Thanks to everyone who's joined me on the blog tour for He is Worthy. It's been a blast, and there is still plenty of time to leave comments and go in the draw to win stuff.
Now, straight from Rome to outer space —
that's what I love most about writing. I get to go wherever my imagination
drags me, and hopefully take some other people along for the ride as
well.
Here's a teaser for Dark Space, out
from Loose Id on December 4. Meet Brady, the narrator. He's got a lot of
snark. He mostly uses it to hide how shit-scared he is.
I was trying hard
to get drunk.
I took a swig of
Hooper’s moonshine and made a face at the taste, and then the burn. It was so
rough I almost spat it over the recruiting poster tacked onto the wall of the
storeroom. Join the Military and Save the
Earth. Bullshit.
They probably just couldn’t fit Join the Military and Become Fucking Cannon
Fodder for Aliens on the posters. Or Join
the Military and Get Abducted and Fucked-Up by Faceless Nightmares in Ways You
Can’t Even Imagine. I mean, look at Cameron Rushton.
We were just talking about Cameron Rushton.
We usually were. He was one of the standard topics of conversation on nights
like these. He came in at number three on what was a pretty short fucking list.
First we talked about girls. Not girls like
any of us had seen in the flesh, but those girls in magazines with huge tits
and puffed-up lips and sleepy eyes, like they’d been fucked hard all night and
they were mostly pouting now because the guy finally pulled out. We talked
about those girls a lot. And it was all talk. Every single one of us was
conscripted at sixteen. Some of us might have copped a feel of some girl from
home, but we sure as hell hadn’t been plowing busty centerfolds until they went
cross-eyed. Any guy who reckoned he’d been with a girl like that was full of
shit.
After girls we talked about the officers,
and which ones hated us most that week, and how we never did anything to
deserve it, and they were just assholes, and if they didn’t have those stripes
on their shoulders, they wouldn’t be so tough. Man-to-man, we could take them.
That was all talk too, I guess.
Then there was Cameron Rushton and the
Faceless. Couldn’t have one without the other.
“The Faceless will take you apart cell by
cell,” Hooper said, taking the bottle off me. “Cell by cell, and you’ll feel
every cut.”
Hooper was crazy, though.
He worked on the Outer Ring, in the Tubes.
I hated the Tubes.
I didn’t like knowing there was only one little air lock between me and
asphyxiation. The Tubes were sleek tunnels that led from the hangars on the
Outer Ring straight out into the black. The Hawks were launched from the Tubes.
I wouldn’t go to the Outer Ring if I could
avoid it. I liked to stick to the Inner Ring and the Core. It was just as
precarious in the Core, probably, but it felt more solid somehow. I felt like I
could never get enough air in the Tubes.
“That’s impossible,” Cesari scoffed.
“It’s not! It’s
nanotechnology!” Hooper was in engineering, so maybe he knew what he was
talking about. But he was also crazy. Some of that was probably down to the
fact he spent half his life breathing in solvents and fumes from fuel hoses,
and the other half making moonshine in the scrubbers, but Hooper was more stir-crazy
than all of us. He’d been on the station longer. Hooper was eight years into
his ten-year service, and eight years was a long time stuck in a tin can in
space with no women.
The government said that women were too
valuable to risk, so they couldn’t serve on the stations anymore. Fucking
government. Fucking Faceless.
“It’s nanotechnology!” Hooper said. “Right,
Garrett?”
Why the fuck was he asking me?
“Dude, like what they’re developing for med
techs!”
I didn’t want to get drawn into this shit.
I was just here for the booze and the cards, but apparently Hooper had decided
I was his expert witness. I shrugged. “I read in a med journal they’re making
nanobots that you can inject right into the heart. Doesn’t mean the Faceless
have them, though.”
I hated even saying
that word. What if I choked on it and all the guys laughed at how afraid I was?
Or maybe what I believed when I was a kid was true: say their name aloud and it
would summon them. Like demons, like every horror story I ever heard and every
nightmare I ever had.
“I’ll bet they do! I’ll bet they used them
to cut Cameron Rushton up!”
Cesari rolled his eyes. “They didn’t take
Cameron Rushton to cut him up into pieces, Hooper. They took him to make
biological weapons they could use on us!”
It was more logical than Hooper’s theory,
but not exactly comforting.
“Yeah,” Hooper said. “And after that they cut him up!”
The worst part was, he was probably right.
***
Dark Space will be out from Loose Id on December 4.
