junkyard fenced by chain link. A particularly unfriendly dog was throwing itself at the fence and offering its unsolicited opinion of my behavior.
“Who asked you?” I told it.
It responded by trying to chew its way through the fence.
The alleyway ended in a tall brick wall without windows or doors. It opened onto a street. Fraser stood in the middle of the street swearing.
I went to join him.
“He got away,” he said by way of greeting.
“Where would he go?”
He shook his head. It was a good question though. The street was made up of storefronts. Mostly closed for the night, though a couple had Out of Business signs in the darkened windows.
In fact, the only thing open was a dive-looking bar called the Blue Moon. A neon cocktail glass containing a blue crescent moon blinked on and off above the battered door.
“There,” Fraser said. He elbowed me and started across the street.
“What? No way.”
“He sure as hell didn’t go in there.” He nodded at the junkyard where the Hound of the Baskervilles was still trying to saw through the fence. “So where is he?”
I looked up and down the empty street. Other than a few parked cars outside the bar—and us—there was no sign of life. No mummy fleeing down the sidewalk in either direction.
“He’s hiding.”
“He’s in
there
. I’m telling you.”
I caught up to him. “Did you see him go in there?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I would love to believe that something,
anything
tonight, makes sense, but I find it diffi—”
I was talking to myself. What else was new?
I followed Fraser inside the bar. It was dark and smoky—although no one had smoked there for years—and surprisingly crowded. Crowded with what appeared to be regulars, because everyone stopped talking and turned our way.
Okay, maybe everyone didn’t stop talking. Maybe it just felt that way after Fraser burst out, “Did anyone see a mummy come in?”
There was a pause—even the jukebox seemed to pause in the middle of a Patsy Cline song—and then all those hard, weather-beaten faces began to roar with laughter.
The Rebuilding Year
Kaje Harper
Losing nearly everything leaves room for the one thing they can’t live without.
A few excruciating minutes pinned in a burning building cost Ryan Ward his job as a firefighter, the easy camaraderie of his coworkers, his girlfriend, and damn near cost him his left leg. Giving up, though, isn’t an option. Compared to the alternative, choosing a new profession, going back to school, and renting a room from the college groundskeeper are simple.
Until he realizes he’s falling in love with his housemate, and things take a turn for the complicated.
John Barrett knows about loss. After moving twice to stay in touch with his kids, he could only watch as his ex-wife whisked them away to California. Offering Ryan a room seems better than rattling around the empty house, but as casual friendship moves to something more, and a firestorm of emotions ignites, the big old house feels like tight quarters.
It’s nothing they can’t learn to navigate, though. But when dead bodies start turning up on campus—and one of the guys is a suspect—their first taste of real love could go up in smoke.
Warning: Contains two hot men wrestling with a shift in their sexuality, as well as a few positions probably listed in the
Gay Kama Sutra
. But it’s not all about the hot and sweaty—especially when your previously straight life knocks on the door and comes back to visit.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
The Rebuilding Year
Copyright © 2012 by Kaje Harper
ISBN: 978-1-60928-832-7
Edited by Sue Ellen Gower
Cover by Angela Waters
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: March 2012
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