All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
That’s right get your free pdf copy of “The Sniper.” All that’s needed is to provide your e-mail address and view my harrangue at the end of the book to leave a review on Amazon. What’s fairer than that? Don’t answer that! It’s a rhetorical question as part of my sales pitch. Let me know if there are any problems with the download. This is my first attempt to use BookFunnel.
Click Here for Link to Sniper Giveaway
Update:
To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.
We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story. I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.” Now I’m looking for beta readers. I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback. Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.
I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read. So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too. And remember, I’m not a fragile author. If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.
If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story. Now this is just a pdf. No nice cover, no actual paper. Just electrons. But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.
And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.
Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson
Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine. His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine. He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy. His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy. His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between. Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles. By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.
After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left. Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos. Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.
An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole. Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude. Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.
Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board. And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles. From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired. The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely. All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.
The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance. At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter. By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.
FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan. “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains. We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations. It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances. He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership. In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel. No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in. Alright, proceed.”
The agents formed two groups. Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well. But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet. And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth. The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror. When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up. When they looked around them, they were astonished. A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head. It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center. Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit. One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk. It was on its side and half buried in the crevice. Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.
Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below. Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain. He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss. Nothing reasonable came to mind.
So, eleven out of twelve jurors in Massachusetts think Lindsay Clancy is not at fault for strangling the life out of her three young children. I think this alone is all anyone needs to know to understand New England. These are the kind of people who live in this region of the world. From their point of view women cannot be held responsible for murdering their own children because life is just not fair to women and anything they do to make themselves happier must be morally right. They’ll blame post-partum depression, dangerous medications and of course her husband along with every other man on the planet. But not Lindsay Clancy. She was not responsible.
So, we’ve come full circle. Under traditional morality a mother saw her children as her primary responsibility in life. She provided them with life and then milk and she loved them with her whole soul and sacrificed her youth and her health to give them a nurturing and loving home.
And now where are we? Children are a burden and an imposition to women who put off bearing them until fertility is strained to the last remaining eggs and then immediately handed off to “child care” and pre-school as soon as the mother can escape her home for the office.
But even that is not enough. Murdering them is now the new frontier. After all, even sending them to day care doesn’t completely get them out of the house. They still show up in the evening when it’s even more inconvenient. And they still want to be fed and washed and who knows maybe even talked to. No, there’s just one way to really free yourself from these parasites. Just choke the life out of them. Any civilized jurisdiction will understand that it just wasn’t fair and therefore you can’t be held legally responsible for freeing yourself from this biological tyranny. After all, women are the sensitive, emotional sex and the sadness you feel about having to eliminate these living chains is punishment enough. Maybe a year or so in a hospital with beautiful gardens and a kind nursing staff might provide the correct “time out” to show the peasants that the medical profession has sanctioned your return to society completely renewed and ready to take up a better place in society. Possibly as a motivational speaker for other women trapped in homes inhabited by tiny monsters.
From my point of view deciding whether she’s evil or insane is moot. There is no place in this world for someone who could do what she did. If she wasn’t insane, she deserves death. If she is so completely insane that she is capable of committing such an inhuman act then she should be put down the way you would a mad dog. But even from an unemotional, practical point of view, what does a woman who strangled her infant and young children do with the rest of her life. Who exactly does she hang around with. Who is signing up to be her neighbor or friend. What would you talk about with her? Her past? You can’t. Her future? She doesn’t have one. I guess you could talk about her anti-psychotic prescriptions or the latest breakthrough with her psychiatrist. But I’m guessing most people wouldn’t want to. She really is basically waiting for death so she can find the correct level in hell for her variety of monster.
This case is a Rorschach test and provides an effective binary choice. If you see the murdered children as the victims, you’re on my side of the fence. If you have even the least sympathy for the child killer, you’re on the other side. It’s a perfect dichotomy. On one side are people, men and women paying forward the life and love that was given them by raising a family and making the future. On the other side is a woman so self-centered and dysfunctional that she could strangle a three-month old infant just to be free of her human responsibility to pay forward what was given her by her parents. To objectively see how despicable this point of view is just imagine the reaction if a father strangled his three young children. Every woman in Massachusetts would be baying for his blood demanding a way to allow capitol punishment for this one heinous case. But for Lindsay Clancy; nothing but sympathy for the devil. Pick a side.
And better had they ne’er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.
Sir Walter Scott
Roger’s sleep was haunted by dreams where he was chased by shoggoths that seemed to mock him by matching his speed and keeping within reach of their tentacles that flicked at the back of his neck and his flailing hands. Their cries echoed in his ears and when one finally gripped his wrist and spun him to face his pursuer the raw panic woke him from this nightmare.
After assuring himself that no real danger was imminent, he consciously steadied his breathing and formulated his plan for getting back to the tunnel leading to Dunwich. Rather than chance a sprint back to where he believed it was, he decided on the painstaking but “safe” option of stopping at each tunnel and waiting for a shoggoth to activate the “shoggoth exclusion principle” before proceeding to the next step. And he congratulated himself. And not just mentally. His calm had been so thoroughly cracked that he found himself muttering his thoughts out loud, “That’s smart Roger, that’s right, that’s how we’ll do it!”
So, employing this smeagolian dialectic technique he steeled himself for the return trek. And after a few minutes a protective shoggoth appeared and as soon as it exited the open circle Roger stepped into the open and tensed for his dash. And barely avoided running into the side of a shoggoth emerging from his destination. The screeching monster shot past him heading to his left. Roger froze and held his breath. Unsurprisingly there was no hint of annoyance at the collapse of his exclusion principle theory. But fifty feet beyond him the living nightmare stopped its forward motion and let out a new sound, a rumbling roar that split the air. It spun around. Shivering from head to toe, Roger swallowed his fear and took off as fast as his legs would carry him to where he imagined the Dunwich tunnel opened. He could hear the shoggoth bellow again but all he could do was aim for the tunnel entrance and pump his legs. Maybe it took fifteen seconds. Roger reached the entrance and made the turn. And what he saw was a window. He had guessed wrong. This wasn’t the Dunwich tunnel. What he could see was dying red light and mountain walls. He hesitated at the brink. But just then the shoggoth slammed into the tunnel behind him and Roger leaped through the looking glass. He rolled onto sandy ground and started running again as fast as his heart and lungs could provide. And right behind him came the shoggoth trumpeting its chase. It was only a few feet behind Roger when it shot out a tentacle and snagged his wrist. As in his dream he was spun around by the pull on his arm and crashed to the suddenly hard ground facing his pursuer. He felt none of the pain in his back from the crash but stared in horror as the monster formed a gaping mouth full of teeth. He heard the triumphant bellow of the creature. But then he heard another bellow. It was familiar but he couldn’t place it in the desperate scene he currently inhabited but it got steadily louder. And then he remembered. It was an air horn. The tractor-trailer hit the shoggoth broad side at about eighty-five miles an hour. The driver hadn’t seen the creature because an outcrop of Nevadan red rock obstructed his view at a curve of the road. His truck was filled with a shipment of refrigerated beef and the vehicle punched a pretty convincing hole right through the gelatinous protoplasm of the unsuspecting hell-spawn. On impact, the tentacle holding Roger released him so he was still facing the mouth of the shoggoth but it seemed to have lost interest in him after its evisceration. And as he watched, the flesh of the beast began to steam in the air and evaporate before his eyes. It was sunset and, in the distance, he could see the lights of Las Vegas brightening an otherwise darkening sky. He staggered away from the blacktop of the highway and slowly trudged toward the now stopped truck.
He could hear himself saying, “Now, how am I going to explain all this?” And then he started laughing hysterically.
The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small consequence, but in enlarging, improving, and correcting the information you possess, by the authority of others.
Sir Walter Scott
Peeking out of the tunnel entrance, Roger, tried to convince himself that his sensory organs were telling him that it was safe to dash the ten feet to the next entrance. But just as he was about to bolt across, the screech of a shoggoth assaulted his ears and sent him scurrying back. Once again, he forced himself forward in the tunnel and this time he resolved to wait for a shoggoth to transit before he made the dash. Of course, nothing showed up for what seemed an eternity allowing his nerves to slowly tighten but this time when the screech happened Roger steeled himself for the run. And as soon as the monster vanished, he made his move.
The short run was barely a few seconds and when no screech immediately followed, he felt almost giddy with relief. Now he began to explore the new space he had reached. Just as for his original tunnel the passage made a ninety-degree bend but there the resemblance ended. After about three feet the tunnel reached a glass wall. At least that’s what it looked like. It was a ten-foot circle that looked like a window into a black void. Roger stared at this anomaly, slightly afraid to get too close. But eventually impatience drove him closer and he gingerly tried to touch its surface with the tip of the cudgel he still held. The surface provided a slight resistance but eventually the wooden rod began to penetrate the surface. He could see it protruding into the void but the view didn’t provide any hint about what the other side of the window contained. Finally, he pulled the cudgel out again and looked at it. Nothing much seemed to have happened to it. It wasn’t much colder or warmer and there wasn’t any residue on it. So, he very carefully pushed his hand through the wall but almost immediately he felt a throbbing pain in his hand and he pulled it out. That convinced him this wasn’t his escape route.
So now by the same methodology, he reached and explored a series of these tunnels and their associated “windows” one after the other. Each time he waited for a shoggoth to transit and then he rushed to the next tunnel. Somehow, he had convinced himself that each shoggoth transit precluded any other shoggoth intrusion. He tentatively named it the “shoggoth exclusion principle” and promised himself to announce it in a scientific paper in whatever was the proper scientific journal in which to record details of shoggoth natural history. Perhaps, Nature or Scientific American or maybe the National Enquirer.
Each window looked out on a vista that was equally unsuitable for his escape. Sometimes he could see a celestial disaster like a black hole surrounded by an accretion disk formed from the corpse of a stellar companion. Once he saw a tropical jungle filled with crocodile-sized insects and arachnids chasing amphibians through the watery forest floor. And one view showed him a desert world under a dying red sun. The ruins of a megalithic city were visible in the distance but no life was apparent.
After this last failure Roger sat down on the tunnel floor and closed his eyes to rest. He was starting to feel the effects of hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep. He was also starting to despair. Reasoning about what he should do he decided that he would give up and head back to Dunwich. As bad as it was, at least it was Earth. It was even New England in a creepy way. Having come to this decision he closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.
As old as the hills.
Sir Walter Scott
The cave was rough-hewn granite that had no man-made supports or reinforcements showing but did not strike Roger as a natural object. The smell, which seemed of an animal nature grew progressively more oppressive as he moved forward. Eventually he also heard or felt a “power hum” that also increased in strength. After about a half hour of walking the tunnel ahead grew lighter. But there was no light source, or rather, the cave walls began to glow to such an extent that he was willing to turn off his flashlight. And now he could see symbols of some sort carved into the rocks. They seemed to be hieroglyphs of some sort, but with outlandish creatures pictured. There were winged dragons with squid-like heads and amorphous blobs covered with eyes and tentacles. These recalled Lovecraft’s nightmare stories and once again got him thinking that this was all some elaborate cosplay event. But this comforting idea was short-lived. Because the tunnel took a sudden ninety degree turn and then opened into a tremendous circular shaped space surrounded by hundreds of tunnel entrances just like the one, he had just emerged from. And here the power hum and smell increased markedly again.
This turn of events had a complicated effect on Roger. The scope of the tunnel system made Roger very nervous but it also let him hope that he was halfway out of the mountain now. He was just about decided that the best course of action was to leave the shelter of his entrance way and walk across the open area to enter the opening that was diametrically across from him. But suddenly the power hum reached a crescendo and from one of the caves to his left something streaked across the ground and disappeared into another cave entrance. It was only visible for about ten seconds but Roger was pretty sure it was what the picture of the amorphous blob with all the eyes and tentacles was supposed to represent. It was about ten feet in diameter and while it traversed the opening it had made a horrible screeching noise that forced Roger to cover his ears with both hands. He ran back into his tunnel entrance and cowered against the wall. Thinking back to the Lovecraft stories he had read, he recalled the name shoggoth. But the name didn’t help him process what he had just seen. His whole mind was suffused with a paralyzing horror of the thing that had flashed by in front of him. Fear and revulsion gripped him and even the idea of going back into the open threatened to throw him into a blind panic and force him to run back down the tunnel.
Slowly Roger got himself under control and faced the fact that he needed to take one of the tunnels to escape the place he was in. But he decided that crossing the whole circle was too risky and instead he would go to the nearest entrance to his right and proceed from there until he found the most likely tunnel to get him back to the sane word he came from. But what if the tunnel had a shoggoth?