Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Omnirunner

  Tape 1, Side 1

  Tape 1, Side 2

  Shadowboy

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Part 17

  Part 18

  Part 19

  Part 20

  Part 21

  Part 22

  Part 23

  Part 24

  Part 25

  Part 26

  Part 27

  Part 28

  Part 29

  Part 30

  Part 31

  Part 32

  Part 33

  Part 34

  Part 35

  Part 36

  Part 37

  Reforger

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Ranger Roy the Rocket Rider

  Heartstrings

  Lucid Blue

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Epilogue

  Shadowdemon

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Part 17

  Part 18

  Part 19

  Part 20

  Part 21

  Part 22

  Part 23

  Part 24

  Part 25

  Part 26

  Part 27

  Part 28

  Part 29

  Part 30

  Part 31

  Part 32

  Dirge of Carcosa

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Dead Men Talking

  Iron Conjurer

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Part 12

  Part 13

  Part 14

  Part 15

  Part 16

  Part 17

  Part 18

  Part 19

  Part 20

  Part 21

  Part 22

  Part 23

  Part 24

  Part 25

  Epilogue

  Gruefield 18

  Tarnished Sterling Omnibus 1

  By Robert McCarroll

  Copyright © 2014-2017 Robert McCarroll

  All Rights Reserved

  I would like to thank...

  Abdul Al’Hazred, for the Necronomicon;

  Frederick K T Anderson, for always being late;

  Carl Sagan, for the stars, the billions and billions of them;

  Artgerm, for the quality;

  Douglas Adams, for all the fish;

  The Elder Things, for the shoggoths;

  Isaac Asimov, for being a god of literature;

  Games Workshop, For the Emperor!;

  Tim Berners-Lee, for the tubes;

  Linkara, for... No wait, Curse you Linkara! I spent way too much on comics thanks to you;

  Governor Cuomo, for making me a criminal;

  The Commentariat, for feeding the trolls;

  Stan Lee, for this cameo is mandatory;

  Gav Thorpe, For ridding the seems

  David Annandale, maybe someday I’ll be able to read your handwriting

  William King, For destigmatizing independant publishing

  Nyarlathotep, for being public domain

  TV Tropes, for not ruining my life

  Margaret Thatcher, For not turning

  Jeff Bezos, for the kindling

  Metaparaxis, for no one will get this reference

  The People at Zombie Planet, You know who you are and what you’ve done

  Dan Abnett, as it’s a job for Aquaman

  The Trolls, for the lulz;

  The People on Goodreads, for helping to hone my craft;

  Hercule Poirot, for not hiding evidence from the reader;

  Dagon, for the deep ones;

  Creative Assembly, Even if they’ve stolen many hours from me;

  Barbara Chepaitis, for putting up with editing the first of these;

  Mike Rowe, for the honest dirt;

  Polonius, for the advice on brevity;

  Ken Thompson, for regularizing expressions;

  My Day Job Coworkers, for buying these books unprompted;

  The Psuedonymous Commentators, for the determination;

  Antonin Scalia, for the most entertainingly written jurisprudence;

  Blaz, for still taking my money;

  and

  My mother, for putting up with the tripe I made her read;

  and

  My Father, even if he still tries to push bad books on me.

  Omnirunner

  Tape 1, Side 1

  I only have a couple of tapes for this old Dictaphone, so I hope I can fit it all in. I'm serious, this tape recorder looks like it's from the Eighties. Anyway, according to the Bureau of Hero Affairs, Dan Fullbright has lived in Wyoming for the past couple of years. They're wrong. I had a friend who made the deposits into my bank account for me. They never realized I'd been mailing money orders from the other end of the country. I could have done it online, but Edna Maus needed the money I paid her to visit my bank every month. The poor old girl was on a fixed income, and every little bit helped.

  Bilgewater was not a nice city, despite the efforts of the corrupt little government to draw tourists there. It sat on a semi-tropical shore, but it had awful beaches and the harbor was riddled with canneries and fishing trawlers. The reek of rotting bycatch wafted through the air most days until the wind shifted. Up the coast, Sandy Shore was drawing the visitors Bilgewater wanted. To be fair, Sandy Shore was an accurate name. It was a rich little pimple of prosperity in the middle of a depressed region. I couldn't afford to live in Sandy Shore, so I had a flop in Bilgewater.

  The day when this mess began hadn't started out
all that well. Still decaffeinated, I'd stripped down to take a shower. The four-foot gator that was occupying the stall tried to take a chunk out of my foot. It was a mean little cuss that had somehow wormed its way into my basement rooms. Luckily, a four-footer is not all that dangerous, unless you happen to be dressed in naught but a towel at the time. The tiles that made up my bathroom were secondhand. They'd been salvaged from a mental institution, and were an ugly shade of green that helped hide the small alligator.

  I got some pants on and returned for the reptile. Gators might be half-tail and half-teeth, but at four feet from tip to tip, it was still small enough for me to overpower it. One hand behind its head and the other on its hips, I carried the gator outside. A hacking cough of a laugh echoed from the stoop. Mrs. Cortez sat on the rail, sucking on an unfiltered Marlboro. The smoke settled into the weathered cracks in her shrunken brown face and refused to leave. Her hair was thin and gray, and the pink floral dress she'd squeezed herself into was marketed to tweens. Flip-flops hung from gnarled toes as she laughed at me, shirtless and lugging a hissing reptile.

  "You let it in, didn't you?" I asked. She replied in Spanish, making an obscene, and anatomically impossible, suggestion as to what I should do with the gator. I walked as far from the tenement as I could manage in bare feet and flung the beast into a ditch. Its angry retort after it landed told me I hadn't killed it. The gator scurried off into the shallow water as I headed back to my place. Upon my return, the old hag was gone. Entering my apartment, the odor of tobacco smoke told me what had happened. I'd forgotten to lock my door, and Mrs. Cortez had raided my fridge. I was short a steak and a brick of cheddar that I could see. She'd left the fruit and vegetables untouched.

  I should have heeded the omens and gone back to bed instead of finishing my shower and having breakfast. I stood out as the whitest resident of the neighborhood, with pale red hair and skin that would not naturally tan. Like most of my neighbors, I was not gainfully employed. Unlike them, I was not on any government handouts. I couldn't be, or they'd be asking how I paid my premiums, and why I wasn't anywhere near Wyoming. I can hear it now: you're listening to my rambling and asking "How do you pay your premiums?" Despite my license to fight crime, I was a professional thief.

  I maintained the charade of being a licensed hero because it kept my dad happy. He was a staunch law-and-order type, and he hadn't realized that I'd started stealing before my powers had even manifested. I even had a code name and a Community Fund membership. How silly is that? I hadn't logged into the Fund network in ages because they'd notice where I was connecting from and start to wonder. Anyway, enough of that. My bad day continued as the bus broke down on the way to Sandy Shore. I had a seasonal job manning a hat stand under the counter for a man who paid crap but didn't ask questions. He had a whole chain of them, and the operators were mostly illegals. Since there was no clock to punch, we were treated as independent contractors. We bought the hats from him and kept whatever we took in. I was pretty sure the hats were counterfeit or stolen. How was he still in business? I mentioned the corrupt government, right? A few kickbacks to the right machine bosses had kept the cops away.

  The job wasn't to pay the bills, it could only stretch that far if you lived twelve to a shack and ate only beans and rice. The hat stand gave me the perfect cover to watch the tourists. To let me see who had too much money and too little sense. These were often the same ones who thought I was the trustworthy chapeau seller because I was the only white guy in the business. They'd have been better off with the Guatemalans. They were mostly East coast snobs. So many wanted to use credit cards that I'd gotten a fake smartphone-mounted card reader. I'd pretend to have 'technical difficulties' and give them a 'discount' down to the same prices the Guatemalans were selling for if they paid cash.

  Had I thought of it, I could have stolen a lot of credit card numbers that way. Instead, I was gathering other information: their name, the hotel they were staying at, how long they planned to be in town, stuff a lot of people will spill as small talk. As the vacuous people blathered on, I was deciding if I hated them enough to break into their hotel room. Usually they'd tell me exactly when they weren't going to be in as they talked about their planned vacation. I picked those who I felt like they deserved it. The entitled prats, those who were rude or abusive towards the poor hat seller, that's who I went after. It was more satisfying than hurting the pensioners who reminded me of Ms. Maus. I also convinced myself that they had the most money.

  When I did make it to Sandy Shore, one of the Guatemalans was in my favorite spot. Crammed between a hotel and a restaurant, it got a lot of foot traffic and had some nice shade. I couldn't exactly kick Salvador out of the space, it would drive off most of the morning business and probably cost me my hat supplier. I found another spot with decent traffic, albeit one less congenial to my pallid hue and set up shop. It consisted of a canvas chair that folded into a tube and a suitcase that turned into a table. I put on one of the hats to at least protect my face and sat down. Too many people in bathing suits wandered about. Most of them wore less cloth than I'd have preferred for my vista. The number of attractive people was small.

  And I'd forgotten my phone.

  Without the prop, I couldn't reliably snag a last name, or buy the time needed to strike up a conversation. If I stuck around, I'd be working for the pittance the Guatemalans got. They don't have insurance premiums to pay. I couldn't afford to waste my time sitting by the beach selling hats without my sideline. Almost as soon as I'd unpacked, I packed up again. I plopped myself into the cafe seating near where Salvador was set up and contemplated my options. Salvador was a born salesman with a broad smile, trustworthy face, and a polite but insistent manner. It was a bit of a shock to see the man in brown walk up and pump five rounds into his chest.

  The man in brown had a thick brow, broad nose, and an olive complexion. He wasn't Hispanic, he looked more Mediterranean. I didn't get that good a look at him, as my gaze was on Salvador. The young man pitched backwards over his seat, a confused look on his face. Shockwaves of panic rippled through the crowd, and people began to run. I joined them, unsure if the man in brown had been after Salvador or the man who normally had that spot. A broad daylight execution of a hat vendor was a rather blunt message. I couldn't think of anyone I'd pissed off that badly. But, Salvador had been the honest, hard-working type that reformers want you to think all illegals were. Or at least that's the impression I'd had. That's what had confused me so much about his killing. It seemed like a case of mistaken identity. I got as far from the beachfront as I could before I got winded.

  I found myself at the door of Tesla Too.

  It was a nightclub with a lightning bolt logo. There had been a previous incarnation in another city called Club Tesla, but that had closed years ago. Tesla Too wasn't locked, but it wasn't open either. With the lights up and the Tesla coils off, it looked like an ordinary bar with a shortage of tables. The walls were painted black to focus attention on the discharges when the coils were powered up. A brown-haired bartender was taking inventory. Her mahogany locks were tied back with an electric blue ribbon. She was dressed in faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Blue eyes flashed in my direction.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  "I just need a place to sit down for a moment," I wheezed. I would have much rather been charming around this attractive young woman, but I had just run from the scene of Salvador's murder. I was sweating like a pig, wheezing like Mrs. Cortez, and wearing a bright red hat that in no way matched my attire. I took off the hat and started fanning myself with it.

  "We're not open," she said.

  "I'm not here for a drink," I said. Though I probably could benefit from an infusion of water, I didn't want her to insist that I leave.

  "Who are you?" she asked.

  "Dan Foley," I lied, holding out a hand. She swatted it aside and went back to work. "Might I at least get y
our name?" I did everything I could to not let on what I'd just witnessed as I went through my list of people who might send a killer my way.

  "Becky," she said, not looking back at me. Something told me she was unattainable, being both jaded and pretty, she'd heard it all, and from more clever men than me. At the time I was still shaken up, so I didn't even try. I was more focused on returning to mental norm and pretending I hadn't been at the beach for the shooting. I glanced around the room, taking in the clear acrylic panels that kept the crowd away from the high voltage hardware. Backlit by the coils, they would be all but invisible.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. Turning slightly, I saw a blond woman in a cream-colored pant suit. She had a sharp nose, narrow face and a severe expression. In her case, I did have a name to go with the face. "Hello Evelyn," I said. Evelyn Wyse was the floor manager for Tesla Too. She'd run a half-dozen other nightclubs, but never owned any herself. In this town, it meant she had the connections to keep the police from performing no-knock raids during peak hours in search of narcotics. It wasn't that they sold drugs, but the customers had a proclivity for using mind-altering substances. It was strong-arm extortion, but even if you won in court, the raid alone would drive off the customer base.

  "We're closed," Evelyn said.

  "I know, Becky already told me," I said. I paused for a second. Evelyn wasn't exactly a friend, more like a business contact. From time to time, she might know of odd jobs for a scoundrel. Today was still a bad day, with the only upside being the possibility that I'd escaped public execution because of a broken bus. "Can we talk? Somewhere private?" I asked.