Crossroads, page 1
part #1 of Hollow Island Series
Crossroads
Hollow Island Series: Book One
Daniel Coleman
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Coleman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by TJ da Roza, Elizabeth Dorothy, and Sadie Coleman
Cover by Okay Creations
Formatted by EmmaKaite Coleman (emmakaite@gmail.com)
Contents
A gray eye…
1. Spits and Fizzles
2. Stupid Overpowered Ranger
3. First Lesson
4. En Tête a Tête
5. Pass or Fail
6. Never Befriend the Oppressed
7. 60 Seconds
8. The Trouble with Routines
9. A Fair Fight
10. Blood Flows like Tomato Juice
11. Blood and Bodies
Also by Daniel Coleman
About the Author
Dedicated to EmmaKaite
who is at a crossroads,
and like Nash, will change the world
A gray eye…
< A gray eye is a sly eye, And roguish is a brown one;
Turn full upon me thy eye,-- Ah, how its wavelets drown one!
A blue eye is a true eye; Mysterious is a dark one,
Which flashes like a spark-sun! A black eye is the best one.
- William R. Alger, 1857 >
1
Spits and Fizzles
<< 1) No Electricity
2) No Escalation
3) No Emigration
- First Three Laws of Hollow Island >>
Nash was not ready to be a hero.
Yeah, he was a Ranger, and he even had some basic training and a badge. No, wait; Rangers didn’t carry badges here. The gun and titanium eyeball they got when they immigrated were better than a badge, but right now it felt like there was a long list of things Nash lacked. Any significant time on Hollow Island, for example, as well as the foggiest idea of what he was up against.
Nash wasn’t even sure he’d heard his trainer right. “A Wizard and a Snake?”
“That’s right, pilgrim,” drawled John Wayne.
It had only taken Nash half a second to wrap his mind around a Chinese John Wayne, complete with full cowboy attire and country twang to his accented voice. Wrapping his mind around a fight against a Wizard and a Snake less than an hour after climbing off the ferry was proving much more difficult. Hopefully his trainer was exaggerating when he said it was time to find out what Nash was made of. Better yet, maybe John Wayne was punking him entirely.
“A Wizard with a pet Snake,” said Nash. “I wonder if they do party tricks.”
“Laugh now,” said John Wayne, with a smirk. “In two minutes, talking won’t get you anywhere, unless you talk with that gun.”
Two minutes. Nash wanted two weeks before being thrown to the wolves. That’s how long he had with his trainer, and he wouldn’t mind that whole time to learn the ropes before proving what he was made of.
“Why that low-down, dirty son of a rusted gun,” growled John Wayne.
“What is it?” asked Nash, peering through the leaves of the mango tree they were staged behind. A dirty, head-bobbing drunk was begging by the gate of the immigrant market.
“That waste of human life is going to learn a lesson starting right—” He froze, midstride through the tree. “Pigsquirmy! Gembel is gonna have to wait. Take a gander.” He stepped back into cover and nodded toward a woman coming out of the market. She led a horse down a small side street.
Resting his gaze on her, Nash waited for her bio to come up. His right eye, the titanium one, operated seamlessly. It not only gave him regular vision, but also supplied information on anyone he scanned. It did all that silently, with the exception of a tiny tink, tink when he blinked. After three seconds, the woman’s bio appeared in the lower right corner of his vision.
Chiel Leatherwood, formerly Felisha Monroe, was born in New York of all places, just like Nash. Twenty-two years old, a few years older than him. Unmodified. Married to Viktor, no surname, who was a sub rosa Viking.
Sub rosa. Nash tried to remember what the term meant. With everything new he’d seen over the last hour, his brain was scrambled. He was pretty sure sub rosa meant someone who was genetically modified, but kept that fact on the down low, almost like a secret identity.
She left his field of view before he could finish reading the rest of her bio.
“Ready to earn your paycheck?” John Wayne asked.
Paycheck? Nash had assumed his income here would come from bounties, but the thought left his mind quickly. Chiel was obviously in trouble so Nash started forward. His trainer put out an arm to hold him back and kept his eyes on the street.
A man in a long duster coat detached himself from the shadows in front of Immigration House and walked in the direction Chiel had gone. Another man had stepped out—no, slithered out—from somewhere Nash hadn’t noticed. They fell into stride without looking at each other.
The tall man with the duster coat had long, slicked-back hair. Cruel lines creased his face around his eyes and he walked confidently across the open space. The other, shorter by twenty centimeters, wore a gray cloak that covered most of his body and obscured his face entirely. His movement was smooth and animalistic, like an eel sliding effortlessly through water. Actually, the figure moved with such grace, Nash wasn’t sure it was a man. He was, however, confident that was the Snake his trainer had mentioned. And that made the grease head the Wizard.
John Wayne wasn’t punking him then. There was a woman in trouble and two dangerous-looking men who had been waiting for her so they could … what? It could be anything. It even crossed Nash’s mind that they were complicit with her, and for some dubious reason, she wanted them to keep a distance.
John Wayne stepped out of the shade of the mango tree and walked nonchalantly in the same direction.
Nash stayed at his side. “What’s the plan? What are we going to do?”
“Follow my lead,” said John Wayne. “And watch out for the Snake. I hear he spits.”
That didn’t help a lot. “Spits and Fizzles,” said Nash, his nerves coming out through his mouth. An image of the tall man in the duster standing over a cauldron, mixing potions had fixed itself in Nash’s mind.
John Wayne gave Nash a sideways look.
“If the Snake spits, what does the Wizard do?”
“No saying.”
As he and John Wayne trailed the men who trailed the woman, every scene Nash had ever seen on the hollows flashed through his mind in images and blips of video—mostly Rangers going up against Pirates, Titans, Giants, Vamps, Scouts, Ninjas. Never a Wizard or a Snake, though, not that he’d seen.
Anything could happen today.
Everything here was for real.
This wasn’t holographic action he could watch from his foster parents’ couch any more. As of an hour ago, he was inside the fish bowl. Inside the hollows.
Nash glanced up at the sky, then around at the buildings. There had been a few cameras in the market, but here, he couldn’t see a single lens. Still, the rest of his life would be captured and broadcasted. It was hard to believe that with one step off the ferry, he’d gone from the outside to the inside. Everything and anything was possible here, which was why people all over the outside world gathered around their holodais to watch what happened next on Hollow Island.
Fear wrapped Nash’s chest like a giant spider, squeezing and making it hard to pull in a full breath. The stakes were enormous—not just his life, but everyone else involved. If only he knew more, he might be able to make a huge difference. His vast ignorance could be costly.
A larger web of that fear-spider spread in every direction, every fiber tingling with excitement. For years he’d dreamed of being here, being a Ranger. And while he felt unprepared, Nash wasn’t about to back down. He just wished he had more time to prepare before going head first into a fight with creatures he knew nothing about.
They still had almost half a block to talk about it. “Are we going to spread out? Or stick together? Draw now, or wait until we’re provoked?”
“Easy, pard. I know you’re new, but I think you can figure out follow my lead.”
Maybe it wouldn’t come to a fight at all, and Nash could talk down the situation. He’d seen quick-tongued Rangers on the hollows diffuse situations with witty banter. Ronan O’Reilly, for example, could talk a snake out of its skin. Or a capital-S Snake. That could work today. If it kept him from having to use his gun, if would be a win.
They went around a corner just in time to see the two men turn onto a smaller street. This part of San Juan was lined with two-story buildings—shops on the bottom floor and residences above them. The streets of what used to be the capital of Puerto Rico before everyone on the island was nuked off the face of the planet, still showed the bright colors of buildings that had withstood the Hour War and the two decades since. Whatever these businesses had been back in the day was no longer apparent, as they had been filled in by tailors, a silversmith, a candle maker, and such. Nash couldn’t wait to have a chance to explore everything including taking a closer look at the people walking up and down the street.
As they approached the intersection, Nash heard a woman’s cry from the side street Chiel had taken. It cut off suddenly.
Nas h started jogging forward, but John Wayne put a hand on his flatpack, pulling him back to the same slow pace.
“You’re not listening,” said John Wayne. “I said easy, pard.”
“If we’re going to do this, we should hurry,” said Nash. Someone needed help. He was ready to pull free of John Wayne’s grip and rush forward, then reminded himself he was here to learn and ease into his new life.
John Wayne came to a complete stop, holding tight to the strap over Nash’s shoulder. “You’re going to listen to me, piker, before I take one more step.” Even his speech was slow and unhurried. “This isn’t make-believe. You rush into something bigger’n you here and you won’t walk away from it.”
Nash’s hands were fisted in frustration. “I didn’t want to come to this fight in the first place,” said Nash. “Give me a few days to figure out life here before throwing me into the fire.”
“I’m gonna give you about five seconds to figure out that you do this my way or you can hit the highway.”
A man’s voice came from around the corner, but it was too low to make out the words. “Fine,” Nash said. “Let’s go.”
“You going to listen to me?” asked John Wayne, making it obvious he wasn’t going anywhere until he was ready.
If Nash refused to listen to John Wayne, did that mean they would leave and try this again another day? Nash wanted nothing more than to step back and figure things out. Of course that would mean ignoring whatever was going on around the corner. Could he really abandon someone who needed help just because he was new?
He’d come here to help people. There was no way he could turn his back now, even on a stranger. He simply said, “Fine.”
“Say it, pilgrim.”
“I’ll listen to you,” said Nash.
“Guns up, then.” John Wayne put a hand on his gun, but kept it holstered as he sauntered around the corner.
About ten meters ahead of them, the two men had detained Chiel. An odd-looking, lanky man was pulling things from her saddlebags and discarding them carelessly. He had a shirt on that looked like snake skin—no, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. The cloak he’d worn earlier now lay across the horse’s back. The man’s upper body and arms were either completely covered in a full chest and arms tattoo or those were real scales. In the shadow where the man stood, it was impossible to tell. The man was completely bald and had a tattoo of a hooded cobra on his head.
The man in the duster was tall with slick, black hair and dark tan skin. One of his hands rested lazily on the curve of Chiel’s neck as he watched his partner ransack her things.
Chiel stood a few feet in front of her horse. She had a frantic look in her eyes, pupils dilated all the way in terror, but everything else about her was calm, almost hypnotic. If Nash had to guess, he’d say the Wizard had somehow paralyzed her, maybe with forced hypnotism.
Nash wanted to pull his gun, but he kept a hand resting on it instead, following his trainer’s lead.
John Wayne pulled a toothpick from somewhere and said in a drawl, “I’d take it kindly if you men unhanded the lady.” He rotated the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and said, “And I use the term men loosely.”
Both men startled and turned to look at them. Nash’s fingers wrapped around the grip, but he kept his finger off the trigger. The last thing he wanted to do was blow off his foot while drawing. The gun had two settings: Lead and Barbs—which only worked on certain Castes. He had set it to Lead earlier, and resisted the urge to take his eyes away to check.
“Throw her things back in the bag,” added Nash, “along with an apology. Or you’re going to see Wizard and lizard gizzard blown against that wall.”
In the edge of the field of his vision, Nash saw John Wayne appraising him. “You went with the rhyme, huh?” he muttered. “I guess it wasn’t horrible.”
Nash shrugged. “I thought about rapping it, but that was probably over the top.” Nerves made it hard to be casual. Someone needed his help, and he was going to make a difference—hopefully. This was what he’d come here for.
The Snake pulled his hands out of the bag as if they were two smaller snakes and slunk toward the newcomers with sinewy movements. As Nash watched him approach, both tattooed hands bobbing in the air in front of him, a bio came up—a name, followed by the word BOUNTY in capital letters. Before Nash could see any more, the other man caught his attention. He had released Chiel, and she fell limply to the ground. He also walked slowly toward Nash and John Wayne.
“That’s close enough,” said John Wayne pulling his gun.
Nash followed suit, and took a moment to verify the Lead setting even though he didn’t want to. John Wayne was aiming at the Snake, so Nash covered the Wizard. Both men came to a stop. The Snake man blinked sideways eyelids and grinned a predator’s smile.
His companion flipped a coin in the air and caught it without looking at it. “Nothing to see here, Rangers.” He flipped the coin again, this time toward Nash.
Nash watched it coming and pulled his finger off the trigger so he didn’t accidentally pull it when his other hand closed around the coin. Watching the men closely, Nash snatched the coin from the air.
It was a kilo, the second biggest coin on the island. While he still didn’t have a good grasp of the value of money here, he knew that was a sizeable amount. Well that hadn’t taken long to get offered his first bribe.
“I’m not for sale,” said Nash, tossing the coin at the feet of the man who’d offered the bribe.
The man didn’t watch it coming and let it clink onto the street unnoticed. His dark eyes had fire in them now. No, not fire. Lightning. “I said, nothing to see here, Rangers.” He snapped his fingers and a spark of electricity flashed in his hand.
So the Wizard’s endowment had something to do with electricity. That explained how he’d stunned Chiel.
“That looked like a threat you just made to my young pard,” drawled John Wayne. “Which frankly pisses me off. You got two choices now. Handcuffs, or a body bag.”
The Wizard motioned with his head and the Snake started forward slowly.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said John Wayne.
The Snake continued forward, his head down as if trying to hypnotize them with the intricate eyes tattooed in the center of his crown.
“Well,” said John Wayne casually. “It’s your funeral.”
Nash didn’t want anyone getting killed today and took a step forward. At the same time, the Snake stopped, apparently believing John’s Wayne was ready to pull the trigger. With his free hand, Nash reached back and yanked the handcuffs off the bottom of his flatpack. “Turn around.”
The Snake’s mouth opened slowly, revealing two prominent fangs. A bifurcated tongue emerged from between the fangs and whipped the air in Nash’s direction.
“That’s gross,” said Nash. “Looks uncomfortable, too, but not as uncomfortable as you’ll be if you take another step and I shoot you in the face.”
The Snake man hissed quietly and to Nash’s surprise, his hands went behind his back.
“Good,” said Nash. “Now turn around.” Nash’s heart was pounding, but he started to think this encounter might actually end without anyone getting a bullet in the head.
The Snake had other ideas. Slowly he pulled his arms back around to the front, revealing a cobra in each hand.
Where the hell had he been hiding those?
“Oh, fig no,” said John Wayne. His gun went off twice, so quickly it almost sounded like a single shot. Nash’s bones shook and his ears rang. The bullets had passed within centimeters of him, and Nash caught the strong smell of burnt gunpowder.
The Snake man was left holding two headless snakes, bodies whipping brainlessly in the air. Nash caught himself staring at his trainer dumbfounded. Those shots, that fast, that accurate were impossible.
Yet there were the two snakes, missing their heads entirely. The Snake man was looking from one side to the other, his eyes widening in rage. Screaming a hiss, he dropped the lifeless cobra bodies and … struck. That was the only way Nash could describe the speed of his movement as the Snake man flashed forward with his fangs bared.
