Ability (Omnibus) (25 page)

“Shhhh,” Kendra said, wrapping her arms around the sobbing teenager. “It’s all right. I understand.”

She reached back with one arm and pulled the knife she’d picked up off the ground near Uncle James’ body from her waistband.

“Shhhh,” Kendra whispered again, kissing the girl on the cheek.

Cindy tried to pull way, choking on her own blood as the knife slowly sank into her neck to the hilt.

Rosewood, Florida - January 19, 2046

The school bus wheezed and rattled down the sandy path. Jamarcus sat on the cab’s roof, enjoying the warm sun and the smell of earthy decay. He’d ridden the entire journey like this, the first line of defense against anyone that thought to attack them. He wondered if the entire world had not only gone mad, but had grown stupid overnight. Every single aggressor that they had encountered since they’d left Leesburg had been unable to resist taking a shot, whether with gun or ability, at Jamarcus, a seemingly easy target at over two meters in height. Only one attack had attempted to go for the tires of the bus, but the withering firepower that erupted from the bus’ side windows had silenced whomever it had been.

Jamarcus slapped his palm against the roof twice, and the driver slowed down. He leaned over the side to tell Gavin where to go, pointing awkwardly from his position at a clearing ahead. Two minutes later, the bus lurched to a stop. Jamarcus stood up, surveying the land from his height. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

After the shock of watching Kendra murder his girlfriend had worn off, he’d realized that the survivors had gathered around him. No one had said a word while he’d wept for the white girl. Jamarcus couldn’t find fault in Kendra’s actions, especially not after sorting through the bodies cooling in the afternoon sun and finding only two survivors. One was a white man in his fifties, the other a young black girl that had survived having her leg ripped completely off by someone’s ability.

The men looked to him to decide the white man’s fate, but Jamarcus wanted no part of it. Jamarcus told them to not let the man suffer, no matter how much he and his kind had made them suffer. No one argued. They dragged the man off behind a column of junked cars and slit his throat. The other survivors performed crude surgery on the girl, cauterizing her leg just below the knee with a blowtorch that someone had found in the junkyard’s main office. Jamarcus was worried that the girl wouldn’t survive, or that she would survive long enough for an infection to finish her.

Jamarcus slapped the roof of the cab again, and Gavin opened the doors. Deontay and Trayshaun were the first to exit, both carrying assault rifles. They fanned out from the bus as more exited. Jamarcus felt sadness once again that there’d only been seventeen survivors at the junkyard, all but Kendra and Jamarcus wounded, some seriously. They’d picked up sixteen more along the way, though he was sure they’d passed at least a hundred or more. The world had gone crazy to the point that they wouldn’t reveal themselves, not even to a school bus full of their fellow African-Americans. A few had taken shots at them.

When Jamarcus, who seemed to have been silently elected leader of the survivors, announced that they were going to leave Lake County and find a safe haven, the only words spoken were questions as to where they would go. When he announced they would rebuild the town of Rosewood, the younger ones had vaguely confused looks, while the older survivors understood perfectly the symbolism, and possibly even the irony of his choice.

“It looks clear,” Deontay called from the tree line.

“Clear,” Trayshaun said from the opposite end.

Kendra waved the rest of them off the bus. As the group assembled in the overgrown grass, smiles began to break out, though there was no joyous celebration. The terror of being rounded up, the wild fight at the junkyard, and the harrowing but mostly uneventful journey up US 27 then southwest along Highway 24 still too fresh to allow them any taste of complete safety. The smiles were mostly for Jamarcus. The tall, quiet teenager was invincible according to the few that had actually witnessed others trying to harm him. The fact that he rode outside of the bus, a large, perfect target for anyone with a gun or an ability, had secured their unspoken decision to let the young man lead them.

Deontay and Trayshaun checked the large house that sat in the middle of the clearing. Kevin and Sanya began to unload the odds and ends that the group had been able to scavenge from Leesburg and other places along the way. Kendra stood next to her brother, leaning her head on his bicep. He looked down at her and gave her the same sweet smile he’d always given her when he wasn’t being a typically annoying big brother before the chaos began. He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

A whistle from the upstairs window of the house caught his attention. When he looked up, Trayshaun gave him the thumbs-up signal indicating the house was clear. Jamarcus turned around to see thirty pairs of eyes locked on him.

“Well then,” he said, his voice strong and loud in the clearing, “let’s make this home.”

Book II: Progeny - Coming Soon

Author’s Notes III

Hello all. Thank you for purchasing and reading Ability. One of the reviews I received for Part I (this story is also broken up into three serialized parts) stated that the reviewer loved my end-of-book rambling almost as much as the story itself. Since this is the last bit of “Ability” for a bit, I get to reward myself with some inane babbling.

Right. So. I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed the story. “Progeny” will be set some years in the future from the events in “Ability.” Progeny is the story that I initially thought up, but then I got pretty involved in coming up with a backstory of how the world ended up in such an apocalyptic state.

However, this doesn’t mean that our three, four now really, as Jamarcus has a big part to play…
heroes
have their stories during the upheaval end and then there’s a sudden flash-forward to the future. Also: Brian’s chapter is intentionally short. I didn’t just cop out and call it a night. Brian and I are going to be working together on a few things between Ability and Progeny. More on that in a moment.

To be honest, I almost abandoned this project after Part II. I truly love this story, but I couldn’t help thinking that it had ended up too dark, too harsh, probably even too controversial. While my rule has always been “I write stories that I want to read that no one else is writing,” it has taken me almost two months to finally decide that I would release the final installment.

I guess this is the one time I truly worried about what reader reaction would be. Which is odd, because I’m never one to shy away from controversy (I’m pretty vocal about things like racial / gender / sexual equality, and I don’t worry about the backlash from bigoted types who love to troll me on the internets).

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the feedback I’ve received from Part I and II, but Part III is, to me, a lot different in tone. However, after being beaten about the neck and head by not only my wife, but quite a few other readers that I shared Part III with, and after reading it again in preparation to publish it (to make it as error-free as possible), I realized that I was being rather foolish.

Not only that, I was going against my own rule of not worrying about what anyone other than myself thinks of the stories I write. This isn’t to say that I don’t care what you readers think. I do, as I want you to read the things I write and enjoy them.

However, I’m willing to eat some bad reviews (and angry emails / messages) from readers who hate my stories to make sure the stories I want to tell get told. I’ve already learned in my short time as an author that I can’t please everyone, and to try means I’d spend all of my time writing copy-cat vampire and zombie stories (and erotica!), or my head would explode from trying to construct the perfect story that every possible reader would enjoy.

I’m not a rebel, I just write adult stories for adult readers. My stories aren’t made of cotton candy and orgasms (if they were, I’d be dead of diabetes or from a heart attack). They’re typically made of sharp bits of glass and gritty sand, the nasty, annoying kind that gets
everywhere
when you go to the beach.

Not always… but according to
The Wife
, I’m always killing off her favorite characters or making them mean or evil.

Or mean
and
evil.

Anyway, I guess I missed the rule that says self-published authors have to be cleaner, more sterile, less controversial or vulgar. Unless writing erotica, which is huge with self-pubs, and I’m almost tempted to give it a go. Until
The Wife
gives me the death-stare.

I’ve tried to tell her many times that just because she teaches public school, there’s no possible way that anyone would connect “Travis Hill the erotica author” with “Travis Hill the author and husband of Carly, the high school teacher.” I mean, what high school kid would be into erotica or porn or that kind of adult stuff?

As a compromise, she’s promised to cut down on the amount of poison she puts in my meals (so now I only have a constant sharp pain in my guts instead of being bedridden for a week a time), and I’ve promised to not write erotica (under my own name, anyway… and I hope she doesn’t actually
read
my books when I hand them to her, though I suppose it would be easier to just not write my evil little plots out in these author notes).

*ahem*

Now, for a bit “more” about what happened to Brian, Garret, and Derry as they fled the chaos of the big cities. After spending even more time revising this final part, my brain began to churn some more from within this universe, and I again find myself excited to write some more in this time period.

If you liked the story, then you’re probably interested to find out exactly what happened in Austin and in other metros, and especially to Brian, since he intentionally got the short end of the stick. There’s a ton of story material for me to work with, and I’m already jotting down some ideas here and there. I think what I’ll do while working on my other projects, of which Progeny is one of, is to write some short stories and novellas that fill in more of the details of the world going mad. Not just stories from Brian, Garret, and Derry. As you read in Chapter 12, this was a worldwide event.

And I plan on making all of the stories free (it can take a while for this to happen at Amazon, so be patient), though when I have a collection of them, I’ll probably put them all together in a single volume and sell it for a buck or three. My cats need to eat, and humans weren’t meant to survive on dry cat food (the feline overlords tend to get upset when they have to share with their starving artist owner).

Sometime soon after releasing Part III, which you’ve just read, I’ll release an
omnibus
edition (yay, this is happened for reals!), which is just a fancy way of saying
the whole story in one volume
. I also plan on releasing it in paperback, as 60,000 words makes for a proper book size. Plus, there are still a ton of readers who prefer print books over ebooks (I love both equally, which is ironic since I was one who initially claimed that I’d never own an ereader… then I bought a Kindle, and you can imagine how quickly I folded).

I won’t be releasing Progeny as a serial. I’ve learned a lot of things in my short time as a published writer, and one of the things I’ve learned with Ability is that I absolutely hate serialized installments. As one reviewer put it, it seems like a cheap ploy to milk readers for money.

The reality is that I always intended to sell the complete Ability story for $2.99, with the first installment free, the second for $.99, and the third for $1.99. I completely understand the reasoning that the reviewer had, and he’s not alone. There are a lot of readers, me included, that simply hate the serial format.

Personally, I’d rather have the book all at once instead of waiting and wondering if the author will ever finish the story, or abandon it in the middle (like I almost did), or worse, just keep it going to make more money from it.

Every story should have an ending. I feel like this is a perfect place to end Ability so I can get on with Progeny.

Once again, thank you for purchasing and reading this story. Now for some shameless self-promotion that I guess all authors have to include at the end of their books…

*****

If you did (or did not!) enjoying the story, drop me a line and let me know why, and what you do or don’t like about it (hatemail encouraged!):

[email protected] / [email protected]

Or you can rank me out on Twitter for being a terrible author:
@Angry_Games

Mailing list if you want to be annoyed whenever I release a new book/story. I ONLY use it for new release announcements, nothing else (i.e. no spam):
http://eepurl.com/D2ktH

http://www.angrygames.com - I sometimes post stuff there. I try to not post about my own books, because I hate feeling like a spammer. You go to websites/blogs to read interesting things or differing viewpoints, not for some jughead like me asking you to buy his book every third sentence (or tying in his book every third sentence, something I’m guilty of because it’s devious and sneaky, which I totally dig). Oh, and I like posting cat videos when I can remember.