LIFERS. Blurb and Chapter One

Blurb for LIFERS:

One frustrated private investigator, one hot-headed girl, and one geeky pyrotechnician lost whilst on his way to a sci-fi convention ... unlikely saviours?

When private investigator Gregg Pieroni goes to the small town of Martinsville to follow a lead given to him by a psychic -a lead telling him the whereabouts of nine missing teenage girls- he stumbles across a secret that’s been hidden from the world for the past seventy years. A secret so surreal, it has him questioning his own beliefs, not to mention his sanity.

When Gregg discovers what the repercussions of discovering that secret mean for him, he realises he can no longer leave Martinsville. Never again will he see his family or friends, or have the life he lived and loved only yesterday. And with every resident there wanting him dead -including the town's maniacal cop- will one storm-sieged night be enough time for him to find and rescue those missing girls?

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One

Martinsville

Harold Robertson looked at his sister; her feet up on his bed with her knees tucked under her chin. And then, still unnerved by what she just handed him, he looked at it again. The hand-writing disguised but the message clear.

“They’re coming for you tonight.”

‘And you didn’t see who left it?’ he said.

‘No. By the time I opened my door they’d gone.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe it was Mom.’

‘Don’t call her that, Alice.’

‘Okay, but it could’ve been her, that person, that’s what I mean.’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘They wouldn’t trust her with information like this, or her stupid husband.’

‘Either way, I didn’t see them.’

Out the window on the half-horizon the sky had darkened to a pre-storm blackness; Harold watched it, his mind going over the words on the note.

“They’re coming for you tonight.” “They’re...”

He turned. ‘Why us?’

‘What?’

‘Why are we being given a chance when all the other kids didn’t get one?’

Alice shrugged.

‘Jimmy Thomson didn’t get one when he turned sixteen. So what’s so special about us?’

She stayed silent, her chewed fingers twisting unkempt blonde hair that fell over the shoulders of a dress she hadn’t been given the option to change for the past seven days.

Harold paced the room as he studied the note. He turned it over. Turned it back. Then read it again in the hope he’d find some small clue to its author.

‘What if it’s a trap?’ Alice said.

‘A trap?’

‘Yes. What if they’re testing our loyalty?’

‘They won’t be.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because we’ve given them no reason to think otherwise.’

She sighed, dropped her feet to the floor. ‘Okay, so what do we do now? Stay? Run?’

Again he moved to the window to see the clouds now flecked with lightning. He turned, indicated the note. ‘This gives us no choice,’ he said. ‘We go this afternoon.’

‘But we don’t know who wrote it, so how can we trust it?’

‘It doesn’t matter if we trust it or not. We knew they’d be coming for us sooner or later, and that’s what we need to think about now. Do we want to be like them? Do we want to spend the rest of our lives trapped in this place? And do we really want to have to survive the way they have to survive?’

Alice shook her head. ‘No, but what happens if they find we’re missing and come after us?’

‘Look, I know you’re scared, and believe me, I’m scared too. But whoever pushed this under your door took a risk, a great risk, and now it’s our turn to take a risk, or be damned for ever if we don’t.’

Again Alice was silent.

‘Come,’ he said, pulling on her arm. ‘You see those storm-clouds? They’ll be over Martinsville in about an hour, and that will be our last chance to get away from here. If we go when the rain comes they can’t follow us, you know they can’t, you’ve seen what it does to them.’

She turned, looked up at him, her face serious, questioning. ‘And what if the clouds come but it doesn’t rain? What do we do then?’

‘I promise you,’ he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. ‘There’s more water in those clouds than runs through Bones Creek every day. We can do this, I know we can.’

Again he looked from the window; he was right about those clouds … had to be.

An hour later the conditions for their escape were as good as Harold could hope for. And as he looked down on the rain-beaten empty street, he knew all the residents would be in the town hall now; all of them huddled together, imprisoned by the rain until the storm ended.

‘This is it, Alice,’ he said, a hand held out to her. ‘It’s now or never.’

She looked up at him, he saw fear in her eyes but there was hope there too, and hope was something neither of them had until that moment.

He felt her cold hand take his.

‘It’s now,’ she said.

For the first half-mile they struggled through dense woods, their feet sinking deep into beds of pine needles lying undisturbed for generations. Next, the steep, rocky hills that would take them to Tarboro Ridge needed to be climbed. Hills that would slow their progress, but the rugged terrain was something the dogs wouldn’t be able to cope with.

After they managed the first of those hills, Harold and Alice headed over the top and down into Bones Creek where the steeper climb to Tarboro Ridge awaited them. The sound of rushing water through the swelled creek brought a smile to Harold’s face, but a smile that faded as fast as it formed.

He turned. ‘When did the rain stop?’

‘I-I don’t know. What do we do? What do we do, Hal?’

‘We don’t panic, all right?’

‘We need to turn back.’

‘No, it’s too late for that. We have to go on.’

She blinked in rapid succession, her lips bitten to a pale thin line, her eyes darting left to right, her breaths coming in short, fast snaps.

‘Calm down, Alice, we’re going to be fine.’

On the surface Harold was calm, controlled, but underneath this facade he knew if their absence had been discovered, then a hunt for them could be already underway.

Again he placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll make it, I prom−’

‘What, what is it?’

‘Shush …’

He’d heard them, distant, but no less recognisable. The dogs were loose and headed their way; the silent woods carried their eager bays only too well. He gripped Alice’s wrist and pulled her through the knee-deep freezing water. Then, on the opposite side, they headed down a narrow path where they came across a disused lodge.

Alice pulled back, snatched loose his grip. ‘Stop, rest a minute …’ she begged. ‘Please, I can’t─’

‘No, we can’t stop, we can’t rest.’

‘Yes we can.’ She pointed. ‘We can hide in there.’

Harold looked to see holes where windows had been, a door smashed open that hung on one remaining hinge, and then above the door, where three quarters of the corrugated tin roof had rusted and caved in.

‘No we can’t,’ he insisted. ‘They’ll find us and they’ll kill us. We have to keep moving.’

Again he seized her arm, again he pulled, and again they ran for their lives. They scrambled onward, upward, desperate to reach the ridge top.
Halfway up their final ascent, Alice screamed as Harold lost his footing and fell.

He reached out for clumps of wet grass, moss covered rocks, anything to stop his plunge or slow his fall toward the creek some sixty feet below. Somehow he managed to snatch for an exposed tree root, ending his fall, but not without consequence.

The right side of his face throbbed; he reached up to feel a gash in his cheek, found blood, lots of it. His shoes and the ground at his feet were dotted red. So now their enemy had a new ally, but it wasn’t the dogs that worried him, it was their handlers. They were far more efficient at detecting spilled blood than any dog.

Harold restarted his ascent and called for Alice to keep moving, to keep climbing and make for the top, but with a defiant shout, she refused. He put more urgency into his pace as he neared the spot where she waited. He reached out, grabbed her hand, but their rain-soaked fingers removed all cohesion from their grip, and once more he slipped away. Again he tried to find a foothold; some little niche to put his hand in, another tree root to grab at, but this time found neither.

Harold bounced off the hillside time and again before landing on his back beside the creek. He heard a shrill, high-pitched laugh from high above, Alice’s laugh, as it echoed across the valley. But that couldn’t be right; she must be calling to him, hoping he’d be okay. He wanted to call back, wanted to tell her to carry on and leave him there, but he found no breath with which to do so.

Fifty yards away and sounding like a pack of starved wolves, the dogs thundered into the clearing. Forty yards, thirty, but even as they neared, their sound, along with Alice’s shrill voice, began to fade into the greyest luminosity of his unconsciousness.

Harold came-to with no idea how long he’d been there. An hour? A day? One thing he felt certain of was the numbing sensation of dozens of nettle stings on his hands and face, but all the stinging nettles had died-off months ago. To his left the sound of water rushing through the creek no longer made him smile, it terrified him, terrified him with a level of fear he’d never felt before.

He pushed off the ground to sit up and expected to feel battered from his fall, but other than those painful stings, he felt nothing. He opened his eyes to see a very thin, very light rain, almost vaporous in viscosity. And it was at that moment he realised the true nature of his suffering.

Then, in the half-light surrounding him, be it dawn or dusk, he sighted the old lodge along the edge of the creek. He rose on unsure legs and stumbled toward it. Once inside, he hoped Alice had carried on, he prayed she reached Tarboro Ridge and freedom, but the likelihood of that seemed far from possible.

After he found the driest spot the broken roof had to offer, he slumped on hind quarters and fingered the depression at the base of his skull to find a small, hard, speck of blood. He looked at his hands to see dozens of narrow holes created by the rain; each one running as deep as the bones beneath. He then touched the gash he suffered falling from the hillside to find it little more than a faded scar. And that’s when he knew his fate for certain.

The rain burning his skin, the speck of dry blood, the holes in his hands, and finally, the healed scar that should still be an open wound.

Alone, any of those signs could mean a multitude of things, but all of them put together could mean only one thing.
Harold Robertson had become one of them.