The Unknown Element: An Action-Packed Supernatural Thriller (Challenged World Book 1) Read online

  THE UNKNOWN ELEMENT

  A Novel

  Vince Milam

  Published internationally by Vince Milam Books

  © 2017 Vince Milam Books

  Terms and Conditions: The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that he/she shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.

  All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

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  Other Challenged World books by Vince Milam:

  Pretty Little Creatures: Challenged World Volume II

  Gather the Seekers: Challenged World Volume III

  Case Lee Adventures by Vince Milam:

  The Suriname Job: A Case Lee Novel

  The New Guinea Job: A Case Lee Novel (coming soon)

  Acknowledgments:

  Cover Design by Rick Holland at Vision Press – myvisionpress.com.

  Story Consultant – Robert Ford

  Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8

  Chapter 1

  Cole Garza still relished the walks through his town, more so now that the cowboy boots sat in the closet, replaced by comfortable walking shoes. It might not fit the sheriff image, but it sure made for better walking. The cowboy hat stayed—functional under the Texas sun—as well as the .40 caliber pistol and sheriff’s badge. A genuine smile towards citizens on these morning meanders, heartfelt and sincere, softened his bird-of-prey focus—a legacy from Comanche blood of four generations past.

  Experience had taught him to believe in the general goodness of people, to not get your shorts in a knot over chosen lifestyles, give folks a break, and maintain a quiet environment. He kept it simple. Don’t harm others, and don’t take what isn’t yours.

  Violent actions toward the innocent were a whole different ballgame. In those cases, he had been known to become, as the locals called it, “ballistic.” On the rare occasions he’d drawn his firearm, it was done so with the utmost seriousness.

  Rockport rose to a classic summer morning. A Gulf breeze kept it to the mid-80s, seagulls called, shrimp boats eased their way through the small harbor, and sport fishermen headed out for redfish and sea trout. The summer sun would soon overwhelm, but the early daylight reflected fresh possibilities.

  Cole smiled, nodded, and said, “Mornin’” to a dozen folks before he dropped into Shorty’s for a late breakfast. As was typical, he had arrived at work earlier, before daylight. The dark mornings afforded time to reflect on events both minor and of greater import as he checked the previous night’s activity report and outlined the day. A short prayer followed, asking for safe endeavors for the people of Aransas County. A request for guidance and understanding used to be included. That had ceased several years ago.

  “Dang light on the corner still ain’t fixed,” grumbled Shorty as he poured Cole coffee.

  Rockport had eleven stoplights. The one at Shorty’s corner blinked red in a semipermanent mode, sufficient to make traffic from all directions pay attention.

  “Not my department.” Cole laid his hat on the counter and reached for the stevia. He’d had to badger Shorty to get the natural sweetener. Shorty saw no point in it, at all.

  “Well, when someone gets killed roaring through there, it’ll sure be your department who gets to scrape up the body parts,” said Shorty.

  Cole smiled into his coffee and glanced sidelong through the diner’s front window. One of Millie Gustafson’s many green-collared rescue dogs ambled through the intersection, unmolested by traffic.

  “Good grief, Shorty,” said one of the regulars. “Scrapin’ body parts? We’re tryin’ to eat, here.”

  Shorty wiped wet hands on the apron stretched across his belly. “Speaking of which, the regular, Sheriff?”

  “Yep. Please.” Regular breakfast consisted of huevos rancheros—fried eggs on corn tortillas covered with ranch sauce and melted cheese, with pooled grease at the edges. The stevia provided small solace as a gesture to better health.

  He sipped coffee and glanced around the room at mostly regulars. A far corner held a large, bald, angular man—pale as a corpse. He stared at Cole and as their eyes met, the man lifted his coffee as a greeting, accompanied by a strange tight smile that the eyes did not reflect. Cole nodded in return, which should have ended the lifted-cup-as-greeting ritual. Instead, the stranger extended a long and hairy index finger on his free hand and pulled down the skin below one eye. The exposed portion of the eyeball showed brilliant purple. With crystalline clarity, the voice came unspoken and sibilant—resonating in Cole’s consciousness. It shall come hot and bright; pain, screams, suffering. Their stares locked; the world distilled to that frozen moment. Cole’s heartbeat hammered in his ears. The stranger released the skin and lowered his cup. The tight-lipped smile remained.

  What the devil? thought Cole. He pushed off the counter to stand, felt fear wash through him, and turned back to the counter, breaking eye contact with the stranger. He stared at the surface of his coffee, unblinking, with fingers pressed white into the counter. His neck hair tingled and his gut knotted. The Gulf breeze cracked open the screen door where it hung suspended until the gust died and the door quietly shut.

  “You heard what those loony bastards in DC are doing now?” This came from a regular customer. The loony bastards in DC had always done something. Rockport seldom felt any of it.

  “I know what they ain’t doin’. They ain’t fixin’ that doggone light,” said Shorty, which brought general laughter.

  Cole barely heard any of it, twisted with indecision and rising anger. Enough, he thought. Enough. You just showed your back to something bad wrong. He turned as he stood to go talk to the man in the corner. The pale stranger had left.

  He moved food around on his plate, too uneasy to eat, and tried to scan the Rockport Pilot, Aransas County’s community newspaper. Time passed, shoulders relaxed, and the question of whether that voice really happened began to present itself. Maybe, he thought. Maybe not.

  In the newspaper, the city council were arguing over bike lanes, some proclaiming the need to formalize that mode of transportation. He wouldn’t allow his deputies to hand out any tickets to bicyclists, and suspected some on the council saw that edict as a revenue opportunity lost. They likely knew his opinion on the matter, so he wasn’t asked to attend the council meeting.

  When Shorty moved along the counter to refill his coffee, Cole asked, “The guy by the corner? Tall, thin, bald guy. Know him?”

  “Gives me the creeps,” said Shorty.

  Cole cracked a smile. His sense of disquiet had subsided as he rationalized the encounter with the stranger as a mixture of one weird dude and his own imagination. “Everyone north of Dallas gives you the creeps, Shorty.”

  Shorty snorted. “Been here a few days. Staying at the Breeze Inn. Fanny said he gives her the creeps, too.” Fanny Ulrich ran the Breeze Inn. “Must be foreign.”

  “Or from north of Dallas,” said Cole.

  Shorty grunted, swatted at a fly with the greasy towel he kept tucked in his apron, and headed off to service customers, wiping the faded and cracked linoleum counter as he moved.

  “Fishing this weekend, Sheriff?” asked a regular.
>
  “Hope to.”

  “Heard they’ve schooled on Parson’s Flat.” An area about five miles by boat from Rockport across the thirty-inch-deep waters of the Laguna Madre, redfish often schooled there to feed.

  “Thanks,” said Cole as he slid off the swiveled chair and put a five-spot on the counter. He grabbed his hat and said to no one particular, “See y’all.”

  “Adios” and “See you” came back from several people. Outside, the first waves of the daily summer bellows began to fire.

  Chapter 2

  Oyster shells crackled under the tires of Burt Hall’s rattling pickup. He parked on the back lot, joining half a dozen other vehicles. The truck door creaked as he slid out and fished for the killing tools behind the seat. The white sun baked and a hot Gulf breeze carried salt and fish, masking whiskey sweat and body odor.

  He removed a two-gallon gas can and the club. He’d stolen the club—known as a salmon priest—from a fishing boat out of Juneau. Two feet long, its hard hickory handle carried a weighty, solid brass knob on one end. Designed to dispatch salmon when removed from fishing nets, Burt intended a different use.

  “This will do.” He caressed the smooth handle and tested the heft of the brass knob. “This will have the pissants flopping.”

  He moved with power and conviction, strength and courage—all new and all good. He’d show them.

  “Transgressions, Burt,” the tall stranger had told him last night. “Transgressions and calumnies.”

  “What?” Burt squinted through smoke.

  The tall stranger tried to smile back. He lacked eyebrows, eyelashes, or any visible hair, except for the backs of the long fingers. There, the hair showed coarse, black, and thick from top knuckle to fingernails.

  “They refuse to understand. They have all done you wrong. A complete lack of respect,” said the stranger.

  The stranger’s voice was deep, quiet, and foreign. You almost had to lean into him to hear. He’d walked right up to Burt and offered to buy the booze if he could sit. The stranger gave a fellow a bit of the willies but free booze was free booze. And it turned out he listened, and that was a big change. Burt was so tired of people not having enough respect to listen.

  “Pissants. The lot of them.” Burt stared into his whiskey at the ramshackle bar. “The pissants don’t show me a single bit of respect.”

  The weather-beaten structure smelled of stale beer, smoke, and urine. It sat near the commercial fishing docks, frequented by deckhands who drifted through the fishing town as regular as the tides. A neon Pabst sign provided much of the lighting, and the handwritten sign behind the bar proclaimed No Credit—Don’t Bother Asking. A fishing boat passed by the bar’s open windows for a night run and created enough wake to cause other tied-up boats to bump against the old docks. The slight impacts reverberated through the floor of the bar. The wind freshened enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay and Patsy Cline cried “Crazy” on the jukebox.

  “That’s right,” said the pale stranger. “Pissants. Doing extremely wrong by you. The whole lot of them. No respect. No love, Burt.”

  “Love? Are you kidding? My own mother don’t even like me.”

  Mom had fiddled with the inheritance and planned to cheat him. A man could tell these things. She wouldn’t produce the will as she clung to life at the local nursing home, and had mentioned a couple of times something about giving to the Salvation Army. The brother and sister had passed on and now she owed him. He seldom visited Mom because all she’d do was complain about one thing or the other. And now she smelled bad—a sweet, sick smell. It was disgusting.

  All that work fishing in Alaska as a young man had bought a small shrimp boat on the Texas coast near the family. Shrimp were harder to harvest now and more foreigners had moved into the game. A man had to work every day to make ends meet, and now the nasty old witch might give his money away to someone else.

  Burt’s yellowed fingers removed the unfiltered cigarette from the side of his mouth. He spat tobacco flecks at the floor as a cockroach scuttled past the table, and looked for the cheap stamped-metal ashtray.

  The pale stranger slouched to Burt’s level, bony elbows on the table and his chin rested in the hairy nest of crossed hands. He made a slight gesture with one of the fingers. The ashtray scooted across the table and stopped under Burt’s cigarette. Neat trick, thought Burt. This guy’s alright.

  “But you do fear them, Burt. All of them. You are afraid. I can tell. I see a fearful little man.”

  Burt’s fist slammed the cheap table. “I ain’t afraid of any one of them!”

  The stranger sat taller and became more animated. “Oh, you fear them. I can tell. I can always tell.”

  “Pissants! Pissants! Afraid of them? They better well fear me!” Flecks of spit flew across the table.

  One long hand crossed the table and encompassed Burt’s curled fist. “They need to fear you. They need to pay. You have the power to make them pay.” The stranger smiled wider, eyes furrowed with conviction.

  Burt nodded, captured by the stranger’s eyes and a sudden flow of animal energy. Then he too smiled. The new friend confirmed everything. He deserved respect. They owed him, big time. They would fear. The pissants would pay.

  Chapter 3

  A nurse stood outside the back door of the nursing home, engaged on her cell phone. She had not bothered to turn at the arrival of the pickup. The oyster shell parking lot lay firecracker hot and the nurse had started to sweat.

  Burt edged behind her and with a quick backhand stroke of the salmon priest crushed her skull. The open air carried the sound, muted and hollow. Her body crumpled to lie on her back, one leg folded under the other. As he opened the back door the voice on the fallen cell phone carried on. High circling gulls called.

  The back entrance led to the kitchen where the head cook was preparing lunch. The cook paid no mind when the door opened and continued to hum “Oh Happy Day.” Burt delivered a blow to the cook’s neck, fracturing vertebrae. It caused instant death. The cook fell and pulled the large pan of half-prepared lasagna to the floor with him. He paused to stare at the victim. “Stay there,” he said, cackling as he moved on.

  He exited the kitchen and strode along a hallway where three wheelchair-bound residents collected and gossiped around a Coke machine. Burt paused and listened. Something about a new resident. A retired banker. A pissant. Two of the group thought the new resident looked handsome. The third bitched about all bankers. All three laughed and teased each other, like it was some kind of idiotic happy-time. They paid no attention to the footfalls that headed their way on the polished hallway.

  He knew where to go. To see Mom. To take care of business. A hot, intense force consumed and empowered him.

  He slowed long enough to jerk each of the three frail residents from their wheelchairs and onto the linoleum floor. It was so unexpected, so bizarre an action, that none of the three emitted a sound. Then, collectively, they cried for help. Good luck with that, he thought, raising the club and driving it downward repeatedly.

  He unscrewed the cap from the gas can and continued toward Mom’s room, pouring a trail of gasoline. The fuel pooled on the hard floor and collected in a ragged line.

  A staff member screamed, “Call 911! 911! Quick!” and ran down the hall behind Burt to see if she could help the brutalized residents. He watched her over his shoulder. Well, then, join the party, toots.

  He emptied the gas can at a hallway intersection, dropped it, and stood still. The salmon priest drifted against his leg, back and forth. So easy. So, so easy.

  “Not a good time to be afraid,” said the tall stranger, apparently waiting for him. Not spoken, the words entered Burt’s consciousness loud and distinct. “They hate you. They see you as a scared little man. You are not afraid, are you?”

  “Do I look like I’m afraid?” He grinned at his new friend and extracted a lighter. “Pissants.”

  “Make them pay,” said the friend. The unspoken words came clear and intens
e.

  A door at the right turn of the hallway flung open as two staff members started to enter. The tall friend uncurled a hand, palm extended. He never took his eyes off Burt. The door slammed shut on the staff members.

  He leaned over the pooled gasoline trail, flicked the lighter, and set it ablaze. He cocked his head at the elevated screams of the staff member behind him. The tall friend had vanished.

  Fire alarms blasted throughout the nursing home. He headed to Mom’s room and encountered two more residents. One used a walker and the other a cane. They saw him approach, turned together, and attempted to flee. He strode at a normal pace and roared over the noise, “Afraid, are we? You better well be afraid. Run! Run, you pissants!”

  The resident with the walker turned at the sound of his now close-by voice. She raised the walker as a lion tamer might raise a chair and confronted him. The other resident with the cane continued to flee.

  He killed them both with vicious overhead blows. Blood and brain matter splattered on his shirt.

  The open door to Mom’s room showed her on the bed, sliding her feet into sandals. The Price Is Right played on the television, the sound overwhelmed by the cacophony of alarms. He entered, covered in swaths of gore, and smiled wide.

  “Burt?” she asked, over the din of the hallway. “What the heck is going on?”

  He trumpeted, “I’m what’s going on, Mom! I’m what’s going on!” He gave the brass-headed club a quick flip toss, catching it as he moved toward her.

  Chapter 4

  The call came on the handheld radio and Cole sprinted the few blocks to the nursing home. He met one of his deputies, R.L. Harris, at the entrance to the single-level building. Smoke alarms screamed and the siren of a Rockport fire engine signaled its approach. A few staff members, one weeping, helped elderly residents out of the building and onto the front lawn. As the residents were laid on the grass, the staff members rushed back inside to save more. The citizens of Rockport who heard the alarms and siren and saw the mayhem and smoke joined the frantic effort to evacuate the building.